In reference to Bob Herbert’s column in today’s New York Times admonishing Liberals to buck up and “Hold Your Heads Up”
To be fair you need to say what Conservative Republicans have given our country. You cannot blame the invasion and occupation of Iraq on Republicans only. Sure the Bush Administration’s neoconservatives gleefully invented an imaginary connection in Iraq to the attack on New York City and Washington; but unless we fully embraced solar, wind and other renewable energy sources some sort of invasion or treaty to grab the oil in Iraq would have occurred.
What the Republican (so-called) conservatives really gave us is deregulation so complete that except for ethical and moral reasons corporations no longer have any inhibition against stealing and cheating. At least from the outside, no one is watching. They only get caught when an officer or employee with a shred of conscience left rats on them. Even then the sentence for a CEO is usually a multi-million dollar severance package. After all when every major corporation operating in the USA has cheating and stealing built into their DNA an honest, moral and ethical company operates at a disadvantage; or so the reasoning goes until they are caught and everybody connected with the company looses big time (see Enron Corporation).
From, FBI saw threat of mortgage crisis, By Richard B. Schmitt
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, August 25, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mortgagefraud25-2008aug25,0,6946937.story
“Long before the mortgage crisis began rocking Main Street and Wall Street, a top FBI official made a chilling, if little-noticed, prediction: The booming mortgage business, fueled by low interest rates and soaring home values, was starting to attract shady operators and billions in losses were possible.
"It has the potential to be an epidemic," Chris Swecker, the FBI official in charge of criminal investigations, told reporters in September 2004. But, he added reassuringly, the FBI was on the case. "We think we can prevent a problem that could have as much impact as the S&L crisis," he said.
Today, the damage from the global mortgage meltdown has more than matched that of the savings-and-loan bailouts of the 1980s and early 1990s. By some estimates, it has made that costly debacle look like chump change. But it's also clear that the FBI failed to avert a problem it had accurately forecast.”
• The Republicans gave us Enron, Bear Stearns, Getty, (it turned out that Getty’s profits came from not paying state and federal gas pump taxes and not from the alleged former Russian mobster CEO’s financial genius), and now Fanny Mae/Freddy Mac.
• The Republicans gave us; Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, Carl Rove, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzales.
• The Republicans have taken a national budgetary surplus and in just 7 years through a combination of profuse reckless spending and tax give always to the extremely wealthy turned it into a monstrous fast growing budget deficit of $407 Billion.
• The Republicans have made foreign countries, chiefly China the “landlords” of our national debt and the financial owners of the United States. The desperate moves to shore up Fanny Mae/Freddy Mac is to keep those nations, mostly China from losing all confidence and abandoning the USA to the fiscal graveyard and moving on with building their country’s wealth.
From The Nation, The Silence of Lambs, posted by William Greider on 09/08/2008 @ 3:08pm http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/356921/the_silence_of_lambs
“Facing the crisis honestly would not fit very well with the flag-waving campaign themes. The United States is financially busted and utterly dependent on lending from foreign powers--both friends and rivals around the world. The government rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could not be put off until after the election, as insiders had hoped, because foreign creditors were beginning to back away from lending any more capital to the two failing US firms. The major creditors are led by China, Japan and other Asian nations, plus oil-rich Arab states and even Russia. The Bank of China has reduced its $376 billion in lending to Fannie and Freddie by 25 percent since July and other nations threaten to do the same.
So the Treasury arranged a deal that throws Fannie and Freddie shareholders over the side, but promises to protect the creditors, foreign and domestic. Bill Gross, chief investment officer of PIMCO, the mammoth bond house in California, issued an ominous warning in advance. If Washington didn't "open up the balance sheet of the US Treasury" and pump lots of public money into the ailing financial firms, the major lenders would sit by and let the great deflation of Wall Street proceed to its ruinous climax. Without the big lenders, credit would dry up through the US economy and the destruction could prove bloody historic for all. The Treasury Secretary heard the message.”
If this last ditch effort does not work; what ordinary people are threatened with is double digit interest rates, plunging property values and very high unemployment. That is what the Republicans can so very patriotically clam as their contribution to the citizens of the USA.
Jim Pitcherella
________________________________________
September 9, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Hold Your Heads Up
By BOB HERBERT
Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal?
Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination.
Liberals have been so cowed by the pummeling they’ve taken from the right that they’ve tried to shed their own identity, calling themselves everything but liberal and hoping to pass conservative muster by presenting themselves as hyper-religious and lifelong lovers of rifles, handguns, whatever.
So there was Hillary Clinton, of all people, sponsoring legislation to ban flag-burning; and Barack Obama, who once opposed the death penalty, morphing into someone who not only supports it, but supports it in cases that don’t even involve a homicide.
Anyway, the Republicans were back at it last week at their convention. Mitt Romney wasn’t content to insist that he personally knows that “liberals don’t have a clue.” He complained loudly that the federal government right now is too liberal.
“We need change, all right,” he said. “Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.”
Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.
There would be absolutely no chance that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin could make a credible run for the highest offices in the land. Conservatives would never have allowed it.
Civil rights? Women’s rights? Liberals went to the mat for them time and again against ugly, vicious and sometimes murderous opposition. They should be forever proud.
The liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance, both of which were contained in the original Social Security Act. Most conservatives despised the very idea of this assistance to struggling Americans. Republicans hated Social Security, but most were afraid to give full throat to their opposition in public at the height of the Depression.
Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/opinion/09herbert.html?hp
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Sunday, September 7, 2008
“Slavery by Another Name, The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.”
I had some "Starbucks" coffee at Barns & Noble tonight. It had not worn off yet. So I tuned in C-Span. "Race in America" was on. The Wall Street Journal's bureau chief in Atlanta, Douglas A Blackmon was discussing his book “Slavery by Another Name, The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.”
My father had a pained look on his face when he talked about the working conditions at Lukens Steel Company before the Unions came. But he was paid for his work. Listen up United Steel Workers Union members; the revelations of this work give a whole new dimension to US Steel Company. Allegedly US Steel in Birmingham Alabama was not significantly different from the slave labor “corporations” of Nazi Germany. US Steel allegedly used thousands of Black male slaves laboring in hellish conditions for five decades; finally ending its alleged slavery at the beginning of World War II.
As historians here in Chester County know, the history of Black people in the USA, while documented is hard to dig up. We know a little about the Jim Crow days but we might just be discovering the devastating effect of what could be called the re-introduction of slavery to the USA following the Civil War. Although Congress had freed the slaves the Federal Government did not prosecute slave owners. “State Rights” prevailed until the 1940s. It is very disturbing that slavery in the USA did not end in the 19th Century. It ended in the 20th Century in 1941 when suggestions that slavery in the USA might be used as propaganda by the enemy prompted President Roosevelt to direct the USDoJ to prosecute slave owners.
From Mr.Blackmon's website:
“The Justice Department recently had formed its Civil Rights Section, created primarily to investigate cases related to anti-organized-labor efforts. It began shifting its focus to discrimination and racial abuse -- issues more commonly associated with the term ‘civil rights’ today.”
“Five days after the Japanese attack, on Dec. 12, 1941, Attorney General Francis Biddle issued a directive -- Circular No. 3591 -- to all federal prosecutors acknowledging the history of unwritten federal policy to ignore most reports of involuntary servitude.
Mr. Biddle wrote: ‘In the United States one cannot sell himself as a peon or slave -- the law is fixed and established to protect the weak-minded, the poor, the miserable. ...Any such sale or contract is positively null and void and the procuring and causing of such contract to be made violates [the] statutes.’He ordered all Department of Justice investigators to entirely drop reference to peonage in their written reports. Instead, they were to label every file ‘Involuntary Servitude and Slavery.”
" Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II."
Jim
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An excerpt from the book at:
http://slaverybyanothername.com/
The Bricks We Stand On
On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy.”1 Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham’s offense was blackness.
After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses—Cottenham’s sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.
The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel Corporation—the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham’s fine and fees. What the company’s managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.
A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No. 12—one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily “task” was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners— many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined.
Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened dozens. Within his first four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide.
Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after, were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine.
Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal brought to the surface into coke—the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S.
Steel’s production of iron. Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.
Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.
Almost a century later, on an overgrown hillside five miles from the bustling downtown of contemporary Birmingham, I found my way to one of the only tangible relics of what Green Cottenham endured. The ground was all but completely obscured by the dense thicket. But beneath the undergrowth of privet, the faint outlines of hundreds upon hundreds of oval depressions still marked the land. Spread in haphazard rows across the forest floor, these were sunken graves of the dead from nearby prison mines once operated by U.S. Steel.2 Here and there, antediluvian headstones jutted from the foliage. No signs marked the place. No paths led to it.
I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, exploring the possibility of a story asking a provocative question: What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes? My guide that day in the summer of 2000 was an industrial archaeologist named Jack Bergstresser. Years earlier, he had stumbled across a simple iron fence surrounding a single collapsed grave during a survey of the area.
Bergstresser was mystified by its presence at the center of what at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the busiest confluences of industrial activity in the United States. The grave and the twisted wrought iron around it sat near what had been the intersection of two rail lines and a complex of mines, coal processing facilities, and furnaces in which thousands of men operated around the clock to generate millions of tons of coal and iron—all owned and operated by U.S. Steel at the height of its supremacy in American commerce. Bergstresser, who is white, told me he wondered if the dead here were forced laborers. He knew that African Americans had been compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family home place south of Birmingham.
A year later, the Journal published my long article chronicling the saga of that burial ground. No specific record of the internments survived, but mountains of archival evidence and the oral histories of old and dying African Americans nearby confirmed that most of the cemetery’s inhabitants had been inmates of the labor camp that operated for three decades on the hilltop above the graveyard. Later I would discover atop a nearby rise another burial field, where Green Cottenham almost certainly was buried.
The camp had supplied tens of thousands of men over five decades to a succession of prison mines ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not survived. Nearly all were black men arrested and then “leased” by state and county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired.3 Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the final chapter of American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.
My father had a pained look on his face when he talked about the working conditions at Lukens Steel Company before the Unions came. But he was paid for his work. Listen up United Steel Workers Union members; the revelations of this work give a whole new dimension to US Steel Company. Allegedly US Steel in Birmingham Alabama was not significantly different from the slave labor “corporations” of Nazi Germany. US Steel allegedly used thousands of Black male slaves laboring in hellish conditions for five decades; finally ending its alleged slavery at the beginning of World War II.
As historians here in Chester County know, the history of Black people in the USA, while documented is hard to dig up. We know a little about the Jim Crow days but we might just be discovering the devastating effect of what could be called the re-introduction of slavery to the USA following the Civil War. Although Congress had freed the slaves the Federal Government did not prosecute slave owners. “State Rights” prevailed until the 1940s. It is very disturbing that slavery in the USA did not end in the 19th Century. It ended in the 20th Century in 1941 when suggestions that slavery in the USA might be used as propaganda by the enemy prompted President Roosevelt to direct the USDoJ to prosecute slave owners.
From Mr.Blackmon's website:
“The Justice Department recently had formed its Civil Rights Section, created primarily to investigate cases related to anti-organized-labor efforts. It began shifting its focus to discrimination and racial abuse -- issues more commonly associated with the term ‘civil rights’ today.”
“Five days after the Japanese attack, on Dec. 12, 1941, Attorney General Francis Biddle issued a directive -- Circular No. 3591 -- to all federal prosecutors acknowledging the history of unwritten federal policy to ignore most reports of involuntary servitude.
Mr. Biddle wrote: ‘In the United States one cannot sell himself as a peon or slave -- the law is fixed and established to protect the weak-minded, the poor, the miserable. ...Any such sale or contract is positively null and void and the procuring and causing of such contract to be made violates [the] statutes.’He ordered all Department of Justice investigators to entirely drop reference to peonage in their written reports. Instead, they were to label every file ‘Involuntary Servitude and Slavery.”
" Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II."
Jim
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An excerpt from the book at:
http://slaverybyanothername.com/
The Bricks We Stand On
On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy.”1 Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham’s offense was blackness.
After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses—Cottenham’s sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.
The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel Corporation—the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham’s fine and fees. What the company’s managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.
A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No. 12—one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily “task” was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners— many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined.
Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened dozens. Within his first four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide.
Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after, were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine.
Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal brought to the surface into coke—the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S.
Steel’s production of iron. Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.
Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.
Almost a century later, on an overgrown hillside five miles from the bustling downtown of contemporary Birmingham, I found my way to one of the only tangible relics of what Green Cottenham endured. The ground was all but completely obscured by the dense thicket. But beneath the undergrowth of privet, the faint outlines of hundreds upon hundreds of oval depressions still marked the land. Spread in haphazard rows across the forest floor, these were sunken graves of the dead from nearby prison mines once operated by U.S. Steel.2 Here and there, antediluvian headstones jutted from the foliage. No signs marked the place. No paths led to it.
I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, exploring the possibility of a story asking a provocative question: What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes? My guide that day in the summer of 2000 was an industrial archaeologist named Jack Bergstresser. Years earlier, he had stumbled across a simple iron fence surrounding a single collapsed grave during a survey of the area.
Bergstresser was mystified by its presence at the center of what at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the busiest confluences of industrial activity in the United States. The grave and the twisted wrought iron around it sat near what had been the intersection of two rail lines and a complex of mines, coal processing facilities, and furnaces in which thousands of men operated around the clock to generate millions of tons of coal and iron—all owned and operated by U.S. Steel at the height of its supremacy in American commerce. Bergstresser, who is white, told me he wondered if the dead here were forced laborers. He knew that African Americans had been compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family home place south of Birmingham.
A year later, the Journal published my long article chronicling the saga of that burial ground. No specific record of the internments survived, but mountains of archival evidence and the oral histories of old and dying African Americans nearby confirmed that most of the cemetery’s inhabitants had been inmates of the labor camp that operated for three decades on the hilltop above the graveyard. Later I would discover atop a nearby rise another burial field, where Green Cottenham almost certainly was buried.
The camp had supplied tens of thousands of men over five decades to a succession of prison mines ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not survived. Nearly all were black men arrested and then “leased” by state and county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired.3 Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the final chapter of American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
US lenders 'face state takeover'
It is good that we have two candidates who agree that we should not reward the white collar criminals at the mortgage companies. Maybe McCain is not an ordinary Republican.
Jim
From BBC News
"We've got to keep people in their homes," said the Republican candidate, John McCain.
"There's got to be restructuring, there's got to be reorganization, and there's got to be some confidence that we've stopped this downward spiral," he added, saying that the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac must not benefit executives at the two companies.
The Democratic Party candidate, Barack Obama, said any action should be focused "on whether it will strengthen our economy and help struggling homeowners".
"We must not allow government intervention to protect investors and speculators who relied on the government to reap massive profits," he said, adding "we must protect taxpayers, not bail out the shareholders and management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7601701.stm
Jim
From BBC News
"We've got to keep people in their homes," said the Republican candidate, John McCain.
"There's got to be restructuring, there's got to be reorganization, and there's got to be some confidence that we've stopped this downward spiral," he added, saying that the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac must not benefit executives at the two companies.
The Democratic Party candidate, Barack Obama, said any action should be focused "on whether it will strengthen our economy and help struggling homeowners".
"We must not allow government intervention to protect investors and speculators who relied on the government to reap massive profits," he said, adding "we must protect taxpayers, not bail out the shareholders and management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7601701.stm
Friday, September 5, 2008
Suddenly religious Jack Abramoff is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison
It looks to me that suddenly religious Jack Abramoff is sorry for being caught, not for what he did.
Newt Gingrich, the “Contract with America”, “Republican Revolution” and “Enron business ethics”; the bright, ivy league schooled “Young Republicans”. They think stealing and “book cooking” is just good business practice and even if they are caught it’s “just business” or “just politics. “Everybody does it” so they did nothing wrong.
Two down; Scooter Libby, Jack Abramoff; who is next?
Grover Norquist, Carl Rove, Alberto Gonzales?
I guess the “white collar” criminals think that they didn’t cause a major recession by means of mortgage fraud and security fraud; they just took advantage of an opportunity. So very many “white collar” criminals who think they did nothing wrong so they can’t go to prison. They are exasperating to investigate and prosecute because they don’t “flip” easily. Mafia bosses are more likeable because they know they are criminals, getting caught is just down time and they respect good AUSAs.
If Bush and Cheney are ever successfully prosecuted will they be repentant or just sorry they were caught?
________________________________________
“New York Times
September 5, 2008
Abramoff Is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON — Jack Abramoff, the onetime flamboyant lobbyist who amassed a fortune by showering gifts on Congressional and executive branch officials while bilking Indian tribes of millions of dollars, was sentenced Thursday to four years in prison.
Judge Ellen S. Huvelle of Federal District Court here ordered that Mr. Abramoff serve the time for corruption and tax offenses uncovered by an influence-peddling investigation that touched Republican leaders in Congress and midlevel officials in the Bush administration, among others. Judge Huvelle said Mr. Abramoff had engaged in “a consistent course of corrupt conduct.”
Mr. Abramoff, who came to symbolize an out-of-control, even brazen style of courting government officials, told Judge Huvelle he had since realized how far he had stepped over the bounds of what was permissible. Wearing a worn brown T-shirt, pants with an elastic waistband and a Jewish skullcap, he apologized profusely and in a quavering voice said he was begging for mercy. “I have fallen into an abyss,” he said. “My name is the butt of a joke.”
The sentencing process was unusual and complicated by many factors. Prosecutors had asked Judge Huvelle to sentence Mr. Abramoff to a term less than the approximately 11 years allowed by federal sentencing guidelines to reflect his extensive cooperation with investigators.”
More at:
http://www.nytimes.com/
Newt Gingrich, the “Contract with America”, “Republican Revolution” and “Enron business ethics”; the bright, ivy league schooled “Young Republicans”. They think stealing and “book cooking” is just good business practice and even if they are caught it’s “just business” or “just politics. “Everybody does it” so they did nothing wrong.
Two down; Scooter Libby, Jack Abramoff; who is next?
Grover Norquist, Carl Rove, Alberto Gonzales?
I guess the “white collar” criminals think that they didn’t cause a major recession by means of mortgage fraud and security fraud; they just took advantage of an opportunity. So very many “white collar” criminals who think they did nothing wrong so they can’t go to prison. They are exasperating to investigate and prosecute because they don’t “flip” easily. Mafia bosses are more likeable because they know they are criminals, getting caught is just down time and they respect good AUSAs.
If Bush and Cheney are ever successfully prosecuted will they be repentant or just sorry they were caught?
________________________________________
“New York Times
September 5, 2008
Abramoff Is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON — Jack Abramoff, the onetime flamboyant lobbyist who amassed a fortune by showering gifts on Congressional and executive branch officials while bilking Indian tribes of millions of dollars, was sentenced Thursday to four years in prison.
Judge Ellen S. Huvelle of Federal District Court here ordered that Mr. Abramoff serve the time for corruption and tax offenses uncovered by an influence-peddling investigation that touched Republican leaders in Congress and midlevel officials in the Bush administration, among others. Judge Huvelle said Mr. Abramoff had engaged in “a consistent course of corrupt conduct.”
Mr. Abramoff, who came to symbolize an out-of-control, even brazen style of courting government officials, told Judge Huvelle he had since realized how far he had stepped over the bounds of what was permissible. Wearing a worn brown T-shirt, pants with an elastic waistband and a Jewish skullcap, he apologized profusely and in a quavering voice said he was begging for mercy. “I have fallen into an abyss,” he said. “My name is the butt of a joke.”
The sentencing process was unusual and complicated by many factors. Prosecutors had asked Judge Huvelle to sentence Mr. Abramoff to a term less than the approximately 11 years allowed by federal sentencing guidelines to reflect his extensive cooperation with investigators.”
More at:
http://www.nytimes.com/
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Attytood: Palin's speech to nowhere
I could never understand Republicans who were not Billionaires or at least were well on their way to becoming Billionaires who were registered to vote as Republican or those “Regan Democrats” who voted Republican. They took the trouble to vote on Election Day not for candidates that would do them any good but for candidates that would actually cause them personal harm. For instance; the single largest crippling effect on small business and entrepreneurs in the United States is health insurance premiums. The single largest biggest boost for small business in the United States would be moving to single payer health coverage for all Americans. Yet the Republicans are unwilling to step away from the insurance company lobbyists.
I can only think that the ultra-wealthy controllers of the Republican Party think that those who constitute a majority of registered Republicans; those who’s personal income is less than $5 M per year, are idiots and will march in goose-step however their leaders demand.
Jim
One of the best critiques of Palin’s speech came from the Philadelphia Daily News writer Will Bunch
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Attytood: Palin's speech to nowhere
Sarah Palin delivered a great speech tonight -- for her party, for John McCain, for herself, for what she set out to accomplish. This was America's first real glimpse at the Alaska governor, and what we saw was a boffo politician who speaks in a plaintive prairie voice that channels America's Heartland like a chilling breeze rippling a field of wheat, who knows how to tell a joke, how to bring down the house and bring a tear to a few eyes. She is proud of her family, as she should be, and there is much to admire in her own "personal journey of discovery" (don't we all have these, by the way?) including her efforts to raise her son Trig. It is indeed nice to think that there would be an advocate for such children inside the corridors of the White House, although I'd surely like to hear what -- if anything -- she's done for special needs kids as governor of Alaska.
But...it was a great speech -- written for someone else, a male in fact, days before the Palin selection was even a gleam in John McCain's eye, but a great speech nonetheless. The pundits are fawning over it as I write this -- Tom Brokaw said she could not have been "more winning and more engaging" -- and in a world that is dominated by horse race journalism I can understand why, because I agree that Palin's one-of-a-kind story has given her long shot running mate a decent chance now of pulling this one out at the finish line.
It's a good metaphor, a horse race, because in the end it finishes right near where it started -- just as it will be for America if John McCain and Sarah Palin are sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009. Yes, it was a great speech politically, and a great night for her family, but an empty speech for America -- and for America's families. It was defined by its lowest moment, Palin's shameless lie about "the Bridge to Nowhere."
This was a Speech to Nowhere.
It was a Speech to Nowhere when Palin said that "I told the Congress 'Thanks but no thanks' on that Bridge to Nowhere, because that was a lie, and the worst kind of lie in American politics, a blatant falsehood that showed utter contempt for the American people that Palin pledged to serve, assuming we are too stupid to look up or know that truth, that she pushed for those funds in Congress and while she
Read the rest of the post here:
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Sad.html
I can only think that the ultra-wealthy controllers of the Republican Party think that those who constitute a majority of registered Republicans; those who’s personal income is less than $5 M per year, are idiots and will march in goose-step however their leaders demand.
Jim
One of the best critiques of Palin’s speech came from the Philadelphia Daily News writer Will Bunch
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Attytood: Palin's speech to nowhere
Sarah Palin delivered a great speech tonight -- for her party, for John McCain, for herself, for what she set out to accomplish. This was America's first real glimpse at the Alaska governor, and what we saw was a boffo politician who speaks in a plaintive prairie voice that channels America's Heartland like a chilling breeze rippling a field of wheat, who knows how to tell a joke, how to bring down the house and bring a tear to a few eyes. She is proud of her family, as she should be, and there is much to admire in her own "personal journey of discovery" (don't we all have these, by the way?) including her efforts to raise her son Trig. It is indeed nice to think that there would be an advocate for such children inside the corridors of the White House, although I'd surely like to hear what -- if anything -- she's done for special needs kids as governor of Alaska.
But...it was a great speech -- written for someone else, a male in fact, days before the Palin selection was even a gleam in John McCain's eye, but a great speech nonetheless. The pundits are fawning over it as I write this -- Tom Brokaw said she could not have been "more winning and more engaging" -- and in a world that is dominated by horse race journalism I can understand why, because I agree that Palin's one-of-a-kind story has given her long shot running mate a decent chance now of pulling this one out at the finish line.
It's a good metaphor, a horse race, because in the end it finishes right near where it started -- just as it will be for America if John McCain and Sarah Palin are sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009. Yes, it was a great speech politically, and a great night for her family, but an empty speech for America -- and for America's families. It was defined by its lowest moment, Palin's shameless lie about "the Bridge to Nowhere."
This was a Speech to Nowhere.
It was a Speech to Nowhere when Palin said that "I told the Congress 'Thanks but no thanks' on that Bridge to Nowhere, because that was a lie, and the worst kind of lie in American politics, a blatant falsehood that showed utter contempt for the American people that Palin pledged to serve, assuming we are too stupid to look up or know that truth, that she pushed for those funds in Congress and while she
Read the rest of the post here:
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Sad.html
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Peggy Noonan "It's over"
Peggy Noonan, Mike Murphy Caught On Tape Disparaging Palin Choice: "It's Over," "Political Bullshit," "Gimmicky"
Huffington Post
September 3, 2008 04:35 PM
"Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan and former John McCain adviser, Time columnist, and MSNBC contributor Mike Murphy were caught on tape disparaging John McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate.
"It's over," Noonan said.
When Chuck Todd asked her if this was the most qualified woman the Republicans could nominate, Noonan responded, "The most qualified? No. I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives. Every time the Republicans do that, because that's not where they live and that's not what they're good at, they blow it."
Murphy characterized the choices as "cynical" and "gimmicky."
Watch (the dialogue in question starts 38 seconds in, full transcript is below the video):
Chuck Todd: Mike Murphy, lots of free advice, we'll see if Steve Schmidt and the boys were watching. We'll find out on your blackberry. Tonight voters will get their chance to hear from Sarah Palin and she will get the chance to show voters she's the right woman for the job Up next, one man who's already convinced and he'll us why Gov. Jon Huntsman. (cut away)
Peggy Noonan: Yeah.
Mike Murphy: You know, because I come out of the blue swing state governor world: Engler, Whitman, Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. I mean, these guys -- this is how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And it's not gonna work. And --
Story continues below
PN: It's over."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/03/peggy-noonan-mike-murphy_n_123647.html
The Noonan and Murphy Video is so; if you will, incriminating, I was wondering if it was legit. But it’s on all the major news:
Jim
Noonan and Murphy on Palin from the Washington Post:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/03/noonan_and_murphy_meet_the_hot.html
Noonan and Murphy on Palin from the LA Times:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/09/sarah-palins-vp.html
Noonan and Murphy on Palin from the New York Times:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/top-gop-pundits-fault-palin-selection/?hp
Noonan and Murphy on Palin from the Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/elections/What_What_You_Say.html
Looks like Palin is only a means to get cash and political support from the TV preachers.
If the old guy with the secret medical history would kick the bucket and she would actually get to be President of the United States, it would be game over; kiss the USA good bye.
It looks like the Republican’s bottom line is winning elections and to hell with the USA.
The Republican Party is pathetic.
Huffington Post
September 3, 2008 04:35 PM
"Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan and former John McCain adviser, Time columnist, and MSNBC contributor Mike Murphy were caught on tape disparaging John McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate.
"It's over," Noonan said.
When Chuck Todd asked her if this was the most qualified woman the Republicans could nominate, Noonan responded, "The most qualified? No. I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives. Every time the Republicans do that, because that's not where they live and that's not what they're good at, they blow it."
Murphy characterized the choices as "cynical" and "gimmicky."
Watch (the dialogue in question starts 38 seconds in, full transcript is below the video):
Chuck Todd: Mike Murphy, lots of free advice, we'll see if Steve Schmidt and the boys were watching. We'll find out on your blackberry. Tonight voters will get their chance to hear from Sarah Palin and she will get the chance to show voters she's the right woman for the job Up next, one man who's already convinced and he'll us why Gov. Jon Huntsman. (cut away)
Peggy Noonan: Yeah.
Mike Murphy: You know, because I come out of the blue swing state governor world: Engler, Whitman, Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. I mean, these guys -- this is how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And it's not gonna work. And --
Story continues below
PN: It's over."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/03/peggy-noonan-mike-murphy_n_123647.html
The Noonan and Murphy Video is so; if you will, incriminating, I was wondering if it was legit. But it’s on all the major news:
Jim
Noonan and Murphy on Palin from the Washington Post:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/03/noonan_and_murphy_meet_the_hot.html
Noonan and Murphy on Palin from the LA Times:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/09/sarah-palins-vp.html
Noonan and Murphy on Palin from the New York Times:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/top-gop-pundits-fault-palin-selection/?hp
Noonan and Murphy on Palin from the Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/elections/What_What_You_Say.html
Looks like Palin is only a means to get cash and political support from the TV preachers.
If the old guy with the secret medical history would kick the bucket and she would actually get to be President of the United States, it would be game over; kiss the USA good bye.
It looks like the Republican’s bottom line is winning elections and to hell with the USA.
The Republican Party is pathetic.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Troopergate Northern Exposure
The problem is not Palin’s direct alleged vendetta on her Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten former brother in law. It is her firing of Alaska’s Director of Public Safety Walt Monegan. Allegedly Monegan was fired by Palin for his refusal to fire State Trooper Mike Wooten.
Go to the “talking points memo” webpage and listen to the recording of a phone call from Frank Bailey, one of Palin’s staff suggesting that Walt Monegan fire Trooper Wooten. The recording begins with an attempt by Palin’s staff member to obtain information about a contract agreement between the police union and the State of Alaska. It is a long telephone call. The alleged pressuring of the Director of Public Safety to fire Trooper Wooten begins in about the middle of the tape.
Looks like enough evidence to convict to me. But, Look who is conducting the investigation, from the Huffington Post: This investigation into Monegan's dismissal has more than its share of subplots as well. The probe into Palin's involvement if any was ordered by a Republican-dominated state legislative council that includes one of the lawmakers under a federal bribery indictment. And Branchflower, the investigator, is a former Anchorage prosecutor whose wife used to work for Monegan at the Anchorage Police Department.
What all this might mean is that “Miss Congeniality” may need to be replaced soon.
Personally I think the Republican Party leadership is a complete failure and we may be looking at the last days of the Republican Party. By the way Jim “go along” Gerlach is thrilled with the choice of Palin.
Jim
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/211769.php
Getting Real About Palin
08.31.08 -- 11:00AM
By Josh Marshall
I've noticed some people who should know better claiming that bringing up Gov. Palin's troopergate scandal is tantamount to making a victim of or defending her slimeball ex-brother-in-law who allegedly once used a taser on his stepson.
That's awfully foolish. So I thought I'd put together a post explaining why.
The person in question is state trooper Mike Wooten -- Palin's ex-brother-in-law who's embroiled in a bitter custody and divorce battle with Palin's sister. Back in the second week of August, well before Palin became a national political figure, TPMMuckraker was reporting on this story. And as part of the reporting we tried to get a handle on just how bad a guy Wooten was. Most people who are familiar with the ugliness that often spills out of custody and divorce cases know to take accusations arising out of the course of them with a grain of salt unless you know a lot about the people involved. And if you look closely at the case there are numerous reasons to question the picture drawn by the Palin family. Regardless, we proceeded on the assumption that Wooten really was a rotten guy because the truth is that it wasn't relevant to the investigation of Palin.
Let's review what happened.
The Palin family had a feud with Wooten prior to her becoming governor. They put together a list of 14 accusations which they took to the state police to investigate -- a list that ranged from the quite serious to the truly absurd. The state police did an investigation, decided that 5 of the charges had some merit and suspended Wooten for ten days -- a suspension later reduced to five days. The Palin's weren't satisfied but there wasn't much they could do.
When Palin became governor they went for another bite at the apple. Palin, her husband and several members of her staff began pressuring Public Safety Commissioner, Walt Monegan -- a respected former Chief of the Anchorage police department -- to can Wooten. Monegan resisted, arguing that the official process regarding Wooten was closed. And there was nothing more that could be done. In fact, during one of the conversations in which Palin's husband Todd was putting on the squeeze, Monegan told Todd Palin, "You can't head hunt like this. What you need to do is back off, because if the trooper does make a mistake, and it is a terminable offense, it can look like political interference."
Eventually, Palin got fed up and fired Monegan from his job. This is an important point. Wooten never got fired. To the best of my knowledge, he's is still on the job. The central bad act was firing the state's top police official because he refused to bend to political pressure from the governor and her family to fire a public employee against whom the governor was pursuing a vendetta -- whether the vendetta was justified or not.
Soon after this, questions were raised in the state about Monegan's firing and he eventually came forward and said he believed he'd been fired for not giving in to pressure to fire Wooten.
After Monegan made his accusations, Palin insisted there was no truth whatsoever to his claims. Nonetheless, a bipartisan committee of the state legislature approved an investigation. In response, Palin asked the Attorney General to start his own investigation which many in the state interpreted as an effort to either keep tabs on or tamper with the legislature's investigation. Again, very questionable judgment in someone who aspires to be first in line to the presidency.
The Attorney General's investigation quickly turned up evidence that Palin's initial denials were false. Multiple members of her staff had raised Wooten's employment with Monegan. Indeed, the state police had a recording of one of her deputies pushing Monegan to fire Wooten. That evidence forced Palin to change her story. Palin said that this was the first she'd heard of it and insisted the deputy wasn't acting at her behest, even though the transcript of the recorded call clearly suggested that he was. (Hear the audio here.)
Read the rest of the article here:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/211769.php
Also check out the Huffington Post. It has a name “Troopergate”:
"Palin Trooper Scandal Could Become Problem"
STEVE QUINN | September 1, 2008 04:30 AM EST |
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Troopergate. It's a political he-said, she-said that has dogged Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for nearly two months and is likely to do so for another two months leading to the Nov. 4 presidential election.
The little-known vice presidential candidate faces accusations of firing public safety commissioner Walt Monegan in what amounts to a messy Palin family drama dating to her pre-gubernatorial days. Monegan had refused to fire a state trooper who had gone through a messy divorce from Palin's sister.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/01/palin-trooper-scandal-cou_n_122903.html
Go to the “talking points memo” webpage and listen to the recording of a phone call from Frank Bailey, one of Palin’s staff suggesting that Walt Monegan fire Trooper Wooten. The recording begins with an attempt by Palin’s staff member to obtain information about a contract agreement between the police union and the State of Alaska. It is a long telephone call. The alleged pressuring of the Director of Public Safety to fire Trooper Wooten begins in about the middle of the tape.
Looks like enough evidence to convict to me. But, Look who is conducting the investigation, from the Huffington Post: This investigation into Monegan's dismissal has more than its share of subplots as well. The probe into Palin's involvement if any was ordered by a Republican-dominated state legislative council that includes one of the lawmakers under a federal bribery indictment. And Branchflower, the investigator, is a former Anchorage prosecutor whose wife used to work for Monegan at the Anchorage Police Department.
What all this might mean is that “Miss Congeniality” may need to be replaced soon.
Personally I think the Republican Party leadership is a complete failure and we may be looking at the last days of the Republican Party. By the way Jim “go along” Gerlach is thrilled with the choice of Palin.
Jim
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/211769.php
Getting Real About Palin
08.31.08 -- 11:00AM
By Josh Marshall
I've noticed some people who should know better claiming that bringing up Gov. Palin's troopergate scandal is tantamount to making a victim of or defending her slimeball ex-brother-in-law who allegedly once used a taser on his stepson.
That's awfully foolish. So I thought I'd put together a post explaining why.
The person in question is state trooper Mike Wooten -- Palin's ex-brother-in-law who's embroiled in a bitter custody and divorce battle with Palin's sister. Back in the second week of August, well before Palin became a national political figure, TPMMuckraker was reporting on this story. And as part of the reporting we tried to get a handle on just how bad a guy Wooten was. Most people who are familiar with the ugliness that often spills out of custody and divorce cases know to take accusations arising out of the course of them with a grain of salt unless you know a lot about the people involved. And if you look closely at the case there are numerous reasons to question the picture drawn by the Palin family. Regardless, we proceeded on the assumption that Wooten really was a rotten guy because the truth is that it wasn't relevant to the investigation of Palin.
Let's review what happened.
The Palin family had a feud with Wooten prior to her becoming governor. They put together a list of 14 accusations which they took to the state police to investigate -- a list that ranged from the quite serious to the truly absurd. The state police did an investigation, decided that 5 of the charges had some merit and suspended Wooten for ten days -- a suspension later reduced to five days. The Palin's weren't satisfied but there wasn't much they could do.
When Palin became governor they went for another bite at the apple. Palin, her husband and several members of her staff began pressuring Public Safety Commissioner, Walt Monegan -- a respected former Chief of the Anchorage police department -- to can Wooten. Monegan resisted, arguing that the official process regarding Wooten was closed. And there was nothing more that could be done. In fact, during one of the conversations in which Palin's husband Todd was putting on the squeeze, Monegan told Todd Palin, "You can't head hunt like this. What you need to do is back off, because if the trooper does make a mistake, and it is a terminable offense, it can look like political interference."
Eventually, Palin got fed up and fired Monegan from his job. This is an important point. Wooten never got fired. To the best of my knowledge, he's is still on the job. The central bad act was firing the state's top police official because he refused to bend to political pressure from the governor and her family to fire a public employee against whom the governor was pursuing a vendetta -- whether the vendetta was justified or not.
Soon after this, questions were raised in the state about Monegan's firing and he eventually came forward and said he believed he'd been fired for not giving in to pressure to fire Wooten.
After Monegan made his accusations, Palin insisted there was no truth whatsoever to his claims. Nonetheless, a bipartisan committee of the state legislature approved an investigation. In response, Palin asked the Attorney General to start his own investigation which many in the state interpreted as an effort to either keep tabs on or tamper with the legislature's investigation. Again, very questionable judgment in someone who aspires to be first in line to the presidency.
The Attorney General's investigation quickly turned up evidence that Palin's initial denials were false. Multiple members of her staff had raised Wooten's employment with Monegan. Indeed, the state police had a recording of one of her deputies pushing Monegan to fire Wooten. That evidence forced Palin to change her story. Palin said that this was the first she'd heard of it and insisted the deputy wasn't acting at her behest, even though the transcript of the recorded call clearly suggested that he was. (Hear the audio here.)
Read the rest of the article here:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/211769.php
Also check out the Huffington Post. It has a name “Troopergate”:
"Palin Trooper Scandal Could Become Problem"
STEVE QUINN | September 1, 2008 04:30 AM EST |
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Troopergate. It's a political he-said, she-said that has dogged Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for nearly two months and is likely to do so for another two months leading to the Nov. 4 presidential election.
The little-known vice presidential candidate faces accusations of firing public safety commissioner Walt Monegan in what amounts to a messy Palin family drama dating to her pre-gubernatorial days. Monegan had refused to fire a state trooper who had gone through a messy divorce from Palin's sister.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/01/palin-trooper-scandal-cou_n_122903.html
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