Sarah Palin Watch

Palin’s Cunning Sleight of Hand

2010-02-16T13:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/opinion/14rich.html

February 14, 2010
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By FRANK RICH

Liberals had a blast mocking Sarah Palin last weekend when she was caught addressing the Tea Party Convention with a cheat sheet scrawled on her hand. Even the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, couldn’t resist getting into the act and treated a White House briefing to a Palin hand gag of his own.

Yet the laughter rang hollow. You had to wonder if Palin, who is nothing if not cunning, had sprung a trap. She knows all too well that the more the so-called elites lampoon her, the more she cements her cred with the third of the country that is her base. Her hand hieroglyphics may not have been speaking aids but bait.

If so, mission accomplished. Her sleight of hand gave the anti-Palin chorus another prod to deride her as an empty-headed, subliterate clown, and her fans another cue to rally. The only problem is that the serious import of Palin’s overriding political message got lost in this distracting sideshow. That message has the power to upend the Obama presidency — even if Palin, with her record-low approval ratings, never gets anywhere near the White House.

The Palin shtick has now become the Republican catechism, parroted by every party leader in Washington. Their constant refrain, delivered with cynicism but not irony, is this: Republicans are the anti-big-government, anti-stimulus, anti-Wall Street, pro-Tea Party tribunes of the common folk. “This is about the people,” as Palin repeatedly put it last weekend while pocketing $100,000 of the Tea Partiers’ money.

Incredibly enough, this message is gaining traction. Though Obama remains more personally popular than the G.O.P., Republicans pulled ahead of the Democrats in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, among others, in a matchup for the 2010 midterms.

This G.O.P. populism is all bunk, of course. Republicans in office now, as well as Palin during her furtive public service in Alaska, have feasted on federal pork, catered to special interests, and pursued policies indifferent to recession-battered Americans. And yet they’re getting away with their populist masquerade — not just with a considerable swath of voters but even with certain elements in the “liberal media.” The Dean of the Beltway press corps, the columnist David Broder, cited Palin’s “pitch-perfect populism” in hailing her as “a public figure at the top of her game” in Thursday’s Washington Post.

That Republican leaders can pass off deceptive faux-populism as “pitch-perfect populism” is in part a testament to the blinding intensity of the economic anger and anxiety roiling the country. It also shows the power of an incessant bumper-sticker fiction to take root when ineffectually challenged — and, most crucially, the inability of Democrats to make a persuasive case that they offer anything better.

The Obama White House remains its own worst enemy. No sooner did Palin’s Tea Party speech end than we learned of the president’s tone-deaf interview expressing admiration for “very savvy businessmen” like Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. With that single remark, Obama ingeniously identified himself with the most despised aspects of both Washington and Wall Street — the bailout and the bonuses. He still doesn’t understand that to most Americans, Blankfein is a savvy businessman only in the outrageous sense that he managed to grab his bonus some 17 months after the taxpayers had the good grace to save him from going out of business altogether.

Instead of praising bailed-out bankers, the president might have more profitably instructed his press secretary to drop the lame Palin jokes and dismantle the disinformation campaign her speech delivered to a national audience. Palin, unlike Obama, put herself on the side of the angels, railing against Wall Street’s bonuses and bailout, even though she and John McCain had supported TARP during the campaign. Palin also bragged that she had “joined with other conservative governors” in “rejecting some” stimulus dollars when in reality she rejected only a symbolic 3 percent of those dollars — soon to be overruled by the Alaskan Legislature, which took every last buck.

This disingenuousness is old hat for Palin, who hired lobbyists to pursue $27 million in earmarks while serving as mayor of the town of Wasilla (pop. 6,700) and loudly defended her state’s “bridge to nowhere” until her politically opportunistic flip-flop. What’s new is the extent to which her test-marketed dishonesty has now become the template for her peers in the G.O.P. “populist” putsch. Adopting her example — while unencumbered by her political baggage — the party is exploiting the Tea Party movement to rebrand itself as un-Washington while quietly conducting business as usual in the capital.

There’s “no difference” between G.O.P. and Tea Party beliefs, claims the House Republican leader, John Boehner. Not exactly. The three senators named “porkers of the month” for December by the nonpartisan Citizens Against Government Waste were all Republicans: Richard Shelby of Alabama, Susan Collins of Maine and Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Shelby is so unashamedly addicted to earmarks that he used a senatorial “hold” to halt confirmation votes on 70 Obama administration appointees until his costly shopping list of Alabama pork projects was granted. Or so he did until his over-the-top theatrics earned him unwelcome attention and threatened to derail his party’s pious antispending posturing.

While more brazen than his peers, Shelby is otherwise typical of them. Jonathan Karl of ABC News last week unearthed photographs of various G.O.P. congressmen posing in their districts with stimulus checks that they had publicly opposed. The Washington Times uncovered more than a dozen other Republican lawmakers who privately solicited stimulus money from the Department of Agriculture while denouncing the stimulus to their constituents and the news media, often angrily.

Even the G.O.P./Tea Party heartthrob of the hour, Scott Brown, is not the barn-coat-wearing populist he purports to be. In her speech, Palin saluted him as “just a guy with a truck” who was doing “his part to put our government back on the side of the people.” In reality Brown’s Massachusetts Senate campaign benefited from a last-minute flood of contributions from financial industry donors — with 80 percent of the haul coming from outside the state. It says all you need to know about our politics that his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, matched him by holding a fund-raiser largely sponsored by lobbyists for the health care and pharmaceutical industries.

Now that he’s in the Senate, Brown is likely to junk the truck and side full time with Wall Street against Main Street. To do otherwise would be to buck his party’s entire establishment. Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, has already signaled that he’ll fight the Obama administration’s push for a “Volcker rule” to rein in too-big-to-fail financial behemoths. The conservative message guru Frank Luntz has drafted a memo instructing G.O.P. legislators on how to defeat a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency while camouflaging themselves as populist foes of the very banks and credit card companies that that agency would regulate. That’s a neat trick — Luntz’s nonpolitical clients include Merrill Lynch and American Express — and it helps explain why Wall Street is now tilting its contributions to Congressional Republicans for 2010.

Yet it’s the Democrats who are now most linked to corporate interests, thanks to all the backroom deals over health care. More Americans have heard of the Medicaid money shoveled to the Democratic senators Ben Nelson (the January “porker of the month”) and Mary Landrieu in exchange for their health care votes than of Thad Cochran’s $8.75 million earmark for the “Exchange With Historic Whaling and Trading Partners Program” (a proposed cut in the Obama budget). The Republicans are so disciplined at claiming the fiscal-hawk high road that even Jenny Sanford, the wronged first lady of South Carolina, is still defending her husband, Mark, as an uncompromising defender of “hard-earned tax dollars” in her new tell-all memoir, “Staying True.” Though she gives us the skinny on her husband’s philandering, she never mentions the subsequent revelations that expenses for his trysts and other personal travel were billed to taxpayers.

Before he was done in by his Argentine firecracker — and before the emergence of Palin — Sanford was floated by The Wall Street Journal editorial page and others on the right as an ideal ticket mate for John McCain in 2008. As a congressman he had slept on a futon in his office and voted against a breast cancer postage stamp as wasteful “feel-good legislation.” As governor, he refused to take stimulus money despite the fact that South Carolina had the nation’s fastest-growing unemployment rate. When an unemployed man from Charleston caring for a seriously ill mother and sister called in to C-Span last February begging Sanford for help, he didn’t budge. But he did volunteer to pray for the caller and his family.

So it went with Palin last weekend. Her only concrete program for dealing with America’s pressing problems came in the question-and-answer session. “It would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country,” she said, “so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again.” That pretty much sums up her party’s economic program, at least: divine intervention will achieve what government intervention cannot. That the G.O.P. may actually be winning this argument is less an indictment of Palin than of Washington Democrats too busy reading the writing on her hand to see or respond to the ominous political writing on the wall.

Palin: Global Warming Just "Snake Oil"

2010-02-11T14:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/09/politics/main6189211.shtml

REDDING, Calif., Feb. 9, 2010
Palin: Global Warming Just "Snake Oil"
Former Alaska Governor Dismisses Climate Change Research at Calif. Logging Conference

(AP) Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin called studies supporting global climate change a "bunch of snake oil science" Monday during a rare appearance in California, a state that has been at the forefront of environmental regulations.

Palin spoke before a logging conference in Redding, a town of 90,000 about 160 miles north of the state capital. The media were barred from the event, but The Associated Press bought a $74 ticket to attend.

Palin said California's heavy regulatory environment makes it difficult for businesses to succeed, a point that is shared by many business leaders in the state.

She criticized what she said were heavy-handed environmental laws. As Alaska governor, for example, she said she sued the federal government to overturn the listing of polar bears as a threatened species.

As Alaska North Slope wells dry up, the state is examining offshore drilling for oil and natural gas reserves. Protections for polar bears under the Endangered Species Act could thwart those explorations, according to Palin and her successor, Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell, who has picked up the cause.

Palin told the audience that filled the 2,000-seat Redding Convention Center that she disagreed with the science the government used to support the listing.

"We knew the bottom line ... was ultimately to shut down a lot of our development," she said during her 40-minute speech, which was followed by a 20-minute question-and-answer session. "And it didn't make any sense because it was based on these global warming studies that now we're seeing (is) a bunch of snake oil science."

Palin urged the federal government to allow states to make such decisions for themselves.

Her comments were well-received by the audience members, many of whom brought copies of her book, "Going Rogue," in hopes of getting Palin's signature. A second Palin speech in Redding scheduled for the evening was sold out.

The events were hosted by the Sierra-Cascade Logging Conference.

Palin made her appearance in a state that often has led the nation on environmental regulations, from restricting automobile pollution to greenhouse gas emissions.

The state's Global Warming Solutions Act, which passed in 2006 and has been championed by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, requires greenhouse gas emissions statewide to be cut to 1990 levels by 2020.

But that and other state environmental laws have come under increasing attack from Republican state lawmakers.

Last week, the secretary of state cleared the sponsors of a ballot petition seeking to suspend the 2006 law until the state unemployment rate falls to 5.5 percent and stays there for a year. Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has criticized the law as being too much of an economic burden while businesses are trying to recover from the recession.

Palin also weighed in on the Obama administration's efforts to secure a climate change treaty during the international conference held recently in Copenhagen.

"Yeah, I don't think much of it," Palin said.

She said it was "providential" that President Barack Obama did not return from Denmark with a clear victory after questions arose about figures used in the scientific studies to promote conservation.

"The weather will not change with the proposals," she said.

Palin struck a sympathetic tone with the crowd, saying she shares the timber industry's worries of cumbersome lawsuits by environmental groups.

"California is tough in this respect," Palin said. "Man, it is expensive to do business here and to get anything done ... I do think there's hope though, because more Americans are becoming aware of the absurdity of such a situation. Maybe California is just a little behind the times."

Palin said she believes there's a way to harvest timber without damaging the environment but has grown frustrated by environmental activists who want to "lock up the land."

"We sought to protect the diversity of our forests and our wildlife while sustaining jobs and subsistence for residents of our state," Palin said of her efforts as governor in trying to develop a vision statement for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Conservation groups and the U.S. Forest Service have fought for decades over management of the country's largest national forest.

She defended herself as a conservationist.

"We really do love our trees," Palin said. "I named my daughter Willow. Isn't that granola enough for them?"

The Beginning of Sarah Palin's Presidential Campaign?

2010-02-08T14:30:00.000-08:00

Did We Just Witness the Beginning of Sarah Palin's Presidential Campaign?
By John Nichols, TheNation.com
February 8, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145589/

Sarah Palin fed the Teapartisans in Nashville an appetizer of warmed over one-liners about taxes, spending and deficits that add up to "generational theft."

Then she gave the meat eaters what they paid for.

The star of the National Tea Party Convention demanded that Attorney General Eric Holder be bumped from his position.

She demanded White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel be bumped from his position.

She demanded Barack Obama should be bumped from his position.

She objected to Obama as a president and a person.

She talked tough about terrorists.

She objected to Obama and talked tough about terrorists at the same time.

She did not seem to recognize the irony inherent in her applause line about Obama and the so-called "war on terror": "To win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law."

While anyone who is familiar with Palin's track record might be amused by the notion that a woman who quit her executive position as governor to write a fine Alaskan whine of a book would dare accuse someone else of falling short in the leadership department, the delegates to the National Tea Party Convention cheered on cue.

They got the message.

Palin may not know that Africa is a continent.

She may not know the difference between World War I and World War II.

But she knows she wants to be seen as a commander-in-chief-in-waiting.

And that is exactly how the Tea Partisans saw her in Nashville.

In fact, they were so convinced that they shouted "Run, Sarah, Run!"

The 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee's seat-of-the-pants positioning of herself as a potential contender for the country's top job is advancing to a new stage.

Palin left the echo chamber at Opryland and headed to the echo chamber that is Fox News for some Q&A. For once, she was frank about her ambitions.

Would she consider running for president in 2012?

"I think that it would be absurd not to consider (running in 2012)," she explained on "Fox News Sunday."

Indeed, Palin suggested, she will enter the race if she thinks it is "the right thing to do for the country."

That's about as close to an announcement of candidacy as you can get without the actual tossing of a hat.

But then things got interesting.

Palin wouldn't say whether she might run as a Republican or as the candidate of a new Tea Party Party.

She did, however, describe the Tea Partisans as "beautiful" and suggest that their movement is "quite reflective" of Republican values.

But then the woman who leads in at least some polls of potential Republican primary voters said that, like the Democrats, the Republicans "have both lost their way in some respects."

Confused? Don't be. This is Sarah Palin, the woman who declared she was "not a quitter" as she quit as governor.

Precise language, like precise strategy, is not her forte.

Palin practices politics as spectacle.

The Tea Party convention was a good show.

But the real fireworks came in that Fox appearance.

Palin may not fully recognize what she has done -- or maybe she does.

But wherever the line between Palin's fantasies and political reality may be drawn, her "I'll run if it's the right thing to do for the country" line makes her more than a mere shouter from the sidelines. Palin is now moving front and center as a potential challenger to Obama.

That may scare Republicans, at least Republicans who worry about their party's prospects in 2012, just as it may delight Democrats.

But the fact is that Palin owned the spotlight over the weekend. And no other Republican, no other conservative, is anywhere near the stage.

John Nichols is The Nation's Washington correspondent.

Palin Holds Door Open to Presidential Run, Slams Obama

2010-02-08T07:24:00.001-08:00

This was a no-brainer! Sounds like she's been campaigning already!

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/02/07/palin-holds-door-open-to-presidential-run-slams-obama/

Palin Holds Door Open to Presidential Run, Slams Obama
POSTED:02/7/10

Sarah Palin said Sunday she would run for President if she believed it was "the right thing to do" for the country and her family, and tore into President Obama for acting like he believed Americans should "shut up" and accept his policies

Asked on Fox News Sunday "why wouldn't you run for President," Palin said, "I would. I would if I believed that that is the right thing to do for our country and for the Palin family. Certainly, I would do so."

"I think that it would be absurd to not consider what it is that I can potentially do to help our country," Palin said. "I don't know if it's going to be ever seeking a title, though." Referring to her new role as a Fox News analyst, she said, "It may be just doing a darn good job as a reporter or covering some of the current events."

But Palin's answers on a possible presidential run have been carefully hedged. A Fox News reporter asked her Saturday whether she would "jump in the ring and challenge Obama" if she felt "the time was right."

"I would be willing to if I believe that it's right for the country," she said. "Today I see many, many other men and women across our country who are in as strong or stronger position than I am to take on the White House and if they're in a better position than I in three years, I'll support them."

Palin, fresh off an appearance at the Tea Party movement's first national convention, made clear that she would actively get involved in party primary contests during the midterm elections just as she did last year in supporting a Conservative Party candidate in upstate New York over what she considered a too-liberal Republican, and as she is doing now in backing Rand Paul for the GOP Senate nomination in Kentucky. Paul is the son of Texas Rep. Ron Paul.

Palin said she wanted the "competition (in primaries) to allow the cream of the crop to rise."

She acknowledged that "there are candidates who will not seek my support because some will perceive me as being too polarizing and if they're in more liberal districts or states they won't want someone like me who has been unfortunately by the media put in a box ... So some people will shy away from my support that I could offer. But those who recognize that I do have strong opinions, a very strong independent streak in me and a lot of common sense and if they ask for my help, I'm gonna give it to them."

On Fox News Sunday, Palin said the Tea Party movement had grown because "both major parties, the D's and the R's, have both kind of lost their way in some respects."

"When the GOP strays from the planks in the platform, a people's movement like the Tea Party movement is invited in to kind of hold these politicians accountable again and remind them of their constitutional limits there on the federal level," she said.

Asked to evaluate Obama's presidency so far, Palin said, "He has some misguided decisions that he is making that he is expecting us to just kind of sit down and shut up and accept, and many of us are not going to sit down and shut up."

Palin said Obama has a "general persona, I think ... when he's up there at a ...lectern ... and he is telling us, basically, 'I know best. My people here in the White House know best, and we are going to tell you that yes, you do want this essentially nationalized health care system.' And we're saying, 'No, we don't.' "

Palin also called for the resignations of Attorney General Eric Holder and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. She criticized Holder for the administration decision to try accused terrorists in civil courts rather than before military tribunals. She said Emanuel should resign for describing as "retarded" liberal activists who planned to air ads attacking conservative Democrats.

Emanuel has apologized, but Palin, whose son has Down's Syndrome and who has highlighted the special needs issue, said it was not enough.

However, she stood by conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh who said in response to the uproar over Emanuel's remarks, "Our political correct society is acting like some giant insult's taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards. "I mean these people, these liberal activists are kooks."

Palin said Limbaugh was satirizing political correctness. "I didn't hear Rush Limbaugh calling a group of people whom he did not agree with 'f'ing retards,' she said. "And we did know that Rahm Emanuel -- it's been reported -- did say that. There's a big difference there."

As for liberal activists, Palin said, "They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh."

Sarah Palin Hijacks The Tea Party Movement

2010-02-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

http://politics.nashvillepost.com/2010/02/07/the-begining-of-the-end-sarah-palin-hijacks-the-tea-party-movement/

Beginning Of The End: Sarah Palin Hijacks The Tea Party Movement
By Kleinheider
Posted on February 7, 2010 at 7:33 am

The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience.

Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.

The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.

This new tea party bears no resemblance to the one that began a year ago as a reaction to the collapse of our financial system and the subsequent bailout. That movement of ragtag and unorganized libertarians, independents and conservatives was something new and unique. An authentic protest movement angered not just by the new President, Barack Obama, who had presided over the bailouts but the president who started the ball rolling and whose incompetence had led to the crisis in the first place, George W. Bush.

The people we saw on the steps of Legislative Plaza and county courthouses across the state last year weren’t “movement conservatives.” Certainly the movement conservatives were there at those protests but the tea parties were much bigger in size, scope and concept than just traditional modern conservatism reheated. Last night, the professional conservatives fixed that for good.

For over a year the media has struggled to try and define just what exactly the movement was. Now they have a definition.
Sarah Palin.

Palin, while explicitly saying the movement had no leader, implicitly offered herself up as one. After this speech, which was widely covered on the internet and carried on television, the tea party movement and Sarah Palin will be inextricably intertwined.

So with the spotlight on her and the attention of the curious media surrounding her what did she present as a tea party agenda? What did she discuss?

Ronald Reagan, national defense and superficial deficiencies of the current democratic occupant of the White House. Wow. In all honesty, the speech could have just as easily been given in 1994 as in 2010 which, of course, was the last time Republican operatives and professional conservatives sought to exploit an authentic populist movement of the center-right.

Ronald Reagan? Are you serious? Three times the name was invoked during the speech. Sure, it was his birthday but it serves to remind us what kind of crowd this was in front of those C-Span cameras.

These weren’t the people who were out protesting. This weren’t regular folks. This was the same old network of conservative hacks, flacks, publicists and hangers-on. This was Conservative Inc.

Ronald Reagan has nothing to do with the tea party movement. Nothing. Ronald Reagan is the past. The GOP’s past, no less. The tea party movement was supposed to be the future.

The fact that Palin even has the temerity to position herself as a leader in the movement (and despite her protests that’s exactly what she was doing) is offensive to any student of very, very recent political history. Palin, as mavericky and rogue as she likes to paint herself, was the Vice-Presidential nominee of the Republican Party in 2008. She ran with John McCain and defended the Bush legacy. A project she continued last night in front of a faux-tea party audience.

In her remarks, Palin praised the Senator from Arizona and chastised the current President for blaming the past one for his problems. Now, I don’t know every tea partier out there but I do know a few and I don’t remember any of them having a whole lot of good to say about President Bush or John McCain. While they don’t have much positive to say about Barack Obama there no love for George Bush either.

And when did the tea party movement get a foreign policy? I didn’t put a clock on it but the first portion of Palin’s speech seemed very heavy on the neoconservatism.

Palin expressed dismay about the fact that President Obama spent only “9 percent” of the State of the Union on foreign policy and stated that Americans “deserve to know the truth about the threats we face and what the administration is or isn’t doing about them.”

She talked about “homicide” Bombers and the slammed the administration of its handling of the man who plotted to take down a Detroit airliner on Christmas Day.

“Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at grave risk because that’s not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this,” she told the assembled at Opryland. “They know we’re at war. And to win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”

Judson Phillips and Sarah Palin

Palin talked about standing up to Iran, defending Israel and making the world safe for Democracy. All noble goals, I suppose, but what was she doing justifying and perpetuating the foreign policy of George Bush at a tea party convention?

The tea party I’m familiar with was concerned more about the collusion of big business and big government than the War in Iraq. The tea party I’m familiar with was more concerned about rejecting the bailout of Wall Street while looking for ways reinvigorate the economy of Main Street than looking for Al-Qaeda. The tea party I’m familiar with seemed more concerned about restoring the Republic at home than Democracy abroad.

Almost from start finish, Sarah Palin outlined an agenda that either ignored or de-emphasized the issues and the spirit that the tea parties were founded on.

Sure, there was some of the old school tea party rhetoric in there for flavor but, for a keynote address to a movement that at its inception was very radical, there was nothing radical about Sarah Palin’s speech. It was derivative circa 2004 neoconservatism as far as I could tell.

But the media now have their definition of what it means to be Tea Party. This convention gave them simplistic nativism, birtherism, media bashing, homophobia, and a heavy does of neoconservative foreign policy.

That is the image of tea partydom that Judson Phillips poured out to the eager media this weekend and is now percolating through the many channels of mass and new media.

By Monday afternoon, it will begin to harden and the tea party movement will be Sarah Palin’s movement.

And that is no tea party at all.

E-mails reveal Todd Palin had big hand in Alaska politics when Sarah Palin was governor

2010-02-07T02:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2010/02/05/2010-02-05_emails_reveal_todd_palin_had_big_hand_in_alaska_politics_when_sarah_palin_was_go.html

Lauren Johnston
NY Daily News
Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:54 EST

It seems Todd Palin was doing more than racing snowmachines while wife Sarah Palin served as Alaska governor. The "first dude," as he was known to constituents, apparently had a hand in several high-level government decisions.

Todd Palin monitored union contract negotiations, was involved in a judicial appointment and had a say in state board appointments, according to more than 3,000 pages of e-mails obtained by msnbc.com and NBC News.

The communications were released by the state of Alaska under its public records law. Officials offered 1,200 separate e-mails and withheld 243, claiming Todd Palin is protected as an unpaid government advisor.

The unreleased e-mails apparently detail Todd Palin's communications with top state officials on everything from gas pipeline bids to per diem payments for the governor's travels. Also among the withheld emails: an explanation of the protocol for replying "to media questions about Todd Palin's work and potential conflict of interests."

The messages also offer a look into the couple's personal lives - including growing tensions between the high-profile pair and the press.

"That gossip crap bugs me," Sarah Palin writes in one, referring to an Anchorage Daily News story on repairs to the governor's mansion.

Another foreshadows a future political firestorm. The Palins zapped messages back and forth to plan a rare date night.

They saw Juno - the surprise hit film about a teenage girl dealing with an unplanned pregnancy - 10 months before their unmarried daughter Bristol, then 18, gave birth to son Tripp.

Palin, Visible and Vocal, Is Positioned for Variety of Roles

2010-02-07T02:50:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/06/us/politics/06palin.html

Mark Leibovich
The New York Times
Fri, 05 Feb 2010

Without leaving home, Sarah Palin will be able to reach much of her political base, courtesy of a soon-to-be-built television studio in her living room paid for by her newest media patron, Fox News. From her house in Wasilla, Alaska, Ms. Palin also sends missives to 1.3 million Facebook "fans," writes newspaper columns, Tweets and signs copies of her book for donors.

She reads daily e-mail briefings on domestic and foreign policy from a small group of advisers who remained loyal after her tumultuous vice presidential campaign in 2008. And though she has fashioned an image as an antiestablishment conservative, she also speaks regularly to a bipartisan nobility of Washington insiders who have helped enrich her financially and position her on the national political stage.

Ms. Palin is becoming increasingly vocal and visible, with a series of events scheduled this weekend: delivering a paid speech to the Salina, Kan., Chamber of Commerce on Friday night, headlining a national Tea Party convention in Nashville on Saturday and appearing on behalf of the re-election campaign of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas in Houston on Sunday.

This latest foray "Outside" (Alaskan slang for the rest of the country) culminates a week in which she achieved a typical run of multimedia ubiquity from Wasilla: She e-mailed a high-profile endorsement of Dr. Rand Paul in a Republican Senate primary in Kentucky. She called - via Facebook - for the resignation of the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, for using the term "retarded," and announced - via a column in USA Today - that she would attend a Tea Party gathering next month in Searchlight, Nev., the hometown of the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid.

Her growing cast of advisers and support system could be working in the service of any number of goals: a presidential run, a de facto role as the leader of the Tea Party movement, a lucrative career as a roving media entity - or all of the above. Ms. Palin represents a new breed of unelected public figures operating in an environment in which politics, news media and celebrity are fused as never before. Whether she ever runs for anything else, Ms. Palin has already achieved a status that has become an end in itself: access to an electronic bully pulpit, a staff to guide her, an enormous income and none of the bother or accountability of having to govern or campaign for office.

"Few public figures not in office have leveraged the nexus between media and political positioning as Sarah Palin has," said the Washington lawyer Robert Barnett (who negotiated, among other things, Ms. Palin's lucrative deal with Fox News, an arrangement with the Washington Speaker's Bureau that pays her a reported $100,000 a pop, and a deal with Harper Collins to write her memoir, Going Rogue, which has already earned her upward of eight figures).

Beyond what her Fox-watchers and Facebookers can see, Ms. Palin is quietly assembling the infrastructure of an expanding political operation. In addition to her longtime spokeswoman, Meghan Stapleton, Ms. Palin's closest aides include members of her former running mate's staff. Her current operations chief, Jason Recher, was a loyal lieutenant on Ms. Palin's campaign plane - loyal to a point where some top McCain aides believed he was encouraging Ms. Palin's "rogue" behavior. (According to internal campaign e-mail messages provided by a former top McCain aide, campaign officials considered firing Mr. Recher in October 2008 over "unacceptable" and "unprofessional" conduct during a rough swing through New Hampshire and Maine.)

"I wouldn't exactly call it a badge of honor to be thought of negatively by some of these people," Mr. Recher said. "But the bottom line is, I was incredibly proud to serve John McCain, and I couldn't be happier to be part of Sarah Palin's world now."

Ms. Palin has also enlisted a small team of policy counselors to guide her through the substantive areas in which many deemed her to be lacking in 2008. Randy Scheunemann, a foreign policy adviser to Mr. McCain who also clashed with the campaign leadership, got $30,000 from Ms. Palin's PAC in the second half of 2009. He helped write a speech for Ms. Palin in Hong Kong last September and also contributes to a daily briefing prepared by Kim Daniels, a Maryland lawyer who did legal work in Alaska for the McCain campaign. (She is now advising Ms. Palin on domestic policy issues and received $21,000 from SarahPAC in the second half of 2009.)

People with knowledge of the daily briefings say they are conducted by phone or e-mail. They typically include information on the day's news, material that could be relevant to an upcoming speech, or guidance about a candidate Ms. Palin might endorse. Mr. Scheunemann in particular is known as a conservative hawk on foreign affairs, in keeping with what many Palin-watchers have viewed as her steady shift to the right.

"She used to be a moderate Republican in Alaska, but I think all of these attacks have hardened her and made her absolutely more conservative," said John Coale, a Washington lawyer and longtime Democratic fund-raiser who helped Ms. Palin set up her political action committee.

Mr. Coale, the husband of the Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, said the crowds that swarmed Ms. Palin's campaign and book events have provided comfort amid so much criticism.

"I think there have been times during all the attacks when she thought, 'This is just too much,' " Mr. Coale said. "But now I think it all makes her more determined. Whatever she's doing now, it feels like a calling to her."

Along with her paid advisers, Ms. Palin has been in regular contact with a kitchen cabinet of Washington power brokers: Mr. Barnett, a Democrat, on business and media decisions, and Fred Malek, an aide to Presidents Richard M. Nixon and the elder George Bush, on political matters.

When asked by The New York Times for others to speak to about Ms. Palin, her spokeswoman, Ms. Stapleton, mentioned the Republican media adviser Mary Matalin (who has been in sporadic contact with Ms. Palin's camp) and Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary for George W. Bush (who seemed barely to know her).

As she jumps more into the national political swamp, Ms. Palin is proving as divisive in Republican circles as she was within the fractious McCain campaign.

Her scheduled appearance in Nashville on Saturday incited cries of "sellout" from other Tea Party factions that objected to the high cost of tickets to the convention ($549). Many of her "establishment" supporters were confounded by her decision to endorse Mr. Paul, who is facing Secretary of State Trey Grayson in the Kentucky Senate primary and who is the son of Ron Paul, the former presidential candidate of libertarian bent.

"I'm disappointed by her endorsement of Paul," said William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and one of the conservatives credited with "discovering" Ms. Palin in 2007. "But they always disappoint you."

Republican candidates have alternately pleaded for her support and avoided her like frostbite. Rep. Roy Blunt, for instance, a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, has lobbied for Ms. Palin to appear on his behalf (to no avail, so far), whereas Scott Brown, the new Republican senator from Massachusetts, claimed he had never spoken to her before later acknowledging that an election-night phone call from Ms. Palin had "slipped his mind."

In some ways, Palin-watchers say, the question of Ms. Palin's ambitions and abilities remain as much a mystery now as when she first stormed the national consciousness 18 months ago. They warn against any notion that she has any grand plan beside keeping faith that God would help her recognize "the next open door" (a favorite Palin refrain).

"I think if Sarah has a passion, it's that she really believes that there is a silent majority out there that she wants the folks in Washington to know about," said Kristan Cole, a friend in Wasilla.

Ms. Palin, who declined to comment for this article, is scarcely seen around her hometown these days, said residents of the so-called Duct Tape Capital of the World. And since leaving office last year, she is silent on state political matters.

"She has expanded her house and turned it into a compound," said Rebecca Braun, who edits the nonpartisan Alaska Budget Report. "She is basically invisible in Alaska but as big a celebrity as Princess Di everywhere else."

Palin wants Rahm Emanuel fired

2010-02-03T13:34:00.000-08:00

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/02/02/palin-wants-rahm-emanuel/?fbid=6lKV7pV4Ry0

February 2, 2010
February 2nd, 2010

Palin says Emanuel should be fired over a recently reported comment.

(CNN) – This time, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has gone too far, Sarah Palin says.

The former Alaska governor is calling on President Obama to fire his notoriously coarse top aide after a report in the Wall Street Journal last week quoted Emanuel as referring to liberal groups in August who attacked the president's health care plan as "F-ing retarded."

In a posting on Facebook, Palin says the language is not only "caustic [and] crude" but deeply offensive to those with disabilities. She also compares the choice of words to that of the "N-word" in reference to African-Americans.

"His recent tirade against participants in a strategy session was such a strong slap in many American faces that our president is doing himself a disservice by seeming to condone Rahm's recent sick and offensive tactic," Palin wrote.

"Just as we'd be appalled if any public figure of Rahm's stature ever used the "N-word" or other such inappropriate language, Rahm's slur on all God's children with cognitive and developmental disabilities – and the people who love them – is unacceptable, and it's heartbreaking," Palin also wrote in the post Monday evening.

Palin's youngest child, Trig, was born with Down Syndrome in April, 2008.

Special Olympics Chairman Tim Shriver has also taken issue with the language, sending a letter to Emanuel last week asking him to join his organization's campaign to end the use of the word.

The White House has not commented on Emanuel's reported language.

Sarah Palin’s PAC Spent $47,777 on Sarah Palin’s Book

2010-02-01T16:45:00.000-08:00

Do you think the publisher gives her a discount?

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/02/01/sarah-palins-pac-spent-47777-on-sarah-palins-book/

Tana Ganeva at 12:07 pm
February 1, 2010 REPLIES: 12

According to the website of Sarah Palin’s political action committee, the former Alaska governor has committed herself to putting America back on the “right road.” A special letter from Sarah on the eve of the publication of her book (the intellectual roadmap for this endeavor) says, “We need to get back on the right road. In order to progress, we must return to our founding principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and strong national defense.”

To that end, SarahPAC is devoted to ” …. supporting fresh ideas and candidates who share our vision for reform and innovation.”

Yet according FEC filings highlighted by the National Journal’s Hotline, Palin’s PAC spent more money on Palin’s “Going Rogue” than on conservative candidates:

The papers filed over the weekend show SarahPAC spent $47,777 on copies of “Going Rogue” during the last 6 months of the year. Meanwhile, she handed out just $43K in donations to candidates seeking federal office.
The PAC bought the books from HarperCollins, Palin’s publisher. The FEC reports show Palin has been purchasing the book to send to donors, some of whom got a copy after contributing a certain amount to the PAC.
No, seriously though. Palin is just concerned about the future of the country.

Sarah Palin’s Latest Disaster: Tea Partiers Demand Refunds for Palin Speech

2010-01-27T17:25:00.000-08:00

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/01/27/sarah-palins-latest-disaster-tea-partiers-demand-refunds-for-palin-speech/

Tana Ganeva
January 27, 2010

Sarah Palin gets paid over a hundred thousand dollars to show up places and tell people all about human nature and Milton Friedman and the future of conservatism. Next month, Palin will collect $115,000 exploiting the momentum of the Tea Party movement at the first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, according to internal documents obtained by Mother Jones magazine. Attendees are expected to shell out $549 for the privilege of hearing Palin say things she’ll say on Fox News all the time.

But as a Mother Jones investigation reveals,

… the tickets for the Palin banquet aren’t selling—and some conservative activists who have already paid to attend are now demanding refunds. With the controversial event shaping up to be a potential flop, some Tea Partiers are urging Palin to cancel her speech to avoid a humiliating public relations disaster.

An activist who quit the organizing committee in protest over the price of attendence told reporter Stephanie Mencimer that most of the tickets to hear Palin speak have not been sold. Mencimer tested that claim by trying to buy tickets for the convention; she had no trouble obtaining 10.

In the past month the convention has sparked division among Tea Partiers. Not surprisingly, the organizers’ decision to charge attendees $549 to celebrate a movement whose identity centers on victimhood and anti-elitism proved unpopular.

The convention was decried as more proof that the GOP is hijacking the movement. Revelations that the organizer planned to turn a profit, in part by exploiting Tea Partiers’ infatuation with Palin, didn’t help.

The sequel no one saw coming: Sarah Palin to campaign with McCain

2010-01-22T14:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/DC-Decoder/2010/0120/The-sequel-no-one-saw-coming-Sarah-Palin-to-campaign-with-McCain

Sarah Palin announced Wednesday that she will campaign for Sen. John McCain, her former presidential running mate, as he bids for another term in the Senate. She'll also stump for conservative up-and-comer Rep. Michele Bachmann and Texas Gov. Rick Perry in early 2010.
By Peter Grier Staff writer
posted January 20, 2010

Washington —
Sarah Palin: best-selling author, new Fox News correspondent, and, indisputably, the Republican Party’s endorser-in-chief.

As Decoder predicted last November, the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate has become a hot ticket on the GOP hustings. Candidates are competing to see who can win Palin’s coveted nod of approval. (Plus her appearance at their fundraisers, of course.)

Her status as the Republican Party’s top draw may have become official on Wednesday with the announcement that in late March she will campaign with Sen. John McCain, who’s bidding for a fifth six-year term.

Remember all that sniping between anonymous aides about who was responsible for the loss, and whether Ms. Palin was on a mental walk-about prior to her debate with Joe Biden, and other stuff like that? Well, we’re not here to talk about the past. Let’s get the band back together!

“I’m looking forward to getting back on the campaign trail with my former running mate,” Senator McCain said in a statement, adding that she “energized our nation and remains a leading voice in the Republican Party.”

McCain’s campaign bank account surely will be energized by Palin’s swing through Arizona. She is scheduled to attend a private fundraising event for the Arizona senator on March 26, with a public appearance, most likely a rally, the following day.

On her Facebook page, Palin announced Wednesday that she will also be campaigning for Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) of Minnesota – an outspoken (very outspoken) favorite of conservatives – and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is facing a primary challenge from Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.

Is she going to Massachusetts? New GOP star Scott Brown won on Tuesday, so a Palin endorsement might not be strictly necessary at the moment, but wouldn’t the telegenic fomer Cosmo model (that’s Brown) and Palin look great together on a podium?

2012 – it’s only two years away. Just saying.

Sarah and the Spiraling Sewer of Regressive Deceit

2010-01-18T11:33:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Sarah-and-the-Spiraling-Se-by-David-Michael-Gree-100116-297.html

January 16, 2010
By David Michael Green

I hope you're sitting down for this one. It's now been revealed that Sarah Palin is absolutely clueless about both international and domestic politics. Shocking, eh?

You remember Sarah, don't you? She's the one regressives gleefully championed just a year ago as the greatest thing since sliced bread, the person most qualified to be Vice President of the United States, just a step away from the presidency.

Turns out no one in America knew better how utterly bogus that claim was than the people who were making it. The latest revelations on this subject come from Steve Schmidt, the McCain-Palin campaign manager, and the guy who originally championed Palin for the VP nod after the ultra-right told McCain he couldn't have his buddy Joe Lieberman on the ticket after all.

Here's what Schmidt is now saying about Palin as she was being prepped for her debate appearance: "She knew nothing". A bit different from what we were hearing from him during the campaign, isn't it?

And when Schmidt says "nothing', he means NOTHING. She didn't know about World War I. She didn't know about that obscure event, World War II. She didn't know about the Fed. She couldn't tell you the difference between North and South Korea. She kept insisting that Saddam Hussein did 9/11. Her son in the military was about to be shipped off to Iraq, and she couldn't say who he'd be fighting there. She was so well acquainted with American politics that during rehearsals she kept referring to her debate opponent, a longtime prominent fixture in Washington, as a certain "Senator O'Biden", hence the real reason for the "Can I call you Joe?" ploy at the beginning of the debate.

Funny thing is, it was easy then to see what a complete and utter lie Palin was, from top to bottom. Easy, that is, if one was willing. But you took a lot of crap for stating the obvious. Emperors don't really like it so much when you point out that they're naked. But anyone who saw the Katie Couric interview, for example, could see how completely two-dimensional and absolutely false was the notion that this person was remotely ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States, especially when the heart in question belonged to an old man with some serious medical history.

How does this happen? How does a presidential bid based on a lie that is simultaneously so manifest and so magnificent in scale nevertheless manage to generate 59,934,814 votes amongst the supposedly sentient occupants of the richest and most powerful country of the world, here in the twenty-first century, no less?

It's quite astonishing, really. But there's a simple answer. The lie of Palin's competence could only be sustained (and only for some people) by piling it on top of a whole litany of other lies.

Welcome to the spiraling sewer of regressive deceit.

The most proximate lie to the one asserting that Palin was ready to be president was the one in which the McCain team assured us they knew what they were talking about. In fact, they had almost no idea who Palin was. Indeed, they were the first among us to learn what a disaster she really was. But only after they'd already picked her.

They didn't know that previously because Lie Number Three they hadn't vetted her anywhere near properly. As the new book "Game Change", by well-regarded mainstream journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann reveals, the campaign came up with her at the last moment, didn't interview her husband or her allies or enemies in Alaska before choosing her, and didn't even send someone up there to investigate her background before the selection. In short, they didn't do any real due diligence in the five whole days they devoted to the project.

Lie Number Four revolved around what happened to anyone who had the temerity to question whether Palin was anything remotely like what she was being presented to the American people as. Palin was a complete unknown to almost all of the country, and it was absolutely natural and proper that, at a very minimum, basic introductory questions should be asked of her. But that, of course, could rapidly turn problematic, as it did. I had the gut sense at the time that they had gamed this out in advance, figuring out how to turn this massive liability into an advantage. In any case, they immediately flipped the logic on its head, so that anyone who asked the most innocuous question of or about Palin became some sort of misogynist, anti-Alaskan, mom-hater, thus turning the whole affair into a story about the people legitimately checking out Palin, rather about than the candidate herself, and thus also scaring off a lot of the mainstream lackey wimps who call themselves journalists.

Couric's simple question about what journals Palin read was the classic example. Not only was it a common sort of query that candidates get asked all the time, but it was especially appropriate for anyone (like all of America, for example) who wanted to know what made this person who was completely new to them tick. As Schmidt himself now admits, it was in no way any sort of "gotcha' question, as she and her camp and her supporters angrily screamed at the time. Quite the opposite. She was asked some simple questions in order to get a sense of who this new face to most voters might be. But she was quickly revealed to be an idiot. Therefore the big lie had to be trotted out to change the story. Poor Sarah. Poor chief executive of one of America's fifty states. Poor ferocious hockey mom. Poor potential president who might one day have to take on Vladimir Putin or Hu Jintao or al Qaeda. Poor abused Sarah. Monsters like Katie Couric were brutalizing her by asking her outrageous questions, such as, "What do you read?"

Which brings us to Lie Number Five, that of regressive competence. Right-wingers love to tell us how pragmatically competent they are. Governor Palin mocked Barack Obama for being a mere "community organizer'. No doubt she preferred MBA president George W. Bush as a better model. You know, the guy who took more vacations than any other president in history. The guy whose administration did wrong everything imaginable that an administration could do wrong, all within eight years time. Lie Number Five is that these regressives are tough, pragmatic, business-hardened, smart, efficient managers who know how to get the heckuva-job-Brownie done. If the job were telling lies, I'd have to agree. Otherwise, the truth is it turns out that they're disastrously incompetent.

Lie Number Six is that McCain was "out of the loop' in the vetting process (as if that would exonerate him, anyhow). Matt Lauer pressed McCain on this question the other day, and the senator trotted out every ploy in the Politician's Master Manual for Epic Evasion, trying to avoid exposure of his crime. Here's how Politico reports that little tête-à-tête:

"Pressed by host Matt Lauer how the GOP presidential nominee wouldn't know about the vetting of his own running mate, McCain said: "I wouldn't know what the sources are or care.' Instead of addressing the charges in the book, the senator repeatedly said he was "proud' of Palin and his campaign -- the same refrain he's kept up since he lost the election as Republicans and even some top members of his own campaign team have criticized the polarizing former governor. But Lauer didn't drop the issue and, in continuing to ask McCain about Palin, drew a flash of the senator's famous temper. "I just spent my time, Matt, over where three Americans were just killed in Afghanistan,' McCain said. "OK?' he asked the morning show host. When Lauer tried to continue, McCain interrupted. "I am not going to spend time looking back at over what happened over a year ago when we've got two wars to fight, 10 percent unemployment in my state and things to do,' he said. "I'm sorry, you'll have to get others to comment.'

Why is McCain so testy about this? Why will he not comment on something he obviously knows about intimately? Why is he hiding behind three dead GIs to avoid the question? Why does he bully his interviewer? Why does the man who based his whole political life on his distant past refuse to talk about events from little more than a year ago?

The answer, of course, is Lie Number Seven, and it's a whopper. McCain won't talk because to do so would be for him to reveal that he committed an act of treason (and I choose my terms carefully here) in choosing Palin. The truth is, McCain willingly and knowingly endangered the country, purely for his own personal benefit. This man who never let up in reminding us all of the vital importance of national security issues put someone on his ticket who was so obscenely incompetent to run the country that she couldn't even pass a sixth grade history class, and he did it for one reason only: because he wanted the personal glory of being president, and he thought she could draw votes. If selling out your country for personal gain doesn't define treason, then I don't know what does. You don't get more obvious examples than this.

Ah, but it gets so much deeper as we descend through the regressive spiral of lies. Because what McCain did in this case is what regressives do all the time. Any honest assessment of contemporary American politics would immediately reveal that more or less everything the Republican Party (and now most of the Democrats as well) does today is treason of this sort. Lie Number Eight is that they actually care about security. Or freedom. Or religion. Or guns. Or who you get to sleep with or marry. The truth is that these are almost entirely diversionary ploys to make sure that you don't notice their real purpose, which is to abet the oligarchy in looting every dollar possible from America and Americans.

And these diversionary tactics of the regressive elite work so well because of Lie Number Nine regarding those they readily manipulate. All the nice folks on the right will claim that their shock troops are rationally deciding what's best for America in determining their allegiances and their votes, just like the Founders intended. But this is nonsense. Sarah Palin has shown herself to be a boob of first proportions, an even bigger one than George W. Bush. In both cases, however, their supporters love them even more for it. These politicians play perfectly to the insecurities of right-wing voters, who respond intensely to the emotional content of their rhetoric. This is the politics of resentment, and political figures who are (or can appear to be) exceptionally ordinary are only more revered, not less, for the big finger they supposedly send to so-called liberal elites.

All of which continues to explain one of the biggest lies of our time, the notion that regressives/Republicans are serious about national security, while progressives/Democrats are not. Leave aside that WWI, WWII, the Korean War, The Vietnam War and the Cold War were all originally launched by Democratic presidents. Leave aside the fact the Barack Obama supposedly the great wimpy apologist for America abroad is massively increasing the American military presence in Afghanistan. And leave aside the crucial fact that belligerence does not necessarily equate to security in fact, it often produces quite the opposite effect. Even putting all of that to the side, the notion that someone whose mind is a complete blank slate on history and foreign policy to the extent that she didn't even know who her own son would be fighting in Iraq would be the right person to put in the White House is part of an enormous deceit that has been propagated for decades now. The latest regressive trope that there was never a terrorist attack on George W. Bush's watch recently articulated by Dana Perino, Mary Matalin and Rudy Giuliani is only the most recent and most astonishing part of this long-term big lie, Number Ten on the Hit Parade. The right will keep us safe. Except all the times it doesn't.

We could go on and on here. Palin said god wanted her to run for the vice-presidency, for example, just like Bush claimed that Ol' Big Beard told him to invade Iraq. My own conversations with Monsieur Yahweh are how should I put this? somewhat less frequent than are those of folks amongst the regressive ranks. But next time we chat, I'm definitely gonna ask him why he wrecks his own reputation by publicly backing such serious losers. After all, if Palin is right, her claim is that god wanted her to run for the vice-presidency ... and then lose. Well, at least Bush's Iraq adventure did less damage to the Big Guy's street cred, right? Oh, never mind.

The thing is, with the right, it's all lies, as deep as you go. It has to be, because, standing alone, each of these individual claims are nutty to the point of embarrassment. LOL!

Sustain them with a whole litany of supporting lies, however, and they become merely absurd.

Bolster them with all manner of deceit, and they're reduced to being only dangerous.

So what if a President Palin wouldn't know the difference between North and South Korea? She'd be surrounded by a bunch of really good advisors who'd make sure she dropped the nukular bomb on the right Korea, wouldn't she?

Uh, well... Remember the last time we heard that one?

Hint: The advisors were named Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell.

Lady BlahBlah

2010-01-17T10:55:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/opinion/16blow.html?th&emc=th

January 16, 2010
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Lady BlahBlah
By CHARLES M. BLOW

I have often accused Sarah Palin of having more fight than strategy in her. But I must concede that her decision to become a contributor to Fox News is a shrewd one. Touché, Barracuda.

Here’s why:

1. She’s made for television.

She’s telegenic. She’s never speechless. She has a gift for talking a lot while saying nothing. And, she has one of the best poker faces in the game — smiling and winking while bobbing and weaving, spouting all manner of nonsense to conceal when she’s nonplussed.

2. There’s no better fit than Fox.

It’s a friendly forum in which to hone her sound bites, learn to parry tough questions and answer easy ones, and to bone up on, well, pretty much everything. Sure, she’ll flub some facts, and she’ll take a drubbing for it. But beating up on her often backfires. The more she takes a punch and cheerfully recovers, the stronger she appears.

And, if she decides to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, and all indications are that she will, this perch will give her another leg up on her Republican rivals. She continues to command the spotlight while they dance in the dark.

3. The timing is impeccable.

There is now a bubbling discontent on the right and, in particular, among whites, which is aimed at President Obama.

According to an analysis of New York Times and CBS News polls, Obama has the lowest approval rating among whites at the end of his first year in office than any president in the 30 years that The Times and CBS News have collected such data. And the gap between Obama and the others is significant, ranging from 10 to 36 percentage points.

Furthermore, a Quinnipiac University poll, released on Wednesday, found that most whites think that Obama’s first year as president has been mainly a failure. A plurality of whites even said that Obama has been a worse president than George W. Bush.

If indeed being Negro-lite made Obama palatable to white voters, as Senator Harry Reid was spanked for saying, that charm has worn off. Whites are now fuming at him.

Palin’s chipper visage, baseless certitude, utter obliviousness and unwavering belief in her own destiny make her an ideal vessel for this mounting white discontent. It’s perfect: blind faith meets blinding frustration. For an image of what this looks like, simply recall her rallies from the previous election.

(For the record, according to the Nielsen Company, more than 95 percent of the viewers of the Fox News Channel are white.)

This move could put Palin in a much better position to become the Republican nominee. The race for the nomination may not be given to the slick or to the strong, but to this fame monster who seems to have the stamina to endure until the end. (Sigh.)

The Danger of Sarah Palin

2010-01-15T14:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2010/01/obama-republicans-palin-party

Andrew Stephen
New Statesman
Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:23 EST

With unemployment at 10 per cent and rising, the ultra-conservative "Tea Party" movement is galvanising Republicans and hurting Obama. And Sarah Palin is its lodestar.

It's good to be back. I began my sabbatical from these pages 16 months ago, disenchanted with Obamania, the 17-vehicle Cheney motorcade that held me up every morning on Massachusetts Avenue and the increasingly pathetic George W Bush. How distant those days now seem. Ted Kennedy's oratory still regularly soared around a Senate that was split equally between Republicans and Democrats, water-boarding was in full swing in Guantanamo, and a wilting Senator John McCain, already 72, was the only alternative to Barack Obama to become the 44th president of the United States.

Today, the Democrats have a filibuster-proof majority of 60 in the Senate (technically 58, plus two independents who invariably vote with the Democrats), and with it, the potential to sweep through legislation as historic as the Civil Rights Act 1964. But after all the utopian, Obama-inspired promises made during the election campaign, the only bill of note they have so far managed to pass is an $871bn health insurance reform - one that still needs to be thrashed out with a sceptical House and will not take effect until 2014.

Changing tides

And Obama himself? I'll resist the temptation to say, "I told you so." But countless election-winning promises - such as his undertaking to shut down Guantanamo by the end of this month - have evaporated into thin air during what, predictably, turned out to be a lacklustre and conventionally right-wing first presidential year. True, he won the Nobel Peace Prize (for not being George W Bush, I suspect), but then he also despatched 47,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan. I'll say no more.

The beneficiaries of the post-Obamania lassitude, amazingly, are turning out to be the Republicans. Rudderless, leaderless and practically broke, they drift helplessly around the political doldrums of early 2010; the coffers of the Republican National Committee plunged from an already measly $22.8m a year ago to $8.7m last November. But at the beginning of the year, Gallup found that a majority of Americans now consider themselves to be what are euphemistically known as "conservatives".

Polls - including a recent survey by the consistently reliable Rasmussen Reports, which had the Republicans 9 points ahead of the Democrats, nationwide - suggest that in the November midterm elections the Republicans could grab back as many as 40 of the 435 House seats and at least one or two governorships and (most crucially of all) destroy the Democrats' filibuster-proof Senate majority. This alone has major implications for Obama: even if he has the political will to do so, it would be significantly harder for him to push through any of his promised dramatic "change" policies during the second half of his first (and last?) term in the White House.

There is speculation that Ted Kennedy's old seat of Massachusetts, held by him since 1962, could fall to the Republicans. Voters in the state that gave rise to the epithet "Massachusetts Liberal" now oppose Democrat health plans by 47 to 41 per cent - and yet Obama carried Massachusetts by 26 points.

The moderate Republican candidate, 49-year-old Scott Brown, is closing in on his Democratic opponent, the state's popular (and populist) attorney general, Martha Coakley - and one poll (but only one so far, mind) actually has him inching ahead. The Democrats are so worried that they are sending Bill Clinton to rally the jaded local party.

The political conundrum is that the Democrats are now suffering the fallout from Bush's woeful economic policies and tax cuts. Nobody can blame Obama for the resulting deep recession (although some do), but his $787bn bailout of the banks and ailing car industry in February last year at last gave Republicans the ammunition they had always lacked against the unattackable Obama: that he was a wimpy "big-government socialist", ready to dole out billions of dollars of taxpayers' money.

Palin's progress

The result, encouraged by ever-willing far-right agitators such as Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, has been the creation of the so-called Tea-Party movement - named after the quintessentially American, anti-British, anti-taxes and anti-big government Boston Tea Party revolt of 1773. Early next month, none other than the 45-year-old Palin - an ambitious lady whom you dismiss lightly at your peril - will reportedly earn a six-figure sum as the keynote speaker at the first conference of a new political entity called the "Tea Party Nation" (TPN), at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville.

"We believe in limited government, free speech, the Second Amendment [the right of Americans to carry guns], our military, secure borders and our country," is TPN's one-sentence manifesto. These words are well-chosen triggers to capture the 57.4 per cent of discontented Americans who think that their country is on the "wrong track" (as opposed to only 35.5 per cent who think it's on the right one).

If this sounds like a joke, it isn't. Palin, usually mindful of what she perceives as her need to cultivate the Republican establishment if she is to achieve the unthinkable and become the party's presidential candidate in 2012, turned down an invitation to speak at the more conventional Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington.

The fledgling TPN is run by two rather dodgy Republican lobbyists. (One of them is Howard Kaloogian, who tried to pass off a photograph of Istanbul as being an image of peaceful Baghdad streets when he was running for the House in 2006.) Should the TPN continue to gain traction, expect more Republican heavyweights, such as Marco Rubio of Florida and Gary Johnson of New Mexico, to move in and take over its leadership.

For Palin, highlighting the TPN and snubbing the CPAC was a politically logical calculation: an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that 41 per cent of Americans now support the TPN, compared with 35 per cent who prefer the Democrats and 28 per cent the traditional Republicans epitomised by the CPAC. She has also decided to speak at the 2010 Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans in April.

So who is leading the Republicans these days? The answer: nobody. The former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is the current favourite to be their presidential candidate in 2012, followed by the former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, Palin (formerly governor of Alaska) and two current governors, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota (note that, unlike in the case of Obama, there are no senators in the running), as well as a handful of the usual suspects. All except Palin are keeping a relatively low political profile.

The closest the Republicans have to a leader is Michael Steele, the eccentric chairman of the Republican National Committee. "I'm the guy they're afraid of," he boasts. "I'm a Tea Partier, I'm a grass-roots-er." He predicts that the Republicans will regain complete control of Congress in November, especially if voters read his new book, Right Now: a 12-Step Programme for Defeating the Obama Agenda. "I'm the chairman. Deal with it," is how he brushes off his many critics.

The blurb on the inside flap of Steele's book (now competing for hearts and minds with Sarah Palin's Going Rogue) urges Republicans to rise up against the Obama administration's "attempts to resurrect a discredited brand of extreme liberalism". The publishers succinctly sum up Steele's agenda even further: "The American people don't want socialised health-care 'reform', invasive 'green' initiatives and burdensome new taxes, and Republicans in Washington have to start listening."

They probably will, too, what with all the plotting Tea Partiers, unemployment at 10 per cent and rising, and the potentially incendiary anger that is sweeping across the country and making America's discontented masses ripe targets for the far right this year. And this is happening even though their party is more of a shambles than it has ever been and has done nothing to earn a single vote.

Factually Challenged Fox News Channel Hires Factually Challenged Palin

2010-01-12T17:22:00.000-08:00

http://mediamatters.org/

Factually Challenged Fox News Channel Hires Factually Challenged Palin
By Media Matters for America
January 12, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145082/

The New York Times reported that Fox News has hired Sarah Palin as a contributor who "will appear on the network's programming on a regular basis as part of a multi-year deal" and "will host an occasional series that will run on the network from time to time." Fox News hired Palin despite her months of pushing false claims and bogus information, including the "Lie of the Year" that the Democrats' health care bill includes "death panels."

Palin reportedly hired as Fox News contributor
From a January 11 New York Times report:

Former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has signed on as a contributor to the Fox News Channel.

The network confirmed that Ms. Palin will appear on the network's programming on a regular basis as part of a multi-year deal. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Ms. Palin will not have her own regular program, one person familiar with the deal said, though she will host an occasional series that will run on the network from time to time. This person would not elaborate, but the network does have a precedent for such a series. Oliver L. North is the host of an occasionally running documentary series on the military called "War Stories."

Many suspected that when Ms. Palin retired as the governor of Alaska last summer she was doing so to pursue some sort of career in television. The Fox News deal, however, would not seem to be all encompassing, and would appear to give her room for other pursuits, as well.

In past months, Palin has frequently misled public on variety of issues

"Death panel." In a Facebook post, Palin claimed that under Democratic health care reform, "Obama's 'death panel' " would "decide" whether her parents or her son Trig, who has Down syndrome, were "worthy of health care." Palin's assertion was based on the widely debunked claim that the House health care reform bill would require end-of-life counseling. Numerous Fox News personalities subsequently advanced Palin's false claim. PolitiFact.com named Palin's death panels claim its "Lie of the Year." During the health care debate, Palin also falsely linked the Independent Medicare Advisory Board created by the Senate health care reform bill and nonbinding mammogram guidelines to death panels.

Palin's memoir goes rogue on facts. Media Matters for America has documented numerous falsehoods in Palin's memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life. For instance:

Palin falsely suggests poor will be "hit hardest" by cap and trade
Palin still falsely claiming stimulus money for energy efficiency she vetoed required tougher building codes
Palin continues distortion of NY Times article to defend "palling around with terrorists" claim
Palin stands by falsehood that Obama opposed "protect[ing] babies born alive after botched abortions"
Palin falsely suggests she did not support aerial hunting
Palin falsely suggested media did not criticize Dems over fashion
Palin attacks "Democrat lawmaker" who's actually a Republican
Palin absurdly claims McCain campaign "did not elaborate" on Obama's purported "relationship with ACORN"
Palin promotes discredited notion that gov't "force[d] financial institutions" into risky lending that "triggered" the "collapse of our financial markets"
Palin offers straw men to criticize Democratic proposals' effects on small businesses
Palin, without elaboration, calls Bridge to Nowhere a "lie"
Media Matters previously documented numerous falsehoods Palin made during the 2008 campaign as Sen. John McCain's vice presidential candidate, including the false claim that as Alaska governor she said "thanks, but no thanks" to the bridge to nowhere and the falsehood that a New York Times article supported the assertion that Obama was "palling around" with terrorists.

Palin misleads on climate change. Palin wrote a December 9 Washington Post op-ed calling on President Obama to boycott the Copenhagen conference. Palin's op-ed advanced several debunked claims about what recently stolen emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia "reveal" about the scientific consensus on man-made climate change, including the claims that climate scientists "manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." Palin also claimed that "we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes."

Obama's birth certificate. As Salon's Alex Koppelman detailed, Palin appeared on a conservative radio program and was asked if she would "make [Obama's] birth certificate an issue" should she run for president. Palin replied that "the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue," and that "it's a fair question" to wonder whether the president was born in the United States. She went on to denounce, once again, the "weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about, that Trig isn't my real son," but then counseled that "maybe we should reverse that and use the same type of thinking on [Obama]." Birthers subsequently used Palin's remarks to promote and legitimize their campaign that Obama was not born in the United States.

Master Plan? Sarah Palin Hired As TV Host

2010-01-12T16:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1169682/Sarah-Palin-hired-as-TV-host

Agence France-Presse
Tue, 12 Jan 2010 02:40 EST

Former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has struck a "multi-year deal" with Fox News in the US to serve as a political commentator and part-time host, the television channel said.

"Governor Palin has captivated everyone on both sides of the political spectrum and we are excited to add her dynamic voice to the Fox News lineup," Executive Vice President of Programming Bill Shine said announcing the contract.

Palin, 45, "will provide political commentary and analysis" for Fox News's political and business news programs and will host "periodic episodes of FNC's Real American Stories, a series exploring inspirational real-life tales," a company statement said.

The series is to debut later this year, it added.

Palin joins a stable of conservative pundits at the channel, which has often been fiercely critical of Barack Obama's presidency.

"I am thrilled to be joining the great talent and management team at Fox News. It's wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news," Palin said in the Fox News statement.

The statement made no mention of Palin's salary.

A mother of five, Palin ran for vice president last year on John McCain's losing ticket and is seen as a potential Republican presidential contender.

Her memoir, Going Rogue, shot to the top of the US bestseller list in its first week after publication in November and is currently number one New York Times bestseller.

A polarising figure who generates a media frenzy with her every interview, Palin enjoys fervent support among Republican activists.

In mid-November she dropped a hint that she might seek to run for the White House in 2012 as champion of America's Republican right.

Sarah Palin will headline first-ever Tea Party Convention

2010-01-08T11:40:00.000-08:00

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0106/Sarah-Palin-will-headline-first-ever-Tea-Party-Convention

Sarah Palin’s appearance is a coup for a movement now getting grudging respect from mainstream commentators. But will the feisty Tea Party movement coalesce with the GOP’s old guard?

By Patrik Jonsson Staff writer
posted January 6, 2010 at 2:49 pm EST

Atlanta —
Almost 1-1/2 years since she shook up American politics with her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is set to headline another landmark political event: the first-ever Tea Party Convention next month in Nashville, Tenn.

On its face, the gig would seem a step down for Ms. Palin, one of conservative America’s most popular and polarizing figures (not to mention major thorn in the side of the Obama White House).

But with an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll ranking a generic “Tea Party” as more popular than either Democrats or Republicans, and Palin herself rivaling the charming Mr. Obama in poll popularity, many experts see the Tea Party event as a potential milestone for a mounting, even transformational, force in US politics.

“[W]ith two wars, a continuing terror threat, huge federal deficits, and a major healthcare overhaul in the works, there is no shortage of disaffection out there … and that could prove to be political dynamite,” writes the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz. Against that backdrop, writes Mr. Kurtz, “The tea types can either blossom into a Perotista-style third-party movement or be subsumed to some degree by the GOP.”

Can the Tea Party movement unify itself?

Indeed, the Nashville event is not about chartering a new political party to represent conservative ideals like low taxes and states’ rights, but more about unifying to take on “Obama, Pelosi and Reid this year,” writes Judson Phillips, head of Tea Party Nation, one of many Tea Party groups and the lead sponsor of a convention that will feature conservative firebrands such as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) of Minnesota.

Already, tea-colored races are appearing around the country, including the looming matchup between Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (seen as Republican Lite by many conservatives) and Cuban-American conservative Marco Rubio, who has gotten the stamp of approval by Tea Party folks.

But courting what many call a fringe and inchoate movement carries huge risks, argues Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, in Atlanta.

He says a Republican shift toward the Reaganesque Tea Party ideal could lead to a sort of pogrom for moderate Republicans, forcing out those (think Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe) who don’t hew precisely to rock-hard conservative principles around economic freedom and limited government interference.

“The Republican Party is trapped by their base, which is going increasingly conservative,” says Mr. Abramowitz. “Yes, Republicans can do fairly well in the 2010 elections – it’s entirely possible that they could pick up 20 to 30 seats in the House – but they could read the wrong message from that. In 2012, if the economy is doing reasonably well again and Obama’s popularity has stabilized, that strategy is going to be very risky and this could all come back to haunt them.”

Democrats will target Palin and Tea Partiers

Solidly behind that assessment, Democrats are aiming to vilify the rising Tea Party movement as woefully old-school and out of touch. “Labeling their GOP candidates as being part of the Sarah Palin or Tea Party wing of the GOP will be the key element” of Democratic attacks in 2010, writes John Fund in The Wall Street Journal.

But if the Tea Party movement stays largely independent and uses its grass-roots network to help swing contested elections, other analysts say, Democrats may want to reconsider that tack and try to tap into a movement that has quickly gone from liberal laughingstock to what New York Times columnist David Brooks grudgingly calls “a major force in American politics.”

“Looks like both grand parties will have to court the tea party supporters because many of them are independents from the purple states,” writes Ellie Velinska at RightPundits.

Now enter Palin. The former Alaska governor has already expressed her simpatico feelings for the Tea Party movement, and her high-profile presence and Facebook-touted preferences for the individual over the collective will help guarantee that eyes and ears will focus on Nashville next month.

Agreeing to appear at a major Tea Party event also gives Palin a larger platform to criticize the president and Congress, and it guarantees news coverage, potentially building momentum for a future campaign.

“This is perfect for her, made for her,” says Abramowitz.

Levi-Bristol custody fight over Palin grandchild will be public

2009-12-30T11:33:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=103861

Tue, Dec. 29, 2009

Levi-Bristol custody fight over Palin grandchild will be public
Lisa Demer | Anchorage Daily News
December 29, 2009

The custody dispute between Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin over their now 1-year-old son Tripp is playing out in court, and despite Palin's efforts to keep the case confidential, a judge last week opened it to the public.

Palin filed a petition for full legal and physical custody Nov. 4. She argued that she and her family provided almost all of the care anyway and asserted that "Levi is not yet mature enough to take on significant parental responsibilities." She also is seeking court-ordered child support.

But Johnston says he wants to share custody of his son and do what he can for Tripp, and Bristol. There's no evidence either of the young parents is unfit, his lawyer, Rex Butler, wrote in a court filing.

This is an unusual custody case because Bristol Palin is the teenage daughter and Tripp is the grandson of former Gov. Sarah Palin. She and Johnston broke up not long after their son was born. He turned 1 on Sunday. Her pregnancy, announced shortly after her mother was chosen to be the vice presidential running mate of Sen. John McCain, received massive media attention. The parents are both now 19.

Bristol Palin sought to have the case sealed from the public, arguing that would be in Tripp's best interest. She asked for a gag order so no one could talk about it. She wanted all filings to be under the pseudonyms Jane and John Doe.

One of her lawyers, Thomas Van Flein, pointed out that proceedings were closed in custody disputes involving some other famous people: Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, and Britney Spears and Kevin Federline.

"This is a routine matter, but the parties' respective celebrity status mandates the protection of the baby ... whose privacy interests should be protected until and unless one day the child decides otherwise," Van Flein wrote.

Johnston fought to allow the custody matter to unfold in public, saying in a sworn statement that doing so would help put everyone on best behavior. He noted that Van Flein also represents Sarah Palin.

"I know that public scrutiny will simplify this matter and act as a check against anyone's need to be overly vindictive, aggressive or malicious, not that Bristol would ever be that way, nor that I would. But her mother is powerful, politically ambitious and has a reputation for being extremely vindictive," Johnston said in his affidavit. "So, I think a public case might go a long way in reducing Sarah Palin's instinct to attack."

Johnston said he didn't want to hurt or embarrass his son -- or Bristol. He thinks Sarah Palin, not Bristol, is acting with "sheer malice," Butler wrote in a court filing.

"He feels Sarah Palin, through her lawyer, under the guise of Bristol Palin's name, would run roughshod over his very bones," Butler wrote.

Bristol Palin responded in a sworn statement that Johnston's assertions and fears about vindictiveness and meddling are off base.

"None of this is true; my mother is not involved in this case," except as a grandmother, she said in her statement.

Johnston only wanted the spectacle of a public custody dispute "for his own self-promotion," Bristol Palin asserted. She said she believes he will soon be filming a reality TV show in Alaska and doesn't think it would be good for Tripp for that to happen during the custody fight. But Butler said nothing has been firmed up about a reality show and that Johnston's priority is his custody quest.

Alaska Superior Court Judge Kari Kristiansen of Palmer ruled on Dec. 23 that Bristol Palin hadn't provided any evidence that Tripp would be harmed by the anticipated publicity. She ordered all the sealed records opened.

In addition, Sharon Gleason, presiding judge for the judicial district, ruled against Bristol Palin's request to use pseudonyms.

Palin's 'Lie of the Year' Was Not a Misunderstanding

2009-12-24T12:53:00.000-08:00

Palin's 'Lie of the Year' Was Not a Misunderstanding
By Matt Gertz, Media Matters for America
Posted on December 23, 2009, Printed on December 24, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://mediamatters.org//144771/

Reporting on Sarah Palin's response to Politifact naming her claim that Democratic health care bills contain a "death panel," Politico's Ben Smith suggests that it's possible that this has all been a big misunderstanding:

She was talking about, she now says, the Medicare Advisory Board, in combination with forecasted declines in Medicare spending:

[...]

In the haze of confusion over this issue, some of Palin's defenders had equated her words with a measure, since dropped, to provide of end-of-life counseling.

Contrary to Smith's suggestion, back in September, when asked what Palin was referring to when she said that under reform, "Obama's 'death panel' " would "decide" whether her parents or her son Trig, who has Down syndrome, were "worthy of health care," Palin spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton responded in an email to ABC's Jake Tapper: "From HR3200 p. 425 see 'Advance Care Planning Consultation'."

That is, of course, the very provision serial health care misinformer Betsy McCaughey had referred to in claiming that the House health care reform bill would "absolutely require" end-of-life counseling for seniors "that will tell them how to end their life sooner." The media subsequently debunked McCaughey and Palin's claims more than 40 times.

Either Palin's own spokesperson was caught up in that same "haze of confusion"... or Palin is cynically changing her definitions in an attempt to preserve her credibility.

Oh, and the Medicare Advisory Board isn't a "death panel" either.

Media On Palin's 'Banned List' Ejected From Going Rogue Event

2009-12-24T12:11:00.000-08:00

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/bloggers_on_palins_banned_list_ejected_from_going.php

Media On Palin's 'Banned List' Ejected From Going Rogue Event
Justin Elliott | December 23, 2009, 12:45PM

Sarah Palin's war on the media continues?

The woman who once called on the press to "quit makin' things up" took it a step further yesterday by allegedly banning four members of the media from a book event in Wasilla, Alaska.

On a four-person "banned list" -- yes, that term was actually used by police -- were a blogger, a videographer, a local radio host, and another person who hasn't been identified. TPMmuckraker reached two of the four by phone in Alaska this morning. Here's what happened.

A bit before 11 a.m., Dennis Zaki and Jesse Griffin drove up to the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center in Wasilla, planning to talk to the Palin diehards and get some footage. "I kind of thought it would be relatively boring," says Griffin, who writes the Immoral Minority blog.

When they arrived, they entered the arena with a crowd of about 1,000, some of whom were holding as many as five copies of Going Rogue. Zaki, who formerly ran the news blog Alaska Report and is now a freelance videographer, saw a sign directing media to check in. When he got to the small ticket office, and a man asked him for ID, he immediately knew something was up.

"This guy picked out my auto license, which is way odd for Alaska -- nothing like this happens in Alaska," says Zaki, who has covered Palin events for years. Then the man "hops on his walkie talkie and calls someone else." At that moment, Zaki glanced behind the man and noticed the zoom lens of a small silver digital camera coming out toward him. A woman had snapped his picture.

"I was shocked -- that hadn't happened to me even at an Obama event," Zaki says. "So I thought, oh geez, what's going on?"

The Wasilla official who runs the arena, Recreation and Cultural Services Manager James Hastings, came down from the upper level, where Palin was signing books, and approached Zaki -- "Dennis, can I talk to you?"

Meanwhile, Griffin had approached the ticket office and also had his picture taken. When he turned around after writing his name in a book, a Wasilla police officer in full uniform was waiting to escort him out of the building. "'The banned list' was the term that was used a couple different times," Griffin tells us.

"When I turned back to talk to Dennis" -- Griffin's ride home -- "the officer put his hand on my shoulder and told me to keep going toward the exit," he says.

"They were anxious to get us out the door quickly. I guess they felt like they were going to have some kind of unseemly incident," says Griffin, who wrote about the experience on his blog. "But that certainly wasn't going to happen."

Zaki says Hastings told him that because it was a paid event -- in which Palin or her publisher, HarperCollins, paid for the police, the food, etc. -- they could ban anyone they wanted. He also told Zaki that the banned list had photos of the four people on it: Zaki, Griffin, local radio host and prominent Palin critic Shannyn Moore, and one other name.

Zaki tells us that in the past he has only put out videos with straight footage of Palin's speeches, no commentary included.

"It all went down so fast. I was just in shock," he says.

Hastings told the Anchorage Daily News that "it wasn't in his (Zaki's) best interest to be here. He and others could have found themselves in a negative situation." But Zaki tells us he's covered plenty "of these tea bagging events and nobody does anything."

Tina Andreadis, a spokeswoman for Harper, tells TPMmuckraker that the company did rent out the arena and hired security for crowd control, as is routine. But Harper had no role in running the event, and no Harper personnel were sent to Wasilla.

Here's video of the event. Around the time that Palin peers over the balcony and the crowd roars, Zaki and Griffin were being shown the door.

Sarah Palin decries 'hoax' of climate change data

2009-12-13T11:40:00.000-08:00

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6950967.ece

December 10, 2009
Sarah Palin decries 'hoax' of climate change data
Tim Reid in Washington

Sarah Palin all but declared global warming a hoax yesterday when she urged President Obama to boycott the Copenhagen climate change conference and to stand up to the “radical environment movement”.

The former Alaska Governor and possible 2012 presidential contender seized upon leaked e-mails from climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia. The scientists have been accused by global warming sceptics of falsifying data to make the case that the phenomenon is real and man-made, something they deny.

The scandal has become a cause célèbre among climate change deniers and sceptics in the US. A group of Republican politicians has vowed to fly to Copenhagen next week to argue that the threat from global warming is overblown and too costly to act on.

Writing on the editorial page of The Washington Post — which was criticised from the Left for allowing her to argue her case — Mrs Palin said: “The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue. She added: “‘Climategate’, as the e-mails have become known, exposes a highly politicised scientific circle — the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies been pushed in Copenhagen won’t change the weather but they would change our economy for the worse.”

Mrs Palin’s article appears at a time when the scandal over the leaked e-mails is gaining increasing exposure in the US. A poll released on Monday also revealed that only 45 per cent of Americans believe that global warming is caused by human activity, down from 56 per cent two years ago.

Mrs Palin, last year’s Republican vice-presidential nominee, has become a leading voice for her party’s conservative grassroots supporters. Recent polls suggest that she would make a competitive candidate if she chose to make a bid to become the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

Her argument that the case for climate change is far from proved is shared by a significant number in Congress. A cap-and-trade climate Bill that Mr Obama wants passed is bogged down in the US Senate, mainly over concerns that it will be too costly, and Democrats are several votes short of seeing it prevail.

Mrs Palin does not deny “the reality of some changes in climate — far from it”, and adds that “I saw the impact of changing weather patterns first hand while serving as governor of our only Arctic state”. She asserts, however, that such weather changes are “natural, cyclical environmental trends,” and that “we can’t say with assurance that man’s activities cause weather changes”.

Man arrested for throwing tomatoes at Sarah Palin during 'Going Rogue' book signing

2009-12-13T04:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=102849

Man arrested for throwing tomatoes at Sarah Palin during 'Going Rogue' book signing
BY LEO STANDORA
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Monday, December 7th 2009, 10:26 PM

Police said Jeremy Paul Olson, 33, tried to paste Palin with a couple of tomatoes he hurled during a book signing at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.

Both messy missiles launched from a balcony missed the former vice presidential candidate but one caught Bloomington Police Commander Mark Stehik right in the puss.

That got Olson busted for suspicion of assault and disorderly conduct. He also may be charged with assaulting a cop.

What Olson had against Palin wasn't immediately clear. What ever it was, he was clearly in the minority.

More than 1,000 die-hard supporters treated the event like another Black Friday, lining up outside in freezing weather before the mall doors opened at 5 a.m.

Emily Calhoon, a 16-year-old who took her place in line at 4:45 a.m., explained that she likes Palin's conservatism.

"She's a lot more relatable than the stereotypical old rich white male," said Calhoon, clutching a copy of Palin's memoir of her life and political career, "Going Rogue."

Palin arrived just before noon clad in trademark red and took the stage with husband Todd who carried their son, Trig.

Neither addressing the crowd nor taking questions from supporters or a throng of reporters, Palin immediately started signing books and didn't stop for four hours.

Barnes & Noble wouldn't say how many books were sold at the event, but the publisher has said more than 700,000 copies were snapped up in the first week, outpacing President Obama's 2006 book "The Audacity of Hope," which sold fewer than 100,000 first-week copies and Hilary Clinton's "Living History," which sold roughly 600,000 copies in 2003.

Palin recently passed the 1,000,000 book mark and has sat atop the New York Times bestseller list for two weeks.

After the book signing, Palin headed to a private, $5,000 per person or couple event hosted by The Freedom Club State PAC. Invitations said all proceeds were going toward electing Republicans to the Minnesota House.

Sarah Palin: a make-up kind of girl

2009-12-07T13:39:00.000-08:00

This psychopathic woman scares me, with or without the makeup. More, she's a 'role model' of the puppet masters for women: If you're not a baby doll or barbie doll, you're not gonna get in. It's all so sick and twisted...

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article6938795.ece

December 6, 2009
Sarah Palin: a make-up kind of girl
You cannot be laid-back about cosmetics and have a career in politics
Shane Watson

Isn’t it great to see Sarah Palin back in the spotlight with her autobiography, Going Rogue (or Going Rouge, as it shall henceforth be known)? When it comes to Palin, the politics are incidental, there’s so much other juicy stuff going on, what with the daughter’s boyfriend, the shooting and all the buzz surrounding her appearance. You may remember the mini scandal during the election campaign, when it emerged that she had spent thousands of dollars on outfits in Neiman Marcus. Well, now her detractors are up in arms about the bill for Palin’s personal make-up artist (£14,000 in a two-week period, according to reports). Not only that, but they are critical of the make-up itself (roughly summarised, it’s too heavy). The message is that Palin is a fake, because she layers it on and doesn’t even do the job herself.

Leaving aside the fact that were she to appear on television or in photographs wearing anything less than serious slap, she would look as if she had just emerged from a crack den (that’s the way it goes, particularly if you’re 45 and it’s before midday), what on earth do people expect? Palin is a make-up kind of gal. Criticising her for taking her maquillage to the max is missing the point. Extreme Republican views, coyote-trimmed down jackets, guns in the glove compartment and plenty of good old-fashioned orange blusher go together like stars and stripes. If Palin were a natural kind of girl — slick of mascara for the school run, bit of tinted moisturiser and lippie for meetings — she’d be a Democrat.

You either are or you aren’t a make-up girl, pretty much from puberty, depending on what your friends are doing and who your role models are (and maybe how much your mother wears), and it is tribal. Right from the word go, girls fall into two camps, and we don’t really mix, because the difference between the heavies and the make-up lites is about more than cash outlay, time spent in front of a mirror and whether you like eye shadow — it’s a philosophy of life.

The make-up-lite crowd fancy themselves truer, freer and more accessible than their well-made-up sisters and suspect the heavies of being a bit hard. The make-up heavies are thinking something along the lines of, “Never let your guard down.” The truth is, we mildly distrust each other because we see the world so differently, but we like it that way. It gives us an immediate and foolproof way of judging other women. Palin is a make-up heavy to the core, and to remark on it at this stage of the game is like accusing Katie Price of being a self-publicist.

There is another point here. For as long as women in the public eye are judged on their looks, it will be compulsory for the likes of Palin to employ teams to prepare them for their close-ups. These days you cannot be laid-back about cosmetics and have a career in politics. Really, Palin should make the party pay her make-up-artist bills, whatever they are. Because she’s worth it.

THE MAN WHO MADE SARAH PALIN

2009-12-07T12:42:00.000-08:00

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2009/08/man-who-made-sarah-palin.html

Monday, August 17, 2009
THE MAN WHO MADE SARAH PALIN
Contents:

1) The Secret Origin of Sarah Palin
2) "Allen Teen Sex Inquiry Re-Opened," Anchorage Daily News
------------------
1) The Secret Origin of Sarah Palin

www.bluebloggin.com/: ...Bill Allen and the VECO employees contributed heavily to politicians and in return expected support for the oil industry. In 2000, Allen co-chaired the Alaska finance committee during the Bush-Cheney campaign.

When Palin decided to run for lieutenant governor in 2001, she paid Bill Allen a visit at his home. According to a VECO employee the two drank wine and spoke about her future. After Palin’s visit with Allen, VECO contributed $5,000 to Palin’s campaign for lieutenant governor. The contributions came at $500 a pop over a two-day period in late December from Allen, his executives and a couple of their spouses, representing 10 percent of all money Palin raised in her 2002 campaign.

Palin and Ted Stevens excellent adventure …

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin began building clout in her state’s political circles in part by serving as a director of an independent political group organized by the now embattled Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.

Palin’s name is listed on 2003 incorporation papers of the “Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.,” a 527 group that could raise unlimited funds from corporate donors. The group was designed to serve as a political boot camp for Republican women in the state. She served as one of three directors until June 2005, when her name was replaced on state filings.

People in igloos shouldn’t throw fireballs.

http://www.bluebloggin.com/2008/10/05/palins-campaign-contributions-from-convicted-criminal-bill-allen/
****
2) Allen teen sex inquiry reopened

Police look into claim ex-Veco boss had sex with underage girl.

By RICHARD MAUER
rmauer@adn.com
Published: February 3rd, 2008 06:01 AM
Last Modified: February 3rd, 2008 06:10 AM

Anchorage police have reopened an investigation into allegations that Bill Allen, the government's key witness in the ongoing corruption inquiry and once a leading political force in Alaska, had sex with an underage girl in the mid-1990s.

The investigation originally began in 2004 as an offshoot of the scandalous Josef Boehm sex and drug ring, according to Detective Kevin Vandegriff, who worked with federal investigators on the Boehm case.

But when federal prosecutors asked Anchorage police to suspend the investigation shortly after it began, the department complied, he said.

The Allen investigation was dormant until December, when it was reopened, said Capt. Gardner Cobb, the city's chief of detectives. The evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Allen, now 70, was contradictory and never strong, both Cobb and Vandegriff said.

But Vandegriff decided to go back into the case, interviewing witnesses and reviewing the record, "to make sure there's nothing else out there that we're missing," Cobb said in an interview in December. Vandegriff is still following leads and the investigation remains open, APD spokesman Paul Honeman said Friday.

The specific allegation was sexual abuse of a minor, Cobb said, a crime for which there is no statute of limitations.

A MIGHTY FALL

Allen pleaded guilty in May to bribing Alaska lawmakers. Once the chairman and an owner of the oil field services company Veco, he was forced to sell the company and now faces a lengthy prison term. That's a stunning fall for a power broker who handed oil-policy decrees to a stable of bribed legislators and who regularly socialized with senators and other national political figures who came to Alaska as guests of Sen. Ted Stevens.

At the time the Boehm investigation was developing, from 2003 to 2004, Allen was still a major player in Alaska politics, as he had been for decades, and was a reliable source of campaign money for state candidates, members of Alaska's congressional delegation and other national politicians. In 2000 he was Alaska co-chairman of President Bush's election campaign.

In an interview in October, Vandegriff wouldn't name Allen's alleged victim or victims. He said Allen was not a direct subject of the Boehm investigation. But he said there was one person involved in both the Boehm case and the investigation of Allen: Bambi Tyree, one of Boehm's co-defendants.

Vince Blomfield, Tyree's boyfriend starting around 1999 when he was 36 and she was 18, said in an interview with a private investigator working for Boehm that Tyree claimed to have had a sexual relationship with Allen when she was 14 or 15. Allen would have been in his late 50s at the time. The interview with Blomfield was cited in a court filing by Boehm's attorneys, who were trying to portray Tyree as having a history of preying on older men with money.

Allen's attorney, Robert Bundy, said Allen denied having an improper relationship with Tyree, now 27.

CASE RE-EVALUATED

Cobb wouldn't say what prompted the department to reopen the case. But the action follows inquiries by the Daily News, a surge in activity in civil lawsuits by Boehm's underage victims, and a reference to the Allen-Tyree allegation in a closed hearing in at least one of the recent federal corruption trials, where Allen was the government's chief witness. The existence of the investigation was first reported last week by the weekly Anchorage Press.

Tyree's father, Mark, who died in 2005, also figures in the ongoing federal corruption investigation in Alaska. He installed the furnace and plumbing in the Veco-supervised renovations to Sen. Ted Stevens' home in 2000, according to Robert Williams, the former Veco employee who hired Tyree.

Mark Tyree's name is mentioned in at least one federal grand jury subpoena concerning Veco and Ted Stevens.

COCAINE AND GIRLS

Boehm, now 64, was the wealthy owner of Alaska Industrial Hardware and other businesses, but his deep addiction to crack cocaine and his unrelenting attraction to girls and young women got him an 11-year federal prison sentence in 2005. He is currently at the minimum security Seagoville Federal Correctional Institution near Dallas.

Tyree was also a crack addict. As one of Boehm's original co-defendants, she pleaded guilty to finding the teenage girls for the ring in return for a seemingly limitless supply of cocaine sold to Boehm by her friends and others. Recognizing her cooperation with authorities and her abuse as a young teen by Boehm and other men, Judge John Sedwick sentenced her to three years.

She was released Sept. 6, 2006, and is living and working in Anchorage. Through her attorney, federal public defender Sue Ellen Tatter, Tyree declined to comment.

In the October interview, Vandegriff said he heard no suggestions that Allen was a visitor to Boehm's Oceanview home or the many "parties" Boehm held at hotels around town.

OLDER MEN

Though Tyree's extensive juvenile record remains sealed, her background has surfaced in several court cases, including a separate federal drug prosecution in 1996. The record shows a long pattern of involvement with older men. Bambi had just turned 15 when she, her older sister Tia, then 18, and 42-year-old Billy Ray Lang were arrested at the airport after a flight from California. The Tyree sisters had a combined 11 pounds of cocaine strapped into girdles they had bought before the trip in a Spenard extra-large shop.

Bambi was ordered to McLaughlin Youth Center. But Tia was held in jail and the girls' parents, Mark and Cris Tyree, testified about the family in an effort to get her released on bail. Bambi, a frequent runaway since age 11 and a Wasilla middle-school dropout, had moved in with Lang in the fall of 1995 when she was 14, Cris Tyree said. Cris Tyree described Lang as Tia's pimp and said that he ran an Anchorage call-girl service named "Cover Girls."

"I was told he was using my daughters," Cris Tyree testified.

Boehm pleaded guilty to cocaine and sexual exploitation charges. The government sought to portray his crimes as particularly egregious, deserving the maximum sentence. The defense tried to show him as a doddering, addled old man exploited for his money by a string of addicts and dealers, with Bambi Tyree first among them. It was a pattern Tyree had established for herself, they asserted, referring to Bill Allen. Vince Blomfield said it was the case in his relationship with her as well.

"She suffers from a heavy crack addiction, and her actions were geared toward obtaining funds to feed that habit," the defense said in a memorandum filed under seal and obtained by the Daily News. "Tyree often obtained the required funds by exploiting rich men."

'B.A.' CITED IN TRANSCRIPTS

Citing their private investigator's interviews with Blomfield and another friend of Tyree's, Marty Myre, the memorandum said that in addition to Boehm, "she developed a relationship with another rich and powerful businessman in Alaska, B.A."

"Bambi claimed that B.A. bought her a vehicle and that on one occasion he gave her $5,000," the defense document said.

While the court documents don't further identify "B.A.," in footnotes, the memorandum referenced pages in the transcripts of a Sept. 23, 2004, interview with Blomfield and a Nov. 10, 2004, interview with Myre. Copies of the transcripts obtained by the Daily News show the initials "B.A." referred to Bill Allen on those pages.

Blomfield, who now works at a Fairbanks strip club, turned down a request for an interview. Myre, a guide and contractor, also wouldn't talk.

LOVE AND MONEY

In the transcript of the Sept. 23, 2004, interview, Blomfield said he met Tyree at a convenience store phone booth around 1999 when she was 18. He pegged her for a party girl and asked her if she wanted a ride. She did, and the relationship developed quickly before coming to a halt when his money ran out, he said.

Tyree told Blomfield she was just ending a relationship with Allen, Blomfield said.

"He figured out, I think, to get as far away from -- you know, because to my knowledge, Bill Allen did not use drugs. He drank and partied with her," Blomfield told the private investigator.

Blomfield said Tyree told him she had a sexual relationship with Allen when she was 14 or 15.

That age range would've extended from the time she ran away to Bill Ray Lang's place in East Anchorage to after her release from McLaughlin on the cocaine trafficking charge.

"His name (Allen) came up constantly," Blomfield said. "She would leave me and go get money from him," Blomfield said. "Her father literally told me under his own words that he had met Bill and that Bill had told him that he was dating his daughter." Blomfield said he was present when Bambi called Allen in Washington, D.C.

"I spent Christmas with Bambi's family, and there were presents under the tree for the entire family from Bill Allen. He had bought her sister a car. He had given her father a number of contracts."

Blomfield said he thought Allen got the car for Bambi Tyree when she was 16. The family always referred to the vehicle "as the car that Bill bought," Blomfield said.

Public records confirm that Bambi Tyree got a new 1999 black Volkswagen Beetle on Nov. 30, 1998, but she wasn't 16 -- she was approaching her 18th birthday and just getting out of another stay at McLaughlin. Nothing in the record indicates who made the down payment. Her parents were listed as co-owners.

Three pickups owned by members of the Tyree family are connected to Allen or Veco.

A 1994 Ford originally owned by Veco Equipment was transferred to Mark Tyree in 2002, according to public records. The truck is now registered to Tyree's brother, James. The records don't show how the truck was financed.

State records show that a 1998 Ford pickup was similarly transferred to Bambi's brother Anthony from Veco Equipment Inc. on Sept. 13, 2006, again with no reference to a price.

Bill Allen's name appears as the note holder on the registration for a 2003 Ford truck registered by Anthony, according to state vehicle records.

Anthony Tyree couldn't be located for comment. A neighbor of the family home in Wasilla said she believed Anthony is attending school out of state.

BLOMFIELD CLAIM DISPUTED

In a handwritten note to the Daily News last year, Cris Tyree said Blomfield never came to her house at Christmas. She described him as "an unreliable source" with drug problems himself and a criminal record. She wouldn't answer questions.

Court records show Blomfield had several forgery and escape convictions, mostly misdemeanors and all related to his drug addiction. In 2001, his mother urged a judge to give him a maximum jail sentence to keep him away from narcotics. (Ironically, some of the money that financed his cocaine use during the time he was dating Tyree would have come from the FBI: His share of money paid by the agency to the real estate company owned by Blomfield's family, which built the FBI's downtown headquarters, according to information in one of his court cases.)

ALLEN BEFRIENDED FAMILY

Robert Bundy, Allen's attorney, said Allen had an above-board friendship with the entire Tyree family.

"Bill says he never had any kind of illicit relationship with her, ever," Bundy said. "(Mark) Tyree was a plumber who did good work, did a lot of work on Bill's stuff. He got to know him over the years."

Bundy said Allen doesn't remember how he met Mark Tyree, but it was "before he ever heard of Bambi."

"He and Mark became pretty good pals because they kind of had similar backgrounds, they both dropped out of high school, and got a trade," Bundy said. Allen never had a sexual relationship with Tyree at any age, Bundy said.

Mark Tyree died of cancer at his Wasilla home on April 1, 2005. Allen was with Tyree at his deathbed, Bundy said, and promised to take care of the family.

CASE WAS SHAKY

Detective Vandegriff of the Anchorage Police Department declined to say whether Blomfield was one of his original sources when he opened the case against Allen in February 2004.

"It came up as part of the Boehm investigation," he said. "It just came out as part of the interviews."

The initial case against Allen "wasn't very solid," he added. "We had some contradictory information, but I was just kind of getting started."

Then federal prosecutors told him to "cease and desist," he said.

The joint city-federal prosecution was run by two assistant U.S. attorneys, Frank Russo and James Goeke. Tyree testified that both prosecutors participated in the 15 to 20 hours of debriefings she underwent with the FBI and detectives as part of her plea deal.

Goeke, now with the prosecution team pursuing the corruption cases, didn't return several calls for comment.

Russo acknowledged "there were allegations along the lines of his (Allen's) involvement with Bambi Tyree," but said he asked Vandegriff to suspend the Allen investigation for purely practical reasons: The Boehm case was complex, with dozens of witnesses, and Boehm himself had a high-powered, three-attorney defense team that fought at every opportunity. Nearly 1,000 documents were filed, and that was in a case that never went to trial.

"We said, 'Hey, why don't we put this aside until later. We have enough to focus on,' " Russo said. That was his only concern, he said.

Federal prosecutors and the FBI have not yet provided a historical account of how the corruption investigation began and how it evolved with Veco and Allen at its center. Court filings by federal prosecutors since made public show it was well under way in the fall of 2005 with court-ordered wiretaps and later, video surveillance of Allen and a Veco vice president. That would have been 18 months after Vandegriff opened his case.

Russo added, "There were no charges ever brought against Allen for anything related to what Boehm was doing. In terms of the sexual assault of a minor, that's something that APD has on their files; they're free to do whatever they want with that."

Vandegriff said Russo's request was fine with him.

"I had plenty on my plate to do with the Boehm investigation, and when I was told to stop that one, no problem," the detective said in the October interview.

While mentions of the relationship between Tyree and Allen have appeared in court, most have been heard in closed proceedings or referenced in sealed filings. That was the case in the Boehm prosecution, and also in the recent federal bribery prosecutions.

Judge Sedwick, the federal district judge who presided over the Boehm cases, is also the judge in the corruption cases.

"You can presume ... that the judge knows all about it," Russo said, referring to the Allen allegations.

ONE CASE LED TO ANOTHER

The issue arose at a closed-door hearing during former Rep. Pete Kott's corruption trial in September just as Allen was taking the stand. Government prosecutors, required to disclose information about their witness, volunteered that Allen wasn't coerced to plead guilty by evidence concerning his relationship with Tyree, according to Kott's lawyer Jim Wendt. Had that happened, Wendt said, it might have been relevant to his case.

Still, Allen's decision to cooperate with the government, made in a single August day in 2006, seemed extraordinarily swift, Wendt said. "I did not understand why Bill Allen would have flipped so fast, and I still don't understand. I don't know if it has anything to do with this young woman or for other reasons," Wendt said.

Asked whether Allen's relationship with Tyree was one of the issues that arose during closed hearings in the next bribery case, that of Rep. Victor Kohring, defense attorney John Henry Browne said, "That's something that we were not allowed to go into," but also said he couldn't "confirm or deny that that was one of them because that would be violating the order of the judge."

In December, secrecy issues in the Boehm case flared anew, this time involving more than a half-dozen plaintiffs -- mostly formerly juvenile victims -- seeking to recover damages from Boehm and his codefendants in the criminal case.

With lawyers poised to depose Vandegriff's APD partner in the Boehm investigation, Detective Steven Boltz, the U.S. Attorney's office intervened to make sure his testimony remained under seal. Assistant U.S. attorney Daniel Cooper said at an emergency hearing in federal court Dec. 18, just before Boltz' deposition, that he was trying to ensure that the identities of juvenile witnesses were protected and grand jury proceedings remained secret. He didn't mention Allen or Tyree.

The civil cases against Boehm were tentatively settled two weeks ago. The terms are secret.

http://www.adn.com/news/government/veco/story/303216.htm

Sarah Palin Excelling at "Chicago Speak"

2009-11-30T08:58:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Sarah-Palin-Excelling-at--by-Martha-Rosenberg-091129-981.html

November 29, 2009
Sarah Palin Excelling at "Chicago Speak"
By Martha Rosenberg

Chicago, IL

Chicago may be home to two of the nation's most eloquent people--President Obama and Oprah Winfrey--but when it comes to the articulateness of every day politicians, yes it can't.

In the city that has had a Mayor Daley for so long people think it is the name of the office--who's your Mayor Daley they ask--tree is still the number that comes after two and orientate is a treasured verb.

Look at Mayor Richard M. Daley--the person not the office.

While his father Richard J. Daley is remembered for proclaiming that "we shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement," and assuring the public after the 1968 Democratic National Convention violence that, "The policeman isn't there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder," Richard M. Daley, our current mayor, also has conversational belly flops under his belt.

Like the misunderestimating former President George W. Bush, Daley will change verbs, tenses, subjects, moods and even his mind--his voice ever rising with Vegas-like glissandos until he is an actual soprano--until reporters run out of tape or have to go file.

When asked in the 1990's if the General Assembly would approve a domed stadium near the convention facility McCormick Place, Daley replied "I don't think they can do it. Maybe the governor can. Maybe there's something down his sleeve. I want to look down there. I look down there a lot. There's nothing down there."

Asked about the national debt, he said about the federal government, "Standard and Poor's or Moody should grade them just like me. Otherwise we're saying to our parent corporation, 'Do anything you want.' What happens is a parent corporation does it, and then we all follow. They're in debt; we go in debt. Who cares? And that's what is wrong with America."

Of course when it comes to rogue pronouns and verbs and circumlocutions that never end up where they started, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and Daley seem separated--vocally--at birth.

Who can forget her response to the charge from Senator John McCain's staffers when she was the Vice Presidential candidate, that she didn't know if Africa were a country or a continent?

"So, no, I think that if there are allegations based on questions or comments that I made in debate prep about Nafta, and about the continent versus the country when we talk about Africa there, then those were taken out of context," she said according to the New York Times. "And that's cruel and it's mean-spirited, it's unprofessional, and those guys are jerks, if they came away with it taking things out of context and then tried to spread something on national news. It is not fair and not right."

How can there be a "continent versus the country" question when there is no country Africa? Even the movie Bruno knows that. And who is "we" when "we talk about Africa there"? Is she trying to spread blame for her mistake? And why Africa "there"? Is that like calling South America "down there"?

Then there's Palin's meandering Checkers speech about the clothes she did or didn't receive.

"There is no clothes audit, except for when the belly of the plane got cleaned out, all the piles of the clothes that they had in there, they wanted me at my house to go through it and box things up and send it," she said according to the Times. "There's no attorneys coming up, and there's no need for it or anything else. But that'll be nice to have that chapter closed because, as I said from Day 1, I never have asked for anything. I'm not, I'm not keeping anything either."

Why is "There is no clothes audit" in the present tense and "when the belly of the plane got cleaned out" past tense? Is the "they" who had items in the plane the same "they" who told Plain to box things up? Wouldn't boxed up things be "them" not "it"?

Isn't "wanted me at my house to go through"?--saying awkwardly the words?

Of course no one expects Palin--or Daley for that matter--to be a natural born orator like President Obama whose books, Dreams From My Father and the Audacity of Hope continue to be bestsellers. But if anything, Palin is a worse speaker since writing, or dictating, her bestseller Going Rogue.

"We have to ramp up industry here in America, and of course reduce the federal debt, quit piling on and growing more," she told Rush Limbaugh this month on his radio show--"quit growing more" not intended.

"I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many American values," she told Bill O'Reilly, gearing up, perhaps, for the cause of unemployment being lack of jobs and other platitudes of oratorical achievement.

What on Earth is the Appeal of Sarah Palin?

2009-11-24T12:59:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/What-on-Earth-is-the-Appea-by-Roger-Shuler-091123-163.html

November 23, 2009
What on Earth is the Appeal of Sarah Palin?
By Roger Shuler

The Sarah Palin book-signing tour comes to Birmingham today, and our local newscasts were awash last night with video of people waiting in long lines, hoping to get wristbands for admittance to the blessed event.

When Palin begins signing copies of Going Rogue at 4:30 p.m. today at the Books-A-Million store in Colonial Brookwood Village, it sounds like the place will be packed with people who can't wait to get a glimpse of the former Republican vice-presidential candidate.

As I watched video reports of people standing in line--if there were any folks with brown skin in line, they escaped my attention--this question came to mind: Why would people go to this trouble to see Sarah Palin?

Regular readers know that we like to play amateur psychology from time to time. So we've surveyed the literature and come up with an answer that we think explains Palin's appeal.

Let's get to our answer by asking a few questions:

* Are people drawn to Palin because of her qualifications for high public office? C'mon! All but the most radical Palin devotees probably realize that she was stretching herself by getting elected mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Palin was part of one of the most bungled national campaigns in American history, so it's hard to see why her appeal would have much to do with politics.

* Are people drawn to Palin because she's famous? The Palin story does have a postmodern, reality-TV quality to it, and quite a few folks probably find that charming. Palin's message seems to be: "If I can be nominated for vice president of the United States, who knows what you can do?" But we suspect her appeal goes beyond fame. After all, former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was signing his book at the same store yesterday, and he's famous. Huckabee drew a respectable crowd, but sounds like it paled in comparison to Palin Mania.

* Are people drawn to Palin because she's good looking? We're getting warm now. Even I have to admit that Palin is easy on the eyes. But does that fully explain her appeal in Birmingham, Alabama? I don't think so. As we noted in an earlier post, Alabama might have more good looking women per capita than anywhere on the planet. Is a woman from Alaska really going to cause a stir here? You could go to Colonial Brookwood Village on any reasonably busy shopping day and see plenty of women who are in Sarah Palin's league--or way beyond. And they probably know more about foreign policy than Palin does. So I don't think we've quite reached our final answer.

* Are people drawn to Palin because of her demonstrated fertility? Bingo! We think this is our answer--or at least the main part of it. Palin, at age 45, has pumped out five white children. And we suspect a segment of the Republican base finds a certain comfort--and primal appeal--from that part of her biography. Why would that be? Well, consider that the U.S. Census Bureau issued a report in 2008 stating that whites will be a minority in this country by 2042. I suspect that causes quite a few white folks to feel like they are under siege--and in red states such as Alabama, it causes them to reflexively vote Republican, against their own economic interests. I think this is part of what Barack Obama was trying to get at during the 2008 presidential campaign when he referred to "bitter" Americans who "cling to guns and religion" during difficult times. In our view, Obama was right on target, but he didn't go far enough. We suspect, subconsciously, many embittered Americans also cling to hopes for white fertility rates. After all, the "brown hordes" can't take over if whites get busy in the baby-making business, right? And who embodies that ethos more than Sarah Palin? Our guess is that Palin's fertility is a big reason she hit the national stage in the first place. What if she and the "First Dude" were like Bill and Hillary Clinton and had only one child? Would the McCain campaign have picked her out of obscurity for the No. 2 spot on a national ticket? I don't think so. Fertility is a central issue in the Palin story, and we suspect it's still at work, driving the Going Rogue book-selling train.

* Are people drawn to Palin because she has demonstrated her fertility while maintaining a svelte figure? Bingo, again! This is the second part of our answer to Sarah Palin's appeal. According to research at the Legal Schnauzer School of Amateur Psychology, anecdotal evidence indicates that society has a special pedestal for women who can bear multiple children and still maintain an eye-catching figure. Women admire this in a "how in the hell does she do that?" kind of way. Men admire this in a "hubba, hubba, what a hot mama" kind of way.

So there you have it: Sarah Palin has become a mayor, a governor, a vice presidential candidate, and a celebrity--all while producing five white children and still looking mighty fine in a tight skirt.

Is it any wonder she's a cultural phenomenon? Gee, I wonder if it's too late for me to get a wristband.

Those who follow Sarah Palin are sowing the seeds of their own destruction

2009-11-24T12:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/23/palin-sowing-seeds-destruction-america

Gary Younge
Guardian UK
Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:53 CST

The former Alaska governor represents thwarted aspirations and brooding resentment. But she backs policies which would increase them.

In the film, The American President, the president's speechwriter Lewis Rothschild (played by Michael J Fox) appeals to the commander-in-chief to take a firm, clear stand against the Right. "People want leadership, Mr President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone." he says. "They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand."

The president (played by Michael Douglas) retorts that the American electorate's problem is not a lack of leadership but an undiscerning palate.

"We've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight," he says. "People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference."

As the faithful wait in line in small towns across the country (some for more than a day) to see Sarah Palin on her book tour, the question of whether the US is deprived of a competent political class or gets the leadership it both deserves and truly desires seems as pertinent as ever.

On the one hand there is roughly between a quarter and a third of America that will clearly believe anything. That is the figure that strongly approved of George Bush's handling of the economy last year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the bailout. That same figure, in the immediate aftermath of hurricane Katrina, believed that Bush's response to the disaster was "about right", and still supports the war in Iraq.

That also happens to be approximately the same proportion of Americans who back Palin for president. Most data suggest the overlap is considerable. Palin's rise to prominence, from little-known governor to one of the most popular and arguably most charismatic Republicans in the country in just a year, has been startling. She had a thin record when she was picked to run as vice-president. Today, having quit the Alaska governorship mid-term and published a bestseller, only her wallet is thicker.

Her resignation speech was so rambling that you would have struggled to find a coherent sentence with an industrial-strength searchlight. "Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me - sports," she announced. "I use it because you're naive if you don't see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket ... and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win." This was not the answer to a hostile interview from the "liberal media elite" but a prepared speech of her own making.

It would be easy to discount her as just a media phenomenon who would go away if we stopped talking about her. That would be a mistake. It would be even easier to poke fun at her as just a small town hick who has blundered into the limelight with a nod, wink and a "you betcha". That too would be a mistake.

For the very things that liberal commentators ridicule her for - being inarticulate, unworldly, simplistic and hokey - are the very things that make her attractive to her base. Indeed, every time she is taunted she becomes more popular because it reaffirms the (not entirely mistaken) view that the deeply held values of a sizable section of the population are being disparaged.

The same dynamic was true for George Bush, but with one crucial exception. Bush is the scion of a wealthy family who turned his back on the cultural trappings of his class while embracing the social confidence and political and financial entitlement that came with it. Palin had none of those advantages: she grew up far from power and privilege in every sense.

The difference in their comfort levels when put on the spot with simple questions was evident when each was asked about their newspaper reading habits. Bush was cocky: "The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world." Palin froze: "I've read most of them ... all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years."

In her world, Ivy League is a slur; cities are not the "real America"; and those who know the price of arugula but cannot handle a rifle are not to be trusted. Palin is the antithesis of an aspirational figure. Her supporters love her not because they want to be like her, but because they already are like her. So for better and for worse, Palin is an entirely self-made - and, if her book is anything to go by, self-invented - personification of the kind of political animal Bush sought to both emulate and nurture. Bush was Palin-lite.

To that extent her performance over the past year has been more tragic than comic. Palin represents the thwarted aspirations and brooding resentment of a large section of white working class Americans. That is not to suggest that her supporters are necessarily racist, but polls show her support is racially exclusive.

Her base has plenty to be resentful about. Their wages are stagnant, their economic security has eroded, and their prospects for social and economic advancement have stalled. In 2004, white Americans were the only racial group for whom the poverty rate actually rose. The fact that it was lower than every other group is of little comfort. Demographically, they are set to become a minority by 2042. Geopolitically, the country for which they display so much patriotic fervour has lost one war, is losing another, and is regularly lectured by others about the urgency of putting its fiscal house in order. America is not what it used to be. The country they keep saying they want to "take back" no longer exists and is not returning.

So when Palin rails against Washington DC, bank bailouts and elitist media she catches their ear. The longer unemployment keeps rising, house prices keep falling and universal healthcare continues to be elusive, the more ears there will be. Motivated, organised and angry, Palin's wing of the Republican party does not have the numbers to make bad things happen; but, as it showed over the summer during the healthcare town hall meetings, its determination to derail good things should not be underestimated.

The trouble is that while many of their grievances are well founded, their affection is certainly misplaced. None of their problems can be remedied by the politics championed by Palin. Indeed, the greater the traction her politics gets, the worse things will be for her base. The America whose passing they mourn was lost precisely because of the freemarket, low-tax, warmongering agenda she advocates.

To crawl through the desert in search of water only to find sand is disappointing; to not know the difference between water and sand is delusional; but to go looking for sand in the belief that it will truly quench your thirst, not once but twice, well that is truly depressing.

Yes, she can: Palin has a shot at the presidency

2009-11-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/23/AR2009112303216.html

Matthew Dowd
Washington Post
Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:45 CST

President Sarah Palin. To many pundits and late-night comedians, this sounds like a punch line, and to many die-hard Democrats it sounds like a reason to leave the country.

Yet while the conventional wisdom has it that Palin is too badly damaged to make a serious run in 2012 -- and I agree that her success is not probable -- it is definitely a possibility that Palin could be elected president of the United States.

Those having concerns about my objectivity or wondering whether I am a "Palinista" should keep in mind that I raised serious questions about her qualifications last fall -- doubts I still have -- and that I predicted John McCain would look back at his vice presidential pick with remorse.

Looking ahead to the political landscape of the 2012 presidential election, there are certain elements to keep in mind, assuming that President Obama runs for reelection.

First, Gallup polls over the past 60 years show that no president with an approval rating under 47 percent has won reelection, and no president with an approval rating above 51 percent has lost reelection. (George W. Bush's approval rating in the weeks before the 2004 election hovered around 50 percent.) The 2012 election will be primarily about our current president and whether voters are satisfied with the country's direction.

Who the Republican candidate is, and his or her qualifications and abilities, will matter only if Obama's approval rating is between 47 and 51 percent going into the fall of 2012. Interestingly, in the latest Gallup poll Obama's approval rating was at a precarious 49 percent.

Second, America is still (unfortunately) politically divided and polarized, and Palin benefits from this dynamic. While Democrats love Obama, Republicans look on him with real disfavor. The gap between Obama's approval rating among Democrats and among Republicans is nearly 70 percentage points -- a higher partisan divide than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush experienced. Obama's agenda and actions this year, and some mistakes, have solidified this divide.

Polls show that Palin's favorability numbers are a mirror image of those of Obama. She is respected and loved by the Republican base, while Democrats despise her. Granted, independent voters have significant reservations about her capability to be president, and this would be a hurdle in the general election. But to win the Republican nomination, Palin needs only to get enough support from the base to win early key states. Already, in nearly every poll today, she has a level of support that makes her a viable primary candidate. Just look at the crowds and the buzz her book tour is drawing.

While today I would not support a Palin candidacy, here are five suggestions that would go a long way toward winning her more converts:

-- Quality over quantity. You don't need to "tweet" quite so much. You don't need to be at countless rallies and photo ops. Instead, seek out substantive platforms where you can relate to people in a thoughtful, measured way. Appear on Sunday shows every now and then, sit down with Charlie Rose and editorial boards, and give serious speeches on your approach to the world in the 21st century.

-- Hope and fear. To be elected president, a candidate has to understand voters' fears but appeal to their hopes. Ronald Reagan (and Bill Clinton) knew this very well. To do this more comprehensively, I would suggest traveling more to better get a handle on where the voters are on topics related to finances, faith, race, etc. Get out of the bubble of high-profile events. Go to the inner cities, the suburbs and small towns where folks are trying to live their lives through great anxiety. And don't go to talk about yourself, but to listen to others.

-- Reagan is the past. While Reagan is a beloved president who did much for this country, folks want to look to the future and believe in a new brand of leader. Espousing the values Reagan spoke to and represented is fine, but you need to be yourself, not an acolyte for a president who is now in the history books.

-- Use humor. In responding to controversy, bad press and negative occurrences in general, learn to let it slide off of you with a knowing smile. Maybe even use some self-deprecation. Levi Johnston, your almost son-in-law, has been a thorn in your side. Let it go. Publicly sparring with a teenager is not presidential. Don't be afraid to make fun of yourself. Voters like candidates who know that they aren't perfect and can laugh at themselves.

-- Think accountability. Yes, bad things happen to good people, and it isn't fair. But voters don't want to hear all the excuses of why an interview didn't go well or which other person was responsible for a bad decision. Americans want presidents who accept blame when things go wrong. They are tired of their leaders and institutions not admitting mistakes, learning from errors and making improvements.

Like it or not, if Sarah Palin decides to seek our nation's highest office, she has a shot. The probability of her success depends on her ability, and that of President Obama, to admit and learn from their mistakes as we head into 2012.

The writer, a political analyst for ABC News, was the chief strategist for George W. Bush's 2004 presidential campaign.

Billy Graham: God was using Palin 'to wake America up'

2009-11-24T12:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1109/Billy_Graham_God_was_using_Palin_to_wake_America_up.html?showall

Billy Graham: God was using Palin 'to wake America up'
Politco
Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:34 CST

Sarah Palin met Billy Graham and his family yesterday in North Carolina, and there's some video of her welcome by his son, Franklin.

They talked, among other things, about foreign policy:

"He's followed her career and likes her strong stand on faith," said son Franklin Graham, who was present for the 2 1/2-hour get-together. "Daddy feels God was using her to wake America up."

The former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate told Billy Graham about how she came to faith in God as a girl in Bible camp.

She quizzed him on the presidents he's known and wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq, Franklin Graham reported.

Sarah Palin Celebrates Her Humble Roots by Eating at a Restaurant That Serves a $25,000 Dessert

2009-11-24T07:35:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin Celebrates Her Humble Roots by Eating at a Restaurant That Serves a $25,000 Dessert
By Byard Duncan, AlterNet
November 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/144137/

Sarah Palin, ever the faux-populist, has finally committed an act of absurdity that perfectly allegorizes her own political M.O.

Last week, while in New York City, Palin dined at Serendipity 3, a restaurant in one of Manhattan’s swankier sections. Serendipity 3 is known for hosting celebrities (others have included Zac Efron and Bill Clinton), but it’s not famous for that. It’s famous for the "Frrozen Haute Chocolate," a sundae composed of edible gold and 28 different cocoas from across the globe. This treat, which costs $25,000, holds the Guinness world record for most expensive dessert. It is eaten with a diamond-studded gold spoon and served with a side of $2,600 per-pound chocolate. At the base of the sundae’s goblet (it is served, by the way, in a goblet) is an 18-karat gold bracelet with 1 carat of white diamonds.

One can only assume that the banana leaves to be fanned with are sold separately.

So how does Palin’s stop at Serendipity compromise her everywoman persona? Let me count the ways. Not only was she in one of the more expensive corners of the Big Apple (a city she promised ‘true’ Americans she would not visit during her book tour, on account of its elites); she was dining at a restaurant where just one item costs more than what many of her supporters will make in a year. Maybe more than twice what some of them will make.

Of course, this sort of gleaming, gold-plated contradiction is nothing new for Palin. Even the most baby-witted of observers know that her two main recipients of polito-pandering (working class Americans, the corporations that routinely screw them over) don’t quite line up right. No, the beauty here is the symbolism of it all -- the sweet, flagrant absurdity: Underdog (dare we say it? "Rogue") politician, preparing to set out across America in a grassroots neo-conquest of a book tour, must first stop to fuel up for the harrowing journey. What better place to do so than at a restaurant whose finest dessert costs as much as a year of college?

I, for one, can think of a lot of better places. How about any joint that doesn’t serve quintuplet-digit golden fudgie treats? You know, the crowns at Burger King are only made of cardboard. Maybe there? McDonald’s? Wendy’s?

At least the noble warrior behaved herself. Palin, who in recent weeks has been walking a bizarre, almost paradoxical tightrope between shameless media pandering (she appeared on Oprah Nov. 16) and Gestapo-like censorship (earlier this month, she blocked all press coverage of a speech she delivered in Wisconsin), posed for pictures "with anyone who wanted them," according to Lynn Dubal, a manager at Serendipity 3.

Dubal did not mention whether or not Palin got the Frrozen Haute Chocolate. But she said that Palin did order a foot-long hot dog with chili ($12.50). Whew! At least there’s one scrap of that blue collar still intact. Too bad the overall gesture reeks of hypocrisy, deception and stale (albeit exotic) cocoa.

Sarah Palin: The pit bull in the china shop

2009-11-23T15:47:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opinion/22rich.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=opinion&adxnnlx=1258916537-OwIDsddiBsHERHxlBwQ6tw

Sarah Palin: The pit bull in the china shop
Frank Rich
Neww York Times
Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:57 CST

AT last the American right and left have one issue they unequivocally agree on: You don't actually have to read Sarah Palin's book to have an opinion about it. Last Sunday Liz Cheney praised Going Rogue as "well-written" on Fox News even though, by her own account, she had sampled only "parts" of it. On Tuesday, Ana Marie Cox, a correspondent for Air America, belittled the book in The Washington Post while confessing that she couldn't claim to have "completely" read it.

Going Rogue will hardly be the first best seller embraced by millions for talismanic rather than literary ends. And I am not recommending that others follow my example and slog through its 400-plus pages, especially since its supposed revelations have been picked through 24/7 for a week. But sometimes I wonder if anyone has read all of what Palin would call the "dang" thing. Some of the book's most illuminating tics have been mentioned barely - if at all - by either its fans or foes. Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves.

The book's biggest surprise is Palin's wide-eyed infatuation with show-business celebrities. You get nearly as much face time with Tina Fey and the cast of Saturday Night Live in Going Rogue as you do with John McCain. We learn how happy Palin was to receive calls from Bono and Warren Beatty "to share ideas and insights." We wade through star-struck lists of campaign cameos by Robert Duvall, Jon Voight (who "blew us away"), Naomi Judd, Gary Sinise and Kelsey Grammer, among many others. Then there are the acknowledgments at the book's end, where Palin reveals that her intimacy with media stars is such that she can air-kiss them on a first-name basis, from Greta to Laura to Rush.

Equally revealing is the one boldfaced name conspicuously left unmentioned in the book: Levi Johnston, the father of Palin's grandchild. Though Palin and McCain milked him for photo ops at the Republican convention, he is persona non grata now that he's taking off his campaign wardrobe. Is Johnston's fledgling porn career the problem, or is it his public threats to strip bare Palin family secrets as well? "She knows what I got on her" is how he put it. In Palin's interview with Oprah last week, it was questioning about Johnston, not Katie Couric, that made her nervous.

The book's most frequently dropped names, predictably enough, are the Lord and Ronald Reagan (though not necessarily in that order). Easily the most startling passage in "Going Rogue," running more than two pages, collates extended excerpts from a prayerful letter Palin wrote to mark the birth of Trig, her child with Down syndrome. This missive's understandable goal was to reassert Palin's faith and trust in God. But Palin did not write her letter to God; she wrote the letter from God, assuming His role and voice herself and signing it "Trig's Creator, Your Heavenly Father." If I may say so - Oy!

Even by the standard of politicians, this is a woman with an outsized ego. Combine that with her performance skills and an insatiable hunger for the limelight, and you can see why she will not stay in Wasilla now that she's seen 30 Rock. The question journalists repeatedly asked last week - What are Palin's plans for 2012? - is a red herring. Palin has no obligation to answer it. She is the pit bull in the china shop of American politics, and she can do what she wants, on her own timeline, all the while raking in the big bucks she couldn't as a sitting governor. No one, least of all her own political party, can control her.

The fact-checking siege of Going Rogue - by the media, Democrats and aggrieved McCain campaign operatives alike - is another fruitless sideshow. Palin's political appeal has never had anything to do with facts - or coherent policy positions. The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause. As Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, has correctly observed, "She represents less a philosophical strain on the right than an affect and a demographic."

That demographic is white and non-urban: Just look at the stops and the faces on her carefully calibrated book tour. The affect is emotional - the angry air of grievance that emerged first at her campaign rallies in 2008, with their shrieked threats to Obama, and that has since resurfaced in the Hitler-fixated "tea party" movement (which she endorses in her book). It's a politics of victimization and sloganeering with no policy solutions required beyond the conservative mantra of No Taxes. Its standard-bearer can make stuff up with impunity: "Thanks, but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere"; Obama's "palling around with terrorists"; health care "death panels."

After the Palin-McCain ticket lost, conservative pundits admonished her to start studying the issues. If Going Rogue and its promotional interviews are any indication, she has ignored their entreaties during her months at liberty. Last week, Greta Van Susteren chastised Oprah for not asking Palin "one policy question," but when Barbara Walters did ask some, Palin either recycled Dick Cheney verbatim (Obama is "dithering") or ran aground. Her argument for why "Jewish settlements" should be expanded on the West Bank was that "more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead." It was unclear what she was talking about - unless it was the "rapture" theology that requires the mass return of Jews to settle the Holy Land as a precondition for the return of Christ.

The discredited neocon hacks who have latched on to Palin as a potential ticket back into power have their work cut out for them. But it's better for Palin's purposes to remain as blank a slate as possible anyway. Some of her most ardent supporters realize that she'll drive still more independent voters away if she fills in too many details. And so Matthew Continetti, the author of the just-published Persecution of Sarah Palin and her most persistent cheerleader after William Kristol, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that her role model for 2012 should be Bob McDonnell, the new Republican governor-elect of Virginia, who won on "a bipartisan, center-right approach."

What Continetti means is that Palin could still somehow fudge her history as McDonnell did; his campaign kept his career-long history as a political acolyte and financial beneficiary of Pat Robertson on the down-low. Even the far right has figured out that homophobia is a turnoff to swing voters, which is why Palin goes out of her way in Going Rogue to remind us she has her very own lesbian friend. (What's left unsaid is that the book's credited ghost writer, Lynn Vincent, labeled homosexuality as "deviance" in her own writings for World, the evangelical magazine.)

But no matter how much Palin tries to pass for "center-right," she's unlikely to fool that vast pool of voters left, right and center who have already written her off as unqualified for the White House. The G.O.P. establishment knows this, and is frightened. The demographic that Palin attracts is in decline; there's no way the math of her fan base adds up to an Electoral College victory.

Yet among Republicans she still ties Mitt Romney in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with 65 percent giving her serious presidential consideration, just behind the 71 for her evangelical rival, Mike Huckabee. The crowds lining up in the cold for her book tour are likely to be the most motivated to line up at the polls in G.O.P. primaries. They don't speak the same language as Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner or, for that matter, McCain. They are more likely to heed Palin salesmen like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh than baffled Bush administration grandees like Peter Wehner, who last week called Palin "a cultural figure much more than a political one" on the Web site of the establishment conservative organ Commentary.

Culture is politics. Palin is at the red-hot center of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black president and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those Americans who haven't benefited from bailouts. As Palin thrives on the ire of the left, so she does from the disdain of Republican leaders who, with a condescension rivaling the sexism they decry in liberals, belittle her as a lightweight or instruct her to eat think-tank spinach.

The only person who can derail Palin is Palin herself. Should she not self-destruct, she will doom G.O.P. hopes of a 2012 comeback. But the rest of the country cannot rest easy. The rage out there is larger than Palin and defies partisan labeling. Her ever-present booster Continetti, writing in The Weekly Standard, suggested that she recast the century-old populist outrage of William Jennings Bryan by adopting the message "You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of Goldman Sachs." If Obama can't tamp down that rage across the political map, Palin will at the very least pave the way for a demagogue with less baggage to pick up her torch.

The Madness Returns

2009-11-23T13:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/112209.html

November 22, 2009
The Madness Returns
By Robert Parry

The hoopla over former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's memoir is the latest sign that the madness, which has dominated American political life for most of the last three decades, has returned – and may be on its way to a political restoration in 2010 and beyond.

The outbreak of Palin-mania follows the right-wing enthusiasm over the accusations about President Barack Obama's being born in Kenya, the phenomenon around Fox News personality Glenn Beck, the Tea Party rallies, and last summer's town hall disruptions over health-care reform.

This excitement has given hope to national Republicans who believe they're headed toward a return to power sooner rather than later. They have even succeeded in shifting the blame for the massive federal debt and the bank bailouts onto Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, when those two mostly handled the messy triage after George W. Bush left behind a multi-car crash with bodies scattered all around.

The Republicans also are gaining traction with the old nostrum that got the United States into the current calamity, a reprise of Ronald Reagan's mantra of tax cuts for the rich, a smaller social safety net, corporate deregulation, and a tough-talking foreign policy.

Their “free market” message is wrapped around clever talking points that appeal to many Americans conditioned for decades to despise “lib-rhuls.” Yet, some GOP arguments are head-snapping, such as the Republican anti-health-reform claim that the party's goal is to protect Medicare.

While the Republicans and the Right are having fun returning to this politically promising world of make-believe, Obama and the Democrats are plodding forward with all the joy of bedraggled war refugees dragging their life's belongings behind them in an oxcart.

The struggle for health-care reform has turned into a long, excruciating march with many of the most worthwhile features – like a true cost-saving system, either a single-payer approach or a robust public option – cast away like family valuables left on the roadside to lighten the painful load.

In the 10 months since Obama was inaugurated on that bitterly cold day in January, he has been transformed from a beacon of hope and change into a cautionary tale, a symbol of what happens to a thoughtful man who is overly accommodating to both rivals and erstwhile allies.

By letting health-reform deadlines slip – and especially allowing Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus to dilly-dally by negotiating with Republicans who simply wanted to string out the process – Obama managed to look weak and indecisive, rather than bipartisan and conciliatory.

And the times when his administration has acted forthrightly, such as when it released evidence of George W. Bush's torture policies and announced trials in New York federal court for five 9/11 defendants, the right-wing and mainstream news media have portrayed those reasonable decisions as controversial, if not unpatriotic and un-American.

Meanwhile, the American Left has reverted to its role as sideline critic, giving Obama almost no credit for his brave acts and lots of blame for his compromises. Progressives also have done little to build an infrastructure of media, think tanks and other institutions that can challenge today's right-wing dominance in what the Right likes to call the “war of ideas.”

The Reagan Revolution

All these tendencies can be traced back three decades to the post-Vietnam War days when the Left largely dismantled its media outlets and think tanks, especially in the news center of Washington. Leading progressives mostly retreated to distant liberal strongholds such as San Francisco.

Simultaneously, the Right began pouring hundreds of millions – even billions – of dollars into building its own Establishment centered in Washington. Besides its own media outlets and think tanks, the Right spent large sums of money in creating anti-journalism attack groups to go after mainstream reporters who dug up information that undermined right-wing positions.

Into that shifting situation of the late-1970s stepped Ronald Reagan, a charming grade-B movie actor, corporate pitchman and former California governor. Unlike the responsible but dreary President Jimmy Carter, who talked about the need to conserve energy and rein in wasteful materialism, Reagan made everything seem simple and fun.

Though dubbed The Great Communicator, Reagan really wasn't that great an orator. His secret was that – as an actor and adman – he understood that Americans wanted the world presented in easy blacks and whites, while enjoying flattering tales about their own innate goodness.

So, Reagan engaged in systematic exaggerations – about the black-hat evils of government, big unions, environmentalists, “welfare queens” and the Evil (Soviet) Empire and about the white-hat goodness of American Way consumerism, unrestrained capitalism, a beefed-up U.S. military and “freedom-fighters” from Nicaragua to Angola to Afghanistan.

To present such a black-and-white world required control of information, so Reagan's Washington foot soldiers, especially a bright young cadre known as neoconservatives, sought control of key information sources. As the shock troops for what's called “information warfare,” the neocons targeted independent-minded Washington journalists and the CIA's analytical division.

The neocons' behind-the-scenes victories over those two groups – made easier by the American Left's abandonment of the information battlefield – proved decisive in setting the nation's political course for three decades. The United States veered off into Reagan's world of fear and fantasy. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

The Interludes

Even during brief respites of relative sanity, such as when some of Reagan's dirty secrets spilled out in the Iran-Contra Affair or when Bill Clinton finally ended the 12-year Reagan-Bush-I reign, the trend away from rationality never was seriously addressed. Rather, the Democrats looked to finesse the falsehoods and avoid ugly conflicts.

Because of that, the madness could quickly resume. For instance, during the first year of Clinton's presidency, the potent right-wing media invented or exaggerated a host of “scandals,” such as Clinton's Whitewater real estate deal, the Travel-gate firing of some holdover White House staff, and the “murder” of White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster, who actually had committed suicide.

In February 1994, when I attended the Conservative Political Action Conference, what I saw was a glimpse of the future. Right-wingers were hawking frat-boy-style magazines showing Hillary Clinton semi-nude and videos recounting Bill Clinton's supposed “murders” and other crimes.

There was a locker-room-style madness to the scene, much like the blustery irreverence on the talk radio shows of Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy and other Clinton-haters.

At the time, Democrats tended to dismiss the significance of this right-wing media assault. Instead, they sought bipartisanship and focused on legislative achievements, such as passing a deficit-reduction bill and pressing for reform of the health-care system. But congressional Republicans responded by doing whatever they could to delay and sabotage Clinton's key initiatives.

Backed by a populist upsurge, which found its voice in the Clinton-hating media, the Republicans mounted a powerful comeback. Both the House and Senate fell under GOP control in 1994, shocking Democrats who had assumed that such a turnover was impossible. The next six years were marked mostly by President Clinton clinging to the White House while under relentless attack.

During Campaign 2000, the Right's mean-spirited humor – which by then pervaded the mainstream news media, too – made fun of the all-too-serious Al Gore. Meanwhile, the over-aged-frat-boy George W. Bush was mostly fawned over as a fresh face with a down-home style. [See Consortiumnews.com's “Al Gore v. The Media” and “Protecting Bush/Cheney.”]

Then, during the disputed election, when Bush's team was busy blocking a Florida recount, which – if done fairly – would have put Gore in the White House, the Right rose up in rebellion against such a prospect (most famously with the Brooks Brothers riot to stop the Miami-Dade recount).

On the other side, Gore and the Democrats pursued a vote recount through the courts. And much of the activist Left insisted that the outcome didn't much matter because Green Party candidate Ralph Nader had declared that there wasn't “a dime's worth of difference” between Gore and Bush anyway.

After Bush snaked away with the presidency, he made it clear that he didn't give a hoot about bipartisan moderation. With the federal budget surprisingly in balance, Bush pressed for Reagan-style tax cuts tilted toward the rich. Soon, the federal government was sliding back into an ocean of red ink.

After the 9/11 attacks, the American people also wanted simplistic moral judgments. So Bush told them that the problem wasn't that al-Qaeda reflected an extreme form of Islamic anger over Western intervention in the Middle East and especially the long-term Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. No, according to Bush, it was that they “hate our freedoms.”

Bush soon extended the black-white dichotomy to the “axis of evil,” three countries with almost nothing in common: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. With the neocons again pulling the strings -- at the CIA's analytical division and with the Washington press corps -- the American people were guided to the conclusion that the neocons wanted, an invasion of Iraq.

Reason Rebounds

Only gradually – especially after the Iraq War turned into a figurative quagmire and New Orleans into a real-life one when Hurricane Katrina hit – did independent-minded Americans and the Left fully wake up to the danger of tolerating Bush's fantasy world. They began to aggressively challenge the lies.

This resurgence of rationality proved powerful in Election 2006, when the Democrats regained control of the Congress. Then, in Election 2008, Obama presented himself as not only a brilliant orator but as a rational human being who respected empirical evidence. Beyond an expression of hope, his victory was a recognition by the American people that reality mattered.

But Obama was also faced with the wreckage that Bush had left behind, including a cratered economy, a staggering federal debt, two wars, and tattered international relations with both allies and adversaries. Obama had to sort out what his priorities were, what needed emergency bandaging and what could wait.

Like Clinton before him, Obama also chose to turn his back on demands that the prior Republican administration be held accountable for its crimes. By looking “forward, not backward” in the name of bipartisanship, Obama presumably thought the Republicans might reciprocate, but – as with Clinton – that wasn't going to happen.

As Obama stumbled, Reagan-style irrationality began to take hold again. After all, it's not much fun to act responsibly and deal with hard problems.

Soon, millions of Americans were counting themselves as followers of Glenn Beck, the clownishly divorced-from-reality host of a popular Fox program. Other Americans tied teabags to their hats and marched on Washington to defend Reagan's chief legacy, hatred of government.

Republican lawmakers trotted out their old cure-all for the economy, more tax cuts. And the neocons were back, questioning Obama's toughness and egging him on to give his militarist commanders in Afghanistan all the fresh troops they want.

Next came Sarah Palin's bus tour on behalf of her memoir, Going Rogue, with crowds lining up by the thousands to buy the book and get a glimpse of their heroine. For two days, cable news shows, including MSNBC, anchored programs from malls where Palin was appearing.

As soon as the mainstream news correspondents sensed that the tide was turning again, they smoothly readjusted to the resurgence of know-nothing-ism. Palin's recitation of right-wing talking points was treated with deference and respect, except by the likes of Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's “Daily Show.”

On his Nov. 18 program, Stewart showed a clip of Palin responding to a question about what she'd do about unemployment if she were President.

“I'd start cutting taxes and allowing our small businesses to keep more of what they're earning,” Palin responded. “Not punishing them by forcing health care ‘reform' down their throats, by forcing an energy policy down their throats that ultimately will tax them more and cost them more to stay in business.”

“That's what I don't like about her right there – it's the nothing,” Stewart said. “If you peel back the pretty, shooty layers of the Palin onion, there's no onion. It's just a conservative boiler-plate mad-lib, ‘freedom is good and taxes are – ooh, I need an adjective – how ‘bout, I don't know, silly.'

“And the worst part is that it is a mad-lib delivered as though it were the hard-earned wisdom of a life well lived. " The glee, boasting about you're straight-shootin' when you're not straight-shootin'. You're just a talking-point machine.” [For part of Stewart's show, see below.]

Palin – like Reagan – has come to embody a willful, almost joyous contempt for reason and facts, a kind of juvenile rebellion against those boring folks who try to figure out reality and act responsibly.

And the Right may be onto something: it's so much more fun and a lot easier politically to let the crazy times roll.

Why Do Conservatives Love Sarah Palin? Because She Never Stops Whining

2009-11-23T09:55:00.000-08:00

Why Do Conservatives Love Sarah Palin? Because She Never Stops Whining
By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant
Posted on November 23, 2009, Printed on November 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144118/

The really beautiful thing about the culture war, from an entertainment standpoint, is that it is fundamentally irresolvable. There isn’t a concrete set of issues involved, where in theory both sides could give in a little and find middle ground, reach some sort of compromise.

That’s because there are no issues at all. At the end of this decade what we call “politics” has devolved into a kind of ongoing, brainless soap opera about dueling cultural resentments and the really cool thing about it, if you’re a TV news producer or a talk radio host, is that you can build the next day’s news cycle meme around pretty much anything at all, no matter how irrelevant — like who’s wearing a flag lapel pin and who isn’t, who spent $150K worth of campaign funds on clothes and who didn’t, who wore a t-shirt calling someone a cunt and who didn’t, and who put a picture of a former Vice Presidential candidate in jogging shorts on his magazine cover (and who didn’t).

It doesn’t matter what the argument is about. What’s important is that once the argument starts, the two sides will automatically coalesce around the various instant-cocoa talking points and scream at each other until they’re blue in the face, or until the next argument starts.

And while some of us are old enough to remember that once upon a time, these arguments always had at least some sort of ideological flavor to them, i.e. the throwdowns were at least rooted in some sort of real political issue (war, taxes, immigration, etc.) we’ve now got a whole generation that is accustomed to screaming at cultural enemies as an end in itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it. Start fighting first, figure out the reasons later.

Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming’s sake generation. The people who dismiss her book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk completely miss the book’s significance, because in some ways it’s really a revolutionary and innovative piece of literature.

Palin — and there’s just no way to deny this — is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment. In this area she leaves even Rush Limbaugh in the dust.

The reason for that is that poor Rush is an anachronism, in the sense that his whole schtick revolves around talking about real political issues. And real political issues are boring.

Listen to Rush any day of the week and you’ll hear him playing the old-fashioned pundit game: he goes about the dreary business of picking through the policies and positions and public statements of Democrats and poking holes in them, arguing with them, attacking them with numbers and facts and pseudo-facts and non-facts and whatever else he can get his hands on, honest or not, but at least he tries. The poor guy nearly killed himself this summer trying to find enough horseshit to arm himself with against the health care bill, coming up with various fairy tales about how state health agencies used death panels to try to kill cancer patients who just wanted to live a little longer, how section 1233 is Auschwitz all over again, yada yada yada.

Rush is no Einstein, but the man does research. It may be fallacious and completely dishonest research, but he does it all the same. His battlefield is world politics and most of the time the relevant action is taking place in Washington. As good as he is at what he does, he still has to travel to the action; he himself isn’t the action.

Sarah Palin’s battlefield, on the other hand, is whatever is happening five feet in front of her face. She is building a political career around the little interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding her sawdust-filled head. And in the process she connects with pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America on a plane that’s far more elemental than the mega-ditto schtick.

Most normal people cannot connect on an emotional level with Rush’s meanderings on how Harry Reid is buying off Mary Landrieu with pork in the health care bill. They can, however, connect with stories about how top McCain strategist and Karl Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt told poor Sarah to shut her pie-hole on election day, or how her supposed allies in the McCain campaign stabbed her in the back by leaking gossip about her to reporters, how Schmidt used the word “fuck” in front of her daughter, or even with the strange tales about Schmidt ordering Sarah to consult with a nutritionist to improve her campaign endurance when she herself knew she just needed to get out in the fresh air and run (If there’s one thing Sarah Palin knows, it’s herself!).

Complaining about the assholes we interact with on a daily basis is the #1 eternal pastime of the human race. We all do it, and we get to do it every day, because the world is full of assholes. Me personally, I waste an enormous amount of time seething over people who get onto crowded subway cars with big backpacks on and/or talk in the Amtrak quiet car and/or drive 57 mph in the fast lane or, my personal favorite, walking with glacial slowness in a horizontal row four overweight tourists across on a New York City sidewalk. We all get into furious arguments at work that make us want to explode in self-righteous fury (in my office dramas I always realize I was actually the asshole a day or so later) and when we get home from work, this is usually what our loved ones hear about for at least the first hour or so.

Not health care, not financial regulatory reform, not Iraq or Afghanistan, but — assholes.

Sarah Palin is on an endless crusade against assholes. It’s all she thinks about. She doesn’t really have any political ideas, in the classic sense of the word — in fact the only thing resembling real political convictions in Going Rogue revolve around the Trans-Alaska pipeline and how awesome she thinks it is.

Most of the rest of the book just catalogs her Gump-esque rise to national stardom (not having enough self-awareness to detect the monstrous narcissistic ambition that in reality was impelling her forward all along, she labors in the book to describe her various career leaps as lucky accidents or mystical acts of Providence) and the seemingly endless parade of meanies bent on tripping her up along the way. The book is really about her battles with these people, how much they did and do suck, and how difficult and inherently unfair life is for a decent hardworking American gal who just wants to live life, serve God, and try to be president without being bothered all the time.

Viewed through the prism of this particular brand of insanity (Palinsanity? does that work?), Katie Couric’s notorious Palin interview last year really was a cheap shot. After all, Katie was trying to nail Palin — which is mean! Who among us can’t sympathize with the experience of being sandbagged by some slick professional rival who catches you in a moment of weakness and, instead of lending a helping hand, drives a fireplace poker through your eye?

You’d have to be thinking about the broader picture, about the fact that the president of the United States ought not to be a drooling yahoo whose two favorite Supreme Court cases are Roe v. Wade and Roe v. Wade and who thinks living near Canada counts as foreign policy experience, to not see what an asshole Katie Couric was being. And that other reality, the reality where one worries about a national political candidate having the brains of an innertube, is less immediate than the five-foot airspace radius around the Palin bobblehead. It’s harder for the average person to connect with, I guess.

Palin’s extraordinary ability to inspire major national controversies around these injustices done to her immediate person is going to guarantee her some kind of major role in American politics for the next dozen years. In this regard she is going to have a willing ally in her supposed keen enemy, the mainstream media, which likewise loves nothing more than a political narrative that has nothing to do with politics. It’ll be a virtually endless war over nonsense like this latest Newsweek cover, which hilariously is being seen as one or the other of a) a liberal media plot or b) a sexist assault on a prominent female politician by the male-dominated media world when in fact, as all of us in this dying print media business know, the magazine’s motive was grounded entirely in the nihilistic desperation to sell newsstand copies.

And Sarah Palin sells copies. She is the country’s first WWE politician — a cartoon combatant who inspires stadiums full of frustrated middle American followers who will cheer for her against whichever villain they trot out, be it Newsweek, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, Steve Schmidt, the Mad Russian, Randy Orton or whoever. Her followers will not know that she is the perfect patsy for our system, designed as it is to channel popular anger in any direction but a useful one, and to keep the public tied up endlessly in pointless media melees over meaningless nonsense (melees of the sort that develop organically around Palin everywhere she goes). Like George W. Bush, even Palin herself doesn’t know this, another reason she’s such a perfect political tool.

With Going Rogue, the 2012 reality show has already begun. As brainless political theater, she can’t be topped. It’s just too bad for conservatives that she happens to be unsustainably divisive and, as Newsweek points out, a really good bet to permanently marginalize the Republican party by reducing it to a pissed-off, semi-coherent mob that repulses independent voters on a visceral level. To paraphrase John Doman’s Deputy Ops Rawls character from The Wire, she’s “brilliant — fuckin’ shame it’s gonna end our careers, but still.”

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

© 2009 True/Slant All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144118/

Fox Issues On-Air Apology for Misleading Footage of Palin Crowds

2009-11-23T05:58:00.000-08:00

There will be no "serious disciplinary action" because it is the agenda of the psychopatic elite to get Palin elected next tie!

Fox Issues On-Air Apology for Misleading Footage of Palin Crowds
By Faiz Shakir, Think Progress
November 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.thinkprogress.org//144071/

Following ThinkProgress’ report yesterday that Fox News had recycled old file footage of Sarah Palin rallies to assert that she is currently getting huge turnouts on her book tour, the network issued an on-air apology this afternoon. Fox’s Happening Now co-host Jane Skinner said it was mistake, but didn’t explain how it happened:

In the tease before the segment — the tease to commercial — we told you how those people were already lining up to meet Palin. The problem is, we didn’t actually show you the video we were referencing. Instead, we mistakenly aired what’s called file tape of Sarah Palin. We didn’t mean to mislead anybody in that tease. It was a mistake. And for that, we apologize.

Watch it:

The Swamp reported earlier that Fox News may take “serious disciplinary action” against control room staffers over the incident. The on-air apology made no reference to such action.

Faiz Shakir is the Research Director at the Center for American Progress and serves as Editor of ThinkProgress.org and The Progress Report.

Buying Sarah Palin's Book Will Help Save Wolves?

2009-11-19T11:55:00.000-08:00

Buying Sarah Palin's Book Will Help Save Wolves?
By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet
November 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/144051/

Sarah Palin's new book may serve a purpose beyond keeping the AP busy and relaunching the hilariously petty sniping between Palin and former McCain campaign aides: it can, counterintuitively, help Alaska's wolves. San Francisco's Green Apple books has announced that %100 of the proceeds from sales of Going Rogue will go to the Alaska Wildlife Federation. From the bookstore's blog:

With all due to respect to the Republicans who were as overjoyed as I was (for different reasons, of course) by Sarah Palin's nomination to the McCain ticket last year, Green Apple is donating 100% of the profits from sales of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life to the Alaska Wildlife Alliance.

According to the Alaska Wildlife Alliance website, the organization is devoted to "the protection of Alaska's natural wildlife for its intrinsic value as well as for the benefit of present and future generations." That's pretty close to the opposite of promoting aerial hunting by paying hunters for severed wolf paws, a policy Palin enacted as Governor of Alaska.

In 2007, a lawsuit brought by the Alliance and two others ended the program.

So, if you feel compelled to own a copy of Going Rogue, buy it from these guys.

The Persecution of Sarah Palin

2009-11-19T06:51:00.001-08:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704782304574542051447849052.html

November 18, 2009 by The Wall Street Journal
The Persecution of Sarah Palin
by Thomas Frank

Maybe in their business lives, conservatives are the stern, unforgiving masters of capitalist lore. But when it comes to politics, oh, do they love a whiner!

It is her mastery of the lament that explained former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's appeal last year, and now her knack for self-pity is on full display in her book, "Going Rogue." This is the memoir as prolonged, keening wail, larded with petty vindictiveness. With an impressive attention to detail, Ms. Palin settles every score, answers every criticism; locates a scapegoat for every foul-up, and fastens an insult on every critic, down to the last obscure Palin-doubter back in Alaska.

From Ms. Palin's masterwork, we learn that the personal really is the political. Every encounter with a critic seems to be a skirmish in the culture wars, from the Alaska debate moderator who didn't play fair once to the "wealthy, effete young chap" who ran against her for governor but who, in one of the quickest transitions from anti-snob to snob in all of literature, is also said to have served as "our limo driver at [her husband] Todd's cousin's wedding."

We read about the mean things people have said about Ms. Palin's daughter Bristol, Ms. Palin's suspicions that the neighbors of the Alaska governor's mansion disapproved of her kids' toys, her assurance that she lived a spartan life as governor, "despite what some critics would later accuse me of doing." There's the nonscandal she calls "Troopergate," which is virtually impossible to follow in this telling, except for the insults Ms. Palin directs at one of the men who was (apparently) on the other side of the issue, whatever it was.

In other circumstances, Ms. Palin seems like a woman of grit. When she discovers that her fifth child is going to be born with Down syndrome, she is initially upset, but then writes a letter in God's voice-incidentally, one of the book's creepiest moments-instructing the rest of the family to "accept that I [i.e., the Almighty] only want the best for you. . . ."

But the mean things people say and do during her vice presidential run-these are not to be taken in the same spirit. These are to be recalled and deplored, one by one, as if from a master list Ms. Palin has been keeping all this time. She reminds us that someone hacked her email, that she got a prank phone call, and that she once saw someone wearing an insulting T-shirt in Philadelphia.

She claims that what ruined her famous interview with wily CBS News personality Katie Couric was the latter's "condescension," which caused Ms. Palin to bungle questions like the one in which she was asked to name her favorite newspaper. And she introduces us to Steve Schmidt, the Republican campaign strategist who is the book's No. 1 bad guy-almost alone among the book's characters, he is always referred to by his last name-and who, as Ms. Palin tells it, once implied to an aide that "if there were any more leaks critical of anybody in the handling of Sarah Palin, then a lot more negative stuff would be said about Sarah Palin."

And, lo and behold, there is. Much more. All of it neatly catalogued, bemoaned, and for sale.

But amid all this score-settling, Ms. Palin wanders into some predictable traps. When explaining her political philosophy, for example, she tells readers that "conservatism is a respect for history and tradition"; on the very next page she instructs readers to accept the creative-destructive whirl of the market, which affects society the way "wildfires in Alaska burn away deadfall to make way for new growth."

So much for tradition. The respect she shows history, though, is the kind of respect you show the flag when you soak it in kerosene and touch a match to it. "[W]e tried growing government to save the economy back in the 1930s, and it didn't work then either," Ms. Palin writes. It is a modest assertion, though, compared to the astonishing finding Ms. Palin reveals in the next sentence: "Massive government spending programs and protectionist economic policies actually helped turn a recession into the Great Depression." If this is, as it seems, a reference to the New Deal, then history, per Ms. Palin, sometimes goes backwards, with the WPA and its ilk actually bringing about events that took place before they were launched.

But Ms. Palin's life is meant to be an inspiration. Maybe I should follow her example. The opinion-page equivalent of the Palinesque style is easy enough to imagine: I would use this space to recite the indignities the world forced on me over the course of the week-an effete-looking young person ignored me the other day-plus glimpses of heartland authenticity-I sure do like pot roast-before concluding, darkly, that the reason I suffer is because I am such a sterling American.

I can't wait to get started.

© 2009 The Wall Street Journal

The Bestseller That Isn't: Going Rogue Hits Bestsellerdom With A Wimper!

2009-11-18T14:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Bestseller-That-Isn-t-by-Daniel-Vojir-091115-976.html

November 15, 2009
The Bestseller That Isn't: Going Rogue Hits Bestsellerdom With A Wimper!
By Daniel Vojir
Will New Book Help Her Run For Office? Or Run FROM Office?

In 1936, when Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind was published, the population of the country was approx, 128 million people (about 42% of what it is now) and the "average Joe" (to use the sexist terminology of the times) put out a whopping $3.00 (roughly 15% of his weekly salary) to read about the exploits of Scarlett O'Hara. Whole city blocks would chip in between five and ten cents a neighbor to have a turn at reading it. It came out on May30th with a print run of 5,000 and then a rushed print run in June of 50,000 copies. By Christmas, one million copies were in print.

There was no New York Times Bestseller List at the time, but the nation viewed it as #1 for a over 2 years. That, however, was a time when books were popular because their authors were, at the very least, captivating. In 1984, for example, ErmaBombeck's Motherhood, The Second Oldest Profession was on the top of the charts for several months. People read it for its wit, humor and professionalism.

Times have changed, haven't they?

What constitutes a bestseller these days? The number of copies sold is still the criteria, but there is something else, or rather, there are things which don't "pal around with" good writing. Notoriety of the author or subject sells. Even negative publicity sells. Booksellers are still banking on brisk sales for CarriePrejean's book Still Standing, but perhaps that's because people sometimes buy books for "camp" value. One truly funny "five star" review:

Although the writing in Miss Prejean's book caused me to throw up a little in my mouth, the spirit moves me to give it five stars. I know some might find that a little strange, but a book is more than simply words, sentences, and chapters; it's also cover art, spine glue, and the little blurbs the publisher commands its other authors to write. In sum, all these pieces must come together to make a book. If I love the smell of the book's spine glue, shouldn't I be allowed to reward the publisher with a few extra stars? I certainly think so.

Now the erstwhile Governor-of-Alaska-for-eighteen-months has penned an autobiography of sorts: Going Rogue will sell in the millions, to be sure, and will (briefly) be on the New York Times bestseller list simply because it had so manypre-pub orders. And die-hard Sarah Palin fans will brace themselves for a culture war skirmish against any liberal MSM onslaught.

Harper Collins' description of the book:

Going Rogue traces one ordinary citizen's extraordinary journey and imparts Palin's vision of a way forward for America and her unfailing hope in the greatest nation on earth.

Certainly the making of a literary megastar! Not! Harper Collins may be trumpeting the pre-pub sales, but in the end, it's the bookseller who knows what's happening to the book.

At Amazon the list price of $28.99 has been marked down to --$9.00! That's a 60% markdown! In other words, "damn the pre-pub sales - let's remainder it before we get stuck with it!"

A tongue-in-cheek five star review:

All I know is this means she wont be running for President in 2012...she will make so much money from her book deal that she can shop atWal-Mart for 1,212 days spending $3,000 each day. This will take her way past electioneering season.
Under "Tags Customers Associate with This Product," the tag with the most customers is Keeping America Stupid. The book is also paired in sales with a right wing polemical book about the Obama administration with the prescient title: Catastrophe!

I've been in books and publishing long enough to know that a book ala Ann Coulter is only read because of who the author is trashing no matter whether it's truth or fabrication. Of course, even Ann Coulter can lie more convincingly than Sarah Palin, but that won't stop some people from determining the book as the gospel truth. And Going Rogue: An American Life will proudly rest in their bookcases along with the conspiracy theories of Pat Robertson (A New World Order) and My Pet Goat.

A Rogue with Lipstick

2009-11-18T13:59:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-Rogue-with-Lipstick-by-Kathy-Malloy-091116-578.html

November 16, 2009
A Rogue with Lipstick
By Kathy Malloy

It's almost the holiday season, and the greatest gift granted to Democrats since Dan Quayle is on a book tour. Yes, Caribou Barbie herself is all over TV these days, which means one of two things: 1) these are the end days and the rapture is upon us, or 2) it's nearly November sweeps and the greedy media execs know that the American Sheeple cannot turn away from All Things Palinicious.

She's better than a boxful of balloon-boys for their ratings.

After all, Thanksgiving is approaching. We're dying to see if she sips her latte through a perky smile . . . her perfect “bump–it”-enhanced updo intact . . . prattling on about how good it feels to do something fun for a change. Meanwhile, one of the extras from the movie Deliverance forces live turkeys head-first into a metal-funnel-turkey-killing-machine (a device that would give Cheney a woody for days) just a few feet behind her. Ah, makes me nostalgic for the good old days . . . Mom, carnage, meth labs and apple pie.

Leaked excerpts from the book, titled Going Rogue, (or is it Reading Vogue?) indicated it is chock full of tasty gossip-girl tidbits more suited to a WB night-time drama than an Executive Office contender. Can you honestly imaginea preening Mike Huckabee bitching about the costly designer threads he was forced to wear? Or Hillary Clinton whining about Katie Couric's “badgering” and dirty interview tactics and obvious low self esteem? Or Joe Biden pouting about strategists who comment negatively about his weight loss?

The book, already a best-seller, officially debuts Tuesday, but Sarah Barraccuda is getting a mavericky head-start on the media blitz with an exclusive interview with Oprah later today. Watch out, Oprah -- the winking Wasilla Godzilla will skewer you in her book sequal if you ask any question tougher than found ona third-grader's civics test.

Better than the book, Simple Sarah is Tweeting again, and regularly posting on Facebook, which must make William Shatner and The Tonight Show staff giddy with anticipation. “Keep your powder dry” is the title of her latest note, in which she teases the conflict with the media she expects as a result of her “shocking” disclosures. But her paranoia really shines in a November 15th posting in which she criticizes the AP for obtaining a copy of the book that was probably leaked by one of her own PR people. The media need to be held accountable for “spreading misinformation and making things up,” she whines in her note. Poor Sarah, the media is always out to get her. That attitude will doubtlessly make for an interesting book tour as every interviewer or reviewer is scrutinized through her rimless glasses and deemed an evil adversary, plotting against her. Nothing like alienating the critics you're trying to woo. I can't wait!

And to think she was almost a few melanoma cells away from the Oval Office. Wow. We already had (at least) one paranoid Republican president. Been there, done that, got the redacted tape transcripts.

Will the book be a success? You bet'cha. Will it help whatever future political career she and her scary rapture-ready followers in the extreme Religious Right have envisioned for her? That's not as certain. But, I am willing to do whatever it takes to make sure she's on the top of the ticket for 2012. I'll organize fundraisers, staff the phone banks, make sure there are fresh fire extinguishers in all the meth labs. I'll print up the bumper stickers, keep the double-barrel fully loaded for illegal helicopter wolf-hunting trips so you can let off a little steam. And, Hallelujah!, I'll be thrilled to handle the press if you or your kids decide it's time to pop out a new Palin. I'll even print up the “Welcome Baby Privit” banner!

Just promise you'll run, Sarah! RUN!

Time for some Palintology

2009-11-18T06:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/16/AR2009111602630.html

Time for some Palintology
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

I saw the other day that George W. Bush is raising money for his proposed policy institute at Southern Methodist University. I did some research and found out that there are something like 3,000 policy institutes, most of them hosting convocations about nothing much and issuing papers no one reads. I suggest therefore that Bush use his money to do something truly different and constructive -- establish the Institute for the Study of Sarah Palin. My check is in the mail.

This is Palin Week -- days of interviews relating to the publication of her book, "Going Rogue." She will appear virtually everywhere, making her usual good impression, and there will be more talk about how she might run for president. Someone will point out that she is even scheduled soon to go to Iowa -- and you know what that means.

On the other hand, someone else will point out that the very week Palin is promoting her book, the current president is abroad attending meetings in Asia, including a visit with our Chinese bankers. Could those who fault Barack Obama for being callow and inexperienced imagine Palin meeting with the Chinese or, for that matter, conducting a protracted policy review about Afghanistan? As for Pakistan, South Korea, North Korea, the Middle East and, of course, the perplexing Georgian-Abkhazian conflict -- I don't think she is quite up to it all, some of those nations not being close to Alaska.

And this being the case, the Institute for the Study of Sarah Palin should look into how she was chosen by John McCain as his vice presidential running mate -- and why McCain, given absolute proof of abominable judgment and the sort of sorry political opportunism he built a career decrying, has not repaired to a monastery and taken a vow of absolute silence because almost anything he has to say post-Palin has to be judged by his choice of her.

A further area of study ought to deal with the mind-set of McCain's former campaign aides who continue to criticize Palin for not turning out to be the mute puppet they had so hoped she would be. That she went rogue I have no doubt -- but this was only after they went stupid and helped pick her in the first place. They live in political ignominy for not resigning from the campaign when it counted.

The Institute for the Study of Sarah Palin might conclude that she represents the exact moment important Republicans gave up on democracy. She was clearly seen as an empty vessel who could be controlled by her intellectual betters. These include the editorial boards of the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal, neither of which would hire Palin to make an editorial judgment but both of which would be thrilled to see her as president of the United States. It does not bother these people in the least that the woman is a demagogue -- remember "death panels"? -- and not, on the face of it, very responsible. If she quit as governor of Alaska in the noble pursuit of money, might she quit as, say, vice president or president for the same reason? From what I hear, one can never be too rich.

I suppose, too, that the Institute for the Study of Sarah Palin would issue oodles of papers on our celebrity age and how she, after all, is just another one. Like most celebrities, she is a vehicle for the sale of something: a book, a magazine, a TV program or a diet regime. This is essential, for we are a vast country without much industry and so we rely on the production of fame, which is what we now do best -- as cars and steel and 20 Mule Team Borax are all a distant memory.

Finally, the Institute for the Study of Sarah Palin will mull what she represents. She has a phenomenal favorability rating among Republicans -- 76 percent -- who have a quite irrational belief that she would not make such a bad president. What they mean is that she will act out their resentments -- take an ax to the people and institutions they hate. The Palin Movement is fueled by high-octane bile, and it is worth watching and studying for these reasons alone.

It may be asking too much of Bush to put his money into something useful instead of the standard presidential monument of self-aggrandizement. This, though, is his chance: Study Sarah Palin. If she's a comer, then we're all goners.

cohenr@washpost.com

Sarah Palin's Poison: The Secret of Her Right-Wing Success

2009-11-18T06:30:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin's Poison: The Secret of Her Right-Wing Success
By Richard Kim and Betsy Reed, The Nation
November 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143922/

This article is adapted from Going Rouge: Sarah Palin--An American Nightmare, edited by Richard Kim and Betsy Reed, available only by direct order from OR Books.

In one way of looking at it, Sarah Palin is the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party.

Electorally, she is the GOP gift that keeps on giving. First there was Campaign 2008, which flamed out with her car-crash Katie Couric interview just as spectacularly as it had begun, three weeks earlier, with her star turn at the Republican convention. More recently, in the November 3 elections this year, she played a crucial role in delivering the Democrats one of their few victories. Palin and her culture-war comrades Rush Limbaugh, Dick Armey and Glenn Beck took up the cause of Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in the 23rd District Congressional race in New York. As a result the moderate, prochoice Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, bowed out, endorsing Democrat Bill Owens. Hoffman was unable to convince the district's overwhelmingly white rural voters that banning abortions and gay marriage and bashing government held the answers to their concerns, and on election day the Democrat triumphed, capturing a district that had been in Republican hands since the nineteenth century.

With enemies like this, who needs friends? If only Palin had intervened more forcefully in gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia -- where, unbidden, she issued robocalls to get out the vote for Republican Bob McDonnell -- Democrats might be celebrating an electoral trifecta.

It's tempting to cheer Sarah Barracuda on as she cannibalizes what remains of the Republican Party. The Going Rogue book tour, the 2010 targeting of moderates like Florida's Charlie Crist, a 2012 bid for the presidency -- bring it on! While the percentage of Republican voters who say they would seriously consider voting for Palin for president stands at 65 percent, among all voters the figure is mired at 33 percent. As former McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt -- one of the key architects of the Palin veep pick -- put it recently, "Were she to be the nominee [for president in 2012], we could have a catastrophic election result." Three more years of Palin poison infusing Republican politics will likely spell supermajorities for Democrats and a second term for Obama.

But what of the poison's other effects? Her nonsensical statements may inadvertently provide comic relief, but it's no laughing matter when serious debate is distorted by the wild misinformation she feeds to her increasingly paranoid base. Sometimes the lunacy is contained on the fringes. At a recent Wisconsin Right to Life fundraiser, she somberly raised the decision to move the "In God We Trust" motto to the edge of the presidential dollar coin. "Who calls a shot like that?" she said, insinuatingly. Actually, George W. Bush did. It was an embarrassing gaffe that also neatly captures the key elements of Palinism: fact-free conspiracy, hollow patriotism and public religiosity -- the very coins of Republican populist rage.

But sometimes her interventions reach a wider audience. Consider the role Palin played in the "death panel" hysteria that hijacked the healthcare debate this summer. That myth did not originate with Palin; the source was Betsy McCaughey, the Clinton healthcare antagonist. But it was Palin who popularized the term "death panel" by posting a screed against healthcare reform on her Facebook page that included this classic Palinism: "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." With remarkable economy of prose, Palin cast healthcare reform as an assault on the country, put a face on its supposed victims (her baby, Trig), contrived the expression "death panel" (linking it directly to Obama), raised the specter of euthanasia in the service of a state-run economy and rallied the troops around a fight against "evil." We all know what happened next. After a summer of zany tea parties, more than 40 percent of Americans believed that healthcare reform would create death panels, and support for a public option (the campaign's real target) had sunk to 52 percent, led by a 17 percent shift among independents.

The recently passed House version of healthcare reform includes both a public option and funding for optional end-of-life consultations (the so-called death panels), and it's possible the final bill will retain those provisions. But the measure of Palin's power lies not in her capacity to write legislation or win national elections but in her ability to torpedo the democratic process, inducing legislative paralysis and, perhaps more important, driving discussion of more progressive options off the road. Palin's death panel crusade has provided a chilling lesson: that a minority armed with conspiracy theories is capable of occupying the national political discourse as long as it has conviction and a mouthpiece. Indeed, Palin is still at it, taking to her Facebook page to denounce the House bill as a theft of American "freedom" and reiterating the death panel lie. Should Congress recess without a healthcare bill on Obama's desk, one can expect Palin to bum rush the field once again.

A crucial aspect of Palinism is Sarah Palin -- the brand. Her name alone instantly conjures up a pungent brew of images, phrases and associations: just an average hockey mom of five, a pit bull with lipstick, beauty queen, moose hunter, long-distance runner, sexy librarian, winker, rogue. Palinism works by draping hard-right policy in a winning personal story and just-folks rhetoric. Its genius rests in its ability to magically absorb inconvenient facts and mutually contradictory realities into an unassailable personal narrative. In the Palin universe, her unwed pregnant teenage daughter, Bristol, is somehow a poster child for abstinence-only education; hence criticism of Palin's sex-ed policies is an attack on her family. Although Palin is an aggressive advocate for opening up the United States' oil reserves to drilling instead of investing in renewable energy, she labels herself pro-environment, a stance exemplified by her love of shooting animals or her husband's hobby of racing snowmobiles across the tundra. And who'd dare question Palin's foreign policy credentials, when her son Track shipped out to Iraq after high school?

Palin perfected this technique of substituting the personal for the political during the campaign, and she now plans a whistle-stop tour of the places she famously called the "real America" to hawk her hastily ghostwritten memoir, reprising her Campaign '08 rallies with appearances in Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Florida. But she's learned a thing or two about the dangers of dealing with journalists who take their jobs seriously, and so, beyond Oprah and Barbara Walters, she'll stick to the right-wing cable and talk-radio circuit. She's also banned all cellphones and recording devices from her appearances. She will, in other words, be talking to her people inside the Palin bubble.

Those of us who reside in the parts of America Palin regards as unreal may secretly enjoy watching the bubble bounce along, relishing her run-on sentences and looney-tunes lines. But the more we chuckle, the more indignant and impassioned the Palin army becomes. That's the bedeviling thing about Sarah Palin, and the secret to her success: neither the left nor the right can get enough of her.

Want the antidote to the propaganda in Sarah Palin's new book? Buy your copy of Going Rouge here, a compilation of the best progressive take-downs of Sarah Palin since she burst onto the national stage. The book includes great analysis of Palin's role in American politics and culture by Max Blumenthal, Jane Hamsher, Christopher Hayes, Jim Hightower, Naomi Klein, AlterNet and many others. Buy it here.

Richard Kim is a senior editor at The Nation. Betsy Reed is the executive editor of The Nation. She is the editor of Unnatural Disaster: The Nation on Hurricane Katrina, a collection of the magazine's coverage of the storm and its aftermath published by Nation Books on the hurricane's one-year anniversary.

They are the co-editors of Going Rouge: Sarah Palin--An American Nightmare available only by direct order from OR Books.

The Palin Effect: How Sarah Palin Made Herself Indispensable While Destroying the Republican Party

2009-11-17T13:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175139

The Palin Effect: How Sarah Palin Made Herself Indispensable While Destroying the Republican Party
Max Blumenthal
TomDispatch
Sun, 15 Nov 2009 10:24 EST

An Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:

It can't get better than this, can it? A first printing of 1.5 million copies sent out into an otherwise dead book market. Possibly as much as $7 million dollars going to the author, who already has interviews lined up with Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters.

A bus tour of the "real America" that manages to avoid such Sodom and Gomorrah-like Democratic hotspots as Los Angeles and New York. Even a collection of critical essays about the author appearing at the same moment -- with her photo on a similarly designed cover, and just two letters in the title reversed, clearly meant to confuse her fans. Then, there's even the parody coloring book. It's a "perfect storm for publishers," says the book editor for the Christian Science Monitor -- and if that's the last time the phrase "perfect storm" is used for this media extravaganza, TomDispatch will eat its baseball cap.

Yes, of course, what else could I be talking about but Going Rogue, Sarah Palin's as-told-to "memoir" -- and its critical doppelganger, Going Rouge (put together by two Nation magazine editors). I wonder, by the way, if, in the uproar to follow, anyone will comment on the strangeness of Palin's book title. True, late last October, with the presidential election fast approaching, an unnamed aide to candidate McCain accused his vice-presidential partner of "going rogue." At the time, an "associate" of hers responded to the charge by claiming she was "simply trying to 'bust free' of what she believes was a damaging and mismanaged [campaign] roll-out." A year later, however, she's evidently ready to make that angry intra-campaign charge proudly her own.

Still, here's the thing that's so odd: since the fall of the Soviet Union, the word "rogue," as in "rogue state," has been associated with only one thing in the U.S.: enemy nations supposedly eager to enter the nuclear proliferation sweepstakes -- in particular, the crew that our previous president lumped together as the "axis of evil." We're talking about Iran, North Korea, Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- and now, evidently, former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Maybe Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, the blistering, bestselling exposé of just how the Republican Party ate itself for lunch, is right. Maybe Palin is intent on going nuclear in American politics. Unfortunately, when the fun's all over, we have no idea who is going to clean up the mess.

The Palin Effect
How Sarah Palin Made Herself Indispensable While Destroying the Republican Party
By Max Blumenthal

Sarah Palin's heavily publicized book tour begins in earnest this Monday, but weeks before, her ghostwritten memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, had already vaulted into the number one position at Amazon. Warming up for a tour that will take her across Middle America in a bus, Palin tested her lines in a November 7th speech before a crowd of 5,000 anti-abortion activists in Wisconsin. She promptly cited an urban legend as a "disturbing trend," claiming the Treasury Department had moved the phrase "In God We Trust" from presidential dollar coins. (The rumor most likely originated with a 2006 story on the far-right website WorldNetDaily.)

In fact, a suggested alteration in its position on the coin was shot down in 2007 after pressure from Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. Nonetheless, Palin did not hesitate to take up this "controversy," however false, since it conveniently pits a tyrannical, God-destroying, secular big government against humble God-fearing folk. In doing so, of course, she presented herself as this nation's leading defender of the faith.

In a Republican Party hoping to rebound in 2010 on the strength of a newly energized and ideologically aroused conservative grassroots, Palin's influence is now unparalleled. Through her Facebook page, she was the one who pushed the rumor of "death panels" into the national healthcare debate, prompting the White House to issue a series of defensive responses.

Unfazed by its absurdity, she repeated the charge in her recent speech in Wisconsin. In a special congressional election in New York's 23rd congressional district, Palin's endorsement of Doug Hoffman, an unknown far-right third-party candidate, helped force a popular moderate Republican politician, Dede Scozzafava, from the race. In the end, Palin's ideological purge in upstate New York led to an improbable Democratic victory, the first in that GOP-heavy district in more than 100 years.

Though the ideological purge may have backfired, Palin's participation in it magnified her influence in the party. In a telling sign of this, Congressman Mark Kirk, a pro-choice Republican from the posh suburban North Shore of Chicago, running for the Senate in Illinois, issued an anxious call for Palin's support while she campaigned for Hoffman. According to a Kirk campaign memo, the candidate was terrified that Palin would be asked about his candidacy during her scheduled appearance on the Chicago-based Oprah Winfrey Show later this month -- the kick-off for her book tour -- and would not react enthusiastically. With $2.3 million in campaign cash and no viable primary challengers, Kirk was still desperate to avoid Palin-backed attacks from his right flank, however hypothetical they might be.

"She's gangbusters!" a leading conservative radio host exclaimed to me. "There is nobody in the Republican Party who can raise money like her or top her name recognition."

During the 2008 presidential race, some Republican Party elders warned of Palin's destructive influence. They insisted she was a polarizing figure whose extremism would accelerate the Party's slide toward the political and cultural margins. New York Times columnist David Brooks, a card-carrying neocon who had written glowingly of Senator McCain, claimed Palin represented "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party." Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for President Reagan and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, blasted Palin as "a dope and unqualified from the start." Last June, Steve Schmidt, the former McCain campaign chief of staff, warned that Palin's nomination as the GOP's 2012 presidential nominee would be "catastrophic."

New polling data appears to support such doomsday prophecies. According to an October 19th Gallup poll, the former governor of Alaska has become one of the most polarizing and unpopular politicians in the country. Since she quit the governorship to pursue her lucrative book deal, a move that upset many in Alaska's Republican leadership and cost the state's taxpayers almost $200,000, her unfavorability rating has spiked to 50% while her favorability has sunk to 40%, again according to Gallup's figures. (The only nationally-known politician who is less popular right now, according to the poll, is John Edwards, the former two-term senator who fathered a child out of wedlock and paid his mistress hush money while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination on a social justice platform.)

Queen Esther

If Palin is indeed a cancer on the GOP, why can't the Republican establishment retire her to a quiet life of moose hunting in the political wilderness? Why has her appeal only increased in the wake of her catastrophic political expeditions? Why won't she listen to, or abide by, conventional political wisdom?

The answer lies beyond the realm of polls and punditry in the political psychology of the movement that animates and, to a great degree, controls, the Republican grassroots -- a uniquely evangelical subculture defined by the personal crises of its believers and their perceived persecution at the hands of cosmopolitan elites.

By emphasizing her own crises and her victimization by the "liberal media," Palin has established an invisible, indissoluble bond with adherents of that subculture -- so visceral it transcends any rational political analysis. As a result, her career has become a vehicle through which the right-wing evangelical movement feels it can express its deepest identity in opposition both to secular society and to its representatives in the Obama White House. Palin is perceived by its leaders -- and followers -- not as another cynical politician or even as a self-promoting celebrity, but as a kind of magical helper, the God-fearing glamour girl who parachuted into their backwater towns to lift them from the drudgery of everyday life, assuring them that they represented the "Real America."

If McCain had taken his preferred choice for a running mate in 2008, he would have chosen Joseph Lieberman, the turncoat Democrat and his best friend in the Senate. But with the base of the Republican Party subsumed by a Christian right that detested the senator, his advisors urged him to choose the untested, virtually unknown Alaskan governor to bring the faithful back to him. Their gamble paid off -- at least in the short-term. When Palin was revealed as the vice presidential nominee at an off-the-record gathering of the Council for National Policy, a secretive cabal of the conservative movement's top financiers and activists, Tom Minnery of the Christian right outfit Focus on the Family recalled, "People were on their seats applauding cheering, yelling... that room was electrified."

Before her nomination, the provincial Palin had traveled outside the country only once and demonstrated little, if any, intellectual curiosity. During the campaign, she was flummoxed when CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric simply asked what magazines she read. Yet the fact that she had such a limited understanding of the world actually recommended her to the Republican base.

The gun-toting, snowmobile-cruising former beauty queen became an instant cultural icon. Little understood by those outside this culture was her religious worldview, cultivated during the 20 years she spent worshipping at the Wasilla Assembly of God, a right-wing Pentecostal church in her hometown north of Anchorage. When I visited the church in October 2008, a pastor from Kenya, Bishop Thomas Muthee, was at the podium comparing Palin to Queen Esther, the biblical queen who used her wiles to intercede for her people. The reference was clear enough: Palin, the former beauty pageant contestant who had chosen Esther as her biblical role model when she first entered politics, would topple America's secular tyrants, leading her people, the true Christians, into the kingdom. As he concluded his sermon, Muthee gesticulated wildly and spoke in tongues, urging parishioners to "come against the spirit of witchcraft as the body of Christ."

Three years earlier, in 2005, Muthee had anointed Palin during a public ceremony at the Wasilla Assembly of God, laying his hand on her forehead while praying to protect her "against all forms of witchcraft." The bishop claimed that he had personally battled a witch in his hometown of Kiambu, Kenya, driving the evildoer from the town and thereby ending an epidemic of crime and licentiousness. The episode was later revealed as a farce by a reporter from Women's eNews who traveled to Kiambu and found the supposed witch, a local healer named Mama Jane, still living happily in her compound. In palling around with Muthee, whom she credited with helping propel her into the governor's mansion by anointing her, Palin revealed herself as an authentic religious zealot. Whatever her flaws might have been, this was what mattered to the movement in 2008 -- and what matters now.

Once Palin was nominated, her sixteen-year-old daughter Bristol (named for Bristol Bay, Alaska) became the subject of ferocious media scrutiny. She had, it turned out, been impregnated by Levi Johnston, a local eighteen-year-old jock who identified himself on his MySpace page as "a f**kin' redneck." To media outsiders, Bristol's out-of-wedlock pregnancy was particularly startling, given Palin's advocacy of abstinence-only education. In the eyes of many liberals, Palin had been revealed as but another family-values hypocrite, but to members of the Christian right, she was something quite different -- a glamorized version of themselves. As the Palin family became a staple of late-night comedy monologues, Palin fought back against the secular enemy, slamming David Letterman for "sexually perverted jokes" about her daughter. With that, the movement's adulation for her overflowed.

The Culture of Personal Crisis

Palin's daughter's drama caught vividly a culture of personal crisis that defines so many evangelical communities across the country. That culture is described in a landmark congressionally funded study of adolescent behavior, Add Health, revealing that white evangelical women like Bristol Palin lose their virginity, on average, at age 16 -- earlier, that is, than any group except black Protestants.

Another recent study by sociologists Peter Bearman and Hannah Bruckner notes that over half of evangelical girls who have pledged to maintain their virginity until marriage wind up having sex before marriage, and with a man other than their future husband. Bearman and Bruckner also disclose that communities with the highest population of girls who attend so-called purity balls, where they vow chastity until marriage before their fathers in a prom-like religious ceremony, also have some of the country's highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases. In Lubbock, Texas, where abstinence education has been mandated since 1995, the rate of gonorrhea is now double the national average, while teen pregnancy has spiked to the highest levels in the state.

"So many families deal with the same issues Sarah Palin is dealing with, so we really can relate to what she is going through," Grace Van Diest, a middle-aged Alaskan delegate from Wasilla, told me on the floor of the 2008 Republican National Convention. Van Diest then described how each of her daughters went on "a date with their dad" to discuss their pledge to "keep themselves pure until marriage."

Palin consolidated her bond with the movement in another very personal way. She cradled her new son Trig, born with Downs Syndrome, before the klieg lights. Her husband Todd had chosen the name believing it was Norse for "strength." ("Trygg" actually means "safe" or "reliable" in Norwegian.) Palin's decision to carry the baby to term excited many evangelicals and anti-abortion activists, including James Dobson, who wrote a letter congratulating her for having what he called "that little Downs Syndrome baby." "What a way to emphasize your pro-life leanings there!" he exclaimed during a radio broadcast in which he endorsed the McCain-Palin ticket, even though he had denounced McCain as a "liberal" only weeks before.

After the market collapsed in the fall of 2008 and the McCain campaign ran off the rails, Palin untethered herself -- as her book title has it, she went "rogue" -- ignoring McCain's rules on attacking Obama. Instead, she lashed out at candidate Obama in her own distinctive way. "This is a man who launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist," she insisted. "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America." With these two lines, apparently uttered without the permission of McCain or his top aides, Palin opened up a deep schism within the campaign, while unleashing a flood of emotions from the depths of the Party faithful.

"Kill him!" a man shouted at a campaign rally in Clearwater, Florida, when Palin linked Obama to terrorism, according to Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank.

The next time she mentioned Obama, another man cried out, "Terrorist!" "Treason!"

"Go back to Kenya!" a woman typically screamed during a Palin rally in Des Moines, Iowa.

While Obama entertained visions of a blissful post-partisan, post-racial America, Palin almost single-handedly gave birth to the birthers who would, after his inauguration, dedicate themselves to proving he was not, by birth, an American. By "going rogue," Palin instinctively and craftily propelled her ambitions beyond Election Day, and so anointed herself as the movement's magical helper in the Obama era.

Elevated by yesterday's man, Palin now represents her Party's future -- and the greatest danger it faces. Her intimate bond with the Republican grassroots has made her the indispensable woman, even if she provokes a visceral sense of revulsion from many independents and moderates. Other Republican frontrunners like former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty have a debilitating problem to face in any race for the presidency: they are viewed as inauthentic candidates by the movement -- cardboard men in suits who are only pantomiming appeals to cultural resentment.

Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister who understands the nuances of evangelical culture, nonetheless bears the burden of being a 2008 primary loser. At that time, the former governor of Arkansas had a clear field when it came to the religious right, but was unable to expand beyond his Southern bastions of support.

Palin was, after all, chosen. She never lost a primary -- and it was McCain who lost the race. If Huckabee sought to run again for the nomination, he might have to compete against her for the allegiance of the evangelical constituency.

Nor can she be easily criticized. Palin is so well positioned as the darling of the movement that any criticism of her would be experienced by believers as a personal attack on them. In this way, their identification with her through the politics of personal crisis is complete. Any Republican primary challenger assailing Palin will be seen as victimizing her, as channeling the attacks of the liberal elites, and possibly as having a secret liberal agenda. On the other hand, to embrace her is to risk losing the great American center.

For the 2010 mid-term elections, Palin's endorsement is already a coveted commodity -- as Mark Kirk's desperate bid to secure it demonstrates. The more she is attacked, the more the Republican base adores her. As she sets out on her book tour, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune only propel her forward. Her influence on a party largely devoid of leadership is expanding. If she doesn't prove to be the Party's future queen, she may have positioned herself to be its future king-maker -- and potentially its destroyer. You betcha.

Max Blumenthal is the author of the bestselling book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party. He is a writing fellow at the Nation Institute and a senior writer for the Daily Beast. See his footage from inside Palin's church by clicking here or visit his website, MaxBlumenthal.com. To listen to an accompanying TomDispatch audio interview with Blumenthal on Palin, "the queen of fly-over country."

Memoir Is Palin’s Payback to McCain Campaign

2009-11-16T03:03:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/15book.html?_r=5&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print

November 15, 2009
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Memoir Is Palin’s Payback to McCain Campaign

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
GOING ROGUE
An American Life
By Sarah Palin

413 pp. HarperCollins. $28.99

“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 presidential 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.

The most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the news media, 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 advance for writing this book.

In what reads like payback for disparaging comments by John McCain’s aides about her after the ticket’s loss to Barack Obama, Ms. Palin depicts the McCain campaign as overscripted, defeatist, disorganized and dunderheaded — 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 insisted, “thorough”: they knew “exactly what they’re getting.”

Although Ms. Palin writes that she is “proud of the senator” for being bold enough to put her on the ticket, some of her 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 Mr. McCain, as Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson reported in their recent book, “The Battle for America 2008,” that she would shake up the race and help him get his “reform mojo back.” Over the weekend McCain aides fired back at Ms. Palin: Mr. Schmidt was quoted on Politico.com saying that charges about him were “all fiction.”

Back in 2008 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 move.

All in all Ms. Palin emerges from “Going Rogue” as an eager player in the blame game, ungrateful to 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 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, an Alaskan town with fewer than 7,000 residents) as his running mate underscores 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. Ms. Palin herself had a surprisingly nonchalant reaction to Mr. McCain’s initial phone call about the vice president’s slot, writing that she was not astonished, that it felt “like a natural progression.”

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 features editor of World, an evangelical magazine) is part cagey spin, 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 drop the names of lots of writers and philosophers gratuitously — 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.

The self-portrait created in these pages recalls the early profiles of Ms. Palin that appeared just after her debut on the national stage: a self-reliant 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 Ms. Palin 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 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 that 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 well-known Alaska dog-sled race, “if you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes.”

Sarah Palin Rules the GOP -- And She Will Destroy It

2009-11-16T02:58:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin Rules the GOP -- And She Will Destroy It
By Max Blumenthal, Tomdispatch.com
November 16, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143967/

Sarah Palin's heavily publicized book tour begins in earnest this Monday, but weeks before, her ghostwritten memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, had already vaulted into the number one position at Amazon. Warming up for a tour that will take her across Middle America in a bus, Palin tested her lines in a November 7th speech before a crowd of 5,000 anti-abortion activists in Wisconsin. She promptly cited an urban legend as a "disturbing trend," claiming the Treasury Department had moved the phrase "In God We Trust" from presidential dollar coins. (The rumor most likely originated with a 2006 story on the far-right website WorldNetDaily.)

In fact, a suggested alteration in its position on the coin was shot down in 2007 after pressure from Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. Nonetheless, Palin did not hesitate to take up this "controversy," however false, since it conveniently pits a tyrannical, God-destroying, secular big government against humble God-fearing folk. In doing so, of course, she presented herself as this nation's leading defender of the faith.

In a Republican Party hoping to rebound in 2010 on the strength of a newly energized and ideologically aroused conservative grassroots, Palin's influence is now unparalleled. Through her Twitter account, she was the one who pushed the rumor of "death panels" into the national healthcare debate, prompting the White House to issue a series of defensive responses. Unfazed by its absurdity, she repeated the charge in her recent speech in Wisconsin. In a special congressional election in New York's 23rd congressional district, Palin's endorsement of Doug Hoffman, an unknown far-right third-party candidate, helped force a popular moderate Republican politician, Dede Scozzafava, from the race. In the end, Palin's ideological purge in upstate New York led to an improbable Democratic victory, the first in that GOP-heavy district in more than 100 years.

Though the ideological purge may have backfired, Palin's participation in it magnified her influence in the party. In a telling sign of this, Congressman Mark Kirk, a pro-choice Republican from the posh suburban North Shore of Chicago, running for the Senate in Illinois, issued an anxious call for Palin's support while she campaigned for Hoffman. According to a Kirk campaign memo, the candidate was terrified that Palin would be asked about his candidacy during her scheduled appearance on the Chicago-based Oprah Winfrey Show later this month -- the kick-off for her book tour -- and would not react enthusiastically. With $2.3 million in campaign cash and no viable primary challengers, Kirk was still desperate to avoid Palin-backed attacks from his right flank, however hypothetical they might be.

"She's gangbusters!" a leading conservative radio host exclaimed to me. "There is nobody in the Republican Party who can raise money like her or top her name recognition."

During the 2008 presidential race, some Republican Party elders warned of Palin's destructive influence. They insisted she was a polarizing figure whose extremism would accelerate the Party's slide toward the political and cultural margins. New York Times columnist David Brooks, a card-carrying neocon who had written glowingly of Senator McCain, claimed Palin represented "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party." Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for President Reagan and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, blasted Palin as "a dope and unqualified from the start." Last June, Steve Schmidt, the former McCain campaign chief of staff, warned that Palin's nomination as the GOP's 2012 presidential nominee would be "catastrophic."

New polling data appears to support such doomsday prophecies. According to an October 19th Gallup poll, the former governor of Alaska has become one of the most polarizing and unpopular politicians in the country. Since she quit the governorship to pursue her lucrative book deal, a move that upset many in Alaska's Republican leadership and cost the state's taxpayers almost $200,000, her unfavorability rating has spiked to 50% while her favorability has sunk to 40%, again according to Gallup's figures. (The only nationally-known politician who is less popular right now, according to the poll, is John Edwards, the former two-term senator who fathered a child out of wedlock and paid his mistress hush money while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination on a social justice platform.)

Queen Esther

If Palin is indeed a cancer on the GOP, why can't the Republican establishment retire her to a quiet life of moose hunting in the political wilderness? Why has her appeal only increased in the wake of her catastrophic political expeditions? Why won't she listen to, or abide by, conventional political wisdom?

The answer lies beyond the realm of polls and punditry in the political psychology of the movement that animates and, to a great degree, controls, the Republican grassroots -- a uniquely evangelical subculture defined by the personal crises of its believers and their perceived persecution at the hands of cosmopolitan elites.

By emphasizing her own crises and her victimization by the "liberal media," Palin has established an invisible, indissoluble bond with adherents of that subculture -- so visceral it transcends any rational political analysis. As a result, her career has become a vehicle through which the right-wing evangelical movement feels it can express its deepest identity in opposition both to secular society and to its representatives in the Obama White House. Palin is perceived by its leaders -- and followers -- not as another cynical politician or even as a self-promoting celebrity, but as a kind of magical helper, the God-fearing glamour girl who parachuted into their backwater towns to lift them from the drudgery of everyday life, assuring them that they represented the "Real America."

If McCain had taken his preferred choice for a running mate in 2008, he would have chosen Joseph Lieberman, the turncoat Democrat and his best friend in the Senate. But with the base of the Republican Party subsumed by a Christian right that detested the senator, his advisors urged him to choose the untested, virtually unknown Alaskan governor to bring the faithful back to him. Their gamble paid off -- at least in the short-term. When Palin was revealed as the vice presidential nominee at an off-the-record gathering of the Council for National Policy, a secretive cabal of the conservative movement's top financiers and activists, Tom Minnery of the Christian right outfit Focus on the Family recalled, "People were on their seats applauding cheering, yelling… that room was electrified."

Before her nomination, the provincial Palin had traveled outside the country only once and demonstrated little, if any, intellectual curiosity. During the campaign, she was flummoxed when CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric simply asked what magazines she read. Yet the fact that she had such a limited understanding of the world actually recommended her to the Republican base.

The gun-toting, snowmobile-cruising former beauty queen became an instant cultural icon. Little understood by those outside this culture was her religious worldview, cultivated during the 20 years she spent worshipping at the Wasilla Assembly of God, a right-wing Pentecostal church in her hometown north of Anchorage. When I visited the church in October 2008, a pastor from Kenya, Bishop Thomas Muthee, was at the podium comparing Palin to Queen Esther, the biblical queen who used her wiles to intercede for her people. The reference was clear enough: Palin, the former beauty pageant contestant who had chosen Esther as her biblical role model when she first entered politics, would topple America's secular tyrants, leading her people, the true Christians, into the kingdom. As he concluded his sermon, Muthee gesticulated wildly and spoke in tongues, urging parishioners to "come against the spirit of witchcraft as the body of Christ."

Three years earlier, in 2005, Muthee had anointed Palin during a public ceremony at the Wasilla Assembly of God, laying his hand on her forehead while praying to protect her "against all forms of witchcraft." The bishop claimed that he had personally battled a witch in his hometown of Kiambu, Kenya, driving the evildoer from the town and thereby ending an epidemic of crime and licentiousness. The episode was later revealed as a farce by a reporter from Women's eNews who traveled to Kiambu and found the supposed witch, a local healer named Mama Jane, still living happily in her compound. In palling around with Muthee, whom she credited with helping propel her into the governor's mansion by anointing her, Palin revealed herself as an authentic religious zealot. Whatever her flaws might have been, this was what mattered to the movement in 2008 -- and what matters now.

Once Palin was nominated, her sixteen-year-old daughter Bristol (named for Bristol Bay, Alaska) became the subject of ferocious media scrutiny. She had, it turned out, been impregnated by Levi Johnston, a local eighteen-year-old jock who identified himself on his MySpace page as "a f**kin' redneck." To media outsiders, Bristol's out-of-wedlock pregnancy was particularly startling, given Palin's advocacy of abstinence-only education. In the eyes of many liberals, Palin had been revealed as but another family-values hypocrite, but to members of the Christian right, she was something quite different -- a glamorized version of themselves. As the Palin family became a staple of late-night comedy monologues, Palin fought back against the secular enemy, slamming David Letterman for "sexually perverted jokes" about her daughter. With that, the movement's adulation for her overflowed.

The Culture of Personal Crisis

Palin's daughter's drama caught vividly a culture of personal crisis that defines so many evangelical communities across the country. That culture is described in a landmark congressionally funded study of adolescent behavior, Add Health, revealing that white evangelical women like Bristol Palin lose their virginity, on average, at age 16 -- earlier, that is, than any group except black Protestants.

Another recent study by sociologists Peter Bearman and Hannah Bruckner notes that over half of evangelical girls who have pledged to maintain their virginity until marriage wind up having sex before marriage, and with a man other than their future husband. Bearman and Bruckner also disclose that communities with the highest population of girls who attend so-called purity balls, where they vow chastity until marriage before their fathers in a prom-like religious ceremony, also have some of the country's highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases. In Lubbock, Texas, where abstinence education has been mandated since 1995, the rate of gonorrhea is now double the national average, while teen pregnancy has spiked to the highest levels in the state.

"So many families deal with the same issues Sarah Palin is dealing with, so we really can relate to what she is going through," Grace Van Diest, a middle-aged Alaskan delegate from Wasilla, told me on the floor of the 2008 Republican National Convention. Van Diest then described how each of her daughters went on "a date with their dad" to discuss their pledge to "keep themselves pure until marriage."

Palin consolidated her bond with the movement in another very personal way. She cradled her new son Trig, born with Downs Syndrome, before the klieg lights. Her husband Todd had chosen the name believing it was Norse for "strength." ("Trygg" actually means "safe" or "reliable" in Norwegian.) Palin's decision to carry the baby to term excited many evangelicals and anti-abortion activists, including James Dobson, who wrote a letter congratulating her for having what he called "that little Downs Syndrome baby." "What a way to emphasize your pro-life leanings there!" he exclaimed during a radio broadcast in which he endorsed the McCain-Palin ticket, even though he had denounced McCain as a "liberal" only weeks before.

After the market collapsed in the fall of 2008 and the McCain campaign ran off the rails, Palin untethered herself -- as her book title has it, she went "rogue" -- ignoring McCain's rules on attacking Obama. Instead, she lashed out at candidate Obama in her own distinctive way. "This is a man who launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist," she insisted. "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America." With these two lines, apparently uttered without the permission of McCain or his top aides, Palin opened up a deep schism within the campaign, while unleashing a flood of emotions from the depths of the Party faithful.

"Kill him!" a man shouted at a campaign rally in Clearwater, Florida, when Palin linked Obama to terrorism, according to Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank.

The next time she mentioned Obama, another man cried out, "Terrorist!" "Treason!"

"Go back to Kenya!" a woman typically screamed during a Palin rally in Des Moines, Iowa.

While Obama entertained visions of a blissful post-partisan, post-racial America, Palin almost single-handedly gave birth to the birthers who would, after his inauguration, dedicate themselves to proving he was not, by birth, an American. By "going rogue," Palin instinctively and craftily propelled her ambitions beyond Election Day, and so anointed herself as the movement's magical helper in the Obama era.

Elevated by yesterday's man, Palin now represents her Party's future -- and the greatest danger it faces. Her intimate bond with the Republican grassroots has made her the indispensable woman, even if she provokes a visceral sense of revulsion from many independents and moderates. Other Republican frontrunners like former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty have a debilitating problem to face in any race for the presidency: they are viewed as inauthentic candidates by the movement -- cardboard men in suits who are only pantomiming appeals to cultural resentment.

Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister who understands the nuances of evangelical culture, nonetheless bears the burden of being a 2008 primary loser. At that time, the former governor of Arkansas had a clear field when it came to the religious right, but was unable to expand beyond his Southern bastions of support.

Palin was, after all, chosen. She never lost a primary -- and it was McCain who lost the race. If Huckabee sought to run again for the nomination, he might have to compete against her for the allegiance of the evangelical constituency.

Nor can she be easily criticized. Palin is so well positioned as the darling of the movement that any criticism of her would be experienced by believers as a personal attack on them. In this way, their identification with her through the politics of personal crisis is complete. Any Republican primary challenger assailing Palin will be seen as victimizing her, as channeling the attacks of the liberal elites, and possibly as having a secret liberal agenda. On the other hand, to embrace her is to risk losing the great American center.

For the 2010 mid-term elections, Palin's endorsement is already a coveted commodity -- as Mark Kirk's desperate bid to secure it demonstrates. The more she is attacked, the more the Republican base adores her. As she sets out on her book tour, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune only propel her forward. Her influence on a party largely devoid of leadership is expanding. If she doesn't prove to be the Party's future queen, she may have positioned herself to be its future king-maker -- and potentially its destroyer. You betcha.

Buy a copy of Going Rouge, a compilation of articles on Sarah Palin by progressive writers like Max Blumenthal, Jane Hamsher, Christopher Hayes, Jim Hightower and Naomi Klein.

Max Blumenthal is the author of Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books, 2009) has just been released. Contact him at maxblumenthal3000@yahoo.com.

Limbaugh Calls Palin Memoir "One of Most Substantive Policy Books I've Read"

2009-11-15T11:20:00.000-08:00

The psychopathic, savage mind understands and extolls other psychopathic, savage minds!

Limbaugh Calls Palin Memoir "One of Most Substantive Policy Books I've Read"
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
November 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/143940/

You know a public figure has captured the cultural imagination when, despite a severely half-baked political career, her memoir becomes a bestseller before it's even released -- and then, when it is released, there are not one, but two, parody books -- with the same title -- hitting shelves at the same time.

I'm talking, of course, about Sarah Palin, that tragicomic trick candle of politics, who never ever seems to go away, no matter how much we want her to (or secretly don't). Her new book, 413 pages long and flirtily titled Going Rogue, will be officially bestowed upon the world next week and reporters everywhere are already feverishly plucking out the best parts -- Palin's innermost thoughts on Katie Couric, for example.

Meanwhile, a number of enterprising lefties are promoting books of their own. And these are actually worth buying.

Going Rouge is the title of this book, to be released next week, on the same day at Going Rogue. A sort of best-of collection of commentary inspired by the former governor of Alaska, it cuts to the chase right on the cover ("An American Nightmare" is the subtitle). And why shouldn't it? By any sane standard, the prospect of Sarah Palin holding national office was -- and remains -- a frightening thought. Now, all the reasons why are packed into one convenient book.

To be clear, this book is no spoof: "Looking back, progressives and feminists did an admirable job in picking apart the GOP's first female vice presidential nominee," write co-editors Betsy Reed and Richard Kim of The Nation Magazine in the introduction. Featuring serious (and sometimes hilarious) articles by writers including Gloria Steinem, Katha Pollitt, Matt Taibbi, and Max Blumenthal -- not to mention our own lovable AlterNet staff -- it's a progressive pre-emptive strike we can totally get behind. (Remember, this is a woman who supports shooting wolves from helicopters.)

Moving on, Going Rouge is also the title of this book, which takes a whole different approach to deconstructing Sarah Palin. "That other book just has a bunch of words," co-author Michael Stinson recently told Buzzflash. "We got pictures!"

Indeed, the "Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring & Activity Book" is a great reason to dig up the Crayolas (do it for the children) -- but, as Buzzflash says, "coloring pictures is only half of it."

There are mazes such as "Help Sarah find her way to the White House" (hint: it's impossible) and a cut-out paper doll page titled "Dress Sarah for Success!" (wardrobe options include an Alaskan wolf pelt skirt). There's also a word search with this theme: "Sarah wins nomination for Pres! Who will she pick for her Veep?" Names to be found include Rush Limbaugh, Joe the Plummer, and Hairstylist.
Speaking of Limbaugh, that right-wing tub of vitriol was recently heard lauding the original Going Rogue as "one of the most substantive policy books I've read." Which I think we can all agree is perfectly hilarious.

It may be tempting to dismiss all of this as part of the continuing absurdity that is Palin's one-woman circus (with the Levi Johnson sideshow soliciting tickets next door). But even as I write this, MSNBC pundits are assessing Palin's political future in somber tones. She may be a cultural punchline to many of those unpatriotic enough to live outside of Sarah's "real America," but, elsewhere, her support is unmistakable. (After all, someone had to make Going Rogue a bestseller.)

Ivy League Liberal Elitism Will Make Sarah Palin President - How Only Union Organizing Can Prevent It

2009-11-13T09:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.truthout.org/1111099

Ivy League Liberal Elitism Will Make Sarah Palin President - How Only Union Organizing Can Prevent It
Wednesday 11 November 2009
by: Mike Elk, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Conservatives win many votes saying that liberals are elitist. I am here to tell you that the liberal movement is indeed very elitist. Its organization's staffs are composed mainly of Ivy leaguers whose life experiences are dramatically different than the 70 percent of Americans that never graduate from college. Very few of them have any actual experience living with or knowing working-class people. As a graduate of Bucknell, I still feel out of a place and most glaringly underdressed when I get in a room with the Ivy Leaguers running our movement.

As garbageman turned United Electrical Workers (UE) in Political Action Director Chris Townsend put it to me:

"When I am in meetings in Washington, DC, with organizations that presume to speak for workers or on behalf of workers - I ironically find myself the only worker in the room. As a worker with a GED - and 30-plus years of labor union experience - opinions like mine are rarely sought and universally dismissed as being too extremist when most workers feel the way I do about things. This is why it is so common for liberal and left-wing staff and activists to completely misunderstand workers."

The experiences of liberal elites are so outside of the mainstream that, very often, they just don't understand the working class. They fail to communicate to workers because most of them have never talked to a worker in real life, except for to ask for fries at McDonald's. Instead, when they fail to understand the misdirected anger of the working class at its economic anxiety, they tend to engage in intellectual snobbery and narrow-mindedness that only serve to alienate the white working class further.

Such snobbery was expressed to me in an email recently sent to me from a Democratic media strategist who said the message of the day was, "Conservatives face a choice about the future of their movement: Will they come to the table to get things done or 'stick with the angry people'?"

Well, let me think about that for a second. If I am a poor white guy, do I want to go with the polite people (Democrats) who are going to beg for change with their sophisticated intellectual arguments that I don't understand? Or do I want to be with the party (Republicans) that embraces my anger and wants to get out in the streets to yell about how awful this economy is?

Americans are screaming now about the economic hell we are in. Republicans are screaming about how awful the economy is and winning many of them over. Albeit, they're winning them with the wrong solutions, but they are trying to win Joe the Plumber, not Joe Stiglitz, so the details don't really matter.

On the economy, the Democratic message is, "Sit tight, don't get out in the street and protest, everything will be alright."

White working-class guys would choose the angry people who are willing to stand up and say how frustrated they feel. The progressives who are telling me to be cool and not get upset with things are just merely talking down to me. They have the privilege of telling me not to get upset, when I have every right to be upset.

Sarah Palin indeed represents all the rage of the working class that liberals of this country are trying to quiet down. Many liberal elites engaged in revisionist history say that McCain's defeat was caused by Palin. However, anybody who actually worked on the Obama campaign like I did knew that McCain's defeat was caused by the financial crisis and McCain's baffling response and coddling of Wall Street.

As an organizer for the Obama campaign on the ground in Western Pennsylvania during the election, I remember how white, working-class, swing voters couldn't stop talking about Sarah Palin for weeks on end. For the three weeks between Palin's selection as VP candidate and the financial crash, we were scared shitless the Republicans were going to win as Palin led to McCain surging in the polls.

Many white, working-class people loved her because here was a politician who finally was working class and ready for a fight. They loved her even more as Ivy League liberals denounced her as basically "white trash." It felt to white, working-class people like liberal elites were calling them "white trash" too.

Liberals still treat Palin and the right-wing populist Tea Party Movement that she leads as "white trash." They spend more time attacking them as "stupid racists" than actually trying to win them over and address their concerns. Its as if liberals are saying we know better than you stupid working-class people.

To understand how easily Sarah Palin could be the next president, we need only look to another vice presidential candidate widely denounced by the liberal elite when he was announced in 1952 - Richard Milhouse Nixon. Nixon became president by mobilizing resentment of the working class against elites. By framing elites as talking down to the poor and working class, Sarah Palin, with the right slick ad men, could mobilize that same type of sentiment against the elitist "eggheads" of the Democratic Party.

From Rick Perlstein's classic, "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America":

"To cosmopolitan liberals, hating Richard Nixon, congratulating yourself for seeing through Richard Nixon and the elaborate political poker bluff with which he hooked the sentimental rubes, was becoming part and parcel of a political identity.

"And to a new suburban mass middle class that was tempting itself into Republicanism, admiring Richard Nixon was becoming part and parcel of a political identity based on seeing through the pretensions of the cosmopolitan liberals who claimed to know so much better than you (and Richard Nixon) what was best for your country. This side saw everything most genuine in Nixon, everything that was most brave, - who saw the Checkers speech for what it also actually was, not just a hustle but also an act of existential heroism: a brave refusal to let haughty 'betters' have their way with him."

It's like déjà vu all over again.

Republicans are rallying the troops against the educated elites of society. As a result of their political jujitsu, Republicans are making it look like they are engaged in a class war on behalf of the working class against the liberal elite.

Liberals instead are playing into the class war trap by talking down to the uneducated masses of America via TV talk shows and blogs. They can't understand why they aren't winning over the working class because they are too busy attacking them.

Such intellectual foolishness was dramatized in the way I heard liberal DC political operatives talk about the widely read focus group study by "The Very Separate Worlds of Conservatives" by Stan Greenberg, James Carville and others. They took the memo as evidence that working class people lived in a world so far outside of their own (socioeconomically speaking, they do) that they couldn't possibly be reasoned with using their methods). They reckoned that surely these people must be " crazy, brain dead racists" who believe Obama is a socialist out to get them.

What they failed to read is one of the main conclusions of the study that shows that their efforts to paint working class conservatives as "racist idiots" is backfiring big time:

"They readily identify themselves as a minority in this country - a minority whose values are mocked and attacked by a liberal media and class of elites."

I wonder why they feel under attack? Maybe it's all the liberal elites calling white, working class people "stupid racists."

Indeed, the focus groups found that race was not an important factor affecting the political opposition of white, working class conservatives. Indeed, the study found that mocking these people as racists, as I argued in my article, "Martin Luther King Would Have Loved the Teabaggers, Not Called Them Racists," only serves to stigmatize them more against liberal elites.

Talking down to working class people engaged in a class war against the elites isn't going to win them over.

What liberals have to do is unite with the teabaggers and engage in a class war against Wall Street. Organized labor has succeeded in doing this by using constant, year-round, on-the-job political engagement to compel people to come over. As a result, Obama won by 23 points among white, non-college graduates who belong to a union, even as he lost by 18 points among all white, non-college voters.

We need to "Organize the Unorganized" in massive organizing drives like we did in 1930's - the heydays for the progressive reform. Union organizing is the best way to engage people one-on-one on a constant year-round basis. We need be constantly sitting down with working class white conservatives one-on-one, listen to their concerns, and engage them in honest dialogue. Only real community organizing can do this, not the slick TV ad buys that DC liberals tend to prefer.

Part of the reason the Obama movement was so successful was that they invested so heavily in community organizing. We would treat them like human beings and engage in friendly conversation. We would find out what issues they cared about it and get them to critically look at issues in friendly, non-threatening communications. Much like Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy, we took no voter for granted. Our movement should do the same when it comes to voters if it expects to be sustainable over the long run.

Sure, we might not get them the first time or the second time or the third time; it might 20, 30, 40 or 50 long, deep conversations in order to win over these working white guys, but it's worth it However, when you get a union on your job every day eight hours day, a good, well-trained union leader or shop stewards have plenty of time to get to that 20th or 30th conversation you need to win a guy. Furthermore, you have a common bond which you guys can unite behind - fighting economic injustice in your workplace.

As a union organizer in West Virginia, I remember some of our most active members showing up with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers on their pickups. A lot of them would complain against liberals ruining society and then in the next breath argue passionately for a strike. Over time through constant dialogue and popular education, our union was able to win these members over to the liberal side. They realized that voting based on slick TV personalities made up to appear folksy was merely putting folks out of jobs.

Sure, not all of them came over, but enough that it was worth the effort. If we can just bring over one-third of white, working class conservatives, we can dramatically change the political landscape of this country. That's what the Employee Free Choice Act would be able to do.

Many liberal political operatives in DC dismiss the Employee Free Choice Act as merely political payback to the unions for their help in the election. They fail to see the larger political implications - increased unionization would dramatically change the political dynamics of this country and prevent 30,000 workers from getting fired from their jobs every year for trying to join a union.

Many lament the loss of marriage equality last week in Maine. There have been a thousand analyses of why we lost this important fight for a fundamental civil right. However, what none of them pointed out is that if we had increased unionization, the fight for marriage equality would be dramatically easier.

Its no coincidence that ranks of the Christian Coalition began to swell as the ranks of unions declined dramatically in the 1980's. Unions are organizations that bring people from different parts of society and unite them in a common cause. Union members know that their true enemy is Wall Street and not a couple of people trying to get married. This is why Obama won by 23 points among white, non-college graduates who belong to a union, even as he lost by 18 points among all white, non-college voters.

We as progressives can win only when we get all the teabaggers into our movement through getting them into unions. As Lincoln said, "United We Stand, Divided We Fall." Only organized labor can achieve that type of unity. Failure to bring working people into the Employee Free Choice Act could easily lead to the election of a Sarah Palin.

Sure, liberals laugh off the idea of Sarah Palin being elected president. However, elitist, out-of-touch liberals laughed off Nixon, Reagan and Bush as unelectable. Well, guess what, they all won.

If we don't stop laughing at white, working class people, we are going to lose too.

Top 10 Things Levi Johnston Could Be Hiding About Sarah Palin

2009-11-03T12:28:00.000-08:00

http://airamerica.com/politics/10-29-2009/top-10-things-levi-knows-about-palin/

Top 10 Things Levi Johnston Could Be Hiding About Sarah Palin
Thursday October 29, 2009 2:17 a.m.PrintPermalink
Share

By Ken Kupchik

Levi Johnston: I'm Hiding "Huge" Things...About Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin's ex-future-son-in-law Levi Johnston has declared that he has information about the former Governor of Alaska that could "really hurt" her. While he refuses to reveal what he knows, we have compiled a list of potential bombshells.

10) Sarah was the one who gave Kanye West that bottle of Hennessey before the VMA's.

9) Sarah Palin threatened to beat up Joe Lieberman if he doesn't filibuster health care reform.

8) She donated the $150,000 worth of clothes from the RNC to Michelle Obama's sick wardrobe.

7) She voted for Barack Obama during the 2008 Presidential elections after watching this.

6) Even she thinks Glenn Beck is an idiot.

5) Levi got the idea to pose for Playgirl after finding Todd Palin's secret magazine stash.

4) She really could not see Russia from her house.

3) She de-friended John McCain on Facebook after the campaign.

2) Palin is the one who leaked the Republican health care plan to Alan Grayson.

1) Sarah Palin actually wrote her book Going Rogue.

CNN Poll: 7 in 10 say Palin not qualified to be president

2009-10-29T04:20:00.001-07:00

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/10/28/cnn-poll-7-in-10-say-palin-not-qualified-to-be-president/

October 28, 2009
CNN Poll: 7 in 10 say Palin not qualified to be president
Posted: October 28th, 2009 03:09 PM ET
From CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser

More than seven in 10 Americans think Sarah Palin is not qualified to be president, according to a new national poll.

WASHINGTON (CNN) - More than seven in 10 Americans think Sarah Palin is not qualified to be president, according to a new national poll.

Seventy-one percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Wednesday morning believe the former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee is not qualified to be president, with 29 percent saying she does have the credentials to serve in the White House. Republicans appear split, with 52 percent saying she's qualified and 47 percent disagreeing with that view.

Related: Palin moves show high risk, high reward strategy

The poll indicates that about half of the country, 51 percent, has an unfavorable view of Palin, with 42 percent seeing her in a positive light. Nearly two-thirds of those questioned say Palin's not a typical politician, and feel she's a good role model for women. Fifty-six percent add that Palin cares about people, and a similar amount think she's honest and trustworthy. But the survey indicates Americans are split over whether Palin shares their values, agrees with them on the issues, or if she's a strong leader.

"Sarah Palin has one advantage that many past Republican candidates have not shared - Americans think she cares about people like them," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "But her biggest Achilles heel is the number who think she is not qualified to be President. Those numbers are similar to what Dan Quayle got in 1993, when only 23 percent thought he was ready for the White House."

Follow Paul Steinhauser on Twitter @steinhauserp

In a very early look at the next race for the White House, the survey indicates that nearly one in three Republican voters, 32 percent, say they would be most likely to support former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in a hypothetical battle for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, with Palin seven points back at 25 percent, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 21 percent. Five percent said they would back Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, with one in ten suggesting they would support some one else.

"Huckabee appears to have more support among Republicans than Palin and her unfavorable rating among all Americans is twice as high as Huckabee's," Holland says. "Palin may attract a lot of attention but the GOP may be looking elsewhere for their frontrunner."

It's the pre-season for the next White House contest, as possible GOP contenders form political action committees, campaign for fellow Republicans, write books and address conservative conferences and party dinners. The poll's release comes the same day that Romney, a 2008 Republican presidential candidate, campaigns in Virginia with Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, and less than three weeks before the release of Palin's book, "Going Rogue, an American Life."

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted October 16-18, with 1,038 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for all respondents and plus or minus 4.5 percentage points for questions asked only of Republicans.

Sarah Palin's Book Is Already on Clearance

2009-10-26T11:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=100002

October 23, 2009 1:46 PM
Sarah Palin's Book Is Already on Clearance
Holly Bailey

With just under a month to go before it’s released to the masses, Sarah Palin’s upcoming autobiography, Going Rogue, has already been near the top of Amazon’s bestseller list for weeks. No surprise, considering the enormous amount of interest—both bad and good—the former Alaska governor has generated since John McCain named her as his vice presidential running mate last year.

But there may be more to the story: over the past week or so, Amazon has been steadily dropping the price of Palin’s book to compete with other retailers, including Wal-Mart, which offered it for presale at $10. Amazon, which originally listed it at $28.99, is now basically giving the book away for a measly $9. This, as my fellow NEWSWEEKer Sarah Ball notes, is cheaper than buying a copy of Pat the Bunny. Heck, even How to Win Friends and Influence People is priced higher. Of course, it would be absolutely, positively un-American for Wal-Mart to back down from its promise of offering people the absolute lowest price, and now it's reportedly charging $8.98 for the Palin opus. By your Gaggler’s math, that’s a whopping 2 cents a page, or, as we’d describe it, practically free. Will Amazon go even lower? Could there be a buy-one-get-one-free scenario in the offing? Not likely, now that the trade association representing independent bookstores has gotten involved. It has asked the Justice Department to investigate Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target (a partner with Amazon) for charging below-cost prices for books in order to dominate the bookselling industry. You know what that means: buy your copies now.

Promoting Sarah for US presidency? Palin a 'Formidable Force,' McCain Says

2009-10-14T05:52:00.001-07:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/11/AR2009101101812.html

Promoting Sarah for US presidency? Palin a 'Formidable Force,' McCain Says

Carol D. Leonnig
The Washington Post
Mon, 12 Oct 2009 04:10 EDT

Last year's Republican nominee for president predicted that Sarah Palin will remain a "formidable force" in the GOP, despite criticisms that his vice presidential choice lacked the substance and policy knowledge needed for national office.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" he is still very fond of the former Alaska governor, whom he chose as his running mate for the Republican ticket in 2008. He said that there is a strong field of Republicans considering the 2012 presidential race and that "Sarah is one of them."

McCain acknowledged that "there were clearly tensions" between some of his top campaign advisers and Palin's camp during the run-up to the election.

One of McCain's top advisers, Steve Schmidt, has openly criticized Palin recently and said that choosing her as the presidential nominee for 2012 would be a catastrophe for the party. During the 2008 campaign, significant animosity and distrust brewed between Schmidt and Palin's advisers.

McCain said that such tensions are natural in a hard-fought campaign, and that although he does not always agree with Palin, her political popularity with many GOP voters is palpable.

"There are fundamental facts . . . that cannot be denied," McCain said. "When we selected or asked Sarah Palin to be my running mate, it energized our party. We were ahead in the polls, until the stock market crashed. And she still is a formidable force in the Republican Party."

Some longtime Republicans privately expressed worry at the time about the choice of a little-known first-term governor. President George W. Bush was dismissive at first, according to a Bush administration speechwriter. Matt Latimer wrote in "Speech-less" that the former president quipped, "What is she, the governor of Guam?"

McCain's advisers concluded in mid-summer 2008 that it would be impossible for him to win the election without a dramatic "game-changing" move. He was encouraged to choose Palin to attract female voters and to motivate a conservative base generally cool to McCain's moderate stands on social issues.

Sarah Palin Memoir "Going Rogue" Due November 17

2009-09-30T10:14:00.000-07:00

Palin is an 'object of fascination'? What's so fascinating about a psychopath?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/28/sarah-palin-memoir-going-_n_302246.html?view=print

Sarah Palin Memoir "Going Rogue" Due November 17
09/28/09

NEW YORK — That was fast.

Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate, has finished her memoir just four months after the book deal was announced, and the release date has been moved up from the spring to Nov. 17, her publisher said.

"Governor Palin has been unbelievably conscientious and hands-on at every stage, investing herself deeply and passionately in this project," said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of Harper. "It's her words, her life, and it's all there in full and fascinating detail."

Palin's book, her first, will be 400 pages, said Burnham, who called the fall "the best possible time for a major book of this kind."

The book now has a title, one fitting for a public figure known for the unexpected – "Going Rogue: An American Life."

Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, has commissioned a huge first printing of 1.5 million copies. Sen. Ted Kennedy's "True Compass," published by Twelve soon after his Aug. 25 death, also had a 1.5 million first printing.

As with the Kennedy book, the digital edition of Palin's memoir will not be released at the same time as the hardcover. "Going Rogue" will not be available as an e-book until Dec. 26 because "we want to maximize hardcover sales over the holidays," Harper spokeswoman Tina Andreadis said Monday.

Publishers have been concerned that e-books, rapidly becoming more popular, might take away sales from hardcover editions, which are more expensive.

Palin, who abruptly resigned as Alaska governor over the summer with more than a year left in her first term, has been an object of fascination since Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, chose her as his running mate, making an instant celebrity out of a once-obscure public official.

During last year's campaign, pundits questioned whether Palin hurt McCain's presidential bid by "going rogue," or defying his campaign's control.

Although Democrat Barack Obama easily won the election and Palin was criticized even by some Republicans for being inexperienced, she remains a favorite among conservatives and is a rumored contender for 2012. Interest in her is so high that a fan recently paid $63,500 to have dinner with her, part of an Internet auction for a charity that aids wounded veterans.

Palin, 45, spent weeks in San Diego shortly after leaving office and worked on the manuscript with collaborator Lynn Vincent, a person close to her said. She was joined in San Diego by her family and her top aide, Meghan Stapleton, then spent several days in New York working around the clock with editors at Harper, said the person, who wasn't authorized to comment and asked not to be identified.

Sarah Palin's pitch leaves Hong Kong unimpressed

2009-09-23T14:26:00.000-07:00

She's making more money as a speaker than she did governing Alaska!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6846041.ece

September 23, 2009
Sarah Palin's pitch leaves Hong Kong unimpressed
Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent
Ms Palin's speech was described as "long, humourless and George W. Bush-like"

Sarah Palin’s first ever visit to East Asia began with a monologue that invoked the spirit of Margaret Thatcher, sounded “unmistakably” like a pitch for the 2012 presidency and was described by several members of the audience as “long, humorless and George W Bush-like”.

Described by some as “safe” and by others as “uncomfortable”, the speech called for closer ties between the United States and China, and attacked the recent decision of the Administration of Barack Obama to impose heavy tariffs on imported Chinese tyres.

But it also warned of China’s own “internal contradictions” and America’s need to stand up against oppression.

It was a rare foreign outing for the former Vice-Presidential candidate who committed a series of foreign policy gaffes during last year’s campaign. She claimed to be familiar with Russia, thanks to Alaska’s proximity to the country, and had only visited Kuwait and Germany before - on both occasions to meet US troops stationed there.

The former Alaska governor’s speech was delivered in Hong Kong to the CLSA Asia Pacific Markets Forum - a lavish annual beano where over 1,000 of the world’s most astute investors come to hear the views of the foremost political and business minds on earth.

“I’m going to call it like I see it and I will share with you candidly a view right from Main Street, Main Street USA,” the former vice-Presidential candidate declared, before launching into prepared remarks on the Alaskan fishing industry.

Several audience members reportedly walked out of Ms Palin’s speech 30 minutes before the end, citing “more important things to do” or describing the talk as “too partisan and too much like a speech at the Republican convention”.

One senior fund manager told The Times that the 80-minute lecture, and the lack of an opportunity to fire any questions at Ms Palin, was a disappointment. “You would think that with her team of speechwriters and a supposedly media-free environment Palin could have afforded to be either funny or thought-provoking, but she was neither,” she said.

The speech carefully attacked America’s worsening fiscal position and directly condemned President Obama’s healthcare plan. Many Americans, she said, were not happy with proposed reforms that impinge on private enterprise. She has recently used her popular Fecebook page to express her opposition to the Obama plan, claiming that it would create “death panels” for old people.

Although the CLSA event was strictly off-limits to media, one attendee remarked that the speech felt like it was carefully crafted for a global television audience, and amounted to Ms Palin’s setting-out her policy stall for the longer term. “This was about an obviously ambitious wannabe presidential candidate laying down a marker on her weak spot of foreign policy,” he said. “I think we are going to hear something very similar to this speech trotted-out again in different places over the next months and years.”

Playing more obviously to a ballroom full of investors, Ms Palin quoted Margaret Thatcher’s comment that there is no alternative to capitalism because it is the system that ensures the most prosperity for the most people. Market-based solutions, she said, must be allowed to improve US healthcare and she concluded that the US economy would “roar back to life” if the private sector were allowed its freedom.

Despite it being her first visit to China, Ms Palin had come armed with a range of forthright views on the Middle Kingdom and how it should conduct itself. China, she argued, must support the de-nuclearisation of Iran and North Korea; the United States should maintain a strong military presence in the region “until China’s internal contradictions are resolved”. Asia is at its best, she added, when it is not dominated by a single power.

Besides its political impact, the speaking engagement is understood to have brought substantial financial relief to Ms Palin, whose recent legal battles have left her with bills of about $500,000. CLSA’s refusal to reveal the fee paid to Ms Palin added to the general mood of secrecy surrounding the event, but it is thought to be in the range of between $170,000 to $220,000.

As Sarah Palin continues to spread misinformation about Barack Obama's health-care plan, FP looks at where the real “death panels” are.

2009-09-11T04:06:00.000-07:00

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/09/the_list_real_life_death_panels

Real Life Death Panels
As Sarah Palin continues to spread misinformation about Barack Obama's health-care plan, FP looks at where the real “death panels” are.
BY ADITI NANGIA, MICHAEL WILKERSON | SEPTEMBER 9, 2009

As the United States debates how to overhaul its health-care system, arguments have become increasingly outlandish -- perhaps none more so than former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin's assertion that the Obama administration plans to implement state-sponsored "death panels" to determine whether the elderly and infirm deserve life-saving medical treatment. Writing in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, Palin doubled down on her claims, saying that though "establishment voices" dismissed them, they nonetheless "rang true for many Americans."

Of course, the U.S. government has no plans to "pull the plug on grandma"; the claims were false and the provision that sparked the rumors - a measure providing for free advice on how individuals can create living wills to inform their doctors and families what kind of end-of-life care they want -- was removed from prospective legislation, just in case. But Foreign Policy took a close look around the world, in places where something akin to death panels is alive and well.

ASSISTED SUICIDE PROGRAMS

The details: Voluntary euthanasia is today legal only in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the U.S. state of Oregon. Physician-assisted suicide is offered to foreign citizens only in Switzerland -- largely through one organization, Dignitas, that has helped hundreds of people who are not Swiss residents end their lives since 1998. Recently, British conductor Sir Edward Downes and his wife travelled to Zurich in July with Dignitas to "die peacefully, and under circumstances of their own choosing."

Countries like the Netherlands and Switzerland do not have "death panels" to determine eligibility. In the Dutch case, for instance the courts and medical societies delineated careful guidelines, which if followed correctly guarantee a physician will not be prosecuted for murder. These include ascertaining the patient is of sound mind and experiencing "unbearable suffering," as well as having a second, independent doctor confirm it. In all countries, the doctor must report the death to the coroner or police.

TEXAS "FUTILE CARE" LAW

The details: In 1999, as governor of Texas, former U.S. President George W. Bush signed legislation giving medical professionals an unprecedented level of autonomous power and creating perhaps the country's only example of a "death panel" in action.

The Advance Directives Act, known also as the Texas Futile Care Law, mostly functions in the way Palin's so-called death panels would: It gives patients the right to dictate the kind of end-of-life care they would like to receive. But the law contains a provision allowing a hospital committee to arbitrate disputes between families and physicians. The boards can end life support for patients if the care is determined to be "futile." Under the current law, the hospital need only inform the patient's family two days before the committee meets to make its decision; the family has 10 days to transfer its loved one to another facility. The Texas legislature is currently considering legislation to extend the time frame.

Advance directives were encouraged by, among others, Palin herself. When still governor of Alaska, she issued a statement on Healthcare Decisions Day encouraging an "increase [in] the number of Alaska's citizens with advance directives."

EXTRAORDINARY TREATMENT PANELS

The details: Though nothing at all like the living-will counseling erroneously portrayed in the United States, the British National Health Service (NHS) does have a panel appeal process that is sometimes accused of giving people an “early death sentence.”

As mentioned briefly in FP’s debunking of global healthcare myths, the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) sets standards for the NHS by evaluating medications and approving those found to be cost-effective. Many cancer drugs which cost exorbitant amounts and afford only a few months of life, at best, do not garner approval.

There is, however, an extensive appeals process by which patients and their doctors can request these treatments. The patient’s doctor submits a request to a local trust, and a panel comprised of at least one doctor reviews it. While some exceptions are granted, most are not.

The patient is left with the choice of paying out-of-pocket or foregoing the treatment (as in the United States, if an insurer refuses a claim). Numerous patients’ rights groups support the sick and their families through the process of requesting approval for the expensive medications. A note of cynicism, however: Significant funding for some of these advocacy groups comes from the same drug companies producing the expensive treatments.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT ARBITERS

The details: So, what about literal death panels? Fifty-eight countries still use the death penalty today, and they have a broad range of trial, appeals, and execution processes. The United States and Japan are the only OECD countries that still execute criminals for the crimes of murder and treason. (Other countries have not outlawed it outright, but no longer apply it.) Both have extensive review and appeals processes, and take years between conviction and execution. And, in both, the country's Supreme Court is essentially the highest-ranking "death panel," the last recourse for those looking to overturn their verdicts or commute their sentences.

In China -- the world leader in executions, at an estimated 5,000 in 2008 (the country does not release official statistics) -- death penalty decisions are made by committee. In 2007, judicial leaders decided the country should execute fewer people and apply the laws more evenly. That initiated a requirement that all capital cases be reviewed by the Supreme People's Court, which now commutes around 15 percent of death sentences. The number of executions has halved since then. But the country has still come under harsh criticism for its quick turnaround between trial, verdict, and death.

Iran and Saudi Arabia -- also criticized for frequent use of the death penalty, even upon minors -- have appeals processes, but execute a high proportion of their prisoners. These two countries along with China, the United States, and Pakistan performed 93 percent of known executions around the world in 2008.

Palin resignation costs Alaska at least $40,000

2009-09-05T04:15:00.000-07:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090904/ap_on_re_us/us_palin_resignation_cost

Palin resignation costs Alaska at least $40,000

By RACHEL D'ORO, Associated Press Writer
Fri Sep 4, 2009

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Early estimates put the cost of Sarah Palin's midterm resignation as Alaska governor at a minimum of $40,000, not including a special legislative session partly linked to her departure.

The preliminary figures obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request show it cost the state almost $14,100 for the July 26 swearing-in ceremony of new Gov. Sean Parnell.

The price tag for moving Palin — the former GOP vice presidential candidate — and her family from the governor's mansion in Juneau amounted to roughly $3,328.

Palin's spokeswoman, Meghan Stapleton, says suggesting the resignation cost the state is "incredibly misleading." She says the resignation ceremony was added to a previously scheduled governor's picnic and was organized by the lieutenant governor's office.

The tally doesn't include the estimated $100,000 it cost for a one-day special session last month in which lawmakers approved Palin's pick to replace Parnell as lieutenant governor and overrode her veto of federal stimulus funds intended for energy efficiency projects.

The Cynical Exploitation of Sara Palin’s Children

2009-09-05T03:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.undiplomatic.net/2008/09/04/the-cynical-exploitation-of-sara-palins-children/

The Cynical Exploitation of Sara Palin’s Children
September 4, 2008

Back when Palinpalooza began, and the progosphere was going nuts over rumors about Sarah Palin and the maternity of one of her children, I said this:

I’ve been following the question of the maternity of Palin’s youngest child, and find the response by both sides largely unseemly. . . . The glee with which the progosphere has leaped on this story is also pretty distressing. Folks aren’t merely reporting it, they’re celebrating it. And they’re calling it “babygate.” That’s not just inappropriate, it’s downright tasteless. . . .
And somewhere in the middle of all this is a little boy with Down syndrome.

As we all know well, a backlash did occur, in part because the blogosphere got the maternity issue wrong. The McCain campaign was able to manage the announcement of Bristol’s pregnancy in a way that rightly or wrongly, made bloggers look even more churlish. But they did so cynically — as I noted here:

What I find odd and a bit distressing about this is that this was issued not by the Palin family but by the McCain campaign — from Arlington, not Anchorage (or Juneau or Wasilla or wherever the Palin family spends its time). Shouldn’t something like this have come from the Governor’s office?
I say that not to doubt the veracity of the Palins’ statement, but to note that McCain operatives, not the Palin family, are managing this story. I find that deeply problematic — because for all the campaign’s talk about the progosphere inappropriately politicizing this story, the reality is that they’ve now made it utterly political. And that can’t be good for the Palins, their kids, or the process.
Last night, we saw just how cynical the McCain campaign could be. The Palins’ youngest child, Trig — the one with Down Syndrome — became a prop, handed off from person to person in order to ensure that as many people as possible got to look good holding him.

Some excerpts from my live blogging of Giuliani and Palin’s speeches last night:

10:18 Shot of Cindy [McCain] holding Trig Palin [during Giuliani's speech].
10:26 Another shot of Cindy with Trig. What in the world is that baby doing in that noisy hall at this time at night??
10:30 Todd now holding Trig. Still have to ask what Trig is doing in that hall at this time of night. Bad reflection on both parents, not just Sarah. . . .
10:37 Introduces family. Todd Palin raises Trig’s hand and waves it. “Children with special needs inspire a very very special love.” Honest to Buddha, I wish to hell I didn’t feel that her appeal to families with special needs wasn’t completely cynical.
10:39 How scripted is this? Todd wasn’t holding Trig when Sarah gave him a shout out and he stood and waved.
[11:15] I’m still deeply disturbed that they’ve got Trig up on stage. It’s after 10:00 in [St. Paul] and he’s four months old. I’m sorry, but that is bad parenting. By both parents.
Think about the decibel level in the room last night. Would you take your 4 month-old to a Motorhead concert? Or even a Celine Dion concert? Would you take him or her to The Dark Knight or any other loud and violent movie? Of course not. As parents, you know that doing so would leave your child overstimulated.

I remember once when Molly and I were driving to Michigan to introduce our two-month old daughter to her grandmother and great-grandmother. Halfway through the trip, we had dinner at a restaurant that had become a favorite stop of ours. We were new parents and didn’t realize just how noisy it was. But we went ahead and ate there. That night, our daughter was up most of the night crying. She had gotten overstimulated by all the noise and didn’t settle down until nearly 4 am. To this day, it was one of the longest and most difficult nights we have ever had with her.

That was a restaurant, whose decibel level had to be one-tenth of the convention last night.

What I didn’t mention during my live blogging is that when Todd got his moment in the sun (Sarah: “he’s still my guy”), he stood up and waved to the crowd. Before he did so, he handed Trig off — not to one of his three teenagers but to Piper, his six-year-old daughter. And while the rest of the audience was riveted by Sarah’s speech, Piper sat there, stroking her little brother’s hair while the cameras periodically cut away from Sarah to show her and Trig.

Would you let your 6-year-old daughter care for your 4-month-old without keeping an eye on her every single second she was holding him? That’s what the Palins did last night. The few shots of the whole family clearly showed them distracted by Sarah’s speech and not paying much attention to Piper and Trig.

Of course, when it came time for the family to go on stage, Todd took Trig back, once again looking like a loving and attentive father.

All of this is just appalling. This isn’t parenting, it’s neglect. And it certainly doesn’t reflect family values.

By focusing on Trig, I don’t want to suggest that the treatment of the rest of the family was somehow okay. Piper also shouldn’t have been anywhere near that arena. Willow looked like a deer in the headlights. Having Track present when he’s deploying in a week was deeply cynical. Where will his parents be during the last week before he deploys? The McCain campaign already has announced a heavy travel schedule for Sarah. Will she take time to say goodbye to the son she so readily uses as a prop in her speeches?

The exploitation of Bristol Palin (and her new fiancee, Levi Johnston) at both the airport and in the arena was particularly selfish and brutish. On the tarmac, McCain spent more time hugging Bristol than he did his entire family. And if he had shaken Levi’s hand one more time, it might have fallen off.

But that was just the latest episode of these poor kids’ saga. It was the McCain campaign, not the Palin family, that announced Bristol’s pregnancy and engagement. It made me wonder: when Sarah and Todd Palin decided that she should accept McCain’s offer, did they talk to Bristol about how this was going to change her life?

Apparently not:

[The Palin family went to] the Manchester Inn and Conference Center in Middleton, Ohio. They were checked into the hotel as the Upton Family.While there, Governor Palin’s children, who had been told they were going to Ohio to celebrate their parents’ wedding anniversary, were told for the first time that their mother would be a nominee for Vice President of the United States of America.”

Keep in mind that this report predates the announcement of Bristol’s pregnancy. It was not intended as some sort of snarky commentary on the family but rater a tick-tock of what happened in the hours leading up to McCain’s announcement of Sarah Palin as his VP candidate.

Keeping that in mind, take a look at that timeline again. If it’s accurate — and if it’s true that Sarah told McCain about Bristol before he chose her as his running mate — it means that Sarah Palin told John McCain about Bristol’s pregnancy before she told Bristol (and her other kids) about her decision to run for Vice President.

So much for putting family first. In fact, it puts a whole new spin on putting country first, doesn’t it?

The Republicans like to say that they are the party of family values. But last night, in permitting a tiny little boy to be exploited so ruthlessly, they demonstrated that two of those values are cynicism and cruelty. They — John McCain, Sarah Palin and Todd Palin in particular — should be ashamed of themselves.

Levi Johnston Lashes Out at Sarah Palin -- Can You Blame Him?

2009-09-05T03:24:00.000-07:00

By Sarah Seltzer, AlterNet
Posted on September 5, 2009, Printed on September 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142434/

Levi Johnston, former Sarah Palin accessory and newfound media personality, leveled some low blows at the grandmother of his child in this month's Vanity Fair.

In its pages, already being excerpted in splashy headlines across the Web, Levi casts Palin as a hodgepodge of stereotypes that feed into the sexist rumormonger's playbook: a bad mom who takes hourlong baths, wears Wal-Mart pajamas in the daytime and doesn't cook for her kids, a money-hungry, narcissistic diva, a grabby woman who tried to take her daughter's baby as her own. Oh, and a wife who doesn't sleep with her man.

Many readers are saying that his words are so extreme, they feel sorry for the former Alaska governer, who despite parroting the sexist, anti-choice policies of the extreme right wing, has taken a staggering amount of unfair, sexist criticism.

It's vital to call out misogyny even when it's directed at our ideological archenemies, and feminists like Alternet's Adele Stan and the Frisky's Jessica Wakeman correctly point out that this latest piece in the so-called liberal media plays into woman-bashing tropes without context or explanation.

Why did Vanity Fair ask Johnston to write about "Mrs. Palin" alone and not his entire experience in the political realm?

But it's hard to get too worked up about Johnston's boorish posturing. Johnston isn't just a typical hanger-on trashing a famous figure to stay in the spotlight -- he's a teenage kid who was used in an abysmal way.

During the Republican National Convention, he and Bristol Palin were cleaned up, shorn, put in fancy clothes and literally paraded in front of a live and TV audience of millions. No one can forget how often the cameras on all the networks swung over to the Palin clan, zooming in on these two somewhat-dazed-looking teen parents-to-be.

The McCain/Palin presidential campaign literally effected the transformation overnight, turning two probably scared kids into the poster children for the anti-choice movement.

Levi and Bristol's suddenly upcoming nuptials were announced with fanfare, and they were applauded in a loud, public way for deciding to carry through with the pregnancy and get hitched. They drove the delegates and the right wing wild and the media wilder.

Their very personal decisions were manipulated to beef up Palin's Republican-mom credentials. She and her handlers played up her image as a mom who had taught her kids, and by extension their partners, to make good traditionally conservative choices. For many, that alone gave her the bona fides to be a great VP candidate.

But by purposefully making the Palin family and Palin's sainted motherhood a huge part of her appeal, and by putting their teenagers' faces on countless screens (teenagers by nature tend to have a twisted and needy relationship to public attention), the campaign created the conditions for a perfect storm.

They also left room for the family to be mocked, imitated, questioned and examined, turned into punchlines and Halloween costumes, something other public families, including the McCains have strived hard not to do. In one fell swoop, Bristol and Levi were given a massive dose of fame's pleasures and its pitfalls.

And for Levi Johnston, there was no turning back. His public persona was created by Palin and her circle of advisers. He's their Frankenstein monster, their brilliant conception that has taken on a life of its own and started causing havoc.

If Palin isn't eager to leave the spotlight, why should Johnston be? And since he was present at the creation of the myth of Sarah Palin, super hockey mom and pillar of upright family values, it appears that his public revenge has taken aim right at the heart of that myth.

Saying that this latest tell-all is a natural progression in the public psychodrama doesn't mean we should try to guess further into Johnston's inner life, excuse his words or necessarily give him credibility. But it does point out that another dynamic is at play besides gender -- the dynamic of age and authority.

The Palins had those privileges over their kids, and they exercised them in a callous way. So is it any surprise that Johnston is using a few choice barbs, leveling his gender privilege to strike back?

It's practically a cardinal law of human psychology that when an adult appears inauthentic or seems to betray a teenager, said teen will lash out.

Even Bristol Palin has let a thought or two of her own slip out (remarking that abstinence-only education is unrealistic) before she was presumably reined back in and turned into the queen of pseudorepentant teen moms.

As parents and adults, the Palins and McCains must have known this, and so to a certain extent they're reaping what they've sown. All the adults in the campaign showed poor judgment, and I'd venture to add, bad caregiving instincts by using young adults and children as props for an ideological movement -- including the babies Tripp and Trig.

Ultimately, this rather tiresome soap opera does not boil down to gender, or to the Palins' and Johnston's class -- no, Gail Collins, the fact that he likes tattoos and hockey has little if anything to do with this -- nor is it really about Palin's home life, which is none of our business now that she's no longer using it as a platform point.

Rather, the Wasilla whirlwind is a strong argument for politicians keeping their kids out of the public eye and using their agendas, rather than their personal lives, to get themselves elected.

As much as I cringe at Johnston's words, there remains a perverse satisfaction to watching him stomp through the countryside, terrorizing the villagers, seeking vengeance on his creators.

But I do wish that Johnston would also take aim at McCain and the campaign officials, who had every bit as much to do with branding him as the Palins did.

And it would be nice if Bristol had the same freedom as her ex -- not to receive undue media scrutiny, but to say exactly what she thought without compunction. I imagine her words would be different from the abstinence-only line she's been (rather unbelievably) toeing recently.

Palin Invited To Testify Before NY Senate On Elderly Care, Death Panels

2009-09-03T10:08:00.000-07:00

Palin should be testifying about the original death panel: the GOP!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/02/palin-invited-to-testify_n_275059.html

Palin Invited To Testify Before NY Senate On Elderly Care, Death Panels
09-3-09

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, whose claim to fame in the current health care debate is helping to spread the infamous "death panel" myth, has been invited to testify before the New York State Senate about how reform will impact the state's elderly.

New York State Senator Reverend Ruben Diaz, a conservative Democrat from the Bronx who is sympathetic to Palin's views, will be hosting a Senate Aging Committee hearing next week on "President Obama's proposed health care reform and the impact it will have on New York State senior citizens."

The witnesses invited include a host of officials from the medical, political, private insurance, and non-governmental world -- each with a clear area of expertise on the topic of caring for the elderly.

Then there is Palin. The former Alaska Governor's health care policy contribution is defined by a brief Facebook message she wrote in early August in which she warned that Democratic reform would create "death panels" tasked with determining who to euthanize, including her child with Down Syndrome.

Palin has not yet accepted or declined the invitation to attend the September 8 hearing, according to Diaz's office. As for why she was invited, Cathy Bern-Smith, a spokesperson for the senator, noted that in another Facebook entry, Palin had referred to "a letter that Senator Diaz wrote to [Rep.] Henry Waxman, (D-Calif.), that was posted on the senator's website."

"There was this Internet conversation going on where she made a comment on her post about something the senator had said," Bern-Smith added. "So we thought, well let's invite her."

Even if Palin doesn't show, the hearing will not lack for controversial conservative figures. Also invited, and confirmed to attend, is Betsy McCaughey, the former Lieutenant Governor of New York and head of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths.

McCaughey actually preceded Palin in pushing the death panel myth, while also promoting a host of equally dubious charges against health care reform. She has, for example, insisted that White House adviser Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel wanted to redefine the Hippocratic Oath. She also claimed -- again falsely -- that the House health care bill would "absolutely require" end-of-life counseling for seniors "that will tell them how to end their life sooner."

Levi Johnston: "Me and Mrs. Palin"

2009-09-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2009/09/levi-johnston.html

Levi Johnston: "Me and Mrs. Palin"
by Vanity Fair
September 2, 2009, 12:01 AM

Watch a behind-the-scenes video of Mark Seliger’s photo shoot with Levi Johnston.

Three days after Sarah Palin was announced as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, the McCain campaign released a statement saying that her 17-year-old unwed daughter, Bristol, was pregnant. The baby’s father, an 18-year-old former hometown hockey star, was thus thrust into the national spotlight. In the October issue of Vanity Fair, Levi Johnston explains what happened behind the curtains of the campaign—and inside the Palin home.

For “Me and Mrs. Palin,” Johnston tells Vanity Fair his story about life with the Palin family—with whom he lived for two months after the election—over the course of his two-and-a-half-year relationship with Bristol. He turns a number of commonly held beliefs about the former governor—the purportedly loving mother, devoted wife, and prolific hunter—upside down.

The Palin house was much different from what many people expect of a normal family, even before she was nominated for vice president. There wasn’t much parenting in that house. Sarah doesn’t cook, Todd doesn’t cook—the kids would do it all themselves: cook, clean, do the laundry, and get ready for school. Most of the time Bristol would help her youngest sister with her homework, and I’d barbecue chicken or steak on the grill.

Even before Palin became John McCain’s running mate, she seemed worried about what a grandchild would do to her political career. According to Johnston, she had a plan for how to handle her daughter’s unexpected pregnancy.

Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret—nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning this plan. She was nagging—she wouldn’t give up. She would say, “So, are you gonna let me adopt him?

”We both kept telling her we were definitely not going to let her adopt the baby. I think Sarah wanted to make Bristol look good, and she didn’t want people to know that her 17-year-old daughter was going to have a kid.

After the campaign, Johnston watched Palin turn into a different person. The result back home in Alaska was a woman ready to turn in elected office for money.

Sarah was sad for a while. She walked around the house pouting. I had assumed she was going to go back to her job as governor, but a week or two after she got back she started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make “triple the money.” It was, to her, “not as hard.” She would blatantly say, “I want to just take this money and quit being governor.” She started to say it frequently, but she didn’t know how to do it. When she came home from work, it seemed like she was more and more stressed out.

The October issue of Vanity Fair hits newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on September 2 and nationwide on September 8.

Report digs into Palin’s personal life

2009-09-03T06:24:00.001-07:00

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/71ce1338-97f2-11de-8d3d-00144feabdc0.html

Report digs into Palin’s personal life
By Anna Fifield in Washington
September 2 2009 20:34

Sarah Palin began talking about quitting as governor of Alaska only weeks after last November’s presidential elections, suggesting she could make “triple the money” as a talk show host or author, her daughter’s former boyfriend has claimed.

In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, Levi Johnston, the 19-year-old father of Mrs Palin’s grandson, also claimed that the former governor tried to persuade him and Bristol, her then-17-year-old daughter, to let her adopt the baby.

Her unmarried daughter’s pregnancy was revealed shortly after John McCain picked the hardline conservative Mrs Palin, who espouses traditional family values and opposes abortion in almost all cases, as his running mate.

Mrs Palin’s spokeswoman could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday, but previous similar claims have been dismissed as attention-getting.

“Sarah was sad for a while. She walked around the house pouting” after the election, Mr Johnston is quoted as telling Vanity Fair, according to interview excerpts published on the magazine’s website on Wednesday.

“I had assumed she was going to go back to her job as governor, but a week or two after she got back she started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make ‘triple the money’. It was, to her, ‘not as hard’,” Mr Johnson quoted the former Republican vice presidential candidate as saying.

“She would blatantly say, ‘I want to just take this money and quit being governor’. She started to say it frequently, but she didn’t know how to do it. When she came home from work, it seemed like she was more and more stressed out,” he told the magazine.

The former governor and Mr Johnston have already been involved in one very public feud, after she resigned her post as Alaska governor in July with more than a year remaining in her first term, citing the mounting legal costs relating to ethics inquiries.

Mr Johnston made similar claims soon after, but Mrs Palin’s spokeswoman dismissed the claims, saying he was merely trying to raise his media profile. Mr Johnston is reportedly writing a book, as is Mrs Palin.

When Bristol Palin’s pregnancy was revealed last year, the teenage couple became engaged but broke up in March, after their son Tripp was born.

In the Vanity Fair interview, Mr Johnston described Mrs Palin’s plan to deal with the pregnancy, which was highly damaging for a politician who advocates abstinence before marriage.

“She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything,” he said, saying Mrs Palin kept “nagging” the young couple, who refused. “I think Sarah wanted to make Bristol look good, and she didn’t want people to know that her 17-year-old daughter was going to have a kid.”

Mr Johnston also claimed that the Palin home was not the traditional family household the former governor portrayed it as.

“There wasn’t much parenting in that house. Sarah doesn’t cook, Todd doesn’t cook — the kids would do it all themselves: cook, clean, do the laundry, and get ready for school,” he said, according to the magazine. “Most of the time Bristol would help her youngest sister with her homework, and I’d barbecue chicken or steak on the grill.”

Mrs Palin has kept up a high public profile since resigning, agreeing to speak at events and regularly commenting on political issues, including healthcare reform, where she was a proponent of the idea that the Obama administration wants to establish “death panels”.

GOP govs sidestep Palin 'death panel' comments

2009-08-26T13:35:00.001-07:00

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h3A4LO8eI9ioHm4L9zs2Dh_PoN5wD9A097C00

GOP govs sidestep Palin 'death panel' comments
By BETH FOUHY (AP) – Aug 10, 2009

NEW YORK — Republican governors said Monday that Americans are justifiably frightened by health care proposals but stopped short of embracing Sarah Palin's suggestion that President Barack Obama would require the elderly and disabled to appear before a bureaucratic "death panel."

No such "death panel" has been proposed. A provision in the plan passed by a House committee last month would allow Medicare to reimburse seniors who seek information and counseling on end-of-life issues. That provision has sparked a backlash among opponents, who suggest the plan would deny coverage to elderly or disabled people.

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue said the anger expressed at town hall meetings across the country was "democracy in action" and legitimately reflected the concerns many voters have about the health care plan.

Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle concurred, saying they weren't simply concerned that their taxes might go up.

"The heightened anger is out of fear for what it's going to mean for their lives and the lives of their families," Lingle said, adding that anxiety about the potential changes to their health care make people worry, "'My very existence could be threatened."

Perdue, Lingle and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour were asked about the town hall protests and Palin's remarks during a conference call with reporters from the Republican Governors Association retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Perdue said Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee who stepped down as Alaska governor last month, could "speak for herself." Barbour refused to comment on Palin's remarks, saying he hadn't seen them. And Lingle did not address the comments.

On Friday, Palin posted a message on her Facebook page calling President Barack Obama's health care overhaul plan "downright evil" and a step toward euthanasia.

"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," Palin wrote.

Palin, for her part, said on her Facebook page Monday that the town hall protests disrupted "civil discourse." She urged participants to exercise restraint.

"Let's not give the proponents of nationalized health care any reason to criticize us," Palin said.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

She's Not There

2009-08-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/She-s-Not-There-by-Kathy-Malloy-090812-447.html

August 12, 2009
By Kathy Malloy

Sarah Palin doesn't care. Why should she? A few weeks ago she abruptly announced she was quitting the governorship of Alaska because, as she explained in a rambling, incoherent exit speech, gosh darn it, she's got to save those Alaskans who elected her from herself. Before heading south, she proved what a compassionate conservative she was in her final days in office. Simply put, old, sick, and disabled people are dying in her state, a result of her time in office. She could have stopped it. She didn't.

It seems federal auditors were forced to suspend new entries into the state Medicaid program because of gross mismanagement by Alaska officials operating under Sarah Palin. As a result, thousands of elderly and disabled people are without care, and hundreds are dying for lack of treatment. According to the Anchorage Daily News, in the last two years, 227 adults already getting services died while waiting for a nurse to reassess their needs. Another 27 died waiting for the initial assessment that would determine if they qualified for help.

Alaskan senator Mark Begich wanted to lift the moratorium, which -- in addition to providing life-saving medical care -- would also preventlow-income elderly or disabled persons from being forced to sell their homes and enter nursing homes. Seems simple enough, right? Begich has asked Palin to lift the ban in a June letter urgingthe now ex-governor to solve the crisis quickly. According to the Alaska Daily News:

"It appears there are legitimate questions on both sides "" about the state's administration of the program and what may be an overly forceful reaction by CMS," Begich wrote to Palin. CMS stands for the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He encouraged Palin to offer "the full services of your executive branch" and asked her to pass his letter on to Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, who will be taking over as governor.

In an emailed reply, Palin stated that "there needs to be strict oversight of all public monies spent on all government services." Then she packed up and left. In other words -- if you're old, sick, and/or disabled in Alaska, and I'm the Conservative governor, no soup for you. They're lucky she didn't set them adrift on an ice floe on her way outta town. Guess she had better things to do in her final days than do her job ina way that would have saved the lives of her most needy and helpless constituents. Maybe she went wolf hunting from her state-funded helicopter, as she is much more adroit at making things dead than keeping them alive.

So, the next time you hear Sarah whine about Obama's "death plan," which she absurdly alleges will force old people to appear before apanel of government officials and either prove they're worthy of living or be euthanized, remember the hundreds of elderly Alaskans she condemned to death for lack of concern and competence.

The programs were in place to rescue people in desperate need of help. Palin chose her own career plansover the needs of Alaskans. As in most other aspects of her political career, she failed. This time, people died. She didn't leave office in time to save them.

Palin doubles down on 'death panels'

2009-08-13T07:54:00.000-07:00

Barbie covering for the overlords.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090813/pl_politico/26078/print

Palin doubles down on 'death panels'

Andy Barr
August 13, 2009

Former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin defended her claim that the Democratic health care proposal would create “death panels” in a statement Wednesday night slamming President Barack Obama.

“Yesterday President Obama responded to my statement that Democratic health care proposals would lead to rationed care; that the sick, the elderly and the disabled would suffer the most under such rationing; and that under such a system, these ‘unproductive’ members of society could face the prospect of government bureaucrats determining whether they deserve health care,” Palin wrote in a note on her Facebook page.

“The provision that President Obama refers to is Section 1233 of HR 3200, entitled ‘Advance Care Planning Consultation.’ With all due respect, it’s misleading for the president to describe this section as an entirely voluntary provision that simply increases the information offered to Medicare recipients,” she continued.

“Section 1233 authorizes advanced care planning consultations for senior citizens on Medicare every five years, and more often ‘if there is a significant change in the health condition of the individual ... or upon admission to a skilled nursing facility, a long-term care facility... or a hospice program.’"

The White House and Democratic lawmakers have blasted Palin in recent days for suggesting that her own son, Trig, would have had to face a bureaucratic panel to get access to health care under the provision in the House health care proposal because he was born with Down syndrome.

“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 wrote last week.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs identified Palin on Wednesday as one of the GOP leaders he says is spreading “wrong” information about the health care debate.

Additionally, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is using Palin’s “death panels” claim in a fundraising plea to supporters, calling the former governor’s statement “disgusting” and “outrageous.”

But Palin seemed undeterred in her latest statement, pointing to columns by The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson and others to support her suggestion last week that the Democratic proposal is “Orwellian.”

“President Obama can try to gloss over the effects of government authorized end-of-life consultations, but the views of one of his top health care advisers are clear enough,” Palin wrote. “It’s all just more evidence that the Democratic legislative proposals will lead to health care rationing, and more evidence that the top-down plans of government bureaucrats will never result in real health care reform.”