But I cannot. The siege and attack on the Palestine in Gaza is so fundamentally Anti-Jewish that I must speak out. To be silent is to stand with the millions who looked on while Jewish baby boys at precisely the time I was born into the world in Virginia , died at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe . I know this to be true because I have researched it at the Holocaust Museum . I know the dates, places and the events. Those crimes are part of my family history. Our souls are united; they died and I lived.

To be silent is to stand with Whites who watched and participated in race discrimination where I grew up or stood silently when I was called “Jew baby” and “Christ Killer” by older neighborhood kids.

After 9-11, I watched silently as a policeman at my SeaTac gate roughly interrogated an Arab professor and his wife on the way to Alaska in front of his children. My inaction haunts me.

For a lifetime, I have stood with indigenous peoples, told their stories, and assisted them when I could. How can I stand silent now and honor them and their histories?

I remember the moment when I learned the new words to the Hatikvah that came with the independence of the Jewish state. I was proud and remain proud to see this evolution from a millennia of Diaspora and persecution, ending with the modern industrialized massacre of six million.

But what I am now seeing is a version of that evil committed by my Landsmen.

So call me anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew, if you wish. The men, women and children of Palestine are being butchered while the world stands, apparently afraid to be termed anti-Semitic, if it speaks out.

The humanitarian moral code that is profoundly Jewish is not happening in Gaza today. Rabbi Hillel would speak and then turn away in shame. Sorry, Mr. Gold, this is not the time to shut up. Too many souls were killed by silence.

I believe all of this because — after all — I once believed in Santa Claus and the Chanukah Bunny. It’s the holiday season.

Elliot Spitzer, the tough minded investigator who gave Wall Street and fraudsters fits, was driven off the hunt and out of the picture by a timely investigation of his bank records. At least he paid for services he received. Getting rid of Spitzer before the Bank bailout and the Madoff disclosure was just one big coincidence. It’s the holiday season.

And all of those sharp Upper Eastsiders who were ready to crow over those idiots from Alaska who could see Russia from some places, but worked and dined with thieves, sociopaths and corporate welfare kings? Was it too close to home for them to read the handwriting on the wall while Alaska was just far enough away for them to understand? Caroline Kennedy answers questions like Sarah Palin in the early days, but she is One of Them so Fit to Run.( By the way, I actually did see Russia from Alaska . After freaking out several nests of Puffins who retaliated by dive bombing me, I reached the top of a bluff over the Siberian Yupik Eskimo village of Gambell on the St. Lawrence Island. I found a gun emplacement, old sandbags and barbed wire. There it was. The first line of Defense in the Cold War, manned, no doubt, by a member of the Eskimo National Guard).So Sarah Palin was right.

Second Prediction: The Message of Change, which has already given way to Smaller Change in the face of catastrophe, will morph by Inauguration Day into a truly Kennedy-esqe message. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’s money transfer machine.” If you are too big to fail, step to the front of the line. If you’re union, prepare to crawl. The second Obama excuse- “It was Bush’s fault”. Repeat after me, “It was Bush’s fault”. Bill Clinton? Deregulation in the Clinton era? Who, he? By the way, so-called Conservatives and Moderate Democrats who used deregulation to cripple government protection were not Conservatives or Moderate Democrats at all. They were Anarchists set to destroy a working government. When they made enforcement of laws impossible with niggardly appropriations (just an expression, like Washington “Redskins”), their aim was to make government a hated burden on taxpayers. When they gave their money away to those who helped them get into office with their donations, they communicated to the rest of us that tax collection was extortion of the less powerful for the powerful. Why throw bombs when you can destroy from within while keeping yours hands clean? They rewrote the Anarchists’ Cookbook.

Third Prediction: The Obama Brand is the hottest commercial label in the public domain. You’ve seen the painted coins on cable TV. Sure, Spellcheck still can’t get it right. Their programmer still has the flu. It still comes up, “Osama.” His face will appear everywhere, on clothing lines, on underwear, on wallpaper, on the sides of cars, on umbrellas, even on shoes. Watch for this on Inauguration Day. It will look like Carnival in Rio or Accra on Independence Day, all in High Definition.

Fourth Prediction: Arnold Schwarzenegger is coming. The Terminator has the perfect bio for higher office, a combination of fantasy, a Kennedy connection, political visibility and flexibility as California ’s governor. I thought he would run for Vice President this last time around. That’s Constitutionally allowable for foreign-born right now. But he was smarter than that. Watch for a move to amend the Constitution to allow a citizen in this nation of immigrants to run for President before 2012. In four years, America will want the Terminator.

Fifth prediction: The Alaskan fixation will continue. Palin haters and admirers abound.

Anonymous bloggers to the Anchorage Daily News drive those of us who are interested in an exchange of ideas on the state and its people absolutely batty. There is a way for non-Alaskans to learn about Alaska before 2012. The Alaska Public Radio Network, the best statewide public radio in the nation, is available on the web. APRN has been a farm system for NPR for years. Peter Kenyan, Elizabeth Arnold, Corey Flintoff and others did their time in Alaska . Listen to APRN, especially back programs of the eclectic AK, with a map at your side to locate communities. Then drive Alaskans nuts with astute advice. And, remember. Sarah Palin said a lot of stupid things on the campaign trail, but did not steal a dime of your money. Remind the next New Yorker you meet to say hello to Bernie. Happy New Year.

Social studies teacher Bob Bird of Nikiski High School did you, Chuck Schumar, Harry Reid and President-elect Obama a big favor. Bird ran on an anti-war, pro-life, anti-federal government platform in Alaska and took more than four percent of the votes in the Senate race, more than 12,144, some of which just might have been earned by Ted Stevens. Stevens had beaten then-Republican Bird by more than 50,000 votes in the1990 party primary. This time, as an AIP candidate, Bird was endorsed by anti-war Libertarian, Ron Paul. Now Bird is getting his sweet revenge on Ted Stevens. Democrat Mark Begich is beating Senator Stevens by only 1,022 votes with 25,000 votes left to count next week, mostly from Begich strongholds in Southeastern Alaska’s Pan Handle and Anchorage. So Sarah Palin won’t get a chance to run in a special election after Senator-elect Stevens resigns or is expelled. With barely a mention in the press and with less money than a single charter flight would have cost to ship all those famous campaign clothes back to Anchorage from the Real America, this Kenai Peninsula unknown has taken the air out of Ted Stevens’ balloon as a Federal jury conviction did not . If Ted Stevens had wanted Bird’s votes, he should have earned them. (That’s what Ralph Nader would say).

Bob Bird had a campaign budget of $28, 360 and spent $22,898 as of October 15, 2008, or, about $1.88, a vote. He reported no outside money, and no PAC contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (Opensecrets.org). Stevens raised $4,978, 737, thirty-five percent from PACs and 68 percent from outside of Alaska. Top contributor’s employers included Boeing, $48.000, Verizon, $45,650, News Corp, $44,600, (read Fox) and General Dynamics, $40, 9190. Begich raised $3,519, 587; thirteen percent from PACs, the top donors’ associations were Thornton and Naumes, $21,500, and the Municipality of Anchorage,$19,700, with lawyers, and labor unions dominating the rest of his list. Sixty-two percent of his money came from outside Alaska. The Center for Responsive Politics’ Opensecrets.org has already declared Stevens, “the Winner.” Better fix that web site, folks. Bob Bird of Nikiski has sung Ted a lullaby (sorry, Uncle Ted).

All of this because Alaska gives ballot space to third parties and independents. Funny how democracy can work things out, if you give it a try.

Consider Hendrick Hertzberg, a staffer at the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, and a former speech writer for President Jimmy Carter. When he left out salient, historical facts about the Alaska Independence Party in a recent piece, leaving the impression that the AIP was a haven for domestic terrorists tied to Sarah and Todd Palin, I assumed he needed help with his research. I wrote the New Yorker:

You praise the Obama for not using a “true” smear about the Palin’s association with Alaskan secessionists. Consider the facts: The bombastic founder of the Alaska Independence Party, Joe Vogler, 80, was murdered by a burglar for non-existent gold buried in his cabin, not (ed: as you wrote) “in connection with an informal transaction involving plastic explosives.” Alaska’s second governor, Republican Wally Hickel left his post to become Nixon’s Secretary of Interior, banned offshore drilling after the Santa Barbara oil spill and quit his cabinet post after the Kent State Massacre. He ran and won for governor again, this time, on the AIP ticket. When they finally met, Hickel chased Vogler out of his office, “brandishing his office stapler like a club” (from the official party web site). Maybe Obama did his homework.

Hertzberg replied

Dear Professor Conn –

Thanks for your letter. I did know about the Hickel connection. But the facts in my piece are still facts. Selected facts, out-of-context facts, inflammatory facts, yes — but if Obama were running a campaign like McCain’s, he’d go right ahead and use those selected, out-of-context, inflammatory facts in a negative ad.

Sincerely, Hendrik Hertzberg

Did other New Yorker readers realize that Mr. Hertzberg had decided to run a campaign like McCain’s on behalf of Obama in “Talk of the Town”? I replied:

Thank you for your honest reply. If facts provided voters are measured by the standard of the most unethical Presidential campaign, where does this place the voter with a sincere desire for information in this race to the bottom? Or, put another way, why does Obama need to sink to McCain’s level of discourse if you and a magazine of the New Yorker’s apparent integrity are willing to do it for him?

Obama may need a good speechwriter who uses facts selectively. Jimmy Carter, banned from the Democratic convention for his Naderlike position on Israel, no longer does.

Now consider the illustrious Colin Powell. His endorsement of Obama on “Meet the Press,” has been considered a turning point in the Virginia campaign and a reason for cheer among American Muslims. Powell’s direct role in selling the Iraqi invasion to the world and his complicity in killing hundreds of thousands of

Muslims on the other side is a slate, now wiped clean by his support. Less publicized was his more expansive endorsement of Alaska Senator Ted Steven’s character under oath before a Washington, DC jury just days before his endorsement of Obama. According to Rich Mauer and Erika Bolstad of the McClatchy chain: Powell told the court that (now convicted felon) Stevens: “was a ‘trusted individual’ and a man with a ’sterling’ reputation.”

Wrote Mauer and Bolstad, “He was someone whose word you could rely on,” said Powell. “The former secretary of state said he had known Stevens for 25 years, mostly in the senator’s role as the top defense appropriator on the Senate Appropriations Committee.” In Stevens, “I had a guy who would tell me when I was off base, he would tell me when I had no clothes on, figuratively, that is, and would tell me when I was right and go for it,” Powell said. “He’s a guy who, as we said in the infantry, we would take on a long patrol.”

So much for the judgment of a former Secretary of State and military leader, at least in the eyes of the jury who convicted Stevens, thereafter, on all seven felony counts. Camp Followers need not be perfect. None of us are. Still, isn’t it strange not a single political journalist in Washington has asked whether Powell’s decision to sell the war and his very recent decision to vouch for Senator Stevens’ character at his trial, taken together, should weigh on the public’s judgment of his decision to vouch for Presidential candidate Obama? The Obama campaign and Powell counted on media silence in the nation’s capital on that question, and got it.

Last and least is a voice from the left, Norman Solomon, who comes forward in these last days to warn his Progressive voter friends to stay away from Ralph Nader at the polls. No matter that national polls say consistently that Nader draws his votes from McCain’s side, Solomon is worried. Even as he acknowledges Obama’s progressive policy failings both domestic and foreign, he explicitly counsels voting for Obama with no expectation of change:

When I’ve spoken to dozens of audiences during the two months since the Democratic National Convention (where I was an elected Obama delegate), there’s been an overwhelmingly positive response when I make a simple statement about Obama and the prospects of an Obama presidency: “The best way to avoid becoming disillusioned is to not have illusions in the first place.”

Looking past the election, progressives will need to mobilize for a comprehensive agenda including economic justice, guaranteed healthcare for all, civil liberties, environmental protection and demilitarization.

I recalled (though many may not) his similar warning to the Greens in October 2003 to stay away from Nader, a decision which ultimately allowed Democratic operatives and Republican law firms to keep Independent Nader’s anti-war message off of state ballots and out of the 2004 campaign. Thousands more died while Progressives mobilized.

If Hertzberg wants to write speeches again and Powell wants in on Presidential foreign policy decisions, Solomon seems ready to audition as the next Ralph Nader within the Obama circle, ignoring entirely Nader’s reason for pursing tirelessly multiple Presidential campaigns: the corporate dominance of the political agenda in both major parties, a dominance which blocks new generations of citizen activists and their plans. That corporate dominance is already implanted in the Obama program of change.

“Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed,” is hardly a battle cry for Progressive mobilization, but, I suppose, it’s a living.

Camp followers are not professional political fabricators like James Carville and Mary Matalin. They are tactical amateurs who arrive when the march is nearly over and shout to be heard. When their own career agenda shades their advice to those who trust them, especially younger voters, they deserve to be tagged with warning labels. Those who rely on their counsel before they vote need to understand that their intent is simply to advance in the ranks of Obama supporters on the way to the White House.

Buried in the report and lost in the shuffle was a familiar public policy issue: how do those policed get simple justice from a system more protective of police than those it serves?

The real story behind Troopergate is better than the one created by Republicans or Democrats, the Partisan Investigation or Big Bully in the State House, take your pick. The Palins naively believed that, armed with the power and authority of the top state office, she (or her husband) could discover and even change the results of an internal and confidential state trooper process and get a bad cop canned, because the evidence was solid that he was, indeed, a bad cop. The only reason we know he was a bad cop is that he voluntarily opened his own, otherwise confidential, personnel files to the public.

An editorial in the Anchorage Daily News, “He’s No Angel,” spells it out:

Trooper Wooten gave his 10-year-old stepson a “test” firing from his state-issued Taser because the boy wanted to know what it was like. That was astoundingly bad judgment. Because the child “consented,” and the test apparently produced no lasting harm, Wooten would have a good defense against any criminal charges. But it was a hopelessly inappropriate thing for a state trooper to do with state-issued equipment. Trooper Wooten also shot a moose illegally, using his wife’s permit. At the time the incident was investigated, he was a wildlife enforcement officer responsible for enforcing the very same hunting laws he broke. Questioned by troopers about the incident, he said he felt it was not inappropriate, according to the troopers’ disciplinary report.

Trooper Wooten also said he would make his father-in-law “eat a f***-ing? lead bullet” if he helped get a lawyer for his daughter. Apparently that didn’t qualify as “assault” under the law because Wooten did not say it directly to his father-in-law. No crime, but another example that trooper Wooten lacked the judgment and temperament to remain a trooper.

Another disturbing incident from Wooten’s record was the courtesy treatment he got from a fellow trooper during a DUI stop. A bartender had reported Wooten as a suspected drunken driver after Wooten caused a commotion in the bar and drove away. Wooten’s fellow officer stopped him, let him leave his car behind and gave him a ride to his destination. An arrest and conviction for DUI would have ended Wooten’s career as a trooper.

In another incident, Wooten was off duty and drove his patrol car with an open container of alcohol. Witnesses indicate he had been drinking before he got in the patrol car — a finding that trooper Col. Julia Grimes upheld in her review of Wooten’s case. Under normal circumstances, Alaskans and the country wouldn’t know much about Wooten’s record as a trooper. Typically, his infractions and disciplinary record would be confidential as a personnel matter. We’d all be left guessing what he had done that made the Palin family so upset.

Not to excuse the Palins’ persistent queries about why Wooten was still a trooper, but they knew nothing of the disciplinary action that had been taken against him. They didn’t know he had been suspended for five days. They just knew he was still on the force.

However, in one of the more bizarre twists in the case, Wooten himself released his personnel information, perhaps thinking it would vindicate him. On the contrary, most who view his record are left wondering, “If what he did doesn’t get you fired from the troopers, what does it take?”

That’s a good question for the Alaska Legislature to ask.

Palin’s own e-mail to her commissioner echoes the editorial and Wooten’s record, but from a complainant’s perspective: (from the Branchflower report to the Legislative Council)

In sharing a few personal examples with you including the trooper who used to be related to me-the one who intentionally killed the cow moose out of season, without a tag-he’s still bragging about it in my hometown and after another cop confessed to witnessing the kill, this trooper was “investigated” for over a year and merely given a slap on the wrist . . . though he’s out there arresting people today for the same crime! This same trooper who shot his 11-yr-old stepson with a taser gun, was seen drinking in his Patrol car, was pulled over for drunk driving but let off by a coworker & brags about this incident to this day…he threatened to kill his estranged wife’s parent, refused to be transferred to rural Alaska and continued to disparage natives in words and ton, he continues to harass and intimidate his ex.-even after being slapped with a restraining order that was lifted when his supervisors intervened . . . he threatens to always be able to come out on top because he’s ‘got the badge,” etc. etc. etc.) This trooper is still out on the street, in fact he’s been promoted. It was a joke the whole year long “investigation” of him- in fact those who passed along the serious information to … were threatened with legal action from the trooper’s union for speaking about it. (This is the same trooper who’s out there today telling people the new administration is going to destroy the trooper organization, and he’s never work for that b***, Palin”.)

Anyway-just a personal example of what I’ve personally seen out there and had to live with for two years — and this is what people in the Valley are putting up with (those many residents who know of this trooper timebomb who supposed to be “protecting them.)” (Branchflower Report pp.57-58)

The Palin family could not believe that a state trooper who had tasered his step-son, broken the fish and game laws he was charged to enforce and threatened a member of their family would be given a few days suspension in an internal inquiry and not fired. They assumed that a governor with the power to hire and fire their boss could reverse this decision, even if a mere civilian with a complaint against a cop could not. The Palins were wrong.

Legislative Investigator Branchflower did not question Palin’s right to constitutionally dismiss her Commissioner of Public Safety. The Alaska constitution gives Governors extremely broad authority to hire and fire members of their cabinets. The drafters wanted centralized power in a strong governor and not scattered authority, as in territorial days, when the state took on natural resource developers- in those days, the mining and fishing industries. Her legal violation was in use of her power to advance a personal interest, by allowing her husband to pressure employees to get rid of the bad cop.

Alaska personnel rules and state statutes trumped civilian access to the process or any civilian’s ability to find out what happened with her complaint or to get a bad cop canned. Her use of her official authority in her personal quest was the abuse of power cited in the Branchflower Report, even though it got her nowhere

Palin used her very broad constitutional authority to dump the one person who was giving her good advice, Walt Monegan, the public safety commissioner. He warned her that she couldn’t make it happen. He couldn’t either, and he was “the boss”.

Said Monegan: “I was resisting the governor from the very beginning on the Wooten matter to protect her from exactly what just happened to her here, being found to have acted inappropriately.” When Palin fired Monegan, she killed her messenger.

What Palin really needed in her Alaskan movie was a “local Native guide,” from any rural Alaskan native village policed by the troopers. Any village leader could have warned Palin that, in matters of trooper conduct, the employees of the Department of Public Safety take care of their own.

In the vast Alaska bush are hundreds of villages, peopled by the last hunter and gatherers on the continent. They look to official state law enforcement from the Department of Public Safety because they can’t afford their own departments. Troopers usually fly into villages to respond to crime from rural towns. As non-native cities incorporated and, along with bigger rural towns, hired their own police, the Alaska bush and the few state highways became the trooper’s remaining turf which they jealously guard from interlopers. What Palin — and most urban Alaskans — fail to appreciate is that the trooper agency effectively lacks civilian oversight. Its clients in the rural villages are policed by it as it chooses and, unlike the citizens of a town like Wasilla or, at least, its political leadership, they have no control over police behavior and limited authority over abuses.

Hundreds of villages in the Alaska bush (with the exception of rural towns and the North Slope Borough that can afford their own police agencies) are policed by an Agency that they don’t control, a system of legal colonialism over rural Alaska.

The troopers’ immunity from meaningful civilian review may have surprised Palin, her husband and her family, but thousands of Alaska natives knew it already. Colonial-style policing — complete with a cadre of Alaska native para-police, akin to Australia’s Aborigine bush trackers of yesteryear, and modeled on the long abandoned Native police in Canada — have been sustained by urban, non-native Alaskan political leaders of both parties for decades.

The first thing Inuit leader Eban Hopson did with property taxes from the North Slope oil fields, collected by an organized borough after a protracted fight with the state, was set up his own police force for his half dozen villages of the hundreds policed by troopers. The state’s department of law and the troopers retaliated. No cases “made” by these new cops were prosecuted for months, including one by a man who later murdered two non-native campers. You don’t mess with the troopers.

Palin, as Wasilla mayor, fired her town’s police chief. But the mayor of Emmonak, on the mouth of the Yukon River, can’t hire or fire or discipline a trooper. Complaints over the decades from villagers who have attended what Alaskans call bush justice conferences, usually related to non-response from troopers who wait for crime to occur before making an appearance. A suit by the Native American Rights Fund, which argued rural Alaskans got unequal legal protection (note: I was one of NARF’s expert witnesses), failed in state court. The state legislature and governors across party lines give short economic shift to village Alaska, treating villages as the US Congress treats the ghettos of Washington, DC. Institutional racism persists.

Further, some Alaskans have noticed that while the Federal authorities have been busy with prosecutions, the state police and the state department of law has been notably absent in ferreting out corruption among state lawmakers, a kind of live and let live arrangement with those who fund them and otherwise leaves them alone, a longtime arrangement that sacrifices police oversight for institutional independence.

Once Palin was nominated, a Republican strategist, with no knowledge of Alaska, wrote her new script. He or she decided to delay the inquiry by the Alaska legislature into the governor’s firing of her public safety commissioner and its rationale. To delay an Alaskan investigation until after the election must have seemed easy to accomplish. You just sent someone to Alaska to bully the local pols, drawing on Palin’s wild Alaskan popularity. It was a dumb move and one that insulted Alaskans unnecessarily — unless it was calculated to do precisely that. It served the purposes of the oil companies who want Palin and the legislature at each other’s throats. And for the Alaska state troopers, it solidified their status as police left free from interference by those whom they police- and even from those who fund them.

Palin’s husband used his wife’s authority to go after a cop who could and probably would have been fired in an agency still subject to civilian control. Within the Alaska system, blatant personal use of official authority amounted to an ethics violation. Only minorities abused by police with no remedy could appreciate her husband’s frustration with a system non-minorities rarely experience. None of this was part of the Troopergate inquiry.

So what did the Troopergate report recommend to help people frustrated after making complaints about police conduct, even people without the clout of Sarah Palin?

“The legislature should consider amendment of (the statute) to permit those who file complaints against peace officers to receive some feedback about the status and outcome of their complaint.” (Branchflower report 79 of 263). Whoop-De-Doo.

Branchflower says, in part, “When citizens are told no information can be released, it has the potential of engendering skepticism about whether the complaint was taken seriously. There is likewise a great potential that the confidence we need to have in our law enforcement agencies will be undermined, and respect for those institutions will be eroded.” (Branchflower 80-18). As in Alaska native villages and the Governor’s mansion?

The Palins had a story to tell, one that was buried in the legislative investigation and one that ordinary people — especially minorities — could relate to, about bad cops and the inability of ordinary citizens (and, apparently, even Governor’s) to get justice when they complain about them or even try to find out if anything happened with their complaints. That the Republican operatives who counseled delay and sought to smear the investigation as purely partisan did not see a better script in Troopergate about a family with a legitimate grievance against a cop and a police organization, shows us how far removed Republicans are from the working class voters and the minorities they seek to persuade.

In this campaign version of Runaway Train, Palin and McCain tear through the Alaskan wilderness, this time to probable electoral oblivion, a catastrophic economic train wreck for the electorate now a near certainty. Seductive campaign promises to reform the political system and better the daily lives and futures of working people with public money are thrown to desperate crowds who want to believe everything they hear, but know they’re just extras in a movie.

Every movie and every campaign has a script. This one has at least two — the Bash Obama story and the Palin’s Troopergate story, a truly bipartisan rewrite of an authentic Alaskan saga about a family’s frustrations with a system that protects a bad cop. Who wrote the original script, especially Palin’s part, her bunk about Obama palling around with a “domestic terrorist,” now a middle-aged professor from Chicago named Ayers? Months before Palin was cast, her script had been prepared and published through Simon and Schuster by, editor, Mary Matalin, Democratic consultant James Carville’s wife. Matalin had told the New York Times in August that the book on which the campaign was to be based, The Obama-Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, by Jerome Corsi was, “a piece of scholarship and a good one at that.”

Once recruited, Governor Palin’s homework was simple: merely to commit to memory the contents of a book selected and edited by Matalin to smear Obama. No wonder that James Carville and his longtime partner, Paul Begala, were so quick on their comebacks when Palin began her campaign. They knew Palin’s script and how to counter it. Carville immediately recalled Palin’s attendance at a Buchanan rally. They described Todd’s flirtation with and Sarah’s welcoming speech to the Alaska Independence Party, founded, they told us, by a “domestic terrorist,” and quickly labeled as anti-American. It helps to preview a script so you can react quickly with smears of equal venom to liven things up and keep debate away from boring, substantive issues, like Biden’s support of the loan shark industry, or McCain’s support of campaign finance reform and Obama’s rejection of public funding. Once Carville’s 2008 client, Hillary Clinton, was knocked out in the primaries, he joined Begala permanently in the smear-Palin corner of their cable news studio. Other Carville wannabees had picked up the scent and booked trips to Alaska. You may have read Begala’s “unholy trinity” tirade against Corsi. But Mary Matalin and the sublime irony of Carville’s professional conflict was studiously ignored by Begala and the Obama campaign. Was this professional courtesy, as in the banking community, a kind of honor among thieves? We know spousal immunity is not afforded participants in political campaigns. Witness the tough media scrutiny of Todd Palin and Bill Clinton. Even spiritual advisors are fair game. Remember Reverend Wright or, recently, the visiting Exorcist from Kenya in the Wasilla church, secretly taped to alarm liberals. But propagandists of the caliber and talent of Carville and Matalin, the Goebbels couple of our era, are not the kind of people you casually throw under a bus, even if they profit from both sides and always come out winners, whether voters do or not. The response to the Matalin-Corsi script from Carville-Begala was amplified by Carville disciples on the Blog. Their new investigations are replete with ignorance about Alaska’s political history They use the same tried and true weapon of guilt by association that Plain’s script employs. It doesn’t seem to matter when throwing back iceballs at the Runaway Train.

For Alaskans who take pride in their personal, political independence from the major parties, the attacks on the Alaska Independence Party as “un-American,” and a coven for domestic terrorist secessionists, seems a bit over the top. Strange bedfellows are commonplace when you form coalitions of the weak against powerful interests. But the AIP has an even stranger history. Consider Wally Hickel, Alaska’s second governor and his direct, historic link to the AIP. Hickel left his Republican gubernatorial post when asked to be Secretary of the Interior under Nixon. He surprised environmentalists when he banned offshore drilling in reaction to the infamous oil spill off Santa Barbara. (The ban on offshore oil drilling was just lifted by Bush and by a bipartisan Congressional vote). Hickel left the Nixon administration after the Kent State Massacre, returned to Alaska and ran and won back his governor’s seat as a candidate for — Tah-Dah — the Alaska Independence Party, that evil coven of “domestic terrorists.” Facts get in the way. Now Salon.com, the Nation and, sadly, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, are pounding away at Palin’s guilt by association with the AIP, both to counter Matalin’s charge that Obama was palling around with ‘60s radical, Ayers, and to prove their mettle as smearsters, equal to James Carville, for the next election cycle,.

Amy Goodman, usually the national treasure of progressive reportage, offered viewers a Salon attack by Alaskan visitor, Max Blumenthal, on former AIP chair, Mark Chryson. He cast Mark Chryson as a confirmed Palin “wing nut,” whatever that means, because Chryson met often with Palin in Wasilla, although Chryson noted in his taped interview that he spoke with many people who did not share his political beliefs. In fact, Chryson had worked with Alaska Greens and the rag tag Alaskan left, (including Alaska Public Interest Research Group when I directed it) to fight a well-funded proposal by Democratic governor Knowles and Big Oil to siphon funds off from the Alaska Permanent Fund, to defray state expenses, lower corporate taxes and reduce the per-capita share of Alaska’s unique guaranteed income program. In this classic David v. Goliath fight, 83 percent of voters rejected the referendum, the largest electoral plurality since statehood.

For major party candidates and their propagandists, there is always a side benefit to holding up minor parties, like the Alaskan Independence Party, to the national media as part of a dangerous, lunatic political fringe. Third party candidates and independents like Ralph Nader just won’t shut up about the wars without end and the corporate crime even when it has been intentionally left out of the script.
The unscripted few can be forced off major networks by major party candidates who hold the networks hostage through airtime buys. But out in the hustings, these men and women just won’t leave the voters alone with their unscripted straight talk about things that matter. The best strategy for major party propagandists is to call fringe parties and their candidate’s nuts, the friends of nuts or supported by nuts. Progressives who claim to support bottom-up, grassroots efforts, like Amy Goodman, should steer clear of this pre-scripted, toxic slime.

To be Continued . . .

For a time, the Obama campaign thought it could win Alaska’s electoral votes. But when Palin was nominated, (or Peter Principled as a favor to EXXON), party operatives snapped up Ben Stevens’ Valley Trash campaign in all but name only. They projected Palin’s private life and her small town conservatism onto her would-be Vice Presidency. Bloggers and journalists went to work on Alaska and Palin, defining it as out of the mainstream and Palin as a Far Right Religious Zealot. Palin was ridiculed as a country rube among rubes, a possible witch whose family might have flirted with incest. Her Alaska became Dog Patch, Wasilla, Lower Slobbovia. James Carville described her as a Buchanan supporter (read, anti-Semite), twenty minutes after she was named, even as Mary Matalin, his loving wife, played the other side of the street with her publication of Obama Nation by James Corsi. As Matalin and Carville explain it, in their co-authored account of the 1992 Presidential campaign, it is not really about Palin, Alaska or even handing the state back to Exxon-Mobil: “All’s Fair Love, War and Running for President.”

It’s amazing how quickly Alaskan liberals bought into the new Palin story, dismissing the recent past as if it had never happened. If Palin had come to Juneau with an agenda crafted in her church basement, cultural lines would have been drawn and no attacks on the Big Oil hegemony would have occurred. And state Democrats, who may have looked down their noses at Valley Trash, just like Ben, were smart enough to keep their mouths shut and find common ground while old-line Republicans leaders looked over their shoulders for subpoenas flowing from their overly cozy relations with VECO, the oil service company. To the dismay of oil company executives, she formed a working coalition with Democrats who represent West Anchorage’s well- paid liberals among unionized public employees and the professions. These Alaska Democrats were not conversant with the tactics of national political spin machines. Still, after 2000, they bought the Ralph Nader-as-spoiler line, hook and sinker as spun from distant Washington, despite Nader’s founding of Alaska PIRG and his steadfast support of Alaska in its fight with natural resource giants. They really couldn’t be blamed. Until this year, the spin and slime and sophistication of national Presidential campaigns were as elusive in Alaska as sun at noon in late January.

While the Alaska coalition, useful to Valley Trash and Democratic liberals alike, is gone, on the national playing field, the attacks against Palin could boomerang against Obama, especially as a national depression threatens to sweep away illusions of a better future for Americans of the next several generations.

Millions of Americans envy the Palins and aspire to their Alaskan lives as their own personal dream of security. Their pieces of the corporate rock, peddled by Wall Street, sank like stones. NYT writer, Timothy Egan, usually the smartest Alaska analyst, asked readers whether American voters could relate to an Alaska where, “Every home seems to have a freezer in the garage stuffed with moose meat and 10 pounds of alder-smoked chinook? Owning a small amount of marijuana is protected by the privacy clause of the Alaska constitution, the courts have ruled.” Are you kidding, Timothy? The answer is HELL, YES! A place where you make great money on the North Slope, do some commercial fishing or gold mining like Todd Palin and have time to compete and win Iron Man cross country snow machine races? All of this and three thousand plus dollars each from Alaska, your yearly share in the oil wealth? How many folks would like to live like the Palins on Lake Lucille in the half million dollar house that Todd designed and built?

Sarah Palin is selling the Alaskan dream as a remaining fragment of the American dream, not her foreign policy or economic expertise drawn from Republican handlers. If her husband spends time helping her at work, or if she confuses her personal internet with the one the state provided, well, she is still Citizen Palin not Professional Politician Palin, like Senators Obama, Biden or McCain with their legions of reliable staffers. Her supporters understand and want to forgive her because she has the life they want. Level-headed Obama supporters need to develop a quick antidote to their own Valley Trash strategy. It’s not going to be Joe Biden, declared champion of the credit card industry and asset forfeiture for drug offenders. If people can’t relate to a United States Senator and his world, dumping on Sarah won’t rein them in. If James Carville thinks he can herd this crowd, the way he cowed progressives into voting for corporate candidates ,instead of Ralph Nader, he has –once again- blown it for the Dems.

In a previous op-ed, I argued that Palin had been Peter Principled into this race as a favor to EXXON. What I am writing about here is what she is actually selling to the voters nationally and how the Obama campaign’s operatives are dealing with it. Campaigns are about perceptions and not reality. Alaskans will bear the cost of this campaign for years to come. The same may be true for those of you in “the lower 48.” National political consultants get paid whether their candidates win or lose.

Today, there is no real momentum in a frozen Washington, D.C. to bring regulation up to date. To the contrary, in 1999, Congress led by Senator McCain’s Advisor, former Senator Phil Gramm and the Clinton Administration led by Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury, and soon to join Citibank (Ed note: and, later, the Obama campaign as its financial advisor) de-regulated and ended the wall between investment banks and commercial banking known as the Glass-Steagall Act. Clinton and Congress opened the floodgates to rampant speculation without even requiring necessary and timely disclosures for the benefit of institutional and individual investors.

Now the entire U.S. economy is at risk. The domino theory is getting less theoretical daily. Without investors obtaining more legal authority as owners over their out-of-control company officers and Boards of Directors, and without strong regulation, corporate capitalism cannot be saved from its toxic combination of endless greed and maximum power — without responsibility.

Uncle Sam, the deeply deficit ridden bailout man, may have another taxpayers-to-the-rescue operation for Wall Street. But don’t count on stretching the American dollar much more without devastating consequences to and from global financial markets in full panic.

Consider the U.S. dollar like an elastic band. You can keep stretching this rubber band but suddenly it BREAKS. Our country needs action NOW from Washington, D.C.

As you read Ralph Nader’s July 2nd warning, perhaps for the first time, the terms of the largest bankers’ robbery of America’s wealth are being hammered out by the bankers and those who neglected to regulate them. Nader’s call to action was not picked up by major media. Censorship of Nader is not too strong a word. But that the crime is occurring before our eyes and that its impact will be massive and long-lasting is now certain.

In their public statements, the two major party Presidential candidates and their corporate advisors scramble to avoid blame. On Friday next, these two candidates will debate. The good citizen who warned of the impending crime, (who is also a Presidential candidate), has not been invited. According to the debate commission, funded by the two major parties, the rules don’t allow it. But, given his uniquely prescient warning to America, shouldn’t he be allowed to say a few words about the crime?

Perhaps Nader could explain how he saw the crime unfolding and leave it to candidates Obama and McCain to explain why they didn’t. Or, more importantly, Obama and McCain could explain how each proposes to deal with its aftermath. While they missed predicting the crime, as Nader did not, they can now predict its impact on us and on future generations of Americans. This small involvement for Nader in the scheduled national debates would amount to a small reward for Nader and, perhaps, an incentive for other citizens to speak up when they see crimes about to happen, be they street crimes or corporate. What a pleasant return to the civil habits of yesteryear when citizen whistleblowers were admired and not ignored?

Steve Conn is a retired professor of justice at the University of Alaska, and former director of Alaska Public Interest Research Group. He lived in Alaska from 1972 to 2007 and now lives in Point Roberts, Washington. He recently helped collect more than 5,900 signatures from Alaskan voters to put Ralph Nader on the 2008 Alaska Presidential ballot. He can be reached at: steveconn@hotmail.com.