Labels: idiocy, Sarah Palin

Campaign of lies disgraces McCain

McCain's straight talk has become a toxic mix of lies and double-speak. It is leaving a permanent stain on his reputation for integrity, and it is a short-term strategy that eventually will backfire with the very types of independent-thinking voters that were so attracted to him.

[snip]

McCain's faux chivalrous outrage over Obama's purported insult is beneath him. He has been a serious public servant willing to say unpopular truths when he thought it best for the country, but he's more than willing in this election to put his name on campaign lies. The leader who says he would rather lose an election than lose a war now risks losing his reputation in an attempt to win the White House.

Labels: John McCain, lies

NPR has learned that the raid by helicopter-borne U.S. Special Operations forces in Pakistan last week was not an isolated incident but part of a three-phase plan, approved by President Bush, to strike at Osama bin Laden and top al-Qaida leadership.

The plan calls for a much more aggressive military campaign, said one source, familiar with the presidential order, which gives the green light for the military to take part in the operations. The plan represents an 11th-hour effort to hammer al-Qaida until the Bush administration leaves office, two government officials told NPR.

"Definitely, the gloves have come off," said a source who has been briefed on the plan. "This was only Phase 1 of three phases."

Pentagon and White House officials have declined to discuss the new plan.

The intelligence community already had approval from the president to carry out operations inside Pakistan, which included attacks by Predator drones, which can carry 100-pound Hellfire missiles.

Additional authority came from the president just recently that allowed incursions by U.S. Special Operations forces, the source said.

[snip]

Both sources say those in the intelligence community and on Capitol Hill are raising questions about the political intent of this new aggressive stance.

"The question is," said one of the sources, "Why wasn't this done a year ago?"

Labels: Bush Administration, cynicism, Osama bin Laden

Labels: bloggers

Labels: hurricanes

Harsh advertisements and negative attacks are a staple of presidential campaigns, but Senator John McCain has drawn an avalanche of criticism this week from Democrats, independent groups and even some Republicans for regularly stretching the truth in attacking Senator Barack Obama’s record and positions.

1: to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive
2: to create a false or misleading impression

Labels: John McCain, lying, sleaze

* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."

* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.

* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.

* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.

* If you teach teach children about sexual predators, you are irresponsible and eroding the fiber of society.

* If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate laywer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America 's.

* If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that hates America and advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

Labels: 2008 election, idiocy, R.I.P. America

Labels: hurricanes

Labels: corruption, John McCain, oil, Republicans

You're U.S. Senator John McCain, and you've got a big problem.
Your wife, Cindy, was addicted to prescription painkillers. She stole pills from a medical-aid charity she heads and she used the names of unsuspecting employees to get prescriptions.

The public is about to find out about it.
Until now, you've managed to keep it all quiet. When Tom Gosinski, a man your wife fired, sued for wrongful termination and threatened to expose the whole sordid story, you didn't hesitate to call in the big guns.

John Dowd, the attorney who got you out of your Keating Five mess, worked on getting your wife a sweetheart deal with federal prosecutors. He also made Gosinski's lawsuit go away.

He didn't stop there.
To help maintain your reputation and discredit your wife's accuser, Dowd called Maricopa County Attorney Richard Romley and complained that Gosinski was trying to extort money. Romley, your Republican ally, promptly launched an extortion investigation.

But now New Times makes a public records request for documents in the extortion case. It's only a matter of days before the story gets out.

Here's what the senator does.
He calls in another big gun, political strategist Jay Smith, who conceives a rather remarkable plan.

On August 19--just three days before the records are to be made public--Smith parades your wife before a select group of journalist friends. She tells a tale of pain and triumph, and, incredibly, all the reporters agree to sit on the story until August 22. When Cindy McCain says her confession is intended to quell rumors and to inspire other druggies to turn their lives around, the journalists lap it up. They write about her "bravery." The first round of stories is one-sided. There is no mention of Tom Gosinski or Romley's extortion investigation.

Labels: Cindy McCain, corruption, drugs, John McCain

GIBSON: Are you in favor of putting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO?

PALIN: (shrugs) Ukraine, definitely yes...and Georgia. Putin thinks otherwise, obviously he thinks otherwise, but --

GIBSON: But under the NATO treaty, wouldn't we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?

PALIN: (Nods) P..perhaps so. I mean, if that is the agreement, when you are a NATO ally is that when another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

Labels: icepick meet forehead, insanity, Sarah Palin, Wake Me Up When It's Over, wingnuttia

A whistleblower is coming forth against John and Cindy McCain, and the picture he is painting is not a pretty one.  You've probably heard about Cindy McCain stealing prescription drugs from her charity in the 1990s.  Today, Tom Gosinski, her former employee and a close friend of the McCain's, came out on the record about the entire sordid episode.  And it appears that McCain used his Senate staff and resources to cover up Cindy's drug use, and potentially to prevent the Drug Enforcement Agency from investigating his wife's theft of illegal prescription drugs.  John McCain certainly used his political connections to begin a campaign of intimidation against Gosinski, because at the time - this was after the Keating 5 scandal - another major scandal would have derailed his career.  Gosinski stayed quiet out of fear until today; a recent fight with cancer has strengthened his resolve.  As he told me today, if he can beat cancer, he can go on the record regarding how the McCain's do business.

Labels: corruption, John McCain

Labels: Craig Ferguson, voters

Labels: 9/11

Labels: John McCain, Sarah Palin, You can't make this shit up

Senator Barack Obama and two other prominent Democrats urged federal housing regulators on Tuesday to cut the golden parachutes of the ousted leaders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, another sign that the government bailout of those mortgage giants could reverberate through the presidential campaign.

Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, asked that any “inappropriate windfall payments” to the chief executives and senior managers of those agencies be voided, in a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the new regulator for Fannie and Freddie.

Together, Daniel H. Mudd of Fannie Mae and Richard F. Syron of Freddie Mac are eligible for as much as $24 million in severance, retirement benefits and deferred compensation.

“Under no circumstances should the executives of these institutions earn a windfall at a time when the U.S. Treasury has taken unprecedented steps to rescue these companies with taxpayer resources,” Mr. Obama wrote.

Amid mounting worries about its viability, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. said it would unload a chunk of troubled assets, sell a majority stake in its money-management unit and slash its dividend 93 percent.

Its problems shook the rest of the financial sector.

The 158-year-old investment bank announced the moves as it reported a $3.9-billion fiscal third-quarter loss - far bigger than its $2.8 billion second-quarter hit.

The loss came after the Wall Street firm wrote down the assets on its books by $7.8 billion. That included a $5.3 billion reduction on investments tied to residential mortgages. The company, which has operations in Utah and 24,000 employees worldwide, also said it would shift up to $30 billion in commercial real estate assets to a new entity, which will be spun off to shareholders.

To conserve cash, Lehman is chopping its annual dividend to 5 cents a share from 68 cents.

''This is an extraordinary time for our industry and one of the toughest periods in the firm's history,'' CEO Richard Fuld said in a statement.

Fuld, 62, the longest-serving CEO on Wall Street, said the firm would examine all other options - including a total sale of the company he joined right out of college. Finding a buyer might pre-empt any hostile takeovers now that Lehman's stock has plunged from $67.73 a year ago to $7.25 Wednesday, down 54 cents.

The contagion spread to other financial companies. Washington Mutual Inc. plunged 74 cents, or 22.4 percent, to $2.56 after setting a multiyear low of $2.30 earlier. WaMu, among the banks hit hardest by the housing mess, has seen the value of its shares plunge 76 percent this year, as it battles rising mortgage delinquencies and defaults. The drop also signaled that the company's recent CEO shake-up may not have been enough to placate anxious investors.

Shares of Citigroup, JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp. and Wachovia Corp. also fell.

Labels: 2008 election, economic death watch, Wake Me Up When It's Over

Labels: cynicism, despair, icepick meet forehead, John McCain, racism, Sarah Palin, sleaze, Wake Me Up When It's Over

Labels: Barack Obama

"It's a very terrible thing that happened on September 11. It's (also) a terrible thing that happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. I just feel so sad for the families that lost relatives and loved ones in the war. But I think it's the stupidest war ever. Who are you fighting against? You're just getting ambushed now. We have more people dead now, after the war, than during the war. You've been looking for weapons of mass destruction. Where are they at? You've been looking for over a year. Can't find them. I don't support that. I don't support what they do. I think it's just stupid."

Labels: activism, New York Mets

Labels: 2008 election, comedy

Labels: John McCain, warmongering

More than 40 million people tuned in last week to listen to the speech from Palin, the 44-year-old, first-term governor whom McCain announced as his surprise vice presidential pick just days before. Since then, that basic script is all anyone has heard from her publicly, and her only interaction with the media was a brief conversation with a small group of reporters on her plane Monday _ off the record at her handlers' insistence.

Associated Press reporters were not on the plane, but an aide told the journalists on board that all Palin flights would be off the record unless the media were told otherwise. At least one reporter objected. Two people on the flight said the Palins greeted the media and they chatted about who had been to Alaska, but little else was said.

Labels: media whores, Sarah Palin

The McCain-Palin campaign is taking aim at Gov. David Paterson for his suggestion this morning that Republicans are making a "racist appeal" in their denegration of Barack Obama's days as a community organizer.

"I think that there are overtones of potential racial coding in the campaign," Paterson said during the Crain's Business Forum breakfast.

"...I think the Republican party is too smart to call Barack Obama 'black' in a sense that it would be a negative. But you can take something about his life - which I noticed they did at the Republican convention -- a 'community organizer.'

They kept saying it, they kept laughing, like what does this mean? It means that an individual who could have gone to Wall Street and made a lot of money and then run for office because he could buy media time chose to go back and work in programs in a neighborhood where he thought he could make a difference and became an elected official based on his involvement right in his own community."

McCain-Palin spokesman Peter Feldman fired back, calling Paterson's comments "disappointing" and accusing him of following Barack Obama's lead in "playing the race card" (an accusation initially levied at Obama by McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis).

Labels: David Patterson, racism, Republicans

Labels: Barack Obama

The governor also has charged the state for travel expenses to take her children on official out-of-town missions. And her husband, Todd, has billed the state for expenses and a daily allowance for trips he makes on official business for his wife.

Palin, who earns $125,000 a year, claimed and received $16,951 as her allowance, which officials say was permitted because her official "duty station" is Juneau, according to an analysis of her travel documents by The Washington Post.

The governor's daughters and husband charged the state $43,490 to travel, and many of the trips were between their house in Wasilla and Juneau, the capital city 600 miles away, the documents show.

Labels: hypocrisy, Sarah Palin, sleaze, wingnuttia

But even after the government seized the mortgage finance companies on Sunday and dismissed their chief executives, the companies’ outgoing leaders could see big paydays — a prospect that angers many investors, particularly because ordinary stockholders could be virtually wiped out.

Under the terms of his employment contract, Daniel H. Mudd, the departing head of Fannie Mae, stands to collect $9.3 million in severance pay, retirement benefits and deferred compensation, provided his dismissal is deemed to be “without cause,” according to an analysis by the consulting firm James F. Reda & Associates. Mr. Mudd has already taken home $12.4 million in cash compensation and stock option gains since becoming chief executive in 2004, according to an analysis by Equilar, an executive pay research firm.

Richard F. Syron, the departing chief executive of Freddie Mac, could receive an exit package of at least $14.1 million, largely because of a clause added to his employment contract in November of last year as his company’s troubles deepened. He has taken home $17.1 million in pay and stock option gains since becoming chief executive in 2003.

Labels: corporatism, greed, incompetence

Labels: Rachel Maddow

Now you know why I feel so strongly about this issue. Because I've lived it and because my entire adult life has forced this issue to the forefront. Life is messy and people get caught up in situations that are not of their own making far too often. We never asked for an ectopic pregnancy, but we got one nonetheless. Pro-life folks want you to think that abortion is the only facet of being pro-choice but they could not be more wrong or dishonest.

Being pro-choice is to be compassionate and honest about the world around us, and to value the life of the mother just as much as the life within her -- and to trust the women and others involved in each circumstance to weigh all of the issues involved. Because that is what they already do. Most of the women that I have ever known who faced unenviable difficulties in these decisions chose to have their child where it was medically possible. Which is...a choice.

Pretending otherwise is simply to lie.

Anti-abortion activists promote a policy of official meddling — yes, by government bureaucrats — into the private lives of millions of American women, and the lives of their husbands and boyfriends.

Their pleas to now give the Palin family privacy in one of its most difficult moments are easily understood and no doubt supported by every American who has ever had a family crisis. That is, by all of us.

No one who supports abortion rights would wish for any unmarried, 17-year-old girl to become pregnant. No advocate of abortion rights would even suggest that a teenager in Bristol's situation should terminate the pregnancy without weighing her own conscience and deciding, with her family, on her own course.

And yes, we believe she should make her decisions in a private cocoon, embraced by loving family and friends. We just wish that anti-abortion crusaders would afford every family the same respect for privacy they now demand for one of their own.

Labels: bloggers, real journalism, reproductive rights

In June, Andrée McLeod, a self-described independent government watchdog in Alaska, sent an open records act request to the office of Governor Sarah Palin. She requested copies of all the emails that had been sent and received by Ivy Frye and Frank Bailey, two top aides to Palin, from February through April of this year. McLeod, a 53-year-old registered Republican who has held various jobs in state government, suspected that Frye and Bailey had engaged in political activity during official business hours in that period by participating in a Palin-backed effort to oust the state chairman of the Alaska Republican party, Randy Ruedrich. (Bailey has been in the national news of late for refusing to cooperate with investigators probing whether Palin fired Alaska's public safety commission because he did not dismiss a state trooper who had gone through an ugly divorce with Palin's sister.)

In response to her request, McLeod received four large boxes of emails. This batch of documents did not contain any proof that Frye and Bailey had worked on government time to boot out Ruedrich. But there was other information she found troubling. Several of the emails suggested to her that Palin's office had used its influence to reward a Fairbanks surveyor who was a Palin fundraiser with a state job. In early August, McLeod filed a complaint with the state attorney general against Palin, Bailey, and other Palin aides, claiming they had violated ethics and hiring laws. Palin, now the Republican vice-presidential candidate, told the Alaska Daily News that "there were no favors done for anybody."

But more intriguing than any email correspondence contained in the four boxes was what was not released: about 1100 emails. Palin's office provided McLeod with a 78-page list (PDF) cataloging the emails it was withholding. Many of them had been written by Palin or sent to her. Palin's office claimed most of the undisclosed emails were exempt from release because they were covered by the "executive" or "deliberative process" privileges that protect communications between Palin and her aides about policy matters. But the subject lines of some of the withheld emails suggest they were not related to policy matters. Several refer to one of Palin's political foes, others to a well-known Alaskan journalist. Moreover, some of the withhold emails were CC'ed to Todd Palin, the governor's husband. Todd Palin—a.k.a. the First Dude—holds no official state position (though he has been a close and influential adviser for Governor Palin). The fact that Palin and her aides shared these emails with a citizen outside the government undercuts the claim that they must be protected under executive privilege. McLeod asks, "What is Sarah Palin hiding?"

Labels: dictatorship, Sarah Palin, secrecy

Sarah Palin's churches are actively involved in a resurgent movement that was declared heretical by the Assemblies of God in 1949. This is the same 'Spiritual Warfare' movement that was featured in the award winning movie, "Jesus Camp," which showed young children being trained to do battle for the Lord. At least three of four of Palin's churches are involved with major organizations and leaders of this movement, which is referred to as The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit or the New Apostolic Reformation. The movement is training a young "Joel's Army" to take dominion over the United States and the world.

[snip]

The pastor, Ed Kalnins, and Masters Commission students have traveled to South Carolina to participate in a "prophetic conference" at Morningstar Ministries, one of the major ministries of the Third Wave movement. Becky Fischer was a pastor at Morningstar prior to being featured in the movie "Jesus Camp." The head of prophecy at Morningstar, Steve Thompson, is currently scheduled to do a prophecy seminar at the Wasilla Assembly of God. Other major leaders in the movement have also traveled to Wasilla to visit and speak at the church.

The Third Wave is a revival of the theology of the Latter Rain tent revivals of the 1950s and 1960s led by William Branham and others. It is based on the idea that in the end times there will be an outpouring of supernatural powers on a group of Christians that will take authority over the existing church and the world. The believing Christians of the world will be reorganized under the Fivefold Ministry and the church restructured under the authority of Prophets and Apostles and others anointed by God. The young generation will form "Joel's Army" to rise up and battle evil and retake the earth for God.

Labels: Christian Dominionism, Sarah Palin, wingnuttia

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.

“The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what’s supposed to be straight news programming,” said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin.

Executives at the channel’s parent company, NBC Universal, had high hopes for MSNBC’s coverage of the political conventions. Instead, the coverage frequently descended into on-air squabbles between the anchors, embarrassing some workers at NBC’s news division, and quite possibly alienating viewers. Although MSNBC nearly doubled its total audience compared with the 2004 conventions, its competitive position did not improve, as it remained in last place among the broadcast and cable news networks. In prime time, the channel averaged 2.2 million viewers during the Democratic convention and 1.7 million viewers during the Republican convention.

[snip]

The McCain campaign has filed letters of complaint to the news division about its coverage and openly tied MSNBC to it. Tension between the network and the campaign hit an apex the day Mr. McCain announced Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. MSNBC had reported Friday morning that Ms. Palin’s plane was enroute to the announcement and she was likely the pick. But McCain campaign officials warned the network off, with one official going so far as to say that all of the candidates on the short list were on their way — which MSNBC then reported.

“The fact that it was reported in real time was very embarrassing,” said a senior MSNBC official. “We were told, ‘No, it’s not Sarah Palin and you don’t know who it is.’ ”

Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams, the past and present anchors of “NBC Nightly News,” have told friends and colleagues that they are finding it tougher and tougher to defend the cable arm of the news division, even while they anchored daytime hours of convention coverage on MSNBC and contributed commentary each evening.

Mr. Williams did not respond to a request for comment and Mr. Brokaw declined to comment. At a panel discussion in Denver, Mr. Brokaw acknowledged that Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews had “gone too far” at times, but emphasized they were “not the only voices” on MSNBC, according to The Washington Post.

Al Hunt, the executive Washington bureau chief of Bloomberg News, said that the entire news division was being singled out by Republicans because of the work of partisans like Mr. Olbermann. “To go and tar the whole news network and Brokaw and Mitchell is grossly unfair,” he said, referring to the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell.

Labels: hack journalism, MSNBC, spinelessness

Labels: bloggers

At age 2, McCain's tantrums were so intense that he'd hold his breath for a few minutes and pass out. His parents would dunk him in cold water to "cure" him, he wrote in his memoir, "Faith of My Fathers."

Frequent temper tantrums
Argumentativeness with adults
Refusal to comply with adult requests or rules
Deliberate annoyance of other people
Blaming others for mistakes or misbehavior
Acting touchy and easily annoyed
Anger and resentment
Spiteful or vindictive behavior
Aggressiveness toward peers
Difficulty maintaining friendships
Academic problems

Labels: anger management, John McCain

The unemployment rate jumped to 6.1 percent in August, the highest level since September of 2003. The establishment survey showed the economy losing another 84,000 jobs in August. With downward revisions to data for the prior two months, the economy has lost an average of 81,000 jobs over the last three months.

Virtually all the data in the household survey indicates that the labor market is weakening at a rapid pace. The 6.1 percent unemployment rate is only 0.2 percentage points below the 6.3 percent peak reached in June of 2003. The employment to population ratio (EPOP) ratio fell to 62.1 percent, only slightly above the 62.0 percent low hit in September of 2003.

Unemployment rose among almost all demographic groups, but women were hit hardest, with a rise of 0.7 pp to 5.3 percent.

[snip]

The only sectors that continue to show healthy job gains are health care, which added another 26,900 jobs, and state and local governments, which added 18,000 jobs. Job growth in both of these sectors is likely to fade as state and local budget shortfalls force cutbacks.

Labels: employment

Ohio election officials are sending out a mass mailer stamped “do not forward” to all registered voters today (Sept. 5) with an absentee ballot application and other important notices for Nov. 4.

What’s important here is not so much what’s going out as what’s being returned to sender.

Unbeknownst to the would-be recipients, the same mailer — just 60 days before the election — has the potential to determine their eligibility to vote, challenged not by election officials but by partisan opposition.

A similar mailer in March netted nondeliverable mail from almost 600,000 registered voters in just five Ohio counties who could now have their ballots thrown out for voting under the wrong address.

The National Voter Registration Act prohibits any state from purging names from the voting rolls within 90 days of an election.

The law doesn’t, however, preclude mass partisan challenges on or shortly before Election Day — known as voter caging — based on the same returned envelopes from state-sponsored mailers like the ones in Ohio and others going out across the country.

In 2004, the year the national election hinged on results from Ohio, the Ohio Republican Party challenged 35,000 voters based on returned mail from the GOP's own friendly reminder notices. From 2004 to 2006, Republicans challenged 77,000 voters this way nationwide. A consent decree issued in 1982 and amended in 1987 enjoins the GOP from instituting “ballot security programs” that focus on minority voters.

No evidence so far suggests Republicans — vote caging is essentially a GOP sport — have mounted a caging campaign this year. Yet, in July, Franklin County Election Director and County GOP Chairman Doug Preisse told reporters he didn’t rule out challenges before November, particularly because of increased home foreclosures, which would make failures to change address on voter registration records more common.

A challenged voter will likely cast a provisional ballot, which often requires voters to return to election divisions to prove their identity and address. Nearly a third of all 1.6 million provisional ballots cast in 2004 were thrown out.

Labels: 2008 election, disenfranchisement, vote suppression

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has agreed to sit down with ABC's Charles Gibson later this week for her first television interview since John McCain chose her as his running mate more than a week ago.

Palin will sit down for multiple interviews with Gibson in Alaska over two days, most likely Thursday and Friday, said McCain adviser Mark Salter.

The interview with Palin was confirmed Friday, ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said.

Labels: Charles Gibson, hack journalism

State records show that Palin submitted a travel authorization for a quick round-trip visit to attend the June 8 graduation of the Master's Commission program at the Wasilla Assembly of God, the church where she was baptized at age 12. The only other item on the agenda for that trip was a "One Lord Sunday" service involving a network of Mat-Su Christian churches earlier that morning at the Wasilla sports complex.

The records show Palin flew from Juneau to Anchorage on Saturday, June 7. She returned to Juneau that Monday afternoon. The plane tickets cost the state $519.50, and she claimed an additional $120 for meals and other expenses.

Palin couldn't be reached for comment Friday as she campaigned for vice president. Her spokeswoman at the McCain campaign said she wouldn't grant an interview.

Labels: Sarah Palin, theocracy, Wake Me Up When It's Over

Labels: Joe Biden, reproductive rights