Americans love books. Americans love intellectual freedom. Americans do not fear intellectual curiosity.
These are the values that led to that little thing that got mankind in the West out of the mud and eventually out from under the delusional Divine Right of Kings. That little thing was called the Renaissance.
In December 1996, [librarian Mary Ellen] Emmons told her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman, that Palin three times asked her — starting before she was sworn in — about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose.
Emmons told the Frontiersman she flatly refused to consider any kind of censorship. Emmons, now Mary Ellen Baker, is on vacation from her current job in Fairbanks and did not return e-mail or telephone messages left for her Wednesday.
When the matter came up for the second time in October 1996, during a City Council meeting, Anne Kilkenny, a Wasilla housewife who often attends council meetings, was there.
Like many Alaskans, Kilkenny calls the governor by her first name.
“Sarah said to Mary Ellen, ‘What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?” Kilkenny said.
“I was shocked. Mary Ellen sat up straight and said something along the line of, ‘The books in the Wasilla Library collection were selected on the basis of national selection criteria for libraries of this size, and I would absolutely resist all efforts to ban books.'”
While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin’s attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.
1) Do I despise and detest the Demoncrats? Yes.
2) Do despise and detest the Republicants? Yes.
3) Do I believe in freedom of religion? Yes.
4) Do I believe in habeas corpus? Yes.
5) Do I believe in a death penalty? Yes (with full accountability only!).
6) Do I believe in the Constitution of the United States of America? Yes.
7) Do I believe in the Bill of Rights? Yes.
8) Do I believe in trial by jury? Yes.
9) Do detest and despise Rush Limbaugh? Yes.
10) Do I despise and detest Air America? Yes.
11) Do worship at feet of Castro? Fuck no!
12) Do I believe our Administration are criminals? Fuck yes! And so do they!
13) Do I believe in fair taxation? Fuck fuck yes!
14) Before Palin surfaced, who was I voting for? Ralph Nader!
15) Do I like Barack Obama? Hell no!
And where the fuck were all of you We Love America bullshit artists to support our American truckers? Go on, show me all your posts!
And speaking of journalistic standards (which, by the way, I am not a journalist, motherfucker), what the hell does Andrew Aucoin’s sexuality have to do with anything? You smug self-righteous bastards all owe your very lives to a gay man!
Update to the Update: Apparently reading skills are so deficient among my fellow Americans that they cannot parse an update. Therefore this Update to the Update, to tell you I am now going to use strikethrough to emphasize that the list has been discredited. But what has not been discredited is Sarah Palin’s ominous questioning of the town public librarian about removing books. And that she shortly thereafter fired the public librarian says more than a list of banned books ever could. Don’t you get it? She wound up banning the librarian!All Comments have been moderated. None were removed.
Update: This list might not in fact reflect the books Sarah Palin wanted banned. As more than one person in Comments has pointed out, some of them were not published when Palin was in office. It is my hope that the mainstream media will not let this story drop and that at some point an actual list will surface. The very thought of having someone who once advocated book-banning possibly occupying one of the highest offices of our land fills me with profound dread. It should fill you with dread too.
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Lord of the Flies by William Golding My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood The Living Bible by William C. Bower The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial Staff
I think that makes it pretty much official that Palin is a very, very dangerous moron.
Do you really want her within a heartbeat of the Presidency?
Chuck Todd: Mike Murphy, lots of free advice, we’ll see if Steve Schmidt and the boys were watching. We’ll find out on your blackberry. Tonight voters will get their chance to hear from Sarah Palin and she will get the chance to show voters she’s the right woman for the job Up next, one man who’s already convinced and he’ll us why Gov. Jon Huntsman. (cut away)
Peggy Noonan: Yeah.
Mike Murphy: You know, because I come out of the blue swing state governor world: Engler, Whitman, Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. I mean, these guys — this is how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And it’s not gonna work. And —
Peggy Noonan: It’s over.
Mike Murphy: Still McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.
Chuck Todd: I also think the Palin pick is insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson, too.
Peggy Noonan: Saw Kay this morning.
Chuck Todd: Yeah, she’s never looked comfortable about this —
Mike Murphy: They’re all bummed out.
Chuck Todd: Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?
Peggy Noonan: The most qualified? No! I think they went for this — excuse me– political bullshit about narratives —
Chuck Todd: Yeah they went to a narrative.
Mike Murphy: I totally agree.
Peggy Noonan: Every time the Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.
Mike Murphy: You know what’ sreally the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism, and this is cynical.
Chuck Todd: This is cynical, and as you called it, gimmicky.
Mike Murphy: Yeah.
As for the source:
Probably satellite feed … there’s sort of a professional courtesy in TV that you can’t use this stuff. The Internet is buggering that all up.
Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.
So on the one hand, the choice of Sarah Palin is “political bullshit” — yet in print she’s a game-changer. Thus does Peggy Noonan lose the aura she has had in my eyes.
Makes me wonder, should she wind up as President, what her stance towards Muslims will be.
McCain picked someone to energize the Right. What I don’t think he considered is the effect it’d have on people who aren’t on the Right. I’m getting right energized against her.
Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.
Emphasis added by me.
Sarah Palin’s ChristoNazis have themselves a book barbecue!
UPDATE:Snopes Says Fake! Dammit, I hate you Photoshoppers, I do! This was convincing to me because her legs look like other photos I’ve seen of her legs. (Oh now all of you will tell me all those others are fakes too! Damn you!) Thanks to Dimension Skipper in the Comments. But I still apply those verses to her.
I was wrong. This is America’s terminal President.
In the event WordPress's Smiley Nazis come after me, I have created a backup blog at Blogger: Mike Cane 2008. I am simulposting to both blogs.
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