Palin, albatross around McCain’s neck

This video from the USA is called Sarah Palin, Amy Goodman and the Unfounding of the USA.

By Patrick Martin in the USA:

New revelations on VP choice heighten crisis of McCain campaign

3 September 2008

After a series of politically damaging reports about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and her family, there is mounting speculation that Republican presidential candidate John McCain may be forced to replace her as his vice presidential running mate. As ABC News asked on its web site, “how long a trip is it from there to Tom Eagleton/Harriet Miers territory?” (both nominees who were compelled to withdraw.)

The candidate herself has not been heard from since her first weekend of campaigning with McCain. She has given only a single media interview—a family-oriented piece of puffery in People magazine, conducted last Friday—and will apparently accept the vice presidential nomination at Wednesday night’s session of the Republican convention without having answered a single press inquiry about her qualifications or political views.

Palin cancelled the one public appearance she was scheduled to make—a speech to the Republicans for Life caucus, a grouping of the most fanatical anti-abortion activists headed by Phyllis Schafly. The group had planned to give Palin an award for her opposition to abortion rights even before the vice presidential selection was announced.

On Monday, Palin and her husband Todd issued a brief written statement acknowledging that their oldest daughter Bristol, 17, was pregnant and planning to marry the father of her unborn child, subsequently identified as Levi Johnston, 18, a former hockey star at Wasilla High School.

While one cannot but feel sympathy for the two young people, barely more than children, now the subject of a media frenzy, there is little basis for extending that sympathy to Governor Palin or the array of reactionary, moralizing preachers and pundits who have suddenly discovered the value of privacy (something they routinely deny to young pregnant women who make a different choice than Bristol Palin).

As for claims that the candidate’s children should be off-limits in the campaign, Palin made her model family the main selling point on her fitness for the vice presidency, speaking at length of her son’s enlistment in the military and deployment in Iraq and her own efforts to combine motherhood and a political career.

As Republicans unveil VP candidate: Democrats silent on threat from religious right: here.

Mass arrests of protesters at Republican National Convention: here.

Palin cartoon: here.

McCain cartoon: here. And here.

McCain houses cartoon: here.