dduane

(sigh) It’s hard to ignore the political noise right now, but as it gets noisier and each side spins the other one (or itself) as hard as it can, I prefer to go back to the earliest available sources to start understanding candidates’ behavior with an eye to projecting how they might possibly behave in the future. I find newspaper citations, especially local ones, can be a useful resource.

With this in mind: this document (a Democrat-prepared opposition document) found at Politico.com contains numerous excerpted details from local Alaskan newspapers regarding various aspects of Sarah Palin’s early political life. Leaving the source aside, and ignoring the bullet points on the first page, this doc is useful in that it gathers a lot of cites together. Does it have its own bias? Doubtless. However, it’s still interesting preliminary reading.

(ETA: This brought me up short --

Asked if she was offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, Palin responded, "Not on your life. If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it's good enough for me and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance."

Did she seriously not know that that phrase was only added in 1956? "What do they teach them in these schools...?")