WASHINGTON — Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records shows, involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands.
The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That’s a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago.
The cost of so-called congressional delegations, known among lawmakers as “codels,” has risen nearly 70% since 2005, when an influence-peddling scandal led to a ban on travel funded by lobbyists, according to the data.
More!
In mid-June, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D., Hawaii) led a group of a half-dozen senators and their spouses on a four-day trip to France for the biennial Paris Air Show. An itinerary for the event shows that lawmakers flew on the Air Force’s version of the Boeing 737, which costs $5,700 an hour to operate. They stayed at the Intercontinental Paris Le Grand Hotel, which advertises rooms from $460 a night.
The lawmakers were invited to a dinner party at the U.S. Embassy and had cocktails at a private party at the Eiffel Tower. Mr. Inouye attended a dinner sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association, a U.S. trade group. Another senator on the trip, Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, took a cruise on the River Seine with defense-industry executives and elected officials from Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.
Mr. Inouye and Mr. Shelby declined to comment.
More!
Often, lawmakers combine trips to war zones with visits to more tranquil spots. In February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a delegation of Democratic lawmakers to visit U.S. troops in Afghanistan for a day. Before landing in Kabul, the eight lawmakers and their entourage of spouses and aides spent eight days in Italy, spending $57,697 on hotels and meals.
Democrats, ACORN vote fraud and stealing elections…
In a nutshell the election boards in Democrat districts were allowed to use different standards for tainted ballots than other districts…which is exactly the illegal double standard what the Supreme Court put a stop to in Bush v. Gore. In our view Coleman should have went to federal court. State courts are often too partisan and too close to the results to play with an election after the fact. Not that Coleman was a very good Senator, because he wasn’t.
Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat’s strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.
But the team’s real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman’s lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.
What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel’s findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn’t demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn’t lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.
This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.
Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don’t end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.
UPDATE – Sotomayor had a conflict of interest in the Ricci case – LINK.
In spite of what some people may think of Ann Coulter’s social and political commentary, she is a very good lawyer. Her analysis of the Ricci decision really cut to the quick as to how wrong headed Obama’s next appointment for the Supreme Court is. Even Justice Ginsburg who is the farthest left rejected Sotomayor’s view on a very key issue.
Obama’s Justice-designate Sotomayor threw out their lawsuit in a sneaky, unsigned opinion — the judicial equivalent of “talk to the hand.” She upheld the city’s race discrimination against white and Hispanic firemen on the grounds that the test had a “disparate impact” on blacks, meaning that it failed to promote some magical percentage of blacks.
This strict quota regime was dressed up by the city — and by Sotomayor’s opinion — as a reasonable reaction to the threat of lawsuits by blacks who were not promoted.
That’s a complicated way of saying: Racial quotas are peachy.
According to Sotomayor, any test that gets the numbers wrong — whatever “wrong” means in any given context of professions, populations, applicants, workers, etc. — is grounds for a lawsuit, which in turn, is grounds for an employer to engage in race discrimination against disfavored racial groups, such as white men.
Consequently, the only legal avenue available to employers under Sotomayor’s ruling is always to impose strict racial quotas in making hiring and promotion decisions.
Say, if the threat of a lawsuit permits the government to ignore the Constitution, can pro-lifers get New Haven to shut down all abortion clinics by threatening to sue them? There’s no question but that abortion clinics have a “disparate impact” on black babies.
This week, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 for the white and Hispanic firefighters, overturning Sotomayor’s endorsement of racial quotas.
But all nine justices rejected Sotomayor’s holding that different test results alone give the government a green light to engage in race discrimination. Even Justice Ginsburg’s opinion for the dissent clearly stated that “an employer could not cast aside a selection method based on a statistical disparity alone.”
Indeed, the dissenters argued that the case should be returned to the lower courts to look for some hidden racial bias in the test. For Sotomayor, the results alone proved racial bias.
The one advantage Sotomayor’s talk-to-the-hand opinion has over Justice Ginsburg’s prolix dissent is that brevity prevented Sotomayor from having to explain why quotas aren’t quotas.
In a yet another shocking breech of journalistic ethics from the elite media, this is perhaps the greatest of all. The Washington Post is selling access to Obama officials to lobbyists and others for cash.
Talk about having a financial interest in keeping the administration happy. Why would anyone trust anything in the Washington Post ever again?
For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few”: Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and — at first — even the paper’s own reporters and editors.
The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”
UPDATE - Watchdog journalist Michelle Malkin was on FNC today talking about this new scandal:
GOP lawmakers may charge Democrat Rep. Ed Markey (Mass.) with violating House ethics rules for “intimidating a witness” who testified before his committee, officials tell The Hill.
House GOP leaders and members of the Energy and Commerce Committee have not “ruled out the option” of forcing a vote in the lower chamber to investigate the possible ethics violations, accusing the senior Democrat “retaliating and bullying” a witness who appeared last Tuesday before Markey’s subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, where the CEO of a major energy company told members that the White House-backed cap-and-trade bill would do nothing to reduce carbon emissions while driving up energy costs.
In that letter, they explained their complaint that while David L. Sokol, CEO of MidAmerican Energy Holding Co. (of which Warren Buffett is the largest stakeholder), told Markey’s subcommittee panel that his cap-and-trade legislation would be ineffective and expensive, the chairman sent a formal request to regulators for an investigation into past statements made by Sokol and Buffett and actions taken by the company.
“Mr. Sokol and his company became the focus of apparent intimidation when Chairman Markey by letter dated the day of the hearing, asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to answer specific questions about investment and transmission-related activist of MidAmerican Energy and its partner, investor Warren Buffett,” they wrote in the letter signed by all GOP members of the committee.
They demanded that the top Democrat “take whatever actions necessary to make sure that witnesses are not “subjected to sanction, retribution and vengeance simply because the facts and opinions they offer do not square with those of the Committee’s members.”
Republican lawmakers contend that Markey’s letter to FERC was an example of a wider effort on the part of Democrats to intimidate individuals who have different viewpoints than “what the Majority wants to hear,” citing reports that the Senate Finance Committee Chairman “just this week … instructed Democrat health care lobbyists not to meet with Republicans.”
“There’s systematic intimidation going on, and bullying of individuals by a party that preaches tolerance and it must stop,” Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.) told The Hill.
How much will it cost that company to fend off a federal investigation? How come the elitre media isnt all over this abuse of power? If a republican had domne this the media would make sure thate veryone knew his name.
The first time we wrote of this it was when the state of Oregon proposed such a program (LINK) and Betsy Imholt of the Oregon state government responded to our piece and hid under her desk after our response.
Here is an excerpt of our response to Imholt:
Betsy,
I appreciate you writing but the problem with the program is a fundamental issue of trust and common sense and it is of little surprise to me that a bureaucrat like yourself just doesn’t get it.
People who have lost their jobs drive less; others are driving more fuel efficient cars to use less gas for economic as well as national security reasons as everyone has been talking about. So now that people are conserving more here comes the bureaucrat to punish them for it.
Everyone is getting by with less…. well not everyone… everyone except you. Here is a novel idea Betsy, everyone is getting by with less, so government should too.
And…
There are also privacy issues and the idea of “big brother”. Bureaucrats are famous for making sure that they are not held accountable for when things go wrong. Betsy, would you be willing to accept a provision in the law that would mandate 20 years in prison without possibility of parole, for you and your staff if these devices are ever used to track someone’s whereabouts. You won’t do it because if one thing is always consistent, it is that government breaks any and all promises when it comes to limiting its own power and influence.
Be sure to follow the link above and enjoy the rest.
The year is 2020 and the gasoline tax is history. In its place you get a monthly tax bill based on each mile you drove — tracked by a Global Positioning System device in your car and uploaded to a billing center.
What once was science fiction is being field-tested by the University of Iowa to iron out the wrinkles should a by-the-mile road tax ever be enacted.
Besides the technological advances making such a tax possible, the idea is getting a hard push from a growing number of transportation experts and officials. That is because the traditional by-the-gallon fuel tax, struggling to keep up with road building and maintenance demands, could fall even farther behind as vehicles’ gas mileage rises and more alternative-fuel vehicles come on line.
The idea of shifting to a by-the-mile tax has been discussed for years, but it now appears to be getting more serious attention. A federal commission, after a two-year study, concluded earlier this year that the road tax was the “best path forward” to keep revenues flowing to highway and transportation projects, and could be an important new tool to help manage traffic and relieve congestion.
The decision by the 15-member National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission was unanimous, which surprised Robert Atkinson, the group’s chairman. But he said it became clear as the commission’s work progressed that a road tax on miles traveled was the best option.
“If you’re committed to the system being improved then it was a no-brainer,” he said.
Agreed, these government types have no brains. Are the American people going to tolerate this crap?
The legal arguments made in the report, which was prepared by Senior Foreign Law Specialist Norma Gutierrez, are quite intricate and based in Honduran law. But the bottom line is this:
The Honduran Congress appears to have acted properly in deposing President Manuel Zelaya. Unlike in the United States, the Honduran Congress has the last word when it comes to interpreting the Constitution. Although there is no provision in Honduras’s Constitution for impeachment as such, the body does have powers to disapprove of the president’s official acts, and to replace him in the event that he is incapable of performing his duties. Most importantly, the Congress also has the authority to interpret exactly what that means.
The Supreme Court was legally entitled to ask the military to arrest Zelaya. The high court, which is the constitutional venue for trials of the president and other high-ranking officials, also recognized the Congress’s ouster of Zelaya when it referred his case back down to a lower court afterward, on the grounds that he was “no longer a high-ranking government official.”
The military did not act properly in forcibly expatriating Zelaya. According to the CRS report and other news stories, Honduran authorities are investigating their decision, which the military justified at the time as a means of preventing bloodshed. In fact, Zelaya should have been given a trial, and if convicted of seeking reelection, he would have lost his citizenship. But he is still a citizen now, and the Constitution forbids the expatriation of Honduran citizens by their government.
The proper line of succession was followed after Zelaya’s ouster. Because there was no Vice President in office when Zelaya was removed (he had resigned to run for president), Micheletti was the proper successor, as he had been president of the Congress.
“The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded the removal of former President Zelaya was Constitutional, and we must respect that,” Rep. Aaron Schock said today. “It’s unconscionable the administration would attempt to force Honduras to violate its own Constitution by cutting of foreign aid.”
UPDATE II – Associated Press is in the tank for the leftist would be dictator….what a surprise. Examine this link HERE. What little pertinent information there is about Zelaya’s legal removal from office is understated. The article refers to Zelaya’s removal as a “coup” when in fact it was ordered by the Supreme Court and mandated by enumerated sections of the Honduran Constitution. Look at the glowing pictures of Zelaya in the article. A propaganda ministry could not have slanted the article much more.
Well said.
Longer clip, more detail and Bill Kristol weighs in. –
UPDATE – 9.16.2009 Greta Van Susteren investigates:
When House Democratic leaders were rounding up votes Friday for the massive climate-change bill, they paid special attention to their colleagues from Ohio who remained stubbornly undecided.
They finally secured the vote of one Ohioan, veteran Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, the old-fashioned way. They gave her what she wanted – a new federal power authority, similar to Washington state’s Bonneville Power Administration, stocked with up to $3.5 billion in taxpayer money available for lending to renewable energy and economic development projects in Ohio and other Midwestern states.
House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, included the Kaptur project in a 310-page amendment to the legislation unveiled at 3 a.m. Friday, just hours before the bill was to be debated on the House floor. The amendment was packed with other vote-getting provisions, both large and small, that had been sought by dozens of wavering Democrats.
The wheeling and dealing proved successful. Mr. Waxman and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, backed by the personal lobbying of President Obama, won over enough lawmakers to pass the bill narrowly Friday evening, 219-212.
Miss Kaptur trumpeted her handiwork on her congressional Web site. She said the new federal authority would bring new economic development to Ohio and the struggling Great Lakes region and would also ensure “regional equity” with other parts of the country that already have such programs.
General Electric, which owns NBC who has been in the tank for the administration more so than any other network, in a few days of lobbying has managed to do this:
General Electric, the world’s largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government’s key rescue programs for banks.
At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government.
The company did not initially qualify for the program, under which the government sought to unfreeze credit markets by guaranteeing debt sold by banking firms. But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE.
As a result, GE has joined major banks collectively saving billions of dollars by raising money for their operations at lower interest rates. Public records show that GE Capital, the company’s massive financing arm, has issued nearly a quarter of the $340 billion in debt backed by the program, which is known as the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, or TLGP. The government’s actions have been “powerful and helpful” to the company, GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt acknowledged in December.
After a big crash many stocks and investments are left undervalued and people will buy, so some aspects of the economy as a result perk up, but eventually the “recovery” stalls and stocks fall again, hence the term “bear market recovery”.
U.S. consumer confidence took an unexpectedly steep slide in June, figures released on Tuesday showed, suggesting the 18-month-long recession had yet to loosen its grip on the economy.
A separate report on April house prices in major cities offered some encouraging signs that the worst of the housing slump may be over, but that was not enough to lift investors’ spirits, while another crop of economic data showed business activity in New York City and the Midwest remained weak and retail chains slogged through a rough June.
Billionaire investor George Soros added to the cautionary tone, saying fears of inflation would drive up borrowing costs and choke off growth once financial markets recover.
A shaky consumer-confidence reading that aggravated investors’ fears of weak profits and a prolonged recession pushed stocks lower on Tuesday.
New housing data were also glum, though the market managed to hold steady at the open following their release. The losses in major indexes began to pile up about a half-hour after the bell, when the Conference Board said its index of consumer confidence for June fell to 49.3, from a revised 54.8 in May, which was originally reported as 54.9.
The foreign investors are worried about inflation and a decreasing dollar amid our insane “print it up like there is no tomorrow” monetary policy. UPDATE – Dollar falls again… (LINK)
Private-sector jobs in the U.S. fell 473,000 in June, according to a national employment report published Wednesday by payroll giant Automatic Data Processing Inc. and consultancy Macroeconomic Advisers.
The expected loss exceeds the 400,000 drop forecast by economists in a Dow Jones Newswires survey and suggests that layoffs may be worsening.
The ADP survey tallies only private-sector jobs, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ nonfarm payroll data, to be released Thursday, include government workers.
How Steve Schmidt blew up the McCain campaign and is attacking Sarah Palin to keep the heat off of himself.
Is Sarah Palin is the biggest threat to the corrupt, big government, crony capitalist kickback establishment culture in modern political memory? But what about Ronald Reagan…- While eventually Ronald Reagan was able to create a massive power-base from the ground up with massive popular support, he never went after the media or after bad apples in the GOP.
With lobbying, corruption, and crony favors in Washington now at an all time high the Democrats have become the party of Wall Street, corrupt crony capitalist, big government “A”; and while there are still some honest hold outs (Bachmann, DeMint, Paul, Sauder, Pence, etc) much of the GOP leadership is still the party of big, corrupt, crony capitalist government “B”. The exit polls in the last election showed this very clearly when voters said that the Republican Party used to stand for something but had lost their way.
Voters had learned that most Republicans in Congress circa 2008 were not the same stock that took over Congress in 1994 and worked so well with President Clinton in 1996 and 1998 to balance the budget, reign in spending, cut taxes and pass the hugely successful (and popular) welfare reform package that helped so many people get back to work. It is no secret that John Kasich, the GOP House Budget Chairman who was the architect of that success has been none too pleased with the House Republicans’ lack of leadership and financial discipline since 2004.
After taking devastating electoral defeats in 2006 and 2008, some wings of the Republican Party still have not learned their lesson. For example: Eight Republicans voted for the 1300 page, corporate favor and pork lined energy tax bill that amounts to the largest tax increase in U.S. history. A bill that almost no one had read when they voted for it.
Members of that big government wing of the Republican Party talk about small, common sense government at election time, but history has proved beyond doubt that they do not govern that way. While not at election time the big government wing bashes the more Reaganite and fiscally responsible wing of the GOP in the media. Of course, the elite media being very hostile to conservatives, goes along with such bashing gleefully. John McCain was the elite media’s favorite Republican because he was happy to be used as a tool to bash people in his own party. John McCain used to say that the elite media was his constituency. McCain learned just how far that gets you when you run against a far left Democrat. McCain was praised by the elite media until the primary battle was over and hours after McCain had the nomination secured the NY Times (in an article that got them sued for libel) printed a baseless and unsourced thinly veiled allegation that McCain was having an affair with a 40 year old lobbyist. That was just the beginning (LINK).
Did the big government wing of the GOP learn it’s lesson in the face of two stark defeats in recent election history? The big government wing seems desperate to stop another 1994 like “Republican Revolution” and is back to currying favor with the elite media by bashing conservatives. The target of targets for months has been Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
Vanity Fair published an unsourced, half truth filled attack piece on Palin (LINK) by Todd Purdum that has been refuted/exposed reasonably well by National Review (LINK) and the Weekly Standard (LINK). Todd Purdum wrote a similarly unsourced nasty hit piece on the Clintons late in the last primary (LINK) [when you follow the link also be sure to compare the Obama picture with the Clinton picture which presents a narrative all it's own - Editor].
Here is what Bill Clinton had to say about Purdum and about some of the elite media’s biased coverage (LINK with audio):
“[He's] sleazy,” he said referring to Purdum. “He’s a really dishonest reporter. And one of our guys talked to him . . . And I haven’t read [the article]. There’s just five or six blatant lies in there. But he’s a real slimy guy,” the former President said.
When I reminded him that Purdum was married to his former press spokesperson Myers, Clinton was undeterred.
“That’s all right– he’s still a scumbag,” Clinton said…
“You know he didn’t use a single name, cite a single source in all those things he said.. It’s just slimy.
It’s part of the national media’s attempt to nail Hillary for Obama. It’s the most biased press coverage in history. It’s another way of helping Obama. They had all these people standing up in this church cheering, calling Hillary a white racist, and he didn’t do anything about it. The first day he said ‘Ah, ah, ah well.’ Because that’s what they do– he gets other people to slime her. So then they saw the movie they thought this is a great ad for John McCain–maybe I better quit the church. It’s all politics. It’s all about the bias of the media for Obama. Don’t think anything about it.”
“But I’m telling ya, all it’s doing is driving her supporters further and further away– because they know exactly what it is– this has been the most rigged coverage in modern history– and the guy ought to be ashamed of himself. But he has no shame. It isn’t the first dishonest piece he’s written about me or her.”
Clinton goes on to say exactly how a piece like this gets generated. A writer decides that they want to write a hit piece, talk to a few political enemies of that person and report every allegation against them as fact with no attempt to present some objective truth. In fairness, while the Clinton’s do not always tell the truth, he is spot on in these comments. When Hillary Clinton’s communications advisor Howard Wolfson says repeatedly that they have to come on Fox News to get a fair shake, when Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity are going after NBC News for their bias against Hillary, well you know it’s bad. Hillbuzz and PUMApac, both sites of those who supported Clinton in the campaign, have done a meticulous job of reporting on the outrageous media bias against Hillary and Governor Palin.
Enter Steve Schmidt
When asked by NBC news about his “sources” Purdum said , “I don’t want to get into sources and methods”. Of course he doesn’t. Politico.com was able to track down some of the unsourced comments back to former McCain chief campaign strategist Steve Schmidt (LINK).
Politico:
The vitriol also suggests the degree to which Palin remains a Rorschach test not simply to Republicans nationally but within a tight circle of elite operatives and commentators, many of whom seem ready to carry their arguments in 2012. Was Palin a fresh talent whose debut was mishandled by self-serving campaign insiders, or an eccentric “diva” who had no business on the national stage?
Politico’s instincts are spot on, and it is very likely Steve Schmidt who is fueling the “hate Palin” flames behind the scenes in the elite media.
So why would Schmidt and a handful of other big government Republican’s want to keep attacking Sarah Palin? There is a long list of reasons, but let’s start with Schmidt.
Schmidt was on the verge of winning the election for his candidate until McCain suspended his campaign to help pass the TARP crap sandwich bailout bill. Up until that weekend McCain/Palin’s numbers were on the rise in spite of being outspent by the Obama campaign. Sarah Palin gave the most effective political speech at a convention in 30 years, and John McCain said at the convention that he was going to name names, the corrupt and the pork spenders were going to be outed by name and he promised that we would “know who they are”. McCain wasn’t serious. When McCain voted for that bailout bill with hundreds of pork amendments on it, it was if he took a stake and drove it through the very heart of his own brand. The “maverick” fight the corrupt spending brand for the McCain ticket was destroyed. All credibility was lost. The emperor had no clothes.
The number one rule of any campaign is to never, ever, ever violate your own brand and the McCain campaign did just that with Steve Schmidt at the helm. Schmidt either created a campaign brand that wasn’t honest, or he failed to keep his candidate from sabotaging the campaign brand, both of which means that Schmidt should never run a campaign again. If McCain was dead set on sabotaging the campaign brand Schmidt should have resigned to help save his career.
This writer believes that suspending the campaign and the decision for McCain to support the bailout was supported by Schmidt and he didn’t make the connection that he was about to trash his own brand. We would know if Schmidt had fought hard with McCain to keep him from those actions because it would have been leaked [by the way what is stopping McCain from naming names now, the corruption and corporate favors from Congress now are off the chart, where is the outrage? - editor]
Schmidt is trying to keep the focus off of his failure by keeping the ball on Palin and he hopes that by continuing to trash her in Washington circles that he can get a job with one of the other 2012 presidential candidates.
Schmidt has an ideological axe to grind against Palin as he has made it very clear that he very much opposes religious and social conservatives (LINK). Schmidt supported McCain when he was the poster child for the so called “moderate lets get along and play nice with Democrats that we know full well are corrupt” Republican. The type of Republican that voters have tossed out of office for two elections in a row.
Palin is anything but that type of Republican.
Sarah Palin outed and very publicly tore down corporate corruption ring that owned much of the Republican Party machine in Alaska. Much of the Republican machine in Alaska still hates her for that (LINK, 2). While some Republicans talk about “naming names” Palin fights corrupt people in her own party fearlessly and ruthlessly. If Governor Palin is ever President Palin you can expect to see some Republicans and Democrats being carted off in handcuffs.
Palin used her overwhelming popular support to force very tough new ethics laws in Alaska and she made real cuts to state government spending. Palin cut off the money train for plenty of the corrupt in Alaska, especially in the so called competitive bidding process that lent itself to cronyism before the reforms (like why it is she stopped that bridge project in Ketchikan – LINK). These are not the kind of reforms a big government wing of the GOP would like to see implemented, because they have gotten wealthy just talking about them and doing the opposite. The prospect of a Palin presidency is bad for them because she means business.
Schmidt, as the Politico article link above makes clear, is very hostile to Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard. The Weekly Standard is a very influential conservative publication that holds Republicans who talk one way and govern another to account. The Weekly Standard was quite favorable towards Governor Palin’s record in Alaska.
It is not enough that Sarah Palin is the embodiment of everything the corrupt, big government wing of the GOP opposes, because there are some in the GOP who are very dedicated to those ideals as well. They fear her because Palin has demonstrated the ability to generate larger crowds than Obama has on campaign events and has also proved that she is a fund raising machine the likes of which the Republican Party has never seen. They have to destroy her now, if they can, because if Sarah Palin hits the stump in earnest she will be able to outspend her opponents by real margins and that is what the smear campaign against her is all about.
By the way, notice how her detractors never talk about her accomplishments as Mayor and Governor? They never get into policy that she has pushed for and executed. Think about it.
UPDATE – Former McCain staffer Patrick Hynes comments:
And what did the lovely Governor of Alaska do to deserve this morning thrashing? Um … she had the gall to be the subject of a Vanity Fair hit piece by Todd Purdum.
That’ll learn her.
Look, I worked on the McCain campaign. Palin had her shortcomings, but she also brought some incredible strengths to the campaign. And perhaps the McCain staffers who continue to trash the governor are deflecting attention away from how remarkably screwed up and dysfunctional the operation was even before the Palin pick. What I don’t understand is this: Why would anyone hire a bunch of campaign staffers after watching how viciously they are attacking their former employer?
UPDATE II – National Review concludes it was Schmidt too – LINK.
