Sarah Palin's Beauty Pageant Swimsuit Competition Footage

Sarah Palin's 1984 beauty pageant swimsuit competition video has hit the web. An Alaskan has uploaded what he claims to be 100% real footage of Sarah Palin in a red tank suit in the 1984 Miss Alaska contest. She walks out, does a 360, walks further, turns around again, and then walks off.

You can hear the announcer (over a jazzy trumpet) introduce her, read her bio and compliment her leadership, saying:

"Sarah says she wants to prepare for a career in television broadcasting by majoring in telecommunications and political science. It is no wonder that she has also been recognized by 'Who's Who?' since she has displayed her leadership in all areas, from academics to student politics to athletics... Ladies and gentlemen, contestant no. 8, Sarah Heath."The poster promises more, writing:

"The 100% legit footage of the 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant featuring Sarah Palin. If you think this clip is good, wait until you see her play her flute in the talent competition... ;)"

Sundials, narrow boats and windmills: British passport is turned into a picture book

The venerable inscription is still in place on the new passports, but is now accompanied by a friendly image of a row of rustic cottages

It began as a handwritten note from the King himself and has remained a reassuringly imposing booklet ever since. But passport holders will soon find themselves handing over a document with a little less pomp - and a few more quaint depictions of rural scenes.

The UK passport has been redesigned in the style of a picture book to include scenic images of country life and national landmarks that make it harder to forge.

Its inside page features a row of cottages and some oak leaves alongside the familiar royal request for safe passage. Another double page bears a depiction of one landscape from each nation of the UK: the White Cliffs of Dover, Ben Nevis, the Giant's Causeway and the Gower Peninsula.

Tourists happily sunning themselves abroad will find a reminder of the dank and dreary weather they left behind - with a hologram of a weather forecast symbol on every page.

Sarah Rapson, chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service, said: 'What we're not trying to do is represent every single aspect of Britain today.

'We've deliberately chosen scenic Britain, the images you're seeing are representative of that aspect of Britain.'

Sarah Rapson, chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service, holds up an example of the new 'two picture' passport

Other images show a woodland with a dry stone wall, a lake scene with a brown trout, a row of beach huts and the gardens of Blenheim Palace. The holder's picture and personal details now run over two pages with two pictures and have been moved to the front of the book, to follow other European countries.

The new design will be launched in October and will cost the same as the current document, £77.50 or more if it is needed at short notice. An electronic chip carrying the holder's biometric data is buried in the lining making it more difficult to remove and replace.

The original biometric passport with its distinctive bird design

That chip was introduced in 2006 and was the latest innovation in the passport's security features since its beginnings as a handwritten royal note in 1387. John Swan, vicar of St Paul's, Malmesbury, Wiltshire, was the first person given a 'Royal License' to let him to travel to Rome.

The exterior of the passport is virtually unchanged, but the main ID section has been moved to the front page, rather than languishing at the back as in former designs.

During the reign of Henry V in the 15th century, notes promising 'safe conduct' were issued to anyone wanting to travel abroad. The need for an original royal signature ended in 1794, when the Secretary of State began issuing passports and the first booklet with a picture was issued in 1914. It was a folded cardboard document which became the blue passport after the First World War. Numerous security modifications led to today's burgundy document being introduced in 1988.

Sarah Palin Hits Upon Quick Money-Making Scheme

Who says she's not a genius?




Governor Palin is trying to scrounge up some last-minute pocket change before her fifteen minutes are over, by charging $15 million to news outlets asking for copies of her official state e-mails. And then doesn't include the governor just forwarding her inbox in to MSNBC: Palin's offce claims it will only print out the emails so the Palin's lawyers can redact any unseemly information. So you'd be paying $15 million for her eighteen minutes of Nixon tape.

Shit, for 15 bucks you can just hire your son's friends who works at Papa Johns to hack into her Yahoo account again. Save yourself a couple mill.

Even Alaska is Getting Sick of Hearing About Their Governor

Sign of the times


A sign outside movie theater in Alaska showing either solidarity for Sarah Palin, or offering her an amazing subliminal diss, depending how you look at it।

Tabloids Trick Readers Into Buying Print Editions, Inadvertently Support Sarah Palin

Web 2.Fail

Once upon a time, you would open a magazine like OK! or Cosmo and see an article that ended with the magazine's website address, ostensibly so readers could find more information about the subject। "More information" usually just meant extraneous lists or irrelevant facts, but more importantly, tons of ads and pop-ups that brought in extra ad revenue.

Well, that was before the era of plummeting newsstand sales, falling at a rate that makes Jann Wenner stay up at night counting solid gold sheep। Now that most celebrity news of the "breaking" variety is fed to the public through blogs and websites, the gossip-mongering print industry fights to keep their newest issues moving off the shelves. Thus, the tried and tired gimmick of offering only glimpses of stories online, with the rest found exclusively in the print edition. Good tactic sure, but it's too bad the pitch will help Sarah Palin/John McCain get elected:

Last week there was the National Enquirer's Palin controversy (no, not the one about Bristol, the one about Palin's alleged affair), where the tabloid withheld the juicy gossip for the print-edition only। OK!'s big Palin story used a similar tactic; offering a tiny slice of intrigue on their website and then announcing, "For the entire story on Sarah Palin's baby scandal, including where she stands on the issues, pick up the new OK! - on newsstands everywhere on Thursday!"

So what's wrong with trying to coerce readers back to the printed word? Well for one, those publications were at the heart of Palin's media attack last week, when she accused the MSM of being unfairly biased and treating Barack Obama like a celebrity (he's been on the National Enguirer's cover too)। The more the tabloids use Palin scandals to desperately sell off copies, the more ammo they give the governor in her campaign to become invincible against real journalistic attacks.

Not to say that the National Enquirer isn't a real paper…they broke that Edwards story after all. Just not online.

Alaskan Paper Not the Biggest Sarah Palin Fan

'

Root root root for the home team

The Anchorage Daily is Alaska's biggest newspaper. And with a readership that large (probably not that large, it's still Alaska after all, and everyone there speaks Russian), and with so few home heroes to to celebrate, perhaps the daily would be kinder to their "hottest governor" and current VP candidate Sarah Palin.
Nope:
Apparently her speech writers decided to soft-pedal her pitch to the party’s conservative base, in hopes of appealing to feminist and blue-collar Hillary Clinton voters.Though brought on the ticket in part to excite religious conservatives, Palin made no mention of abortion or other hard-line social conservative causes like banning same-sex marriage. [Anchorage Daily via E&P]
Then again, the Anchorage Daily isn't practicing any sort of new subterfuge.
Remember what the New York papers did to their own senator Hillary earlier this year?
The New York Daily News had a field day calling Clinton "sick and disgusting" for staying in the race as long as she did (and this was after they supported her back in February).At the time, even the most hardened Barackaphile would agree that media coverage of Clinton was biased and unfairly skewed, in no small part because of her gender and her image as a ball-breaker.
The only thing going for Palin, then, is that Alaska's largest traitor of a newspaper has nothing on New York Post's circ.

NYT Memo to Metro, Sports Section: Everything Must Go!

Cutting costs, just like everyone else

It's mentally fatigued to work for the New York Times, because everyone is always on your case about political biases and blatant nepotism. And it's hard for a reader to tell them to "suck less" because hey, they are still the standard for journalism in the city, if not the country.
Alas, the NYT is in a financial tailspin just like every other publication, so it's with a heavy heart that executive editor and Adam West lookalike Bill Keller dashed off a memo to his staff about the "consolidation" of the Metro and Sports section. At least he tried to rally his employees to look on the bright side:
"We will get some later deadlines, which will help us competitively. Monday Bizday, which is now on the early press run with deadlines in the afternoon, will be printed on the late run, something business editors have long craved."
Watch out Bizday editors; this is Keller's way of politely warning you that your section could be next.
Oh, and the best part of the memo is definitely the one sentence about "opportunities the Web presents us." That's it? Or just cut the entire Metro section out of the paper and put it all online, because the Cityroom blog the NYT has going is actually pretty brills!
Let's see more of that and fewer Sunday Style wedding announcements that encourage trolling JDate with a pint of Cherry Garcia.

The GOP's Best Defense Against Us Weekly' Palin Hit Job? UsWeekly.com

Dot-com dogma

'Some readers trying to find the article online may have been surprised by the political coverage there. The magazine does not own the domain name USWeekly.com which is a vehement anti-Obama site, featuring articles like "We’re Not Fooled Barack — Nor Will We Be." A representative from Us Weekly said that Wenner Media, which owns Us Weekly, had approached USWeekly.com when the magazine went weekly in 2000. Wenner did not succeed at buying the site then. The magazine has "no real recourse" since the USWeekly.com site seems to have been established before Us magazine changed its name to Us Weekly, said Mark G. McCreary, a partner at the law firm Fox Rothschild. It is unclear who owns USWeekly.com, but at least one person affiliated with the site had his own opinion on media coverage of the campaigns. In response to an e-mail inquiry, a response from someone using the name Richard Carroll — who is listed as an author on the site — said he did not own it. "We have nothing to discuss," he wrote, "other than for me to point out to you as I have other reporters who have written: Why the media blackout surrounding Barack Hussein Obama?"' (NYT).