Turkey Pardons – Palin Style

 

It almost makes you feel sorry for her, not quite, but almost.

more about “Turkey pardons – Palin style“, posted with vodpod

Ellen vs. Sarah Palin and a Federal Ban on Gay Marriage

 

Republican party bailout… what this historical moment is calling for

 

… bail out at the ballot box that is.

There appears to be an unprecedented number of Republican party intellegencia publicly denouncing the McCain campaign.  Despite the visibility and numbers of party-defectors, this is no ’come to Jesus’ Republican conversion.  I don’t believe these staunch party die-hards are permanently disavowing the GOP or their core belief systems.  I think they’ve come to realize that there is something worse, much worse, than a big-government, elitist liberal at the helm.  What’s worse is clearly a McCain-Palin ticket.  

I have often wondered why this ticket doesn’t scare thinking Republicans?  Apparently, it does.  Colin Powell is just the lastet to announce an 11th hour endoresement of Barack Obama.  Earlier this week, in a dramatic turn worthy of Lost, Christopher Buckley (son of William F Buckley and former columnist for The National Review) announced his support for Barack Obama.

From Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama
Christopher Buckley
thedailybeast.com, October 14, 2008

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon.

As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times… a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

… John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man…

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

McCain – Palin Mob

 

It made me sick to my stomach to watch this.

Wonder Woman vs. Sarah Palin

 

Another Sarah Palin smack down by one of my heroes:

Okay, last question. I’m sure you’ve seen all the comparisons in the media and among Republicans of Sarah Palin to Wonder Woman. How do you feel about that?

Don’t get me started. She’s the anti-Wonder Woman. She’s judgmental and dictatorial, telling people how they’ve got to live their lives. And a superior religious self-righteousness … that’s just not what Wonder Woman is about. Hillary Clinton is a lot more like Wonder Woman than Mrs. Palin. She did it all, didn’t she?

No one has the right to dictate, particularly in this country, to force your own personal views upon the populace — religious views. I think that is suppressive, oppressive, and anti-American. We are the loyal opposition. That’s the whole point of this country: freedom of speech, personal rights, personal freedom. Nor would Wonder Woman be the person to tell people how to live their lives. Worry about your own life! Worry about your own family! Don’t be telling me what I want to do with mine.

I like John McCain. But this woman — it’s anathema to me what she stands for. I think America should be very afraid. Very afraid. Separation of church and state is the one thing the creators of the Constitution did agree on — that it wasn’t to be a religious government. People should feel free to speak their minds about religion but not dictate it or put it into law.

What I don’t understand, honestly, is how anyone can even begin to say they know the mind of God. Who do they think they are? I think that’s ridiculous. I know what God is in my life. Now I am sure that she’s not all just that. But it’s enough to me. It’s enough for me to have a visceral reaction. And it makes me mad.

People need to speak up. Doesn’t mean that I’m godless. Doesn’t mean that I am a murderer. What I hate is this demonization of everybody but one position. You’re un-American because you’re against the war. It’s such bullshit. Fear. It’s really such a finite way of thinking about God to think that your measley little mind can know the mind of God. It’s a very little God that way. I think that God’s bigger. I don’t presume to know his mind. Or her mind.

From Philadelphia Magazine, September 2008

Have you ever almost choked to death from laughter?

 

It’s totally way more fun than it sounds.  I just almost died.  I friggin’ LOVE Rosanne Cash and I will vote for her as VP or anything other position she and her Chanel-wearing ass want to run for.  Here’s one precious little excerpt of a fabulous piece… do yourself a huge favor and read the whole thing.

Roseanne Cash’s first argument for why she’d make a fine Vice President…

1. Focus on the Family

I am the mother of five children, just like Governor Palin. I have known the demands of managing a full-time career and motherhood at the same time. I have juggled a breast pump and a BlackBerry, and I know when to put the BlackBerry down. (To be perfectly honest, I did once send a text to the baby and tried to nurse my bass player. You learn from your mistakes.)

Thanks so much Tanene for this amaaaaazzzzing link.

Call on McCain to take a stand against dangerous and hateful attacks on Barack Obama

 

You don’t have to support John McCain or Sarah Palin to write to them.  You don’t have to be a Democrat to have a problem with hateful anti-Obama rhetoric being spewed by McCain supporters.  Write, call, email, blog… make your voice heard by the Republican Party and the McCain campaign.  Demand that John McCain and Sarah Palin take an immediate and public stand against the toxic tone of their campaign’s destructive, deceitful language.  Am I the only person who is scared shitless about where this will lead?  Let me answer that for you, NO!

In the most blunt terms imaginable, Republican author Frank Schaeffer called upon McCain in an October 10th Baltimore Sun Op-Ed piece to take a stand against the ugly and false statements about Barack Obama:

If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as “not one of us,” I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence…

Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.

John McCain, you’re walking a perilous line. If you do not stand up for all that is good in America and declare that Senator Obama is a patriot, fit for office, and denounce your hate-filled supporters when they scream out “Terrorist” or “Kill him,” history will hold you responsible for all that follows.

John McCain and Sarah Palin, you are playing with fire, and you know it. You are unleashing the monster of American hatred and prejudice, to the peril of all of us. You are doing this in wartime. You are doing this as our economy collapses. You are doing this in a country with a history of assassinations.

So what are you going to do?  You read my stupid blog, now go do something else.  I don’t care who you support in this election, take a stand against this anti-Obama garbage.   It sounds like it is straight out of a KKK handbook and it is seriously freaking me out.

Here are some links to help you out (uh, don’t contribute, just complain):

Republican National Party
McCain Palin Campaign

A place in Hell

By now I’m sure you’ve heard Sarah Plain misquoted former Secretary of State Madeline Albright at a rally in Carson, CA on October 4^th.

Sarah, misquoting Madeline Albright:

There is a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women.

Madeline Albright:

There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.

My problems with this are many:

1. Sarah’s folksy shout-out to all the folks who drink Starbuck’s mochas.
2. Sarah misquoting Albright’s statement.
3. Sarah’s misrepresentation* of Albright’s statement:

   Though I am flattered that Governor Palin has chosen to cite me as a source of wisdom, what I said had nothing to do with politics.

   Madeline Albright, to the Huffington Post

   *I would call it a flagrant misrepresentation, but I suspect Sarah had a literalistic interpretation of the quote and actually believes Ms. Albright thinks women will go to hell for not supporting her.

4. The fact that Sarah had only read the quote the day before and could not remember it correctly (coupled with a deep suspicion that she had no idea who Madeline Albright was before reading the side of her mocha cup).
5. Um, Sarah didn’t support Hillary Clinton, did she? Wouldn’t that be a problem for the GOP if she had? Where does that put her on the whole hell-bound-support-women issue?
6. Ok, she said “support” but she really meant “vote” right? She thinks women are going Hell if they don’t vote for her? For real? Hell as in ‘eternal damnation and suffering in a pit of fire?’ That hell? That seems a little extreme to me. I’m no expert… but I’m surprised to hear voting for Obama ranks up there with abortion and gay-marriage in terms of sin.
7. Hell again. Is that really fair? Men can vote for Obama but I can’t or I’ll go to Hell? You know, because I’m a woman and I’m not supporting her.
8. The fact that Sarah Palin is playing the gender card at all.

   This one’s more complicated. The issue of gender and politics is not an easy one for me. Being a feminist, a lesbian and a person who generally feels that women have historically been fucked over in every imaginable way… I won’t even pretend gender doesn’t matter to me. Call me biased… Whatever! I think gender does play a role in my decision making and I still have problems with Sarah Palin pulling gender on me, or on any woman.  What, we’re all a bunch of sheep… Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin are interchangeable?  Stick Palin on the ballot and you’ve got the women’s vote.   Please, that is ridiculous.  Sarah Palin is not fit to be in the same room with Senator Clinton, let alone assume she could garner any of her votes.

9. The gender card again.  When I supported Hillary, which was up until she the very last possible moment, I cannot tell you how many times it was implied to me (by fellow-Dems and Reps alike) that I supported her only because she’s a woman. I resented the implication that I’m so vapid I can’t make a political decision based on issues other than gender (not to mention the absurdity of the notion that Hillary’s only qualification for the job was being female). Not that I can blame Palin for that experience… it’s not like she rang me up and said “hey Diane, who really cares about Hillary’s xx chromosomes, vote McCain” and now she’s flip-flopping. But, with my own gender-politics fury hanging about in recent memory, I couldn’t even listen to Sarah’s speech without really getting really pissed off (you might ask, what’s new about that?). It’s bad to vote for Hillary because she’s a woman, and good to vote for Palin because she’s a woman. Huh?

I guess you could say I’m misrepresenting Sarah’s position on this issue. But, then, I’m a blogger not a Vice Presidential candidate. I can do as I please. And I have to wonder, how much am I really misrepresenting her?  Save me a place in Hell.

And in a break from politics, I bring you more poetic relief from Sarah Palin

“Challenge to a Cynic”

You are a cynic.
Because show me where
I have ever said
That there’s no absolute proof
That nothing that man
Has ever conducted
Or engaged in,
Has had any effect,
Or no effect,
On climate change.

To Charlie Gibson, ABC News, September 11, 2008

“On Reporters”

It’s funny that
A comment like that
Was kinda made to,
I don’t know,
You know …

Reporters.

To Katie Couric, CBS News, September 25th, 2008

These were my personal favorites, but there are more (be sure to check out her Haiku):

http://www.slate.com/id/2201342/pagenum/all/#page_start

Can’t y’all take a joke… I was winking not blinking

“You Can’t Blink”

You can’t blink.
You have to be wired
In a way of being
So committed to the mission,

The mission that we’re on,
Reform of this country,
And victory in the war,
You can’t blink.

So I didn’t blink.

Sarah Palin to Charlie Gibson, ABC News, September 11, 2008

I have no clue how to re-blog with credit (guess I’m not that bright, but then I’m not running for Vice President)… so here’s where I found the fabulous picture (and lots of other great stuff):

http://butnotmine.tumblr.com/