Carl Bernstein argues in The Palin Pick — The Devolution of McCain that America’s security will be in danger if left to the GOP’s VP candidate:

Three weeks after the 2008 Republican convention, on the cusp (maybe) of the first presidential debate, it is time to confront an awkward but profound question: whether in picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has committed — by his own professed standards of duty and honor — a singularly unpatriotic act.

“I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war,” he has said throughout this campaign. Yet, in choosing Palin, he has demonstrated — whatever his words — it may be permissible to imperil the country, conceivably even to “lose” it, in order to win the presidency. That would seem the deeper meaning of his choice of Palin.

Indeed, no presidential nominee of either party in the last century has seemed so willing to endanger the country’s security as McCain in his reckless choice of a running mate.

I certainly agree. From a security perspective Palin clearly is unfit for office. Moreover, for all her redeeming qualities, she serves primarily as a token to the extreme right and to the “poison” of fundamentalists:

Above all, the John McCain I covered in 1999-2000 was — he said — convinced that two factors were undermining the interests of the United States: its cultural wars, causing political gridlock in Washington and civic discontent across the land; and the unbending agenda of the right-wing of the Republican party that, in his view, had been captured by the Christian conservative movement and bore disproportionate responsibility for the poisonous state of American politics. Exhibit One: the scorched-earth campaign that George W. Bush was then waging against McCain’s insurgent run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Yet, McCain, is, in fact, running the kind of campaign against Barack Obama that George Bush ran against him in 2000, which he regarded rightly as dishonest, dishonorable and diversionary in terms of the truth about him and about the nation’s problems.

Will he sacrifice the long-term security and stability of the country just to win an election? Does he think his dubious deal with the fundamentalists will give him any freedom or independence once he is in the hot seat? That was not how things turned out in Iran.

Sometimes I really like Letterman. This is funny. Very diplomatically said:

I have to scratch my head at the defense used by Senator Stevens. An AP article called Cabin remodel detailed at Stevens corruption trial has the story:

“We reach for the yellow pages, he reached for VECO,” prosecutor Brenda Morris said Thursday during opening statements. “And the defendant never paid a dime.”

Defense attorney Brendan Sullivan countered that his client’s wife controlled the pursestrings and paid every bill received for the project, $160,000 in all. The senator was in Washington, 3,300 miles away from the job site, and Sullivan said Stevens can’t be held responsible for any freebies or work done by Allen that wasn’t billed.

“You cannot report what you don’t know,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan is right, but he is actually condemning his client rather than supporting him. Stevens should be held 100% accountable. He is a Senator, and he is expected to keep his affairs clear of corruption. Turning a blind eye to corruption is no excuse.

Why on earth (pun not intended) would a company go to great lengths to provide free renovations and upgrades to an Alaska politician’s property if they thought that person would be so ignorant as to not even notice? Sounds like an absurd twist to me. He had to have been aware, or they would never have made the changes. Are we supposed to believe that VECO operated as a charity towards Senators in need?

This is exactly the kind of unethical and irresponsible leadership that Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) was intended to put an end to…if you are elected or appointed to a leadership position, then you should be accountable to the happenings under your watch. SOX basically says executives should be punished if they knowingly or unknowingly publish false information in financial statements.

Senator Paul Sarbanes and Representative Michael G. Oxley had the Act approved in 2002 by a House vote of 423-3 and Senate vote of 99-0. Stevens was in favor back then. And now?

Instead of “I don’t know, so don’t blame me” we should instead hear “I did not know, so I clearly I failed in my duties. Sorry for being out of touch when I was supposed to be a leader and in charge of financial affairs.”

More details can be found in an amusing TheZoo blog post called “Somebody call the Waa-ambulance”

In the new documents, the government also dismissed Stevens’ assertions that his conduct was shielded by the Constitution as a member of Congress, citing nine examples of the senator’s “errands” and requests involving a former Alaska oil-services company that had nothing to do with protected lawmaking.

Among them: an intercepted phone call in which Stevens discusses how his son Ben, then the state Senate president, planned to push a bill favored by the oil industry as a prelude to natural-gas development.

The new filings go substantially further than a July indictment that charges Stevens with seven counts of failing to disclose gifts from 1999 through 2006. Most of the alleged gifts, including the renovation of the senator’s Girdwood, Alaska, home, were from former oil-service company VECO and its politically active chairman, Bill Allen.

TheZoo also quotes Bill Maher:

“Let’s ask Sarah Palin about Sarbanes-Oxley. What would she say? ‘I shot one the other day’?”