OK Vanessa

Tell us what you think of Sarah Palin and why. Trust me, I'm not famous.

I'll take Supreme Court Cases for $400, Alex

What is "Brown vs. Board of Education"

I'll take Supreme Court Cases for $600, Alex

What is the "Dred Scott" decision

Actually, now that you

Actually, now that you mention it by name, I know exactly what "Brown vs. Board of Education" refers to, although I wouldn't be able to debate the particulars of the case.

But I concede that you win the pop quiz ;-) Therefore, I nominate you for Deputy Prime Minister.

Finally some accountability

Finally some accountability for a Palin-bashing celebrity....and some integrity from some grass roots feminists:

"Women's shelter cuts Bernhard after gang-rape line"
http://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/ap/20081002/ten-people-bernhard-palin-5e343d7.html

Surprise, surprise (not)

Oh, look who's backtracking:

"Sandra Bernhard denies issuing Sarah Palin 'gang rape' warning"

http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2008/10/02/2008-10-02_sandra_bernhard_denies_issuing_sarah_pal.html

nightbloom, I think you're demonstrably wrong

In fact, the opposite is the case:

http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/prime_ministers/dossiers/2084-12983/

Guess you forgot that didn't you.

This CBC clip is very interesting - and it takes us back into the atmosphere at the time.

If anything, Campbell was portrayed as a policy wonk who didn't care a thing about ordinary, non-academic, non chess playing Canadians...about whom we here in BC has already had a mittfull.

Nothing to do with her sex.

You need to pick another example

Some suggestions

You might want to use different examples.

Here are a few suggestions:
Alexa McDonough; Sheila Copps; Belinda Stronach; Audrey McLaughlin

But Kim Campbell, nope - Joanna Everitt's paper on the subject is interesting - but very thin and weak on the empirical side when it comes to Nathan Divinsky's former wife.

She's much more of a Maggie Thatcher type....

You might find a short bit of bio interesting:

In 1964, she went to U.B.C. where she majored in political science. Here again, Campbell met with political success and was elected the first female freshman president. After graduation, she took some graduate courses at the Institute of International Relations, before winning a scholarship to the London School of Economics. At the L.S.E., Campbell began a doctorate in Soviet studies She returned to Vancouver in 1973, her thesis unfinished, and began lecturing part-time at Simon Fraser University and Vancouver Community College.

In 1980, she returned to U.B.C. to study law, and at the same time, got involved in local politics. Campbell was elected to the Vancouver School Board and served for four years. Her platform of fiscal restaint caught the attention of the governing Social Credit party and was asked to run as a Socred candidate in the 1984 provincial election. Although she lost the seat, Campbell was offered a job as a policy advisor to B.C. Socred Premier Bill Bennett the following year.

When Bennett resigned in 1986, Campbell ran for provincial leader Bill Vander Zalm. In the election that year, she won a seat in the legislature. Here she made her mark by publicly opposing the premier's restrictive stance on abortion. By 1988, Campbell was being wooed by the federal Conservative party. Their star B.C. Cabinet minister, Pat Carney, was retiring from politics and a candidate was needed for her seat in Vancouver Centre. Campbell agreed to run and won in the 1988 election.

She was offered a junior Cabinet post in 1989 as Minister of State for Indian and Northern Affairs. The following year she became Canada's first female Justice Minister. It was here that she proved her mettle as a politician. Campbell introduced a bill amending the gun laws. In the wake of the 1989 Montreal massacre, she had to satisfy a widespread public outcry for more restrictive gun laws and get support for the legislation from a determined lobby of gun-owners within her own caucus.

Campbell was also praised for Bill C-49 which was drafted when the Supreme Court struck down the 1983 "rape sheild" law as unconstitutional. She made the unprecendented move with consulting with women's groups and law associations, as well as ministry officials, in drafting the new law. By focusing in the principle of consent, Bill C-49 remained constitutional and still protective of a victim's rights. It passed second reading in the Commons with a rare vote of unanimity by all three federal parties.

In 1993, Campbell became Minister of National Defence and was immediately embroiled in the debate over the EH-101 helicopter contract and the deaths of four Somalis at the hands of Canadian paratroopers. By this time, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had announced his retirement, and Campbell was encouraged to run for party leader. Her only strong competition was Jean Charest, and she won in a close contest at the convention in June. Kim Campbell became Canada's first female prime minister.

However the Conservative mandate to govern had expired and Campbell had to call an election for October 1993. She was unable to overcome her party's nine-year legacy and bore the brunt of voters' dissatisfaction with free trade, the GST, the constitutional fiascos and the economic recession. The Conservatives suffered an extraordinary defeat, reduced to just two seats in the House of Commons. Campbell herself lost her Vancouver seat - the first time a sitting prime minister has done so.

Life after being Prime Minister for Campbell has been a mix of academia (Harvard), foreign service (Consul General of Canada in Los Angeles), and member of international organizations (Council of Women World Leaders and Club of Madrid).

A real victim of gender discrimination all right.

Jeez!

Sorry about the butchered tense agreement in my penultimate post above here....

Oh yes there is

I agree, let's cut to the chase - maybe we could dicuss this:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16721264/mccains_last_stand

Or is it just another effusion of your favourite whipping boy - the god-almight Liberal left conspiracy?

Why would anyone hate Palin's guts?

She's irrelevant to anything but the fundamentalists anyway.

As for coming to terms with having a Down Syndrome child...spare me.

The child was born in April wasn't it?

How much time you thing St Sarah has spent 'nurturing' since then?

My sympathy goes out to those mothers who live in poverty, with dead end (or no) jobs, who mangage somehow to bring up kids - handicapped or otherwise - and not have them end up in jail or dead on a street corner.

When I hear Sarah Palin talking about the welfare of the more than 600,000 people in the United State who've lost their jobs this year and the 45 million who STILL don't have health insurance I'll stop tuning her out as an air-head.

How about some real values discussions and a little less dirt?

And furthermore

The suggestion that keeping and raising a handicapped child is somehow a qualification for being President of the United States escapes me entirely.

John McCain couldn't run a government department or a major corporation - he's too inconsistent and mercurial but the suggestion that Palin could is bizarre.

If the only thing you can cite in her favour is her 'family' values I think that's damning with faint praise..

Maybe we could start with this paragraph

It could provide a template for more or less the same sort of conclusions about Palin and her supporters.

"Yeah, but..." I begin, then let it go. The look on McCain's face says it all. His answer doesn't have to make sense; it just has to work with this crowd. If you can tour the countryside and get away with telling a bunch of poorly educated Middle American fear addicts that bin Laden will be showing up at their kids' soccer games if they don't keep up the war effort, then you do it. Because that's how you win elections in this country, by scaring the shit out of people. That's a far cry from "Straight Talk" -- but then again, that "Straight Talk" shit was a long time and many ugly poll results ago.

You up for a little 'Straight Talk'?

And when you've finished that article

We can start on this one:

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23316912/makebelieve_maverick/print

Then perhaps we have some empirical evidence for BOTH sides of that debate...you know the one about who and what are being unfair and polemical to whom.

Enough fulminations already

As I said, there's something about this woman that induces hysterical, ad feminam, non-policy-related, and totally illogical fulminations from the political left. Case in point.

Cheers, and enjoy the rest of the show =)

Yep you said it

And then failed serially to prove that the statement had any basis in fact.

Fulmination is apt as a description...because you haven’t provided a single piece of evidence except a foul-mouthed comedienne.

The comedian claims she didn't say what you attributed to her and I already posted my disgust with Larry Flynt already.

Now, since no further real evidence has been adduced I guess we can put a line under this one. I’m beginning to think that the whole business was purpose built to distract attention from Ms Palin’s obvious shortcomings….with….fulminations!

Case in point.

Don't suppose you'll see this nightbloom

But if you do, I rest my case about the fundamental racism of the McCain campaign.

I assume you saw John McCain refer to his opponent as 'THAT ONE' last night.

If nothing else makes the scales fall from peoples' eyes about what the GOP 'establishment' thinks of uppity blacks who might challenge the silver spoon entitlements of the American gentry, that moment surely will.

Disgusting, racist and full of prejudice.

You could read it in every move of that reptillian monster last night...'how is this black guy able to challenge me, the partrician son of a a patrician father and grandfather...the descendant of admirals who have airfields and ships named after them?'

God damn it, the man is a moral disaster.

I finally watched the 2nd

I finally watched the 2nd debate last night on YouTube (since I don't "do" television). Without parsing specific policy positions here, I felt McCain won this debate (as he did the first one). Most of the media criticisms of McCain's performance are invented or grossly inflated, and then repeated and circulated ad nauseum until they become accepted dogma. His use of "that one" didn't stick out any more than any other aspect of his response, and was a totally natural part of his speaking style and gestalt. The liberal-left's "victorian vapour generator" is working overtime on that one. They really, really, *want* to see racism so damn bad they're actually going to *invent* it if they have to. I think it's fair to conclude that the liberal media is waging a campaign of its own, even though it isn't fielding a candidate at the podium who can be identified and challenged in front of the public in a similar debate.

Obama's performance has been extremely scripted and weak, first vs. Hillary and now vs. McCain. Interestingly, there has been no change of tone or content from his debates with Hillary. It's all memory-work and "tone" with him, and no departure from that. There's something quite monochromatic about his on-screen persona, in contrast to McCain's peppy motoring about the stage, his more genuine approach to audience members (and the moderator), and his occasional feisty and humorous asides. I also had to laugh how Obama slouched like a lanky boy on his stool, smiling vacantly at McCain like an extra in a Dentine commercial, when McCain addressed him directly with perfectly on-target criticism. Who in their right mind coached him to do that? It was totally funny. I didn't get the references to "boy-man" until I saw him like that.

Indicentally, I was taken aback when a staged reference to Michelle Obama resulted in a camera cue and and lovely smile & wave from the candidates wife. This is a political debate, and she wasn't one of those selected to ask a question, so where was McCain equal "humanizing moment" camera time?

you're kidding, right?

The man, McCain, is either demented or unstable - he prowled around the perimeter of the stage like like a white-haired reptile.

His contempt for Obama and for a black questioner - who he suggested didn't understand the terms of his own question - were not trivial.

These things are not subtle, they are obvious - as is your own use of the term monochromatic in reference to a black man.

This has nothing to do with the media my friend - the man is a steaming blob of pent-up entitlement and resentment...did you read the Rolling Stone piece?

I could almost see little Johnny McCain, furious that this uppity black man (the one his running mate calls Sambo ~ now there's a boderline personality) should be beating his patrician ass in this contest.

I wonder he didn't hold his breath until he collapsed unconscious and had to be rushed to a bath of ice-water again - as his parents did when he was a child.

Perhaps McCain's wife was too busy thinking up the comment she would shortly make to the media about Obama's campaign being the 'dirtiest' ever. Please - let's leave the wives out of it - you're not going to win that argument.

The racism is obvious - let the scales fall from your eyes and you'll see it - it is certainly at the centre of the crowds screaming 'terrorist' who come to see every scripted McCain meeting.

As for content, you're right about that - neither candidate offered anything new or different.

Are you 4 real?

Gwest said: "...as is your own use of the term monochromatic in reference to a black man."

WHAT on EARTH are you on about?? That's gotta be the most opportunistic and PARANOID inference to have ever (dis)graced these discussions threads.

Like I said earlier: the liberal-left wants to see racism in this race **so freakin' badly** that they're willing to invent it at any cost. And now you've transposed that neurosis to these threads. It's so transparently disingenuous, and risks making a mockery of real and legitimate complaints of racism.

All men are monochromatic (no matter what the shade) except for that one pink spot they don't like to talk about. Get over yourself, Gwest.

This is what you wrote

There's something quite monochromatic about his on-screen persona,...

Figure it out for yourself.

I think the GOP is racist - and McCain is playing to that.

Because Obama doesn't pace about like a wounded duck flapping his wings and gesticulating he's 'monochromatic'?

It isn't just the liberal left which sees racism in this race - it's there, in spades.

If you don't want to confront the fact that the whole Reverend Wright, South- side of Chicago, Bill Ayers and terrorism stuff is merely code for 'scary black man' then at least admit that McCain's continual repetition of 'who are you?' is.

I think it's evident to any

I think it's evident to any reader that you're unnecessarily twisting my comments well beyond their meaning. Dunno why you even went there. I hope this isn't a foretaste of the paranoia and venom to come in the unlikely event that Obama actually loses. I can already see it - there will be no end to corrosive and poisonous grievance-peddling by the liberal-left.

As for racism in the campaign, I think there's been exponentially more sexism in this race, mainly on the part of Obama-supporters (including the pro-Obama liberal media) towards both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, and there hasn't been anything "coded" about it.

I think the readers can make up their own minds

This has nothing to do with your favourite hobby horse and everything to do with traditional anti-black (combined with a strong dose of anti-intellectual) prejudice.

Obama is not a radical left-wing liberal.

And that's simply a fact - neither was Hillary.
Sarah Palin comes across to me as someone who suffers from borderline personality disorder and John McCain as demented.

The one thing they agree on is that any lie is fine as long as it works.

As for the sexism, it's nonsense - just like your claim that sexism trumped Kim Campbell's political career.

As for going 'anywhere' I plead not guilty.

My conversations with you are almost always a question of 'responding' to something you've written....

As usual, you pivot when

As usual, you pivot when someone calls you on your nonsense.

Regardless, I think there's genuine anger out there at the way the media and infotainment sector has covered this election campaign. The bias has been incredible - I don't think we've seen such one-sideness on the part of the media since the aftermath of 9/11 and the early days of the current military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I'm not saying this because I'm pro-McCain (in fact, I supported Obama over Hillary). But I'm just appalled at the unrelenting and often underhanded negative coverage Hillary and Palin have received by the supposedly neutral & "disinterested" media.

Not at all

Straight ahead for me...perhaps you'd like to explain this:
http://news.aol.com/elections/article/anger-roils-crowds-at-mccain-rallies/207330?icid=100214839x1211264287x1200686109

If the GOP is getting negative coverage it is because they are very negative, violent and angry people.

There's no way anyone can be disinterested in the face of visceral hatred.

And, it always makes me feel good when, frustrated by your lack of debating success, you revert to this kind of thing:

Where did you learn that approach?

I think it's safe to say

I think it's safe to say that this thread has run its course.

Yep!

I take it you noted the findings of the Alaska commission looking into Palin's behavior...another liberal/left conspiracy I suppose.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

A coda - from Frank Rich

The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama
By FRANK RICH

IF you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.

Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.

Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.

It wasn’t always thus with McCain. In February he loudly disassociated himself from a speaker who brayed “Barack Hussein Obama” when introducing him at a rally in Ohio. Now McCain either backpedals with tardy, pro forma expressions of respect for his opponent or lets second-tier campaign underlings release boilerplate disavowals after ugly incidents like the chilling Jim Crow-era flashback last week when a Florida sheriff ranted about “Barack Hussein Obama” at a Palin rally while in full uniform.

From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.

McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

The operatives who would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it ever since. A key indicator came two weeks after the convention, when the McCain campaign ran its first ad tying Obama to the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Rather than make its case by using a legitimate link between Fannie and Obama (or other Democratic leaders), the McCain forces chose a former Fannie executive who had no real tie to Obama or his campaign but did have a black face that could dominate the ad’s visuals.

There are no black faces high in the McCain hierarchy to object to these tactics. There hasn’t been a single black Republican governor, senator or House member in six years. This is a campaign where Palin can repeatedly declare that Alaska is “a microcosm of America” without anyone even wondering how that might be so for a state whose tiny black and Hispanic populations are each roughly one-third the national average. There are indeed so few people of color at McCain events that a black senior writer from The Tallahassee Democrat was mistakenly ejected by the Secret Service from a campaign rally in Panama City in August, even though he was standing with other reporters and showed his credentials. His only apparent infraction was to look glaringly out of place.

Could the old racial politics still be determinative? I’ve long been skeptical of the incessant press prognostications (and liberal panic) that this election will be decided by racist white men in the Rust Belt. Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that Americans are riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not energy. Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic meltdown (a campaign “suspension,” a mortgage-buyout stunt that changes daily) are as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate stage.

To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On July 4 this year — the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer reported that strategists of both parties agreed Obama’s chances to win the state fell “between slim and none.” Today, as Charlotte reels from the implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is a dead heat in North Carolina and Helms’s Republican successor in the Senate, Elizabeth Dole, is looking like a goner.

But we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.

I don't suppose you'll mind my bolding the last two paragraphs...

That's 'sentences'

Obviously

And, since this window is still open

I'll post a little more paranoia from the liberal-left media mavens...this time from that well-known hotbed of pinko sentiment -E.J.Dionne at the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/13/AR2008101302173.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

I wonder if he has enough RC cred for you nightbloom.

Still open!

And no reaction to debate # 3?

Dude - Maybe this explains it -

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/us/politics/19palin.html?_r=1&hp&oref=login

And more...vile liberal/left stuff - eh?

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1417423198/bctid1866657225

Still more

'...wild left-wing feminist stuff'

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2008/10/21/mailer/

Are you beginning to get the picture?

And this...

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/pains-makeup-stylist-fetches-highest-salary-in-2-week-period/?hp

Which really DOES say a lot about where the Palin/MCain campaign puts its priorities, doesn't it?