« BACK  |  PRINT

RS

MEMBER DIARY

Lets Take Out Another Palin Smear

The rape kit nonsense

By: Brian Simpson (Diary)  |  September 22nd, 2008 at 03:10 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Over the course of the last few weeks the left and their willing accomplices in the Mainstream Media have been putting forth smear after smear about Governor Sarah Palin in hopes that something will stick. One of the latest (of many) is the the Governor charged rape victims for the test kits that the police administer in the process of collecting evidence.

This particular attack has been somewhat of a calling card for AOL Policical Machine blogger Tommy Christopher. He has used the talking point at least four times in the blog:

McCain/Palin: The Pig Ticket

Rape Kits Cheaper Than Palin’s Per Diem

McCain ‘Divorced From Day-to-Day Challenges’

To Palin: Spare Us Phony Respect For Hillary

He has also made several references to this talking point in the new Blog Talk Radio program Unusable Signal(Our friend Caleb Howe is the conservative host on Friday nights. You should check it out by the way. It can be pretty entertaining at times.).

The attack alleges that then Mayor Palin and the town of Wasilla continued to charge rape victims for the rape kits after a 2000 state law banning the practice.

Here’s the big problem, Tommy. The story isn’t true.

Confederate Yankee has a response from Wasilla Police Chief Angela Long:

The Finance Department searched all financial records on our system for fiscal year 2000, 2001 and 2002. There are no records of billings to or collections from rape victims or their insurance companies in our system. The financial computer system goes back to the beginning of fiscal year 2000, and accounts receivable backup documentation goes back six (6) years per our records retention schedule.

A review of files and case reports within the Wasilla Police Department has found no record of sexual assault victims being billed for forensic exams. State law AS 18.68.040, which was effective August 12, 2000, would have prohibited any such billings after that date.

So much for that Palin Myth. Consider it BUSTED.

Addendum: I don’t think that anyone else here on TMR has pointed to this piece by National Review Online’s Jim Geraghty:

Six Points to Consider When Reading About Wasilla’s Policy on Rape Kits

1.It is indeed a terrible policy to charge a rape victim for the cost of collecting evidence to prosecute. But these charges occur, even in places where the law theoretically bans it. According to a 2008 U.S. News and World Report article, some Illinois rape victims are still being charged for the rape kits.

The state seemed to address this in a 2001 law, but it would seem that as usual, passing a law and getting a bureaucracy to comply are two different things.

No, you mean Senator Obama allowed this practice to continue too?

src="http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/4499/tmrxlogo1dw7.jpg"
style="border:2px solid #dbd9d6;">

Tags: , , ,

COMMENTS

POSTING RULES  |  LOGIN TO COMMENT  |  REGISTER TODAY
  • aaronbg

    Sometimes it’s as easy as listening to what the left is saying to find out their own sins.. They literally assume everyone is as crooked and deceitful as them and accuse based on that. I say let them keep talking…by the time this is through we will find Hoffa based off some gaffe that Biden makes.

    Oh by the way…rec’d.

  • Achance

    Stuff like this wasn’t on my plate ever, and I was a classified employee a level or two below policy stuff when this all went down, but I remember the hassle.

    In most of Alaska, geographically at least, the State through the Alaska State Troopers handles all law enforcement, so any rape investigations would be solely a State matter. As I recall, the hassle was about whether the State would pay for rape forensics for polisubs that had their own police departments, e.g., Wasilla, Anchorage, Juneau, Fairbanks, Kenai, Nome, Ketchikan, Sitka, and maybe one or two other communities. The only crime lab belongs to the State, though the hospitals in the larger communities could do this work as could the IHS. Of course, the move by the polisubs was to say that if the State wouldn’t pay, they’d charge the victim. Well, guess what, the State decided to pay for all of them. Of course, charging the vics was an untenable position. Just politics.

  • Stuckinmichigan

    And every person they talked to said Palin had nothing to do with it.

    A state rep dem who introduced a bill to ban the practice of charging rape victims said Palin had nothing to do with it.

    CNN’s own reporter looked at all city council meeting notes and said it was never brought up there.

    The chief of police was the one who actually said something pertaining to it. And he obviously was a moron.

    So what I got out of the whole story was that they ran it to run it. Even though they found no connection to Palin, they painted it as a Palin scandal. Then they ran a story on the wacko child molester church in Arkansas I believe. No problem there except the news anchor bridged the 2 stories with, and then theres this, in a tone of look what these crazy christian folks do. Thats just my opinion but if I took it that way then I am sure others did as well.

  • TommyXtopher

    Brian, Brian, Brian. Are you really going to make me list all of the holes in your “rebuttal,” or would you like to do some rewriting?

    I’ll give you a head start. Where in any of my stories does it say, or even imply, this: “The attack alleges that then Mayor Palin and the town of Wasilla continued to charge rape victims for the rape kits after a 2000 state law banning the practice.”

    See, that’s a pretty easy argument to win, but it’s one you’re having with yourself. What’s that called again, a “Wheat Dude Postulate?” “”Sippy-tube Hombre Thesis?” Wait, it’ll come to me…

    • Moe_Lane

      It’s an actively moderated discussion board, so please tuck yourself back in and show some couth.

      Thanks in advance.

      • simpson316

        If you would like to have your head completely fall off your shoulders, maybe you should check this out:

        Update: CY finds even more evidence knocking this firmly into the myth column.

        There is now evidence that although the practice was technically on the books in Wasilla, it was never used during the Palin administration. It’s kind of like the laws in some parts of the country that you can’t own more than one family pig. It’s there, but nobody did anything about it.

  • voice

    Apparently The city of wasilla has no documentation of charging rape victims for kits, however if you look at the city’s budget you can see that Mrs. Palin did dramatically cut public funding for such services for a 6 mo span in 2000 right before State law AS 18.68.040 was passed banning the the the possibility of a practice of vicitims paying for their own kits. If you look closer you will also notice that there we about 10 sexual assaults that year in wasilla…maybe they all happened after june of 2000… either way obviously this sory is overblown media hype in many ways, however the fact remains that even if Mrs. Palin did not maliciously seek to revictimize the raped citizens of wasilla (as some might spin it) she did eliminate the majority of the funding for rape kits for 6 months until it was more or less illegal in ALaska to do so. If you have a lot of time to waste wanking your political muscle look it up in wasilla’s budget online.