The Associated Press got an advance copy of Sarah Palin's book, Going Rogue, and assigned eleven reporters, apparently, to try to find errors in it. The eleven collaborated on an article titled "FACT CHECK: Palin's book goes rogue on some facts." In fact, though, the AP's catalogue of alleged errors--six in total--is thin at best.
The AP starts with this one:
PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking "only" for reasonably priced rooms and not "often" going for the "high-end, robe-and-slippers" hotels.
THE FACTS: Although she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) for a five-hour women's leadership conference in New York in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000.
This is frankly pathetic. Palin says she didn't "often" stay at high-end hotels, and the AP counters by saying she did, once. Yes, that's why she said "not often" rather than "never." What is indisputable is that Palin sold the Governor's private jet and flew commercial, thereby saving the taxpayers a large amount of money and qualifying her as a frugal traveler.
The rest are about as lame. Here is another:
PALIN: Rails against taxpayer-financed bailouts, which she attributes to Obama. She recounts telling daughter Bristol that to succeed in business, "you'll have to be brave enough to fail."
THE FACTS: Palin is blurring Obama's stimulus plan--a $787 billion package of tax cuts, state aid, social programs and government contracts--and the federal bailout that President George W. Bush signed.
Palin's views on bailouts appeared to evolve as John McCain's vice presidential running mate. In September 2008, she said "taxpayers cannot be looked to" to bail out Wall Street.
The next month, she praised McCain for being "instrumental in bringing folks together" to pass the $700 billion bailout. After that, she said "it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in."
The AP doesn't quote Palin, so it's hard to say whether she "blurs" the bailouts or not. But by the AP's own account, Palin has consistently opposed bailouts, except that during the Presidential campaign, she loyally supported McCain's position on the initial TARP program. That's what a Vice-Presidential candidate is supposed to do, and this is not a "fact-check."
This one, I simply don't believe:
PALIN: Welcomes last year's Supreme Court decision deciding punitive damages for victims of the nation's largest oil spill tragedy, the Exxon Valdez disaster, stating it had taken 20 years to achieve victory. As governor, she says, she'd had the state argue in favor of the victims, and she says the court's ruling went "in favor of the people."
THE FACTS: That response is at odds with her reaction at the time to the ruling, which resolved the case by reducing punitive damages for victims to $500 million from $2.5 billion. Palin said then she was "extremely disappointed" and it was "tragic" so many fishermen and families put their lives on hold waiting for the decision.
Again, the AP doesn't quote Palin but rather asks us to take their word for the fact that Palin "welcomes" the Supreme Court's Exxon Valdez decision in her book as a "ruling [that] went 'in favor of the people.'" I would bet that the AP is mischaracterizing what Palin says in her book. She criticized the Supreme Court's decision at the time, as did most Alaskans, and cited it as a Supreme Court decision with which she disagreed in the Katie Couric interview. I seriously doubt that she contradicts that position in her book, although I wouldn't doubt that she called the verdict against Exxon (which was slashed by the Supreme Court) as a decision "in favor of the people."
It appears to be a tribute to the factual accuracy of Palin's book that eleven hostile AP reporters can't come up with anything better than this.
It's funny how the press fact-checks some things but not others. Here is just one of thousands of examples one could cite: John Kerry, arguing for the cap-and-tax bill that he co-sponsored with Barbara Boxer (these are two of the least intelligent legislators of modern times, by the way), claimed that "over the last eight years, emissions in the United States of America in greenhouse gases went up four times faster than in the 1990s." This is a typical example of a "fact" that John Kerry just made up. In fact, carbon emissions rose much faster in the 1990s than over the last eight years:
Untethered to the governor’s desk in Alaska, Sarah Palin addressed the CLSA Investors’ Forum in Hong Kong. The Associated Press had the most complete and likely most accurate coverage of the speech, including actual quotes from Mrs. Palin’s speech.
The speech was closed to the press, which gave the rest of the media reports on it a blind-men-describing-an-elephant quality.
“She was brilliant,” said a European delegate, on condition of anonymity.
“She said America was spending a lot of money and it was a temporary solution. Normal people are having to pay more and more but things don’t get better. The rich will leave the country and the poor will get poorer.”
Two US delegates left early, with one saying “it was awful, we couldn’t stand it any longer.” He declined to be identified.
Another attendee said: “It was almost more of a speech promoting investment in Alaska. As fund managers we want to hear about the United States as a whole, not just about Alaska. And she criticised Obama a lot but offered no solutions.”
Hmm. (What solutions should she have offered? Vote him out?)
“She started the speech with the Alaskan fishing industry, which I think is a safe topic for her,” said Suyeon An of RCM Asia Pacific Ltd, who left before Palin stopped talking. “She was avoiding the important economic issues. She tried to talk some about Hong Kong in general, but it was nothing specific. It was a very safe speech, boring I have to say.”
Double hmm.
“The speech was wide-ranging, very balanced, and she beat all expectations,” said Doug A. Coulter, head of private equity in the Asia-Pacific region for LGT Capital Partners.
“She didn’t sound at all like a far-right-wing conservative. She seemed to be positioning herself as a libertarian or a small-c conservative,” he said, adding that she mentioned both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. “She brought up both those names.”
Triple hmm.
I suspect some people expected Joan of Arc while others expected Tina Fey. I think they got Sarah, a bright person from middle America who is more mainstream than the geniuses we have in Washington, more intelligent than the media gives her credit for and more informed than even her supporters think she is.
It is too bad our current president did not face the same scrutiny before he was elected.
As I said earlier, the AP did the best job (Read the AP story here).
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
"considers prognosis, since its aim is to achieve complete lives. A young person with a poor prognosis has had a few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern the disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognoses. When the worst-off can benefit only slightly while better-off people could benefit greatly, allocating to the better-off is often justifiable....When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.
...[Sarah] Palin’s background has caused issues for her. She is what most politicians pretend to be: just a regular person who climbed up through the ranks. She doesn’t come from old money or a famous family. She didn’t go to an Ivy League school. She hasn’t spent decades kibitzing at New York and D.C. cocktail parties with people who view themselves to be the elite of American society. To the contrary, Sarah Palin is a PTA mom, hunter, and Wasilla beauty queen from small town America who attended five different colleges.
With a pedigree like that it wouldn’t matter if she cured cancer and turned lead into gold; to some elitists in both parties she will never be acceptable.
(Excerpt from "Why They Hate Sara Palin" by John Hawkins)
