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Sunday, September 14, 2008
(Updated) Palin: One Heartbeat Away
Update: If you want to regain some faith that ordinary people see through this dishonesty and incompetence, check out this DK diary (with wonderful video and photos) that tells the story of the largest demonstration ever held in Anchorage, Alaska -- for an Alaska Women Reject Palin rally. It might make your day.
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Palin does her Bush doctrine fade above. Even better, see last night's hilarious Saturday Night Live opening, with Tina Fey returning to the show to nail Palin, body language and all, and Amy Poehler getting down to it as Hillary. (They keep taking it down at YouTube so click the link to watch it at NBC.)
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler on SNL
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September 14, 2008 at 11:21 AM in 2008 General Presidential Election, Media | Permalink
Comments
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are hilarious. Tina is a dead-on ringer for Palin and what a funny way to turn it around 'cause, who in their right mind would want to be told they look like Palin!
I missed SNL. Thanks for the link. Laughed my butt off.
Palin, however, is no laughing matter.
It is amazing how the Repubs are defending her. I was reading over on DCF and was amazed at people I once thought were smart and articulate... now defending her! Gah!
Obama needs to get on the fast track and start hitting McSame hard on the issues. Biden needs to step up and take on Palin... NOW!
I'm tired of the McSame Machine lying and calling out Obama. Obama needs to do some calling out of his own. He doesn't need to lie or be nasty like McSame... all he needs to do is question their stance, compare against his own agenda, and keep doing it... hard.
Otherwise, we will be a nation of numbskulls following (or constantly rising up against and, well, maybe that's what we need to do) a wolf/polar bear killin', right-winged ignorant tryin' to put her laws on my body, oil industry supportin', science be damned, kill 'em all, half a heartbeat away from the presidency, scary, scary woman.
Thanks for the laugh with Tina and Amy.
Happy Sunday! Where's the bird-bloggin'?
:)
Posted by: | Sep 14, 2008 1:39:15 PM
I don't know the correct way to pass this along but here goes.
Anchorage Daily News
Palin pressured Wasilla librarian
TOWN MAYOR: She wanted to know if books would be pulled.
By RINDI WHITE
rwhite@adn.com
(09/04/08 01:49:40)
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 had to go.
Emmons had been city librarian for seven years and was well liked. After a wave of public support for her, Palin relented and let Emmons keep her job.
It all happened 12 years ago and the controversy long ago disappeared into musty files. Until this week. Under intense national scrutiny, the issue has returned to dog her. It has been mentioned in news stories in Time Magazine and The New York Times and is spreading like a virus through the blogosphere.
The stories are all suggestive, but facts are hard to come by. Did Palin actually ban books at the Wasilla Public Library?
CONFRONTATION WITH PALIN
In December 1996, Emmons told her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman, that Palin three times asked her -- starting before she was sworn in -- about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose.
Emmons told the Frontiersman she flatly refused to consider any kind of censorship. Emmons, now Mary Ellen Baker, is on vacation from her current job in Fairbanks and did not return e-mail or telephone messages left for her Wednesday.
When the matter came up for the second time in October 1996, during a City Council meeting, Anne Kilkenny, a Wasilla housewife who often attends council meetings, was there.
Like many Alaskans, Kilkenny calls the governor by her first name.
"Sarah said to Mary Ellen, 'What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?" Kilkenny said.
"I was shocked. Mary Ellen sat up straight and said something along the line of, 'The books in the Wasilla Library collection were selected on the basis of national selection criteria for libraries of this size, and I would absolutely resist all efforts to ban books.'"
Palin didn't mention specific books at that meeting, Kilkenny said.
Palin herself, questioned at the time, called her inquiries rhetorical and simply part of a policy discussion with a department head "about understanding and following administration agendas," according to the Frontiersman article.
TEST OF LOYALTY
Were any books censored banned? June Pinell-Stephens, chairwoman of the Alaska Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee since 1984, checked her files Wednesday and came up empty-handed.
Pinell-Stephens also had no record of any phone conversations with Emmons about the issue back then. Emmons was president of the Alaska Library Association at the time.Books may not have been pulled from library shelves, but there were other repercussions for Emmons.
Four days before the exchange at the City Council, Emmons got a letter from Palin asking for her resignation. Similar letters went to police chief Irl Stambaugh, public works director Jack Felton and finance director Duane Dvorak. John Cooper, a fifth director, resigned after Palin eliminated his job overseeing the city museum.
Palin told the Daily News back then the letters were just a test of loyalty as she took on the mayor's job, which she'd won from three-term mayor John Stein in a hard-fought election. Stein had hired many of the department heads. Both Emmons and Stambaugh had publicly supported him against Palin.
Emmons survived the loyalty test and a second one a few months later. She resigned in August 1999, two months before Palin was voted in for a second mayoral term.
Palin might have become a household name in the last week, but Kilkenny, who is not a Palin fan, is on her own small path to Internet fame. She sent out an e-mail earlier this week to friends and family answering, from her perspective, the question Outsiders are asking any Alaskan they know: "Who is this Sarah Palin?"
Kilkenny's e-mail got bounced through cyberspace and ended up on news blogs. Now the small-town mom and housewife is scheduling interviews with national news media and got her name on the front page of The New York Times, even if it was misspelled.
Find Daily News reporter Rindi White online at www.adn.com/contact/rwhite or call 352-6709.
Posted by: qofdisks | Sep 15, 2008 8:39:52 AM
Here is another one from the Public Historian. Appalling! Palin told 3 employees to choose amongst themselves which one is to be "let-go".
Public Historian
history on the web, in the museum, and beyond
September 3, 2008
The Wasilla museum and museum politics
Posted by Suzanne Fischer under museums, politics
For a small local history museum, the Dorothy G. Page Museum has been getting unusual amounts of national publicity.
The city-owned museum in Wasilla, Alaska has been spotlighted (or, well, mentioned in passing) in discussions of VP hopeful Sarah Palin’s record as mayor of the smallish town near Anchorage. After Palin took office in the late ’90s, she fired or asked for the resignation of many top city officials, including the museum director, John Cooper, and the library director (who was later spared). Palin also pushed through drastic budget cuts for the museum, whose mission is “to identify, collect, preserve, research, interpret and exhibit the cultural and historical heritage of Wasilla, Knik and Willow Creek areas,” cutting $32,000 a year from a museum with an annual budget of around $200,000. Additionally, three long-term employees were told that one of them must leave and all three resigned in protest. Media reports unfailingly describe these staff members as “septuagenarian,” “grey-haired,” “matronly,” or just “old.” For this I’ll excerpt an article from the Anchorage Daily News, August 1997, which has been making the rounds on the web (for instance, as well as this, and Jessamyn has discussed the library implications):
Opal Toomey, Esther West and Ann Meyers don’t seem like politically active types. There are no bumper stickers on their cars, no pins on their lapels.But the three gray-haired matrons of Wasilla’s city museum decided to take a stand last week. Faced with a $32,000 budget cut and the prospect of choosing who would lose her job, the three 15-year-plus employees decided instead to quit en masse. They sent a letter to the mayor and City Council announcing they plan to retire at the end of the month, leaving the museum without a staff. They also sent a message: They’d rather quit than continue working for a city that doesn’t want to preserve its history.
”We hate to leave,” said Meyers, who at 65 is the youngest of the three. ”We’ve been together a long time. But this is enough.” If the city were broke, it would be different, she said. ”If they were even close to being broke.”
Instead, the city is flush thanks to a 2 percent sales tax passed in 1994 that has left it with $4 million in reserves. There is no reason the museum’s budget should be cut, Meyers said . . . .
The women are only the latest to leave the city payroll, noted John Cooper, who was the museum’s director until Palin fired him last fall.
In addition to Cooper, Wasilla Police Chief Irl Stambaugh left last winter after Palin fired him, and planning director Duane Dvorak and Public Works director John Felton turned in their resignations this summer.
”People are voting with their feet,” he said.
Palin maintains she is doing what voters asked. To have $4 million in reserves is prudent. That’s not even an entire year’s budget, she said.
Much of the latest flap over the museum is a misunderstanding, she said.
All the council wanted was to cut back the museum’s hours in winter from seven days a week to five. The women made the decision to resign, Palin said.
West, Toomey and Meyers disagree. They say they were told that one of them would have to leave in September.
Unfortunately, when small museums have their budgets cut, it usually doesn’t make national news. And if it makes national news ten years later, as it has here in Wasilla, that’s too late for the artifacts and the dedicated volunteers and staff. The city’s website, though, shows the museum open six days a week during the tourist season, including a visitors center and museum with exhibits, and a historic town site with several preserved buildings. My hunch is that these budget cuts made continuing exhibits and programs more important than collections care, but that perhaps the funding has been restored by now. Wasilla also has several other museums, though the city only runs the Page museum and historic town site.
The lesson I draw from this incident, far from being a reflection on national politics, is that, on the contrary, local politics is far more influential for small museums. As I’ve said before, it just takes one county commissioner or mayor who doesn’t understand what museums do and thinks your museum is a waste of money to make decisions that will endanger the future of your museum. And on the local level, it’s much easier to find out candidates’ positions on museum and humanities funding and to influence those positions with your museum advocacy bloc. Susie at Museum Audience Insight notes that museum enthusiasts, a statistical group they call “museum advocates,” vote at a much much higher rate than the general public, 3.5 times more in the state of Connecticut this year. So, small history museums: you and your supporters can have a political voice.
Posted by: qofdisks | Sep 15, 2008 8:50:02 AM
The proof is abundant regarding numerous examples of horrible and even, perhaps, illegal conduct by Palin, yet many in the media prefer to ignore the facts. Instruments dedicated to preserving the status quo via a third term for the Bush agenda are like that.
As for the bird blogging mentioned by Natalie, the avian members of our family have been busy working for Dem candidates up and down ticket as only they can. However, we'll try to give you another glimpse soon of Bosco the peach-faced lovebird, Sunny the sun conure and our buncha parakeets.
Posted by: | Sep 15, 2008 9:03:44 AM
