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Vanity Fair does the numbers on the "banana look" so you don't have to :

Cindy McCain
Oscar de la Renta dress: $3,000
Chanel J12 White Ceramic Watch: $4,500
Three-carat diamond earrings: $280,000
Four-strand pearl necklace: $11,000–$25,000
Shoes, designer unknown: $600
Total: Between $299,100 and $313,100

I know am coming late to the Campbell Brown party but I just have to post it here because it's so awesome. Campell Brown smacks down McCain surrogate Tucker Bounds for not being able to give not one example of Sarah Palin's alleged experience with National Security.

She goes after him like a pitbull and doesn't back down even as he acts insulted by not being allowed to stick to his talking points. Funny because now the Alask National Guard has responded directly to the question and the answer is, No. Sarah Palin has never had to deploy the Alaska National Guard in any situation akin to a national security crisis. (h/t to Andrew Sullivan)

It's amazing we have to congratulate Campbell for just doing her job.

That "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs" bit is pure gold :

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."

Y'all know how pissed off I got after La Steinem wrote that horrid anti-Obama Op/Ed for the New York Times and that my beef with her is just not new. This time around she serves her purpose well for, indeed, all what Palin and Clinton share is nothing but a chromosome. Yet Ms. Steinem needs to go further.

Let me just come out and say this right off the bat : We need more black and latina feminists on TV tearing into the right wing's forced pregnancy frame to reproductive rights.

I had the honor again to participate in Melissa Long's livecasting from the conventions. In the first one at the DNC we barely spoke of women's issues. Ironically here in St. Paul and with Palin's nomination the discussion was almost exclusively about her and about women's rights.

Which is why am being very candid about the need to put more colored feminists into these traditional media settings. Our perspectives on reproductive and women's rights are not filtered necessarily through the need to curtail our ability to have children as much as having the right to not have the government control our bodies by claiming surrogate ownership.

Which is why it is outrageous to me that someone as young and seemingly intelligent as Amanda Carpenter from Town Hall will go on wailing about how Palin is being vilified for not aborting her Down Syndrome child.

Is she serious?!?!

Try as I may, I couldn't make the gentleman stop to speak with me. Actually, when I asked him if he was a Republican, he kind of fast walked away from me. OK ... he did run across the street like I was the plague. So I just started telling him loudly, "C'mon! You can tell me! Don't run away!"; but no, the man was definitely weary of my indentifying him.

So even though he didn't answer my question, I am pretty sure that what we have here is a picture of the "Abjectio Republicanus Africasensis" in the wild.

An endangered political species indeed.

First the Bush family Pastor slams McCain's character and endorses Obama. So McCain sure needs a pick me up when it comes to the character issue. I think that was what the Palin nomination was SUPPOSED to give him. Now the Palin decision is already backfiring on McCain, simlpy adding to his problems.

Two conservative "pundits" slam McCain's Palin decision:

Meanwhile, seems Palin attends a church that embraces anti-Semitism. Certainly this deserves as much coverage as Bush's pastor endorsing Obama, and McCain's "spiritual guide" (McCain's words)Hagee's anti-Semitism. Seems McCain/Palin has far more pastor problems than Obama.

I mean, seriously ... Minne ... APPLE?

 (( groan ))

Hadn't noticed the origamied towels in my bathroom.
I didn't get that in Denver with the dems .... heh.

The irony is of the consistency of rich, silky, farm-fresh happy-cow sweet cream: the party of family values is, tonight, going to give a big, raucous cheer to teen pregnancy.

On a question that is flying around here in St. Paul: What about the presence of one Levi Johnston, the 18 year-old father of Bristol Palin's unborn child? At the end of this kind of speech, there is usually a lot of applause, music, and the candidate's family up on stage. Johnston is in St. Paul, I am told, but there has been no final decision about what he will do tonight.

"This is not an issue that we're going to act ashamed or scared about," my source told me.

Somebody should tell Senator Tom Coburn, republican of Oklahoma, who last week - not in the last decade, last year, last month, but last week - said this on the floor of the Senate while trying to block a bill that adequately funds sex education in public schools:

"How many people really think it's in the best interest of young people to be sexually active outside of marriage? Does anything positive ever come from that?"

Whether or not anything positive ever comes out of teen pregnancy isn't for me to decide, but one thing is clear: it's not a problem when the mother of the teenager is running for high elective office as a republican. For that higher purpose, Tom Coburn will cheer his little head off, along with the rest of his party.

John McCain's VP pick, corrupt Republican Sarah Palin, turns out to have a teenage daughter who is pregnant out of wedlock. And this has created quite a bit of consternation among republicans. Many righ wingers are condemning McCain and Palin over Palin's teen daughter's pregnancy. Of course McCain is already being attacked by Bush's own pastor for his immorality and poor character, so this is bound to further alienate McCain's base.

But I don't condemn Palin over her daughter's pregnancy per se. This is life. Studies show that more than 90% of Americans have sex before marriage, most starting while they are young. Palin's family is no different than most of our families and they are sticking together over this. Good for them!