Category Archives: politics

Is he black?

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My 92 year old mother is up late since I am watching the election returns. Obama has won and is about to speak.
“Look, Mom,”I say. “That’s the new president of our country.”
I’m never sure she hears me and/or understands. But this time she looks hard at the television screen, taking in the crowds, the shouting, the man.
“Is he black?” she asks.
“Yes,” I answer, explaining (now that she seems to be paying attention) that his mother was white and his father was black, and he is now the president of the United States.
She continues to look intently at the television screen as Obama begins his acceptance speech.
“Can you make it louder?” she asks and moves to a chair nearer the tv, where she sits and listens and watches until he’s done.
I’m not sure what it all meant to her, but I sure know what it all means to me. We have a truly democratic leader as president.
On my daughter’s blog, she reflects on her feelings about the election and tells of how this election has been a unique “teachable moment” for my grandson:

This morning I explained to my son why this is so historical. Why it’s a big deal that an African American could be President. To do so, I had to introduce slavery as part of our history (mind you, he’s only 6 and in first grade)…he askes SO many questions. “Why did men take them from their homes?” “What do you mean, can you explain more about how they were treated badly?”

And as I explained the best I could in appropriate terms for a 6 year old, but also without sugar-coating the truth, I saw tears fought back in his eyes. Our SIX YEAR OLD felt the injustice those men and women must have felt. Our child felt the horror and sadness of it. “Just because of the color of their skin?!”

He was aghast and stymied. Disgusted and outraged.

The only way I could make him feel better was to assure him that in the end, other men felt the way he just did. Which led to teaching him a bit about the civil war, Abe Lincoln and Harriet Tubman. It helped a bit, but there was no totally shaking him from the sadness he felt to learn how human beings had been treated.

I told him I was proud that he cared. Proud that it mattered to him. And that in the end, that is why it was historical today.

Don’t tell me kids can’t get it. And don’t tell me a kid can’t help direct his learning. Homeschooling rocks!

And my son b!X parties in Portland, missing his Dad, who would have been overcome with joy at the reality of President Obama.
Yes, mom. He’s black and he’s our president.

What? Me biased?

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For the last year and a half, a team of psychology professors has been conducting remarkable experiments on how Americans view Barack Obama through the prism of race.

That’s the first line of an article in the New York Times that links to online tests that you can take to assess your attitudes about race and skin color, particularly in relation to the presidential race between McCain and Obama.
The article goes on to say:

A flood of recent research has shown that most Americans, including Latinos and Asian-Americans, associate the idea of “American” with white skin. One study found that although people realize that Lucy Liu is American and that Kate Winslet is British, their minds automatically process an Asian face as foreign and a white face as American — hence this title in an academic journal: “Is Kate Winslet More American Than Lucy Liu?”

After you read the article, you might want to test yourself here or here.
I took one of the tests on the first link above. The results said that I prefer black people to white people and that I prefer McCain over Obama. I am positive that neither statement about me is true. And the two results are conflicting anyway. So, I’m skeptical about that series of tests, but I plan to try out the rest of them anyway.
The second test is a whole other approach, and I think I’m just not quick enough to connect what I’m seeing with the right key.
Nevertheless, I’m going to go back to both sites and try more of the tests. As the Times article states:

….with race an undercurrent in the national debate, that also makes this a teachable moment. Partly that’s because of new findings both in neurology, using brain scans to understand how we respond to people of different races, and social psychology, examining the gulf between our conscious ideals of equality and our unconscious proclivity to discriminate.

Incidentally, such discrimination is not only racial. We also have unconscious biases against the elderly and against women seeking powerful positions — biases that affect the Republican ticket.

As the article goes on to explain, our attitudes and biases probably are formed by some combination of “nature” and “nurture.” Understanding that can, indeed, make this a very “teachable moment” for a great many Americans.
While I don’t have a bias against McCain’s age or against Obama’s race, I admit that I do have a bias. And it’s in favor of a liberal policy agenda. Whoever has that has my vote.

in between worlds

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I’m blogging today from my daughter’s computer, sitting in her comfy desk chair and lumbar-wrapped in an ACE bandage, while my grandson is upstairs in bed, fighting what looks like the flu (poor little guy).
He seemed fine yesterday, when we all went out and picked out a bed and mattress for me to buy for my new digs.
Today I’m feeling in between worlds as I mentally begin my re-entry into the world I have to leave. I have set a “move” date of November 13 — an arbitrary date, but I like the number 13 since most people don’t.
But for the moment, I’m enjoying the quiet, the peacefulness, the loving acceptance that suffuses this home of my daughter and son-in-law and grandson. This home that will soon be mine as well.
Before I leave, I will listen again to the video below — a rousing reminder of the freedom to come. Listen to “Les Misbarack.”

letter to the Red States

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Got this in an email. Don’t know who the author is, but it’s a great piece, so I’m sharing it here.
Dear Red States:
We’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren’t aware,that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.
To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole’ Miss. We get 85 percent of America’s venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition’s, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms. Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we’re going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they’re apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don’t care if you don’t show pictures of their children’s caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq , and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we’re not willing to spend our resources in Bush’s Quagmire.
With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country’s fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation’s fresh fruit, 95 percent of America’s quality wines, 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT. With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.
Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we’re discussing the war, the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.
Finally, we’re taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico.
Peace out,
Blue States

red-faced redneck

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Caught in the act of being an a**hole.

Documented by CBS News:

After Palin finished her remarks this morning, the man holding the stuffed monkey seemed to notice that a video camera was pointed at him, at which point he removed the Obama sticker from the doll’s head and crumpling it up in his hand. He then handed the doll to a young boy who was watching the rally from his father’s shoulders. The boy’s parents later told CBS News that they weren’t acquainted with the man who gave their son the stuffed monkey.


If you’re embarrassed by the way you protest, there must be something wrong about the way you protest.
This guy deserves all the ridicule he gets. Pass it along.

is the second American Revolution almost here?

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From here

In October 1, 2008, the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was redeployed for 12 months on what is expected will be a permanent mission to respond to the threat of terrorist attacks on American soil and perform crowd control of unruly American citizens in the case of civil unrest. The force was renamed CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force and is now under the the daily control of United States Northern Command’s Army North, whose mission is to protect the United States homeland and support local, state, and federal authorities.

From here

[Congressman Brad Sherman] revealed that United States Congress was threatened with martial law if George W. Bush’s Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was not passed.

“…the only way they can pass this bill is by creating and sustaining a panic atmosphere. That atmosphere is not justified. Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday, that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day, another couple thousand the second day. And a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no. That’s what I call fear fear-mongering, unjustified, proven wrong. We’ve got a week, we’ve got two weeks to write a good bill. The only way to write, to pass, a bad bill: keep the panic pressure on.”

On October 4, 2008, political consultant Naomi Wolf issued a statement on KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle, arguing that the deployment of several thousand American soldiers to perform crowd control on American soil, along with the threats of martial law reported by Brad Sherman, was in fact part of a coup d’état which has taken place in the United States. She called for the immediate arrest of George W. Bush. Watch the entire interview and get really scared.

Wolf connected her statements to the point of her new book: Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
Naomi Wolf is exactly my daughter’s age and is considered one of the leaders in the third wave of feminism. Her writings are provocative and put forth extreme points of view as a way of broadening the debate and forcing deeper examinations of the issues she explores. She calls herself a “liberal feminist” rather than a “radical feminist,” and I’m right with her on that distinction.
Now, she warns that America is already a police state and intimates that only a revolution can give us back our liberties. In her previous book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, she listed the 10 steps necessary for a state to take control of individuals’ lives:
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
2. Create secret prisons where torture takes place.
3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.
5. Harass citizens’ groups.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
7. Target key individuals.
8. Control the press.
9. Treat all political dissidents as traitors.
10. Suspend the rule of law.
In her interview, above, she explains the ways these 10 steps have been completed in America.
This election needs to be our second Independence Day, the day the American people revolt against the coup d’etat carried out by the Bush administration and his Republican supporters.
We need to make Barack Obama the George Washington of a Second American Revolution.

the real author of the McCain vacation piece?

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On October 3, I posted material about a “My Holiday with John McCain” piece that has been circulating via email.
Today, this comment was left on that post:

(Note from a friend: This shocking account was written by Ana Dubey, a friend of my cousin and her husband, who have known Ana for many years. Ana has a PhD in psychology and has a private practice in San Francisco. My cousin’s husband went to business school with Ana’s husband, who has since started and sold a number of successful companies. Ana’s husband is currently a Managing Director of a private equity firm in the Bay Area. Ana and her husband are not political activists and don’t have any personal ax to grind. In fact, in writing this account of her experience with John McCain, Ana is acting outside of her own economic self-interest as she and her husband are among the top 3-5% of our population who would benefit from the McCain tax/economic policies. Please pass this on to anyone you know who might vote for John McCain.. Also please post it on blogs and send it to newspapers and radio stations).

Actually, many blogs have been posting about the vacation account, including what is known about the originator. A post on Telling Thoughts.com, where John Hay tried to track down the author, pretty much covers the information that is so far available. And according to that blog post:
Update 3* 17/9 – NB. Am now advised that the author is Anasuya Dubey PsyD. Apparently Ana is a highly regarded person and a Clinical Psychologist who was operating and studying in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005. We are trying to contact her. If anyone can supply me with her email address it would be most appreciated. Please send details to john@tellingthoughts.com
Update* 18/9 – NB. Received an email this morning 18/9/08 @ 6.32 am from a Dr Michael Bower who claims to know Ana personally. He claims she has informed him that she has been speaking to a magazine which has requested her not to contact other media until a decision is made as to whether to go to print with Ana’s story.
If the story is true, it should be widely circulated before election day. If it’s not, that fact needs to be verified soon and the story buried.
Fair is fair.

Rolling Stone outs McCain

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In a ten-page mini-biography, the current issue of Rolling Stone exposes McCain for what he is and always was: a conscience-less and undisciplined self-promoter.
The article, an indictment of McCain, not only as a manipulative politician, but, perhaps more importantly, a soulless human being, includes information like the following:

The reckless, womanizing hotshot who leaned on family connections for advancement before his capture in Vietnam emerged a reckless, womanizing celebrity who continued to pull strings.

Even McCain admits to an “immature and unprofessional reaction to slights” that is “little changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy.”

During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain’s wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was “getting a little thin up there.” McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.

And this account of McCain’s first war-time plane crash (he crashed planes several times before that) reveals that he probably fools himself better than he fools others:

As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. “This distressed me considerably,” he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. “I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal.”

The fire blazed late into the night. The following morning, while oxygen-masked rescue workers toiled to recover bodies from the lower decks, McCain was making fast friends with R.W. “Johnny” Apple of The New York Times, who had arrived by helicopter to cover the deadliest Naval calamity since the Second World War. The son of admiralty surviving a near-death experience certainly made for good copy, and McCain colorfully recounted how he had saved his skin. But when Apple and other reporters left the ship, the story took an even stranger turn: McCain left with them. As the heroic crew of the Forrestal mourned its fallen brothers and the broken ship limped toward the Philippines for repairs, McCain zipped off to Saigon for what he recalls as “some welcome R&R.”

Later, these observations:

If heroism is defined by physical suffering, Carol McCain is every bit her ex-husband’s equal. Driving alone on Christmas Eve 1969, she skidded out on a patch of ice and crashed into a telephone pole. She would spend six months in the hospital and undergo 23 surgeries. The former model McCain bragged of to his buddies in the POW camp as his “long tall Sally” was now five inches shorter and walked with crutches.

By any standard, McCain treated her contemptibly. Whatever his dreams of getting laid in Rio, he got plenty of ass during his command post in Jacksonville. According to biographer Robert Timberg, McCain seduced his conquests on off-duty cross-country flights — even though adultery is a court-martial offense. He was also rumored to be romantically involved with a number of his subordinates.

Although McCain stresses in his memoir that he married Cindy three months after divorcing Carol, he was still legally married to his first wife when he and Cindy were issued a marriage license from the state of Arizona. The divorce was finalized on April 2nd, 1980. McCain’s second marriage — rung in at the Arizona Biltmore with Gary Hart as a groomsman — was consummated only six weeks later, on May 17th. The union gave McCain access to great wealth: Cindy, whose father was the exclusive distributor for Budweiser in the Phoenix area, is now worth an estimated $100 million.

In 1989, in behavior the couple has blamed in part on the stress of the Keating scandal, Cindy became addicted to Vicodin and Percocet. She directed a doctor employed by her charity — which provided medical care to patients in developing countries — to supply the narcotics, which she then used to get high on trips to places like Bangladesh and El Salvador.

Tom Gosinski, a young Republican, kept a detailed journal while working as director of government affairs for the charity. “I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. senator has driven her to . . . cover feelings of despair with drugs,” he wrote in 1992. When Cindy McCain suddenly fired Gosinski, he turned his journal over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, sparking a yearlong investigation. To avoid jail time, Cindy agreed to a hush-hush plea bargain and court-imposed rehab.

Ironically, her drug addiction became public only because she and her husband tried to cover it up.

Following his failed presidential bid in 2000, McCain needed a vehicle to keep his brand alive. He founded the Reform Institute, which he set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — a tax status that barred it from explicit political activity. McCain proceeded to staff the institute with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, as well as the fundraising chief, legal counsel and communications chief from his 2000 campaign.

There is no small irony that the Reform Institute — founded to bolster McCain’s crusade to rid politics of unregulated soft money — itself took in huge sums of unregulated soft money from companies with interests before McCain’s committee.

And if the following don’t convince you that McCain is NOT the candidate to vote for, well….

At least three of McCain’s GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain’s “temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.” Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn’t “want this guy anywhere near a trigger.” And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that “the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded.

Indeed, McCain’s neocon makeover is so extreme that Republican generals like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft have refused to endorse their party’s nominee.

“I’m sure John McCain loves his country,” says Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar under Bush. “But loving your country and lying to the American people are apparently not inconsistent in his view.”

After reading the whole of the Rolling Stone piece, one can’t help wondering if the email to which I refer in my post below is true. One also can’t help wondering how Fundamentalists and and others who say they value morality, ethics, and other requirements of the Ten Commandments can support the ego-centric McCain. I guess he spins well, and so they rationalize because they are mesmerized.
This issue of Rolling Stone also includes a harsh indictment of Sarah Palin in an article entitled “Mad Dog Palin”. This from that:

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV — and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

I think that if you quoted the above to a Palin admirer, he/she would give the response that Brian Williams (on the Letterman show last night) said that he expected to get from those individuals: “So….. your point is?”
Maybe this is going to be one of those times when most of the people do get fooled.

will the real author please stand up!

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Sometimes you get a viral email that you wish were true.
Today I got one about someone who supposedly went on vacation and ran into John McCain. The email is falsely attributed thusly: “Mary Kay Gamel is a literature and classics professor at UC Santa Cruz.”
I emailed Mary Kay Garnel, and this is the response I got from her:

I have received thousands of emails and phone calls about the Turtle Island account.

I did NOT write that account, forward it under my name, or ask for it to be widely distributed.

I have never been to Turtle Island (which costs $2000/day), have never met Senator McCain, was a classics major, not an English Literature major, and never eat pancakes.

I regret the misinformation which is circulating, but it is not my doing, and I protest the misuse of my name.

How I think this happened: on 16 September I received this account 3rd-hand and forwarded it, with full email trail information and the name of the purported author (whom I don’t know), to several friends with whom I discuss politics. It was further forwarded, and at some point the trail was deleted and I was misidentified as the author. I suspect whoever did this thought that my name and contact information would make the story more credible.

Snopes.com is investigating the account; current status “undetermined.”

This is NOT an organized effort on the part of any political candidate.

I hope you will pass this information on to anyone interested in this story.

And finally, the story itself isn’t necessarily false. But we’ll never know unless the author herself comes forward.

MKG

I AM ENDING THIS POST WITH THE TEXT OF THE VIRAL EMAIL AND SEND OUT A CALL FOR THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR TO STAND UP, TAKE OWNERSHIP, AND VERIFY WHETHER OR NOT THE ACCOUNT IS TRUE.

MY HOLIDAY WITH JOHN McCAIN
It was just before John McCain’s last run at the presidential nomination in 2000 that my husband and I vacationed in Turtle Island in Fiji with John McCain, Cindy, and their children, including Bridget (their adopted Bangladeshi child).
It was not our intention, but it was our misfortune to be in close quarters with John McCain for almost a week, since Turtle Island has a small number of bungalows and their focus on communal meals force all vacationers who are there at the same time to get to know each other intimately. He arrived at our first group meal and started reading quotes from a pile of
William Faulkner books with a forest of Post-Its sticking out of them. As an English Literature major myself, my first thought was “if he likes this so much, why hasn’t he memorized any of this yet?” I soon realized that McCain actually thought we had come on vacation to be a volunteer audience for his “readings” which then became a regular part of each meal. Out of politeness, none of the vacationers initially protested at this intrusion into their blissful holiday, but people’s buttons definitely got pushed as the readings continued day after day.
Unfortunately this was not his only contribution to our mealtime entertainment. He waxed on during one meal about how Indo-Chine women had the best figures and that our American corn-fed women just couldn’t meet up to this standard. He also made it a point that all of us should stop Cindy from having dessert as her weight was too high and made a few comments to Amy, the 25 year old wife of the honeymooning couple from Nebraska that she should eat less as she needed to lose weight. McCain’s appreciation of the beauty of Asian women was so great that David the American economist had to move his Thai wife to the other side of the table from McCain as McCain kept aggressively flirting with and touching her.
Needless to say I was irritated at his large ego and his rude behavior towards his wife and other women, but decided he must have some redeeming qualities as he had adopted a handicapped child from Bangladesh. I asked him about this one day, and his response was shocking: “Oh, that was Cindy’s idea – I didn’t have anything to do with it. She just went and adopted this thing without even asking me. You can’t imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona . No, it wasn’t my idea at all.”
I actively avoided McCain after that, but unfortunately one day he engaged me in a political discussion which soon got us on the topic of the active US bombing of Iraq at that time. I was shocked when he said, “If I was in charge, I would nuke Iraq to teach them a lesson”. Given McCain’s personal experience with the horrors of war, I had expected a more balanced point of view. I commented on the tragic consequences of the nuclear attacks on Japan during WWII — but no, he was not to be dissuaded. He went on to say that if it was up to him he would have dropped many more nuclear bombs on Japan. I rapidly extricated myself from this conversation as I could tell that his experience being tortured as a POW didn’t seem to have mellowed out his perspective, but rather had made him more aggressive and vengeful towards the world.
My final encounter with McCain was on the morning that he was leaving Turtle Island. Amy and I were happily eating pancakes when McCain arrived and told Amy that she shouldn’t be having pancakes because she needed to lose weight. Amy burst into tears at this abusive comment. I felt fiercely protective of Amy and immediately turned to McCain and told him to leave her
alone. He became very angry and abusive towards me, and said, “Don’t you know who I am.” I looked him in the face and said, “Yes, you are the biggest asshole I have ever met” and headed back to my cabin. I am happy to say that later that day when I arrived at lunch I was given a standing ovation by all the guests for having stood up to McCain’s bullying.
Although I have shared my McCain story informally with friends, this is the first time I am making this public. I almost did so in 2000, when McCain first announced his bid for the Republican nomination, but it soon became apparent that George Bush was the shoo-in candidate and so I did not act then. However, now that there is a very real possibility that McCain could be elected as our next president, I feel it is my duty as an American citizen to share this story. I can’t imagine a more scary outcome for America than that this abusive, aggressive man should lead our nation. I have observed him in intimate surroundings as he really is, not how the media portrays him to be. If his attitudes toward women and his treatment
of his own family are even a small indicator of his real personality, then I shudder to think what will happen to America were he to be elected as our President.


If you got this email, please don’t forward it as attributed to Mary Kay Gamel.