The more American voters find out about Sarah Palin, the less comfortable they are with the idea that she could, in the case of an elderly McCain’s illness or death, become President of the United States in as little as five months from now.
The Militant Moderate writes: “I want to vote for McCain, but he is working hard to convince me otherwise. The nomination of Sarah Palin is only the latest, most egregious, example.”
The McCain campaign says that Sarah Palin is not ready to hold a press conference or to be interviewed by journalists. The mystery on the minds of voters is how Palin could possibly be ready to succeed John McCain as President of the United States if she can’t even answer a reporter’s questions.
If the McCain-Palin campaign won’t give the Press the chance to find out more about Sarah Palin directly, then it’s up to the Press, and to the rest of us, to find out what we can on our own. A good place to start is the sixty six page summary of Sarah Palin’s time as mayor of Wasilla, created by Democrats in 2006. The summary is written by Democrats, but the information is from state and local newspapers and the public record.
Read. Inform yourself.
Then call the McCain-Palin press office at 703-650-5550 and tell them you expect Sarah Palin to start answering reporters’ unscripted questions today. Call the Washington Post ombudsman at 202-334-7582 too, and get ask the D.C. paper to put the pressure on McCain as well.
“You ask me my feelings on an issue and I’ll give it to you straight up, because that’s the only way a voter knows where his employee stands. Elected officials are exactly that—employees.” — Sarah Palin, September 30 1992.
9 days since Sarah Palin was announced as VP pick. 0 press conferences with Sarah Palin answering reporters’ questions. 58 days left until the election.
Sarah Palin is still not ready.
Go ahead, steal that little web badge. I want you to. I want you to stick it up on your blog and remind everybody who visits that Sarah Palin is still not ready to answer the questions a Vice President should answer. Remind your visitors that, should John McCain kick the bucket, Sarah Palin is still not ready to answer the questions a President must answer.
To point this out in even larger style, steal a larger graphic:
Once you hyperlink to one of these graphics, it will automatically update on your web page every day that Sarah Palin refuses to stand before a room full of reporters and answer their questions.
Sarah Palin is running scared. Palin is terrified of reporters. She’s frightened by journalists. Sarah Palin lives in fear of appearing in public at an occasion that isn’t pre-scripted for her convenience.
Even the McCain campaign admits that Sarah Palin isn’t ready to talk to reporters yet.
Palin isn’t ready yet? It’s less than two months until Election Day! If Sarah Palin isn’t ready now, then she never will be.
If Sarah Palin isn’t ready to talk intelligently to reporters, then how will she ever speak intelligently with the leaders of foreign countries? That’s something that the Vice President has to do quite frequently.
And what if, as is quite likely, John McCain dies and leaves Sarah Palin President. How will Sarah Palin ever get ready for that?
For the McCain campaign to keep Sarah Palin hidden, running away from reporters who want to ask her important questions that the American people deserve to have answered is an insult. It’s an attempt to prevent American voters from finding out who Sarah Palin really is - without the mask of a script to make her look pretty and sound prepared.
If the McCain campaign is keeping Sarah shielded in this way, they must know something about her that they want to stay hidden. Maybe it’s that Sarah Palin has little knowledge or understanding of national and international issues. Maybe it’s that Sarah Palin can’t speak without being told what to say. Maybe it’s something else.
Whatever the reason for the McCain campaign to keep Sarah Palin protected from unscripted questions, we cannot sit and wait passively for the Republicans to tell the tales that want to be told. It’s time to wake up the Press, and shake the McCain campaign into letting us see who the real Sarah Palin is.
Action #1: Call the Press to action. Start with your own community’s newspaper, and express your displeasure that reporters are being given no access to Palin. Communicate your expectation that the Press will pressure the McCain campaign to provide unfiltered access for reporters to Palin - or stop reporting on Palin’s scripted publicity events.
Continue with the newspaper in our nation’s capitol, and call Deborah Howell, the Washington Post’s obmudsman, at 202-334-7582.
Action #2: Call the press office of the McCain campaign itself, at 703-650-5550, and tell the staff there that for Palin to be shielded from free questioning by journalists is an unacceptable insult to voters.
We just saw an emblem of what has been worst about the Republican rule of the White House. While John McCain gives his speech, people are being dragged off the floor of the Republican National Convention into the shadows, where they can no longer be seen.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
That’s freedom of the press violated right there. Freedom of assembly has been twisted as protesters are shuffled into segregated Free Speech Zones to protest the Republican National Convention away from the subject of their petition. When freedom of the press and freedom of assembly to voice grievance are curtailed, speech is no longer free but contingent on subject matter. If you have happy talk, you’re free to go. If you’ve got a grievance, move along or else.
I have no sympathy for the assholes who use the cover of otherwise peaceful protests to engage in pointless violence against other people. No matter where they say they fit on a left-right spectrum, such thugs would be the worst of fascists if put in any position of power. But that’s not what was going on in this instance. Peaceable assembly and free speech have a constitutional mandate, and the detention of journalists who cover such assembly and speech should never be tolerated.
I await a prompt and thorough investigation of these constitutional violations by the police of the Twin Cities, by the Secret Service that is overseeing operations during the RNC, and by the FBI.
In 2005, the protest coalition ANSWER was denied access to the Second Inauguration route of George W. Bush so that Bush’s pals with tickets could have spots. ANSWER successfully sued the government and a federal judge demanded that the Bush administration rewrite the rules for access to the inauguration with the understanding that “The Inauguration is not a private event.”
If the free speech clause of the First Amendment does not protect the right of citizens to `interject’ their own convictions and beliefs into a public event on a public forum then it is difficult to understand why the Framers bothered including it at all.
– and opens up 70 percent of the Inauguration parade route along Pennsylvania Avenue to members of the public and political demonstrations.
Read the rule, which is written in relatively straightforward language. Then click here to leave your comment directly with the federal government on the rule. The comments window closes on September 22, 2008, so you don’t have much time. I urge you to write in and ask for more space for demonstrations and free speech on Inauguration Day.
The comment I submitted:
While I am glad to see the government expanding the space available to the general public and demonstrators along the Inaugural parade route in Washington DC, I would like to see the federal government make even MORE of that space open to the public. This is the public’s space and the first amendment to the Constitution guarantees our right to peaceably assemble and speak our piece — not the right to jumbotrons or VIP viewing stands or media access or special ticketed areas for the powerful as the new rule envisions. Americans’ civil rights are paramount and should be treated as such.
Defend your first amendment rights. Send in your comment now.
According to the Constitution of the United States of America, the government is supposed to be uninvolved in matters of religion, and leave belief up to individual personal conscience. However, as of 2008, the Democratic Party will no longer support that position.
The Constitution requires that, in government, there be no establishment of religion. However, as of 2008, the Democratic Party will officially support government establishment of religion.
On page 50 of the new Democratic platform, to be approved this week, the Democratic Party officially goes on the record as endorsing the government “supporting faith-based institutions” and government programs to “empower” these institutions. A “faith-based institution” is a euphemism for a religious organization, like a church or missionary organization.
This plank of the Democratic platform supports government establishment of religion, plain and simple.
It also declares the Democratic Party to be an officially pro-religion political party. “We honor the central place of faith in our lives. Like our Founders, we believe that our nation, our communities, and our lives are made vastly stronger and richer by faith,” the Democratic platform says.
The Democratic Party is not neutral on the issue of whether you ought to be religious or not. The leaders of the Democratic Party cannot content themselves with saying that it’s not their business whether American citizens are religious or not. The Democratic Party is now dedicated to using its power to promote efforts to spread religion.
It is now the absurd, yet official position of the Democratic Party that it is not unconstitutional for the federal government to directly fund churches and other religious organizations.
It’s for everybody’s good, the Democrats say.
Well, it’s not for my good. Religion has hijacked the Democratic Party, and taken the Democratic Party away from the position of defending the First Amendment of the Constitution.
The official position of the Democratic Party, after the new platform is passed, will be that it would be better for me and my community if I would submit to a religious conversion.
I cannot accept that position as anything but a purposeful insult to me and to all of the millions of other nonreligious citizens of the United States of America. The Democratic Party no longer defends our rights. The Democratic Party is now set against us.
The reason for this betrayal is crass and corrupt. Evangelical Christians have more money and more organizational power than nonreligious Americans do. The Democratic Party wants to profit from that power, and so the Democrats are engaging in a repudiation of secular government in order to make evangelical Christians happy.
Atheists, agnostics, humanists, brights, freethinkers and other nonreligious Americans no longer have any place in the Democratic Party. We have been told to sit down and shut up, or to leave.
We must not sit down and shut up. So, it is time for us to leave the Democratic Party.
It seems that Americans who truly believe in the separation of church and state now need to work against both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. In order to do so, we need to become as politically organized and energetic as the evangelicals have become. Our goal: To be recognized as a constituency as important and influential as the theocratic Christians have become.
The sharks used to provide the squalene for Dr. Lark beauty products are captured and killed by bottom-trawling deep sea fishing operations. Those operations use heavy nets that drag across fragile ecosystems on the ocean floor, ripping them up and replacing healthy marine habitat with deep sea deserts.
The tragedy of it all is that Dr. Lark could just as easily obtain squalene from olives grown organically in sustainable groves. Instead, Dr. Lark has chosen to support the destructive overfishing of the world’s oceans.
If this environmental destruction were happening in order to provide life-saving medications available in no other way, perhaps there might be some reasonable excuse for it. But that’s not what we’re talking about. The following are the kind of beauty products Dr. Lark uses bottom dredged shark liver squalene in:
- Moisturizing Body Mist
- Rejuvenating Eye Cream
- Ultra-Hydrating Night Cream
My irregular beauty tip: If you’re willing to subsidize the ecological destruction of the oceans so that you can make yourself feel pretty with moisturizing body mist, don’t bother. You’re already ugly to the bone.
Instead, do something truly beautiful: Boycott all Dr. Lark’s products until she agrees to stop using shark liver squalene, and let her know she’s lost your business.
A large group of nonviolent protesters in the village of Bil’in, along the wall separating Israel and Palestine, was attacked by the Israeli army, hit with concussion grenades, sprayed with strange colored water, and what local sources are calling CS gas - chlorobenzylidenemalononitrile, a kind of tear gas.
I can’t find a single American commercial news source that’s reporting on this incident.
F.G. Fitzer’s somewhat flippant treatment of Benjamin Franklin earlier this morning recalled to my mind a much more serious message delivered by Franklin. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Franklin rose in approval of the Constitution, but warned of its demise at the same time.
Speaking of the Constitution, he said, “This is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”
Over most of the last decade, we have warned of the attacks against the Constitution made by President George W. Bush. Bush is clearly responsible for the weakening of the Constitution, but he is not alone in his responsibility.
Of the over 300 million citizens of the United States of America, how many have taken a public stand against Bush’s anti-constitutional agenda? How many have taken even a single afternoon to do their part to defend the Constitution against Bush’s attacks?
The number is low, and it isn’t because Americans don’t have the time or resources to do what’s necessary. The latest Batman movie, Dark Knight had earned 471.5 million dollars by the beginning of this week. Even if movie tickets cost ten dollars, which they usually don’t, that would mean that 47 million viewers have gone to see the movie. Let’s say, for the sake of of argument, that just 5 million of attending were Americans, and that they had all been counted twice, for paying to see the movie over again. That would still be 2.5 million Americans who have gone to see the Batman movie over the last month.
Those Americans could have taken their time and money to make a demonstration of opposition to President Bush’s grab of autocratic powers in defiance of the Constitution. However, they didn’t care enough to do it. They cared more about a comic book character than the Constitution of their country.
Month after month, year after year, Americans have made this kind of decision, and month after month, year after year, the Constitution of the United States of America has grown weaker as a result. Now, Americans, grown too lazy to meaningfully participate in their own democracy, seem to have concluded that they need a despotic government, because they have become incapable, as Benja min Franklin warned, of any other.
More than any single politician, it is the American people who have become corrupt.
In this presidential election, Barack Obama has been pandering to religious Americans from day one, and working to get religious tax-exempt organizations involved directly in his political campaign.
Obama attacked “secularists” for trying to maintain the Democratic Party as a sphere clean of illegal infiltration by tax exempt churches. “Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square,” Obama warned.
“How do you kick off a week-long celebration to showcase our Party’s nominee, our strength, our diversity and our shared values? …the first ever Convention interfaith gathering — the first official event of the 2008 Democratic National Convention. See how you can join delegates, elected officials, clergy from many communities of faith and special musical guests as we gather in a spirit of unity.”
This supposed Democratic Party “unity” only goes so far: Nonreligious Americans are not invited. Ron Millar of the Secular Coalition for America wrote to the Democratic National Committee pointing out that “I have received complaints by people who identify as atheist and humanist who feel that this event excludes them as full participants in the convention.”
The Democratic National Committee has refused to even write a letter back to the Secular Coalition, much less to include nontheistic Americans in the event.
Imagine how it would seem if the Democratic National Committee made a European-American Inter-Ethnic Assembly the first event of the convention - and did not hold any event for Democrats of other ethnicities at any time during the convention. Americans of non-European descent would rightly regard themselves as excluded from full participation in the convention.
That’s exactly what the DNC is doing to non-religious Americans. Giving religious Democrats, and leaders of tax-exempt religious organizations, special access to political leaders in the Democratic Party, while excluding non-religious Democrats from that access, is not a way to demonstrate unity. It’s a way to promote divisiveness and discrimination.
The DNC put a Pentacostal minister, Leah Daughtry, in charge of organizing the Democratic National Convention, who declared, “For me as person of faith who has made God first in her life, it is symbolically important that the first thing we’re doing is coming together as people of faith to celebrate our faith traditions and to ask the blessings of God on us as we undertake this great civic responsibility.” Has no one in the Democratic Party explained to Ms. Daughtry that this convention isn’t supposed to just reflect her personal preferences as a Christian?
If the Democratic National Committee does not want to allow non-religious Americans to have equal access to the Democratic National Convention, then why should non-religious Americans give the Democrats their support? If the Democrats refuse to make an equal place for us at their convention, then the only place there is for non-religious Americans within the Democratic Party is the place of second-class citizens.
That is not a place that non-religious Americans ought to accept. As Barack Obama takes leadership over the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly hostile to non-religious Americans.
If the Democratic Party is going to be a religious party instead of a political party, then it’s time for politically aware non-religious Americans to leave the Democratic Party, and re-register as independent voters. Perhaps that will demonstrate to the Democratic leadership what the cost of faith-based pandering can be.
Activism opportunity:Send a message to Leah Daughtry about her decision to have the Democratic National Convention discriminate against non-religious Americans.
In the buildup to the Democratic National Convention in Denver next week, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center will hold a picnic dinner this Friday to “celebrate” the 25 years that the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center has been in existence.
This idea of a celebration struck me as kind of odd. What is the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center actually celebrating?
The Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center says that it “seeks a world free of war, weapons, and violence.” Well, after 25 years of work from the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, are we any closer to a world free of war, weapons and violence? Nope.
So why are they celebrating? It makes me wonder whether the true purpose of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center is to serve as a community center for people who enjoy a certain kind of lifestyle, which includes meetings, and discussion groups, and folk music, and picnics.
There seems to be a lack of interest in results in the so-called peace movement. After decades of failure, this movement keeps on doing the same things. Presumably, that’s because those things are what members of the peace movement like to do.
If people in the peace movement were as interested in finding effective ways to convince others to embrace peace as they are in doing things that they like to do, could we be closer to achieving actual peace?
Yesterday, the crackerjack reporters at the New York Times broke the story that a large number of Americans get their news from The Daily Show. Thanks for keeping us up to date, NYTimes.
Out of the article, one paragraph in particular stood out. Talking seriously about the comedy of The Daily Show, the article explained that it was important, in discussing issues like torture at Guantanamo Bay, not to be too strident, because strident people talking about the problems with torture torture is like torture itself.
I had never thought about that before, really. I had never really considered that it’s a torment for the American people to have to listen to people seriously discussing the violent abuses that their President has set into motion. I realize that I, here at Irregular Times, have at times discussed issues like torture by the American government, and the many other attacks against the Constitution by George W. Bush and his allies. All the while, I never cracked a joke. I never did anything cute to make it all seem like just a laugh.
I apologize for all the mental anguish I surely have caused to Irregular Times readers by being stridently opposed to George W. Bush’s agenda of wrecking our country. I am so, so, so, so, so profoundly sorry that I never stopped to think of your feelings. I realize that I am probably making myself vulnerable to a lawsuit by admitting my guilt, but to be honest, my anguish at having written seriously about the high crimes by the President is so great that if I am the target of a class action lawsuit, I don’t think that I would contest it.
I just wish I could take it all back. What was I thinking, that confronting the lies, torture, big brother spying and power grab was more important than making sure that the American people feel comfy and happy?
I regret being strident, and intend to spend the rest of my days trying to make up for it. Here’s a first step: Look - it’s a pretty girl! See, I’m not being strident. I just want you to feel all cushy. Go sit down in your easy chair. Have a cup of hot chocolate. Don’t read your newspaper. In fact, don’t read at all. Go watch a cartoon. Eat Froot Loops.
Our newest book set:
2008 Reasons to Elect a Progressive President, Volume 1:
Reasons 1-1034 on Community, Economy, Education, the Environment and Freedom
2008 Reasons to Elect a Progressive President, Volume 2:
Reasons 1035-2008 on History, War and Peace, Democrats, Republicans, and Values
The Militant Moderate writes: “I want to vote for McCain, but he is working hard to convince me otherwise. The nomination of Sarah Palin is only the latest, most egregious, example.”
Palin isn’t ready yet? It’s less than two months until Election Day! If Sarah Palin isn’t ready now, then she never will be.
I just wish I could take it all back. What was I thinking, that confronting the lies, torture, big brother spying and power grab was more important than making sure that the American people feel comfy and happy?
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