Brayton’s Bag: Is Sarah Palin ready for Oprah the Devil?

You may have seen footage of a protest at an Obama rally in Florida last week involving a group calling itself Blacks Against Obama. Demonstrators were holding up signs saying things like “Obama endorsed by the KKK.” What you probably haven’t seen is the Web page of the group’s leader, Michael Warn, which is at MichaelDefeatsSatan.com. And who is Satan? I’ll let Michael tell you:

This book is written primarily to show the BLACK MAN, and the WORLD the true source of their problem, 33% of the BLACK WOMEN of AMERICA (BABYLON). GOD is angry with the world for worshipping this WOMAN LILITH the DEVIL. Acts 19:22-27 is shocking saying: THE WHOLE WORLD WORSHIPETH THE WOMAN GODDESS DIANA WHO ACTUALLY is LILITH this BLACK WOMAN in BABYLON (America). This can be proven on page 2 of this book, end of paragraph.

People of the WORLD this BOOK OF TRUTH is your warning to separate from LILITH. For what communion has light with darkness. EVE is 67% of the BLACK WOMEN, the one that is GOOD and will help save us, ADAM THE BLACK MAN. THE BLACK MAN is almost extinct and LILITH the DRAGON will kill us all if EVE and we the people of the world don’t stop her. LILITH must be revealed. This WOMAN has made man in the world impotent and obsolete.

Not only is Satan “33% of black women” (huh?), but more specifically Satan is … Oprah Winfrey.

Obama is the Beast 666 given power by the dragon (serpent) Oprah

How ridiculous! Everyone knows that the devil is really Celine Dion.

Sarah Palin: Confident about being ready to be prepared

Judging by last week’s town hall meeting in Grand Rapids, featuring John McCain and Sarah Palin taking softball questions from a handpicked audience of supporters, there’s a good reason why they’re keeping Palin away from any contact with actual reporters who might ask real questions. A sympathetic woman lobbed up a question designed to be hit out of the park, and Palin whiffed:

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Gov. Palin, there has been quite a bit of discussion about your perceived lack of foreign policy experience. And I want to give you your chance. If you could please respond to that criticism and give us specific skills that you think you have to bring to the White House to rebut that or mitigate that concern.

PALIN: Well, I think because I’m a Washington outsider that opponents are going to be looking for a whole lot of things that they can criticize and they can kind of try to beat the candidates here, who chose me as his partner, to kind of tear down the ticket. But as for foreign policy, you know, I think that I am prepared and I know that on Jan. 20th, if we are so blessed as to be sworn into office as your president and vice president, certainly we’ll be ready. I’ll be ready. I have that confidence. I have that readiness.

And if you want specifics with specific policy or countries, go ahead and you can ask me. You can even play stump the candidate if you want to. But we are ready to serve.

I’ll take vapid and substanceless responses for $1,000, Alex. The astonishing thing to me is her ability to say things like this with the sort of bravado that would usually come with saying something that actually makes sense. “Ready to serve” makes her sound like pre-cooked breakfast sausage. But since those are made of pork and I’d hate to wind up the GOP’s fake outrage machine, I better stop right there.

Creationist museum prepares for Darwin anniversary

Next year is the 150th anniversary of the publishing of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The creation museum in the Cincinnati area is preparing for the event by firing up their nonsense machines:

“We’re going to have a couple [of] special exhibits opened: one on natural selection, showing that natural selection is not evolution; and another one on ape-men, showing that they are either apes or people and not in between. But we’re doing this in ready for the Darwin year,” Ham explains.

I always laugh when I hear creationists claim that there are no intermediates between apes and humans (or more accurately, between the now-extinct primate ancestors of humans and modern humans) because while all creationists are absolutely sure that every single hominid specimen we’ve ever found is 100-percent ape or 100-percent human, they can never agree on which ones are apes and which ones are human.

My friend Jim Foley has charted the amusing efforts of seven leading creationists (none of them with any training in anthropology, by the way) to put all the major fossil specimens into either the ape or human group. On Peking Man, for instance, three of those creationist “experts” say it was clearly just an ape, while four of them say it was clearly a human. On the most complete Homo habilis specimen, again, three think it was clearly an ape, while four think it was clearly human. Sounds like pretty good evidence that those species are intermediate to me.

Then again, these are the same people who think that little boys and girls used to ride around on a Triceratops like it was Sandy the Penny Pony at Meijer.

The National Review pushes a poll

You have to love the myopic optimism of Mark Hemingway of the National Review over polling in Michigan. Faced with five months of continual polls showing Obama with a steady lead in this state, Hemingway finds the one poll that showed McCain with a lead and seizes on it as the only one that really understands us:

Michigan is a complex and difficult state to poll in, and one of the few polling firms who seems to “get” Michigan is Marketing Research Group (MRG).

Their latest poll has McCain/Palin up in Michigan by 3 points.

He doesn’t even attempt to explain why this poll, out of the dozens of others, really “gets” it. Nor does he even mention the fact that the poll is several days old and that no fewer than six other polls taken on the same days or after show Obama with an average lead of 5 points and as high as 9 points. Apparently any poll that he likes the results of proves that the company “gets” Michigan; any poll he doesn’t like magically doesn’t exist.

The treasury bailout provokes gallows humor

Having the government put us taxpayers on the line for hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to rescue failing companies in the financial sector has people cracking wise, probably to avoid crying. Best lines so far:

From Jim Henley: “Wouldn’t it save administrative costs if I just started giving my money to random rich people?”

And from John Scalzi: “Are we socialists yet? No, no. Relax. We couldn’t possibly be socialists. Socialists only nationalize successful businesses.”