Anchorage, Alaska in the 1970's.

This is the Anchorage I remember.  Before the oil money started to pour through the city streets, and we learned that cash was the key to happiness, while trading away our soul in exchange for strip malls and cookie cutter housing developments.

4th Avenue, at that time the heart of the city.

Seedy bars, adult book stores, and houses of worship were often seen only blocks apart on the same street.

Pre-fab housing Alaska style.

Did you know Anchorage had a Drive-in theater?

Two actually, and in the summer it was too light out to see a damn thing on the screen, and in the winter we froze our asses off while trying to make out the actor's faces through the haze of drifting exhaust emanating from our idling automobiles.

Spenard Road, where massage parlors lined the street all in a row, and the prostitutes too nasty to get jobs in them waved at you as you drove home from school.

I delivered the Anchorage Daily News, every morning at 6:00 a.m. to this one.

This is essentially what every neighborhood I lived in looked like back then.

I have to say that the city is a whole hell of a lot tidier these days, but there certainly was something raw and untamed about the Anchorage of the 1970's. Come to think of it, most of US were raw and untamed back then as well. 

To see many more great photos, just click here.

Lawrence O'Donnell helps to identify Mike Huckabee as a 9-11 profiteer, and a crappy history teacher.

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Personally I believe that ANY parent that subjects their child to these insultingly inaccurate "history" lessons should be charged with child abuse.

I love how O'Donnell ponders whether or not Huckabee will identify the religion of EVERY historical figure that's discussed in the tapes. I think I already know the answer to that one.

SarahPAC paid $13,708 to decorate Sarah's bus so she could go on a five day vacation. How is that fiscal conservative BS working for ya? Update!

Courtesy of The Note:

Sarah Palin spent almost $14,000 to adorn her “One Nation” tour bus with larger-than-life renditions of the Constitution, Liberty Bell, and her signature.

That’s one of hundreds of expenditures listed in SarahPAC’s semi-annual FEC report, which was filed online today. The former Alaska governor’s political action committee paid $13,708.44 to the Tennessee company Fast Signs for “Bus Wrap” on May 26, three days before her tour of the northeast kicked off.

Unbelievable that the poor, undereducated paint chip eaters that are still dreaming of a Sarah Palin Presidency, spent almost $14,000 to decorate a bus so that their idol (And the only family member that could stand her) could visit tourist attractions for five days, while continuing to play the political prick tease in order to attract the publicity that she so desperately craves.

That is almost $3000 a day!  And what did the Palin-bots GET for their hard earned money?

This:



And of course this. Not to mention this. And really who could forget this? Which of course inevitably led to this.

Well gee that was such a good investment I wonder what else Palin spent her supporter's retirement savings on?

SarahPAC raised $1,658,897 during the first six months of 2011 and spent $1,591,520. The PAC has $1,402,368 cash on hand. In a statement, SarahPAC treasurer Tim Crawford told ABC News that the group “more than doubled the amount we raised as compared to the same time period in 2009. We received more than 36,700 contributions from over 24,000 contributors.”

Among SarahPAC’s other noteworthy disbursements:

-- $26,295.47 to a Visa/BankCard payment center in Dallas, Tex. for “Air Fare, Lodging, Car Rental, Wireless.” The date of disbursement is June 2, the day she visited Massachusetts and New Hampshire. 
Presumably, the sum accounts for some of the cost of her “One Nation” tour. 


So besides the $14,000 she wasted on this "bus tour" she also spent an additional $26,000 on air fare, lodging, and "CAR RENTAL!"  What the hell for? She had a bus with $14,000 worth of decorations on it that she could both live in AND use for transportation!


-- $5,794 to Israel’s Sar-El Tours and Travel for a“Tour of Holy Land.” Palin visited Israel in March and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Oh yeah, that trip ALSO turned out well.

-- $18,700 to Young America’s Foundation, a conservative outreach organization aimed at students.

Is that how much the brain washing of young people costs these days? How much do you want to bet she could not get HER kids to attend if she duct taped them to the top of her car and drove their ass there?

-- $10,000 to Peter Schweizer for “Research Consulting.” Schweizer is a conservative author based in Florida who Palin hired as her foreign policy adviser in May.

I wonder if part of his advice was for Palin to hide in her room for two days while visiting India in order to avoid the locals?

-- $5,416.66 to Anchorage, Alaska’s True North L'Attitudes for scheduling.

-- $683 to the Nashville, Tenn. store Nico & LaLa for bookmarks.

There is in fact much more in these filings, which you can find here.

I have a feeling that this is just the beginning and that we will learn much more about how Sarah wastes her supporters money in the days, and weeks ahead.

You know some days I feel bad for the people who are so besotted with Sarah Palin that they will allow her to take such advantage of them.  Today is not one of those days.

You people are idiots, and she's a fraud, move on!

Update: It looks like the Washington Post has uncovered evidence that Palin's bus tour might actually have cost even MORE than we thought. Seriously?

But the total for the trip is likely much more, because many bills came in after the June 30 filing deadline, Sarah PAC treasurer Tim Crawford said in an interview. In addition, many other expenses associated with the trip, such as photography, videography, Internet fundraising and airfare, are more difficult to account for. (One item in the report describes $6,999 paid to an air charter company called Republican Presidential Travel on June 9, at the tail end of “One Nation.”)

Wait, what?  There is a such thing as a "Republican Presidential Travel" airline?  I have never heard of that.

And by the way neither have the folks over at Talking Points Memo. But they did learn THIS:


Doug Garrett, the former owner of Moby Dick Airways, told TPM that Republican Presidential Travel is headquartered in Alaska and under an agreement with the new owner of Moby Dick Airways only does charters in Alaska. He referred questions specifically about the services his company provided to Palin to SarahPAC.

Okay by a show of hands, does ANYBODY have any doubt that this airline is somehow ONLY providing flights to a certain half-term governor?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Frank Schaeffer reveals how Fundamentalist religions are destroying the world. They're playing my song baby!

Courtesy of Alternet:

The deluded religious belief that any people or nation or church is a "chosen" people is the root of almost all our troubles. So is the lunacy of believing in "Truth" revealed through one special prophet to one special peoples and/or tribe, be they Jews, Muslims or American Evangelical Christians, or conservative Roman Catholics who believe in the special primacy of their popes.

Eliminate willful self-serving tribal religious delusion from the globe and there might be hope for the survival of the human race. Combine tribalism and religious conviction with nukes and the "right" to exploit the earth and disaster looms.

It's no accident that the most dangerous cultures today are also the most religiously observant societies. The ultra-religiously observant USA embraces perpetual war as a way of life. With our notion of "exceptionalism," we fear the "other" who might challenge our notion of having been chosen by God for some special task.

This is a great article and I urge you to spend the time to read all of it.  However I will let you know that this next part is my favorite portion.

Someday these "special" and "chosen" countries will cease to exist as will all nation states. Someday they will not even be remembered because all things pass from time into oblivion, nor will their "holy" books and "holy" places exist forever, simple geology will take care of that. What makes them dangerous today is their shared religious delusion that they are somehow essential and eternal.

I know that for religious people this is a very difficult concept to grasp, that their nation, and even their religion, may someday disappear into the mists of time, but anybody who has studied even junior high school history cannot deny the reality of that statement.

I remember once making a born again Christian hopping mad at me for referring to his religion as a mythology.

"No it is not!" he said.

"You're right." I replied. "It's not a mythology, today. But someday it WILL be, unless of course it is not remembered at all."

I was kind of a jerk in those days, and loved to rattle people's cages concerning their sacred cows.  I am much more mellow, and less combative, these days but the truth of my prediction is no less valid.

What has to be remembered is that thousands of years ago armies of "chosen" warriors marched to war after giving offerings to,and receiving the blessing from, Gods that you and I have never even heard of.  Yet they had complete faith that these long forgotten deities would keep them safe, or provide a place for their spirit to reside if they were felled in battle.

Millions have died under the swords of armies who believed that their gods had given  them license to destroy those who dared to worship at "sacrilegious" altars. And that faith allowed them to do so without even a hint of guilt at the wholesale murder of entire civilizations.

Now be honest, from that time to this, has mankind REALLY evolved that much?  And if not, why not?

Man who gave Palin her Paul Revere tour says she was "misplacing a few facts when quizzed on her visit."

Courtesy of Newser:

A vicar who gave Sarah Palin and her family a Paul Revere history lesson claims to have the "inside scoop" on the former Alaska governor's "Boston history massacre." I know "where all the factoids she cited came from and take responsibility for putting them in her head," confesses Rev. Stephen Ayres. "I will not take the blame for the odd order those factoids came out. Perhaps it was too much information in too short a period of time to digest properly." Ayres, the vicar of Boston's Old North Church, was asked by the National Park Service to offer the family a tour of the church where patriots, operating on a signal from Paul Revere, held two lanterns to warn Americans that the British were coming by sea.

Ayres speculates that Palin talked later about Revere "ringing bells" to warn the British about American arms because he told her that a teenage Revere had founded the church's "bell ringing guild" in 1750. He also offered the "standard talk" about Revere that included a mention of Revere's capture by the British, "warning those troops that the minutemen had been alerted," he writes in the church blog. Ayres is grateful for Palin's historical mishmash, he adds. "She succeeded in her stated intention of drawing attention to America's historical sites and inadvertently provided us with priceless free publicity by misplacing a few facts when quizzed on her visit," he notes

It is VERY kind of the Vicar to offer to take some of the blame for Palin's complete inability to retain information, but he should know that it is simply not his fault.  No matter how slowly he talked, or how many illustrations he drew for her with crayons, she STILL would have fucked the whole thing up.

Not only does Palin's bus tour do NOTHING to educate the American people about this country despite what she says, it also appears she is actively distracting others from learning anything about it.

The poor tour guide is doing his level best to teach these tourists something about the history of Bunker Hill, but Palin is disrespectfully keeping the crowd from hearing him by keeping the focus on her as she signs autographs using her daughter's back. (Apparently Piper got demoted from security detail to "handy writing surface.")

Perhaps if Palin were more interested in education she would not have mistakenly claimed that Paul Revere "warned the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms by ringing those bells."

Warned the British?

Rang bells?

Take away our arms?

WTF?

Isn't there a third grade child around to correct this imbecile?

Or I guess she could just visit this educational site for children and learn the facts.

And it is in THIS woman's house that Willow Palin is supposed to get her education.  Not bloody likely.