Eventually David Clark will stand trial for murdering his wife.
Why is there no outrage over Obama's refusal to disclose his birth certificate?To read the entire article by WND http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=79174
Camille Paglia has written another fabulous article concerning Sarah Palin. While Ms. Paglia and I disagree on many things; her stance on Palin in relation to feminists, liberals and the media is one that I applaud:
[B]oth Todd and Sarah Palin, whom most people in the U.S. and abroad had never even heard of until six weeks ago, have emerged as powerful new symbols of a revived contemporary feminism. That the macho Todd, with his champion athleticism and working-class cred, can so amiably cradle babies and care for children is a huge step forward in American sexual symbolism.
Although nothing will sway my vote for Obama, I continue to enjoy Sarah Palin’s performance on the national stage. During her vice-presidential debate last week with Joe Biden (whose conspiratorial smiles with moderator Gwen Ifill were outrageous and condescending toward his opponent), I laughed heartily at Palin’s digs and slams and marveled at the way she slowly took over the entire event. I was sorry when it ended! But Biden wasn’t — judging by his Gore-like sighs and his slow sinking like a punctured blimp. Of course Biden won on points, but TV (a visual medium) never cares about that.
The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin’s brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don’t we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.
And where is all that lurid sexual fantasy coming from? When I watch Sarah Palin, I don’t think sex — I think Amazon warrior! I admire her competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal. The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry — including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.
One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is “dumb.” Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can’t see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism — the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.
As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry, I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English — beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse — which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant.
Even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism. As I said in my last column, Palin has made the biggest step forward in reshaping the persona of female authority since Madonna danced her dominatrix way through the shattered puritan barricades of the feminist establishment. In 1990, in a highly controversial New York Times op-ed that attacked old-guard feminist ideology, I declared that “Madonna is the future of feminism” — a prophecy that was ridiculed at the time but that turned out to be quite true. Madonna put pro-sex feminism on the international map.
But it is now 18 years later — the span of an entire generation. The instabilities and diminishments for young women raised in an increasingly shallow media environment have become all too obvious. I had grown up in a vibrant pop culture with glorious women stars of voluptuous sensuality — above all Elizabeth Taylor, sewn into that silky white slip as the vixen Manhattan call girl of “Butterfield 8.” In college, I feasted on foreign films starring sexual sophisticates like Jeanne Moreau, Anouk Aimée and Catherine Deneuve. Sex today, however, has become brittle and superficial. Except for the occasional diverting flash of Lindsay Lohan’s borrowed bosom, I see nothing whatever that is worth a second glance. Pro-sex feminism has worked itself out and, like all movements, has degenerated into clichés. And even Madonna, with her skeletal megalomania, looks like a refugee from a horror movie.
The next phase of feminism must circle back and reappropriate the ancient persona of the mother — without losing career ambition or power of assertion. Betty Friedan, who had first attacked the cult of postwar domesticity, had long warned second-wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem about the damaging exclusion of homemakers from their value system. The animus of liberal feminists toward religion must also end (I am speaking as an atheist). Feminism must reexamine all of its assumptions, including its death grip on abortion, if it wishes to survive.
The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism. But I am convinced that Palin’s bracing mix of male and female voices, as well as her grounding in frontier grit and audacity, will prove to be a galvanizing influence on aspiring Democratic women politicians too, from the municipal level on up. Palin has shown a brand-new way of defining female ambition — without losing femininity, spontaneity or humor. She’s no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she’s pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite — which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend. And by the way, I think Tina Fey’s witty impersonations of Palin have been fabulous. But while Fey has nailed Palin’s cadences and charm, she can’t capture the energy, which is a force of nature.
Stewart wins after NASCAR disallows Smith's pass
Move results in penalty for Smith and 18th-place finish
By Sporting News Wire Service October 5, 200810:21 PM EDT
TALLADEGA, Ala. -- Tony Stewart, a six-time bridesmaid at Talladega Superspeedway, finally got to Victory Lane at the 2.66-mile track in Sunday's AMP Energy 500. But a controversial finish left rookie Regan Smith shouting, "Stop the wedding!"
In a green-white-checkered-flag finish that took the race two laps beyond its scheduled distance of 188, Stewart was declared the winner, even though Smith crossed the finish line first. With a quarter-mile to go and Stewart protecting the bottom of the track, Smith was forced to dip below the yellow line, which divides the speedway proper from the apron, to complete the final pass for the lead.
In NASCAR's view, Smith's move was out of bounds, violating NASCAR's rule against improving position by passing below the yellow line. Accordingly, Stewart was awarded the victory, and Smith was demoted to an 18th-place finish as the last car on the lead lap.
Smith thought he was within the rules on the pass, and went with Dale Earnhardt Inc. president Max Siegel to defend himself to NASCAR.
The ruling gave Stewart his first win of the season and snapped a 43-race winless streak dating to Watkins Glen last year. There was concern in his voice as he questioned whether Smith would be awarded the win, but he quickly started the celebration when his spotter gave the "20 is the winner" declaration.
"Man, it's one thing to get back to Victory Lane -- but to do it at Talladega -- this is one of four places I haven't won a Cup race, and talk about one to win," Stewart said. "I wanted to win here for so long."
Stewart said further that he had no qualms about blocking Smith.
"I've lost Daytona 500s, and I've lost races here because somebody blocked," Stewart said. "The nice thing is that I was on the right end of it this time. I have no regrets."
Smith saw it differently.
"They always tell us in the drivers' meeting, if you get forced to the inside, you can go for it, especially on the last lap," Smith said. "I saw the replay when I was pulling in here [to pit road], and I felt like we won that race. I could have caused a big pileup, and you don't want to do that, either.
"You cannot improve your position any time you go below the yellow line," NASCAR vice president of corporate communications Jim Hunter said. "In our judgment, he [Smith] improved his position, and the penalty for that is a pass-through, so he was moved back to the tail end of the longest line, or 18th position.
Notes: Denny Hamlin sustained an ankle injury during hard contact with the outside wall in Turn 2 on Lap 99. He was taken to a local hospital for further evaluation. ... The race produced 28 different leaders, a NASCAR record for all tracks, not just Talladega.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.
Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.
Just as Paglia "may not agree a jot with [Palin] about basic principles", Paglia and I disagree also. But it is refreshing to find a Democrat (or Republican for that matter) who looks at issues logically and not emotionally.
Camille Paglia's column is a must-read. Trust me on this!
Boy, what a busy weekend! Yesterday the Gipsy Kings, today the Museum of FA, and tomorrow Gustav. We are turning into exciting people. Okay, maybe not. but we have been busy.
Whoever the next President is, the best choice for Secretary of Energy would be T. Boone Pickens. Here is a man with a plan!
By building wind generators from Texas to North Dakota we can "produce 20% of the electricity for the United States." Also, building wind power facilities in small towns will produce jobs for rural Americal.
Pushing Natural Gas Vehicles (NGV) would not only help with our enery crisis, but they are cheaper to run and are better for the environment. "Natural gas is our country's second largest energy resource; [it] is one of the cleanest, safest and most useful forms of energy — residentially, commercially and industrially; [and] Domestic natural gas reserves are twice that of petroleum." In some states, natural gas at feuling stations are less than $1 a gallon! "According to the California Energy Commission, critical greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas are 23% lower than diesel and 30% lower than gasoline. "
More details on the Pickens Plan are available at the website below.
http://www.pickensplan.com/
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