[OFB Cafe] Time Magazine and NY Times on Sarah Palin

[Fred Smith]

>From Time (http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1837918,00.html) :
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"as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy
at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning
books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate
language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen
Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time
show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full
support" to the mayor.

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>From the NY Times
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/opinion/03wed1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin)
:

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" As far as we can tell, Mr. McCain and his aides did almost no due
diligence before choosing Ms. Palin, raising serious questions about
his management skills. The fact that Ms. Palin's 17-year-old daughter
is pregnant is irrelevant to her candidacy. There are, however, very
serious questions about her political past and her ideology.

" If Mr. McCain wanted to break with his party's past and choose the
Republicans' first female vice presidential candidate, there are a
number of politicians out there with far greater experience and
stature than Ms. Palin, who has been in Alaska's Statehouse for less
than two years.

" Before she was elected governor, she was mayor of a tiny Anchorage
suburb, where her greatest accomplishment was raising the sales tax to
build a hockey rink.

" Palin gathered up $27 million in subsidies from Washington, $15
million of it for a railroad from her town to the ski resort hometown
of Senator Ted Stevens, now under indictment for failing to report
gifts.

"The Republicans are presenting Ms. Palin as a crusader against Mr.
Stevens's infamous "Bridge to Nowhere." The record says otherwise; she
initially supported Mr. Stevens's boondoggle, diverting the money to
other projects when the bridge became a political disaster. In her
speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God in June, Ms. Palin said it was
"God's will" that the federal government contribute to a $30 billion
gas pipeline she wants built in Alaska.