Another great example of USA education system! Double negative means HE DID KILL SOMEBODY?

Suspected Ill. serial killer Sonny Pierce told mom he "never killed nobody"

Sonny Pierce

(Credit: Cook County Sheriff's Office)

(CBS/WBBM) CHICAGO - The mother of Sonny Pierce, a man who is currently sitting behind bars and being accused of the rape and murder of three women, is convinced that the authorities have the wrong man.
"It hurts," said Pierce's mother, Esther Pierce-Pearson to CBS station WBBM. "It hurts."
Pierce-Pearson believes her son is innocent because he told her so, the station reports.
She said she asked her son point-blank, "'Are you a murderer? Have you ever murdered anybody? You be honest with me,' and he told me, he said, 'Mama, I swear to the living God, I never murdered anybody. I never killed nobody,'" she explained to WBBM.
Pierce, 27, has been in jail since August of last year on charges of raping a 15-year-old girl, reports the station.
The 15-year-old girl survived, but according to authorities in the three other cases, Pierce not only raped the women, but then strangled them after meeting them on phone chat lines, reports the station.
Pierce has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Kiara Windom, 18, Kimika Coleman, 18, and Mariah Edwards, 17, the station reports.
Investigators found 20 calls between Windom's cell phone and Pierce the night before her body was found, prosecutors said. He met her on a singles party line in August 2009, they said according to the station.
DNA evidence linked Pierce to Windom, and video evidence refuted his alibis for the times of the crime, police said.
Police also discovered a videotape linking Pierce to Edwards' murder in July 2010.
Edwards' body has not been recovered, but she was reported missing and hasn't been seen alive since July 2010.
Pierce's mother said while she believes her son and will stand by him, she grieves over what happened to the three teenage girls, reports the station.
"I feel for those that lost their loved ones, because I'm a mother," Pierce-Pearson said to the station. "I have nine children; six daughters."
Pierce was ordered held without bond at the Markham Courthouse Wednesday.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"I guess it’s over."
- Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) on ABC's "Good Morning America" discussing the false claim made by Donald Trump and others that President Obama was not born in the United States.

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COMMENT OF THE DAY

"Combined service cuts & tax hikes are the only way. Everything else is as silly as a diet plan that doesn't involve exercise & eating less."
- Comment from "SageThrasher" on "Poll: Americans oppose entitlement cuts to slash debt"
Join the Discussion

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Q&A DISCUSSIONS

Q: DEBT
Why didn't S&P talk about Bush deficits when Bush was president? Aren't the Bush tax cuts for EVERYONE set to expire on January 1st, 2013? Won't that have a major effect on the deficit when they do expire if Congress does nothing?
A: DAVID WYSS :
We did talk about the Bush deficits and the introduction of both tax cuts and Medicare part D. However, back then no one was paying attention. We started in 2006 pointing out that the US budget was on an unsusatainable course and that either spending had to be cut or taxes increased to keep debt within realistic bounds. The difference now is that we are running out of time. In 2006, we had 8 years to fix the problem; now we have 2 or 3. The deficit now is three times the last Bush deficit, but the tax cuts and spending increases in the last administration were also unaffordable.
Read the full discussion with David A. Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s

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Poll finds most Americans can't name a GOP presidential candidate

Most recent polls suggest that there's no clear frontrunner in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. A new poll suggests that may have something to do with the fact that most people can't even name any of the candidates.

About half of all Americans -- 53 percent -- could not name anyone when asked which Republican candidate they've been hearing the most about, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.

The lack of knowledge about the several potential Republican candidates could account for Donald Trump's recent rise in the polls. The business magnate and television personality already benefited from widespread name recognition, and in recent weeks he has dominated news headlines with his presidential flirtation.

Twenty-six percent of Americans surveyed by Pew named Trump as the candidate they've heard the most about lately -- a larger portion than those who named Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty combined.

The poll suggests the public knows little about the potential GOP candidates because they lack interest and because of relatively little news coverage on the subject.

Just 20 percent of Americans said they followed news about possible GOP candidates very closely in the last week, and coverage of the presidential race only made up 2 percent of news coverage in the past week, according to Pew.

The debate in Washington over deficit reduction, by contrast, accounted for 31 percent of last week's news coverage, and 36 percent said they followed that story very closely.

While Americans may not be paying too much attention to the upcoming elections at this point, other polls suggest they have strong ideas when it comes to proposed deficit reduction plans.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that 78 percent oppose cutting spending on Medicare to reduce the debt, and 69 percent oppose cutting spending on Medicaid. Additionally, 56 percent oppose cuts in military spending to reduce the debt.

While Americans oppose cutting spending in those three particular areas, as many as 72 percent approved of the idea of raising taxes on the rich to reduce the national debt.

The Post-ABC poll also specifically asked people if "Medicare should be changed so that people over 65 would receive a check or voucher from the government each year for a fixed amount they can use to shop for their own private health insurance policy." The question referred to the 2012 budget plan put forward by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan. Sixty-four percent of Americans oppose the idea, while 34 percent approve.

The Post poll results mirror other recent polls. A CBS News poll released last month found that 76 percent of Americans are not willing to reduce spending on Medicare to address the budget deficit. And last week, Gallup released a poll showing that even a plurality of Republicans -- 33 percent -- believe the government should not do anything to try to control the costs of Medicare.

Obama, Before Facebook Crowd, Presses G.O.P. on Budget

By JACKIE CALMES

PALO ALTO, Calif. — President Obama on Wednesday opened a Western front in his war against House Republicans’ budget, telling an appreciative audience at Facebook headquarters here that the plan is radical, short-sighted and would reduce annual federal deficits at the expense of the nation’s poor and powerless.
In a town-hall-style forum with the 26-year-old Facebook chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Obama seized on a question about the House-passed budget to mount a long, withering indictment. The questioner, an employee of the social networking company, noted that some news media accounts suggested that the sponsor of the Republican budget, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, is “bold and brave” for proposing the deep spending cuts.
“The Republican budget that was put forward I would say is fairly radical,” Mr. Obama said. “And I wouldn’t call it particularly courageous.” He added: “I do think Mr. Ryan is sincere. I think he’s a patriot. I think he wants to solve a real problem, which is our long-term deficit. But I think that what he and the other Republicans in the House of Representatives also want to do is change our social compact in a pretty fundamental way.”
“Nothing is easier,” Mr. Obama said, “than solving a problem on the backs of people who are poor, or people who are powerless and don’t have lobbyists or don’t have clout.”
Mr. Obama’s critique in many ways echoed his speech at George Washington University a week ago, two days before the House passed the plan without any Democratic votes. There he first called for a more balanced approach for reducing deficits by $4 trillion in 10 to 12 years, with spending cuts and tax increases. But here he grew particularly exercised in contrasting his and Republicans’ visions for reducing annual deficits, with his energy and the enthusiasm of the estimated 1,200 mostly young people giving the event a campaignlike partisan air.
While Mr. Obama’s new energy in criticizing Republican policies has stirred supporters, it is infuriating Republicans even as he is calling for bipartisan talks with them to reach a compromise framework in time for Congress’s vote before July on raising the $14.2 trillion debt limit.
In a statement just before Mr. Obama’s appearance here, the House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, reiterated that if the president and Congressional Democrats “refuse to accept serious reforms that immediately reduce federal spending and end the culture of debt in Washington, we will not grant their request for a debt limit increase.”
Early in his remarks, Mr. Obama recounted the origins of the current debt, recalling the trillions of dollars added in the past decade when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress and cut taxes, opened two wars, and created a new Medicare prescription drug benefit — all without offsetting spending cuts or tax increases.
He joked to the billionaire Facebook founder that wealthy Americans — “people like me and, frankly, you, Mark” — should pay higher taxes to reduce deficits. But Republicans, he said, would further reduce taxes for rich taxpayers and corporations and cut deeply from clean energy, education and transportation programs “to make his numbers work."
“I guess you could call that bold. I would call it short-sighted,” Mr. Obama said, provoking another burst of applause.
He said the Republican proposals to shrink projected health spending, by eventually turning Medicare into a voucher system and Medicaid into a limited block grant to the states, would not curb the rise of health care costs.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who posed questions to Mr. Obama from his employees and from Facebook users nationwide, as both men sat on stools in a cavernous hall, wore a sport coat and tie for the occasion, along with jeans and jogging shoes. But at the end he brought out his trademark hoodie, in purple, and presented it to the president.
From the Facebook campus, Mr. Obama headed to nearby San Francisco for the first of several fund-raising events over two days, including in Reno, Nev., and Los Angeles on Thursday.

Mubarak Leaves an Air of Wistfulness

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

CAIRO — Hosni Mubarak is the only leader most Egyptians have ever really known, so while he remains disliked for how he ran the country, there is an undercurrent of discomfort here with how he has been treated since being forced from power.
There is no survey to prove this, and those who feel a touch of sympathy for the former president tend to say so under their breath, like Salma Sowellem, as she visited an art show recently: “Shhh, I don’t want my boyfriend to hear, he’ll get mad. But Mubarak, he’s an old man. He’s sick. His sons are in prison. That’s enough.”
But the sentiment is very much part of the complex mix of emotions that have overwhelmed this nation as it struggles to reconcile with the past and move into the future, to balance calls for revenge against demands for justice. Egyptians are still not sure if they should pursue South African-style reconciliation, an Eastern European-style hunt for collaborators or just try to forget it all and press on.
They know they have to start at the top.
“He was like God, and we still keep saying that he is ruling Egypt, even though he has been arrested,” said Hussein Hanafy, 44, as he stood with a group of friends near downtown one day discussing the situation. “I have not seen anyone but him for 30 years. I won’t just forget him overnight.”
And then summing up a sentiment repeated over three days of interviews here he said: “I feel sorry for him. But he is not innocent.”
Mr. Mubarak was president for nearly 30 years, and in that time he engaged in the alchemy of a typical autocrat, transforming his mortal identity to that of near deity — or in the Egyptian context, pharaoh. His picture was not only posted everywhere, but to destroy or deface it was a crime.
And then he was gone, and even some who cheered his fall found themselves disoriented by the loss of the most familiar feature of their national landscape.
“Nobody is happy with what he did,” said Mona Yousef, as she left her dentist’s office near the center of the city on Sunday. “But we grew up with him there. He was there my entire life. It is difficult to just move on.”
One artist, Ali Ali, decided to challenge and provoke discussion about Mr. Mubarak, hoping that would lead to “closure.” He made “Thirty Hosnis,” for Mr. Mubarak’s three decades in power, silk-screen images using well-known photographs of the former president, cast in subdued tones beside pop culture images like Darth Vader and the dot-gulping creature in the video game Pac-Man.
“This is after all the most iconic image of our generation,” the artist said in a flier distributed at his opening show in the Articulate Baboon gallery. “At a time when images of Hosni Mubarak are being taken down all over the country there has never been a better time to put them up.”
But instead of closure what he provoked — or, perhaps, revealed — was the confusion that Egyptians now wrestle with.
“I’m upset; they shouldn’t put pictures of Mubarak,” said Ahmed Taha, 24, at first unsure what to make of the show. “When I look at him I remember humiliation, I remember unemployment, I remember inflation, I remember corruption, I remember the country’s bad reputation abroad. He reminds me of everything that is bad in this country.”
For all that, Mr. Taha does not want to see Mr. Mubarak put on trial. “I just want to forget,” he said.
But Mena Hashem, 25, a banker at the show, disagreed.
“It’s a good thing that Mubarak is being tried,” she said. “But then, exactly how will he be tried? By the same corrupt people who are protecting him?”
Mr. Mubarak is 82 years old, almost 83. He had appeared to be in relatively solid health right until the prosecutor announced that he would be questioned about corruption and his role in the deaths of more than 800 people killed during the protests that unseated him. Then he felt chest pains. He has been taken to a military hospital, where he is being detained while undergoing questioning. His fall accelerated as public pressure forced the military rulers of Egypt to take steps against him.
“The tragedy was not necessarily like Sadat’s assassination or Nasser dropping dead,” said Salama Ahmed Salama, head of the editorial board at the independent newspaper Sharouk. “The tragedy for Mubarak was how he fell from the height and pinnacle of power in a matter of days or hours. Who would have thought that such a powerful man would have to say goodbye just like that?”
Mr. Mubarak is all gray now, Egyptian newspapers reported, no longer taking the trouble to dye his hair jet black. And he has told prosecutors that they can do anything to him, but to release his sons, Gamal and Alaa, who are in jail while being investigated for corruption.
But most Egyptians are delighted to see his widely despised sons in jail while many cringe at the thought of their former leader behind bars.
His very public humbling has satisfied fears that he was behind the scenes orchestrating plans for a counterrevolution. But it also has raised questions about where to go next and how far to go. Many people have called for his execution — particularly if he is found to have ordered the security forces to fire on protesters — while many more have said he should just be forgotten and left alone.
“The whole country is Hosni Mubarak,” said Adel el-Sayed as he stood on a sidewalk corner with four friends talking about current events on Sunday. “That’s why it’s hard to get Hosni Mubarak out of Egypt.”
For the moment, it appears that Mr. Mubarak is headed to some kind of accounting, probably a trial, assuming his health holds up. While that is not a certainty, it could in itself offer the answer for how to proceed. A fair public trial could satisfy calls for justice — and revenge.
“Mubarak’s trial will be a turning point in Egypt’s history and the history of the region,” said Alaa Al Aswany, the best-selling author and social commentator. “This is a the civilized part of the revolution and the kind of justice that Mubarak did not do for the Egyptian people.”

Checkout Coupon Company Joins Boom in Online Discount Offers

By STUART ELLIOTT

A COMPANY long known for providing shoppers with coupons at store checkouts is joining the popular, crowded category of online coupons.
The Catalina Marketing Corporation is introducing Coupon Network by Catalina, to be found online at Couponnetwork.com. Advertisers with offers on the Web site include pantry mainstays like Campbell Soup, General Mills, Kellogg, Kraft Foods, Nestlé, Reckitt Benckiser and Unilever.
There are also some unexpected offers on Couponnetwork.com, among them savings on toys from the Fisher-Price division of Mattel and light bulbs from General Electric.
Coupon Network is an addition to the decades-old businesses that Catalina calls shopper-driven marketing, intended to help advertisers more efficiently and effectively reach target audiences. Catalina estimates that it distributes more than $6.5 billion in coupons to shoppers each year through its printers at store checkout counters.
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The checkout coupons provided by Catalina compete for consumer favor with coupons in free-standing inserts, which are the coupon booklets carried in Sunday newspapers; coupons in magazines and so-called penny-saver publications; and coupons distributed by direct mail.
Catalina is so well known for checkout coupons that many devoted couponers, as avid discount-seekers refer to themselves, call the offers “Catalinas.” There are few higher accolades in marketing than a brand becoming synonymous with a product, whether it is Band-Aid, Kleenex or Q-Tip.
Still, the online coupon field is alluring, because it is booming. Two factors are feeding its growth.
One is the increasing influence of the Internet in everyday life. Not only are there printers in millions of homes, readily printing out coupons from Web sites, but there is also the phenomenon of social daily-deal coupons from companies like Groupon and LivingSocial.
The other factor benefiting online coupons is the recent bumpy economy. Coupon redemption rates had been falling for decades until the recent recession.
Although online coupons account for only 1 percent of all coupons distributed, they account for about 10 percent of all coupons redeemed, said Susan Gear, group vice president for digital at Catalina in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Ms. Gear also noted that consumers “can print out coupons for exactly the products they want,” which adds to their appeal.
For some time, Ms. Gear said, Catalina had been considering an entry into the online coupon realm, joining Web sites like Coolsavings.com, Coupons.com, Couponmom.com, Redplum.com and Smartsource.com.
The idea gathered momentum after Catalina took technological steps in the last couple of years that included offering coupons by mobile e-mail, handling Target’s coupons section on its Web site and acquiring E-centives, an Internet coupon company.
In developing the Web site, Catalina consulted with advertisers, retailers and bloggers, among them the “Super-Coupon Queen,” Jill Cataldo.
“They’ve got a lot of great printable coupons” on Couponnetwork.com, said Ms. Cataldo, of Huntley, Ill., who has a Web site, Jillcataldo.com, and writes “Super-Couponing Tips,” a nationally syndicated column.
Coupon Network “is doing a good job giving us coupons we might not have seen before and are pretty relevant to what I buy,” she added.
Those are welcome words to an advertiser like Karl Schmidt, director for promotional marketing at General Mills in Golden Valley, Minn. “We’ve been going digital with print-at-home coupons since tests in 2001,” he said.
“In the early days of print-at-home, six, seven years ago, there were issues with redemption,” Mr. Schmidt said, as retailers declined to accept them. As that largely disappeared, digital coupons have become “a significant percentage of our spending,” he added.
“We get great results; it’s the perfect self-targeting medium,” Mr. Schmidt said. “And they’re available 24/7.”
Also, “digital coupons attract younger consumers,” he said, “who aren’t buying the Sunday newspapers” that carry free-standing inserts.
In the digital coupon realm, Catalina executives “are playing come from behind, which they’re probably not used to,” Mr. Schmidt said. “But they have strong content and a strong sales force.”
Another point in Catalina’s favor is that Couponnetwork.com includes a type of Catalina in-store offer, called YourBucks, that are prized by couponers like Ms. Cataldo because they offer discounts off whatever they buy the next time they shop rather than savings on a single specified item the way regular coupons do.
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The retailers whose checkouts have been home to Catalina’s printers are unlikely to bemoan the company’s expansion online because they, too, have been going digital.
“More and more of our offerings are moving online as well, replacing circular coupons,” said Karen Meleta, a vice president at ShopRite, part of the Wakefern Food Corporation in Keasbey, N.J.
There is a section of Shoprite.com devoted to YourBucks along with other coupons.
Ms. Gear said Catalina has also been considering initiatives in areas like daily deals and group buying, adding, “We’re working with our clients to figure out how to market in this new world.”
“There’s a fun, engaging, gaming element to couponing,” Ms. Gear said. “We are exploring how you take the concept of social networks and add that to it.”
Among the attractive aspects of how social coupons work are the “element of urgency to the daily-deal buying,” she added, and their interruptive nature as companies “send out texts or e-mails.”
Because Catalina is privately held, she added, the company would not disclose how much it has spent on developing Coupon Network. Catalina is owned by the investment firm Hellman & Friedman.

'In Financial Circles, It's Pretty Well Known That Trump Is a Deadbeat'

By Joshua Green

Everybody knows that Donald Trump is a showman, and that's helped rocket him to a level of political celebrity most people wouldn't have imagined. But it looks to me like Trump is about to experience the downside of sudden political fame. That downside is scrutiny. Trump doesn't seem to mind--indeed, seems rather to enjoy--the scrutiny of his personal life, the models, etc. But he's awfully thin-skinned about his business affairs, and that's where things are heading next.

Last night, NBC News did a damning expose of Trump's record, which is replete with bankruptcies, lawsuits, and aggrieved former investors. But that only scratched the surface. Trump's hilarious, bombastic dismissal of Mitt Romney's business career, coupled with his heightened political profile and rampant egotism, suddenly seems to be rubbing Wall Street folks the wrong way. Financiers who chuckled about Trump, have become peeved and willing to share their thoughts on his business acumen.

Earlier this evening, I had the opportunity to get the unvarnished thoughts of a former Deutsche Bank employee familiar with Trump from this $640-million deal gone awry on the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. Trump was sued to collect on a $40-million personal guarantee that was part of the deal. Suffice it to say, the banker held a dim view of the Donald. "[The Chicago deal] was pretty minor given all the other things going on at the time. Real estate developers do default from time to time," he said. "But this guy has been doing it for 20 years, failing. Remember the Trump Shuttle? That's why he'll never run. His finances just won't hold up to scrutiny. It's pretty well known in financial circles that this guy is a deadbeat."

I expect we'll be hearing a lot more along these lines. Since Trump's business reputation is the thing he seems to prize above all else, I doubt he'll enjoy this, which is why I don't think he'll stick around for the long haul, regardless of what the poll numbers say. 

What Donald Trump's Birther Investigators Will Find in Hawaii

By Joshua Green

The path to Obama's birth certificate, as told by someone who's looked

credit: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Donald Trump is making a big show of his sudden, flamboyant conversion to "birtherism"--the absurd belief that President Obama wasn't born in the United States. Trump has dispatched private investigators to Hawaii to look into Obama's origins, and he's getting plenty of mileage from an often-credulous media by insinuating darkly about what they're finding. Republican voters seem to like it.

Lost in this circus is that Trump is hardly the first Obama opponent to harbor these suspicions--or to act on them. The path his investigators are presumably taking is a well-trodden one. Others have already looked. And one of them agreed, on the condition of anonymity, to walk me through exactly what Trump's private eyes will find. Here's what I learned:

When you go to Hawaii to investigate Obama's birth, what you're looking to examine are public records. They're easy to find. Fly into the Honolulu airport, rent a car, and drive downtown to the state library. You can't miss it: it's practically in the shadow of the gold-leaf King Kamehameha statue in front of the Aliiolani Hale, the former palace. Once inside the library, head downstairs where they keep the microfilm. Obama was born (they tell us) on August 4, 1961, but you'll want the August 13, 1961 edition of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, because that's when the birth announcement appeared. When you've loaded up the film, flip to the back pages, to the section of the paper called "Vital Statistic." This is the record of births, marriages, and deaths provided by the Hawaii Department of Health's Bureau of Vital Statistics. When you get to Page B-6, scan down the lefthand column--there it is, toward the bottom:

Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Hwy., son, Aug. 4

Congratulations! You've located the birth announcement. Nothing indicates obvious Kenyan-Communist plotting or the nefarious handiwork of Bill Ayers. And the competing paper, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, also published an announcement. But you'll want to be diligent and investigate that address. So you'll head back upstairs and hunt down a copy of the Honolulu City Directory. Actually, because these documents are snapshots in time, you'll want the city directories from 1960 through 1962, to see if you can establish any pattern of movement.

After you've lugged them to a table, you'll find the address: it turns out to belong to the Dunhams, who are the parents of Ann Dunham, Obama's mother. If you keep looking, you'll also discover that Barack Obama Sr. is listed at a separate address, 625 11th Ave. in Kaimuki, close to the University of Hawaii. So you can surmise that Obama's parents may not have lived together. You can also find a newspaper article in which Barack Obama Sr. talks about how he is going to Harvard. A short while later, Obama's mother, Ann, returns to using her maiden name, Dunham, and several years after that, the parents divorce. And that's all you're going to find.

Obama was born at the Kapiolani Medical Center, where he (or more likely his mother) was issued a "certificate of live birth," the cat-nippy phrase that gets the birthers howling at the moon. You can visit the Kapiolani Medical Center. But you can't obtain a copy of Obama's certificate of live birth because the Federal Health Information Privacy Act of 1999, which protects medical records from public scrutiny, forbids it. The Obama campaign probably worsened the situation by releasing this copy of a certificate of live birth--worsened it because this is obviously only a copy (printed from a computer) and not the original. So the effect on the birther rumors was like the effect of steroids on Barry Bonds: it made everything bigger and uglier.

But the point is, that's it. That's the whole paper trail, all there is to find. My friend says you can do the entire investigation in a single day: Leave DC first thing in the morning, obtain the documents, and you'll still have time to sip a mai-tai on the beach before catching your flight home in the evening. He even went on Expedia and made me an itinerary: the whole trip would only cost $1228.40 (mai-tai not included). So, for me, the takeaway here is that Trump is a fool; he's getting robbed by his investigators, who are taking their sweet time in Hawaii; and he's not going to turn up anything. Also, I'm going to bring this surprisingly reasonably priced itinerary to my editor's attention and see if I can't wangle an assignment.

Sarah Palin's Version Of Trig's Birth May Be More Troubling Than The Hoax

PROFESSOR: Sarah Palin Probably Staged A Gigantic Hoax About Being Trig's Mother INTERVIEW: The Professor Who Says Sarah Palin Staged Gigantic Hoax

This past week, the draft of an academic paper that focuses on the 2008 birth of Sarah Palin's son, Trig Paxson Van Palin, and the various theories that surround his birth, was made public prior to publication through a university newspaper and then exploded, quite predictably, on the Palin-centric blogosphere, where Trig's birth remains a cause célèbre and the source of considerable controversy. It has now spilled over into the mainstream media as well.

"Palin, the Press, and the Fake Pregnancy Rumor: Did a Spiral of Silence Shut Down the Story?" written by Bradford W. Scharlott, Ph.D., an associate professor at Northern Kentucky University, comes to two primary conclusions: 1) that Palin "likely" staged "a hoax" concerning the birth of her son Trig; and 2) that "a spiral of silence" prevented the mainstream U.S. media from adequately investigating the circumstances of Trig's birth.

As both a life-long journalist and an academic--and perhaps most importantly, as the author of the forthcoming book, The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power--I read Scharlott's draft thesis with considerable interest and anticipation.

Scharlott's initial contention that Palin orchestrated an elaborate "hoax" around the birth of Trig does not hold up to close scrutiny. It remains a premise, not a fact. That said, his second assertion about "the spiral of silence" raises several issues about Palin, her birth story and the mainstream media that must be scrutinized fully as Palin continues to position herself for a run in the 2012 Republican primaries.

In the end--as is the case with virtually all things Palin--the most troubling scenario regarding Trig's birth is the one proffered by Palin herself--a scenario that has been largely muted, or disregarded, by the focus on Trig's birth as being a "hoax."

Let me acknowledge that while researching my book I spent a considerable amount of time and resources trying to sort out the facts of Trig's birth. As with many elements of Palin's life story, there are disquieting discrepancies between what actually happened and Palin's version of events. Her capacity for deceit simply knows no bounds, and this duplicity has contributed significantly to the atmosphere of doubt regarding the details of Trig's birth. Contrary to Palin's contention otherwise, the rumors that Trig was not her son originated long before she was named as John McCain's running mate, commencing immediately upon her public acknowledgment, in March of 2008, that she was pregnant.

Palin, by her own account in Going Rogue, did not tell anyone but her husband Todd that she was pregnant with what would be the couple's fifth child. She kept the news from her parents, siblings, children and her closest staff--odd behavior under any circumstances. Moreover, she did not tell members of her family that the child she was carrying had been diagnosed with Down syndrome. So when Palin announced being seven months pregnant--to a handful of reporters in Juneau on March 5, 2008--the rumor mill went into overtime.

Hoping to disprove the conspiracy theory when I initiated work on my book--and to put the story to bed once and for all--I interviewed several close associates of Palin's, including her friends and political allies. I was anticipating, perhaps even hoping, that they would tell me conclusively that Trig was her child.

I was shocked by the response.

 One close friend of Palin's--a widely respected woman who had given birth to several children as well and who had close contact with Palin in Juneau up until the time of Trig's birth--told me that "Palin did not look like she was pregnant. Ever. Even when she had the bulging belly, I never felt that the rest of her body, her face especially, looked like she was pregnant." When I asked her point-blank if she was certain the baby was Palin's, she said, "No. I don't know what to believe."

The news of Palin's pregnancy came as a complete surprise to Palin's State Trooper security detail Gary Wheeler, a well-liked, 26-year veteran of the Alaska State Troopers who worked under several administrations in Alaska state government, both Republicans and Democrats. Only two weeks earlier, in late February of 2008, Wheeler had accompanied Palin back to Washington, D.C. for a Republican Governors Association Conference, where she had just met John McCain and his campaign manager Rick Davis, who was to be in charge of the vice-presidential nomination selection process.

 Wheeler remembers that Palin had changed into jeans upon her arrival in Washington, with no apparent revelation of pregnancy.

Wheeler also said that his wife, Corky, actually made fun of him when the news came out because he was supposed to be a "trained observer." Wheeler simply shakes his head: "I had nary an idea she was packin'."

As Wesley Loy of the Anchorage Daily News reported it at the time, Governor Palin "shocked and awed just about everybody around the Capitol" with her announcement.

This is at seven months.

More significantly--and thus begins the troubling nature of even Palin's own account--according to Wheeler, Palin did not tell the Alaska State Troopers who were assigned to protect her that she was pregnant, even though her age and the fact that she was carrying a child with Down syndrome presented potential health complications. All of this both foreshadows and serves as an important prelude to Palin's troubling journey from Texas to Alaska, during which she was experiencing--again by her own account--early signs of childbirth, including the so-called breaking of her waters.

Palin was scheduled to make a speech at an RGA energy conference in Dallas on April 17, slightly less than eight months into her pregnancy. At the last moment before her trip to Texas--which involved a stopover in Seattle--Wheeler says that Palin made an "out-of-the-ordinary" announcement that she wouldn't be needing a Trooper to accompany her on her junket, and that her husband Todd would be traveling with her instead.

An email written by Palin--obtained through a Alaska Public Records Act request--confirms Wheeler's recollection. At 9:26 on the morning of April 14, 2008, only a day before her scheduled departure, Palin sent the following email to her administrative assistant, Janice Mason:

J- instead of rga paying for staff, and/or rga (or state) paying for Security on this Texas trip, pis let them know First Spouse is available to travel instead - they can pay for Todd. Pls chk on flt availability for him (on my flts). [sic] Thanks

I cover the ensuing details of Palin's so-called "wild ride" from Texas back to Alaska in considerable detail in my book, but in short--according to information she gave at a news conference immediately following her return--Palin claimed that she called her physician in the middle of the night from her hotel room in Texas to discuss what Palin referred to as "amniotic fluid leaking."

 Despite the presence of this fluid--a strong indicator of impending birth and which potentially exposed Palin and her child to infection--Palin stayed in Dallas and delivered her speech later that day.

Rather than getting checked at a nearby hospital in Dallas before her departure (Baylor Medical Center was less than ten minutes away), Palin and her husband commenced on their return flight home to Anchorage via Seattle. They did not tell flight attendants of Palin's medical situation. The failure of the Palins to inform airline personnel of her impending medical situation not only put her infant and herself at risk, it also potentially put all passengers and staff on the two flights at risk as well. As The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan (who deserves a commendation for keeping this story from being buried completely) dubbed it, Palin's decisions were "reckless beyond measure."

Once returning to Anchorage late in the evening of April 17, Palin claims to have bypassed the Providence Hospital in Anchorage (which has a neonatal intensive-care unit and is located only a few minutes from the Ted Stevens International Airport) for the roughly hour-long drive to the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, located just off the Parks Highway, roughly seven miles outside of Wasilla (and which has no neonatal intensive-care unit).

Three days after Trig's birth, Palin and her husband held a news conference in Anchorage, with Trig joining them. The audio recording of the news conference provides a fascinating glimpse into the Palins' mindset at the time of Trig's birth and their chafing at criticism of their decision to fly back to Alaska. Again, I cite several passages from the press conference in my book, but what follows are some highlights:

Sarah Palin: Well that was again if, if I must get personal, technical about this at the same time, um, it was one, it was a sign that I knew, um, could lead to uh, labor being uh kind of kicked in there was any kind of, um, amniotic leaking, amniotic fluid leaking, so when, when that happened we decided OK let's call her [her physician, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson].

The answer was classic Palin--evasive, circuitous, garbled and indirect. In fact, The Anchorage Daily News story the following day, by Kyle Hopkins, reported that Palin had not asked her physician "for a medical OK to fly."

Hopkins also contacted an obstetrician in California, Dr. Laurie Gregg, active in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who said that "when a pregnant woman's water breaks, she should go right to the hospital because of the risk of infection. That's true even if the amniotic fluid simply leaks out."

As for the distinction that Palin was trying to make between "breaking" and "leaking," Gregg was not buying into it. "To us, leaking and broken, we are talking the same thing," Gregg asserted. "We are talking doctor-speak."

The Palins were clearly irritated by the direction of the questioning. "There's a lot of new doctors out there on the streets in the last couple of days," Todd Palin asserted irritably.

An aide to the Palins decided it was time to wrap things up. One final question was allowed.

Reporter: Was it important to you to have the baby in Alaska?

Sarah Palin: It was very important that we have...it was more important that, that Trig arrive safely and healthy and um, and that is exactly what happened. The extra blessing was that Trig was able to be born into this great state, you know, kind of like, I feel like this extended Alaskan family, that he was here, for that.

Todd Palin: Can't have a fish-picker from Texas.

That became the family mantra.

There have also been a number of discrepancies in Palin's story. In Going Rogue, for instance, she makes no mention of her waters breaking. At a speech delivered in Waco, Texas, last year, Palin claimed that she delivered Trig in Anchorage. (Note the passage at 16:55 into her speech.)

The response to Scharlott's paper has been both troubling and predictable. On the one hand, those who continue to subscribe to the "hoax" theory have championed it as a work of academic brilliance. On the other hand, Palin's former flack Bill McAllister threatened to "slap" Scharlott and said that in "a different era," he'd have challenged Scharlott to "a duel." Salon's Justin Elliot used the occasion to take a cheap shot at Andrew Sullivan by describing him as a practitioner of "Trug Trutherism" -- the belief "that Sarah Palin faked her 2008 pregnancy because Trig is actually the son of Bristol Palin"--when, in fact, all Sullivan has ever asserted is the absence of "easily available and definitive" evidence that Palin is the mother of Trig.

And in what can be described only as  pathetic response to Scharlott's paper, Anchorage Daily News columnist Julia O'Malley contradicted her own newspaper's body of work on this matter by invoking a "spiral of silence" perspective and demanding that "someone" should "Make. It. Stop." She doesn't say who and she doesn't say how. What she means is that she doesn't want the issue even discussed.

Perhaps O'Malley was too high on her horse to recall that in December of 2008, in the aftermath of the national election, the Anchorage Daily News tried to confirm once and for all--as did I--that Sarah Palin was the mother of Trig, only to be rebuffed by Palin herself. The ADN's executive editor Pat Dougherty assigned his fine reporter Lisa Demer to the task of investigating the rumor. But a story was never published.

On December 31, Palin sent Dougherty an email attacking him for the line of questioning:

And is your paper really still pursuing the sensational lie that I am not Trig's mother? Is it true you have a reporter still bothering my state office, my very busy doctor (who's already set the record straight for you), and the school district, in pursuit of your ridiculous conspiracy?

Dougherty's response should be of particular interest given O'Malley's commentary. He said that his goal was "to let a reporter try to do a story about the 'conspiracy theory that would not die' and, possibly, report the facts of Trig's birth thoroughly enough to kill the nonsense once and for all." Dougherty said that Demer received "very little cooperation" from Palin or her family. He killed the story. But he made a telling observation to Palin:

It strikes me that if there is never a clear, contemporaneous public record of what transpired with Trig's birth, that may actually ensure that the conspiracy theory never dies.

And there's the rub. O'Malley's own editor did not Make It Stop because Sarah Palin has never provided sufficient concrete evidence to put the conspiracy theories to bed. She hadn't in 2009, and she hasn't now. The problem is rooted not in the wild imaginations of bloggers, as O'Malley would have us believe, but in the calculated obfuscation of the issue by Sarah Palin herself.

A week after her email to Dougherty, Palin issued a formal State of Alaska press release from the Governor's office. "As a public official, I expect criticism and I expect to be held accountable for how I govern," Gov. Palin said. "But the personal, salacious nature of recent reporting, and often the refusal of the media to correct obvious mistakes, unfortunately discredits too many in journalism today, making it difficult for many Americans to believe what they see in the media."

Held accountable? Throughout her political career, Sarah Palin has been the master of the dodge. She has never held herself accountable. At one point she claimed that she had made Trig's birth certificate public; she did not. The hospital has never issued a formal birth notice. She said that she would make her health records public. She did not. It was another lie.

This past week Palin had the gall to giggle and smirk her way through an interview on Fox News in which she supported Donald Trump's investigation of President Obama's birth certificate in Hawaii: "Well, uh, I appreciate that 'The Donald' wants to spend his resources in getting to the bottom of something that so interests him and many Americansm," Palin opined. "You know, more power to him."

The hypocrisy is staggering. There is one person who can put an end to the Trig matter immediately and instantly, and that is Sarah Palin. Before she takes another step in what has been a hapless bid to position herself for a run for the presidency, the American media should demand that Palin produce full and conclusive evidence of Trig's birth and parentage.
It's that simple.

Once that step is taken, then the American media needs to break its "spiral of silence" about Palin's "wild ride" from Texas to Alaska and to demand direct answers from her about the decisions she made, the actions she took and what motivated her to do so.
Anyone who examines Palin's own story closely will come to no other conclusion that she was "reckless beyond measure"--as Andrew Sullivan so succinctly put it--and entirely unqualified to hold higher office in these challenging and demanding times.

Geoffrey Dunn is the author of the forthcoming book The Lies of Sarah Palin.

America’s Top Liars

James Stewart explains how Barry Bonds, Martha Stewart, and others built houses of deceit—and how America lost the truth.

by Tony DokoupilApril 17, 2011

Illustration by Gluekit; source photographs clockwise from top: Hiroko Masuike / Getty Images; Gerald Herbert / AP, Jeff Chiu / AP; Andrea Renault / Polaris

Clockwise from upper left: Bernie Madoff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Barry Bonds, and Martha Stewart.

Clad in a dark suit and purple tie, Barry Bonds walked out of a San Francisco courthouse last week, capping years of near-total seclusion. But although he may be cleared of perjury charges, the home-run king (and presumed steroidal hulk) shed no new light on the alleged lies he told a 2003 grand jury.

 For that, one has to turn to James Stewart’s Tangled Webs, which throws open the doors on the Bonds case and three other blockbuster trials—with previously secret testimony, exclusive interviews, and investigators’ notes. Stewart reports that Bonds told the grand jury why he refused to let his personal trainer and friend testify, yet never rewarded him for his loyalty. “I’m black,” he says, “and I’m keeping my money. And there’s not too many rich black people in the world … And if my friends can help me, I’ll use my friends.”

That’s not the only delectable line in Stewart’s epic. Through three decades, eight books, and countless articles, the gentleman scribe has made exposing liars the leitmotif of his career. Just don’t ask him to explain why. “It’s in the Ten Commandments!” he exclaimed recently over a plate of candied-almond pancakes. “Do you want to see what a society looks like where everyone lies? It’s horrendous! It’s corrupt!” It’s also America, at least as Stewart presents it, sounding the alarm on “a surge of concerted, deliberate lying” at all levels of society. When done under oath, it’s a felony punishable by up to five years in prison (downgraded from the old English preference for cutting out the liar’s tongue or making the offender stand with each ear nailed to the pillory).

What concerns Stewart the most isn’t the everyday street criminals who blinker cops but white-collar royalty, those at the pinnacle of media, politics, sports, and business, who are supposed to be role models, not rogues. Although there are no data on this clean-handed corruption, Stewart believes it’s on the rise, threatening to swamp the legal system, stymie the courts, and sow cynicism nationwide. Ultimately, he argues, “it undermines civilization itself.” That’s a grand statement. Limited to the kind of blockbuster cases that Stewart examines, however, it’s hard to deny its essential truth. Lying under oath is poisonous to a society rooted in fair play and rule of law. And when the most public of liars aren’t pursued and punished, more lying ensues, reducing the chance of any one person getting caught and encouraging still others to deceive.

Good thing, then, that we have Stewart to play The Ethicist, retrying Bonds but also Martha Stewart, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Bernie Madoff—and nailing some ears to the post. “Somebody has to,” says Stewart, elegantly dressed in jacket and tie. All of Stewart’s subjects have already been convicted of perjury (or a related crime), but what Stewart does is pinpoint the moment when each person parted ways with the truth. The results are startling. Media mogul Martha Stewart tried to shake insider-trading charges by destroying evidence in her assistant’s calendar and concocting a story with her equally culpable broker. Former Cheney adviser Libby created “a parallel universe,” complete with a fictitious conversation with the late Meet the Press host Tim Russert, to avoid admitting that he leaked the name of a CIA agent for political gain.

In the last chapter, Stewart rakes the case of multibillion-dollar fraudster Madoff, somehow finding new façades used to fool the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2004, for example, SEC investigators obtained emails from the top-flight hedge fund Renaissance Technologies that questioned Madoff’s stellar returns. When they confronted Madoff, he turned the conversation into story time, regaling the younger investigators with swashbuckling tales of Wall Street glory. When pushed, he explained his success in terms of “cooking a meal,” albeit one involving “a blender” and “carrots and oranges and a whole bunch of stuff.” Then, he got concrete: “Some guys have more guts than others,” he explained, and “some people feel the market.”

The SEC, to its credit, sensed only bull, and by 2006 it had evidence of Madoff ladling it out under oath. At the time, his scheme involved about $20 billion. When it collapsed two years later, it had tripled to $65 billion, a fact that leaves Stewart aghast at the SEC. “Failing to pursue [Madoff’s] lies cost innocent victims another $45 billion,” he writes.

But what can we really do about it? Stewart itemizes the contributing factors of perjury, including unscrupulous defense lawyers, overworked prosecutors, and a collective shrug from the culture at large. These days loyalty has replaced honesty as the highest virtue. But he acknowledges a still bigger problem with snuffing it out: people themselves. Lying seems to be an inherent part of human nature—something that we’re all capable of when pushed. Most people have never been tried the way Stewart’s subjects have been, never had to choose between what they perceive to be their careers or their friends, and the truth.

 Not even Stewart has been put to such a test—and he’s not so sure he’d pass. “One would like to think,” he confides, but “there for the grace of God go all of us.”