Brown: So are you going to run for governor?

Barkley: I plan on it in 2014.

Brown: You are serious.

Barkley: I am, I can't screw up Alabama.

Brown: There is no place to go but up in your view?

Barkley: We are number 48 in everything and Arkansas and Mississippi aren't going anywhere.

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

• ¡Alarma! is a Mexican tabloid devoted to publishing stories about and photos of murders and death.
• Except for a brief period in the 1990s, it has run weekly since 1963.
• This is part 1 of a documentary about its photographers.

With 10 days to go until election day, long brewing tension between Sarah Palin and key aides to John McCain has become so intense, it is spilling out into the public.

Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin “going rogue” recently, while a Palin associate says she is simply trying to “bust free” of what she believes was a mishandled roll-out that damaged her.

McCain sources point to several incidents where Palin has gone off message, and privately wonder if they were deliberate. For example: labeling robo calls “irritating,” even as the campaign was defending the use of them and telling reporters she disagreed with the campaigns controversial decision to pull out of Michigan.

A second McCain source tells CNN she appears to now be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.

“She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” said this McCain adviser, “she does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else. Also she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: divas trust only unto themselves as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.”

Oct. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said a "once-in-a-century credit tsunami" has engulfed financial markets and conceded that his free-market ideology shunning regulation was flawed.

"Yes, I found a flaw," Greenspan said in response to a grilling from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "That is precisely the reason I was shocked because I'd been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."

Greenspan said he was "partially" wrong in opposing regulation of derivatives and acknowledged that financial institutions didn't protect shareholders and investments as well as he expected. Forecasting is an inexact science, he said.

"If we are right 60 percent of the time in forecasting, we are doing exceptionally well; that means we are wrong 40 percent of the time," Greenspan said. "Forecasting never gets to the point where it is 100 percent accurate."

In May 2005 speech, Greenspan said that "private regulation generally has proved far better at constraining excessive risk-taking than has government regulation."

Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, said Greenspan had "the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis."

"You were advised to do so by many others," he told Greenspan. "And now our whole economy is paying the price."

Waxman and other lawmakers repeatedly interrupted Greenspan as he answered their questions, in contrast to deference to his testimony while he was Fed chairman.

RDS: btw: that deal is ridiculous

SM: I know right ... model def does not capture half of the risk

RDS: we should not be rating it

SM: we rate every deal

SM: it could be structured by cows and we would rate it

"The Dead Zone" is a political novel. There's that scene in "The Dead Zone" where Johnny Smith sees Greg Stillson in the future starting a nuclear war. Around my house we kinda laugh when Sarah Palin comes on TV, and we say, "That's Greg Stillson as a woman."

For me the most moving moment came when the family in front of me, comprising probably 4 generations of voters (including an 18 year old girl voting for her first time and a 90-something hunched-over grandmother), got their turn to vote. When the old woman left the voting booth she made it about halfway to the door before collapsing in a nearby chair, where she began weeping uncontrollably. When we rushed over to help we realized that she wasn't in trouble at all but she had not truly believed, until she left the booth, that she would ever live long enough to cast a vote for an African-American for president. Anyone who doesn't think that African-American turnout will absolutely SHATTER every existing record is in for a very rude surprise.

CNN contributor Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist, said "Colin Powell ... is a warm glass of milk and a cookie for those voters who have a hard time going to sleep at night."

"You have to remember, I have a son" in Iraq, she said in an earlier interview with the Tribune from Kosovo. "It just spilled out of my mouth, and then I got back on the bus and I thought, 'Oh my God, what have I done?' I thought, 'Oh, I should never have opened my mouth. How did that happen? I'll put duct tape over it.'"

The notion that Joe the Plumber who Owns a Small Business and Makes $250,000/year and Goes to Political Rallies to Question the Candiates (sic)--that this dude somehow represents the average American is patently absurd. It's wonderful. McCain, who increasingly appears to be the hate child of Danny Devito's Penguin and Howard Beale, the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves, had this crazy houdou direct address to Joe thing going on, and then Barack got in on the act, swiveling toward the camera and chopping his hand and shouting out to "Joe." The "average American" makes more like foedy, fiddy, sisty grand, works in an office, and exists only to amuse the world-spanning, multi-nodal, transpersonal superconsciousness of The Internet on company time. He doesn't fix things or conjure jobs and wealth out of the ether. The Politicians' endlessly reiterated genuflection to The Genius and Innovation and Productivity of the American Worker is the most cynical ploy in all of politics. Do any of you folks buy it? What the fuck are you doing reading blogs at 11:30 on a Thursday morning?

Whatever creature is gnawing away at the part of McCain's brain overseeing fine muscle control is doing an excellent and thorough job, giving him a frightful testudine appearance, all head and shoulders, beak snapping this way and that. When his flippers rose to put air quotes around "women's health," I almost made uh-oh in my underoos. Give Gee-dub this much credit: he maintained enough active synapses to slickly signal fellowship with the natalist far right while blending code phrases and cultural tropes into a stage-managed aw-shucks demeanor. McCain's efforts to do the same turn his every utterance into a probability cloud of hazy non sequiturs and Kulturkampf strophes ripped straight out of 1992. I honestly feel for the monster, self-immolating on the burning political faction whose approval he so long sought and finally, if briefly, received.

While the leaders managed to paper over any rifts by the time they emerged from their meeting, their lack of agreement on a British-style guarantee of loans made between banks worried economists.

If other countries do not follow the same course as Britain, they said, it could destabilize the financial system, because money may flow to Britain from countries without those same guarantees.

“You now have the full faith and credit of the British government standing behind the banking system,” said Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “The British could suck deposits from continental Europe and even the United States.”

“All of the things they said about Barack Obama in the TV, on the TV, at their rallies, and now on Youtube and everything else,” Biden said — referring to McCain and Palin tying Obama to Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers and accusing him of “palling around with terrorists.”

“John McCain could not bring himself to look Barack Obama in the eye and say the same things to him,” he said to cheers. “In my neighborhood, you got something to say to a guy, you look him in the eye and you say it to him.“

And we have not yet even felt the full economic brunt here. I fear we may be at that moment just before the tsunami hits — when the birds take flight and the insects stop chirping because their acute senses can feel what is coming before humans can.

I have never been overly political, and I am purposely registered as ‘unaffiliated’ in California, as I’ve never felt that a two-party system was inherently democratic. I’ve also never been an alarmist nor have I been a rabid politico. Several events, both public and private in nature, have led me to the point where I simply cannot look away from what’s happening right now.

I am a student of journalism, political science and law, holding degrees/backgrounds in all three. What we’re seeing now is nothing short of terrifying if people take a step back and do some basic analysis on a macro level.

What this horrible McCain/Palin campaign is doing is reminiscent of the worst of the 1930’s. Whipping uneducated, mindless acolytes into a violent – perhaps literally – frenzy, stirring fear and playing our citizens against themselves and each other. We’ve seen ‘journalism’ in Sean Hannity broadcast a disgusting and totally false propaganda hit piece in furtherance of this movement. We’ve even recently seen a quasi-nationalization of our main business – credit – much like what happened 70+ years ago.

I’ve never been an alarmist nor someone to lean towards the melodramatic, but am I wrong in feeling as though our governmental system and very freedom could be at stake in the coming weeks? This terrifies me, and has prompted me to act.

"Some countries will slip toward balance-of-payment crises."

On September 17, 2008, the record set after the Black Monday crash of 1987 was broken as the TED spread exceeded 300bps.

Sarah Louise Heath Palin (born February 11, 1964) is the current governor of Alaska, Republican vice presidential candidate, a compulsive breeder, and a major lady dick.

The only thing Sarah Palin seems to enjoy more than having children is giving those children ridiculous names and inadequate sex education.

Palin served as both a city councilor and mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a nightmare of suburban sprawl located in the armpit of the state’s two major highways. Somehow, she was elected governor of Alaska in 2006, not only becoming the first woman, but also the hottest chick ever to hold the office.

On August 29, 2008, Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain performed perhaps the greatest political mindfuck in American history by announcing that he had chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin celebrated by ovulating.

Sarah Palin is helped inordinately by the fact that no one knows anything about her or Alaska, and probably never really will. Regardless of whether she turns out to be a disastrous pick for the McCampaign, Sarah Palin is a total MILF.

As long as she does not murder a puppy then potty herself on stage, the pundits will proclaim it a win.

Many people lingered outside the venue like some weird sort of survivors, talking about what they'd just witnessed with mostly awed shakes of their heads. The comparisons came quickly and furiously. "Like standing behind a 747" one guy in front of me texted midway through the onslaught. I couldn't help but think of the 2007 Danny Boyle film "Sunshine," in which one of the crewmen sent on a mission to the sun becomes addicted to the power he sees when he looks at an ever-approaching sun.

It made me think that if we do enter hard times, something really strange could happen to our political culture. The Great Depression gave us fascism, communist intellectuals and all sorts of odd movements. I doubt we’re in for a Great Depression, but if times get tough I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some sort of radicalism resurface, of the sort we haven’t really seen since the 1960s.

Needless to say I was irritated at his large ego and his rude behavior towards his wife and other women, but decided he must have some redeeming qualities as he had adopted a handicapped child from Bangladesh. I asked him about this one day, and his response was shocking: "Oh, that was Cindy's idea - I didn't have anything to do with it. She just went and adopted this thing without even asking me. You can't imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona .

NEED SARAH PALIN LOOKALIKE ASAP FOR ADULT FILM (LA)]
Date: 2008-09-10, 8:20PM PDT

Looking for a Sarah Palin lookalike for an adult film to be shot in next 10 days.

Major adult studio.

Please send pix, stats etc. ASAP

Pay: $2000-3000

* Location: LA
* Compensation: $2000-3000