Just a few scattered, unrelated thoughts in these last crucial days. I want to make a couple of observations and then ask you a question that is driving me nuts and ask how you reconcile the people at Republican rallies with anything even leaning toward rational or sane.
Phone Calls to crucial states:
As I have been calling Ohio today, I was repeatedly told (when someone actually answered their phones) that many were not answering phones as Ohio (who knows where else) because they have been inundated with calls from volunteers (or maybe robo-calls?). I apologized to the 3rd person in 25 I was able to reach, and said I was a volunteer for the Obama campaign for Change. This wonderful woman said the calls weren't coming from the Obama people so much, but the McCain campaign was relentless and it was driving everyone crazy. She told me that everyone she knew had decided they just couldn't take it and weren't answering their phones. She said that her son has just lost his home and she and her husband (in their mid-70's) were doing everything they could to help him out and losing what they had set aside in doing so. She said, "Ohio is in an awful fix".
I asked her if she and her husband had voted or were voting and she said they had already voted for Obama. They are in their 70's and were so excited about CHANGE, it brought tears to my eyes. I'm a grandmother too, and am raising my grandchildren. I'll tell you this for sure, and I heard it in her voice too, "It's never too late to have HOPE for CHANGE! She said she believes Obama because she just knows he is a good man. She said, what I also feel. Barack's and, Michele's goodness shines through and you can feel it. It's tangible. It's times like this that you are so glad you are making those calls, even if sometimes people hang up on you. Just one call like this can make your day.
McCain/ Palin rallies:????????????????????????????
It is so incredible to me to watch people scream and boo when they say that Obama wants to raise taxes. Who are these people with pom poms and Joe the Plumber shirts that somehow have missed every report on every network (perhaps not Fox, but I never watch Fox News) that Obama will lower taxes for everyone that earns under $200,000 per year. Are all these screaming people in the small towns in barns and Republican rallies that rich or are they cheering against themselves? I know you must have the same thoughts when you see this strange phenomenon.
Now, I am perfectly aware, that a big part of the GOP are the fortune 500 types or those with huge, obscene profits - yes, the greedy rich (not the wealthy Kennedy type dedicated to helping those in need). And, they hold their fortunes close to their Nordstrom's vests, with a tendency toward the true sociopath, blind to the suffering in America brought about by their greed. They will always, as a sacred action, vote Republican, even though the fiscally conservative party no longer exists. In fact, that is the party that has committed acts of reckless socialism of late (baling out the rich they assisted in raping Americans). Oh well, they have now become archeologists digging for the remains of their party.- that tight fist is holding on to a party that has, of late, become a fascinating cartoon. But, the rich fixated on self, believing they are entitled, are not who amaze me. Characters like Scrooge have been around since the first caveman, in tough times, hoarded his kill for a select few, leaving the rest of the clan to starve.
Those who amaze me, are the middle class and the poor at Republican rallies screaming about Barack raising taxes. They have no chance in hell of being negatively impacted in any way, by Barack's plan of tax cuts for 95% of the American people. They would benefit by having their taxes lowered. Where do these people go when the rallies are over? They don't have 8 homes, they are not heirs or heiresses, they are not millionaires, and many are just trying to hang on to their homes. So, the really bizarre and puzzling thing to me is how these ordinary folks, who are suffering in this economy show up in any numbers at these rallies?
They are fighting the party and the candidates fighting their guts out to help them. They cannot be this dumb can they? Really, I am dead serious. I just can't make this enigma register - I don't get it. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but the Republicans have been stealing from the poor and middle class for years. They have to know that! How can they cheer the pitt bull saying Barack will raise taxes? Yes, he will! For the rich! But these people are like sheep to the slaughter. They are not cheering Palin's radical views on the Rapture, speaking in tongues, praying by laying on hands to protect her from witchcraft, or her waiting with baited breath for the end times (my personal prayers is, "God, keep her hands off that phone at 3:00AM!"). Those would be the far right wing-nuts who have made her their spiritual leader and want the church to run the America - their church!. I would expect their reaction at a Palin revival.
Noooo! These middle class "Joe the Plumbers (who DO NOT EARN A QUARTER OF A MILLION A YEAR) are cheering and chanting to keep paying the tab for the rich and are onboard with cheating themselves! What the hell is wrong with these people? They aren't living in caves - so if you know what is going on with these crowds (true - they're getting smaller) who are blind as bats to their own plight, tell me your read on how this can happen - mass hysteria?. It reminds me of the old cliche', "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink". But, how did they drink the cool-aid like at Jonestown.
Can anyone tell me what you think, as to how this is happening?. What am I missing here? Before this election becomes history and we are only seeing things in retrospect, can you tell me what you think? They remind me of zombies as in The Night of the Living Dead, just following, and following regardless of their lives and losses. Keep up all the great things you have done for this historic campaign in which our futures are at stake.Thank you,Susan Federighi
Dear Senator McCain and Governor Palin.Americans are sick of the old dirty mud slinging and Swift Boating smears of the same tired Washington politics that has brought us to the brink of destruction of our people. Today, Sarah Palin showed she is incapable of rising above the burned out spin of accusations trying to win by ignoring your absence of concrete policies and resorting to name calling. Since Sarah Palin is incapable of forming a thought of her own, the "Alaskan Cartoon Character" parrots the old tactics of anti-change. After stealing the CHANGE mantra from the Obama campaign, you both FORGOT to look up the definition.
Americans are hurting, desperately seeking change and restoration. We want to hear facts, policies, platforms, and what will save us, redirect us, salvage our homes, investments, retirement savings, bring our jobs back, educate our children, save our planet, and allow us to stay afloat if we become ill. We are looking for a White House that can see us, feel our pain and not find loopholes for the rich paid for by the ever increasing poor. We are sick of name calling, scare tactics, and war mongering. We don't want to hear any more of it because of your fear of losing. It may be your last resort, but it's our final straw. All you have left are lies and deceit, but it won't work anymore. Not in this election. Not this time. Don't waste our time.
We want you to talk about us! We don't want to listen to the lies. We have heard them all before. We've seen your show. Will you resume the terrorist alerts in Oct? Enough!
NEW RULES:
(1) NO ONE OLDER THAN DIRT, CAN DIG UP OLD DIRTY LIES ABOUT CLEAN OPPONENTS, WHILE IGNORING THAT AMERICANS ARE TRYING TO DIG OUT OF THE DIRT THAT THE PARTY BURIED THEM IN FOR THE LAST 8 YEARS. NO MORE DIRTY POLITICS FROM PEOPLE WHO HAVE DIRTY HANDS FROM THROWING MUD AS A LAST RESORT TO SAVE A DIRTY CAMPAIGN.
(2) McCAIN AND PALIN ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SAY THE WORD CHANGE UNTIL THEY HAVE LEARNED WHAT IT MEANS. They must learn what it means by watching the Obama - Biden campaign
(3) YOU MUST KNOW WHAT A WORD MEANS BEFORE YOU STEAL IT!CHANGE Transform, Revolutionize, Make-Over, Convert, Alter, Renovate, RestoreBarack Obama, Joe Biden
(4) McCAIN AND PALIN MUST LEARN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHANGE AND SAME, BEFORE THEY CONTINUE CAMPAIGNING.
SAME
Identical, Alike, One in the Same, Impossible to tell apart, Indistinguishable, Matching, Bush, McCain, Palin
(5) SARAH PALIN IS NOT ALLOWED TO MENTION THE THREAT OF TERRORISM (OR TERRORIST)Note: SARAH PALIN HAS NOT BEEN ACCUSED OF ASSOCIATION WITH A TERRORIST BUT SHE IS ONE. (6) McCAIN AND PALIN ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SAY THE WORD TERRORIST UNTIL THEY HAVE LEARNED WHAT IT MEANS.
TERRORIST
One who terrorizes. Radical, militant, belligerent, combative, rebellious, and, we can add “someone who threatens our safety and our lives”.
We believe that Sarah Palin is an unparalleled threat to the welfare and safety of America. Her ignorance of all that is vital to our safety and protection, qualifies her as a terrorist threat to this country in the strongest sense of the word. So, for a look into the campaign of the truly desperate and what is instore for us .............
ARTICLE:
The Republican campaign, falling behind Obama in polls, plans to make attacks on Obama's character a centerpiece of candidate John McCain's message in the final weeks of the presidential race.
Palin told a group of donors at a private airport, "Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." She also said, "This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America."The Obama campaign called Palin's remarks offensive but not surprising in light of news stories detailing the campaign's come-from-behind offensive.
"What's clear is that John McCain and Sarah Palin would rather spend their time tearing down Barack Obama than laying out a plan to build up our economy," Obama campaign spokesman Hari Sevugan said in a statement.
Palin's remark about Obama "palling around with terrorists" comes as e-mails circulate on the Internet with suggestions that the Democratic candidate is secretly a radical, foreign-born Muslim with designs against the U.S. — even though Obama is a native of Hawaii, a Christian and has no connections to Muslim extremists.Palin, Alaska's governor, said that donors on a greeting line had encouraged her and McCain to get tougher on Obama. She said an aide then advised her, "Sarah, the gloves are off, the heels are on, go get to them.
"The escalated effort to attack Obama's character dovetails with TV ads by outside groups questioning Obama's ties to Ayers, convicted former Obama fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko and Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
It takes a hard heart not to like Sarah Palin. She has a winning personal story. She can be poised, charming and funny. As she showed at the Republican National Convention, her ability to deliver set-piece speeches â€" a big part of the job for all politicians, but especially Presidents â€" is considerable. On balance, she's probably an asset to John McCain. But we should stop pretending that she is ready now or anytime in the forseeable future to be Commander-in-Chief.
I reached this conclusion after watching the foreign-policy portion of her disastrous Sept. 25 interview with Katie Couric. A number of commentators, including The Atlantic's James Fallows and Slate's Christopher Beam, have said that Palin resembled, in Beam's words, "a high-schooler trying to BS her way through a book report," which is an insult to both high-schoolers and B.S. Palin's answers were hesitant, convoluted and at times â€" like when she appeared to suggest that Vladimir Putin might be preparing a one-man airborne invasion of Alaska â€" downright loony.
But the more worrisome responses were the ones that betrayed her lack of curiosity about current events and reliance on bumper-sticker wisdom over complex thoughts. There were moments, in fact, in which you wondered whether she had been paying any meaningful attention to the world outside Alaska before McCain picked her as his running mate a month ago.
Set aside her strange imagining of Putin's flight path and her failure to remember that her tutor Henry Kissinger actually supports talking to Iran (which McCain also forgot during Friday's Presidential debate). Though less YouTube-able, two other moments in the CBS interview stood out as even more troubling. The first was when Couric asked Palin whether she believes "the Pakistani government is protecting al-Qaeda within its borders." This was Palin's response:
I don't believe that new President Zardari has that mission at all. But no, the Pakistani people also, they want freedom. They want democratic values to be allowed in their country, also. They understand the dangers of terrorists having a stronghold in regions of their country, also. And I believe that they, too, want to rid not only their country, but the world, of violent Islamic terrorists.
There's nothing inherently incorrect about that answer: Zardari, whose wife was assassinated by al-Qaeda, isn't in league with Osama bin Laden, and the vast majority of Pakistanis oppose terrorism. The trouble is that the same could be said about nearly every country in the world. But anyone who has picked up a newspaper in the last few months knows that Pakistan is now home to al-Qaeda's top leaders and is the staging ground for the dramatic increase in suicide bombings in Afghanistan â€" and that elements of its security services are indisputably aiding that cause. Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, said this week that "the murder, killing, destruction, dishonoring and insecurity in Afghanistan is carried out by the intelligence administration of Pakistan, its military intelligence institutions." Just last month, the top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, David McKiernan said, "Do I believe there has been some complicity on the part of organizations such as the ISI over time in Pakistan? I believe there has been." In fact, it's precisely the Pakistani government's unwillingness to go after militants along the Pakistan-Afghan border that has prompted the Bush Administration to authorize raids by U.S. commandos into Pakistani territory.
In short, most foreign-policy hands â€" including members of the current Administration â€" would have given Couric the exact opposite answer that Palin did. If U.S. officials once praised Pakistan's cooperation in the war on terror, they almost never do now. But Palin doesn't seem to have noticed.
Then there was her pained, and painful, response to Couric's questions about the Bush "freedom agenda" â€" the goal of spreading democracy in the Islamic world. Predictably, Palin repeated standard Bush platitudes about making "every effort possible to help spread democracy for those who desire freedom, independence, respect for equality. That is the whole goal here in fighting terrorism. It's not just to keep the people safe, but to be able to usher in democratic values and ideals around this, around the world." That theory, though, has been discredited by the debacle in Iraq and years of inconvenient outcomes in the Middle East, in which elections have brought to power parties that are more extreme, not less. As a result, the Bush Administration abandoned the lofty talk about transforming the region roughly, oh, three years ago. Couric pressed Palin on this:
Couric: What happens if the goal of democracy doesn't produce the desired outcome? In Gaza, the US pushed hard for elections and Hamas won.
Palin: Yeah well especially in that region, though, we have to protect those who do seek democracy and support those who seek protections for the people who live there. What we're seeing in the last couple of days here in New York is a President of Iran, Ahmadenijad, who would come on our soil and express such disdain for one of our closest allies and friends, Israel ... and we're hearing the evil that he speaks and if hearing him doesn't allow Americans to commit more solidly to protecting the friends and allies that we need, especially there in the Mideast, then nothing will.
Couric's question was beyond difficult â€" it's the most vexing question that has faced US policymakers over the last seven years. What do you do when democracy produces results you don't like? There's no good answer, but there are many ways to grasp at one. Palin could have said that elections are only one component of democracy; that bringing extremist groups into the political process helps to moderate their behavior; that extremists tend to lose support once in power, because they don't know how to govern. She could even have said, Those are the breaks â€" we don't get to choose.
Instead, she changed the subject to the threat Iran poses to Israel. Why did she do this? Was it because she didn't want to acknowledge that democracy sometimes produces undesired results? Did she calculate that, since Gaza shares a border with Israel, she could use it as an opportunity to turn the discussion to Iran, where McCain and Obama disagree? Or did she just not know what Couric was talking about?
If she didn't, that's understandable. Most Americans are not particularly interested in the nuances of politics in Pakistan or the Middle East. But we should expect our leaders to be fluent in at least the basics of foreign policy. So far Palin is still struggling for words.
Post TurtleWhile suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year old Texas rancher whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Sarah Palin and her bid to be a heartbeat away from being President.
The old rancher said, 'Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle.'
Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was.
The old rancher said, 'When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle.'
PLEASE SHARE YOUR PICTURES - CAMPAIGNING WITH YOUR GRANDCHILDREN!
Hi Carole (Obama_grandmama@mac.com and grandparents everywhere as well)
I look forward to your emails, even though I don't live in WI, but rather in CA. I have relatives in WI, so I am a member of your listserv. I am a single grandmother raising my grandchildren (a second family after I raised my four kids) and have raised them from toddlers to teens. It's so great to see another grandmama so politically active and astute. I was wondering if you would join our group www.grandparentsforobama.org (or) www.grandparentsforobama.com which had several delegates in Denver, were an active presence there, and are very devoted to proving that we "older folks are not resistant to change. We relish CHANGE that could restore this country to it's former greatness on the World scene, guarantee our retirement and see that we do not leave our children and grandchildren to choke on debt, destroyed international relations, the loss of constitutional rights for women, a destroyed environment,(my personal horror) the loss of endangered species, and a never ending list of atrocities. WE WILL VOTE FOR CHANGE!
Are there actually smears being spread against our generation? Are the Republicans saying that everyone over 50 is stuck in the past - afraid of the promise of a bright future if we need to adopt a policy of CHANGE - and clinging to John McCain because he is old, with stuck failed policies and that's all we have the intelligence to believe in?Well, let me tell you, John McCain, and your imported brutal wolf killer, that we, as a voting block are LONGING FOR CHANGE, TO RESTORE THIS COUNTRY TO BE CAPABLE OF ONCE AGAIN, OFFERING THE AMERICAN DREAM! We want to know that we do not leave behind the destruction that the last 8 years has created. We still dream! We dream about the restored America we can make happen We want to assure that we don't lose everything we worked for all our lives to become a problem to our children and grandchildren. We want CHANGE to be our legacy to the children and grandchildren we love.
We want to tell them, that one day our country met a man who we recognized would take us forward, restore us, take us by the hand and pull us out of the shame wrought upon this beautiful country. He was Barack Obama and we recognized him as the leader who the World would applaud. He, we can tell them, did just that! We can tell them that the safety they enjoy was because this man was CHANGE and we embraced it. We knew he was CHANGE WE COULD BELIEVE IN! Barack Obama presidency will leave a legacy that will allow us to proudly say that we knew would make the sum of us better than each of us. There is a man, an extraordinary man, who is the voice of reason and a beacon of light in the chaos and darkness. He is a standard bearer against a government for the rich, deregulation for the greatest of all scams perpetrated upon this country which took place under the noses and protection of the Republican party. This same party, who are now grandstanding their reluctance to bail out that which they have caused. This degenerate party has hopefully self-destructed without taking the entire middle class with it. It has collapsed before our eyes, and God forbid threatened to bring down everyone who was not part of the well lobbied, and now spoiled feast, spoiled by the worst unchecked greed this country has known. So, please join us.
We are not the sheep, not afraid of CHANGE! We are the generation who was known to shake up the status quo, refuse to accept corruption, bad wars, and discrimination against women, minorities, gays, and we stood up and created CHANGE! Don't try to make us believe we are the old, the fearful, the prejudiced, that we just can't get what all the young people see and are embracing. WE WERE THE FIRST GENERATION TO ROCK AND WE STILL DO! BA-ROCK AND ROLL!
Remember when we marched, came together against what we could not accept, and made our voices heard? We can do that again. We can do it NOW, AT THIS MOMENT, FOR THIS CANIDATE, FOR OUR COUNTRY, AND FOR A BETTER TOMORROW!!! Please join us at www.grandparentsforobama.org and blog with us too at grandparentsforobama@groups.barackobama.com on MyBarackObama.com (search grandparents)We are a force to reckon with! Make them hear our unified voices again! Make this country remember who we are, what we stand! www.grandparentsforobama.org
Thank you and we hope to have your voice join ours as Grandparents of America for ObamaSusan FederighiLET'S SEND OUT PHOTOS OF GRANDPARENTS CAMPAIGNING WITH OUR GRANDCHILDREN AND MAKE A GIANT ONLINE SCRAPBOOK. SEND ME YOUR PHOTOS AND I WILL MAKE A CAMPAIGN AD FOR GRANDPARENTS FOR OBAMA WITH JUST PHOTOS (MAYBE ON SENTENCE TO GO WITH EACH) GET PHOTOS OF YOU WITH THOSE KIDS! WE NEED THE OLDER DEMOCRATS TO SHOW WE ARE BIG NUMBERS!
Just another couple of jaw droppers! OMG when are they going to pack her back to AK? Wait! They can't do that. It would a cruel thing to do to all the beautiful indigenous animals for her to continue her bloody reign on the pristine wilderness. Susan Federighi (sfed)
Latest Palin Gaffe: Can't Name Supreme Court Case Other Than Roe V. Wade
September 29, 2008 06:30 PM
Today, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reported on potentially embarrassing clips of Sarah Palin being interviewed by Katie Couric that haven't yet been aired. The Politico has more information on one in particular:
Of concern to McCain's campaign, however, is a remaining and still-undisclosed clip from Palin's interview with Couric last week that has the political world buzzing. The Palin aide, after first noting how "infuriating" it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions.After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases.There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.
The Palin aide, after first noting how "infuriating" it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions.
After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases.
There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.
By JOHN TEEL Special to the Courier & Press Tuesday, September 16, 2008 I shudder at the thought of Sarah Palin as vice president because I live in Alaska and know how violently misaligned Alaskan culture is with the rest of the United States. Not only is there an entire country physically separating Alaska from the United States, but there is a cultural divide just as wide. Palin governs a culture stuck in the 19th century.
Although she has an 80 percent approval rating as governor, keep in mind that most Alaskans are very different from most people in the United States. Nearly everyone in Alaska owns several guns, enjoys trophy hunting, and thinks we should drill for oil anywhere and everywhere. In Alaska many people still use outhouses, rarely bathe or comb their hair, and it's normal not to have electricity and running water. Does this sound like you and your family? If New York City had the population density of Alaska, there would be one person living on Manhattan Island. Alaska is like no other state, and in most regards it's a foreign country with a foreign culture. Alaska was colonized by greedy people who wanted to get rich fast through the consumption of natural resources (minerals, wildlife and oil).
Little has changed in a hundred years, and every industry in Alaska still exploits the land, sea or wildlife. Natural resource extraction is the backbone of Alaska, and it runs through every aspect of Alaskan life. Palin represents the modern face of these pioneer day interests.
Let me highlight some of Palin's atrocities occurring right now in Alaska: Palin offered a bounty of $150 for each right front leg of freshly killed wolves; Palin supports aerial hunting of wolves and bears, even though Alaskans voted twice to ban it; Palin used $400,000 of state money to fund a media campaign supporting aerial hunting; Palin is a champion for big oil and supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; Palin believes man-made global warming is a farce; and Palin opposes listing polar bears as an endangered species and is suing the federal government over it because she thinks it will limit her oil exploitation. The list of her atrocities to the natural world goes on and on.
It is not just a vehement disregard for the environment that makes Palin's policies so horrific. Palin believes that creationism should be taught in public schools; Palin opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest; and Palin is currently under investigation in Alaska for abuse of power. If Palin ever becomes president, we can kiss the natural world goodbye, along with the freedom we treasure so much in this country. Palin is bad for the planet and bad for America.
John Teel of Homer, Alaska, is a native of Evansville. He is an engineer and wildlife advocate. For more information, visit his Web site, GrizzlyBay.org.
A note to grandparents: If you are not a grandparent, PLEASE pass this along to the many grandparents you must know.
THIS ELECTION NEEDS OUR VOICE!
The Children's World is in Your Hands
Grandparents for Obama
The article below is very encouraging coming from the from the Kansas City Star. I am pleasantly surprised at the opinions stated, This is a an example of a state where we need Grandparents for Obama representation since MO is currently reported as leaning McCain This article suggests a chink in McCain's armor. I too believe that older voters. (I am a member of www.grandparentsforobama.org as the older vote is so essential this election) are not pleased with arrogance and disdain of McCain so dramatically obvious in the 1st debate, He has no shame after his complicity in the complete Republican failure of leadership in America over the last 8 years. www.grandparentsforobama.org is a National group and our membership is spreading across the country with a membership from a large number of states. We need a large number of grandparents, unified for CHANGE from every state in the nation.
We are working to CHANGE the direction of this country for our children and grandchildren. I am a single grandmother who has raised my grandchildren from toddlers to teens. We are working together for this campaign. I know that young people are afraid of what has become of the country they will inherit. We are horrified by the complete disregard for the disappearing middle class, America's poor and unemployed. We as seniors are worried about what will happen to our own social security, retirement, and our futures as well. We want to make things better for our children, not become dependent upon them on them. We certainly hope it will!
The Republicans are trying to demonize AARP, which is putting up a spirited fight against private social security accounts.. Bush and McCain suggested that older Americans are standing in the way of change to protect their own retirement incomes - an insulting tactic that could backfire.
Those who have already reached retirement age understand better than anyone that a guaranteed safety net of social security could be as necessary for coming generations as it is now, when nearly two out of three retirees rely largely or solely on Social Security. So we are looking out for our children and grandchildren, an act of responsibility not self-interest.
McCain has aligned himself with Bush on almost every issue in his tenure as the Senator from AZ, one of the nations most right wing states. We need change there too and have members on the ground to energize our party there.
Lets, show this country that as older voters we trust Barack Obama and that the Change he promises is for 95% of us. There is a myth that we, older voters, as a voting block, are afraid of CHANGE. Being afraid of the disaster in America, taking us to the brink of a depression, soaring unemployment, and the threat of privatizing our social security is the real fear, not Change!! We're not fooled or stuck in past failures. We, grandparents have had enough of the devastating results from the McCain supported, deregulated financial institutions and their investments. Should we toss our retirement into the same heap that has just failed to the tune of a trillion dollars? McCain thinks we should. Should we pay taxes on our health care benefits? McCain says that if he is President we will. In a desperate attempt to win at any cost, McCain and the Rove gang found a woman for his running mate that was to appeal to the block of voters McCain had never reached. Sarah Palin stands for nothing that McCain's claims of reaching across the isle and maverick politics was painted to represent. He has been pro-choice, believes in global warming, against off shore drilling, and it appears that the straight talk express is the double talk express. The maverick, non-conformist is a genuine schizophrenic chameleon, willing to sell us all out for his personal gain. He no longer knows his own platform or himself.
McCain is agitated and behaving erratically. It was unnerving to watch him during the debate. He appeared so unstable - not a condition suitable to the Presidency. And, a 72 year old's (with a horrific health history) heartbeat from the Presidency is a candidate who is the greatest insult to America's intelligence in political history. The arrogance of McCain to belittle us like this. Sarah Palin is the final straw, the final threat, the last insult and greatest danger of our times, perhaps greater than the financial holocaust we are now facing. We could find ourselves with a constitution run by a particular religious vision, and a woman who loves to have her finger on the trigger to have her finger on America's nuclear power. Sarah Palin, with no knowledge of foreign policy or the federal government who has only had a strobe light intro to foreign leaders (conversation consisting of what?) It would be funny if it wasn't real! This is a CHANGE I am afraid of! I am not afraid of the CHANGE Barack Obama is offering us! I am not afraid of the CHANGE that recognizes the plight of the middle class and wants my second family to have health care, food on the table and a roof over our heads that we are not afraid of losing. I am not asking for 8 houses, jets, servants or becoming the "Chairwoman of the Beer Board". I am afraid of a President who can't relate or recognize what the middle class is! How can McCain know what we have lost? He lives in a mega-millionaire's bubble and his entire history is tax breaks for the rich. When has he spent 5 minutes fighting for me?. Lies! I AM AFRAID OF 4 MORE YEARS OF A REPLICA OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND MORE LIES. BUT, DO NOT TELL ME THAT I AM AFRAID OF CHANGE - I AM FIGHTING FOR THE CHANGE TO MY LIFE AND YOURS THAT BARACK OBAMA WILL BRING US.
How can anyone, anywhere who is not rich, vote against their own best interests and against someone begging to help them. I watch the crowds, obviously middle class people, who gather to hear McCain's speeches or Palin's rhetoric and I wonder who these people really are. Who could listen to someone who saw to it that the financial industry was deregulated so the greedy rich could run wild with our money?. Who could vote for a longtime cohort of Bush and his cronies - the fraternity of greed and lies? Why would they cut off their feet rather than walk away? I AM NOT AFRAID OF CHANGE. I SUPPORT BARACK OBAMA AND BELIEVE HE WILL RESTORE AMERICA. If you have friends who don't understand, help them understand. Reach out and help them see through the lies and the mask - the many masks of McCain.
Please, if you are a grandparent join us, or if you know grandparents tell them about us, If you have grandparents tell them they can be empowered by www.grandparentsforobama.org Together, we can help every older voter grab the gold ring of CHANGE! Each of us can be a strong link in a long chain of older voters who have the power to increase our state's and national polling in this crucial election. This election will determine the fate of the middle class, those who will be retiring, those who have retired, and the future of our grandchildren who we must protect from Republican greed. We are their voice.
Please join us!
Thank you, Susan Federighi
sfed147@aol.com
Steering Committee
www.grandparentsforobama.org
Kansas City Star Article:_______________________________________________________________________________Poll results for first presidential debate (with update of independent voter poll): Obama wins
By George Harris, Kansas City Star Readers Advisory Panel 2008
Who won the debate?
Ignore all commentators' opinions expressed without evidence. The winner is determined by the numbers, especially the votes of the undecided. Here are some preliminary answers:
CBS Insta Poll shows Barack Obama won 39% to John McCain's 25% with 36% saying the debate was a draw.
Insider Advantage reports of those polled Obama won 42% to McCain's 41% with Undecided 17%
CNN reports voter opinions that Obama "did better" 51%, McCain "did better" 38%
The CNN poll showed men were evenly split, but women gave Obama higher marks 59% to 41% for McCain.
The CNN pollster noted a slight Democratic bias in the survey. Well, there just are more Democrats in the country. So more Democrats watched. However, this may also suggest Democratic enthusiasm which will help turn out the vote.
The MSNBC on-line (non-scientific) poll showed Obama winning the debate 52% to 33%. (But this is what one would expect from such a poll at MSNBC because of the nature of its viewers.)
MediaCurves.com reported Independents favored Obama overall 61% to 38%. (I do not know this organization or know how it conducts polls, so take results with a couple of grains of salt.)
Some free analysis: As I noted on this site during and after the debate, McCain appeared angry and dismissive of Obama and generally impressed as someone who would slap colleagues across the aisle if reaching over to them. He said several times in the debate that he hasn't won the Miss Congeniality contest in the Senate, and he proved why during the debate.
I suspect that women voters especially would be turned off by McCain's sarcastic tone because women do tend to be the conciliators in our society and saw Obama display those conciliatory qualities very well in the debate. Obama looked at McCain, and McCain wouldn't return the eye contact but rather glared or displayed a tight and angry expression.
I also suspect (but don't have the data to support) that older voters were also turned off by Senator McNasty. I believe older voters will also be reassured that, though McCain has been around longer, Obama has a good grasp of foreign affairs and can learn quickly. He impressed as a statesmen, in marked contrast to McCain's warrior demeanor.
McCain referred to Obama as naive or as not understanding on many issues when the listener probably saw a mere difference of opinion. McCain's condescenion felt annoying; to the listener who might agree or disagree with Obama, Obama nevertheless was making good points, not naive ones.
In general, I think the country is tired of negativity, and McCain's performance didn't give anyone the impression that age has mellowed him. In fact, he seemed rather proud of his continuing bellicose manner. The country seems ready for a change from the "fighting as first choice crowd."
Watch for new polls over the next week. Things can shift for a variety of reasons as people reflect on the debate.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
COULD BE A VOTING BLOCK THAT SHIFTS THE NEW POLLS IN KEY STATES. LET'S BE ONE OF THOSE VARIETIES OF REASONS!
Sarah Palin and The Comedy of Errors
"The Palin Horror Picture Show"
I am 62 years old. I have never, in my lifetime, witnessed anything as horrifying as this aggressive, uninformed cartoon character who has left her yard, in which she views Russia, and all it's political complexities, and has sadly stumbled onto the stage of the continental U.S. Her purpose is to placate the religious extremists in the Republican Party as well as any woman who voted for Hillary dumb enough to vote gender over policy, vision, and her own rights over her own body. She also appeals to the just plain dumb who relate to a soccer mom and thinks relating is good enough for a vote. You know, sage decisions like Little League Coach for President - no other qualifications needed - after all men could relate- right?It would be the stuff that sit-coms are made of if Sarah Palin was not a 72 year old's heartbeat away from the Commander and Chief if McCain is elected. It would be a complete comedy if the polls were a runaway for Obama.
It would be hilarious if it was not for the idiot Palin fan factor in this country who (oops - here it is - a fact - those who do not or cannot follow politics, but worship their guns - semi automatic assault weapons included) as well as a radical, tongue speaking, right wing, segregating God who will rapture them and send the rest of us to hell with all the Jews who do not accept Jesus. This idiot block of backwoods voters don't know she's an idiot because they are idiots - funny YES! Deadly - yes! It would be fall on the floor ridiculous to think the GOP trainer wheels/tutors can teach a journalism major foreign relations, economics, geography, history, current events, in a crash course like Cliff Notes on "Experience", if it was not a pass/fail test which translates to a life and death course that she is failing. This wacko wolf in sheep's clothing (an appropriate metaphor for the bloodthirsty brutal animal killer) could, with her ignorant view of global warming actually contribute to the destruction of our planet. With her tunnel vision on women's rights, she could send women back to the time in which they found women's corpses mutilated in botched abortions they attempted themselves (even using coat hangars), in basements of renegade doctors,or in filthy conditions at the mercy of foreign charlatans in the dark years before Roe v.Wade.
It would be a laugh riot to think of the cartoons of the outbreak of teen pregnancy when our youth are denied age appropriate information in sex education, or would it? Well, all those children having children would be a photo op for the success of the Palin abstinence education program anyway.Oh yes, my favorite joke on the nation. Palin would have her gun "shootin' paw on the panic button triggering our nation's nuclear reaction to a crisis. And who would be the final word on that determination - Right! The same woman interviewed by Katie Couric & Charlie Gibson (in what respect Charlie?) Hey, this would be slightly more difficult than shootin a moose (fish in a barrel) or some cowardly aerial slaughter of the magnificent indigenous, ethereal wolves who people come from all over the world just to catch a glimpse of them running free in the Alaskan wilderness. They are shot when the ground is covered in snow as this makes these mystical (I mean in the same beautiful way that dolphins touch us deeply) splattering their terrified blood across their white home, left to die slowly as no shots are clean. Palin participates in the bloodletting, and may equally enjoy the prospect of war, (using her Gibson interview as an example) as she is ready to go to war with Russia over Georgia when she has Georgia admitted to the UN.
Bottom line, is that her interviews and her very presence on the political stage is a sick, self serving, joke that McCain is pulling on the American people to get himself elected. The Maverick of Lies will try to quiet his idiot until the bill of goods is sold to those who do not think beyond their weapons and the takeover by the Evangelical/ Pentecostal faction taking over our government. These radical zealots have even helped Jew settlers in Israel financially. They need the Jews in place for the Biblical scripture to come to fruition for the second coming in which Jesus will return and meet out his punishment of the Jews who have not converted, and of course, the Palin righteous will have had their bodies lifted to the heavens, raptured "out of here" so they need not be part of the tribulation In other words, these fundamentalists have actually aided the Jews as a lure (like baiting) to serve their own disturbed prophecies:
___________________________________________________________________
Fundamentalism's Bloody Homeland for Jews
Well known is this highly embarrassing, and therefore actively covered up, aspect of modern fundamentalism, namely, the movement's substitution of Jews for Christians as the victims of a supposedly future (but actually past) "Great Tribulation." Fundamentalists actively support the State of Israel, despite their belief that by doing so, they are helping to lure millions of Jews into a horrible death: "Holocaust II." They do so for a reason: they expect to escape death personally. This is a powerful incentive. "The Great Tribulation" is the phrase used by fundamentalists to describe a future time of persecution and slaughter of the Jews. Gruesome enough? Disgusting enough? And she speaks of defending Israel? How crazy is this?
_______________________________________________________
So, to add to the human comedy/tragedy here, we could have a President who is delightfully anticipating the Rapture heralding the end of this world as we know it. Sarah Palin is, as every Evangelical, joyously "saved" waiting to be lifted to Heaven. Now, just imagine this woman with this theology with her finger on the World trigger - judgement by faith and God's audible word - no experience needed there.
So, the two faces of Sarah Palin, comedy and tragedy (comedy if she is not taken seriously as a candidate but rather a Calamity Jane sitcom, and tragedy if McCain succeeds) is the most serious threat to the World, I have seen in my lifetime. I truly believe that the current threat of a depression is less frightening than a mad woman who could either destroy our planet by her belief system, or by incredible stupidity. John McCain is playing a dangerous and horrifying hoax on this country and can no longer be thought of outside of this betrayal in which he has thrown the safety of our country out the window along with his ethics. He wants to win at any cost - literally at any cost.
Susan Federighi (sfed)
NRA Misfires against Obama
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/09/nra_misfires_against_obama.html
Contrary to Rusch's claim, the Kennedy proposal of July 2005, SA 1615, was not aimed at "virtually all deer hunting ammunition." Instead, it would have authorized the attorney general to define types of illegal ammunition capable of penetrating body armor commonly used by law enforcement officials. During the Senate debate, Kennedy said that his amendment would "not apply to ammunition that is now routinely used in hunting rifles," a point contested by the NRA.
Rusch did not respond to a telephone message left with his wife requesting comment.
While it is true that Obama favors tighter gun laws, it is a huge stretch to argue that he wants to take away the guns and ammunition most commonly used by hunters. The claim that he favors "a huge new tax on guns and ammo" rests on a confusingly worded 9-year-old newspaper article that has little relevance for Obama's platform as a presidential candidate. The NRA misfires on this one.
Sam HarrisNEWSWEEKFrom the magazine issue dated Sep 29, 2008Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer whoâ€"being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could. Then came Palin's first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortuneâ€"and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal. The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history. The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary. We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security ... the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them. Palin's most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn't much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase "Bush doctrine." And I am quite sure that her supporters didn't care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to knowâ€"or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain's advisers. What doesn't she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth. I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americansâ€"but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country even the welfare of our species as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House. In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"? You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"? It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who "intends" to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of "the dysfunction in the black community"?Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the Palins' case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also fought vigorously for a "parental consent law" in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planningâ€"or, indeed, of the 21st century.We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she representsâ€"and her supporters celebrateâ€"the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth: "Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?""Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter.""But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind.""That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earthâ€"in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated. I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex and dangerous with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization. Harris is a founder of The Reason Project and author of The New York Times best sellers
Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer whoâ€"being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.
Then came Palin's first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortuneâ€"and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.
The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.
The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.
We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security ... the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.
Palin's most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn't much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase "Bush doctrine." And I am quite sure that her supporters didn't care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to knowâ€"or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain's advisers. What doesn't she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.
I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americansâ€"but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country even the welfare of our species as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.
In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"?
You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?
It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who "intends" to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of "the dysfunction in the black community"?
Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the Palins' case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also fought vigorously for a "parental consent law" in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planningâ€"or, indeed, of the 21st century.
We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.
What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she representsâ€"and her supporters celebrateâ€"the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:
"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"
"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."
"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."
"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."
The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery.
Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earthâ€"in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.
I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex and dangerous with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.
Harris is a founder of The Reason Project and author of The New York Times best sellers
The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation
His Web site is samharris.org.
FIRST McCAIN STOLE THE SLOGAN FOR "CHANGE". NOW HE HAS STOLEN AUDACITY! McCain - Palin have the audacity to call their mothball fleet of advisors, part of "Change"! With the fact that he and Palin are literally surrounded (SURROUNDED!!) by Bush cohorts steering the McCain campaignRead this WA Post Article to see what "Change means to McCain" It means he has now changed into Bush! Susan F (sfed)
Steering the McCain Campaign, a Lot of Old Bush Hands - washingtonpost.com
The personnel shift has become a cause of distress for Republicans,(ISN'T THAT WHAT "CHANGE MEANS" - ISN'T THAT WHAT McLIAR SAID?) who had hoped for a new brand of Republicanism to take hold, fueled by players who had experience outside Washington. "It's insane to me that at the same time that it's running saying it's not going to be the Bush administration, this campaign looks like the Bush campaign on steroids," said one Republican strategist.
IN PART: The breathtaking list showing the "Audacity of Hopeless"____________Palin spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt worked on the Bush campaigns and, more recently, at the Republican National Committee. Two other Palin press officers, Maria Comella and Ben Porritt, worked on Bush's 2004 reelection campaign. W. Taylor Griffin, who worked on the 2004 campaign, is helping manage Palin's communications effort in Alaska. Another Bush advance pro, Chris Edwards, is helping to stage-manage Palin's appearances around the country.
While a handful of McCain's longtime allies -- including his closest aide, Mark Salter, and two former lobbyists, Rick Davis and Charlie Black -- continue to hold senior posts in his campaign, many of his advisers from his first presidential bid now play tangential roles at best. In addition to Weaver, McCain's 2000 campaign manager, Michael Murphy, and press adviser Todd Harris are largely out of the McCain circle. The housecleaning, aides said, has been conducted largely by Schmidt, whose own Bush credentials run deep: He helped run the communications shop in the 2004 campaign and went on to work for Vice President Cheney and to shepherd the president's controversial nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court. Schmidt then ran California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's successful reelection campaign before withdrawing from national politics -- until he joined the McCain campaign in December 2006.
AMAZING! ABC TAKES McCAIN APART - THE PANEL TOLD THE TRUTH ABOUT McCAIN & OBAMA! ABC usually skirts issues like this - not this time! We got great coverage
THIS ARTICLE SHOULD BE SENT EVERYWHERE. PLEASE SEND THIS TO AT LEAST 10 PEOPLE! Send this to as many people as you can - Please! We can make this a viral email attack add ourselves.McCain has been sending out his standard lying attack adds on the financial crisis and I was shocked to see panel expose him. For those who believe him, we should be sure this piece travels all over - especially outside our listserv.For anyone who believes any of the many faces of McCain, this is a testimony to his falsehoods, as well as praising Obama on his reaction -
PRESIDENTIAL!Susan F (sfed)http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/21/abc-panel-tears-into-mcca_n_128055.html
If you are having problems reading this email, please click here to view it as a webpage.International Fund for Animal Welfare | September 19, 2008A
Better World for Animals and People
Let your local candidates know you oppose the seal hunt
Dear Susan,The October 14th federal election is fast approaching and IFAW is working hard to raise the issue of Canada's commercial seal hunt with candidates. We need you to help us get the seal hunt on the political agenda
The majority of Canadians oppose the commercial seal hunt*. Let your local candidates know you’re one of them! Make sure your voice is heard on election day October 14th! Together we can stop this cruel, needless and wasteful hunt. Please visit www.sealmyvote.ca today and find out how you can help. Thank you so much for your continued support. Yours sincerely,Olivier Bonnet Director, IFAW Canada * Environics poll for IFAW, 2008.
This message was sent to sfed147@aol.com All gifts to IFAW represent a contribution to IFAW's entire mission. Donations will be used where they are most needed to help animals.Worried about Donating online?I used to be too ... so I made sure our online system is safe, secure, and state-of-the-art. It also eliminates check-processing costs, so more money goes directly to saving animals. But if you prefer to donate by phone or mail, simply click here for address information.IFAW is planning to raise an estimated amount of CAN$2.5 million this year on fund-raising campaigns. It will cost our organization an estimated CAN$407,500. The money raised will support IFAW's international animal-welfare campaigns. For further information, please contact the Canadian Supporter Relations Manager at 1-888-500-4329 ext. 241. Our address is 1 Nicholas Street, Suite 612, Ottawa, ON K1N 7B7. NOTE: To make sure you continue to receive further emails from IFAW, please add olivier@ifaw1.org to your email address book. If you use a spam filter program, please assign this address a status of safe or trusted. If you have an AOL, Hotmail, MSN or Yahoo email address, this is particularly important as we receive many bounce backs from these email addresses.Remove yourself from all mailings from IFAW Canada (English).
IFAW 2008www.ifaw.orgSuite 612, 1 Nicholas Street • Ottawa, ON K1N 7B7 • Canada
From: actionfund@defenders.orgTo: sfed147@aol.comSent: 9/9/2008 3:14:49 P.M. Pacific Daylight TimeSubj: Showdown This Week: Big Oil vs. Polar Bears and American Families If Big Oil Wins, We All LoseMore dirty drilling means more pollution, less innovation and widespread destruction of habitat that animals like polar bears and dolphins need to survive. Fast FactsAccording to the federal Energy Information Administration, offshore drilling would not have a significant impact oil prices before 2030. At peak production -- 20 years from now -- drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would reduce the price of a gallon of gas by less than 4 pennies.Dear Susan, All summer, we’ve fought together to promote sound energy solutions and protect our wildlife from Big Oil. Now it all comes down to this. Congress is expected to begin voting as soon as this week on energy legislation -- and finally decide between a forward-looking energy policy that helps American families and protects our polar bears dolphins and other wildlife or more dirty drilling and giveaways to Big Oil. Even if you have already called your Representative or Senators on this issue, please call their Washington, DC offices today at one of the numbers below:Rep. Lynn C. Woolsey - (202) 225-5161 - http://www.woolsey.house.gov/contactemailform.asp Sen. Barbara Boxer - (202) 224-3553 - http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/email/policy.cfm Sen. Dianne Feinstein - (202) 224-3841 - http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.EmailMe Once you are connected, just deliver this simple message:“My name is Susan Federighi and I’m calling from San Rafael because I’m tired of policies that benefit Big Oil but not me. America needs independence from Big Oil and faster, cheaper, better solutions to our energy crisis than drilling. Please oppose efforts to open more of our natural areas to drilling and support policies that promote energy efficiency, clean, renewable energy and real relief for American families hardest hit by energy prices.”Help us coordinate our campaign for responsible energy choices. Please let us know that you called your Representative and/or Senators.We have energy solutions today that can help our economy, our wildlife and our planet, but we need your voice to make sure that’s the path Congress takes. But Republican leaders in Congress and Big Oil’s lobbyists have held America’s energy future hostage for months. Democrats want to pass:Consumer rebates and other common-sense strategies that would help American families save money at the pump and on home energy costs. The extension of tax credits to help spur business innovations in clean, affordable and sustainable American energy sources; Federal investment in clean, renewable energy to reduce dependence on foreign oil. Legislation to fix out-of-control speculation in the oil markets that has caused energy prices to skyrocket. The elimination of billions of dollars in tax breaks for Big Oil, even as oil companies post obscene profits. Renewal of utilities standards for clean energy to help wean America off of foreign oil.Instead, the Republican leadership has screamed “Drill, baby, drill!” to whoever will listen while Big Oil has poured tens of millions of dollars into a public relations campaign designed to bamboozle Americans into industrializing our coasts and sacrificing our wild places. Big Oil Republicans have hijacked the legislative process. No bill advances unless it has drilling. Now we need your voice to break the gridlock and put America on the path to true energy independence -- independence from BIG OIL!Here are the facts, according to the Bush/Cheney Administration’s own analysts at the Department of Energy: Neither offshore drilling nor drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will have a significant impact on the prices that Americans pay for energy in the next decade.But more dirty drilling would decimate vital habitat for imperiled polar bears, sea turtles, dolphins and other wildlife. It will increase carbon emissions that contribute to global warming and other pollution. It will fuel America’s dangerous and unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels. And it will mean lining the pockets of oil company executives whose companies are already swimming in obscene profits. Say no to this energy scam. Call your elected officials now at the phone numbers below and tell Congress to stop letting Big Oil dictate America’s energy future:Rep. Lynn C. Woolsey - (202) 225-5161 - http://www.woolsey.house.gov/contactemailform.asp Sen. Barbara Boxer - (202) 224-3553 - http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/email/policy.cfm Sen. Dianne Feinstein - (202) 224-3841 - http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.EmailMe You can also encourage your friends and family to make the call, and don’t forget to let us know that you called, and what kind of response you got. Remember, every voice counts -- not just Big Oil’s and their lobbyists!With Respect,Rodger SchlickeisenPresidentDefenders of Wildlife Action Fund P.S. Last week, our sister organization Defenders of Wildlife took on the Bush/Cheney Administration’s own plan for more destructive drilling, mobilizing nearly 34,000 wildlife activists in just 5 days. With your help, Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund can send a powerful message to Congress, too! Please call now to stop Big Oil and their allies on Capitol Hill… Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Donate Now | Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund Home © Copyright 2008, Defenders of Wildlife Action FundThis message was sent to sfed147@aol.com.Please do not respond to this message. Click here to update your information or unsubscribe. Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund provides a powerful voice in Washington to Americans who value our conservation heritage. Through grassroots lobbying, issue advocacy and political campaigns, the Action Fund champions those laws and lawmakers that protect wildlife and wild places while working against those that do them harm.Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund can be contacted at: 1130 17th Street, NWWashington, DC 20036Paid for by Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund at http://www.defendersactionfund.org/ and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
If Big Oil Wins, We All Lose
More dirty drilling means more pollution, less innovation and widespread destruction of habitat that animals like polar bears and dolphins need to survive.
Fast Facts
All summer, we’ve fought together to promote sound energy solutions and protect our wildlife from Big Oil. Now it all comes down to this.
Congress is expected to begin voting as soon as this week on energy legislation -- and finally decide between a forward-looking energy policy that helps American families and protects our polar bears dolphins and other wildlife or more dirty drilling and giveaways to Big Oil.
Even if you have already called your Representative or Senators on this issue, please call their Washington, DC offices today at one of the numbers below:
Once you are connected, just deliver this simple message:
“My name is Susan Federighi and I’m calling from San Rafael because I’m tired of policies that benefit Big Oil but not me. America needs independence from Big Oil and faster, cheaper, better solutions to our energy crisis than drilling. Please oppose efforts to open more of our natural areas to drilling and support policies that promote energy efficiency, clean, renewable energy and real relief for American families hardest hit by energy prices.”
“My name is Susan Federighi and I’m calling from San Rafael because I’m tired of policies that benefit Big Oil but not me. America needs independence from Big Oil and faster, cheaper, better solutions to our energy crisis than drilling.
Please oppose efforts to open more of our natural areas to drilling and support policies that promote energy efficiency, clean, renewable energy and real relief for American families hardest hit by energy prices.”
Help us coordinate our campaign for responsible energy choices. Please let us know that you called your Representative and/or Senators.
We have energy solutions today that can help our economy, our wildlife and our planet, but we need your voice to make sure that’s the path Congress takes. But Republican leaders in Congress and Big Oil’s lobbyists have held America’s energy future hostage for months. Democrats want to pass:
Instead, the Republican leadership has screamed “Drill, baby, drill!” to whoever will listen while Big Oil has poured tens of millions of dollars into a public relations campaign designed to bamboozle Americans into industrializing our coasts and sacrificing our wild places.
Big Oil Republicans have hijacked the legislative process. No bill advances unless it has drilling. Now we need your voice to break the gridlock and put America on the path to true energy independence -- independence from BIG OIL!
Here are the facts, according to the Bush/Cheney Administration’s own analysts at the Department of Energy: Neither offshore drilling nor drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will have a significant impact on the prices that Americans pay for energy in the next decade.
But more dirty drilling would decimate vital habitat for imperiled polar bears, sea turtles, dolphins and other wildlife. It will increase carbon emissions that contribute to global warming and other pollution. It will fuel America’s dangerous and unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels.
And it will mean lining the pockets of oil company executives whose companies are already swimming in obscene profits.
Say no to this energy scam. Call your elected officials now at the phone numbers below and tell Congress to stop letting Big Oil dictate America’s energy future:
You can also encourage your friends and family to make the call, and don’t forget to let us know that you called, and what kind of response you got. Remember, every voice counts -- not just Big Oil’s and their lobbyists!
With Respect,
Rodger SchlickeisenPresidentDefenders of Wildlife Action Fund P.S. Last week, our sister organization Defenders of Wildlife took on the Bush/Cheney Administration’s own plan for more destructive drilling, mobilizing nearly 34,000 wildlife activists in just 5 days.
With your help, Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund can send a powerful message to Congress, too! Please call now to stop Big Oil and their allies on Capitol Hill…
© Copyright 2008, Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund
This message was sent to sfed147@aol.com.Please do not respond to this message. Click here to update your information or unsubscribe.
Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund provides a powerful voice in Washington to Americans who value our conservation heritage. Through grassroots lobbying, issue advocacy and political campaigns, the Action Fund champions those laws and lawmakers that protect wildlife and wild places while working against those that do them harm.
Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund can be contacted at: 1130 17th Street, NWWashington, DC 20036
Paid for by Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund at http://www.defendersactionfund.org/ and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
Dear Susan,
We asked and you delivered.
We received more than 6,000 great bumper-sticker slogans calling out the McCain-Palin ticket for being radically anti-choice.
Vote for the best one, so that Americans will have the facts when they vote on Nov. 4.
I always knew NARAL Pro-Choice America activists were clever and creative.
We asked for bumper-sticker slogan ideas, and you delivered...more than 6,000 of them! Narrowing them down was tough, but we've picked what we think are the five best—the ones that best capture the threat John McCain and Sarah Palin pose to our reproductive freedom and privacy.
Now the ball is in your court. You vote. You decide which one best says that the McCain-Palin ticket is on the radical anti-choice fringe.
Click here to access your ballot.
Here are the great options you'll have to choose from:
Vote now!
It's no wonder we got so many great entries in this contest. After all, there are so many reasons for America's pro-choice majority to reject McCain-Palin, and so many ways that McCain and Palin have shown their hostility toward our values.
Change? The only change they're serious about is overturning Roe v. Wade.
I've been on the road with the Obama-Biden campaign, and everywhere I go, pro-choice friends are more fired up than ever about this election. By choosing Sarah Palin and doubling down on anti-choice extremism, John McCain has energized our base and alienated the moderate Independent women he needs to win the election.
But with just seven weeks to go, there can be no let-up. We all need to work overtime to spread the message that a McCain-Palin administration would jeopardize everything we've fought for.
So help pick the most compelling slogan. Help define McCain-Palin as the anti-choice extremists that they are!
We want to get as many people as possible involved in the slogan vote. So after you've chosen your favorite, help get out the vote by passing this message along to your friends. We'll announce the winner at the end of the week.
Thank you for everything you do.
My best,Nancy KeenanPresident, NARAL Pro-Choice America
Please forward- This is horrible if you care about women. The fired Commissioner wanted to assign some law officials to cover “sex crimes” (like SVU) and Palin forbade him to do it.
Tania Tetlow, Associate Professor and Director, Tulane Law School Domestic Violence Clinic and Former Assistant U.S. Attorney,has written a must-see article on Palin and her record as mayr and governor dealing with the issue of rape:
http://www.motleymoose.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=166
"When asked why we were attacked on 9/11, Sarah Palin answered because the terrorists hate our freedoms. While she has been derided for her lack of foreign policy experience, she may have come up with the most innovative program yet to deter terrorists: taking those freedoms away. Just like many Middle Eastern countries, Mayor Palin punished the women of Wasilla for reporting rape. Her administration charged them substantial fees for the rape kits used to prove the crime.
After being attacked, a Wasilla woman could look forward to being billed up to $1200 in return for a grueling forensic pelvic exam."
A diary referencing the article is currently top of rec list at DKOS:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/9/17/16937/2631/149/601917
-chris
The Moose is Loose!
http://motleymoose.com
This is from today's blog by Will:
"I heard this morning that McCain has a measurable lead amongst those 55 and over -- a cohort into which many of us fit. So while we fret and fume over support in other areas this is one we can seriously ask ourselves how to address. "Dear age-mate ... what on earth are you thinking!?! " In particular, McCain's health issues, which the campaign is trying to bury under cries of ageism, ought to concern us all. McCain’s embarrassing confusion is already pretty major news in Spain today, but at this point, the only major U.S. outlets who’ve picked up on this are the online sections of Time and the Washington Post. (I saw it on CNN-Pati)Forgetting Zapetero’s name is almost forgivable, though hard to explain for a candidate who claims to be an expert in foreign policy. But the interviewer kept using the word “Spain.” She even gave him a big hint with the word “Europe.”Let’s also not lose sight of the broader pattern. McCain thinks the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia was “the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War.” He thinks Iraq and Pakistan share a border. He believes Czechoslovakia is still a country. He’s been confused about the difference between Sudan and Somalia. He’s been confused about whether he wants more U.S. troops in Afghanistan, more NATO troops in Afghanistan, or both. He’s been confused about how many U.S. troops are in Iraq. He’s been confused about whether the U.S. can maintain a long-term presence in Iraq. He’s been confused about Iran’s relationship with al Qaeda. He’s been confused about the difference between Sunni and Shi’ia. McCain, following a recent trip to Germany, even referred to “President Putin of Germany.” All of this incoherence on his signature issue.I’m curious. What do you suppose the reaction would be from the political establishment if Barack Obama had made these mistakes over the course of the campaign? What would reporters, pundits, and Republicans have to say about Obama’s ability to lead a complex world in a time of war and uncertainty?I think an intellectually honest person would agree that if Obama had made these same mistakes he’d be labeled “clueless” on foreign policy. So, why the double-standard?"
