It's a decent little Sunday so far here in Madison - 65 degrees, intermittently sunny, breezy, a windows-open-with-a-pot-of-coffee-and-the-newspaper sort of day. Wood Brothers/Common Market/Blue Scholars on the iTunes, baseball and football on tv...and of course, I'm (somewhat) working, trying to come up with a draft for the restaurant's eighth anniversary dinner in two weeks, and being more or less tied to my phone and/or computer as the boss and I attempt to brainstorm over email.
I'm getting annoyed with Blogger. (Yes, Google, I'm talking to you.) As I briefly mentioned yesterday, the formatting just sucks. Copying and pasting is a hassle, and if I italicize, sometimes it doesn't understand when I say I want to turn the italics off. There's workarounds for most of the problems, but sometimes I have to throw my hands up and say "forget it" (like yesterday's post).
Did you really think you were getting a politics-free post? Good luck with that. Today it's just a copy and paste from, again, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo - here's the link to the main article - "Not Training Wheels We Can Believe In:

There's a lot of complaining that the McCain campaign won't allow anyone to interview Sarah Palin. And for the major news outlets that would be in line for such an interview there's a logic to keeping up the drumbeat. But McCain campaign manager Rick Davis is right: It's their campaign to run. They can do it how they want. Everyone else should just shut up, stop complaining and call the reality for what it is.

Davis says Palin won't give any interviews until she feels "comfortable" giving one. And this morning he added that she wouldn't give any "until the point in time when she'll be treated with respect and deference."

Sarah Palin could be the President of the United States in four and a half months. We tend to think of this as an abstraction; but it's true. And yet today she's so unprepared and knows so little about the challenges and tasks facing the country that she can't even give a softball interview.

That's really all we need to know. Yes, she's off being prepped at some undisclosed location. And I've little doubt that by the time her debate rolls around she'll be sufficiently pumped full of slogans and bromides to make a show of it. But now, this moment, is the one that tells us all we need to know.

As is so often the case, Palin is the incarnation of the Republican slurs. The darling of the hard-right; she gives a stem-winding speeches. She pushes all their buttons. But she's such a lightweight, they can't risk letting her answer a few questions. Not even on Fox. They know she's not ready and probably never will be. But they think the politics might work for them.