In a quick look at non political blogs that talked about Sarah Palin people say not to judge her based on her values. One even said she has good family values implying most of the rest of us don’t. I don’t think that’s what the blogger meant to say judging by other parts of the blog

The New York Times (a paper I will read on weekends forever or until my dotage) public editor was slightly defensive in his defense of the paper’s coverage of her. He did say the FBI hadn’t vetted her before the announcement. Actually only one person asked questions about her before the announcement

By choosing a running mate unknown to most of the nation, and doing so just before the Republican National Convention, John McCain made it inevitable that there would be a frantic media vetting. It turns out that Palin was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it, that she sent e-mail complaining about a lack of disciplinary action against a state trooper who was going through a messy custody battle with her sister, and that she never made a decision as commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard, one of her qualifications cited by McCain

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There’s enough in that paragraph alone to wonder about her qualifications. I don’t care that Todd had a DUI over 20 years ago. I might care that he was a member of a separatist party. Yet if Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin’s plan for New York City to succeed from the state had taken off I might have joined it. That I was only eighteen wouldn’t have mattered in the long run and some people (well, me) remember Mailer not only for his brilliant writing but for his championing of a killer who killed again when Mailer got him out. That’s two things people could use against me before I even hit 20–there’s more but I’m not running for office and understand that we live in Google forever now.

The point is we live in an age when every little decision we make at every stage of our lives can both boomerang and come back to hit you in the face. Only the decision Sarah Palin made not to talk about her daughter Bristol’s pregnancy is neither in the past nor irrelevant to her future. It has everything to do with her “qualification” to be VP and probably President if McCain wins because just look at him.

I’m not Christian. This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in “Christian values.” It does mean that Palin presented her daughter’s pregnancy in a way that was a slap in the face to everybody who has different beliefs than her. The public doesn’t have a right to know usually. This isn’t “usually.”

As an adoptee I might have liked to have heard her mention discussing adoption with Bristol. I would have liked to have known that her daughter knew about safe se_ because if Palin and McCain do win they will do everything in their power to stop that from being taught to teenagers and any study will show that abstinence only doesn’t work.

People keep telling us to “play nice.” Ask the Democrats who saw themselves portrayed on Recount how they felt as being portrayed as decent, honorable but inept people.

This coming week will be the seventh anniversary of 9/11. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened with Gore as president. For proof of that one only has to look at the 8/6 memo that Gore wouldn’t have slept on.

Bloggers were told during Katrina we couldn’t cast blame and help at the same time. We could and we did.

The USA is one giant mess. We all felt so good and became complacent as we believed that the radical right was a dead force. To have to live with the consequences of that belief is beyond my comprehension.

I and most”liberals” don’t care what kind of mother Sarah Palin is. That’s none of our business. It is our business to care that she’s trying to foist her values on us.

I’m not going to dredge out the original draft of The First Amendment again–the one that very distinctly spelled out that church and state shouldn’t meet. When people haughtily talk about how “under God” was good enough for the founding father’s they should remember that Madison and Jefferson cared more about separating God from government than anything else.

We can’t and won’t give Palin a free pass. We did that to Bush after 9/11 and suffered. If we say anything negative about Palin, we’re talking se_ism.

I have never defined myself as a feminist but I married young and kept my last name at a time when that entailed walking around with a marriage certificate for banks, apartments, even some hotels. The only male I have ever been dependent upon for money I called “daddy” and that kind of went with the job description.

I’m buying a free standing house and one of the reasons I think I’m so into this is because i am an economically empowered woman and owning a house represents the final challenge. One day, in the townhouse, I thought “what responsibility is missing here? Roofs,” and I realized that I could dial a roofer with the best of them. Though my nail tips (long story) keep me from doing anything nail related with the ease I once knew, I can be both the girliest woman and the most strident of feminists in one breath.

Don’t call me “se_ist” when my entire adult life has been about challenges.

Don’t think that the choice of Palin is going to go over well with moderates who were sitting on the fence or leaning toward McCain as too many of them have children. And they want their children to learn about responsible se_.

And if people weren’t around when abortion was illegal, it’s up to those of us who were around to tell them that many women chose to have illegal abortions in unsafe conditions. The daughter of close friends of my parents died of sepsis when I was fifteen. It’s something that stays with you for life. So needless. The parents were affluent, but the daughter felt she couldn’t confide in them. By that I mean the daughter could have gotten a safe abortion.

We can’t go back to those days. There is a very real possibility that if McCain and Palin win we will. I understand that many girls chose to be teenage mothers but in the world I come from that was not an option–just as abortion isn’t an option to Palin.

I believe that it’s up to the individual who is pregnant.

By saying talking about Bristol’s pregnancy is off limits we’re closing ourselves to a much needed debate. No not a debate–we have to keep abortion legal as girls and women will always have them.

We’re letting them win once again by being nice and we can’t be. The future of our country in every way is at stake.
Here’s the unrequited love of my life Frank Rich.

We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction

Fiction–in an era where everything can be vetted–fact checking is a life style, people look something up on the Internet and call it “research” Palin thinks she’s above the rest of us and can re-invent her life.

I went, not willingly but to support a friend, to the modern version of est the other night–actually the night Palin was giving her speech-and they said you can reinvent your life. I thought how wonderful to live in a world you make that has no basis in reality–reframe yes, see through different lenses, but reinvent? Apparently est and Palin have much in common.

Cooper this post is for you. I think Cooper the secret prognosticator should be the tagline of wonderlandornot, and once a week you should tell some aspect of somebody’s future. Or not.

It’s past time for all Americans who truly understand the Constitution to take a stand. We can’t give this country over to bigots who will do our deciding for us.

I was much moderate, but too much is at stake now, and I live in South Carolina most of the time where I don’t feel free to e_press my views. I will, I need time.

I’m interrupting my eat my way through my last month as a New Yorker for the following post
Three years ago this week I had post up in Blog Critics on Intelligent Design It was a good post and garnered many comments. It would have gotten more but I hysterically tried to stop it. I was told I was Americancentric and many more things.

I bring this up not because I’m enamored with the post, though I am, but because I tried to stop it when it became obvious to me that Katrina was going to be the most deadly storm in my lifetime.

This morning at my bff, Lucia’s we saw Sarah Pallin on Maria Bartiromo’s. Sarah said we’re in war over oil. And I thought first we were in war to find Bin Laden and WMD’s, then to find Hussein.

Of course we’re in war to dominate the MidEast and he or she who dominates gets oil.

How can I write about oil at a time like this? Because they’re already exploiting Gustav and the people of New Orleans–a city I hope is spared but if not is never rebuilt until the levees….and maybe even then.

Sarah Pollin stands for everything I was brought up to and then learned on my own to disdain.

This election’s not about me. Well my old age, and damn it I do deserve a good one. But it’s really about younger generations. Kids just in school who might never get a decent education because of No Child Left Behind, all women–and I can imagine a country without choice where rich girls or girls from affluent families who could tell their families went to other countries or the best doctors who surreptiously performed abortions. Every other girl took her chances.

The Republican’s party already gotten rid of Bush and Cheney. They won’t be hanging at the convention like embarrassing relatives who long ago wore out their welcome.

They’re saying McCain’s a maverick who voted against Bush. Ten percent of the time does not a maverick make.

I don’t usually believe in political parties. I do this year. This year I will vote straight Democratic because this is the election of our lifetime.

There might be up to three new Supreme Court Justices in the next four years.

I thought all this was behind us. I must have been living in a dream world as I focused on moving–which I’m still doing.

But Sarah Pollin–and New Orleans three years to the day. It’s too much.

Three years ago many bloggers didn’t like it when others of us, many of us, said “yes, we can cast blame and help at the same time.” We were proven more right than most of us wanted to be.

I saw somewhere in The Times that Bush said Gustav is deadly serious. I guess we do need comic relief.

I won’t let people forget that Bush didn’t interrupt his vacation; that Condi Rice didn’t think a Secretary of State had anything to do with domestic affairs so she stayed in New York, shopped and saw Spamalot

My friends are all convinced Obama is going to win. I’m not so sure. She orates well. A lot of people who might have been wavering might find her a moral authority or some shit. My friend said he would sleep with her in a second. No he won’t vote for her, but people have based their voting decisions on less
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I had all the restaurants I have eaten in listed and all the ones I plan to were going to be listed. It’s kind of nice that my friends–the same ones who are convinced of an Obama win–have declared this coming month “eat anything month” in my honor. I put on my size too big pants this morning Fortunately they still were.