crazy... Dems are seriously lowering the bar.

[ragged325]

How hard is it to understand what a lie is?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvqH6GnE3k0

[ragged325]

Palin did two things. She increased the oil tax from a 10 percent gross revenue tax to a 25 percent profits tax. Then she increased the payouts to residents by $1,200. Wasn't the oil industry going to pour all of that $6 billion dollars extra they've paid Alaskans the last fiscal year into researching alternative fuels? I'm confused. Didn't the oil companies pass that extra cost onto me? Instead of drilling more in Alaska, aren't the oil companies going to get oil from other places that aren't as expensive?

Didn't McCain say that federal windfall profits taxes on the oil industry would "increase our dependence on foreign oil and hinder exactly the same kind of domestic exploration and production we need."?

[Vedubin01]

i see pretty much all taxes as stupid, in this case it is more of a "use fee" than taxes for social programs ( the robin hood programs ), which imo still is pretty stupid but quite a bit less so.

You try to make it sound like the tax and dividend to the alaskans wasn't there before palin and that's not the case. She was in office when an increase in the dividend was made ( a one time only 1200$ addition in 2008) but didn't institute the payment to start with.

The fund is not run by the government in alaska, it is run by the alaska permanent fund corporation created by the alaskan government in exchange for the mineral rights to state and federal lands in alaska by private companies. It's the people in alaska getting money for the use of their land from a private enterprise.

Try and compare that to the ponzi scheme that is medicare and social security and see if you can understand the difference between a use fee and the " robin hood " taxes of welfare programs.

:)

[Pinepig]

So Pinepig, now that you're here, what do you think about Palin taxing oil companies and giving the money to the Alaskans?

I see pretty much all taxes as stupid, in this case it is more of a "use fee" than taxes for social programs ( the Robin Hood programs ), which IMO still is pretty stupid but quite a bit less so.

You try to make it sound like the tax and dividend to the Alaskans wasn't there before Palin and that's not the case. She was in office when an increase in the dividend was made ( a one time only 1200$ addition in 2008) but didn't institute the payment to start with.

The fund is not run by the government in Alaska, it is run by the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation created by the Alaskan Government in exchange for the mineral rights to state and federal lands in Alaska by private companies. It's the people in Alaska getting money for the use of their land from a private enterprise.

Try and compare that to the ponzi scheme that is Medicare and Social Security and see if you can understand the difference between a use fee and the " Robin Hood " taxes of welfare programs.

[Vedubin01]

So Pinepig, now that you're here, what do you think about Palin taxing oil companies and giving the money to the Alaskans?

I think its great, its the peoples land! My brother lives up there, he just got his check for $3250 a few days ago.

Im headed there in just a few days. Will be posting pics and looking for some Meth for Dave!:D

[//MPower]

America is going to shit as in shit the state of being not action verb.

No way! Banks are failing nation wide. GM and our entire economy is bankrupt, but every thing is great. Hell, we're not even in a recession. Just look the other way and keep watching American Idol while they steal your pension funds, triple the national debt, convert their currency to euros and move to Dubai. No worries.

Everything is okay as long as we are spending all our money on fighting an invisible enemy somewhere in the world.

Don't worry. Obama or McCain will fix everything. :up:

[ragged325]

So Pinepig, now that you're here, what do you think about Palin taxing oil companies and giving the money to the Alaskans?

[Pinepig]

GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?

PALIN: They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.

And then they edited out the next question,

GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?

PALIN: They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.

GIBSON: What insight does that give you into what they’re doing in Georgia?

PALIN: Well, I’m giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with all of these countries, especially Russia. We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it’s in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.

[ragged325]

GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?

PALIN: They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.

[kylebes1]

America is going to shit as in shit the state of being not action verb.

[ragged325]

bump

[ragged325]

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jMtvzhUJmkDwVPsjJ0vhp-MDl1-gD934RHCG0

Analysis: McCain's claims skirt facts, test voters

By CHARLES BABINGTON – 13 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The "Straight Talk Express" has detoured into doublespeak.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He accuses Democrat Barack Obama of calling Palin a pig, which did not happen. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone's taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.

Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain's skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama's campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

McCain's persistence in pushing dubious claims is all the more notable because many political insiders consider him one of the greatest living victims of underhanded campaigning. Locked in a tight race with George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, McCain was rocked in South Carolina by a whisper campaign claiming he had fathered an illegitimate black child and was mentally unstable.

Shaken by the experience, McCain denounced less-than-truthful campaigning. Vowing to live up to his "straight talk" motto, he apologized for his reluctance to criticize the flying of the Confederate flag at South Carolina's state Capitol in a bid for votes. When the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacked the military record of Democrat and fellow Navy officer John Kerry in 2004, McCain called the ads "dishonest and dishonorable."

Now, top aides to McCain include Steve Schmidt, who has close ties to Karl Rove, Bush's premier political adviser in 2000.

Politicians usually modify or drop claims when a string of newspaper and TV news accounts concludes they are untrue or greatly exaggerated. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, conceded she had not come under sniper fire in Bosnia after a batch of debunking articles subjected her to scorn during her primary contest against Obama.

But McCain and his running mate Palin, the Alaska governor, were defiant this week in the face of similar reports. Day after day she said she had told Congress "no thanks" to the so-called Bridge to Nowhere, a rural Alaska project that was abandoned when critics challenged its costs and usefulness. For nearly a week, major news outlets had documented that Palin supported the bridge when running for governor in 2006, noting that she turned against it only after it became an object of ridicule in Alaska and a symbol of Congress's out-of-control earmarking.

The McCain-Palin campaign made at least three other aggressive claims this week that omitted key details or made dubious assumptions to criticize Obama. It equated lawmakers' requests for money for special projects with corruption, even though Palin has sought nearly $200 million in such "earmarks" this year.

It produced an Internet ad implying that Obama had called Palin a pig when he used a familiar phrase, which McCain also has used, about putting "lipstick on a pig" to try to make a bad situation look better. McCain supporters said Obama was slyly alluding to Palin's description of herself as a pit bull in lipstick, but there was nothing in his remarks to support the claim. Obama accused the GOP campaign of "lies and phony outrage."

The lipstick wars were fully engaged when the McCain campaign produced another ad saying Obama favored "comprehensive sex education" for kindergartners. The charge triggered the sort of headlines becoming increasingly common in major newspapers and wire services monitoring the factual content of political ads and speeches.

"Ad on Sex Education Distorts Obama Policy," was the headline on a New York Times article Thursday. "McCain's 'Education' Spot is Dishonest, Deceptive," The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" article said.

Major news outlets have written such fact-checking articles for years. "But in the last two election cycles, the very notion that the facts matter seems to be under assault," said Michael X. Delli Carpini, an authority on political ads at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. "Candidates and their consultants seem to have learned that as long as you don't back down from your charges or claims, they will stick in the minds of voters regardless of their accuracy or at a minimum, what the truth is will remain murky, a matter of opinion rather than fact."

With Palin giving McCain's campaign a boost in the polls, Obama supporters are nervously watching to see what impact the latest claims will have. Surveys already show that most people believe Obama would raise their taxes — a regular McCain claim — even though independent groups such as the Tax Policy Center concluded that four out of five U.S. households would receive tax cuts under his proposals.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds defended the campaign's statements. "We include factual backup in every one of our TV spots," he said Thursday.

Obama, of course, has made exaggerated or questionable assertions as well. Earlier this year, for instance, he repeated a claim that more black men are in prison than in college, after news accounts refuted it. He also used a McCain remark about having troops in Iraq for "100 years" to exaggerate McCain's proposals for being fully engaged militarily in that country.

In general, however, Obama has been quicker to react to news accounts challenging his accuracy. Faced with skeptical reports this year, for instance, he stopped saying he "worked his way" through college, and instead credited hard work and scholarships.

Dan Schnur, a former McCain aide who now teaches politics at the University of Southern California, said McCain and Obama learned they must stretch the truth "when staying on the high road didn't work out to their benefit."

McCain, he said, "tried it his way. He had a poverty tour and nobody covered it. He had a national service tour, and everybody made fun of it. He proposed these joint town halls" with Obama, "and nothing come of it. Through the spring and early summer, that approach didn't work. You can't blame him for taking a step back and reassessing."

I think the lesson is, if you're going to start lying, wait until a few weeks before the election when you won't get caught.

[ragged325]

Bump. Where did the Republicans go? I thought you guys liked to argue.

[ragged325]

There is a reason there is no grocery tax in Wasilla and the people all love Palin.

Basically, Alaska taxes the oil companies and gives the money to the residents. It used to be $2,000/resident per year. Palin raised it to $3,200/resident per year. I've heard a lot of Republicans talk about how we shouldn't tax corporations too much, if Palin's the one doing it, it's fine. Of course, the oil companies pass those taxes on to people that don't live in Alaska, so we're really the ones giving $3,200/resident to the Alaskans. Wonder why they want to drill more there?

Despite this, Alaska is one of the states that receive the most per capita in federal tax money. Again, I thought a lot of Republicans didn't like welfare states, but Alaska is different.

Welcome to the People’s Republic of Alaska, where every resident this year will get a $3,200 payout, thanks in no small measure to the efforts of Sarah Palin, the state’s Republican governor. That’s $22,400 for a family of seven, like Palin’s. Since 1982, the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests oil revenues from state lands, has paid out a dividend on invested oil loot to everyone who has been in the state for a year. But Palin upped the ante by joining with Democrats and some recalcitrant Republican state legislators to share in oil company windfall profits, further fattening state tax revenue and permitting an additional payout in tax funds to residents.

No wonder she is popular with voters in a state whose residents pay no income or sales taxes but are blessed with state coffers rolling in cash at a time when all other states are suffering. Indeed, when the oil companies pay more taxes to the state of Alaska, they get to write that off against their federal tax obligation, leaving the rest of us to make up the shortfall.

The state of Alaska owns most of the oil-producing land and was getting upward of 85 percent of its budget from the oil companies that lease the fields, even before Palin helped increase the state’s cut. While other states fire schoolteachers because of the economic downturn, Alaska has, as Palin indicated in accepting John McCain’s offer to join him on the GOP ticket, more money than it knows what to do with. In a display of plucky arrogance at her coming-out press conference, Palin boasted deceptively that if Alaskans wanted that infamous bridge to nowhere, “we’d build it ourselves.”

She originally had supported having U.S. taxpayers finance that boondoggle, before McCain and others in Congress blasted it.

Not that I blame Palin for wrangling for her state a bigger cut of oil company windfall profits; it’s just not an option that will work wonders for states without oil. Of course we can remedy that by having a federal windfall profits tax of the sort that Barack Obama dared propose, and which McCain and his fellow congressional Republicans have managed to quash. Their argument, rejected quite pointedly by Palin for Alaska, is that it would discourage oil companies from investing in boosting oil field yields.

McCain derided Obama’s call for the windfall profits tax, saying it would “increase our dependence on foreign oil and hinder exactly the same kind of domestic exploration and production we need.” I am far more interested in how McCain handles the contradiction between his and Palin’s position on windfall oil profits than whether he properly vetted her on her family-values commitment to the abstinence-only teenage sex education program.

Why is it a good thing for the folks up in Alaska to get a cut of exorbitant oil company profits, but not the rest of us, if we are all part of one nation? Didn’t taxpayers from across the U.S. buy the place from the Russians? Isn’t it our federally collected tax dollars that have been subsidizing Alaska more lavishly than any other state, both before and after the bonanza of oil?

Just witness the success of Palin, who, as mayor of the hamlet of Wasilla, hired a big-time lobbying firm intimately connected with the state’s now-indicted Republican Sen. Ted Stevens and thus obtained $27 million in federal earmarks during her tenure. As The Washington Post calculated in a devastating report on Mayor Palin’s assault on the federal treasury, her home town of Wasilla (with about 6,000 inhabitants in 2002 when she was mayor) received $6.1 million, or $1,000 per resident in earmarks, almost as much as Boise, Idaho, got this year with a population that is 30 times larger.

It obviously helped to have Alaska’s now-indicted senator as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. And despite McCain’s claims that Palin distinguished herself by breaking with Alaska’s discredited Republican establishment in February, the governor sent Stevens a request for $200 million to support various state projects. With representatives like that, it’s no wonder that Alaska, despite its oil boom, is still at the top of states subsidized by federal dollars, receiving $1.84 back from Washington for every $1 that Alaskans pay in federal taxes. (California receives 78 cents for every $1.)

Unfortunately, looking to Palin for advice on helping the rest of us during the oil crunch, as McCain has promised, is a bit like asking a Saudi oil minister or Russia’s Vladimir Putin to provide a model for our nation’s economic woes. They hardly feel our pain at the pump.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080902_palins_alaska_reaps_the_windfall_profits_mccain_decries/

[BMW_TUNER]

All I have to say is I was just in Wasilla and ther was no grocery tax. I can not believe people who receive those emails and think that they are somehow on a secret mailing list for the truth. I am sitting in Seatac on my way back from AK and all I have to say is the people (and I mean the people I met in AK ,35 or so) are all in suport of her. The only negative comment I heard was one lady in Talkeetna say that she hopes Palin doesn't win so that she can stay on as Gov. of AK. active research has given me my answer. For the rest of you children who refuse to find your own truths and only suckel at the tit of the media please GFY.