I didn't mention it in my previous rant because it didn't come up in the debate, but in a CBS interview last week, Katie Couric asked Sarah Palin about her position on abortion. I've had a number of conservatives question my support of Barack Obama because of his pro-choice position, and because of Palin's pro-life stance. However, what Palin actually said sounds pretty pro-choice to me:

I'm saying that, personally, I would counsel the person to choose life, despite horrific, horrific circumstances that this person would find themselves in. And, um, if you're asking, though, kind of foundationally here, should anyone end up in jail for having an abortion, absolutely not. That's nothing I would ever support. ...I don't think that [the morning-after pill] should necessarily be illegal.

Read the full transcript here.

The pro-life position is that abortion should be illegal, not just that it should be counseled against. The extreme pro-life position does not make exceptions for rape or incest, and considers the morning-after pill to be a form of abortion (despite the term "emergency contraceptive"). That is my position, and either Sarah Palin doesn't agree with that position or she completely failed to articulate her own position.

My reasoning, which I've explained here, is that life begins at conception and the right of the unborn child to live outweighs all other rights of the mother. The only exception I would make is for rare situations where the pregnancy jeopardizes the mother's health, since the child's right to life does not outweigh the mother's right to life (and, from a practical standpoint, if the mother dies while pregnant, the child likely dies with her, so this is a very important exception to make). But apart from that, the rights of the mother are completely irrelevant here. Of course women should have the right to make choices about their own bodies, but abortion goes beyond that to take away the life of another human being, and nobody has the right to do that (whether governments have that right, or whether someone has the right to take their own life, are separate discussions).

If Sarah Palin shares this position, but cannot articulate it, she is not qualified to be Vice-President. You may disagree with my position, but if after reading this you can at least understand it, then I have done what she could not, and I am not a politician whose job it is to communicate these kinds of ideas. I don't consider myself qualified to be Vice-President, and if she cannot articulate her positions, then she isn't either.

If, on the other hand, Palin does not share this position, then pro-life voters should not vote for McCain/Palin because of Palin's stance on abortion, since she is actually pro-choice. Since all the candidates are really pro-choice, I encourage you to base your decision on other issues.

Sarah Palin did an admirable job of memorizing her talking points. Unfortunately for her, the questions of tonight's debate occasionally strayed from the topics she had canned answers for. She even said herself, "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you [Sen. Biden] want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people...."

This is why when asked about McCain's health care plan, she instead talked about taxes and jobs. when Biden pointed out that McCain voted the same way as Obama on what Palin called a tax increase, Palin responded by talking about her record as Mayor. When asked what a McCain/Palin administration would have to do differently because of the economic crisis, she instead started talking about energy policy. When asked to respond to Biden's comments about McCain's position on subprime mortgages, she answered by talking about energy policy. When asked about carbon emissions caps and clean coal technology, she said "drill, baby, drill" is what Americans are hungry for. When asked about about a strategy for getting out of Iraq, she briefly mentioned that they do have a plan, in the middle of babbling about how important it is that we win the war.

Palin also reemphasized McCain's position that meeting with someone like Ahmadinejad without preconditions is dangerous and irresponsible; see my rant about that here.

Another thing she mentioned a few times that bothers me is how successful the surge has been, and she (like McCain) bashed Obama for his initial statements that the surge would not work. This is true - the surge has been successful. However, there are a couple of important points here: first, the Iraq war began in 2003, and the Bush administration was moving singlemindedly down the wrong path from the very beginning, up until the day after the 2006 midterm election when Democrats swept the House and picked up a narrow majority in the Senate. Suddenly the White House woke up, admitted that there was a problem, and began asking questions about how to fix it. A few months later, they had some answers that they labeled "the surge". It eventually became clear that this actually meant far more than a troop surge; the "surge" label actually refers to a complete change in strategy in Iraq. The new strategy is actually focussed on responding to real problems and winning the war, and this new strategy is working. A surge in troops without this change in strategy would not have worked, and that's what Obama was talking about, because the nature of this change in strategy was not made clear by the Bush administration. Of course that's a more complex explanation than can be stuffed into a sound bite.

Something else Palin screwed up on was citing Obama's voting record in instances where McCain voted exactly the same way that Obama did. Unfortunately both of them are guilty of selectively quoting an expert on something, and then claiming the other person's selective quoting of the same expert is wrong. For example, they both referred to the commanding general in Afghanistan, and amusingly neither of them could remember his name (Palin called him "McClellan"; they both were actually referring to Gen. David McKiernan).

It's frustrating when they agree with each other but can't bring themselves to admit it. The moderator had to draw the conclusion that they're both in agreement about gay marriage, because the candidates refused to say they agree.

I thought Palin did a little better in the last half of the debate. One thing she said that I thought was exactly right was that Biden and Obama can't seem to stop pointing backwards to assign blame; it would be nice if they would talk more about the future and less about the past.

I completely love Apple's <input type="search"> feature, and especially the placeholder attribute. I've decided to push for these to be implemented by other browsers, so I've submitted requests to WHATWG, Mozilla, and Opera for placeholder (and Mozilla and WebKit for a placeholder-color CSS property), and to Mozilla and Opera for <input type="search">. WHATWG says they will officially adopt them as part of the HTML 5 specification, and Google wants to implement them.

I'm not sure the best venue to make the same suggestions to the IE team, but they have a scheduled monthly chat that I intend to participate in two weeks from Thursday. Once WHATWG gets around to making them official, I'm sure Microsoft will get on board anyway, but there's no reason to wait for that.

You can send me e-mail at web@phroggy.com or use this form: