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links for 2008-10-05

  • Gov. Sarah Palin's husband is planning to speak to an investigator looking into abuse-of-power allegations against the governor, Todd Palin's lawyer said Saturday. He previously refused to testify under subpoena in a separate probe.

    Attorney Thomas Van Flein said he asked the investigator, Anchorage attorney Timothy Petumenos, to reserve the third week of October to interview Todd Palin, but a date has not been set because he is waiting to hear back from Petumenos.

    Todd Palin refused to testify under subpoena last month in a separate investigation by the Alaska Legislature. Petumenos is heading a parallel probe by the Alaska State Personnel Board into whether Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, acted improperly when she fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan this summer.

    (tags: sarah_palin)
  • (tags: blogs blogging)
  • The Obama campaign has shattered all fund-raising records, raking in $458 million so far, with about half the bounty coming from donors who contribute $200 or less. Aides say that's an illustration of a truly democratic campaign. To critics, though, it can be an invitation for fraud and illegal foreign cash because donors giving individual sums of $200 or less don't have to be publicly reported.
    ++++++++++
    No…. "the ONE" would never condone internet fraud. No wonder he oped out of public financing after he pledged he would accept it.
    (tags: barack_obama)
  • Time for Republicans to boycott overly partisan Left-wing Celebs.
  • As others have noted, today’s New York Times carries a story on the relationship between Barack Obama and unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist, Bill Ayers. The piece serves as a platform for the Obama campaign and Obama’s friends and allies. Obama’s spokesman and supporters’ names are named and their versions of events are presented in detail, with quotes. Yet the article makes no serious attempt to present the views of Obama critics who have worked to uncover the true nature of the relationship. That makes this piece irresponsible journalism, and an obvious effort by the former paper of record to protect Obama from the coming McCain onslaught.
    The title of the article when it first appeared on the web last night was, "Obama Had Met Ayers, but the Two Are Not Close." That was quickly changed to, "Obama and the ‘60's Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths." Perhaps the first headline made the paper’s agenda a bit too obvious
  • (tags: blogs blogging)
  • An analysis carried out by a language monitoring service said Friday that Gov. Sarah Palin spoke at a more than ninth-grade level and Sen. Joseph Biden spoke at a nearly eighth-grade level in Thursday night's debate between the vice presidential candidates.
    +++++++++
    You betcha Sarah Palin did…..
  • Steve Chapman, a columnist for The Chicago Tribune, defended Mr. Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his longtime pastor, whose black liberation theology and “God damn America” sermon became notorious last spring. But he denounced Mr. Obama for associating with Mr. Ayers, whom he said the University of Illinois should never have hired.

    “I don’t think there’s a statute of limitations on terrorist bombings,” Mr. Chapman said in an interview, speaking not of the law but of political and moral implications.

    “If you’re in public life, you ought to say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with this guy,’ ” Mr. Chapman said. “If John McCain had a long association with a guy who’d bombed abortion clinics, I don’t think people would say, ‘That’s ancient history.’ ”

  • With the party already struggling to generate enthusiasm for its brand, Republican strategists fear that an outpouring of public anger generated by Congress's struggle to pass a rescue package for the financial industry may contribute to a disaster at the polls for the GOP in November.
    ++++++++++
    The past few years have not been kind to the GOP brand and unless McCain-Palin come out swinging the potential for more losses will be apparent. Team McCain must go negative all of the time now until November 4.
  • The Alaska Supreme Court has agreed to hear an emergency appeal from lawyers seeking to shut down the Legislature's investigation of Gov. Sarah Palin.

    Friday's action came the day after Anchorage Superior Court Judge Peter Michalski threw out their lawsuit attempting to halt the Legislature's investigation of Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president. Texas-based Liberty Legal Institute and Anchorage attorney Kevin Clarkson filed the suit on behalf of a group of Alaska Republican state legislators opposed to their colleagues' investigation, which has come to be called Troopergate.
    ++++++++
    The report will be leaked in any case and if unfavorble to Sarah Palin will be challenged as biased. Impact will be minimal.

    (tags: sarah_palin)

6 Comments

  • Liz

    Those of you who think McCain is an exceptional war hero might be interested in reading this Rolling Stones article (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23316912/makebelieve_maverick/print), from which I posted some excerpts below:

    EXCERPT FROM: Make-Believe Maverick: A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty, Time Dickinson, Rolling Stone Magazine

    Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital,” he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. “I had to tell them,” he insisted to Dramesi, “or I would have died in bed.”

    Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain’s service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot’s behavior as heroic — “he wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” — has a corrosive effect on military discipline. “This business of my country before my life?” Dramesi says. “Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs — or he’d be dead.”

    Once the Vietnamese realized they had captured the man they called the “crown prince,” they had every motivation to keep McCain alive. His value as a propaganda tool and bargaining chip was far greater than any military intelligence he could provide, and McCain knew it. “It was hard not to see how pleased the Vietnamese were to have captured an admiral’s son,” he writes, “and I knew that my father’s identity was directly related to my survival.” But during the course of his medical treatment, McCain followed through on his offer of military information. Only two weeks after his capture, the North Vietnamese press issued a report — picked up by The New York Times — in which McCain was quoted as saying that the war was “moving to the advantage of North Vietnam and the United States appears to be isolated.” He also provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid.

    THE CONFESSION

    In the company of his fellow POWs, and later in isolation, McCain slowly and miserably recovered from his wounds. In June 1968, after three months in solitary, he was offered what he calls early release. In the official McCain narrative, this was the ultimate test of mettle. He could have come home, but keeping faith with his fellow POWs, he chose to remain imprisoned in Hanoi.

    What McCain glosses over is that accepting early release would have required him to make disloyal statements that would have violated the military’s Code of Conduct. If he had done so, he could have risked court-martial and an ignominious end to his military career. “Many of us were given this offer,” according to Butler, McCain’s classmate who was also taken prisoner. “It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to ‘admit’ that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was ‘lenient and humane.’ So I, like numerous others, refused the offer.”

    “He makes it sound like it was a great thing to have accomplished,” says Dramesi. “A great act of discipline or strength. That simply was not the case.” In fairness, it is difficult to judge McCain’s experience as a POW; throughout most of his incarceration he was the only witness to his mistreatment. Parts of his memoir recounting his days in Hanoi read like a bad Ian Fleming novel, with his Vietnamese captors cast as nefarious Bond villains. On the Fourth of July 1968, when he rejected the offer of early release, an officer nicknamed “Cat” got so mad, according to McCain, that he snapped a pen he was holding, splattering ink across the room.

    “They taught you too well, Mac Kane,” Cat snarled, kicking over a chair. “They taught you too well.”

    The brutal interrogations that followed produced results. In August 1968, over the course of four days, McCain was tortured into signing a confession that he was a “black criminal” and an “air pirate.” ”

    “John allows the media to make him out to be the hero POW, which he knows is absolutely not true, to further his political goals,” says Butler. “John was just one of about 600 guys. He was nothing unusual. He was just another POW.”

    McCain has also allowed the media to believe that his torture lasted for the entire time he was in Hanoi. At the Republican convention, Fred Thompson said of McCain’s torture, “For five and a half years this went on.” In fact, McCain’s torture ended after two years, when the death of Ho Chi Minh in September 1969 caused the Vietnamese to change the way they treated POWs. “They decided it would be better to treat us better and keep us alive so they could trade us in for real estate,” Butler recalls.

    By that point, McCain had become the most valuable prisoner of all: His father was now directing the war effort as commander in chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. McCain spent the next three and a half years in Hanoi biding his time, trying to put on weight and regain his strength, as the bombing ordered by his father escalated. By the time he and other POWs were freed in March 1973 as a result of the Paris Peace Accords, McCain was able to leave the prison camp in Hanoi on his own feet.

    Even those in the military who celebrate McCain’s patriotism and sacrifice question why his POW experience has been elevated as his top qualification to be commander in chief. “It took guts to go through that and to come out reasonably intact and able to pick up the pieces of your life and move on,” says Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, who has known McCain since the 1980s. “It is unquestionably a demonstration of the character of the man. But I don’t think that it is a special qualification for being president of the United States. In some respects, I’m not sure that’s the kind of character I want sitting in the Oval Office. I’m not sure that much time in a prisoner-of-war status doesn’t do something to you. Doesn’t do something to you psychologically, doesn’t do something to you that might make you a little more volatile, a little less apt to listen to reason, a little more inclined to be volcanic in your temperament.”

  • Aneriz

    “Dramesi has no desire to dishonor McCain service”, but he does anyway. The darkest moment of this regrettable piece is when it says that in order for McCain to be a hero he would have had to be missing an arm, a leg or be dead. Even though later in the article it affirms that the ordeal is sure to take a psychological toll on any individual, it gives McCain no credit for enduring and overcoming to become a Senator but uses it to discredit McCain further.

    In order for his article to carry any non-partisan credibility, Dramesi would have to have shown more courage then McCain, instead of more envy.

  • Liz

    Umm…I think Dramsei did show more courage than McCain in the fact that he did not sign a confession. The point is that McCain and his campaign have not corrected the untruth that he was tortured for 5 years when in fact it was for 2. The other point is that McCain has been painted as a war hero, which he very well may be in the sense that anyone who fights to defend their country could/should be considered a hero. But he did give information to the enemy – this is not a criticism – most captured POWs did the same. Dramsei, who won military awards, is just stating that nothing about McCain’s experience was especially out of the ordinary. But I would add except for the fact that his torture stopped 3 years early because he told them who his father was. I, unlike many conservatives might, do not consider that dishonorable. I think that’s plain old human nature; Dramsei must be a really incredible man.

  • Liz

    Also, let me ask you this:

    – Is it wrong to inform the American people that McCain was tortured for 2 years instead of 5, and that his campaign has been deliberately misleading on this point?
    – Is it wrong to recognize that McCain’s POW experience was pretty ordinary and not especially heroic, especially in contrast to Dramsei, who did not confess nor give information to the enemy?

    If so, tell me why that’s wrong.

  • Flap

    Wrong, no. He is entitled to his opinion and that is all it is.

    There are others who have written other accounts and Barack Obama’s experience in the military is?

    NONE.

  • Aneriz

    To be torture for 2 days is a day too long for me. Two, three or five years gives anyone war hero status in my book.
    Obviously not on Dramsei’s. His book is very short, he is the only hero.