Ellington

The whole coal-gate controversy, pushed by McCain and especially Palin, has inspired me to start a list of the lies/distortions that duo has pushed in recent weeks. I need y'all to help beef it out.

1. Coal-gate
2. Palling around with terrorists; lie that Obama started his campaign in Bill Ayers' living room. Now, he likes terrorists? She is hideous.
3. The Khalidi card—didn't seem to matter to Palin or McCain that he gave the professor a half million dollars.
4. Palin the reformer—just kidding, wink, wink said no to Congress on the Bridge to Nowhere. Actually, Congress said no, and she took the money and spent it elsewhere.
5. Palin saying the Troopergate investigation did not find that she abused her power, when it said that she "abused her power."
6. Quoting an old radio interview saying that Obama wanted "redistribution" and a "radical" court when he was talking against Supreme Court judicial activism.
7. Saying Obama's tax plans are "socialism," while similar ideas pushed by McCain aren't. (Nor is Alaska's oil-tax redistribution plan.)
8. Palin making fun of fruit-fly research in her special-needs "policy" speech—while fruit-fly research is vital to finding a cure for autism.
9. McCain's Pennsylvania campaign head pushing the Ashley Todd "mutilation" story to the media before it was confirmed.
10. McCain and Palin saying Obama wants to cut defense spending 25 percent. Flat-out lie.
11. Saying that Joe-the-Plumber would be hurt by Obama's tax plan.

OK, help me out. What were the other whoppers? Number them please.

Previous Comments

ID

140158

Comment

Sounds like the second Troopergate is coming in a half hour at 6:30 p.m. CST. Will it reveal more lies? On the eve of Tuesday's historic presidential election, the Alaska Personnel Board will release a report by an independent investigator it hired to determine whether Gov. Sarah Palin broke state ethics law when she fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan in July. At a personnel board meeting Monday, independent investigator Timothy Petumenos, an Anchorage attorney, told the board he wrapped up his investigation and had prepared a report for the panel. Petumenos has been meeting with the personnel board behind closed since late Monday morning. The personnel board said Petumenos's report will be released at 8:30 p.m. EDT. Y'all have heard that Palin has dropped 30 points in approval in Alaska, right? And that Alaska is polling in single digits between Obama and McCain? Maybe Alaskans are sick and tired of the McCain campaign trying to waltz in and try to tell them how to run their damn state. And, it seemed, many didn't know how hateful she could be.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2008-11-03T17:57:47-06:00

ID

140160

Comment

And here is what Christopher HItchens says about the contrived attack on Obama's dinner with Khalidi: My main point, though, is not to call attention to the bullying and demagogy of McCain's attack. It is to observe how completely it undermines any claim on his part to foreign-policy experience. Khalidi has been known to me for some time and can easily be read and consulted by anyone with the remotest curiosity about the Israeli-Arab dispute. He is highly renowned, well beyond the borders of his own discipline, for his measure and care and scruple in weighing the issue. If he is seriously to be compared to a "neo-Nazi," then the Republican nominee has put the United States in the unbelievable position of slandering the most courageously "moderate" of the Palestinian Arabs as a brownshirt and a fascist. What then has been the point of every negotiation on a two-state solution since President George H.W. Bush convened the peace conference in Madrid in 1991? Nazis, after all, are to be crushed, not accommodated. One would have to think hard before coming up with a more crazy and irresponsible statement on any subject. Once again, it seems that McCain utterly lost his bearings. I put the word moderate in quotation marks above because I dislike employing it in its usual form. Rashid Khalidi's family is a famous one in Jerusalem, long respected by Arab and Christian and Jew and Druze and Armenian, and holding a celebrated house and position in the city since approximately the time of the Crusades. I have had the honor of being invited to this very house. If Rashid chooses to state that he doesn't care to be evicted from his ancestral home in order to make way for some settler from Brooklyn who claims to have God on his side, I think he has a perfect right to say so. I would go further and say that if Barack Obama was looking for a Palestinian friend, he could not have chosen any better. But perhaps John McCain has decided that he doesn't need any Palestinian friends and neither do we. Perhaps he thinks it's all right to refer to refugees and victims of occupation, who have been promised self-determination and statehood at the podium of the United Nations and the U.S. Congress by George Bush and Condoleezza Rice, as if they were Hitlerites. How shameful. How disgusting. How ignorant. No one has stooped lower than John McCain in a campaign in the last several decades. He and Palin make the Willie Horton attacks look nice in comparison. I have lost all respect for someone I once respected immensely. It is so tragic. And that hateful woman needs to head back to Alaska to mend fences on the homefront.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2008-11-03T18:11:00-06:00

ID

140161

Comment

Just in: The second report says that Palin did not violate state ethics law: A new report just released -- hours before the polls open on Election Day -- exonerates Gov. Sarah Palin in the Troopergate controversy. The state Personnel Board-sanctioned investigation is the second into whether Palin violated state ethics law in firing her public safety commissioner, and it contradicts the earlier findings by a special counsel hired by the state Legislature. Both investigations found that Palin was within her rights to fire Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. But the new report says the Legislature's investigator was wrong to conclude that Palin abused her power by allowing aides and her husband, Todd, to pressure Monegan and others to dismiss her ex-brother-in-law, Trooper Mike Wooten. Palin was accused of firing Monegan after Wooten stayed on the job. There's no stopping Todd Palin now!

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2008-11-03T18:57:29-06:00

ID

140163

Comment

This is infuriating. She is outright lying about what the tape said, and the context of what he is saying. It's as if Palin doesn't understand basic discussion about issues, and thinks voters are no smarter than she is—or that they have the power to go listen to this stuff themselves. For the record, here is Obama-Biden's energy platform. And a Washington Post piece breaking it down: The Western Business Roundtable, the National Mining Association and various other groups criticized Obama for a comment he made in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. They quoted the interview at some length, in which Obama discusses his support for a cap-and-trade bill that would force all emitters of greenhouse gases to buy allowances in a public auction. This is a plan that has very widespread support among Democrats, some Republicans (including Sen. John McCain, who co-sponsored two cap-and-trade bills) and many utilities (especially those with more nuclear than greenhouse gas-emitting coal plants). Here's the key line from Obama: "So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted." And this: The Obama campaign hit back today, calling the issue another of the McCain-Palin campaign's "last minute, desperate distortions." The campaign said that Obama supports "clean coal," shorthand for saying he would invest in technology that would attempt to capture and bury carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants. That technology is critical to the future of coal if climate change predictions are correct. The climate issue can't be solved without addressing emissions from coal plants. But the technology is probably at least a decade or so away from being commercially viable, so supporting "clean coal" sidesteps the question of what he'd do about new coal plants now. That is, presumably, why the senator was describing the impact a cap-and-trade bill might have at an earlier point. This is a dilemma, incidentally, that a McCain presidency would have, too, if McCain is sensitive to the need to slow climate change. So what did Obama actually say? The Western Business Roundtable sent a text around. But the Obama campaign version includes a few sentences at the beginning that the business group omitted. Here it is: "I voted against the Clear Skies Bill. In fact, I was the deciding vote. Despite the fact that I'm a coal state. And that half my state thought that I had thoroughly betrayed them. Because I think clean air is critical and global warming is critical. But this notion of no coal, I think, is an illusion. Because the fact of the matter is is that right now we are getting a lot of our energy from coal. And China is building a coal-powered plant once a week. So what we have to do then is figure out how can we use coal without emitting greenhouse gases and carbon. And how can we sequester that carbon and capture it. If we can't, then we're gonna still be working on alternatives.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2008-11-03T19:32:06-06:00