Burn, baby, burn

I've abandoned my child! I've abandoned my boy!

...

Now, you probably haven't missed me, given that the only story in the past week is the apparent pending collapse of the American financial industry which, as I've established before, I know virtually nothing about--in other words, about as much as John McCain knows. All I can tell is that there's a Big Shitpile, and if we don't pay Wall Street bankers $700 billion immediately to take the shitpile off their hands, it'll be Great Depression 2.0: The Depressioning.

This bailout package is either necessary to keep the shitpile from totally collapsing the economy, or the most blatant extortion racket in American history, or possibly both. I can't begin to tell you whether it's necessary or not, but I don't have the first bit of confidence in our business-owned government to make sure this is a real emergency and not just a handout to billionaires. I'm not the only one who sees the resemblance between between this situation and the Iraq war resolution in 2002; a burgeoning crisis that must be answered !right now! without any time for the public to digest the consequences. And Paulson's original proposal--give us the money now, no questions, no strings attatched--doesn't strike me as coming from a man who is serious about making a good-faith compromise to thwart impending doom.

If Paulson and his Wall Street comrades--We Are All Socialists Now, apparently--really want that money, now seems like a good time to give it to them nailed down with a full spread of progressive demands. As the original proposal showed, however, they have no interest in anything except a deferrential offer because they're more than willing to hold the contry hostage until we give in to their demands. After an overwhelming pubilc outpouring, the House rejected a version of the bailout bill on Monday, with representatives facing the biggest electoral challenges in November playing the deciding factor. You may think this looks like a rare victory for democracy, but you'd be wrong. The Dow plunged 777 points after the bill failed, as the public's financial masters reminded them who's making the rules here.

I expect this will scare the pubilc enough to provide the political cover needed to pass the bailout. And practically that may be the best thing. In a better world, we might have a democratic government that did more than the bidding of big business, but that ship has long since sailed. The bankers are, as always, in the stronger position, because they will walk away with the most toys regardless of what happens. When Jesus said "the poor will always be with you," he hadn't considered the antithesis in modern gangster capitalism.

Root for a tie

The Electoral College needs to go, but it seems no outcome can sufficiently prove its absurdity to the two major parties. Genghis Bush won the 2000 election despite losing the popular vote, and nearly had the tables turned on in 2004, but neither prompted any movement toward revamping the antiquated system. There may be, however, one outcome disastrous enough to spur a movement for dumping the college.

A tie.

According to the last update from the boys of fivethirtyeight.com, a 269-269 electoral vote tie occurred in 3.2 percent of their simulations. The most likely road to a tie has Obama winning al the Kerry states save New Hampshire and adding Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico. It's a longshot, as McCain needs to come back in New Hampshire, and Obama must defend the key Kerry states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, but, this far from the election, it can't be ruled out.

Would it be a nightmare? It could be, especially if--as Silver predicts--McCain wins the popular vote. The House of Representatives would have to break a tie, and it's technically controlled by Democrats, though they could've fooled me. This could be the partisan inverse of Florida 2000 magnified a hundred fold, and I don't think the righties will take too kindly to having Katherine Harris come back and haunt them.

It's finished!

After nearly five years, slacktivist has finished his epic deconstruction of the eponymous first novel in the "Left Behind" series.

I think this ties it up nicely:

Any one of those faults, on its own, would have been enough to earn Left Behind a place on the Worst Books of 1995 list. The presence of all of those faults -- in a single book and in such concentrated form -- is more than enough to secure its place on a list of the Worst Books of All Time.

Yet the book's signature failure is something far simpler. Left Behind disproves the very thing it sets out to prove. It presents an inadvertent but irrefutable case for the unreality and impossibility of all of the events that Tim LaHaye claims are prophesied to occur at any moment.

Those events are not about to occur. They never will occur. They never can occur. Don't believe me? Go read Left Behind and see for yourself.

That signature failure, Left Behind's forceful refutation of itself, is what earns this book my vote as the Worst Book of All Time.

Indeed. Ultimately, the major flaw of "Left Behind" is that it's actually antagonistic to the whole of the Rapture-ready/"end is near" theology. The latter relies on uncertainty; it needs vague ominous warnings to appeal to people. This way, any major upheaval in global politics, weather, geologic activity and so forth can be invoked as a sign of the Last Days, without any need to assign it to a broader outlook. "Left Behind" betrays this by laying out such a world in detail, and it's a world that anyone with a modest understanding of geopolitics would recognize as having no resemblance to our own, and anyone with a thorough understanding of the globe would recognize that the world of "Left Behind" could never come to pass.

Any admirer of Tim LeHaye cannot believe LeHaye's insistence that the Rapture is near at hand. LeHaye himself has seen to it.

Does John McCain know where Spain is?

Of course not; he can't see it from any of his houses. 

You may have forgotten about John McCain, who's still technically running for president as the titular head of the Republican ticket.  He may want you to forget for a few days more, after a baffling interview he gave to a Spanish radio presenter in which he seems to conflate Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero with other Latin American left-wing leaders, and says he won't meet with Zapatero even after the interviewer reminds McCain that he's the prime minister of Spain.  

 McCain's campaign is apparently claiming he fully intended to snub Zapatero, whose social democrats came to power when the Spanish public ejected the previous right-wing government for its support of the Iraq war.  Perhaps they're right, and Spain is becoming the new France in American wingnut circles.  More likely McCain just can't keep track of all the things he's supposed to say anymore.  The interview also aired on a Miami radio station, and McCain was probably told to spare no quarter in denouncing the Latin left.  Then he drew a blank when he tried to remember if Zapatero was included, and decided to take the safe way out rather than risk angering the right-wing refugees in South Florida. 

Palinland

News the past few days has been falling faster than the Milwaukee Brewers' playoff hopes. Not exactly Ratheresque, but when you're too busy keeping up its hard to think up avuncular zingers.

...

The Times and Post both had extensive articles Sunday documenting Sarah Palin's political career in Alaska, and neither is very flattering. Palin comes off with an almost Nixonian dedication to a personalized political agenda, firing or intimidating anyone who crosses her and hiring under-qualified friends to top government positions.

Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.

“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ ”

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

Using your high school yearbook as an application folder? Man, I gotta get the Donkeyman elected to public office.

The Times article also covers Palin's alleged inquiry into banning books at the Wasilla public library shortly after her election as mayor, an incident that preceded the mysterious sacking of the librarian (that seems to be a recurring theme with Palin; future employees of the Vice-President are encouraged to keep their resumes updated--or their high school yearbook nearby). The top target of Palin's book-banning effort was "Pastor, I Am Gay," by the Rev. Howard Bess, a feisty, independent Baptist minister who has been a frequent agitator in the ultra-conservative Wasilla region.

Palin has attended several churches over the years, but all of them have been affiliated with the pentecostal Assemblies of God, the same denomination portrayed in the film "Jesus Camp" which many evangelicals dismissed as non-representative fringe movement. She certainly has the vocabulary of a fundamentalist, twice telling an Alaska blogger she believes the Rapture will occur in her lifetime. And, despite the sudden discovery of identity politics by Republicans, Palin is far from a friend of women's rights. As mayor of Wasilla, Palin backed a law forcing rape victims to pay for their own rape kits.

Sarah Palin may well represent the final melding of reality television with national elections, as the American public is poised to put a small-town petty hack in the White House on the illusion that she's a real-life Disney character, and that'll make for great TV. Many observers have correctly warned that Barack Obama is a substance-free celebrity candidate, but the Repubilcans have again played a trump card, taking lowerst-common-denominator, pop-culture politics to its logical conclusion. However, the fleeting nature of American celebrity may come back to haunt the McCain campaign; the torrent of negative revelations is taking its toll on the popular perception of Palin, and her "aw shucks I'm jes' folks" act may not survive until Election Day.

Let's play two

After a lengthy hiatus, it's time for another installment of the nation's slowest-growing quiz-show sensation, America or Oceania?

Today's contestant is everyone's favorite moose-shootin', pork-denyin' hockey mom governor from the Great White North.

When Gibson said if under the NATO treaty, the United States would have to go to war if Russia again invaded Georgia, Palin responded: "Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

"And we've got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable," she told Gibson.

It's fun, and by fun I mean the kind of fun you can only have sticking your eye on a hot poker and using it to garnish your mooseburger, to watch Bush, McCain and their acolytes talk about the Georgian war without also indicting American foreign policy. There was Zalmay Khalilzad, in an Olympian effort riffed hilariously by The Daily Show, claiming foreign invasions are only verbotem "in Europe." Now Mrs. Mooselini is playing the "democracy" card, as if a democratically-elected government has ever been an impediment to American intervention. Just ask Bolivia right now.

But what we're really shooting for, kids and peoples, is that alternate universe where the Russian invasion was "unprovoked," for tis there we may finally find the secret to the right-wing mind. You may have thought the war started when Georgia started shelling the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali. You can argue, quite convincingly, that the Russian response was several steps too far beyond what was justified, but you can't convince me that it was unprovoked. I know what I thought I saw, and no Lucasian "Russia shot first" editing can possibly change my mind.

Unless...

‘It will not last,’ said O'Brien. ‘Look me in the eyes. What country is Oceania at war with?’

Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania and that he himself was a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war.

‘I don't remember.’

‘Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been condemned to death for treachery. You pretended that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent. No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?’

‘Yes.’

O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.

‘There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?’

‘Yes.’

And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment — he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps — of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had faded but before O'Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some period of one's life when one was in effect a different person.

We've got the whole world in our hands

Jonathon Freedland writes in The Guardian about the international reaction to the American election.

But what of the rest of the world? This is the reaction I fear most. For Obama has stirred an excitement around the globe unmatched by any American politician in living memory. Polling in Germany, France, Britain and Russia shows that Obama would win by whopping majorities, with the pattern repeated in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. If November 4 were a global ballot, Obama would win it handsomely. If the free world could choose its leader, it would be Barack Obama.

The crowd of 200,000 that rallied to hear him in Berlin in July did so not only because of his charisma, but also because they know he, like the majority of the world's population, opposed the Iraq war. McCain supported it, peddling the lie that Saddam was linked to 9/11. Non-Americans sense that Obama will not ride roughshod over the international system but will treat alliances and global institutions seriously: McCain wants to bypass the United Nations in favour of a US-friendly League of Democracies. McCain might talk a good game on climate change, but a repeated floor chant at the Republican convention was "Drill, baby, drill!", as if the solution to global warming were not a radical rethink of the US's entire energy system but more offshore oil rigs.

If Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger. And I predict a deeply unpleasant shift.

Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside a leftist hardcore, it has mostly been anti-Bushism, opposition to this specific administration. But if McCain wins in November, that might well change. Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start - a fresh start the world is yearning for.

Now this, dear Mr. Freedland, is not how things work here in America. We don't care who the rest of the world wants us to elect. In fact, that makes us even more likely to elect the other guy. We like rubbing your nose in our shit. We make the rules; you live in our reality. And with our economy falling apart, the empire is all we've got to hang our hat on. Hell, even Obama thinks we have to get off the Demon Imported Oil because it makes us have to respect other countries. Bombing them doesn't always work out so well, it seems. That's just ass-backwards, kids! Running the world is our job, you're going to depend on us!

...

Writing in slacktivist comments, Praline expresses a similar sentiment.

America's policies send shock waves through the rest of the world. I live in the UK, and Bush has managed to plough our economy along with yours; food prices are already rising out of control and we're heading for a depression.

Considering America was founded on 'No taxation without representation', the way it screws up its supposed allies' economies while claiming the right to act however it darn well pleases makes me feel pretty pissy. And worried about earning enough money to live on.

You can run, but you can't hide. Why else are so many foreigners on this board getting mad about the policies of a nation they don't inhabit? It's not because America is so darned special, it's because America has power over us. I don't hang around on boards that discuss Canadian or Jamaican politics, because those policies don't affect my way of life. America affects all of us

The biggest crisis facing America today...

...is apparently the terror of congressional earmarks for pork-barrel projects. Which are, you know, a bad thing, but hardly on par with a looming climate crisis, destroyed international relationships, and a broadly failing economy on the echelon of things sending this country down the drain. But because this is apparently the only thing McCain/Palin have to hang their "reform" image on, we have to pretend it supercedes all of these other issues where they would simply rubber-stamp the old Bush plan all in the name of "balance" (see previous post). So, in an election with such a vast array of potential topics, we're left to argue over the minutiae of when Sarah Palin decided she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere. Such fun.

The news gets around

One of the slow-dying casualties in my political awakening is the idea that journalists ought to strive to be balanced and non-partisan.  The failure of the American news networks to convey virtually any meaningful information to citizens is a testimony to the weakness of this idealism.  Forced to tolerate the right's insatiable cries of "liberal bias" by its dogmatic committment to balance, the news media has been rendered little more than an outlet for competing spin, which the right has then abused by becoming more and more outlandish.  

Glennzilla documents the latest case of a news-net folding in the face of righty complaints. 

Yesterday, Gillespie got exactly the "response" that he demanded from a super-compliant MSBNC. There is no question whatsoever that the Bush administration, the McCain campaign, and the Right generally have recently made it a top priority to force MSNBC to remove Olbermann (and Chris Matthews) from playing a prominent role in its election coverage, and MSNBC has now complied with the Right's demands. Does it need to be explained why it is disturbing in the extreme that the White House and the McCain campaign can so transparently dictate MSNBC's programming choices?

Conservatives love to claim that MSNBC is now the liberal version of Fox News because they give one hour to a guy who doesn't like Bush, and, as of today, one hour to an actual liberal who is, by my count, the first unabashed liberal to host a cable news show since Phil Donohue was fired for not toeing the line on Iraq.  You can see what the righty idea of "balance" is.  Of course, the argument has always been disingenuous.  Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine because he knew what it would produce; a docile, corporate-owned press that's shifted hard rightward.  

Now, I don't support re-instituting the fairness doctrine, either.  I think we would be better off with a European newspaper model, where journalists are expected to be fair-minded but with an understood ideological partisanship.  This is heresy to most American journalists, who will undoubtedly bawl about hyper-factionalization of the pubilc, but it's hard to argue that Americans aren't tragically underinformed about global reality compared to the rest of the first world.  Rupert Murdoch has already brought the model here with his products, but Serious American journalists are squeamish about anyone who would dare challenge him.  

One of the immediately positive benefits of this system would be not having a political party able to say that it won't allow its vice-presidential candidate to be interviewed by journalists unless they are properly deferrential.  Of course, she would still make the rounds at Fox News, but the rest of the press could tell her to kindly piss off, and then she would look cowardly for not facing down a hostile interview.  Conservatives would still cry liberal bias because that's just a Pavlovian reflex for them, but no one would take it too seriously. Now that's, of course, not going to happen in the country we inhabit.  And we've also seen what happens when those European journalists think they can bring their act to America.  

Beyond that, network and cable shows routinely convene panels filled with right-wing views and devoid of anything remotely approaching liberalism, and that creates no controversy. Just this past weekend, I subjected myself while traveling to ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and the panel discussing Sarah Palin was composed of right-wing ideologue George Will, establishment-spokesperson Cokie Roberts, and reporter Sam Donaldson. That is typical for television panels: right-wing partisans such as Will are "balanced" not by any liberals but by allegedly "neutral journalists" such as Roberts or Donaldson. That's because the Right has created a reality where anyone who isn't explicitly Rush Limbaugh is deemed to be a "liberal" (hence, Donaldson likely qualifies) and no actual liberal ever needs to be included.

I suspect the corporate media has gone to the right much more happily than they would let on in public.  "We must appease the conservatives!" is just a cover for the rightward shift that has come with being more corporate-controlled and profit-oriented.  You can see it in these unbalanced panels, where in-house journalists are expected to be the counter to conservative pundits.  They'll willingly accept the righty accusation that their reporters represent "liberals" and don't need to be accentuated with someone of actual left-liberal persuasion because that also happens to be management's view.  

XIII

The Express is back in the station.

Haven't been able to do this since this time last year

We're getting good at this colonialism deal

Obama was in Terre Haute, Indiana today pushing, among other things, his new, crassly xenophobic, line on Iraq. I don't have a transcript or video, but it took broadly the same tone as this exchange (via) between Obama and Bill O'Reilly (!!).

Sen. Barack Obama: “Bill, what I’ve said is—I’ve already said it succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

Bill O’Reilly: “Right! So why can’t you just say, I was right in the beginning, and I was wrong about the surge?"

Sen. Obama: “Because there is an underlying problem with what we’ve done. We have reduced the violence…”

O’Reilly: “Yeah?”

Sen. Obama: “...but the Iraqis still haven’t taken responsibility! And we still don’t have the kind of political reconciliation. We are still spending, Bill, $10 [billion] to $12 billion a month.”

O’Reilly: “And I hope, if you’re president, you can get them to kick in and pay us back.”

Sen. Obama: “They’ve got $79 billion in New York!”

O’Reilly: “And I’ll go with you!”

Sen. Obama: “Let’s go!”

O’Reilly: “We’ll get some of that money back.”

Obama makes Iraqis sound like archetypal Reaganesque welfare queens; sucking at the teat of the American government while hoarding a giant pile of gold. Why, those ungrateful bastards! It's not like we blew up most of their country and made them rebuild their entire political system from scratch! When will they stand up and take responsibility for the mess we made of their homeland?

Of course, what Obama doesn't say is that the Iraqi public has wanted U.S. withdrawal for years now, and Obama has essentially endorsed al-Maliki's timetable. But I suppose admitting this would make it seem like Obama gave a shit what our colonial underlings thought, and that might be a sign of weakness.

Ah, the sun never sets, etc, etc.

The future

According to David Corn at MoJo:

Number of sentences in John McCain's acceptance speech about his experience as a POW in Vietnam: 43.

Number of sentences about his 25 years in the House and Senate: 8.

If McCain wins this election based on nothing beyond sympathy for his capture while aiding war crimes (via) in North Vietnam, we are well and truly on the way to being a military state within the next 20 years.  The mainstream press and Democratic Party will do nothing but offer complete deference when faced with someone brandishing any kind of military credentials, regardless of how irrelevant they may be.  We're already seen this play out this year with Wesley Clark on "Face the Nation."  I really don't know how the Democrats plan to stop the inevitable David Petraous presidential bid.  Whenever that comes, it's going to be a walkover. They may as well not bother with a convention.  Then we'll all have to hope we didn't just hand the keys over to a 21st-century Curtis LeMay.  But that'll inevitably happen, too. 

All manner of awesome

This clip is why The Daily Show is so invaluable. 

...

....

Doghouse Riley pins evangelicals to the wall. 

By the way: spare me any more fucking lectures about how Liberals, or The Angry Left, or however it is you refer to sane people these days, "just don't get" evangelicals. Yes, yes, yes, you publicly excuse your own if your fat gets anywhere near the fire. This does not come as a shock to anyone who's been paying attention. If Young Miss Palin had denounced the war in Iraq and claimed Jesus was the Prince of Peace we'd've seen how quick you are with the shunning. And, yes, you hate sex and love reproduction. Also not new. Sin is only really a sin if people you consider sinners are doing it, though you'll never put it that way, because Jesus puts a premium on artificial humility. At least His sales reps do.

Best summary I've read in years.  

Why I can't turn away

The Anchorage Daily News is reporting that Levi Johnston, Sarah Palin's future son-in-law and self-described "fuckin' redneck," is headed to St. Paul for Palin's big speech tonight.  I would have some respect for the campaign begging for privacy in the whole matter, but it's awfully hard when they seem to be begging for journalists to ogle the couple.  The article also strongly hints that Johnston may be a high school dropout.  

The talking points that have been issued by McCain's people concerning Palin is that she has an average small-town American family.  Indeed she does, which is why marrying off their 17-year old pregnant daughter to her jock boyfriend is such a delicious story.  That's the kind of small-town America that everybody who grew up in one knows.  It's not what the local chambers of commerce and the Podunk Pravda newspapers will show you, and not what the big national press, which exists to flatter the working class toward more uncritical acceptance of elite direction, wants to see.  The media is flabbergasted that a real, red-blooded family just appeared on the national stage and doesn't look like it walked straight from a time-machine to the 1940's. 

We know the truth; rural America is much more Drive-By Truckers than Kenny Chesney, regardless of how much it tries to convince itself otherwise.  The myth of our unblemished, pastoral tranquility has just been given a tasering on the national stage and I, for one, couldn't be more pleased about it.   

The Palindrome will consume you!

Just...can't...stop...watching....

...

The Times today augments what many guessed over the weekend. Palin was never McCain's choice at all; she was a hasty compromise after outraged social conservatives threatened a riot over the possibility of a pro-choice VP. To some, this proves the fundie Christians are still running the GOP, but that's exactly the wrong conclusion. Firstly, she's only being nominated to the largely symbolic post of vice-president. And, even if McCain dodders off and she inherits the presidency, she's so green she'll do whatever the economic feudalism wing of the party demands, just like a certain other dim-witted governor of a vast, oil-rich state. Secondly, Palin has so far proven a colossal embarrassment. If the Big Bidness "Publicans wanted to shame and discredit the Christocrats back into servitude, they could hardly be doing better.

...

Palin's pick also reinforces the "Free Republic to New Republic" span of the Overton Window in American politics. Yes, the mainstream press has been rough on Palin, but they've largely focused on her wafer-thin resume and soap-opera family life, not that her fringe social views are an obvious sop to the reactionary Republican base. I trust you can imagine the scenario if Obama had picked someone like Keith Ellison as his running mate. David Broder might need to be hospitalized to have the pearls removed from between his fingers. It would certainly be proof in the pundits' eyes that the Democrats had fallen under the spell of the Angry Left and would shortly be destroying civilized politics as we know it. Anarchist parties in the Capitol building couldn't be far behind.

Not that there was ever any reason to be worried. The Democrats hate their base as much as the Washington press does, and Obama never considered anyone who wasn't reliably center-right.

The thing about shotgun weddings...

It's often said that the hardcore social conservatives aren't really concerned about abortion; otherwise they'd support safe-sex education, contraception, and other things that actually reduce the demand for abortions. More broadly, what they want to do is preserve the plank in their arbitrary morality system which says sex outside of approved conditions is unethical. But the anti-sex league also realizes that modern developments have sharply marginalized, if not eliminated, actual material consequences from unsanctioned sex, which is why they furiously wave their hands at harmless preventative measures like condom distribution. To preserve their antiquated vision of morality, they have to ensure that the erstwhile punishment for wanton sex remains active, however artificially.

What this means, of course, is that the kids born to these teenage mothers have to live with the fact that they were meant to be punishment for their parents' indiscretion. That seems like an awful lot to hang on a kid, since most people tend to resent their punishment. I'm not a psychologist, but I can't see how that's a positive situation.

Junogate

Remember the past few days, political heads, because they aren't likely to happen again anytime soon.

It all started last Friday, when John McCain tapped Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential nominee. A bright-green rookie whose CV makes Barack Obama look like an elder statesman, Palin's claim to fame before being the half-term governor of the fourth-least populated state in the country was being the mayor of Wasila, Alaska, population 5,469. And, although she has the reputation for being a clean whistle in the mdst of Alaska's notoriously corrupt Republican party, Palin brings along a cloud of suspicion concerning the mysterious sacking of a public safety commissioner after he refused to fire Palin's brother-in-law, a state trooper locked in a custody battle with Palin's sister.

Over the weekend, a rumor began percolating on the internet when a few bloggers, using some circumstantial oddities and photographs as evidence, began questioning whether Palin's fifth child--a four-month old son with Down's syndrome--was actually born to her 17-year old daughtor Bristol. The rumor had all the credulity of a 9/11 Troofer convention, but the McCain campaign panicked, and on Monday issued a press statement admitting that Bristol Palin was five months pregnant and was not only keeping the baby but also marrying the father, who was not identified.

Palin remains a largely mysterious figure. Little is known about her except for her Christian fundamentalist beliefs (anti-abortion, pro-creationism in schools, etc.), which likely explains her presence on the ticket and why she was not vetted by the McCain campaign, which has reportedly sent a clean-up crew to Wasila to shore up any more leaks. Palin represents a new link in the pact between the Roveites and the Christocrats, who naturally adore her, and McCain, who reportedly wanted Lieberman, was overruled by other forces in his party. It raises the question of how much Bombin' Johnny McPOW is running his own show.

As for Bristol Palin and her shotgun wedding, the release had this to say:

Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby, McCain aides said. 'We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us,' the Palins' statement said. 'Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support,' the Palins said."

As someone who's seen a few shotgun weddings in my day, I can assure you that the participants only have a choice insofar as they care about seeing their family again. But fundie Christians do have very peculiar interpretations of the idea of "choice."

It's hard to say what the political fallout will be here, and everything is complicated by the involvement of a minor who's entirely an innocent bystander here. I'm inclined to draw a parallel to the very familiar public anti-gay crusader who's dipping his toes in the pool on the side. Sarah Palin thinks it's great for her own daughter to choose bringing her pregnancy to term in an affluent, supportive family, but doesn't think kids in less fortunate situations should be given the same choice. Then there is the travesty of abstinence-only sex "education," which Palin also supports despite its actual counter-productive effect on teen pregnancy.

And the convention! And a hurricane! And fascist cops pre-emptively raiding the houses of suspected protestors! What story will the media choose to cover? (Uh, don't bet on the last one...)