The Chris Moeller Archives

The Lord's work

Jane Addams lived from 1860 to 1935. She opened the country's first-ever "settlement house" for the underprivileged at the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets in Chicago in 1889. "Hull House" was host to two-thousand people every week, with kindergarten classes and club meetings for children and teens, and what amounted to the first-ever night school and adult education program in America. Under her leadership, Hull House also came to add an art gallery, a boarding school for girls, a gymnasium and swimming pool, an employment bureau, a music school, a circulating library, and a public kitchen to help feed the city's needy. She served on Chicago's Board of Education and participated in the founding of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, to say nothing of her leadership later in global bodies such as the Women's Peace Party and the International Congress of Women. She became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

As a civics lesson then to the self-satisfied twit John McCain chose as his running mate, Ms. Addams is what you would call "a community organizer."

In her speech last night at the Republican National Convention, Sarah Palin proclaimed, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities"-- denigrating Barack Obama's inner-city relief work during the 1980s with a group called the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

While Palin has called the war on Iraq "a task from God" and once said of a natural-gas pipeline-- "I think God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built," she obviously thinks decidedly less of Obama's spiritual mission during his stint as an organizer-- efforts which included job training assistance and finding housing for laid-off steel workers on Chicago's industrial south side.

Twenty-first century Republicans are more apt to sneer or spit on the poor than to ever get their hands dirty lending a hand to such a Christ-like mission. Palin's entire introduction to the country last night-- sarcastic and ugly-- indicates that she might be ready to helm the fundraising department for the party's national committee, but that she's obviously been holed up inside that gated community in the wilderness for too long to understand and share the core human values of the American people. It should have already been apparent that she was unfit to carry water as anybody's running mate on a presidential ticket, but the boat is sailing as well on her closer walk with thee. You stay classy, Sarah Palin.

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The 17-year-old daughter of their VP nominee is knocked up and Republican operatives and party bosses are almost unanimous in their public posturing that the pregnancy is a private family matter for only the Palins and the Johnstons of Wasillia, Alaska. The irony of that position is that the right to privacy is the very Constitutional mandate they wish to destroy by overturning Roe v. Wade.

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Sarah Palin is the Clarence Thomas of the women's movement.

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She's the new Phyllis Schlafly.

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How would the country's right wing have reacted if Michelle Obama had a 17-year-old daughter that got pregnant?

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Since he's fallen in line behind the VP nomination of an unqualified woman chosen because of her gender, does that make Rush Limbaugh a "femi-nazi"?

posted by CM @ 6:05 PM