Carly Fiorina, who is inexplicably a top McCain economic advisor after being fired as CEO of Hewlett-Packard (the company halved its market share and shed a lot of jobs during her tenure) was on Saint Louis radio today. According to Fiorina, Palin does not have the experience to run a major company.

“Do you think [Sarah Palin] has the experience to run a major company, like Hewlett Packard?” asked the host.

“No, I don’t,” responded Fiorina. “But you know what? That’s not what she’s running for.”

Listen to the audio here.

H/T Sam Stein.

One focus of an NYT article reprinted in the Sunday Post-Dispatch is that Sarah Palin has been, both as a mayor and as a governor, inclined to skip that competence thing and hire her buddies.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.

By that rationale, I should be the president’s advisor on air pollution because I love to breathe. It’s a well documented fact that I have always efficiently used and appreciated oxygen.  

Palin is also, according to the NYT article,  vindictive (Troopergate is only the tip of the iceberg) and secretive. “Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business.” (Shades of Matt Blunt!) But they attempt to look transparent: “A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account ‘when there was significant state business.'”Mmm-hmmm.

Another example: Palin claimed that a study by state scientists on the effects of global warming showed that it wasn’t harming polar bears. In fact, she has sued the federal government to block putting them on the endangered species list. But a University of Alaska professor used a federal records request to obtain the e-mails of the scientists. It turns out, of course, that they concluded the polar bears are indeed in trouble.

To give the devil her due, she did help pass a bill that tightened the rules governing lobbyists, and she did get the tax code rewritten so that the state got a larger share of oil and gas sale proceeds.

But the bottom line is that her slip is showing. Or, to quote an editorial in the Sunday P-D:

This is not change. This is politics as usual. This is George W. Bush in red patent-leather, peep-toe Naughty Monkey pumps.

Photo courtesy of STLtoday.com

There’s got to be a super secret republican governor’s handbook somewhere that tells them: “Whatever you do, don’t let anybody see your embarrassing e-mails.”

Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin (r – apparent heir to the legacy of Darth Cheney) has obviously read the handbook:

Palin e-mails off public record

by Rebecca Palsha

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – E-mails from the Palin administration are being withheld from the public and the governor is citing executive privilege.

With subject lines like “Fagan,” “Andrew Halcro” and even “Alaska Ear,” it makes some wonder how those topics could possibly be policy related; especially since those same e-mails were copied to the governor’s husband…

Heh. Just think what our world would be like if Missouri Governor Matt “baby” Blunt were the republican nominee for vice president. He has some of the same qualifications and most of the same ideology as Sarah Palin.

I’m not really a huge fan of Claire McCaskill, but she hits the nail on the head regarding Sarah Palin and John McCain’s “reformer” claims.

I will say this, Hillary Clinton didn’t but I will say this, I have a hard time imagining that Sarah Palin is a reformer if she took taxpayer money to sleep in her own bed. That is not a definition of a reformer, that’s a deifnition of somebody who’s gonna fit right in in Washington.

Barack Obama’s new ad, taking on the myth of the maverick:

I wish that Palin part had been more hard-hitting, but bonus points for calling John McCain out for lying.

McCain gave a speech worse than some of the ordinary folks that both parties gave a chance to speak in their respective conventions. Was this his way of trying to prove he’s an outsider?

Jon Stewart has a masterful piece exposing the hypocrisy of several top Republicans in their defense of Sarah Palin.

It’s times like these that I’m glad I’m from Missouri. No, not the “show me” saying thing. It’s just that when compared to other places and other people, dare I say it, we appear to be so much more sane.

For example, Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, darling of the wingnut right, and vice presidential pick of McSame:

…COMPLAINT AGAINST SELF

Tom Daniel, an Anchorage labor and employment lawyer hired by the board in the Renkes case, took a quick look at Palin’s complaint Tuesday.

“It appears that the Governor has filed an ethics complaint against herself. … This is very unusual because ethics complaints typically are filed against others,” Daniel wrote in an e-mail responding to a Daily News query.

Asked whether the personnel board could take the investigation away from the Legislature — as Palin wants to do — Daniel answered: “I’ve never looked at that issue, but I can’t see why filing a complaint with the personnel board would deprive the Legislature of the right to conduct its own investigation…”

Yes, that’s right, Sarah Palin has filed an ethics complaint against herself. Don’t be so quick to applaud her altruism. She also claims that this complaint trumps the current investigation by the state legislature. A ha.

When I was a kid we used to run this gag all the time: “I confess, [long pause] he did it.”

Then there’s the definition of chutzpah: murdering your parents and then asking for leniency from the court because you’re an orphan.

At least our republican governor….oh wait…  

If you don’t want a media circus the first thing you do is don’t show up at the tent:

Levi Johnston is on his way to join Palins at convention

By RACHEL D’ORO

The Associated Press

Published: September 3rd, 2008 01:50 AM

Last Modified: September 3rd, 2008 02:06 AM

WASILLA — The boyfriend of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s unwed, pregnant daughter will join the family of the Republican vice presidential candidate at the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn.

Levi Johnston’s mother said her 18-year-old son left Alaska Tuesday morning to join the Palin family at the convention where Sen. John McCain will officially receive the Republican nomination for president. The boy’s mother, Sherry Johnston, said there had been no pressure put on her son to marry 17-year-old Bristol Palin and the two teens had made plans to wed before it was known she was pregnant.

“This is just a bonus,” Johnston said…

No, that was not an Onion article. It’s from the Anchorage Daily News.

From Mudflats:

…It took me a while to get my palms off my face so I could check it out, but it’s true.  I know we’re not supposed to interfere with the personal lives of candidates’ children.  I know that many people, including myself, feel sorry for Bristol and the fact that she was hurled out in front of the nation with nothing to cover her secret expanding midsection except a baby and a giant blanket.  I even heard Barack Obama ask us all to drop it.  But, inviting the boyfriend to come to the convention in the middle of all this?  Who has brought this, and him, right into the most glaring of bright lights, in front of the hugest of audiences?  How to create a distracting, embarrassing spectacle with one plane ticket. The mind reels….I think.   It’s been reeling since Friday, so it’s hard to tell any more…

This could have all been so easy. McSame could have picked Tim Pawlenty and we could have had a nice, boring week (and election). But no, he had to go and pick Sarah Palin with a sloppy (or worse, “I don’t give a damn”) vetting process. One thing after another. There is no end.

Next:

Sarah Palin’s Preacher Problem. End Times Coming?

Good Lord. Another ‘gate’. Just talked to one of our local progressive radio talk show hosts (yes, we have them in Alaska!) and she said her head is spinning. Mine is too. No one knows where to turn. Keeping up with the tidal wave of what’s hitting the fan in Alaska is fast becoming a full-time job…

…I did a drive-by of Palin’s church when I was traveling through Wasilla yesterday, not realizing the furor that would be churning the blogosphere less than 24-hours later about a speech Palin delivered there only three months ago. Here’s what she said regarding the war in Iraq.

“Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God.”

Let that sink in a minute. A task that is from God. Sarah’s war is a holy war. It’s not, apparently from the God that says “turn the other cheek” or “I am my brother’s keeper” or “the greatest of all these is love”. It’s not about diplomacy, international relations, figuring out why we are so despised in the Middle East, keeping Israel secure, revamping how the U.S. deals with its unsustainable dependence on foreign oil, combating poverty and desperation that leads young men to terrorism. Nope. This war is God’s will. It’s God’s holy war. She went on:

That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.

So the plan is to pray for a plan? Perhaps it would have been better to pray for a plan beFORE we went to Iraq. Better still to sit down and create a plan – a thoughtful, intelligent, human-type plan…

[emphasis in original]

From an Alaskan Blog – Mudflats: Tiptoeing Through the Muck of Alaskan Politics

Go. Read the whole thing.