9-05-08, 9:25 am

As moderate elements of the Republican Party melt away from supporting the Bush legacy and John McCain, more and more of the hardcore and extremist forces and voices in the Republican Party have eagerly stepped forward. Sarah Palin is one of those, and her nomination is a signal by McCain that he needs the extremists in his party to even have a chance on November 4th.

Since tapping Palin as his running mate, the McCain campaign has managed to avoid dealing with real issues, the point at which he tends to lose voters eager for change. Thus, the McCain camp has used mainly on a smear campaign against Barack Obama, relying on gossip and innuendo and a pliant media to get the word out.

So seeing where Sarah Palin stands on real issues, then, is worth some detailed attention. We know, based on her speech at the Republican National Convention in which she slammed community activism and civic-minded people, that Sarah Palin doesn't much like ordinary people anyway. Doing work with your local PTA? Palin thinks you're a joke.

It is not even clear that Sarah Palin wants to be an American. One of the most extreme sections of the Republican Party coalition is the militia/secessionist movement. And Sarah Palin appears to be tied to it. The Alaska Independence Party (AIP), which Sarah Palin's husband joined in the mid-1990s and to whose convention both Palins visited and Sarah delivered addresses, favors separating that state from the United States and rejects identifying with the rest of the country.

As recently as six months ago, according to background research, Palin expressed good luck wishes to the AIP, a far right party in the militia, anti-government strain popularized in the 1990s (see: the Montana Freemen for a parallel). In 2000, both Palin and her husband went to the AIP convention, and at least two AIP leaders have said that Palin herself was a member. (Palin refused to get a US passport, a symbol of citizenship as well as a document needed for global travel, until 2007 when she made campaign stops in Western Europe.)

On the foreign policy front, Republicans have touted Palin's proximity to Alaska as giving her qualifications and experience. But so far, her strongest foreign policy statements have been to describe the Iraq war as 'a task that is from God' during a speech at her old Wasilla Assembly of God. This church's particular mix of religion and politics has earned it a positive story on the fascist/Nazi Web site Stormfront.

Palin's comment about the war is remarkably similar to Osama bin Laden's own claims to be justified by God to commit acts of violence. It is the kind of comment that should perk the interest of US allies who do not agree that the US has been ordained by God to launch wars based on lies or any other agenda.

Still, it isn't clear that Palin's position on the Iraq war is a consistent one. She is joining a ticket whose star, though confused at times about his own views, has renounced people who support timetables for withdrawal as people who support surrender, but Palin was quoted in the Alaska Business Monthly in 2007 as calling for 'an exit plan.'

In the past, Palin seemed to agree with most people that the Iraq war was fought over oil. “We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources,” Palin said in an interview with Business Week last month. While it may be true, the comment suggests at the time she had not yet been indoctrinated in the Bush-McCain Iraq war justification as the central front in the 'war on terror.' But over the past six days she has begun toeing the Bush-McCain doctrine.

Palin is no reformer. As the mayor of the tiny village of Wasilla, Alaska and as governor of the state, she has requested hundreds of millions in earmarks for various projects, which John McCain now appears willing to overlook, despite having expressed specific objections at the time the earmarks were made. Palin also supported the infamous 'bridge to nowhere' project that cost one Alaska Republican member of Congress his seat and may cost Republican Sen. Ted Stevens his freedom. In fact, Palin saw the Alaska Republicans in Congress as a strong source of support for getting such earmarks.

As mayor of Wasilla and as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin's demand for federal taxpayer dollars suggests she believes it 'took a village' – a whole village of taxpayers to develop her city and state, but as McCain's sidekick, expect to hear her tell taxpaying working families they are now on their own.

Though Palin, reportedly, loves to fish and hunt, she doesn't believe in protecting the environment. She told right-wing Web site Newsmax that global warming, which is causing the melting of the ice caps in the polar regions, was not caused by human activity, despite mounting scientific evidence to the contrary.

She rejected calls to tighten federal protections of polar bears in Alaska, and she allowed bounty hunting on wolves, including for airborne wolf hunters, according to the Alaska Wildlife Alliance.

Palin does agree with McCain on drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, proven to hold no more than a drop of the total untapped national oil supply. In a letter opposing Sen. Joe Lieberman's bill to block drilling there, she wrote, “development [re: drilling] should be authorized.” She also agrees with McCain's demand for more offshore oil drilling first.

Palin, in staunch agreement with Bush and McCain, rejects the right of a woman to choose when to be pregnant. She believes that abortion should be outlawed always, even in cases of incest and rape.

She also supports the Bush administration's abstinence-only sex education programs, a flawed approach to sex education that has come back to haunt her own family. Abstinence-only sex education groups convince young people the only way to avoid pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases like HIV/AIDS is to abstain from sex. Many groups talk young people into taking virginity pledges.

Unfortunately, as several studies have shown, these programs do not teach participants about other scientifically sound methods of birth control or protection (like condom use). And because, according to surveys, the majority of youth who take virginity pledges break them, young participants in these programs are in increased danger of practicing unsafe sex, which leads to more unwanted pregnancies and exposure to sexually transmitted diseases, like HIV/AIDS.

In a normal world, anyone who would put their own child in a position of being exposed to a deadly disease might normally be accused of endangering the life and well-being of that child – let alone tens of thousands of other people's children.

But it is pretty clear so far that Palin isn't a big supporter of science. To round out her anti-science credentials, Palin says she supports teaching 'creationism' as science in public schools, rather than in the normally accepted social studies classroom with other religious studies as now commonly practiced.

But Palin's Christian beliefs haven't gotten in the way of her ethical shortcomings. The question of influence-peddling and improper use of of office are characteristics she shares with John McCain. Her ties to Sen. Ted Stevens and Jack Abramoff are strong. She oversaw Stevens' 527 group and used her position as Wasilla mayor to force the city to hire Stevens' favorite law firm. She used her office to fire Wasilla's police chief for political reasons, including disagreements with the city's bar owners with whom Palin sided.

She appears to share George W. Bush's propensity for cronyism. Recently, a state employee filed an ethics complaint against her for violating Alaska state law by trying to get a state job for one of her supporters.

The biggest ethics story out of Juneau, however, is that the state legislature just recently appointed a special prosecutor to examine the circumstances around her attempting to pressure another state official to fire a state policemen had just recently divorced her sister. So far, Palin has refused to release e-mails pertaining to the case to the police union, citing, not unlike the Bush administration, 'executive privilege,' according to Alaska media sources.

Her positions on civil rights are standard right-wing fare: opposition to marriage equality for LGBT people and she even told one LGBT newspaper that she opposes federal hate crimes legislation that includes sexual orientation as a protected category.

On health care, she, like Bush and McCain, is a free market fundamentalist who denies that current prices and insurance premiums are a serious problem. If anything the private health care industry suffers from too much interference. In Alaska, she blocked legislative efforts to restrain rising costs, and signed a weak S-CHIP bill that excluded thousands of Alaska's low-income working families from the health insurance rolls.

Her record on taxes, as thin as it is, is inconsistent. While Alaska governor, she supported a tax increase on big oil, but also left her Wasilla Mayor job with the city of a mere 7,000 people at least $2 million in debt. Presumably, on the campaign trail, she will remain consistently inconsistent: supporting John McCain's new health care tax on employee benefits as well as his new tax breaks for Big Oil and the wealthiest corporate executives.

When it comes right down to it, Sarah Palin represents more of the same Bush policies and style of governance. Palin isn't an enigma. She is an ultra-right politician with a shady extremist past. She highlights the dangerous extreme rightward tilt of the Republican Party. Above all, if elected she will be one heartbeat away from the presidency. And because statistics tell us that it is reasonable to assume that John McCain, now 72, will die even before the first half of his term concludes, Palin is a risk voters just cannot take.

--Reach Joel Wendland at