Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘sarah palin’

Sarah Palin won’t run for President in 2012:

After much prayer and serious consideration, I have decided that I will not be seeking the 2012 GOP nomination for President of the United States. As always, my family comes first and obviously Todd and I put great consideration into family life before making this decision. When we serve, we devote ourselves to God, family and country. My decision maintains this order.

If there is a god, he’s probably applauding this decision. Though not for the reasons that Palin might have assumed.

Tina Fey, on the other hand, must be disappointed.

Despite the best efforts of the likes of Stewart and Colbert to restore sanity and/or fear, the predictions of big gains for the Republican party in today’s US midterm elections are, sadly, pretty likely, with exit polls showing that the Democrats have lost ground with key groups of voters.

But before Obama panics too much, he might want to consult this list of Midterm study strategies, compiled by me back in the eighth grade:

• Eliminate distractions. Minesweeper, SuperNES, listening to your mom fight with your sister down the hall, trying to mediate a mideast peace settlement… all these are distracting to the study process.

• Prioritize the material. Midterm exam questions are usually about things that have been covered recently on the curriculum, and are therefore foremost in the minds of teachers – er – voters. Spend more time on recent issues like the tea party, and less time on the stuff that was covered at the start of the term and that everyone’s forgotten about by now anyway, like, y’know, healthcare.

• Plan your time. Midterms take place in the middle of the term, as their name suggests. While you’re studying for them, you also have to juggle other assignments and a social life. Oh, and national security and economic concerns, too. Make a schedule and stick to it. Use whatever tools work for you, like an agenda book or, if you prefer, a highly-paid team of executive secretaries.

• Find the right study buddies. Pick people who are smarter than you and copy their notes, or arrange a cram session with them in the library. If you can get them to write your speeches for you, too, all the better.

• Remember that it’s not worth as much as the final. Even a bad grade on a midterm can be made up for with a strong final exam, which is usually worth a bigger percentage of your overall grade. Time to put it behind you and focus on what’s important: Beating Sarah Palin in 2012.

For actual news about the US midterm election, in case anyone’s interested, check out the CBC’s interactive maps.

One day till election day, and as they say, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings:

That’s Sarah Palin, laughing as she digs her own grave, getting prank called by CKOI’s Les Justiciers Masqués. It’s kind of like watching a car wreck; equal parts entertaining and horrifying.

When Obama wins on Tuesday, as is expected, Montreal will have played its part.

I’ll be traveling during the election, so there won’t be any commentary on the results on this blog for a couple of weeks. That said, to all Americans out there, make sure to exercise your civic duty and vote!

Start getting used to hearing that. With a fair lead in the polls and only a week until election day, an Obama win is looking like the most likely scenario at this point. Of course, anything can happen, and if too many Democrats get complacent and stay home next Tuesday, McCain might pull off some surprising victories. But the smart money’s on Obama at this point. And, after eight years of Dubya, it’s hard to argue against a change at this point.

The bad news from this scenario? We won’t be able to make fun of Sarah Palin anymore. Really, Joe Biden isn’t nearly as much fun to mock.

Meanwhile, the assholes are at it again. Why aren’t these investigations kept under wraps to prevent media hype and asshole copycats?

Obama? McCain? The winner is… Joe the Plumber.

Except that it seems he’s not really a plumber. And he’s not really an undecided voter. And he’s not really named Joe. (It’s his middle name). Oh yeah, and for a guy supposedly so concerned about taxes, he hasn’t quite paid his own.

So, lies, cheating and misrepresentation… Hey, sounds like a politician to me. Joe the Plumber for President in 2012? Why not? As Jon Stewart pointed out, he’s already given more interviews than Sarah Palin.

The great debate isn’t between Obama and McCain, or between Biden and Palin, or between Harper, Dion, Layton, Duceppe and May. No, it’s over which debate to watch tonight on TV: the Canadian English PM debate, or the US vice-presidential debate.

The Canadian debate is obviously more relevant to us as Canadians. But for sheer entertainment value alone, the US VP debate is likely to be much more exciting. Start exercising that channel flipping thumb; you may need it.

Some rare insight from a columnist who I usually disagree with, the Gazette’s Janet Bagnall:

Palin is a true-blue representative of her party. She is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association and against gay marriage. Her opposition to abortion extends to cases of rape and incest. The women who backed Hillary Clinton’s historic run for the nomination for presidency don’t generally ascribe to those values.

[ . . . ]

Tokenism is an insult, an insidious one whose effects are difficult to erase over time. People will forget that there were other options on the Republican table, capable, long-serving, proven women like Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas – and that McCain ignored them in favour of doing something headline-grabbing. That effect is already starting to wear off. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll this week found, “Three quarters of all voters think McCain chose a female running mate specifically because he thought adding a woman to the Republican ticket would help him win in November.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with the otherwise politically-savvy selection of Palin. Choosing a candidate solely because she’s a woman is no better than systematically denying opportunities to qualified people because they are women.

And while McCain no doubt sees Palin’s stance on issues like abortion and gun control as qualifications, not drawbacks, given the socially conservative voters he’s trying to attract, the fact remains that Palin is much less qualified than the myriad other choices that McCain had – of both genders. She was chosen for her youth (to contrast McCain’s age) and her gender, proving that tokenism is no better than discrimination, after all.