Will John Kass Stop Telling Me About Small Town Ways?
ArchPundit
It’s really annoying and he’s a giant poseur. Being a white guy doesn’t entitle one to wax rhapsodic about the heartland. Jackass.
September 2008
On the One Hand
John McCain is rallying the base very well.
On the other, the base’s agenda is hated by 70 percent of the US Population and their VP candidate is incredibly unsympathetic to most Americans. I’ll take it.
Who Knew?
Someone can make Pat Buchanan look warm and fuzzy.
Deep Thoughts
The Civil Rights Movement was a large community organizing effort.
“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities,”
- Hmmmm…
You also don’t get Ted Stevens getting earmarks for you. You make $12,000 instead of $64,000 a year. You work on issues like removal of asbestos instead of what time the bars close or whether to ban books at the library.
Community organizing is what ordinary people do in order to clean up messes made by politicians and their failed policies.
There’s nothing wrong with being a small town Mayor. There’s also nothing wrong with being a community organizer. The problem with Palin’s ‘experience’ isn’t the jobs she has held as much as a complete lack of interest in those issues that a VP must have a background on. Of course, Obama was an organizer 25 years ago before going on to:
- Harvard Law and the first African-American President of the Law Review
- Running an incredibly effective voter registration turnout operation in 1992
- 8 years in the Illinois Senate
- Being a Board of Director to a multi-million dollar grant to improve education in Chicago
- Running against an entrenched incumbent in Bobbie Rush
- Becoming the third African-American Senator since Reconstruction
- And then his Senate Record which includes bipartisan bills to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation and make government more transparent
That, my friends, is experience you can believe in.
On top of that, he beat the Machine backed candidate in Dan Hynes who had every County Chair supporting him and a multimillionaire who threw money around like it was nothing. After that he beat back Mike Madigan and elected a young progressive to the State Treasurers position.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htnL6QRCqK0[/youtube]
The power of the presidency is to persuade.
“Reading about people not that much older than me who had gone to jail and suffered beatings in order to liberate a people,” he said, “I thought there’s something powerful about that.”
Fellow Harvard University student Kenneth Mack remembered walking around the Harvard Law campus with his friend, who was constantly quoting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
” ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,’ ” Mack remembered Obama saying. “For other people to say things like that, people wouldn’t take it seriously, but with Barack, people really did take him seriously. They thought of him as someone who really sincerely believed it.”
But Obama was about 20 years too late to join King’s movement. So, he decided to do the next best thing. In 1985, a few years before he went to Harvard, Obama took a job as a community organizer. 
Test your knowledge about Obama »
He worked with Jerry Kellman’s Developing Communities Project. As a leader, he stayed in the background, but he taught residents of Chicago’s poor South Side how to effectively lobby their government to get badly needed services.
“Remember, at the time in Chicago, the wards were really politically motivated,” said the Rev. Alvin Love, pastor at Lilydale First Baptist Church. “If you weren’t onboard with the political process and people in leadership, then your garbage didn’t get picked up on time and your street didn’t get fixed.”
Obama helped bring pastors like Love and other community activists together to work on their neighborhood’s problems. En masse, they showed up at city meetings, and in a professional but firm manner made their concerns heard.
“Politicians understand that the number of community residents that come out for a community meeting probably represent 10 times the number of votes,” Love said. “So they pay attention.”
At first, the group achieved simple things. It got the city to clean up Palmer Park, a park filled with garbage and overrun with drug dealers. It got the city to start an after-school program. It even got the area its first badly needed job center. 
See photos of Obama campaigning »
“It might have been small victories to the outside world, but to us, it was big. It meant those kids could get the jobs; they could buy things to start back to school,” said Yvonne Lloyd, one of the residents Obama trained to lead lobbying efforts.
The small success gave residents something that would last a lot longer than a clean park or a job center. Residents said Obama gave them hope.
“We saw what could happen. We saw what can be done if the community has the resources and somebody to come in and train them. I’ll always be grateful for that,” Lloyd said.
The biggest challenge Obama’s group faced was the one that eventually ended Obama’s career as a community organizer.
Linda Randle, a fellow activist, brought a dramatic injustice to Obama’s attention.
At her job at the Ida B. Wells housing project, she noticed workers removing asbestos from the Public Housing Authority’s offices in that building. When she asked management when they planned to remove the dangerous substance from residents’ apartments, she said they told her they had no such plans. She was livid.
“I’m a lot more of a hothead than Barack is,” she said. “Barack is more for compromise, you know. He’ll wait and see.”
Obama joined the growing effort to lobby the city to remove the asbestos from public housing. Randle said he counseled calm and added that was good for her, because he encouraged her to take the high road in negotiations. “So I would say to myself, OK, I’m not really great at the high road, because the road is already crumbling, OK? So, I don’t know if I can make the road higher.”
Eventually, the Housing Authority gave in to the residents’ pressure. The management promised to remove asbestos from all parts of the buildings, not just its offices.
Educational Experience
New Trier turned what could have been a fairly tense situation into an educational and positive experience. Some pics from the day:
How You Know They Didn’t Vet
There’s actually a defense of this story
WASILLA, ALASKA – For much of his long career in Washington, John McCain has been throwing darts at the special spending system known as earmarking, through which powerful members of Congress can deliver federal cash for pet projects back home with little or no public scrutiny. He’s even gone so far as to publish “pork lists” detailing these financial favors.
Three times in recent years, McCain’s catalogs of “objectionable” spending have included earmarks for this small Alaska town, requested by its mayor at the time — Sarah Palin.
Now, McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, has chosen Palin as his running mate, touting her as a reformer just like him.
McCain has made opposition to pork-barrel spending a central theme of his 2008 campaign. “Earmarking deprives federal agencies of scarce resources, at the whim of individual members of Congress,” McCain has said.
It’s not a perfect defense, but many municipalities have found themselves having to go for earmarks since the agency funding is diverted by other earmarks. It’s perfectly true and with a good candidate you can even talk about how that’s the trap for even good people.
However, that defense starts with preempting the news stories and explaining it before it ever makes the news. Once it does, you are screwed.
Hillarious
Live Mics are a bitch:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrG8w4bb3kg[/youtube]
Peggy was a bit more equivocal in her public writings:
Gut: The Sarah Palin choice is really going to work, or really not going to work. It’s not going to be a little successful or a little not; it’s not going to be a wash. She is either going to be magic or one of history’s accidents. She is either going to be brilliant and groundbreaking, or will soon be the target of unattributed quotes by bitter staffers shifting blame in all the Making of the President 2008 books. Of which there should be plenty, as we’ve never had a year like this, with the fabulous freak of a campaign.
More immediately and seriously on Palin:
Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.
New Trier Handles It Well
As far as I can tell, New Trier’s basic position is that, yes, the system is problematic and we are sympathetic to the concerns of parents. They handled yesterday very well:
Friendly — if not a bit nervous — he offered an application. She filled it out. Scanning a second sheet of enrollment requirements, she fumbled through her file and gave him everything she had. He diligently went away to make copies.
That same process was played out again, CPS student after student.
After some time in the heat, Gelissa had a seizure, and New Trier staff moved her to air-conditioned offices and called New Trier nurse Joan Liess.
Johnson and Liess hit it off, sharing conversation about Gelissa and the lack of needed services for her at CPS. Then Liess gave Johnson a tour of the special ed department.
Johnson observed teaching staff fully complemented by nurses and aides in well-equipped classrooms with low student-teacher ratios.
And as she wheeled Gelissa out, Johnson whispered: “Can you make this possible for my baby, Lord?”
That makes me really sad.
It’s the Leeebrals who Are Sexists
I am extremely disappointed in the choice of Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential candidate of the Republican Party. I will still vote for Senator McCain, because I am very concerned about having a fundamental leftist, especially one who is a marvelous orator, as President.
At first, I thought it amusing that McCain picked a pretty, smart, and tough female to counter the racist/sexist accusations going back and forth between parties. I remember how Oprah Winfrey got caught in the cross-fire as she stepped up to the political table to support Obama with pride that a black man could rise to such heights in the USA, only to get slammed by feminists who told her it was gender, not race, that she should back. Understandably, Ms. Winfrey pulled back from it all.
Forget gender and race. I’m frankly and sadly caught in the dilemma of having to balance policy versus example in touting a candidate for the office of the First Family. I was ferociously attacked (what’s new?) when I spoke out strongly against Bill Clinton’s dalliances in the Oval Office. That situation quickly turned into a debate whether “private has anything to do with public.” Nonsense. Role models are very important. Children and young adults look to those who are visible and successful as a road map of what is acceptable behavior and emulate those actions over the morals and values their parents and churches have taught and tried to reinforce. It’s a tough go these days, when the “bad that men or women do” is used for entertainment purposes without judgment, or is excused because of political or financial considerations.
I’m stunned – couldn’t the Republican Party find one competent female with adult children to run for Vice President with McCain? I realize his advisors probably didn’t want a “mature” woman, as the Democrats keep harping on his age. But really, what kind of role model is a woman whose fifth child was recently born with a serious issue, Down Syndrome, and then goes back to the job of Governor within days of the birth?
I am haunted by the family pictures of the Palins during political photo-ops, showing the eldest daughter, now pregnant with her own child, cuddling the family’s newborn. When Mom and Dad both work full-time (no matter how many folks get involved with the children), it becomes a somewhat chaotic situation. Certainly, if a child becomes ill and is rushed to the hospital, and you’re on the hotline with both Israel and Iran as nuclear tempers are flaring, where’s your attention going to be? Where should your attention be? Well, once you put your hand on the Bible and make that oath, your attention has to be with the government of the United States of America.
I am positively moved that neither Sarah nor her daughter were willing to terminate the lives of their unborn children. This is in sharp contrast to Obama’s statement that “When it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include…which should include abstinence education and teaching children…teaching children, you know, that sex is not something casual. But it should also include – it should also include other, you know, information about contraception, because, look, I’ve got two daughters, 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” (March, 2008)
So, one Vice Presidential candidate and her daughter demonstrate, under conditions of great stress, that babies are valued human beings, not punishment. However, that same VP candidate came forth in April of 2008 with a proclamation for “Family Child Care Week,” in which she wrote: “These professionals are positive role models for the children they care for and the communities they serve.” Clearly, Palin sees the need for
positive role models. I suggest that they be Mommy and Daddy, and not the hired help.
Child-care facilities are a necessity when mothers and fathers (when they exist at all) are unwilling or incapable of caring for their offspring. Unfortunately, they have become a mainstay of the feminista mentality that nothing should stand in the way of a woman’s ambition – nothing, including her family.
Any full-time working wife and mother knows that the family takes the short end of the stick. Marriages and the welfare of children suffer when a stressed-out mother doesn’t have time to be a woman, a wife, and a hands-on Mommy.
Some guy named Todd apparently isn’t important to her.
The irony to me personally is that my wife stayed home with the kids for 5 years and is now looking to return to work part time as the girls have entered kindergarten. Of course, that was a choice we made not because, first of all and unlike my mother, we could. Second, it made sense for us with twins compared to the relative cost of child care to Ms. ArchPundit working. Third, Jennifer wanted to. It was a choice.