As of this writing, it’s looking more and more like a major hurricane will hit New Orleans for the second time in four years. I’ve already read a couple of sites speculating about the “delicious irony” of seeing a split-screen GOP convention, with hurricane-ravaged footage on one side of the screen. I’m sorry, but this isn’t the time to be scoring cheap political points. These are people’s lives and livelihoods we’re talking about here.
That’s not to say that I think we shouldn’t hold people responsible for their failings in Katrina, or anything of the sort. I just hope something happens so that it’s not so bad this time around, and if the worst does happen, I hope the response is worlds better this time than it was last time. I don’t care who it helps or hurts politically — that’s the least of my worries. The people of the Gulf Coast are all that matters right now. The petty politics can be sorted out later.
The Sarah Palin nomination is so ludicrous it’s hard to grasp. People are still trying to get a handle on what it means, and what the relevant aspects of her tissue-thin background are. There’s been a lot of good commentary so far, including her relatively minor political experience, all of it in (literally) bush-league environs, and the obvious pandering - to pro-Hillary defectors and religious-right goons - that constitutes the only justification for her nomination. There is also her utter lack of background or preparation for assuming the Presidency without warning - as is her most important, and almost sole, Constitutional responsibility. And there is her apparent penchant for using her office and state agencies for personal vendettas. No doubt all of this will get more thoroughly aired, as it should. (My only fear is that McCain will come to his senses before the official nomination and force her to “reluctantly withdraw” to “spend more time with her family” - I want her on the GOP ticket!)
But there has been some other stuff entering into the discussion that I think is very ugly and ill-advised. Of course there have been some idiotic sexist remarks (and some equally idiotic attempted defenses of her “women’s work” as a qualification for President that are just as sexist in their condescension); that’s bad enough. And it’s hard to know just how to evaluate her “life story”, since much of her qualification for office - according to those who support her - is that she hunts moose and has a passle of kids. If they really think those are qualifications*, then it’s fair game to point out that they are not.
But there are other personal issues that are not fair game.
I hardly like to even bring the subject up, but it should be confronted. There are all kinds of weird rumorsgoing around about Palin and her kids. Many people have suggested that her last child, born when Palin was 44 years old and not known to have been pregnant at the time, was actually the child of Palin’s oldest teenage daughter, who had dropped out of school claiming illness for over 6 months leading up to the birth. In addition, that child was born with Down Syndrome, and some other clown is now posting suggesting that that condition was the result of Sarah Palin’s behavior during the pregnancy.Alan Colmes has suggested Palin could have endangered the fetus by traveling more than 9 hours to a rural Alaskan hospital, rather than go to any of the many larger and closer hospitals, while supposedly in labor. (Note that the two rumors conflict with one another.)
Aside from this being a highly personal issue (and, if the rumor about the teenage mother is true, then apparently something the family does not want to acknowledge), it’s hard to see what legitimate relevance it has. Once, this would have been a career-killing scandal; thankfully, as the result of progressive social activism and the victories for women’s reproductive freedom that Palin herself opposes, there are now many options for forming families, and one’s personal choices in that regard are granted much more respect. Ironically, it is only Palin’s own base that would find anything scandalous in this. But it can certainly be used to create discomfort for the candidate and her family, and, again, among all the irrelevant lightweight issues Palin brings to the campaign, this seems to bear no relation to the question of her fitness for office.
To deliberately pick on an uncomfortable and private issue for the purpose of embarrassing or harassing a candidate is despicable. And to use women’s reproductive choices as weapons against them only involves us in the worst abuses of the right wing. This is absolutely the sort of thing we - decent progressives who support women’s freedom to choose their reproductive pathway - must not be doing. Yet highly-visible blogs like DailyKos and Andrew Sullivan (not a defender of choice, it’s true) are pushing the issue, and others are spreading it with their concern-trolling.**
There is perhaps one argument that makes the issue sound relevant, and that is the question of hypocrisy. The religious right and the GOP are on hair-trigger to judge other people’s lifestyles, family structures, and reproductive choices, so when one of them finds themselves enmeshed in a “non-traditional family” saga, perhaps we are entitled to some schadenfreude? And perhaps we are, but the only decent response is to welcome that family to the community of freedom of choice and freedom from condemnation. Palin, as far as I know, has not been one of the overt persecutors of others in that respect, and does not deserve to be persecuted in return.
Lee Stranahan, of the Huffington Post, offers this odd defense:
The whole story is based on an insulting view of fundamentalist Christians; that they’d be so freaked out by a teenage pregnancy that they’d have the Governor — the most highly visible and public women in the small fishbowl of Alaska — fake a pregnancy to cover up the sins her of daughter Bristol.
Actually, I find that perfectly possible to believe. But it’s just as much none of our business as it is none of theirs. We’ve got to stop making political fodder out of people’s health and reproduction, out of their attempts to just live their lives as best they can by their own lights, without interfering with anyone else. I have little hope that this story - whatever is behind it - will have any such effect on the GOP; in fact I have little hope that it will even encourage Sarah Palin to think that women who make different reproductive choices from hers might deserve the kind of privacy and respect that she wants for herself. But if we’re going to see a future in which people have the freedom and security to live their own lives and make their own choices, we have to let everyone do so, even those who oppose that freedom for others. We can’t let ourselves be the thing we oppose and expect anything good to come of it.
Update: Palin herself has just announced that the rumors her 17-year-old daughter had the baby (Trig) in May are false, because . . . the daughter is pregnant now.
ST. PAUL (Reuters) – The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.
That would seem to lay the other rumor to rest. It also explains why the daughter was seen wearing an engagement ring - she’s marrying the father of her expected baby (yes, 17 years old, with a baby and a husband, neither of which she planned for). Palin has requested privacy for her family over that issue, and again it seems to me they ought to have it. This does raise the tantalizing question of how her insane fundie supporters are going to react, but I think we know the answer to that already: they would be screaming and howling at any Democrat who made the same announcement, but nothing matters if you’re a Republican, so it’ll be just fine.
* I’m highly suspicious that any of her supporters actually believe she is qualified for this office, or that they really mean the things they say in claiming so.
** I hope that’s not what I’m doing here, also. That’s not my intent, at least.
John McCain has revealed that his apparent choice of Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running-mate was, as many observers predicted, a carefully-staged hoax. “Yeah, right,” McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said of Palin, laughing with reporters. “As if! What do we look like, a bunch of complete lackwits? You guys will believe anything.”
McCain’s actual running mate will be a ham sandwich.
The sandwich, said by analysts to be “a little light on the ham,” has never held any public office and is incapable of speech or rational thought. It is thought that the choice will solidify McCain’s credentials as a “maverick.”
John McCain makes decisions with his gut,” said Davis. “That’s what Americans like, right?”
Some Democrats questioned whether a sandwich was qualified to be the Vice President of the United States, let alone President if anything should happen to McCain, 72.
Republican spokesmen fired back that any attempt to criticize the sandwich in any way would constitute a display of bigotry.
One of our nice Republican friends needs to explain to me why this is not the action of a police state:
Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff’s department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than “fire code violations,” and early this morning, the Sheriff’s department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.
Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning — one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided. Each of the raided houses is known by neighbors as a “hippie house,” where 5-10 college-aged individuals live in a communal setting, and everyone we spoke with said that there had never been any problems of any kind in those houses, that they were filled with “peaceful kids” who are politically active but entirely unthreatening and friendly. Posted below is the video of the scene, including various interviews, which convey a very clear sense of what is actually going on here.
… Several of those who were arrested are being represented by Bruce Nestor, the President of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers’ Guild. Nestor said that last night’s raid involved a meeting of a group calling itself the “RNC Welcoming Committee”, and that this morning’s raids appeared to target members of “Food Not Bombs,” which he described as an anti-war, anti-authoritarian protest group. There was not a single act of violence or illegality that has taken place, Nestor said. Instead, the raids were purely anticipatory in nature, and clearly designed to frighten people contemplating taking part in any unauthorized protests.
… The Uptake has this amazing video interview with the Democracy Now producer who was detained today. As the DN producer explains, she was present at a meeting of a group called “I-Witness” — which videotaped police behavior at the 2004 GOP Convention in New York and helped get charges dismissed against hundreds of protesters who were arrested. The police surrounded the St. Paul house where they were meeting even though they had no warrant, told them that anyone who exited the house would be arrested, and then — even though they finally, after several hours, obtained a warrant only for the house next door — basically broke into the house, pointed weapons at everyone inside, handcuffed them, searched the house, and then left. Here is a blog post from one of the members of I-Witness asking for help during the time when they were forced to stay inside the house (see the second post — it reads like a note from a hostage crying out for help). This is truly repugnant, extreme police behavior designed to intimidate protesters, police critics and others, and it ought to infuriate anyone and everyone who cares about basic liberties.
This is intimidation by the organs of the sate against people who have done nothing other than express an intent to exercise their constitutional rights. It is state-sponsored thuggery, plain and simple, intended to make clear that the Constitution applies only to those who hold approved of opinions. They intend a free country only for those with no wish to take advantage of that freedom. Anyone else, apparently, is a threat that must be dealt with like these protestors, journalists, and lawyers were dealt with.
So after criticizing Obama’s inexperience, McCain picks someone with even less experience. And after criticizing Obama for “snubbing” Hillary (who, he tells us, got “millions of votes”), he “snubs” Romney and Huckabee, who also got millions of votes. Apparently, the McCain campaign doesn’t own a mirror…
UPDATE: I think this is a pretty fair analysis of the Palin pick and its implications.
That was a remarkable speech. Obama, deliberately by all appearances, turned down some of the flowing rhetoric and attacked McCain and the Republicans for their failures of the last eight years. He made a fullthroated defense of progressivism and full-throated attack on conservatism as it has been practied in the last eight years. He went directly after the GOP character assassination tactics and treated them with the contempt they deserve. He talked about programs and policies and specific issues. He gave us red meat and post-partisanship. He gave us his own biography and the stories of the people he intends ot help. And he did all of it while sounding more Presidential than perhaps any person in my adult lifetime.
And, most importantly, for the first time in my adul lifetime, the Democratic nominee for President spoke in clear and strong terms about progressive ideals and progressive change. For the first time since, perhaps, 1980, the Democratic Party as an institution is committed to progressive goals. Not a bad speech, not a bad night, and not a bad place to be.
John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain’s health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)
“So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime,” Mr. Goodman said. “The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.
“So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved.”
An emergency room does not provide cost effective treatment. You cannot get mammograms at an emergency room. You cannot get chemotherapy in an emergency room. You cannot get regular prescriptions for chronic problems in an emergency room. You cannot get a comprehensive check up that could catch problems before they become emergencies in an emergency room. This is, quite simply, a giant middle finger to every American suffering without health insurance. The McCain camp does not think that there is a real problem and intends to do nothing to help correct it.
My father grew up in a country where African Americans were, by law, forced into separate and unequal lives. They were lynched, cheated, driven from homes, kept from jobs, denied their rights, and abused by te justice system. They lived as refugees in their own nation. Today, an African American was nominated for the Presidency of the United States by one of the two major political parties. Today we are reminded that the world as it is does not need to be accepted, that the good guys do not always lose and that we can make things better.
This is not the end of the fight for equality. This is not the promised land. But it is a step, a large step, closer. On most days I settle for the Democratic party because of the way our political institutions force that choice upon me. But tonight, tonight I am deeply proud to be a Democrat.
Hey, remember back in February, when Serr8d used disingenuous graphs to try to argue that melting polar ice wasn’t a problem? And remember how I subsequently pointed out the flaws in his arguments, and noted that the late summer ice levels are what’s important? Well, lookie here:
The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported that the extent of sea ice in the Arctic is down to 2.03 million square miles. The lowest point since 1979 is 1.65 million square miles set last September.
With about three weeks left in the Arctic summer, this year could wind up breaking the previous record, scientists said.
Arctic ice always melts in summer and refreezes in winter. But over the years, more of the ice is lost to the sea and with less of it recovered in winter. While ice reflects the sun’s heat, the open ocean absorbs more heat and the melting accelerates warming in other parts of the world.
…snip…
“We could very well be in that quick slide downward in terms of passing a tipping point,” said center senior scientist Mark Serreze. “It’s tipping now. We’re seeing it happen now.”
Within a few years — “five to less than 10 years” — the Arctic could be free of sea ice in the summer, said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally.
“It also means that climate warming is also coming larger and faster than the models are predicting and nobody’s really taken into account that change yet,” he said.
Other scientists, including James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, agreed. Hansen in a Wednesday e-mail said the sea ice “is the best current example of a tipping point.”
Last year was an unusual year when wind currents and other weather conditions coincided with global warming to worsen sea ice melt, Serreze said. Scientists wondered if last year’s melt was an unusual event or the start of a new and disturbing trend.
This year’s results suggest the latter because the ice had recovered a bit more than usual thanks to a somewhat cooler winter, Serreze said. Then this month, when the melting rate usually slows, it sped up, he said.
Of course, these are people who study this sort of thing for a living, so what the hell do they know? Obviously, they’re just politically-motivated alarmist hacks…
You decide. More on the Clinton supporter in the McCain ad. As far as I can tell, this is sour grapes, and she’s doing it out of pure spite. If she could name just two substantive issues where McCain’s position is closer to Clinton’s than Obama’s is, I might understand. Of course, it would be foolish to expect anyone in the media to actually ask that question.
Quoth the woman:
every time I tried to learn about [Obama] he seems to change his mind on a lot of the issues
Err, have you ever “tried to learn” about McCain? He’s “changed his mind” on everything from tax cuts to torture to social security privatization. And it’s no coincidence, I think, that he’s changed his mind in the less-mavericky direction. A partial list of McCain flip-flops.
UPDATE: Did anyone see The Daily Show’s bit on the Clinton Supporters for McCain? They actually talked to a child behavior expert about how to deal with kids who refuse to play nice, then tried the tactics on the Clinton supporters. Hilarious!
That was a very, very good speech. Despite the campaign ads and the talking heads nonsense, the Obama’s are an incredible, uniquely American story. They came form less than privileged backgrounds — no Admiral in the family to smooth the way for Barack, no rich daddy to make things easier for Michelle — and they worked very hard to be where they are. It is a remarkable, deeply American story that resonates, I think, with people who have had to work for a living, have had to struggle to get where they are in the world. Barack Obama, despite the opinion of the millionaire wignut welfare brigade, is as American as apple pie. Michelle Obama did a fantastic job reminding people of that last night.
But her speech was more than just that. When she talked about building the country that should be, she was getting to the heart of the campaign. John McCain really is just more of the same. he basically wants to continue the foreign policy and economic policies that the Bush Administration has followed for the last eight years. he thinks things are fine, with maybe a little tweaking. The country as it is, according to McCain, is basically as it should be. I don’t think that, obviously. hard work doe snot pay as it should. Our foreign policy is stupid and counter-productive. Discrimination of various forms are still a large problem. The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. It is getting harder to send your kids to a doctor or to a college. The world should not be this way.
And it doesn’t have to. No matter how entrenched the interests seem to be, no matter how much money and political power the status quo has, not matter how long this predator state has been in existence, it does not have to be this way. It can be made to change. Bowing to a crown, keeping another man as a slave, holding a women in a house as a virtual child: at one time, men could say “that is the way the world is”. And now they represent the way the world was. It does not have to be this way. It is, I think, one of the most powerful notions in human events and the Obamas seem to understand that at a fundamental level. That, more than the stories of their lives, more than the genuine emotion with which Michelle talked about their past and their dreamed for future, more than even their adorable kids (okay, maybe not more than that), is what struck me about Michelle’s speech. Their lives have taught them that the worlkd is not as it should be and that we can do something about that.
I was anxious to hear Michelle speak tonight. I was concerned that not being a professional, she might not be too effective in communicating her message. Needless to say, those concerns have been soundly put to rest. She certainly put Nancy Pelosi to shame.
I wonder if we could have a debate between Cindy McCain and Michelle. That would be a very interesting experience.
Sebastian of Pro-Gun Progressive gets his panties all in a twist because Lewis Black — a vocal critic of gun rights — had some fun at the expense of gun rights on a comedy show. (Sample line: “I don’t have the energy to google up the location of a gym, let alone come to your house and wrestle your guns away.”) And it’s not like they went soft on PeTA while daring to go after the Sacred Church of the NRA. In any case, the “expert witness testimony” at 0:43 of the video below is funny, I don’t care who you are.
I mean, I knew that the real serious gun rights activists had a rifle stick up their collective ass, but when you can’t take being the brunt of a few jokes on a show that treats everything that way (and I do mean everything — they’ve lampooned everything from Tila Tequila to the Catholic Church), then I humbly (or, maybe not-so-humbly), that may suggest that it’s time for a nice warm glass of Get The Hell Over Yourself.
So its Biden. better pick than most. He is wrong about a lot of stuff, staring with the bankruptcy bill, but he is correct about a lot too, starting with things like FISA. I think I like this pick. Biden is too old to run for the office himself, so he doesn’t prevent a progressive voice from winning the nomination in 2012 that a younger centrist might have. He is better on most issues and is more competent than most of the other names floated, especially Bayh and Kaine. The press, bless their myopic little hearts, seem to love him so that might offset some of the media McCain worship that is already intolerable. And, most importantly, he is a funny, sarcastic guy perfectly willing, even eager, to play the bull dog role. Obama could have done better, but he certainly could have done worse.
Nothing is lamer than when one of the “reasonable” conservatives tries to make a fact-based argument about politics. George Will tried it today and is now still wandering around the Science and Nature section of Barnes & Noble, gibbering like a loon.
Obama recently said that he would “require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term — more than double what we have now.” Note the verb “require” and the adjective “renewable.”
By 2012 he would “require” the economy’s huge energy sector to — here things become comic — supply half as much energy from renewable sources as already is being supplied by just one potentially renewable source. About 20 percent of America’s energy comes from nuclear energy produced using fuel rods, which, when spent, can be reprocessed into fresh fuel.
Uh, no, George. You know jack shit about nuclear energy, and your claim doesn’t even make sense on its face. “Renewable” energy doesn’t mean re-using unspent fuel - that’s just recycling. And you can’t reprocess “spent” fuel - it’s . . . “spent”.
It sounds to me like he’s confusing reprocessing partially spent fuel rods from ordinary reactors, and transmuting non-fissionables in “breeder” reactors. Breeder reactors are often described as “making more fuel than they use”, which is true in the sense that they output more fissionable material than is input to them. But doing that requires a steady input of non-fissionable material, usually low-enrichment uranium (but there are other designs). So you’ve still got to keep digging radioactive crap out of the ground and shoveling it in there to get any energy out. It would be more accurate to say they are non-renewable generators capable of using a wide range of fuels (by transmuting non-fissionable ones into fissionable ones). And they’re going to play exactly no role in energy production in the next four years: there are very few breeder reactors in the world today, and most of those are shut down or obsolete; breeders were banned in the US because they generate huge amounts of nuclear material requiring reprocessing, raising the danger of the diversion of plutonium from the output stream. There are ways to make it almost impossible to use that plutonium for nuclear weapons, but all of the fissionables are potential contamination sources for “dirty bombs”, which are much more likely to be a terrorist weapon that an actual fission bomb anyway.
Will might also want to take a look at the Department of Energy’s own Web site, which explicitly lists nuclear (and other non-renewable) energy sources in completely separate categories from “Renewables”, and does not list nuclear energy among its examples of renewable sources on the page for that category.
The rest of the column is equally dumb. He just wanders around yawping at whatever shiny bit of energy policy catches his attention. Spent fuel containment? George knows the way. Electric car industry growth by way of market incentives? That can’t work, because liberals believe in it. (Yes, he thinks that way.) And see here: Obama’s projected 1 million electric cars won’t have enough power because his proposed 80% carbon-emissions reduction would require a cap set at the level of “colonial days” due to the projected 11% population increase over the next 40+ years. (Wow. Science. It’s got numbers in it and everything. Never mind that he bounces from electric cars to population growth to carbon caps to colonial wood-burning stoves like a Labrador chasing a butterfly. It’s all so . . . real-seeming.) Is any of this true? It comes from the American Enterprise Institute by way of George Will, so the answer is almost undoubtedly “no”, but who cares? The whole point to carbon reduction is that we need to shift to other energy sources, not live like colonials. Is Will suggesting that, if we could find large amounts of renewable energy, we should still keep emitting greenhouse gasses anyway?
It doesn’t matter what he’s saying, because, in the very next paragraph, he’s off on (wait for it . . .) marginal tax rates for upper income levels. (Huh. What a shock.) He notes that Obama has remarked in passing that he didn’t want a 60% marginal tax rate, and then states that “Obama’s policies would bring it to the mid-50s for many Americans, close to the 60 percent Obama considers excessive.” And this means - what? That Obama has set his own tax policy to conform to his own beliefs about appropriate maximum levels? What else did Will expect? (Never mind. The paragraph did give him a chance to mention Ronald Reagan twice, which presumably was reward enough.)
