Currently This

Like most everyone else, I watched with great interest the other night as Sarah Palin accepted the nomination for Vice President at the Republican convention. I wanted to like her - not enough to change parties and vote for her, but enough that I could say she represented my gender with integrity and intelligence. Unfortunately, beyond the aging beauty queen cuteness of her, there's not much to like.

She said "I told the Congress "thanks, but no thanks," for that Bridge to Nowhere." Not quite - she supported it fully until it became clear how unpopular it was and then changed her tune. She never gave back the money congress gave her to build it, either. Never mind that, though.

She crows about saving the taxpayers money by selling the Governor's private jet on eBay (at a profit, McCain tells us). She said "While I was at it, I got rid of a few things in the governor's office that I didn't believe our citizens should have to pay for. That luxury jet was over the top. I put it on eBay." Not quite true. She tried to sell it on eBay, but no one wanted it and they ended up selling it to a private bidder for six hundred thousand dollars less than it originally cost to buy it. Never mind that, too.

What gets me is her claim that those of us with special needs kids will have a friend in Washington if she is elected. Her sister, who also has a special needs child, tells us that having a child and a nephew with special needs makes Palin aware of how hard we all struggle and we need her in Washington, on our side.

One has to wonder how much Palin has had to struggle, as her child is an infant and she has a full time nanny. Can't have been much of a struggle so far. For the sake of her child, let's hope it stays that way, because services for special needs children in her state are hard to come by since Palin slashed funding for those services by 62% over the last three years. (Budgets: 2007, 2008, 2009).

Lying bitch. Oh, you lying, manipulative bitch. None of my friends, most of whom I met through our special needs children, would ever think to slash funding for the programs that are so critical to our families. Of course, none of us have nannies, either. We've all actually raised our kids and we have fought and clawed for every bit of help we have needed for our children. Without those programs, the quality of our children's lives would have been greatly diminished.

Palin won't know what I'm talking about. Her child is an infant and she has a nanny so her personal experience as a mother of a special needs child is pretty scant. I wonder if she asked her sister, whose son is special needs, what she thinks? What conversations went on at the Thanksgiving table every year after the budget came out and her sister found that there would be even fewer services for her child than the year before? Is dissention allowed? Would there have been any? Does her sister have lots of money and a nanny, too?

Sarah Palin will never need the services that she cut. She has enough money to buy her son all the help he'll never need. We're not all that lucky, but we the people don't really matter and haven't for a long time. Getting into the White House is no longer a matter of public service but of positioning ones self to enjoy the perks of power. It's been a very long time since anyone in the White House gave a tinker's damn about any of us out here.

My family needs those services, though. We don't have a lot of money, or a nanny. We live paycheck to paycheck in an expensive state and although we could live a lot higher on the hog in a different place, we stay in California because California is our son's safety net. California has a law that provides doctors, prescriptions, job training, living assistance, affordable housing, in-home support services . . . anything he will need to survive if something should ever happen to us. He is eligible for these services because he is autistic and epileptic, but he only gets this help as long as he lives in Ca. and because he has lived here for so long. We move out of state, and he has no safety net at all.

Our Governor (also one of the Compassionate Conservatives) has already cut special education funding by $480,000,000 this year. We've spent years terrified that one too many cuts will mean my son no longer is able to attend the special education school we believe saved his life. Too many families are hanging on by their fingernails to trust Sarah Palin who, despite her family being touched by the same special needs issues the rest of us are struggling with, has already shown an alarming lack of concern for these families - her own family, for that matter, by cutting special education funding in Alaska by more than sixty percent.

Any woman with children who votes for this woman ought to be strung up by their ovaries.