My thoughts

My thoughts on Gov. Sarah Palin.

Really, I was very unsure of her when I initially heard that Sen. McCain picked Gov. Palin as his running mate.  She was completely unknown to most people outside of Alaska.  It is refreshing to see that Sen. McCain strayed from normalcy.  I figured he was going to pick one of the decoys that the press was hovering around, Pawlantry, Lieberman, or Romney.  I think it is awesome that he broke the cycle, picked a younger politician, and by some accounts so far, has chosen well.  Instead of the GOP looking very Grand Old Man Party, now there is a new, younger, and feminine face. Republicans are rallying to the cause and have a new vigor.  It is exactly what the party needed.  I think it is funny how some people, including some of my more liberal minded friends, are complaining about Palin dominating the news.  Funny, but the rest of the world has had to listen to the news report about Sen. Obama or Sens. Obama and Clinton for two years now.  Give the new GOP a chance for a “change.”  McCain and Palin are what the party needed.  Here’s another article that discusses how much activity has been centered around Gov. Palin’s wikipedia website.

I will admit that there are a couple of issues where I don’t agree with McCain and Palin.

1. I don’t think the government should be able to completely take away a woman’s right to chose.  I think that we don’t need to be terminating late term pregnancies unless they are going to kill the mother, but taking the right to chose away from a woman is mixing religion and politics if you ask me.
   
2. I don’t believe that a civil union must only be between a man and a woman.  I’m not going to argue nature v. nurture, but it’s painfully obvious that there are gay men and women in the world today.  If two people of the same sex want to have a civil union and be treated like they are married for all intensive purposes, I think they should have that option.  Or at the very least, leave it up to the individual states to make that choice.

As far as I can tell, those are the biggest issues I have with the GOP ticket.  Other than those two issues, I think Sen. McCain is the better choice.  I don’t trust the Democrats.  It isn’t so much just Sen. Obama, but the Democratic party as a whole.  No matter how this election turns out, it is going to be historic.  Either the first black person or the first woman will be at the top of the executive branch.  That’s definitely a step in the right direction for his nation.  Change is afoot.

More Wordle

This summer, Sandy mentioned that you could go to this site, Wordle, give it a url or copy and paste some text into it, and it would make a neat visual of the words.  While I thought it was pretty cool when I first saw it, someone took the idea and made it political, sort of.  There was an article in Wired.com where they took the speeches from the DNC and the RNC and put them in Wordle.  Pretty cool to see a visual representation of the words used most often by the speakers.  The article has a lot more of the speeches posted, but I thought I’d just stick to the ones that we’re actually electing.  Here’s the big four.

Sen. Joe Biden

Sen. Barack Obama

Gov. Sarah Palin

Sen. John McCain

This is not really my forte, but I do find it interesting that in both speeches from the DNC, John McCain is mentioned enough to have his name show up pretty largely.  On the other hand, Barack Obama is not mentioned enough in the two speeches from the RNC to show up.  Interesting that the Dems were slinging more mud when they had the national stage.  I know that Gov. Palin referred to Sen. Obama many times in her speech, but rarely used his name.  Okay, so she was slinging some mud too, but that is the traditional job of the VP during elections.  Remember the only difference between her and a pit bull is supposed to be lipstick.

I don’t think Gov. Palin or Sen. McCain made sure that their speeches looked a certain way in Wordle.  Sen. McCain’s campaign has done its share of pointing out possible flaws with Sen. Obama.  Johnny Mac didn’t need to go into it when he had the national spotlight.