So It Is Safer To Be In Iraq Than Chicago

Did McCain brag about being a community organizer?

Has McCain ever said that his claim to fame is his community organization skills?

This is so beyond ridiculous. It's not like Obama was a COP before running for President.

If you want an example of REAL evidence that work prior to running for national office is a bad omen for the future, look at the fact that before Palin became mayor of Wassilla, it had no debt. After she left as mayor, it was about $20 MILLION in debt.

"After she left as mayor, it was about $20 MILLION in debt."

Let me guess, another brilliant piece of fake news garnered from the mental midgets at DailyKOS? I searched and found nothing but liberal blogs and a few fake online newspapers making that claim. Even Huffington Post didn't have a story making that claim.

*cough*
http://thinkprogress.org/...
"As Mayor 'hardcore conservative' Sarah Palin left Wasilla $20 million in debt"

They always back their stuff up. How thoroughly did you poke around the net Task?
Gotta check the alternative news folks too!
And give the Daily Kos a little break, sometimes they catch a gem or two...the sifters often find alot of junk, but they get credit for sifting to find the occasional gem anyway.

P.s. "liberal" being sorta a huge encompassing term and all that as far as people go, I'd like to ask you to try not to generalize all liberal blogs as bad/untrustworthy things. I typically dislike most "party" or certain political affiliation oriented websites, but occasionally you find one with integrity...so I don't think that's very fair and doesn't help that tolerance thing much.

Just my two cents, you can completely ignore me, if you want.

There is still no link to the budget reports from those years, though I assume the paper it took it's quote from was at least good enough to give a source. I could only find budget reports on Wasilla's city website going back to 2005.

Oh yeah, thinkprogress... That's a great source. Comb through their articles. I just did a google search on them and every article listed on the first ten pages was either anti-McCain or pro-Obama. I didn't see anything even resembling a non-partisan approach.

The source they cited isn't valid either. The claim from Politico was listed under: "Other nuggets Democrats hope reporters will mine over the next two months:" It wasn't a major part of their article and didn't explain where that figure came from or if it was just speculation that they wanted to look into.

There's no way I can have any respect for DailyKOS after their disgusting lies that Palin's son Trig was really Bristol's son. When you run a smear piece like that filled with obvious lies and BRAG about how they uncovered the story, you kill any dream of credibility.

Paranoia, my point is that blogs are notoriously untrustworthy and aren't subject to ANY standards except what they themselves create. Citing a blip about how democrats want to find out about Wasilla's budget is not a valid citation if you are writing an entire article on that budget. You need to cite the budget itself or it's clear that you wrote an article without really investigating the claim.

Task, I haven't the means to investigate the claim. Since politico is slightly more mainstream -- I figured it was -fairly- trustworthy on the scale of things.
I'm sure if you'd had the means you would've tried to get something more solid.
I hear the Daily Kos is requesting documents from Alaska for something more solid...

Blogs are words of the people. The media, therefore isn't much different and if you've noticed...very few of them actually have much more integrity than blogs.
How about all the crap CNN, MSNBC, Fox...has pulled?
Why do you think media-watchdogs exist now?

MY point was, you really can't judge a whole website for one, or a couple things they do.

Thinkprogress is written by several people, all of whom have their own opinions. There's one writer, for example whose main issue is global warming -- I don't agree with that, I'm more of a climate change believer...not global warming, but I know that, that's not all ThinkProgress is about.
Yes, they're heavily after McCain...but they catch a ton of the best little tidbits about him. And they usually do back up their stuff.
And actually, I've only seen about...well, two I think articles on there about Obama the last two months. Your Google search prolly spanned longer than that, did you actually go to their front page...or the second page to get a general feel for their every-day postings? It wouldn't have been that hard to do.

It's super easy to generalize, however...as a blogger myself, I try to get the best information I can. Which means I really can't be choosy about where it comes from,and I don't care if I disagree with or dislike the people as long as the information is good and I can provide it to my readers so they can judge for themselves.

There's a very decent hint that Palin has left Wasilla in debt -- how is a scant mention a good hint? Because that means it's not one of those rumors started to damage a campaign, if it was that..then it would've been spread all over the place. Splashed across everywhere -- there'd be like five topics about it started on mylot, lol. I've seen..whispers. No mainstream sources have parroted it. Just regular folks going, "Ummm..."
Generally, this means there's good reason to think it might be true -- of course, it's no reason for a person not to be skeptic, though I wouldn't hold my breath for any question of something negative about a new star of a politician to be investigated.*shrugs*

Oh I know, this day and age is so fun, isn't it? Knowing that you really can't outright trust most news lol.

Well xParanoia, I hope you and Clarus are still watching this thread because I've just annihilated the lies about Sarah Palin leaving Wasilla with a 20 million dollar debt. Their budget is well balanced with a handsome surplus.

http://www.cityofwasilla.com/index.aspx?page=136

2002 Budget
Revenues: $8,710,166
Expenditures: $6,751,309
Surplus: $1,958,857

2003 Budget
Revenues: $9,299,797
Expenditures: $7,046,325
Surplus: $2,253,472

So, to clarify, her last year in office she had a 1.9 million dollar budget surplus, and left the city with a 2.2 million dollar budget surplus. Where exactly is that darned 20 million dollars in debt?

I'm glad to see you found some hard data (which I'm gonna have to take your word on 'cause I don't have the time to check the documents) -- I'll be sure to note this on my own blog, for the record.

And, Task? I just hope you don't think us all naive, but we all just go on the information we have. Not a ton of information= working from scratch on grasping a subject -- or, in this case, a person.

Hopefully, over these next few months we all will have more solid footing to talk about Palin, on.

2.6% of all homicides in Singapore are by firearms.

That's because only hardest of the Hardcore Criminals can get them.

Lol. Garbage! Singapore has 30 + murders a year, none of them due to firearms. 2.6% of 39 is 1 by the way. And even that 1, I cannot believe that someone can smuggle a firearm and shoot somebody with it in this kind of environment. Please do not distort the facts.

Tell me Latrivia, Who were those civilians killed by? And that number is still down from the 5000 a month that Saddam and his sons were killing before we got there. But tell me how many were killed by the same people that have been shooting at us? And then tell me how many Iraqi Troops and policemen are killed each month. Four cops were shot,no,I mean Four Cops were KILLED in my county last year. What do we compare that to?
The point is one group was in a war zone and the other was in it's living room. When I lived in downtown Detroit in the 80's, I picked up the paper on a Monday and the headline said that 41 People had been shot in Detroit OVER the WEEKEND. That's when it lived up to the name Murder City. Forty One people In The City of Detroit Lifted a gun and shot someone else. That's unacceptable. One hundred and Twenty Three People in The City of Chicago shot AND KILLED someone else in just over three months. Clearly this city needs more than midnight basketball.