If the real thing don’t do the trickYou better make up something quickYou gonna burn it out to the wickAren’t you, Barracuda?
- Heart, ‘Barracuda‘
So Sarah Palin dumped her resignation announcement on Friday night before Fourth of July weekend. Palin can see Indictment from her house:

… all of this precedes what are said to be possible [...]

I can never keep the rules of sham marriages straight. If you’re an up and coming Indian actress, you have to pretend you’re not married a la Freida Pinto or pretend you’re not kept by babus and crorepatis. If you’re an illegal desi immigrant, you have to pretend you are married to a citizen to [...]

M.I.A. performing “Paper Planes” on the day her baby is due, briefly. Please, M.I.A. — the Grammys aren’t that important. Rest. Then straight into “Swagga Like Us”… all eyes were on M.I.A., as they are anytime she’s on the stage… Yes, we wanted M.I.A. to win, too, but we knew that wasn’t going to happen. [...]

Here’s a current AdSense ad referencing Pakistan’s Supreme Leerer. We really do need a Romanization standard for Indian languages. Who would’ve thought you could build entire competitors around transliteration-squatting? (thanks, Puneet)

Eclipsed

It strikes me that every time Barack Obama debates, we’re finally starting to get some reality on Pakistan. It used to be that India was the largest victim of Pakistan-based terrorists. Joe Sixpack rarely stirred himself to learn anything about them. The country name ends in ’stan,’ which, though synonymous with ‘land,’ paints it in [...]

What 70 million people watched last night was more a press conference without questions than an actual debate. When an experienced debater is paired with a novice, the novice is handed a brief and told to read it. Palin was typical of a novice debater pulled from the oratory circuit. She spoke with charm, although [...]

In tonight’s vice presidential debate, moderator Gwen Ifill never pushed followup questions, so Palin’s color-coded index cards carried the day. Biden hammered on AfPak being the central front against bin Laden and terrorism:
John [McCain] continues to tell us that the central war in the front on terror is in Iraq. I promise you, if an [...]

One morning I woke up at the University of the Pacific, one of the most beautiful college campuses I’ve ever seen, and improbably found myself in the final round of the California debate championship. My partner and I had won some rounds against better teams and were amped about our improbable run.
To win the trophy, [...]

Does anyone now doubt that Bobby Jindal would’ve been a better pick for John McCain than Sarah Palin? In the last couple of days, we’ve learned that Palin doesn’t read any newspapers, didn’t know of any state bills when she ran for governor and hasn’t heard of any Supreme Court decisions other than Roe v. [...]

The McCain campaign just did its second damage control interview in a row with Katie Couric. Here, John McCain tries to stanch the bleeding after Sarah Palin contradicted him on Pakistan. He claims that a voter’s question is ‘gotcha journalism.’ Palin calls the president of Pakistan ‘Zadari,’ McCain intercepts a question asked directly of her: [...]

Not ready

Last night, Sarah Palin contradicted John McCain’s position on Pakistan, the one he’s flogged so relentlessly against Barack Obama:
“So we do cross border, like from Afghanistan to Pakistan you think?” …
“If that’s what we have to do stop the terrorists from coming any further in, absolutely, we should…” [CNN]
Today McCain was forced to disavow [...]

Shorter Obama on terrorism:Got that? Good.
Barack Obama repeated over and over at tonight’s presidential debate that the real threat is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That our policy toward Musharraf was unhinged. That seeing everything through the lens of Iraq puts us at risk.
Dubya and John McCain’s fixation on a country uninvolved with Al Qaeda is [...]

Here’s Sarah Palin, for whom English seems to be a second language, expounding on Afghanistan policy in part deux of her Katie Couric interview. Drink a shot every time she fails to complete a sentence or veers off into unrelated talking points:
The logistics that we are already suggesting here, not having enough troops in the [...]

Pratibha PatilIndian president
Pratibha Patil has kicked up another row having claimed that she had a “divine premonition” of greater responsibility coming her way after speaking to a late spiritual guru. [HT]
“The Baba came into the body of Hriday Mohini Dadiji… he had a chat with me and put me into difficulty. He also made me [...]