Two days ago, I said that Sarah Palin reminded me of my mother and my sister. Let me apologize. While both my mother and sister are strong working mothers with children that have special needs, that’s where the similarities end. Sarah Palin is a judgmental, divisive, nasty woman whose comments about a person with whom she disagrees were sarcastic and mean-spirited.

Sarah Palin has done more to convince me that McCain is 4 more years of George Bush than anything else in recent politics. She’s as Rovian, divisive, petty, narrow-minded and beholden to the cultural terrorists who call themselves evangelicals as Dubya. She’s Dubya in a dress.

Both my mother and sister have identified themselves as independents to me. The support and genuine love I’ve received from them over the years would be completely foreign to Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is a partisan hack, a down-the-line neocon Republican loyalist without a maverick bone in her body. She may fight with other Republicans over who gets the biggest piece of the pie, but she’s ideologically a radical social conservative with anti-woman, anti-queer, anti-nonchristian, anti-poor beliefs.

Sarah Palin set herself up as an advocate for children with disabilities, yet Republican policies will cut Medicare, Medicaid, and social programs that help families with special needs. Palin policies would punish the permanently disabled adults like my aunt (for whom my mother and sister both provide care and love) by gambling social security on the stock market. Palin will never do as much for disabled children as my sister, who professionally helps families and children with special needs, or my mother, who has spent much of her adult career caring for veterans, the mentally disabled, and the elderly as one of the most compassionate people to ever set foot in assisted living facilities.

To my mother and sister, please accept my apology for comparing you to this horrid, horrid woman.

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Posted: September 4th, 2008 under Mi Familia, politics.
Comments: 1

If you, like me, need an antidote to the parade of crusty old white men who profess to be heterosexual getting super excited about the possibility of deciding what happens to your daughter’s womb, that is the Republican National Convention, I have just the thing for you.

The trailer for Milk was released today. Please ignore the commercial for another crappy film at the start of this embed, it’s the only embeddable copy I could find. But you can download the trailer for free through iTunes.

To be honest, this trailer caused the first pangs of homesickness for San Francisco. If I could pack up and go home right now, I would. But I can’t, and I have other things to focus on.

The staffing agency I’m working with asked me to revise my resume today. Most people need help making their resume impressive. Mine was too intimidating and I was asked to remove the words “manager” and “editor” entirely. In other words, cut all but two of my actual job titles going back to college. Anyway, we’ll see if the new and humble resume scores more points in the job hunt.

I’m bracing myself for tonight’s convention coverage. I’ve got news for the McCain-Palin campaign, the scrutiny of Palin and the vetting process is not “nonsense” and it won’t go away just because you stamp your foot and act forcefully. After all the bullshit nonsense about Rev. Wright, I can’t wait for the mainstream media to pick apart the Wasilla Bible Church and Pastor Larry Kroon. For instance, Palin was in the audience when they had David Brickner of Jews for Jesus as a special guest. Brickner has described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God’s “judgment of unbelief” of Jews who haven’t embraced Christianity. Palin’s church apparently supports ex-gay reparative therapy. Or we can back up a couple years to Palin’s former long-term pastor, Ed Kalnins of the Wasilla Assembly of God, who

preached that critics of President Bush will be banished to hell; questioned whether people who voted for Sen. John Kerry in 2004 would be accepted to heaven; charged that the 9/11 terrorist attacks and war in Iraq were part of a war “contending for your faith;” and said that Jesus “operated from that position of war mode.”

Family and children may be “off limits” but surely pastors and religious affiliations are not, right? I mean, the Republicans couldn’t possible imply that questioning a candidate’s fitness to lead and policy positions might be dangerously affected by extremist and offensive religious leaders, right?

Will someone please ask Joe Lieberman, once praised for the historic moment as the first Jewish person selected as vice presidential nominee on a major party ticket, how he feels about endorsing a woman who was reverently listening to David Brickner less than three weeks ago?

Posted: September 3rd, 2008 under San Francisco, atheism, movies, politics.
Comments: 2

I rarely find myself agreeing with or even bothering with “libertarian conservative” Andrew Sullivan, but a quote today caught my eye as being particularly insightful.

“To my mind, this pick is not about Palin’s unreadiness to be president. It’s about McCain’s unreadiness to be president. This act of judgment - a blend of ignorance, gut, cynicism, and pure egotism - makes him seem like a worse potential presdent (sic.) than even George W. Bush. This is McCain’s first real executive decision. And it is unbelievably shallow, incompetent and reckless.” emphasis mine [here]

In the last 72 hours, I’ve heard some amazing responses to the choice of Sarah Palin. What strikes me most is the emotional nature of the discussion and reaction. From the maybe-fake-pregnancy story to the Alaskan separatist ties to the pregnant daughter to the troopergate scandal, people seem to be reacting with a mix of anger, hurt, sadness, indignant defiance, mean-spirited glee and smug satisfaction.

I’ve had my personal commitment to feminism called into question (something I found terribly upsetting, but in the end, all I can do is make weak protests and admit that I’m a man and sometimes I’m simply blind to the hurt and pain that others perceive). I’ve been forced into some soul-searching about questions about the means and the ends in political goals. As a family member of handicapped children, I’ve had to really think about the role of family and parenting when a child has special needs.

That’s when it hit me. Sarah Palin reminds me of my mother. She reminds me of my sister, Jessi. Both are women with children that have special needs. My mother had 9 children, a large family like Palin’s with children separated by 15 years. When my brother Jordan was very young, my mother was a stay-at-home mom, but she later went to work and some of the older children began taking on more responsibility with Jordan. Jessi has worked since Craig was born and only recently found out he has Asperger’s syndrome.

The so-called “Mommy Wars” heating up the internet today have women and mothers on both sides of the debate discussing whether a woman with a newborn that has Down’s syndrome, an unwed pregnant teenage daughter, and a son shipping off to Iraq can be second-in-line to the Presidency.

Looking at the examples set within my own family, I have no doubt that it’s possible to be both a fantastic mother and be well-qualified, capable and dedicated to your career.

Much as I might identify Palin with members of my own family, there’s still no way I could vote for her. There’s a pundit on TV right now saying Americans are bonding with Sarah Palin because “she’s one of us.” That may be true, but if my mother or sister expressed as many anti-choice, anti-queer, anti-environmental, anti-science, anti-peace and anti-poor policies as Palin does, I wouldn’t vote for them, either.

We need to put aside the “emotional bond” we may feel for the candidates and remind ourselves that an informed electorate must use their brains.

There’s room for us to debate sexism, gender roles, parenting roles and family roles in our national political discourse. I’d welcome such discussion, but wouldn’t that discussion be better served if we could inject a little more patience, empathy, reason, and logic into the conversation?*

As I’ve said from the beginning, there’s nothing about Palin’s politics that I like. I believe she’s a dangerous addition to the Republican ticket that will only further bind the “party of Lincoln” to racist, religiously biased, sexist, heterosexist, classist, compassionless conservatism. And McCain’s choice of such a neocon nut addition to his administration signals that far from being a maverick, he’s simply a typical win-at-any-cost politician. As Mr. Sullivan hints, and as remarkable and impossible as it seems, McCain-Palin may one day have us looking back on the Bush-Cheney administration as the golden years.

* I’m aware that even my call for “logic” and “reason” in the debate may, based on historical record and institutionalized biases, strike some as sexist and particularly male-dominant. I’ve heard the IQ/EQ debates, and don’t much like the Mars/Venus brain theory of gender duality. My opinion.

Posted: September 2nd, 2008 under politics.
Comments: 3

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Posted: August 31st, 2008 under Funny, politics.
Comments: none

As the news and blog echo chamber desperately tried to figure out how to characterize political cipher and blank slate Sarah Palin (it seems the VPILF thought is catching on, sadly… can’t we find better ways to mock her than resorting to sexism? how about her utterly insane desire to see creationism taught as science? She’s not a VPILF, she’s the holier-than-thou lady from church who lectures other people’s children for misbehaving in the supermarket), the most provocative thing I’ve read yet is an analysis of what the pick says about John McCain on Yahoo News.

The article by Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris ignores the obvious questions about how women will react, how Evangelicals will react, etc., and lists 6 things that this selection says about John McCain:

1. He’s desperate. Let’s stop pretending this race is as close as national polling suggests. The truth is McCain is essentially tied or trailing in every swing state that matters … McCain could easily lose in an electoral landslide.
2. He’s willing to gamble — bigtime. Let’s face it: This is not the pick of a self-confident candidate.
3. He’s worried about the political implications of his age. Like a driver overcorrecting out of a swerve, he chooses someone who is two years younger than the youthful Obama and 28 years younger than he is.
4. He’s not worried about the actuarial implications of his age. … If he were really concerned about an inexperienced person sitting in the Oval Office, we would be writing about vice presidential nominee Mitt Romney or Tom Ridge or Condoleezza Rice.
5. He’s worried about his conservative base. If he had room to maneuver, there were lots of people McCain could have selected who would have represented a break from Washington politics as usual. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman comes to mind (and it certainly came to McCain’s throughout the process). He had no such room.
6. At the end of the day, McCain is still McCain. People may find him a refreshing maverick or an erratic egotist. In either event, he marches to his own beat.

While there’s no room for us to sit back and pretend everything will be fine, I think this veep pick shows just how badly the McCain campaign is going, and it’s only going to get worse after the debates. Obama will wipe the floor with McCain, who is counting on scoring “rough points” on topics like the troop surge, experience and offshore drilling, while Obama will continue talking about his middle class tax breaks, jobs, and health care. My guess is, Obama has a better read on the concerns of the majority of Americans right now.

Also, regardless of what the transparent Republican talking heads are saying on the cable news networks, all I’ve been hearing from middle-class, white, independent women voters and Hilary die-hards is the same “Ohmygod, like, my vagina will totes make me vote for Palin… wait, nevermind, my brain turned on.”

Posted: August 31st, 2008 under politics.
Comments: none

Don’t know much about unknown Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin?

The crazy kids of twitter have been busy populating the social medium with Little Known Facts about Sarah Palin. And then there’s this website, too. I know it’s a Republican marketing scheme to paint her as a Chuck Norris folk hero, but I think it’s funny and points to the fact that she’s a complete unknown and a puppet onto whom the conservo-batshit-crazy crowd can paint whatever image they want to see. She’s a cypher, a blank slate and at this moment, the most that 90% of Americans known about her is that she’s hot and a good Christian mom. In other words, the perfect woman from the Dobson-Warren-Limbaugh sheep point-of-view.

Image from 13th Floor

So you don’t have to search for it, my favorite personal contribution:
Little Known Fact: anagrams for Sarah Palin include “A Hairs Plan” “A Sharp Nail” “Hi Anal Spar” and “Ah Liars Nap”

If you use her full name “Sarah Heath Palin” you can get “Hi, Anal Trash Heap” and “Ah Snap, Hail Hater.”

In fairness, “Jere Keys” becomes “Jerk Eyes.”

What fun anagrams can you make with famous names?

Posted: August 29th, 2008 under politics.
Comments: 1

Another exciting day at Casa Diggs.

Jacob found work, leaving me as the only still underemployed member of the household, but I’m still not really worried about it yet. It took me about 6 weeks when I moved to San Francisco, and it’s only been three and a half since I arrived in Cincy.

After hitting the gym pretty hard, all 3 of us (4 if you count the dog) gathered around the television to watch our next President. Yes, there were chills and moments that made us very happy. I’m glad me mentioned gays and lesbians, wish he’d mentioned bisexual and transgender, but progress is progress.

Apparently, McCain is less than 100 miles from me right now - preparing to announce his veep (scary evangelical Tom Pawlenty, most likely) in Dayton at 9am tomorrow. If I had a car, I’d make plans to go protest or something. Get outta my new state. Based on all the polls I’ve looked at, if Obama takes Ohio, he takes the country. Don’t believe me, try it out. Just hit the “Create your own scenario” and watch what happens when you switch Ohio to blue… that’s before you add the votes he’s almost certain to get from DC, Hawaii and Vermont. If you take away Minnesota because of Pawlenty, he still wins with DC, Hawaii, Vermont and Maryland… plus Ohio. I desperately want Ohio to be the state that brings it home for Obama this year.

Posted: August 29th, 2008 under Cincinnati, politics.
Comments: 2

Now that we have our house fully wired for cable and internet, I spent most of today watching the DNC and working on a couple writing projects that needed attention.

I’m suddenly feeling like the law school personal statement I’ve been working on since April is too routine and forgettable. I started on another topic that certainly runs the risk of being too out-of-the-ordinary. I’m not trying to rhyme or pull any cute gimmicks, I’m writing about a time in my life that was very influential on my adult career, but may be too risque a topic for law school admission boards. No, not a boring coming out tale. I may share it if I decide it’s too controversial for my applications.

Anyway, my heart swells with pride tonight at the official nomination of the country’s first African-American as a major party candidate for President. We went out to dinner, so I missed all but the end of Bill Clinton’s speech, but I’ll catch up after Biden’s speech about to start.

Posted: August 27th, 2008 under law school, politics.
Comments: none

I appreciate that she used her speech to draw attention to how anti-woman McCain is.

Posted: August 26th, 2008 under politics.
Comments: 1

More provocative yard signs at MyYardOurMessage.com.

Posted: August 15th, 2008 under politics.
Comments: 1