Vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin has announced she will forgo the expensive outfits purchased by the Republican Party for her campaign appearances, and from now on will appear on the stump wearing her own Alaska-bought clothes.

Mrs Palin stressed to throngs of supporters at a campaign stop in Tampa, Florida, that she was wearing her own jacket, pointing to her blazer, and said she would eschew clothing that wasn't hers, following a campaign kerfuffle over high-priced garb purchased by the campaign for her public outings.

Growing Doubts on Palin Take a Toll, Poll Finds

A growing number of voters have concluded that Senator John McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, is not qualified to be vice president, weighing down the Republican ticket in the last days of the campaign, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

All told, 59 percent of voters surveyed said Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up nine percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favor Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee.

And in a possible indication that the choice of Ms. Palin has hurt Mr. McCain’s image, voters said they had much more confidence in Mr. Obama to pick qualified people for his administration than they did in Mr. McCain.

After nearly two years of campaigning, a pair of hotly contested nominating battles, a series of debates and an avalanche of advertisements, the nationwide poll found the contours of the race hardening in the last days before the election on Tuesday. Twelve percent of the voters surveyed said they had already voted. These were among the findings:

¶Mr. Obama is maintaining his lead, with 51 percent of likely voters supporting him and 40 percent supporting Mr. McCain in a head-to-head matchup.

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Even scarier than the Republican vice-presidential nominee's ignorance of science is that many Americans agree that Earth began just a moment ago in time. Rick Feneley reports.

Sarah Palin believes in fossil fuels but not necessarily in fossils. This is no trivial matter. Of all the intense scrutiny Palin has faced in this campaign - not least on the matter of her wardrobe - nobody in America seemed much interested in asking her the dinosaur question.

That is: do you believe, or have you ever believed, that the world was created in the past 5000 or 10,000 years and that dinosaurs roamed the planet alongside humans?

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Sarah Palin is campaigning in areas in which right-wing Republicans are already smitten with right-wing Republicans. She is going out and speaking to the basest part of the base, the part that believes Obama's a terrorist and wants him tried for treason. The McCain campaign continues to show no faith in her intelligence. Her speeches rarely vary at all, no matter the city or the venue; if an audience is old, she talks about health care and Social Security. If the audience is young, she talks about health care and Social Security.

Palin knows that not every audience cares about the issues she's discussing; she just is not comfortable with a slight change in the speech she has been handed.

It's a pretty jarring sight. But even though not every right-wing audience reacts to each part of Palin's script with the same enthusiasm, one thing is clear: the far right really likes Palin. And let there be no doubt about this: in 2012, Sarah Palin does not want to debate VP Joe Biden. She wants to debate President Obama. She wants to be the Republican Party nominee for President.

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John McCain had no choice but to pick a women as a VP candidate to boost his chances in the presidential elections. But he certainly picked the wrong one. Sure Palin is full of life, but has zilch proper focus on the planet we live on... There would have been better older wiser women on his side but have they all gone to the other camp? Why pick the good looking spruiking creationist pea-brain? One can argue that one is entitled to their own opinions... Fine. But science — although a human stylistic endeavour like religion and money —  is not an opinionated discipline, although there can be some opinionated scientists... In the short run, Obama will do despite being short on policy revelations... while he will be having a monumental rescue operation to perform after the "we crash 'em, You Fix 'em" policies of the last ignoramus president...

Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been cleared by a new report of abuse of power in firing Alaska's top law enforcement official.

An independent investigator appointed by the Alaska Personnel Board said she had violated no ethics law.

Mrs Palin, governor of Alaska, was accused of sacking Walt Monegan because he failed to dismiss her ex-brother-in-law, state trooper Michael Wooten.

An earlier report for Alaska's congress found that she had abused her office.

Mrs Palin has always denied any wrongdoing, and her supporters say the charges were motivated by her political opponents.

From the First Post

Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic, meanwhile, was moved to write a point-by-point demolition of Palin's arguments. Regarding Climategate, he writes: "Some of the e-mails discuss deleting data; there are investigations underway to determine whether data was deleted; there is no evidence that data was manipulated, aside from words deliberately taken out of context, like 'trick' and 'contain'."

Other bloggers have ridiculed Palin's claim that she has "always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics", which neatly glosses over her support for the teaching of creationism in schools and the passage in her book that explains she "didn't believe in the theory that human beings - thinking, loving beings - originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea".

On a similar theme, a science blogger slammed Palin's revelation that "some [Climategate] scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago".

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see global warming is real and comments... and toon at top.

Sarah Palin is such a cold-eyed skeptic about the Copenhagen summit on climate change that it's no surprise she would call on President Obama not to attend. After all, Obama might join other leaders in acknowledging that warming is a "global challenge." He might entertain "opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions." He might even explore ways to "participate in carbon-trading markets."

Oh, wait. Those quotes aren't from some smug Euro-socialist manifesto. They're from an administrative order Palin signed in September 2007, as governor of Alaska, establishing a "sub-Cabinet" of top state officials to develop a strategy for dealing with climate change.

Back then, Palin was the governor of a state where "coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice, record forest fires, and other changes are affecting, and will continue to affect, the lifestyles and livelihoods of Alaskans," as she wrote. Faced with that reality, she sensibly formed the high-level working group to chart a course of action.

"Climate change is not just an environmental issue," wrote Palin. "It is also a social, cultural, and economic issue important to all Alaskans."

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Sarah Palin, the scourge of Barack Obama's plan to introduce a limited government healthcare scheme to America, has admitted to benefiting from Canada's state-funded health system when she was a child.

The Calgary Herald reports that in a speech in Calgary at the weekend, the former Alaskan governor told an audience who'd paid $200 each for the privilege: "My first five years of life we spent in Skagway, Alaska, right there by Whitehorse. Believe it or not – this was in the 60s – we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse... I think, isn't that kind of ironic now."

Some would say ironic: others might say hypocritical. Palin has been criticised for stoking up feelings in the healthcare reform debate by suggesting that rationing of resources in a future government-funded health system might result in bureaucrats deciding who was most deserving of treatment.

Palin dubbed these bureaucrats "death panels" – a charge dismissed by House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the "lie of the year".

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You may not have encountered the writing of Geller, one of the more controversial ascending stars of the American extreme right. Politicised, as she says, by the events of 9/11, she inspired, then orchestrated, opposition to the construction of the planned Muslim cultural centre two blocks away from the former site of the World Trade Center, which Geller named the "Ground Zero Mosque". A pivotal figure in the so-called "birther" movement, she has – in common with other robustly conservative figures such as Donald Trump, broadcaster Glenn Beck and her writing partner Robert Spencer – tirelessly queried details of President Obama's ancestry, and hence his entitlement to office. Geller still has many questions in this area, despite the recent release of the "long form" of the president's birth certificate, proving that he was born in the American state of Hawaii.

A glance at her voluminous blog reveals her disdain for institutions such as the UN (for employing "child-raping peacekeepers") The New York Times ("Jew-haters") and other famously subversive voices such as that of our own Sun newspaper (for whom "Jewkilling is OK, everything else is terror") and Pope Benedict XVI ("Maybe Jew-hating," she writes with reference to the German pontiff, "obliterates rational thought"). She didn't like the way Campbell's Soup went about producing a halal recipe and has described liberal Jews as "self-hating wretches". An infamous post on Atlas Shrugs suggesting that Barack Obama was the love-child of Malcolm X was, Geller insists, not written by her. The image she posted of Obama urinating on an American flag was "a very well-circulated cartoon – so what?"

"I believe you once said that President Obama 'wants jihad to win'."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/pamela-geller-american-patriot-or-extremist-firebrand-2282486.html

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Sarah Palin has canceled an interview with NBC’s Today Show after a host on its sister network, MSNBC, proposed a scatological punishment for Palin in graphic detail.

The Associated Press reports that the row began with an inflammatory comment from MSNBC’s Martin Bashir. He took offense at Palin’s comparison of U.S. indebtedness to slavery and suggested that Palin deserved a stomach-turning punishment inflicted on wayward slaves, which included defecation in the mouth and urination on the face. Bashir apologized for the remark on Monday, calling it “totally unacceptable.”

Palin’s representatives demanded that NBC executives take disciplinary action against Bashir. With no action forthcoming, she cancelled an interview with the Today Show’s Matt Lauer. Lauer was scheduled to visit Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska to discuss her new book about the spirit of Christmas.