Women for Ike

Obama Responds to "Lipstick on a Pig"

Mrs. Palin goes to Warshington

Say it with me John McCain: Wash WASH WASH. WASHington. Not WARSHington. That drove me nuts last night listening to his speech.

The RNC came to an end last night, and the termites are starting to appear from the woodwork. From CNN.com:

Aides to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin improperly obtained her former brother-in-law's state police personnel files and cited information from those records to raise complaints about the officer, the head of Alaska's state police union said Thursday.

"It's apparent to us that the governor or someone on her staff had direct access to his personnel file, as well as his workers' comp file, and those are protected," said John Cyr, executive director of the Alaska Public Safety Employees Association.

"In the center of all of the controversy is Trooper Wooten's continued employment," the former police commissioner said. "My job was to provide passion and support to 900 people -- almost 900 people -- in the Department of Public Safety, and one of them -- which included Trooper Wooten -- was an irritant to her."

Palin tried to have her ex-brother-in-law fired from the Alaska State Troopers, and when the person who would do the firing, her public safety commissioner, refused, she fired him instead. Her lawyers claim that Wooten signed a waiver releasing his personnel files to the public domain during his divorce from Palin's sister. But that doesnt explain why Gov Palin needed access to them. Just a bit of a conflict of interest. Nice vetting there McCain.

republicans divided

From Daily Kos:

By the way, in that clip, Rove calls Wasilla Alaska's 2nd largest city. Based on current estimated population, that would actually be Fairbanks ... at 31,142. Juneau comes third at 30,737. Wasilla is fourth, believe it or not, at 9,236 today. When she was mayor, it had a population of 5,469.
Richmond, VA, which Rove mocked earlier when he was taking aim at Tim Kaine, has a population of 200,123.

tell me lies tell me sweet little lies

I watched a bit of Sarah Palin's speech last night, until I started becoming queasy and turned off the TV. She blatantly lied in her speech and the republicans ate it up. The Associated Press did some fact checking and found some flubs, as well as some by other republicans:

PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."
THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere."

PALIN: "There is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate."
THE FACTS: Compared to McCain and his two decades in the Senate, Obama does have a more meager record. But he has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the work of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy voice in the Senate. In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.

MCCAIN: "She's the commander of the Alaska National Guard. ... She has been in charge, and she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities," he said on ABC.
THE FACTS: While governors are in charge of their state guard units, that authority ends whenever those units are called to actual military service. When guard units are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, they assume those duties under "federal status," which means they report to the Defense Department, not their governors. Alaska's national guard units have a total of about 4,200 personnel, among the smallest of state guard organizations.

FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States."
THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor's election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.

Keep it classy, RNC

oh the hypocrisy

Frankly, I'm not that concerned or shocked that Sarah Palin's daughter is 17 and pregnant. But the shear hypocrisy of the evangelical right is so amazing. If this were Joe Biden's knocked-up teenage daughter, the right-wingers would be all over it.
"What does this say about his family's morals and his character?"
"How could he have let this happen, he obviously doesn't have enough control over his own family, how could he run a country?"
"Liberals lack morality, he should have taught his daughter to wait until marriage, like a good christian."

But since this is one of their own, they are all too eager to justify this snafu. Apparently it only reinforces family values b/c they didn't have the baby aborted. Does that mean Britney Spears' mom should be VP b/c she didnt make her teenage daughter, Jamie Lynn, abort her lovechild? Parents were ready to boycott Nickelodeon b/c Jamie Lynn was going to ruin childrens morality.. but b/c its Sarah Palin's daughter, they're all too happy to support her.

Palin's daughter is 5 months pregnant. Why did Palin choose to put her daughter through this media scrutiny, knowing she was pregnant? I really have a hard time believing that a calculated Republican campaign such as John McCain's would have picked her to be VP knowing she had an unwed, pregnant, teenage daughter. Its apparent to me that picking Palin for VP was a rushed job. She's pretty, female and young. That's all McCain needed to know.

how frustrating

"radical leftists" have yet again taken "civil" out of "civil discourse". Why do protesters think they have to destroy property to get their messages across? In the end they just look bad, and they make the rest of us liberals look bad because conservatives immediately associate them with anyone else who isn't a conservative. I'm sure conservative talk-radio is having a field day with this story. Hey radical idiots, you're only doing a disservice to yourself, no one will ever take you seriously.