The sky is green and the grass is blue.
Sounds ridiculous – right?
Welcome to Sarah Palin’s world. Fortunately, Americans aren’t in the mood this year to buy her bullshit. The situation we face is just too serious, and she’s not a serious candidate.
Many conservative intellectuals are jumping ship, and Alaskans are getting sick of her as well. The Anchorage Daily News published an editorial today about her response to the troopergate report.
Sarah Palin’s reaction to the Legislature’s Troopergate report is an embarrassment to Alaskans and the nation.
She claims the report “vindicates” her. She said that the investigation found “no unlawful or unethical activity on my part.”
Her response is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian.
Page 8, Finding Number One of the report says: “I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.”
In plain English, she did something “unlawful.” She broke the state ethics law.
Perhaps Gov. Palin has been too busy to actually read the Troopergate report. Perhaps she is relying on briefings from McCain campaign spinmeisters.
Because if she had actually read it, she couldn’t claim “vindication” with a straight face.
Palin asserted that the report found “there was no abuse of authority at all in trying to get Officer Wooten fired.”
In fact, the report concluded that “impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda, to wit: to get Trooper Michael Wooten fired.”
Palin’s response is the kind of political “big lie” that George Orwell warned against. War is peace. Black is white. Up is down.
Posted in: Civil Liberties, Culture War, Lunatic Fringe, Politics, President 2008
Tags: McCain campaign, Orwellian, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin Orwell, troopergate
There were no ethical violations (except, of course, for those ethical violations).
Ridiculous.
I’m boycotting your blog- I can’t take it anymore!
Really? There are still people out there defending this woman?
Nick – you can’t accept the obvious – this woman is a trainwreck.
Considering Nick is certain that Obama would “destroy our country,” you can understand why he’d be so forgiving of Palin.
But this man is the “pure” individual that has the vision to send us to an up to now unknown utopia.
Here is a quick look into 3 former Fannie Mae executives who have brought down Wall Street.
Franklin Raines was a Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Fannie Mae. Raines was forced to retire from his position with Fannie Mae when auditing discovered severe irregulaties in Fannie Mae’s accounting activities. At the time of his departure The Wall Street Journal noted, ‘ Raines, who long defended the company’s accounting despite mounting evidence that it wasn’t proper, issued a statement la te Tuesday conceding that ‘mistakes were made’ and saying he would assume responsibility as he had earlier promised. News reports indicate the company was under growing pressure from regulators to shake up its management in the wake of findings that the company’s books ran afoul of generally accepted accounting principles for four years.’ Fannie Mae had to reduce its surplus by $9 billion.
Raines left with a ‘golden parachute valued at $240 Million in benefits. The Government filed suit against Raines when the depth of the accounting scandal became clear. http://housingdoom.com/2006/12/18/fannie-charges/ . The Government noted, ‘The 101 charges reveal how the individuals improperly manipulated earnings to maximize their bonuses, while knowingly neglecting accounting systems and internal controls, misapplying over twenty accounting principles and misleading the regulator and the public. The Notice explains how they submitted six years of misleading and inaccurate accounting statements and inaccurate capital reports that enabled them to grow Fannie Mae in an unsafe and unsound manner.’ These charges were made in 2006. The Court ordered Raines to return $50 Million Dollars he received in bonuses based on the miss-stated Fannie Mae profits.
Tim Howard – Was the Chief Financial Officer of Fannie Mae. Howard ‘was a strong internal proponent of using accounting strategies that would ensure a ‘stable pattern of earnings’ at Fannie. In everyday English – he was cooking the books. The Government Investigation determined that, ‘Chief Financial Officer, Tim Howard, failed to provide adequate oversight to key control and reporting functions within Fannie Mae,’
On June 16, 2006, Rep. Richard Baker, R-La., asked the Justice Department to investigate his allegations that two former Fannie Mae executives lied to Congress in October 2004 when they denied manipulating the mortgage-finance giant’s income statement to achieve manag ement pay bonuses. Investigations by federal regulators and the company’s board of directors since concluded that management did manipulate 1998 earnings to trigger bonuses. Raines and Howard resigned under pressure in late 2004.
Howard’s Golden Parachute was estimated at $20 Million!
Jim Johnson – A former executive at Lehman Brothers and who was later forced from his position as Fannie Mae CEO. A look at the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s May 2006 report on mismanagement and corruption inside Fannie Mae, and you’ll see some interesting things about Johnson. Investigators found that Fannie Mae had hidden a substantial amount of Johnson’s 1998 compensation from the public, reporting that it was between $6 million and $7 million when it fact it was $21 million.’ Johnson is currently under investigation for taking illegal loans from Countrywide while serving as CEO of Fannie Mae.
Johnson’s Golden Parachute was estimated at $28 Million.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
FRANKLIN RAINES? Raines works for the Obama Campaign as Chief Economic Advisor
TIM HOWARD? Howard is also a Chief Economic Advisor to Obama
JIM JOHNSON? Johnson hired as a Senior Obama Finance Advisor and was selected to run Obama’s Vice Presiden
Good God, Norb. At least check Snopes before you copy and paste an email that one of your conservative friends sends you…
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/fanniemae.asp
It debunks most of what you just pasted here.
To Tall man: thanks for educating me. I stand corrected. Hopefully I have the intellect to keep trying to learn the truth, unlike the ignorant bastards that will not let any discussion interfere with their convictions, right or wrong.
I’m not sure if you’re taking a shot at me or not, but you’re welcome for the info.
Anytime I get an email like that (from the right or the left), I copy a paragraph and search snopes. Usually whatever claims are being made turn out to be false. There is so much misinformation out there.
Palin badly needs a Checkers the dog speech, ala Nixon 1952. But in the words of Lloyd Bentsen, ‘she’s no Dick Nixon’! She’s more like Ted Stepien!
Norb – Raines does not work for Obama and he has never worked for him.
Article in British press
Friday, September 05 2008 A pistol-packin’ LoobyLoo: the
Left’s worst nightmare
Frank Sinatra would have got the joke. In the words of
the great political philosopher, they all laughed at Christopher
Columbus when he said the world was round.
They’re all laughing, too, at John McCain for choosing Sarah
Palin as his running mate. The usual suspects took one look at
this pistol-packin’ momma and reacted like John McEnroe to a
disputed line call: you cannot be serious!
Certainly, the pick came, as the Americans say, out of
left field. But Sarah Palin is centre stage now, and suddenly it’s
game on.Stern, God-fearin’, gun-totin’ Sarah Palin. Will
she get the last laugh?
At the very least, McCain has got a wonderful sense of
mischief -a quality sadly lacking in most politicians.
The way the Left, both here and in America , are contorting
themselves is a joy to behold. Sarah Palin is every Guardianista’s
worst nightmare. It’s reminiscent of how they used to patronise Mrs
Thatcher 30 years ago. What did this small-town girl know about anything?
How could any woman expect to run a country and raise a family?
What does she know about foreign affairs?
Of course, they weren’t saying that a woman couldn’t be Prime
Minister, you understand. Just not this woman.
Shirley Williams would have been fine, but this ghastly,lower
middle-class Snobby Roberts woman from Grantham, of all places -
AAARGH! It’s been hilarious watching the sisterhood tie
themselves in knots over Sarah Palin.
They’ve been in full Glenda Slagg mode – dontcha just hate her,
dontcha just love her? On the one hand she’s a feisty, capable woman shaking
up the political establishment, while juggling a family and career. I
don’t know how she does it.But on the other, she’s a Godfearing, gun-totin’,
good ol’ girl.She hunts, she fishes – she’s a Republican, for goodness’
sake.Sarah Palin is every red-blooded redneck’s fantasy figure, every
randy schoolboy’s Mrs Robinson. She could have stepped straight out
of one of long-lost cousin Michael’s Ripping Yarns.
Cheerleader, beauty queen, dominatrix of the Harper Valley PTA,
mother of five, mayor, governor and now a heartbeat away from the
Vice-Presidency. You couldn’t make her up. Law And Order’s Fred
Thompson, once a presidential candidate himself, hit the baby seal on the head
when he said the Left were in a blind panic over what to do about Palin.
Joke’s on you: John McCain, displaying a sense of
mischief rare in politics, with his choice of Sarah Palin, surrounded by her
family, as his running-mate What they are doing is what they usually do when confronted
with something which offends their world view – character
assassination.Every ‘liberal’ newspaper and TV network has sent hatchet
men north to Alaska to dig for the dirt beneath the tundra.
What they discovered is that 80 per cent of Alaskans think
she’s doing a great job. A supermarket tabloid is claiming she had an affair, which
she denies. Apart from that, the worst the scandal-hounds have come
up with is that Palin, as governor, put pressure on a police chief
to fire her former brother-in-law.Given that said brother-in-law had beaten up her sister and
threatened to kill her father, I’d say that far from abusing
her office, she showed considerable restraint. I’m surprised she
didn’t put a bullet in his head.The big talking point is the pregnancy of Palin’s
17-year-old daughter, Bristol , who is soon to marry her boyfriend.
That’s what I call a shotgun wedding.Still, it kills the wild rumor that Bristol is really the
mother of Palin’s Down’s syndrome baby, Trig.
You’ve just got to like a woman who calls her son after a
character in Only Fools And Horses. Although it’s probably
fair to assume she doesn’t have a working knowledge of Cockney
rhyming slang,otherwise her daughter would never have been christened Bristol .
When Palin talks about shattering the glass ceiling, the
sisters are supposed to cheer – except most of them suspect her idea of
shattering a glass ceiling would be with a both barrels blast
from a12-bore.She epitomises the ‘God and guns’ mentality at
which Barack Obama and his supporters sneer. They use ‘small town’ as a
pejorative term.hat’s not how Middle America sees it.
John Mellencamp wrote his hit song Small Town as an
Ironic take on Hicksville , USA . He even performed it at an Obama rally
earlier this year.Back at you: Democrats say Sarah lacks the experience for
the top job – but neither do Obama or Biden
But that hasn’t stopped Middle Americans adopting it as
an anthem.Mellencamp must be just as horrified as Springsteen was when
Ronald Reagan purloined his anti-war Born In The USA as a campaign song.
It’s not that the Americans don’t do irony, as European
‘sophisticates’ always maintain.It’s just that sometimes, my dear, they don’t give a
damn. A good song is a good song – and to hell with the message.
Most Americans were born and raised in a small town. Her values are their values.
The mantra from the Obama camp is that she lacks the experience to
be VP. In truth, she has more executive experience than either
Obama or his Neil Kinnock-impersonator sidekick mate Joe Biden, neither
of whom has ever run anything.But, wail the sceptics, what about foreign affairs?
Admittedly,Palin has never slagged off her country at a mass rally in Berlin
But Alaska ‘s next door to Russia . She’s got more
experience of dealing with Russians than anyone outside of corporate
hospitality at Stamford Bridge egotiate with dictators’ Obama, or Looby Loo
packing heat? To paraphrase the Duke of Wellington, I don’t know what
she does to the enemy, but she scares the life out of me.
Palin reminds me of the old joke about what’s the difference
between the IRA and a woman with PMS? You can negotiate with the
IRA.What she does have in spades is experience of the energy
industry the number one concern right now. Palin would drill, drill and
drill some more – polar bears or no polar bears. And when the oil
companies got greedy, she imposed a windfall tax. Unlike Gordon Brown,
who’d keep it, she gave every Alaskan a $1,200 rebate.
With all the hoop-la, it’s easy to forget that she’s
running for Vice-President, not President. Not yet.
Sarah Palin: The next Margaret Thatcher? Time will tell…
That’s what really frightens her condescending opponents.
Not that we’ve a leg to stand on in Britain .
We’ve got Harriet Harman a chewed fingernail away from the top job – and she’s never
shot a moose in her life.
Remember, they all laughed at Margaret Thatcher.
But ho, ho, ho, who had the last laugh?
To tall man:
I was being sincere in both points; I honestly believe that the search for truth is man’s greatest pursuit, and man’s biggest sin is to attach himself in ideas without foundation.
One point that is cropping up in more and more blogs and I was not aware of this. In mid August 2008, only a few weeks ago, Palin attended a mass at her church, in which a speaker from “Jews for Jesus” made a presentation, filled with the usual language that upsets Jewish voters. Jewish voters were likely to have voted McCain in the highest percentage ever of GOP votes by Jews.
While Obama has his Rev Wright problem, I think the Palin controversy is interesting because it offends one group of voters who probably turn out in higher percentages than any other bloc.
Palin has become a real problem for McCain, the what if crowd must really be wondering how he might have done had he chosen Leiberman instead of Palin