Palin courted conservative DC insiders and they swooned

It turns out that Sarah Palin didn't come out of Alaskan tundra to be picked by John McCain as his vice presidential candidate.

Richard Cohen reports in today's Washington Post that leading conservative intellectuals and activists were actively courted by Palin while cruising in Alaska more than two years ago.

Cohen writes:

In 2007, several conservative journalists got off their cruise ships and met Sarah Palin. They saw the present, and she was a babe.

The cruises were sponsored by the National Review and the Weekly Standard, journals of significant influence in conservative circles. The ships disgorged some top conservative editors and writers, who on two occasions were invited at the governor's mansion. Almost to a man, they were thunderstruck.

What followed, once everyone returned to the lower 48, was a gusher of mush -- praise, love notes, sweet nothings and, altogether, the sort of mooning one does not usually hear from the likes of William Kristol, Fred Barnes, Rich Lowry, Dick Morris and my Post colleague Michael Gerson. In short order, important writers set themselves the task, in print and on television, of promoting Palin and, in the process, making perfect asses of themselves. They succeeded at both.

The account of that summer of love comes from yet a third magazine, the New Yorker. In it, Jane Mayer detailed the efforts of the highly ambitious Palin to become well known in the Washington political-journalistic milieu she pretends, in proper demagogic fashion, to detest. After an apparently bravura saying of grace, she wowed her guests with some excellent halibut cheeks and the Category 4 force of her personality. Some of them sank into a kind of delirium known to high schoolers and praised her as "my heartthrob" (Kristol), "a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc" (Gerson) and, so far not evident, "smart" (Barnes).

The entire article is linked here.

McCain and Palin have crossed the line with their McCarthyite attacks

I received another McCain campaign mailer this weekend claiming that Barack Obama is a terrorist.

Enough is enough!

McCain, Palin and the Republican Party have crossed the line with their McCarthyite attempt to associate Barack Obama with Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground. Their irresponsible and dishonest ads are promoting an atmosphere of fear and anger that increases the potential for violence against Barack Obama and his campaign volunteers.

Barack Obama is a United States Senator, a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, constitutional law professor, and community organizer and a candidate for the President of the United States. His Grandfather fought in World War II. His Grandmother, gravely ill, was a bank Vice President.

He is no more a terrorist than I am the Pope!

Obama was 8 years old when Bill Ayers was active in the Weather Underground. The fact that Obama and Ayers, Chicago's Citizen of the Year in 1997, have served on some philanthropic boards together and live in the same neighborhood is irrelevant. I serve on several boards and know nothing about the personal or political histories of my fellow directors. Nor do I have any control over my neighbors political activities or their past actions even though I have been welcomed into their homes.

William C. Ibershof, the lead federal prosecutor of the Weathermen in the 1970s, recently repudiated McCain's efforts when he wrote::" I am amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers’s terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child."

It's a thoughtful letter that repudiates the McCain campaign's unprincipled attempt to malign Barack Obama for events that he had no role in.

McCain's suggestion that Obama condones violence and intimidation to pursue political objectives turns American history on its head.

Violence and terror have mainly been used as political weapons by the American right wing.

Following the Civil War the planter class that had provoked the War by seceding organized violent, white supremacist paramilitary organizations like the White League in Louisiana and the the Red Shirts in Mississippi, North and South Carolina, to terrorize and murder African- Americans for exercising their newly won freedoms.

Black political participation declined precipitously, reconstruction was betrayed and African Americans were stripped of their constitutional rights for almost 100 years.

The terrorist Ku Klux Klan enforced the post-reconstruction system of racial segregation (Jim Crow) throughout the south through beatings, cutting off fingers, burning down houses, and destroying the crops of African Americans.

Murder was common. There were 5,000 lynchings which were often treated like festivals by white families enjoying the spectacle of execution as entertainment in the post Civil War period. More often, victims were lynched by a small group of white vigilantes under the cover of night. While hanging was most common, some victims were beaten, burned, stabbed, shot, or slowly tortured to death.

Violence was also been routinely used against American workers for trying to bring democracy to the workplace. Workers were routinely fired, evicted from the company owned housing, beaten and murdered for simply trying to organize. From the Colorado and West Virginia coal wars through Andrew Carnegie's use of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to the Henry Ford's secret police headed by the notorious Harry Bennett, terror was employed by employers against their own employees.

More recently, terror was used by states rights extremists against Americans organizing non-violently to extend citizenship rights to African Americans.

Emmitt Till, Medgar Evers, Michael Schwerner Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Viola Liuzzo among others were brutally murdered. Others were viciously beaten, including Georgia Congressman John Lewis, and hosed. Bombings, most notoriously of the 16th Street Baptist Church, were frequent.

Pro-life terrorists bombed and burned women's health clinics and murdered doctors who performed legal abortions more than 150 times between 1982 and 1996.

McCain and Palin's attempt to undermine Barack Obama's growing support by labeling him a terrorist has not worked.

It won't because he is not and because the American people have real concerns like the losing their jobs, their homes, their life savings, their health care and their sons in daughters in an ill conceived war. But by suggesting that Barack Obama is a terrorist and associating him with the 9/11 attack on America, McCain and Palin are creating an atmosphere of hate and fear that is fertile ground for extremists among their followers.

If there is, God forbid, an attack on Barack Obama, the blood will be on their hands.

Sarah Palin's lipstickgate!

Remember when Sarah Palin talked about being a plain old hockey mom, a self-described pitbull with lipstick?

Well today we learned that Ms. Palin's been buying a whole lot of lipstick, and rouge too.

Or at least her traveling makeup artist, Amy Strozzi, was.

Now hockey moms know all about traveling teams. But traveling makeup artists? Not so much.

It turns out that Ms. Strozzi was the highest paid McCain staffer for the first two weeks of October taking home a sweet $22,800.

Not only that. Ms. Palin also has a traveling hair stylist, Angela Lew. She pocketed another $10,000.

And earlier this week we learned that the Republican Party dropped a cool $150,000 at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, not your typical hockey mom turf, outfitting Palin.

Of course, the serious issue is the McCain campaign's hypocrisy in trying to paint Senator Barack Obama as an out of touch elitist when it is John "I don't know how many houses I own" McCain and Sarah "Neiman Marcus" Palin who have tastes the rest of could only dream about.

Palin's geography: bobcats, moose and my hometown!

Sarah Palin drew some boos and shouts of confusion from her supporters yesterday, when while speaking in New Hampshire she mistakenly claimed that the Granite State was part of the "great Northwest.

"I like being here," she told the crowd in Laconia, "because it seems like here and in our last rally too -- other parts around this great Northwest -- here in New Hampshire you just get it."

I grew up in New Hampshire, on Oyster River Road in Durham, to be exact. Went to Oyster River High School and played ice hockey for the Bobcats, although we never saw one in Durham or there abouts. No moose or hockey moms either, although I hear there are plenty of both in the state now.

New Hampshire was in the Northeast, you know, bordered by Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont, when I left in 1966 to attend the University of Wisconsin. It's still there as far as I can tell.

McCain smear campaign has crossed the line!

There is a fine line between a smear campaign and an incitement to violence. The McCain Palin campaign has crossed that line.

Robert Kennedy-McCain, Palin and the Alaskan Independence Party!

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., noting that Sarah Palin and her husband have been affiliated as recently as two years ago with the Alaskan Independence Party whose aim is to secede from the United States asks:"... isn't it time the media start giving equal time to Palin's buddy list of anti-American bombers and other radical associates?

It's a thoughtful indictment of the McCain Palin campaign's use of McCarthy era-guilt-by- association tactics and of the media for allowing itself to be manipulated into focusing on non- issues.

It's linked here and worth the read.

Palin resurrects dire warning against dangers of Medicare!

Sarah Palin closed her debate with Joe Biden by quoting Ronald Reagan:

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.


What was the threat to American freedom that Reagan feared?

Incredibly, it was Medicare, the nation's old age health insurance system.

The quote comes from a a recording Reagan made for Operation Coffeecup — a campaign organized by the American Medical Association to block the passage of Medicare. Doctors’ wives were encouraged to organize coffees for patients, where they would play the Reagan recording, which declared that Medicare would lead us to totalitarianism.

You can't make this stuff up.

Medicare has been around since 1965. Former President Harry Truman was the first person to enroll in the program. Republicans have tried to undermine it through cuts and underfunding ever since, but it remains an efficient and valuable program that provides basic coverage for millions of senior citizens.

Reagan was employing scare tactics in a futile effort to stop legislation that the Republican Party opposed.

What was Palin thinking, or was she, when she resurrected a projection that was so wrong?

Maybe Tina Fey will provide us with an answer Saturday night!

Saturday Night Live does the VP debate

Post debate poll results and NYTimes analysis

CBS NEWS/KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS POLL of Uncommitted Voters who watched the debate

46% of uncommitted voters who watched the debate tonight thought Joe Biden was the winner.

21% thought Sarah Palin won, 33% thought it was a draw…

98% after the debate saw [Biden] as knowledgeable (79% before the debate).

Who did the best job in the debate?

Biden 51 Palin 36

Did Biden do better or worse than you expected?

Better 64 Worse 14 Same 20

Did Palin do better or worse than you expected?

Better 84 Worse 7 Same 8

Is Palin qualified to serve as president? (Question not asked about Biden.)

Yes Before debate: 42 After debate: 46

No Before debate: 54 After debate: 53

Evidently, most undecided voters agreed with the NY Times assessment of the debate:

Ms. Palin mainly relied on enthusiasm and humor, talking about hockey moms, soccer moms and Joe Sixpack almost as often as she used the word “maverick” to describe Mr. McCain or herself.

But she offered virtually no detail — beyond the Republican mantra of tax cuts — for how she and Mr. McCain would address the financial crisis or help Americans avoid foreclosure or what programs they would cut because of the country’s disastrous fiscal problems.

Ms. Palin’s primary tactic was simply to repeat the same thing over and over: John McCain is a maverick. So is she. To stay on that course, she had to indulge in some wildly circular logic: America does not want another Washington insider. They want Mr. McCain (who has been in Congress for nearly 26 years). Ms. Palin condemned Wall Street greed and said she and Mr. McCain would “demand” strict oversight. In virtually the next breath, she said government should “get out of the way” of American business.

There were occasional, disturbing flashes of the old, pre-campaign Sarah Palin. Asked about the causes of global warming, Ms. Palin suggested that man had some role — but she wasn’t saying how much.

In the end, the debate did not change the essential truth of Ms. Palin’s candidacy: Mr. McCain made a wildly irresponsible choice that shattered the image he created for himself as the honest, seasoned, experienced man of principle and judgment. It was either an act of incredible cynicism or appallingly bad judgment.

Sarah Palin's primetime meltdown

Alaskan women criticize Palin

McCain Palin administration would be worse than Bush Cheney!

Paul Krugman, prominent economist and New York Times columnist, writes;

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

...now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

The column is linked.

Palin hired lobbyist to pursue earmarks!

Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin and her supporters continue to claim she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere when in fact she supported it until it was on its deathbed.

She and John McCain claim she opposed "earmarks" when the truth is as Mayor she hired lobbyists to pursue them even as Joe Klein reports Alaska's oil revenues and federal deficits were soaring.

Palin sought $197 million in so-called "earmarks" for 2009. In the previous budget year, she asked for earmarks worth $256 million.

She claims she sold a state plane on eBay, for a profit. Neither claim is true.

The McCain Palin campaign is the most dishonest in recent memory as the attached CNN report makes clear.

Joe Klein: Republicans appeal to mythical past

Time Magazine's Joe Klein writes that Reagan's "...vision of the future was the past. He offered the temporal pleasures of tax cuts and an unambiguous anticommunism, but his real tug was on the heartstrings — it was "Morning in America." The Republican Party of Wall Street faded before the power of nostalgia for Main Street...at least a Main Street that existed before America began losing wars, became ostentatiously sexy and casually interracial. In his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Reagan talked about an America that existed "when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem." The blinding whiteness and fervent religiosity of the party he created are an enduring testament to the power of the myth of an America that existed before we had all these problems. The power of Sarah Palin is that she is the latest, freshest iteration of that myth. "


It's an interesting take on Palin's appeal.

Palin's extremist views are not good for women

Ellen Bravo, author, activist and UWM faculty member, writes in Crossroads today that John McCain's choice of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate "...was probably the most calculated political move he’s made."

"McCain is trying to pass off Palin as a career mom who knows the difficulties of balancing job and family — hoping women won’t notice the ticket’s opposition to every measure that would ease those difficulties, from expanding family leave to paid sick days to equal pay."


"The real question isn’t why McCain chose Palin, but why the media continues to give them both cover, pasting on the “maverick” and “moderate” labels as if listing these terms were equivalent to listing party affiliation and state."

I have linked the entire piece.

Republicans' Forked Tongues and the Gender Card

Palin mocks community organziers; defends the status quo!

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin ridiculed Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and community organizers in her speech Wednesday evening.

Reacting to legitimate questions that her political experience as the part-time Mayor in a town of only 5700 people had not equipped her to be a heart-beat away from the Presidency, she said: " I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities."

The response, which brought down the Republican house, is instructive.

First, contrary to McCain's repeated assertions last night that he would "end partisan rancor," Palin's response was a highly personal and partisan attack on Barack Obama and his experience as a community organizer.

It doesn't take a great memory to recall that George W. Bush also ran as a "uniter, not a divider. But once elected he became one of the most divisive and partisan Presidents in U.S. history.

The country is more polarized politically today than at any time in recent memory. Economic inequality, the divide between the very richest and the bottom 95 or even 99% is greater, wider, than at any time since immediately before the Great Depression.

The Republican Party and its current candidates may talk bipartisanship, but they do not walk the walk!

Sarah "Barracuda" Palin ridiculed community organizers.

Has she forgotten the contributions of Tom Paine, the Knights of Labor, the abolitionists and suffragettes, the Congress for Industrial Organization (CIO) labor organizers, the the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the United Farm Workers and more?

These organizations and the social movements they gave leadership to were not led by small town mayors, who more often than not opposed them, but by organizers like Tom Paine, Daniel Shay, A. Phillip Randolph, Nathaniel Bacon, Martin Luther King Jr. (the "non-partisan" John McCain opposed making his birthday a national holiday), Cesar Chavez, Saul Alinsky, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Paul Robeson, Father Groppi, Mother Jones, Sojourner Truth, David Walker, Jane Adams, Big Bill Haywood, and John L. Lewis.

Organizers and the social movements they led are responsible for expanding the democratic rights of citizenship from a small, elite group of wealthy white male property owners to almost all of Americans. They are responsible for winning the right to vote, regardless of race or gender, the elimination of slavery and child labor, Social Security and Medicare (opposed by the Republican Party of McCain and Palin), the Occupational Health and Safety Act, unemployment compensation, workers compensation, environmental protection, unions, and much, much more.

These social movements not only created this country, but have ensured that it live up to its promise that "all men (and women) are created equal and are endowed by their creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

McCain and Palin, whose party has been in power for the last eight years and most of the last forty, have tried to position themselves as agents of change. But in attacking the real agents of change and progress, they have tipped their hand. They will do anything to protect the power of the status quo.

McCain, Palin and their party have adopted the rhetoric of change and reform because they know the American people are dissatisfied with the state of the country after eight years of Republican Party leadership.

Don't be fooled by their rhetoric. Change is nothing more than a marketing tool to McCain and Palin.

If you liked the last eight years, you will love a McCain, Palin administration!

Palin selection raises serious questions about McCain's qualifications!

Today's New York Times editorial concludes that: " Choosing Ms. Palin raises serious questions about Mr. McCain’s qualifications."

It's linked here and worth the read.

Governor Sarah Palin: Iraq Invasion decreed by God

The Huffington Post reports that on June 8, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) addressed the graduating class of commission students at the Wasilla Assembly of God church. During that address, Palin portrayed the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a quest decreed by God, and said that U.S. soldiers were carrying out “God’s plan”:

" Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan."

During that speech, Palin also promoted a $30-billion natural gas pipeline project, stating, “God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built.”

McCain VP pick-"worst vetting ever!"

The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen writes that Republican Presidential nominee John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin was the "WORST VETTING EVER."

He writes: "

The Washington Post had an item yesterday quoting multiple McCain campaign aides who insisted that thorough vetting had been done on Sarah Palin. "Nobody was vetted less or more than anyone in the final stages, and John had access to all that information and made the decision," Rick Davis said.

If that's true, John McCain is overseeing the most incompetent political operation in recent memory. These guys had very little idea who Sarah Palin was before putting her on the national Republican ticket.

They've bragged that Palin opposed the famous "Bridge to Nowhere," only to learn that Palin supported the project and even told residents of Ketchikan that they weren't "nowhere" to her.... Likewise, though she cut taxes as mayor of Wassila, she raised the sales tax, making her hardly a tax cutter. [...]

McCain's campaign seemed unaware that she supported a windfalls profits tax on oil companies and that she is more skeptical about human contributions to global warming than McCain is.

They did not know that she took trips as the mayor of Wasilla to beg for earmarks.

They did not know that she told a television interviewer this summer that she did not fully understand what it is that a vice president does.

That last one was just a couple of months old. A 30-second search on Lexis-Nexis would have turned it up.

To reiterate a point from the weekend, the fact that Sarah Palin shouldn't be one heartbeat from leading the free world is obvious, but beside the point. The problem here is that John McCain's judgment is so comically flawed, the prospect of his presidency is starting to become quite literally frightening.

Even cursory vetting would have turned up some of these basic details of Palin's record. Indeed, her career in public office is so brief, this should have been extremely easy for even incompetent researchers. McCain, one assumes, would have demanded extensive background information before making a decision of this magnitude. Except, he didn't.

So, what are we left with here? John McCain met Sarah Palin in person once, for 15 minutes. Months later, he then talked to her on the phone for five minutes. Four days later, without a thorough background check, he invited her to be vice presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

Sensible people of sound mind and character simply don't do things like this. Leaders don't do things like this. Those fundamentally unsuited for the presidency do things like this.