NORAD: Sarah Palin has no role in guarding U.S. airspace despite claims in Katie Couric interview
Tuesday, September 30th 2008, 5:21 PM
CBSAlaska Gov. Sarah Palin talks to CBS news anchor Katie Couric in their interview last Wednesday.
WASHINGTON - When Russian bombers approach American airspace and U.S. Air Force fighters are scrambled, Sarah Palin's phone doesn't ring.
The Alaska governor has no command authority over the guardians of U.S. airspace despite her recent suggestion otherwise.
"She doesn't have any role in that process," Air Force Maj. Allen Herritage, spokesman for the Alaska North American Aerospace Defense Command, told the Daily News.
"The authority to launch and respond to a Russian incursion lies with the Alaska NORAD Region commander" - Air Force Lt. Gen. Dana Atkins, he said.
Palin said last week that her foreign policy experience includes facing the Russians.
"It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia, as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America - where do they go? It's Alaska," Palin told CBS' Katie Couric.
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"It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation," she said.
Moscow's bombers have skirted Alaskan airspace 20 times, thugh they have not violated it, during Palin's governorship, officials said.
When F-15 and F-22 interceptors scrambled from Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage in response, John McCain's running mate was not speed-dialed with the news.
"The commander does not call the governor," Herritage said.
Steven Biegun, a McCain foreign policy adviser, said Palin is informed of the fly-bys by her National Guard commander.
The Alaska Air Guard, which Palin oversees, performs airspace-watching missions only under NORAD command, and does not fly interception sorties.
Palin did get an annual Air Force briefing in February.
"She asked a lot of questions and seemed generally curious," recalled Herritage, who was there. "She was very interested in Russian long-range aviation."
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The above article points to the foolish blunder that McCain made in picking this woman as his running mate. She is involved as well in too many controversies.
Below is another article concerning the so called Wall Street Crisis: You judge for yourself. Has Bush made blunder after blunder for which over 90 % of the time McCain has voted with? The evidence is in our faces. It is up to we the people to turn things around and run these Republicans out and make, I say MAKE the Democrates do what is best for us, "We the People"!
President Bush and other inept leaders are forgetting one tiny ingredient: YOU
Wednesday, October 1st 2008, 1:40 AM
Dharapak/APPresident Bush addresses the country's economic crisis on Tuesday.
All the elected and appointed officials who hold the life of the country in their hands parade in front of us and not only can't explain how to get us out of this, they can't even explain how we got here.
VOTE: WHO DESERVES BLAME?
At the head of this parade, of course, is a sunken-eyed, bustout President, who wants you to trust him with your money; a President who spends $10 billion a month on his war in Iraq, which has a $79 billion surplus because of oil revenues.
This is a President who hasn't been able to inspire this country or lead it for years and now can't even inspire or lead his own party, a President whose approval ratings are in the same kind of nosedive as the stock market.
RELATED: ANOTHER BAILOUT VOTE ON TAP
But he wants Congress and the country to trust him and trust his Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, another member of his crackerjack cabinet, who is mercifully set to follow him out the door.
"I assure our citizens and citizens around the world that this is not the end of the legislative process," George W. Bush said Tuesday, and no one was sure whether it was good news or not.
It is no longer just about Bush, even if so much of this happened on his watch. It is not just about far-right Republicans or Democrats on the far left. It is about all of them, to whom ideology is more important than actual thought; to whom holding onto their own jobs is more important than letting you hold onto yours.
The leadership of the country at a time of crisis has become an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. They speak in billions and trillions to people drowning in credit card debt; who can't get college loans, much less pay them off; who can't afford to put gas in their cars.
They talk about the value of shares and reduction of capital gains taxes to people who have no capital, have made no gains in such a long time that they can't even remember when they did, or when they felt as if they were ahead of the game.
"Yesterday the American taxpayer lost a trillion dollars," a Republican congressman named John Campbell said on television on Tuesday afternoon. And all you want to say to Campbell and all those like him is that, no, the American taxpayers didn't lose that kind of money on Monday.
They just lost more jobs, lost another home or car, lost the chance to get a mortgage.
The taxpayers didn't lose a trillion dollars.
They just couldn't come up with $25 for a MetroCard or the $50 to fill up their gas tank. Or make the $100 minimum payment on their credit cards.
So you have ideologues on the left and right fighting it out in Congress now, yelling constantly at each other - and at you - about the economic recovery package that Bush and Paulson have sent to them, the Democrats blaming the Republicans, even though Democrats could have passed this bill, and the Republicans yelling about socialism because they listen to the right-wing yahoos on the radio.
Even when there are modest gains in the stock market, the way there were Tuesday, the people of this country still lose a little more. Lose faith, lose confidence, fear they are about to lose everything. They lose more off their savings, off the future they had planned for themselves and their children, lose more of their dreams. It is because when they look for leadership they get all these people, both parties, on the far side of the clown line.
You have Nancy (Screaming) Pelosi, speaker of the House, acting like the speaker at a big-ticket fund-raiser back home in California, when she is trying to get Bush's bill, Paulson's bill, through Congress.
It was a shockingly inappropriate and tone-deaf performance by Pelosi at the worst possible moment, a speech that was supposed to be about George Bush that was really about her. Pelosi was more interested on Monday night in pointing fingers than doing her job, which meant getting a deal.
"I'm proud of the debate," she said at the time, and you wonder where you could find anyone anywhere who agreed with her.
Pelosi talked about all the work that Rep. Henry Waxman, another Democrat out of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is going to be doing on oversight and regulations in the coming days and weeks and months. You want to ask Pelosi, ask all of them, where the oversight was in Washington when the economy of this country was disappearing into a sinkhole.
Now Wall Street is lousy with bad paper, and we are supposed to believe that this flawed, $700 billion recovery plan that Bush has sent to Capitol Hill will be the beginning of some kind of dramatic turnaround. Only nobody believes him anymore. Nobody believes any of them.
They don't know how to talk to you, or listen to your concerns, or understand lives on which Wall Street doesn't keep score. They talk constantly about doing this for you.
Only they no longer have any idea who you are.
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John McCain's fans are flipping as he flops
Monday, September 29th 2008, 4:00 AM
An unprecedented set of circumstances has changed before our eyes and everyone has been able to see them. Transformations have the dangerous rapidity of a werewolf under a full moon. Predators in full change stand before us with blood on their teeth or dressed in business suits but beginning to turn. Things have gotten hairy.
Some are thinkers, some are ideological hacks, all in the media. Thinkers rarely get in power, perhaps because they do not depend on slogans, and we all know that America would be nothing if most of its political thoughts could not fit on a campaign button.
But those thinkers are having their say and what they are saying is surprising because they have felt the anger, the disillusionment and the loss of confidence in everything from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue to one of the candidates in particular.
Perhaps most unexpected is the way that conservatives have begun to serve John McCain his head on a plate. George Will, easily one of the most eloquent and intellectually stimulating conservatives, has recently charged John McCain with not being fit for the presidency. He has become disgusted and disturbed by all of McCain's turnabouts, his shooting off his mouth before he knows anything or has a line anywhere close to actual information, and his melodramatic posturing of ideas that have no nuance and no heft. McCain's canceling his campaign in order to apparently try to steal some heroism from the financial crisis was, for Will, the final straw.
Will is not a supporter of McCain's opponent. He considers Barack Obama little more than a naive but charismatic windbag who has a lot to learn - and has disdainfully but not hysterically listed his many misgivings. But recently he made it clear that there are other considerations. While it might be painful in the short run, it is easier to learn than to change one's temperament. Sensibility is fate and Will has concluded that John McCain's would have tragic consequences for the country if he were elected.
David Brooks thinks that McCain has lost his way by repudiating his own record and giving in to a contrived version of political show business. Campaigns are little more than videos - constant shifting of position that might be dramatic but far from substantial. Brooks admires - or admired - the man when he actually lived up to his brand name as "a maverick." I think that part of the rage beneath McCain's words comes from the strain that being someone other than himself has imposed on him.
William Kristol is one of the neo-conservatives who gave Bush the intellectual basis for the invasion of Iraq and convinced him that it would be a grand campaign that would be greeted by the people of Iraq the way American troops were welcomed by the French after D-Day. They were wrong and not much has been heard of the stronger ones of the bunch but the upshot was an invasion and an occupation that has hemorrhaged money.
But now Kristol, after thinking about it and perhaps realizing that he has intellectually stepped in it already, doesn't buy the idea of the bailout proposed by Bush. Nor do a growing number of Republicans, even though the President "guarantees" us a long, hard way to go if $700 billion is not forked over almost immediately. Some say that the recalcitrant House Republicans are particularly ticked off and have lost all faith in Bush, whom they now react to as no more than a lame duck who has been shot on the porch and will stink up the property until removed.
So as we move into an uncertain future, which is what the future always is, even in the best of times, we keep hearing the blues and will continue to for some time. We are in a gigantic bucket and it will take us some effort and some years to get out of it.
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