One of the more interesting takes on the whole teen pregnancy upset was given to me by Brian Weber, a 25-year-old delegate from Dodge City, Ks:
“I don’t think it’ll have an effect on elections. I think Palin’s daughter’s choice to have her baby will ring true with Americans.”
Weber says he has spoken to many delegates from many states, all of whom say this hasn’t shaken their faith in the McCain/Palin ticket; instead, Weber said, they feel this is proof that the pro-life conviction can be put into action by anyone in any sphere of life. That view is shared by James Dobson, founder of the conservative Focus on the Family. According to an NPR story, he:
“commending the Palins ‘for not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances.’ He added: ‘Being a Christian does not mean you’re perfect. Nor does it mean your children are perfect. But it does mean there is forgiveness and restoration when we confess our imperfections to the Lord.'”
It’s an interesting premise, a twist on the Obama-eschewed-a-high-paying-corporate-law-job-to-help-the-people or McCain-suffered-in-a-POW-camp-he-knows-the-horrors-of-war. Here it’s Palin who has chosen belief over facility (though it undoubtedly would have been much worse had the story of her teenage daughter’s abortion broke). Will she lose McCain supporters for standing by her daughter through a teen pregnancy? Probably not. Will she gain fence-sitters for sticking to her principles? It’s not clear. But in my opinion, this can’t alienate Palin from voters any more than her strange resume already might.
That’s just my opinion though.
I’ll be headed to a Ron Paul rally later today, which I hope to post about. My laptop has a virus on it, so I can’t post a picture I have of some Paulites doing their thing in front of MSNBC cameras, but I plan on posting all the pics I’ve taken so far tonight, using the hotel computer.
loved it. how dare obama mock ibanking. he deserved the hit.
wow. game changer. mccain’s got great instincts. now, thats a real feminist.
102 · Manju said
you meant pimp?
great speech! pity this will be the face of female republican politics.
102 · Manju said
yes, complete with beta-izing her hubby on national tv, “oh, you’re so cute with your commercial fishing and ice machine racing.”
104 · Nayagan said
yeah, seeing the husband holding the baby was the single most dramatic feminist symbol in american history
and the repubs are gettin in on the xenophobia game .. american jobs/american workers rah rah rah. but i am sure manju is still comfortable with them ‘cuz they keep his taxes low and are feminists.
holy crop. hillary’s wolfson is gushing on fox, saying obama must be shaking or something. if the clinton camp fans the flames obama could be in trouble.
106 · moralize this said
i didn’t hear that honestly, expect in relation to low taxes. didn’t hear any jobs to india rhetoric like warner or american jobs going overseas like hillary. just some folksy my sis bought a gas station stuff.
107 · Manju said
I have also heard that when a manbearpig in the Caucuses (gawd that’s so hard to say!) flaps it’s wings, 50 Chadian children find loving French abductors.
100 · Manju said
That depends on how much you love the GOP I guess! In my household I was forced to change the channel! A Trite speech, I would say.
108 · Manju said
I assume you were also unaware of the ‘let’s stick it to the evil oil companies..and look how I
raised taxesdid it in Alaska” portion of Palin’s speech. Or the frequent allusions to the threat of foreign oil and mentions of evil tyrants in the middle east.110 · KarmaByte said
i honestly don’t have a dog in the fight, b/c if you haven’t noticed, i’ve heaped praise on obama. so i’m its easy for me to have a sense of detachment about this very entertaining election. i’m Machiavellian Manju at this point.
the speech was a political winner. she’s very formidable. And most importantly, the immediate belittling of her by sullivan and kos appears, and i’m not saying it is, appears misogynistic and classist….that’s waht i learned from the PUMAs. these peckerheads just permanently assigned the elitist tag on obama, who doesn’t deserve it but its guilt by association. thats politcs. they were jerks. worse than jerks. they were jerks who hurt themselves. yeah, beat up a 17 yr old, that’s the way to win.
111 · Nayagan said
well there are evil tyrants in the middle east, though i didn’t hear her mention it. foreign oil is more a populist anti-big biz codeword, not really and xenophobia dogwhistle. after all, it refers to corporations and monarchies and governments, not poor individuals in bangalore who take american jobs.
i feel your pain. is frustrating. the dems are usually better on these issues. but they really stepped in it this election cycle: first and foremost with obama racism, then with clinton misogyny, follwed by anti-indian xenephobia by both clinton and obama, and now beating up a 17yr old b/c her moms allegedly a hypocrite for not being a liberal.
113 · Manju said
cheering AIDS rates in non-whites is pretty dung-stepping as well.
114 · Nayagan said
did you read the link? the crowd didn’t chear. stone ass silence. kudos to them. Rios sounds like an ass. If you said how’d she even get to speak at the convention, i’d say you got me.
so the ‘small roar of applause’ was all for Dole? the spirit of 96 lives on!!!!
112 · Manju said
I was thinking the same thing–THIS IS BETTER THAN PRO-WRESTLING!!!–until I remembered that people are dying and entire generations are being uprooted and untethered on account of this last Cheney/Rumsfeld administration.
Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran. And then send them more cigarettes to kill them quicker. Gooooooo TEAM!!!
It’s not pro-wrestling.
112 · Manju said
I believe ya :), the speech worked up the excel center no doubt. But I wonder if it will change the odds on her getting dumped!
One thing McCain did achieve is to take the attention away from himself! Have to see how his speech goes tomorrow.
The Republicans are probably going to get a big bump in the polls after the very effective speeches by Giuliani and Palin. This election is turning into a contest between Obama and Palin. You could say that the Republicans have found their Obama, as some right winger exulted on TV.
118 · KarmaByte said
yeah, i wathing inttrade too. nothing’s as honest as money. i predict the odds of her departing will plummet.
o god, its like a creepy old pedophile reading to children. really. i’m not being hyperbolic.
that’s exactly how i read it. i report, u decide:
“We’re in the run-up to the big speeches, when speakers like Dr. Elena Rios of the Hispanic Medical Association are prodded onstage with a half-hearted “knock ’em dead, kid” to address an uninterested audience. Rios, though, was entertainingly off-message. By the year 2032, she said, minorities will make up a majority of our population! Dead silence. John McCain understands this! Yet more silence. Then, when Rios warned the crowd about the high rate of AIDS in non-white women, higher than it is among white women, a small roar of applause went up on the left of the stage. Sen. Bob Dole was walking the floor, saying hi.”
120 · Manju said
What do you call betting on betting again? Isn’t that what this whole financial meltdown is about?
I am sure many women, including hard core feminists who disagree with her social conservatism, would day Yes! to that 🙂
You could see that the women in the audience were ecstatic. Cindy McCain’s open mouthed euphoria when Palin finished her speech was exactly how the athletes reacted when they won their gold medals in the Olympics.
122 · Harbeer said
Heh..a new derivative!
Hey, valmiki…ur spot on in ur last 2 observations. its good to lose ones morality once in a while to see the world as it is, not as it should be. T’isn’t it?
125 · Manju said
Alinsky? Ayers? Turror?
I think the most memorable portion of the night was when Rudy remarks “only in america!” in reference to Obama’s rise and the crowd find it a good time to have a chuckle. Those precious minorities. That and wishing he had the chemical assistance necessary to make a comparison between governing Wasila and governing New York. (and the failure to mention McCain-Feingold–the Fred T. allusion was weak sauce).
108 · Manju said
i know.
117 · Harbeer said
That’s exactly what last night at the RNC felt like! With the speeches void of substance but full of mean-spirited insults and a crowd of fat white people booing the “enemy”, i thought i was watching WWF. Or at least Jerry Springer (“Drill, baby, drill”)
Attacks, praise stretch truth at GOP convention
Anybody notice the Hottest Gov. buttons on the convention floor? I guess its part of the strategy to appeal to the red blooded males 😉
No, I think it’s more about easy credit, and betting, in general, on margin (see: Yen carry trade – pure speculation based on low japanese interest rates and high interest rates in Australia and New Zealand, which convinced Japanese housewives and many others to keep speculating). But certainly convoluted processes of “risk sharing” without agencies / companies acting in the best interests of those betting (investors) certainly didn’t help.
There was too much dishonesty in Sarah Palin’s, Rudy Giuliani’s and most others’ speeches last night:
She boasted again that she said no to the “bridge to nowhere”, and got a tepid response from the audience who knew that was a self-serving half-truth.
She lied about Obama’s tax plans.
She (and Giuliani) were dishonest (and contemptuous) in comparing Obama’s community service to her stint as mayor of a very small town. The correct comparison is Obama’s 8 years as state senator of the large state of Illinois (which includes the third largest city in America) to Palin’s 8 years as mayor of a small town of around 6000 people; and Obama’s three and a half years as US Senator to Palin’s one and a half years as Governor of a state with a population of less than a million.
She, and even more so Giuliani, mocked Obama’s lack of executive experience even though the top of their own ticket, McCain, is also lacking in that department.
133 · Valmiki said
seems like they were making the case for palin to be president and mccain to be veep. he can even learn at her feet.
@ 133 Valmiki
Nope, weak points…if you want a pissing match, you’ve got to try harder.
It seems very rare that you’re not Machiavellian Manju. I would like to see you defend the hyperbole in the first sentence. I haven’t seen the speech, but it’s hard for me to imagine that a woman running on a rabidly anti-woman ticket the head of whom offered his wife naked to a bunch of bikers recently said ANYTHING that, in context, can be understood as “the single most dramatic feminist symbol in american history.” As a result, when you’re making the argument that you have no “dog in the fight”, it strikes me as a bit disingenusous – you self-identify as a republican, even if you are more in the middle of a presidential campaign between a centrist and a far right winger with idiosyncratic quirks.
heh!
McCain had criticized earmarks from Palin
This is absurd. It’s populist AND xenophobic. “foreign oil” = “middle eastern oil” = “Muslim.” And the people who work in jobs in Bangalore that are outsourced are hardly poor by Indian standards, though they are “poor” by global standards. Moreover, if the outsourcing attacks can be tied to moving the U.S. government away from “free trade” (= the imposition of U.S. economic ideologies on the rest of the world), then I’ll take it. It’s not actually anti-Indian – it’s anti-Indian elite / probably intermediate class, even if it’s not heard or understood that way in America.
But good try.
105 · Manju said
I thought that was pretty well diminished by the heaps of praise regarding Palin’s speech that McCain laid on Palin’s
masterhusband rather than on Palin herself.134 · moralize this said
I agree. Moreover, Guiliani and Palin mocking Obama’s experience as a community organizer was very disrespectful and distasteful not only to Obama but the communities he worked in — as if addressing the problems found in those communities were a trivial and unworthy job. However, I’ll be the first to say that Palin’s speech was very effective and did its job in rallying the Repubs. Hopefully, the Democrat spin doctors will do a good job of highlighting her disingenuous blab on the ‘bridge to nowhere.’ And, either clarifying or relegating Obama’s ‘present’ votes on to the political backburner will help him a lot.
140 · portmanteau said
It doesn’t seem like Obama did much for them. They’re still in the same sorry state and from the interviews I’ve seen with residents nobody can remember anything Obama did other than being polite and nice. I think he disrespected those communities a lot more than Palin or Giulani did. Plus, they’re mocking him because he insisted on deriding her experience.
136 · Dr AmNonymous said
a republican who actually votes based on the eternal issues decided by the supreme court, i.e. cultural issues. no wonder mccain doesn’t excite him as much as palin does.
is it just me or does Sarah Palin has a striking resemblence to Tina Fey ( SNL, 30 Rock)?
For a woman who wants to keep her family affairs private it seemed odd to see so much parading on the stage last night of them.
Yeah all parties bring their families but the hand holding of the teenagers etc just seemed a little ott.
131 · KarmaByte said
And the “Hoosiers for Hot Chicks” button with a picture of Palin.. haha
Yes, right from the announcement, it has been a big part of their strategy. Well-planned and relentlessly pursued.
Among the talk radio hosts that overlap with my commute, Rush in the morning is focusing on the “femininity” angle contrasting her with Hillary — “she is not shrill. she does not remind guys of their ex-wives. rather they wish she was single. she wears skirts — no more pantsuits.” etc. In the afternoon, Brian (bay area local) and Levine are playing up the no-nonsense outdoorsy-tough-buddy-ready-to-go-hunting angle — “she reminds me so much of my wife; whenever i am in doubt, she sets me straight. any secure man will be very attracted to her”.
This two-pronged approach is necessary because some of the must-win states are in Appalachia and the rest is in the west.
Sarah Palin: celebrity.
I think this is the crowning convention of contradictions:
Give us 4 more years, and we promise we won’t break washington like we did the last 8.
Many conservatives, who spent a generation ridiculing the politics of victimhood and group identity, are now zealously invoking both in the Twin Cities.
Just last spring, Palin herself scoffed when Hillary Clinton’s campaign complained about a double standard in coverage.
PALIN on SEXISM – “When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism, or maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, ‘Man, that doesn’t do us any good, women in politics, or women in general, trying to progress this country,’ †Palin said.
Now, McCain’s team is urgently recruiting female surrogates and loudly crying sexism to deflect legitimate inquiries into Palin’s experience, her record, and the last-minute, improvisational process by which McCain chose a small-state governor who was elected in 2006 after serving of mayor of small-town Wasilla, a far suburb of Anchorage.
🙂 Look who’s whining now.
The many media outlets that I’ve see have shown Americans having sexist concerns about Palin – It’s not coming from the Dem’s camp, as far as I can see. I was watching the Today show and an anchor was just interviewing women (the anchor wasn’t espousing these views), and the interviewed women expressed (what to me) are sexist views such as, “How can she give birth to a downs-syndrome baby and go so soon back to work, etc”.
It is sexist, but coming from the Repub camp from Palin w/ her disgusting before statement to Hillary, who had to deal with quite a bit of sexism, is a joke. And I don’t see these sexist attitudes coming from the Obama campaign right now. The tv shows are just showing what some sexist men and women feel.