...And speaking of labor, happy Labor Day!
Update: Positive fall-out: people figure it out. (Language alert --seriously-- but see the links at the end of the post). A little late, I'd say! Some of us stopped reading him in 2005. Remember this Amy Welborn post?
Update 2: A nice round-up of "religious" reaction to the news that Bristol Palin is expecting. The only judgmental comments I've heard have come from those who ordinarily aren't opposed to pre-marital sex. Obama handles it well:
I have said before, and I will repeat again: People's families are off-limits," Obama said. "And people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn’t be a topic of our politics.Mr. W. sent me this piece in Time that's making the rounds. Worth a read.
People in Wasilla are Alaskan tough, so not only does a thing like teen pregnancy not seem like anyone's damn business, but it's also not seen as the calamity so many people in the lower 48 might think it is. This is dangerous country — it's not just the roughneck jobs on cable reality shows. It's real life here. I listened to the absolutely heartbreaking story of how the godfather of Track Palin, Sarah's oldest son, died in small plane crash just minutes after having dropped off four kids. Another family invited me into their home and told their incredible story; with one son in Iraq, their other son was working on a conveyor line in Anchorage, got cWheat & Weedsaught in the belt and had his head partially crushed. He lived to stand across the kitchen table from me and his parents, looking fully healed just three months later, grinning at his dumb luck and wondering what comes next in life. "It makes you realize that a thing like a little teenage pregnancy isn't such a big deal," his mom said. "Bristol—and lots of other girl like her out there — are going to be just fine."The interesting thing in that piece is that Bristol's pregnancy was well-known in the Palin's hometown. Which comports with what Byron York reports here after talking with a columnist and former editor of the Anchorage Daily News:
As far as the fake baby story was concerned, Carey told me that the rumors were going around in Alaska a few months ago, not long after the birth of Sarah Palin's fifth child. He told me that Daily News reporters and editors explored the story quite extensively, and, as Carey said on NPR, "could find no basis for it except that people who didn't like Sarah Palin believed it." He told me that Daily News reporters talked at length to the Palins about it — Carey said the Palins were actually eager to talk about the rumor because they knew how much it had spread around Alaska. He also said Daily News reporters looked into the medical angle of the rumor, which included talking to at least one doctor involved, and again found nothing to support the story. In the end, Carey told me, the newspaper became "convinced that it was not true."York wonders why no one reporting the baby fake rumor bothered to do even the elemental homework --like call the Anchorage Daily News?
