Palin, a petty and vindictive politician...

From the New Zork Times: (but remember, she's a 'man of God'. Does her 'god' have two horns? Is she the anti-Christ that we have read about?)

Palin hired friends and hit critics
Interviews indicate a governing style that uses loyalty and secrecy
By JO BECKER, PETER S. GOODMAN AND MICHAEL POWELL
The New York Times

WASILLA, Alaska - Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as one of her qualifications for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.

When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

Points to her management experience
Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.

But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.

Still, Ms. Palin has many supporters. As a two-term mayor she paved roads and built an ice rink, and as governor she has pushed through higher taxes on the oil companies that dominate one-third of the state’s economy. She stirs deep emotions. In Wasilla, many residents display unflagging affection, cheering “our Sarah” and hissing at her critics.

“She is bright and has unfailing political instincts,” said Steve Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska. “She taps very directly into anxieties about the economic future.”

“But,” he added, “her governing style raises a lot of hard questions.”

Declined interview for article
Ms. Palin declined to grant an interview for this article. The McCain-Palin campaign responded to some questions on her behalf and that of her husband, while referring others to the governor’s spokespeople, who did not respond.

Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell said Ms. Palin had conducted an accessible and effective administration in the public’s interest. “Everything she does is for the ordinary working people of Alaska,” Mr. Parnell said.

In Wasilla, a builder said he complained to Mayor Palin when the city attorney put a stop-work order on his housing project. She responded, he said, by engineering the attorney’s firing.

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears. (Ms. Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects, and she has sued the federal government to block the listing of the bears as endangered.) An administration official told Mr. Steiner that it would cost $468,784 to process his request.

When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show.

“Their secrecy is off the charts,” Mr. Steiner said.

State legislators are investigating accusations that Ms. Palin and her husband pressured officials to fire a state trooper who had gone through a messy divorce with her sister, charges that she denies. But interviews make clear that the Palins draw few distinctions between the personal and the political.

Last summer State Representative John Harris, the Republican speaker of the House, picked up his phone and heard Mr. Palin’s voice. The governor’s husband sounded edgy. He said he was unhappy that Mr. Harris had hired John Bitney as his chief of staff, the speaker recalled. Mr. Bitney was a high school classmate of the Palins and had worked for Ms. Palin. But she fired Mr. Bitney after learning that he had fallen in love with another longtime friend.

“I understood from the call that Todd wasn’t happy with me hiring John and he’d like to see him not there,” Mr. Harris said.

“The Palin family gets upset at personal issues,” he added. “And at our level, they want to strike back.”

Hometown mayor
Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Ms. Palin’s first run for mayor in 1996, recalled the night the two women chatted about her ambitions.

“I said, ‘You know, Sarah, within 10 years you could be governor,’ ” Ms. Chase recalled. “She replied, ‘I want to be president.’ ”

Ms. Palin grew up in Wasilla, an old fur trader’s outpost and now a fast-growing exurb of Anchorage. The town sits in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, edged by jagged mountains and birch forests. In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration took farmers from the Dust Bowl area and resettled them here; their Democratic allegiances defined the valley for half a century.

In the past three decades, socially conservative Oklahomans and Texans have flocked north to the oil fields of Alaska. They filled evangelical churches around Wasilla and revived the Republican Party. Many of these working-class residents formed the electoral backbone for Ms. Palin, who ran for mayor on a platform of gun rights, opposition to abortion and the ouster of the “complacent” old guard.

After winning the mayoral election in 1996, Ms. Palin presided over a city rapidly outgrowing itself. Septic tanks had begun to pollute lakes, and residential lots were carved willy-nilly out of the woods. She passed road and sewer bonds, cut property taxes but raised the sales tax.

And, her supporters say, she cleaned out the municipal closet, firing veteran officials to make way for her own team. “She had an agenda for change and for doing things differently,” said Judy Patrick, a City Council member at the time.

Careers turned upside down
But careers were turned upside down. The mayor quickly fired the town’s museum director, John Cooper. Later, she sent an aide to the museum to talk to the three remaining employees. “He told us they only wanted two,” recalled Esther West, one of the three, “and we had to pick who was going to be laid off.” The three quit as one.

Ms. Palin cited budget difficulties for the museum cuts. Mr. Cooper thought differently, saying the museum had become a microcosm of class and cultural conflicts in town. “It represented that the town was becoming more progressive, and they didn’t want that,” he said.

Days later, Mr. Cooper recalled, a vocal conservative, Steve Stoll, sidled up to him. Mr. Stoll had supported Ms. Palin and had a long-running feud with Mr. Cooper. “He said: ‘Gotcha, Cooper,’ ” Mr. Cooper said.

Mr. Stoll did not recall that conversation, although he said he supported Ms. Palin’s campaign and was pleased when she fired Mr. Cooper.

In 1997, Ms. Palin fired the longtime city attorney, Richard Deuser, after he issued the stop-work order on a home being built by Don Showers, another of her campaign supporters.

Your attorney, Mr. Showers told Ms. Palin, is costing me lots of money.

“She told me she’d like to see him fired,” Mr. Showers recalled. “But she couldn’t do it herself because the City Council hires the city attorney.” Ms. Palin told him to write the council members to complain.

Meanwhile, Ms. Palin pushed the issue from the inside. “She started the ball rolling,” said Ms. Patrick, who also favored the firing. Mr. Deuser was soon replaced by Ken Jacobus — then the State Republican Party’s general counsel.

“Professionals were either forced out or fired,” Mr. Deuser said.

Ms. Palin ordered city employees not to talk to the press. And she used city money to buy a white Suburban for the mayor’s use — employees sarcastically called it the mayor-mobile.

The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral.

“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.”

Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.

But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.

“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”

“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

Reform Crucible
Restless ambition defined Ms. Palin in the early years of this decade. She raised money for Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from the state; finished second in the 2002 Republican primary for lieutenant governor; and sought to fill the seat of Senator Frank H. Murkowski when he ran for governor.

Mr. Murkowski appointed his daughter to the seat, but as a consolation prize, he gave Ms. Palin the $125,000-a-year chairmanship of a state commission overseeing oil and gas drilling.

Ms. Palin discovered that the state Republican leader, Randy Ruedrich, a commission member, was conducting party business on state time and favoring regulated companies. When Mr. Murkowski failed to act on her complaints, she quit and went public.

The Republican establishment shunned her. But her break with the gentlemen’s club of oil producers and political power catapulted her into the public eye.

“She was honest and forthright,” said Jay Kerttula, a former Democratic state senator from Palmer.

Ms. Palin entered the 2006 primary for governor as a formidable candidate.

In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist in the state, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Ms. Palin had conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. Ms. Palin handled the crisis with a street fighter’s guile.

“I told her it looks like she did the same thing that Randy Ruedrich did,” Mr. Jenkins recalled. “And she said, ‘Yeah, what I did was wrong.’ ”

Mr. Jenkins hung up and decided to forgo writing about it. His phone rang soon after.

Mr. Jenkins said a reporter from Fairbanks, reading from a Palin news release, demanded to know why he was “smearing” her. “Now I look at her and think: ‘Man, you’re slick,’ ” he said.

Ms. Palin won the primary, and in the general election she faced Tony Knowles, the former two-term Democratic governor, and Andrew Halcro, an independent.

Not deeply versed in policy, Ms. Palin skipped some candidate forums; at others, she flipped through hand-written, color-coded index cards strategically placed behind her nameplate.

Before one forum, Mr. Halcro said he saw aides shovel reports at Ms. Palin as she crammed. Her showman’s instincts rarely failed. She put the pile of reports on the lectern. Asked what she would do about health care policy, she patted the stack and said she would find an answer in the pile of solutions.

“She was fresh, and she was tomorrow,” said Michael Carey, a former editorial page editor for The Anchorage Daily News. “She just floated along like Mary Poppins.”

Surrounded herself with people she knew
Half a century after Alaska became a state, Ms. Palin was inaugurated as governor in Fairbanks and took up the reformer’s sword.

As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments, those with insider credentials were now on the outs. But a new pattern became clear. She surrounded herself with people she has known since grade school and members of her church.

Mr. Parnell, the lieutenant governor, praised Ms. Palin’s appointments. “The people she hires are competent, qualified, top-notch people,” he said.

Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.

“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ ”

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

To her supporters — and with an 80 percent approval rating, she has plenty — Ms. Palin has lifted Alaska out of a mire of corruption. She gained the passage of a bill that tightens the rules covering lobbyists. And she rewrote the tax code to capture a greater share of oil and gas sale proceeds.

“Does anybody doubt that she’s a tough negotiator?” said State Representative Carl Gatto, Republican of Palmer.

Yet recent controversy has marred Ms. Palin’s reform credentials. In addition to the trooper investigation, lawmakers in April accused her of improperly culling thousands of e-mail addresses from a state database for a mass mailing to rally support for a policy initiative.

While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a Blackberry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”

Private e-mail addresses used for state business
The governor’s office did not respond to questions on the topic.

Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin’s state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: “Frank, this is not the governor’s personal account.”

Mr. Bailey responded: “Whoops~!”

Mr. Bailey, a former mid-level manager at Alaska Airlines who worked on Ms. Palin’s campaign, has been placed on paid leave; he has emerged as a central figure in the trooper investigation.

Another confidante of Ms. Palin’s is Ms. Frye, 27. She worked as a receptionist for State Senator Lyda Green before she joined Ms. Palin’s campaign for governor. Now Ms. Frye earns $68,664 as a special assistant to the governor. Her frequent interactions with Ms. Palin’s children have prompted some lawmakers to refer to her as “the babysitter,” a title that Ms. Frye disavows.

Like Mr. Bailey, she is an effusive cheerleader for her boss.

“YOU ARE SO AWESOME!” Ms. Frye typed in an e-mail message to Ms. Palin in March.

Many lawmakers contend that Ms. Palin is overly reliant on a small inner circle that leaves her isolated. Democrats and Republicans alike describe her as often missing in action. Since taking office in 2007, Ms. Palin has spent 312 nights at her Wasilla home, some 600 miles to the north of the governor’s mansion in Juneau, records show.

Where's Sarah?
During the last legislative session, some lawmakers became so frustrated with her absences that they took to wearing “Where’s Sarah?” pins.

Many politicians say they typically learn of her initiatives — and vetoes — from news releases.

Mayors across the state, from the larger cities to tiny municipalities along the southeastern fiords, are even more frustrated. Often, their letters go unanswered and their pleas ignored, records and interviews show.

Last summer, Mayor Mark Begich of Anchorage, a Democrat, pressed Ms. Palin to meet with him because the state had failed to deliver money needed to operate city traffic lights. At one point, records show, state officials told him to just turn off a dozen of them. Ms. Palin agreed to meet with Mr. Begich when he threatened to go public with his anger, according to city officials.

At an Alaska Municipal League gathering in Juneau in January, mayors across the political spectrum swapped stories of the governor’s remoteness. How many of you, someone asked, have tried to meet with her? Every hand went up, recalled Mayor Fred Shields of Haines Borough. And how many met with her? Just a few hands rose. Ms. Palin soon walked in, delivered a few remarks and left for an anti-abortion rally.

The administration’s e-mail correspondence reveals a siege-like atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes. Even some who helped engineer her rise have felt her wrath.

Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend of Ms. Palin, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found himself branded a “hater.”

It is part of a pattern, Mr. Fagan said, in which Ms. Palin characterizes critics as “bad people who are anti-Alaska.”

Aides sit in on interviews
As Ms. Palin’s star ascends, the McCain campaign, as often happens in national races, is controlling the words of those who know her well. Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, has been asked not to speak to reporters, and aides sit in on interviews with old friends.

At a recent lunch gathering, an official with the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce asked its members to refer all calls from reporters to the governor’s office. Diane Woodruff, a city councilwoman, shook her head.

“I was thinking, I don’t remember giving up my First Amendment rights,” Ms. Woodruff said. “Just because you’re not going gaga over Sarah doesn’t mean you can’t speak your mind.”

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26691018/

Palin is a 'reformer' and a Maverick. Just not the kind you are thinking she is...

She brought a new contempt for the 'rule of law' and a new embrace of deficits.

She 'reformed' Wasilla. Well, more like 'deformed' it.

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.

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?"

'Sarah barracuda'. Stay out of the way of her teeth...

Sarah Palin has a problem with the truth and honesty. Honestly...

The Bush Blight House is missing almost a years worth of e-mails and his minions were using RNC email addresses to conduct national business and gosh, look who else has a problem with the truth and emails...

Sarah Palin.

She's been using a Yahoo email address to conduct state business? Well heck, why not just stand outside your house and use a PA system and announce it to the world!

Yahoo ain't the best email system on the planet.

This goes to show her contempt for the rule of law.

If she is elected, she will fit right in with the legacy of the Bushist junta's contempt for law...

And just think that Bush promised to 'bring responsibility and credibility back to the White House'. Just like everything else in his life, yep, he spectacularly failed...

Palin, like Rove before her, stayed off government e-mail servers

One of the best revelations that has come out about Sarah Palin's governorship is not only the fact that she's kept her e-mail off of public, taxpayer-funded, subpoena-able servers, but that she's doing so on a Yahoo e-mail account.

That's right, the governor of Alaska is conducting state business from something that's just a step above the ridiculousness of an e-mail address like palinpower907@yahoo.com. Her actual e-mail address (although most probably by now it's been overrun with spam and hate mail) is gov.sarah@yahoo.com.

This e-mail address was discovered last week by an Anchorage female Republican government watchdog, Andrée McLeod. She had filed an open records request with the governor's office. She then received four boxes of correspondence, and a 78-page list of 1,100 e-mails (with the subject line revealed) that it was not releasing.

As Mother Jones reports:

Many of them had been written by Palin or sent to her. Palin's office claimed most of the undisclosed emails were exempt from release because they were covered by the "executive" or "deliberative process" privileges that protect communications between Palin and her aides about policy matters. But the subject lines of some of the withheld emails suggest they were not related to policy matters. Several refer to one of Palin's political foes, others to a well-known Alaskan journalist. Moreover, some of the withhold emails were CC'ed to Todd Palin, the governor's husband. Todd Palin -- a.k.a. the First Dude -- holds no official state position (though he has been a close and influential adviser for Governor Palin). The fact that Palin and her aides shared these emails with a citizen outside the government undercuts the claim that they must be protected under executive privilege. McLeod asks, "What is Sarah Palin hiding?

But here's the thing: This strategy of moving non-official email off of government servers is a well-known practice amongst Republicans and Democrats alike. President Bush famously stays off e-mail entirely lest it be subject to legal scrutiny. Karl Rove and others, meanwhile, used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts to conduct official government business.

In a lesser-known example right here in our backyard, as Valleywag pointed out this morning, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was in touch with his staff via his personal iPhone late last year following the major oil spill in the San Francisco Bay. Apparently, because those communications are from the mayor's iPhone, even if he was conducting official city business on it, they are -- astonishingly -- not subject to subpoena.

What I want to know is, how is there such a gaping loophole in the world of government communications? How is it that simply by moving to another e-mail account that those communications cannot be touched by a legal 10-foot pole? I've got queries into a few legal scholars and will definitely be reporting back as soon as I get more info.

She ain't too bright, including her husband in on State Business... Will he be the power behind the Palin presidency? God, I can hardly wait...

The gas and oil futures market - Great game if you can get into it...

It's headache time...

Owwwwwww...

The great hurricane Ike is causing all kinds of strange things to happen in the oil markets and with gas prices...

Ike wasn't as bad as it could have been but you'd never know it by the reaction of the people... And the market.

Oil is under $100 a barrel, according to this article. It takes 10 ears to get crude oil to be gas on the open market (now there's a concept). So, why the run on gas and trying to blame it on oil? You'd think that America got all its gas from one refinery in Galveston...

People were lined up like Lemmings on Friday to fill'er up. Why are prices so high for the past 4 years? Think Enron, and think Lemmings. Lined up to plunk down their American dollars (or Chinese dollars using their credit card) and driving off thinking that they 'got away with something'.

Yeah, someone did...

Ike skews gas; some stations ask $5 a gallon

By JOHN PORRETTO and MARK WILLIAMS Associated Press Writer

Sep 14th, 2008 | HOUSTON -- Pump prices jumped above $5 per gallon in some parts of the country Sunday as Hurricane Ike, which caused less destruction than feared, left refineries and pipelines idled and destroyed at least 10 offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

Far beyond areas struck directly by high winds and flooding, Ike left behind it a bizarre pattern of prices at gas pumps, with disparities of more than $1 a gallon in some states, and even on some blocks.

"We're on the other side of the looking glass," said Claire Raines, who lives near Knoxville, Tenn. "I just passed three gas stations with prices that ran from about $3.50 to close to $5 within walking distance."

Average prices exceeded $4 per gallon in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, South Carolina, Hawaii and Alaska, according to auto club AAA, the Oil Price Information Service and Wright Express.

States fed directly by refineries along the Gulf Coast were particularly hard hit and supply may be sporadic for the next few weeks with refineries shut down, said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst with the Oil Price Information Service.

A station in Knoxville, Tenn., was asking $5.19 for a gallon of regular gas. In Nashville, about 180 miles away, gas was going for $3.50.

Whatever pain is being felt at U.S. gas pumps will likely be a very brief phenomenon, analysts say. The dour drumbeat of the global economy has the vast majority of traders believing the world has lost its appetite for high-priced crude and gasoline.

The pain was immediate, however, for 22-year-old college student Isiah James. He bought four gallons of gas at $3.99 near the Columbus, Ohio, suburb of Worthington.

"You've got to work harder," he said.

Hurricane Ike appears to have destroyed a number of production platforms and damaged some of the pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico, federal officials said Sunday.

Fly-overs revealed that at least 10 production platforms were destroyed by the storm, said Lars Herbst, regional director for the U.S. Minerals Management Service.

"It's too early to say if it's close to Katrina- and Rita-type damage," Herbst said.

The MMS says Hurricane Katrina destroyed 44 platforms three years ago, and soon after Hurricane Rita destroyed 64.

Herbst stressed the assessments were preliminary, but the damage appeared far worse than that caused by Hurricane Gustav two weeks ago.

Specifics about the size and production capacity of the destroyed platforms were not immediately available.

Herbst said the aerial inspections showed Ike damaged several large pipelines, but the extent of the damage was not known, nor whether they carried oil or natural gas.

Since just before Gustav's arrival two weeks ago, nearly 100 percent of Gulf Coast crude production has stopped, or about 1.3 million barrels per day. About 98 percent of all natural gas production is on hold.

There was limited production between storms, but that ended as Ike approached.

Kloza said it's unlikely damage to platforms in the Gulf would keep prices up for long.

"It's not a big deal in the economy we see working in the oil market," he said.

The wave of higher gas prices across large sections of the U.S. stood in stark contrast to the direction of crude and gasoline futures Sunday on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Nymex held a special trading session because of trader concerns over Ike.

The price for a barrel of light, sweet crude tumbled $2.43 to $98.75.

Gasoline futures fell more than 11 cents to $2.6563.

The crude sell-off came two days after a barrel of oil dropped below $100 for the first time since April 2.

Overnight, retail gasoline prices nationwide rose an average of more than 6 cents for a gallon of regular gasoline, to $3.795, according to auto club AAA, the Oil Price Information Service and Wright Express. That followed another 6-cent jump between Friday and Saturday.

Overnight changes in the national average for gas are usually measured by tenths of a cent.

Shell said Sunday the majority of its stations in the Houston, Galveston and Beaumont areas remained closed.

Meanwhile, two weeks after Hurricane Gustav shut down production and closed a dozen refineries in Louisiana, those same companies were sending out crews Sunday to assess damage. The upper Texas coast is home to about one-fifth of the nation's petroleum refining capacity, and any prolonged disruption could severely crimp gasoline supplies.

However, because of ongoing damage assessments and uncertainty about how long it will take to get power restored, refiners were unable to say when they'd be able to resume production of gasoline and other fuels.

The Gulf also accounts for 25 percent of domestic oil production and 15 percent of natural gas output. That production was nearly 100 percent shut down Sunday, though Shell and some other producers had begun restaffing platforms and other offshore facilities that were not in Ike's path.

More than half of Texas' 28 refineries have been shut down because of Ike.

Valero Energy Corp., North America's largest refiner, said crews had found no significant structural damage at facilities in Houston, Texas City and Port Arthur.

The company said it had no timetable for when production would resume.

"Gulf Coast pipelines that carry crude oil and refined products to other parts of the country are also experiencing outages, which will further complicate the supply situation," Valero said.

Transocean Inc., the world's largest offshore drilling contractor, said Sunday that Ike moved one of its three moored, semisubmersible rigs in the Gulf about 2 miles to the north of its pre-storm location, and crews were trying to determine if it sustained any significant damage.

Another of the rigs, which was damaged during Gustav, kept its location, while the third was docked in Mobile, Ala., out of the storm's path, said spokesman Guy Cantwell.

The Department of Energy said Sunday it had agreed to deliver 200,000 barrels of emergency exchange oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to ConocoPhillips' Wood River refinery in Roxana, Ill.

The department said it also will deliver an additional 109,000 barrels of emergency exchange oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to Placid Oil's Port Allen, La., refinery along a Shell pipeline in Louisiana.

The oil was requested by ConocoPhillips and Placid because of supply disruptions. The deliveries were to begin Sunday.
———
Associated Press writer Stephen Majors in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

Like I said, it's the best game in town and people will pay just about whatever you charge...

Aren't Lemmings great? Well, if you get them to play by your rules...

Hey, let's make rape victims pay for the tests to find the rapist.

Sound far fetched?

Not to Sarah Palin.

The thing is that the democrat that took office after her repealed that act of cruelty towards women who where sexually attacked.

I thought that being 'religious' meant being 'compassionate' towards those that were ruthlessly attacked...

But I guess that a woman that gets a rape test would be driven to abort any fetus that might result. Well, and we can't have people aborting children that the can't, or shouldn't have can we.

Next thing they'll be demanding the right to vote and get paid the same as a man for doing the same exact job. Well, and then they might think that evolution and science are true...

Sarah Palin is bad news...

Oh, and how much is a 'rape kit'? $1,200! So not only is John McCain a adulterer and a liar and abetting someone who stole narcotics from charities that helped people suffering in other countries, but he actually wants more rapists on the street!

Nice 'family values' candidate.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said 'W'04. Christianity is a character flaw." I can believe that...

Palin, Oil, Palin, Lies, Palin...

Oil, it's all a dirty, dirty game...

Oil goes down. Ike hits the gulf. Gas jumps. Gas that is based on oil pumped nearly TEN YEARS AGO!!!

It's all a huge game.

And the mice play when they are in the seat of power.

But rest assured that Sarah Palin, pentecostal nut job and determined anti-feminist, who doesn't have a clue what the 'Bush doctrine is, is a whiz at 'energy', and obviously not at foreign relations. (She took credit for a fuel stop in Ireland (I think that's it) on her way to a guided tour of Iraq as a 'foreign country she's been to))

She threatens Russia with war over the Georgia attacks on the separatist parts of Georgia. Nice going, brainiac.

Oh, and her 'church' thinks that the Bible is better than ANY science book...

And she says that she's ready to lead. Where is what has me frightened...

Meet Sarah Palin's 'god'...

And watch out for it is a vengeful and ignorant god at that.

Science: the gift of a God to help His creation understand the world they are in.

Evolution: to help His creations survive and adapt to the world at it itself evolves and changes over time.

Creationism: the gift of God to make it easier to tell the idiots from the thinkers.

Abortion: the ability to exercise the untimate control that the Creator has bestowed on us. There ARE worse things than abortion. Being forced into poverty because your uncle rapes you and your 'church' forces you to carry 'it' to term AND raise 'it'. Now that's barbaric.

Meet Sarah Palin's 'god':

Where she was saved
The church where Sarah Palin grew up and was baptized preaches some of the most extreme religious views in the nation.

By Sarah Posner

Sep. 11, 2008 | In June, Sarah Palin took the stage at the Wasilla Assembly of God, a deeply conservative Pentecostal church. The excitable Alaskan governor told a graduating class of missionary students that it "was so cool growing up in this church, getting saved here, getting baptized." She went on to declare that her son Track will deploy to Iraq, and urged students to pray "that our leaders, that our national leaders, are sending [soldiers] out on a task that is from God." She added: "That's what we have to make sure that we are praying for --

that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan

."

One big question about Palin is how that deterministic view of God's will in world affairs influences her decision-making on issues ranging from the Middle East to the environment, sexuality to education. What is not in doubt is that her addition to the Republican ticket has fired up the religious right and the party's most conservative base.

The McCain campaign has downplayed Palin's Pentecostal roots. But as her testimony at the Wasilla Assembly of God demonstrates, she is motivated by the idea that godly forces are locked in spiritual warfare with satanic forces. For many with a Pentecostal upbringing like Palin's, fighting that battle is part of God's plan for the end of days, when war will end the world as we know it, Jesus will come back, and non-Christians will convert or perish.

Pentecostals are so named for the feast, or Pentecost, documented in the Book of Acts, during which early followers of Jesus were said to have been "filled with the Holy Spirit" and able to "speak in other tongues." Although they share religious doctrine with other evangelicals, Pentecostals' religious experiences include such "spirit-filled" expressions as speaking in tongues, receiving divine prophecy and revelation, casting out demons and witnessing miracles. While not all Pentecostals are conservative (Leah Daughtry, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Convention, is a Pentecostal minister), most of them, according to a 2006 study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, are more conservative than other Christians on social, moral and spiritual issues, and far more likely to believe in the rapture and end-times.

Palin was raised as a Roman Catholic before being saved and baptized at Wasilla Assembly of God. In 2002, the year she first ran for national office, unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor, she left her childhood church and joined the Wasilla Bible Church, a nondenominational evangelical church that "believe[s] in the Bible as the only inspired inerrant Word of God authoritative for faith and practice," according to its statement of faith. In contrast to Assemblies of God, the Wasilla Bible Church's statement of faith contains no reference to such Pentecostal requirements as speaking in tongues, divine healing or belief in the rapture. When she's in the state capital, Palin attends the Juneau Christian Center, an Assemblies of God church, although it doesn't advertise that in its name.

"All of us in the business know that 'Christian Center' is an Assemblies of God church trying to rebrand itself to people who are not necessarily Pentecostal," says Anthea Butler, a religion professor at the University of Rochester and an expert on Pentecostalism. "You don't put Assemblies of God on the door because people think, 'Oh, those are the holy rollers.'"

Based on her public statements, Palin's views appear to be in line with the Assemblies of God official positions on abortion, creationism and homosexuality. The denomination "views the practice of abortion as an evil that has been inflicted upon millions of innocent babies and that will threaten millions more in the years to come." The only possible exception is if the mother is at "likely" risk of death; "however, vague threats to the mother's physical or emotional health must not become an excuse to place the child at risk." With regard to creation, the Assemblies of God's official position is that "even though the Bible is not primarily a book of science, it is as trustworthy in the area of science as when it speaks to any other subject" and its "account of creation is intended to be taken as factual and historical." Homosexuality is a sin because "it is disobedient to Scriptural teachings," "contrary to God's created order for the family and human relationships," and "comes under divine judgment."

The National Association of Evangelicals, of which the Assemblies of God is a member, has attempted to broaden its horizons beyond the culture wars to address global warming. But the only official statement on the environment from the staunchly conservative Assemblies of God comes from its Commission on Doctrinal Purity and the Executive Presbytery: "Today in our American culture, many people have turned their adoration from the Creator to the creation. They have gone to the extreme and are now worshiping the earth. We believe worship of the land, the sea, the oceans, and other attributes of the earth is an abomination to God the Creator."

Belief in the rapture and end-times is part of the official position of the Assemblies of God. That puts the church in tune with the 90 percent of Pentecostals who believe in the rapture, compared to 59 percent of other Christians. (During the rapture, believers will be whisked off to heaven to sit out the bloody tribulation period and final battle before Jesus returns.) John Hagee, the white evangelical pastor of a Texas mega-church, who endorsed John McCain, believes that war against Iran is a necessary fulfillment of biblical prophecy of how the end-times scenario will unfold. (McCain later rejected Hagee's endorsement over Hagee's controversial statements that the Holocaust was God's will.)

Assemblies of God members represent a tiny fraction of evangelicals. Of the 26 percent of white Americans who identify as evangelical, 4 percent belong to Pentecostal denominations, and 1 percent belong to the Assemblies of God, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life's Religious Landscape Survey. As of 2006, according to the denomination's own statistics, there were more than 12,000 Assemblies of God churches in the United States; 91 of them were in Alaska. More than 2.8 million Americans, like Palin, identify with an Assemblies of God church, according to the denomination's statistics, even if they were not official members.

Many more evangelicals belong to neo-Pentecostal, nondenominational churches. In the conservative ones, the rhetoric of spiritual warfare, particularly in the context of political issues, is common. When McCain rejected the endorsement of televangelist Rod Parsley because of Parsley's statements that "Islam is a false religion that must be destroyed," he was rejecting Parsley's version of spiritual warfare, in which the divine force of the United States of America will vanquish the enemy of red-blooded American Christianity.

Yet Pentecostals celebrate that spiritual battle. And the religious right is rapturous about having Palin on their side. "The McCain camp may want to play her as the reformer maverick, but it's her Christian warrior spirit that has really brought McCain and his team the jolt they've needed," the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody wrote this week on his blog.

Religion professor Butler says that warrior spirit -- or Palin's "Pentecostal-ness" -- is the reason why her candidacy excites the conservative base more than a non-Pentecostal would. Watching Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention, Butler says she thought to herself, "This is a flat-footed, I'm-in-the-back-of-the-camp-meeting-truck-preaching-woman" in the style of the trailblazing early 20th century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

At the end of her speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God youth missionaries, Palin prayed for a spiritual revival in the state of Alaska. "I'm just praying for an outpouring of God's spirit, for a revival to be here in Alaska," she declared. After the pastors prayed over the governor, and described Alaska as a "refuge state in the last days," Palin explained that when she attends other churches, the pastors apologize in advance for parishioners who might raise their hands or clap, in the spirit of Pentecostal worship. "And I say," said Palin, bursting with pride and laughter, "I grew up in Wasilla Assembly of God. Nothing freaks me out!"

Link

She is way too 'out there' to be president. Heck, we might as well have Ayatollah Khomeini and his burka requiring sharia laws. Is the bible just like the Koran? Was it meant to be like the Koran? Is this a case, like with Palin and Bin Laden, of extremists pushing a very violent and ignorant religious extremism unto the world?

Will women be drawn to this anti-Christ McCain/Palin as if to a flame? She is BAD NEWS! This country doesn't need and the world definitely doesn't need yet another religious extremist peddling their warped and disastrous beliefs on the world.

Bush says that time will tell what his legacy is and I can tell right now, with Palin I can see it as bright as day. Ready the religious wars and the Palin inquisitions and ready the religious police... 'Handmaids Tale', here we come...