Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

In the clip, you'll see John McCain's pick for vice president, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, interviewed by the nauseatingly unctuous Glenn Beck, which makes the clip NSE (not safe for eating while watching). The interview actually starts at 4:20.

She was on the program to discuss her lawsuit against the Bush administration to stop them from including polar bears on the endangered species list, and reveals herself to be a rabid anti-environmentalist and a strong proponent of global warming, who favors drilling in her state's pristine wildernesses.

Here are a some highlights of her biography:

• She was born in 1964, and is the youngest and first female governor of Alaska
• She's a former beauty queen: In 1984, Palin was second-place in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant after winning the Miss Wasilla contest earlier that year, winning a scholarship to help pay her way through college. In the Wasilla pageant, she played the flute and also won Miss Congeniality
• She is married to her high school sweetheart, Todd Palin. They have five children, including a son who is serving in Iraq
• Her political resume appears to be thin. She was a city councilmember and mayor in Wasilla, ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of Alaska and then served as the ethics chair of a state energy commission, but later resigned in disgust at the unethical behavior she uncovered. She has been governor since January 2007
• She is a former follower of Christian nationalist Pat Buchanan and is a member of Feminists for Life and opposes gay marriage. However, she claims to have gay friends and vetoed a measure that would have withheld benefits for gay state employees
• She likes to hunt and eat moose burgers

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

[UPDATE 7:39am PT: NBC News' Kelly O'Donnell has confirmed that McCain has picked Palin.]

No less a source than Fox News says this morning that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is en route to Ohio this morning, and is likely to be John McCain choice to be his running mate.

Fox also reports that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is out of the running. Meanwhile, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty told a local radio station this morning that he will not be in Ohio later today when John McCain names his vice presidential running mate.

About Palin, Fox reports that "a charter aircraft from Anchorage had arrived in Dayton, Ohio, where McCain has scheduled a noon ET rally to announce his choice."

Of course, because the source is Fox News, the story about Palin could be disinformation sent out by the McCain campaign

Bob Novak, the rightwing columnist who treasonously revealed the clandestine identity of CIA WMD investigator Valerie Plame, has been diagnosed with a brain tumor, but recently returned to producing short squibs for his syndicate, including the latest on Joe Lieberman's chances of being named as John McCain's VP on Friday:

We should be so lucky.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

It appears he really is running for President of the Hanoi Hilton.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

This sounds like a story you might read on the spoof site, womenforjohnmccain.com, which my colleague Trish at Pensito Review wrote about earlier today, but, sadly, this is no joke. Or at least it's not meant to be.

Yesterday, just in time for the start of the Democratic National Convention, the McCain campaign released a new ad that features Debra Bartoshevich, a nurse from Washington, who claims to be a "proud Hillary Clinton Democrat" who now plans to vote for McCain.

But at news conference in Denver arranged for the Republican National Committee, Bartoshevich revealed what appears to be a shaky grasp on her candidate's position on an issue that is fundamental to actual Hillary Clinton supporters:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

The 3 a.m. call:

Vice presidential candidates are often called on to be the aggressors in the campaign. A comment Biden made earlier this year may have resonated with Obama:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Early reports that Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones had died were incorrect, however her condition appears to be very serious.

Cleveland Plain Dealer at about 1:30 p.m. EDT:

Update 4:31 p.m. PDT: The Associated Press and C-SPAN are reporting that Rep. Tubbs Jones died at 6:12 p.m. EDT today, in Cleveland. Our thoughts are with her family.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Events in the campaign this week offer a case study in how Fox "News" assists the right wing --- in this case, the McCain campaign --- to disseminate disinformation:

Monday: Speaking before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, John McCain falsely claimed credit for supporting the 21st Century GI Bill, which was sponsored by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.):

In reality, the bill McCain "sought" was not Webb-Hagel, which he opposed because its tuition benefits were "too generous" to the troops. The version he sought was a different bill that he co-sponsored, and which "in no way resembles" the bill which was ultimately passed, as noted by ThinkProgress...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

The McCain campaign is fighting hard against charges that McCain cheated on the rules of debate at a rightwing evangelical forum in a California megachurch over the weekend by cribbing the questions in advance. They are so desperate, apparently, that a McCain operative even played the POW card, citing McCain's imprisonment by the Vietnamese 40 years ago as evidence somehow that he did not cheat Saturday night.

Even "Pastor Rick" Warren, the multimillionaire evangelist who hosted the event --- and who clearly favored McCain in the questioning --- has admitted that despite his assertion to the audience that McCain was sequestered in a "cone of silence" during the live session with Obama, McCain was, in fact, in his car during much of Obama's session, where he certainly could have listened to the interview.

And this exchange from the forum appears to indicate that McCain knew that Warren was going to ask him a very specific question about the Supreme Court. Notice how McCain asks if he can go "back" to a question about the court:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

“There are things you can do individually to save energy,” Barack Obama said last week “… Making sure your tires are properly inflated — simple thing. But we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling — if everybody was just inflating their tires. And getting regular tune-ups. You’d actually save just as much.”

Despite the fact that even NASCAR extols the gas-saving virtues of proper tire inflation on its website, the McCain campaign spent the early part of this week mocking Obama’s assertion that keeping tires inflated conserves gasoline by selling tire gauges, for a $25 donation, labeled “Obama Energy Plan.”

On Wednesday night, however, during a conference call with supporters, McCain did a complete 180 on tire inflation:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

George Bush went out of his way not to use the term "mission accomplished" yesterday when he quietly declared the surge in Iraq to be a success. Bush's declaration has been ignored by just about everyone, except for Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who used it as an opportunity to trot out one of the tired-est of the GOP Big Lies: that Saddam Hussein's government was behind the 9/11 attacks.

First, here's a bit of Bush's non-declaration of success mumbo-jumbo:

A little later, during a press conference held by Lieberman and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to congratulate Dear Leader on his latest triumph, Lieberman said this:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

We reported earlier that a report from the Department of Justice Inspector General confirmed that Monica Goodling, the political hack installed by the GOP at the department, had in fact used an applicant's status as a "loyal Bushie" as a litmus test for DOJ employment.

Now comes confirmation of a rumor reported on NPR in April that the DOJ IG was also pursuing charges that Goodling had fired a US Attorney because Goodling suspected the woman was gay:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Prospects are so bad for Republicans in the Senate that Sen. Mitch McConnell, their embattled leader, has given them free reign to vote against the party and, certainly, their unpopular president, if it will help them save their seats in November.

In stark contrast, Republicans in the House are apparently determined to follow Bush in lockstep over the cliff (to mix multiple metaphors), or at least that's the impression they gave at the impeachment hearing last Friday --- which was officially titled "Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitation" --- when GOP Judiciary Committee members put on a show of the sort of blind loyalty to George Bush that put their party in its dire predicament in the first place.

One by one, these pols --- all of them the sort of Republicans who give white guys a bad name --- took turns lashing out at the proceedings and trying to spin Bush's crimes as insignificant and morally relative to other president's misdeeds. At worst, it was a disgusting display of complicit politicians trying to save their own skins by fending off any pursuit of justice for Bush. At best, they came off a bit comically, like vampires in movies clawing and snarling at sunlight just seconds before they meet their doom.

Speaking of horror, a prime example of growling and back-biting --- not to mention outright lying on the record --- was the performance of Rep. Steve King of Iowa (who is not related to the novelist Stephen King).

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Does anything that George W. Bush and John McCain say matter? Based on this colloquy between Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on "Countdown" last night, apparently not:

Here's the question Bush was asked in May 2007, as well as a bit of preamble to the money quote:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

On Election Day this November, voters in San Francisco will vote on a local initiative to rename one of the city's largest waste treatment plants in honor of George W. Bush. If the initiative passes --- and since the number of Republicans in the city is statistically zero, it very well might --- the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant will be forever known as the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. It is as fitting a monument to the eight years of the Bush presidency as we can think of, with the possible exception of naming a garbage dump after him.

The San Francisco effort is the work-product of local activists who came up with the idea in the most grassroots of all settings: over beers. Subsequently, the group set up the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco, which handled promotion for the petition drive. On Thursday, the city's Department of Elections certified that the 7,168 signatures the commission submitted were valid and approved the initiative for the November ballot.

Although the organizers in San Francisco are clear that their effort is satire, this is a cause that grassroots organizers in other cities should consider seriously. This nationwide effort could be similar to, but hopefully more successful than, the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which was the brainchild of the anti-government lobbyist Grover Norquist, who is best known for his close associations with corrupt Bush cronies like (now-imprisoned) Jack Abramoff and (perhaps incarcerated one day) Karl Rove.