Palin phenomenon

[G M]

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.

[ccp]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[DougMacG]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[SB_Mig]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

I have my questions about Sarah, but she remains someone keeping an eye on.  She certainly has the right enemies

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.

[DougMacG]

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.

[ccp]

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.****

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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."

[ccp]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

 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?

[DougMacG]

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
-------
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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

Page 2 of 2)


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.”

[Body-by-Guinness]

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=

[Crafty_Dog]

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?

[Crafty_Dog]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/12/sarah-palin-conan-obrien-surprise-nbc.html

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSdFIDygFwM&feature=related

[DougMacG]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

Sarah definitely pulls people in.

I wonder how Bristol is going to do on DWTS? 

[ccp]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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.”)

=======

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.

[ccp]

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

[ccp]

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****

[DougMacG]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

Good article.  Good comment.

[G M]

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.

[G M]

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.

[ccp]

"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???

[G M]

I personally like her and enjoy how she enrages the left, but I fear her giving O-Barry a second term.

[ccp]

***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".

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[G M]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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?

[G M]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[G M]

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.

[DougMacG]

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.

[G M]

The Times struggles to deal with anyone or anything foreign to their Manhattan cocktail party circles.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2010/11/30/

[DougMacG]

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.

[G M]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/7715310-rumors-fly-as-bristol-palin-buys-arizona-home-photos

[DougMacG]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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