seether

Remember the Veruca Salt album from 1994? Seether I think it was called.
"I can't see her till I'm foaming at the mouth..."
In the song it sounded like she was saying 'seethe her' -- which is what I am feeling just now.
I am sick of the RNC saying that Sarah Palin has more experience than Barack Obama. She actually said 'being mayor of a small town is sort of like being a community organizer, except you have actual responsibilities.' Or something like that. She was the Mayor of a town with 7,000 people and she has been the governor of Alaska for 20 months. The state of Alaska has a huge budget surplus because of it's oil and the federal money pumping into the state to keep the people who own all that land happy. In case you haven't noticed Sarah Palin, the rest of the country does not have a budget surplus. Similarly, hardly anyone lives in Alaska. And those who do are not the most diverse group of people. Hello Republicans-- America is a diverse country and a country in need of people with experience working with MANY different kinds of people.
My parents were community organizers in Little Rock, Dallas, New Orleans, Vermont, New Hampshire and Boston. I can tell you first hand that community organizers are the people who do the jobs that no one else wants to do. Community organizers are the people who help the people who can't always pull themselves up by their bootstraps-- because, as Obama so generously and perceptively recognized in his Convention speech, sometimes people don't even have boots on. And a lot of time-- this is through no 'fault' of their own-- as many of the people speaking this week at the RNC would have you think.
I grew up in a neighborhood in Boston where a lot of my classmates faced incredible challenges, brothers or sisters being shot while playing, no food, no shoes, tattered clothes, no health insurance etc., and these classmates were children. Innocent children. And they were great children and they are great people today-- firefighters, teachers, police officers... and if they were growing up right now, or under a McCain/Palin administration-- I can only imagine. If the abstinence education Palin supports didn't work, (as it didn't in her own family)-- and they were to get pregnant, with the Supreme Court getting increasingly socially conservative abortion might not be an option and so these young people would have the challenges of a family on their hands at a time when unemployment is at a high, financial aid for college is at a low ... it just terrifies me to think about.

I can't stand the appropriation of 'real' Americans by the Republican Party to refer to relatively well-off white people. I can't stand the accusations flying that the people challenging Palin's credentials are sexist. It is not because she is a woman. I love women and and I am glad she is a woman but that has nothing to do with it. The people saying that anyone saying 'she might not have her priorities straight' is sexist-- because I felt the same way when Edwards chose to campaign despite his wife's Cancer coming back. When you have a 4-month old with Down-Syndrome and a 17-year old who is SO FAR oFF from the values you are espousing FOR THE COUNTRY, I think you need to assess what is most important right now. Man or woman. I don't feel like it should fall on Ms. Palin's shoulders any more than on Mr. Palin's shoulders, but I think we can look to how a candidate looks out for their family as a sign of how they are going to look out for a WHOLE COUNTRY.