And she happens to be a woman who hunts and wants to drill for oil.
Governor Sarah Palin is a member of Feminists for Life who lives her values. A year after her election as Alaska's governor, the 44 year old Mrs. Palin, already the mother of 4 children, discovered she was pregnant. Prenatal testing showed that the little boy had Down's syndrome, which results from getting an extra copy of Chromosome 21 from either the mother or the father. The baby is nearly 4 months old now. He is cared for by both his mother and father, Todd Palin.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Pro-life Governor tapped for GOP VP
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7 comments:
Unfortunately tolerence will not be a part of a gop platform any time in the near future.
That's a broad statement, what.
Perhaps you'd care to explain, along with your definition of "tolerance."
She is being hit by scandal after scandal right now - all the skeletons being dragged out the closet at once.
- The 'pro-family' faction is a little upset that she has five children, of whome one is seriously disabled and one is about to have a child of their own at the age of seventeen, and yet is still trying to get a job so demanding on time as vice president with a good chance of becoming president considering McCain's age. She may walk the talk on pro-life, but her concern for her own family seems a little lacking.
- She is strongly opposed to contraceptive education. Republicans are fine with this, but it's making the undecided voters a bit nervous. Both because the undecideds usually support comprehensive sex ed to some extent, and because of concerns that she is also opposed to contraception in general, and may try to make it less accessible.
- Her pro-life views are also putting moderats in doubt - while many of those would support some restrictions on abortion, Palin is one of the 'no exceptions' group: If abortion is the only way to save the life of a woman, Palin would rather let both woman and fetus die than allow an abortion. Such views may win her the pro-life vote, but moderates just fear going from one extreme to the other.
- In a tidy bit of political symmetry, she has a pastor-scandal: The pastor of the church she has attended for twenty years and even given speeches at believes that terrorist attacks on Israel are God's punishment on the Jews for rejecting Christ.
- Her public boasts about fighting earmarks appear to be a lie: Under her governship there were a great many earmarks, and even the Bridge to Nowhere she voted in favor of before she switched to oppose it. Even the requested budget for 2009 holds a few, including $3.2m for 'seal and sea lion research.'
- Her knowledge of history seems to be a bit dubious - in particular, she believes the US was founded as an exclusively Christian country. Again, this makes the undecideds very nervous.
- She used to be a member of a party campaigning for Alyaska to seceed from the US.
- Currently under investigation by an ethics panel for firing the Alyaska Public Safely Commissioner shortly after he divorced her sister. She insists this was for 'performance reasons,' he claimed it was because of his personal dispute with her family. Though the case went to court, it was inconclusive: The judge decided that the safety commissioner may be fired for any reason or none, in the absence of a specific law stating otherwise.
- Loyalty demands while mayor: She fired the chief of police and library director for, as she put it, "not fully supporting her efforts to govern." The fact that they both supported her opponent in the election might have something to do with it. The fireings were both without warning. City officials report she was fiercely demanding of loyalty - it was made clear that anyone who questioned or criticised her would be risking their employment.
The good news for Palin supporters is that it's the start of September right now, and the public has a short attention span. By election day, all these scandels will be old news and long forgotten.
What an amazing thing for any man or woman to sacrifice their private lives for public service!
To do so in these days of divisive politics and tabloid media, and then to sit on display all week proves courage, at least.
Or they actually believe what they say they believe, and they are human, not caricatured straw men.
You've repeated the current talking points, pointing out that the division you underline is really about abortion.
However,SR, if these are "all at once," the list is pretty short and ordinary.
None of your points are accompanied by references and each of them is skewed toward exaggeration in order to make some purely political point, to widen the division.
I don't think it will work. The Palins really point out our common ground more than our division.
We know that Bristol is pregnant, but did you know that I eloped my senior year (my parents grounded me just as I turned 18, I fixed *them*.)
Did you see that I was noted as being against comprehensive sex ed in Texas Monthly this spring?
Finally, if a newly elected official has hiring and firing power, it must be because someone thought they'd need it. Or should be responsible for that position.
I was writing from memory - if you need references, google news can probably provide whatever you need.
As for abortion, only one of my nine items was abortion-related. The issue there isn't that she is pro-life, but that she is *too* pro-life. Enough to scare moderates, who would support imposing further restrictions on abortion but not to the no-exceptions extreme that Palin would wish. If she were merely of the 'abortion should be banned, except in cases of rape, incest, or for medical purposes' camp she would easily get majority support for that position. But the 'no abortion, ever, even if it means allowing women to die needlessly' position is just getting moderates worried. They don't want abortion on demand, but they don't want her view either.
These are all coming at once, but that's for simple enough reasons: She is suddenly somebody. All these have been local scandals in the past, of no great note. Suddenly she has been lifted into national politics, and all the long-past accumulated unpleasantness she has accumulated has hit the spotlight. Things that were old news before are getting a second chance. This hasn't all happened at once, it's just all become news at once.
The librarian story is a lie:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122098339946615609.html?mod=Best+of+the+Web+Today
The book-banner tale seems to have originated in a widely circulated Aug. 31 email from Anne Kilkenny, who is not a "South Park" character but a Wasilla resident and harsh Palin critic:
While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.
On Sept. 2, Time magazine repeated the tale, attributing it to John Stein, Palin's predecessor as mayor, whom she defeated in the 1996 election:
Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.
The same day, Blogress Jessamyn West, a Vermont librarian, posted the Time story to her site, Librarian.net, and added that "Mary Ellen Baker resigned from her library director job in 1999."
A reader of the blog named Andrew AuCoin then posted "the list of books Palin tried to have banned"--90 of them in all. Another reader, Charlie Brown, noticed that the list actually seemed to originate at this page--where it appears under the headline "Books Banned at One Time or Another in the United States." But the phony list was already making its way around the Internet. On Sept. 6, a reader forwarded it to us, having received it from a friend, who received it from another friend, who received it from her mother, a librarian.
As it turns out, not only was the list a fake, but when the Anchorage Daily News investigated the story, it found no evidence that Palin had ever sought to remove books from the library. Baker (who was then named Emmons) did tell the local paper back in 1996 that Palin asked her, in the Daily News's words, "about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose." Emmons "flatly refused to consider any kind of censorship."
Kilkenny makes an appearance in the Daily News story, quoting Palin as asking Baker at a City Council meeting, " 'What would be your response if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?' " Baker's response was firm and negative, according to Kilkenny, who acknowledges that Palin did not cite any specific books for removal.
The chairman of the Alaska Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee tells the Daily News that there is no evidence in her files of any censorship at the Wasilla library. As for Baker's resignation, it appears to be unrelated to the putative censorship:
Palin told the Daily News back then the letters were just a test of loyalty as she took on the mayor's job, which she'd won from three-term mayor John Stein in a hard-fought election. Stein had hired many of the department heads. Both Emmons [i.e., Baker] and Stambaugh had publicly supported him against Palin.
Emmons survived the loyalty test and a second one a few months later. She resigned in August 1999, two months before Palin was voted in for a second mayoral term.
Yet the myth that Sarah Palin is a "book banner" has taken hold, at least on the left. It shows up, for instance, in two Salon articles (here and here) today.
All of those accusations except the pro-life views of the Governor are pretty much false, according to this article posted on MSNBC.
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