Getting real about Palin

Given McCain’s thrashing of the media, I know it must be easy to gush over Sarah Palin right now. But that just won’t do. We turn to the media to deliver us unbiased news. And someone needs to dish on the undeniable facts about Palin.

First, she’s against abortion, even in the case of rape and incest. What ever happened to the biblical phrase: “One man’s liberty is not judged by another man’s conscience”? Second, she doesn’t believe that people have caused global warming. She sued the Bush administration for putting polar bears on the endangered-species list. And here’s a final scary point: She thinks the war in Iraq is a task given to the United States by God.

Straight from the reader’s heart: I praise the media for being courageous enough to not back down at the wag of McCain’s finger. When you’re a VP candidate, you’ve got to expect hard questions—especially when you’ve got extreme views. Claiming foul and anti-feminism should be seen for the sham it is.

This election is about issues, not personality. Let’s focus on the issues and stand behind our media for reporting on what matters.

—  Gina Patterson, educated Christian feminist
Asheville

SHARE

Thanks for reading through to the end…

We share your inclination to get the whole story. For the past 25 years, Xpress has been committed to in-depth, balanced reporting about the greater Asheville area. We want everyone to have access to our stories. That’s a big part of why we've never charged for the paper or put up a paywall.

We’re pretty sure that you know journalism faces big challenges these days. Advertising no longer pays the whole cost. Media outlets around the country are asking their readers to chip in. Xpress needs help, too. We hope you’ll consider signing up to be a member of Xpress. For as little as $5 a month — the cost of a craft beer or kombucha — you can help keep local journalism strong. It only takes a moment.

About Webmaster
Mountain Xpress Webmaster Follow me @MXWebTeam

Before you comment

The comments section is here to provide a platform for civil dialogue on the issues we face together as a local community. Xpress is committed to offering this platform for all voices, but when the tone of the discussion gets nasty or strays off topic, we believe many people choose not to participate. Xpress editors are determined to moderate comments to ensure a constructive interchange is maintained. All comments judged not to be in keeping with the spirit of civil discourse will be removed and repeat violators will be banned. See here for our terms of service. Thank you for being part of this effort to promote respectful discussion.

5 thoughts on “Getting real about Palin

  1. nuvue

    Thanks for the letter Gina,
    I also do not think you can be very much of a good Christian and also believe in assault weapons for the general public. And whatever happened to some of the Ten Commandments?? Wasn’t there one about Thou shall not Kill? Does that not hold true for for the “infidels”

  2. Dionysis

    “This election is about issues, not personality.”

    One would think so, anyway. However, the McSame campaign has decided that they will follow forty years of Republican history and try and make the election about ‘personality’ and ‘values’, since they have nothing of accomplishment to tout. McSame and that loon he’s picked (“soul mate”) as his VP running mate have probably reached a new low in terms of blatant lies, misrepresentation and diversion. Can anyone cite any specific programmatic element of this ridiculous campaign? What the eff does “we’re gonna fix things…we’re gonna shake things up” mean coming from Mr. Establishment? Does it mean that if he wins, Phil Gramm, author of the current mortgage meltdown crisis and critic of American ‘whiners’, will, as economist Paul Krugman recently noted, be “the one person who can push this recession into a full blown depression?”

    Oh wait, the “fundamentals of the economy are strong” and all we have to do is “form a commission”.

    As far as the not-too-bright habitual liar Sarah Palin goes, her positives have dropped and her negatives have increased within the last four days. She continues to be caught in lie after lie, and she has clearly demonstrated she has no clue about foreign affairs. But, like the Chimperor, she is ‘resolute’ (in her ignorance), likes to promote cronies over competence and even mis-pronounces ‘nuclear’ just like Chimpy!

    Care to take a walk down Sarah Palin’s most blatant lies? And hey, we still have weeks to go!

    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/04/politics/animal/main4414049.shtml

    http://www.ajc.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/ajc/bookman/entries/2008/09/09/palin_lies_could_lead_to_bridg.html

    http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2008/09/more-palin-lies.html

    http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?

    topic=57099.0

    Of course, let’s remember that we now know McSame “created the Blackberry.” Wow.

  3. entopticon

    Thank you Gina, for submitting this thoughtful letter. Informative and insightful post by Dionysis as usual as well.

    Women need to know the truth about Palin McCain. John McCain literally has a 0% rating on women’s issues and he actually brags about it!

    Unfortunately, Sarah Palin is even worse than John McCain. She has opposed equal pay for women, opposed additional funding for domestic abuse victims, is against reproductive choice even in cases of rape and incest, and she instituted a policy as Mayor of Wasilla which started charging rape victims for their own rape kits!

    Conversely, Barack Obama has a 100% rating on women’s issues. Joe Biden was the original author of the Violence Against Women Act which has provided relief to millions of abused women.

    Congresswoman Jan Schakowski wrote an excellent article detailing McCain-Palin’s astonishingly abysmal record on women’s issues:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-jan-schakowsky/warning-to-women-mccain-p_b_125809.html

    The editorial board of the NY Times wrote an excellent piece, which essentially argues that John McCain made a Faustian bargain with the ultra right-wing extremists when he chose Sarah Palin, which may help his chances, but he will never be able to recover his integrity because he is now a pawn of the neocons:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/opinion/13sat1.html

    Princeton economist Paul Krugman also wrote one of the best articles on the subject of McCain Palin’s candidacy, which was aptly titled Blizzard of Lies. The final paragraph of the article is very insightful and particularly chilling:

    “What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.”

    Krugman has also pointed out that the single most responsible person for the economic catastrophe that we are currently facing is none other than the architect of John McCain’s economic plan, Phill Gramm! To elect John McCain would be insanity.

    The right-wing extremists are trying to sell Palin as a financially conservative reformer, but don’t believe their ridiculous lies. Sarah Palin is the Queen of earmark pork. Alaska took in far and away more earmark pork per capita than any other state.

    In fact, at $555.54 per person, Alaska took in more than twice the earmark money per capita than any other state! She took in approximately 22 times that of Obama’s state, Illinois, which only took in $25.47 per capita!

    Vote with your head. Obama/Biden 08

  4. Dionysis

    Entopticon, in addition to the information you provide on Palin, it is certainly worth noting just how she has ‘governed’ so far:

    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 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.

    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!”

    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.

    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 his request would cost $468,784 to process.

    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 (Note: McSame has sent his legal goons to derail this investigation).

    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…

    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.

    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.

    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.”

    Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account “when there was significant state business.”

    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.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?_r=1&em;=&pagewanted=print

    It makes one wonder exactly why the Republican ‘base’ is so enamored with this character. These are the values they embrace? This is the type of attitude that they want to see permeating the White House? Evidently, the more egregious, hypocritical and fundamentally un-democratic their nominees become, the better this fringe ‘base’ likes it?

    And this doesn’t even touch upon her spiritual guide who likes to hunt witches and her repeated speeches before an anti-American group, nor her belief that Alaska will be the last refuge for the righteous when Armageddon happens.

  5. jacquie

    It would be great if everyone would channel all of this energy into getting Barack Obama elected. There is a field office on Merrimon Ave. or go online to mybarack.com you can actually phone voters from HOME or join canvessing groups! There is a group meeting every Wednesday at 5pm at the West Asheville Haywood Rd Ingles to talk to neighbors/voters. YES WE CAN !!

Leave a Reply to entopticon ×

To leave a reply you may Login with your Mountain Xpress account, connect socially or enter your name and e-mail. Your e-mail address will not be published. All fields are required.