By JO BECKER, PETER S. GOODMAN and MICHAEL POWELL
Published: September 13, 2008
Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval rating.
And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.
But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.
Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.
The rest of the story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin
Posted on Sun, Sep. 14, 2008
Intolerance thrives in Palin's Pacific Northwest
Catherine McNicol Stock is chair of the history department at Connecticut College and author of "Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain"
Despite her efforts to portray herself as an average, small-town, "folksy" American, Sarah Palin's political views - ardently pro-gun, pro-censorship, antichoice and antigay - make John McCain's conservative credentials pale in comparison. What few observers have said, however, is these beliefs are not just extreme - they are radical, and even bear a comparison with some of the most notorious "rural radicals" of our time.
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20080914_Intolerance_thrives_in_Palin_s_Pacific_Northwest.html
Just Another Small Folksy Town
Monday, September 15, 2008
The Field Negro
Although home to tens of thousands of native peoples, Alaska is not much different in terms of diversity from the other states of the region. African Americans live in areas near important military installations in Anchorage and Fairbanks and almost nowhere else. Wasilla, where Sarah Palin was mayor, makes the census' list of the top 10 Alaskan communities with the largest number of African Americans because they make up a full 1 percent of the population. Rough calculations suggest that 65 blacks lived in the town.
But the region also must be defined by its history of intolerance, resentment, antistatism and violence. Appearing in the region in the 1980s and 1990s were some of the most notorious "hate radicals" of our time: militia groups, survivalists, Identity Christians, secessionists, white supremacists and others.
Some simply hated the federal government, like Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge, Idaho, a survivalist whose wife and child died when their compound was fired upon by FBI agents attempting to arrest him on gun charges. "Whether we live or whether we die," Weaver said, 'we will not obey this lawless government.'
Other groups, like the Aryan Nation, with headquarters in Hayden Lake, Idaho, actively planned to rid the United States of African Americans, Jews, and other 'non-Aryan' peoples. A few carried out their plans, murdering Jewish radio host Alan Berg in Denver, the Goldmark family in Seattle, an African American state trooper in Arkansas, Fish and Wildlife officials and FBI agents in Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana, and more than 160 federal employees and their children in Oklahoma City. "
http://field-negro.blogspot.com/
PEACE!
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