This official portrait of Wasilla City Council member Sarah Palin, was taken in 1995, as she was planning her run against John Stein for his office as mayor. At that time, her husband, who is now refusing to honor a valid subpoena from the the State of Alaska, was a member of the Alaska Independence Party. It is a group that advocates a citizen's responsibility not to honor such "illegal subpoenas."The document opened up in her three-ring binder is a copy of a mass-mailed flyer from the John Birch Society. She probably got it along with the other council members. It hasn't been determined yet whether or not it normally would have ended up bound as it appears in front of her. Next to it is an unopened copy of the magazine, The New American.
Confronted with this information, Palin spokesperson Michael Goldfarb says, "This photo from the early to mid 90s shows the Governor having her photo taken in front of a three ring binder of information from local citizens presented regularly to Wasilla council members by the town clerk. These binders featured material given by members of the public to all council members."
William N. Grigg stated today that, "I was a Senior Editor of The New American at the time the "Con-Con Call" story was published. We did send thousands of reprints of that story to every state and local policy-maker we could identify. I'm pretty sure Mrs. Palin's only contact with the JBS in this matter was receiving a copy of the reprint from local members."
I'm not so sure. At the time this happened, Palin was gearing up a campaign against Wasilla Mayor Stein, that was comprised of the following basic elements:
-- Eliminate the new Wasilla Police Department
-- Do away with taxes, including the recent city sales tax
-- John Stein's wife is a Democrat
-- John Stein's wife has a different last name than Stein
-- John Stein's wife is a baby killer (pro-choice)
-- John Stein might be Jewish
I was there. I watched that campaign unfold, bringing out a level of slime our community hadn't seen until then.It makes it hard for me to believe, that, with all the stuff a city council member gets to go through, she somehow blindly chose those pages to show for her portrait.