Governor Sarah palin has been dealing with the former Alaskan Independence Party chairman Mark Chryson and with his party for many years. Palin attended Alaskan Independence Party convention many times . Todd Palin , Palin's husband, was a member of Alaskan Independence Party. America you tell me now who is the real terrorist? Sarah Palin is running for vice president of the united states of America who approved and supported the terrorists group who has been seeking for independence from United States of America. Palin has been dealing with these people for many years who have been seeking for independence from United States of America.
Alaskan Independence Party
Sarah Palin approves and supports Alaskan Independence Party
On the afternoon of Sept. 24 in downtown Palmer, Alaska, as the sun began to sink behind the snowcapped mountains that flank the picturesque Mat-Su Valley, 51-year-old Mark Chryson sat for an hour on a park bench, reveling in tales of his days as chairman of the Alaska Independence Party. The stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic battles to eliminate taxes, support the "traditional family" and secede from the United States.
So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that were intended for his personal protection. "This here is my attack dog," he said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from his passenger seat. "Her name is Suzy." Then he pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol — once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops — out of his glove compartment. "I’ve got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement," he said, clutching the gun in his palm. "Then again, so do most Alaskans." But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call "the 48." "We want to go our separate ways," he said, "but we are not going to kill you."
Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah Palin. An obscure figure outside of Alaska, Chryson has been a political fixture in the hometown of the Republican vice-presidential nominee for over a decade. During the 1990s, when Chryson directed the AIP, he and another radical right-winger, Steve Stoll, played a quiet but pivotal role in electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda afterward. Both Stoll and Chryson not only contributed to Palin’s campaign financially, they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp before, during and after her victory.
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Palin backed Chryson as he successfully advanced a host of anti-tax, pro-gun initiatives, including one that altered the state Constitution’s language to better facilitate the formation of anti-government militias. She joined in their vendetta against several local officials they disliked, and listened to their advice about hiring. She attempted to name Stoll, a John Birch Society activist known in the Mat-Su Valley as "Black Helicopter Steve," to an empty Wasilla City Council seat. "Every time I showed up her door was open," said Chryson. "And that policy continued when she became governor."
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.
The AIP was born of the vision of "Old Joe" Vogler, a hard-bitten former gold miner who hated the government of the United States almost as much as he hated wolves and environmentalists. His resentment peaked during the early 1970s when the federal government began installing Alaska’s oil and gas pipeline. Fueled by raw rage — "The United States has made a colony of Alaska," he told author John McPhee in 1977 — Vogler declared a maverick candidacy for the governorship in 1982. Though he lost, Old Joe became a force to be reckoned with, as well as a constant source of amusement for Alaska’s political class. During a gubernatorial debate in 1982, Vogler proposed using nuclear weapons to obliterate the glaciers blocking roadways to Juneau. "There’s gold under there!" he exclaimed.
Vogler made another failed run for the governor’s mansion in 1986. But the AIP’s fortunes shifted suddenly four years later when Vogler convinced Richard Nixon’s former interior secretary, Wally Hickel, to run for governor under his party’s banner. Hickel coasted to victory, outflanking a moderate Republican and a centrist Democrat. An archconservative Republican running under the AIP candidate, Jack Coghill, was elected lieutenant governor.
Hickel’s subsequent failure as governor to press for a vote on Alaskan independence rankled Old Joe. With sponsorship from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Vogler was scheduled to present his case for Alaskan secession before the United Nations General Assembly in the late spring of 1993. But before he could, Old Joe’s long, strange political career ended tragically that May when he was murdered by a fellow secessionist.
Hickel rejoined the Republican Party the year after Vogler’s death and didn’t run for reelection. Lt. Gov. Coghill’s campaign to succeed him as the AIP candidate for governor ended in disaster; he peeled away just enough votes from the Republican, Jim Campbell, to throw the gubernatorial election to Democrat Tony Knowles.
Despite the disaster, Coghill hung on as AIP chairman for three more years. When he was asked to resign in 1997, Mark Chryson replaced him. Chryson pursued a dual policy of cozying up to secessionist and right-wing groups in Alaska and elsewhere while also attempting to replicate the AIP’s success with Hickel in infiltrating the mainstream.
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Sarah Palin's ties to Alaskan Independence Party are played down
The McCain campaign denies his running mate supports the party's separatist bent.
Tonight, Sarah Palin will be nominated as the Republican Party's choice for vice president of the United States.
But back home, she has cheered the work of a tiny party that long has pushed for a statewide vote on whether Alaska should secede from those same United States. And her husband, Todd, was a member of the party for seven years.
"Keep up the good work," Sarah Palin told members of the Alaskan Independence Party in a videotaped speech to their convention six months ago in Fairbanks. She wished the party luck on what she called its "inspiring convention."
The Alaskan Independence Party, founded in 1978, initially promoted "the Alaskan independence movement." But now, according to its website, "its primary goal is merely a vote on secession."
McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said Tuesday that Palin did not support splitting Alaska off from the rest of the country. He sidestepped the question of whether she favored a statewide vote on secession.
"Gov. Palin believes that every American is entitled to their point of view, and their political beliefs," he said.
Bounds also did not directly answer the question of whether her husband supported the secession of Alaska.
"I can tell you that Mr. Palin is a proud American," Bounds said. "And he's excited that his wife has joined John McCain to reform Washington and make government work more effectively for all Americans."
For all but two months from 1995 to 2002, the governor's husband was registered as an Alaskan Independence Party member, according to the Alaska Division of Elections.
With McCain's campaign emphasizing patriotism -- his latest slogan is "Country First" -- the Palins' links to a party founded by the late secessionist gold miner Joe Vogler could prove awkward.
"I'm an Alaskan, not an American," Vogler is quoted as saying elsewhere on the party’s website. "I've got no use for America or her damned institutions."
The party supports a plebiscite on four options that it says Alaskans were entitled to vote on before becoming a state in 1959: Form a sovereign nation of their own, become a state, accept commonwealth status similar to Puerto Rico's, or remain a U.S. territory.
Leaders of the party say many of its 13,681 registered members have joined out of frustration over restrictions that the federal government has placed on the use of its vast land holdings in Alaska. Beyond the secession vote, the party also advocates gun rights, home schooling and abolition of property taxes.
A question-and-answer page on its website asks, "Aren't most Alaskan Independence Party members a bunch of radicals and kooks?"
"The party has its share of individualists, in the grand Alaskan tradition," the answer says. "No longer a fringe party, the AIP is a viable third party with a serious mission and qualified candidates for elected offices."
Less than 3% of the state's 479,721 registered voters are members of the party.
An AIP high point came in 1990, when Walter J. Hickel -- a Republican governor of Alaska in the late 1960s -- won the job again as the Alaskan Independence Party's candidate. But he returned months later to the GOP.
Palin and her husband attended the party's 1994 convention at a Best Western in Wasilla, Alaska, said former Chairman Mark Chryson, a computer repairman who is now the party's webmaster.
A former mayor of Wasilla, Palin also spoke to the party's convention in the same hotel in 2006 when she was running for governor, Chryson said.
Dexter Clark, an Alaskan Independence Party vice chairman, brought up Palin's ties to the group in videotaped remarks to the second North American Secessionist Convention in October in Chattanooga, Tenn.
"She was an AIP member before she got the job as the mayor of a small town," Clark told the group. "That was a nonpartisan job. But you get along to go along. She eventually joined the Republican Party."
McCain's campaign distributed Palin's voter registration records Tuesday to show that she had never been a member of the AIP.
The Alaska Division of Elections confirmed that Palin had been registered as a Republican since 1982.
McCain's campaign also slammed ABC News for posting a Web story saying that Palin had been a member of the party, calling the report a "smear."
michael.finnegan@latimes.com
LaTimes Report
THE ALASKA INDEPENDENCE PARTY.... What may prove to be the single most damaging angle to Sarah Palin's role on the Republican Party ticket? There are quite a few contenders (ethics scandal, earmarks, inexperience, outside-the-mainstream views), but following up on Hilzoy's item from last night, Palin's association with the Alaska Independence Party might be the most politically detrimental.
It's practically impossible to make a "Country First" argument when your running mate is affiliated with a political party that puts country second.
Officials of the Alaskan Independence Party say that Palin was once so independent, she was once a member of their party, which since the 1970s has been pushing for a legal vote for Alaskans to decide whether or not residents of the 49th state can secede from the United States.And while McCain's motto -- as seen in a new TV ad -- is "Country First," the AIP's motto is the exact opposite -- "Alaska First -- Alaska Always."
Lynette Clark, the chairman of the AIP, tells ABC News that Palin and her husband Todd were members in 1994, even attending the 1994 statewide convention in Wasilla. Clark was AIP secretary at the time.
"We are a state's rights party," Clark -- a self-employed goldminer -- tells ABC News. The AIP has "a plank that challenges the legality of the Alaskan statehood vote as illegal and in violation of United Nations charter and international law."
For all the talk about Barack and Michelle Obama's patriotism, John McCain's running mate was a member of a political party that liked the idea of seceding from the United States altogether. It's the kind of idea that would have been more common in the 1850s.
Advocating secession is, practically by definition, un-American. How does the right go after Obama's patriotism while supporting a ticket with a candidate who joined a secessionist party?
CBS News
In the mid-1990s, the Alaskan Independence Party was experiencing a boom of sorts. A governor had been elected on its ticket in 1990, when the party was not even a decade old. And membership was swelling.
Among the new recruits was Todd Palin, whose wife, Sarah, would later become governor of Alaska. The Palins attended the party’s convention in their hometown, Wasilla, in 1994, according to party officials, where the party called for a revote on statehood and a draft constitution for an independent Republic of Alaska. Mr. Palin joined the party.
The New York Times
McCain is cooking the books on buying mortgages and lying to America
Sen. John McCain's proposal to have the federal government directly buy and refinance troubled home loans would cost about $300 billion, his campaign said yesterday.
That money would come from the new $700 billion Wall Street bailout and a $300 billion refinancing program enacted as part of a housing bill adopted this summer.
Many details of the plan were unclear yesterday, but the few that emerged led some mortgage industry experts to criticize the plan as flawed and say that the $300 billion estimate is unrealistic given its scope and the magnitude of the housing crisis.
McCain talked about the plan during this week's debate with Democratic presidential rival Sen. Barack Obama. He said that as president he would order the Treasury Secretary to "immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those loans."
The idea of having the government buy bad loans and rework them has surfaced before. McCain floated the concept months ago and Obama pushed a similar idea as recently as September. But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's senior policy adviser, said this version is more substantive.
McCain said he wants to buy the mortgages and refinance them into more affordable 30-year, fixed-rate loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration.
Under the $700 billion bailout plan, the Treasury Department already has authority to buy residential mortgages as well as mortgage securities. And under the housing bill, the FHA already can refinance troubled loans, building on an effort underway since last year.
But the problem is this: Many borrowers these days are struggling because they are under water, meaning they owe more than their homes are worth. Helping them has proved tricky because someone has to take a financial hit in bailing them out.
To protect itself, when the FHA gets involved now with refinancing a troubled mortgage, it will insure a loan for only up to 90 percent of the home's current value. Lenders must voluntarily agree to forgive the rest of the debt for borrowers who have no equity.
Many lenders have resisted, which explains why only 1 percent of the 369,000 people who have refinanced through the FHA in the past year were delinquent.
McCain plans to overcome lender resistance by bypassing them, Holtz-Eakin said yesterday.
That means the government could end up buying these loans at face value. For instance, it may potentially buy a loan in which the borrower owes $250,000 on a home that's worth $200,000.
The FHA, and potentially the taxpayer, would then foot the bill for the difference.
Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, said he and others have supported the government buying loans at a discount and then restructuring them. But buying them at face value is a dramatic departure, he said.
It is "outright loss for the taxpayer," said Blinder, an Obama supporter who said he has answered queries from the Obama campaign. "I don't see why anybody, Republican or Democrat, would want to do that. Ironically, you would be giving the biggest gifts to the lenders who made the worst mortgages."
The losses will grow if home values continue to drop, said Abdullah Yavas, a real estate professor at Penn State University.
"The more the property value goes down, the bigger that loss will be," said Yavas, who is not affiliated with either campaign.
But Holtz-Eakin said taxpayers have to cover the loss because the economy has deteriorated so rapidly. "That's the only way to get a rapid and broad-based response."
About six months ago, McCain pitched a plan in which lenders would have forgiven part of the debt. "In the end, the lenders didn't," Holtz-Eakin said.
The Obama campaign yesterday called the initiative "erratic policymaking" that would have the government "massively overpay for mortgages."
The Bush administration did not comment directly on the plan. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said in separate briefings that they had not seen details.
Yesterday, McCain's campaign said its Home Resurgence Plan would target people who financed their primary residence and who did not falsify documents or avoid a down payment. Ultimately, the plan would help stabilize home values, campaign officials said.
Chris Mayer, a real estate professor at Columbia University, said $300 billion won't be enough to achieve McCain's goals.
"There's over $400 billion in negative equity sitting around the country right now and $300 billion is not going to come close to the magnitude of solving the problem," he said.
And, he said, it won't help potential buyers who can't find a loan because credit has dried up.
John McIlwain, a senior fellow for housing at the Urban Land Institute, said that reworking these loans might be the fastest solution to the housing crisis. "But it was not something I expected to hear from a conservative Republican."
During the debate, McCain took ownership of the idea and its costs. "Is it expensive? Yes," he said.
"And it's my proposal," he added. "It's not Senator Obama's proposal. It's not President Bush's proposal."
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