Did an embezzlement scandal force Sarah Palin to
resign

Max Blumental reports on The Daily Beast that Sarah Palin may have quit her job today because she was trying to avert a major, yet-to-be-disclosed corruption scandal. The gist of the rumor is that an Alaska building company called Spenard Building Supplies (SBS) was awarded a contract by Palin to build a hockey arena in Wasilla, AK, and in return, SBS helped construct Palin’s home:

Many political observers in Alaska are fixated on rumors that federal investigators have been seizing paperwork from SBS in recent months, searching for evidence that Palin and her husband Todd steered lucrative contracts to the well-connected company in exchange for gifts like the construction of their home on pristine Lake Lucille in 2002. The home was built just two months before Palin began campaigning for governor, a job which would have provided her enhanced power to grant building contracts in the wide open state.

SBS has close ties to the Palins. The company has not only sponsored Todd Palin’s snowmobile team, according to the Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett, it hired Sarah Palin to do a statewide television commercial in 2004.

Though Todd Palin told Fox News he built his Lake Lucille home with the help of a few “buddies,” according to Barrett?s report, public records revealed that SBS supplied the materials for the house. While serving as mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin blocked an initiative that would have required the public filing of building permits?thus momentarily preventing the revelation of such suspicious information.

Just months before Palin left city hall to campaign for governor, she awarded a contract to SBS to help build the $13 million Wasilla Sports Complex. The most expensive building project in Wasilla history, the complex cost the city an addition $1.3 million in legal fees and threw it into severe long-term debt. For SBS, however, the bloated and bungled project was a cash cow.

Alaska bloggers have reported in recent weeks that “a long simmering embezzelment/IRS scandal is still being looked at by the feds.” In her press conference today, Palin asked the public to “trust me with this decision and know that it is no more politics as usual.” But she also bemoaned “political operatives” who have “descended on Alaska” to investigate “all sorts of frivolous ethics violations.” Palin said this “politics of personal destruction” was one of the key motivating factors behind her decision today.

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Friday Stuff

Words can't express my shock over the news that Just Plain Folks Sarah Palin is resigning (and not even finishing out her term...???) - with that in mind, here once more is her interview in front of the turkey slaughtering processor, for the benefit for the half-dozen-or-so people on this planet who haven't seen this yet (there's a version out there with commentary by K.O., but I think the captions here are funnier)...



...Jon Stewart takes down that idiot Michael Scheuer for wishing another 9/11 on this country (Stewart's initial five-word reaction nails it - h/t The Daily Kos)...

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cOsama bin Laden Needs to Attack Americawww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show
Full EpisodesPolitical HumorJason Jones in Iran

...and time for a bit of summer fun...


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...also, Happy Fourth, everybody.


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http://liberaldoomsayer.blogspot.com/2009/07/friday-stuff.html

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Audacity personified

Several days ago I caught something in passing as I was going about my daily housewifing duties with the radio on in the background that set me off ever so slightly, but I was busy and I made a note to follow up on it later.

Operation Rescue, it would seem, has asked the Department of Justice to provide them with protection from their political adversaries because in the wake of the murder of Wichita physician George Tiller, they have been on the receiving end of a couple of threatening phone calls.  

Let me see if I can screw up an appropriate amount of outrage on their behalf....I'm trying real, real hard...yeah...I can do this...

Oh boo fucking hoo!

An anti-abortion group is asking the U.S. Justice Department to investigate what it says are death threats against abortion opponents after the killing of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas.

Operation Rescue of Wichita, Kan., on Thursday released audio recordings and e-mails containing threats, including one that says it's "time to start killing Bible-thumping morons."

Tiller, an abortion provier, was gunned down May 31 while attending his church in Wichita. Abortion opponent Scott Roeder is charged with first-degree murder and aggravated assault in the case.

Operation Rescue president Troy Newman says the Justice Department dispatches federal marshals to protect abortion providers but ignores threats against abortion opponents.

The Justice Department declined comment.

Fuck these bible thumping morons.  How do the body counts stack up again?  Why, all of the dead - numbering nearly a dozen - are from our side.  And that is just the lives taken by the so-called "pro-life" fetus-fetishists.  That doesn't include the lives upended and altered by bombs and bullets and stalking.  

I know their handiwork.  I was a medical professional in Wichita in the summer of 1991.  The so-called Summer of Mercy.  

I can tell you that I am about 90% sure that some of those protesters probably cost lives wasting our ICU resources.  One particularly fat and oily fucker from Colorado sticks out in my mind.  He was a truly awful man and a heart attack waiting to happen.  When they arrested him, he faked one.  Because he was an overweight slob who had a heart condition, we kept him for 24 hours and he dodged jail.  His blood kept hemolyzing when the phlebs would use a vacutainer because his trigs were high - I told you he was a walking heart attack waiting to happen - so a tech had to go draw him with a syringe.  I didn't fuck around with him. I used an 18 gauge needle, didn't chat him up, just did my job and got out of his room, and didn't accept his little 'feet' pin.  

That was all it took.  

That was the last time my last name ever appeared anywhere on a work badge, or that I had a published phone number - and we will just leave it at that.

Scott Roeder topped James Kopp, the assassin who killed of Dr. Barnett Slepian as he stood in his kitchen, by walking up to Dr. George Tiller in the foyer of his church and shooting him in the head, killing him instantly.  

They have a lot of damned gall after they have incited murder and violence whining about a couple of phone calls.  They should shut the fuck up and get back to us when the karmic scales start balancing.  

And the payback rolling down the pike for these unrepentant fuckheads has to be a bitch.  I mean, Roeder is still advocating for the murder of healthcare providers from his jail cell.


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ity-personified

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Junk food even has negative impact on cockroaches

Attorneys for the junk food industry have suggested that the tests were unfair and a distortion of the true nutritional value they provide to humans and cockroaches alike. Not really, but it wouldn't surprise anyone if they did. LiveScience:

To find out, Moore and her colleagues picked young female cockroach nymphs and divided them into two dietary groups. Half were fed a good-quality balanced diet of protein-rich fish food and high-carbohydrate oatmeal, while the rest were raised on fish food only.

Both groups were allowed to eat as much as they wanted. The difference in diets "was not quantity but variety," Moore said.

After the last molt, when the nymphs became adults, the team switched the diets of some animals. Half of the cockroaches raised with good quality diet lost their oatmeal, while half of the bugs fed poorly were promoted to a good-quality diet.

Eighteen days after the switch, the diet control ended and some of the surviving cockroaches were dissected. The rest were allowed to live on and reproduce.

The results: While the lifespan of the members of both groups was about the same, the cockroaches on the poor diet were fatter and took longer to mature.

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Late Afternoon/Early Evening Open Thread

Coming up on Sunday Kos ...

• Next week, Presidents Obama and Medvedev will meet in Moscow to negotiate a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Plutonium Page will discuss the treaty and the role it plays in the complicated path to Global Zero.
• Just in time for the holiday weekend, DarkSyde will review some of the amazing spin-offs from gunpowder in a Brief History of Fireworks.
• The Republican Party will try to start some July 4th fireworks this weekend with an ad (of questionable accuracy) targeting vulnerable Dems for their vote on the American Clean Energy Act. Steve Singiser looks at the factual issues with the ad, and some of the more curious targets of the NRCC's attacks.
• SusanG will take a look at two first-hand accounts of dealing with the housing market: the controversial and ethically challenged book by New York Times finance reporter Edmund Andrews, Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown, and Gimme Shelter by Mary Beth Williams, a rollicking account from a freelance journalist of a three-year journey trying to buy a home in New York City.
• DarkSyde and DevilsTower team up for a foray into the convoluted world of financial markets and unregulated derivatives in "Bids and Bubbles."

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Krugman: It's That 30s Show. We Need Another
(Bigger) Stimulus.

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Krugman was right again. Instead of taking a strong leadership position and insisting on a larger package, Obama played nice with the so-called "moderates" of both parties (i.e. morons who would sell their own mothers to feed their swollen egos). And here we sit, in a stagnating economy that sinks even deeper in recession as jobs are flushed down the drain.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite business books, "Management by Baseball." Author Jeff Angus (who also has a great blog) says one of the most common management mistakes is when a manager assumes a strategy that has been successful for him as a player will apply to all situations when he's a manager. Obama's built his career on being a cautious incrementalist, but what's called for now is bold vision.

So what's Obama going to do about it? Krugman has some suggestions:

So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3½ million jobs by late next year. That?s much better than nothing, but it?s not remotely enough. And there doesn?t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration?s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.

All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren?t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.

So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily ? but it?s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.

Just to be clear, I?m well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted.

There won?t be any cooperation from Republican leaders, who have settled on a strategy of total opposition, unconstrained by facts or logic. Indeed, these leaders responded to the latest job numbers by proclaiming the failure of the Obama economic plan. That?s ludicrous, of course. The administration warned from the beginning that it would be several quarters before the plan had any major positive effects. But that didn?t stop the chairman of the Republican Study Committee from issuing a statement demanding: ?Where are the jobs??

It?s also not clear whether the administration will get much help from Senate ?centrists,? who partially eviscerated the original stimulus plan by demanding cuts in aid to state and local governments ? aid that, as we?re now seeing, was desperately needed. I?d like to think that some of these centrists are feeling remorse, but if they are, I haven?t seen any evidence to that effect.

And as an economist, I?d add that many members of my profession are playing a distinctly unhelpful role.

It has been a rude shock to see so many economists with good reputations recycling old fallacies ? like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment ? and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)

Also, as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms.

So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it?s essential.

Obama administration economists understand the stakes. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the ?lessons of 1937? ? the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.

What I don?t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.

So here?s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don?t, you?ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.

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Palins Shot Across Pawlentys Bow

While trying to make a virtue of what might have been necessity on her part, Sarah Palin takes dead aim at the actions of fellow governor, Republican and presidential wannabee, Minnesota's Tim Pawlenty: "...I thought well about how much fun some[...]

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http://firedoglake.com/2009/07/03/palins-shot-across-pawlentys-bow/

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Friday Night at 8: "The Forms to Which They Are
Accustomed"

Title of tonight's essay is taken from the Declaration of Independence, to-wit:Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Docudharma/~3/Z1VLDxxcXLs/friday-night-at-8-the-fo
rms-to-which-they-are-accustomed

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Serena Williams discusses playing Venus in
Wimbledon Finals

Click the link below to watch a great ESPN interview with Serena Williams. She discusses having to play her sister, Venus in the Wimbledon Final:http://www.letstalkhonestly.com/blacknewsblackviews.html

Read The Full Article:
http://glciii.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/serena-williams-discusses-playing-venus-in
-wimbledon-finals/

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Meditation for the Day

John McCain and his shrewd judge of character.[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Talking-Points-Memo/~3/jdj6A_2H1wY/meditation_for_
the_day.php

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