McCain the Bailout Drama Queen

Placing Blame
I do blame McCain for his puerile histrionics and for dragging this issue--which should have been above partisanship--into presidential politics. Let's make no mistake about it: his various gimmicks had absolutely nothing to do with the substance of the issue. He doesn't know all that much about the substance of the issue. The gimmicks were a failed attempt to make it seem as if he had powers, and knowledge, he didn't have. Clearly, he was in a more difficult position than Obama--the populist conservative wing of House Republicans was unwilling to take responsibility for the fruits of the deregulation that they promoted--and that might have required a more aggressive effort to move votes on his part, but the flailing about only confused Republicans (was he for, was he against?) and made matters worse.

As for Barack Obama, his visceral aversion to showboating did him a service. He laid out four requirements for his support of the bill--requests he had, clearly, coordinated with the Democratic Leadership (and which McCain supported). He made the necessary calls to keep up with the negotiations (as McCain did). He made it clear, without ostentation or fuss, that he supported the compromise. Even today, after the bill failed, Obama warned against panic and advised the Congress to get back to work and, "Get it done."

This was, I believe, eminently rational behavior in a moment of crisis. Obama didn't pretend that he could, or should, do something that he couldn't do.

McCain’s Suspension Bridge to Nowhere

McCain’s Suspension Bridge to Nowhere
Senator John McCain was on a roll. In a room reserved for high-stakes gamblers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, he tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table. When the marathon session ended around 2:30 a.m., the Arizona senator and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings.

A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino he oversaw as a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and he was doing so with the lobbyist who represents that casino, according to three associates of Mr. McCain.

The visit had been arranged by the lobbyist, Scott Reed, who works for the Mashantucket Pequot, a tribe that has contributed heavily to Mr. McCain’s campaigns and built Foxwoods into the world’s second-largest casino. Joining them was Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s current campaign manager. Their night of good fortune epitomized not just Mr. McCain’s affection for gambling, but also the close relationship he has built with the gambling industry and its lobbyists during his 25-year career in Congress.

As a two-time chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, Mr. McCain has done more than any other member of Congress to shape the laws governing America’s casinos, helping to transform the once-sleepy Indian gambling business into a $26-billion-a-year behemoth with 423 casinos across the country. He has won praise as a champion of economic development and self-governance on reservations.

“One of the founding fathers of Indian gaming” is what Steven Light, a University of North Dakota professor and a leading Indian gambling expert, called Mr. McCain.

As factions of the ferociously competitive gambling industry have vied for an edge, they have found it advantageous to cultivate a relationship with Mr. McCain or hire someone who has one, according to an examination based on more than 70 interviews and thousands of pages of documents.

Mr. McCain portrays himself as a Washington maverick unswayed by special interests, referring recently to lobbyists as “birds of prey.” Yet in his current campaign, more than 40 fund-raisers and top advisers have lobbied or worked for an array of gambling interests — including tribal and Las Vegas casinos, lottery companies and online poker purveyors.

When rules being considered by Congress threatened a California tribe’s planned casino in 2005, Mr. McCain helped spare the tribe. Its lobbyist, who had no prior experience in the gambling industry, had a nearly 20-year friendship with Mr. McCain.

Blaming Democrats for Financial Crisis?

Under the golden parachute, a place for community reinvestment
As it crafts the mother of all bailouts, Congress is wrestling with the question of whether, and to what extent, ordinary people should be included in the rescue effort. As critics try to parse the layers of responsibility that led to the mess, some are wagging fingers at a long-standing federal law to promote financial and social equity.

The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, and others have linked the crisis to the Community Reinvestment Act, Carter-era legislation that encourages banks to boost equity in lower-income communities that lack access to financial resources. Critics say the CRA set up a dangerous spiral of unaffordable and unsustainable lending.

But as a form of regulation, the CRA, far from instigating the current crisis, seems to have promoted relatively stable wealth building, while helping underserved communities counter discrimination in financial services. Supporters point out that while it did establish a regulatory framework for lenders, the law tended to benefit both clients and the bottom line.

Earlier this year, Ellen Seidman of the New America Foundation’s Financial Services and Education Project testified to Congress that on the whole, the CRA has encouraged banks to be more proactive and innovative about doing business with underserved communities, and that “Once these initiatives were started, many have proven to be sustainable in purely financial terms.”

As Robert Gordon pointed out in the American Prospect, the CRA has been gutted under the Bush administration, and many of the lenders that dished out bad loans fell outside the regulatory scope of the CRA (which makes a case in favor of regulation, rather than against it).

“CRA didn't bring about the reckless lending at the heart of the crisis. Just as sub-prime lending was exploding, CRA was losing force and relevance. And the worst offenders, the independent mortgage companies, were never subject to CRA -- or any federal regulator. Law didn't make them lend. The profit motive did."

Some of the most vocal criticisms of exploitative lending have come from advocacy and service-provider organizations that champion the CRA. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition, for instance, has lambasted discriminatory lending patterns and pushed for tighter regulations long before the current chaos erupted.

Yet despite the CRA's accomplishments, the devastation of low-income families and communities of color in the mortgage crisis reveals the stubbornness of entrenched inequities. Here on Long Island, for example, low- and moderate-income blacks were hit with high-cost loans about twice the rate of their white counterparts.

If the public is getting saddled with a bill for $700 billion worth of someone else's bad decisions, people are understandably hunting for targets to blame. But in contrast to the blind profit motives that plunged Wall Street into a hole, the 30-year history of the Community Reinvestment Act shows it has managed to keep many of the neighborhoods already at the bottom from falling further.

McCain Has All The Answers To Bailout

It's Judgment Day for McCain By THOMAS FRANK
Last week, Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for a commission to "find out what went wrong" on Wall Street. It was an excellent suggestion: Public inquiries into Wall Street practices served the country well in the 1930s.


And Mr. McCain has a special advantage to bring to any such investigation -- many of the relevant witnesses are friends or colleagues of his. In fact, he can probably get to the bottom of the whole mess just by cross-examining the people riding on his campaign bus. So the candidate should take a deep breath, remind himself that the country comes first, pull the Straight Talk Express over at a rest stop, whistle up his media pals, and begin.

Topic A should be deregulation. Financial institutions are dropping everywhere after playing with poorly regulated financial instruments; the last investment banks standing are begging the government for stricter oversight; and some of our nation's leading champions of laissez faire have ditched that theory in an extraordinary attempt to rescue the collapsing industry.

The philosophy of government that has dominated Washington for almost three decades is now in ruins, and it is up to Mr. McCain to find out exactly why we believed it in the first place. Why did government stand back and permit all the misconduct that generated all this bad debt? What particular ideas led us to believe that government should just keep its hands off and let markets run their course?

Maybe the McCain Commission on Deregulation can kick off with a statement from the candidate himself. It will be helpful for the public, if painful for the senator himself, to hear about Mr. McCain's own close brush with one of the towering figures of financial deregulation, Charles Keating, the master of Lincoln Savings and Loan. Keating had a special, urgent interest in getting Big Brother off our backs: in 1986 some meddlesome agency suspected him of massive violations of S&L regulations. Keating fought back by recruiting a handful of legislators, including Mr. McCain, to pressure S&L regulators to leave his S&L alone. A few years later, Lincoln became one of the largest financial failures in U.S. history.

After that, Mr. McCain can get on to witness No. 1: Phil Gramm, a former adviser to the candidate on economic issues and for many years the heavyweight champion of financial deregulation. It was this very fellow who, as a senator, co-authored the Financial Services Modernization Act, largely trashing the old financial regulatory structure and allowed banks, insurance companies and investment houses to merge into what Mr. Gramm called "a supermarket for financial services" -- supermarkets whose lousy decisions are now the wonder of the world and whose losses we will be underwriting for years to come.

The public will be intrigued to hear that Mr. Gramm, who eventually became an executive at UBS, a bank known for its subprime profligacy, also regarded uncompensated environmental regulation as "nothing less than robbery." They will want to know if he would now apply the same term to the activities of the industry on whose behalf he has labored for so many years.

If Mr. Gramm's wife Wendy happens to be on the bus, Mr. McCain might want to sort out some of the controversies that have followed her own career as a deregulator.

McCain's Economic Plan Blurt Out Random Crap

McCain's Economic Plan Blurt Out Random Crap
There are several reasons why Senator Obama is enjoying a double-digit lead in the "honest and trustworthy" category (47 percent to 36 percent according the new ABC News/Washington Post poll). First, Senator Obama doesn't, you know, lie to the American people every damn day. Second, Senator Obama didn't vote with the dishonest, corrupt Bush administration 90 percent of the time.

But one of the main reasons why the nation appears to be lining up against Senator McCain's insanely obvious lack of integrity could be because his very serious and mavericky campaign strategy can be described in four simple words:

Blurt Out Random Crap.

"Crap," in this context, is defined as everything from lies to weasel-words to inexplicably weird nonsense. And it seems like Senator McCain does this a lot. So much so that we can only conclude that it's intentional.

The goal: Get McCain on record saying something no matter how ridiculous. This way, he can hit the stump later and boast that he said something with regards to scary stuff in the news. I said something [that didn't make any sense and was probably a lie] and Senator Obama didn't say anything [also a lie]! My friends! And whenever he's accused of routinely blurting out random crap, Senator McCain trucks out the old punishment theorem: If Senator Obama had only agreed to the town halls, I wouldn't be selling-out the last shreds of my honor or integrity just to get elected. Can't you see? Senator Obama turned me into a hack, dammit!

First thing that pops into his head. Is it truthful? Doesn't matter. Sex education for kindergarteners, for instance. "Palin sold her jet on eBay," for instance. Does it even make sense or is it just a bunch of words strung together to form a sentence? Who cares. "President Putin of Germany," for instance. "Delivering bottled hot water to dehydrated babies," for instance.

I'll admit that the latter category is more fun to document. However, the lying is especially infuriating -- and maybe that's the idea -- piss off the liberals. But it can't be helping with independents and undecideds who are discovering quite rapidly that the mythology of "John McCain" doesn't match the real-life John McCain. The Real McCain is rapidly coming into focus for those in the middle. McRage. McLiar. McPanderer. McIncompetent. McBush. And the Obama campaign only needs to tweak these frames. After all, the McCain campaign is doing all of the heavy lifting by itself.

The Witch Hunter Anoints Sarah Palin

The Witch Hunter Anoints Sarah Palin

On September 20 and 21, I attended services at the church Sarah Palin belonged to since she was an adolescent, the Wasilla Assembly of God. Though Palin officially left the church in 2002, she is listed on its website as "a friend," and spoke there as recently as June 8 of this year.

I went specifically to see a pastor visiting from Kiambu, Kenya named Thomas Muthee. Muthee gained fame within Pentecostal circles by claiming that he defeated a local witch, Mama Jane, in a great spiritual battle, thus liberating his town from sin and opening its people to the spirit of Jesus.

Muthee's mounting stardom took him to Wasilla Assembly of God in May, 2005, where he prayed over Palin and called upon Jesus to propel her into the governor's mansion -- and beyond. Muthee also implored Jesus to protect Palin from "the spirit of witchcraft." The video archive of that startling sermon was scrubbed from Wasilla Assembly of God's website, but now it has reappeared.

The Youtube version is below (Palin appears after about 7:30) video at link

McCain Loses His Head

McCain Loses His Head

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency.

Blaming Democrats for the Sub-Prime Crisis

Blaming Democrats for the Sub-Prime Crisis by Robert Gordon
The idea started on the outer precincts of the right. Thomas DiLorenzo, an economist who calls Ron Paul "the Jefferson of our time," wrote in September that the housing crisis is "the direct result of thirty years of government policy that has forced banks to make bad loans to un-creditworthy borrowers." The policy DiLorenzo decries is the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend throughout the communities they serve.

The Blame-CRA theme bounced around the right-wing Freerepublic.com. In January it figured in a Washington Times column. In February, a Cato Institute affiliate named Stan Liebowitz picked up the critique in a New York Post op-ed headlined "The Real Scandal: How the Feds Invented the Mortgage Mess." On The National Review's blog, The Corner, John Derbyshire channeled Liebowitz: "The folk losing their homes? are victims not of 'predatory lenders,' but of government-sponsored -- in fact government-mandated -- political correctness."

Last week, a more careful expression of the idea hit The Washington Post, in an article on former Sen. Phil Gramm's influence over John McCain. While two progressive economists were quoted criticizing Gramm's insistent opposition to government regulation, the Brookings Institution's Robert Litan offered an opposing perspective. Litan suggested that the 1990s enhancement of CRA, which was achieved over Gramm's fierce opposition, may have contributed to the current crisis. "If the CRA had not been so aggressively pushed," Litan said, "it is conceivable things would not be quite as bad. People have to be honest about that."

This is classic rhetoric of conservative reaction. (For fans of welfare policy, it is Charles Murray meets the mortgage mess.) Most analysts see the sub-prime crisis as a market failure. Believing the bubble would never pop, lenders approved risky adjustable-rate mortgages, often without considering whether borrowers could afford them; families took on those loans; investors bought them in securitized form; and, all the while, regulators sat on their hands.

The revisionists say the problem wasn't too little regulation; but too much, via CRA. The law was enacted in response to both intentional redlining and structural barriers to credit for low-income communities. CRA applies only to banks and thrifts that are federally insured; it's conceived as a quid pro quo for that privilege, among others. This means the law doesn't apply to independent mortgage companies (or payday lenders, check-cashers, etc.)

The law imposes on the covered depositories an affirmative duty to lend throughout the areas from which they take deposits, including poor neighborhoods. The law has teeth because regulators' ratings of banks' CRA performance become public and inform important decisions, notably merger approvals. Studies by the Federal Reserve and Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, among others, have shown that CRA increased lending and homeownership in poor communities without undermining banks' profitability.

But CRA has always had critics, and they now suggest that the law went too far in encouraging banks to lend in struggling communities. Rhetoric aside, the argument turns on a simple question: In the current mortgage meltdown, did lenders approve bad loans to comply with CRA, or to make money?

The evidence strongly suggests the latter. First, consider timing. CRA was enacted in 1977. The sub-prime lending at the heart of the current crisis exploded a full quarter century later. In the mid-1990s, new CRA regulations and a wave of mergers led to a flurry of CRA activity, but, as noted by the New America Foundation's Ellen Seidman (and by Harvard's Joint Center), that activity "largely came to an end by 2001." In late 2004, the Bush administration announced plans to sharply weaken CRA regulations, pulling small and mid-sized banks out from under the law's toughest standards. Yet sub-prime lending continued, and even intensified -- at the very time when activity under CRA had slowed and the law had weakened.

Second, it is hard to blame CRA for the mortgage meltdown when CRA doesn't even apply to most of the loans that are behind it. As the University of Michigan's Michael Barr points out, half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA. A further 25 to 30 percent came from bank subsidiaries and affiliates, which come under CRA to varying degrees but not as fully as banks themselves. (With affiliates, banks can choose whether to count the loans.) Perhaps one in four sub-prime loans were made by the institutions fully governed by CRA.

Most important, the lenders subject to CRA have engaged in less, not more, of the most dangerous lending. Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, offers the killer statistic: Independent mortgage companies, which are not covered by CRA, made high-priced loans at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts. With this in mind, Yellen specifically rejects the "tendency to conflate the current problems in the sub-prime market with CRA-motivated lending.? CRA, Yellen says, "has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households."

Yellen is hardly alone in concluding that the real problems came from the institutions beyond the reach of CRA. One of the only regulators who long ago saw the current crisis coming was the late Ned Gramlich, a former Fed governor. While Alan Greenspan was cheering the sub-prime boom, Gramlich warned of its risks and unsuccessfully pushed for greater supervision of bank affiliates. But Gramlich praised CRA, saying last year, "banks have made many low- and moderate-income mortgages to fulfill their CRA obligations, they have found default rates pleasantly low, and they generally charge low mortgages rates. Thirty years later, CRA has become very good business."

It's telling that, amid all the recent recriminations, even lenders have not fingered CRA. That's because CRA didn't bring about the reckless lending at the heart of the crisis. Just as sub-prime lending was exploding, CRA was losing force and relevance. And the worst offenders, the independent mortgage companies, were never subject to CRA -- or any federal regulator. Law didn't make them lend. The profit motive did.

Republican Eliminationism and Obama

The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama

In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process.

A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.

More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent — say they aren’t sure about his religion because they’ve heard “different things” about it.

When I’ve traveled around the country, particularly to my childhood home in rural Oregon, I’ve been struck by the number of people who ask something like: That Obama — is he really a Christian? Isn’t he a Muslim or something? Didn’t he take his oath of office on the Koran?

In conservative Christian circles and on Christian radio stations, there are even widespread theories that Mr. Obama just may be the Antichrist. Seriously.

John Green, of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, says that about 10 percent of Americans believe we may be in the Book of Revelation’s “end times” and are on the lookout for the Antichrist. A constant barrage of e-mail and broadcasts suggest that Mr. Obama just may be it.

The online Red State Shop sells T-shirts, mugs and stickers exploiting the idea. Some shirts and stickers portray a large “O” with horns, above a caption: “The Anti-Christ.”

[ ]...In fact, of course, Mr. Obama took his oath on the Bible, not — as the rumors have it — on the Koran. He is far more active in church than John McCain is.

(Just imagine for a moment if it were the black candidate in this election, rather than the white candidate, who was born in Central America, was an indifferent churchgoer, had graduated near the bottom of his university class, had dumped his first wife, had regularly displayed an explosive and profane temper, and had referred to the Pakistani-Iraqi border ...)

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

McCain Army of Lobbyists So Much For McReform

Is McCain More the Populist than Obama?

Forget for a moment all of McCain's connections to the current crisis. (He seems to do so easily enough.) Forget that his pal and adviser Phil Gramm helped create this mess. That his top advisers and campaign staffers lobbied for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And that over 80 lobbyists for top financial industry firms--including AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Washington Mutual--have worked for McCain's campaign. McCain is showing anger, vowing to knock heads together (on Wall Street and Washington), and, by the way, tying Obama to the mess. McCain is no William Jennings Bryan. But for a Republican, he's coming on like a populist gangbuster. Given his track record as a deregulator, this is faux populism. But that doesn't mean it can't work politically.

McCain attacks on Obama for purported ties to Freddie and Fannie, but not McCain aides' lobbying on their behalf

McCain attacks on Obama for purported ties to Freddie and Fannie, but not McCain aides' lobbying on their behalf

In articles about the presidential candidates' responses to the economic crisis, the Associated Press, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post reported that the McCain campaign criticized Sen. Barack Obama for, in the words of McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, "his ties to spiraling lenders like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and their jet-set CEOs." But those articles did not note that several senior McCain campaign aides have served as lobbyists for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or both. As Mother Jones reported on its MoJoBlog, the following McCain campaign officials have lobbied for one or both entities: chief political adviser Charlie Black, national finance co-chairman Wayne Berman, congressional liaison John Green, Arthur Culvahouse, who reportedly headed McCain's vice-presidential search team, and William E. Timmons Sr., who reportedly "has been tapped by the McCain campaign to conduct a study in preparation for the presidential transition."

According to a Media Matters for America search of the Senate Office of Public Records' Lobbying Disclosure Act Database, Black lobbied for Freddie Mac from 1999 to 2004; Berman for Fannie Mae from 2004 to 2008 and for Freddie Mac in 2004; Green for Fannie Mae from 2004 to 2007 and for Freddie Mac in 2003; Culvahouse for Fannie Mae in 1999, 2003, and 2004; and Timmons for Freddie Mac from 2000 to 2008.

None of the four articles noted McCain aides' ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, despite quoting McCain's criticism of Obama. The AP reported Bounds' claim that "[w]hen Barack Obama came to Washington, he chose to strengthen his ties to spiraling lenders like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and their jet-set CEOs, not make change." The Chronicle and the Post each reported all or part of McCain's statement that Obama "didn't lift a finger to avert this crisis. While the leaders of Fannie and Freddie were lining the pockets of his campaign, they were sowing the seeds of a financial crisis we see today, and they also enriched themselves with millions of dollars in payments. That's not change, that's what's broken in Washington, my friends." Additionally, both the Chronicle and the Post reported McCain's accusation that former Fannie Mae executive Franklin D. Raines served as an adviser to the Obama campaign, although the Post reported that the Obama campaign issued a statement from Raines that "strongly denied having provided counsel to Obama." The Journal Sentinel reported that McCain "said Obama was a major recipient of campaign contributions from officials with the two entities."

Early Signs Of Sarah Palin's Radical Agenda?

Early Signs Of Sarah Palin's Radical Agenda?

Here is a biographical and personality insight one would only turn up through a more careful examination of political pictures.

Last week, the NYT published a widely-read story about the way Sarah Palin treated her friends and foes as the Wasilla mayor. The photo leading the article, supplied by the Heath family, shows Palin flanked by the council in 1998, two years into her mayoral tenure. If you scroll down, however, the article offers a second photo, also supplied by the family, of Palin when she was still a Wasilla councilwoman. (Although undated, she was a city council member from '92 - '96.) The photo is one of those easy-to-pass-by, standard sitting-at-your-desk shots in front of your name plate.

The picture, however, is also one of those published by The Times you are invited to click to enlarge.

Doing so, what you can suddenly make out quite clearly is what Palin chose to be photographed attending to, which is a newsletter with a photo of a guy in a suit, the page headlined with the title: "Con-Con Call." A "con-con" call, if (like me) you're not versed in government-speak, is a call for a constitutional convention, intended to either revise or completely rewrite the constitution of a state or the federal government.

The point is, and what the photo telegraphs is that, even at this early stage of her local career, Palin is revealing herself as an activist officeholder with not just ambitious, but much larger and radical notions.

Update: 8:55 pm PST -- Thanks to a BNN reader for identifying the article by Don Fotheringham ("Saving the Constitution: unbeknownst to most people, ten years ago the United States nearly had its Constitution rewritten under the guise of bringing the federal government to heel") published in the September 19, 2005 issue of American Opinion Magazine. American Opinion was the official publication of the John Birch Society.

The article outlines the effort by the Birch Society to oppose constitutional conventions where, as Fotheringham writes, "demagogues, internationalists, and think-tank reformers could get their hands on it." Totheringham explains how this and previous articles on the subject had been published or copied and distributed widely by the Birch Society to state government officials across the country to expose - full story at link

Todd Palin has exerted unusual influence on his wife's Alaska government

Todd Palin has exerted unusual influence on his wife's Alaska government

Soon, Todd Palin was getting copied on e-mails dealing with official state business. He had already helped write the state budget, gotten involved in personnel matters and called up lawmakers when he -- or Sarah Palin -- had a bone to pick with them. Apparently Palin's inner circle figured they better include him on messages about pending legislation or ongoing controversies, too. The First Dude's involvement in Palin's efforts to get her ex-brother-in-law fired from the state police force have now earned him a subpoena from the Legislature, and he also allegedly intervened to have John Bitney (a former friend) fired from the state payroll for having an affair with the ex-wife of one of Todd Palin's buddies. The Washington Post reported last week that the Palins billed the state $1,371 for Todd's airfare to Washington, when he joined Sarah Palin at a National Governors Association conference, and for the whole family to fly around Alaska watching him compete in the Iron Dog snowmobile race.

In the Palin administration, Todd appears to have had an unusually strong role, the extent of which remains unclear. He is not on the state payroll and was never elected -- but the First Dude has crossed over from the standard-issue supportive political spouse to something far more influential, weighing in on policy and political matters in ways that few observers seem to understand. His apparent influence in his wife's administration -- some in Alaska have referred to him as the "shadow governor" -- has raised questions about whether a Sarah Palin vice-presidency would hand the same type of backstage power to Todd, and what that might mean in the running of the U.S. government.

McCain, Social Security and Wall Street

If McCain Had His Way, That'd Be Our Social Security Money Wall St. is Losing

Today Obama said it proves that the Republican economic philosophy has failed, and I heard him mock McCain for calling for a commission because "we know how we got into this mess." Now some people think about things like "economic philosophy" a lot, and many have at least a general notion of how we got into this mess. But even though everybody cares about how much money ends up in their pockets, most people are understandably a little fuzzy about the policies and philosophies and market forces behind our very complex economy. And to further confuse the issue, McCain is also saying something about reform, and taking on "fat cats," and accusing Obama of being just as cozy with these Wall Streeters as anyone else. The upshot so far is that slightly more voters trust John McCain to handle the economy than trust Barack Obama.

As it happens, though, not that long ago we had a rare political moment in this country, a moment where the public sat up and took notice of economic policy -- and spoke out and made its voice heard too. When George W. Bush made it to term #2, he decided to try to privatize social security to reward his supporters on Wall Street with a new source of capital, customers, and fees. (Those would be the same people whose firms are now cratering under the weight of the bad debt they recklessly took on while Republican regulators looked the other way). But as it turned out, we Americans were not about to let our elected representatives turn over our social security taxes to Wall Street financiers to gamble with if it meant losing the guaranteed income that has allowed millions upon millions of American seniors to live out their sunset years with at least a basic measure of dignity.

But while ordinary Americans spoke out, John McCain stood with Bush (hugged him awkwardly in public, even), against the American people. In fact, just six months ago, McCain again let slip his fondness for privatization.

I have been scratching my head why this has not been talked about more, especially since Obama has been having trouble winning votes among seniors. There may well be some good reason I'm missing why it hasn't been a top argument thus far.

But now that you can't look at a newspaper or TV screen without seeing the mayhem on Wall St, it's time to remind Americans what the world would look like if John McCain was in charge of our economic policy. Plenty of people are losing plenty of their retirement savings as it is. But if we had let Bush and McCain privatize social security, some of those people would be losing a lot more. And a lot of other people with less retirement savings would be hurting even more, because they depend on social security to cover basic needs.

This is something Americans understand: social security is secure, and the stock market is anything but. There are few more personal or dramatic ways to illustrate McCain's terrible judgment than to imagine the nightmare scenario so many Americans would face if McCain and Bush had gotten their way on this -- or if McCain were to get his way as President.

Palin Not Ready

Not Ready

With most candidates for high public office, the question is whether one agrees with them on the major issues of the day. With Ms. Palin, it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing. She doesn’t appear to understand some of the most important issues.

“Do you believe in the Bush doctrine?” Mr. Gibson asked during the interview. Ms. Palin looked like an unprepared student who wanted nothing so much as to escape this encounter with the school principal.

Clueless, she asked, “In what respect, Charlie?”

“Well, what do you interpret it to be?” said Mr. Gibson.

“His worldview?” asked Ms. Palin.

Later, in the spin zones of cable TV, commentators repeatedly made the point that there are probably very few voters — some specifically mentioned “hockey moms” — who could explain the Bush doctrine. But that’s exactly the reason we have such long and intense campaigns. You want to find the individuals who best understand these issues, who will address them in sophisticated and creative ways that enhance the well-being of the nation.

McCain and Palin Are Trying to Take Political Lying to the Next Dimension

McCain and Palin Are Trying to Take Political Lying to the Next Dimension

Despite all the chatter about how "historic" Campaign 2008 has been, it is the McCain-Palin ticket that it is truly testing the limits, not of race or gender politics, but whether the United States is ready to enter into a new dimension of political lying.

Until two weeks ago, it would have been hard to believe that any political figure would have had the audacity to step into the national spotlight by telling the bald-faced lies that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has. Yet, many Americans have embraced her enthusiastically and don't want to hear anything negative about her.

Palin's most obvious lie is one that she has repeated over and over: "I told Congress, 'thanks but no thanks' about that Bridge to Nowhere." Now, however, anyone who has bothered to fact-check this claim knows that Palin supported the bridge until Congress removed the earmark and then she kept the money to use on other state projects.

Palin also presents herself as a "reformer" who can't stand earmarks or the lobbyists who arrange such wasteful pork-barrel spending -- except that she hired Alaska's top Washington lobbyists to secure millions of dollars in earmarks for her town, Wasilla, and for her state, including sending off a wish list of nearly $200 million just this year.

With the help of the lobbying firm and her annual treks to Washington, Palin secured a stunning $27 million in earmarked funds for Wasilla, a town then with about 6,000 residents. Some of Palin's projects were considered such prime examples of Washington pork that they were cited in anti-earmark reports compiled by none other than Sen. John McCain earlier this decade.

When ABC's news anchor Charles Gibson asked Palin about her past support of earmarks and her backing for the Bridge to Nowhere, Palin simply refused to acknowledge that she had made misleading or false claims about herself.

"It has always been an embarrassment that abuses of the ear form -- earmark process has been accepted in Congress," Palin said. "And that's what John McCain has fought. And that's what I joined him in fighting."

But Palin is not alone in simply denying reality. Her partner, John McCain, has shown his own ability to not blush while lying.

On the ABC-TV show "The View," McCain was confronted with Palin's contradictory record of arranging earmarks while selling herself as a reformer. McCain simply ignored the facts and declared, "not as governor she didn't."

McCain's Lies

But McCain now has his own long trail of stunning lies, both about his opponent Barack Obama and McCain's dubious reputation for clean politics. After presiding over a convention notable for its partisan rancor -- including endless mocking of Obama as a "community organizer" -- McCain said his presidency would be about eliminating "partisan rancor."

Earlier in the campaign, McCain approved ads accusing Obama of everything from causing $4 a gallon gasoline (a silly charge) to stiffing wounded U.S. troops in Germany by canceling a visit because he couldn't bring along cameras (a false accusation).

More recently, McCain and his team have blamed Obama for passing a law that would require sex education for kindergarteners and for calling Palin a "pig" when the Democratic nominee criticized McCain's economic package by saying it was like "putting lipstick on a pig."

Though McCain himself had applied the common expression to Hillary Clinton's health-care plan, Obama's use of the image was ripped from its context and twisted into a "sexist" attack on Palin.

As for the kindergarten sex-education ad, the McCain campaign had contorted Obama's support for a program that would teach young school children how to avoid sexual predators into providing them "comprehensive sex education."

Assessing the Republican Party Platform

Assessing the Republican Party Platform by Stephen Zunes

While the foreign policy segments of the Democratic Party platform as outlined in my most recent article is disappointing in many respects, the Republican Party platform is downright scary.

Among the more frightening aspects of the platform is its unconstitutional assertion that the president has sole prerogative to make decisions on matters of war, rejecting any role for Congressional "interference" in foreign policy matters. This appears to be a pre-emptive assertion by the Republican Party that, in the event of a John McCain win in November, they would reject any attempt by the likely Democratic-controlled Congress to impose any checks and balances to prevent a possible war on Iran or other dangerous executive initiatives.

The Republican platform calls for the development and deployment of both national and theater missile-defense systems. These incredibly expensive weapons systems, which are unlikely to work in any case, violate arms-control agreements signed and ratified under the Nixon administration.
Also disturbing is the platform's classification of immigration as a national security issue, which has serious ramifications in terms of the nature of legislation and enforcement. It also claims that warrantless wiretapping of American citizens is "vital" to America's national security.

And, despite the Clinton administration's increases in the already bloated military budget after the end of the Cold War, the Republican platform insists that "national defense was neglected and under-funded by the Clinton Administration." The platform then calls for a significant increase in the size of the American armed forces, even though the United States - at barely 4% of the world's population - already accounts for over one-half of the world's military spending.

The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
The Republican platform calls for nothing less than an outright "military victory" in Iraq, something which has alluded the United States for over five years despite its overwhelming military might. As the Bush administration has claimed every year since the 2003 U.S. invasion, "A stable, unified, and democratic Iraqi nation is within reach." Yet, despite the relative lull in violence in recent months, such a scenario appears to be as far from reality as ever. The platform rejects any timetables for a U.S. withdrawal. Despite the ruling Iraqi coalition's domination by sectarian fundamentalist Shia parties and their militias, the platform argues that continuing to sacrifice American lives and dollars to keep that regime in power would somehow "give us a strategic ally in the struggle against extremism."

Using language remarkable similar to that of the Nixon administration in its defense of policies that needlessly and tragically prolonged the war in Vietnam, the platform insists that "To those who have sacrificed so much, we owe the commitment that American forces will leave that country in victory and with honor."

The Republican platform claims that a military victory in Iraq in necessary in order to "deny al-Qaeda a safe haven" and "limit Iranian influence in the Middle East." But al-Qaeda had no safe haven in Iraq and Iran had virtually no influence in Iraq until the Republican administration invaded Iraq and overthrew its government, which had until then successfully suppressed both pro-Iranian elements as well radical Sunnis who could potentially align with al-Qaeda.

McCain Campaign Officials Lobbied For Companies At Center of Sex-For-Oil Scandal

McCain Campaign Officials Lobbied For Companies At Center of Sex-For-Oil Scandal

Here's something that could complicate the McCain-Palin reform message a bit: It turns out that McCain's national finance co-chair, Wayne Berman, is a paid lobbyist, and has been one for years, for two of the oil companies that are at the center of the sex, drugs and oil scandal enveloping the Interior Department.

One of McCain's high-ranking campaign officials also lobbied for the companies for years -- during time periods when the scandal has unfolded -- up until he joined the McCain campaign in the spring.

The lobbyists themselves aren't tied to the scandal in any way, and their activity on the companies' behalf doesn't implicate McCain, either. But it's legit to ask why it is that a campaign that proclaims that it's about reform is taking advice and/or money from lobbyists who were getting paid by companies involved in the scandal, one of whom is still collecting money from them.

Berman, who's McCain's national finance co-chair and one of the Arizona Senator's leading bundlers, is a lobbyist with Ogilvy Government Relations, which has been paid millions of dollars for lobbying by the Chevron and Hess corporations, according to disclosure forms. The second official, John Green, who is McCain's chief liaison to Congress, also was with Ogilvy and worked on those same contracts until joining the campaign.

Chevron and Hess are involved in what is arguably the most sordid scandal in Washington right now.

The short version is as follows: Employees at a number of leading energy companies allegedly gave improper gifts -- including sports tickets, ski trips, illegal drugs and even sexual relations -- to federal officials in charge of a program that oversees a program by which the companies can pay for use of public lands with free energy instead of cash, saving them money.

Palin And The Bush Doctrine

Palin And The Bush Doctrine

I watched the first clip of Sarah Palin's interview with Charlie Gibson, and to me, the most striking part was her complete inability to answer the question: "Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?" Here's what she said:

"Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?"

"In what respect, Charlie?"

"The Bush -- well, what do you interpret it to be?"

"His world view?"

"No, the Bush Doctrine, enunciated in September 2002, before the Iraq war."

"I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell-bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership -- and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better."

"The Bush Doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense; that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?"

The transcript doesn't really do it justice; the video is here, and it makes it pretty clear that she has no idea what the Bush Doctrine actually is. It also makes it clear that she is very quick on her feet -- she almost succeeds in getting Gibson to tell her.

Personally, I would have loved to see a good follow-up question. For instance: do you know in what respect the Bush Doctrine departed from previous policy? -- This one would have gotten away from the mere gotcha of whether she knows what the name "Bush Doctrine" refers to, and onto a much more substantive question. Likewise: how would you argue in favor of the Bush Doctrine to other countries who point out that when we invaded Iraq, the intelligence that we said showed that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to us turned out to be wrong? Or: do you think that other countries have the same right of preemptive self-defense that we have? If so, would you support the right of Russia to invade Georgia, or Pakistan and India to invade one another?

This matters not because I think a whole lot turns on whether or not someone can correctly identify the Bush Doctrine, in particular, but because it is not a hard question to anyone who has been following foreign policy for the last few years. I want someone who might end up being President to have a reservoir of background knowledge to draw on in times of crisis. And Sarah Palin just doesn't have one.

Con Artists Are Nice Just Like Sarah Palin

Unfit to Lead

TODAY, on the anniversary of the horror of Sept. 11, 2001, we should recall what happens when an unqualified candidate captures the presidency. An incurious western governor, George W. Bush, arrived in Washington unprepared for the job. And it showed every day of his presidency.

John McCain's health could kill us. It's conceivable that a 72-year-old hot head who has had four bouts of cancer might not make it through his first term as president, leaving the country in the hands of a person whom McCain (a former POW) met one time. One time! I've spent more time shopping for a car than he spent choosing a potential president. Yet Sarah Palin could be one heart attack, one stroke, one metastasized melanoma away from becoming president of the United States.

Sarah Palin is Clarence Thomas, completely unqualified but cynically chosen for being a member of a demographic group that usually votes Democratic. No wonder so many women are insulted by the choice.

Will Hillary voters buy Palin's extreme antiabortion stance that allows no exceptions, not even for incest or rape; her belief in "market- and business-driven healthcare"; her support for teaching creationism in public schools; her rejection of global warming as man-made?

Stopping the Russians. In a goofy attempt to give Palin foreign policy credentials, McCain (an ex-POW) said Alaska is near Russia. Come to think of it, there haven't been any Russian invasions since she's been governor.

The day she was picked, she called herself "commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard." This is so preposterous even Mitt Romney didn't try it. The head of the Alaska Guard told the Associated Press that he and Palin play no role in national defense.

God is in the pipeline! Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States invaded Iraq as a "task that is from God." While she was there, she urged them to pray for a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in the state, calling it "God's will."

Palin's pipeline to pork. McCain (an ex-POW) has for years attacked the practice of earmarking, where powerful members of Congress deliver federal funds for pet projects back home. McCain even published "pork lists." The Los Angeles Times found that three times in recent years McCain's pork lists contained earmarks for Wasilla, Alaska. Its mayor, Palin, had hired the town's first lobbyist, who steered almost $27 million in federal earmarks to a place with 6,700 residents. This year, as governor, her pork list fattened up to $197.8 million.

Abramoff connection. The lobbyist our "reform" mayor hired was tied to disgraced lobbyist and convicted felon Jack Abramoff. The Washington Post reports that Steven Silver - a former chief of staff to now-indicted Alaska GOP Senator Ted Stevens - was hand-picked by Palin at a time when Silver included as a client the Abramoff lobbying firm.

Troopergate, the iceberg cometh. Dead ahead, Palin is facing a report from a special prosecutor chosen unanimously by the Alaska Legislature. The prosecutor is looking into charges that she fired the State Police chief in July because he failed to remove a trooper who had been married to Palin's sister. The brother-in-law went through a messy divorce with child-custody issues.

A month after she took office, Palin's husband met with the chief to complain about the trooper. The chief has saved e-mails from Palin where she demanded the dismissal. In one angry e-mail that's surfaced, she actually curses (!) over the lack of action.

The press helps McCain whitewash Bush

The press helps McCain whitewash Bush

CNN.com announced last week that among McCain's top political priorities for the Republican convention was his "need to make it clear that his first term will not be Bush's third term."

In fact, it was probably the worst kept secret in St. Paul: McCain had to completely cut ties with the wildly unpopular Republican incumbent and his record of failure. Republicans in St. Paul sure did their best whitewashing Bush: For the entire convention, Bush's name was only mentioned six times from the podium, according to a running count kept by a Los Angeles Times blog.

But how to erase Bush completely? Sitting presidents traditionally enjoy high-profile send-offs at conventions. When Ronald Reagan bid farewell to the GOP faithful at the party's 1988 convention in New Orleans, he addressed party activists at length the day before the convention began, he was fêted with an 18-minute video tribute inside the Superdome the next night, and then delivered the evening's keynote address.

Republicans in St. Paul seemed to catch a political break when, thanks to the threat of Hurricane Gustav, they were able to ease Bush out of the spotlight when Bush announced he had to monitor the storm and could not attend the convention. But then Bush turned around and, according to one report, demanded some convention face time (via satellite, as it turned out), creating a potential PR mess for Republicans.

Fast forward to McCain's convention speech Thursday night and immediately upon its conclusion, MSNBC's Chris Matthews reiterated that if McCain had a chance at winning the White House, he had to separate himself from the unpopular GOP incumbent, and that with his Thursday night address, McCain had "effectively" done so.

"It is dramatic and may well be the one brilliant move that could win him the election," Matthews announced, toasting McCain as some sort of Harry Houdini.

But if McCain did pull off the great escape, it was only thanks to the press and the way eager journalists pitched in to erase Bush from the political picture.

And here's why: The press is just as anxious as McCain to have Bush go away. The press is just as anxious as McCain to forget about the failures of the last eight years. Why? Because the press, like McCain, is partly to blame for Bush's White House misadventure.

And that's why Bush was a non-story in St. Paul and remains a non-story in the unfolding campaign. Forget about the 15,000 journalists who were camped out at the Xcel Energy Center and supposedly desperate for even the hint of internal struggles and political squabbling in order to create news at the tightly scripted event. Forget about the press glomming on to the Bush-McCain story the way journalists did in Denver the week before when they displayed an insatiable appetite to speculate about and hype supposed conflicts over the speaker scheduling at the Democratic convention.

It's true that on the surface, two convention storylines appeared remarkably similar. "The Democrats had the awkwardness of the Clintons at their convention," the Associated Press noted. "Republicans now have their version of a precarious guest: President Bush."

But boy, the coverage sure wasn't the same. On the day Hillary Clinton addressed the convention in Denver, there were more than 1,200 mentions of "Clinton" on cable and network news, according to TVeyes.com. The following day, when Bill Clinton spoke, there were more than 1,500 mentions. By contrast, on the day that Bush addressed the GOP convention, TV news outlets made reference to him only 500 times.

Sarah Palin as Alaska National Guard commander

Sarah Palin as Alaska National Guard commander

WASHINGTON — Seeking to buttress the foreign policy credentials of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Republicans have repeatedly cited the vice presidential nominee's experience as commander of the Alaska National Guard.

As governor, Palin oversees military units whose duties include serving overseas, search-and-rescue missions across the state's vast landscape and manning key elements of the U.S. missile defense system at Ft. Greely.

But foreign deployments of Guard units and the operation of national defense assets like the Ft. Greely missile interceptors are not the responsibility of state governors. Those functions come under the regular U.S. military chain of command.

Commanding the Alaska National Guard is hardly an insignificant job, military officials say. Still, they acknowledge that it provides little, if any, foreign policy experience.

...Since governors have no role in overseeing Guard members federalized for service in Iraq, military experts said that should not count as foreign policy experience.

Palin the real scandal

Palin the real scandal

Governor Palin would also like to bring open-cast coal mining to Alaska's Brooks Range Mountains, an act of environmental vandalism in the eyes of many.

The Palin administration has allowed Chevron to triple the amount of toxic waste it pours into the waters of Cook Inlet. This, even though the number of beluga whales in the bay has collapsed from 1,300 to 350 – the point of extinction – because of pollution and increased ship traffic.

On the Republican convention floor she said: "We Americans need to produce more of our own oil and gas and take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: We've got lots of both."

The fact that drilling won't solve every problem "is no excuse to do nothing at all", she said, putting the country on notice that "starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we're going to lay more pipelines ... build more nuclear plants ... create jobs with clean coal ... and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative sources".

Mrs Palin also took a swipe at Barack Obama's environmental stance saying: "What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet?"

Her support in Alaska relies on squeezing more money for the state from the oil companies themselves. In Alaska, every man woman and child is in line for a bonus cheque of about $2,000 (£1,100) from the state's massive oil wealth fund. This is, in effect, a vote-buying machine for the would-be Vice-President.

Governor Palin wants nothing to hinder the oil companies. She maintains that polar bears are well managed and their population has dramatically increased over 30 years as a result of conservation. And if the ice should go away, then they will adapt to living on the land.

Many oil companies abandoned Alaska when prices fell in the 1980s but they have been rushing back to drill and prospect areas that are among the least hospitable on earth. That spirit of the Klondike is already in full swing in Prudhoe Bay the epicentre of oil production and one of the world's largest industrial complexes. It's so big that BP, UPS and FedEx operate a special fleet of jets from Anchorage just to service to the region.

Hundreds of spills involving tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil and other petroleum products occur in the area each year. Decades-old spills are still a problem and 17,000 acres of wildlife and marine habitat have already been destroyed.

But Prudhoe is just a tiny fraction of the area being targeted by Governor Palin and the oil companies. A similar fate of environmental destruction awaits the entire coastal plain as well as the special areas of the western Arctic – home to migratory caribou herds, musk oxen, wolverines, grizzly and polar bears should a McCain-Palin administration be elected.

The oil boom has attracted oilmen from across America. One of them is Todd Palin, husband to the vice-presidential candidate who works for BP on Alaska's North Slope.

It is illegal to hunt polar bears, and that is not about to change. But in an area known as "Polar Bear Seas", from Point Hope on Alaska's far western edge to the pristine coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, one tenth of the world's polar bear population is at risk, as well as beluga and bowheaded whales and bearded and spotted seals.

Big game hunters are happy to pay lots of money to shoot wolves and bears from the air. They also chase them across the snow to the point of exhaustion and then land the planes on skis, shooting them from point-blank range. The animals are considered endangered across the "lower 48" states of America, but not Alaska. The hunters keep and sell the animals' pelts.

Last year, Mrs Palin proposed offering a bounty of $150 per wolf, as long as the hunter provided the wolf's foreleg as proof of the kill. The measure did not pass. She even spent $400,000 on a state-funded campaign to block attempts to end the hunt.

Palin McCain 2008

Earmarks

John McCain has made earmarks a central theme of his campaign this election but it is just more of the same empty rhetoric.

Nevermind that he can't name any specific earmarks he would nix, and even admitted he wouldn't cut off aid to Israel, which is done through earmarks.

So when the McCain campaign introduced Sarah Palin to the ticket, it was no surprise that she attempted to portray herself as an ardent foe of earmarks. She continued to push the false claim last night, but too bad for her and the campaign that her record simply doesn't match the rhetoric.

Seattle Times: "Palin's earmark requests: more per person than any other state."

Just this year, she sent to Sen. Ted. Stevens, R-Alaska, a proposal for 31 earmarks totaling $197 million — more, per person, than any other state.

In fact, Palin supported the "Bridge to Nowhere" during her campaign for governor.

During her first speech after being named as McCain's surprise pick as a running mate, Palin said she had told Congress "'thanks but no thanks' on that bridge to nowhere."


In the city Ketchikan, the planned site of the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere," political leaders of both parties said the claim was false and a betrayal of their community, because she had supported the bridge and the earmark for it secured by Alaska's Congressional delegation during her run for governor.

The bridge, a span from the city to Gravina Island, home to only a few dozen people, secured a $223 million earmark in 2005. The pricey designation raised a furor and critics, including McCain, used the bridge as an example of wasteful federal spending on politicians' pet projects. [emphasis added]

Update: More pork! Palin also supported the "Road to Nowhere."

The "Road To Nowhere" is a $375 million "mega-project" designed to connect Juneau to the towns of Haines and Skagway via 50 miles of new road along the steep slopes of an avalanche-battered canal, ending at a ferry terminal at the Haines river.


As of 2005, Haines had a population of 2,400, while Skagway had 870 residents.

DNC Launches New Web Ad: ''90 Percent Bush''

"In a year when Americans want change, McCain is offering more of the same," said the DNC's Brad Woodhouse. "John McCain has voted with President Bush 90 percent of the time, and Americans can't afford more of the same failed Bush policies for another four years."