8. Palin and Big Oil's interests: one and the same.

Ok, so let's pretend you're an oil exec. You're looking for a buddy in the White House. Sure, you've had some success in the political world recently with people buying "the drill here, drill now" rhetoric ... but what you really need is a go-to person who's tied up in your interests. McCain's coming around, but let's be honest, your go-to person is Sarah Palin. Because, as James Ridgeway at Mother Jones notes:

... she is an enthusiastic supporter of what the oil giants want most: to extract more oil and gas from Alaska and its adjoining waters. "We Americans need to produce more of our own oil and gas," she said last week in her vice presidential acceptance speech. "And take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: We've got lots of both."

Yep, there is a lot of oil up there. But what about those damn pesky environmentalists? Aren't a lot of these places off-limits because they're natural treasures or something?

... Palin's elevation to national office would help give the companies a free hand when it comes to extraction, with little concern for environmental impact: This spring, the state of Alaska announced that it would sue the US Fish and Wildlife Service to block the addition to the endangered species list of Alaska's polar bears -- which, if their habitat were protected, might pose an obstacle to the pipeline and other development. She has also opposed protecting beluga whales in waters slated for oil and gas drilling (and she has backed a plan that allows the aerial hunting of bears and wolves). She is a steadfast booster of opening ANWR to drilling (a move that McCain opposes). And she has said that while she is concerned about climate change, "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made."

All right! Except most people aren't oil executives who'll profit from Palin being in the White House. Most people are getting screwed at the pump while oil companies make record-breaking profits.

7. Palin's views are so extremist her own friends may not vote for her.

ABC sent a reporter to Alaska for a hard-hitting interview with those "who know [Palin] best," a group of four women who met Palin in aerobics class. The interview revealed the earth-shattering news that Palin hates cats and likes white chocolate, but amid the fluff, something interesting and telling emerged: Palin's views on abortion are so right-wing that even some of her best friends are hesitant to vote for her. Three of the women stated that they were pro-choice, and two admitted that while they supported her as a friend they were not sure they would support her candidacy for vice-president. One refused to fess up, stating "my vote is between me and the voting booth."

And than you have the question of Palin's extreme religion as Huffington Post reports:

Sarah Palin's churches are actively involved in a resurgent movement that was declared heretical by the Assemblies of God in 1949. This is the same 'Spiritual Warfare' movement that was featured in the award winning movie, "Jesus Camp," which showed young children being trained to do battle for the Lord. At least three of four of Palin's churches are involved with major organizations and leaders of this movement, which is referred to as The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit or the New Apostolic Reformation. The movement is training a young "Joel's Army" to take dominion over the United States and the world.

Along with her entire family, Sarah Palin was re-baptized at twelve at the Wasilla Assembly of God in Wasilla, Alaska and she attended the church from the time she was ten until 2002: over two and 1/2 decades. Sarah Palin's extensive pattern of association with the Wasilla Assembly of God has continued nearly up to the day she was picked by Senator John McCain as a vice-presidential running mate. Palin's dedication to the Wasilla church is indicated by a Saturday, September 7, 2008, McClatchy news service story detailing possibly improper use of state travel funds by Palin for a trip she made to Wasilla, Alaska to attend, on June 8, 2008, both a Wasilla Assembly of God "Masters Commission" graduation ceremony and also a multi-church Wasilla area event known as "One Lord Sunday." At the latter event, Palin and Alaska LT Governor Scott Parnell were publicly blessed, onstage before an estimated crowd of 6,000, through the "laying on of hands" by Wasilla Assembly of God's Head Pastor Ed Kalnins whose sermons espouse such theological concepts as the possession of geographic territories by demonic spirits and the inter-generational transmission of family "curses". Palin has also been blessed, or "anointed," by an African cleric, prominent in the Third Wave movement, who has repeatedly visited the Wasilla Assembly of God and claims to have effected positive, dramatic social change in a Kenyan town by driving out a "spirit of witchcraft."

The Wasilla Assembly of God church is deeply involved with both Third Wave activities and theology. Their Master's Commission program is part of an three year post-high school international training program with studies in prophecy, intercessory prayer, Biblical exegesis, authority and leadership. The pastor, Ed Kalnins, and Masters Commission students have traveled to South Carolina to participate in a "prophetic conference" at Morningstar Ministries, one of the major ministries of the Third Wave movement. Becky Fischer was a pastor at Morningstar prior to being featured in the movie "Jesus Camp." The head of prophecy at Morningstar, Steve Thompson, is currently scheduled to do a prophecy seminar at the Wasilla Assembly of God. Other major leaders in the movement have also traveled to Wasilla to visit and speak at the church.
The must see video
The Third Wave is a revival of the theology of the Latter Rain tent revivals of the 1950s and 1960s led by William Branham and others. It is based on the idea that in the end times there will be an outpouring of supernatural powers on a group of Christians that will take authority over the existing church and the world. The believing Christians of the world will be reorganized under the Fivefold Ministry and the church restructured under the authority of Prophets and Apostles and others anointed by God. The young generation will form "Joel's Army" to rise up and battle evil and retake the earth for God.

6. Even Ed Koch, who supported President Bush, thinks Palin is "scary."

Former Mayor of New York Ed Koch is a bit of a controversial figure with a long political history. But the last race he got involved with was in 2004 and he endorsed George W. Bush. Koch not only endorsed Bush, but campaigned for him in six states including Florida; so, not exactly a passive endorsement. But now Koch is making it clear that he's endorsing Obama, and he's making his reason for switching sides clear: it's Palin. Ed Koch told Politico's Ben Smith what he thought of the new VP nominee, "She's scary." In his endorsement of Obama, Koch put the sentiment in writing, saying:

If the vice president were ever called on to lead the country, there is no question in my mind that the experience and demonstrated judgment of Joe Biden is superior to that of Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is a plucky, exciting candidate, but when her record is examined, she fails miserably with respect to her views on the domestic issues that are so important to the people of the U.S., and to me. Frankly, it would scare me if she were to succeed John McCain in the presidency.

So a former Mayor who stumped for Bush in six (six!) different states is endorsing Barrack Obama because of Palin. And losing Koch doesn't just mean losing his vote, as Bush can probably tell you. Smith points out that Koch comes with a lot of other votes, especially in the sunshine state:

Koch is a member of a set of secular, swing-voting Jewish Democrats who may have been pushed away by the selection of Palin, and his endorsement may be a marker of an opportunity for Obama to strengthen his campaign among older Jewish voters in Florida.

5. Palin isn't big on government transparency.

Sometimes, the public wants to know what its elected officials are doing. That's what Andree McCleod, an "independent government watchdog," tried to find out when she requested internal documents from Palin's office that she suspected linked top-Palin aides to an effort to oust Alaska's Republican Party Secretary. But, as Mother Jones reports, Palin's office withheld 1,100 emails from McCLeod, claiming the correspondence covered confidential policy matters. It didn't. As Mother Jones' David Corn points out:

... the subject lines of some of the withheld emails suggest they were not related to policy matters. Several refer to one of Palin's political foes, others to a well-known Alaskan journalist. Moreover, some of the withhold emails were CC'ed to Todd Palin, the governor's husband. Todd Palin -- a.k.a. the First Dude -- holds no official state position (though he has been a close and influential adviser for Governor Palin). The fact that Palin and her aides shared these emails with a citizen outside the government undercuts the claim that they must be protected under executive privilege.

As McLeod states, "When the finger is pointed at somebody else, she's all for accountability. When it's pointing at her, it's different."

4. Palin may have rewarded serviceman with promotion for his about-face on her candidacy.

When the McCain campaign first announced that Palin would be joining the Republican ticket, most people thought they had just undercut their best attack against Obama: his supposed lack of experience. The McCain campaign was quick to answer concerns by parading Sarah Palin's position as Commander in Chief of the Alaskan National Guard as an example of executive leadership. But few bought the sale, knowing enough about the National Guard to realize that being Governor doesn't exactly make you a general.

This idea was backed up when the Adjutant General of Alaska's National Guard Major Craig Campbell reportedly told the Boston Globe that the Alaskan governor is not in the chain of command and has no authority over its operations. But Campbell's thoughts on the matter quickly changed, as Brandon Friendman reports for the Huffington Post:

But suddenly -- and strangely -- the commander of the Alaska National Guard, Major General Campbell, changed his story. By the end of the convention, he was praising Palin's experience, talking on TV about how she had taken control of Alaska's National Guard operations and how she was a "great" leader.

Interestingly enough, Palin promoted him with his third star -- to the rank of Lieutenant General -- only three days later.

Essentially, Campbell had been unhelpful to the campaign at the very least. But all of a sudden he became one of Palin's biggest supporters. And he was then promoted to be one of the two highest-ranking state National Guard officials in the country.

The timeline that Friedman lays out in his piece shows Campbell's full metamorphosis from a critic to a preacher of Palin's executive experience with the National Guard. Buying off a service-person with a quick promotion in order to get them to change their tune? Maybe the McCain Campaign is right -- maybe Palin does have the chops of an executive after all.

3. Palin's Wasilla charged rape victims for their sexual assault exams.

When Sarah Palin was Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, the town's police department charged rape victims for their forensic testing.

In a May, 2000 article, the Frontiersman reported:

While the Alaska State Troopers and most municipal police agencies have covered the cost of exams, which cost between $300 to $1,200 apiece, the Wasilla police department does charge the victims of sexual assault for the tests.

Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon stated:

"In the past we've charged the cost of exams to the victims insurance company when possible. I just don't want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer," Fannon said.

Let's be clear: charging a person who has the strength to come forward after being sexually assaulted for their own examination isn't just insensitive, it is monstrous. And for victims to hear the Chief of Police say that he thinks it's right to charge the victim is horrifying.
Now let's talk about Palin's executive responsibility on this issue. As a blogger on BitchPhD points out:

One can only assume that she supported Wasilla's policy of billing rape victims for their own rape kits... not only because Fannon was her appointee, but also because this was four years into her tenure as mayor and because, let's be honest: in a town of that size, the mayor doesn't get to plead ignorance of policies or public statements of her own chief of police.

[...]

Palin was willing to raise taxes to build a sports complex. Her police chief was unwilling to use public funds to investigate rapes.

This shit needs to be in the national news. And Palin and McCain need to answer some hard questions about it.

2. Next to Palin, even McCain looks like an economic genius.

Over the weekend Palin probably gave economic analysts throughout the land mini-strokes when she made an egregious misstatement about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lending institutions at the heart of the housing market meltdown. During a speech in Colorado Springs, Palin stated that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had "gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers."

While the two companies will soon face a takeover by the Treasury Department, they are currently privately owned. So any burden on taxpayers is in the future, when the government goes about the task of helping the lending giants out of their largely self-made mess.

As the Huffington Post reports, Palin's gaffe does not auger well for her ability to handle the complex economic issues that will dog the next administration:

"You would like to think that someone who is going to be vice president and conceivable president would know what Fannie and Freddie do," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "These are huge institutions and they are absolutely central to our country's mortgage debt. To not have a clue what they do doesn't speak well for her, I'd say."

1. Palin paid herself to stay at home

Sarah Palin is being trumpeted as a fiscal conservative. And it's true to a certain extent. She did cut funding for a program that helps teen moms get back on their feet. But as the Washington Post revealed today, Palin may not be a paragon of fiscal restraint after all. The Post reports that Palin paid herself a per diem allowance (money that's supposed to cover expenses accrued while traveling on state business) for the 312 days she spent in her home in Wasilla during her 19 months in office.

The Post also states that travel expenses for her husband and kids totaled $43,490.

According to former Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles, this is hardly par for the course in Alaska:

"I gave a direction to all my commissioners if they were ever in their house, whether it was Juneau or elsewhere, they were not to get a per diem because, clearly, it is and it looks like a scam -- you pay yourself to live at home,"

Furthermore:

... the policy was not to reimburse for family travel on commercial airlines, because there is no direct public benefit to schlepping kids around the state.

As Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake writes:

Palin and her husband both make six-figure incomes. They don't need to be chiseling the state for this money to live, and she sure isn't entitled to be running on fiscal responsibility when she's pocketing cash in a way that has a history of being regarded in Alaska as a "scam."

Why McCain's Plans Would Only Add to Americans' Economic Pain

McCain's main economic promises are cutting taxes, creating jobs and balancing the budget (aka removing pork). All commendable, except when you consider the details. His policies would result in a higher deficit, a lower dollar, more jobs leaving the country, and a reduction in Social Security, Medicare, education and other entitlement programs.

Let's start with tax cuts. The "pro-growth" plan on his Web site centers on corporate taxes, which he would cut from 35 percent to 25 percent to "help American companies compete and keep jobs from going overseas."
But his cuts won't actually be tied to job creation. Already, corporations don't pay a lot of taxes, and that hasn't kept jobs from heading east. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid zero federal taxes during the past decade. Almost three-quarters of all foreign corporations between 1998 and 2005 didn't, either.

Citizens pay the bulk of the $2.5 trillion federal tax revenue. Our income taxes contributed 43 percent of it and Social Security taxes 37 percent. Corporate taxes only accounted for 13 percent. If McCain was truly a "reformer" bent on "fighting" for the citizens, he'd go after the $20 billion of executive compensation sliding through loopholes, or the $100 billion of annual offshore tax dodges. Instead, American citizens effectively wind up subsidizing this.

As for jobs, McCain said, "We're going to help workers who've lost a job that won't come back find a new one that won't go away." He didn't specify how, even though the unemployment rate of 6.1 percent is a five-year high, and we have lost more than 600,000 jobs this year.
When he talks about jobs going overseas, McCain means China. Between 2001 and 2007, 2.3 million jobs were lost or displaced (two-thirds of those jobs came from the manufacturing sector, the rest from the tech sector), as the trade deficit with China tripled. He didn't say how he would change that. In his acceptance speech, McCain pretended to acknowledge the pain of voters -- in swing states. "Bill and Sue Nebe from Farmington Hills, Michigan... lost their real estate investments in the bad housing market. Bill got a temporary job after he was out of work for seven months. Sue works three jobs to help pay the bills."

Maybe their votes matter, but implementing McCain's health plan won't help them. McCain believes that competition will improve health insurance quality and lower prices and that "families should be able to purchase health insurance nationwide, across state lines."
His plan extends the carrot of a direct refundable $2,500 tax credit for individuals and $5,000 for families to offset the cost of insurance. Which sounds peachy, except that the average family cost of health insurance is $12,000 (up from $7,600 in 2001.) Plus, families won't be getting that $5,000 directly; the money would be sent straight to insurance companies, which would make them very happy.

Of course, you can't get the credit if you don't have health insurance to begin with. Opening insurance companies to interstate competition will result in a strategy similar to that of credit card companies: Health insurance providers will consolidate through mergers and relocate to the states where they can charge the most and pay the least taxes, negating the potential positive effects of competition. This will not bring down the cost of insurance any more than it has brought down credit card rates and fees.

McCain says he will cut government spending, but the three top items of government spending are defense, social programs and interest on our debt. Since 2001, defense spending has risen from $376 billion to $587 billion. The debt owed by the U.S. government has nearly doubled, from $5.7 trillion in 2001 to almost $10 trillion (PDF). Interest on that debt is $401 billion per year, the third-largest line item in the federal budget. Foreign governments hold a record $4.1 trillion of it.
He has promised to balance the budget by 2013. But, since he's not cutting defense and can't control our interest payments, and if he cuts corporate taxes further, debt and debt payments will rise, as they have during the past eight years, that leaves other entitlement spending on the chopping block.
Sure enough, his strategy for "reforming" Social Security, in shades of Bush, is propping it up with personal accounts. He has already voted to use the Social Security surplus to fund his corporate tax reductions. He will also "reduce the growth" of (read: cut) Medicare spending, at a time when 1.85 million Americans go bankrupt each year due to medical bills alone.

As for education, "the civil rights issue of this century," his plan for doubling the child tax exemption from $3,500 to $7,000 will surely help millions of American families, but they won't be able to afford college tuition, which has increased by 70 percent since 2001. It doesn't bode well that he voted against $5 billion for grants to local educational agencies and against shifting $11 billion from corporate tax loopholes to education.

McCain's policies would benefit corporations by reducing the tax burden they already shirk, ignore the need for regulation in the banking industry, and inject cash into an overcharging health insurance industry. He would fund this by subtracting from Social Security, Medicare, education and other entitlement programs. That's the only way the math works. The end result would be a federal government more in the hole to foreign governments, and a citizenship on shakier economic ground than it already is. For those reasons, we can not afford to elect John McCain.

Almost All Americans' Wages are Plummeting

Today, the Wall Street Journal reports the sobering news that, since 2000, real wages have fallen for every educational group in America except folks with professional degrees (doctors, lawyers, and the like). All other groups, even those with master's degrees and Ph.D.'s, saw declining wages over this period. The WSJ piece is based on recently released Census data (you can find the most recent Census Bureau report on income and earnings here).
In recent years, the college earnings premium has decreased substantially. As the Journal points out:
In 1975, for instance, workers with college degrees earned 60% more per year on average than workers with high-school diplomas only, according to the 2006 Economic Report of the President.
Workers with a college degree saw their earnings premium grow steadily over the next quarter century, and by 2000 their average earnings were roughly double what workers with a high-school diploma made. Over the next four years the trend reversed: By 2004, workers with a college diploma only were earning about 80% more than high-school grads, on average.
The Journal article identifies globalization (including the outsourcing of both blue- and white-collar jobs) and rising health costs as possible causes for the decline in wages. One reason workers' wages aren't keeping up with inflation is that health care costs have risen dramatically in recent years, so employers are shelling out more for health coverage, and less in wages.
For most Americans, these data paint a fairly bleak picture of their economic prospects. About the only good thing I can say about this is that, given this economic climate, I find it almost impossible to believe that the Republicans triumph this November. The seven-year period during which wages have been in freefall just happen to be seven years in which a Republican was president and Republicans, for the most part, controlled Congress. There's no way in hell that the Republicans should be able to get away with this. If, in spite of everything, they end up winning this fall, it will be the con job of the century.