download .mp4 (89.5 MB) | read the transcript
This afternoon the President continued his conversation on health reform with a roundtable at the Children's National Medical Center, a conversation that has taken him to every region of the country and encompassed every imaginable perspective on health care reform. It has been a conversation that has brought more people and more stakeholders into the fold supporting strong reform than ever before, and taken us further down that road than ever before. And so it is no surprise, perhaps, that those who feel they would profit financially or politically have come out swinging furiously to try to kill reform.
Surrounded by those who heroically do everything they can to help the young and the ill, today the President made clear that whereas those special interests and their voices in Congress have stopped change in the past, they would not win this time: And over the past decade, premiums have doubled in America; out-of-pocket costs have shot up by a third; deductibles have continued to climb. And yet, even as America's families have been battered by spiraling health care costs, health insurance companies and their executives have reaped windfall profits from a broken system. Now, we've talked this problem to death, year after year. But unless we act -- and act now -- none of this will change.
Just a quick statistic I heard about this hospital: Just a few years ago, there were approximately 50,000 people coming into the emergency room. Now they've got 85,000. There's been almost a doubling of emergency room care in a relatively short span of time, which is putting enormous strains on the system as a whole. That's the status quo, and it's only going to get worse.
If we do nothing, then families will spend more and more of their income for less and less care. The number of people who lose their insurance because they've lost or changed jobs will continue to grow. More children will be denied coverage on account of asthma or a heart condition. Jobs will be lost, take-home pay will be lower, businesses will shutter, and we will continue to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on insurance company boondoggles and inefficiencies that add to our financial burdens without making us any healthier. So the need for reform is urgent and it is indisputable. No one denies that we're on an unsustainable path. We all know there are more efficient ways of doing it. We just -- I spoke to the chief information officer here at the hospital and he talked about some wonderful ways in which we could potentially gather up electronic medical records and information for every child not just that comes to this hospital but in the entire region, and how much money could be saved and how the health of these kids could be improved. But it requires an investment.
Now, there are some in this town who are content to perpetuate the status quo, are in fact fighting reform on behalf of powerful special interests. There are others who recognize the problem, but believe -- or perhaps, hope -- that we can put off the hard work of insurance reform for another day, another year, another decade. Just the other day, one Republican senator said -- and I'm quoting him now -- "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."
Think about that. This isn't about me. This isn't about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America's families, breaking America's businesses, and breaking America's economy. And we can't afford the politics of delay and defeat when it comes to health care. Not this time. Not now. There are too many lives and livelihoods at stake. There are too many families who will be crushed if insurance premiums continue to rise three times as fast as wages. There are too many businesses that will be forced to shed workers, scale back benefits, or drop coverage unless we get spiraling health care costs under control. (President Barack Obama roundtable with health care providers at Children's Hospital, July 20, 2009. Official White House Photograph by Pete Souza)
THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG SUBSCRIBE MONDAY, JUNE 15TH, 2009 AT 4:19 PM
Why Reform, Why Now Posted by Jesse Lee
This afternoon the President gave a landmark, sweeping speech on health care reform to the American Medical Association in Chicago. More so than at any time before, he explained his vision for comprehensive reform that addresses every weak point in our health care system. It is a vision that implements best practices that have allowed some towns and companies to cut costs by as much as half compared to others. It is a vision that makes sure everybody has access to quality, affordable coverage, whether your family hits a rough patch or you have a pre-existing condition. It is a vision in which patients’ and doctors’ interests are aligned. And it is a vision where Americans’ choices of doctors and coverage are maintained, and they also have a choice of a public option that can help keep private insurers honest. It is a vision that focuses on prevention, making sure Americans stay healthy throughout their lives. It is well worth the while to read through the entire speech, but here are a few key excerpts, including some key points you may not have heard before:
On the costs of inaction: If we fail to act -- (applause) -- if we fail to act -- and you know this because you see it in your own individual practices -- if we fail to act, premiums will climb higher, benefits will erode further, the rolls of the uninsured will swell to include millions more Americans -- all of which will affect your practice.
If we fail to act, one out of every five dollars we earn will be spent on health care within a decade. And in 30 years, it will be about one out of every three -- a trend that will mean lost jobs, lower take-home pay, shuttered businesses, and a lower standard of living for all Americans. And if we fail to act, federal spending on Medicaid and Medicare will grow over the coming decades by an amount almost equal to the amount our government currently spends on our nation's defense. It will, in fact, eventually grow larger than what our government spends on anything else today. It's a scenario that will swamp our federal and state budgets, and impose a vicious choice of either unprecedented tax hikes, or overwhelming deficits, or drastic cuts in our federal and state budgets. So to say it as plainly as I can, health care is the single most important thing we can do for America's long-term fiscal health. That is a fact. That's a fact. (Applause.)
On incentives for doctors: There are two main reasons for this. The first is a system of incentives where the more tests and services are provided, the more money we pay. And a lot of people in this room know what I'm talking about. It's a model that rewards the quantity of care rather than the quality of care; that pushes you, the doctor, to see more and more patients even if you can't spend much time with each, and gives you every incentive to order that extra MRI or EKG, even if it's not necessary. It's a model that has taken the pursuit of medicine from a profession -- a calling -- to a business. That's not why you became doctors. That's not why you put in all those hours in the Anatomy Suite or the O.R. That's not what brings you back to a patient's bedside to check in, or makes you call a loved one of a patient to say it will be fine. You didn't enter this profession to be bean-counters and paper-pushers. You entered this profession to be healers. (Applause.) And that's what our health care system should let you be. That's what this health care system should let you be. (Applause.) Now, that starts with reforming the way we compensate our providers -- doctors and hospitals. We need to bundle payments so you aren't paid for every single treatment you offer a patient with a chronic condition like diabetes, but instead paid well for how you treat the overall disease. We need to create incentives for physicians to team up, because we know that when that happens, it results in a healthier patient. We need to give doctors bonuses for good health outcomes, so we're not promoting just more treatment, but better care.
On making sure doctors and patients have all the right information: A recent study, for example, found that only half of all cardiac guidelines are based on scientific evidence -- half. That means doctors may be doing a bypass operation when placing a stent is equally effective; or placing a stent when adjusting a patient's drug and medical management is equally effective -- all of which drives up costs without improving a patient's health. So one thing we need to do is to figure out what works, and encourage rapid implementation of what works into your practices. That's why we're making a major investment in research to identify the best treatments for a variety of ailments and conditions. (Applause.)
On America’s relationship with doctors: But my signature on a bill is not enough. I need your help, doctors, because to most Americans you are the health care system. The fact is Americans -- and I include myself and Michelle and our kids in this -- we just do what you tell us to do. (Laughter.) That's what we do. We listen to you, we trust you. And that's why I will listen to you and work with you to pursue reform that works for you. (Applause.) Together, if we take all these steps, I am convinced we can bring spending down, bring quality up; we can save hundreds of billions of dollars on health care costs while making our health care system work better for patients and doctors alike. And when we align the interests of patients and doctors, then we're going to be in a good place.
On the Health Insurance Exchange and a public option: Now, if you don't like your health care coverage or you don't have any insurance at all, you'll have a chance, under what we've proposed, to take part in what we're calling a Health Insurance Exchange. This exchange will allow you to one-stop shop for a health care plan, compare benefits and prices, and choose a plan that's best for you and your family -- the same way, by the way, that federal employees can do, from a postal worker to a member of Congress. (Applause.) You will have your choice of a number of plans that offer a few different packages, but every plan would offer an affordable, basic package. Again, this is for people who aren't happy with their current plan. If you like what you're getting, keep it. Nobody is forcing you to shift. But if you're not, this gives you some new options. And I believe one of these options needs to be a public option that will give people a broader range of choices -- (applause) -- and inject competition into the health care market so that force -- so that we can force waste out of the system and keep the insurance companies honest. (Applause.)
Now, I know that there's some concern about a public option. Even within this organization there's healthy debate about it. In particular, I understand that you're concerned that today's Medicare rates, which many of you already feel are too low, will be applied broadly in a way that means our cost savings are coming off your backs. And these are legitimate concerns, but they're ones, I believe, that can be overcome. As I stated earlier, the reforms we propose to reimbursement are to reward best practices, focus on patient care, not on the current piecework reimbursements. What we seek is more stability and a health care system that's on a sounder financial footing. And the fact is these reforms need to take place regardless of whether there's a public option or not. With reform, we will ensure that you are being reimbursed in a thoughtful way that's tied to patient outcomes, instead of relying on yearly negotiations about the Sustainable Growth Rate formula that's based on politics and the immediate state of the federal budget in any given year. (Applause.)
And I just want to point out the alternative to such reform is a world where health care costs grow at an unsustainable rate. And if you don't think that's going to threaten your reimbursements and the stability of our health care system, you haven't been paying attention. So the public option is not your enemy; it is your friend, I believe. Perhaps the most rousing moment of the speech came about half way through, as he stated the underlying moral basis for health reform: We are not a nation that accepts nearly 46 million uninsured men, women and children. (Applause.) We are not a nation that lets hardworking families go without coverage, or turns its back on those in need. We're a nation that cares for its citizens. We look out for one another. That's what makes us the United States of America. We need to get this done. (Applause.)
Doctors are on the front lines of the country’s health care crisis and see firsthand every day why Americans are demanding reform. That’s why on Wednesday, White House Director of Health Reform Nancy-Ann DeParle hosted the latest in a series of White House Stakeholder Discussions with doctors from around the country.
President Obama's Saturday address to the American people caps a week which saw major health care players, from providers to payers, meet face-to-face at the White House to work out ways to cut more than $2 trillion from the nation's health care costs.
The current health care system does not work for women. On Wednesday, Secretary Sebelius met with women small-business owners at a knitting shop in Washington D.C. to discuss health reform.
A Discussion with President Obama: The President held a meeting in the Roosevelt Room on May 12, 2009 with employers to discuss innovative workplace practices to improve the health of workers and reduce the rising rate of health care spending.
Many Americans are struggling to make ends meet as the cost of care goes up while others face losing insurance as businesses struggle to cover employees.
Dear Friend,
Last week was National Small Business week, and I would like to talk about a top concern of those Americans that run and work in these companies: health care. Read more
President Obama is committed to enacting comprehensive health reform this year that lowers costs, guarantees choice of doctors and plans, and assures quality affordable health care for all Americans.
Read more about recent events supporting this commitment.
View Report | Printable PDF | Watch Secretary Sebelius Discuss the Report
View Hard Times in the Heartland Report | View Bottom Line Report | View Costs of Inaction
Weekly Video Posted May 29
Archived Weekly Updates |
Captioned Version
If you see a red box in the place of the view player, please install the latest version of Flash from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer.
We want to hear what you think about health reform. Send us your story, proposals and ideas.
The recommendations from more than 3,200 Health Care Community Discussions were systematically analyzed to compile the report, Americans Speak on Health Reform.
View Report
Printable PDF
Read a Sample Report From Your State
The Innovations Gallery celebrates the innovators and innovations who are championing the President’s vision of more effective and open government. HealthReform.gov was recognized by www.WhiteHouse.gov for allowing Americans to take part personally in the health reform process.
Watch Video
President Obama brought together leaders with diverse views at the White House Forum on Health Reform. The White House issued a report highlighting the productive discussions from the event.
Read the White House Forum on Health Reform Report (PDF)
Read Director of the White House Office of Health Reform Nancy-Ann DeParle’s blog post
The President’s 2010 Budget lays the groundwork for reform of the American health care system, most notably by setting aside a deficit-neutral reserve fund of $635 billion over 10 years to help finance reform of our health care system to bring down costs, expand coverage, and improve quality.
Read more about the President’s 2010 Budget and health reform
Over the past ten years, which has increased faster: the average cost of a home, or spending on health insurance premiums?
Check Out The Answer
Thursday, May 28, 2009
“Health Bill Would Fix What’s Broken”
Today, Senator Ted Kennedy wrote an Op-Ed in the Boston Globe, underscoring the need for health reform this year. In the piece, Senator Kennedy shares how his recent battle with cancer has given him extra incentive to ‘fix what’s broken’ in the health care system. Senator Kennedy outlines some of the key principles of what he and President Obama seek in a health reform bill.
Read Excerpt
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
More Small Firms Drop Health Care
Rising health care premiums and sharp declines in revenue from the recession are forcing some small businesses to choose between dropping health insurance or laying off workers – or staying in business at all. A recent Wall Street Journal article highlights the struggles small business owners face from rising health care costs.
“Time is Now to Fix Health Care”
On Sunday, the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald published an editorial, urging Congress to pass health reform this year. The Herald-Telegraph pointed at the increasing percentage of uninsured Americans and the increasing price of prescription drugs as two of the most pressing reasons to reform health care.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
America cannot afford to wait
Americans across the country realize that the health care status quo is unsustainable. However, nurses are on the frontlines of health care. Today, Margaret Drugay, a nurse from Arizona writes an opinion piece in the Arizona Daily Star, appropriately stating that “America cannot afford to wait.”
Read more
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Obama for America Post from Obama for America:
President Obama's Call from Air Force One By Christopher Hass - May 30th, 2009 at 7:46 am EDTOn Thursday, President Obama took time to speak by phone with thousands of Organizing for America volunteers about the urgent need to organize for health care reform.
“If we don’t get it done this year, we’re not going to get it done,” the President said.
He stressed that health care reform will only become a reality if grassroots supporters mobilize support for it in every community in America. The fight over health care reform, he noted, offers a "big chance to prove that the movement that started during the campaign isn’t over.”
Also speaking on the call was David Plouffe, OFA Director Mitch Stewart, OFA Deputy Director Jeremy Bird, OFA New Media Director Natalie Foster and OFA volunteer Diane Robertson, who offered her advice on how to organize support in your community.
The fight over health care reform begins in your neighborhood June 6th. Sign up to host or attend a kickoff event in your area.
Open for Questions: Round two
Monday, December 29, 2008 01:01pm EST / Posted by Dan McSwain
During this brief transition period, we’ve rolled out important new tools to let users interact with our team in a transparent and meaningful way.
Our first run of Open for Questions was one such feature, with nearly 1,000,000 votes cast on questions from the Change.gov community.
In this round, you can still view all of the questions that have been submitted—or you can break down the questions by category for easier navigation. For instance, you can read the top-ranking question regarding Energy and the Environment and browse through other questions on the same topic by clicking on that issue.
We think this change is valuable. It serves the other key purpose of features like Open for Questions: making your input easy to pass on to the members of our Transition team that are crafting solutions to these vital issues right now.
Check out the Open for Questions feature here. We’ll close this round of questions and put together our responses in the new year.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the 2009 Presidential Inaugural Committee announced that the President-elect, Vice President-elect and their families will travel - via railroad—to Washington, D.C. on Saturday, January 17th and host events along the way in Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore. The trip marks the final leg of a journey that began on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Illinois and will culminate on the steps of the United States Capitol. “As part of the most open and accessible Inauguration in history, we hope to include as many Americans as possible who wish to participate, but can’t be in Washington,“ said Emmett S. Beliveau, Executive Director of the 2009 Presidential Inaugural Committee. “These events will allow us to do that while honoring the rich history and tradition of previous inaugural journeys.“ In the tradition of past Presidents-elect, the daylong trip will include a series of events on the way to Washington, DC. Saturday morning, President-elect Obama and his family will hold an event in Philadelphia before boarding a train bound for Wilmington, Delaware, where he will be joined by Vice President-elect Biden and his family. Together, the families will travel to Baltimore, Maryland, and hold another event, before finally arriving in Washington, D.C. on Saturday evening. In keeping with the theme of the 2009 Inauguration, “Renewing America’s Promise,“ the President-elect and Vice President-elect will hold events in some of the cities instrumental to that promise: Philadelphia, where that promise was realized; Baltimore, where that promise was defended, then immortalized in our national anthem; and Washington, where Americans of all backgrounds will gather over four days, united in common purpose and resolved to renew that promise once more. Additional details of the inaugural trip, including information on each event, will be released at a later date. For the latest information on the 2009 Presidential Inauguration, please visit www.pic2009.org.
Overview of the Administration
Change.gov
We will profile the people that will be leading the Obama Administration and the priority work that will begin after the inauguration in January. The Transition Project is responsible for overseeing the appointments of a new White House staff and members of the Cabinet.
The Cabinet is made up of the Vice President, the White House Chief of Staff, and the Secretaries of each of the 15 executive departments:
The Cabinet also includes:
the Office of Management and Budget, the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States Trade Representative, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In addition to selecting new Cabinet members, an entirely new staff will be chosen to lead the offices within the Executive Office of the President. These offices include:
There are also many offices within the White House Office that will be filled with new personnel. These include:
For the first time, the weekly Democratic address has been released as a web video. It will also continue to air on the radio.
President-elect Obama plans to to publish these weekly updates through the Transition and then from the White House.
Today's address from the President-elect concerns the current economic crisis:
Also available on AOL, Yahoo, and MSN High-resolution, Quicktime format: (106MB .mov file).
Remarks of President-elect Barack Obama
November 15, 2008
Today, the leaders of the G-20 countries -- a group that includes the world's largest economies -- are gathering in Washington to seek solutions to the ongoing turmoil in our financial markets. I'm glad President Bush has initiated this process -- because our global economic crisis requires a coordinated global response.
And yet, as we act in concert with other nations, we must also act immediately here at home to address America's own economic crisis. This week, amid continued volatility in our markets, we learned that unemployment insurance claims rose to their highest levels since September 11, 2001. We've lost jobs for ten straight months -- nearly 1.2 million jobs this year, many of them in our struggling auto industry. And millions of our fellow citizens lie awake each night wondering how they're going to pay their bills, stay in their homes, and save for retirement.
Make no mistake: this is the greatest economic challenge of our time. And while the road ahead will be long, and the work will be hard, I know that we can steer ourselves out of this crisis -- because here in America we always rise to the moment, no matter how hard. And I am more hopeful than ever before that America will rise once again.
But we must act right now. Next week, Congress will meet to address the spreading impact of the economic crisis. I urge them to pass at least a down-payment on a rescue plan that will create jobs, relieve the squeeze on families, and help get the economy growing again. In particular, we cannot afford to delay providing help for the more than one million Americans who will have exhausted their unemployment insurance by the end of this year. If Congress does not pass an immediate plan that gives the economy the boost it needs, I will make it my first order of business as President.
Even as we dig ourselves out of this recession, we must also recognize that out of this economic crisis comes an opportunity to create new jobs, strengthen our middle class, and keep our economy competitive in the 21st century.
That starts with the kinds of long-term investments that we've neglected for too long. That means putting two million Americans to work rebuilding our crumbling roads, bridges, and schools. It means investing $150 billion to build an American green energy economy that will create five million new jobs, while freeing our nation from the tyranny of foreign oil, and saving our planet for our children. It means making health care affordable for anyone who has it, accessible for anyone who wants it, and reducing costs for small businesses. And it also means giving every child the world-class education they need to compete with any worker, anywhere in the world.
Doing all this will require not just new policies, but a new spirit of service and sacrifice, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. If this financial crisis has taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers -- in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people. And that is how we will meet the challenges of our time -- together. Thank you.
Send the Kids to the Inauguration (Community Service)
There are 45 school children from Coatesville who will be going to the Inauguration in January 2009.
A community concert will be held on November 14th beginning at 6:30 PM at the Scott Middle School located at 800 Olive Street, Coatesville, PA 19320.
The event is produced by the Chester County Internet Radio Project and the Scott Middle School Mentoring Project.
Expect to see some great gospel, hip hop and rhythm and blues. The event has a free will donation. There will be food and activities for children.
Time: Monday, November 17 from 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Host: John Hall Location: Scott Middle School (Coatesville, PA) 800 Olive Street Coatesville, PA 19320 Maps:
Directions: Take Rt. 30 By-Pass to Reeceville Rd. exit. Turn left onto Reeceville Rd. Continue south towards Coatesville. Turn right on Rt. 30 (Lincoln Highway. Go three lights turn left. Scott Middle is one block on the left. The auditorium entrance is on the left.
Associated Groups: B Reed Henderson High School Students For Obama, Berks for Obama, Berks Region 5--Dream Team, Brandywine Valley for Obama, Chester Countians for Obama, Chester Springs for OBAMA, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania Students for Barack Obama, Coatesville, PA for Obama, Lionville Middle School for obama, Pennsylvanians for Obama, Rock For Barack, West Chester Henderson High School for Obama!, West Chester University (WCU) for Obama!
Signup for 'Send the Kids to the Inauguration'
Barack Obama's sister has not emerged in public since the death of their grandmother two days before her brother's historic presidential election but in a post-election email to close friends Maya Soetoro-Ng said "I wept tears of joy for all of us on Tuesday. He may not be a perfect man. Certainly, he has often said that he'll likely be an imperfect president, but he is a good man, a smart man, a disciplined soul who balances temperance with determination and courage. We've made a great choice, I assure you."
Their maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died on the Sunday before the Tuesday Nov. 4 presidential election in the two-bedroom, 10-story apartment where Dunham raised Obama. The email was shared with this reporter (and with his newspaper, the daily Honolulu Advertiser).
In the final run-up to Election Day, Obama had abruptly changed his campaign schedule to fly back home and visit Dunham, who was dying of cancer at the age of 86. After her death was announced, on Election Day eve, he spoke movingly of her at a final campaign appearance, tears streaming down his face. Services for Dunham have not been announced and the Honolulu mortuary handling the arrangements, Borthwick Mortuary, has not returned phone calls. Obama's campaign, however, says he will return home to Honolulu sometime in December, prior to his Jan. 20 inauguration 5,100 miles away in the nation's capitol.
During a family vacation in August, then Sen. Obama brought his family to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, which overlooks the apartment where he grew up. Obama and his children left two leis at niche No. 440, where the ashes of his grandfather Stanley Dunham are in an urn behind a bronze plaque. Stanley Dunham was an Army sergeant in World War II and died of prostate cancer in 1992. Officials at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific have since been contacted by Borthwick Mortuary about holding a service for Madelyn Dunham, says Gene Castagnetti, the cemetery's director. Stanley Dunham's niche is large enough to hold another urn. If the family decides on that arrangement, Sgt. Dunham's bronze plaque covering the niche would be removed and replaced with another that would include his wife's name, birthday and date of death.
As it turned out, Dunham's koa wood urn arrived on Election Day, Soetoro-Ng wrote in her email. Soetoro-Ng surrounded the urn with pictures of Dunham's late daughter, Stanley Ann Dunham (the mother of Soetoro-Ng and the President-elect), Dunham's grandchildren and her great grandchildren, "all of us who benefited so much from her steady voice and hand," she wrote.
Soetoro-Ng could have accepted her brother's invitation to be by his side on Election Night in Chicago. But, as she had for much of the past eight years, she chose to stay in the apartment on Beretania Street where Dunham raised Obama as a boy and where Soetoro-Ng had later cared for her. In the post-election email, Soetoro-Ng writes of the sometimes-conflicting emotions surrounding both her grandmother's death and her brother's success — and of the need to then unplug for a while with her husband, Konrad, and their 4-year-old daughter, Suhaila, on Oahu's rural North Shore. She writes that she had been flooded with email messages "of both congratulation and condolence.... There's a wide swatch of emotion cutting through me, sometimes swirling, never simple... a briny mixture of elation, sadness, determination, regret, pride, hope, fatigue. You can imagine..."
Dunham, whom Obama called "Toot" after the Hawaiian word for grandparent, tutu, never showed self-pity or fear as she faced the end of her life, Soetoro-Ng writes. But Dunham could be wickedly funny. "When she saw the number of flowers that had been sent to her," Soetoro-Ng writes, 'she said, 'Oh my...with all of this hullabaloo, it's going to be embarrassing if I DON'T die.' I gave her a chuckle and of course told her that I wouldn't at all mind such an embarrassment, and then I invited her to stay and dance with me into the new year. She couldn't stay, but she certainly tried, and defied expectations again and again."
Click here for pictures of Obama's campaign.
The story of the campaign and this historic moment has been your story. Share your story and your ideas, and be part of bringing positive lasting change to this country.
Posted November 2, 2008 5:47 PM
by Jason George
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- At Gov. Sarah Palin's Sunday rallies, she's earned big responses by repeating the line that an independent organization has found that Sen. Barack Obama's proposed policies "would destroy 6 million jobs over the next decade."
A quick search though finds that the only thing destroyed is the truth in that statement.
The facts: The "independent organization" Palin cites is actually the Center for Data Analysis, which is part of The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank.
Further, the figure is what the Heritage Foundation believes would be the amount of potential jobs not created if Obama changes tax law (including repealing the Bush tax cuts.)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27350530/
Woman retracts allegation she was assaulted for supporting Republican
msnbc.com staff and news service reports
updated 4:32 p.m. ET, Fri., Oct. 24, 2008
PITTSBURGH - A John McCain volunteer in Pittsburgh who said she was robbed and sexually assaulted because of her political views has admitted to fabricating the story and will be charged, police said Friday.
20-year-old Ashley Todd, of College Station, Texas, "stated that she made up the story which snowballed and got out of control," Pittsburgh police said in a statement, adding that she would be arrested and charged with filing a false police report.
"Ms. Todd stated that she was not robbed and there is no 6'4" black male attacker," the police added. "She indicated that she has had a prior mental problems and she does not remember how the backward letter "B" got on her face."
Todd had earlier agreed to take a polygraph test due to inconsistencies in her statements.
Among other things, police said photos and bank card information from an automated teller machine where the college student claimed she was robbed do not show her using the machine at the time, police said.
Other differences in her accounts are whether she lost consciousness, whether she remembers handing over money and how the man assaulted her, police said.
GOP candidates called herThe report of the attack prompted the Republican presidential candidate and his running mate, Sarah Palin, to call Todd expressing their concern. Barack Obama's campaign also issued a statement wishing Todd well and hoping the attacker would be swiftly brought to justice.
The Associated Press could not immediately locate Todd or her family.
Ethan Eilon, executive director of the College Republican National Committee, told reporters that Todd worked in New York for several months before moving to Pennsylvania two weeks ago to continue working for the group.
Eilon declined to comment on the investigation Friday or to help The Associated Press contact Todd. "We think this girl has endured enough and that this is going to be something for her and her family to work through," Eilon said before the arrest was announced.
In her initial account, Richard said, Todd attempted to use the ATM when the man approached her from behind, put a knife with a 4- to 5-inch blade to her throat and demanded money. She told police she handed the assailant $60 and walked away.
Todd told investigators that she suspected the man then noticed a John McCain sticker on her car, became angry and punched her in the back of the head, knocking her to the ground and telling her "you are going to be a Barack supporter," police said in a statement.
She said he continued to punch and kick her while threatening "to teach her a lesson for being a McCain supporter," police said. She said he then sat on her chest, pinned her hands down with his knees and scratched a backward letter "B" into her face using what she believed to be a dull knife.
The woman told police she didn't seek medical attention, but instead went to a friend's apartment nearby and called police about 45 minutes later.
Posted on Sun, Oct. 19, 2008
His aim is untrue in too many areas, so a longtime Republican is voting for Obama.
By Michael Smerconish - Inquirer
Inquirer Currents Columnist
I've decided.
My conclusion comes after reading the candidates' memoirs and campaign platforms, attending both party conventions, interviewing both men multiple times, and watching all primary and general-election debates.
John McCain is an honorable man who has served his country well. But he will not get my vote. For the first time since registering as a Republican 28 years ago, I'm voting for a Democrat for president. I may have been an appointee in the George H.W. Bush administration, and master of ceremonies for George W. Bush in 2004, but last Saturday I stood amid the crowd at an Obama event in North Philadelphia.
Five considerations have moved me:
Terrorism. The candidates disagree as to where to prosecute the war against Islamic fundamentalists. Barack Obama is correct in saying the front line in that battle is not Iraq, it's the Afghan-Pakistan border. Osama bin Laden crossed that border from Tora Bora in December 2001, and we stopped pursuit. The Bush administration outsourced the hunt for bin Laden and instead invaded Iraq.
No one in Iraq caused the death of 3,000 Americans on 9/11. Our invasion was based on a false predicate, so we have no business being there, regardless of whether the surge is working. Our focus must be the tribal-ruled FATA region in Pakistan. Only recently has our military engaged al-Qaeda there in operations that mirror those Obama was ridiculed for recommending in August 2007.
Last spring, Obama told me: "It's not that I was opposed to war [in Iraq]. It's that I felt we had a war that we had not finished." Even Sen. Joe Lieberman conceded to me last Friday that "the headquarters of our opposition, our enemies today" is the FATA.
Economy. We face economic problems that are incomprehensible to most Americans, certainly they are to me. This is a time to covet intellect, and that begins at the top. Jack Bogle, the legendary founder of the Vanguard Group, told me recently that McCain's assertion that the fundamentals of the economy were "strong" was the "stupidest statement of 2008." In light of the unprecedented volatility in the market, who can dispute Bogle's characterization and the lack of understanding that McCain's assessment portends?
VP. I opined here that Sarah Palin demonstrated the capacity to be president in her speech to the Republican convention. Sadly, there has been no further exhibition of her abilities, and she remains an unknown quantity. We are left questioning the judgment of a candidate who bypassed his reported preferred choices, Lieberman and former Gov. Tom Ridge, and instead yielded to the whims of the periphery of his party. With two wars and a crumbling economy, Palin is too big of a risk to be a heartbeat away from a presidency held by a 72-year-old man who has battled melanoma. Advantage Joe Biden.
Opportunity. In a speech delivered on Father's Day, Obama lamented that too many fathers are missing from the lives of too many children and mothers. Look no further than Philadelphia for proof that the nation has a fatherhood problem at the root of its firearms crisis. And no demographic is affected by this confluence of factors like the black community. Among the many elements needed to address this crisis are role models, individuals whom urban youth can aspire to emulate. Little more than a year ago, Charles Barkley told me: "I want young black kids to see Barack on television every day. . . . We need to see more blacks who are intelligent, articulate, and who carry themselves with great dignity." Obama can be that man.
Hope. Wednesday morning will come and an Obama presidency holds the greatest chance for unifying us here at home and restoring our prestige around the globe. The campaigns have foretold the kind of presidency we can expect from each candidate. Last Friday in Lakeville, Minn., McCain himself had to explain to a supporter who was "scared" of an Obama presidency that those fears were unfounded. Another told McCain that Obama was untrustworthy because he is an "Arab." Those exchanges were a predictable byproduct of ads against Obama featuring tag lines such as "Too Risky for America" and "Dangerous," and a failure to rein in individuals at McCain events who highlighted Obama's middle name, all against a background of Internet lore.
Last Saturday at Progress Plaza, I heard Obama say: "The American people aren't looking for somebody to divide this country; the American people are looking for someone to lead this country."
What people do for their 15 minutes amazes me!!
TOLEDO, Ohio - “Joe the plumber,” the new face of middle-class America after Sen. John McCain made him famous in Wednesday night’s presidential debate, isn’t technically a plumber, and he probably wouldn’t be adversely affected by Sen. Barack Obama’s tax plan. But the issues he raises are important and worth examining for their impact on small businesses.
Joe the plumber — Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, 34, of suburban Toledo, Ohio — is the first to say that he’s not the story and that no one should listen to him when it comes to tax policy.
“I just hope I’m not making too much of a fool of myself and can get some type of message out there as far as, you know, really watch actions and learn for yourself,” Wurzelbacher said Thursday outside his home. “Don’t take other people’s opinions.”
Wurzelbacher first came to attention over the weekend, when he engaged Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, in a six-minute discussion of tax policy at a rally in Holland, Ohio. He told Obama that he was a plumber and was hoping to buy his boss’s business, which he said made $250,000 to $280,000 a year. He was concerned, he said, that Obama’s economic proposals would mean he’d be kicked into a higher tax bracket.
Wednesday night, McCain adopted Wurzelbacher as the representative of struggling middle-class Americans, addressing many of his comments directly to “Joe the plumber,” whom he misidentified as “Joe Wurzelburger.”
“The real winner last night was Joe the plumber. Joe’s the man,” McCain said Thursday at a campaign rally in Downington, Pa. “He won, and small businesses won across America. They won because Americans are not going to let Senator Obama raise taxes in a tough economy.”
‘There’s a lot I’ve got to learn’Legally speaking, Wurzelbacher isn’t a plumber, because he isn’t licensed by Toledo, Lucas County or the state of Ohio. A representative of the Toledo Building Inspection Division said a plumber must be registered with the state and only then can apply for a city plumbing contractor’s license.
Wurzelbacher said he worked under the license held by his boss, Al Newell of Newell Plumbing and Heating Co. of Toledo. Newell is a licensed plumbing contractor in Toledo, records show. But anyone working under Newell should have a journeyman’s plumbing license or an apprenticeship license, officials said.
Building Inspection officials said Newell was responsible for making sure that anyone working under him was licensed. The Toledo Plumbing Board of Control may consider sanctions against Wurzelbacher or Newell, officials told NBC affiliate WNWO of Toledo.
“There’s a lot I’ve got to learn” about the plumbing business, Wurzelbacher said Thursday.
Wurzelbacher also acknowledged that he had no specific plans for buying Newell’s business, saying he and Newell had simply talked about the idea from time to time. He might have difficulty making the purchase: Court records from his divorce show that Wurzelbacher made $40,000 in 2006.
Even if he did buy Newell Plumbing and Heating, Obama’s tax plan wouldn’t affect him. While Wurzelbacher told Obama that the business would be taxed at a higher rate because it grossed more than $250,000 a year, Ohio business records show the company’s estimated total annual revenue as only $100,000.
In any event, Obama’s tax plan specifies that the higher rate would apply only to revenue above the $250,000 threshold. For a company with revenue of $280,000, the top end of Wurzelbacher’s supposition, only the extra $30,000 would be taxed at a higher rate.
Joe says Obama would be ‘hurting others’Analysts calculated that the extra tax would amount to $900, which would likely be more than offset by separate provisions of Obama’s plan: a 50 percent tax credit for health care and elimination of the capital gains tax for small businesses.
“I’d have to look at your particular business, but you might end up paying lower taxes under my plan and my approach than under John McCain’s,” Obama told Wurzelbacher during their exchange last weekend.
At the time, Wurzelbacher replied, “Oh, yeah, I understand that.” But by Thursday, he had reconsidered.
“If you believed (Obama), I'd be receiving his tax cuts, but I don’t look at it that way,” he said. “He’d still be hurting others.”
Wurzelbacher, a registered Republican, refused to say whom he would vote for, insisting that “I want the American people to vote for who they want to vote for. I just want them to be informed when they make that vote.”
But he hinted that his choice would be McCain, the GOP standard-bearer, whom he said it would be “an honor” to meet. Asked about other issues by a covey of curious reporters, Wurzelbacher voiced strongly Republican opinions.
“Social Security’s a joke,” he said. “I have parents. I don’t need another set of parents called the government. Let me take my money and invest it how I please.”
On immigration: “I wish our borders were closed.”
And on the war in Iraq, which McCain has strongly supported: “I’m not sorry we’re in Iraq. ... It’s made us safer. I absolutely believe that.”
By JIM RUTENBERG
Published: October 12, 2008
The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that arguably set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”
That statement was contained in a press release and it spun a complex tale about the alleged ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian.
The press release was picked up by the conservative FreeRepublic.com Web site and spread virally and steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and, ultimately, books. It continues to be an engine that drives other false rumors about Mr. Obama’s background to this day, with one finding national, public voice on Friday, when a woman told Senator John McCain at a town-hall-style meeting, “I have read about him,” and “he’s an Arab.” Mr. McCain corrected her.
Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyber-whisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs where he is a bête noir.
But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The Fox program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.
An examination of legal documents and election filings, and interviews with those from Mr. Martin’s past, revealed a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims, who has left a trail of animosity – including anti-Jewish comments -- among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over the course of more than 30 years.
A law school graduate, his admission to the Illinois state bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.” Though he is not a licensed lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he also made various unsuccessful attempts to run for public office in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as an author and writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.
Mr. Martin, in a series of interviews, did not dispute his influence in Obama rumors.
“Everybody uses my research as a take off point,” Mr. Martin said, adding, however, that some take his writings “and exaggerate them to suit their own fantasies.”
As to his background, he said, “I’m a colorful person, there’s always somebody who has a legitimate cause in their mind to be angry with me.”
When questions were raised last week about Mr. Martin’s appearance and claims on “Hannity’s America” on Fox News, the program’s producer said his views were expressed as his opinion and not necessarily fact, and, as such, were not unwarranted.
It was not his first turn on national television.
The CBS News program “48 Hours” devoted an hour-long program to his legal prowess in 1993 entitled, “See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits.” He has filed so many lawsuits – and paperwork containing anti-Semitic slurs – a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court house without preliminary approval.
He prepared a run for Congress in Connecticut – where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew Power.” He ran for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he showed a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of cocaine use.
In the mid-1990s he was jailed in relation to an assault case in Florida.
His newfound prominence, and the persistence of his line of political attack -- updated regularly on his Web site and through press releases -- amazes those from his past.
“Well, that’s just a bookend for me,” said Tom Slade, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party who says the party spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending against lawsuits Mr. Martin brought for Mr. Slade’s refusal to support his bid for state office. “He’s crazy as a run-over dog. But he’s fearless.”
Given Mr. Obama’s unique background, which was the focus of his first book, it was perhaps bound to become fodder for some opposed to his candidacy.
Mr. Obama was raised mostly by his white mother, an atheist, and his grandparents, who were Protestant, in Hawaii. He hardly knew his father, a Kenyan from a Muslim family who variously considered himself atheist or agnostic, Mr. Obama wrote. For a few childhood years Mr. Obama lived in Indonesia with a stepfather he described as a nonpracticing Muslim.
Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But every independent analyst seeking the origins of the cyberspace attack winds up back at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.
Its general outlines have turned up in a host of works that have expounded falsely on Mr. Obama’s heritage or supposed attempts to conceal it, including “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best-seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome S. Corsi. Mr. Corsi, who has made anti-Muslim and anti-Catholic slurs for which he later apologized, opens with a quote from Mr. Martin.
“Martin gets credit for the idea of, call it ‘the sound bite narrative mien,”’ said Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University who has investigated the e-mail campaign’s circulation and origins. “What he’s generating gets picked up in other places, and it’s an example of how the Internet has given power to sources we would have never taken seriously at another point in time.”
Ms. Allen said that Mr. Martin’s original work found amplification in 2006, when a man named Ted Sampley wrote an article painting Mr. Obama as a secret practitioner of Islam. Quoting liberally from Mr. Martin, the article circulated on the Internet, and its contents eventually found their way into various e-mail messages, particularly an added claim that Mr. Obama had attended “Jakarta’s Muslim Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging jihad on the rest of the world.”
Mr. Obama for two years attended a Catholic school in Indonesia, where he was taught about the Bible, he wrote in “Dreams of My Father,” and for two years went to an Indonesian public school open to all religions where he was taught about the Koran.
Mr. Sampley, coincidentally, is a Vietnam veteran and longtime opponent of Senator John McCain and Senator John Kerry, both of whom he accused of ignoring his claims that American prisoners were left behind in Vietnam. He previously portrayed Mr. McCain as a “Manchurian candidate” and again opposed him this year in a primary-season campaign that was roundly denounced as a smear.
Speaking of Mr. Martin’s influence on his Obama writings, Mr. Sampley said, “I keyed off of his work.”
It is perhaps ironic that Mr. Martin’s depictions of Mr. Obama as a secret Muslim have found resonance among some Jewish voters who have received e-mail messages containing various versions of his initial theory, often by new authors and with new twists.
In his original press release Mr. Martin wrote that he was personally “a strong supporter of the Muslim community.” But, he wrote of Mr. Obama, “It may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel,” and, “His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles.”
Yet in various court cases, Mr. Martin had impugned Jews.
A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the overseeing judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”
In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”
During an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.
But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993 he affirmed a different anti-Semitic portion of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”
On Friday, when asked about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”
He said he was not anti-Semitic. “I was trying to show that everybody in the bankruptcy court was Jewish and I was not Jewish,” he said, “and I was being victimized by religious bias.”
In discussing his denied admission to the Illinois bar, Mr. Martin said the psychiatric exam listing him as having a “moderately severe personality defect” was spitefully written by an evaluator he clashed with.
Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 13, 2008, on page A1 of the New York edition.
Extremists Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll helped launch Palin’s political career in Alaska, and in return had influence over policy. “Her door was open,” says Chryson — and still is
By Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert
Oct. 10, 2008 PALMER, Alaska — | On the afternoon of Sept. 24 in downtown Palmer, Alaska, as the sun began to sink behind the snowcapped mountains that flank the picturesque Mat-Su Valley, 51-year-old Mark Chryson sat for an hour on a park bench, reveling in tales of his days as chairman of the Alaska Independence Party. The stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic battles to eliminate taxes, support the “traditional family” and secede from the United States.
So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that were intended for his personal protection. “This here is my attack dog,” he said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from his passenger seat. “Her name is Suzy.” Then he pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol — once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops — out of his glove compartment. “I’ve got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement,” he said, clutching the gun in his palm. “Then again, so do most Alaskans.” But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call “the 48.” “We want to go our separate ways,” he said, “but we are not going to kill you.”
Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah Palin. An obscure figure outside of Alaska, Chryson has been a political fixture in the hometown of the Republican vice-presidential nominee for over a decade. During the 1990s, when Chryson directed the AIP, he and another radical right-winger, Steve Stoll, played a quiet but pivotal role in electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda afterward. Both Stoll and Chryson not only contributed to Palin’s campaign financially, they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp before, during and after her victory.
Palin backed Chryson as he successfully advanced a host of anti-tax, pro-gun initiatives, including one that altered the state Constitution’s language to better facilitate the formation of anti-government militias. She joined in their vendetta against several local officials they disliked, and listened to their advice about hiring. She attempted to name Stoll, a John Birch Society activist known in the Mat-Su Valley as “Black Helicopter Steve,” to an empty Wasilla City Council seat. “Every time I showed up her door was open,” said Chryson. “And that policy continued when she became governor.”
When Chryson first met Sarah Palin, however, he didn’t really trust her politically. It was the early 1990s, when he was a member of a local libertarian pressure group called SAGE, or Standing Against Government Excess. (SAGE’s founder, Tammy McGraw, was Palin’s birth coach.) Palin was a leader in a pro-sales-tax citizens group called WOW, or Watch Over Wasilla, earning a political credential before her 1992 campaign for City Council. Though he was impressed by her interpersonal skills, Chryson greeted Palin’s election warily, thinking she was too close to the Democrats on the council and too pro-tax.
But soon, Palin and Chryson discovered they could be useful to each other. Palin would be running for mayor, while Chryson was about to take over the chairmanship of the Alaska Independence Party, which at its peak in 1990 had managed to elect a governor.
The AIP was born of the vision of “Old Joe” Vogler, a hard-bitten former gold miner who hated the government of the United States almost as much as he hated wolves and environmentalists. His resentment peaked during the early 1970s when the federal government began installing Alaska’s oil and gas pipeline. Fueled by raw rage — “The United States has made a colony of Alaska,” he told author John McPhee in 1977 — Vogler declared a maverick candidacy for the governorship in 1982. Though he lost, Old Joe became a force to be reckoned with, as well as a constant source of amusement for Alaska’s political class. During a gubernatorial debate in 1982, Vogler proposed using nuclear weapons to obliterate the glaciers blocking roadways to Juneau. “There’s gold under there!” he exclaimed.
Vogler made another failed run for the governor’s mansion in 1986. But the AIP’s fortunes shifted suddenly four years later when Vogler convinced Richard Nixon’s former interior secretary, Wally Hickel, to run for governor under his party’s banner. Hickel coasted to victory, outflanking a moderate Republican and a centrist Democrat. An archconservative Republican running under the AIP candidate, Jack Coghill, was elected lieutenant governor.
Hickel’s subsequent failure as governor to press for a vote on Alaskan independence rankled Old Joe. With sponsorship from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Vogler was scheduled to present his case for Alaskan secession before the United Nations General Assembly in the late spring of 1993. But before he could, Old Joe’s long, strange political career ended tragically that May when he was murdered by a fellow secessionist.
Hickel rejoined the Republican Party the year after Vogler’s death and didn’t run for reelection. Lt. Gov. Coghill’s campaign to succeed him as the AIP candidate for governor ended in disaster; he peeled away just enough votes from the Republican, Jim Campbell, to throw the gubernatorial election to Democrat Tony Knowles.
Despite the disaster, Coghill hung on as AIP chairman for three more years. When he was asked to resign in 1997, Mark Chryson replaced him. Chryson pursued a dual policy of cozying up to secessionist and right-wing groups in Alaska and elsewhere while also attempting to replicate the AIP’s success with Hickel in infiltrating the mainstream.
Unlike some radical right-wingers, Chryson doesn’t put forward his ideas freighted with anger or paranoia. And in a state where defense of gun and property rights often takes on a real religious fervor, Chryson was able to present himself as a typical Alaskan.
He rose through party ranks by reducing the AIP’s platform to a single page that “90 percent of Alaskans could agree with.” This meant scrubbing the old platform of what Chryson called “racist language” while accommodating the state’s growing Christian right movement by emphasizing the AIP’s commitment to the “traditional family.”
“The AIP is very family-oriented,” Chryson explained. “We’re for the traditional family — daddy, mommy, kids — because we all know that it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And we don’t care if Heather has two mommies. That’s not a traditional family.”
Chryson further streamlined the AIP’s platform by softening its secessionist language. Instead of calling for immediate separation from the United States, the platform now demands a vote on independence.
Yet Chryson maintains that his party remains committed to full independence. “The Alaskan Independence Party has got links to almost every independence-minded movement in the world,” Chryson exclaimed. “And Alaska is not the only place that’s about separation. There’s at least 30 different states that are talking about some type of separation from the United States.”
Next page: The War of Northern Aggression, or the Civil War, or the War Between the States — however you want to refer to it — was not about slavery
This has meant rubbing shoulders and forging alliances with outright white supremacists and far-right theocrats, particularly those who dominate the proceedings at such gatherings as the North American Secessionist conventions, which AIP delegates have attended in recent years. The AIP’s affiliation with neo-Confederate organizations is motivated as much by ideological affinity as by organizational convenience. Indeed, Chryson makes no secret of his sympathy for the Lost Cause. “Should the Confederate states have been allowed to separate and go their peaceful ways?” Chryson asked rhetorically. “Yes. The War of Northern Aggression, or the Civil War, or the War Between the States — however you want to refer to it — was not about slavery, it was about states’ rights.”
Another far-right organization with whom the AIP has long been aligned is Howard Phillips’ militia-minded Constitution Party. The AIP has been listed as the Constitution Party’s state affiliate since the late 1990s, and it has endorsed the Constitution Party’s presidential candidates (Michael Peroutka and Chuck Baldwin) in the past two elections.
The Constitution Party boasts an openly theocratic platform that reads, “It is our goal to limit the federal government to its delegated, enumerated, Constitutional functions and to restore American jurisprudence to its original Biblical common-law foundations.” In its 1990s incarnation as the U.S. Taxpayers Party, it was on the front lines in promoting the “militia” movement, and a significant portion of its membership comprises former and current militia members.
At its 1992 convention, the AIP hosted both Phillips — the USTP’s presidential candidate — and militia-movement leader Col. James “Bo” Gritz, who was campaigning for president under the banner of the far-right Populist Party. According to Chryson, AIP regulars heavily supported Gritz, but the party deferred to Phillips’ presence and issued no official endorsements.
In Wasilla, the AIP became powerful by proxy — because of Chryson and Stoll’s alliance with Sarah Palin. Chryson and Stoll had found themselves in constant opposition to policies of Wasilla’s Democratic mayor, who started his three-term, nine-year tenure in 1987. By 1992, Chryson and Stoll had begun convening regular protests outside City Council. Their demonstrations invariably involved grievances against any and all forms of “socialist government,” from city planning to public education. Stoll shared Chryson’s conspiratorial views: “The rumor was that he had wrapped his guns in plastic and buried them in his yard so he could get them after the New World Order took over,” Stein told a reporter.
Chryson did not trust Palin when she joined the City Council in 1992. He claimed that she was handpicked by Democratic City Council leaders and by Wasilla’s Democratic mayor, John Stein, to rubber-stamp their tax hike proposals. “When I first met her,” he said, “I thought she was extremely left. But I’ve watched her slowly as she’s become more pronounced in her conservative ideology.”
Palin was well aware of Chryson’s views. “She knew my beliefs,” Chryson said. “The entire state knew my beliefs. I wasn’t afraid of being on the news, on camera speaking my views.”
But Chryson believes she trusted his judgment because he accurately predicted what life on the City Council would be like. “We were telling her, ‘This is probably what’s going to happen,’” he said. “‘The city is going to give this many people raises, they’re going to pave everybody’s roads, and they’re going to pave the City Council members’ roads.’ We couldn’t have scripted it better because everything we predicted came true.”
After intense evangelizing by Chryson and his allies, they claimed Palin as a convert. “When she started taking her job seriously,” Chryson said, “the people who put her in as the rubber stamp found out the hard way that she was not going to go their way.” In 1994, Sarah Palin attended the AIP’s statewide convention. In 1995, her husband, Todd, changed his voter registration to AIP. Except for an interruption of a few months, he would remain registered was an AIP member until 2002, when he changed his registration to undeclared.
In 1996, Palin decided to run against John Stein as the Republican candidate for mayor of Wasilla. While Palin pushed back against Stein’s policies, particularly those related to funding public works, Chryson said he and Steve Stoll prepared the groundwork for her mayoral campaign.
Chryson and Stoll viewed Palin’s ascendancy as a vehicle for their own political ambitions. “She got support from these guys,” Stein remarked. “I think smart politicians never utter those kind of radical things, but they let other people do it for them. I never recall Sarah saying she supported the militia or taking a public stand like that. But these guys were definitely behind Sarah, thinking she was the more conservative choice.”
“They worked behind the scenes,” said Stein. “I think they had a lot of influence in terms of helping with the back-scatter negative campaigning.”
Indeed, Chryson boasted that he and his allies urged Palin to focus her campaign on slashing character-based attacks. For instance, Chryson advised Palin to paint Stein as a sexist who had told her “to just sit there and look pretty” while she served on Wasilla’s City Council. Though Palin never made this accusation, her 1996 campaign for mayor was the most negative Wasilla residents had ever witnessed.
While Palin played up her total opposition to the sales tax and gun control — the two hobgoblins of the AIP — mailers spread throughout the town portraying her as “the Christian candidate,” a subtle suggestion that Stein, who is Lutheran, might be Jewish. “I watched that campaign unfold, bringing a level of slime our community hadn’t seen until then,” recalled Phil Munger, a local music teacher who counts himself as a close friend of Stein.
“This same group [Stoll and Chryson] also [publicly] challenged me on whether my wife and I were married because she had kept her maiden name,” Stein bitterly recalled. “So we literally had to produce a marriage certificate. And as I recall, they said, ‘Well, you could have forged that.’”
When Palin won the election, the men who had once shouted anti-government slogans outside City Hall now had a foothold inside the mayor’s office. Palin attempted to pay back her newfound pals during her first City Council meeting as mayor. In that meeting, on Oct. 14, 1996, she appointed Stoll to one of the City Council’s two newly vacant seats. But Palin was blocked by the single vote of then-Councilman Nick Carney, who had endured countless rancorous confrontations with Stoll and considered him a “violent” influence on local politics. Though Palin considered consulting attorneys about finding another means of placing Stoll on the council, she was ultimately forced to back down and accept a compromise candidate.
Emboldened by his nomination by Mayor Palin, Stoll later demanded she fire Wasilla’s museum director, John Cooper, a personal enemy he longed to sabotage. Palin obliged, eliminating Cooper’s position in short order. “Gotcha, Cooper!” Stoll told the deposed museum director after his termination, as Cooper told a reporter for the New York Times. “And it only cost me a campaign contribution.” Stoll, who donated $1,000 to Palin’s mayoral campaign, did not respond to numerous requests for an interview. Palin has blamed budget concerns for Cooper’s departure.
Next page: “I think there was only one time when I wasn’t able to talk to her and that was because she was in a meeting”
The following year, when Carney proposed a local gun-control measure, Palin organized with Chryson to smother the nascent plan in its cradle. Carney’s proposed ordinance would have prohibited residents from carrying guns into schools, bars, hospitals, government offices and playgrounds. Infuriated by the proposal that Carney viewed as a common-sense public-safety measure, Chryson and seven allies stormed a July 1997 council meeting.
With the bill still in its formative stages, Carney was not even ready to present it to the council, let alone conduct public hearings on it. He and other council members objected to the ad-hoc hearing as “a waste of time.” But Palin — in plain violation of council rules and norms — insisted that Chryson testify, stating, according to the minutes, that “she invites the public to speak on any issue at any time.”
When Carney tried later in the meeting to have the ordinance discussed officially at the following regular council meeting, he couldn’t even get a second. His proposal died that night, thanks to Palin and her extremist allies.
“A lot of it was the ultra-conservative far right that is against everything in government, including taxes,” recalled Carney. “A lot of it was a personal attack on me as being anti-gun, and a personal attack on anybody who deigned to threaten their authority to carry a loaded firearm wherever they pleased. That was the tenor of it. And it was being choreographed by Steve Stoll and the mayor.”
Asked if he thought it was Palin who had instigated the turnout, he replied: “I know it was.”
By Chryson’s account, he and Palin also worked hand-in-glove to slash property taxes and block a state proposal that would have taken money for public programs from the Permanent Fund Dividend, or the oil and gas fund that doles out annual payments to citizens of Alaska. Palin endorsed Chryson’s unsuccessful initiative to move the state Legislature from Juneau to Wasilla. She also lent her support to Chryson’s crusade to alter the Alaska Constitution’s language on gun rights so cities and counties could not impose their own restrictions. “It took over 10 years to get that language written in,” Chryson said. “But Sarah [Palin] was there supporting it.”
“With Sarah as a mayor,” said Chryson, “there were a number of times when I just showed up at City Hall and said, ‘Hey, Sarah, we need help.’ I think there was only one time when I wasn’t able to talk to her and that was because she was in a meeting.”
Chryson says the door remains open now that Palin is governor. (Palin’s office did not respond to Salon’s request for an interview.) While Palin has been more circumspect in her dealings with groups like the AIP as she has risen through the political ranks, she has stayed in touch.
When Palin ran for governor in 2006, marketing herself as a fresh-faced reformer determined to crush the GOP’s ossified power structure, she made certain to appear at the AIP’s state convention. To burnish her maverick image, she also tapped one-time AIP member and born-again Republican Walter Hickel as her campaign co-chair. Hickel barnstormed the state for Palin, hailing her support for an “all-Alaska” liquefied gas pipeline, a project first promoted in 2002 by an AIP gubernatorial candidate named Nels Anderson. When Palin delivered her victory speech on election night, Hickel stood beaming by her side. “I made her governor,” he boasted afterward. Two years later, Hickel has endorsed Palin’s bid for vice president.
Just months before Palin burst onto the national stage as McCain’s vice-presidential nominee, she delivered a videotaped address to the AIP’s annual convention. Her message was scrupulously free of secessionist rhetoric, but complementary nonetheless. “I share your party’s vision of upholding the Constitution of our great state,” Palin told the assembly of AIP delegates. “My administration remains focused on reining in government growth so individual liberty can expand. I know you agree with that … Keep up the good work and God bless you.”
When Palin became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, her attendance of the 1994 and 2006 AIP conventions and her husband’s membership in the party (as well as Palin’s videotaped welcome to the AIP’s 2008 convention) generated a minor controversy. Chryson claimed, however, that Sarah and Todd Palin never even played a minor role in his party’s internal affairs. “Sarah’s never been a member of the Alaskan Independence Party,” Chryson insisted. “Todd has, but most of rural Alaska has too. I never saw him at a meeting. They were at one meeting I was at. Sarah said hello, but I didn’t pay attention because I was taking care of business.”
But whether the Palins participated directly in shaping the AIP’s program is less relevant than the extent to which they will implement that program. Chryson and his allies have demonstrated just as much interest in grooming major party candidates as they have in putting forward their own people. At a national convention of secessionist groups in 2007, AIP vice chairman Dexter Carter announced that his party would seek to “infiltrate” the Democratic and Republican parties with candidates sympathetic to its hard-right, secessionist agenda. “You should use that tactic. You should infiltrate,” Carter told his audience of neo-Confederates, theocrats and libertarians. “Whichever party you think in that area you can get something done, get into that party. Even though that party has its problems, right now that is the only avenue.”
Carter pointed to Palin’s political career as the model of a successful infiltration. “There’s a lot of talk of her moving up,” Carter said of Palin. “She was a member [of the AIP] when she was mayor of a small town, that was a nonpartisan job. But to get along and to go along she switched to the Republican Party … She is pretty well sympathetic because of her membership.”
Carter’s assertion that Palin was once a card-carrying AIP member was swiftly discredited by the McCain campaign, which produced records showing she had been a registered Republican since 1988. But then why would Carter make such a statement? Why did he seem confident that Palin was a true-blue AIP activist burrowing within the Republican Party? The most salient answer is that Palin was once so thoroughly embedded with AIP figures like Chryson and Stoll and seemed so enthusiastic about their agenda, Carter may have simply assumed she belonged to his party.
Now, Palin is a household name and her every move is scrutinized by the Washington press corps. She can no longer afford to kibitz with secessionists, however instrumental they may have been to her meteoric ascendancy. This does not trouble her old AIP allies. Indeed, Chryson is hopeful that Palin’s inauguration will also represent the start of a new infiltration.
“I’ve had my issues but she’s still staying true to her core values,” Chryson concluded. “Sarah’s friends don’t all agree with her, but do they respect her? Do they respect her ideology and her values? Definitely.”
