09.28.08
Posted in News! at 5:51 pm by Anna
Okay folks…
I’ve been away for a while - got incredibly busy with work.
I’m back now to say…I actually feel sorry for Sarah Palin!
I don’t blame the McCain camp for keeping her from the media - she can’t put a sentence together. Her confidence is sinking daily (with good reason), and every interview seems to get worse! I mean, there are 6th graders who can do a better job answering questions about the bailout.
I have lost so much respect for McCain, for putting billions of lives at risk by putting her in a position to be potential prez…Can we impeach a candidate? 
Yesterday’s SNL skit with Tina Fey just nailed it!
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09.12.08
Posted in News! at 12:03 pm by Anna
To Decide
To Choose
To Trust our own best judgement
To Know what is best for our bodies, our families
To Take responsibility for whether or not we have the means & ability to raise a child in the way he/she deserves
Women don’t have the right. It is that simple.
We do not have the right to follow our hearts.
To use the power of our minds.
To guide the course of our own lives.
We don’t have the right. Maybe we’re not smart enough.
Women do not have the right to think our own thoughts.
To revel in our femininity.
To be glad that we are women.
We don’t deserve to be respected, much less adored & admired for the unique, quirky, exquisite creatures that we are.
We don’t have that right. Perhaps we don’t deserve it.
John McCain’s wife Cindy doesn’t have the Right to help him before an interview, without him calling her a C*NT in public, in front of reporters.
She DOES have the right to smile after being humiliated in public, then defend her humiliator during the campaign to fulfill his lifelong dream of attaining glory and power.
Chelsea Clinton doesn’t have the right to be a normal teenager without John McCain making this ugly joke in front of reporters: “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.”
I guess Chelsea, Janet & Hillary don’t have the right to receive respect or common decency either. (But make sure you lay off Bristol, you sleazy media.)
Polar Bears don’t have the right to survive as a species.
The earth doesn’t have the right to be protected, respected, kept in tact.
(But we have the right to destroy it and then wonder why we live in a state of constant natural disaster)
OUR CHILDREN DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE SAFE!
Anyone who tries to teach them how to protect themselves against inappropriate touching or sexual predators should be publicly mocked and portrayed as a predator himself!!
(Like the “honorable” McCain did to Obama in his latest so-called ad.)
We do not have the Right to natural, renewable energy - not as long as the oil companies can still squeeze & screw us for every last penny we own.
Women do not have the RIGHT to make up their own minds about the election either. We must be manipulated by a token woman, a symbol with a skirt, so we blindly follow the blind…to our own defeat and destruction. Cheering all the way, about the latest crack in the glass ceiling.
Women (and men for that matter) do NOT have the right to criticize, question, or do anything other than worship Sarah Palin. If we wonder about her alleged abuses of power, or her lack of basic foreign policy experience, not to mention her extreme world views…we are just SEXIST!
Women DO have the right to do whatever McCain says. To think what he thinks. To do his bidding at every turn. And to take his abuse with a smile. Like Cindy. And like in the dark ages.
Yup, that’s right.
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09.10.08
Posted in News! at 9:52 pm by Anna
AP - Anchorage
In a bizarre turn of events Wednesday night, Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin returned to her home state into the welcome arms of the Alaskan GOP Party, which put on an elaborate rally in support of the Republican Vice Presidential candidate.
The awed Palin was seen mouthing the word, “Wow”, over and over again as she and husband Todd Palin passed their baby son back and forth to each other.
Shortly after the rally however, Governor Palin stunned the audience by saying, “Well I unfortunately don’t have a speechwriter for this occassion, so Alaska for one last time, it’s just you and me.”
At this the crowd proffered a deafening cheer.
Palin then proceeded to list all the names of the people who did not do her bidding when she was “just the Mayor of a tiny town with a $6 million dollar annual budget” in her words. The crowd listened in stunned silence as her voice rose and grew in anger.
Palin continued on with a litany of “unsupportive” and “faithless” people who disagreed with her during her 18 months as Governor of the state; and who refused to align themselves with her “vision of God’s plan.”
The feisty Republican then criticized the Alaskan GOP Party for not jumping to her defense the past few weeks when “the media smeared me”.
With a flick of the hand and nasal whine that would make the Donald himself green with envy, Palin squeeked into the mic, “You’re fired.”
Okay, so that was a silly farsicle. Now the Real Underlying Issue!
If Sarah Palin tried to fire the Wasilla Librarian for refusing to ban books; and allegedly fired a gov’t official for refusing to fire her ex-brother in law…Who else do you think she may have tried to …or wanted to…or thought of…or succeeded in firing…and for what?
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Posted in Vacation (all I ever wanted) at 8:28 pm by Nicole
Tomorrow I will be on a plane to a tropical destination far far away from LA. (Mexico!) I’m taking two weeks to decompress and not do ANYTHING except lounge, drink pina coladas, and eat. And I cannot wait. Meanwhile, I am slaving away here at work trying to wrap everything up before the trip…it’s going to be a long night.
My posting will be sporadic (though, I will try and post pictures of the beach) but Anna is back with a vengance on all the political posts (which, by the way, I LOVE, and I too am also obsessed with this election) so I’m sure she’ll keep y’all entertained with her commentary and news.
See you on the flip side!
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Posted in News! at 7:14 am by Anna
I just heard on ABC News that the Librarian of the Wasilla Library was interviewed briefly. She basically said that Sarah Palin asked her if she’d be willing to remove certain books from the Library. As the President of the National Library Association, she said all the books were bought according to standards and guidelines, so No. She would not support banning any books.
A few weeks later she was fired.
The community uproared. (I heard they almost recalled her as Mayor, but I don’t know if that’s true.)
Sarah Palin was forced to reinstate the Librarian. But she quit 2 years later anyway, because she said Sarah Palin made it so hard for her.
She said Sarah Palin’s treatment of her was very rough, and it’s a time in her life she doesn’t care to revisit.
Says a lot about Sarah Palin. And probably, TrooperGate. I predict a lot more is going to come out about these types of stories. And it should. We need to know the truth about what kind of woman this really is. And what kind of leader she would potentially be (hope not).
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09.08.08
Posted in General at 12:26 pm by Anna
Nice.
Are the 3,000+ American deaths also God’s plan?
And the 350 billion dollars we’ve spent on the war - God’s plan?
The resulting layoffs, unemployment, gas prices… also God’s plan?
The suffering of millions of Americans who are unemployed & can’t afford the gas to go search for a job…That must be God’s plan too?
The extinction of polar bears? Definitely God’s cruel plan. After all she is suing the Bush administration for having the nerve to put them on the endangered list.
The Republicans losing the election in a mudslide? Now that sounds like a good plan. And I’ll thank God if it happens.
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Posted in News! at 10:40 am by Anna
Just a heads up that CNN is doing a special tonight called Palin’s Faith. It supposedly talks about her religious beliefs and addresses the things she’s said about the Iraq War being part of God’s plan, etc. I think it’s important to know.
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09.07.08
Posted in General at 12:18 pm by Anna
Just when I was trying to maintain more of an open mind about Sarah Palin, I read this article in the New York Times. It is infuriating.
John McCain has put this whole country at risk by choosing someone as a potential VP, who was NOT - as it turns out - fully vetted. They knew almost NOTHING about her except 2 things:
1) The conservatives would love her
2) She is a woman
I agree the media & bloggers (including me) have been hard on Sarah Palin - but not without cause. We know NOTHING about her, except that she did a good job of reading a script at the Republican Convention, which written by someone else who had never even met her…and didn’t even know who the VP pick was when he wrote the speech.
She, the “reformer” is in the middle of a significant ethics investigation, she knows NOTHING about foreign policy, she treats the earth and the environment as badly as the moose she hunts, and she doesn’t think there are any long term consequences. That is just plain stupid.
And John McCain has sold his soul to the devil - changing everything he used to believe in - from tax cuts, to abortion, to his VP pick…all to win his next gold medal of honor on Election Night.
And for the next 4 years, he wants the citizens of this country to be his POW’s…
Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 6, 2008
SARAH PALIN makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech — longer even than Barack Obama’s — you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum’s rush.
Still, attention must be paid. McCain’s address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn’t smug or nasty.
The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.
As is nakedly evident, the speech’s central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)
Even more fraudulent, if that’s possible, is the contrast between McCain’s platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: “I’ve been called a maverick.” If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.
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.
She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.
How long before we learn she never shot a moose?
Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president, it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is. Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place. Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates’ maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever we do and don’t know about Palin’s character at this point, there is no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain’s character and potential presidency.
He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. “God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,” said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins. The “no surrender” warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.
That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.
As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article. After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had a “full vetting process.” She had been subjected to “an F.B.I. background check,” we were told, and “the McCain camp had reviewed everything it could find on her.”
The Times had it right. The McCain campaign’s claims of a “full vetting process” for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical details they’ve invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper. Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting process was basically “a Google,” he wasn’t joking.
This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton’s imagination. “Often my haste is a mistake,” McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, “but I live with the consequences without complaint.” Well, maybe it’s fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to complain.
We’ve already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 — even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam’s W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn’t until months after “Mission Accomplished” that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.
In other words, McCain’s hasty vetting of Palin was all too reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war. He has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the military rescue of Georgia (“Today, we are all Georgians”) or in reaffirming as late as December 2007 that the crumbling anti-democratic regime of Pervez Musharraf deserved “the benefit of the doubt” even as it was enabling the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. McCain’s blanket endorsement of Bush administration policy in Pakistan could have consequences for years to come.
“This election is not about issues” so much as the candidates’ images, said the McCain campaign manager, Davis, in one of the season’s most notable pronouncements. Going into the Republican convention, we thought we knew what he meant: the McCain strategy is about tearing down Obama. But last week made clear that the McCain campaign will be equally ruthless about deflecting attention from its own candidate’s deterioration.
What was most striking about McCain’s acceptance speech is that it had almost nothing in common with the strident right-wing convention that preceded it. We were pointedly given a rerun of McCain 2000 — cobbled together from scraps of the old Straight Talk repertory. The ensuing tedium was in all likelihood intentional. It’s in the campaign’s interest that we nod off and assume McCain is unchanged in 2008.
That’s why the Palin choice was brilliant politics — not because it rallied the G.O.P.’s shrinking religious-right base. America loves nothing more than a new celebrity face, and the talking heads marched in lock step last week to proclaim her a star. Palin is a high-energy distraction from the top of the ticket, even if the provenance of her stardom is in itself a reflection of exactly what’s frightening about the top of the ticket.
By hurling charges of sexism and elitism at any easily cowed journalist who raises a question about Palin, McCain operatives are hoping to ensure that whatever happened in Alaska with Sarah Palin stays in Alaska. Given how little vetting McCain himself has received this year — and that only 58 days remain until Nov. 4 — they just might pull it off.
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09.06.08
Posted in General, News! at 11:05 am by Anna
>>
Even though Obama has been attacked a lot lately, and even misquoted, he fought back today and did it like a real leader. He didn’t take any cheap shots (like Palin regularly does). He spoke with class and dignity. And humor. He was smiling & everybody up (including himself.)
Aside from his personality, to me this shows real confidence & conviction in what he believes. He had no need to get over-defensive. He’s just on a mission, and he’s determined. That’s how he struck me, at least.
Props to Obama for that!
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Posted in News! at 10:42 am by Anna
Latest poll I saw on CNN.com says Obama leading McCain.
Obama: 45%
McCain 42%
Unsure 13%
A big percentage of unknowns…
I guess McCain didn’t get the bump he hoped for by choosing Palin.
Apparently most voters don’t believe she is qualified enough to be VP. While Republicans seem to like her a lot, Democrats & Independents have a high disapproval rate. The Independents’ perspectives are what is telling.
I saw Palin’s speech yesterday. She is feisty to be sure, but I was disappointed by 2 things:
1) She made the case for John McCain by talking about his POW experience. God bless him for that, but that is not what makes someone a good President.
2) She took Obama’s comments about the surge out of context. She made it sound like Obama admitted the surge was the best thing to happen since the parting of the Red Sea. Which is not true - I saw what he said on the O’Reilly Factor, and what he really said was that, yes, the violence was down but the underlying issues about the war are still unsolved. And that is why the surge was and is not the be-all, end-all solution that John McCain pretends it is.
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