So I think I have reached the point where I am not sure what is going on with Sarah Palin. Part of me cannot WAIT for Thursday night's debate. But then, when i hear about this "debate camp" that Sarah Palin is now attending, i wonder what will happen. Will all of her coaching make her a decent debater? I dont want to lose faith in my boy Joe, but there is part of me that is nervous. I KNOW it comes from my cynical bulb, which bloomed in 2000.
Are the republicans making her seem like a dumb, ignorant, puppet woman to appeal to the evangelical sector who probably were appalled that a woman would have such a high powered position. But when they see she is submissive, they are ok with it. they probably wont even watch the debate, so is that when her "smarts" will come out?
I have all of these doubts, but then i see things like this:
and if America really is THAT stupid to vote for a guy who could likely die in office if elected, and make HER president, I really do not think I will be living in this country much longer. I have a back up husband in London (thank you, Mok) and i THINK I can somehow get a Canadian citizenship through my mom. Although, since I lived in London for over a year, and if McCain does indeed win, he will think I am qualified enough to be the embassador to the UK, so I may get my wish after all.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Friday, September 26, 2008
palin a mistake!
This is from the Huffington Post:
Jack Cafferty unloaded on Sarah Palin's "disastrous" interview with Katie Couric Friday afternoon on CNN, telling Wolf Blitzer, "There's a reason the McCain campaign keeps Governor Palin away from the press."
After showing a clip of Palin stumbling over Couric's question about the bailout and offering an answer connecting the bailout to healthcare, Cafferty asked, "Did you get that?"
He warned the viewers: "If John McCain wins this woman will be one 72-year-old's heartbeat away from being President of the United States. And if that doesn't scare the hell out of you, it should."
Watch:
Later, Cafferty continued, calling the clip "one of the most pathetic pieces of tape I have ever seen from someone aspiring to one of the highest offices in this country."
Cafferty's concerns were echoed by "a growing number of Republicans," according to Politico's Alexander Burns and David Paul Kuhn:
A growing number of Republicans are expressing concern about Sarah Palin's uneven -- and sometimes downright awkward -- performances in her limited media appearances.
Conservative columnists Kathleen Parker, a former Palin supporter, says the vice presidential nominee should step aside. Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing on the conservative National Review, says "that's not a crazy suggestion" and that "something's gotta change."
Tony Fabrizio, a GOP strategist, says Palin's recent CBS appearance isn't disqualifying but is certainly alarming. "You can't continue to have interviews like that and not take on water."
"I have not been blown away by the interviews from her, but at the same time I haven't come away from them thinking she doesn't know s--t," said Chris Lacivita, a GOP strategist. "But she ain't Dick Cheney, nor Joe Biden and definitely not Hillary Clinton."
Jack Cafferty unloaded on Sarah Palin's "disastrous" interview with Katie Couric Friday afternoon on CNN, telling Wolf Blitzer, "There's a reason the McCain campaign keeps Governor Palin away from the press."
After showing a clip of Palin stumbling over Couric's question about the bailout and offering an answer connecting the bailout to healthcare, Cafferty asked, "Did you get that?"
He warned the viewers: "If John McCain wins this woman will be one 72-year-old's heartbeat away from being President of the United States. And if that doesn't scare the hell out of you, it should."
Watch:
Later, Cafferty continued, calling the clip "one of the most pathetic pieces of tape I have ever seen from someone aspiring to one of the highest offices in this country."
Cafferty's concerns were echoed by "a growing number of Republicans," according to Politico's Alexander Burns and David Paul Kuhn:
A growing number of Republicans are expressing concern about Sarah Palin's uneven -- and sometimes downright awkward -- performances in her limited media appearances.
Conservative columnists Kathleen Parker, a former Palin supporter, says the vice presidential nominee should step aside. Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing on the conservative National Review, says "that's not a crazy suggestion" and that "something's gotta change."
Tony Fabrizio, a GOP strategist, says Palin's recent CBS appearance isn't disqualifying but is certainly alarming. "You can't continue to have interviews like that and not take on water."
"I have not been blown away by the interviews from her, but at the same time I haven't come away from them thinking she doesn't know s--t," said Chris Lacivita, a GOP strategist. "But she ain't Dick Cheney, nor Joe Biden and definitely not Hillary Clinton."
i really, really do not like him
this is from the Huffington Post:
After days of saying that John McCain would not attend Friday's presidential debate unless an agreement on a bailout package for the markets was "locked-down," the McCain campaign has gone back on its word.
On Friday, it announced that the Senator would head down to Mississippi even though, as they readily admit, much work remained needed on the bailout agreement.
The whole episode left even conservatives admitting that the McCain campaign looked erratic and a bit foolish with no apparent direction or guiding principle.
"It just proves his campaign is governed by tactics and not ideology," said Republican consultant Craig Shirley, who advised McCain earlier in this cycle. "In the end, he blinked and Obama did not. The 'steady hand in a storm' argument looks now to more favor Obama, not McCain."
Shirley added, "My guess is that plasma units are rushing to the McCain campaign as we speak to replace the blood flowing there from the fights among the staff."
Adding to the rocky perception was a McCain campaign web ad released this morning declaring "McCain Wins Debate!" -- put out even before the candidate had announced he was planning to debate.
After days of saying that John McCain would not attend Friday's presidential debate unless an agreement on a bailout package for the markets was "locked-down," the McCain campaign has gone back on its word.
On Friday, it announced that the Senator would head down to Mississippi even though, as they readily admit, much work remained needed on the bailout agreement.
The whole episode left even conservatives admitting that the McCain campaign looked erratic and a bit foolish with no apparent direction or guiding principle.
"It just proves his campaign is governed by tactics and not ideology," said Republican consultant Craig Shirley, who advised McCain earlier in this cycle. "In the end, he blinked and Obama did not. The 'steady hand in a storm' argument looks now to more favor Obama, not McCain."
Shirley added, "My guess is that plasma units are rushing to the McCain campaign as we speak to replace the blood flowing there from the fights among the staff."
Adding to the rocky perception was a McCain campaign web ad released this morning declaring "McCain Wins Debate!" -- put out even before the candidate had announced he was planning to debate.
Rash Decision Maker
as we eagerly await McCain's decision weather or not to debate Barack Obama tonight, I cant help but wonder: if this going to help him or hurt him?
the little ball of hope in me thinks "oh my god, this could be it, this could be what ruins McCain"
then the little black ball of skepticism says "remember these are the Americans you are dealing with, there are some people who think that he is being honorable doing this."
so. i don't know. i am so MANIC with this whole election. i swear. i am up and down. up on the polls, down on the polls, up on McCain's decision, down on it. up on the celebrity endorsements for obama, down on them. i have days when i tear up thinking of Obama winning, and days when I tear up thinking about this country having McCain/Palin in the White House.
I saw on CNN last night that this whole decision of McCains is also manic - they say it is going to either really hurt him or really help him. and they think it was a rash decision. of COURSE it was. every decision he makes is rash!
So let's ask ourselves: do we really want a President who will make RASH, selfish decisions? NO. Do we really want someone who will be a big baby and say "NO! I'm not gonna debaaaaaaaaaate!!!!" and stamp his foot? That is what he is doing! and we can't let it happen! I read yesterday that he wants to postpone it until next Friday, and have it REPLACE the vice-presidential debate. Well, I can tell you one thing: Joe Biden cannot WAIT to destroy Sarah Palin in that, so that IS NOT going to happen. i wonder WHY McCain wants that to happen? is it because he has realized his RASH decision to pick Palin was NOT a good one?!
Let's hope that this latest rash decision of McCains will only help Obama. We'll take whatever we can get during this corrupt time.
the little ball of hope in me thinks "oh my god, this could be it, this could be what ruins McCain"
then the little black ball of skepticism says "remember these are the Americans you are dealing with, there are some people who think that he is being honorable doing this."
so. i don't know. i am so MANIC with this whole election. i swear. i am up and down. up on the polls, down on the polls, up on McCain's decision, down on it. up on the celebrity endorsements for obama, down on them. i have days when i tear up thinking of Obama winning, and days when I tear up thinking about this country having McCain/Palin in the White House.
I saw on CNN last night that this whole decision of McCains is also manic - they say it is going to either really hurt him or really help him. and they think it was a rash decision. of COURSE it was. every decision he makes is rash!
So let's ask ourselves: do we really want a President who will make RASH, selfish decisions? NO. Do we really want someone who will be a big baby and say "NO! I'm not gonna debaaaaaaaaaate!!!!" and stamp his foot? That is what he is doing! and we can't let it happen! I read yesterday that he wants to postpone it until next Friday, and have it REPLACE the vice-presidential debate. Well, I can tell you one thing: Joe Biden cannot WAIT to destroy Sarah Palin in that, so that IS NOT going to happen. i wonder WHY McCain wants that to happen? is it because he has realized his RASH decision to pick Palin was NOT a good one?!
Let's hope that this latest rash decision of McCains will only help Obama. We'll take whatever we can get during this corrupt time.
McCain really is a big baby...
This is from the Huffington Post.
Inside an intense White House meeting over the financial crisis on Thursday, where nearly every key player came to an agreement on the outlines of the bailout package, Sen. John McCain stuck out. The Republican candidate, according to sources with direct knowledge, sat quiet through most of the meeting, never offered specifics, and spoke only at the end to raise doubts about the rough compromise that the White House and congressional leaders were nearing.
McCain's reluctance to jump on board the bailout agreement could throw the entire week-long negotiation into a tailspin. Sen. Chris Dodd, after leaving the White House, suggested on CNN that the tenuous process could be derailed by what he viewed as McCain's political motives.
"What happened here, basically, if you want an honest appraisal of the thing, we have been spending a lot of time and I am tired. I have spent almost seven straight days at this in trying to come out with a workout plan for our economy a rescue plan," said Dodd. "What this looked like to me was a rescue plan for John McCain for two hours and took us away from the work we are trying to do today. Serious people trying to do serious work to come up with an answer."
According to the source with knowledge of the White House gathering -- which featured both presidential candidates, congressional leaders and the President -- virtually ever key figure in the room, save McCain and GOP Sen. Richard Shelby, were in agreement over a revised version of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's plan.
Towards the end, McCain finally spoke up, mentioning a counter-proposal that had been offered by some conservative House Republicans, which would suspend the capital gains tax for two years and provide tax incentives to encourage firms that buy up bad debt. McCain did not discuss specifics of the plan, though, and was non-committal about supporting it.
Paulson, however, argued directly against the conservative proposal. "He said that he did not think it would work," according to the source. At another point in the meeting, President Bush chimed in, "If money isn't loosened, this sucker could go down" -- and by sucker he meant economy.
ABC News reported that, following the meeting, Paulson "walked into the room where Democrats were caucusing...at the White House and pleaded with them 'please don't blow this up.'" But this story isn't incomplete, according to sources.
Democrats stayed talking in the Roosevelt room and Paulson approached them. After his comment, Speaker Pelosi and Rep. Barney Frank shot back that the real problem was with House Republicans. Paulson replied, "I know, I know," as he got down on one knee to lighten the mood. Pelosi joked back, "I didn't know you were a Catholic."
After the White House meeting, Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, restated his long-standing opposition to the bailout, and suggested that a deal was not, as reported earlier in the day, imminent. But Shelby's no. 2 on the committee, Sen. Bob Bennett, supports the compromise principles, as do other top GOP House and Senate leaders.
Dodd himself was incensed that the hard work he and others had put in could be undermined at the last minute.
"We were told it came out of the Republican House. We were told at this one point that this was maybe John McCain was floating the idea that Hank Paulson was considering it," Dodd said of the proposal, which he did not elaborate upon. "And of course Barney Frank and I, along with Republicans from the House and the Senate, had spent three hours this morning working on a different core. We were told for the last seven days it was the core issue to give the Secretary authority to move with the crisis, but simultaneously protect the taxpayers and accountability and deal with foreclosure issues all of the things the president mentioned last evening were going to be important as well."
Obama himself did not directly take McCain to task at his post-meeting press avail, but suggested that his methods were not helping the process.
"What I found and I think was confirmed today when you inject presidential politics into delicate negotiations it is not necesary as helpsful as it could be," he said, according to Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown. "When you are not worried about who is getting credit and who is getting blamed you tend to move forward more constructively."
UPDATE: CBS News reports that McCain's alternative proposal includes "fewer regulations and corporate tax breaks"
Inside an intense White House meeting over the financial crisis on Thursday, where nearly every key player came to an agreement on the outlines of the bailout package, Sen. John McCain stuck out. The Republican candidate, according to sources with direct knowledge, sat quiet through most of the meeting, never offered specifics, and spoke only at the end to raise doubts about the rough compromise that the White House and congressional leaders were nearing.
McCain's reluctance to jump on board the bailout agreement could throw the entire week-long negotiation into a tailspin. Sen. Chris Dodd, after leaving the White House, suggested on CNN that the tenuous process could be derailed by what he viewed as McCain's political motives.
"What happened here, basically, if you want an honest appraisal of the thing, we have been spending a lot of time and I am tired. I have spent almost seven straight days at this in trying to come out with a workout plan for our economy a rescue plan," said Dodd. "What this looked like to me was a rescue plan for John McCain for two hours and took us away from the work we are trying to do today. Serious people trying to do serious work to come up with an answer."
According to the source with knowledge of the White House gathering -- which featured both presidential candidates, congressional leaders and the President -- virtually ever key figure in the room, save McCain and GOP Sen. Richard Shelby, were in agreement over a revised version of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's plan.
Towards the end, McCain finally spoke up, mentioning a counter-proposal that had been offered by some conservative House Republicans, which would suspend the capital gains tax for two years and provide tax incentives to encourage firms that buy up bad debt. McCain did not discuss specifics of the plan, though, and was non-committal about supporting it.
Paulson, however, argued directly against the conservative proposal. "He said that he did not think it would work," according to the source. At another point in the meeting, President Bush chimed in, "If money isn't loosened, this sucker could go down" -- and by sucker he meant economy.
ABC News reported that, following the meeting, Paulson "walked into the room where Democrats were caucusing...at the White House and pleaded with them 'please don't blow this up.'" But this story isn't incomplete, according to sources.
Democrats stayed talking in the Roosevelt room and Paulson approached them. After his comment, Speaker Pelosi and Rep. Barney Frank shot back that the real problem was with House Republicans. Paulson replied, "I know, I know," as he got down on one knee to lighten the mood. Pelosi joked back, "I didn't know you were a Catholic."
After the White House meeting, Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, restated his long-standing opposition to the bailout, and suggested that a deal was not, as reported earlier in the day, imminent. But Shelby's no. 2 on the committee, Sen. Bob Bennett, supports the compromise principles, as do other top GOP House and Senate leaders.
Dodd himself was incensed that the hard work he and others had put in could be undermined at the last minute.
"We were told it came out of the Republican House. We were told at this one point that this was maybe John McCain was floating the idea that Hank Paulson was considering it," Dodd said of the proposal, which he did not elaborate upon. "And of course Barney Frank and I, along with Republicans from the House and the Senate, had spent three hours this morning working on a different core. We were told for the last seven days it was the core issue to give the Secretary authority to move with the crisis, but simultaneously protect the taxpayers and accountability and deal with foreclosure issues all of the things the president mentioned last evening were going to be important as well."
Obama himself did not directly take McCain to task at his post-meeting press avail, but suggested that his methods were not helping the process.
"What I found and I think was confirmed today when you inject presidential politics into delicate negotiations it is not necesary as helpsful as it could be," he said, according to Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown. "When you are not worried about who is getting credit and who is getting blamed you tend to move forward more constructively."
UPDATE: CBS News reports that McCain's alternative proposal includes "fewer regulations and corporate tax breaks"
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
is he chicken?
so not too long ago, McCain announced he is suspending his campaign, and would like to cancel/postpone Friday's debate because of the crisis with the economy. part of me thinks it is him chickening out of the debate - he is way down in the polls, sarah palin has lost her magic touch, and just not too long ago, he declared there was no economic crisis. Suddenly, it is HUGE. well, McCain, I hate to break it to you, but there has been an economic crisis for AWHILE now, and suddenly you decide to do something about it!?!?! here is an article from the huffington post:
McCain Asks To Postpone Friday Debate Due To Economic Crisis
Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., delivers a statement to the traveling press corps in New York, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2008, that he is directing his staff to work with Barack Obama's campaign and the debate commission to delay Friday's debate because of the economic crisis.
NEW YORK — Republican presidential nominee John McCain challenged rival Barack Obama on Wednesday to suspend their heated campaign, postpone Friday's debate and work together to deal with the nation's financial troubles. Obama did not immediately respond to his rival's bold political move, but Obama campaign officials say the senator is inclined to move ahead with the debate.
McCain said the Bush administration's Wall Street bailout plan seemed headed for defeat and a bipartisan solution was urgently needed. The move was an effort by the Republican to claim leadership on an issue that has been troublesome for him at a time when his rival is moving ahead in the polls.
McCain said he would put politics aside and return to Washington Thursday to focus on the nation's financial problems after addressing former President Clinton's Global Initiative session in New York. McCain said he had spoken to President Bush and asked him to convene a leadership meeting in Washington that would include him and Obama.
"It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the administration's proposal," McCain said. "I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time."
McCain said he has spoken to Obama about his plans and asked the Democratic presidential nominee to join him.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid issued a statement saying the debate should go on because "we need leadership, not a campaign photo op."
The University of Mississippi said it was going forward with preparation for the debate in Oxford. "We are ready to host the debate, and we expect the debate to occur as planned," the school said, adding that it had received no notification of any change in the timing or venue.
The Obama campaign said in a statement that Obama had called McCain around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday to propose that they issue a joint statement in support of a package to help fix the economy as soon as possible. McCain called back six hours later and agreed to the idea of the statement, the Obama campaign said. McCain's statement was issued to the media a few minutes later.
"We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved," McCain said. "I am confident that before the markets open on Monday we can achieve consensus on legislation that will stabilize our financial markets, protect taxpayers and homeowners, and earn the confidence of the American people. All we must do to achieve this is temporarily set politics aside, and I am committed to doing so."
McCain's statement was an effort to show leadership on an issue that has spread economic fears across the country and overshadowed the presidential campaign just six weeks from Election Day. The economy has not been McCain's strongest suit, and his move was an attempt to turn it into an opportunity to show he's the candidate of bipartisanship and action. Recent polls showed Obama with an advantage with voters in handling the economy.
The move put Obama in a bind. Rejecting the idea would allow McCain alone to appear above politics, but agreeing to suspend campaigning and the debate could make Obama look like he's following McCain's lead.
McCain said if Congress does not pass legislation to address the crisis, credit will dry up, people will no longer be able to buy homes, life savings will be at stake and businesses will not have enough money
"If we do not act, ever corner of our country will be impacted," McCain said. "We cannot allow this to happen."
McCain also canceled his planned appearance Wednesday on CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman" program.
A senior McCain adviser, Mark Salter, said the campaign would suspend all advertising and campaign events until a workable deal is reached on the bailout proposal _ but only if the Obama campaign agrees to do the same.
___
Associated Press Writer Nedra Pickler in Washington contributed to this report.
McCain Asks To Postpone Friday Debate Due To Economic Crisis
Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., delivers a statement to the traveling press corps in New York, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2008, that he is directing his staff to work with Barack Obama's campaign and the debate commission to delay Friday's debate because of the economic crisis.
NEW YORK — Republican presidential nominee John McCain challenged rival Barack Obama on Wednesday to suspend their heated campaign, postpone Friday's debate and work together to deal with the nation's financial troubles. Obama did not immediately respond to his rival's bold political move, but Obama campaign officials say the senator is inclined to move ahead with the debate.
McCain said the Bush administration's Wall Street bailout plan seemed headed for defeat and a bipartisan solution was urgently needed. The move was an effort by the Republican to claim leadership on an issue that has been troublesome for him at a time when his rival is moving ahead in the polls.
McCain said he would put politics aside and return to Washington Thursday to focus on the nation's financial problems after addressing former President Clinton's Global Initiative session in New York. McCain said he had spoken to President Bush and asked him to convene a leadership meeting in Washington that would include him and Obama.
"It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the administration's proposal," McCain said. "I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time."
McCain said he has spoken to Obama about his plans and asked the Democratic presidential nominee to join him.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid issued a statement saying the debate should go on because "we need leadership, not a campaign photo op."
The University of Mississippi said it was going forward with preparation for the debate in Oxford. "We are ready to host the debate, and we expect the debate to occur as planned," the school said, adding that it had received no notification of any change in the timing or venue.
The Obama campaign said in a statement that Obama had called McCain around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday to propose that they issue a joint statement in support of a package to help fix the economy as soon as possible. McCain called back six hours later and agreed to the idea of the statement, the Obama campaign said. McCain's statement was issued to the media a few minutes later.
"We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved," McCain said. "I am confident that before the markets open on Monday we can achieve consensus on legislation that will stabilize our financial markets, protect taxpayers and homeowners, and earn the confidence of the American people. All we must do to achieve this is temporarily set politics aside, and I am committed to doing so."
McCain's statement was an effort to show leadership on an issue that has spread economic fears across the country and overshadowed the presidential campaign just six weeks from Election Day. The economy has not been McCain's strongest suit, and his move was an attempt to turn it into an opportunity to show he's the candidate of bipartisanship and action. Recent polls showed Obama with an advantage with voters in handling the economy.
The move put Obama in a bind. Rejecting the idea would allow McCain alone to appear above politics, but agreeing to suspend campaigning and the debate could make Obama look like he's following McCain's lead.
McCain said if Congress does not pass legislation to address the crisis, credit will dry up, people will no longer be able to buy homes, life savings will be at stake and businesses will not have enough money
"If we do not act, ever corner of our country will be impacted," McCain said. "We cannot allow this to happen."
McCain also canceled his planned appearance Wednesday on CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman" program.
A senior McCain adviser, Mark Salter, said the campaign would suspend all advertising and campaign events until a workable deal is reached on the bailout proposal _ but only if the Obama campaign agrees to do the same.
___
Associated Press Writer Nedra Pickler in Washington contributed to this report.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Happy Birthday, Dad
I have to say Happy Birthday to my dad, and then share this latest polling number (though i DONT pay attention to polls):
Democrats lead battle for Congress
Posted: 03:46 PM ET
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Call it the overlooked election. An intense battle is going on right now for control of Congress, but it’s overshadowed in the media by a historic race for the White House.
So which party has the upper hand in the fight for Capitol Hill?
The answer, according to a new national poll, appears to be the Democrats. In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Tuesday, 56 percent of those questioned are backing the Democratic candidate for Congress, while 42 percent support the Republicans.
That’s a change from immediately after the GOP convention, when the Democrats had only a 3-point lead lead over the Republicans, 49 percent to 46 percent.
Democrats lead battle for Congress
Posted: 03:46 PM ET
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Call it the overlooked election. An intense battle is going on right now for control of Congress, but it’s overshadowed in the media by a historic race for the White House.
So which party has the upper hand in the fight for Capitol Hill?
The answer, according to a new national poll, appears to be the Democrats. In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Tuesday, 56 percent of those questioned are backing the Democratic candidate for Congress, while 42 percent support the Republicans.
That’s a change from immediately after the GOP convention, when the Democrats had only a 3-point lead lead over the Republicans, 49 percent to 46 percent.
Monday, September 22, 2008
I got this in an email - i'm not sure where it originated from, but I like it...
Trying to get my head straight on the upcoming election
I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight....
Trying to get my head straight on the upcoming election
I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight....
If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different.". Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.
If your name is Barack, you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim. Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.
Graduate from Harvard Law School and you are unstable. Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.
If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registr ation drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.
If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian. If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.
If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society. If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant , you're very responsible.
If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.
OK, much clearer now.
a conservative for Obama
i heard this read on the radio, and got it from the D Magazine's website:
A Conservative for Obama
My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.
Leading Off By Wick Allison, Editor In Chief
THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.
In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.
Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.
Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.
But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.
Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.
This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.
Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.
Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.
“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.
Write to wicka@dmagazine.com.
A Conservative for Obama
My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.
Leading Off By Wick Allison, Editor In Chief
THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.
In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.
Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.
Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.
But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.
Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.
This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.
Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.
Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.
“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.
Write to wicka@dmagazine.com.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
the truth keeps coming out...
Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes
By JO BECKER, PETER S. GOODMAN and MICHAEL POWELL
Published: September 13, 2008
This article is by Jo Becker, Peter S. Goodman and Michael Powell.
WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.
So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.
Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.
When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.
And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.
“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”
Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.
But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.
Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.
Still, Ms. Palin has many supporters. As a two-term mayor she paved roads and built an ice rink, and as governor she has pushed through higher taxes on the oil companies that dominate one-third of the state’s economy. She stirs deep emotions. In Wasilla, many residents display unflagging affection, cheering “our Sarah” and hissing at her critics.
“She is bright and has unfailing political instincts,” said Steve Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska. “She taps very directly into anxieties about the economic future.”
“But,” he added, “her governing style raises a lot of hard questions.”
Ms. Palin declined to grant an interview for this article. The McCain-Palin campaign responded to some questions on her behalf and that of her husband, while referring others to the governor’s spokespeople, who did not respond.
Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell said Ms. Palin had conducted an accessible and effective administration in the public’s interest. “Everything she does is for the ordinary working people of Alaska,” he said.
In Wasilla, a builder said he complained to Mayor Palin when the city attorney put a stop-work order on his housing project. She responded, he said, by engineering the attorney’s firing.
Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.
Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears. (Ms. Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects, and she has sued the federal government to block the listing of the bears as endangered.) An administration official told Mr. Steiner that his request would cost $468,784 to process.
When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show.
“Their secrecy is off the charts,” Mr. Steiner said.
State legislators are investigating accusations that Ms. Palin and her husband pressured officials to fire a state trooper who had gone through a messy divorce with her sister, charges that she denies. But interviews make clear that the Palins draw few distinctions between the personal and the political.
Last summer State Representative John Harris, the Republican speaker of the House, picked up his phone and heard Mr. Palin’s voice. The governor’s husband sounded edgy. He said he was unhappy that Mr. Harris had hired John Bitney as his chief of staff, the speaker recalled. Mr. Bitney was a high school classmate of the Palins and had worked for Ms. Palin. But she fired Mr. Bitney after learning that he had fallen in love with another longtime friend.
“I understood from the call that Todd wasn’t happy with me hiring John and he’d like to see him not there,” Mr. Harris said.
“The Palin family gets upset at personal issues,” he added. “And at our level, they want to strike back.”
Through a campaign spokesman, Mr. Palin said he “did not recall” referring to Mr. Bitney in the conversation.
Hometown Mayor
Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Ms. Palin’s first run for mayor in 1996, recalled the night the two women chatted about her ambitions.
“I said, ‘You know, Sarah, within 10 years you could be governor,’ ” Ms. Chase recalled. “She replied, ‘I want to be president.’ ”
Ms. Palin grew up in Wasilla, an old fur trader’s outpost and now a fast-growing exurb of Anchorage. The town sits in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, edged by jagged mountains and birch forests. In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration took farmers from the Dust Bowl area and resettled them here; their Democratic allegiances defined the valley for half a century.
In the past three decades, socially conservative Oklahomans and Texans have flocked north to the oil fields of Alaska. They filled evangelical churches around Wasilla and revived the Republican Party. Many of these working-class residents formed the electoral backbone for Ms. Palin, who ran for mayor on a platform of gun rights, opposition to abortion and the ouster of the “complacent” old guard.
After winning the mayoral election in 1996, Ms. Palin presided over a city rapidly outgrowing itself. Septic tanks had begun to pollute lakes, and residential lots were carved willy-nilly out of the woods. She passed road and sewer bonds, cut property taxes but raised the sales tax.
And, her supporters say, she cleaned out the municipal closet, firing veteran officials to make way for her own team. “She had an agenda for change and for doing things differently,” said Judy Patrick, a City Council member at the time.
But careers were turned upside down. The mayor quickly fired the town’s museum director, John Cooper. Later, she sent an aide to the museum to talk to the three remaining employees. “He told us they only wanted two,” recalled Esther West, one of the three, “and we had to pick who was going to be laid off.” The three quit as one.
Ms. Palin cited budget difficulties for the museum cuts. Mr. Cooper thought differently, saying the museum had become a microcosm of class and cultural conflicts in town. “It represented that the town was becoming more progressive, and they didn’t want that,” he said.
Days later, Mr. Cooper recalled, a vocal conservative, Steve Stoll, sidled up to him. Mr. Stoll had supported Ms. Palin and had a long-running feud with Mr. Cooper. “He said: ‘Gotcha, Cooper,’ ” Mr. Cooper said.
Mr. Stoll did not recall that conversation, although he said he supported Ms. Palin’s campaign and was pleased when she fired Mr. Cooper.
In 1997, Ms. Palin fired the longtime city attorney, Richard Deuser, after he issued the stop-work order on a home being built by Don Showers, another of her campaign supporters.
Your attorney, Mr. Showers told Ms. Palin, is costing me lots of money.
“She told me she’d like to see him fired,” Mr. Showers recalled. “But she couldn’t do it herself because the City Council hires the city attorney.” Ms. Palin told him to write the council members to complain.
Meanwhile, Ms. Palin pushed the issue from the inside. “She started the ball rolling,” said Ms. Patrick, who also favored the firing. Mr. Deuser was soon replaced by Ken Jacobus, then the State Republican Party’s general counsel.
“Professionals were either forced out or fired,” Mr. Deuser said.
Ms. Palin ordered city employees not to talk to the press. And she used city money to buy a white Suburban for the mayor’s use — employees sarcastically called it the mayor-mobile.
The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral.
“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.”
Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.
But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.
“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”
“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”
Reform Crucible
Restless ambition defined Ms. Palin in the early years of this decade. She raised money for Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from the state; finished second in the 2002 Republican primary for lieutenant governor; and sought to fill the seat of Senator Frank H. Murkowski when he ran for governor.
Mr. Murkowski appointed his daughter to the seat, but as a consolation prize, he gave Ms. Palin the $125,000-a-year chairmanship of a state commission overseeing oil and gas drilling.
Ms. Palin discovered that the state Republican leader, Randy Ruedrich, a commission member, was conducting party business on state time and favoring regulated companies. When Mr. Murkowski failed to act on her complaints, she quit and went public.
The Republican establishment shunned her. But her break with the gentlemen’s club of oil producers and political power catapulted her into the public eye.
“She was honest and forthright,” said Jay Kerttula, a former Democratic state senator from Palmer.
Ms. Palin entered the 2006 primary for governor as a formidable candidate.
In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist in the state, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Ms. Palin had conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. Ms. Palin handled the crisis with a street fighter’s guile.
“I told her it looks like she did the same thing that Randy Ruedrich did,” Mr. Jenkins recalled. “And she said, ‘Yeah, what I did was wrong.’ ”
Mr. Jenkins hung up and decided to forgo writing about it. His phone rang soon after.
Mr. Jenkins said a reporter from Fairbanks, reading from a Palin news release, demanded to know why he was “smearing” her. “Now I look at her and think: ‘Man, you’re slick,’ ” he said.
Ms. Palin won the primary, and in the general election she faced Tony Knowles, the former two-term Democratic governor, and Andrew Halcro, an independent.
Not deeply versed in policy, Ms. Palin skipped some candidate forums; at others, she flipped through hand-written, color-coded index cards strategically placed behind her nameplate.
Before one forum, Mr. Halcro said he saw aides shovel reports at Ms. Palin as she crammed. Her showman’s instincts rarely failed. She put the pile of reports on the lectern. Asked what she would do about health care policy, she patted the stack and said she would find an answer in the pile of solutions.
“She was fresh, and she was tomorrow,” said Michael Carey, a former editorial page editor for The Anchorage Daily News. “She just floated along like Mary Poppins.”
Government
Half a century after Alaska became a state, Ms. Palin was inaugurated as governor in Fairbanks and took up the reformer’s sword.
As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments, those with insider credentials were now on the outs. But a new pattern became clear. She surrounded herself with people she has known since grade school and members of her church.
Mr. Parnell, the lieutenant governor, praised Ms. Palin’s appointments. “The people she hires are competent, qualified, top-notch people,” he said.
Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.
“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ ”
The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.
To her supporters — and with an 80 percent approval rating, she has plenty — Ms. Palin has lifted Alaska out of a mire of corruption. She gained the passage of a bill that tightens the rules covering lobbyists. And she rewrote the tax code to capture a greater share of oil and gas sale proceeds.
“Does anybody doubt that she’s a tough negotiator?” said State Representative Carl Gatto, Republican of Palmer.
Yet recent controversy has marred Ms. Palin’s reform credentials. In addition to the trooper investigation, lawmakers in April accused her of improperly culling thousands of e-mail addresses from a state database for a mass mailing to rally support for a policy initiative.
While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a BlackBerry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”
Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account “when there was significant state business.”
On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin’s state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: “Frank, this is not the governor’s personal account.”
Mr. Bailey responded: “Whoops~!”
Mr. Bailey, a former midlevel manager at Alaska Airlines who worked on Ms. Palin’s campaign, has been placed on paid leave; he has emerged as a central figure in the trooper investigation.
Another confidante of Ms. Palin’s is Ms. Frye, 27. She worked as a receptionist for State Senator Lyda Green before she joined Ms. Palin’s campaign for governor. Now Ms. Frye earns $68,664 as a special assistant to the governor. Her frequent interactions with Ms. Palin’s children have prompted some lawmakers to refer to her as “the babysitter,” a title that Ms. Frye disavows.
Like Mr. Bailey, she is an effusive cheerleader for her boss.
“YOU ARE SO AWESOME!” Ms. Frye typed in an e-mail message to Ms. Palin in March.
Many lawmakers contend that Ms. Palin is overly reliant on a small inner circle that leaves her isolated. Democrats and Republicans alike describe her as often missing in action. Since taking office in 2007, Ms. Palin has spent 312 nights at her Wasilla home, some 600 miles to the north of the governor’s mansion in Juneau, records show.
During the last legislative session, some lawmakers became so frustrated with her absences that they took to wearing “Where’s Sarah?” pins.
Many politicians say they typically learn of her initiatives — and vetoes — from news releases.
Mayors across the state, from the larger cities to tiny municipalities along the southeastern fiords, are even more frustrated. Often, their letters go unanswered and their pleas ignored, records and interviews show.
Last summer, Mayor Mark Begich of Anchorage, a Democrat, pressed Ms. Palin to meet with him because the state had failed to deliver money needed to operate city traffic lights. At one point, records show, state officials told him to just turn off a dozen of them. Ms. Palin agreed to meet with Mr. Begich when he threatened to go public with his anger, according to city officials.
At an Alaska Municipal League gathering in Juneau in January, mayors across the political spectrum swapped stories of the governor’s remoteness. How many of you, someone asked, have tried to meet with her? Every hand went up, recalled Mayor Fred Shields of Haines Borough. And how many met with her? Just a few hands rose. Ms. Palin soon walked in, delivered a few remarks and left for an anti-abortion rally.
The administration’s e-mail correspondence reveals a siege-like atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes. Even some who helped engineer her rise have felt her wrath.
Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend of Ms. Palin, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found himself branded a “hater.”
It is part of a pattern, Mr. Fagan said, in which Ms. Palin characterizes critics as “bad people who are anti-Alaska.”
As Ms. Palin’s star ascends, the McCain campaign, as often happens in national races, is controlling the words of those who know her well. Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, has been asked not to speak to reporters, and aides sit in on interviews with old friends.
At a recent lunch gathering, an official with the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce asked its members to refer all calls from reporters to the governor’s office. Dianne Woodruff, a city councilwoman, shook her head.
“I was thinking, I don’t remember giving up my First Amendment rights,” Ms. Woodruff said. “Just because you’re not going gaga over Sarah doesn’t mean you can’t speak your mind.”
By JO BECKER, PETER S. GOODMAN and MICHAEL POWELL
Published: September 13, 2008
This article is by Jo Becker, Peter S. Goodman and Michael Powell.
WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.
So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.
Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.
When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.
And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.
“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”
Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.
But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.
Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.
Still, Ms. Palin has many supporters. As a two-term mayor she paved roads and built an ice rink, and as governor she has pushed through higher taxes on the oil companies that dominate one-third of the state’s economy. She stirs deep emotions. In Wasilla, many residents display unflagging affection, cheering “our Sarah” and hissing at her critics.
“She is bright and has unfailing political instincts,” said Steve Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska. “She taps very directly into anxieties about the economic future.”
“But,” he added, “her governing style raises a lot of hard questions.”
Ms. Palin declined to grant an interview for this article. The McCain-Palin campaign responded to some questions on her behalf and that of her husband, while referring others to the governor’s spokespeople, who did not respond.
Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell said Ms. Palin had conducted an accessible and effective administration in the public’s interest. “Everything she does is for the ordinary working people of Alaska,” he said.
In Wasilla, a builder said he complained to Mayor Palin when the city attorney put a stop-work order on his housing project. She responded, he said, by engineering the attorney’s firing.
Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.
Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears. (Ms. Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects, and she has sued the federal government to block the listing of the bears as endangered.) An administration official told Mr. Steiner that his request would cost $468,784 to process.
When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show.
“Their secrecy is off the charts,” Mr. Steiner said.
State legislators are investigating accusations that Ms. Palin and her husband pressured officials to fire a state trooper who had gone through a messy divorce with her sister, charges that she denies. But interviews make clear that the Palins draw few distinctions between the personal and the political.
Last summer State Representative John Harris, the Republican speaker of the House, picked up his phone and heard Mr. Palin’s voice. The governor’s husband sounded edgy. He said he was unhappy that Mr. Harris had hired John Bitney as his chief of staff, the speaker recalled. Mr. Bitney was a high school classmate of the Palins and had worked for Ms. Palin. But she fired Mr. Bitney after learning that he had fallen in love with another longtime friend.
“I understood from the call that Todd wasn’t happy with me hiring John and he’d like to see him not there,” Mr. Harris said.
“The Palin family gets upset at personal issues,” he added. “And at our level, they want to strike back.”
Through a campaign spokesman, Mr. Palin said he “did not recall” referring to Mr. Bitney in the conversation.
Hometown Mayor
Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Ms. Palin’s first run for mayor in 1996, recalled the night the two women chatted about her ambitions.
“I said, ‘You know, Sarah, within 10 years you could be governor,’ ” Ms. Chase recalled. “She replied, ‘I want to be president.’ ”
Ms. Palin grew up in Wasilla, an old fur trader’s outpost and now a fast-growing exurb of Anchorage. The town sits in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, edged by jagged mountains and birch forests. In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration took farmers from the Dust Bowl area and resettled them here; their Democratic allegiances defined the valley for half a century.
In the past three decades, socially conservative Oklahomans and Texans have flocked north to the oil fields of Alaska. They filled evangelical churches around Wasilla and revived the Republican Party. Many of these working-class residents formed the electoral backbone for Ms. Palin, who ran for mayor on a platform of gun rights, opposition to abortion and the ouster of the “complacent” old guard.
After winning the mayoral election in 1996, Ms. Palin presided over a city rapidly outgrowing itself. Septic tanks had begun to pollute lakes, and residential lots were carved willy-nilly out of the woods. She passed road and sewer bonds, cut property taxes but raised the sales tax.
And, her supporters say, she cleaned out the municipal closet, firing veteran officials to make way for her own team. “She had an agenda for change and for doing things differently,” said Judy Patrick, a City Council member at the time.
But careers were turned upside down. The mayor quickly fired the town’s museum director, John Cooper. Later, she sent an aide to the museum to talk to the three remaining employees. “He told us they only wanted two,” recalled Esther West, one of the three, “and we had to pick who was going to be laid off.” The three quit as one.
Ms. Palin cited budget difficulties for the museum cuts. Mr. Cooper thought differently, saying the museum had become a microcosm of class and cultural conflicts in town. “It represented that the town was becoming more progressive, and they didn’t want that,” he said.
Days later, Mr. Cooper recalled, a vocal conservative, Steve Stoll, sidled up to him. Mr. Stoll had supported Ms. Palin and had a long-running feud with Mr. Cooper. “He said: ‘Gotcha, Cooper,’ ” Mr. Cooper said.
Mr. Stoll did not recall that conversation, although he said he supported Ms. Palin’s campaign and was pleased when she fired Mr. Cooper.
In 1997, Ms. Palin fired the longtime city attorney, Richard Deuser, after he issued the stop-work order on a home being built by Don Showers, another of her campaign supporters.
Your attorney, Mr. Showers told Ms. Palin, is costing me lots of money.
“She told me she’d like to see him fired,” Mr. Showers recalled. “But she couldn’t do it herself because the City Council hires the city attorney.” Ms. Palin told him to write the council members to complain.
Meanwhile, Ms. Palin pushed the issue from the inside. “She started the ball rolling,” said Ms. Patrick, who also favored the firing. Mr. Deuser was soon replaced by Ken Jacobus, then the State Republican Party’s general counsel.
“Professionals were either forced out or fired,” Mr. Deuser said.
Ms. Palin ordered city employees not to talk to the press. And she used city money to buy a white Suburban for the mayor’s use — employees sarcastically called it the mayor-mobile.
The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral.
“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.”
Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.
But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.
“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”
“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”
Reform Crucible
Restless ambition defined Ms. Palin in the early years of this decade. She raised money for Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from the state; finished second in the 2002 Republican primary for lieutenant governor; and sought to fill the seat of Senator Frank H. Murkowski when he ran for governor.
Mr. Murkowski appointed his daughter to the seat, but as a consolation prize, he gave Ms. Palin the $125,000-a-year chairmanship of a state commission overseeing oil and gas drilling.
Ms. Palin discovered that the state Republican leader, Randy Ruedrich, a commission member, was conducting party business on state time and favoring regulated companies. When Mr. Murkowski failed to act on her complaints, she quit and went public.
The Republican establishment shunned her. But her break with the gentlemen’s club of oil producers and political power catapulted her into the public eye.
“She was honest and forthright,” said Jay Kerttula, a former Democratic state senator from Palmer.
Ms. Palin entered the 2006 primary for governor as a formidable candidate.
In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist in the state, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Ms. Palin had conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. Ms. Palin handled the crisis with a street fighter’s guile.
“I told her it looks like she did the same thing that Randy Ruedrich did,” Mr. Jenkins recalled. “And she said, ‘Yeah, what I did was wrong.’ ”
Mr. Jenkins hung up and decided to forgo writing about it. His phone rang soon after.
Mr. Jenkins said a reporter from Fairbanks, reading from a Palin news release, demanded to know why he was “smearing” her. “Now I look at her and think: ‘Man, you’re slick,’ ” he said.
Ms. Palin won the primary, and in the general election she faced Tony Knowles, the former two-term Democratic governor, and Andrew Halcro, an independent.
Not deeply versed in policy, Ms. Palin skipped some candidate forums; at others, she flipped through hand-written, color-coded index cards strategically placed behind her nameplate.
Before one forum, Mr. Halcro said he saw aides shovel reports at Ms. Palin as she crammed. Her showman’s instincts rarely failed. She put the pile of reports on the lectern. Asked what she would do about health care policy, she patted the stack and said she would find an answer in the pile of solutions.
“She was fresh, and she was tomorrow,” said Michael Carey, a former editorial page editor for The Anchorage Daily News. “She just floated along like Mary Poppins.”
Government
Half a century after Alaska became a state, Ms. Palin was inaugurated as governor in Fairbanks and took up the reformer’s sword.
As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments, those with insider credentials were now on the outs. But a new pattern became clear. She surrounded herself with people she has known since grade school and members of her church.
Mr. Parnell, the lieutenant governor, praised Ms. Palin’s appointments. “The people she hires are competent, qualified, top-notch people,” he said.
Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.
“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ ”
The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.
To her supporters — and with an 80 percent approval rating, she has plenty — Ms. Palin has lifted Alaska out of a mire of corruption. She gained the passage of a bill that tightens the rules covering lobbyists. And she rewrote the tax code to capture a greater share of oil and gas sale proceeds.
“Does anybody doubt that she’s a tough negotiator?” said State Representative Carl Gatto, Republican of Palmer.
Yet recent controversy has marred Ms. Palin’s reform credentials. In addition to the trooper investigation, lawmakers in April accused her of improperly culling thousands of e-mail addresses from a state database for a mass mailing to rally support for a policy initiative.
While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a BlackBerry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”
Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account “when there was significant state business.”
On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin’s state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: “Frank, this is not the governor’s personal account.”
Mr. Bailey responded: “Whoops~!”
Mr. Bailey, a former midlevel manager at Alaska Airlines who worked on Ms. Palin’s campaign, has been placed on paid leave; he has emerged as a central figure in the trooper investigation.
Another confidante of Ms. Palin’s is Ms. Frye, 27. She worked as a receptionist for State Senator Lyda Green before she joined Ms. Palin’s campaign for governor. Now Ms. Frye earns $68,664 as a special assistant to the governor. Her frequent interactions with Ms. Palin’s children have prompted some lawmakers to refer to her as “the babysitter,” a title that Ms. Frye disavows.
Like Mr. Bailey, she is an effusive cheerleader for her boss.
“YOU ARE SO AWESOME!” Ms. Frye typed in an e-mail message to Ms. Palin in March.
Many lawmakers contend that Ms. Palin is overly reliant on a small inner circle that leaves her isolated. Democrats and Republicans alike describe her as often missing in action. Since taking office in 2007, Ms. Palin has spent 312 nights at her Wasilla home, some 600 miles to the north of the governor’s mansion in Juneau, records show.
During the last legislative session, some lawmakers became so frustrated with her absences that they took to wearing “Where’s Sarah?” pins.
Many politicians say they typically learn of her initiatives — and vetoes — from news releases.
Mayors across the state, from the larger cities to tiny municipalities along the southeastern fiords, are even more frustrated. Often, their letters go unanswered and their pleas ignored, records and interviews show.
Last summer, Mayor Mark Begich of Anchorage, a Democrat, pressed Ms. Palin to meet with him because the state had failed to deliver money needed to operate city traffic lights. At one point, records show, state officials told him to just turn off a dozen of them. Ms. Palin agreed to meet with Mr. Begich when he threatened to go public with his anger, according to city officials.
At an Alaska Municipal League gathering in Juneau in January, mayors across the political spectrum swapped stories of the governor’s remoteness. How many of you, someone asked, have tried to meet with her? Every hand went up, recalled Mayor Fred Shields of Haines Borough. And how many met with her? Just a few hands rose. Ms. Palin soon walked in, delivered a few remarks and left for an anti-abortion rally.
The administration’s e-mail correspondence reveals a siege-like atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes. Even some who helped engineer her rise have felt her wrath.
Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend of Ms. Palin, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found himself branded a “hater.”
It is part of a pattern, Mr. Fagan said, in which Ms. Palin characterizes critics as “bad people who are anti-Alaska.”
As Ms. Palin’s star ascends, the McCain campaign, as often happens in national races, is controlling the words of those who know her well. Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, has been asked not to speak to reporters, and aides sit in on interviews with old friends.
At a recent lunch gathering, an official with the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce asked its members to refer all calls from reporters to the governor’s office. Dianne Woodruff, a city councilwoman, shook her head.
“I was thinking, I don’t remember giving up my First Amendment rights,” Ms. Woodruff said. “Just because you’re not going gaga over Sarah doesn’t mean you can’t speak your mind.”
when i am old and gray...
i want to be able to collect my social security. if mccain is elected, that may not happen...
this is from truthout.org:
McCain Would Privatize Social Security
Monday 15 September 2008
by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
(Image: FBI)
The Republicans have already turned to sick sexual innuendo and nonsense about their vice-presidential candidate, pigs and lipstick in order to distract the public from the real issues in this campaign. One of the items that should be on top of the list of real issues is Senator McCain's plans to privatize and cut Social Security.
McCain has repeatedly expressed interest in privatizing Social Security along the lines proposed by President Bush. For those who have forgotten that nightmare, Bush's plan would have reduced benefits by approximately one percent a year for many workers.
Workers who retired 10 years after the plan was put in place would see a 10 percent reduction in benefits compared with the currently projected levels. Workers who retired 20 years after the plan was implemented would see approximately a 20 percent cut in benefits and workers who retired 40 years after the plan started would see their benefits cut by close to 40 percent.
This schedule of cuts would apply to workers who earn $100,000 a year. Workers who earn $60,000 a year would see cuts of about half this size.
The losses to retired workers could mean big benefits for the financial industry. Under some versions of the plan, the financial industry would rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in fees and commissions over the next 40 years.
According to a recent World Bank analysis, the financial industry pocketed 15-20 percent of the money paid into the privatized Social Security system in Chile, which has often been held up as a model by privatizers in the United States. Given the losses that the millionaire Wall Street bozos have incurred with the housing crash, it is understandable that Senator McCain would want to help the very rich needy.
Privatization would be especially painful coming now, in the wake of the collapse of the housing bubble. The huge baby boom cohort that is just now reaching retirement age has seen most of their wealth wiped out by the housing crash.
A recent analysis that I did with David Rosnick, my colleague at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, showed that a typical late-baby-boomer household (between the ages of 45 and 54) will have less than $100,000 in wealth in 2009. This figure includes 401(k)s, IRAs and other retirement accounts, personal savings and home equity.
A relatively small share of these late baby boomers has traditional defined-benefit pensions. In other words, these families are going to have very little to support themselves in retirement other than the Social Security that Senator McCain is so anxious to cut.
While the Bush-McCain crew has long been trying to whip up fears about Social Security's finances, the reality is that the program is financially solid. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently updated its analysis of the program's finances.
The analysis projects that Social Security will be able to pay all scheduled benefits through the year 2049 with no changes whatsoever. Even after 2049, when the program is first projected to face a shortfall, the payable benefit is projected to be more than 30 percent higher than what the average retiree gets today, and the payable amount would continue to rise from that level every year.
The privatizers have worked hard to convince the public that Social Security is on its last legs, but this is simply a lie. We are going to face many problems that dwarf the dimensions of the projected Social Security shortfall. For example, the annual costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are approximately three times as large as the annual revenue that would be needed to eliminate the projected Social Security shortfall.
The 2049 date when Social Security is first projected to face a shortfall is more than three decades after the latest date when the next president can leave office. John McCain will be 113 when Social Security is first projected to be unable to pay full benefits. In a country where millions of families are struggling to hang onto their homes, and tens of millions are struggling to pay for health care and child care, a distant and relatively minor problem like the projected Social Security shortfall hardly warrants center stage.
The public should know that Social Security is fundamentally sound today and is projected to be sound far into the future. The line about Social Security going bankrupt is just a scare tactic pushed by the privatizers.
The presidential debate must return to Social Security and other issues that affect people's lives. The sleaze that Senator McCain and his vice-presidential candidate throw out as a distraction should be left to the pigs.
this is from truthout.org:
McCain Would Privatize Social Security
Monday 15 September 2008
by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
(Image: FBI)
The Republicans have already turned to sick sexual innuendo and nonsense about their vice-presidential candidate, pigs and lipstick in order to distract the public from the real issues in this campaign. One of the items that should be on top of the list of real issues is Senator McCain's plans to privatize and cut Social Security.
McCain has repeatedly expressed interest in privatizing Social Security along the lines proposed by President Bush. For those who have forgotten that nightmare, Bush's plan would have reduced benefits by approximately one percent a year for many workers.
Workers who retired 10 years after the plan was put in place would see a 10 percent reduction in benefits compared with the currently projected levels. Workers who retired 20 years after the plan was implemented would see approximately a 20 percent cut in benefits and workers who retired 40 years after the plan started would see their benefits cut by close to 40 percent.
This schedule of cuts would apply to workers who earn $100,000 a year. Workers who earn $60,000 a year would see cuts of about half this size.
The losses to retired workers could mean big benefits for the financial industry. Under some versions of the plan, the financial industry would rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in fees and commissions over the next 40 years.
According to a recent World Bank analysis, the financial industry pocketed 15-20 percent of the money paid into the privatized Social Security system in Chile, which has often been held up as a model by privatizers in the United States. Given the losses that the millionaire Wall Street bozos have incurred with the housing crash, it is understandable that Senator McCain would want to help the very rich needy.
Privatization would be especially painful coming now, in the wake of the collapse of the housing bubble. The huge baby boom cohort that is just now reaching retirement age has seen most of their wealth wiped out by the housing crash.
A recent analysis that I did with David Rosnick, my colleague at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, showed that a typical late-baby-boomer household (between the ages of 45 and 54) will have less than $100,000 in wealth in 2009. This figure includes 401(k)s, IRAs and other retirement accounts, personal savings and home equity.
A relatively small share of these late baby boomers has traditional defined-benefit pensions. In other words, these families are going to have very little to support themselves in retirement other than the Social Security that Senator McCain is so anxious to cut.
While the Bush-McCain crew has long been trying to whip up fears about Social Security's finances, the reality is that the program is financially solid. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently updated its analysis of the program's finances.
The analysis projects that Social Security will be able to pay all scheduled benefits through the year 2049 with no changes whatsoever. Even after 2049, when the program is first projected to face a shortfall, the payable benefit is projected to be more than 30 percent higher than what the average retiree gets today, and the payable amount would continue to rise from that level every year.
The privatizers have worked hard to convince the public that Social Security is on its last legs, but this is simply a lie. We are going to face many problems that dwarf the dimensions of the projected Social Security shortfall. For example, the annual costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are approximately three times as large as the annual revenue that would be needed to eliminate the projected Social Security shortfall.
The 2049 date when Social Security is first projected to face a shortfall is more than three decades after the latest date when the next president can leave office. John McCain will be 113 when Social Security is first projected to be unable to pay full benefits. In a country where millions of families are struggling to hang onto their homes, and tens of millions are struggling to pay for health care and child care, a distant and relatively minor problem like the projected Social Security shortfall hardly warrants center stage.
The public should know that Social Security is fundamentally sound today and is projected to be sound far into the future. The line about Social Security going bankrupt is just a scare tactic pushed by the privatizers.
The presidential debate must return to Social Security and other issues that affect people's lives. The sleaze that Senator McCain and his vice-presidential candidate throw out as a distraction should be left to the pigs.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Sunday, September 14, 2008
what happened to fair and balanced?
this is from mediamatters.org:
Over five-day period, Fox News provided far more campaign stump time to Republicans than to Democrats
Summary: Of the total time Fox News devoted to unfiltered campaign clips between September 5 and September 9, 78 percent was of the Republican candidates and their surrogates, with 22 percent devoted to the Democrats. Moreover, all three cable networks devoted more airtime (significantly more in the cases of Fox News and MSNBC) to, and broadcast a significantly greater number of, clips of the Republican candidates and their surrogates campaigning than of the Democratic candidates and their surrogates on both Fridays after the two national conventions.
Over the five-day period from September 5 through September 9, Fox News spent far more time airing unfiltered clips -- that is, clips of the candidates talking at campaign events uninterrupted by journalists' voice-overs -- of the Republican presidential ticket and its surrogates than of the Democratic presidential ticket and its surrogates, also airing a far greater number of Republican clips. Moreover, all three cable networks devoted more airtime (significantly more in the cases of Fox News and MSNBC) to, and broadcast a significantly greater number of clips of, the Republican candidates and their surrogates campaigning than of the Democratic candidates and their surrogates on both Fridays after the two national conventions.
Of the total time Fox News devoted to unfiltered campaign clips between September 5 and September 9, 78 percent was of the Republican candidates and their surrogates, with 22 percent devoted to the Democrats. Moreover, of the total number of these clips aired on Fox News, 81 percent were of Republicans.
During the five-day period, 47 percent of the time that Fox News devoted to unfiltered clips was spent on clips of Gov. Sarah Palin, 29 percent on clips of Sen. John McCain, 22 percent on clips of Sen. Barack Obama, and no time on clips of Sen. Joe Biden. Similarly, 47 percent of Fox News' clips were of McCain, 25 percent were of Palin, and 19 percent were of Obama.
On Friday, September 5, all three cable networks -- MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News -- devoted more time to airing unfiltered clips of the McCain-Palin campaign than of the Obama-Biden campaign, with Fox News and MSNBC skewing significantly in favor of the Republicans. Fox News devoted 81 percent of its unfiltered clip time to Republicans and MSNBC 64 percent. CNN devoted 53 percent of the total clip time length to the Republicans.
Of the total number of clips run on the three cable channels on September 5, 93 percent on Fox News, 77 percent on CNN, and 68 percent on MSNBC were of Republicans.
While the fact that September 5 was the day after the Republican convention might be cited by the cable networks as justification for the disparate coverage, on the previous Friday, the day after the Democratic National Convention, the cable networks' coverage of candidates also skewed heavily in favor of the Republican candidates. On August 29, of the time devoted to unfiltered clips of candidates and their surrogates, Fox News and CNN both devoted 98 percent to the Republicans, while MSNBC devoted 86 percent to them.
Moreover, on August 29, 86 percent of the unfiltered clips aired by Fox News, 85 percent of those aired by CNN, and 57 percent of the ones aired by MSNBC were of the Republicans.
For September 6-9, the rest of the period monitored, Fox News continued to have skewed coverage while the other two networks were more balanced. Fox News devoted 77 percent of its total clip time length to Republicans, while CNN and MSNBC devoted 51 and 52 percent, respectively, to Republicans.
Between September 6 and September 9, 71 percent of the total number of clips that Fox News aired were of Republicans, 53 percent of the clips that CNN aired were of Republicans, and 53 percent of the clips aired on MSNBC during this period were of Democrats.
Methodology
Media Matters for America documented unfiltered and unmediated speech clips from the candidates and their surrogates aired on the three major cable news networks -- CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News -- on August 29 and from September 5 through September 9 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET. The total number of clips and the length of each clip were recorded. Only clips that were 15 seconds or longer were included in the study.
To be included in the study, the clip had to be unfiltered and unmediated by any journalist or news agency. Clips in which a journalist or anchor talked over the candidate or surrogate were not included. Clips of press conferences were included only if the candidate or surrogate was not answering questions, but making opening statements to the journalists present. Clips of interviews were not included.
For the Democratic side, the vast majority of the clips recorded were of Obama and Biden. Sen. Hillary Clinton was clipped twice, for a total time length of approximately eight minutes. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine was clipped once for 19 seconds on August 29. No other Democratic surrogates were clipped during the time period. On the Republican side, the vast majority of the clips recorded were also of the candidates, McCain and Palin. Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC), former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and Gov. Palin's husband, Todd Palin, were each clipped once. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was clipped twice. The total time for these surrogates was less than two minutes. An unidentified McCain supporter was also clipped speaking at a rally for nearly two minutes on August 29.
— M.M.B., C.S., R.S., A.J.W., & L.Y.
Posted to the web on Saturday, September 13, 2008 at 03:44 PM ET
Over five-day period, Fox News provided far more campaign stump time to Republicans than to Democrats
Summary: Of the total time Fox News devoted to unfiltered campaign clips between September 5 and September 9, 78 percent was of the Republican candidates and their surrogates, with 22 percent devoted to the Democrats. Moreover, all three cable networks devoted more airtime (significantly more in the cases of Fox News and MSNBC) to, and broadcast a significantly greater number of, clips of the Republican candidates and their surrogates campaigning than of the Democratic candidates and their surrogates on both Fridays after the two national conventions.
Over the five-day period from September 5 through September 9, Fox News spent far more time airing unfiltered clips -- that is, clips of the candidates talking at campaign events uninterrupted by journalists' voice-overs -- of the Republican presidential ticket and its surrogates than of the Democratic presidential ticket and its surrogates, also airing a far greater number of Republican clips. Moreover, all three cable networks devoted more airtime (significantly more in the cases of Fox News and MSNBC) to, and broadcast a significantly greater number of clips of, the Republican candidates and their surrogates campaigning than of the Democratic candidates and their surrogates on both Fridays after the two national conventions.
Of the total time Fox News devoted to unfiltered campaign clips between September 5 and September 9, 78 percent was of the Republican candidates and their surrogates, with 22 percent devoted to the Democrats. Moreover, of the total number of these clips aired on Fox News, 81 percent were of Republicans.
During the five-day period, 47 percent of the time that Fox News devoted to unfiltered clips was spent on clips of Gov. Sarah Palin, 29 percent on clips of Sen. John McCain, 22 percent on clips of Sen. Barack Obama, and no time on clips of Sen. Joe Biden. Similarly, 47 percent of Fox News' clips were of McCain, 25 percent were of Palin, and 19 percent were of Obama.
On Friday, September 5, all three cable networks -- MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News -- devoted more time to airing unfiltered clips of the McCain-Palin campaign than of the Obama-Biden campaign, with Fox News and MSNBC skewing significantly in favor of the Republicans. Fox News devoted 81 percent of its unfiltered clip time to Republicans and MSNBC 64 percent. CNN devoted 53 percent of the total clip time length to the Republicans.
Of the total number of clips run on the three cable channels on September 5, 93 percent on Fox News, 77 percent on CNN, and 68 percent on MSNBC were of Republicans.
While the fact that September 5 was the day after the Republican convention might be cited by the cable networks as justification for the disparate coverage, on the previous Friday, the day after the Democratic National Convention, the cable networks' coverage of candidates also skewed heavily in favor of the Republican candidates. On August 29, of the time devoted to unfiltered clips of candidates and their surrogates, Fox News and CNN both devoted 98 percent to the Republicans, while MSNBC devoted 86 percent to them.
Moreover, on August 29, 86 percent of the unfiltered clips aired by Fox News, 85 percent of those aired by CNN, and 57 percent of the ones aired by MSNBC were of the Republicans.
For September 6-9, the rest of the period monitored, Fox News continued to have skewed coverage while the other two networks were more balanced. Fox News devoted 77 percent of its total clip time length to Republicans, while CNN and MSNBC devoted 51 and 52 percent, respectively, to Republicans.
Between September 6 and September 9, 71 percent of the total number of clips that Fox News aired were of Republicans, 53 percent of the clips that CNN aired were of Republicans, and 53 percent of the clips aired on MSNBC during this period were of Democrats.
Methodology
Media Matters for America documented unfiltered and unmediated speech clips from the candidates and their surrogates aired on the three major cable news networks -- CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News -- on August 29 and from September 5 through September 9 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET. The total number of clips and the length of each clip were recorded. Only clips that were 15 seconds or longer were included in the study.
To be included in the study, the clip had to be unfiltered and unmediated by any journalist or news agency. Clips in which a journalist or anchor talked over the candidate or surrogate were not included. Clips of press conferences were included only if the candidate or surrogate was not answering questions, but making opening statements to the journalists present. Clips of interviews were not included.
For the Democratic side, the vast majority of the clips recorded were of Obama and Biden. Sen. Hillary Clinton was clipped twice, for a total time length of approximately eight minutes. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine was clipped once for 19 seconds on August 29. No other Democratic surrogates were clipped during the time period. On the Republican side, the vast majority of the clips recorded were also of the candidates, McCain and Palin. Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC), former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and Gov. Palin's husband, Todd Palin, were each clipped once. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was clipped twice. The total time for these surrogates was less than two minutes. An unidentified McCain supporter was also clipped speaking at a rally for nearly two minutes on August 29.
— M.M.B., C.S., R.S., A.J.W., & L.Y.
Posted to the web on Saturday, September 13, 2008 at 03:44 PM ET
Friday, September 12, 2008
deer in headlights
I love that Charlie Gibson knows he is smarter and more experienced than Sarah Palin to be VP. i love it.
Eve Ensler
I have always liked Eve Ensler, now i like her even more:
Drill, Drill, Drill (from Eve Ensler's blog)
I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.
I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.
But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.
I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.
Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, 'It was a task from God.'
Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.
She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.
Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.
Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.
Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.
I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.
If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, 'Drill Drill Drill.' I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.
Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?
Eve Ensler
Drill, Drill, Drill (from Eve Ensler's blog)
I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.
I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.
But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.
I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.
Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, 'It was a task from God.'
Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.
She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.
Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.
Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.
Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.
I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.
If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, 'Drill Drill Drill.' I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.
Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?
Eve Ensler
Thursday, September 11, 2008
cocky wacko
From CNN:
Former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee has words for Sarah Palin.
(CNN) – Former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee was known for keeping a low-key profile on Capitol Hill, but the Republican -turned -Independent is making waves with his exceedingly blunt comments on newly-minted Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin:
She's a "cocky wacko," he told a Washington think tank earlier this week.
Chafee, the lone Senate Republican to vote against the Iraq war who endorsed Obama's White House bid earlier this year, told an audience at the New America Foundation in Washington Tuesday that Palin's selection has energized Obama backers.
"People were coming into my office, phone calls were flooding in, e-mails were coming in, 'I just sent money to Obama, I couldn't sleep last night' — from the left. To see this cocky wacko up there," he said.
He also described McCain's candidacy as "lackluster” and described the selection of Palin as a throwing "this firestorm, this tornado, into the whole presidential election."
Former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee has words for Sarah Palin.
(CNN) – Former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee was known for keeping a low-key profile on Capitol Hill, but the Republican -turned -Independent is making waves with his exceedingly blunt comments on newly-minted Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin:
She's a "cocky wacko," he told a Washington think tank earlier this week.
Chafee, the lone Senate Republican to vote against the Iraq war who endorsed Obama's White House bid earlier this year, told an audience at the New America Foundation in Washington Tuesday that Palin's selection has energized Obama backers.
"People were coming into my office, phone calls were flooding in, e-mails were coming in, 'I just sent money to Obama, I couldn't sleep last night' — from the left. To see this cocky wacko up there," he said.
He also described McCain's candidacy as "lackluster” and described the selection of Palin as a throwing "this firestorm, this tornado, into the whole presidential election."
talk about an over reaction...
I am so sick of the "Lipstick on a Pig" hooplah. Obama didnt mean it in a sexist way to Sarah Palin. I really hope no one truly believes that. it is obvious that John McCain doesnt truly believe it, as he has used the phrase several times before...
This is from DIgitalJournal.com:
McCain Said 'Lipstick on a Pig' at Least Three Times
Senator McCain came to Clawson, Michigan to speak prior to the Republican primaries.
by Wigwam Jones
DigitalJournal.com citizen journalist Susan Duclos covered the recent story about Barack Obama using the phrase “lipstick on a pig.” The phrase caused outrage after critics said Obama was referring to Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.
Obama said:
"You can put lipstick on a pig, It's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink. We've had enough of the same old thing.
The McCain campaign was very upset about this statement from Obama and accused him of attacking Palin personally.
McCain's campaign released a new ad attacking Obama over the “pig” line, and while it is no longer available on YouTube, you can watch it here. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/259664
But what the McCain camp has not mentioned is the fact McCain himself has used the phrase at least three times, one of which is shown in the video above. McCain used the same phrase to describe Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan.
At a press conference on the Iraq war strategy on Feb. 1, 2007, McCain said:
"It gets down to whether you support what's being done in this new strategy or you don't. You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig in my view."
National Public Radio also said McCain used this phrase on the same day in a similar context:
"It's all about withdrawal or not withdrawal, okay? I mean that's what it's all about. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig."
Obama responded to the controversy and said the parties should focus on real issues.
"We've got an energy crisis...We have an education system that is not working for too many of our children and making us less competitive. We have an economy that is creating hardship for families all across America. We've got two wars going on, veterans coming home not being cared for -- and this is what they want to talk about.
According to Wikipedia, the phrase lipstick on a pig "...is an American colloquialism that means, 'making the unattractive superficially attractive,' with overtones of futility or of a lost cause."
In her article, DigitalJournal.com citizen journalist Duclos rightly commented:
The audience may have assumed Obama was referring, at least partially to Sarah Palin, but many others on both sides of the aisle, see it for what it most probably was, and that is an expression that has been used by many, in politics and in every day life.
I think both parties should move on and concentrate on real issues and focus on the $75 trillion horror, which should garner more outrage than this silly phrase.
This is from DIgitalJournal.com:
McCain Said 'Lipstick on a Pig' at Least Three Times
Senator McCain came to Clawson, Michigan to speak prior to the Republican primaries.
by Wigwam Jones
DigitalJournal.com citizen journalist Susan Duclos covered the recent story about Barack Obama using the phrase “lipstick on a pig.” The phrase caused outrage after critics said Obama was referring to Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.
Obama said:
"You can put lipstick on a pig, It's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink. We've had enough of the same old thing.
The McCain campaign was very upset about this statement from Obama and accused him of attacking Palin personally.
McCain's campaign released a new ad attacking Obama over the “pig” line, and while it is no longer available on YouTube, you can watch it here. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/259664
But what the McCain camp has not mentioned is the fact McCain himself has used the phrase at least three times, one of which is shown in the video above. McCain used the same phrase to describe Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan.
At a press conference on the Iraq war strategy on Feb. 1, 2007, McCain said:
"It gets down to whether you support what's being done in this new strategy or you don't. You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig in my view."
National Public Radio also said McCain used this phrase on the same day in a similar context:
"It's all about withdrawal or not withdrawal, okay? I mean that's what it's all about. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig."
Obama responded to the controversy and said the parties should focus on real issues.
"We've got an energy crisis...We have an education system that is not working for too many of our children and making us less competitive. We have an economy that is creating hardship for families all across America. We've got two wars going on, veterans coming home not being cared for -- and this is what they want to talk about.
According to Wikipedia, the phrase lipstick on a pig "...is an American colloquialism that means, 'making the unattractive superficially attractive,' with overtones of futility or of a lost cause."
In her article, DigitalJournal.com citizen journalist Duclos rightly commented:
The audience may have assumed Obama was referring, at least partially to Sarah Palin, but many others on both sides of the aisle, see it for what it most probably was, and that is an expression that has been used by many, in politics and in every day life.
I think both parties should move on and concentrate on real issues and focus on the $75 trillion horror, which should garner more outrage than this silly phrase.
More McCain
This is from Thinkprogress.org:
On Morning Of 9/11 Attacks, McCain Immediately Began Making The Case For Iraq War»
On the morning of the 9/11, just moments after the World Trade Center collapsed from the terrorist strikes, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) went on television and immediately began focusing the nation’s attention on Iraq. In an interview with CBS’ Dan Rather on 9/11, McCain said:
To be honest with you, Dan, I never thought that an operation of this sophistication and size would take place. I just never did. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are countries — Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea and others — who we know engage in proliferation of — of capabilities and, from time to time, involve themselves in state-sponsored terrorism. But never did we imagine on a scale such as this.
The next day, on 9/12, McCain reiterated the point in an interview with Chris Matthews. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he said, “we’re talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others.”
Just a few weeks later — on Oct. 9, 2001 — McCain narrowed his focus, arguing that Iraq was “obviously” next:
PAULA ZAHN: And as you know, Senator, the U.S. and Great Britain notified the U.N. Security Council yesterday that they reserve the right to strike against other countries in this campaign. What countries are we looking at?
MCCAIN: Well, I think very obviously Iraq is the first country, but there are others — Syria, Iran, the Sudan, who have continued to harbor terrorist organizations and actually assist them.
On Oct. 18, 2001, McCain told David Letterman, “the second phase is Iraq” while linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks. Watch it:>
In Jan. 2002, McCain visited a crowd of soldiers aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and yelled: “Next up, Baghdad!”
The New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick recently noted that McCain “began making his case for invading Iraq to the public more than six months before the White House began to do the same.” The Times reported:
While pushing to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr. McCain also made arguments and statements that he may no longer wish to recall. He lauded the war planners he would later criticize, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. McCain even volunteered that he would have given the same job to Mr. Cheney.) He urged support for the later-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi’s opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and echoed some of its suspect accusations in the national media. And he advanced misleading assertions not only about Mr. Hussein’s supposed weapons programs but also about his possible ties to international terrorists, Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.
On Morning Of 9/11 Attacks, McCain Immediately Began Making The Case For Iraq War»
On the morning of the 9/11, just moments after the World Trade Center collapsed from the terrorist strikes, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) went on television and immediately began focusing the nation’s attention on Iraq. In an interview with CBS’ Dan Rather on 9/11, McCain said:
To be honest with you, Dan, I never thought that an operation of this sophistication and size would take place. I just never did. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are countries — Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea and others — who we know engage in proliferation of — of capabilities and, from time to time, involve themselves in state-sponsored terrorism. But never did we imagine on a scale such as this.
The next day, on 9/12, McCain reiterated the point in an interview with Chris Matthews. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he said, “we’re talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others.”
Just a few weeks later — on Oct. 9, 2001 — McCain narrowed his focus, arguing that Iraq was “obviously” next:
PAULA ZAHN: And as you know, Senator, the U.S. and Great Britain notified the U.N. Security Council yesterday that they reserve the right to strike against other countries in this campaign. What countries are we looking at?
MCCAIN: Well, I think very obviously Iraq is the first country, but there are others — Syria, Iran, the Sudan, who have continued to harbor terrorist organizations and actually assist them.
On Oct. 18, 2001, McCain told David Letterman, “the second phase is Iraq” while linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks. Watch it:>
In Jan. 2002, McCain visited a crowd of soldiers aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and yelled: “Next up, Baghdad!”
The New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick recently noted that McCain “began making his case for invading Iraq to the public more than six months before the White House began to do the same.” The Times reported:
While pushing to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr. McCain also made arguments and statements that he may no longer wish to recall. He lauded the war planners he would later criticize, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. McCain even volunteered that he would have given the same job to Mr. Cheney.) He urged support for the later-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi’s opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and echoed some of its suspect accusations in the national media. And he advanced misleading assertions not only about Mr. Hussein’s supposed weapons programs but also about his possible ties to international terrorists, Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.
let's ignore the polls
For the next 2 months, our minds are going to be filled with campaign ads, blurbs from speeches, new information leaking out about the candidates, Bush doing some wonderful things to make the Republican party look good, celebrity endorsements, fundraisers, rallies, smearing, scandal, and polls.
The latest poll scared me a bit. Did SARAH PALIN really give McCain that boost? Are Americans really that stupid to buy into her? Then I read the article about not “hyperventilating.” But I am, a bit. Fear from 2000, my first presidential election. Fear of 2004, of the country proving just how naïve they are, of the corrupt system proving how corrupt it really was. However, I remain hopeful.
I have faith in the lazy democratic voters. I have hope that the under 30s who usually don’t vote will come out in droves and tip the scale. I have a true belief that the polls are skewed, and we will be surprised by what really happens. I hope the electoral system helps us rather than screws us this time. I want my faith in Americans to be renewed.
The latest poll scared me a bit. Did SARAH PALIN really give McCain that boost? Are Americans really that stupid to buy into her? Then I read the article about not “hyperventilating.” But I am, a bit. Fear from 2000, my first presidential election. Fear of 2004, of the country proving just how naïve they are, of the corrupt system proving how corrupt it really was. However, I remain hopeful.
I have faith in the lazy democratic voters. I have hope that the under 30s who usually don’t vote will come out in droves and tip the scale. I have a true belief that the polls are skewed, and we will be surprised by what really happens. I hope the electoral system helps us rather than screws us this time. I want my faith in Americans to be renewed.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
i found out how to do a new trick
I figured out how to put videos into my blog!!! hooray!
here is my favorite speech from the convention...
here is my favorite speech from the convention...
i will try not to hyperventilate anymore...
from CBS.com:
(CHICAGO) -- With John McCain’s traveling press corps cooling their heels here as they waited for McCain to wrap up a fundraiser, Barack Obama’s campaign knew a captive audience when they saw one. The Obama campaign extended an invitation for us to drop by Obama’s campaign headquarters for a briefing by their campaign manager David Plouffe.
Sitting under a charcoal sketch of the Obama family that was donated by a supporter, Plouffe said that they weren’t concerned by the bump in poll numbers that McCain has experienced after the Republican convention and the announcement of Sarah Palin as his running mate.
“There’s a lot of hyperventilating about national polls,” Plouffe said, which wasn’t a surprise since both a CBS News poll and the Gallup daily tracking poll showed McCain taking the lead nationally in the presidential race. “When you look at battleground states, we feel very good about where we are.”
Plouffe argued that McCain has “jettisoned the idea” that this election is about experience with selection of first term governor Sarah Palin on the ticket. McCain is now trying to make the election about change, Plouffe said, and “that’s a debate we’re happy to have.”
Plouffe said the election would boil down to which campaign could appeal to undecided voters in battleground states and who could bring out the highest turnout numbers. “We have a huge ability to grow turnout,” he said. “We have a more credible path to 270 [electoral votes, the number it takes to win] than McCain does.”
Both campaigns have attempted to take race out of the campaign, and Plouffe rejected the notion of a “Bradley effect” – voters telling pollsters they would vote for a black candidate, but changing their mind in the voting booth. “Swing voters that are up for grabs are not going to factor race into the equation,” he said.
(CHICAGO) -- With John McCain’s traveling press corps cooling their heels here as they waited for McCain to wrap up a fundraiser, Barack Obama’s campaign knew a captive audience when they saw one. The Obama campaign extended an invitation for us to drop by Obama’s campaign headquarters for a briefing by their campaign manager David Plouffe.
Sitting under a charcoal sketch of the Obama family that was donated by a supporter, Plouffe said that they weren’t concerned by the bump in poll numbers that McCain has experienced after the Republican convention and the announcement of Sarah Palin as his running mate.
“There’s a lot of hyperventilating about national polls,” Plouffe said, which wasn’t a surprise since both a CBS News poll and the Gallup daily tracking poll showed McCain taking the lead nationally in the presidential race. “When you look at battleground states, we feel very good about where we are.”
Plouffe argued that McCain has “jettisoned the idea” that this election is about experience with selection of first term governor Sarah Palin on the ticket. McCain is now trying to make the election about change, Plouffe said, and “that’s a debate we’re happy to have.”
Plouffe said the election would boil down to which campaign could appeal to undecided voters in battleground states and who could bring out the highest turnout numbers. “We have a huge ability to grow turnout,” he said. “We have a more credible path to 270 [electoral votes, the number it takes to win] than McCain does.”
Both campaigns have attempted to take race out of the campaign, and Plouffe rejected the notion of a “Bradley effect” – voters telling pollsters they would vote for a black candidate, but changing their mind in the voting booth. “Swing voters that are up for grabs are not going to factor race into the equation,” he said.
Calling Ted Haggard
Thanks for my dear friend Jen Lewis for bringing this article to my attention:
Palin's Church Promotes Gay Conversion
AP
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Sept. 8) - Gov. Sarah Palin's church is promoting a conference that promises to convert gays into heterosexuals through the power of prayer.
"You'll be encouraged by the power of God's love and His desire to transform the lives of those impacted by homosexuality," according to the insert in the bulletin of the Wasilla Bible Church, where Palin has prayed for about six years.
Al Grillo, AP
Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has attended services at the Wasilla Bible Church in Wasilla, Alaska, for about six years.
Palin's conservative Christian views have energized that part of the GOP electorate, which was lukewarm to John McCain's candidacy before he named her as his vice presidential choice. She is staunchly anti-abortion (opposing exceptions for rape and incest), and opposes gay marriage and spousal rights for gay couples.
Focus on the Family, a national Christian fundamentalist organization, is conducting the Love Won Out Conference in Anchorage, about 30 miles from Wasilla.
Palin, campaigning with McCain in the Midwest on Friday, has not publicly expressed a view on the so-called "pray away the gay" movement. Larry Kroon, senior pastor at Palin's church, was not available to discuss the matter Friday, said a church worker who declined to give her name. Gay activists in Alaska said Palin has not worked actively against their interests, but early in her administration she supported a bill to overrule a court decision to block state benefits for gay partners of public employees.
The woman who would be a heartbeat away from the presidency if John McCain wins in November has transfixed much of the nation with her complexities. Above, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin kneels beside one of her daughters and a caribou she shot in Alaska.
At the time, less than one-half of 1 percent of state employees had applied for the benefits, which were ordered by a 2005 ruling by the Alaska Supreme Court.
Palin reversed her position and vetoed the bill after the state attorney general said it was unconstitutional. But her reluctant support didn't win fans among Alaska's gay population, said Scott Turner, a gay activist in Anchorage.
"Less than 1 percent of state employees would even apply for benefits, so why make a big deal out of such a small number?" he said. "I think gay Republicans are going to run away" if Palin supports efforts like the prayers to convert gays, said Wayne Besen, founder of the New York-based Truth Wins Out, a gay rights advocacy group. Besen called on Palin to publicly express her views now that she's a vice presidential nominee. "People are looking at Sarah Palin as someone who might feasibly be in the White House," he said.
Palin's Church Promotes Gay Conversion
AP
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Sept. 8) - Gov. Sarah Palin's church is promoting a conference that promises to convert gays into heterosexuals through the power of prayer.
"You'll be encouraged by the power of God's love and His desire to transform the lives of those impacted by homosexuality," according to the insert in the bulletin of the Wasilla Bible Church, where Palin has prayed for about six years.
Al Grillo, AP
Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has attended services at the Wasilla Bible Church in Wasilla, Alaska, for about six years.
Palin's conservative Christian views have energized that part of the GOP electorate, which was lukewarm to John McCain's candidacy before he named her as his vice presidential choice. She is staunchly anti-abortion (opposing exceptions for rape and incest), and opposes gay marriage and spousal rights for gay couples.
Focus on the Family, a national Christian fundamentalist organization, is conducting the Love Won Out Conference in Anchorage, about 30 miles from Wasilla.
Palin, campaigning with McCain in the Midwest on Friday, has not publicly expressed a view on the so-called "pray away the gay" movement. Larry Kroon, senior pastor at Palin's church, was not available to discuss the matter Friday, said a church worker who declined to give her name. Gay activists in Alaska said Palin has not worked actively against their interests, but early in her administration she supported a bill to overrule a court decision to block state benefits for gay partners of public employees.
The woman who would be a heartbeat away from the presidency if John McCain wins in November has transfixed much of the nation with her complexities. Above, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin kneels beside one of her daughters and a caribou she shot in Alaska.
At the time, less than one-half of 1 percent of state employees had applied for the benefits, which were ordered by a 2005 ruling by the Alaska Supreme Court.
Palin reversed her position and vetoed the bill after the state attorney general said it was unconstitutional. But her reluctant support didn't win fans among Alaska's gay population, said Scott Turner, a gay activist in Anchorage.
"Less than 1 percent of state employees would even apply for benefits, so why make a big deal out of such a small number?" he said. "I think gay Republicans are going to run away" if Palin supports efforts like the prayers to convert gays, said Wayne Besen, founder of the New York-based Truth Wins Out, a gay rights advocacy group. Besen called on Palin to publicly express her views now that she's a vice presidential nominee. "People are looking at Sarah Palin as someone who might feasibly be in the White House," he said.
Monday, September 8, 2008
War, honor and John McCain
This column is from today's Globe...
War, honor, and John McCain
By James Carroll
September 8, 2008
THE NADIR of John McCain's time in the North Vietnamese prison came when, under terrible pressure, he gave his captors a false confession. I asked him about it. He said, "I think at that moment, coming back to my cell, knowing what I'd just done, whose son I was, whose grandson . . . well, it was very, very difficult. They [the interrogators] didn't want a confession, they just wanted me to feel this . . . this . . ." He could not finish the sentence, but I knew the word he wanted: dishonor. The worst experience of McCain's life, as he felt it, was the dishonor he brought to his family and his nation when he broke. In his cell, he attempted suicide.
Honor defines the man. People marvel at the McCain prison saga - how he refused an early release, ahead of prisoners held longer than he - but that refusal was McCain's dogged effort to reclaim the honor he thought he had lost. It worked. The 1973 photo of Richard Nixon greeting the freed McCain in his white uniform and on crutches became a national icon. As sacrificial victims do, the maimed McCain took on a mystical aura, which became his political identity.
A man of honor, McCain became the source of honor. Antiwar activists who came to regret the extremity of their protests sought him out to apologize, and he forgave them. In befriending John F. Kerry, as many saw it, McCain restored the honor that had been besmirched by Kerry's antiwar actions.
When Kerry and he led the Clinton-era effort to lift the embargo against Vietnam, which required debunking the myth that the Vietnamese were still holding Americans in jungle cages, it was seen as McCain returning honor to the enemy that had abused him. Such actions endeared McCain to the liberal press corps, many of whom, having never been at ease with their avoidance of military service, felt their own honor restored by his attentions.
But lurking below all of this was the real content of the lesson McCain took from his ordeal. His years in prison coincided exactly with the period in which Americans across the political spectrum reckoned with the failure of the Vietnam War. To McCain, the war was never a failure. To regard it as such was akin to the false confession he had given in his moment of weakness. War, rather, is a source of meaning and nobility. Wars are to be won, period. That resolve of McCain's is what enabled his survival. He comes by such belligerence of spirit far more honorably than the chicken hawks who have shaped policy in Washington, but it leaves McCain in the grip of a dangerous militancy.
After 9/11, McCain emerged as a tribune of militant victimhood, embodying in himself the wounded and angry spirit of Americans' first reaction to the Al Qaeda assaults. With McCain, militant victimhood has been a permanent reaction, and he has reinvented his political career around it. His insistence that the war in Iraq continue indefinitely is his way of dealing with the evident fact that ending that war must involve a reckoning with its character as shamefully unnecessary. McCain's notion of honor makes any such reckoning unthinkable. War equals honor.
For the liberals he derides, facing up to the nation's dishonor has become the new meaning of honor. That is nonsense to McCain because, in prison, it was by making the nation's honor his unrepentant absolute that he was able, in repentance, to reclaim his personal honor. Bravely confronting his own failure, that is, made him incapable of confronting his nation's. McCain's dynamic here is tragic - and, in a national leader, dangerous.
McCain spoke to me of his prison experience 12 years ago. He did so reluctantly. Honor requires such reticence. Alas, now pressed by his political handlers, McCain cheapens that experience in ads, and by using it as cover. When Jay Leno recently joshed him about his many houses, for example, he cited "5 1/2 years in a prison cell. I didn't have a house." It is sad to see John McCain dishonor his own core value in this way, but it is clear why he does so. Nothing else qualifies him to be president.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
War, honor, and John McCain
By James Carroll
September 8, 2008
THE NADIR of John McCain's time in the North Vietnamese prison came when, under terrible pressure, he gave his captors a false confession. I asked him about it. He said, "I think at that moment, coming back to my cell, knowing what I'd just done, whose son I was, whose grandson . . . well, it was very, very difficult. They [the interrogators] didn't want a confession, they just wanted me to feel this . . . this . . ." He could not finish the sentence, but I knew the word he wanted: dishonor. The worst experience of McCain's life, as he felt it, was the dishonor he brought to his family and his nation when he broke. In his cell, he attempted suicide.
Honor defines the man. People marvel at the McCain prison saga - how he refused an early release, ahead of prisoners held longer than he - but that refusal was McCain's dogged effort to reclaim the honor he thought he had lost. It worked. The 1973 photo of Richard Nixon greeting the freed McCain in his white uniform and on crutches became a national icon. As sacrificial victims do, the maimed McCain took on a mystical aura, which became his political identity.
A man of honor, McCain became the source of honor. Antiwar activists who came to regret the extremity of their protests sought him out to apologize, and he forgave them. In befriending John F. Kerry, as many saw it, McCain restored the honor that had been besmirched by Kerry's antiwar actions.
When Kerry and he led the Clinton-era effort to lift the embargo against Vietnam, which required debunking the myth that the Vietnamese were still holding Americans in jungle cages, it was seen as McCain returning honor to the enemy that had abused him. Such actions endeared McCain to the liberal press corps, many of whom, having never been at ease with their avoidance of military service, felt their own honor restored by his attentions.
But lurking below all of this was the real content of the lesson McCain took from his ordeal. His years in prison coincided exactly with the period in which Americans across the political spectrum reckoned with the failure of the Vietnam War. To McCain, the war was never a failure. To regard it as such was akin to the false confession he had given in his moment of weakness. War, rather, is a source of meaning and nobility. Wars are to be won, period. That resolve of McCain's is what enabled his survival. He comes by such belligerence of spirit far more honorably than the chicken hawks who have shaped policy in Washington, but it leaves McCain in the grip of a dangerous militancy.
After 9/11, McCain emerged as a tribune of militant victimhood, embodying in himself the wounded and angry spirit of Americans' first reaction to the Al Qaeda assaults. With McCain, militant victimhood has been a permanent reaction, and he has reinvented his political career around it. His insistence that the war in Iraq continue indefinitely is his way of dealing with the evident fact that ending that war must involve a reckoning with its character as shamefully unnecessary. McCain's notion of honor makes any such reckoning unthinkable. War equals honor.
For the liberals he derides, facing up to the nation's dishonor has become the new meaning of honor. That is nonsense to McCain because, in prison, it was by making the nation's honor his unrepentant absolute that he was able, in repentance, to reclaim his personal honor. Bravely confronting his own failure, that is, made him incapable of confronting his nation's. McCain's dynamic here is tragic - and, in a national leader, dangerous.
McCain spoke to me of his prison experience 12 years ago. He did so reluctantly. Honor requires such reticence. Alas, now pressed by his political handlers, McCain cheapens that experience in ads, and by using it as cover. When Jay Leno recently joshed him about his many houses, for example, he cited "5 1/2 years in a prison cell. I didn't have a house." It is sad to see John McCain dishonor his own core value in this way, but it is clear why he does so. Nothing else qualifies him to be president.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
Yay Rachel Maddow!
I am a HUGE fan of progressive talk radio, and one of my favorite hosts, Rachel Maddow is going to be on MSNBC starting tonight! Here is an article in Today's Boston Globe:
ST. PAUL - When Rachel Maddow arrived at a local café one morning last week on behalf of the Air America affiliate that broadcasts her three-hour drive-time show in the Twin Cities, she was dressed for radio, with a loose-fitting V-neck T-shirt and thick-rimmed black glasses.
One of the hundreds of listeners who patiently waited in line to meet Maddow came with an offering: a "Give Peace a Chance" lapel pin that she hoped Maddow would sport on her MSNBC television show. "I won't wear jewelry" on the air, Maddow said, apologetically affixing the pin to a corner of her shirt, near her waist. "I don't want to start a cascade of things I can't control."
It may be too late to stop the gush. Maddow was part of the original lineup on Air America, founded in 2004 to counter conservative dominance of talk radio under the market-friendly promise that liberals, too, could be entertaining. More than anyone else, Maddow fulfilled that pledge, with an affable and erudite approach to the day's news and the rhetorical combat that inevitably surrounds it.
Tonight, "The Rachel Maddow Show" debuts on MSNBC, leaving her on the cusp of full-blown stardom in the mainstream media that her most devoted fans see as an enemy.
Maddow, 35, was an accidental radio personality. She got her start on Holyoke's WRNX-FM only after winning a tryout to be a morning-show sidekick; Maddow had moved to the Pioneer Valley after college to pursue a career in AIDS policy, and still spends every weekend there, prizing the Massachusetts fishing license that allows her to catch trout near her Northampton-area home.
She brings a studied ambivalence about her newfound TV fame, which has come thanks to steady appearances as an MSNBC pundit. (The glasses usually are left behind.) Maddow has not owned a television since leaving home at 17, and she spends more time describing how she will defend her new program from the medium than taking advantage of its possibilities.
"The strategy is to make it as much as possible reflective of who I am, and avoid the homogenizing tendencies of TV production," she said. "It's like being put through a meat grinder and coming out as a pasteurized and homogenized meat product. I want to remain a veal chop."
Since auditioning in 2005 for a role as a sidekick to Tucker Carlson on his since-canceled afternoon show, Maddow has become a key face of the new, feisty, ratings-boosted MSNBC.
"MSNBC is trying to define a niche for itself as a center for commentary," said Sid Bedingfield, a former CNN executive who teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina. "It wants to be the home for liberal and left-wing viewers."
Much of that has been propelled by the ratings success of Keith Olbermann, whose nightly show gleefully attacks Republicans, rarely with counterpoint. Maddow was a frequent substitute host for Olbermann on his "Countdown" show, and he pushed MSNBC executives to give her the slot between his 8 p.m. broadcast and a replay at 10 p.m. (The two now share an agent.)
"With Keith Olbermann, TV finally figured out, like a lot of the radio industry, that talk for the left is economically successful," said Janet Robert, owner of KTNF, the Minneapolis-area Air America affiliate.
While critics increasingly call the network a Fox News of the left, an MSNBC executive said the network had not made a conscious decision to hire liberal talent, but was not bothered if efforts to alter its style had left it ideologically imbalanced.
"I look at the MSNBC brand as high-powered intellects," said Bill Wolff, a vice president for prime-time programming. "I'm not saying we're NPR, but there is an appetite for really smart discussion of the news. That's more about what I'm trying to make Rachel's show about than her position on a particular issue. I don't think you have to agree with Rachel in your views to really enjoy Rachel."
Although she happily holds up the liberal position in left-right debates, Maddow prides herself on being "cripplingly patriotic" - she signs radio-station bumper stickers "Your Country Needs You, xox" - and, the daughter of an Air Force captain, she has a yen for national-security issues.
The former Rhodes scholar, with a doctorate in political science from Oxford, is writing a book about military politics in postwar America and is famous at MSNBC for bringing a scholarly rigor to her preshow research and preparation. She has been known to arrive at Rockefeller Center from her Manhattan apartment nine hours before she is due to go on air, cloistering herself in a cubicle with an iPod as she reads and writes on the day's news.
"One of the things that separates Rachel from many people is the amount of fresh information she brings to her storytelling," said Wolff. "She really often isn't expressing an opinion as much as laying out facts that lead to the conclusion."
When Maddow took questions at the St. Paul cafe, it was clear her fans saw no limits to her potential expertise: Would Sarah Palin withdraw? How concerned was Maddow about voter fraud? Does human nature include an instinct for compassion?
"I'm not a biologist," Maddow cautioned. "But I think that we're naturally empathetic."
Maddow, who came out as a lesbian as a teenager, says that one of the galvanizing moments in her political development was Pat Buchanan's declaration of a "cultural war" at the 1992 Republican convention. Now the two are frequently used as good-humored, left-right sparring partners on MSNBC. Maddow praises Buchanan as a "gentleman."
"Pat enjoys debating, and I enjoy debating," Maddow told her fans in St. Paul. "When Pat is saying something outrageous, you know when you yell at the TV? I get to yell at him in person. I get to yell at the TV and it hears me."
As a host, Maddow says, she expects to continue debating on her show, but only as part of a broader repertoire of reported pieces, interviews, and commentaries. "I won't be Punch and Judy. I'm not into the fight for the sake of the fight. If it's not illuminating to present two sides of an issue, I don't want to," she said.
Maddow said she was particularly looking forward to taking on subjects of personal fascination - Kurdish politics and the failures of American infrastructure - that she says do not get covered enough. She wants to have debates on same-sex marriage and the need for more troops in Afghanistan, where the presidential candidates did not necessarily disagree in predictable ways.
"Where's the left and right on that?" she said. "Let's hash it out."
ST. PAUL - When Rachel Maddow arrived at a local café one morning last week on behalf of the Air America affiliate that broadcasts her three-hour drive-time show in the Twin Cities, she was dressed for radio, with a loose-fitting V-neck T-shirt and thick-rimmed black glasses.
One of the hundreds of listeners who patiently waited in line to meet Maddow came with an offering: a "Give Peace a Chance" lapel pin that she hoped Maddow would sport on her MSNBC television show. "I won't wear jewelry" on the air, Maddow said, apologetically affixing the pin to a corner of her shirt, near her waist. "I don't want to start a cascade of things I can't control."
It may be too late to stop the gush. Maddow was part of the original lineup on Air America, founded in 2004 to counter conservative dominance of talk radio under the market-friendly promise that liberals, too, could be entertaining. More than anyone else, Maddow fulfilled that pledge, with an affable and erudite approach to the day's news and the rhetorical combat that inevitably surrounds it.
Tonight, "The Rachel Maddow Show" debuts on MSNBC, leaving her on the cusp of full-blown stardom in the mainstream media that her most devoted fans see as an enemy.
Maddow, 35, was an accidental radio personality. She got her start on Holyoke's WRNX-FM only after winning a tryout to be a morning-show sidekick; Maddow had moved to the Pioneer Valley after college to pursue a career in AIDS policy, and still spends every weekend there, prizing the Massachusetts fishing license that allows her to catch trout near her Northampton-area home.
She brings a studied ambivalence about her newfound TV fame, which has come thanks to steady appearances as an MSNBC pundit. (The glasses usually are left behind.) Maddow has not owned a television since leaving home at 17, and she spends more time describing how she will defend her new program from the medium than taking advantage of its possibilities.
"The strategy is to make it as much as possible reflective of who I am, and avoid the homogenizing tendencies of TV production," she said. "It's like being put through a meat grinder and coming out as a pasteurized and homogenized meat product. I want to remain a veal chop."
Since auditioning in 2005 for a role as a sidekick to Tucker Carlson on his since-canceled afternoon show, Maddow has become a key face of the new, feisty, ratings-boosted MSNBC.
"MSNBC is trying to define a niche for itself as a center for commentary," said Sid Bedingfield, a former CNN executive who teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina. "It wants to be the home for liberal and left-wing viewers."
Much of that has been propelled by the ratings success of Keith Olbermann, whose nightly show gleefully attacks Republicans, rarely with counterpoint. Maddow was a frequent substitute host for Olbermann on his "Countdown" show, and he pushed MSNBC executives to give her the slot between his 8 p.m. broadcast and a replay at 10 p.m. (The two now share an agent.)
"With Keith Olbermann, TV finally figured out, like a lot of the radio industry, that talk for the left is economically successful," said Janet Robert, owner of KTNF, the Minneapolis-area Air America affiliate.
While critics increasingly call the network a Fox News of the left, an MSNBC executive said the network had not made a conscious decision to hire liberal talent, but was not bothered if efforts to alter its style had left it ideologically imbalanced.
"I look at the MSNBC brand as high-powered intellects," said Bill Wolff, a vice president for prime-time programming. "I'm not saying we're NPR, but there is an appetite for really smart discussion of the news. That's more about what I'm trying to make Rachel's show about than her position on a particular issue. I don't think you have to agree with Rachel in your views to really enjoy Rachel."
Although she happily holds up the liberal position in left-right debates, Maddow prides herself on being "cripplingly patriotic" - she signs radio-station bumper stickers "Your Country Needs You, xox" - and, the daughter of an Air Force captain, she has a yen for national-security issues.
The former Rhodes scholar, with a doctorate in political science from Oxford, is writing a book about military politics in postwar America and is famous at MSNBC for bringing a scholarly rigor to her preshow research and preparation. She has been known to arrive at Rockefeller Center from her Manhattan apartment nine hours before she is due to go on air, cloistering herself in a cubicle with an iPod as she reads and writes on the day's news.
"One of the things that separates Rachel from many people is the amount of fresh information she brings to her storytelling," said Wolff. "She really often isn't expressing an opinion as much as laying out facts that lead to the conclusion."
When Maddow took questions at the St. Paul cafe, it was clear her fans saw no limits to her potential expertise: Would Sarah Palin withdraw? How concerned was Maddow about voter fraud? Does human nature include an instinct for compassion?
"I'm not a biologist," Maddow cautioned. "But I think that we're naturally empathetic."
Maddow, who came out as a lesbian as a teenager, says that one of the galvanizing moments in her political development was Pat Buchanan's declaration of a "cultural war" at the 1992 Republican convention. Now the two are frequently used as good-humored, left-right sparring partners on MSNBC. Maddow praises Buchanan as a "gentleman."
"Pat enjoys debating, and I enjoy debating," Maddow told her fans in St. Paul. "When Pat is saying something outrageous, you know when you yell at the TV? I get to yell at him in person. I get to yell at the TV and it hears me."
As a host, Maddow says, she expects to continue debating on her show, but only as part of a broader repertoire of reported pieces, interviews, and commentaries. "I won't be Punch and Judy. I'm not into the fight for the sake of the fight. If it's not illuminating to present two sides of an issue, I don't want to," she said.
Maddow said she was particularly looking forward to taking on subjects of personal fascination - Kurdish politics and the failures of American infrastructure - that she says do not get covered enough. She wants to have debates on same-sex marriage and the need for more troops in Afghanistan, where the presidential candidates did not necessarily disagree in predictable ways.
"Where's the left and right on that?" she said. "Let's hash it out."
More on Palin
I received this from my roommate via email this morning...
Dear Family and Friends,
When you get a few minutes read this and past in on. It is written by a person who lives under the governance of Sarah Palin now. This is from a Bryn Mawr college grad to her fellow alums:
Dear classmates -
As an Alaskan, I am writing to give all of you some information on Sarah Palin, Senator McCain's choice for VP. As an Alaska voter, I know more than most of you about her and, frankly, I am horrified that he picked her. Her husband works in the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay and races snow mobiles. She is a life time member of the NRA and has worked tirelessly to allow indiscriminate hunting of wildlife in Alaska , particularly wolves and bears. She has spent millions of Alaska state dollars on aerial hunting of these predators from helicopters and airplanes, dollars
that should have been spent, for example, on Alaska 's failing school system.
We have the lowest rate of high school graduation in the country. Not all of you may think aerial predator hunting is so bad, but how anyone (other than Alaska wolf-haters, of which there are many, most without teeth), could think this use of funds is appropriate is beyond me. If you want to know more about the aerial hunting travesty, let me know and I will send some links to informative web sites. She has been a strong supporter of increased use of fossil fuels, yet the McCain campaign has the nerve to say she has "green" policies. The only thing green about Sarah Palin is her lack of experience. She has consistently supported drilling in ANWR, use of coal-burning power plants (as I write this, a new coal plant is being built in her home town of Wasilla ), strip mining, and almost anything else that will
unnecessarily exploit the diminishing resources of Alaska and destroy its environment.
Prior to her one year as governor of Alaska , she was mayor of Wasilla, a small red neck town outside Anchorage.The average maximum education level of parents of junior high school kids in Wasilla is 10th grade. Unfortunately, I have to go to Wasilla every week to get groceries and other supplies, so I have continual contact with the people who put Palin in office in the first place. I know what I'm talking about.
These people don't have a concept of the world around them or of the serious issues facing the US . Furthermore, they don't care. So long as they can go out and hunt their moose every fall, kill wolves and bears and drive their snow mobiles and ATVs through every corner of the wilderness, they're happy. I wish I were exaggerating.
Sarah Palin is currently involved in a political corruption scandal. She fired an individual in law enforcement here because she didn't like how he treated one of her relatives during a divorce. The man's performance and ability weren't considered; it was a totally personal firing and is currently under investigation. While the issue isn't close to the scandal of Ted Steven's corruption, it shows that Palin isn't "squeaky clean" and causes me to think there may be more issues that could come to light. Clearly McCain doesn't care.
When you line Palin up with Biden, the comparison would be laughable if it weren't so serious. Sarah Palin knows nothing of economics (admittedly a weak area for McCain), or of international affairs, knows nothing of national government, Social Security, unemployment, health care systems - you name it. The idea of her meeting with heads of foreign governments around the world truly frightens me. In an increasingly dangerous world, with the economy in shambles in the US , Sarah Palin is uniquely UNqualified to be vice president.
John McCain is not a young man. Should something happen to him such that the vice president had to step in, it would destroy our country and possibly the world to have someone as inexperienced and inappropriate as Sarah Palin. The choice of Palin is a cheap shot by McCain to try to get Hillary supporters to vote for him. when McCain introduced her today, Palin had the nerve to compare herself with Hillary and
Geraldine Ferraro.
Sarah Palin, you are no Hillary Clinton. To those of you who, like me, supported Hillary and were upset that she did not get the nomination, please don't think that Sarah Palin is a worthy substitute. If you supported Hillary, regardless of what you
think the media and the democratic party may have done to undermine her campaign, the person to support now is Obama, not Sarah Palin. To those of you who are independent or undecided, don't let the choice of Palin sway you in favor of McCain. Choosing her shows how unqualified McCain is to be president.
To those of you who are conservative, I guess you have no choice for president. But please try to see how the poor choice of Palin tells us a great deal about McCain's judgment. While the political posturing inherent in the choice of Palin is obvious, the more serious issue is the fact that the VP is, literally, a heartbeat away from the presidency. Sarah Palin is totally and unequivocally unqualified to be vice president, let alone president. I know this is a lengthy and emotional email, but the stakes are high. I thought it might help for all of you, regardless of political
affiliation, to know something about Palin from someone who has to live with her administration in Alaska on a daily basis.
Here's some basic background from MoveOn.org:
She was elected Alaska 's governor a little over a year and a half ago. Her previous office was mayor of Wasilla, a small town outside Anchorage.
Palin is strongly anti-choice, opposing abortion even in the case of rape or incest. She supported right-wing extremist Pat Buchanan for president in 2000.
Palin thinks creationism should be taught in public schools.
She's doesn't think humans are the cause of climate change.
She's solidly in line with John McCain's "Big Oil first" energy policy. She's pushed hard for more oil drilling and says renewables won't be ready for years. She also sued the Bush administration for listing polar bears as an endangered speciesshe was worried it would interfere with more oil drilling in Alaska.
Here's a sample of Alaskan's responses:
She is really just a mayor from a small town outside Anchorage who has been a governor for only 1.5 years, and has ZERO national and international experience. I shudder to think that she could be the person taking that 3AM call on the White House hotline, and the one who could potentially be charged with leading the US in the volatile international scene that exists today. Rose M., Fairbanks , AK
She is VERY, VERY conservative, and far from perfect. She's a hunter and fisherwoman, but votes against the environment again and again. She ran on ethics reform, but is currently under investigation for several charges involving hiring and firing of state officials. She has NO experience beyond Alaska . Christine B., Denali Park , AK
As an Alaskan and a feminist, I am beyond words at this announcement. Palin is not a feminist, and she is not the reformer she claims to be. Karen L., Anchorage , AK
Alaskans, collectively, are just as stunned as the rest of the nation. She is doing well running our State, but is totally inexperienced on the national level, and very much unequipped to run the nation, if it came to that. She is as far right as one can get, which has already been communicated on the news. In our office of thirty employees (dems, republicans, and nonpartisans), not one person feels she is ready for the V.P. position.Sherry C., Anchorage , AK
She's vehemently anti-choice and doesn't care about protecting our natural resources, even though she has worked as a fisherman. McCain chose her to pick up the Hillary voters, but Palin is no Hillary. Marina L., Juneau , AK
I think she's far too inexperienced to be in this position. I'm all for a woman in the White House, but not one who hasn't done anything to deserve it. There are far many other women who have worked their way up and have much more experience that would have been better choices. This is a patronizing decision on John McCain's part- and insulting to females everywhere that he would assume he'll get our vote by putting "A Woman" in that position.Jennifer M., Anchorage , AK
Please forward this to everyone you know!
Best regards,
Melissa-
Dear Family and Friends,
When you get a few minutes read this and past in on. It is written by a person who lives under the governance of Sarah Palin now. This is from a Bryn Mawr college grad to her fellow alums:
Dear classmates -
As an Alaskan, I am writing to give all of you some information on Sarah Palin, Senator McCain's choice for VP. As an Alaska voter, I know more than most of you about her and, frankly, I am horrified that he picked her. Her husband works in the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay and races snow mobiles. She is a life time member of the NRA and has worked tirelessly to allow indiscriminate hunting of wildlife in Alaska , particularly wolves and bears. She has spent millions of Alaska state dollars on aerial hunting of these predators from helicopters and airplanes, dollars
that should have been spent, for example, on Alaska 's failing school system.
We have the lowest rate of high school graduation in the country. Not all of you may think aerial predator hunting is so bad, but how anyone (other than Alaska wolf-haters, of which there are many, most without teeth), could think this use of funds is appropriate is beyond me. If you want to know more about the aerial hunting travesty, let me know and I will send some links to informative web sites. She has been a strong supporter of increased use of fossil fuels, yet the McCain campaign has the nerve to say she has "green" policies. The only thing green about Sarah Palin is her lack of experience. She has consistently supported drilling in ANWR, use of coal-burning power plants (as I write this, a new coal plant is being built in her home town of Wasilla ), strip mining, and almost anything else that will
unnecessarily exploit the diminishing resources of Alaska and destroy its environment.
Prior to her one year as governor of Alaska , she was mayor of Wasilla, a small red neck town outside Anchorage.The average maximum education level of parents of junior high school kids in Wasilla is 10th grade. Unfortunately, I have to go to Wasilla every week to get groceries and other supplies, so I have continual contact with the people who put Palin in office in the first place. I know what I'm talking about.
These people don't have a concept of the world around them or of the serious issues facing the US . Furthermore, they don't care. So long as they can go out and hunt their moose every fall, kill wolves and bears and drive their snow mobiles and ATVs through every corner of the wilderness, they're happy. I wish I were exaggerating.
Sarah Palin is currently involved in a political corruption scandal. She fired an individual in law enforcement here because she didn't like how he treated one of her relatives during a divorce. The man's performance and ability weren't considered; it was a totally personal firing and is currently under investigation. While the issue isn't close to the scandal of Ted Steven's corruption, it shows that Palin isn't "squeaky clean" and causes me to think there may be more issues that could come to light. Clearly McCain doesn't care.
When you line Palin up with Biden, the comparison would be laughable if it weren't so serious. Sarah Palin knows nothing of economics (admittedly a weak area for McCain), or of international affairs, knows nothing of national government, Social Security, unemployment, health care systems - you name it. The idea of her meeting with heads of foreign governments around the world truly frightens me. In an increasingly dangerous world, with the economy in shambles in the US , Sarah Palin is uniquely UNqualified to be vice president.
John McCain is not a young man. Should something happen to him such that the vice president had to step in, it would destroy our country and possibly the world to have someone as inexperienced and inappropriate as Sarah Palin. The choice of Palin is a cheap shot by McCain to try to get Hillary supporters to vote for him. when McCain introduced her today, Palin had the nerve to compare herself with Hillary and
Geraldine Ferraro.
Sarah Palin, you are no Hillary Clinton. To those of you who, like me, supported Hillary and were upset that she did not get the nomination, please don't think that Sarah Palin is a worthy substitute. If you supported Hillary, regardless of what you
think the media and the democratic party may have done to undermine her campaign, the person to support now is Obama, not Sarah Palin. To those of you who are independent or undecided, don't let the choice of Palin sway you in favor of McCain. Choosing her shows how unqualified McCain is to be president.
To those of you who are conservative, I guess you have no choice for president. But please try to see how the poor choice of Palin tells us a great deal about McCain's judgment. While the political posturing inherent in the choice of Palin is obvious, the more serious issue is the fact that the VP is, literally, a heartbeat away from the presidency. Sarah Palin is totally and unequivocally unqualified to be vice president, let alone president. I know this is a lengthy and emotional email, but the stakes are high. I thought it might help for all of you, regardless of political
affiliation, to know something about Palin from someone who has to live with her administration in Alaska on a daily basis.
Here's some basic background from MoveOn.org:
She was elected Alaska 's governor a little over a year and a half ago. Her previous office was mayor of Wasilla, a small town outside Anchorage.
Palin is strongly anti-choice, opposing abortion even in the case of rape or incest. She supported right-wing extremist Pat Buchanan for president in 2000.
Palin thinks creationism should be taught in public schools.
She's doesn't think humans are the cause of climate change.
She's solidly in line with John McCain's "Big Oil first" energy policy. She's pushed hard for more oil drilling and says renewables won't be ready for years. She also sued the Bush administration for listing polar bears as an endangered speciesshe was worried it would interfere with more oil drilling in Alaska.
Here's a sample of Alaskan's responses:
She is really just a mayor from a small town outside Anchorage who has been a governor for only 1.5 years, and has ZERO national and international experience. I shudder to think that she could be the person taking that 3AM call on the White House hotline, and the one who could potentially be charged with leading the US in the volatile international scene that exists today. Rose M., Fairbanks , AK
She is VERY, VERY conservative, and far from perfect. She's a hunter and fisherwoman, but votes against the environment again and again. She ran on ethics reform, but is currently under investigation for several charges involving hiring and firing of state officials. She has NO experience beyond Alaska . Christine B., Denali Park , AK
As an Alaskan and a feminist, I am beyond words at this announcement. Palin is not a feminist, and she is not the reformer she claims to be. Karen L., Anchorage , AK
Alaskans, collectively, are just as stunned as the rest of the nation. She is doing well running our State, but is totally inexperienced on the national level, and very much unequipped to run the nation, if it came to that. She is as far right as one can get, which has already been communicated on the news. In our office of thirty employees (dems, republicans, and nonpartisans), not one person feels she is ready for the V.P. position.Sherry C., Anchorage , AK
She's vehemently anti-choice and doesn't care about protecting our natural resources, even though she has worked as a fisherman. McCain chose her to pick up the Hillary voters, but Palin is no Hillary. Marina L., Juneau , AK
I think she's far too inexperienced to be in this position. I'm all for a woman in the White House, but not one who hasn't done anything to deserve it. There are far many other women who have worked their way up and have much more experience that would have been better choices. This is a patronizing decision on John McCain's part- and insulting to females everywhere that he would assume he'll get our vote by putting "A Woman" in that position.Jennifer M., Anchorage , AK
Please forward this to everyone you know!
Best regards,
Melissa-
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
