Small Blawg

It's summer, and there's too much going on to spend much time blogging, though heaven knows I'd love to roll in the sex scandal muck for a while, or chastise Dana Milbank for his silly attack on Obama's willingness to take questions relayed from Iran at a press conference, or give Obama a swift kick in the briefs (legal briefs, that is) for his DOJ's vicious anti-gay support of Dubya's position on gay marriage in the Smelt case, spitefully delivered just a couple of weeks before the 40th anniversary of Stonewall. Nope, no time for any of that today while the sun is shining and the flowers are blooming, bees buzzing, and oh, look out, if I'm seriouslyl hitting the birds and the bees already I'll start babbling about Mark Sanford in no time.

So instead, may I direct your attention to an extensive profile of Sarah "Slippery" Palin, presidential prospect and all-around loon? Nine thousand and eight hundred words, according to one count, by Todd S. Purdom in August's Vanity Fair, already online here:

What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency? Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?

Thanks to Politico for the heads-up.

Look at that, he posed for that! He looks like a warlock! It's frightening!

      — Chris Matthews on February 26, 2008 on HARDBALL, re the upcoming cover of the New York Times Magazine

Newt, who stomped off in a huff and at huge expense to his district (which then had to run a special election to replace him) after realizing he would not be re-elected to be Speaker of the House back in 1998, imagines he is presidential timber.

Newt, who dillydallied about a 2008 run before sensibly staying out, is thinking he'll jump into the 2012 scrum. While the Republican Party is in such disarray that they could run a mangy vulture 2012 and have it look more presidential than any of their current field, Newt would still come in second to a bald polychrome carrion eater.

Even if he did bring his staffer-extramarital mistress-now-wife to the Vatican, where his hypocritical behind was welcomed with cries of great joy.

Not his first wife, of course. The first wife is the one he abandoned literally in her hospital bed, sitting down and telling her they had to work out the property division before she was fully recovered from the anesthesia for her cancer surgery.

And not his second wife, either. No, the Vatican entertained Newt and his third wife, the one he had been giving a government paycheck while she was his mistress and while he was still married to the second wife - who should have seen that coming, since he was married to wife #1 while courting her. Newt, come on now, it's been years - you can admit it was tacky to have a mistress on staff while married to wife #2, wasn't it? Especially since this was at the exact same time you were foremost on the national stage, being faux-outraged re l'affaire Lewinsky?

Newt. Hear me. Some of us have not forgotten. Your policy initiatives, such as they were, contributed to the Republican ruin of this nation over the past thirty years. Your phony "pro-family" stances remain a stench unto heaven to this day. The Vatican may find multiple adulteries and multiple divorces forgivable so long as you say you're willing to nationalize every uterus in the country, but actual American women, forgive? Forgive the "pro-family" adulterer who believes in mandatory childbirth for every pregnant woman? No, not so much. And cap that with the way you forced the poor people of Georgia to pay for a special election when you came pouting home from DC because your colleagues had the good sense to refuse to make you Speaker again, and boy, Newt, there's no point in going any further with this discussion.

Stay home, Newt. Ten years is not enough time to rehab a reputation like yours.

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day...
Oh yes deep in my heart
I do believe
That we have overcome today.

Of course "over" isn't over. There will be lawsuits and hatefulness and I heard there's already an impeach-Obama movement a-bornin'. In those senses, the election isn't over. But to recast a phrase, our long national nightmare which began at the Democratic Convention of 1968 — in Grant Park, in Chicago — is over.

And the fat lady is singing.

From an agitated (read: hopefully agitating) email from the DCCC which went out under actor Alec Baldwin's signature this morning:

• In Florida, they've sent operatives to steal ballots from elderly Democratic voters.


• In California, they used phony petitions to dupe people into registering Republican.


• In Virginia they even circulated phony fliers telling Democrats to vote on the wrong day.

In good news, friend_x tells me that Obama's grandmother's vote, cast early via absentee ballot, will count in today's election, though she died yesterday morning. My friend Abu Felix was lamenting that she died one day too soon; but if through some horrific shenanigans, the Republicans are able to steal their third presidential election in a row, then I say she died just in time, in the confident belief that her grandson would be president. She deserves so much credit for the way she raised him, and apparently she and her husband did a pretty good job raising his mother to be a fine person too. R.I.P., Madelyn Dunham.

Friend X is an indoor attorney poll watcher all day today. I'm just taking a short sidewalk shift being one of those annoying people who hands you literature on your way into the polling place. I'm up at this unholy hour because I suspect there may be a line of people waiting to vote at 6 a.m. here in Northern Virginia. After the last two "elections," I feel more trepidation than even Shakespeare can express:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
. . . .
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage

...and use your cell phone if you think there's voter fraud or suppression taking place at your polling station:

Obama Hotline: 877 US4 OBAMA (877 874 6226)
Election Protection: 866 OUR VOTE (866-687-8683)
League of Women Voters for Spanish Speakers: 888 VE-Y-VOTA (888-839-8682)

And in Virginia:
State Board of Elections: 800 552 9745
Fairfax County Elections: 703 222 0776
ACLU Virginia Election Hotline: 804-644-8080

"Vote for the guy with one wife, one house, one car."

And one heck of a campaign organization. Today, an Obama doorknocker came to my house to drop off a door hanger telling me my polling place.

An hour later, I got a robocall doing the same thing.

Three times today, I've gotten emails from local volunteers for the campaign.

And last night, a McCain supporter vandalized my house by trespassing 30' over the property line to steal a 4' x 8' Obama sign from my fence, only six feet from where we were sleeping.

Yeah, that's the way to win friends and influence people... and get charged with burglary.

I will be thinking of, and talking about, the Republican thieves as I work the sidewalk in front of the polling place tomorrow. This is the third time an Obama sign has been stolen from me. The first two times, of the three Democratic candidates I'm supporting, only the sign for the black candidate was taken. That's been true all up and down my street: signs for Judy Feder for Congress and Mark Warner for Senate are ignored, but Obama signs are taken. (This third time, all three of my smaller yard signs were in the house overnight for safekeeping, so it's not clear whether the Obama sign would have been singled out, as in the prior two attacks.)

It would be nice to think that Virginia — especially "communist" and "unreal" Northern Virginia, where I live — had gotten over this sort of thing. Tomorrow's vote tally for my precinct should be interesting reading. We're using Diebold machines which have been proven by past performance in this precinct to miscount and to flip votes.

And, as usual, anyone voting in my precinct, Hindu, Christian, Jew, Moslem or other, will have to do so in a room hung with three crucifixes, one about four feet tall. I can't wear an Obama button into the polling place. That would be electioneering. Nope, my lapels will be bare as I line up in front of Giant Jesus and then wend my way past Second Jesus before I am finally permitted to vote on an unreliable machine right under the corpus of the Third Jesus.

"Congress shall make no law..." I hope no one, no matter what their faith, will feel unwelcome where we vote tomorrow.

UPDATE: Between 7:10 and 7:20 tonight, our Obama sign was stolen for the fourth time. And once again, the two signs we have for white Democrats were spared.

I was going to do a post about a slogan I saw buried in Comment 17 here, following a story about a Republican women's group leader in New Mexico who succumbed to Islamophobia and the temptation to lie like a rug regarding Obama's own religious persuasion in a local letter to the editor. A slogan posted in response?

"Vote for the guy with one wife, one house, one car."
And that's great: succinct, to the point, and a response to the faux pro-family, pro-middle-class tropes the McPalin campaign keeps pushing. But it is nothing to the sheer poetry of this icon by jehannamama of Texas:



Rosa sat, so Martin could walk...
Martin walked, so Obama could run...
Obama is running... so our children can fly.

This post is not complete without this:

Daughter of Slaves, 109, Votes For Obama.

I was fumbling around the internet and found someone saying the same thing I said, but about an actual conversation with his hairdresser instead of the abstract hand-wringing I was doing. He also attributes the self-sabotage to a fear of socialism rather than, as I do, to being wealth groupies. Here's Peter Ross Range writing in Der Spiegel, emphasis added:

So I'm sitting in the hair salon, getting a haircut, and my Korean immigrant hairdresser begins telling me all the reasons she plans to vote for John McCain.

First, she says, Barack Obama wants to "give away money to the poor people." That, she declares, “is socialism.” Admitting that she earns about $30,000-40,000 a year before tax, she begins defending the lawyers who earn $250,000 or more and would have to pay a higher tax rate under Obama’s tax plan. "These are my customers. They have lots of bills, two or three kids in college, big houses, two cars. Things are hard for them, too."

It was breathtaking.

Here an up-by-her-bootstraps first-generation immigrant, who lives in a small city apartment that she shares with her sister, is coming to the rescue of highly-paid Washington lawyers with big houses in the suburbs. "They shouldn’t have to pay more taxes than other people," she continues, snip-snip. "They work hard, just like I do." Snip, snip.

Her sister, who also earns around $30,000 per year, pipes up. "I know his tax idea is probably good for us. We don’t earn so much. But it’s wrong that he wants to tax other people so much. I will vote for McCain."

It was a bracing moment, and a quick reminder of the power of misinformation. We’re only two blocks from the White House. My interlocutors (the two sisters) are self-proclaimed "news junkies." And yet they’ve bought into one of the biggest canards of the McCain propaganda machine: that Barack Obama is a socialist.

In the American political lexicon, socialist is a dirty word second only to communist. Both words translate into "un-American," which is maybe the worst epithet of all.

The fact is that only 5 percent of US households have incomes greater than $250,000. And the analyses I’ve read suggest Obama’s plan to raise taxes on those households, though supposedly a 3-percent increase from 36 percent to 39 percent, would in fact translate into relatively modest tax hikes. Silly me, I thought everyone understood that.

Not my hairdressers. And to the extent that one of them grasped that she would be better off under Obama’s plan, her devotion to the anti-socialist principle leads her to vote knowingly against her own self-interest.

Hillary Clinton did not deserve to have the worst of sexist fears embodied in the metal nutcracker made in her image, nor the prurient coverage of her cleavage, nor... oh, the list goes on. Likewise, Sarah Palin has come in for some sexism she doesn't deserve either.

She doesn't deserve having a porn film made starring a look-alike. It's not flattery, it's degrading, to her and to all women in politics.

She doesn't deserve being the subject of stripper look-alike contests either. Ditto.

She doesn't deserve being called a "diva." If McCain's staff wants to call her an egotist, fine, say egotist. Call her a rogue, that's fine too. Call her a whack job - it's perfectly true. But don't call her a gendered insult such as "diva."

And, although this is not sexist, just vicious, don't hang her in effigy. It encourages sexists, whatever the original intent of the display was. It may be free speech, but it's really trashy, just as trashy as her winking and nodding and waving past the shouts of "Kill him!" at her rallies. It's hateful and it incites violence. Be an American and have the class to take it down. Because of sexism, some loon might take a shot at her, just for being a female candidate for the second-highest office in the country. Certainly plenty of loons felt that way about Hillary Clinton. Don't encourage them.

There. I'm through defending her, I hope. Picking on her $150K worth of clothes is not sexist. It's questioning why what should be a personal expense (like John Edwards' infamous haircuts) is a campaign expense. It's questioning if she's going to scamper off with the goods at the end of the campaign by either paying income tax on the $150K, or having the garments evaluated at Goodwill prices for "used clothes" and reimbursing the campaign for that, instead of the purchase prices. It's about questioning why the campaign is paying her makeup artist about $11,000 each week - more than double the campaign's senior foreign policy analyst. It's about asking whether the McCain's campaign costly focus on her looks is sexist.

Chiding her for continuing to hide from a real press conference is not sexist. It's a recognition that a person who can't handle the press corps is obviously unable to handle Congress, the United Nations, or any head of state — and a veep has to be able to handle all that on a moment's notice. No time to hang out by a creek memorizing speechlets, as she did prior to her "debate" with Biden.

Saying she's a drag on the ticket is not sexist. She is, and it's not because she's a woman, it's because she's the aforesaid whack job and because McCain's campaign put her on pitbull duty, doing the traditional attack-dog routine veep candidates always do. Rabid hatefulness rarely raises anyone's likability, regardless of gender; but the McCain campaign has decided that's her job.

Saying she's disloyal to McCain is not sexist. It's true. She's not the first veep or veep hopeful who has been disloyal to the top of their ticket, though she may be the first to be so blatant about it before the election is held. Saying she's ambitious for 2012 is not sexist. That, also, is true. Whether it's a legit ambition at this time, or ever, doesn't hinge on her gender so feel no compunction: just say it. McCain has been disloyal to women all his life. Perhaps it's karma if this time, this one beat him to it.

Questioning the birth of a full-term child seven months after her rushed, no-family-present wedding and now, her teen daughter's pre-marital pregnancy, is not sexist. It's a legitimate comparison of what she does versus what she says. It is not sexist to expose or discuss the hypocrisy of someone who wants to make every woman's reproductive life subject to government control, and who wants to deny public school teens access to realistic sex ed classes.

Questioning why McCain picked her in the first place and suggesting his notorious fondness for beauty queens is not sexist. That's a slap at McCain, not her, and he richly deserves it. Likewise the recent articles pointing out how the cruising pundits became enamored of her for her looks as well as her charm (nevermind any real qualifications): not sexist. Again, that's a slap at them for being beauty groupies, not at her for being beautiful.

Saying she has a pretty face is not sexist. We talk about how attractive male candidates are, or are not, as well. Saying she's nothing but a pretty face is sexist. She's so much more than that: a self-serving pragmatist who has tossed not one but two mentors over the side, who is married to a secessionist but runs on "Country First!", and who has a record of abusing every office she's held for personal benefit (including using threats of a Secret Service investigation to keep Alaska state investigators away from her re the Troopergate scandal). She's a whack job, all right, who needs to be asked if she considers oral contraceptives abortion, and whether she believes that the government should execute witches. And so on, and so on; so very much more than just a pretty face.

I was on the phone with friend_x as the story broke and the first thing I said was, "I'll betcha these 'men' are about 18," because of their plan to target a high school. Sure enough, one is 18, the other 20.

I'm not going to get into the whole thing here. Anyone reading this blog will have seen the wannabe-assassins story all over the mediaverse by the time they get here. This is just a trivia post. The Associated Press is being cagey about why 88 and 14 are special numbers to neo-Nazis, which is silly and lends them an air of mystery and intrigue. Come out and explain it:

88 stands for 'Heil Hitler' - H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.

14 or 14W stands for the Fourteen Words - 'we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.' It's from the rantings of David Lane, who was an American who founded the neo-Nazi group The Order. He summarized it from something out of Mein Kampf.

They're not kabbalists or numerologists or anything else that would require, y'know, math. They're a pair of post-adolescent morons, looking for their fifteen minutes of fame. And fortunately, as they failed, fifteen minutes of limelight is about all they'll get before starting fifty years in federal prisons.

I can hardly believe I'm still posting on this, but here it is once more. Let's lead off on a manly note again, re Al Franken's hapless opponent up in Minnesota. Per TIME magazine:

[Norm] Coleman added to his woes by clumsily dodging questions about a report that a longtime donor had been buying suits and other clothing for him without it being reported on Senate disclosure forms. His spokesman's repeated refusal to give a direct yes or no answer to reporters' questions at one particularly tense press conference was so awkward that the video became a popular clip on political blogs. By the time Coleman finally gave a definitive response a few days later — "Nobody except my wife or me bought my suits" — the damage to his ebbing credibility had been done.

And the BBC explanation for Brits about what the money spent on Palin's campaign wardrobe really means:

[The $150K] adds up to more than double the average American household's yearly income. Amanda Sanders, a celebrity adviser at New York Image Consultants, told the BBC News website that to the average person the price would seem "astronomical."

"Maybe her look could have been reached with $50,000 - $150,000 seems a little over the top... especially when the American economy is in the toilet the way it is. That's, like, a new outfit every day from August to the election."

However, she praises Mrs Palin's new look as "very polished and sophisticated" apart from the odd fashion glitch such as knee-high boots, which Ms Sanders deems "inappropriate" for her role.

She speculates that the logic behind the makeover was to make Mrs Palin look less out of place beside the highly-groomed Mrs McCain and elegant Michelle Obama.

"The Republicans couldn't have her look so Middle America when Cindy looked so high-end. They wanted her to look polished and sophisticated like Cindy," she said. "She's not a 'soccer mom' any more - her new wardrobe says 'take me seriously.' They wanted her to look as 'Jackie O' as Obama's wife - I think that was important."