Probably not all that much as long as she keeps the child, marries the father, and lives happily ever after. Hmm, have they stated Palin's stance on abstinence yet? Id guess from the rest of what I've heard about her that she'd be firmly in the no-sex-before-marriage camp, but is she actually?

Works real well.

Would the kid have been made to marry her unborn child's father regardless, do you think, or is she being pushed into it a little harder because of her mother's political ambition? 

The Republicans have done a decent job solidifying support from their core voter base, probably drawn in a handful of irrational angry ex-Dems, but alienated any moderates who probably were a toss up anyway.

This is the fun thing about your American politics, is that it really *is* that polarized, compared to say, Canada.

Don't get me wrong, we're far from a unified agreeable mass, and there's always the handful of folks who are at the far ends of the spectrum, but by and large it's mostly just varying flavors of grey with the occasional big divides. Part of it is, we're hard-pressed to keep railing back and forth on a social issue once it's been dealt with. Take the whole gay marriage thing. There was some talk in the last election about re-opening it for a vote again. Never happened. Why? Because quite frankly the majority of Canadians were sick and tired of talking about it, especially when we had things like, say, a tanking economy that deserved more attention. Also, there's far less of a religious component to our politics as a whole. I have no idea why. Maybe it's because we have some natural aversion of confrontation over these things. Maybe we really are that liberal, or maybe we don't get our panties in a bunch over stupid social shit when there's more important stupid economic, environmental, and war shit to deal with. Most of our major disagreements are with minor details, rather than with a position or policy as a whole. We don't tend to have that many major policy decisions that set us vastly in opposition to one another. Recent exceptions being the war in Afghanistan. But things like abortion or gay marriage? I can't remember the last time they got brought up in any level of serious policy-making discussion since we last dealt with them and effectively put them to rest. Of course, the lack of big highly-polarizing issues is probably also why no one really gives much of a damn about politics here as much as in the States, and also why, when coupled with multiple parties, we probably get a whole lot less accomplished.

But, I digress, we're not talking about Canada, here. We're talking about the States. You have two highly charged, high energy, polarized groups with substantially large support bases, which are by and large, likely to not change. Most serious Democrats are probably going to always vote Dem, the Republicans have a similar sized chunk of people who are much the same way. And then you've got that middle chunk of swing voters, which I figure are probably split into two relatively equal groups: the group that couldn't give two shits about most social issues and is primarily concerned about the economy; and the ones who vote based entirely off of pure emotion or feeling, or looks, and doesn't really give much of a damn about any issues at all.

Fun times with ballots.

Hey there, Barr, McKinney, Nader, and Baldwin all deserve their own slot.

The extremes of either liberal or conservative here love to bash the other side as unthinking while maintaining the moral high ground for their own party.  The thing is, they're not really the majority opinion, they just happen to be the loudest.  I think most Americans have the ability to make rational decisions and weigh the pros and cons of each party's platform individually instead of getting all hopped up, froth at the mouth stupid over the "evil" other side.

I mean look how evenly most elections are split.  If you go here and look at the popular vote results (instead of the electoral college results) you'll see that you have to go back to 1972 before you get a really clear majority vote for one candidate over the other.

I think the republicans were thinking they could get Palin by despite her flaws due to her having a vagina, simple as that.  I mean you've got the PUMA people who only see the election in terms of gender who the Republicans are trying to court.  What stronger way to get them than to throw a woman onto the ticket?  The rest of America... well... they've got a fairly short attention span and the Obama campaign isn't going to harp away on Palin's daughter because that's not the kind of campaign they're running.  Unfortunately, I think in the long run this will prove to be a non-issue.

In a stunning display of hypocrisy, it was Glenn Beck who, a few months ago, blasted Jamie Lynn Spears for being an unwed teenage mother.