Another Alaskan Woman Speaks Out Against Palin

This is a letter written in response to Mairiis' letter earlier in the blog. Nina, the author, is another amazing Homer friend of mine. The photo above is one I took while visiting Nina and Ed to witness the amazing sandhill cranes that summer in Homer.


Mairiis,

You, as a life-long, small-town Alaska resident, have eloquently spoken for those of us who do not support Sarah Palin and what she stands for.

There are many Alaskans who care about the environment, social justice, reproductive rights and personal choice, separation of church and state, and do not support the war in Iraq and do not want to see a continuation of the present Bush policies.

Make no mistake about it--McCain/Palin=More of the Same Bush Policies. You are right on when you point out that the Sarah Palin campaign is a diversion from scrutiny of McCain and what he represents. What I find very scary too is that the McCain campaign is trying very hard to keep the news media from digging deeply into Sarah's background and from asking too many questions. If the media is not working as probing, truth-finders and are prevented from doing their jobs of interviewing candidates, the public is reduced to getting their information mainly the campaigns. Most people do not go beyond what they hear on tv, radio, or newspapers. Fair but tough media scrutiny is important to an open democracy.

And that is another thing that really bothers me, all the secrecy we are now learning about in the Palin administration. There is a real problem in government accountability and transparency if much of Alaska's business is being conducted on private email accounts. There is a loss of state history this way and a loss of public access to state records. According to the Anchorage Daily News article http://www.adn.com/front/story/526281.html
Palin's aides were requested to use her personal yahoo account to email her. This is very disturbing for a governor who has publicly said she would have an open and transparent government. None of the state's business should be done on personal accounts. I thought we had just ended the Murkowski administration, one of the most secretive in the state's history!

I hope that Americans will look closely at how the McCain campaign is putting the glitzy gloss on their public image to cover over what they really represent. Their motto for Sarah is really, "No questions if it is not in the script." Look deeper, find out what McCain's record is--90% like Bush's-- and urge the media to keep asking hard questions of all candidates.

Nina,
another small-town Alaska resident