FINAL COUNTDOWN FOR USA ELECTION 2008

Fine. If she is misrepresenting stuff, I am sure it will come back to bite her.

I will keep an eye on this stuff, but frankly the bridge is not that interesting of an issue.

Fine. If she is misrepresenting stuff, I am sure it will come back to bite her.

I will keep an eye on this stuff, but frankly the bridge is not that interesting of an issue.

okie wrote:

Fine. If she is misrepresenting stuff, I am sure it will come back to bite her.

I will keep an eye on this stuff, but frankly the bridge is not that interesting of an issue.

The only reason it is interesting to me is that it has been made into this huge big deal by the media and hatemongering bloggers. It was a line in a speech to introduce herself to Convention. It left out a lot of detail that could have been included, but it was a funnier and more effective line when all that clutter was left out. It did give an impression different from the actual facts, but it was not a lie. It was a small and insignificant thing in the grand scheme of things.

But for those who think Sarah Palin must be destroyed so that Obama can win, don't care about fairness, honesty, or concern for any human being not on their side.

Hey, you want to run campaigns based on misrpresentations and rock stars, the Repubs have to compete, cyclops. Clinton lied himself into office, and now Obama is running as a celebrity, with absolutely no experience except to be a community organizer, hello Acorn. You asked for this kind of stuff, cyclops, so what else should you expect? This is where you guys have taken politics. So you have no sympathy from me. I am not particularly defending Palin, I just find all of this rather humorous, and you deserve everything she is bringing at you guys.

Sarah is no naive "small town mayor" - she just *started out* there. Btw, as Mayor of Wasilla, she brought this "small town" through a lot of GOOD changes and left it at the end of her term having grown to the 4th largest CITY in Alaska - a lot of growth and a stronger economic base than ever before. (Truth or Fiction Site)

WASILLA, Alaska "" The world arrived here more than a century ago with the gold rush and later the railroad. Yet one aspect of American life did not come to town until 1996, the year Sarah Palin ran for mayor and Wasilla got its first local lesson in wedge politics.

The traditional turning points that had decided municipal elections in this town of less than 7,000 people "" Should we pave the dirt roads? Put in sewers? Which candidate is your hunting buddy? "" seemed all but obsolete the year Ms. Palin, then 32, challenged the three-term incumbent, John C. Stein.

Anti-abortion fliers circulated. Ms. Palin played up her church work and her membership in the National Rifle Association. The state Republican Party, never involved before because city elections are nonpartisan, ran advertisements on Ms. Palin’’s behalf.

Two years after Representative Newt Gingrich helped draft the Contract With America to advance Republican positions, Ms. Palin and her passion for Republican ideology and religious faith overtook a town known for a wide libertarian streak and for helping start the Iditarod sled dog race.

“Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff, and I was like, ‘‘Whoa,’’ said Mr. Stein, who lost the election. ““But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits and the religious born-again thing. I’’m not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: ‘‘We will have our first Christian mayor.’’
“I thought: ‘‘Holy cow, what’’s happening here? Does that mean she thinks I’’m Jewish or Islamic?’’ ”” recalled Mr. Stein, who was raised Lutheran, and later went to work as the administrator for the city of Sitka in southeast Alaska. “The point was that she was a born-again Christian.”

For all the admiration in Alaska for Ms. Palin, her rapid ascent from an activist in the P.T.A. to the running mate of Senator John McCain did not come without battle wounds. Her years in Wasilla, her first executive experience, reveal a mix of successes and stumbles, with Ms. Palin gaining support from a majority of residents for her drive, her faith and her accessibility but alienating others with what they said could be a polarizing single-mindedness.

“She is an aggressive reformer who isn’’t afraid to break glass, to bring change to Wasilla and later to the state of Alaska,” said Taylor Griffin, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, who declined to address specific aspects of Ms. Palin’s tenure as mayor. “Washington needs some of that.”

In Wasilla, Ms. Palin is widely praised for following through on campaign promises by cutting property taxes while improving roads and sewers and strengthening the Police Department.

Her supporters say she helped Wasilla evolve from a ridiculed backwater to fast-growing suburb. The population of about 5,000 during her tenure as mayor has grown to nearly 10,000 now, and the city is filling with big box stores, including a Target that is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, one of three opening statewide that day in the chain’’s Alaska debut.

Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin tried to ban books from the library. Palin asked the library how she might go about banning books because some had inappropriate language in them""shocking the librarian, Mary Ellen Baker. The Truth:
Palin did not ask for any actual books to be banned.
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/p/palin-banned-books.htm

For instance re a banned book reference in NYT article, the truth is here:
Summary of the eRumor:
Quote:

Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin tried to ban books from the library. Palin asked the library how she might go about banning books because some had inappropriate language in them""shocking the librarian, Mary Ellen Baker. The Truth:
Palin did not ask for any actual books to be banned.
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/p/palin-banned-books.htm

Community organizing is just as essential in understanding Obama. But what does it say about him?

The first thing is that he has a talent for, well, organizing. Everyone who worked with Obama says he was good at the job. And he has used the techniques he learned in Chicago to organize his own presidential campaign, going so far as to enlist Mike Kruglik to help start a “Camp Obama” program to instill organizing principles into Obama supporters. The result is a campaign that even Obama’s opponents admit is a very impressive operation.

But Obama’s time in Chicago also revealed the conventionality of his approach to the underlying problems of the South Side. Is the area crippled by a culture of dysfunction? Demand summer jobs. Push for an after-school program. Convince the city to spend more on this or that. It was the same old stuff; Obama could think outside the box on ways to organize people, but not on what he was organizing them for.

Certainly no one should live in an apartment contaminated by asbestos, but Obama did not seem to question, or at least question very strongly, the notion that the people he wanted to organize should be living in Altgeld at all. The place was, after all, one of the nation’s capitals of dysfunction. “Every ten years I would work on the census,” Yvonne Lloyd told me. “I always had Altgeld. When you look at those forms from the census, you had three or four generations in one apartment " the grandmother, the mother, the daughter, and then her baby. It was supposed to be a stepping stone, but you’ve got people that are never going to leave.”

No doubt Obama would agree that that is a bad thing, but when a real attempt to break through that culture of dysfunction " the landmark 1996 welfare-reform bill, now widely accepted as one of the most successful domestic-policy initiatives in a generation " came up, Obama vowed to use all the resources at his disposal to undo it. “I made sure our new welfare system didn’t punish people by kicking them off the rolls,” he said in 1999. Two years earlier, he had declared: “We want to make sure that there is health care, child care, job training, and transportation vouchers " everything that is needed to ensure that those who need it will have support.” Obama applied his considerable organizational skills to perpetuating the old, failed way of doing things.

Obama’s professional colleagues, people like Jerry Kellman, believe his lasting accomplishment was to build an organization, the Developing Communities Project, that survived his departure. Today, DCP still exists, run out of a small Methodist church building on 95th Street, working on after-school programs, drug prevention, and voter registration. It has become, much more than it was when Obama was there, a grant-getting institution; according to tax records, about three-quarters of its funding comes from government grants, with the rest from liberal foundations like the Woods Fund, on whose board Obama sat from 1993 to 2002.

Has any of that brought about the change Obama spoke of back in 1985? Not in any large sense. But if Obama doesn’t have much to show for his years as an organizer, it’s fair to say that many of the people he touched revere him deeply. Remember what Loretta Augustine-Herron said: Obama had such a powerful presence that he made her believe he could do the job, even though there was little in his résumé to suggest he could. Does that sound familiar to anyone who has watched the Obama campaign? When hope is the product, Obama can sell it with the best of them.

When he left for law school, Obama wondered what he had accomplished as an organizer. He certainly had some achievements, but he did not " perhaps could not " concede that there might be something wrong with his approach to Chicago’s problems. Instead of questioning his own premises, he concluded that he simply needed more power to get the job done. So he made plans to run for political office. And in each successive office, he has concluded that he did not have enough power to get the job done, so now he is running for the most powerful office in the land.

And what if he gets it? He’ll be the biggest, strongest organizer in the world. He’ll dazzle the country with his message of hope and possibility. But we shouldn’t expect much to actually get done.

Quote:

For instance re a banned book reference in NYT article, the truth is here:
Summary of the eRumor:
Quote:

Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin tried to ban books from the library. Palin asked the library how she might go about banning books because some had inappropriate language in them""shocking the librarian, Mary Ellen Baker. The Truth:
Palin did not ask for any actual books to be banned.
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/p/palin-banned-books.htm

Oh nah, she just asked the librarian how she felt about banning books, and when she didn't get the answer she like, she fired her; only to hear a giant outcry from her constituents, upon which she re-hired her.

Cycloptichorn

Six years of her executive experience came as mayor of Wasilla, a city north of Anchorage that had about 5,000 residents when she took over. As much of Palin’s hometown rallies with pride around her, 1,400 miles away - in a National Archives warehouse in Seattle - three boxes of documents help capture the quality of her mayoral experience.

These records, from a federal wrongful-termination lawsuit, include the minutiae of municipal governance, with memos to administrators and personnel records stamped "confidential." The documents, combined with accounts from her hometown newspaper, show how Palin’s first year as mayor could easily have been her last.


[...]

After notifying the librarian that she was fired, Palin backtracked and decided to keep her on. Palin had twice asked this librarian what she thought about banning books, to which the librarian responded it was a lousy idea, one she wouldn’t go along with. Later, Palin told the local paper that any questions she’d raised about censorship were only "rhetorical."

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Quote:

For instance re a banned book reference in NYT article, the truth is here:
Summary of the eRumor:
Quote:

Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin tried to ban books from the library. Palin asked the library how she might go about banning books because some had inappropriate language in them""shocking the librarian, Mary Ellen Baker. The Truth:
Palin did not ask for any actual books to be banned.
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/p/palin-banned-books.htm

Oh nah, she just asked the librarian how she felt about banning books, and when she didn't get the answer she like, she fired her; only to hear a giant outcry from her constituents, upon which she re-hired her.

Cycloptichorn

Okay that is the kind of statement that really does require credible sourcing Cyclop. Have any? If you don't, will you admit that you are among or approve of the bottom feeders who just make up stuff to slime her?

Anne Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.

The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.

In 1996, Ms. Palin suggested to the local paper, The Frontiersman, that the conversations about banning books were “rhetorical.”

WASILLA " In the wake of strong reactions from the city’s library director to inquiries about censorship, Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin on Monday was taking pains to explain her questions about censoring library material were “rhetorical.”
…
Library Director Mary Ellen Emmons last week said Palin broached the subject with her on two occasions in October - once Palin was elected mayor Oct. 1 but before she took office on Oct. 14, and again in more detail on Monday, Oct. 28.
…
Palin said Monday she had no particular books or other material in mind when she posed the questions to Emmons.
…
But on Monday, Oct. 28, Emmons said Palin asked her outright if she could live with censorship of library books. This was during a weak when Palin was requesting resignations from all the city’s department heads as a way of expressing loyalty.
…
Emmons said Palin asked her on Oct. 28 if she would object to censorship, even if people were circling the library in protest about a book.
…
Palin called Emmons into her office Monday [12/14/1996] to discuss the censorship questions again.
…
Emmons said the current Wasilla policy, which she described as written in more general terms than the borough’s, also worked procedurally in a book-challenge case last year. Emmons said then-council-woman Palin was distressed about the issue when it came up, indicating she was aware of the city’s book-challenge policy.

Emmons said in the conversations with now-Mayor Palin in October, she reminded her again that the city has a policy in place. “But it seamed clear to me that wasn’t really what she was talking about anyhow,” Emmons added. “I just hope it doesn’t come up again.”

There are millions of people working on behalf of churches, cyclops, most of which probably don't care about politics. And Obama's street organizing involved alot more than church work I think. I haven't researched it, but one thing I understand was Acorn, which is nothing more than a leftie group that registers voters, often times fraudulantly. Great experience, cyclops!

So you haven't researched it, but feel comfortable knocking it? I wouldn't be proud to admit that, myself.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

So you haven't researched it, but feel comfortable knocking it? I wouldn't be proud to admit that, myself.

Cycloptichorn

It doesn't make you feel dirty saying that?