Dressed to be First Lady

After the world became aware of the amount of money Sarah Palin had been spending on her campaign wardrobe, the Obamas had to think smart.  A few days later Michelle Obama appeared on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno is a non-designer outfit. She simply stated that she was wearing a “JCrew ensemble”.

And now for the goods from JCrew:

PEMBRIDGE-DOT PENCIL SKIRT – in ivory – $148

ITALIAN DECO TANK – originally $148 – NOW $99

CRYSTAL-BUTTON COLORBLOCK CARDIGAN – WAS $89 [SOLD OUT]

I have always been a fan of the Crew. But knowing our upcoming First Lady has been online shopping there too, makes me feel a little more sophisticated walking around in my cute sweater.

For more info, check out : Michelle Obama in JCrew.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

BARACK OBAMA: The chicken crossed the road because it was time for a change! The chicken wanted change!

JOHN MC CAIN: My friends, that chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road… ZZZZZzzzzzzzzz

SARAH PALIN: Because, Praise Jesus, I was gonna shoot his sorry liberal butt off for blocking my view of Russia!

JOE BIDEN: Now I love that Chicken, I mean I’d take a bullet for that chicken. But he is nuts, crazy, stupid in the head to cross that road.

HILLARY CLINTON: When I was First Lady, I personally helped that little chicken to cross the road. This experience makes me uniquely qualified to ensure right from Day One that every chicken in this country gets the chance it deserves to cross the road. But then, this really isn’t about me.

GEORGE W. BUSH: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road, or not. The chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle ground here.

DICK CHENEY: Where’s my gun?

COLIN POWELL: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.

BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken. What is your definition of crossing?

AL GORE: I invented the chicken.

JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken’s intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.

AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white? We need some black chickens.

DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won’t realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he’s acting by not taking on his current problems before adding new problems.

OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross this road so bad. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I’m going to give this chicken a car so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.

NANCY GRACE: That chicken crossed the road because he’s guilty! You can see it in his eyes and the way he walks.

PAT BUCHANAN: To steal the job of a decent, hardworking American.

MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way that chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmers Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.

DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I’ve not been told.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die in the rain, alone.

JERRY FALWELL: Because the chicken was gay! Can’t you people see the plain truth? That’s why they call it the other side. Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And if you eat that chicken, you will become gay, too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like the other side. That chicken should not be crossing the road. It’s as plain and as simple as that.

GRANDPA: In my day we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough.

BARBARA WALTERS: Isn’t that interesting? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heart warming story of how it experienced a serious case of molting, and went on to accomplish its lifelong dream of crossing the road.

ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.

JOHN LENNON: Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads together, in peace.

BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken2008, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook. Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken2008. This new platform is much more stable and will never crash.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?

Debating Strategies

Alaskans Give Palin the Picket

ANCHORAGE — A couple of hours after Gov. Sarah Palin returned to the Outside, as Alaskans call the Lower 48, her local critics swarmed an Anchorage intersection to correct the widespread impression that the whole of the Last Frontier endorses her candidacy.

The midday protest outside a city library drew a crowd in the high hundreds — perhaps surging past a thousand — from the city’s relatively liberal environs, who seemed very happy to see one another and be reminded that they are not alone.

“The whole thing grew out of frustration,” said Charla Sterne, one of the organizers, who like several people at the rally declined to say where they worked (several said they were state employees and feared retribution).

“Last week this was just ten women sitting around talking about this perception that all of Alaska supports Sarah Palin. We apparently hit a nerve and started a movement,” Sterne said.

A sense of festival obtained. There was a woman in a polar bear suit representing “Polar Bear Moms Say: No Palin.” Drivers on 36th Avenue saw a little girl waving a sign “Don’t Ban My Books.”

Maia Nolan, 29, wore a sticker reading, “My Mom for V.P.”

“My mom is from Alaska. She’s a working mother. She’s good looking,” said Nolan. “So she seems to be qualified to be vice president.”

There were also a few score Palin supporters in the mix, most of them alerted to the event by a conservative talk show host.

Eddie Burke of KBYR-AM showed up in person, but while there was no evident friction between the two camps, cheerful chants of “O-bam-ah” effectively drowned out whatever he was saying to the cameras in the center of a mini-media scrum.

The din did not prevent reading the signs, pro and against:
Bush In A Skirt
Palin: She Be Failin’
I Love My Alaska Girl
Jesus Was a Community Organizer
We Luv Our Lady Guv
Palin: Thanks But No Thanks
Smearing Alaska’s Good Name One Scandal @ a Time
Candidate To Nowhere
Rape Kits Should Be Free
Voted For Her Once: Never Again!
Community Organizers are the Real Patriots
Barbies for War
I Shall Not Be Pandered To
Give Palin Your Vote AND Your Draft Age Child
Sarah Palin: So Far Right She’s Wrong
Sarah Palin Is My Hero
Alaska Is Not Frisco
Gun Rights
Coat Hangers for McCain
Sarah Palin, Undoing 150 Years of American Feminism
Hockey Mama for Obama (on a hockey stick)

For some reason, these pictures were not shown in American newspapers. I wonder why…

This story was taken from The Trail, a website dedicated to giving people up-to-date information on the 2008 campaigning. If you like what you see, read more at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/.

Palin: Wrong Woman, Wrong Message

A friend sent me this article. I think it is one of the best political articles I have read during this campaign. Gloria Steinem is eloquent and articulate with her wording and opinions. She put into words everything I have been thinking while enlightening me on some issues I wasn’t aware of.

Enjoy.

from Opinion – LA Times
PALIN: WRONG WOMAN, WRONG MESSAGE
By Gloria Steinem

September 4, 2008

Here’s the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing — the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party — are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women — and to many men too — who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the “white-male-only” sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won’t work. This isn’t the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive
speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than
twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned
and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much
everything Clinton’s candidacy stood for — and that Barack Obama’s still does.
To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, “Somebody stole my
shoes, so I’ll amputate my legs.”

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can’t do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn’t say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden’s 37 years’ experience.

Palin has been honest about what she doesn’t know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, “I still can’t answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?” When asked about Iraq, she said, “I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq.”

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she’s won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain’s campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax.
Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn’t know
it’s about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps
McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department,
of putting a job candidate’s views on “God, guns and gays” ahead of competence.
The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away
from the presidency.

So let’s be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can’t tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin’s value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women’s wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves “abstinence-only” programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers’ millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn’t spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don’t doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn’t just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn’t just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn’t just echo McCain’s pledge to
criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her
daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not
only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates
abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, “women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership,” so he may be voting for Palin’s husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can’t appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male
leaders who know that women can’t be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men
should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.

Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women’s Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.

If you have not yet registered to vote, register today! Voice your opinion! It’s your country, take a stand! Now is the time for change. ROCK THE VOTE!