By Kyle Hopkins
Anchorage Daily News
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – A California-based conservative group that hammered
Barack Obama during the presidential election is launching a string of
commercials this week praising Gov. Sarah Palin, R-Alaska.
Designed to counter what the group calls attacks on Palin – a potential
presidential candidate in 2012 – by "media elites," the ads began airing
in Alaska on Tuesday.
But Palin's critics have been just as busy. A group spearheaded by local
left-leaning bloggers says the governor still has to answer for the
findings of an abuse-of-power investigation finished during the
campaign, and are pressing lawmakers to take action next session.
The group, Alaskans for Truth, says the state Legislature ought to
censure Palin for breaking ethics rules and hold hearings on whether the
governor and her husband told investigators the truth.
At the same time, Palin sup****ters are airing commercials paid for by a
political action committee called the Our Country Deserves Better
Committee, which originally formed in July to defeat Obama's
presidential bid.
On its Web site, the political action committee writes about stopping
illegal immigration and liberal judges, and says the country needs a
president who embraces a "culture of life."
The plan was to disband after the election, said chief strategist Sal
Russo, a Sacramento political consultant. But sup****ters voted in an
online poll to keep going.
The committee is spending $50,000 on the ads in Alaska and plans to air
spots on national cable and network TV too, Russo said.
"We thought a good thing to start with was your governor was being
maligned by too many media elites and political pundits," Russo said.
"We're saying we want her to continue to be a leader of the Republican
Party, that we need her."
The ads hit local television on Tuesday and will appear across Alaska
during prime time today and Thursday – in time for Thanksgiving. Palin,
whose stance on social issues such as abortion leans hard to the right,
has left the door open to a potential presidential bid in four years.
The Our Country Deserves Better Committee made headlines during the
campaign for airing footage of Obama's controversial former pastor, the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and holding a multi-state "Stop Obama" bus tour.
The group's chairman is Howard Kaloogian, a Republican who served in the
California state Assembly from 1994 to 2000. Together with Russo, he
worked on the successful 2003 effort to recall Gov. Gray Davis.
Palin spokesman Bill McAllister said Palin wasn't aware of the ads until
re****ters called about the commercials last week.
Alaskans for Truth was launched as an informal group this fall,
organizing an Anchorage anti-Palin rally in October that drew more than
1,000 people and calling for Attorney General Talis Colberg to lose his
job.
Group leaders said they want the Alaska state Legislature to follow up
on an investigation into Palin's firing of her public safety
commissioner that found the governor abused her power in allowing her
husband and top aides to push for the firing of her former
brother-in-law, a state trooper.
That finding came from an investigator hired by the Alaska Legislative
Council. After her selection as Sen. John McCain's running mate, Palin
refused to cooperate, with her local campaign officials saying the probe
had become a witch hunt by Obama sup****ters.
She did, however, give a statement in a subsequent investigation by the
Alaska Personnel Board, which eventually cleared her of wrongdoing.
Alaskans for Truth leaders maintain lawmakers should stick with the
original re****t.
--
It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad
for them, it's failing.
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