I don't see anything about Obama's political career, either...
Funny how people only see what they want to see.
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The media needs to lay off the daughter. I hope that everyone that has critisized her daughter has a daughter that gets pregnant out of wed lock just to show them that it happens in everywalk of life. At least she isn't having an abortion. The daughter made a mistake, it happens. Kinda like when Chelsea(sp?) Clinton got a DUI when she was a teen. Remember that one? :D As the saying goes **** happens. And it happens to everyone.
Just last week Biden said an Obama ad was 'terrible'.
Katie Couric: Are you disappointed with the tone of the campaign and 'lipstick and the pig' stuff, some of the ads? You guys haven't been completely guilt free, making fun of John McCain's inability to use a computer.
Biden: I thought that was terrible.
By firing a man for not firing her brother-in-law who was involved in a custody dispute with sister?
She sold it at a loss. Way to go!Quote:
What about the fact that she sold a multi million dollar air plane that the former Govenor had and gave the money back to the people, where is that in your post?
I also didn't mention how she continuously lies about her support for the Bridge to Nowhere, and even after she turned against it she kept the federal money anyway and just spent it on other stuff.Quote:
Funny you failed to mention any of that. :D But you did do a good job building up Obama. :(
Um... that's the post I was referring to... No political career highlights for EITHER of them...Quote:
Originally Posted by mkriii
Good luck in accomplishing whatever it is you're trying to accomplish, everyone...??? :confused: :confused: :confused:
"Only a brave person is willing to honestly admit, and fearlessly to face, what a sincere and logical mind discovers." -Rodan of Alexandria
"Every hard-boiled egg is yellow inside." -Anonymous
That partisan investigation is going nowhere. You do know e-mails exist that show the guy got fired for exactly why Mrs Palin says he was fired, right? Do you even know the official reason why he was fired?
Depreciation for one. Second, once she sold it they no longer had to pay for its fuel, maintenance and flight crew. So it did save the people of Alaska money.
It's strawman city today in here. :rolleyes:
I tend to use men's last names on forums. I tend to put Ms, Mrs, or Miss with women. I usually call Hillary Clinton 'Hillary' as that is how she is generally referred to.
Notice I usually call John McCain 'McCain' as well.
Care to answer the questions now?
Sarah Palin is the governor of Alaska and the Republican vice-presidential nominee in the 2008 United States presidential election.
She was a member of the Wasilla, Alaska, city council from 1992 to 1996 and mayor from 1996 to 2002. After an unsuccessful campaign for lieutenant governor of Alaska in 2002, she chaired the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission from 2003 to 2004. She was elected governor of Alaska in November 2006 by defeating the incumbent governor in the Republican primary and a former two-term Democratic governor in the general election. She is the youngest person to have been elected to the position, and Alaska's first female governor.
On August 29, 2008, Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain announced he had chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate. She was nominated at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Palin is the first woman and the first Alaskan to run on the Republican party's presidential ticket.
Palin attended Wasilla High School in Wasilla. She was the head of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter at the school and the point guard and captain of the school's girls' basketball team. She helped the team win the Alaska small-school basketball championship in 1982, hitting a critical free throw in the last seconds of the game, despite having an ankle stress fracture. She earned the nickname "Sarah Barracuda" because of her intense play.
In 1982, Palin enrolled at Hawaii Pacific University but left after her first semester. From there she transferred to North Idaho College, where she spent two semesters as a general studies major. From there, she then transferred to the University of Idaho for two semesters. During this time Palin won the Miss Wasilla Pageant beauty contest, then finished third (second runner-up) in the Miss Alaska pageant, at which she won a college scholarship and the "Miss Congeniality" award. She then left the University of Idaho and attended Matanuska-Susitna College in Alaska for one term. The next year she returned to the University of Idaho where she spent three semesters completing her Bachelor of Science degree in communications-journalism, graduating in 1987.
In 1988, she worked as a sports reporter for KTUU-TV in Anchorage, Alaska, and for the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman as a sports reporter. She also helped in her husband’s commercial fishing family business.
City council of Wasilla
Sarah Palin was elected twice to the city council of Wasilla, in 1992 and 1995. Palin says she entered politics because she was concerned that revenue from a new Wasilla sales tax would not be spent wisely.
She ran for Wasilla city council in 1992, at age 28. She won 530 votes to John Hartrick’s 310. On the council, she successfully opposed a measure to curtail the hours at Wasilla's bars by two hours, which surprised Hartrick because she was then a member of a church that advocated abstinence from alcohol. After serving on the city council for three years, she ran for reelection against R’nita Rogers in 1995, winning 413 votes to Rogers' 185. According to Laura Chase of Wasilla, Palin as city councilwoman mentioned to her colleagues in 1995 that she saw the book Daddy's Roommate in the library and did not think it belonged there. City of Wasilla Library records indicate that there was never a request for the library to remove the book and that no books have ever been censored or banned.
Palin did not complete her second term on the city council because she ran for mayor in 1996. Throughout her tenure on the city council and the rest of her career, Palin has been a registered Republican.
Mayor of Wasilla
Palin served two terms (1996–2002) as mayor of Wasilla. At the conclusion of Palin's tenure as mayor in 2002, the town had about 6,300 residents, and it is now the fifth-largest population center in the state.
In 1996, Palin defeated three-term incumbent mayor John Stein, on a platform targeting wasteful spending and high taxes, and Stein says that she introduced abortion, gun rights, and term limits as campaign issues. Although the election was a nonpartisan blanket primary, the state Republican Party ran advertisements on her behalf.
Despite a turbulent first year in office, Palin gained broad favor with Wasilla voters. She kept a jar with the names of Wasilla residents on her desk, and once a week she pulled a name from it and picked up the phone; she would ask: "How's the city doing?" Using income generated by a 2% sales tax that was enacted before she was on the city council, Palin cut property taxes by 75% and eliminated personal property and business inventory taxes. Tapping municipal bonds, she made improvements to the roads and sewers and increased funding to the Police Department. She also oversaw new bike paths and procured funding for storm-water treatment to protect freshwater resources. At the same time, she reduced spending on the town museum and blocked construction of a new library and city hall. Palin ran for re-election against Stein in 1999 and won, with a majority of 74%. Palin was also elected president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors.
Second term
During her second term as mayor, Palin introduced a ballot measure proposing the construction of a municipal sports center to be financed by a 0.5% sales tax increase. The $14.7 million Wasilla Multi-Use Sports Complex was built on time and under budget, but the city spent an additional $1.3 million because of an eminent domain lawsuit caused by the failure to obtain clear title to the property before beginning construction. The city's long-term debt grew from about $1 million to $25 million through voter-approved indebtedness of $15 million for the sports complex, $5.5 million for street projects, and $3 million for water improvement projects. A city council member defended the spending increases as being caused by the city's growth during that time.
Palin also joined with nearby communities in jointly hiring the Anchorage-based lobbying firm of Robertson, Monagle & Eastaugh to lobby for federal funds. The firm secured nearly $8 million in earmarked funds for the Wasilla city government, and another $19 million for other public and private entities in the Wasilla valley area. Earmarks included $500,000 for a youth shelter, $1.9 million for a transportation hub, $900,000 for sewer repairs, and $15 million for a rail project linking Wasilla and the ski resort community of Girdwood. Term limits prevented Palin from running for a third term as mayor in 2002.
Post-mayoral years
In 2002, Palin ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor, coming in second to Loren Leman in a five-way Republican primary. The Republican ticket of U.S. Senator Frank Murkowski and Leman won the November 2002 election. When Murkowski resigned from his long-held U.S. Senate seat in December 2002 to become governor, he considered appointing Palin to replace him in the Senate, but instead chose his daughter, Lisa Murkowski, who was then an Alaskan state representative.
Governor Murkowski appointed Palin to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. She chaired the Commission beginning in 2003, and served as Ethics Supervisor. Palin resigned in January 2004, protesting what she called the "lack of ethics" of fellow Republican members.
After resigning, Palin filed a formal complaint against Oil and Gas Conservation Commissioner Randy Ruedrich, also the chair of the state Republican Party, accusing him of doing work for the party on public time and of working closely with a company he was supposed to be regulating. She also filed a complaint against Gregg Renkes, a former Alaska Attorney General, accusing him of having a financial conflict of interest in negotiating a coal exporting trade agreement, while Renkes was the subject of investigation and after records suggesting a possible conflict of interest had been released to the public. Ruedrich and Renkes both resigned and Ruedrich paid a record $12,000 fine.
From 2003 to June 2005, Palin served as one of three directors of "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.," a 527 group designed to provide political training for Republican women in Alaska. In 2004, Palin told the Anchorage Daily News that she had decided not to run for the U.S. Senate that year, against the Republican incumbent, Lisa Murkowski, because her teenage son opposed it. Palin said "How could I be the team mom if I was a U.S. Senator?"
Governor of Alaska
Palin visits soldiers of the Alaska National Guard, July 24, 2007. In 2006, running on a clean-government platform, Palin defeated incumbent Governor Frank Murkowski in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Her running mate was State Senator Sean Parnell.
Despite being outspent by her Democratic opponent, she won the gubernatorial election in November, defeating former governor Tony Knowles 48.3% to 40.9%. Palin became Alaska's first female governor and at 42, the youngest governor in Alaskan history. She is the state's first governor to have been born after Alaska achieved U.S. statehood, and the first not to be inaugurated in Juneau; she chose to have the ceremony held in Fairbanks instead. She took office on December 4, 2006 and has been very popular with Alaska voters. Polls taken in 2007 early in her term showed her with a 93% and 89% popularity among all voters. A poll taken in September 2008 shows her popularity at 68%. Palin declared that top priorities of her administration would be resource development, education and workforce development, public health and safety, and transportation and infrastructure development.
Palin had championed ethics reform throughout her election campaign. Her first legislative action after taking office was to push for a bipartisan ethics reform bill. She signed the resulting legislation in July 2007, calling it a "first step" declaring that she remains determined to clean up Alaska politics.
Lt. Col. David Cogdall helps Palin try out the Engagement Skills Trainer, July 24, 2007.Palin has sometimes broken with the state Republican establishment. For example, she endorsed Sean Parnell's bid to unseat the state's longtime at-large U.S. Representative, Don Young. Palin has publicly challenged Senator Ted Stevens to come clean about the ongoing federal investigation into his financial dealings. Shortly before his July 2008 indictment, she held a joint news conference with Stevens, described by The Washington Post as being "to make clear she had not abandoned him politically."
Palin promoted oil and natural gas resource development in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), where such development has been the subject of a national debate. In March 2007, Palin put forward an Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA) to encourage building a natural gas pipeline from the state's North Slope. In January 2008, Palin announced that TransCanada Corporation was the sole AGIA-compliant applicant. In August 2008, Palin signed a bill awarding TransCanada Pipelines $500 million in seed money and a license to build and operate the $26 billion pipeline to transport gas from the North Slope to the Lower 48 through Canada.
In 2006, Palin obtained a passport and in 2007 traveled for the first time outside of North America on a trip to Kuwait. There she visited the Khabari Alawazem Crossing at the Kuwait–Iraq border and met with members of the Alaska National Guard at several bases. On her return trip to the U.S., she visited injured soldiers in Germany.
Budget, spending and federal funds
In June 2007, Palin signed a record $6.6 billion operating budget into law. At the same time, she used her veto power to make the second-largest cuts of the construction budget in state history. The $237 million in cuts represented over 300 local projects, and reduced the construction budget to $1.6 billion. In 2008 Palin vetoed $286 million, cutting or reducing funding for 350 projects from the FY09 capital budget.
Palin followed through on a campaign promise to sell the Westwind II jet, a purchase made by the Murkowski administration for $2.7 million in 2005 against the wishes of the legislature. In August 2007, the jet was listed on eBay, but the sale fell through, and the plane was later sold for $2.1 million through a private brokerage firm. Palin lives in Juneau during the legislative session and lives in Wasilla and works out of offices in Anchorage the rest of the year. Since the office in Anchorage is far from Juneau, while she works there she is legally entitled to a $58 per diem travel allowance, which she has taken (a total of $16,951), and to reimbursement for hotels, which she has not, choosing instead to drive about 50 miles to her home in Wasilla. She also chose not to use the former governor's private chef. In response to criticism for taking the per diem, and for $43,490 in travel expenses for the times her family accompanied her on state business, the governor's staffers said that these practices were in line with state policy, that Palin's gubernatorial expenses are 80% below those of her predecessor, Frank Murkowski, and that "many of the hundreds of invitations Palin receives include requests for her to bring her family, placing the definition of 'state business' with the party extending the invitation."
Federal funding
In her State of the State Address on January 17, 2008, Palin declared that it was time for Alaska to "grow up" and not continue to rely on federal government earmarks. Alaska's federal congressional representatives cut back on pork-barrel project requests during Palin's time as governor; as of 2008, Alaska was still the largest per-capita recipient of federal earmarks, requesting nearly $750 million in special federal spending over two years.
Alaska State revenues doubled to $10 billion in 2008, and there is no sales tax or income tax. For the 2009 budget, Palin gave a list of 31 proposed federal earmarks or requests for funding, totaling $197 million, to Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. During 2008, Palin’s decreasing support for federal earmarks was the leading source of friction between herself and the state's congressional delegation; according to her staff, she has requested $95 million to $150 million fewer earmarks or funding requests during each of her years in office than her predecessor Frank Murkowski requested in his last year.