Twenty Set’s Monica O’Brien interviewed several Gen-Y women by e-mail as part of her postmortem of the 2008 election. She just posted a piece on the role female candidates and First Lady-to-be Obama played and the ramifications of their presence on the very public political stage for future elections.
You can find my thoughts on why Hillary lost and what Michelle Obama represents to professional women over at Twenty Set.
“Don’t Speak For Me Sarah Palin” to the tune of Evita‘s “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”.
Lawrence Lessig put together a great video covering the career highlights of each Vice President to serve in our country.
Bottom line: Sarah Palin pales in comparison, besting only Republican Chester Alan Arthur’s pre-term experience, which wouldn’t matter, but for one issue. John McCain would be the oldest candidate ever elected President, making that 1 in 5 chance of Palin becoming President a Russian Roulette game she’d likely win to the detriment of the country.
Lessig asks, “Can we afford this risk?” Lessig says no.
Following the announcement of Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential candidate, pro-choice supporters nationwide began spreading a novel form of protest. Across the blogosphere, writers and activists encouraged readers to make a donation to Planned Parenthood in the name of Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is pro-life/pro-birth even in the cases of rape and incest.
For every tax-deductible donation made in Sarah Palin’s name, a handwritten thank you card is sent to the McCain campaign headquarters. Those cards now number in the tens of thousands.
Though a national tally of donations won’t be available until next week, pro-choice donors seem to be filling Planned Parenthood’s coffers, an organization that provides “sex education, women’s health care and abortion services”
Katie Groke Ellis, field manager for the Planned Parenthood of the Rockies Action Fund, predicts that the five-state chapter of the group alone could draw $100,000 in donations.
With just five states netting $100,000, it is well with in the range of possibility that more than $1 million in funds have been raised for Planned Parenthood in response to Sarah Palin’s nomination. (UPDATE 9/27 Planned Parenthood reports more than $760,000 in donations made in Sarah Palin’s name nationwide.)
It’s a highly effective means of protest. The honorary donations contribute to care that Palin vehemently disagrees with. Education and services that most Americans support. The funds are put into action, rather than lost in commercials or financing public demonstrations.
Another perquisite, this means of protest gives the opposition little recourse. Since the donations take place via the Internet, pro-life activists can show up to rally against the action. There’s no physical embodiment of those donations. . . well, except Sarah Palin herself.
If you’d like to contribute to Planned Parenthood, you can make your donation here.
If you make a donation in Sarah Palin’s name, you can have the acknowledgement sent to the McCain campaign headquarters:
McCain for President
1235 S. Clark Street
1st Floor
Arlington , VA 22202
Salon just posted a feature about Palin’s involvement in book censorship and her religious ideology. Troubling stuff, folks.
Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’
“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”
Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.’”
. . . “Like all religious fundamentalists — Christian, Jewish, Muslim — she is a dualist. They view life as an ongoing struggle to the finish between good and evil. Their mind-set is that you do not do business with evil — you destroy it. Talking with the enemy is not part of their plan. That puts someone like Obama on the side of evil.
Given she’s a woman who “doesn’t blink,” and McCain’s clearly got poor judgement and an anger management issue, are they apt to nuke first and deal with the literal fall out later?
I guess that gives Matt Damon his answer.
A few days ago, I wrote about the Alaskan legislation passed in order to eliminate the billing of rape victims for the rape kits that collect forensic evidence. Palin was the mayor of Wasilla at that time, and her town was the ONLY community in the state to engage in such practices.
Some have come to her defense saying that we have no idea how long that policy was in place. It’s unfair to judge her for what could be a long standing rule.
Turns out that that policy was initiated on her watch. A Huffington Post Off the Bus blogger did some digging through Wasilla records.
Placing the city budget records, however, alongside a timetable of Palin’s firing Chief Stambaugh and hiring Chief Fannon makes it clear the policy was put in place as a direct result of Palin’s leadership. . .
Checking the budget confirmed former Chief Stambaugh’s claim. He had included a contingency of $15,000 in his budget for the department’s 1st year of existence (1993-1994), $5,000 for 1994-1995 and 1995-1996, and $13,000 for his final year as police chief in 1996-1997, spending $11,625.
Duwayne Charles Fannon, his replacement, halved the budget request in 1997-1998, with a request of $7,298, spending $3,454. However, it seems he began the “victim pays” policy in the 1998-1999 fiscal year. That year, he requested $3,000 but spent only $205. This data can be found in the Document Central section of Wasilla’s website.
It feels somewhat more reprehensible that a woman signed off on this policy shift. But given parallels have been drawn between Palin and conservative crusader Schlafly, it’s no suprise.
Each week, bloggers at Feministing take a swing at individuals that make the struggle for women’s rights harder, not easier. This week, they explain why Sarah Palin is NOT a feminist candidate.
UPDATE: Women Against Sarah Palin‘s Quinn Latimer and Lyra Kilston sent an e-mail to 40 women a week ago asking them to explain why they won’t be voting for a McCain-Palin ticket with the intention of posting the responses to their blog. A tsunami of response followed: 100,000 in the first week.
. . .
We want to clarify that we are not against Sarah Palin as a woman, a mother, or, for that matter, a parent of a pregnant teenager, but solely as a rash, incompetent, and all together devastating choice for Vice President. Ms. Palin’s political views are in every way a slap in the face to the
accomplishments that our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers so fiercely fought for, and that we’ve so demonstrably benefited from.First and foremost, Ms. Palin does not represent us. She does not demonstrate or uphold our interests as American women. It is presumed that the inclusion of a woman on the Republican ticket could win over women voters. We want to disagree, publicly.
Therefore, we invite you to reply here <mailto: womensaynopalin@gmail.com> with a short, succinct message about why you, as a woman living in this country, do not support this candidate as second-in-command for our nation.
Please include your name (last initial is fine), age, and place of residence.
We will post your responses on a blog called “Women Against Sarah Palin,” which we intend to publicize as widely as possible. Please send us your reply at your earliest convenience, the greater the volume of responses we receive, the stronger our message will be.
Two weeks ago, Daily Kos posted several graphic depictions of DNC speeches using Wordle. I thought it might be interesting to compare DNC and RNC speeches by the key players.
I’ve included the word clouds DKos generated for Biden, Clinton, and Biden and created several more to cover the Republicans and our possible first ladies.
The candidate for President
Barack Obama
John McCain
The candidate for Vice President
Joe Biden
Sarah Palin
The (soon-to-be) Former President
Bill Clinton
George Bush
The Presidential candidate’s wife
Michelle Obama
Cindy McCain
Check out wordle for all your word cloud needs. Thanks to Kara for her speedy response to my jpg question.
In 2000, Democratic Governor Tony Knowles signed House Bill 270, which among other things, banned the billing of rape victims for the processing of their own rape kits. Signing the bill, he said,
We would never bill the victim of a burglary for fingerprinting and photographing the crime scene, or for the cost of gathering other evidence, Knowles said. Nor should we bill rape victims just because the crime scene happens to be their bodies.
For those of you unfamiliar with rape kits, The Denver Post offers a graphic at the bottom of a 2007 article.
After being physically violated, the brave few that choose to report rapes undergo an invasive medical exam to capture every last bit of possible evidence from semen to pubic hairs to saliva, maximizing the possibility of prosecution should there be a DNA match.
What does this law have to do with Sarah Palin? We already know that Sarah Palin is staunchly pro-birth, even if the cases of rape and incest, an extremist view embraced by only 17% of the electorate. But Palin’s disregard for sexual assault victims gets worse.
Palin served as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska from 1996-2002. Seeing as she felt the responsibilities were unextraordinary
‘It’s not rocket science,’ Palin said, ‘It’s 6 million and 53 employees.’
no doubt she was well versed in the policies and laws governing her community.
So it should come as a disturbing shock that in 2000, Wasilla charged sexual assault victims for the $300-$1200 worth of rape kit testing. Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon, hired by Palin, complained,
saying the law will require the city and communities to come up with more funds to cover the costs of the forensic exams.
In the past weve charged the cost of exams to the victims insurance company when possible. I just dont want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer, Fannon said.
According to Fannon, the new law will cost the Wasilla Police Department approximately $5,000 to $14,000 a year to collect evidence for sexual assault cases.
While Palin was drumming up $20 million in debt for her hometown thru a poorly executed grab at property for a sports complex, there wasn’t $14,000 to spare to pay to investigate rapes?
Over the last 30 years, Alaska has had the highest rape rate in the country for 23 of those years, holding the title yearly since 1993. In 2006, Alaska faced 76 rapes per 100,000 residents versus the national average of 30.9. In a recent study of rape by the University of Alaska’s Justice Center:
In nearly 1,000 cases studied over two years, the average age of victims was 16, while the average age of those accused was 29. In four out of five cases, the suspects were relatives, friends or acquaintances.
It is estimated that roughly 5% of rape victims find themselves pregnant after an attack.
Cold comfort to the 1 in 6 American women who will be raped in their lifetimes, including the children in Alaska, that Governor Palin wasn’t concerned about tipped scales of justice against women in her home town. But she’ll fight for the rights of gestating fetuses that result from those rapes.
I wonder how many rapes went unreported by women who couldn’t afford to pay the police to do their job?
Does Palin think anything should be done about the sexual assaults of 1 in 3 women serving in the Armed Forces?
I’m not counting on the mainstream media to find out.
UPDATE: A blogger dug through old Wasilla budget records to determine that the policy shift to put the burden of rape kit costs on victims began shortly after she appointed a new police chief. As she approved the police department’s budget; there’s no way she was unaware of the policy shift taking place.
Sam Harris is a great writer (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason). Today, his column makes a very important about Sarah Palin’s nomination to the Republican ticket: Average isn’t good enough.
Americans seem to think the very serious executive posts of President and Vice President are something akin to an episode of American Idol or Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. The reality is the weight of the world will literally be placed upon the shoulders of the person elected in November.
Sarah Palin is a great hockey mom and governor of a small, oil-pumping state. It’s not just that she’s not in Hillary Clinton‘s league. She’s not the caliber of Putin or Gordon Brown or Kofi Annan. I can’t take anyone seriously who puts her in the same category as those leaders. And that she considers herself qualified to go head-to-head with such world leaders, since she’s just a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, is yet another sign of her bad judgement and McCain’s.
Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the “Who would you like to have a beer with?” poll question in 2004, and won reelection.
This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages — and loses — both necessary and unnecessary wars.
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