Sarah Palin, 1996: "I want to be president."

[seafan]

(edited for copyright purposes-proud patriot moderator Democratic Underground)


This NY Times piece is A MUST READ for everyone wanting to know who this woman is.


Here are just SOME of the items from this article that jumped off the page:



In Office, Palin Hired Friends and Hit Critics

By JO BECKER, PETER S. GOODMAN AND MICHAEL POWELL
September 14, 2008

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!”

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.

Much more in the rest of the article.


Thank you to the authors of this article, JO BECKER, PETER S. GOODMAN AND MICHAEL POWELL for this excellent and incisive reporting of the FACTS. Keep it up.

The future of our country depends upon it.



And to Ms. Sarah Palin: NO, WE WILL NOT STOP BLOGGING.

[redstate_democrat]

1. This bitch is off the charts,

She can't get anywhere near the WH.

[patrice]

2. She has not made her own way. She's been in the Repub stable and they've been grooming

her by bringing her along in an extreme pork environment, i.e. not on her own abilities.

[BrainStorm]

3. She sounds just like Bush: appointments of personal (unqualified) friends, ideological firings,

schmoozing the evangelical base, secrecy, vendettas....

She's Bush all over again and trained by Newt Gingrich.

[PresidentObama]

6. Just like Bush, only with less experience.

[MarjorieG]

4. A GOPAC find of Gringrich to advance their screwy ideas.

[BrainStorm]

7. This has to be drummed into everyone's head. She's a Newt protege

She is wacko and comes from a wacko PAC. She's not "out of nowhere."

[PresidentObama]

5. She wants to be President? Anyone else fear for McCain's safety?

She might be crazy enough to poison him.

[kestrel91316]

10. If McCain gets elected, she will have him taken out of her way PDQ.

He isn't using her. She's using him.

She's like a female black widow spider.

[villager]

16. She'll put a pillow over his face pretty quickly; She's Lady Macbeth to McCrazed's King Duncan

n/t

[Boz]

23. VP Jeb Bush

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

8. If Palin has wanted to be president, why the heck hasn't she studied for the job since 1996?

Over the last 12 years, she should have been devouring reading material on every aspect of federal government administration and policy. How could she show such a lack of knowledge if the presidency has been a long-time goal? If it's been a big desire of hers, she should have become a walking encyclopedia on the major issues in governance. Instead, she doesn't even appear to know that the founding fathers didn't write the pledge of allegiance.

[kestrel91316]

11. Maybe somebody told her she didn't need to go to all that trouble?

And that she would just magically get there through their machinations?

[MadMaddie]

14. You said reading , government admin and policy in the same

sentence. She wouldn't have made it through your sentence. She is an exact replica of *, she does not have the thirst for knowledge or for exploration outside of her own world. This makes for a very dangerous person to be seeking the VP seat and who is literally a heart beat away from the Presidency.

[kestrel91316]

9. Little Sarah Smartass doesn't want to be president, kiddies......

she wants to be QUEEN.

She couldn't be Queen of Alaska in 1984, but now she's gonna have a shot at the brass ring.

[Imagevision]

12. Sherry Whitstine, whatever you do, don't quit your day job...

[anonymous171]

13. Palin isn't an just an airhead. She's a devious airhead.

Holding office, for her, is not about governing, it's about furthering her own personal agenda.

[opihimoimoi]

27. Self Centered and Self Absorbed are not good Traits...period

and she is both

[msallied]

15. There is no way in hell this woman wins.

She is being taken to task here. Wow.

[seafan]

17. Abusive firings; attempts to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records

NYT

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.

[seafan]

22. Abusive firing of longtime city attorney for unfavorable decision for Palin supporter

NYT

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.

[Imagevision]

18. Palin is being coached by Liberman, that's rich...

[seafan]

19. “The Palin family gets upset at personal issues, .... they want to strike back."

NYT

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.”

[seafan]

20. Palin in 1996: ‘I want to be president.’

NYT

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.’ ”

[opihimoimoi]

28. If so...then why didn't she prepare herself properly by reading and writing

so as to be astute?

[seafan]

21. Firings of town museum staff: Palin saw the museum as 'too progressive' for her town's own good.

NYT

After winning the mayoral election in 1996, Ms. Palin presided over a city rapidly outgrowing itself. ..... 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.

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.

[seafan]

24. As mayor, used city money for Suburban, named 'the mayor-mobile' by employees.

NYT

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.

[seafan]

25. Palin pressured the town librarian to ban books; books discovered with pages ripped out or marked up

NYT

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.”

[seafan]

37. Another book Palin tried to ban is "Pastor, I Am Gay", by Rev. Howard Bess

.....

That is what scares the Rev. Howard Bess. A retired American Baptist minister who pastors a small congregation in nearby Palmer, Wasilla's twin town in Alaska's Matanuska Valley, Bess has been tangling with Palin and her fellow evangelical activists ever since she was a Wasilla City Council member in the 1990s. Recently, Bess again found himself in the spotlight with Palin, when it was reported that his 1995 book, "Pastor, I Am Gay," was among those Palin tried to have removed from the Wasilla Public Library when she was mayor.

"She scares me," said Bess. "She's Jerry Falwell with a pretty face.

"At this point, people in this country don't grasp what this person is all about. The key to understanding Sarah Palin is understanding her radical theology."

.....

The pastor who clashed with Palin



We've got less than 2 months to get this truth about Sarah Palin out to every American.

[seafan]

26. Palin accused of improperly using state database for e-mail addresses to rally political support

NYT

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.

[seafan]

29. Deliberate use of Blackberrys and personal e-mail to circumvent subpoenas

NYT

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.”

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~!”

Does anyone doubt that Karl Rove had a hand in tutoring this woman?

[seafan]

30. Alaska lawmakers complained that Palin ignored their communications

NYT

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.

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.

[seafan]

31. A Democratic mayor was told to 'turn off traffic lights' when the state failed to send operational $

NYT

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.

***Yeah, just turn off some traffic lights and shut up, Mayor Begich.--- Regards, Sarah***

[seafan]

32. '...a siege-like atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes.'

NYT

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.

ANYONE who supports this charlatan as a candidate for Vice President of the United States is seriously deficient in critical thinking.


We are less than 2 months away from the specter of the unthinkable.

[TwilightGardener]

33. This lady is pure batshit crazy and evil. She's a sociopath. We should

all be terrified. Dick Cheney wasn't this bad.

[seafan]

34. A morning kick for more eyes. This entire article is a MUST READ. n/t

[alcibiades_mystery]

35. You'd think someone who set that goal 12 years ago would know more about

Well, about something...

[seafan]

36. Monday kick. n/t

[bullwinkle428]

38. She was LOL-catting before we ever heard of LOL-cats!

"Eye kin haz perezidensy?"