Sarah Palin’s Real Estate Impropriety (Video)

By popular demand, I am reposting this story about Mayor Sarah Palin eliminating building permits before her personal home AND the Wasilla Sports Complex were constructed in Wasilla, Alaska.  The post originally appeared on the Sarah Palin Truth Squad back in October 14, 2008.

The original title was The Book of Sarah (Palin): Contractors Awarded Wasilla Sports Complex Contract Built New Palin Family Home.”

Although this is old news, it’s good to remember the personal ethics of Sarah Palin as she moves forward into her latest career.

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Sarah Palin winking to the cameras.

Wayne Barrett, investigative journalist and senior editor for the Village Voice, published a brilliantly illuminating exposé on Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the building of her new Wasilla family home by the same contractors awarded the contract to build the new, multi-million dollar Wasilla sports complex. Also, throughout Sarah Palin’s political career, she has worked closely with lobbyists, promoting the interests of big business and oil corporations. Barrett was interviewed by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Countdown as to the possible conflicts of interest these connections might have posed for Gov. Palin.

Along with the winks and folksy “doggone” moments early in her debate with Joe Biden last week, Sarah Palin repeated her familiar claim to the title of “maverick,” declaring that “as a governor and as a mayor,” she’s had a “track record of reform” and has now “joined a team of mavericks.”

Despite the free fall that her polling numbers went into after her disastrous interviews with Katie Couric, that branding as a “reformer” has been resilient. Introduced skillfully before tens of millions during an intense surge of interest six weeks ago, it’s been hammered home with repeated soundbites.

But the label doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. From the controversy that catapulted her to the governorship, to her ties to the indicted patriarch of Alaska’s GOP, to the multilayered nexus of lobbyists and Big Oil interests around her, and, finally, to the Wasilla sports complex that capped her mayoral career, the myth of Sarah Palin, reformer, withers under inspection.

Wasilla, Alaska Sports Complex

PALIN’S CLAIM to fame as an Alaska reformer-that she risked her career to expose the chairman of the state GOP-is revisionist. In fact, Palin supported the methane-drilling project that helped sink GOP boss Randy Ruedrich before she later decided she was against it-a mirror of her flip-flop on the infamous Bridge to Nowhere. And her reversal had more to do with seizing a political opportunity than following her conscience.

Sarah Palin’s Scare Tactics Would Make Joe McCarthy Proud

Sarah Palin spoke to crowds on the 'treat' of a President Barack Obama, stirring up fear in some Americans towards anyone with a different point of view.

Try this on for size: Palinism. What is it? It is an updated version of McCarthyism, which takes its name from the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin liar, demagogue and drunk, and means, according to Wikipedia, “reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries.” As far as we know, Sarah Palin is not a drunk.

But she certainly shares McCarthy’s other attributes – and this one as well: the ability to drive the debate. In McCarthy’s day, it was anti-communism coupled with national security, and it hardly mattered that he frequently did not have his facts straight. He got huge amounts of attention anyway.

With Palin, the subject is health care, which in many ways is the Red Menace of our day and lends itself to a kind of political pornography. For sheer disregard of the facts, her statement about President Obama’s “death panel” has to rank with McCarthy’s announcement that “I have here in my hand a list of 205″ (or 72 or 57 or whatever) names of Communists in the State Department. They were both false – McCarthy’s by commission, Palin’s probably by omission. She rarely knows her facts.

Senator Joseph McCarthy speaking to the nation about the 'threat' of Communists, causing many Americans to be fearful of each other and turn against their neighbors.

What was most depressing about McCarthy’s career was not just the excesses of the man himself, but the refusal of others – mainly his fellow Republicans – to either rein him in or defend his victims. Now we are seeing something similar with Palin. Say what you will about any of the health care proposals, not one of them suggests a “death panel” empowered to withhold medical services from the aged or the disabled. To suggest that one exists is reprehensible. To state it outright is either boldly demagogic or just plain loopy.

Sarah’s Ghoulish Carousel

Newt Gingrich

I’m not sure the man who popped off and tweeted that Sonia Sotomayor was a “Latina woman racist” is the best Henry Higgins for the Eliza Doolittle of Alaska.

But Newt Gingrich was a professor. And he does know something about pulling yourself up by dragging down others and imploding when you take center stage — both Palin specialties.

Besides, he agrees with Sarah — who fretted that her parents and son Trig might be in danger from Obama “death panels” — that we should be very wary about trusting government with end-of-life decisions.

So Newt took it upon himself to become Palin’s Pygmalion. He told Politico that the out-of-work pol should write a book; take a commentator gig on TV; get a condo in D.C. or New York to use as an East Coast base; and prepare three types of speeches — one “to make money,” another to “project her brand” before universities and interest groups, and a vivid campaign stump speech to use for Republican candidates in 2010.

Most important, he advised, the dizzy Palin has to be “clear in her own head what she wants to do.”

Ever The Shrewd Narcissist, Sarah Palin Again Pawns Own Child For Cheap Publicity

Sarah Palin with Trig out on the campaign trail during the 2008 Presidential race.

No Sarah, it was never about Trig or even about your “concern” for the elderly in our society. In typical and consistent fashion, you again showed America and indeed the whole world that not only is integrity far from you, but deceit, deception and disinformation are the hallmarks of your very being.

It would be funny were it not cold-hearted and incendiarily unbecoming for you to use a medium through which you would not have to answer any questions to forment hate and falsehood. Rather akin to your hypocritical display of “patriotism” (in accusing then candidate Obama of “palling around with terrorists” while you may actually be married to one) during the last presidential elections.

Sarah Palin Spits on the Legacy of Eunice Shriver

Eunice Kennedy Shriver devoted her life to improving the welfare of the mentally disabled and founded the Special Olympics as a showcase for their abilities.

In 1962, Eunice Kennedy Shriver published an article in the Saturday Evening Post, lamenting the fate of her eldest sister, Rosemary.  Born in 1918, “Rosemary,” as Eunice wrote simply, “was mentally retarded.” The Kennedys had the means and the love to care for her at home, refusing to send her to an institution, as so many families did with such children. But an attempt to improve her condition through a lobotomy failed, and an institution is where Rosemary ended up. Eunice wrote,

It fills me with sadness to think this change might not have been necessary if we had known then what we know today — that 75 to 85% of the retarded are capable of becoming useful citizens with the help of special education and rehabilitation. Another 10 to 20% can learn to make small contributions, not involving book learning, such as mowing a lawn or washing dishes. Only 5% — the most severely retarded cases — must remain completely dependent all their lives.

If only Rosemary had been born forty years later, Eunice thought, things would have been different for her. This led Shriver to devote her life to such children and their families. She lobbied her brother, the President, to pour $120 million into research. The family foundation donated millions to care centers and medical facilities. As a Senator, her brother Robert successfully prodded Governor Rockefeller to improve (at least for a time) the horrid conditions at state mental institutions in New York. And most of all, she started the Special Olympics out of her own backyard.

What Sarah Palin and Other Patriotic Traitors Think About Health Care Reform: “Soylent Green Is People!”

Solent Green is People!!

Like the U.S. army major who “saved” a Vietnamese village by destroying it, the patriotic traitor seeks to preserve his country by bringing it down. Recently I watched Seven Days in May . In this political thriller, an American president has negotiated a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviets over the objection of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a four-star general played by Burt Lancaster. After the Senate ratifies the treaty, the general is certain the Soviets have pulled a fast one and will soon launch a first strike. So he plots to overthrow the government. The president gets wind of the coup and, in a tense scene scripted by Rod Serling, confronts the general in the Oval Office: “You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with — its Constitution! You ask for a mandate, general — from a ballot box! You don’t steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned.”

The president’s words are dismissed by the general, who can’t accept that his warped sense of patriotism has driven him to commit treason. Of course, he’s a fictional character. Sarah Palin, however, is real, although she often acts like something conjured up in a novelist’s overheated imagination. Her deliberately distortive statement on President Obama’s health care plan, in which she again exploits her son Trig, is just the latest rhetorical IED detonated by an increasingly unhinged right-wing insurgency. The Soylent Green scenario she paints, in which the elderly and disabled will be euthanized and then presumably rendered into energy bars, should disqualify her from further consideration as a serious contender for high office. And yet her supporters will hail this patriotic traitor as a great American.

There’s Just No Way Sarah Palin’s Writing Her Facebook Notes

Is Sarah Palin writing well researched, grammatically correct entries complete with footnotes on Facebook??

Just before midnight, a “note” was posted on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page titled, “Concerning the ‘Death Panels.’” Predictably, the media latched onto it and reported her thoughts. However, there’s a problem: there’s no way in hell Sarah Palin wrote it.

How do I know this, you ask? Well, the answer to that question is perhaps best explained by a comment someone named Marvin Settle posted under Palin’s note. He wrote:

Wow, and the public thought she wasn’t educated enough to be President? That is some of the most well researched and thought out material I have ever read. Thanks Sarah.

Exactly! Thank you Marvin Settle. Thank you very much.

So You Think the National Health Service in the UK is Evil, Mrs Palin?

President Barack Obama’s debate on healthcare reform has seen Britain’s National Health Service demonised by Republicans like Sarah Palin.

As a respected doctor, Professor David Kerr of the Royal Bournemouth Hospital is amply qualified to give a diagnosis of America’s health care problems.

“Something must be wrong there because there are now 40 million uninsured Americans yet the US spends 18 per cent of its gross domestic product on healthcare,” he says.

Having lived in the USA, Prof Kerr, an endocrinologist specialising in diabetes, has seen both sides of transatlantic healthcare. He recently visited hospitals in New York and San Francisco to discuss how Bournemouth is successfully tackling the growing problem of Type-2 diabetes.

He’s so concerned at the low-level the debate is being carried out at that he’s even contacted the White House to offer the President or his aides the chance to visit Dorset. “I’ve suggested that the Obama campaign should speak to quality centres in the UK of the type we have here in Bournemouth and Poole and we can show them how to run a quality service, remaining in the black, which is available to all,” he said. “I’d be very pleased to explain to the president’s team how we do things over here.”

He accused US Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin of “scaremongering”. “I understand she’s suggested the NHS is evil and has spoken about ‘death panels’ which decide whether people live or die,” he said. “My experience of American healthcare is that they have a huge problem. I think it’s expensive, they don’t practise evidence-based healthcare to the extent that we do in Europe because the money is made by increasing the number of investigations and procedures. There are huge vested interests and that’s the problem.”

Sarah Palin For ‘Death Panels’ Before She Was Against Them? Palin Endorsed End of Life Counseling As Governor

Gov. Palin favored end of life counseling in a proclamation on "Healthcare Decisions Day" last April 2008.

In recent weeks, right-wing groups have been pushing the myth that health care reform will somehow kill seniors. One of the most high profile voices pushing this lie has been Sarah Palin, who claimed President Obama will institute bureaucratic “death panels.” Today, again on her Facebook page, she continued the attack. Though some Republicans have rebuffed this absurd, inaccurate notion — like Johnny Isakson (R-GA), who called such talk “nuts” — others, like Newt Gingrich, have piled on to agree with Palin.

However, on April 16th 2008, then Gov. Sarah Palin endorsed some of the same end of life counseling she now decries as a form of euthanasia. In a proclamation announcing “Healthcare Decisions Day,” Palin urged public facilities to provide better information about advance directives, and made it clear that it is critical for seniors to be informed of such options:

Zeke Emanuel on Sarah Palin’s Accusation of ‘Death Panels’: ‘It’s An Absolute Outrage’

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is the Chair of the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institute of Health.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the health-policy adviser at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget — who has been caricatured by conservatives as a “Dr. Death” seeking to pull the I.V.s out of your grandparents’ arms in the name of cost containment – is not happy.

Asked by ABC News in an interview about the thoroughly discredited claim by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to paint his philosophical writings as evidence – along with a provision providing optional end of life counseling in the House Democrats’ health care reform bill – that President Obama wants to set up “death panels” to deny medical treatments to seniors and the disabled, including her son Trig, Emanuel, brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, does not hold back.

“It’s an absolute outrage that you would take first of all a provision written in the bill,” Emanuel says, a provision allowing for “doctors to talk to patients about end of life care, and turn it into the suggestion that we’re going to have euthanasia boards – that’s a complete misreading of what’s there. It’s just trying to scare people.”

Emanuel says as an oncologist he’s had hundreds of discussions with patients about what to do when treatment doesn’t work.

“It’s wrenching,” he says.

The provision in the House Democrats’ bill is “an acknowledgment doctors should be compensated for making that conversation available,” he says. “It’s not forced – it’s voluntary.”

As for Palin’s vision of “Obama ‘death panels,’” Emanuel argues “there’s no basis for that claim either in any of my writings or the legislation. It has no grounds in reality. It’s surreal and Orwellian, the idea that this legislation or my writings suggest that her son Trig shouldn’t get health care.”

He notes that his sister has Cerebral Palsy, so he is not without personal sympathy for those with disabilities.

An opponent of euthanasia, Emanuel says he “abhor”s people “cavalierly distorting those writings and the work that I’ve done over 25 years to help improve medical care in America for vulnerable people who often have no voice.”