Defending Dan

(1/10/09) Our friend and fellow blogger Dan Fagan has come under attack for raising the question about how the governor's future son in law, landed a position as an electrical apprentice without meeting minimum qualifications; primarily not having a high school diploma or a GED.

Emails by Fagan's critics (link below) and letters to the editor in the Anchorage Daily News have been merciless. In today's ADN, Vince Beltrami President of the AFL/CIO takes off after Dan for not doing enough research before he penned his piece.

"If only Fagan had done a minimal amount of accurate research, then perhaps his attempt at skewering the governor would have come off as something more than his typical vitriolic blowhard message of hate disguised as "journalism," Beltrami writes in his opinion column.

In fact Fagan had done accurate research to support his main contention.

Fagan's main contention was that the governor's future son in law got a position without the proper qualifications.

This was proven accurate by his research.

In Fagan's initial column he reported that he contacted the sponsor company of the apprentice program and confirmed that one of the company's core requirements was that participants must have a high school diploma or a GED equivalent.

When asked how the governor's future son in law got the job after admitting that a high school diploma was a necessity, the company spokesman couldn't or wouldn't say how the eighteen year old high school dropout got the job.

Fagan might have been wrong in asserting that all apprentice programs require a high school diploma, but the program that mattered, the one the governor's future son in law was enrolled in, certainly held that requirement.

But there is more surrounding the whole discussion about Governor Palin's future son in law being high school drop out and all of the shrill voices seeking to attack those who are simply reporting on the facts.

Yesterday, Pat Dougherty the Senior Vice President and Editor of the Anchorage Daily News was a guest on the Mike Porcaro Radio Program. According to Dougherty, Palin sent him an email in December 31, 2008 asking about the Daily News running stories that stated her future son in law was a high school drop out.

Palin's implication was that the ADN was being unfair and untruthful.

I took the email very seriously and spent most of my day crafting a response, Dougherty told Porcaro. He said his email reply to Palin stated that they had three stories since September, all from the Associated Press, that said Levi Johnston was a high school drop out.

Dougherty said he offered to print a retraction/correction if the governor would verify that Johnston was in fact not a high school drop out. According to Dougherty, Palin never replied to the email even though she received it on December 31, 2008, the same day she had sent her original complaint.

On January 5, 2009, five days after ignoring Dougherty's offer to print a retraction about Johnston being a high school dropout, Palin sat for an interview with a film maker doing a documentary on how the media treated conservatives like Palin unfairly during the election.

Palin said this about the media in her interview:

"This report that Bristol and Levi are high school dropouts and they're just going to look for government handouts to raise their child, that couldn't be further from the truth. I asked some in the media to correct that and they haven't corrected that and that gets frustrating."

So let me get this straight; five days after the media offers to correct the story about Levi Johnston being a high school drop out if Palin will simply confirm that Johnston is not a high school drop out, Palin tells a conservative filmmaker in a documentary about bias in the media, that the media is biased because it hasn't corrected the story about Johnston?

The fog of Palin's narcissism is getting so thick you couldn't even cut it with a high school diploma. 

Meanwhile, Pat Dougherty at the Anchorage Daily News was still waiting for a response from Palin to verify that Levi was not a high school dropout so he could correct the story.