Is Sarah Palin qualified to be President of the United States?

[angus]

Seems so.  She was born in Idaho, isn't a convicted felon, and is well over 35 years old.  

I may have to buy some TRP.  I sold a hundred shares of ID at Scottrade after a spike and have been looking for a short-term investment.  Now that she has given the state authority to give them that pipeline deal, and getting nominated two days later, they're bound to be up as long as McCain/Paulin look competitive.  There was a spike Wednesday from 37.62 to 38.40, after the announcement that Paulin gave TransCanada the contract, but oddly there wasn't one today.  I may be reading this wrong.

[angus]

I think she's a pretty good choice.  She's qualified to be president--qualifications are pretty minimal.  George Bush and Barack Obama are both qualified, after all--and she's not bad looking.  anyone find any pics of her nude?  I've been searching but haven't found any yet.  There are some of her playing basketball in high school.  And a VOGUE cover that's not bad.  

I think once folks get over the fact that it's a blatant attempt to win female voters--those who are still pissed at Howard Dean and company for backing Obama over Clinton, and those who are still undecided--then they'll realize that she's a pretty good pick.  I think she'll appeal to the culturally convservative base.  And being a mother she'll appeal to mammals in general.  (Although, as a mother of five you gotta wonder if she really has time for the job.)  Apparently she named her youngest boy after a math class, which is kind of weird.  But I like weird.

I still like Obama better than McCain, but I think McCain's VP pick will probably help him more than hurt him.

Let me know if y'all find any hot images of Sarah, though.  Seriously.

[angus]

Is Sarah Palin qualified to be President of the United States?

Hehe.  Quite a thread you started.  Seems to have brought out the best in many off our posters

The timing was impeccable, though, you gotta admit.  I was out and about today and noticed that every store I stopped at that had a Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier (local daily) vending machine also had a big pink banner that said "MCCAIN PICKS VP.  READ IT INSIDE."  And a perusal of the first page showed that he indeed had.  The banner headline was "McCain's veep choice is historic and hardly known"  and it was on the top half.  The half you see when you look into the machine.  And they're already making bad puns about it.  Smaller articles on the top-half margin read "The McCain Event."  In order to read the equally large banner on the bottom half, which was about a star-spangled Democrat convention in Denver, you had to buy the paper.  Totally overshadowed the DNC's lovefest.  And this in a county that the Democrats carried handily in 2000 and in 2004.  Not bad, John McCain. 

And, really, there's nothing wrong with her.  He's old.  She's young.  He's man.  She's woman.  They complement one another well.  And she's an anti-tax crusader and a traditionalist.  And she's pro-corporate growth.  And she's a feisty journalist to boot, so one assumes she can read and write.  Maybe not what you'd choose--or I'd choose--in a candidate, but it's what McCain wanted in a running mate.  And from what I've read they like one another personally, which is far more than you can say about the Gore/Clinton duo, or about Reagan and Bush. 

She needs to lose the glasses though.  Seriously, invest in some contacts.

[angus]

he smokes about a pack a day.

false

No, it's true.  I ran into him at the mosque this morning and invited him over for a drink or two, but he declined.  You know, he's pretty observant about the faith.  Inshallah.  But he did burn a big fat joint with me, and after we finished it, he lit up a Marlboro.  Then, before we parted company, he'd finished that first Marlboro and just before it went out he lit a second one from the dying cherry of the first.

[angus]

Compare two things, the announcement of Biden and the announcement of Palin.  Which was better.

Biden: a 3:00 AM phone call on a Saturday morning.  Palin: a Noon announcement on a Friday, that relegated Obama's acceptance speech to the second news story.

McCain knows what he's doing.

Not to mention that two word phrase, "glass ceiling."

I agree.  But in all fairness your fear of an Obama administration is as irrational as their nitpicking over minutiae and irrelevant factions involving Sarah Palin. 

By the way, the McCain/Palin duo is blatantly playing up the glass ceiling angle now.  Did you catch the snippet today with Palin talking about how Clinton's "grace and hard work resulted in 18 million little cracks in the glass ceiling."  Or something like that.  She did use the word "grace" in connection with Hillary Clinton.  I nearly lost my lunch.  But it's clever pandering, no doubt, and I agree with your post entirely.  In fact I posted elsewhere my objective observations today about how McCain's pick trumped the DNC stories, and how smart I thought the timing was.  But don't lose sight of the fact that there will be a VP debate at some point, and Biden, for all his faults, can muster an incisive wit on demand.  Think she's up for it?  You don't really know yet, do you?  In fact, none of us know very much about her except that she's considerably easier on the eyes than Joe Biden.

[angus]

The sad fact is, H Clinton has responded more "gracefully" to this VP announcement than practically every other high-level Democrat. Their nearly-uniform ugliness is a turnoff, and it may backfire.

Good point.  And well said.  I was just thinking today that I hope Obama doesn't start taking advice from Democrats.  He hasn't been so far.  I voted for Clinton in 92 and 96, but haven't supported any Democrat presidential candidate since then.  I'm still pretty sold on Obama, though, and a big part of it is that he doesn't usually come off the way most of his fellow democrats do.  He's downright optimistic.  Moreso than even 80s Republicans, but the attacks on Palin are wearing mighty thin.  My feeling is that they're pissed at the timing.  Like they have been burned, unfairly, but there's nothing they can do about it.  Like when you give a guy enough money to buy you a lid, because he says that this particular connection is weird and nervous about meeting new people, so you have to wait in the car, and so you wait in the car, and twenty minutes later the guy shows up with what amounts to a thin half, or more honestly just a fat quarter.  And you're burnt.  You know that asshole pinched your bag.  But it's not like you can go to the Better Business Bureau or anything.  So you start talking nasty to all the other heads you know about this guy.  That's how the Dems are acting just now.  It's not unreasonable, but it seems petty.  At if it continues some of the swing vote may just swing back to the neocons--Not mine.  Mine would swing to a third party, if it swung at all, because I still can't stomach John McCain even if he has the good sense to pick an attractive, individualistic Westerner for a running mate--but some might.  I guess Obama needs to try to squeeze in one more high profile speech over the weekend.  Before the RNC and Hurricane Gustav begin to hog the airwaves.  And it should be a speech to the brainwashed, braindead, hacks within his own party.  And it should tell them to chill.

[angus]

and that will only be amplified for someone who comes from a rural area in a remote part of the globe.

hur, hur, hur. rUralz aRe sTupId!!!!11111

Au contraire.  The country mouse is often ridiculed by his city cousin for not knowing that he needs to buy tokens before attempting to board a subway, or for nearly getting killed by not crossing the street with the lights, but rural folks are not significantly less informed than urban ones.  They're just informed about different things.  For example, Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford was a potato farmer's son from New Zealand.  He was ridiculed as a grad student at Cambridge for his rustic ways and slow New Zealand twang.  But he continued his steadfast arguments against dandy Trinity College physicist, Sir J. J. Thomson, who was convinced that that electrons were dispersed in a positive medium like plums in a pudding.  Rutherford had proposed a "nuclear" model, in which most of the mass of the atom was concentrated in a positive core called the "nucleus" while the electrons were sparse and fuzzy and existed at the perimeter.  To settle the debates, Rutherford directed alpha particles onto a thin gold foil and observed that a small percentage of particles were deflected through angles much larger than 90 degrees.  To dandy, urbane Thompson's thinking, it was as though he had fired a cannonball at a piece of toilet tissue and the cannonball had richocheted!  Not only did New Zealand potato-farmer hick Ernest Rutherford settle the debate about the structure of the atom, but he also calculated the charge on the gold nucleus, paving the way for the modern arrangement of the periodic table of the elements in order of increasing atomic number.  (Mendeleev's original table had them in order of increasing atomic "weight.")  Rutherford was reported to have exclaimed, "That's the last potato I'll ever pick!" when he heard the news that he'd been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

[angus]

Palin doesn't have a record here.

That's really the point, though, isn't it?  It's not as though McCain needs to pick a serious neocon power projectionist to convince the electorate that he's hawkish enough for Yankee-style imperialism.  In fact, it was Obama, not McCain, that needed a foreign policy expert/defense hawk to balance his own perceived weaknesses.  McCain needed a cultural conservative, a ceiling-crasher, and somebody with a twig up his ass about corruption and profligate spending.  Seems that they both chose fairly well in those regards. 

of the four, Biden, Palin, McCain, and Obama, McCain's the only one who comes close to not being qualified.  But even he's qualified since he was born before the Carter administration.  And since no one, Democrat or Republican, wants to be the one to have to tell every military family that their children can’t be president if they take an overseas assignment while said children are in utero.

I still say it's the presidential candidate that matters, not the VP.  Whatever states Obama wins he does so no matter his second.  Same for McCain.  Just my two cents.