DelawareCountyPaForObama

Overview of the Administration

Jill 4 Obama — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:01:15 EST

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:

Department of Agriculture
Department of Commerce
Department of Defense
Department of Education
Department of Energy
Department of Health and Human Services
Department of Homeland Security
Department of Housing and Urban Development
Department of the Interior
Department of Justice
Department of Labor
Department of State
Department of Transportation
Department of the Treasury
Department of Veterans Affairs

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:

Council of Economic Advisers
Council of Environmental Quality
National Security Council
Office of Administration
Office of Management and Budget
Office of National Drug Control Policy
Office of Science and Technology Policy
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
United States Trade Representative

There are also many offices within the White House Office that will be filled with new personnel. These include:

Domestic Policy Council
Homeland Security Council
National Economic Council
Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
Office of the First Lady
Office of National AIDS Policy
Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Boards
USA Freedom Corps
White House Fellows Office
White House Military Office

Attorney General, Eric Holder

Jill 4 Obama — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:01:44 EST

Politics

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JOHN M. BRODER Published: November 18, 2008 WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team has signaled to Eric H. Holder Jr., a senior official in the Justice Department in the Clinton administration, that he will be chosen as attorney general, but no final decision has been made, people involved in the process said Tuesday. Skip to next paragraph Susan Walsh/Associated Press Eric H. Holder Jr., a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, was a legal adviser to the Obama campaign. Related Times Topics: Eric H. Holder Jr. Blog The Caucus The latest on the 2008 election results and on the presidential transition. Join the discussion.

Election Results | More Politics News

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Virdia McGee showed passers-by a photograph she had taken of President-elect Barack Obama’s motorcade on Tuesday.

Mr. Holder would be the first African-American to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement official. As a top adviser to Mr. Obama, he has long been considered the front-runner for the job of attorney general because of his extensive record as a prosecutor and a judge and a well-honed reputation inside Washington. Mr. Obama’s advisers appear to have overcome concerns that Mr. Holder’s involvement in a presidential pardon scandal as President Bill Clinton left office in 2001 might cloud his nomination for the job.Word that Mr. Holder was likely to be nominated as attorney general leaked out as Mr. Obama also began settling on other members of his team and signaling his policy priorities upon taking office.

Mr. Obama is set to hire Peter R. Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, as the White House budget director, people involved in the transition said. They said the leading candidate at this point for another top post on the economic team, director of the National Economic Council, is Jacob Lew, who was Mr. Clinton’s budget director.While Mr. Obama has yet to name any of his cabinet secretaries, his early choices for White House staff positions and the names currently at the top of the list for staff and cabinet jobs suggest that his administration could be heavily stocked with Democrats who served under Mr. Clinton. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, under consideration to be secretary of state, was said by an adviser to be torn about giving up her Senate seat. In his only public appearance on Tuesday, Mr. Obama indicated that he intended to move rapidly on one of the most ambitious items on his agenda, tackling climate change.

Speaking to a bipartisan group of governors by video, the president-elect said that despite the weakening economy, he had no intention of softening or delaying his ambitious goals for reducing emissions that cause the warming of the planet. “Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all,” Mr. Obama said. “Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”He repeated his campaign promise to reduce climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and invest $150 billion in new energy-saving technologies. Some industry leaders and members of Congress have suggested that Mr. Obama’s climate proposal would impose too great a cost on an already-stressed economy — having the same effects as a tax on coal, oil and natural gas — and should await the end of the current downturn. A bill similar to Mr. Obama’s plan failed to clear the Senate this year, largely because of concerns about its impact on the economy.Mr. Obama rejected that view, saying that his plan would reduce oil imports, create jobs in energy conservation and renewable sources of energy, and reverse the warming of the atmosphere.

“My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process,” he said.Mr. Obama said that although he would not attend a meeting on climate change sponsored next month by the United Nations, he had asked members of Congress who would be attending to report back to him on what the United States could do to reassert leadership on global climate policy.Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has been a consistent skeptic on global warming science and legislation, said Tuesday that Mr. Obama might be getting out ahead of his own party on climate change. Mr. Inhofe noted that nearly a third of Senate Democrats had opposed the similar climate change bill that came to a vote this year. “President-elect Obama will face an even tougher sell in the years ahead, with economic concerns remaining front and center,” Mr. Inhofe said.

In Washington, Michelle Obama and her two daughters, Malia and Sasha, visited the White House on Tuesday, the final day of a two-day trip devoted to scouting out private schools for the young girls. Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama, said Laura Bush had invited Mrs. Obama for her second visit to the White House — she and Mr. Obama visited last week — so the girls could get a feel for their new home-to-be. During their trip to Washington, Mrs. Obama and her daughters also toured Sidwell Friends School and Georgetown Day School, two private schools they are considering.

Members of Mr. Obama’s transition team said Tuesday that no decision had been made on the attorney general spot and denied reports that Mr. Holder, 57, had already been selected. People involved in the transition process said, however, that the decision appeared all but certain once the process of vetting of Mr. Holder was completed. If Mr. Holder is selected as attorney general and confirmed by the Senate, his biggest challenge, legal observers agree, will be to restore the credibility of a department that was badly battered by political scandal during the Bush administration. The dismissal of eight United States attorneys in 2007 and other controversies opened up the Justice Department to accusations that it had routinely let politics trump legal considerations.

Mr. Holder first met Mr. Obama at a small dinner party in 2004 welcoming him to Washington. The two lawyers, each the son of immigrant fathers, were seated next to each other at the dinner, and Mr. Holder said he was immediately impressed by the new senator. Mr. Holder went on to serve as an adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaign on legal issues and served on the two-member vice-presidential selection team that led to the choice of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. as Mr. Obama’s running mate.

Now in private practice as a partner at the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, Mr. Holder served as a federal prosecutor, a trial court judge, and United States attorney for the District of Columbia before becoming the top-ranking aide to Attorney General Janet Reno in 1997. He was regarded as a strong ally for federal prosecutors and helped shape Mr. Clinton’s program to put 100,000 police officers on the street. His last days at the Justice Department in 2001 were marred by his peripheral involvement in Mr. Clinton’s pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich, as Republicans sharply criticized Mr. Holder as failing to oppose the pardon and allowing the White House to bypass the normal pardon review process at the Justice Department. Mr. Holder told the Clinton White House at the time that he was “neutral, leaning toward favorable” on the idea of pardoning Mr. Rich, whose former wife, Denise Rich, had contributed heavily to Mr. Clinton’s presidential library. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, which reviews nominees for attorney general, told reporters on Tuesday that while he had not taken any position on the prospect of Mr. Holder as attorney general, his role in the pardon of Mr. Rich should be “a factor to consider” in any confirmation.

With the battered economy the most immediate problem facing him when he takes office in January, Mr. Obama interviewed Mr. Orszag in Chicago last week for the cabinet-level job of director of the Office of Management and Budget, people familiar with the transition said. Mr. Obama’s budget director will have to scramble to draft a proposed budget to be ready soon after the Jan. 20 presidential inauguration, and to help with the economic stimulus proposals that Mr. Obama has said he will offer after taking office. Like several other candidates for top posts, Mr. Orszag is a protégé of Robert E. Rubin, former Treasury secretary to Mr. Clinton, and shares Mr. Rubin’s centrist approach to fiscal policies and concern about big deficits.Mr. Orszag was also considered for the job of director of the White House National Economic Council, which coordinates the work of the president’s principal economic and fiscal advisers. That post is expected to go to Mr. Lew, another Clinton White House veteran who is now chief operating officer of Citi Alternative Investments, a unit of Citigroup, where Mr. Rubin is a director.While the economic crisis has forced Mr. Orszag to focus on the $700 billion bailout program and various stimulus proposals before Congress, his emphasis has otherwise been on health policies. He has sought to draw attention to the growing costs for Medicare and other federal programs that are driving the projections of unsustainable budget deficits. Recently, for example, he gave a speech highlighting studies on potential cost savings from preventive medicine and more cost-efficient treatments.Reporting was contributed by Jackie Calmes, Rachel L. Swarns, Helene Cooper, Jeff Zeleny and Peter Baker.

Coatesville School Children Going to the Inauguration!

Jill 4 Obama — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 07:44:56 EST

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'

Change.gov - The Official Website of the U.S. Presidential Transition

Jill 4 Obama — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 05:53:41 EST

Very interesting. Launched at amazing speed! Change.gov is a website launched by the Obama team's Presidential Transition Project which documents the transition into power and solicits ideas from the public. Change.gov

Change.gov - The Official Web Site of the The U.S. Presidential Transition

"Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today." - President-Elect Barack Obama
Change.gov - The Official Web Site of the The U.S. Presidential Transition

Thursday, November 06, 2008 | 75 Days Until Inauguration

Obama & Biden in Grant Park

The Newsroom Wednesday, November 5, 2008 04:09pm EST / in Blog Change has come to America Last night, President-Elect Barack Obama delivered the final speech of a presidential campaign that promised change in Washington. Open Government It's Your America: Share Your Ideas

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.

GSA Transition Directory

The Transition Directory was developed to introduce Presidential nominees, appointees, and members of the President-elect's Transition Team to the operation of the Federal government and to the resources available to help them begin their service in the new Administration.

http://change.gov/

Letter from Obama for America

Jill 4 Obama — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 07:59:00 EST

Thank you for contacting Senator Obama and Obama for America. Barack greatly appreciates the outpouring of messages he is receiving from across the country and from Americans around the world. He is deeply honored by the confidence the American people have placed in him and in Senator Biden.

Senators Obama and Biden are hopeful about the opportunities and clear-eyed about the challenges our nation faces. They look forward to working with all Americans, regardless of who they voted for, in the great project of American renewal. Enlisting the energy and ingenuity of the American people is the only way we will create the changes that so many people want to see, so we hope you'll be involved.

You have just contacted Obama for America, the Obama/Biden campaign organization. A new organization is being formed to facilitate communication with the Obama/Biden Administration that will take office on January 20, 2009. If you have questions, suggestions, or comments about the federal government, policy, or the coming Obama/Biden Administration, please stay tuned for more information and a new website coming soon that will tell you how to get involved.

If you're contacting us because you've been energized by your participation in our grassroots movement, we hope you will remain active in your community and involved in national policy debates. Please continue to visit www.BarackObama.com regularly. We've built one of the most comprehensive nationwide organizing networks in history, and our victory on November 4th is only the beginning of the work we will do together.

If you have other thoughts or business with the campaign, you can continue to reach us toll free at 866-675-2008. Due to the extremely high number of messages we are currently receiving, we may be unable to respond to your message individually, but we do appreciate hearing from you and hope you'll work with us as we build America's future together.

Thank you again for contacting us.

Sincerely,
Obama for America

-----------------------
Paid for by Obama for America

Time for our grassroots bottom-up campaign to start

Joe Hussein Streett — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:10:58 EST

To those of us who got Baracks message from the beginning, and those who followed later. More than ever President Obama will need our help. We need to get involved in our local Democratic club. It is time to to strengthen our bottom up campaign for our future and our childrens future, so our beloved America never gets out of touch with who made this country great, and its borders safe, we the ordinary citizens. Lets keep this momentum going and reform our party for the average working person. We need qualified candidates to run against these local incumbents, who have been in office for years, and keep promising tax reform, health care reform, etc. every time they run for office, but never happens. Lets fight for what we want. YES WE CAN

No more "dream deferred" ... the dream has come true.

Janet from PA ... no longer bitter, because hope has prevailed — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:02:50 EST

Last night, I was too overcome to write, although I did stay up for hours watching the TV coverage and reading everything on this blog. I finally went to sleep, still partly incredulous, still wondering if everything I'd seen on MSNBC last night would turn out, in the morning, to be just a dream.

I woke up today, and nothing in my dream had changed ... because yes, this time, everything had changed. No more stolen elections. No more "politics as usual." WE WON.

I'm still crying ... tears of joy ... and pride. Yes ... for the first time in a long time, I'm REALLY proud of my country ... and its people ... especially of these people, who made the dream come true:

Congratulations to Barack. You will be a glorious and inspirational president. Jed Bartlett, move over. :-)

Congratulations to Michelle, Malia, and Sasha. You unselfishly lent us your husband and father for so many months ... giving so many of us the opportunity to get to know him, as you do ... and to love him, as you do.

Congratulations to the Davids, their staffs, all the wonderful field organizers, and everyone else involved ... for running a brilliant and positive campaign. You've shown that the high road can be the road to victory.

Congratulations to everyone who endorsed Barack ... all those far-seeing politicians, from Bill Richardson and Ted Kennedy onward ... and all the columnists we read and whose links we posted so often ... who knew that Barack was someone very special and who told us so. You had the right words at the right time.

Congratulations to Keith and Rachel, pundits extraordinaire ... two voices of truth amid a mass-media chorus of innuendos and omissions and lies. You kept the faith, and kept us faithful.

Congratulations to Joe Biden, running mate extraordinaire. No more Amtrak for you ... you're on the O-train now.

And congratulations to us, the volunteers ... the canvassers, the phonebankers, the donors, the bloggers ... the millions of blades of grass that grew from those grass roots ... and flourished ... and spread Barack's message of hope throughout a parched America. We never stopped giving ... our time, our money, our words, our actions, our hearts, our souls ... and our votes.

We won this election, and we can all be proud of our country ... and ourselves.

Palin Misstates Anti-Obama Data Source

Hupp — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:05:31 EST

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.)

I am doing work for Obama

Ken — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:18:11 EDT

Yikes! It is not easy to sign on to this account. I just came in to look at some news and my activity makes it look like I am doing virtually nothing, but hey not all of us are doing it in ways documented by this site. I have volunteered at the Obama-Biden office in Media, Pennsylvania. I have a blog (http://texbird.blogspot.com/) where I am pushing for voter protection and discussing some issues. I am lobbying with peers, such as Deaf Americans.

As an older, disabled citizen I have no money to contribute so I give in every other way that I can and plan to be out Tuesday waving signs trying to excite people to vote. I hope millions others will be joining me.

Visit my bog: http://texbird.blogspot.com/

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama, Delaware County, Chester, PA

Jill 4 Obama — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:31:53 EDT

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama (Chester, PA) Chester, PA | October 28, 2008

One week.

After decades of broken politics in Washington, eight years of failed policies from George Bush, and twenty-one months of a campaign that has taken us from the rocky coast of Maine to the sunshine of California, we are one week away from change in America.

In one week, you can turn the page on policies that have put the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street.

In one week, you can choose policies that invest in our middle-class, create new jobs, and grow this economy from the bottom-up so that everyone has a chance to succeed; from the CEO to the secretary and the janitor; from the factory owner to the men and women who work on its floor.

In one week, you can put an end to the politics that would divide a nation just to win an election; that tries to pit region against region, city against town, Republican against Democrat; that asks us to fear at a time when we need hope.

In one week, at this defining moment in history, you can give this country the change we need.

We began this journey in the depths of winter nearly two years ago, on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois. Back then, we didn't have much money or many endorsements. We weren't given much of a chance by the polls or the pundits, and we knew how steep our climb would be.

But I also knew this. I knew that the size of our challenges had outgrown the smallness of our politics. I believed that Democrats and Republicans and Americans of every political stripe were hungry for new ideas, new leadership, and a new kind of politics - one that favors common sense over ideology; one that focuses on those values and ideals we hold in common as Americans.

Most of all, I believed in your ability to make change happen. I knew that the American people were a decent, generous people who are willing to work hard and sacrifice for future generations. And I was convinced that when we come together, our voices are more powerful than the most entrenched lobbyists, or the most vicious political attacks, or the full force of a status quo in Washington that wants to keep things just the way they are.

Twenty-one months later, my faith in the American people has been vindicated. That's how we've come so far and so close - because of you. That's how we'll change this country - with your help. And that's why we can't afford to slow down, sit back, or let up for one day, one minute, or one second in this last week. Not now. Not when so much is at stake.

We are in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. 760,000 workers have lost their jobs this year. Businesses and families can't get credit. Home values are falling. Pensions are disappearing. Wages are lower than they've been in a decade, at a time when the cost of health care and college have never been higher. It's getting harder and harder to make the mortgage, or fill up your gas tank, or even keep the electricity on at the end of the month.

And yet, just yesterday, we learned that despite this crisis, Wall Street bank executives are set to walk away with billions more in bonuses at the end of this year. Well, they might call that a bonus on Wall Street, but here in Pennsylvania, we call it an outrage - and they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it.

We can't afford four more years of the tired, old theory that says we should give more to billionaires and big corporations and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. That's the failed theory that got us into this mess. It hasn't worked, and it's time for change. That's why I'm running for President of the United States.

Now, in the closing days of this campaign, my opponent is trying to distance himself from the President he has faithfully supported 90% of the time. He's supported four of the five Bush budgets that have taken us from the surpluses of the Clinton years to the largest deficits in history. John McCain has ridden shotgun as George Bush has driven our economy toward a cliff, and now he wants to take the wheel and step on the gas.

And when it comes to the issue of taxes, saying that John McCain is running for a third Bush term isn't being fair to George W. Bush. He's proposing $300 billion in new tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and big corporations. That's something not even George Bush proposed. Not even George Bush proposed another $700,000 tax cut to the average Fortune 500 CEO. Not even George Bush proposed a plan that would leave out 100 million middle class families. That's not change.

Change is a middle class tax cut for 95% of workers and their families. Change is eliminating income taxes for seniors making under $50,000 and giving homeowners and working parents more of a break. Change is eliminating capital gains taxes for the small businesses that are the engine of job-creation in this country.

That's what I want to do. That's what change is.

The fact is, there's only one candidate with a plan that could eventually raise taxes on millions of middle class families, and it isn't me. It's my opponent, who'd make you pay taxes on your health care benefits for the first time ever.

Now, it's true that I want to roll back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans and go back to the rate they paid under Bill Clinton. But make no mistake: If you make less than a quarter of a million dollars a year - which includes 98% of small business owners - you won't see your taxes increase one single dime. Not your payroll taxes, not your income taxes, not your capital gains taxes - nothing. Because the last thing we should do in this economy is raise taxes on the middle-class.

In the end, the choice in this election isn't between tax cuts and no tax cuts. It's about whether you believe we should only reward wealth, or whether we should also reward the work and workers who create it. It's about whether you believe in an America where opportunity and success is open to anyone who's willing to work for it. And that's the America we will build together when I'm President of the United States.

We've tried it John McCain's way. We've tried it George Bush's way. Deep down, Senator McCain knows that, which is why his campaign said that "if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." That's why he's spending these last weeks calling me every name in the book. Because that's how you play the game in Washington. If you can't beat your opponent's ideas, you distort those ideas and maybe make some up. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run away from. You make a big election about small things.

Pennsylvania, we are here to say "Not this time. Not this year. Not when so much is at stake." Senator McCain might be worried about losing an election, but I'm worried about Americans who are losing their homes, and their jobs, and their life savings. I can take one more week of John McCain's attacks, but this country can't take four more years of the same old politics and the same failed policies. It's time for something new.

The question in this election is not "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" We know the answer to that. The real question is, "Will this country be better off four years from now?"

I know these are difficult times for America. But I also know that we have faced difficult times before. The American story has never been about things coming easy - it's been about rising to the moment when the moment was hard. It's about seeing the highest mountaintop from the deepest of valleys. It's about rejecting fear and division for unity of purpose. That's how we've overcome war and depression. That's how we've won great struggles for civil rights and women's rights and worker's rights. And that's how we'll emerge from this crisis stronger and more prosperous than we were before - as one nation; as one people.

Remember, we still have the most talented, most productive workers of any country on Earth. We're still home to innovation and technology, colleges and universities that are the envy of the world. Some of the biggest ideas in history have come from our small businesses and our research facilities. So there's no reason we can't make this century another American century. We just need a new direction. We need a new politics.

Now, I don't believe that government can or should try to solve all our problems. I know you don't either. But I do believe that government should do that which we cannot do for ourselves - protect us from harm and provide a decent education for our children; invest in new roads and new science and technology. It should reward drive and innovation and growth in the free market, but it should also make sure businesses live up to their responsibility to create American jobs, and look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road. It should ensure a shot at success not only for those with money and power and influence, but for every single American who's willing to work. That's how we create not just more millionaires, but more middle-class families. That's how we make sure businesses have customers that can afford their products and services. That's how we've always grown the American economy - from the bottom-up. John McCain calls this socialism. I call it opportunity, and there is nothing more American than that.

Understand, if we want get through this crisis, we need to get beyond the old ideological debates and divides between left and right. We don't need bigger government or smaller government. We need a better government - a more competent government - a government that upholds the values we hold in common as Americans.

We don't have to choose between allowing our financial system to collapse and spending billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out Wall Street banks. As President, I will ensure that the financial rescue plan helps stop foreclosures and protects your money instead of enriching CEOs. And I will put in place the common-sense regulations I've been calling for throughout this campaign so that Wall Street can never cause a crisis like this again. That's the change we need.

When it comes to jobs, the choice in this election is not between putting up a wall around America or allowing every job to disappear overseas. The truth is, we won't be able to bring back every job that we've lost, but that doesn't mean we should follow John McCain's plan to keep giving tax breaks to corporations that send American jobs overseas. I will end those breaks as President, and I will give American businesses a $3,000 tax credit for every job they create right here in the United States of America. We'll create two million new jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, and bridges, and schools, and by laying broadband lines to reach every corner of the country. And I will invest $15 billion a year in renewable sources of energy to create five million new energy jobs over the next decade - jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced; jobs building solar panels and wind turbines and a new electricity grid; jobs building the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow, not in Japan or South Korea but here in the United States of America; jobs that will help us eliminate the oil we import from the Middle East in ten years and help save the planet in the bargain. That's how America can lead again.

When it comes to health care, we don't have to choose between a government-run health care system and the unaffordable one we have now. If you already have health insurance, the only thing that will change under my plan is that we will lower premiums. If you don't have health insurance, you'll be able to get the same kind of health insurance that Members of Congress get for themselves. We'll invest in preventative care and new technology to finally lower the cost of health care for families, businesses, and the entire economy. And as someone who watched his own mother spend the final months of her life arguing with insurance companies because they claimed her cancer was a pre-existing condition and didn't want to pay for treatment, I will stop insurance companies from discriminating against those who are sick and need care most.

When it comes to giving every child a world-class education so they can compete in this global economy for the jobs of the 21st century, the choice is not between more money and more reform - because our schools need both. As President, I will invest in early childhood education, recruit an army of new teachers, pay them more, and give them more support. But I will also demand higher standards and more accountability from our teachers and our schools. And I will make a deal with every American who has the drive and the will but not the money to go to college: if you commit to serving your community or your country, we will make sure you can afford your tuition. You invest in America, America will invest in you, and together, we will move this country forward.

I won't stand here and pretend that any of this will be easy - especially now. The cost of this economic crisis, and the cost of the war in Iraq, means that Washington will have to tighten its belt and put off spending on things we can afford to do without. On this, there is no other choice. As President, I will go through the federal budget, line-by-line, ending programs that we don't need and making the ones we do need work better and cost less.

But as I've said from the day we began this journey all those months ago, the change we need isn't just about new programs and policies. It's about a new politics - a politics that calls on our better angels instead of encouraging our worst instincts; one that reminds us of the obligations we have to ourselves and one another.

Part of the reason this economic crisis occurred is because we have been living through an era of profound irresponsibility. On Wall Street, easy money and an ethic of "what's good for me is good enough" blinded greedy executives to the danger in the decisions they were making. On Main Street, lenders tricked people into buying homes they couldn't afford. Some folks knew they couldn't afford those houses and bought them anyway. In Washington, politicians spent money they didn't have and allowed lobbyists to set the agenda. They scored political points instead of solving our problems, and even after the greatest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, all we were asked to do by our President was to go out and shop.

That is why what we have lost in these last eight years cannot be measured by lost wages or bigger trade deficits alone. What has also been lost is the idea that in this American story, each of us has a role to play. Each of us has a responsibility to work hard and look after ourselves and our families, and each of us has a responsibility to our fellow citizens. That's what's been lost these last eight years - our sense of common purpose; of higher purpose. And that's what we need to restore right now.

Yes, government must lead the way on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and our businesses more efficient. Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But all of us must do our part as parents to turn off the television and read to our children and take responsibility for providing the love and guidance they need. Yes, we can argue and debate our positions passionately, but at this defining moment, all of us must summon the strength and grace to bridge our differences and unite in common effort - black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American; Democrat and Republican, young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight, disabled or not.

In this election, we cannot afford the same political games and tactics that are being used to pit us against one another and make us afraid of one another. The stakes are too high to divide us by class and region and background; by who we are or what we believe.

Because despite what our opponents may claim, there are no real or fake parts of this country. There is no city or town that is more pro-America than anywhere else - we are one nation, all of us proud, all of us patriots. There are patriots who supported this war in Iraq and patriots who opposed it; patriots who believe in Democratic policies and those who believe in Republican policies. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America.

It won't be easy, Pennsylvania. It won't be quick. But you and I know that it is time to come together and change this country. Some of you may be cynical and fed up with politics. A lot of you may be disappointed and even angry with your leaders. You have every right to be. But despite all of this, I ask of you what has been asked of Americans throughout our history.

I ask you to believe - not just in my ability to bring about change, but in yours.

I know this change is possible. Because I have seen it over the last twenty-one months. Because in this campaign, I have had the privilege to witness what is best in America.

I've seen it in lines of voters that stretched around schools and churches; in the young people who cast their ballot for the first time, and those not so young folks who got involved again after a very long time. I've seen it in the workers who would rather cut back their hours than see their friends lose their jobs; in the neighbors who take a stranger in when the floodwaters rise; in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a limb. I've seen it in the faces of the men and women I've met at countless rallies and town halls across the country, men and women who speak of their struggles but also of their hopes and dreams.

I still remember the email that a woman named Robyn sent me after I met her in Ft. Lauderdale. Sometime after our event, her son nearly went into cardiac arrest, and was diagnosed with a heart condition that could only be treated with a procedure that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Her insurance company refused to pay, and their family just didn't have that kind of money.

In her email, Robyn wrote, "I ask only this of you - on the days where you feel so tired you can't think of uttering another word to the people, think of us. When those who oppose you have you down, reach deep and fight back harder."

Pennsylvania, that's what hope is - that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better is waiting around the bend; that insists there are better days ahead. If we're willing to work for it. If we're willing to shed our fears and our doubts. If we're willing to reach deep down inside ourselves when we're tired and come back fighting harder.

Hope! That's what kept some of our parents and grandparents going when times were tough. What led them to say, "Maybe I can't go to college, but if I save a little bit each week my child can; maybe I can't have my own business but if I work really hard my child can open one of her own." It's what led immigrants from distant lands to come to these shores against great odds and carve a new life for their families in America; what led those who couldn't vote to march and organize and stand for freedom; that led them to cry out, "It may look dark tonight, but if I hold on to hope, tomorrow will be brighter."

That's what this election is about. That is the choice we face right now.

Don't believe for a second this election is over. Don't think for a minute that power concedes. We have to work like our future depends on it in this last week, because it does.

In one week, we can choose an economy that rewards work and creates new jobs and fuels prosperity from the bottom-up.

In one week, we can choose to invest in health care for our families, and education for our kids, and renewable energy for our future.

In one week, we can choose hope over fear, unity over division, the promise of change over the power of the status quo.

In one week, we can come together as one nation, and one people, and once more choose our better history.

That's what's at stake. That's what we're fighting for. And if in this last week, you will knock on some doors for me, and make some calls for me, and talk to your neighbors, and convince your friends; if you will stand with me, and fight with me, and give me your vote, then I promise you this - we will not just win Pennsylvania, we will not just win this election, but together, we will change this country and we will change the world. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless America.

Remarks of Senator Obama, Indianapolis, IN, Oct. 23, 2008

Jill 4 Obama — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 08:41:34 EDT

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama (Indianapolis, IN) Indianapolis, IN | October 23, 2008

It is fitting that we meet today on the mall of the American Legion, surrounded by monuments to our nation's heroes. Because on this day, 25 years ago, the Marine barracks in Beirut were bombed. 241 Americans laid down their lives for this country and for the peace they were there to protect. We revere their service. We honor their sacrifice. And we keep their families in our prayers.

We will never forget them.

Indiana, in just 12 days, you'll have the chance to elect your next President. And you'll have the chance to bring the change we need to Washington. That's the good news. But we're going to have to work, and struggle, and fight for every single one of those 12 days to move our country in a new direction.

I am hopeful about the outcome. We were thrilled this weekend when a great American statesman, General Colin Powell, joined our cause. But we cannot let up. And we won't.

Because one thing we know is that change never comes without a fight. In the final days of campaigns, the say-anything, do-anything politics too often takes over. We've seen it before. And we're seeing it again today. The ugly phone calls. The misleading mail and TV ads. The careless, outrageous comments. All aimed at keeping us from working together, all aimed at stopping change.

Well, what we need now is not misleading charges and divisive attacks. What we need is honest leadership and real change, and that's why I'm running for President of the United States.

Now, more than ever, this campaign has to be about the problems facing the American people - because this is a moment of great uncertainty for America.

We're facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The Dow plummeted again yesterday, threatening the job security, retirement security, and economic security of millions of ordinary Americans. Indiana lost 4,500 manufacturing jobs in September alone. And just today, we learned that more and more Americans are filing for unemployment. Home values are falling. Foreclosures are rising. Wages are shrinking. And the cost of health care and college tuition has never been higher.

And that's what this election is all about - because John McCain and I have real differences about how to get us out of this economic mess. You see, Senator McCain thinks the economic policies of George W. Bush are just right for America. In the Senate, he's voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time. Said earlier this year that we've made "great progress" over the last eight years. And while Senator McCain says now that he's different from President Bush, you sure couldn't tell by the policies he's proposing.

Just yesterday, Senator McCain strongly defended the Bush policy of lavishing tax cuts on corporations that ship American jobs overseas. He made the peculiar argument that the best way to stop companies from shipping jobs overseas is to give more tax cuts to companies that ship jobs overseas. More tax cuts for job outsourcers. That's what Senator McCain proposed as his answer to outsourcing.

He said that's - quote - "simple fundamental economics."

Well, Indiana, my opponent may call that "fundamental economics," but we know that's just another name for the Wall Street first, Main Street last economic philosophy we've had for the past eight years - and that's fundamentally wrong.

If Senator McCain wants to defend tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, that's his choice. But I say, let's end tax cuts for companies that ship American jobs overseas, and give them to companies that create good jobs right here in Indiana - in the United States of America.

If he wants to defend free trade agreements designed to protect the profits of multinational corporations and a trade policy that lets countries like China tilt the playing field against our workers, that's up to him. But I say, we need a trade policy that protects the dreams of hardworking Americans.

If he wants to defend a tax code that's more than 10,000 pages long and filled with loopholes written in by corporate lobbyists like the ones running his campaign, he's got every right. He has every right to defend offshore tax havens that let companies avoid paying taxes here in America. But I say, it's time to close corporate loopholes, shut offshore tax havens, and restore balance and fairness to our tax code.

By the way, did you know that there's a building in the Cayman Islands that supposedly houses 18,000 corporations. That's either the biggest building or the biggest tax scam on record. And I think we know which one it is.

That's the system my opponent defends. That's the system he wants to preserve. Well, Indiana, we've tried it John McCain's way. We've tried it George Bush's way. And we're here today to say enough is enough. We can't afford four more years of their "fundamental economics." That's why I'm running for President of the United States of America.

You see, I have a different notion of fundamental economics than my opponent. Because where I come from, there's nothing more fundamental than a good-paying job. There's nothing more fundamental than being able to pay your health care bills, put your kids through college, or retire with dignity and security. There's nothing more fundamental than the American dream - and that's the dream we can reclaim if you stand with me on November 4.

I know we can do this. I know we can steer ourselves out of this crisis. Because I believe in you. I believe in the American people.

We are the United States of America. We are a nation that's faced down war and depression; great challenges and great threats. And at each and every moment, we have risen to meet these challenges - not as Democrats, not as Republicans, but as Americans. With resolve. With confidence. With that fundamental belief that here in America, our destiny is not written for us; it's written by us. That's who we are, and that's the country we need to be right now.

But Indiana, I know this. It will take a new direction. It will take new leadership in Washington. It will take a real change in the policies and politics of the last eight years. And that's why I'm running for President of the United States.

It's time to turn the page on eight years of economic policies that put Wall Street before Main Street but ended up hurting both. We need policies that grow our economy from the bottom-up, so that every American, everywhere, has the chance to get ahead. Not just the person who owns the factory, but the men and women who work on its floor. Because if we've learned anything from this economic crisis, it's that we're all connected; we're all in this together; and we will rise or fall as one nation - as one people.

The rescue plan that passed the Congress was a necessary first step to easing this credit crisis, but if we're going to rebuild this economy from the bottom up, we need an immediate rescue plan for the middle-class - and that's what I will do as President of the United States.

Nine months ago, I called for a stimulus plan to provide immediate relief for states, along with tax rebates to get money directly to middle class families and a foreclosure prevention fund to help people keep their homes. Senator McCain's advisors openly mocked the stimulus plan before Congress - one referred to it, and I quote, as "borrowing money from the Chinese and dropping it from helicopters." Another dismissed it as "junk."

Just this week, after nine straight months of job losses, when our Federal Reserve Chairman supports another stimulus to get our economy moving, Senator McCain said he doesn't think we need to pass this stimulus immediately. Well, the working families who've been hard hit by this economic crisis - folks who can't pay their mortgages or their medical bills or send their kids to college - they can't afford to go to the back of the line behind CEOs and Wall Street banks. They need help right here, right now - and that's why I'm running for President of the United States.

I've proposed a new American jobs tax credit for each new employee that companies hire here in the United States over the next two years. And I'll help make sure the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow are built not just in South Korea or Japan, but right here in Indiana.

Few have been harder hit by our credit crisis than the workers who make our cars and the companies that supply their parts. Now, when it came to rescuing Wall Street, Washington didn't waste a minute. But now that auto-workers are suffering, Washington's put on the breaks. It turns out it could take a year for the auto industry to get the loan guarantees we passed a few weeks ago.

Well, the workers who are being laid off and the companies that are seeing their sales drop - they can't afford to wait a year, they need help right now. That's why I've called on Washington to fast-track those loan guarantees and provide more as needed - because that's how we'll secure our auto jobs and save our auto industry.

I'll also help small businesses by eliminating capital gains taxes and giving them emergency loans to keep their doors open and hire workers. I'll put a three-month moratorium on foreclosures so that we can give homeowners the breathing room they need to get back on their feet. And I will create a Jobs and Growth fund to help states and local governments save one million jobs and pay for health care and education without having to raise your taxes.

These are the steps that we must take - right now - to start getting our economy back on track. But we also need a new set of priorities to grow our economy and create jobs over the long-term.

It starts with tax relief. There's been a lot of talk about taxes in this campaign. And the truth is, my opponent and I are both proposing tax cuts. The difference is, he wants to give a $700,000 tax cut to the average Fortune 500 CEO. I want to put a middle class tax cut in the pockets of 95% of workers and their families. My opponent doesn't want you to know this, but under my plan, tax rates for middle class families will actually be less than they were under Ronald Reagan.

It's true that I want to roll back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans and go back to the rate they paid under Bill Clinton. John McCain calls that socialism. What he forgets is that just a few years ago, he himself said those Bush tax cuts were irresponsible. He said he couldn't "in good conscience" support a tax cut where the benefits went to the wealthy at the expense of "middle class Americans who most need tax relief." Well, he was right then, and I am right now.

Let me be crystal clear: If you make less than a quarter of a million dollars a year - which includes 98% of small business owners - you won't see your taxes increase one single dime. Not your payroll taxes, not your income taxes, not your capital gains taxes - nothing. That is my commitment to you.

For the last eight years, we've given more and more to those with the most and hoped that prosperity would trickle down to everyone else. And guess what? It didn't. So it's time to try something new. It's time to grow this economy from the bottom-up. It's time to invest in the middle-class again.

If I am President, I will invest $15 billion a year in renewable sources of energy to create five million new, green jobs over the next decade - jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced; jobs building solar panels and wind turbines and fuel-efficient cars; jobs that will help us end our dependence on oil from Middle East dictators.

I'll also put two million more Americans to work rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges - because it is time to build an American infrastructure for the 21st century. And if people ask how we're going to pay for this, you tell them that if we can spend $10 billion a month in Iraq, we can spend some money to rebuild America.

If I am President, I will finally fix the problems in our health care system that we've been talking about for too long. This issue is personal for me. My mother died of ovarian cancer at the age of 53, and I'll never forget how she spent the final months of her life lying in a hospital bed, fighting with her insurance company because they claimed that her cancer was a pre-existing condition and didn't want to pay for treatment. If I am President, I will make sure those insurance companies can never do that again.

My health care plan will make sure insurance companies can't discriminate against those who are sick and need care most. If you have health insurance, the only thing that will change under my plan is that we will lower premiums. If you don't have health insurance, you'll be able to get the same kind of health insurance that Members of Congress get for themselves. And we'll invest in preventative care and new technology to finally lower the cost of health care for families, businesses, and the entire economy. That's the change we need.

And if I'm President, we'll give every child, everywhere the skills and the knowledge they need to compete with any worker, anywhere in the world. I will not allow countries to out-teach us today so they can out-compete us tomorrow. It is time to provide every American with a world-class education. That means investing in early childhood education. That means recruiting an army of new teachers, and paying them better, and giving them more support in exchange for higher standards and more accountability.

And it means investing in agricultural education. From seeing all those blue corduroy jackets in the crowd, I know there's a Future Farmers of America convention here in Indianapolis. And I want you to know that if I'm elected President, I will fight for you - because America's farmers are America's future. And it's time we had a President who understood that.

We need to make sure every American who has the drive and the will but not the money can go to college. My opponent's top economic advisor actually said that they have no plan to invest in college affordability because we can't have a giveaway to every special interest. Well I don't think the young people of America are a special interest - they are the future of this country. That's why I'll make this deal with you: if you commit to serving your community or your country, we will make sure you can afford your tuition. No ifs, ands or buts. You invest in America, America will invest in you, and together, we will move this country forward.

Now, make no mistake: the change we need won't come easy or without cost. We will all need to tighten our belts, we will all need to sacrifice and we will all need to pull our weight because now more than ever, we are all in this together.

At a defining moment like this, we don't have the luxury of relying on the same political games and the same political tactics that are used every election to divide us from one another and make us afraid of one another. With the challenges and crises we face right now, we cannot afford to divide this country by class or region; by who we are or what policies we support.

There are no real or fake parts of this country. We are not separated by the pro-America and anti-America parts of this nation - we all love this country, no matter where we live or where we come from. There are patriots who supported this war in Iraq and patriots who opposed it; patriots who believe in Democratic policies and those who believe in Republican policies. The men and women from Indiana and all across America who serve on our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America.

We have always been at our best when we've had leadership that called us to look past our differences and come together as one nation, as one people; leadership that rallied this entire country to a common purpose - to a higher purpose. And I am running for President of the United States of America because that is the country we need to be right now.

This country and the dream it represents are being tested in a way that we haven't seen in nearly a century. And future generations will judge ours by how we respond to this test. Will they say that this was a time when America lost its way and its purpose? When we allowed the same divisions and fear tactics and our own petty differences to plunge this country into a dark and painful recession?

Or will they say that this was another one of those moments when America overcame? When we battled back from adversity by recognizing that common stake that we have in each other's success?

This is one of those moments. I realize you're cynical and fed up with politics. I understand that you're disappointed and even angry with your leaders. You have every right to be. But despite all of this, I ask of you what's been asked of the American people in times of trial and turmoil throughout our history. I ask you to believe - to believe in yourselves, in each other, and in the future we can build together.

Together, we cannot fail. Not now. Not when we have a crisis to solve and an economy to save. Not when there are so many Americans without jobs and without homes. Not when there are families who can't afford to see a doctor, or send their child to college, or pay their bills at the end of the month. Not when there is a generation that is counting on us to give them the same opportunities and the same chances that we had for ourselves.

We can do this. Americans have done this before. Some of us had grandparents or parents who said maybe I can't go to college but my child can; maybe I can't have my own business but my child can. I may have to rent, but maybe my children will have a home they can call their own. I may not have a lot of money but maybe my child will run for Senate. I might live in a small village but maybe someday my son can be president of the United States of America.

Now it falls to us. Together, we cannot fail. And I need you to make it happen. If you want the next four years looking like the last eight, then I am not your candidate. But if you want real change - if you want an economy that rewards work, and that works for Main Street and Wall Street; if you want tax relief for the middle class and millions of new jobs; if you want health care you can afford and education that helps your kids compete; then I ask you to knock on some doors, make some calls, talk to your neighbors, and give me your vote.

In Indiana, you can vote early right here, and right now. To find out how, just go to voteforchange.com. And if you stand with me, I promise you - we will win Indiana, we will win this election, and then you and I - together - will change this country and change this world. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless America.

Lieberman Tacitly Agrees: McCain Exhibited His Bad Judgment With VP Pick

Sheldon from Doylestown — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:08:17 EDT

Senator Lieberman, Former Democratic VP Candidate now McCain pusher talking about Sarah Palin yesterday:"Thank God, she's not gonna have to be president from day one, because McCain's going to be alive and well," Lieberman said in a conference call with reporters.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/25/lieberman-on-palin-thank_n_137769.html

BARACK OBAMA in Pennsylvania, Mon. & Tues., Oct. 27, 28

Jill 4 Obama — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 06:49:31 EDT

Exciting News!

Barack is going to make two stops in Pennsylvania early this week.

Here are the details:

Monday, October 27th
Doors Open: 3:00 p.m.

Mellon Arena
66 Mario Lemieux Place
Pittsburgh, PA 15219
RSVP

Tuesday, October 28th
Doors Open: 8:00 a.m.
Program Begins: 10:00 a.m.

Widener University
Main Quad
One University Place
Chester, PA 19013

Public Entrance off of E 17th St.
RSVP

McCain Volunteer to be Charged in Attack Hoax

Hupp — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:40:05 EDT

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27350530/

Video

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 her
The 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.

I couldn't vote early, but ...

Janet from PA ... no longer bitter, because hope has prevailed — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:47:44 EDT

... today I helped two senior citizens vote ... early ... for Barack!

As a member of "Delaware County Senior Volunteers for Obama," I've been making calls to folks in [mostly Republican] retirement communities. Today I was able to obtain absentee ballots for two Obama supporters, Dorothy and John, aged 93 and 94. They'd applied (or thought they had) six weeks ago and hadn't gotten their ballots yet, and they were desperate.

After getting affadavits (permitting me to act as their agent) faxed to me by the Delco Election Board, I drove to Dorothy and John's apartment, had them fill in the affadavits and absentee ballot applications, drove back to the Board of Elections, obtained the absentee ballots, took them back to D&J for their votes and signatures ... and then returned the ballots to the Board of Elections.

This took a total of three hours.

Dorothy -- whom I had not met until today -- is very sharp, "with it," and well informed about the issues. Physically, however, she is not at all well ... breathing problems, spasms ... she is very frail and can hardly walk. She'd told me on the phone that she and her husband, who's paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair, are both "hanging on by a thread" ... but they simply HAD to vote in this election ... because life in a country run by McCain and Palin was "unthinkable."

As I sat beside Dorothy in her living room, helping her fill out her application (no simple task), I saw her write her birthdate as 3/8/15 ... and I gasped, because I was born on 3/8, also. Clearly, this encounter was MEANT to happen!

And then when I returned later with the actual absentee ballots, and she filled hers in and let me assist her husband to do the same ... and together, we got two votes "signed, sealed, and delivered" for Barack ... she was so incredulously grateful that I'd taken the time to do this wonderful thing for her and her husband. In fact, she promised to bake me a birthday cake next March!

I was crying all the way home ... tears of joy ... for Dorothy and John; for my own parents, who didn't live to see this incredible election; for all Obama supporters everywhere.

That's my early-voting story ...

... donate in their honor?

Link

Head Strong: McCain fails the big five tests

Hupp — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:54:36 EDT

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."

Joe the Plumber is a McCain Plant (In My Opinion)

Hupp — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:06:26 EDT

What people do for their 15 minutes amazes me!!

‘Joe the plumber’ and Obama’s tax planTurns out, would-be small-business buyer likely wouldn't be affected at all

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.”

McCain Helped Send Economy To The Brink

Hupp — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:36:07 EDT

The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama

Hupp — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:05:12 EDT

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.

Meet Sarah Palin’s radical right-wing pals

Hupp — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:26:11 EDT

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.”

McCain linked to private group in Iran-Contra case

Hupp — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:44:11 EDT

By PETE YOST

WASHINGTON (AP) — GOP presidential nominee John McCain has past connections to a private group that supplied aid to guerrillas seeking to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua in the Iran-Contra affair.

McCain's ties are facing renewed scrutiny after his campaign criticized Barack Obama for his link to a former radical who engaged in violent acts 40 years ago.

The U.S. Council for World Freedom was part of an international organization linked to former Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America. The group was dedicated to stamping out communism around the globe.

The council's founder, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, said McCain became associated with the organization in the early 1980s as McCain was launching his political career in Arizona. Singlaub said McCain was a supporter but not an active member in the group.

"McCain was a new guy on the block learning the ropes," Singlaub told The Associated Press in an interview. "I think I met him in the Washington area when he was just a new congressman. We had McCain on the board to make him feel like he wasn't left out. It looks good to have names on a letterhead who are well-known and appreciated.

"I don't recall talking to McCain at all on the work of the group," Singlaub said.

The renewed attention over McCain's association with Singlaub's group comes as McCain's campaign steps up criticism of Obama's dealings with William Ayers, a college professor who co-founded the Weather Underground and years later worked on education reform in Chicago alongside Obama. Ayers held a meet-the-candidate event at his home when Obama first ran for public office in the mid-1990s.

Obama was roughly 8 years old when Ayers, now at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was working with the Weather Underground, which took responsibility for bombings that included nonfatal blasts at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol. McCain's vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, has said that Obama "pals around with terrorists."

In McCain's case, Singlaub knew McCain's father, a Navy admiral who had sought Singlaub's counsel when McCain, a Navy pilot, became a prisoner of war and spent 5 1/2 years in North Vietnamese hands.

"John's father asked me for advice about what he ought to do now that his son had been shot down and captured," Singlaub recalled in one of two recent interviews. "I said, 'As long as you don't give any impression that you care more about him than you care about any of the other prisoners, he won't be treated any differently.'"

Covert arms shipments to the rebels called Contras, financed in part by secret arms sales to Iran, became known as the Iran-Contra affair. They proved to be the undoing of Singlaub's council.

In 1987, the Internal Revenue Service withdrew the tax-exempt status of Singlaub's group because of its activities on behalf of the Contras.

Elected to the House in 1982 and at a time when he was on the board of Singlaub's council, McCain was among Republicans on Capitol Hill expressing support for the Contras, a CIA-organized guerrilla force in Central America. In 1984, Congress cut off CIA funds for the Contras.

Months before the cutoff, top Reagan administration officials ramped up a secret White House-directed supply network and put National Security Council aide Oliver North in charge of running it. The goal was to keep the Contras operational until Congress could be persuaded to resume CIA funding.

Singlaub's private group became the public cover for the White House operation.

Secretly, Singlaub worked with North in an effort to raise millions of dollars from foreign governments.

McCain has said previously he resigned from the council in 1984 and asked in 1986 to have his name removed from the group's letterhead.

"I didn't know whether (the group's activity) was legal or illegal, but I didn't think I wanted to be associated with them," McCain said in a newspaper interview in 1986.

Singlaub does not recall any McCain resignation in 1984 or May 1986. Nor does Joyce Downey, who oversaw the group's day-to-day activities.

"That's a surprise to me," Singlaub said. "This is the first time I've ever heard that. There may have been someone in his office communicating with our office."

"I don't ever remember hearing about his resigning, but I really wasn't worried about that part of our activities, a housekeeping thing," said Singlaub. "If he didn't want to be on the board that's OK. It wasn't as if he had been active participant and we were going to miss his help. He had no active interest. He certainly supported us."

Lagging In The Polls, Palin Shifts To Fear Tactics

Hupp — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:56:26 EDT

October 6, 2008, 11:09 AM

Posted by Scott Conroy| 79

(CBS)From CBS News' Scott Conroy:

(FORT MYERS, FLA.) On the day when the McCain campaign released a new attack ad not-so-subtly titled “Dangerous,” Sarah Palin made a concerted effort to use words like “fearful” and “afraid” to describe Barack Obama, signaling her campaign’s decision to make the election a referendum on Obama’s character, rather than the issues facing the country.

“I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America—as the greatest source of good in this world,” Palin said at a rally this morning in Clearwater, Fla.

“I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country. This, ladies and gentlemen, has nothing to do with the kind of change anyone can believe in—not my kids, not for your kids.”

Palin has devoted a significant portion of every one of her stump speeches in recent days to lamenting that the “filter of the mainstream media” has not given her a chance to do what she really wants to do: talk about the issues. But in filter-free forums across the country, Palin continues to speak in generalities about where she and John McCain want to take the country, calling for tax cuts, winning the wars, and reforming government, while providing very few details on how she would accomplish those goals.

Instead, Palin has increasingly focused her remarks on tearing down Obama.

“Either do the math or just go with your gut,” Palin said at a rally here this morning. “Either way you’re going to come up with the same conclusion — Barack Obama is gonna raise your taxes. So there’s a pattern here of a left-wing agenda that is packaged and prettied up to look like mainstream policies.”

Though it is nothing new for Palin to question Obama’s promise to initiate tax cuts, it has only been in recent days that she her stump speeches have been marked by a series of scathing, personal attacks. Beginning with a fundraiser in Denver on Saturday, Palin has linked Obama to former 60s radical William Ayers at every public rally and closed fundraiser she has attended. The Alaska governor said the two men had a relationship akin to being “pals,” even though the Associated Press and many other news outlets have concluded that Obama and Ayers’ relationship added up to far less than a close friendship.

In the 1988 and 2004 elections, Democratic nominees Michael Dukakis and John Kerry also found themselves coming under personal attacks in the waning days of the campaign, and both men were criticized for not responding forcefully. By contrast, the Obama campaign is not only defending its candidate, it is launching a full-on counterattack against McCain, using a similarly questionable guilt by association tactic of highlighting the Arizona senator’s involvement in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of almost 20 years ago.

The shift in Palin’s rhetoric comes as the McCain/Palin campaign finds itself trailing the Democrats in nearly every important battleground state. A WBZ poll out today shows the Obama/Biden ticket with a whopping 13-point lead in New Hampshire, marking a dramatic turnaround in a state where, in January, McCain won the first-in-the-nation primary and Obama lost.

Although she almost always wears a sunny demeanor, smiling broadly even as she delivers her scathing barbs against Obama, Palin’s words show that she has embraced the traditional vice presidential candidate’s role of being the attack dog and is even more willing than McCain to engage in personal mudslinging.

Palin recently questioned Obama’s relationship with his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, even though McCain vowed that his campaign would not use Wright to score political points.

“Those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that—with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave—to me, that does say something about character,” Palin told New York Times columnist William Kristol. But you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

First Debate -Repost from Mary Fox's Blog, September 27, 2008

Jill 4 Obama — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:54:29 EDT

Post from Mary Fox's Blog:
My Analysis of the First Debate:"Heaping Live Coals Upon His Head"

By Mary Fox - Sep 27th, 2008 at 11:16 am EDT
Also listed in: 10 groups

For those of us who saw the first presidential debate last night, many of us were hoping that Obama would slam McCain during several of the moments that presented themselves. I originally was disappointed about this too. But I have had a night to sleep on my reaction and consider why the undecideds seemed to prefer Obama's style.

I have decided that Obama presented himself as strong opponent - yet a gentleman with sportsmanship. At one point he said "fair enough" and graciously took being cut off. He kept looking over at McCain and addressing him, but McCain would not reciprocate and look in his direction. At one point toward the beginning of the debate, in McCain's expression I saw glaring evil angry eyes and I thought he wanted to kill Obama. I extrapolated that that was the reason McCain wouldn't look Obama in the face - he was holding back from jumping across the stage and attacking him.

This debate was truly a battlefield for McCain - but a battle that Obama won. Every time Obama said "You're right, John," John's face on the TV looked like he was blinking hard as if he had just received a painful whiplash - like Obama was "heaping hot coals upon his head" (Proverbs 25:22).

This is a very interesting dynamic indeed. For those of us unfamiliar with this biblical proverb, it says that by being nice to an enemy it will be as if you are "heaping hot coals upon his head". I think that is what we saw last night - a very stateman, kind, and gentle, cool and collected Obama and an angry, abusive and agressive old white man. Anyone in the audience who thought Obama's race was a problem for them, now are facing the option of a very angry, scowling, ranting old white man for the next four years or a very kind and diplomatic black man.

On a more personal note, I find myself drawn to what I am calling Obama's "Daddy Factor". As a (white) daddy's girl, I see in Obama's vision for this country everything my father conveyed to me as the reason he loved our great nation - a nation where the "American Dream" actually happended - a land of the free and the brave. When I see Obama with his daughters, being a kind, gentle, loving father, I transfer all of my tender familial feeling for my father onto Obama. He is the kind of man my father tries to be - and sometimes is. He is the sportsman that my father taught my brother to be (in his semi-professional status as a tennis athlete). If I were to pick which candidate I would want as a father - I know I do not want the scowling McCain for my father - and I know I would want the kind, loving Obama to be my dad. A knowledgable, loving dad who could protect me and solve my problems.

Maybe this is what the polls are showing us. Obama's kindness was the real secret weapon which made him the champion of the hour. He showed himself to be statesman, sportsman, gentleman, and even - I will add - a Christian in his demeanor and behavior. He is the kind of man I would want to be related to. The kind of man I would want to lead our great nation. A much better person than I, who was routing to see blood in the arena, currently am.

God Bless the United States of America

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. -- Bob Marley
P.E.A.C.E.(PositiveEducationAlwaysCorrectsErrors)

-Martin J. Wade

Last Week's Events

Hupp — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:59:34 EDT

by kos Sun Sep 28, 2008 at 04:52:34 PM PDT

The congressional leadership has some sort of deal, 110 pages long (or so), that people are supposed to digest and vote on tomorrow. Whatever the details of the bill might be, the fact that the leadership of both parties have refused to take a breath and explore alternate and less costly (to the taxpayers) options is a disgrace. The only question is whether the rank and file will vote for this thing, and given that the voters aren't happy, we'll see what happens.

That aside, the Democratic leadership did a masterful job of destroying McCain last week, with a healthy assist from McCain's own Capitol Hill "allies". Truly. Let's look at the timeline:

September 17-18

Paulson and Bernanke meet with the Congressional leadership and lay out their doomsday scenario. Everyone runs around screaming because it's the end of the world. Or at least, the Bush Administration says its the end of the world.

As negotiations proceeded, Reid and Pelosi made clear that any bailout would have to be delivered with majority Republican support. No one was going to get hung out to dry just weeks before an election with a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. The same went for John McCain.

Tuesday, September 23

McCain still hadn't weighed in on the bailout. Reid repeatedly called on McCain to explain his position, yet silence.

We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands and what we should do.

Reid wasn't asking McCain to head down to Washington, just to clarify his position. Pelosi was doing the same. And they were both doing it for obvious reasons -- political cover. At this point, nothing noble about it. As I said, no one wants to get hung out to dry with this stinker and it was critical that the Republicans be aboard any deal. If McCain had any issues, they needed to be out in the open so negotiators could address them.

Wednesday, September 24

But then McCain pulled his now-infamous political stunt, declaring that was "suspending" his campaign, canceling the Friday debate, and that he would head out to D.C. to set everyone straight. The bailout negotiators were stunned. Things were progressing in the delicate negotiations, the last thing they needed was the insertion of the presidential campaign into their deliberations.

Reid told McCain to stay away, while Pelosi said:

“I got a call yesterday … from Senator McCain, and he said that he was calling because nothing was happening, and there was no progress being made on all of this; he was calling a meeting, and would I come,” Pelosi told reporters.
“I said, ‘Well, senator, I have good news for you. Quite a bit has been done. The deliberations are going forward, and we make progress every day, and I don't see any reason for us to come to a meeting based on a premise that nothing is being done, because plenty is’.”

Thursday, September 25

Upon questioning about the plan that he was swooping in to "save", McCain admitted that he hadn't read the plan yet. All three pages of it.

So his ignorant ass shows up, showboating for the cameras, and trashes a deal almost in place.

The fact is that, by 2pm yesterday, the House and Senate Democrats had settled their most important differences, the White House had caved on CEO pays, and the two sides were coming close to dealing with the bailout's oversight mechanism, its posture toward homeowners, and whether taxpayers would get ownership stakes in taken-over companies. Then McCain airdrops in --well, he's not actually in DC yet, so it was a virtual airdrop -- and it compresses the timeline even more.

Democrats flood the airwaves to complain about McCain's "political stunt", calling it a "hail mary", and accusing McCain of putting his campaign before the interests of the nation. The country may not be liking what was being cooked up in DC, but they weren't liking McCain's showboating either.

As for the White House meeting, that McCain had insisted on?

"On the Trail," here's CNN's Candy Crowley.
CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: It's about leadership. John McCain's urgent hard-charging effort to look like he's taking control, up against Barack Obama's effort to look cool and in control, above the fray.
OBAMA: Right now, there has to be a sense of urgency on the part of everybody because this is putting jobs at risk, economic growth at risk, small businesses at risk, the financial markets and people's retirement accounts over time, potentially, at risk. So we've got to move rapidly.
CROWLEY: Fresh off that big White House meeting, Obama did not directly accuse McCain of mucking up a tentative bailout plan. He is more nuanced than that.
OBAMA: What I've found, and I think was confirmed today, is that when you inject presidential politics into delicate negotiations, it's not necessarily as helpful as it needs to be. Just because there's a lot of glare of the spotlight, there's the potential for posturing or suspicions.
CROWLEY: Obama can afford to stay cool while Washington heats up. He has plenty of help from his Capitol Hill surrogates, who have been tearing into McCain for him.
SEN. HARRY REID (D-NV), MAJORITY LEADER: I would suggest anyone at that meeting that tried to understand what John McCain said at the meeting couldn't. He was the last person to speak at the meeting, talked for a couple of minutes, and really didn't say anything substantive.

But you know what was most incredible about all of this?

No Republicans pushed back. No one got McCain's back. None seriously argued that McCain was moving the negotiations forward or otherwise contributing to the effort in any meaningful, non-self-serving political way.

So while Democrats were eager and able to craft the narrative, Republicans tacitly approved it with their silence. It was clear that they themselves were also unhappy with McCain's behavior. As for the McCain campaign, they seemed befuddled by it all.

But the return to Washington on Thursday brought a new low for the campaign. The White House meeting McCain had called for devolved into dissension and argument. One McCain adviser said the senator walked into a Democratic "buzz saw."
McCain's ability to reach across the aisle and bring his colleagues to consensus -- something he brags about repeatedly on the campaign trail -- appeared to have vanished Thursday.
"Thursday was a disaster," said a top aide who had been part of the planning. "The vision on Wednesday did not play out as we thought."

Did they really think that Democrats would allow him to swoop in, say nothing, things would magically resolve themselves, and he wold be able to claim credit? Really?

Friday, September 26

Negotiations, stalled much of Thursday, seemed to pick up. But they weren't going to get done by Friday night. And McCain, who had claimed he wouldn't do the debate until there was a deal, was suddenly force to "blink" -- a cardinal sin in wingnut circles -- and head out to Mississippi for the debate.

Democrats were relentless on message and refused to give McCain any obvious (or perceived) victories, while Republicans left their nominee flail with no backup support.

The results? A big Obama surge in the polls.

A Freddie Mac Money Trail Catches Up With McCain

Hupp — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 19:55:34 EDT

Michael Isikoff and Holly Bailey

From the magazine issue dated Oct 6, 2008

Few advisers in John McCain's inner circle inspire more loyalty from him than campaign manager Rick Davis. McCain and his wife, Cindy, credit the shrewd, and sometimes volatile, Republican insider with rescuing the campaign last year when it was out of money and on the verge of collapse. As a result, McCain has always defended him—even when faced with tough questions about the foreign lobbying clients of Davis's high-powered consulting firm. "Rick is a friend, and I trust him," McCain told NEWSWEEK last year.

Last week, though, McCain's trust in Davis was tested again amid disclosures that Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage giant that was recently placed under federal conservatorship, paid his campaign manager's firm $15,000 a month between 2006 and August 2008. As the mortgage crisis has escalated, almost any association with Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae has become politically toxic. But the payments to Davis's firm, Davis Manafort, are especially problematic because he requested the consulting retainer in 2006—and then did barely any work for the fees, according to two sources familiar with the arrangement who asked not to be identified discussing Freddie Mac business. Aside from attending a few breakfasts and a political-action-committee meeting with Democratic strategist Paul Begala (another Freddie consultant), Davis did "zero" for the housing firm, one of the sources said. Freddie Mac also had no dealings with the lobbying firm beyond paying monthly invoices—but it agreed to the arrangement because of Davis's close relationship with McCain, the source said, which led top executives to conclude "you couldn't say no."

The McCain campaign told reporters the fees were irrelevant because Davis "separated from his consulting firm … in 2006," according to the campaign's Web site, and he stopped drawing a salary from it. In fact, however, when Davis joined the campaign in January 2007, he asked that his $20,000-a-month salary be paid directly to Davis Manafort, two sources who asked not to be identified discussing internal campaign business told NEWSWEEK. Federal campaign records show the McCain campaign paid Davis Manafort $90,000 through July 2007, when a cash crunch prompted Davis and other top campaign officials to forgo their salaries and work as volunteers. Separately, another entity created and partly owned by Davis—an Internet firm called 3eDC, whose address was the same office building as Davis Manafort's—received payments from the McCain campaign for Web services, collecting $971,860 through March 2008.

In an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, a senior McCain official said that when the campaign began last year, it signed a contract with Davis Manafort "in which we purchased all of [Davis's] time, and he agreed not to work for any other clients." The official also said that though Davis was an "investor" in 3eDC, Davis has received no salary from it. As to why Davis permitted the Freddie Mac payments to continue, the official referred NEWSWEEK to Davis Manafort, which did not respond to repeated phone calls. One senior McCain adviser said the entire flap could have been avoided if the campaign had resisted attacking Barack Obama for his ties to two former Fannie Mae executives, which prompted the media to take a second look at Davis. "It was stupid," the adviser said. "A serious miscalculation and an amateurish move." Still, this adviser said, McCain's faith in his campaign manager remains unswerving.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/161218

How the Commodity Futures Moderinization Act Was Moved Through Congress

Hupp — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:45:57 EDT

This will probably not go anywhere today, being all eyes are upon the bailout discussion next door, and to my own chagrin, it may even appear partisan in a time that bipartisanship is needed to save our country..

But I spent a lot of time digging through this and need to lay it down simply so I can move on.. Maybe some historian somewhere will dig it up when investigating where and when and how this crises began...

Perhaps some may take away from this the small part that it politically relevant and that is that the person responsible for removing the legislation that kept this type of speculation under control, could be our next Secretary of the Treasury if John McCain gets elected: that would be Phil Gramm. This is the story of how the bill was sneaked through the halls of Congress without nary a vote...nay without nary a debate....

It is common knowledge to some, but many discovering it for the first time, are outraged....

The bill is the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Two versions of it were introduced in both houses; the House on December 14th, 2000; the Senate on December 15, 2000.

Both were introduced in the Agriculture Departments of their respective houses, because the agricultural commodities were the primary recipients of the deregulation. For that reason, two Democrats from Farm States signed onto the bill in the Senate: Tim Johnston from South Dakota, and Tom Harkin from Iowa, as well as one House Democrat...John J. LaFalce from Buffalo, New York...

Embedded in this bill were riders which freed up derivative securities to become deregulated as well.

Both bills were killed on arrival by both committees by sending them down to their respective sub-committees during the dying days of the 106th Legislative session....

At the same time, debate was ongoing over HR 4577, properly known as the Omnibus Bill, which was a giant bill providing funding for Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and related agencies from September 30th, 2000 to September 30th, 2001. It was placed on the floor as of June 1st of 2000, and the House version was passed on June 14thand the Senate version was cleared on June 30th. From there it went into conference committee....where it sat, and sat, and sat...

The last day of session for the 106th Congress was December 15th, 2000. Just 3 days before, America had learned that the Supreme Court had nixed the ballot count challenge made by the Democrats, and that George W. Bush would become the next president.... Clinton was still president and had to sign the new budget. On that last day the Conference Committee offered the Omnibus Bill onto the floor to be voted up or down as it was... Everybody was anxious to head out of Washington for the holidays, and in the Senate it was passed on an unanimous voice assent, and in the House, it was overwhelmingly passed....On that date, the large Omnibus Bill was cleared for the signature of the President, just shy of two and three quarters of a month late after funding had expired....

Buried in that Omnibus Bill was HR5660, the undebated and unsigned Bill that was buried by the respective Agricultural committees in both the House and Senate just the day before.

That is how it became law... Included in that bill was something that became known as theEnron Loophole. It was use of this loophole which allowed Enron to shut power down to California, and then charge higher prices to meet pent up demand.... Wendy Gramm was the Enron officer responsible for this action..She was Phil Gramm's wife..

If one looks at the bills HR5660 and SB3283 which were killed in committee and then cross references them with the HR4577 inclusion in the gigantic (11,000 page) Omnibus Page, one finds some interesting discrepancies.

In both original bills, when one looks at the table of contents, ... Section 208 is missing... the sequence runs from 206, 207, 209, 210.... In the final document, 208 is where it should be...( an astute reader has shown that one can link to 207 and continue scrolling to reach through to 208). So you may wonder what was missing... is it important or is it politically sensitive enough that it might benefit from not being seen?

The missing section which does not show up in the syllabus of the original bills, covers the changes made to the act of 1933 and 1934 which were enacted to prevent another Great Depression from never happening again... It is not long, so I am publishing it in full...

SEC. 208. AMENDMENTS RELATING TO REGISTRATION AND DISCLOSURE ISSUES UNDER THE SECURITIES ACT OF 1933 AND THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934.
(a) AMENDMENTS TO THE SECURITIES ACT OF 1933-

(1) TREATMENT OF SECURITY FUTURES PRODUCTS- Section 2(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 (15 U.S.C. 77b(a)) is amended–

(A) in paragraph (1), by inserting `security future,’ after `treasury stock,’;

(B) in paragraph (3), by adding at the end the following: `Any offer or sale of a security futures product by or on behalf of the issuer of the securities underlying the security futures product, an affiliate of the issuer, or an underwriter, shall constitute a contract for sale of, sale of, offer for sale, or offer to sell the underlying securities.’;

(C) by adding at the end the following:

(16) The terms `security future’, `narrow-based security index’, and `security futures product’ have the same meanings as provided in section 3(a)(55) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.’.

(2) EXEMPTION FROM REGISTRATION- Section 3(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 (15 U.S.C. 77c(a)) is amended by adding at the end the following:

`(14) Any security futures product that is–

(A) cleared by a clearing agency registered under section 17A of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 or exempt from registration under subsection (b)(7) of such section 17A; and

`(B) traded on a national securities exchange or a national securities association registered pursuant to section 15A(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.’.

(3) CONFORMING AMENDMENT- Section 12(a)(2) of the Securities Act of 1933 (15 U.S.C. 77l(a)(2)) is amended by striking `paragraph (2)’ and inserting `paragraphs (2) and (14)’.

(b) AMENDMENTS TO THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934-

(1) EXEMPTION FROM REGISTRATION- Section 12(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (15 U.S.C. 78l(a)) is amended by adding at the end the following: `The provisions of this subsection shall not apply in respect of a security futures product traded on a national securities exchange.’.

(2) EXEMPTIONS FROM REPORTING REQUIREMENT- Section 12(g)(5) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (15 U.S.C. 78l(g)(5)) is amended by adding at the end the following: `For purposes of this subsection, a security futures product shall not be considered a class of equity security of the issuer of the securities underlying the security futures product.’.

(3) TRANSACTIONS BY CORPORATE INSIDERS- Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (15 U.S.C. 78p) is amended by adding at the end the following:

(f) TREATMENT OF TRANSACTIONS IN SECURITY FUTURES PRODUCTS- The provisions of this section shall apply to ownership of and transactions in security futures products.’.

For me had I been looking over these bills in committee, this title:

AMENDMENTS RELATING TO REGISTRATION AND DISCLOSURE ISSUES UNDER THE SECURITIES ACT OF 1933 AND THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934.

would have shown up as a red flag... With its omission, one would flip through 265 pages and say lets bury it in committee...

As if to show just how controversial and sensitive these inserts were at that time, here is a portion of the reply (March 9, 2000) by the SEC after perusing the draft of the GAO's report covering this issue....

Although the agencies have worked diligently, cooperated closely, and approached the negotiations in good faith, we have not yet reached a detailed consensus on how to regulate single stock futures and the markets and intermediaries that trade them. The procedural and jurisdictional issues raised by the trading of single stock futures are extremely challenging and we believe that further discussions are necessary to achieve a full resolution.........

The SEC appreciates the profound and widespread consequences attached to the trading of single stock futures and believes it would be irresponsible to permit such products to trade without fully resolving all outstanding issues. Therefore we strongly believe that single futures should not be permitted to trade in the United States until a comprehensive framework has been developed and implemented. The adoption to the temporary or piecemeal fixes to the fundamental regulatory disparities (ie insider trading,margin, customer suitability) is not an appropriate remedy -- In fact, it could damage the integrity of our capital and derivatives markets and result in regulatory arbitrage.

If it had been me, and had I wanted to pass a piece of financial regulation that was not approved by the SEC, I certainly know that I would try to hide it.

Now according to some sources, these parts were written by lobbyists for Enron and then given to Gramm to be inserted into legislation... Somehow through Gramm's position on the Conference committee, it was able to be unknowingly slipped into law...much to the chagrin of Californians who later shelled out 40 billion for electricity more than they should have....

Since legislation is sneaked through Congress this way all the time, no matter how immoral; it is not illegal... this practice will probably not stop with this admission that it took place. However, the magnitude of the scale with which we today are faced.. the immensity of asking for a loan amounting to two years of the entire spending of every governmental program... just in order to survive,.... puts an ominous aura surrounding this one sneaky, backhanded, transaction eight years ago.

If historians ever look back for the silver bullet that quelled this once great superpower at the time of its peak, if they don't point to the Bush election, they will eventually find themselves investigating the way this sneaky, backhanded legislation was passed, for "it" is what legally allowed deals worth hundreds of billions to be openly traded, with no real equity to back them up.....

The McCain Campaign...A Campaign of Whiners?

Hupp — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:12:35 EDT

McCain Camp Takes Issue With Times Coverage

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: September 22, 2008

The McCain campaign lashed out at The New York Times on Monday, accusing it of dropping its journalistic standards and being “150 percent in the tank” for Senator Barack Obama.

In a conference call with reporters, Steve Schmidt, Senator John McCain’s senior campaign adviser, was asked about an article in The Times on Monday reporting that Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had been paid nearly $2 million by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac to head a group devoted to defend the mortgage giants against the imposition of stricter regulations.

Asked about the article, Mr. Davis, who was on the call, said the group’s sole function was to promote home ownership. But Mr. Schmidt criticized The Times for its coverage.

“Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization,” Mr. Schmidt said. He added, “This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate, which is their prerogative to be.”

He added, “Everything that is read in The New York Times that attacks this campaign should be evaluated by the American people from that perspective.”

Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, responded in a statement: “The New York Times is committed to covering the candidates fully, fairly and aggressively. It’s our job to ask hard questions, fact-check their statements and their advertising, examine their programs, positions, biographies and advisers. Candidates and their campaign operatives are not always comfortable with that level of scrutiny, but it’s what our readers expect and deserve.”

http://blip.tv/file/1284017/

Loan Titans Paid McCain Adviser Nearly $2 Million

Hupp — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:04:29 EDT

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and CHARLES DUHIGG

Published: September 21, 2008

Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate for president, has recently begun campaigning as a critic of the two companies and the lobbying army that helped them evade greater regulation as they began buying riskier mortgages with implicit federal backing. He and his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, have donors and advisers who are tied to the companies.

But last week the McCain campaign stepped up a running battle of guilt by association when it began broadcasting commercials trying to link Mr. Obama directly to the government bailout of the mortgage giants this month by charging that he takes advice from Fannie Mae’s former chief executive, Franklin Raines, an assertion both Mr. Raines and the Obama campaign dispute.

Incensed by the advertisements, several current and former executives of the companies came forward to discuss the role that Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager and longtime adviser, played in helping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat back regulatory challenges when he served as president of their advocacy group, the Homeownership Alliance, formed in the summer of 2000. Some who came forward were Democrats, but Republicans, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed their descriptions.

“The value that he brought to the relationship was the closeness to Senator McCain and the possibility that Senator McCain was going to run for president again,” said Robert McCarson, a former spokesman for Fannie Mae, who said that while he worked there from 2000 to 2002, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together paid Mr. Davis’s firm $35,000 a month. Mr. Davis “didn’t really do anything,” Mr. McCarson, a Democrat, said.

Mr. Davis’s role with the group has bubbled up as an issue in the campaign, but the extent of his compensation and the details of his role have not been reported previously.

Mr. McCain was never a leading critic or defender of the mortgage giants, although several former executives of the companies said Mr. Davis did draw Mr. McCain to a 2004 awards banquet that the companies’ Homeownership Alliance held in a Senate office building. The organization printed a photograph of Mr. McCain at the event in its 2004 annual report, bolstering its clout and credibility. The event honored several other elected officials, including at least two Democrats, Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania and Representative Artur Davis of Alabama.

In an interview Sunday night with CNBC and The New York Times, Mr. McCain noted that Mr. Davis was no longer working on behalf of the mortgage giants. He said Mr. Davis “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”

Asked about the reports of Mr. Davis’s role, a spokesman for Mr. McCain said that during the time when Mr. Davis ran the Homeownership Alliance, the senator had backed legislation to increase oversight of the mortgage companies’ accounting and executive compensation. The legislation, however, did not seek to change their anomalous structure as private companies with federal support.

The spokesman, Tucker Bounds, also noted that the Homeownership Alliance included nonprofit organizations like Habitat for Humanity and the Urban League. “It’s not controversial to promote homeownership and minority homeownership,” Mr. Bounds said. More than a half-dozen current and former executives, however, said the Homeownership Alliance was set up mainly to defend Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by promoting their role in the housing market, and the two companies paid almost the entire cost of the group’s operations.

“They were financed largely, possibly exclusively, by Fannie and Freddie,” said William R. Maloni, a Democrat who is a former head of industry relations for Fannie Mae. “We thought it would be helpful to have someone who was a broadly recognized Republican to be the face of the organization, and that person became Rick Davis.” Mr. Maloni added, “Rick, for that purpose, turned out to be quite good.” (Several executives said Mr. Davis’s compensation was not unusual for the companies’ well-connected consultants.)

The federal bailout of the two mortgage giants has become an emblem of what critics say is the outdated or inadequate regulatory system that allowed the financial system to slide into crisis this summer.

At the time that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recruited Mr. Davis to run the Homeownership Alliance in 2000, they were under new pressure from private industry rivals and deregulation-minded Republicans who argued that the two companies’ federal sponsorship gave them an unfair advantage and put taxpayers at risk. Critics of the companies had formed their own Washington-based advocacy group, FM Watch. They were pushing for regulations that would deter the companies from expanding into new areas, including riskier and more profitable mortgages.

Mr. Davis had recently returned to his lobbying firm from running Mr. McCain’s unexpectedly strong 2000 Republican primary campaign, which elevated Mr. McCain’s profile as a legislator and Mr. Davis’s as a lobbyist.

“You can say what you want about free-market distortions, but people like the system because it gets them into houses cheap,” Mr. Davis said to Institutional Investor magazine in 2000, adding that he would run the advocacy group out of his Alexandria, Va., lobbying firm.

The organization also hired Public Strategies, a communications firm that included former Bush adviser Mark McKinnon. Mr. Davis wrote letters and gave speeches for the group. In April 2001, he sent out a press release headlined, “It’s Tax Day — Do You Know Where Your Deductions Are? For Most Americans, They’re in Your Home.”

But by the end of 2005, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were recovering from accounting problems and re-examining costs, former executives said. The companies decided the Homeownership Alliance had outlived its usefulness, and it disappeared.

In Case Anyone Has Forgotten.... The Keating Five

Hupp — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 22:08:55 EDT

So, John McCain will help bring about positive change to the "strong" fundamentals of our economy?

Please read the entire article, and let me know what you think.....

John McCain (R-AZ)

Alan Cranston (D-CA)

Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ)

John Glenn (D-OH)

Donald W. Riegle (D-MI)

The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The five senators, Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), John Glenn (D-OH), John McCain (R-AZ), and Donald W. Riegle (D-MI), were accused of improperly aiding Charles H. Keating, Jr., chairman of the failed Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which was the target of an investigation by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB).

After a lengthy investigation, the Senate Ethics Committee determined in 1991 that Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, and Donald Riegle had substantially and improperly interfered with the FHLBB in its investigation of Lincoln Savings. Senators John Glenn and John McCain were cleared of having acted improperly but were criticized for having exercised "poor judgment".

All five of the senators involved served out their terms. Only Glenn and McCain ran for re-election, and they were both re-elected. In 2008, McCain accepted the nomination of the Republican Party for President.

Contents[hide]

Circumstances See also: Savings and Loan crisis

The U.S. Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was the failure of 747 savings and loan associations (S&Ls) in the United States. The ultimate cost of the crisis is estimated to have totaled around $160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.[1].

The concomitant slowdown in the finance industry and the real estate market may have been a contributing cause of the 1990-1991 economic recession. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of new homes constructed per year dropped from 1.8 million to 1 million, the lowest rate since World War II.[2]

The Keating Five scandal was prompted by the activities of one particular savings and loan: Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, California. Lincoln's chairman was Charles Keating, who ultimately served five years in prison for his corrupt mismanagement of Lincoln.[3] In the four years since Keating's American Continental Corporation (ACC) had purchased Lincoln in 1984, Lincoln's assets had increased from $1.1 billion to $5.5 billion.[4] Such savings and loan associations had been deregulated in the early 1980s, allowing them to make highly risky investments with their depositors' money, a change of which Keating took advantage.[4] Lincoln's investments took the form of buying land, taking equity positions in real estate development projects, and buying high-yield junk bonds.[5]

Corruption allegations

The core allegation of the Keating Five affair is that Keating had made contributions of about $1.3 million to various U.S. Senators, and he called on those Senators to help him resist regulators. The regulators backed off, to later disastrous consequences.

Beginning in 1985, Edwin J. Gray, chair of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), feared that the savings industry's risky investment practices were exposing the government's insurance funds to huge losses.[5] Gray instituted a rule whereby savings associations could hold no more than ten percent of their assets in "direct investments",[5] and were thus prohibited from taking ownership positions in certain financial entities and instruments.[6] Lincoln had become burdened with bad debt resulting from its past aggressiveness, and by early 1986,[5] its investment practices were being investigated and audited by the FHLBB:[7] in particular, whether it had violated these direct investment rules; Lincoln had directed FDIC-insured accounts into commercial real estate ventures.[4] By the end of 1986, the FHLBB had found that Lincoln had $135 million in unreported losses and had surpassed the regulated direct investments limit by $600 million.[5]

Keating had earlier taken several measures to oppose Gray and the FHLBB, including recruiting a study from then-private economist Alan Greenspan saying that direct investments were not harmful,[5] and getting President Ronald Reagan to make a recess appointment of a Keating ally, Atlanta real estate developer Lee H. Henkel Jr., to an open seat on the FHLBB.[5] But by March 1987, Henkel had resigned, upon news of his having large loans due to Lincoln.[5] Meanwhile, the Senate had changed control from Republican to Democratic during the 1986 Congressional elections, placing several Democratic senators in key positions, and starting in January 1987, Keating's staff was putting pressure on Cranston to remove Gray from any FHLBB discussion regarding Lincoln.[8] The following month, Keating began large-scale contributions into Cranston's project to increase California voter registration.[8] In February 1987, Keating met with Riegle and began contributing to Riegle's 1988 re-election campaign.[9]

It appeared as though the government might seize Lincoln for being insolvent.[6] The investigation was, however, taking a long time.[7] Keating was asking that Lincoln be given a lenient judgment by the FHLBB, so that it could limit its high risk investments and get into the safe (at the time) home mortgage business, thus allowing the business to survive. A letter from audit firm Arthur Young & Co. bolstered Keating's case that the government investigation was taking a long time.[10] Keating now wanted the five senators to intervene with the FHLBB on his behalf.

By March 1987, Riegle was telling Gray that "Some senators out west are very concerned about the way the bank board is regulating Lincoln Savings," adding somewhat ominously, "I think you need to meet with the senators. You'll be getting a call."[9] Keating and DeConcini were asking McCain to travel to San Francisco to meet with regulators regarding Lincoln Savings; McCain refused.[10][6] DeConcini told Keating that McCain was nervous about interfering.[6] Keating called McCain a "wimp" behind his back, and on March 24, Keating and McCain had a heated, contentious meeting.[10]

On April 2, 1987, a meeting with chairman Gray of the FHLBB was held in DeConcini's Capitol office, with Senators Cranston, Glenn, and McCain also in attendance.[6] DeConcini started the meeting with a mention of "our friend at Lincoln."[6] Gray told the assembled senators that he did not know the particular details of the status of Lincoln Savings and Loan, and that the senators would have to go to the bank regulators in San Francisco that had oversight jurisdiction for the bank. Gray did offer to set up a meeting between those regulators and the senators.[6]

On April 9, 1987, a two-hour meeting[4] with three members of the FHLBB San Francisco branch was held, again in DeConcini's office, to discuss the government's investigation of Lincoln.[10][6] Present were Cranston, DeConcini, Glenn, McCain, and additionally Riegle.[6] The regulators felt that the meeting was very unusual and that they were being pressured by a united front, as the senators presented their reasons for having the meeting.[6] McCain said, "One of our jobs as elected officials is to help constituents in a proper fashion. ACC [American Continental Corporation] is a big employer and important to the local economy. I wouldn't want any special favors for them.... I don't want any part of our conversation to be improper." Glenn said, "To be blunt, you should charge them or get off their backs," while DeConcini said, "What's wrong with this if they're willing to clean up their act? ... It's very unusual for us to have a company that could be put out of business by its regulators."[6] The regulators then revealed that Lincoln was under criminal investigation on a variety of serious charges, at which point McCain severed all relations with Keating.[6] Glenn continued to help Keating after that revelation, by setting up a meeting with then-House Majority Leader Jim Wright, which turned out to be the only questionable thing Glenn did throughout the whole affair.[11]

The San Francisco regulators finished their report in May 1987 and recommended that Lincoln be seized by the government due to unsound lending practices.[6][4] Gray, whose time as chair was about to expire, deferred action on the report, saying that his adversarial relationship with Keating would make any action he took seem vindictive, and that instead the incoming chair should take over the decision.[5] Meanwhile Keating filed a lawsuit against the FHLBB, saying it had leaked confidential information about Lincoln.[5] The new FHLBB chair was M. Danny Wall, who was more sympathetic to Keating and took no action on the report, saying its evidence was insufficient.[4][6] In September 1987, the Lincoln investigation was removed from the San Francisco group and in May 1988, a new audit of Lincoln began in Washington.[6]

News of the April meetings between the senators and the FHLBB officials first appeared in National Thrift News in September 1987, but was only sporadically covered by the general media for the next year and a half.[12]

Failure of Lincoln and investigation of the senators

Lincoln stayed in business; from mid-1987 to April 1989, its assets grew from $3.91 billion to $5.46 billion.[5] During this time, the parent American Continental Corporation was desperate for cash inflow to make up for losses in real estate purchases and projects.[13] Lincoln's branch managers and tellers convinced customers to replace their federally-insured certificates of deposit with higher-yielding bond certificates of American Continental; the customers later said they were never properly informed that the bonds were uninsured and very risky given the state of American Continental's finances.[13]

American Continental went bankrupt in April 1989, and Lincoln was seized by the FHLBB on April 14, 1989.[4] More than 21,000 mostly elderly investors lost their life savings. This total came to about $285 million.[citation needed] The federal government was liable for $2 billion to cover Lincoln's losses when it seized the institution.[13]

Keating was hit with a $1.1 billion fraud and racketeering action, filed against him by the regulators.[4] Asked whether his contributions had bought him influence, Keating said: “I want to say in the most forceful way I can: I certainly hope so.”[14]

In September 1989, several Republicans from Ohio filed an ethics complaint against Glenn, charging that he had improperly intervened on Keating's behalf.[15] When the former chairman of the FHLBB went public about all five of the senators' assistance to Keating, that set off a series of investigations by the California government, the United States Department of Justice, and the Senate Ethics Committee. The initial charges against the five Senators were made in October 1989 by Common Cause, a public interest group.[16][17] By November 1989, the matter was getting large-scale press attention and the senators became known as the "Keating Five".[18][19] All the senators denied they had done anything improper in the matter, and said Keating's contributions made no difference to their actions.[15] The senators' initial defense of their actions rested on Keating being one of their constituents; McCain said, "I have done this kind of thing many, many times," and said the Lincoln case was like "helping the little lady who didn't get her Social Security."[18]

The Ethics Committee's investigation focused on all five senators and subsequently lasted 22 months,[16] with 9 months of active investigation and 7 weeks of hearings.[20] It reported on the other four senators in February 1991, but delayed its final report on Cranston until November 1991.[20]

Relationships of senators to Keating

Much of the press attention to the Keating Five focused on the relationships of each of the senators to Keating.

Cranston had received $39,000 from Keating and his associates for his 1986 Senate re-election campaign. Furthermore, Keating had donated some $850,000 to assorted groups founded by Cranston or controlled by him, and another $85,000 to the California Democratic Party.[4] Cranston considered Keating a constituent because Lincoln was based in California.[18]

DeConcini had received about $48,000 from Keating and his associates for his 1988 Senate re-election campaign.[4] In September 1989, DeConcini stated he would return the money.[4] DeConcini considered Keating a constituent because Keating lived in Arizona; they were also long-time friends.[18]

Glenn had received $34,000 in direct contributions from Keating and his associates for his 1984 presidential nomination campaign, and a political action committee tied to Glenn had received an additional $200,000.[4] Glenn considered Keating a constituent because one of Keating's other business concerns was headquartered in Ohio.[18]

McCain and Keating had become personal friends following their initial contacts in 1981,[10] and McCain was the closest socially to Keating of the five senators.[21] Like DeConcini, McCain considered Keating a constituent as he lived in Arizona.[18] Between 1982 and 1987, McCain had received $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates.[22] In addition, McCain's wife Cindy McCain and her father Jim Hensley had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. McCain, his family, and their baby-sitter had made nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard Keating's jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay. McCain did not pay Keating (in the amount of $13,433) for some of the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln.[6][23]

Riegle had received some $76,000 from Keating and his associates for his 1988 Senate re-election campaign.[4] Riegle later announced in April 1988 he was returning the money.[5] Riegle's constituency connection to Keating was that Keating's Hotel Pontchartrain was located in Michigan.[18]

Conclusion of investigation

The Senate Ethics Committee's report regarding the Keating matter came out in August 1991, and addressed each of the five senators.[24]

Cranston: severely reprimanded

The Senate Ethics Committee ruled that Cranston had acted improperly by interfering with the investigation by the FHLBB.[24] He had received more than a million dollars from Keating, had done more arm-twisting than the other Senators on Keating's behalf, and was the only Senator officially rebuked by the Senate in this matter.[25]

Cranston was given the harshest penalty of all five Senators. In November of 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee voted unanimously to reprimand Cranston, instead of the more severe measure that was under consideration: censure by the full Senate. Extenuating circumstances that helped to save Cranston from censure were the fact that he was suffering from cancer, and that he had decided to not seek reelection, according to the Chairman of the Ethics Committee, Democratic Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama. The Ethics Committee took the unusual step of delivering its reprimand to Cranston during a formal session of the full Senate, with almost all 100 Senators present.[16]

Cranston was not accused of breaking any specific laws or rules, but of violating standards that Heflin said “do not permit official actions to be linked with fund-raising.” The Ethics Committee officially found that Cranston’s conduct had been “improper and repugnant”, deserving of "the fullest, strongest and most severe sanction which the committee has the authority to impose." The sanction was in these words: "the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, on behalf of and in the name of the United States Senate, does hereby strongly and severely reprimand Sen. Alan Cranston.”[16]

After the Senate reprimanded Cranston for repugnant conduct, Cranston took to the Senate floor to deny key charges against him. In response, Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, the Republican Vice-Chairman of the Ethics Committee, charged that Cranston’s response to the reprimand was “arrogant, unrepentant and a smear on this institution," and that Cranston was wrong to imply that everyone does what Cranston had done. Alan Dershowitz, serving as Senator Cranston's attorney, alleged that other Senators had merely been better at “covering their tracks.”[16] Likewise, political historian Lewis Gould has written that, “the real problem for the 'Keating Three' who were most involved was that they had been caught.”[26]

Riegle and DeConcini: criticized for acting improperly

The Senate Ethics Committee ruled that Riegle and DeConcini had acted improperly by interfering with the investigation by the FHLBB.[24]

DeConcini later charged that McCain had leaked to the press sensitive information about the investigation that came from some of the closed proceedings of the Ethics Committee.[6] McCain denied doing so, although one congressional investigator concluded that McCain had been one of the main leakers during that time.[6]

Glenn and McCain: cleared of impropriety but criticized for poor judgment

The Senate Ethics Committee ruled that the involvement of Glenn in the scheme was minimal, and the charges against him were dropped.[24] He was only criticized by the Committee for "poor judgment."[27]

The Ethics Committee ruled that the involvement of McCain in the scheme was also minimal, and he too was cleared of all charges against him.[25][24] McCain was criticized by the Committee for exercising "poor judgment" when he met with the federal regulators on Keating's behalf.[6] The report also said that McCain's "actions were not improper nor attended with gross negligence and did not reach the level of requiring institutional action against him....Senator McCain has violated no law of the United States or specific Rule of the United States Senate."[28] On his Keating Five experience, McCain has said: "The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."[6]

After McCain became a leading Republican contender for the U.S. presidency in the 2000s several retrospective accounts of the controversy contended that McCain was included in the investigation primarily so that there would be at least one Republican target.[29][30][31][11] Glenn's inclusion in the investigation has been attributed to Republicans who were angered by the inclusion of McCain, as well as committee members who thought that dropping Glenn (and McCain) would make it look bad for the remaining three Democratic Senators.[29][31] Democrat Robert S. Bennett, who was the special investigator during the scandal, suggested to the Senate Ethics Committee that it pursue charges against neither McCain nor Glenn, saying of McCain, "that there was no evidence against him."[30] The Vice Chairman of the Ethics Committee, Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, agreed with Bennett, but the Chairman, Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama, did not agree.[11]

Regardless of the level of their involvement, both senators were greatly affected by it. McCain would write in 2002 that attending the two April 1987 meetings was "the worst mistake of my life".[32] Glenn has described the Senate Ethics Committee investigation as the low point of his life.[7]

Reactions

Not everyone was satisfied with the Senate Ethics Committee conclusions. Fred Wertheimer, president of Common Cause, which had initially demanded the investigation, thought the treatment of the senators far too lenient, and said, "The U.S. Senate remains on the auction block to the Charles Keatings of the world."[33] Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, called it a "whitewash".[33] Jonathan Alter of Newsweek said it was a classic case of the government trying to investigate itself, labelling the Senate Ethics Committee "shameless" for having "let four of the infamous Keating Five off with a wrist tap."[34] Margaret Carlson of Time suspected the committee had timed its first report to coincide with the run-up to the Gulf War, minimizing its news impact.[33] One of the San Francisco bank regulators felt that McCain had gotten off too lightly, saying that Keating's business involvement with Cindy McCain was an obvious conflict of interest.[35]

Aftermath

Keating and Lincoln Savings became convenient symbols for arguments about what had gone wrong in America's financial system and society,[36] and were featured in popular culture references.[37][36] The senators did not escape infamy either.[35] By spring 1992, a deck of playing cards was being marketed, called "The Savings and Loan Scandal", that featured on their face Charles Keating holding up his hand, with images of the five senators portrayed as puppets on his fingers.[36][6] Polls showed that most Americans believed the actions of the Keating Five were typical of Congress as a whole.[20]

Cranston left office in January of 1993, and died in December of 2000. DeConcini and Riegle continued to serve in the Senate until their terms expired, but they did not seek re-election in 1994. DeConcini was appointed by President Bill Clinton in February 1995 to the Board of Directors of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. [38]

Glenn did choose to run for re-election in 1992, and it was anticipated that he would have some difficulty winning a fourth term in the Senate. However, Glenn handily defeated Lieutenant Governor R. Michael DeWine for one more term in the Senate before retiring in 1999.

After 1999, the only member of the Keating Five remaining in the U.S. Senate was John McCain, who had an easier time gaining re-election in 1992 than he anticipated,[39] and who ran for president in 2000 and became the Republican presidential nominee in 2008. McCain survived the political scandal in part by becoming friendly with the political press.[39]

The scandal was followed by a number of attempts to adopt campaign finance reform—spearheaded by U.S. Sen. David Boren (D-OK)—but most attempts died in committee. A weakened reform was passed in 1993. Substantial campaign finance reform was not passed until the adoption of the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002.

See also

House and Senate career of John McCain, 1982–2000

Notes

^ "Financial Audit: Resolution Trust Corporation's 1995 and 1994 Financial Statements" (PDF), U.S. General Accounting Office (July 1996).
^ "Housing Finance in Developed Countries An International Comparison of Efficiency, United States" (PDF), Fannie Mae (1992).
^ Grossman, Mark. “Political corruption in America”, page 201 (2003).
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m "The Lincoln Savings and Loan Investigation: Who Is Involved", The New York Times (1989-11-22).
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Nathaniel C. Nash (1989-07-09). "Showdown Time for Danny Wall", The New York Times.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u Nowicki, Dan and Muller, Bill (2007-03-01). "John McCain Report: The Keating Five", The Arizona Republic. Retrieved on 2007-11-23.
^ a b c John Glenn archives, JOHN GLENN ~ POLITICAL CAREER, The Ohio State University Libraries. Retrieved 2008-07-16.
^ a b Binstein, Michael; Bowden, Charles (1993). Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions. Random House. ISBN 0-679-41699-4. p. 275.
^ a b Binstein and Bowden, Trust Me, pp. 278–279.
^ a b c d e Alexander, Paul (2002). Man of the People: The Life of John McCain. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-22829-X. pp. 108–111.
^ a b c Karaagac, John. “John McCain: An Essay in Military and Political History”, pages 163 and 169 (Lexington Books 2000).
^ McCain, John; Salter, Mark (2002). Worth the Fighting For. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-50542-3. pp. 185–186. Used because it has a thorough list of media references to what would become Keating Five.
^ a b c Nathaniel C. Nash (1989-11-30). "Collapse of Lincoln Savings Leaves Scars for Rich, Poor and the Faithful", The New York Times.
^ Gehring, Verna and Galston, William. “Philosophical dimensions of public policy”, page 67 (Transaction Publishers 2003).
^ a b Robert North Roberts, Marion T. Doss, From Watergate to Whitewater: The Public Integrity War, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997, ISBN 0275955974. pp. 140–141.
^ a b c d e Dewar, Helen. “Cranston Accepts Reprimand; `Keating 5' Senator Angers Colleagues by Denying Misconduct”, Washington Post (1991-11-21).
^ Berke, Richard L. (1989-10-27). "Savings and Loan Executives Accused of Tapping Phones", The New York Times.
^ a b c d e f g Berke, Richard L. (1989-11-05). "Helping Constituents or Themselves?", The New York Times.
^ Carlson, Margaret (1989-11-27). "'A Legal Bank Robbery'", Time.
^ a b c Robert Williams, Political Scandals in the USA, Edinburgh University Press, 1998, ISBN 1853311898. p. 103.
^ Berke, Richard L. (1991-01-05). "2 Senators Deny Impropriety In Dealings With Keating", The New York Times.
^ Sullum, Jacob (2005-03-11). "How John McCain Reformed", Reason.

So, About That 'Stop Iran' Rally...................

Hupp — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:53:58 EDT

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. -- Introducing her running mate today in Minneapolis, Palin said that her revoked invitation to next week's "Stop Iran" rally is the fault of "Democrat partisans" who politicized the event.

"Some Democrat partisans put politics first and now no elected official will be able to appear at that Stop Iran Rally," Palin told the crowd. "Iran's pursuit of these weapons should concern all Americans, this should not be a matter for partisan politics."

Yesterday, First Read reported that the group's invitation to Palin, which was revoked yesterday along with invitations to all political figures, was originally extended by Jewish leader Malcolm Hoenlein, an associate of Palin advisor Mark Wallace.

Hoenlein tells NBC/NJ that Palin was invited -- with the approval of all the event organizers -- after efforts to secure a Republican senator to speak were unsuccessful. He said there was no initial effort to reach out to the Obama campaign because they already had a prominent Democrat on board -- Hillary Clinton, who canceled the appearance after hearing of Palin's intention to attend.

(Today, Palin lauded Clinton's original agreement to appear at Monday's event, noting that she "appreciates" the one-time presidential candidate's commitment to the cause.)

Acknowledging the concern of some members that the group could lose its tax-exempt status if Palin attended without a Democratic counterpart, Hoenlein said that an offer was made to the Obama campaign, which designated Rep. Robert Wexler to speak for them.

The group announced in a press release yesterday that "In order to keep the focus on Iranian threats and to ensure that this critical message not be obscured, the organizers of the rally have decided not to have any American political personalities appear. "

Scenario What if.......

Hupp — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:41:21 EDT

John McCain and Sarah Palin win the election in the fall?

Immediately after John and Sarah are sworn in , Sara declares John McCain has a career shortening case of dementia. Medical doctors agree and she's made President on Jan. 21, 2009. She puts all the Blue States and Red States up for sell on Ebay because they are too expensive to support..a broker has to be called in and they're sold at a tremendous loss.

Mexico buys all the Blue States thru a Broker, James Carville and Assoc. Inc. and Canada buys all the Red States thru Carly Fiorina's Clientèle Internationale LLC Brokers.

Alaska secedes from the Union and Sarah moves under “The Reformers Movement Act” all of Washington D.C. to Juneau, Alaska in three months. First order of business in Sarahington D.P. (new name District of Palin) is to build a 90 ft. fence on the border of Alaska and Canada...to keep the riff-raff out. All moose and caribou are hunted to extinction within weeks. All salmon fishing is given exclusive rights to one company. God is made to preach in all schools. Pitbulls become the only dog allowed to breed in The United States of Alaska. Tanning booths and beds are proven to destroy CO2 and stop global warming if left on 24/7. After 2 years the lower 48 states, The United States of Canico (Mexico and Canada combined) under President Barack Obama go through the biggest expansion in economic history.

President Palin embargoes all oil and natural gas to Canico hoping to bring that young country to it's knees. A major explosion happens at the largest natural gas and oil reserves in Alaska, fracturing the fault lines splitting Alaska in two pushing the planet off it's tilt angle of rotation. Another “Ice Age” begins...... Morale of this story...If you have a lot of gas be very careful and don't blow it our way Alaska.

We need Obama/Biden more than ever....

McCain, Palin Defiant in 'lies' storm

Hupp — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:32:12 EDT

Monday, September 15, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin stand accused Monday of trying to "lie" their way into the White House with discredited claims and advertising -- and it's not just outgunned Democrats crying foul.

Non-partisan fact-check operations, newspapers and opinion columnists are also charging McCain, once a darling of the press, of cloaking the election in sleaze and unfairly smearing Democrat Barack Obama.

With the United States locked in two foreign wars, punished by its thirst for Middle Eastern oil and with the economy plummeting, the race was consumed for two days last week by McCain camp claims Obama called Palin a "pig."

US election campaigns and hardball advertising always push the limits of truth and often amount to outright distortion -- the Obama camp has not hesitated to blur McCain's record too.

Campaigns and experts usually steer clear of blatantly accusing a candidate of lying, but the term is being bandied about following McCain's latest hard-hitting assault on Obama's character and defense of Palin's record.

Last week, the McCain campaign accused Obama of wanting to teach sex education in kindergarten. In reality, the bill he voted for as an Illinois lawmaker mandated warnings for young children about sexual predators.

Palin was accused of saying she visited Alaskan troops in Iraq when it emerged her trip was to an Iraq/Kuwaiti border post.

She is also taking heat for repeatedly saying she blocked a notorious multi-million dollar project to build a bridge to a sparsely-inhabited island in her state which she initially backed and of not fully returning all the federal dollars doled out for it.

"Generally those come out as outright lies, not just not incorrect," said Larry Powell, a professor of communications of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The McCain camp is also now being accused in news reports of embellishing attendance figures at campaign rallies.

The Obama camp derided the volley of accusations as "disgusting lies" and questioned McCain's honor.

Newspapers and independent fact-checking groups also accused Republicans of peddling untruths.

"The claim is simply false," said FactCheck.org of the sex education ad.

The St Petersburg Times complained: "McCain's straight talk has become a toxic mix of lies and double-speak.

"It is leaving a permanent stain on his reputation for integrity."

Republicans, like President George W. Bush's guru Karl Rove, have been playing hard knocks-style politics for more than 20 years, often taking a Democrat's perceived strength and turning it into a liability.

Ironically, McCain was a victim of such treatment, bowed out embittered by the 2000 primary campaign against Bush and apparently not willing to take the high road again.

Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota Sunday said Democrats were descending into "hysteria." Another top McCain aide Carly Fiorina said McCain's foes were panicking and accused them of unfairly exploiting McCain's age.

McCain himself denied on Friday that his attacks were rooted in untruth.

"Actually, they are not lies," McCain said on the ABC show "The View."

"This is a tough campaign."

Whatever its morality, the final judgement on McCain's strategy will be dictated by whether it works.

An earlier negative barrage that branded Obama an empty "celebrity" seemed to jolt the Democrat last month, changing a race McCain appeared to be losing.

Latest broadsides slowed Obama again: for every hour he spends defending himself, he is not talking about the failing economy or comparing McCain to Bush.

"They are trying to put Obama on the defensive... to make a whiner out of him," said Powell.

Latest polls give McCain a slight edge, but can a scorched earth policy work all the way through to November 4?

"If that is the only thing they are doing, then they would be in serious trouble," said Kathleen Kendall, a communications professor at the University of Maryland.

"A lot of things are happening at once," she said, mentioning positive advertisements the campaign is running and speeches by McCain on issues. Palin is also reinvigorating Republicans.

Obama's response is also critical.

"I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage," he said before launching a fight-back.

But he does not seem comfortable in the political gutter.

"He doesn't want to go as sulphorously negative as his opponents are if he can avoid it," said Bruce Buchanan, of the University of Texas at Austin.

McCain's aides are like "guerrilla fighters fighting those who are following Marquis of Queensbury rules," he said.

Bilderberg Seeks to Centralize World’s Banks

Hupp — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:00:25 EDT

June 9, 2008

From Rogue Government:

“Fresh off of the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting, it looks as if New York Federal Reserve president Timothy Geithner is set to push a new agenda in the world of central banking that was likely decided upon at Bilderberg. Geithner yesterday, wrote an article in the Financial Times calling for a global regulatory banking framework. In addition, Geithner called for the Federal Reserve to have an instrumental role in this new framework. Geithner cites all of the problems that were actually created by the central bankers in the first place as the rationale for having greater centralized power. It is interesting Geithner decides to write this piece right after the Bilderberg Meeting where some of the most powerful figures in the world of central banking attended. Not only did Geithner attend, but the attendee list included Ben Bernanke the Federal Reserve Chairman, Henry Paulson the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jean-Claude Trichet the president of the European Central Bank, Robert Zoellick the president of the World Bank and other high profile bankers. With the who’s who of central banking attending the Bilderberg Meeting, it is highly unlikely that what Geithner is proposing in his Financial Times article was not discussed at the Bilderberg Meeting. It is no secret that the true objective of the Bilderberg Meeting is to steer the world into accepting a global government. By establishing a new global regulatory banking framework, this will inch the planet ever closer to a one world currency operating in a cashless society where microchips are used to facilitate transactions. Make no mistake about it, this system will not be good, because it will be controlled by a bunch of criminal psychopaths like the one’s who attended the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting….

… What Geithner is proposing is entirely insane but this is the same tactic that the financial elites used to establish the Federal Reserve back in 1913. They created a crisis and said that the crisis happened because they didn’t have enough power to prevent it. The Panic of 1907 which was used to justify the passage of the Federal Reserve Act was actually caused by JP Morgan and assorted elite financial interests. They did this so they could use the crisis as an excuse to centralize their control and power over the banking system. Through the Federal Reserve, banks were finally consolidated under its umbrella through the Great Depression which was deliberately caused by the tight monetary policies implemented by the central bank. Throughout the 1920s money was made plentiful, but following the stock market crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve tightened the money supply which put hundreds of community banks out of business and allowed the central bankers to consolidate control over the nation’s banking system.

Geithner is using the excuse of the current financial crisis that was caused by the Federal Reserve and the world’s assorted central banks in order to again consolidate more power for the banking cartel. It is simply history repeating itself, only this time it is on a much larger scale….

… What Geithner doesn’t say in his article is that the current global financial crisis was caused by the Federal Reserve and the world’s various central banks. Alan Greenspan intentionally set interest rates at incredibly low levels after the 9/11 attacks. This encouraged lenders to lend out money using all sorts of creative financing packages. It also encouraged borrowers to borrow money from the lenders because of the cheaper money. These policies lead to the continued devaluation of the U.S. Dollar and the U.S. housing crisis which have been the main drivers behind most of the economic problems we are currently seeing.

Geithner wants us to believe that giving the Federal Reserve and the rest of this private banking system more power is what’s needed to resolve all of the economic problems that were caused by the central bankers themselves. How stupid does Geithner and the rest of the global elite think we are? We have a historical track record of central bankers creating economic problems and bringing in phony solutions to expand their control. We need decentralization and free markets to resolve the economic problems that have been created by these people, not more centralized power….

… the global elite are planning to push forward their cashless society grid agenda with the use of implantable microchips. The implantable microchips would be sold as a way for people to easily move through the militarized control grid that they’ve setup via the bogus terror war…. The central bankers would need a global regulatory framework for the banking system so they can move closer to a global currency operating in a cashless society.

This is some incredibly scary stuff. Of course there was not one word of the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting in any major U.S. media outlets. The corporate controlled media maintained a blackout on any coverage of this incredibly important yearly meeting of the global elite….”

Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes

Hupp — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:20:13 EDT

Interviews indicate a governing style that uses loyalty and secrecy

By JO BECKER, PETER S. GOODMAN AND MICHAEL POWELL

updated 7:17 p.m. ET, Sat., Sept. 13, 2008

WASILLA, Alaska - Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as one of her qualifications for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.

When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

Points to her management experience
Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.

But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.

Still, Ms. Palin has many supporters. As a two-term mayor she paved roads and built an ice rink, and as governor she has pushed through higher taxes on the oil companies that dominate one-third of the state’s economy. She stirs deep emotions. In Wasilla, many residents display unflagging affection, cheering “our Sarah” and hissing at her critics.

“She is bright and has unfailing political instincts,” said Steve Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska. “She taps very directly into anxieties about the economic future.”

“But,” he added, “her governing style raises a lot of hard questions.”

Declined interview for article
Ms. Palin declined to grant an interview for this article. The McCain-Palin campaign responded to some questions on her behalf and that of her husband, while referring others to the governor’s spokespeople, who did not respond.

Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell said Ms. Palin had conducted an accessible and effective administration in the public’s interest. “Everything she does is for the ordinary working people of Alaska,” Mr. Parnell said.

In Wasilla, a builder said he complained to Mayor Palin when the city attorney put a stop-work order on his housing project. She responded, he said, by engineering the attorney’s firing.

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears. (Ms. Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects, and she has sued the federal government to block the listing of the bears as endangered.) An administration official told Mr. Steiner that it would cost $468,784 to process his request.

When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show.

“Their secrecy is off the charts,” Mr. Steiner said.

State legislators are investigating accusations that Ms. Palin and her husband pressured officials to fire a state trooper who had gone through a messy divorce with her sister, charges that she denies. But interviews make clear that the Palins draw few distinctions between the personal and the political.

Last summer State Representative John Harris, the Republican speaker of the House, picked up his phone and heard Mr. Palin’s voice. The governor’s husband sounded edgy. He said he was unhappy that Mr. Harris had hired John Bitney as his chief of staff, the speaker recalled. Mr. Bitney was a high school classmate of the Palins and had worked for Ms. Palin. But she fired Mr. Bitney after learning that he had fallen in love with another longtime friend.

“I understood from the call that Todd wasn’t happy with me hiring John and he’d like to see him not there,” Mr. Harris said.

“The Palin family gets upset at personal issues,” he added. “And at our level, they want to strike back.”

Hometown mayor
Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Ms. Palin’s first run for mayor in 1996, recalled the night the two women chatted about her ambitions.

“I said, ‘You know, Sarah, within 10 years you could be governor,’ ” Ms. Chase recalled. “She replied, ‘I want to be president.’ ”

Ms. Palin grew up in Wasilla, an old fur trader’s outpost and now a fast-growing exurb of Anchorage. The town sits in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, edged by jagged mountains and birch forests. In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration took farmers from the Dust Bowl area and resettled them here; their Democratic allegiances defined the valley for half a century.

In the past three decades, socially conservative Oklahomans and Texans have flocked north to the oil fields of Alaska. They filled evangelical churches around Wasilla and revived the Republican Party. Many of these working-class residents formed the electoral backbone for Ms. Palin, who ran for mayor on a platform of gun rights, opposition to abortion and the ouster of the “complacent” old guard.

After winning the mayoral election in 1996, Ms. Palin presided over a city rapidly outgrowing itself. Septic tanks had begun to pollute lakes, and residential lots were carved willy-nilly out of the woods. She passed road and sewer bonds, cut property taxes but raised the sales tax.

And, her supporters say, she cleaned out the municipal closet, firing veteran officials to make way for her own team. “She had an agenda for change and for doing things differently,” said Judy Patrick, a City Council member at the time.

Careers turned upside down
But careers were turned upside down. The mayor quickly fired the town’s museum director, John Cooper. Later, she sent an aide to the museum to talk to the three remaining employees. “He told us they only wanted two,” recalled Esther West, one of the three, “and we had to pick who was going to be laid off.” The three quit as one.

Ms. Palin cited budget difficulties for the museum cuts. Mr. Cooper thought differently, saying the museum had become a microcosm of class and cultural conflicts in town. “It represented that the town was becoming more progressive, and they didn’t want that,” he said.

Days later, Mr. Cooper recalled, a vocal conservative, Steve Stoll, sidled up to him. Mr. Stoll had supported Ms. Palin and had a long-running feud with Mr. Cooper. “He said: ‘Gotcha, Cooper,’ ” Mr. Cooper said.

Mr. Stoll did not recall that conversation, although he said he supported Ms. Palin’s campaign and was pleased when she fired Mr. Cooper.

In 1997, Ms. Palin fired the longtime city attorney, Richard Deuser, after he issued the stop-work order on a home being built by Don Showers, another of her campaign supporters.

Your attorney, Mr. Showers told Ms. Palin, is costing me lots of money.

“She told me she’d like to see him fired,” Mr. Showers recalled. “But she couldn’t do it herself because the City Council hires the city attorney.” Ms. Palin told him to write the council members to complain.

Meanwhile, Ms. Palin pushed the issue from the inside. “She started the ball rolling,” said Ms. Patrick, who also favored the firing. Mr. Deuser was soon replaced by Ken Jacobus — then the State Republican Party’s general counsel.

“Professionals were either forced out or fired,” Mr. Deuser said.

Ms. Palin ordered city employees not to talk to the press. And she used city money to buy a white Suburban for the mayor’s use — employees sarcastically called it the mayor-mobile.

The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral.

“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.”

Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.

But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.

“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”

“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

Reform Crucible
Restless ambition defined Ms. Palin in the early years of this decade. She raised money for Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from the state; finished second in the 2002 Republican primary for lieutenant governor; and sought to fill the seat of Senator Frank H. Murkowski when he ran for governor.

Mr. Murkowski appointed his daughter to the seat, but as a consolation prize, he gave Ms. Palin the $125,000-a-year chairmanship of a state commission overseeing oil and gas drilling.

Ms. Palin discovered that the state Republican leader, Randy Ruedrich, a commission member, was conducting party business on state time and favoring regulated companies. When Mr. Murkowski failed to act on her complaints, she quit and went public.

The Republican establishment shunned her. But her break with the gentlemen’s club of oil producers and political power catapulted her into the public eye.

“She was honest and forthright,” said Jay Kerttula, a former Democratic state senator from Palmer.

Ms. Palin entered the 2006 primary for governor as a formidable candidate.

In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist in the state, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Ms. Palin had conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. Ms. Palin handled the crisis with a street fighter’s guile.

“I told her it looks like she did the same thing that Randy Ruedrich did,” Mr. Jenkins recalled. “And she said, ‘Yeah, what I did was wrong.’ ”

Mr. Jenkins hung up and decided to forgo writing about it. His phone rang soon after.

Mr. Jenkins said a reporter from Fairbanks, reading from a Palin news release, demanded to know why he was “smearing” her. “Now I look at her and think: ‘Man, you’re slick,’ ” he said.

Ms. Palin won the primary, and in the general election she faced Tony Knowles, the former two-term Democratic governor, and Andrew Halcro, an independent.

Not deeply versed in policy, Ms. Palin skipped some candidate forums; at others, she flipped through hand-written, color-coded index cards strategically placed behind her nameplate.

Before one forum, Mr. Halcro said he saw aides shovel reports at Ms. Palin as she crammed. Her showman’s instincts rarely failed. She put the pile of reports on the lectern. Asked what she would do about health care policy, she patted the stack and said she would find an answer in the pile of solutions.

“She was fresh, and she was tomorrow,” said Michael Carey, a former editorial page editor for The Anchorage Daily News. “She just floated along like Mary Poppins.”

Surrounded herself with people she knew
Half a century after Alaska became a state, Ms. Palin was inaugurated as governor in Fairbanks and took up the reformer’s sword.

As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments, those with insider credentials were now on the outs. But a new pattern became clear. She surrounded herself with people she has known since grade school and members of her church.

Mr. Parnell, the lieutenant governor, praised Ms. Palin’s appointments. “The people she hires are competent, qualified, top-notch people,” he said.

Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.

“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ ”

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

To her supporters — and with an 80 percent approval rating, she has plenty — Ms. Palin has lifted Alaska out of a mire of corruption. She gained the passage of a bill that tightens the rules covering lobbyists. And she rewrote the tax code to capture a greater share of oil and gas sale proceeds.

“Does anybody doubt that she’s a tough negotiator?” said State Representative Carl Gatto, Republican of Palmer.

Yet recent controversy has marred Ms. Palin’s reform credentials. In addition to the trooper investigation, lawmakers in April accused her of improperly culling thousands of e-mail addresses from a state database for a mass mailing to rally support for a policy initiative.

While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a Blackberry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”

Private e-mail addresses used for state business
The governor’s office did not respond to questions on the topic.

Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin’s state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: “Frank, this is not the governor’s personal account.”

Mr. Bailey responded: “Whoops~!”

Mr. Bailey, a former mid-level manager at Alaska Airlines who worked on Ms. Palin’s campaign, has been placed on paid leave; he has emerged as a central figure in the trooper investigation.

Another confidante of Ms. Palin’s is Ms. Frye, 27. She worked as a receptionist for State Senator Lyda Green before she joined Ms. Palin’s campaign for governor. Now Ms. Frye earns $68,664 as a special assistant to the governor. Her frequent interactions with Ms. Palin’s children have prompted some lawmakers to refer to her as “the babysitter,” a title that Ms. Frye disavows.

Like Mr. Bailey, she is an effusive cheerleader for her boss.

“YOU ARE SO AWESOME!” Ms. Frye typed in an e-mail message to Ms. Palin in March.

Many lawmakers contend that Ms. Palin is overly reliant on a small inner circle that leaves her isolated. Democrats and Republicans alike describe her as often missing in action. Since taking office in 2007, Ms. Palin has spent 312 nights at her Wasilla home, some 600 miles to the north of the governor’s mansion in Juneau, records show.

Where's Sarah?
During the last legislative session, some lawmakers became so frustrated with her absences that they took to wearing “Where’s Sarah?” pins.

Many politicians say they typically learn of her initiatives — and vetoes — from news releases.

Mayors across the state, from the larger cities to tiny municipalities along the southeastern fiords, are even more frustrated. Often, their letters go unanswered and their pleas ignored, records and interviews show.

Last summer, Mayor Mark Begich of Anchorage, a Democrat, pressed Ms. Palin to meet with him because the state had failed to deliver money needed to operate city traffic lights. At one point, records show, state officials told him to just turn off a dozen of them. Ms. Palin agreed to meet with Mr. Begich when he threatened to go public with his anger, according to city officials.

At an Alaska Municipal League gathering in Juneau in January, mayors across the political spectrum swapped stories of the governor’s remoteness. How many of you, someone asked, have tried to meet with her? Every hand went up, recalled Mayor Fred Shields of Haines Borough. And how many met with her? Just a few hands rose. Ms. Palin soon walked in, delivered a few remarks and left for an anti-abortion rally.

The administration’s e-mail correspondence reveals a siege-like atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes. Even some who helped engineer her rise have felt her wrath.

Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend of Ms. Palin, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found himself branded a “hater.”

It is part of a pattern, Mr. Fagan said, in which Ms. Palin characterizes critics as “bad people who are anti-Alaska.”

Aides sit in on interviews
As Ms. Palin’s star ascends, the McCain campaign, as often happens in national races, is controlling the words of those who know her well. Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, has been asked not to speak to reporters, and aides sit in on interviews with old friends.

At a recent lunch gathering, an official with the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce asked its members to refer all calls from reporters to the governor’s office. Diane Woodruff, a city councilwoman, shook her head.

“I was thinking, I don’t remember giving up my First Amendment rights,” Ms. Woodruff said. “Just because you’re not going gaga over Sarah doesn’t mean you can’t speak your mind.”

Palin cut own duties as mayor of Wasilla

Hupp — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:49:57 EDT

GOP VP hopeful says tenure as mayor grounded her in real needs of voters

By Alec MacGillis

updated 6:13 a.m. ET, Sun., Sept. 14, 2008

WASILLA, Alaska - On Sept. 24, 2001, Mayor Sarah Palin and the City Council held their first meeting after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The council condemned the attacks and approved a $5,000 gift to a disaster relief fund. Palin said she would try to obtain materials from both attack sites to include in the town's "Honor Garden."

And then the council and mayor returned to their normal business: approving funds to upgrade the public well, issuing a restaurant permit and taking up a measure forbidding residents from operating bed-and-breakfasts in their homes. After a lively debate, the bed-and-breakfast measure lost, 4 to 1.

Since joining the Republican ticket, Palin has faced questions about whether she is qualified to be vice president or, if necessary, president. In response, the first-term Alaska governor and Sen. John McCain point to the executive qualifications she acquired as Wasilla mayor, a six-year stint from 1996 to 2002 that represents the bulk of her political experience.

Palin says her time as mayor taught her how to be a leader and grounded her in the real needs of voters, and her tenure revealed some of the qualities she would later display as governor: a striving ambition, a willingness to cut loose those perceived as disloyal and a populist brand of social and pro-growth conservatism.

But a visit to this former mining supply post 40 miles north of Anchorage shows the extent to which Palin's mayoralty was also defined by what it did not include. The universe of the mayor of Wasilla is sharply circumscribed even by the standards of small towns, which limited Palin's exposure to issues such as health care, social services, the environment and education.

Firefighting and schools, two of the main elements of local governance, are handled by the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, the regional government for a huge swath of central Alaska. The state has jurisdiction over social services and environmental regulations such as stormwater management for building projects.

Low property tax rate
With so many government services in the state subsidized by oil revenue, and with no need to provide for local schools, Wasilla has also made do with a very low property tax rate -- cut altogether by Palin's successor -- sparing it from the tax battles that localities elsewhere must deal with. Instead, the city collects a 2 percent sales tax, the bulk of which is paid by people who live outside town and shop at its big-box stores.

The mayor oversees a police department created three years before Palin took office; the public works department; the parks and recreation department; a planning office; a library; and a small history museum. Council meetings are in the low-ceilinged basement of the town hall, a former school, and often the only residents who show up to testify are two gadflies. When Palin was mayor, the population was just 5,500.

Palin limited her duties further by hiring a deputy administrator to handle much of the town's day-to-day management. Her top achievement as mayor was the construction of an ice rink, a project that landed in the courts and cost the city more than expected.

'It's not rocket science'
Arriving in office, Palin herself played down the demands of the job in response to residents who worried that her move to oust veteran officials would leave the town in the lurch. "It's not rocket science," Palin said, according to the town newspaper, the Frontiersman. "It's $6 million and 53 employees."

Further constraining City Hall's role is the frontier philosophy that has prevailed in Wasilla, a town that was founded in 1917 as a stop along the new railroad from Anchorage to the gold mines further north. The light hand of government is evident in the town's commercial core, essentially a haphazard succession of big-box stores, fast-food restaurants and shopping plazas.

The only semblance of an original downtown is a small collection of historic cabins that have been gathered for display in a grassy area beside a shopping center. Most residents live in ranch houses scattered through the woods. Churches, offices, stores and most other buildings are made of corrugated metal or composite materials. Standing in contrast to the utilitarian architecture are the lakes and majestic peaks.

Many of those in town were astonished to learn that Palin had been named McCain's running mate six years after leaving City Hall.

"I was happy in a way, because it is a new beginning for the country, but also I am very worried due to her lack of experience," said Darlene Langill, a self-described arch-conservative who served on the City Council during Palin's first year in office.

Duane Dvorak, the city planner when Palin took office, said the mayor's ambition had been plain to see, but added: "My sense is that this opportunity maybe came along before she was ready for it or thought it would come along."

The McCain campaign declined to respond to questions about Palin's tenure as mayor, but the current mayor, Dianne Keller, said Palin's tenure has prepared her to be vice president.

"Executive experience is executive experience. Whether you are a mayor or a governor or an executive at a company, the duties and responsibilities are the same," said Keller, who served on the City Council under Palin.

As constrained as Palin's duties as mayor were, her rise to power in Wasilla allowed her to hone the sharp political instinct that has guided her since. When she ran for City Council in 1992, it was as a young PTA mother and daughter of a well-liked local family.

But in her four years on the council, she picked up on sentiment that was building against the three-term incumbent, John Stein, who pushed for the 2 percent sales tax to pay for road, sewer and water upgrades. These investments laid the way for the city's growth, but they also unnerved some residents.

"People said, 'What are you doing to my city? I liked it better when we didn't have government,' '' said Richard Deuser, the city attorney at the time. "And Sarah really pandered to that resentment, that resistance to change. Sarah became their person."

Running against Stein, Palin called for an end to his "tax-and-spend mentality" -- and introduced Wasilla to the kind of socially conservative campaigning that was taking hold across the nation. A national antiabortion-rights group sent cards to voters praising Palin, and her brochures said she was "endorsed by the NRA." After she won with 616 votes -- 58 percent of the total -- a local TV station referred to her as Wasilla's "first Christian mayor," even though Stein and his predecessors were also Christian.

Show of force
Palin took office as mayor in October 1996 with a show of force. She fired the museum director and demanded that the other department heads submit resignation letters, saying she would decide whether to accept them based on their loyalty, according to news reports at the time. She clashed with Police Chief Irl Stambaugh over his push for moving bar closing time from 5 a.m. to 2 a.m. and for his opposition to state legislation to allow people to carry guns in banks and bars.

In notes that he took during a meeting in Palin's first week on the job, Stambaugh wrote that the new mayor told him "that the NRA didn't like me and that they wanted change," according to the Seattle Times, which reviewed the notes at a federal archive in Seattle. Stambaugh was fired on Jan. 30, 1997, partly, the mayor said, because he had not taken seriously her request for a weekly progress report "on at least two positive examples of work that was started, how we helped the public, how we saved the City money, how we helped the state, how we helped Uncle Sam." Stambaugh filed a wrongful-termination suit, which he lost.

Palin also differed with the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons. The Frontiersman reported at the time that Palin asked Emmons three times in her first weeks in office whether she would agree to remove controversial books. The librarian said she would not. The McCain campaign has confirmed Palin's questions but said that she never demanded removal of any specific books. Palin also fired Emmons on Jan. 30 but reinstated her after an uproar.

Although the town had a $4 million surplus, Palin cut the museum budget by $32,000, and the three older women who worked there quit instead of deciding which would have to go. But Palin dipped into the budget to create the deputy administrator slot, which some council members complained was at odds with her small-government stance. She told city officials not to talk to reporters.

A recall effort in early 1997 fizzled out, but hard feelings lingered. "Working in small towns, I had never seen someone come in and clean house like that in such a precipitous manner. It was pretty scary and emotional," said Dvorak, the city planner, who left after eight months.

Deuser, the former city attorney, said it was upsetting to hear the McCain campaign refer to Palin's takeover as a matter of getting rid of the "good ol' boy network."

"They were just good public servants who did a really admirable job and deserved better," said Deuser, who was replaced in 1997.

'Bold about what needed to be done'
Jeff Carney, another local attorney, said Palin was just trying to assert herself against skeptics. Members of the town's old guard "thought they could run over her and were bothered that she could think for herself and make up her own mind up and not do what someone older and wiser told her to do," he said.

In 2006, Palin told the Anchorage Daily News she learned from it all. "At the time, it seemed perplexing that people would object. I was very bold about what needed to be done," she said. "It was rough with a staff who didn't want to be there working with a new boss. I learned you've got to be very discerning early on and decide if you can win them over or not. If you can't, you replace them early on."

Palin's replacements included a public works director who lacked engineering experience but was married to a top aide to a former Republican governor, and she made a former state GOP lawyer city attorney, according to the Daily News. Langill, the former councilwoman, said the new hires fit Palin's management style.

"Sarah always did and still does surround herself with people she gets along well with," she said. "They protect her, and that's what she needs. She has surrounded herself with people who would not allow others to disagree with Sarah. Either you were in favor of everything Sarah was doing or had a black mark by your name."

But things did run more smoothly from then on, and department directors whom Palin hired said she was good at delegating authority and letting them do their job. "She's a quick study," said Don Shiesl, who took over public works in 1998. "She's a heck of a public speaker and she works her magic on people. Give her four years, with some training, and she'll be up to snuff. She's not dumb, she'll be able to catch on to stuff real quick."

The town's coffers swelled as more stores moved in, letting Palin reap the political benefits of Stein's sales tax and infrastructure upgrades. With her natural charisma putting voters at ease after the initial turbulence, she was reelected in 1999 to the $68,000-a-year job. The budget expanded by nearly half during Palin's tenure as she increased spending on police and public works but kept a lid on city planning and the library, and further reduced the property tax.

Further buttressing the budget were the earmarks Palin sought for the town after hiring a Washington lobbyist for $38,000 a year. The town secured $27 million in all, including $1.9 million for a transportation hub, $900,000 for sewer repairs and $15 million for a rail project.

Despite the city's flush accounts, the police department under the chief Palin hired to replace Stambaugh required women who said they had been raped to pay for examination kits themselves, a policy Palin now says she rejects. State legislation passed a year later required the town to pay for the kits.

'Make things more welcoming'
The social-issues platform of Palin's first campaign found little outlet in town, beyond some symbolic moves such as declaring Wasilla a "City of Good Character" and a resolution opposing the legalization of marijuana. Instead, she focused on continuing the city's growth and development. Her second city planner, Tim Krug, said last week that the city would sometimes "lighten" regulations, to "make things more welcoming."

Some in town had for years pressed the city for a new space for the cramped library. Palin, who calls herself a "typical hockey mom," instead focused on building a sports complex with an NHL-size rink. In 2002, by a 20-vote margin, voters approved a $14.7 million bond to be financed by a half-cent sales tax hike.

Palin had forged ahead with the project despite a lingering legal dispute over whether the city had ownership of the land. A judge had initially ruled in the city's favor, but it later lost on appeal and had to pay $1.3 million more for the land.

"The only accomplishment of note was the building of the sports complex . . . and it was bungled," said Deuser, the former city attorney. Keller, the new mayor, defended Palin, saying she had relied on legal advice in proceeding with the project.

Bound by term limits, Palin ran for lieutenant governor in 2002, came in a strong second and was later rewarded with a high-paying spot on the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

In September 2002, she presided over her last City Council meeting. The council took up an ordinance to ban sex shops. The police chief announced that Raymond Chiemlowski was promoted to sergeant. Keller "reported that traffic lights on Knik-Goosebay Road will be turned on soon and encouraged everyone to use caution while adjusting to the new traffic pattern."

And with that, at 9:48 p.m., Sarah Palin's final meeting as mayor of Wasilla was adjourned.

Did Palin Misquote Lincoln?

Hupp — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:45:07 EDT

Much has been made, and rightly so, of the widespread misrepresentation of Sarah Palin's remark about U.S. troops being in Iraq "on a task that is from God." It was taken out of context. Her full statement, recorded on videotape at the Wasilla Assembly of God church, went as follows:

Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do also what is right for this country -- that our leaders, our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan.

"The crucial point," notes Bill Poser on Language Log, "is that she didn't assert that the Iraq War is a 'task that is from God'; rather, she prayed that it would turn out that it is. Expressing the hope that something will turn out to be true is entirely different from asserting it."

Quite right.

Still, it looks as though Palin may have done herself a disservice by claiming in her TV interview with Charlie Gibson that she was paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln. She said:

[T]he reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words when he said -- first, he suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words. But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side. That's what that comment was all about, Charlie.

Patrick Buchanan resorted to the same defense when Palin's remark came up for discussion on The Rachel Maddow Show: "No, no. She did not say this war is God's plan," Buchanan said. "Look at it again . . . Just like Lincoln said, 'Look, let us pray that we are on God’s side.'"

But some observers, including author Caleb Crain and historians Harold Holzer and Jim Oakes, question whether Lincoln ever really said such a thing. Crain writes:

There is a bit of a mystery here. Either Buchanan is a mind-reader, or he and the Palin-McCain campaign have been in touch. Further Googling reveals that Buchanan and/or the Palin-McCain backup team seem to be thinking of an unsourced anecdote that circulates on the Internet in a dozen versions, about a supposed encounter between a Northerner, who hopes God is on his side, and Lincoln, who hopes the North is on God's side. Maybe a source for the anecdote will turn up, but I don't recall having read of it before today.

I checked, and one can indeed find a passel of different versions of the quote by plugging keywords into Google, e.g.:

"I don't want to claim that God is on our side, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side."
"We trust, sir, that God is on our side. It is more important to know that we are on God's side."
"Pray not that God be on our side, but pray instead that we be found on God's side."
"I know God is with me, yet I am more concerned whether in all my doings am I on God's side."

Crain reports that he tried and failed to locate a match in the Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln. The earliest one he did find turned up in a book published in 1943: "I care not if God is on my side. My constant hope and prayer is that I may be found upon God's side."

He suspects it to be a twentieth-century fabrication.

Apocryphal though it may well be, I've found references to yet another variant dating back some sixty-odd years earlier. Consider this anecdote that appeared in the minutes of the Connecticut Temperance Union, dated January 19, 1881:

One of the best of the many good stories that are told of our Martyr President, runs as follows: At the close of a scientific convention in Washington, the members called upon the President. One of them said: "Mr. President, we trust during this time of trial in which the nation is engaged, God is on our side, and will give us victory." The noble Lincoln replied: "Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side. My great concern is to be on God's side. For God is always right!"

Could it have been a nineteenth-century fabrication? The jury is still out.

At the very least, say historians Jim Oakes and Harold Holzer, Palin (and Buchanan) misinterpreted Lincoln's known views on the subject. Citing two authenticated passages representing the 16th President's rather tortuous ruminations on God and war, Oakes told the Guardian: "Lincoln isn't just saying we can't know which side God is on. He's saying God doesn't take sides in battles like this, in wars like this. The only thing we can know is that He sent this war, because He could stop this war whenever He wants."

Holzer, addressing Palin's comments in the Boston Globe, said, "I think there is no computing the precise Lincoln quote with her own quote. Lincoln sought guidance from God, he didn't tell people that God was guiding him. It is just different."

To be fair, Sarah Palin hasn't been the only politician in the race to call out the ghost of Abraham Lincoln in this regard. Look what Barack Obama said in response to a question from CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien on June 8, 2007:

O'BRIEN: Do you think that God takes sides in a war? For example, in the war on terror, is God on the side of U.S. troops, would you say?

OBAMA: Well, you know, I always remember Abraham Lincoln, when, during the Civil War, he said, "We shouldn't be asking whose side God is on, but whether we're on his side." And I think that's the question that all of us have to ask ourselves during any battle that's taking place, whether it's political or military, is, are we following his dictates?

I've spent the better part of a morning trying to nail down the precise origin of this variegated story myself, to no avail. Are there any Lincoln aficionados out there who can cite a specific text, or a specific speech at a specific time and place, in which the contested passage can be found? Please send it here.

In the meantime, the final word goes to Bob Dylan.

Obama Points to the Issues, Ignore Attacks, Democrat Implores

Hupp — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 08:07:07 EDT

By Jonathan Weisman

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, September 14, 2008; Page A10

MANCHESTER, N.H., Sept. 13 -- Sen. Barack Obama brought his newly aggressive campaign against Republican opponent John McCain to an open-air rally here, castigating the senator from Arizona as a latecomer to the cause of change and imploring about 8,000 Granite State citizens to ignore the GOP's barrage of negative attacks.

"The McCain-Palin ticket, they don't want to debate the Obama-Biden ticket on the issues, because they're running on eight more years," Obama said under a sunny sky at Veterans Memorial Park. "They will try to distort my record, and they will try to undermine your trust in what the Democrats want to do. . . . But the times are too serious for those strategies to work this time."

After a long period of focusing his attention on more intimate events in high school gyms and work sites that communicated the feel of a candidate meeting face-to-face with voters, Obama returned to large crowds with the Manchester rally. The McCain campaign had long criticized such big events as a form of "celebrity" worship but has itself adopted the format since the addition of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to the Republican ticket.

Saturday's event was toned down as Hurricane Ike ravaged Texas. An appearance by running mate Joseph R. Biden Jr. was scrapped. A scheduled appearance on "Saturday Night Live" was canceled.

Obama opened his rally here with an appeal for help for the Red Cross and hurricane victims in Texas. "During difficult times, during moments of tragedy, the American people come together," he said.

But unlike his response during Hurricane Gustav, Obama did not declare a temporary cease-fire -- an acknowledgment of the shifting dynamics of the presidential campaign since the end of the Democratic convention. Instead, Obama quickly pivoted from sympathy for the victims of Ike to a more aggressive speech focused squarely on the struggling economy, saying that "there are a lot of quiet storms going on all across America" in the form of job losses, spiraling health-care and college costs, and schools that are "underfunded and uninspired."

"People are concerned not just for their immediate well-being, but they're concerned about what happened to that promise, what happened to that dream? Are we going to be the first generation that passes on a country that is a little less prosperous, a little less unified and a little meaner than the last generation?" he said, intoning the phrase that has become his theme since the Democratic convention. "We are here to say enough is enough."

McCain, who was off the campaign trail Saturday, issued a statement about Hurricane Ike expressing concern that "there may have been a substantial loss of life." He added: "We do know that the economic impact from this storm will be severe. . . . But our priority now must be to help the relief effort in any way we can, and to pray for the safety of those in the storm's path."

Meanwhile, his campaign, under fire for the negative tone it has employed over the last week, tried to shift that criticism to Obama.

"It says a lot about Barack Obama's judgment that while his campaign canceled his appearance on 'Saturday Night Live' and his running mate stayed home, Obama went ahead and delivered a series of scathing personal attacks," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, calling the speech "a new low." McCain was off the campaign trail on Saturday but also planned to stump in New Hampshire on Sunday.

The Obama campaign did not let up.

"We will take no lectures from John McCain, who is cynically running the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

As the senator from Illinois spoke, the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee officially highlighted a campaign commercial castigating McCain as a tool of Washington lobbyists. "His campaign manager lobbies for corporations outsourcing American jobs," the ad states, flashing an image of McCain with top aide Rick Davis. "The campaign chairman he picked last year . . . a bank lobbyist," it continues, with an image of McCain and former Texas senator Phil Gramm. "If seven of McCain's top advisers are lobbyists, who do you think will run his White House?"

Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod insisted that Palin has energized conservative Republicans mainly in Republican states that were going to vote for McCain regardless of whom he selected.

"There's not going to be a person in America who by the end of these next weeks will not understand who represents change and who represents more of the same," Axelrod boasted.

Greenspan: We can't afford McCain's tax cuts

Hupp — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 20:25:06 EDT

updated 4:50 p.m. ET, Sat., Sept. 13, 2008

WASHINGTON - Alan Greenspan says the country can't afford tax cuts of the magnitude proposed by Republican presidential contender John McCain — at least not without a corresponding reduction in government spending.

"Unless we cut spending, no," the former Federal Reserve chairman said Friday when asked McCain's proposed tax cuts, pegged in some estimates at $3.3 trillion.

"I'm not in favor of financing tax cuts with borrowed money," Greenspan said during an interview with Bloomberg Television. "I always have tied tax cuts to spending."

McCain has said that he would offset his proposed cuts — including reducing the corporate tax rate and eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax that has plagued middle-class families — by ending congressional pork-barrel spending, unnecessary government programs and overhauling entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

Democrats pounced on Greenspan's comments, in part because McCain professed last year that he was weaker on economics than foreign affairs and was reading Greenspan's memoir, "The Age of Turbulence," to educate himself.

"Obviously he needs to go back to that book and study it some more," Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said during a conference call arranged by the campaign of Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

McCaskill said eliminating congressional earmark spending — estimated at $17 billion annually — cannot offset McCain's proposed tax cuts.

"That's a huge amount of money, but it's not even a drop in the bucket to pay for $3.5 trillion in tax cuts," she said. "So, every time he throws up earmarks and he's asked how he's going to pay for it, he knows he's being disingenuous, he knows he's not being forthcoming."

McCain aides dispute numbers
McCain campaign officials dispute the $3.3 trillion figure, saying it assumes eliminating 2003 tax cuts made by the Bush administration and then cutting from that higher level. They say McCain is proposing tax cuts worth $600 billion from current levels.

"John McCain opposed President Bush's tax cuts in 2003, because they didn't include the necessary spending controls. Sen. McCain's proposed job-growing tax cuts are modest in comparison to his plans to slow the exploding growth of federal expenditures — meaning that contrary to Chairman Greenspan's assertions, this relief isn't proposed on borrowed money," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds.

While McCain opposed the 2003 cuts and previous Bush administration tax cuts from 2001, he now says he would leave them intact. Obama has said he would repeal Bush tax cuts benefiting families making over $250,000 annually to pay for programs and provide middle-tax class relief.

Conservative summit miffed
Meanwhile, organizers of a conservative summit in Washington said McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, missed an opportunity by not addressing the gathering. Some 2,100 activists from 44 states, plus another 10,000 people who signed up to watch online, participated in the three-day Values Voter Summit.

On Saturday, McCain was less than 10 miles away, working in at his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va. Palin was leaving Alaska and traveling to a rally in Reno, Nev. Last year, McCain and seven other GOP presidential candidates spoke at the summit.

"I think there is some disappointment that he's not here. I think there's greater disappointment that Palin is not here," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a key sponsor of the summit. "I think people would have liked to have heard from her."

Activists attending the summit were unanimous in their enthusiasm for Palin, including several who said their support for McCain was lukewarm before he selected her.

Gary Ward, pastor of the Rocky Point Church in Stephenville, Texas, said he supported former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for the GOP nomination but that his enthusiasm for McCain has been increased by his choice of Palin and his recent statement that he believes life begins at conception.

"That was absolutely the right answer," Ward said.

Elizabeth Kish, an administrative assistant from Gainsville, Fla., said she was put off by McCain's record on immigration and was considering voting for Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr until Palin's selection.

"Once he chose Palin that was it for me," said Kish, who was wearing a "Pro-Life Pro-Palin" button and another button featuring pictures of Chief Justice John Roberts and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito under the slogan, "The Kind of Change I Believe In."

McCain's Earmark Hypocrisy: Seals, Crabs, and Bears! Oh My!

Hupp — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 07:47:59 EDT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj6TvUQ_0to&eurl

John McCain and Sarah Palin on the campaign trail, September 9, 2008

PAKISOURCED

Hupp — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 01:20:25 EDT

Posted on Thu, Sep. 11, 2008

By Michael Smerconish
Philadelphia Daily News

Daily News Opinion Columnist

This morning, I'll be leading five busloads of local residents on a trip to Shanksville, Pa., to the spot where Flight 93 crashed seven years ago today. Like the beaches at Normandy, it is one of those places that every American should see.

This was written for publication in my next book, "Morning Drive: Things I wish I knew before I started talking," set for publication in March, 2009, by Lyons Press.

WHERE THE HELL are Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? And why does virtually no one ask anymore?

What's changed since the days when any suburban soccer mom would have strangled either of them with her bare hands if given the chance? And what happened to President Bush's declaration to a joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11 that "any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

We're at the seven-year anniversary of 9/11, lacking not only closure with regard to the two top al Qaeda leaders but also public debate about any plan to bring them to justice.

Bin Laden is presumed to have been in Afghanistan on 9/11 and to have fled that nation during the battle at Tora Bora in December 2001. Then came a period when the Bush administration was supposed to be pressing the search through means it couldn't share publicly. But as time went by with no capture, the signs became more troubling.

We now know that in late 2005, the CIA disbanded the FBI-CIA unit dedicated to finding bin Laden, reported on July 4, 2006 by the New York Times. At the time, I hoped we'd closed the bin Laden unit because Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was fully engaged in the hunt in his country's northwest territories, where bin Laden and al-Zawahiri were supposedly hiding. In September 2006, however, Musharraf reached an accord with tribal leaders - notorious for their refusal to hand over a guest - to give them continued free reign.

Getting the policy, firsthand

In October 2006, I participated in a week-long, Pentagon-sponsored program called the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference, for 45 civilians to learn firsthand about the military's Central Command (CENTCOM).

We boarded the USS Iwo Jima by copter in the Persian Gulf, fired the best of the Army's weaponry in the Kuwait desert (just 10 miles from Iraq), drove a Humvee obstacle course designed to teach about IEDs (improvised explosive devices), boarded the Air Force's most sophisticated surveillance aircraft in Qatar and even took a tour of a humanitarian outpost in the Horn of Africa.

In addition to Secretary Rumsfeld, we were briefed by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the vice admiral of CENTCOM and other high-ranking war commanders.

I came home with the utmost respect for the men and women throughout the ranks of all five branches of the service committed to eradicating the forces of radical Islam. But there was one thing noticeably absent: The search for bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. It was not part of our otherwise comprehensive agenda, and when I asked, there was no information forthcoming except a general assertion that, indeed, the hunt continued.

When we were briefed at Andrews Air Force Base by Vice Admiral David Nichols, I asked him whether the hunt for bin Laden was completely dependent on President Musharraf. He told me that we respect national sovereignty, and described the search as "difficult and nuanced."

In Bahrain, I put the same question to Marine Brig. Gen. Anthony Jackson. He told me that the search was like trying to find one man in the Rockies, an analogy that I heard repeatedly. He also said that "no one is giving up," and that my question was better put to the guys in special ops.

At special-ops headquarters in Qatar, I raised the matter again, with Col. Patrick Pihana, the chief of staff to the Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command. He offered nothing substantive on the issue.

If we did kill him, what then?

I came home worried that the days of aggressively hunting bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had ended. Of course, I could fully appreciate that an aggressive pursuit is underway but that I, a blowhard from Philadelphia, was simply unworthy of any information.

But more than one individual with whom I spoke - no one I've named here - raised the question of what would happen to public support for the war against radical Islam if we were to kill bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. They wanted to know: Would the American people then expect the military to pack up and go home? No one ever told me that we're not hunting bin Laden because killing him would cause Americans to want to close up shop in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it was on the minds of our warriors as support for the war in Iraq dissipated.

Meanwhile, the White House and the Pentagon have consistently played down the significance of capturing bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, and President Bush offered only superficial responses to the few questions raised on the status of the search.

At a May 24, 2007, White House news conference, when asked why Osama was still at large, President Bush offered, "Because we haven't got him yet. . . . That's why. And he's hiding, and we're looking, and we will continue to look until we bring him to justice." For me, it had begun to wear thin. Unfortunately, the president's line has been accepted by the media and American people.

I hoped that the presidential campaign would move the issue to the front burner, but it's failed to stir up a discussion about the failure to capture or kill those who pushed us down such a perilous path. In the first seven presidential debates there was only one question that touched on the subject of finding bin Laden, and it came from the audience.

Strong words - and ridicule

Things changed somewhat on Aug. 1, 2007, when Barack Obama delivered a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars: "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets, and President Musharraf won't act, we will," he said. "We can't send millions and millions of dollars to Pakistan for military aid, and be a constant ally to them, and yet not see more aggressive action in dealing with al Qaeda."

Finally, I thought, a presidential candidate saying something about this foreign-policy failure.

The reaction? Ridicule.

Then-candidates Joe Biden and Chris Dodd responded derisively. John McCain pounded Obama for a perceived lack of seasoning in foreign relations: "The best idea is to not broadcast what you're going to do," McCain said. "That's naive." (More recently, McCain has grown fond of saying that he'll "follow bin Laden to the gates of hell.")

Obama has refused to back away from his insistence on reasserting control over the hunt for bin Laden. On March 21, he told me: "What I've learned from talking to troops on the ground is that unless we can really pin down some of these Taliban leaders who flee into the Pakistan territories, we're going to continue to have instability, and al Qaeda's going to continue to have a safe haven, and that's not acceptable."

I asked about it again on April 18. He told me that Musharraf, despite billions in American aid, was not taking counterterrorism seriously. He pointed out that the Bush administration is actually showing signs of following his lead. Obama reminded me that a late-January airstrike killed a senior al Qaeda commander in Pakistan, calling it an example of the type of action he's been recommending since August. The CIA, it was reported a few weeks after the strike, acted without the direct approval of Musharraf.

Soon after I spoke with Obama, the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, issued a report called "Combating Terrorism: The United States Lacks Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas."

The report, undertaken at the request of U.S House and Senate members, minces no words in issuing a conclusion that should make Americans' blood boil: Six years after Sept. 11, the United States had failed to destroy the terrorist havens in Pakistan's federally administered tribal areas.

'Tailor-made for bin Laden'

More recent headlines continue to defy the GAO recommendations. "Pakistan asserts it is near a deal with militants," read the front page of the April 25 edition of the New York Times. Pakistan's newly elected government was again on the verge of an accord with the militants running amok in the tribals areas - despite the new government's previously stated desires to move away from Musharraf's policies.

The arrangement was tailor-made for bin Laden. It permitted the local Taliban group, Tehrik-e-Taliban, to assist in keeping law and order in the area in the northwest frontier province, while not attacking the existing security forces, in return for an exchange of prisoners between the Pakistani Army and the Taliban. The Army also agreed to withdraw forces from parts of the area.

According to a report from the May 22 Times, the Bush administration was concerned that the deal would "give the Taliban and al Qaeda the latitude to carry out attacks against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan." Some U.S. officials even went so far as to call it a "victory" for bin Laden, as reported by ABC News.

In May 2008, I got the chance to interview Marcus Luttrell, the only survivor of Operation Red Wing, a mission that resulted in the worst loss in Navy Seal history. He earned a Navy Cross for his valor and wrote about his harrowing story in "Lone Survivor."

Luttrell gave a brutally honest account of the time he had spent in the Hindu Kush, the mountainous area just a few miles from the northwestern border of Pakistan. He described how his efforts were too often constricted by red tape.

"We'd be chasing the bad guys in there and they had a lot of security set up, and we have to stop what we're doing while they just run across, and if we don't, we'll get engaged by the Paki border guards, and that's an international incident."

'Such a joke . . . so stupid'

I asked him if the Pakistan issue was a problem in general.

"Hell, yeah, it's a problem. Heck, they're harboring the enemy. It's such a joke, it's so stupid. hey come over and do their business, whatever is, and if it gets them into trouble, all they have to do is sink back into Pakistan and stay there . . . it's frustrating."

Supporting Luttrell's account is a chilling report released by the RAND Corp. think tank on June 9, 2008. It warned that the "United States and its NATO allies will face crippling long-term consequences in their effort to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan" if it does not eliminate Taliban strongholds in Pakistan.

But the presidential contenders and Americans headed to the polls are mostly silent in the face of six and a half years moving in the wrong direction. Ayman al-Zawahiri is apparently so comfortable that he now spends time logging into jihadi chat rooms.

The Bush administration's failure to orchestrate a successful counterterrorism plan - topped off with justice for bin Laden and al-Zawahiri - has left me embarrassed for my party, and angry.

Unfortunately, Sen. McCain only offered a continuation of the Bush policy. In a conversation on June 13, he first attempted to say that our counterterrorism efforts were working and that remaining on good terms with Pakistan was imperative to our safety.

"There has been progress in those areas," he said. "Pakistan is a sovereign nation and we have to have the cooperation of Pakistan in order to have these operations succeed. . . . if you alienate Pakistan and it turns into an anti-American government, then you will have much greater difficulties."

When the senator reminded me that the U.S. also gives a great deal of money to Egypt, which also could be more helpful in the War on Terror, I pointed out that these guys aren't hiding in Cairo. The people responsible for the atrocities of 9/11 are concentrated in northwestern Pakistan, I repeated to the senator. He pointed out the difficulty with the region.

"I have promised that I will get Osama bin Laden when I am president . . . but . . . there's a reason why it hasn't been governed since the days of Alexander the Great. They're ruled by about, it's my understanding, 13 tribal entities, and nobody has ever governed them, not the Pakistani government, not the British -nobody."

I said, "All I think is that the guys who sent those guys over here are still on the lam and we're writing a big check, and I'm unhappy about it."

There is one bit of encouraging news: In August, Abu Saeed al-Masri, a senior al Qaeda commander, was killed in an American air strike. Where? The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, of course. And we're continuing to use unmanned attack drones to put al Qaeda forces in the area in the crosshairs, even as recently as this week.

This election offers a chance

But I still believe that this election will be the chance to overturn the conventional wisdom that President Bush has offered for seven years and that Sen. McCain appears resigned to advance: That the now-gone Musharraf was a friend who did what he could to prevent Pakistan from defaulting toward further extremism, that the hunt for bin Laden is nuanced and that U.S. forces are doing everything they can to find him, and that the war in Iraq is a necessary one that hasn't distracted from the fight against those who planned and perpetrated 9/11.

That wisdom has been proven unequivocally wrong.

Forget ideology or politics. I wish every American could agree that our obligation to bring these two to justice needs outrage. I wish Hillary Clinton would have done more than promise to answer the White House phone at 3 a.m. Forget following bin Laden to the gates of hell; I just want John McCain to follow him to Pakistan. Most important, I wish Barack Obama's calls for refocusing the War on Terror there would fall on receptive ears.

More than anything, I want Americans to stop standing for this. I doubt that the families of the 3,000 innocents murdered on 9/11 - and the 4,000 that followed them in Iraq - are content with it. If we don't have the fire in our belly to kill these two, I fear we'll be left to deal with another fire, raging in another building, burning a hole in another American city. *

Listen to Michael Smerconish weekdays 5-9 a.m. on the Big Talker, 1210/AM. Read him Sundays in the Inquirer. Contact him via the Web at www.mastalk.com.

12 Year Old Girl Tells the Truth on Fox News about Georgia

Hupp — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 01:12:46 EDT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-ZTZpRMhbU&feature=related

12 Year Old Girl Tells the Truth on Fox News about Georgia. Fox News even had to cut them off right in the middle of the account of Georgian aggression even though they had just come from a commercial break 2 minutes prior to that. Fox News and corporate media do not want the truth out. Every main stream news agency in the world feeds the world propaganda every day!!!!Not just an American Flaw!!!!!!

CBS Edits McCain's Whopper Out of Broadcast (w/original video)

Hupp — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:50:28 EDT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDIAsS9VXiM&feature=related

Fiscal Conservative?

Hupp — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:10:20 EDT

If John McCain thinks we're on the right track, that's not a train I want to be on!

McCain's Ad Cites Articles That Rip Him Worse Than Obama

Hupp — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:04:09 EDT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/09/mccain-ad-cites-articles_n_125218.html

John McCain's attack ad released Tuesday evening is perhaps the most outlandish yet this election cycle -- not simply because the spot claims that Obama lacks any substantive record on education policy (he actually can claim several achievements on that front), and not because McCain charges that Obama's lone feat is "comprehensive sex education" for kindergartners (a hysterical description of efforts aimed at protecting children from predators).

What sets this ad apart is that every article save one that the McCain camp cites as being critical of Obama's education policies either has far more derogatory things to say about McCain himself or goes on to praise the Illinois Democrat.

In the spot, the McCain campaign references a June 2008 Washington Post editorial that called Obama "elusive" on school accountability. That same editorial, however, stated that McCain "has not been forthcoming with any detailed plan." Moreover, when the Post editorial board revisited the subject of education last month, it found that "Obama has given the issue more attention" than McCain, whose plan was "both late in coming and still a work in progress."

Moreover, the specific "elusive" claim is in reference to a David Brooks op-ed in the New York Times that was noted by the Post. But in that piece, Brooks was far more critical of McCain. "Obama endorses many good ideas and is more specific than the McCain campaign, which hasn't even reported for duty on education," the Times columnist wrote.

In its press release accompanying the ad, the McCain campaign also cites an Education Week article which states that, as a legislator, Obama "hasn't made a significant mark on education." The same story, however, goes on to add: "Sen. Obama may have a unique perspective among the candidates seeking the presidency in 2008. As a private citizen, he led Chicago's portion of the Annenberg Challenge school reform initiative financed by the late philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg--an experience that shaped Mr. Obama's perspective on the critical importance of principals and teachers."

Additionally, during the heat of the Republican primary, Education Week ran a withering story on the lack of McCain accomplishments in the field, titled "John McCain on Education: Where Art Thou?"

"With Republican presidential contender John McCain poised to make a strong showing--or even win--tomorrow's primary in New Hampshire, it seems appropriate to re-examine his views on education," read the story. "That's not such an easy task. Education doesn't make the Arizona senator's list of issues on his campaign website. ... McCain is a campaign-finance, foreign-relations, anti-abortion, tax-cut candidate. Education is not his thing."

Indeed, only one article referenced by the McCain campaign doesn't, in turn, rip the Republican nominee even harder than Obama. That article (which is misleadingly attributed in the ad to the Chicago Tribune) is a July 2008 op-ed by libertarian columnist Steve Chapman, who has also argued for abolishing the Department of Education.

Double Standards Rule The Day

Hupp — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:43:09 EDT

Let me get this straight, Dick Cheney can use the exact same phrase in 2004 vs. John McCain, with no backlash. Barack Obama uses this phrase four years later, and because a woman is on MCain's ticket, that makes it sexism? That's just plain ridiculous.

Here is Dick Cheney in 2004:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjwVEeq7JiQ

And Barack today in Virginia, same context regarding talking tough:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPd4yk0x-eg

Equally ridiculous is the ad the McCain camp released today....

Throw the flag against: The McCain-Palin campaign.

Call: Unsportsmanlike conduct.

What happened: A new 30-second TV ad attacks Barack Obama's record on education, saying that Obama backed legislation to teach " 'comprehensive sex education' to kindergartners." The announcer then says, "Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama. Wrong on education. Wrong for your family."

Why that's wrong: This is a deliberately misleading accusation. It came hours after the Obama campaign released a TV ad critical of McCain's votes on public education. As a state senator in Illinois, Obama did vote for but was not a sponsor of legislation dealing with sex ed for grades K-12.

But the legislation allowed local school boards to teach "age-appropriate" sex education, not comprehensive lessons to kindergartners, and it gave schools the ability to warn young children about inappropriate touching and sexual predators.

Republican Alan Keyes tried to use Obama's vote against him in the 2004 U.S. Senate race. At the time, Obama spoke about wanting to protect young children from abuse. He made clear then that he was not supporting teaching kindergartners about explicit details of sex.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said Tuesday of McCain's ad: "It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls."

Penalty: 15 yards for the McCain campaign's deliberate low blow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVLQhRiEXZs

Bridge of Lies

Hupp — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:33:03 EDT

Sarah Palin's claim debunked....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfLDjmKfigw

Why MSNBC/NBC/GE caved on Olbermann and Matthews

Hupp — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:19:25 EDT

by kos Mon Sep 08, 2008 at 01:29:29 PM PDT

As I'm sure most of you have seen, MSNBC has removed Olbermann and Matthews as anchors of their political coverage.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

We know that MSNBC had been under pressure from the McCain campaign over their political coverage, since of course, only sycophantic pro-GOP voices should be allowed on the air.

More recently, though, McCain, 72, has accused news organizations such as the New York Times, Time magazine and the NBC television network of being unfair to him. The campaign even considered pulling out of one of the three presidential debates because it would be moderated by Tom Brokaw, a former NBC News anchorman.

In fact, read that last sentence above again. That's apparently why MSNBC caved. McCain would pull out of that debate unless MSNBC ensured that there would be no progressive (or semi-progressive) voices to comment immediately following the debate.

So while Dems continue to go on Fox News, legitimizing them, and while Obama gives O'Reilly a ratings bonanza, showing the whole country how he can abuse, talk over, and interrupt the Democratic presidential nominee, Republicans are playing hardball and winning.

Just more evidence that their side plays the game far better than ours. Politics is a contact sport, which puts us at a huge disadvantage when only one side seems to grasp the rules.

Permalink ::
Discuss (583 comments)

Midday open thread by SusanG Mon Sep 08, 2008 at 12:50:50 PM PDT

A new 527 is prepped in California, apparently by former Giuliana backers, to take on Obama.

ABC finds some friends of Sarah Palin who aren't sure they'll vote for her.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who made a brief return to the national stage during last month's Democratic convention, will not return to the Senate this year as he battles abrain tumor, his office has announced.

Not-so-idle gossip from New Mexico: Val Kilmer might run for governor in 2010. Holy green chile, Batman!-- Plutonium Page

Ken Silverstein at Harper's asks: Does McCain Campaign Chair’s Lobby Shop Share Skybox with AT&T??

Historians join with CREW to ask a federal judge "to declare that Cheney's records are covered by the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and cannot be destroyed, taken or withheld without proper review," according to the Washington Post.

Compassionate conservative Condoleezza Rice nixes lifting the Cuba embargo as the country suffers from the ravages of Hurricane Gustav.

Like father, like son. Andrew McCain is tied to bank that failed because of "poor-quality loans primarily related to real estate development," according to CBS.

Could Ron Paul be on the ballot this fall in Montana? Left in the West says he may be the nominee of the Constitution Party.

Rutledge's Mayor Needs Reality Check

Hupp — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:19:22 EDT

Way to go Nicola...you're the best!!

By: NICOLA TOLLETT JEFFERSON, Times Guest Columnist

09/07/2008

I am proud to live in a country where ordinary citizens are free to express their views and have the opportunity to disseminate those views beyond a limited circle of personal friends and acquaintances. The purpose of this letter is not to address the merits of Mayor Shields' contention that presidential candidate U.S. Senator Barack Obama and U.S. Representative Joseph Sestak "are not friends of the unborn... [or] of freedom." Just as Mayor Shields has presumably done, we voters will thoughtfully, intelligently, and honestly evaluate the presidential candidates and vote for whom we think would be the best individual to do the job.

Reasonable minds certainly can and will disagree on who should be our next president. Similarly, we all will not see eye-to-eye on any number of issues confronting the nation.
Rather, the purpose of this letter is to encourage Mayor Shields not to let his passions cause him to forget the importance of civility when engaging in public discourse. As a fellow citizen who is proud to be an American, I must say the use of discourtesy, rudeness, and disrespect do not positively contribute to the public climate.

Similarly, as a parent and teacher, I must say that I, along with many other Americans, am aware of the current battle in our country to restore good manners and basic civility. Most Americans, irrespective of religion, background, ethnicity, or political persuasion, can agree on the value and importance of being civil.

Specifically, I am referring to the 16 times Mayor Shields refers to Senator Obama as "Hussein" or some variant thereof. The other variations are "Hussein Obama," Barack Hussein Obama," and "the gift from God Hussein."

A basic principle of courtesy and respect is to call a person by the name he or she uses. By all indications, Mayor Shields prefers to be referred to as "C. Scott Shields" since that is how he refers to himself. While I do not know what the "C" stands for I have no reason to think he is ashamed of his first name. Nor do I think ill of him for not going by that first name.

There is also the possibility his first name is no more than an initial and the "C" does not stand for anything. Whatever the case may be, it is certainly true many people in this country are given a first or middle name that, for whatever reason, they do not use. Others still choose to go by a shortened version of their first or middle name or even another "nickname" altogether. The possibilities and variations are almost endless.

Whenever some type of name variation does occur, as in a person is given one name at birth but does not strictly use that name, out of common and basic courtesy the custom is to refer to the person by the name he or she uses to refer to him or herself. This custom implicitly recognizes two important facts.

First, as babies we have no say as to the name we are given. Second, when we get older, and certainly as adults we have a right to take liberties with the name given us thereby giving us some control over what we are to be called. It would be unreasonable to fault a person or otherwise hold him or her responsible for his or her given names.

Similarly, it would be unreasonable to expect adults who take liberties with their given names have an obligation, moral, political or otherwise, legally to change those names or otherwise repudiate the name their parents gave them.
Out of respect to their parents and to their personal history, many people keep their given names even if they choose not to be called by that name in the fullest and strictest sense.

Simply put, common courtesy dictates that we call others what they ask to be called.
I can only infer that Mayor Shields insists on referring to Senator Obama as "Hussein" in a disappointing attempt to manipulate others. In his anger and profound disagreement with Senator Obama, in particular, and the Democratic Party in general, Mayor Shields, sadly, resorts to appealing to the public's prejudices and fears. He hopes to encourage others to make irrational leaps of "logic" so as to support the all-too-human inclination to disrespect, degrade and personally attack those with whom we disagree.

Additionally, instead of adding clarity and objective analysis to the issues - something lawyers are trained to do in law school - Mayor Shields contributes confusion, discourtesy and disrespect.

I hope Mayor Shields will think long and hard about the example he is setting and the message he is sending when he disregards the name another person uses. (In his opinion piece, he refers to the President of Russia as "Czar Putin.")

Regardless of the choice he makes, I hope the rest of us do not condone his actions or join him in being uncivil ourselves.

Nicola Tollett Jefferson, an attorney, is the Founder and Executive Director of The Achievement Project, a nonprofit organization that helps Chester High School students succeed academically and gain admission into college. She uses her full first, middle (maiden) and last names in professional contexts but otherwise drops her middle name or simply uses her middle initial. While her husband, some family members and friends call her by one of several nicknames, something that does not in the least bit bother her, she generally prefers to be called "Nicola," with the accent being on the first syllable. She never used the middle name that her parents gave her at birth.

Republicans = Hipocracy

Hupp — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 08:14:47 EDT

I realize this is politics, but this is ridiculous.

If the MSM covered these "flip flops" the presidential race would be over. The only reason it is a "close" race is because the media is making it a close race, because as long as it is a close race then the candidates have to buy more ad space and the networks can make more money. There's no profit in a landslide presidential victory.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/04/daily-show-on-republ.html

Please Help Me With A Response to the Joseph Breslins and C. Scott Shields of the world (Delaware County anyway)

Hupp — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:55:12 EDT

I have attempted several tactful responses to these smears in the Daily Times by Joseph Breslin of Haverford, PA and C. Scott Shields, mayor of Rutledge, PA. Both are of the "conservative" persuasion who have been hammering the false implications that we should somehow be fearful of an Obama administration.

The Daily Times is clearly allowing these smears that have been proven false; and I am seeking a more effective response that may actually get published.

Thanks in advance.

An Alaskan's Opinion

Hupp — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 01:46:32 EDT

The letter written by Alaskan resident, Anne Kilkenny, has received a truth rating on snopes.com:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/kilkenny.asp

What follows is an open letter written by a resident of Wasilla, Alaska named Anne Kilkenny.

I am a resident of Wasilla, Alaska. I have known Sarah since 1992. Everyone here knows Sarah, so it is nothing special to say we are on a first-name basis. Our children have attended the same schools. Her father was my child’s favorite substitute teacher. I also am on a first name basis with her parents and mother-in-law. I attended more City Council meetings during her administration than about 99% of the residents of the city.

She is enormously popular; in every way she’s like the most popular girl in middle school. Even men who think she is a poor choice and won’t vote for her can’t quit smiling when talking about her because she is a “babe”.

It is astonishing and almost scary how well she can keep a secret. She kept her most recent pregnancy a secret from her children and parents for seven months. She is “pro-life”. She recently gave birth to a Down’s syndrome baby. There is no cover-up involved, here; Trig is her baby. She is energetic and hardworking. She regularly worked out at the gym.

She is savvy. She doesn’t take positions; she just “puts things out there” and if they prove to be popular, then she takes credit. Her husband works a union job on the North Slope for BP and is a champion snowmobile racer. Todd Palin’s kind of job is highly sought-after because of the schedule and high pay. He arranges his work schedule so he can fish for salmon in Bristol Bay for a month or so in summer, but by no stretch of the imagination is fishing their major source of income. Nor has her life-style ever been anything like that of native Alaskans. Sarah and her whole family are avid hunters. She’s smart.

Her experience is as mayor of a city with a population of about 5,000 (at the time), and less than 2 years as governor of a state with about 670,000 residents. During her mayoral administration most of the actual work of running this small city was turned over to an administrator. She had been pushed to hire this administrator by party power-brokers after she had gotten herself into some trouble over precipitous firings which had given rise to a recall campaign.

Sarah campaigned in Wasilla as a “fiscal conservative”. During her 6 years as Mayor, she increased general government expenditures by over 33%. During those same 6 years the amount of taxes collected by the City increased by 38%. This was during a period of low inflation (1996-2002). She reduced progressive property taxes and increased a regressive sales tax which taxed even food. The tax cuts that she promoted benefited large corporate property owners way more than they benefited residents.

The huge increases in tax revenues during her mayoral administration weren’t enough to fund everything on her wish list though, borrowed money was needed, too. She inherited a city with zero debt, but left it with indebtedness of over $22 million. What did Mayor Palin encourage the voters to borrow money for? Was it the infrastructure that she said she supported? The sewage treatment plant that the city lacked? or a new library? No. $1m for a park. $15m-plus for construction of a multi-use sports complex which she rushed through to build on a piece of property that the City didn’t even have clear title to, that was still in litigation 7 yrs later–to the delight of the lawyers involved! The sports complex itself is a nice addition to the community but a huge money pit, not the profit-generator she claimed it would be. She also supported bonds for $5.5m for road projects that could have been done in 5-7 yrs without any borrowing.

While Mayor, City Hall was extensively remodeled and her office redecorated more than once. These are small numbers, but Wasilla is a very small city. As an oil producer, the high price of oil has created a budget surplus in Alaska. Rather than invest this surplus in technology that will make us energy independent and increase efficiency, as Governor she proposed distribution of this surplus to every individual in the state.

In this time of record state revenues and budget surpluses, she recommended that the state borrow/bond for road projects, even while she proposed distribution of surplus state revenues: spend today’s surplus, borrow for needs.

She’s not very tolerant of divergent opinions or open to outside ideasor compromise. As Mayor, she fought ideas that weren’t generated by her or her staff. Ideas weren’t evaluated on their merits, but on the basis of who proposed them.

While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin’s attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.

Sarah complained about the “old boy’s club” when she first ran for Mayor, so what did she bring Wasilla? A new set of “old boys”. Palin fired most of the experienced staff she inherited. At the City and as Governor she hired or elevated new, inexperienced, obscure people, creating a staff totally dependent on her for their jobs and eternally grateful and fiercely loyal–loyal to the point of abusing their power to further her personal agenda, as she has acknowledged happened in the case of pressuring the State’s top cop (see below).

As Mayor, Sarah fired Wasilla’s Police Chief because he “intimidated” her, she told the press. As Governor, her recent firing of Alaska’s top cop has the ring of familiarity about it. He served at her pleasure and she had every legal right to fire him, but it’s pretty clear that an important factor in her decision to fire him was because he wouldn’t fire her sister’s ex-husband, a State Trooper. Under investigation for abuse of power, she has had to admit that more than 2 dozen contacts were made between her staff and family to the person that she later fired, pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law. She tried to replace the man she fired with a man who she knew had been reprimanded for sexual harassment; when this caused a public furor, she withdrew her support.

She has bitten the hand of every person who extended theirs to her in help. The City Council person who personally escorted her around town introducing her to voters when she first ran for Wasilla City Council became one of her first targets when she was later elected Mayor. She abruptly fired her loyal City Administrator; even people who didn’t like the guy were stunned by this ruthlessness.

Fear of retribution has kept all of these people from saying anything publicly about her.

When then-Governor Murkowski was handing out political plums, Sarah got the best, Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission: one of the few jobs not in Juneau and one of the best paid. She had no background in oil & gas issues. Within months of scoring this great job which paid $122,400/yr, she was complaining in the press about the high salary. I was told that she hated that job: the commute, the structured hours, the work. Sarah became aware that a member of this Commission (who was also the State Chair of the Republican Party) engaged in unethical behavior on the job.

In a gutsy move which some undoubtedly cautioned her could be political suicide, Sarah solved all her problems in one fell swoop: got out of the job she hated and garnered gobs of media attention as the patron saint of ethics and as a gutsy fighter against the “old boys’ club” when she dramatically quit, exposing this man’s ethics violations (for which he was fined).

As Mayor, she had her hand stuck out as far as anyone for pork from Senator Ted Stevens. Lately, she has castigated his pork-barrel politics and publicly humiliated him. She only opposed the “bridge to nowhere” after it became clear that it would be unwise not to.

As Governor, she gave the Legislature no direction and budget guidelines, then made a big grandstand display of line-item vetoing projects, calling them pork. Public outcry and further legislative action restored most of these projects–which had been vetoed simply because she was not aware of their importance–but with the unobservant she had gained a reputation as “anti-pork”.

She is solidly Republican: no political maverick. The State party leaders hate her because she has bit them in the back and humiliated them. Other members of the party object to her self-description as a fiscal conservative.

Around Wasilla there are people who went to high school with Sarah.

They call her “Sarah Barracuda” because of her unbridled ambition and predatory ruthlessness. Before she became so powerful, very ugly stories circulated around town about shenanigans she pulled to be made point guard on the high school basketball team. When Sarah’s mother-in-law, a highly respected member of the community and experienced manager, ran for Mayor, Sarah refused to endorse her.

As Governor, she stepped outside of the box and put together of package of legislation known as “AGIA” that forced the oil companies to march to the beat of her drum.

Like most Alaskans, she favors drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She has questioned if the loss of sea ice is linked toglobal warming. She campaigned “as a private citizen” against a state initiaitive that would have either a) protected salmon streams from pollution from mines, or b) tied up in the courts all mining in the state (depending on who you listen to). She has pushed the State’s lawsuit against the Dept. of the Interior’s decision to list polar bears as threatened species.

McCain is the oldest person to ever run for President; Sarah will be a heartbeat away from being President. There has to be literally millions of Americans who are more knowledgeable and experienced than she. However, there’s a lot of people who have underestimated her and are regretting it.

CLAIM VS FACT

•“Hockey mom”: true for a few years
•“PTA mom”: true years ago when her first-born was in elementary school, not since
•“NRA supporter”: absolutely true
•social conservative: mixed. Opposes gay marriage, BUT vetoed a bill that would have denied benefits to employees in same-sex relationships (said she did this because it was unconsitutional).
•pro-creationism: mixed. Supports it, BUT did nothing as Governor to promote it.
•“Pro-life”: mixed. Knowingly gave birth to a Down’s syndrome baby BUT declined to call a special legislative session on some pro-life legislation
•“Experienced”: Some high schools have more students than Wasilla has residents. Many cities have more residents than the state of Alaska. No legislative experience other than City Council. Little hands-on supervisory or managerial experience; needed help of a city administrator to run town of about 5,000.
•political maverick: not at all
•gutsy: absolutely!
•open & transparent: ??? Good at keeping secrets. Not good at explaining actions.
•has a developed philosophy of public policy: no
•”a Greenie”: no. Turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots. Is pro-drilling off-shore and in ANWR.
•fiscal conservative: not by my definition!
•pro-infrastructure: No. Promoted a sports complex and park in a city without a sewage treatment plant or storm drainage system. Built streets to early 20th century standards.
•pro-tax relief: Lowered taxes for businesses, increased tax burden on residents
•pro-small government: No. Oversaw greatest expansion of city government in Wasilla’s history.
•pro-labor/pro-union. No. Just because her husband works union doesn’t make her pro-labor. I have seen nothing to support any claim that she is pro-labor/pro-union.

WHY AM I WRITING THIS?

First, I have long believed in the importance of being an informed voter. I am a voter registrar. For 10 years I put on student voting programs in the schools. If you google my name (Anne Kilkenny + Alaska), you will find references to my participation in local government, education, and PTA/parent organizations.

Secondly, I’ve always operated in the belief that “Bad things happen when good people stay silent”. Few people know as much as I do because few have gone to as many City Council meetings.

Third, I am just a housewife. I don’t have a job she can bump me out of. I don’t belong to any organization that she can hurt. But, I am no fool; she is immensely popular here, and it is likely that this will cost me somehow in the future: that’s life.

Fourth, she has hated me since back in 1996, when I was one of the 100 or so people who rallied to support the City Librarian against Sarah’s attempt at censorship.

Fifth, I looked around and realized that everybody else was afraid to say anything because they were somehow vulnerable.

CAVEATS

I am not a statistician. I developed the numbers for the increase in spending & taxation 2 years ago (when Palin was running for Governor) from information supplied to me by the Finance Director of the City of Wasilla, and I can’t recall exactly what I adjusted for: did I adjust for inflation? for population increases? Right now, it is impossible for a private person to get any info out of City Hall–they are swamped. So I can’t verify my numbers.

You may have noticed that there are various numbers circulating for the population of Wasilla, ranging from my “about 5,000″, up to 9,000. The day Palin’s selection was announced a city official told me that the current population is about 7,000. The official 2000 census count was 5,460. I have used about 5,000 because Palin was Mayor from 1996 to 2002, and the city was growing rapidly in the mid-90’s.

The Real McCain - Sign The Petition

Hupp — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 01:21:16 EDT

http://therealmccain.com/pac/

Palin's Church Problem

Hupp — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 01:12:57 EDT

By BEN SMITH | 9/2/08 6:53 PM EST

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Barack Obama has struggled for 18 months to lock down the support of a traditionally Democratic group, Jewish voters.

In the past week, John McCain may have helped Obama with his Jewish problem by choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

McCain and Obama are battling over a portion of the Jewish community: older, conservative Democrats, largely in South Florida, some of whom backed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. McCain’s secular, hawkish credentials appeal to many in that group, who are skeptical of Obama’s relatively short record and have been deluged with rumors about his pro-Palestinian leanings.

But Democrats hope Palin’s social conservatism, her paper-thin record on Israel, and — perhaps most importantly — her cultural roots in evangelical Christianity may be a major turnoff to Jewish voters, just as Republicans have tried to reach women disappointed that Obama didn’t choose Hillary Clinton,

Democrats have already begun to to capitalize on the choice of Palin — over Jewish Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman — in South Florida and elsewhere. A prominent Obama backer, Florida Rep. Robert Wexler, has attacked Palin for appearing at a 1999 event with Pat Buchanan — who has attacked the influence of the Israeli lobby in America. And the same factors that are rallying the evangelical base to Palin may push away the Jews.

“There is almost always an inverse proportion between a candidate's popularity among conservative Christians and secular Jews,” said Jeff Ballabon, a Republican lobbyist long active in Jewish politics who supports McCain.

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 executive director 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.

"Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It's very real. When [Brickner's son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment — you can't miss it."

Palin was in church that day, Kroon said, though he cautioned against attributing Brickner’s views to her.

The executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, Ira Forman, cited the “cultural distance” between Palin and almost all American Jews.

“She’s totally out of step with the American Jewish community,” he said. “She is against reproductive freedom – even against abortion in the case of rape and incest. She has said that climate change is not man-made. She has said that she would favor teaching creationism in the schools. These are all way, way, way outside the mainstream.”

Huffington Post on Tuesday posted portions of Palin speaking at her former church, a politically conservative Assemblies of God congregation, in which she suggested that an Alaska pipeline plan reflects God’s will.

A spokesman for McCain and Palin, Michael Goldfarb, dismissed the notion that Palin would bring a Jewish problem.

“If this is going to be about who was at church on the day of which sermon, that’s not going to be an argument that the Obama campaign is going to win,” he said, a reference to Obama’s controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

“This woman has been on the national stage for all of four days – of course it’s going to take some time for people to get a sense of what her views are on some things,” Goldfarb said. “Once she’s had a chance to make her positions clear on these issues, the Jewish community is going to be very, very comfortable with her.”

In the meantime, however, there’s simply little information available about Palin’s views. Two of Palin’s prominent Alaska Jewish allies, Rabbi Joseph Greenberg and businessman Terry Gorlick, told Politico they consider her a friend of the Jews. But they said they’d never heard her discuss Middle East policy in detail and that she’d never visited Israel, though they cited a boilerplate Alaska-Israel friendship resolution she signed.

Her thin record was underscored when the staunchly loyal Republican Jewish Coalition e-mailed its members evidence of her support for Israel: a video in which a small Israeli flag can be seen poking out from behind a drape.

"I think it speaks volumes that she keeps an Israeli flag on the wall of her office," the group's executive director, Matt Brooks, told Politico in an e-mail. "It clearly shows what's in her heart.”

Obama’s Jewish allies, meanwhile, are doing their best to fill that gap with unsettling information, an effort that in some ways mirrors the overt and covert campaigns against Obama in that community.

“My constituents are bewildered by Senator McCain’s pick and they just don’t understand it,” said Wexler, the Florida Democrat, citing the report that Palin had gone to a Buchanan event, and Buchanan’s “frightening views.”

Also Tuesday, a new Jewish Democratic group, JewsVote.org, sent out an email under the heading “Who is Sarah Palin?” an echo of conspiratorial anti-Obama emails that have criss-crossed the Jewish community.

“Given her record as a hard-right Christian conservative, her embrace of Pat Buchanan, her praise of Ron Paul, and her lack of credentials on foreign affairs, it is likely that her selection would raise serious red flags about the McCain/Palin ticket among Jewish swing voters,” they wrote, asking their members to send out their own anti-Palin emails.

McCain aide Goldfarb called the email “unbelievably cynical—fighting smears with smears.” Gallup and other polls conducted over the summer showed Obama beating McCain by a roughly two-to-one margin among Jewish voters - a comfortable lead, but narrower than John Kerry's and Al Gore's wins among Jewish voters in the last two elections.

Tuesday, both sides scrambled to play on the changed turf of the Jewish vote. Palin, shepherded by Lieberman, introduced herself to leaders of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC in St. Paul on. Tuesday.

"We had a good productive discussion on the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and we were pleased that Gov. Palin expressed her deep, personal, and lifelong commitment to the safety and well-being of Israel," AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said. “AIPAC is pleased that both parties have selected four pro-Israel candidates.”

Obama's running mate, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), meanwhile, campaigned through the Jewish heartland of South Florida, showing off his cultural familiarity, dropping Yiddish words into his talk to a crowd of hundreds at a retirement community.

"I want to remind those of you who don't know me — and those of you who do know me — what my record has been. It has been unstinting in the defense and support of Israel," he said.

It was a contrast Wexler said he relished.

“There’s just no relationship, there’s no comfort, there’s no natural affinity with Palin,” he said. “There is with Joe Biden.”

Sarah Palin Knocks Michelle and Barack Obama in her Speech

Hupp — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:53:09 EDT

Brutal..I am livid!!

Sarah Palin quotes:

".....and I've always been proud of my country...."

".....being a mayor of a small town is sort of a like being a community organizer, except you have actual responsibilities..."

".....a candidate that speaks differently in Scranton and San Francisco..."

McCain's Million Dollar Parking Lot

Hupp — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:50:02 EDT

http://www.youtube.com/v/l-6zPwfk5QY

50+ Problems for McCain's VP Selection

Hupp — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 07:49:47 EDT

What do we know about Sarah Palin?

She's a popular governor with some mixed history of standing up to Alaskan Republicans and big oil. In the next few days we will hear a lot about her "soccer mom" lifestyle and "Miss Congeniality" awards. We'll hear about her DRILL DRILL DRILL mentality to solving gas prices and her staunch anti-choice beliefs.

We all know that she is under investigation for abuse of power and there are audio recordings to back it up. What you won't hear on the news is this list of other things you didn't know about the woman they call "Miss Baracuda."

BoBo2020's diary :: ::

Sarah Palin has an Abramoff problem - a Pro-Palin illegal mailer was sent during her gubernatorial campaign on behalf of Palin by the RGA, the DC group that got money from Abramoff, Reed, etc.

She advocated AGAINST mine safety / pollution control

She has an ANTI-ENVIRONMENT RECORD and is on the wrong side of global warming and doesn't think polar bears should be listed as endangered because it interferes with her drilling plans.

She's against sex education - abstinence only.

She appears to oppose windfall taxes on oil companies at the national level but supported them to benefit her state.

Believes Creationism should be taught in science classes

Don't believe the whispers that she supportive of the GLBT community. She's opposed to state health benefits for same-sex partners and only vetoed a resolution that would have ended state benefits because the Supreme Court had already declared it unconstitutional.

She's opposed to universal health care and stem cell research

No foreign policy experience? According to the folks at FOX think she has foreign policy experience because "Alaska is near Russia." Oh, and she didn't even have a passport until last year.

She doesn't know what the Vice President really does.

This choice is NOT helping McCain's polling numbers, especially with women.

McCain only met Sarah Palin ONCE and talked to her TWICE making this a purely cynical and desperate political appointment by HIS CAMPAIGN not by him! She's not really HIS VP choice.

She's deeply connected to the Bridge to Nowhere.

She stated that she would force her own daughter to have a rapist's child.

She has 3 houses

Terre pointed out that she's connected to VECO - the company at the heart of Ted Stevens' troubles. She also received an endorsement from Ted that has suddenly disappeared from her webpage.

She called candidate Clinton a whiner. Why does everyone in the McCain campaign think others are whiners?

She apparently hasn't taken a stand on most major political issues

Her selection has created a major rift among the Republicans, especially Romney & Pawlenty.

Past quotes by Rove make Palin's selection look like desperation.

Palin may have been scrubbing her own wikipedia page

Sarah Palin, Buchanite - Palin supported Pat Buchanan in 2000, a fact which may alienate certain Florida voters. Hat tip to misslotus

She was vetted too quickly and McCain only picked her the night before making the announcement.

She's still focused on Alaska not the fact the she would be Vice President for the whole nation.

She participated in a profane on-air attack againt the Alaskan State Senate President and giggled at the word b*tch..

Like Bush and McCain, she can't admit when she's wrong.

She's linked to the Dominionist movement and Joel's Army.

The United Steelworkers have already spoken out against her.

She was a bad mayor who left her town's economy in tatters.

She supported Obama's energy plan, but suddenly these references are disappearing.

Some of the PUMA's believe that John McCain is patronizing them.

Additionally, this choice eliminates the "He's not ready" attack on Obama.

This choice raises the issue of McCain's age (Is Palin ready to take over if he keels over).

It also raises the issue of McCain's past unfavorable statements against women.

Additionally, this choice reminds us that McCain is an adulterer and raises the spectre that he is just a dirty old man with wandering eyes.

Palin's husband is on BP's payroll creating a possible conflict of interest.

She made extremely poor use of Eminent Domain during her time as mayor.

She favors censoring library books (Alert your local librarian!)

Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young (both under investigation) campaigned for her in 2006.

She didn't support McCain in the primaries.

The top 2 ALASKAN newspapers question her fitness for the job.

She supports aerial hunting of wolves even though it was outlawed by Congress. She's using a loophole.. Hat tip to Scarce

UPDATED: 43. She's part of Feminists for Life and is AGAINST BIRTH CONTROL. It would be awesome if someone asked her McCain's now famous "should insurance companies cover viagra/birth control" question.

Undecideds apparently don't like the Palin pick. Thanks marabout40!

More environmental problems - She fighting to prevent Belugas from being listed as endangered. Thanks again Terre!

In addition to polar bears, belugas, and wolves, for the first time in Alaskan history she is supporting hunting black bear sows and cubs. Thank you for the information Bodean.

She's either going to be distracted by being deposed soon or she is going to draw negative attention by trying to avoid being deposed.

There have been discussion of witness tampering and possible impeachment hearings related to charges of her abuse of power

MEME: Palin's selection provides a clear example of John McCain's hasty decision-making and poor judgement on important issues (like who would be best qualified to take his place if he could not complete his term).

She wants to destroy 1.5 MILLION ACRES of ANWR, not the 2000 acres she has lied about on the news.

Palin stated "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq.."

It's Not Because John McCain Doesn't Care ...

Hupp — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 07:35:07 EDT

John McCain campaigning for the Republican nomination in New Orleans, Louisiana in April 2008:

Republican U.S. presidential candidate John McCain on Thursday sharply criticized the Bush administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina and vowed, "Never again." McCain, putting some distance between himself and fellow Republican President George W. Bush, said if he had been president during the 2005 catastrophe he would have immediately visited New Orleans during the initial shock aftermath of the killer storm. "I'm just saying I would've landed my airplane at the nearest Air Force base and come over personally," he said.

History records that John McCain had every opportunity to advise the President on the day of the disaster, but John McCain had other priorities:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRar6yKZE8g

Palin Booed For Mentioning Hillary Clinton

Hupp — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 03:33:47 EDT

Posted: 07:35 PM ET

From CNN Political Producer Peter Hamby

August 30, 2008

Palin is praising Clinton on the trail as the GOP woos the New York senator’s supporters.

WASHINGTON, Pennsylvania (CNN) – This might not be the best way to reach out to those disillusioned Hillary Clinton supporters.

In just her second appearance on the campaign trail with John McCain, newly-minted GOP running mate Sarah Palin was showered with boos on Saturday for attempting to praise Clinton’s trail-blazing bid to become the first female president.

As she did at in her debut speech in Ohio yesterday, Palin appealed to the women in the crowd here in Pennsylvania with a political shout-out to Geraldine Ferraro, who preceded Palin as the first women to be tapped as a vice presidential candidate.

But in contrast with the mild reception that greeted her comments at the Ohio event, when Palin praised Clinton here for showing “determination and grace in her presidential campaign,” the Alaska governor was met with a noisy mix of boos, groans and grumbles around the minor league ballpark where the “Road to the Convention Rally” was held.

Palin quickly recovered, promising the audience that female candidates weren’t yet finished, and that she and McCain were on their way to victory in November.