Ending Perpetual Privatization

Whether or not his hands are tied on future spending plans as a result of the Paulson bailout, I hope Barack Obama follows through on this:

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama moved to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility in a roiling economy, vowing on Monday to slash federal spending on contractors by 10 percent and saving $40 billion.

Urging members of his own party to be just as fiscally tough as the most conservative Republicans, Obama said the $700 billion economic bailout plan proposed by the Bush administration and congressional leaders is forcing a renewed look at federal spending.

As president, Obama said he would create a White House team headed by a chief performance officer to monitor the efficiency of government spending [...]

President Bush ran for office on a platform of efficiency in government, Obama said, noting that Bush instead has presided over a mushrooming federal budget and deficits. Under Bush, spending on contractors has more than doubled, from $203 billion in 2000 to $412 billion in 2006.

"We cannot give a blank check to Washington with no oversight and accountability, when no oversight and accountability is what got us into this mess in the first place," said Obama. He warned that even as the government moves to bail out the financial sector there are signs that special interests are looking to profit.

The rhetoric may sound fiscally conservative, but what Obama is really talking about is the privatization of everything. That includes letting private companies collect taxes instead of the IRS, letting private military contractors fight our wars instead of the US military, letting lobbyists and corporate interests run our foreign and domestic policy. And there's a pretty stark choice here, more than is conventionally described in the traditional media. The fact is that McCain has a belief in privatization as a way to drown government in the bathtub, and he certainly has not been shy in enriching those private contractors, even in the case of the earmarks he supposedly never pursues.



The fact that Sarah Palin supposedly rejected the bridge to nowhere while spending $25 million on a road to that same stretch of nowhere is similiarly discordant.

The federal government needs to do the job of the federal government. This idea that private interests are inherently more efficient has been proven a lie by the past eight years. If Barack Obama wants a legacy as a privatization hunter, I'm all for it.

The Fundamentals Of McCain-Palin Lies Are Strong

People are really getting into the swing of chronicling the lies of the McCain-Palin ticket. Practice makes perfect, of course, and the team is giving us the equivalent of summer two-a-days.

Last night Sarah Palin retold a debunked lie about the TelePrompTer breaking during her RNC convention speech, when there is photographic and eyewitness evidence to the contrary.

Palin and McCain continue to tell the completely discredited story about Sarah saying "thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge To Nowhere, and McCain compounded it yesterday by claiming that Palin vetoed earmarks as Governor of Alaska, which you can't do.

But now we have the great Magilla Gorilla, the one that should get the "serial liar" meme cruising to the top of the charts.

Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate's top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

"He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."

I think he's talking about spectrum policy which led to things like the Blackberry. The thing is that telecommunications is actually pretty poor in the United States. We're behind much of the industrialized world in broadband penetration and overall cellular signal strength. Also there's the little matter that Research in Motion, actual creators of the Blackberry, are in Canada.

I guess McCain is trying to disavow Holtz-Eakin's comment as we speak. But there's no reason to be so generous. Al Gore never claimed he invented the Internet yet the label became a punchline for the entire campaign. McCain's top economic adviser taking credit for a range of telecom innovations should be met the same way.

Also, do you really want to tie yourself that close to the hated telecom industry?

UPDATE: Obama campaign comments:

"If John McCain hadn't said that 'the fundamentals of our economy are strong' on the day of one of our nation's worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week," said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

Love them coming back to hammering the "fundamentals" theme.

UPDATE II: Documentary evidence!

Why It's Rigged

We're finally getting around in the larger blogosphere to something I was flogging a few weeks ago - how the media is failing to apply the same standard to John McCain that they did to Al Gore in 2000.

It's completely clear that the McCain campaign is outright lying about Sarah Palin's opposition to the bridge to nowhere. It's almost comical how many news stories have debunked it (here's a pretty thorough list). And the Obama campaign is not being passive about it, either. Not in any way.

On the same day that dozens of news organizations have exposed Governor Palin's phony Bridge to Nowhere claim as a 'naked lie,' she and John McCain continue to repeat the claim in their stump speeches. Maybe tomorrow she'll tell us she sold it on eBay," said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor.

And this is only one of a host of lies that McCain and Palin have uttered on the stump and in interviews. McCain, who has abandoned virtually every "maverick" instinct he's ever had, just yesterday blasted Obama for wanting to cancel a weapons system that he himself opposed just a few years ago. This has happened multiple times and it's not going to stop. In fact, Palin is STILL saying that she opposed the bridge to nowhere on the campaign trail. She's lied about it at least 23 times.

It's not going to stop because the media has not exacted a price for all the lying. They haven't built a "serial liar" narrative around John McCain the way they did around Al Gore, despite there being far more cause for one in this case. This is what Matt Yglesias was getting at yesterday with Marc Ambinder's blithely ignorant post wondering why the electorate doesn't penalize campaigns for lying. Yglesias correctly stated that the media doesn't penalize the campaigns, so why should the electorate, who's getting their cues from that same media? One-off stories debunking the lies are nice, but an overall narrative - which does exist - is the only thing that would do the trick in this case. In response, Ambinder said this:

...it must somehow be the press's fault that John McCain is enjoying a post-convention something-or-other because Americans don't realize that he's a lying liar, or whatever, [...] To move to a Greenwaldian debate about the duties, obligations and frustrations of the press -- well -- read elsewhere if you want to play that game. I'll abstain.

Ambinder is playing the conventional journalist's game of failing to recognize that the media is part of the story of campaigns. It's inescapable that they are the filter through which candidates must get out their message. And the hands-off approach they take, their unwillingness to referee on the side of the truth, hurts America.

If everyone got a newspaper once a day, and there were eight political stories, and all of them were different each day, and one of them had pointed out that Palin actually did support the Bridge to Nowhere, then the press would indeed have done its job. The job was to report the story, and they reported it.

But cable news and blogs and radio sort of changed all that and now there's too much information, and so consumers largely rely on the press to arrange that information into some sort of coherent story that will allow them to understand the election. And the press assumed that role -- they didn't create some new institution, or demand that the cable channels be credentialed differently and understood as "political entertainment."

They fill this new role through the methods storytellers have always used to tell stories: the repetition of certain key themes and characters, which creates continuity between one day's events and the next and helps the audience understand which parts to pay attention to [...] This requires deciding what matters. And on this, people have different opinions. Take the Bridge to Nowhere, which Ambinder mentions in his post. I think it's important that one of the central arguments the McCain campaign is making for Palin is a lie. I think that should be reported a lot, at least as often as the McCain campaign repeats it, and then if the McCain campaign doesn't stop repeating it, their lying should be emphasized a lot, because that's also important. On the level of first order principles, I know the press agrees with me, because they did this with John Kerry. The crucial problem in this discussion comes here: The press isn't allow to admit that they construct these narratives at all, and so can't transparently justify why they choose to use one and not another. Which creates mistrust and anger.

In a similar way, the press can't report that their corporate overseers play a significant role in shaping the news that we see. If you don't believe that, look at the MSNBC situation from yesterday. It's a cable network with a corporate parent that has found a niche generating cable news with a nominally liberal perspective, but it conflicts with the perceived rights and repsonsibilities of the corporate parent, so they must act against their financial interest and squash the nominal liberal perspective.

So they tie their own hands about a fundamental part of the campaign, something that really shapes public opinion on a variety of subjects. It really comes down to whether or not the grand poohbahs of the chattering class like the candidate. Glenn Greenwald weighs in on this.

It isn't particularly surprising that journalists view debates over their "duties and obligations" as sanctimonious, worthless, boring irritants -- a frivolous little "game" that is the last thing they're going to indulge. After all, they have campaign planes to catch, Steve Schmidt gossip to be dished along, petty scoops to uncover, and the daily drama of the election to be dissected. They're not going to be sidetracked from those fun and exciting pursuits by haughty objections from interlopers about the destructive role they're playing in our elections, or by ponderous debates from non-members about their so-called "obligations" to scrutinize candidates' claims and expose the falsehoods of political leaders. Please.

I do think that Democratic operatives embedded in the media, what few there are, have started to catch on to this, and maybe a constant haranguing can bring us to some kind of reckoning. Paul Begala does a good job here.

ROBERTS: That would appear, Paul, to end any argument over whether or not she supported the bridge initially. But why can't Barack Obama make that point stick?

PAUL BEGALA, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Because the press won't do its job, John. I criticized Barack Obama when he hasn't been tough enough. Barack's job is to run against John McCain, right. Don't shoot the monkey when you can shoot for the organ grinder. His job is not to focus on number two but number one. But it is the media's job when a politician flat out lies like she's doing on this bridge to nowhere so call her on it. Or this matter of earmarks where she's attacking Barack Obama for having earmarks, when she was the mayor of little Wasilla, Alaska, 6,000 people, she hired a lobbyist who was connected to Jack Abramoff, who is a criminal and they brought home $27 million in earmarks. She carried so much pork home she got trichinosis. But we in the media are letting her tell lies about her record.

ROBERTS: Hey, OK. We got to let Alex respond to that. Flat out lies, Alex?

ALEX CASTELLANOS, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Let's be a little gentle. Look, every elected official in this country works under the system we have, which is you try to get a little bit of your tax money back. You just don't want to leave it all in Washington. The amazing thing about Sarah Palin is when she became governor she actually stood up and said no. And she made it -

BEGALA: That's not true.

CASTELLANOS: She took a strong stand. That is rare and that never happened.

ROBERTS: All right.

BEGALA: That's just not true. You know, John, the facts matter. There's lots of things that are debatable who is more qualified or less experienced or more this or more passionate, whatever. It is a fact that she campaigned and supported that bridge to nowhere. It is a fact that she hired lobbyists to get earmarks. It is a fact that as governor she lobbies for earmarks. Her state is essentially a welfare state taking money from the federal government.

ROBERTS: We still have 56 days to talk about this back and forth.

BEGALA: This is the problem. We have this false debate when we ought to have at least agreed upon facts.

There is going to be a lot of resistance to this. The Village establishment couldn't dare see themselves as biased arbiters and swayers of public opinion. They're just going to have to be called out. Repeatedly.

Working Our Own Refs

It's clear that the media has little choice but to fact check the McCain campaign's decidedly wrong comments on earmarks and federal largesse. It hasn't changed behavior, however, nor will it. That's a key difference between Democrats and Republicans

John McCain and Sarah Palin criticized Democrat Barack Obama over the amount of money he has requested for his home state of Illinois, even though Alaska under Palin's leadership has asked Washington for 10 times more money per citizen for pet projects.

At a rally in swing state Missouri, the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate accused Obama of requesting nearly $1 billion in earmarks for his state during his time as a senator. The new line of attack came after Obama made his first direct criticism of Palin over the weekend, using the topic of earmarks, which are special projects that lawmakers try to get for their districts and constituents.

"Just the other day our opponent brought up earmarks — and frankly I was surprised that he would even raise the subject at all," Palin said. "I thought he wouldn't want to go there."

Obama hasn't asked for any earmarks this year. Last year, he asked for $311 million worth, about $25 for every Illinois resident. Alaska asked this year for earmarks totaling $198 million, about $295 for every Alaska citizen.

There is no such thing as "contradiction" in the conservative lexicon. The McCain campaign has repeated the nonsense about Palin opposing the bridge to nowhere, despite documentary evidence to the contrary, 19 times and counting. It really doesn't matter to them. They're going to continue to portray themselves as fiscal conservative patriots:

The biggest project that Sarah Palin undertook as mayor of this small town was an indoor sports complex, where locals played hockey, soccer, and basketball, especially during the long, dark Alaskan winters.

The only catch was that the city began building roads and installing utilities for the project before it had unchallenged title to the land. The misstep led to years of litigation and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for a small municipality with a small budget. What was to be Ms. Palin's legacy has turned into a financial mess that continues to plague Wasilla.

"It's too bad that the city of Wasilla didn't do their homework and secure the land before they began construction," said Kathy Wells, a longtime activist here. "She was not your ceremonial mayor; she was in charge of running the city. So it was her job to make sure things were done correctly."

I guess she didn't know that she had "actual responsibilities."

Sebastian Mallaby, hardly a liberal, gets at the heart of this persistent variance between appearance and reality today in his column, which raps McCain for lying about Obama's tax plan.

McCain used to be a real straight talker. On campaign finance, spending earmarks, Iraq and immigration, he has fought bravely for his principles; and that record might have been a trump against an opponent who has taken almost no such risks. But we are now witnessing what might be called McCain's Palinization. McCain once criticized Christian conservatives as agents of intolerance, but he has caved in to their intolerance of a pro-choice running mate. McCain claims to be devoted to his country, yet he would saddle it with a vice president who is unprepared to serve as commander in chief. In the same sad way, McCain has caved in to his party's anti-tax fanatics. The man of principle has become a panderer. The straight talker flip-flops.

I think as the progressive netroots we need to reward those journalists who tell the truth, and mau-mau the others into doing the same. It's an uphill battle - in crucial ways the game is rigged - but it's worth doing because otherwise you cede all ground to the right. Tell them to put the lies in context, to build an overall picture of dishonesty around the McCain campaign.

Lie, Lie, Lie Some More

For her public appearances thus far, Sarah Palin uses prepared remarks, off a TelePrompTer, that are virtually identical to her convention speech. I mean to the letter identical. It's like a traveling summer stock production, where the audience can recite the familiar lines by heart after a while. This is popular, despite the fact that some of those lines are documented lies.

"She said she "championed reform of earmark spending by Congress, and I told the Congress thanks but no thanks on that 'Bridge to Nowhere'", she said, ommiting (sic) mention that she'd campaigned for governor supporting the bridge."

It's a lie, everyone knows it's a lie, and yet she repeats it, word for word. If anything shows that Palin is a typical Republican politician, this is it. The zombie lie that never dies is a staple of Republican campaign strategy. We've seen multiple new ones sprout up these past months: that Palin recited the speech from memory after the TelePrompTer broke (then why's she still using one?), that the Democrats threw away their American flags from their convention, that Obama plans to raise everyone's taxes, that China is drilling off the coast of Cuba, etc.

I agree with Atrios that Republicans actually relish repeating debunked lies. When truth is devalued, those on the wrong side of it react with glee when their leaders "throw it in the face" of those Eastern elites with their facts and such. Their base appreciates lying to the public.

It may be an insult to our intelligence but that doesn't mean it won't succeed. This really is uncharted territory - lie, have the lie exposed, and continue to lie. And I have no faith in the media dissemination that the lie will hurt the Republican ticket in any meaningful way.

The Latest On Troopergate et al.

Quite a few developments, actually. Michael Wooten has emerged for an interview with CNN:



Wooten doesn't come off as entirely credible here, and he admits he tasered his own son in a demonstration. I don't know where the sympathies are going to go, but the personality of Wooten vs. Palin is besides the point. The Public Safety Administrator wouldn't fire him, so Palin fired Walt Monegan. And she used her public office to settle private scores. That's the issue.

The Alaska State Legislature has now fast-tracked the investigation, which means the details will be released earlier in October and not by Halloween, as scheduled. However, while they will issue subpoenas in the case, Palin will not be compelled to testify.

The commitee, led by Sen. Hollis French, an Anchorage Democrat also announced that it would meet on September 12 to issue subpoenas in the case.

But according to the release, Palin herself will not be subpoenaed. The committee still holds out hope that she will talk to indepedendent investigator Steven Branchflower voluntarily.

"We also discussed and agreed amongst ourselves that no subpoena will be issued for the Governor," said Representative Nancy Dahlstrom, R-Eagle River. "She has told the public that she intends to cooperate with the investigation, indeed, she has told the public that she welcomes the investigation and I have every faith that she means it. If necessary we can send Mr. Branchflower to wherever the Governor is, or she can give her statement to him over the telephone, whatever is most convenient for her. We recognize that her schedule is extremely busy, and we want to accommodate that."

I think the majority-Republican committee is being way too nice to Palin here. She has explicitly said that she wouldn't testify in the case. And now they've moved up their deadline, making it easier for her to elude them. Like Palin's media strategy, her strategy will be to deny any request followed by attacking them for bothering to investigate. There won't be a backlash strategy, she won't call the Alaska Legislature "effete" or "East Coast liberals," but she will certainly mourn the "witch hunt" that intrudes on her private life (all the while making sure everyone sees the results of her private life, which she'll use as a human shield).

Meanwhile, on the earmark front, it turns out that the lobbyist for Wasilla, Alaska is the lobbyist that secured the bridge to nowhere, and Palin was certainly happy with his performance while she was mayor. In fact, she's praised the earmarking done by her porkbarrel colleagues in the Congress as recently as this year:

"And our congressional delegation, God bless 'em. They do a great job for us," she said at the forum hosted by the Alaska Professional Design Council. "Representative Don Young, especially God bless him, with transportation -- Alaska did so well under the very basic provisions of the transportation act that he wrote just a couple of years ago. We had a nice bump there. We're very, very fortunate to receive the largesse that Don Young was able to put together for Alaska."

Young barely hung on in his primary race - will Palin endorse him? Will she endorse the indicted Ted Stevens, who she ran a PAC for a few years ago?

Radio silence.

Good Speaker, Same Lies

If this is indicative of the reaction to last night's set of speeches, then I'm not too concerned. The GOP is running a red meat base strategy because they think the low-information voters will just jump on board with the tougher candidate. Na ga happen.

In two different focus groups of Clinton-supporting Nevada women -- married and unmarried -- conducted immediately after Gov. Sarah Palin's Wednesday night speech to the Republican National Convention, a few common reactions quickly took shape.

First, women in both groups were impressed with Palin's speaking ability and poise. But they were hardly convinced that she was qualified to be vice president, or that she truly represented the "change" they were looking for, especially in light of what was deemed an overly harsh "sarcasm" pervading her address [...]

In the "married" group, when one attendee kicked off the discussion by saying "she's a good speaker, and a crowd pleaser," the rest of the room articulated their agreement. "I didn't expect to be as impressed as I was," said another respondent. But then another woman added: "Once she started mudslinging, I thought, it's the same old crap as other politicians. McCain used her to get the women's vote. And she's using McCain."

"Thank you," another woman responded. "That really upset me; there was no need for that. It was snippy."

The unmarried group also voiced similar objections to the harsh, partisan edge of Palin's remarks. "I'm not impressed with her at all as a person," one said, citing her "finger pointing" and general sarcasm after the group had generally agreed that she was a talented public speaker.

Still not all focus group members thought Palin came off too harsh. "She didn't seem very aggressive to me at all," said one unmarried participant.

But in both groups, narrow majorities said they held a more negative view of Palin after her speech. "She comes off pretty cutthroat," said one.

On other issues, women in both groups said they wanted to hear more of Palin's own policy views, outside the realm of energy. Education, heath care, the economy and Iraq were all cited as areas in which women were hungry for more information -- especially in light of McCain's age. "I think America is concerned, because of McCain's age, that we're gonna have a female president who's maybe inexperienced. The nation needs to know what her issues are," said one married respondent, which prompted another to add: "I don't think she's got what it takes." An unmarried participant said she had yet to hear enough "in regards to her personal views, which could be implicated on us if McCain was to die."

The speech didn't reflect her views because it wasn't her speech; it was written for somebody else. And she delivered it well, but the effect showed her to be just another Republican politician playing the resentment card. Works well in the hall, not necessarily at home.

Not only that, when there was substance, it was a set of lies:

PALIN: "I fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history. And when that deal was struck, we began a nearly forty billion dollar natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence. That pipeline, when the last section is laid and its valves are opened, will lead America one step farther away from dependence on dangerous foreign powers that do not have our interests at heart.

THE FACTS: Palin implies that construction has begun on a major natural gas pipeline from the top of Alaska into Canada. That is not correct.

In fact, no building has begun and actual construction is years away, if it ever happens. This summer the Alaska Legislature, at Palin's request, passed a bill under which the state will issue a "license" to a Canadian energy company, TransCanada Corp., and pay it up to $500 million as an incentive to someday build this enormous project, which Alaska politicians have long sought with little success. The license is not a construction contract, and federal energy regulators have not yet approved the project [...]

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, although she has cut, by more than half, the amount the state sought from Washington this year. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to Gravina Island, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere."

It's amazing that she kept in the bridge to nowhere line, when she's documented as supporting it. And this memo of an earmark with Palin's own handwriting on it, pronouncing "We did well!!!" just shows how bankrupt this "reformer" meme is. Here's another report fact-checking the speech. Obviously the GOP hopes that they can keep lying their way through it.

And there was one line that overreached.

“Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown,” Ms. Palin told the delegates in a speech that sought to eviscerate Mr. Obama, as delegates waved signs that said “I love hockey moms.” “And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”

Let's see if the media will react to a Democratic hissy fit. Because there's ample opportunity. Roland Martin lays this out. Community organizers, which were part of George H.W. Bush's thousand points of light, give comfort to the suffering, help save jobs, create opportunity. In the largely white confines of the Republican convention, the phrase is a slur, like "ghetto hustler," but lots and lots of people benefit from community groups, including church groups, and the help they provide ordinary people. The Obama campaign is going to try and ramp this up, they've already done so in an email to supporters:

I wasn't planning on sending you something tonight. But if you saw what I saw from the Republican convention, you know that it demands a response.

I saw John McCain's attack squad of negative, cynical politicians. They lied about Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and they attacked you for being a part of this campaign.

But worst of all -- and this deserves to be noted -- they insulted the very idea that ordinary people have a role to play in our political process.

You know that despite what John McCain and his attack squad say, everyday people have the power to build something extraordinary when we come together. Make a donation of $5 or more right now to remind them.

Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed.

Let's clarify something for them right now.

Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.

And it's no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions of people have found that by coming together in their local communities they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign has been about from the beginning.

Throughout our history, ordinary people have made good on America's promise by organizing for change from the bottom up. Community organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek. And it's happening today in church basements and community centers and living rooms across America.

Meanwhile, we still haven't gotten a single idea during the entire Republican convention about the economy and how to lift a middle class so harmed by the Bush-McCain policies.

It's now clear that John McCain's campaign has decided that desperate lies and personal attacks -- on Barack Obama and on you -- are the only way they can earn a third term for the Bush policies that McCain has supported more than 90 percent of the time.

But you can send a crystal clear message.

Enough is enough. Make your voice heard loud and clear by making a $5 donation right now:

https://donate.barackobama.com/fightback

Thank you for joining more than 2 million ordinary Americans who refuse to be silenced.

They can go ahead and hate the people who try to make a difference in their communities. They can keep turning up their nose at regular people. Winning this election will be about making sure those people know who's on their side.

Palin read a TelePrompTer well last night, but I'm not sure it fundamentally changed this campaign. And if the Obama campaign can pull off the righteous indignation, it might have hurt.

Scandal Overload

I actually think this mad rush to do John McCain's vetting work for him has led to too much information out there about Sarah Palin. It's simply not possible to process it all. There are important issues and not-so-important issues and issues that aren't important but bring up other issues that might be, and the whole thing devolves into a kind of scandal morass not unlike what you see with the Bush Administration, allowing the offending party to emerge relatively unscathed. It's harder for Palin because this is her debut in the national spotlight, but the effect is the same. Like I said, I think she's going to have a great speech tonight and the media will do a complete 180, even though she'll be unchallenged on many fronts and omit key details while defining herself completely on her terms.

She'll call herself a reformer and discuss how she took on the "old boy's club" of backroom politics in Alaska. But there is now documentary evidence that she supported the "Bridge to Nowhere" throughout 2006 until it became a national laughingstock, and she made a career as a small-town mayor out of calling for earmarks, even some that wound up on John McCain's pork-barrel list of unnecessary expenditures. She's even defended the earmarking process while governor:

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.

(she's not entirely wrong here - earmarks are overrated as a budget-buster - but the success with which Alaska gets their federal projects funded is out of proportion with the rest of the country, and with their petro-dollars that looks even worse.)

She'll call herself someone who rooted out the corruption and impropriety in government, yet she has a clear record of abuse of power, firing public officials not for lapses in their job performance but insufficient loyalty.

She'll call herself someone who held public officials to the standards of all citizens, but in the current "Troopergate" case, where she dismissed Walt Monegan, the Department of Public Safety head who wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law, she's clearly obstructing the investigation.

Gov. Sarah Palin wants a state board to review the circumstances surrounding the dismissal of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan -- taking the unusual step of making an ethics complaint against herself.

Her lawyer sent an "ethics disclosure" Monday night to Attorney General Talis Colberg. The governor asked that it go to the three-person Personnel Board as a complaint. While ethics complaints are usually confidential, Palin wants the matter open [...]

Tom Daniel, an Anchorage labor and employment lawyer hired by the board in the Renkes case, took a quick look at Palin's complaint Tuesday.

"It appears that the Governor has filed an ethics complaint against herself. ... This is very unusual because ethics complaints typically are filed against others," Daniel wrote in an e-mail responding to a Daily News query.

Asked whether the personnel board could take the investigation away from the Legislature -- as Palin wants to do -- Daniel answered: "I've never looked at that issue, but I can't see why filing a complaint with the personnel board would deprive the Legislature of the right to conduct its own investigation."

Aides are also refusing to testify in the probe.

And then there are her many troubling stances on issues like reproductive rights, family planning, science, global warming, book burning (!) and a host of others.

This is actually too much to digest at once. And so it heads down the memory hole. Of course, once the anaesthesia of the speech wears off, there'll be more drip-drip-drip.

...UPDATE: Some speech samples here. It's going to be tough and straight-up Orthogonian politics of resentment. We'll see if she can channel her anger at being called out for ridicule this week; I think she's up to the task, and this backlash stuff is standard Republican politics when they are put up against the wall. Stoller is asking the right question - will this be the right way to introduce yourself to the whole nation, including independents?

Sharks Patrol These Waters

When I last left the Internet for a delightful Labor Day barbecue, the questioned raised about Sarah Palin were merely the stuff of blog comment sections and the like. It took what ought to be a private occurrence of the Governor's 17 year-old daughter's pregnancy, but the traditional media has now caught on that this pick is exceedingly strange, and that the only people who knew less about her than the American public were John McCain's Vice Presidential vetting team.

Greg Sargent has a great rundown.

* The news that Palin once backed the Bridge to Nowhere went national.

* It emerged that Palin has links to the bizarro Alaska Independence Party, which harbors the goal of seceding from the union that McCain and Palin seek to lead.

* The news broke that as governor, Palin relied on an earmark system she now opposes. Taken along with the Bridge to Nowhere stuff, this threatens to undercut her reformist image, something that was key to her selection as McCain's Veep candidate.

* The news broke that Palin's 17-year-old daughter became pregnant out of wedlock at a time when the conservative base had finally started rallying behind McCain's candidacy.

* Barely moments after McCain advisers put out word that McCain had known of Bristol Palin's pregnancy, the Anchorage Daily News revealed that Palin's own spokesperson hadn't known about it only two days ago.

* A senior McCain adviser at the Republican convention was forced into the rather embarrassing position of arguing that McCain had known about the pregnancy "last week" -- without saying what day last week he knew about it.

* It came out that Republican lawyers are up in Alaska vetting Palin -- now, more than 72 hours after it was announced that she'd been picked.

* Palin lawyered up in relation to the trooper-gate probe in Alaska -- a move that ensures far more serious attention to the story from the major news orgs.

There's actually more. The lawyer she hired in the trooper-gate probe - which is being paid for by state taxpayers - asked for all documents from the investigator, a discovery request which may make sense in a grand jury but not in an independent legislative investigation. ABC is on the case of the Alaska Independence Party, which is kind of a big deal - a secessionist group which possibly has ties to separatist militias. The earmark story has gone national - turns out that as mayor she had a personal lobbyist that secured around $27 million in federal earmarks. There are at least 10 McCain operatives up in Anchorage at this point, and didn't get there until THURSDAY, the day before the choice was announced. And major media is asking the forbidden questions:

While there was no sign that her formal nomination this week was in jeopardy, the questions swirling around Ms. Palin on the first day of the Republican National Convention, already disrupted by Hurricane Gustav, brought anxiety to Republicans who worried that Democrats would use the selection of Ms. Palin to question Mr. McCain’s judgment and his ability to make crucial decisions.

...and...

Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina said that he had heard no discussion about removing Ms. Palin from the ticket. In fact, he said, he thought her daughter’s pregnancy would not hurt her with voters.

What's notable is that the media is asking the question of if she'll be removed from the ticket. It's not a far reach to go from if to when. When the traditional media smells blood in the water, ideology goes out the window. Check out Campbell Brown, married to Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor Campbell Brown, eviscerating a McCain spokesman.



Focus groups are weighing in with, shall we say, concern, and what's more, major media is reporting on them. And the secessionist party thing is so hot to handle that McCain's camp is not commenting on it. They tried to dump a lot of this news on the Labor Day holiday with a major hurricane hitting land and it didn't work. They are completely off message, the revamped convention (which already lost a day's worth of attacking Obama) is at a crossroads, and the questions from the talking heads will be all about Palin.

I actually hope he keeps her on the ticket at this point, this is too entertaining...

Bridge To Somewhere

Turns out that Sarah Palin has been caught in a lie on the first day on the job:

During the unveiling of his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) tried to cast her as a “reformer” and “fiscal conservative.” She boldly claimed that with regard to Sen. Ted Stevens’s (R-AK) infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” she told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks“:

I championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. In fact, I told Congress — I told Congress, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ on that bridge to nowhere. If our state wanted a bridge, I said we’d build it ourselves.

It appears, however, that Palin is lying. As Bradford Plumer first noted, the Anchorage Daily News interviewed Palin during her 2006 campaign for governor. At the time, federal funding for the bridge had been stripped by Congress. They asked if she was in favor of continuing state funding for the project. “Yes,” she responded, noting specifically her desire to renew Congressional support:

Yes. I would like to see Alaska’s infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later. The window is now–while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist.

The lying is a persistent issue with Palin. She actually campaigned hard on that bridge to nowhere, and then switched positions when the bridge became a punchline, but she's still using the funding to build an access road, because otherwise she would have to return the funding to the federal government. Runaway spending! Despite this, of course, Palin is being portrayed as a crusader against earmarks, and I expect that zombie lie to hold because... well, because she said so. Forget the $346 million in earmarks requested just last year.

There's also the DPS firing scandal, a good primer for which is here. The court tapes have been released, and the Washington Post had a chat with the fired DPS chief, Walt Monegan, which is more than the McCain campaign did.

The July firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan by Gov. Sarah Palin, who was announced as John McCain's running mate on Friday, has unearthed a stream of soap-opera-like details about Palin, her husband, her family and top state appointees. The controversy has also cut against Palin's reputation for holding an ethical line and standing up to colleagues in the Republican Party over matters of principle.

Monegan, 57, a respected former chief of the Anchorage Police Department, said in an interview with The Washington Post's James V. Grimaldi on Friday that the governor repeatedly brought up the topic of her ex-brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, after Monegan became the state's commissioner of public safety in December 2006. Palin's husband, Todd, met with Monegan and presented a dossier of information about Wooten, who was going through a bitter custody battle with Palin's sister, Molly. Monegan also said Sarah Palin sent him e-mails on the subject, but Monegan declined to disclose them, saying he planned to give them to a legislative investigator looking into the matter.

Palin initially denied that she or anyone in her administration had ever pressured Monegan to fire the trooper, but this summer acknowledged more than a half a dozen contacts over the matter, including one phone call from a Palin administration official to a state police lieutenant. The call was recorded and was released by Palin's office this month. Todd Palin told a television reporter in Alaska that he did meet with Monegan, but said he was just "informing" Monegan about the issue, not exerting pressure.

"She never directly asked me to fire him," Monegan said.

That's a thin reed to hang propriety on. And it's not the first time she tried to get rid of someone who crossed her. The police chief and library director supported her opponent in the Wasilla mayoral race in 1996, so she fired them. The police chief sued, and lost, because the judge said that technically, the mayor could fire him for whatever reason she chose. That's the kind of spoils system to expect with her as VP.

There's more from Monegan here. And she might end up being deposed in the case. Lest anyone not get why this is important, Josh Marshall breaks it down.

We rely on elected officials not to use the power of their office to pursue personal agendas or vendettas. It's called an abuse of power. There is ample evidence that Palin used her power as governor to get her ex-brother-in-law fired. When his boss refused to fire him, she fired him. She first denied Monegan's claims of pressure to fire Wooten and then had to amend her story when evidence proved otherwise. The available evidence now suggests that she 1) tried to have an ex-relative fired from his job for personal reasons, something that was clearly inappropriate, and perhaps illegal, though possibly understandable in human terms, 2) fired a state official for not himself acting inappropriately by firing the relative, 3) lied to the public about what happened and 4) continues to lie about what happened.

These are, to put it mildly, not the traits or temperament you want in someone who could hold the executive power of the federal government.

Indeed.