August 31st, 2008
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.
Cross-posted everywhere I can cross-post.
Categories: News & Current Events |
2 Comments
August 31st, 2008
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 rumors going 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.
[Crossposted to KTK's bioethics blog, Sufficient Scruples.]
Update: Revised description of one of the rumors; my original explanation was wrong.
Categories: Bloggin, Church & State, Culture, General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics, Privacy |
28 Comments
August 31st, 2008
Philosoraptor nails it:
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.
Read the rest. It gets better.
Categories: General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics, Satire |
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August 31st, 2008
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.
Categories: General, Legal Issues, Politics |
9 Comments
