September 04, 2008

Anne Kilkenny's letter about Sarah Palin

  This points to a copy of a letter about Palin that details her political history, as viewed by a city council attendee since 1992, who has negative feelings about Palin's tenure but balances the letter with some positive info also.

There are almost no cites in the letter.

<---- Logo at left is used with consent of Warrior Librarian, but that site and its staff have NO association with Palin, Kilkenny, or me.

    See two quite opposing points of views from Wasilla: Debbie and Jerry Frost and Butch King.

    I've added, and will continue to update that page with, articles that give much more information about Palin's actual political history.
    Rebuttals or corrections, with cites, for any of this are welcome.  The articles that have been written since the letter appeared do have more information about some of the items, including info that shows a couple of them in a somewhat better light.  And updates are linked at the bottom of the page.

It was the paragraph about the librarian that made my hair stand on end .

I've since read that it seems to have been similar to what happens in the White House when a new administration takes over, though this procedure wasn't usually used in that small town of course -- a new administration (Republican in this case) asks for resignations from admin staff of the former (Democrat Mayor Stein's) and then interviews the people who'd like to stay on.  One article mentioned (I didn't make note of the URL) that the librarian had chosen to sign a loyalty oath to the former mayor, which had made things somewhat problematical, though I can't imagine why, once a new mayor was in.

What I've found so far is that Palin asked the librarian, in the interview, if she'd be willing to remove certain books (without naming any) if requested, and the librarian said "No."  More detail at the main page.

Update - 9/6/08. Per former Mayor Stein, Palin mentioned some voters were concerned about 'inappropriate language.'  But no one's mentioned a request to remove certain or specific books -- and as it turns out, Palin never did ask for removal or banning in her tenure there or since.   I still worry about the impulse though..

UPDATES were added to the Palin-Kilkenny letter page.  There was actually a lot of misinformation being distributed during the election.  I've added fact-checking sites to the reference area and logged germane stories from that time and added an "Aftermath" section.  There was so much interest at one point -- after I discovered the comments-area letter that pointed out her controversial history in Alaska -- that there were 53,000 separate requests for the page in one day, with an average of 40,000/day for awhile.  I had linked to the letter's contents at a Daily KOS forum and one other, though I can't remember which.  But I've always liked looking at which parts of any story are true and which may not be.