Free Republic

Recently I ran across a video interview in which Sarah Palin enthusiastically declares "I support Michael Steele…I think he's doing a great job. Michael Steele is an outsider. The machine, I think, is tough to penetrate--I think it's been good to have an independent outsider trying to create some change in the Republican Party." Michael Steele has from the first day of his tenure been a spokesman for the RINO, pro-abortion, amoral, 'money is god' elite minority that presently controls the Republican Party. The statement that Steele is an outsider is an outright lie. He has for some years now...

A growing number of voters have concluded that Senator John McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, is not qualified to be vice president, weighing down the Republican ticket in the last days of the campaign, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. All told, 59 percent of voters surveyed said Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up nine percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favor Senator Barack Obama,...

Gov. Sarah Palin is taking the wrong approach to Troopergate. She should be practicing the open and transparent, ethical and accountable government she promised when running for governor and boasts about now that she's on the national stage. Instead, Gov. Palin has begun stonewalling the Legislature's attempt to get the bottom of allegations that she, her family or staff violated ethical or state personnel rules. As a result, the Troopergate allegations hang over Palin's future and cloud her candidacy for vice president....

WASILLA, Alaska -- The biggest project that Sarah Palin undertook as mayor of this small town was an indoor sports complex, where locals played hockey, soccer, and basketball, especially during the long, dark Alaskan winters. The only catch was that the city began building roads and installing utilities for the project before it had unchallenged title to the land. The misstep led to years of litigation and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for a small municipality with a small budget. What was to be Ms. Palin's legacy has turned into a financial mess that continues to plague Wasilla....

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Here in the Twin Cities, as in every city and town across America, there's only one question on everyone's mind: What could possibly qualify Sarah Palin as a candidate for vice president? The answer was provided by former presidential candidate Fred Thompson. "I can say without fear of contradiction," he told GOP delegates, most of whom had never heard of Palin a week ago, "that she is the only nominee in the history of either party who knows how to properly field dress a moose." Fine. So, on your next trip to Alaska, hire her as...

Aides to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin improperly obtained her former brother-in-law's state police personnel files and cited information from those records to raise complaints about the officer, the head of Alaska's state police union said Thursday. "It's apparent to us that the governor or someone on her staff had direct access to his personnel file, as well as his workers' comp file, and those are protected," said John Cyr, executive director of the Alaska Public Safety Employees Association. Palin, now the Republican candidate for vice president, is battling allegations that she sacked her public safety commissioner in July because he...

According to Nicole Wallace of the McCain campaign, the American people don't care whether Sarah Palin can answer specific questions about foreign and domestic policy. According to Wallace -- in an appearance I did with her this morning on Joe Scarborough's show -- the American people will learn all they need to know (and all they deserve to know) from Palin's scripted speeches and choreographed appearances on the campaign trail and in campaign ads....

In a rousing speech at last night's Republican National Convention, vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, touted her record, attacked the opposition, and in some cases bent the facts. PALIN: "[Obama] is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word 'victory' except when he's talking about his own campaign." FACT: On July 15, in a speech in Washington, D.C., Obama twice used the word "victory" in reference to Iraq. "In fact," he said, "true success in Iraq -- victory in Iraq -- will not take place...

Is the McCain campaign afraid of an 'October surprise' involving vice-presidential pick Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska? The Alaska state senator running an investigation of Gov. Palin says the McCain campaign is using stall tactics to prevent him from releasing his final report by Oct. 31, four days before the November election. "It's likely to be damaging to the Governor," said Senator Hollis French, a Democrat, appointed the project manager for a bi-partisan State Senate Legislative Counsel Committee investigation of claims that Palin abused her office to get the Alaska public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, fired....

This was posted in the comments section on the Washington Independent by Alaskan and a Wasillan, Anne Kilkenny, someone who has followed Sarah Palin very, very closely - with too many city council meetings under her belt - not to say her piece.... Her experience is as mayor of a city with a population of about 5,000 (at the time), and less than 2 years as governor of a state with about 670,000 residents. During her mayoral administration most of the actual work of running this small city was turned over to an administrator. She had been pushed to hire...

The governor's appearance on KWHL's "The Bob and Mark Show" last week is plain and simple one of the most unprofessional, childish and inexcusable performances I've ever seen from a politician. Anchorage DJ Bob Lester unleashed a vicious, mean-spirited, poisonous attack on Senate President Lyda Green last week while our governor was live on the air with him. When we played the tape on my show the day after it happened, we received 130 calls. Even some Palinbots were disgusted. The Daily News posted the recording on its Web site and it fired up bloggers. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner editorial...

Barack Obama has struggled for 18 months to lock down the support of a traditionally Democratic group, Jewish voters. In the past week, John McCain may have helped Obama with his Jewish problem by choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.... "There is almost always an inverse proportion between a candidate's popularity among conservative Christians and secular Jews," said Jeff Ballabon, a Republican lobbyist long active in Jewish politics who supports McCain. An illustration of that gap came just two weeks ago, when Palin's church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to a figure viewed with...

WASILLA, ALASKA -- For much of his long career in Washington, John McCain has been throwing darts at the special spending system known as earmarking, through which powerful members of Congress can deliver federal cash for pet projects back home with little or no public scrutiny. He's even gone so far as to publish "pork lists" detailing these financial favors. Three times in recent years, McCain's catalogs of "objectionable" spending have included earmarks for this small Alaska town, requested by its mayor at the time -- Sarah Palin.... This year, Palin, who has been governor for nearly 22 months, defended...

Republican presidential candidate John McCain picked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate after conservatives threatened a revolt if he went with his first choice, former Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman. Senator McCain has defended his choice of Ms Palin to run for vice-president after news of her 17-year-old pregnant unmarried daughter dominated day one of the Republican national convention in St Paul, Minnesota. Now it has emerged that the shock announcement of the unknown Ms Palin was forced upon Senator McCain after conservatives threatened a revolt at the convention if he pushed ahead with his preferred vice-presidential pick, Independent...

As Republicans and Democrats race to write Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R) political biography, one issue remains a mystery: her views on immigration reform. Democratic opposition researchers were searching databases Wednesday in hopes of uncovering a position that could hurt Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) efforts to cut into Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) lead among Hispanic voters, who make up 10 percent of the electorate and a higher percentage in a few key swing states in the West. But Palin’s record on immigration, as recorded by Nexis and Google, is practically nonexistent, and everyone from bloggers to members of Palin’s own...

On tax policy, Alaska governor Sarah Palin has a rather uninspiring, albeit brief, record. The following is some information gleaned from State Tax Notes. Palin supported and signed into law a $1.5 billion tax increase on oil companies in the form of higher severance taxes. One rule of thumb is that higher taxes cause less investment. Sure enough, State Tax Notes reported (January 7): “After ACES was passed, ConocoPhillips, Alaska's most active oil exploration company and one of the top three producers, announced it was canceling plans to build a diesel fuel refinery at the Kuparuk oil field. ConocoPhillips blamed...

The story of the day out here in Minneapolis is the McCain campaign's war against the press. This has been building for some time. Those of us who have criticized the candidate--and especially those of us who enjoyed good relations with McCain in the past--have been subject to off-the-record browbeating and attempted bullying all year. But things have gotten much worse in recent days: there was McCain's rude, bizarre interview with Time Magazine last week. Yesterday, McCain refused to an interview with Larry King, for God's sake, because Campbell Brown had been caught in the commission of journalism on CNN...

I had dinner last night with a Republican-leaning independent who was despondent over John McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. She had been looking forward to supporting McCain as a fiscal conservative with a deep understanding of foreign relations. But all she could now see was that picture of Palin's pregnant 17-year-old looking defiant and stupid as she held mom's fifth baby. Many religious conservatives are jubilant. They regard Palin as a swell choice because her high-schooler was going to have the baby. The line sent my friend into shock. This is not a matter...

WASILLA -- Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so. According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn’t fully support her and...