sarah palin found guilty in troopergate

not only is sarah palin guilty in the troopergate affair, but time magazine thinks that she and her administration up in alaska are a bunch of idiots. mostly it was her staff and her husband involved in the stupidity, and not her. and while she is guilty of wrongdoing from an ethical standpoint, she and her administration have not actually blatantly violated any laws in the troopergate affair. think of it this way: while it is perfectly legal to cheat on your spouse, it is generally considered unethical and immoral. so sarah palin was not found guilty in a legal sense, but guilty in a moral and ethical sense. more than being found guilty, she was found to be in charge of an administration that was full of incompetent fools who had no idea what they were doing.

in other news, some group called “acorn” is in the news for allegedly engaging in fake voter registrations on a massive scale, and republicans are all over themselves to try to connect this scandal to barack obama. since i do not know much of anything about acorn, i will leave it to the huffington post to tell you what to think. that link goes to all posts on the huffington post tagged “acorn”, regardless of who the author is. same thing on daily kos here. yay! i don’t feel like writing anything about a topic i know absolutely nothing about, namely this a.c.o.r.n. group. those 2 links will constantly be updated with the latest acorn developments long after i post this, so you can stay current. and you can probably find similar acorn news on other websites if you want. whatever. this acorn thing seems to me like an october surprise meant to benefit john mccain, and is highly suspicious. that is not to say that i think this acorn group didn’t do anything wrong or that i am defending them: i know absolutely nothing about them. i just find the entire thing incredibly suspicious and question the motives not only of the acorn people but also of the people prosecuting them and the people pushing this story to the newsmedia. from what little i understand, i can say acorn is set up to register the poorest of the poor to vote, and acorn pays people to go out and register really poor people. i think acorn gets its money from donations since it is a nonprofit, and basically spends it on these people who go out and register poor people to vote. but these people who go out and register poor people, well they might just be doing it for the money, since they are not actual volunteers. so that explains why some of them might just be turning in lots of fake voter registrations: it is easier for them than going out and registering real people. i have heard that the acorn organization itself tries to weed out these fake registrations and fires anyone involved in turning those fake ones in. but obviously they are not doing a good enough job at weeding out the fake registrations. you can find out more information about acorn at sourcewatch, a website that tracks organizations and people involved in politics. or just look at the wikipedia article, which has at the top, “the neutrality of this article is disputed.” i will leave it to you to guess why the neutrality of that article is disputed. it turns out acorn has been involved in a lot more activities than voter registration, including activism that helped eliminate discrimination against minorities by the mortgage industry. acorn’s activism seems to have gotten them a lot of conservative republican enemies over the years, ready to pounce on anything remotely suspicious that acorn ever does. so, now that they are finally caught submitting fake voter registrations... who knows? i think acorn is just going to be vilified and used to make barack obama look bad through guilt by association as part of john mccain’s never-ending smear campaign against our probable next president. as with sarah palin, i doubt the leadership of acorn did anything illegal, although it was probably stupid of them to hire some of the low-ranking people they did for the voter-registration drives. low-ranking people in that organization probably did violate the law, but i doubt any of those people were actually committed to the liberal cause. they were either just trying to make easy money by submitting fake voter registrations or were part of a republican campaign to infiltrate acorn and bring it into disrepute. i doubt anyone actually committed to the liberal cause would ever undermine the efforts of a liberal organization like acorn on purpose, because if they did, that would prove that they are traitors to the liberal cause, like joe lieberman. acorn needs to do better screening to weed out non-liberals and rogue elements of society before hiring people.

in other news, neo-nazi leader jörg haider of austria has died, joining the ranks of fellow austrians who joined the nazi cause and later died, such as adolf hitler. i am sure there is much rejoicing in austria over the demise of such a hated politician, except for the few dolts out there who actually supported the bastard. then again, in the recent elections held at the end of last month, his party won 10.70% of the vote and got 21 out of 183 seats in the austrian parliament, and the other party he used to be in charge of won 17.54% of the vote and got 34 out of 183 seats in the austrian parliament. so together those 2 parties won quite a bit of the vote and are quite a presence in the new austrian parliament. hopefully they will not be in charge of anything, since they are a bunch of neo-nazis. i am related to some people who live in austria and i hope things go well for them.

anyway, sarah palin is guilty in troopergate and john mccain was guilty in keating 5. barack obama and joe biden were never found guilty of wrongdoing by any government investigation, and john mccain and sarah palin both were. the difference is clear. do you want corruption, or not? 4 more years of the failed policies of george w. bush with a different figurehead in charge of the same old republican political machine, or 4 years of positive change led by forward-thinking democrats? for the first 6 years of his presidency, george w. bush could ram whatever legislation he wanted through congress, and the only impediment was democrats who sometimes filibustered things in the senate. if we are lucky, barack obama will get a similar situation, with a congress willing to pass his legislation undoing all of the failed bush/mccain republican policies, and he will be able to appoint liberal democrats to be on the supreme court to replace retiring liberal judges, so the court does not become even more conservative (currently 7 out of 9 justices are republican appointees, 5 are conservative, and 4 are extremely conservative; the 2 democratic appointees are liberal along with 2 republican appointees, and 1 of the 5 conservatives is only moderately conservative rather than an ultra-right-wing extremist). now if just one more supreme court justice joins the court and is of the scalia/thomas/roberts/alito mold, there will be a 5-4 majority in favor of overturning roe v. wade and abortion will become illegal in more than half the states soon after. and that is sure to happen if john mcain is elected president. that 5-4 majority of ultra-conservatives could also make a whole lot of other changes to this country that most people would not like at all, and it could become a 6-3 majority or even a 7-2 majority if even more liberal or moderate justices retire or die. this would give conservative republicans control of the supreme court for a generation or more. we would have mandatory prayer in school, creationism taught in school, desegregation would be reversed, workplace protections would be removed, environmental laws would be overturned, individuals would have no rights to sue the government or corporations for wrongdoing, and we would become a more theocratic and plutocratic nation. we would end up living in the dystopia that conservatives think of as their utopia, and no amount of democratic elections could solve this problem for years to come. we already are seeing the horrific effects of conservative republican economic policies on our nation. why prolong their mismanagement and allow them to make things even worse? that is insanity. we might as well elect robert mugabe president so he can bring us the same hyperinflation, violent represssion, and mass starvation that he brought to zimbabwe, if we want to do something crazy. sure it is unconstitutional, but george w. bush and other politicians have been blatantly violating the constitution for years and never been punished for it. this would just be taking things 1 step further. of course there is still a completely sane option that would actually improve things: voting for the obama-biden ticket. comparing sarah palin to dan quayle is an insult to dan quayle, and comparing john mccain to bob dole is an insult to bob dole. sarah palin is dan quayle without the brains, and john mccain is bob dole without the charisma. my apologies to dan quayle and bob dole for mentioning them in the same sentence as the 2 nitwits running as the republican ticket this year.

UPDATE: my original post failed to mention something that i have now become aware of, since i did not know about it then. apparently sarah palin VIOLATED alaskan ethics LAW, according to the findings of the report, so she actually DID break the law, and i was wrong to say that she did not act illegally. also, apparently the a.c.o.r.n. organization is REQUIRED BY LAW to turn in ALL voter registrations that are turned in to them, EVEN ones that they KNOW are fake. apparently, the reason organizations like a.c.o.r.n. are required by law to turn in all voter registration applications they receive is so they do not favor one party over the other, say, by only turning in applications for democrats and not for republicans, independents, or third parties. so... when someone tries to pull a fast one on a.c.o.r.n. by getting hired there to register people to vote, and then turns in a huge number of fake applications, a.c.o.r.n. would be violating the law if they did not turn those applications in to the local board of elections, along with every other voter registration application they get. since a.c.o.r.n. is such a huge organization that employs so many people in so many states, there are bound to be a few bad apples, and unfortunately, a.c.o.r.n. is legally prohibited from throwing out the fake voter registrations. a.c.o.r.n. does attach notes to the fake voter registrations saying that they are probably fake, or at least they did in nevada. the board of elections in nevada didn’t even read the notes written by a.c.o.r.n., and are now trying to cover their own asses for their incompetence by blaming everything on a.c.o.r.n. and not on themselves, when it is really the job of the board of elections to screen out false voter registrations, and, as previously mentioned, groups that do voter registration drives are prohibited from any such screening of fake voter registrations. now a.c.o.r.n. is not completely blameless in this; they do need some human resources professionals to carefully screen and background-check everyone who wants to work for them. but ok, think of it this way: remember back when there were “disgruntled postal employees” and people talked about “going postal”, all because of a few bad apples in our nation’s gigantic postal service? clearly that was not a fair way to treat that organization, which has served our nation well since the late 1700s by delivering our mail and packages, and i doubt the percentage of postal employees who are homicidal maniacs or psychotic differs much from the percentage of the population at large who are homicidal maniacs or psychotic. i think a.c.o.r.n. is being treated the same way that the united states postal service got treated back when people made unfair attacks against our postal service because of a few bad apples. now i understand there are many cases when “a few bad apples” turns out to be the people in charge of an organization. for instance, look at the torture done in abu ghraib prison in iraq, which turned out to be the type of thing many top bush administration officials (george w. bush, dick cheney, alberto gonzales, etc.) had been trying to get the legal authority to do. in that case the few bad apples turned out to be the leaders of the bush administration. or if you look at companies like enron, the few bad apples were the top executives who were in charge of everything. i have not seen any evidence to suggest that this a.c.o.r.n. controversy is anything but a manufactured controversy created by a desperate mccain campaign that is losing badly in the national polls and in swing state polls. meanwhile, sarah palin lies by repeatedly saying that the report cleared her of any wrongdoing in troopergate, and that she did not violate any laws or do anything unethical. clear, flat-out lies, what she is best at saying. sarah palin makes richard nixon look like george “i cannot tell a lie” washington by comparison. no, wait... that comparison is unfair... to richard nixon. he was a quaker after all, and quakers believe in telling the truth at all times and under all circumstances. i suppose richard nixon must have lapsed in his quaker faith. i guess that means i have something in common with him. also, the story about george washington cutting down a cherry tree as a kid and saying “i cannot tell a lie” is actually just a completely made-up myth to try to glorify our first president. a lot of the “history” we are taught is just myths or propaganda like that. if humanity survives long enough so that the modern era becomes ancient history, i am sure it will be badly distorted by the time the future-people teach it to their children, and it will be full of inaccuracies. even today, the news is very biased and often has inaccuracies, and that will just get worse and worse, the farther people get from the primary source of the information, and the more other people the information went through along the way to get to them. and that is why elections are so close: the news media is a for-profit enterprise, and keeping things close and exciting helps increase viewership/readership and thus boost ad revenue and profits. if one candidate were way ahead of the other and the news media just let that stay the same way for a really long time, everyone would find it an incredibly boring story and not want to bother with checking the news. whenever one candidate gets too far ahead of the other, the news media tears them to shreds, in order to try to keep our country evenly divided. and they are only doing it for one reason: money. ok, maybe i give the news media too little credit for the good work that they do, but you get my point about why our country is almost evenly divided. this is no accident. it is just like how congressional districts are gerrymandered. close elections = bigger ratings for news = profit! so, the news media loves to go after the front-runner and knock them down a few pegs. also, did i mention that taking down someone big and powerful is a great boost to someone’s ego? so for both financial and personal reasons, the news media has a stake in keeping elections close and keeping anyone from becoming too popular. that is a clear conflict of interest, so in the public interest, the news media should be prohibited from covering news. (just kidding about that last part, of course they should get to keep covering news, i love watching or reading the news; i was just applying the same standards to them that they apply to everyone they go after. turnabout is fair play.) anyway, just for fun, watch some rats leave a sinking ship: