John McCain, lizard king: The tongue is the tell

Like the rest of us, presidential candidates are entitled to their weird tics.  However, John McCain’s periodic lingual spasms during the debate last week might rank among the strangest — and, in poker terms, most telling — in the…

Palin’s Alaska environmental policy: No way, no how, no science (and no polar bears)

For the past several weeks, Sarah Palin has aggressively harvested Alaska’s mythic cultural status on a national political stage. In addition to her near-daily odes to guns, hockey and mooseburger, Palin has also reinforced the perception of Alaska as a vast frontier land where environmental concerns and resource extraction converge harmoniously. By explaining, as she did to the right wing throwbacks at Newsmax, that Alaska would experience the consequences of climate change in unique ways, she has repeatedly implied that her leadership on climate change has been cautious and realistic.

It hasn’t.

Letter from Alaska: Palin a maverick? Please

If John McCain manages to carry the 2008 presidential election, his victory will be due in no small part to his success in persuading a passel of independent voters that Sarah Palin was chosen for some reason other than her appeal to the variety of conservatives who continue to dominate the Republican party. In Palin’s selection, in fact, we can observe the distilled absurdity of McCain’s “maverick” pretensions. While claiming to have selected a consummate “outsider,” he actually selected someone who’d been promoted by William Kristol, whom history will forever recall as the intellectual godfather of the Iraq War; Larry Kudlow, the bog-standard free marketeer who yodeled gleefully when McCain rescinded his (hopelessly mild) approval for cap and trade carbon emissions policy; and fundamentalist elites like Richard Land and Dan Coats, who have consistently served as vital theological supporters and enablers of the Bush administration from its first days to the Last Days.

The Thrilla from Wasilla: An Alaskan recounts the reign of Gov. Sarah Palin

The nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate is perhaps the most bizarre thing I’ve witnessed since moving to Alaska six years ago, arguably surpassing the time a bald eagle dropped a…