Perhaps David Letterman should never have made his famous tasteless jokes about Sarah Palin and her daughter Bristol.  After all, it gave them unwarranted media attention that's still going strong through a couple of murders committed by right-wing terrorists and serious political unrest in Iran.  The greatest crime here is putting someone who shouldn't win a school board election on the national stage again.

While a mother responding to an attack on her child, whether by a comedian or not, is completely understandable, I don't know what Palin's goals are in trying to paint the comments as if they were intended for her 14 year old daughter Willow.  This is just another lie from an extremely practiced liar. Those who repeat this meme through the blogosphere (whether they get 20+ recs or not) are guilty of intellectual dishonesty.

As to the question of whether Bristol Palin is 'fair game' being the daughter of a politician, I say she became fair game the minute she launched an apology tour for doing what conservatives say is the right thing to do in her scenario.  Bristol came out on Fox News and said abstinence was unrealistic, and then as a legal adult and person of free will chose to enter the debate about contraception in the country on the wrong side (And by wrong, I mean stupid).  It is not sexist or out of bounds to make fun of a public figure who is actively participating in the debate.

The media is not being hard enough on Bristol Palin.  She deserves mountains of negative attention for this stunt.  How is her son Tripp going to feel as the world's most famous accident?  Imagine finding out that your mother went all around the country touting your existence as the reason girls shouldn't have sex, then watching her proclaim to television cameras that "noone would want to have sex" if they knew what it was like having you?

Also worth a mention is the 'slutty stewardess' comment.  Everyone immediately got the joke, as gov. Palin's style does somewhat resemble that of a flight attendant.  If she wore white frequently instead of navy, it probably would have been a 'naughty nurse' joke instead.  If Sarah Palin was not attractive, obviously the joke would not have been made at all.  What this comment has lead to is a revival of the idea that people commenting on Sarah Palin's appearance are all sexist. 

Male and female politicians will always have a different level of scrutiny on their appearance and sex appeal.  Comments about the sex appeal of JFK, Bill Clinton (about whom oral sex jokes will be told for a generation), and Barack Obama have been rampant, though I admit this is the exception rather than the rule.  While I look forward to the far future when men evolve a light switch on their genitals to turn off and on the tendency to mentally size up women as sex partners, that day will likely not be in my lifetime.  Policy makers, journalists, and even comedian/journalists like Stewart and Colbert, who are continually blurring the line between the two disciplines, have a responsibility to try to keep the debate based on facts of policy rather than base instincts.  Pure comedians like Letterman, Leno, and Conan have no such obligation.  Their duty is to make people laugh and walk the line of good taste, and that is what Letterman did.

While the hypocrisy of the right in general is staggering, the Palins were not the ones making comments about Janet Reno and Chelsea Clinton during the Clinton years.  Sarah Palin has been entirely consistent.  Anyone who criticizes or opposes her is clearly a sexist, and by extention the entire left wing is sexist (why else would they 'promote' abortion?)  Sarah Palin's views, how little she knows about the world she wishes to make policy in, and her willingness to stand idly by and even smile while her supporters were suggesting murdering Barack Obama are disgusting.  On the whole she is a vile, vile woman.  Her daughter's apology tour is almost equally vile.  My disdain for both of them is based on this, I have no bias against women. 

Her selection as McCain's running mate was a gimmick to rile up people who felt Hillary Clinton was robbed by the primary process, and that gimmick failed.  While her colleagues are actually assailing Sonia Sotomayor for her race and gender, she's pulling the 'everybody's picking on me because I'm a woman, so please pay attention to me' card.  Many of us are biting on this hook, line, and sinker. 
 
I detest Sarah Palin as a politician.  I will laugh at jokes that would not be funny if the governor was not attractive or Bristol had never gotten pregnant. The reason I am laughing is not based in gender, it's that the jokes are making fun of people I really dislike.  If I was a comedian, and I'd thought somebody famous primarily for having been pregnant was in the same place as somebody famous for being promiscuous, I probably would have made the same joke.  (on a side note I don't think I've heard A-Rod weigh in on being treated as nothing but a sex object)

While we do have legal freedom of speech in this country, there is obviously a line between what you should and should not say.  If David Letterman had said something along the lines of "Sarah Palin's just another stupid woman who thinks she can run anything more complicated than a kitchen" that would be an obviously offensive sexist remark.  What he did do was make a sexually charged comment about a woman who was chosen specifically for her attractiveness and gender (it couldn't have been for her dazzling intellect) and there's nothing wrong with that. 

It's comparable to a comment about the possibility of tokenism behind the selection of Michael Steele as RNC chairman.  Though such comments are racially charged, they are not necessarily racist.  Part of the comeback strategy the Right is employing is to use high profile women and minorities to draw fire.  Having been attacked for racist/sexist remarks, they cry "the Left are the real racists/sexists!" whenever Jindal, Palin, Steele, or sometimes Bachmann says something stupid and gets called on it.  We are playing right into their hands by giving the Letterman "issue" this level of attention.

Meanwhile, we all piss ourselves playing a game of "who's the most sensitive liberal" and indulging in the ideological infighting that got the democrats where they were in 1999.  I was only a teenager at the end of the Clinton years, but from then until about 2006, Democrats and liberals assailed each other with the vigor we should have saved for George W. Bush.  Disagreements on any issue, whether on Israel, abortion, or censorship often got visceral and nasty, hence the term "wedge issue".  The left fragmented to the point that we had no message, just like 1980.  As a result, Nader got enough votes to make Florida contestable in 2000.  Only after six years of being completely out of power did the left agree to disagree when we were all on board with major issues.  However, smarminess and pettiness are slowly starting to make a comeback.  We may differ on whether these jokes were appropriate, but let's make sure we never forget how awful it is when the Right gets power and present a unified front in 2010 and 2012. 

Michael Vick got out of prison yesterday.  For those of you who've been living in a cave the last couple years, Vick was the Falcons' star quarterback who was convicted of running a large scale dog fighting ring.  Because of this unbelievable breach of basic human decency, the mindset it takes to run a criminal enterprise while making millions legitimately, and the leadership role any quarterback plays on a team and in a city, Vick was banned for life by the NFL suspended indefinitely with the possibility of reinstatement.

Coach Herm Edwards of the Miami Dolphins (formerly of the KC Chiefs) was on ESPN the other day, expressing interest in bringing Vick back to the NFL to play for his team.  Edwards' rationale was that "in America, we believe in second chances."  If this is true, I have seen no evidence.  Talented people with convictions going back decades have their employment opportunities limited.  Though it may not make sense to give a former burglar a door-to-door sales job, or to give a former drug user a job at a rehab clinic, in my experience pretty much any criminal activity (whether you were 18 or 28 when it happened) if it doesn't force you into menial labor, at least keeps you from the upper (or even middle) eschelons of any company.

The "give people a second chance" meme has built up steam in the NFL dialogue (which I'm sure everyone on this site follows closely).  If people get excluded from jobs with considerably less responsibility to society than an NFL quarter back has for a bag of marijuana, why does Vick get a free pass for an abhorrent, felonious crime which was clearly of intent?  It's an easy answer really, he's an extremely gifted athlete.  In America, however, we don't give second chances to people just because they're talented, we only give them to people who are famous.

Hopefully, the Vick scandal will let people reexamine how they think about their fellow human, and more people will be given second chances for considerably less serious charges.  Or, perhaps, people will realize that this man was not arrested for a tiddlywinks violation, and that what he did was so reprehensible, he deserves to be exiled from the esteemed position of NFL quarterback forever.  The most likely outcome, however, is that people say "damn, the man can play ball" and the status quo goes on. 

I receive articles from Human Events, a conservative magazine, just to see what Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, Chuck Norris, and the rest of the idiot squad are spewing.  It gets me ready for when their toxic memes inevitably trickle down to my conservative friends.  Today, I got a lovely piece of bile from one of their sponsors: "RightMarch PAC".  They wanted me to send blast faxes to Representatives supporting the Mathew Shepard Act. 

The following is actual "reasoning" from a US Representative.

ALERT: If a bill that the U.S. House just passed isn't STOPPED in the Senate, here's what can happen, according to Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX):

If a mother hears that their child has been raped and she slaps the assailant with her purse, she is now gone after as a hate criminal because this is a protected class. There are other protected classes in here. I mean simple exhibitionism. I have female friends who have told me over the years that some guy flashed them, and their immediate reaction was to hit them with their purse. Well now, he's committed a misdemeanor, [and] she has committed a federal hate crime because the exhibitionism is protected under sexual orientation... You see someone spying on you changing clothes and you hit them -- they've committed a misdemeanor; you've committed a federal felony under this bill. It is so wrong.

Rep. Gohmert is correct: IT IS SO WRONG!

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to be hearing this from a Texan representative, but the problem here is that the GOP is again applying the Santorum strategy of taking behaviors that violate others rights, this time going as far as child-rape, and equating them with homosexuality.  Then they go one step further, saying that giving rights to one brand of "deviant" will result in the collapse of civilization when all the other "deviants" become emboldened.

What really bothers me about this argument is that he seems to think it's okay to run down and beat somebody who was "spying on you changing".  Again the GOP seems to disregard the rule of law for visceral impulses.  I'm going to take a lucky guess that the gentleman from Texas considers himself a Christian man, and I can't think of a more fitting application of "turn the other cheek" than when dealing with a voyeur.

The email then goes on to detail how hate crimes bills will allow gays and transexuals to get in your face and if you reject them they'll haul you away.  It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Now that the GOP has lost on the economy and national security issues, all they can do is breed resentment against minorities and gays to try to fire up their base until everyone forgets how awful they are in a couple decades.

This morning, I saw something hilarious on YouTube.  Senator Inhofe (R-OK) went on Fox "News" to talk about how since Specter jumped ship to avoid certain death in a Pennsylvania closed Republican primary, the Republicans can mount a counter-offensive in the 2010 elections because ideological purity somehow gives them legitimacy.  It seems to me that the Senator from Oklahoma needs a lesson in recent PA political history.

Pennsylvania is a political double-stuffed oreo.  Blue on the edges, with a big creamy red center known fondly as Pennsyltucky. One need only ask Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pennsyltucky) to find out that the "Hillary Democrats" of this area are terrified both of black people and the government coming to their doorsteps trying to take away their guns.  Imagine the terror a black secret islamo-fascist gungrabber must inspire!

Despite having vast swaths of red through it, Pennsylvania had millions of democratic crossovers this year, enough to make the GOP preemptively cry voter fraud.  While there were concerns that a lot of these new registrations were to boost Hillary, and that the white creamy center of the Pennsyltucky Oreo would never vote for Obama, on election night my home state went firmly blue (Solidified by Obama calling for NCAA football playoffs on election eve, something Penn State fans have been after for decades.  No surprise I didn't see much about that in the MSM).

The point is that most of these new democrats (barring the Operation Chaos bozos) didn't change their registration back.  Turns out that mixed in amongst the racists, militia nuts and teabaggers were a lot of reasonable people who happen to have centrist political views, who might just be registered Republican because all their neighbors are.  Perhaps these people have even been nudged a little left of center by the epic failure of the Bush administration, and are now open to ideas they found reprehensible when Clinton proposed them with Reagan's "golden age" in recent memory. 

These reasonable Republicans were Specter's key demographic in the Republican primary.  Now that democrats control the center in the political chessgame, especially in PA, those on the center must join with the democrats or perish, as those voting in the Republican primaries will likely vote how Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh tell them to.  The reason Specter can't win a primary on the Republican side isn't that your moronic teabagger movement fired up your party against centrists, it's because all the centrists got fired up against your party and quit in 2008.

Rendell just announced that he expects Specter to run unopposed.  If he changes his mind on EFCA and starts voting more like a democrat, I would have no problem with this.  However, if he doesn't, I'd like to have a choice between Specter and a more liberal candidate.  Of course, the winner will breeze through the general election against whatever sacrifical lamb the GOP throws up. 

Moreover, this isn't just a PA problem for the Republicans.  The loss of the special election in upstate New York (an area considered similar to Pennsyltucky by the city crowd) shows that Democrats are becoming a silent majority in all but the reddest parts of the country.  How ironic. 

The dems have a material advantage, great pawn structure (experienced fundraisers and field organizers), a brilliant tactician in Obama at the helm, and now have complete control of the center of the board.  At the risk of beating the chess analogy to death, the Republicans have no option left but to tip their king over and start from scratch.  That is unless the economy blows up so badly we're living in shanty towns eating tuna straight from the can.