She WILL have a George Allen-style YouTube moment by Election Day. Count on it. I can sense it coming.

Jesse, I know you have a certain tone going here, but when you say “She had a Down’s baby!” please say instead, “she had a baby with Down’s.” When referring to people who are differently-abled, speak of the person first, not the disability. You don’t say, for example, a handicapped child, but a child with a handicap, just as you would not call a person who wears denim a denim person, but rather a person who wears denim. Remember, it’s always the person first, not the attributes first.

In spite of everything Palin was supposed to bring, state polls show Obama regaining Colorado by a +3 margin, moving up to a tie in Florida, and only losing 1-2% in OH, MI, PA and VA compared to before both conventions; one or two national polls are bad, but most are a 1-2% McCain lead tops.  And those 1-2% margins will be gone before we know it…let’s not kid ourselves.

I think Palin hurts a hell of a lot in Florida and doesn’t help much except push McCain’s margins up in such important states (snark) as Alabama and Oklahoma.

She’s not Tracy Flick, though, TomHilton.  I don’t remember Tracy Flick putting on a performance to make herself more palatable to men and low-info women.  She was ruthless and ambitious, like Palin, but she didn’t exactly hide it.  Palin is trying to sell herself as something she’s not (just a down-home reformer, yeehaw!).

disablity rights -

I hate to derail, but I have to call you out on this.  “differently abled”??  ew.  that’s just “othering” language (making a whole brouhhahaha about how that person is able too ! just in a different way!! isn’t that special?!!)  and the whole thing about “person before the attribute” is just ridlicious.  I don’t want to be referred to “the woman who is ___” or “the woman who happens to be ___ “.  We don’t refer to persons of color as “the man who is black”, or “the man who happens to be black”.  We just say “that black guy”.  Or “that hispanic guy”  “or the midget woman at the supermarket”.  Or whatever. 

I’m sorry, I just found your entry to be really conscending and it made me go, ‘what the fuck??!!”

And yes, I am a person with a disability, and I can speak for myself, than you very much.  And I don’t consider myself disabled in the traditional sense of the world, and I feel no need to sugarcoat my specific “attribute” either.

This is what gives P.C. a bad name.

/derail

(sorry, you guys can go back to the subject now)

“Manic Pixie Dream Governor.”

Perfect.

She seems to be even better than McCain at lying with complete sincerity. (Which is in line with what the MPDG is supposed to do, namely get the guy in touch with his true nature.)

Melaka

I am currently taking a course on teaching students with disabilities and my professor told the class that the correct way to refer to a person with disabilities is “A person with X” rather than a “X person.”

I am currently taking a course on teaching students with disabilities and my professor told the class that the correct way to refer to a person with disabilities is “A person with X” rather than a “X person.”

One thing I learned in my time at a marxist-leaning liberationist university was that (and I say this as a women’s studies minor) not all X Rights or X Studies or X Awareness professors are always right, all the time.  Especially when it comes to PC terminology.

I’m not disabled, but I’ve always understood that, when describing someone who is a member of some othered group is that you want to make sure that your identification of that person’s group membership is an adjective, not a noun.  You don’t talk about your friend who is A Jew, but your friend who is Jewish (your Jewish friend also being acceptable, since that, too, is an adjective).  You don’t talk about The Blacks or The Gays, you say Black people or Gay people (or, again, people who are black; people who are gay—it’s still an adjectival phrase).  So in terms of disability, the most polite thing to say is “deaf people” rather than “the deaf”, for example.  Some constructions are easier than others (you never hear people saying “I saw a blind in the store,” but you do sometimes hear “I saw a midget in the store”). 

Though I agree with you in spirit that “A baby with Down Syndrome” is preferable to “A Downs Baby”.  But I hardly think it’s worth raking Jesse over the coals—we all say things that aren’t the absolute most correct and PC sometimes.  I also think it’s clear that Jesse is using the entire series of expressions as conservatives would use them, not as liberals would.  It kind of spoils the joke if you stop to be especially PC about disabled people, but let a lie like “I sold a plane on eBay!” go.

Well, if the *teacher* said it, certainly there’s no need to bother what the actual people with disabilities are saying!

Sorry, was that too snarky? I just got banned on a gaming forum because over there it seems 90% of the people are thirtypercenters, and I’ve been sufficiently chastened now that I am starting to double guess everything I say.

This is an old tape?  Isn’t she still in hiding?

I am an asthmatic person who likes well crafted sentences. If you called me a person with asthma, I’d wonder why you didn’t use the adjective. Person is the noun in either case. And I would rather conserve my breath with fewer syllables when I am having an attack!

the correct way to refer to a person with disabilities is “A person with X” rather than a “X person.”
This makes a kind of sense: it’s OK to say “A person of color,” but not OK to say, “A colored person.”

I think part of the problems is that Republicans at some level know that they have screwed up the country.  The are however looking for the next best thing to fix it.  They dare desperate for a new Reagan (as imagined, not that was).  Think back, a few months ago, they loved Rudy, then it was Thompson, then Huckabee.  They settled for John McCain, and had made their piece when Palin came along.  Rove is hoping that their new love infatuation will last until November (hence the limited media contact).  I am hoping that they find out what a tool their blind date really is before it is too late.

Disability Rights

Why not go all the way and say the child is differently chromosomed?

Disability Rights: One thing I think you missed was that Jesse was not speaking for himself, but aping the voice of the twits who would find the MPDG appealing.

Please do try to keep up.

Wow.  I didn’t think this would go right on another track there…

Thanks, guys for making more clear what I was trying to express.

And as a person with a disability (ugh, forget it, I’m just going to be specific here)....

And as a deaf woman, I *was* a student with a disability, so to speak, and trust me, using the “person who has x” sentence construction just comes off as being conscending. It’s like my deafness was so special it couldn’t be mentioned directly as an adjective (*gasp*  to be so limited in such a way!!! we must avoid doing that! how horrible!).  For fuck’s sake. I’m deaf. Jesse’s black. Amanda’s a feminazi (no, just kidding there, I adore you, girl), and Sarah Palin’s a rightwing nut (I say this in all seriousness).

Also, I’ve found the field of “special” education to be infested with a type “oh noes, poor people, we need to help them because we know best” mentality.  I teach American Sign Language classes, along with culture and linguistics, and I’ve often had to explain to my students that I am not “differently abled”,  I am not “hearing challenged” or any other of those special vocabulary words created for us very special people. And I didn’t need any kind of “special” education, either, other than extra exposure to English via the written word.

I’m just as normal as you are.  I may be at the end of the bell curve when it comes to how well I can hear, but I’m normal. Just as you are.  And there’s no reason to hide anything behind special words and grammar constructions.  There’s absolutely wrong with calling it as what it is.

Ok, rant over. Sorry.

Oh, and Hector, I think the “person of color” versus “colored people” is a whole other ball of wax. The rules don’t apply there.

Aww, I hated that Manic Pixie Dream Girl bit before, on account of how almost every character in almost every movie behaves in implausible-yet-formulaic ways. I didn’t think we needed to ascribe all sorts of wish-fulfillment onto screenwriters we assumed were all emotionally damaged straight men. I mean, if being some kind of stock character who does anything less than totally mundane while the camera is pointed at them is evidence of lazy, sexist (or other *ist) writing, then every movie ever made was badly written and somehow vaguely evil.

So I’m angry that you’ve found a real-life MPDG example, because yeah, Palin fits the bill. And that weakens my argument because if there was ever an escaped cartoon character, it’s her. (But damn, that CGI is getting better all the time. The reflections off those frameless glasses alone must take weeks of rendering time. Script needs work, though.)

I love this.  She’s running on redemptive quirkiness!

@melaka-i have dealt with some deaf people in my work, and the impression i got was that deaf is fine.  in fact, i got the impression that deaf people (not people with hearing impairment) were (largely) perfectly happy to be deaf and didn’t consider themselves in any way handicapped.  could you comment on this?

rengeko -

Yes, I agree.  I don’t consider myself handicapped.  But I *am* considered to be handicapped, and attitudes towards the disabled (as in other disabled people) affect me too.  I’m in the same boat with them, whether I think I belong there or not.  So that’s why I felt the need to comment.  That guy over there in the wheelchair gets that attitude as much as I do.  We both suffer from the same perception, that we are not normal, and that our fragile egos need to be massaged with extra special words and sentence constructions.

But anyway, answering your question - yes - a large percentage of deaf people do feel perfectly happy to be deaf.  Including myself.

I’m just happy to see a TV Trope here.

Ahhh! Wow- now that I look at that picture from that annoying movie (Garden State) and read about how goddamn annoying Palin is everyday I realize that my seemingly irrational hatred of that movie had a lot to do with Portman’s charcater being some sort of “magical wonder chick” and “wacky” but in a “good” way. She’s sort of a douchebag loser and yet everyone seems like really think she’s charming. Much like the way the rethugs are trying to paint Palin.

Oy vey.

Tracey Flick was competent, organized and forthright. Governor, I knew Tracey Flick, and you, madam, are no Tracey Flick.

I wondered what part of Palin’s face I found familiar. She really does look like an older version of Natalie Portman. Except Palin works for the Dark Side.
And [noun] [verb] Downs baby.

Jesse, I know you have a certain tone going here, but when you say “She had a Down’s baby!” please say instead, “she had a baby with Down’s.” When referring to people who are differently-abled, speak of the person first, not the disability. You don’t say, for example, a handicapped child, but a child with a handicap, just as you would not call a person who wears denim a denim person, but rather a person who wears denim. Remember, it’s always the person first, not the attributes first. - Disability Rights

So it’s ok to to say “having a baby with Downs is wacky shit” but not ok to say “having a Downs baby is wacky shit?”

But she is, for conservative men who feel feminism has robbed them of the super-wives they’re entitled to, a real fantasy.

Exactly.  Her 5 kids are proof that she’s no cockblocker when it comes to the First Dude’s manly seed, but she’s still kept the weight off and stays perfectly coiffed and fashionably miniskirted at all times.  Except when she slaps on the camo, grabs a rifle and shoots large & powerful animals from well outside any range in which they could retaliate.  She’s also ‘Tough’—or the conservative estimation of it—meaning she’s willing to use whatever power she has for her own enrichment & self-aggrandizement and screwing people too weak or unable to defend themselves.

Best of all, she’s able to wield power without getting too uppity.  The Vice Presidency is the ultimate second banana (Cheney notwithstanding).  She may be VP, but she’ll Know Her Place, and her anti-choice policies will make sure that other women know their place too.

I am having a pretty good visual hallucination of Palin in one of those backless hippie indian print dresses, twirling around in the hallways of the Cap Centre amidst the rest of her spinner, dreadlocked, brainwashed yashua worshippin brethren, having trouble focusing her sparkling and unusually dilated eyes - and not caring that she is having trouble focusing - during a particularly plaintive and searching Stella Blue before she gets back on the Yashua bus (hey, it had BEAUTIFUL woodwork) to go back to her commune in VT.

Those of you who were on tour with the boys between 90 and 94 know what I am talking about.  Apologies to everyone else.

When I look at Sarah Palin, what I see is a younger and more attractive incarnation of Idaho’s late Helen Chenoweth, she of the infamous Endangered Salmon Bake.  From what I understand, Sarah is originally from Idaho too.

disablity rights - we could do as you ask, IF we wanted our writing to suck.  And be flabby.