I understand your admiration for Palin’s strength, determination, boldness, etc., and I agree with your admiration for the Italian women you describe. What I don’t get is what’s so special about it? All the women in my family and most of the women I know are like that – and a lot of good it does them! They still get 75% pay for the same work, on average, have to be vigilant about intimidation and sexual harassment, and wary of government interference in their reproductive decisions. The only thing special about Sarah Palin is that, like Clarence Thomas, after benefiting from the struggles and sacrifices of a liberation movement, she chooses to advance herself beyond her peers by selling it out.

I totally see her allowing that nice, strapping young Roman centurian-like man who knocked on her door today replace her roof tomorrow for $75,000 in cash. She will admire his boldness in demanding the right to cash upfront. She will brush off the snobby protestations from her liberal friends, those elitists who demand such pretentions as a signed contract and some kind of professional license. These pompous liberals are prejudiced against plainspoken working men who are ambitious and smart enough to go door-to-door seeking a job! After all, didn't our own ancestors go seeking work in person? They did not "advertise" or need to be "certified" or "registered" with any authorities!

Our forebearers were brave, bold, brilliant people making their way in the world with their own hands and their own brains, just like this unostentacious traveling roofer is. And we send these good people away from our door at our peril!

Quickly, I am on my way to the bank!

Madonna? Check.

"Sexual Personae"? Check.

Pags get damp thinking about her new dreamgirl, the insipid, vacuous, completely irrelevant, Sarah Palin. Check!!

PAGLIA: The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor?

Hey Joan Walsh...she might as well been talking about you there!! How does that make you feel?

PAGLIA: Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.

WHAT THE FUCK does that even mean??

Walsh, there's a special place in hell for you for publishing this imbecilic nonsense. Is she blackmailing you? Do you even read your own Goddamn website?? For Christ's sake woman, put this idiot out of our misery!!

From the American Prospect Online:

3. Palin's "Chosen Vessels of God."

Just hours before last week's vice-presidential debate, Stephen Strang, founder of the Charisma publishing giant, highlighted an account by an Ohio pastor who claimed to have had a revelation of Palin as Esther. Pastor Mark Arnold, of Life Covenant Church in Monroe, Ohio, approached Todd and Sarah Palin at a campaign stop in Lebanon, Ohio, and made them cry with his prophecy of Palin as Esther.

Arnold claims that God told him to tell Palin, who encountered him in the rope line, that "God wants you to know that you are a present day Esther!" Palin, Arnold says, immediately began to cry. "The news and nay-sayers and criticizers are going to be very hateful toward you," Arnold continued, "and in the days ahead they are going to turn up the heat ... but do not fear." You are a "present day Esther," Arnold told Palin, and God "has chosen you to reign." Then Arnold made Todd Palin cry, too, and McCain shook his hand and gave him a "deep look of understanding." Sure.

"When I got to my car I sat there for quite a long time," Arnold concluded, "knowing the GOD of the Universe had just used me to deliver a message confirming to Sarah and Todd to realize they are truly chosen vessels of God."

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_fundamentalist_100808

Camille,

With all due respect, your woman-crush on Sarah Palin has gotten the best of you. I don't think she's dumb, but neither is she intelligent. Astute would be a more apt adjective. In trying to bolster your case for Palin being a powerful feminist figure, you actually diminish it by refusing to acknowledge that she may not be as bright as you thought she was. I ask: does admitting that Palin's evidently lower intelligence quotient somehow disqualify her from being a role model to women? I don't see how it could. She possesses plenty of other admirable traits.

The way you gush about her performance during the debate completely overlooks the fact that it was obviously the result of intense scrubbing and polishing by campaign handlers. It was, frankly, a little embarrassing to read you extoll her virtues during such a canned and contrived format. The fact that she held it together for 90 minutes was hardly proof of nuanced thought or introspection on her part. Political smarts are one thing, leadership skills, wisdom and judgment are quite another. Surely you can see why her star has been fading in an election in which voters are thirsting for something other than gimmicky smarts.

Don't forget to tell them that the Mormons had all those extra wives so giving women the vote kept the Mormon Church a political powerhouse throughout the Jell-O-Belt. Not so much for the non-Mormons then in the pretty, great state of Utah (Utah joke. You wouldn't get it.) The non-Mormon miners and railroad boys brought proportionately fewer women with them, just a handful of wives and whores, so, alas, the real point of the MC supporting women's suffrage wasn't to give *women* the vote. (Mormon authorities don't give a rat's damn about women -- never have, never will.) The real point was to increase the Mormon vote exponentially against non-Mormons.

Typical Mormon male attitude? "I think no more of taking another wife than I do of buying a cow." - Apostle Heber C. Kimball, The Twenty Seventh Wife, Irving Wallace, p. 101.

Doesn't hurt to keep in mind the MC was a great force in defeating the ERA. Without the MC, it might have passed. They brag about it. Also check out any support for equal pay for equal work, reproductive rights, supportive attitudes for women working outside the home, anything like that. Zero. Nada. Nothing.

Anyone here who still believes Mormons are even in the 19th century, let alone the 21st, about women's rights need only check out this infamous Conference talk from 2007. (Conference is the word of God.)

http://www.lds.org/conference/talk/display/0,5232,23-1-775-27,00.html

If you find that breathtakingly reactionary, you can sign petition in protest here:

http://www.whatwomenknow.org/

Hope I'm not bursting your bubble, John100. If I trigger a crisis in faith, you can always check out postmormon.org. :)