Being Italian, I wish I had a nickel for every time I was called a Dago or a Wop (even guinea though I'm not Sicilian). Some people just called me that because they were mad at me; others did it because they were prejudiced against Italians. Racism and ethnic prejudice seem to be a component of some peoples make-up. Of course, their companion is gender or religious prejudice.
I guess it's all a product of socialization with some genetics thrown in.

As Gazzo said of his driver in Rocky, "Some people just hate." Who knows why. I don't know what's wrong with being a Muslim. As a non-believer, I view religion as a rock in believers life foundation. If it helps you be a good person, cool. otherwise, I don't see its value.

Well put.

While some people do need religion to keep them on the straight and narrow, if you're a non-believer, who happens to be an inherently better human being and a more qualified candidate than your opponent, it shouldn't matter.

That was me Oli. and thanks for answering.

If they included Biden's and Palin's gaffes, the story would be 15 pages long.

I could have written this (maybe not as well) except take all the Italian references and put in "Latina" then "sp*c" and "go home" (even though I was born here, all worse after 9/11).

I had a girl come to the house tonight dressed as Sarah Palin. She was sooo cute. She was wearing a suit and her purse was her candy bag.

McCain can't hold a football?

Great picture RR. I hadn't seen that yet.

I had saved his one from last April, when the candidates met with a few foreign leaders. I don't remember who he is with here though? Like the above picture, I just thought it looked Presidential.

TIS

Eagleburger went on Foxnews and said "he put his foot in his mouth", and it was "plain stupid".

My grand-niece (in Florida) dressed up as Palin for Halloween, too. (That's her brother as Mario):

Very cute SC. Me, I had NO trick or treaters in my area.

Anyway, here's an example the tension this election. A McCain supporter at an Obama rally. Some people I guess simply believe what they want to believe.


TIS


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/31/mccain-palin-supporter-st_n_139711.html

Halloween was much slower in my neighborhood this year. Must be the economy.

Interesting article on the future of women as Presidential candidates.

MADAM PRESIDENT: Will She Ever Get There?

By Anne E. Kornblut, The Washington Post

As the presidential campaign draws to a close, it's commonplace to hear 2008 heralded as an excellent year for women. But has it been?

First Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton ran the most serious presidential campaign of any woman in U.S. history. Then Gov. Sarah Palin, the first woman on a Republican ticket, sparked an initial rush of excitement. Never before have women played such a prominent role in national politics, the reasoning goes, and that has laid the groundwork for even greater advancement the next time a woman runs.

But both women's campaigns devolved into such strife, their candidacies provoking such frenzied passions and mocking caricatures along the way, that it's only fair to ask whether the first woman's path to the White House was eased this year -- or whether Clinton and Palin simply unearthed the land mines without defusing any of them. If Democrat Barack Obama wins on Tuesday, he will have broken a huge barrier. But another one still awaits.

On Tuesday, Palin will emerge, win or lose, as the figure most transformed by her brief time in the public eye. After bursting onto the national scene as a moose-hunting mother of five who could rescue John McCain's campaign, the Alaska governor wound up sinking in the polls and getting entangled in a classic "girl story" about her now famous Republican National Committee-financed shopping spree. Her campaign handlers promptly threw her overboard and anonymously declared her a "whack job" and a "diva" -- hardly a moment of profound advancement. In the end, Palin seems to represent less "an explosion of a brand-new style of muscular American feminism" (in the words of the contrarian feminist Camille Paglia) than the stereotypical former-beauty-queen-made-good who seeks affirmation about her abilities while people just titter about her clothes.


Clinton moved along a different trajectory, from the lofty status of former first lady and commanding front-runner to the scrappy underdog in the Democratic primaries, fighting her way to the end of the contests and winning a sweeping 18 million votes in the process. But the New York senator's uncharacteristically tearful moment on the eve of the New Hampshire primary will forever be linked to her victory there, deservedly or not. And after her campaign ended, some of her supporters threatened to revolt if Obama picked a woman other than Clinton as his running mate. "That's feminism?" one senior Obama adviser asked me pointedly at the time.

More than just groundbreaking candidates, Clinton and Palin became cultural flashpoints. That Clinton would be ridiculed and mimicked and scrutinized came as no surprise to her team -- many of them had seen her go through a similar wringer in the White House and upon her arrival in the Senate -- but some of her advisers chalked the rough treatment up as much to her being a Clinton as to her being a woman. As the 2008 primary campaign went on, however, they increasingly spoke of a genuine double standard rooted in gender; by the end, they openly complained of sexist treatment in the media, which goes some way toward explaining why Clinton declined to criticize Palin once McCain chose the Alaska governor as his running mate.

Palin lost her luster soon after the Republican convention, stumbling on basic substance in interviews, hiding from most of the media and making claims about her record (such as having opposed the so-called bridge to nowhere) that were debunked. But rather than move to confront her weaknesses, her campaign swiftly seized on sexism as a reason Palin was being grilled in the first place. Most notably, the Republican campaign arranged a conference call to denounce Obama for using the phrase "lipstick on a pig" because just days earlier, Palin herself had made a reference to lipstick ("Disgusting comments, comparing our vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, to a pig," said former Massachusetts governor Jane Swift, a McCain surrogate). Professionals will argue about the political wisdom of that tactic -- it did, after all, distract attention from more serious issues that were failing to boost McCain's standing -- but few would cite it as a trailblazing moment in the history of gender politics.

More recently, another Palin subplot, in addition to the $150,000 boutique wardrobe, had emerged -- her attractiveness, and whether McCain had picked her on that basis. A recent New Yorker article by Jane Mayer noted the swoon among several neoconservatives when they met Palin in Alaska in 2007. ("Exceptionally pretty," said Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard.) In a focus group conducted by the Democratic pollster Peter Hart last Sunday in Ohio, undecided voters were asked which of the four candidates they would most like to sit next to on an airplane. One initially picked Palin, saying, "Geez, I'm a 29-year-old male." (He then changed his answer, saying he'd rather sit with Obama.) Obama views Palin as such a liability that he ran an ad last week featuring her winking. And Palin allies are blaming her McCain handlers for her fall, starting with top communications adviser Nicolle Wallace, who helped arrange the CBS interview with Katie Couric that began Palin's downward slide. The complaints have ballooned into an ugly cat fight. Progress? Really?

Prominent women in politics have been largely focused on the good news -- that Clinton and Palin were there at all. And regardless of which ticket wins on Tuesday, a woman will have a rightful claim to being head of the opposition party. Meanwhile, many Democrats, still scared of picking the scabs from the primary wounds, have embraced Obama's ascent as a positive harbinger of its own.

"Every time we break down one barrier, the other quickly comes down as well," said Donna Brazile, the onetime campaign manager for Al Gore. "Throughout the year, most observers have tried to put race versus gender -- like, what is the greatest disadvantage? As if some of us don't represent both."

Brazile urged people to look beyond the presidential tickets for signs of advancement. "It took us 88 years to get here," she noted. "We have a speaker of the House, a secretary of state, a phenomenal woman who ran for the Democratic ticket and a woman competing to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. It has elevated the process."

Many women in the feminist movement's dominant, largely Democratic wing seem to feel that Clinton's campaign, however flawed, was a step forward -- while Palin's was a step back. "If Hillary cracked the glass ceiling, I think Sarah Palin slipped on some of the pieces of glass," said Ellen Malcolm, the founder of EMILY's List, which supports female candidates who favor abortion rights.

Except, of course, that Clinton didn't actually crack that glass ceiling. Rather, she dented it (18 million times, as she famously pointed out in her final speech in June). And along the way, her candidacy fractured the traditional women's movement: The abortion-rights group NARAL endorsed Obama (deeply angering the Clinton campaign and wounding the candidate personally), while EMILY's List and other groups stood by her, even after it appeared that she wouldn't have enough delegates to win the nomination.

That has left today's feminist movement struggling to define its mission or wondering whether it even has one. Is the goal to promote and elect women everywhere, or is it to support the candidate viewed as the best for the job, whether male or female? Wouldn't the latter be the more progressive course? Is the common purpose to back candidates who back abortion rights and liberal policies? The questions became unexpectedly urgent when McCain picked Palin in August, but they were already bubbling up by the early spring.

Then, in a strikingly similar fashion, conservative women broke into two angry camps as they struggled with whether they were obliged to stand by Palin. McCain's high command had hoped that Palin would peel away resentful Clinton supporters; in fact, she has driven away some GOP stalwarts. The conservative writer Kathleen Parker led the Republican defections, followed by former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who disgustedly waved Palin off in one of her Wall Street Journal columns as an unqualified empty vessel who "doesn't seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts." The exodus was rooted in disdain for Palin's intellect, but in a way, the Republican departures have been even more disloyal than the feminists who chose Obama over Clinton: Parker, Noonan and others were not abandoning Palin for another partisan of stature, as the Democrats had in their primaries. They were just abandoning her.

Along the way, there have been rogues with their own takes on gender politics. Ann Coulter, a conservative provocateur who openly loathes McCain, declared herself a Clinton supporter. Paglia praised Palin's "frontier grit and audacity" (even though she has said she still intends to vote for Obama), and Ellen Lafferty, a former editor of Ms. magazine and a Clinton supporter, showed up onstage recently at a Palin rally.

But the massive wave of Clinton supporters that Republicans predicted would sweep toward McCain has never materialized, at least not according to the late-October polls. Palin's selection has turned out to be the one example in recent history of a vice presidential pick having a measurable effect on the direction of the race -- a negative one.

In the months and years before she announced her candidacy, Clinton was often asked whether the country was ready to elect a woman president of the United States. "Well, we won't know until we try," she always said.

Having tried, heading into 2009, the question is still out there.

kornbluta@washpost.com

Anne E. Kornblut covers politics for The Washington Post.

I think Clinton (Hillary) opened the door thus making a "Palin" seem plausible (yea even Palin). However, by the next election I think there will be other serious female contenders in the running. It won't be just a Hillary and a Sarah. Palin came out of nowhere, and I think females from both parties are gonna pop up and give both these ladies a lot of compeition, that neither will have it in the bag. I think the nation IS ready for both it's first Afrian American AND first female President...and it's about time in both cases.


TIS

Palin prank called by Quebec Comedians

MONTREAL — A Quebec comedy duo notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads of state has reached Sarah Palin, convincing the Republican vice-presidential nominee she was speaking with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

In the interview, which lasts about six minutes, Palin and the pranksters discuss politics, pundits, and the dangers of hunting with current vice-president Dick Cheney.

The Masked Avengers, who have a regular show on Montreal radio station CKOI, intend to air the full interview on the eve of the U.S. elections.

The well-known duo of Sebastien Trudel and Marc-Antoine Audette have also tricked Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and French president Jacques Chirac.

The best sponsorship of the year!

Cheney Endorses McCain

With President Bush "intentionally lying low this week," according to the New York Times, the Obama campaign wasted no time sending out a video of Vice President Dick Cheney's endorsement of Sen. John McCain for president.

DICK CHENEY: And in three days we'll choose a new steward for the presidency and begin a new chapter in our history. It's the biggest decision that we make together as Americans. A lot turns on the outcome. I believe the right leader for this moment in history is Senator John McCain. John is a man who understands the danger facing America. He's a man who has looked into the face of evil and not flinched. He's a man who's comfortable with responsibility and has been since he joined the armed forces at the age of 17. He's earned our support and confidence, and the time is now to make him commander-in-chief. I'm delighted to support John McCain and I'm pleased that he's chosen a running mate with executive talent, toughness and common sense, our next vice president in Sarah Palin."

Update: Obama responded by saying, "I'd like to congratulate Senator McCain on this endorsement because he really earned it."

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2008/11/01/cheney_endorses_mccain.html

However, I just read this:

MOGADISHU, Somalia - A 13-year-old girl who said she had been raped was stoned to death in Somalia after being accused of adultery by Islamic militants, a human rights group said.

Dozens of men stoned Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow to death Oct. 27 in a stadium packed with 1,000 spectators in the southern port city of Kismayo, Amnesty International and Somali media reported, citing witnesses. The Islamic militia in charge of Kismayo had accused her of adultery after she reported that three men had raped her, the rights group said.

I think this woman was taking things a bit too seriously.

http://www.freep.com/article/20081101/NEWS02/81101029


Grosse Pointe Farms woman denies Halloween candy to Obama supporters

ASSOCIATED PRESS

A Grosse Pointe Farms woman has doled out political tricks by refusing Halloween treats to children whose parents support Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Shirley Nagel passed out candy Friday — but only to those who shared her support for Republican presidential candidate John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin.

Fox 2 News says a sign posted outside Nagel's house, about 12 miles west of Detroit, served notice to all trick-or-treaters. It read: "No handouts for Obama supporters, liars, tricksters or kids of supporters."

Nagel tells WJBK-TV that "Obama's scary." When asked about children who'd been turned away empty-handed and crying, she said: "Oh well. Everybody has a choice."

Fax and phone messages were left today at numbers listed in Nagel's name

What a bitch.

I'm sorry, but that's just fucking mean to kids. Kids!

An interesting if fuck-ed up article on white supremacists supporting Obama, and a black racist voting for McCain!

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/racists-support-obama-061308

While I was out doing some Christmas shopping today I seen several yard signs that said "Democrats for McCain"

BTW Have any of you Obama supporters heard or read anything about how he wants to make it harder for people to buy guns and ammo? For example someone told the Col. that he wants to raise taxes on guns and ammo 500%. Is there any truth to this?

Sarah Palin getting Prank Called

One of our Social Studies teacher held a mock election for students only (middle school). Our demographics roughly: Income: Middle/lower class families; White 48% Hispanic and black are the majority with a small per centage of Middle Eastern (this is my rough estimate). We have approximately 1400 students enrolled. (For some reason, I couldn't copy/paste the document, so I roughly typed it.

While obviously these kids won't vote, I'm assuming it may reflect their parents preferences. We will have voting at my school site Tuesday. I'll be extremely curious on turnout.

MOCK ELECTION VHMS



CANDIDATE VOTES %

Barack Obama 858 76%
John McCain 240 21.26 %
Cynthia McKinney 12 1.06%
Ralph Nader 6 .53%
Bob Barr 6 .27%
Alan Keyes 3 .35%

Now here are the statistics nationwide when given to Middle School students: I wasn't aware they did this

Barack Obama 60.8%
John McCain 35.52%
Ralph Nader 1.06%
Bob Barr .90%
Cynthia McKinney .32%
Alan Keyes .02%

TIS

The Democrats called it: "an unexpected gift this weekend".

edit: oops, that should be "unexpected".

Ha ha ha!! Well it is almost Christmas.



TIS

I agree with something a Republican strategist said on one of the cable networks earlier. Obama would be better off spending the final days in Ohio, PA, and Florida, instead of spending time and money out west trying to "run up the score".

November 1, 2008
McCain's name nowhere to be seen at Palin rally

From CNN Political Producer Peter Hamby

Palin signs made an appearance at a Florida rally – McCain signs did not.

POLK CITY, Florida (CNN) — At a boisterous Sarah Palin rally in Polk City, Florida on Saturday afternoon, one name was surprisingly absent from the campaign décor — John McCain’s.

Looking around the Fantasy of Flight aircraft hangar where the rally took place, one could see all the usual reminders that it was a pro-McCain event. There were two large “Country First” banners hung on the walls along with four enormous American flags meant to conjure the campaign’s underlying patriotic theme. Many of the men and women in the audience wore McCain hats and t-shirts.

But on closer inspection, the GOP nominee’s name was literally nowhere to be found on any of the official campaign signage distributed to supporters at the event.

Members of the audience proudly waved “Country First” placards as Palin delivered her stump speech. Those signs were paid for by the Republican National Committee.

The other sign handed out to supporters read “Florida is Palin Country,” but those signs were neither paid for by the Republican National Committee nor the McCain campaign. In small print, the signs were stamped with the line “Paid for and authorized by Putnam for Congress" — as in, the re-election campaign of Florida congressman Adam Putnam, whose district skirts Polk City.

In fact, Putnam’s name was considerably more prominent than was McCain’s — his campaign had placed a number of large “Putnam for Congress” banners around the event site.

Hey JL,

I only skimmed this last page to see if there was a post on Palin getting scammed by the Candadian comedian who called her and claimed to be the French President, Zarcosee' (I know I butchered the spelling) . They just played it on MSN. In spite of how naive and dumb it made Palin sound, I think it was a cruel joke, don't you? I couldn't believe how long they strung her along. (7 minutes I hear)



TIS

I haven't bothered to listen to the whole thing, but I heard parts of it on the various cable channels. I don't think it was cruel. From the parts I heard, I can't believe she is actually that stupid, and that she hung in there for almost 7 minutes.

Yea, that' it. I kind of felt embarrassed for her.

Btw, McCain will be on SNL tonight. Don't know if it's true, but I heard rumor that Palin may be as well. I know I won't be able to stay awake for it. I'll see the highlights tomorrow.

3 days. I can't believe it. I can't wait.


TIS

EDIT: I'm watching MSN, David Shuster, who's playing the SNL clips with Sara Palin. They are playing the rap song in which the Moose shows up. I'm just understanding the rap lyrics..."Hey you plumbers pull your pants up!"