Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin was spotted at the Belmont Stakes this weekend sporting a buxom new look that lead many to believe she may have recently had breast enlargement surgery. The folks at Wonkette say yes, but you be the judge.

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Sarah Palin is defending evangelist Franklin Graham after he was uninvited to chair a major Pentagon event next month, in light of his inflammatory remarks against Islam.

"It’s truly a sad day when such a fine patriotic man, whose son is serving on his fourth deployment in Afghanistan to protect our freedom of speech and religion, is dis-invited from speaking at the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer service," Palin wrote in a Facebook post Friday.

The same "fine patriotic man" said in 2001: "We're not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He's not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It’s a different God and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion."

Five years later he told ABC News his views hadn't changed, reiterating the position last year on CNN. Yesterday, he appeared on Fox News and commented, "I want Muslims everywhere to know that Christ can come into their heart and change them... They don't have to die in a car bomb to be accepted by God. They can be free through faith in Jesus Christ and Christ alone."

Palin claimed said his comments were "aimed at those who are so radical that they would kill innocent people and subjugate women in the name of religion" and lamented as a "shame" America's "hyper-politically correct" culture.

In her defense of Franklin Graham, she also referred to his son as "serving on his fourth deployment in Afghanistan to protect our freedom of speech and religion."

An Army spokesman confirmed Thursday that evangelist Franklin Graham's invitation to chair the May 6 Pentagon event was withdrawn over objections to his statements on Muslims.

"This Army honors all faiths and tries to inculcate our soldiers and work force with an appreciation of all faiths and his past comments just were not appropriate for this venue," Col. Tom Collins told ABC News.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) praised the Army's decision.

"We applaud this decision as a victory for common sense and good judgment,” Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a statement. "Promoting one's own religious beliefs is something to be defended and encouraged, but other faiths should not be attacked or misrepresented in the process."

The Plum Line's Greg Sargent critiqued the media's relative lack of interest in Palin's defense of a sweeping generalization about Muslims. "Palin attacks Obama = huge news. Palin attacks entire Islamic religion = crickets," he Tweeted.

"How would conservative pundits, shouting heads, bloggers and politicians react," wondered David Corn of Politics Daily, "if a leading American imam decried Christianity as an "evil" religion and then was invited to participate at a National Day of Prayer event at the Pentagon"?

Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT), the poster child of liberal bloggers ire, has done it again.

Once the darling of Democratic political heavyweights -- he campaigned in 2000 as the vice presidential running mate of then-Vice President Al Gore -- the Connecticut senator now appears to enjoying sparring his his former party at every opportunity.

Lieberman became an independent during his 2006 campaign, in which he faced off with liberal millionaire Ned Lamont. Liberal bloggers largely supported Lamont.

Since then, Lieberman has nettled those in his former party for his continual overtures to Republicans. Recently, he said he wouldn't rule out running as a Republican in his 2012 Senate race.

But in a Newsmax interview published Monday, he took himself one step further toward the party he once campaigned to defeat.

"There were a lot of people, particularly Democrats, who were declaring after the 2008 election that we were beginning a period of Democratic dominance that would go on for decades," Lieberman told Newsmax. "Now, all of a sudden, the momentum is with the Republicans. And that's — thank God — that's the way people have spoken, you know? That's our democracy."

The senator also said that "everybody should listen" to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

“I think Sarah Palin for a lot of people has become a spokesperson," Lieberman said. "People worried that government has forgotten them, has grown too big, that the deficit is growing too large, and in some sense that we’re not being as strong as we should be in the world — Governor Palin has spoken to those concerns as much as anyone.

“I do disagree with her on some of the specifics that she has said, but I think anybody who underestimates Sarah Palin as a political force in America does so at some peril, because she is speaking for a lot of people out there," he continued. “I don’t know what her future is, but I’m just saying everybody should listen.”

Lieberman was speaking in an interview that largely focused on US foreign policy regarding Israel and Iran. The onetime Democrat has repeatedly urged the US to take a hawkish position against Iranian development of nuclear weapons, and consider an armed airstrike to halt nuclear enrichment.

There are many horrible jobs in this life. Emergency room janitor. Sow inseminator. Earwax collector. Sarah Palin's grammar checker. Glenn Beck's fluffer. Republican. New Jersey.

But when I sit back, sip my scotch and scan the newswires for sundry effluvia indicative of our culture's joyful hellbound deathspin, the realization soon dawns that I can think of few gigs more nightmare-inducingly, soul-deadeningly horrible than being an executive for garbage food megacorp.

That is to say, a VP for McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King or their ilk, someone who sits around all day trying to discover new ways to manipulate, coerce, poison, and otherwise flagrantly kill millions of humans worldwide by convincing them to eat mass-produced, industrial feedlot, chemical-blasted garbage you should not feed to your dog unless you totally hate him and want him to get heart disease and die.

Hell, even the oil titans right now raping Canada can claim to be supplying a commodity that runs the engines of the world. Even Wall Street ogres can claim to be partaking of a time-honored tradition of gutting the U.S. Treasury at the expense of the ignorant masses. But head of marketing for, say, Kentucky Fried Chicken? Oh, you poor soul. Hell hath a special room for you.

Who are you, really, Mr. KFC executive? Who are you who just gave your approval to a rather shocking new KFC food item, who said "Oh holy hell, yes! Look at these great test-marketing numbers! Fuck it, let's go against every shred of human decency, common sense, and even the First Lady's humble plea to get us to please quit making the country so stupidly obese and sick, and sell a truly disgusting creation."

Do you know what I'm talking about yet? Have you seen it? Apparently, for many months, people who run the snarky junk food blogs on the Interwebs heard rumors that KFC was testing this item, and thought it might be a joke, a viral gimmick. Or if not that, then something that certainly would never make it to market, given how it looks like some sort of frat-boy prank, like the drones at KFC's test kitchens got completely hammered one night and had a bet as to who could come up with the most repulsive menu item imaginable.

Special deal! Eat two of these nausea bombs in a row and receive a coupon for a free
surgical stent for your coronary artery, and 10% off an XXL casket at CoffinTown! Or eat
three and die almost instantly and save us the postage. While supplies last!

Did you notice? How in one pseudo-food item, you are consuming not one, not two, but the mutated, chemically injected flesh/byproducts of fully three different distended, liquefied, industrially tortured creatures? Feel the love, pitiable animal kingdom.

You got your chicken-like creature, your pig-like creature, your dairy cow-like creature, all wrapped in a $5 fistful of nausea, ready to strangle your heart and benumb your brain. God knows what's in the "special sauce." Maybe some sort of fish byproduct, just to round it all out. It's like a wild kingdom in your mouth! It's like a toxic zoo in your colon! It's like a suicide note from what's left of your brain! "If you eat this, you are a complete and total idiot, and we're through. Signed, You."

Let us now add a shred of wary perspective. For well do I know this horrible crapbucket of chyme joins a very long list of fast-food nightmares you should never put anywhere near your mouth, unless you deeply hate yourself and don't give a damn anymore, and you want to die fat and stupid and smelling like that rotting thing you found in your rain gutter.

What's more, some fast food companies are trying, at least a little, to respond to the call for slightly healthier foods, adding salads and fruit and grilled chicken breasts to their menus, even though every single one of those items is just as jammed with chemicals, preservatives, synthetic flavorings and high-fructose corn syrup as the rest, and all the "healthy" meat products are still raised on the most execrable, environmentally rapacious industrial feedlots imaginable. But hey, it's something, right?

Further, some argue that it's a bit disingenuous to blame the junk food purveyors for all the obesity, cancer, impotence, bad skin and colonic pain in the land. After all, the undereducated masses love to eat this garbage, right? KFC test-marketed this Double Down death bomb for months, to (presumably) great effect.

Of course, it's sort of a foregone conclusion, a rigged game. This vile meatwich is crammed like a grenade with sodium, sugar, fat and chemicals. Ergo, the testers, presumably people with taste buds devastated by years of cramming similar compost into their guts, thought it was pure nirvana. And then their colons exploded.

Had KFC actually tested it on people who eat real food every day, folk who haven't touched fast food in years, whose systems are strong and fully recovered and in whose bodies blood flows unobstructed, had KFC dared any genuinely healthy human to take a bite, you can bet they would have heard, and smelled, a slightly different reaction.

Maybe it's all a silly, futile argument, a fool's game to point up the obvious evil of such products. These items are legion. They just keep right on coming. What's more, it's just capitalism at work. It's about giving the people what they want, right?

And if they don't really want it -- if, deep down, most humans sense this garbage is hugely unhealthy, that it's a form of slow poison and there are far better and wiser options out there -- well, you do what companies like KFC, Coca-Cola, Kraft, McDonald's and all the rest have done since the dawn of the free market.

You convince the less educated and the gullible that they are wrong, that this crap is actually a good value for your family, nutritious and safe to feed to children, even as you manufacture all the flavors, smells and meat-like textures in a giant lab and sell truckloads of the crap to the poorer classes, until they get fat and sick and die. Meanwhile, you employ cute cartoon characters and bright, funny mascots to lure in the next generation, to keep the cycle going.

Do I have that about right, Mr. KFC exec? Did I miss anything? Can you hear me down there, what with all the flames and the screaming?

This piece was originally published at the San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate, here.

Mark Morford is the author of The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism, a mega-collection of his finest work for the SF Chronicle and SFGate. Get it at daringspectacle.com or Amazon. He recently wrote about the Texas Board of Education, sex rehab, and what it's like being part of the evil liberal conspiracy. His website is markmorford.com. Join him on Facebook, or email him. Not to mention...

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