Custody Battle Between Bristol Palin & Levi Johnston Brewing

Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota September 3, 2008.

The custody battle between Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin became public last week when two Superior Court judges issued orders unsealing the court record and denying the use of pseudonyms to protect the feuding parents’ identities.

A Dec. 23 order from Judge Kari C. Kristiansen denied Palin’s motion to close the proceedings and opened the case file to public access, while an order issued the same day by Presiding Judge Sharon Gleason denied Palin’s request to use John and Jane Doe in place of Johnston’s and her own real names.

On Nov. 4, Palin filed for sole custody of Tripp Johnston-Palin, the former couple’s son, who celebrates his first birthday today. Kristiansen initially issued temporary orders limiting access to the case file and allowing the parties to file under pseudonyms.

Johnston wasn’t playing along, however. In an opposition to Palin’s motion for a gag order, Johnston’s attorney, Rex Butler, said: “Simply put, this matter is public in nature, the courts are not refuges for the scions of the elite to obtain private dispensation of their legal matters because the public at large has an interest in the proceedings.”

There’s another factor in the mix, of course: Palin’s mother, former governor Sarah Palin, with whom Johnston has repeatedly locked horns in the press, and from whom he claims to fear retaliation.

Palin, Bristol vs. Johnston, Levi (3PA-09-02261CI)

The following information is from the Alaska Trial Court Cases Public Access Docket List in the matter of 3PA-09-02261CI Palin, Bristol vs. Johnston, Levi:

12/23/2009

Request for Oral Argument Thomas Van Flein (Attorney) on behalf of Bristol Palin (Plaintiff) Case Motion #1: Ex Parte Motions for (1) Closure of Custody Proceedings ((2) Motion for Protective Order (3) Substitution of Pseudonym’s), Case Motion #2: Ex Parte Motions for( (1) Closure of Custody Proceedings) (2) Motion for Protective Order ((3) Substitution of Pseudonym’s), Case Motion #3: Ex Parte Motions for ((1) Closure of Custody Proceedings (2) Motion for Protective Order) (3) Substitution of Pseudonym’s

12/23/2009

Reply to Opposition to Motion to Use Pseudonyms and for Protective Order (Pwk only) Thomas Van Flein (Attorney) on behalf of Bristol Palin (Plaintiff) Case Motion #3: Ex Parte Motions for ((1) Closure of Custody Proceedings (2) Motion for Protective Order) (3) Substitution of Pseudonym’s

Palin: I’m Not the Biggest Liar of the Year

Sarah Palin continues to draw negative attention to herself.

There’s an old story that occasionally makes the rounds in Washington. In the 1970s, a magazine (now long defunct) named New Times reported that Sen. William Scott, a Virginia Republican, had been ranked the “dumbest” senator in a survey conducted by a public interest group. Subsequently, Scott held a press conference to deny the charge — thereby proving he was pretty darn dumb. After all, he only called more attention to the accusation.

Sarah Palin has taken a Scott-like position.

Earlier this month, PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times, awarded Palin the not-so-coveted “lie of the year” award for claiming last summer that President Obama‘s health care reform initiative would set up “death panels” run by bureaucrats who would decide if seniors and disabled citizens “based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’ ” would be “worthy of health care.” PolitiFact.com explains:

On Aug. 10, PolitiFact rated Palin’s statement Pants on Fire [its highest -- or lowest -- rating]. In the weeks that followed, health care policy experts on both the right and the left said the euthanasia comparisons were inaccurate. Gail Wilensky, a health adviser to President George H.W. Bush, said the charge was untrue and upsetting.

Lie of the Year: ‘Death Panels’

And the "Lie of the Year" winner is ... Sarah Palin!!

Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.

“Death panels.”

The claim set political debate afire when it was made in August, raising issues from the role of government in health care to the bounds of acceptable political discussion. In a nod to the way technology has transformed politics, the statement wasn’t made in an interview or a television ad. Sarah Palin posted it on her Facebook page.

Her assertion — that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care — spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, “Death panels? Really?”

The editors of PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking Web site of the St. Petersburg Times, have chosen it as our inaugural “Lie of the Year.”

PolitiFact readers overwhelmingly supported the decision. Nearly 5,000 voted in a national poll to name the biggest lie, and 61 percent chose “death panels” from a field of eight finalists. (See the complete results.)

This is the story of how two words generated intense heat in the national debate over health care.

Sarah Palin Cuts Vacation Short in Wake of Visor Controversy

Sarah Palin with her husband Todd Palin and family on vacation in Hawaii.

Sarah Palin announced Thursday evening that she has cut short her vacation in Hawaii after paparazzi snapped a picture of her wearing a marked-out McCain campaign visor, Politico reports. Palin reiterated her insistence that the visor was not, as TMZ had asserted, a political statement slighting her former running mate, and said that her family decided to head home early because the media attention was annoying other vacationers.

“In an attempt to ‘go incognito,’ I Sharpied the logo out on my sun visor so photographers would be less likely to recognize me and bother my kids or other vacationers,” she said in a statement. “Todd and I have since cut our vacation short because the incognito attempts didn’t work and fellow vacationers were bothered for the two days we spent in the sun.”

The Irrefutable Stupidity of Sarah Palin (Video)

Sarah Palin is the personification of America's anti-intellectualism and seems to be determined to exploit her intellectual limitations at the expense of the nation's best interests.

From time to time, I’ll get into a debate with a right-winger about whether Sarah Palin is actually stupid or if liberals are just hopelessly biased against her. They claim this bias comes from the fact that liberals are scared of her electability, her charm, her looks, her femininity, her Christianity, her ability connect to the common man and her overall wonderfulness. So, the theory is that we have all collectively decided that she is the best Republican candidate in some secret liberal meeting and are conspiring against her because we are afraid of how brilliant and electable she really is.

Now, there are a couple of problems with this theory. There are no opinion leaders on the left with Rush Limbaugh-like authority who can command all other progressives to think the same thing and use the same arguments against one person. In other words, we all think she is stupid because she is in fact stupid, not because some liberal cabal told us to think that.

How come we don’t call Newt Gingrich stupid? Or Dick Cheney or Kay Bailey Hutchinson or Elizabeth Dole or Dennis Hastert? And the list goes on and on of heinous and deplorable right-wingers who are not stupid. We don’t make those charges against those people, because as much as we might not agree with them or like them, we know that they are not dullards. They’re all clever in their own way. Mitt Romney is greasy, Michael Steele is a clown and Tom DeLay is dirty, but we don’t go after their mental acuity like we do with Sarah Palin because they’re not as dumb as her (not even Steele).

So, finally we get to the evidence. I thought I’d just do it here and be done with it. Then I can just point people to this post from now on and end this senseless argument.

Sarah Palin’s Brand of Populism is Dangerous and Deceptive

Sarah Palin

Writing about Sarah Palin in Newsweek last month, I pointed out the crude way in which she tried to Teflon-ize herself when allegations of weird political extremism were made against her. Thus, she had once gone to a Pat Buchanan rally wearing a pro-Buchanan button, but only because she thought it was the polite thing to do. She and her husband had both attended meetings of the Alaskan Independence Party—he as a member—but its name, she later tried to claim, only meant “independent.” (The AIP is a straightforward secessionist party.) She didn’t disbelieve all the evidence for evolution, only some of it. She hadn’t exactly said that God was on our side in Iraq, only that God and the United States were on the same side. She says that she left Hawaii Pacific College after only one year because the climate was too sunny for an Alaskan; her father (whom she considers practically infallible) tells her most recent biographers that she quit because of the preponderance of Asian and Pacific islanders: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous. So she came home.” And so on. As I tried to summarize the repeated tactic:

So there it is: anti-Washington except that she thirsts for it, and close enough (and also far enough away to be “deniable”) to the paranoid fringe element who darkly suggest that our president is a Kenyan communist.

Palin Poll Numbers Show Struggle Among African-Americans, Hispanics, Women & Non-Elderly

Sarah Palin is losing ground in the latest national poll among African Americans, Hispanics, women and young people.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin faces major electoral limitations if she chooses to mount a 2012 bid, despite a slight increase in the country’s opinion of her, according to a new public opinion survey.

Public Policy Polling released a study on Thursday revealing that, one year after bursting onto the national scene, Palin still has not made inroads among a variety of key demographic groups. Most significantly, among women the Alaska Republican has only a 37 percent favorable rating compared to a 51 percent unfavorable.

“She has had a reverse gender gap in her numbers since about two weeks since John McCain picked her as her running mate,” explained PPP pollster Tom Jensen. “I think that women voters pretty much decided quickly since she went on the national spotlight that they didn’t like her much and that hasn’t really changed.”

It isn’t just a gender gap that hampers Palin. Only five percent of African-American voters said they had a favorable rating of the former Alaska Governor. Meanwhile, only 37 percent of Hispanics offered a favorable view — which would seem small if not for the fact that only 31 percent of Hispanics voted for McCain in 2008.

Sarah Palin Says Barack Obama Should Boycott Copenhagen Climate Talks

Sarah Palin "can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes" and "any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs."

In the practice of preaching to the choir, Sarah Palin appears to have all but patented the art of saying what a few want to hear — and it’s an all-new tune now.

Palin, who was the Republican Party’s nominee for vice president, is suggesting that President Barack Obama “boycott” an international conference on climate change underway in Copenhagen, because some hacked emails questioning the ethics of some scientists at a university in Great Britain have given the obstinate opposition to the concept of global warming, let alone the science involving man’s hand in climate change, all the fuel it needs to declare the case closed, conference over, thank you ma’am.

The president’s withdrawal from the conference, with an appearance planned near the summit’s finish next week, would come as quite a surprise to a global community that has witnessed the reengagement of the United States in an international dialog about the fate of the planet from which the previous president had all but withdrawn until the end of his second term.

But, for a share of the American electorate which fears the consequences of limitations on the emissions of pollutants that could force the U.S. to find alternative, and in some cases more costly, sources of energy – the fabled “energy tax” – talk such as Palin’s comes straight from the wand of the maestro.

Why the Washington Post Was Right to Publish Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin‘s column today in the Washington Post calling for President Obama to boycott the Copenhagen summit is pure malarkey. Which is why the Post was absolutely right to print it.

Those who are claiming that the column was factually inaccurate miss the point. Since when has anything that Palin ever said been accurate? It’s like accusing Sarah Silverman of failing to be serious or Hugh Hefner of being promiscuous.

Palin isn’t interested in accuracy, but causing a stir and, above all, positioning herself as a serious candidate for the GOP’s nomination in 2012, which keeps moving to the right, partly in response to Palin and partly because Palin is responding to it. So far, she’s done an excellent job of trying to establish herself as a major voice in the party. Now she needs to tackle policy, and she’s doing it.

Her column epitomizes conservative conspiracy thinking and ventilates her views rather deftly (does anyone think that Palin actually wrote it?). It accuses a cabal of radical scientists of pushing alarmism about global warming. To be sure, Palin, in order to give her views a veneer of sobriety, concedes that warming is actually taking place, just that it can’t be pinned on humans. How come conservatives, who are always stressing individual moral responsibility, suddenly abdicate it when it comes to global warming?