Sarah? Really?

Since yesterday morning, when I learned that McCain had chosen a woman named Sarah Palin as his VP, I haven't been able to stop thinking and reading and shouting about it. It is the single stupidest thing I have ever known a politician do.

Oh, it does have some political plausibility. She's a Pentecostal Christian who believes in Creationism and opposes abortion under every and all circumstances. She's pro-guns and anti-environmentalism. So it seems like it might appeal to some folks who mistrust McCain.

But is there any way in hell that anyone can pretend to believe that McCain put Country First in making this choice? Is there any way that people can will themselves to believe that after looking over all possible candidates for Vice President, this PTA mom's name rose to the top of the list on her merits alone? Is this really the second-best person in the country to get that 3 am phone call? Is there anything whatsoever in her resume that would suggest that she's ready to be governor, much less vice president, or God forbid, president? Running New York City doesn't really prepare you to be president. How does running Wusilla, or even the entire state of Alaska (population 683,478, ie a fair-sized American city, but certainly no New York or Chicago. In fact, it would be # 17 if it were a city, between Austin and Fort Worth Texas.)

And I don't care if it sounds un-feminist of me, but no mother worthy of the name goes back to work 3 days after her special-needs baby is born, and then takes on a new job more demanding than anything she's ever done before.

If this doesn't sink John McCain, then it will surely sink the whole country. It is a disgrace to the Republican party, and I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out like that Harriet Miers thing, where a woman manifestly unqualified for the job has to be withdrawn from contention.

I would hesitate to hire a woman with her resume as president of a community college, and McCain is offering her to us as the person he most trusts to take over the reins of the country if something were to happen to him? No way, no how, no McCain!! Go get her, Hillary!!

Irony meter meltdown

Ya know what I particularly love about the indictment of Senator Stephens REPUBLICAN of Alaska? I love that his constituents are all conflicted and stuff about his downfall because he did so much for them. He was a genius at getting federal money for all kinds of stuff in Alaska to make people there happy. He really knew how to get the old pork rolling. He could spend tax money like no one else, and all for the benefit of those poor Alaskans, those staunch rugged individualists who just needed a little hand up or hand out from federal coffers.

Do these guys have no shame, no conscience at all? They gripe and moan about "tax and spend liberals," but what is all this, but taxing and spending? Let's face it, it's really quite all right as long as those tax-purchased projects are benefitting good honest hard-working (you know, white) Americans. It's the idea that "our" hard-earned money is going for "them,"( black or brown people), that "big government" becomes such a problem. The whole fiscal conservative thing is such a crock. If corporations, or small business people, or farmers, or middle class people, all of whom sound pretty white, need money, then that's just our nation at its finest. It's only when some "welfare queen" can be invoked, or some immigrant "popping out an anchor baby" while howling in Spanish, then they get all tight-fisted.

Can't afford clean technology

I heard something the other day about Bush saying that if we make regulations that require industries to produce less pollution, it will cripple our economy, and we can't afford to do things like that.

But that doesn,'t make sense to me. When it comes to a war, everyone always says it's "good for the economy" because it increases orders for all sorts of stuff. Money is being spent, jobs are being created, the economy is humming. However, war is a means by which we produce a lot of equipment in order to destroy things--other people's infrastructure, but also a lot of airplanes and tanks and hummers and other equipment. So we've "helped the economy" by ordering things at taxpayers expense and then destroying them. Wow.

On the other hand, tighter emission standards, for example, would also require spending a lot of money. But spending money is *good* for the economy, remember? And in this case, instead of spending it to bomb and kill and destroy stuff, we would be spending it to keep our own environment cleaner, healthier, more productive. How can that not be a net gain?

If I lived in a city where people threw their garbage and chamberpots out the window (Europe in 1500, say), then sure, sewers and garbage collection would cost a lot more--at least at first! But in the long run, look what that investment (spending) on infrastructure produced--not only cleaner, more pleasant cities, but new jobs, longer, healthier lives, and an overall improvement in the standard of living. Only a moron would prefer to foul the streets with sewage. And yet, if it's the air that is being filled with diesel particles, or CO2, we suddenly can't afford it. The huddles masses of Europe felt they couldn't afford to do anything but throw their feces into the gutter, too--but when they stopped doing that, they also stopped dying of dysentery! Thus a huge jump in productivity.

China is currently growing its economy while pouring life-threatening quantities of pollution into the air. They also think they can't afford to keep the air clean, but they pay with their lives for this savings. Of course, what happens, what always happened, is that the poor pay with their lungs while the rich get the "savings." (Though a city like Beijing is pretty miserable for rich as well as poor.)

Books

There were more instructions, but I'm gonna keep this simple. Bold the books you have read. Italicize the books you've started.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The life and times of the wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the nightime
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves (what? That's not a book!)
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
*Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

(from: http://www.librarything.com/blog/2008/04/librarything-love-and-unread-books-meme.php )

Polygamy

Several weeks ago some 400 plus children,. plus their mothers, were forcibly removed from Longing for Zion compound in Texas by Child Protective Services. The situation is not easy to deal with--if you stand up for Constitutional rights, it seems that you don't care about the welfare of a bunch of young women (usually called girls by the media) who are being forced to have sex (ie raped) by men old enough to be their fathers or grandfathers. If you stand up against child abuse, it sounds like you don't care about religious liberty and the right to be left alone by the government.

I have wavered and gone back and forth on this--wow, it's really bad how much control those guys have over the women and children, but then wow, it's really bad that the government took all those kids away from their parents without any proof of individual wrong-doing.

Just now it dawned on me what is wrong with what happened: look at who was taken away--the victims. The women and the children. Presumably these are the very ones whom the state is trying to protect. Look who was left in their own homes: the men. If a crime was committed (or many crimes), who should be arrested and taken away? The men. The ones accused of rape. Not the victims. If the crime is having sex with underage girls, why take the girls into custody? Oh sure, I know the answer: to protect them. But if the perpetrators were arrested, the girls would be even safer, not being placed in foster care, where sexual abuse is a well-known possibility.

Why were the men not arrested? Obviously, because you need to have some sort of evidence, some proof, some accusation at least, that this specific man had sex with this specific underage girl. That's what they didn't have.

This is of a piece with the loss of civil liberties since 9/11. Instead of the government having the burden of proof that this specific individual committed this crime, whole classes of people are picked up based on their membership in the class, and assumed to be guilty, with no probable cause, no evidence, and no opportunity for the accused to hear the evidence against them.

Clearly, in Texas, there was no urgency to remove those kids from those homes. This lifestyle has been practiced by these people for 100 years. It would not have hurt to wait long enough to pinpoint an accuser, and have her named the man whom she claimed abused her, and then arrested him and charged him with a crime. And let the girl remain in her own home. Let him be taken away and placed with strangers. Let him do the perp walk in front of cameras while everyone looks at how he dresses and how he wears his hair.

I will never forget a woman telling me about how back in the 1950s, she reported to her teacher that her father was raping her. And how the police car came to her house and took....her. That feeling of guilt and shame never left her. She was the bad girl who had to be taken away.

If a crime has been committed, let's arrest the rapists, the pedophiles, the polygamists. Not the girls.

Ya know what I really like?

I really like the idea of Obama's 2 little girls living in the White House. How amazing will it be for a black woman and 2 black girls to be the First Family? Obama is kind of post-racial, but Michelle is a southside Chicago black girl and so are her kids. To have that as the image of America's First Family will really be Change with a capital C.

Who wants to be a ....president of the US??

Ok, so Obama is having a really hard time with damage control regarding his pastor. Every time he thinks he has "put it behind him," it pops back up again.

But he is not alone is having problems.

Obama can't control his former pastor.
Hillary can't control her husband and former president.
And McCain can't control his temper.

Sheesh. And one of these three will be president a year from now?