Commentary: Sarah Palin, wrong

So why then do I think that Sarah Palin would be a terrible vice president? Because I also think that John McCain would be a terrible president.

I don't care about how Sarah Palin or John McCain take care of their families. I care about how their policy choices affect my family and millions of other Americans.

McCain and Palin get their health insurance paid for by the government (hers in Alaska and his in Washington). Yet they oppose giving the nearly 46 million uninsured Americans the same access to affordable health care.

John McCain's kids don't have to worry about paying for college. Yet he has opposed every single education support program to help others.

McCain and Palin say they will stand up to oil companies. Yet the only energy policy they support gives millions of dollars in tax breaks to oil companies to do more drilling and he has opposed every piece of federal legislation to explore alternative fuel sources.

McCain and Palin say they will revamp how Washington does business. Yet his campaign is filled with lobbyists and she has cooperated with Sen. Ted Stevens in funneling federal money for useless projects in Alaska for years. And McCain and Palin have no solutions for Americans worrying about their jobs in a fragile economy.

McCain and Palin want us to leave their families alone. Yet they want to make rules for our families by eliminating our right to make our own choices over abortion, eliminate our access to family planning education or domestic partner benefits, and our freedom from discrimination.

They want to control what our kids learn in school about sex and about science. In short, through the policies they promote and the judges they support, they want the government to have more control over our private lives than at any time in history.

McCain and Palin now say their campaign is about change, too. Yet the only real change they have proposed is a change from a suit to a skirt in the vice president's office and one man fighting a misplaced war for another in the Oval Office.

That seems to me to be the right reason to oppose them in November. It's not the process or the people, it's what they represent. This unconventional choice of a vice presidential nominee by John McCain won't result in a win in November, because McCain and Palin are the wrong choice for the country.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer. 

Editor's note: CNN contributor Hilary Rosen is the political director and Washington editor at large of HuffingtonPost.com, which describes itself as an Internet newspaper and focuses on politics from a liberal point of view. A longtime Democratic adviser, Rosen is a former CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America and supported Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Click here for a rival view.

Hilary Rosen says she empathizes with Sarah Palin's personal choices but opposes her political views. 

Palin: Iraq war 'a task that is from God' (How Moronic... Sounds a lot like Extremist Terrorist thinking to me)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a "task that is from God."

ADVERTISEMENT

In an address last June, the Republican vice presidential candidate also urged ministry students to pray for a plan to build a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in the state, calling it "God's will."

Palin asked the students to pray for the troops in Iraq, and noted that her eldest son, Track, was expected to be deployed there.

"Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God," she said. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan."

A video of the speech was posted at the Wasilla Assembly of God's Web site before finding its way on to other sites on the Internet.

Palin told graduating students of the church's School of Ministry, "What I need to do is strike a deal with you guys." As they preached the love of Jesus throughout Alaska, she said, she'd work to implement God's will from the governor's office, including creating jobs by building a pipeline to bring North Slope natural gas to North American markets.

"God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that," she said.

"I can do my job there in developing our natural resources and doing things like getting the roads paved and making sure our troopers have their cop cars and their uniforms and their guns, and making sure our public schools are funded," she added. "But really all of that stuff doesn't do any good if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with God."

Palin attended the evangelical church from the time she was a teenager until 2002, the church said in a statement posted on its Web site. She has continued to attend special conferences and meetings there. Religious conservatives have welcomed her selection as John McCain's running mate.

Rob Boston, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, lamented Palin's comments.

"I miss the days when pastors delivered sermons and politicians delivered political speeches," he said. "The United States is increasingly diverse religiously. The job of a president is to unify all those different people and bring them together around policy goals, not to act as a kind of national pastor and bring people to God."

Democrats say Palin mimics Bush divisiveness (From CNN.com)

(CNN) -- Democrats accused Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin of mirroring "divisive" attacks by President Bush Wednesday night and said showed she wasn't qualified to be on the ticket.


Barack Obama's campaign said Sarah Palin's speech sounded just like George W. Bush.

"The speech that [Alaska] Gov. Palin made was well delivered, but it was written by George Bush's speechwriter and sounds exactly like the same divisive, partisan attacks we've heard from George Bush for the last eight years," said Bill Burton, the campaign spokesman for Sen. Barack Obama.

"If Gov. Palin and John McCain want to define 'change' as voting with George Bush 90 percent of the time, that's their choice, but we don't think the American people are ready to take a 10 percent chance on change." Watch Palin attack Obama's record »

In her speech, Palin drew large applause for attacking Obama for writing two memoirs, but no major laws or reforms.

Robert Gibbs, an Obama campaign senior adviser, said that like Joe Lieberman's speech last night, Palin was wrong.

"I hope if she continues that argument that she'll get her facts straight," Gibbs said.

Gibbs said Obama had worked on strong ethics reform in the state and U.S. legislatures.

In her speech, Palin highlighted her ethics reforms in Alaska as proof she was qualified for the job. iReport.com: I touched Obama's "styrofoam" columns

Don't Miss
Palin blasts Obama as unfit to lead
Read Palin's full speech
"While I was at it, I got rid of a few things in the governor's office that I didn't believe our citizens should have to pay for," Palin said. "That luxury jet was over the top. I put it on eBay."

Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who served as national co-Chair for Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign, said those words showed Palin's lack of qualifications. Watch Democrats weigh in on Palin's speech »

"I thought [her speech] was a tirade of attacks and it was really surprising that the case that Gov. Palin made for her candidacy for vice president is her experience in negotiating the sale of her state's plane on eBay," she said. If, God forbid, anything happens to John McCain, then we are in for a scary proposition."

Kiki McLean, who served as senior adviser to Clinton's campaign, called most of the jabs "great political theater."

McClean, Gibbs and Wasserman Schultz all said that for the second night in a row, the slams against the Democrats were merely a distraction from the fact that nobody has offered detailed plans on the issues Americans care most about.

"For the second night in a row we have yet to see what John McCain will do to get this economy on track, create more jobs," Gibbs said. "That's what Americans want to hear."

Palin also took a swing at Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of the "current do-nothing Senate" for comments he made about McCain.

"[Reid] said, 'I can't stand John McCain,' " Palin said. "Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps no accolade we hear this week is better proof that we've chosen the right man. Clearly what the majority leader was driving at is that he can't stand up to John McCain."

Reid's spokesman Jim Manley fired back, calling Palin's remarks "shrill and sarcastic political attacks."

"Anyone who knows Sen. Reid knows he never backs down when he's fighting for what's right and that he always stands up to John McCain when he is wrong," Manley said. "Shrill and sarcastic political attacks may fire up the Republican base, but they don't change the fact that a McCain-Palin administration would mean four more years of failed Bush-Cheney policies."

The Republican vice presidential pick continued to take swings at Obama and his campaign after they raised allegations that she is unfit and inexperienced for the job of vice president. In the past week, she has also faced tough criticism after revealing news that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is pregnant. iReport.com: Mother of 5 fit to be VP?

Both Obama and Republican candidate McCain criticized the attacks, saying family members were off limits. But that didn't stop former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney from taking a perceived jab at Michelle Obama, who once said her husband's White House run made her "really proud" of her country for the first time.

"Just like you, there has never been a day when I was not proud to be an American," Romney said.

Obama's campaign fired back at Romney's remarks before his speech Wednesday night, calling them, "as pathetic as [Romney's] failed presidential campaign."

Kevin Smith's Next Movie

The Next Game for Joe to get

What I am reading about today

The Call of Cthulhu" is one of H. P. Lovecraft's best-known short stories. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in Weird Tales, February 1928.[1] It is the only story written by Lovecraft in which the extraterrestrial entity Cthulhu himself makes a major appearance.
It is written in a documentary style, with three independent narratives linked together by the device of a narrator discovering notes left by a deceased relative. The narrator pieces together the whole truth and disturbing significance of the information he possesses, illustrating the story's first line: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity; and it was not meant that we should voyage far."Cthulhu Mythos scholar Robert M. Price, in his introduction to The Cthulhu Cycle, points to Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "The Kraken" as a major inspiration for Lovecraft's story. The poem depicts the Kraken—elsewhere described as a giant octopus or squid—sleeping "Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea/His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep":
There hath he lain for ages and will lie,
Battening on huge seaworms in his sleep;
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Price points to the parallels with Lovecraft's creature: a huge, octopoid sea monster, sleeping for ages at the bottom of the ocean (either "dreaming" or "dreamless"), and destined to emerge from his slumber in an apocalyptic age.[2]
Price also considers the work of Lord Dunsany to be a major source for Lovecraft's dreaming god. Lovecraft himself noted that he read some Dunsany, an author he greatly admired, on the day that he conceived the plot of "Call of Cthulhu"; Price points in particular to "A Shop in Go-by Street", which talks of "the heaven of the gods who sleep", and notes that "unhappy are they that hear some old god speak while he sleeps being still deep in slumber". Another Dunsany work cited by Price is The Gods of Pegana, which depicts a god who is constantly lulled to sleep, because if he should awaken "there will be worlds nor gods no more."[3]

Chicago