T: Is for Taking a Stand!

The election that has this country holding their breath, is about to happen. 13% of the voters are new voters including me. We are voting not because we think Obama is the best choice but that Sarah Palin is the worst. It has sparked new creativity. Two West Hollywood residents created a haunted house with a Palin hanging in effigy, which caught the eye of the secret service. The New Yorker's November 9th issues cover is brilliant. Two kids dressed as Sarah Palin and John McCain frighten children dressed as the devil, a witch, a ghost and a goblin. My favorite is the new Obama ad. I think it says it all.

Dan Simon didn’t mince his words when asked to describe the Republican party’s vice-presidential candidate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. “She’s an idiot. A politically immature woman. A complete idiot who just doesn’t get it. It is a joke that she is running for vice-president,” stated Dan Simon. Dan is a human resources manager attending the Human Society for Human Resource Management’s Diversity Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, is from South Dakota, a state known for backing Republicans in presidential elections. He also is a staunch Republican supporter, but not any more. Simon said McCain exposed either his poor sense of judgment or his weakness in compromising with the powers in the Republican Party by picking Sarah Palin as his running mate. “He is 72 years old and has undergone treatment for cancer. If anything happens to him, she will be president, God forbid. If that happens, I will migrate to Canada”. There are a lot of Americans who feel this way, including me. The majority of the polls show that the majority of Americans consider Palin unqualified for the office. Most Republican-leaning newspapers have endorsed Obama for president over McCain for the same reason. Ironically, the list includes the Anchorage Daily News, the most influential paper in Alaska, Palin’s home state. In its endorsement, it said: “Obama displays thoughtful analysis, enlists wise counsel and operates with a cool, steady hand. The same cannot be said of Senator McCain.” The scientific community has also been expressing its disgust with Palin over some of the ignorant things she has been saying lately. The harshest came from PZ Myers a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota. Myers, was shocked by Palin’s speech last week in which she claimed that she wanted more support for children with disabilities, more tools to test for disorders, but decried the expense for scientific research. She reportedly said: “Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? You’ve heard about some of these pet projects; they really don’t make a whole lot of sense.
“Sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” Myers res-ponded in his popular blog: “ I am appalled. This idiot woman, this blind, short-sighted ignoramus, this pretentious clod, mocks basic research and the international research community. “You damn well better believe that there is research going on in animal models. “What does she expect, that scientists should mutagenize human mothers and chop up baby brains for this work? “Yes, scientists work on fruit flies. Some of the most powerful tools in genetics and molecular biology are available in fruit flies, and these are animals that are particularly amenable to experimentation. “Molecular genetics has revealed that humans share key molecules, the basic developmental toolkit, with all other animals, thanks to our shared evolutionary heritage (something else the wackaloon from Wasilla denies), and that
we can use these other organisms to probe the fundamental mechanisms that underlie core processes in the formation of the nervous system – precisely the phenomena Palin claims are so important. “In this next election, we’ve got to choose between 21st century rationalism and Dark Age inanity. It ought to be an easy choice.

On Tuesday we have a chance to speak up for our freedoms which are seriously in danger of being taken away. Cast your vote. Speak loudly and this country will stand a chance and that is a F.A.C.T.