Let's ask ourselves one major question (and there's many to be asked), if Sarah Palin's so ready to lead, why is she so guarded by McCain's campaign staff?

Since the GOP Convention the basic script is all anyone has heard from her publicly, and her only interaction with the media was a brief conversation with a small group of reporters on her plane Monday — off the record at her handlers' insistence.

Her public remarks essentially have been excerpts of her convention speech, delivered while introducing McCain at rallies. By comparison, her Democratic counterpart, Joe Biden, has been campaigning on his own for weeks, at times taking questions from audiences. He was interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday. -Associated Press

SOME FACTS:

DRILLING: "Offshore, a jackup rig will take 2-3 years and a semi 3-4 years. Seeing that we just lost several shipyards along the Gulf Coast, well, the MODU's might have to be made elsewhere, meaning more time - and lots more money." THE OIL DRUM

PORK BARREL SPENDING:

"I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere," she said in her convention speech last week.

That's not what she told Alaskans when she announced a year ago that she was ordering state transportation officials to ditch the project. Her explanation then was that it would be fruitless to try to persuade Congress to come up with the money.

THE FACTS: Palin did abandon plans to build the nearly $400 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport. But she made her decision after the project had become an embarrassment to the state, after federal dollars for the project were pulled back and diverted to other uses in Alaska, and after she had appeared to support the bridge during her campaign for governor.

Under her administration, Alaska is still and by far the largest per-capita consumer of federal pet-project spending.

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS AND FOREIGN POLICY:
TRUTH:

Governors are commanders of their state National Guard units, but their roles are restricted to deployments of soldiers and airmen within their states, said Randy Noller, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau, the federal defense agency that oversees the Army and Air National Guards. But that hasn’t stopped the McCain campaign from claiming Palin’s role with the state Guard, and her visit to Alaska Guard members in Kuwait last year, as foreign policy experience.

ABSTINENCE as a form of birthday control- most research shows that it doesn't work....well, it works if teens live by the 'rules' of no sex. but that rarely happens.

THE HYPOCRISY religious groups are showing in the support of a teen having sex out of wedlock is astonishing. You can't preach it one way, and accept it when it's convenient to you. THIS is a national issue, not just one related to Sarah Palin. So the McCain campaign cannot call it foul play if this is brought up in any debate.