Is Palin failin' ? or OMG McCain wins with Palin !! pt. 2

[VintagePunk]

What point did we make? That the Republicans have co-opted the term and are falsely using it in order to appear hip and cool and concerned with women's issues?

Please.

 

[corianderstem]

^^ What she said.

It's a better response than the eye-rolling I was doing.

 

[diamond]

Revoke my feminist card -- I like Palin


September 16, 2008

BY MICHAEL SNEED Sun-Times Columnist
Hmmm. Maybe . . . I am not a feminist after all.

Maybe . . . working in a man's world for 42 years and busting my butt to beat them up the ladder deletes me from the feminist category.

Perhaps . . . struggling to be a good single mom in a very married world -- yet meeting my five-day-a-week column deadline -- doesn't earn me a feminist handle either.

Certainly . . . because I'm not appalled or sickened or shocked by Sarah Palin's stealing the thunder from Obama the orator, I am not a feminist.

Give me a break.

I'm tired of women working hard for a hammer that never breaks the glass ceiling; disgusted when Hillary Clinton, an incredibly capable, brilliant woman, lost the fight of her life; disheartened by other countries throughout the free world being led by formidable women before America is.

Only this time, it was an amazing orator named Barack Obama who was stealing our thunder . . . and I was . . . well, you know. Pissed.

And then along came Palin, a woman of the tundra who could be America's next best frontier story -- and I was pleasantly surprised.

Hell, I was delighted.

So what if she's a Republican? I tend to vote for Republican presidents.

So what if she didn't know the definition of the Bush Doctrine? Her performance was a Western draw. Bravery in tact. But no one shot.

So I asked myself -- what fault is there in admiring a woman who is against abortion -- even though I believe in freedom of choice?

What's wrong with huge respect for a woman who chose to give birth to a Down syndrome child knowing full well what was in store for her and her family?

And if appreciating a woman who chose a husband who supports her ladder-climbing skill puts me in the non-feminist category, well maybe that's where I belong.

To be blunt, Palin is like a zephyr blowing across the prairie with a retro hairdo tied back like a sheaf of wheat.

She is real. She is rural. She may not be a brilliant tactician, but she's got street sense. Palin is so unlike the very controlled Hillary Clinton, who would never be caught dead in red heels.

Thus, it now appears Palin has emerged as "everywoman" to a huge portion of our female population; a woman never really identified with what we thought was our quintessential role model -- a highly educated woman who wears tailored suits, whose voice is never shrill and who has a husband who makes more than she does.

I don't know what perfume Palin wears, but to me she smells of the soil.

Our huge land once had the call of the frontier for a new start -- and Alaska became the last of it.

Palin's kind of grit and savvy is akin to a frontier story: a young woman who was raised in a land of big sky and the midnight sun, a metaphor of sorts for being able to spot trouble a long way away.

In the next two months, Palin may be able to forge a hammer big enough to crack the glass ceiling. Maybe not.

And no Palin moose gun may be powerful enough to pursue critics of John McCain, who -- rightly or wrongly -- may be tarnished by our economy.

But McCain did choose a tough and savvy woman as his running mate . . . and it is refreshing to think, at least for a while, a little air from the Alaskan aerie wafted through America.

 

[Irvine511]

i think a feminist can absolutely be anti-choice, or pro-forced-pregnancy.

however, i think that much of the anti-choice movement is deeply, profoundly sexist.

 

[VintagePunk]

i think a feminist can absolutely be anti-choice, or pro-forced-pregnancy.

I disagree. I think that a feminist can certainly be opposed to having an abortion herself, but would not take that choice away from others.

 

[Utoo]

Revoke my feminist card -- I like Palin


September 16, 2008

BY MICHAEL SNEED Sun-Times Columnist
Hmmm. Maybe . . . I am not a feminist after all.

Maybe . . . working in a man's world for 42 years and busting my butt to beat them up the ladder deletes me from the feminist category.

Perhaps . . . struggling to be a good single mom in a very married world -- yet meeting my five-day-a-week column deadline -- doesn't earn me a feminist handle either.

Certainly . . . because I'm not appalled or sickened or shocked by Sarah Palin's stealing the thunder from Obama the orator, I am not a feminist.

Give me a break.

I'm tired of women working hard for a hammer that never breaks the glass ceiling; disgusted when Hillary Clinton, an incredibly capable, brilliant woman, lost the fight of her life; disheartened by other countries throughout the free world being led by formidable women before America is.

Only this time, it was an amazing orator named Barack Obama who was stealing our thunder . . . and I was . . . well, you know. Pissed.

And then along came Palin, a woman of the tundra who could be America's next best frontier story -- and I was pleasantly surprised.

Hell, I was delighted.

So what if she's a Republican? I tend to vote for Republican presidents.

So what if she didn't know the definition of the Bush Doctrine? Her performance was a Western draw. Bravery in tact. But no one shot.

So I asked myself -- what fault is there in admiring a woman who is against abortion -- even though I believe in freedom of choice?

What's wrong with huge respect for a woman who chose to give birth to a Down syndrome child knowing full well what was in store for her and her family?

And if appreciating a woman who chose a husband who supports her ladder-climbing skill puts me in the non-feminist category, well maybe that's where I belong.

To be blunt, Palin is like a zephyr blowing across the prairie with a retro hairdo tied back like a sheaf of wheat.

She is real. She is rural. She may not be a brilliant tactician, but she's got street sense. Palin is so unlike the very controlled Hillary Clinton, who would never be caught dead in red heels.

Thus, it now appears Palin has emerged as "everywoman" to a huge portion of our female population; a woman never really identified with what we thought was our quintessential role model -- a highly educated woman who wears tailored suits, whose voice is never shrill and who has a husband who makes more than she does.

I don't know what perfume Palin wears, but to me she smells of the soil.

Our huge land once had the call of the frontier for a new start -- and Alaska became the last of it.

Palin's kind of grit and savvy is akin to a frontier story: a young woman who was raised in a land of big sky and the midnight sun, a metaphor of sorts for being able to spot trouble a long way away.

In the next two months, Palin may be able to forge a hammer big enough to crack the glass ceiling. Maybe not.

And no Palin moose gun may be powerful enough to pursue critics of John McCain, who -- rightly or wrongly -- may be tarnished by our economy.

But McCain did choose a tough and savvy woman as his running mate . . . and it is refreshing to think, at least for a while, a little air from the Alaskan aerie wafted through America.

What a bunch of bullshit that is! Why are people obsessed with electing someone who is "just like me?" Gosh, Sarah Palin is a "real" "everywoman!" Oooooh, Sarah Palin smells like the soil! Oh my, it's like a frontier story!

What the hell kind of idiocy is that????

If you want brain surgery, you don't ask your neighbor to do it.

If I want a POTUS or VP, I don't go ask my friend's mom's bookclub pal to run.


Honest to God, the Republicans have been dumbing America down for the last decade. If there's any good reason to defeat these idiots, that's it.

 

[diamond]

What a bunch of bullshit that is! Why are people obsessed with electing someone who is "just like me?" Gosh, Sarah Palin is "real" "everywoman!" Oooooh, Sarah Palin smells like the soil! Oh my, it's like a frontier story!



.


Honest to God, the Republicans have been dumbing down America for the last decade. If there's any good reason to defeat these idiots, that's it.

bill clinton was "just like everyone else".

we gave him a chance after the confessed infildelities, and he still let us down.

<>

 

[Se7en]

i always presumed that feminism was about fundamentally altering (destroying) the sex-based power structure of modern society, in both public and private life.

does sarah palin believe that she should submit to her husband? hard to say...

 

[yolland]

Who calls who a feminist is completely irrelevant to voting.

 

[Utoo]

bill clinton was "just like everyone else".

<>

But was he elected because of that? Or because he appeared less out of touch than Bush (recall the famous "what would your presidency mean for me" fiasco)?


Seriously, diamond. If you honestly use crap like this article to choose who should lead this country..... I don't know what to say that wouldn't get me banned.

 

[Lila64]

What a bunch of bullshit that is! Why are people obsessed with electing someone who is "just like me?" Gosh, Sarah Palin is a "real" "everywoman!" Oooooh, Sarah Palin smells like the soil! Oh my, it's like a frontier story!

What the hell kind of idiocy is that????

If you want brain surgery, you don't ask your neighbor to do it.

If I want a POTUS or VP, I don't go ask my friend's mom's bookclub pal to run.


Honest to God, the Republicans have been dumbing America down for the last decade. If there's any good reason to defeat these idiots, that's it.

Palin can be just like "you or me", but that's no credential to be VICE PRESIDENT!!!

 

[financeguy]

i always presumed that feminism was about fundamentally altering (destroying) the sex-based power structure of modern society, in both public and private life.

I expect you'll come to your senses eventually.

 

[financeguy]

however, i think that much of the anti-choice movement is deeply, profoundly sexist.

Any particular evidence for this assertion?

Your own latte liberal prejudices don't count as evidence, unfortunately.

 

[yolland]

This article is more occasioned by the present VP campaign than directly relevant to it, but I thought it was really interesting, and it reads somewhat like a coda to the piece on 'small town values' Irvine posted last week.

A Western State of Mind

By KATHERINE ROBERTS
New York Times, September 13, 2008


As Americans get to know Sarah Palin, they’re taking a crash course on life in the Last Frontier. There is her sport of moose hunting, for example. Shooting the prey turns out to be the easy part. The hard part is figuring out where to do the deed, according to the Alaska Division of Wildlife Conservation: “When choosing an area to hunt and a means of transportation, remember that you will have about 400 to 700 pounds of meat and up to 65 pounds of antlers to transport from the kill-site to home. That’s why many seasoned Alaskan moose hunters say, ‘Never kill a moose more than a mile from a vehicle of some sort.’ ” No wonder, then, that Ms. Palin has been photographed driving a tank-like A.T.V. As for the field-dressing, it’s no joke to brave the blowflies while carving up a half-ton animal.

A few weeks ago a national conversation about such arcana would have seemed unlikely. But that was before the emergence of a candidate who has divided the country in unexpected ways—not simply because of her record and her views, but also because Governor Palin comes from a place in the West that embodies deep-seated ideas and myths and contradictions about the role of the frontier in the American psyche. In some sense, Ms. Palin has become a metaphor for Alaska itself, and as grand a landscape as Alaska is, the current discussion is less about a geographical location than about a state of mind, or states of mind.

“The West was another name for opportunity,” Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893, in his famous essay that declared an end to the frontier, which in his definition meant the end of free land. More than a century later, the dreams and myths about the West persist. So do fantasies and outright misperceptions. Some originated in the East, with its vision of the frontier as being at once a majestic playground and a site of commercial depredation, of strip mines and strip malls. (“The East,” Turner wrote, “has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it.”)

Other simplifications flourish in the West, with its self-regarding belief in an untamed wilderness brought to heel by fiercely independent souls. The truth has always been more ambiguous, not least because of the region’s tangled relationship with the federal government, which had cleared the land of Indians and offered the handout of the Homestead Act in 1862, itself adopted after some 70 years of debate about the rightful disposition of public lands.

In the 20th century, accounts of the West often centered on this paradox. The inhabitants boasted of their autonomy, even as the government did the dirty work, took the risks and offered sweet deals to settlers, so they could expand the borders of the United States. Without this help, as many writers have noted, the waves of Western pioneers wouldn’t have had the luxury of hating Washington bureaucrats. This attitude, of wanting it both ways, was neatly summed up a half-century ago by the historian Bernard DeVoto as: “Get out and give us more money.” The novelist Wallace Stegner was just as unsparing when he observed, in 1986: “Westerners who would like to return to the old days of free grab, people of the kind described as having made America great by their initiative and energy in committing mass trespass on the minerals, grass, timber and water of the Public Domain, complain that no Western state is master in its own house.”

Competing ideas about the West have dominated our politics for many decades now. No candidate was so synonymous with the regional ideal as Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who spoke Navajo and posed, like Governor Palin, in rugged outdoor outfits, sometimes with a rifle. “We didn’t know the federal government,” he said of his forebears who came to Arizona in 1860. “Everything that was done, we did it ourselves.” But, as Rick Perlstein pointed out in “Before the Storm,” his history of Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, the land Goldwater’s grandfather traveled “to follow a gold strike,” in fact “developed as a virtual ward of the federal government,” and the money for the first Goldwater general store in 1872 “came largely from contracts for provisioning Army camps and delivering mail.” Barry Goldwater, who was born in 1909, grew up with “a nurse, chauffeur and a live-in maid,” Mr. Perlstein added. As a politician, Goldwater excelled at playing both sides of the game. He railed against federal intrusion in the West, but was first in line to demand the billions of dollars that came to his state from Washington in the form of water projects, to cite one gargantuan example.

Today, the West is not the federal economic colony it once was. Nor is it the uncrowded rural paradise of lore. In fact, it has long been the most urbanized part of the country. This transformation has enticed a new brand of fortune-seeker, from the telecommuting migrants in mountain enclaves to the influx of people into metropolitan “boomburgs” where they are employed in the same jobs as people in the rest of the country. It has been fully 15 years since the last Sagebrush Rebellion, the movement of boisterous anti-government types who aimed to “take back” their land from Washington, by force if necessary. It doesn’t hurt that all those energy companies now drilling on federal lands pay high wages and provide many jobs.

The region’s politics, never as uniform as portrayed, is more diverse today than it has been in years. There are now Democratic governors in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona, not one of whom was elected by praising the federal government or calling for a Buffalo Commons. Barack Obama is mounting strong campaigns in several of these states—where Democratic presidential candidates have often struggled mightily for 30 years.

It is, to some extent, the collapsing of the old distinctions, and with it the continuing convergence of East and West, that explains the sudden fascination with Alaska now that Ms. Palin has become a national figure. The state, for all its suburban big-box resemblance to the rest of the West, remains in some ways the last true frontier—at least in the sense that it remains distant and exotic to most Americans, with its mammoth size, its severe climate, its many unpopulated miles. Its contradictions, however, are the same ones noted by DeVoto and Stegner, only starker and more extreme. While half the land in the Western states in the lower 48 is owned by the federal government, in Alaska, it’s closer to 70%, and only 1% of the state is privately owned.

Alaska’s dependence on and disdain for government date back to its territory days. John McPhee captured the paradox in his book “Coming Into the Country,” published in 1976: “When one adds in the existing parks, government forests and wildlife refuges and a vast federal petroleum reserve in the north, not much remains, so it is one of the ironies of Alaska that in the midst of this tremendous wilderness people consider themselves fortunate to have (anywhere at all) a 50-by-100-foot lot they can call their own.” The most cantankerous assessment, perhaps, came from the nature writer Edward Abbey. “Alaska is not, as the state license place asserts, ‘the Last Frontier,’ ” Abbey wrote in the 1980s. “Alaska is the final big bite on the American table, where there is never enough to go around...Alaska, like the rest of our public domain, has been strapped down and laid open to the lust and greed of the international corporations...Anchorage, Fairbanks and outposts like Barter Island, with their glass-and-aluminum office buildings, their airlift prefab fiberboard hovels for the natives and the workers, their compounds of elaborate and destructive machinery, exhibit merely the latest development in the planetary expansion of space-age sleaze—not a frontier, but a high-technology slum. For Americans, Alaska is the last pork chop.”

Ms. Palin’s critics have tried to tie her to all the supposed evils Abbey detailed and some new ones, too—relationships that any governor of Alaska might expect to be questioned about. If Mrs. Palin stood up to the oil companies, was it so she would raise taxes for the state treasury? What about her on-and-off stand on that symbol of federal pork, the Bridge to Nowhere? While she may attack earmarks, as she did in her interview with ABC News, what funds has she sent back to Washington, given that Alaskans get $231 per person in earmarks, compared with $22 per person in Mr. Obama’s Illinois?

The governor’s supporters have painted her detractors as out-of-touch elitists, blind to their own insularity and entitlements and self-regard. Behind this view lurks a feeling of injustice rooted in another difference between East and West, the feeling that access to a particular kind of prestige and power is still off-limits to much of the country, to graduates of the University of Idaho, like Ms. Palin, rather than to those who went to Columbia and Harvard, where Mr. Obama got his degrees. This in turn points to a very different though related continental rift, one whose origins are not so much regional as socioeconomic, and rooted less in competing myths about place than about class. Turner saw all that too in 1893. “Free lands and the consciousness of working out their social destiny did more than turn the Westerner to material interests and devote him to a restless existence,” he wrote. “They promoted equality among the Western settlers, and reacted as a check on the aristocratic influences of the East.” Economic equality followed, and “this involved political equality.”

“Not without a struggle would the Western man abandon this ideal,” he concluded, “and it goes far to explain the unrest in the remote West today.” And it may also explain the uneasiness so many Easterners now feel as they are confronted, once again, with their own assumptions about the American frontier.

 

[Irvine511]

bill clinton was "just like everyone else".

we gave him a chance after the confessed infildelities, and he still let us down.

<>

no he wasn't. he felt our pain (and breasts), but he was very upfront about his stellar academic credentials and ambition.

remember this?

 

[Irvine511]

Any particular evidence for this assertion?

the obsession with abstinence-only education that goes along with the anti-choice movement; the notion that a collection of cells is more important than the autonomy of a woman; the sneaking suspicion that concern for "murdering babies" is just a pretext for wanting to keep women clean and unsoiled for their future husbands.

just how many pro-choicers do you think wear chastity rings? or make virginity pledges? or go to purity balls and vow to their fathers to remain "pure" until marriage?

and the lack of emphasis on purity for the menfolk. it's still always about women's vaginas and what goes in there. there is no similar standard of behavior expected of men in the way that there is for women.

further, not all (many anti-choice organizations do good work in helping women have babies and then find employment) but much of anti-choice movement could well be considered to be pro-birth but not genuinely pro-life. where is the universal health care? where do we guarantee that women get equal pay for equal work? where is the federally funded child care?

 

[BVS]

apparently the right defines feminism differentlly from the left.

This doesn't come as a shock. The right defines everything differently from the rest of the world.

 

[Utoo]

Stumper : Palin's Favorability Ratings Begin to Falter

Palin's Favorability Ratings Begin to Falter

The polls reflected the early success of her strategy. In the three days after Palin joined Team McCain--Aug. 29-31--32 percent of voters told the pollsters at Diageo/Hotline that they had a favorable opinion of her; most (48 percent) didn't know enough to say. By Sept. 4, however, 43 percent of Diageo/Hotline respondents approved of Palin with only 25 percent disapproving--an 18-point split. Apparently, voters were liking what they were hearing. Four days later, Palin's approval rating had climbed to 47 percent (+17), and by Sept. 13 it had hit 52 percent. The gap at that point between her favorable and unfavorable numbers--22 percent--was larger than either McCain's (+20) or Obama's (+13).

But then a funny thing happened: Palin lost some of her luster. Since Sept. 13, Palin's unfavorables have climbed from 30 percent to 36 percent. Meanwhile, her favorables have slipped from 52 percent to 48 percent. That's a three-day net swing of -10 points, and it leaves her in the Sept. 15 Diageo/Hotline tracking poll with the smallest favorability split (+10) of any of the Final Four. Over the course of a single weekend, in other words, Palin went from being the most popular White House hopeful to the least.

What happened? I'd argue that Palin's considerable novelty is starting to wear off.

 

[Irvine511]

question for the anti-choice/pro-life people: would you have an amniocentesis? why? why do you think Palin had one?

 

[anitram]

..that many here are resorting to race baiting shows their desperation.

<>

I think you better be concerned with that speck in your own eye:

The 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul had the lowest black representation in 40 years, the Center reported. The 36 African-American delegates in 2008 represented only 1.5 percent of the party’s total delegate count. That’s a 78.4 percent decline from 2004, when 164 black delegates participated at the Republican Convention.

The Joint Center has prepared similar reports for both the Republican and Democratic conventions every four years since 1972. (It found that nearly 25 percent of delegates attending the Democratic Party’s 2008 convention were African American.)

Why is nobody talking about John McCain's problem with black people?

Obama's problem with PUMAs, Catholics, rednecks, women, racists, Pennsyltuckians and heaven knows what else has been discussed ad nauseum.

Does John McCain not care about black people? Why isn't he courting them? Are they not part of his country too? Is he not ashamed that he'll get 3% of their vote if he's lucky?

Let's talk about race if you want to talk about race.

What's he down with Latinos these days? 40 points?

 

[Lila64]

 

[elevated_u2_fan]

John McCain hates black people...

 

[Lila64]

I was waiting for that Kanye

 

[yolland]

why do you think Palin had one?

From what I've read, her explanation was that she "likes to be prepared"--meaning, I assume, that she'd rather not find something like that out only at birth, as opposed to having had time to come to terms with the emotions, the anticipated extra care burden, etc. (Though I find this hard to reconcile with the fact that she didn't tell her other children, but maybe that's just me.)

 

[Lila64]

Isn't it usually normal for a woman over 40 to have an amnio?

 

[yolland]

You can refuse one, though, and I think a lot of pro-life women would on principle.

 

[anitram]

(Though I find this hard to reconcile with the fact that she didn't tell her other children, but maybe that's just me.)

The fact that the 15-year-old daughter took one look at the baby and then asked why they weren't told that he was Down's struck me as incredibly odd. When I relayed the story to my Mom, she commented that she thought it was extremely selfish not to prepare your children better, especially since they are older children.

 

[Harry Vest]

I think you better be concerned with that speck in your own eye:



Why is nobody talking about John McCain's problem with black people?

Obama's problem with PUMAs, Catholics, rednecks, women, racists, Pennsyltuckians and heaven knows what else has been discussed ad nauseum.

Does John McCain not care about black people? Why isn't he courting them? Are they not part of his country too? Is he not ashamed that he'll get 3% of their vote if he's lucky?

Let's talk about race if you want to talk about race.

What's he down with Latinos these days? 40 points?

Am I missing something or is this THE FIRST TIME EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES THAT A BLACK MAN IS RUNNING FOR THE HIGHEST OFFICE IN THE LAND. And you wonder why McCain is only getting 3%???
C'mon, it's not rocket science.

 

[BVS]

I think you better be concerned with that speck in your own eye:



Why is nobody talking about John McCain's problem with black people?

Obama's problem with PUMAs, Catholics, rednecks, women, racists, Pennsyltuckians and heaven knows what else has been discussed ad nauseum.

Does John McCain not care about black people? Why isn't he courting them? Are they not part of his country too? Is he not ashamed that he'll get 3% of their vote if he's lucky?

Let's talk about race if you want to talk about race.

What's he down with Latinos these days? 40 points?

"I'm not a racist, but the reason no one cares is because they don't vote."

I've heard this not once but twice in the last week, once in private and once on the radio by a talking head.

 

[anitram]

I am wondering why McCain is unconcerned about it.

I am wondering why he's been down by as many as 40 points with Latinos - is Obama Hispanic now too? And why nobody in the media seems to give a shit about this.