Parting Shots at Palin
I would have had a hard time believing it, but Sarah Palin is even more stupid and irresponsible than we imagined. She allegedly didn't know which countries were in NAFTA and thought that Africa was a country. After her first interview with Charlie Gibson she "just didn't have the bandwidth" to study for the Couric interview. She also spent a lot more than $150,000 on clothes, using the personal credit cards of a wealthy (and surprised) donor and sent multiple aides out (without telling them about each other) to buy things with their own credit cards that she hadn't gotten approval for the expenses from the RNC after the $150k brouhaha and saying that she would be returning it. Republican National Committee lawyers are likely to go to Alaska to conduct an inventory and try to account for all that was spent. Even more surprising to me was learning that she'd "jumped the gun" with her "palling around with terrorists" line, which had not yet been cleared by the McCain campaign. It forced the campaign to defend itself for making a low-road allegation, and caused a sharp and disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October. She also showed up at McCain's concession speech with her own speech, not realizing that vice presidential candidates don't give concession speeches.
This is "old news" - it came out late last week - but I wanted to bring it up as an example of why reporters may have seemed "in the tank" for Obama/Biden, or why the media seemed like it had a liberal slant. Because these comments were "off the record" until after the election. Because reporters pay more attention than we do, they know more than we know, and they know more than they can say, they end up having a different slant on politics. If you're a reporter and you know that someone is an idiot, or a crook, or incompentent, or a liar, and you can't say that they are any of these things you end up revealing your biases in other ways. I'm not trying to say that every reporter's bias can be directly attributed to secret knowledge, but it would seem to be a factor sometimes.
I can't say I'm surprised by this stuff about Palin. For all her much-touted "executive experience" she is still the governor of Alaska. It's a state that gets about 80% of its tax revenue from oil, so much that Alaska doesn't collect state sales tax or levy an individual income tax on any type of personal income. This year the state government didn't just hand out the usual $2000 check to every resident whether they'd done anything to earn it or not - they gave an additional $1200 "resource rebate" to every resident to offset the high price of gas whether or not they owned a car. That was the really weird thing about Palin's socialist fearmongering: even if you set aside the fact that the Alaskan government controls the means of production and they're still the third most socialist state in the union, collecting nearly twice as much in federal subsidies as they provide in federal taxes. It was weird seeing her railing against socialism when the Alaskan government is the biggest socialist wealth-spreading-around state in the country.
This is "old news" - it came out late last week - but I wanted to bring it up as an example of why reporters may have seemed "in the tank" for Obama/Biden, or why the media seemed like it had a liberal slant. Because these comments were "off the record" until after the election. Because reporters pay more attention than we do, they know more than we know, and they know more than they can say, they end up having a different slant on politics. If you're a reporter and you know that someone is an idiot, or a crook, or incompentent, or a liar, and you can't say that they are any of these things you end up revealing your biases in other ways. I'm not trying to say that every reporter's bias can be directly attributed to secret knowledge, but it would seem to be a factor sometimes.
I can't say I'm surprised by this stuff about Palin. For all her much-touted "executive experience" she is still the governor of Alaska. It's a state that gets about 80% of its tax revenue from oil, so much that Alaska doesn't collect state sales tax or levy an individual income tax on any type of personal income. This year the state government didn't just hand out the usual $2000 check to every resident whether they'd done anything to earn it or not - they gave an additional $1200 "resource rebate" to every resident to offset the high price of gas whether or not they owned a car. That was the really weird thing about Palin's socialist fearmongering: even if you set aside the fact that the Alaskan government controls the means of production and they're still the third most socialist state in the union, collecting nearly twice as much in federal subsidies as they provide in federal taxes. It was weird seeing her railing against socialism when the Alaskan government is the biggest socialist wealth-spreading-around state in the country.