Author Paretsky: No Hillary supporter I know is supporting Palin

As you may know, I wear other hats besides television critic at the Kansas City Star. I'm also a small publisher and in that capacity, I've been asked each of the past two years to serve on the advisory committee for the Kansas Notable Book Award, entering its fourth year at the State Library of Kansas.

The 2008 winners were honored Tuesday at the Capitol in Topeka, among them Sara Paretsky, author of the popular V.I. Warshawski novels. Her book that won the Notable award, however, was a riveting collection of nonfiction first-person essays called Writing in an Age of Silence. In it she writes about her childhood in Kansas, the political climate of the 1960s, the awakening of her own feminism, the attack on civil liberties and our obsession with terrorism and biological warfare.

After the ceremony I buttonholed her to talk about the topic on many women's minds this week: John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate.

Calling McCain's pick a "wonderful, cynical moment in American politics," Paretsky said having a woman on the Republican ticket wasn't going to convince her or any Hillary Clinton supporter she knew to abandon the Democratic ticket, given Sarah Palin's hostility to reproductive rights. Still, it wouldn't surprise her if some women did cross over, as women have always opposed women's rights going back to the pre-suffrage era.

Speaking of history, we also talked about a similarly bitter moment in American political history, when women and African Americans were pitted against each other over voting rights, as Mrs. TV Barn has written about.

A word about the video quality here -- it's bad. This was the first video I shot on my new LG Dare phone. It's not the Dare's fault; I had dragged Paretsky over to a lighted window, not realizing that the superior optics and low-light capabilities of my new phone would have allowed us to do the interview in Dick Cheney's bunker. Anyway, I'll get better, and this video is still worth a play.