>>Hey Tamar,
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>>>Did her belonging to the AIP make it to MSM or only to blogs? I don't actually recall. I do find one source that says that is was _officials_ of the AIP who said she was a member, so the story clearly isn't entirely nonsense. Even if she wasn't registered in the party, she has been involved with them (including attending two conventions and recording a message for one as governor).
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>>I believe that the AIP claim was on MSNBC's frontpage on the day after her speech; as were two other disparaging articles/commentaries. Subsequently the GOP provided proof, which I honestly have not seen but satisfied the media, that she's been a Republican for 20+ years.
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>It would be interesting to see what actually appeared. As I said, I found a source that said that officials of the AIP claimed she'd been a member. If that's what was reported, that's fair game.
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>>>You keep saying there's stuff to look at, but you don't give a clue what it would be. He's been in the national public eye for 4 years, and fairly visible in Illinois for a decade before that. Given how much passion he arouses (on both sides), don't you think that if there were something there, someone (MSM, right-wing bloggers, National Enquirer, ...) would have come up with some credible information by now? Instead, it's all hints and insinuations and guilt by association.
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>>Tamar, I don't pretend to understand what the media outlets think is important and what isn't. I would think that Obama's long association with some rather questionable figures which could easily be construed as poor judgement would be far more germane to the election than Palin's 6 years of matriculation 20 years ago. It is easy to see why conservatives and a lot of independents paint the media as biased because they sure act that way.
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>The Wright thing got plenty of "ink," so I don't think you can claim the media ignored that. I know Ayres bothers you, but as someone else pointed out, Obama was a kid when Ayres was a radical, and Ayres seems to have since joined the mainstream. I know plenty of folks who were pretty radical in the 60's who are still liberal, but working inside the system today.
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>>But there may be another angle on this: Perhaps they're afraid to go negative on Obama because of the race issue. But then you'd have to infer that they would not go negative on Palin because of her gender and I'm left throwing my hands in the air again, confused.
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>Maybe there's just nothing there. I know you believe there's some deep, dark secret hidden, and that Obama isn't what he seems to be. But maybe you're wrong.
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>>Admit this: If McCain had been a member of ...say....the PTL 700 Club for 20 years then the media would be stumbling all over themselves insinuating he was a puppet controlled by evangelicals. Yet Obama can belong to a black separatist church for 20 years and hardly any objective news source thinks it's newsworthy.
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>Hard to argue that a church that's a member of the UCC is "a black separatist church." And, this _was_ all the media.
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>>Another thing perplexing: Purported reputable left-leaning commentators are saying things about Palin that would get a right-wing commentator fired. And that's OK. The rule seems to be if you're a liberal woman that's OK and don't you dare question gender but if you're a Republican woman then it's OK to make ridiculous statements like she can't be VP because she has 5 kids. So, the message is it's OK to be a sexist pig as long as you're a liberal sexist pig.
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>I've seen a few people go off the deep end about Palin, but not many. I also think you're seeing a fair number of _women_ who have found out firsthand how difficult it is to balance a challenging career with marriage and motherhood expressing concern that, at the stage her family is _now_ at, she'll find it hard to make it work. I know that when my kids were little, there were occasionally weeks at a time when little or no paid work got done because kids were sick, school was closed, etc., etc. Add the fact that she has a brand-new special needs baby, and probably no idea yet just how intense dealing with that will be, and I do worry that as governor, let alone as VP, she'll have to make some unpleasant compromises.
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>I saw/heard (can't remember which) someone try to compare this to Pelosi, who also has 5 kids, but the comparison totally left out the fact that Pelosi didn't enter politics until her kids were older (grown, I think, but I wouldn't swear to it--looked it up, she ran for Congress when the youngest was a senior in high school).
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>I know that Palin's husband had to leave some job because of a conflict of interest. Is he now a stay-at-home dad handling the day-to-day running of the family? If so, and if that's what he intends to do in the long run, then the questions about her handling this are moot. If, otoh, he's also working, then there are legitimate questions to ask about how they're going to handle the kind of problems every family with two working parents has encountered. You or I can take a day off to take care of a sick kid. Can the VP or the president?
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>Tamar

I cannot believe you wrote this.