[Vision2020] Who is the Real Sarah Palin?

[No Weatherman]

Ms. Lund,

Before I waste my time reading another Salon hit job on Sarah Palin,
can you please tell me why you think they're a credible source and why
you trust them to reveal "the real Sarah Palin."

And if I may be so bold as to ask a personal question, can you tell
this forum why you hate her with such a passion?

I don't think you see this, but your Palin related posts are dripping
with bitterness. It's like she threatened to make you "eat a fucking
bullet," to quote the martyred state trooper.

I have my genuine questions about Barack Obama, and I have serious
disagreements with him, but I don't want to see him get gang raped by
a pack of his big black brothers, to quote a disgusting comedian.

The animus that you and about four others in this forum show for Gov.
Palin is palpable and I truly do not understand it.



On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 11:30 AM, Saundra Lund <sslund_2007 at verizon.net> wrote:
> Meet Sarah Palin's radical right-wing pals
> Extremists Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll helped launch Palin's political
> career in Alaska, and in return had influence over policy. "Her door was
> open," says Chryson - and still is.
> Editor's note: Research support provided by the Nation Institute
> Investigative Fund.
> By Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert
> Oct. 10, 2008
>
> On the afternoon of Sept. 24 in downtown Palmer, Alaska, as the sun began to
> sink behind the snowcapped mountains that flank the picturesque Mat-Su
> Valley, 51-year-old Mark Chryson sat for an hour on a park bench, reveling
> in tales of his days as chairman of the Alaska Independence Party. The
> stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic
> battles to eliminate taxes, support the "traditional family" and secede from
> the United States.
>
> So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said
> Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He
> invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that
> were intended for his personal protection. "This here is my attack dog," he
> said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from
> his passenger seat. "Her name is Suzy." Then he pulled a 9-millimeter
> Makarov PM pistol -- once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops -- out
> of his glove compartment. "I've got enough weaponry to raise a small army in
> my basement," he said, clutching the gun in his palm. "Then again, so do
> most Alaskans." But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of
> that faraway place some Alaskans call "the 48." "We want to go our separate
> ways," he said, "but we are not going to kill you."
>
> Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the
> secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other
> like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not
> without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah
> Palin. An obscure figure outside of Alaska, Chryson has been a political
> fixture in the hometown of the Republican vice-presidential nominee for over
> a decade. During the 1990s, when Chryson directed the AIP, he and another
> radical right-winger, Steve Stoll, played a quiet but pivotal role in
> electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda
> afterward. Both Stoll and Chryson not only contributed to Palin's campaign
> financially, they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp
> before, during and after her victory.
>
> Palin backed Chryson as he successfully advanced a host of anti-tax, pro-gun
> initiatives, including one that altered the state Constitution's language to
> better facilitate the formation of anti-government militias. She joined in
> their vendetta against several local officials they disliked, and listened
> to their advice about hiring. She attempted to name Stoll, a John Birch
> Society activist known in the Mat-Su Valley as "Black Helicopter Steve," to
> an empty Wasilla City Council seat. "Every time I showed up her door was
> open," said Chryson. "And that policy continued when she became governor."
>
> When Chryson first met Sarah Palin, however, he didn't really trust her
> politically. It was the early 1990s, when he was a member of a local
> libertarian pressure group called SAGE, or Standing Against Government
> Excess. (SAGE's founder, Tammy McGraw, was Palin's birth coach.) Palin was a
> leader in a pro-sales-tax citizens group called WOW, or Watch Over Wasilla,
> earning a political credential before her 1992 campaign for City Council.
> Though he was impressed by her interpersonal skills, Chryson greeted Palin's
> election warily, thinking she was too close to the Democrats on the council
> and too pro-tax.
>
> But soon, Palin and Chryson discovered they could be useful to each other.
> Palin would be running for mayor, while Chryson was about to take over the
> chairmanship of the Alaska Independence Party, which at its peak in 1990 had
> managed to elect a governor.
>
> The AIP was born of the vision of "Old Joe" Vogler, a hard-bitten former
> gold miner who hated the government of the United States almost as much as
> he hated wolves and environmentalists. His resentment peaked during the
> early 1970s when the federal government began installing Alaska's oil and
> gas pipeline. Fueled by raw rage -- "The United States has made a colony of
> Alaska," he told author John McPhee in 1977 -- Vogler declared a maverick
> candidacy for the governorship in 1982. Though he lost, Old Joe became a
> force to be reckoned with, as well as a constant source of amusement for
> Alaska's political class. During a gubernatorial debate in 1982, Vogler
> proposed using nuclear weapons to obliterate the glaciers blocking roadways
> to Juneau. "There's gold under there!" he exclaimed.
>
> Vogler made another failed run for the governor's mansion in 1986. But the
> AIP's fortunes shifted suddenly four years later when Vogler convinced
> Richard Nixon's former interior secretary, Wally Hickel, to run for governor
> under his party's banner. Hickel coasted to victory, outflanking a moderate
> Republican and a centrist Democrat. An archconservative Republican running
> under the AIP candidate, Jack Coghill, was elected lieutenant governor.
>
> Hickel's subsequent failure as governor to press for a vote on Alaskan
> independence rankled Old Joe. With sponsorship from the Islamic Republic of
> Iran, Vogler was scheduled to present his case for Alaskan secession before
> the United Nations General Assembly in the late spring of 1993. But before
> he could, Old Joe's long, strange political career ended tragically that May
> when he was murdered by a fellow secessionist.
>
> Hickel rejoined the Republican Party the year after Vogler's death and
> didn't run for reelection. Lt. Gov. Coghill's campaign to succeed him as the
> AIP candidate for governor ended in disaster; he peeled away just enough
> votes from the Republican, Jim Campbell, to throw the gubernatorial election
> to Democrat Tony Knowles.
>
> Despite the disaster, Coghill hung on as AIP chairman for three more years.
> When he was asked to resign in 1997, Mark Chryson replaced him. Chryson
> pursued a dual policy of cozying up to secessionist and right-wing groups in
> Alaska and elsewhere while also attempting to replicate the AIP's success
> with Hickel in infiltrating the mainstream.
>
> Unlike some radical right-wingers, Chryson doesn't put forward his ideas
> freighted with anger or paranoia. And in a state where defense of gun and
> property rights often takes on a real religious fervor, Chryson was able to
> present himself  as a typical Alaskan.
>
> He rose through party ranks by reducing the AIP's platform to a single page
> that "90 percent of Alaskans could agree with." This meant scrubbing the old
> platform of what Chryson called "racist language" while accommodating the
> state's growing Christian right movement by emphasizing the AIP's commitment
> to the "traditional family."
>
> "The AIP is very family-oriented," Chryson explained. "We're for the
> traditional family -- daddy, mommy, kids -- because we all know that it was
> Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And we don't care if Heather has two
> mommies. That's not a traditional family."
>
> Chryson further streamlined the AIP's platform by softening its secessionist
> language. Instead of calling for immediate separation from the United
> States, the platform now demands a vote on independence.
>
> Yet Chryson maintains that his party remains committed to full independence.
> "The Alaskan Independence Party has got links to almost every
> independence-minded movement in the world," Chryson exclaimed. "And Alaska
> is not the only place that's about separation. There's at least 30 different
> states that are talking about some type of separation from the United
> States."
>
> This has meant rubbing shoulders and forging alliances with outright white
> supremacists and far-right theocrats, particularly those who dominate the
> proceedings at such gatherings as the North American Secessionist
> conventions, which AIP delegates have attended in recent years. The AIP's
> affiliation with neo-Confederate organizations is motivated as much by
> ideological affinity as by organizational convenience. Indeed, Chryson makes
> no secret of his sympathy for the Lost Cause. "Should the Confederate states
> have been allowed to separate and go their peaceful ways?" Chryson asked
> rhetorically. "Yes. The War of Northern Aggression, or the Civil War, or the
> War Between the States -- however you want to refer to it -- was not about
> slavery, it was about states' rights."
>
> Another far-right organization with whom the AIP has long been aligned is
> Howard Phillips' militia-minded Constitution Party. The AIP has been listed
> as the Constitution Party's state affiliate since the late 1990s, and it has
> endorsed the Constitution Party's presidential candidates (Michael Peroutka
> and Chuck Baldwin) in the past two elections.
>
> The Constitution Party boasts an openly theocratic platform that reads, "It
> is our goal to limit the federal government to its delegated, enumerated,
> Constitutional functions and to restore American jurisprudence to its
> original Biblical common-law foundations." In its 1990s incarnation as the
> U.S. Taxpayers Party, it was on the front lines in promoting the "militia"
> movement, and a significant portion of its membership comprises former and
> current militia members.
>
> At its 1992 convention, the AIP hosted both Phillips -- the USTP's
> presidential candidate -- and militia-movement leader Col. James "Bo" Gritz,
> who was campaigning for president under the banner of the far-right Populist
> Party. According to Chryson, AIP regulars heavily supported Gritz, but the
> party deferred to Phillips' presence and issued no official endorsements.
>
> In Wasilla, the AIP became powerful by proxy -- because of Chryson and
> Stoll's alliance with Sarah Palin. Chryson and Stoll had found themselves in
> constant opposition to policies of Wasilla's Democratic mayor, who started
> his three-term, nine-year tenure in 1987. By 1992, Chryson and Stoll had
> begun convening regular protests outside City Council. Their demonstrations
> invariably involved grievances against any and all forms of "socialist
> government," from city planning to public education. Stoll shared Chryson's
> conspiratorial views: "The rumor was that he had wrapped his guns in plastic
> and buried them in his yard so he could get them after the New World Order
> took over," Stein told a reporter.
>
> Chryson did not trust Palin when she joined the City Council in 1992. He
> claimed that she was handpicked by Democratic City Council leaders and by
> Wasilla's Democratic mayor, John Stein, to rubber-stamp their tax hike
> proposals. "When I first met her," he said, "I thought she was extremely
> left. But I've watched her slowly as she's become more pronounced in her
> conservative ideology."
>
> Palin was well aware of Chryson's views. "She knew my beliefs," Chryson
> said. "The entire state knew my beliefs. I wasn't afraid of being on the
> news, on camera speaking my views."
>
> But Chryson believes she trusted his judgment because he accurately
> predicted what life on the City Council would be like. "We were telling her,
> 'This is probably what's going to happen,'" he said. "'The city is going to
> give this many people raises, they're going to pave everybody's roads, and
> they're going to pave the City Council members' roads.' We couldn't have
> scripted it better because everything we predicted came true."
>
> After intense evangelizing by Chryson and his allies, they claimed Palin as
> a convert. "When she started taking her job seriously," Chryson said, "the
> people who put her in as the rubber stamp found out the hard way that she
> was not going to go their way." In 1994, Sarah Palin attended the AIP's
> statewide convention. In 1995, her husband, Todd, changed his voter
> registration to AIP. Except for an interruption of a few months, he would
> remain registered was an AIP member until 2002, when he changed his
> registration to undeclared.
>
> In  1996, Palin decided to run against John Stein as the Republican
> candidate for mayor of Wasilla. While Palin pushed back against Stein's
> policies, particularly those related to funding public works, Chryson said
> he and Steve Stoll prepared the groundwork for her mayoral campaign.
>
> Chryson and Stoll viewed Palin's ascendancy as a vehicle for their own
> political ambitions. "She got support from these guys," Stein remarked. "I
> think smart politicians never utter those kind of radical things, but they
> let other people do it for them. I never recall Sarah saying she supported
> the militia or taking a public stand like that. But these guys were
> definitely behind Sarah, thinking she was the more conservative choice."
>
> "They worked behind the scenes," said Stein. "I think they had a lot of
> influence in terms of helping with the back-scatter negative campaigning."
>
> Indeed, Chryson boasted that he and his allies urged Palin to focus her
> campaign on slashing character-based attacks. For instance, Chryson advised
> Palin to paint Stein as a sexist who had told her "to just sit there and
> look pretty" while she served on Wasilla's City Council. Though Palin never
> made this accusation, her 1996 campaign for mayor was the most negative
> Wasilla residents had ever witnessed.
>
> While Palin played up her total opposition to the sales tax and gun control
> -- the two hobgoblins of the AIP -- mailers spread throughout the town
> portraying her as "the Christian candidate," a subtle suggestion that Stein,
> who is Lutheran, might be Jewish. "I watched that campaign unfold, bringing
> a level of slime our community hadn't seen until then," recalled Phil
> Munger, a local music teacher who counts himself as a close friend of Stein.
>
> "This same group [Stoll and Chryson] also [publicly] challenged me on
> whether my wife and I were married because she had kept her maiden name,"
> Stein bitterly recalled. "So we literally had to produce a marriage
> certificate. And as I recall, they said, 'Well, you could have forged
> that.'"
>
> When Palin won the election, the men who had once shouted anti-government
> slogans outside City Hall now had a foothold inside the mayor's office.
> Palin attempted to pay back her newfound pals during her first City Council
> meeting as mayor. In that meeting, on Oct. 14, 1996, she appointed Stoll to
> one of the City Council's two newly vacant seats. But Palin was blocked by
> the single vote of then-Councilman Nick Carney, who had endured countless
> rancorous confrontations with Stoll and considered him a "violent" influence
> on local politics. Though Palin considered consulting attorneys about
> finding another means of placing Stoll on the council, she was ultimately
> forced to back down and accept a compromise candidate.
>
> Emboldened by his nomination by Mayor Palin, Stoll later demanded she fire
> Wasilla's museum director, John Cooper, a personal enemy he longed to
> sabotage. Palin obliged, eliminating Cooper's position in short order.
> "Gotcha, Cooper!" Stoll told the deposed museum director after his
> termination, as Cooper told a reporter for the New York Times. "And it only
> cost me a campaign contribution." Stoll, who donated $1,000 to Palin's
> mayoral campaign, did not respond to numerous requests for an interview.
> Palin has blamed budget concerns for Cooper's departure.
>
> The following year, when Carney proposed a local gun-control measure, Palin
> organized with Chryson to smother the nascent plan in its cradle. Carney's
> proposed ordinance would have prohibited residents from carrying guns into
> schools, bars, hospitals, government offices and playgrounds. Infuriated by
> the proposal that Carney viewed as a common-sense public-safety measure,
> Chryson and seven allies stormed a July 1997 council meeting.
>
> With the bill still in its formative stages, Carney was not even ready to
> present it to the council, let alone conduct public hearings on it. He and
> other council members objected to the ad-hoc hearing as "a waste of time."
> But Palin -- in plain violation of council rules and norms -- insisted that
> Chryson testify, stating, according to the minutes, that "she invites the
> public to speak on any issue at any time."
>
> When Carney tried later in the meeting to have the ordinance discussed
> officially at the following regular council meeting, he couldn't even get a
> second. His proposal died that night, thanks to Palin and her extremist
> allies.
>
> "A lot of it was the ultra-conservative far right that is against everything
> in government, including taxes," recalled Carney. "A lot of it was a
> personal attack on me as being anti-gun, and a personal attack on anybody
> who deigned to threaten their authority to carry a loaded firearm wherever
> they pleased. That was the tenor of it. And it was being choreographed by
> Steve Stoll and the mayor."
>
> Asked if he thought it was Palin who had instigated the turnout, he replied:
> "I know it was."
>
> By Chryson's account, he and Palin also worked hand-in-glove to slash
> property taxes and block a state proposal that would have taken money for
> public programs from the Permanent Fund Dividend, or the oil and gas fund
> that doles out annual payments to citizens of Alaska. Palin endorsed
> Chryson's unsuccessful initiative to move the state Legislature from Juneau
> to Wasilla. She also lent her support to Chryson's crusade to alter the
> Alaska Constitution's language on gun rights so cities and counties could
> not impose their own restrictions. "It took over 10 years to get that
> language written in," Chryson said. "But Sarah [Palin] was there supporting
> it."
>
> "With Sarah as a mayor," said Chryson, "there were a number of times when I
> just showed up at City Hall and said, 'Hey, Sarah, we need help.' I think
> there was only one time when I wasn't able to talk to her and that was
> because she was in a meeting."
>
> Chryson says the door remains open now that Palin is governor. (Palin's
> office did not respond to Salon's request for an interview.) While Palin has
> been more circumspect in her dealings with groups like the AIP as she has
> risen through the political ranks, she has stayed in touch.
>
> When Palin ran for governor in 2006, marketing herself as a fresh-faced
> reformer determined to crush the GOP's ossified power structure, she made
> certain to appear at the AIP's state convention. To burnish her maverick
> image, she also tapped one-time AIP member and born-again Republican Walter
> Hickel as her campaign co-chair. Hickel barnstormed the state for Palin,
> hailing her support for an "all-Alaska" liquefied gas pipeline, a project
> first promoted in 2002 by an AIP gubernatorial candidate named Nels
> Anderson. When Palin delivered her victory speech on election night, Hickel
> stood beaming by her side. "I made her governor," he boasted afterward. Two
> years later, Hickel has endorsed Palin's bid for vice president.
>
> Just months before Palin burst onto the national stage as McCain's
> vice-presidential nominee, she delivered a videotaped address to the AIP's
> annual convention. Her message was scrupulously free of secessionist
> rhetoric, but complementary nonetheless. "I share your party's vision of
> upholding the Constitution of our great state," Palin told the assembly of
> AIP delegates. "My administration remains focused on reining in government
> growth so individual liberty can expand. I know you agree with that ... Keep
> up the good work and God bless you."
>
> When Palin became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, her attendance
> of the 1994 and 2006 AIP conventions and her husband's membership in the
> party (as well as Palin's videotaped welcome to the AIP's 2008 convention)
> generated a minor controversy. Chryson claimed, however, that Sarah and Todd
> Palin never even played a minor role in his party's internal affairs.
> "Sarah's never been a member of the Alaskan Independence Party," Chryson
> insisted. "Todd has, but most of rural Alaska has too. I never saw him at a
> meeting. They were at one meeting I was at. Sarah said hello, but I didn't
> pay attention because I was taking care of business."
>
> But whether the Palins participated directly in shaping the AIP's program is
> less relevant than the extent to which they will implement that program.
> Chryson and his allies have demonstrated just as much interest in grooming
> major party candidates as they have in putting forward their own people. At
> a national convention of secessionist groups in 2007, AIP vice chairman
> Dexter Clark announced that his party would seek to "infiltrate" the
> Democratic and Republican parties with candidates sympathetic to its
> hard-right, secessionist agenda. "You should use that tactic. You should
> infiltrate," Clark told his audience of neo-Confederates, theocrats and
> libertarians. "Whichever party you think in that area you can get something
> done, get into that party. Even though that party has its problems, right
> now that is the only avenue."
>
> Clark pointed to Palin's political career as the model of a successful
> infiltration. "There's a lot of talk of her moving up," Clark said of Palin.
> "She was a member [of the AIP] when she was mayor of a small town, that was
> a nonpartisan job. But to get along and to go along she switched to the
> Republican Party . She is pretty well sympathetic because of her
> membership."
>
> Clark's assertion that Palin was once a card-carrying AIP member was swiftly
> discredited by the McCain campaign, which produced records showing she had
> been a registered Republican since 1988. But then why would Clark make such
> a statement? Why did he seem confident that Palin was a true-blue AIP
> activist burrowing within the Republican Party? The most salient answer is
> that Palin was once so thoroughly embedded with AIP figures like Chryson and
> Stoll and seemed so enthusiastic about their agenda, Clark may have simply
> assumed she belonged to his party.
>
> Now, Palin is a household name and her every move is scrutinized by the
> Washington press corps. She can no longer afford to kibitz with
> secessionists, however instrumental they may have been to her meteoric
> ascendancy. This does not trouble her old AIP allies. Indeed, Chryson is
> hopeful that Palin's inauguration will also represent the start of a new
> infiltration.
>
> "I've had my issues but she's still staying true to her core values,"
> Chryson concluded. "Sarah's friends don't all agree with her, but do they
> respect her? Do they respect her ideology and her values? Definitely."
> http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/10/10/palin_chryson/
>
>
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