Asked to clarify whether he intended to use the word, he said, "Yeah, uppity."

In a statement Friday, Westmoreland - a white man who was born in 1950 and raised in the segregated South ? said he didn't know that "uppity" was commonly used as a derogatory term for blacks seeking equal treatment.

"John McCain doesn't run with the Washington herd," said Palin, the surprise pick as McCain's running mate.

"It's over. It's over. It's over for the special interests," McCain promised. "We're going to start working for the people of this country."

"These are tough times for many of you, in the state of Michigan, times are tough," McCain said.

"Change is coming, change is coming," McCain promised the audience, borrowing the same theme that Democrat Barack Obama has made the centerpiece of his run for the White House.

• She is really just a mayor from a small town outside Anchorage who has been a governor for only 1.5 years, and has ZERO national and international experience. I shudder to think that she could be the person taking that 3AM call on the White House hotline, and the one who could potentially be charged with leading the US in the volatile international scene that exists today. --Rose M., Fairbanks, AK
• She is VERY, VERY conservative, and far from perfect. She's a hunter and fisherwoman, but votes against the environment again and again. She ran on ethics reform, but is currently under investigation for several charges involving hiring and firing of state officials. She has NO experience beyond Alaska. --Christine B., Denali Park, AK
• As an Alaskan and a feminist, I am beyond words at this announcement. Palin is not a feminist, and she is not the reformer she claims to be. --Karen L., Anchorage, AK
• Alaskans, collectively, are just as stunned as the rest of the nation. She is doing well running our State, but is totally inexperienced on the national level, and very much unequipped to run the nation, if it came to that. She is as far right as one can get, which has already been communicated on the news. In our office of thirty employees (dems, republicans, and nonpartisans), not one person feels she is ready for the V.P. position. --Sherry C., Anchorage, AK
• She's vehemently anti-choice and doesn't care about protecting our natural resources, even though she has worked as a fisherman. McCain chose her to pick up the Hillary voters, but Palin is no Hillary. --Marina L., Juneau, AK
• I think she's far too inexperienced to be in this position. I'm all for a woman in the White House, but not one who hasn't done anything to deserve it. There are far many other women who have worked their way up and have much more experience that would have been better choices. This is a patronizing decision on John McCain's part- and insulting to females everywhere that he would assume he'll get our vote by putting "A Woman" in that position. --Jennifer M., Anchorage, AK

• Barack Obama has been president for the last eight years, despite having been nothing but a (sneer) community organizer before that. (He probably deserted from the Illinois National Guard, too.)
• The Democrats have held a monopoly on congressional and media power during the same period.
• The Republicans are the outsiders, the change agents, the reformers who will clean up the cesspit of elite and entrenched Democratic corruption.
• Teenage pregnancy is good, teenage pregnancy is cute, it's as American as apple pie, and a 17-year-old girl should be forced to "choose" to marry her trailer-trash statutory rapist. (Though the word "choice" is taboo for everyone else - IOKIYAR.)

The Alaska Independence Party, which was formed with the goal of seceding from the union and establishing Alaska as an independent state, says that [Sarah] Palin addressed their 2008 convention.

"The problem with you John Birchers' is that you are too damn liberal!"

-- Joseph Vogler, Founder Alaskan Independence Party

Fingerprint tests show that human remains found in a gravel pit east of Fairbanks on Wednesday are those of Joe Vogler, the founder of the Alaskan Independence Party, who vanished in May 1993, Alaska state troopers said today.

The discovery of the remains, following an anonymous tip to the authorities, apparently resolves a year-and-a-half-old mystery concerning Mr. Vogler, a folk hero throughout the state who was 80 when he disappeared from his home here.

The blue tarp and duct tape in which the remains were wrapped, officials said, matched a description given by a convicted thief, Manfred West, who confessed last summer that he had killed Mr. Vogler in a plastic-explosives sale gone bad and had then buried him. [Link]

The Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff's Department (that's them above) just obtained an armored personnel carrier, complete with a belt-fed, .50-cal turreted machine gun. Sheriff Leon Lott has charmingly named the vehicle "The Peacemaker," and insists that using a caliber of ammunition that even the U.S. military is reluctant to use against human targets (it's generally reserved for use against armored vehicles) will "save lives."

Can we call this overkill, yet? Is there any weapon people like Sheriff Lott would consider inappropriate for use against American citizens? [Link, with hat tip to Jim Downey]

• What is acceptable to the humourless atheist?
• On wisdom
• Is wisdom necessary?
• Emotions and decisions
• Atheism and choosing the good

The more interesting questions are: 1. does the social acceptance of an agreed framework of values tend to enable people to be good or otherwise? And: 2. does atheism undermine the social acceptance of an agreed framework?

(I think this was Peter Hitchens' essential point - that it is the breakdown of common belief that has undermined social virtue. It happens to have been Christianity in the British context, but it doesn't need to be.)

As I understand it, atheism doesn't (cannot) recognise anything outside of the individual conscience to which appeal can be made. From a (humourless) atheist point of view, for a common social order to be established, each individual member of the community needs to be intellectually persuaded of the merits of that order. The individual conscience is the lynchpin of the system, around which everything else pivots.

What this misses out is the panoply of ways in which human beings operate non-rationally (note, NOT irrationally) on which their rationality depends. You could say that atheism has a hopelessly inadequate anthropology. In particular, choosing of the good depends upon evaluation, which is a form of emotional intelligence. Why shouldn't I have that extra portion of chocolate dessert? Why shouldn't I lie and cheat and steal and so on?

The question should be whether McCain - and all the other Republicans who have been going on for months about Obama's dangerous lack of foreign-policy experience - ever meant a word of it. And the answer is apparently not. Many conservative pundits woke up this very morning fully prepared to harp on Obama's alleged lack of experience for months more. Now they face the choice of either executing a Communist-style U-turn ("Experience? Feh! Who needs it?") or trying to keep a straight face while touting the importance of having been mayor of a town of 9,000 if you later find yourself president of a nation of 300 million.

Question: Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?
Palin: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.