Case in point: A couple years before I attended college in the town, the Hartford Courant (whose cartoons by Bob Englehart this site often features) portrayed the town as the heroin capital of the state. Indeed there were problems with heroin. One of the buildings in town where drug use was a problem was called the “Hooker Hotel,” and not just because it was named after a guy with a last name of Hooker. Yet, the article (which was extensive) was eventually panned, with a lot of people calling it “yellow journalism.”

So, it's hard to know what's being exaggerated and what's not in the article on Wasilla.

Many issues (particularly with youth) in Wasilla stem from the lack of constructive activities available in the community. The community sports center was a good idea when it was proposed, but it became a boondoggle for many of the same reasons that public work programs become boondoggles around the country. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't a good idea at the time or that it wasn't a valid use of local and state funds.

http://sweasel.com/archives/1634

Andrew Sullivan has been working very very hard to destroy the evil glasses lady. If you go over to his blog you will find (several hysterical) posts on every detrimental rumour he has been able to find or invent.

Plenty of arguments are available to attack the GOP program without just Making Stuff Up(TM).

P.S. Everyone running on either ticket is a politician. Of course they are presenting things in the best light, or shading the truth, or just freaking lying. 24/7/365.

OK, I'll play. This is about JUDGMENT! This woman is a liar and was a lousy mayor. While her community is being eaten alive by the scourge of drug addiction and child abuse, she's raiding the treasury to build a SPORTS complex! What kind of priorities are THOSE? The town doesn't even have a sewage plant and she's raising taxes, going into debt and ignoring the real problems of hard working white Americans in Wasilla. Drug crime devastating families and she's FIRING police and troopers! Governor, you are a FAILURE! Hypocrite!

Better? Better get me a bucket.

http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conse…

Better luck next time.

“I have to agree with Sil on this one” ~ APR

lol…”have to”…

Is it really that painful? …lol…

It's not just that. The origin of so much of our problems has been the abandonment of personal responsibility and accountability and a perverse expansion of “Do Your Own Thing” that the radical left sought in fighting (to this day) any kind of judgment and evaulation of personal behavior (accompanied by a few wrongly-oriented so-called libertarians). It's the traditional Democratic and liberal minority community that has suffered from underclass pathologies of various kinds, and even liberals in the 1960s warned that eventually the problem would spread to plain-vanilla whites and extend beyond the cities to the suburbs and the rural areas.

The Palin-child pregnancy was, insofar as we all know, an accident. Do you realize that in many places, such as in upstate New York where I lived for a while, it is now common and even deliberately sought by girls and young women to have children without getting married? Typically it is pregnancy sought using their (current) boyfriends, with whom cohabitation is now a fully accepted norm and responsibility-reduced preference to marriage, often with the knowledge that the boyfriend will later leave. I saw this happen with not only one, not two, but three of the young women working in one of the only two 24-hour restaurants in the town where I was living. (One had her baby before I left; the boyfriend has since left her. The second had her baby on my first or second return visit to the area; the third was pregnant and trying to stop smoking — she told me, while smoking — on my third or fourth visit to the area.)

This problem is in numerous ways worse than the political-activist idiocy that has polluted the schools with demands for all kinds of sex education, AIDS education (which involves other politics that are inappropriate in a school setting), and of course, condomania. (It's no surprise if birth control on school grounds is sought, or even abortion someday.)

Overreaction to the fact that it can also happen to families that include conservative or Republican politicians is merely a stupid sideshow. (cheap shot attacks that go nowhere among the intelligent)

Well, Biden has referred to Lieutenant Governor Palin, so that makes Obama-Biden the Misunderestimated Bush Third Term ticket this year.

On a side note, Wasilla is a town of roughly 10,000 at this point and growing faster than just about any town in AK. It is the center of the Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su) Valley, the agricultural center of AK (6 foot cucumbers!). The Mat-Su Valley (or just the Valley for people in Anchorage) is over 50,000 people and sort of acts as one community. So yes she is from a small town, but it isn't tiny. It's also 40 minutes up the Parks Highway from Anchorage and can be shut off from the city during the winter. Many people who live there work and commute to Anchorage. There aren't an overwhelmingly large number of opportunities there for employment or entertainment. All this leads to large drug and alcohol abuse rates, teenage sex, and domestic violence. So in many cases it shares the same problems as many small towns in America.

I'm always amused when people hyperventilate about how a candidate has been exploiting something in their personal background or beliefs, and the critic is actually the one who is raising that thing to the heights of importance. Sarah Palin praises her small town upbringing and somehow that's considered a utopian idealism? When Obama talked about the positive effects of his upbringing in Kansas was he saying that that state has no problems with drugs or crime?

Similarly I've seen some attacks about Sarah Palin exploiting her family (this is trotted out in response to the criticism that her family was unfairly scrutinized and subjected to vile rumormongering) because she…gasp…had her children appear on camera at the convention! OMG! I've never seen a candidate so blatantly put their cute kids in the public spotlight!!!

Seriously guys, can't you do any better than this? I imagine that there are a number of issues on which you disagree with the GOP ticket. Maybe try discussing them?