While the media is trumpeting Sarah Palin's book, which sounds like a very bad soap opera, they are ignoring a report by Goldman-Sachs about health insurance stock. According to the Goldman-Sachs report, if the proposed health care reform contains no public options, stock earnings would grow 5% a year from 2010 to 2019. If health insurance companies kill health care reform, the stock earnings would grow 10% a year and by 2019, the value of stock in health insurance companies would rise 59%.*
The folks who will pay for this financial bonanza are the tea-baggers who make up Sarah Palin's fan club. In addition to paying stock dividends, Sarah Palin's fans will also pay the salaries for CEO's, lobbyists, advertising campaigns, and right-wing organizers. They'll make generous campaign contributions to politicians because 2010 is an election year. They can expect their health insurance rates to skyrocket. Many companies will off-shore to avoid insurance costs, precipitating an exodus of American jobs - or they will offer crummy insurance policies that really do not cover anything, so that when a tea-bagger gets sick, he or she also has to file for bankruptcy.
Needless to say, if tea baggers gain too much weight, get diagnosed with breast-cancer, or if one of their children gets asthma, they will get dropped by their insurance companies and left to die. After call insurance companies really invented the death panels, except it's called "controlled utilization." (Term courtesy of Humana, and I got the info from David Sirota.)
Why doesn't any one in the media ask Sarah Palin these questions? The answer is simple. As a rogue, which by definition means a crook, a charlatan or an con-artist, The Queen of the Rogues, Sarah Palin gets to pick and choose the questions she wants to answer, and as rogue, she also gets to pick and choose when she's going to tell the truth.
* Source, The Progress Report, November 13 by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Colrey, Benjamin Armruster, pat Garafolo Zaid Jilani.
Sliming Palin
False Internet claims and rumors fly about McCain's running mate.
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
Summary
We've been flooded for the past few days with queries about dubious Internet postings and mass e-mail messages making claims about McCain's running mate, Gov. Palin. We find that many are completely false, or misleading.
Palin did not cut funding for special needs education in Alaska by 62 percent. She didn't cut it at all. In fact, she tripled per-pupil funding over just three years.
She did not demand that books be banned from the Wasilla library. Some of the books on a widely circulated list were not even in print at the time. The librarian has said Palin asked a "What if?" question, but the librarian continued in her job through most of Palin's first term.
She was never a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, a group that wants Alaskans to vote on whether they wish to secede from the United States. She's been registered as a Republican since May 1982.
Palin never endorsed or supported Pat Buchanan for president. She once wore a Buchanan button as a "courtesy" when he visited Wasilla, but shortly afterward she was appointed to co-chair of the campaign of Steve Forbes in the state.
Palin has not pushed for teaching creationism in Alaska's schools. She has said that students should be allowed to "debate both sides" of the evolution question, but she also said creationism "doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."
We'll be looking into other charges in an e-mail by a woman named Anne Kilkenny for a future story. For more explanation of the bullet points above, please read the Analysis.
Correction: In our original story, we incorrectly said that a few of the claims we examine here were included in the e-mail by Kilkenny. Only one of the claims – about the librarian's firing – was similar to an item in that e-mail. We regret the error.
Clarification: Clarification: The summary originally said that Palin "tripled" per-student funding. The bill Palin signed will triple per-student funding for what Alaska calls "intensive needs" students, but has not done so yet. We also reworded that sentence to make clear the tripling is for funding for special needs students with particularly high costs. Special needs funding overall increased as well.
Analysis
Since Republican presidential nominee John McCain tapped Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate, information about Palin's past has been zipping around the Internet. Several claims are not true, and other rumors are misleading.
No Cut for "Special Needs" Kids
It's not true, as widely reported in mass e-mails, Web postings and at least one mainstream news source, that Palin slashed the special education budget in Alaska by 62 percent. CNN's Soledad O'Brien made the claim on Sept. 4 in an interview with Nicolle Wallace, a senior adviser to the McCain campaign:
O'Brien, Sept. 4: One are that has gotten certainly people sending to me a lot of e-mails is the question about as governor what she did with the special needs budget, which I'm sure you're aware, she cut significantly, 62 percent I think is the number from when she came into office. As a woman who is now a mother to a special needs child, and I think she actually has a nephew which is autistic as well. How much of a problem is this going to be as she tries to navigate both sides of that issue?
Such a move might have made Palin look heartless or hypocritical in view of her convention-speech pledge to be an advocate for special needs children and their families. But in fact, she increased special needs funding so dramatically that a representative of local school boards described the jump as "historic."
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next Page »
Discuss