Sept. 11 (Bloomberg) — John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate sent a signal that he would end business as usual and cronyism in government. Her record shows the Alaska governor engaged in some of the same practices she and McCain now condemn.

Palin’s office approved a state job for a friend and campaign aide with whom she shared a land investment, financial records and interviews over the past two weeks show. She hired a former lobbyist for a pipeline company to help oversee a multibillion-dollar deal with that same company.

She named a police chief accused of harassment to head the state police. And she sent campaign e-mails on her city hall account while serving as mayor of Wasilla — conduct for which she later turned in an oil commissioner on ethics charges.

These incidents raise “some serious questions about her judgment and serious questions about her standards of ethics in public service,” said James Thurber, director of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies in Washington. Suggesting a real estate investment partner for a job “may be acceptable in Alaska; it would not be acceptable in Washington, D.C., a place whose norms she wants to change.”

Palin defeated an incumbent governor, a fellow Republican, in 2006 charging that her party’s old guard had committed ethical lapses and become too cozy with special interests, including oil companies. A central theme in this year’s presidential campaign has been that Palin’s record demonstrates the change a McCain administration would bring to Washington.

Recent statements by the governor may erode that claim. In her acceptance speech last week, she suggested that she opposed the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” a $223 million earmark for a bridge to an island where only 53 people lived.

For It, Against It

When Palin, 44, campaigned for governor, however, she said she was in favor of the bridge. In 2007, she canceled the project in the face of national outrage. The state never returned the money allocated by the federal government, with some of the funds going toward other state and local projects.

And as mayor of Wasilla, a job she held for six years until 2002, Palin hired lobbyists to get federal funding for local projects. Wasilla secured $27 million in earmarks for the town of about 9,000 that included a rail project and a youth center.

Shortly after she was elected governor, Palin’s office signed off on hiring Deborah Richter — who attended college for a year then worked in bookkeeping and finance jobs — as director of a division that distributes dividends to Alaskans from the state’s oil-wealth savings account.

Richter, who said she’s known Palin for 13 years, was Palin’s gubernatorial campaign treasurer and ran her inaugural committee.

Sharing an Investment

The Richters and Palins also shared an investment: 30 acres of rural property near a lake in Petersville, Alaska, worth $47,300, according to Matanuska-Susitna Borough data.

“It sounds like a patronage deal for someone who ran your campaign; that’s pretty normal,” said Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington. “What’s not normal is that they have business dealings together.”

Deborah Richter gave up her share of the property last September in a divorce settlement that followed an affair with Palin’s legislative director, John Bitney. Bitney and Richter both acknowledged the affair in interviews. Bitney said Palin fired him over it; Richter is still on the job. They are now married.

Last month, Palin signed a law granting TransCanada Corp., Canada’s largest pipeline company, an exclusive state license and up to $500 million in subsidies to proceed with work on a $27 billion pipeline, which would carry natural gas from Alaska to other U.S. markets.

Once a Lobbyist

Marty Rutherford, the chief coordinator behind Palin’s pipeline effort, once worked as an Alaska lobbyist for a TransCanada pipeline subsidiary, according to state records. Rutherford, deputy commissioner at the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, earned $40,200 as a lobbyist for 10 months in 2003 working for Foothills, the subsidiary.

Rutherford said in an interview that she only did consulting work for the company, including reviewing natural gas legislation. She said the work had no bearing on her future job as coordinator of Palin’s pipeline team.

“I intended to leave state government when I went to Jade North, but as time went on I realized my heart was in government,” she said, referring to the firm she briefly worked for.

Palin told the Anchorage Daily News last December that Rutherford’s work with Foothills wasn’t a conflict because it had been five years earlier.

Trooper Investigation

The governor already has triggered an investigation by the Alaska legislature into whether she fired the state commissioner of public safety, Walt Monegan, for not removing a state trooper involved in a contentious divorce from Palin’s sister.

Palin has denied exerting any pressure on Monegan and said she dismissed him because she wanted to take the department in a new direction.

Since McCain picked Palin, seven Palin aides have declined to be interviewed on the matter by an investigator hired by the Alaska legislature, according to the House and Senate Judiciary committees.

Earlier this year, Palin found herself apologizing for her handling of Monegan’s replacement. About six weeks before she learned McCain wanted her to be his vice president, she named Kenai, Alaska, police chief Charles Kopp to replace Monegan.

On July 25, two weeks after being appointed, Kopp resigned amid scrutiny over a 2005 sexual-harassment complaint against him while he was chief in Kenai. The complaint resulted in a letter of reprimand from the city, which Palin told reporters she never knew about and had believed that the allegations were unsubstantiated, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

Not a Harasser

In a July press conference, Kopp denied any harassment. “I’ve always done every job I’ve ever done with honor and integrity,” he said. “There is one thing I am not. I am not a sex harasser.” Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.

The moment that crystallized her image as a reformer came when she turned in state Republican chairman Randy Ruedrich after discovering he was using his state e-mail account to conduct party business.

Palin and Ruedrich were serving together as commissioners on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a state regulatory agency, at the time. Ruedrich resigned from the commission in November 2003, and was later fined $12,000, according to a 2004 article in the Anchorage Daily News.

In 2006, Palin found herself asking forgiveness for a similar offense from her past, according to a July 28, 2006, article in the Anchorage Daily News. She had sent campaign e- mails from her Wasilla mayor’s office in 2002, when she made an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor.

“For any mistakes like that (were) made, I apologize,” Palin said of the e-mail controversy in July 2006, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

For Related News: For news on the election: STNI ELEC2008 For news on McCain: BIO JOHN S MCCAIN For news on Palin: BIO SARAH LOUISE PALIN

This is supposed to be a day of remembrance. Remembrance of the attack, remembrance of the national unity which followed it.

Most important of all, remembrance of the dead.

But 9/11 has become…… a brand name.

A Republican campaign slogan.

Propaganda of the lowest form.

9/11 has become… 9/11 **with a trademark logo.**

9/11 (**TM**) has sustained a president who long ago should have been dismissed, or impeached. It has kept him and his gang of financial and constitutional **crooks** in office without – literally – any visible means of support.

9/11 (**TM**) has made possible the greatest sleight-of-hand in our nation’s history.

The political party in office at the time of the attacks, at the local, state and national levels, the party which **uniformly** ignored the warnings — and the presidential administration already through twenty percent of its first term and no longer wet behind the ears — have not only thus far escaped any **blame** for the malfeasance and criminal neglect that allowed the attacks to occur, but that presidency and that party, have managed to make it seem as if the **other** political party would be solely and irredeemably responsible for any similar catastrophe in the future.

Thus, Senator McCain, were you able to accomplish a further inversion of reality at your party’s nominating convention last week.

There was the former Mayor of the City of New York — the one who took **no counter-terrorism measure** in his seven years in office between the first attack on the World Trade Center, and the second attack.

Nothing, except to insist — despite all advice and warning – that his Emergency Command Center be moved directly **into** the World Trade Center.

Yet there was this man, Sir – Rudolph Giuliani — quite succinctly dismissed as “A Noun, a Verb, and 9/11,” and repudiated even by Republican **voters** — transformed into the keynote speaker, Senator McCain — at **your** convention.

And his childish, squealing, braying, Tourette’s-like repetition of 9/11 (**TM**), was greeted not as conclusive evidence that he is consumed by massive guilt – hard-earned guilt, in fact – but rather as some kind of political tour-de-force, an endorsement of your Vice Presidential nominee, a rookie governor — a facile and slick con artist.

The blind endorsing the bland, to a chorus of 9/11 (**TM**), 9/11 (**TM**), 9/11 (**TM.**)

Your ringing mindless cheer of “We’ve Kept You Safe Since Then”…

While nobody asks “doesn’t **then** count?”

All of this, sadistically disrespecting the dead of New York, and Washington, and Shanksville…

**Endorsed**, Senator McCain…

**Exploited**, Senator McCain…

**Trademarked,** Senator McCain… by **you.**

And yet of course **the** exact moment in which Senator McCain’s Republicans showed the nation exactly how far they have fallen from the Better Angels of Mr. **Lincoln’s** Nature, came the **next** night.

The television networks were told that the Convention would pause, early in the evening, when **children** could still be watching, for a 9/11 **Tribute**, and they were encouraged to broadcast it.

What we got was not a tribute to the **dead** of 9/11, nor even a tribute to the responders, or the singularity of purpose we all felt.

The Republicans gave us sociological pornography… a virtual **snuff film**.

Years ago, responsible television networks, to the applause of the nation, and the relief of its mental health authorities, voluntarily stopped showing the most graphic of the images of the World Trade Center, except with the strongest of warnings.

And yet, the Republicans, at their convention, having virtually seized control of the cable news operations, showed… the worst of it.

This is **all** anyone with a conscience can show you of what the Republicans showed you.

The actual collapse of the smoking towers.

A fleeting image of what might have been a victim leaping to his death from a thousand feet up.

And something new.

From this angle, ground-level, perfectly framed, images — of the fireball created when the second plane hit the second tower.

It was terrifying.

After all its object **was**… to **terrify.**

Not to commemorate, not to call for unity, not to remember the dead.

But to terrify.

To open again the horrible wounds, to brand the skin of this nation with the message — as hateful as the terrorists’ own — that you must vote Republican or this will happen again and you will die…

And just in case that was **not** enough, to also dishonestly and profanely **conflate** 9/11 with the 1979 **Irahn** Hostage Crisis — to stoke the flames of paranoia about **another** Middle Eastern Nation.

This **was** a 9/11 Tribute.

Not to the dead, nor to the unity.

But a tribute to how valuable 9/11 has been as a political tool for the Republican Party.

9/11… (**TM.**)

Senator McCain, you had promised us a **clean** campaign.

You could be Snow-White the rest of the way, Sir, yet that manipulative videotape from **your** convention should tar you always in the minds of decent Americans.

And still, as this seventh 9/11…(**TM**)… approaches — that, Sir, is not the worst of your contributions to the utter politicizing of a day that should be sacrosanct to all of us.

Hard to believe, but the Senator has done worse with 9/11 and the evil behind it.

We heard it last week in Minnesota… we’ve heard it off and on since January…

But Senator McCain said it most **concisely** in June.

“Look,” he said. “I know the area, I’ve been there, I know wars, I know how to win wars, and I know how to improve our capabilities so that we will capture Osama bin Laden — or put it this way, bring him to justice. We will do it. I know how to do it.”

Senator McCain seems to be quite serious — that he and he alone — not the CIA, nor the U-S Military, nor the current President — can capture Bin Laden.

Thus we must take him at his word, that this is no mere ludicrous campaign boast.

We must assume Senator McCain truly believes he is capable of doing this, and has **been** capable of doing this, since last January.

“We will capture Osama bin Laden… we will do it. I know how to do it.”

Well then, Senator… you’d better go and **do it**… **hadn’t** you?

Because, Sir, if a man or woman in this nation, Democrat or Republican, had a clear and effective means of capturing or killing Osama Bin Laden…

If that person had been advertising his claim, Senator… for **eight** months…

But if that person not only refused to go to responsible authorities in government and **advise** them of this plan to catch Bin Laden, but further announced he would not even begin to **enact** this secret plan to corral the world’s most hated man… until the end of **next** January…

What would be **your** description of such an individual, Senator?

Charlatan?

**Do-nothing**?

**Opportunist**?

Senator McCain, if you have — if you have **had** — a means of capturing Osama Bin Laden, and you do not immediately **inform** some responsible authority of the full scope of that plan, you are to some degree great or small… **aiding and abetting** Osama Bin Laden.

If you could assist in **capturing** him now, Senator McCain, but you have chosen not to… you, Sir, have helped… Osama Bin Laden… stay **free.**

**Free** to inspire and supervise the terrorists.

**Free** to plan or execute attacks here.

**You**, Sir, are **blackmailing** some portion of the American electorate into voting for your party, by promising to help in the capture of Bin Laden… **only** if you are made president!

I’d rather win an election than catch Bin Laden!

No more cynical calculation has ever been made in this nation’s history, Sir.

If you **lose** the election, Senator, are you **not** going to tell the President-Elect?

Are you intending to keep this a **secret** until the next election and your party’s next nominee?

Senator, as you and your Republicans shed your phony, crocodile, opportunistic tears tomorrow on 9/11 **TM**, in front of the utterly disingenuous banner “Country First”….

The **fact** is, you have shown that it is **John McCain** first, and the country **last.**

The **fact** is, Sir, by **holding out** on your secret plan to catch Bin Laden…

By searing those images into our collective wounded American psyche at your nomination last week…

Terrorists are not what you, John McCain, **fight**.

Terrorists… are what you, John McCain, **use.**

Good night, and good luck.

It was disturbing enough when Bush’s people were copying (and using) RNC email addresses for official business.

It’s one thing if it was something like “Honey, bring home a quart of milk.” But what the hell does Todd Palin have to do with official state busines?

That sounds a tad improrer to me.

Damn, that sounds familiar!

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 10, 2008

WASILLA, Alaska, Sept. 9 — Gov. Sarah Palin is being asked by a local Republican activist to release more than 1,100 e-mails she withheld from a public records request, including 40 that were copied to her husband, Todd.

Palin had claimed executive privilege for documents copied to her husband, who is not a state employee, in responding to an open records request in June made by Andrée McLeod, an activist in Anchorage. The administrative appeal filed yesterday by McLeod’s attorney, Donald C. Mitchell, argued that by copying Todd Palin on sensitive state correspondence, the governor and her aides shattered the privilege rightly afforded elected officials.

“She has allowed Todd Palin — who has not been elected by the people of Alaska, who is not a state employee — to entangle himself apparently as he sees fit in the operations of the executive branch of the state government,” Mitchell said.

“From the case law, if government voluntarily opens up that internal decision-making to what I would call civilians, then that is waiver of that protection of the government policy decision-making process. That is what happened here, and it happened because Sarah Palin doesn’t understand it,” he said.

Todd Palin was frequently copied on e-mails relating to Alaska State Troopers and the union representing public safety employees, according to McLeod, who received four boxes of redacted e-mails in response to her request. At the time, both Sarah and Todd Palin were complaining to the state public safety commissioner about a disciplinary matter involving Sarah Palin’s ex-brother-in-law, a state trooper.

Palin also routinely does government business from a Yahoo address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, rather than her secure official state e-mail address, according to documents already made public.

“Whoops!” Palin aide Frank Bailey wrote, after addressing an e-mail to the governor’s official state address. “Frank, This is not the Governor’s personal account,” a secretary reminded him.

Calls seeking response from the governor were not immediately returned by a Palin spokesperson. Palin last month described McLeod as a disgruntled former employee, though in 2004 Palin endorsed her as a state House candidate “not afraid to stand up for what’s right.”

Mitchell’s appeal, addressed to Palin in her capacity as the decision-maker on the earlier records request, questions the wisdom of the governor and her aides shipping messages about state business between their public and private e-mail accounts “with complete and total abandon,” he said.

“There’s a reason the governor should be using her own official e-mail channels, because of security and encryption,” the lawyer said. “She’s running state business out of Yahoo?”

On March 17, minutes after peppering a state official about whether e-mails about state business contained on a personal BlackBerry could become public, senior Palin aide Ivy Frye addressed a message to both Palins and two other aides: “In sum, it’s just as I thought — questions of confidentiality are still unanswered by law.”

McLeod, a former state employee who once was close to Palin, filed an ethics complaint last month against Palin and others. She cited e-mail traffic that appeared to show that the governor’s office improperly helped a Palin fundraiser obtain a civil service position.

“By withholding these emails, Sarah Palin has broken on her promise of being open, honest and transparent,” McLeod said in a statement. “It’s old-school politics and not the kind of reform she pledged to Alaskans.”

If you’ve never heard it- listen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAvlimEYEpQ&feature=related

I hope he has many more like today over the next month.

One more such victorius day and he just might be undone.

Of course, it is not over until the fat Arab in the tower sings.

Liberals believe that choice means not having to risk your life to choose- that includes choosing to keep the child. The most important issue is the woman and what she wants- it is her body. And no woman should be killed for it.

The liberals proposed higher sentencing for people who killed pregnant women- and HARMED them as well- which would have included men who beat women who are pregnant. But the antis just wanted that fetal personhood law so bad- they chose to screw women who are merely ‘injured’ while choosing to carry her child.

Anyone who thinks Alexa’s law was anything more than antis getting their agenda pushed are morons.

By LARRY ROHTER
Published: September 10, 2008

Escalating its efforts to portray Senator Barack Obama as a candidate whose values fall outside the mainstream, the campaign of Senator John McCain on Tuesday unveiled a new television advertisement claiming that Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, favors “comprehensive sex education” for kindergarten students.

“Learning about sex before learning to read?” the narrator asks in the 30-second advertisement, which the campaign says will be shown in battleground states and on national cable. The commercial also asserts that a sex-education bill introduced in Illinois, which Mr. Obama did not sponsor and which never became law, is his “one accomplishment” in the field of education.

Both sets of accusations, however, seriously distort the record.

The original controversy dates to 2003, when a bill to modify the teaching of sex education in Illinois was introduced in the Legislature. The proposal was supported by a coalition of education and public health organizations, including the Illinois Parent Teacher Association, the Illinois State Medical Society, the Illinois Public Health Association and the Illinois Education Association.

Mr. Obama voted for the bill in committee, where it passed, but it never came to a full and final vote. The proposal called for “age and developmentally appropriate” sex education and also allowed parents the option of withdrawing their children from such classroom instruction if they felt that it clashed with their beliefs or values.

In referring to the sex-education bill, the McCain campaign is largely recycling old and discredited accusations made against Mr. Obama by Alan Keyes in their 2004 Senate race. At that time, Mr. Obama stated that he understood the main objective of the legislation, as it pertained to kindergarteners, to be to teach them how to defend themselves against sexual predators.

“I have a 6-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old daughter, and one of the things my wife and I talked to our daughter about is the possibility of somebody touching them inappropriately, and what that might mean,” Mr. Obama said in 2004. “And that was included specifically in the law, so that kindergarteners are able to exercise some possible protection against abuse, because I have family members as well as friends who suffered abuse at that age.”

It is a misstatement of the bill’s purpose, therefore, to maintain, as the McCain campaign advertisement does, that Mr. Obama favored conventional sex education as a policy for 5-year-olds. Under the Illinois proposal, “medically accurate” education about more complicated topics, including intercourse, contraception and homosexuality, would have been reserved for older students in higher grades.

The advertisement, then, also misrepresents what the bill meant by “comprehensive.” The instruction the bill required was comprehensive in that it called for a curriculum that went from kindergarten and through high school, not in the sense that kindergarteners would have been fully exposed to the entire gamut of sex-related issues.

In another part of the advertisement, Mr. McCain maintains that Mr. Obama’s sole achievement in education was the sex-education bill. In reality, Mr. Obama not only helped administer a $49 million education project in Chicago in the 1990s, but also sponsored or co-sponsored measures that increased the number of charter schools in Illinois, and expanded federal grants to summer school programs and to historically black colleges.

As support for its contention that Mr. Obama is “wrong on education,” Mr. McCain’s advertisement cited criticism by Education Week, a trade publication. Mr. Obama “hasn’t made a significant mark on education” in his years in the Senate in Illinois and Washington, the advertisement asserts.

Education Week did indeed make that assessment in an article published last year. But in the same paragraph, the magazine also said that Mr. Obama “did promote early-childhood initiatives that advocates considered “innovative and progressive,” and also noted that “his biggest accomplishment in the field was the creation of a state board to oversee the expansion of early-childhood education in the state.”

The same publication has also criticized Mr. McCain, in language that was perhaps even stronger. Early this year, in an article titled “John McCain Where Art Thou?” it complained that he offered “a laundry list of fairly vague answers” on how to improve schools and did not make education a priority.

“McCain is a campaign-finance, foreign-relations, anti-abortion, tax-cut candidate,” the magazine said. “Education is not his thing. Depending on your perspective, McCain’s relative silence on education may be a good thing. If you think the federal government has grossly overreached into the state business of education, then he may be your guy.”

The Obama campaign expressed outrage over the commercial, with Bill Burton, a spokesman, describing it as “shameful and downright perverse.”

But Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said, “the Obama campaign did not and cannot dispute a shred of the content in the ad.”

What CHANCE does that baby have? The “pro lifers” will abandon it to the mercies of the market and business and how the mother or the family do what they are FORCED to do to support and care for it.

Senator Barack Obama was right. The Republicans see a baby as a punishment and an anchor to obligation to those who would USE that mother or family and not help them.

Point to where I attacked your right to defend yourself and maybe I start taking you mildly seriously.
================================================================

Try reading your own post at 11:06 smartass.

If I have a baby, then SOMEONE ELSE should pay for it.

If I have an abortion, then SOMEONE ELSE should pay for the abortion.

It’s human sometimes, but not at other times?

Oh, I get it.

More Lib Hypocracy.

“It takes a village to raise a child.”

Governor Palin has her “village”. It is made up of nannies and other such government paid employees that will care for her baby….

…while SHE tells other women in a circumstance similar in hers to fend for themselves.

Point to where I attacked your right to defend yourself and maybe I start taking you mildly seriously.