Salon has an excellent story about Sarah Palin's direct affiliations with the Alaska Independence Party.
The article is an excellent read and sheds light on just how dirty, and extremist affiliated, Sarah Palin is. Obama's connection to Ayers is an absolute non-issue when compared to what Palin, and her husband Tod, are connected to.
I suspect this article will be written about in detail. I want to shine a bright light on the other cockroaches associated with the Palins via the AIP.
Let's start with the Salon article first. From former AIP President Chryson:
When Chryson first met Sarah Palin, however, he didn’t really trust her politically. It was the early 1990s, when he was a member of a local libertarian pressure group called SAGE, or Standing Against Government Excess. (SAGE’s founder, Tammy McGraw, was Palin’s birth coach.) Palin was a leader in a pro-sales-tax citizens group called WOW, or Watch Over Wasilla, earning a political credential before her 1992 campaign for City Council. Though he was impressed by her interpersonal skills, Chryson greeted Palin’s election warily, thinking she was too close to the Democrats on the council and too pro-tax.
But soon, Palin and Chryson discovered they could be useful to each other. Palin would be running for mayor, while Chryson was about to take over the chairmanship of the Alaska Independence Party, which at its peak in 1990 had managed to elect a governor.
Palin has known the AIP for a long time. Her affiliation with the former president goes back to the early 1990's.
But who is the AIP affiliated with?
The North American Secessionist Convention.
The charter of the American Secession Project is simple. We desire to place the concept of secession in the mainstream of political thought. Our intent is to proclaim that secession is a viable and legal right and a practical solution to contemporary problems. Secondly, we desire to build a coalition of groups seeking autonomy and independence within the current United States. Mutual support for the concept of self-determination and secession will eventually benefit all groups seeking freedom.
Secessionist come in all ethnic and cultural backgrounds colors and religious persuasions. Secession is neither liberal nor conservative, it is a right that might be equally applied regardless of a group's persuasion. The folks that support a free California and an Independent Alaska certainly disagree on numerous issues, specifically environmental issues. However the concept of supporting another in their bid to manage their own affairs is certainly a historic American (if not 20th century American) point of view.
I find the statement that this movement is neither "liberal nor conservative" very interesting. Early in her career it was alleged Palin was associated more with Democrats than with Republicans. What exactly is going on here? I suspect Sarah Palin's move upwards has more to do with her AIP affiliations than an allegiance to a Republican agenda.
The AIP is also associated with the Constitution Party.
Join the Constitution Party in its work to restore our government to its Constitutional limits and our law to its Biblical foundations
And their seven principles are:
Seven Principles of the Constitution Party are:
- Life: For all human beings, from conception to natural death;
- Liberty: Freedom of conscience and actions for the self-governed individual;
- Family: One husband and one wife with their children as divinely instituted;
- Property: Each individual's right to own and steward personal property without government burden;
- Constitution: and Bill of Rights interpreted according to the actual intent of the Founding Fathers;
- States' Rights: Everything not specifically delegated by the Constitution to the federal government is reserved for the state and local jurisdictions;
- American Sovereignty: American government committed to the protection of the borders, trade, and common defense of Americans, and not entangled in foreign alliances.
These people square with all of the rhetoric flowing out of Palin's mouth each time she opens it. The Southern Poverty Law Center has an older, but excellent read, on the shenanigans of the Constitution Party.
Remember Roy Moore? The Republican judge who didn't know how to separate church from state? The nuts in the Constition Party were all over Moore during his Ten Comandments stunt. They rallied on his behalf.
When the judge was booted out of office in August 2003 for defying a federal court order to remove his 2.5-ton Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building, hundreds of fundamentalist and neo-Confederate supporters rallied around him, chanting, "Roy Moore for president!" That far-fetched notion was mostly forgotten until last November, when The Associated Press ran a story headlined "Constitution Party wants Moore to run for president."
The details were sketchy, aside from the fact that the national chairman of the staunchly anti-government, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-immigrant third party — the only political entity listed as a "Patriot" group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — had approached Moore about quitting the GOP and mounting an anti-Bush candidacy.
Seems they were not too happy with the Republican agenda.
Since the early days of Bush's term, extremists like Chuck Baldwin, an evangelical pastor and talk-show host from Pensacola, Fla., had been urging their fellow travelers to "draw your line in the sand" and stop voting like sheep for the Republicans.
This is their agenda. This is Sarah Palin's agenda.
How perfect could it get? Moore and the Constitution Party looked like a match made in heaven, with their mutual disgust for abortion and the "homosexual agenda," and their mutual desire to make the U.S. a Bible-based republic.
True, the Constitution Party is small, with only 340,000 registered voters nationwide, but that does make it the nation's biggest third party. Considering the dismal track record of American third parties, it's also one of the longest-lasting, having existed in one form or another since Wallace's wildly successful third-party effort in 1968...
They may only have 340,000 plus registered voters nationwide, but they now have Sarah Palin one 72 heart beat away from the presidency of the United States.
Back to Salon. This is what Sarah Palin has accomplished:
Chryson and his allies have demonstrated just as much interest in grooming major party candidates as they have in putting forward their own people. At a national convention of secessionist groups in 2007, AIP vice chairman Dexter Carter announced that his party would seek to "infiltrate" the Democratic and Republican parties with candidates sympathetic to its hard-right, secessionist agenda. "You should use that tactic. You should infiltrate," Carter told his audience of neo-Confederates, theocrats and libertarians. "Whichever party you think in that area you can get something done, get into that party. Even though that party has its problems, right now that is the only avenue."
A couple of questions I have are whether Sarah Palin has the gray matter between her ears to know this is her agenda, or, if she is just another mean girl who is being used by the AIP but is so ego driven that she doesn't know the difference.
Time will tell.