This is pretty rich coming from someone who had no problem “spreadin’ the wealth around” from the oil companies to the citizens in Alaska.  Complaints of “big government spenders” ring pretty hollow from someone who left her small town $20 million in debt.

And to make this whole thing all the more lovely, at the 2:38 mark in the video, it sounds like one of her supporters yells out “He’s a n**ger”.

Please.Make.It.Stop. I’ve had enough of the fear mongering and the race baiting.

I don’t know about anyone else, but to me this whole meme they’ve latched onto with the “spreading the wealth around” comments, and the latest cries of socialism, or communism, or whatever “ism” of the day they want to try to slap onto Obama … it all just reeks of racism. The dog whistle they’re blowing for the folks this hits home with is this: “Obama wants to give your hard-earned tax dollars to all of the lazy Negroes who want to sit home all day and collect welfare while you white people have to go to work every day to support them.”

Of course, this is not what Obama is advocating when he promotes tax breaks for the middle class. I truly hope that most of this country has grown as weary of this type of class warfare as I have.

It’s pitting one group of working people against another, and against the poor. Divide and conquer. It’s all they have left.

• As of Oct 16, Windschitl’s campaign had taken in over $32,000.
• One eastern Iowa lobbying group, Iowans for Tax Relief (ITR), contributed 39% of the reported total. The same lobbying group contibuted more than half of his 2006 campaign budget.  Rep. Paul Wilderdyke, defeated by Windschitl in 2006, said of ITR, “They just bought a seat in the Iowa House.“  They are spending even in our district this year than they did in 2006.

Our opponent has amassed a lot of money. We’ll never match it. But then we didn’t expect to win the election by outspending an incumbent Republican. We win by mobilizing volunteers and talking to our neighbors. You can still organize a coffee for Jan, do phone banking and door knocking, and participate in the get-out-the-vote effort.  Give us a call, don’t put it off.

It’s sort of a strange way to convince your audience to agree with you.  Science is, after all the main way that we know things.  It is a method of learning about the physical world by observing it—not by studying the words of wise men, or taking a poll, or trying to imagine how the world would work if it were perfect, or trying to figure out how God wants the world to work.  The core of science is this:  the only way to know if an idea is true, is to test it by observing the world.  You don’t have to be a professional scientist to do science.  You just have to believe your own eyes and ears, and be willing to prove yourself wrong now and then.

For centuries, those who were more interested in power than in truth have been annoyed by scientists and their pesky evidence.  Galileo was tried for heresy by the Catholic Church (which has since apologized) for demonstrating that the Sun and not Earth was the at the center of the solar system.  Charles Darwin was condemned by the Church of England (which has since apologized) for his theory of evolution, a theory still under attack today. Nikolai Vavilov died in a Soviet prison because he dissented from the officially approved genetic theories of the Soviet Union at the time (which are now discredited).  And today, the Bush administration has waged a multi-front war on science, for example, censoring EPA statements on global warming to conform with White House claims on the subject (claims which the Bush administration has since abandoned).

We can’t make good public policy if we ignore evidence we don’t like.  It’s OK if a legislator doesn’t know everything—who does?—but you have a right to expect that anyone who represents you will seek out the facts, and make decisions based on facts.  Anybody can just respond to rumors and prejudice.  Leaders should be held to a much higher standard.

And leaders who incite you to distrust evidence, to distrust science itself, are worse than ignorant.  They’re trying to make you ignorant.  Nothing could demonstrate more contempt for the voters, and for democracy itself.

Her previous claim to fame was being mayor of Wasilla, a growing town about 40 minutes from Anchorage of about 15,000 people. Wasilla is a hellhole, even by Alaskan standards, where there are plenty of hellhole towns and villages. Wasilla is an ugly place that shows a complete absence of planning, design, or sense of public vision. Gov’t agencies and services are completely overrun in this town; things are so bad that they can’t even track their population or build schools in the right place, because most parts of the town don’t require building permits, so the only clue about where people are settling are utility receipts. Imagine trying to be an emergency responder in this kind of place: Houses don’t just catch on fire in Wasilla, they burn to the ground, because by the time the fire department has figured out which road to take (no signs) or whose house it is (no directory), the place is done for. Palin was mayor this town for at least 2 terms before being elected gov. a year and a half ago.

Oh yeah. I totally want her to be in charge of the federal government.

A writer observed: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.” I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman. I grew up with those people.

Now we know which writer she was talking about: fascist writer Westbrook Pegler. And when Pegler was talking about “those people,” he meant people who weren’t homosexuals, blacks or Jews. Pegler believed that Jews could not be the victims of persecution because persecution “connotes injustice.… They are, instead, enduring retaliation, or punishment.” His views toward African Americans were just as enlightened.  In an 1963 column he wrote that “[It is] clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry.”  For some reason Palin didn’t use those quotes.

Now don’t tell me you’re surprised. Well…I’m a little surprised that her handlers didn’t vett the speech a little more carefully, checking, you know, for overtly fascist references, but I’m not surprised that she counts fascists among her intellectual forbears. This is the Republican Party we’re talking about here, the party of Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, and Charlie Black, Helm’s “brain” and now chief strategist for John McCain. This is the party whose White House was in charge of the response to Hurricane Katrina. This is the party whose 1984 ticket was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.  And lest you think 1984 was just too long ago to count, this is the party whose 2008 nominee for President uses racial slurs, not just in private conversations with his racist buddies, but while talking directly to the press.

They may have repackaged themselves a few times since the 1960s, but it’s the same product inside the box.

Americans enjoy a country with a much freer press than the countries above (and indeed, a freer press than we had in my grandparents’ day). We’re not perfect; our legal system does sometimes suppress legitimate expression, for a time at least, in the name of security, copyright, or “the children”.  (And sometimes the threat of criminal violence can suppress books when the law does not.) It is worth remembering the important books that can be published thanks to the free press, and not to take them for granted.

In the Logan-Magnolia district, property taxes ill be reduced by over $700,000 and the district stands to gain over $580.000 in revenue.  In Woodbine, the revenue gain for schools will be over $380,000.

For some reason, those numbers seem to get caught in the throat of Windschitl and his Iowans for Tax Relief buddies.

They follow the talking points line by line and do not veer away from the script, no matter how much this may improve the lives of our students and teachers.

And very good buddies they are.  Iowans for Tax Relief, a Muscatine, Iowa anti-tax group, and Taxpayers United, an anti-tax group working out of the same P.O. box, gave Matt Windschitl more than half of his campaign dollars in 2006.  It’s too bad the people of the district don’t command the same kind of loyalty from the incumbent.

Why object to surveillance, some might ask, if you have nothing to hide? That argument is used to justify all sorts of intrusive searches, and it’s bogus. When you send in your tax return, you put it in a sealed envelope, right? Why? Do you have something to hide? Of course not. Your tax return (and most of your other mail) goes in an envelope because it’s just private. You don’t have to answer questions from the government about what you’re hiding in that envelope, or behind your bedroom windowshade, or in your appointment book—not unless the government gets a warrant based on probable cause. The same applies to your movements and associations with other people.

Well vehicle tracking is not going to happen in Iowa, not if I have anything to say about it. If I’m elected I will push for a state law outlawing any use of traffic-light cameras for surveillance purposes. And if it turns out that traffic-light cameras cause more accidents, as at least four scientific studies have shown, then we should get rid of the cameras altogether.

Update:  it’s way more than four studies.  Thanks, Bill!

And Agriprocessors isn’t done abusing working people. The Mexican workers rounded up by the feds have been replaced by Somali refugees who are being packed into substandard housing.

This is why we need strong, active, growing labor unions, and why we need rigorous enforcement of labor laws.

What is it they hate? Guiliani and Palin both made it pretty clear: community organizing. Community organizing is energized from below. From the periphery. It is the direction and facilitation of mass energy towards productive and cooperative ends. It is about replacing conflict with collaboration. It is the opposite of war; it is peace.

Last night, the Republican Convention made it clear they prefer war. They see the world as a dangerous and terrible place. Like the fascist leaders satirized in Starship Troopers, they say they believe it is better to be on the offensive, taking the war to the people who might wish us harm than playing defense. It is better to be an international aggressor - a bulldog with lipstick - than led by the misguided notion that attacking people itself makes the world a more dangerous place.

In their attack on community organizing - a word combination they pretended they didn’t know what it meant - Giuliani and Palin revealed their refusal to acknowledge the kinds of bottom-up processes through which our society was built, and through which local communities can begin to assert some authority over their schools, environments, and economies. Without organized communities, you don’t get the reduction in centralized government the Republicans pretend to be arguing for. In their view, community organizing as, at best, equivalent to disruptive and unpredictable Al Qaeda activity.

I recommend you read the whole piece.  It’s not long, and it cuts through several years of Republican flimflam to the core of what they believe.