Mavericks

We went to dinner on Friday night at a great restaurant in SF called....Maverick. Didn't realize the irony until later, when my uncle Todd gave me a birthday present with a cutout of a winking Sarah Palin on it. Oy. Thank god for Tina Fey, otherwise I'd be crying instead of laughing about the very real risk that the much-ballyhooed moose hunter will be a heartbeat away from being Prez.

Nearly 10 years ago, Norman Mailer nailed it (except for the part about the Dow rising...ugh, don't even talk to me about my 401K) when he said the following in a letter published in the recent New Yorker magazine:
"The point is: the Republican Party is schizophrenic: on the one hand, they are, as I say, for God, flag and family, but on the other, they are for the unbridled expansion of capitalism, and thereby leave out something that might still be important to you which is that Jesus, like Karl Marx, thought money leaches out all other values. Indeed, it does. If the whole country is going to pot, and it certainly is, I think you could graph the decline not only in morals, but in a sense of social eclat and social standards - I think you could plot the decline right next to the rise of the Dow Jones - the higher the Dow, the lower the standards. Money destroys all other values. I can even respect the right wing Republicans for holding to a few standards, as they do, but they never take on capitalism which, unbridled, is the worst scourge of human value that we have right now."