The race is on…

A little round-up of news items that have crossed my desk/inbox today.

First, this insightful post from the ladies over at Our Bodies, Our Blog, the writings of the Boston-based Women’s Health Collective that is generally at the forefront of women’s health advocacy. While during the primaries their blog was heavily pro-Hillary, they are now strong supporters of Obama/Biden for the ticket’s decidedly more progressive (read: not stone-age) stances on health care, reproductive rights, and reality.

Next-up, the NY Times columnist we love to hate: Maureen Dowd. When she isn’t pissing off men, women, feminists, misogynists, right-wingers, liberals, PUMAs, Ann Coulter, your mother, your pastor, her editors, etc… she is writing well-researched investigative Op-Eds, along the lines of this week’s trip down Palin’s memory lane. Ms. Dowd visits Wasilla, Alaska and discovers what it’s like to live in the shadow of Miss Popular, aka Sarah Palin. I’m starting to understand why she has so many fans (if you are perplexed, netflix Mean Girls and talk to me in the morning).

Another NY Times article more thoroughly explores Palin's political experience, and lends more ammo to the Mean Girls theory. A quote from Laura Chase, Palin's former campaign manager from her 1996 run for Wasilla mayor: “I’m still proud of Sarah, but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

And lastly, this email forward, of unknown origin, which I will paste in its entirety for you here:

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.

If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."

Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers: a quintessential American story.

If your name is Barack, you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track: you're a maverick.

Graduate from Harvard Law School and you are unstable.

Attend five different small colleges before graduating: you're well grounded.

If you spend three years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional law professor, spend eight years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services Committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.

If your total resume is: local weather girl; four years on the city council and six years as the mayor of a town with fewer than 7,000 people; 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people; then you're qualified to become the country's second-highest-ranking executive.

If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising two beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.

If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, left your wife, and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.

If you teach responsible, age-appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.

If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system, while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.

If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude," has at least one DWI conviction and no college education, didn't register to vote until age 25, and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

Okay... much clearer now.

And in response to the other bizarro blog I read today, which I will not link to, because its author has already used the number of page-clicks as proof of the veracity of his claims (rather than the more likely sheer astonishment of readers who click to the blog to verify that this kind of lunacy does really exist, and then quickly realize, as I did, that by reading his ranting, I am somehow validating his crazy… oh the guilt). Just trust me, he’s crazy, don’t bother googling and visiting the blog, you’ll be just another page-click in his arsenal. Basically, the gist is, he is suing Obama for illegally running for president because Obama is not a US citizen. Though Obama has the Hawaii-issued birth certificate to prove it, and it has been vetted by various fact-check types, and by the way, McCain was born in PANAMA. Yes, inside the U.S. zone, but the constitutionality of that is tenuous at best, and well, isn’t all of this a bit irrelevant in today’s world, and wouldn’t focusing on, oh say, THE ISSUES, instead of Obama’s passport, Palin’s lipstick, etc., etc.

Phew.

Remember to vote. Wisely.