King says Palin will appear on ‘SNL’ this week
Larry King broke the news to his guest Bill Maher on ‘Larry King Live’
Republican vice presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, right, with Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, reacts as she sees the crowd waiting for her during a campaign stop at the Bangor Airport, Thursday, Oct. 16.
Access Hollywood
According to Larry King, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin will make an appearance on this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live.”
“We’ve just confirmed that Sarah Palin will appear on “Saturday Night Live” on Saturday,” King said as he talked to Bill Maher, who appeared as a guest on “Larry King Live.”
Much has been made about a reported Palin appearance ever since Fey’s spot-on spoof of the Alaska governor a few weeks ago.
In an earlier interview between Access and “SNL Weekend Update” anchor Seth Meyers, he said they would love to have the politician make an appearance on the show.
“The door is open if she would like to come and make an appearance,” Meyers said of Palin. “We heard from her people that she really liked the first time that Tina played her. We haven’t heard from her since then.”
Copyright 2008 by NBC. All rights reserved.
Sarah Palin and family
Moderator: doug
by doug » Fri Oct 17, 2008 12:21 am
Palin's e-mails? That'll be $15 million
Even at that price, many records won't be available until after the election
The office of Gov. Sarah Palin has given duplicative cost estimates to many different news organizations to "recover" the same e-mail accounts.
By Bill Dedman
Investigative reporter
msnbc
Sarah Palin's office has discovered a renewable resource to bring millions of dollars into Alaska's economy: the governor's e-mails.
The office of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has quoted prices as high as $15 million for copies of state e-mails requested by news organizations and citizens. No matter what the price, most of the e-mails of Palin, her senior staff and other state employees won't be made public until at least several weeks after the Nov. 4 presidential election, her office told msnbc.com on Thursday.
How did the cost reach $15 million? Let's look at a typical request. When the Associated Press asked for all state e-mails sent to the governor's husband, Todd Palin, her office said it would take up to six hours of a programmer's time to assemble the e-mail of just a single state employee, then another two hours for "security" checks, and finally five hours to search the e-mail for whatever word or topic the requestor is seeking. At $73.87 an hour, that's $960.31 for a single e-mail account. And there are 16,000 full-time state employees. The cost quoted to the AP: $15,364,960.
And that's not including the copying costs. Although the e-mails are stored electronically in Microsoft Outlook and on backup servers, and although a blank CD-ROM costs only 41 cents at Capital Office Supply in Juneau, the governor's office says it can provide copies only on paper.
Why? Because lawyers need printouts so they can black out, or "redact," private or exempted information. That task is more difficult because Palin and her senior staff have used government e-mail accounts for some personal correspondence, and personal e-mail accounts for much of their government correspondence. The photocopies of those printouts will be a relative bargain, only 10 cents a page. A state administrator said he understood that such redaction could be done electronically, but that state offices weren't set up to do that.
That process of deleting information is likely to be so lengthy that most requestors won't be able to see the records until well after the next president and vice president are chosen, Palin's office said.
E-mail sent between the governor's staff and their private Yahoo e-mail accounts won't be collected until Oct. 31. Searches will take an additional two weeks, until Nov. 14. And then the legal review of each e-mail will begin. There's no telling how long that will take, because no one knows how many e-mails there are, wrote Linda J. Perez, administrative director for the governor, in a letter she sent to the state attorney general seeking approval for a delay.
A small victory: Copies of the requests themselves
Msnbc.com did receive from the governor's office copies of all the public records requests filed since she was inaugurated, and the replies from the governor's office. Palin took office in December 2006, after seeking office on a platform of clean and transparent government.
The price quotes reveal that Palin's office has repeatedly tried to charge different news organizations the cost to reconstruct the same e-mail accounts of the governor, her senior staff and other employees. Each time an e-mail is requested, the office quotes the same cost of $960.31 for 13 hours to recover and search each employee's e-mails.
NBC's price quote for e-mails sent to Todd Palin: $15 million.
The AP's price for e-mails between state employees and the campaign headquarters of Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain: $15 million.
And the AP again, for e-mails between state employees and the National Park Service (on polar bears, wolves and other topics): $15 million.
The AP's news editor in Anchorage, Mark Thiessen, told msnbc.com he wasn't authorized to say whether the AP, a nonprofit cooperative owned by newspapers, planned to pay the $45 million for e-mails.
You can read all the requests for records, and the responses of Gov. Palin's office in this PDF file.
The employees in the governor's office have been polite and responsive in fulfilling the request by msnbc.com for all the public records requests and replies. The charge was only $37.70 for photocopies, and the administrative coordinator, Michelle Fabrello, dashed out the door to make sure the package got in the overnight mail delivery.
No free passes
Palin's office hasn't always interpreted state law in favor of public access. The Alaska law on public records does not require it to charge any fee for public records, although a fee is allowed if the processing would take five hours or more. The state law says all fees may be waived if the information is used for a public purpose, such as journalism or academic research.
But the governor and the Law Department have been waiving fees only when they are just a few dollars. The state has not been granting requests to waive the fees in the public interest, because it has not been considering those requests.
The records released to msnbc.com show that the state is charging for e-mails at the same hourly rate that it charged before Palin was chosen by McCain on Aug. 29. Only the scale of the requests has changed, and now most requests come from out of state. (State law does not require requestors to be residents.) There are some in-state requests, including the local news organizations, the Democratic party and several citizens. The state employees union, which had filed an ethics complaint against Palin in the inquiry known as Troopergate, was told it would have to pay $88,000 to see e-mails for a list of employees in the governor's office.
Even before interest in Palin went national, large and small news organizations in Alaska have been dissuaded from seeking public records from her administration, because of the cost. Voice of the Times, a conservative online news site, was quoted a price of $1,250 in May to retrieve e-mails from the accounts of two top aides to the governor, Ivy Frye and Frank Bailey. "Please cancel my request for public records," editor Paul Jenkins wrote to the governor's administrator. "We have a limited budget here and paying $1,250 in fees for people who already are on the state payroll is ridiculous." The newspaper announced this week it will shut down at the end of October for lack of money.
A weekly paper, the Anchorage Press, was told it would have to pay $6,500 for e-mails of Palin and three aides relating to the lieutenant governor. The request was withdrawn, with the newspaper offering the apology. ""Hi Linda - wow, that's an expensive request I made," reporter Brendan Joel Kelley wrote to state administrator Linda Perez. "In that case, I definitely don't want to waste 60 hours of the state's resources, whether we had the fee waived or not. Consider the request withdrawn. I had supposed/hoped that an electronic records request would be fairly simple."
State employees overwhelmed
Since Palin was chosen by McCain, state employees have been overwhelmed by hundreds of public records requests sent to the governor's office and other agencies, said Kevin Brooks, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Administration. There's been no attempt to delay release of public records about the governor until after the election, he said. Many records requests have been fulfilled, forming the basis of news stories and online archives such as the one growing at governmentattic.org.
But e-mails have been much slower to emerge through the tight window of nine weeks from Palin's selection until the election.
"I've had my information technology folks working nights and weekends. These people are not doing their regular jobs anymore," Brooks said. "We used to get several records requests for e-mail in a week, or a month. Now it's literally hundreds and hundreds. It's gone exponentially off the charts."
After msnbc.com challenged apparent double billing, Brooks said he was going to try a new approach: assembling the e-mail files a single time, without charging requestors for that time. But that still leaves the search and copying costs.
"Hindsight is 20-20," Brooks said. "If we could do it over again, we would have loaded it all up and done these requests." Still today, he said he was not considering taking a more active approach, posting online for the public all of the governor's e-mails.
Brooks said he was also rethinking that rate of $73.87 an hour. That cost is not the actual salary of any particular employee. At that rate, an employee would be making about $144,000 a year. Instead, the state has been charging the public and news organizations the same rate that the state Enterprise Technology Services group charges other state departments, as a cost-shifting mechanism on state budget forms.
Alaska law does allow the state to charge for an employee's time for recovery of records. Brooks said he thought the actual cost would be between $50 and $60 an hour, including benefits and a share of the department's overhead costs.
As for the estimate of up to five hours to search e-mail for a single word or phrase, Brooks said he was just passing along the estimate from the technical staff.
‘A heckuva lot’ of data
"Why five hours? I've asked repeatedly, and that's what they say it will take," Brooks said. "We're talking about 5 terabytes of compressed data. I don't know what a terabyte is. I just know it's a heckuva lot."
Brooks said the state has Outlook on the desktop computers of employees, and that a search of those e-mails would take only a few seconds. But he said most e-mails are on journal servers, which hold e-mail for many employees, and that older or deleted messages might be on archival servers. "The point is we have three sources. We pull from those three and download to a storage device we can search. The process is not simple."
The courts have given the Palin administration a nudge toward open records. A state judge ruled this week that the state must retrieve public e-mails sent between state accounts and the private e-mail accounts used by the governor and other state employees.
Having a private e-mail account, by itself, is not unusual or unethical, because state employees are forbidden to carry out political activities on government accounts. That's the reason given for Palin's habit of punching away on two separate Blackberry devices. But a citizen request earlier this year yielded hundreds of heavily redacted e-mails from the governor's office, which suggested that Palin and her staff had chosen to move most of their government conversations off the radar, to their Yahoo accounts. News reports then led to public curiosity and the hacking of one of Palin's Yahoo accounts, for which a college student in Tennessee, the son of a Democratic legislator, has been indicted.
Brooks said the state doesn't know yet how much e-mail it can recover from Yahoo, in cases where one state employee on a personal account e-mailed another on a personal account.
But the state probably can recover e-mails sent between government and personal e-mail accounts, he said. At least 18 public records requests have been filed for some or all of those e-mails. The requestors include Mother Jones magazine, the AP, NBC, the Anchorage Daily News, the Juneau Empire, msnbc.com, CNN, the Alaska Democratic Party, and several citizens, including Andree McLeod, whose request for the Yahoo e-mails was upheld by the court. Msnbc.com, for example, sought all e-mails sent or received by the governor and a dozen top aides between their state accounts and the personal e-mail accounts of themselves and others. The request included e-mail sent to Palin's husband, Todd, who has been active in policy and political discussions. The state quoted a price of $11,000 for all the e-mails sought by msnbc.com, which apparently won't be available until after the election.
To respond to those requests, the state is pulling together all the e-mails sent or received by 51 employees, including Palin, her senior staff, members of the Cabinet, the governor's assistants and schedulers, and key staff involved with the pipeline proposed to bring natural gas from Alaska's North Slope, the governor's office said Thursday. It sought the attorney general's approval to delay the search of the e-mails until mid-November. Later Thursday, the attorney general, Talis J. Colberg, sent the requestors a letter offering them a chance to be heard before he rules on that request.
'The hottest thing right now'
Many states have had battles with news organizations and citizens over the fees charged for access to the public's records, particularly for electronic records such as e-mails.
News organizations have often claimed that the fees are used as a tollbooth to discourage requests, and that requests are delayed until interest in a public issue or candidate has long passed.
Federal law is more favorable. The federal Freedom of Information Act will change in January to penalize agencies for delay. After January, if an agency takes more than 20 days to respond to a request, it can't charge any duplication fees to individual requestors.
Nationally, access to e-mails of government employees "is the hottest thing right now in open government," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit that helps journalists obtain public records. "Most judges are interpreting the laws that if you use your private e-mail for state business, that's a public record.
"Many public officials thought e-mail was more like a phone call, but it's more like a letter. You type those words, those are like documents. It doesn't matter if you used a piece of paper from your home or stationery from your office. The form doesn't matter."
© 2008 msnbc.com
Even at that price, many records won't be available until after the election
The office of Gov. Sarah Palin has given duplicative cost estimates to many different news organizations to "recover" the same e-mail accounts.
By Bill Dedman
Investigative reporter
msnbc
Sarah Palin's office has discovered a renewable resource to bring millions of dollars into Alaska's economy: the governor's e-mails.
The office of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has quoted prices as high as $15 million for copies of state e-mails requested by news organizations and citizens. No matter what the price, most of the e-mails of Palin, her senior staff and other state employees won't be made public until at least several weeks after the Nov. 4 presidential election, her office told msnbc.com on Thursday.
How did the cost reach $15 million? Let's look at a typical request. When the Associated Press asked for all state e-mails sent to the governor's husband, Todd Palin, her office said it would take up to six hours of a programmer's time to assemble the e-mail of just a single state employee, then another two hours for "security" checks, and finally five hours to search the e-mail for whatever word or topic the requestor is seeking. At $73.87 an hour, that's $960.31 for a single e-mail account. And there are 16,000 full-time state employees. The cost quoted to the AP: $15,364,960.
And that's not including the copying costs. Although the e-mails are stored electronically in Microsoft Outlook and on backup servers, and although a blank CD-ROM costs only 41 cents at Capital Office Supply in Juneau, the governor's office says it can provide copies only on paper.
Why? Because lawyers need printouts so they can black out, or "redact," private or exempted information. That task is more difficult because Palin and her senior staff have used government e-mail accounts for some personal correspondence, and personal e-mail accounts for much of their government correspondence. The photocopies of those printouts will be a relative bargain, only 10 cents a page. A state administrator said he understood that such redaction could be done electronically, but that state offices weren't set up to do that.
That process of deleting information is likely to be so lengthy that most requestors won't be able to see the records until well after the next president and vice president are chosen, Palin's office said.
E-mail sent between the governor's staff and their private Yahoo e-mail accounts won't be collected until Oct. 31. Searches will take an additional two weeks, until Nov. 14. And then the legal review of each e-mail will begin. There's no telling how long that will take, because no one knows how many e-mails there are, wrote Linda J. Perez, administrative director for the governor, in a letter she sent to the state attorney general seeking approval for a delay.
A small victory: Copies of the requests themselves
Msnbc.com did receive from the governor's office copies of all the public records requests filed since she was inaugurated, and the replies from the governor's office. Palin took office in December 2006, after seeking office on a platform of clean and transparent government.
The price quotes reveal that Palin's office has repeatedly tried to charge different news organizations the cost to reconstruct the same e-mail accounts of the governor, her senior staff and other employees. Each time an e-mail is requested, the office quotes the same cost of $960.31 for 13 hours to recover and search each employee's e-mails.
NBC's price quote for e-mails sent to Todd Palin: $15 million.
The AP's price for e-mails between state employees and the campaign headquarters of Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain: $15 million.
And the AP again, for e-mails between state employees and the National Park Service (on polar bears, wolves and other topics): $15 million.
The AP's news editor in Anchorage, Mark Thiessen, told msnbc.com he wasn't authorized to say whether the AP, a nonprofit cooperative owned by newspapers, planned to pay the $45 million for e-mails.
You can read all the requests for records, and the responses of Gov. Palin's office in this PDF file.
The employees in the governor's office have been polite and responsive in fulfilling the request by msnbc.com for all the public records requests and replies. The charge was only $37.70 for photocopies, and the administrative coordinator, Michelle Fabrello, dashed out the door to make sure the package got in the overnight mail delivery.
No free passes
Palin's office hasn't always interpreted state law in favor of public access. The Alaska law on public records does not require it to charge any fee for public records, although a fee is allowed if the processing would take five hours or more. The state law says all fees may be waived if the information is used for a public purpose, such as journalism or academic research.
But the governor and the Law Department have been waiving fees only when they are just a few dollars. The state has not been granting requests to waive the fees in the public interest, because it has not been considering those requests.
The records released to msnbc.com show that the state is charging for e-mails at the same hourly rate that it charged before Palin was chosen by McCain on Aug. 29. Only the scale of the requests has changed, and now most requests come from out of state. (State law does not require requestors to be residents.) There are some in-state requests, including the local news organizations, the Democratic party and several citizens. The state employees union, which had filed an ethics complaint against Palin in the inquiry known as Troopergate, was told it would have to pay $88,000 to see e-mails for a list of employees in the governor's office.
Even before interest in Palin went national, large and small news organizations in Alaska have been dissuaded from seeking public records from her administration, because of the cost. Voice of the Times, a conservative online news site, was quoted a price of $1,250 in May to retrieve e-mails from the accounts of two top aides to the governor, Ivy Frye and Frank Bailey. "Please cancel my request for public records," editor Paul Jenkins wrote to the governor's administrator. "We have a limited budget here and paying $1,250 in fees for people who already are on the state payroll is ridiculous." The newspaper announced this week it will shut down at the end of October for lack of money.
A weekly paper, the Anchorage Press, was told it would have to pay $6,500 for e-mails of Palin and three aides relating to the lieutenant governor. The request was withdrawn, with the newspaper offering the apology. ""Hi Linda - wow, that's an expensive request I made," reporter Brendan Joel Kelley wrote to state administrator Linda Perez. "In that case, I definitely don't want to waste 60 hours of the state's resources, whether we had the fee waived or not. Consider the request withdrawn. I had supposed/hoped that an electronic records request would be fairly simple."
State employees overwhelmed
Since Palin was chosen by McCain, state employees have been overwhelmed by hundreds of public records requests sent to the governor's office and other agencies, said Kevin Brooks, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Administration. There's been no attempt to delay release of public records about the governor until after the election, he said. Many records requests have been fulfilled, forming the basis of news stories and online archives such as the one growing at governmentattic.org.
But e-mails have been much slower to emerge through the tight window of nine weeks from Palin's selection until the election.
"I've had my information technology folks working nights and weekends. These people are not doing their regular jobs anymore," Brooks said. "We used to get several records requests for e-mail in a week, or a month. Now it's literally hundreds and hundreds. It's gone exponentially off the charts."
After msnbc.com challenged apparent double billing, Brooks said he was going to try a new approach: assembling the e-mail files a single time, without charging requestors for that time. But that still leaves the search and copying costs.
"Hindsight is 20-20," Brooks said. "If we could do it over again, we would have loaded it all up and done these requests." Still today, he said he was not considering taking a more active approach, posting online for the public all of the governor's e-mails.
Brooks said he was also rethinking that rate of $73.87 an hour. That cost is not the actual salary of any particular employee. At that rate, an employee would be making about $144,000 a year. Instead, the state has been charging the public and news organizations the same rate that the state Enterprise Technology Services group charges other state departments, as a cost-shifting mechanism on state budget forms.
Alaska law does allow the state to charge for an employee's time for recovery of records. Brooks said he thought the actual cost would be between $50 and $60 an hour, including benefits and a share of the department's overhead costs.
As for the estimate of up to five hours to search e-mail for a single word or phrase, Brooks said he was just passing along the estimate from the technical staff.
‘A heckuva lot’ of data
"Why five hours? I've asked repeatedly, and that's what they say it will take," Brooks said. "We're talking about 5 terabytes of compressed data. I don't know what a terabyte is. I just know it's a heckuva lot."
Brooks said the state has Outlook on the desktop computers of employees, and that a search of those e-mails would take only a few seconds. But he said most e-mails are on journal servers, which hold e-mail for many employees, and that older or deleted messages might be on archival servers. "The point is we have three sources. We pull from those three and download to a storage device we can search. The process is not simple."
The courts have given the Palin administration a nudge toward open records. A state judge ruled this week that the state must retrieve public e-mails sent between state accounts and the private e-mail accounts used by the governor and other state employees.
Having a private e-mail account, by itself, is not unusual or unethical, because state employees are forbidden to carry out political activities on government accounts. That's the reason given for Palin's habit of punching away on two separate Blackberry devices. But a citizen request earlier this year yielded hundreds of heavily redacted e-mails from the governor's office, which suggested that Palin and her staff had chosen to move most of their government conversations off the radar, to their Yahoo accounts. News reports then led to public curiosity and the hacking of one of Palin's Yahoo accounts, for which a college student in Tennessee, the son of a Democratic legislator, has been indicted.
Brooks said the state doesn't know yet how much e-mail it can recover from Yahoo, in cases where one state employee on a personal account e-mailed another on a personal account.
But the state probably can recover e-mails sent between government and personal e-mail accounts, he said. At least 18 public records requests have been filed for some or all of those e-mails. The requestors include Mother Jones magazine, the AP, NBC, the Anchorage Daily News, the Juneau Empire, msnbc.com, CNN, the Alaska Democratic Party, and several citizens, including Andree McLeod, whose request for the Yahoo e-mails was upheld by the court. Msnbc.com, for example, sought all e-mails sent or received by the governor and a dozen top aides between their state accounts and the personal e-mail accounts of themselves and others. The request included e-mail sent to Palin's husband, Todd, who has been active in policy and political discussions. The state quoted a price of $11,000 for all the e-mails sought by msnbc.com, which apparently won't be available until after the election.
To respond to those requests, the state is pulling together all the e-mails sent or received by 51 employees, including Palin, her senior staff, members of the Cabinet, the governor's assistants and schedulers, and key staff involved with the pipeline proposed to bring natural gas from Alaska's North Slope, the governor's office said Thursday. It sought the attorney general's approval to delay the search of the e-mails until mid-November. Later Thursday, the attorney general, Talis J. Colberg, sent the requestors a letter offering them a chance to be heard before he rules on that request.
'The hottest thing right now'
Many states have had battles with news organizations and citizens over the fees charged for access to the public's records, particularly for electronic records such as e-mails.
News organizations have often claimed that the fees are used as a tollbooth to discourage requests, and that requests are delayed until interest in a public issue or candidate has long passed.
Federal law is more favorable. The federal Freedom of Information Act will change in January to penalize agencies for delay. After January, if an agency takes more than 20 days to respond to a request, it can't charge any duplication fees to individual requestors.
Nationally, access to e-mails of government employees "is the hottest thing right now in open government," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit that helps journalists obtain public records. "Most judges are interpreting the laws that if you use your private e-mail for state business, that's a public record.
"Many public officials thought e-mail was more like a phone call, but it's more like a letter. You type those words, those are like documents. It doesn't matter if you used a piece of paper from your home or stationery from your office. The form doesn't matter."
© 2008 msnbc.com
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24815
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
by doug » Sun Oct 19, 2008 7:28 am
Tina Fey: Anyone can imitate Palin's voice
‘It's a little bit 'Fargo,' it's a little bit Reese Witherspoon,’ actress says
Tina Fey has won praise for her uncanny impersonation of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, but Fey brushes off the compliments, saying Palin's voice is easy to imitate.
The Associated Press
NEW YORK - Anyone can do Sarah Palin's voice, says comedian Tina Fey, who has done a pretty good job of it herself.
"Not since 'Sling Blade' has there been a voice that anybody can do," Fey said. "Anybody can take a swing at this voice."
Appearing on CBS "Late Show with David Letterman" scheduled to air Friday, Fey shared her formula for having spoofed the Alaska governor in recent "Saturday Night Live" sketches.
"It's a little bit `Fargo,' it's a little bit Reese Witherspoon in `Election,'" said Fey, adding she also borrowed the Midwestern accent of her friend Paula's grandma, "a sweet, sweet old lady from Joliet, Illinois. She would always say, `Ohhhh, this and that and stuff like that!'"
Fey, the star of the NBC comedy "30 Rock," was formerly a writer and cast member at "SNL," where she has made a splash with guest appearances this fall making sport of her resemblance to the Republican vice presidential hopeful.
She explained to Letterman other ways she captures Palin's distinctive speaking style: dropping g's and loading sentences with r's."
"She's digging those r's," Fey said. "I think she thinks there's oil in those r's — she is digging deep!"
As spoof made way for reality, Palin was scheduled to appear on "SNL" Saturday. There was no word on whether Fey would be on hand.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
‘It's a little bit 'Fargo,' it's a little bit Reese Witherspoon,’ actress says
Tina Fey has won praise for her uncanny impersonation of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, but Fey brushes off the compliments, saying Palin's voice is easy to imitate.
The Associated Press
NEW YORK - Anyone can do Sarah Palin's voice, says comedian Tina Fey, who has done a pretty good job of it herself.
"Not since 'Sling Blade' has there been a voice that anybody can do," Fey said. "Anybody can take a swing at this voice."
Appearing on CBS "Late Show with David Letterman" scheduled to air Friday, Fey shared her formula for having spoofed the Alaska governor in recent "Saturday Night Live" sketches.
"It's a little bit `Fargo,' it's a little bit Reese Witherspoon in `Election,'" said Fey, adding she also borrowed the Midwestern accent of her friend Paula's grandma, "a sweet, sweet old lady from Joliet, Illinois. She would always say, `Ohhhh, this and that and stuff like that!'"
Fey, the star of the NBC comedy "30 Rock," was formerly a writer and cast member at "SNL," where she has made a splash with guest appearances this fall making sport of her resemblance to the Republican vice presidential hopeful.
She explained to Letterman other ways she captures Palin's distinctive speaking style: dropping g's and loading sentences with r's."
"She's digging those r's," Fey said. "I think she thinks there's oil in those r's — she is digging deep!"
As spoof made way for reality, Palin was scheduled to appear on "SNL" Saturday. There was no word on whether Fey would be on hand.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24815
- Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2002 10:06 pm
- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
by doug » Sun Oct 19, 2008 6:03 pm
More viewers watching Fey's Palin online
More fans watching Fey's Palin impersonation online than on TV
There were 10.2 million people watching the season-opening "Saturday Night Live" when Tina Fey first appeared as Sarah Palin, with Amy Poehler portraying Hillary Clinton, according to Nielsen Media Research. Through the middle of last week, NBC estimated that it had streamed the skit online more than 13 million times.
By David Bauder
The Associated Press
NEW YORK - More people are checking out Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impersonations Saturday night later than Saturday night live.
Fey's dead-on take of the Republican vice presidential candidate is not just the pop-culture event of the campaign season. It is a landmark in how people watch television, a peek into the future of a new media world.
Only one-third of the people who have seen at least one of the skits watched it first live on "Saturday Night Live." More people have checked them out online or, to a lesser extent, watched later on a digital video recorder or through video on demand, according to Integrated Media Measurement Inc., a research firm that measures media exposure through a person's mobile phone.
The company has never seen anything expand its reach beyond the first-run broadcast quite to this extent.
"I don't know if we would have seen this sort of viral activity a year ago, if people didn't think of their computer as a place to turn to for video entertainment," said Amanda Welsh, IMMI's head of research. "I really believe that we are seeing a change in consumer behavior on a very profound level."
Rather than jealously guard Fey's skits for live TV, NBC has actively encouraged the activity.
There were 10.2 million people watching the season-opening "Saturday Night Live" when Fey first appeared as Palin, with Amy Poehler portraying Hillary Clinton, according to Nielsen Media Research. These days, that's a good-sized audience for prime-time, let alone late-night, TV.
Another 1.2 million people captured the episode on their DVRs and watched within the week. Through the middle of last week, NBC estimated that it had streamed the skit online more than 13 million times. Those are just the numbers NBC can keep track of; the skit was undoubtedly captured and posted or e-mailed many more times.
NBC perfected "widget" technology only a few months ago, allowing video of its material to be captured across the Internet while retaining a tie to the network's Web site. It has aggressively marketed the Fey skits to political and comedy blogs. Her skits are posted on NBC's Web site almost immediately after they air on the East Coast — a fan in California can see them online before it's on TV. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft.)
The idea is to create buzz; if people see the clips online they might find them funny and tune in to "Saturday Night Live" regularly, said Vivi Zigler, president of NBC Universal digital entertainment, owned by the General Electric Co. Lapsed viewers might return, or even people who have never seen the show might watch, she said.
The danger to this approach is that more viewers might decide not to watch "Saturday Night Live" on Saturday night, and advertising revenue could suffer. So far the opposite is true: The show's audience for its first three episodes is 49 percent higher than last year's.
The experts expect that pattern to continue.
"The more platforms you make available to consumers, the more consumers you capture," Welsh said.
There's also the chance for even more revenue. Only in the past few weeks has NBC Universal perfected the technology to place a movie studio advertisement at the end of the clip it distributes online. Pre-clip advertising would add even more value.
It's not the only sign this fall of how the typical habits of watching TV — making an appointment with your easy chair at a given time each night — are rapidly becoming obsolete.
The "CBS Evening News" saw only a modest bump in ratings during Katie Couric's interview segments with Sarah Palin this fall. Yet they became so well known that "Saturday Night Live" based one of its Fey skits on Palin's bewildering answers. CBS News' Web site had significantly more traffic than normal at the time, with Couric's interview one of the most popular features. The network wouldn't give out specific numbers.
HBO's "True Blood," based on the Sookie Stackhouse book series, has become a hit quietly this fall, in large part because only 23 percent of the show's regular viewers watch each episode when it first appears on Sunday night.
With the Fey-Palin skits, NBC hit upon the perfect combination to promote its time-shifting, Zigler said. The "Saturday Night Live" writers came up with sharp material at a time the public is fascinated about politics, right when NBC perfected technology to spread the material online while protecting its rights to it.
Word of mouth made a big difference. Viewing of the "Saturday Night Live" skits is almost equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, Welsh said.
Consumers are in the midst of a behavioral change where they are increasingly looking to the computer for video, she said. The computer is shaping up as a more popular choice than DVRs, Welsh said.
"It is a tipping point for entertainment companies," Zigler said. "It is exactly what we expected would happen."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
More fans watching Fey's Palin impersonation online than on TV
There were 10.2 million people watching the season-opening "Saturday Night Live" when Tina Fey first appeared as Sarah Palin, with Amy Poehler portraying Hillary Clinton, according to Nielsen Media Research. Through the middle of last week, NBC estimated that it had streamed the skit online more than 13 million times.
By David Bauder
The Associated Press
NEW YORK - More people are checking out Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impersonations Saturday night later than Saturday night live.
Fey's dead-on take of the Republican vice presidential candidate is not just the pop-culture event of the campaign season. It is a landmark in how people watch television, a peek into the future of a new media world.
Only one-third of the people who have seen at least one of the skits watched it first live on "Saturday Night Live." More people have checked them out online or, to a lesser extent, watched later on a digital video recorder or through video on demand, according to Integrated Media Measurement Inc., a research firm that measures media exposure through a person's mobile phone.
The company has never seen anything expand its reach beyond the first-run broadcast quite to this extent.
"I don't know if we would have seen this sort of viral activity a year ago, if people didn't think of their computer as a place to turn to for video entertainment," said Amanda Welsh, IMMI's head of research. "I really believe that we are seeing a change in consumer behavior on a very profound level."
Rather than jealously guard Fey's skits for live TV, NBC has actively encouraged the activity.
There were 10.2 million people watching the season-opening "Saturday Night Live" when Fey first appeared as Palin, with Amy Poehler portraying Hillary Clinton, according to Nielsen Media Research. These days, that's a good-sized audience for prime-time, let alone late-night, TV.
Another 1.2 million people captured the episode on their DVRs and watched within the week. Through the middle of last week, NBC estimated that it had streamed the skit online more than 13 million times. Those are just the numbers NBC can keep track of; the skit was undoubtedly captured and posted or e-mailed many more times.
NBC perfected "widget" technology only a few months ago, allowing video of its material to be captured across the Internet while retaining a tie to the network's Web site. It has aggressively marketed the Fey skits to political and comedy blogs. Her skits are posted on NBC's Web site almost immediately after they air on the East Coast — a fan in California can see them online before it's on TV. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft.)
The idea is to create buzz; if people see the clips online they might find them funny and tune in to "Saturday Night Live" regularly, said Vivi Zigler, president of NBC Universal digital entertainment, owned by the General Electric Co. Lapsed viewers might return, or even people who have never seen the show might watch, she said.
The danger to this approach is that more viewers might decide not to watch "Saturday Night Live" on Saturday night, and advertising revenue could suffer. So far the opposite is true: The show's audience for its first three episodes is 49 percent higher than last year's.
The experts expect that pattern to continue.
"The more platforms you make available to consumers, the more consumers you capture," Welsh said.
There's also the chance for even more revenue. Only in the past few weeks has NBC Universal perfected the technology to place a movie studio advertisement at the end of the clip it distributes online. Pre-clip advertising would add even more value.
It's not the only sign this fall of how the typical habits of watching TV — making an appointment with your easy chair at a given time each night — are rapidly becoming obsolete.
The "CBS Evening News" saw only a modest bump in ratings during Katie Couric's interview segments with Sarah Palin this fall. Yet they became so well known that "Saturday Night Live" based one of its Fey skits on Palin's bewildering answers. CBS News' Web site had significantly more traffic than normal at the time, with Couric's interview one of the most popular features. The network wouldn't give out specific numbers.
HBO's "True Blood," based on the Sookie Stackhouse book series, has become a hit quietly this fall, in large part because only 23 percent of the show's regular viewers watch each episode when it first appears on Sunday night.
With the Fey-Palin skits, NBC hit upon the perfect combination to promote its time-shifting, Zigler said. The "Saturday Night Live" writers came up with sharp material at a time the public is fascinated about politics, right when NBC perfected technology to spread the material online while protecting its rights to it.
Word of mouth made a big difference. Viewing of the "Saturday Night Live" skits is almost equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, Welsh said.
Consumers are in the midst of a behavioral change where they are increasingly looking to the computer for video, she said. The computer is shaping up as a more popular choice than DVRs, Welsh said.
"It is a tipping point for entertainment companies," Zigler said. "It is exactly what we expected would happen."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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by doug » Wed Oct 22, 2008 11:36 am
GOP spends $150,000 for Palin's wardrobe
McCain campaign says clothing bought will go to a 'charitable purpose'
Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin addresses a crowd at a minor league baseball field in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Monday.
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - John McCain's presidential campaign said thousands of dollars worth of clothing purchased by the Republican Party for running mate Sarah Palin will go to a "charitable purpose" after the campaign.
The Republican National Committee spent about $150,000 on clothing, hair styling, makeup and other "campaign accessories" in September for the McCain campaign after Palin, the governor of Alaska, joined the ticket.
The expenses include $75,062 spent at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis Minn., and $41,850 in St. Louis in early September. The committee also reported spending $4,100 for makeup and hair consulting. The expenses were first reported by Politico.com.
"With all of the important issues facing the country right now, it's remarkable that we're spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses," said McCain spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt, who has been traveling with Palin. "It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign."
In 2007, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards sparked Internet derision and jokes from late-night TV comics after his campaign for the party's nomination paid for two $400 haircuts by a stylist from Beverly Hills, Calif. His campaign said the bill was paid by the campaign by mistake and that Edwards would reimburse the campaign.
The RNC has been helping the McCain campaign financially now that McCain is locked into spending only $84 million for the fall campaign under his agreement to accept public financing. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, chose not to participate in the public system and raised a whopping $150 million in September.
The RNC is allowed to spend up to $19 million in "coordinated expenses" with the campaign. In September, it spent a a total of $4.4 million. The clothing and styling was part of that, but most was spent on postage for campaign mailings.
Federal campaign finance law prohibits the use of campaign funds for personal use, but it defines personal use as any expense "that would exist irrespective of the candidate's campaign or duties as a federal officeholder."
© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
McCain campaign says clothing bought will go to a 'charitable purpose'
Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin addresses a crowd at a minor league baseball field in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Monday.
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - John McCain's presidential campaign said thousands of dollars worth of clothing purchased by the Republican Party for running mate Sarah Palin will go to a "charitable purpose" after the campaign.
The Republican National Committee spent about $150,000 on clothing, hair styling, makeup and other "campaign accessories" in September for the McCain campaign after Palin, the governor of Alaska, joined the ticket.
The expenses include $75,062 spent at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis Minn., and $41,850 in St. Louis in early September. The committee also reported spending $4,100 for makeup and hair consulting. The expenses were first reported by Politico.com.
"With all of the important issues facing the country right now, it's remarkable that we're spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses," said McCain spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt, who has been traveling with Palin. "It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign."
In 2007, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards sparked Internet derision and jokes from late-night TV comics after his campaign for the party's nomination paid for two $400 haircuts by a stylist from Beverly Hills, Calif. His campaign said the bill was paid by the campaign by mistake and that Edwards would reimburse the campaign.
The RNC has been helping the McCain campaign financially now that McCain is locked into spending only $84 million for the fall campaign under his agreement to accept public financing. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, chose not to participate in the public system and raised a whopping $150 million in September.
The RNC is allowed to spend up to $19 million in "coordinated expenses" with the campaign. In September, it spent a a total of $4.4 million. The clothing and styling was part of that, but most was spent on postage for campaign mailings.
Federal campaign finance law prohibits the use of campaign funds for personal use, but it defines personal use as any expense "that would exist irrespective of the candidate's campaign or duties as a federal officeholder."
© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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- doug
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by doug » Fri Oct 24, 2008 3:39 pm
Palin might have brighter future in Hollywood
Agents, execs discuss possibilities for capitalizing on candidate's popularity
By Andrew Wallenstein and Steven Zeitchik
Hollywood Reporter
LOS ANGELES - As campaign managers for Sarah Palin plot last-minute tactics to get her elected, Hollywood bigwigs are convening strategy sessions of their own. Their goal: finding the ideal on-air vehicle for the VP candidate if and when she exits politics.
Love her or hate her — there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground with Palin — the 44-year-old hockey mom has captured the public imagination in a way no politician has since, well, Barack Obama.
But as more and more polls cast doubt on the McCain-Palin ticket, producers and agents across the entertainment world are discussing possibilities for capitalizing on her fame, ranging from an Oprah-style syndicated talk show to a Sean Hannity-like perch in cable news or on radio.
“Any television person who sees the numbers when she appears on anything would say Sarah Palin would be great,” said veteran morning-show producer Steve Friedman, citing the double-digit ratings gains her appearances on “Saturday Night Live” and “CBS Evening News” generated. “The passion she has on each side, love and hate, makes television people say, ’Wow, imagine the viewership.”’
Although none of the execs has — at least as far as anyone is admitting — made direct overtures to Palin, they are readying their battle plans if she decides to give up her day job.
Of course, even if the McCain-Palin ticket loses, the Tina Fey look-alike still has a job in politics for at least another two years as governor of Alaska. A spokesman for Palin did not return calls for comment.
But the candidate has undeniable onscreen charisma as her “SNL” performance proved last weekend. And though the Palin Express sometimes veers off the tracks — as it did in her notorious interview with Katie Couric — Americans enjoy celebrities as much for their contretemps as their talent.
Palin as daytime talk-show host?
Most industry insiders believe a talk show is the probable route for Palin. Although daytime syndication can be tough sledding, it would take a personality of her stature to break through the clutter, and her folksy red-state persona could be just the thing to connect with this female-skewing audience.
One producer/packager said he has held internal staff meetings about how to best parlay Palin’s appeal and skills, with a daytime talk show the likely vehicle. “I see her less as a variety-show host like Ellen (DeGeneres) and more of a single-topic host like Tyra (Banks), or maybe what Jenny Jones used to be,” said Chris Coelen, CEO of RDF USA, producer of “Wife Swap.”
However, one syndie veteran who wished to remain anonymous believes Palin would not make an ideal candidate for talk show host or even court show judge.
“I would not put her on the air,” the exec said. “I find her a little stiff, and her ability to read the room is not quite fully developed.”
Cable news is another possibility, particularly Fox News Channel, if Palin wants to keep her conservative bona fides intact. There’s a well-worn path between the Beltway and TV, from Pat Buchanan to recent presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, who just began his own weekly series on Fox News.
A weekly cable news berth also could be a less demanding side gig to occupy while still in office in Alaska, though losing the election could dent her credibility among conservatives.
Eric Wattenberg, an agent at N.S. Bienstock, a New York-based firm that handles many news anchors, believes syndication is a safer bet. “I could see her getting more traction as an Oprah than as an Anderson Cooper,” he said.
Some combination of talk and news could even be in the cards: One agent recommended that News Corp. should let her hone her chops for a few years on Fox News in anticipation of rolling out a broader-appealing talker over Fox-owned stations after 2010.
And then there are those who are thinking outside the box, as in reality television.
One producer floated the idea — only half-joking — of taking advantage of the curiosity surrounding the entire Palin clan and their Alaska setting and packaging “The Palins”: Think “The Osbournes” meets “Northern Exposure.”
Some skeptics point out that Palin will run into a major obstacle in trying to win over the kind of widespread support one needs to become a national television figure. She is, after all, a polarizing personality. But as with such media darlings as Howard Stern or Star Jones, polarization has its advantages. “She could have a Kathie Lee Gifford kind of thing,” Wattenberg said. “You’re either addicted to her because you love her or you just want to tune in to see if she’ll do something stupid.”
Another potential obstacle to Palin is that there will be execs in liberal-leaning Hollywood who might shut the door to her solely out of political distaste. “People pretend they don’t feel that way, but they do,” one agent said.
The question mark amid all this speculation is whether Palin has any interest in an entertainment career. There’s little indication of that, unless you count the vp candidate sending a tape of herself to late-night host Craig Ferguson last year before anyone in the lower 48 had ever heard of Wasilla. For a segment on his “Late Late Show,” Ferguson had been soliciting invitations from politicians to help him become a citizen. The host was impressed enough with the unknown Palin’s screen presence that he put the video on the air, even commenting, “Is it just me, or do I get a naughty librarian vibe from her?”
Even if Palin opts to remain in politics, Hollywood likely will find some way to sink its claws into her.
Although Matt Damon’s comparison of Palin’s rise to “a really bad Disney movie” was meant as a dig, the point wasn’t lost on a lot of execs: The narrative of Palin’s life is highly conducive to a biopic — one likely already in development; whether it’s a big-screen “W.”-style treatment or a smaller-scale approach for women’s cable channel Lifetime remains to be seen.
Palin herself might not be able to wait until the end of her term to act on any showbiz ambitions.
IMG Worldwide agent Babette Perry noted what could be called the Sanjaya effect: Celebrities (like the “American Idol” also-ran) can go from household name to obscurity with the push of a remote. “You’ve got to strike while the iron is hot,” Perry said. “People forget that today’s story is tomorrow’s afterthought.”
Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Agents, execs discuss possibilities for capitalizing on candidate's popularity
By Andrew Wallenstein and Steven Zeitchik
Hollywood Reporter
LOS ANGELES - As campaign managers for Sarah Palin plot last-minute tactics to get her elected, Hollywood bigwigs are convening strategy sessions of their own. Their goal: finding the ideal on-air vehicle for the VP candidate if and when she exits politics.
Love her or hate her — there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground with Palin — the 44-year-old hockey mom has captured the public imagination in a way no politician has since, well, Barack Obama.
But as more and more polls cast doubt on the McCain-Palin ticket, producers and agents across the entertainment world are discussing possibilities for capitalizing on her fame, ranging from an Oprah-style syndicated talk show to a Sean Hannity-like perch in cable news or on radio.
“Any television person who sees the numbers when she appears on anything would say Sarah Palin would be great,” said veteran morning-show producer Steve Friedman, citing the double-digit ratings gains her appearances on “Saturday Night Live” and “CBS Evening News” generated. “The passion she has on each side, love and hate, makes television people say, ’Wow, imagine the viewership.”’
Although none of the execs has — at least as far as anyone is admitting — made direct overtures to Palin, they are readying their battle plans if she decides to give up her day job.
Of course, even if the McCain-Palin ticket loses, the Tina Fey look-alike still has a job in politics for at least another two years as governor of Alaska. A spokesman for Palin did not return calls for comment.
But the candidate has undeniable onscreen charisma as her “SNL” performance proved last weekend. And though the Palin Express sometimes veers off the tracks — as it did in her notorious interview with Katie Couric — Americans enjoy celebrities as much for their contretemps as their talent.
Palin as daytime talk-show host?
Most industry insiders believe a talk show is the probable route for Palin. Although daytime syndication can be tough sledding, it would take a personality of her stature to break through the clutter, and her folksy red-state persona could be just the thing to connect with this female-skewing audience.
One producer/packager said he has held internal staff meetings about how to best parlay Palin’s appeal and skills, with a daytime talk show the likely vehicle. “I see her less as a variety-show host like Ellen (DeGeneres) and more of a single-topic host like Tyra (Banks), or maybe what Jenny Jones used to be,” said Chris Coelen, CEO of RDF USA, producer of “Wife Swap.”
However, one syndie veteran who wished to remain anonymous believes Palin would not make an ideal candidate for talk show host or even court show judge.
“I would not put her on the air,” the exec said. “I find her a little stiff, and her ability to read the room is not quite fully developed.”
Cable news is another possibility, particularly Fox News Channel, if Palin wants to keep her conservative bona fides intact. There’s a well-worn path between the Beltway and TV, from Pat Buchanan to recent presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, who just began his own weekly series on Fox News.
A weekly cable news berth also could be a less demanding side gig to occupy while still in office in Alaska, though losing the election could dent her credibility among conservatives.
Eric Wattenberg, an agent at N.S. Bienstock, a New York-based firm that handles many news anchors, believes syndication is a safer bet. “I could see her getting more traction as an Oprah than as an Anderson Cooper,” he said.
Some combination of talk and news could even be in the cards: One agent recommended that News Corp. should let her hone her chops for a few years on Fox News in anticipation of rolling out a broader-appealing talker over Fox-owned stations after 2010.
And then there are those who are thinking outside the box, as in reality television.
One producer floated the idea — only half-joking — of taking advantage of the curiosity surrounding the entire Palin clan and their Alaska setting and packaging “The Palins”: Think “The Osbournes” meets “Northern Exposure.”
Some skeptics point out that Palin will run into a major obstacle in trying to win over the kind of widespread support one needs to become a national television figure. She is, after all, a polarizing personality. But as with such media darlings as Howard Stern or Star Jones, polarization has its advantages. “She could have a Kathie Lee Gifford kind of thing,” Wattenberg said. “You’re either addicted to her because you love her or you just want to tune in to see if she’ll do something stupid.”
Another potential obstacle to Palin is that there will be execs in liberal-leaning Hollywood who might shut the door to her solely out of political distaste. “People pretend they don’t feel that way, but they do,” one agent said.
The question mark amid all this speculation is whether Palin has any interest in an entertainment career. There’s little indication of that, unless you count the vp candidate sending a tape of herself to late-night host Craig Ferguson last year before anyone in the lower 48 had ever heard of Wasilla. For a segment on his “Late Late Show,” Ferguson had been soliciting invitations from politicians to help him become a citizen. The host was impressed enough with the unknown Palin’s screen presence that he put the video on the air, even commenting, “Is it just me, or do I get a naughty librarian vibe from her?”
Even if Palin opts to remain in politics, Hollywood likely will find some way to sink its claws into her.
Although Matt Damon’s comparison of Palin’s rise to “a really bad Disney movie” was meant as a dig, the point wasn’t lost on a lot of execs: The narrative of Palin’s life is highly conducive to a biopic — one likely already in development; whether it’s a big-screen “W.”-style treatment or a smaller-scale approach for women’s cable channel Lifetime remains to be seen.
Palin herself might not be able to wait until the end of her term to act on any showbiz ambitions.
IMG Worldwide agent Babette Perry noted what could be called the Sanjaya effect: Celebrities (like the “American Idol” also-ran) can go from household name to obscurity with the push of a remote. “You’ve got to strike while the iron is hot,” Perry said. “People forget that today’s story is tomorrow’s afterthought.”
Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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by doug » Sun Nov 02, 2008 7:57 am
Palin's prank call from fake French president
GOP vice presidential pick takes comedian's call, talks about Bruni, Cheney
The Associated Press
MONTREAL - Sarah Palin unwittingly took a prank call Saturday from a Canadian comedian posing as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and telling her she would make a good president someday.
"Maybe in eight years," replies a laughing Palin.
The Republican vice presidential nominee discusses politics, the perils of hunting with Vice President Dick Cheney, and Sarkozy's "beautiful wife," in a recording of the call released Saturday and set to air Monday on a Quebec radio station.
Palin campaign spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt confirmed she had received the prank call.
"Governor Palin was mildly amused to learn that she had joined the ranks of heads of state, including President Sarkozy and other celebrities, in being targeted by these pranksters. C'est la vie," she said.
The call was made by a well-known Montreal comedy duo, Marc-Antoine Audette and Sebastien Trudel. Known as the Masked Avengers, the two are notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads of state.
Hints to the joke
Audette posing as Sarkozy speaks in an exaggerated French accent and drops ample hints that the conversation is a joke. But Palin seemingly does not pick up on them.
He tells Palin one of his favorite pastimes is hunting, also a passion of the 44-year-old Alaska governor.
"I just love killing those animals. Mmm, mmm, take away life, that is so fun," the fake Sarkozy says.
He proposes they go hunting together by helicopter, something he says he has never done.
"Well, I think we could have a lot of fun together while we're getting work done," Palin counters. "We can kill two birds with one stone that way."
The comedian then jokes that they shouldn't bring Cheney along on the hunt, referring to the 2006 incident in which the vice-president shot and injured a friend while hunting quail.
"I'll be a careful shot," responds Palin.
'I can see Belgium'
Playing off Palin's much-mocked comment in an early television interview that she had insights into foreign policy because "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska," the caller tells her: "You know we have a lot in common also, because except from my house I can see Belgium."
She replies: "Well, see, we're right next door to different countries that we all need to be working with, yes."
When Audette refers to Canadian singer Steph Carse as Canada's prime minister, Palin replies: "Well, he's doing fine and yeah, when you come into a position underestimated it gives you an opportunity to prove the pundits and the critics wrong. You work that much harder." Canada's prime minister is Stephen Harper.
Palin praises Sarkozy throughout the call and also mentions his wife Carla Bruni, a model-turned-songwriter.
"You know, I look forward to working with you and getting to meet you personally and your beautiful wife," Palin says. "Oh my goodness, you've added a lot of energy to your country with that beautiful family of yours."
'Lipstick on a Pig'
The Sarkozy impersonator tells Palin his wife is "so hot in bed" and then informs her that Bruni has written a song for her about Joe the Plumber entitled "Du rouge a levres sur une cochonne" — which translates as "Lipstick on a Pig."
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama derided his Republican challenger John McCain's call for change in Washington as "lipstick on a pig," days after Palin made a lipstick joke at the Republican convention. The McCain-Palin campaign then released an ad implying Obama was calling Palin a pig with that remark.
The caller asks Palin if Joe the Plumber is her husband and adds: "We have the equivalent of Joe the Plumber in France. It's called Marcel, the guy with bread under his armpit."
He also tells the Alaska governor that he loved the "documentary" made about her and referred to a pornographic film with a Palin look-alike made by Hustler founder Larry Flynt.
She answers tentatively, "Ohh, good, thank you, yes."
The callers then reveal the prank and identify themselves and their radio station.
"Ohhh, have we been pranked?" Palin asks before handing the phone to an aide who ends the call.
Obama's campaign spokesman Robert Gibbs, commenting on the prank, said: "I'm glad we check out our calls before we hand the phone to Barack Obama."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
GOP vice presidential pick takes comedian's call, talks about Bruni, Cheney
The Associated Press
MONTREAL - Sarah Palin unwittingly took a prank call Saturday from a Canadian comedian posing as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and telling her she would make a good president someday.
"Maybe in eight years," replies a laughing Palin.
The Republican vice presidential nominee discusses politics, the perils of hunting with Vice President Dick Cheney, and Sarkozy's "beautiful wife," in a recording of the call released Saturday and set to air Monday on a Quebec radio station.
Palin campaign spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt confirmed she had received the prank call.
"Governor Palin was mildly amused to learn that she had joined the ranks of heads of state, including President Sarkozy and other celebrities, in being targeted by these pranksters. C'est la vie," she said.
The call was made by a well-known Montreal comedy duo, Marc-Antoine Audette and Sebastien Trudel. Known as the Masked Avengers, the two are notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads of state.
Hints to the joke
Audette posing as Sarkozy speaks in an exaggerated French accent and drops ample hints that the conversation is a joke. But Palin seemingly does not pick up on them.
He tells Palin one of his favorite pastimes is hunting, also a passion of the 44-year-old Alaska governor.
"I just love killing those animals. Mmm, mmm, take away life, that is so fun," the fake Sarkozy says.
He proposes they go hunting together by helicopter, something he says he has never done.
"Well, I think we could have a lot of fun together while we're getting work done," Palin counters. "We can kill two birds with one stone that way."
The comedian then jokes that they shouldn't bring Cheney along on the hunt, referring to the 2006 incident in which the vice-president shot and injured a friend while hunting quail.
"I'll be a careful shot," responds Palin.
'I can see Belgium'
Playing off Palin's much-mocked comment in an early television interview that she had insights into foreign policy because "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska," the caller tells her: "You know we have a lot in common also, because except from my house I can see Belgium."
She replies: "Well, see, we're right next door to different countries that we all need to be working with, yes."
When Audette refers to Canadian singer Steph Carse as Canada's prime minister, Palin replies: "Well, he's doing fine and yeah, when you come into a position underestimated it gives you an opportunity to prove the pundits and the critics wrong. You work that much harder." Canada's prime minister is Stephen Harper.
Palin praises Sarkozy throughout the call and also mentions his wife Carla Bruni, a model-turned-songwriter.
"You know, I look forward to working with you and getting to meet you personally and your beautiful wife," Palin says. "Oh my goodness, you've added a lot of energy to your country with that beautiful family of yours."
'Lipstick on a Pig'
The Sarkozy impersonator tells Palin his wife is "so hot in bed" and then informs her that Bruni has written a song for her about Joe the Plumber entitled "Du rouge a levres sur une cochonne" — which translates as "Lipstick on a Pig."
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama derided his Republican challenger John McCain's call for change in Washington as "lipstick on a pig," days after Palin made a lipstick joke at the Republican convention. The McCain-Palin campaign then released an ad implying Obama was calling Palin a pig with that remark.
The caller asks Palin if Joe the Plumber is her husband and adds: "We have the equivalent of Joe the Plumber in France. It's called Marcel, the guy with bread under his armpit."
He also tells the Alaska governor that he loved the "documentary" made about her and referred to a pornographic film with a Palin look-alike made by Hustler founder Larry Flynt.
She answers tentatively, "Ohh, good, thank you, yes."
The callers then reveal the prank and identify themselves and their radio station.
"Ohhh, have we been pranked?" Palin asks before handing the phone to an aide who ends the call.
Obama's campaign spokesman Robert Gibbs, commenting on the prank, said: "I'm glad we check out our calls before we hand the phone to Barack Obama."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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by doug » Sun Nov 02, 2008 11:59 am
North Carolina politicians guard family privacy North Carolina politicians guard family privacyWednesday, September 3 (updated 3:08 am)
By Doug Clark
Off the Record (blog)
Americans are learning plenty about Sarah Palin's family. The Republican vice presidential candidate gave up personal privacy when she accepted John McCain's offer to join his ticket.
Her decision to carry to term a baby with Down syndrome rather than have an abortion, and now her unmarried teenage daughter's pregnancy, are topics of conversation not only within the Palin household but in the national media and among millions of Americans. Her business is our business.
That just goes with the territory for someone who wants to become one of our nation's top leaders.
Shift to a different territory, however, and the rules seem to change -- probably for the better.
How much do North Carolinians know about the families of their top elected officials?
Very little. And, in this state at least, the public doesn't seem to want to know more. There's clearly a greater willingness to grant a zone of privacy on the part of the people and the media.
Gov. Mike Easley's family, for example, garnered hardly any publicity until recently, when first lady Mary Easley's European travels and big pay raise at N.C. State were reported. The issues were newsworthy only because they involved public funds and, in the case of her job at State, possible favoritism.
Almost never in the news is the Easleys' son, Michael Jr., a law student at Carolina. The only child of the state's governor for the past eight years is virtually unknown to most North Carolinians. His public appearances are so rare, in fact, that The News & Observer of Raleigh made a special note of it when he joined his father for a Hillary Clinton campaign event in High Point before the primary in May.
Attention is focusing now on the major candidates for Easley's job, Democrat Bev Perdue and Republican Pat McCrory. What about their families?
Perdue's husband, Bob Eaves, was brought up during the primary campaign by Democratic opponent Richard Moore, who charged that ball caps carrying Confederate emblems are sold in Georgia convenience stores owned by the Eaves family. Moore didn't score any points with that lukewarm potato.
Perdue has two grown sons from a previous marriage and one granddaughter. Their personal lives are completely outside the realm of public interest.
McCrory's wife, Ann, doesn't have a public role in his campaign, and they have no children.
Everyone knows Sen. Elizabeth Dole's husband. Bob Dole was a longtime senator from Kansas and the Republican presidential candidate in 1996 and vice presidential candidate in 1976. She has no children.
North Carolina's other senator, Richard Burr, and wife, Brooke, have two sons. Their names and ages aren't given in Burr's biography on his Senate Web site, and no one's clamoring for the information.
A North Carolina politician who's more open about her family is Greensboro's Kay Hagan, the Democratic candidate for Dole's Senate seat. Her husband, Chip, and three grown children, Jeannette, Tilden and Carrie, have been campaigning with and for her across the state.
Whether any North Carolina politician would be as open about family as Sarah Palin, however, is doubtful. The cone of privacy is thicker here. It might crack in a case of criminal behavior or some other scandal that thrust a family member into the news, but a teenage daughter's pregnancy likely would remain a protected family matter. Rightfully so. It's hard to think of circumstances that would bring such a personal development to public attention.
Sarah Palin may be breaking new ground by announcing her daughter's pregnancy to the national media. In part, doing so was a response to rumors spread by political opponents that 17-year-old Bristol Palin, not Sarah, is the real mother of infant Trig, and that Sarah has been covering up for her daughter. Bristol's current pregnancy makes that impossible.
But news would get out, anyway, especially in the Palins' small Alaska hometown. Bristol's pregnancy apparently was known there already, as was the identity of her 17-year-old boyfriend. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, decided to get it all out in the open and make it clear that they love and support their daughter. Family values prevail.
Most North Carolina politicians say they stand for family values, too. When it comes to their own families, though, they prefer privacy.
North Carolina voters and media seem perfectly fine with that.
Copyright (C) 2008 News & Record and Landmark Communications, Inc.
By Doug Clark
Off the Record (blog)
Americans are learning plenty about Sarah Palin's family. The Republican vice presidential candidate gave up personal privacy when she accepted John McCain's offer to join his ticket.
Her decision to carry to term a baby with Down syndrome rather than have an abortion, and now her unmarried teenage daughter's pregnancy, are topics of conversation not only within the Palin household but in the national media and among millions of Americans. Her business is our business.
That just goes with the territory for someone who wants to become one of our nation's top leaders.
Shift to a different territory, however, and the rules seem to change -- probably for the better.
How much do North Carolinians know about the families of their top elected officials?
Very little. And, in this state at least, the public doesn't seem to want to know more. There's clearly a greater willingness to grant a zone of privacy on the part of the people and the media.
Gov. Mike Easley's family, for example, garnered hardly any publicity until recently, when first lady Mary Easley's European travels and big pay raise at N.C. State were reported. The issues were newsworthy only because they involved public funds and, in the case of her job at State, possible favoritism.
Almost never in the news is the Easleys' son, Michael Jr., a law student at Carolina. The only child of the state's governor for the past eight years is virtually unknown to most North Carolinians. His public appearances are so rare, in fact, that The News & Observer of Raleigh made a special note of it when he joined his father for a Hillary Clinton campaign event in High Point before the primary in May.
Attention is focusing now on the major candidates for Easley's job, Democrat Bev Perdue and Republican Pat McCrory. What about their families?
Perdue's husband, Bob Eaves, was brought up during the primary campaign by Democratic opponent Richard Moore, who charged that ball caps carrying Confederate emblems are sold in Georgia convenience stores owned by the Eaves family. Moore didn't score any points with that lukewarm potato.
Perdue has two grown sons from a previous marriage and one granddaughter. Their personal lives are completely outside the realm of public interest.
McCrory's wife, Ann, doesn't have a public role in his campaign, and they have no children.
Everyone knows Sen. Elizabeth Dole's husband. Bob Dole was a longtime senator from Kansas and the Republican presidential candidate in 1996 and vice presidential candidate in 1976. She has no children.
North Carolina's other senator, Richard Burr, and wife, Brooke, have two sons. Their names and ages aren't given in Burr's biography on his Senate Web site, and no one's clamoring for the information.
A North Carolina politician who's more open about her family is Greensboro's Kay Hagan, the Democratic candidate for Dole's Senate seat. Her husband, Chip, and three grown children, Jeannette, Tilden and Carrie, have been campaigning with and for her across the state.
Whether any North Carolina politician would be as open about family as Sarah Palin, however, is doubtful. The cone of privacy is thicker here. It might crack in a case of criminal behavior or some other scandal that thrust a family member into the news, but a teenage daughter's pregnancy likely would remain a protected family matter. Rightfully so. It's hard to think of circumstances that would bring such a personal development to public attention.
Sarah Palin may be breaking new ground by announcing her daughter's pregnancy to the national media. In part, doing so was a response to rumors spread by political opponents that 17-year-old Bristol Palin, not Sarah, is the real mother of infant Trig, and that Sarah has been covering up for her daughter. Bristol's current pregnancy makes that impossible.
But news would get out, anyway, especially in the Palins' small Alaska hometown. Bristol's pregnancy apparently was known there already, as was the identity of her 17-year-old boyfriend. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, decided to get it all out in the open and make it clear that they love and support their daughter. Family values prevail.
Most North Carolina politicians say they stand for family values, too. When it comes to their own families, though, they prefer privacy.
North Carolina voters and media seem perfectly fine with that.
Copyright (C) 2008 News & Record and Landmark Communications, Inc.
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- doug
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- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
by doug » Sun Nov 02, 2008 12:05 pm
Moore attacks Perdue over Rebel hats
Submitted by bniolet on April 25, 2008 - 4:02pm.
The racial rhetoric of the race for the Democratic nomination for governor ratcheted up another notch Friday afternoon as State Treasurer Richard Moore's campaign displayed Confederate flag-emblazoned goods they purchased at Georgia convenience stores owned by Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue's family.
"Is this a hat that Bev Perdue would let her campaign staff wear?" said Jay Reiff, Moore's campaign manager, pointing to a row of three baseball caps with different "Stars and Bars" variations: one with flames, one with a reflective logo and one with camouflage.
Moore did not attend his campaign's news conference.
Perdue's husband, Bob Eaves, owns a chain of "The Right Stuff Food Stores" in Georgia. Until last year, Perdue was an officer in the company. Perdue's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Moore's campaign staff said they purchased the goods at two locations and displayed receipts. They supplied photographs of merchandise in the store. One image, above, shows beer insulators next to a University of Georgia license plate.
Update: David Kochman, a Perdue spokesman, issued a statement again accusing Moore of "Jesse Helms tactics." Kochman said the attack was "so low that Richard Moore himself wouldn't even attend the press conference announcing it."
Kochman said the stores are run by Perdue's stepson and that while her husband retains partial ownership, is not involved in day-to-day management of the company.
A beer bottle insulator included the Confederate flag, seen as a sign of slavery and repression by many blacks and an emblem of heritage by some whites, and the phrase: "Old Times Are Not Forgotten," extracted from the song "Dixie."
Moore's staff spotlighted the convenience store goods hours after distributing copies of a 1989 newspaper article recounting how Perdue watered down a bill that was the Legislative Black Caucus' top priority that year: making it easier for candidates to avoid a runoff election in a
primary.
Rep. Mickey Michaux, a Durham Democrat, at the time said Perdue's move was "a slap in the face of black people."
On Friday, Michaux, a Perdue supporter, said her change to the legislation is an exception to an otherwise positive record on civil rights.
"She made a couple of mistakes," Michaux said, "But that doesn't necessarily undercut the good job she's done particularly when it comes to those matters affecting the minority community."
On Thursday Moore's campaign criticized a 1987 vote in which Perdue opposed a bill that made it easier for the State Bureau of Investigation to investigate hate crimes. Perdue was one of only two Democrats in the General Assembly to vote against the bill.
Re: Gallant Generals on Both Sides
Submitted by Proctor on April 27, 2008 - 10:11am.
By the way, do they have any Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard T-shirts?
Re: Moore attacks Perdue over Rebel hats
Submitted by tangoz on April 25, 2008 - 8:37pm.
The NAACP is placed in a position of being considered a double standard organization. It is ok for them but not the rest of us.
Re: Moore attacks Perdue over Rebel hats
Submitted by FFC1304 on April 25, 2008 - 5:05pm.
ROFLMAO!!!! OMG!!! THIS is over the TOP!!!! LOLOLOLllllllll
You cannot write a script like this! I absolutely LOVE to watch democrackkks attackkk each other!!!!!!!!!
Copyright 2008, The News & Observer Publishing Company
A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company
Submitted by bniolet on April 25, 2008 - 4:02pm.
The racial rhetoric of the race for the Democratic nomination for governor ratcheted up another notch Friday afternoon as State Treasurer Richard Moore's campaign displayed Confederate flag-emblazoned goods they purchased at Georgia convenience stores owned by Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue's family.
"Is this a hat that Bev Perdue would let her campaign staff wear?" said Jay Reiff, Moore's campaign manager, pointing to a row of three baseball caps with different "Stars and Bars" variations: one with flames, one with a reflective logo and one with camouflage.
Moore did not attend his campaign's news conference.
Perdue's husband, Bob Eaves, owns a chain of "The Right Stuff Food Stores" in Georgia. Until last year, Perdue was an officer in the company. Perdue's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Moore's campaign staff said they purchased the goods at two locations and displayed receipts. They supplied photographs of merchandise in the store. One image, above, shows beer insulators next to a University of Georgia license plate.
Update: David Kochman, a Perdue spokesman, issued a statement again accusing Moore of "Jesse Helms tactics." Kochman said the attack was "so low that Richard Moore himself wouldn't even attend the press conference announcing it."
Kochman said the stores are run by Perdue's stepson and that while her husband retains partial ownership, is not involved in day-to-day management of the company.
A beer bottle insulator included the Confederate flag, seen as a sign of slavery and repression by many blacks and an emblem of heritage by some whites, and the phrase: "Old Times Are Not Forgotten," extracted from the song "Dixie."
Moore's staff spotlighted the convenience store goods hours after distributing copies of a 1989 newspaper article recounting how Perdue watered down a bill that was the Legislative Black Caucus' top priority that year: making it easier for candidates to avoid a runoff election in a
primary.
Rep. Mickey Michaux, a Durham Democrat, at the time said Perdue's move was "a slap in the face of black people."
On Friday, Michaux, a Perdue supporter, said her change to the legislation is an exception to an otherwise positive record on civil rights.
"She made a couple of mistakes," Michaux said, "But that doesn't necessarily undercut the good job she's done particularly when it comes to those matters affecting the minority community."
On Thursday Moore's campaign criticized a 1987 vote in which Perdue opposed a bill that made it easier for the State Bureau of Investigation to investigate hate crimes. Perdue was one of only two Democrats in the General Assembly to vote against the bill.
Re: Gallant Generals on Both Sides
Submitted by Proctor on April 27, 2008 - 10:11am.
By the way, do they have any Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard T-shirts?
Re: Moore attacks Perdue over Rebel hats
Submitted by tangoz on April 25, 2008 - 8:37pm.
The NAACP is placed in a position of being considered a double standard organization. It is ok for them but not the rest of us.
Re: Moore attacks Perdue over Rebel hats
Submitted by FFC1304 on April 25, 2008 - 5:05pm.
ROFLMAO!!!! OMG!!! THIS is over the TOP!!!! LOLOLOLllllllll
You cannot write a script like this! I absolutely LOVE to watch democrackkks attackkk each other!!!!!!!!!
Copyright 2008, The News & Observer Publishing Company
A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company
providing immigration services worldwide for 25 years
- doug
- Posts: 24815
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- Location: chapel hill, n.c.
by doug » Sun Nov 02, 2008 12:08 pm
By Mary Jekielek Insprucker
July 2005
Although Lieutenant Governor Beverly Perdue is contemplating running for governor in 2008, I say, pass "Go," collect $200 and move directly to President of the US . This former public school teacher and health care professional rocks the boat, but makes sure everyone, especially older adults, wear a life jacket while she is doing it.
Working as director of a geriatrics program at a community hospital in Craven Co., Perdue, 58, saw firsthand what was happening in long-term senior care. It was her personal observations about the way seniors were treated that motivated her to first run for public office in the NC House of Representatives. "I was frustrated because there would have been more choices for them if the rules were reconfigured," Perdue said. "So when a seat opened, I thought I'd stop whining and do something to make things better."
Her determination led to five terms in the Senate and two terms in the House of Representatives. "The House was interesting. I was fresh and learned a lot, but I didn't make a lot of difference, which is why I ran for the Senate. In the Senate I was much more productive as a legislator and policy maker."
Through her government service, Perdue shepherded the Excellent Schools Act and Governor Hunt's Smart Start, and crafted the state's balanced budget from 1996-2000.
She still continues to work on issues such as clean air and water, access to technology, and support of law enforcement officers.
However, one of her top priorities is, and has always been, issues of an aging population. As Chair of the Health and Wellness Trust Fund Commission, Perdue led the efforts to create Senior Care, NC's prescription drug program. "We didn't wait for the federal government to put together their program. We took action to create a program that's been called the best in the nation by the state's AARP," said Perdue.
Another successful initiative she helped develop was the brown-bag medical assistance program, which involves seniors, physicians and pharmacists taking a close look at medications to avoid duplication and adverse interaction. This medical assistance program has been such a success statewide that it may become a federal model. "We now have 50 programs running in the state and according to the School of Public Health , it has helped to cut hospital visits and medication costs," said Perdue, who is quick to point out that without the Governor's support, change may have not happened.
Perdue also led the fight for S 10, which enacted tough reforms to protect seniors in long-term care and group homes. "I worked for fairly controversial change in long term and general adult care," said Perdue, who for the past three years labored to secure a Community Block Grant allowing nursing care funds to go to home care. "If I were queen for a day, we would fix it!"
Perdue encourages older adults to let their voices be heard. "I never understood with their numbers, why the message and needs of seniors were not more dramatically addressed," said Perdue, who advises older adults to empower through organization and working with county commissioners. "We need to break the stereotype of 65-year-olds being ancient, when in fact, they are active, engaged, and giving people."
Perdue is certainly engaged and giving. She also has a great sense of humor. When talking about her Tibetan Terrier, Dos (Spanish for "2" because the Governor's dog is #1), she jokes, "I never had a dog with papers before. I guess that's what happens when you marry a republican." (speaking of her husband, Robert Eaves Jr.)
Her sense of humor doesn't allow for taking herself too seriously. Perdue will humbly relate a story about a time she was to be the keynote speaker at an important event when her husband was mistaken for the Lt. Gov. "We were given a gift basket with a card that read, 'Lt. Gov. Robert W. Eaves Jr. and Ms. Bev Perdue,'" which, to remain grounded, she keeps in her office. School kids will often provide the same service when she visits. "When I walk up to the mic, they'll ask, 'Where's the Lieutenant Governor?' looking over at my communications director. It keeps me humble."
There are a few other things folks may not know about Perdue. "I am an avid reader. I'm also kind-of shy. I'm outgoing enough to talk to anyone, even a tree. But there's days I just don't want to."
Where did she think she would be at 50? "I remember when I was about 7 or 8, being at our town's 100-year anniversary, eating a sandwich under a tree and thinking about that. I am shocked I'm in politics," said Perdue, who at one time thought she would be a professor, writer, or researcher. "I thought I'd spout words of wisdom on health care and policy. But I guess I'm not high brow; I'm low brow."
It is, however, within the realm of possibility. "I still dream of working with a university on aging and health care issues. There is life after politics."
October 2008
William Terry, A Lifelong Learner
July 2005
Although Lieutenant Governor Beverly Perdue is contemplating running for governor in 2008, I say, pass "Go," collect $200 and move directly to President of the US . This former public school teacher and health care professional rocks the boat, but makes sure everyone, especially older adults, wear a life jacket while she is doing it.
Working as director of a geriatrics program at a community hospital in Craven Co., Perdue, 58, saw firsthand what was happening in long-term senior care. It was her personal observations about the way seniors were treated that motivated her to first run for public office in the NC House of Representatives. "I was frustrated because there would have been more choices for them if the rules were reconfigured," Perdue said. "So when a seat opened, I thought I'd stop whining and do something to make things better."
Her determination led to five terms in the Senate and two terms in the House of Representatives. "The House was interesting. I was fresh and learned a lot, but I didn't make a lot of difference, which is why I ran for the Senate. In the Senate I was much more productive as a legislator and policy maker."
Through her government service, Perdue shepherded the Excellent Schools Act and Governor Hunt's Smart Start, and crafted the state's balanced budget from 1996-2000.
She still continues to work on issues such as clean air and water, access to technology, and support of law enforcement officers.
However, one of her top priorities is, and has always been, issues of an aging population. As Chair of the Health and Wellness Trust Fund Commission, Perdue led the efforts to create Senior Care, NC's prescription drug program. "We didn't wait for the federal government to put together their program. We took action to create a program that's been called the best in the nation by the state's AARP," said Perdue.
Another successful initiative she helped develop was the brown-bag medical assistance program, which involves seniors, physicians and pharmacists taking a close look at medications to avoid duplication and adverse interaction. This medical assistance program has been such a success statewide that it may become a federal model. "We now have 50 programs running in the state and according to the School of Public Health , it has helped to cut hospital visits and medication costs," said Perdue, who is quick to point out that without the Governor's support, change may have not happened.
Perdue also led the fight for S 10, which enacted tough reforms to protect seniors in long-term care and group homes. "I worked for fairly controversial change in long term and general adult care," said Perdue, who for the past three years labored to secure a Community Block Grant allowing nursing care funds to go to home care. "If I were queen for a day, we would fix it!"
Perdue encourages older adults to let their voices be heard. "I never understood with their numbers, why the message and needs of seniors were not more dramatically addressed," said Perdue, who advises older adults to empower through organization and working with county commissioners. "We need to break the stereotype of 65-year-olds being ancient, when in fact, they are active, engaged, and giving people."
Perdue is certainly engaged and giving. She also has a great sense of humor. When talking about her Tibetan Terrier, Dos (Spanish for "2" because the Governor's dog is #1), she jokes, "I never had a dog with papers before. I guess that's what happens when you marry a republican." (speaking of her husband, Robert Eaves Jr.)
Her sense of humor doesn't allow for taking herself too seriously. Perdue will humbly relate a story about a time she was to be the keynote speaker at an important event when her husband was mistaken for the Lt. Gov. "We were given a gift basket with a card that read, 'Lt. Gov. Robert W. Eaves Jr. and Ms. Bev Perdue,'" which, to remain grounded, she keeps in her office. School kids will often provide the same service when she visits. "When I walk up to the mic, they'll ask, 'Where's the Lieutenant Governor?' looking over at my communications director. It keeps me humble."
There are a few other things folks may not know about Perdue. "I am an avid reader. I'm also kind-of shy. I'm outgoing enough to talk to anyone, even a tree. But there's days I just don't want to."
Where did she think she would be at 50? "I remember when I was about 7 or 8, being at our town's 100-year anniversary, eating a sandwich under a tree and thinking about that. I am shocked I'm in politics," said Perdue, who at one time thought she would be a professor, writer, or researcher. "I thought I'd spout words of wisdom on health care and policy. But I guess I'm not high brow; I'm low brow."
It is, however, within the realm of possibility. "I still dream of working with a university on aging and health care issues. There is life after politics."
October 2008
William Terry, A Lifelong Learner
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- doug
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by doug » Sun Nov 02, 2008 12:12 pm
How old is Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue?
In recent years, she's said she was born on Jan. 14, 1947. But older news sources say she was born in 1948.
The most notable is her Ph.D. dissertation, which says in a brief biographical sketch that she was born in 1948. Files at the University of Florida, where she studied in the early '70s, also say 1948.
A Perdue spokesman confirmed she was born in 1947, but he said she changed the year to please her first husband.
At the time she wrote her dissertation, she was married to Gary Perdue, an attorney. He was born on Oct. 6, 1947, making him seven months younger than she.
"At that time, it was the early '70s, it was something that was important to her husband — and to the marriage — not to be married to somebody older than him," said spokesman David Kochman.
The Perdues divorced in 1994. Gary Perdue died in 1997.
Submitted by Gideon_S_Band on October 29, 2007 - 11:38pm.
I can't think of a woman alive that probably hasn't lied about her age at some point.
This is news?
We should apply it everyday
Submitted by Anglico on October 29, 2007 - 7:19pm.
and the outcome of that analysis would be similar . . . planted stories masking hidden agendas . . . from people who ought to know better. Or something like that.
Re: Perdue's change of birthdate
Submitted by twoshadesofblue on October 29, 2007 - 6:40pm.
Speaking of bias, should we apply "The Raleigh Soup" analysis to "Under the Dome" today?
Re: Perdue's change of birthdate
Submitted by Isaac136 on October 29, 2007 - 6:33pm.
Thenk yew~
Re: Perdue's change of birthdate
Submitted by ryanteaguebeckwith on October 29, 2007 - 6:19pm.
The person making that grammatical mistake was ... me? I?
Uh, mistakes were made.
It's been corrected.
— RTB
Re: Perdue's change of birthdate
Submitted by tnixon8084 on October 29, 2007 - 6:08pm.
Dead men tell no tales!
Re: Perdue's change of birthdate
Submitted by Isaac136 on October 29, 2007 - 5:54pm.
"making him seven months younger than SHE"
Come on now. You guys know better. Just because the spokesman was grammatically OFF ("somebody older than him" should have been somebody older than HE") doesn't mean that it's ok for you.
Don't make me report this to James Kilpatrick.
Copyright 2008, The News & Observer Publishing Company
A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company
In recent years, she's said she was born on Jan. 14, 1947. But older news sources say she was born in 1948.
The most notable is her Ph.D. dissertation, which says in a brief biographical sketch that she was born in 1948. Files at the University of Florida, where she studied in the early '70s, also say 1948.
A Perdue spokesman confirmed she was born in 1947, but he said she changed the year to please her first husband.
At the time she wrote her dissertation, she was married to Gary Perdue, an attorney. He was born on Oct. 6, 1947, making him seven months younger than she.
"At that time, it was the early '70s, it was something that was important to her husband — and to the marriage — not to be married to somebody older than him," said spokesman David Kochman.
The Perdues divorced in 1994. Gary Perdue died in 1997.
Submitted by Gideon_S_Band on October 29, 2007 - 11:38pm.
I can't think of a woman alive that probably hasn't lied about her age at some point.
This is news?
We should apply it everyday
Submitted by Anglico on October 29, 2007 - 7:19pm.
and the outcome of that analysis would be similar . . . planted stories masking hidden agendas . . . from people who ought to know better. Or something like that.
Re: Perdue's change of birthdate
Submitted by twoshadesofblue on October 29, 2007 - 6:40pm.
Speaking of bias, should we apply "The Raleigh Soup" analysis to "Under the Dome" today?
Re: Perdue's change of birthdate
Submitted by Isaac136 on October 29, 2007 - 6:33pm.
Thenk yew~
Re: Perdue's change of birthdate
Submitted by ryanteaguebeckwith on October 29, 2007 - 6:19pm.
The person making that grammatical mistake was ... me? I?
Uh, mistakes were made.
It's been corrected.
— RTB
Re: Perdue's change of birthdate
Submitted by tnixon8084 on October 29, 2007 - 6:08pm.
Dead men tell no tales!
Re: Perdue's change of birthdate
Submitted by Isaac136 on October 29, 2007 - 5:54pm.
"making him seven months younger than SHE"
Come on now. You guys know better. Just because the spokesman was grammatically OFF ("somebody older than him" should have been somebody older than HE") doesn't mean that it's ok for you.
Don't make me report this to James Kilpatrick.
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A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company
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by doug » Mon Nov 03, 2008 6:05 am
McCain campaign accused of 'Hispandering'
An English-language advocate isn't surprised that Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin would use a Spanish television network to discuss the topic of illegal immigration.
On October 21, Palin appeared on Univision television's Aqui y Ahora (Here and Now) program. The reporter asked her a number of questions about illegal immigration, including whether she favored amnesty for 12-to-13 million illegal aliens. Palin said while she does not favor total amnesty, she does support a pathway to citizenship for illegals. She added that there is "no way" the U.S. would round up and deport every illegal immigrant.
"Not only economically is that just an impossibility," the Alaska governor explained, "but that's not a humane way anyway to deal with the issue that we face with illegal immigration."
Jim Boulet, executive director of English First, claims Palin is merely a mouthpiece for McCain's ideas on immigration.
"We have to remember that Governor Palin is not a free agent here. She's the junior member of a presidential ticket, and so she is going to largely have to do as she's told if something is important to the McCain campaign," he contends. "If you look at her remarks, they might as well have been written by the McCain campaign -- a McCainian muddle of, 'Well, I'm against amnesty, but I'm for a path to citizenship, and we can't round up everybody.'"
According to Boulet, the Palin interview on Univision appears to be an effort by the McCain campaign to do a little -- as he describes it -- "Hispandering."
Copyright 2006-2008 American Family News Network - All Rights Reserved.
An English-language advocate isn't surprised that Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin would use a Spanish television network to discuss the topic of illegal immigration.
On October 21, Palin appeared on Univision television's Aqui y Ahora (Here and Now) program. The reporter asked her a number of questions about illegal immigration, including whether she favored amnesty for 12-to-13 million illegal aliens. Palin said while she does not favor total amnesty, she does support a pathway to citizenship for illegals. She added that there is "no way" the U.S. would round up and deport every illegal immigrant.
"Not only economically is that just an impossibility," the Alaska governor explained, "but that's not a humane way anyway to deal with the issue that we face with illegal immigration."
Jim Boulet, executive director of English First, claims Palin is merely a mouthpiece for McCain's ideas on immigration.
"We have to remember that Governor Palin is not a free agent here. She's the junior member of a presidential ticket, and so she is going to largely have to do as she's told if something is important to the McCain campaign," he contends. "If you look at her remarks, they might as well have been written by the McCain campaign -- a McCainian muddle of, 'Well, I'm against amnesty, but I'm for a path to citizenship, and we can't round up everybody.'"
According to Boulet, the Palin interview on Univision appears to be an effort by the McCain campaign to do a little -- as he describes it -- "Hispandering."
Copyright 2006-2008 American Family News Network - All Rights Reserved.
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- doug
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by doug » Thu Nov 06, 2008 9:50 am
NYT: Rifts divided McCain, Palin camps
Republican's running mate appeared to have been catalyst for infighting
Republican Sen. John McCain delivers his concession speech to an election-night rally in Phoenix, Ariz., on Tuesday. McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, looks on.
By Elisabeth Bumiller
The New York Times
PHOENIX - As a top adviser in Senator John McCain’s now-imploded campaign tells the story, it was bad enough that Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska unwittingly scheduled, and then took, a prank telephone call from a Canadian comedian posing as the president of France. Far worse, the adviser said, she failed to inform her ticketmate about her rogue diplomacy.
As a senior adviser in the Palin campaign tells the story, the charge is absurd. The call had been on Ms. Palin’s schedule for three days and she should not have been faulted if the McCain campaign was too clueless to notice.
Whatever the truth, one thing is certain. Ms. Palin, who laughingly told the prankster that she could be president “maybe in eight years,” was the catalyst for a civil war between her campaign and Mr. McCain’s that raged from mid-September up until moments before Mr. McCain’s concession speech on Tuesday night. By then, Ms. Palin was in only infrequent contact with Mr. McCain, top advisers said.
“I think it was a difficult relationship,” said one top McCain campaign official, who, like almost all others interviewed, asked to remain anonymous. “McCain talked to her occasionally.”
But Mr. McCain’s advisers also described him as admiring of Ms. Palin’s political skills. He was aware of the infighting, they said, but it is unclear how much he was inclined or able to stop it.
The tensions and their increasingly public airing provide a revealing coda to the ill-fated McCain-Palin ticket, hinting at the mounting turmoil of a campaign that was described even by many Republicans as incoherent, negative and badly run.
For her part, Ms. Palin told reporters in Arizona on Wednesday morning that “there is absolutely no diva in me.”
Later in the day, she refused to address the strife within the campaigns. “I have absolutely no intention of engaging in any of the negativity because this has been all positive for me,” she said, adding that it was time to savor President-elect Barack Obama’s victory and “not let the pettiness or maybe internal workings of a campaign erode any of the recognition of this historic moment.”
As the ticketmate with a potentially brighter political future, Ms. Palin has more at stake going forward than Mr. McCain, whose aides now have an interest in blaming outside factors for their loss, making Ms. Palin a tempting target. And even as the votes from the election were still being counted, there were new recriminations, with Mr. McCain’s aides suggesting that a Palin aide had leaked damaging information about them to reporters.
The tensions were described in interviews with top aides to the two campaigns who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be seen as disloyal to Mr. McCain’s effort at a difficult time.
Finger-pointing at the end of a losing campaign is traditional and to a large degree predictable, as Mr. McCain himself acknowledged in a prescient interview in July.
“Every book I’ve read about a campaign is that the one that won, it was a perfect and beautifully run campaign with geniuses running it and incredible messaging, etcetera,” Mr. McCain said then. “And always the one that lost, ‘Oh, completely screwed up, too much infighting, bad people, etcetera.’ So if I win, I believe that historians will say, ‘Way to go, he fine-tuned that campaign, and he got the right people in the right place and as the campaign grew, he gave them more responsibility.’ If I lose,” people will say, “ ‘That campaign, always in disarray.’ ”
The disputes between the campaigns centered in large part on the Republican National Committee’s $150,000 wardrobe for Ms. Palin and her family, but also on what McCain advisers considered Ms. Palin’s lack of preparation for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric of CBS News and her refusal to take advice from Mr. McCain’s campaign.
But behind those episodes may be a greater subtext: anger within the McCain camp that Ms. Palin harbored political ambitions beyond 2008.
As late as Tuesday night, a McCain adviser said, Ms. Palin was pushing to deliver her own speech just before Mr. McCain’s concession speech, even though vice-presidential nominees do not traditionally speak on election night. But Ms. Palin met up with Mr. McCain with text in hand. She was told no by Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, and Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain’s top strategist.
On Wednesday, two top McCain campaign advisers said that the clothing purchases for Ms. Palin and her family were a particular source of outrage for them. As they portrayed it, Ms. Palin had been advised by Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain aide, that she should buy three new suits for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in September and three additional suits for the fall campaign. The budget for the clothes was anticipated to be from $20,000 to $25,000, the officials said.
Instead, in a public relations debacle undermining Ms. Palin’s image as an everywoman “hockey mom,” bills came in to the Republican National Committee for about $150,000, including charges of $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue. The bills included clothing for Ms. Palin’s family and purchases of shoes, luggage and jewelry, the advisers said.
The advisers described the McCain campaign as incredulous about the shopping spree and said Republican National Committee lawyers were likely to go to Alaska to conduct an inventory and try to account for all that was spent.
Ms. Palin has defended her wardrobe as the idea of the Republican National Committee and said that she would give it back.
“Those clothes, they are not my property,” she said. “Just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the R.N.C. purchased.”
Advisers in the McCain campaign, in suggesting that Palin advisers had been leaking damaging information about the McCain campaign to the news media, said they were particularly suspicious of Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy aide who had a central role in preparing Ms. Palin for the vice-presidential debate.
As a result, two senior members of the McCain campaign said on Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had been fired from the campaign in its final days. But Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, and Mr. Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, said Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had in fact not been dismissed. Mr. Scheunemann, who picked up the phone in his office at McCain campaign headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, responded that “anybody who says I was fired is either lying or delusional or a whack job.”
Mr. Scheunemann was referring to widely disseminated criticism by Mr. McCain’s advisers in the final days of the campaign that Ms. Palin, as first reported in Politico, was a “whack job.”
Whatever the permutations, the advisers said they strongly believed that Mr. Scheunemann was disclosing, as one put it, “a constant stream of poison” to William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a columnist for The New York Times.
Mr. Kristol, who wrote a column on Oct. 13 calling on Mr. McCain to fire his campaign because it was “close to being out-and-out dysfunctional,” said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the campaign advisers were paranoid. Mr. Kristol has been a strong supporter of Ms. Palin.
“I wasn’t writing poison,” Mr. Kristol said. He added: “Randy Scheunemann is a friend of mine and I think he did a good job. I talked to him, but I talked to a lot of people at the campaign.”
The McCain camp was further upset about Ms. Palin’s interview with Ms. Couric, which was broadcast at a time when Ms. Palin was meeting with foreign leaders at the United Nations and trying to establish some foreign policy credentials. Ms. Palin’s wobbly and tongue-tied performance was mocked in an iconic impersonation on “Saturday Night Live” by Tina Fey.
Ms. Palin, who had prepared for and survived an initial interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News, did not have the time or focus to prepare for Ms. Couric, the McCain advisers said. “She did not say, ‘I will not prepare,’ ” a McCain adviser said. “She just didn’t have a bandwidth to do a mock interview session the way we had prepared before. She was just overloaded.”
One of the last straws for the McCain advisers came just days before the election when news broke that Ms. Palin had taken a call made by Marc-Antoine Audette. Mr. Audette and his fellow comedian Sebastien Trudel are notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads of state.
Ms. Palin appeared to believe that she was talking to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, even though the prankster had a flamboyant French accent and spoke to her in a more personal way than would be protocol in such a call. At one point, he told Ms. Palin that she would make a good president some day. “Maybe in eight years,” she replied.
Julie Bosman and Michael Cooper contributed reporting.
Copyright © 2008 The New York Times
Republican's running mate appeared to have been catalyst for infighting
Republican Sen. John McCain delivers his concession speech to an election-night rally in Phoenix, Ariz., on Tuesday. McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, looks on.
By Elisabeth Bumiller
The New York Times
PHOENIX - As a top adviser in Senator John McCain’s now-imploded campaign tells the story, it was bad enough that Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska unwittingly scheduled, and then took, a prank telephone call from a Canadian comedian posing as the president of France. Far worse, the adviser said, she failed to inform her ticketmate about her rogue diplomacy.
As a senior adviser in the Palin campaign tells the story, the charge is absurd. The call had been on Ms. Palin’s schedule for three days and she should not have been faulted if the McCain campaign was too clueless to notice.
Whatever the truth, one thing is certain. Ms. Palin, who laughingly told the prankster that she could be president “maybe in eight years,” was the catalyst for a civil war between her campaign and Mr. McCain’s that raged from mid-September up until moments before Mr. McCain’s concession speech on Tuesday night. By then, Ms. Palin was in only infrequent contact with Mr. McCain, top advisers said.
“I think it was a difficult relationship,” said one top McCain campaign official, who, like almost all others interviewed, asked to remain anonymous. “McCain talked to her occasionally.”
But Mr. McCain’s advisers also described him as admiring of Ms. Palin’s political skills. He was aware of the infighting, they said, but it is unclear how much he was inclined or able to stop it.
The tensions and their increasingly public airing provide a revealing coda to the ill-fated McCain-Palin ticket, hinting at the mounting turmoil of a campaign that was described even by many Republicans as incoherent, negative and badly run.
For her part, Ms. Palin told reporters in Arizona on Wednesday morning that “there is absolutely no diva in me.”
Later in the day, she refused to address the strife within the campaigns. “I have absolutely no intention of engaging in any of the negativity because this has been all positive for me,” she said, adding that it was time to savor President-elect Barack Obama’s victory and “not let the pettiness or maybe internal workings of a campaign erode any of the recognition of this historic moment.”
As the ticketmate with a potentially brighter political future, Ms. Palin has more at stake going forward than Mr. McCain, whose aides now have an interest in blaming outside factors for their loss, making Ms. Palin a tempting target. And even as the votes from the election were still being counted, there were new recriminations, with Mr. McCain’s aides suggesting that a Palin aide had leaked damaging information about them to reporters.
The tensions were described in interviews with top aides to the two campaigns who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be seen as disloyal to Mr. McCain’s effort at a difficult time.
Finger-pointing at the end of a losing campaign is traditional and to a large degree predictable, as Mr. McCain himself acknowledged in a prescient interview in July.
“Every book I’ve read about a campaign is that the one that won, it was a perfect and beautifully run campaign with geniuses running it and incredible messaging, etcetera,” Mr. McCain said then. “And always the one that lost, ‘Oh, completely screwed up, too much infighting, bad people, etcetera.’ So if I win, I believe that historians will say, ‘Way to go, he fine-tuned that campaign, and he got the right people in the right place and as the campaign grew, he gave them more responsibility.’ If I lose,” people will say, “ ‘That campaign, always in disarray.’ ”
The disputes between the campaigns centered in large part on the Republican National Committee’s $150,000 wardrobe for Ms. Palin and her family, but also on what McCain advisers considered Ms. Palin’s lack of preparation for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric of CBS News and her refusal to take advice from Mr. McCain’s campaign.
But behind those episodes may be a greater subtext: anger within the McCain camp that Ms. Palin harbored political ambitions beyond 2008.
As late as Tuesday night, a McCain adviser said, Ms. Palin was pushing to deliver her own speech just before Mr. McCain’s concession speech, even though vice-presidential nominees do not traditionally speak on election night. But Ms. Palin met up with Mr. McCain with text in hand. She was told no by Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, and Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain’s top strategist.
On Wednesday, two top McCain campaign advisers said that the clothing purchases for Ms. Palin and her family were a particular source of outrage for them. As they portrayed it, Ms. Palin had been advised by Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain aide, that she should buy three new suits for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in September and three additional suits for the fall campaign. The budget for the clothes was anticipated to be from $20,000 to $25,000, the officials said.
Instead, in a public relations debacle undermining Ms. Palin’s image as an everywoman “hockey mom,” bills came in to the Republican National Committee for about $150,000, including charges of $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue. The bills included clothing for Ms. Palin’s family and purchases of shoes, luggage and jewelry, the advisers said.
The advisers described the McCain campaign as incredulous about the shopping spree and said Republican National Committee lawyers were likely to go to Alaska to conduct an inventory and try to account for all that was spent.
Ms. Palin has defended her wardrobe as the idea of the Republican National Committee and said that she would give it back.
“Those clothes, they are not my property,” she said. “Just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the R.N.C. purchased.”
Advisers in the McCain campaign, in suggesting that Palin advisers had been leaking damaging information about the McCain campaign to the news media, said they were particularly suspicious of Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy aide who had a central role in preparing Ms. Palin for the vice-presidential debate.
As a result, two senior members of the McCain campaign said on Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had been fired from the campaign in its final days. But Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, and Mr. Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, said Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had in fact not been dismissed. Mr. Scheunemann, who picked up the phone in his office at McCain campaign headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, responded that “anybody who says I was fired is either lying or delusional or a whack job.”
Mr. Scheunemann was referring to widely disseminated criticism by Mr. McCain’s advisers in the final days of the campaign that Ms. Palin, as first reported in Politico, was a “whack job.”
Whatever the permutations, the advisers said they strongly believed that Mr. Scheunemann was disclosing, as one put it, “a constant stream of poison” to William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a columnist for The New York Times.
Mr. Kristol, who wrote a column on Oct. 13 calling on Mr. McCain to fire his campaign because it was “close to being out-and-out dysfunctional,” said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the campaign advisers were paranoid. Mr. Kristol has been a strong supporter of Ms. Palin.
“I wasn’t writing poison,” Mr. Kristol said. He added: “Randy Scheunemann is a friend of mine and I think he did a good job. I talked to him, but I talked to a lot of people at the campaign.”
The McCain camp was further upset about Ms. Palin’s interview with Ms. Couric, which was broadcast at a time when Ms. Palin was meeting with foreign leaders at the United Nations and trying to establish some foreign policy credentials. Ms. Palin’s wobbly and tongue-tied performance was mocked in an iconic impersonation on “Saturday Night Live” by Tina Fey.
Ms. Palin, who had prepared for and survived an initial interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News, did not have the time or focus to prepare for Ms. Couric, the McCain advisers said. “She did not say, ‘I will not prepare,’ ” a McCain adviser said. “She just didn’t have a bandwidth to do a mock interview session the way we had prepared before. She was just overloaded.”
One of the last straws for the McCain advisers came just days before the election when news broke that Ms. Palin had taken a call made by Marc-Antoine Audette. Mr. Audette and his fellow comedian Sebastien Trudel are notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads of state.
Ms. Palin appeared to believe that she was talking to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, even though the prankster had a flamboyant French accent and spoke to her in a more personal way than would be protocol in such a call. At one point, he told Ms. Palin that she would make a good president some day. “Maybe in eight years,” she replied.
Julie Bosman and Michael Cooper contributed reporting.
Copyright © 2008 The New York Times
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- doug
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by doug » Wed Nov 12, 2008 7:56 am
NYT: Palin calls her critics 'jerks'
Alaska governor says Africa, Nafta comments were 'taken out of context'
By WILLIAM YARDLEY and MICHAEL COOPER
The New York Times
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska fired back Friday at the unnamed McCain campaign aides who have been maligning her in recent days, saying that their criticism was “cruel and it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional, and those guys are jerks.”
Ms. Palin spoke out upon her return to the governor’s office here, defending herself from a barrage of criticism that has been aimed at her from unnamed McCain aides ever since the McCain-Palin ticket was defeated Tuesday.
The McCain campaign aides complained about the $150,000 that the Republican National Committee had spent on Ms. Palin’s clothes, the way a Canadian comedian was able to embarrass the campaign by calling her and pretending to be the president of France, and the political ambitions she seemed to harbor beyond 2008.
By the end of the week, their complaints had escalated considerably, with Fox News quoting unnamed McCain campaign officials as saying that Ms. Palin had not known that Africa was a continent, not a country, and claiming that she did not know which countries were covered by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
'Cowardly'
Ms. Palin told reporters in Alaska that the anonymous criticism was “cowardly,” and that she had discussed the campaign’s position on Nafta at her debate prep sessions.
“I remember having a discussion with a couple of debate preppers,” she said. “So if it came from one of those debate preppers, you know, that’s curious. But having a discussion about Nafta — not, ‘Oh my goodness, I don’t know who is a part of Nafta.’ ”
“So, no, I think that if there are allegations based on questions or comments that I made in debate prep about Nafta, and about the continent versus the country when we talk about Africa there, then those were taken out of context,” Ms. Palin said. “And that’s cruel and it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional, and those guys are jerks, if they came away with it taking things out of context and then tried to spread something on national news. It is not fair and not right.”
Ms. Palin fought back after the infighting had made its way up to Senator John McCain, who made it clear that that he was upset by the back and forth, and ordered his campaign workers to stop it, aides said. Some in the staff worried that questioning the qualifications of the woman Mr. McCain had chosen as his running mate was damaging his reputation.
Ms. Palin said that her experience made her realize how brutal national politics could be. And she had some pungent criticism of the national news media, saying that there had been some bad apples in the bunch.
“For the most part, absolutely, media persons, reporters, have been absolutely right on and there has been fairness and objectivity,” she said. “There have been some stinkers, though, who have kind of made the whole basket full of apples, once in a while, smell kind of bad.”
Senior McCain aides had moved to quell the divisions earlier in the day. Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain campaign aide who worked with Ms. Palin, defended her Friday on NBC’s “Today.”
“She is perhaps the most un-diva politician I’ve ever seen,” Ms. Wallace said. “The only thing I’ve ever seen her ask for is a diet soda.”
Randy Scheunemann — a foreign policy adviser to the campaign who some factions claimed was fired in the final week, but others said had not been — said that some of the claims about her were false, and ultimately damaging to Mr. McCain.
“The people that are spreading these lies refuse to go on the record,” Mr. Scheunemann said. “They obviously have no loyalty to John McCain or to the person John McCain chose to be his vice president.”
'No clothes audit'
Ms. Palin initially brushed off the criticisms, but upon her return home decided to address them. She said that threats that the Republican National Committee would send lawyers to Alaska to audit the clothes they had bought her were false.
“There is no clothes audit, except for when the belly of the plane got cleaned out, all the piles of the clothes that they had in there, they wanted me at my house to go through it and box things up and send it,” Ms. Palin said during a brief interview in her Anchorage office.
“There’s no attorneys coming up, and there’s no need for it or anything else,” she said. “But that’ll be nice to have that chapter closed because, as I said from Day 1, I never have asked for anything. I’m not, I’m not keeping anything either.”
Mr. McCain has planned his first post-election television interview for Tuesday, when he will appear on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”
When Ms. Palin was asked by an entertainment reporter if she would consider becoming a talk show host, she said, “I don’t have any idea of what the next chapter of life is going to open up into, and I look forward to just the surprises that life offers.”
William Yardley reported from Anchorage, and Michael Cooper from New York. Julie Bosman and Brian Stelter contributed reporting from New York.
This story, Palin Calls Critics Among McCain Aides ‘Jerks’, originally appeared in the New York Times.
Copyright © 2008 The New York Times
Alaska governor says Africa, Nafta comments were 'taken out of context'
By WILLIAM YARDLEY and MICHAEL COOPER
The New York Times
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska fired back Friday at the unnamed McCain campaign aides who have been maligning her in recent days, saying that their criticism was “cruel and it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional, and those guys are jerks.”
Ms. Palin spoke out upon her return to the governor’s office here, defending herself from a barrage of criticism that has been aimed at her from unnamed McCain aides ever since the McCain-Palin ticket was defeated Tuesday.
The McCain campaign aides complained about the $150,000 that the Republican National Committee had spent on Ms. Palin’s clothes, the way a Canadian comedian was able to embarrass the campaign by calling her and pretending to be the president of France, and the political ambitions she seemed to harbor beyond 2008.
By the end of the week, their complaints had escalated considerably, with Fox News quoting unnamed McCain campaign officials as saying that Ms. Palin had not known that Africa was a continent, not a country, and claiming that she did not know which countries were covered by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
'Cowardly'
Ms. Palin told reporters in Alaska that the anonymous criticism was “cowardly,” and that she had discussed the campaign’s position on Nafta at her debate prep sessions.
“I remember having a discussion with a couple of debate preppers,” she said. “So if it came from one of those debate preppers, you know, that’s curious. But having a discussion about Nafta — not, ‘Oh my goodness, I don’t know who is a part of Nafta.’ ”
“So, no, I think that if there are allegations based on questions or comments that I made in debate prep about Nafta, and about the continent versus the country when we talk about Africa there, then those were taken out of context,” Ms. Palin said. “And that’s cruel and it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional, and those guys are jerks, if they came away with it taking things out of context and then tried to spread something on national news. It is not fair and not right.”
Ms. Palin fought back after the infighting had made its way up to Senator John McCain, who made it clear that that he was upset by the back and forth, and ordered his campaign workers to stop it, aides said. Some in the staff worried that questioning the qualifications of the woman Mr. McCain had chosen as his running mate was damaging his reputation.
Ms. Palin said that her experience made her realize how brutal national politics could be. And she had some pungent criticism of the national news media, saying that there had been some bad apples in the bunch.
“For the most part, absolutely, media persons, reporters, have been absolutely right on and there has been fairness and objectivity,” she said. “There have been some stinkers, though, who have kind of made the whole basket full of apples, once in a while, smell kind of bad.”
Senior McCain aides had moved to quell the divisions earlier in the day. Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain campaign aide who worked with Ms. Palin, defended her Friday on NBC’s “Today.”
“She is perhaps the most un-diva politician I’ve ever seen,” Ms. Wallace said. “The only thing I’ve ever seen her ask for is a diet soda.”
Randy Scheunemann — a foreign policy adviser to the campaign who some factions claimed was fired in the final week, but others said had not been — said that some of the claims about her were false, and ultimately damaging to Mr. McCain.
“The people that are spreading these lies refuse to go on the record,” Mr. Scheunemann said. “They obviously have no loyalty to John McCain or to the person John McCain chose to be his vice president.”
'No clothes audit'
Ms. Palin initially brushed off the criticisms, but upon her return home decided to address them. She said that threats that the Republican National Committee would send lawyers to Alaska to audit the clothes they had bought her were false.
“There is no clothes audit, except for when the belly of the plane got cleaned out, all the piles of the clothes that they had in there, they wanted me at my house to go through it and box things up and send it,” Ms. Palin said during a brief interview in her Anchorage office.
“There’s no attorneys coming up, and there’s no need for it or anything else,” she said. “But that’ll be nice to have that chapter closed because, as I said from Day 1, I never have asked for anything. I’m not, I’m not keeping anything either.”
Mr. McCain has planned his first post-election television interview for Tuesday, when he will appear on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”
When Ms. Palin was asked by an entertainment reporter if she would consider becoming a talk show host, she said, “I don’t have any idea of what the next chapter of life is going to open up into, and I look forward to just the surprises that life offers.”
William Yardley reported from Anchorage, and Michael Cooper from New York. Julie Bosman and Brian Stelter contributed reporting from New York.
This story, Palin Calls Critics Among McCain Aides ‘Jerks’, originally appeared in the New York Times.
Copyright © 2008 The New York Times
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by doug » Mon Nov 24, 2008 11:04 am
Did Biden Get It Wrong? You Betcha
Monday, October 06, 2008
By John R. Lott, Jr.
When you interview for a job, here is a hint: make sure you know what the job is. Joe Biden failed that test last Thursday. He couldn’t even get right what a vice president does, but the media didn’t notice.
The media is all over itself about how smart and experienced Biden is. Political analyst Charlie Cook is quoted in the Washington Post on Saturday as saying “Biden is clearly so much more knowledgeable, by a factor of about a million.” Saturday Night Live does a skit about Biden being smart, if slimy. Meanwhile, Governor Sarah Palin is treated as being nothing more than a simpleton.
Yet, take Biden’s statement from the debate on the role of the vice president:
Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.
And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit.
The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he's part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive, and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous.
One should be careful when throwing around terms such as “most dangerous” and “bizarre.” But Biden is confusing which part of the Constitution covers the Executive Branch (it is Article II, not Article I). More importantly, the notion that the vice president can preside over the Senate only when there is a tie vote is simply wrong. Nor is it true that the only legislative involvement the vice president has is to break tie votes. The vice president is the president of the Senate, where he interprets the rules and can only be overridden by a vote of 60 senators.
Early vice presidents spent a lot of time in the Senate. Thomas Jefferson even spent his time writing “A Manual of Parliamentary Practice: for the Use of the Senate of the United States.” Modern vice presidents may show up only when they think tie votes will occur, but that is their choice.
This isn’t rocket science. The Constitution on this point is very straightforward: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”
Instead, it was Palin who got it right. Besides correctly stating that the vice president holds positions in both the executive and legislative branches, she also noted that:
Of course, we know what a vice president does. And that's not only to preside over the Senate and [I] will take that position very seriously also. I'm thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president if that vice president so chooses to exert it in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president's policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are.
But just as the vice president’s job includes more than simply being ready to assume the presidency if the president dies, the Constitution merely states what the vice president’s minimum responsibilities are.
Compare the uproar over Palin’s answer to Charlie Gibson about the “Bush Doctrine,” a doctrine that Gibson clearly didn’t understand and for which there apparently exist at least four different versions. Where is the outrage over Biden not understanding what vice presidents do? For Biden, his inability to correctly say what vice presidents do was surely his “gotcha” moment.
Yet, this mistake during the debate was hardly unique. Biden got a lot of things wrong in the debate that are going unnoticed by the fact-check media. Take just a few:
-- Will McCain's health care proposals raise taxes? Biden says that McCain’s proposal will cost people money. The Tax Foundation finds that could easily be "roughly deficit-neutral over ten years."
-- Under an Obama Administration the middle class will "pay no more than they did under Ronald Reagan"? No, the tax rates will be similar to the higher rates under Clinton.
-- Did "we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country"? No, one year’s worth of spending in Iraq equaled five in Afghanistan.
-- France and the U.S. "kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon"? No, and it wouldn't have made much more sense if he had said "Syria" instead.
-- Is it really “simply not true” that Obama said that he would meet with the leader of countries such as Iran without preconditions? No, Obama said “I would.”
-- Did Obama warn against letting Hamas participate in Palestinian legislative elections in 2005? No.
-- Do “Iraqis have an $80 billion surplus”? No. If oil prices had remained high, it might have reached $50 billion by the end of this year.
-- Finally, an amusing point as evidence that Biden is just one of the people he pointed to, inviting anyone to have a beer with him at "Katie's Restaurant" in Wilmington, Del. Unfortunately, people will have a hard time taking him up on his offer, since the restaurant hasn't had that name for probably 15 years.
Unfortunately, voters who are trying to get an accurate count on whether the candidates are telling the truth can’t rely on the media. FactCheck.org mentions only one of these points, the size of the Iraqi surplus. The Washington Post mentioned Biden’s misstatement on Hamas and Katie’s restaurant. AOL’s coverage of the errors in the vice presidential debate was by far the worst, though that might not be too surprising given that Tommy Christopher, who wrote their news analysis, also blogs on the Obama Web site. None of these checkers mentioned Biden's statements about the role of the vice president.
Compare this to the attacks on Sarah Palin:
-- FactCheck.org criticizes Palin for claiming that McCain’s health care tax credits will be "budget neutral" – they argue that the tax credit will be larger than the new taxes that the program will impose. Fine, but if the people at FactCheck.org believe that is true and that the Tax Foundation is wrong, Biden’s claim about increased taxes is even more inaccurate. But FactCheck.org doesn't even mention Biden’s statement from the debate.
-- From AOL's news analysis piece. “Palin: Said that it is untrue that the U.S. is killing civilians in Afghanistan. According to an analysis by the AP, however, the U.S. is killing more civilians than insurgents are.”
What Palin actually said was: “Now, Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians.” Whether one believes the AP estimate or not, the question is whether she was accurately characterizing Obama’s statement of the job that our forces were doing. And Obama said, “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians” (emphasis added).
-- FactCheck.org’s first critique claims that Palin was wrong to claim that troop levels in Iraq are down to their pre-surge levels. They are correct that after the recently announced drawdown, 6,000 more troops will be in Iraq than immediately before the surge. But why not mention that 84 percent of the 38,000 troops in the surge are home or are in the process of coming home?
The media seems to have been covering for Biden for some time. While news stories still talk about Dan Quayle’s spelling mistake 18 years later, there has been almost no news coverage of Biden’s numerous wacky statements. What if Quayle had said something similar to Biden’s recent statement that, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'" A neat trick given that Herbert Hoover was president in 1929 and no one was watching television.
It might not fit the simple template for a 36-year veteran of the Senate to not understand what vice presidents do (after all, eight vice presidents have served with him), but Biden knew less about this than the political outsider, Sarah Palin. Given that they are running to be vice president, why didn’t that story dominate the news coverage after the debate?
John Lott is the author of Freedomnomics and a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland.
© 2008 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.
Monday, October 06, 2008
By John R. Lott, Jr.
When you interview for a job, here is a hint: make sure you know what the job is. Joe Biden failed that test last Thursday. He couldn’t even get right what a vice president does, but the media didn’t notice.
The media is all over itself about how smart and experienced Biden is. Political analyst Charlie Cook is quoted in the Washington Post on Saturday as saying “Biden is clearly so much more knowledgeable, by a factor of about a million.” Saturday Night Live does a skit about Biden being smart, if slimy. Meanwhile, Governor Sarah Palin is treated as being nothing more than a simpleton.
Yet, take Biden’s statement from the debate on the role of the vice president:
Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.
And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit.
The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he's part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive, and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous.
One should be careful when throwing around terms such as “most dangerous” and “bizarre.” But Biden is confusing which part of the Constitution covers the Executive Branch (it is Article II, not Article I). More importantly, the notion that the vice president can preside over the Senate only when there is a tie vote is simply wrong. Nor is it true that the only legislative involvement the vice president has is to break tie votes. The vice president is the president of the Senate, where he interprets the rules and can only be overridden by a vote of 60 senators.
Early vice presidents spent a lot of time in the Senate. Thomas Jefferson even spent his time writing “A Manual of Parliamentary Practice: for the Use of the Senate of the United States.” Modern vice presidents may show up only when they think tie votes will occur, but that is their choice.
This isn’t rocket science. The Constitution on this point is very straightforward: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”
Instead, it was Palin who got it right. Besides correctly stating that the vice president holds positions in both the executive and legislative branches, she also noted that:
Of course, we know what a vice president does. And that's not only to preside over the Senate and [I] will take that position very seriously also. I'm thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president if that vice president so chooses to exert it in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president's policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are.
But just as the vice president’s job includes more than simply being ready to assume the presidency if the president dies, the Constitution merely states what the vice president’s minimum responsibilities are.
Compare the uproar over Palin’s answer to Charlie Gibson about the “Bush Doctrine,” a doctrine that Gibson clearly didn’t understand and for which there apparently exist at least four different versions. Where is the outrage over Biden not understanding what vice presidents do? For Biden, his inability to correctly say what vice presidents do was surely his “gotcha” moment.
Yet, this mistake during the debate was hardly unique. Biden got a lot of things wrong in the debate that are going unnoticed by the fact-check media. Take just a few:
-- Will McCain's health care proposals raise taxes? Biden says that McCain’s proposal will cost people money. The Tax Foundation finds that could easily be "roughly deficit-neutral over ten years."
-- Under an Obama Administration the middle class will "pay no more than they did under Ronald Reagan"? No, the tax rates will be similar to the higher rates under Clinton.
-- Did "we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country"? No, one year’s worth of spending in Iraq equaled five in Afghanistan.
-- France and the U.S. "kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon"? No, and it wouldn't have made much more sense if he had said "Syria" instead.
-- Is it really “simply not true” that Obama said that he would meet with the leader of countries such as Iran without preconditions? No, Obama said “I would.”
-- Did Obama warn against letting Hamas participate in Palestinian legislative elections in 2005? No.
-- Do “Iraqis have an $80 billion surplus”? No. If oil prices had remained high, it might have reached $50 billion by the end of this year.
-- Finally, an amusing point as evidence that Biden is just one of the people he pointed to, inviting anyone to have a beer with him at "Katie's Restaurant" in Wilmington, Del. Unfortunately, people will have a hard time taking him up on his offer, since the restaurant hasn't had that name for probably 15 years.
Unfortunately, voters who are trying to get an accurate count on whether the candidates are telling the truth can’t rely on the media. FactCheck.org mentions only one of these points, the size of the Iraqi surplus. The Washington Post mentioned Biden’s misstatement on Hamas and Katie’s restaurant. AOL’s coverage of the errors in the vice presidential debate was by far the worst, though that might not be too surprising given that Tommy Christopher, who wrote their news analysis, also blogs on the Obama Web site. None of these checkers mentioned Biden's statements about the role of the vice president.
Compare this to the attacks on Sarah Palin:
-- FactCheck.org criticizes Palin for claiming that McCain’s health care tax credits will be "budget neutral" – they argue that the tax credit will be larger than the new taxes that the program will impose. Fine, but if the people at FactCheck.org believe that is true and that the Tax Foundation is wrong, Biden’s claim about increased taxes is even more inaccurate. But FactCheck.org doesn't even mention Biden’s statement from the debate.
-- From AOL's news analysis piece. “Palin: Said that it is untrue that the U.S. is killing civilians in Afghanistan. According to an analysis by the AP, however, the U.S. is killing more civilians than insurgents are.”
What Palin actually said was: “Now, Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians.” Whether one believes the AP estimate or not, the question is whether she was accurately characterizing Obama’s statement of the job that our forces were doing. And Obama said, “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians” (emphasis added).
-- FactCheck.org’s first critique claims that Palin was wrong to claim that troop levels in Iraq are down to their pre-surge levels. They are correct that after the recently announced drawdown, 6,000 more troops will be in Iraq than immediately before the surge. But why not mention that 84 percent of the 38,000 troops in the surge are home or are in the process of coming home?
The media seems to have been covering for Biden for some time. While news stories still talk about Dan Quayle’s spelling mistake 18 years later, there has been almost no news coverage of Biden’s numerous wacky statements. What if Quayle had said something similar to Biden’s recent statement that, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'" A neat trick given that Herbert Hoover was president in 1929 and no one was watching television.
It might not fit the simple template for a 36-year veteran of the Senate to not understand what vice presidents do (after all, eight vice presidents have served with him), but Biden knew less about this than the political outsider, Sarah Palin. Given that they are running to be vice president, why didn’t that story dominate the news coverage after the debate?
John Lott is the author of Freedomnomics and a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland.
© 2008 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.
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