John McCain Is Not the Real Stuff

Tim Dickinson, a contributiong editor at The Rolling Stones magazine sums up John McCain in a few and very interesting minutes. John McCain has more in common with Sarah Palin than one migh first suspect: Both are basically shameless self-promoters, with very little substance to back up their claims, whether it regards their own history, or their featherlight opnions. They pride to call themselves mavericks, but there are many less flattering names for people who pretend to be something they are not.

Watch the Rolling Stone piece here!

Hans Sandberg

Pea Soup, Punch & A New Book

In case you didn't know it, Swedes have a particular affinity for pea soup - made of yellow peas and not the split green peas that count for pea soup in the U.S. When I served in the Swedish army - which was mandatory back then - we had peasoup and Swedish pancakes every Thursday for dinner. The food at the cantina usually sucked and so did the pancakes, but the pea soup was great.

For Swedes abroad pea soup brings you closer to home, which is why Manhattan sports it's own Swedish pea soup association - Ärtans Vänner - born some forty years ago, and still surviving.

Next Thursday I will attend the Halloween Pea Soup Party hosted by Ärtans Vänner, and introduce my new book Swedish-American Currents. Check out the online invite here!

And You Thought It Couldn't Get Any Stupider... Try "Socialism" Or "the Russians Are Coming"

John McCain is desperate. His campaign is floundering and his Vice President candidate is a public embarrassment, attracting only devout foot soldiers and what looks like a bunch of beefy, beer-bellied guys, who would love to drool all over over her at the nearest pool hall.

The McPain campaign has tried everything out of the republican playbook, but for once it seems that the democrats have found their own Teflon Man. For all the muck they have been throwing his way, Barack Obama looks as crisp and neat as ever. And his lead is growing!

Hence the socialism debate, which is really farfetched, but hey, these are desperate times if you are a conservative republican hoping to extend the George W. Bush era for another eight years. So now there is talk about socialism and even communism. Neither McCain nor Palin dare to say it straight, so they quote instead their newfound think-tank, Joe-the-Wannabe-Plumber, who asked if Obama's tax plan isn't "socialism."

What did Barack Obama say to enter the Socialist Hall of Fame? Well, he suggested that it's not a bad thing to spread wealth around a bit, by taxing the rich more. My God, what an offense! Only thing is that you would have to put most American presidents in this Hall of Fame with Barack Obama as they all have used the tax system for income redistribution, and so would John McCain if he became president. But a McCain-Palin government would do its best to redistribute from the middle class to the rich, and cut services for the poor, which might not exactly be "what Jesus would do."

For all her lowlife Joe Sixpack attraction, the shopoholic Sarah Palin looks more and more like Marie Antoinette, who (probably wrongly) was accused of callously suggesting that the poor could "eat cake" if they couldn't afford bread. For all her parrotting, prancing and giggling, she is no friend of the average Joe, and neither is Joe McCain.

Hans Sandberg

John Cleese On Sarah Palin

Sharp Critic of President George W. Bush Wins the Nobel Prize In Economics

Media captures Princeton University's toast for Paul Krugman.

He looked happy, but tired and slightly frazzled, which one probably should expect from an economist these turbulent days, and certainly from one that just got the call from the Royal Swedish Academy informing him that he has been awarded the Noble Prize in Economics. 

Paul Krugman gets the prize for his research as a young man, modifying the classic theory of copmparative advantages to bring it a bit closer to reality. At Princeton University he is a popular lecturer and text book author, but for the past eight years he has written columns for the New York Times, and it is these sharp and often biting columns that has made hime famous outside the Academical world. He is politically progressive, and supported Hillary Clinton until she pulled out of the primary. His criticism of George W. Bush's economic and political follies has been an ongoing theme in his columns.  

He said at the press conference in Princeton that he is not interested in a post in a Barack Obama government, saying that working in the government doesn't agree with his temper.


A happy, but exhausted winner.


Paul Krugman with John Nash, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics.


Paul Krugman with colleagues at the Economics Department.

Paul Krugman was naturally asked to comment on the current financial crisis, and sounded slightly optimistic after the summit in Europe over the weekend.
"This was the first time that the decisionmakers surpassed the expectations, he said."

Hans Sandberg

George Soros Speaks

Watch Bill Moyers' interview with George Soros!

Read John Cassidy's extensive review of George Soro's new book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means in the same magazine.

Also read The Financial Crisis: An Interview with George Soros in the May 15, 2008 issue of the magazine. 

And George Soros article The Perilous Price of Oil in the September 25, 2008 issue.

Blatte United - A Swedish Soccer Team That Shines On and Off the Field

Blond and blue-eyed they are not, but they come from Sweden, speak Swedish, love soccer, and are proud of their mixed heritage. In New York they found good jobs, opportunities, and a chance to not stand out as “immigrants.” And there they came together as Blatte United, one of the city’s best amateur soccer teams.

For all the multiculturalism of the intellectual and political circles in Sweden, immigrants and their children find it hard to fit in. They often sense that they stick out because of their parents, the way they look, maybe even a foreign accent. It’s true that Sweden has a generous public policy when it comes to refugees and other immigrants, providing them with housing, education, and the other boons of the welfare state, but it’s still hard to find a qualified job if your name is Ahmed and not Anders. (Some immigrants take more Swedish-sounding names so that their job applications won’t be immediately dismissed.)

The members of Blatte United didn’t “flee” Sweden, but they are all living in New York, some permanently, some temporarily while studying. Most of them didn’t know each other before Medufia “Keke” Kulego and Omino Gardezi met at a Manhattan party, realized that they were both Swedes, and discovered that they both loved soccer. An idea was born, and soon enough, they had formed a team that later was named after the Swedish slang for immigrant: Blatte.

On June 7, Blatte United won Manhattan’s Bowery Cup in Chinatown after defeating Bowery Football Club 2 in the semifinal and Bowery Football Club 1 in the final. These were two incredibly intense matches played under a scorching midday sun with just a short break between. All three teams played to win. They played tough, sometimes rough, but without resorting to dirty tricks.

Four days later I met up with five members of the team at Syrup Inc., a hot ad agency in Manhattan’s TriBeCa district. (Jakob Dashek, son of a Swedish mother and a father of Finnish-Czech descent, and Robert Holzer, an American who once worked at New York Times Digital, founded Syrup eight years ago.)

Selim Adira was born in southern Sweden to parents who had immigrated from Morocco. He moved to the U.S. three years ago to work as restaurant manager for the Swedish restaurant Ulrika, and now runs the official residence for the Swedish UN ambassador Anders Lidén. When Adira lived in Rosengård, a large immigrants’ suburb in outer Malmö, he played soccer with Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who later went on to become Sweden’s leading soccer star.

Sebastian Alvarado played soccer on Sweden’s junior national team as well as in Spain’s Division 2. His father came from Chile, his mother from Finland. He arrived in the U.S. five years ago and today is business development manager at Syrup.

Omino Gardezi grew up in Sweden. His father was a diplomat from India and his mother came from Iran. He moved to New York in 1993 and is one of the top managers for Syrup. He also has his own media-consulting firm, S.A.M.

Adel Koubaa is a medical student at Sweden’s in-ternationally renowned research hospital Karolinska Institutet. For the past six months he has done research at Boston University and New York’s Columbia University. Koubaa was born in Sweden to parents from Tunisia.

Medufi a “Keke” Kulego is known to Currents readers, as we introduced him in our banking and finance issue (Winter 2007). He was born in Malmö, Sweden, to parents from Ghana. He grew up in Rosengård and excelled at soccer. Like many of his immigrant friends he dreamed of becoming a pro, but his father insisted that he excel at school too, which he did. He landed a soccer scholarship that took him to St. John’s University on Long Island, where he stayed for four years. When he returned to Sweden with a degree in business marketing and finance, he discovered that the only job he could get was as a physical education teacher at a local high school. Disappointed, he moved back to New York, where he became a hedgefund manager.

Blatte’s passion for soccer is certainly something its players share with other Swedes, as well as with people all over the world (except in the U.S., where American football rules the sports mainstream). But in addition to winning late night and weekend soccer games, they are succeeding in New York City, an ultra-competitive place where you would think that displaying a Swedish mentality in a business setting sounds like a bad joke.

But none of my new Blatte friends would hesitate for a moment to put “Swedish” on their business cards. For them, their Swedish connections and mentality are big plusses. “It’s great to be able to say that you come from Sweden!” Omino Gardezi says. “I definitely say that, even though my dad came from India and my mother from Iran. I’m a Swedish citizen, and my nationality is Swedish.

”The Swedish business mentality has a lot to do with building long-term relationships, while it’s a more short-term thing for Americans,” Gardezi goes on. “Swedes are a bit more cautious and would never want to burn any bridges. They are diplomatic and take their time. I believe we have an advantage as immigrant Swedes. We have the aggressive foreign mentality, but at the same time we’ve acquired the  Swedish mentality from living in Sweden. This is a great combination that’s worked out really well for us all here.” “It’s definitely a good thing to be a Swede in the U.S.,” Sebastian Alvarado agrees. “People have an immediate picture of Sweden — they like it right off the bat. And Sweden has definitely formed us. When Americans hear that you are from Sweden, they assume you’re a hard worker, disciplined, and humble. We are automatically helped by this. In busi-ness, Sweden is known as a  highly developed country with advanced industries. Swedes have a very strong reputation.”

“They have a fantastic reputation, for coming from such a small country,” says Gardezi. “Sports, culture, design, you just name it,” says Alvarado.

“In my field, finance,” says Keke Kulego, “Swedes are very humble and down-to-earth, while Americans are more aggressive in their posture and how they see things. Everything is big. Everything is loud.”

“Swedes’ down-to-earth approach is very non-threatening,” Gardezi says. “Americans are so gung-ho about everything, but they really like the mellow Swedish attitude.”

But as good as the Swedish mentality can be when blended with the Blatte mentality, on its own it can hold you back. When you move to New York, you need to shed some of your Swedishness if you’re going to make it. “We immigrants have that fire in us that the ordinary Swede doesn’t have,” says Kulego.

“The Swedish humility is a positive thing for us, because we know how to balance it.”

“You can tell the difference between somebody who’s been here for a while and someone who’s new,” says Alvarado. “People who’ve been here a few years get a tougher skin and dare to be a little more pushy, while the newcomers act more Swedish.”

"Back home you have a formula to stick to,” says Kulego. “You’re not allowed to be loud and stick out. You’re not allowed to be yourself. If you don’t stick to the formula, you’re seen as crazy and obnoxious. In Sweden, it’s not good to be full of yourself, believe in yourself and talk aloud about it.”

“It’s almost strange, because a lot of Swedes here are completely integrated into American society,” Gardezi says.

“Swedes are very flexible,” Alvarado says, thinking of Swedes abroad. “You can put a Swede almost anywhere and he will adapt well. That’s actually something Swedes are very good at, and they fit in really well into the U.S. Most Swedes love New York and the atmosphere here.

“There is, however, a big difference between us immigrant Swedes and what you call ordinary Swedes,” Alvarado continues. “We’re more aggressive right from the start, more daring. We have a little more of this Zlatan mentality. Maybe you need to be something in between,” he says, displaying the Swede’s typical preference for lagom (“just right.”)

"We have immigrants to Sweden who’ve been very successful here. Just look at Omino, who runs much of this company, and Keke, who works for a hedgefund, and Marcus Samuelsson with his restaurants. Their success has a lot to do with their multicultural background, with the fact that they dared to break the barriers. It has a lot to do with personality, and a Swedish mentality of discipline and hard work, but they would never have made it if they hadn’t dared to go for it,” Alvarado says, pointing to Frans Johansson’s book The Medici Effect (see Currents No. 1, 2005).

Sweden’s famous welfare system leaves our Blattar with mixed feelings. On one hand, they admire Americans for working hard and not complaining about it, whereas Swedes complain about being exhausted after having worked 9 to 5. On the other hand, they feel that Americans work so hard because they don’t know better. “All they’ve ever known is working 10 to 12 hours a day with two weeks of vacation a year. In Sweden you’re aware of alternatives,” says Alvarado. “I like the fact that workers stick to their rights in Sweden. Nobody talks about that or unions here, so you can push workers around more. They can sack you and you’ll be out the next day with two weeks’ pay if you’re lucky. I know many who that’s happened to.”

“I admire that Americans work without complaining so much. Even if they work until 8 in the evening, they can go out and have a drink with friends. People are having more fun. Try that at home,” Selim Adira says, but Alvarado interjects: “Here in New York, many are young and don’t have families and children yet. People come here to make a career and make money, so the tempo is high.” When you leave home you change. For Swedes, it’s as if the Law of Jante (groupthink) loosens its grip abroad. “Swedes at home and Swedes abroad are like two different types,” says Adel Koubaa. “Over here they enjoy being social, while they’re more careful at home. My parents have lived in Sweden for 33 years, and even though they have colleagues at work, they don’t have any close Swedish friends, friends that you can just drop in on. When people meet, it’s for formal dinners.”

“But how many American friends do you have here?” Gardezi asks.

“I have quite a few,” Alvarado says.

“But how many do you see regularly? I’ve lived here since 1993, but I see three, maybe four Americans,” Gardezi says, which brings him back to Blatte United. “You try to connect to people that share your interests. My mother’s best friend comes from Chile. Our group here connects because we come from similar neighborhoods and have similar experiences from school. We have a lot in common.”

“It’s easy for guys to join our group. We work in very different trades, but we all have soccer as our big passion, and we have a similar mentality,” Alvarado says.

”When my dad visited me in New York, he was so surprised at the fact that people talked to us everywhere,” Adira says. “He told me that at home, he takes the bus every day but nobody ever talks to him. Nobody says hi, and they don’t ask how you are  doing, but here people are so warm and friendly. ‘How are you doing?’ people ay when you enter a store. They talk to people they don’t know. People are also very polite and helpful here in New York.”

“And still, they’re much nicer in California and other parts of the country. There they think New Yorkers are unfriendly,” Alvarado comments.

What do other Swedes think when they hear about what the Blatte group is doing here?

“We work with a lot of Swedish companies, and they’re usually completely wowed about everything we’ve done,” says Alvarado. “We’ve worked with big brands and we’ve done this and that. They are always wowed and they ask, ‘How did you do that?’”

“Traditional Swedes are amazed when they see us, but you know, we never got the chance in Sweden. That’s the dilemma,” says Kulego. “They’re impressed, and there is something in them that’s happy we’re Swedes, but there’s also something that can’t believe we’ve reached this stage. And then they say, ‘Wow, you speak Swedish so well,’ and I say, ‘Why shouldn’t I? I was born in Sweden!’ They can’t really grasp that we’re doing well over here, but we could have done well in Sweden if we’d gotten a chance.

Hans Sandberg

The Evolving Swedish (Business) Mind

(First published in Currents Magazine No. 3 2008.)

Let’s say you’re an American having dinner in Stockholm with a Swedish businessman. The food is delicious and the view of the Royal Palace across the water is spectacular. Everything would be perfect if it weren’t for the silence. “Why am I doing all the talking?” you wonder. “I thought we understood each other, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

Here you are in one of the most Americanized countries in Europe, yet you feel like you could be in Japan or China. You can’t read your partner’s mind, and his body language isn’t helping much. He, on the other hand, is satisfied with today’s meetings, but would rather go over a few details of the project than engage in small talk about personal stuff.

“Swedish businessmen abroad tend to be too single-mindedly focused on doing business, even at a dinner with their business partners. French and Japanese businessmen see this as a purely social event, an opportunity to get to know the person they’re dealing with, to learn about his hobbies, his family and children. To many Swedes, this is strange. They don’t understand the weight this is given in other countries, and even if they do, they don’t always know what to say, as they often lack knowledge about their own culture and history,” says Åke Daun, a retired professor of ethnology at the University of Stockholm and the author of several books about Swedish culture including Swedish Mentality (Stockholm, 1989), which shaped much of the debate on the issue in Sweden.

Once you get to know the Swedes, you’ll realize that there is nothing wrong with you, nor with your Swedish partner. It’s just that you’re coming from two different cultures. While Americans live in subcultures that are often ethnically mixed and overlapping, most Swedes live in homogenous environments where it doesn’t take much context to figure somebody out. This is why it’s said to be a “low-context” culture.

The Swedes have a reputation for being hard workers, great inventors, socially progressive, skilled at international diplomacy, as well as savvy business-men who have built global empires such as ABB, Electrolux, Ericsson, IKEA, H&M, Saab, SKF, and Volvo. But then again, they can be painfully shy and awkward.

Stereotypes are stereotypes, shortcuts we take when we can’t or don’t want to deal with reality in all its complexity. But once we take a closer look, the simplistic image seems to dissolve, revealing a more complex picture. Take Zlatan Ibrahimovic, for example, one of the most famous Swedes in soccer. Every Swede knows Zlatan. Next, Aquavit’s famous chef has a perfectly Swedish name — Marcus Samuelsson — but he was born in Ethiopia and adopted by a Swedish couple at the age of three. There are about one million Swedes like Marcus and Zlatan these days, and some of them have even made their way over to the U.S. In this issue you will meet some of Samuelsson’s friends in Blatte United, a soccer team made up of young immigrants who had immigrated to Sweden as children but have since emigrated to New York. They all speak Swedish, often with a southern accent, and are proud of their Swedishness, as well as of their “blatteness” (blatte is slang for ”immigrant” in Sweden).

So being Swedish doesn’t have to mean you’re blond, blue-eyed, and boring, but there are still Swedes who fit the stereotype. A foreigner with a little experience can usually pick out a Swede at a party. They hover among other Swedes like penguins waiting for their spouses to return from the long journey. The lucky ones find an acquaintance to exchange a few words with, but the conversation seldom gets going until alcohol has softened the grip of Lutheran guilt, which strangely enough has survived a century of secularization.

Åke Daun traces the Swedish mentality back to the country’s rough climate and late industrialization. The modern Swede was late in becoming urbanized, and when a large part of the population moved to the big cities and suburbs in southern and central Sweden (during the 1950s, 60s and 70s), they brought with them a rural village culture. Mr. and Mrs. Svensson found themselves lived in modern-looking cities and suburbs but were still peasants at heart, to quote Martin J. Gannon’s Understanding Global Cultures (Sage Publications, 3rd edition, 2003).

“When Swedes meet, they look for sameness, for the least common denominator,” says Daun. “It’s still one of the most homogenous countries in Europe, and its peasant culture survived well into the 1950s. Before the Second World War, most people lived in rural areas or small towns, and Stockholm was a very small capital with very few foreign tourists.

“The population’s homogeneity resulted in a strong expectation for likeness in social meetings. If you meet people you don’t know at a dinner party, you will almost instinctively look for what you have in common, whether it’s ideas, hobbies, work or common acquaintances. You will avoid divergent views during the initial conversation. A good host always tries to match up guests that have something in common to ensure that the dinner conversation will be nice.

“One result of this cautious ambition to find similarities is that it can be hard for a Swede to join a conversation with several people at once. Hence, the Swede might prefer to just listen and look interested,” Daun says.

Historically, Sweden’s rough terrain (only seven percent arable land) and short harvest season put a premium on hard work and practicality. You had to stick together and cooperate in order to survive the long, cold winter, and during the brief summer you had to work from early morning to late at night to reap the harvest. You had to be practical, one reason that Martin Luther’s puritan ethos gained such a strong hold on the Swedish mind. This down-to-earth, egalitarian attitude was later absorbed by the social-democratic labor movement that ruled Sweden for most of the 20^th century.

When it comes to the shyness Swedes are so famous for, Daun says they share this trait with Americans. He points to research he did with his American colleague James McCroskey at the University of West Virginia, who is an expert on shyness. “We studied students in several countries and found that American and Swedish students were equally shy, but while the American culture encouraged the students to overcome this social handicap, the Swedish culture associated it with humility and high morals. The quiet person was seen as deep and reflective, while people who talked a lot were seen as superficial and difficult.

“While being outspoken and speaking up are seen as signs of self-confidence in the U.S., in Sweden this is seen as being boastful and lacking humility. In the U.S., on the other hand, as well as in Southern Europe, a person of few words is perceived as stupid, one who has nothing to say. Swedes take it as a negative if you talk a lot and are loud. It’s a sign of being a foreigner, of being different,” Daun says.

This can create problems for immigrants to Sweden, especially if you’re coming from an old-city culture where you spend a lot of time talking as a way of investigating your social environment. In such a high-context culture, you can’t take for granted that you understand other people, which is why you need to talk to them.

But the stereotypical Swede is becoming far less typical, and this is especially true for entrepreneurs, innovators, and businesspersons. To run a business, you have to step out of the mold and dare to break the “Law of Jante” (i.e., the “Don’t believe you’re special!” attitude that grew out of Sweden’s egalitarian village culture and the bureaucratic capitalism which emerged during the 16th and 17th centuries).

Add to that that the entire Swedish society has gone through tremendous changes over the past few decades. Sweden’s already highly international economy has grown even more integrated into the globalized world, thanks to cross-national mergers such as those that gave us ABB and Pharmacia Upjohn, and the sale of Saab Automobile to General Motors and Volvo Automobile to Ford Motors. Today, more Swedes than ever are working and traveling abroad, at the same time that Sweden has become mixed economically, culturally, and demographically (13 percent of the population are first or second generation immigrants). Besides, we have a young generation that grew up with Facebook, Google and YouTube and is used to teaming up with people from all around the world to battle shoulder to shoulder in virtual wars. And finally, when Swedes go on vacation, they are as likely to go to Turkey, Thailand, or Trinidad as to stay in their parents’ little red sommarstuga.

Hans Sandberg

What Would Jesus, the Pope, and John Maynard Keynes Do?

What would Jesus do about the financial collapse? Would he come down on Wall Street flipping those tables that haven’t already been flipped? Or would he, like Pope Benedict XVI, preach Buddhist sounding nihilism - 'money vanishes, it is nothing'' - something that an innocent soul - God forbid! - could take to mean that it is all right to fill this globalization pioneer's collection baskets with words rather than those vanishing bills and checks. After all, "only God's words are a solid reality" as the pontiff preached in Rome on Monday.

When the Pope declared the world's financial systems "built on sand," he should have reminded us that not even the most solid faith is enough to keep St. Peter’s Cathedral from crashing down, hence Bramante made sure that it had a firm underpinning. In Wall Street’s case, such underpinnings are called regulations, and I can’t remember having heard demands for government regulations of the financial markets from the Catholic Church.

If we take the Pope’s statement on a personal level, there is certainly an existential truth in his paraphrasing Jesus, "he who builds only on visible and tangible things like success, career and money builds the house of his life on sand''. But one does wonder if that truth also holds in the Vatican City with all its displays of conspicuous wealth? I much enjoy visiting catholic churches, but there is something to say for Lutheran frugality.

But enough of this, because it’s not really what Jesus would do or say that interests us. The real question is what John Maynard Keynes would think if he had been around to watch capitalism performing what looks like a global hara-kiri. Contrary to the classical economists, and our neo-conservative believers, Keynes looked at the real economy, and what he saw after the Great Crash of 1929 was that markets alone would not be able to bring about an equilibrium where all resources are optimally used. Mere humans run the markets, and humans are typically shortsighted. It takes not a village, but a government to pull a country out of a severe recession, or a depression. There is always work that needs to be done. Leaving everything up to the markets carries a political risk that no responsible government can take. Hence it intervenes, projecting its power into the future. The private sector typically does not respond well to needs that are long-term, and where the rewards are indirect and often lies years in the future. What FDR did - inspired by Keynes - was to lead the country and the economy to start working again, whether it was to build roads, dams or water systems. The government can do this and it can - and if it does it well, and for peaceful purposes - give the entire economy the jolt it needs to restart the economic engines.

When capitalism freezes up, it doesn’t mean that our private and social needs have seized to exist, but that there is a general loss of confidence among the actors in the market. There is simply too much fear and uncertainty, which means that the ball de facto has passed from the economic system to the political system.

The world, and the United States in particular, is facing a tremendous need for investments in education, health care, repairing and expanding its collapsing infrastructure, and in converting its energy system from one that exacerbates global warming to one that relies on alternative and sustainable energy and limits its dependence on foreign energy sources. The private sector cannot lead here, but if the government sets out the course, and starts the process, the private sector will soon catch up and take over. That was how the computer industry grew from serving the Department of Defense and NASA to serving the entire society, and the entire world.

The world is now shell-shocked much like after 9/11. Hopefully, the answer will not be ignorance, economic follies, chauvinism and new wars (the McCain Path), but realism, economic and ecological restructuring, fairness and global responsibility (the Obama Path).

Hans Sandberg

And this Man Was Going To Fix the Financial Mess..

There is a ton of things I'd like to say about this video, but it really speaks for itself. It's not shrill, it's not an attack ad, it's just the truth, plainly stated. That's why it is so devastating for McCain. Just watch it!

Sarah Palin Did Great - Apply Directly To the Forehead

Alaska's Governor Sarah Palin surprised the world by not making a fool of herself in the debate with Joe Biden, but she did it by following her script so tight that there were moments when I thought I was watching the Head On commercial.



Im a Hockey Mom! Cut Taxes! McCain Is A Maverick! Drill, Baby, Drill!
Im a Hockey Mom! Cut Taxes! McCain Is A Maverick! Drill, Baby, Drill!
Im a Hockey Mom! Cut Taxes! Get the Government Out of the Way!

Hans Sandberg