Razib Khan ponders the similarities between Islam and orthodox westerners:
On issues such as abortion and the marriage of homosexuals the orthodox will part ways with the conservative. The orthodox Westerner may see in the Muslim a closer adherent to the true tradition. This is one reason why the Traditionalist philosopher Rene Guenon converted to Islam. But, I believe that the orthodox underestimate the implicit cultural commonalities which are unspoken and unelucidated, and which bind societies and civilizations together even more than adherence to a metaphysic. “My Country, Right or Wrong” is at once a profoundly unintellectual idea, but at the same time so is the assumption that one would sacrifice one’s own life for one’s child. Instincts have their limits, but at some point human flourishing is contingent upon [admitting] that life depends on implicit instincts for proper functioning, and that reflection is an exceptional avocation, islands in a sea of reflex.
About Sarah Palin, you've written that "All we know for sure is that whatever she says isn't true. It never is."
I'd argue that what she says has no relation whatsoever to the truth - you can't count on it to be false anymore than you can count on it to be true. What you can generally count on is that it will be hastily conceived and self serving. I know you've invested a great deal of time proving her to be a liar, but to my mind Palin's a bullshitter, as defined by Harry G. Frankfurt in his book, On Bullshit.
My column plumbs the amazing powers of a certain someone:
Palin is indeed a feisty Alaskan and a genuine triumph of red-state feminism. But her narrative is embellished and embroidered to such an extent, it resembles not so much a memoir as a work of magical realism.
If you treat it as a factual narrative you will soon falter. Among the few early reactions were those of Nicolle Wallace — a McCain campaign staffer — who said of one passage: “It is pure fiction. No such discussion took place.” A reporter Palin says targeted her daughter Piper after a press conference was never at the press conference cited. Palin’s claim that she was personally billed $50,000 for vetting is point blank denied by the McCain campaign. Palin’s account of her record in the Exxon Valdez lawsuit was described last week by the chief lawyer for the case as “the most cockamamie bullshit”. I could go on.
None of this is particularly surprising. Palin has a long and documented record of saying things that are empirically untrue but asserting them as if her own imagination is the only source of objective reality.
So you simply read the book as if it is fiction and enjoy it. Or you read it as non-fiction and believe that Palin is a magical mythical figure who defies the laws of time and space and normal human nature.
Take one story that every mother will relate to: the drama of her delivery of her fifth child, Trig.
Razib Khan builds off the arguments in Michael Specter's new book:
[S]erious problems emerge when our intuitive prejudices push themselves into the scientific domain. Natural science has over the past few centuries has proven itself to be a marvel not by extension of our intuition, but contravention of that intuition resulting in an even closer fit to reality (contrast Newtonian physics with "folk physics").** Humans have always had engineering in the form of tinkering with technology. But the last two centuries of productivity growth through mechanical improvements have been based in part on the rise of science as a theoretical framework which allows for more than trial & error experimentation guided by intuition. Science allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive their theories are, because they are judged not on plausibility but predictivity.
[P]erhaps the unemployment crisis, the real estate crisis, the health
care crisis, and even global warming are more urgent matters in the
grand scheme of things just now.
Now, that is. However, how about in 2014, when Obama has just two
years to go and other things are presumably taken care of to the extent
that they can be (and assuming that John Thune, Tim Pawlenty and Sarah
Palin will not turn out to be the GOP’s secret weapons three years from
now)? By then Obama will not be facing re-election, nor will he likely
be mired in a sex scandal to distract him from real work.
For now, maybe we have to face things like what happened in the
Bronx Monday as a weekly kind of event. But what kind of a nation are
we to treat episodes like that one as business as usual? The War on
Drugs stands as an obstacle to people becoming the best that they can
be. It is, in its way, un-American.
Authority...performs a dual function; looking to authorities is a
way of increasing the likelihood of being right, and of reducing the
penalty for being wrong. An authoritative source isn’t just a source
you trust; it’s a source you and other members of your reference group
trust together. This is the non-lawyer’s version of “due diligence”;
it’s impossible to be right all the time, but it’s much better to be
wrong on good authority than otherwise, because if you’re wrong on good
authority, it’s not your fault.
"There is a virus of disrespect and hate spreading here very rapidly.
And unless one lives right here with it, day in and day out, it is
unbelievable how quickly and subtly it infects reasonably intelligent
persons. This is not too hard to understand only if one recognizes the
unremitting, deep, bitter religious and racial prejudice existing today
in this section of our land — I don’t know if any of them are similarly
infected in other sections, but I know personally of what I
speak as regards East Texas.
The most recent employment report shows the unemployment rate rising past 10 percent even though it appears output may have already turned the corner, while new claims for unemployment insurance
are still over 500,000, a number that indicates the economy is still
losing jobs overall. In fact, I am worried that the peak in
unemployment could lag even further behind the recovery than it did in
the last two recessions.
Stanislas Dehaene, chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collège de France, gives his view of the brain:
What I am proposing is that the human brain is a much more constrained
organ than we think, and that it places strong limits on the range of
possible cultural forms. Essentially, the brain did not evolve for
culture, but culture evolved to be learnable by the brain. Through its
cultural inventions, humanity constantly searched for specific niches
in the brain, wherever there is a space of plasticity that can be
exploited to “recycle” a brain area and put it to a novel use. Reading,
mathematics, tool use, music, religious systems -- all might be viewed
as instances of cortical recycling.
Joe Kloc examines why we get creeped out by lifelike robots and lifeless bodies:
Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are
instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has
defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the
particular occurrences of the uncanny, in which humans are bothered by
interaction with human-like models, began as a psychological curiosity.
But as our ability to design artificial life has increased—along with
our dependence on it—getting to the heart of why people respond
negatively to realistic models of themselves has taken on a new
importance. Attempts to understand the origins of this reaction, known
since the 1970s as the “uncanny valley response,” have drawn on
everything from repressed fears of castration to an evolutionary
mechanism for mate selection, but there has been little empirical
evidence to assess the validity of these ideas.
Stephen Williams reviews the latest work by Bruce Ellis Benson:
The argument in this volume is that Nietzsche retained
his native Pietism. He was brought up in a Pietist home and broke away
from the beliefs which it housed, but he did not thereby cease to be
religious or pious. He aspired to become a disciple of Dionysus, a
devotee of Life, of which Dionysus is the symbol. This determination to
pursue a way of life is rightly called "piety" when we observe the
continuities between Nietzsche's background Pietism and his later
quest. His Pietism was a way of life rather than a set of doctrines.
After and during the Saturday victory, fans set me on fire twice. They
were harmless conflagrations, but they reminded me what a blessing it
is, in so many ways, not to be the type who wears polyester and flammable hairspray.
A man ignited a sparkler next to me, in an area packed so tight we were
pressed together, chest to back. By the time he realized his folly,
sparks had sizzled through my shirt and lightly scorched my skin. At
Tahrir Square, which is Cairo's Times Square, fans shut the place down
to traffic and began lighting aerosol cans ablaze. One burnt off the
fringe of my hair.
Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there
is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention - not
even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to
have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our
ancestors going back least 30 million years.
Heather MacDonald doesn't appreciate how the faithful connect religion to ethics:
Would someone please provide an example of
a. someone actually claiming that murder, say, (or theft) is fine at all times and places, or
b. someone claiming that murder (or theft) is fine at all times and places because there is no God, or
c. someone claiming that murder (or theft) is fine at all times and places because there is no God, and then being recalled to sanity by an invocation of the Sixth (or Eighth) Commandment?
Michael Fitzgerald sorts through a number of studies on the economic effects of religion:
Among the most provocative findings
have come from Robert Barro, a renowned economist at Harvard, and his
wife, Rachel McCleary, a researcher at Harvard’s Taubman Center. [...] The
two collected data from 59 countries where a majority of the population
followed one of the four major religions, Christianity, Islam,
Hinduism, or Buddhism. They ran this data - which covered slices of
years from 1981 to 2000, measuring things like levels of belief in God,
afterlife beliefs, and worship attendance - through statistical models. Their results show a strong correlation between economic growth and
certain shifts in beliefs, though only in developing countries.
Most
strikingly, if belief in hell jumps up sharply while actual church
attendance stays flat, it correlates with economic growth. Belief in
heaven also has a similar effect, though less pronounced. Mere belief
in God has no effect one way or the other. Meanwhile, if church
attendance actually rises, it slows growth in developing economies.
There are no lies in Sarah's book; nor in
her life, nor in her heart. Utterances that seem untrue are not lies,
because Sarah believes them true. If she says one thing, then later
forgets what she said and says the opposite, Sarah Palin is neither
lying nor mistaken, nor forgetful, because at each moment, she
believes what she has said. And a minute later, she will believe
something else, if she says it. Whatever she says, if she says it,
will be true. But if it's not, so what? It's words, only words.
Sooner or later, words fail everyone. This goes double for Sarah and
her faithful. Sarah Palin is the voice - and the embodiment - of the
inarticulate.
Douthat applauds the pro-life movement's gradual acceptance of women in the workplace:
During the ‘08 election, you’d often hear media types buzzing about
how Palin was a bad mother for putting her political ambitions ahead of
her family; you’d almost never hear that from pro-lifers. Some of this
reflects partisan biases, obviously — but some of it reflects a real
sea change in how religious conservatives view women in the workplace.
Indeed, you might say that the pro-life movement has done an
impressive job of embracing, albeit slowly, the positive achievements
of the feminist revolution, while remaining steadfast in its opposition
to that revolution’s darker consequences. (Well, O.K., you might not say that, but I probably would.)
Matt Taibbi shares the Dish's desire to have politics be about arguments about solutions to emergent problems. He's not unaware that the culture war has helped prevent this, which is the core reason I supported Obama in 2007. But Taibbi sees Palin as a kind of anti-matter to Obama's matter. And he's dead on:
Rush [Limbaugh] is no Einstein, but the man does research. It may be fallacious and completely dishonest research, but he does it all the same. His battlefield is world politics and most of the time the relevant action is taking place in Washington. As good as he is at what he does, he still has to travel to the action; he himself isn’t the action.
Sarah Palin’s battlefield, on the other hand, is whatever is happening five feet in front of her face. She is building a political career around the little interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding her sawdust-filled head.
A People reader asks Palin, "How is your daughter Bristol doing as a young mother?" She replies:
She's spectacular. She's amazing. Still doesn't get a lot of sleep
because Tripp is a light sleeper through the night and Bristol's got
him all the time. But she's going to college, she's working and taking
care of the baby. She's got her hands full. But very, very strong, very
optimistic. She teaches me good lessons through all of this, too. She
keeps things in perspective. She is realizing that her good decisions
today will bear fruit, perhaps years down the road, but she's seeing
now that it's worth it to take the high road when it comes to the
[custody] controversy with Levi [Johnston] and him doing his porn stuff
[posing for Playgirl]. It's all about the baby, it's all
about what he is going to grow up with, and she knows she has to pull
even more weight to make sure Tripp has a good upbringing.
More unprompted attacks on the father of her grandson - "doing his porn stuff". And more inconsistency:
The finalists are in. Few literary hounds are surprised by this entry:
The Pulitzer prize-winning [Philip] Roth makes the line-up for
The Humbling, in which the ageing actor Simon converts Pegeen, a
lesbian, to heterosexuality. The Literary Review singled out a scene in
which Simon and Pegeen pick up a girl from a bar and convince her to
take part in a threesome. Simon looks on as Pegeen uses her green dildo
to great effect.
"This was not soft porn. This was no longer two
unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something
primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the
room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman,
acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her
genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and
was not supposed to be."
Hitch reviewed Roth's Exit Ghost a few years back and similarly gagged.
From my post as an outside observer, it seems to me that Sarah Palin
doesn't care much about the truth. In that way, she is a very special
liar. Instead, Palin seems to love the effect her disingenuous
pronouncements have on her audiences and so she just runs with them.
Her fans adore her claims about "death panels" and about Obama
supposedly "palling around with terrorists" and all the rest. Look at
how they roar with approval and fervor when she tosses that red, bloody
moose meat to them - how can the mere (non) truth-value of what she is
saying ever compete with that? Plus, the fact that her taunts drive her
detractors over the edge - well, that just adds to the fun!
Sarah Palin seems to relish the reaction she gets to her claims and
complaints. Among her core fan base, the theme that the mean media and
the full-of-themselves campaign staffers were unfair to noble,
authentic, small-town Sarah seems to be a winner. Whether it is really
true is almost irrelevant.
I do love the irony of Palin flaunting her authenticity with lies.
Researchers are trying to create microchips that function like neurons:
“Energy efficiency isn’t just a matter of elegance. It fundamentally limits what we can do with computers,” [Kwabena Boahen, a Stanford scientist] says. Despite the amazing progress in electronics technology—today’s transistors are 1/100,000 the size that they were a half century ago, and computer chips are 10 million times faster—we still have not made meaningful progress on the energy front. And if we do not, we can forget about truly intelligent humanlike machines and all the other dreams of radically more powerful computers...Most modern supercomputers are the size of a refrigerator and devour $100,000 to $1 million of electricity per year. Boahen’s Neurogrid will fit in a briefcase, run on the equivalent of a few D batteries, and yet, if all goes well, come close to keeping up with these Goliaths.
Historically, politicians are most likely to tackle deficits when
prodded by markets. Denmark in 1982, Ireland in 1987 and Canada in 1995
all embarked on ambitious programmes after spiralling debts had driven
up interest rates. In the same way, American deficit-reduction deals in
1985, 1990 and 1993 were nudged along by nervous markets. Such concerns
are notably absent now. “Until the bond-market vigilantes form a posse
again, it’s just too easy to ignore this issue,” says Alan Blinder, a
Princeton University professor and former adviser to Bill Clinton.
I'm a college grad who has been unemployed for several months now. I'm scraping by living and doing volunteer work at a hostel while searching for work, and living off a bare-bones unemployment check (which pays for food, that's about it) that is about to expire. In applying to several entry-level positions in recent months in fields that are strong (social media and video game production), in the area that they are strongest (i.e., the Bay Area), I've noticed a disturbing trend: In places I applied to, rather than being rejected outright or just not hearing from them, I'm getting responses saying that the job is "on hold," or that the position was "closed" without any hires. They often note that I was certainly qualified for the position, they just can't afford to hire anyone right now.
I think the question has to be asked now, concerning unemployment: If our economy is in "recovery," then what is preventing companies from actually hiring people? I hate saying this, but this is feeling like another "Mission Accomplished" to people, especially me.
"100 dancers led by one of Australia's most famous drag queens surprised bathers on Bondi Beach with a medley of hot jams. It starts with “Love Shack” and only gets better from there…"
Andy: Generally from like 6:15 in the morning till 7, 8, 9 at night.
Rex: Is your boyfriend OK with that?
Andy:
Not really. He'd like me to work probably about six hours less than
that but, you know, it pays the rent and it's what I need to do to sort
of keep the site going, so, you know, he understands.
Rex: How do we keep up with the flow of information? You and I have similar kinds of jobs. I feel overwhelmed regularly. Do you?
Andy:
I feel overwhelmed right now because I'm not reading and I'm doing this
interview instead, but, you know, it's how I regularly feel if I'm out
or whatever.
History professor and Alaskan David Noon corrects Palin for repeating the myth of "Seward's Folly" - the purchase of Alaska in 1867 by Secretary of State William Seward. From Going Rogue:
Critics ridiculed Seward for spending so much on a remote chunk of
earth that some thought of as just a frozen, inhospitable wilderness
that was dark half the year. The $7.2 million purchase became known as
“Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’ Icebox.” Seward withstood the mocking and
disdain because of his vision for Alaska. He knew her potential to help
secure the nation with her resources and strategic position on the
globe. . . . [D]ecades later, he was posthumously vindicated, as
purveyors of unpopular common sense often are.
From the historian:
So far as public opinion was concerned, most newspapers actually supported the purchase. The major exception was the New York Tribune,
which was owned by Horace Greeley, a Republican who was nevertheless
one of William Seward’s avowed enemies. (Greeley believed Seward had
been too radical on the slavery issue, among other things). Even
Democratically-aligned papers in the North — while not missing the
opportunity to crack wise about polar bears and walruses — tended to
support the purchase, mainly because there was no compelling reason to
oppose it. And at the end of the day, the treaty with Russia passed
the US Senate by a vote of 37-2, with no significant expressions of
opposition during the floor debate.
Phil Wolf, owner of Wolf Automotive used car dealership, stands in
front of a billboard on his auto lot on November 21, 2009 in Wheat
Ridge, Colorado. Wolf paid $2,500 to have the billboard painted, and it
has sparked controversy since it was put up the day before. Wolf, 57,
said the dealership received more than a thousand calls from throughout
the U.S. and Canada in a single day, both in support and against the
sign. 'We've had death threats. We had people call and say they were
going to firebomb the place last night,' he said, adding that local
police provided overnight security outside the dealership because of
the threats. Wolf, a supporter of the 'birther' movement, questions
President Obama's citizenship. 'We've got to recall our country, the
election,' he said. This guy (Obama), is illegal.' He also blamed the
President for the massacre at Ft. Hood. 'The cavalier attitude taken by
Mr. Obama towards the enemy within us is absolutely horrible. If I had
a snake in the house, I would kill it,' Wolf said. Several left-leaning
advocacy groups have called on the public to boycott the auto
dealership. By John Moore/Getty Images.
Detail of the cartoons of Obama as Muslim terrorist after the jump:
George Patten, aged eight, [...] boasted at school about having met Abraham Lincoln, having been introduced to the then presidential candidate with his journalist father. The boy's friends thought he had made the story up, and bullied him. To settle the matter, Patten's teacher wrote to the White House asking for clarification about whether there was any truth to the anecdote. On 19 March 1861, two weeks after his inauguration and despite being preoccupied with forming an administration and the early slide into civil war, Lincoln took the trouble to reply: "To whom it may concern: I did see and talk with Master George Evans Patten, last May, at Springfield, Illinois. Respectfully, A. Lincoln."
[T]he only way we're ever going to reduce medical costs is to restrict procedures that haven't passed evidence-based efficacy tests. Maybe that means 40 year old women don't get mammograms, or that we treat prostrate cancer less aggressively, or that we stop performing spinal fusion surgeries. Although there's solid evidence to question all of these medical options, such changes provoke intense debate. Why? Because our emotions don't understand statistics. Because when we have back pain we want an MRI. Because when it's our father with prostate cancer we want the most aggressive possible treatments. And so on.
The point is that there's often an indefatigable gap between the rigors of cost-benefit analyses and the emotional hunches that drive our decisions. We say we want to follow the evidence, but then the evidence rubs against a bias like loss aversion, and so we make an exception. We'll follow the evidence next time.
The grandmother of Tripp Johnston, Bristol Palin's infant and Sarah Palin's grandson, is headed to jail for three years plus three years of probation:
Johnston made a deal with prosecutors to
plead to a single felony count in exchange for dropping five other
felony drug dealing charges against her. The deal called for the
42-year-old Wasilla woman to be sentenced to three years of prison time
plus three years of probation, which is what the judge gave her.
Johnston received less time than the normal five to eight years for a
second-degree felony drug charge because the amount she was dealing was
so small.
What impact this could have on the Palin-Johnston feud requires inside knowledge of those families that the Dish simply doesn't have. But I imagine it must be painful for Levi. I wonder if Palin will comment.
An amateur's moment of glory in rugby: a $400,000 prize is awarded to any of a group of rugby fans to kick the ball and hit the crossbar. First up, Steve Tinner:
Liz Cheney's terror-mongering advocacy groupreleases an ominous short documentary about how the citizens of Standish, Michigan, are supposedly dead set against the transfer of detainees to a nearby prison. Greg Sargent cuts through the deception:
But Standish’s City Manager tells us that local leaders and residents want the facility, and dismissed Cheney’s efforts as “fearmongering.” Cheney is “certainly not representing the views of our community,”
the City Manager, Michael Moran, told our reporter, Amanda Erickson. While some local residents do appear to have expressed
mixed feelings or opposition to the plan, Moran says that they’re an
isolated minority that Ms. Cheney’s video elevates out of proportion in
a way that’s “off base.” What’s more, the Standish city council recently passed a unanimous resolution expressing support for bringing Gitmo detainees, citing job losses in the wake of the closing of the facility.
Under-blogger Bodenner profiled the town for TNR last month and found the same findings. Noam Scheiber this week suggests that the scare tactics in Standish are working, and that similar tactics are showing up in Thompson, Illinois - the latest potential destination for detainees.
Right now, I think a lot of Democrats would take a 1982-style result — the halving of their House majority — and consider themselves lucky to escape. Whether they’ll feel the same way in a year’s time will depend on where the unemployment numbers go from here. But I doubt that anyone on the Democratic side of the aisle was encouraged to hear the Obama administration’s Jared Bernstein — the co-author of the over-optimistic chart that I tweaked in today’s column — telling CBS last week that job growth won’t return until the second half of next year. He may be erring on side of pessimism, but that’s an awfully long way off — especially if unemployment goes higher still in the meantime — and much too close to November for comfort.
In a nutshell, when a simulation of a complex phenomenon (brains,
weather systems) reaches a certain level of fidelity, it becomes just
as difficult to figure out what's actually going on in the model—how
it's organized, or how it will respond to a set of inputs—as it is to
answer the same questions about a live version of the phenomenon that
the simulation is modeling.
Jim Fallows is deeply depressed by the moronic horse-race coverage of Obama's recent trip to Asia. He is not the only person staggered that the cable-news 24-hour spin-cycle is now the main prism through which to analyze complex long-term diplomacy. Money quote:
We're all familiar with one "crisis of the press," the business
collapse. This is a different kind of crisis, though it makes the
business crisis worse: the distortion of reality by compressing every
complex issue into the narrative of the DC-based "horse race."
As told to Bill O'Reilly, whose interview was a class above anyone else on Fox:
I believe that I am [qualified to be president] because I have common sense,
and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other
American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not
the elitism, the kind of a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for
that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fact resume
that's based on anything but hard work and private sector, free
enterprise principles.
The lies of Sarah Palin are different from any other politicians'. They are different because they assert things that are demonstrably, empirically untrue; and they are different because once they have been demonstrated to the entire world that they are untrue, Palin keeps repeating them as if they still were true or refuses to acknowledge that she was wrong.
Ann Althouse has rightly figured out how dumb Palin is; she has not yet figured out how disturbed she is. And once again, for Ann's sake, here are the lies I mean. Go through them. See if you think they are Clintonian type parsings of the truth or artful political hedging or anything like what we find in most pols. They really are not. They are functions of delusion and a worldview that wants things to be a certain way and cannot absorb that they are not. If you find the slightest error or come across a fact that we should add to this list of current lies, please let us know. We want this list to be as accurate as Palin is delusional. We want to create some template of easily-accessible reality as some kind of guard against the fantasies and fabulisms of our post-modern and fundamentalist age.
Palin lied
when she said the dismissal of her public safety commissioner, Walt
Monegan, had nothing to do with his refusal to fire state trooper Mike
Wooten; in fact, the Branchflower Report concluded that she repeatedly
abused her power when dealing with both men.
Palin lied
when she repeatedly claimed to have said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to
the Bridge to Nowhere; in fact, she openly campaigned for the federal
project when running for governor.
Palin lied
when she denied that Wasilla's police chief and librarian had been
fired; in fact, both were given letters of termination the previous day.
Palin lied
when she wrote in the NYT that a comprehensive review by Alaska
wildlife officials showed that polar bears were not endangered; in
fact, email correspondence between those scientists showed the opposite.
Palin lied when she claimed in her convention speech that an oil gas pipeline "began" under her guidance; in fact, the pipeline was years from breaking ground, if at all.
Palin lied
when she told Charlie Gibson that she does not pass judgment on gay
people; in fact, she opposes all rights between gay spouses and belongs
to a church that promotes conversion therapy.
Palin lied
when she denied having said that humans do not contribute to climate
change; in fact, she had previously proclaimed that human activity was
not to blame.
Palin lied
when she claimed that Alaska produces 20 percent of the country's
domestic energy supply; in fact, the actual figures, based on any
interpretation of her words, are much, much lower.
Palin lied
when she told voters she improvised her convention speech when her
teleprompter stopped working properly; in fact, all reports showed that
the machine had functioned perfectly and that her speech had closely
followed the script.
Palin lied
when she recalled asking her daughters to vote on whether she should
accept the VP offer; in fact, her story contradicts details given by
her husband, the McCain campaign, and even Palin herself. (She later added another version.)
Palin lied
when she claimed to have taken a voluntary pay cut as mayor; in fact,
as councilmember she had voted against a raise for the mayor, but
subsequent raises had taken effect by the time she was mayor.
Palin lied
when she insisted that Wooten's divorce proceedings had caused his
confidential records to become public; in fact, court officials
confirmed they released no such records.
Palin lied
when she suggested to Katie Couric that she was involved in trade
missions with Russia; in fact, she has never even met with Russian
officials.
Palin lied when she told Shimon Peres that the only flag in her office was the Israeli flag; in fact, she has several flags.
Palin lied
when she claimed to have tried to divest government funds from Sudan;
in fact, her administration openly opposed a bill that would have done
just that.
Palin lied
when she repeatedly claimed that troop levels in Iraq were back to
pre-surge levels; in fact, even she acknowledged her "misstatements,"
though she refused to retract or apologize.
Palin lied when she insisted that the Branchflower Report "showed there was no unlawful or unethical
activity on my part"; in fact, that report prominently stated, "Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute
39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act."
Palin lied
when she claimed to have voiced concerns over Wooten fearing he would
harm her family; in fact, she actually decreased her security detail
during that period.
Palin lied
when asked about the $150,000 worth of clothes provided by the RNC; in
fact, solid reporting contradicted several parts of her statement.
Palin lied
when she suggested that she had offered the media proof of her
pregnancy with Trig to "correct the record"; in fact, no reports of her
medical records were ever published; and the letter from her doctor
testifying to her good health only emerged hours before polling ended
on election day, even though there was nothing in it that couldn't have
been released two months earlier.
Palin lied
when she said that "reported" allegations of her banning Harry Potter
as mayor was easily refutable because it had not even been written yet;
in fact, the first book in that series was published in 1998 - two
years into her first term - and such rumors were never reported by the
media, only circulated as emails.
Palin lied
when she denied having participated in a clothes audit with campaign
laywers; in fact, the Washington Times later confirmed those details.
Palin lied when asked about Couric's question regarding her reading habits; in fact, Couric's words were not, "What
do you read up there in Alaska?" or anything close to condescension.
Palin lied
when she mischaracterized the "$1200 check" given to Alaskans as the
permanent fund dividend check; in fact, that fund had yielded $2,069 per person, and
she claimed otherwise to obscure the fact that Alaskans also received a
$1200 rebate check from a windfall profits tax on oil companies - a tax
widely criticized by Republicans.
Palin lied
when she claimed to be unaware of a turkey being slaughtered behind her
during a filmed interview; in fact, the cameraman said she had picked
the spot herself, while the slaughter was underway.
Palin lied when she denied having rejected federal stimulus money; in fact, she continued to accept and reject the funds several times.
Palin lied
when she claimed that legislative leaders had canceled a meeting with
her to hold their own press conference; in fact, they only canceled it
after being told she would not participate, and the purpose of the
press conference was very different from the meeting's.
Palin lied
when she announced on the news that she never holds closed-door
meetings; in fact, she had just attended a closed-door meeting with the
legislature earlier that day.
Palin lied
when she said that former aide John Bitney's "amicable" departure was
for "personal" reasons; in fact, Bitney said he was fired because of
his relationship with the wife of Palin's friend, plus a Palin
spokesperson later claimed "poor job performance" for his firing -
without elaborating.
Palin lied
when she said she kept her running injury a secret on the campaign
trail; in fact, her bandaged hand was clearly visible in photographs
and the story was widely talked about.
Palin lied
when she claimed that Alaska has spent "millions of dollars" on
litigation related to her ethics complaints; in fact, that figure is
much, much lower, and she had initiated the most expensive inquiry.
Palin lied
when she denied that the Alaska Independence Party supports secession
and denied that her husband had been a member; in fact, even the McCain
campaign noted that the party's very existence is based on secession
and that Todd was a member for seven years.
Palin lied when she told Oprah that she desperately wanted to go on Saturday Night Live because it would be "fun" and could push back on the Tina Fey impression Palin says she hated but never actually listened to. Contemporaneous emails show that Palin resisted going on SNL and was therefore lying to Oprah.
Palin lied when she told Oprah Winfrey that she gaffed on the campaign trail in saying that the McCain campaign shouldn't quit Michigan. She said she had been unaware at the time that the decision to withdraw had already been taken. Contemporaneous emails show she was lying, and had already been told.
Palin lied in "Going Rogue: in accusing two journalists she recognized from a press conference as ambushing her daughter Piper on the street. One of those journalists had never attended the press conference cited by Palin, but Palin has never withdrawn the charge.
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