Blind perhaps, but no longer silent on Palin.

Three people who worked closely with Sarah Palin in her early political years have collaborated on a book that sets the record straight on Governor Quitter.

Despite being filled with regret for his own actions while serving for nearly four years under candidate and then half-governor Sarah Palin, Frank Bailey came to fear that his former boss remained a voice in American politics. In Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin, former insider and my co-author Frank Bailey said of his ideals when we first met, “I am still a Fox News Conservative.”

Frank went on to explain that Sarah Palin, despite her carefully managed image and “word salad” lip service to conservative ideals, cared little for the smaller government and social values that attracted him to her candidacy in 2005. She was (and he admits guilt in getting sucked in, and participating wholeheartedly) consumed not with governance, but with image, vindictiveness, and ultimately reaping worldly rewards.

Go read the rest at The Mudflats.

Funny Twitter Folks

My virtual roomie just blogged about a journalist named Andy Carvin, a *serious* Twitter person who tweets and retweets events as they occur in real time in Libya and other political hot spots and who provides links to news stories and people in the fire of action.

In addition to @acarvin, I also follow a variety of individuals who exploit Twitter's potential for delivering pithy and scathing political commentary.

@RagingTeabagger, for example, offers the above photo with a suggested caption: "Palin puts the move on Netanyahu's wife in a Bush/Merkel moment."

That would be this intimately inappropriate moment.

However, from Sara Netanyahu's vantage point, it might be possible to see The $arah's nostril hair, as well as the rest of her, becoming ever so wordly and savvy in diplomatic affairs ... NOT.

Sarah Palin's Downward Spiral

Is that not a splendid headline about The $arah©™ Palin©™?

From here:

Palin's favorability among Republicans — not support for a presidential candidacy; but merely whether they like her — has usually been in the 70s or 80s, well above other prominent party members. But now it's in the 50s, right down there with the other sad sacks[...] So now intensity of support among primary voters, the only reason a Sarah Palin presidential candidacy has been taken with the least bit of seriousness, isn't much of a factor anymore. They prefer Mitt Romney, an abortion-loving plastic liberal from Taxachusetts, more than Sarah Palin.

And also. Too:

Here's a brief history of Sarah Palin's relationship with the establishment Republican party and its supporters in the press: They sat on their hands after John McCain picked her as vice president because she was able to fire up a despondent base; they continued to sit on their hands in the two years leading up to the 2010 elections because Palin raised tons of money while mobilizing the Tea Party; and now that that's over, they don't want her to run for president because she's an embarrassment to the nation and clearly incapable of doing the job even if she were to somehow win, which she won't.

But they can't just call her an incompetent joke in public. The base would rush to her defense! So instead they come up with meek, over-intellectualized excuses for why they don't like her and want her to disappear forever.

Best of all, now that The $arah©™ Palin©™ is shedding supporters faster than true pit bulls lose the lipstick, more ... dare we say? ... realistic and not-so flattering pix of her are popping up on the web.

Like this one, f'rinstance. Eh.

Girls just wanna have guns

What do rightwingnutjob *REAL* women and young *REAL* women have to say about sexual assault? Phyllis Schlafly is on tour, blaming and shaming women for all the bad things that happen to them, claiming with a Botoxed straight face and a grim demeanour that feminists make women want to have divorces and abortions.

Meanwhile, the entrepreneurial & spiritual spawn of $arah Palin©™ believes girls and young women should carry guns to defend themselves from potential rapists. Since the majority of sexual assaults perpetrated on women under 25 are committed by men known to their victims - family members, neighbours, work colleagues, teachers or religious officials, classmates, acquaintances, friends as well as intimate partners, that's not bound to end well.

Nonetheless, here she is. Oh, and her sister participated in the ACORN entrapment scheme.



For a different, rational and not as shrieeeky analysis of sexual assault and rape culture, here's an opinion piece by Sady Doyle. She's known for her highly visible campaigns, mobilizing opposition to John Boehner's attempts to restrict access to legal abortions in the US and to defund Planned Parenthood.

Doyle compares and contrasts the media coverage of reports regarding journalist Lara Logan in Egypt, and about sexual assaults committed allegedly committed by Wikileaks founder Assange.

But the contrast is clear. In Logan’s case, all is fact. We believe her, as we have every reason to do. In the Assange case, nothing can be definitively known. In Logan’s case, the violence is clear and visible; in the Assange case, the alleged violence has widely been trivialized and dismissed. (In response to the allegation that Assange forcibly pinned a struggling woman and forced her legs open, Assange’s defender Geoffrey Robinson said that it was “what is usually termed the missionary position.”) In Logan’s case, the assailants were strangers, and they had multiple witnesses; in the Assange case, the alleged assaults took place privately, between acquaintances, which is also the case with most actual rapes.

We don’t need to play ranking games here. What happened to Logan was horrific; if the allegations against Assange are true, those assaults were also horrific. But one might assume — I did — that Logan would not be subject to the same sort of defamation or victim-blaming that Miss A or Miss W have been. We know it happened; there’s no way to dismiss it. We know that she was outnumbered and overpowered; there’s no way to blame her for what happened. Right?

Wrong. Just as Miss A and Miss W were subject to nasty insinuations about their sexuality and lifestyle — the Daily Mail found the time to tell the world that Miss A was “an attractive blonde” and “a well-known ‘radical feminist,’” and to assert that the case had negative implications for both women’s “values” — the coverage of Logan’s assault often focused on her sexuality or attractiveness. Simone Wilson of LA Weekly described her as a “blonde reporter” who was “known for her shocking good looks,” and whose “sex life famously came under fire” two years before the (completely unrelated) attack. Just as people insinuated that Miss A and Miss W somehow invited an attack, they said the same about Logan.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Lie-Là Rose - in full The $arah©™ mode.

Lie-Là Rose is furiously pimping her judiciously edited tapes, purportedly demonstrating that Planned Parenthood staff believed her little entrapment scenario. She doesn't seem to grasp that you can't fool all the people all the time - except for the rightwingnutjobs who keep funding her little mock-docs.

From Media Matters, here's the *word stew* regurgitated by Lie-Là when asked about the letter Planned Parenthood sent to the US Attorney General about a sex trafficking ring.

Remember, Lie-Là's scam is her claim that Planned Parenthood tried to cover it up instead of reporting it to the authorities.

"What Planned Parenthood has done is try to spike Live Action's story, and try to cover up their cover up by confusing and muddling the matter and getting the FBI in this absurd letter to look into Live Action, or to kind of implicate Live Action as somehow, you know, needing-- Live Action needing to be investigated. So what they're doing is what they do classically, what they've been doing over the past four years, which is instead of addressing the institutional cover up in their clinic, instead of addressing that, instead of-- instead of resolving that, they turn to us as the investigative team, or they turn against the, you know, the people that are trying to spread this message and get people aware, and they attack us. So this is just-- This is just another example of how Planned Parenthood's sexual abuse cover up and aiding and abetting of human trafficking is top down."

Background to grifter Lie-Là's dress-up games and bloody fantasies here and here.

To get the Vulture Culture stink of Lie-Là out of your head, here's a powerful personal account from a young woman who went from an Abstinence Education slut-shaming-primed adolescence to a rational and humane perspective on reproductive responsibility - and freedom.

Smells fishy.

Organizers for an event that featured The $arah©™ cancelled her appearance, citing "an onslaught of personal attacks". From here:

Palin was to speak at the Patriots & Warriors Gala at the Infinity Park Event Center in Glendale, Colo., which was billed as an awards banquet and fundraiser for military families in need and for a grief camp for children who had lost loved ones in combat.

But the event, sponsored by the Sharon K. Pacheco Foundation, was canceled Saturday, a day after it had been announced to the media. A press release posted on the sponsoring organization's Facebook page reads, "Due to an onslaught of personal attacks against Gov. Palin and others associated with her appearance, it is with deep sadness and disappointment that, in the best interest of all, we cancel the event for safety concerns."

The press release goes on to say that no direct threats were made against Palin, nor were any made against members of the organization's staff, but in light of the shooting rampage in Arizona last month, the negative rhetoric "raises concern for her safety and the safety of others despite the call for civility in America."

As the WaPo item observes, this frees Palin's schedule so she can appear at the NBC/Politico Republican presidential primary debate at the Reagan Presidential Library in California on the same date. Interesting - and opportunistic - timing, I would say.