Weekly Sarah Palin roundup and report from the anti-Palin protest rally in Eugene, Oregon on April 23, 2010

Weekly roundup

Guest post by Blueberry Tart

Hello again, Palingaters; Blueberry Tart here with a roundup of the news of the past week (or so) in Palin-la-la-land. My “week” actually began with my own first foray into guest-posting on Palingates, with my report and photos from the Tea(bagger) rally in Boston last week. It’s been a busy week at Palingates since then (as usual); here is a quick recap:

1. The roundup begins with mxm’s excellent guest post, providing a detailed analysis of the first quarter 2010 report from SarahPAC. Some of the key findings: the PAC took in a little less (~$400K) than it paid out in the first quarter ($409K+). The biggest expenditures were for consultants (almost $300K), with very little going to support political campaigns ($9500). Sarah’s promise that her fees from the Tea(bagger) Party Convention in Nashville seems to be another false promise, as there is no evidence that she reinvested her fee in that cause.

The updates to the post include questions about the legality of some of the expenses, such as the payments to Thomas Van Flein’s law firm (PAC funds cannot pay personal expenses). Also, there is a list of all the donors at the $5000 level. Great work sorting through and organizing this information by mxm!

2. This wealth of information about SarahPAC led to several excellent follow up posts. The first, by Patrick and Kathleen, was about Kim Daniels, one of the PAC’s payees ($21,000 this quarter), who is an evangelical attorney at the ultra-Christian Thomas More Law Center. The post has a chilling video about this organization; if you haven’t seen it, you should, but be forewarned that it might give you nightmares. Among other things, the TMLC has filed a legal challenge against the individual mandate provision of the new health insurance reform legislation. Kim Daniels is apparently paid by SarahPAC to write a daily briefing report for Sarah.

3. Next was a comic interlude by Danielle Crittenden (recently ousted Republican political consultant David Frum’s wife), who entertained us with tweets from Palin’s speech in Hamilton, Ontario. Her tweets were biting and especially fun to read, coming from a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. And honestly, if you have not read the transcript of the speech, you really should get yourself an adult beverage and indulge in an almost out-of-body experience (happily, you won’t have to listen to THE SHRIEK), bordering on the paranormal. Beginning with Sarah apparently confusing “Buenos Aires” with “buenos días,” this speech almost gives the resignation speech a challenge in terms of its pure chaos, random juxtapositions and lack of intelligible communication.

4. Back to business with Eye on You’s inquiry about how Krobar (Kurt Robar) earned $51,405 in the first quarter, when it appears that the websites that he designed are rudimentary and still “under construction.” Several commenters with expertise in the website design field offered differing opinions about whether these expenses were justifiable or not. There were theories that there may be websites already created but under wraps, awaiting the grand announcement of a run for political office (God forbid), versus other thoughts that these expenses were way out of line for any such services. One commenter who knows Mr. Robar personally vouched for him as a decent guy with a wife who is, among other things, a biting critic of Her Highness. To add another layer of confusion (so typical in everything Palin), it is not entirely clear that Mr. Robar is even aware that he was supposedly paid this much money.

5. Next, Mrs. TarquinBiscuitBarrel presented an excellent critique of Anne Kornblut’s underwhelming book, "Notes from the Cracked Ceiling", which covers Hillary Clinton’s and Sarah Palin’s failed candidacies for higher office and “what it will take for a woman to win.” Mrs. TBB gives an interesting insider view of why the MSM won’t touch babygate (or many other Palingates). She calls out the books flaws, including its apparent failure to recognize and call out the major differences in the qualifications of Hillary and Sarah – thus by implication equating them with each other. I cannot do justice to Mrs. TBB’s way with words in highlighting the books major weaknesses; my own take is that it is simplistic, primarily a regurgitation, offering nothing new in either information or insight. The commenters encouraged Mrs.TBB to work on a book on Palin, which she seems willing to do – oh, please do! There was also strong support in the comments for Palingates to pull its material together in book form – yes!

6. Rounding out my first week on the job (so to speak) is Patrick’s excellent post on the incredibly foul and disgusting, threatening messages received by California State Senator Leland Yee, due to his calls to investigate the way in contract for Sarah Palin to speak at California State University Stanislaus. His questions about whether public funds are being used for the speaking engagement apparently enraged some totally nasty lunatic fringe Palin-bots, who responded by making threatening calls and sending horrific faxes to his office. Our very own Patrick called Senator Yee’s office and received a copy of the fax and the audio clip of a highly abusive phone call, which he posted. Thanks to the efforts of PG and its readers, the story is being picked up by other sites. Hopefully PG’s great work exposing the disgusting underbelly of the radical rightwing will help to discredit these wingnuts and those who incite them.

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Thank you so much again, Blueberry Tart!

The weekly roundup had been written before the events of yesterday, but I am sure that you have all seen our post about Sarah's testimony in the David Kernell trial.

In addition, we have received an "on-the-spot report" and brilliant photos from our reader "Tyroanee" from the anti-Palin protests which happened yesterday in the liberal stronghold of Eugene, Orgeon. I cannot express how proud we are that so many people are willing to contribute to the Palingates community!

Also, click HERE for the special message of the week from our very own Palingates mascot!

Patrick

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Palin Protest Rally Eugene Oregon 2010

Guest post by Tyroanee

In Eugene we are famous for our outrageous garb, straight talk and some odd looking individuals. We are a nuclear free zone as well… but I’m sure that wasn’t presented in full to the queen of Wasilla.

So on this beautiful sunny day in Eugene Oregon my family and I had a chance to stand along side such individuals. I decided to take my two teenagers, whom hadn’t been to a protest before so they could see and hear what it is that makes some of the Palinbots tick. I was ready to take video and ask questions as to what policies interested them and in what way? There were only 4 or 5 individuals in support of Palin, they only stayed for a short time and were gone POOF.

Many Sarah protesters showed up to voice their opinion on Palin Politics, some carried signs, and others had speaker-phones. Many milled about and took pictures or video and kept to themselves, until this one particular lady showed up wagging her finger across the street and holding this sign:

“The one without sin throw the first stone!!- said Jesus”

Now mind you I am not the one you want to start slinging bible quotes, as it has absolutely no plausible reason to be in a Palin protest… but to be honest I was looking on the ground for some stones. Was she serious? Oh very-very serious, but then so were the others, so we held our signs high because throwing rocks would be completely out of the question.

My two teenagers stood alongside with me holding up signs and cheering to the cars on 6th Ave. As the driving fans honked in support, we did have a few hand gestures directed at us, and the occasional Obama Sucks shout-out, but all in all it was a successful protest.

A few stories above us were the young waiters whom were obviously bored earning their $8.oo hr waiting to serve Palin and her merry followers $$$. As the sky literally filled with dark rain clouds as we walked to our car… Palin stood behind the transparency glass of hidden agendas, deep from the public eye they gathered to hear their queen speak; she had a roaring crowd of standing ovations from her paying admirers.

Nothing but the best…Hilton is the dirty old building in town holding only 800 people

As we walked to our car a block away, I stopped and had to take this picture, here on the same road, in front of the same building that Sarah was to speak parked this truck:

Eugene Oregon Has a Funny Sense of Humor

Parked right in front of the Hilton building (see windows in background) in this picture is Sarah Palin delivering her spew to her Republican supporters…?
This is why I love Oregon.

Peace to all
Tyroanee over and out for the night

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More pictures from the protest yesterday in Eugene, Oregon, taken by Tyroanee:

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Book review: "Notes From the Cracked Ceiling - Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win", by Anne E. Kornblut

Guest post by Mrs. Tarquinbiscuitbarrel

I keep waiting for some member of the so-called mainstream media (MSM), other than Andrew Sullivan, to take a searching look into all of the dim corners of Sarah Palin's rise to national prominence, and to question what she says about herself, and what we are told about her. Sadly, Notes From the Cracked Ceiling fails to do so, and for reasons with which I am personally, and unhappily, familiar. Kornblut, who has covered all three Presidential elections since joining the Washington Post in 1998, is young (thirtysomething?), ambitious, and is likely to continue to follow a well-worn path to journalistic success.

Unfortunately, MSM journalists, already shell-shocked by grim tidings about their career prospects, tend to proceed cautiously. Any vigorous investigative journalism that might rock a craft as leaky as the S.S. Sarah might very well swamp the journalist--who has no PAC, no slush fund, no television show, no screaming fans--rather than Palin herself. My oldest son, still in his early twenties, has worked for five newspapers, and currently writes for The New York Times. We have fought bitterly about the details of Palin's life. My husband, who was a very successful journalist and editor before rejoining his original profession, has a gentler view of the "Why bother?! Who cares?!" views that our son has shouted at me. "Sarah Palin's never going to run for anything again," says the senior Mr. B. "So I don't know why all of this matters so much."

Evidently, Anne E. Kornblut shares the same viewpoints as the Biscuitbarrel men. Though she writes astutely and perceptively about women as politicians--not just Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, but Janet Napolitano, Nancy Pelosi, Jane Swift, and Meg Whitman, among others--regarding Palin, Kornblut seemed to be treading a cautious path, deviating not a whit from the MSM's Palin memes with which we already are so familiar.

My argument with Kornblut (and her publishers) begins with the book's title. Though yes, both Clinton and Palin were involved in the 2008 election, Palin arrived long after Clinton had admitted defeat in the national primaries and vowed to support Barack Obama. To lump together both women in the subtitle ...And What It Will Take for a Woman to Win, confers co-equal "qualities" upon the two women--one running for President, one named to the Vice Presidential slot on the ticket late in the race, with just nine weeks left to campaign--that we all now know that Palin does not possess. In major races, a candidate's strengths also may prove to be their weaknesses. Although Hillary Clinton has a superior education and professional resume, as well as thirty-five years in the public eye including eight years as First Lady, those very assets did not help her with Democratic voters suffering from "Clinton fatigue," or those susceptible to the powerful appeal of her Senate colleague, Barack Obama.

Where does Sarah Palin fit into that equation? Well, she doesn't, not compared with the other politicians in this book. Govenor Jennifer Granholm was successfully elected governor of Michigan only after her model-perfect looks were "toned down" by black-and-white campaign ads. However, Phi Beta Kappa Granholm also graduated with honors from Harvard Law School. So, Palin and Granholm aren't comparable... okay, I tried. Kornblut's book is at its weakest when she presents the even more feeble reasoning given for Palin's appearance on the Republican ticket. Neither Tim Pawlenty nor Mitt Romney were believed to lend significant support to John McCain's campaign, as would a socially conservative woman who also was called a "hottie."

Regarding the husbands of politicians, Kornblut demonstrates that women are held more accountable than their male opponents regarding the family career and finances. Senator Dianne Feinstein was passed over as Walter Mondale's running mate when the finances of Feinstein's husband, Richard Blum, came under the microscope, a fate that also befell Geraldine Ferraro and her husband John Zaccaro after Ferraro was added to the 1984 Presidential ticket.

However, Kornblut slips, and slips big-time, in her completely inadequate account of Todd Palin. Although the e-mails demonstrating Todd Palin's intimate acquaintance with State of Alaska business had been released by MSNBC before Kornblut's book went to press, there was no mention of Todd Palin's co-governorship, just a brief mention of Troopergate. ("Todd Palin said he had simply met with the safety commissioner, not taken part in any effort to pressure him,") notes Kornblut parenthetically. Neither did Kornblut touch Todd's membership with the separatist Alaska Independence Party, Sarah Palin's involvement with Arctic Cat and other donors, the family's dicey receipt of per diem funds to live in their own house, or discuss how the First Dude might have enjoyed special privileges while competing on those eternal snow machine races for which other participants were disqualified. The material was there for the using; Kornblut didn't bite.

Picture below: Sarah Palin on April 8, 2008 -

Footage shot by Israeli filmmaker Elan Frank

Read about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy HERE.

I would have been shocked had Kornblut not dropped the ball on Babygate, but drop it she did. Though she says that she "and every other ... journalist I know, including Andrew Sullivan" had received the DailyKos posting by ArcXIX, that began, "Sarah I'm calling you a liar. And not even a good one. Trig... is not your son. He is your grandson," she had nothing to add. McCain aide Nicolle Wallace tells proudly of responding to the first reporter who called to ask about Palin's alleged "wild ride" by responding, "'Are you asking me to respond, on the record, to a charge than amniotic fluid came out of her vagina?' He was so mortified, he hung up."

Kornblut adds, "Back at McCain headquarters, where aides had been out of the loop on Palin's selection in the first place, advisers did not know whether to believe the baby was hers. The conspiracy theory ... was reminiscent of the frenetic response a decade and a half earlier" when Hillary Clinton allegedly "had participated in corruption and murder, or secretly been a lesbian." Whoa, Nelly! Anne, honey, what a jump! After Kornblut goes off on a tangent and returns to "refute questions about a faked pregnancy," she appears completely content with the McCain campaign's insistence that Bristol was "five months pregnant" at the time of the RNC, and therefore could not possibly have given birth to Trig. Finis. We all know that no birth certificate has ever been presented to confirm Trig's birth date and birthparents. Kornblut doesn't mention this, either.

Reading this book with an eye to what will interest Palingates, it is clear that the only new material (for me, at least) is Wallace's remark above. There is absolutely nothing else in this book about Palin that we haven't seen a hundred times before. Elaine Lafferty, interestingly enough, shows up as early as page three in Notes From the Cracked Ceiling, when she "showed up on stage at a Palin rally." Subsequently, on page 53, Lafferty (billed solely as "former editor of Ms. Magazine" and not yet on the McCain/Palin payroll, a fact that appears to have eluded Kornblut completely), wrote Hillary Clinton a memo stating, "You ignore the Oprah phenomenon at your peril."

I'm going to quote what is perhaps, for Palingates readers, the money quote of this book: On page 120, after McCain adviser Carly Fiorina had been sidelined "after remarking on television that neither McCain nor Palin would have been qualified to run her former company. Fiorina's treatment only made the women of the campaign feel more isolated. Newer allies, including Elaine Lafferty, former editor of Ms. Magazine and a Clinton supporter, tried to intervene.

"Lafferty was an unusual fit inside McCain's world: a feminist and a Democrat; moved by Clinton's defeat, she offered her expertise as a writer and a communicator after Palin was selected (she had also, five years earlier, coauthored a book with [Greta] Van Susteren)...Now, in late 2008, Lafferty found herself volunteering at McCain headquarters as the Republicans tried to win over disaffected Clinton voters. [Emphasis added.] "I had been obviously brought on to have something to do with women voters, but couldn't get anywhere with that, despite memo after memo after memo," she said. "People would say, 'What do you do on the campaign?' I would say, 'I write memos.

"Lafferty was insistent that Palin could be more effective if she tried to talk more directly to women, rather than repeating her stock lines about being a 'maverick.' "My point was that you've got to use certain language. Women wanted to support her. The ones who are lukewarm can be made passionate, the ones who are passionate can convince others, the ones who are uncomfortable can be brought around. I was trying to push language, and push a speech,' said Lafferty.

"Remarkably enough, Palin did give a speech on women, on October 22, in Henderson, Nevada. It went almost completely unnoticed at the time, buried under a cascade of daily events and viewed cynically by the traveling press corps--another cheap effort to win women over, just as the Palin pick itself had been. Palin was still drawing big crowds, but by then she was such a problematic running mate that few in the political establishment took her seriously...

"If Clinton had epitomized the feminist movement's dream, Palin was in many ways its worst nightmare, and almost all of the national groups--NOW, the National Organization for Women, being the most prominent--rejected her reflexively. That left some big-tent feminists, such as Lafferty, feeling alienated.... when Lafferty wrote a piece for The Daily Beast defending Palin's intellect, she was pilloried in over-the-top terms (one posting on the popular women's site Jezebel.com bore the headline, in huge type, "As Far As I'm Concerned, Elaine Lafferty Can Go F**k Herself")..."

The Jezebel author's name, Megan Carpentier, was not mentioned by Kornblut. Neither did Kornblut know, evidently, that Lafferty received $25,000 for "GOTV consulting" from the McCain/Palin campaign on September 30, 2008, a month before "Sarah Palin's a Brainiac" appeared in The Daily Beast on October 27, 2008; Lafferty received another $25,000 from the McCain/Palin campaign on October 31, 2008, as well as subsequent payments from both the McCain/Palin campaign and from SarahPAC. This author started out viewing Lafferty as a volunteer, and did not do the follow-up to ensure that she remained so, or not. In addition to the usual acknowledgments, Kornblut thanks dozens and dozens of people (including Elaine Lafferty), "the gang on the plane," and specifically thanks five separate researchers, as well as "the team at Accentage... turning around transcripts within days just as I needed them." My, my. Quite a luxury, as any midlist author will tell you.

In summary, this is an excellent resource for anyone interested in women politicians, as well as party and gender preferences during elections. It contains material that will make election junkies nod their heads in agreement, and boasts moments of pure charm. For example, when Rahm Emanuel advised Nancy Pelosi not to "get too comfortable with the idea of winning back the [Democratic] majority [in Congress] in 2006, [as] he was superstitious," Pelosi playfully responded, "Jews never put the crib up until the baby is born. In the Catholic tradition, we never take the crib down." Kornblut excels in that sort of anecdote. But Notes From the Cracked Ceiling proved to be profoundly frustrating as a source of information of anything new and revealing on Sarah Palin. So much access! So many resources! And all Anne gives us is the same old, same old! And most depressingly, I'm sure I know why!

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Websites which linked to this post:

Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Dish

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