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.

What Obama Needs to Do in the Final Sixty Days

Avoiding President Palin
Democrats around the country have been growing increasingly anxious over the last week, and for good reason. If there was a clear message from Denver, it was reflected in the remarks of virtually every commentator on television after Obama's magnificent speech: "Wow, Obama can throw a punch." He needed to indict the Bush administration and the Republican Party for what they have done to the country, and he needed to show that he can be powerful, not just eloquent and inspiring. If there was another message, it was the power of narrative. Over and over we heard comments like, "Wow, what a great story"--referring both to the stories Michele and Barack Obama told about themselves and the stories Bo and Joe Biden told about Obama's vice presidential nominee, which drew a visible tear from the eyes of Michele--which itself addressed the story Republicans were trying to tell about her, that she is a cold, hard, angry black woman (the same story they told about Hillary Clinton when she was first lady, with the racial twist to make it more incendiary).
It was not just the "liberal media elite" who responded to a week in which Democrats finally told a sustained, coherent, narrative about how the Bush administration and the Republican Party had pillaged our economy and left the country increasingly alone and unsafe in the world (although they left out some crucial details Americans should have heard about, like the extraordinary rendition of innocent people to torture chambers in the Middle East), about how McCain represents the same failed ideology of the Bush years, and about who Barack Obama really is and how he intends to lead. By the end of the convention, Obama had opened up an 8-point lead in the Gallup Polls, a stark contrast to the two-point deficit with which he began the convention after three months of failing to offer any narrative at all and doggedly refusing to go after McCain while McCain was using him as a punching bag, hitting him with one narrative after another (Obama is a celebrity, an elitist, an uppity guy who is too big for his breeches, a tax and spend liberal, someone who doesn't put country first, someone who doesn't share "our" values, not one of "us").
But the political panorama can change rapidly, and this one did the moment the convention ended and the Obama campaign decided to resume shooting scenes from its sequel to the Kerry campaign, "President Palin's Revenge" (which itself was a bad remake of "Dukakis, Tanks but No Tanks"). They already had all the footage they needed from the summer: no real narrative about their candidate, no narrative about their opponent, refusal to answer attacks, weak performances in televised interviews, poor use of surrogates on television (if they were even present), changing positions in ways that undercut the candidate's narrative of authenticity, and an disquietingly poor performance on Rick Warren's pseudo-debate with McCain. This was stock Democratic footage.
So after a week of Republicans mocking the Democrats, deriding everyone who isn't one of them (especially the dark-skinned, exotic Obama) as un-American, anti-life, elitist, hostile to "small town values," and narcissistic or subversive (putting himself, something, or some group--perhaps black people?--other than "Country First"), McCain has now opened a 4-point lead in the Gallup Polls among registered voters. That's not even factoring in McCain's advantage among "likely voters," which is higher; or the percent of voters who accurately guess the race of the person on the other end of the phone when the pollster calls and adjust their response if she sounds black, or the additional percent who would vote for a black man in public (as they did in Democratic caucuses) but whose unconscious (and increasingly conscious) prejudices emerge when they vote in private, often taking forms such as, "I just don't know Obama," "Something about him makes me uneasy," "I'm not sure I can trust him," "I think he's really a Muslim," or "He must have stuck with that Reverend Wright all those years for a reason."
Fortunately these numbers are volatile, and the Obama campaign seems to have decided that it's time to run an offense again at least part of the time (with a new ad debuting yesterday in swing states attacking McCain's "maverick" status). With all the factors going for Democrats this year (their generic lead over Republicans after 8 years of mismanagement and malfeasance remains in the double digits) and the more charismatic candidate, the polls should shift back again, at least to parity.
But McCain shouldn't have gotten a 10-point bump from his uncivil convention, and this election shouldn't be close. What happened in one short week was both completely predictable and completely avoidable. Just hours after a Democratic Convention that reignited Democratic enthusiasm and started to swing those swing voters who just weren't sure about Obama, the Obama campaign had forgotten everything it should have learned from its success of Denver--most importantly that you never drop your gloves, and that you never let the other side control the narratives--and had returned to the same failed strategies that gave us Presidents Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry, strategies Democratic consultants have passed from generation to generation like a family heirloom laced with hemlock.

The Palin War on Decency

Palin proudly advertises her membership in the national pro-life group Feminists for Life, which discourages abortion by addressing "the root causes that drive women to abortion—primarily lack of practical resources and support." No woman should have to choose between her career, education, and child, Palin told the Anchorage Daily News while running for governor back in 2006, arguing for more family-friendly environments. The question is, how often has her record backed up her rhetoric on issues of interest to families?
Not much, it turns out. Restrictions on abortion in Alaska have actually been loosened during her tenure. Last November, the Alaska Supreme Court rejected a 1997 law requiring girls younger than 16 to obtain parental consent before getting an abortion. Palin slammed the ruling as "outrageous" and had her attorney general file for a rehearing, but it was promptly denied.
Meanwhile, both this year and last year, she has used her line-item veto to slash state funds for programs providing precisely the kinds of resources Feminists for Life supports for at-risk mothers on the fence about abortion. She cut by 20 percent the funding for Covenant House Alaska, a state-supported program that includes a transitional home where new teenage mothers can spend up to 18 months learning money management and parenting skills. Critics have jumped all over that decision, arguing that the decision looks especially bad in light of the news that Palin's 17-year-old daughter has since become pregnant.
Palin has also voided funds for two other similar programs during her tenure as governor. One, the WIC (Women, Infants, Children) Program, would have provided breast pumps and nutrition support to low-income rural women, for a total cost of $15,480. Another, the Cook Inlet Housing Authority's student housing and daycare facility project, would have built a childcare facility and family-style housing units for students pursuing vocational education in Anchorage, most of whom come from rural areas.
Even Palin's commitment to pro-life legislation has been questioned back home. In April, the governor denied the state legislature's request for extra debates on two controversial anti-abortion bills, one requiring minors to obtain parental consent before having abortions and another outlawing partial-birth abortion except to save the life of the mother. After state senators failed to reach agreement, the chamber's president tried to attach them to the agenda of a special legislative session being held on Palin's top legislative priority: a new natural gas pipeline. Palin demurred. "Alaskans know I am pro-life and have never wavered in my belief in the sanctity of every human life," she said in a statement. "These issues are so important they shouldn't be diluted with oil and gas deliberations."
Palin's office indicated that those issues were next on the governor's agenda, referring requests for further comment on Palin's record to the McCain campaign, which did not return phone calls. If pro-life activists in Alaska are unhappy with Palin for not doing more, they don't show it. Alaska Right to Life director Karen Lewis, who has known Palin for a decade and calls her a "superhero" on the issue, blamed the legislative failures on a political squabble between the governor and state Senate President Lyda Green. When recent cancer survivor Lyda Green publicly was called a “cancer bitch” that did Governor Palin, nicknamed “Sarah Barracuda”, burst into a roar of laughter a minute later repeated, she reacted again with the same joy of approval.
Liberal advocates on women's health issues have been more vocal. They say Palin raised expectations in 2007, when she attended a summit organized by The Alliance for Reproductive Justice, a group affiliated with Planned Parenthood. According to one attendee quoted on the Planned Parenthood Web site, "we had not planned on meeting Gov. Palin, so that was a surprise. She took the time to talk with us about her own experiences as a working mother, and relayed her support for women's health."
But early hopes have been dashed by a lack of follow-through, these activists say; Palin has taken a laissez-faire approach to the issues they discussed, including children's health care, domestic violence shelters, sex education and breastfeeding in the workplace.

In Alaska, there's no shortage of work for a concerned politician to do. The state's domestic violence and sexual assault rates are over twice as high as the national average. More women are murdered by men there than in any other state in the country. Alaska also has the highest Chlamydia rate in the nation, with 681.8 cases per every 100,000 people (the national average is 347.8 per 100,000). Activists point to a dire shortage in funding for domestic violence shelters, which have waiting lists despite the fact that the state boasts a $7 billion budget surplus. Amnesty International joined the chorus in April 2007, slamming both federal and state authorities for creating "a maze of tribal, state and federal jurisdictions" that effectively allowed sexual assailants impunity.
In response, Palin has requested—and secured—a $436,000 increase in state funding for the public safety department's Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. The year before, too, she'd bumped up funding by another $300,000. But Clover Simon, head of Planned Parenthood Alaska, and Geran Tarr, a former state legislative aide who heads up the affiliated Alliance for Reproductive Justice, point to the overflowing shelters and say much more is needed. And Alaska might be able to afford it, given the council's total budget of nearly $11.5 million.
Could Palin have done more? Her critics agree that the natural gas pipeline project has monopolized the governor's political energy for the past two years, leaving little for the social issues she champions. At the same time, Right to Life Executive Director Karen Lewis points to achievements outside the legislative arena, such as judicial appointments, to buttress her faith in Palin as a pro-life leader. Likewise, in Alaska Right to Life's newsletter, former president Bob Bird commended her for "asking for public support in her efforts to reshape the judiciary." In her time as governor, Palin has appointed one Supreme Court justice and 10 lower-court judges.
But some critics think Palin has cynically hyped her personal story for political gain—a move that helps mask a flimsy record of accomplishment on the social issues that matter most to the GOP's religious conservative base. "This is what always happens in politics, and what I expect they will do in her run for vice president. She'll be going into churches and meeting with those types of groups and saying what they want to hear," says Tarr. "Her priority was the gas line. And that's fine that that was her priority, but she can't go ahead and claim to be active on women's and children's issues too."