"Ethan was developmentally disabled, not a criminal."

"He was entranced by police and police departments and liked communicating with them to the extent that, if there was ever a complaint, it was that he’d call so they could come to the house so he could talk to them."

"There is so much that is heinous about Brittany being used for political gain in this way..."

"... but let’s start with the obvious thing, which is that neither Mitt Romney nor anybody running for office under the Republican banner is suggesting doing anything that would hurt her."

All right, National Review's The Corner, but I found it deeply affecting. I am a woman, and I vote.

Bristol Palin is waiting for Obama's phone call.

Given that he called Sandra Fluke, she says she's "a little surprised my phone hasn’t rung":

Your $1,000,000 donor Bill Maher has said reprehensible things about my family.  He’s made fun of my brother because of his Down’s Syndrome. He’s said I was “f—-d so hard a baby fell out.”...

What if you did something radical and wildly unpopular with your base and took a stand against the denigration of all women… even if they’re just single moms? Even if they’re Republicans?

Best move for Obama? Call her!

Andrew Sullivan reflects on the "difficult task is summoning the right amount of anger with the right amount of generosity of spirit."

Including the way he has treated Sarah Palin:

Here, there is no conceivable way in which, in my judgment, her presence on the national stage can improve our discourse, help solve our problems or improve public life. But that does not forbid one from noting the great example she has shown in rearing a child with Down Syndrome, whatever his provenance, or noting her effectiveness as a demagogue, or from admiring her father's genuineness or her skill in exploiting new media. I've consistently tried to do this without undercutting my still-raw amazement that an advanced democratic society could even contemplate putting such an unstable and irresponsible person in a position of any real power.

His approach to the new civility, he says, will be "generous anger: a classically Orwellian term." The idea is "to make strong and lively points without demonization."

What Sarah Palin is doing to her children.

The ratings are up for "Sarah Palin's Alaska." Oh, that's so sad for the people who exulted last week when the ratings were down. I skipped last week myself, but I watched this week's show. It was pretty cool seeing the Palins hauling in fish nets, slicing salmon into strips, tying the strips with string, and hanging them up in a smokehouse, with Todd's Eskimo grandmother demonstrating how to set up the fire to get the smoke just right.

I was touched by Sarah's interaction with Trig and with another boy with Down Syndrome (a member of her extended family). It made me cry and it made me think about this post by Andrew Sullivan criticizing Sarah Palin for combining motherhood and a career in national politics:

Anyone one who genuinely cared about the privacy of her kids would have either said no [to the vice presidential nomination] or been extremely careful to release the information as soberly as possible....

[S]he parades a special needs infant in front of the press, dangles him half-naked in front of book tour crowds, uses him constantly as a rhetorical campaign prop, and cites him at almost every speech to appeal to pro-life voters....

What Palin has done with her young children is unprecedented. Think of how Obama strictly protects his daughters, and how George W. Bush did the same. 

Think of how the press — including you — regards those daughters as off-limits but goes after Palin's daughters.

What Palin has done is use her children, having failed to actually rear them. She is still doing it on her reality show. That she has gone so far as to use and thereby abuse a child with Down Syndrome whose interests are clearly in seclusion, careful nurturing and care, and constant parental attention, tells you a huge amount. 

Seclusion? Is that right, tucking those kids away from the rest of the society? Why not be out and proud?

Jonathan Chait makes a Special Olympics joke!

He wisecracks "Mitch Daniels Wins The Fiscal Special Olympics."

What is stupider than being stupid while calling other people stupid? You'd think Obama fans would at least learn from Obama's mistakes.

3 Google executives are criminally convicted — in Italy — based on Google's hosting of a video that some Italian students uploaded.

Incredible! And Google even took down the video as soon as it was notified and helped the authorities find and punish the students.

And how horrendous was this video? It depicted bullying. The child bullied had Down syndrome, but still.

ADDED: From the Official Google Blog:

[The conviction] attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

"She understood deeply the lesson our mother and father taught us -- much is expected of those to whom much has been given."

"Throughout her extraordinary life, she touched the lives of millions, and for Eunice that was never enough."

So said Teddy Kennedy about his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, dead at the age of 88.

In the competitive household of her youth, she established herself as the most intellectually gifted of the sisters in a family where the patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., decided that his sons were the ones bound for politics.

Within the constraints of her era, gender, and social strata, she was the most ambitious, too, becoming an international leader more than a half century ago in the burgeoning movement to wrest mental retardation from the shadows of hushed conversations.

A younger sister of Rosemary Kennedy, who was developmentally disabled and institutionalized most of her life, Mrs. Shriver dedicated decades to ensuring that other families would not endure the fate of her own, watching a loved one whisked behind closed doors. In an attempt to alleviate Rosemary’s intellectual disabilities, doctors performed a lobotomy that instead left her in need of constant care.

Here are 2 pictures of the great lady — young and old:

Did Sarah Palin say Obama's "death panel" might kill her baby?

Eric Kleefeld writes:

In a new posting on her Facebook account, former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) made a dire statement about health care reform -- that it could result in an Obama-created "death panel" killing her infant son with Down Syndrome...

Here's the full text of her Facebook post. Excerpt:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

She doesn't say that the government will kill disabled (or elderly) persons directly, but that death will occur as a result of the decisions of cost controlling bureaucrats with the power to determine who can receive various treatments. I don't know why "level of productivity in society" is in quotes, nor do I know whether it is the plan to ration care on this basis. Those are actually serious matters, and I'd like to know the answers. What Kleefeld is doing is trying to sweep Palin aside as a big crazy wacko.

Yes, she used a colorful expression "death panel," but it's a good and fair polemical expression if in fact life-saving care will be rationed on this basis. I have found myself saying, in conversation, "I'm afraid Obama is going to kill me." Now, I'm not picturing him or one of his minions coming over to murder me, but I am afraid that as I get older and need expensive care to keep me alive that I will be told I cannot have it, because at my age, in the government's opinion, there's not enough life left in me to be worth the money that I would take from the system that needs to pay for everything.

This isn't a phantom fear. It's a fear stoked by things like this:



(There's a longer version of that clip, plus discussion, here.)

And here's the end of the Palin post, which I think is cool-headed and manifestly sane:

We must step up and engage in this most crucial debate. Nationalizing our health care system is a point of no return for government interference in the lives of its citizens. If we go down this path, there will be no turning back. Ronald Reagan once wrote, “Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Let’s stop and think and make our voices heard before it’s too late.

Kleefeld and others like him — the Andrew Sullivan post title is "Obama's Gonna Kill My Baby!" — would love to squelch that debate.

Let's read Andrew Sullivan's new Sarah Palin post.

Here's the post:

It's getting worse. This is a classic:

"The Palins have no intention of providing a ratings boost for David Letterman by appearing on his show. Plus, it would be wise to keep Willow away from David Letterman," PalinPAC spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton said Wednesday.

So Letterman is a child abuser for making a tasteless joke?

Sullivan seems to miss that Stapleton just made a child-rape joke. It's a joke! Well, it's a joke is not an apt excuse — is it? — when the joke is supposed to work based on a shared belief about the butt of it.

Stapleton's joke depends on seeing Letterman as someone who's enthused about the rape of children — or at least the children of politicians we don't like. By the same token, Letterman's joke worked to the extent that the audience shares the belief that Palin's daughter is a big slut.

Neither joke is any damned good. Letterman is a creep for making a girl the butt of his joke, and Stapleton is an idiot for trying to show that she can joke too and cranking out another dose of child-rape humor.

But the surrealism and narcissism of the Wasilla nutcase is what stands out:

"First, remember in the campaign, Barack Obama said, 'Family's off limits. You don't talk about my family.' "And the candidate who must be obeyed, everybody adhered to that and they did leave his family alone. They haven't done that on the other side of the ticket and it has continued to this day so that's a political double standard."

So brandishing a special needs infant as a campaign prop was putting your family off-limits? Pushing your own daughter into the klieglights to divert attention from your own fantastic lies is family-protective? Pushing Bristol Palin into an absurd abstinence campaign to gin up support from the Christianist right is looking after your kids? Palin reaps what she sows. And she clings to any whisp of victimhood like the attention-starved celebreality star she really is.

Now, this is absurd. Nearly all politicians display their families. Do they brandish them? Brandish means to shake or wave (as a weapon) menacingly/to exhibit in an ostentatious or aggressive manner. Occasionally, one reads of some criminal swinging a baby around like a cudgel, but with politicians, the displaying of the family is non-aggressive and without any weapon connotations. Obama displayed and continues to display Sasha and Malia in the conventional political way, and I'm sure Sullivan would be steamed if anyone mocked them or said anything sexual about them.

Bristol Palin's abstinence effort seems pretty silly to me too, but there's no reason to view that as opening her up to all sorts of vicious mockery. She found herself in an awfully uncomfortable spot. It's embarrassing enough for a teenager to become pregnant by accident, but to endure this in the crossfire of a political campaign had to be excruciating. But she put up with it somehow, didn't take the out of abortion, kept smiling, and tried to turn herself into a good lesson for others. How is this sowing something that she deserves to reap?

Or — oh — it's Palin who reaps what she sows. Is the girl not a person worthy of any regard? What did the girl do? "Family's off limits. You don't talk about my family." Obama said that. It was intended to bind his harshest opponents to a standard of behavior. Sullivan offers absolutely no reason why the same principle does not protect Palin's family.

And why should the governor of a state be called an "attention-starved celebreality star"? Is it because you don't respect her as a politician? You might call everyone with the nerve to run for President/Vice President an attention-starved celebreality star, but the fact is you don't. Apparently, it's because she's got kids who do things that you think we can sit back and view as objects of idle amusement. If anyone is to be a politician — in your nasty little world — their kids better toe the line and stay perfectly prim and healthy and smart (or hide).

If you are truly opposed to abortion, why would you have amniocentesis -- as Sarah Palin did -- knowing that it might kill the unborn child?

Andrew Sullivan raises doubts about whether Sarah Palin is really as pro-Life as she claims. The premise is that to have amniocentesis is to act in a way that reflects a belief that abortion is a possibility.

I note the additional question: If amniocentesis really means that, why did Palin disclose that she had it? The answer would need to be that she wanted to tell the world that she knew she was about to give birth to a child with Down Syndrome and wanted pro-Life credit for her... I was going to say decision. Which brings us back to Sullivan's question.

(Sullivan has more here, where readers have attempted answers.)

ADDED: This question is being discussed on Metafilter, with many good comments, especially this from anastasiav:

And if, for whatever reason, the parents are sure that they will not abort the child, then there is no point in getting tested because the information gained is of no use.

I'd like to speak to this. I was tested. If our son had Down Syndrome I would not have terminated the pregnancy (although I might have if some of the more horrific abnormalities that are possible had been present) -- but it was important to me to know. In advance. Not find out the day my perfect and dreamed of child was born, but far enough in advance to plan and learn and grieve if I needed to. Far enough in advance so that everyone would know and no one would recoil in surprise and then try to put on their "oh what a lovely baby" mask. Far enough in advance to be able to understand what I was getting into before I was standing in the middle of the field.

Its commonplace now to learn the gender of your child in advance "so you can plan." I see this testing as no different. Its a way to be prepared. To plan.

"Many people will express sympathy, but you don’t want or need that, because Trig will be a joy."

Here's the big NYT story -- pre-touted on Drudge -- about Sarah Palin and her baby:

No one has ever tried to combine presidential politics and motherhood in quite the way Ms. Palin is doing, and it is no simple task. In the last week, the criticism she feared in Alaska has exploded into a national debate. On blogs and at PTA meetings, voters alternately cheer and fault her balancing act, and although many are thrilled to see a child with special needs in the spotlight, some accuse her of exploiting Trig for political gain.

But her son has given Ms. Palin, 44, a powerful message. Other candidates kiss strangers’ babies; Ms. Palin has one of her own. He is tangible proof of Ms. Palin’s anti-abortion convictions, which have rallied social conservatives, and her belief that women can balance family life with ambitious careers. And on Wednesday in St. Paul, she proclaimed herself a guardian of the nation’s disabled children.

“Children with special needs inspire a special love,” Ms. Palin said....

“Many people will express sympathy, but you don’t want or need that, because Trig will be a joy,” Ms. Palin wrote. She added, “Children are the most precious and promising ingredient in this mixed-up world you live in down there on Earth. Trig is no different, except he has one extra chromosome.”

Is there really a public issue here to be discussed? What exactly is it?

ADDED: Did the "belief that women can balance family life with ambitious careers" just become right wing? If so, wow! That is perhaps the most amazing political flip I've seen in my life.

Live-blogging night 3 -- Sarah Palin alert! -- of the Republican Convention.

5:43 Central Time: I'm just setting this up so you can get started talking and to let you know that I'll be here -- on what is obviously a very exciting night.

7:48: I'm just settling in for some serious blogging, and the first thing I notice is this open mike eavesdropping on Mike Murphy and Peggy Noonan. Peggy: "The most qualified? No! I think they went for this -- excuse me-- political bullshit about narratives... Every time the Republicans do that, because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at, they blow it."

8:11: It's Mitt Romney. He's got a peppy, plastic style. It's hammy in a way that might work from farther back in the room. Down with the "eastern elites"! It's time for sun to rise in the west -- in Arizona and Alaska. Now, he's getting an audience chant going: "It's liberal!" "We need change all right. Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington." Liberals don't understand business. They grow government and dependency. It's "death to initiative." Fight dependency "like the poison it is." "It's time for the party of big ideas, not the party of Big Brother." He does a pretty good job of sharpening up the line between conservatives and liberals and making the conservative side seem better -- especially in economics.

8:28: I'm watching on CNN, with a TiVo assist. I'm keeping up with the speeches. But I pause when a speech ends and then scroll through the commentary when it's time for the next speech. Are the CNN commentators interesting? I don't have time for it all. Let's stop. Here's Jeffrey Toobin saying that bitching about the news media is hypocritical coming from John McCain, because they always used to love him. How come suddenly they seem "hypocritical and biased against him"? Huh? What's hypocritical? That sounds like they were always biased, but they just aren't supporting John McCain right now. What the hell kind of a defense of journalism isn that supposed to be? I mean, I can see why McCain is pissed about it. But it's an embarrassing defense.

8:33: Candy Crowley snags Mitt on the convention floor. She poses a hypothetical. Hey, what if John McCain drops dead on day one, huh? What do you think about that? How is Palin up for it? Mitt responds exactly the way you'd expect: Well, Obama, if elected, would be Prez on day one and how's he going to do it? Yeah, you don't even need a death scenario for that, you know, Candy. Mitt-quote: "The question about experience raises a lot of questions about Barack Obama."

8:36: Now, Mike Huckabee is up. He admits he's disappointed not to be the nominee. But McCain was his second choice, he says. He's got "the character and the stubborn kind of integrity that we need in a President." He thanks the MSM for uniting the Republican Party. Obama "will elevate our taxes and our risk in a dangerous world." He's got a chant he's trying to get going: "You want something to change." But don't forget about the things you don't want to change, like our freedom. He mocks "Barack Obama's Excellent Adventure to Europe." We don't like "European ideas." We like our freedom -- in other words, we don't like big government. This is the anti-dependency message again. It's not what government will do for you, it's what you will do for yourself if government gets out of the way. "The only soap we ever had in my house is Lava." That's a great line. "I'm not a Republican because I grew up rich. I'm a Republican because I didn't want to grow up poor waiting for the government to rescue me." Hey! This is an excellent speech. Much better than Romney's. Nice rhetoric and delivery.

8:46: The digital backdrop -- a flag, I think -- is, on these closeups, just a throbbing red. It's hard on the eyes. They need to blue it up, like normal TV. [ADDED: When Sarah Palin speaks, they just turn if off and have a black background.]

8:51: Huckabee ends with a long, folksy story about a teacher with a lesson to students about how they could "earn their desks." Veterans carrying desks are involved. I respect respecting veterans, but don't really see what's so wonderful about taking little kids and lengthily instructing them about what men have done in far away wars. It's a little too Captain-Koons-Hello-Little-Man for my taste.

8:58: I just corrected a typo in the 8:11 entry. I'd written "It's hammy in a way that might work from father back in the room." My son John emailed me about the typo, and I indicated that maybe it was Freudian, and I really wished I could have Mitt Romney for my dad, and John sends me this pic...



... and reminds me that he always said that Mitt looks like the dad on "The Donna Reed Show."

9:05: It's Rudy Giuliani, and this should be good. He was great at the RNC in '04. (Closeup on Cindy McCain who suddenly has her hair curled. Did the memo go out to soften her up?)

9:07: Rudy is saying that electing a President is basically hiring someone to do a job. He recites McCains résumé. Then we have another man. "He worked as a community organizer." He pauses. Mutters "what?" The audience reacts. Rudy repeats: "He worked as a community organizer." "Maybe this is the first problem on the résumé." And: "He immersed himself in Chicago machine politics." (That's an important line that could take a lot more play.) The audience boos Chicago machine politics. On to the Illinois state legislature where he couldn't figure out whether to vote yes or no. "It was too tough!" "I didn't know about this vote 'present' when I was mayor of New York City." And Sarah Palin couldn't vote "present" as Governor of Alaska. Being able to vote "present" means you weren't in an executive position.

9:17: Barack Obama has never led people in times of crisis. "He is the least experienced candidate for President in at least the last 100 years." He's never led people in anything -- "nada, nothing." Hey, that's unfair! He led the Harvard Law Review.

9:19: And don't forget: He led his campaign for President.

9:23: Rudy says Obama talks about change, but it might be the wrong kind of change. We want the right kind of change. Like, we should drill for oil. The crowd is all: "Drill, baby, drill!"

9:24: The Dems worry that it's politically incorrect to say "Islamic terrorism." They're afraid of insulting terrorists. The big digital screen is used to show a big skyline of NYC.

9:26: The surge was right. McCain got it right and Obama got it wrong. John McCain has taken unpopular positions and political risks. When, Rudy asks, has Obama ever done that? He was for an undivided Jerusalem for one day, only one day, when he was in Israel. The idea is that Obama is a man who played it safe, ingratiating himself in one way after another.

9:31: Palin has had "more executive experience than the entire Democratic ticket combined." He doesn't throw in John McCain and say she's had more executive experience than all 3 of them put together. He mocks the Dems for mocking her for being a mayor of a small town... where they cling to religion and guns. And now she's the most popular Governor in the country with an 80% approval rating. "You never get that in New York City." She fought corruption. She stood up for what is right. She and McCain "are going to shake up Washington." And "how dare they question whether Sarah Palin has enough time to spend with her children and be Vice President. When do they ever ask a man that question? When?!"

9:36: And now! It's her! Sarah Palin! Black skirt. Silver jacket. Oh, when do they ever say that about a man?

9:37: Huge cheers. Cute kid closeup. "Thang-Q. Thang-Q. Thang-Q so much."

9:38: She introduces her family -- her son, who is going to Iraq, her 3 daughters -- the cute youngest waves -- and the baby Trig, the special needs child. And she looks out directly on America, as though she sees all the people who have special children in their families -- and pledges that we will have a friend and advocate in the White House.

9:48: She tells us about Todd, the fisherman, her "guy," and don't forget that Yupik ancestry. She's got a Native American husband.

9:50: She praises small town Americans (like her!). Don't disrespect them! They are the salt of the earth.

9:52: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer... except that you have actual responsibilities." And in small towns, they don't know what to make of a candidate who "lavishes praise" on them when he's around and then, behind their backs, "talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns." Don't talk about us "one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco." Ouch. John McCain is the same man wherever he goes.

10:00: In power, she fought corruption and government excess. "That luxury jet was over the top. I put it on eBay." "Nearly half a billion dollars in vetoes."

10:11: She's laying into Barack Obama. What is he, once those styrofoam pillars are dragged off the stage? It's all show. And the real plan is the old tax and spend.

10:13: "The American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery."

10:19: She retells the story of John McCain, with the emphasis on character and authenticity. Elect "a great man" as the next President, she implores... to fabulous applause. We see the newly-curly-headed Cindy in the audience. She's pumped. The Palin family files out onto the stage. Trig is awakened. No baby would understand what the hell is going on, but he's gazing around at the lights and colors. The pregnant Bristol is there with her hunky hockey boyfriend. And now McCain trundles out. He raises his arms as high as he can to wave to the crowd. His tie is the color of the pantsuit Hillary wore for the DNC. [ADDED: He's sending the secret tie signal.] "Don't you think we made the right choice for the next Vice President of the United States? And what a beautiful family." He leans over to respond to something the little girl said. He shrugs. I guess he didn't know whatever it was that she didn't know.

10:32: Maybe it was: "Are you the next President?"

3 questions about Sarah Palin the Obama supporter should not want to ask.

According to David Bernstein:

(1) How can she do her job as vice-president and take care of her kids?

Because Obama has kids, so the only way to ask the question is with an anti-feminist assumption. Obama supporters are tempted to make a Down Syndrome distinction and to emphasize that the decision to have the child entails a commitment to spend extra time on it, but that only forefronts the disagreement about abortion -- for her, there was no choice -- and highlights the harsh reality that (some of those) who accept abortion think it's a good idea to discriminate against the (unborn) disabled. None of that is very pretty. And yet, planting seeds of doubt is all that is needed. You can believe that an anti-feminist argument is wrong and even think that it will trigger a strong counter-argument and still think it might work as it plants doubts in some voters' minds and decide to do it anyway, because that's how much you want to win. Just look at the doubts the Clinton campaign tried plant about Obama in minds that they must have hoped had a place where racial prejudice could grow.

(2) What makes anyone think that Palin has enough experience to be "one heartbeat from the presidency?"

Because it points up that Obama, with his corresponding lack of experience would actually be the President.

(3) Is Sarah Palin's church/pastor nutty?

Because McCain supporters would love to bring back good old Jeremiah Wright -- American chickenssssssss and all.

Bernstein's points are good. And yet, Bernstein supports McCain, right? Why is it a McCain supporter who is giving this advice. Why should Obama supporters take this any more seriously than they take the bogus advice they are dispensing about how Palin ought to drop out for her own good?

ADDED: Bernstein isn't a declared supporter of McCain's.

In our Palinsanity, we need a Palindrome: Harass Sarah.

I'm up way too early this morning, not because I personally am tossing and turning over the Palinsanity that has seized the blogosphere, but I can see that you people have been up all night, and every night since Friday, commenting feverishly throughout the night, pushing my traffic up threefold and more.

This morning I take a glance at the NYT -- "Disclosures on Palin Raise Questions on Vetting Process," "In Political Realm, ‘Family Problem’ Emerges as Test," "Palin Daughter’s Pregnancy Interrupts Script" -- and Memeorandum -- "The Palin Meltdown in Slo-Mo," "Pool: What Day Will Sarah Palin Drop Out?," "Face It: They Didn't Vet Her" -- and I see that the press and the blogosphere have rolled out their attacks for the first working day after the McCain's game-changing announcement.

So it looks like another big day for the craziness that, last night, I called Palinsanity.

In the comments -- and there are tons of comments -- Madison Man said (I've added links):

You need to make a Palindrome.

Amba said:

Welcome to the Palin-Drome.

Now let's have some palindromes to let off steam.

Or is a palindrome like a syndrome? Is it getting you Down? (wince)

But it was chickenlittle who discovered the perfect Palin Palindrome:

Harass Sarah.

And we all smile at chickenlittle's bon mot and hope the sky is not falling.

"Stop prying into other people's vaginas, even if you happen to oppose them politically. What is wrong with you people?"

The insane obsession with Sarah Palin's pregnancy rages on.

This will all go down in the annals of feminism, people. So think before you write. Andrew? [AND.]

IN THE COMMENTS: The first comment is from Maguro:

Let me be the first to say that I've never politically opposed anyone's vagina.

Ha ha. We start with the grammar.

AND: I see I'm getting Google traffic from the search "Sarah Palin Is NOT The Mother," which currently returns 311,000 hits. The top one is a new Kos diary, from ArcXIX:

Now, I've known liars in my life. Their single core problem is not with themselves, but those around them. If they're never called out on their twisting of truths and fabrications, they simply continue to make larger lies.

Well, Sarah, I'm calling you a liar. And not even a good one. Trig Paxson Van Palin is not your son. He is your grandson. The sooner you come forward with this revelation to the public, the better.

Whew! That is ugly. Pictures are posted, with captions like: "Sarah's waistline never changed. Her wardrobe still remained tight and professional." Note the gratuitous insult to pregnant working women. They can't possibly dress in a professional manner. There are also enlarged photos of the 16-year-old daughter with comments about the shape of her abdomen. The whole world is invited to talk about that teenager's body.

Despicable, sexist trash. Shameful.

AND: ArcXIX displays a huge blowup of the picture of the 16-year-old and issues a faux-scientific opinion: "Bristol is pregnant in these pictures. She is not carrying belly fat, which grows outwardly wide, and does not become dome-shaped. That's because fat is generally evenly distributed around the abdomen and a fetus is not. Bristol's chest is sticking out, a normal body reaction when sucking in stomach muscles." Belly fat grows outwardly wide? Nonsense. People come in all different shapes, and female abdomens tend to protrude. If the girl was pregnant and inclined to hide it, why would she be wearing tight clothes and standing in proud half-profile? I apologize for asking that question, but I'm hoping to shake some sense into those who are pushing this story. They should be ashamed to stoop so low for the sake of politics. I doubt if the Obama campaign wants this kind of help, not that it's likely to be any help at all.

UPDATE: The first link in this post goes to a Metafilter thread that you can still read but that is deleted from the front page of Metafilter. The reason given for the deletion is: "you should probably keep this in the existing palin thread." Here is that first Palin discussion, which has 1420 comments as of Monday morning. Search on the page for the word "pregnant" to see how obsessed people have been about this. Since this thread was set up as a generic discussion of of Palin, it is a better gauge of the obsession. You can see how this issue popped up and seized the hive mind.

"If people with Down syndrome ruled the world."

From the National Association for Down Syndrome:

Affection, hugging and caring for others would make a big comeback....

All people would be encouraged to develop and use their gifts for helping others....

People would be refreshingly honest and genuine....

We believe, too, that a stuffy high society would probably not do well in the world of Down syndrome.

However, we believe that BIG dress up dances would flourish. People with Down syndrome love dressing up and dancing at big shindigs. They have a ball, and ...can they dance!...

People engaged in self talk would be considered thoughtful and creative. Self talk rooms would be reserved in offices and libraries to encourage this practice.....

Order and Structure would rule...

IN THE COMMENTS: hokiepundit writes:

Um...let's not forget that adults with Down Syndrome aren't just perpetually-innocent children in big-people bodies. They still have things like libidos and the capacity to act hatefully. They're just as human as the rest of us and it's unspeakable that people will abort their Down Syndrome babies, but these aren't supermen but simply men.

Man, I feel like I just harshed some mellow. I'll just go back to my legal reading now.

I respond:

Hokie, sure, we know that. This is just an effort to encourage respect for people who are part of the diversity of humanity.

I'm getting a vibe from some of the anti-Palin writings on the web that it's irresponsible to give birth to a Down's child unless you are planning to give up all your other aspirations in life. To me, this is thinly veiled abortion-encouragement, and it's quite horrifying.

I don't really want people with Down syndrome to rule the world. "Order and Structure would rule"... I think we know how things like that work out in practice.

ADDED: Rule-the-world fantasies are interesting and crazy and, at bottom, scary.

If I ruled the world/Every day would be the first day of spring/Every heart would have a new song to sing/And we'd sing of the joy every morning would bring/Every man would be as free as a bird/Every voice would be a voice to be heard/Take my word we would treasure each day that occurred/My world would be a beautiful place/Where we would weave such wonderful dreams/My world would wear a smile on its face/Like the man in the moon has when the moon beams/Every man would say the world was his friend/There'd be happiness that no man could end/No my friend, not if I ruled the world.

Hey, I can picture Barack Obama singing that, but here's the great original recording by Tony Bennett.

Sarah Palin, the VP pick! [ADDED: And the live-blog and profusion of comments continue here.]

10:25: Thought you'd like to see a picture. The handsome guy is her husband (and Bill Clinton's chief competition on the face of this earth for future First Gentleman).

And this post can be used for commenting on the [first] live-blog post, when the comments there hit 200 (and become hard to see).

10:30: Here's almost the whole family. (There's a new baby now.)



Wow. Beautiful. Including the mountain!

10:44: She named her kids Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig. Does that seem like something a Commander in Chief would do? Why not? It's bold. Crisp.

10:47: In the comments, Sloanasaurus writes:

Palin is the common man's dream wife. Smart, accomplished, beautiful, was a sportscaster, loves to hunt and fish.

Perhaps Palin is the "post-feminist" woman. She competes in a mans world being governor of the largest state, but she can still be feminine (a mother and wife).

Hmmm... maybe Ann will have fun with this analysis.

It's not perfectly feminist, Sloan, but I understand what you mean, and I think it's something that will appeal to many of the swing voters. As a feminist, I love that she did not leverage herself into power through her husband and consider this an important improvement over Hillary.

10:53: David Gergen -- on CNN -- is saying the media thought McCain was going to make a "safe pick" and that it would be Pawlenty.

11:13: "We're the ones with a babe on the ticket," says Rush Limbaugh, who's been enthusing about the "inspired," "brilliant" choice. "Alaska is about as far away from Washington as you can get."

11:17: McCain comes out. The music is "Right Now."

11:18: Big cheers. "Happy Birthday" signs make him say "Thanks for reminding me," which is an old-guy response to "Happy Birthday." Really big cheers. He's glad to announce in Dayton, where people are "hard-working" and "honest." He's picking up what was the biggest theme of the Democratic convention: Fighting for hard-working people. He wants to "shake up Washington." He's found "the right partner to help me stand up to those who value their privileges over their responsibilities, who put power over principle, and put their interests before your needs."

11:24: He's found someone who's stood up to special interests, he says, fought against government spending, and has executive experience. A huge cheer comes when he says Palin's parents were both coaches who "raised their children to excel at sports."

11:28: She's been a union member and her husband is a union member. "In the week we celebrate the anniversary of women's suffrage," she's a "devoted wife and a mother of five." She's got the "grit, integrity, good sense and devotion to the common good" we need today. She doesn't let anyone tell her to "sit down." (Is that a reference to something? Did someone tell Hillary to "sit down"?)

11:31: Here she is, in a dark, skirted suit. (No pantsuit.) Behind her, a daughter is holding the new baby. Palin is wearing a HUGE, glittering flag pin. She's got that trademark hairdo. (Want to wear that hairdo? I'm going to be looking around on campus to see if any of the young women are wearing their hair in the Palin style. If you see me, let me take your picture!)

11:33: She introduces the hunky hubby Todd. And it's their 20th anniversary, and she said she was going to give him a little surprise. He's a fisherman. He's a world-class snow-mobile racer. Four of her children are there with her. The 5th, Track, enlisted in the Army last September 11th. This September 11th, he's deploying to Iraq. McCain won't talk about his sons in Iraq. He's made a principle of it... one that she obviously doesn't share. A "U.S.A." chant. She introduces the kids that are there, including Trig, "a beautiful baby boy."

11:31: She's speaking extremely well, and she's presenting herself as a McCain-style maverick. She seems like his perfect counterpart. She enumerates achievements in Alaska that involve taking "risks" and "challenging the status quo." She rejected "the Bridge to Nowhere." Now, she's praising McCain extremely well, and he's fiddling with his wedding ring, a reflex married people often have. Her speech is amazingly clear and strong, passionate and devoid of any hesitation or filler "uhs." The sign on the lectern reads "Country First." It's fitting, she says, that this privilege of running with McCain has been given to her almost 88 years after women got the right to vote. She wants to honor Geraldine Ferraro, the first (and up until now the only) female, major-party VP pick and Hillary Clinton, who "showed such determination in her presidential campaign." Palin loves to point her index finger and jab it about, a gesture that you don't see that often in a politician anymore and that you almost never see done with a pointy polished fingernail. It's especially striking as she talks about Hillary and urges us to join her cause.

11:49: Wow! Great performance! Fabulous first walk onto the national stage!

11:51: On the radio, Limbaugh calls the speech "magnificent." "Her story is real." She doesn't have to "put any holes" in her story the way Obama does. He's been emphasizing that we should be comparing Palin not to Biden, but to Obama. Biden and McCain are more comparable as long-experienced Senators, and she, as a relatively inexperienced outsider who would be a first, is more comparable to Obama. "Middle America is going to love her. She lives their values." He speculates on questions she'll be asked -- about how to shoot a gun, whether she baits her own fishing hooks, and if, when she found out her unborn baby had Down Syndrome, she considered an abortion "before or after it was born."

12:05: I see we're getting up close to 200 comments again, so I'm going to put up an new post, so please spill over there.

Let's talk about potential VP candidate Sarah Palin.

1. Check out the picture that represents her in her Wikipedia article:



Fur!

2. "[S]he ... is a rabid gun advocate. She’s an edgy conservative who could help get those vital cross-over and independent votes." Rabid? Edgy? With a gun? Sounds dangerous.... Dangerous women!

3. Alaska! With Hawaii represented by Barack Obama, it would be cool to give the other latecomer state some respect at this time. It's always troubled me that Hawaii's been so far off and disconnected from the rest of the United States, and it's good that there's another disconnected state to keep it company. (You know when I was a kid in the 1950s, I heard discussion of Alaska becoming a state, and when someone said "I hear Hawaii is coming in too," I thought the islands were somehow floating over and would connect to the west coast.) Alaska's important too: oil-related. We're going to be talking about gas prices, and having the governor of Alaska will resonate.

4. John McCain is going to try to get the disappointed Hillary supporters to come over to his side, and choosing a woman may have a big effect.

5. She's very pro-life. And she just had a child with Down Syndrome. She knew he had Down Syndrome, yet she didn't abort him. Some people will give her strong credit for that. Some — like me — will say: Well, of course, what else could she do?! Show me someone who supports abortion rights but chooses not to abort a child with Down Syndrome and I'll be impressed.

6. She has 5 children now. That's impressive. The new one is named Trig. The others are not named after math class, but are named rather oddly, rather hippie-style: Track, Bristol, Willow, and Piper. Boys or girls? Only Track is a boy. And he's in the Army. [CLARIFICATION: I know Trig is also a boy, as indicated under point #5. I meant of the others, the 4 names listed here as odd and "hippie-style."]

7. Is she prepared to be President? Clearly, I haven't answered that question here!

ADDED: The photo is by Ryan McFarland, and here's his blog post showing the whole context of the picture -- a Vikings and Valkyries pageant of some sort. Note that the fir is some less-than-serious piece on loan for the occasion.

The end of Down syndrome.

The NYT writes about the dwindling number of births of children with Down Syndrome:

[U]nder a new recommendation from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, doctors have begun to offer a new, safer screening procedure to all pregnant women, regardless of age.

About 90 percent of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis have chosen to have an abortion.

Convinced that more couples would choose to continue their pregnancies if they better appreciated what it meant to raise a child with Down syndrome, a growing group of parents are seeking to insert their own positive perspectives into a decision often dominated by daunting medical statistics and doctors who feel obligated to describe the difficulties of life with a disabled child.

They are pressing obstetricians to send them couples who have been given a prenatal diagnosis and inviting prospective parents into their homes to meet their children. In Massachusetts, for example, volunteers in a “first call” network linking veteran parents to new ones are now offering support to couples deciding whether to continue a pregnancy.

The parent evangelists are driven by a deep-seated fear for their children’s well-being in a world where there are fewer people like them. But as prenatal tests become available for a range of other perceived genetic imperfections, they may also be heralding a broader cultural skirmish over where to draw the line between preventing disability and accepting human diversity.

For those who are opposed to abortion across the board, this is not a difficult question. And apparently -- look at that 90 percent figure -- those who support abortion rights don't have qualms based on the idea of "accepting human diversity" when it comes to the matter of choice over what kind of family they will have.

But 90 percent! That must mean that a lot of women who support restrictions on abortion would still have an abortion if they knew the child would have Down syndrome. In the future, it seems, anyone taking care of a child with Down syndrome will be viewed as a saint... or, perhaps, misguided and foolish.

IN THE COMMENTS: This is important, from bearing:

Remember that this doesn't mean "90 percent of all unborn children who have DS are aborted," but "90 percent of all unborn children who are diagnosed before birth are aborted."

Many women who are opposed to abortion decline the DS tests on the grounds that they are not actionable information. I've had three pregnancies and never had any tests for that reason. So -- I don't know how many, but a lot of the strongly-opposed-to-abortion people are not part of that calculation. You'd need to know what fraction of people actually get tested to know how often people betray their principles to abort a child with DS.

ADDED: Andrew Sullivan links here and says:

Conservatives Who Abort

Ann Althouse peers into a not-too-pretty closet.

In the comments here, TMink says:

[S]ome parents would abort a child if a test suggested that the child would be homosexual.

Awful. Tragic. Sinful.

I am not trying to be judgmental, I am speaking about myself and my wife. As Christians, we trusted God to give us the child we wanted. We tried fertility treatments, to no avail.

I didn't mean for this post only to question conservatives. I want to question liberals too. I wonder about the liberals who oppose discrimination against the disabled, but would abort their child because it is disabled. I assume these people would support gay rights for the living but feel justified aborting their own child if they there were a test that showed it was going to be gay.

It is one thing to support abortion rights -- I believe it should be the pregnant woman's choice -- but rejecting interference with that choice doesn't mean you see no question of morality. What are the wrong reasons to abort? Shouldn't we talk about that? Some religious conservatives like TMink say that they trust God to give them the child that is meant to be. Others, it seems, judging from the 90% statistic, make an exception for themselves and have the abortion. But isn't there something equivalent for social liberals? Shouldn't they have moral standards about what reasons are acceptable for an abortion?

MORE: William Saletan reads the same article I did and sums it up this way:

Official rationales: 1) Down's kids are a joy and not such a burden. 2) Routine abortion of them is a step toward eugenics. Unofficial rationale: If no more kids are born with the syndrome, society's support for kids already affected will evaporate. Cynical view: Misery loves company. Hardcore pro-choice view: This smells like pro-life pressure tactics.