"... a reputation for being extremely vindictive."

That was from Levi Johnston's statement, in opposition to keeping court proceedings closed.

An Alaska judge has ordered the proceedings in Bristol Palin's child custody case to remain open, the Anchorage Daily News reports. [...]

Bristol's attorney Thomas Van Flein said in court filings that Bristol seeks full legal and physical custody in the "best interest of the child," while allowing Johnston visitation rights.

[...] the judge has ordered the proceedings to be open, as Johnston had requested, rather than closed, as Bristol's legal team sought.

"I know that public scrutiny will simplify this matter and act as a check against anyone's need to be overly vindictive, aggressive or malicious, not that Bristol would ever be that way, nor that I would," Johnston writes in his affidavit, according to the Daily News. "But her mother is powerful, politically ambitious and has a reputation for being extremely vindictive."

Let the shrieeeking from the Sarah Palin sycophants, acolytes and uncritical admirers begin.

Although Palin has expressed admiration for mama grizzlies' reaction when their cubs are threatened.

Dueling commodifications.

DJ! has blogged before about Levi Johnston - most recently here. And. Also here. But this interview with The Guardian's Ed Pilkingston, writing from Anchorage, offers a weight of credibility that surpasses most of the puff pieces, including the titillating gossip Vanity Fair published. This is Johnston's version of how things unfolded:

In Johnston's account of what happened in the run-up to the presidential election, Palin treated him like modelling clay – taking this rugged teenager and smoothing him out to fit the image of the perfect, loyal family man that she wanted presented to the news channels. Even before she was chosen as McCain's running mate, she was pressuring him and Bristol to marry, he says. "Oh yeah, that's what Sarah and Todd [her husband] wanted. She just kept mentioning that we should, she was all in a hurry, so I was 'Alright, I'll do it!'"

Johnston claims she even offered to adopt Tripp. He says he and Bristol were appalled by the suggestion, which Palin made over the phone while he was at a tattoo parlour, though Palin has strongly denied this.

After the election any positive feelings between Johnston and the Palin family vanished, though he still wears Bristol's name in a floral tattoo on his ring finger, having not got round to having it removed. Sarah Palin's attitude, he says, changed overnight after she lost the race. "Suddenly it was 'Maybe you ought to think again about marriage, wait, maybe do it next year.' So at that point I had to think that she had just wanted us to marry to make herself look better in the campaign, to
boost things up."

Here's the difference between Johnston and Palin. Levi's not running for public office, power-hungry nor pretending to be something he's not. What you see (or will see, in a future Playgirl issue) seems closer to what he is, than the "Sarah Palin" fabrication that his son's grandmother and her handlers have concocted.

The weird turn pro, Part Trois.

As a never-ending source of weirdness, Sarah Palin just keeps providing news-gathering organizations, tabloids, photographers and bloggers with a mother lode of rich comic material.

Twenty years ago, you couldn't have created a credible fictional character like Palin. She moved the goal posts in ways too numerous to list. She leaves Tom Wolfe's most bizarre creations in the dust.

Most of the outrageousness originates with her. And then of course, there's her entourage, chosen or inadvertent. Which brings us to Levi Johnston who should have been by all reckoning a minor player on the stage of Palin's life.

Pat Buchanan gave Todd advice on how to deal with him.

So Levi headed south and is now popping up in the strangest places, as well as saying not very nice though hardly surprising things about Sarah and the rest of the Palins.

Every Sperm Was Sacred.

Last year scientists at University of Newcastle created primitive sperm cells with female embryonic stem cells.


As you can imagine, that provoked some shrieeeking from fundamentalist religious right wing zygote zealots. "Oh no!!! Bay-beez without holy sperm from the Menz!!!"


This year, the same team, led by Karim Nayernia, Professor of Stem Cell Biology, has re-purposed the research so its focus does not send Pat Robertson and his acolytes into a full-metal testerical rightwingnutter melt-down. A news item from ABC news reassures its viewers:

... the technique would allow researchers to study how sperm develops and possibly help develop treatments for infertile men. ... More than a third of infertility cases, which affect 7.3 million people in the United States, can be attributed to the male partner, according to a 2002 National Survey of Family Growth from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ... new research may provide a glimmer of hope that infertile men may one day be able to contribute to the gene pool.

Speaking of rightwingnutters called Pat*, Pat Buchanan had advice for the Palins regarding an outcast contributor to their family gene pool:

"Well, first, with regard to Levi, I think First Dude up there in Alaska, Todd Palin, ought to take Levi down to the creek and hold his head underwater until the thrashing stops." The whole 'Morning Joe' gang laughed pretty hard at Buchanan's joke ...

More on that stem cell research here.

* Thanks for catching that, J.A.Baker.

The weird turn pro, Part Deux.

C'mon. Everybody was waiting for the other shoe to drop. If there's one thing that one can safely predict about the ongoing PR train wreck that is Sarah Palin, it's that someone somewhere in the biggest small-town in the world that's the state of Alaska has sumtin' more to add.

This is Levi Johnston's post-script to Sarah's big news bomb she dropped last week. Johnston apparently lived with the Palin family after baby Tripp was born.

Johnston, the 19-year-old father of Palin's grandson and ex-fiance of the governor's daughter Bristol, said at a news conference Thursday that he personally had heard Palin discuss the possibility of leaving her state behind to go capitalize off her quick rise to fame. "She had talked about how nice it would be to take some of this money people had been offering us and you know just run with it, say 'forget everything else,'" Johnston said ...

Ah well, at least Levi's still got that cool tattoo to remind him of 2008, right?

More here.

She Says, He Says.

Do you hear the sound of dueling banjos in the background?

She says: "Regardless of what I did personally, I just think that abstinence is the only way you can effectively, 100% foolproof way you can prevent pregnancy." Asked how she squared her own experiences with her new campaign, she said, "I'm not quite sure, I just want to go out there and promote abstinence and say, this is the safest choice.

He says: "Abstinence is a great idea, but I also think you need to enforce, you know, condoms and birth control and other things like that to have safe sex. I don't just think telling young kids, you can't have sex, it's not going to work. It's not realistic."

Do as I say, not as I did - so that's Bristol's message. Right. One snarky candid media source used this headline: "Bristol Palin favors oral contraception: Just say no." That goes to the truth of the matter; fundamentalists religious rightwing conservatives view sexuality as a battleground in the war between women and men. They uphold the notion that women are in control by withholding sex; yet undercut that by providing men with control over everything else.

Wedding is off.

Few may be surprised by this turn of events, but it appears as though the Bristol Palin / Levi Johnston engagement is over.

Mercede Johnston claims the 18-year-old daughter of Alaska's governor dumped her brother, Levi, an out-of-work high school drop out. The sister claims Bristol Palin, who took her beau to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., has made it tough for her brother to spend time with his 2-month-old son, Tripp.

"Levi tries to visit Tripp every single day, but Bristol makes it nearly impossible," ... "She [Bristol] tells him he can't take the baby to our house because she doesn't him around 'white trash'!" she said.

In December, Levi Johnston's mother, Sherry, was arrested in an undercover drug sting and charged with six felonies involving the pain killer oxycontin.

It always seemed to me that the announcement of their plans to marry, which coincided with the news shortly after Sarah Palin was named McCain's running mate that her daughter was pregnant and unwed, was merely a tactic to silence critics.

If those teenagers had been madly in love and wanting to spend the rest of their lives together, the wedding would have been scheduled to take place before the birth of Palin's grandchild, preferably during the presidential election campaign to take advantage of MASSIVE media coverage.

In fact, it reflects well on Sarah that she didn't pressure the young couple to tie the knot ASAP and let them wait it out to see if their marriage would actually happen.

PREVENTION as well as Devotion

We recently learned that Levi Johnston, who got Bristol Palin in a family way, attended the Republic National Convention with a new tattoo to flash. As proof of his devotion it is said that he had the name Bristol permanently inked on his left ring finger.

Unfortunately, the reality of Bristol’s pregnancy demonstrates that Abstinence-only sex education often fails. Perhaps Levi should also get the word condom tattooed on his johnson.

As a reminder of his devotion, of course.

First posted at Birth Pangs.