Last Night At The Debate Party...

No, she did not get the achilles heel question. Sorry to break it to ya, dont'tcha know, but the average hard-working American -- working two jobs, raising tons of little tikes and doing outreach like counseling homos to straighten up -- just doesn't have enough time to worry about ancient Greeks like people in liberal media!

The wife and I turned off the debate around 10pm (she couldn't stand to hear Palin's voice anymore and I was getting frustrated with both of them skating around answering most of the questions).

From what I did see, it looked like Biden did better as far as presenting his case with the Obama/Biden version of the facts while also rebutting Palin's attacks by pointing out the McCain voted the same way on almost every single issue that she was faulting either Biden or Obama for voting for/against.

But, Palin didn't fall flat on her face as expected. Though, I do think a lot of her outright question deflection was a subtle way of showing that she really had no idea what she was talking about a lot of the time.

It seemed that, when she didn't have a prepared answer, she would spout out some random sound bites that may or may not have had anything to do with the question at hand.

Then again, a good deal of Biden's "What would you do" questions were answered in a "This is what my opponent has done" fashion. So, I guess it could be argued that he didn't have any real answers, either.

Joe Six-Pack my a--.

This is from the super right-wing Washington Times:

Estimates show Palin assets top $1 million
SHARON THEIMER and BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASILLA, ALASKA (AP) - Sarah Palin and her husband have pieced together a uniquely Alaskan income that reached comfortably into six figures even before she became governor, capitalizing on valuable fishing rights, a series of land deals and a patchwork of other ventures to build an above-average lifestyle.

Add up the couple's 2007 income and the estimated value of their property and investments and they appear to be worth at least $1.2 million. That would make the Palins, like Democratic vice presidential rival Joe Biden and his wife Jill, well-off but not nearly as wealthy as multimillionaire couples John and Cindy McCain and, to a lesser extent, Barack and Michelle Obama.

One measure of financial health: While there is a home loan, Palin reported no personal credit card debt on her most recent financial report as Alaska governor. That compares to average household credit card debt among Americans of $9,840 last year.

A more complete picture will come when Sarah Palin outlines her personal finances in federal paperwork in coming days. It will include details of any mortgage debt and at least rough dollar totals for bank accounts and investments.

Palin this week characterized herself as "an everyday, working-class American" who knows how it feels when the stock market takes a hit.

The Palins' total income last year was split almost evenly between Sarah Palin's white-collar job and her husband's blue-collar work. Sarah Palin's salary as governor was $125,000; Todd Palin took in $46,790 as a part-time oil production operator for BP Alaska in Prudhoe Bay, plus $46,265 in commercial fishing income and $10,500 in Iron Dog snowmachine race winnings. These figures do not include nearly $17,000 in per diem payments Palin received for 312 nights spent in her own home since she was elected governor; she also has received $43,490 to cover travel costs for her husband and children.

In addition, each member of the Palin family received $1,654 in state oil royalties paid to all Alaskans.

The Palins' assets seem enviable: a half-million-dollar home on a lake with a float-plane at the dock, two vacation retreats, commercial-fishing rights worth an estimated $50,000 or more and an income last year of at least $230,000. That compares to a median income of $64,333 for Alaskans and $50,740 for Americans in 2007, according to the Census Bureau.

But in Alaska, scarce roads make private planes commonplace, it's typical to spend a month or two fishing commercially, and wilderness acreage is so plentiful the state has sold loads' worth stake-your-claim style. So, it's often the finer points that matter: How old is the airplane? Where exactly is the fishing spot? Is the house on a paved road?

Land itself doesn't necessarily translate to wealth, said Tom Hawkins of Anchorage, who paid about $2,000 for a five-acre parcel miles from the nearest road, best reached by snowmachine.

"I've got a stunning parcel overlooking a river," Hawkins said. "I took my wife to it. And she stood up and looked out at the stunning view and said, 'Dear, what are we going to do with it?'"

The Palins' main residence, a large two-story house on Lake Lucille in Wasilla, draws much of its value from its prime position along a paved road and float-plane accessible lake, said Darcie Salmon, a local real estate agent. He said lakefront land is plentiful in Alaska, but lakefront land along paved roads isn't.

The Palins' home, tucked behind a wooded field, is off Wasilla's main road, Parks Highway, a mostly four-lane road cluttered with restaurants, bars, retail stores, offices, grocery stores and big-box outlets such as Target. A store-bought "no trespassing" sign is posted near the entry to an unmarked, private gravel drive that winds about 100 yards to the lakefront home. A neighbor's property has an old metal gate at its entrance with a sign warning, "Enter at your own risk."

The Palins' four-bedroom, four-bath house, nearly 3,500 square feet, sits on just over two acres behind a tall wood-plank privacy fence that runs along one side of the property. It's one of the newest homes in the Snider subdivision lining Lake Lucille and is assessed at $552,000 _ more than twice the value of a neighboring two-acre lot with a much smaller, older wood-frame home.

Todd Palin built the house with friends who were contractors, he said in a recent television interview.

The house is worth substantially more than the Palins' starter home, a three-bedroom, two-bath house house built in 1984 on the far western boundary of Wasilla. The quiet, wooded neighborhood was developed about three miles from the city center, with half-acre lots and space for young families.

In addition to the Lake Lucille home, the Palins own recreational property in two remote areas accessible by plane, all-terrain vehicle or snowmachine.

The Palins invested in five lots along Safari Lake, an undeveloped area near Denali State Park. They bought the property, once owned by the state's Department of Natural Resources and valued at $30,000 in assessment records, with friends Scott and Deborah Richter in 2004 and 2005. The Richters have since divorced.

With other friends, the Palins own a cabin on five acres southwest of Wasilla and the Iditarod National Historic Trail. The land and cabin are assessed at $55,000; property records do not show what the Palins paid for their share.

The Palins own snowmachines and an airplane. Todd Palin has a 1958 Piper float plane that he said has been in his family for about 20 years.

Though old, such planes remain in wide use. Palin's plane would be worth from about $38,000 to $78,000 depending on its condition, said Boyd Newman, owner of West One Aircraft Sales in Caldwell, Idaho.

Other family assets include Todd Palin's shoreside lease and commercial fishing permit to harvest salmon from Bristol Bay each season. Last year, the Palins took in $46,265 commercial fishing for sockeye salmon over about a month.

Todd Palin said he purchased his permit from his grandfather in the 1970s. A limited number of permits and shoreline leases have been issued, and the rights to them are often passed down through families or sold. Holders pay a fee each year to renew them.

Palin's is worth about $30,000, a shoreside lease on Coffee Point, where Palin's set-net site is located, is worth about $20,000, and Palin's skiff and gear are likely worth another $20,000, according to estimates by Paul Piercey, a broker with Dock Street Brokers in Seattle, which handles sales of fishing permits, boats and shoreside leases.

Palin's fishing spot is considered good but not great, Piercey said. And the work is backbreaking. Palin has said he expects to earn 68 cents per pound for this summer's catch.

"When you get up in the morning, your fingers are so swollen that you have to stick them in a bucket of icewater just to get movement back again" and ease the pain, said Hawkins, who fished on Bristol Bay one year.

Hawkins is former chief operating officer of the Bristol Bay Native Corp. and former chief executive of Choggiung Ltd., two native corporations in which Todd Palin, who is part Yup'ik Eskimo, is a shareholder, along with the Palin children. The Palins are among about 8,000 shareholders in BBNC and among about 1,200 shareholders in Choggiung Limited, Hawkins said.

Sarah Palin reported Todd Palin collecting $266 and each child $21 in dividends last year from BBNC, and a total of $16.50 from Choggiung Limited.

Todd Palin is still a BP employee. Company spokesman Steve Rinehart declined to describe Palin's status beyond confirming his employment. Palin's schedule is one week on, one week off, Palin said in a recent television interview.

Palin previously left BP in the 1990s to run Valley Polaris, a snowmachine, four-wheeler and watercraft dealership he pursued with a friend and business partner. They sold the business in 1997; public records do not show whether it was at a profit or a loss. At the time, Sarah Palin was earning about $61,000 a year as Wasilla mayor.

The Polaris dealership was among three business ventures the Palins explored; the others never took off. Palin's financial disclosure reports do not say how much if any money the Palins invested in the business ventures or real estate, or what if any profit they made on sales.

Sarah Palin formed a consulting business called "Rouge Cou" _ French for redneck _ but didn't pursue it.

The Palins teamed with another couple, Ray and Carolin Wells of Anchorage, to start a car wash in Anchorage, but it was never built. Carolin Wells described the Palins as silent partners she believes initially paid half the money to buy the land. Around the time Sarah Palin began considering a run for governor, the Palins reduced their stake to 40 percent.

Barely a year into the land ownership, the man lined up to operate the car wash backed out, and since neither couple wanted to run it, they decided to sell the land and move on, Carolin Wells said. She couldn't recall the purchase or sales prices of the land, but believes she and her husband made a modest profit and the Palins broke even.

The couples let their state paperwork lapse on the venture, Anchorage Car Wash LLC, resulting in a letter threatening to dissolve the corporation. The letterhead carried Gov. Palin's name on it.

The deal was among several involving undeveloped land the Palins have engaged in over the years.

The Palins purchased a parcel on Beaverhouse Lake in Big Lake in 2003 and sold it in 2004 for an undisclosed amount. The land has been assessed at $14,000 the past three years.

The Palins sold nearly five acres of undeveloped waterfront property on the northeast shore of Wasilla Lake in 2005 to a local developer. The sales price wasn't disclosed. The land now is subdivided into five parcels, with two waterfront lots, two others behind those, and a commercial lot. Duane Mathes, a local real estate agent showing the property for the owner who bought it from the Palins, said the leveled lots are listed for $149,500 each.

Salmon, who was mayor of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough that includes Wasilla while Palin was Wasilla mayor, recalled that as mayor, Sarah Palin shared many of his pro-development views, and said the Palins' land acquisitions weren't unusual.

"A lot of Alaskans own a lot of land," Salmon said, "and if you're bright, you buy land in the path of progress."

Debbie and Liz, Thanks for your hospitality. I enjoyed meeting you, as well as the Iceman, Mauigirl, and a few others; wish I had met more. It was nice to be able to put faces to the screen names. The BF enjoyed himself, too. We plan on going back to Fitzgerald's..great food!

I enjoyed watching the debate in that venue. Thanks for the drink, Baristanet.

Cheers!

appletony,

My wife and I both work full-time, have 2 kids (including a newborn), and I have a degree in classical languages (not that *that* degree ever did me much good, besides pegging me as a "liberal elitist" but that's another topic entirely).

Where do *I* fit in? Heh.

I guess there's not a lot of mythology taught in the curriculum of Alaska's schools; I learned about Achilles and his proverbial vulnerable heel in elementary school, long before any sort of "elitist" college education.

Of course, teaching classics in public schools has been a subject of controversy in the decades since PC "reared its head" (to use a Palinism) because Greeks and Romans aren't "multicultural" enough, so who knows if any products of American public-schooling in the past 30 years would have "got it"?

However you slice it, not knowing what an "Achilles heel" is is pretty lame.

Banana, Sorry we didn't hook up. I would have enjoyed meeting you.

Same here, Nellie. Next time!

I love these articles: What Palin & Biden said vs. The Truth.

cjbvii, is it PC/multiculturalism or just giving credit where credit is due? After all, not only did intelligent thought not originate with the Greeks but Greek civilization would be a mere shadow of it's legacy had it not been for the education of the the Kemites.

I heard of Hippocrates in grade school but nothing of Imhotep who established diagnostic medicine 2,500 years before Hippocrates existed.

I heard of Pythagoras but not that he was educated for over 20 years in Kemet, an education that was the basis for his own accomplishments in mathematics.

I don't think the western world is ready yet to admit, nevermind teach, the fact that Greek civilization and philosophy, which is the foundation of the western world, owes much to the Africans who were kind enough to teach them. Plato revealed the root of this in his "Republic" where he explained the dichotomy between the higher and lower self. We pursue higher self through the vehicle of lower self which is evident in our schools' teaching the ethnocentrist view that white Greek civilization is the beginning and there's no possible way that the black Africa could have had anything to do with European greatness.

While it's true the Greeks, for the most part, readily gave credit to the Kemites, it's not common knowledge and certainly not taught. We teach a very Eurocentric view of history in this country and it's disappointing that any attempts to go beyond that are frowned upon and labeled PC or an attempt at multiculturalism.

But I do agree that not knowing what an Achilles' Heel is, is pretty lame.

dannyboo,

I have no problem giving credit where credit it due, but I don't think we ought to throw the baby out with the bathwater either.

The problem I have with many attempts at "multicultural" education, is that they tend to teach, say, an Afro-centric curriculum to the exclusion of European classics, demonizing anything Greco-Roman in the process.

I agree teaching that Greek civilization was the "beginning" of technological or cultural enlightenment is not only wrong, it's irresponsible, but it's equally irresponsible to teach a curriculum based on the work of "scholars" like Martin Bernal who have put forth the ridiculous notion that, say, Cleopatra was black by virtue of being Queen of Egypt. She wasn't, she was a Macedonian princess from Northern Greece, at a time when Egypt (aka Kemet) was ruled by descendants of Hellenistic generals who served under Alexander (in her case, the Ptolemies).

There's no doubt that the Greeks learned a lot from the Egyptians, especially in the realms of engineering, sculpture, architecture and science/medicine. However, there are levels to which the Greeks took these disciplines that are entirely the result of their own ingenuity.

My point, again, wasn't that Greek classics should be the be-all and end-all, but that educators are depriving generations of kids the cultural reference point upon which a lot of our society IS based (and to which constant allusions are made in art, literature, politics, and even everyday conversation) by not teaching them at all.

I'm glad you clarified cj as I see we are in agreement. I had interpreted your original statement in a different manner than which you meant it.

At any rate, it looks like everyone had fun and the party was a great success.

Well, it's taken awhile but it finally looks like Nancy Pelosi is starting to figure out how the house works:

"We're not going to take a bill to the floor that doesn't have the votes."

Congrats Nance!

Looks like I missed a fun time. I stayed home and watched the debate with a bowl of cheese curls, which I almost choked on a few times when Sarah uttered some of her more, um, profound Palinisms. The one that almost killed me was "rear that head of abuse".

I wonder if anyone was keeping score on how often she uttered each of her signature catchphrases and buzzwords.

Perhaps Palin's Achilles' heel is her ignorance and apparent lack of education, which would explain why she didn't get the reference.

The last thing on Earth that I intended was to start a rational discussion!!!!

cjbvii, I believe appletony was engaging in sarcasm.

How do we know she didn't understand the question?

She wasn't asked to define the term.

I think there are other and better explanations - such as she had some prepared generic statements she wanted to make and this was her opening, or she saw it as a "trick question" (being asked to name a weakness) and ignored it, or she lost track of her time. Maybe she forgot what the question was.

A good time was had by all! Thanks, Barista, for the fun party. It was great finally meeting Iceman, Lasermike and Nellie! Mrs. Martta, sorry you weren't there, will have to catch you next time!

Really, Maui, sorry I missed you as well. Maybe we can organize a pre-holiday Baristaville gathering.

After last night's debate I found myself wondering about the term "maverick" (note how nicely it rhymes with "makes me sick") so I looked around and found that Saturn Smith had already done the homework on this:

The original maverick is, actually, Samuel Maverick, b. 1803, a slave-owning Texas lawyer and land-baron who put the name into popular usage because he was (1) sensitive to the animals' pain, or (2) keen to be able to claim any unbranded cattle as his own, or (3) just too disinterested in ranching to be bothered to brand his cattle -- thus wayward animals wandering the range aimlessly with no sign of where they belonged were called, in his honor, Maverick cattle.

Mr. Maverick also served in government, where he took a number of unpopular stands (he was against secession before he was for it) and was a POW, imprisoned by the Mexican army when they tried to claim Texas (serving some of his time in solitary at the notorious San Carlos Hilton). Oh yeah, he was also a Democrat.

Thus, here we go, the original maverick (looks like a real wild man, no?): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Augustus_Maverick

Irony Alert for the Ms. Artic Maverick - Samuel was grandfather to the guy who coined the term "gobbledygook"

It was great finally meeting Iceman, Lasermike and Nellie!

How did you all go about introducing yourselves??

...in my head, it's a pretty funny exchange!

I saw Iceman's McCain flag hanging out of his pocket so I went over and said Hi. He happened to be chatting with mauigirl when I did. I was thinking we should have had name tags with our screen names. I might have met more people if I had hung out at the bar but we hadn't had dinner so we got a table.

Maybe we can organize a pre-holiday Baristaville gathering.
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Sounds like a plan!

I might have met more people if I had hung out at the bar but we hadn't had dinner so we got a table.

Maybe, maybe not. People were pretty tight-lipped throughout the debate, even at the bar!

Maybe we can organize a pre-holiday Baristaville gathering.
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Sounds like a plan!
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Didn't someone mention something about a local piano bar? That would be a hoot!

Karaoke.

LOL..yes!

I'll sing a Toby Keith song.

Holiday songs!

Sarah Palin Flowchart:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/the-palin-debat.html

I note, somewhat belatedly, dannyboor's stumping for the "influence" of black Africa upon Greek philosophy and culture. Really, dannyboor, this one is silly. At least read Mary Lefkowitz's "Not Out of Africa" before you run your mouth on such a controversial topic.

There isn't a serious scholar out there who takes the idea of black African influence on the Greeks as more than a passing, PC-driven fancy. There are, however, plenty of serious scholars out there who hesitate to loudly condemn such nonsense for risk of undergoing what Mary Lefkowitz did after she published her brave book.

It was also just you showing off your pesudo-education, danny, to refer somewhat pretentiously to ancient Egypt as "Kemet." Really, if "Egypt" was good enough for Leonard Woolley and Flinders Petrie....We all know now that you've maybe read a book or two on ancient Egypt, but the next time, could you find some less credulous volume?

This one has been exploded so often that I wondered what the point of dannyboor's stumping for it was. Then I remembered his rather noisily announced dislike of lame white old chubby folk who can't sing. So I get it now! The reason Greeks can dance and sing so well is because of contact with blacks in Egypt! Opa! Opa!

Cathar, you didn't take your lecture far enough. All humans come from Africa, ultimately, that is, if carbon dating and fossils have any academic value.
Only don't tell that to Sarah Palin. Her husband might keel over if he discovered that his great great great great grandpappy was African.

My peep's took a left out of Africa and headed up to Eastern Europe where they heard there was great stuffed cabbage.