So I posted a "repulsive" image of Sarah Palin's autobiography cover Blingee'd into oblivion yesterday.

Yes, I still have the heart of a twelve-year-old.

I thought they were funny. I sent the link to an ailing friend of mine to cheer her up and she laughed, coughed, and laughed again. Palin's only real claim to fame is her tagging along with McCain for a run to the White House and, in the process, turning that campaign into a bigger joke than it already was. As far as I'm concerned, her story ought to have ended right there, but she keeps coming back like a bad penny. It's sad and awful that the media has turned into her tool to the extent that her book is already selling out online. She most certainly does not speak for me, either as a woman or as a public figure, has already proven a willingness to manipulate even her own offspring for her own ends, and, in the end, she is simply a quitter in the realm of public service.

Her brand of selfish crazy is indeed repulsive to me.

What is also repulsive, though, atop it all is how much the mainstream media takes its eye off the ball with regards to many of the real issues of the day...

....how ineffective a Democratic majority in Congress really has been...

...why we still cannot extricate ourselves from Iraq and Afghanistan...

...why not having the Olympics in Chicago is a good thing...

...and why, when all is said and done, a murder rate is much, much more than its numbers:

What concern of mine is Carmen? Why do I publish the lists of the dead, the mostly low-life victims? Why do check the blog stats page for links into those posts and the Internet searches that bring them in. I wonder why I plucked the story of another young girl named Chanel Sanchell. The local newspaper story doesn’t tell us much about Chanel either, what lead her out of her house that night with someone her family didnt’ know who came to the door looking for her. All I know is here in New Orleans there are too many golems with guns, soulless shells who will take a life without much more thought than to take out and light a cigarette, and they move through the life of the streets like sharks through schools of fish, predators and prey trapped together in the currents of only place they know to live.

I remember what I wrote about Chanel and it applies to Carmen as well. Whatever lead them out into the night with a stranger, a night that ended with a gunshot, both were once small children not much different than my own, as innocent as lambs in the lap of Sunday school Jesus. If their deaths cease to matter to you, matters no more than the condition of the bad schools your children didn’t attend or the trouble on streets you never cross; if the broken families of people who pulled two or three tours in Iraq don’t bother you then consider this:

The next time you see some kid on the corner eyeballing you at the stoplight, the one in the chee-wee haircut with the long white t-shirt, don’t avoid his gaze. Look straight back at him. If that bulge at his waist looks like it might be a gun don’t turn away or run the light. Look hard, as if into a mirror at your own cold and soulless reflection in his eyes.

That is what matters.

Okay, so I shouldn't have posted the Palin picture in a Sukkot post. My apologies there as a Yiddishe maideleh.

It's actually more appropriate for Purim...