When my friend from Wasilla comes to visit us in California, she says she's "going to America." It's a local joke that's been told the last half-century.
Coming from Wisconsin, which has a similarly tenuous relationship with the rest of the U.S., I think the joke is pretty funny.

Palin is too far conservative for me, but I think she's an intelligent, capable woman. I've never believed the allegations that she didn't know Africa was a continent, that she didn't know the members of NAFTA, and the rest of it. She's a college graduate, and I just can't believe American education is so poor that she wouldn't know those things.

On the other hand, there have also been all sorts of nasty falsehoods spread about Barack Obama, and I wonder who was the source of them - particularly the ones stating Obama was born in Kenya and has a falsified Hawaii birth certificate, and that he was actually a Muslim. My 93-yr-old mother-in-law still believes those allegations, and she's very upset that a foreign Muslim terrorist was elected president. She heard it over and over again on talk radio, so she believes it must be true. I heard somewhere that a single person was the source of most of the anti-Obama falsehoods, but I haven't found confirmation of that.

One would thing the issues would be enough basis for voting - why do we have to cloud the discussion up with so many lies? Oh, and did you notice the lies were directed at a woman and a black man, and against Hillary Clinton during the primaries? Seems like those boldfaced lies are boldfaced bigotry. I didn't hear similar lies about McCain and Biden.

-Joe-