Loving Vs Virginia: 40th Anniversary of Interracial Marriage

1967 Loving Vs. Virginia. Why I am here. Why Obama is here. Lets keep fighting against the hate!

Palin Abused Power According to Alaskan Legislators

"I did nothing wrong" Palin insists after a bipartisan committee created by a Republican-controlled committee of Alaskan legislators published a 263-page report declaring that she "abused the powers of her office." and violated "the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act."

According to the Washington Post, the Republican-appointed Investigator Steven Branchflower, "found that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin abused her executive power when she and her husband engaged in a campaign to oust her former brother-in-law from the state police force." (James V, Grimaldi and Kimberly Kindy),

The Alaska Legislature’s bipartisan Legislative Council unanimously commissioned the investigation in July, a month before Palin was chosen as John McCain's running mate.

According to the New York Times, "In the report, the independent investigator, Stephen E. Branchflower, a former prosecutor in Anchorage, said that Ms. Palin wrongfully allowed her husband, Todd, to use state resources as part of the effort to have Trooper Wooten dismissed." (Serge F. Kovaleski)

Although he was never elected to any public office, apparently the "First Dude" thinks he has a say in how the government is run?

The report says Sarah Palin knowingly “permitted Todd Palin to use the governor’s office and the resources of the governor’s office, including access to state employees, to continue to contact subordinate state employees in an effort to find some way to get Trooper Wooten fired.”

But the report doesn't just blame the unelected spouse of wrongdoing. The report accuses Gov. Palin of violating a statute (39.52 110(a)) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act which reads:

"The legislature affirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust."

The report found that Palin abused that public trust and acted unethically for personal gain. Sounds a lot less like "maverick" or reform behavior and a whole lot more like "the old boys network" where even unelected boys have power.

Palin is un-phased by this legislative condemnation. She has decided she is not to blame and guess who is?

In a desperate move to avoid taking responsibility for her actions Palin has gone to the extreme of blaming Obama for the findings of her own state legislature.

Really?

Really! There seems no limit to what the McCain/Palin ticket is willing to blame on others, especially their opponent.

The McCain/Palin campaign spokeswoman explained that " the report showed that the investigation was a “partisan led inquiry run by Obama supporters." And Palin has been stumping claiming this investigation is an Obama-pressured plot against her.

Really? Are they really trying to claim that Obama's reach is that far? That he controls the Alaskan legislature? Really?

But why not when according to McCain and Palin, Obama is also responsible for:
1) the decline of the entire economy (because, like McCain, he has worked with Fannie May lobbyists?)
2) the injuries faced by American troops in Iraq (like McCain, he voted against body armor. Cindy McCain has amnesia about the fact that McCain voted against another version of the same bill, thus denying troops body armor the same year)
3) Palin's inability to answer simple questions posed by the press (the liberal gotcha media composed entirely of Obama supporters who puppet-like he also apparently controls?)

Now Obama is also responsible for Palin's abuse of power. Really? Are they serious?

We don't need a woman who lets her husband control her even after she is elected to a major public office, representing women in the white house. We don't need a "first dude" in the White House.

We don't need a liar, who when caught lies more and blames others for her misdeeds, to be one heartbeat away from running the country.

CNN: Palin abuse case

The worst kind of liar: the kind who keeps lying after she is caught

CNN: Palin Found to be lying About Obama

Palin's claim found to be false after fact-checked

The T word: McCain and Palin's Latest Desperate Tactic

When all else fails, go for an ad hominem attack. Cant beat your opponent on issues? On policies? On solutions to America's financial crisis? Well, you can always go after his or her character. And if you cant go after anything he or she specifically has done or said that you disagree with, then its best to play the terrorist card. After all, anyone who gets called a terrorist is ipso facto a very bad man.

The only problem with this is that the word terrorist is now being bandied about with real abandon. It is being used more as a generalized derisive heckle than as an actual description these days.

People can be labled terrorists for having a particular religious practice (Islam), for looking South Asian or Arab (like me or Obama), for having a name that sounds similar to that of a terrorist (like Osama) or for living in the same neighborhood as someone who might once have been a terrorist (like Ayers).

All this terrorist name-calling is the racism of the new world order. Racists cant come right out and say they don't want Obama because he is black or half-black or brown. They can't say they don't want anyone who is not 100% black. They cant say they would rather have a dishonest old guy and incompetent young woman who are both white than anyone not white, no matter how competent.

So they do what they can. They call him by his suspiciously Muslim sounding middle name. They cal him mysterious, sneaky, unknown, dishonest (all racial stereotypes typically attributed to Arabs) and they try to paint him as a foreigner (as if suddenly Hawaii is not a part of the United States).

The McCain/Palin ticket is desperate and they are appealing to the racists among us to join their panic.

Too bad its too late for that tactic to work. Obama has already won the war. Despite the racists. Racism is irrational and it is taking our country a very long time to figure that out..... but by and by I DO think we are learning to be better than that.

SNL Parody of the Debate

Palin mastered not answering questions and Biden was excessively effusive

Palin/Biden Debate: Anti-Intellectualism, Class, and Meanness

After seeing Sarah Palin debate, I have to admit she is a skilled rhetoritician and to be honest after five gaffes in 8 days, my expectations for her were pretty low. The fact that she got through the entire debate without getting too tangled up in any tongue-tying grammatically incorrect incoherencies was truly surprising. Too bad she had nothing of substance to say and refused to answer most of the questions. But what was most appalling about her performance was her suoerficiality, her anti-intellectualism, and her complete disregard for the truth. Have we reached a new low in electoral politics?

Why was misrepresenting the truth a central debate strategy for Palin? Is she really still still saying that Obama wants to raise taxes when every news source in the country has revealed that as a lie? Is she really still claiming McCain had a pivotal role in the bailout bill when all reports indicate he had a marginal or destructive role if any? And did she think none of us listened to the Presidential debate ourselves and that we would believe her misrepresentation of it when she claimed Obama had called for talks with terrorists while she and McCain were devoted to diplomacy? McCain was very clearly arguing against diplomacy. Sitting down to talk with leaders you disagree with is the definition of diplomacy. She repeated the lie that McCain supports regulation of Wall Street when his entire record suggests otherwise and when Katie Couric asked her to name one instance of him voting for regulation she could not.

Governor Palin claims she is "Joe Six-Pack," meanwhile her yearly household income is over a quarter of a million. She is rich, not middle class, not working class, not poor. What she does have in common with many people who are working class is a substandard education. She attended five different colleges before finally getting a bachelors degree in journalism. Despite her background in journalism she now claims all reporters are elitist and out to get her with "gotcha journalism." Her running mate is still less educated than she is, having only attended the US Naval Academy where he was ranked the 894th out of 899 students. Neither one of them is working class. Neither one of them was denied opportunities to get education but both of them were poor students and neither of them has pursued the higher levels of education their class status gave them access to.

Joe Biden, meanwhile, might have been too smart to debate Palin. He actually answered every question (save one) he was asked and actually gave reasons, cited dates, and recited facts. He actually demonstrated intimate knowledge of foreign policy and a thorough understanding of legislative history. Palin, for her part, was very good at towing the Republican party line. She also lied a lot. For the life of me I still cant understand how her ticket can lie so much with a straight face. But she had almost no content and was very good at changing the subject, appealing to jingoism and talking in condescending and hostile tones about Joe Biden. She came across as a remarkably mean-spirited person but not a passionate mean-spirited person. She did not seem to be guided by any sense of justice or any real political mission. "Say it isnt so, Joe?" Really?

Biden meanwhile spent all of his time being civil, calm, and polite. He never attacked Palin, not once. Although she attacked him on a personal level, he was careful never to take an aggressive stance towards her, never critiquing her record or her positions on anything. I think he should be commended for this. After watching all her embarrassing interviews this week, I for one would not have been able to keep a straight face while she spoke if I were debating her.

What Palin does have is a real command of fake folksy appeal, superficial cutsey poses and colloquial expressions devoid of any content, designed it appears, to manipulate what she must think is a decidedly stupid electorate. While she repeated vague expressions and stock vocabulary, Biden kept providing detailed policy proposals and making detailed contrasts between the goals and records of Senators McCain and Obama.

Palin was unable to answer the only hard question she got - that regarding what the constitution says the role of the vice president is. I don't know why the questions were all so easy. Was the moderator afraid of embarrassing her after Palin endured so many embarrassing interviews this week? Who knows.

Biden wrote the Violence Against Women Act (which McCain voted against twice). And he cried! The man has ovaries! Women's rights will be much safer on his watch.