Month: September 2008

I thought the Obama campaign was about a kinder, more gentlemanly way of doing business.
Given Obama’s educational background, one would have to be pretty naive to think that his reference to a pig with lipstick and an old fish wrapped in paper was merely metaphorical and not a deliberate insult to Palin and McCain.
Either that, or his subconscious is leading the Senator into dangerous oratorical territory, not exactly what we want in a President, either.
Rather than responding with an apology and a getting back to business, Obama shot back with accusations of “Lies, phony outrage and Swift-boat politics.”
Well, he’s right about one thing: Enough really is enough.

So, the world’s largest particle accelerator conducted its first test this morning at CERN, and planet Earth was not consumed by a resulting black hole.
Phew.

I finally took a few minutes to research the ownership and takeover earlier this month of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in reference to the supposed “gaffe” by Sarah Palin, in which she said that they had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.”
Palin made that statement in Colorado Springs on the same day that these privately held but government guaranteed organizations (GSEs, or government sponsored enterprises) were taken over by the federal government (the technical term is “conservatorship”).
In other words, the government assumed responsibility for the running of these organizations, including replacing their CEOs*.
The takeover also means that the government has promised to invest (purchase stock) up to $100 billion into each company in any quarter in which they’d otherwise be insolvent.
Sure, there’s the possibility that taxpayers could ultimately profit from this investment, the operative word being “could”.
The point is, at the time Sarah Palin made that statement, the federal government was, in fact, not only running FNMA and FHLMC but had made a commitment to bail them out with infusions of taxpayer funds to the tune of $200 billion. That would be the largest bailout in US history.
I’m no economist, but what Sarah Palin said in Colorado Springs sounds correct to me, unless you believe that a guaranteed investment of public funds would not involve an actual expenditure of public money, the operative words being “would not”.
As it turns out, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) agrees with her, too. They included $25 billion in estimated costs for the bailout in their budget deficit projections.
*Replacing but still rewarding: “Richard Syron, who was ousted from Freddie Mac, could get an exit package reaching $15 million while Fannie Mae’s deposed CEO, Daniel Mudd, stands to leave with $14 million”, per MarketWatch

Fastcheck, on the Sliming of Sarah
Pajamas Media
From Tammy Bruce, former president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, on RCP:
Palin’s candidacy brings both figurative and literal feminist change. The simple act of thinking outside the liberal box, which has insisted for generations that only liberals and Democrats can be trusted on issues of import to women, is the political equivalent of a nuclear explosion.
The idea of feminists willing to look to the right changes not only electoral politics, but will put more women in power at lightning speed as we move from being taken for granted to being pursued, nominated and appointed and ultimately, sworn in.
It should be no surprise that the Democratic response to the McCain-Palin ticket was to immediately attack by playing the liberal trump card that keeps Democrats in line – the abortion card – where the party daily tells restless feminists the other side is going to police their wombs.
The power of that accusation is interesting, coming from the Democrats – a group that just told the world that if you have ovaries, then you don’t count.
Sarah Palin FAQ on Slate

In a recent LA Times column, Gloria Steinem, who in her youth made feminism a household word via sexy hairdos and short skirts, savaged Sarah Palin for being against abortion and for teaching creationism in the schools.
To the 74 year old Ms. Steinem, this is caving in to the “patriarchy”.
Ms. Steinem is not at all troubled by the hard reality that the next President of the United States could have been a woman if it were not for the fact that the real patriarchy of the Democratic Party undermined her campaign in every possible way.
Rather, in a paroxysm of delight over imagined domestic bliss in the Obama and Biden households, she wrote the following incomprehensible paragraph in support of their candidacy:
And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can’t be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.
“Until men are equal in it”? What is that supposed to mean? “(W)ho suffer more because of having two full-time jobs” – what is that supposed to mean? That collecting two paychecks is a greater injustice than having the sh*t beat out of you, both literally and figuratively? Is she KIDDING?!
Gloria Steinem misses the point. The Democrats had an opportunity to put a woman in the White House and didn’t. The Republicans had an opportunity to put a woman in the White House and did.
So, how does that make the Democratic Party the supporters of feminist principles and the Republican Party a stronghold of the “patriarchy”?
It doesn’t.
The leadership of the Democratic Party did just about everything they could to prevent Hillary Clinton’s nomination, from their failure to investigate charges of improprieties in the primaries to their refusal to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations until their capitulation to The One.
In contrast, this past week, we saw the leaders of the Republican party, including the female Governor of Hawaii, defending Sarah Palin from daily if not hourly media attacks, including accusations of marital infidelity and speculation about the parentage of her youngest child.
Being pro- or anti-choice is not the most important issue for me. Ron Paul, to whose campaign I contributed, is also anti-choice.
What matters to me is that the Democratic Party had an opportunity to support a strong, competent, qualified woman as their Presidential nominee, and they simply could not bring themselves to do it.
Every woman who’s ever run for a leadership position against a male opponent has seen this pattern. It is so embedded in our culture that even a feminist icon like Gloria Steinem fails to recognize it.
Steinem and other Democratic apologists like Gail Collins, Eleanor Clift, Maureen Dowd and Judith Warner should be ashamed of themselves for caving in to the patriarchy’s expectation that they will punish the “uppity” Governor Palin by dipping her figurative pigtails in ink and throwing mud on her figurative Mary Jane shoes.
It’s bullshit walking, and they know it, but publishing being a rich old man’s game and these being hard times, I guess a girl’s gotta kiss a lot of patriarchal a*s to eat.