Sarah Palin II

And Palin's popularity on her home turf will help lock up the previously [url=http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/alaska.html]hotly-contested Alaska[/url] for McCain.

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Alaska has observer status within the WCI. Palin herself is somewhat of a skeptic,

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Your answer gives me the impression that the Pacific Coast Collaborative Initiative (PCCI) is a watered down version of the Western Climate Initiative (WCI). If it wasn't, then why would she have signed onto the PCCI but only has observer status on the WCI! Correct me if I got the wrong impression.

I know the odd left leaning American who has signed onto a Republican mailing list to keep track of what the enemy is doing and the odd NDPer who reads the Fraser Institute for the same reason.

And then there is Harper who has his own "made in Canada" plan, which is a watered down version of Kyoto.

Map of Partners and Observers in the WCI:

[url=http://www.westernclimateinitiative.org/ewebeditpro/items/O104F17480.jpg...

Isn't Saskatchewan getting into Oil!

[url=http://www.climatechange.alaska.gov/]Alaska on climate change[/url]

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/us/politics/30veep.html]She needed to get a new passport in July 2007 to visit Alaskan troops in Kuwait and Germany; she has also visited Ireland.[/url]

[url=http://www.newsmax.com/headlines/sarah_palin_vp/2008/08/29/126139.html]C... change:[/url]

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Q: What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?

A: "A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made."

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[url=http://www.nfmpolitico.com/2008/08/30/sarah-palin-what-we-know-now/]Crea...

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In her 2006 race for governor, Palin dodged a question on evolution, saying: “I’m not going to pretend I know how all this came to be.”

She favors teaching both evolution and creationism in public schools, saying in a gubernatorial debate: “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information. … Healthy debate is so important and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”

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Probably, for the first time in my life, I agree with David Frum:

"The McCain campaign’s slogan is ‘country first’. If it were your decision, and you were putting your country first, would you put an untested small-town mayor a heartbeat from the presidency?"

[url=http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/three-words... Sullivan has had a series of interesting posts on Palin:[/url]

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Think about what the Palin pick really says about how McCain views this campaign and how he views his potential responsibilities in national security. Think about what it says about the sincerity of McCain's own central criticism of Obama these past two months in foreign affairs. Think about how he picked a woman to be a heartbeat away from a war presidency who hadn't even thought much, by her own admission, about the Iraq war as late as 2007. Think about how he made this decision barely knowing the woman.

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[ 31 August 2008: Message edited by: Willowdale Wizard ]

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she has done a fine job

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[img]rolleyes.gif" border="0[/img]

[url=http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/0808/McCain_Palin_a_soulmat...'s first TV interview since he announced Palin as his running-mate:[/url]

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He saw in Sarah Palin "a partner and a soul mate."

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The comments below the blog post make for interesting reading:

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I wonder how Cindy feels about this "soulmate" crap. If being on the city council of a town of five thousand makes you qualified to be VP, why wasn't I vetted? I was class president of a high school larger than that town!

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A man who's famous for trusting nobody unless he knows them really well picks an unknown who's been barely vetted (if at all) whom he met once for 15 minutes --- and now he's calling her his soulmate? This thing gets weirder and weirder.

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It's funny how conservatives are so happy with an unknown politician that McCain met only once, just because she's pro-abortion and shoots a gun. That tells me how shallow the Republican base is. McCain picks someone just to please and you're immediately bought. How cheap.

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A friend who is a woman and an independent listened to Sarah Palin's acceptance speech. Her reaction, she laughed, then she asked why. She's convinced that McCain wants to lose. That has been the reaction of most all the people I know.

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As for right to life, I truly hope at some point in the campaign, someone asks her or McCain whether they think oral contraceptives should be made illegal. (If life begins at conception, then because the birth control pill induces a woman's period even if she has a fertilized egg, it's the same as an abortion.) I bet a lot of voters aren't aware of that one.

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A soulmate? What is this, The Love Connection?

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I have one question for all you Bush/McSame lovers, if this is his pick for VP, noting that is clearly out of her league for VP, who the heck is McSame going to pick for Secratary of Defense? A first year grad from the Army? What about Treasury? A bank clerk from Wyoming?

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This is amusing - it's from a candidate questionnaire she answered while running to be governor:

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Are you offended by the phrase “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?
SP: Not on your life. [b]If it was good enough for the founding fathers[/b], its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance

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[url=http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/31/174153/834/246/581480]History FAIL[/url]

Love the comment: "she is a female George Bush"

Sarah(as she's known universally to supporter and opponent alike here in my home state) probably best described as a prime example of exactly how much you can get away with by presenting yourself as "perky".
She's been just as reactionary, corporate-obedient and downright ugly in her actual policies (she's led the fight against listing polar bears as an endangered species because protecting them would displease the oil companies) as her predecessor, Frank Murkowski(know here as "Frank the Bank" back in his comically inept single term as governor), but because of her carefully manufactured image as "just a soccer mom from Wasilla(a small town near Anchorage in the "Railbelt" region, and the recent proposed site of a relocated state capitol, once they move it from my current home town as the Anchorage real estate types, building contractors and corporate bigwigs are obsessed with doing), the voters are convinced she's a harmless "moderate".

The whole state did a collective spit take when McCain announced that he'd chosen her on Friday.

One guy was quoted in the Ketchikan paper(Ketchikan is the southern-most large town in the state) as saying he'd thought the announcement was just a comedy piece on the radio.

We're all wondering how she's going to get up to speed on foreign policy from complete ignorance in the two months between now and the election. Watch for comic geography errors galore.

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Originally posted by TCD:
[b][url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/opinion/31dowd.html]In this article Maureen Dowd exemplifies every Democratic party tendency that the average American hates.[/url] In it:
- She shits on Palin for getting a degree from a State School in Idaho - contrasting it with Obama's Harvard degree.
- Calls Alaska an "oversized igloo" and implies that a moron could govern it.
- Makes fun of Palin's frumpy hair, her marriage and her kids.

This is where Democrats always lose. I remember Democrats gleefully jumping on Bush's [url=http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/e599.htm]failure to name world leaders[/url] in 1999 - shortly before he beat them. Twice.

Bush won (to the extent he did) because he understood something Democrats don't get. Most Americans don't know who runs Taiwan. They didn't go to Harvard. They don't hate children. And they think that people who do are weird and alien. And they don't vote for them.

Which brings us to this week, where Democrat activists are smugly chortling because Sarah Palin doesn't know obscure historical facts about the evolution of the pledge of allegiance.

If this is the best the Dems can produce history will repeat itself.[/b]

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So your argument is "stupid is as stupid does" and America does stupid?

Saying that the Republican VP candidate is stupid is not the same thing as saying the American people are stupid.

And I really hope you aren't implying that Americans actually like their leaders to sound ignorant. That's a hell of an insult. Bush won because he had massive corporate backing and because his Democratic opponents ran hopelessly lame campaigns, not because Americans wanted to have a head of state who sounds like Larry the Cable Guy's stunt double.

It wouldn't make the Dems more electable to nominate stupider-sounding people.

Also, Democrats and progressives and leftists in the U.S. DON'T "hate children". Where the hell did you get the idea that we do? You aren't really arguing that people who support reproductive rights are anti-child, are you?

[ 31 August 2008: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

I was referring to the Maureen Dowd article I linked to in the same post. She mocks Palin's kids. More than a few Democrat bloggers have mocked her kids. And the fact that she has them. The repeated implication is that she has too many.

And, please, don't ask me to shed a tear for the poor Democrats who just couldn't compete with the big bad Republicans corporate funding. The next time I see the Dems take a pass at corporate donations I'll have some sympathy.

What I've clearly said, and is actually pretty self-evident to a lot of people, is that American voters, like most voters, go with their guts. So they'll actually be pretty forgiving of a politician who, say, doesn't know who the President of Pakitstan is. "Hell," they say, "Who the hell does know that? He'll have advisors to help him with that anyway."

They won't, however, be forgiving of a candidate they think is a pompous ass. So when Obama's team is out with a message track like, "Sarah Palin went to University of Iowa. Obama is from Harvard and therefore better." They're likely to say, "Go to hell you Ivy League snob." Justifiably so.

Seriously I think the Dems need to start with stuff like;

Why are we building a Y2Y corridor for the grizzlies if [b]Mrs[/b] Palin is going to put their dead bodies on her furniture, or walls?

How safe is the cariboo breeding habit if she is another George Bush desiring to open up the Alaska Yukon nature preserve to feed the oil industry which her husband works in? Was it big oil that got her the ticket? Seems so...

Does the USA need debt of the type that she is used to ringing up, we need only look at how she financially devastated the town she was mayor of for her spending habits?

She gutted woman's pregnancy prevention programs and her only comment about doing so, was "we need to expect a rise in unwanted pregnancies, because there will be a lack of those types of services for women, now". Not all women, such as herself, have the finacial ability to provide nanny services, from the minute they were born, for the children they do not want to have to care for.

Should elected officials be using their children for political gain in their political career? (I.e. sending 19 year old son off to Iraq, and having a down syndrome baby she apparently does not want to care for, but her having it looks good to the pro-life crowd, and she would have been tossed out had she had it aborted.) *The latter part does not need to be stated, people will draw the lines themselves.

She wants to move the state capital at great expense to the taxpayers, while gutting the state social and health care programs. What would she do as VP, make sure every poor child is left behind?

Pretty gutsy of her becoming a VP running mate to presidential candidate with a history of health problems, but her gutsyness will not save Americans from what will fall upon the country, because of her inexperience, when she has to take over the reins of government. Putin, will eat her up and spit her out.

Anything along those viens, IMV are acceptable for immediate use, until she starts speakin mor publically.

She should be questioned hard about what her plans would be if her running mates health failed, as it has been known to do.

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Originally posted by MCunningBC:
[b]As I read through the last thread, and now this one, I am getting the impression that a large number of posters are at least mildly enthusiastic about McCain's choice of Palin.

For some, it's a PUMA thing. But for many it seems to be a desire to assert some independence from the presumed Canadian preference for the Democrats. Or maybe they're just Republican trolls![/b]

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A "large number of posters" on babble are "maybe" "Republican trolls"?

Stay out of this thread from now on, please. If you post in it again, you'll be taking a vacation from babble.

TCD's points are right on.

Increasingly, the choice of Palin looks to be a trap that some Democrats are eagerly walking into. They have secured their own token candidate, and they seem miffed that the Repubs have dredged up one of their own!

If they were smart and principled (oh well, zero out of two ain't bad), they would congratulate McCain on his choice of running mates, welcome Palin gracefully to the race, and get back to fighting the issues. In my experience, U.S. voters are no more likely than Canadian ones to respond well to character assassination.

Like FDR in his time (as we saw in the other thread), the Democrats could then campaign from the left and be assured victory. Of course, they will [b]never[/b] do that.

[url=http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008151136_palin01m0.h... Times[/url]

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Palin failed to appear at four major debates conducted during the 2006 general-election campaign that pitted her against former Gov. Tony Knowles and Andrew Halcro, an independent.

Knowles said that when Palin did show up for debates, she typically kept a stack of cards cached behind her lectern's nameplate. Knowles said they were color-coded for different topics, full of notes, and that Palin constantly referred to them as she answered questions.

"When the questions came up, she would roll her fingers down to the right area ... ," Knowles said. "It was quite bizarre."

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[url=http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-palin31-2008aug31,0,3379120.s... Times[/url]

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Hollis French [WW - Alaskan Democrat State Senator] faulted Palin for not helping the Legislature pass a bill to raise the benefits threshhold for children and pregnant women from 175% of the poverty level to 200%. (Most states set them at 200% to 250%.) "She said she wanted to help us raise it," French said, "but couldn't be bothered to do anything in the closing days of the Legislature, when she could have helped it through."

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[url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/31/AR200808... Post[/url]

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At the time Bush chose Harriet Miers, he was under pressure to pick a woman to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Bush picked his close White House aide, hoping that his own standing with the right would push her through. Conservatives would have none of it. They assailed Miers's lack of judicial grounding. And they certainly had a case. But what really bothered them was that they had no idea how she would vote on the court. Fearing she was a closet moderate, they blocked her.

How do Palin and Miers compare?

Miers, at least, had been a lawyer for 35 years, the head of the state bar in Texas and White House counsel. Palin's experience comes down to a couple of years as governor and six years as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a town with fewer than 10,000 residents.

Bush knew Miers well, worked with her closely, trusted her deeply. You can question Bush's judgment in pushing her for the court, but at least he had good reason to believe in the person he was asking others to count on.

McCain, as far as anyone can tell, met Palin only once before considering her for vice president, and once more before settling on her, which is to say he barely knows her.

For the purpose of courting disaffected Hillary Clinton voters and satisfying the social conservatives, McCain is willing to place someone he knows mostly from press clippings and, okay, what his staff insists was thorough vetting, in the direct line of succession to the presidency. There is a breathtaking recklessness about this choice.

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Actually, I don't think calling Ferraro a token is anathema in the Democratic Party anymore(especially after her vicious race-baiting attacks on Obama in the primaries).

I never understood why Democratic women would've been behind Ferraro even back in the day. As a lot of you may not know, Ferraro, as chair of the 1984 Democratic platform committee, tried to remove the endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment from the platform.

You're right Ferraro herself is busy pissing away her "legacy" daily. That being said Dems still have a blind spot when it comes to our own rhetoric on gender, race and especially class.
I think that the so called "Clinton" voters who have been enthused by Palin were not really Democratic voters. They are now moving back home from Clinton not forward to a new place.It is a move they were already destined to make.
The right of a woman to controll her reproductive destiny is the sole fixed star of American Feminism for three and a half decades, far more important than gender equity in pay. Palin and her co-hort may call themselves Feminists For Life all they want; there aint no such animal as an Anti-Choice American Feminist.
If there were such creatures walking our woods Libby Dole would have been President by now.

Yes, it's turning into the John McCain Comedy Hour - and I'm not sure that it helps him.

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They have secured their own token candidate

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He earned it the hard way. She didn't.

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Originally posted by unionist:
[b][url=http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/09/01/palin-pregnant.html?ref=rss]Palin's 17-year-old daughter is pregnant[/url]

If they keep this up, Obama will soon be yesterday's news...[/b]

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The website, Daily Kos, alleged in a post on Sunday that Sarah Palin had faked her most recent pregnancy to cover up the fact that her youngest child, four-month-old Trig, was actually her daughter's illegitimate baby.

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The media will try to tear her to shreds but all they are doing is showing the Palins to bear with admirable strength the same concerns other families have to deal with.

Everyone underestimates this woman at each turn of her career. If she was a progressive, you lot would be peeing yourselves with delight at having a champion after so many years in the wilderness. Is there no progressive woman out there who can provide our champion?

How about Martha Hall Findlay?

Palin's daughter isn't running for public office and should be left alone until she does.

[url=http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/obama_family_off_li... Tapper (ABC News) just asked Obama at a press conference about his reaction to the pregnancy news:[/url]

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"I have heard some of the news on this and so let me be as clear as possible. I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people's families are off limits, and people's children are especially off limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics, it has no relevance to governor Palin's performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18. And how family deals with issues and teenage children that shouldn't be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that is off limits."

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Seems Palin was a bit of a Ron Paul nut a few months back.

[url=http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/351293]Palin on Ron Paul: "Right On!"[/url]

Ron Paul = kook magnet.