FINAL COUNTDOWN FOR USA ELECTION 2008

Possibly but linking only to sites or sources that dish out dishonest dirt is just as bad as reporting it. I do NOT intentionally use as authoritative ANY sources that intentionally deal in dishonest dirt.

True Whoppers

By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, September 17, 2008; Page A19

Economists are not generally known for their lyrical phrasing. But the other day, one told me something about the election that has stuck with me: He cautioned against succumbing to the "symmetry of sin."

This unexpected snippet of political poetry, from a Democrat advising Barack Obama, was prompted by my expressed desire to hold both campaigns accountable for their lapses from good policy and honest argument. At which point my eloquent economist invoked the lure of false symmetry.

He was peddling a self-interested, but important, point: All campaigns fall short, but some fall far shorter than others. And it is a phony evenhandedness, comfortable for journalists but ultimately misleading, that equates these failures without measuring the grossness of their deviation from the standard of decency.

In the 2008 race, and especially in the past few weeks, the imbalance has become unnervingly stark. Ideological differences aside, John McCain's campaign has been more dishonest, more unfair, more -- to use a word that resonates with McCain -- dishonorable than Barack Obama's.

Both candidates are guilty of playing trivial pursuit in a serious season, campaigning from gotcha to gotcha. Obama also has eagerly taken every cheap shot -- McCain wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years, doesn't get the economy, can't count his own houses. Neither candidate is running the honest, confront-the-hard-questions campaign he promised.
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McCain's transgressions, though, are of a different magnitude. His whoppers are bigger; there are more of them. He -- the easy out would be to say "his campaign" -- has been misleading, and at times has outright lied, about his opponent. He has misrepresented -- that's the charitable verb -- his vice presidential nominee's record. Called on these fouls, he has denied and repeated them.

The most outrageous of McCain's distortions involve Obama on taxes. He asserts that Obama's new taxes could "break your family budget," and that an Obama presidency would inflict "painful tax increases on working American families." Hardly. Obama would lower taxes for most households, and lower them more than McCain would. The only "painful tax increases on working American families" would be on working families making more than $250,000.

Likewise, the McCain campaign has its story about Sarah Palin, and it's sticking with it -- facts be damned. She said "thanks but no thanks" to that "Bridge to Nowhere," except that she didn't: She backed the bridge until it was unpopular, then scooped up the money and used it for other projects. More than a year after McCain began railing against the bridge, Palin, then a gubernatorial candidate, said the state should build it "now -- while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist."

Palin sold the gubernatorial jet, on eBay and for a profit -- except that she didn't. She didn't take earmarks as governor -- except for the $256 million she sought last year, and the $197 million wish list for 2008.

Every hard-fought campaign is in some sense a struggle between the id of political consultants driving for a victory and the superego of policy types who worry about having to govern with the consequences of campaign rhetoric. Every campaign calls on the candidate to calibrate, at some point, how far he is willing to go in pursuit of the prize.

No candidate has felt this tension so keenly, or written about it as movingly, as McCain. In his memoir "Worth the Fighting For," McCain describes the sickening sensation of renouncing his views about the Confederate flag to curry favor with South Carolina voters in 2000 -- "reading it as if I were making a hostage statement."

He wrote that his "theatrics" were designed to "telegraph reporters that . . . political imperatives required a little evasiveness on my part. I wanted them to think me still an honest man, who simply had to cut a corner a little here and there so that I could go on to be an honest president."

Sitting on the couch with the women of "The View" last week, McCain offered a litany of excuses for his conduct this time around: Obama's ads are hard-hitting, too. The tone wouldn't be so negative if Obama had agreed to more debates. McCain's own lipstick comment was different because he was referring to health care.

You had to wonder: Are there any corners left for McCain? Is there any reason to trust that a man running this campaign would go on to be an honest president?

[email protected]

Re the general discussion on sources: Personally, I believe I can get a fuller picture on an issue as long as I use a variety of sources. Relying on a single source is usually disastrous for any inquiry.

Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he's president that he'll take on, and I quote, 'the old boys network in Washington.'

Now I'm not making this up. This is somebody who's been in Congress for twenty-six years, who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign.

And now he tells us that he's the one who's gonna' to take on the old boys network. The old boys network? In the McCain campaign that's called a staff meeting. Come, on!

Sarah Palin's wasteful ways
She poses as a fiscal watchdog, but when Palin was mayor, she grabbed city funds to give her office a pricey "bordello" makeover.

By David Talbot

Sep. 17, 2008 | Sarah Palin has been touting herself as fiscal watchdog throughout her political career. But Palin's tenure as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, was characterized by waste, cronyism and incompetence, according to government officials in the Matanuska Valley, where she began her fairy-tale political rise.

"Executive abilities? She doesn't have any," said former Wasilla City Council member Nick Carney, who selected and groomed Palin for her first political race in 1992 and served with her after her election to the City Council.

Four years later, the ambitious Palin won the Wasilla mayor's office -- after scorching the "tax and spend mentality" of her incumbent opponent. But Carney, Palin's estranged former mentor, and others in city hall were astounded when they found out about a lavish expenditure of Palin's own after her 1996 election. According to Carney, the newly elected mayor spent more than $50,000 in city funds to redecorate her office, without the council's authorization.

"I thought it was an outrageous expense, especially for someone who had run as a budget cutter," said Carney. "It was also illegal, because Sarah had not received the council's approval."

According to Carney, Palin's office makeover included flocked, red wallpaper. "It looked like a bordello."

Although Carney says he no longer has documentation of the expenditures, in his recollection Palin paid for the office face-lift with money from a city highway fund that was used to plow snow, grade roads and fill potholes -- essential municipal services, particularly in weather-battered Alaska.

Carney confronted Mayor Palin at a City Council hearing, and was shocked by her response.

"I braced her about it," he said. "I told her it was against the law to make such a large expenditure without the council taking a vote. She said, 'I'm the mayor, I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can't.'"

"I'll never forget it -- it's one of the few times in my life I've been speechless," Carney added. "It would have been easier for her to finesse it. She had the votes on the council by then, she controlled it. But she just pushed forward. That's Sarah. She just has no respect for rules and regulations."

Carney, who comes from a long-established homesteading family in the area and once ran the city's garbage collection business, has decided to speak out for the first time since Palin's vice-presidential nomination. He is viewed as a longtime Palin gadfly, ever since he sided with her opponent in the 1996 mayor's race. After Palin won, she froze out Carney, refusing to call on him at City Council meetings and deep-sixing his proposals. "That's the way Sarah is," Carney said. "She rewards friends and cuts everyone else off at the knees."

Other local officials -- who lack Carney's acrimonious history with Palin -- share his dim view of her mayoral reign. When Palin ran for mayor, she dismissed concerns about her lack of managerial expertise by saying the job was "not rocket science." But after a tumultuous start, marked by controversial firings and lawsuits against the city, Palin felt compelled to hire a city manager named John Cramer to steady the ship.

"Sarah was unprepared to be mayor -- it was John Cramer who actually ran the city," said Michelle Church, a member of the Mat-Su Borough Assembly, who knows Palin socially. "As vice-president she'll certainly have to rely on faceless advisors with no public accountability. Haven't we had enough of that in the past eight years?"

Other officials in the borough government -- the equivalent of county government in other states -- point out that Palin actually had very little executive responsibility, since the borough oversees many of Wasilla's vital functions.

"After all her boasting about her executive experience, what did she do?" asks a longtime borough official, who, like many in local circles, requested anonymity because of Palin's reputation for vengeance. "The borough takes care of most of the planning, the fire, the ambulance, collecting the property taxes. And on top of that she brought in a city manager to actually run the city day to day. So what executive experience did she have as mayor?"

Palin does have two major accomplishments to her name as mayor: the by now highly publicized sports complex on the outskirts of Wasilla, which she pushed through city government, and the less well-known emergency dispatch center, which she also brought to her hometown.

The sports complex, however, is seen by many local officials as a budget-busting white elephant.

"I feel sorry for our current mayor, because of the mess that Sarah left behind," said Anne Kilkenny, a respected government watchdog in Wasilla. "And the sports arena is still a money loser for the city."

"Sarah was very focused on the sports complex," said Wasilla council member Dianne Woodruff, who began serving after Palin's tenure. "But somebody forgot to buy the land before they started building on it. Somebody dropped the ball. It was the fault of the people running the city at the time. As a result, we've spent well over a million dollars more than we should have. And we're still paying for it."

Today, the sports complex sits like a huge airplane hangar outside the Wasilla city limits, in a clearing in the woods. Since Palin's administration decided to build the complex far from Wasilla's population center, kids can't walk there or ride their bicycles. On a recent, drizzly afternoon, the cavernous building sat nearly empty. Inside, two girls glided aimlessly around on the ice rink.

But the quiet arena still held Palin's charged presence. A wall plaque commemorated Mayor Sarah Palin and her City Council for constructing the edifice. And on the walls, big, bold quotations urged young athletes to attempt impossible, Sarah Barracuda-like feats: "'You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.' -- Wayne Gretzky."

Local officials are also highly critical of Palin's decision to build an emergency dispatch center -- even though Wasilla and nearby Palmer already shared the costs of an emergency operation for the Mat-Su Valley. As a result of the duplication, there are now two expensive operations for an area with 85,000 people, while the city of Anchorage, with a population of over 300,000, makes do with one emergency station.

"Don't tell me about earmarks," snorts a borough official. "Because of Palin's ego, she couldn't stand the idea of sharing an emergency dispatch operation with Palmer, which has been Wasilla's town rival ever since her high school basketball days. So she ran to [Senator] Ted Stevens to get an earmark for her own system. Now we have two expensive emergency systems and both are losing money. She's no budget cutter -- give me a break. She's just the opposite."

Nick Carney, who is now retired in Utah, has a lot of time to ponder Sarah Palin's rise these days. When he and his wife picked Palin to run for City Council in 1992, because they felt the council needed an average-mom type like her, Carney had no idea how far their protégé would soar. "It was a very casual process, she wasn't even our first choice. We had known her since she was a girl, she went to school with our daughter. It wasn't that she was the brightest thing on the horizon, a rising star or anything like that."

But, in hindsight, Carney can see the qualities that have rocket-propelled Palin to where she is today.

"'Sarah Barracuda' -- she's proud of that name now, she uses it in her campaigns," said her former mentor. "But she got that name from the way she conducted herself with her own teammates. She was vicious to the other girls, always playing up to the coach and pointing out when the other girls made mistakes. She was the coach's favorite and he gave her more playing time than her skills warranted. My niece was on her team; she was a very good player. I used to sit there in the stands, and I would wonder, Why on earth is Sarah getting so much playing time?"

-- By David Talbot

Yeah. Imagine the immediate former editor of Salon and immediate former CEO of Salon media doing a hit piece on Palin! Scandalous. But some people are so gullible (or desperate) they will think he's actually a credible and unbiased source.

(I know you won't take my advice, Cyclop, but you might take Wandel's and try to few other sources, including a few reputable ones, to see if you can collaborate this stuff in any way. If you can't, it's pretty safe to discard it as being of any importance whatsoever.)

The day that you post anything positive about President Bush, John McCain, or Sarah Palin or anybody else that you oppose, I'll believe you really look for honest information instead of just the slime, Cyclop. You believe what you believe and you have as much right as anybody else to post it. I have the right to trust sources of publications, organizations, and people who are not committed to sliming people, however, and Salon isn't one that I trust.

Well at least that explains why you find the garbage put out by the slime merchants to be so appealing.

The day that you post anything positive about President Bush, John McCain, or Sarah Palin or anybody else that you oppose, I'll believe you really look for honest information instead of just the slime, Cyclop.

Factual allegations. Hmm. Is that an oxymoron?
But seriously, Cyclop, if they are so factual, wouldn't you think they would be collaborated by a reputable source somewhere? That's all I ask. That those who deal in slime, innuendo, and distortions be called on it. If they are the only ones saying this stuff, then you can be pretty darn sure there is absolutely nothing to it.

Foxfyre wrote:

The day that you post anything positive about President Bush, John McCain, or Sarah Palin or anybody else that you oppose, I'll believe you really look for honest information instead of just the slime, Cyclop.

That doesn't make sense at all.

You can post completely honest information without ever posting anything positive about the politicians you oppose.

The fact that someone never posts anything positive about a certain politician does in no way make the information questionable.

I would agree that it isn't necessary to say something positive in order to criticize.

But when somebody constantly goes out of his way to post stuff from the slime sites that are collaborated by no credible source, I think it is safe to assume that his primary interest is in sliming somebody.

And if he never has anything good to say about the person he is sliming, it does draw his motives into question, don't you think?

Sarah Palin's wasteful ways
She poses as a fiscal watchdog, but when Palin was mayor, she grabbed city funds to give her office a pricey "bordello" makeover.