The Republican party has become a collection of world-class infantile bitchers and moaners but they still refuse to offer any helpful suggestions or solutions on the economy. Only cries of how Obama is wrong.

We're still waiting, you guys. Put down your nuks-nuks and say something useful for once in your God-forsaken lives.

I absolutely love this small passage from her New York Times Magazine interview.

Q: What do you think about Judge Sotomayor’s frank remarks that she is a product of affirmative action?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: So am I.

Don't hold your breath waiting for her to choose "right things" candidates. Joe also made the same pledge. All he supported on his stumps was Joe the Plumber.

The Washington Times reports that Palin will quickly jump "back into the national political fray." "I will go around the country on behalf of candidates who believe in the right things, regardless of their party label or affiliation," Palin said over lunch in her downtown office. "People are so tired of the partisan stuff — even my own son is not a Republican."

Well, there you go. Sarah threw her son into the conversation, not the hateful liberal media. So now that she tossed in that hand grenade, just what party does he belong to? Chances are, like Todd Palin, it's the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party.

But I'm being mean to drag her kid into this.

Never count out the loud oafish minority.

It’s more likely that she will never get anywhere near the White House, and not just because of her own limitations. The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.

Its voice can be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week. “Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American revolution, promising “there will be blood.”

These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.

Drudge's childish lead story (for the second straight day, by the way) is the picture of Obama allegedly staring at a girl's ass, complete with a dozen links to stories about it and the equally childish headline, "Second Stimulus Package!"

First of all, even Joe Scarborough conceded that the picture is a deception once he saw the video. It was a split-second in time which shows from another angle that Obama wasn't even looking there, but was in fact turning to help the woman behind him down the step. (Video here) Sarkozy, on the other hand...

Secondly, Drudge decided to lower her age to 16 (she was 17 - a junior G8 delegate from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, not a 16-year-old from Rio, as Drudge asserts). Nothing gets the right wing fatasses' blood boiling faster than a scary black man ogling a white girl. Especially a scary...DEMOCRATIC black man.

Finally, even if he was looking there...so the hell what? I sure as hell looked there.

Drudge really wouldn't understand anyway. He hasn't gotten anything right since 1996. Real mature, you dipshits. Goddamn infants.

Alaska's newspaper of record won't be missing the cut-and-runner.

She continues to say she didn't want to stick around as a lame duck, once she decided not to run for re-election. In the upcoming legislative session, she suggested, she would be a political piñata, as lawmakers bashed on her in hopes of winning the soon-to-be vacated space in the governor's mansion.

That might make sense if Palin were as unpopular as her predecessor. But Palin is still plenty popular with Alaskans, so bashing her would be a strange marketing strategy for a future gubernatorial candidate. She doesn't seem to realize that lame duck status also can be liberating, freeing an official to do what she thinks best, even if it's politically unpopular...

Gov. Palin's responsibilities to the state and her national ambitions pull her in opposite directions. Before running for national office, Palin inspired bipartisan coalitions to pass ethics reform, fix the state's corruption-tainted oil taxes and create a competitive bidding process for issuing state incentives to pursue a North Slope gas pipeline. Once on the national stage, though, she won the adulation of Republican voters for her partisanship.

Ever since being chosen for the Republican ticket last summer, Gov. Palin has seemed more and more disengaged from the daily work of running state government. Given the continuing pull of national politics and a diminishing interest in governing Alaska, her decision to leave appears to be the right decision for Alaska.

BOTTOM LINE: The explanations are perplexing, but Alaska will be better off with a governor who wants to do the job.

From bi-partisan to out-of-step neocon. She screwed up: She blindly and weakly let a loser like Bill Kristol guide her career. Now she has none.

All we can say is...thanks.

Iranians have returned to the streets, and the revolution continues.

Iranian police have fired tear gas at hundreds of demonstrators who defied government warnings that any fresh attempt at protests would be "smashed".

The marchers were heading towards Tehran University to commemorate the 10th anniversary of student unrest.

All gatherings have been banned in a crackdown on mass protests that erupted after the disputed election of 12 June.

The BBC's Jon Leyne says the opposition is trying to put momentum back into the campaign against the vote result.

They were organised to mark the anniversary of protests in 1999 between pro-reform activists and the loyalist Basij militia.

Small student-led groups have commemorated the event every year since then.

Between 200-300 protesters in Tehran chanted "Death to the dictator".

Nico Pitney's blog reports it's just a hair over "200-300 protesters" - it was more like well into the thousands. Pictures don't lie. AP still has headline-to-story ADD:

And Bush's nightmare continues in Iraq.

More than 50 people have been killed in a series of bomb attacks in Iraq in the worst day of violence since US forces withdrew from urban areas on 30 June.

The most lethal attack was in Talafar, near Mosul, where at least 34 people were killed and more than 60 injured in a double suicide bombing.

In Baghdad, two attacks at markets left at least 16 dead.

Several other people were killed in smaller attacks in the capital and in southern Kirkuk.

The BBC's Gabriel Gatehouse in Baghdad says the attacks raise questions about whether Iraqi forces are capable of guaranteeing security without US support.

Those who want to derail the handover from US to Iraqi forces now appear to be testing the ground to see how much room they have for manoeuvre, he adds.

In Esquire, Jeb Bush tries to talk about what's said on the campaign trail.

"Barack Obama would not have gotten elected if he'd let us in on his secret plan prior to the election. He would not have gotten elected if he'd said, 'My idea is to create a $1.8 trillion deficit for the next fiscal year. My idea is to spend $750 billion over the next ten years on a government-sponsored, government-subsidized health-care policy. My idea is to create a massive cap-and-trade system [based on the idea] that CO2 is [a] pollutant and we need to tax it in a massive way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.' Those ideas, which are now embedded in his budget, and the ideas in the stimulus package, weren't central in his campaign."

Forget the fact that all this was done to right this ship after W practically destroyed the country's financial infrastructure with his wars, deregulation, corporate kowtowing and tax cuts. If campaign ethics are such a big issue with this family, we can start with his father's "Read My Lips - No New Taxes" and his brother's "No Nation Building" and bullshit claims of being a champion of bipartisanship (not to mention this laundry list of saying anything to get elected).

A Bush shouldn't even be in any list of people who should make ANY criticism of campaign promises. So, Jeb...STFU.