I find myself thinking a lot about Sarah Palin. Mostly because every reporter, friend, colleague, and stranger who I meet lately wants to know "what do you think about Sarah Palin?" I wonder, as I quickly examine the person asking the question, what is it they want me to say about her? I wonder what it is I want to say about her. It is a great question - what do we think about Sarah Palin? In many ways, it is the question for a generation of women whose mothers stayed at home baking cookies, throwing parties, and keeping things on track, whispering in their daughter's ears the entire time "Don't do what I did. Learn to take care of yourself. Be independent." People across the country have projected on to Sarah Palin their hopes and fears about working women and the choices they have made.

 

It's not so much what I think about Sarah Palin, but what Sarah Palin makes me think about. She makes me think about the multiple young women I know who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on post-graduate degrees and who now spend their days at the park or driving from birthday party to birthday party - all the while paying down the law school or med school debt. She makes me think of the men I work with, whose wives left lucrative, productive careers to have and raise their children and how guilty the men feel about it (and what role their wives play in fostering the guilt). She makes me think of my uber-professional, working women friends and how they celebrate their success and child-free life. How they talk about what a drag it would be not to be able to go to a movie or go shopping or fly off to Europe for a business meeting or vacation - all the while knowing that each of them is very familiar with that lonely place in their head where they wonder what they've given up, what they're missing, and if they are going to regret it one day.

 

There's not a woman I know who thinks she has nailed the balance between education, career, and motherhood - no one is sure they got it right.

 

What concerns me about the reaction to Sarah Palin on this dimension is that it suggests there may be a new generation of mothers out there, with post-graduate degrees, jobs, and a decent amount of guilt and uncertainty, who lean over and whisper into their daughters' ears, "Don't do what I did. Don't try to do it all, you'll regret it. Make a choice and be happy."

 

And I just can't decide whether that's progress.

I may sound alarmist but this campaign makes me fear for American Democracy. My thesis: We are on the edge of becoming a one party state.  Many one party states have some token opposition but there is no real serious challenge to the power of the dominant party and that is where we may be going.

 

If the Democrats do not soundly defeat the Republicans at all levels including the Presidency the US will have become a defacto one party state. That means that no matter how poorly the Republican Party performs in economic, social and foreign policy they will not face any serious challenge and thus there will be no real check on their power or sanction for corruption. Given the growing power of the imperial presidency and a Supreme Court that McCain/Palin will tilt rightward, the Republican Party will be able to use the levers of government to consolidate their power and to insure that while the Democratic Party will survive, it will never represent a serious challenge to their dominance. Others have argued this but few are talking about how critical the 2008 election is in stopping Rove's plan for a one party state. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_10_38/ai_n26706626

 

The litany of failures of Republican government at the federal level are too long to list. The Republicans have fallen asleep on regulating the economy and banking. This led to the worst housing bubble and banking disaster in decades. The fact is, the problems we are facing are nothing short of corruption as CEO's have taken millions in bonuses while ships sink. This is not the first time. Remember Enron?

 

Our foreign policy is a mess. We have gotten involved in a war under false premises and have spent trillions of dollars and lost over four thousand American lives. Only the war profiteers like Halliburton and Bechtel have benefited from the war as the US debt has exploded.

 

As the US economy flags and the deficit explodes Republicans want more tax cuts for their wealthy friends.

 

The choice has never been clearer. The pile up of hypocritical sex scandals, corruption, failed management of government like Hurricane Katrina and failed foreign and economy policy show that Republicans have demonstrated themselves incapable of handling the levers of government. At the same time, their culture war campaign tactics touch a deep well of resentment, nationalism, and fear in some Americans.  Some version of the American public are such true believers they are unwilling to punish Republicans for their errors or to even ask hard questions.

 

One example is the day after Sarah Palin was picked by McCain. I entered a gift shop in a hotel in Boston.  I was buying a newspaper and the woman behind the counter asked me what I thought about her. I responded that I did not know much and thus was puzzled. She tore into me as a part of the "media elite" and rattled off a series of talking points about Palin's experience relative to Obama's, the closeness of Alaska to Russia (thus qualifying her as a foreign policy expert) and her credentials as a "reformer" fighting the "bridge to nowhere." Palin had been on the national stage for less than twelve hours and this woman had the playbook and talking points down pat, as if she was a McCain/Palin surrogate. I could not even argue with her. She was so completely convinced and uncritical that any discussion was pointless.

 

The story is not to say that the woman in the shop is dumb. What gives me shudders is how effective the Fox News, Republican campaign, talk radio machinery is at creating or distorting the world in which we live.  They also present the information in such a way that any attempt to question it is met with angry response. It is the wolves of the liberal media again, out to harm normal Americans (coded as white, suburban and/or rural etc.). The woman was not only convinced but she was angry at anyone who dared question what she had been told. The more I questioned the angrier she got.

 

Democracy depends upon a deliberative public. One that is willing to listen in good faith to different points of view. It also depends upon the people not allowing leaders and political parties to operate with impunity. If there is no real debate, and if leaders don't fear punishment for corruption and poor performance then we are democratic in form and but not in practice, a defacto one party state.

 

McCain's campaign manager suggested that this election is quote, "Not about issues," and also suggested that the media needed to treat Palin with "deference". http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-onthemedia9-2008sep09,0,6637772.story. Deference is reserved for Kings or despots who can't be questioned by the democratic process or bothersome questions about whether what they say is true or what their policy plans are. Deference is a feature of our coming one party state. It was something Bush demanded in the wake of 9-11 and is what the McCain campaign is demanding on the campaign trail. Deference by the media spells the death knell of democracy.

 

I may be alarmist but in this election American democracy itself hangs in the balance. I hope not only Obama, but also the American public says to that well-oiled machine, "ENOUGH!"

How quickly we forget.

 

Today, John McCain and Barack Obama shared a "We are the World" moment at Ground Zero to remember the 7th anniversary of 9/11. What they didn't do was say how they intend to reform US intelligence to prevent the next attack.

 

In the 2004 presidential election, it was all intelligence reform, all the time. In July, the 9/11 Commission final report became an instant best-seller and CIA Director George Tenet resigned. In August, Congress took the brave and unusual step of actually holding hearings during (gasp!) the summer recess. And in the fall, the 9/11 families and 9/11 Commission members received more press coverage than the Iraq War. Instead of arguing about lipstick and pigs or hockey mom hooey, John Kerry and George Bush were trying to outdo each other on just how much they were going to reform U.S. intelligence agencies.

 

I'd be the first to say that "reform" hasn't worked out so well.  Just last week, the 9/11 Commission co-chairs gave the Bush administration a "C" grade and declared that the threat of WMD terrorist attack remains deadly real. But at least the presidential candidates in 2004 were trying. And the election got the slow, grinding, gears of Washington moving, however little, however late.

 

This year we get rose laying and moments of silence. But silence is the last thing Americans need on 9/11. What we need is action.

So this is my Public Service announcement. I am Mark Sawyer, Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at UCLA. I am also the Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics (www.csrep.ucla.edu). I am happy to be able to blog for you from here on occasion during this election season. I am a "frequent blogger" as it may be, writing about the elections for sites like The Root, News and Views and EbonyJet.com. I will link some of my writings on the campaign in other venues below so you can get it up to speed if you care to. Also, if you'd like to hear an extended discussion of race and the campaign you can hear my appearance on "Fresh Air" August 28^th http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94061275.

I will try to drop something here everyday. Sometimes short sometimes long.

Just so everyone is clear. I am an unabashed Obama supporter. I worked on his first campaign knocking on doors as a graduate student at University of Chicago. So for me the junior Senator of Illinois is my hometown candidate. But I do know my stuff and can offer analysis and critiques as well. I want to be thought provoking. Some things I write will be plain commentary, some essays some just analysis. It will be wild ride to this historic election.

If you disagree with me please read. I love the back and forth/rough and tumble of political debate. It is what got me into this business to begin with. So, whether you love what I write or hate it, I hope it is thought provoking.

How good looking is Sarah Palin? I can tell you...exactly.

 

She is 0.75 on a scale of -1.2 to 1.06.

 

It seems like nearly every delegate at the Republican Convention last week, following Sarah Palin's introduction to the world, described her leading qualification as being "a beautiful lady" or some derivative thereof. Putting aside the matter of whether there should be concern that the politically sophisticated attendees at the convention offer this as a qualification for office, it is interesting to note how smitten they seemed to be by her. Is she really all that?

 

I have a feeling that I will end up mentioning often in this blog that, as political scientists, we don't have that much scientific to say regarding this election. That is not to say we don't try, but just that elections are extremely complex phenomenon, and they are hard to measure scientifically.However, I do have something scientific to say about Sarah Palin's appearance.

 

There is a buzz around about whether Palin's looks will help her move from Juneau to Washington. An honest political scientist will tell you that they do not know the answer to that question. However, I can begin to have some informed speculation because I have actually quantified Palin's looks - as I have those of Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, and hundreds of other politicians. The Grand Old Delegates might be disappointed to learn that their candidate's appearance is only 0.75. Based on all the chatter about her on websites, such as http://vpilf.com, and the schoolyard talk of some of my Right-minded friends, you might think her supporters are ready to declare her a 10, the fact that my scale only goes to 1.06, not withstanding.

 

However, despite the seemingly unimpressive score of 0.75, her new throngs of admirers would probably be happy to know (and have their opinion confirmed) that she is far above the average politician, in fact she is firmly in the top 5% of politicians when it comes to looks.

 

Let me explain how I can claim to know all of this.

 

My colleagues, Matthew Atkinson, Seth Hill, and I undertook a survey that quantified the "facial competence" of hundreds of candidates for Congress and governor's mansions, between 1990 and 2006. This was following on the work of the psychologist Alexander Todorov and his colleagues at Princeton. They showed undergraduate students photographs of the faces of competing candidates and asked them to pick the more "competent." In the  journal Science, they demonstrated that the difference between the ratings of which candidate was more competent, correlated, that is matched up, with the difference in actual vote share between the two candidates. The more competent looking candidate won the actual election almost 70% of the time. What's more, they only flashed these photographs for a very short time, about 1 second. So, the judgements that correlated with election outcomes were actually snap-judgements, not reasoned opinions.

 

Todorov and his colleagues did not take a position on whether their research means that voters are making decisions about for whom to vote based on who is better looking. It is an intriguing question though, that raises some others. Do people actually even know what candidates for relatively obscure offices, like the United States House of Representatives, look like? If they do, what type of person would actually have their vote changed by this? Would a Republican really vote for a Democrat because the Republican candidate isn't pretty enough?

 

In many ways, their finding was compelling and curious: there is well-supported political science evidence that the more attention a person pays to an election, the more likely they are to be a firm believer in one side or the other. So, would a person that pays enough attention that they know what a candidate looks like, and is a firm believer in, say, the GOP, really vote for a Democrat because that Democrat was just so much better looking?

 

Questions like these led us to undertake a similar study. However, we created a scale that allows a comparison of all candidates, Palin to Biden for example, and not just those candidates that actually ran against each other. To do this, we sat hundreds of UCLA students in front of computer screens and flashed photos of the candidates at them. Instead of just flashing the pairs of candidates that actually ran against each other, we randomly matched candidates, and asked the students to choose which looked more competent. This allowed us to create a scale with a score for the face of every candidate.  Seth has an example of the survey on his webpage at http://sjhill.bol.ucla.edu/faces/ The numbers don't mean anything in an absolute sense. The scale is arbitrary, but the numbers have a relative meaning. So, if you like Palin, don't get too upset about her seemingly low score. I'll explain how she stacks up against her competitors shortly.

 

For those of you that like sports, this method of scaling is somewhat similar to how those computer rankings are made for college football. Those rankings allow for two teams that have not played each other to still be compared because the computer keeps track of how they did against common opponents or a team that one team played that played a team that the other team played. Or a team that one played that played a team that played a team that the other played, etc. If there are enough games, these rankings can give a fairly accurate idea of how two teams compare, even though they never actually played each other. Now, for those of you saying that those darn rankings keep your team out of their bowl game every year!, you might be right because in college football, there are not many games, and the accuracy is dependent on the number of games that occur. In our study, each face engaged in hundreds of "games" against other faces -- so we are fairly confident about the accuracy of our ratings. Can we separate Palin from Elizabeth Dole who has a score of 0.755 (Palin is actually 0.752)? Not very well (the typical score has a standard error of about 0.11). But we can be almost certain that Palin is far better looking than her opponent Biden. He scored a relatively measly 0.38 (although Biden is still doing better than the mean score of 0.22).

 

Now, before you express your disgust at having read this far just to have somebody tell you the shocking news that Sarah Palin has a better face than Joe Biden, there is some less obvious information out there. How does Palin compare to other names that were floated for the GOP Vice Presidential nomination? As far as faces go, Palin was a far better choice than the often mentioned Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (-0.14). However, she can't quite stack up with the even more oft mentioned, and acclaimed as handsome, Mitt Romney (0.93). Of course, there was some quiet chatter about John McCain choosing Texas Senator Kay Baily Hutchison, presumably to court the female vote, as some claim is the reason he chose Palin. When it comes to faces, Palin was the better choice, as Hutchison only came in at 0.56.

 

How does Palin do against the rejected Democratic VP possibilities? Quite well against Governors Tim Kaine of Virginia (0.11) and Kathleen Sebelius of Indiana (0.14). Even better against Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut (0.05). However, had Barack Obama chosen Evan Bayh of Indiana, he might have stood a chance, facially, against Palin, with a score of 0.63.

 

In fact, we found across all candidates, for all offices, Republicans, on average, have more competent faces than Democrats. Take that for what you well, but incumbents tend to have more competent faces and Republicans were in the majority for most of the years covered in our survey.

 

Now you say, what about the politicians we really want to hear about? McCain? Obama? Hillary Clinton? I have not avoided mentioning them for the purposes of suspense. I have no scores for them. In doing the ratings, we removed the photos of candidates that the students were likely to recognize. The idea is to have the students make decisions based on appearance alone, not other opinions they might have about the person. Romney stayed in the sample because in spring 2007, when we conducted the survey, Romney was a nobody - at least to college students - the overwhelming majority of whom could not even identify a photo of their own, long serving Member of Congress, Henry Waxman. Romney, however, was not as much of a nobody as Sarah Palin, even though one of my colleagues now recalls being struck by her beauty when we were preparing the photos for the   survey. It seems then, that in getting her face rated, the half-term Governor from Alaska, benefited from her obscurity. The same obscurity that some have argued helped her in becoming a finalist for the position of "heartbeat away" from the most powerful post in the world.

 

Of course, I did start by giving the "hottest VP candidate ever" only a 0.75. To avoid any accusations of bias on my blog, I should repeat that she is in the top 5% of politicians we rated. The 95th percentile ain't bad. I don't know if it will satisfy her most ardent supporters, but this means we can give her a 9.5 out of 10 (scientifically speaking).

Dear Reader,

 

In this election year, the catchphrase has been "Change," and for good reason. By most measures, the past eight years have not been banner ones for this country as a whole, and we have gotten to this point through a combination of complacency, self-interest, and gridlock among our country's decision makers. The problems are systemic and are not restricted to healthcare, but as this is a healthcare blog, I will try not to stray too far.

 

Healthcare now consumes over 16% of GDP, an astounding amount of money, but as consumers, we are not getting value for our money. Private insurance covers less than half of those insured, but still generate enormous profits for these companies. There are approximately 45 million uninsured persons in the country. We all pay for the uninsured, as their costs are passed on to the rest of us. A majority of healthcare in our country is now paid for through public moneys. Most individuals receive private health insurance through their jobs. If you are too sick to work, then eventually you become too sick to have private health insurance.

 

Over the course of the next few weeks leading up to this year's presidential election on November 4th, I will be writing about health and healthcare related issues on UCLA's Election Blog. My goal will be to highlight the factual basis of the issues and to offer insights into the party platforms, candidates' proposals, and timely national and statewide healthcare news. My comments will be informed by my experience as a primary care physician, as a researcher in quality of care and health policy, and as a professor representing UCLA, a public university. I will not shy away from stating the obvious or extrapolating from a combination of current trends and historical data. Where appropriate, I will use other issues to contrast how we make (or don't make) decisions in healthcare.

 

Let me know if I am missing the mark or touching where it hurts!

Although the media continue to play up the horse-race aspect of the presidential campaign, it is important to note that we have a long way to go. Another way to think about it is that an important national election is much like an NBA game - not much happens until the fourth quarter. And in that fourth quarter a minute can seem like a lifetime. Timeouts are called, points are scored in bunches, players turn the ball over, and the crowd gets whipped up in a frenzy.

 

In other words, for all of the noise generated by the party conventions and the subsequent (requisite?) media panting, we still have two months, three presidential debates, and one vice presidential debate ahead of us.

 

Now I know my social science colleagues believe they can accurately predict the outcome of elections using a few key variables. For example, some argue that the incumbent party almost always loses if they have been in power for two terms. Others contend that presidential elections turn on things like which candidate is ahead in the polls right after Labor Day or which candidate is taller.

 

Perhaps the most elegant of the predictive models is the one used by Alan Abramowitz of Emory University. Abramowitz's model is pretty straightforward: "the president's net approval rating (NAR - approval minus disapproval) in the Gallup Poll plus five times the annual growth rate of real GDP minus 25 if the president's party has held the White House for two terms or longer." Abramowitz calls this formula the Electoral Barometer (EB). It ranges from 100 to -100. A positive EB usually means the president's party wins and a negative EB usually means the president's party loses. The EB, according to Abramowitz, has predicted the winner of the popular vote in 14 of the 15 of the presidential elections since WW II.

 

For the 2008 presidential election this formula predicts the following:

 

 

By this account, Obama should win the election handily. For instance, the EB in 1980 was -66 and Reagan won by 9.7% of the popular vote. Likewise, the EB in 1952 was -49.5 and Eisenhower won by 10.9%.

 

So why are the opinion polls so close and David Axelrod is biting his fingernails? It's because these models don't adequately account for the "fourth quarter" effect. You see, people aren't sure if Obama can really handle the job of head coach. They aren't sure if the plays that worked in the first half are solid down the stretch, that he can call timeout at the appropriate time, or devise a clever play to get the last shot. They aren't convinced his team can cool off the hot shooting guard (Sarah Palin) from the other team. In short, they are not convinced he can deliver the goods in "crunch time" (Plot line sound familiar? See, "Glory Road"!).

 

And folks, in crunch time minutes unfold in dog years. Don't put your money down on the table just yet.

When liberals question Sarah Palin's parenting and social conservatives support her career ambitions, you know something very bizarre is going on. McCain's VP pick has hit a nerve, revealing some ugly realities about women in American politics.

 

Critics wonder how Palin's "family values" produced her family circus; question her ability to balance her chaotic home life with her heartbeat-away day job; and fault her for either not realizing her candidacy would put her pregnant teen in the media spotlight, or realizing it and not caring.

 

Supporters argue that nobody would be raising these questions of a man, and that everybody should be supporting Palin's choices as a woman in this best of times/ worst of times moment.

 

This is progress?

 

Geraldine Ferraro ran as the first major party VP candidate 24 years ago, back when there were two Germanys and no al Qaeda, when cell phones were rare and the internet was not yet born.

 

Oh, Ferraro had her troubles, particularly with her husband's finances. But her biggest one was called Ronald Reagan. Mondale was trailing Reagan badly before he chose Ferraro as a long-shot runningmate, and he never was able to catch the Gipper.

 

Ferraro has 3 kids. But if memory serves, she didn't run for vice president as a hockey mom, soccer mom, or any other kid of sports mom. She ran as a Member of Congress. Three years earlier, Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed the first female Supreme Court justice. She has 3 children also, but she wasn't nominated as Ranch Mom. O'Connor graduated at the top of her Stanford law School Class, alongside future Chief Justice William Rehnquist. She served in both the Arizona legislature and the Arizona Court of Appeals. O'Connor's qualifications for the highest court in the land were her brains, not her ovaries.

 

It wasn't long ago that Senator Barbara Boxer accused Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of not understanding the real price of the Iraq War because she had no children - an argument that was as offensive as it was stupid. Generations of high officials may have snagged deferrals and special favors to keep their own children out of war zones. Condi's offense was bigger: having no children at all.

 

We may be arriving at a post-racial politics moment with Barack Obama's historic candidacy. But there are no post-feminist moments in the offing with Palin. Or Hillary Clinton, no matter how loudly those three or four "It's Hillary-or-McCain" ladies scream about needing to heal. When her husband was running for president, Mrs. Clinton criticized cookie baking then engaged in it, proving to worried voters that this First-Lady-To-Be could stand by her man. When Senator Clinton was running for president, she increasingly asked her man to stand aside (lest he cause more trouble with his angry finger wagging) and stumped with her daughter, Chelsea. She may not have said it, but it was there: See what a good job I did raising my daughter? I will answer that 3am phone. I will be a good president just like I was a good mother.

 

When exactly did parenting become a qualification for women but not male candidates seeking high office? When did women get thrown back to add-on titles: Governor-AND-mother- of-five? When did all the promise of women's choices - to stay at home, work full time, find something in between, seek balance in so many different ways - mutate into unceasing judgment and political pandering?

 

We may have 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling, but women still have a long way to go, baby.

Suppose John McCain had selected Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal as his running mate. Would there be the same objections to his experience and job qualifications that are directed at Sarah Palin? Jindal, after all, is considerably younger and has even less gubernatorial experience than Mrs. Palin. Or suppose Barack Obama acted as many figured he would and asked one-term Virginia governor, Tim Kaine, to be his vice presidential candidate. Would there be the same outrage that someone with so little experience was only a heartbeat away from the presidency?

 

I certainly wouldn't complain about these choices the way I've been killing the Palin pick. This ostensible double standard has little to do with the legitimate arguments about Jindal and Kaine being better known governors of moderate sized states too. Nor, hopefully, does it have anything to do with the overtly sexist sentiments underlying much of the Palin criticism. The reason I find Kaine and Jindal to be much better qualified candidates is that Tim Kaine is a Harvard Law graduate, Bobby Jindal is a Rhodes Scholar, and Sarah Palin has a not so comparable BA from the University of Idaho.

 

I don't think it's a big secret that president of the United States is an intellectually demanding position. Yet, innate intelligence and educational attainment are rarely considered relevant aspects of candidates' resumes. So often, for instance, you hear Republicans claim that Sarah Palin has as much or more experience than Barack Obama. Just once I would like to hear the retort that his position as president of Harvard Law review and constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago probably prepare him a little better for the cognitive demands of the White House than her prior profession as a sportscaster.

 

You would never hear this, though. For Americans would unfortunately find such a truism to be intolerably elitist. It is indeed a sad indictment of the quality of our present political discourse that Barack Obama's biographical convention video cannot draw attention to these qualifications for fear of the elite tag, but that "I was just your average Hockey Mom" is one of Sarah Palin's biggest applause lines.

 

With all due respect to Hockey Moms, being an average Hockey Mom who joined the PTA does not qualify you to answer the proverbial 3AM phone. Nor does being a mother of five, a high school point guard, a moose hunter, or any of the other folksy aspects of her biography that the McCain Campaign loves to tout in order to demonstrate she's just like us. I don't want someone like me answering that phone. I want someone who has demonstrated that he or she possesses the intellectual ability and contextual knowledge to understand the complexities that such emergency calls inevitably entail. Bobby Jindal, Tim Kaine, and most certainly Barack Obama have demonstrated through their superior intellect and educational attainment that they have the background suited to comprehend such complexity.

 

Shouldn't that be considered experience?

The text below seems to be going around as a chain email. (It's also picking up some website mentions.) I got it from someone I've never heard of, who had gotten it from someone else and forwarded it to an email list.

 

 

There follows a long list including the usual suspects (Lady Chatterly, Catcher in the Rye, Heather Has Two Mommies, HuckleberryFinn) and the first four Harry Potter books.

 

Now shall we count up all the ways this has to be fraudulent?

 

1. It has no source. "The official minutes of the Wasilla Library Board" is a typical viral-nonsense pseudo-source. A real record would have a date, and perhaps a list of board members. It would also come from someplace (e.g., a newspaper) or have the name of the person who claims to have seen the original record, with some explanation of how.

 

2. "Official" sets off alarm bells; what other sorts of minutes are there? Is there actually a "Wassila Library Board"? If there is, it doesn't show up on the city's website. There's a "Library Steering Committee," a temporary outfit with only advisory functions; there's a non-profit group called "Friends of the Wassila Library;" it has a board, but no official power. That's not proof positive that there was no board from 1996 to 2004 when Sarah Palin was Mayor, but it sure raises some doubt.

 

3. Another warning bell: the existence of a list seems inconsistent with the news stories about Mayor Palin's asking the head of the library about banning books, which claim that the inquiry was general and never got around to specific books. Again, not an air-tight case, but by now your fraud antennae should be humming.

 

4. Those stories do, however give us a date: around 1996, when Palin was first elected. And that, in turn, gives us a smoking gun: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was first published in 2000.

 

 

I think it's reasonably likely that Palin asked her library director about banning books, either because she meant it or because she was looking for an excuse to fire the library director. It's not impossible (though I'd count it pretty unlikely) that some books were actually banned, perhaps after that director quit and a successor was put in place. But by mentioning the threat to fire the original library director around 1996 and a book that wasn't published until 2000 as parts of a single narrative, the document convicts itself of aggravated bogosity.

 

Whether this is a sincere-but-stupid attempt to discredit Palin, or instead a sophisticated attempt to discredit attacks on Palin, it deserves zero credence. If you get, it, I urge you to do what I did: send it back to every email address that comes with it, recipients as well as sources, explain how you know it's b.s., and urge the senders to relay the word back up the chain.

 

It looks as if the Obama campaign is going to focus on Palin's false claims about pork in general and the Bridge to Nowhere in particular. Even Fox News seems to have gotten tired of retailing the McCain/Palin lies about the Bridge to Nowhere, though the McCain campaign is still pushing the story.

 

That, and Troopergate, and Palin's record of profligacy as mayor, and her wingnut political positions, and her ignorance of national issues are all good talking points. She's a target-rich environment; even putting the ethics of the problem to one side (which I'd be loath to do), it's clear that the banned-books story is one of the decoys.