“Monegan said he was fired after refusing pressure to fire State Trooper Mike Wooten, who had gone through an acrimonious divorce and custody battle with Palin’s sister.
“Palin has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, describing Wooten as a “rogue trooper” who had threatened her family. Wooten denied the allegations.”
Interesting choice of words. I might have phrased it “maverick trooper.” All things considered.
“Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility.”
Joe Six-Pack could not be reached for comment at press time.
- Louis Maistros
DISTURBING ADDENDUM:
The ORIGINAL version of the CNN.com article stated this:
“Palin had the authority as governor to fire him, the report by former Anchorage prosecutor Stephen Branchflower states.
“However, it states that her efforts to get Wooten fired broke a state ethics law that bars public officials from pursuing personal interest through official action.”
But the second line, that clearly states Palin “broke a state ethics law,” HAS BEEN REMOVED from the article! What gives?
LESS DISTURBING ADDENDUM:
This morning the sentence is back, but revised. I’m guessing I’m not the only one who noticed.
First lets start off with a little video. Ed Rollins, who is quite my opposite in political leanings is someone whose intelligence and political field of view I respect. Even more so after seeing him on a panel and getting to interview him at Advertising Week. When Rollins says that the McCain campaign is sunk it brings me joy.
So the hate speech being incited by McSame and Caribou Barbie bugs the hell out of me, how about you? Inciting people to violence, giving tacit approval by not calling them down for it immediately and in public? This is naked powermongering, a lack of honor and judgement that our country cannot afford.
Here are the critical comments, linked to their sources and coming from both sides of the aisle. Please tweet, digg, and re-transmit.
This pretty much sums things up. If you remove a lot of the emotional knee jerk rhetoric and conditioned responses from the discourse you end up with a number of fundamental facts (stronger than Sen McCain’s strong fundamentals of our economy I hope) taken from voting records, media archives, and other official and independent sources. If you pull out and look at the big picture you can see Obama thinking three moves ahead like a good chess player. You can also see the McCain’s recently developed ability to contradict himself and spew forth and amazing array of outright lies as he becomes more frantic.
The Editors of The New Yorker have published the most powerful and digestible single statement about this presidential run and why there is really only one choice that can be sanely made. would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?
The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.
The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure. (Click here for the full article)
Presented for your edification by Loki, HumidCity Founder
Mere weeks remain, soon the overburdening hysteria will subside as votes are tallied, recounts demanded and one reptile or the other slithers into the Oval Office. Like the majority of my fellow bloggers on HumidCity I am pro Obama. Unlike many out there I do not trust or like him very much at all. I do believe he is our last, best hope for salvaging something from our country’s toppling fall of the past eight years.
I don’t think anyone who seeks power is trustworthy, power intrinsically attracts the corruptible. Make no mistake, I am sharpening my claws for Obama’s screw ups once he is in office as I would anyone else taking the position. All politicians must be watch-dogged, even (sometimes especially) the charismatic ones.
That said I encourage all of you out there to cast a vote for Obama come election day. He is the only politician I’ve ever heard acknowledge the vital nature of dealing with the wetlands. While we were evacuated during Gustav I caught some of Anderson Cooper’s 360 when he was speaking with Obama. The Senator from Illinois was asked what his strategy for the Gulf Coast would be upon taking the Oval Office. Sen. Obama replied that while levees and housing issues are vital the most important thing is restoration of the wetlads so that this becomes a once every hundred to hundred fifty years occurence as aopposed to an every two or three year occurence. As Gulf Coast residents this is an angle we all to be on the same page about. “Drill, baby, drill!” will do nothing but further destroy our only barrier against the storm surge.
Obama is as close to the answer as we are going to get right now. It is incredibly important to have someone in office who will deviate from the disastrous path our country has been taken down by the “Current Occupant.” As McCain’s campaign becomes more overtly hate filled and brazen in its attempts at deception I feel pretty safe in saying he is not the one we need. He voted with Dubya 90%+ of the time and helped to bring our nation to its knees, as we watch the global economy begin to spiral down the toilet as a result the course of action should be clear.
Once he is in office then it will be time to explore and lobby for a new syste (Instant Runoff Voting comes readily to mind) that will enhance democracy by making third party candidates viable without being “Vote wasters.”
Come on people, this is too important to screw up.
That is what John McCain called Senator Obama’s campaign staffers pointing out that he has not once, but twice voted against and 8/29 Commission. Now both Senators are politicians, which means I don’t trust either one of them. This is why I love the Annenberg Political Fact Check. A non partisan group that documents the realities behind the political posturing.
Today they addressed this one. Here is the summary, once you’re done click the link at the bottom for full documentation with sources.:
McCain was asked by a New Orleans reporter why he voted twice against an independent commission to investigate the governments failings before and after Hurricane Katrina, and he incorrectly stated that he had “voted for every investigation.”
McCain actually voted twice, in 2005 and 2006, to defeat a Democratic amendment that would have set up an independent commission along the lines of the 9/11 Commission. At the time of the second vote, members of both parties were complaining that the White House was refusing requests by Senate investigators for information.
The McCain campaign accused the Obama campaign of “tired negative attacks” for pointing out and documenting McCains gaffe.
