Thelma Drake? She’s struggling to hold on to her Congressional seat! Does she really have the time for this?

Oh thanks for the giggle on their poor fact-checking!

“vile rumors and smears” = embarrassing truths

But I wouldn’t put it past a Rove-led staff to make up lies to circulate, hoping the Dems will snap at the bait and embarrass themselves, because of that ridiculous Bree-baby story spread over the Labor Day weekend

... pro-Obama Democrats have “airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers into Anchorage” to dig for dirt on our vice presidential nominee ...

... which is 30 more than you sent as part of the vetting process ...

Oooh! Crazy Michele Bachmann is one of them!  Is she going to spy on Obama’s operatives from the bushes?

They just keep stealing ideas from the Obama campaign.  Obama came up with “Change” as a slogan; McCain stole it.  Obama came up with the Fight the Smears website to counter ACTUAL falsehoods about him; McCain stole that idea too.

Is this a circle jerk or a circular firing squad?

Both?

Hmm…where’s the A team?  No KBH, Sen. Olympia Snowe, Sen Susan Collins, former Gov Todd- Whitman?

Maybe they’re pissed about getting passed over for the younger, new model and don’t want to get on the Straightjacket Bus to Hell?

Ack, I thoroughly dislike Thelma Drake.  And among other Virginia Monologues the list also includes… Ms. Macaca, Susan Allen.  Minor league.

Don’t worry, Thelma Drake is goin’ down this year.

All this for a woman who ordered up confidential personnel records on state employees for the sake of digging dirt..  Sad.

JANE SWIFT????  My God, I thought she’d retired after her term as ACTING Governor of Massachusetts ended.  I wouldn’t trust her to tell me the sky was blue!  Is this some kind of joke?

The Heather Wilson pick is genius.  She got a U.S. Attorney fired for not doing her bidding, now her mission is to protect another pol who does that to every bureaucrat she meets.

Wait, this is a real press release, and not one of those wacky Michael Bérubé parody press releases?

The most prominent Republican woman they could find for this gig was Heather Wilson?  That’s just pathetic.

Ellid’s got it. Swift was never more than the Acting Governor, legally, since Mitt Romney swooped in and took the R nomination away from her.

But Jane Swift knows all about being a mommy/governor: if you need child care, just make your staff do it! Gotta get home for Thanksgiving? Take a State Police helicopter to avoid the traffic! Maybe she’s comparing notes with Gov. Palin on how to charge the state for living at home.

Speaking of “Truthiness”, I read a book recently some of y’all might be interested in: “True Enough - Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society”.  It talks about how all of us—left and right and the mushy middle—filter information in ways that feed into our view of how the world should be.  I found it to be thought-provoking reading, perhaps you will too.

Can’t believe I’m writing anything in Jane Swift’s defense.  A bright enough woman, she wasn’t ready for prime time when Paul Cellucci decided he’d rather be ambassador to Canada.  For whatever reason, she felt she had to be superwoman.  She turned down an offer to create a governors mansion or in Boston, maybe she thought it was a plot to embarrass her.  She ended up commuting from the western part of the state, mostly by car.  Maybe because she was working a couple hours away from home, she had child care issues which the citizens of MA became far too aware of. 

Note:  MA’s lack of a governor’s mansion makes running for governor from Central MA west a real burden for anyone who isn’t personally quite wealthy and able to buy or rent a place to live within an easy commute of the state house. 

By the way, before we hang Palin out to dry about the per diem we should check out what other govern’s have been doing.

But Jane Swift knows all about being a mommy/governor: if you need child care, just make your staff do it! Gotta get home for Thanksgiving? Take a State Police helicopter to avoid the traffic! Maybe she’s comparing notes with Gov. Palin on how to charge the state for living at home.

CKD, in a word, BULLSHIT!  Way to work those misogynist talking points and oversimplify the situation in a vastly partisan way - just like Karl Turdblossom!

Swift’s sins were not having a trust fund or a huge stock portfolio to subsidize her time in office, being a sole wage earner, and being a mother. 

1.  Swift lived at the far end of the state, and MA does not have housing for the Governor.  As a sole wage earner, she was expected to maintain two households, one in Boston (where two bedroom apartments were renting for over $2,000 a month) on a less than $100K salary at the time.  Not . Possible.  Most governors of even remote states get housing in their compensation package. 

You can’t be from the working classes, even be a child of the working classes, and make ends meet in MA on what the governor was paid UNLESS you already live in the Boston area and own a house and have paid for your student loans and have a spouse pulling down a full-time professional income.

But I doubt you have lived with a family around here, so you can’t be expected to be troubled by the reality that only the wealthy can be governor.

2. Her husband and daughter were in the hospital, and her other children were with a neighbor.  She had to commute because she couldn’t afford housing, and she needed to get home right away.

The helicopter wasn’t her idea ... IT WAS THE STATE POLICE who told her it was available and offered to take her.  Way to ignore the facts and lay blame. 

Jane Swift’s real “crimes” were to 1) not be rich, 2) not be from money, 3) not have a sugarspouse to hold the financial fort and (most of all) 4) being a woman who actually had babies in office!!!! OMFG!  Women can’t do that!

For Immediate Release
Tuesday, September 9, 2008

We know the truth and are committed to ensuring it as well.

Is it just me, or does this statement make “truth” into something contingent? I mean, I know these folks make shit up as they go along, but have they really gone so far over the edge that truth, itself, has become something that will only persist as long as they “fight for it”? Wow ...

It annoys me to have to defend Jane Swift (because she is a massive Republican tool in some ways), but Ms Kate is 100% correct. A lot of the criticisms leveled against her were unfair and stemmed from the fact that she wasn’t based out of Boston/couldn’t afford a second residence there (like other states with one big city and a “rest of the state,” there is a decent amount of tension between those that live in the Metro area and everyone else*). That isn’t to say that she was a particularly amazing Acting Governor, but who is, usually? 

I don’t think that being wealthy as a key to local political success is unique to Massachusetts (it helps everywhere, after all), but the local political machine is basically inaccessible to most of us and the easiest way to enter into the machine is to have money. It was the same way in Rhode Island when I was growing up – you have to know someone or have money to get anything done. You can tell who has family that works at the Registry by watching if they stand in line and how they get their license plate (RI is wild for vanity plates).

*I say this as someone who lives just north of Boston, btw.
—

Jane Swift is on this “truth squad”? ROFLMAO!! The same Jane Swift who was governor of Massachusetts, who while in office used a Massachusetts State Police helicopter to commute cross-state, from Boston to her home in North Adams; and, who used State House aides to babysit her children (she had a baby in office, too)? By the end of her term she was very unpopular, down to single-digits. Jane Swift was ineffective as governor, and she abused the privileges of her office.

Sound familiar?