http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hpC0ED5JB9qx1iUsd9xz-dBbwWBwD92UR2C81

The AIP Chairwoman told reporters that Sarah Palin was an AIP member, but then later retracted her statement. Sarah may have attended some AIP conventions or meetings with her husband, but never changed her party registration.

Sarah Palin also apparently addressed the AIP state convention by video early this year, but it was mostly just welcoming remarks.

The New York Slimes Times has retraced their story.

Ah, Bad, classy as ever. When you can’t defend your position, insult. That works every time!

And if you could remove your Obama blinders for a bit, you would notice my repeated position that I can’t support Senator McCain due to McCain-Feingold. That makes me the ideal neutral party in this, able to judge that this whole "she wasn’t vetted" meme smacks of desperation.

Washington Post: "Far from being a last-minute tactical move or a second choice when better known alternatives were eliminated, Palin was very much in McCain’s thinking from the beginning of the selection process, according to McCain’s advisers. The 44-year-old governor made every cut as the first list of candidates assembled last spring was slowly winnowed. The more McCain learned about her, the more attracted he was to her as someone who shared his maverick, anti-establishment instincts."

Associated Press: "Culvahouse said Palin’s review, like others, began with a team of two dozen people culling information from public sources. The team reviewed speeches, financial records, tax information, litigation, investigations, ethical charges, marriages and divorces, for a number of potential running mates. For Palin specifically, the team studied online archives of the state’s largest newspapers, including the Anchorage Daily News, but didn’t request paper archives for Palin’s hometown newspaper for fear the secret review would become public."

Anchorage Daily News: "Palin, like others on the short list, then was sent a personal data questionnaire with 70 "very intrusive" questions, Culvahouse said. She also was asked to submit a number of years of federal and state tax returns, as well as any controversial articles she had written or interviews she had done. The campaign also checked her credit. Then, Culvahouse conducted a nearly three-hour-long interview."

"Not done the way I would do it" (since you’re a professional investigator, no doubt) does not equate to "not done". The whole "she wasn’t vetted" meme is really just desperate Democrats looking for slime to fling and desperate media folks trying to excuse the fact that they were caught totally unawares. Which one are you?

Here is a time line with details concerning "Troopergate".

2) Palin appears to have been for the "bridge to nowhere" before she was against it. It looks like her claim to being against it is very misleading.

Read this. 

3) As mayor of a town of 7000, she pulled in $27 million in federal earmarks over 4 years.

Looks like it’s true, but at least "she used this money to build a train system, build a youth shelter, repair the sewer system, and build a transportation hub" (RedState.com)  Certainly doesn’t sound wasteful, but earmarks are earmarks…

4) It looks like Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence party in the 1990s. This is a fringe party that wanted Alaska to be a separate country in the 1970s, but now wants to hold a vote on whether Alaska should persue seceding from the US. Very interesting VP for a campaign with the "country first" solgan.

She’s been a Republican since she was 18 according to this. And this.

At least she didn’t release anyone’s social security number…

If you didn’t have your fingers so firmly in your ears, you could probably sing "la la la la" better in tune.

To vet someone is to dig up everything you can find out about them: uncover all the skeletons.  It means digging deep.  But even the McCain campaign account seems to describe mostly googling and then giving Palin a questionaire, and McCain talked to her but once, briefly.   

In short, a sloppy, slapdash effort that could have been put together by an teenage intern rather than any sort of serious effort to vet her.

Did the McCain campaign know that she tried to ban books from local libraries?  That this vaunted for of pork actually hired anactual Abramoff-linked lobbyist to win millions in pork all for her tiny town alone?  And so on.  There’s no evidence that they tried to find this out, and the places that hold such evidence say that the McCain campaign never contacted them.  

In fact, the McCain campaign has lately lamely claimed that they DIDN’T LOOK because, I dunno, the records were in microfilm or something.  

But no no: you assure us that all evidence to the contrary, they did a real and thorough job… or if not that, then "vetting" must for the moment come to be defined as whatever it was that the McCain campaign did do.

It’s nothing short of amazing to see people so deeply wrapped up in their ideology that they start to make arguments and defenses that defy common sense: as sometimes it seems like even they know as they are making them.  Palin has foreign policy experience (despite having openly denied it herself!) because Alaska is near Russia.  Or because she headed up the National Guard (oops, no, not on national defense/foreign policy issues she didn’t).  On and on it goes…  

Whether Palin was a good choice or bad, her appointment to the VP slot has supplanted Obamanews for the nonce.