Hey, That’s My Name

Two of my favorite people to listen to on the issue of veterans and how McCain didn’t address those issues in his speech Thursday night.

And yet they had this woman stand in front of a crowd on Friday and talk about how anti-earmark she is. I wonder if she’s going to talk about that again tonight. Knowing how the GOP generally treats facts, she probably will.

Three times in recent years, McCain’s catalogs of “objectionable” spending have included earmarks for this small Alaska town, requested by its mayor at the time — Sarah Palin.

…

This year, Palin, who has been governor for nearly 22 months, defended earmarking as a vital part of the legislative system. “The federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship,” she wrote in a newspaper column.

In 2001, McCain’s list of spending that had been approved without the normal budget scrutiny included a $500,000 earmark for a public transportation project in Wasilla. The Arizona senator targeted $1 million in a 2002 spending bill for an emergency communications center in town — one that local law enforcement has said is redundant and creates confusion.

McCain also criticized $450,000 set aside for an agricultural processing facility in Wasilla that was requested during Palin’s tenure as mayor and cleared Congress soon after she left office in 2002. The funding was provided to help direct locally grown produce to schools, prisons and other government institutions, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

Wasilla received $11.9 million in earmarks from 2000 to 2003. The results of this spending are very apparent today. (The town also benefited from $15 million in federal funds to promote regional rail transportation.)

…

Wasilla had received few if any earmarks before Palin became mayor. She actively sought federal funds — a campaign that began to pay off only after she hired a lobbyist with close ties to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who long controlled federal spending as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He made funneling money to Alaska his hallmark.

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This year she submitted to Congress a list of Alaska projects worth $197.8 million, including $2 million to research crab productivity in the Bering Sea and $7.4 million to improve runway lighting at eight Alaska airports. A spokesman said she cut the original list of 54 projects to 31.

[From McCain had criticized earmarks from Palin -- chicagotribune.com]

I’m a little late to the game in the discussion of Sarah Palin, John McCain’s presumptive Vice Presidential nominee, thanks to a craptastic three day weekend, but I hope you won’t hold it against me. I swear I said some of these things to friends on Friday, before they became commonplace among the media (I have witnesses, really). So here’s what I have to say about the Alaska governor, as well as a choice list of factoids that I think are worth noting about the woman we are so quickly getting to know.

So, I had two major responses to McCain’s unveiling of his VP pick last Friday. The first is one that I believe has only been confirmed over this weekend as the press has dug up more and more dirt. I believe that this was an impulsive choice on McCain’s part. It was a reckless attempt to get the spotlight off of Obama and the Democrats and the spectacularly succesful performance of last week’s convention only made such a decision seem more necessary. Rather than appoint someone unexciting like Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty, they decided to pick a woman that no one had ever heard of and given this knee-jerk decision, she was never fully vetted as a candidate. That’s certainly proven to be true as the juicy stories have spilled out this weekend, because let’s face it, if the vetters did have time to fully do their job, they should never work again because they did a really shitty job.

The second response is the one that was apparent to everyone else: McCain picked her to appeal to estranged Hillary supporters. First of all, this is obviously a pre-convention tactic as I’m confident that the Clintons tied up any disappointed voter that they had the ability to move last week. Any other hold-outs aren’t holding out because they loved Hillary, they have their own issues. But as a woman (who, granted, has always been an Obama supporter), I find the idea that putting a pair of ovaries on the presidential ticket as a way to appeal to women voters incredibly insulting. Palin and Clinton are 180 degrees different from each other. Just because they both have two x chromosomes doesn’t make them the same and the idea that all women are is, to me, incredibly indicative of how the Republican party views the fairer sex. Just give us a girl and we’ll be happy, doesn’t matter what she stands for. And that, “my friends,” is bullshit.

Some more buzz on the issue is that McCain actually wanted his buddy Joe Lieberman to be his running mate. However, the right-wing heavyweights weren’t so hot on that idea and pressed him to pick a red-blooded conservative. Isn’t that a real “maverick” thing to do?

So now McCain has landed himself running mate with no foreign policy experience, less than two years as the governor of Alaska. Alaska, by the by, is a state that is ranked 47th in population and 50th in population density and has fewer people in it than most United States congressional districts. She’s currently under ethics investigation for abuse of power. Her previous job execution as mayor of Wasilla, a 6,000 person town, has not been evaluated well. They’re hanging their hat on her reputation as a “reformer” even though she has ties to indicted Alaska senator Ted Stevens and a history of pro-earmark policies. Her teenage daughter is pregnant, while she herself has supported abstinence-only sex education and is a member of Feminists for Life, an organization that does not support birth control. This is just the tip of the iceburg, folks, especially when this is the VP pick for the oldest person ever to run for the office President that has a history of cancer. People in the media are already wondering if McCain will take the opportunity in the next couple of days to pull her nomination. Personally, I can’t wait for the Vice Presidential debate this year.

These are some of the choice tidbits I pulled from the various stories that gathered in my feed reader over the long weekend. Some were touched on above, some are fluffy and just mildly interesting but several are items that I find very significant. Enjoy. Hope I can help you learn something new.

• McCain only met with her in person once (though I did hear a rumor that it’s possible they didn’t actually meet, they were just both at the same event) prior to selecting her as his running mate. [Time Online]
• Several Alaskan GOP polticians are stunned at this pick, including someone from her hometown who says, “She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?…Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation?” The state house speaker stated that her qualifications for the job were that she was 35 and a U.S. citizen. [Anchorage Daily News]
• Told Alaska Business Monthly that she hadn’t been focusing on the Iraq war but that she wanted to know there was an exit plan in place. [Andrew Sullivan]
• While she touted her opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere in her coming out speech, it turns out that she originally supported the earmark funding and that while she later made public statements against it, Alaska kept all the money. [DailyKos]
• Has stated publicly that Iraq is war for oil: “We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources” [BusinessWeek]
• She has hired a private practice attorney to represent her and her office in an ethics investigation. A bi-partisan committee voted to allocate money to investigate her dismissal of a state employee who allegedly would not fire her sister’s husband. [KTUU]
• Palin’s office is currently withholding e-mails from the public concerning her alleged ethics violations, citing executive privilege. Gee, sound familiar, anybody. [KTUU]
• She does not believe global warming is man-made. [Newsmax]
• She is anti-choice/pro-life, opposed to stem cell research, opposed to physician-assisted suicide, thinks that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools, supports a constitutional amendment that would bar state health benefits for same sex couples and believes in abstinence only sex education. In other words, she wants her Evangelical Protestant faith to be yours and supports legislation to make it so. [Boston Globe]
• Has stated that she is opposed to abortion even if the case of rape and that if her own daughter was raped she would not allow the child to be aborted. [DailyKos]
• She is a member of the Feminists for Life organization, which does not support the use of birth control. [DailyKos]
• Her husband is on BP’s payroll. [KTUU]
• While she was mayor of Wasilla, she employed a lobbying firm that brought in $27 million in earmarks to her town. Wait, isn’t John McCain all anti-earmark? [Washington Post]
• She served as the director of indicted Alaska senator Ted Stevens’  527 group “Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.” McCain has previously stated that he believes 527 groups should be eliminated. [Washington Post]
• While acknowledging Senator Clinton in her coming out speech, she failed to point out that earlier in the campaign, Palin had referred to Clinton’s “whining.” [Newsweek]
• She supported Pat Buchanan in 2000 (so don’t be surprised when you see him on MSNBC talking about how awesome she is). [The Nation]
• She has only had a U.S. passport since 1997. Her foreign travel includes a trip last year to Kuwait and Germany to visit troops, as well as a jaunt to Canada. Early reports stated that she had been to Ireland, but it turns out that that was only a refueling stop. I had a 15 minute layover in Brussels, doesn’t mean I’ve been to Belgium. [AmericaBlog]
• As mayor of Wasilla, botched the planning of a new sports complex so badly that it left the town’s economy in tatters. [DailyKos]
• Palin contacted the library asking how she could go about banning books and threatened to have the librarian she spoke to fired if she did not fully support her efforts. [Time]
• Speaking at her church this past June, she referred to the Iraq war as “a task that is from God” and that they should pray for the plan in Iraq to be “God’s plan.” [Huffington Post]
• Her mother-in-law has stated that she isn’t sure what she brings to McCain’s ticket other than being a woman and conservative and that she’s not certain which candidate she’ll vote for. *sigh* In-laws. [Daily News]
• As governor, filed suit against the US government to overturn the decision to put polar bears on the endangered species list because it would delay offshore oil and gas exploration. Yes, that’s right, she’s anti-polar bear. (Also reports of stances against wolves, belugas, and black bears.) Guess she’s not getting the PETA vote. [Time Online]
• Has stated on television that she doesn’t know what the job of the Vice President actually is. [Politico]
• She owns three houses. Less than McCain, but still more than Obama. [Politico]
• Despite what the Republicans pundits and spokespeople have been saying, Major General Craig Campbell, adjutant general of the Alaska National Guard says that Palin plays no role in defense activies, including those that involve the Alaska National Guard, as the entire thing is under federal control. Don’t let them tell you that’s part of her “experience,” it’s not. [CBS News]
• Her husband was arrested for a DUI when he was 22 years old. This was more than 20 years ago and the two were not yet married, though they were dating at the time. [ABC News]
• Palin and her husband were members of the Alaska Independence Party, a group that believed that Alaskans should have a vote as to whether or not they should be part of the United State…you know, the chance to secede. [DailyKos]

Painting the Democratic candidate (in any election) as the latte-drinking, arugula-eating, out of touch elitist is old hat for the GOP, so it’s no surprise that the McCain has been making those claims against Obama for a long time now. However, as with many issues in this campaign, the candidate has been bringing the hypocrisy of those claims to light quite a bit, especially in the last five days.

First there was his appearance at the Saddleback church this past weekend where he responded to a question about how he defined being rich in this country and his response was that rich begins at $5 million. I remember the good old days when being a millionaire meant you were rich, but apparently John McCain doesn’t think so.

However the real kicker was yesterday when Politico asked him how many houses he owned.

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

[From Politico: McCain unsure how many houses he owns]

Seriously? I mean, I know McCain’s been doing a wonderful job of playing the old guy who doesn’t remember anything and has a hard time keeping things straight and thus can use that to avoid any responsibility for changing my positions or not knowing the facts about integral policy issues, but he doesn’t even know how many houses he owns! You’re trying to say that Obama is out of touch and elitist and you can’t even remember that you own 7 houses (that was the figure his campaign staff eventually submitted to the press).

The Obama campaign has been quick to jump on this little gem. The candidate himself mentioned it mere hours after McCain’s response to the question reported and they’ve already generated an ad that highlights the comment.

The McCain campaign has responded thus far by saying that because Obama owns one million dollar “mansion” (complete with a nice reference to Tony Rezko), made $4 million last year (a drop in the bucket compared to Cindy McCain’s fortune) and spent his vacation in Hawaii (because it’s not like that’s where he was raised or where his grandmother lives), that he has no place to talk about houses and elitism. But since the Obama campaign released the above ad after the McCain camp’s comments, their response on this issue seems to be, “Game on.”

And no, it’s not Barack Obama: