{"id":2583,"date":"2010-02-24T21:00:16","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T21:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2583"},"modified":"2010-02-24T21:00:16","modified_gmt":"2010-02-24T21:00:16","slug":"this_is_long_ov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2583","title":{"rendered":"This Is Long Overdue"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s must-read is Dana Goldstein&#8217;s article in The Daily Beast on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/blogs-and-stories\/2010-02-22\/does-palin-have-disability-cred\/\">Sarah Palin and her credibility&#8211;or lack thereof&#8211;as an advocate for disability issues<\/a>. Goldstein points out that, despite Palin&#8217;s lip service to &#8220;special needs&#8221; families during the election, she has made very few substantive policy statements on disability topics. This has not gone unnoticed by disability advocates: <\/p>\n<p><b>&#8220;Since the end of the presidential election, we haven&#8217;t heard Sarah Palin articulate any specific policy proposals [on disability],&#8221; said Peter Berns, CEO of The Arc, a Beltway lobbying group representing people with intellectual disabilities. Like nine other national disability-rights leaders The Daily Beast spoke to, Berns pointed to Palin&#8217;s excusing of Rush Limbaugh&#8217;s use of the word &#8220;retarded&#8221;\u2014even as she hammered Emanuel, President Obama&#8217;s chief of staff, for the same sin\u2014as evidence of her lack of seriousness. &#8220;It has unfortunately politicized the issue in ways that are not productive, and it has converted what really are bipartisan issues into partisan ones,&#8221; Berns said.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>It became clear during the election that Palin was not a deep policy thinker, but it always annoyed me that the press swooned over the fact that she was a parent of a kid with Down&#8217;s Syndrome without closely examining her views on funding the services that people with disabilities need to get by in life. I don&#8217;t doubt that Palin loves her son, but I doubt she favors putting more money into Medicaid community-based services or stronger enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In fact, I doubt she&#8217;s spent enough time thinking about those issues enough to form an opinion. Palin is quick to call out perceived slights against her son and his disability, but a certain hollowness accompanies those protests because it seems that, for Palin, the disability community is a constituency of one.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks again to <a href=\"http:\/\/andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com\/the_daily_dish\/2010\/02\/does-palin-walk-the-walk-on-disability-issues.html#more\">Andrew Sullivan<\/a> for the tip. <\/p>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.zemanta.com\/pixy.gif?w=695\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s must-read is Dana Goldstein&#8217;s article in The Daily Beast on Sarah Palin and her credibility&#8211;or lack thereof&#8211;as an advocate for disability issues. Goldstein points out that, despite Palin&#8217;s lip service to &#8220;special needs&#8221; families during the election, she has made very few substantive policy statements on disability topics. This has not gone unnoticed by <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2583' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-FF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}