Sarah Palin Found Guilty of Abuse of Powers

An investigation has found Sarah Palin guilty of abuse of powers in the Troppergate scandal:

A legislative investigation has concluded that Gov. Sarah Palin abused her power in pushing for the firing of an Alaska state trooper who was once married to her sister.

The report by investigator Steve Branchflower was made public late this afternoon by a 12-0 vote of the Legislative Council, which authorized the investigation.

Branchflower’s report contains four findings. The first concludes that Palin violated the state’s executive branch ethics act, which says that “each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.”

Branchflower was investigating whether Palin abused her power by pushing for the firing of state trooper Mike Wooten, who was involved in a nasty divorce from Palin’s sister. Palin and her husband, Todd, have accused Wooten of threatening Palin’s father.

The response to this report will prove valuable in showing the nature of the Republican Party. Over the last eight years while we have witnessed abuses of power by George Bush but some Republicans have claimed they retain honor by claiming that the abuses of Bush and Cheney did not reflect upon the entire party. Some conservatives, who speak of opposing abuse of power while while all too often looking the other way, even claim that George Bush is not a conservative.

This report provides fair warning that the vice presidential candidate of the Republican Party has abused her power and is unfit to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. John McCain and the Republican Party, if they have any honor and any concern about restraining the power of government, have no choice but to remove Sarah Palin from the ticket. Should they fail to do so they will be demonstrating that the abuses of power under George Bush and Dick Cheney are not an aberration from Republican views but that abuse of power is sanctioned by the party. Should this be the case, they are unfit to govern. This will also be a good litmus test of conservative writers and bloggers as we see which support principle and which support party over principle.

Moms for Obama National Rally Day

Saturday November 1, 2008 will be Moms for Obama Nationally Rally Day:

Women and men across America are signing up by the hundreds to plan and participate in organized rallies as a show of support for Senator Barack Obama days before Election Day. Moms for Obama, a national grassroots group on my.barackobama.com, are coordinating the event, billed as “MOMS FOR OBAMA NATIONAL RALLY DAY” by its organizers.

On Saturday, November 1, at 12:00 pm PST (3:00 pm EST), on the same day, at the same hour all across America, mothers, fathers, grandparents and their children will participate in marches and rallies. This event is for women to have their voices heard in their community. Moms for Obama believe that a nationwide rally across America is a tremendous opportunity for mothers and families to gather and share their concern for all of our children. As well as to demonstrate to the American people that mothers will be out in force on Election Day and we will be supporting the Democratic ticket of Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

William Milliken Has Second Thoughts About John McCain

Former Republican Governor William Milliken of Michigan realizes that conditions have changed from when he endorsed John McCain:

He endorsed John McCain in the presidential primary, but now former Republican Gov. William Milliken is expressing doubts about his party’s nominee.

“He is not the McCain I endorsed,” said Milliken, reached at his Traverse City home Thursday. “He keeps saying, ‘Who is Barack Obama?’ I would ask the question, ‘Who is John McCain?’ because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.

“I’m disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues.”

Milliken, a lifelong Republican, is among some past leaders from the party’s moderate wing voicing reservations and, in some cases, opposition to McCain’s candidacy…

“I know John McCain is 72. In my book, that’s quite young,” said Milliken, 86, Michigan’s longest-serving governor. But he added, “What if she were to become president of the United States? The idea, to me, is quite disturbing, if not appalling.

“Increasingly, the party is moving toward rigidity, and I don’t like that. I think Gerald Ford would hold generally the same view I’m holding on the direction of the Republican Party.”

While the support by Milliken, along with other moderate Republcans mentioned in the article, is welcome, this really should not come as a surprise. Milliken did endorse John Kerry over George Bush in 2004. Now that John McCain is running for a third Bush term, it only made sense that Milliken would reject him. It is also of interest that Milliken backed McCain for the nomination as opposed to supporting Mitt Romney. Milliken served as Lieutenant Governor under Mitt’s father, George Romney, before becoming governor.

William Milliken’s endorsement of John Kerry in 2004 is posted under the fold.

(more…)

Obama Predicted McCain’s Campaign

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH2iufUU1f4]

Some criticized Obama for the above speech, claiming he was playing the race card. In reterospect he certainly did an excellent job of predicting exactly what the Republicans would do. Many thought that John McCain would be different, but in the end he turned out to be among the worst of them all.

A Buckley for Obama

Some conservatives are getting fed up with John McCain and realize he lacks the ability to handle our current problems. One example is Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley understands that the recent attempts by the far right to portray Obama as a leftist and socialist lack validity. He writes:

John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Bush Or McCain–The Game

Play Bush or McCain? The goal is to identify if quotations are from George Bush or John McCain. The two are so similar in their beliefs that it is often hard to tell. Fortunately many of the points were easy due to having heard some of the quotes in the past.

The Wisdom of Ronald Reagan

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqfedYAAGEI]

Ronald Reagan has the right advice in this video for deciding how to vote.

Obama on William Ayers

Barack Obama responded to some of the smears from the McCarthy McCain campaign virtually accusing Obama of being a terrorist for his limited association with William Ayers.  The Politico has a portion of what Obama had to say in an interview with Michael Smerconish:

In the interview, which was taped this afternoon and will air tomorrow, and which you can listen to above,  Obama recalled moving back to Chicago after law school, and becoming involved in civic life there.

“The gentleman in question, Bill Ayers, is a college professor, teaches education at the University of Illinois,” he said. “That’s how i met him — working on a school reform project that was funded by an ambassador and very close friend of Ronald Reagan’s” along with “a bunch of conservative businessmen and civic leaders.”

“Ultimately, I ended up learning about the fact that he had engaged in this reprehensible act 40 years ago, but I was eight years old at the time and I assumed that he had been rehabilitated,” Obama said.

That may not have been an unreasonable assumption for Obama in the 1990s. Though Ayers never repented his part in the Weather Underground bombings, he had not yet become notorious for advertising them. That notoriety returned in 2001, when he published his memoir, “Fugitive Days,” and reminisced about the bombings in a New York Times interview that happened to appear September 11 of that year.

“This guy is not part of my inner circle, he doesn’t advise my campaign, he’s not going to advise me as president,” Obama assured listeners.

Obama also lashed McCain for focusing on Ayers on a day of dramatic economic turmoil, calling th issue a “red herring.”

“The fact that Senator McCain wants to make this the centerpiece of his campaign is pretty remarkable,” he said. “We are going through an enormous challenge right now. ”

“Senator McCain surely doesn’t believe that I’ve endorsed any of the actions that [Ayers] has taken,” he said. “They’re trying to distract from the economy.”

“We’ve got the biggest economic crisis on our hands since the Great Depression and Senator McCain’s team has said in the newspapers, they’ve said it publicly, ‘If we talk about the economy, then we lose the election,'” Obama said.

Michael Smerconish has also written an op-ed on the controversy, calling it guilt by association and warns that this standard could lead to virtually everyone becoming disqualified for public office:

If we start to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon when selecting public servants, we’d better be ready for a diminished pool of candidates. (That might include Sen. McCain, whose dealings on behalf of Charles Keating were enough to garner a wrist slap from the Senate Ethics Committee almost 20 years ago.)

If the vetting process for a presidential candidate now extends to people with whom they’ve had even minimal contact, it may keep some otherwise qualified individuals out of the system.

I suspect not too many in the seminary or rabbinical school are ready to run for office.

In McCain’s case there are far more examples than Charles Keating, including many extremists who have been far closer to McCain than Ayers was to Obama as I noted yesterday.

While McCain has put out an ad with false claims regarding Obama and Ayers, so far it has only appeared on line. Most likely McCain is hoping that the media will pick up the story without it being obvious that the story originated from McCain. Marc Ambinder writes, “The McCain campaign worries that tough Ayers talk that’s link to McCain will hurt them among certain demographic groups. So — the campaign has yet to back up its talk with action.”  “Certain demographic groups” as used here by Ambinder is another term for “all thinking, rational Americans who would be sickened by the McCain campaign’s practice of McCarthyism in labeling someone un-American merely based upon someone they happen to have met or been on a committee with.”