There’s been a lot to write about this week. However, I also need to make a living. In an effort to clear out my queue, here are interesting links that I’ve wanted to post. Basically, this is a round-up of all the Palin news that has interested me.

Sarah Palin’s publishing and political worlds in collision
Mary Matalin, CNN.com

“Going Rogue” will now be a “comp” (or baseline) for assessing the value of and advances for political “big books,” so all you big book writers of the future better hope it sells big — or your future advances won’t be.

What Palin’s Detractors Don’t Understand
John Hudson, Atlantic Wire

A New Style of Feminist Her Detractors Will Never Appreciate, writes Melanie Kirkpatrick in The Wall Street Journal: “Mrs. Palin’s veep candidacy ignited fury on the left and much skewed reporting in the mainstream media. It is probably too much to hope that a book that begins at the Right to Life booth at the Alaska State Fair will inspire her critics to read on. But if they do, they’ll find themselves in the company of a woman whose views are more nuanced than they were portrayed to be during the campaign… Through it all, Mrs. Palin emerges as a new style of feminist: a politician who took on the Ole Boy network and won; a wife with a supportive husband whose career takes second place to hers; and a mother who, unlike working women of an earlier age, isn’t shy about showcasing her family responsibilities. She writes with sensitivity and affection about her gay college roommate, and she confesses her anguish when she found out that she was carrying a baby with Down syndrome. That experience, she says, helped her to understand why a woman might be tempted to have an abortion. This is not the prejudiced, dim-witted ideologue of the popular liberal imagination.”

Who’s Team Is It, Anyway?
Katha Pollitt, The Nation

Women Democrats have taken an awful lot of hits for the team lately. Many of us didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary because the goal of electing a woman seemed less important than the goal of electing the best possible president. Only a self-hater or a featherhead didn’t feel some pain about that. And although women are hardly alone in this, we’ve seen some pretty big hopes set aside in the first year of the Obama administration. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which would expand women’s protections against sexism in the workplace, is on the back burner. Meanwhile, the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is not only alive and well; it’s newly staffed with antichoicers like Alexia Kelley of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, who, as Frances Kissling notes in Salon, has compared abortion to torture.

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