Wasilla High School: One of the most interesting tidbits I picked up from ABC's Charlie Gibson interview with Sarah Palin was the chance to see the interior of Wasilla's high school.

My first thought was "Wow! What a cushy high school! Looks like something you'd expect in a rich Chicago suburb, what with that fancy indoor track and all!"

Then a few mitigating factors did occur to me:

1. The weather is pretty bad up there in the winter, so if you want to have your kids running, an indoor track is the thing you need.
2. It was obviously implemented as a multi-purpose facility, since it served as plain old hallway as well as being the indoor track.
3. Wasilla has experienced lots of growth over the last decade or so, so it's not really surprising that they'd have needed a new high school building.

Nonetheless, the optics were that this was not your typical small town (as I recall it, having grown up on a farm 3 miles from a village of 300, and bussed to high school 15 miles away in a town of 6,500 -- almost precisely the size of Wasilla), but a small town in a state that has literally millions of dollars in money that can be spent on building lavish public facilities. Alaska is simply not a normal state, and this means that the citizens of Alaska are accustomed to a much higher level of public services and investment in fancy infrastructure (like high schools with indoor tracks) than most of the people in small towns around the country.

However justifiable and understandable that indoor track may be, it still serves as a visible symbol of just how enormously different from the rest of the country of Palin's hometown actually is.

Addendum: Matthew Yglesias makes an observation on another aspect of Palin's past that shows how odd Alaska really is.

It's Blinky! Sarah Palin sure does seem to like the turn of phrase "I didn't blink in the face of..." or "We can't blink when confronted with..."

From the interview transcript:

On the subject of experience (emphasis added):

GIBSON: Governor, let me start by asking you a question that I asked John McCain about you, and it is really the central question. Can you look the country in the eye and say "I have the experience and I have the ability to be not just vice president, but perhaps president of the United States of America?"

PALIN: I do, Charlie, and on January 20, when John McCain and I are sworn in, if we are so privileged to be elected to serve this country, will be ready. I'm ready.

GIBSON: And you didn't say to yourself, "Am I experienced enough? Am I ready? Do I know enough about international affairs? Do I -- will I feel comfortable enough on the national stage to do this?"

PALIN: I didn't hesitate, no.

GIBSON: Didn't that take some hubris?

PALIN: I -- I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink.

So I didn't blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.

From later in the interview, discussing intervention in Pakistan (the Obama question, emphasis added):

GIBSON: But, Governor, I'm asking you: We have the right, in your mind, to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government.

PALIN: In order to stop Islamic extremists, those terrorists who would seek to destroy America and our allies, we must do whatever it takes and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.

I propose that every time we mention Sarah Palin in blog posts, we deploy the lamented and underused BLINK tag to highlight her strength in the face of adversity, her determination not to waver in the face of opposition, her fantastic pink internal energy that gives her the guts to say NO. Thus:

Sarah Palin is a liar.

UPDATE: George Saunders in the New Yorker is much funnier than I am.

Travel to Europe: Roger Ebert tells this little story in his article taking down Sarah Palin:

And how can a politician her age have never have gone to Europe? My dad had died, my mom was working as a book-keeper and I had a job at the local newspaper when, at 19, I scraped together $240 for a charter flight to Europe. I had Arthur Frommer's $5 a Day under my arm, started in London, even rented a Vespa and drove in the traffic of Rome. A few years later, I was able to send my mom, along with the $15 a Day book.

This looks to me like a generational thing -- Ebert is old enough to have benefited from the years in the early 70s when the dollar was still increbibly strong against European currencies. I have a friend who travelled to the South of France several summers in a row, at a time when he was making about $5,000 gross income per hear. I have always really envied that, because by the time I was that age (just out of college), the era of the strong dollar and cheap travel to Europe was simply over. Palin is two years younger than I, and she wouldn't have had that opportunity, either.

Chris Matthews: I've never been a fan of Chris Matthews, who has always struck me as a blithering idiot, so I hardly ever see him. But tonight Rachel Maddow's new show on MSNBC was pre-empted by coverage of the Public Service forum featuring McCain and Obama. In the coverage afterwards, I observed two things:

1. Chris Matthews intensely dislikes Rachel Maddow. This seemed blatantly clear in the interaction between them (despite his false-sounding praise of her investigative skills). I don't know if it is just jealousy over the new kid on the block, or garden-variety sexist resentment, but it certainly came through loud and clear to me.
2. Chris Matthews is completely ignorant of the context of the modern movement to throw ROTC programs off campus. Back in the early 70s, yes, it was anti-war fervor that caused ROTC protests. But that ended in the Reagan era, with ROTC programs invited back to a lot of campuses that had thrown them out during the Vietnam War era. The present-day anti-ROTC protests have a completely different justification: the conflict between universities' anti-discrimination policies and the military's prohibition of gay soldiers. A university that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is going to look awfully inconsistent if it permits and supports a program that tacitly discriminates on that basis. But Chris Matthews doesn't appear to know any of that.

Why is Chris Matthews still on TV?

The Dishonorable Candidate: Today on Thom Hartmann's program on Air American, Lee Rayburn (guest hosting) featured a lot of information about McCain campaign efforts at voter caging in Wisconsin and elsewhere. This is yet another example of the McCain campaign's dishonorable actions, because all of these mailings are specifically designed to mislead voters into making mistakes that could cause their votes to be thrown out. Absent these mailers from the McCain campaigns, 99.9% of the mistakes that might come from them would have no chance of happening.

Add this to the list of dishonorable actions from McCain in regard to his campaign (chiefly, his insistence on repeatedly lying about his running mate's record, and about his opponents -- one bald-faced lie after another). He and his running mate are serial liars and have abandoned any semblance of truth and honor in the conduct of their campaign.

Neither is worthy to be elected president.

Google's Chrome: When I first tried it last week, I was very impressed by its incredibly speed. But now all I'm impressed with is it's extremely piggy memory footprint (lipstick or no).

I browse my daily blogs in a set of 16 bookmarked tabs, and Firefox tends to bog down with that, using up to 128MBs of RAM. Depending on what's in the pages (Flash, Java applets, badly written Javascript), it can really bog things down terribly and lead to awful paging slowdowns (I'm working with a memory-poor machine, WinXP with only .5 GBs of RAM for now). So, I thought maybe Chrome would address that.

I really should have known better than to think that! It was clearly announced that Chrome launches separate processes for each tab, but it didn't occur to me that this would incur a huge penalty in duplication of code and vastly up the memory requirements. When I first tested the 16 tabs in Chrome, it killed my system before I killed Chrome when it exceeded 300MBs of total memory usage.

But I still thought there was a place for Chrome for running problematic pages that often bring Firefox (and WinXP) to a standstill. One of those is Air America steaming live broadcast feed, which has been very problematic (it's bad enough in having connection blocking problems which I've only been able to fix by killing its connections through my software firewall, but also occasionally goes into the bad memory spiral, causing Firefox to just increase and increase its memory usage), and I thought that perhaps running it in Chrome would be the answer.

Well, at this moment, the only thing running in Chrome is http://AirAmerica.com/Listen/, yet, here's a screenshot of Task Manager showing Chrome's memory usage:

There are THREE Chrome processes just to support one window with one tab, and it's using 89MBs of RAM!!! Firefox is currently running with 3 windows with 14 total tabs open, and it's using only one process and 144MBs. If I want a memory-hogging browser with process separation, I've already got one in IE! Why do I need another one?

Updated: And I forgot about the GoogleUpdate process that the Chrome installer puts in the Run key of your registry so that a useless process is always running, insuring that you are always going to be annoyed whenever Google decides to nag you about updating their software. I removed the Run item so it doesn't load at boot, but then noticed yesterday that GoogleUpdate loads if you run Chrome. So, I changed the permissions on the GoogleUpdate executable to DENY access 100% for everyone.

It's sad that Google thinks they need to do this and opt everyone into automatic updates by default, but sadder still that they don't allow any form of opt out unless you are something of a computer guru. If Google really does believe in it's putative "do no evil" mantra, they aren't demonstrating it with behavior like this.

Poll Freakout: Well, everybody in the progressive/Democratic side of the blogosphere and media is freaking out over all the polls that have swung massively for McCain in the last few days. These swings actually are significant, since the crosstabs in most of them really do reflect major changes.

But I really think everyone should really chill, and for two reasons:

1. The assumption that people choose on likability/issues first and then determine the candidate they favor is backwards. That is, most people assume that now that McCain is getting more votes, it's because people have changed their minds and now favor his position and like him better. But the way it really works is people choose the candidate first (for nebulous reasons, some having to do with issues, some with personality and optics) and then harmonize their answers on "favor on health care" and "favor on change" to match their top-of-the-ticket choice. In other words, these things are not independent at all. And the swing is just a matter of enthusiasm and lack of familiarity. People really want to like McCain and a choice like Palin (which is wearing awfully thin for me -- if I see that smarmy, arrogant, self-satisfied "lipstick" sound bite one more time I think I'll scream) just makes them want to like him more. For now, they are warm and rosy about him. But when we get to the debates, the rubber will meet the road and we'll find out how completely different the two candidates really are in regard to where they want to take the country (I've no doubts about Obama's ability to put across his policies and control the framing of McCain's platform, despite all the hand-wringing about Obama not being so strong in debates).
2. I much prefer my candidate being behind at this point in the race. It's better to have to scrap and come from behind than it is to get self-satisfied and cautious. Obama is going to have to come out as a fighter, as someone who is passionate. Passion is what he's lacked, and the polls are going to force him to make the commitment that will the win hearts and minds of those who still have doubts about him.

So, I'm not so very worried. There's plenty of time for Palin to self-destruct. There's plenty of time for it to become obvious how unserious the Republicans are in their campaign, with their constant spouting of lies betraying their basic contempt for the American electorate. As long as Obama's surrogates keep hammering home the message that McCain really cannot possibly be an agent of change (or, of any kind of change that people would want), and keep harping on the fact that it's Republicans who have screwed everything up, then I think things will turn out OK.

If they don't, I think it will be the fault of the traditional media for simply not doing their job and pointing out what an awful candidate McCain and Palin are in terms of their lack of interest in truthfulness. I sure wish they'd give them the Al Gore treatment, except this time it would be well-deserved.

Last of all, we have to keep in mind the principle that drives Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com, i.e., that the polls whose questions run "If the election were held today..." are simply false. The election is not today, and what people say about their choice now (when forced to choose) does not necessarily determine to any large degree what choice they will make in November. In other words, we just don't know what will happen because the polls actually don't mean what they are always presented to mean. And, besides, the top-line national polls simply don't mean a damned thing, given that the popular vote doesn't determine the winner. The Electoral College math has tightened, yes, but it's still Obama's game to lose.

All in all, we simply don't know enough to panic yet. And I still feel more comfortable with Obama tied or behind at this point.