This weekend, the trolls at Fox News, Drudge and Newsbusters created a bogus story about the Coal industry and here’s the facts about that “hidden” tape. Watch this:
Posts Tagged Sarah Palin
Sublime.
McCain: One Way Out
Oct 13
As it happens sometimes, your best idea gets written by someone else–and most of the time better than you would have ever written it. In this case, the topic was to be McCain’s only shot at losing with some measure of dignity. Alas, Miles Mogalescu at Huffington Post beat me to it with a brilliant, prescient post about McCain’s legacy and the options he has remaining in this election.
With the Presidential election only 3 weeks away, John McCain faces a stark choice: Will he go down in history as a principled conservative who lost an election standing on his convictions? Or will he go down as an opportunist who lost while bringing out the darkest elements in American politics?
John McCain is now at a crossroads. At this historical moment, he has virtually no path to win the Presidency. The question is whether he will lose with honor or lose with disgrace. Will his legacy be like that of his Arizona Senatorial predecessor Barry Goldwater, who ran a campaign of conservative principal in a liberal year and lost in a landslide, only to see his principals come to power 16 years in the form of Ronald Reagan? Or will his legacy be like some combination of Richard Nixon, Robert Dole and George Wallace, one of a man whom, in his overweening ambition for victory, took the low road and tapped the dark forces of American politics to his own everlasting shame and dishonor?
I highly recommend that you read Miles Mogalescu’s prescription for McCain’s ailing campaign. As someone who once respected McCain, I couldn’t agree more.
With a unanimous vote of 12-0, the Republican-dominated Alaska State Legislative council voted to release its findings [pdf] regarding Governor Sarah Palin’s efforts to get her ex-brother-in-law fired and the dismissal of Department of Public Safety head, Walt Monegan. Finding number one was:
Finding Number One
For the reasons explained in section IV of this report, I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act. Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) provides
“The legislature reaffirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.”
Given that the reports recommends that no criminal charges be pursued, the question is, “What should Alaska do now?”
It seems clear to me watching from the outside that there is only one course of action for the Alaska Legislature: the Alaska Legislature must impeach Sarah Palin.
Read the rest of this entry »
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how the McCain Campaign had announced that Palin “agreed to cooperate with the Troopergate investigation” and how what was really going on was that she agreed to participate in the investigation initiated by her own complaint filed against herself at the Alaska State Personnel board. Now they have a new pile of crap they want you to believe: on Thursday, the day before Steven Branchflower is due to release the real investigative report into the Troopergate scandal, the McCain campaign has released its own “report” that “clears” Palin of any wrongdoing. The McCain campaign doesn’t just think Americans are stupid: they actually think voters are as stupid as Todd Palin.
Trying to head off a potentially embarrassing state ethics report on GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, campaign officials released their own report Thursday that clears her of any wrongdoing.
Not only that, the faux report blames Andrew Halcro, who now sarcastically admits, he was “the blogger on the grassy knoll.”
And as for the real report, TPM Muckraker is reporting that Palin’s lawyer is now complaining that the report cannot possibly be complete because Palin was never deposed.
Palin’s lawyer, Thomas Van Flein, tried to preemptively discredit the report, telling the ADN that it won’t be comprehensive because Branchflower didn’t interview Palin or her chief of staff, Mike Tibbles.
“They didn’t even try to interview the governor. You want to know why she reassigned Monegan, it would be nice to talk to her. They didn’t even try,” Van Flein said. “It’s a report that’s going to be half-done at best. And anything that’s half-done will likely be half-baked.”
What a friggin’ joke! She refuses to cooperate with the investigation and then complains she didn’t get a chance to tell her story. I hope Alaskans run a recall election for Governor up there.
I think we’ll wait for the real report.
Pathetic John McCain
Oct 7
After crashing his campaign into the mountain with the “suspend the campaign” stunt to “save” the country from the financial mess, finding his deregulated economy crashing down around him and power-hungry Palin giving barely literate interviews to “hard-ball” morning show reporters like Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson, John McCain will now have to spend every last drop of his faux “straight talker” legacy in a pathetic attempt to derail Obama in these final days of the 2008 Presidential campaign.
No matter how many of the polls found the country yearning for a more Preisdential and fiscally responsible adult, McCain only has the “angry” right-wing vote left. As boneheads in Republican audiences scream, “Terrorist”, the rest of the country is now loudly voting “No” to the ham-fisted economic team of Angry and Snippy.
As Talking Points Memo Election Central’s ever astute Greg Sargent puts it:
The crisis also forced McCain to suddenly wrench himself into a populist posture — a transformation so ridiculous given his previous statements and pro-deregulatory past that it colored everything that followed. Obama then performed solidly amid the skirmishing in Congress. This, combined with the public’s preference for Obama’s economic solutions over McCain’s, ensured that McCain’s higher “preparedness” numbers didn’t lead voters to see him as best prepared to manage the crisis.
It’s the basic disconnect at the heart of McCain’s claim to being the right candidate to take control of the economy that is really driving him down. In short, McCain lost his “maverick” brand because on the driving issue of the campaign, he isn’t a maverick, and never really was. And thanks to media coverage pulled towards skepticism by the liberal counter-narrative — not to mention the crisis itself — voters know it.
Or as Glenn Greenwald of Salon describes the Republicans’ situation:
This is a dying, desperate movement — so deeply out-of-touch with the country that they actually proclaimed that Sarah Palin would save them in the wake of the debate, only to watch her continue to drag down their ticket. Polls now even show Obama with large leads in traditional red states like Virginia (10-12 points) and North Carolina (6 points). Watch McCain’s speech today and you will see only one thing: the behavior of cornered rats.