Gov. Sarah Palin had recently promised to co-operate fully with the investigation into her alleged abuse of power. The memo must not have reached her staff, her executive powers must not be all that effective, or, more likely, the McCain campaign legal team trying to quash the investigation must be in control now.
This piece Alaskan news just prior to Gov. Palin as the GOP VP nominee, after a recorded phone call showing her staff using the Governor’s office for Palin’s personal purposes was released to the public. KTVA reporst that Gov. Palin reversed course this day on her original denial of any abuse of power:
The problem is that FFL doesn’t just oppose abortion. FFL wants abortion to be illegal. All abortions, period, including those for rape, incest, health, major fetal defects and, although Foster resisted admitting this, even some abortions most doctors would say were necessary to save the woman’s life. (Although FFL is not a Catholic organization, its rejection of therapeutic abortion follows Catholic doctrine.) FFL wants doctors who perform abortions to be punished, possibly with prison terms.
It was extremely difficult to get Foster to say what she thought would happen if abortion was banned. At one point she would not concede that women would continue to have abortions if it was recriminalized; at another she argued that criminalization was no big deal: Instructions on self-abortion were posted on the Internet. I had to work to get her to admit that illegal abortion was common before Roe, and that it was dangerous–numbers on abortion deaths were concocted by pre-Roe legalization advocates, she told me. Yet the FFL website prominently features gory stories of abortion mishaps and discredited claims that abortion causes breast cancer. (Challenged on the cancer connection, Foster says they just want women to have medical information. Asked why they don’t then link to the 2004 Lancet article debunking their cancer claims, she says they are not medical experts and have considered taking the cancer pages down.) So legal abortion is dangerous but illegal abortion would be safe? When I pointed out that in countries where the operation is banned, such as Brazil and Peru, rates are sky-high and abortion a major cause of injury and death, she professed ignorance.
I got similarly evasive answers when I asked why FFL didn’t promote birth control, and when I asked if FFL considered the pill an “abortifacient.” She did tell me that “birth control doesn’t work” for swing-shift nurses because they lose track of their body clock–interesting, if true–or for teenagers, which I know to be false.
The GOP now has a VP candidate who thinks there are too many polar bears. These furry mammals have made the egregious mistake of chosing to move to the area Ms. Palin and her oil buddies would like to start landcaping.
Nine polar bears are at risk of drowning after the ice floe where they lived melted because of global warming, scientists have said. The bears were spotted in open ocean off the northwest coast of Alaska, miles from their normal hunting area by US government oil survey scientists flying over the Chukchi sea.
Scientists who study the polar bear see this group of nine bears trying to swim 400 miles to safety as a bad sign. In an area as vast as the unprecedentedly-large open waters of the Arctic, spotting one group this large and this lost means there are likely many others.
