Let me just come out and say this right off the bat : We need more black and latina feminists on TV tearing into the right wing's forced pregnancy frame to reproductive rights.

I had the honor again to participate in Melissa Long's livecasting from the conventions. In the first one at the DNC we barely spoke of women's issues. Ironically here in St. Paul and with Palin's nomination the discussion was almost exclusively about her and about women's rights.

Which is why am being very candid about the need to put more colored feminists into these traditional media settings. Our perspectives on reproductive and women's rights are not filtered necessarily through the need to curtail our ability to have children as much as having the right to not have the government control our bodies by claiming surrogate ownership.

Which is why it is outrageous to me that someone as young and seemingly intelligent as Amanda Carpenter from Town Hall will go on wailing about how Palin is being vilified for not aborting her Down Syndrome child.

Is she serious?!?!

It is outrageous and completely insulting to me that women like her will frame reproductive rights in terms of abortion when black and latina women like me know that one of the biggest battles we have are the various eugenic efforts in the United States of forced sterilization in communities of color.

Meaning, at times there have been efforts to have colored women abort or just not have any children at all whatsoever.

What is an Amanda Carpenter or even a Sarah Palin going to say about that?

I stand by what I had said earlier about Palin's nomination : The Republicans have lost an incredible opportunity. They could have had a real fighting chance at cannibalizing women's votes from the Democratic Party had they picked someone like Christine Todd-Whitman or other socially moderate yet fiscally conservative Republican women. Christine would have been the perfect Republican stand-in for Hillary Clinton and they blew it.

Who do they go with?

A woman who is so to the extreme right of George Bush, who may have had her political baptism in a secessionist and anti-US government party. A woman who doesn't believe women should have access to birth control and who believes that if her daughter were to become pregnant through rape or incest she should be forced to go to term. A woman who not only believes reproductive science education is evil but who went ahead and cut funding to her state's teen pregnancy outreach program all the while hiding her own teenage daughter's pregnancy.

And that's just her values vis a vis women's issues. Don't get me started on her desire to blast the Arctic for oil, on her eagerness to slaughter endangered species and on her belief there ought to be no separation of Church and State.

Seriously, Sarah Palin is the worst that could have happen to Republican women. She's the standard bearer of everything thats wrong with the GOP when there's so much right in some of their women leaders.

What about, again, of Christine Todd-Whitman?

What about Meg Whitman?

What about Carly Fiorina?

Heck, I'll give you even Olympia Snowe.

As a feminist, Palin is a huge mistake and a huge step backwards for women rights. As a Democrat, of course she's a godsend and many like me are ecstatic at the prospect of seeing the GOP ticket implode.

Sarah Palin set the GOP ticket so much to the right of the Bush administration that there is no way they have a chance of winning in November.

So people, start getting used to the words "President Obama".

And be nice by thanking Sarah Palin.