WASHINGTON (AP) – Sarah Palin’snew book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven’t become any truer over time.
Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer’s dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.
Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush – a package she seemed to support at the time.
A look at some of her statements in ”Going Rogue,” obtained by The Associated Press in advance of its release Tuesday:
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PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking ”only” for reasonably priced rooms and not ”often” going for the ”high-end, robe-and-slippers” hotels.
THE FACTS: Although travel records indicate she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) overlooking New York City’s Central Park for a five-hour women’s leadership conference in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000. Event organizers said Palin asked if she could bring her daughter. The governor billed her state more than $20,000 for her children’s travel, including to events where they had not been invited, and in some cases later amended expense reports to specify that they had been on official business.
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PALIN: Boasts that she ran her campaign for governor on small donations, mostly from first-time givers, and turned back large checks from big donors if her campaign perceived a conflict of interest.
THE FACTS: Of the roughly $1.3 million she raised for her primary and general election campaigns for governor, more than half came from people and political action committees giving at least $500, according to an AP analysis of her campaign finance reports. The maximum that individual donors could give was $1,000; $2,000 for a PAC.
Of the rest, about $76,000 came from Republican Party committees.
She accepted $1,000 each from a state senator and his wife in the weeks after the two Republican lawmakers’ offices were raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into a powerful Alaska oilfield services company. After AP reported those donations during the presidential campaign, she said she would give a comparative sum to charity after the general election in 2010, a date set by state election laws.
PALIN: Rails against taxpayer-financed bailouts, which she attributes to Obama. She recounts telling daughter Bristol that to succeed in business, ”you’ll have to be brave enough to fail.”
THE FACTS: Palin is blurring the lines between Obama’s stimulus plan – a $787 billion package of tax cuts, state aid, social programs and government contracts — and the federal bailout that Republican presidential candidate John McCain voted for and President George W. Bush signed.
Palin’s views on bailouts appeared to evolve as McCain’s vice presidential running mate. In September 2008, she said ”taxpayers cannot be looked to as the bailout, as the solution, to the problems on Wall Street.” A week later, she said ”ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy.”
During the vice presidential debate in October, Palin praised McCain for being ”instrumental in bringing folks together” to pass the $700 billion bailout. After that, she said ”it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in.”
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PALIN: Says Ronald Reagan faced an even worse recession than the one that appears to be ending now, and ‘’showed us how to get out of one. If you want real job growth, cut capital gains taxes and slay the death tax once and for all.”
THE FACTS: The estate tax, which some call the death tax, was not repealed under Reagan and capital gains taxes are lower now than when Reagan was president.
Economists overwhelmingly say the current recession is far worse. The recession Reagan faced lasted for 16 months; this one is in its 23rd month. The recession of the early 1980s did not have a financial meltdown. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent, worse than the October 2009 high of 10.2 percent, but the jobless rate is still expected to climb.
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PALIN: She says her team overseeing the development of a natural gas pipeline set up an open, competitive bidding process that allowed any company to compete for the right to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48.
THE FACTS: Palin characterized the pipeline deal the same way before an AP investigation found her team crafted terms that favored only a few independent pipeline companies and ultimately benefited a company with ties to her administration, TransCanada Corp. Despite promises and legal guidance not to talk directly with potential bidders during the process, Palin had meetings or phone calls with nearly every major candidate, including TransCanada.
PALIN: Criticizes an aide to her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, for a conflict of interest because the aide represented the state in negotiations over a gas pipeline and then left to work as a handsomely paid lobbyist for ExxonMobil. Palin asserts her administration ended all such arrangements, shoving a wedge in the revolving door between special interests and the state capital.
THE FACTS: Palin ignores her own ”revolving door” issue in office; the leader of her own pipeline team was a former lobbyist for a subsidiary of TransCanada, the company that ended up winning the rights to build the pipeline.
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PALIN: Writes about a city councilman in Wasilla, Alaska, who owned a garbage truck company and tried to push through an ordinance requiring residents of new subdivisions to pay for trash removal instead of taking it to the dump for free — this to illustrate conflicts of interest she stood against as a public servant.
THE FACTS: As Wasilla mayor, Palin pressed for a special zoning exception so she could sell her family’s $327,000 house, then did not keep a promise to remove a potential fire hazard on the property.
She asked the city council to loosen rules for snow machine races when she and her husband owned a snow machine store, and cast a tie-breaking vote to exempt taxes on aircraft when her father-in-law owned one. But she stepped away from the table in 1997 when the council considered a grant for the Iron Dog snow machine race in which her husband competes.
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PALIN: Says Obama has admitted that the climate change policy he seeks will cause people’s electricity bills to ‘’skyrocket.”
THE FACTS: She correctly quotes a comment attributed to Obama in January 2008, when he told San Francisco Chronicle editors that under his cap-and-trade climate proposal, ”electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” as utilities are forced to retrofit coal burning power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Obama has argued since then that climate legislation can blunt the cost to consumers. Democratic legislation now before Congress calls for a variety of measures aimed at mitigating consumer costs. Several studies predict average household costs probably would be $100 to $145 a year.
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PALIN: Welcomes last year’s Supreme Court decision deciding punitive damages for victims of the nation’s largest oil spill tragedy, the Exxon Valdez disaster, stating it had taken 20 years to achieve victory. As governor, she says, she’d had the state argue in favor of the victims, and she says the court’s ruling went ”in favor of the people.” Finally, she writes, Alaskans could recover some of their losses.
THE FACTS: That response is at odds with her reaction at the time to the ruling, which resolved the long-running case by reducing punitive damages for victims to $500 million from $2.5 billion. Environmentalists and plaintiffs’ lawyers decried the ruling as a slap at the victims and Palin herself said she was ”extremely disappointed.” She said the justices had gutted a jury decision favoring higher damage awards, the Anchorage Daily News reported. ”It’s tragic that so many Alaska fishermen and their families have had their lives put on hold waiting for this decision,” she said, noting many had died ”while waiting for justice.”
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PALIN: Describing her resistance to federal stimulus money, Palin describes Alaska as a practical, libertarian haven of independent Americans who don’t want ”help” from government busybodies.
THE FACTS: Alaska is also one of the states most dependent on federal subsidies, receiving much more assistance from Washington than it pays in federal taxes. A study for the nonpartisan Tax Foundation found that in 2005, the state received $1.84 for every dollar it sent to Washington.
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PALIN: Says she tried to talk about national security and energy independence in her interview with Vogue magazine but the interviewer wanted her to pivot from hydropower to high fashion.
THE FACTS are somewhat in dispute. Vogue contributing editor Rebecca Johnson said Palin did not go on about hydropower. ”She just kept talking about drilling for oil.”
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PALIN: ”Was it ambition? I didn’t think so. Ambition drives; purpose beckons.” Throughout the book, Palin cites altruistic reasons for running for office, and for leaving early as Alaska governor.
THE FACTS: Few politicians own up to wanting high office for the power and prestige of it, and in this respect, Palin fits the conventional mold. But ”Going Rogue” has all the characteristics of a pre-campaign manifesto, the requisite autobiography of the future candidate.
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AP writers Matt Apuzzo, Sharon Theimer, Tom Raum, Rita Beamish, Beth Fouhy, H. Josef Hebert, Justin D. Pritchard, Garance Burke, Dan Joling and Lewis Shaine contributed to this report.
First off, I think it’s GREAT that homosexuals want to serve in the military. I’m surprised that they want to fight for a country that won’t allow them to get married or have those benefits that come with marriage.
That’s just my outside opinion though, but what do I know.
Secondly, considering the muslim that just shot up Fort Hood…
Hmmm… Muslims serving in a war against many of their own people
v.s.
Gays serving in a war against people that would much rather stone a gay man to death.
All I’m saying is: Does it seem like the military is picking and choosing who to allow in from some strange and illogical rules?
Ben Smith: Frank: ‘Don’t ask’ repeal coming next year
November 11, 2009
Kerry Eleveld reports that there’s a plan and a timetable for repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell”:
Repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” will likely be included as part of next year’s Department of Defense authorization bill in both chambers of Congress, Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said Wednesday.
“Military issues are always done as part of the overall authorization bill,” Frank said, insisting that this has been the strategy for overturning the policy all along. “’Don’t ask, don’t tell’ was always going to be part of the military authorization.”
Frank said he has been in direct communication with the White House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, and other Congressional leaders about the strategy for ending the 1993 ban on gays serving openly in the military.
Though some moderate Democrats have recently expressed concern about repealing the policy during a midterm election year, Frank said resolve at the White House has never wavered. “The Administration is totally committed to this and has been from the beginning,” he said.
Also, this great behind-the-scenes nugget:
Anecdotally, Frank recalled an incident earlier this year when Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a statement to reporters suggesting that repeal was still an open question.
“There was a point where Gates said, ‘If we repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell,”’ — and the next day he said, ‘When we repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell,”’” said Frank. “That’s because Rahm called him up. The White House has been consistently committed.”
So, basically this man wanted out of the army because he was uncomfortable killing his own people?
Nobody assisted in this issue for fears of being labeled as “Racist” or “wrong”.
The man was a muslim that wanted out-and had he just come out of the closet instead of trying to convince the military that he couldn’t be a part of this operation, he went postal and murdered many people.
Should getting out of the military be so difficult?
Should the military have more precise qualifications as far as a “belief” system for applicants?
Should muslims enlisted be forced to engage in war with other muslims?
Some Saw Trouble With Fort Hood Suspect
Sunday, November 08, 2009
AP
Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan is suspected of a deadly rampage at the Fort Hood base in Texas. Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan is suspected of a deadly rampage at the Fort Hood base in Texas.
FORT HOOD, Texas — In retrospect, the signs of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s growing anger over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem unmistakable. But even people who worried his increasingly strident views were clouding his ability to serve the U.S. military could not predict the murderous rampage of which he now stands accused.
In the months leading to Thursday’s shooting spree that left 13 people dead and 29 others wounded, Hasan raised eyebrows with comments that the war on terror was “a war on Islam” and wrestled with what to tell fellow Muslim solders who had their doubts about fighting in Islamic countries. “The system is not doing what it’s supposed to do,” said Dr. Val Finnell, who complained to administrators at a military university about what he considered Hasan’s “anti-American” rants. “He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out.” Finnell studied with Hasan from 2007-2008 in the master’s program in public health at the military’s Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, where Hasan persistently complained about perceived anti-Muslim sentiment in the military and injected his politics into courses where they had no place. “In retrospect, I’m not surprised he did it,” Finnell said of the shootings. “I had real questions about what his priorities were, what his beliefs were.”
Hasan, who was shot by civilian police and taken into custody, was in intensive care but breathing on his own late Saturday at an Army hospital in San Antonio. Officials refused to say if he was talking to investigators.
At least 17 victims remained hospitalized with gunshot wounds, and nine were in intensive care late Saturday. On Sunday, numerous church services honoring the victims were planned both on the post and in neighboring Killeen.
Military criminal investigators continue to refer to Hasan as the only suspect in the shootings but won’t say when charges would be filed. “We have not established a motive for the shootings at this time,” said Army Criminal Investigative Command spokesman Chris Grey.
A government official speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the case said an initial review of Hasan’s computer use has found no evidence of links to terror groups, or anyone who might have helped plan or push him toward the shooting attack. The review of Hasan’s computer is continuing and more evidence could emerge, the source said.
The floor is often bombarded with a bunch of bullshit to waste time.
Amazingly, Rep. Alan Grayson actually bombarded it with something of importance, but Rep. Phil Gingrey wasn’t having it…
Dehumanizing legislation makes it easier to support and tear down…
But, when real people and their lives are encompassed in the discussion of legislation, that’s when things get complicated.
Thank you Rep. Grayson for complicating this legislation, and I mean it. Thank you for listing those that might have lived…
And go to Hell Rep. Gingrey.
Burn.
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Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) took to the floor Wednesday night to read the names of those who had died from lack of health insurance in Republican districts.
“Is it really asking too much of us that we keep people alive?” he asked. Later he added,
“We can save these people, or we can let them die.”
Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) called for the clerk to take down Grayson’s words — leading to an adjournment. But when the House reconvened, Grayson continued naming Republican representatives and the dead in their districts.
Glenn Beck, one of my favorites on television because I personally hate him so much, joins forces with Peta to discuss Al Gore’s diet.
The reason for this?
Well, according to Peta, you can’t really be an environmentalist and eat meat.
So, Al Gore is a liar.
Now, just an idea…but if the environmentalists want others to jump on the bandwagon with them to fight their cause, wouldn’t it be more rational AND logical to use the term environmentalist in ways that aren’t so absolute.
Meaning, it’s going to be difficult to grow your political movement if the term you use to encompass all the members is so strict.
I believe in saving the environment, that’s why I recycle and do not litter.
Now, that is my part, and as far as I’m concerned it’s enough for one person.
I must be wrong though…I should also get rid of my meat, although we are omnivores, and i love a cheeseburger now and then.
I should also get rid of my vehicle, which I could not possibly afford.
I should also do a bunch of other shit that is just not realistic.
I’m going off trail here…enjoy the video-because I did.
