Palin’s town charged women for rape exams

This is inexplicable

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (CNN) – Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s hometown required women to pay for their own rape examinations while she was mayor, a practice her police chief fought to keep as late as 2000.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/21/palin.rape.exams/index.html

drill here, drill now

thanks, brent

Drill Here, Drill Now:
A Pipe Dream

 

According to the US Energy Information Administration, oil production from drilling offshore in the outer continental shelf wouldn’t begin until around the year 2017. Once begun, it wouldn’t reach peak production until about 2030 when it would produce only 200,000 barrels of oil per day (in yellow above).This would supply a meager 1.2% of total US annual oil consumption (just 0.6% of total US energy consumption). And, the offshore oil would be sold back to the US at the international rate, which today is $106 a barrel. So, the oil produced by offshore drilling would not only be a “drop in the bucket”, it would be expensive, which translates to “no relief at the pump”. 

here

brooks writes good column

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September 16, 2008

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Why Experience Matters

By DAVID BROOKS

Philosophical debates arise at the oddest times, and in the heat of this election season, one is now rising in Republican ranks. The narrow question is this: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be vice president? Most conservatives say yes, on the grounds that something that feels so good could not possibly be wrong. But a few commentators, like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum and Ross Douthat demur, suggesting in different ways that she is unready.

The issue starts with an evaluation of Palin, but does not end there. This argument also is over what qualities the country needs in a leader and what are the ultimate sources of wisdom.

There was a time when conservatives did not argue about this. Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said.

But, especially in America, there has always been a separate, populist, strain. For those in this school, book knowledge is suspect but practical knowledge is respected. The city is corrupting and the universities are kindergartens for overeducated fools.

The elitists favor sophistication, but the common-sense folk favor simplicity. The elitists favor deliberation, but the populists favor instinct.

This populist tendency produced the term-limits movement based on the belief that time in government destroys character but contact with grass-roots America gives one grounding in real life. And now it has produced Sarah Palin.

Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.

Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.

And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.

How is prudence acquired? Through experience. The prudent leader possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and who can’t, what has worked and what hasn’t.

Experienced leaders can certainly blunder if their minds have rigidified (see: Rumsfeld, Donald), but the records of leaders without long experience and prudence is not good. As George Will pointed out, the founders used the word “experience” 91 times in the Federalist Papers. Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared.

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

hi

	Heath Family/Associated Press CONSERVATIVE VOICES Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska poses with a caribou she shot in Alaska.

great mustache line:

Who cares how much steel John McCain has in his gut when the steel that today holds up our bridges, railroads, nuclear reactors and other infrastructure is rusting? McCain talks about how he would build dozens of nuclear power plants. Oh, really? They go for $10 billion a pop. Where is the money going to come from? From lowering taxes? From banning abortions? From borrowing more from China? From having Sarah Palin “reform” Washington — as if she has any more clue how to do that than the first 100 names in the D.C. phonebook?

here

from the national review?

really?

Perhaps I’m focusing on an irrelevant issue, but the presence, or non-presence, of Johnston on the stage tonight strikes me as important.  It’s one thing for delegates to be understanding and compassionate about the fix these two teenagers have gotten themselves into.  It’s another to actually celebrate it.  And, given what we’ve learned in the last few days, if Johnston is up on stage with his girlfriend and the Palin family, and Republicans are wildly cheering, it will certainly look like they are celebrating this situation.

I don’t usually engage in these scenarios, but I’ll do it here.  If the Obamas had a 17 year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if that they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families.  

courtesy of frank rich

typewriters, baby, typewriters

sometimes tom friedman’s mustache is pretty sweet: 

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”

here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/opinion/14friedman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

facts

It’s unbelievable that people are now openly discussing whether facts even matter. This is all being discussed by real people in real news. It’s really disheartening. If you take away facts and logic, there’s no reason to talk anymore. Maybe we should all just fight each other.

September 11, 2008

Analysis: McCain’s claims skirt facts, test voters

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 7:33 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — John McCain’s campaign keeps telling voters that Sarah Palin opposed a federally funded Bridge to Nowhere that, in fact, she originally supported. It accuses Democrat Barack Obama of calling Palin a pig, which did not happen.

Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain’s skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Barack Obama’s campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

That voter reaction could help determine who wins this presidential election and influence the strategies of future campaigns.

Politicians usually modify or drop claims when a string of newspaper and TV news accounts concludes they are untrue or greatly exaggerated. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, conceded she had not come under sniper fire in Bosnia after a batch of debunking articles subjected her to ridicule during her primary contest against Obama.

McCain’s persistence in pushing dubious claims is all the more notable because many political insiders consider him one of the greatest living victims of underhanded campaigning. Locked in a tight race with George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, McCain was rocked in South Carolina by a whisper campaign claiming he had fathered an illegitimate black child and was mentally unstable.

Shaken by the experience, McCain denounced less-than-truthful campaigning. He even apologized to journalists for his own reluctance to criticize the flying of the Confederate flag at South Carolina’s state Capitol in a bid for votes. When the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacked the military record of Democrat and fellow Navy officer John Kerry in 2004, McCain called the ads ”dishonest and dishonorable.”

Now, top aides to McCain include Steve Schmidt, who has close ties to Karl Rove, Bush’s premier political adviser in 2000.

McCain and his running mate Palin, the Alaska governor, were defiant this week in the face of fact-checking news reports. Day after day she said she had told Congress ”no thanks” to the so-called Bridge to Nowhere, a rural Alaska project that was abandoned when critics challenged its costs and usefulness. For nearly a week, major news outlets had documented that Palin supported the bridge when running for governor in 2006, and she turned against it only after it became an embarrassment to the state and a symbol in Congress of out-of-control earmarking.

The McCain-Palin campaign made at least three other aggressive claims this week that omitted key details or made dubious assumptions to criticize Obama. It equated lawmakers’ requests for money for special projects with corruption, even though Palin has sought nearly $200 million in such ”earmarks” this year.

It produced an Internet ad implying that Obama had called Palin a pig when he used a familiar phrase, which McCain also has used, about putting ”lipstick on a pig” to try to make a bad situation look better. McCain supporters said Obama was slyly alluding to Palin’s description of herself as a pit bull in lipstick, but there was nothing in his remarks to support the claim. Obama accused the GOP campaign of ”lies and phony outrage.”

The lipstick wars were fully engaged when the McCain campaign produced another ad saying Obama favored ”comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners. The charge triggered the sort of headlines becoming increasingly common in major newspapers and wire services monitoring the factual content of political ads and speeches.

”Ad on Sex Education Distorts Obama Policy,” was the headline on a New York Times article Thursday. ”McCain’s ‘Education’ Spot is Dishonest, Deceptive,” The Washington Post’s ”Fact Checker” article said.

Major news outlets have written such fact-checking articles for years. ”But in the last two election cycles, the very notion that the facts matter seems to be under assault,” said Michael X. Delli Carpini, an authority on political ads at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. ”Candidates and their consultants seem to have learned that as long as you don’t back down from your charges or claims, they will stick in the minds of voters regardless of their accuracy or at a minimum, what the truth is will remain murky, a matter of opinion rather than fact.”

With Palin giving McCain’s campaign a boost in the polls, Obama supporters are nervously watching to see what impact the latest claims will have. Surveys already show that most people believe Obama would raise their taxes — a regular McCain claim — even though independent groups such as the Tax Policy Center concluded that four out of five U.S. households would receive tax cuts under his proposals.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds defended the campaign’s statements. ”We include factual back-up in every one of our TV spots,” he said Thursday.

Obama, of course, has made exaggerated or questionable assertions as well. Earlier this year, for instance, he repeated a claim that more black men are in prison than in college, after news accounts refuted it. He also used a McCain remark about having troops in Iraq for ”100 years” to exaggerate McCain’s proposals for being fully engaged militarily in that country.

In general, however, Obama has been quicker to react to news accounts challenging his accuracy. Faced with skeptical reports this year, for instance, he stopped saying he ”worked his way” through college, and instead credited hard work and scholarships.

Dan Schnur, a former McCain aide who now teaches politics at the University of Southern California, said McCain and Obama learned they must stretch the truth ”when staying on the high road didn’t work out to their benefit.”

McCain, he said, ”tried it his way. He had a poverty tour and nobody covered it. He had a national service tour, and everybody made fun of it. He proposed these joint town halls” with Obama, ”and nothing come of it. Through the spring and early summer, that approach didn’t work. You can’t blame him for taking a step back and reassessing.”

^——

EDITOR’S NOTE — Charles Babington covers national politics for The Associated Press.

joe biden, best person in the world

Earlier in the week, in Columbia, Mo., Mr. Biden urged a paraplegic state official to stand up to be recognized.

“Chuck, stand up, let the people see you,” Mr. Biden shouted to State Senator Chuck Graham, before realizing, to his horror, that Mr. Graham uses a wheelchair.

“Oh, God love ya,” Mr. Biden said. “What am I talking about?”

here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/us/politics/12biden.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1221177758-t4snlfZv4Yw0DBQlKravhg

Sarah Palin, foreign policy expert

Doesn’t this hooker know that pushing for Georgian NATO membership is what started the recent conflict in the first place? And, um, let’s just say Russia aint Iraq. Maybe she’ll send in the Alaskan national guard.

September 11, 2008, 6:16 pm <!– — Updated: 6:23 pm –>

Palin Interview: She Didn’t Blink When Asked to Run

By Katharine Q. Seelye

In Gov. Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated interview with ABC News, she said she “didn’t blink” when Senator John McCain asked her to be his running mate.

Charles Gibson, the interviewer, asked her if she didn’t hesitate and question whether she was experienced enough.

“I didn’t hesitate, no,” she said.

He asked if that didn’t that take some hubris.

“I answered him yes,” Ms. Palin said, “because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink. So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.”

Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, is making her debut news interview, 13 days after Mr. McCain plucked her from relative obscurity to fill, potentially, the second-most powerful position in the world and perhaps the most powerful, should the need arise.

The McCain campaign selected Mr. Gibson to be her first questioner, and the network is taking the opportunity to stretch out its eye in the spotlight as curiosity about Ms. Palin has sent network ratings soaring.

Excerpts from Mr. Gibson’s first interview are to appear tonight on “World News” at 6:30 P.M., Eastern, and again on “Nightline” tonight. There’s more on Friday, starting with “Good Morning America” at 7 A.M., then again on “World News” and on “20/20,” which will broadcast a one-hour special edition at 10 P.M.

The network teased the interview on its Web site this afternoon with this eye-popping bulletin: “Exclusive: Gov. Sarah Palin warns war may be necessary if Russia invades another country.”

But the transcript showed that she was merely repeating Mr. McCain’s position and had not used provocative language. And we’re wondering if the McCain camp is reconsidering its selection of ABC, since it hyped the teaser to sound like Ms. Palin was ready to press the button.

Anyway, she said that she believes, as Mr. McCain does, that Ukraine and Georgia should be admitted to NATO. Mr. Gibson then asked: “And under the NATO treaty, wouldn’t we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?”

“Perhaps so,” Ms. Palin responded. “I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be called upon and help.”

A moment later, Mr. Gibson asked: “And you think it would be worth it to the United States, Georgia is worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to invade?”

She responded: “What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant against. We have got to be cognizant of what the consequences are if a larger power is able to take over smaller democratic countries. And we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to.”

The first segment of the interview will be broadcast at 6:30 p.m. today.