John
McCain can't keep his
eyes off of Sarah Palin.
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Thursday, October 30, 2008
This year in Alaska every man, woman, and child received a check for $3,269 from the state of Alaska. Governor Sarah Palin levied a high tax on the oil companies doing business there and distributed the money to every single one of the state's residents.
This is what she said: "We can afford to share resource wealth with Alaskans and to temporarily suspend the state fuel tax." She also said, "And Alaska we're set up, unlike other states in the union, where it's collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs."
Now she's going out warning people about the dangers of "Spreading the Wealth" and the Communist threat of "Collective Ownership," a concept that is completely foreign to Barack Obama's economic plan.
It's easy to get a high approval rating when you give every man, woman, and child $3,269.
But demonizing your opponent for doing the very same thing, when you're opponent is not even suggesting it, is called hypocrisy and outright fraud.
Gov. Sarah Palin's signature accomplishment — a contract to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48 — emerged from a flawed bidding process that narrowed the field to a company with ties to her administration, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The leader of Palin's pipeline team had been a partner at a lobbying firm where she worked on behalf of a TransCanada subsidiary. Also, that woman's former business partner at the lobbying firm was TransCanada's lead private lobbyist on the pipeline deal, interacting with legislators in the weeks before the vote to grant TransCanada the contract. Plus, a former TransCanada executive served as an outside consultant to Palin's pipeline team.
—Under a different set of rules four years earlier, TransCanada had offered to build the pipeline without a state subsidy; under Palin, the company could receive a maximum $500 million.
Who was the highest paid individual in Senator John McCain's presidential campaign during the first half of October as it headed down the homestretch?
Not Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain's chief foreign policy adviser; not Nicolle Wallace, his senior communications staff member. It was Amy Strozzi, who was identified by the Washington Post this week as Gov. Sarah Palin's traveling makeup artist, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday night.
Ms. Strozzi, who was nominated for an Emmy award for her makeup work on the television show "So You Think You Can Dance?", was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October alone, according to the records. The campaign categorized Ms. Strozzi's payment as "PERSONNEL SVC/EQUIPMENT."
Gov. Sarah Palin charged the state for her children to travel with her, including to events where they were not invited, and later amended expense reports to specify that they were on official business.
The charges included costs for hotel and commercial flights for three daughters to join Palin to watch their father in a snowmobile race, and a trip to New York, where the governor attended a five-hour conference and stayed with 17-year-old Bristol for five days and four nights in a luxury hotel.
In all, Palin has charged the state $21,012 for her three daughters' 64 one-way and 12 round-trip commercial flights since she took office in December 2006. In some other cases, she has charged the state for hotel rooms for the girls.
Alaska law does not specifically address expenses for a governor's children. The law allows for payment of expenses for anyone conducting official state business.
Seems the RNC coughed up a whopping $150,000 to outfit/accessorize Palin and her family for the campaign trail.
The tally included included a $75,062.63 visit to Neiman Marcus and two Saks Fifth Avenue pit shops totaling $49,425.74, according to Jeanne Cummings at Politico. That's a lot more than the $1,874 spent by average Americans, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
An interviewer for KUSA-TV in Denver asked, "Brandon Garcia wants to know, 'What does the vice president do?"'
Palin replied, "That's a great question, Brandon, and a vice president has a really great job, because not only are they there to support the president's agenda, they're like the team member, the teammate to that president."
"But also, they're in charge of the United States Senate, so if they want to, they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom. And it's a great job and I look forward to having that job," she added.
While the vice president presides over the Senate and breaks tie votes, the positions comes with no official policymaking power. The constitutional role of vice president is to step in if the president dies in office, resigns, is removed, or becomes incapicated.
An Alaska state legislative investigator found yesterday that Gov. Sarah Palin abused executive power when she and her husband engaged in a campaign to oust her former brother-in-law from the state police force.
The 263-page report released in Anchorage also found that while Palin was well within her right to fire Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan, his dismissal came in part because he refused to remove her sister's ex-husband from the Alaska State Troopers.
Investigator Stephen Branchflower found evidence that Palin actively joined her husband, Todd, in pursuing a personal vendetta against the trooper and that she used state employees to try to settle a score in a bitter family feud.
"Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda, to wit: To get Trooper Michael Wooten fired," said the report released by a bipartisan legislative committee.
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin tells audiences the election is about the "truthfulness and judgment" needed to be president. But the Alaska governor often stretches the truth herself. She has exaggerated the nature of Barack Obama's personal ties to a former 1960s radical and falsely claimed the Democratic presidential candidate plans to raise most people's taxes.
On Tuesday, she tried rebutting the Illinois senator's criticisms of Republican presidential candidate John McCain over health care and Social Security. She said Obama was misleading and wrong, but she herself told less than the full story.
To be sure, most of Palin's assertions about Obama echo claims McCain himself has made or lines from Republican TV ads.
At a rally Tuesday, Palin tried to link Obama to the failure of housing giant Fannie Mae by noting that two Obama supporters once led the troubled company. The government seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, another housing finance company, last month to prevent their collapse from worsening the global credit crisis.
"What's next, claiming that he didn't know two of his biggest supporters were running Fannie Mae, the subprime mortgage giant?" Palin said. "That has done harm to the American economy."
She referred to Jim Johnson, who chaired Fannie Mae from 1991-1998, and Franklin Raines, his successor who stepped down in 2004 in an accounting scandal.
In the last few weeks John McCain and Sarah Palin have launched a barrage of negative attacks that many in the media flagged as gross distortions or outright lies.
"Pinocchio Posses" are showing up at McCain-Palin events, leading "Lie-Ins," wearing pinocchio noses, and reciting the litany of McCain-Palin lies. Start your own now.
They have step-by-step instructions, a "Pinocchio Nose" that you can print (or buy one for $1.49 at Buy Costumes.com), a list of scheduled appearances so that you can represent in your hometown.
The office of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has told a state public employee union that if it wants to gain access to previously undisclosed emails from the Palin's office they’re going to have to pony up some serious cash.
Palin's office wants $88,000 to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act request filed recently by the state's Public Safety Employees Association, the union that represents the governor former brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, an Alaska state trooper, who was involved in a bitter divorce and child custody suit with Palin's sister.
The union alleges Palin’s office illegally accessed the trooper's personnel and workers compensation file and disseminated confidential information to a top Alaska state trooper official in an attempt to get Wooten fired.
In August, the union filed an ethics complaint against Palin alleging unauthorized access to Wooten's personnel files.
John Cyr, the director of the PSEA, also filed a FOIA request for emails after an audio recording surfaced in July that showed Palin's director of state boards and commissions, Frank Bailey, telephoned police Lt. Rodney Dial last February to inquire about union issues involving state troopers and outlined disparaging details about Wooten's finances and personal behavior that appear to have come from his personnel file.
Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, have assets worth up to $2.1 million, and they paid $24,738 in 2007 income taxes on total income of $166,495, which came from her salary as governor of Alaska and money he earned as an oil worker, fisherman and snowmachine racer, documents released by her campaign yesterday show.
The tax returns indicated that Palin paid no taxes on $16,951 in state payments she received as meal and incidental expenses when she stayed at her home in Wasilla instead of at the governor's mansion in Juneau.
Alaska's director of finance has already declared that the state does not consider these $60-a-day payments taxable. Accounting experts and some tax courts have differed on the question of whether such compensation is tax-exempt. Yesterday, the McCain campaign issued a legal opinion from Washington lawyer Roger M. Olsen supporting the state's view that the payments are not taxable.
Palin stayed in her Wasilla home 312 nights, or 54 percent of the time, when she claimed reimbursements from Dec. 4, 2006, through June 30, 2008. Although her staff has said most of her work as governor is performed in Anchorage, 45 miles from Wasilla, Finance Director Kim Garnero said the state capital in Juneau is considered her duty station, making her eligible for the non-taxable meal and expense payments.
The Republican Sarah Palin and her officials in the Alaskan state government drew on the work of at least six scientists known to be sceptical about the dangers and causes of global warming, to back efforts to stop polar bears being protected as an endangered species, the Guardian can disclose. Some of the scientists were funded by the oil industry.
In official submissions to the US government's consultation on the status of the polar bear, Palin and her team referred to at least six scientists who have questioned either the existence of warming as a largely man-made phenomenon or its severity. One paper was partly funded by the US oil company ExxonMobil.
The status of the polar bear has become a battleground in the debate on global warming. In May the US department of the interior rejected Palin's objections and listed the bear as a threatened species, saying that two-thirds of the world's polar bears were likely to be extinct by 2050 due to the rapid melting of the sea ice. Palin, governor of Alaska and the Republican nominee for US vice-president, responded last month by suing the federal government, to try to overturn the ruling. The case will be heard in January.
Though the state of Alaska has no polar bear specialists on its staff, the governor's stance has pitted it against the combined scientific fire-power of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey, and world experts on the mammal.
In its lawsuit, Alaska said it opposed the endangered label partly because the listing would "deter activities such as ... oil and gas exploration and development". Oil companies recently bid $2.7bn (£1.5bn) for rights to explore the Chuckchi sea, an established polar bear habitat.
The threatened species status might also impede the building of an Alaskan natural gas pipeline, which Palin has called the "will of God".
Though Sarah Palin depicts herself as a pit bull fighting good-old-boy politics, in her years as mayor she and her friends received special benefits more typical of small-town politics as usual, an Associated Press investigation shows.
When Palin needed to sell her house during her last year as Wasilla mayor, she got the city to sign off on a special zoning exception - and did so without keeping a promise to remove a potential fire hazard.
She gladly accepted gifts from merchants: A free "awesome facial" she raved about in a thank you note to a spa. The "absolutely gorgeous flowers" she received from a wedding supply store. Even fresh salmon to take home.
She also stepped in to help friends or neighbors with City Hall dealings. She asked the City Council to add a friend to the list of speakers at a 2002 meeting - and then the friend got up and asked them to give his radio station advertising business.
Some of her first actions after being elected mayor in 1996 raised possible ethical red flags: She cast the tie-breaking vote to propose a tax exemption on aircraft when her father-in-law owned one, and backed the city's repeal of all taxes a year later on planes, snow machines and other personal property. She also asked the council to consider looser rules for snow machine races. Palin and her husband, Todd, a champion racer, co-owned a snow machine store at the time.
"Sarah Palin's credentials as a "reformer" are nothing but spin. She has sided with Big Oil, lobbied to increase pork spending and abused her public power to carry out personal vendettas. Here's a guide to separating myth from fact. "
Sarah Palin requested and received an extension of the deadline for revealing her personal finances, until the day after her debate with Democrat Joe Biden.
The Republican vice-presidential candidate received a four-day extension today from the Federal Election Commission.
The federal financial disclosure report was initially due Monday. Now Palin has until Oct. 3, the day after her debate in St. Louis with Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee.
It has been widely reported that Sarah Palin has yet to give a news conference or even answer a few questions from the traveling press that follow her from city to city on her plane. But, today the Palin camp went to new lengths to control the media, which is covering the GOP Vice-Presidential nominee.
It was decided by the campaign that today’s meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, and Former Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger would be pooled. This means only one television network with their camera and producer, plus a print reporter, and wire reporters would be let in at the beginning of the meeting and then be ushered out before the leaders and Palin began talking. This is common practice in presidential campaigns, but this morning a little over one hour before the meetings would begin the pool network television producer and print poolers were told they were not allowed to enter the meetings.
This means that the Palin camp has the benefit of pictures of her shaking hands with world leaders and have that video broadcast all over the world, but there would be no risk of her having to answer even one question from a reporter at the beginning of the meetings. It is many television network’s policy, including Fox News Channel to not provide a camera if an editorial presence is not allowed in. Once the campaign realized that these pictures would not be seen they relented, but the print pool is still not allowed to enter the Karzai event, which is about to begin.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's hometown required women to pay for their own rape examinations while she was mayor, a practice her police chief fought to keep as late as 2000.
Former state Rep. Eric Croft, a Democrat, sponsored a state law requiring cities to provide the examinations free of charge to victims. He said the only ongoing resistance he met was from Wasilla, where Palin was mayor from 1996 to 2002.
"It was one of those things everyone could agree on except Wasilla," Croft told CNN. "We couldn't convince the chief of police to stop charging them."
Alaska's Legislature in 2000 banned the practice of charging women for rape exam kits -- which experts said could cost up to $1,000.
Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, often talks about her experience running Wasilla, population approximately 7,000, and that has prompted close scrutiny of her record there. Wasilla's practice of charging victims for their rape exams while she was mayor has gotten wide circulation on the Internet and in the mainstream media.
Some supporters of Palin say they believe she had no knowledge of the practice. But critics call it "outrageous" and question Palin's commitment to helping women who are the victims of violence.
For years, Alaska has had the worst record of any state in rape and in murder of women by men. The rape rate in Alaska is 2.5 times the national average.
The husband of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will ignore a subpoena and refuse to testify tomorrow in an abuse-of-power investigation into his wife, the Republican candidate for vice president.
Todd Palin had been subpoenaed to appear before Alaska lawmakers to testify about whether Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan was fired because he refused to dismiss a state trooper who had gone through a bitter divorce with Sarah Palin's sister.
McCain-Palin spokesman Ed O'Callaghan said Thursday that Todd Palin no longer believes the Legislature's investigation is legitimate. She initially welcomed the investigation but now opposes since Sen. John McCain picked her as his running mate.
Are YOU ready for Armageddon? Sarah Palin's Alaska is.
Judge not lest ye be judged, but this is something all voters should see, and learn about the witch-hunting pastor she is talking about, Bishop Thomas Muthee. As the person who posted this clip commented, "Is this the kind of person we really want with her finger on the big red button?":
She's talking about Bishop Thomas Munthee, a witch hunter
Last week, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain said his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, hadn't sought earmarks or special-interest spending from Congress, presenting her as a fiscal conservative. But state records show Gov. Palin has asked U.S. taxpayers to fund $453 million in specific Alaska projects over the past two years.
These projects include more than $130 million in federal funds that would benefit Alaska's fishing industry and an additional $9 million to help Alaska oil companies. She also has sought $4.5 million to upgrade an airport on a Bering Sea island that has a year-round population of less than 100.
~*snip*~
During an appearance Friday on ABC's "The View," Sen. McCain said Gov. Palin shared his views, and hasn't sought congressional earmarks. "Not as governor she hasn't," he said.
In fact, in the current fiscal year, she is seeking $197 million for 31 projects, the records show. In the prior year, her first year in office, she sought $256 million for dozens more projects ranging from research on rockfish and harbor-seal genetics to rural sanitation and obesity prevention. By comparison, her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, sought more than $350 million in his last year in office.
...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.
~*snip*~
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.
In response to a Boston Globe article today, the Palin camp has been forced to clarify exactly where Sarah Palin traveled in her July 2007 trip to the Middle East to visit Alaskan National Guard troops
Previously the campaign said she had traveled to Iraq to visit Alaskan soldiers, but the Globe reported today that it was just a border crossing between Kuwait and Iraq. In her ABC interview Thursday night with Charlie Gibson, Palin did not mention Iraq when talking about the trip saying she visited the troops in Kuwait and then visited injured soldiers in Germany.
Today, the Palin camp responded that the Vice-Presidential nominee did cross into Iraq, but it was a quick trip:
"Last summer, Governor Palin traveled to Kuwait where she visited Alaskan National Guard troops deployed to the war in Iraq at Camp Arifjen. While she was there she traveled to the K Crossing on the Kuwait-Iraq border, and a quarter mile into Iraq. According to the General who traveled with her, while she was there she presided over a re-enlistment ceremony of an Alaskan National Guard soldier. En route back to the United States, she traveled to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany. While in Germany, Governor Palin visited wounded soldiers at the Landstuhl military hospital. She then returned home. She also visited Canada, as well as Mexico for a vacation."
Palin also claimed to have been to Ireland on the same Middle East trip, but it turned out merely to be a re-fueling stop. Palin has faced criticism for her limited travel outside of the United States and for obtaining her first passport last year.
On the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, Gov. Sarah Palin took a hard-line approach on national security and said that war with Russia may be necessary if Georgia were to join NATO and be invaded by Russia.
~*snip*~
The governor advocated for the admittance of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.
When Gibson said if under the NATO treaty, the United States would have to go to war if Russia again invaded Georgia, Palin responded: "Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.
"And we've got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable," she told Gibson.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain criticized two of his future running mate's hometown projects in broadsides in 2001 against congressional "pork-barrel" spending, records from the Arizona senator's office show.
McCain and running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin have criticized such spending as a central part of their campaign for the White House. McCain has made pork-busting a centerpiece of his maverick pitch for years.
But when Palin served as mayor of her hometown of Wasilla, outside Anchorage, she obtained about $27 million in federal "earmarks" during her last four years in office, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.
In a 2001 statement opposing a transportation spending bill McCain singled out for criticism about $3 million worth of those projects. McCain's list of "objectionable" spending included a $2.5 million road project for the town that then had a population of 5,500, as well as a $450,000 appropriation for an agricultural processing plant there.
Palin's office approved a state job for a friend and campaign aide with whom she shared a land investment, financial records and interviews over the past two weeks show. She hired a former lobbyist for a pipeline company to help oversee a multibillion-dollar deal with that same company.
She named a police chief accused of harassment to head the state police. And she sent campaign e-mails on her city hall account while serving as mayor of Wasilla -- conduct for which she later turned in an oil commissioner on ethics charges.
These incidents raise "some serious questions about her judgment and serious questions about her standards of ethics in public service," said James Thurber, director of American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies in Washington. Suggesting a real estate investment partner for a job "may be acceptable in Alaska; it would not be acceptable in Washington, D.C., a place whose norms she wants to change."
Barack Obama wasn't the only one ticked off by the way the McCain campaign jumped all over his use of the phrase "lipstick on a pig." CBS on Wednesday forced YouTube to yank a John McCain Web ad titled "Lipstick" because the commercial used unauthorized footage of CBS anchor Katie Couric.
The ad showed a clip of Obama's comments during a campaign event Tuesday in Virginia in which he said, "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig." McCain's campaign accused him of making a sexist dig at Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a charge Obama heatedly disputed, saying he was referring to McCain's policies.
To buttress its argument, the McCain campaign used footage in its ad from a Web commentary Couric did this year on CBSNews.com about the media's coverage of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. "One of the great lessons of that campaign is the continued and accepted role of sexism in American life," Couric said.
An Anchorage judge three years ago warned Sarah Palin and members of her family to stop "disparaging" the reputation of Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten, who at the time was undergoing a bitter separation and divorce from Palin's sister Molly.
Allegations that Palin, her husband Todd, and at least one top gubernatorial aide continued to vilify Wooten -- after Palin became Alaska's governor and pressured state police officials to take action against him -- are at the center of "Troopergate," a political and ethical controversy which has embroiled Palin's administration and is currently the subject of an official inquiry by a special investigator hired by the state legislature.
Court records obtained by NEWSWEEK show that during the course of divorce hearings three years ago, Judge John Suddock heard testimony from an official of the Alaska State Troopers' union about how Sarah Palin -- then a private citizen -- and members of her family, including her father and daughter, lodged up to a dozen complaints against Wooten with the state police. The union official told the judge that he had never before been asked to appear as a divorce-case witness, that the union believed family complaints against Wooten were "not job-related," and that Wooten was being "harassed" by Palin and other family members.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a "per diem" allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business.
The governor also has charged the state for travel expenses to take her children on official out-of-town missions. And her husband, Todd, has billed the state for expenses and a daily allowance for trips he makes on official business for his wife.
Palin, who earns $125,000 a year, claimed and received $16,951 as her allowance, which officials say was permitted because her official "duty station" is Juneau, according to an analysis of her travel documents by The Washington Post.
The governor's daughters and husband charged the state $43,490 to travel, and many of the trips were between their house in Wasilla and Juneau, the capital city 600 miles away, the documents show.
Radioman in Kansas City gives a first-hand account of the Dynamic Duo's appearance in Lee's Summit, Missouri today, churning out the same Bush speechwriter-written speech she's given every day since it did so well at the convention.
Sarah Palin's love and support of aerial hunting is not shared by all.
Sarah Palin Uses State Funds to Attend Religious Functions
According to the Anchorage Daily News, taxpayers of Alaska shelled out more than $600 so that Sarah Palin could make this speech to some graduates at her old church, asking them to pray for a pipeline, of all things:
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