Tags
One focus of an NYT article reprinted in the Sunday Post-Dispatch is that Sarah Palin has been, both as a mayor and as a governor, inclined to skip that competence thing and hire her buddies.
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 a qualification 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.
By that rationale, I should be the president’s advisor on air pollution because I love to breathe. It’s a well documented fact that I have always efficiently used and appreciated oxygen.
Palin is also, according to the NYT article, vindictive (Troopergate is only the tip of the iceberg) and secretive. “Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business.” (Shades of Matt Blunt!) But they attempt to look transparent: “A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account ‘when there was significant state business.'”Mmm-hmmm.
Another example: Palin claimed that a study by state scientists on the effects of global warming showed that it wasn’t harming polar bears. In fact, she has sued the federal government to block putting them on the endangered species list. But a University of Alaska professor used a federal records request to obtain the e-mails of the scientists. It turns out, of course, that they concluded the polar bears are indeed in trouble.
To give the devil her due, she did help pass a bill that tightened the rules governing lobbyists, and she did get the tax code rewritten so that the state got a larger share of oil and gas sale proceeds.
But the bottom line is that her slip is showing. Or, to quote an editorial in the Sunday P-D:
This is not change. This is politics as usual. This is George W. Bush in red patent-leather, peep-toe Naughty Monkey pumps.
Photo courtesy of STLtoday.com
Palin phenomena. In particular, this comparison of the Republican’s resume to Obama’s, taken from an email sent to Tomasky by a friend, struck me as particularly delicious:
I think that any ostensibly serious statements comparing Obama’s and Palin’s experience are indicative of journalistic sloppiness as well as a double-standard that even Gibson showed in the interview you reference above.
True, he pushed on a few international relation issues such as the Bush doctrine–had he not done so, his own credibility would have been not just toast, but burned-to-cinders toast. However, he let her skate with statements about the bridge to nowhere, Troopergate, book-banning, etc. that patently contradict reportage from reputable sources such as the NYT, Washington Post and from Factcheck.org (what Factcheck really says, not what McCain et al. claim they say).