pm123 on November 3, 2008 at 5:06 PM

You don’t pay much in taxes – do you?

LOOK B4 YOU LEAP on November 3, 2008 at 4:32 PM

So I guess you will be leaping for Barack Obama?

Thanks super intelligent liberals.

This conjecture is predicated on the latest Rasmussen swing state polls, the RealClearPolitics battleground averages, a slight, eleventh hour, unpolled pro-McCain swing in Pennsylvania based on the anti-coal flap, a dash of wishful thinking, and an ass…

pm123 on November 3, 2008 at 5:24 PM

Your pathetic attempt to equate taxes that are imposed on individuals with the individual right to donate to a cause has already been answered twice.
Apparently you have the same dysfunctional mental imbalance that your buddy Biden who thinks j-o-b-s is made up of three words or your hero Obama who wants to be president of all 57 states of America so he can protect us from getting the bomb dropped on us like at Pearl Harbor.

I have never voted for or agreed to many taxes that I have to pay like gas,the 700,000 million bailout because of democrats being in the pocket of Fannie/Freddie,and paying for people who chose not to work for a living.

I chose as an individual to donate my time or money to a charity when I feel like it.period.

If you can’t seem to grasp this very easy to understand concept than please go back to your coffee shop with the rest of your idiot friends that said we could not win in Iraq,That Bush lied about pre-war intel(how’s that impeachment going genius),That Bush tore up the Constitution
with the Patriot act and NSA wiretapping(that your hero Obama voted for and many other super intelligent democrats)
and have fun in your Berkeley bubble.

unfortunately Couric palin purposely destoyed dusted up Palin in the 2nd interview

Fixed it for you, woodward. She’s still out there on the hustings, drawing crowds as big or bigger than Barry draws. Give my regards to Bernstein

Don’t get me wrong, I have always been a Palin supporter but the McCain Campain people handle her horriblely
Politics 101 do not let your opposition define you
By not having her do a press conference or letting Gibson
and couric rip her apart in the interviews they let the people in the media not just oblermann, matthews, maher but the entire CBS morning define her in an unfavorable way. she never overcame the bad interviews. She has had very bad
polls numbers since those interviews. If the outcome of those interview were different her polls #’s might be different

If the people you hang around with ostracise you for not spending money, then find new friends. Fact is, you can find new friends, ignore the people who sneer at you, or do anything else to spend your money as you please, but the government takes money from you with the threat of jail if you don’t pay. There is nothing your church can do to take your money if you don’t want to give it. In fact, you can even leave that particular church and find a new place to worship if you don’t like their practises.

Your last sentence is a non-sequitor. There is a fundamental difference between using taxes for legitimate governmental purposes (i.e. gas taxes pay for road repairs) and for illegitimate ends (spreading the wealth). One is a function of a free government, the other is a function of a dictatorship.

Please explain to me the essential difference between taxation and charitable contributions.

One is voluntary.

Please explain to me the essential difference between taxation and charitable contributions. Don’t say that one is voluntary and the other isn’t, because that, of course, is nonsense. We the people pass the written laws that require taxation, just as we the people pass the unwritten laws that require charitable contributions. You’re not required to do either – but if you don’t, in one case you will be ostracized from society by being incarcerated, and in the other you will be ostracized from society by being labeled “un-Christian.” We must all be our brother and sister’s keepers, whether we do it on religious grounds or social grounds, no? All this nonsense about taxation being evil is ridiculous – taxes pay for the common good. Feel free to reject the use of electricity, roads, bridges, schools, the police or fire services, and the military, but I doubt that’s what you want to do.

For all of you who claim to despise “Marxist” or “Socialist” ideas, how many will refuse to cash their Social Security checks?

I don’t blame anyone for cashing their Social Security checks. It’s money they’ve earned, and had deducted from their paychecks.

How many refuse to give money to their church, which after all only plans to “redistribute” that wealth?

Unlike socialism and Marxism, giving to one’s church is voluntary, and dictated by one’s own conscience and not by government coersion.

How many refuse to work at soup kitchens or donate to food banks or send money to the Red Cross?

Again, these are voluntary. Submitting to government-coerced wealth redistribution is not.

The hypocrisy here is a mile think!

A “mile think”? If you want real hyprocrisy, go to the left, where Michael Moore denounces Americans for not living in more integrated communities, as he lives in a place where the African-American population is zero, or Ted Kennedy, who denounces “big oil”, as he and his family earn millions from oil via mineral rights.

You must be the one that’s thick if you can’t tell the difference between charity (voluntarily given by individuals), and taxation by a government.

Plus, if one has paid into the SS system, they should definitely not worry about getting their checks later (although they would have gotten a much higher return on their ‘investment’ if they had gotten to keep the money and invest it).

Personally, I’m not counting on any SS being left when my husband and I retire, so we are setting aside money now for the future. Yep, saving and planning ahead or as conservatives like to call it–personal responsibility. What a novel concept!

Did you happen to notice the big blob that runs from Western Kentucky up through Illinois? Lots of coal in Illinois.

Oldnuke on November 3, 2008 at 10:13 AM

Yes, I did indeed, but I’m a realist on that score: no way, no how The Machine let’s their man lose in his home state. If the coalers in those areas had access to this info, vis-a-vis Obama on the coal industry, you’d probably see a record turn out from them, all voting against him, but then, all the more reason for the MSM to surpress it, yes?

That and The Machine probably has a contingency plan in the event that the coalers mobilize and look to be comming out strong for McCain, which, if history’s any indicator, involves the city of Chicago showing 500% turnout on election day, with felons, illegals, and the dead all throwing the lever for 0bama.

Some thought the ethynol opposition would be the big deal breaker for McCain in Iowa. Bet those Iowa coalers, and folks related to them, may reconsider if they heard the tape.

Still sticking with my prediction of McCain flipping PA.

I’ll be watching FNC, so I’ll only get to see Juan Williams jaw drop and Mort Condracke stammer like a fool when they call it for McCain, but I imagine there will be more, shall we say, severe, reactions elsewhere…(if Matthews’s head does, in fact, explode, will somebody please post the video? Ditto if Olberman swallows his tongue or Andrea Mitchell starts sobbing uncontrollably.)

Editor’s note: You can find Salon’s complete coverage of Sarah Palin here.

By David Talbot

S S S RSS Print Email
Read more: David Talbot, Alaska, John McCain, Politics, News, 2008 election, Sarah Palin

AP Photo/Al Grillo

Sarah Palin in Anchorage, Alaska, Aug. 8, 2002. Palin was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, from 1996-2002.

Sept. 17, 2008 | WASILLA, Alaska — 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.

Enjoy this story?

Buzz up!More Buzz up!

Digg

Facebook

StumbleUpon

Reddit

“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?”

The real quote:

“That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants are being built, they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted-down caps that are imposed every year. So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel, and other alternative energy approaches…

…But this notion of no coal, I think, is an illusion. Because the fact of the matter is, is that right now we are getting a lot of our energy from coal. And China is building a coal-powered plant once a week. So what we have to do then is figure out how can we use coal without emitting greenhouse gases and carbon. And how can we sequester that carbon and capture it. If we can’t, then we’re gonna still be working on alternatives.”

KEEP THE DESPERATE SPINNING SPINNING KIDS

Dave Rywall on November 3, 2008 at 2:12 PM

The hypocrisy here is a mile think!

I haven’t been able to see this particular CNN video since last night, though I have elsewhere on Youtube.

Cheers,
Victoria

rwoodward6 on November 3, 2008 at 10:08 AM

unfortunately Couric palin purposely destoyed dusted up Palin in the 2nd interview

Fixed it for you, woodward. She’s still out there on the hustings, drawing crowds as big or bigger than Barry draws. Give my regards to Bernstein.