While you won’t hear this reported by the mainstream media, it turns out President Obama has yet again broken another record in the first year of his historic Presidency.
Not since 1953 has another sitting President accomplished what President Obama has now done. The last and only other sitting President to also set this record was none other than Lydon Johnson.
President Obama set a new record last year for getting Congress to vote his way, according to an annual study by Congressional Quarterly.
In his first year in office, Obama won 96.7 percent of the votes on which he had clearly staked a position.
That was a bit less than 4 percentage points higher than the previous record, set by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.
Congressional Quarterly, a sister publication to Congress.org, has compiled statistics on presidential support since 1953. Editors select the votes based on clear statements by the president or authorized spokesmen before the vote.
In all, Congress took 151 votes in which Obama had taken a position ahead of time.
His wins included votes for creating a massive economic stimulus package, bailing out the auto industry, letting the Food and Drug Administration regulate tobacco and confirming Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
But they also included key moves toward overhauling the health care system, regulating financial services and reducing greenhouse gases which have not yet passed both chambers of Congress.
That unfinished work will be taken up in the second session, which begins Tuesday. Obama’s ultimate success will depend on how well his second year in office goes.
“If this Congress passes both health care reform and climate change legislation on top of the economic stuff, it will go down as a historic achievement,” says Rich Fleisher, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York City. “But unless they continue to manage the agenda in a way that is very, very careful, that could all fall apart.”
In the House, Obama won 68 votes and lost four.
Among the losses: a vote to disapprove further spending on a bank bailout and a July vote to pass a food safety overhaul. Both were temporary setbacks since Congress eventually ended up supporting the president’s position.
In the Senate, Obama won 78 votes and lost one.
The Republican win there came on an amendment which would have barred spending money to transfer detainees from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to the United States. In the end, the bill allowed the transfer under certain conditions.
To build this record, Obama relied heavily on Democratic majorities with only occasional support from the GOP. As in the health care overhaul, he also had to keep the entire Democratic caucus in the Senate in line.
“How you begin to understand his success is as a triumph of party government,” says Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Minnesota. “He’s got the large and unified majorities, and those are the enabling conditions for his record high support score.”
This is much different from President Johnson, who achieved the previous record by overcoming a divided Democratic caucus.
Agree or not, this is change you can not only believe in but find proof of. Given the time Obama will prove to be a President of great moral character determined to inspire Americans to get involved in government again. Whether he will be successful still remains, but he seems to have gotten off to a good start.
I Have a Dream – Address at March on Washington
August 28, 1963. Washington, D.C.
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
What would Dr. King have to say about us as people today? Have we learned to accept one another as individuals not by race or creed or religion?
Are we doing all we can to work together to make this a better country?
What are we teaching our children?
There was a time when the church was very powerful—in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society…..But the judgment of God is upon the church [today] as never before.If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the 20th century. -Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them. – Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967.
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important. – Wall Street Journal, November 13, 1962.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction….The chain reaction of evil–hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars–must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. – Strength To Love, 1963.
Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority. Strength to Love, 1963.
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true. – Strength To Love, 1963.
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority. – Strength to Love, 1963.
Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. – Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.
Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten….America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness–justice. – Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.
Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy. – The Measures of Man, 1959.
A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared. – Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.
To be a Negro in America is to hope against hope. – Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.
Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan. – Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.
Yele Haiti, 212-352-0552 Wyclef Jean’s grassroots org Text Yele to 501501 to donate $5 via cellphone
The U.S. State Department Operations Center said Americans seeking information about family members in Haiti should call 1-888-407-4747. Due to heavy volume, some callers may receive a recording. “Our embassy is still in the early stages of contacting American citizens through our Warden Network,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement. “Communications are very difficult within Haiti at this time.”
Text to help For those interesting in helping immediately, simply text “HAITI” to “90999″ and a donation of $10 will be given automatically to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts, charged to your cell phone bill. (More information)
Some of the major credit card companies, including American Express and Mastercard are waiving their usual fees so that the full amount of donation will go to the relief organization. Typically, a small percentage is charged to the organization accepting the credit card.
An analysis by the Huffington Post found that credit card companies make about $250 million a year off of people’s charitable donations.
Beware of scams Finally, the FBI urges people who are looking for ways to help with earthquake relief to be wary of solicitations that could be from scam artists.
“Past tragedies and natural disasters have prompted individuals with criminal intent to solicit contributions purportedly for a charitable organization or a good cause,” the FBI said, in passing along these tips:
Ignore unsolicited e-mails, and do not click on links within those messages.
Be skeptical of individuals representing themselves as surviving victims or officials asking for donations via e-mail or social networking sites.
Be cautious of e-mails that claim to show pictures of the disaster areas in attached files, because the files may contain computer viruses. Open attachments only from know senders.
Decline to give personal or financial information to anyone who solicits contributions.
Make contributions directly to known organizations, rather than relying on others who claim in e-mails that they will channel the donation to established groups.
During his December 1, 2009 speech on the house floor, Sen. Tom Coburn had a message for senior citizens:
The Democratic health care reform legislation will cause you to die sooner.
Really Senator Coburn? No honesty? Just lies directed at senior citizens in an attempt to scare them? Do you really think they can be fooled this easily or are you just hoping they can.
The Minnesota Independent is reporting today that the 6th Congressional District that Rep Michele Bachmann (R-MN) represents continues pace as the district in Minnesota with the highest number of home forclosures. Yet Bachmann continues to vote against any relief for the homeowners in her District.
Bachmann’s district had the highest number of foreclosures in Minnesota and the highest rate of foreclosures. Now, as 2009 draws to a close, that trend continues. According to new data from HousingLink and county sheriffs’ offices, the Sixth Congressional District is being disproportionately impacted by the foreclosure crisis despite its representative’s reticence to vote for foreclosure relief legislation.
Bachmann’s district had 1,097 foreclosures in July, August and September of 2009, the highest in the state and almost three times as many as Rep. Tim Walz’s district, which had the state’s lowest number of foreclosures, at 396.
As the Minnesota Independent noted in April, the second-term Republican voted against every major piece of foreclosure-relief legislation brought before the House:
Bachmann voted against five key foreclosure relief bills, including the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act, which would set standards for mortgages and reduce predatory lending, and the Neighborhood Stabilization Act, which would provide funds for buying and rehabilitating foreclosed properties in affected neighborhoods. She also opposed the Expanding American Homeownership Act, which allows more people to qualify for FHA-backed mortgages, and the Expand and Preserve Home Ownership Through Counseling Act, which aims to improve financial literacy. Bachmann additionally voted against the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, a law signed by President Bush that contained many provisions to assist struggling homeowners and also the only one of the bills to become law.
And since April, she successfully spearheaded an effort to strip the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) of Housing and Urban Development funds aimed at preventing foreclosures in low and middle income neighborhoods.
Bachmann did, however, cosponsor a bill “to direct the Architect of the Capitol to acquire and place a historical plaque to be permanently displayed in National Statuary Hall recognizing the seven decades of Christian church services being held in the Capitol from 1800 to 1868, which included attendees James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.”
The Blackberry addict & former Palin aide John Bitney, host Shannyn Moore, the town crank Anne Kilkenny, and the effete young chap Andrew Halcro. Courtesy of Moore Up North
It has already been established and is well documented that former Alaska Governor and losing VP Candidate Sarah Palin has a very hard time telling the truth in her book Going Rogue.
Sarah trashes Nick Carney (the Wasilla city councilman who recruited Sarah into politics), John Stein (Sarah’s predecessor as mayor of Wasilla), Anne Kilkenny (a Wasilla resident whose viral email educated the nation to Sarah’s lackluster record as mayor), an unnamed City of Wasilla librarian, Frank Murkowski (Sarah’s predecessor as Governor of Alaska), Gregg Renkes (Frank’s Attorney General), Lyda Green (the former President of the Alaska Senate), Hollis French (the chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the Alaska Senate), Steve Schmidt (John McCain’s campaign manager), an unnamed KTUU television cameraman, Walt Monegan (Sarah’s Commissioner of Public Safety), Randy Ruedrich (the chairman of the Alaska Republican Party with whom Sarah worked at the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission), Bill Allen (the corpulent head of the oil field services company VECO, a odious scum bag whose reputation as the bag man for Big Oil in the state capitol had been a matter of common knowledge in Alaska for a generation when Sarah went with her hand out to Bill for the campaign contributions she used to launch her statewide political career), Mike Wooten (Sarah’s ex-brother-in-law), unnamed executives of the Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum, and Conoco-Phillips oil companies, Pete Rouse (a former Alaskan who was Senator Barack Obama’s chief of staff), Rahm Emanuel (President Barack Obama’s chief of staff), Kim Elton (a former member of the Alaska Senate who is Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar’s Special Assistant for Alaska), unnamed members of the McCain campaign staff who prepped Sarah for her television debate with Joe Biden, John Bitney (Governor Palin’s liaison to the Alaska Legislature), Levi Johnston (the hockey-playing, Playgirl modeling impregnator of Bristol Palin).
That’s not the complete list. There’s no index and I’m tired of typing.
Of all the individuals on the Going Rogue enemies list, the two firsts among equals are Andrew Halcro and Andree McLeod.
Halcro is a former Republican member of the Alaska House of Representatives who ran as an independent candidate against Sarah Palin in the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial election. After the election he started a website that he used to become one of Governor Palin’s most articulate and factually well-informed critics.
It was Andrew Halcro who broke the story that Governor Palin had fired Walt Monegan, her Commissioner of Public Safety, because Walt had refused to fire Mike Wooten, Sarah’s ex-brother-in-law, from his union job as an Alaska State Trooper. That news led to the Troopergate investigation of Sarah (and Todd) Palin’s misuse of the Office of the Governor. In the Troopergate report that Sarah touts as clearing her of wrong-doing, the investigator, a former prosecutor with whom (unlike the Legislature’s investigator) Sarah cooperated, implies that during his investigation either Walt Monegan committed criminal perjury or Sarah Palin committed criminal perjury. But the Legislature had no stomach during the remainder of Sarah’s tenure as Governor to determine whether she was the felon.
In Going Rogue Sarah describes Andrew Halcro as “a wealthy, effete young chap who had taken over his father’s local Avis Rent A Car, and he starred in his own car commercial. He would go on to host a short-lived local radio show while blogging throughout the day, all of which were major steps up from a previous job as our limo driver at Todd’s cousin’s wedding.”
Andree McLeod is where I come in.
Short, smart, politically committed, and tenaciously energetic, Andree McLeod is a Republican political activist of Armenian heritage who had once been a personal friend of Sarah Palin’s, who Sarah had endorsed when Andree ran in the Republican primary for a seat in the Alaska House of Representatives.
When I went to her home in east Anchorage to have my cup of coffee I found Andree sitting at her dining room table surrounded by two-foot-high stacks of paper print-outs of several thousand emails that the Office of the Governor had given to her in July in response to a request she had filed in June pursuant to the Alaska Public Records Act. The request had asked for emails that had been sent to or received by employees of the Office of the Governor who Andree suspected had been engaging in partisan – i.e., Alaska Republican Party – political activities during their public employee workdays. Andree submitted her public records request three months before anyone other than those of us in Alaska had ever heard of Sarah Palin.
The reason I had been invited to meet with Andree was that one of the things she had discovered by reading the emails was that when Governor Palin assumed office she had set up a private back-channel email system so that she and her senior staff could communicate with each other about state business without the content of their communications being “captured” by State of Alaska computer servers, and hence being available for public inspection pursuant to the Alaska Public Records Act. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other national media would later report that story. To read more visit Alaskan site The Mudflats.
The month after the McCain-Palin ticket lost the presidential election, again representing Andree McLeod, on December 8, 2008 I filed a second lawsuit against Governor Palin when a further review of the emails that Andree had been given revealed that the Office of the Governor had given to Todd Palin, a private citizen who was an employee of British Petroleum, copies of emails that it was withholding from public inspection on the ground of deliberative process privilege.
That litigation is ongoing. The legal questions of first impression that they present for decision are important enough that my expectation is that both lawsuits will end up in the Alaska Supreme Court.
What does any of that have to do with me and Going Rogue?
Prior to me agreeing to represent her in the two lawsuits above-described, Andree McLeod had begun filing what became a series of complaints against Sarah Palin with the State Personnel Board that alleged ethical transgressions unrelated to the lawsuits. Other Alaskans did the same thing. According to Going Rogue, those ethics complaints have driven Sarah Palin flat-out full-crank nuts.
After trashing Andree McLeod at page 354 of Going Rogue Lynn Vincent aka Sarah Palin moves on to me. Here’s what Lynn and Sarah say: We always suspected that someone was funding and directing Andree’s efforts. During the spring of 2009, she was actually still begging my administration for a job and led others to believe she hadn’t worked for a couple of years. Yet somehow she had enough time or money to turn harassment of the governor’s office into a full-time vocation. Over time, the wording of her ethics complaints became more and more sophisticated, and we later found out why: prominent liberal attorney Don Mitchell was advising her. As early as September 2008, weeks before the presidential election, Mitchell had already detailed the ethics attack strategy in an article in the Huffington Post. Later he sat with Andree as her counsel at one of her hearings.
I wish my late mother was still alive. Because I know how proud she would be that I made the Going Rogue enemies list and have been mentioned by name in a book whose first printing is 1.5 million copies. (Because he is not named, the mother of the KTUU cameraman who posed Sarah in front of the turkeys can take no such pride.)
But my number is listed in the Anchorage telephone book. If that failed, Lynn and Sarah could have googled “Donald Craig Mitchell.” And if that had failed, since Meg Stapleton, the increasingly strange combination of Sancho Panza and Odd Job who works for Sarah, and I have mutual friends, Meg could have found me quite easily.
Had Lynn Vincent, Sarah, or Meg called me before Lynn had finished writing Going Rogue, I would have told her that in a single paragraph Lynn/Sarah got almost every one of their facts about me, other than that I am an attorney, wrong.
While I probably once was, I haven’t been a “prominent” attorney in Alaska in years. While I am a registered Democrat, my personal politics are hardly “liberal.” To the extent anyone cares, I am a social libertarian who is an Eisenhower era deficit hawk who agrees with Teddy and Frank Roosevelt that the principal responsibility of government is to save capitalism from itself. And while during the presidential campaign several of my ‘Governor Girl Reports’ were posted by individuals other than me on the Huffington Post and Atlantic Monthly web sites, none of those musings “detailed an ethics attack strategy.”
But most importantly, not only have I never advised Andree regarding her ethics complaints, to the best of my recollection I have never read an Andree McLeod ethics complaint. Had Lynn, Sarah, or Meg called me, I also would have told them that neither Andree McLeod nor I have been paid a nickel by anyone for anything (although if I win either of my lawsuits I intend to send the Office of the Governor a bill for my attorneys fee, which under Alaska law I am permitted to do).
It is true, however, that, as Going Rogue reports, because she asked me to, I did accompany Andree to her interview with Tim Petumenos, the former prosecutor the State Personnel Board hired to investigate both the complaint Sarah filed against herself regarding the Troopergate affair and a complaint Andree filed against Sarah and Frank Bailey, Sarah’s Director of Boards and Commissions, for violating state civil service rules in order to give one of Sarah’s campaign supporters a job for which he was not qualified. Again to the best of my recollection, I have never read either complaint. And if he is asked, I think Tim will say that during his interview with Andree I pretty much just sat there.
It also is worth mentioning that the State Personnel Board found the ethics complaint that Andree McLeod filed against Frank Bailey meritorious.
Why should anyone care about any of that? The reason they should care is that if Lynn Vincent aka Sarah Palin got as many of the facts, asserted and implied, about me in Going Rogue as wrong as she did, what does that say about the validity of the many other, much more important, “facts” in Sarah’s book?
It’s fully fine by me that billions of federal tax dollars are being spent annually to invent an AIDS vaccine. But it is just as important to someday invent a Pinocchio serum.
If the world had one, before a faux celebrity like Sarah Palin writes a book, doctors from the CDC could roll up the celebrity’s sleeve and inject him or her with a jolt of the serum. And a serum also would have other important uses.
For example, on page 214 of Going Rogue Lynn Vincent reports that when the McCain campaign vetted Sarah, she confessed to Steve Schmidt, the manager of the campaign, that “the one skeleton I’d kept hidden in my closet” (my emphasis) was that she had gotten a D in a college course.
Had Sarah been shot up with Pinocchio serum prior to the vetting, the immediate growth of the length of her nose would have tipped off Schmidt that the more truthful answer to the one skeleton in the closet question would have been, as The National Enquirer subsequently reported with no push back from Team Sarah, “cuckolding Todd when he was working on the North Slope by hooking up with Brad Hanson, Todd’s business partner in the Polaris snow machine sales business Brad and Todd owned in Wasilla.”
The Anchorage Daily News Reports today that one former Palin aide isn’t too happy about being referred to as a Blackberry Video Game Junkie who can’t seem to keep food off of his tie.
Former Gov. Sarah Palin’s book, “Going Rogue,” blames her first legislative director for moves early in her term that helped poison her relationship with state lawmakers. But the ex-aide, John Bitney, calls Palin’s account a fabrication and said he wishes his former boss would leave him alone.
“I’m just pilloried right and left and turned into the big bad wolf here for stuff I didn’t do,” said Bitney, who is now an aide to Valdez Republican Rep. John Harris. “It’s like I’m this fictional character that she’s decided to make me out to be this sort of incompetent slob.”
Palin’s lawyer, Tom Van Flein, responded in an e-mail that Bitney and others have been talking about “their perceptions of, and distortions about” Palin for more than a year, since after she was chosen as Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential running mate.
” ‘Going Rogue’ is Sarah Palin’s book to set the record straight. It is her right to speak about the events that occurred in her administration and neither Mr. Bitney nor anyone else has the right to stifle that speech,” Van Flein said. “The statements in ‘Going Rogue’ speak for themselves, and it is Sarah Palin’s turn to get the truth out there after a year of misrepresentations, half-truths and dissembling by her critics.”
Palin’s writing about Bitney is her most detailed description yet of incidents that helped shape her relationship with legislators. Her bad blood with top legislators of both parties began not long after she took office. By last spring, relationships with many lawmakers from both parties had soured to the point that feuds with the governor overshadowed much of the other legislative business.
Bitney joins a list of people slammed in the book who are calling it fiction, including McCain’s former campaign manager, Steve Schmidt. Bitney, though, has a far deeper relationship with Palin than the others. He was a high school classmate of Palin’s from Wasilla who played a key role as an adviser in her successful 2006 campaign for governor.
Palin’s dealings with Bitney are described on several pages of her memoir, although he is never named and there are no details of his work on her 2006 campaign. Palin refers to him as “my first legislative director” and he comes in for some of the harshest criticism of anyone in the book. That includes observations on his personal grooming, such as, “He turned out to be a BlackBerry games addict who couldn’t seem to keep his lunch off his tie.” Later, in describing one encounter to discuss the budget, Palin writes, “The fact that his shirt was buttoned one button off and his shirt tail was poking through his open fly didn’t exactly inspire confidence.” But Palin’s larger point is that Bitney bungled her relationship with legislators.
Bitney is now swinging back hard at Palin, agreeing to appear over the weekend on a television show hosted by one of the former governor’s most vocal critics in Alaska, blogger Shannyn Moore. Bitney was on a panel of others slammed in “Going Rogue” that included Palin nemesis Andrew Halcro and Anne Kilkenney, who wrote a long e-mail critical of Palin’s leadership in Wasilla that was forwarded around the country during the presidential campaign last year.
Moore asked Bitney if Palin is sane. Bitney’s response: “Is a sociopath sane?”
‘ADULT IN THE HOUSE’
One turning point between Palin and Alaska lawmakers came in 2007 after her first legislative session. Legislators complained that Palin blindsided them with the scope of her budget vetoes and she rubbed it in by saying there had to be an “adult in the house.” Legislators saw it as a slap in the face and the remark was not forgotten.
Palin writes that it was Bitney who advised her to tell lawmakers that they were in need of adult supervision. In fact, she writes, he told her, “Trust me, I know this stuff, they want to hear it.”
Palin writes that she followed his advice and had a “come-to-Jesus meeting” with legislators. But, as it turned out, that’s not what they wanted to hear. She writes that “when the fallout began after that meeting, I looked at the legislative director. He looked at the ground and shrugged as if to say ‘Wasn’t me.’ “
Bitney said in an interview that he joked with Palin in her office about how there needs to be an adult in the room when it comes to the state budget, but he said he never advised the then-governor to say it to anyone. He said Palin then made the comment in an interview with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner editorial board — not in a “come-to-Jesus” meeting with legislators as she recounts in her book.
Bitney left the governor’s office in July 2007 in what Palin’s spokeswoman initially said was an “amicable” termination in which it was mutually agreed that he would leave his post for personal reasons. When reporters raised questions about it during the presidential campaign, the reason given by Palin’s office was “poor job performance.”
Bitney has told reporters he was fired after Palin was informed he was having an affair with the wife of a friend of Palin and her husband, Todd. Bitney, who has since married the woman, has said he was not forthcoming with Palin about it and understands why he had to go.
Palin’s only reference to that in her book is that “later we learned the legislative director had been too busy with his personal affairs to attend to much state business.”
‘LEAVE ME ALONE’
Bitney has influential defenders in the Legislature, including Sitka Republican Sen. Bert Stedman, who has been critical of Palin and said he won’t read her book because she is “entertainment and not news.” Stedman said Bitney is qualified and that he did a good job dealing with the Legislature for Palin. He said he told Bitney at one point to let him know if he was ever looking for a job.
Palin writes that she told Bitney to send a letter to legislators about what sort of spending she would approve but that he didn’t do it. She said he indicated lawmakers were fine with budget vetoes that were coming but it became clear otherwise when they howled about being blindsided. “It soon became obvious just how little the legislative director had done to inform the legislature this was coming,” she writes.
Bitney said it was another staffer in the governor’s office, not him, who was requested to send the letter. The letter asked legislators for suggestions on which of their projects to cut, Bitney said, and not surprisingly they did not rush to answer Palin.
Bitney said he did meet with the four co-chairs of the state House and Senate finance committees to tell them about the coming vetoes, and reported back to Palin that three of them felt that was her prerogative and only one became angry.
But Palin staffers had only identified about $100 million worth of cuts by that point, about half of the final total. Bitney said the following day was when his “troubles” with Palin began. He said he was pulled from the governor’s budget work, and fired soon after. In the meantime, he said, Palin staffers kept cutting beyond what he had told legislators but he didn’t have authority to talk to them about it.
Palin uses Bitney in the book to illustrate a point about government. Bitney had years of experience as a legislative staffer and lobbyist before joining her team. “So much for my idea that I needed to hire an ‘insider.’ Lesson learned,” she writes.
Bitney said he tried to be fair to Palin when national media kept “crawling up my backside” over the past year to interview him about her. But the book is too much, he said.
“I’ve had it. Enough. Just enough; leave me alone,” he said.
On Friday after they received an advance copy of Sarah Palin’s new book, the Associated Press called me to get a response from the two hundred plus words that Alaska’s former 1/2 term governor dedicated to me.
My favorite passage as read to me by Rachel D’Oro at the AP was when Palin referred to me as an “effete chap.”
An effete chap? Who am I, Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby?
And by the way, when did Palin start using 17th century Latin in her dialogue?
According to the brief excerpts I’ve heard, the book seems like it’s less about her and more about blaming everybody around her for all of her short comings. From her lack of intelligence to the word getting out about her pregnant daughter, no matter what the problem or criticism, it’s always somebody elses fault and never hers.
This in and of itself is rich in irony.
After all, how many real rogues complain about being hemmed in by the actions of others?
Isn’t that the antithesis of a rogue?
However, once the book is on the street beginning Tuesday, those throughout Palin’s 413 page pity party that suffer the wild blows of her imagination will come forward with guns blazing to refute the revisionist history Palin has penned.
From the brief passages that Palin has written about me in her book, the terms unmitigated lies, narcissistic delusions and libel came to mind first.
Obviously she never learned the timely Confucius warning:
“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
Beginning Tuesday…the people whom Palin has attacked in her book will start reaching for their own shovels.
After perusing the articles on Andrew’s site I would feel confident in my assessment of what really bugs Sarah about Andrew…………….he’s smart, does his homework, works hard and cares about Alaska.
Alaskan Radio Host Shannyn Moore recently begin filming her new show Moore Up Northabout political and state issues. Moore Up North was taped before a live audience at Bernie’s Bungalow Lounge in Anchorage. Last weeks guests included: Rick Steiner, Anne Kilkenny, Andrew Halcro and John Bitney. As expected they discussed the Sarah Palin they know.
House conservatives have threatened to block the reform bill if their more restrictive provision isn’t included. Kerry acknowledged that there could still be negotiations, “but that’s where the Senate is starting.
Instead of taxing the rich to pay for a significant piece of the bill, as the House does, the Senate plan taxes “Cadillac” health plans. But the value of plans that would be taxed is increased from previous versions to $8,500 for an individual and $23,000 for a family of four. Higher values are allowed in high-cost states and workers in high-risk jobs – such as coal miners – are given an exemption.
Reid’s bill also altered the formula by which businesses would be assessed a fee for not insuring their workers. But the new formula was unclear. Kerry called it “convoluted” and Durbin dubbed it “complex.”
Reid presented to his colleagues a preliminary Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate health care legislation. It finds that the bill will cost $849 billion over the next decade while covering 94 percent of eligible Americans; 31 million currently uninsured Americans would be covered under the legislation. The bill would also lower the deficit by $127 billion over the next decade and by $650 billion during the decade after that. Kerry cautioned that the numbers were still being finalized and could change slightly.
By keeping the total cost of the bill under $900 billion, Reid met one of the conditions set by the Obama White House. The bill is also expected to drastically bend the cost curve in the health care system — another major Obama objective — by achieving “almost a trillion dollars in cost savings” within the health care system.
Reid will file a cloture motion Thursday, which will be followed by an intervening day, by Senate rules, leaving Saturday for the vote.
I’m starting to wonder if Fox News even cares if they appear to be honest or not. I’m almost convinced they really don’t care, but instead are completely happy being the channel of make believe. I guess as long as their viewers feel better after an hour of lies, fake footage and hate they won’t be changing formats anytime soon.
At least not until a Republican is back in the White House anyway. Then they’ll have nothing but positive and glowing reports on how their country is thriving.
Last week John Stewart (well not just John but he has a tv show) noticed that Sean Hannity was using footage from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 protest as the footage for the Michele Bachmann disaster rally which they of course helped promote with Dick Armey providing the teabaggers with free transportation to D.C.
The footage they keep showing on the television claiming it’s the crowds showing up to book signing’s on Sarah Palin’s book tour but it certainly looks like footage from McCain/Campaign rallies.
That’s right, they’re here and they are looking for members to join their gang of thugs. This Taliban doesn’t read the Koran though; they read the good old American Bible. I say American Bible because the members and supporters of God’s Taliban have hijacked and distorted the bible so they can use it for their mission of hate, oppression and violence, much like the very terrorists that we are engaged in two wars with. Hey if they can use their bible for violence, why can’t these folks right?
Now we know if you’re going to have a club, a group, a gang, you need something like a slogan or something of that nature to indentify yourself while also conveying the ultimate purpose of your gang, right?
So what might there slogan be?
“Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8″
Sounds harmless enough, huh? Pray for Obama. That sounds like a good message from a bunch of caring Christians.
That would be the case if you aren’t one for having passages from the Bible memorized in your head.
But if you looked up the verse, what would it say?
“Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”
Ok, not real nice, but still doesn’t sound terrible, right? Just sounds like you don’t agree with him and want him to be replaced after one term, huh? Looks innocent enough.
But if you went on to read the next verse you’d find………………………………..this sacred passage…………………………
“Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”
Yes folks, so this is the slogan of the new American Taliban………..God’s Taliban. God’s Taliban is even trying to hawk novelty items like t-shirts, bumper stickers, hats, etc. carrying their new slogan.
Rachel Maddow had Frank Schaeffer on her show Wednesday evening to discuss God’s Taliban, the purpose of their group and who is fanning the flames on their behalf.
If you don’t know who Frank Schaeffer is, he is the son of the late evangelist Francis Schaeffer, who his son claims“was once a Religious Right leader that denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government”. Frank Schaeffer left the Republican Party in the mid 1980’s because he felt the party encouraged the very same reasoning whenver they weren’t in complete power.
Frank wants to know what the GOP leadership or the evangelical community is doing anything to tamp down and denounce this rhetoric.
“Where the hell are you?” he asks. “And be it on your head if something happens to our president…Until they speak out, they’re culpable.”
Frank also wants us to know that the combination of fear mongering, false new stories, associations to Hitler, made up theories pushed by the likes of Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann is nothing short of “trawling for assassins” and using Bible slogans as a recruiting tool.
This is serious business. It’s un-American, it’s unpatriotic and it goes to show that the religious right, the Republican far right, have coalesced into a group that truly wants revolution and if it turns out to be blood in the streets, so be it.
Schaeffer also emphasizes these messages nor the people who think they “doing god’s work” should be dismissed or ignored, especially since the Secret Service is handling a 400 percent increase in threats against the current administration and that it’s partly on us should anything happen.
Obama supporters had better start speaking up in support of him and not sniping at him all of the time because he’s not moving towards change as fast as we’d like in every area. This is serious stuff. The chips are down, he has real enemies–some of them are violent–and as far as I’m concerned it’s time to support our president, stand with him and not only wish him the best, but pray for his safety in the face of these religious maniacs….There are not many steps left on this insane path.
As I am unable to convey the emotion that Frank Schaeffer evoked during his segment on Rachel’s show you must watch this and listen to his remarks. It is too important not to.
The situation that I find genuinely frightening right now is that you have a ramping up of Biblical language, language from the anti-abortion movement, for instance, death panels and this sort of thing, and what it’s coalescing into is branding Obama as Hitler…as something foreign to our shores, we’re reminded of that he’s born in Kenya, as brown, as black, above all, as not us. He is Sarah Palin’s “not a real American.” But now it turns out that he joins the ranks of the unjust kings of ancient Israel, unjust rulers to which all these Biblical allusions are directed, who should be slaughtered, if not by God, then by just men. So there’s a direct parallel here with Timothy McVeigh’s t-shirt on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing in which he said the tree of liberty had to be watered occasionally by the blood of tyrants. And that quote we saw again at a meeting at which Obama was present being carried on a placard by someone carrying a loaded weapon.
It is time we stand up to this craziness. It’s time for the rest of us to chase God’s Taliban and it’s disillusioned and blasphemous tales right out of here. We’re going to take our country back from those who are hijacking the bible and God in the name of hate.
Do your part. Write a letter to the editor to your local paper about the hijacking of the bible and ask others to do the same.
This woman has to be the most hypocritical human being on the planet. Not only is she having trouble with all her lies, but can’t resist making something out of nothing just to make sure her name stays in the news.
I guess that’s even more important now since she has a book out and sales may turn out to be quite disappointing.
Over the past summer Sarah Palin did an interview with Runners World about her love of running. She also took the time to pose for several photographs for the photographer Brian Adams (not that Brian Adams). In fact she posed for a total of 47 different photos for Mr. Adams. None appear to be a serious photos, minus three which of course feature Trig, but the remaining 44……. cheesecakes. Sarah bent over stretching, Sarah leg hiked up stretching and flashing a little smile, Sarah in a yoga pose, you get the idea. Six feature Sarah Palin desigrating the American Flag similiar to the one used by Newsweek.
So this week’s issue of Newsweek used one of the photos featured in the Runners World spread with the caption ‘How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sarah?’ and of course Sarah has found something else to use on her Majical Victim Tour as another victimization of poor Sarah Palin. But I say she should be grateful they at least used the ones with the photoshopped legs instead of using the original, wouldn’t you?
The choice of photo for the cover of this week’s Newsweek is unfortunate. When it comes to Sarah Palin, this “news” magazine has relished focusing on the irrelevant rather than the relevant. The Runner’s World magazine one-page profile for which this photo was taken was all about health and fitness – a subject to which I am devoted and which is critically important to this nation. The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now. If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin. The media will do anything to draw attention – even if out of context.
Poor Sarah…………….the media she speaks of that’s willing to do anything to draw attention is the same media that’s she’s attempting to use and confuse with all of her contradicting stories and lies.
This week, to coincide with the release of Sarah Palin’s book Going Rogue, Newsweek’s editors decided to print two essays (one by Evan Thomas, the other by Christopher Hitchens) about the former Alaska governor and have her image grace our cover. The photo chosen was from a shoot Palin had participated in for Runner’s World magazine.
To note that choosing that particular photograph has ruffled a few feathers is perhaps an understatement. Palin denounced it—and us—to her million-strong Facebook following last night. “The choice of photo for the cover of this week’s Newsweek is unfortunate. When it comes to Sarah Palin, this ‘news’ magazine has relished focusing on the irrelevant rather than the relevant,” she wrote on her fan page, adding, “The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now.” She also told ABC’s Barbara Walters that she found the cover “a wee bit degrading.” Others, like CBN’s David Brody, said our cover was a new low: “biased and sexist at the same time.”
Today, Newsweek’s Editor Jon Meacham has responded to critics. “We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do,” Meacham said. “We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard.”
I will never stop being amazed at the number of idiots in this country who are still so spiteful and so jealous of ‘That One’ that they come up with such ridiculous theories and attacks. I understand they think these attacks actually work, but it’s beginning to get old and frankly embarrassing.
I will also NEVER for the life of me understand what is so awful, so anti-American, so dangerous about our President trying to restore some of the diplomacy lost during the Bush/Cheney years? Nor will I ever understand what the crime is in knowing your audience.
We lost a lot during those eight years and did very little to maintain or create new allies or relationships. Any wonder why we’re falling behind.
Since when do we want a President that offends other world leaders? Since when do we want a President that is embarrassing because he doesn’t know the customs of another country? Since when do we want a President that makes our relationships with other countries tenser and more tenuous?
Do we really want a President that offends the very people he’s attempting to have discussions with?
Has the right become such a jealous and hateful bunch that they’d rather he go around the world kicking butt and taking names?
I for one prefer to see my President not only show respect for their customs, but their people as well. I want a President that is admired by other world leaders and citizens even if his politics may not be. I want a President that leaves a positive and long lasting impression on our fellow citizens of the world. I want a President that other world leaders view as not only intelligent, but respectful, yes I said respectful, which is conducive to progress.
Do we want our President to be a laughing stock in other countries?
Or rather a person who is admired and appreciated if nothing else his understanding of the rest of the world.
I know what the majority of us would like, but the rest just want him out of the way.
This little snippet from The Washington Times editor Wesley Pruden’s column on Nov 17 illustrates just how delusional they still are about Barack Obama winning the White House, their White House.
A little traveling, like a little learning, can be a dangerous thing. Barack Obama on the loose in a foreign land is enough to frighten protocol officers and embarrass the rest of us.
He went off to Asia to tell the Chinese a thing or two about world trade, to prepare the world for a treaty to make the sun change its spots, and of course to pay his respects to assorted heads of state, with particular attention to any royal head (perhaps even including Miss Universe) who crosses his path.
Courtesy of Life Magazine
So far it’s a memorable trip. He established a new precedent for how American presidents should pay obeisance to kings, emperors, monarchs, sovereigns and assorted other authentic man-made masters of the universe. He stopped just this side of the full grovel to the emperor of Japan, risking a painful genuflection if his forehead had hit the floor with a nasty bump, which it almost did. No president before him so abused custom, traditions, protocol (and the country he represents). Several Internet sites published a rogue’s gallery showing how other national leaders – the prime ministers of Israel, India, Slovenia, South Korea, Russia and Dick Cheney among them – have greeted Emperor Akihito with a friendly handshake and an ever-so-slight but respectful nod (and sometimes not even that).
Now we know why Mr. Obama stunned everyone with an earlier similar bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, only the bow to the Japanese emperor was far more flamboyant, a sign of a really deep sense of inferiority. He was only practicing his bow in Riyadh. Sometimes rituals are learned with difficulty. It took Bill Clinton months to learn how to return a military salute worthy of a commander in chief; like any draft dodger, he kept poking a thumb in his eye until he finally got it. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, seems right at home now giving a wow of a bow. This is not the way an American president impresses evildoers that he’s strong, tough and decisive, that America is not to be trifled with.
Some of the president’s critics are giving him a hard time, and it’s true that this president seems never to have studied much American history. Not bowing to foreign potentates was what 1776 was all about. His predecessors learned with no difficulty that the essence of America is that all men stand equal and are entitled to look even a king, maybe particularly a king, straight in the eye. Can anyone imagine George Washington, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson making a similar gesture of servile submission? Or Harry Truman? Or FDR, who famously served the lowly hot dog, with ballpark mustard, to the king and queen of England? John F. Kennedy, on the eve of a trip to London, sharply warned Jackie not to curtsy to the queen.
Douglas MacArthur, who ranked above mere heads of state in his own mind, once invented his own protocol on greeting Emperor Hirohito. The emperor, the father of Akihito, wanted to meet MacArthur soon after he arrived to become the military regent of Japan in 1945, perhaps to thank him for saving the throne at the end of World War II. When the emperor invited MacArthur to call on him, the general sent word that the emperor should call on him – speaking of breaches of custom – and the two men were photographed together, astonishing the Japanese. The emperor arrived in full formal dress, cutaway coat and all, and MacArthur received him in summer khakis, sans tie, with his hands stuffed casually in his back pockets. Further astonishing the Japanese, he towered over the diminutive emperor.
Courtesy of Life Magazine
But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy ’60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to “hope” for “change.” It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.
He no doubt wants to “do the right thing” by his lights, but the lights that illumine the Obama path are not necessarily the lights that illuminate the way for most of the rest of us. This is good news only for Jimmy Carter, who may yet have to give up his distinction as our most ineffective and embarrassing president.
The Washington Times might want to get a new editor since Mr. Pruden seems not only challenged in his history and facts, but also appears not to understand quite how ‘The Google’ works. For that matter maybe he needs a lesson in ‘The Internet’ because he doesn’t seem to realize that it is full of proof that President Obama isn’t the only US Leader to show respect.
Then came the moment: When Mr. Bush approached the emperor’s casket, he bowed deeply.
Those of us who had lived in Japan thought nothing of it. That is how respect is shown in Japan. But the pre-cable pundits were screaming, and soon one of our colleagues, the late Gerald Boyd, asked Mr. Bush about it at a news conference.
Mr. Bush danced around an answer for a moment, mentioning members of his squadron who never came home, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s decision to keep the emperor system, as a way of unifying the Japanese people. Then he said this:
I’m representing the United States of America. And we’re talking about a friend, and we’re talking about an ally. We’re talking about a nation with whom we have constructive relationships. Sure, we got some problems, but that was all overriding — and respect for the Emperor. And remember back in World War II, if you’d have predicted that I would be here, because of the hard feeling and the symbolic nature of the problem back then of the former Emperor’s standing, I would have said, “No way.” But here we are, and time moves on; and there is a very good lesson for civilized countries in all of this.
So did President Obama violate protocol? Well, yes, but not by bowing. He made the mistake of both shaking hands and bowing at the same time, a big breach of etiquette. The truth was that he was supposed to choose one or the other.
Maybe Mr. Pruden needs a refresher course on etiquette AND history?
The Oprah-Palin interview has aired and the web is on fire with the various reviews and discoveries from not only the interview but also from all the reviews of the excerpts that have been obtained by various sources.
Considering the amount of information out there it would take all night to put it into context so instead I’ll list several and you can choose which articles to review. I might add that some of what’s being reported and discussed today is pretty revealing and emotions are running high. I’ve gathered from several of the Alaskan blogs that have followed her career from day one that she might end up wishing she never, ever wrote this book.
We’ll have to wait and see what’s next.
In out takes posted by Oprah today, Sarah Palin states she made the decision to run with Todd. It was a “mommy decision”…and she told her children after the she had decided to run.
While campaigning last year, Palin went in to great detail about polling her children and not asking Track…about the decision to run. She answers this question in the first minute.
Well, thanks to my fairy godperson, I’ve landed the motherlode of Going Rogue pages, and have served you up a tasty breakfast smorgasbord of easily digestible Rogue nuggets. Let’s start with the most revolting quote:“There was a bright spot in Philly, and his name was Joe Lieberman.”
It will be hard to top that one.
But here, for your reading pleasure is some wonderful comment fodder from the pages of Going Rogue.
Page 76
Her friends threw her a baby shower for Piper at a shooting range, with a cake the shape of an airplane. Piper’s middle name is Indi for “Independence.” (AIP anyone?) Starts railing on Anne Kilkenny whose letter about Sarah Palin to her friends went viral on email and was posted at numerous sites on line. Calls her a “Birkenstock-and-granola Berkeley grad.” She was friends with the evil town librarian and the police chief with whom Palin was “mixing it up.”
Page 233
Says she wasn’t used to fancy hotel rooms (Fancy hotel room anyone?),but learned that Bristol’s pregnancy had been outed while she was brushing her teeth looking at the flat screen TV embedded in the bathroom mirror. If only she had been able to be up front about it from the start, but the McCain campaign botched it.
Page 237
On this page, Wasilla mayoral rival John Stein gets slammed for telling Time Magazine that Palin sought to ban books in the Wasilla Library.
Unbelievably, she also asserts that in the media “It was one lie after another – from rape kits to Bridge to Nowhere. All easy enough to disprove if the press had done its job.” WOW. Blames the Alaska GOP and Randy Ruedrich for not correcting it. Yes, it’s her lie and she’s stickin’ with it. Fortunately it remains easy to fact check HERE and HERE. Slams media and bloggers for saying that if she couldn’t control her own daughter how could she be president, and saying that her philosophy about teaching abstinence was hypocritical, and didn’t work just because… it’s hypocritical and it doesn’t work.
Page 336
John McCain says he’s going to thank America. She says “I want to thank YOU!” He says, NO SPEECH. She finally gets that there will be no speech. Time to get on stage, but she’s not ready and doesn’t know where the giant entourage from all across Alaska is. She wants to go on stage with the whole family. She walks on stage with Todd and everyone she could find and the speech still in her hand. She wants five generations of her family there.
On Oprah Sarah says that Levi lied when he said that he had lived at the Palin home with Bristol. Tonight Levi holds his ground:
“That’s total bullsh*t. I did [live with the Palin family] for a few months, then we split up and that was it.”
He is currently gearing up for a custody battle. “I think this interview is really gonna kick up some things,” he says. “I don’t think she wanted to do that.”
What an exciting day we had yesterday! The unexpected email from Christopher Goff, Senior Vice President at Harper Collins, made our day. Many things happened as a result: We made lots of new and important friends, received a large amount of new visitors and the blogsphere showed its muscles and closed ranks in solidarity (many thanks again to Andrew Sullivan, Wonkette and Buzzflash for linking to us). With the new attention we used the unexpected opportunity to get one of our most important messages across to a greatly enlarged audience: That Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy with Trig (it’s a FACT, in case you didn’t know yet).
Christopher Goff, can we get more emails from you, please?
Palingates and Linda Kellen Biegel’s blog “Celtic Diva” were singled out by Harper Collins- why? Other blogs and websites also published extensive excerpts of Sarah Palin’s “Book of Lies” – but did they receive a letter by our new friend Christopher Goff? Noooooooooo!
The investigative bloggers are “the” thorn in Sarah Palin’s side. We are not afraid of the Quitter Queen, and we are ready to expose her many lies – after all, the MSM has failed on many levels and has for example conveniently overlooked the fact that from an objective point of view, the facts regarding her pregnancy with Trig DO NOT ADD UP. They never have. Believe me: I would not be so stupid to write here as a FACT in public that Sarah Palin had faked her pregancy if I didn’t know with 100% certainty that it is indeed a FACT.
There were no questions about the Bush doctrine, but Sarah Palin’s appearance Monday on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to promote her memoir looked less like a celebratory comeback than a redo of the presidential campaign.
For all her aplomb and telegenic charm, Ms. Palin still had the hunted look and defensive crouch she wore in television interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson last year. And it would seem that the pain of those tongue-tied encounters was not exorcised by writing “Going Rogue: An American Life,” a tell-all book that blamed the McCain staff for the way it “handled” her on the trail.
When Ms. Winfrey pressed Ms. Palin about why she would not mention the names of newspapers or magazines she read when Ms. Couric asked her to, Ms. Palin said she found the CBS anchor’s persistence “annoying.” Still looking annoyed, she recalled how she left a rally “pumped up” and aglow, only to pull back the curtain and discover Ms. Couric waiting with camera and crew, or as she put it sourly, “There’s the perky one again.”
Ms. Winfrey, who didn’t hide her surprise at Ms. Palin’s impolitic wording, came to Ms. Couric’s defense, noting, “You’re pretty perky too.”
First, I would like to say a big “thank you” to “Gawker”, who linked to us today, as well as to the “Daily Kos”, who in a very informative diary post also included a link and even cited from our blogpost! It’s great to see solidarity in the blogsphere in this important and difficult fight.
Gawker also posted four scanned pages of “Going Rogue” – NAUGHTY! But then as we know, Christopher Goff from Harper Collins is only going after the non-commercial citizen blogs, not after the commercial blogs like Gawker and Wonkette who certainly would have some sharphish lawyers and large funds behind them. But maybe we also have some battle-hardened lawyers in the background, who would just be too happy to take on Sarah Palin – you never know…!
So – does Sarah Palin mention the Trig Truthers in her book “Going Rogue”?
On Friday after they received an advance copy of Sarah Palin’s new book, the Associated Press called me to get a response from the two hundred plus words that Alaska’s former 1/2 term governor dedicated to me.
My favorite passage as read to me by Rachel D’Oro at the AP was when Palin referred to me as an “effete chap.”
An effete chap? Who am I, Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby? And by the way, when did Palin start using 17th century Latin in her dialogue?
According to the brief excerpts I’ve heard, the book seems like it’s less about her and more about blaming everybody around her for all of her short comings. From her lack of intelligence to the word getting out about her pregnant daughter, no matter what the problem or criticism, it’s always somebody elses fault and never hers.
This in and of itself is rich in irony. After all, how many real rogues complain about being hemmed in by the actions of others?
Isn’t that the antithesis of a rogue?
However, once the book is on the street beginning Tuesday, those throughout Palin’s 413 page pity party that suffer the wild blows of her imagination will come forward with guns blazing to refute the revisionist history Palin has penned.
From the brief passages that Palin has written about me in her book, the terms unmitigated lies, narcissistic delusions and libel came to mind first.
Obviously she never learned the timely Confucius warning:
“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
Beginning Tuesday…the people whom Palin has attacked in her book will start reaching for their own shovels.
Over the last few days several websites and blog have received scanned pages of Sarah Palin’s soon to be released autobiography to their sites. So they’ve posted the pages and excerpts they’ve received to their sites.
Several sites have posted scanned pages from the book, but originally only one little blog, which is run by someone in France was first contacted and asked to remove the pages from their site. Interesting though that this blog called itself Palingates with links to articles, documents, quote, photos and much more on subjects like Babygate, Troopergate,Dairygate, Housegate and has quite and extensive list of other gates they seem to have researched quite thoroughly. It appears Babygate has been quite the focus of late and it’s apparent that Sarah Palin has followed this blog for a long time. I guess if I were Sarah I’d be quite concerned about their thorough research too.
So today on a Sunday afternoon an attorney for Harper Collins, the publisher releasing Palin’s book on Tuesday sent the following e-mail to the blog Palingates.
I act as legal counsel to HarperCollins Publishers. I have just learned that you have posted a substantial excerpt from our as yet unpublished book, Going Rogue, by Sarah Palin, on your web site. We view your posting of this excerpt as an infringement of our and Governor Palin’s exclusive rights under copyright. Accordingly, we demand that you remove it from your web site.
Christopher Goff
Senior Vice President & General Counsel HarperCollins Publishers
10 East 53rd Street New York, NY 10022
Voice: 212 207 7127
Fax: 212 207 7552
The scanned pages were removed, but Palingates also contacted other bloggers and news sites that were also posting the scanned pages or providing excerpts and none had received the same cease and desist request.
The “Drudge Report” has posted the content of three full pages.
On many other websites, the content of the book was discussed and extensive parts have already been published – did they all receive a letter, too?
Only one other site contacted with regard to discussing the excerpts or posting the pages. Alaskan Blogger Celtic Diva . It might be interesting to note that the Celtic Diva is a former state employee, although not during Palin’s time. She’s very good at reading all the official documents like travel expenses, financial disclosures, ethics laws, etc. and has been on Palin’s case quite deservedly.
Liz Cheney made the rounds this morning showing her support for the re-election of President Barack Obama in 2012.
After all she says that whoever runs in 2012 will need to:
“…address these incredibly grave challenges we’re facing as a nation. They’re going to … in my view, they will have to undo a lot of the damage that this president has done to our national security, to our economy, to our health care system, to our standing around the world…”
She must have still been thiking GW was President.
She also feels Sarah Palin is a serious candidate for president and that her book is a fabulous and “well-written” book. Says it would be nothing short of sexist for someone to not think she’s a contender.
But she ends her remarks with the greatest of support for President Obama…………
Liz Cheney says you can look at the comparison between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama and think,
“Cheney 2012″.
I’m sure President Obama thanks your for the support and your attempts to keep him right where he is.
Former McCain strategist John Weaver slammed Palin for using the book for “petty and pathetic” score-settling.
“Sarah Palin reminds me of Jimmy Stewart in the movie ‘Harvey,’ complete with imaginary conversations. All books like these are revisionist and self-serving, by definition,” Weaver wrote in an email to POLITICO. “But the score-settling by someone who wants to be considered a serious national player is petty and pathetic.”
“The problem wasn’t who her interview was with, the problem was her interview,” he added. “Couric asked no trick questions. This just seems to be an attempt to obscure as bad a performance since Roger Mudd asked Ted Kennedy that simple question.”
A good wrap up of the book that is described as one long complaint about the McCain campaign, and its staffers. After a strange diatribe about the campaign’s penchant for Atkins diet bars, she recounts the reaction to the infamous prank call from a fake President Nicholas Sarkozy. ”Right away, the phones started ringing. One of the first calls was [Steve] Schmidt, and the force of his screaming blew my hair back. “How can anyone be so stupid?! Why would the president of France call a vice presidential candidate a few days out?!” And here’s where it starts to get really interesting.
Sarah Palin speaking to Oprah Winfrey
Previews of her upcoming Oprah November 16th interview haven’t been so well received either and seem to open up another can of worms when it comes to her recent feuding with the father of her grandchild Levi Johnston.
Johnston has been in New York busy with his photo shoot for Playgirl and spending a lot of time doing interviews over the last two weeks, meeting with Donald Trump, receiving an unearned award and busy talking with Inside Edition.
Levi tells Inside Edition that Palin’s laugh at the beginning of Oprah’s question about him proves the answer that followed was untrue.
All in all, Ms. Palin emerges from “Going Rogue” as an eager player in the blame game, thoroughly ungrateful toward the McCain campaign for putting her on the national stage. As for the McCain campaign, it often feels like a desperate and cynical operation, willing to make a risky Hail Mary pass in order to try to score a tactical win, instead of making a considered judgment as to who might be genuinely qualified to sit a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
The Associated Press has been busy fact checking some of Palin’s statements. Here’s just a snippet of what they found so far: These are just a few of the inconsistencies, but you can follow the link to read the rest by following the link
Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush — a package she seemed to support at the time.
PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking “only” for reasonably priced rooms and not “often” going for the “high-end, robe-and-slippers” hotels.
THE FACTS: Although travel records indicate she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) overlooking New York City’s Central Park for a five-hour women’s leadership conference in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000. Event organizers said Palin asked if she could bring her daughter. The governor billed her state more than $20,000 for her children’s travel, including to events where they had not been invited, and in some cases later amended expense reports to specify that they had been on official business.
___
PALIN: Boasts that she ran her campaign for governor on small donations, mostly from first-time givers, and turned back large checks from big donors if her campaign perceived a conflict of interest.
THE FACTS: Of the roughly $1.3 million she raised for her primary and general election campaigns for governor, more than half came from people and political action committees giving at least $500, according to an AP analysis of her campaign finance reports. The maximum that individual donors could give was $1,000; $2,000 for a PAC. Of the rest, about $76,000 came from Republican Party committees.
She accepted $1,000 each from a state senator and his wife and $30 from a state representative in the weeks after the two Republican lawmakers’ offices were raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into a powerful Alaska oilfield services company. After AP reported those donations during the presidential campaign, she gave a comparative sum to charity.
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PALIN: Rails against taxpayer-financed bailouts, which she attributes to Obama. She recounts telling daughter Bristol that to succeed in business, “you’ll have to be brave enough to fail.”
THE FACTS: Palin is blurring the lines between Obama’s stimulus plan — a $787 billion package of tax cuts, state aid, social programs and government contracts — and the federal bailout that Republican presidential candidate John McCain voted for and President George W. Bush signed.
Palin’s views on bailouts appeared to evolve as McCain’s vice presidential running mate. In September 2008, she said “taxpayers cannot be looked to as the bailout, as the solution, to the problems on Wall Street.” A week later, she said “ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy.”
During the vice presidential debate in October, Palin praised McCain for being “instrumental in bringing folks together” to pass the $700 billion bailout. After that, she said “it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in.”
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PALIN: Says Ronald Reagan faced an even worse recession than the one that appears to be ending now, and “showed us how to get out of one. If you want real job growth, cut capital gains taxes and slay the death tax once and for all.”
THE FACTS: The estate tax, which some call the death tax, was not repealed under Reagan and capital gains taxes are lower now than when Reagan was president. Economists overwhelmingly say the current recession is far worse. The recession Reagan faced lasted for 16 months; this one is in its 23rd month. The recession of the early 1980s did not have a financial meltdown. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent, worse than the October 2009 high of 10.2 percent, but the jobless rate is still expected to climb.
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PALIN: She says her team overseeing the development of a natural gas pipeline set up an open, competitive bidding process that allowed any company to compete for the right to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48.
THE FACTS: Palin characterized the pipeline deal the same way before an AP investigation found her team crafted terms that favored only a few independent pipeline companies and ultimately benefited a company with ties to her administration, TransCanada Corp. Despite promises and legal guidance not to talk directly with potential bidders during the process, Palin had meetings or phone calls with nearly every major candidate, including TransCanada.
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PALIN: Writes about a city councilman in Wasilla, Alaska, who owned a garbage truck company and tried to push through an ordinance requiring residents of new subdivisions to pay for trash removal instead of taking it to the dump for free — this to illustrate conflicts of interest she stood against as a public servant.
THE FACTS: As Wasilla mayor, Palin pressed for a special zoning exception so she could sell her family’s $327,000 house, then did not keep a promise to remove a potential fire hazard on the property.
She asked the city council to loosen rules for snow machine races when she and her husband owned a snow machine store, and cast a tie-breaking vote to exempt taxes on aircraft when her father-in-law owned one. But she stepped away from the table in 1997 when the council considered a grant for the Iron Dog snow machine race in which her husband competes.
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PALIN: Welcomes last year’s Supreme Court decision deciding punitive damages for victims of the nation’s largest oil spill tragedy, the Exxon Valdez disaster, stating it had taken 20 years to achieve victory. As governor, she says, she’d had the state argue in favor of the victims, and she says the court’s ruling went “in favor of the people.” Finally, she writes, Alaskans could recover some of their losses.
THE FACTS: That response is at odds with her reaction at the time to the ruling, which resolved the long-running case by reducing punitive damages for victims to $500 million from $2.5 billion. Environmentalists and plaintiffs’ lawyers decried the ruling as a slap at the victims and Palin herself said she was “extremely disappointed.” She said the justices had gutted a jury decision favoring higher damage awards, the Anchorage Daily News reported. “It’s tragic that so many Alaska fishermen and their families have had their lives put on hold waiting for this decision,” she said, noting many had died “while waiting for justice.”
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PALIN: Describing her resistance to federal stimulus money, Palin describes Alaska as a practical, libertarian haven of independent Americans who don’t want “help” from government busybodies.
THE FACTS: Alaska is also one of the states most dependent on federal subsidies, receiving much more assistance from Washington than it pays in federal taxes. A study for the nonpartisan Tax Foundation found that in 2005, the state received $1.84 for every dollar it sent to Washington.
The Cover Byline: Palin didn’t write the book by herself. Most books with known ghostwriters list their co-author’s name on the cover. In this case it was Lynn Vincent (a well-known homophobe). Going Rogue does not.
Going Rogue features Palin’s obsession with Katie Couric and characterizes the CBS anchor as “badgering.” Palin refused to prep for the Couric interview because she was more concerned about her popularity in Alaska than about what was best for the campaign. Was it really badgering to ask what books or periodicals Palin read? Palin further claims that Couric suffered from low self-esteem. In fact, according to those close to Palin, it’s the former governor who suffers from low self-esteem and frequently projects that onto other women.
Palin asserts that there was a “jaded aura” around McCain’s political advisors once she entered the campaign. In fact, McCain’s aides bent over backwards to protect Palin and to try to get her up to speed on international affairs. In addition to not knowing whether or not Africa was a continent, according to sources in the McCain campaign, Palin also didn’t understand the difference between England and Great Britain. And much, much more.
Palin contends to have been saddled with legal bills of more than $500,000 resulting from what she calls “frivolous” ethics complaints filed against her. The lion’s share of those bills resulted from the ethics complaint she filed against herself in a legal maneuver to sidestep the Troopergate charges being brought against her by the bipartisan Alaska Legislative Council.
Palin rather astonishingly claims that she was saddled with $50,000 in bills for the legal fees associated with her vice-presidential vetting. A) She was not vetted; B) A McCain campaign advisor says this is “categorically untrue.”
Palin states that she found out only “minutes” before John McCain’s concession speech that she would not be allowed to make remarks of her own introducing McCain. In fact, she had been told at least three times that she would not be allowed to give the speech and kept lying about it in the hopes of creating some last-minute chaos that would allow her to assume the dais.
Palin asserts that her effort to award a license for a natural gas transmission line was turning a “pipe dream” into a pipeline. Although she claimed otherwise in her speech at the GOP convention, there is no pipeline. It remains a pipe dream.
Ms. Palin was particularly angry at bloggers and the media, associates said, for speculation that her baby Trig was really the child of Bristol, her daughter.
At one point, according to people familiar with the discussions, Ms. Palin considered pursuing a libel suit against at least one blogger, the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan. Ms. Palin decided against such a move because of the publicity it would bring.
Mr. Sullivan, in response, said asking “factually verifiable questions is obviously not libel.”
A spokeswoman for Ms. Palin didn’t respond to email requests seeking comment.
We also have a preview of her previously recorded interviews with Barbara Walters that will air next week as she kicks off her book tour. One has to ask why a woman who repeatedly asked the media to leaver her children alone and only focus on her, then why are two of the children sitting right beside her during the interview?
The interviews with Barbara and Oprah are the only mainstream interviews that Palin will be doing on the book tour. All others that she will be interviewing with like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, BFF Greta Van Susteren, Bill O’Reilly and the like won’t challenge her or discuss subjects they know she’s weak on. Do you think we’ll see Piper or Willow sitting beside her for those interviews?
Did Sarah Palin bring those girls to sit front row at Oprah and right next to her on the couch with Barbara to stave off any serious discussions are personal questions?
Was Sarah dishonest in her answer to Barbara Walters when Barbara asked if Sarah Palin and her husband Todd knew that Bristol was sexually active before she informed then she was pregnant?
Is this why someone who obviously still considers themself to be a serious contender of the political world bring their young children to interviews, pretty them up and then sit them on the couch right next to you?
Meanwhile those is Alaska have also been busy pouring over Palin’s book Going Rogue and verifying her claims and statements from the book.
Blue Oasis – Has an analysis of how the books Sarah from Alaska, The Persecution of Sarah Palin, and Going Rogue handle the topic of the ethics complaints filed against her, the state records requests, and her tangle with the Alaska Public Offices Commission – No titilating gossip, but instead issues that matter a whole lot more. There’s no one better than Linda Kellen Biegel, former AK state employee at picking apart the details and giving a great analysis of this tangled mess.
Shannyn Moore: Just a Girl from Homer – One of the plaintiffs in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case, she notes, “So Sarah was against the decision before she couldn’t remember it before she was for it. And now, courtesy of Going Rogue, Sarah Palin manages to insult and injure Alaskans who will never be made whole with yet another one of her documented lies.” Videos included.
The Anchorage Daily News – Too many out there are watching and waiting for Palin’s emails that were requested via state records requests, to be revealed. The law is clear, and the state is breaking it – over, and over, and over. Palin is gone but now the big mess she left has been dumped squarely in the lap of the next administration who continues to stall. Paul Jenkins speculates that “enterprising young lawyers will have to haul the state into court for failure to obey its own law.”
While we can’t feel very confident in much of what Sarah Palin and her ghostwriter present as fact in her autobiography Going Rogue, one thing we can be sure of…………….the next week will be a crazy one. Sarah’s book comes out with Levi’s photo spread coming out the same day, while Howard Stern, Joy Behart and John Stewart court Levi to visit their shows. Sarah is already on her facebook page complaining
We’ve heard 11 writers are engaged in this opposition research, er, “fact checking” research! Imagine that – 11 AP reporters dedicating time and resources to tearing up the book, instead of using the time and resources to “fact check” what’s going on with Sheik Mohammed’s trial, Pelosi’s health care takeover costs, Hasan’s associations, etc.
American Hatriotism explores the hate and hypocrisy raging through America in the name of god and country. All written material is copyright of American Hatriotism 2009. We do not claim copyright of any images used or seen here.
"What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?" - Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Institute Address, February 27, 1860.
The people that you have to lie to, own you. The things you have to lie about, own you. When your children see you owned, they are not your children any more, they are the children of what owns you. If money owns you, they are the children of money. If your need for pretense and illusion owns you, they are the children of pretense and illusion. If your fear of loneliness owns you, they are the children of loneliness. If your fear of the truth owns you, they are the children of fear of the truth. –Michael Ventura
What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility ... a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.-
Adlai Stevenson
When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart. - Ralph Waldo Emerson; Journals, 1824
I'm conservative, but I'm not a nut about it.- George H.W. Bush
If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the 20th century. -Letter from a Birmingham Jail
The chain reaction of evil–hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars–must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. – Strength To Love, 1963.
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