Teleprompter

Did anyone know Sarah Palin's teleprompter broke during her speech Wednesday? I check CNN.com regularly throughout the day as well as some other news sources occasionally and never saw anything about this. Nor did I hear anything on (P)MSNBC or CSPAN which I saw a little of today. Nothing at all. And yet it happened. The fantastic speech she gave is now even better because apparently the prompter wasn't stopping (or the operator wasn't stopping it) when the audience applauded so after a while, she was way behind and did the whole thing by memory. Who knew? I never noticed it from her behaviour and she never complained about it. I learned of it from Rush and Leno, during a standup joke on his show tonight, confirmed it. I did hear reports on CNN about how her speech was written for her, blah blah blah. As if that's not standard practice. But they didn't bother to report that she did the speech more on her own than Obama or anyone else who also had their speech written for them AND a perfectly operating teleprompter. Once again, our fine companions in the media show how dishonourable they are and continue to erode the scant confidence I have left in them. My warning to all: question EVERYTHING. Everyone out there has an agenda, even me. We all have our biases that are hard to overcome. Some are ethical and acknowledge this, like myself. Others, like the media, are beyond unethical to the point of scandalous. But I will give kudos to Anderson Cooper from CNN. Apparently, when Campbell Brown (a fellow CNN reporter with him no less) asked him if he thought it was responsible for Palin to run for this office when she has 5 kids, he responded, "It's funny, I don't remember anyone asking Obama that." I'm always happy to give praise to a liberal media type when it is deserved, and he earned it with that. Good for him. Unfortunately, the fact that he holds a CNN microphone still has him on my blacklist. One more note, Palin made a funny comment during her speech saying she thought the former AK governor's private jet was over the top and a taxpayer burden, so she "put it on eBay." The media (you guessed it, CNN) now reports she did PUT it on eBay but it didn't sell and she had to sell it another way. OK, so MAYBE Palin fudged a fact there. I think, however, there was no deception intended at all...the logistics of how the jet was sold were irrelevant, the point is she did it and the eBay comment she made was not like a grandiose lie, it was just a humorous pop-culture line that elicited a number of laughs. They took a light hearted comment she made and are trying to make it sound like she's lying. But they won't report that she was completely on her own without a teleprompter. Scandalous. And one more note (really this time): Us Weekly magazine has a cover with Pain's picture and the caption, "Children, Lies, Scandal." The actual article when you read it inside links the lies and scandal part to bad things being projected AT her so it's actually a not-so-bad article about her. But the cover, it seems, is an intentional misrepresentation intended to catch the attention of supermarket check out line people who will read only that, associating her face with the words lies and scandal, people who will not actually read the article. Us Weekly is published by none other than the owner of Rolling Stone, one of the most liberal extremists out there. McCain and Palin have to fight not only Obama's campaign, but the media, Hollywood, and hippie protestors. That Bush won twice in a row against those odds is an accomplishment and McCain doesn't quite have the charisma of Bush. Let's hope Palin can help in that arena. I'll end on a couple of good comments from Rush about McCain's speech and Obama: "...the performance aspect might have been low, but the words were penetrating and they were from the heart and they were from the soul." "I don't think Obama thinks he needs to grow. Obama's it in his mind and in the minds of his supporters."