Compared to her, Yogi Berra was eloquent, witty, and succinct.

This is a HUGE negative for Palin. She has a certainty that does not allow for admitting mistakes. This is a huge character flaw in President Bush as well.

i can't wait until Nov.5, when i'll never have to hear about Sarah Palin ever again.

(until 2012, that is, or in Rich Lowry fan-fic)

But this is the problem in a nutshell. Redstaters constantly think everyone else is making fun of them because they themselves perceive how their lives are nothing like those they see in the mainstream media. We overcompensate which comes off as condescending and presto! -- we're the problem.

People like Palin have imagined our contempt for them for decades, when in fact they're projecting their own insecurities.

They don't need a political party; they need group therapy.

Palin not admitting a mistake (or something) about this is drawn from the same playbook as McCain not admitting a mistake (or something) about Zapatero. They're of the same cloth, why should we expect their responses on something like this to diverge?

This is so far BEYOND sad...it's frightening and I am personally going to begin a list of commentators and pundits in print and radio/tv who continue to be unable to CALL OUT the absolute ridiculousness of this candidacy! Should this team of Grampy and Scarah actually ascend to the highest offices in our once proud country it will be in large part due to the inability of our PRESS to speak the real truth to power...not that they often show the courage to do that anyhow...WHY aren't people more enraged by the fact that she is even still on the scene it presents the very WORST of our FREEDOM!!!

Well, she has a computer with internet access, doesn't she? After all, what about those Troopergate emails? She could've been improving her mind by reading the Carpetbagger Report and Political Animal all along. But she wasn't.

I read that Couric's questions, including the one about news sources, 'annoyed' Palin. Yes, that Katie Couric sure is a tough journalist, isn't she? Always importuning, always probing, always following up, trying to get some kind of coherent answer.

Isn't this the selfsame Katie Couric who only a month ago edited a John McCain interview to make his answers seem intelligible? I guess Palin's responses were so incoherent that not even Katie's editing magic could do the trick, so she just published the interview as-is.

Before the debate recedes into history, can someone please ask Palin what she meant when she cited "corruption and greed on Wall Street" over and over? Ask her to give specific examples of the greed and/or corruption that she was talking about and ask her what a McCain-Palin administration will do to prevent those sorts of things from happening in the future.

And to the McCain campaign, their apologists and the majority of "journalists" who are failing to do their job -- the essential role that journalists have in our democracy is to ask the people in office and those who are running for the questions that I would like to ask but can't. If you are nothing but a stenographer or worse, a propagandist, then you are a traitor to the ideal of democracy.

The first quote sounds like a riff on the standard conservative definition of "freedom" to me -- it means freedom to do the right thing. If you're using your freedom of speech or the press to do something wrong (like criticizing a Republican president), you're "abusing" it, and that's not what's supposed to be protected.

No, it doesn't make any sense. But Lakoff wrote a whole book about it.

"But, I was sort of taken aback.."

sarah....stop whining....

Michael:

Half the time Yogi was saying something, he didn't know he was saying all of it. That goes double for Palin.

(Yogi was one of my all-time favorites.)

Does anyone here speak Palin?

Classic. I do speak Palin but unfortunately, in order to understand it, it has to be translated to Quayle, and then to Bush and then through a Rovian filter (do you have one?)

In any event, it comes out something like this: "lower taxes, reform, maverick, and hockey mom you betcha..."

You then repeat 7x while winking every 30 seconds.

OMG! The woman has a parochial paranoid streak too!

Put this statement along side the daffy move by the Palins to fly back to Alaska from Texas after her water broke so that their newborn would be identified not as a US citizen but as an ALASKAN fish picker!

Palin long ago shattered McCain's credibility. Now she is shattering her own mind as well as her ability to "govern" Alaska after she returns home in November.

Actually this is a pretty fair description of Palin's reaction to Couric's question--she says at one point, more than a little defensively, that they actually do get magazines delivered up in Alaska. There was, however, nothing in Couric's questions or her tone that suggested that Couric doubted that; on the contrary, the questions assumed the opposite.

So let's give Palin the benefit of the doubt--she couldn't answer a relatively straightforward question about her reading habits because she was consumed by feelings of rage over the suggestion that people in Alaska (or her in particular) are too uneducated to read, so she lied. Or maybe just pique, not rage, clouded her judgment temporarily.

Yeah, I want her for Vice President.

And, BTW, Yogi Berra is and was eloquent, witty and succinct. I think the proper comparison is with George W. Bush.

I've seen the type in my office at my university, heard their presentations in class, given them the lousy grades. This is the kind of student who will plagiarize and then vehemently deny it; the kind of student who doesn't do the reading but bs's answers; the kind of student who brings a cheat sheet to an exam. Palin is a total fraud. She's an example of the bankruptcy of Republican politics but taken to such an extreme as to be almost surreal: I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up!

Does anyone here speak Palin?

Durn Tootin'. "I want to be Vice President. Vice Presidents have to be intelligent. Intelligent people use long sentences with patriotic terms. Freedom of the press, truth and fairness are patriotic terms. Other than patriotic terms, no one understands VP's."

Got it?

She apparently thinks that freedom "of" the press means freedom "from" the press. That's what we're fighting over there in Eye-raq, that vile press. Always distorting things with their tricky questions and not letting politicians just tell things straight to the American people the way they had written on their cue cards.

I'm thinking journalism must have just been the easy major to graduate with. Every university has a major you can slide by on and not work hard. Though I'm sure it did prepare her for being a weather girls, or was it reading the sports scores on local news? I don't actually care.

"This is the kind of student who will plagiarize"

Are you referring to Joe Biden"

Steve, I can translate.

"Duh. Duh. Duh. We will bend the facts to suit our own views. Duh. Duh. Duh."

As someone posted earlier she has all the substance of: Stuart Smalley
"I'm going to do a terrific show today! And I'm gonna help people! Because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggonit, people like me!"

I figured it out - Sarah is Al Franken in Drag

Check this out - her statement makes as much sense backwards and forwards. It's a Palindrome!

Forward:
"As we send our young men and women overseas in a war zone to fight for democracy and freedoms, including freedom of the press, we've really got to have a mutually beneficial relationship here with those fighting the freedom of the press, and then the press, though not taking advantage and exploiting a situation, perhaps they would want to capture and abuse the privilege. We just want truth, we want fairness, we want balance."

Backward
"We just want truth, we want fairness, we want balance. Perhaps they would want to capture and abuse the privilege, though not taking advantage and exploiting a situation here, with those fighting the freedom of the press. And then the press, we've really got to have a mutually beneficial relationship, including freedom of the press, to fight for democracy and freedoms, as we send our young men and women overseas in a war zone."

What absurdity. When I saw her talking on Fox about why she couldn't answer the reading material question, even at that moment I remembered exactly how Couric couched the question: we're trying to get to know you and to that end, could you tell us the stuff you read that helps form your worldview?

For anyone who reads (anything other than Harlequin Romances, which I can understand no one would want to own up to) that is about the easiest question you could ever be asked. A truly educated person with a well-rounded worldview would, for example, be able to immediately reel off the names of several authors of fiction and/or non-fiction whose work they admire and read, followed by an explanation of how the particular authors have helped to inform their view of the world. That would be a perfectly acceptable answer in lieu of reeling off the names of a bunch of periodicals and dailies. That's the truly horrific thing about her inability to answer the question - offering a litany of newspaper and newsmagazine names is the easiest way to answer the question, since it doesn't require that you demonstrate that you've understood, for example, the theme of a novel or novelist - and she couldn't even do that.

This bullshit "I was being harrassed for being from a small state" stuff is pitiful. Bill Clinton had lived 90% of his life in a state that is the butt of jokes nationally for being backwards and out of the flow of modern life when he ran for president - does anyone think he would have been offended by such a question? He would have exhausted the interviewer with the length and breadth of his reading materials, rather than pretend that someone was insulting him and his state by assuming no one there had ever heard of books. I should know, because I live in Arkansas and have these types of conversations with people regularly online.

I think the bottom line here is that people who are well-rounded don't need to get defensive about questions of this type, no matter where they are from. People only get defensive about questions of this nature when they can't answer them, and then project onto the questioner the idea that it's a put-down of their intellect to be asked. Which is exactly what Palin did. People who have curiosity about the world read and have no problem telling others about what they've read and why it's important, even if most of their reading is concentrated on a narrow topic. Palin doesn't read much, and my guess would be it's because she thinks she already has all the answers she - or anyone else- needs, from the Bible.

She could have just admitted that she flubbed the question

My attempt at 'translation'. You've got to understand that occasionally words drop out.

"we've really got to have a mutually beneficial relationship here with those fighting the freedom of the press,"

= 'We all win when the troops are fighting [for] the freedom of the press'

"and then the press, though not taking advantage and exploiting a situation, perhaps they would want to capture and abuse the privilege."

= 'But the press is hurting the troop's [mom] by investigating too hard'

Fwiw, at least one part of the transcript is off, at least judging by a video of this that I saw last night. And luckily, it's this bit: "those fighting the freedom of the press". There was actually a 'for' in there, so it read: those fighting for the freedom of the press.

"As we send our young men and women overseas in a war zone to fight for democracy and freedoms, except that's not why went in to Iraq including freedom of the press, we've really got to have a mutually beneficial relationship here with those fighting the freedom of the press, in other words, we need to be more like oppressive governments that limit press freedoms and then the press, though not taking advantage and exploiting a situation, taking advantage and exploiting a situation is sole province of the Republican party perhaps they would want to capture and abuse the privilege. abuse the privilege by challenging GOP talking points We just want truth, we want fairness, we want balance." as exemplified by Fox News.

Palin's answers appear to show that she is torn between impulses toward libertarianism and toward fascism. I use impulses carefully, because almost none of her political preferences appear to have ever been thought out. Someone needs to tell McCain and Palin that 'maverick' does not actually describe a political philosophy or even a coherent concept of governing.

Very funny Danp.
And Lampwick you are on to something there: It reads the same no matter how cut and shuffled.

Lastly...
Zasloff over at Kleiman's place puts the attack ad in proper perspective. Given that, I'd like to see her firebombed as a pernicious liar by 527s. She ought not to be allowed to skate away from this election without being so exposed to the general electorate...

I think her real problem is that she could not work out in her mind what publications, the names she would have known, she could have named without disadvantageous interpretation of her "ideology" or leanings.
She could not have lied and said the NYT or WP because they are "liberal" news outlets. WSJ would have sounded out of character. Alaskan papers would have sounded parochial. It is clear that she does not regularly read, but it also clear that she's trapped in not being able to present the extreme wrong headedness of her true political inclinations as there are no publications printed by fundies or the NRA and such which she can admit to. She was not quick enough to come up with something innocuous as USA Today. Basically the McCain camp started too late to groom a suitable candidate and the GOP is totally lost as to what kind of politics it wants to present.

Think of Katie's original question and how you would answer it yourself. You'd probably mention your local paper, maybe a national paper like the Times or the WSJ. You'd probably then mention the better magazines you read. Most of us would then cite the news sites and blogs we read.

But she had no answer at all.

She then got a do-over on Fox--perhaps the lamest attempt to recover from a public embarrassment ever.

The reality is quite clear--she either reads nothing, or she reads far right-wing trash and knew she couldn't admit it.

Somehow, the GOP came up with someone more vacuous than George W.

Palin's answers appear to show that she is torn between impulses toward libertarianism and toward fascism.

Freelunch describes Palin's conflicting political tendencies perfectly. Anyone else notice that she describes press freedom as a privelege, not a right?

We need freedom of the press but sometimes the press has too much freedom, and needs to be reminded who they should be attacking, and who they should be revering.

If you don't have an answer, the right thing to do is find a sympathetic ear who will help you malign the questioner.

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

I'm Sarah Palin, and John McCain approves my message. Now give me more power.

The myth of liberal MSM bias will die hard. A friend of 44 years, registered Republican voting for Obama, still can't give it up. He thinks Gibson was unfair to Pallin! When I say that if the media was fair and balanced, McCain would have been driven from the race long ago for his flip-flops and funk-ups, he just kinda mumbles. 10 years of driving truck listening to Limbaugh will do that to a person.

Another GOP myth is biting the dust:

GOPers from Dumbfuckistan run the country OK?

No, they really don't. Look how the last guy did.

I need that magic decoder ring too. When I heard pundits saying after the debate that she was in charge of the facts, I knew I needed that ring badly. To me it sounds like pure gibberish.

I wish she wouldn't use provocative phrases like "capture and abuse the privilege." Now Rick Lowry is going to be "sitting up straight" again, certain she's talking directly to him.

These are serious times and a low-integrity, low-info, bullshitting actress just won't cut it.

McCain couldn't have been more cynical, irresponsible, and insulting to the public trust.

Sarah Palin: "...the press, though not taking advantage and exploiting a situation, perhaps they would want to capture and abuse the privilege,..."

For the record, the ability to get a driver's license is a privilege--the freedom of the press is a Constitutional right. Big difference.

It's just stoking the resentment of the GOP victim brigade: They're surrounded by a hostile, librul media and Eastern elites who think they're better'n them.

That's really all it is. The McPalin campaign's response to embarrassing questions (including queries that wouldn't, as Jennifer says, remotely embarrass a sentient candidate) will be laughable stuff like "You're making fun of my state!" partly because that's all they can come up with, but mostly because they see a chance to work the bruised egos of the poor, put-upon red staters.

I wonder, though, how many Republicans under, say, age 65 are getting all these direct Nixonian references: "We want to get our message out without the media filter," "Georgetown cocktail parties," etc. If I hadn't read a good deal about the Nixon administration, which was before my (political) time, I wouldn't have noticed how precisely all this language mirrors Tricky Dick's. Do they not realize this stuff just isn't going to resonate with younger voters?

A bit off topic, but someone up there mentioned the "clean up the greed and corruption on Wall Street" stuff Miss Sarah has mentioned a number of times. Why hasn't anyone asked for specifics? Oh yeah she only talks to Fix News (Olberman's apt name for them). Exactly how would Wall Street work without greed? How do you stop greed anywhere anyhow? What corruption? I thought the main corruption was addressed by insider trading laws, which as Martha Stewart might agree, seem to be enforced. It's not corruption if it's allowed by law. (Derivatives?, hedge funds?, etc.) What would it take to end that kind of stuff, if that's what she's talking about? Government regulation and intrusion? Uh-oh, she's definitely against that sort of stuff. Golden parachutes - OK - I thought compensation was set by the market. So, can't go there. Could however radically raise income and profit taxes on the super rich. Uh-oh, totally against that too. This seems like really simple questioning to me that should be persued in her next press conference. Oh, right, I forgot, she hasn't had any, unlike oh I dunno, every vice presidential candidate in history.

So one of her main platforms is to help the privileges that are captured and abused? Open Battered Privilege Centers? She's qualified to be VP because she wants to preside over congress but she's an outsider who is unaware of how they operate.

I understand she's got some health care plan involving takin' hits and takin' shots and some new suppository called a Mav'rick.

And something about a sex aid called a Putin featuring a "rearing head". The woman is very open minded as well as being a great down home communicator in the mold of W.

Wait, so Palin's repeated failure to understand our system of government is more important than Biden's misstatements? What, just because hers demonstrates a systemic ignorance? How fucking elitist of you. Next thing you know you will be pretending that she is less prepared to be VP than Biden and that Obama's demonstrable knowledge and experience make him qualified to be President.

This bullshit "I was being harrassed for being from a small state" stuff is pitiful. Bill Clinton had lived 90% of his life in a state that is the butt of jokes nationally for being backwards and out of the flow of modern life when he ran for president - does anyone think he would have been offended by such a question? He would have exhausted the interviewer with the length and breadth of his reading materials, rather than pretend that someone was insulting him and his state by assuming no one there had ever heard of books. I should know, because I live in Arkansas and have these types of conversations with people regularly online.

I spent two years in Iowa, and know full well what you're talking about. During my time there, I found Iowans more interested in world affairs than outsiders might believe (agriculture, still an important part of the state's economy, has become such a global concern that it has to be thus). Believe it or not -- and this is something both liberals and conservatives need to realize -- there are plenty of intelligent, well-read people who reside in "flyover country" and have never set foot on an Ivy League campus. And Sarah Palin isn't their surrogate.

People like Palin have imagined our contempt for them for decades, when in fact they're projecting their own insecurities.

No, they're not. They're projecting their own contempt.

How often have you heard or read sneering references to "San Francisco Democrats," "Massachusetts liberals," "Taxachusetts," "big-city elite liberals," "San Francisco liberals," and so on? And how many times have you heard sneering references to "Alaska Republicans" or "Alabama conservatives" or "Mississippi values"?

How many times have you heard that people who live in cities are out of touch with the Real America? Conversely, how many times have you heard that rural people are out of touch with the Real America?

And yet, rural people are the smallest proportion of our population. Why are they considered authentic, and city and suburban people aren't?

Our political culture allows only one kind of geographic bigotry to be voiced: anti-city, anti-liberal state.

If an elected official or prominent pundit has ever said, for broadcast or publication, that rural people are stupid, I haven't heard it. But I hear constantly that people in big cities are untrustworthy and alien and un-American.

And yet Palin and her ilk are allowed to peddle the fiction that the bigotry runs the other way. Why doesn't anyone point this out?

Maybe she means "capture and abuse the privileged." Perhaps she's a secret revolutionary, sent to muck up the Republican ticket, and she let this one phrase slip out.

PALIN'S 2006 TAX RETURN

Self Employment Tax NOT CALCULATED CORRECTLY!
If you look at form SE Form for 2006 return, notice lines 7 through 10 are not correct.
Palins only calculated MEDICARE portion on self employment.
No SOCIAL SECURITY tax was calculated.
Self employed have to pay both sides (employee and employer) for social security and medicare.
I am self employed also, I would not be able to get away with paying no social security tax on self

What Sarah Palin says on Fox News -- indeed, everything that Sarah Palin says -- is fodder for the weak-minded, ignorant, neo-brownshirt dittohead base of the Republican Party.

In this case she is just repeating one of the favorite themes in their mythology of poor-pitiful conservative victimhood at the hands of powerful liberal elites: that the only media they can trust is the partisan Republican right-wing extremist media, e.g. Fox News.

Note that the essence of her comments is that she has been victimized by the "powerful liberal media" and that it is only through Fox News that she can speak directly to the people.

This connects back to the rather shocking moment in the debate when she arrogantly proclaimed to both Ifill and Biden that she was not going to answer questions, but was going to recite whatever random, scripted talking points she wanted "directly to the American people". No doubt many thousands of mental slaves of Rush Limbaugh cheered that moment.

The lunatic-fringe right-wing extremist know-nothing base is all the Rove-Schmidt-Palin-McCain campaign has left. That is the only portion of the electorate that they are really targeting now -- with Palin's line of fake-folksy bullshit and shameless lies, with their decision to run only negative, dishonest attack ads for the duration of the campaign, etc.

These strategies are not aimed at "independent" or "undecided" voters. They are aimed at bringing out the base, because that -- combined with unprecedented, massive voter suppression, disenfranchisement and fraud schemes -- is their only hope of putting Palin and McCain in the White House.

"What was that, Gov. Palin? I couldn't hear you over that big chip on your shoulder. Could you speak up, please?"

Any suggestion that Couric's question had an anti-Alaska bias was only happening in Palin's head. Assuming, of course, that isn't just a rhetorical invention after the fact. Personally, I usually take it as a compliment when people ask me what I read and where I get my news.

People who actually do read newspapers understand that there are a wide variety of them and they aren't interchangeable, and the ones you chose say a lot about how you process information and understand the world. For people who actually are engaged in current events and politics, the question has nothing to do with being a rube, and a lot to do with understanding your approach to the world.

Even Palin's excuse reveals that she doesn't understand. Paradoxically, only someone who actually was an uninformed rube would think that was a question that assumed she was an uninformed rube. It's the sort of question an informed cosmopolitan would have no difficulty answering, and would think nothing of.

C'mon kids. Sarah only needs to read 1 book, the Book. You know the Gospel of Prosperity as written by the great prophet Pat Robertson with the forward by Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker and James Dobson.

After all who can forget the words of the Savior, "Ignore the poor and downtrodden, feed and care for the wealthy." Or "Only the wealthy get cuts in the line to Heaven."

They have no shame, they're Republicans

The odd thing about her bristling at Katie's question is that there are a million acceptable answers. For instance, even saying "Well Katie, I'm too busy to read much, so I listen to the cable news channels" would have not been unreasonable. The only explanation is that she doesn't read much of anything, and doesn't want to.

I know this comment is very late (with reqard to this post and the subject in general), but I have had something nagging at me ever since I first saw the clip of Couric asking Palin about the publications that helped shape her (Palin's) "world view." I wondered to myself - especially given Palin's odd assertion that she read the publications that had been "in front of [her]" over the years. I thought to myself, "Does one of Katie Couric's producers read Bag News Notes?

http://bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagnews/2008/09/early-signs-of.html

I have not independently verified that the photo in the link shows Palin posing with a publication of the John Birch Society, but it could it did make me wonder about Palin and her defensiveness in another light.

Finally, I have to say that if Palin finds herself annoyed by Katie Couric's questions, she has nothing on me. I am very annoyed that Palin - an underqualified, conceited, ambitious, more-than-a-tad-clueless politician is being considered for a job that is one step away from the most important, powerful political office on the planet. I am annoyed every time I hear or read one of her incoherent responses to a question. I am annoyed when tools like Mara Liason judge her debate performance as "articulate," when any person who truly respects the meaning of that word would never dream of using it to describe the poli-babble of Palin. I am annoyed that she lies without even the slightest hint of self-awareness or regret (see ambition and cluelessness). I heartily annoyed by the sheer awesomeness (and I do not use that word in the casual, throw-away junk vernacular that you do) of your utter lack of qualification for office of VPOTUS. So, Govenor Palin, get over yourself and your faux heartland indignation. I grew up in a small town, and the people who live in them are every bit as flawed and no more basically patriotic as those who live in the city. I do not think your level of annoyance can compete with mine.

Palin expects "deference" from the media. Hadn't you heard?

On Fox News, Palin was able to give a few examples of publications she reads, including the New York Times, Washington Post and The Economist.

Her sudden ability to name a few publications, like her recollection of Supreme Court rulings, reminds me of the George Bush Reading List that came out a couple years ago.

It reminds me of stories from the Cold War days when Stalin was praised as an inventive genius by the Soviet press.

Her talking-point now, to excuse her inability to answer easy questions from Couric, is that she was being "flippant."

*Of course* I had good answers to those questions, she's saying; I was just being flippant. I'm not really as unbelievably ignorant as I appear.

Sarah's replies during the debate had substance and were intelligent. Some don't think so. But again, her reply's reflected the world view of a large part of the country. Simply because the libs don't agree and don't understand her comments doesn't mean she lacked substance. It's Sarah is a wonderful woman and I would love to see someone that honestly represents the middle class in the white house.
WhiteTrashVote.blogspot.com

I don't know why she didn't just admit that she doesn't read. She could've said something like "With five kids and a state to run, I don't have much leisure time, but I do watch FOX News!" The base would have loved it.

Lisa: You are one effed up individual. You go on believing that Sarah Palin is intelligent and your friend. She is neither. Go on bearing your little cross of victimhood, as if some elitest is trying to hold you back and put you down. Govenor Palin does not appeal to your better angels, she is tapping your lowest fears and insecurities. And, she does NOT believe she is anything like you. Neither do you, I guess, since you have proclaimed her to be your "Princess Di." What a joke and a tragedy.