My beat around here is Global Warming and Energy. The choice come November could not be starker in these arenas (that is, at least in fact not media framing). The contrast also could not be starker… across a wide range of issues.
Among these, John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin has added a searing 
issue to the table:
Do we want a separatist with easy access to the centers of power in the nation?
What would it mean to have a Vice President (likely President) sleeping with a separatist?
This question is essentially absent from the pages of traditional media.
Imagine if Michelle Obama were a registered member of the Black Panthers until 2002? Imagine the drumbeat of outrage that all Americans would hear. About Todd "My Guy" Palin’s separatist credentials? Crickets chirping in the night …
Fellow Traveler Sarah?
Sarah Palin has not just been sleeping with a separatist but clearly seems to be in the realm of fellow traveler.
Note that she speaks in this video of Alaska as a "self-sufficient state".
Guess that is why she has fought so hard against Wasilla, Alaska, having dependence on pork-barrel politics and has worked so successfully to remove Alaska from the Federal Government dole. NOT!!!
The Republican ticket is almost in balance on this: Alaska 1st, Ariz. last in pork spending.
But … back to secessionists
Dexter Clark, the head of the AIP, said:
Our current governor who I mentioned at the last conference, the one we were hoping would get elected, Sarah Palin, did get elected . . . .and there was a lot of talk about her moving up. She was an AIP member before she got the job as mayor . . . but to get-along-to-go-along, she eventually joined the Republican Party . .
Now, he has backed off those claims and it seems likely that Sarah was never a member formally. But consider what Dexter Clark says:
We don’t say we’re Americans, we say we’re Alaskans.
In videos previously available on YouTube, Clark bragged about student’s giving thumb’s down sign for America, but the thumb’s up for Alaska.
“We are a state’s rights party,” says Clark, a self-employed goldminer. The AIP has “a plank that challenges the legality of the Alaskan statehood vote as illegal and in violation of United Nations charter and international law.”
What does he advise AIP members to do? He urges members to infiltrate political parties to further their cause. Infiltration by a subversive organization? Todd Palin was a member of the AIP untill 2002 when he registered as a member of the Republican Party. Did he follow his Party leader’s instructions?
Remember 9/11
September 11th, 2008 — seven years, 2557 days since the planes hit the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Have we reached a point where, in all seriousness, we are considering putting into the very centers of the corridors of power someone sleeping with a secessionist? Someone who is a fellow traveler with an organization potentially linked to terrorism?
Let us be clear, the McCain-Palin ticket offers very dismal prospects for the future in terms of energy and global warming implications on economic, environmental, and national security terms. The McCain-Palin ticket might best be called McWorse, since George W Bush began his Presidency on the backs of the prosperity of the Clinton-Gore years. McCain will be starting from the deep hole that Bush-Cheney-Republican Members of Congress have worked to dig so deeply.
Even with all of the frustration and anger with Bush-Cheney, no one has credibly suggested that Laura Bush’s or Lynn Cheney’s very allegiance to the concept of the existance of the United States of America could be questioned.
With Todd Palin, with Sarah Palin, the question must be asked:
How can someone who could possibly be in line to become President of the United States be associated with a group that advocates secession from the United States?
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If an independent Kurdistan, financed by the Kirkuk oilfields, is OK for the Kurds,
why isn’t an independent Alasaka, financed by the North Slope and ANWR, not OK for the Alaskans?
I mean, it’s not as if the VP’s oath of office will mean anything more than McCain’s first wedding vows.
weird. what else does the AIP stand for?
The video is no longer available ???
I don’t know if you are aware that Mc Cain was a POW and you have no business asking any questions.
The video is no longer available ???
Nope – not here, either.
How surprising. /s
Those pesky liberals are trying to cause trouble for St. McCain
Good thing for McCain that his supporters thrive on his lies.
Mc Cain was a POW and you have no business asking any questions.
This gets a little tricky, huh? Since all of McCrazy’s ‘foreign policy experience’ was evidently gained in the Hanoi Hilton, guess we don’t get to know what his foreign policy would entail.
But we now *do* know Mrs. Palin’s foreign policy experience. It has to do with being able to see Russia from some point in Alaska, and in fighting with oil companies.
Or something.
More stuff down the memory hole, courtesy of the Ministry of Truth.
Alaska Independence Party….. the founder REFUSED to be bured under the US flag and is currently Interred in Canada….. Jeff Farias on Nova M Radio has been playing audio from him slamming the founders hate of the US
Aargh.. bad link.
Go directly to Brad Delong and
look at the top story.
No wonder there’s no 527s supporting Obama. There’s just no material for them to work with.
The Republican ticket is almost in balance on this: Alaska 1st, Ariz. last in pork spending.
What a silly argument. You seem to be implying that Mrs. Palin is a pork-glutton.
Don’t you realize that this was merely an exercise in on-the-job training for heading off to D.C. to thwack (with a moose-head?) any representative trying to push through bullshit requests, such as the ones she made.
See – now that she’s an expert in *procuring* pork, she is eminently qualified to make sure nobody else gets away with the shit she got away with.
Yep…she has a hard time explaining it her very self. But she will let her hand/fists do the talking everytime. (Remember the experiments when folks had to sit on their hands or tie them down to see if one could still speak without one’s hands?) She should try it. Oh well, she could probably still lie.
Now, come bearing smoked moose fillets and you get what you came for.
Not to mention that the Govenor ‘first dude’ has been implicated in Troopergate, which means he is not off doing his job or being Mr. Mom, he has been known to interfere with government. How close to the red button do we want this guy??
Oh well, she could probably still lie.
I’m thinking that as long as she has teeth, she can lie through them.
;) One day maybe you will just write stand-up….thanks
Tax payers of every state pay taxes into the Federal pot…… and then money flows back to the state in various forms….. education, highway/transportation and healthcare in Medicaid and Medicare…… but some states are the pigs at the trough and then there are others who do not get their fair share….. Think about it….. until 2006…. AZ had two Repug Senators and 6 repug congresscritters and 2 Democrats….. AND we did NOT get our fair share of federal funding….. NOT pork but a fair share……
What?! You implying she won’t be able to lie through her dentures when she is McShame’s age?
I have every confidence that, in the area of lying, she will prove to be quite adaptable.
this is not really the correct framing, more like;
“imagine if michelle obama had public meetings telling everyone she didn’t even want to be an American”?
that’s more in context
This is nothing new.
After the acquisition of the presidency in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson proceeded to issue pardons to almost every single person who had taken up arms against the union, restored lands to them that had been seized under the Confiscation Act of 1862, and fought tooth and nail against suffrage for freed slaves. The same people who had been the vanguard of secession that brought on the Civil War (and one who even attacked Charles Sumner of Massachusetts) were returned to Congress after the Democrats and the Johnson administration torpedoed reconstruction.
This travesty led to the corruption of Grant’s time in office and the completed revolution represented by the 1876 “election” of Rutherford B. Hayes, the governor of Ohio, which gave the former states of the Confederacy the green light to get their revenge on the Union.
The only entity these people worship is the machine that churns out their ideological marching orders. The United States of America is just something for them to use as cover for their treasonous actions.
and check this out
and this on the same subject
I’m so disgusted with this whole campaign season. Bad enough the lies and the slime, but the fact that it’s working is making me sick. We’ve known about Todd and the AIP for awhile. Has anyone asked McC, Palin or any spokesperson about this? Why not ask Newt or Pat Buchanon, they’re any tv around the clock. Along with half the Bush White House staff.
It just keeps getting weirder and weirder
There is no way in hell Palin was properly vetted by the Mc Crazy team
If she was and McSame picked her anyway Then this guy really is nuts!!
I look at the way the two candidates run their campaigns it tells me alot about how they would run the country
Johnny boy will do any thing to get himself elected ,can ya just imagine his foreign policy.
Lies are what got us into Iraq !!!
Excellent framing. I’ll use that. “The first dude doesn’t even want to be an American citizen. He, fer sure, doesn’t love this country”.
Mrs. Obama gets lathered up but good for saying “really proud…etc” (operative word ‘really’, which always got conveniently left off when referenced), but Palin gets a pass when her husband was a member of a separatist party for several years and, better than that, she spoke to said group at one of its’ conventions.
Obama wouldn’t have made it to Super Tuesday with that background.
Americablog has a post now suggesting that the reason is because of her stand on abortion because as part of a rape exam and treatment is the morning after pill to prevent pregnancy…..
Bad enough the lies and the slime, but the fact that it’s working is making me sick.
Yes, it *is* working. I would, however, credit the non-stop Rovian lies about equally with the addition of Palin as reasons that the race is now tied, or tilting to the R’s.
Palin, chivalry be damned, must be crushed. Let the 527’s handle that.
Obama should start running ads which (accurately) portray McCain as a fucking crazy war-monger. Show maybe 3 of the various clips of McCrazy saying “there will be more wars”, show quotes from fellow Repubs in which *they* say that a McCain presidency scares them to death, and finish with Pat Buchanan saying “McCain will make Dick Cheney look like Gandhi”
All true, and all available. We’re heading into the late rounds- time to swing for the knock-out.
We seem to be the only one’s in the forest that hear the tree fall.
I don’t trust Mcsame I think he’d love to get another chance to fight the Vietnam war
After this campaign how are we to believe anything McSame says
He has no credibility in my mind
I did some googling last week, and over 25 states have some level of secessionist movement. Some are liberal (Vermont, NH) others are Christian Fascist, other white supremacist (League of the South, others anti-immigrant. There have been two national ’secessionist conventions’ already and a third one will take place New Hampshire in November.
Not only is the secessionist movement bigger than I ever dreamed, it’s easy to make a case that this earmark war is viewed as either 1) a good way to get your New Nation’s infrastructure in place before cutting and running or 2) a perceived way for state politicos to keep their dissident elements in the voter fold by drowing them in gravy or 3) combination of the above. Alasks, not suprising, has both the biggest formal secessionist movement and the biggest history of earmarks.
we need to cut down mc$hame, not just palin.
news to make everyone smile
perris, calm down now, still your heart
small touchup, no charge
Just like Joseph Kennedy, who made lots of money cornering various markets and then wrote the SEC rules to prevent others from doing likewise. A true American hero.
Double wow! BRING ‘EM TO JUSTICE!
Thanks for that linke; it has made my day.
Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran would make a good ad.
John McBush:
Talk about yer lack of credibility.
Sarah Palin knows more about energy than anyone in the USA.
I’m dumbfounded. I don’t know what to say.
My mind reels at how stupid a statement that is, let alone that it came from a serious candidate for POTUS.
My mind reels at how stupid a statement that is, let alone that it came from a serious candidate for POTUS.
Take that back!
He is a befuddled, not a serious candidate for POTUS.
Does anyone know why a governor, who wants us to believe that she was so very, very, competent in running the state of Alaska that she’s ready willing and able to run the country…..why would such a competent woman need to carbon copy her husband on most e-mails? I mean, he’s not an elected official or anything. Is this standard operating procedure for most governors? Does Matt Blunt, the idiot who runs Missouri, cc his wife on e-mails concerning state business? Just curious about the appropriateness of all this.
And if, as I suspect, John McCain isn’t long for this world and old Sarah might be our president, will she need to run everthing by her husband, who isn’t even college educated?
Wayne Madsen has some damning information on this issue, and it is on his site on the public section, at http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20080910 .
Some key paragraphs…
September 10, 2008 — Palin’s adviser base and political affiliations are Klan and neo-Nazi
WMR has learned from informed sources in Washington, DC who have tracked for a number of years the activities of the Confederacy restoration movement, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and white supremacist organizations that key players in a number of these groups are actively advising and financing the campaign of GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska.
Many observers have pointed out that McCain’s campaign and the GOP somehow failed to properly vet Palin’s involvement in various scandals as both mayor of Wasilla, Alaska and in year barely two years as Governor of Alaska. However, it is precisely because of Palin’s links to extreme right-wing organizations and neo-Confederates that she was chosen as McCain’s running mate. […]
Palin’s and her husband’s dalliances with the Alaska Independence Party (AIP), which advocates the secession of Alaska from the United States is the tip of a web of organizations that count among their membership extreme right-wing elements, many of whom also participate in Republican Party candidate selection and the lobbying of Republican members of Congress on behalf of Big Tobacco, Big Mining, Big Agra, and the small arms and defense industry clients.
The AIP is part of a network of extreme right-wing secessionists around the country, many of whom are linked to white supremacist causes. In 2006, the AIP participated in the first North American Secessionist Convention in Burlington, Vermont. Also attracted to the convention were a number of Southern secessionist movements, including the League of the South; the Southern Caucus; the Southern National Congress; and Christian Exodus, which advocates the secession of South Carolina as an independent republic governed by the Ten Commandments as the foundation of law.
Yeah anyway, Tex B.
((hope you and yours are safe and dry))
Segued with Sarah saying that she’s ready to start a war with Russia.
Yeah, folks…not one…but TWO new wars…even bigger and more expensive and more deadly than the last.
Blue America upstairs
we’re all fine.
nephew still down in the gulf on guard duty, doing good things and making us proud.
A clarification-
“Serious” because he has a chance to win (unfortunately), not because of the candidate himself.
The guy is demented. He has truly lost his marbles. If you watched the Forum on Thursday night, you saw utter inchoerence from him. For example, he argued that Sarah Palin’s derision of community organizers was the result of Obama refusal to participate in “town meetings.” McCain has gone barking mad– see http://firedoglake.com/2008/09…..-againand/
Howie is up with Blue America — we have Scott Kleeb from Nebraska on today. If everyone could stop by and say howdy, I’d really appreciate it! Thanks!
A dichotomy of history here:
In the wake of the Lincoln assassination Johnson attempted to fulfill Lincoln’s plans for reuniting the citizens and healing the rift between the belligerents. Part of which, for reestablishing an oath of allegiance citizenship would be restored and rebellion would be pardoned. Freed slaves were extended rights of citizenship, some were elected to state legislatures. Agents overseeing this were sent into the rebellious states to administer Lincoln’s policy; these became known as “carpetbaggers”. It was a group or radical Republicans in Congress that, in order to exact political revenge upon the secessionists, torpedoed Lincoln’s policy for reconstruction, and in furtherance of their revenge attempted to impeach Johnson (who came from a successionist state).
The Radical Republican group in Congress were politically allied to the businesses and industries which obtained immense profit from the War of Succession, their dominance of the political process lead to the noted graft and corruption of the Grant Administration. Grant himself, maintained his personal integrity, such as it was. This political dominance endured until the end of the century with few exception (e.g. Grover Cleveland). At no time was a green light for revenge on the Union ever given the successionist states, that is pure fantasy. After about a decade and a half, the reconstruction of the south was abandoned.
Since the Radical Republicans and their business and industrial base obtained political dominance of the Republican Party during the Johnson Administration, they continued their domination throughout the Western expansion and consolidation of the country. These same were the bought and sold political representatives of the emerging national corporations and special business interests. They have been present and are still present in all political policy-making. This will not change although it must be controlled. As for treasonous, be very careful on whom and how you use this word. If it is used ignorantly as it is here, it ultimately will damage the power it carries.
You and I have no similar views to history. I suspect that your education is from a degraded educational system from the one I enjoyed. This is just one example of the debasement of history I suspect and it is important to compare it with others and see if they correspond.
Ersatz edit:
I did not recognize the history you were using, it is totally unknown to my experience. This is very dangerous, when “facts” become detached from the record. It leaves those using them singing from different hymnals, the old story of Babel ensues, and the shared knowledge is lost. Also, if there is no agreement from whence we came, there is very little likelihood there will be a shared vision for a destination, or solution to any common difficulty. If you can justify your statements, please do so, it will be a revelation to me.
How can Palin get a Top Secret Clearance and above with her continued association with a secessionist?
oh i don’t know. An independent California has a certain appeal. We wouldn’t have to worry about Palin and her fundie buddies if that was the case….
Gov. Palin’s environmental policy, as explained by noted Internet intellectual Gibblets:
Profound stuff…
I think that everytime you mention Todd Palin, it is important to note that the secessionist org. he was in advocated “infiltrating” the other parties to push their agenda.
How DARE you use Sarah’s name in the same paragraph as the word PORK. Are tou implying that she’s a PIG??? I’m calling Fox to report this outrage.
A question for anyone who might know about these things: Can Sarah Palin get security clearances as VP if her husband belongs to a secessionist party?
Perris,
Thank you for a good framing approach. Considering how she was (and still is getting) skewered for a far more innocuous comment, this is a good way to phrase it without mentioning “black” …
AND — ALL — I didn’t have notice as to timing of post … For any who return, mea culpa that I was not engaged in the conversation … there were many amusing, insightful, appreciated comments …
Madsen has damning statements that may or may not be accurate. Difficult to trust this without substantial corroboration.
Question might be more Todd … but the President (and the VP) have an awful lot of leeway in getting people cleared.
It’s here my friend was one ofo the people who lost their accounts over this clip