On Sarah Palin

She scares me.  I dig the being from a small town & standing up for what you believe in.  I'm always the first to root for the underdog.  The big difference is that I don't try to legislate my views onto other people.  I think it is great to be involved in your kids' activities (hockey mom), joining the PTA is a great way to actively be involved in your child's education, again very important to me.  I do believe that education needs to be better & needs to have more parental involvement.  Finding out she had worked towards banning books at the local library upset me to no end.  I'm not saying I've always read the most age appropriate books (Thompson's "Hells Angels" at age 11 is a fine example of that) but the idea of being in a town in Alaska, cut off from just driving 30 mins to the nearest bigger town & finding more, really upsets me.  I'm a huge proponent of being able to write, read, say, & scream anything I want anytime I want.  It is a big reason I don't just fuck off to another country.  I don't question the things her family is going thru with the daughter's pregnancy, that's just rough.  Though I do agree that she probably won't be going on WIC or any of the other public programs like most of the unwed mothers I've known have done.  I find it hysterical that the focus has been all redemptive that her daughter didn't just "get an abortion" so she is touted as walking the walk...  Sarah Palin actively works to fund and allow strictly abstinence only education for youth.  This has been proven to NOT be effective.  My problems include the detriment to women's health that it causes & the fact that it denies viable information to people.  I'm always pro-education, sharing any disease prevention, sharing any detail about our bodies that will help the next generation understand things better is always a positive.  Denying them education in any fashion about our own bodies is simply a travesty.  Then you reach over to the secession of Alaska issue - I'm not comfortable saying yes to a woman who has spent time & energy trying to secede from the union as a politically aware adult, now trying to run for an office in the union.  There is more here than these surface issues.  But these are all the media are addressing so I thought I'd get my thoughts out of the way on them before resuming economic screaming.  Also: "War from God" - not my God, no legislation of religious-Christian values onto me please.  I really think they need to rewatch the movie & stop being involved in a land war in Asia.

I didn't provide links to the intel I'm using here - feel free to rock the GoogleFu for confirmation.  Most of it was gleaned thru my daily scouring of the news while at work.  Which means I was too busy to copy all the links into an email to myself as I read.