Sarah Palin's Verboten Book List

Updated 9/11 - 9:50 PM From CBS News

Here's what we know about Sarah Palin's interest in banning books. Time reported last week that Palin asked the Wasilla librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, about the process for banning library books. Baker was reportedly "aghast" at the question. Soon after taking office, Palin, according to a New York Times report, fired Baker, and news reports from the time indicate that Palin thought Baker hadn't done enough to give her "full support" to the mayor.

Palin reversed course on Baker's dismissal after a local outcry, and later said the discussions about banning books were "rhetorical."Yesterday, ABC News' Brian Ross moved the ball forward a bit, with an interesting report.

Ross emphasized an angle I previously hadn't heard much about. Palin was elected mayor thanks in large part to the strong backing of her church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, which, right around the time Palin took office, "began to focus on certain books available in local stores and in the town library, including one called 'Go Ask Alice,' and another one written by a local pastor, Howard Bess, called 'Pastor, I am Gay.'"

Palin became mayor, her church was interested in censorship, and soon after, Palin asked a "rhetorical" question about how books might be excluded from the public library. When the librarian resisted, she was, at least initially, fired.

The line from the McCain campaign has been that Palin never had any interest whatsoever in banning library books.

That seems increasingly difficult to believe.

Updated 9/11 - 3:30 PM

I took it at face value since it came from what I believed was a credible source, so I guess I can no longer do that, Thanks Kristine for calling me out (again):

From USA Today

As discussion about the controversy has spread in recent weeks, non-partisan FactCheck.org reported that a list circulating on the Internet of books allegedly banned in Wasilla was actually a copy of "books banned at one time or another in the United States" from the Florida Institute of Technology library Web page.

Jim Rettig, president of the American Library Association and university librarian at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said the organization received 420 challenges to library materials last year but said he believes many more challenges go unreported.

Let's spend a few moments browsing the list of books Mayor Sarah Palin tried to get town librarian Mary Ellen Baker to ban in the lovely, all-American town of Wasilla, Alaska. When Baker refused to remove the books from the shelves, Palin threatened to fire her. The story was reported in Time Magazine and the list comes from the librarian.net website.

I'm sure you'll find your own personal favorites among the classics Palin wanted to protect the good people of Wasilla from, but the ones that jump ed out at me were the four Stephen King novels (way to go Stephen, John Steinbeck only got three titles on the list), that notorious piece of communist pornography "My Friend Flicka," the usual assortment of Harry Potter books, works by Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain (always fun to see those two names together), Arthur Miller, and Aristophanes, as well as "Our Bodies, Ourselves" (insert your own Bristol Palin joke here), and the infamous one-two punch of depravity: "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Little Red Riding Hood." But the cherry on the sundae, the topper, is Sarah Palin's passionate, religious mission to clear the shelves of the Wasilia Public Library of that ultimate evil tome: "Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary." That's the one with "equality," "free speech" and "justice" in it.

Go over to your book case and take down one of the books you'll find on the list (I know you've got a couple) and give it a read in honor of the founding fathers. Then tell me I'm not the only voter who doesn't want this woman within thirty feet of the United States Constitution.

Sarah Palin 's “Book Club”

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess


• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle


• Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden


• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner


• Blubber by Judy Blume


• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley


• Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson


• Canterbury Tales by Chaucer


• Carrie by Stephen King


• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller


• Christine by Stephen King


• Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau


• Cujo by Stephen King


• Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen


• Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite


• Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck


• Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller


• Decameron by Boccaccio


• East of Eden by John Steinbeck


• Fallen Angels by Walter Myers


• Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland


• Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes


• Forever by Judy Blume


• Grendel by John Champlin Gardner


• Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam


• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling


• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling


• Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling


• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling


• Have to Go by Robert Munsch


• Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman


• How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell


• Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain


• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou


• Impressions edited by Jack Booth


• In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak


• It's Okay if You Don't Love Me by Norma Klein


• James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl


• Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence


• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman


• Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm


• Lord of the Flies by William Golding


• Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein


• Lysistrata by Aristophanes


• More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz


• My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier


• My House by Nikki Giovanni


• My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara


• Night Chills by Dean Koontz


• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck


• On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer


• One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn


• One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey


• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez


• Ordinary People by Judith Guest


• Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective


• Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy


• Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl


• Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz


• Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz


• A Separate Peace by John Knowles


• Silas Marner by George Eliot


• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.


• Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs


• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain


• The Bastard by John Jakes


• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger


• The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier


• The Color Purple by Alice Walker


• The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth


• The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs


• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck


• The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson


• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood


• The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder


• The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks


• The Living Bible by William C. Bower


• The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare


• The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman


• The Pigman by Paul Zindel


• The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders


• The Shining by Stephen King


• The Witches by Roald Dahl


• The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder


• Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume


• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee


• Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare


• Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial Staff


• Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth