TrooperGate, the Real Story

Getting Real About Palin I've noticed some people who should know better claiming that bringing up Gov. Palin's troopergate scandal is tantamount to making a victim of or defending her slimeball ex-brother-in-law who allegedly once used a taser on his stepson.
That's awfully foolish. So I thought I'd put together a post explaining why.
The person in question is state trooper Mike Wooten -- Palin's ex-brother-in-law who's embroiled in a bitter custody and divorce battle with Palin's sister. Back in the second week of August, well before Palin became a national political figure, TPMMuckraker was reporting on this story. And as part of the reporting we tried to get a handle on just how bad a guy Wooten was. Most people who are familiar with the ugliness that often spills out of custody and divorce cases know to take accusations arising out of the course of them with a grain of salt unless you know a lot about the people involved. And if you look closely at the case there are numerous reasons to question the picture drawn by the Palin family. Regardless, we proceeded on the assumption that Wooten really was a rotten guy because the truth is that it wasn't relevant to the investigation of Palin.
Let's review what happened.
The Palin family had a feud with Wooten prior to her becoming governor. They put together a list of 14 accusations which they took to the state police to investigate -- a list that ranged from the quite serious to the truly absurd. The state police did an investigation, decided that 5 of the charges had some merit and suspended Wooten for ten days -- a suspension later reduced to five days. The Palin's weren't satisfied but there wasn't much they could do.
When Palin became governor they went for another bite at the apple. Palin, her husband and several members of her staff began pressuring Public Safety Commissioner, Walt Monegan -- a respected former Chief of the Anchorage police department -- to can Wooten. Monegan resisted, arguing that the official process regarding Wooten was closed. And there was nothing more that could be done. In fact, during one of the conversations in which Palin's husband Todd was putting on the squeeze, Monegan told Todd Palin, "You can't head hunt like this. What you need to do is back off, because if the trooper does make a mistake, and it is a terminable offense, it can look like political interference."
Eventually, Palin got fed up and fired Monegan from his job. (Palin claims, not credibly, that she fired Monegan over general differences in law enforcement priorities.) This is an important point. Wooten never got fired. To the best of my knowledge, he's is still on the job. The central bad act was firing the state's top police official because he refused to bend to political pressure from the governor and her family to fire a public employee against whom the governor was pursuing a vendetta -- whether the vendetta was justified or not.
Update:

Palin's Post-Scandal Appointee Served Just Two Weeks. It looks like there's even more muck than meets the eye in Trooper-Gate.
After the allegedly improper firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) appointed former Kenai Police Chief Chuck Kopp to the post. Kopp served just two weeks this summer as the head of law enforcement in Alaska, resigning on July 25, after a past complaint of sexual harassment and a subsequent letter of reprimand surfaced in news reports.
But Palin made sure he had a soft fall from grace, giving him a $10,000 severance package for just two weeks served.
While Palin has conceded she was aware of the past complaint against Kopp, she claims that she thought the complaint had been unsubstantiated and was unaware of the letter of reprimand.

Soon after this, questions were raised in the state about Monegan's firing and he eventually came forward and said he believed he'd been fired for not giving in to pressure to fire Wooten.
After Monegan made his accusations, Palin insisted there was no truth whatsoever to his claims. Nonetheless, a bipartisan committee of the state legislature approved an investigation. In response, Palin asked the Attorney General to start his own investigation which many in the state interpreted as an effort to either keep tabs on or tamper with the legislature's investigation. Again, very questionable judgment in someone who aspires to be first in line to the presidency.
The Attorney General's investigation quickly turned up evidence that Palin's initial denials were false. Multiple members of her staff had raised Wooten's employment with Monegan. Indeed, the state police had a recording of one of her deputies pushing Monegan to fire Wooten. That evidence forced Palin to change her story. Palin said that this was the first she'd heard of it and insisted the deputy wasn't acting at her behest, even though the transcript of the recorded call clearly suggested that he was. Hear the audio here.
Just yesterday, Monegan gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he said that not only Palin's aides, but Palin's husband and Palin herself had repeatedly raised the Wooten issue with him and pressured him to fire him. And now he says he has emails that Palin sent him about the matter. (In an interesting sidelight, that may end up telling us a lot, Monegan says no one from the McCain campaign ever contacted him in the vetting process.)
The investigator appointed by the state legislature began trying to arrange a time to depose Gov. Palin last week -- in other words, in the final days before her selection.
So let's put this all together.
We rely on elected officials not to use the power of their office to pursue personal agendas or vendettas. It's called an abuse of power. There is ample evidence that Palin used her power as governor to get her ex-brother-in-law fired. When his boss refused to fire him, she fired his boss. She first denied Monegan's claims of pressure to fire Wooten and then had to amend her story when evidence proved otherwise.
The available evidence now suggests that she
1) tried to have an ex-relative fired from his job for personal reasons, something that was clearly inappropriate, and perhaps illegal, though possibly understandable in human terms,
2) fired a state official for not himself acting inappropriately by firing the relative,
3) lied to the public about what happened and
4) continues to lie about what happened.
These are, to put it mildly, not the traits or temperament you want in someone who could hold the executive power of the federal government.
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Is the Whole GOP out of Touch?

Rudy Giuliani comes to VP pick Sarah Palin's defense
Rudy Giuliani defended the GOP's vice presidential pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, as having more executive experience than Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden "combined."

Giuliani, who failed in his own bid to be president and got passed over for vice president, kept up his new, designated role: Republican attack dog for John McCain.

Having spent part of last week in Denver, where he gleefully lobbed shots at the Democrats' convention, Giuliani picked up the ball yesterday by contrasting Palin's 20 months as governor with Obama and Biden's experience in the legislative branch.

"Maybe it's my own background as a mayor and United States attorney, but this whole idea of executive experience to me would really qualify her," Giuliani said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"I mean I think that she already has more executive experience than Sen. Obama and Sen. Biden combined."
click to view
When moderator Bob Schieffer asked how Palin's experience as a mayor and governor in little populated Alaska could outweigh Obama's and Biden's, Giuliani chuckled.

"Sure. You know why?" said Giuliani. "She had to make decisions. All Sen. Obama has had to do is talk. That's all he does."

Sen. Fred Thompson, another failed presidential contender, added to the refrain when he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "Wolf, I hate to break it to you, but you don't get national experience by being on the Sunday talk shows….She has more experience than Barack Obama."

Speaking on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanapolous," Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) added, "She's done things Obama would never dream of."

Palin's qualifications was one of the two major talking points yesterday on the Sunday shows, the other being Hurricane Gustav.

Because of the storm, Republicans were weighing whether to delay, shorten or even cancel portions of the four day event, which tomorrow was supposed to include a prime-time keynote speech by Giuliani.

The former mayor is an interesting choice for the keynote, which is usually a chance to serve up heaping portions of political red meat to the party faithful.

But Giuliani is pro-choice, pro-gay rights and has favored strict gun controls in the past, all positions that place him outside the party's conservative base.

"We disagree about that," Giuliani said about his pro-choice views in a sit-down with The News. " But I don't disagree on the fact that John McCain is very well qualified to be president, and I have the extra added advantage of having announced that when I was a candidate [for president].... That he should be the president if I wasn't able to win."

The Palin Trap

I may be broke but, I'm not flat busted There is something in the spelling of this text... and more: she's just a crude slut as my today's earlier post shows.

On Friday, following McCain's announcement that Sarah Palin was his choice for running mate, like way too many others I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that this was the stupidest decision of a GOP presidential candidate since Dan Quayle was tapped for the role. Now that my post-DNC sense of invincibility has worn off, however, so has my triumphalism. I woke up yesterday morning with a much different sense of the Sarah Palin choice. I think it's a trap.
The McCain campaign knew exactly how both Democrats and the traditional media would respond to the Palin announcement, because it was entirely predictable. Choosing someone this plainly unqualified wasn't a mistake, and it wasn't even a gamble. It was a trade-off.
My suspicion is that the McCain campaign doesn't really care that Palin undermines McCain's case for experience, because they're not planning to use that argument anymore. They've decided that the experience argument is ineffective against Obama's change message, and they're more or less giving it up. Moreover, they know how to respond to attacks on Palin's total lack of qualification for the office, and are in fact inviting those attacks as a way to build sympathy with working class independent voters. That's where Palin's value lies.
Instead of continuing on the experience theme, McCain is front-loading his "Country First" message, and his campaign is taking the competition for working class voters on economic issues much more seriously than they were a few months ago. McCain has finally figured out that this is not going to be a national security election, and that Iraq is a distant second to the recession as the central issue in 2008. So it doesn't matter that Palin has no foreign policy experience. That's not what they need her for - they need her for the debate over the economy.
Of course, Palin is useless for any actual debate on the subject that might require policy expertise and persuasive argumentation. In that, she's similar to McCain, who is not identified as a Senator with any special knowledge on economic issues, and has been exposed as an out of touch multimillionaire. For all these reasons, and with GOP-style economics completely out of style, the McCain campaign is at a major disadvantage in any wonky policy debate on fixing the economy. Knowing this, and knowing that the election is going to be won or lost on whether their ticket is regarded as the best equipped to meet that challenge, the McCain campaign is doing what the GOP always does when it has to fight for working class voters in a debate that Republicans can't win on its merits: they are reverting to symbolic politics, a role for which Palin is tailor-made.
Palin was educated at a not-famous public university, received a bachelor's degree in journalism and became a sportscaster before entering the political arena. She married her high school sweetheart, a commercial fisherman and oil company worker (not an executive, or even a manager). Her political career began at the PTA. She raised four kids while holding down her career, and recently had a fifth. Compared to McCain, Obama and even Biden, her story is easily the most sympathetic to working class voters, especially white women. While the McCain campaign whispers to voters in Peoria that Obama is not 'one of us,' with Palin they will be able to present a face and a story that is reassuringly familiar - much more so than the top of the ticket.
The McCain campaign is going to trot Palin out whenever they need to make the case that they feel America's pain. They're going to contrast her story to Obama's, and even to Biden's (not the part about being a scrappy kid from Scranton, but the part about being in the Senate for a million years). They're going to have her stick relentlessly to her personal biography, and avoid at all costs any discussion of policy. And whenever any Democrat attacks her for being inexperienced, they're going to turn to working class voters and ask why all these Harvard-educated, pointy-headed know-it-alls think that they know better how to help working families than a woman who worked her way through a demanding career while raising five kids, stayed married to her hard-working husband, and was so successful that she became a governor and then a VP nominee. They're going to turn any question about Palin's 'experience,' whether from a Dem or from a journalist, into another elitist attack on working class culture, another example of snooty, brainiac liberals condescending to ordinary Americans. And to boot, a bunch of good old boys picking on Mrs. Mom.
I don't believe that this is a bid for Hillary supporters, I think it's a bid for the same segment of the electorate that almost every tactic from both campaigns has been aimed at: white working class swing voters. I think the inevitable attacks on Palin are part of the purpose of her selection. By turning her into a lightning rod, they will be able to deflect attacks away from McCain toward a far more sympathetic figure, and then use those attacks as evidence in a far more powerful counterattack against typical liberal elitism.
We're best off not taking that bait.

Sarah Palin Likes the Hard Way. She Is Not A Lady!

Wasilla City Hall
When an opponent and survivor of cancer is publicly called a bitch and a cancer Governor Sarah Palin is amused

Early this year, an op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News ripped into Gov. Sarah Palin's appearance on a morning "shock jock" radio show as "plain and simple one of the most unprofessional, childish and inexcusable performances I've ever seen from a politician."
So what happened? Palin has repeatedly feuded with the state's Senate president, Lyda Green, over a wide range of legislation. Last January, Palin appeared on "The Bob and Mark Show," whose host Bob Lester despises Green. That's when the trouble started:
Early on in the conversation before Palin started to crack up, Lester referred to Sen. Green as a jealous woman and a cancer. Palin, who knows full well Lyda Green is a cancer survivor, didn't do what any decent person would do, say, "Bob, that's going too far."
But as the conversation moved on, Lester intensified his attack on Green.
Lester questioned Green's motherhood, asking Palin if the senator cares about her own kids. Palin laughs.
Then Lester clearly sets the stage for what he is about to say by warning his large audience and Palin. He says, "Governor you can't say this but I will, Lyda Green is a cancer and a bitch." Palin laughs for the second time.
What were teenage boys thinking when they heard the governor laugh at someone being called a cancer and a bitch? How about the teenage girls who look up to Palin. What did they think when they heard her laugh?
But there is more. Lester then describes Green's chair as big and cushy. A clear reference to the senator's weight. Palin laughs a third time. She's just having a grand old time.
Palin was clearly enjoying every second of Lester's vicious attack on her political rival.
Here's the audio:
As the Daily News op-ed notes, Palin later released a statement reading, "The Governor called Senator Green to explain that she does not condone name-calling in any way and apologized if there was a perception that the comment was attributed to the Governor." Then again, at the end of the call in question, Lester asked if he could come visit Palin, and she responded, "I'd be honored to have you."
So what does the incident actually say about Palin? If nothing else, it plays into the developing perception that she has a ruthless streak when taking on her political opponents, whether they be opposing legislators or state/local employees.

Barack Obama Campaign Spokesman Bill Burton responds to John McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate:

"Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. Governor Palin shares John McCain's commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush's failed economic policies -- that's not the change we need, it's just more of the same."

Sen. Chuck Schumer says:
"After the great success of the Democratic convention, the choice of Sarah Palin is surely a Hail Mary pass. It is a real roll of the dice and shows how John McCain, Karl Rove et al realize what a strong position the Obama-Biden team and Democrats in general are in in this election. Certainly the choice of Palin puts to rest any argument about inexperience on the Democratic team and while Palin is a fine person, her lack of experience makes the thought of her assuming the presidency troubling. I particularly look forward to the Biden-Palin debate in Missouri."

Rep. Rahm Emanuel:
"Is this really who the Republican Party wants to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency? Given Sarah Palin's lack of experience on every front and on nearly every issue, this Vice Presidential pick doesn't show judgment: it shows political panic."

Rep. Jim Clyburn on South Carolina ETV Radio:
"I do believe that McCain has to do something to reshuffle the cards, shake up the establishment, do something unexpected and Governor Palin has all the kinds of things that McCain might see as a way to shake things up. I think [her selection] would be something similar to Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle proved to be sort of an embarrassment as a campaigner. Being thrust on a national stage like that could be very tough. Now Mondale tried to shake things up by going with Geraldine Ferraro.she proved to be a disaster as a running mate. And as a campaigner, she was absolutely awful. And so I just think that it is very risky for McCain to do this, but it may be all he has left."

Barbara Boxer:
The vice president is a heartbeat away from becoming president, so to choose someone with not one hour's worth of experience on national issues is a dangerous choice.
If John McCain thought that choosing Sarah Palin would attract Hillary Clinton voters, he is badly mistaken.
The only similarity between her and Hillary Clinton is that they are both women. On the issues, they could not be further apart.
Sen. McCain had so many other options if he wanted to put a woman on his ticket, such as Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe -- they would have been an appropriate choice compared to this dangerous choice.
In addition, Sarah Palin is under investigation by the Alaska state legislature, which makes this more incomprehensible.

Meanwhile, the non-partisan group Campaign Money Watch responded that the pick underscores McCain's loss of maverick reformer credentials:
"In choosing Governor Palin, Senator McCain is clearly trying to shore up his past maverick reformer image - an image that is now in tatters due to the type of campaign he's run and the big money lobbyists he depends on every day of the week," Donnelly said.
"This selection raises plenty of questions," Donnelly continued. "She bills herself as a reformer, but has been silent on whether she supports public financing of elections in her own state. As governor of an oil-producing state, she's been a friend to Big Oil. Given John McCain's extensive fundraising from Big Oil, her selection raises concerns of whether the McCain-Palin ticket will promise the same access for oil companies and their lobbyists that we've seen for nearly eight years from the Bush-Cheney administration."

Obama distanced himself from some of the harsher criticisms of Palin, the Politico reports:
"I think that, uh, you know, campaigns start getting these, uh, hair triggers and, uh, the statement that Joe and I put out reflects our sentiments," he said, according to the pool report, apparently criticizing his staff for going overboard, as he did occasionally in the primary.
He was referring to a more gracious statement of congratulations he issued later with Biden, which he then reiterated.
"I haven't met her before. She seems like a compelling person ... with a terrific personal story.
"I'm sure that she will help make the case for Republicans, unfortunately the case is more of the same, and so ultimately John McCain is at the top of the ticket."
"He wants to take the country in the wrong direction, I'm assuming Gov. Palin agrees with him and his policies," he said.
"But the fact that she ... will soon be nominated ... is one more indicator of this country moving forward ... one more hit against that glass ceiling. I congratulate her and look forward to a vigorous debate."

Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid’s Limits

When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.
That is a symptom of a broad national problem. Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore’s hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands.
The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.
The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads.
“We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
While the United States today gets barely 1 percent of its electricity from wind turbines, many experts are starting to think that figure could hit 20 percent.
Achieving that would require moving large amounts of power over long distances, from the windy, lightly populated plains in the middle of the country to the coasts where many people live. Builders are also contemplating immense solar-power stations in the nation’s deserts that would pose the same transmission problems.
The grid’s limitations are putting a damper on such projects already. Gabriel Alonso, chief development officer of Horizon Wind Energy, the company that operates Maple Ridge, said that in parts of Wyoming, a turbine could make 50 percent more electricity than the identical model built in New York or Texas.
“The windiest sites have not been built, because there is no way to move that electricity from there to the load centers,” he said.
The basic problem is that many transmission lines, and the connections between them, are simply too small for the amount of power companies would like to squeeze through them. The difficulty is most acute for long-distance transmission, but shows up at times even over distances of a few hundred miles.
Transmission lines carrying power away from the Maple Ridge farm, near Lowville, N.Y., have sometimes become so congested that the company’s only choice is to shut down — or pay fees for the privilege of continuing to pump power into the lines.
Politicians in Washington have long known about the grid’s limitations but have made scant headway in solving them. They are reluctant to trample the prerogatives of state governments, which have traditionally exercised authority over the grid and have little incentive to push improvements that would benefit neighboring states.
In Texas, T. Boone Pickens, the oilman building the world’s largest wind farm, plans to tackle the grid problem by using a right of way he is developing for water pipelines for a 250-mile transmission line from the Panhandle to the Dallas market. He has testified in Congress that Texas policy is especially favorable for such a project and that other wind developers cannot be expected to match his efforts.
“If you want to do it on a national scale, where the transmission line distances will be much longer, and utility regulations are different, Congress must act,” he said on Capitol Hill.
Enthusiasm for wind energy is running at fever pitch these days, with bold plans on the drawing boards, like Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s notion of dotting New York City with turbines. Companies are even reviving ideas of storing wind-generated energy using compressed air or spinning flywheels.
Yet experts say that without a solution to the grid problem, effective use of wind power on a wide scale is likely to remain a dream.
The power grid is balkanized, with about 200,000 miles of power lines divided among 500 owners. Big transmission upgrades often involve multiple companies, many state governments and numerous permits. Every addition to the grid provokes fights with property owners.
These barriers mean that electrical generation is growing four times faster than transmission, according to federal figures.
In a 2005 energy law, Congress gave the Energy Department the authority to step in to approve transmission if states refused to act. The department designated two areas, one in the Middle Atlantic States and one in the Southwest, as national priorities where it might do so; 14 United States senators then signed a letter saying the department was being too aggressive.

Energy Department leaders say that, however understandable the local concerns, they are getting in the way. “Modernizing the electric infrastructure is an urgent national problem, and one we all share,” said Kevin M. Kolevar, assistant secretary for electricity delivery and energy reliability, in a speech last year.
Unlike answers to many of the nation’s energy problems, improvements to the grid would require no new technology. An Energy Department plan to source 20 percent of the nation’s electricity from wind calls for a high-voltage backbone spanning the country that would be similar to 2,100 miles of lines already operated by a company called American Electric Power.
The cost would be high, $60 billion or more, but in theory could be spread across many years and tens of millions of electrical customers. However, in most states, rules used by public service commissions to evaluate transmission investments discourage multistate projects of this sort. In some states with low electric rates, elected officials fear that new lines will simply export their cheap power and drive rates up.
Without a clear way of recovering the costs and earning a profit, and with little leadership on the issue from the federal government, no company or organization has offered to fight the political battles necessary to get such a transmission backbone built.
Texas and California have recently made some progress in building transmission lines for wind power, but nationally, the problem seems likely to get worse. Today, New York State has about 1,500 megawatts of wind capacity. A megawatt is an instantaneous measure of power. A large Wal-Mart draws about one megawatt. The state is planning for an additional 8,000 megawatts of capacity.
But those turbines will need to go in remote, windy areas that are far off the beaten path, electrically speaking, and it is not clear enough transmission capacity will be developed. Save for two underwater connections to Long Island, New York State has not built a major new power line in 20 years.
A handful of states like California that have set aggressive goals for renewable energy are being forced to deal with the issue, since the goals cannot be met without additional power lines.
But Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico and a former energy secretary under President Bill Clinton, contends that these piecemeal efforts are not enough to tap the nation’s potential for renewable energy.
Wind advocates say that just two of the windiest states, North Dakota and South Dakota, could in principle generate half the nation’s electricity from turbines. But the way the national grid is configured, half the country would have to move to the Dakotas in order to use the power.
“We still have a third-world grid,” Mr. Richardson [supporting the Obama-Energy-Plan] said, repeating a comment he has made several times. “With the federal government not investing, not setting good regulatory mechanisms, and basically taking a back seat on everything except drilling and fossil fuels, the grid has not been modernized, especially for wind energy.”

OK, but how about to do it yourself?

Is History Siding With Obama’s Economic Plan?

Such differences are hardly surprising. Democrats and Republicans have followed different approaches to the economy for as long as there have been Democrats and Republicans. Longer, actually. Remember Hamilton versus Jefferson?
Many Americans know that there are characteristic policy differences between the two parties. But few are aware of two important facts about the post-World War II era, both of which are brilliantly delineated in a new book, “Unequal Democracy,” by Larry M. Bartels, a professor of political science at Princeton. Understanding them might help voters see what could be at stake, economically speaking, in November.
I call the first fact the Great Partisan Growth Divide. Simply put, the United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.
The stark contrast between the whiz-bang Clinton years and the dreary Bush years is familiar because it is so recent. But while it is extreme, it is not atypical. Data for the whole period from 1948 to 2007, during which Republicans occupied the White House for 34 years and Democrats for 26, show average annual growth of real gross national product of 1.64 percent per capita under Republican presidents versus 2.78 percent under Democrats.
That 1.14-point difference, if maintained for eight years, would yield 9.33 percent more income per person, which is a lot more than almost anyone can expect from a tax cut.
Such a large historical gap in economic performance between the two parties is rather surprising, because presidents have limited leverage over the nation’s economy. Most economists will tell you that Federal Reserve policy and oil prices, to name just two influences, are far more powerful than fiscal policy. Furthermore, as those mutual fund prospectuses constantly warn us, past results are no guarantee of future performance. But statistical regularities, like facts, are stubborn things. You bet against them at your peril.
The second big historical fact, which might be called the Great Partisan Inequality Divide, is the focus of Professor Bartels’s work.
It is well known that income inequality in the United States has been on the rise for about 30 years now — an unsettling development that has finally touched the public consciousness. But Professor Bartels unearths a stunning statistical regularity: Over the entire 60-year period, income inequality trended substantially upward under Republican presidents but slightly downward under Democrats, thus accounting for the widening income gaps over all. And the bad news for America’s poor is that Republicans have won five of the seven elections going back to 1980.
The Great Partisan Inequality Divide is not limited to the poor. To get a more granular look, Professor Bartels studied the postwar history of income gains at five different places in the income distribution.
The 20th percentile is the income level at which 20 percent of all families have less income and 80 percent have more. It is thus a plausible dividing line between the poor and the non-poor. Similarly, the 40th percentile is the income level at which 40 percent of the families are poorer and 60 percent are richer. And similarly for the 60th, 80th, and 95th percentiles. The 95th percentile is the best dividing line between the rich and the non-rich that the data permitted Professor Bartels to study. (That dividing line, by the way, is well below the $5 million threshold John McCain has jokingly used for defining the rich. It’s closer to $180,000.)
The accompanying table, which is adapted from the book, tells a remarkably consistent story. It shows that when Democrats were in the White House, lower-income families experienced slightly faster income growth than higher-income families — which means that incomes were equalizing. In stark contrast, it also shows much faster income growth for the better-off when Republicans were in the White House — thus widening the gap in income.
The table also shows that families at the 95th percentile fared almost as well under Republican presidents as under Democrats (1.90 percent growth per year, versus 2.12 percent), giving them little stake, economically, in election outcomes. But the stakes were enormous for the less well-to-do. Families at the 20th percentile fared much worse under Republicans than under Democrats (0.43 percent versus 2.64 percent). Eight years of growth at an annual rate of 0.43 percent increases a family’s income by just 3.5 percent, while eight years of growth at 2.64 percent raises it by 23.2 percent.
The sources of such large differences make for a slightly complicated story. In the early part of the period — say, the pre-Reagan years — the Great Partisan Growth Divide accounted for most of the Great Partisan Inequality divide, because the poor do relatively better in a high-growth economy.
Beginning with the Reagan presidency, however, growth differences are smaller and tax and transfer policies have played a larger role. We know, for example, that Republicans have typically favored large tax cuts for upper-income groups while Democrats have opposed them. In addition, Democrats have been more willing to raise the minimum wage, and Republicans have been more hostile toward unions.
The two Great Partisan Divides combine to suggest that, if history is a guide, an Obama victory in November would lead to faster economic growth with less inequality, while a McCain victory would lead to slower economic growth with more inequality. Which part of the Obama menu don’t you like?

For a Kennedy, an Unexpected Role in the Veep Choice

CHICAGO — Yes, Caroline Kennedy says, she was taken aback when Senator Barack Obama asked her in the late spring to play a primary role on his vice-presidential search team.
“I was surprised and really honored,” she said Sunday in a telephone interview. “I thought it would be incredibly interesting and obviously important.”
When Ms. Kennedy endorsed Mr. Obama in January, making a considerable foray onto a political stage she has sought to avoid, she thought her announcement would be the extent of her public role in his campaign.
But for the past two months, she has been a detective, gathering information, asking questions and learning exhaustive details about some of the nation’s top Democrats. (No, she said, she would not share anything.) Either alone or with her co-chairman of the search team, Eric Holder, she talked with senators and members of Congress, governors and other party leaders.
She said Mr. Obama cast a wide net. “His goals and values were really clear from the way he approached it. He wanted somebody who was an independent thinker.”
They presented the information to Mr. Obama in a handful of private sessions, Ms. Kennedy said, and she watched Mr. Obama work his way to selecting Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.
She said the search showed her another side of Mr. Obama.
“I’ve campaigned with him and seen him in large settings,” Ms. Kennedy said, “but to see the way he asked questions, listened, brought people together, with his leadership style and the kind of judgments he was making, really made me think he was even better than I thought he was.”

Advisers Say Conservative Ire Pushed McCain Away From Picking Lieberman

In the end, the choice of his running mate said more about Senator John McCain and his image of himself than it did about Sarah Palin, the little-known governor of Alaska whose selection has shaken up the presidential race.
For weeks, advisers close to the campaign said, Mr. McCain had wanted to name as his running mate his good friend Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democrat turned independent. But by the end of last weekend, the outrage from Christian conservatives over the possibility that Mr. McCain would fill out the Republican ticket with Mr. Lieberman, a supporter of abortion rights, had become too intense to be ignored.
With time running out, and after a long meeting with his inner circle in Phoenix, Mr. McCain finally picked up the phone last Sunday and reached Ms. Palin at the Alaska State Fair. Although the campaign’s polling on Mr. McCain’s potential running mates was inconclusive on the selection of Ms. Palin — virtually no one had heard of her, a McCain adviser said — the governor, who opposes abortion, had glowing reviews from influential social conservatives.
Mr. McCain was comfortable with two others on his short list, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. But neither was the transformative, attention-grabbing choice Mr. McCain felt he needed, top campaign advisers said, to help him pivot from his image as the custodian of the status quo to a change agent like his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama.
Not least, Mr. Obama’s decision to pass over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as his running mate opened the possibility for Republicans to put a woman on the ticket and pick off some of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters.
At 11 a.m. on Thursday, at the McCain vacation compound near Sedona, Ariz., Mr. McCain invited Ms. Palin to join him on the ticket. He hardly knew her, and she had virtually no foreign policy experience, but Ms. Palin was a “kindred spirit,” a McCain adviser said. Mr. McCain was betting, the adviser said, that she would help him reclaim the mantle of maverick that he had lost this year.
The selection was the culmination of a five-month process, described by Mr. McCain’s inner circle and outside advisers in interviews this past weekend, and offers a glimpse into how Mr. McCain might make high-stakes decisions as president.
At the very least, the process reflects Mr. McCain’s history of making fast, instinctive and sometimes risky decisions. “I make them as quickly as I can, quicker than the other fellow, if I can,” Mr. McCain wrote, with his top adviser Mark Salter, in his 2002 book, “Worth the Fighting For.” “Often my haste is a mistake, but I live with the consequences without complaint.”
Mr. McCain began the search for a running mate shortly after he secured the Republican nomination, with some 40 names on a list. By early spring he had cut it to 20, including, a top adviser said, at least five women: Ms. Palin; Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Carleton S. Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard; and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas.
Mr. McCain cast the process, at least in those days, as orderly and said that the last thing he wanted was the kind of rushed decision that President George Bush had made in 1988 in selecting his running mate, Dan Quayle, then a senator from Indiana.
But it was not until the last few weeks that Mr. McCain winnowed his list to five or six finalists. They included, a McCain adviser said, Mr. Pawlenty, Mr. Romney, Mr. Lieberman, Ms. Palin and Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania who also supports abortion rights. Ms. Palin, unlike the others, was barely mentioned in news media speculation.
The finalists, including Ms. Palin, were vetted, a campaign adviser said, and Mr. McCain then asked his inner circle — Mr. Salter, Rick Davis, Steve Schmidt and Charlie Black — to provide him with assessments of each. “He said, ‘Give me plusses and minuses on each of these people,’ ” Mr. Black said.
One of Mr. McCain’s closest friends, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, weighed in as well, pushing so hard for Mr. Lieberman — Mr. McCain, Mr. Graham and Mr. Lieberman are longtime traveling companions — that he vexed some of the other advisers. Others in the inner circle favored Mr. Pawlenty or Mr. Romney. Ms. Palin had no strong advocates in the group, an outside adviser said, but she had no detractors, either.
Last Sunday, 24 hours after Mr. Obama announced his running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, Mr. McCain met with his senior campaign team at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Phoenix. By then, campaign advisers said, the group had long decided that Mr. McCain’s “experience versus change” argument against Mr. Obama had run its course, to the extent that it had worked at all.
At the same time, Mr. Obama’s coming acceptance speech before a stadium of about 80,000 people (and what turned out to be a television audience of nearly 40 million) loomed large. As much as the campaign was publicly dismissing Mr. Obama as a celebrity in a rock-star setting, the concern was that his command of such a large crowd on the last night of the Democratic convention would give him the aura of a president.
In any case, one campaign adviser said, Mr. McCain hated running as the wizened old hand of experience. Despite his embrace this year of President Bush and many of the administration’s policies, Mr. McCain, a campaign adviser said, still saw himself as the maverick who delighted in occasionally throwing political grenades at his own Party.
Ms. Palin, and not Mr. Pawlenty or Mr. Romney, would reinforce Mr. McCain’s self-image, an adviser said. She had a reputation as a reformer in Alaska, she hunted and fished, and she had once belonged to a union. Just as crucial, Ms. Palin, 44, was beloved by the party’s religious base but did not come off as shrill. “She’s conservative,” Mr. Black said, “but she’s not an ideologue.”
After Mr. McCain contacted Ms. Palin, Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Salter met with her on Wednesday in Flagstaff, Ariz. It was not until the following morning that she traveled to Sedona to meet with Mr. McCain, who then sat down with her for his only interview of a potential running mate.
Within hours if not minutes after the interview was concluded, Ms. Palin had the job.
Over the next weeks, Ms. Palin will be prepared by Mr. McCain’s foreign policy staff, led by Randy Scheunemann, for the vice-presidential debate with Mr. Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who moves easily among heads of state.
Introducing Ms. Palin at a rally Saturday in Washington, Pa., Mr. McCain praised her and spoke about her selection.
“You know, I had a lot of good people to choose from, and I want to thank Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani,” said Mr. McCain, referring to his rivals for the Republican nomination. “And,” he added, “it’s with great pride and gratitude I tell you I have found the right partner to help me stand up to those who have corrupted Washington.”
For her part, Ms. Palin still sounded surprised to have been picked. “Well, I know that when Senator McCain asked me to be his running mate, he had a short list of highly qualified men and women,” she said. “To have made that list at all was a privilege. And to have been chosen, it brings a great challenge.
“I know that it will demand the best that I have to give, and I promise nothing less.”

Palin Pleased with Obama's Energy Plan and His Stance on Iraq

August 4, 2008, Fairbanks, Alaska - Governor Sarah Palin today responded to the energy plan put forward by the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

“I am pleased to see Senator Obama acknowledge the huge potential Alaska’s natural gas reserves represent in terms of clean energy and sound jobs,” Governor Palin said. “The steps taken by the Alaska State Legislature this past week demonstrate that we are ready, willing and able to supply the energy our nation needs.”

In a speech given in Lansing, Michigan, Senator Obama called for the completion of the Alaska natural gas pipeline, stating, “Over the next five years, we should also lease more of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska for oil and gas production. And we should also tap more of our substantial natural gas reserves and work with the Canadian government to finally build the Alaska natural gas pipeline, delivering clean natural gas and creating good jobs in the process.”

Governor Palin also acknowledged the Senator’s proposal to offer $1,000 rebates to those struggling with the high cost of energy.

“We in Alaska feel that crunch and are taking steps to address it right here at home,” Governor Palin said. “This is a tool that must be on the table to buy us time until our long-term energy plans can be put into place. We have already enjoyed the support of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, and it is gratifying to see Senator Obama get on board.”

The Governor did question the means to pay for Obama’s proposed rebate — a windfall profits tax on oil companies. In Alaska, the state’s resource valuation system, ACES, provides strong incentives for companies to re-invest their profits in new production.

“Windfall profits taxes alone prevent additional investment in domestic production. Without new supplies from American reserves, our dependency and addiction to foreign sources of oil will continue,” Governor Palin said.

McCain and I are not on the same Iraq page, Palin says

By Carrie Melago, Daily News Staff Writer:
Two weeks before she was tapped as the Republican vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin compared herself to Barack Obama - and said she didn't see eye-to-eye with John McCain on the Iraq war.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Palin said her gubernatorial campaign in Alaska had striking similarities to Obama's since her theme was also "new energy."
She said that the Democrat's strong showing in Alaska had people in the traditionally Republican state "wigging out," but not her.

"To me, that's indicative, too. It's the no-more-status quo, it's change," she told reporter Philip Gourevitch.

Palin went on to say that she is "hard-core Republican" on issues of gun control and abortion, but that she doesn't consider herself overly partisan and doesn't even speak to her state's GOP leader. She said McCain similarly has been "buttin' heads with Republicans for years," calling that a "healthy place to be."
She was less enthusiastic when it came to his stance on the war in Iraq.
"I'm a mom, and my son is going to get deployed in September, and we better have a real clear plan for this war," she said. "And it better not have to do with oil and dependence on foreign energy."

Now Cindy McCain has something else to say about her husbands new girlfriend:

Alaskan and Russian islands are fewer than 3 miles apart in the Bering Strait. The two mainlands are about 55 miles apart.

Reminded that Democrats are calling Palin too inexperienced to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, she responded by saying that Palin's son is about be deployed to Iraq.

"I asked her, how do you feel about this? This is two things you have to do, is not only possibly be a vice presidential candidate, but also, you know, listen, to worry about your son," Cindy McCain recounted of her conversation with Palin before the vice presidential announcement. "And she looked me square in the eye and she said, 'You know something? I'm a mother. I can do it.'"

[What??? two weeks ago she was less enthusiastic when it came to his (McCain's) stance on the war in Iraq.
"I'm a mom, and my son is going to get deployed in September, and we better have a real clear plan for this war,"]

Democratic Sen. John Kerry, his party's 2004 presidential nominee, disputed Palin's credentials a few minutes later on the show, saying the Alaska governor has "zero, zero experience in foreign policy."

It's unusual for the spouse of a presidential candidate to go on a Sunday talk show, but Cindy McCain used her 10 minutes to defend her husband from charges of elitism.

She also signaled she'd want to focus on humanitarian crises as first lady, talking about her meetings in Georgia last week with refugees of the recent Russian invasion.

Georgia "is a wonderful, young democracy," McCain said. "We can't let it go. We can't let a country come back in and take it back down to a Soviet-style government. This is democracy, and that's what we're all about."

She added: "The United States is the best at what we do. We're the ones that give the most and give the earliest, every time something happens. And I'd like to continue that, and also encourage others to get involved. You don't have to cross an ocean to be of help."

McCain bristled at charges by Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama that her husband is out of touch with most Americans because of the eight homes their family owns.

"My husband was a Navy boy. His father and mother were in the Navy. I mean, there's nothing elitist about that," she said. "I'm offended by Barack Obama saying that about my husband."

Todd Palin Unique Among Nation's 5 First Husbands

THE MAN: He's worked the oil patch, won the Iron Dog and takes care of the kids.
It was mid-February and Todd Palin, Alaska's newest first gentleman, was speeding across 2000 miles of ice and snowy tundra en route to victory in the world's most grueling snowmobile race.
That same week, his wife, Gov. Sarah Palin, was in Juneau requesting more money for the state budget and assuring legislators they'd soon see her plan for a natural gas pipeline that could one day be the most expensive construction project in North America. Then she flew to Fairbanks to wave her exhausted husband across the finish line.
It's not just his title as the state's reigning snowmobile co-champion that sets 42-year-old Todd Palin apart from the nation's other first spouses. And it's not that he's one of just five who are men.
White-collar jobs in law, education or health care are typical among the current crop of first spouses, but Palin spent nearly 20 years as a blue-collar employee in the oil fields of the North Slope. And every summer he heads west to his birthplace in Dillingham to work the Bristol Bay commercial salmon fishery from his property on the Nushagak River.
A lifetime of manual labor in the state's two largest and most physically demanding industries is helping Palin carve out his role as Alaska's first spouse, or "first dude," a nickname he has in common with the Kansas governor's husband, Gary Sebelius.
Like other first spouses around the country, Palin has been asked to champion an array of causes or institutions since his wife took office in December.
His favorite is steering young Alaskans toward stable jobs in the oil and gas industry. It's a singular choice among his counterparts, whose pet issues include schools, public health, domestic violence, poverty or the arts.
BP-TRAINED
"For those of us who learn by touching and tearing stuff apart and for those who don't have the financial background to go to college, just being a product of that on-the-job training is really important," Palin said one morning over pastries at an Anchorage coffee shop, before meeting with trainers at several companies and trade groups in Anchorage and Wasilla.
Palin, who took college courses, but does not have a degree, said he is grateful for the training he received from the multinational oil company BP starting in 1989.
Until recently, he earned hourly wages as a production operator in a BP-run facility that separates oil from gas and water. Palin was making between $100,000 and $120,000 a year before he went on leave in December to make more time for his family and avoid potential conflicts of interest. London-based BP is heavily involved in the gas pipeline negotiations with his wife's administration.
Palin's advocacy dovetails neatly with his wife's No. 1 priority: forging a construction contract with private companies to transport natural gas from the North Slope to the Lower 48. The export of natural gas would presumably replace revenue from the state's dwindling oil reserves, which funded 80 percent of the state budget last year.
"He will be passing information on to me and participating in getting work force development programs up and running in Alaska," Sarah Palin said. "That's in addition to doing all the things that make Todd Todd. There are lots of things I would never want to take away from him, but this is something he's enthused about."
Those things include taking care of their four kids and escaping into the Alaska wilderness to fish commercially, hunt or train for the Tesoro Iron Dog, billed as the longest, toughest snowmobile race in the world. The Palins have a son, Track, 18, and three daughters, Bristol, 16, Willow, 12, and Piper, 6.
A PALIN PASSION
Palin is so passionate about the Iron Dog that he made sure to squeeze in snowmobile runs between official events this winter, such as statewide inaugural galas, and moving the family to the governor's mansion in Juneau. The capital is 600 miles southeast of the family home in Wasilla.
"I've got a really good group of buddies and we train either early in the morning or late at night so we can still make things like the kids' basketball games and try not to impact the family life," Palin said.
In past years, Palin has trained about 3,000 miles before the race to accustom his body to hours of constant jolting and to detect any mechanical kinks in his vehicle. This winter, Palin covered more than 2,500 miles on the frozen swamps and rivers around Wasilla.
Scott Davis, his race partner of five years, said Palin has the willpower to stay levelheaded while racing at high speeds over terrain that can range from glare ice to bare ground to flooded coastlines strewn with driftwood. The Iron Dog traces the Iditarod trail from Wasilla to Nome, plus an additional leg to Fairbanks.
"I have to trust my life in his hands, and I do, because he can still think when he's dehydrated and tired," said Davis, a seven-time winner. "You know, I think this is the longest I've been partners with anybody. A lot of teams certainly don't have fun when they're doing it and I like to think Todd and I do."
This year's win is Palin's fourth since he started running the Iron Dog in 1993.
Palin was born in the western Alaska town of Dillingham to Jim Palin and Blanche Kallstrom, who is a quarter Yu'pik Eskimo. He met Sarah Heath at a high school basketball game and they eloped in 1988, six years after graduation, to avoid having to pay for a wedding.
"We had a bad fishing year that year, so we didn't have any money," Todd Palin said. "So we decided to spend 35 bucks and go down to the courthouse."
At home, Palin takes care of the cooking, the bills and other domestic paperwork, in addition to driving the kids to extracurricular activities like basketball and soccer, according to his wife. He divides much of his time between Wasilla, where Track is recovering from shoulder surgery, and the capital in Juneau, where the Palin daughters are in school.
"He can go on just an hour or two of sleep a night. He says, 'I can sleep when I die,' " said Sarah Palin. "There is no way I could have done this job without his tremendous contributions to the home life. He's able to keep it organized, like a well-oiled machine."
Here you can watch the former sports journalist Sarah Palin: Video MSNBC.

Sarah Palin Poses Troopergate Risk to John McCain's US Election bid

John McCain has not just taken a risk on the inexperience of Sarah Palin, his choice of running mate in the presidential race.

He is also gambling that an ethics investigation into the Alaska governjavascript:void(0)or does not blow up in her face when the Democrat leading the inquiry delivers his report on Oct 31 - just five days before the election.
What started as a family dispute in the suburbs of Anchorage could yet determine who governs the world's most powerful nation for the next four years as Alaskan politics finds itself as the unprecedented focus of a billion-dollar election battle.
Gov Palin is under investigation for her role in the sacking last month of Walter Monegan, the state's public safety director. Mr Monegan had previously refused to fire Mrs Palin's estranged former brother-in-law, a state trooper who allegedly threatened to shoot her father during a nasty child custody battle with her sister.
Mrs Palin said that Mr Monegan was removed for failing to fill vacancies and welcomed a public examination of her actions. Mr Monegan said he was put under pressure to sack the state trooper Michael Wooten by Mr Palin's husband Todd and a senior aide.
An internal trooper investigation had found Mr Wooten guilty of several infractions - using a taser stun gun on his stepson, drinking on duty, threatening his then father-in-law and shooting a moose without a permit, the Anchorage Daily News reported yesterday.
Those events took place when Mrs Palin was mayor of Wasilla, a town of about 7,000 people which is an hour's drive north of Anchorage and a different world from the nation's capital Washington. Nonetheless, Mr McCain's White House hopes could be shaped by the outcome of Alaska's "Troopergate", as the controversy is inevitable known.
The affair has done little to dampen Mrs Palin's popularity rating which stands at a level - 80 per cent - of which governors of the other 49 states can only dream. Not that that translates into many people in the sparsely-populated state: she was elected with a total of just 115,000 votes.
There is no denying that the state's First Family is an all-Alaskan clan. In an interview with People magazine to introduce them to the American people, Mr Palin, who is one-quarter Yu'pik Eskimo, offers some revealing domestic insights.
The favorite dish on the dinner table is apparently caribou hot dogs.
"We get caribou, get 'em ground up and put them into hot dogs," said the reigning champion in the annual Iron Dog snowmobile race, known affectionately as "First Dude".
His wife's work duties have apparently prevented her hunting recently and he was due to go shooting this weekend but had to cancel the trip to help her run for the White House instead.
He also disclosed the source of their children's unusual names: "Sarah's parents were coaches and the whole family was involved in track and I was an athlete in high school, so with our first-born, I was, like, 'Track!' Bristol is named after Bristol Bay. That's where I grew up, that's where we commercial fish.
"Willow is a community there in Alaska. And then Piper, you know, there's just not too many Pipers out there and it's a cool name. And Trig is a Norse name for 'strength'."
In their home town of Wasilla, where the former beauty queen and sports journalist began her career in public life with election to the parent-teachers' association, friends and family greeted the news with a mixture of delight and disbelief.
"Holy cow. I'm just kind of speechless on the whole thing," said her father Chuck Heath. The former elementary schoolteacher shot the grizzly bear whose hide now adorns his daughter's office sofa but that is as far as his political interests stretch. "I'd rather go moose hunting than be involved with politics," he confessed.
On the campaign trail, the Democrats will highlight Mrs Palin's decision to remain neutral during the primary campaign because she disagreed with Mr McCain's opposition to oil drilling in Alaska's wildlife refuge.
But they will struggle to link her to financial scandals involving the state's Republican hierarchy, most notably the recently indicted Sen Ted Stevens, as Mrs Palin made her name fighting corruption and against what she calls the "good 'ole boy" network. She ran an "insurgent" campaign against her party establishment to win the 2006 gubernatorial election.
But Mrs Palin's sharp political elbows have earned her some enemies along the way, particularly within ranks of her own party.
"I would have preferred the McCain folks to have done a little more homework and chosen another candidate," Lyda Green, the Republican state senate president and fellow Wasilla resident, told The Sunday Telegraph. "It is hard enough going from running a town of a few thousand people to become governor. It is a huge leap to move to the national stage with such little legislative experience. But she's a quick learner and when she puts her mind to something, she is really aggressive. You know her nickname on the school basketball team? Sarah Barracuda."

Sarah Palin and Feminists for Life

By Ruth Rosen, AlterNet.

McCain's veep pick is a proud member of Feminists for Life, which tries to convince young women that choice means giving up the right to 'choose.'

Many people are unfamiliar with Feminists for Life and wonder what the choice of Sarah Palin, who is against abortion rights, signals to the electorate.
Well, let me tell you something about Feminists for Life. In 2003, I decided to investigate this group and its energetic leader, Serrin Foster. What did it mean, I wondered, to be a feminist and actively fight against the right to choose when or whether to have a child?
So I went to a church in sprawling, suburban, wealthy Danville, California to hear Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life, speak on "The Feminist Case Against Abortion" to a huge crowd of mainly high-school students.
Founded in 1972, one year before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the historic Roe vs. Wade decision that made abortion legal in the United States, Feminists for Life now focuses exclusively on practical alternatives to abortion for college-age women.
No woman, argues Foster, should ever have to choose between having a child and a career. "Abortion is a reflection that society has failed women," she tells high school and college students as she tours the country.
"Women deserve better choices," she says and points to practical alternatives and resources available to a young woman who has an unwanted pregnancy. She can choose single parenthood and use food stamps or temporary assistance to needy families. She can choose adoption. Or, college-age women can pressure school campuses to offer child care and family housing so that they never, ever, have to choose between a pregnancy and an education.
Feminism is all about having choices, Foster told me, after her talk. I couldn't agree more. Young women, she says, should have the right to bear a child and have access to high-quality, affordable child care. Again, I heartily agreed.
But Foster is cleverly disingenuous. When I asked what she does to promote child care, her answers were vague and evasive. When I read the organization's brochures aimed at campus physicians and psychologists, I found nothing about campaigning for child care. The real goal is to convince professionals to persuade young women to "choose" to bear a baby.
Despite its protestations, Feminists for Life is not really about choice. You can see this on its Web site, where the slogan "refuse to choose" appeared repeatedly. Nor does the organization challenge the real difficulties working mothers face. Instead, it cleverly appropriates the words "feminist" and "choice" to convince young women that abortion is always an unacceptable choice.
Part of the problem is that Foster either does not know her history or purposefully distorts the past. She spoke that night as though she had invented the idea of child care and describes pioneer feminists of the 1960s and 1970s as selfish, diabolical creatures who never wanted women to have the choice to bear a child.
But she's wrong. The three demands made at the first national march in New York City in 1970 included child care, equal pay for equal work and the legal right to "choose" an abortion. Many feminists, moreover, spent years trying to persuade the institutions where they worked that real equality for women required family-friendly policies, including child care.
Foster also accused Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America of supporting abortion in order to stay in business. But I had to wonder about her own financial goals when I saw, in the organization's magazine, that I could buy a "stunning new logo pin" in either sterling silver or 24-carat gold for $75.
In the end, I decided that Feminists for Life is neither about feminism nor about choice. It is a cunning attempt to convince young women that choice means giving up the right to "choose."
Sarah Palin is the inexperienced woman Sen. John McCain has chosen as his running mate, hoping that she will attract the vital female vote.. It's the worst kind of affirmative action, choosing a person he barely knows, who is completely unprepared to assume any national office. It's like nominating Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court. It's all about ideology and not about competence.
To put it bluntly, Sarah Palin is no Hillary Clinton. Nor does she have the vision and brilliance of Barack Obama. This is an incredible insult to most American women. Just how stupid does he think we are?

Getting to Know Sarah Palin

To show what a Republican is worth in current politics, it is a pleasure to take the measures of Sarah Palin, who is, according to Republican standards, the most qualified after McCain to be President of the United States of America.
Pointer presents a series of aspects, selected from the media, to see what and how long this image can endure, a count down. This dossier of articles is labeled The Palin COUNT DOWN and you can select the articles apart from the others by selecting that label.
Fairbanks Paper Hits Palin Veep Pick
Editor & Publisher Staff August 29, 2008
NEW YORK Since, even as her leading backers admit, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska is unknown nationally -- until today, when she was picked by John McCain as his running mate -- E&P will provide a number of pieces in coming days about her, taken strictly from Alaska newspapers and reporters for same.
The first one comes from the Daily News-Miner in Fairbanks, Alaska. Surprisingly, considering she is now the highest profile political figure to ever come from Alaska, the newspaper in an editorial posted on its site today declared her flatly not qualified for the office of vice president.
It also brought up an intriguing fact. Palin in her speech on Friday -- also a point used by McCain surrogates -- is that she refused to go along with the plan to build the so-called "bridge to nowhere" in her state, wanting to halt wasteful spending. But the Fairbanks editorial points out that the state still kept the money for the project.

Here is an excerpt from the editorial.

Sen. John McCain’s selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate was a stunning decision that should make Alaskans proud, even while we wonder about the actual merits of the choice....

Alaskans and Americans must ask, though, whether she should become vice president and, more importantly, be placed first in line to become president.

In fact, as the governor herself acknowledged in her acceptance speech, she never set out to be involved in public affairs. She has never publicly demonstrated the kind of interest, much less expertise, in federal issues and foreign affairs that should mark a candidate for the second-highest office in the land. Republicans rightfully have criticized the Democratic nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, for his lack of experience, but Palin is a neophyte in comparison; how will Republicans reconcile the criticism of Obama with the obligatory cheering for Palin?
Most people would acknowledge that, regardless of her charm and good intentions, Palin is not ready for the top job. McCain seems to have put his political interests ahead of the nation’s when he created the possibility that she might fill it.
It’s clear that McCain picked Palin for reasons of image, not substance. She’s a woman. She has fought corruption. She has fought the oil companies. She’s married to a union member. These are portrayals for campaign speeches; they are not policy positions.
There was also some pandering right from the start. “I told Congress `Thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere,’ ” Palin reported to the crowd in Dayton, Ohio. “If our state wanted a bridge, I said, we’d build it ourselves.”
But the state kept the bridge money. That’s because Alaskans pay federal gas taxes and they expect a good share to come back, just like people do in every other state. We build very little by ourselves, and any governor who would turn that tax money down likely would be turned out of office.


Anchorage Reporter Expresses Strong Doubts About Palin
NEW YORK As related in a previous article today, E&P over the next few days will be presenting how Alaska newspapers and reporters view their Gov. Sarah Palin -- now John McCain's pick for his running mate. She has been a near-unknown nationally so it seems to makes sense to go to the people who know her best locally. See our Part I today, on a surprising editorial in the Fairbanks daily.

Also today, Gregg Erickson, columnist and reporter for the Anchorage Daily News, took part in an online chat at www.washingtonpost.com. He expressed some rather mixed views about his governor. Here are a few excerpts.

Baltimore, Md.: What are Governor Palin's three greatest strengths? What are her three greatest weaknesses?
Gregg Erickson: She is smart, vivacious and energetic; she tends to oversimplify complex issues, has had difficulty delegating authority, and clearly has some difficulty distinguishing the line between her public responsibilities and private wishes.
She is under legislative investigation regarding the last issue, the so-called "troopergate," in which she is said to have used improper influence to try to get her sister's ex-husband fired from the state troopers.

Eagle River, Ak.: Morning, Gregg! I've suddenly being hearing a number of pundits credit Gov. Palin with stopping the "bridge to nowhere." This isn't how I remember it, though -- in fact, I seem to recall that she was initially in favor of the bridge. Could you clarify? Thanks!
Gregg Erickson: She did curtail state support of the "bridge to nowhere" connecting Ketchikan with its island airport. But contrary to her statement today in Dayton, OH, she didn't send the federal money back. It's available for use in other projects elsewhere.

Los Angeles, Calif.: It's clear from your responses that you don't particularly like her (I'm not speaking personally, but politically.) How do you explain her high approval ratings?
Gregg Erickson: I think she did a great job in taking on the oil industry, that has had a lock on Alaska politics since 1981 She is also stood up against the corruption in Alaska politics long before it was fashionable to do so. I think those things resonate with many Alaskans beside myself.
Her approval ratings are high--65 percent, or so--but down from 80 percent earlier in her term. Most Alaskan's haven't watched her as closely as most reporters or legislators. If you took a poll of reporters and legislators I expect her approval rating would be down in the teens or twenties.

Washington, D.C.: Why don't reporters and legislators have a high opinion of the governor?
Gregg Erickson: It is clear that she has not paid much attention to the nitty-gritty unglamorous work of government, of gaining consensus, and making difficult compromises. She seems to be of the view that politics should be all rather simple. That often appeals to the wider public, but frustrates those who see themselves as laboring in the less glamorous parts of the vineyard.

Washington, D.C.;: You wrote: "If you took a poll of reporters and legislators I expect her approval rating would be down in the teens or twenties." What do they know about her that the general population does not?
Gregg Erickson: One example: The Republican chair of the Alaska State House Finance budget subcommittee on Heath and Medicaid says he can't find anyone in Palin's executive office who cares about helping bring that budget under control. He is furious with her about that.

Wheaton, Md.: Why is she experienced enough to lead our nation as president if McCain were unable to do so?
Gregg Erickson: I have a hard time seeing how her qualifications stack up against the duties and responsibilities of being president.

Washington, D.C.: What should we expect from her during the VP debates?
Gregg Erickson: I expect her to stick with simple truths. When asked about continued American troop presence in Iraq she said she knows only one thing about that (I paraphrase): no one has attacked the American homeland since George Bush took the war to Iraq.

Germantown, Md.: Is it true that Gov. Palin is skeptical about global warming?
Gregg Erickson: Yes. Although she has not been outspoken about that. Alaska's national politicians have been allied with Sen. Imhoff, but have had to reverse course rather dramatically on that as the effects of climate change began to show up so dramatically in Alaska.

Palin Ad Starring Ted Stevens Already Scrubbed From Palin's Campaign Website
By Greg Sargent - August 29, 2008, 1:58PM
That was quick. This morning, an ad from Sarah Palin's 2006 gubernatorial campaign featuring an endorsement from scandal-plagued Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was available on Palin's campaign Web site. We were able to access it ourselves by clicking on the link:
...but now the Stevens ad has already been scrubbed. The link is no longer on her campaign site.
Luckily, the ad featuring Stevens and Palin is still available for your viewing pleasure!
Ah, the miracles of YouTube...
Senator Ted Stevens is under investigation about nothing less but corruption.

Representative Jesse Jackson Jr.(Ill-2)

U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., IL-2
Monday, August 25, 2008 at 06:00 PM
I’m sure Dr. King is looking down on us here in Denver, noting that this is the first political convention in history to take place within sight of his mountaintop.
On the day President Johnson submitted the Voting Rights Act to Congress, he said, “At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.”
So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was at Appomattox. So it was in Selma, Alabama. Tonight, I would like to add: and so it shall be in Denver, Colorado, with the nomination of Barack Obama to be President of the United States.
What a remarkable thing it is that the man who came to this convention four years ago as the keynote speaker is returning this year as our party’s nominee. But for those of us who’ve known Barack over his decade in public office in Illinois the yearning for change, the hunger for unity that he’s tapped into across the country has a familiar ring.
I remember when Barack first decided to run for the United States Senate. He’d had a remarkable career in the state Senate, reaching across the aisle to put a tax cut into the pockets of working families, to expand health care for more children and parents and to take on the lobbyists who had so much influence in Springfield.
But despite this record, most in Springfield didn’t take his candidacy all that seriously. The party establishment was skeptical of this young leader from the South Side. They didn’t know what to make of a man like Barack, with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas and a funny name that few could pronounce. They didn’t see how this former community organizer could possibly defeat candidates with more money, more name recognition and more backing from “all the right people.”
But here’s the thing: that race wasn’t going to be decided in the halls of power in Springfield or the high rises on the lakefront. It was not going to be decided by the power brokers or opinion shapers. It was going to be decided by the people of Illinois. Illinois is America. It’s great cities and small towns, it’s old factories and new industries, it’s timeless Midwestern values of faith, family and hard work. And it’s black and white and Latino all living together, as one Illinois family, as one America. And the people of Illinois were hungry for change. From the old factory towns of our industrial north to the farms of our agrarian south, families had been struggling to meet the challenges of our global economy. And more often than not, they’d been harmed, rather than helped, by economic policies that failed to them get ahead and reach for their dreams.
But what they heard from Barack as he traveled across the state was a message of hope. Whether he was upstate or downstate; whether he was talking with folks who’d been laid off and seen their jobs shipped overseas or families struggling to keep up with rising costs; whether he was talking with recent immigrants who wanted to know that America had a place for them too, or African Americans who were falling further and further behind, Barack spoke of the same powerful idea. The idea that’s at the heart of who Barack is. The idea that’s at the heart of who we are as Americans. And the idea that’s at the heart of this campaign. That we all have a stake in each other; that the well-being of the “we” depends on the well-being of the “he” and “she”; and that in this country we rise and fall together as one people, as one nation.
And what I saw in that campaign is what I’m seeing today: ordinary men and women of all races, all religions, all walks of life coming together to demand a government in Washington that’s as honest and decent, as purposeful and responsible as the American people.
Fellow Democrats, this is an historic moment. I know. I grew up with the lessons of another generation, my father’s generation. I know his stories of struggle and sacrifice, of fear and division. I know America is still a place where dreams are too often deferred and opportunities too often denied.
But here’s what I also know. I know that while America may not be perfect, our union can always be perfected. I know what we can achieve when good people with strong convictions come together around a common purpose. And I know what a great leader can do to help us find common ground. America, we need such a leader today, a leader who can heal the wounds of the last eight years, a leader who knows that what unites us is greater than what divides us and that America is at its strongest when hard work is rewarded and all of our dreams are within reach.
I know Barack Obama. I’ve seen his leadership at work. I’ve seen the difference he’s made in the lives of people across Illinois. And that is why I know that for the sake of our children, our families, and the future we hold in common, he is the leader America needs right now. Forty-five years to the day after a young preacher called out, “Let freedom ring,” let history show in this fourth week of August in this Mile-High City, freedom in America has never rung from a higher mountaintop than it does here today.

Brian Schweitzer at the DNC About Energy

Brian Schweizer, Governor of Montana at the Democratic National Convention the video:
Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 08:05 PM
I’m a rancher who has made my living raising cattle and growing wheat, barley and alfalfa in Montana, a beautiful place with soaring peaks, pristine rivers and endless prairies. I’m probably a little biased, but I think it’s the best place in the world to raise a family, to start and grow a business, and to build a community.

When I ran for governor of Montana, I had never before held elected office. I chose a Republican, John Bohlinger, to be my lieutenant governor, with the simple proposition that we could get more done working together than we could fighting. Because Montana really isn’t a red state or a blue state. As Senator Obama might put it, we’re a united state.

And so in three-and-a-half years, working together—Republicans and Democrats in Montana—we have cut more taxes for more Montanans than any time in history, increased energy production at the fastest rate in the history of Montana, invested more new money in education than ever before and we created the largest budget surplus in the history of Montana. That’s the kind of change we brought to Montana, and that’s the kind of change President Barack Obama is going to bring to America.

Like Senator Obama, my family has roots in the Great Plains. My grandparents were immigrants who came to Montana with nothing more than the clothes on their back, high hopes and faith in God. My family didn’t have much in our little house. But a few things stand out in my memory: a crucifix and, on our kitchen wall, a framed picture of President Kennedy. My parents never even graduated from high school, but President Kennedy’s idealism and spirit of possibility inspired them to send all six of us children to college. And when he said, “we’re going to the moon,” he showed us that no challenge was insurmountable.

A generation later, we face a great new challenge, a world energy crisis that threatens our economy, our security, our climate and our way of life. And until we address that energy crisis, our problems will only get worse. For eight long years, the White House has led us in the wrong direction. And now Senator McCain wants four more years of the same.

Can we afford four more years? Is it time for a change? When do we need it? And who do we need as the next President of the United States of America? That’s right. Barack Obama is the change we need!

Right now, the United States imports about 70 percent of its oil from overseas. At the same time, billions of dollars that we spend on all that foreign oil seems to end up in the bank accounts of those around the world who are openly hostile to American values and our way of life. This costly reliance on fossil fuels threatens America and the world in other ways, too. CO2 emissions are increasing global temperatures, sea levels are rising and storms are getting worse.

We need to break America’s addiction to foreign oil. We need a new energy system that is clean, green and American-made. And we need a president who can marshal our nation’s resources, get the job done and deliver the change we need.

That leader is Barack Obama. Barack Obama knows there’s no single platform for energy independence. It’s not a question of either wind or clean coal, solar or hydrogen, oil or geothermal. We need them all to create a strong American energy system, a system built on American innovation.

After eight years of a White House waiting hand and foot on big oil, John McCain offers more of the same. At a time of skyrocketing fuel prices, when American families are struggling to keep their gas tanks full, John McCain voted 25 times against renewable and alternative energy. Against clean biofuels. Against solar power. Against wind energy.

This not only hurts America’s energy independence, it could cost American families more than a hundred thousand jobs. At a time when America should be working harder than ever to develop new, clean sources, John McCain wants more of the same and has taken more than a million dollars in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry. Now he wants to give the oil companies another 4 billion dollars in tax breaks. Four billion in tax breaks for big oil?

That’s a lot of change, but it’s not the change we need.

In Montana, we’re investing in wind farms and we’re drilling in the Bakken formation, one of the most promising oil fields in America. We’re pursuing coal gasification with carbon sequestration and we’re promoting greater energy efficiency in homes and offices.

Even leaders in the oil industry know that Senator McCain has it wrong. We simply can’t drill our way to energy independence, even if you drilled in all of John McCain’s backyards, including the ones he can’t even remember.

That single-answer proposition is a dry well, and here’s why. America consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil, but has less than 3 percent of the reserves. You don’t need a $2 calculator to figure that one out. There just isn’t enough oil in America, on land or offshore, to meet America’s full energy needs.

Barack Obama understands the most important barrel of oil is the one you don’t use. Barack Obama’s energy strategy taps all sources and all possibilities. It will give you a tax credit if you buy a fuel-efficient car or truck, increase fuel-efficiency standards and put a million plug-in hybrids on the road.

Invest $150 billion over the next 10 years in clean, renewable energy technology. This will create up to 5 million new, green jobs and fuel long-term growth and prosperity. Senator Obama’s plan will also invest in a modern transmission grid to deliver this new, clean electricity from wind turbines and solar panels to homes, offices and the batteries in America’s new plug-in hybrid cars.