PalinVI

[url=http://www.feministing.com/archives/010930.html]While Mayor, Sarah Palin Charged Rape Victims for their Own Justice[/url]

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Multiple readers clued us into the latest incredibly disappointing fact about Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin: under her mayoral leadership in Wasilla, Alaska, rape victims were charged for their own rape kits.

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The Event: [b]Vice Presidential Debate[/b]
Location: [b]Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri[/b]
Date: [b]October 2, 2008[/b]

That is going to be one of, if not [i]the[/i], critical remaining events between now and the election. If Palin wins, or even holds her own, against Biden, this thing could be over.

My gut tells me that she will get crushed (I mean, how is she going to handle foreign affairs questions???), but my brain tells me, "She's too much of a wild card, and too much of an unknown, to predict how she will do in the debate...she may walk all over Biden."

It's been 11 days since Palin's announcement as McCain's VP selections.

[url=http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/09/the-eagleto... Sullivan points out that[/url] the longest that a VP candidate has gone before having a press conference with the media, until now, has been 10 days (Eagleton in 1972, and we know how that ended up).

Lloyd Bentsen? One day after selection. Ferraro? Four days. Quayle? One day. Lieberman took eight days, but he was a senator who had given national press conferences before.

Moreover, Eagleton was selected on July 15, 1972, i.e. six weeks earlier than Palin.

Sullivan:

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Most campaigns actually believe that it is good for them to get press interest in their vice-presidential pick. Normally, they can't wait to get him or her in front of the cameras. It's important to realize that, whatever the intimidation from the GOP, what is happening with Palin is without historical precedent. The question we have every right to ask is: why?

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Originally posted by Sven:
[b]The Event: [b]Vice Presidential Debate[/b]
Location: [b]Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri[/b]
Date: [b]October 2, 2008[/b]

That is going to be one of, if not [i]the[/i], critical remaining events between now and the election. If Palin wins, or even holds her own, against Biden, this thing could be over.

My gut tells me that she will get crushed (I mean, how is she going to handle foreign affairs questions???), but my brain tells me, "She's too much of a wild card, and too much of an unknown, to predict how she will do in the debate...she may walk all over Biden."[/b]

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CSPAN currently has streaming video on its
[url=http://www.c-span.org/search.aspx?For=alaska%20governor%20debate]website... of the 2006 Alaska Gubernatorial debate. I watched it with interest and she definitely comes off as informed and a formidable debating opponent. I don't think she will be easy on Biden and I am certain he is watching it in preparation.

My favourite part is when she cuts off both of her male opponents (one a repub) and loudly says "Gentlemen, Alaskans deserve a better discourse than this" over top of them. They are both obviously stunned, shut right up and she proceeds to speak.

Okay. So, she challenges (and beats) a sitting Republican Governor in the primary election, goes on to beat a former Democratic Governor in the general election, and then posts [i]an 80% approval rating[/i].

She may be more appealing to voters than I might have at first imagined...especially if she debates well.

[url=http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=5759133]ABCNews[/url] is reporting a “stunning” shift among white women voters. In a new poll today, ABCNews is reporting [b]a 20-point shift[/b] in support between August and now among white women voters:

In August, Obama had an 8% lead over McCain among white women voters (50% Obama versus 42% McCain). Today, McCain has a 12% lead over Obama among that same demographic group (41% Obama versus 53% McCain).

I think the explanation can be boiled down to two words: Sarah Palin.

Will that be sustained?

[ 09 September 2008: Message edited by: Sven ]

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
[b] Outdoing himself in the face of adversity, I see.[/b]

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[img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img] Ah, good point...I'll fix that.

What's interesting, and lost in Sven's Sarah Palin's obsession, is that Obama is doing better among men. For example, [url=http://americanresearchgroup.com/]this[/url] poll has him down by only three among men. And the ABC poll noted:

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For all the tumult among white women over the past two weeks on the big picture of Obama vs. McCain, they are about where they were in June.

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And

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But, now, for the first time, Obama is on the defence rather than on the offence.

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You obviously must have been on the other side of the world from April to July. [img]rolleyes.gif" border="0[/img]

[ 09 September 2008: Message edited by: josh ]

[ 09 September 2008: Message edited by: josh ]

I think that the fairest and most accurate thing to say about the recent polls is that the race very tight—and probably will remain so up through the date of the election. That fact alone is just stunning given that Bushke has a dismal approval rating of less than 30%.

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Originally posted by josh:
[b]And tracking polls and regular polls are different kettles of fish. In a tracking poll, you can have a dramatic change based on the addition, or subtraction, of one day's results.[/b]

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How so? Tracking polls are usually made up of multi-day rolling averages and most static polls are taken over several days as well. So, a bump, one way or the other, gets blended in either type of poll.

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Originally posted by Sven:
[b]

How so? Tracking polls are usually made up of multi-day rolling averages and most static polls are taken over several days as well. So, a bump, one way or the other, gets blended in either type of poll.[/b]

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A regular poll has a set begining and end, not dependent on a particular day's result. Unlike a tracking poll.

From Michael Graham of the [url=http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view.bg?articleid=1117752... Herald[/url]:

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[b]I have one piece of advice for the struggling Obama campaign:

Fire MSNBC. They’re killing your campaign.

By all accounts the Democrats had a successful national convention in Denver. Their nominee’s speech at the ObamaDome was well received. At one point last week, Sen. Barack Obama had an 8-point lead in the polls.

Today, he’s losing by 4. If you only count likely voters, Obama is down by 10. And he has his fawning friends in the media to thank for it.

[SNIP]

What’s worse for Obama is how this is affecting his support among women.

I still don’t believe that true Hillary Clinton supporters will back the McCain/Palin ticket. Liberal feminists aren’t going to turn into home-school hockey moms because there’s a girl on the GOP team. But something is up.

One week ago, Obama had a 14-point lead among women in the Rasmussen survey. Yesterday, it was down to 3 percent. Women are watching what’s happening to this confident and authentic female leader, and they don’t like it. [/b]

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According to [url=http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/09/schreiber.palin/index.html]Ronnee Schreiber[/url], a political science professor at San Diego State University, conservative women are playing "FemBall" (adopting feminist strategies to promote the conservative agenda):

"Whether or not you support McCain/Palin (and to be clear, I do not), it is a huge mistake to think of conservative women as pawns of right-wing men who will matter little in this election. These activists and Palin's nomination show us how much power and political significance they actually possess."

Juan Cole on the difference between fundementalism and the fundementalist dominionism of Palin who seeks to destroy any Jeffersonian "wall of separation" between church and state.

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Published on Tuesday, September 9, 2008 by Salon.com
What's the Difference Between Palin and Muslim Fundamentalists? Lipstick
A theocrat is a theocrat, whether Muslim or Christian.

by Juan Cole

[....]
Palin has a right to her religious beliefs, as do fundamentalist Muslims who agree with her on so many issues of social policy. None of them has a right, however, to impose their beliefs on others by capturing and deploying the executive power of the state. The most noxious belief that Palin shares with Muslim fundamentalists is her conviction that faith is not a private affair of individuals but rather a moral imperative that believers should import into statecraft wherever they have the opportunity to do so. That is the point of her pledge to shape the judiciary. Such a theocratic impulse is incompatible with the Founding Fathers' commitment to tolerance and democracy, which is why they forbade the government to "establish" or officially support any particular religion or denomination.

McCain once excoriated the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his ilk as "agents of intolerance." That he took such a position gave his opposition to similar intolerance in Islam credibility. In light of his more recent disgraceful kowtowing to the Christian right, McCain's animus against fundamentalist Muslims no longer looks consistent. It looks bigoted and invidious. You can't say you are waging a war on religious extremism if you are trying to put a religious extremist a heartbeat away from the presidency.

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[url=http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/09-7]Juan Cole[/url]

[url=http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/98077/]The Sarah Palin I Know[/url], by Anne Kilkenny

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A long-time Wasilla resident who has known Palin for 16 years shares her own views on the Vice Presidential candidate.

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[url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122108935141721343.html?mod=todays_colum... Rove (!) gives Obama advice:[/url]

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If Mr. Obama wants to win, he needs to remember he's running against John McCain for president, not Mrs. Palin for vice president.

Michael Dukakis spent the last months of the 1988 campaign calling his opponent's running mate, Dan Quayle, a risky choice and even ran a TV ad blasting Mr. Quayle. The Bush/Quayle ticket carried 40 states.

Adlai Stevenson spent the fall of 1952 bashing Dwight Eisenhower's running mate, Richard Nixon, calling him "the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, and then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation." The Republican ticket carried 39 of 48 states.

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[url=http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1840388,00.html]Joe Klein is also interesting in Time:[/url]

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Palin's embrace of small-town values is where her hold on the national imagination begins. She embodies the most basic American myth — Jefferson's yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness — updated in a crucial way: now Mom works too. Palin's story stands with one foot squarely in the nostalgia for small-town America and the other in the new middle-class reality. She brings home the bacon, raises the kids — with a significant assist from Mr. Mom — hunts moose and looks great in the process. I can't imagine a more powerful, or current, American Dream.

Reagan's vision of the future was the past. He offered the temporal pleasures of tax cuts and an unambiguous anticommunism, but his real tug was on the heartstrings — it was "Morning in America." The blinding whiteness and fervent religiosity of the party he created are an enduring testament to the power of the myth of an America that existed before we had all these problems. The power of Sarah Palin is that she is the latest, freshest iteration of that myth.

Obama faces an uphill struggle between now and Nov. 4. He has no personal anecdotes to match Palin's mooseburgers. His story of a boy whose father came from Kenya and mother from Kansas takes place in an America not yet mythologized, a country that is struggling to be born — a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity. It is the country where our children already live and that our parents will never really know, a country with a much greater potential for justice and creativity — and perhaps even prosperity — than the sepia-tinted version of Main Street America. But that vision is not sellable right now to a critical mass of Americans.

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
[b][url=http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/98077/]The Sarah Palin I Know[/url], by Anne Kilkenny
[/b]

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I thought I would quote from the article. I am forever amazed at how this kind of behaviour is not newsworthy but her moose hunting is.

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While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.

Sarah complained about the "old boy's club" when she first ran for Mayor, so what did she bring Wasilla? A new set of "old boys". Palin fired most of the experienced staff she inherited. At the City and as Governor she hired or elevated new, inexperienced, obscure people, creating a staff totally dependent on her for their jobs and eternally grateful and fiercely loyal-loyal to the point of abusing their power to further her personal agenda, as she has acknowledged happened in the case of pressuring the State's top cop (see below).

As Mayor, Sarah fired Wasilla's Police Chief because he "intimidated" her, she told the press. As Governor, her recent firing of Alaska's top cop has the ring of familiarity about it. He served at her pleasure and she had every legal right to fire him, but it's pretty clear that an important factor in her decision to fire him was because he wouldn't fire her sister's ex-husband, a State Trooper. Under investigation for abuse of power, she has had to admit that more than 2 dozen contacts were made between her staff and family to the person that she later fired, pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law. She tried to replace the man she fired with a man who she knew had been reprimanded for sexual harassment; when this caused a public furor, she withdrew her support.

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For those dear babblers who hate Camille Paglia, no need to read any further.

But, for those interested in reading an interesting commentary about Sarah Palin by a strong Barack Obama supporter, I recommend Paglia’s piece posted today on [url=http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/09/10/palin/]Salon.com[/url].

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[b]Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

[SNIP]

Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was an all-American version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother's generation -- agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.

Here's one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, "Stop her!" as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, "Men!"

Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem...

[/b]

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
[b]Sven, the issue is not whether we "hate" Ms. Paglia but the extent to which she hates feminism and women who don't fit her Ayn-Randish fantasy. Sad to see you stink up this space with such bile.

[ 11 September 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ][/b]

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Move along...move along...nothing to gawk at here, Marty...

[url=http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/61410aa4ff]Gina Gershon Strips Down Sarah Palin [/url]

Camila's endorsement of that horrible woman Palin shows exactly what kind of "feminist" she pretends to be. No one takes her seriously (except men like Sven apparently).

Soo...

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Palin Stumped On The Bush Doctine, Believes It Is The President’s ‘Worldview’»

During her much anticipated interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had a “deer-in-headlights moment” when Gibson asked her if she agreed with the Bush Doctrine. Surprised at the question, Palin asked Gibson what he meant. When Gibson asked, “Well, what do you interpret it to be?” Palin replied inquisitively, “His worldview?” Gibson then explained his understanding of the Bush Doctrine and asked if Palin agreed:

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine as I understand it is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense and we have the right of preemptive strike against any country we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country.

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[url=http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/11/palin-gibson-bushdoctrine/]Palin clip[/url]

The question I have is when do I wake up?

edited add: That blog missed out a part in the middle of that. Rough transcript here. Much better to watch though to get all the expressions and body language.

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GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

GIBSON: The Bush — well, what do you — what do you interpret it to be?

PALIN: His world view?

GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that’s the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.

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[ 11 September 2008: Message edited by: ElizaQ ]

It seems Death-cult Armageddonist Palin would prefer a hot war with Russia so as not to "repeat a cold war".
No problem. She will be whisked merrily up to her Heaven on a mushroom cloud while ye of incorrect faith can go to Hell.

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Palin leaves open option of war with Russia

Staff
AP News

Sep 11, 2008 17:29 EST

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin left open the option Thursday of waging war with Russia if it were to invade neighboring Georgia and the former Soviet republic were a NATO ally.

"We will not repeat a Cold War," Palin said in her first television interview since becoming Republican John McCain's vice presidential running mate two weeks ago....

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[url=http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=342187]source[/url]

Are those things that far out? I mean it's exactly what I expect Bush would have said, if asked. This "all options are on the table" talk has been going on for years in the U.S. Same old, same old saber-rattling. Indeed, I find the cool discussion of U.S. support for Israel's imminent massive strikes against Iran much scarier.

[ 11 September 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]