Well, as most of us know now, McCain did not fully vet Sarah Palin before he announced her as his VP pick. We know this, because eight McCain staffers just arrived in Alaska to perform that function.
Can McCain retroactively vet Palin?
Well sure! He can pretty much do anything that he damn well pleases, (well, except pick Lieberman for VP). It’s pretty much like putting toothpaste back into the tube. It’s extremely difficult, messy, and you can never get all of it back in, (my buddy and I tried this in college, and proved that you could get quite a bit back in, if you were very patient…and very bored).
Gov. Palin is a prominent member of Feminists For Life, a fundamentalist group advocating prison for doctors who perform abortions under any circumstances. FFL also opposes birth control, even for married couples.
Nice slogan, eh? “*Refuse to Choose*”
(FFL states that it does not endorse politicians, despite the banner on their homepage endorsing Gov. Palin for Vice President.)
The problem is that FFL doesn’t just oppose abortion. FFL wants abortion to be illegal. All abortions, period, including those for rape, incest, health, major fetal defects and, although Foster resisted admitting this, even some abortions most doctors would say were necessary to save the woman’s life. (Although FFL is not a Catholic organization, its rejection of therapeutic abortion follows Catholic doctrine.) FFL wants doctors who perform abortions to be punished, possibly with prison terms.
It was extremely difficult to get Foster to say what she thought would happen if abortion was banned. At one point she would not concede that women would continue to have abortions if it was recriminalized; at another she argued that criminalization was no big deal: Instructions on self-abortion were posted on the Internet. I had to work to get her to admit that illegal abortion was common before Roe, and that it was dangerous–numbers on abortion deaths were concocted by pre-Roe legalization advocates, she told me. Yet the FFL website prominently features gory stories of abortion mishaps and discredited claims that abortion causes breast cancer. (Challenged on the cancer connection, Foster says they just want women to have medical information. Asked why they don’t then link to the 2004 Lancet article debunking their cancer claims, she says they are not medical experts and have considered taking the cancer pages down.) So legal abortion is dangerous but illegal abortion would be safe? When I pointed out that in countries where the operation is banned, such as Brazil and Peru, rates are sky-high and abortion a major cause of injury and death, she professed ignorance.
I got similarly evasive answers when I asked why FFL didn’t promote birth control, and when I asked if FFL considered the pill an “abortifacient.” She did tell me that “birth control doesn’t work” for swing-shift nurses because they lose track of their body clock–interesting, if true–or for teenagers, which I know to be false.
The GOP now has a VP candidate who thinks there are too many polar bears. These furry mammals have made the egregious mistake of chosing to move to the area Ms. Palin and her oil buddies would like to start landcaping.
Nine polar bears are at risk of drowning after the ice floe where they lived melted because of global warming, scientists have said. The bears were spotted in open ocean off the northwest coast of Alaska, miles from their normal hunting area by US government oil survey scientists flying over the Chukchi sea.
Scientists who study the polar bear see this group of nine bears trying to swim 400 miles to safety as a bad sign. In an area as vast as the unprecedentedly-large open waters of the Arctic, spotting one group this large and this lost means there are likely many others.
I was rather astonished this morning by McCain’s VP pick. I actually thought that he might pick a woman and Christine Todd Whitman or Condeleezza Rice seemed obvious choices. I suppose Palin is a better match with McCain. Whitman is probably a bit too liberal and I would have loved seeing the ads with Rice saying “bin Ladin determined to attack in America” over and over and over.
Pat Buchanin luvs him some Palen. You remember Pat Buchanin right?
