Why it matters -- Palin's unmarried 17 year old pregnant daughter. Ordinarily I couldn't care less about someone's personal sexual life. I did not care about Bill Clinton's escapade nor did I care about John Edward's liaison. I DID care about Larry Craig's indiscretion as I did care about representative Vitter's relationship with prostitutes and I did care about Representative Foley's emails to House pages and I did care about Ted Haggard's liaison with a male hooker. Why? Obviously, because these Republican right wing religious extremists are HYPOCRITES of a huge order. They are the ones to deny rights to others whose sexual morality they do not approve. It's not the act that they commit it's the utter HYPOCRISY it establishes. When one's political party, especially a major party in a national election, has party platforms that are extraordinarily judgmental, restrictive and punishing of those who do not conform to their sexual moral religious commands then they open themselves up for intense scrutiny and criticism when they do not live up to their own beliefs. It is as I call it, the Scarlet Letter syndrome.

Sara Palin's daughter is of interest because her mother touted home schooling, because her mother is anti-abortion and anti-science, most probably against sexual education in schools, pro abstinence and against a whole host of other moral behaviors to which her OWN family obviously did not conform. If her advocacies are so effective then how come a young 17 year old was having sex as an unmarried high schooler?

When these people demand the utmost sexual purity by religious order for other's lives, inscribe it into public policy, force it down everyone's throats but do NOT live up to their own proscriptions then they are up for condemnation and intense scrutiny. Sarah Palin is not running for dog catcher or town council or even governor. She is running for an office a heart beat away from a 72 year old cancer victim's presidency. Democrats do not suffer from those moral hammers which want to create policy by forcing people to conform to a religious sexual moral code. That is the huge difference between the two parties and that is why I believe Sarah Palin's family's personal lives are fair game to place under the microscope of public scrutiny.

The Unrecognizable Republican Party-the Palin Pariah : The staggeringly morphed Republican party is a poor relative of the once cerebrally adept party of Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. At least that party stood for something -- the mantra of smaller government whether in the bedroom, the boardroom or the international arena. The ghosts of that party's former leadership must be doing some six feet under revolvings. If they phantasmagorically returned to life they would not recognize their party. It has been taken over by religious fanatics who threaten the Constitutionally vital separation of church state doctrine, the very phenomenon our Founders, men of the Enlightenment, feared.

George Bush is the pariah now of his own party so much so that many think Hurricane Gustav a blessing as it forced the cancellation of his appearance at the Republican Convention. McCain/Palin now his improbable heirs are an outrage to many sagacious Republicans of intellectual credence. It is obvious that McCain cares about McCain and used a hail Mary pass as a last ditch effort to win the presidency for himself by choosing the extremist of extremists, Sarah Palin, to appeal to Hillary's supporters and/or his Republican fanatically religious base. To heck with national security and the country if a 72 year old man with two cancer bouts dies and this presidentially unqualified Sara Palin, science denying soccer mom and procreator supreme, is catapulted to the throne.

It is a sad commentary, indeed, if Republicans think that Hillary's supporters, most especially, are that stupid that they would flock to McCain because of his choice of Palin as VP. Palin is the 360 degree opposite of everything for which Hillary Clinton stands. Palin is an anti-feminist who capitalizes on the dogged determination of feminists who preceded her first in the suffrage movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries to achieve the vote and then in the late 1960's to throw off the final yokes of male supremacy in other cultural venues. Without those leftist progressive movements Palin would be knitting in her living room today. To think that women who supported Hillary and who occupy positions of great influence in the Democratic party, would vote for an anti-choice, pro gun, anti-science, creationist promoting religious extremist is utterly insulting to the intelligence of Hillary's supporters.

The fact that Palin has breasts has nothing absolutely nothing to do with the 18 million cracks hewed by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Those who think Palin represents those cracks have cracks in their own ceiling. The choice of Palin is an outrage to thinking women and men everywhere. I hope the only ceiling Sarah Palin sees is the one in her own living room!