Palin is the perfect Bushie

The Palin's, like the Bushies, feel they are above the law and don't feel they are accountable for their actions. No wonder the Bushies love her, I'm just surprised the Bush WH didn't find her before and make her secratary of the Navy or something (she's been on a boat). Being unqualifed, having contempt for the law and loving guns and hating abortion are all you need for a Bush appointment and sadly McCain continues that practice with this HORRIBLE choice

Fiscal Reformer???

Read it quick before the Conservatives who control the media kill the story.



Maybe she should have kept the plane…


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26616212/

ANCHORAGE - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a "per diem" allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business.

Palin charged the state a per diem for working on Nov. 22, 2007 -- Thanksgiving Day. The reason given, according to the expense report, was the Great Alaska Shootout, an annual NCAA college basketball tournament held in Anchorage (WISH I COULD GET PAID TO GO TO SPORTING Events)

One event was in New York City in October 2007, when Bristol accompanied the governor to Newsweek's third annual Women and Leadership Conference, toured the New York Stock Exchange, and met local officials and business executives. The state paid for three nights in a $707-a-day hotel room.


Meanwhile, Todd Palin spent $725 to fly to Edmonton , Alberta , for "information gathering and planning meeting with Northern Alberta Institute of Technology," according to an expense report. During the three-day trip, he charged the state $291 for his per diem. A notation said "costs paid by Dept. of Labor." He also billed the state $1,371 for flight to Washington to attend a National Governors Association meeting with his wife. (I wish my company paid to fly my partner to for my business trips)

The family also charged for flights around the state, including trips to Alaska events such as the start of the Iditarod dog-sled race and the Iron Dog snowmobile race, a contest that Todd Palin won. (Did the state pay his entry fees too?)

In the past, per diem claims by Alaska state officials have carried political risks. In 1988, the head of the state Commerce Department was pilloried for collecting a per diem charge of $50 while staying in his Anchorage home, according to local news accounts. The commissioner, the late Tony Smith, resigned amid a series of controversies.

"It was quite the little scandal," said Tony Knowles, the Democratic governor from 1994 to 2000. "I gave a direction to all my commissioners if they were ever in their house, whether it was Juneau or elsewhere, they were not to get a per diem because, clearly, it is and it looks like a scam -- you pay yourself to live at home," he said.

I asked for 20 qualifications that Palin has to be VP or Prez...I got one

The one thing I got was she was Governor of a state with 600,000 people for 20 months. And a bunch of crap that Obama has no executive experience (neither does McCain and Newt Gingrich is the only Republican I've heard admit that fact)

So, I thought clarify Obama's experience:

While I wait for the 19 other qualifications she brings to the table.

I just wanted to clear up some fallacies you appear to be operating
under.

Obama has EXECUTIVE Experience.

• He was the PRESIDENT of the Harvard Law Review ( I can’t wait to hear how that’s not executive experience)
  
• He was also the DIRECTOR of Chicago ’s
  Developing Communities Project and I know you hate poor people and like to mock
  those who actually help out in their communities unless it’s bombing abortion
  clinics, but this too is EXECUTIVE Experience.
  
• He was CHAIRMAN of the Health and Human Services Committee in the Illinois Senate (damn, more leadership experience)
  
• He is CHAIRMAN of the Foreign Relations subcommittee on European Affairs (Even more leadership and with International Experience).
  

Now, again I know it’s not raising taxes to build a new hockey rink, but it IS Executive Experience.


I’m glad we can put that to rest now.


But again, we should be comparing McCain’s resume with Obama’s and Biden’s with Palin’s. I know you don’t want to do that b/c Obama’s and McCain’s experience is in the same damn job and Biden’s knowledge of Economics and International Relations is some of the best in America . I can understand why you’d resort to name calling (like when you pretend to care
about experience and your only response to Bill Richardson’s resume is to call
him a buffoon. Funny how you changed the subject from Experience to name-calling
when presented with the most qualified candidate in America…you must be a
racist)

A "maverick" selection...not so much

While the GOP has been breaking their arms patting themselves on the back for putting a woman on the ticket and calling it some radical new idea, I got to thinking that it’s really not all that radical. (Especially when you consider the vitriol they have spewed toward Hilary Clinton for the past two decades)

The Democrats did it 24 years ago. 24 years!

The Libertarians did it in 1972 and Toni Nathan was the first women to ever receive an electoral vote.

Then I did some research

The 2008 Green Party has an ALL FEMALE ticket and have had at least one woman on the ticket since 96. The Libertarians did it again in 1992 and 96. Lyndon LaRouche did it, as did Pat Buchanan. All before the Republicans…seems like they are pretty late to the party. Here is a list:


Wikipedia has a list of over 100 women who have been a various parties Tickets going back to 1870

Soliciting sex acts in bathrooms is "free speech"?

I hear Larry Craig, the disgraced Senator from Idaho who hates gay people, except when he's having sex with them, is going to claim that tapping his foot to initiate sex in a public rest room is protected by FREE SPEECH.

How awesome is that? Again the hypocrisy. The Republicans who HATE free speech now are using it to defend the solicitation of bathroom sex...WOW. The next time you get busted for solicitation of prostitution, you should claim it's Free Speech.

You've got to admit that the Republicans do have balls. They can stand in Congress and rail against gays while they still smell of manlove. they try to force their version of "family values" while they hire prostitutes and have affairs.

But the free speech thing is AWESOME. Balls the size of Idaho

Why does the media not report on Sarah Palin's anti-semetic pastor?

Yes, Sarah Palin sat in a church where this message was given. Two weeks ago. The karma in all this is just amazing:

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.

How does Hannity deal with this? After what he said about Jeremiah
Wright

?

Let's get a couple of things straight about John McCain's newest ad and, for that matter, about his running mate. Yes, Sarah Palin was, technically, the person to put the final nail in the coffin of the "Bridge to Nowhere" last fall. Apparently that was a prime reason she got picked for the Republican ticket -- McCain liked that the same Alaska Republicans who are angry at him were also angry at her.

But the implication coming from Palin and McCain is that in doing so, she saved U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. "I told the Congress 'thanks, but no thanks,' for that Bridge to Nowhere," Palin said at the Republican convention last week. "If our state wanted a bridge, we'd build it ourselves." McCain's ad says, "She stopped the Bridge to Nowhere" (with some dramatic music behind the narration that makes it sound like McCain and Palin are running for the newest slots in the Legion of Super Heroes, not the White House).

That's not actually how it happened, though. Nearly two years before Palin acted, Congress had already decided the federal government wouldn't pay for the bridge. But Alaska would still get the $229 million that had been earmarked for the project. By the time Palin took office and "killed" the bridge in September 2007, she knew that if she didn't, the state would be on the hook for the whole bill, and Alaska wouldn't get the massive windfall to spend on... well, whatever other transportation boondoggles it wanted to fund. She did officially spike the project, but it was basically already finished. Since the federal government was going to pay for almost the entire cost of the project, once Congress removed the earmark, Palin didn't have much choice. "It wasn't really a bold move when she did it," bridge opponent Lois Epstein, with the Alaska Transportation Priorities Project, told PolitiFact. Not to mention, of course, that Palin supported the bridge during her 2006 campaign for governor, and only came around to opposing it and scaling back the state's earmark requests when it became clear the bridge was hurting Alaska 's image in Washington and around the country.

McCain's campaign doesn't even seem to be paying attention to these details. Defending the ad Monday morning, spokesman Brian Rogers sent reporters a memo about the bridge project. "After taking office and examining the project closely, Governor Palin consistently opposed funding the 'Bridge to Nowhere' and ultimately canceled the wasteful project," Rogers wrote, glossing over exactly how long it took for her to examine the project closely. "She stopped it." But the memo cites the PolitiFact articles that make it clear that Palin was just bowing to the reality that the bridge was already dead. Never mind that, though. In John McCain's world, Sarah Palin is a maverick reformer who fought wasteful spending. In the world the rest of us live in, that's not so clear. (Note: Carly Fiorina would probably say this post is sexist, because it criticizes Palin's record, but Salon is willing to live with that risk.)

In the long Bushie Republican tradition of lying about everything

She DIDN'T sell the Jet on eBay, she DIDN'T make a profit.

and if she craftily didn't say she did sell it on eBay which is what everyone remembers, she manipulated America in her speech to lead us to believe that she did sell it on eBay.

That's the same old Bushie lying.

John McCain ...i really hope selling your soul to the Bushie Republicans pays off for you b/c I used to respect you. I really did, but now you're just as bad as the Bushies, but it's worse b/c you were once a stand up guy but over the past 12 months you changed. George W. Bush never knew better, he had everything handed to him and he got by b/c of who his father was. You used to be your own man...it's really sad to see what you've let them do to you.

Republican distaste for copyright

The GOP really seems to have a problem with this whole playing music inappropriately whether it's in violation of copyright law or when Reagan used "Born in the USA" as a campaign song, ignorant of the song's meaning.

Clowns

Palin is "qualified"? Then so are about 80,000 other people

Pathetic. This might be the most obvious showing of GOPs complete lack of anything resembling principles in the years.

I knew that the would completely change course on tokenism after this. Shameful pandering that is an insult to women b/c this horrible choice is based solely on the idea that Hilary supporters are going to vote for McCain now b/c his VP has a vagina and ignore that she's a right wing hack. But apparently, it's only black women that are tokens, right?

Here is a woman who has been governor of a state with more reindeer than people for all of 20 months. Before that the mayor of a town of 5000...What a joke. If leading a governmental agency of a population of 600,000 for a little over a year and a half makes you qualified to be President that would open it up to about 20,000 mayors, County Executives, governors.

You are honestly telling me that she is the BEST and most qualified member of the GOP to be VP? Really? She's not even the best female candidate, Kay Bailey Hutchinson is infinitely more qualified than her if you must have a woman candidate. Elizabeth Dole?

Please, Executive experience. Her big ethics controversy is so freakin' quaint as to be right out of an Andy Griffith episode. Using her influence to get her sister's ex-husband fired. That is so precious and it shows how small time she is. She's so ill-equipped to be VP that only a few weeks ago she didn't have enough information to form an opinion on The Surge in Iraq.

George Bush had been an executive for years and he let 9/11 happen. So, I'm not sure the Governor card is a strong one.

Finally, can you imagine the the shit spouted by Malkin, Coulter and or any of the other Republican Hypocrites if Obama's 17 year old daughter were pregnant…OMG the double standard. And of course the absolute SILENCE about Cindy McCain. If Michele Obama were a drug addict, that would be all you'd hear about. But nothing about the pretty white girl. I'm not saying that Cindy's past (I love Cindy McCain, I think she's a class act) has any relevance but you can sure as shit bet that if Michelle Obama had the same past that's all that Righty Wing Media fascists would be going on about.

Media Bias toward the GOP in this country is sickening.

Not such a Great Reformer this Savior from the Great White North

Not much of a reformer, this “maverick” from the great white north…





"So while Sen. McCain was going after cutting earmarks in Washington ," said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, "Gov. Palin was going after getting earmarks."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/la-na-earmarks3-2008sep03,0,5932587.story



Wasilla had received few if any earmarks before Palin became mayor. She actively sought federal funds -- a campaign that began to pay off only after she hired a lobbyist with close ties to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who long controlled federal spending as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He made funneling money to Alaska his hallmark.

Steven Silver was a former chief of staff for Stevens. After he was hired, Wasilla obtained funding for several projects in 2002, including an additional $600,000 in transportation funding.

That year, a local water and sewer project received $1.5 million, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, which combs federal spending measures to identify projects inserted by congressional members.

McCain's bad decision

From the NYT:

Candidate McCain’s Big Decision

More often than not, the role of a vice president is a minor one, unless some tragedy occurs. But a presidential nominee’s choice of a running mate is vitally important. It is his first executive decision and offers an important insight into how that nominee would lead the nation.

If John McCain wants voters to conclude, as he argues, that he has more independence and experience and better judgment than Barack Obama, he made a bad start by choosing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska .

Mr. McCain’s supporters are valiantly trying to argue that the selection was a bold stroke that shows their candidate is a risk-taking maverick who — we can believe — will change Washington . (Mr. Obama’s call for change — now “the change we need” — has become all the rage in St. Paul .)

To us, it says the opposite. Mr. McCain’s snap choice of Ms. Palin reflects his impulsive streak: a wild play that he made after conservative activists warned him that he would face an all-out revolt in the party if he chose who he really wanted — Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.

Why Mr. McCain would want to pander to right-wing activists — who helped George W. Bush kill off his candidacy in the 2000 primaries in a particularly ugly way — is baffling. Frankly, they have no place to go. Mr. McCain would have a lot more success demonstrating his independence, and his courage, if he stood up to them the way he did in 2000.

As far as we can tell, Mr. McCain and his aides did almost no due diligence before choosing Ms. Palin, raising serious questions about his management skills. The fact that Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant is irrelevant to her candidacy. There are, however, very serious questions about her political past and her ideology.

If Mr. McCain wanted to break with his party’s past and choose the Republicans’ first female vice presidential candidate, there are a number of politicians out there with far greater experience and stature than Ms. Palin, who has been in Alaska ’s Statehouse for less than two years.

Before she was elected governor, she was mayor of a tiny Anchorage suburb, where her greatest accomplishment was raising the sales tax to build a hockey rink. According to Time magazine, she also sought to have books banned from the local library and threatened to fire the librarian.

MY COMMENT She’s a book burner…no wonder the GOP claims to love her.
For Mr. McCain to go on claiming that Mr. Obama has too little experience to be president after almost four years in the United States Senate is laughable now that he has announced that someone with no national or foreign policy experience is qualified to replace him, if necessary.

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who has been one of Mr. McCain’s most loyal friends, said Tuesday that he was certain that Ms. Palin would take the right positions on issues like Iraq , Russia ’s invasion of Georgia and Iran ’s nuclear weapons ambitions. That seemed based largely on his repeated assertion that Ms. Palin would be tended by Mr. McCain’s foreign policy advisers. That was not much of an endorsement.

Some of the things Ms. Palin has had to say in the recent past about foreign policy are especially worrisome. In a speech last June to her former church in Wasilla, Ms. Palin said the war in Iraq was “a task that is from God.” Mr. Bush made similar claims as he rejected all sound mortal advice on how to conduct the war.

Mr. McCain, Mr. Graham and others also claim that Ms. Palin is a fearless reformer who is committed to fighting waste, fraud and earmarks. Ms. Palin did show courage taking on some of the Alaska Republican Party’s most sleazy politicians. But she also was an eager recipient of earmarked money as a mayor and governor.

Mayor Palin gathered up $27 million in subsidies from Washington , $15 million of it for a railroad from her town to the ski resort hometown of Senator Ted Stevens, now under indictment for failing to report gifts.

The Republicans are presenting Ms. Palin as a crusader against Mr. Stevens’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” The record says otherwise; she initially supported Mr. Stevens’s boondoggle, diverting the money to other projects when the bridge became a political disaster. In her speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God in June, Ms. Palin said it was “God’s will” that the federal government contribute to a $30 billion gas pipeline she wants built in Alaska .
Mr. McCain will make his acceptance speech on Thursday, and Ms. Palin will speak on Wednesday. Those two appearances will go a long way to forming voters’ views of this Republican ticket.

As Senator Graham noted, Mr. McCain has to reach out beyond the party’s loyal base. “We’re going to have to win this thing,” he said. “This is not our race to lose.”

Mr. McCain’s hurdles are substantial. To start, he has to overcome Mr. Bush’s record of failures. (The president addressed the convention Tuesday night and now, McCain strategists fervently hope, will retire quietly to the Rose Garden.) That record includes the disastrous war in Iraq , a ballooning deficit, the mortgage crisis — and the list goes on.

To address those many problems, this country needs a leader with sound judgment and strong leadership skills. Choosing Ms. Palin raises serious questions about Mr. McCain’s qualifications.

sounds like a real Republican...trying to game the system and use power to her personal advantage

The woman was obsessed with getting her ex-brother in law fired. Hardly the behavior becoming a governor, a mayor of a town of 5000 maybe, but surely not a governor.


Palin had promised to cooperate with the legislative inquiry, but last month she hired a lawyer to fight to move the case to the jurisdiction of the state personnel board, which Palin appoints.