from Anchorage Daily News - Sept. 4th:

Kuwait was Palin's first trip overseas

Last year, Gov. Sarah Palin journeyed abroad to visit 500 members of the Alaska Army National Guard who were stationed 15 months in Northern Kuwait.

She also stopped at a U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, to visit wounded Alaskans, including regular Army troops based at Fort Richardson.

The journey marked the first time that Palin had ever traveled overseas, according to Palin spokeswoman Sharon Leighow.

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My bass guitar has been in Germany for 6 weeks, Iceland for 2 weeks, France for a week, Japan for a week, Okinawa for 1 1/2 weeks, Diego Garcia for a week, South Korea for two weeks, Guam for a week, Turkey for three weeks, Spain for almost a month, Greece for a week, Italy for 2 weeks, and made stops at a bunch of other places (Singapore, Cyprus, Crete, etc.), not to mention at least 38 states and three Canadian provinces.

I think my bass guitar is WAAAAY more quailified in foreign affairs than Sarah Palin.

Just sayin....:-)

John McCain himself brought up the Alaska-is-close-to-Russia-
so-Palin-has-foreign- policy-experience meme last night in his
pre-interview with Charlie Gibson.

My one positive foreign policy takeaway from the Palin fiasco is that her selection by McCain has put the kibosh on an October surprise attack on Iran. I can't believe the White House and the Republicans would now want to run the risk of initiating military action with the frightening pair of 72 year old John McCain and foreign policy flyweight Sarah Palin on the Republican party ticket. As some Republican commentator recently said, next to Palin, Obama now looks like George C. Marshall. If McCain had selected Lieberman or Romney, Bush probably would have gone for it.

So maybe we have a few months now to figure out how to prevent something stupid post-election, between November and January.

Barack Obama is "easily put on the defensive, easily gives up his offensive game strategy." Spot on. I'd just add that this "back on his heels" posture is more often than not the result of not having any idea what he's talking about.

"I can't believe the White House and the Republicans would now
want to run the risk of initiating military action with the
frightening pair of 72 year old John McCain and foreign policy
flyweight Sarah Palin on the Republican party ticket."

Really? Gamblers and adventurers take risks, that`s what they`ve
done for the last 8 years.

They said Palin's teleprompter went out. She reverted to Stepford Mode(tm) and started playing the fear card about Miranda rights like all good loyal American soccer moms are programmed to do.

The Borg glitch is still intact!

I was amused that they threw in an obscure reference to the Abqaiq pipeline hub in Saudi Arabia in Palin's speech -- which has been called the 'jugular vein of the world economy' -- to demonstrate some street cred on energy security. Would anyone who's actually heard of Abqaiq before believe she knew what that was before the briefings this week?

Posted by Dan Kervick Sep 04, 1:16PM
>>>>>>>>>

I don't think Palin's selection makes any difference one way or another. It's clear Bush has been backing off Iran for a while now. Bush appears to be just sitting back and counting the days until he no longer has to play president.
However that is no guarentee that those around Bush and others outside of office and outside the US aren't plotting a way to get to Iran before January.

I was thinking that should Obama be elected we might get a surprise between Nov and Jan but now I don't know. The Biden selection, with Biden's long demonstrated foreign policy hubris recently shown in Georgia-Russia, and the way Obama has 'parroted' Biden's every opinion since his selection, might have the neos and zios thinking they can minipulate an Obama - Cheney lite adm as easily as they did Bush. Especially on Iran as Biden has stated repeatedly that "Israel is in his heart and his gut" in all his I am a Zionist speeches".

I can see the neos using the same ploys and provoking the same kind of events with 0-B as they did before. So they might be thinking all they have to do is wait and then restart their game.

I see nothing that makes me think the dems are really going to get our foreign policy on the right track . They will just 'slid" us into more messes with their f'ing never ending meddling rathering then just immediately declaring war on the world as McCain has.

The Palin pick is not really one to win, so much as it is to advance T.Boone's pet project of a natural gas pipeline.

You know, the natural gas that will be tapped in the oil 'stans and shipped out on the Indian Ocean? Why can't Prudhoe be fashioned to handle it?

That means we can stay in Afghanistan for 100 years also!

Let them eat fossil fuels!

New York Mag is right: The culture wars are on. Frothing at the mouth at a young girl holding her infant brother is probably not a winner.

http://www.politicalcartoons.com/cartoon/805beff5-aade-4ad0-b3a0-020cf6dd2bc1.html

Foreign policy is a lot harder to deal with if one of your convention's chief objectives is to avoid reminders that your guy has been President for the last eight years.

Republicans have conditioned themselves to think and talk about foreign policy only in terms of how it related to public perceptions of George Bush that they now don't have much to say. It's quite a change from the respective ends of the last two eight-year Republican Presidencies, when the GOP's political advantage in national security and foreign policy was overpowering. Both 1976 and 1988 saw vigorous debate and division within the Republican Party on how to handle international affairs, despite the fact that Nixon, Ford and Reagan had pursued consequential foreign policy courses with great success. The younger Bush has charged or stumbled into one debacle after another, maintaining party unity the whole time. And now he's on his way out, with disapproval ratings of nearly 70% and no one left in the Party under the age of 80 with a record of promoting a different approach to foreign affairs.

No, Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel don't count. You have to fight battles to win victories, and these guys didn't.

So Palin's first trip overseas was to visit the Alaska National Guard in Kuwait and check out the international energy scene as governor of Alaska.

Obama's first trip to EUROPE as (obviously acting) chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on EUROPE was to give a campaign speech sandwiched between two rock concerts.

"My campaign staff is bigger than her mayoral staff" -- I'm surprised more people don't think this is a completely boneheaded response.

"Barack Obama's excellent adventure to Europe took his campaign for change to hundreds of thousands of people who don’t even vote or pay taxes here." -- Huckabee

Four of the ten richest Americans don't pay taxes here.

Europe, schmEurope. He was EVERYwhere else. Not that Africa and the ME and Indonesia and Russia count for anything.... We've been over this one already.

And Huckabee's nativism is a little gross. We are bombing the crap out of an entire country whose citizens don't pay taxes here. We've driven 5 MILLION of them into refugee status, killed as many as 1 MILLION of them -- so leave this one alone. It's disgusting.

And your snark about Obama's not knowing what he's talking about is a huge misdiagnosis.

The right wing hot air machine that can turn a wounded warrior missing limbs into a traitor can take any any any position Obama states and turn it into the dumbest thing anyone has ever said. Because the right controls the media, sets the memes, it becomes impossible to talk, think, discuss with any intelligence any possible course of action.

Cuba, energy, tax policy -- try to say anything that doesn't reflect a fairly hard-to-right position and see what happens. Obama's pretty damned shrewd to survive this mostly intact. He knows good and well drill here drill now is crap. But with McCain and the right FROTHING at it, what can he do? STAND FIRM, lose the election for something as trivial as what he says the drill policy will be??? I'd rather have the seeming triangulation for now, though it's a strategy I fervently wish were not necessary.

Yes, why challenge the narrative? Let's campaign on every GOP assumption, so as to water down the votes Congress will have.

Ooops, looks like we have to compromise, instead of driving forward a Democratic agenda. Who could have imagined?

Go ahead, vote for your stealth republican. So much for change....
You've got some kind of nerve to compare that faux progressive to any of the Civil Rights pioneers.
Truth to Power? Well, not exactly.

Tahoe - DUDE- family values??? Putting a Down Syndrome baby in
the Thunder Dome and letting a six-year-old hold him, after
passing the infant around like a hot potato, demonstrates FAMILY
VALUES?

Seriously, Tahoe, you're going to drive me to vote for Obama. It's
a nice day for a SHOT GUN WEDDING! Bristol and Levi, teenagers in
lust, together forever...

The trailer-trash meme is only going to highlight the Scranton-San Francisco disparity of the "who is my audience?" Obama campaign.

My sister brought her baby to a Nationals game once. There were fireworks and lots of cheering. I should have had her arrested.

I'm guessing you don't have firsthand experience of large families with babies. Babies get lots of attention from everyone. It's not a bad thing.

Tahoe-I come from a family of six kids, and have a huge,
extended, close family as well. The kids in my immediate
family have a 20 year age gap from oldest to youngest. I
diapered my brother, and my oldest sister diapered me.

And we're from ARIZONA, which could have rivaled Alaska in
terms of being the reddest of red states when I was growing-up.

McCain, son and grandson of admirals, married to a woman
worth at least $100 million, and a self-admitted adulterer, is
only a wannabe redneck in my home state of Arizona, which he
claims as his. Carpetbagger.

Palin is a real redneck, I'll give you that. And an unbelievably
hypocritical mother.

And, as for Palin and her husband taking an infant with Down
Syndrome to a place full of loud noises and flashing lights, and
then passing him around as if he were a doll, and eventually
leaving him with a six-year-old, well, STUPID IS AS STUPID
DOES.

Governor Gump (as she's called in Alaska) has a lot to answer
for just in terms of what she's done to her youngest, including
what she did last night.

You guys bit the trash talk bait....
This was a Foreign Policy discussion for awhile
sheesch!

Really, that is just the most nonsense any liberal could come up with. Criticizing the Palin family's care of their baby is cuckoo for coco puffs.

"Ridiculing McCain’s VP pick for her commitment to family, poking fun at her hobbies and pushing smear about her kids will only bite back. Remember there’s a reason the naked protesters who ran up and down Eighth Avenue in New York City during the 2004 convention helped Republicans: they made liberals look cuckoo for cocoa puffs."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/sarah_palin_deeply_threatening.html

If you watched Steve's clip, he noted that the culture wars are back on.

"This was a Foreign Policy discussion for awhile
sheesch!"

eberit, mid November, I optimistically predict that TWN will get
back on track. (but then, I`m not an eagle or Cassandra, like our
Australian prophet Kotzabasis...)

re: eberit Sep 04, 4:33PM
"You guys bit the trash talk bait....
This was a Foreign Policy discussion for awhile
sheesch!"

eberit, This is what Tahoe Editor gets paid to do - disrupt productive threads.

Interestingly, Mr. Clemons continually allows it to happen...

Just for laughs -- I PREDICT (that we can all have a good laugh in 60 days....) that the commercial real estate market is going to tank sooner rather than later -- this is where mortgages on shopping malls, landmark skyscrapers and hotel/convention complexes meet. The stock market will drop below 11,000 (I've been thinking 10,000 is a bottom, but I'm not at all an economist). More people will lose jobs, the economy will become an issue again. We'll be saying Trig Who? It's not going to be a values election, it'll be significant economic collapse. But gas may edge down the way it seems to do for every pres. election. Drill here, drill now may lose some of its power.

Look around at all the bankruptcy lawyer ads -- even with the tougher bankruptcy laws, people are hurting and contacting lawyers.

Record number of kids graduating from high school and wanting to go to college -- in an economic collapse. Come Nov., those applications are pretty real. A lot of families will be worrying big time about Pell grants, loans, and 50,000 dollars to head to Harvard. How many families are going to have to say to their children, sorry, it's local community college for you, and you have to work half time to pay for it?

And perhaps a lot of pregnant winger women will be wondering what to do since hubby and wifey are unemployed suddenly.

Save this so we can all laugh at my bad predictions!!