Drinking Liberally in New Milford: Palin Speech Canceled

9/3/08

Palin Speech Canceled - Will she be dumped?

The McCain campaign provides what I believe to be spin on what may be a necessary reaction to the complete failure of John McCain's pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate:

Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly lashed out Tuesday at the McCain campaign after it suddenly canceled an appearance by vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin at an event sponsored by Schlafly’s Republican National Coalition for Life.

Palin was to receive the “Life of the Party” award and deliver the keynote speech at the event this afternoon, but the McCain campaign canceled her appearance, citing the need for her to prepare for Wednesday night’s speech at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Schlafly said.
“I think this is clearly somebody in the McCain campaign who doesn’t understand where the votes are coming from,” Schlafly told ABC News.

Given the number of scandals that are breaking on Palin, new scandals nearly by the hour since McCain picked Palin without properly vetting her, I think that Bob and others may be speaking the truth here:

The Sarah Palin Death Watch

It's getting worse for Ms. Palin every day. The MSM has picked up the loose threads of her various issues, and they're digging hard. How long before she either a) withdraws because of "family issues", or b) is unceremoniously dumped by McCain and the GOP?

I was giving odds (3-1 at last estimate) but a metaphorical death watch seems more appropriate. It's not whether it's going to happen, but when? I say 9/7/08 is going to be the day.

Over on FDL they've started a "Sarah Palin Goodbye Watch", but really, shouldn't it be called a figurative "death watch"? Because her political ambitions are going to expire well before their time (which would have been November 4th anyway).

A lot of the scandals have yet to be fully absorbed in the mainstream media and feed into the public eye-line, considering not everyone is a news and policy junkie Blogger in America, but the media is catching up and a lot of the stuff is going to be in your face from the traditional media newspaper sources as well as in the supermarket magazine racks:

The article inside is as scathing as the cover stories promise, though it won't include the more recent scandals and updates on the old ones.

On January 15, Alaska governor Sarah Palin laughed along with an Alaskan shock-jock DJ who called her political rival Lyda Green a "cancer," a "bitch" and ridiculed her weight. (Green is a cancer survivor.)

"People were so nice and were motified. Newspapers that were never Lyda Green-friendly, they demanded that [Sarah] apologize," Green told Us.

"You know what she said? She said, 'I'm calling to apologize. I hope you didn't misunderstand the radio program,'" Green says. "I told her, 'I didn't misunderstand.'"

The Alaska state senator added, "It's not a good way to behave. Why would anybody call a shock jock?"

So what did Green think when she heard Palin was John McCain's vice presidential candidate? "It's been very difficult to work with her," she tells Us Weekly. "I wish there had been more vetting."

Monday, Palin released a statement confirming that her daughter Bristol, 17, was five-months pregnant.
Mom-of-five Palin is antiabortion (even in cases of rape) and opposed to sex-education classes (she believes in abstinence instruction for teens).

The latest scandal du jour on Palin exemplifies the kind of bush failure that the eratic John McCain has further embraced as his own in his pick of the deeply scandalized Palin:

Mat Maid in brief:

Palin fired the whole state Agriculture and Conservation board in July 2007, ostensibly to save a mismanaged state-owned dairy, and replaced it with her usual gang of cronies.

As a result, the dairy lost more money than it had in twenty years.

The dairy, an Alaska icon, closed anyway in two months, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional state money with it.

Millions of dollars in dairy equipment ended up, at a steep discount, in the hands of a local Palin ally, who now runs a remarkably similar operation with the help of a Ted Stevens earmark.

Want to learn more? Please read on - I've reworked my entry somewhat for clarity and added some new information.

...snip...

Once the new Board was seated and the death sentence on Mat Maid lifted, Palin immediately authorized paying out the $600,000 state grant to Mat Maid the prior board had refused. The money disappeared into the corporation’s general funds, where it was used to fund operations. Payments to Wasilla-area dairy farmers continued uninterrupted, even as other bills piled up. In fact,the Board raised the price of milk Mat Maid paid to dairy farmers, only making Mat Maid’s economic predicament worse, but shifting even more taxpayer dollars into the pockets of the well-connected.

Of course, this naked income redistribution - from hard-strapped Alaska taxpayers to well-connected dairy farmers - needed camouflaging. So the new Board spent several months, and tens of thousand of dollars, investigating the prior Board’s behavior, hiring an accounting firm (Mikunda, Cottrell and Company) to review the financial records of Mat Maid in search of the classic mismanagement trinity: waste, fraud and abuse. No significant improprieties were ever found.

Which, of course, only adds to Palin's clear ties to the eternally corrupt Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens - a prime candidate for the Corrupt Bastads Club - and further exposes her abusive mismanagement skills while rewarding her own cronies.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin began building clout in her state's political circles in part by serving as a director of an independent political group organized by the now embattled Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.

Palin's name is listed on 2003 incorporation papers of the "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.," a 527 group that could raise unlimited funds from corporate donors.

Sarah Palin tried to build an image as some kind of "reformer" in Alaskan politics. But it is proving that she did so simply for the reason that it allowed her to push many in the previous "old boys network" out of the way in order to install her own network of cronies and profiteers. She eventually turned on Ted Stevens as well. But only after it became clear that Stevens was not going to escape indictment.

Given the fact that McCain represents just more of the same corrupt corporate profiteering, as evidenced by his campaign backbone being run by some of the worst examples of corporate lobbying run amok in Washington D.C., it is becoming clearer every day why John McCain went out of his way to make this clearly incompetent and irrational pick of Palin as his running mate.

Previously brewed in New Milford:

Lobbying for the Truth Behind the McCain Affairs

The truth that the GOP is trying to avoid discussing... Has nothing to do with the fact that McCain cheated repeatedly on his first wife, finally leaving her when he found a suitable stepping stone spouse for his political career. I could deal with The Real McCain's family values disgraces but I'll leave that to the ostriches in the conservative echo chamber to choke on:

According to Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief, February 1, 2008, "[John McCain] used nepotism to get ahead: When he was rejected by the National War College, he used his father's contacts with the Secretary of the Navy to make them reconsider." Skousen also notes that "McCain cheated on his first wife after she had a severe accident. He then divorced her and married his multi-millionaire mistress, whose daddy bought McCain a spot in the Congress."

It has also never been explained why the son and grandson of Navy admirals would not rise to the rank of Admiral himself. (He exited the Navy as a Captain.) Was it his numerous adulterous affairs or his violent temper? Or both?

John McCain's biographer Robert Timberg chronicles McCain's numerous sexual affairs with subordinates both when he was an Executive Officer and later Squadron Commander. Obviously, such fraternization is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

They can torture themselves over McCain's hypocrisy on that issue while burying their heads in the sand from the real issue raised in the recent NY Times article. Glen Greenwald gets straight to the heart of the very real McCain issue, the issue that the GOP is avoiding like a neoconservative plague:

In issuing a very specific, point-by-point denial of the NYT story, McCain specifically denied that he ever talked to Paxson's CEO, Lowell Paxson (or any other Paxson representative) about this matter:
No representative of Paxson or Alcalde and Fay discussed with Senator McCain the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proceeding. . . . No representative of Paxson or Alcalde and Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC regarding this proceeding.

Au contraire, my fuzzy, feathery pet neocons:

But Newsweek's Mike Isikoff today obtained (or was given) the transcripts of deposition testimony which McCain himself gave under oath several years ago in litigation over the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold. In that testimony, McCain repeatedly and unequivocally stated the opposite of what he said in this week's NYT denial: namely, that he had unquestionably spoken with Paxson himself over the pending FCC matter:
"I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue," McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by NEWSWEEK. "He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint."
While McCain said "I don't recall" if he ever directly spoke to the firm's lobbyist about the issue -- an apparent reference to Iseman, though she is not named -- "I'm sure I spoke to [Paxson]."
It's hard to imagine how there could be a clearer contradiction in McCain's statements than (a) "I'm sure I spoke to [Paxson]" and (b) "No representative of Paxson or Alcalde and Fay discussed with Senator McCain the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proceeding."

I'll let the GOP cry over whether or not he cheated on his second wife, the lobbying mistress he left his first wife for after repeatedly cheating on her, and whether or not he married her for her money and used her to further his career ambitions... Most of the left could care less about McCain's spousal issues. It is a minor issue, and trivial to a certain degree. It is all just a shield for the right to try deflect from and avoid the lobbying allegations. Never mind the hypocrisy concerning other lobbying aspects of his dubious campaign:

Set aside the issue of the nature of his relationship with Iseman, and you have the undeniable conflict of McCain, the chest-beating reformer, being so undeniably close to lobbyists. That, many have pointed out, is the real story. The man who's absurdly proclaimed that "I’m the only one the special interests don’t give any money to" is surrounded by lobbyists.
And The Washington Post, a day after it ran its own Iseman story on page one, goes with that story on today's front page under the concise headline, "The Anti-Lobbyist, Advised by Lobbyists."

I'm not playing into John McCain's supporters hands and deflecting from the real issues of lying about unethical lobbyist connections because...

I'm Not Your Stepping Stone!

Certainly not when all John McCain has to offer is less jobs, and MORE WAR!

[update] Via MSNBC, McCain says he won't discuss his Lobbyist weaknesses any further:

"I don't have any more comment about this issue. I had a press conference yesterday morning, and I answered every question," McCain said.

"I'm moving on. I'm talking about the issues and the challenges of America and the big issues that Americans are concerned about. I addressed the issue and addressed every question that was addressed to me.

"I do not intend to discuss it further," he told reporters.

After omitting the fact that he lied at that press conference yesterday, McCain then goes on to exactly what he said he wouldn't do: Discuss it further:

"I square it one way," McCain said. "The right to represent interests or groups of Americans is a constitutional right. There are people that represent firemen, civil servants, retirees, and those people are legitimate representatives of a variety of interests in America.

WOOOHOOO! The old "Constitutionally protected" argument from a candidate that regularly ignores and tramples on The Constitution when it comes to your rights and mine. When McCain says he isn't going to talk about it anymore... He is really just praying that we will stop asking and digging on it. Good luck on that one!

[update deux] Crooks and Liars chronicles some of the lies from McCain:

So much for the Straight talk express. He’s been trying to spin the influence that Ms. Iseman had on him overall and specifically regarding the Paxson deal. McCain’s camp had this to say:

Statements from McCain’s office said Iseman met only with staff and indicated that a staff member was involved in drafting and sending the letter. Thursday’s statement went to lengths to say why McCain could not have met with Paxson.

There’s a slight problem with that. Bud Paxson basically called McCain a liar.

Broadcaster Lowell “Bud” Paxson yesterday contradicted statements from Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign that the senator did not meet with Paxson or his lobbyist before sending two controversial letters to the Federal Communications Commission on Paxson’s behalf.

Paxson said he talked with McCain in his Washington office several weeks before the Arizona Republican wrote the letters in 1999 to the FCC urging a rapid decision on Paxson’s quest to acquire a Pittsburgh television station.

And what about Vicki Iseman, you know, the lobbyist that McCain called a “friend?”

Paxson also recalled that his lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, likely attended the meeting in McCain’s office and that Iseman helped arrange the meeting. “Was Vicki there? Probably,” Paxson said in an interview with The Washington Post yesterday. “The woman was a professional. She was good. She could get us meetings.”