09/02/2008
Sarah Palin: Experience vs Pregnancy vs the Female Vote vs the GOP
A note to all from Alaskan housewife Anne Kilkenny: "So many people have asked me about what I know about Sarah Palin in the last 2 days that I decided to write something up . . ."
"Sarah Palin admitted yesterday her "beautiful daughter" Bristol was five months pregnant and would marry Levi. The baby is due in late December"....Self-described "f---in' redneck" Levi Johnston is baby's father...
McCain's lousy record on teen pregnancy: "Republican John McCain, whose running mate disclosed that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, has opposed proposals to spend federal money on teen-pregnancy prevention programs and voted to require poor teen mothers to stay in school or lose their benefits."
Washington Post's Sally Quinn: "McCain claims he knew about the pregnancy, and was not at all concerned. Why not? Not only do we have a woman with five children, including an infant with special needs, but a woman whose 17-year-old child will need her even more in the coming months. Not to mention the grandchild. This would inevitably be an enormous distraction for a new vice president (or president) in a time of global turmoil. Not only in terms of her job, but from a media standpoint as well. McCain's cynical choice has created a dilemma for many women. For still-angry Hillary Clinton voters, they will have to decide if they want to vote against their concscience and political interests by voting to elect a Republican woman who's even more conservative than McCain."
POLITICO: New Palin details may help...
Baltimore Sun columnist: "So this is what being pandered to feels like..."
Palin sets off mommy wars: "When Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska was introduced as a vice-presidential pick, she was presented as a magnet for female voters, the epitome of everymom appeal. But since then, as mothers across the country supervise the season’s final water fights and pack book bags, some have voiced the kind of doubts that few male pundits have dared raise on television. With five children, including an infant with Down syndrome and, as the country learned Monday, a pregnant 17-year-old, Ms. Palin has set off a fierce argument among women about whether there are enough hours in the day for her to take on the vice presidency, and whether she is right to try.
DailyKos: Palin candidacy 'Death Watch'...
Obama on Palin 'experience': "My understanding is that Gov. Palin’s town, Wassilla, has I think 50 employees. We've got 2500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe 12 million dollars a year – we have a budget of about three times that just for the month...Our ability to manage large systems and to execute I think has been made clear over the past couple of years and certainly in terms of the legislation I’ve passed in the past couple of years, post-Katrina."
Obama: Palin's family off-limits. "Let me be as clear as possible. I think people's families are off-limits, and people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as governor or her potential performance as a vice president. How a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn't be the topic of our politics, and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that's off-limits."
Republicans try to brush off pregnancy "tempest" at Convention: "Finally, Cindy McCain walked onstage Monday night in a yellow dress that looked like a rain slicker, to something of a hero's welcome from the crowd. (Her daughters, Meghan and Bridget, and her mother-in-law, Roberta McCain, watched from the VIP box just off the floor.) 'As John has been saying for the last several days,' McCain said, 'this is a time when we take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats.' It's an odd line for a party that claims to have the market cornered on patriotism; if they're not Americans when they're being Republicans, what are they? But if things work the way the McCain campaign hopes, the public will forget that Obama asked the 5 million-plus people on his own campaign's e-mail list to send money to the Gulf (and redirected his Web site's donation pages to the Red Cross)."
John McCain turns on the media, his onetime "base": " As the relationship has deteriorated, McCain has stopped hosting his once-famous 'straight talk' get-togethers on his campaign plane. He also has abandoned regular press conferences. Instead, he stops occasionally to read short written statements in front of cameras, like he did Aug. 31 in Jackson, Mississippi; then walks away from questions shouted by reporters. His campaign plane is custom configured with a lounge area designed for hosting question-and-answer sessions with the press. McCain inaugurated the lounge on one of the plane's first flights and hasn't used it since."
Posted 11:42 AM EST by Andy Towle in Barack Obama, Election 2008, John McCain, News, Republican Party, Sarah Palin | Permalink
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Las Vegas, Thorsen, you an fools. Please stick to posting at Wing Nut Daily. That people like you are even here shows how truly scared the reich-wingers are.
All polls are showing a McCain DROP because of this idiotic selection. And her family is open to investigation when the way she has run it reveals her incredible hypocrisy. If Biden had a 17 year old daughter who got knocked up, Rush would probably have gotten so heated up inveighing about his "moral failure as a father" the big pig would have gone into cardiac arrest!
Posted by: St. Theresa of Avila | Sep 2, 2008 2:11:34 PM
I would hope that AIDS education would help all students avoid the disease, but given the statistics, young gay males are more vulnerable now than at any time since the mid-80's. The odds of a str8 male getting AIDS from vaginal intercourse is very, very low.
Posted by: anon | Sep 2, 2008 2:28:01 PM
I gotta post this excellent comment from Reddit:
"I agree with the Repubs, Palin's daughter's pregnancy is private, just as abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, and recreational drug use are private matters that should be beyond government and politics."
Posted by: JohnT | Sep 2, 2008 2:37:29 PM
Dear Theresa,
I know it's hard to believe that there is some diversity in the GLBT community and not everyone bows at the altar of the Democrats. However, a little objectivity and tolerance goes a long way.
P.S. just because you use anal beads for your rosary does not mean you're a saint.
Posted by: Las Vegas | Sep 2, 2008 2:47:20 PM
I know it's hard to believe that there is some diversity in the GLBT community and not everyone bows at the altar of the Democrats. However, a little objectivity and tolerance goes a long way.
P.S. just because you use anal beads for your rosary does not mean you're a saint.
Posted by: Las Vegas | Sep 2, 2008 2:47:20 PM
---------------------------
'a little objectivity and tolerance goes a long way?'
Man you GOP trolls are such fucking douche bags. Isn't Rush or one of those assholes on, so you can stop writing your crap, that no one listens to?
Posted by: patrick nyc | Sep 2, 2008 3:13:17 PM
I think we (and particularly Derrick) can agree that the Republicans somehow made their convention more exciting than the Democrats! Way to go, Johnny!
Posted by: anon | Sep 2, 2008 3:27:54 PM
Patty from NYV
Because I don't really like him very much..he's as bad as most of the left wing kool aid drinkers on here...by the way I write my "crap" because sometimes another view point may make people stop and think. Thinking for someone like you is very hard. I mean it must take hours for you to come up with such gems as troll and douche bag.
I always find it interesting that all that people like can do is hurtle insults when presented with an argument you can't win or understand. Mostly I see that sort of behavior in spoiled children but some little boys never grow up I guess.
Posted by: Las Vegas | Sep 2, 2008 3:30:53 PM
..by the way I write my "crap" because sometimes another view point may make people stop and think.
---------------
That is true, they stop and think 'what a fucking tool'.
Posted by: patrick nyc | Sep 2, 2008 3:35:32 PM
@Las Vegas
Diversity in the gay community does not include diversity of opinions. You will be castigated and ostracized for having opinions that are not in concert with liberal conventional "wisdom."
Unfortunately, there is no room for dissent.
Posted by: Rik | Sep 2, 2008 4:04:54 PM
I think it's a ruse. I think Palin will "gracefully back out to spend more time with the family." This way they get to claim they wanted a woman on the ticket and then they get to put another old, rich, white guy up there. I can't imagine they are this stupid to not vet her properly. Okay, they are, but I still think Karl Rove has his evil little claws in there somewhere
Posted by: Chris | Sep 2, 2008 4:33:51 PM
All this outrage about Palin and the ridiculous attacks I read over the weekend on HuffPo and Daily Kos--Palin's baby is actually the daughter's child, etc.--is nothing but liberal conspiracy theory hysteria at this point. It's serving to whip the Left up into a rabid frenzy about this apparent monster of a hockey-mom governor, but its ugliness has the potential to fuel a huge backlash by moderate Dems, Independents, and formerly dispirited conservatives who find Palin appealing. Palin's politics are on the whole not my politics, but I find her likeable as a person, and I appreciate her successes in governing Alaska despite the fact that the Republican powers that be in that state pretty much hate her.
I grew up in a Catholic Republican family in the heartland of the Reagan democrats, Macomb County, Michigan, in the suburbs of Detroit. Palin and her family are a lot like the family friends I grew up around—hockey moms, hunters, snowmobilers, boisterous kids, blue collar people—so I can no more see her as the monster the blogs on the left have made her out to be than I could think the same thing about friends and family I've known all of life who simply happen to have political ideas I think are wrongheaded—and there are a lot of those people in my life. That's why the ferocity of these attacks has appalled me. When I read the hate and venom directed at this family from the bloggers, I feel outrage and sympathy—and I'm a liberal gay man living in West Hollywood. How do you think Middle America is feeling? They're going to feel that one of their own is being attacked. Also, they're going to feel that the Left is finally verbalizing what the common folk on the right have always suspected they believe: that there is a caste system in place and that candidates can't come from among the common people; they have to have attended Harvard or Yale or come from the moneyed ruling class—that the common people are too stupid to participate in higher levels of government; they need to be tended and herded like cattle.
To educate myself about Palin and get through the hype, I watched a long interview with her on Newseek.com in which she showed herself to be sharp, knowledgeable, passionate, and personable. She seemed less committed to imposing her social agenda than handling economic and political issues. So the concept of her as a Creationist theocrat seems to have been cobbled together out of religious bigotry and quotes taken out of context. And this is a big part of what bothers me: we're supposed to be the good guys, the ones who tell the truth and never smear the other side. We're supposed to succeed by the superiority of our ideas, not by lies and distortions. The "anything goes" and "the ends justify the means" attitudes that have predominated among Democrats this election season have really shocked and disappointed me. I guess I'm a naïve idealist, but I though the politics of personal destruction was the weapon of the bad guys—especially considering that one of the targets is a child, who like a fair number of other girls her age—from good families and not-so-good families—finds herself pregnant.
There's a lot of mocking laughter from bloggers like Andy Ostroy and Chris Kelly over at HuffPo (Kelly: I also think big families like the Palins are great. Hitler was the fourth child in a run of eight..."), but I think there's a greater than 50-50 chance that this kind of superior gloating laughter from the pundits of the left will turn to howls of agony when they provoke a huge backlash and we end up with yet another Republican in the White House because they couldn't shut their f*cking traps and refrain from these immoderate attacks.
Posted by: Tom | Sep 2, 2008 4:37:05 PM
Of course the Republicans are now screaming (lying) that the Obama team is "smearing" their poor VP choice! Obama has stayed admirably above the fray. The Republicans smeared themselves with this one, and I love seeing them in complete disarray going into their convention (the storm couldn't save them forever).
As for the teen pregnancy. No, it shouldn't disqualify Palin. (There are plenty of other reasons for that.) But it is not smearing to point out that her teenage daughter might have benefited from real sex-ed, the kind her mother and McCain oppose. And it's fair game to highlight McCain's teen pregnancy prevention record and the hypocrisy of so-called Republican "family values" that pretend it is perfectly ok for a knocked up teen to marry her boyfriend of the moment but not ok to recognize in any way much longer-term gay relationships or the validity of gay families with children. It's not the Springer antics that are the problem but rather the Republican way of dealing with them.
Posted by: Ernie | Sep 2, 2008 4:37:22 PM
If the GOP Platform and it's candidates McCain/Palin think that the government has every right to regulate adoption, marriage, morality, sex, then I as HELL can call them on their HYPOCRASY!
Nothing new...Charlie Crist, Mark Foley, Larry Craig.
What about all those evangelical ministers and their followers who believed that women need to be subjegated to their men --in ALL WAYS?! are they on board with a mother of 5 still at home and the youngest with serious medical problems forgoing the family---er sorry this is what they must mean by COUNTRY FIRST.
And I remember all the crap the Edwards took when Elizabeth was diagnosed with cancer. All the hand-wringing on how could be run for president and put her through it.
G-O-P equals HY-PO-CRACY.
Posted by: MCnNYC | Sep 2, 2008 4:45:44 PM
"Diversity in the gay community does not include diversity of opinions."
Apparently it does, though! There are even gay people who want to collaborate in their own oppression! Just look at that wonderful platform! The only good thing the LCR has to say about McCain on gay issues is that he voted against the gay marriage amendment -- but they don't mention that he lobbied FOR it in his own state! (It's sort of like Palin's opposing the bridge to nowhere, only when she realized that being for it was an unpopular position)
Palin may energize the religious right "base," but she will definitely alienate all the independents and former Hillary supporters. The Repubs were hoping Gustav would be the storm of the century and distract attention from the real disaster that is their party.
Resignation on the horizon.
Posted by: Kevinvt | Sep 2, 2008 4:50:12 PM
PS: Cindy will go ballistic if she sees that pic of hubby embracing Palin! It reminds me of slow-dancing at a Catholic HS prom, when the chaperones required you to keep a hand's distance away from your partner. But I guess that's a warm Alaskan embrace?
Posted by: kevinvt | Sep 2, 2008 4:55:47 PM
Las Vegas writes:
*One of the reasons Ms. Palin is pregnant is a direct result on the attack on the family by the liberals. The constant drum beat of liberal teachers in school and he media to have sex and be free has taken it's toll on this Conservative family. Certainly by removing a moral basis in education, perpetuated by the liberal NEA, children now have to be subjected to a value system that is not matching what they are getting at home and/or church.*
SERIOUSLY!!??
Liberal teachers are telling teens to have sex and THAT's why Palin's daughter got knocked up? SERIOUSLY? Liberal teachers in conservative Alaska?
This doesn't even deserve a reply, but I would ask that you actually do some RESEARCH on the subject before forming and then spouting such an ignorant opinion.
One of the things shown by RESEARCH is that with abstinence-based education, the teens are MORE likely than those having more informative sex education to find themselves unprepared (for example, having a condom at hand) when that which is naturally bound to occur in relationships, namely attraction and sexual arousal, happens between, say, a high school hockey player and his girlfriend who happens to be the governor's daughter. WHICH MEANS UNWANTED, UNPLANNED PREGNANCIES! (See Waxman's study, I think from 2004, for the details).
Posted by: JT | Sep 2, 2008 6:09:44 PM
too many liberals are responding in such a way that will surely turn votes away from obama and towards mccain/palin.
further obama's ridiculous comments that his experience running his campaign is enough executive experience.
just everyone keep on belittling the woman and that will surely push people over the edge.
Posted by: tofer david | Sep 2, 2008 6:59:08 PM
"just everyone keep on belittling the woman and that will surely push people over the edge."
They don't need our help going over the edge. The Republicans are pushing themselves off of cliffs remarkably well on their own. I swear, it's becoming the Lemmings Convention. Grab a chair and watch them self-destruct.
Posted by: Ernie | Sep 2, 2008 8:37:36 PM
Tofer David writes:
*too many liberals are responding in such a way that will surely turn votes away from obama and towards mccain/palin.
further obama's ridiculous comments that his experience running his campaign is enough executive experience.
just everyone keep on belittling the woman and that will surely push people over the edge.*
In what way are "liberals" responding that assures votes will be turned towards McCain? The votes going to McCain now are from the conservative base, which could hardly have been expected to vote for Obama. Merely anecdotal info here, but in a conversation with someone today who spoke with several friends about Palin - friends who had been Hillary supporters and who were undecided - I was told that to a person, this Palin situation convinced them to vote for Obama and not McCain. Because of the lack of judgment on McCain's part.
To make more out of Palin's experience and less out of Obama's is a ridiculous. While it might not seem so at first glance, running a campaign is very much running a business. As for his other experience in government, I think his stints in state and federal government surely have given him exposure to all sides of government since one has to work with all sides as a senator. And the sophisticated nature of that exposure must surely compare more favorably and have more gravitas than the local shenanigans of small town government in Alaska, even at the state level. As someone who has lived in a big city (Phoenix) and now lives in a small town in Northern CA (although still at least 7 times bigger than the hamlet Palin was mayor of), I can tell you that there is no comparison. The complexity just isn't there. And I'll wager that Illinois is a heck of a lot more complicated than Alaska, any day of the week.
Finally, this "leave the poor little woman alone" stance is just ludicrous. Politics is a tough business. It's not for the faint of heart or tender of stomach. To question Palin's ability and experience is appropriate. Winning competitions in small ponds only goes so far. I want someone extraordinary a heartbeat away from the Presidency, not some small town pageant runner-up with delusions of grandeur. Obama has been scrutinized, criticized, and vilified, and still came out on top, in extraordinary fashion. Would I like more from him as a candidate? Probably. Would I accept either McCain or Palin as an alternative? Not in a heartbeat. I want more, not less.
Posted by: JT | Sep 2, 2008 9:29:59 PM
Someone should tell Laura that fondant goes on top of cakes, not first ladies.
Posted by: Chino | Sep 2, 2008 10:57:27 PM
Now, now, let's stop attacking one another and focus on the real issues.
Right now my biggest concern is, who's going to tell Cindy McCain that white people (especially blonde white people) should not wear that shade of yellow? Michelle Obama, on the other hand, would rock that dress.
Second, who's going to take care of the tiny 'tard? (I know, I'm just awful, and I hate myself for it.) Seriously, though, are they going to hire a nanny, or will daddy do it? Will "family values" be jettisoned when they're not convenient or expedient? Maybe Bristol can help, since her life is ruined anyway.
Third, what can we do to keep the comments on here short and snappy? Save your windy, insightful essays for the Daily Kos or something.
Posted by: Christopher | Sep 5, 2008 1:14:05 PM
Every time I see pictures of Palin holding up her baby, the horrifying scene of Martin Sheen holding up a baby as a human shield from "Dead Zone" leaps to mind.
Posted by: CanChuckle | Sep 7, 2008 4:24:16 PM
Christopher:
So sorry if some of us go over your acceptable word count. Could you now tell us what that is so that we don't risk boring you in the future?
Honestly, right now I'd tell you what I think of your vapid, shallow little mind that prefers sound bites over thought, but not only would that go past your word limit, as a good christian woman, I just can't.
Posted by: JT | Sep 8, 2008 1:26:21 AM