See? She's on Our Level!

Ignorant as the dirt, that is.

Of concern to McCain's campaign, however, is a remaining and still-undisclosed clip from Palin's interview with Couric last week that has the political world buzzing.

The Palin aide, after first noting how "infuriating" it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions. After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases.

There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.

She wants to be VP, and quite possibly President, where she'll be responsible for appointing Supreme Court justices, and that's the only court case she even knows.

Well, why would she know any others? Taking away the right of women to own their own bodies -- that's the only important fight on the table! Screw Brown v Board of Education, or Miranda v Arizona, or Hustler v Falwell (I like that one), or Lawrence v Texas....but you'd think she'd know, say, Boumediene v Bush? Given it's her party with its policy on the line?

Unless, of course, she really is fucking stupid?

(Question asked & answered, professor.)

OMG!

Berube is back!  Yay!  This cheers me up, even today, when the World is Ending!

Also, in his second new post, he notes the trend I've been suspecting since seeing Pat Buchanan grumble about it on the Rachel Maddow Show -- after years of deregulation and decades of tax-give-aways to their rich buds, not to mention ten billion a month for the past -- how long has it been now? -- for the War in Iraq which was, jeez, whose idea was that? -- who are they going to blame this crash on?

Yeah, you guessed it: Obama and the Democrats.

Don't ask me how either.  It's that famous non-reality-based WV.

Exactly

This, from Angry Black Woman, is so exactly what I was thinking during the debate.

Why wouldn't McCain look at Obama?  It's no mystery to those of us from the South -- well, to many of us from the South, anyway.  McCain is an old white guy.  Obama is a black guy.  How many times did McCain insist, with hot temper edging his voice, with those jaw muscles working in his jaws, that Obama could not possibly know what he was talking about?

You can call that a campaign tactic if you want to: I'm telling you it's a worldview.  The same way McCain does not, really, believe women know anything worth know, he knows, for a fact, this black guy over there can't really understand military or world affairs.  He's not looking Obama in the eye because white men don't looking black guys in the eye.  They snap orders at them, they don't engage with them.  That would be like, well, treating a woman as your equal. You wouldn't do that, either, would you?

Out of touch?  McCain is out of this millennium.  And here's a question for anyone who have no problem with his worldview: how's he going to handle having to talk to worldleaders who don't happen to be, oh, white guys like him?

Leave him in the Senate where he belongs.  That's my advice.

More Depressing Bits from Pork Smith

So we take the kid out to eat tonight, as we have been promising and promising her we will, and we're happily eating our Chinese food like good Americans, when -- oy -- what do we hear from the next table?

These two women having a discussion about why Sarah Palin is so perfect a VP, and why Obama "better not get it."

Palin is perfect because she's going through what so many American women are going through, with her daughter being an unwed mother and all, and because she doesn't "talk down" to people.

"She's on our level," the first woman assured the second woman earnestly.  "She's a real American."

I exchanged glances with mr. delagar.

"I just hope Obama doesn't get it," the first woman went on.  "That's all.  He better not.  If he does, he's going to get killed, you watch, and then these blacks, they'll rise up and kill us all."  

She suddenly turned to us -- to our table, where we were minding our own business -- and demanded: "Don't you think that's what will happen?  Don't you think Obama will be killed if he's elected and then these blacks will kill us in our beds?"

mr. delagar, who is much more self-possessed than I am under these circumstances (I wanted to spit something like, are you fucking kidding me, you racist bint?), said, "You're misreading the situation radically.  First, Palin is not qualified to hold the office she is running for, and second, Obama is being protected so well it is highly unlikely he'll be assassinated."

They gaped at us.

"Further," he added, "we're Obama supporters and would like to eat in peace."

"Well," said the first woman.  "Excuse us."

Later, he wondered if he had been too mean.  Not mean enough, I said.  But actually, what is the point? 

Still, what a depressing encounter.

Torture

Last night, during the debate, McCain admitted that his administration, or at least the Bush administration he has supported 90% of the time, despite his cute comments about how he's not "Miss Congeniality" and how he's a "Maverick," has, in fact, tortured prisoners.

This is no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, so I didn't blink when he made the admission -- or rather, the promise to the people that if he was elected he'd make sure no"American" prisoners were tortured ever again (screw any other prisoners -- business as usual with them).

Notice where that leaves guys like this.

Given what Rice and the rest have been revealing about what went on in the Bush White House, well, why be appalled now, but I am made ill by my country -- by these things being done in my country's name.  When Obama says that he will make America's respected again around the world, I say Yes.  That's what I want.  Bush has made us liars and torturers and pirates.  I want us to be the good guys again.

America the Beautiful

You want to know why McCain is still so close to Obama, despite being so inept he picked a VP who knows nothing about American History, economics, foreign policy, who can't think on her feet, who supports a culture of rape, who is a total misogynist -- yeah I could go on -- who himself can't decide from one day to the next what his policy is, who has demonstrated he is clueless about how to run the country, who lies about everything -- I mean EVERYTHING -- even something so petty as why he's not going to be able to make the Letterman Show -- why, why, why is nearly half the country thinking of voting for this guy?

Well! Lucky for you, my university has been running a non-scientific survey on just this question!  We have butcher paper up all over the U, asking students to write why the right to vote is important to them.  Many of them are, in fact, instead, writing why it is so important to vote for McCain.

Guess why?

Here's some reasons:

*He's the closest thing we have to a Republican!!!1!

*McCain will avoid the EVIL of Obama.

*Obama loves terrorists

*People Died for Your Right to Vote So Vote McCain NOT OBAMA

*McCain is the lesser of two wrongs

*Capitalism Made This Country Great, Vote McCain

*Its a child Not a Choice Obama is For Killing Babies

And, of course, there's the woman I overheard recently, telling another woman that Barak Hussein Obama was from Kenya, after all -- just getting elected to turn us all over to those Africans!  That was his plan!

Sometimes I despair.

*

Cancel What Now?

I had been dealing with my own various crises all day yesterday, and so didn't get to link into the 'sphere until like six last night.

What's the first thing greets my cheery gaze?

McCain has canceled what now?

I began laughing hysterically. Oh, boy, I bet he has.

What's the next announcement? Bush cancels election? Wouldn't be prudent! Not at this time!

(Also: See Dave. B/c McCain isn't ever done with the lying.)

Wow

Thank God this is just a joke!

I mean, seven hundred billion dollars!  That's a lot of money!  Think what we could do with that in this country besides hand it over to a lot of rich thieves on Wall Street!

Health Care For Me

So, bad news first: I have what might be a torn rotator cuff and, in entirely unrelated news, Lyme's disease.  Yay me!  Lyme's disease, if you catch it early and hit it hard enough with enough antibiotic (doxycilian, I think?), should cause no lasting problems, though the bull's-eye rash on my knee is so impressive everyone at the clinic had to be called in to view it, and my doctor wanted to take a picture.

The rotator cuff, well: that is causing me serious...no, serious is not the word.  Agonizing?  Vicious?  Amazing?  Astounding pain.  Who knew pain could reach this level?  Me with my migraines and childbirth stories and remember I had gall-bladder issues.  This is a whole new place of pain!  Oh boy!

I've got a fat new bottle of Vicodin and I can see already it won't last long.  Ten of them got me through last night.  mr. delagar kept thumping (I was wailing in my sleep) telling me, "Go take another one."  (I was drugged enough to sleep but not enough to let him sleep.)

The good news?  Our University just, like two months ago, got us a semi-socialized clinic.  Yay!  So I do actually have medical care.

This is opposed to all summer long, when I did not, because the doctors we had been seeing cut us off because we were unable to pay off what we owed them at the rate they thought we ought to be paying them.  (We owed twenty-five hundred dollars, that's over and above what the insurance had already paid, which I was paying off at the rate of fifty a month, that's all I could manage, considering mr. delagar's a diabetic and I'm on five different meds, so our monthly medical expenses are already fairly steep -- fifty a month was not enough: one day when I called for an appointment, they wanted me to give them five hundred dollars: that day, right then, or they were giving us no further medical treatment.  I offered them two hundred, all I had left in the bank just then.  Nope.  Five hundred or fuck off.  I pointed out I needed my prescriptions refilled, that I was a cancer survivor, and that these prescriptions were necessary, that I would die, literally, without them.  Fine, they said, cough up five hundred dollars then.)

I love American Health Care, don't you?

Anyway, I went to a doc in the box, and got the scripts refilled, but we had been doing without health care since.  (The docs above turned us over to a collection agency, even though I continued to pay fifty dollars every month.)

Now we have our university-sponsored semi-socialized health-care clinic, where the doctors don't do anything but practice medicine, where I never have to wait three hours to see the doctor (as I usually did at the previous place), where I don't get told, every third or fourth call, as I always did at the last place, that the doctor is "too busy" to see me, so I'll have to try a doc in the box if I'm "really sick," where I have to do research beforehand myself and tell the doctor what the problem is, if I don't want to end up paying for five or six hugely expensive tests I won't need, because the doctor is too busy to actually figure out what is wrong with me, and is taking the shotgun approach to medicine.

Also? because it's semi-socialized medicine, which means the university sort-of owns it?  Our health insurance totally covers it.  I get bills, but every single one of them says Patient Owes $OO.OO.

Boy, do I like reading that.

So...

We can't afford universal health care, or Pell Grants that actually pay enough to get students through school, or a system of trains that would replace these cars that are destroying our planet.

But we can afford a useless war that is costing us ten billion a month, is it, and we absolutely can afford to bail out these thieving bankers?  Do I have that straight?

Just checking.

Oh -- and while we're on it, remember how the Right is always telling us on the Left it's not fair to be always wanting to tax those rich folk so much cause it's their money, they earned their twenty million a year, it's class warfare, wanting these tax rates of 34 percent and so on, shut up and suck it up and live on our twenty-two hundred a year and do without medical care, it's our fault, should a been born rich if we ain't like it?

Well, okay, then: now that we're bailing out these fuckers, can we make them give some of that money back now?  Out of the money they made, say, just last year off of this crashing markey that we're now bailing out for them?  Money from my tax dollars?

Or is that still class warfare?

Is that still not fair?

Is it only socialism when the poor want it from the rich, and not the other way around?

These rules are so complicated.

Yay!

Bitch met its fund-raising goal in only 3 days!  Good for us!

Bleg

Bitch needs money.

I know we're all broke, but throw'm a couple ten bucks if you can!

On the Other Hand..

Bardiac cheers us up.

See now? It's not all darkness and evil out there.

Racist? Palin Racist?

How can Palin be racist, her supporters are claiming, when she married a guy who is half-Innuit?


I'm reminded of Sheriff Harry Lee, our guy in Jefferson Parish, who ordered his officers to arrest any black men who were seen on the streets of Kenner, Louisiana, on the obvious (to him) cause that no black man has any legitimate business walking the streets of that (mainly white) neighborhood. When he was called on the racism of this order, he said, "How can I be racist? I'm Chinese!"


There's one source, which you might have heard already, which says that Palin, having heard that Obama won the nomination, remarked, "So Sambo beat the bitch!" I've held off blogging about that one; but here's this one: Palin only has white folks on her staff (white folks she went to high school with, btw): when confronted with this?


While meeting with Black leaders concerning the absence of any African Americans on her staff, Gov. Palin responded that she doesn’t have to hire any Blacks and was not intending to hire any.


This makes me even more cranky than it might because I've been reading this book, Slavery By Another Name, which is utterly horrifying --Douglas Blackmon writes about what happened to the freed slaves and then black men in America after the Civil War, up to 1930s/1940s, which is, essentially, they were stolen from their communities, their jobs, their towns, convicted on invented charges (changing jobs without permissing, vagrancy, "loud talking") and then "leased" to mines, public works projects, U.S. Steel, along with various large landowners -- leased as in sold them as contract labor.

White-owned corporations, white landowners, white America, abetted by the white justice system, right up through the 1940s, profitted enormously off the stolen labor of black America: not black American criminals: black Americans that white Americans thieved into forced labor and then worked to death in a system as evil as anything the Nazis dreamed up (in the mines and camps of U.S. Steel and Tennessee Coal and Oil, as many as half the contract laborers died, according the meticulous records kept -- records, by the way, that record whippings given and feet and legs amputated due to the blood poisoning from the leg irons and various chain "punishments" inflicted on obdurated contract laborers.)

When I read this sort of thing, and this, where Brad Hicks talks about the real purpose of lynching (not to kill "uppity" black folks, but to terrorize blacks into selling their land to whites -- and yes, historical evidence exists to support this theory), and then I hear Palin and McSame and their crew, I don't have to hire any of them and I don't intend to, and when I look at this election, again? Again we're going to put these evil people in power?

Again, America?

What About That Book Banning?

It's pretty clear that Palin did not try to ban that list of books that's been floating around the internet.

On the other hand, if you've been watching Fox News and CNN, the paid dogs of the Republican Camp have now begun barking about how Palin never ever tried even thought about banning books.  And out on the campaign trail she's beaming her Palin smirk and saying it's an "old wives tale!"  Me ban books!  Never!

Because you know these Fundamentalist Christians!  They love Free Thought!  Honest!

Here, over at Kevin Drum's site, he gives us the lowdown, which is that, no, she never managed to get the local librarian to actually cooperate (cause, you know, most librarians are tough cookies about issues like banning books, if you have ever actually met a librarian) but that doesn't mean Sarah Barracuda didn't try.

Among the books she, honest, never ever thought about banning?  Daddy's Roommate, Go Ask Alice, and Pastor Am I Gay.  Also, when her charming Fundamentalist church could not get the librarian to yank these books from the shelves, they did what the local churches here in Pork Smith have been known to do: disappeared them from the shelves!  Because, you know, God wants you to commit theft if it's for Jesus.

Hmm

Here's AmericaBlog's take on the Rapekit scandal, which basically argues that Palin required rape victims to pay for their own rape kits because to do otherwise would, in fact, encourage them to report the rapes, which would encourage them to acknowledge they had been raped, which might, in fact, lead to them possibly aborting the rapist's child.

This woman is one sick puppy.

Update on Rapekits

Well, now -- according to information uncovered by Huffington Post, Palin not only was on watch while her Sheriff was charging rape victims for their rape kits: Palin not only knew her Sheriff, the one she hired, was charging victims for their rape kits: Palin not only signed off on the policy of charging victims for their rape kits: Palin very well may have instituted the policy in Wasilla of charging victims for their rape kits.

Mind you, it was legal in Alaska to charge victims for their rape kits (as it apparently also is in NC and various other states) but previous to Ms. Sarah Palin's tenure no one was such a horrible person to think that was an appropriate action.

Really.  Seriously.  Fuck's sake.  What sort of evil heart does a human being have to have to think that's right action?

And we want her to quite possibly lead our nation?

Update:

This is from the USA Today article on the Rapekit-Gate:

"In 2000 there were 497 rapes reported in Alaska...That's a rate of 79.3 per 100,000 residents, the highest in the nation."  Which, why wouldn't the state have the highest in the nation, with this attitude toward rape?  Ms. Palin believes (a) a woman should have to bear the child of her rapist and (b) should have to bear the costs of prosecuting that rapist if she's bold and brave enough to bring charges against him.  What sort of message is she sending to the potential rapist in her state?  She's made it legal to shoot wolves from the air; she's all but made it open season on women, too.  Patriarchy much?

And, yes, Alaska wasn't the only place this was going on -- which was why Congress passed a law requiring states to provide rape kits free of charge to the victims in 2005.  Guess who was a co-sponsor of that bill?  Guess who was not? Yes, that would be Obama for the former, and our buddy McCain for the latter.

Republicans: We Support the Culture of Rape!

My Man Obama

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!

Go read this.

Watch the video. This is who should be President. Why is this contest even close?

Hey, it's just a word

You know, uppity -- not a racist word!

Just ask them white guys from Georgia. They'll explain it all to you.

Christ

Not that it will matter, since no one cares what the Right does, but look at this: while Palin was mayor of Wasilla? If a woman was raped there, and reported the rape? The city would charge her for the forensic kit.

Her own fault, after all, for leaving the house while female. Who else should pay? The good pure abstinent Christian citizens? I think not!

Deja vu all over again, or I'm Depressed

2000. 2004. 2008?

Crap, I hope not. If this country is stupid enough to buy these lies one more time -- how can we be? I thought, no. Not after Bush. Not after Bush AGAIN. Not after Bush lied and tortured and destroyed their ecosystem and stripped away their civil rights and destroyed the economy and took their jobs and murdered their children and put them in a war which now even most of them can see is stupid and useless, not to mention criminal, now, I said, now, surely this time--

But no. Dance a shiny puppet in front of them who is spitting pretty words (Country first! America Great! Liberals Bad! You Rock!) and that's it.

You'll never go broke, as the man said.

Republican America

Here's their country: the way they like it. Over on Althouse they were cheering this shit. McCain gets in, this is how they'll run the country for all of us.

Yet More Palin!!

The hits keep rolling in!!

From a 2006 Eagle Forum candidate questionnaire:

Q: Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance?  Why or Why not?

Sarah Palin: Not on your life.  If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me.

(Via Uggabugga)

More Palin

Urk:

Before she was elected governor, she was mayor of a tiny Anchorage suburb, where[...]she also sought to have books banned from the local library and threatened to fire the librarian.

Can't we declare this race over now?

(mr. delagar wonders when the naked photos of Palin will appear.)

Palin and Sex Ed

Some have been claiming that Palin is okay with using contraception -- um, no.

Here's a post on her actual positions, including that one.

(I suppose it could be possible that she's fine with her children using it -- she just doesn't want anyone else to have access to it. I've heard there are compassionate conservatives around like that.)

(This is OT, but also adorable. Someone tell me again how thoroughly McCain vetted this candidate?)

We Don't Need No Sex Education

Okay, well:

Bristol Palin, one of Alaska Gov. Palin's five children with her husband, Todd, is about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, the Palins said in a statement released by the campaign...

I just seriously don't even know what to say about this.

The problem obviously isn't her having the kid -- I'm pro-choice.  She's a woman, even if she's 17, and I'm hoping the decision was left up to her (I'll keep my doubts on that score to myself).

The problem is -- five months pregnant? How are we just now dealing with this?  Why is Bristol afraid to tell her parents about this before now?  What kind of family values do we have in this house?  What kind of judgment have we been teaching our kids?  Also, how's this seventeen year old not being taught about birth control? (Or is that something Ms. Sarah Feminist for Life Palin also doesn't believe in?  Was Bristol supposed to Just Say No?  Did she get the Abstinence Only Sex-Ed?)  

Also, what kind of tool is John McCain, who claims he knew about Bristol's pregnancy (yeah, I believe it too) and chose Palin anyway.

I could go on, but I'll leave further objections to the class.

Gustav

My family is out & safe; my brother and SIL with the new baby and the newly refurbished house in Gentily (they just paid off the Home Depot credit cards with the Road Home check) are biting their nails as they watch the storm track in.  Those new levees don't look good, I hear.  Here's hoping they hold.