total convenience and flowers seven days milk:

For people who don't read blacksquirrel's journal, you should pop over there right now and look at her last couple of posts. Her not-especially-political brother was arrested as he walked to his car from a sold-out concert in Minneapolis a couple of nights ago by police who thought he might be an anarchist, held overnight, and treated ... not so well. It's not too different from what you might remember from the 2004 Republican convention in NYC, except for the "completely innocent bystander" part. Still, if you thought that the thuggish tactics of the Bush administration - notably, the disregard for habeus corpus that I keep going on about - were likely to diminish under McCain, well, this might worry you.

Relevant post is here and the preceding post.

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Meanwhile, like everyone else, I am unable to look away from Sarah Palin for a red-hot second. Still. I love her! She is the butchest Republican since Teddy Roosevelt! I mean, she would be an awful president, or vice-president, but I am sincerely grateful to learn that she exists. Did you know that when she got to be governor of Alaska she fired the chef who worked at the governor's mansion because real women do their own cooking? I told you: she loves her family, and she loves firing people!

And another thing: apparently most of the childcare in her family since Palin became governor has been done by her eldest daughter and her mother-in-law. This is the same mother-in-law who ran for mayor of Wasilla after Palin moved on to higher office, and lost because Palin supported another candidate whose anti-abortion stance was tougher. Todd Palin was supposed to be more of a stay-at-home-dad, it seems, but he just couldn't hack it, although he has been doing a fair amount as the spouse of the governor - or, as he prefers, "First Dude."

Do you think Geena Gerson could play her in the movie? The movie in which a shy but brilliant bisexual historian living in a romantic Canadian city is swept off her feet by the force of personality and fabulous gun collection of a former runner-up for Miss Alaska who now is a candidate for national office, but still finds time to nurture her large family - and her secret lesbian passions? Do you think the movie could be called "First Dude"?

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If I can be semi-serious for a moment, though, as difficult as that is to do in these circumstances:

I agree with Obama's stance toward the whole Palin debacle that candidate's family lives are not fair or useful topics of political discussion. I'm not claiming to be having a political discussion here. I'm just sincerely fascinated. But if I was having a political discussion, I would say that I don't see the hypocrisy that bloggers and commenters have pointed to in Palin's actions having to do with teenagers and sex. The point of abstinence-only education is to prevent non-reproductive sex, right? And to link up sex and marriage? Preferably not in that order, I get that, but still - I don't see the hypocrisy here. There's quite a lot that's wrong with Palin's ideas, especially around marriage and sex, but if we match up her public words and actions with what her private ones seem to have been, she is quite rigidly consistent.

In fact, it's her rigid consistency that makes her so funny.


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