John Aravosis writes on tips he is getting about further evidence John McCain is fleeing from the mainstream press because all of a sudden they are not his compliant lapdogs, but are asking hard questions of him and Palin and actually, gasp, expecting answers.
A little birdie tells us that John McCain is setting up all sorts of interviews on local TV interviews this weekend in order to circumvent having to talk to the national press. (McCain thinks all the media now hates him - which is funny, since a few months ago he called them his “base” ).
McCain must think that local TV shows are pretty dumb, and that they won’t ask him about his running mate’s ethical scandals, her lie during her convention speech that she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere (she actually supported it), her lie that she visited Ireland, her lie that the media uncovered the story of her unwed pregnant daughter when in fact it was John McCain who leaked the story to Reuters, her claim that living near Russia counts as national security expertise, the claim that Wasilla with population 7,000 is just like running New York City, her latest ruse pulling the “sexism” card because she simply isn’t qualified to answer serious questions on serious issues.
John McCain is counting on local TV being dumb so he doesn’t have to face the hard questions about his mental state in choosing someone as unfit as Sarah Palin to lead our nation during wartime. Also, since McCain has been looking pretty bad lately, and avoiding major press conferences, doing a TV interview on local TV means only having to spend, what, a minute at a time talking to a reporter. Even if McCain is ill, or has no more energy left, he can eek out a minute-long TV interview and convince people that he’s still a vital 60-something. But he’s not. He’s 72 and has had 4 bouts of cancer. And he’s looking very bad lately. That’s why we’re so worried about Sarah Palin. Dan Quayle was an idiot, but at least Bush (the father) was young and healthy. John McCain is neither.
I wonder if she bought liquour. (I did at the airport in Iceland. Does that qualify me to run for the Vice Presidency, a heartbeat away from the Oval Office?)
This afternoon, the McCain campaign issued a Palin fundraising solicitation for the joint McCain-Palin-RNC fund. …
…Palin said in the email solicitation, adding: “Unfortunately, as you’ve seen this week, the Obama/Biden Democrats have been vicious in their attacks directed toward me, my family and John McCain. The misinformation and flat-out lies must be corrected.”
…neither Obama nor Biden nor the campaign has attacked Palin’s family. In fact, Obama said this after it was revealed that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant: “I have said before and I will repeat again: I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. … And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories.”
… RNC spokesman Danny Diaz cited a comment Obama’s Florida spokesman made noting (incorrectly, it seems) that Palin supported Pat Buchanan, whom Jews — at least according to this spokesman — have called a “Nazi sympathizer.”
But Diaz didn’t cite a single Obama or Biden charge against Palin’s family.
*** UPDATE *** Obama spokesman Bill Burton fires off this email in response to this story: “The only ‘flat-out lie’ is this ridiculous claim, and it proves that John McCain has wasted no time in teaching Sarah Palin the ways of the Washington he’s inhabited for the last twenty-six years. The continued dishonesty and divisiveness from John McCain’s campaign has made a complete mockery of the reform and bipartisanship he’ll boast about tonight, and it’s not the change we need to bring this country together around an agenda to create new jobs, cut taxes for middle-class families, and make us independent of foreign oil.”
So far, the McCain campaign is keeping the press away from Palin, not permitting ANY unscripted or unstaged interviews or interactions between her and the press or the American people.
This clearly demonstrates the high regard and respect in which they hold the American people as they attempt to determine in whose hands they wish to place the fate of our nation.
I mean, it is clearly not necessary for Palin to be subject to mean old reporters who might ask her difficult questions. I am sure the McCain campaign will tell us all we need to know.
And of course, since anyone who asks Palin a hard question is clearly, according to the McCain campaign and the Republicans, a dirty sexist pig, well, we just can’t have that sort of behavior, can we. After all, we all know how concerned Republicans are with issues of sexism and gender discrimination and equality for women.
According to Nicole Wallace of the McCain campaign, the American people don’t care whether Sarah Palin can answer specific questions about foreign and domestic policy. According to Wallace — in an appearance I did with her this morning on Joe Scarborough’s show — the American people will learn all they need to know (and all they deserve to know) from Palin’s scripted speeches and choreographed appearances on the campaign trail and in campaign ads.
Or, as the Associated Press puts it in a slightly different tone (emphasis added first two paragraphs):
John McCain’s campaign could be panicking or politicking with its claim that sexism lies beneath any questions about Sarah Palin’s past.
They say they’re not panicked — that the Alaska governor’s spot on the GOP ticket is secure — so that leaves room for just one conclusion for now: McCain’s political team is playing the gender card to appeal to women, and bashing the media to solidify support among conservatives.
Hours before Palin’s high-stakes address to the nation, McCain was trying to inoculate his untested and embattled running mate against criticism.
“This is part of a very clever strategy to lead the Democrats into a trap that will end up with them dumping on Gov. Palin and paying a heavy price,” said GOP consultant Rich Galen.
The chorus began at dawn Wednesday when senior adviser Steve Schmidt released a statement declaring that the campaign would no longer answer questions about its background check of Palin, a little-known governor whose every blemish is being paraded before Americans.
“The vetting controversy,” Schmidt said, acknowledging that McCain has trouble on his hands, “is a faux media scandal designed to destroy the first female Republican nominee for the vice president of the United States who has never been a part of the old boys’ network that has come to dominate the news establishment of this country.”
It was a two-fer: Schmidt both tried to rally undecided female voters behind McCain’s historic pick and prodded conservative Republicans to do what they do every election cycle — blame the media.
THE FACTS: Palin implies that construction has begun on a major natural gas pipeline from the top of Alaska into Canada. That is not correct.
…
The license is not a construction contract, and federal energy regulators have not yet approved the project.
Palin also puts the price tag for the project at $40 billion, an exaggeration. This is roughly $10 billion more than most cost estimates industry players and consultants have made to date.
THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million.
In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation, although she has cut, by more than half, the amount the state sought from Washington this year. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to Gravina Island, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a “bridge to nowhere.”
By Gloria Steinem
September 4, 2008
Here’s the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing — the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party — are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women — and to many men too — who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the “white-male-only” sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.
But here is even better news: It won’t work. This isn’t the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.
Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton’s candidacy stood for — and that Barack Obama’s still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, “Somebody stole my shoes, so I’ll amputate my legs.”
So let’s be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can’t tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.
Palin’s value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women’s wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves “abstinence-only” programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers’ millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn’t spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.
John McCain and the Republicans are throwing hissy fits because the media is actually doing their jobs: asking questions about what esperience Palin has to justify electing her to a position a heartbeat from the Presidency. McCain was so angry a CNN reporter asked questions and kept wanting them answered by Palin that McCain cancelled an appearance on Larry King.
Roger Simon at Politico writes on the current effort of McCain and the Republicans to blame his disastrous choice of Palin on the news media with tongue stuck firmly in cheek.
We have asked pathetic questions like: Who is Sarah Palin? What is her record? Where does she stand on the issues? And is she is qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?
We have asked mean questions like: How well did John McCain know her before he selected her? How well did his campaign vet her? And was she his first choice?
Bad questions. Bad media. Bad.
It is not our job to ask questions. Or it shouldn’t be. To hear from the pols at the Republican National Convention this week, our job is to endorse and support the decisions of the pols.
“I live in the American heartland, and have been a governor [here] for six years,” she said. “I don’t know any mayor in any small town in Kansas — and we have a lot of mayors of small towns — who hires a lobbyist and goes after earmarks the way Sarah Palin did.” On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin secured more than $27 million in federal earmarks for a town with only 6,700 residents.
Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz:
…Palin “had a real problem with the truth last night” and adding that “even her hometown newspaper said she stretched the truth.” (a reference to Thursday’s Anchorage Daily News headline: “Some Of Palin’s Remarks Stretch The Truth.”)
Schultz also suggested that Palin had simply done a good job of robotically delivering an address she had little hand in crafting herself. “Whenever I have had to give significant speeches, I’ve spent a lot of time with the people assisting me in drafting remarks, adding my own voice,” Schultz said. “Last night, I only heard Sarah Palin’s voice [through] negative partisan attacks, with no substance or vision of where she thinks the country should go.”
On Palin’s effort to position herself and McCain as reformers, Schultz asked, “Where is the beef? Where is the evidence? Sarah Palin is not a reformer, she is under investigation in her home state for the abuse of power in trying to get a state trooper fired… If her best example of being a reformer was trying to sell a plane on E-Bay, that is not my definition of reform.”
Shultz also questioned Palin’s readiness to lead. “To say that her experience as a mayor of a town of 7,000 people … makes her qualified to have her hands on the pillar of American foreign policy, if God forbid anything happens to John McCain, to suggest that is frightening,” she said. “What kind of experience does Sarah Palin have to sit across the table from negotiators of the dangerous countries of this world?”
The McCain team may not have vetted Sarah Palin with boots on the ground in Alaska, but the Democrats sure did — two years ago when she ran for governor. The oppo-research, compiled in a 62-page document with countless summaries or direct quotes, largely from local newspapers, covers all of the important issues you would expect to see, from her views on abortion and abstinence to tangled oil pipeline questions.
…
[Some examples. See article for many more.]
Palin Said “Hang ‘Em Up” When Asked About the Death Penalty. Asked about the death penalty, in extreme cases such as the murder of a child, Palin said, “My goodness, hang ‘em up, yeah.”
In her 2002 Lt. Governor bid, Mayor Palin used city employees, telephones, computers, fax machines for campaign fundraising and literature. On her candidate registration form, she used her City Hall fax number, and her mayoral e-mail address. Records show that Wasilla city property was used to contact supporters, donors, media contacts, and media purchasing.
Stambaugh Sued for Gender Discrimination After Palin Said She Was Intimidated by His Size. After Palin fired Irl Stambaugh, the police chief, he sued the city in part based on gender discrimination. The [Wasilla] Frontiersman wrote, “The gender discrimination issues stem from statements Palin allegedly made to others that she was intimidated by Stambaugh’s size. He stands over 6-feet tall and weighs more than 200 pounds, which, the lawsuit said, is attributed to his gender.”
Palin Exaggerated Work Experience for Mayoral Campaign. In 1997, Frontiersman columnist Paul Stuart wrote that after Palin had criticized her opponent for using City Hall resources for political gain, “when Palin was asked back then (by me) why the lodge where she claimed, in her campaign, to have gained her management experience, had no record of a borough business license or of paying any bed tax, she paused and said it might have been because the place had no clients for a year or so.” In an article describing the possibility of recalling Palin, the Frontiersman wrote the “reasons include Palin’s alleged falsification of her credentials during the campaign last fall.”
It was the McCain campaign that announced Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy. That alone might be understandable since it appears a supermarket tabloid was about to print the story. But it was the McCain campaign, entirely on its own, that dished up unsubstantiated claims about maternity tests and all sorts of other lurid nonsense that had never been seen in print anywhere. And now the McCain campaign has staged a ceremonial laying-on-of-hands on the tarmac in St. Paul in which Sen. McCain has given his official blessing to the young couple and embrace of Bristol’s boyfriend Levi.
Let’s be clear about what’s happening here. Overwhelmingly, reporters are pressing eminently reasonable questions — her role in troopergate, her lack of experience, her connections to the AIP, her history of earmarking and lobbyists, etc. Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is going absolutely non-stop about Palin’s daughter. It is unmistakable.
Perhaps I’m focusing on an irrelevant issue, but the presence, or non-presence, of Johnston on the stage tonight strikes me as important. It’s one thing for delegates to be understanding and compassionate about the fix these two teenagers have gotten themselves into. It’s another to actually celebrate it. And, given what we’ve learned in the last few days, if Johnston is up on stage with his girlfriend and the Palin family, and Republicans are wildly cheering, it will certainly look like they are celebrating this situation.
I don’t usually engage in these scenarios, but I’ll do it here. If the Obamas had a 17 year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if that they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families.
Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager and the person at the point of the vice presidential process, said there was no abrupt change of course in the final hours. Nor, he said, was Palin selected without having gone through the full vetting process that was done for other finalists. That process included reviews of financial and other personal data, an FBI background check and considerable discussion among the handful of McCain advisers involved in the deliberations.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not participate in the vetting of Gov. Sarah Palin and did not conduct a background check as part of the process, an FBI spokesman said today.
The Washington Post reported Sunday, citing an interview with campaign manager Rick Davis, that the vetting process “included reviews of financial and other personal data, an FBI background check and considerable discussion among the handful of McCain advisers nvolved in the deliberations.
“In general, we do not do vetting for political campaigns except as it might regard investigations needed for security clearances,” said John Miller, the chief FBI spokesperson.
The FBI did not participate in a vet, nor did it run a background check of Gov. Palin as part of the process.
Palin might already have a clearance that relates to her duties as governor. But the FBI can’t speak to that, and in any event, those investigations wouldn’t be accessible to the McCain campaign anyway.
WASILLA, ALASKA — For much of his long career in Washington, John McCain has been throwing darts at the special spending system known as earmarking, through which powerful members of Congress can deliver federal cash for pet projects back home with little or no public scrutiny. He’s even gone so far as to publish “pork lists” detailing these financial favors.
Three times in recent years, McCain’s catalogs of “objectionable” spending have included earmarks for this small Alaska town, requested by its mayor at the time — Sarah Palin.
…
Wasilla had received few if any earmarks before Palin became mayor. She actively sought federal funds — a campaign that began to pay off only after she hired a lobbyist with close ties to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who long controlled federal spending as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He made funneling money to Alaska his hallmark.
…
When Palin spoke after McCain introduced her as his running mate at a rally in Ohio last week, she made fun of earmarking. She said she had rejected $223 million in federal funds for a bridge linking Ketchikan to an island with an airport and 50 residents, referring to it by its derogatory label: the “bridge to nowhere.”
In the nationally televised speech, she stood by McCain and said, “I’ve championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. In fact, I told Congress thanks, but no thanks, on that bridge to nowhere. If our state wanted a bridge, I said, we’d build it ourselves.”
However, as a candidate for governor in 2006, Palin had backed funding for the bridge. After her election, she killed the much-ridiculed project when it became clear the state had other priorities. She said she would use the federal funds to fill those needs.
This year she submitted to Congress a list of Alaska projects worth $197.8 million, including $2 million to research crab productivity in the Bering Sea and $7.4 million to improve runway lighting at eight Alaska airports. A spokesman said she cut the original list of 54 projects to 31.
“So while Sen. McCain was going after cutting earmarks in Washington,” said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, “Gov. Palin was going after getting earmarks.”
ST. PAUL, Minn., Sept. 2 — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was not subjected to a lengthy in-person background interview with the head of Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential vetting team until last Wednesday in Arizona, the day before McCain asked her to be his running mate, and she did not disclose the fact that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant until that meeting, two knowledgeable McCain officials acknowledged Tuesday.
The new details of the selection process provide a fuller picture of how and when McCain made his decision. Despite the late interview of the little-known Palin, senior McCain advisers said Tuesday night that she was chosen only after a lengthy and deliberative process that included the same background investigation given to others on McCain’s shortlist and considerable debate among the candidate’s inner circle about all his choices.
McCain did not speak face to face with Palin until Thursday morning, at his retreat in Sedona, Ariz. He also talked to her by telephone the previous Sunday. McCain had spoken with all of the others on his shortlist over the course of a selection process that went on for several months, but he was least familiar personally with the person he finally chose.
Intrade, the Prediction Markets web site, which allows you to speculate on events, has opened up a line on whether Sarah Palin will have to withdraw from pick as VP nominee. The trading opened at just over 12 and is as of Sept. 3 at 9 bid and 10 ask.
Laura McGann, an enterprising reporter for the online Washington Independent, was doing a basic check on John McCain’s VP choice, Sarah Palin, and called up Kristie Smithers, the Wasilla City Clerk where Palin was Mayor. Ever courteous, McGann thanked Smithers, noting that she must have fielded request after request from the McCain campaign and Republican vetters.
“She chuckled,” McGann wrote. “Then she told me that I’m the first person who has asked her office for anything.”
The incident reflects the apparently superficial examination of Palin’s past and present by the McCain campaign - a lapse that has produced a seemingly unrelenting series of negative news stories, many stemming from the new media, many catching Republican operatives off guard and many demonstrates the lightening fast response of both the blogosphere and the mainstream media.
The mainstream media has been no slouch in tracking Palin. Matthew Mosk of the Washington Post, for example, broke the story that Palin had been a director of a “527″ independent expenditure organization working in behalf of Senator Stevens’ re-election. McCain has been an adamant critic of such organizations.
…
Even the McCain campaign’s defensive strategy in dealing with the Palin controversies is being vetted by the blogosphere. Marc Ambinder posted the campaign’s internal email telling delegates and others to counter inquiries by saying the Palin family’s privacy should be respected.
While stiff-arming inquiring reporters may work to help a delegate who otherwise would not know what to say, the McCain’s failure to fully vet Palin is blood in the water for the press — something like an aphrodisiac for Don Juan: There is no stopping the media, new and old, in the hunt for Palin stories.
Determined, at least for the moment, to avoid even a hint of replicating the forced withdrawal in 1972 of Vice Presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton, Republicans here are uniformly claiming that absolutely no one - except the press - has discussed, mentioned or even hinted at the possibility that John McCain may have to bump Sarah Palin off the ticket.
“Hell no! No hint of that! None! Nada,” declared Republican Pollster Whit Ayres. “All of the talk is exactly the other way,” he said, claiming to be stunned by a reporter’s inquiry. Palin, he said, “has energized this convention. These people [delegates] are fired up about her. Now they are going to work their hearts out for her.”
On the record and off the record, Republican strategists are putting up a nearly united front in a drive to quash public speculation that the growing controversies surrounding the Palin pick, and the growing body of evidence that only a superficial background check of the Alaska Governor was conducted, are forcing the McCain campaign to rethink its choice.
It looks like the McCain camp is now actively taking steps to punish media outlets that give them bad coverage.
Wolf Blitzer just reported that the campaign has cancelled a scheduled interview with Larry King due to an unfriendly segment last night on CNN — the segment we flagged last night where the network’s Campbell Brown grilled McCain spokesperson Tucker bounds over Sarah Palin’s lack of foreign policy experience.
Blitzer said the McCain campaign complained that Campbell Brown’s grilling of Tucker Bounds over Sarah Palin’s lack of foreign policy experience was “over the line.”
Woah! Did you hear that? CNN asked a vice presidential nominee, a person who may very likely be asked to fill John McCain’s shoes should he die or be incapacitated in office, someone who very may well become our next commander in chief during wartime -
CNN asked a McCain spokesman what national security experience Sarah Palin has? How DARE they? Clearly CNN hates America. I mean, what kind of moron cares what kind of national security experience our president has?
Well, okay sure, John McCain has made national security experience the center piece of his entire campaign, so yeah, I mean, McCain thinks everything depends on the candidate’s national security experience. But still, what kind of sick, depraved reporter would ask about something so personal, something so off-limits, so base as the foreign policy experience, national security experience, of a presidential candidate? Have you no shame, Campbell Brown?
The founder of the Alaska Independence Party — a group that has been courted over the years by Sarah Palin, and one her husband was a member of for roughly seven years — once professed his “hatred for the American government” and cursed the American flag as a “damn flag.”
The AIP founder, Joe Vogler, made the comments in 1991, in an interview that’s now housed at the Oral History Program in the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
“The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” Vogler said in the interview, in which he talked extensively about his desire for Alaskan secession, the key goal of the AIP.
“And I won’t be buried under their damn flag,” Vogler continued in the interview, which also touched on his disappointment with the American judicial system. “I’ll be buried in Dawson. And when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones home.”
At another point, Volger advocated renouncing allegiance to the United States.
In the wake of claims by AIP officials that McCain’s VP pick was “an AIP member” in the early 1990s (see background here, here, here, here and here), the McCain campaign–realizing that having Sarah Palin tied to a secessionist group probably isn’t going to win over voters–has gone on the defensive.
As part of their push to prove that McCain’s candidate doesn’t have ties to the radical AIP, they released Sarah Palin’s voter registration records (PDF)since 1982. And yes, those records confirm that she has been a registered Republican since that time. And at about the same time the McCain released those records, Lynette Clark, one of the AIP officers who stated that Palin was a “member”, retracted her statement.
But as the McCain camp was trying to stamp out one fire, another one flared up yesterday, as we learned that Sarah Palin’s husband, Todd Palin, currently registered as “undeclared,” was indeed an official member of the Alaskan Independence Party from October 1995 through July 2002 (except for a few months in 2000).
An illustration of that gap came just two weeks ago, when Palin’s church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to a figure viewed with deep hostility by many Jewish organizations: David Brickner, the founder of Jews for Jesus.
Palin’s pastor, Larry Kroon, introduced Brickner on Aug. 17, according to a transcript of the sermon on the church’s website.
“He’s a leader of Jews for Jesus, a ministry that is out on the leading edge in a pressing, demanding area of witnessing and evangelism,” Kroon said.
Brickner then explained that Jesus and his disciples were themselves Jewish.
“The Jewish community, in particular, has a difficult time understanding this reality,” he said.
Brickner’s mission has drawn wide criticism from the organized Jewish community, and the Anti-Defamation League accused them in a report of “targeting Jews for conversion with subterfuge and deception.”
Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God’s “judgment of unbelief” of Jews who haven’t embraced Christianity.
During the primary Sarah Palin chided Hillary Clinton for complaining about sexism.
“She does herself a disservice to even mention it, really,” Palin said. “When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism, or maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, ‘Man, that doesn’t do us any good, women in politics, or women in general, trying to progress this country,’” Palin said. “I don’t think it bodes well for her.”
She, or at least her advisers in McCain-land, seem to have discarded this principle today, along with years of Republican complaints about identity politics and political correctness.
The campaign just blasted out an op-ed by adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer under the heading “Ignore the Chauvinists. Palin Has Real Experience.”
Said McCain adviser Carly Fiorina: “Because of Hillary Clinton’s historic run for the presidency and the treatment she received, American women are more highly tuned than ever to recognize and decry sexism in all its forms. They will not tolerate sexist treatment of Gov. Palin.”
n addition to being a mayor and raising four children, Sarah Palin found time for another venture in her Wasilla years — she was part-owner of an Anchorage car wash.
Palin and husband Todd each held a 20 percent stake in Anchorage Car Wash LLC, according to state corporation records filed in 2004.
A review of Palin’s gubernatorial disclosure filings indicates that she failed to report her stake in the company on the form that requires candidates for governor to disclose any interest in a nonpublicly traded company.
The car wash venture was not entirely smooth sailing. State records show the business ran into trouble with Alaska’s division of corporations business and professional licensing after Palin became governor of the state in 2006.
A Feb. 11, 2007 letter to the governor’s business partner advises that the car wash had “not filed its biennial report and/or paid its biennial fees,” which were more than a year overdue.
The warning letter was written on state letterhead, which carried Palin’s name at the top, next to the state seal.
On April 3, 2007, the state went further and issued a “certificate of involuntary dissolution” because of the car wash’s failure to file its report and pay state licensing fees.
It looks like the special investigator in the Trooper-Gate case — in which John McCain’s surprise VP pick Sarah Palin stands accused of trying to fire a state trooper who had been embroiled in a bitter divorce proceeding with Palin’s sister — could soon uncover exactly what happened.
State Senator Hollis French, a Democrat and the chair of the bipartisan Senate committee overseeing the investigation, told TPMmuckraker that the independent investigator assigned to the case, Steve Branchflower, has contacted the Governor’s office about having her deposed, and has received a response. French said that Palin’s deposition would likely take place in the next few weeks and will almost certainly be under oath. “I think that’s best,” he said. French added that Branchflower does not expect to have to subpoena Palin, as her office has been cooperative thus far.
But that co-operation appears to have extended only so far. Her office has claimed executive privilege on emails requested by the state trooper’s union in a separate civil suit*. But several Alaska lawmakers told TPMmuckraker Friday that those claims likely won’t stand up, and that Branchflower should get access to the emails should he force the issue.
Palin had at first denied that her office was involved in the effort to have the trooper fired, but was forced to retract those denials when taped evidence emerged that a staffer in her office was involved.
Gov. Sarah Palin is already facing ethical questions over her firing of the Alaska public safety commissioner, and now she faces questions over the firing of a longtime local police chief.
After taking over as Mayor of the small town of Wasilla, Palin fired the longtime local police chief. The former police chief, Irl Stambaugh says he was fired because he stepped on the toes of Palin’s campaign contributors, including bar owners and the National Rifle Association.
I appreciate those who have begun to comment on this effort, but for now, publishing comments is disabled.
Revolutionaries
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending
too small a degree of it. -Thomas Jefferson
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve
neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin
I want to tell you how proud I am to be the President of a nation that -- in which
there's a lot of Philippine-Americans. They love America and they love their heritage.
And I reminded the President that I am reminded of the great talent of the --
of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House. - George W. Bush
Watch the Video!
I will conduct a respectful debate. Now, it will be dispirited -- it will be spirited --
because there are stark differences. I am a proud conservative, liberal Republica--
conservative Republican...Hello? Easy there. - John McCain
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