Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: DougMacG on September 08, 2008, 09:01:17 AM
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Even if she fails miserably and becomes a trivia question in history, I think she has already earned her own DB topic. :-)
One network host is up in arms that Palin isn't doing interviews her first minute on the ticket while another ABC is sending Charlie Gibson to Alaska this week for an interview. I agree with protecting her a little at first from the wolves as she will get plenty of exposure including the VP debate. My free advice is that they should offer her for an extra debate, Palin v. Barack Obama, one on one, anytime/any place, and find out quickly which side is more afraid of their next gaffe.
If you want to preview for the VP debate you can see a Gubernatorial debate from 2006 on C-Span at http://cspanjunkie.org/?p=407 Unlike her current opponent, she makes her point clearly and then stops talking. The woman has talent.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn7UzxXv8p4
I bet Barry-O would be whizzing down both pantlegs in a similar situation.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/09/09/do0904.xml&posted=true&_requestid=75665
Sarah Palin is not such a small-town girl after all
By James Bennett
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 09/09/2008
It is clear that few in America, let alone Britain, have any idea what to make of Sarah Palin. The Republicans' vice-presidential candidate confounds the commentators because they don't understand the forces that shaped her in the remote state of Alaska.
John McCain and Sarah Palin
Thus, most coverage dwells on exotica - the moose shooting, her Eskimo husband - combined with befuddlement at how a woman can go from being mayor of a town of 9,000, to governor, to prospective VP within the space of a few years.
But, having worked with Alaskans, I know something of the challenge she has faced, and why - contrary to what Democrats think - it could make her a powerful figure in the White House.
The first myth to slay is that she is a political neophyte who has come from nowhere. In fact, she and her husband have, for decades, run a company in the highly politicised commercial fishing industry, where holding on to a licence requires considerable nous and networking skills.
Her rise from parent-teacher association to city council gave her a natural political base in her home town of Wasilla. Going on to become mayor was a natural progression. Wasilla's population of 9,000 would be a small town in Britain, and even in most American states.
But Wasilla is the fifth-largest city in Alaska, which meant that Palin was an important player in state politics.
Her husband's status in the Yup'ik Eskimo tribe, of which he is a full, or "enrolled" member, connected her to another influential faction: the large and wealthy (because of their right to oil revenues) native tribes.
All of this gave her a base from which to launch her 2002 campaign for lieutenant (deputy) governor of Alaska.
She lost that, but collected a powerful enough following to be placated with a seat on, and subsequently the chairmanship of, the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which launched her into the politics of Alaska's energy industry.
Palin quickly realised that Alaska had the potential to become a much bigger player in global energy politics, a conviction that grew as the price of oil rose. Alaska had been in hock to oil companies since major production began in the mid-1970s.
As with most poor, distant places that suddenly receive great natural-resource wealth, the first generation of politicians were mesmerised by the magnificence of the crumbs falling from the table. Palin was the first of the next generation to realise that Alaska should have a place at that table.
Her first target was an absurd bureaucratic tangle that for 30 years had kept the state from exporting its gas to the other 48 states. She set an agenda that centred on three mutually supportive objectives: cleaning up state politics, building a new gas pipeline, and increasing the state's share of energy revenues.
This agenda, pursued throughout Palin's commission tenure, culminated in her run for governor in 2006. By this time, she had already begun rooting out corruption and making enemies, but also establishing her bona fides as a reformer.
With this base, she surprised many by steamrollering first the Republican incumbent governor, and second, the Democratic former governor, in the election.
Far from being a reprise of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Palin was a clear-eyed politician who, from the day she took office, knew exactly what she had to do and whose toes she would step on to do it.
The surprise is not that she has been in office for such a short time but that she has succeeded in each of her objectives. She has exposed corruption; given the state a bigger share in Alaska's energy wealth; and negotiated a deal involving big corporate players, the US and Canadian governments, Canadian provincial governments, and native tribes - the result of which was a £13 billion deal to launch the pipeline and increase the amount of domestic energy available to consumers. This deal makes the charge of having "no international experience" particularly absurd.
In short, far from being a small-town mayor concerned with little more than traffic signs, she has been a major player in state politics for a decade, one who formulated an ambitious agenda and deftly implemented it against great odds.
Her sudden elevation to the vice-presidential slot on the Republican ticket shocked no one more than her enemies in Alaska, who have broken out into a cold sweat at the thought of Palin in Washington, guiding the Justice Department's anti-corruption teams through the labyrinths of Alaska's old-boy network.
It is no surprise that many of the charges laid against her have come from Alaska, as her enemies become more and more desperate to bring her down. John McCain was familiar with this track record and it is no doubt the principal reason that he chose her.
Focusing on the exotic trappings of Alaskan culture may make Palin seem a quaint and inexplicable choice. But understanding the real background of her steady rise in politics suggests that Barack Obama and Joe Biden are underestimating her badly. In this, they join two former Alaskan governors, a large number of cronies, and a trail of enemies extending back over a decade.
James Bennett is the author of 'The Anglosphere Challenge'
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GM:
Fascinating read. Good find.
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Running Alaska
September 10, 2008
One rap on Sarah Palin's qualifications to be Vice President is that she governs one of our least populated states, with a budget of "only" $12 billion and 16,000 full-time state employees. On the other hand, it turns out that the Governor's office in Alaska is one of the country's most powerful.
For more than two decades Thad Beyle, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, has maintained an index of "institutional powers" in state offices. He rates governorships on potential length of service, budgetary and appointment authority, veto power and other factors. Mr. Beyle's findings for 2008 rate Alaska at 4.1 on a scale of 5. The national average is 3.5.
Only four other states -- Maryland, New Jersey, New York and West Virginia -- concentrate as much power in the Governor's office as Alaska does, and only one state (Massachusetts) concentrates more. California may be the nation's most populous state, but its Governor rates as below-average (3.2) in executive authority. This may account in part for Arnold Schwarzenegger's poor legislative track record. The lowest rating goes to Vermont (2.5), where the Governor (remember Howard Dean) is a figurehead compared to Mrs. Palin.
In Alaska, the Governor has line-item veto power over the budget and can only be overridden by a three-quarters majority of the Legislature. In 1992, the year Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton was elected President, his state budget was $2 billion and among the smallest in the country. Compared to that, Sarah Palin is an executive giant.
WSJ
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Feminist Army Aims Its Canons at Palin
Because womanhood is a state of mind.
By Jonah Goldberg
Whether or not Sarah Palin helps John McCain win the election, her greatest work may already be behind her. She’s exposed the feminist con job.
Don’t take my word for it. Feminists have been screaming like stuck pigs 24/7 since Palin was announced as McCain’s running mate. (Are pig metaphors completely verboten now?)
Feminist author Cintra Wilson writes in Salon (a house organ of the angry left) that the notion of Palin as vice president is “akin to ideological brain rape.” Presumably just before the nurse upped the dosage on her medication, Wilson continued, “Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She’s such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it’s easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.”
And that’s one of the nicer things she had to say. Really.
On Tuesday, Salon ran one article calling Palin a dominatrix (“a whip-wielding mistress”) and another labeling her a sexually repressed fundamentalist no different from the Muslim fanatics and terrorists of Hamas. Make up your minds, folks. Is she a seductress or a sex-a-phobe?
But this any-weapon-near-to-hand approach is an obvious sign of how scared the Palin-o-phobes are.
Gloria Steinem, the grand mufti of feminism, issued a fatwa anathematizing Palin. A National Organization for Women spokeswoman proclaimed Palin more of a man than a woman. Wendy Doniger, a feminist academic at the University of Chicago, writes of Palin in Newsweek: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”
It’s funny. The left has been whining about having their patriotism questioned for so long it feels like they started griping in the Mesozoic era. Feminists have argued for decades that womanhood is an existential and metaphysical state of enlightenment. But they have no problem questioning whether women they hate are really women at all.
Since we know from basic science that Palin is a woman — she’s had five kids, for starters — it’s clear that these ideological thugs aren’t talking about actual, you know, facts. They’re doing what people of totalitarian mind-sets always do: bully heretics, demonize enemies, whip the troops into line.
The academic feminist left has scared the dickens out of mainstream men and women for so long, the liberal establishment is terrified to contradict feminists’ nigh-upon-theological conviction that female authenticity is measured by one’s blind loyalty to left-wing talking points. This is a version of the Marxist doctrine of “false consciousness,” which holds that you aren’t an authentic member of the proletariat unless you agree with Marxism.
It works like this: If you don’t agree with feminist scolds, you’re not a real woman, even if you’re a very feminine working mom. But even if you’re an actual man — never mind a childless feminist who looks like a Bulgarian weightlifter in drag — you’re a “real woman” solely because you nod your head like a windup clapping monkey every time you read the latest editorial in Ms. Recall how they christened Bill Clinton the “first female president,” too.
But here’s the fun part. Feminists are hooked on their own Kool-Aid; they actually believe the stuff they say. The shrill, angry women you see on MSNBC claiming to speak for all women actually think they do. But they don’t. They speak for a few left-leaning women in faculty lounges, editorial boardrooms and that’s about it.
Mainstream liberals have been in captivity for so long, eagerly accepting their ritual beatings, that they’ve gotten Stockholm Syndrome and convinced themselves that Gloria Steinem and Co. are the authentic voices of women everywhere.
Stop laughing.
The reality is that there is an actual reality out there, and it doesn’t look anything like what feminists see beyond the rims of their ideological blinders.
For instance, immediately after the Palin announcement, the priestesses not only ruled it “sexist” for McCain to pick a woman but also said it was strategically dumb — “insulting to women!” — to think any real women would switch support from the beatified Obama to that old devil McCain.
Well, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, there’s been a 20-point swing among white women from Obama-Biden to McCain-Palin. Did this “ideological brain rape” suddenly induce an epidemic of false consciousness?
Of course not. Nor are women mindlessly switching loyalties because there’s a woman on the ticket. What the Palin pick has demonstrated, however, is that the Feminist-Industrial Complex is a fraud. Disagreeing with self-described feminists doesn’t mean you’re anti-woman. Usually it just means you’re sensible.
And for that lesson alone, we should all be grateful.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjE4ZTcxZjQ5YjBiYzFlMGJlMzk5YjNjOTkyZWQyMTg=
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I don't find Salon particularly angry and I wouldn't say the NRO is particularly temperate. I was not a big fan of Wilson article I like the one I am going to post much better.
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/09/11/zombie_feminism/print.html
How did Sarah Palin become a symbol of women's empowerment? And how did I, a die-hard feminist, end up terrified at the idea of a woman in the White House? Femenists are definitely wrestling with Palin's candidacy.
By Rebecca Traister
Sep. 11, 2008 | I have been dreaming about Sarah Palin. (Apparently, I'm not alone.) I wish I could say that I'd been conjuring witty, politically sophisticated nightmares in which she leads troops into Vancouver or kindergartners in the recitation of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." But, alas, mine have been nonsensical, kiddie-style doozies in which she kidnaps my cats, or enjoys a meal with my girlfriends while I bang on the restaurant window. There's also a chilling one, in which a scary witch stands on a wind-swept hill and leers at me.
What troubles me most -- aside from the fact that there is suddenly a Republican candidate potent enough to so ensnare my psyche -- is my sense that these are dreams in which it matters very much that Palin is a woman.
I have been writing about feminism for more than five years; I have been covering the gender politics of the 2008 presidential election for more than two. And I am absolutely gobsmacked by the intensity of my feelings about Sarah Palin. I am stunned not only by the way in which her candidacy has changed the rules in the gender debate, or how it is twisting and garbling the fight for women's progress. But I'm also startled by how Palin herself is testing my own beliefs about how I react to women in power.
My feelings about Palin have everything to do with her gender -- a factor that I have always believed, as a matter of course, should neither amplify nor diminish impressions of a person's goodness or badness, smartness or dumbness, gravitas or inconsequence. Why are my rules changing?[
I am still perfectly capable of picking out the sexism being leveled against the Alaska governor by the press, her detractors and her own party. Every time someone doubts Palin's ability to lead and mother simultaneously, or considers her physical appeal as a professional attribute, or calls her a "maverette," I bristle.
But that's the easy stuff. The clear-cut stuff. I'm far more torn about the more subtle, complicated ways in which Palin's gender has me tied in knots.
Perhaps it's because the ground has shifted so quickly under my feet, leaving me with only a slippery grasp of what the basic vocabulary of my beat -- feminism, women's rights -- even means anymore. Some days, it feels like I'm watching the civics filmstrip about how much progress women made on the presidential stage in 2008 burst into flames, acutely aware that in the back of the room, a substitute teacher is threading a new reel into the projector. It has the same message and some of the same signifiers -- Glass ceilings broken! Girl Power! -- but its meaning has been distorted. Suddenly it's Rudy Giuliani and Rick Santorum schooling us about pervasive sexism; Hillary Clinton's 18 million cracks have weakened not only the White House's glass ceiling, but the wall protecting Roe v. Wade; the potential first female vice president in America's 200-year history describes her early career as "your average hockey mom" who "never really set out to be involved in public affairs"; and teen pregnancy is no longer an illustrative example for sex educators and contraception distributors but for those who seek to eliminate sex education and contraception.
In this strange new pro-woman tableau, feminism -- a word that is being used all over the country with regard to Palin's potential power -- means voting for someone who would limit reproductive control, access to healthcare and funding for places like Covenant House Alaska, an organization that helps unwed teen mothers. It means cheering someone who allowed women to be charged for their rape kits while she was mayor of Wasilla, who supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, who has inquired locally about the possibility of using her position to ban children's books from the public library, who does not support the teaching of sex education.
In this "Handmaid's Tale"-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we're witnessing "a new creation ... of the feminist ideal," the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it's now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: "put a skirt on." "I want her watching my kids," says Deutsch. "I want her laying next to me in bed."
Welcome to 2008, the year a tough, wonky woman won a primary (lots of them, actually), an inspiring black man secured his party's nomination for the presidency, and a television talking head felt free to opine that a woman is qualified for executive office because he wants to bed her and have her watch his kids! Stop the election; I want to get off.
What Palin so seductively represents, not only to Donny Deutsch but to the general populace, is a form of feminine power that is utterly digestible to those who have no intellectual or political use for actual women. It's like some dystopian future ... feminism without any feminists.
Palin's femininity is one that is recognizable to most women: She's the kind of broad who speaks on behalf of other broads but appears not to like them very much. The kind of woman who, as Jessica Grose at Jezebel has eloquently noted, achieves her power by doing everything modern women believed they did not have to do: presenting herself as maternal and sexual, sucking up to men, evincing an absolute lack of native ambition, instead emphasizing her luck as the recipient of strong male support and approval. It works because these stances do not upset antiquated gender norms. So when the moment comes, when tolerance for and interest in female power have been forcibly expanded by Clinton, a woman more willing to throw elbows and defy gender expectations but who falls short of the goal, Palin is there, tapped as a supposedly perfect substitute by powerful men who appreciate her charms.
But while the Republicans would have us believe that Palin can simply stand in for Hillary Clinton, there is nothing interchangeable about these politicians. We began this history-making election with one kind of woman and have ended up being asked to accept her polar opposite. Clinton's brand of femininity is the kind that remains slightly unpalatable in America. It is based on competence, political confidence and an assumption of authority that upends comfortable roles for men and women. It's a kind of power that has nothing to do with the flirtatious or the girly, nothing to do with the traditionally feminine. It is authority that is threatening because it so closely and calmly resembles the kind of power that the rest of the guys on a presidential stage never question their right to wield.
The pro-woman rhetoric surrounding Sarah Palin's nomination is a grotesque bastardization of everything feminism has stood for, and in my mind, more than any of the intergenerational pro- or anti-Hillary crap that people wrung their hands over during the primaries, Palin's candidacy and the faux-feminism in which it has been wrapped are the first development that I fear will actually imperil feminism. Because if adopted as a narrative by this nation and its women, it could not only subvert but erase the meaning of what real progress for women means, what real gender bias consists of, what real discrimination looks like.
Perhaps that's why my reaction to Palin is so bone-deep, and why she is shaking some of my convictions about how to approach gender. When, last Sunday, I picked up the New York Post, with its front-page headline "Ladykiller: Hillary to Check Hockey Mom" next to photos of Palin in porno librarian mode and Clinton with her teeth bared, I didn't roll my eyes in disgust at the imagined cage match. Instead, I envisioned it. And I enjoyed it. I was overcome by the desire to see Clinton take on Palin, not only checking her but fouling her, smushing her, absolutely crushing her. Get her, Hillary! Don't let her channel all the energy generated by you and your Democratic supporters into anti-woman, pro-God government! You are the only one who can stop her.
It's true that the last time I had this kind of visceral yearning for a politician to save the day was on the evening of Sept. 11, when the only person whose face I wanted to see on my television was Bill Clinton's. Perhaps when the Clintons took office in my 18th year, they became imprinted on my brain as my presidential parent-figures, my ur-protectors. But it's hard not to notice that if that's the case, it's Bill I want to nurture and soothe me, and Hillary I want to show up, guns blazing Ripley-style, to surprise the mother alien just as she is about to feast on independent voters, protectively shouting, "Get away from them, you bitch!"
There I go again with the hyper-feminized anxieties. I think it's mostly that I want Hillary Clinton -- the imperfect history maker whose major selling points for "First Woman..." status, in retrospect, included the fact that she was not a Republican, not pro-life, did not believe in teaching creationism alongside evolution, had never inquired about the feasibility of banning books, understood the American economy, supported universal healthcare and did not kill wolves from planes -- to make Sarah Palin go away and stop threatening to make history I don't want to see made.
It is infuriating that Clinton, her supporters and, yes, also those Obama supporters who voiced their displeasure at the sexist treatment Clinton sometimes received, and also female voters, and also females full stop, are being implicated in feminism's bastardization.
But if we inadvertently paved the way for this, then the Democratic Party mixed the concrete, painted lanes on the road, put up streetlights and called it an interstate. The role of the left in this travesty is almost too painful to contemplate just yet.[/b]
For while it may chafe to hear Rudy Giuliani and John McCain hold forth on the injustice of gender bias, what really burns is that we never heard a peep or squawk or gurgle of this nature from anyone in the Democratic Party during the entire 100 years Hillary Clinton was running for president, while she was being talked about as a pantsuited, wrinkly old crone and a harpy ex-wife and a sexless fat-thighed monster and an emasculating nag out for Tucker Carlson's balls. Only after she was good and gone did Howard Dean come out of his cave to squeak about the amount of sexist media bias Clinton faced. That may not be pretty to recall, especially in light of the Grand Old Party's Grand Old Celebration of Estrogen. But it's true. And it's also true that if there hadn't been so much stone-cold silence, so much shoulder-shrugging "What, me sexist?" inertia from the left, if there had been a little more respect (there was plenty of attention, of the derisive and annoyed sort) paid to the unsubtle clues being transmitted by 18 million voters that maybe they were interested in this whole woman-in-the-White-House thing, then the right would not have had the fuel to power this particular weapon.
Which leads us to my greatest nightmare: that because my own party has not cared enough, or was too scared, to lay its rightful claim to the language of women's rights, that Sarah Palin will reach historic heights of power, under the most egregious of auspices, by plying feminine wiles, and conforming to every outdated notion of what it means to be a woman. That she will hit her marks by clambering over the backs, the bodies, the rights of the women on whose behalf she claims to be working, and that she will do it all under the banner of feminism. How can anybody sleep?
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The same drivel we always hear. If a woman doesn't kneel at the alter of leftist victimhood, she doesn't count. Palin is hated because she is a strong woman that makes her way in the world without hating men.
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQK1al91drs[/youtube]
Also some more man hating feminists for you
http://womenagainstsarahpalin.blogspot.com/
http://current.com/items/89270795_target_women_sarah_palin
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Rachel,
It's nothing more than the same hatred and vitriol the left casts on minorities that dare to question the left's paradigm.
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Rachel:
The Rebecaa Traister piece reveals the workings of a seriouly confused and neurotic mind doing its best to understand, but not getting very far.
OTOH the Colter bit is scathingly funny. What is the URL for it? BTW in the interests of martian logic, I would note that unlike Hillary's "They're picking on me", to my knowledge SP has said no such thing. Its the McCain people and flunkies like Hannity who are doing so.
I'm delighted that all this seems to be helping McC, but its not anything I take seriously. IMHO MC is running the risk of overplaying it and it may well come back to bite him in the butt.
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You mean the daily show clip ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQK1al91drs
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Wow, the NRO piece isn't "temperate" but the 2 Rachel posted are? The double standards being flung about where Palin is concerned demonstrate just how sunk in situational ethics most Democrats are.
The main reason I long ago abandoned my left leaning ways was the expectation that you have to march in ideological lockstep with all fellow travelers lest you be cast out as an apostate. I'd do something silly like point out how high Stalin had stacked corpses, say there are biological difference between women and men, point out recycling isn't economically sustainable, or otherwise tinkle on a PC shibboleth and would get shrieked at and shunned. Histrionics and peer pressure do not an argument make so I migrated toward political circles that had less use for them.
As that may be, the lockstep expectation works pretty good when it comes time to nominate a candidate: the various covens convene, declare which candidate best connotes the orthodoxies du jour, the assembled masses unite behind the anointed one, and then join battle against the evil republicans. Alas, this process excludes the bitter church goers and gun owners of fly over country by design, and when winning requires communication with the bitter masses it's discovered that anyone capable of doing so has long since been browbeaten into submission or excommunicated outright. Another election gets lost and stolen election teeth gnashing proceeds apace.
Bottom line, the arguments posted above will only sway those who have drunk the kool-aid, but look like a situational rehash to those your side of the aisle need to convince.
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Marc—Did Hillary herself say attacks against her were sexist?
BBG,
In my opinion both Salon and TRO are not angry or temperate. They are both very partisan papers with very vehement views
The main point of Salon and TRO is to rally the base and to cover issues important to the base. The main point of either newspaper is not to convert other people. Also, what ardent Republican regularly watches the daily show? (You are missing out though)
It is probably true that someone could find clips of Democratic hypocrisy as well. Politicians just want their guy to win and would use whatever argument they could against them.
I don’t participate in this forum because I think I am going to change someone political orientation. Banging my head against a brick wall is not my idea of a good time. I doubt that there are a whole of undecided people around here. Most people who have not made up their mind yet and could be easily swayed probably aren’t that interested in politics.
I also don’t think you have to drink poison to be either an Republican or a Democrat.
Rational, intelligent, informed, and good - intentioned people can have different opinions.
Republicans under Bush had much more party unity than the Democrats ever did.
I live in Illinois( You know where Obama lives) which would generally be included in fly-over country.
I know plenty of people who own guns and go to church and who will vote for Obama.
The problem with this election is that people would rather talk about sex, teen sex, the mommy wars, and cat fights than the issues and really who wouldn’t.
I think people should think seriously about some of these issues but I don't like politicians and their families being used as an object lesson.
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The main point of Salon and TRO is to rally the base and to cover issues important to the base. The main point of either newspaper is not to convert other people. Also, what ardent Republican regularly watches the daily show? (You are missing out though)
I'm not a republican and I do occasionally watch the Daily Show; my very left wing sister makes sure I get the URL of any particularly biting piece.
It is probably true that someone could find clips of Democratic hypocrisy as well. Politicians just want their guy to win and would use whatever argument they could against them.
Sliding in situational ethics here. When a right winger starts flailing about with the Jesus card I'll call BS on him. When some gun knucklehead starts warbling about shooting all the politicians, I'll contend against the point. When feminists start making anti-feminists remarks, true feminists should object. The fact they don't demonstrates they've quaffed the kool-aid.
I don’t participate in this forum because I think I am going to change someone political orientation. Banging my head against a brick wall is not my idea of a good time. I doubt that there are a whole of undecided people around here. Most people who have not made up their mind yet and could be easily swayed probably aren’t that interested in politics.
Uhm, okay, abdicate away. I think ideas matter, and bad and inconsistent ones should be ridiculed. Unwillingness to defend feminist hypocrisy may be mistaken by some as an inability to do so, though.
I also don’t think you have to drink poison to be either an Republican or a Democrat. Rational, intelligent, informed, and good - intentioned people can have different opinions.
Alas, my point was that much of the feminist response to Palin is not rational, intelligent, informed, or good.
Republicans under Bush had much more party unity than the Democrats ever did. I live in Illinois( You know where Obama lives) which would generally be included in fly-over country.
Which I guess explains Bush's low favorable ratings among republicans. I grew up in Illinois and know Chicago ain't fly over country while downstate is, witness all the Daily v. downstate battles going on over "assault weapons" and such.
I know plenty of people who own guns and go to church and who will vote for Obama.
Hmm, a rare breed in my experience. Certainly don't find many OHB supporters in the NRA or downstate Illinois.
The problem with this election is that people would rather talk about sex, teen sex, the mommy wars, and cat fights than the issues and really who wouldn’t.
With most those people being the "feminists" and democrats noted in the above pieces.
I think people should think seriously about some of these issues but I don't like politicians and their families being used as an object lesson.
All the more reason to shun left wing feminist critiques in favor of more substantive and internally consistent ones.
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http://jezebel.com/5047957/please-people-stop-making-me-defend-sarah-palin
Look, I don't want Sarah Palin to be our next Vice President and I'd also prefer that she not be our next President. I disagree with her on just about every issue she's got a publicly-stated opinion on, except for maybe her current opinion on the Bridge to Nowhere (if not her initial assessment). Of course, those public opinions number about 5: choice; drilling; Obama's fitness for the Presidency; the media; and... well, I'm sure she's got another opinion on something that she'll tell Charlie Gibson about eventually. I got to write exactly one piece about how I disagreed with her after which it was all "not Trig's mom" this and "this is what abstinence brings to a family" that and plenty of name-calling that used to rightly horrify feminists when flung at Hillary Clinton. And then, finally, some people wrote smart things about why not to support Palin that didn't include the word "bitch" and I breathed a sigh of relief. That sigh came too soon.
Because, you see, then came Cintra Wilson's piece in Salon today, and, oh boy, let me count the sexist and/or just plain offensive smears. No, really, let me count 'em!
1. "fuckable"
2. "Christian Stepford wife"
3. "she is their hardcore pornographic centerfold spread"
4. "Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms."
5. The part where she compares electing Sarah Palin to allowing child-rapist Warren Jeffs to babysit her kids.
6. The part where electing Palin "is akin to ideological brain rape."
7. "this Republican blowup doll"
8. The part where electing a Republican woman into office equals "women being downgraded to second-class, three-holed chattel."
9. "the self-abnegating, submissive female Uncle Tommies"
10. "she has done everything but volunteer for her own circumcision."
11. "She tacitly promises a roll backward into old-fashioned sexual roles" (despite being a breadwinner and the more powerful spouse).
12. "We must regard Sarah Palin as the Carmella Soprano of the GOP — an enabling wife of organized crime"
13. Being a female Republican is performing an "ideological lap dance" for men.
14. "Sarah Palin is the White House [Playboy] bunny."
15. "Here's an It Girl vice president who is easy on the eyes."
16. "She's like a grown-up version of Mary Ann from 'Gilligan's Island.'"
17. "Women, even if they are vice president, can always look pretty, worship their husbands in the fear of God and never, ever resist invasions from unwanted sperm."
18. "Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa..."
19. "She's such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty..."
So, to summarize: according to Wilson, despite being the governor of a state and a candidate for Vice President, Sarah Palin is, basically, a too-pretty Republican bimbo too stupid to realize she's being played by men, completely subservient to her husband and the men of the Republican party with few independent thoughts of her own who is unwillingly impregnated by her husband but too submissive to resist. Um, ugh? Just because she disagrees with feminists doesn't give us the right to forego our (supposedly) strongly-held beliefs about the inappropriateness of sexism.
I know plenty of Republican women who understand everything I have — or anyone else has — to say about choice or social justice or pay equity and still vote Republican. They vote Republican because they have strongly-held and often (I know this might be shocking) well-researched beliefs about everything from taxes to defense to choice issues. And I respect their right to hold those beliefs and vote those beliefs without resorting to calling them "stupid cunts" or anything else because I don't actually believe that they are stupid or cunts. I believe that they are wrong on those issues, but they're not ill-informed or tools of some nebulous patriarchal conspiracy.
So, look, I really, really want to talk about the issues I disagree with Sarah Palin on. I want to talk about her shifting position on earmarks; about how she hasn't said a word about most of the issues facing the country today; about whether 8 years as mayor of Wasilla and 2 as governor of Alaska prepared her to lead this country; about the firing scandals; about the appropriateness of airplane-assisted wolf hunts. There are lots and lots of things I want to talk about and want to rip into her about and even some good points in the midst of Wilson's sexist and disgusting hyperbole that need to be made about Sarah Palin. But I first want to stop shouting into the darkness about how sexism doesn't just hurt women when it's directed at liberal women. Being sexist to Sarah Palin hurts us by reinforcing stereotypes about women and by allowing conservatives to point fingers at us and call us hypocrites.
By assuming she's a Republican because she's too stupid to know better, we're driving the Reagan Democrats and centrist Republicans and conservative independent voters into McCain's arms, because no one wants to vote for the candidate that makes them feel stupid. This is how George Bush won two elections and this is the genius of Karl Rove's strategies — he doesn't ever make those people vote for him, he gets us to do it for him. So, stop with this shit, please. Let's try assuming Sarah Palin is a capable, intelligent politician with whom we disagree and start disagreeing with her as a politician
Sarah Palin Sexism Watch, #12
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah-palin-sexism-watch-12.html
If you scroll down to the bottom of the article it gives you links to the first 11 as well
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Woof Rachel:
In case it isn't yet clear, I am glad you are part of the mix here and I am sure I am not the only one. BBG and GM have a relentless martian love of logic, :wink: but I am sure you are up to the conversation. Even if we may persuade each other rarely, I am sure that we will understand our own positions and the positions of others better for our interaction.
Thank you for the URL. I will be posting this in a couple of hard core right wing forums-- it will be fun to see the reaction. :lol:
With regard to Hillary, my distinct impression is that she DID do a "all those men are picking on me routine" during the early primaires, similar in emotional content to her early days in her husband's White House when she did the "Pretty in Pink" press conference. Also, in my unprovable opinion, her tears after losing some primaries were quite deliberate. In short, I do distinguish her actions with those of Barracuda so far.
I respect the intellectual integrity of the piece you post immediately prior to this one of mine.
I suspect that Team McCain may be peaking on this issue by overplaying it and overplaying Barracuda. I gather today that they had to backtrack on SP's record on earmarks, and may be backtracking on the Sex Ed clip they put out. The utter cynicism of both sides-- see your Colbert clip for for really crisp examples from Rove and Bloviating Bill, and see any of several posts from GM and BBG for examples from the left or your post for that matter-- is going to leave McC a bit high and dry.
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ABC cheap shots Palin. Who'd have thought it could happen?
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http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2008/09/13/abc-news-edited-out-key-parts-sarah-palin-interview
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So, look, I really, really want to talk about the issues I disagree with Sarah Palin on. I want to talk about her shifting position on earmarks; about how she hasn't said a word about most of the issues facing the country today; about whether 8 years as mayor of Wasilla and 2 as governor of Alaska prepared her to lead this country; about the firing scandals; about the appropriateness of airplane-assisted wolf hunts. There are lots and lots of things I want to talk about and want to rip into her about and even some good points in the midst of Wilson's sexist and disgusting hyperbole that need to be made about Sarah Palin. But I first want to stop shouting into the darkness about how sexism doesn't just hurt women when it's directed at liberal women. Being sexist to Sarah Palin hurts us by reinforcing stereotypes about women and by allowing conservatives to point fingers at us and call us hypocrites.
I'm down with most of this so long as the blade cuts both ways. Many of the earmarks Palin as governor and mayor is being excoriated over are earmarks Biden and Obama also voted for. Biden's love of the earmark vortex Amtrak is and that he coincidentally commutes home on certainly deserve the same level of scrutiny. Delaware's checkered financial history has made it an ideal abode for some of the more unsavory credit card issuers, and Biden, no doubt coincidentally, has been behind efforts to make it more difficult for those who get in over their heads with easy credit to apply for bankruptcy, as his lobbyist son backpedals from his lobbying efforts.
BHO's tabula rosa through much of his legislative life and back to his editorship of the Harvard Law Review resists analysis, and indeed was foreshadowed by various court nominations where a lack of track record was considered an asset. This makes the papers created when he was the putative executive doling out Annenburg funds with his pal William Ayers important source material. It'd be nice if the energy the MSM is applying to Palin's library inquiries et al were applied to the issues outlined above in a commensurate fashion.
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What does it mean when the reaction to Palin by Pravada and the rank and file DNC differs only by degree?
Palin – the Devil in disguise
Front page / Opinion / Columnists
12.09.2008 Source:
The candidate for the Vice Presidency of the United States of America, whose experience in small town politics, mothers´day dos and the local hockey club is her claim to fame, threatened to open the gates of Hell by attacking Russia in the event of another invasion of Georgia in a televised interview on ABC (shown today). One question for this self-opinionated upstart: Do you know what a nuclear holocaust is?
Sarah Palin, Mrs. Nobody know-it-all shreiking cow from Alaska, the joke of American politics, plied with a couple of vodkas before letting rip in front of incredulous audiences while McCain coos in the background, cuts a ridiculous figure as she strives to be taken seriously.
How can anyone whose husband is a member of the Alaska Independence Party and who is running for the Vice Presidency of the Union be taken seriously? How indeed can the Republican Party be taken seriously for not vetting this female, or have they not yet discovered the skeletons in her closet? We have.
So Sarah Palin, Mrs. Hockey Mom housewife-cum-small-town gossip merchant and cheap little guttersnipe, suppose you shut up and allowed real politicians and diplomats to do their work? Threatening Russia with a war is perhaps the most irresponsible thing anyone could do at this moment in time. Have you any idea what a nuclear holocaust is? Have you any notion of the power of Russia’s armed forces? Did you know that Russia has enough missiles to destroy any target anywhere on Earth in seconds?
And have you not forgotten, you pith-headed little bimbo from the back of beyond, that small detail about the slaughter of Russian citizens by Georgians, which started the whole debacle? So next time suppose you keep your mouth shut and while you’re at it, make sure the members of your family keep their legs shut too. Your country has enough failed mothers as it is.
Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY
PRAVDA.Ru
Pravda.ru forum. The place where truth hurts
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/12-09-2008/106354-palindevil-0
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Of course Palin is minimally qualified. Obama opened the door on that. The difference is that Obama earned where he is with 18 million votes or so and Palin started as the choice of one, but that's how that works. I agree with Rachel that the debate of Palin should be on issues and stands that she takes and opponents should quit underestimating or trashing her.
Exact reverse of Rachel, I want her elected because of her positions and hope that the mini-scandals and airlifted investigators don't bring her down first. We should hammer out those issue discussions one by one on their merits not just the stand of a VP candidate.
I stayed out of a previous debate or two like the gay marriage discussion in trying to avoid making me-too posts of comments already made, but I certainly agree with Crafty that I greatly appreciate the presence of opposing views on both sides here.
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Fred Barnes fleshes out Barracuda's history:
Palin the Pragmatic
Doctrinaire conservatives beware.
by Fred Barnes
09/22/2008, Volume 014, Issue 02
Conservatives are rushing to crown Alaska governor Sarah Palin as the new Ronald Reagan. And indeed there are similarities. Like Reagan, Palin has a dazzling star quality and an appeal to voters outside the conservative orbit. But there's another likeness to Reagan that conservatives may find a bit off-putting. She governs as a pragmatic conservative--with heavy emphasis on the pragmatic.
Palin, John McCain's vice presidential running mate, is a strong social and religious conservative. She opposes abortion and gay rights and, as an evangelical Christian, believes in a God-centered universe. But these matters are neither her top priorities as governor nor even her second-tier concerns. Her social conservatism has been muted.
Instead, her agenda since being elected governor in 2006 consists of oil and gas, taxes, and ethics reform. "Just look at the bills she put her name on," says John Bitney, her policy director during her first year as governor. "They speak for themselves." The bills involved a new arrangement for building a natural gas pipeline, higher taxes on oil companies, and new ethics rules covering the governor's administration and the legislature.
Those were her major initiatives. Next on Palin's list of priorities were maintaining the solvency of the pension program for teachers, cutting spending in the state's capital budget, and assuring that parents who home school their children aren't discriminated against by state regulations.
Palin has frequently voiced her support for anti-abortion bills requiring parental consent for girls under 17 and outlawing partial-birth abortions. "Alaskans know I am pro-life and have never wavered in my belief in the sanctity of every human life," she declared in April.
But she refused to introduce the pro-life measures in a special legislative session last spring devoted to the gas pipeline. "These issues are so important they shouldn't be diluted with oil and gas deliberations," she said.
Later, she declined to call a separate special session to take up the abortion bills. Her reasoning: Pro-lifers had failed to persuade her the bills could pass the state senate. Nor would she intervene to pressure two Republican senators who opposed the legislation to change their minds. Palin isn't willing "to jump out in front of the bus on things that aren't moveable" in the legislature, says state Republican chairman Randy Ruedrich.
Palin's conservatism, like Reagan's, has never been in doubt. When I talked to her last year, she described herself as "pro-business and pro-development." TheAnchorage Daily News said the spending cuts she imposed in 2007 "may be the biggest single-year line-item veto total in state history." Of course, Palin is also pro-gun.
When she attended a governor's conference in Washington last February and was interviewed on C-SPAN by Steve Scully, she endorsed "across the board" tax cuts because Americans "know best" how to spend their own money. Palin said she's "committed" to making Alaska "more of a contributing state . . . and less reliant on the federal government."
Her biggest task as governor has been to start construction of the gas pipeline to the lower 48 states. She tossed out the sweetheart contract her predecessor, Republican Frank Murkowski, had reached with three oil companies and negotiated a new deal with a Canadian company. The goal, she said, is "to feed hungry markets in our state, reduce energy costs, help secure the nation, [and] flow that energy into hungry markets across the nation. That's my mission."
Her record as governor hardly qualifies her as a doctrinaire conservative. She proposed a graduated tax on oil as the price soared, then signed a bill passed by the legislature that set the new tax rate even higher. Reagan, by the way, cut taxes in 1981 and raised them the next year.
Why did Palin push a pipeline and favor a tax hike? Bitney says the answer is simple: Alaska needs more energy as older oil fields become depleted, and the pipeline will generate jobs and revenue. As for raising taxes, Palin follows the command of the state constitution to get the maximum benefit from the state's natural resources.
Bitney says Palin never instructed her gubernatorial staff to "go after abortion" or any other issues of concern to social conservatives. In a campaign debate in 2006, she said that both evolution and creationism should be taught in public schools. "You know, don't be afraid of education," she said. "Healthy debate is so important and so valuable in our schools."
The next day she thought better of her comment. "I would not push the state board of education to add creation-based alternatives to the state's required curriculum," she said. But there shouldn't be "a prohibition against debate if [creationism] comes up in class."
As governor, Palin has appointed a commissioner of education and nine members of the state board--without applying a litmus test on creationism or evolution. And there's been no effort, either by Palin or her appointees, to add creationism to the curriculum.
Palin's most celebrated act of practical conservatism was killing the notorious Bridge to Nowhere in Ketchikan. She had endorsed it in a gubernatorial campaign debate, but changed her mind after being elected. By then, the project had become a symbol of wasteful spending, and the congressional earmark with money for it had been rescinded.
But the three members of Alaska's congressional delegation--Ted Stevens, Lisa Murkowski, and Don Young--still favored the project. Their expectation was that Palin would keep it alive with federal highway funds and state money. She refused.
The anointing of Palin as the new Reagan is surely premature. Let's say she's a potential Reagan. Like him, Palin has focused on a few big issues, while allowing others popular with conservatives to fall by the wayside. This brand of pragmatic conservatism worked for Reagan. It's worked for Palin too.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
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I lived in Alaska for approximately 7 years. For all its hugeness, the state is tiny population wise. I lived in a town of 2000. I traveled frequently through the Matanuska Susitna Valley which is where Wasilla is. Lots of things happen in Alaska that are kind of "bush league" (hence the expression perhaps) with regard to government and community. The people are diverse but there are strong conservative and evangelical leanings in many places. People have moved there to escape having anyone tell them how to live. Up in the remoteness of Alaska they can do it their way more easily than in the lower 48. Very independent.
This article appeared in the New York Times and later on MSNBC.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin)
Nothing that is presented in this article surprises me. Lots of communities in Alaska have the flavor of being rough around the edges and a bit wild. While Wasilla is only 30 miles from Anchorage and has many modern amenities, it is insular to live there as it is in much of Alaska. People go to Alaska to be left alone and they are fiercely independent to a fault. There is much I admire in this but there is also much that is the result of escaping a larger more complex world. It results in communities that have very unique flavors and ways of doing things. In some of them you fit in or you don't. This article in its description of Sarah Palin reminds me of all of that.
I still have friends in Alaska. Some of them are involved in politics up there. I have asked them about all of this. They expressed a lot of concern over the amount of power that is being offered to Wasilla's former mayor and Alaska's governor.
I do think that Sarah Palin reminds me of common folk in many rural communities and I can certainly see the attraction that she has for many people in the blue collar places in the country. But she reminds me of the dark side of the common folk I am afraid. Those aspects of the smaller communities where to be different is bad, where being intelligent must be hidden, and where there is a RIGHT way to think as opposed to open discourse. I am basing this on the several weeks of watching and listening to the media but also and more importantly on my personal connections with friends in Alaska who have confirmed my fears that this person shoots from the hip in a way that does not sit well with me.
I know lots of people in the more rural places that I have lived who I admire greatly, who are calm and wise, and who express the very best of what people are. In those small communities people can band together and support one another in a way that is refreshing. At times of challenge ideologies are swept away. So that is a good thing. But what I am reading and learning about this person does not remind me enough of those positive features to make me even close to being comfortable with her as vice president. In this way I think that her addition to the republican ticket, while in some ways clever, actually detracts.
Karsk
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What Was Feminism?
By Victor Davis Hanson
The Washington Times | Monday, September 15, 2008
The media went hysterical over Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and Republican nominee for vice president. She may have appeared to the public as an independent, capable professional woman, but to a particular elite she couldn't possibly be a real feminist or even a serious candidate.
And that raises questions about what is — and what is not — feminism.
Feminism grew out of the 1960s to address sexual inequality. At an early age, I was mentored on most feminist arguments by my late mother. She graduated from Stanford Law School in the 1940s but then was offered only a single job as a legal secretary. Instead, she went back home to raise three children with my father, a teacher and farmer, and only returned to legal work in her 40s. She was eventually named a California superior court judge and, later, a state appellate court justice.
Hers was a common and compelling feminist argument of the times, and went something like this: Women should receive equal pay for equal work, and not be considered mere appendages of their husbands. Childrearing — if properly practiced as a joint enterprise — did not preclude women from pursuing careers. A woman's worth was not to be necessarily judged by having either too many or too few children, given the privacy of such decisions and the co-responsibility of male partners.
In such an ideal gender-blind workplace, women were not to be defined by their husband's or father's success or failure. The beauty of women's liberation was that it was not hierarchical but included the unmarried woman who drove a combine on her own farm, the corporate attorney and the homemaker who chose to home-school her children.
Women in the workplace did not look for special favors. And they surely did not wish to deny innately feminine differences. Instead, they asked only that men should not establish arbitrary rules of the game that favored their male gender.
Soon radical changes in American attitudes about birth control, abortion, dating, marriage and health care became, for some, part and parcel of women's liberation. But in its essence feminism still was about equality of opportunity, and so included women of all political and religious beliefs.
That old definition of feminism is now dead. It has been replaced by a new creed that is far more restrictive - as the controversy over Sarah Palin attests. Out of the recent media frenzy, four general truths emerged about the new feminism:
(1) There is a particular class and professional bent to the practitioners of feminism. Sarah Palin has as many kids as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, she has as much of a prior political record as the once-heralded Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, who was named to the Democratic ticket by Walter Mondale in 1984 - and arguably has as much as, or more executive experience than, Barack Obama. Somehow all that got lost in the endless sneering stories about her blue-collar conservatism, small Alaskan town, five children, snowmobiling husband and Idaho college degree.
(2) Feminism now often equates to a condescending liberalism. Emancipated women who, like Mrs. Palin, do not believe in abortion or are devout Christians are at best considered unsophisticated dupes. At worst, they are caricatured as conservative interlopers, piggybacking on the hard work of left-wing women whose progressive ideas alone have allowed the Palins of the world the choices they otherwise would not now enjoy.
Apparently these feminists believe that without the ideas of Gloria Steinem on abortion, a moose-hunting PTA mom would not have made governor. The Democrat's vice presidential candidate, Joe Biden, said Mrs. Palin's election, given her politics, would be "a backward step for women."
(3) Hypocrisy abounds. Many female critics of Mrs. Palin, in Washington and New York politics and media, found their careers enhanced through the political influence of their powerful fathers, their advantageous marriages to male power players and the inherited advantages of capital. The irony is that a Sarah Palin - like a Barbara Jordan, Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher - made her own way without the help of money or influence.
(4) Most Americans still believe in the old feminism but not this new doctrinaire liberal brand. Consequently, a struggling John McCain suddenly has shot ahead of Mr. Obama in the polls. Apparently millions of Americans like Mrs. Palin's underdog feminist saga and her can-do pluckiness. Many are offended by haughty liberal media elites sneering at someone whom, politics aside, they should be praising - for her substantial achievements, her inspirational personal story and her Obama-like charisma.
This last week we were supposed to learn about a liberated Gov. Sarah Palin. Instead the media taught us more than we ever wanted to know about what they now call feminism.
Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A War Like No Other" (Random House).
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Buchanan on his opinion of the neocons and their bid to influence Palin:
****Will the neocons who tutored George W. Bush in the ideology he pursued to the ruin of his presidency do the same for Sarah Palin?
Should they succeed, they will destroy her. Yet, they are moving even now to capture this princess of the right and hope of the party.
In St. Paul, Palin was told to cancel a meeting with Phyllis Schlafly and pro-life conservatives. McCain's operatives said Palin had to rest for her Wednesday convention speech.
Yet, on Tuesday, Palin was behind closed doors with Joe Lieberman and officials of the Israeli lobby AIPAC. There, according to The Washington Post, Palin took and passed her oral exams.
"Palin assured the group of her strong support for Israel, of her desire to see the United States move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and of her opposition to Iran's aspirations to become a nuclear power, according to sources familiar with the meeting."
AIPAC's mission, like that of Likud, is to goad America into launching air and missile strikes on any and all Iranian nuclear facilities.
AIPAC went away happy. Purred spokesman Josh Block, "We were pleased that Gov. Palin expressed her deep personal commitment to the safety and well-being of Israel."
Heading home to Alaska to prepare for her interview with Charlie Gibson, Palin was escorted by Randy Scheunemann, McCain's foreign policy guru and, until March, a hired agent of the Tbilisi regime.
Scheunemann's lobbying assignment: Bring Georgia into NATO, so U.S. troops, like 19-year-old Track Palin, will be required to fight Russia to defend a Saakashvili regime that has paid Randy and his partner $730,000.
Reportedly, a phone conversation was held between Saakashvili and Palin, in which Palin committed herself to the territorial integrity of Georgia, though South Ossetia and Abkhazia have declared independence and been recognized by Moscow, which now has troops in both.
Also on Palin's plane was Steve Biegun, formerly of Bush's National Security Council, and Scheunemann's choice to tutor her. Of Biegun, Steven Clemens of the New American Foundation says, "He will turn her into an advocate of Cheneyism and Cheney's view of national security issues."
During her interview with Gibson, Palin often took a neocon line. Three times she said that, should Israel decide to attack Iran, the United States should not "second guess" Israel's decision or interfere.
This contradicts U.S. policy. Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs, has warned Israel not to attack Iran, as the United States does not want a "third front." And the Pentagon is withholding crucial weapons the Israelis want and need to carry out any such attack.
Palin also volunteered that the Russian invasion was "unprovoked," though Georgia attacked South Ossetia first. She followed up by saying that Georgia and Ukraine should be brought into NATO.
Would that mean America would have to go to war with Russia on behalf of Georgia in any new conflict, asked Gibson.
"Perhaps so," said Palin.
Scheunemann should get a fat severance check from Saakashvili for that one.
One ex-White House aide at American Enterprise Institute, asked by Tim Shipman of the Daily Telegraph if AEI sees Palin as a "project," replied: "Your word, not mine. ... But I wouldn't disagree with the sentiment. ... She's bright, and she's a blank page. She's going places, and it's worth going there with her."
In fairness to Palin, on issues like NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, her answers reflect the views of the man who chose her. She has no option at present but to follow the line laid down by Scheunemann.
But make no mistake. Sarah Palin is no neocon. She did not come by her beliefs by studying Leo Strauss. She is a traditionalist whose values are those of family, faith, community and country, not some utopian ideology.
Wasilla, Alaska, is not a natural habitat of neoconservatives.
And her unrehearsed answers to Gibson's questions reveal her natural conservatism. Asked if she agrees with the Bush Doctrine, Palin asked for clarification. "In what respect, Charlie?"
Gibson: "Do we have the right of an anticipatory self-defense?"
Yes, said Palin, "if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against (the) American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend."
Exactly. The intelligence must be legit and the threat "imminent."
Interviewed by Alaska Business Monthly in March 2007 on the surge, Palin said, "I heard on the news about the new deployments, and while I support our president, I want to know that we have an exit plan in place."
That is not the language of empire or "benevolent global hegemony."
Palin may disappoint many conservatives in the next seven weeks by having to parrot the McCain-neocon line on NATO expansion, NAFTA and a "path to citizenship" for illegal aliens. But the battle for Sarah's soul is not over.
For, again, the lady is no neocon. Nor is the husband Todd, First Dude of Alaska and former member of the "Alaska First" Independence Party.
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Don't see a link, but if this is indeed Pat Buchanan then I'm surprised he didn't raise the specter of the Illuminati and Trilateral Commission. Buchanan's Hitler apologia he recently published is just one element of a long list of rank foolishness he's been associated with.
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PALIN BAGS A BIGFOOT
Posted on 15 September 2008
WASILLA, AK - Records and eyewitnesses have come to light that prior to announcing her candidacy for the Vice Presidency; Sarah Palin shot a Bigfoot from a helicopter.
A government helicopter was seen flying low over the Chugach National Park with what witnesses described as “a sexy librarian shooting out the side.” Employees at a local bait shop report seeing a similar woman only hours before carrying an infant in a camouflage Baby Bjorn.
The Bigfoot, or Sasquatch as it is known in scientific circles, was found dead on the outskirts of the park, just south of Wasilla, Alaska. Preliminary forensics reports confirm that an adult male Sasquatch was shot in the face with Palin’s trademark 5mm M4 Carbine Assault Rifle.
Environmental groups are in an uproar at the hunting death of a rare and notoriously reclusive species. Efforts to have the Sasquatch placed on the endangered species list have met with repeated opposition from state legislature, since protecting the ‘Missing Link’ could be seen as validating evolution.
Conservatives have immediately rallied to their party’s new star, citing that gun ownership and hunting are indelible parts of American culture. Indeed this point is hard to argue, as John Adams was notorious for having captured what he called a “Skunk Ape” and killing it with his bare hands on the White House lawn in front of a paying audience.
(http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/palinvsbigfoot.jpg)
http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/?p=2605
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The sad thing is, the above article is one of the more reasonable hit pieces written by the MSM....... :-D
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I dunno, dude. Does that look like an M4 to you?
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That's very funny BBG.
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Well I am not afraid to say it. Palin got my vote just on her looks alone, and the fact I seen her on youtube shooting a machine gun!!!!!
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OUR SISTER SARAH PALIN'S ANTI-ELITIST CHARM
Palin: Yes, she's 100 percent Ivy-free.
Posted: 3:26 am
September 20, 2008
I KNOW Sarah Palin, and so does my wife.
Neither of us ever actually met the governor of Alaska, but we grew up with her - in the small-town America despised by the leftwing elite.
One gal-pal classmate of my wife's has even traveled from New York's Finger Lakes to Alaska to hunt moose with her husband. (Got one, too.) And no, Ms. Streisand, she isn't a redneck missing half her teeth - she's a lawyer.
The sneering elites and their mediacrat fellow travelers just don't get it: How on earth could anyone vote for someone who didn't attend an Ivy League school? And having more than 1.7 children marks any woman as a rube. (If Palin had any taste, her teenage daughter would've had a quiet abortion in a discreet facility.)
And what kind of retro-Barbie would stay happily married to her high-school sweetheart? Ugh. She even kills animals and eats them. (The meat and fish served in the upscale bistros patronized by Obama supporters appears by magic - it didn't really come from living things. . .)
Palin has that hick accent, too. And that busy-mom beehive 'do. Double ugh! Bet she hasn't even read Ian McEwan's latest novel and can't explain Frank Gehry's vision for a new architecture. She and her blue-collar (triple ugh!) husband don't even own a McMansion, let alone an inherited family compound on the Cape.
And she wants to be vice president?
The opinion-maker elites see Sarah Palin clearly every time they look up from another sneering article in The New Yorker: She's a country-bumpkin chumpette from a hick state with low latte availability. She's not one of them and never will be. That's the real disqualifier in this race.
Now let me tell you what those postmodern bigots with their multiple vacation homes and their disappointing trust-fund kids don't see:
Sarah Palin's one of us. She actually represents the American people.
When The New York Times, CNN, the NBC basket of basket cases and all the barking blog dogs insult Palin, they're insulting us. When they smear her, they're smearing every American who actually works for a living, who doesn't expect a handout, who doesn't have a full-time accountant to parse the family taxes, who believes in the Pledge of Allegiance and who thinks a church is more than just a tedious stop on daughter Emily's 100K wedding day.
Go ahead, faux feminists and Hollywood deep thinkers: Snicker at Sarah America's degree from the University of Idaho, but remember that most Americans didn't attend Harvard or Princeton as a legacy after daddy donated enough to buy his kid's way in.
Go ahead, campaign strategists: Mock Americans who go to church and actually pray. But you might want to run the Census numbers first.
And go right ahead: Dismiss all of us who remember how, on the first day of deer season, our high school classrooms were half empty (not a problem at Andover or Exeter).
That rube accent of Palin's? It's a howler. But she sounds a lot more like the rest of us than a Harvard man or a Smithie ever will.
Why does Sarah Palin energize all of us who don't belong to the gilded leftwing circle? Because she's us. We sat beside her in class. We hung out after school (might've even shared a backseat combat zone on prom night). And now she lives next door, raising her kids.
For the first time since Ronald Reagan, our last great president, we, the people, see a chance that one of us might have a voice in governing our country.
Speaking of Reagan (Eureka College, Illinois), every chief executive we've had since the Gipper snapped his final salute as president has had the imprimatur of an Ivy League university. And we've gone from bad to worse:
* George Herbert Walker Bush: Yale.
* William Jefferson Clinton: Georgetown, Oxford, Yale Law.
* George W. Bush: Yale and Harvard Business School.
The first lacked the sense to finish the job in Desert Storm; the second lacked the guts to go after al Qaeda when it was just a startup - and the third, well, let's just say he disappointed our low expectations.
Now we have the Ivy League elite's "he's not only like us but he's a minority and we're so wonderful to support him" candidate, Sen. Barack Obama (Columbia and Harvard Law).
Our country can't afford another one of these clowns. Harvard isn't the answer - Harvard's the problem.
So here's the message Palin is sending on behalf of the rest of us (the down-market masses Dems love at election time and ignore once the voting's done): The rule of the snobs is over. It's time to give one of us a chance to lead.
Sen. John McCain's one of us, too. He raised hell at Annapolis (quadruple ugh: military!), and he'll raise the right kind of hell in Washington.
McCain's so dumb he really loves his country.
Sarah Palin's dumb that way, too. How terribly unfashionable.
Ralph Peters' latest book is "Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World."
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Not what I expected from the NR0
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDZiMDhjYTU1NmI5Y2MwZjg2MWNiMWMyYTUxZDkwNTE=
Palin Problem
She’s out of her league.
By Kathleen Parker
If at one time women were considered heretical for swimming upstream against feminist orthodoxy, they now face condemnation for swimming downstream — away from Sarah Palin.
To express reservations about her qualifications to be vice president — and possibly president — is to risk being labeled anti-woman.
Or, as I am guilty of charging her early critics, supporting only a certain kind of woman.
Some of the passionately feminist critics of Palin who attacked her personally deserved some of the backlash they received. But circumstances have changed since Palin was introduced as just a hockey mom with lipstick — what a difference a financial crisis makes — and a more complicated picture has emerged.
As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.
Yes, she recently met and turned several heads of state as the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York. She was gracious, charming and disarming. Men swooned. Pakistan’s president wanted to hug her. (Perhaps Osama bin Laden is dying to meet her?)
And, yes, she has common sense, something we value. And she’s had executive experience as a mayor and a governor, though of relatively small constituencies (about 6,000 and 680,000, respectively).
Finally, Palin’s narrative is fun, inspiring and all-American in that frontier way we seem to admire. When Palin first emerged as John McCain’s running mate, I confess I was delighted. She was the antithesis and nemesis of the hirsute, Birkenstock-wearing sisterhood — a refreshing feminist of a different order who personified the modern successful working mother.
Palin didn’t make a mess cracking the glass ceiling. She simply glided through it.
It was fun while it lasted.
Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.
No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.
Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: “Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.”
When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: “I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”
If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.
If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.
What to do?
McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the GOP’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.
Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.
Do it for your country.
— Kathleen Parker is a nationally syndicated columnist.
© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group
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I was on vacation the last week and didn't watch any interviews or monitor things online until I got home. With that handicap, I expect that this is more of an artifact of "gotcha" being played by our corrupt media rather than any lack of ability on Palin's behalf.
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Hope you enjoyed the vacation.
GM; you are usually well read and informed albeit sometimes over zealous :-)
but take some time and catch up and you will see that unfortunately Kathleen Parker has a valid point.
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We shall see tonight how accurate Kathleen Parker is , , ,
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October 02, 2008, 6:30 a.m.
Sarah Biden
Vice-Presidential meltdown.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Journalists continue to ask, “What was John McCain thinking in selecting the gaffe-prone Gov. Sarah Palin?”
In what has now become a disturbing pattern, the Alaska governor seems either unable or unwilling to avoid embarrassing statements that are often as untrue as they are outrageous. Recently, for example, in an exclusive interview with news anchor Katie Couric, Palin gushed, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’ ” Apparently the former Alaskan beauty queen failed to realize that in 1929 there was neither widespread television nor was Franklin Roosevelt even President.
Sometimes the Idaho-native Palin seems to confuse and embarrass her own running mate. Shortly after her nomination, she introduced a “John McAmerica;” then she referred to the Republican ticket as the “Palin-McCain administration;” and finished by calling Sen. Obama, “Senator George Obama.” The Palin gaffes seem to be endless: on her way to Washington to meet the national press corps, Palin, the mother of five, once again stumbled — this time characterizing Senator Biden as “Congressman Joe Biden,” who, she chuckled, was “good looking.”
But then Palin only compounded that growing image of shallowness when introducing her own snow-mobiling husband Todd, “as drop-dead gorgeous!” And when asked about the controversial McCain ad suggesting that Barack Obama had introduced explicit sex education classes to pre-teenagers, the Christian fundamentalist Palin scoffed that it was “terrible” and that she would have never had allowed such an unfair clip to run — before retracting that apology under pressure from the now exasperated McCain campaign staff. But then, according to press reports, wild Sarah only made things worse still by announcing that paying higher taxes was the “patriotic” thing for Americans to do.
This week, the gun-owning, moose-hunting Palin also promised blue-collar Virginians that she would protect their firearm rights — even, if need be, from her own running-mate: “I guarantee you, John McCain ain’t taking my shotguns, so don’t buy that malarkey. Don’t buy that malarkey. They’re going to start peddling that to you. I got two. If he tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem. I like that little over and under, you know? I’m not bad with it. So give me a break. Give me a break.”
Palin may have had some experience in Alaskan politics, but at times the former small-town mayor seems unaware of the pressures of running a national campaign in a diverse society. For example, Palin — who has had past associations with reactionary groups — caused a storm earlier when she characterized Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama in seemingly racialist terms: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Such stereotyping suggested that the Alaskan was not aware of the multiracial nature of American politics — an impression confirmed when in her earlier gubernatorial run, she had once suggested that to enter a donut shop was synonymous with meeting an Indian immigrant.
The recently-elected Governor Palin was further rattled by media scrutiny, when, in a moment of embarrassing candor, she confessed, “Mitt Romney is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Quite frankly he might have been a better pick than me.” That confession followed an earlier deer-in-the-headlights moment, when the nearly hysterical Palin urged a wheel-chair bound state legislator to rise: “Sally, stand up, let the people see you!”
The Palin gaffes are no surprise to those who have followed closely her previous races. They cite her aborted governor campaign, when she was forced to pull out after fraudulently claiming that her working-class family had been Idaho coal miners — in an apparent case of plagiarism of British Prime Minister candidate Neal Kinnock’s stump speech. Palin once boasted: “I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Sarah Palin’s the first in his family ever to go to University . . . is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright . . . who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Idaho and would come up after 12 hours and play volleyball?” It did not help Palin that reporters quickly discovered that while as a student at the University at Idaho she had been caught plagiarizing and also misrepresented her undergraduate transcript.
Most recently on the campaign trail, Governor Palin apparently promised a vocal supporter that the United States would certainly not burn coal to produce electricity — even though roughly half of current U.S. power production is coal-fired. The same uncertainty seems to extend to foreign policy. Under cross-examination, Palin appeared confused about her own recent trips abroad, first claiming that her helicopter had “been forced down” in Afghanistan, although other passengers suggested the landing was a routine cautionary measure to avoid a possible snowstorm. Palin likewise had alleged that she was shot at while in Baghdad’s Green Zone, although there was no evidence from her security detail that she had, in fact, come under hostile fire.
The Obama campaign has lost no time in hammering at the former hockey-mom Palin’s foreign-policy judgment, alleging that shortly after September 11 she once suggested sending $200 billion to Iran as a “good will” gesture, and reminding journalists that in repeated interviews, Palin had called for dividing Iraq into three separate nations, despite Iraqi resistance to such outside interference. Palin, the nominal head of the Alaskan National Guard, has also falsely insisted that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen had once suggested that we were losing the war in Iraq and that the Bush administration had sent Undersecretary of State William Burns to Teheran to meet with Iranian officials.
In response to Palin’s unbridled misstatements, journalists have coined the term “Palinism” — the serial voicing of sweeping declarations that are either insulting, or untrue — or both. No wonder rumors mount that Sen. McCain is now seeking a possible graceful exit for the gaffe-prone Palin, even as the Obama campaign continues to make the contrast with their own sober and circumspect Joe Biden.
— This parody is by NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmU3YzIyZDU1ZTM2OTc1MTI0Mzc3Njc3ODFmYzZjNWY=
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Very funny-- and given the poor deceived state of the people's awareness of these issues, a parody that runs the risk of being taken seriously.
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:lol:
The Post Turtle
I was suturing a cut on the hand of a favorite patient and friend of mine, an old Texas rancher who'd caught his hand in a gate while he was working cattle. While I worked, we talked and the conversation came around to Sarah Palin and her bid to be a heartbeat away from being President.
The old rancher said, 'Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle.'
Not being familiar with the term, I asked, 'What's a post turtle?'
The old rancher said, 'When you're driving down a country road and you spy a fencepost with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle.'
He saw that I looked puzzled, so he continued, 'You know she didn't get up there by herself; she doesn't belong up there; she doesn't know what to do while she is up there, you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put her up there to begin with, and you just want to help the poor thing get down."
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/10/02/new-mccain-ad-just-a-reminder-that-bidens-an-idiot/
Let Biden be Biden.
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Post turtle, my arse.
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http://michellemalkin.com/2008/10/02/sarah-rocks/
SARAH ROCKS!
By Michelle Malkin • October 2, 2008 10:50 PM
First, I would like to see all the Sarah doubters and detractors in the Beltway/Manhattan corridor eat their words.
Eat them.
Sarah Palin is the real deal. Five weeks on the campaign trail, thrust onto the national stage, she rocked tonight’s debate.
She was warm, fresh, funny, confident, energetic, personable, relentless, and on message. She roasted Obama’s flip-flops on the surge and tea-with-dictators declarations, dinged Biden’s bash-Bush rhetoric, challenged the blame-America defeatism of the Left, and exuded the sunny optimism that energized the base in the first place.
McCain has not done many things right. But Sarah Palin proved tonight that the VP risk he took was worth it.
Her performance also underscored the underhandedness of the hatchet job editors at ABC News and CBS News, which failed to capture her solid competence on the whole array of foreign and domestic policy issues on the debate table tonight. (I didn’t care for all the “greed” rhetoric, but I understand they are trying to appeal to independents and Dems. They’re trying to win the election.)
Pause to reflect on this: She matched — and trumped several times — a man who has spent his entire adult life on the political stage, run for president twice, and as he mentioned several times, chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Sarah Palin looked presidential.
Joe Biden looked tired.
Sarah made history.
Biden is history.
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Prediction: Watch for a whole new, severe strain of Palin Derangement Syndrome to begin tonight.
They hated her before tonight. They are going to pour on more unfathomable hate at a level we have never seen before.
Sarah, we’re praying for you.
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Frank Luntz’s focus group agrees: Sarah rocks.
Reader Brett had a sharp observation: “Palin amazingly avoided falling into a trap when Gwen Ifill asked whether she agreed with Biden on a particulalr issue — instead Palin repeated the question and stated her answer — rather than say “I agree” — like Obama said so many times at an earlier debate.”
Yes, that was excellent.
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Previous: Liveblogging the debate.
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As for Gwen “Age of Obama” Ifill, she behaved herself for the most part. She was duly chastened. But the questions and the controversy and the double standards don’t go away. As I wrote in my column this week:
It’s not the color of your skin, sweetie. It’s the color of your politics. Perhaps Ifill will be able to conceal it this week. But if the “stunning” “Breakthrough” she’s rooting for comes to pass on January 20, 2009, nobody will be fooled.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31447_Bidens_Big_Lie
Senator Hairplugs was very dishonest about this point.
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I agree Ifill behaved, indeed I thought she did a rather good job-- though I suspect her personal policitics being put in the spotlight had something to do with that.
I thought SP did quite well. Although not able to wonk with Biden on some of the points and there were some passages where he scored well, she showed a strong ability to define things on her terms and an impressive abiilty to absorb and articulate a lot of material-- to operate at this level after 5 weeks on the national stage I find genuinely impressive. She did very well keeping track of Biden's points and answering them-- and ducking the ones that she wanted to. I thought she did well by steering the conversation to energy matters where she was able to show substance, and did VERY well with "the vision thing", leaving Biden looking the wonk.
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Palin communicated and showed very well; polls show Biden "won", but I think Palin did better than expected so she should get some points.
I think my one frustration is that she simply didn't answer most of the questions, she just repeated her memorized mantra taught to her by
her handlers. In a "debate" I like to hear substance and an answer to a direct question and not repeatedly see avoidance (why?), ducking
broad generalities or repeatedly reverting to a speech on another unrelated topic that has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
It would have been much more interesting and I wish Ifill had insisted that both participants "simply answer the question". She did once, but
Palin avoided her - too tough for Palin to do I guess. But is that asking to much? That would not have been partisanship but just a good debate.
And to say that you were genuinely impressed with her ability to operate at this level after only 5 weeks on the national stage; heck, the elections are five weeks away
and if elected, she will be "a heartbeat away from being President". Now is not the time to BEGIN learning the subjects assuming she even has the intellect
to even do so. And Biden might be a "wonk", but Palin looks the airhead. I'ld rather have the wonk. He's qualified, she's not.
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**Watch, Senator Hairplugs will get a pass from the MSM on this one. If Sarah said something this stupid, this would be the headline screamed from the mountaintops.**
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/10/03/mother-of-all-gaffes/
Mother of all gaffes”
POSTED AT 1:40 PM ON OCTOBER 3, 2008 BY ED MORRISSEY
Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House has followed the wars in Lebanon more closely than most bloggers, and Joe Biden’s assertion that the US and France “kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon” has him gasping for breath. Calling it “completely insane”, Rick deconstructs the rest of the answer on this question to seriously challenge whatever credentials Biden claims on foreign policy. First, here’s Biden’s answer in its entirety, emphases mine:
BIDEN: Gwen, no one in the United States Senate has been a better friend to Israel than Joe Biden. I would have never, ever joined this ticket were I not absolutely sure Barack Obama shared my passion. But you asked a question about whether or not this administration’s policy had made sense or something to that effect. It has been an abject failure, this administration’s policy. In fairness to Secretary Rice, she’s trying to turn it around now in the seventh or eighth year.
Here’s what the president said when we said no. He insisted on elections on the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, “Big mistake. Hamas will win. You’ll legitimize them.” What happened? Hamas won. When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, “Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.”
Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel. The fact of the matter is, the policy of this administration has been an abject failure. And speaking of freedom being on the march, the only thing on the march is Iran. It’s closer to a bomb. Its proxies now have a major stake in Lebanon, as well as in the Gaza Strip with Hamas.
We will change this policy with thoughtful, real, live diplomacy that understands that you must back Israel in letting them negotiate, support their negotiation, and stand with them, not insist on policies like this administration has.
Rick couldn’t believe his ears:
Of course, no one “threw Hezb’allah out of Lebanon.” They have been there all along as the expert above notes. The Lebanese people threw the Syrians out of Lebanon, with no help from liberal Democrats like Biden and Obama, but with a great big behind the scenes lift from France and the US. It was we who put the bug in King Abdullah’s ear to lobby the Syrians to get while the going was good as the French worked directly on Baby Assad. The combination worked wonderfully and the Syrians left in a hurry – after a couple of million Lebanese took to the streets in a breathtaking show of defiance to tyranny and love of freedom.
Joe Biden – or any rational human being on this planet anyway – never recommended that NATO be dispatched to “fill the vacuum.” It is a lie. If it had been proposed. Colin Powell would have been laughed out of the room – something we should do to Biden at this point because he compounded his gaffe by evidently believing that not having NATO as a buffer between Israel and Hezb’allah – an absolute impossibility mind you – led to the ascension of Hezb’allah in Lebanon as a political power.
Where has Biden been for the last 20 years – at least since the Taif Accords were signed in 1989 which gave Hezb’allah a free hand in the southern part of the country and then pressuring the Lebanese government to formally designate them as “the resistance” to Israel? Hezb’allah’s rise is directly related to Iran’s funding of their proxy to the tune of around $250 million a year.
Like Rick, I cannot recall anyone seriously suggesting that NATO occupy the sub-Litani region of Lebanon. NATO already found itself stretched to meet its commitments in Afghanistan, although Germany and Italy did find troops to contribute to the beefed-up presence in UNIFIL, the same multinational force that had sat idle while Hezbollah armed itself after the Israeli withdrawal from the region a few years ago — and then turned around and did the same thing after the Israeli withdrawal in 2006.
Some people assumed that Biden meant that the US and France kicked Syria out of Lebanon, but Michael Totten — who has spent considerable time in Lebanon — doesn’t buy that explanation, either:
And did Biden and Senator Barack Obama really say NATO troops should be sent into Lebanon? When did they say that? Why would they say that? They certainly didn’t say it because NATO needed to prevent Hezbollah from returning–since Hezbollah never went anywhere.
I tried to chalk this one up as just the latest of Biden’s colorful gaffes. Did he mean to say “we kicked Syria out of Lebanon?” But that wouldn’t make any more sense. First of all, the Lebanese kicked Syria out of Lebanon. Not the United States, and not France. But he clearly meant to say Hezbollah, not Syria, because he correctly notes just a few sentences later that Hezbollah is part of Lebanon’s government. He wasn’t talking about Syria. He was talking about Hezbollah all the way through, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of his outlandish assertion.
And all of this points out the folly of presidential-level meetings with the leadership of Iran, without the precondition of them ending their support for the terrorist group Hezbollah. Iran funds Hezbollah and their terrorist activities, which Biden rightly decries. But if Biden doesn’t want Hezbollah to be a “legitimate part” of the Lebanese government for that reason, why would he legitimize their sponsors with presidential-level meetings without first insisting on the end of that support?
It’s a completely incoherent policy as well as a terrible misreading of history and the present status of the region. And if Biden can’t get this right, what does that say about his running mate, who chose Biden to fill the gaps in his own foreign-policy portfolio?
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Over to you JDN :-)
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Over to you JDN :-)
Gee thanks. :-)
Biden misspoke; period. What do you want me to say? :oops:
To be fair, BOTH candidates misspoke, overstated, and stretched the truth last night. But I just wish Palin had answered
the questions rather than simply dodging them or ignoring most of them.
Palin made a point somewhere in another interview. To paraphrase, she said she was criticized for not having the perfect answers in
Couric's interview and she has been criticized for being too vague and clueless. Palin commented that (to paraphrase)
"she's damned either way". I understand her point, and sympathize, however I would rather tolerate a few gaffes (do I care if she pronounces
a general's name wrong - give her a break!) than simply avoiding the question as she seemed to do time after time last night.
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It appears that when Biden was sounding authoritative in the debate, he was just making things up.
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GM:
I agree.
JDN:
As a general rule, I agree about "answering the question", but where I diverge is when it surrenders that candidate's communication with the people. The media are not a gatekeeper to the American people whose permission is needed to communicate. Sometimes, one needs simply to blow them off and define the agenda as one will-- and let the people make of it what they will.
I'll agree ducking some questions for which she wasn't ready may have been a part of it, I heartily approve of her defining herself and what she thinks important directly with the people.
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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31461_Bidens_Lies_the_Short_List
More on Biden's "misspeakings".
Anyone in the MSM with even an ounce of journalistic ethics left? Hello?
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Replying to the Biden mis-speaks in the Palin-Biden debate, thanks for the short list. May I add something else scary he said. Bankruptcy court should write down the interest AND THE PRINCIPLE on mortgages. Do liberals no longer believe in binding contracts between consenting adults? In his miserable legal training did they not teach him about choice of remedies. They are supposed to get the house back or get the money. Why else would you call it a secured loan? Personal loans that are not secured against real estate are not tax deductible. Did everyone just lose their home interest deduction?
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DougMacG; Thank you!!!! Forget the little gaffes, "write down the interest AND PRINCIPLE on mortgages?" I have been lumped in to the "liberal" camp, but please.... take some responsibility! As you succinctly pointed out, it is a SECURED loan! I have had a few glasses of wine, it's Friday, but everyone seems to blame the evil businessman, Wall Street, et al, BUT what
about personal responsibility? I HATE fraud, but if you make 40k per year, and you buy a 500k house, and get kicked out one year later for not making the payments, why am I
suppose to feel sorry for you or blame the lenders or Wall Street. YOU took the loan. YOU lived in a house you had absolutely no business living in; please, just say thank you for the experience
and move on. And my kudos for the people who didn't buy because they knew they couldn't "afford" the "real" price. I like Biden, and in another argument I defended him, but this is ridiculous.
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Wow. Here i'm having to agree with JDN again. I may need to have a few pops now..... :-D
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I agree Ifill behaved, indeed I thought she did a rather good job-- though I suspect her personal policitics being put in the spotlight had something to do with that.
I thought SP did quite well. Although not able to wonk with Biden on some of the points and there were some passages where he scored well, she showed a strong ability to define things on her terms and an impressive abiilty to absorb and articulate a lot of material-- to operate at this level after 5 weeks on the national stage I find genuinely impressive. She did very well keeping track of Biden's points and answering them-- and ducking the ones that she wanted to. I thought she did well by steering the conversation to energy matters where she was able to show substance, and did VERY well with "the vision thing", leaving Biden looking the wonk.
I don't think she even answered half the questions she was asked, and I don't think that is a good thing. She just fell back on whatever her note cards said. Ducking the issue doesn't give me confidence in someones leadership abilities. It makes me think they are selling me a lemon.
Here is my real problem with Palin. she is playing the "I am a country bumpkin" card. "Say it ain't so Joe!" "Well gosh darn..." I don't want a bumpkin as our second in command. I think it is disgusting that people demand an "elite" brain surgeon, but when it comes time to vote they look for the most mediocre person they can find. Why does being a soccer mom all of the sudden qualify someone to be in office? I won't vote for someone that acts and talks like my grandmother. I love gramma, but she would make a terrible president! :P
Peoples expectations of presidential, and vice presidential candidates are so low that she pretty much won that debate by not screwing it up... it makes me sort of sad...
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I agree Ifill behaved, indeed I thought she did a rather good job-- though I suspect her personal policitics being put in the spotlight had something to do with that.
I thought SP did quite well. Although not able to wonk with Biden on some of the points and there were some passages where he scored well, she showed a strong ability to define things on her terms and an impressive abiilty to absorb and articulate a lot of material-- to operate at this level after 5 weeks on the national stage I find genuinely impressive. She did very well keeping track of Biden's points and answering them-- and ducking the ones that she wanted to. I thought she did well by steering the conversation to energy matters where she was able to show substance, and did VERY well with "the vision thing", leaving Biden looking the wonk.
I don't think she even answered half the questions she was asked, and I don't think that is a good thing. She just fell back on whatever her note cards said. Ducking the issue doesn't give me confidence in someones leadership abilities. It makes me think they are selling me a lemon.
Here is my real problem with Palin. she is playing the "I am a country bumpkin" card. "Say it ain't so Joe!" "Well gosh darn..." I don't want a bumpkin as our second in command. I think it is disgusting that people demand an "elite" brain surgeon, but when it comes time to vote they look for the most mediocre person they can find. Why does being a soccer mom all of the sudden qualify someone to be in office? I won't vote for someone that acts and talks like my grandmother. I love gramma, but she would make a terrible president! :P
**When did we become Britain, where having the "right" accent makes or breaks you? What kind of accent does an elite brain surgeon have? I'm pretty sure SP has a bit more than "soccer mom" on her resume, yes?**
Peoples expectations of presidential, and vice presidential candidates are so low that she pretty much won that debate by not screwing it up... it makes me sort of sad...
**She's been targeted in the most abusive and unfair ways possible since being announced. Her debate was "moderated" by one of the more corrupt members of the MSM i've seen in a long time. Apparently, Michelle Obama wasn't available, so Gwen Ifill was their second choice. She had the cards stacked against her going in, so it was a matter of playing a good defensive game and winning on personality.**
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I agree Ifill behaved, indeed I thought she did a rather good job-- though I suspect her personal policitics being put in the spotlight had something to do with that.
I thought SP did quite well. Although not able to wonk with Biden on some of the points and there were some passages where he scored well, she showed a strong ability to define things on her terms and an impressive abiilty to absorb and articulate a lot of material-- to operate at this level after 5 weeks on the national stage I find genuinely impressive. She did very well keeping track of Biden's points and answering them-- and ducking the ones that she wanted to. I thought she did well by steering the conversation to energy matters where she was able to show substance, and did VERY well with "the vision thing", leaving Biden looking the wonk.
I don't think she even answered half the questions she was asked, and I don't think that is a good thing. She just fell back on whatever her note cards said. Ducking the issue doesn't give me confidence in someones leadership abilities. It makes me think they are selling me a lemon.
Here is my real problem with Palin. she is playing the "I am a country bumpkin" card. "Say it ain't so Joe!" "Well gosh darn..." I don't want a bumpkin as our second in command. I think it is disgusting that people demand an "elite" brain surgeon, but when it comes time to vote they look for the most mediocre person they can find. Why does being a soccer mom all of the sudden qualify someone to be in office? I won't vote for someone that acts and talks like my grandmother. I love gramma, but she would make a terrible president! :P
**When did we become Britain, where having the "right" accent makes or breaks you? What kind of accent does an elite brain surgeon have? I'm pretty sure SP has a bit more than "soccer mom" on her resume, yes?**
Peoples expectations of presidential, and vice presidential candidates are so low that she pretty much won that debate by not screwing it up... it makes me sort of sad...
**She's been targeted in the most abusive and unfair ways possible since being announced. Her debate was "moderated" by one of the more corrupt members of the MSM i've seen in a long time. Apparently, Michelle Obama wasn't available, so Gwen Ifill was their second choice. She had the cards stacked against her going in, so it was a matter of playing a good defensive game and winning on personality.**
This isn't about accent, this is about acting like your an "average joe." The vice president should not be an "average joe," and if they act like one they should be called on it. I am sorry, but that is how I see it. She is presenting a personality and demeanor that I think is unbefitting of the VP of the United States.
As far as calling foul on how she has been treated... well... deal with it. She is a celebrity now, and she is under direct public scrutiny. This will not change if she is the VP, so she better learn to handle it. To be totally fair she has been given a pass on several things that any of the other candidates would have taken flack for.
And she didn't win on personality. My point was that she won by not screwing up. "Hey look, she didn't answer any of the questions, but she didn't make a fool of herself so she did very well!" Like I said, I feel like I am being sold a lemon.
-
GM: Be nice, Ifill although perhaps biased, was really quite fair during THIS debate. You can't blame the moderator.
Blame Palin if you want to pass the blame. Jonobos has some good points.
PS It's nice to agree once in a while :-) I hope you are having those "pops"; it has been a long week and I am sure for you too. And I am really not
the devil incarnate although sometimes I think you think so. :-D
-
I agree Ifill behaved, indeed I thought she did a rather good job-- though I suspect her personal policitics being put in the spotlight had something to do with that.
I thought SP did quite well. Although not able to wonk with Biden on some of the points and there were some passages where he scored well, she showed a strong ability to define things on her terms and an impressive abiilty to absorb and articulate a lot of material-- to operate at this level after 5 weeks on the national stage I find genuinely impressive. She did very well keeping track of Biden's points and answering them-- and ducking the ones that she wanted to. I thought she did well by steering the conversation to energy matters where she was able to show substance, and did VERY well with "the vision thing", leaving Biden looking the wonk.
I don't think she even answered half the questions she was asked, and I don't think that is a good thing. She just fell back on whatever her note cards said. Ducking the issue doesn't give me confidence in someones leadership abilities. It makes me think they are selling me a lemon.
Here is my real problem with Palin. she is playing the "I am a country bumpkin" card. "Say it ain't so Joe!" "Well gosh darn..." I don't want a bumpkin as our second in command. I think it is disgusting that people demand an "elite" brain surgeon, but when it comes time to vote they look for the most mediocre person they can find. Why does being a soccer mom all of the sudden qualify someone to be in office? I won't vote for someone that acts and talks like my grandmother. I love gramma, but she would make a terrible president! :P
**When did we become Britain, where having the "right" accent makes or breaks you? What kind of accent does an elite brain surgeon have? I'm pretty sure SP has a bit more than "soccer mom" on her resume, yes?**
Peoples expectations of presidential, and vice presidential candidates are so low that she pretty much won that debate by not screwing it up... it makes me sort of sad...
**She's been targeted in the most abusive and unfair ways possible since being announced. Her debate was "moderated" by one of the more corrupt members of the MSM i've seen in a long time. Apparently, Michelle Obama wasn't available, so Gwen Ifill was their second choice. She had the cards stacked against her going in, so it was a matter of playing a good defensive game and winning on personality.**
This isn't about accent, this is about acting like your an "average joe." The vice president should not be an "average joe," and if they act like one they should be called on it. I am sorry, but that is how I see it. She is presenting a personality and demeanor that I think is unbefitting of the VP of the United States.
**Let me remind you of the words of an "average joe" that was born in a log cabin and never attended Harvard: "and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." He never said anything about the supposedly elite members of our society running things for the rest of us. I bet his rural roots were quite evident in his speech patterns.**
As far as calling foul on how she has been treated... well... deal with it.
**She has. Quite well, thank you.**
She is a celebrity now, and she is under direct public scrutiny. This will not change if she is the VP, so she better learn to handle it. To be totally fair she has been given a pass on several things that any of the other candidates would have taken flack for.
**Oh really? Please explain.**
And she didn't win on personality. My point was that she won by not screwing up. "Hey look, she didn't answer any of the questions, but she didn't make a fool of herself so she did very well!" Like I said, I feel like I am being sold a lemon.
**When does Barry-O get the same sort of scrutiny from the MSM?**
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GM: Be nice, Ifill although perhaps biased, was really quite fair during THIS debate.
**Only because she found herself under an intense microscope due to her blatant conflict of interest she failed to disclose. What would happen to a judge that failed to recuse him/herself from a case where they held a direct financial interest in the outcome?**
You can't blame the moderator.
**I can blame her for her blatantly unethical behavior.**
Blame Palin if you want to pass the blame. Jonobos has some good points.
**I'm still looking for them**
PS It's nice to agree once in a while :-) I hope you are having those "pops"; it has been a long week and I am sure for you too. And I am really not
the devil incarnate although sometimes I think you think so. :-D
No, I don't think you're the devil. He's taller, and he lives in Santa Monica. :evil:
-
And when was that average joe born? And you don't think the demands of international politics, and the oval office have changed a bit since then? You also realize that not everyone always had the right to vote. It was only the land owning elite... Things change. The demands of the office have changed.
For better or worse she has played her part perfectly. I am only calling it like I see it. I think it is very disturbing that this is what America wants in its leaders.
Imagine that Barry-O had a daughter that was pregnant, 17, and not married. The religious right would have been shaking the gates of heaven with cries of "the immorality of liberal family values, and safe sex education." It would have no doubt been the fault of gay marriage, and a sign of the end... but I degress. You know that the issue would not have been glossed over. People would have been on that like flies on cowpies, as the saying goes. But because the fundamentalist crowd are Palins constituents they kept their mouths shut on the whole thing. Obama, Biden, or Mccain would have taken way more flak over that don't you think?
I am not in here advocating obama. I am telling you that I find nothing spectacular about her other than her ability to sell the average joe cheerleader soccer mom act.
On top of it all her religious beliefs send chills up my spine. If you like her you have every right to vote that way... but I can't bring myself to do it.
-
A physics professor once told me that in physics progress was reducing the amount of principles needed to explain how the world/universe works. In a similar vein, I think that clarity of thought can often be manifested by reducing the number of words necessary to express a thought e.g. Sarah Palin. The risk of course is superficiality, but at the moment I'm seeing her as someone with tremendous potential.
It has been pointed out that the world is more complicated than when Lincoln was president. Accepting that to be true, it seems to me that it correspondingly becomes more important for a president to have a clear sense of the principles that define how the political-economic world works. Someone without this will be overwhelmed by the rivers of data that are part and parcel of wonkery. Someone with a clear sense of these things will be , , , a President Reagan. :-D
I am delighted to see a shared understanding here of the utter outrageiousness of Biden's position (presumably BO's as well? does anyone have confirmatin of this?), which was also shared by Hillary BTW, that courts should be able to interfere with the terms of mortgage contracts.
I am finding that I like Palin more and more. I agree that there are areas, some of them important, where she is not ready yet-- on the other hand I like that she doesn't know that the US drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon and that sending NATO in was an option. :lol: Clarity on the right to self defense (a.k.a. the right to bear arms) is a matter of great importance to me, and I have no interest or trust in His Glibness's slippery slope of sh*t on this. That a leader understands that TANSTAAFL (There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) is a vital matter of importance-- and one that eludes much of the Democratic Party as well as BO-JB. The idea of a Dem Senate, Dem House, Dem White House-- all of which appoint Dems to the Supreme Court seems to me a tremendous disaster of long lasting consequences for this country.
What I do like so far (and there is more to learn no doubt) is what I see as her core principles, her apparent integrity (e.g. going after the Republican corruption in Alaska) and her apparent ability to define herself on her own terms instead of dancing to the tune of others. No matter our political persuasion, I hope we can all agree that the process that the MSM seeks to impose on candidates is often one of great stupidity, vapidity, and irrelevance to the matters of import. Its more than fine by me if a candidate talks to me directly about what is important to him/her instead of "answering the question" of some Barbie and Ken teleprompter reader. (Again, I thought Ifill did a good job on this occasion-- probably due in part to her being put in the spotlight-- OTOH Katie Couric, give me a fcuking break :roll:). If instead a candidate uses this as a technique for evading substance, I think the collective wisdom of the democratic process will make note and exact its toll.
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A physics professor once told me that in physics progress was reducing the amount of principles needed to explain how the world/universe works. In a similar vein, I think that clarity of thought can often be manifested by reducing the number of words necessary to express a thought e.g. Sarah Palin. The risk of course is superficiality, but at the moment I'm seeing her as someone with tremendous potential.
It has been pointed out that the world is more complicated than when Lincoln was president. Accepting that to be true, it seems to me that it correspondingly becomes more important for a president to have a clear sense of the principles that define how the political-economic world works. Someone without this will be overwhelmed by the rivers of data that are part and parcel of wonkery. Someone with a clear sense of these things will be , , , a President Reagan. :-D
I am delighted to see a shared understanding here of the utter outrageiousness of Biden's position (presumably BO's as well? does anyone have confirmatin of this?), which was also shared by Hillary BTW, that courts should be able to interfere with the terms of mortgage contracts.
I am finding that I like Palin more and more. I agree that there are areas, some of them important, where she is not ready yet-- on the other hand I like that she doesn't know that the US drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon and that sending NATO in was an option. :lol: Clarity on the right to self defense (a.k.a. the right to bear arms) is a matter of great importance to me, and I have no interest or trust in His Glibness's slippery slope of sh*t on this. That a leader understands that TANSTAAFL (There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) is a vital matter of importance-- and one that eludes much of the Democratic Party as well as BO-JB. The idea of a Dem Senate, Dem House, Dem White House-- all of which appoint Dems to the Supreme Court seems to me a tremendous disaster of long lasting consequences for this country.
What I do like so far (and there is more to learn no doubt) is what I see as her core principles, her apparent integrity (e.g. going after the Republican corruption in Alaska) and her apparent ability to define herself on her own terms instead of dancing to the tune of others. No matter our political persuasion, I hope we can all agree that the process that the MSM seeks to impose on candidates is often one of great stupidity, vapidity, and irrelevance to the matters of import. Its more than fine by me if a candidate talks to me directly about what is important to him/her instead of "answering the question" of some Barbie and Ken teleprompter reader. (Again, I thought Ifill did a good job on this occasion-- probably due in part to her being put in the spotlight-- OTOH Katie Couric, give me a fcuking break :roll:). If instead a candidate uses this as a technique for evading substance, I think the collective wisdom of the democratic process will make note and exact its toll.
Oh there you go dropping the R bomb crafty... you conservatives :P
Anyway, you do touch on some points that I won't even pretend to side with the liberals. I am totally against the nanny state gun bans, and criminalizing of the right to self defense. I can at least agree with her principles on those issues...
I think you are probably right on the mortgage issue as well... but I admit that I am not well educated in that area...
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***OTOH Katie Couric, give me a fcuking break***
Yes. Like these questions she gave Sarah: are you for the morning after pill?
So are you for the morning after pill? After a hesitation from Sarah, Couric asks her when do you beleive life begins?
Answer: "at conception"
Couric now having completed the ambush asks: so again, are you for the morning after pill?
Wow Katie that is great journalism. :roll:
My question to Couric:
Which crat operative gave you those questions or did you come up with that ambush all on your own?
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And when was that average joe born?
**1809**
And you don't think the demands of international politics, and the oval office have changed a bit since then?
**Times changes, but human nature remains the same, and the demands of leadership are onerous no matter the time period.**
You also realize that not everyone always had the right to vote. It was only the land owning elite... Things change. The demands of the office have changed.
**Leadership and the affairs of state are eternal, though the details and technology changes. Machiavelli's "The Prince" and Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" as as valid today, as they were when they were written because of this.**
For better or worse she has played her part perfectly. I am only calling it like I see it. I think it is very disturbing that this is what America wants in its leaders.
**If you want to base your model of leadership on shallow surface appearances and mannerisms of speech, then I guess that's your prerogative.**
Imagine that Barry-O had a daughter that was pregnant, 17, and not married. The religious right would have been shaking the gates of heaven with cries of "the immorality of liberal family values, and safe sex education."
**Hardly. "Liberal family values" is an oxymoron anyway. No one claims that by having a religious faith, it places a bubble around your family that ensures that tragedy doesn't happen, or that 17 year olds don't fall victim to our highly sexualized peer culture that is the result of the "post-modern, post-moral" ethos that has afflicted our society since the left became culturally ascendent since the 60's/70's.**
It would have no doubt been the fault of gay marriage, and a sign of the end... but I degress.
**Not true, but as you said, you digress.**
You know that the issue would not have been glossed over. People would have been on that like flies on cowpies, as the saying goes. But because the fundamentalist crowd are Palins constituents they kept their mouths shut on the whole thing.
**You are misstating this. Christians, as as group recognize the imperfection of humanity and the need for redemption, as well as the value of life. I've never seen the right smear family members of politicians as the left does.**
Obama, Biden, or Mccain would have taken way more flak over that don't you think?
**No.**
I am not in here advocating obama. I am telling you that I find nothing spectacular about her other than her ability to sell the average joe cheerleader soccer mom act.
On top of it all her religious beliefs send chills up my spine. If you like her you have every right to vote that way... but I can't bring myself to do it.
**How do the religious beliefs of Barry-O's church of "God Damn America" sit with you?**
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**If you want to base your model of leadership on shallow surface appearances and mannerisms of speech, then I guess that's your prerogative.**
Again this is not my intention. I am disturbed that she would play these things up, and that the public would swallow it hook line and sinker.
**Hardly. "Liberal family values" is an oxymoron anyway. No one claims that by having a religious faith, it places a bubble around your family that ensures that tragedy doesn't happen, or that 17 year olds don't fall victim to our highly sexualized peer culture that is the result of the "post-modern, post-moral" ethos that has afflicted our society since the left became culturally ascendent since the 60's/70's.**
**You are misstating this. Christians, as as group recognize the imperfection of humanity and the need for redemption, as well as the value of life. I've never seen the right smear family members of politicians as the left does.**
I am not going to get started on these. Suffice it to say that I find your position laughable, and think you are in complete denial of reality. You apparently feel the same of me... so it goes.
**How do the religious beliefs of Barry-O's church of "God Damn America" sit with you?**
Here is an example of a manufacture-versy if I have ever heard one. This goes right up there with the flag pin nonsense. Hey, the media does idiotic things on both sides. I believe I made that claim earlier.
Look. I don't like Palin, but I don't claim that she hates America. Hey, the guys pastor, or reverend, or whatever, turned out to be a wacko... this is no shock to me. I think anyone that believes people get swallowed by whales and spit up alive is a little nuts. I don't think any of the candidates, whether I agree with them or not, hate America.
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I disagree with the good comments about Gwen Ifill. She did as well as most and as well as Tom Brokaw will do, but she annoyed me at times. No one of recent memory matches the neutrality that Jim Lehrer projects IMO.
The comments about Palin going on without directly addressing the question are true and she explained early that she would do that. Normally that bothers me. Given her awareness of the bias of the moderator, the limitations of time etc. I found that to be a nicer way of handling the situation instead wasting time explaining what she didn't like about a question or answering every petty attack from the opponent. The moderator is a form of filter steering the conversation just as ABC and CBS filter by choosing which clips to play from long interviews. 90 minutes in a debate sounds like enough but the candidates had a limited time to say what they wanted to say to the voters. Palin covered her views on tax policy, energy, health care, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel etc. very well. Also she presented a compelling case for her top of the ticket, made important distinctions between McCain and Obama and even made telling distinctions between Biden and Obama.
In the first Pres. debate question, the most complicated economic issue of our time was brought up, then Jim Lehrer said 'you have 2 minutes'. What a joke! If they can't adjust rules for candidates to address the crisis and bailout of the century, then the preparations and strategies for debates have to be adjusted to the format which is a time slot barely longer than a commercial.
At the end Palin hinted to 'Joe' that she would be up for more of this, presumably meaning without Gwen Ifill and the timer. There is no way in hell that Obama will allow Biden to do that, especially since they lead at this point in the race. For all the complaints about not enough time, not enough answers and not enough back and forth, it's too bad that political considerations trump the public's right to know.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/10/04/the-sarahcuda-on-the-attack/
Rightly calling out the empty suit known as Barry-O.
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Palin says Obama 'palling around' with terrorists
Oct 4 03:32 PM US/Eastern
By JIM KUHNHENN
Associated Press Writer
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. (AP) - Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Saturday accused Democrat Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists" because of his association with a former 1960s radical, stepping up the campaign's effort to portray Obama as unacceptable to American voters.
Palin's reference was to Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the group the Weather Underground. Its members took credit for bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol, during the tumultuous Vietnam War era four decades ago. Obama, who was a child when the group was active, served on a charity board with Ayers several years ago and has denounced his radical views and activities.
The Republican campaign, falling behind Obama in polls, plans to make attacks on Obama's character a centerpiece of presidential candidate John McCain's message with a month remaining before Election Day.
Palin told a group of donors at a private airport, "Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." She also said, "This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America."
Palin, Alaska's governor, said that donors on a greeting line had encouraged her and McCain to get tougher on Obama. She said an aide then advised her, "Sarah, the gloves are off, the heels are on, go get to them."
The escalated effort to attack Obama's character dovetails with TV ads by outside groups questioning Obama's ties to Ayers, convicted former Obama fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko and Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and Obama live in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood and served together on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based charity that develops community groups to help the poor. Obama left the board in December 2002.
Obama was the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school-reform group of which Ayers was a founder. Ayers also held a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Obama when Obama first ran for office in the mid-1990s.
Palin cited a New York Times story published Saturday that detailed Obama's relationship with Ayers. In an interview with CBS News earlier in the week, Palin didn't name any newspapers or magazines that had shaped her view of the world.
Summing up its findings, the Times wrote: "A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called 'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.'"
Earlier Saturday, Palin spent 35 minutes at a diner in Greenwood Village where she met with Blue Star Moms, a support group of families whose sons or daughters are serving in the armed forces. Reporters were allowed in the diner for less than five minutes before being ushered out by the campaign.
Palin, whose 19-year-old son, Track, deployed last month as a private with an Army combat team, was overheard at one point commiserating with one of the mothers: "Any time I ask my son how he's doing, he says, 'Mom, I'm in the Army now.'"
Taking one question from reporters about competing in battleground states, Palin repeated her wish that the campaign had not pulled out of Michigan, a prominent state in presidential elections where Obama leads by double-digit percentage points in recent polls.
"As I said the other day, I would sure love to get to run to Michigan and make sure that Michigan knows that we haven't given up there," she said. "We care much about Michigan and every other state. I wish there were more hours in the day so that we could travel all over this great country and start speaking to more Americans. So, not worried about it but just desiring more time and, you know, to put more effort into each one of these states."
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 03, 2008
Beneath Contempt
One thing about liberal "pundits," including those in the blogosphere. Just when you think they've hit rock-bottom with contemptuous comments, they find a way to reach a new low in public discourse.
The latest case-in-point is ABC Sports sideline reporter Suzy Shuster, who also blogs at the Huffington Post. Here's her "take" on "Sarah Palin's 'favorite campaign prop,' her five-month-old son Trig (H/T to Michael Bates at Newsbusters):
It actually came after the debate, when for seemingly the millionth time, Sarah Palin trotted out her piece de resistance, her favorite prop of this campaign season: her five and a half month old son Trig.
Why is this child up so late every time there is a camera op? Why isn't this baby sleeping in a crib or bassinet somewhere with a sleep sheep or some other sound apparatus lulling him into night-night? Is it just me or does it seem like she carts this poor child around like a living breathing example of how wonderful a mom she is? After all, she's more than adopted the "I'm just a mom, just like you moms out there, America" attitude.
But the truth is, if she was just like all you other Moms out there, America, then she'd know the best thing she can do for this infant is to make sure he is tucked safely in his bed and out cold at eleven pm. And please don't say well, maybe she doesn't have anyone to watch him. Believe that, and I've got a Bridge to Nowhere that I want to sell you.
As far as we know, Ms. Shuster doesn't have any children. So, her "offering" parenting advice is a bit like sex counseling from a priest. However, we are reminded that Shuster had her own, domestic difficulties last year, when she discovered her husband, fellow sportscaster Rich Eisen, had received racy bikini photos from Philadelphia anchorwoman Alycia Lane.
Now, we understand why Mr. Eisen was engaged in that "platonic," on-line relationship with Ms. Lane.
***
ADDENDUM: As an alert reader at Free Republic noted, Trig Palin's body clock is on Alaska Time, four hours behind the eastern time zone. So, when the debate ended at 10:30 EDT last night, it was "only" 6:30 for Trig. No wonder he was wide awake when the debate concluded. We're also reminded that infants tend to operate on their own schedule, as any parent who's been awakened at 3:00 a.m. can attest.
One more thing: we always thought liberals championed the idea of women "having it all"--balancing work, a successful marriage and children. Obviously, there's a different standard for conservatives. And conversely, we can predict Ms. Shuster's reaction if Sarah Palin had left Trig behind in Alaska, in the care of relatives or a nanny; something along the lines of "she's ignoring her baby," or "she's ashamed of her handicapped son."
Governor Palin really does get under their skin.
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Palin on Ahmadinejad: 'He Must Be Stopped'
By SARAH PALIN | September 22, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/opinion/palin-on-ahmadinejad-he-must-be-stopped/86311/
Governor Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, was scheduled to speak today at a rally in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza to protest the appearance here of President Ahmadinejad of Iran. Her appearance was canceled by rally organizers who sought a nonpolitical event. Following are the remarks Mrs. Palin would have given:
ROBYN BECK / 2008 AFP
Sarah Palin
***
I am honored to be with you and with leaders from across this great country — leaders from different faiths and political parties united in a single voice of outrage.
Tomorrow, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will come to New York — to the heart of what he calls the Great Satan — and speak freely in this, a country whose demise he has called for. Ahmadinejad may choose his words carefully, but underneath all of the rhetoric is an agenda that threatens all who seek a safer and freer world. We gather here today to highlight the Iranian dictator's intentions and to call for action to thwart him.
He must be stopped.
The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place. He dreams of being an agent in a "Final Solution" — the elimination of the Jewish people. He has called Israel a "stinking corpse" that is "on its way to annihilation." Such talk cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a madman — not when Iran just this summer tested long-range Shahab-3 missiles capable of striking Tel Aviv, not when the Iranian nuclear program is nearing completion, and not when Iran sponsors terrorists that threaten and kill innocent people around the world.
The Iranian government wants nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that Iran is running at least 3,800 centrifuges and that its uranium enrichment capacity is rapidly improving. According to news reports, U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Iranians may have enough nuclear material to produce a bomb within a year.
The world has condemned these activities. The United Nations Security Council has demanded that Iran suspend its illegal nuclear enrichment activities. It has levied three rounds of sanctions. How has Ahmadinejad responded? With the declaration that the "Iranian nation would not retreat one iota" from its nuclear program.
So, what should we do about this growing threat? First, we must succeed in Iraq. If we fail there, it will jeopardize the democracy the Iraqis have worked so hard to build, and empower the extremists in neighboring Iran. Iran has armed and trained terrorists who have killed our soldiers in Iraq, and it is Iran that would benefit from an American defeat in Iraq.
If we retreat without leaving a stable Iraq, Iran's nuclear ambitions will be bolstered. If Iran acquires nuclear weapons — they could share them tomorrow with the terrorists they finance, arm, and train today. Iranian nuclear weapons would set off a dangerous regional nuclear arms race that would make all of us less safe.
But Iran is not only a regional threat; it threatens the entire world. It is the no. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. It sponsors the world's most vicious terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah. Together, Iran and its terrorists are responsible for the deaths of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, and in Iraq today. They have murdered Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinians, and other Muslims who have resisted Iran's desire to dominate the region. They have persecuted countless people simply because they are Jewish.
Iran is responsible for attacks not only on Israelis, but on Jews living as far away as Argentina. Anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are part of Iran's official ideology and murder is part of its official policy. Not even Iranian citizens are safe from their government's threat to those who want to live, work, and worship in peace. Politically-motivated abductions, torture, death by stoning, flogging, and amputations are just some of its state-sanctioned punishments.
It is said that the measure of a country is the treatment of its most vulnerable citizens. By that standard, the Iranian government is both oppressive and barbaric. Under Ahmadinejad's rule, Iranian women are some of the most vulnerable citizens.
If an Iranian woman shows too much hair in public, she risks being beaten or killed.
If she walks down a public street in clothing that violates the state dress code, she could be arrested.
But in the face of this harsh regime, the Iranian women have shown courage. Despite threats to their lives and their families, Iranian women have sought better treatment through the "One Million Signatures Campaign Demanding Changes to Discriminatory Laws." The authorities have reacted with predictable barbarism. Last year, women's rights activist Delaram Ali was sentenced to 20 lashes and 10 months in prison for committing the crime of "propaganda against the system." After international protests, the judiciary reduced her sentence to "only" 10 lashes and 36 months in prison and then temporarily suspended her sentence. She still faces the threat of imprisonment.
Earlier this year, Senator Clinton said that "Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is in the forefront of that" effort. Senator Clinton argued that part of our response must include stronger sanctions, including the designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization. John McCain and I could not agree more.
Senator Clinton understands the nature of this threat and what we must do to confront it. This is an issue that should unite all Americans. Iran should not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. Period. And in a single voice, we must be loud enough for the whole world to hear: Stop Iran!
Only by working together, across national, religious, and political differences, can we alter this regime's dangerous behavior. Iran has many vulnerabilities, including a regime weakened by sanctions and a population eager to embrace opportunities with the West. We must increase economic pressure to change Iran's behavior.
Tomorrow, Ahmadinejad will come to New York. On our soil, he will exercise the right of freedom of speech — a right he denies his own people. He will share his hateful agenda with the world. Our task is to focus the world on what can be done to stop him.
We must rally the world to press for truly tough sanctions at the U.N. or with our allies if Iran's allies continue to block action in the U.N. We must start with restrictions on Iran's refined petroleum imports.
We must reduce our dependency on foreign oil to weaken Iran's economic influence.
We must target the regime's assets abroad; bank accounts, investments, and trading partners.
President Ahmadinejad should be held accountable for inciting genocide, a crime under international law.
We must sanction Iran's Central Bank and the Revolutionary Guard Corps — which no one should doubt is a terrorist organization.
Together, we can stop Iran's nuclear program.
Senator McCain has made a solemn commitment that I strongly endorse: Never again will we risk another Holocaust. And this is not a wish, a request, or a plea to Israel's enemies. This is a promise that the United States and Israel will honor, against any enemy who cares to test us. It is John McCain's promise and it is my promise.
Thank you.
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By GARANCE BURKE, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 49 minutes ago
WASILLA, Alaska - The camera closes in on Sarah Palin speaking to young missionaries, vowing from the pulpit to do her part to implement God's will from the governor's office.
What she didn't tell worshippers gathered at the Wasilla Assembly of God church in her hometown was that her appearance that day came courtesy of Alaskan taxpayers, who picked up the $639.50 tab for her airplane tickets and per diem fees.
An Associated Press review of the Republican vice presidential candidate's record as mayor and governor reveals her use of elected office to promote religious causes, sometimes at taxpayer expense and in ways that blur the line between church and state.
Since she took state office in late 2006, the governor and her family have spent more than $13,000 in taxpayer funds to attend at least 10 religious events and meetings with Christian pastors, including Franklin Graham, the son of evangelical preacher Billy Graham, records show.
Palin was baptized Roman Catholic as a newborn and baptized again in a Pentecostal Assemblies of God church when she was a teenager. She has worshipped at a nondenominational Bible church since 2002, opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest and supports classroom discussions about creationism.
Since she was named as John McCain's running mate, Palin's deep faith and support for traditional moral values have rallied conservative voters who initially appeared reluctant to back his campaign.
On a weekend trip from the capital in June, a minister from the Wasilla Assembly of God blessed Palin and Lt. Gov Sean Parnell before a crowd gathered for the "One Lord Sunday" event at the town's hockey rink. Later in the day, she addressed the budding missionaries at her former church.
"As I'm doing my job, let's strike this deal. Your job is going be to be out there, reaching the people — (the) hurting people — throughout Alaska," she told students graduating from the church's Masters Commission program. "We can work together to make sure God's will be done here."
A spokeswoman for the McCain-Palin campaign, Maria Comella, said the state paid for Palin's travel and meals on that trip, and for other meetings with Christian groups, because she and her family were invited in their official capacity as Alaska's first family. Parnell did not charge the state a per diem or ask to be reimbursed for travel expenses that day.
"I understand the per diem policy is, I can claim it if I am away from my residence for 12 hours or more. And Anchorage is where my residence is and I'm based from. And this trip took about four hours of driving time and time at the event, so I did not claim per diem for this one," Parnell told the AP.
Palin and her family billed the state $3,022 for the cost of attending Christian gatherings exclusively, including visits to the Assembly of God here and to the congregation they attend in Juneau, according to expense reports reviewed by the AP.
Experts say those trips fall into an ethically gray area, since Democrats and Republicans alike often visit religious venues for personal and official reasons.
J. Brent Walker, who runs a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for church-state separation, said based on a reporter's account, Palin's June excursion raised questions.
"Politicians are entitled to freely exercise their religion while in office, but ethically if not legally that part of her trip ought to not be charged to taxpayers," said Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. "It's still fundamentally a religious and spiritual experience she is having."
The Palins billed the state an additional $10,094 in expenses for other multi-day trips that included worship services or religiously themed events, but also involved substantial state business, including the governor's inaugural ball and an oil and gas conference in New Orleans.
Palin also submitted $998 in expenses for a June trip to Anchorage that included a bill signing at Congregation Beth Shalom synagogue, the only non-Christian house of worship she has visited since taking office, according to the McCain campaign.
In response to an AP request, Comella provided a list showing that since January 2007 the governor had attended 25 "faith-based events," including funerals and community meetings held at churches. Many did not appear on the governor's schedule or her travel records.
Palin has said publicly her personal opinions don't "bleed on over into policies."
Still, after the AP reported the governor had accepted tainted donations during her 2006 campaign, she announced she would donate the $2,100 to three charities, including an Anchorage nonprofit aimed at "sharing God's love" to dissuade young women from having abortions.
An AP review of her time as mayor, from late 1996 to 2002, also reveals a commingling of church and state.
Records of her mayoral correspondence show that Palin worked arduously to organize a day of prayer at city hall. She said that with local ministers' help, Wasilla — a city of 7,000 an hour's drive north of Anchorage — could become "a light, or a refuge for others in Alaska and America."
"What a blessing that the Lord has already put into place the Christian leaders, even though I know it's all through the grace of God," she wrote in March 2000 to her former pastor. She thanked him for the loan of a video featuring a Kenyan preacher who later would pray for her protection from witchcraft as she sought higher office.
In that same period, she also joined a grass-roots, faith-based movement to stop the local hospital from performing abortions, a fight that ultimately lost before the Alaska Supreme Court.
Palin's former church and other evangelical denominations were instrumental in ousting members of Valley Hospital's board who supported abortion rights — including the governor's mother-in-law, Faye Palin.
Alaska Right to Life Director Karen Lewis, who led the campaign, said Palin wasn't a leader in the movement initially. But by 1997, after she had been elected mayor, Palin joined a hospital board to make sure the abortion ban held while the courts considered whether the ban was legal, Lewis said.
"We kept pro-life people like Sarah on the association board to ensure children of the womb would be protected," Lewis said. "She's made up of this great fiber of high morals and godly character, and yet she's fearless. She's someone you can depend on to carry the water."
In November 2007, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that because the hospital received more than $10 million in public funds it was "quasi-public" and couldn't forbid legal abortions.
Comella said Palin joined the hospital's broader association in the mid-1990s. Records show she was elected to the nonprofit's board in 2000.
Ties among those active at the time still run deep: In November, Palin was a keynote speaker at Lewis' "Proudly Pro-Life Dinner" in Anchorage, and the governor billed taxpayers a $60 per diem fee for her work that day.
Palin also is one of just two governors who channeled federal money to support religious groups through a state agency, Alaska's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Palin has made it a priority to unite faith communities, local nonprofits and government to serve the needy, bringing her high marks — and $500,000 — from the Bush administration.
In fiscal year 2008, Alaska was one of only four states to receive $500,000 in federal grant money from the national initiative.
"The governor has a healthy appreciation for faith-based groups that serve Alaskans in need," said Jay Hein, who until recently directed national faith-based initiatives at the White House. "The grant speaks to their organizational strength, and the dynamism of Alaska's operation."
Several Catholic and Christian charities received funding, including $20,000 for a Fairbanks homeless shelter that views itself as a "stable door of evangelism and Christian service" and $36,000 for a drop-in center at an Anchorage mall that seeks to demonstrate "the unconditional love of Jesus to teenagers."
The state ensures all faith-based groups keep a strict separation between their work in the community and their prayer services to ensure recipients don't feel coerced, said Tara Horton, a special assistant to the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services. Though staffers reached out to nonprofits and religious groups of many faiths, mostly Christian organizations applied for funding, she said.
In June, when Alaska legislators decided to cut $712,000 in state support for the office, Parnell sent lawmakers an urgent letter asking them to put it back in the budget. A small portion of state funding was later restored.
"Gov. Palin is motivated by the needs out there, and faith-based and community initiatives are a great way to do that," Parnell said. "It matters not to state government what religion people belong to, so long as they are serving the public and the money they receive is used appropriately."
Still, a state worker who directs an Anchorage-based group that advocates for church-state separation, Lloyd Eggan, said Palin's administration hasn't done enough to assure voters that government money doesn't support ministry.
"That sort of thing is exactly what courts have said is barred by the First Amendment," Eggan said.
___
Associated Press writers Justin Pritchard in Anchorage and Anne Sutton in Juneau contributed to this report.
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How much US taxpayer money was used when the Clintons attended church services? Was any tax money spent when Bill was being ministered to by Jesse Jackson post-Lewinski ?
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How much US taxpayer money was used when the Clintons attended church services? Was any tax money spent when Bill was being ministered to by Jesse Jackson post-Lewinski ?
Don't know, but him doing it doesn't excuse her her. That type of behavior needs to be stopped period.
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So elected officials can't attend religious services? Will Obama have to cancel his official blessing by Louis Farrakhan then?
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So elected officials can't attend religious services? Will Obama have to cancel his official blessing by Louis Farrakhan then?
That gave me a good belly laugh! You are too much GM :-D
Anyway, they can attend whatever they like... but not on the publics buck. This goes for anyone in office... in any party.
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The president, whomever he or she may be, has a USSS protective detail that is quite expensive surrounding them at all times, as well as other personnel, such as the military officer with the "football". They can't take the day off when the president goes to religious services.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/09/new-palin-scandal-she-billed-the-state-for-stuff-she-was-allowed-to-bill/
Scandal! :-o
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The president, whomever he or she may be, has a USSS protective detail that is quite expensive surrounding them at all times, as well as other personnel, such as the military officer with the "football". They can't take the day off when the president goes to religious services.
Oh so those two scenarios are the same right?
Hardly.
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What's the difference between Palin and any other elected official in this?
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Secret service are paid to protect the president. If he happens to be at a religious service it really has very little to do with their job. They are doing their job. The job they are paid to do.
Palin is not paid to attend religious services, and if she charges the taxpayers for it then there is a problem.
The two are very clearly different.
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The Old-Boy Network Strikes Back
Gov. Sarah Palin has been asking reporters to actually read the Alaska state government report issued over the weekend that supposedly found she had abused her power in seeking the dismissal of Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten. And indeed, the report is more favorable to Mrs. Palin than much of the reporting has suggested. Mrs. Palin and her husband Todd did likely push for Mr. Wooten to be fired. But Special Prosecutor Stephen Branchflower was originally asked to look into whether Mrs. Palin violated state laws by firing her Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, who claimed that he was let go for refusing to oust Mr. Wooten. Mr. Branchflower determined that, in fact, the governor was within her rights to fire Mr. Monegan.
What's more, the recommendations Mr. Branchflower makes are largely favorable to Mrs. Palin. She had warned that Mr. Wooten, her ex-brother-in-law, was too unstable to be a police officer and had posed a threat the Palin family. Mr. Branchflower discounts the family's personal safety concerns, but recommends that the legislature create procedures so those who file complaints about police officers are informed about what steps are subsequently taken. Throughout the Wooten affair, the Palins had expressed frustration that no one could tell them what disciplinary action had been taken against Mr. Wooten (which likely led to the impression they were pressuring state officials). The report also notes that the original complaint filed against Mr. Wooten came from Chuck Heath, Mrs. Palin's father, who reported being concerned about an alleged threat by Mr. Wooten to kill him.
The report is a compilation of sordid details surrounding a messy episode in Alaska. Democrat Sen. Hollis French, who oversaw the special out-of-session legislative committee that ordered the investigation, insisted it be completed and released before Election Day. The report seems to rely on an assumption that Mrs. Palin wasn't really concerned about her personal safety, because she had reduced the size of her security detail -- never mind that she had campaigned partly on trimming back gubernatorial perks and pomp and had acted on those promises in other ways too. The report is available online (http://media.adn.com/smedia/2008/10/10/16/Branchflowerreport.source.prod_affiliate.7.pdf). It's hardly the smoking gun her opponents would like it to be.
-- Brendan Miniter
PD WSJ
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Secret service are paid to protect the president. If he happens to be at a religious service it really has very little to do with their job. They are doing their job. The job they are paid to do.
Palin is not paid to attend religious services, and if she charges the taxpayers for it then there is a problem.
The two are very clearly different.
She got her per diem as allowed for by law, she didn't bill for attending a religious service. It's not like she got a house through Tony Rezko or anything.....
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http://volokh.com/posts/1220936107.shtml
New Washington Post "Expose" on Palin:
You have to read the article carefully to figure this out, but what the story ultimately reveals is that Palin (a) billed the state for most expenses allowed by law, including per diem when she stayed in her own home (her "duty station" was the state capitol of Juneau) in Wasilla; (b) didn't bill the state for other expenses, when she could have done so lawfully, such as per diems for her children; and (c) spent a lot less money on expenses than did her predecessor, especially on travel and by ridding herself of the state's personal chef. [FWIW, she apparently maintained two residences, the governor's mansion in Juneau, which by state law is her official work "base" and where assumedly she didn't get a per diem [update: confirmed here] (but where her predecessor had a personal chef whom she let go), and Wasilla, from where she commuted to Anchorage for work when the legislature wasn't in session. Saintly to take the per diem she was legally entitled to when in the second residence? No. Worthy of the lead headline on Washingtonpost.com? Please! Not illegal, not unethical, and not a scandal.]
Meanwhile, I have to wonder whether the Post has several reporters looking over Joe Biden's expense reports. Does he bill the government for his daily roundtrip to Delaware? How many "fact-finding missions" has he participated in annually during his Senate career? Inquiring minds want to know?
UPDATE: The Post doesn't do the math for us, but the total per diem claimed was $16,951 divided divided by 312 days, or $54.33 per day (the per diem is $60, so there were some partial days).
Also, the article headline, "Palin Billed State for Nights Spent at Home," and some related content, is very misleading. A glance at the expense report reproduced on the Post's website makes it clear that she requested per diem for her daily expenses, but not for lodging, and that she apparently wrote "lodging--own home" only to explain why she wasn't requesting hotel expenses. One almost wonders whether the author of the story understands what a "per diem" is; the story notes that Palin rarely charged the state for meals when in Wasilla and Anchorage, but of course she didn't, because she instead just asked for the per diem!
The Post also reports:
In the past, per diem claims by Alaska state officials have carried political risks. In 1988, the head of the state Commerce Department was pilloried for collecting a per diem charge of $50 while staying in his Anchorage home, according to local news accounts. The commissioner, the late Tony Smith, resigned amid a series of controversies.
"It was quite the little scandal," said Tony Knowles, the Democratic governor from 1994 to 2000.
It must have been quite a little scandal, because a search of the Anchorage Daily News for "Tony Smith" reveals no per diem controversy, only a controversy over alleged contract-steering that led to Smith's resignation, and an earlier, much smaller controversy about state officials, including Smith, taking foreign trips. There was a contemporaneous (early 1989) controversy over the expenses claimed by state Sen. Paul Fischer, including allegations that he requested a per diem on days when he was not where he claimed to be.
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Hatin' Palin She's not the reason Americans can't stand their politicians.By DANIEL HENNINGER
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The abuse being heaped on Sarah Palin is such a cheap shot.
The complaint against the Alaska governor, at its most basic, is that she doesn't qualify for admission to the national political fraternity. Boy, that's rich. Behold the shabby frat house that says it's above her pay grade.
NBC
Sarah Palin appears with Lorne Michaels on Saturday Night Live.
Congress has the lowest approval rating ever registered in the history of polling (12%!). She isn't the reason polls are showing people want the entire Congress fired, with many telling pollsters they themselves could do a better job.
Sarah Palin didn't design a system of presidential primaries whose length and cost ensures that only the most obsessional personalities will run the gauntlet, while a long list of effective governors don't run.
These rules have wasted the electorate's time the past three presidential elections, by filling the debates with such zero-support candidates as Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Al Sharpton, Duncan Hunter, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden (8,000 total votes), Wesley Clark and Alan Keyes.
Daniel Henninger discusses the "cheap shots" taken at Sarah Palin and highlights some problems with the political system. (Oct. 23)
Out of this process has fallen a Democratic nominee who entered the U.S. Senate in 2005 fresh off a stint in the Illinois state legislature, with next to no record of political accomplishment. He may be elected mainly because, in Colin Powell's word, he is thought to be "transformational." One may hope so.
By not bothering to look very deeply at the details beneath either candidate's governing proposals, the media have created a lot of downtime to take free kicks at Gov. Palin. My former colleague, Tunku Varadarajan, has compiled a glossary of Palin invective, and I've added a few: "Republican blow-up doll," "idiot," "Christian Stepford wife," "Jesus freak," "Caribou Barbie," "a dope," "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party," "liar," "a national disgrace" and "her pretense that she is a woman."
If American politics is at low ebb, it is because so many of its observers enjoy working in its fetid backwash.
The primary discomfort with Gov. Palin is the notion that she doesn't have sufficient experience to be president, that Sen. McCain should have picked a Washington hand seasoned in the ways of the world. Such as? Here's an opinion poll question:
If as Joe Biden suggests the U.S. is likely to be tested by a foreign enemy next year, who of the following would you rather have dealing with it in the Oval Office: Nancy (of Damascus) Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Joe (the U.S. drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon) Biden, Mike Huckabee, Geraldine Ferraro, Tom DeLay, Jimmy Carter or Sarah Palin?
My pick? Gov. Palin, surely the most grounded, common-sense person on that list of prime-time politicians.
The established political pros let the selection process come to this. Presidential candidates such as John McCain and Barack Obama have become untethered from the discipline of party institutions, largely because the parties have lost coherence. So we get celebrity candidates made famous, fundable and electable by dint of their access to the Beltway media. For voters, this election is a national Hail Mary.
For nearly two years, all the major candidates have rotated through our lives as solitary personalities attended by careerist campaign professionals. Barack, Hillary, Rudy, Mitt, Mike, McCain. When the moment arrived to pick a running mate, input from the parties was minimal. That famous party boss, Caroline Kennedy, advised Barack Obama. They picked a three-decade denizen of the Senate. John McCain's obligation was himself and his endless slog to this big chance.
The quick surge of party-wide excitement and campaign contributions after his selection of Sarah Palin made clear that the McCain candidacy was moribund and headed for a low-turnout debacle. If he had picked any of the plain-vanilla men on his veep short list -- Pawlenty, Sanford, Romney or Lieberman -- they'd have won approval from the media's college of cardinals, and killed his campaign.
The stoning of Sarah Palin has exposed enough cultural fissures in American politics to occupy strategists full-time until 2012. We now see there is a left-to-right elite centered in New York, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley who hand down judgments of the nation's mortals from their perch atop the Bell Curve.
It seems only yesterday that the most critical skill in presidential politics was being able to connect to people in places like Bronko's bar or Saddleback Church. When Gov. Palin showed she excelled at that, the goal posts suddenly moved and the new game was being able to talk the talk in London, Paris, Tehran or Moscow. She looks about a half-step behind Sen. Obama on that learning curve.
Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of "Saturday Night Live," lives on the forward wave of American life. This week he gave his view of Sarah Palin to EW.com: "I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she's powerful. Her politics aren't my politics. But you can see that she's a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she's had a huge impact. People connect to her."
Uh-oh. Sounds like the cancer could be in remission.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR9V_aOCga0
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Palin wig a top seller in Brooklyn
Oct. 24, 2008
Associated Press , THE JERUSALEM POST
Don't be surprised if you see a few Sarah Palin lookalikes in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods like Brooklyn's Borough Park.
A wig wholesaler there says its Palin wig has become one of the company's most popular items.
Georgie Wigs Vice President Shlomo Klein said Thursday that the company has sold about 50 Palin wigs since the Alaska governor joined John McCain on the GOP ticket.
"It's a very conservative yet fashion-forward look," Klein said. "It can be worn down, it can be worn up. There are a lot of styling options. The bun higher, the bun lower."
Klein's company caters to Orthodox Jewish women who must cover their hair after marriage as well as women who need wigs for medical reasons.
He said he doesn't think it's odd that Jewish women would model themselves on Palin, a devout Christian from a frontier state with very few Jews.
"She's pro-Israel," he noted.
Klein said Georgie Wigs has carried Hillary Clinton and Jennifer Anniston wigs in the past. Its catalog currently includes a Posh Spice wig.
The all-human hair Palin wig sells for $695.
"We always try to stay up on the trends," Klein said, "and right now she is the trend."
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http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2008/10/24/palin_stylist/index.html
Today, the New York Times' Caucus blog broke the news that the highest-paid person in McCain's campaign for the past two weeks is Sarah Palin's stylist
[Amy] Strozzi, who was nominated for an Emmy award for her makeup work on the television show "So You Think You Can Dance?", was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October alone, according to the records. The campaign categorized Ms. Strozzi’s payment as "Personnel Svc/Equipment."
Before you sharpen your Ginsus, however, consider this: Last night, on CNN, Campbell Brown asked the media to stop covering the story about Palin's wardrobe (which Broadsheet had, of course, already covered).
There is an incredible double standard here, and we're ignoring a very simple reality. Women are judged based on their appearance far, far more than men. This is a statement of fact. There has been plenty of talk and plenty written about Sarah Palin's jackets, her hair, her looks. Sound familiar? There was plenty of talk and plenty written about Hillary Clinton's looks, hair, pantsuits. Compare that to the attention given to Barack Obama's $1,500 suits or John McCain’s $520 Ferragamo shoes. There is no comparison.
I asked Salon staffers: Should we stop covering this story? Is it newsworthy that Palin's stylist was paid so enormously well? Why -- if at all -- does this story matter?
The responses are posted below:
Andrew O'Hehir: Once again, I'm going to have my cake and eat it too. No question, Brown has a point -- women in public life are subjected to intense scrutiny of their physique, hair and wardrobe in a way men never are. But when people wrote or blogged snarky things about Clinton's ankles or her pantsuits or whatever, that's all it was -- random sexist bitchiness. No one argued that the specifics of Clinton's wardrobe or toilette were especially revelatory or pointed out some hypocrisy in the way she was packaged and presented.
For one thing, we were all pretty sure that Hillary Clinton was packaging herself, for better or for worse. And that's where the Palin clothing budget becomes relevant. As I said earlier, the GOP made a strategic and/or tactical decision to package Palin as a pop star and to play up her physical attractiveness by dressing her in flattering and extremely expensive designer outfits. I'm not horrified by this in the abstract, and I'm sure Obama and/or his people select his very nice and very not-cheap suits with immense care. They flatter his physique, too, and he looks terrific. (McCain, well, you have to feel for the poor bastard on this front. He can spend a million bucks on shoes made from Peruvian anteater hides if he wants, and God knows Cindy's got the money, but it won't help.)
But of course the media has seized on the Palin fashion budget because A) it appears to undermine her winky, Wasilla Main Street, Wal-Mart-mom stage persona, which as it happens is not resonating outside the Republican base the way they hoped it might; and B) it was a dumbass blunder that speaks to the arrogance and cluelessness of this year's GOP campaign, which just keeps dredging up golden oldies and finding that the audience has moved on.
So while I think there is always an element of sexism in any public dissection of a prominent woman's appearance -- and some of the media will fall into that trap more than others -- this remains a legit story.
Rebecca Traister: My take on Palin and wardrobe: I am just flat-out tired of talking about it. I didn't think it was sexist when it broke as a mini-story (see also: Edwards' haircut, Kerry's botox, McCain's 15 houses) but the four-day fetishization is pushing me to: Move along, folks, the lady bought too many expensive clothes. Nothing to see here. And can't help but feel that the gawking would be less intense and prolonged if it were about a man's wardrobe. But also: There is way more problematic distance between how Palin addresses her real American fans vs. how she legislates on their behalf than there is between how she dresses and how she talks.
Jeanne Carstensen: I agree with Rebecca that "There is way more problematic distance between how Palin addresses her real American fans vs. how she legislates on their behalf than there is between how she dresses and how she talks." Totally.
But I still the media scrutiny is warranted. Sure, sexism puts more pressure on women than men to play the beauty card, to spend extravagantly on fashion, hair, makeup. So it's not surprising to learn those Valentino suits and Manolo Blahnik shoes weren't in Palin's closet in Wasilla but were purchased after she was plucked by McCain for his veep. Same for that hair and perfectly applied foundation. Any politician, and especially a woman, would need a major makeover after being thrust suddenly onto the national stage from a regional one. But still, the disconnect between Palin's populist hockey-mom routine and her current status as a right-wing celebrity complete with GOP-funded fashion entourage is notable. She derides anyone not on the barstool next to her with "Joe Sixpack" as un-American. Since she's so aggressive about attacking others not in her supposed cultural camp, the details about what Sarah "Hockey Mom" Palin actually wears, and how much it costs, are facts voters have a right to know.
Judy Berman: I wasn't especially bothered by the original revelation about Palin's clothing expenditures, but the makeup artist's paycheck gets to me. Though I don't necessarily think the McCain camp should be prohibited from spending that much money on an employee whose entire job is to keep Palin's face looking VPILF-tastic, the decision does say something depressing about their priorities and judgment. You're lagging by a large margin in the polls, voters are hungry to hear something -- anything -- about how your administration would deal with the economic crisis ... and you're paying the makeup artist from "So You Think You Can Dance?" nearly twice what the heads of your communications and foreign policy teams make? Really?
Katharine Mieszkowski: It's a great day when the political tempest in a teapot is that a woman is being paid too much.
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14929.html
Quote:
Palin allies report rising campaign tension
By: Ben Smith
October 25, 2008 02:32 PM EST
Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics.
Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.
"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.
"I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said.
The emergence of a Palin faction comes as Republicans gird for a battle over the future of their party: Some see her as a charismatic, hawkish conservative leader with the potential, still unrealized, to cross over to attract moderate voters. Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated.
"These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric, the sometimes painful content of which the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.
"A number of Gov. Palin's staff have not had her best interests at heart, and they have not had the campaign's best interests at heart," the McCain insider fumed, noting that Wallace left an executive job at CBS to join the campaign.
Wallace declined to engage publicly in the finger-pointing that has consumed the campaign in the final weeks.
"I am in awe of [Palin's] strength under constant fire by the media," she said in an e-mail. "If someone wants to throw me under the bus, my personal belief is that the most graceful thing to do is to lie there."
But other McCain aides, defending Wallace, dismissed the notion that Palin was mishandled. The Alaska governor was, they argue, simply unready — "green," sloppy and incomprehensibly willing to criticize McCain for, for instance, not attacking Sen. Barack Obama for his relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Palin has in fact performed fairly well in the moments thought to be key for a vice presidential nominee: She made a good impression in her surprise rollout in Ohio and her speech to the Republican National Convention went better than the campaign could have imagined. She turned in an adequate performance at a debate against the Democratic Party's foremost debater.
But other elements of her image-making went catastrophically awry. Her dodging of the press and her nervous reliance on tight scripts in her first interview, with ABC News, became a national joke — driven home to devastating effect by "Saturday Night Live" comic Tina Fey. The Couric interview — her only unstaged appearance for a week — was "water torture," as one internal ally put it.
Some McCain aides say they had little choice with a candidate who simply wasn't ready for the national stage, and that Palin didn't forcefully object. Moments that Palin's allies see as triumphs of instinct and authenticity — the Wright suggestion, her objection to the campaign's pulling out of Michigan — they dismiss as Palin's "slips and miscommunications," that is, her own incompetence and evidence of the need for tight scripting.
But Palin partisans say she chafed at the handling.
"The campaign as a whole bought completely into what the Washington media said — that she's completely inexperienced," said a close Palin ally outside the campaign who speaks regularly to the candidate.
"Her strategy was to be trustworthy and a team player during the convention and thereafter, but she felt completely mismanaged and mishandled and ill advised," the person said. "Recently, she's gone from relying on McCain advisers who were assigned to her to relying on her own instincts."
Palin's loyalists say she's grown particularly disenchanted with the veterans of the Bush reelection campaign, including Schmidt and Wallace, and that despite her anti-intellectual rhetoric, her closest ally among her new traveling aides is a policy adviser, former National Security Council official Steve Biegun. She's also said to be close with McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, who prepared her for the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate.
When a McCain aide, speaking anonymously Friday to The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, suggested that Palin's charge that Obama was "palling around with terrorists" had "escaped HQ's vetting," it was Scheunemann who fired off an angry response that the speech was "fully vetted" and that to attack Palin for it was "bullshit."
Palin's "instincts," on display in recent days, have had her opening up to the media, including a round of interviews on talk radio, cable and broadcast outlets, as well as chats with her traveling press and local reporters.
Reporters really began to notice the change last Sunday, when Palin strolled over to a local television crew in Colorado Springs.
"Get Tracey," a staffer called out, according to The New York Times, summoning spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt, who reportedly "tried several times to cut it off with a terse 'Thank you!' in between questions, to no avail." The moment may have caused ulcers in some precincts of the McCain campaign, but it was an account Palin's admirers in Washington cheered.
Palin had also sought to give meatier policy speeches, in particular on energy policy and on policy for children with disabilities; she finally gave the latter speech Friday, but had wanted to deliver it much earlier.
She's also begun to make her own ad hoc calls about the campaign's direction and the ticket's policy. McCain, for instance, has remained silent on Democrats' calls for a stimulus package of new spending, a move many conservatives oppose but that could be broadly popular. But in an interview with the conservative radio host Glenn Beck earlier this week, Palin went "off the reservation" to make the campaign policy, one aide said.
"I say, you know, when is enough enough of taxpayer dollars being thrown into this bill out there?" she asked. "This next one of the Democrats being proposed should be very, very concerning to all Americans because to me it sends a message that $700 billion bailout, maybe that was just the tip of the iceberg. No, you know, we were told when we've got to be believing if we have enough elected officials who are going to be standing strong on fiscal conservative principles and free enterprise and we have to believe that there are enough of those elected officials to say, 'No, OK, that's enough.'"
(A McCain spokeswoman said Palin's statement was "a good sentiment.")
But few imagine that Palin will be able to repair her image — and bad poll numbers — in the eleven days before the campaign ends. And the final straw for Palin and her allies was the news that the campaign had reported spending $150,000 on her clothes, turning her, again, into the butt of late-night humor.
"She never even set foot in these stores," the senior Republican said, noting Palin hadn't realized the cost when the clothes were brought to her in her Minnesota hotel room.
"It's completely out-of-control operatives," said the close ally outside the campaign. "She has no responsibility for that. It's incredibly frustrating for us and for her."
Between Palin's internal detractors and her allies, there's a middle ground: Some aides say that she's a flawed candidate whose handling exaggerated her weak spots.
"She was completely mishandled in the beginning. No one took the time to look at what her personal strengths and weaknesses are and developed a plan that made sense based on who she is as a candidate," the aide said. "Any concerns she or those close to her have about that are totally valid."
But the aide said that Palin's inexperience led her to her own mistakes:
"How she was handled allowed her weaknesses to hang out in full display."
If McCain loses, Palin's allies say that the national Republican Party hasn't seen the last of her. Politicians are sometimes formed by a signal defeat — as Bill Clinton was when he was tossed out of the Arkansas governor's mansion after his first term — and Palin would return to a state that had made her America's most popular governor and where her image as a reformer who swept aside her own party's insiders rings true, if not in the cartoon version the McCain campaign presented.
"There are people in this campaign who feel a real sense of loyalty to her and are really pleased with her performance and think she did a great job," said the McCain insider. "She has a real future in this party."
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Sarah Palin's War on Science
The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 27, 2008, at 11:43 AM ET
In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."
It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.
In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable." As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)
With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.
Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be done on Nov. 4."
This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2203120/
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Sarah Palin's War on Science
The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 27, 2008, at 11:43 AM ET
In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."
**I don't think her point or position was anti-fruit fly research, but questioning the role of the federal government using taxpayer's dollars to fund it.**
It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.
In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable." As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)
**The US Fish and Wildlife Service has a great animal forensic lab based in OR. that does outstanding work in DNA for wildlife law enforcement, but I digress.**
With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.
**Yes, mindlessly believing is religion is bad, unless the religion is "global warming", then no science is needed.**
Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive).
**Ah, if only Obama's belief system and peers were vetted so closely. Oh well, one can dream.**
High points, also available on YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be done on Nov. 4."
**If the clergy were only screaming "God damn America", then this would be a non-issue, right?**
This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2203120/
A quick dose of Palin's actual take on evolution: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31417_Video-_Sarah_Palin_on_Social_Issues
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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31488_Palins_Creationism_Statements-_Distorted_by_Right_and_Left
More on her actual stance.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-27/sarah-palins-a-brainiac/1/
A different take than the usual "Protocols of the elders of Palin" hit pieces posted here.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWZHTJsR4Bc
Saracuda does not come out looking very good on this one.
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Backbiting from McCain campaign officials scrambling to cover their own asses. Sadly not unusual for failed campaigns. Noticed that it's from unnamed sources.
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Fair enough, it IS hard to believe that she didn't know that Africa was a continent-- still, there have been moments where she has left me with an uneasy feeling-- and I like her a lot.
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1) Didn't know basic civics and government structures.
2) Didn't know countries involved in NAFTA
3) Couldn't name countries in North America
4) Didn't know Africa was a continent
5) Didn't understand the theory of Amercian Exceptionalism
If even one of these is true, it is deeply disturbing, no matter how you want to spin it.
Detailed report on O'Reilly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtxDs3Rk_vE&feature=related
I see this to be a pure toss under the bus. Complete and unnecessary defamation of character. I think they see Palin as a threat in '08 - '12 and are launching pre-emptive strikes.
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Temporary Ted
People are scratching their heads that Alaska Senator Ted Stevens appears to have won re-election despite being convicted on seven felony counts of concealing improper gifts received from an oil services company executive. He clings to a 4,000-vote lead over Democrat Mark Begich, Anchorage's mayor, with several thousand absentee ballots not yet counted.
That Alaska is a Republican state and turnout was high due to the presence of Governor Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket isn't enough to explain how the 84-year-old Stevens appears to have become a political Lazarus. For one thing, turnout wasn't up very much, if at all. Certainly loyalty to Mr. Stevens, whose control over the levers of the federal budget has allowed him to play the state's Santa Claus for four decades, was a factor.
But the real reason for his survival appears to be tactical voting on the part of the state's voters. GOP sources tell me word was spread that the only way to keep the seat in the Republican column and prevent a possible 60-seat filibuster-proof Democratic majority was for voters to hold their noses and re-elect Mr. Stevens. Mr. Stevens himself implied as much in the race's only debate, held after his conviction.
The drama is now likely to play out as follows: Should Mr. Stevens be certified the winner, he will likely be told he won't be seated when the new Senate convenes in January. Governor Palin then would fill the vacancy for a period not to exceed 90 days, when a special election would have to be held. Mrs. Palin is likely to appoint her lieutenant governor, Sean Parnell, to the seat. Mr. Parnell, in turn, would likely face Mr. Begich early next year. Watch for a great deal of money to be poured into the race by Democrats, who hope that the absence of the legendary Mr. Stevens from the ballot will finally give them a chance to win.
-- John Fund
=================
What if Saracuda appoints herself to Stevens seat?!? Can she do that?!?
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I see this to be a pure toss under the bus. Complete and unnecessary defamation of character. I think they see Palin as a threat in '08 - '12 and are launching pre-emptive strikes.
Yup. Smartest thing for Sarah to do is go back to Alaska and govern well. In the future, the public will want to see a real track record of actually skill as an executive rather than treating a presidential election as a reality TV show and going for the new and exciting novelty.
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If Stevens wins and then has to resign, can she appoint herself Senator?
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Without trying to dig through Alaska and federal law, I'd guess that in theory, yes. I think that would be a very bad idea though.
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The answer is apparantly yes but... not directly.
According to MSNBC. Something to the effect she could resign and appoint or be repolaced by the leutenant governor to her position as governor. Then he could replace Stevens post with her if he resigns or gets removed.
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I think this from the WSJ gets it right:
Palin and the GOP
Love Sarah Palin or hate her -- and there seems to be little in between -- the Alaska Governor has become a national political figure. She could have a big political future, assuming she and the many Republicans now trashing her learn something from their recent misadventures.
Last August we advised John McCain not to select a relative unknown like Mrs. Palin, in part because we remember the way Dan Quayle was treated. The media haze GOP candidates in a way they never do Democrats. (See Joe Biden, unreported gaffes of.) Any national-campaign novice was bound to be chewed up. Mr. McCain nonetheless decided to take one of his celebrated leaps off the high bar. (Our track record this campaign was perfect: If we proposed it, Mr. McCain did the opposite.)
Associated Press
In the event, Mrs. Palin's contribution to the McCain ticket was mixed. Her bravura convention speech defied the early media mockery and made her an instant hero among rank-and-file Republicans. Her reform credentials and social conservatism inspired a GOP base that was angry with its wayward party and wary of Mr. McCain. The exit polls show that conservative turnout was strong, and Mrs. Palin deserves some credit for that.
Yet Mrs. Palin was clearly thrust into the spotlight before she was prepared for the rigors of a national campaign. The McCain camp also did her no favors, initially keeping her under a quarantine that raised the stakes for any media interview she did do. When it finally handed her over to Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, Mrs. Palin was set up to fail with ground rules that let CBS dribble out her uncertain answers night after night.
The nasty leaks and gossip about Mrs. Palin that are now emerging from sources inside the McCain campaign have the ring of score-settling. Staff aides who mishandled her, or set her up for the Couric embarrassment, are now saying she refused coaching. Perhaps these were the same advisers who told her to cite Alaska's proximity to Russia as a foreign-policy credential.
No one really cares by now who did what to whom. The important point is that Mrs. Palin isn't responsible for Tuesday's defeat. The sages who urged Mr. McCain to "suspend" his campaign and throw himself in the middle of bailout talks on Capitol Hill can take far more credit for the loss.
Mrs. Palin is of course responsible for her own campaign performance, and this was uneven at best. A generation ago, a candidate might have been able to get away with the missteps in the Couric interview, but not in the age of YouTube. On the day she was chosen, the Governor wasn't conversant enough with many of the biggest national security and economic debates. Amid the financial panic, all she could offer were populist bromides about "greed and corruption." Voters who heard those answers were no doubt among the 60% who told exit pollsters on Tuesday that they didn't feel she was ready to be Commander in Chief.
Only 44 years old, and now with a loyal conservative following, Mrs. Palin is nonetheless well-positioned to help shape the Republican future. Her grasp of energy policy suggests she's capable of mastering subjects when she wants to, and if she wants a national future she's going to have to do the same on national issues.
Our advice would be that she also broaden her appeal beyond the politics of cultural division. One unfortunate campaign decision was to turn Mrs. Palin's initial response to press criticism into a consistent theme. The Governor's stump speech took on an us-versus-them cast, framing the election as a battle between the "real America" and blue-state elites. Hard as it may be to believe, New Jersey is part of America too.
This was an odd turn for Mrs. Palin, given her reputation in Alaska of taking on her own party and reaching across the aisle. Her commitment to a set of principles -- cleaning up government, taking on crony capitalism -- is what earned her 90% job approval. Her decision to jettison that appeal in favor of a base-rallying cultural pitch turned off many independents and suburbanites. Mrs. Palin will need those Americans if she wants to rebuild a party that must win in places like suburban Philadelphia, Orlando and New Hampshire to retake the White House.
As for Mrs. Palin's Republican critics, they might consider if they can afford to write off a young leader with such natural political talent. We don't see a large constellation of other GOP stars on the horizon. Mr. McCain was right to understand that his party needs a new generation of leaders who haven't grown comfortable with the perks of Washington. Especially as Democrats once again grow the Beltway, the next GOP leaders will need to make a better case for entrepreneurship and limited government. Mrs. Palin deserves a chance to see if she has the skill and work ethic to become that kind of leader.
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I agree with CCP and Krauthammer that Palin was the wrong choice for McCain this year because it undercut his biggest argument that Obama lacked sufficient experience.
That said I now declare my support for Palin and the Plumber in 2012.
She is an intuitive conservative, not one who has read all the arguments from all the pundits. We need someone who is intuitive AND informed, experienced and prepared.
Regarding the Palin for the Stevens senate seat, we had a similar situation in the land of 10,000 taxes. When Walter Mondale moved to the vice presidency, our Governor was the most popular politician around - young, handsome, charismatic, an olympic hockey star, and was just on the cover of Time magazine promoting the good life here. Everyone thought it obvious for the Governor to appoint himself, so he resigned and his Lt. Gov. put him to the senate. In the next election, Republicans swept this Democrat state taking both senates seats and kicking out the appointing Governor.
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By JOHN O'SULLIVAN
Being listed in fourth place for Time magazine's "Person of the Year," as Sarah Palin was for 2008, sounds a little like being awarded the Order of Purity (Fourth Class). But it testifies to something important.
Though regularly pronounced sick, dying, dead, cremated and scattered at sea, Mrs. Palin is still amazingly around. She has survived more media assassination attempts than Fidel Castro has survived real ones (Cuban official figure: 638). In her case, one particular method of assassination is especially popular -- namely, the desperate assertion that, in addition to her other handicaps, she is "no Margaret Thatcher."
Very few express this view in a calm or considered manner. Some employ profanity. Most claim to be conservative admirers of Mrs. Thatcher. Others admit they had always disliked the former British prime minister until someone compared her to "Sarracuda" -- at which point they suddenly realized Mrs. Thatcher must have been absolutely brilliant (at least by comparison).
Inevitably, Lloyd Bentsen's famous put-down of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate is resurrected, such as by Paul Waugh (in the London Evening Standard) and Marie Cocco (in the Washington Post): "Newsflash! Governor, You're No Maggie Thatcher," sneered Mr. Waugh. Added Ms. Coco, "now we know Sarah Palin is no Margaret Thatcher -- and no Dan Quayle either!"
Jolly, rib-tickling stuff. But, as it happens, I know Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is a friend of mine. And as a matter of fact, Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have a great deal in common.
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They are far from identical; they rose in different political systems requiring different skills. As a parliamentarian, Mrs. Thatcher needed forensic and debating skills which her training in Oxford politics and as a tax lawyer gave her. Mrs. Palin is a good speaker, but she needs to hone her debating tactics if she is to match those of the Iron Lady.
On the other hand, Mrs. Palin rose in state politics to jobs requiring executive ability. Her successful conduct of the negotiations with Canada, Canadian provinces and American states over the Alaska pipeline was a larger executive task than anything handled by Mrs. Thatcher until she entered the Cabinet and, arguably, until she became prime minister.
Mrs. Thatcher's most senior position until then had been education secretary in the government of Edward Heath where, as she conceded in her memoirs, she lacked real executive power. Her political influence within that government was so small that it took 17 months for her to get an interview with him. Even then, a considerate civil servant assured Heath that others would be present to make the meeting less "boring." Her main political legacy from that job was the vitriolic slogan, "Margaret Thatcher, Milk-Snatcher," thrown at her by the left because of a budgetary decision she had opposed to charge some children for school meals and milk. It was the single most famous thing about her when she defeated Heath for the Tory leadership in 1975.
At this point she became almost as "controversial" as Sarah Palin. Heath, for example, made it plain privately that he would not serve under her. And Sir Ian Gilmour, an intellectual leader of the Tory "wets," privately dismissed her as a "Daily Telegraph woman." There is no precise equivalent in American English, but "narrow, repressed suburbanite" catches the sense.
Mrs. Thatcher attracted such abuse for two reasons. First, she was seen by the chattering classes as representing a blend of provincial conservative values and market economics -- Middle England as it has come to be called -- against their own metropolitan liberalism. They thought this blend was an economic dead-end in a modern complex society and a political retreat into futile nostalgia. Of course, they failed to notice that their modern complex society was splintering under their statist burdens even as they denounced her extremism.
Second, Margaret Thatcher was not yet Margaret Thatcher. She had not won the 1979 election, recovered the Falklands, reformed trade union law, defeated the miners, and helped destroy Soviet communism peacefully.
Things like that change your mind about a girl. But they also take time, during which she had to turn her instinctive beliefs into intellectually coherent policies against opposition inside and outside her own party. Like Mrs. Palin this year, Mrs. Thatcher knew there were serious gaps in her knowledge, especially of foreign affairs. She recruited experts who shared her general outlook (such as Robert Conquest and Hugh Thomas) to tutor her on these things. Even so she often seemed very alone in the Tory high command.
As a parliamentary sketch writer for the Daily Telegraph (and a not very repressed suburbanite), I watched Mrs. Thatcher's progress as opposition leader. She had been a good performer in less exalted positions. But initially she faltered. Against the smooth, condescending Prime Minister James Callaghan in particular she had a hard time. In contrast to his chuckling baritone she sounded shrill when she attacked. But she lowered her tone (vocally not morally), took lessons in presentation from (among others) Laurence Olivier, and prepared diligently for every debate and Question Time.
I can still recall her breakthrough performance in a July 1977 debate on the Labour government's collapsing economy. She dominated the House of Commons so wittily that the next day the Daily Mail's acerbic correspondent, Andrew Alexander, began his report: "If Mrs. Thatcher were a racehorse, she would have been tested for drugs yesterday." She was now on the way to becoming the world-historical figure who today is the gold standard of conservative statesmanship.
In Today's Opinion Journal
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Bush and Scooter LibbyColombo the Asbestos SleuthThe Domestic Threat
TODAY'S COLUMNISTS
Main Street: The President Comforts a Marine Mom
– William McGurnGlobal View: A Monument for Obama
– Bret Stephens
COMMENTARY
Conservative Snobs Are Wrong About Palin
– John O'SullivanBernanke Is the Best Stimulus Right Now
– Robert E. Lucas Jr.Let's Confront North Korea on Human Rights
– Jay LefkowitzMrs. Palin has a long way to go to match this. Circumstances may never give her the chance to do so. Even if she gets that chance, she may lack Mrs. Thatcher's depths of courage, firmness and stamina -- we only ever know such things in retrospect.
But she has plenty of time, probably eight years, to analyze America's problems, recruit her own expert advice, and develop conservative solutions to them. She has obvious intelligence, drive, serious moral character, and a Reaganesque likability. Her likely Republican rivals such as Bobby Jindal and Mitt Romney, not to mention Barack Obama, have most of these same qualities too. But she shares with Mrs. Thatcher a very rare charisma. As Ronnie Millar, the latter's speechwriter and a successful playwright, used to say in theatrical tones: She may be depressed, ill-dressed and having a bad hair day, but when the curtain rises, out onto the stage she steps looking like a billion dollars. That's the mark of a star, dear boy. They rise to the big occasions.
Mrs. Palin had four big occasions in the late, doomed Republican campaign: her introduction by John McCain in Ohio, her speech at the GOP convention, her vice-presidential debate with Sen. Joe Biden, and her appearance on Saturday Night Live. With minimal preparation, she rose to all four of them. That's the mark of star.
If conservative intellectuals, Republican operatives and McCain "handlers" can't see it, then so much the worse for them.
Mr. O'Sullivan is executive editor of Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty in Prague, and a former special adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His book, "The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister" (Regnery), has just been published in paperback.
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Palin's biggest obstacle in 2012 will be enticing moderates and liberals to vote for her. IMHO it will take a A LOT of work for her to that off.
I see no problem with her winning the conservative vote.
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Tax Cuts and Fiscal Discipline
By Sarah Palin
Especially evident in these trying economic times is America's need for affordable, abundant and secure energy. This means American energy resources developed through American ingenuity and produced by American workers. I applaud President Obama's focus on alternative and renewable energy, and here in Alaska we've joined the effort: I have asked Alaskans to focus on obtaining 50% of our electric generation from renewables by 2025. In the meantime, we must not abandon oil and gas exploration and development. In fact, Americans should demand the cooperation of the major oil producers so that Alaska's vast supply of clean natural gas can be brought to market. Alaska stands ready to positively contribute to the nation's markets and energy needs.
Another step on the path to economic recovery is to let Americans keep more of their income. Mr. Obama and Congress could make this happen with permanent tax cuts and by adhering to a path of fiscal discipline. When congressional appropriation trains run too hastily, they accumulate excess baggage, spending more taxpayer money. Leaving more money in American pockets through tax cuts and fiscal discipline stimulates the business-investment and job-creation climate -- the climate for economic recovery.
Finally, we are extremely proud of our men and women in uniform. Mr. Obama and Congress must continue to guarantee a strong national defense by modernizing and equipping our armed forces; by treating active-duty military and veterans fairly; and by supporting the families of our service members. America will face difficult challenges in the years ahead. As Mr. Obama takes the helm, our prayers are with him as he seeks direction for our great nation.
Mrs. Palin is governor of Alaska.
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I have my questions about Sarah, but she remains someone keeping an eye on. She certainly has the right enemies :-D
By JAMES TARANTO
The first we heard about Sarah Palin's "death panels" comment was in a conversation last Friday with an acquaintance who was appalled by it. Our interlocutor is not a Democratic partisan but a high-minded centrist who deplores extremist rhetoric whatever the source. We don't even know if he has a position on ObamaCare. From his description, it sounded to us as though Palin really had gone too far.
A week later, it is clear that she has won the debate.
President Obama himself took the comments of the former governor of the 47th-largest state seriously enough to answer them directly in his so-called town-hall meeting Tuesday in Portsmouth, N.H. As we noted Wednesday, he was callous rather than reassuring, speaking glibly--to audience laughter--about "pulling the plug on grandma."
The Los Angeles Times reports that Palin has won a legislative victory as well:
A Senate panel has decided to scrap the part of its healthcare bill that in recent days has given rise to fears of government "death panels," with one lawmaker suggesting the proposal was just too confusing.
The Senate Finance Committee is taking the idea of advance care planning consultations with doctors off the table as it works to craft its version of healthcare legislation, a Democratic committee aide said Thursday.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the committee, said the panel dropped the idea because it could be "misinterpreted or implemented incorrectly." . . .
The Palin claim about "death panels" was so widely discredited that the White House has begun openly quoting it in an effort to show that opponents of the healthcare overhaul are misinformed.
You have to love that last bit. The fearless, independent journalists of the Los Angeles Times justify their assertion that the Palin claim was "widely discredited" with an appeal to authority--the authority of the White House, which is to say, the other side in the debate. One suspects the breathtaking inadequacy of this argument would have been obvious to Times reporters Christi Parsons and Andrew Zajac if George W. Bush were still president. And of course this appears in a story about how the Senate was persuaded to act in accord with Palin's position--which doesn't prove that position right but does show that it is widely (though, to be sure, not universally) credited.
Podcast
James Taranto on Palin and the "death panel" debate.
.One can hardly deny that Palin's reference to "death panels" was inflammatory. But another way of putting that is that it was vivid and attention-getting. Level-headed liberal commentators who favor more government in health care, including Slate's Mickey Kaus and the Washington Post's Charles Lane, have argued that the end-of-life provision in the bill is problematic--acknowledging in effect (and, in Kaus's case, in so many words) that Palin had a point.
If you believe the media, Sarah Palin is a mediocre intellect, if even that, while President Obama is brilliant. So how did she manage to best him in this debate? Part of the explanation is that disdain for Palin reflects intellectual snobbery more than actual intellect. Still, Obama's critics, in contrast with Palin's, do not deny the president's intellectual aptitude. Intelligence, however, does not make one immune from hubris.
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Crafty: "I have my questions about Sarah, but she remains someone keeping an eye on."
Likewise. She was not the correct VP choice last time, but nonetheless has amazing talent and star-power, is an intuitive conservative and has an unknown future.
My thoughts are similar to Taranto's, but I take it further. When you look at the timing of where the pendulum really started to pick up momentum against the massive government healthcare expansion proposals, the newsworthy story was a blogpost of Gov. Palin coining the term "Death Panels".
Taken literally, death panels was assumed to refer to a mandate in Obama-Pelosi-Care that requires the government to come visit you and talk to you about your choices and your costs to society as your pathetic life starts appearing to be fading.
Palin said these will decide your fate when the legislative truth is that 'they' will just be required to come 'talk to you' - with the purpose of persuading you to maybe forego heroic efforts and save us all a lot of money. So Palin is wrong on that point by just a smidgen.
"Death Panels" as a political concept has legs and provokes a vivid visualization and more meanings which I will expand on below.
Obama chose to answer the claim, refute it and give it more legs and more publicity. His thorough and total denial was followed by a news story that the death panels will be removed from the legislation. So much for the total denial. :-)
But "Death Panels" means much more than that. The term symbolizes the concept of rationing. If life-saving procedures will be rationed based on age, quality of life, etc, and the decisions at least in the 'public option' will be made by bureaucrats meeting and negotiating with other budgeting bureaucrats... then "Death Panels" is a perfect negative phrase to describe the cost-saving aspects of ObamaCare.
And it goes a step further. Recall how liberals 'dislike' Sarah Palin for pro-life views. Contrast that with the extreme abortion rights that are in the bill, forced on you to cover with the public option and forced on you with your private choices. This fact comes from Obama' own words.
And speaking of abortion recall that Sarah Palin in the mother of a Down Syndrome baby. Those are the ones that mostly get aborted, statistically even ahead of black babies that aborted at 3-times the rate of white babies. (Disclosure: I am uncle to a Down Syndrome baby who I have grown rather fond of.)
Currently expecting mothers are fully informed about the health and status of their unborn child including the ability to view amazing photos in the womb. One reason they inform always about Down Syndrome is to give you the opportunity to abort the 'defective' baby - and wait for a 'good one'.
Now enter government health care trying to ration and control costs, coming in to give you that same talk about the quality of life your fetus with defects can expect and how expensive the follow up surgeries can be, only to live this less than Ivy-League life. Other than death panels, what else would you call someone who comes in and advocates abortion to you in this emotionally-charged situation.
I'm sure that aborting or encouraging abortion of extra chromosome fetuses does not offend many. For liberals maybe you should instead wisualize the situation after we learn to recognize the fetuses who will be born gay. Another one of God's little life quirks, want to stomp that out too?? Better talk to your death panel about it.
Sound far-fetched?? We already abort black babies at 3 times the rate of white babies. Why? It is the result of the advice these young women are getting already, mostly in government health care, BEFORE we go to fully rationed and socialized health care.
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Charles is right. To state there are "death panels" in the health care panel "debases the debate".
From a purely policital point of view Palin's cOmments were a stroke of pure genius!
With regard to much of what else Charle's has to say I don't quite agree. There are an INFINITE end of life scenerios.
No size fits all. Of course liberals, aka "progressives" will come up with gov. regs that are so ridiculously complex as it attempts to cover every single possible one of these scenerios we will have books about it.
Yet Charles does not address the point that much care if provided at the end of some people's lives with little if any gain in lifespan and to some extent often worsens quality of life.
We must be spending countless billions of people who just can't or won't except the fact they ARE dying. Esp. when the bill goes to someone else.
This can't be ignored while costs sky rocket.
*****Jewish World Review August 14, 2009 / 24 Menachem-Av 5769
The Truth About Death Counseling
By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Let's see if we can have a reasoned discussion about end-of-life counseling.
We might start by asking Sarah Palin to leave the room. I've got nothing against her. She's a remarkable political talent. But there are no "death panels" in the Democratic health-care bills, and to say that there are is to debase the debate.
We also have to tell the defenders of the notorious Section 1233 of H.R. 3200 that it is not quite as benign as they pretend. To offer government reimbursement to any doctor who gives end-of-life counseling — whether or not the patient asked for it — is to create an incentive for such a chat.
What do you think such a chat would be like? Do you think the doctor will go on and on about the fantastic new million-dollar high-tech gizmo that can prolong the patient's otherwise hopeless condition for another six months? Or do you think he's going to talk about — as the bill specifically spells out — hospice care and palliative care and other ways of letting go of life?
No, say the defenders. It's just that we want the doctors to talk to you about putting in place a living will and other such instruments. Really? Then consider the actual efficacy of a living will. When you are old, infirm and lying in the ICU with pseudomonas pneumonia and deciding whether to (a) go through the long antibiotic treatment or (b) allow what used to be called "the old man's friend" to take you away, the doctor will ask you at that time what you want for yourself — no matter what piece of paper you signed five years earlier.
You are told constantly how very important it is to write your living will years in advance. But the relevant question is what you desire at the end — when facing death — not what you felt sometime in the past when you were hale and hearty and sitting in your lawyer's office barely able to contemplate a life of pain and diminishment.
Well, as pain and diminishment enter your life as you age, your calculations change and your tolerance for suffering increases. In the ICU, you might have a new way of looking at things.
My own living will, which I have always considered more a literary than a legal document, basically says: "I've had some good innings, thank you. If I have anything so much as a hangnail, pull the plug." I've never taken it terribly seriously because unless I'm comatose or demented, they're going to ask me at the time whether or not I want to be resuscitated if I go into cardiac arrest. The paper I signed years ago will mean nothing.
And if I'm totally out of it, my family will decide, with little or no reference to my living will. Why? I'll give you an example. When my father was dying, my mother and brother and I had to decide how much treatment to pursue. What was a better way to ascertain my father's wishes: What he checked off on a form one fine summer's day years before being stricken; or what we, who had known him intimately for decades, thought he would want? The answer is obvious.
Except for the demented orphan, the living will is quite beside the point. The one time it really is essential is if you think your fractious family will be only too happy to hasten your demise to get your money. That's what the law is good at — protecting you from murder and theft. But that is a far cry from assuring a peaceful and willed death, which is what most people imagine living wills are about.
So why get Medicare to pay the doctor to do the counseling? Because we know that if this white-coated authority whose chosen vocation is curing and healing is the one opening your mind to hospice and palliative care, we've nudged you ever so slightly toward letting go.
It's not an outrage. It's surely not a death panel. But it is subtle pressure applied by society through your doctor. And when you include it in a health-care reform whose major objective is to bend the cost curve downward, you have to be a fool or a knave to deny that it's intended to gently point the patient in a certain direction, toward the corner of the sickroom where stands a ghostly figure, scythe in hand, offering release.****
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By SARAH PALIN
Writing in the New York Times last month, President Barack Obama asked that Americans "talk with one another, and not over one another" as our health-care debate moves forward.
I couldn't agree more. Let's engage the other side's arguments, and let's allow Americans to decide for themselves whether the Democrats' health-care proposals should become governing law.
Some 45 years ago Ronald Reagan said that "no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds." Each of us knows that we have an obligation to care for the old, the young and the sick. We stand strongest when we stand with the weakest among us.
We also know that our current health-care system too often burdens individuals and businesses—particularly small businesses—with crippling expenses. And we know that allowing government health-care spending to continue at current rates will only add to our ever-expanding deficit.
How can we ensure that those who need medical care receive it while also reducing health-care costs? The answers offered by Democrats in Washington all rest on one principle: that increased government involvement can solve the problem. I fundamentally disagree.
View Full Image
Associated Press
.Common sense tells us that the government's attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy. And common sense tells us to be skeptical when President Obama promises that the Democrats' proposals "will provide more stability and security to every American."
With all due respect, Americans are used to this kind of sweeping promise from Washington. And we know from long experience that it's a promise Washington can't keep.
Let's talk about specifics. In his Times op-ed, the president argues that the Democrats' proposals "will finally bring skyrocketing health-care costs under control" by "cutting . . . waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies . . . ."
First, ask yourself whether the government that brought us such "waste and inefficiency" and "unwarranted subsidies" in the first place can be believed when it says that this time it will get things right. The nonpartistan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) doesn't think so: Its director, Douglas Elmendorf, told the Senate Budget Committee in July that "in the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount."
Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He's asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the president suggested that such a group, working outside of "normal political channels," should guide decisions regarding that "huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . . ."
Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats' proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans. Working through "normal political channels," they made themselves heard, and as a result Congress will likely reject a wrong-headed proposal to authorize end-of-life counseling in this cost-cutting context. But the fact remains that the Democrats' proposals would still empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death health-care matters. Such government overreaching is what we've come to expect from this administration.
Speaking of government overreaching, how will the Democrats' proposals affect the deficit? The CBO estimates that the current House proposal not only won't reduce the deficit but will actually increase it by $239 billion over 10 years. Only in Washington could a plan that adds hundreds of billions to the deficit be hailed as a cost-cutting measure.
The economic effects won't be limited to abstract deficit numbers; they'll reach the wallets of everyday Americans. Should the Democrats' proposals expand health-care coverage while failing to curb health-care inflation rates, smaller paychecks will result. A new study for Watson Wyatt Worldwide by Steven Nyce and Syl Schieber concludes that if the government expands health-care coverage while health-care inflation continues to rise "the higher costs would drive disposable wages downward across most of the earnings spectrum, although the declines would be steepest for lower-earning workers." Lower wages are the last thing Americans need in these difficult economic times.
Finally, President Obama argues in his op-ed that Democrats' proposals "will provide every American with some basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable." Of course consumer protection sounds like a good idea. And it's true that insurance companies can be unaccountable and unresponsive institutions—much like the federal government. That similarity makes this shift in focus seem like nothing more than an attempt to deflect attention away from the details of the Democrats' proposals—proposals that will increase our deficit, decrease our paychecks, and increase the power of unaccountable government technocrats.
Instead of poll-driven "solutions," let's talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven. As the Cato Institute's Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top-down government plan, let's give Americans control over their own health care.
Democrats have never seriously considered such ideas, instead rushing through their own controversial proposals. After all, they don't need Republicans to sign on: Democrats control the House, the Senate and the presidency. But if passed, the Democrats' proposals will significantly alter a large sector of our economy. They will not improve our health care. They will not save us money. And, despite what the president says, they will not "provide more stability and security to every American."
We often hear such overblown promises from Washington. With first principles in mind and with the facts in hand, tell them that this time we're not buying it.
Ms. Palin, Sen. John McCain's running mate in the 2008 presidential election, was governor of Alaska from December 2006 to July 2009.
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By JOHN FUND
Sarah Palin may no longer be governor of Alaska, but she's certainly destined to become a best-selling author. HarperCollins, her publisher, has announced the print-run of her memoir will be a staggering 1.5 million copies -- equal to the print-run of Senator Ted Kennedy's posthumous autobiography published this month. Publishing sources tell me that such a giant run is only ordered up when there is clear evidence from booksellers and surveys of massive interest in a book.
The book, which will be published on November 17, was a crash project. Ms. Palin actually moved temporarily to San Diego after she resigned the governorship in July so she could be close to her collaborator, Lynn Vincent. I bumped into Ms. Vincent, a former editor at the Christian-oriented World magazine, in New York a few weeks ago, where she had parked herself in a hotel close to the offices of HarperCollins while working on the book's final edits.
Ms. Vincent didn't reveal any details about the book, but did acknowledge it will describe Ms. Palin's frustration over her treatment by the staffers she inherited from the McCain campaign after her surprise pick as the GOP vice presidential nominee last year. Ms. Palin was booked on grueling interviews with hostile reporters while talk-show hosts such as Glenn Beck couldn't even get through to her aides. Mr. Beck tells me he was stunned when he picked up the phone one day just before the election to discover Sarah Palin was on the other end of the line. "She explained that she had been blocked from reaching her audience, so she was now 'going rogue' and booking her own interviews," Mr. Beck told me. "I was thrilled she had burst out of the cage they'd built for her and we were finally talking."
That incident was the only time Ms. Palin declared her independence from her keepers, and it's fitting that the title of her upcoming book will be "Going Rogue: An American Life."
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Good luck to her and it is fine with me if she makes millions.
That said I don't why I would want to read her book.
We know her political stances on issues.
I wouldn't expect to gain insight into anything other than her from reading it.
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Meanwhile, if you're not part of a special interest but just a regular American who hopes one day to grow old (because it beats the alternative), NewsBusters.org has a timely reminder that proponents of "health-care reform" don't necessarily sympathize with that aspiration. NewsBusters links to another Morgen Richmond YouTube clip, this one of a speech that Robert Reich, who served as President Clinton's labor secretary, delivered on the subject in 2007:
I will actually give you a speech made up entirely--almost at the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is, and a candidate will never say, but what candidates should say if we were in a kind of democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice of citizenship, and they were educated in terms of what the issues were, and they could separate myth from reality in terms of what candidates would tell them:
"Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health-care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. [laughter] That's true, and what I'm going to do is I am going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people. But that means you--particularly you young people, particularly you young, healthy people--you're going to have to pay more. [applause] Thank you.
"And by the way, we are going to have to--if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive, so we're going to let you die. [applause]
"Also, I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid--we already have a lot of bargaining leverage--to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. But that means less innovation, and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market, which means you are probably not going to live that much longer than your parents. [applause] Thank you."
As noted in our transcription, Reich's Berkeley, Calif., audience applauded the idea of taxing the young, killing the old, and stifling lifesaving innovations. One suspects that these ideas would not be greeted as warmly in most other American locales, which is why elected politicians who are actually trying to sell such ideas cloak them in euphemisms about "universal care," "reform," "cost cutting" and so forth.
Liz Hunt of London's Daily Telegraph reports on an even more chilling euphemism used in a country that long ago instituted "health-care reform":
"Mrs ------- has breathing difficulties," the night manager told her. "She needs oxygen. Shall we call an ambulance?"
"What do you mean?" my friend responded. "What's the matter with her?"
"She needs to go to hospital. Do you want that? Or would you prefer that we make her comfortable?"
"Make her comfortable." Here's what that meant:
Befuddled by sleep, she didn't immediately grasp what was being asked of her. Her grandmother is immobilised by a calcified knee joint, which is why she is in the home. She's a little deaf and frail, but otherwise perky. She reads a newspaper every day (without glasses), and is a fan of the darling of daytime television, David Dickinson. Why wouldn't she get medical treatment if she needed it?
Then, the chilling implication of the phone call filtered through--she was being asked whether her grandmother should be allowed to die.
"Call an ambulance now," my friend demanded.
The person at the other end persisted. "Are you sure that's what you want? For her to go to hospital."
"Yes, absolutely. Get her to hospital."
Three hours later, her grandmother was sitting up in A&E [the accident-and-emergency ward], smiling. She had a mild chest infection, was extremely dehydrated, but was responding to oxygen treatment.
As Hunt notes, "Withdrawal of fluids (and drugs) is one of the steps on the controversial palliative care programme known as the Liverpool Care Pathway, which has been adopted by 900 hospitals, hospices and care homes in England."
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman disagrees: "In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We've all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false." But is it possible that Reich is right and Krugman is wrong?
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I already posted that I thought she was the wrong choice for McCain's VP running mate mostly because it mooted the main weakness of Obama, his lack of experience and readiness for President and Commander in Chief. She showed areas of weakness while being blindsided by the national media but also held her own both in terms of campaign excitement and in debating Washington-insider Joe Biden.
Palin is an intuitive conservative, one who knows big government isn't the answer for everything without having read every VDH column or Heritage study. That said, in the first post of this thread I posted a C-SPAN link to the Alaska gubernatorial debate in which she was articulate, poised, principled and extremely knowledgeable on all the state issues that came up.
To move forward, as others have said, she will need to get fully up to speed on all national issues and make another first impression if that's possible with moderates and independents in the country. Conservatives and liberals have already made up their minds about her, unchangeably.
Besides coming out with a book to tell her side of the campaign story and whatever else, she is taking stands on issues and on candidates for the direction for the party, like it or not. Congressional District NY-23 is the hot spot of the moment. She came out early for the cause of conservatism and against the party. That stand is looking better all the time.
This piece contrasts her with Newt. At the alienating those here who are fans of Newt (including me), his very successful contract with America was very poll-based, his experience is congressional not executive and his reforms were not lasting. His support of Cap and trade (some other version), like Mitt Romney's past support for govt health care, works to blur the lines and weaken the arguments of the day IMO. - Doug
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http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/sarah_palin_and_newt_gingrich.html
Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich: The Visionary and the Hack
By Claude Sandroff
Two weeks after Sarah Palin's unique exit from public office, Newt Gingrich offered up some unsolicited counsel for the former governor in an interview with POLITICO. Apparently, Newt was certain that Palin's reputation needed serious burnishing, and he was all too ready to provide it by offering substantial details on the range and style of speeches that would be most appropriate for Palin to deliver to various audiences in order to sustain a public revival. Exactly why he felt she needed his help remains a bit of a mystery, except that Gingrich, like Karl Rove, seems absolutely certain that the world is always on edge awaiting his next tactical stroke of genius.
Now that an intense internecine battle is raging over how Republicans should react to Doug Hoffman's Conservative Party bid for New York's 23rd , one thing is certain: it is Newt whose reputation is in shambles, and it is he who should seek political advice from Palin as to how he might regain his lost stature. And this will remain true whether Mr. Hoffman wins or loses.
By unconditionally supporting the Republican machine candidate Dede Scozzafava -- one of the most liberal candidates ever offered by the party in any race -- Newt has forfeited any remnant of respect he might have retained as the standard-bearer of the conservative congressional revolution of 1994.
Scozzafava supports the same extreme political positions (card-check, Obama stimulus) as any adolescent left-wing blogger. She maintains deep alliances with the most radical and odious groups (Acorn, Working Family Party) associated with the Democratic Party. By standing with her, Newt Gingrich has earned that dreaded label he once affixed to Nancy Pelosi. Newt has become a partisan and trivial politician. He has become a common hack.
In contrast, Sarah Palin just compiles conservative esteem. When she railed against the compromised Republican machine in its support of Scozzafava, it felt like a stiff, clean, purifying breeze. In her October 24th Facebook Note announcing her support for Hoffman, Palin argued with deep philosophical references to conservative ideals. Her support and conviction were not products of a focus group. The note moved many a radio talk show host who read it aloud, from Mark Levin to Tammy Bruce. It was the reasoned stance of a visionary.
Palin evoked Ronald Reagan, mentioned the importance of establishing sharp contrasts with opponents, and stressed the primacy of principle over party. Palin continues to be the antithesis of the trivial politician. She has that unique ability to convey the highest sense of personal honor without ever projecting any of the usual political pomposity. Perhaps the highest compliment we can pay Palin is that she is always interesting and always surprising.
This is the reason so many political junkies from the right and left have undisclosed part-time jobs as Palin observers. You can never get enough of authenticity. Near the end of her farewell speech, Palin promised that by removing the confining yoke of office she'd be able "to work even harder for you. For what is right. And for truth."
What she meant by those almost biblical cadences wasn't clear then, but now it is coming into focus. And what is most stunning is that she is attaining her goals not by speaking in front of audiences, but through her writing. We all know how mesmerizing she is on the stump. But none of us had any idea that she was a gifted prose stylist: succinct, witty, and memorable.
But she has chosen Facebook, not YouTube, as her preferred mode of communication, at least for now. And over and over again, she has proven highly effective and influential, whether discussing health care, energy, China policy, defense, or congressional elections.
It's an effectiveness gained through focus, a focus that we can only hope other politicians begin to emulate. Free markets, individual liberty, small government, strong national defense, and low taxes are the constant themes she invokes. Along with those values, she makes constant mention of the two political giants of the 20th century who embodied them, championed them, and communicated them tirelessly: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
While pundit after pundit argues that we should throw Reagan over the side in pursuit of Obama-lite, Palin is bringing us back to the principled, universal roots that Reagan shared with the Founders. While many columnists anguish over immoderate candidates, Palin warns against "blurring the lines" and writes a Facebook birthday tribute to Margaret Thatcher.
A recent Gallup poll shows that in America, conservatives outnumber liberals by two to one. We know from history that conservatives can win landslide elections. But conservatives need to be confident to be resurgent. None of us knows what Sarah Palin has in mind for 2012 and beyond. But if she is the force that helped us regain the confidence of our convictions, then she will have given us a gift beyond repayment.
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I have been a big admirer of Newt for many years, but in the past presidential campaign I got the whiff of things I did not care for and in the Scuzzyfava affair he has seriously and perhaps permanently damaged my opinion of him. In this moment to back a candidate backed by ACORN, who is for the end to secrecy in unionizing votes, and so forth is just so spectacularly wrong AND tin eared that I just don't know what to say.
OTOH Sarah has, once again showed heart and political killer instinct.
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Memoir Is Palin’s Payback to McCain Campaign Recommend
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: November 14, 2009
“Going Rogue,” the title of Sarah Palin’s erratic new memoir, comes from a phrase used by a disgruntled McCain aide to describe her going off-message during the campaign: among other things, for breaking with the campaign over its media strategy and its decision to pull out of Michigan, and for speaking out about reports that the Republican Party had spent more than $150,000 on fancy designer duds for her and her family. In fact, the most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the press, but at the McCain campaign. The very campaign that plucked her out of Alaska, anointed her the Republican vice-presidential nominee and made her one of the most talked about women on the planet — someone who could command a reported $5 million for writing this book.
In what reads like payback for McCain aides’ disparaging comments about her in the wake of the ticket’s loss to Barack Obama, Ms. Palin depicts the McCain campaign as overscripted, defeatist, disorganized and dunder-headed — slow to shift focus from the Iraq war to the cratering economy, insufficiently tough on Mr. Obama and contradictory in its media strategy. She also claims that the campaign billed her nearly $50,000 for “having been vetted.” The vetting, which was widely criticized in the press as being cursory and rushed, was, she insists, “thorough”: they knew “exactly what they’re getting.”
Some of Ms. Palin’s loudest complaints in this volume are directed at the McCain campaign’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt, ironically enough, was one of the aides to most forcefully make the case for putting her on the ticket in the first place, arguing to his boss, as Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson reported in their recent book “The Battle for America,” that she would shake up the race and help him get his “reform mojo back.” Robert Draper reported in The New York Times Magazine that neither Mr. Schmidt nor Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, apparently saw Ms. Palin’s “lack of familiarity with major national or international issues as a serious liability,” and that Mr. McCain, a former Navy pilot, saw the idea of upending the chessboard as a maverick kind of move.
All in all, Ms. Palin emerges from “Going Rogue” as an eager player in the blame game, thoroughly ungrateful toward the McCain campaign for putting her on the national stage. As for the McCain campaign, it often feels like a desperate and cynical operation, willing to make a risky Hail Mary pass in order to try to score a tactical win, instead of making a considered judgment as to who might be genuinely qualified to sit a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
In “Going Rogue,” Ms. Palin talks perfunctorily about fiscal responsibility and a muscular foreign policy, and more passionately about the importance of energy independence, but she is quite up front about the fact that much of her appeal lies in her just-folks, “hockey Mom” ordinariness. She pretends no particular familiarity with the Middle East, the Iraq war or Islamic politics — “I knew the history of the conflict,” she writes, “to the extent that most Americans did.” And she argues that “there’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood.”
A CNN poll taken last month indicates that 7 out of 10 Americans now think Ms. Palin is not qualified to be president, and even as ardent a conservative as Charles Krauthammer lamented in September 2008 “the paucity of any Palin record or expressed conviction on the major issues of our time.”
Yet, Mr. McCain’s astonishing decision to pick someone with so little experience (less than two years as the governor of Alaska, and before that, two terms as mayor of Wasilla, a town with fewer than 7,000 residents) as his running mate and Ms. Palin’s own surprisingly nonchalant reaction to Mr. McCain’s initial phone call about the vice president’s slot (she writes that it felt “like a natural progression”) underscore just how alarmingly expertise is discounted — or equated with elitism — in our increasingly democratized era, and just how thoroughly colorful personal narratives overshadow policy arguments and actual knowledge.
Indeed Ms. Palin suggests that she and her husband, Todd, are ideally qualified to represent the Joe Six Packs of the world because they are Joe Six Packs themselves. “We know what it’s like to be on a tight budget and wonder how we’re going to pay for our own health care, let alone college tuition,” she writes in “Going Rogue.” “We know what it’s like to work union jobs, to be blue-collar, white-collar, to have our kids in public schools. We felt our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans, could be a much-needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.”
“Going Rogue” (written with an assist from Lynn Vincent, the editor of World, an evangelical magazine) is part cagey spin job, part earnest autobiography, part payback hit job. And its most compelling sections deal not with politics, but with Ms. Palin’s life in Alaska and her family. Despite an annoying tendency to gratuitously drop the names of lots of writers and philosophers — in the course of this book, she quotes or alludes to Pascal, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Paine, Pearl S. Buck, Mark Twain and Melville — she does a lively job of conveying the frontier feel of the 49th state, where television broadcasts were tape-delayed in her youth and they shopped for clothes “via mail order through the Sears catalog,” where “we don’t have big league professional sports teams or many celebrities (except famous dog mushers),” and so regard politics as a local sport.
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The self-portrait created in these pages recalls the early profiles of Ms. Palin that appeared in the wake of her debut on the national stage: a frontierswoman who knows how to field dress a moose; a feisty gal with lots of moxie and pep; a former beauty queen with a George W. Bush-like aptitude for mangling the English language (the first paragraph of the book contains the phrase “I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier”). She talks about juggling motherhood with politics, and gives a moving account of learning that her son Trig would be born with Down syndrome.
She recalls her initial feeling — “I don’t think I could handle that” — and her “sudden understanding of why people would grasp at a quick ‘solution,’ a way to make the ‘problem’ just go away,” though her own pro-life stance would deny women the choice of having an abortion.
Elsewhere in this volume, she talks about creationism, saying she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the Republican ticket, she sees the hand of God: “My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago, invite Him in to take over.”
Just as Ms. Palin’s planned book tour resembles a campaign rollout — complete with a bus tour and pit stops in battleground states — so the second half of this book often reads like a calculated attempt to position the author for 2012. She tries to compare herself to Ronald Reagan, by repeatedly invoking his name and record. She talks about being “a Commonsense Conservative” and worrying about the national deficit. And she attempts to explain, rationalize or refute controversial incidents and allegations that emerged during the 2008 race.
She says she “never sought to ban any books” as mayor of Wasilla, and in fact has always had a “special passion for reading.” She suggests that the $150,000-plus designer clothes were the campaign’s idea, that she and her family are actually frugal coupon clippers who shop at Costco. And she says she was manipulated into doing that famous series of Katie Couric interviews (which would do much to cement an image of her as an easily caricatured ignoramus) by Nicolle Wallace, a communications aide for the campaign, and that Ms. Couric just seemed to want “to frame a ‘gotcha’ moment.”
Along the way, Ms. Palin acknowledges that she is a busy, “got to go-go-go” sort of person — and for an average hockey mom, pretty ambitious. “As every Iditarod musher knows,” she writes of the famous Alaska dog-sled race, “if you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes.”
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Palinophobes Hate First, Ask Questions Later
Sarah Palin is neither savior nor satanic.
By Jonah Goldberg
Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus’ Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin. In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor’s writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:
“The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”
Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.”
But soon, the original contributor confessed: “I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It’s taken from the first paragraph of ‘Dreams From My Father,’ written by Barack Obama.”
The ruse should have been allowed to fester longer, but the point was made nonetheless: Some people hate Palin first and ask questions later.
My all-time favorite response to John McCain’s selection of Palin as his running mate was from Wendy Doniger, a feminist professor of religion at the University of Chicago. Professor Doniger wrote of the exceedingly feminine “hockey mom” with five children: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”
The best part about that sentence: Doniger uses the pronoun “her” — twice.
Just this week, a liberal blogger at The Atlantic who has dedicated an unhealthy amount of his life to proving a one-man birther conspiracy theory about Palin’s youngest child (it’s both too slanderous and too deranged to detail here) shut down his blog to cope with the epochal, existential crisis that Palin’s book presents to all humankind. The un-self-consciously parodic announcement seemed more appropriate for a BBC warning that the German blitz was about to begin, God Help Us All.
Indeed, some of us will always be sympathetic to Mrs. Palin if for nothing else than her enemies. The bile she extracts from her critics is almost like a dye marker, illuminating deep pockets of asininity that heretofore were either unnoticed or underappreciated.
In fairness, just as there are people who hate Palin for the effrontery she shows in daring to draw breath at all, there are those who love her with a devotion better suited for a religious icon.
I hear from both camps, often. And while I don’t think both sides are equally wrong (after all, the acolytes of the Doniger school openly reject reality more than any so-called creationist), I don’t think either position is laudable or sufficient.
Sarah Palin is neither savior (that job has been taken by the current president, or didn’t you know?) nor is she satanic. She is a politician, a species of human like the rest of us.
I’m fairly certain that if you read many of her public-policy positions but concealed her byline, many of her worst enemies would say “that sounds about right,” and some of her biggest fans would say “that sounds crazy.” But most people would say that her views are perfectly within the mainstream of American politics. She may be more religious than coastal elites in the lower 48, but that is something some bigots need to get over, anyway.
I’m happy about the books she’s selling thanks to the controversy over her, but that doesn’t mean I think these controversies are justified. Palin holds no public office and, as of yet, is not running for one. But the Associated Press assigned eleven reporters to “fact-check” her book, while doing nothing like that to fact-check then-candidate Obama’s or current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s no doubt riveting book.
As it stands, my sense is that Palin is good for the Republican party but not necessarily great. She generates enthusiasm among, and donations from, the base. But she also turns off many of the people the GOP needs to persuade and attract. That could change with this book tour, and I hope it does. Whether she’s ready or qualified for the presidency is another matter. But the presidency is a long way off, and besides, that’s what primaries are for.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzdiYTliN2MwYmJiNWY4OWVlZTA4ZmIwYzJkMjFjOGI=
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She certainly has the right enemies, but I was deeply disappointed in her anti-market rabble rousing in the closing two months of the campaign.
Also, with the very meaning of America hanging in the balance, all she can think of is settling scores with the McCain team?
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http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/12/sarah-palin-conan-obrien-surprise-nbc.html
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By JOHN FUND
No one knows if Sarah Palin is running for president in 2012, but we do know her decision to resign as governor of Alaska has brought her a bonanza of riches she couldn't have tapped if she had remained in her $125,000-a-year government job.
ABC News estimates that since she left the governor's office just eight short months ago, Ms. Palin has brought in at least 100 times her old annual salary -- or a minimum of $12 million. Her best-selling book, "Going Rogue," was sold to Harper Collins for an estimated $7 million, her deal with Fox News is said to be worth up to $2 million, and she will make about $250,000 an episode for an eight-part Learning Channel show on the culture and sights of Alaska.
Then there are the paid speaking engagements. While Ms. Palin does many events for free or donates the proceeds to charity, she's still hauling in several six-figure fees for speeches to groups ranging from economic conferences to university gatherings. Her clients have included the Bowling Proprietors Association of America, the Complete Woman Expo, the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America, and the Sierra-Cascade Logging Conference. Tomorrow, she will cross the border into Canada to speak for an estimated $200,000 at a fundraising dinner for a cancer center and hospital near Toronto. Tickets, priced at $200 each, have sold out.
At the same time, Ms. Palin's political action committee is raising decent but unspectacular amounts. SarahPAC raised $400,000 in the first quarter of this year, a haul smaller than similar PACs run by Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty ($566,000) and Mitt Romney ($1.45 million). Both men are likely candidates for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.
All in all, the available evidence is that Ms. Palin's Excellent Adventure Tour is bringing in too much fun and profit for her to consider giving it up as early as next year to run for president. At age 46, she has the luxury of securing her financial future, repairing cracks in her credibility from the 2008 campaign and waiting for another year to run for president. If I had to bet, she'll still be running for the gold in 2012 rather than the presidential brass ring.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSdFIDygFwM&feature=related
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Without taking anything away from Glen Beck's amazing success with the rally of 300,000 in Washington with many speakers, just wanted to put a historical marker here that when they want to 'fill the stadium' Sarah Palin is still the one they call.
Thanks Crafty for the pageant video. She was also I believe, point guard for a state championship basketball team. I don't know of any video but that story might give a better look at her other qualities, passion, leadership, determination etc.
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Sarah definitely pulls people in.
I wonder how Bristol is going to do on DWTS? :lol:
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Did you see Hillary between Abbas and Netenyahu today? What a political setup.
They might as well have put a sign behind her asking "should I run in 12 or wait till 16"?
If Bamster continues to screw up I would certainly be very surprised if there wasn't a big push for the Hill to save the crats in 12.
IF only people voted based on how one looks in a bikini.
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By SUDEEP REDDY
Sarah Palin, delving into a major policy issue a week after the mid-term elections, took aim Monday at the Federal Reserve and called on Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to "cease and desist" with a bond-buying program designed to boost the economy.
Speaking at a trade association conference in Phoenix, the potential 2012 presidential candidate and tea-party favorite said she's "deeply concerned" about the central bank creating new money to buy government bonds. Ms. Palin said "it's far from certain this will even work" and suggested the move would create an inflation problem.
Sarah Palin says she's deeply concerned about the Federal Reserve's plan to buy $600 billion of U.S. bonds to boost the economy. Alan Murray, Jerry Seib and Jon Hilsenrath discuss why the Federal Reserve has been drawn into the political fray.
.Monday's remarks, in which Ms. Palin staked out a firm stance on a complex topic, follow criticism from GOP strategist Karl Rove, who questioned her "gravitas" based on her appearance in a cable-television reality show about the Alaskan wilderness. Other Republicans have said she would have to answer for quitting her job as Alaska governor partway through her term.
Ms. Palin has made clear she intends to forge a policy profile apart from her celebrity image. She used her Facebook page over the summer to begin laying out foreign policy views, and used a National Review essay last week to caution newly empowered conservatives that compromising with Mr. Obama on spending would result in the GOP "going the way of the Whigs."
The Fed last week said it would buy $600 billion in Treasury securities over the next eight months in an effort to lower the 9.6% unemployment rate and ensure that inflation, which is running below the central bank's informal target, does not morph into outright deflation. Foreign officials have criticized the move for weakening the dollar and threatening speculative capital inflows that could hurt their own economies.
More
Sarah Palin's QE2 Criticism Includes Inflation Hyperbole
Palin Takes On Bernanke, QE2
."When Germany, a country that knows a thing or two about the dangers of inflation, warns us to think again, maybe it's time for Chairman Bernanke to cease and desist," according to Ms. Palin's remarks, obtained in advance by National Review magazine, before the Specialty Tools and Fasteners Distributors Association. "We don't want temporary, artificial economic growth bought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings."
U.S. politicians generally avoid criticizing the Fed, especially its monetary policy, to maintain the central bank's traditional independence from politics. But several Republican lawmakers last week assailed the Fed's decision to engage in another round of bond-buying, known as quantitative easing.
Ms. Palin's remarks Monday were the sharpest yet by a political figure about the Fed announcement. They echoed economists from the left and right who have questioned the policy's effectiveness and potential drawbacks.
View Full Image
Associated Press
Sarah Palin campaigns in October, 2008.
.Ms. Palin's latest speech came within a week of the mid-term elections in which many candidates she backed won key races and helped Republicans take the House, though several of her high-profile picks were defeated. The Phoenix speech Monday appeared to mark a pivot toward a weighty and divisive policy issue—the strength of the dollar and how to boost the U.S. economy.
Other countries have attacked the Fed move just days before a big international summit in South Korea. President Barack Obama Monday effectively defended the U.S. central bank at a press conference in New Delhi, noting that U.S. economic growth is "good for the world as a whole."
—Peter Wallsten contributed reporting to this article.
Write to Sudeep Reddy at sudeep.reddy@wsj.com
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How’s That Outdoorsy Stuff Working for Ya?
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: November 11, 2010
Sarah Palin says her new series on TLC is not a reality show, and she has a point. The show is not an outdoorsy version of celebrity-dysfunction shows like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” or “The Hasselhoffs.”
“Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” which begins on Sunday, is odder than that. The snowcapped mountains, pine forests and shimmering lakes are majestic, the Palin children are adorable, and the series looks like a travelogue — wholesome, visually breathtaking and a little dull. In a way it’s like “The Sound of Music” but without the romance, the Nazis or the music.
There are a few shots of the great indoors, coyly edited scenes of family friction that are de rigueur in reality shows. In one, Ms. Palin asks her teenage daughter, Willow, to do a chore, and Willow, just rising around noon, answers sarcastically, “Sorry, no can do,” as she inspects the fridge.
But mostly, the eight-part series lives up to its title — the camera follows the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee as she fishes, hunts, dog-sleds and rock-climbs. It’s a nature series for political voyeurs: viewers get to observe Ms. Palin observing nature.
And to her credit, the governor who quit the job with more than a year left to her term doesn’t use the camera crew to recast her image or pad gaps in her résumé. She doesn’t pore over position papers in a book-lined study, phone foreign leaders or even watch “Jeopardy.”
Mostly she has fun outdoors. That includes white-water rafting, kayaking, salmon fishing and climbing glaciers. “You know what they say,” she says to the camera after a disappointing fishing trip. “A poor day of fishing beats even a great day of work.”
When she works, it doesn’t take up a great deal of time. Ms. Palin slips out of her hoodie and running shorts and into a red power blazer, dons an earpiece and talks to Fox News in a makeshift television studio next to her house as her husband, Todd, works the camera.
Her preparation is homespun. “So, Todd,” Ms. Palin asks from her desk seconds before airtime, “if they want a personal example — with all the uncertainty regarding what new taxes may be hit — that would influence how many guys you would hire?”
A reality show is a risky step for any politician, but then Ms. Palin is no ordinary politician. It’s still not clear whether she plans to run for president in 2012, or is just riding high on her popularity and fame. The TLC program highlights her physical bravery, but the series’s existence points to a different kind of courage: Ms. Palin is not afraid to be herself.
The first episode doesn’t show much of the nitty-gritty of handling six children, including Trig, the Palins’ toddler, who has Down syndrome, and Tripp, the young son of their eldest daughter, Bristol. Ms. Palin says they don’t have a lot of household help, but viewers aren’t privy to feedings, diaper changes and vacuuming.
Yet Ms. Palin allows the camera to record moments that may well make her critics snicker, particularly now that Bristol is back in the limelight as an underdog contender on “Dancing With the Stars.” (Bristol first became famous during the 2008 campaign as the governor’s unwed and pregnant teenage daughter; she later led a high school abstinence campaign and is now identified on the dance show as a “teen activist.”)
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How’s That Outdoorsy Stuff Working for Ya?
Published: November 11, 2010
In the premiere Andy, Willow’s teenage friend, prepares to follow Willow upstairs to her bedroom. Ms. Palin squawks like a mother hen and rushes over to the baby safety gate on the steps. “See, this gate is not just for Trig,” she tells Andy. “It’s for no boys go upstairs.” When Andy tiptoes upstairs anyway — a move underscored with antic reality show music — Ms. Palin calls her daughter on her cellphone and orders them back down.
One day a hired seaplane lands on the lake at the back of their Wasilla house to take the family salmon fishing and bear watching. The Palins watch, awestruck, as brown bears lope, swim, growl, fight. At one point a bear seems on the verge of charging the boat, a danger that Ms. Palin says “keeps you on your heels.”
Watching the bears delights Ms. Palin, who refers to herself and other female candidates as “mama grizzlies.” She says, “It was amazing to watch this mama grizzly, brown bear, really, protecting her cubs and saying, ‘No one’s going to mess with my cubs.’ ”
Cubs are not always grateful. Piper, 9, confides, “My mom is superbusy, she is addicted to the BlackBerry.” Mimicking her mother’s thumb typing, she adds, “She’s like, ‘Hold on, I’ll be there in a second.’ ”
Perhaps Ms. Palin’s most impressive feat is climbing a glacier with a guide and her husband, a rock-climbing adventure that is obviously arduous and scary. She says out loud many times that she is afraid she can’t make it to the top. Viewers may fear another risk; her high-pitched voice is so piercing it could trigger an avalanche.
There are other dangers lurking back at the house, and those include the next door neighbor, the writer Joe McGinniss (“Fatal Vision”), who rented a house for a while to observe the Palins close up, so close up that Mr. Palin built a 14-foot fence to block his view.
But Ms. Palin is sometimes her own worst enemy, and she is not afraid even of that. Alluding to one of her most mocked mis-statements during the campaign, Ms. Palin poses in front of a mountain range and says, “You can see Russia from here,” then adds with an arch smile, “almost.” (No, Ms. Stanley, Tina Fey said that. SP said that Russia can be seen from Alaska, which is true.)
Sarah Palin’s Alaska
TLC, Sunday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
Produced for TLC by Mark Burnett Productions. Mark Burnett, Sarah Palin and Maria Baltazzi, executive producers.
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Ed Rollins to Palin - your no Reagan.
I don't know why she keeps showing up on Fox cable network. It must be a ratings thing. I don't know what she says that is ever different than what she already has said. She just rants on and on at a thousand miles per hour. I don't even waste my time listening to her. She has become a broken record that just won't stop.
I don't understand why people continue to listen to her over and over again. Am I missing something?:
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-12-01/opinion/rollins.palin_1_sarah-palin-vice-presidential-debate-john-mccain?_s=PM:OPINION
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Another take. It is not that I disagree with much of what she says - it is almost how she says it. She is like the nightmare spouse who just shoots off at the mouth (not like mine at all) and doesn't shut up driving everyone nuts. Whenever I hear her speak, after 30 seconds I find her extraordinarily annoying frankly. Except for her fan base I believe most other Americans do too.
****The qualities of Sarah Palin
A head for business, a natural communicator—and a disaster in waiting for the Republicans
Dec 2nd 2010 | from PRINT EDITION
SO WOULD President Sarah Palin have been able to prevent the embarrassment of WikiLeaks? You betcha. “Inexplicable,” was her first tweeted reaction to the affair: “I recently won in court to stop my book ‘America by Heart’ from being leaked, but US Govt can’t stop WikiLeaks’ treasonous act?”
Needless to say, the commentators she derides as the “liberal elite” and the “lamestream media” pounced upon this confusion of apples (Mrs Palin won a copyright case) and oranges (the federal government lacks the legal power to silence WikiLeaks) as further evidence, if such were needed, that the former governor of Alaska should never be trusted to lead the free world. They did the same last week, when she said in a radio interview: “Obviously, we gotta stand with our North Korean allies.” Mrs Palin’s occasional flubs make it easy to underestimate her. But opponents who dismiss her as an airhead do so at their peril.
Consider first her head for business. Mrs Palin has converted her two months of fame as John McCain’s running-mate in 2008 into a global brand and a fast-growing fortune. Her earnings are private, but her first book, “Going Rogue”, was a runaway bestseller and may have netted her $7m or more. Now “America by Heart” is flying off the shelves. She is said to earn about $100,000 per speech, and her multi-year broadcasting deal with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News reputedly earns her $1m a year. Millions of viewers are now glued to “Sarah Palin’s Alaska”, an air-brushed not-quite-reality television series in which she and her brood cavort with bears and exude familial wholesomeness amid Alaska’s magnificent snowbound panoramas. That is said to be bringing her another $2m for eight episodes.
Next, there is the politics. However telegenic and sassy she is, not even Mrs Palin could keep this glistening bubble of celebrity permanently aloft if it were not for the speculation that she hopes one day to be president. Here, too, she has shown a deftness of touch that only the most purblind critic would refuse to acknowledge. Her quixotic (at the time many said “flaky”) decision in the summer of 2009 to resign half-way through her term as governor has been brilliantly vindicated. Though now a private individual, holding no office and not yet formally seeking one, she has made herself one of the most powerful forces in the Republican Party just when its fortunes have rebounded.
This did not happen by accident. Mrs Palin has rare political qualities. She is bold: she embraced the tea parties well before their impact became obvious. She is innovative: she has perfected the art of using the new social media to reach over the heads of a hostile press. And for all that she lacks the fluency of a Barack Obama, she is a natural communicator. Her Facebook post on “death panels” altered the national debate on health reform. When she asked “How’s that hopey changey thing working out for ya?”, she encapsulated many people’s doubts about their president. Just one tweet (“Doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate”) galvanised opposition to the so-called Ground Zero mosque. She helped put ratification of the new START treaty on hold. She even turned the president’s articulateness into a weapon against him. “We need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law,” she told a tea-party convention in Nashville.
But can she become president?
That said, you do not have to underestimate Mrs Palin to recognise that it will be hard for anyone so divisive to win a presidential election. Mr McCain points out that Ronald Reagan, too, was accused of being divisive. But the Gipper was popular among blue-collar Democrats as well as his own party. In contrast, a recent poll found that the obverse of Mrs Palin’s stellar ratings among Republicans was that only 8% of Democrats had a favourable view of her. Another reported that 34% of Americans saw her “very unfavourably”. She says she can beat Mr Obama, but for as long as those numbers hold nothing would suit him better than for the Republicans to choose her as their nominee for 2012.
For the present it is her fellow Republicans—those who are seeking the nomination, that is—who have the greater cause for concern, if only because the attention the media lavish on the Sage of Wasilla drowns out their own messages. Nate Silver, a polling guru, notes that her search traffic on Google is 16 times that of Mitt Romney, 14 times Newt Gingrich’s and 87 times Tim Pawlenty’s. Rivals are loth to criticise her lest she accuses them of belonging to the party “establishment”, a high misdemeanour in these tea-driven times. When Barbara Bush, a former first lady, said she hoped the former governor would remain in the Alaska she appears to like so well, Mrs Palin responded immediately by lashing out at the party’s “blue-bloods”.
Whether Mrs Palin sincerely believes she can and should be president may not become clear for some time. Because her celebrity and income depend on the idea that she might run, she has every reason not to rule herself out of the race too soon. Since she is already famous, she does not have to declare early in order to build up the name-recognition that other contenders still lack.
This suggests that she could keep her party in a state of fevered expectation for months to come. And even if in the end she does not run, she will have an impact on the race’s outcome. In the primaries before the mid-term elections, Republican candidates learnt the value of an approving tweet from the patron saint of the tea-partiers—even though over a third of her picks then failed to win seats in Congress. Joe Scarborough, a television host and former Republican congressman, called this week on the party’s leaders to say in public what they all complain about in private: that she could devastate the Republicans’ cause in 2012. For some reason, none of them wants to speak up first.
Economist.com/blogs/lexington****
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CCP, I was wondering if it was her substance or her so-called Fargo / rural northern MN accent that is driving your Palin annoyance. I don't watch cable but why is she on? For Fox it is viewership. For Palin it is great money plus practice and exposure. For you, over-exposure. Don't underestimate her, she is the hottest political attraction going. This ride is now over 2 years so she is not just a flash. OTOH, she is the well known Republican losing the 2 way race with Obama. We know they are very aware of polls. Maybe she will take that information and remain a role player, not a national candidate.
I wrote previously that she had every right to end her governorship but then don't come back to us running for President saying you were an important governor, for part of a term. Yes that worked for Obama who left the senate to campaign without resigning, after no record of any significance. No one I know of is looking for another Obama. The path to high elected government office should be through proof of winning, serving and finishing other high elected offices along the way. If we are going to open up the search to pundits who never served, I have several others in mind.
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Good article. Good comment.
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The best thing Palin could do is replace Oprah on daytime TV. There she could have a tangible impact on the nation and spare us the 2nd and much worse term for Barry-O as resident of the white house.
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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/alexspillius/100017431/oprahs-show-a-new-job-for-sarah-palin/
Oprah's show: a new job for Sarah Palin?
By Alex Spillius World Last updated: November 20th, 2009
Sarah Palin is one of those people who makes her own luck. From Wasilla mayor to govenror to VP candidate in a few steps – it all just seems to happen for the gal from Alaska. But the great quandary over what to do next could now be solved: forget the White House, in 2011 an afternoon talk show slot is opening up on ABC, now that Oprah Winfrey is stepping down to manage her modest cable venture. And just a week after Palin opened her publicity tour on Oprah’s show; the timing could not be more apposite.
In 2012 the loss will be the Democrats’, not the Republicans’, for Palin as nominee would have all but guaranteed an Obama second term.
Palin is the perfect candidate to replace Oprah and even has a background in TV from her young days as sports presenter in Alaska. She is good-looking, charming and great at talking about herself. Her first guest, of course, has to be Katie Couric.
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"CCP, I was wondering if it was her substance or her so-called Fargo / rural northern MN accent that is driving your Palin annoyance. I don't watch cable but why is she on?"
The accent doesn't bother me at all. I've been to Fargo and like most midwesterners they seem to be friendly types.
She is appearing a lot on Hannity who promotes her like she will be the savior of the world and Greta who seems to love her. I guess they are counting on those few millions of viewers who apparently like listening to her to boost there ratings. But everytime I start to listen to her I feel compelled to change the station.
There is something very in your face about her with the shit eating grin, the four eyes, the never ending smart ass anit-democrat remarks, the endless platitudes about the Constitution, freedom, our founding fathers. After all is said and done I never know anything more after listening to her than I did before. She talks endlessly and says little.
Compare her to Newt who is a geniune thinker and intellect. Compare her to Bolton who I love to listen to. There is simply no comparison. I can't quite explain it frankly. Does any one else here watch FOX and thus get endless promotions of her understand or see and hear what I hear???
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I personally like her and enjoy how she enrages the left, but I fear her giving O-Barry a second term.
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***enjoy how she enrages the left***
Maybe that is it.
I agree with you and her ie. the "left", but,
***I fear her giving O-Barry a second term.***
as you imply she is only enraging or turning people off who are not on the same page.
We need someone who can appeal to at least the "independents" or swing voters (a better description).
I want more people to accept conservative/American ideals. I don't see her convincing anyone. Just being a angry mouthpiece for those of us who are already pissed off at the "left".
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Her voice irritates the hell out of my wife.
Like GM I certainly admire her enemies list. While she may not say much that is cutting edge (though her recent comments on QE2 were enough in front of the pack that a recent WSJ editorial complimented her on it) I like that she says it forthrightly with confidence and pride. I think she makes it cooler for women to be conservative. She has a very good ability to deflate with pithy soundbites.
Brit Humes current six part series on FOX on the history of the conservative movement (quite good by the way- recommended!) is currently at part four, which covers the Reagan presidency. Amongst the points well-made was that Reagan had a tremendous ability to take and hold the course with momentarily unpopular stands. Much of the Rep party was quite skittish or even hostile to his tax rate cuts for example, particularly around 1982 when the economy still had not recovered. Palin gives the impression of someone with a similar quality.
In contrast Gingrich, and regular readers of this forum will remember I strongly wanted him for president this past election, recently has shown signs of a life of punditry on FOX and elsewhere dulling his edge e.g. his backing that liberal in Republican clothing for Congress in upstate NY; hesitations over the Tea Party, etc.
All this said, I have considerable doubts about the wisdom of her as a candidate.
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The thing the swing voters want/need is someone actually able to do the job, someone with a real resume that doesn't have the embedded negatives of a Gingrich or Palin.
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And "able to do the job" includes life experiences that prepare one for what may be the toughest job on the planet.
Palin comes from being mayor of a town of 10,000, two years governing a state with a population less than one million, a VP campaign, and , , , tweeting. While I've no doubt this left her better prepared than BO (with her background dealing with the oil industry i suspect she would have handed the BP Gulf oil spill far better than BO) is it really enough?
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It's not. If Palin were the nominee, I assume that CCP would hold his nose and vote for Palin, but that won't win the election. We have to win over a large chunk of independents who will look at Barry and say "Well, at least he's the devil you know" if we don't provide someone who will impress them with intellect and proven ability.
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A recent segment of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” her live-action show on TLC, was preceded by a warning that parts of it “may be disturbing to some viewers.” Presumably this referred to scenes of Ms. Palin clubbing to death a huge halibut and then triumphantly holding up a still-beating halibut heart, images that probably did send chills down the spines of animal lovers and moderate Republicans. But no scene in the show is as disturbing as the way she uses it to enhance her political glow.
Sarah PalinThe eight hours of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” are a visually sumptuous — if occasionally bloody — marketing campaign for an ostensibly undeclared presidential candidate. They are yet another in a series of brilliant bypasses of conventional politics that may provide Ms. Palin with a legacy. Other candidates have found new ways to reach voters — Barack Obama’s e-mail fund-raising in 2008 comes to mind — but having one’s own hagiographic reality show is a chapter in an entirely new playbook.
And Ms. Palin is astonishingly good at turning every halibut clubbing and caribou shooting into an advertisement for her own ruggedness or a political parable. The program is theoretically nonpolitical and its producers have a blog intended to siphon off heated arguments among viewers. But having converted her lifestyle and family into political accessories, Ms. Palin never resists temptation when it comes along and the cameras are rolling.
Referring to the 14-foot wall that her husband built for protection from the journalist Joe McGinniss, who moved in next door, Ms. Palin says, “This is what we need to do to secure our nation’s border.” She says she loves that the liberals “get all wee-wee’d up” that her baby shower was held in a shooting range. And she exults that her teenage daughter Willow is gutting salmon instead of texting or partying, perhaps suggesting that her parenting skills are what the nation needs, too.
In the two years since her rocky vice presidential candidacy, Ms. Palin has become famously contemptuous of the “lamestream media,” which she has often described as elite and conspiratorial (against her and America’s exceptionalism). She would not be the first politician who has stumbled and then lashed at the press for its lack of balance. But the parallel structure Ms. Palin has created as an alternative to conventional scrutiny and campaigning has been remarkably effective.
She is a regular on Fox News and its affiliated radio shows, and her book tour (no questions from reporters, please) has taken her largely to Republican-leaning primary states. As a recent article in The New York Times Magazine documented, she has no need for an actual press staff and believes it is sufficient to communicate largely through Twitter and Facebook. And as long as she remains more provocative than substantive, her strategy works.
On Monday, at 3:17 p.m., she issued a Facebook broadside that blamed the Obama administration’s “incompetence” for the latest round of WikiLeak revelations. Within three hours, it was “liked” by more than 4,000 followers and picked up by scores of major news organizations and blogs, though its suggestion that the administration might have been able to stop the leaks was partisan wishful thinking.
“She tweets one thing, and all of a sudden you’ve got a room full of people that want to know,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, complained to The Times Magazine, referring to the White House press corps.
But Mr. Gibbs and his successors will probably have to get used to it. Ms. Palin will not be the last potential candidate to aim her political fire from a camouflage blind, and then retreat to a careful seclusion where only easygoing questions can be asked.
We now live in a world where a politician can be the executive producer of her own precampaign show. A world where a governor can quit her elected job and make far more money, and political headway, creating a television legend as America’s most fearless outdoorswoman and most encouraging mother to her brood of hunters and fishers. A world where millions of supporters flock to this portrait of a way of life that is radically different from the way most Americans now live and get some extremist politics mixed in with the supposed nostalgia. To paraphrase TLC, voter discretion is now advised.
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Anyone see that opinion piece by Aaron Sorkin attacking Palin? Perhaps he can get together with Obama, an eight-ball of coke and show what democrats do rather than shoot caribou.
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NY Times: "And as long as she remains more provocative than substantive, her strategy works."
She was out in front of that newspaper on MONETARY POLICY, not fashion trends. What a bunch of continuing BS. Crafty said, they struggle to deal with her. They also struggle with truth when it doesn't fit their storyline.
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The Times struggles to deal with anyone or anything foreign to their Manhattan cocktail party circles.
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2010/11/30/
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Very funny! The only thing stranger than the Palin Phenomenon is the obsession of her detractors. On my snowed-in day yesterday I wandered into a scary place called the Huffington Post. Their number one lead category was 'Palin'. Google 'Huffington Post' and Sarah Palin is the only person with a direct category link. Just like the last 2 years of Letterman, Palin is what sells on both sides of the aisle, like her or not.
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The MSM will never give her a fair shot. Anyone like her already has the deck stacked against them, unfortunately, she fcuked up early on and let them tear her up. She is, and always will be damaged goods as far as pres/vp.
Keep in mind that a good portion of the voters know what they know about current events from the Daily Show and late night talk show monologues. Before the last election, I spoke with a number of people that said they were voting for Obama and gave Palin as a reason why. When I asked why they did not like her, they often quoted lines that were never said by her, but by Tina Fey as Palin.
Can't fix stupid.
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http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/7715310-rumors-fly-as-bristol-palin-buys-arizona-home-photos
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They are sitting on some money and this is a small investment. Bristol I assume will keep riding her own career wave to see where it leads. Short plane ride or a 6 hour drive to LA. (What does a 4000 sq.ft. house in a nice part of L.A. cost?) For sure they needed a landing point in the lower 48 for the family. The Southwest makes sense, you don't dream of coming down from the tundra in winter to land in Iowa or the Dakotas and then hope for movie cameos and television appearances or whatever she has her eye on.
The house itself is a very frugal investment for big celebrities. Nothing at all like the McCains, or Kerry or even Obama's empty million dollar shack in Chicago. Probably a true investment of Bristol's new money with the father Todd being the main family financial adviser on it. For the exact median price of a home in America they got 4000 square feet, recently built, recently remodeled. Room for the whole family - I assume that is much bigger than the home in Wasilla. Property taxes a little over a hundred a month, I don't think you can't get an association fee at a condo for that, or one night in a hotel room.
Palin running for the McCain seat rumor made sense if it was coming up but he just won a 6 year term. He could step down and the R. Gov. could appoint Palin, but those pre-arranged deals sour quickly with voters.
Long story short, they bought a house - and it is not in an early primary state.
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By JAMES TARANTO
"At a time when there is virtually unanimous agreement that health care reform is needed in this country, it is hard to invalidate and strike down a statute titled 'The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,' " Judge Roger Vinson observed Monday in his ruling in Florida v. HHS, which did just that.
It would have been a lot harder had ObamaCare enjoyed wide political support. But it did not and does not. Americans never bought the bill of goods that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and their supporters in the formerly mainstream media tried to sell. A good deal of the credit goes to Sarah Palin, for coining the phrase "death panel" in an August 2009 Facebook post.
Four months later PolitiFact.com, a project of the left-leaning St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, named the phrase "lie of the year":
Her assertion--that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care--spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, "Death panels? Really?"
In truth, PolitiFact was more vulnerable to the charge of lying than Palin was, for its highly literal, out-of-context interpretation of her words was at best extremely tendentious. What she wrote was this:
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
Palin put the term "death panel" in quotes to indicate that she was using it figuratively. She was not lying but doing just the opposite: conveying a fundamental truth about ObamaCare. Proponents were describing it as a sort of fiscal perpetual-motion machine: We're going to give free insurance to tens of millions of people and reduce the deficit! As a matter of simple arithmetic, the only way to do that is by drastically curtailing medical benefits.
Associated Press
Keep your laws off her baby!
."Health care by definition involves life and death decisions," Palin wrote. ObamaCare necessarily expands the power of federal bureaucrats to make such decisions, and it creates enormous fiscal pressures to err on the side of death. Whether it establishes literal panels for that purpose is a hair-splitting quibble. By naming this "lie of the year," PolitiFact showed itself to be less seeker of truth than servant of power.
President Obama, meanwhile, treated Palin's criticism as a joke. As we noted at the time, he told a New Hampshire town meeting: "The rumor that's been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for 'death panels' that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we've decided that we don't--it's too expensive to let her live anymore." The transcript records that the audience laughed at this callous "joke."
The perpetual-motion claim wasn't the only deception at the heart of the argument for ObamaCare. Consider the individual mandate, whose unconstitutionality was the center of Judge Vinson's ruling. In a footnote, Vinson quotes a critic of the idea as observing, "If a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house." Guess who? CNSNews.com digs up the full context:
"Both of us want to provide health care to all Americans. There's a slight difference, and her plan is a good one. But, she mandates that everybody buy health care. She'd have the government force every individual to buy insurance and I don't have such a mandate because I don't think the problem is that people don't want health insurance, it's that they can't afford it," [then-Sen. Barack] Obama said in a Feb. 28, 2008 appearance on Ellen DeGeneres' television show. "So, I focus more on lowering costs. This is a modest difference. But, it's one that she's tried to elevate, arguing that because I don't force people to buy health care that I'm not insuring everybody. Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn't."
Obama ran for office on opposition to the individual mandate, then made it the centerpiece of his signature legislative initiative. Perhaps this should have been "lie of the year." At PolitiFact.com, it wasn't even a runner-up.
And what is the individual mandate, anyway? In September 2009, ABC News host George Stephanopoulos argued in an interview with the president that it is a tax increase. Obama strenuously denied it and indeed accused Stephanopoulos of dishonesty: "For us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. . . . George, you--you can't just make up that language and decide that that's called a tax increase."
By last July, the administration was--well, just making up that language and deciding that that's called a tax increase. As even the New York Times reported:
When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government's "power to lay and collect taxes."
And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.
Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.
Lie of the year? Nope, again not even a PolitiFact.com runner-up. The winner for 2010, announced Dec. 16, was "The Democrats' health care reform law is a 'government takeover of health care.' " This was a "lie," PolitiFact averred, because the government did not formally nationalize the health-insurance industry via the so-called public option.
The same day that PolitiFact was announcing its 2010 "lie of the year," an exchange in Judge Vinson's courtroom was giving the lie to it. As Bloomberg reported:
"We've always exercised the freedom whether we want to buy or not buy a product," Vinson told the Obama administration's lawyer.
[Justice Department lawyer Ian] Gershengorn said health insurance is "a financing mechanism," not a product. "It's not shoes," he said. "It's not cars. It's not broccoli."
As we wrote at the time:
Under the scheme envisioned by ObamaCare, in which insurers would be obliged to cover all comers, a medical policy would no longer be insurance--that is, a contract to indemnify the policyholder against risk. It would instead be, as Gershengorn describes it, a "financing mechanism" for medical services. . . . Because participation would be mandatory, the "premium," and not just the penalty for failure to pay it, would effectively be a tax.
In a famous 2003 video, Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, declared, "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care program." That is, Obama wished for a system of outright socialization of health-care costs, in which the government would pay for medical treatment using tax dollars. ObamaCare differs from such a system only in that ostensibly private insurance companies act as the government's middleman, collecting the taxes and paying the benefits.
"Government takeover," like "death panel," is a true description of ObamaCare's essence. These phrases are "inaccurate" only in that they cut through formal distinctions designed to deceive the public. (We wish we could use a barnyard vulgarity in place of the unwieldy clause "formal distinctions designed to deceive the public," but The Wall Street Journal is a family newspaper.)
"Death panel" was especially effective at cutting through the hockey. Lots of people warned about rationing, but, as PolitiFact grudgingly acknowledged, it was Palin's vivid language that "launched the health care debate into overdrive. The term was mentioned in news reports approximately 6,000 times in August and September, according to the Nexis database. By October, it was still being mentioned 150 to 300 times a week."
Many of these media mentions were disparaging, "raising issues," as PolitiFact prissily puts it, about "the bounds of acceptable political discussion." In other words, Palin's statement was widely propagated by journalists who thought it "unacceptable." Americans recognized the essential truth of Palin's words and strongly opposed ObamaCare.
Palin got the truth out with the help of journalists determined to bolster the deceptions at the heart of ObamaCare. She was instrumental in winning the political argument that looks increasingly likely to render ObamaCare's legislative victory a Pyrrhic one. Sarah Palin outsmarted the formerly mainstream media simply by being blunt and honest. That is why they burn with a mindless rage against her
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2011/05/27/palin-2012-just-got-more-likely/
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http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-may-31-2011/indecision-2012---driving-miss-crazy
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvTRvtzVpUo&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvTRvtzVpUo&feature=player_embedded
Having a posh Brit accent doesn't mean you aren't a moron.
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Sarah's writing skills
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/writing-analysts-claim-palin-writes-at-8th-grade-level/
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Right between the level of "I have a dream" and the "Gettysburg Address".
"exceeds that of most chief executives."
“She’s very concise. She gives clear orders. Her sentences and punctuations are logical,” said Paul Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. “She has much more of a disciplined mind than she’s given credit for.”
I've not known many 8th graders to write timely and insightful comment on monetary policy. Writing in clear, direct sentences makes sense to me. We all should do more of it.
Leaving unnecessarily during her first term is another thing. Puts her on a par with 2007-2008 Obama, inexperienced and largely unqualified. If nominated and running against 4 more years of leftism, I expect to be voting for her.
The media and public should be appalled at the lack of privacy even in official, behind the scenes, government work. Will we be seeing Rahm Emmanuel's work on the govt payroll in its entirety as well? How 'bout little Weiner? Equal protection is an idea that came and went some time ago.
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Listening to CNN bring up one particular email today as being very interesting. I thought ok here comes the hit. Surprise, shock!
Kyra Phillips who is an obvious liberal nanny on the cable nanny network actually discussed the email in a *complementary* fashion.
It shows Palin to be a sensitve thoughtful person.
http://us4palin.com/cnn-palin-emails-reveal-a-hard-working-governor/
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I have not had a chance to read this for myself yet, but it comes from a usually reliable friend.
=======================
Sarah Palin actually had it right. The reporters who claimed she didn't know her
history were WRONG:
www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/paul-reveres-ride.html
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I have not had a chance to read this for myself yet, but it comes from a usually reliable friend.
=======================
Sarah Palin actually had it right. The reporters who claimed she didn't know her
history were WRONG:
www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/paul-reveres-ride.html
**If feminism was actually about supporting and empowering women and gender equality, Palin would be a feminist hero.
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/06/06/historians-agree-palin-was-right-about-revere/
Historians agree: Palin was right about Revere
posted at 9:25 am on June 6, 2011 by Ed Morrissey
One if by land, and two if by sea … and then what? According to historians interviewed by the Boston Herald, Paul Revere then warned the British not to challenge a roused and armed populace. That came as news to many observers who had rushed to criticize Sarah Palin for her response to a gotcha question at the Old North Church:
Sarah Palin yesterday insisted her claim at the Old North Church last week that Paul Revere “warned the British” during his famed 1775 ride — remarks that Democrats and the media roundly ridiculed — is actually historically accurate. And local historians are backing her up.
Palin prompted howls of partisan derision when she said on Boston’s Freedom Trail that Revere “warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.”
The first to dispute Palin’s critics was … Paul Revere himself. In his own account of the ride, written twenty-three years later, Revere recounts how the British captured him, and how he attempted to dissuade the British from advancing. Revere warned that he had roused the local militias and that there would soon be 500 or more armed citizens coming together to repel the British.
A Boston University history professor told the Herald that Revere did indeed warn the British as well as the Americans earlier in his ride:
Boston University history professor Brendan McConville said, “Basically when Paul Revere was stopped by the British, he did say to them, ‘Look, there is a mobilization going on that you’ll be confronting,’ and the British are aware as they’re marching down the countryside, they hear church bells ringing — she was right about that — and warning shots being fired. That’s accurate.”
Of course, Revere wasn’t planning on getting captured. He and others riding to the alarm (William Dawes and Samuel Prescott) wanted to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams of British action first, and rouse the militia second. Dawes and Prescott managed to elude the British and complete the mission, but Revere was captured. Furthermore, his warnings sufficiently rattled the British that they let him go — but without his horse. He returned on foot to Lexington, where he managed to hide a trunk with Hancock’s letters to keep it from being captured, but missed the battle.
Andrew Malcolm notes the “faux gaffe” and gives a history of such in the media:
This phenomenon is actually not a new one in American politics, although its immediate spread is obviously hastened by the Internet. Speaking of which, Al Gore did not invent it. Nor did he claim to, as often as you’ve heard otherwise.
In 1999, the hapless former journalist, who should have known to make a better word choice, told CNN that in Congress he “took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
Democrat Gore never used the word “invented.” That was part of another willful misinterpretation that fit expectations of Gore’s boasts and was gleefully spread by opponents as further proof of his unseemly hubris. It lives on to this day.
Perhaps you remember how one day during a photo op President George H.W. Bush was overheard asking a store checkout clerk how this price scanner thing worked?
That quote was immediately transmitted as proof of how disconnected that Republican chief executive was, that he had no knowledge of something as ordinary as a checkout scanner.
The fact is, asking such inane and often obvious questions as “what are you doing here?” is a bipartisan ploy used by politicians to fill the awkward time void they are hanging around someone working while photographers snap their photos several hundred times.
Frankly, I had forgotten much of the history of Revere’s ride until this incident, and I had to look it up for myself to recall what Palin meant by her response. Tom Burnam covered it succinctly and accurately in his indispensable Dictionary of Misinformation, a book I have had on my shelf for more than 30 years. If all people know of Revere is Longfellow’s poem, which is what the reaction to Palin’s remarks seem to show, then they know far less than they think.
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www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/paul-reveres-ride.html
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S18gsZ37QXY&feature=player_embedded
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What a terrible scene.
I wonder how the guy knew who she was.
I would never recognize her.
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Well, she was there with a camera crew and she was on "Dancing with the Stars" last year (which I am guessing is big in the gay community) and infuriated many on the left by being voted to the next round far beyond her actual talents (i.e. Sarah Palin fans voted for her regardless of her performance).
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"which I am guessing is big in the gay community"
Was that guy gay?
I think I did hear a comment about him bitching aboug her mother being anti-gay.
I think most of us are not interested in bothering gays and don't care what they do on their time.
But I am tired of their shoving their agenda down our throats. I am not for gays adopting children. I am not for state sponsered marriage. I am not for an enitre division of the DOJ being set up for thier rights and of "hate crimes".
I know most Americans agree. As for the APA claiming there is not pscyh disorder with it - it is clearly not a natural lifestyle and not meant to be - ever hear of procreation. The mental health organizations are filled with gay activists and it is a poltical opinion not a medical one. That said I otherwise do not want to bother them or interfere with their lives. If they don't hurt anyone, then live and let live like the old saying.
As for Sarah the hit job on her is done with astoundingly cruelty. And all allegations. Who knows if any of it true. So many on the left hate her there would be no problem finding people to say anything.
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Not worth my time to double to double check, but I thought I heard him say he was gay. Anyway, I'm with you on the rest of it.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/i-apologize-bristol-palins-bar-heckler-buckles-under-negative-media-coverage-plus-bristol-responds/#comments
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Sarah Palin will be co-hosting NBC's "The Today Show" on Tuesday:
www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/03/31/sarah-to-katie-game-on
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/noam-chomsky-sarah-palin-was-right-about-obama/
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http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/07/26/sarah-palin-we-weren%E2%80%99t-allowed-tell-truth-about-obama-2008-campaign-and-now-we-have
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We know Noam Chomsky isn't going to go out and vote for Palin if she should ever run. Surely he thinks Obama is not enough of a radical liberal not the other way around from Palin's perspective.
We are forever reading about the split in the Republican party but we never hear about any in the Democratic side. The left seems very good at coming together and voting like a large machine/block.
Like a steamroller.
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http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/noam-chomsky-sarah-palin-was-right-about-obama/#.UkWZwKLD_cc
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-awLzndo7Qg
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Palin might be an excellent hosts of a show that is the answer to Bill Maher.
Her calling is political humor with a conservative twist and a liberal bite.
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That is an interesting idea 8-)
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/04/03/putin-asks-palin-who-to-invade-next-in-hilarious-tonight-show-sketch/
The social implications of The Tonight Show to do this bit are rather intriguing , , ,
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/26/palin-waterboarding-how-wed-baptize-terrorists-her/
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www.sarahpalinchannel.com
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There is a little humor and irony in the fact that the RINOs and decaying establishment need the the face of the tea party to step in and rescue their losing campaign to win the Senate after viciously fighting off a tea party challenges in hotly contested primaries. Sarah takes one for the team.
http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2014/09/23/Palin-to-campaign-with-Roberts-in-Kansas
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Sarah Palin Loses Special Election to Fill Alaska House Seat
By Mimi Nguyen Ly September 1, 2022 Updated: September 1, 2022biggersmaller Print
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Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin lost to Democrat Mary Peltola on Wednesday in a special election to fill Alaska’s only U.S. House seat in a surprising defeat.
Peltola, a former state lawmaker, was the winner according to the Alaska Division of Elections. She defeated Palin by three percentage points at 51.47 percent; Palin received 48.53 percent.
Peltola will finish the remainder of the term of Republican Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), which expires at the end of this year. Young left the seat vacant when he died in March this year at the age of 88.
Peltola will later face re-election on Nov. 8. Palin and Republican Nick Begich III are expected to vie for the House seat for the next two years.
The election marked the first time the state used a ranked-choice system where voters list candidates in order of preference on the ballot. To be declared the winner, a candidate must clear 50 percent of the vote.
mary peltola
U.S. House candidate Mary Peltola speaks with reporters at her campaign party at 49th State Brewing in Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 16, 2022. (Kerry Tasker/Reuters)
She is the first Alaska Native to represent a state where almost 20 percent of the population is indigenous, the highest proportion in the United States. She will also be the first woman to hold the seat. Young had held the seat for 49 years and became the longest-serving Republican in the history of the House.
During her campaign, Peltola ran as “Alaska’s best shot at keeping an extremist from winning,” according to her campaign website. She also said she was “the only candidate in this race who isn’t a multi-millionaire.”
Palin’s campaign for the House seat was her first run for public office after she was tapped by John McCain as his running mate in the presidential election in 2008. The two lost to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama and vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Reuters contributed to this report.