Palin's Commencement Address Pamela Geller Sarah Palin's Farewell Address as Governor of Alaska Sunday was no farewell address at all. It was just the beginning; it was a commencement address. More
Excerpt:
Her speech embodied what a great American sounds like, and what a President ought to sound like. Palin made no apologies. She said nothing like Obama's inane drone of "America's best days are behind us." No tearing down of our nation. Obama ranks on us; Palin raises us up and speaks of national pride.
First and foremost, she thanked our brave men and women defending this great nation and ripped the media, warning:
"You represent what could and should be a respected, honest profession that could and should be a cornerstone of our democracy. Democracy depends on you, and that is why, that's why our troops are willing to die for you. So, how about, in honor of the American soldier, you quit makin' things up?"
She briefly outlined her plans for real energy independence -- American resources for Americans -- speaking of commercializing our clean natural gas (AGEA) as the first private sector energy project in the history of America. Palin believes (and rightly so) that the pressing issue of our time is energy independence. "There is," she said, "an inherent link between energy and prosperity...We will prove you can be pro-development and pro-environment because no one loves their clean air, and their land, and their wildlife more than an Alaskan. We will protect it!"
She invoked America's pioneering spirit. She urged us to resist enslavement to big central government: "Be wary of accepting government largess."
Sarah Palin embodies what an American is. She is what Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin envisioned when they carved out the American idea.
Anyone who wants write her off, proceed at your own risk.
The more evil succeeds and overwhelms our foreign and domestic policy, our culture, our discourse and the very social fabric of our lives, the clearer it becomes that Palin is the antidote, the answer to fighting this morally bankrupt sewer in which we find ourselves during the Obama Administration.
The low state of the world is a fact, but so are great Americans who will fight tooth and nail to stop what Obama is doing to America. Clear thinking Americans see what is happening. America is being tested in a way she never has been before. The President has in every decision reinforced the impression that he is a radical, even a communist/Islamist: the usurpation of the Constitution, the bankrupting of our nation, the illegal grab of private wealth, the infiltration of Islamic supremacism, the abandonment of our allies, the weakening of our military. It's stunning.
Sarah Palin sees it, too. Smart, sharp, patriotic, she best represents the majority of Americans. Not Obama's shills in the press, not the chattering elites and the Beltway insiders, but Americans.
In addition to my regular gig on the Jaz McKay show today at 4pm Eastern time, 1560 KNZR, I will be appearing on the The Eddie Burke Show on WBYR - the best news and talk in Alaska to talk about Sarah Palin at 3:30pm Alaska time, 7:30pm Eastern time. I very much look forward to it.
UPDATE: The video was taken down again,this time at sevenload. It seems the jackals and the hyenas don't want their mugs used (believe me we don't want to have to look at 'em) so they keep sending emails to have them taken down. Myriad frivolous, harassing lawsuits against Palin but don't flash my ug-mug!
I liken "ethics" out of the mouths of Obama and his operatives to chastity and abstinence out of the mouth of the chief cook and bottle washer (ahem) of the Chicken Ranch. Criminal governance at work. Target - the good (for being the good).
BTW, "The Alaskan bloggers featured in this video had it removed from YouTube".
Link:
Exposed "Ethicsgate" Obama and the Democrats multiple direct links to the political effort to destroy Sarah Palin.
The more evil succeeds and overwhelms our foreign and domestic policy, our culture, our discourse and the very social fabric of our lives, the clearer it becomes that Palin is the antidote, the answer to fighting this morally bankrupt sewer in which we find ourselves .
The low state of the world is a fact, but so are great Americans who will fight tooth and nail to stop the coup. American is being tested in a way she never has been before. Treason is in power.
Just for knowing, the always entertaining and lunatic Ron Paul said in a Politico piece here:
As for soon-to-be departing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Paul dismisses her supporters as "more establishment, conventional Country-Club type of Republicans.”
So the Stan Laurel look-alike Ron Paul is attacking Sarah and her supporters for being "country clubbers." An absolutely absurd comment. I am sure all those Joe Sixpacks are waiting for their golf carts as we speak.
Well, I've done some searching around, and there is zero evidence to indicate that Sarah has ever been a member of a country club. Is there a more down to earth, true grit haimish candidate out there, I ask you? My vlog on Sarah is here.
Ron Paul and his wife Carol are Lifetime Members of the Lake Jackson Country Club. It is located on Highway 332 in between Lake Jackson and Brazoria.
Nothing new here. Ron Paul is a full of shitnik glomming onto Sarah's star just to get a little (any) publicity. She wouldn't be a real frontierswoman, a real American. Her platform of small government, less taxation, individual liberties, energy, national security and good old fashioned American exceptionalism is the cure this sick country needs.
Delicious factoid: The latest Rasmussen Poll (out today) has Barack Obama leading Sarah Palin (for President) by 48% to 42%. Somehow, I don't ObamaLand was happy to hear those results.
Once again, Palin is on the front page of the Puff ho (the attacks are daily) -- part of the relentless drum beat of the left to destroy this iconic individualist. The mission by objective? Ruin strong leaders on the right. Therefore, more daily pounding on the American psyche to destroy this popular figure.
Today's libel depicts Palin as psychologically fragile, weak, and about to break. As if. That's nerve. Palin is a rock. The Puff Ho, OTOH, is, well ......my kingdom for a look see into Arianna Huffington's medicine cabinet and Birkin bag ..............
It strikes me as pure envy that Arianna Huffington, who did not make it on her own, should undertake such a naked and pathetic campaign to destroy a superior specimen. Huffington was a high priced courtesan when she came to the States from her native Greece, via England. She didn't have to be. She had every advantage. Instead, she sold herself to the highest bidder, selling herself as a beard to a gay husband and getting remunerated for it handsomely.
Character alert: Huffington was accused of plagiarism for copying material for her book Maria Callas; the claims were settled out of court.[
Palin is everything that carpetbagger isn't. Palin's existence vaporizes the moochers, looters and destroyers like Arianna Huffington. Which is why the Puff Ho's attacks are so vapid, so unhinged, so relentless, so ugly.
During these years and around the time of her [Huffington] involvement with John-Roger's religious group, she was involved with Democratic politician and then-governor (currently Attorney General) of California, Jerry Brown. It was during this time that Huffington (then Stassinopoulos) was first known as a liberal/left-wing/Democrat, the position she returned to once again in the post-90s following the right-wing years of the 1980s to late 1990s.[citation needed]
She became a Republican when she married the gay Republican, Michael Huffington. Ed Rollins has publicly claimed that she offered to provide him with a prostitute if he would manage her husband's campaign. (The rumor is the prostitute was .......)
She met oil millionaire Michael Huffington, a family friend of the Bushes, at a 1985 party hosted by Ann Getty in San Francisco. The couple were married in 1986 at a wedding paid for by Getty, who had declared that she needed to find Arianna a husband. They moved to Washington, D.C., when he was appointed to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy. They later established residency in Santa Barbara, California, in order for him to run in 1992 as a Republican for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he won by a significant margin. He was a political conservative on most issues. Arianna campaigned for her husband, courting religious conservatives, arguing for smaller government and a reduction in welfare. In 1994 he narrowly lost the race for the U.S. Senate seat from California to incumbent Dianne Feinstein.[3] Arianna and Michael have two daughters: Christina and Isabella.
The couple divorced in 1997, and in 1998 Michael Huffington revealed that he was bisexual.[4] A 1999 magazine article claimed that Arianna Huffington "entered the marriage... with full knowledge of Michael Huffington's sexual interests in men".[5] The financial terms of their divorce agreement remain undisclosed. Arianna Huffington chose to retain her former husband's surname, although she had been known as Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington during the period of her marriage. (more here)
She took her gay husband's payoff - and started a blog with leftopaths and barely literate Hollywood celebs.
Every time I see her I can hear Ed Rollins' description of her ringing in my ears. Here is how Rollins, who managed Michael Huffington's 1994 California Senate run, described Arianna and her husband in his book "Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms":Since early July, I'd been working for two of the most unprincipled political creatures I'd ever encountered. One was such a complete cipher he gave empty suits a bad name. But his wife was even worse - a domineering Greek Rasputin determined to ride her husband's wealth to political glory at any cost....
Arianna Huffington had charmed me out of my socks to get me to manage her husband's campaign. But in a few short months, I'd come to realize that she was the most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I'd met in thirty years in national politics - not to mention that she sometimes seemed truly pathological.
Could her bio be any more different than Sarah Palin's? Palin is everything this useful idiot is not. She is good, real, honest and smart. She has a solid marriage with a man she adores - healthy marital relations -the glow is unmistakable :)- Huffington married a gay man to give him a beard and she was paid handsomely for it. Sarah builds, Huffington destroys. Sarah is honest, Huffington is dishonest and a vile disinformationalist. Sarah has a fabulous sex life, Arianna has ............. well, I'll refrain here from being cruel.
These two dig each other.
Huffington hates Palin. Remember that. The hatred of the good for being the good. Huffington hates Palin because she is everything the Puff ho ain't. It's that simple.
Clear thinking Americans see what is happening. The furious coup on America by a radical communist/Islamist -- best illustrated by the usurpation of the Constitution, the bankrupting of our nation, the illegal grab of private wealth, the infiltration of Islamic supremacism, the abandonment of our allies, the weakening of our military -- is stunning.
Sarah Palin sees it, too. Smart, sharp, patriotic, she best represents the majority of Americans. Not the BO hos in the press, not the chattering elites and the Beltway insiders. Americans. There was no way she would stay on as Governor, as she was unable to fulfill her duties. The leftist wing in America had her tied up in bogus lawsuits (all of which she won). She agreed to pay the travel fees for taking her children on one of her trips. Obama should do the same. Those trips to Paris for his two girls. Pay it back. Pay back the $100,000 it cost taxpayers for his "date" in New York. Pay it back. Pay for those ridiculous $100 steaks. Pigs at the trough. Not Palin.
The hypocrisy knows no bounds.
We want Palin. I heard Michael Steele say on FOX today that she would not run in 2012. Steele is a suit. He speaks for no one. The GOP won't even back Lt. Colonel Allen West. He (nor the GOP) will pick our candidate. Palin is going to help us win back the House/Senate by campaigning and working for candidates in that fight in 2010. And we, the good, decent folks in America, are going to help her win the White House 2012.
We need her. She knows it. She is heeding our call. Is she a hack like Obama and going to campaign on the taxpayers' dime, as he did as a junior senator when he ran for President? No. Extraordinary? Yes. But so is integrity, ethics and decency. The left is calling her a "quitter". Just the opposite, my friends. Just a fighter, a winner. And she is getting into the fight. Baruch hashem!
So the point is this: The Pew numbers show that Palin's base as of June 2009 was as strong as Obama's on the eve of the 2008 campaign. Consider two numbers: Palin's "very favorable" rating last month on the Pew Research survey among all adults was 15%. Obama's very favorable score among all adults on a Pew Research survey in August 2007 was 14%.
As such, it is not completely crazy for Palin want to free herself from the time and travel constraints imposed by her gubernatorial commitments in Alaska. A month ago, Chris Cillizza outlined the logistical reasons why Palin would want to "take a pass" on a second term (resigning now is another story, of course). She has a big base and time is a resource. With more time to travel and speak, she would be able to build a grassroots army as Obama did.
The notoriously left wing LA Times reports that the FBI reports that there is is "absolutely no truth" to the lies being spread by force of nature Sarah Palin. Palin scares the malevolent to death. Palin is the silver cross to the Democrats' Dracula.
Palin in a facebook message said yesterday:
I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint" "How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country," the statement said. "And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make."
"To the extent several websites, most notably liberal Alaska blogger Shannyn Moore, are now claiming as 'fact' that Governor Palin resigned because she is 'under federal investigation' for embezzlement or other criminal wrongdoing, we will be exploring legal options this week to address such defamation," Van Flein said in a statement. "This is to provide notice to Ms. Moore, and those who re-publish the defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post, that the Palins will not allow them to propagate defamatory material without answering to this in a court of law."
I love her! She is the leader Americans need. She is the leader the tea parties need.
I hope Palin sues just to shut these fat bastids up.
The former GOP vice presidential candidate's surprise resignation as Alaska governor had set off speculation, including rumors of a pending federal corruption probe or charges.
Reporting from Washington -- A day after Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resigned, a federal official in her home state dismissed one potential explanation for her sudden and unexpected resignation: a rumored FBI investigation into the former Wasilla mayor on public corruption charges.
Despite rumors of a looming controversy after the Republican governor's surprise announcement Friday that she would leave office this month, some of them published in the blogosphere, the FBI's Alaska spokesman said the bureau had no investigation into Palin for her activities as governor, as mayor or in any other capacity.
."There is absolutely no truth to those rumors that we're investigating her or getting ready to indict her," Special Agent Eric Gonzalez said in a phone interview Saturday. "It's just not true." He added that there was "no wiggle room" in his comments for any kind of inquiry.
Harlan Muth isn’t organizing Sarah Palin’s presidential campaign, but pledges as soon as someone does, “I’ll be with ’em.In the meantime, the Marion maintenance contractor is turning heads with his “Sarah Palin 2012” poster prominently displayed on his van.
UPDATE: Want to get involved? Of course you do! From the folks at Team Sarah
We have had many new members join and many others come back in to Team Sarah to get involved, so I wanted to provide some basic information to help you navigate the community.
If you want to find people with a similar interest or participate in a get together and meet Team Sarah members in your state go here and use search, type in your interest or state to find groups you can join.
How can you help Team Sarah and Sarah Palin?
SarahPAC is Sarah Palin's PAC, it is here: This is to support Sarah Palin's Political Action Committee and it's activities and candidates/causes she supports.
To support her legal defense fund go here: This fund is working to retire the legal expenses accrued from all those false ethics complaints.
Palin spoke from the heart. She is a natural leader. I unequivocally support her. I have to find the video of her full speech in Alaska today. Here is the official statement from her office: (hat tip Larwyn)
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has released her complete remarks announcing she will be stepping down from office; they can be found on her Web site.
Hi Alaska, I appreciate speaking directly to you, the people I serve, as your Governor.
People who know me know that besides faith and family, nothing's more important to me than our beloved Alaska. Serving her people is the greatest honor I could imagine.
I want Alaskans to grasp what can be in store for our state. We were purchased as a territory because a member of President Abe Lincoln's cabinet, William Seward, providentially saw in this great land, vast riches, beauty, strategic placement on the globe, and opportunity. He boldly looked "North to the Future". But he endured such ridicule and mocking for his vision for Alaska, remember the adversaries scoffed, calling this "Seward's Folly". Seward withstood such disdain as he chose the uncomfortable, unconventional, but right path to secure Alaska, so Alaska could help secure the United States.
6:40 pm: The diseased and utterly morally left at work again (I talked of this very evil here, earlier this week) - photoshopping Palin family pictures here. Do you believe this represents America? (hat tip Dave)
Bear in mind, this is not the first time they have made fun of and photoshopped Trig. And these are not fringe blogs. These are some of the biggest blogs in the left wing blogosphere. (Wonkette, Tbogg, Firedoglake etc.)
CNN (!) video. I LOVE HUH!
5:00 pm: FOX is running Palin's remarks. They must read Atlas :)
Turn on FOX, decide for yourself. And please, someone vidgrab it!
4:30 pm: My take? If Palin is anything like I think she is (know she is),Obama's treasonous presidency is responsible for this. She, like all patriotic Americans, is shocked by what is happening. Obama is destroying this country. She knows it. We all know it. We need a leader. She is answering our call.
She did not quit. She is going to get into the fight to save America. Watch what happens.
4:23 PM: FOX news cut her news conference. 7 days of Michael Jackson and they did not allow us to hear her remarks in full. First Iran, now this.
From what I saw - this is not a woman who is retiring. She is assuming the mantle. This was a campaign speech. She was amazing. I will try to get text or video.
4:09 pm: Liveblogging her announcement........... she is speaking (no teleprompter, how refreshing!) about the sacrifice great Americans have made on this eve of Independence day and what our founding fathers fought and died for.
"I am showing my independence"
She is outlining all of the achievements of her administration.
"living beyond our means today is irresponsible for tomorrow"
"vetoed debt ridden stimulus dollars"
"being right is better than being popular"
She is going after every Obama move without naming him. I have got to get a copy of these remarks.
The ethics legislation she championed was used by an army of political operatives who filed 15 charges against her, draining the public resources. She and her staff spend most of their day on the charges that have been dismissed, incurring over half a million in legal fees. That is not serving the people of Alaska.
The biggest problem today is that people are apathetic. They go with the flow. "Todd and I are fishermen and know only dead fish go with the flow".
This is a great speech.
She believes in and wants to fight for free enterprise, small government, national security .....
FOX NEWS JUST CUT OFF HER SPEECH. WTF???????????????
4:05 pm: The 2012 campaign began today!
3:47 pm: We are waiting for her press conference. There is lots of speculation. I am paying it no mind. In my opinion, it will allow her to spend more time in the lower 48 states without the left accusing her of neglecting her duties as Governor.
Her husband, Todd Palin, said she wants to do things to help the country that she can't do while fulfilling her role as Governor.
UPDATE: Governor Palin is stepping down! We are awaiting her announcement. She is the right's best hope for 2012. She is handing over control to Lt Governor Sean Parnell. He will be sworn in July 25.
I hope the reason is to run. Her country needs her desperately.
It is being reported that Governor Sarah Palin will announce that she will not be running for reelection as Governor of Alaska. Eureka! This is magnificent news. The thrilla from Wasilla! Hope! Change! Seriously.
She has been mercilessly attacked. Brutal, but like water off a duck's back. Those on the right who have suffered the slings and arrows of the vile left smear machine (the depths of which are unthinkable to decent men, here) know that the more they throw, the greater you are. The more vile, disgusting, outrageous the smear, the more envious and afraid you know the destroyers are.
The Democrats and their propaganda machine, the dinosaur media, will continue to attempt to destroy and marginalize this wonder woman. New media better pick up the slack. Jugular for jugular. The hatred of the good for being the good. That is Palin. I am unmoved by assertions that Palin needs more foreign policy or more this and that. She has the key ingredient to great leadership - common sense. I am not concerned that she won't get up to speed on the nitty gritty details of national and international issues. Her thinking, her epistemology is good.
She has common sense, a moral compass and a very definite understanding of good and evil.
Best of all, she is not a product of the limpwristed, spineless, dickless GOP. She is outside the box. She has grit. She has balls. She is my kind of kishka.
The hatred of the good for being the good. Ayn Rand
Sarah Palin scares the guts out of RINOs, leftopaths and freedom haters. She embodies all that good and fine and decent, and they vomit. You couldn't have written a more charismatic honorable character in a Victor Hugo novel. They will do anything and say anything to destroy this woman. They are so low, so corrupt .... their depravity continues to shock even the most jaded.
It really is hard to understand why some adults feel the need to make fun of Trig Palin, a one-year old who has Down Syndrome. Politics alone cannot explain it. If you don't like Sarah Palin, fine, but why go after Trig?
The controversy regarding the Photoshop of Trig by Alaskan blogger Linda Biegel is only the tip of the iceberg. Ever since Sarah's nomination, Trig has been a target. Last fall, the popular DC-based "gossip" website Wonkette joked how Trig must have wished he'd been aborted. Now Wonkette has taken Biegel's Photoshop antics as an excuse to go after Trig anew.
In a recent post, Wonkette promoted and joked about even cruder Photoshops of Trig at the Something Awful web forum, where people can post anonymously (examples below). Wonkette even included one of these photoshops in its post (above right) while mocking Trig as the "New Jesus," "Holy Infant" and "Sacred One."
All the attacks on Trig are Sarah's fault, according to the Wonkette post, since Sarah had the audacity to bring Trig on stage at the Republican National Convention (where the original photo in question was taken), which Wonkette calls using Trig as a "cheap political prop." I guess that makes the Obama kids fair game according to Wonkette since they were brought on stage at the Democratic National Convention.
Sarah is to blame for all the new Photoshops of Trig, according to the Wonkette post, because Sarah complained about Biegel:
The Virgin Palin, Our Lady of Eternal Anger, gave birth to the New Jesus at some point last year — or not, who knows, and now Andrew Sullivan just cares about Iran (which is a good thing!) so we’ll never find out the truth — and ever since it has been both a Cardinal/Venial Sin and Sharia Law that no mortal shall “desecrate” an image of the Sacred One … no one but Sarah Palin herself, because Allah both allows and encourages the use of the Holy Infant as a cheap political prop as long as such cruel hackery is performed by the Virgin Palin herself.
Palin’s fury was such, when she found out some blog “on the Internet” had combined a picture of her cradling one of her Magic Babies together with a picture of her Jedi Master, some dingbat old radio talk-show clown in Alaska, that she did verily send her dumbest disciple, “Brother Meg,” to start a Jihad against the Entire Internet.
But we know what happens when a fear-and-anger crazed Snow Witch starts a vain war she can never hope to win: The Internet Strikes Back.
Which is to say, Palin basically poked a stick in the world’s largest beehive filled with cheap & tireless insanity, and the SomethingAwful.com goons have unleashed a pack of Photoshop Dogs From Hell to make the most incredible collection of Sarah Palin Desecration Images in the History of Time, the end.
Here are two of the milder Photoshops in the Something Awful forum, which are Sarah's fault according to Wonkette:
What a riot. It takes small people to stoop this low.
[Note: Accordingly to one of the commenters, the face imposed on the photo immediately above is that of a convicted sex offender, Brian Peppers, which makes that Photoshop particularly sick.]
UPDATE: Huffington Post blogger Jason Linkins has joined Wonkette in blaming Sarah for the crude Photoshops because Sarah complained and used the word "desecrate":
And now, all of these people that you had heretofore never heard of are famous, because Sarah Palin wouldn't let the stuff slide. Even dumber, she said that the photoshopping was a "desecration," which means she believes Trig had been "divested of her sacred character." Now I think Trig Palin is an awesome kid, but COME ON. That's a really pretentious thing for a parent to say.
Can't the Editors at Wonkette or bloggers at HuffPo check the dictionary? Desecrate has more than one meaning, and is not limited to someone being "divested" of "sacred character." The Merriam-Webster online dictionary includes "to treat disrespectfully, irreverently, or outrageously" in the definition of the term. Sounds right to me. More important, regardless of which words Sarah used, why does that justify attacks on Trig?
As if that weren't terrible enough, Vanity Fair has a hit piece coming out filled with lies and propaganda. Worse, they were aided by the cancerous liberals of the Republican party.
There is a struggle in the Republican party for the heart and soul of our future. The RINOs (McCain, Romney etc. vs true individualists and conservatives). You must get involved in this struggle.
The GOP wants to knock her out, for the same reasons that they don't back the formidable, courageous Lt. Colonel Allen West.
Steve wrote:
Vanity Fair is loaded with Obama lovers and Palin-haters. It's right up there with MSNBC. My friends, this is more than a struggle to keep Sarah viable. It's a battle for the Republic. Ferocity, please!
The McCain Campaign was abominable in every way imaginable -- no strategy, low-quality support staff, pathetic fundraising, and a top-of-the-ticket candidate who was more interested in preserving his Beltway status than in winning the election. The low point in the campaign was when McCain essentially told the woman in Wisconsin who "feared" Obama that she had nothing to fear from an Obama presidency.
As a 3-year-speechwriter, I found it obvious that Sarah needed a topflight speechwriter/advisor (Elaine Lafferty would have been fine, and I would have done it for nothing) with her; she had no such person. Biden did. Sarah didn't. McCain clearly resented the fact that Sarah drew huge crowds . . . and he couldn't draw flies.
The GOP is trying to knock her out.
Below is to give you a taste of what is to come. There is a devastating hate piece in Vanity Fair, in what can only be a pathetic attempt at complete and total character assassination.Vanity Fair on Palin: 'It came from Wasilla' - reporter Todd Purdum relies heavily on quotes from unnamed McCain campaign officials.
The same shills that laud Obama for dropping a cool $100,000 on a "dinner and a show with Meesh in NYC, are aghast that Sarah spent $150,000 of donated bucks on her wardrobe for the presidential campaign.
By the time Election Day rolled around, the staff had been serially pummeled by unflattering press reports about the gaps in Palin’s knowledge, her stubborn resistance to direction, and the post-selection spending spree in which she ran up bills of $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family at high-end stores.
"Whatever her political future, the emergence of Sarah Palin raises questions that will not soon go away," Todd Purdum writes in a long piece that ranges from her campaign for governor to her current status as the "sexiest and riskiest brand" in GOP politics. "What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party-long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics-keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency?" ...
As Palin makes her way slowly across the crowded ballroom—dressed all in black; no red Naughty Monkey Double Dare pumps tonight—she is stopped every few inches by adoring fans. She passes the press pen, where at least eight television cameras and a passel of reporters and photographers are corralled, and spots a reporter for a local community newspaper getting ready to take a happy snap with his pocket camera. For a split second she stops, pauses, turns her head and shoulders just so, and smiles. She holds the pose until she’s sure the man has his shot and then moves on. A few minutes later, the evening’s nominal keynote speaker, the Republican Party’s national chairman, Michael Steele, who has been reduced to a footnote in the proceedings, introduces the special guest speaker as “the storm that is the honorable governor of the great state of Alaska, Sarah Palin!”
[...]
In the aftermath of the November election, the conventional wisdom among Palin’s supporters in the Republican establishment was that she should go home, keep her head down, show that she could govern effectively, and quietly educate herself about foreign and domestic policy with the help of a cadre of experienced advisers. She has done none of this. Rather, she has pursued an erratic course that, for her, may actually represent the closest thing there is to True North. Her first trip to Washington since the election was to attend the dinner of the Alfalfa Club, an elite group of politicians and businesspeople whose sole function is an annual evening in honor of a plant that would “do anything for a drink.” Some of her handlers first said she had accepted—though she then went on to decline—an invitation to speak at the annual June fund-raiser for the congressional Republicans. She created a political-action committee—Sarahpac—with the help of John Coale, a prominent Democratic trial lawyer. But just months into its existence the pac’s chief fund-raiser, Becki Donatelli, a veteran of Republican campaigns, suddenly quit. One person familiar with the situation told me that Donatelli could not stand dealing with Palin’s political spokeswoman in Alaska, Meghan Stapleton, who has drawn withering fire from Palin friends and critics alike for being an ineffective adviser. Also with Coale’s help, Palin formed the grandiosely named Alaska Fund Trust, to defray a reported half million dollars in legal expenses arising from a slew of formal ethics complaints against her in her home state—prompting yet another formal complaint, that the fund itself constitutes an ethical breach. Onetime supporters have become harsh critics. Walter Hickel, 89, a former two-term governor and interior secretary, and the grand old man of Alaska politics, who was co-chair of Palin’s winning gubernatorial campaign, in 2006, now washes his hands of her. He told me simply, “I don’t give a damn what she does.”
Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life—neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith but a phenomenon all her own. The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan—the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game—give her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection. Palin’s life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure.
Another aspect of the Palin phenomenon bears examination, even if the mere act of raising it invites intimations of sexism: she is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics, the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs. This pheromonal reality has been a blessing and a curse. It has captivated people who would never have given someone with Palin’s record a second glance if Palin had looked like Susan Boyle. And it has made others reluctant to give her a second chance because she looks like a beauty queen.
Soon Palin will take a crack at her own story: she has signed a book contract for an undisclosed but presumably substantial sum, and has chosen Lynn Vincent, a senior writer at the Christian-conservative World magazine, as co-author of the memoir, which is to be published next year not only by HarperCollins but also in a special edition by Zondervan, the Bible-publishing house, that may include supplemental material on faith. During the presidential campaign, Palin’s deep ignorance about most aspects of foreign and domestic policy provided her with a powerful political reason not to submit to interviews. The forthcoming book adds a powerful commercial reason.
Palin is a cipher by choice. When she chooses to reveal herself, what she reveals is not always the same thing as the truth. Her singular refusal to have in-depth conversations with the national media—even Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney, among the most saturnine political figures in modern American history, each submitted to countless detailed interviews over the years—has compounded the challenge of understanding who she really is. There has been Hollywood talk that Palin could star in a reality-TV show about running Alaska, but nothing has come of it yet. Recently, Palin did star in a week-long seriocomic feud with David Letterman over some of his borderline jokes. Meanwhile, she has begun sharing insights several times a day on Twitter, with chipper reports on her own doings and those of her husband, Todd, and the rest of what she calls the “first family.” “Look forward to today’s staff discussion re: my 3rd justice appt to highest court in 3 yrs. Supreme Court truly effects AK’s future,” reads one. And another: “Picking up my handsome little man to rtrn to Juneau, Trig got 1st haircut so my little hippie baby’s ready for AK sunshine on his shoulders.”
The top McCain aides who had tried hard to work with Palin—Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist; Nicolle Wallace, the communications ace; and Tucker Eskew, her traveling counselor—were barely on speaking terms with her, and news organizations were reporting that anonymous McCain aides saw Palin as a “diva” and a “whack job.”
This quote, irritating as it is, is merely a setup for a later assertion:
Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression? (Palin’s youngest son was less than six months old.)
"Like any politician at this level, I've got a healthy ego."
However, quoting anonymous sources to imply that a national political figure may, in fact, have been mentally unstable during a campaign is beyond any stretch of journalistic integrity. And yet, Purdum is not content to smear Palin with the ethereal possibility of postpartum depression:
More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly.
It is amusing to consider the idea that random, unidentified constituents would, unbidden, pick up the copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that they just so happened to have sitting on the bookshelf, and wonder if Sarah Palin suffered from a mental disorder.
For the sake of argument, however, let us simply settle on the fact that failing to identify these people – or their expertise in the field of psychiatric medicine – leaves this paragraph as a near-libelous attack on the mental state of a public figure.
The Palin "webathon" means a lot to me. I love this woman. She is a damn fine woman and a great American. The best. And the liberals know it, which is why they have done everything to destroy her. Bankrupting her is part of it.
A bunch of "ankle biters" in Alaska has pursued frivolous ethics complaints against Sarah Palin since the 2008 election. She has won every one of these, including the complaint that she wore a jacket with the logo of her husband's snowmobile team. This is the way liberals work the system.
"Conservatives4Palin" is running a webathon to help retire the $500,000 in legal debts that Palin has incurred. People can contribute as little as $5.00, but most important spread the word about the webathon. Here is the link for information about the complaints and for contributing:
Click the image above to visit AFT and make a donation.
The Democrats despise Palin (the hatred of the good for being good), because she best embodies everything they are not. Principled, true, hard working, smart, honorable ............. "the ideal man" (in the Randian sense). I adore Palin, and will work for her candidacy - whatever race she chooses.
Just for knowing, the moochers and the looters are attempting to bankrupt the Palin family with needless litigation costs. She has been cleared of all, but she has to pay her bills -- and unlike the Democrats, we don't rob the public treasury. We guard it. Democrats, OTOH, build John Murtha airports to fly him back and forth to Washington.
Help Palin pay off the legal debt incurred by the harassment and attrition of the dangerous party.
As I announced last week on the Tammy Bruce Show, Conservatives4Palin is sponsoring a Webathon to retire the legal debt that Governor Palin amassed while defending herself from frivolous and politically motivated ethics complaints.
To date, all fourteen of these complaints have been dismissed, but in the process of defending herself, Governor Palin amassed over $500,000 in legal debt.
The Alaska Fund Trust is the official Palin legal defense fund. There was limited media attention given to the AFT when it was launched. The attention has tapered off, but Governor Palin's legal debt is still there and is still accumulating as her enemies have regrouped and are looking for new ways to hit her with more frivolous complaints.
The AFT needs our help.
What use is a grassroots movement if we can't take a stand and help Governor Palin when she needs us the most?
Conservatives4Palin will sponsor a Webathon from June 15 – 22, 2009, and we encourage all of you to join us and be an active part.
Here’s how it works...
We created the following “Webathon Banner” which we would like people to post prominently on their websites throughout the week:
Notice the Banner’s four simple instructions.
We are asking people to donate to the AFT and then email us to tell us how much they gave.
We will update the Banner daily to reflect the new numbers raised.
Alongside the Webathon Banner, we would like people to post this video announcing the Webathon:
The systematic leftist smear campaign of Republican leaders is criminal and slanderous. And yet everyone on the right puts up with it in the spirit of what? - free speech? Vile pornographic slander is what it is.
They take our finest people and attempt to destroy them. IT HAS TO STOP. Absent of morality, we must live in a culture where stupidity, anti-Americanism, promiscuity, racism, betrayal, ridicule is heralded. Hollywood personalities, "cultural icons" are in and out of drug addiction centers and applauded for their courage. Music "icons" spew racist bile, degrade women, and denounce America. Debased Democrats defraud the people, perpetrate voter fraud, pay for play, disabuse voters and pat each other on the back - job well done!
They rob, cheat, steal and usurp our Constitution. Democrats with refrigerators full of cash get off scot-free. Presidential candidates cheat on their cancer stricken wives and father children out of wedlock, and the media ignores it while the left yawns. The engineers of the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac meltdown not only walk away but now oversee the subsequent "solution" - the greatest theft (and generational theft) of the American treasury in world history. Democrat leaders run gay prostitution rings out of their apartments and if we don't like it - we are homophobic.
The leftwing media - now indistinguishable from the Democrat party - call evil good and good evil. They bow to an unfit, unqualified, America hater in the White House - and vilify anyone who points out that the emperor has no clothes.
No one, much less a President of the United States, who is not a Moslem would deeply bow to a Saudi Wahhabi tyrant in an act of utter submission.
This is the most disgraceful act of any president in American history.Wahhabism is the most evil religion on earth, a religion of hate which the Saudi king spends billions promoting around the world.To bow to its principal proponent is submission to evil, an announcement of one's true beliefs.
No patriotic American can ever again, upon seeing this picture and understanding its meaning, consider this man to be the legitimate president of his country.
And the media never reported on it.
No one has suffered the libelous slings and arrows more than Sarah Palin. Simply because she represents greatness. Yes, greatness. The better the person, the more debased and vile the attacks. Palin represents the right's best hope. This is hatred of the good for being good. Smart, hardworking, accomplished, clear, rational - every attribute the leftopaths lack. She came up the hard way, married a delicious guy she is crazy about (and he her), and has a wonderful family. And this is what riles the left. They hate normal. Despise it - like Dracula hates the silver cross. Her daughter has suffered unmercifully all because she didn't get an abortion - that's what it's all about. The leftopaths are giving our five year olds sex ed in school, handing out condoms in the hundreds of thousands, and offering abortion without parental consent to underage girls, but Bristol Palin is a bad girl.
The Alinksy inspired leftists need to destroy our most effective leaders. Palin is presidential and I would support her candidacy in a heartbeat in 2012. No RINOs for me - not this time. Any future leader - Palin, Bobby Jindal, Allen West, Michele Bachmann, will be crucified in the press.
Basta! Enough is enough. We must stand up and fight, aggressively.
Regular readers here know that we frequently disagree with the slanted journalism at the Anchorage Daily News. The bias appears not only on their editorial page (where even the two "conservative" voices, Dan Fagan and Paul Jenkins, are virulent over-the-top Palin-bashers) but in their news articles. We have no problem calling them out on that regularly, or pointing out such stupidity as linking to Trig Truth blogs, or investigating Trig Palin's parentage themselves.
Obama1Fan wrote on 04/03/2009 05:19:44 PM: Talk about WHITE TRASH.....LOL.
Yosarian wrote on 04/03/2009 05:35:15 PM: Oh this is hilarious. Maybe Levi's mom could help her out, he he.
BunkerBuster wrote on 04/03/2009 05:47:47 PM: The Palin's are a joke a minute. Bristol already has a new boyfriend too. The Palins = The Beverly Hillbillies.
CrabbyPatty wrote on 04/03/2009 07:22:15 PM: Goodness - does this mean that Palin is pallin' around with criminals? So, is the new Fox Reality Show going to be called "Palin Family Values"?
ajkrueger wrote on 04/03/2009 07:27:07 PM: Probably needed some things for the trailer! You betcha!
martha12 wrote on 04/03/2009 07:27:36 PM: Palins are a family of grifters!
Lelbo wrote on 04/03/2009 07:53:56 PM: Yesterday Brystals baby's father admitted to Tyra Banks that Palin permitted two minors to stay in the same bedroom and breed. Did these underage sexual romps occur in the govenors mansion, or in Wasilla where she charged the state a perdiem for this "act of abstanence"
SissyHankshaw wrote on 04/03/2009 08:12:12 PM: Ennealogic wrote: "And the reason for the theft ... one might infer that Todd's sister-in-law has a habit that needs supporting? Maybe?"
Ha! No doubt. I would imagine that ANYONE who found themselves married into that dysfunctional family would need a little pharmaceutical help to get them through the day! I rule Not guilty by reason of (imposed) insanity!
pmalaska wrote on 04/03/2009 08:46:14 PM: The Palins really are the modern version of Beverly Hillbillies. Trailor courts, drug dealing relatives, child pregnancy and drug busts, and now petty burglaries.
Ninette wrote on 04/03/2009 09:01:46 PM: ooooooooooweeeeeee! Cue the banjo song from Deliverance.
Ninette wrote on 04/03/2009 09:09:45 PM: Or, at what point will the state come in and take those kids away from such a dysfunctional environment where these kids are obviously neglegted by a dad who tinkers and a mom who is more interested in her own ambition?
ikeyboy wrote on 04/04/2009 10:36:13 AM: Yep, them Palin hillbillies are at it again. Every day is another story!
Alaskan4Ever wrote on 04/04/2009 01:50:58 PM: The Palin Family is an embarrassment to Alaska and Alaskans. GO AWAY SARAH! And take your crazy family with you!
This kind of behavior even spilled over into an article about the economic stimulus:
Doggonit wrote on 04/03/2009 10:18:57 PM: How is allowing your young teen daughter's boyfriend to share her bedroom with her, practicing abstinence?
blueeyedgurly wrote on 04/03/2009 11:29:16 PM: Shes listening but wont do anything. She could care less about Alaskas kids. She cant even take care of her own. High School drop outs
lived9lives wrote on 04/04/2009 11:28:14 AM: Oh, sorry about my previous post. I now realize Sarah was busy listening to Levi and Bristol practicing abstinence in the bedroom of HER home. (See Levi's commments @ bedroom) Guess that's why she couldn't read the Stimulus Package.
(I should add that all of the above comments were "recommended" by dozens of other adn.com readers.)
Now, my question to Mr. Dougherty and Ms. Wright would be: How do these types of comments lead to "a relatively free flow of ideas in hopes of stimulating a vigorous conversation about happenings in our state"?
Some might ask why I don't simply flag these abusive comments via adn.com's built-in reporting features. The reason is that I can't - because I've been banned from their website. Shortly after the new comments policy was announced, I began flagging comments that, in my opinion, violated the guidelines. Within a matter of couple of days, the ADN mods banned me.
(I should note that that adn.com uses a particularly weaselly method of banning commenters. There is no notification, and to all appearances it seems that you can post comments as normal. However, the comments posted are invisible to all but the banned user. If you're wondering if you've been banned, log in to ADN and post a test comment. Then log out and refresh the page. If your comment isn't visible anymore, then you've been banned.)
So my message to Mr. Dougherty, Ms. Wright, and the rest of the ADN staff is this:
Your promises to clean up the poison at adn.com have turned out to be completely insincere. Enough is enough. No more invective about white trash, hillbillies, methamphetamine or crack cocaine use, or trailer parks. No more snarky comments about the purported sex lives of the Governor or her children, such as statements that the Governor was listening to her daughter "breeding" in her own home. No more insults towards special needs children, or speculation about the parenting skills of the Governor and her husband. No more assertions that the Governor is not the mother of her youngest child. These claims all appear on your website on a regular basis and are deeply offensive to all decent people.
Liberals understand protest and invective. When they're angry at you, they might write nasty letters or show up outside your offices with signs. Conservatives understand business and free enterprise, so we'll just target your Alaskan ad revenue.
Let me be clear about what we'll do. Every time one of the worst examples of these comments appears on adn.com, we won't flag it as offensive. We won't even contact you. Instead, we'll cache that webpage and make screen captures. Then we'll look at the Alaskan advertisers who have purchased space next to these vile comments, and pass the messages along to them with a query as to why they are financially supporting such toxic garbage.
Let's start with a few test cases, who I contacted today with the examples given above. I encourage our readers to do the same. We'll expand our database of advertisers as time goes on.
I encourage you to take this seriously. This blog may still be relatively small fry in the blogosphere, though we've quadrupled our readership over the last couple months to several thousand readers per day. If I can motivate only 1% of this blog's readership to get involved, I can put dozens of complaints per day into the inbox of an Anchorage realtor or car dealership. And I won't limit myself to the resources of this site - I'll drag in whatever allies I can, from Team SarahFree Republic. And there are plenty of those people willing to get involved. When you consider that Team Sarah has almost 70,000 members, or that Governor Palin's Facebook page has over half a million followers, you don't want to face the impact if even a tiny percentage of those people get irate with your advertising clients.
Your lawyers and advertising people can explain until they're blue in the face that, due to fine print in your user agreement, the ADN is not legally responsible for slanderous user comments. But you, I, and everyone else knows that you are MORALLY responsible, because this toxic content appears under the banner of the Anchorage Daily News, and right next to space paid for by your advertisers.
A couple of political realities that you should refresh your knowledge on -- despite 7 months of unending savage criticism in the national media, Governor Palin still enjoys the solid approval of over 60% of Alaskans. And even those who disapprove of her are unlikely to be sympathetic to the evil personal attacks that you host on your website. I'd ask you to look even deeper into the subset of Alaskan small business owners who give you the majority of your advertising revenue - do you think they lean more Republican or Democrat? And do you think they like the idea of funding these toxic comments?
Oh, and I forgot to mention - we'll also continually remind the nice folks at McClatchy Corporate of what's going on at your paper. I'm starting with these folks, but hopefully we can expand our mailing list to include others in your corporate hierarchy, especially members of the Board of Directors. And each message will prominently mention, and link, that Pat Dougherty and Julie Wright promised to clean up this problem, but that they still inexplicably allow hate speech to appear under the banner of a McClatchy publication, next to space paid for by McClatchy clients.
We're asking that the ADN follow one of the following options -- either go to a fully-moderated format to ensure that none of this stuff ever appears on your website, or, if you can't do that, follow the example of the Juneau Empire and eliminate reader comments altogether. After all, you already have another discussion forum for readers to exercise their free speech rights.
Mr. Dougherty and Ms. Wright, keep your promises and clean up your website.
This is our future -- mighty bright. This is our Margaret Thatcher (can you see the leftard lurkers groan? A figure like Palin is to the left what a silver cross is to a vampire).
After four years of an incompetent socialist, America will throw him the hell out with both hands and the pendulum will swing the other way. Think David Dinkins in NYC (a perfect example of a wildly unqualified failed affirmative action project).
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ANCHORAGE, AK [CHI] — Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin lit a candle in memory of the victims of the Mumbai attacks and the Schluchim, Rabbi Gaviel Noach and Rivka Holtzberg, at a public Chanukah celebration of Chabad in Alaska organized by the Rebbe’s Schluchem Rabbi Yosef and Esty Greenberg. More pictures in the Extended Article!
More than 600 people participated in the 18th annual Chanukah Arts Festival of Chabad in Alaska. The celebration was dedicated to adding light and good deeds of kindness as a response to the Mumbai attack. In addition to the Alaska tradition of lighting a giant ice Menorah for Chanukah; this year a “Cannorah,” a Menorah made of cans, was constructed by an Alaskan artist to be delivered to the needy as an expression of adding goodness and kindness to the world, which was lit by community supporters, David and Shani Green
Nidra Poller who has joined me in my Florida trek to convert the misled Jews on our Great Reverse Shlep has penned (and nailed it) oped on Palin. Fresh from Paris ...... an expat's perspective.
Northern Virginia, Southern Florida October 25-29, 2008
Nidra Poller
[original English version of an article published in Hebrew translation by Makor Rishon]
John McCain’s vice presidential pick was a stroke of strategic genius. The popular Alaska governor, Sarah Palin, looked like the queen that would trump Obama’s knight. More sex appeal than Barack and Michelle combined, more and cuter kids, more spring to her step, more charm and…real executive experience. A track record you could believe in because it is all up front, visible and documented. Obama was attracting swoons from the idol worshippers. Sarah Palin inspired whoops of joy. Go girl go!
Her presence on the ticket was a shot in the arm to McCain, who suddenly began to show his impish smile. Her grace offset the wooden gestures of the war hero and survivor of Vietcong prison camps whose sacrifice earned him no credit in the opposing camp or in the mainstream media, deeply settled in Obama’s pocket since day one of the Democrat primaries. But Sarah Barracuda (her nickname on the basketball court) and self-described hockey Mom announced from the get go that she was not afraid of the media.
Her boldness was like blood to a shark. The media moved in immediately and have been doing a hatchet job that would leave a lesser woman twice dead. Governor Palin is subjected to relentless scrutiny, mockery, sarcasm, and sleaze. It doesn’t faze her. She keeps on stumping, drawing huge enthusiastic crowds at Republican rallies. She conveys the campaign message with convincing candor. She makes TV appearances, including a triumph of good sportsmanship on the Saturday Night Live show, side by side with Tina Fey, the actress who imitates her on the political comedy show. She is interviewed by hostile journalists who frame their questions with the sole intention of showing her up. Palin keeps smiling. Her enemies take this as confirmation of her stupidity.
On the—rather broad—lunatic fringes of Democratic fans, the attacks on Sarah Palin have reached a new low in American politics…and in misogyny, including disgraceful t-shirts reduce her to her sexual organs “Sarah is a c___ .” A mockup of her baby was auctioned on e-bay as a “prop” and, most recently, she was hung in effigy from the eaves of a home in Californian as a Hallowe’en decoration. The first anti-Palin rumor went straight to the womb, with allegations that she was pretending to be the mother of the Down syndrome babe in arms who really belonged to her 17 year-old daughter Bristol. That gossip was rapidly replaced with a new scandal and much clucking over the discovery that the daughter is in fact pregnant, out of wedlock, and intending to marry the father of her child, 18 year-old Levi Johnston.
You would think the entire progressive camp had turned into 19th century Puritans. But no, silly, her sin was not in having sexual relations outside of marriage—everybody does that. Her sin was in not having an abortion. There was no further need to look at Governor Palin’s record as mayor of Wasilia and governor of Alaska. No need to look at McCain’s platform. All you had to do was look at the child-mother’s swelling belly to conclude that Governor Palin is opposed to birth control and abortion. In short, she’s a witch! If the girl had posed nude in a pornographic film or been caught driving while high on drugs it would not have provoked such outrage as her precocious maternity.
The fact that Barack Hussein Obama was born to an unwed seventeen and a half year-old mother was not considered proof of anything. The fact that his father already had a wife and two children in Kenya when he brought his seed to Ann Dunham caused no retroactive scandal. And the fact that if Ann had been as modern and enlightened as progressives require, she would have aborted, and there would be no Obama to worship and elect, seemed not to occur to anyone but me.
French media are more Obamophile and less fair and balanced than the worst of the US brand. The nominally conservative Figaro newspaper is just as one-sided as the leftwing Libération. One would think, from French election coverage, that the U.S. was already an African style dictatorship with one 90% sure-to-win candidate and a pygmy somewhere out in the bush lucky to stay alive before the victory of the President for Life is announced. McCain is virtually nonexistent…except to be panned. The top NY Times slur of the day is picked up and recycled a few days later in France, and so it was with the pro-life scandal of the Palin family. However, a few days into that story, unwed Justice Minister Rachida Dati announced that she is pregnant. I am ashamed to say that I have no inside information about the father of Dati’s child. It may be one of those well-disseminated French secrets that everyone who is anyone knows… for awhile people were saying the father is former Spanish president Aznar…they would make a handsome couple but the rumor has been denied… Nonetheless, no one suggested that the Justice Minister was a wimpess for not having an abortion. But then she is in her forties, so her pregnancy can fall into the trendy category.
On the Left, Sarah Palin is seen as an affront to feminism. On the Right she is held forth as a resounding denial of the doctrinaire ideology of a liberation movement that, we should remember, originated with closet lesbians like Kate Millett who rejected not only male domination but males, threw off not only the chains of uncontrolled fertility but maternity itself. As the movement broadened to include heterosexual women these harsh positions were tempered but, as we see from the hysterical reaction to Palin, it never disappeared. Women in their forties inherited freedoms seized by the bra burners and at the same time uncritically adopted the narrow definition of the Acceptably Liberated Woman. Palin doesn’t make the grade!
I have always said the greatness of the country is the common man. "The individual will save this nation". If history has talk us anything, its that the individual can change the course of human history. Despite Obama's and his cultists contempt, the very idea of America, the birth of this nation was the rights of the individual, not the collective, not the state -- it was ..... Joe.
Nidra gets it too. Although she is an expat living in Paris (fo decades now), she is distinctly American and love her very American perspective from a European perch.
Joe the Plumber, Sarah the Governor, and other common folk
Nidra Poller
October 19, 2008
The chance encounter between Barack Obama and a commoner—Joe the Plumber—not only exposed the Hope & Change candidate’s plan for redistribution of wealth, it also revealed his attitude toward the ordinary guys he has pledged to serve.
Leftists everywhere love the wretched of the earth…as long as the poor stay poor and the downtrodden downtrodden. As we see by Barack Obama’s reaction to the uppity Ohio plumber, the wretched are supposed to know their place. The Democratic candidate is splurging millions on ads to show how much he’ll do for the working man & woman but the sight of a real guy, who would like to make his way into a higher tax bracket without getting taxed back down to where he came from, threw him off balance. He blurted out his true intention of spreading the wealth around. More like spreading it thin, no?
Senator Obama lectured Joe on the spot, explaining (what do plumbers know?) that his success would be all the more acceptable if those coming up behind him could also succeed. Obama was too heady with ideology and ambition to understand that Joe is that guy coming up behind. Now Obama’s dissing him. “Who ever heard of a plumber that makes 250,000?” Obama’s minions are furious with Joe for tricking their idol into spilling his socialistical beans. They went and dug up the dirt on Joe. “His name is not really Joe,” they hissed. Voters beware: under an Obama administration first names will come first, middle names will stay in the middle, and last will not be least…
"And we've got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable," she told Gibson. Russia invaded Georgia after the ex-Soviet republic invaded the separatist region of South Ossetia.
Palin said she had insights into U.S. relations with Russia because "they're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska ... from an island in Alaska." (more here)
Van wrote me that the Russian long-range Bear recon and bombers would soon be back. Palin's remarks about these flights were ridiculed in the press. Well, here they come and they are armed now. He predicts they will show up in Cuba. They have already flown to Venezuela.
DEBKAfile's military sources report that starting Monday, Tu-160 Blackjack and Tu-95 MS Bear-H strategic bombers will fly missions carrying the maximum combat payload and firing all cruise missiles aboard over sub-Arctic Russia and Belarus, close to Alaska. Moscow is claiming to 18 percent of the oil-rich Arctic's territory.
Palin comes out swinging and starts telling the folks what's at stake here. Why McCain is so damn polite when the very country is at stake confounds me. These are dangerous people and we need a leader, unafraid of the media, unafraid of the leftwing bullies -- we are counting on you McCain and you are failing us.
Palin OTOH is opening up and telling folks what we on the blogs have been reporting for over a year now - Obama's nefarious radical alliances. The media is having a two year old temper tantrum but even the deeply leftarded Rolling Stone agrees. This from February 2007 - thanks to Joe
In the tank for Obama early and often, Rolling Stone was enthralled back then at the thought of Obama, with "as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from," (p.3) becoming a force for change on the national stage. The reference is to Wright, rather than to Ayers, but the politics are ultimately the same. I bring this up not because the article sheds any new light on Obama, but rather because of its tone. Obama's radicalism was a selling point with which leftist journals like RS were trumpeting just last year and attempting to bury now.
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. -Republican vice presidential candidate on Saturday accused Democrat Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists" because of an association with a former '60s radical, stepping up an effort to portray Obama as unacceptable to American voters.
Palin's reference was to Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the group the Weather Underground. Its members took credit for bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol, during the Vietnam War era. Obama, who was a child when the group was active, has denounced Ayers' radical views and activities.
While it is known that Obama and Ayers live in the same Chicago neighborhood, served on a charity board together and had a fleeting political connection, it's a stretch of any reading of the public record to say the pair ever palled around. And it's simply wrong to suggest that they were associated while Ayers was committing terrorist acts.
This is mainsteam media injecting its narrative into a news story.
Falling behind Obama in polls, the Republican campaign plans to make attacks on Obama's character a centerpiece of candidate John McCain's message in the final weeks of the presidential race. Coming late in the campaign, Palin's remark could be particularly incendiary, however, and could knock Obama off his focus on the troubled economy.
Incendiary and true.
Palin told a group of donors at a private airport, "Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." She also said, "This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America."
That's my take. She was herself. And she's wonderful. Smart, authentic. I dug when she chided that old dinosaur. I wish she had gone more on the attack more particularly when Biden was blaming Bush/ McCain for the financial meltdown. It was the poisonous fruit of cancerous Democrat government intervention.She missed opportunities to go for the jugular but her performance was exceptional. She seemed perfectly comfortable. She got her shots in.
Biden said, we will end this war.
Palin: “Your plan is a white flag of surrender.”
Calling him on redistribution of wealth. “You said paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle-class, where I’m from, that’s not patriotic. You’re the problem.”
She made no mistakes. O'Biden was wrong at least 10 times (Karl Rove just said Biden was absolutely wrong ten times, arguably wrong another six)
She was engaging, warm charming. She feels like family, so I am kvelling :) He was old, tired robotic .............
Check out this shot under the headline Gov. Sarah Palin. When can we expect Obama dick shots? Hillary thigh shots? (perhaps not, they probably didn't want to scare the children.)
Republican White House hopeful John McCain(L) often seems relegated to the background at campaign rallies, where his running mate Sarah Palin(R) generates an electric reception from party faithful.
THE VILLAGES -- Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin told wildly cheering, flag-waving, chanting supporters that John McCain is "the only great man in this race" and promised Sunday he will fix the nation's economy if voters give the GOP four more years in the White House.
Women United has extended an invitation Governor Sarah Palin, among others, to address a press conference and rally to "Stop Ahmadinejad", taking place in front of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City on Thursday, September 25th protesting a meeting being held at the hotel between Iran's President Ahmadinejad and various organizations wishing to open up with him a dialogue and who appear thereby to be providing tacit legitimacy to the Iranian president's policies.
The crazy thing is the mainstream media keeps excusing this crime by injecting this canard -- perhaps she was using her private email for government business (which she didn't). Whether she did or she didn't is irrelevant. Laws were broken here. The motivation for the crime is not the issue, But it seems if the left deems the motive as legit then any sociopathic leftard will be excused their crime. The Left's propaganda machine is going full speed.
The Secret Service contacted The Associated Press on Wednesday and asked for copies of the leaked e-mails, which circulated widely on the Internet. The AP did not comply.(more here - hat tip Van)
This afternoon, in a thread that was later deleted, an individual claiming to be the original poster gave his account of what happened. I’ve attached screencaps. Here’s the text. The original poster used the name “rubico.” The linked email address for the poster was rubico10@yahoo.com.This is what rubico said:
rubico 09/17/08(Wed)12:57:22 No.85782652
Hello, /b/ as many of you might already know, last night sarah palin’s yahoo was “hacked” and caps were posted on /b/, i am the lurker who did it, and i would like to tell the story.
In the past couple days news had come to light about palin using a yahoo mail account, it was in news stories and such, a thread was started full of newfags trying to do something that would not get this off the ground, for the next 2 hours the acct was locked from password recovery presumably from all this bullshit spamming.
after the password recovery was reenabled, it took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)
the second was somewhat harder, the question was “where did you meet your spouse?” did some research, and apparently she had eloped with mister palin after college, if youll look on some of the screenshits that I took and other fellow anon have so graciously put on photobucket you will see the google search for “palin eloped” or some such in one of the tabs.
I found out later though more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on “Wasilla high” I promptly changed the password to popcorn and took a cold shower…
>> rubico 09/17/08(Wed)12:58:04 No.85782727
this is all verifiable if some anal /b/tard wants to think Im a troll, and there isn’t any hard proof to the contrary, but anyone who had followed the thread from the beginning to the 404 will know I probably am not, the picture I posted this topic with is the same one as the original thread.
I read though the emails… ALL OF THEM… before I posted, and what I concluded was anticlimactic, there was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped, all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor…. And pictures of her family
I then started a topic on /b/, peeps asked for pics or gtfo and I obliged, then it started to get big
Earlier it was just some prank to me, I really wanted to get something incriminating which I was sure there would be, just like all of you anon out there that you think there was some missed opportunity of glory, well there WAS NOTHING, I read everything, every little blackberry confirmation… all the pictures, and there was nothing, and it finally set in, THIS internet was serious business, yes I was behind a proxy, only one, if this shit ever got to the FBI I was fucked, I panicked, i still wanted the stuff out there but I didn’t know how to rapidshit all that stuff, so I posted the pass on /b/, and then promptly deleted everything, and unplugged my internet and just sat there in a comatose state
Then the white knight fucker came along, and did it in for everyone, I trusted /b/ with that email password, I had gotten done what I could do well, then passed the torch , all to be let down by the douchebaggery, good job /b/, this is why we cant have nice things
The “white knight fucker” was the /b/tard who thought that going through Sarah Palin’s email wasn’t cool. He logged in, changed the password, and sent an email to a friend of Palin’s warning her and letting her know the new password. Unfortunately, he then posted a screenshot of this email to let the other /b/tards know their fun was over. He failed to blank the password, and they all tried to log in and change the password — which tripped the automated Yahoo! freeze. Since then, the account has been deleted. “Rapidshit” refers to rapidshare.com — i.e., rubico wanted to download the emails, put them into one file, and put that file up on rapidshare for /b/tards and the world at large to download. But he panicked, or didn’t know how to download the emails, and so pawned that task off on Anonymous, which he didn’t realize wasn’t monolithic and in his favor.
Does this mean that gone are the excuses being trotted out by the mainstream press — and those on the left side of the blogosphere — for running with this pilfered private info? “Clerical stuff” justifies this breach of privacy, and yet these are the same fucks who’ve spent years screeching about data mining communication traffic patterns for terrorists with one point outside the US?
An Instructive Candidacy: What Sarah Palin taught us about ourselves. Victor Davis Hanson, NRO.com Soon this depressing campaign will be over, and we can reflect on what we learned from our two-month introduction to Sarah Palin.
Clearly, it is more than we would have ever wished to know about ourselves.
First, there turns out to be no standard of objectivity in contemporary journalism. Palin’s career as a city councilwoman, mayor, and governor of Alaska was never seen as comparable to, or — indeed, in terms of executive experience — more extensive than, Barack Obama’s own legislative background in Illinois and Washington. Somehow we forgot that a mother of five taking on the Alaskan oil industry and the entrenched male hierarchy was somewhat more challenging than Barack Obama navigating the sympathetic left-wing identity politics of Chicago.
So we seem to have forgotten that the standards of censure of her vice-presidential candidacy were not applied equally to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. The media at times seems unaware of this embarrassment, namely that their condemnation of Sarah Palin as inexperienced equally might apply to Barack Obama — and to such a degree that by default we were offered the lame apology (reiterated by Colin Powell himself) that Obama’s current impressive campaigning, not his meager political accomplishments, was already an indication of a successful tenure as president. The result is that we now know more about the Palin pregnancies — both of mother and daughter — that we do the relationships of Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, and Father Pfleger with our possible next president.
Indeed, the media itself — in private, I think — would admit that while have learned almost everything about Tasergate and the Bridge to Nowhere, we assume that at some future date a publicity-starved, megalomaniac Rev. Wright will soon offer his post-election memoirs, detailing just how close he and a President Obama were. Or we will learn Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, as long-time friends, in fact, did communicate via phone and e-mail well after Ayers had told the world, about the time of 9/11, that he, like our present-terrorist enemies, likewise wished he had engaged in more bombing attacks against the United States government. And the media never wondered whether a Palin’s falling out with those who ran Alaska might have been more of a touchstone to character than Obama’s own falling in with those who ran Chicago.
While Gov. Palin’s frequent college transfers and Idaho degree are an item of snickering among pundits, none of them can claim to care much about Barack Obama’s own undergraduate career. To suggest that he release his undergraduate transcript is near blasphemy; to scribble that Sarah Palin’s Down Syndrome child was not her own is journalism as we now know it. To care that Joe Biden is vain, with bleached teeth, the apparent recipient of some sort of strange facial tightening tonic, and hair plugs is deservedly mean and petty; to sneer that the Alaskan mom of five bought a new wardrobe to run for Vice President is, of course, vital proof for the American voter of her vanity and shallowness.
Second, there does not seem to be much left of feminism any more. Of course, feminists once gave liberal pro-choice Bill Clinton a pass for his serial womanizing of vulnerable subordinates, and Oval Office antics with a young female intern. But they gave the game away entirely when they went after Gov. Palin for her looks, accent, pregnancies, and religion, culminating in assessments of her from being no real woman at all to an ingrate — piggy-backing on the pioneer work of self-acclaimed mavericks like themselves.
Feminism, it turns out, is no longer about equal opportunity and equal compensation, but, in fact, little more than a strain of contemporary elitist identity politics, and support for unquestioned abortion. Had Gov. Sarah Palin just been a mother of a single child at Vassar rather than of five in Alaska, married to a novelist rather than a snow-machiner, an advocate of pro-choice, who shot pictures of Alaskan ferns rather than shot moose — feminists would have hailed her as a principled kindred soul, and trumpeted her struggles against Alaskan male grandees.
So there was something creepy about droves of irate women, in lock-step blasting Sarah Palin from the corridors of New York and Washington, when most of them were the recipients of the traditional spoils of either family connections, inherited money, or the advantages that accrue from insider power marriages. Indeed, very few of Palin’s critics on their own could have emerged from a small-town in Alaska, with an intact marriage and five children, to run the state of Alaska.
We have come to understand that — for a TV anchorwoman, op-ed columnist, or professor — it would be a nightmare to birth a Down Syndrome child in her mid-forties, or to have had her pregnant unwed teen actually deliver her baby. In the world outside Sarah Palin’s Wasilla, these are career-ending blunders that abort the next job promotion or book tour— or the future career of a prepped young daughter on her way to the Ivy League.
Third, from the match-up of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, we discovered that our media does not know anything about the nature of wisdom — how it is found or how it is to be adjudicated. For the last eight weeks, Palin has been demonized as a dunce because she did not, in the fashion of the class toady with his hand constantly up in the first row, impress in flash-card recall, the glasses-on-his-nose Charlie Gibson, or clinched-toothed Katie Couric.
Meanwhile Joe Biden has just been Ol’ Joe Biden — which means not that he can get away with the occasional gaffe, but that can say things so outrageous, so silly, and so empty that, had they come out of the mouth of Sarah Palin, she would have long ago been forced to have stepped aside from the ticket.
Factual knowledge? Biden, in the midst of a financial meltdown on Wall Street, apparently thinks that the last time it happened in 1929, we heard FDR rally us on television. And such made-up nonsense came in the form, as many of Biden’s gaffes do, of a rebuke to the supposedly obtuse George W. Bush.
Sobriety? Biden now admits that dangerous powers abroad will immediately test a President Obama. He warns that the results of such a crisis will be very disappointing to the American electorate, and thus Team Obama/Biden will need loyal supporters to rally as their polls sink. Yet remember that Biden himself has been a fierce and opportunistic critic of Bush, who despite a frenzy of congressional demagoguery, initiated the successful surge and ignored the very polls that the for-the-war/against-the-war Biden so carefully tracked. More importantly, if an Ahmadinejad, Chavez, or Putin ever had any doubts about carving out new spheres of uncontested influence, they may entertain very few now.
Veracity? If one were to think that Biden’s past brushes with plagiarism, inflated bios, and falsehood were exceptional rather than characteristic, the last two months confirmed otherwise. For all the false recall, it is hard to remember anything he said in his Palin debate that was true, whether describing the status of Hezbollah in Lebanon or his own past remarks about the wisdom of burning coal.
Silliness? Imagine the following outbursts, mutatis mutandis, from the mouth of a Sarah Palin — “John McAmerica,” “a Palin-McCain administration,” “Senator George Obama,” “Congressman Joe Biden,” who is both “good looking,” and “drop-dead gorgeous.” Or “I guarantee you, John McCain ain’t taking my shotguns. . . . If he tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem. I like that little over and under, you know? I’m not bad with it. So give me a break.”
Check out this shot under the headline Gov. Sarah Palin. When can we expect Obama crotch shots? Hillary thigh shots? (perhaps not, they probably didn't want to scare the children.)
Republican White House hopeful John McCain(L) often seems relegated to the background at campaign rallies, where his running mate Sarah Palin(R) generates an electric reception from party faithful.
Examining the New York Times' assessment of Palin’s years in state government — John Podhoretz accurately calls it a “notebook dump” — reveals that the Washington Post actually had the fairer profile of the Alaska governor yesterday.
Ed Morrissey argues that Franci Havemeister’s appointment to the State Division of Agriculture may not be the ipso-facto disastrous cronyism that the Times presumes it to be. It’s interesting that the Times doesn’t spotlight any decision Havemeister has made to argue the appointee is unqualified; they seem to presume that because she and Palin went to high school together, it had to be cronyism.
Similarly, we’re told, “When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.”
Were these good projects that were left unfunded? Local pork and wastes of taxpayer dollars? The Times never even bothers to give us details. It's just presumed that by meeting with her budget director and her husband, she must have used the wrong decision-making process.
We're told - source unclear - about Palin's assistant calling up a blogger who criticized the governor and said, "You should be ashamed! Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!"
If every reporter had a dime for every call of complaint they got from a lawmaker, journalism would be a much higher-paid profession. But I suppose we're supposed to treat this as a sign that Palin wants to rescind the First Amendment or something.
"But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image."
Really? That carefully crafted public image is "a pit bull with lipstick." We're supposed to be surprised that she attacks her critics?
We're told, of Palin's administration, "Their secrecy is off the charts."
I can listen to that argument. But recall that the public cannot get access to paperwork related to grants to distributed by then-state-legislator Barack Obama (records from 1997 to 2000 aren't available); his state legislative office records (which he says may have been thrown out); he refuses to release a specific list of law clients, instead giving a list of all of his firm's clients, numbering several hundred each year; he won't release his application to the state bar (where critics wonder if he lied in responding to questions about parking tickets and past drug use); he’s never released any legal or billing records to verify that he only did a few hours of work for a nonprofit tied to convicted donor Rezko; and he's never released any medical records, just a one-page letter from his doctor. Then there was the effort against Stanley Kurtz for his effort to examine documents relating to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, where William Ayers hired Obama to be board chairman. Oh, and Biden has released his earmark requests for one year out of his 36 in the Senate.
If the Times were running front-page stories on any of that, then scrutinizing the Palin administration's secrecy surrounding e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears would seem more justified.
Maybe my favorite sentence in this piece: “Careers were turned upside down.” In late 1994, I remember reading a feature story about the Democratic congressional staffers who faced unemployment with the election results - a piece dripping with pathos and sympathy. It's easy to feel bad for those folks - losing a job is always a miserable experience — but it's not like those staffers had a birthright to those jobs. If the preceding Wasilla Museum Director, John Cooper, was doing a fantastic job and was replaced by an incompetent, it's worth noting. But disruption to Cooper's career trajectory cannot rank high on the list of priorities of the voters, or of readers of the New York Times.
The story notes, in looking into the library controversy:
“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.”
How this anecdote ties to Palin isn't really clear. But it helps make the town look like a bunch of Philistine vandals, so I guess it's okay.
Deep into the story, the Times reporters note one of the highlights of Palin career, her resignation from a state board for failing to discipline a state Republican leader for conducting party business on state time and favoring regulated companies when the governor who appointed her failed to act on her complaints. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the Times loves whistleblowers exposing corruption, in this case, a Republican who was abusing his office to help big businesses. Only now does this seem like a minor detail to stick in the 50th paragraph.
In the 68th paragraph, the Times feels it is time to mention her 80 percent approval rating.
By the end, the piece degenerates into piling on, quoting staffers' e-mails and attributing rather routine staffer behavior:
Like Mr. Bailey, she is an effusive cheerleader for her boss.
“YOU ARE SO AWESOME!” Ms. Frye typed in an e-mail message to Ms. Palin in March...
The administration’s e-mail correspondence reveals a siege-like atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes.
As opposed to all of those staffers who don't keep score, who cheer their enemies and don't gloat to each other over successes.
If someone were to go through the e-mails of New York Times reporters, would we ever see an ALL CAPS congratulatory message?
HipHop Republican has this mindblowing attack on Palin over at the Sun Times. If Palin has done nothing else, she has ripped the mask off the feminists. The crazy thing is, when you get right down to it, they despise women and our natural inclinations, desires and tendencies.
"Palin should be laughingstock to all feminists" is the title of Mary Mitchell's column in today's Chicago Sun-Times. In that calm, detached tone readers have come to expect, Mitchell begins: Sarah Palin makes me sick. I hate that she was able to steal Barack Obama's mojo just by showing up wearing rimless glasses and a skirt.
~What's funny is, if she stole his mojo, just by wearing rimless classes and a skirt, he must not have had much in the first place . Anyway there is a new groupformed formed by women all over this nation supporting Sarah Palin.
Evidence Gibson Was Prejudiced Against Palin: Comparison of Palin and Obama Interviews
I compared Charles Gibson’s interview of Palin with his interview of Obama and there is much evidence that Gibson was prejudiced against Palin. He interviewed Obama right after he became the presumptive presidential nominee and he interviewed Palin shortly after she became the vice presidential nominee. So the situation of the interviews is similar. And because the situation of the interviews is similar Gibson’s extreme prejudice against Palin is very obvious.
For example, Gibson asked Obama a lot of questions focused on the positive aspects of Obama being a champion and breaking a glass ceiling for African Americans. Yet he didn’t ask Palin about her potential of breaking the infamous glass ceiling and the benefits that would create for women who are a much larger percentage of the U.S. population than African Americans.
Furthermore, Gibson often questioned Palin’s ability to lead, but he never questioned Obama’s ability to lead. This is outrageous because Palin has more political executive experience than Obama and far more political accomplishments. Another reason why it was prejudiced for Gibson to question Palin’s ability to lead and not Obama’s ability to lead is that Palin is seeking the much less powerful job of VP. And to add insult to injury Gibson even asked Palin if it was conceited of her to accept the vice presidential nomination, yet he did not insult Obama with that question even though Obama is applying for a much more powerful job.
Also Gibson maintained an almost constant sour face when interviewing Palin and his tone of voice seemed to imply that he was disappointed in her. I haven’t watched the entire Obama interview but the part I watched showed Gibson with a pleased expression on his face and the transcript shows that there was frequent laughter during his interview with Obama.
Even the camera angle was designed to be prejudiced against Palin. She is filmed from the side and slightly with her back to the camera. Although there are close ups of her face the long shot shows her back to the camera. It seems filming her with her back to the camera was meant to make her appear less likeable. In contrast, the film crew placed the long shot camera facing Obama so at all times when he is speaking the camera looks him in the face rather than looking at his back.
And Obama was asked much easier questions mostly about feelings about winning, breaking the glass ceiling and 2008 campaign decisions. In contrast, Palin was asked numerous specific policy and military strategy questions that required extensive knowledge about treaties, U.S. anti-terrorism strategy and world history. And Gibson misquoted Palin falsely stating that she said our troops were in an alleged holy war when what she said was that she prayed that we were doing God’s will. The following is a breakdown of the questions asked of the nominees:
How does it feel to break a glass ceiling? How does it feel to "win"? How does your family feel about your “winning” breaking a glass ceiling? Who will be your VP? Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP? Will you accept public finance? What issues is your campaign about? Will you visit Iraq? Will you debate McCain at a town hall? What did you think of your competitor’s [Clinton] speech?
Do you have enough qualifications for the job you’re seeking? Specifically have you visited foreign countries and met foreign leaders? Aren’t you conceited to be seeking this high level job? Questions about foreign policy -territorial integrity of Georgia -allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO -NATO treaty -Iranian nuclear threat -what to do if Israel attacks Iran -Al Qaeda motivations -the Bush Doctrine -attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan Is America fighting a holy war? [misquoted Palin]
There’s no doubt the Charles Gibson interviews showed extreme prejudice against Palin and extreme favoritism towards Obama. His manner towards Palin was much more negative. He asked her much more difficult questions and the questions were more adversarial. He constantly questioned her ability to lead but never questioned Obama’s ability to lead, all the more amazing considering that Palin was the only one with executive experience and the presidency is the highest level executive job in politics. The camera angles always focused on Obama’s face when he was talking making him the center of attention yet during Palin’s interview the angle often focused on her back apparently for the purpose of lessening the impact of her presence.
The questions, camera angle, and manner of the interviewer were designed in a way that favored Obama. Because Palin is a historic woman candidate and has been attacked with sexism it is reasonable to believe that ABC News is trying to harm her candidacy due to sexism. Of particular note is that Gibson asked Obama four questions about breaking the AA political glass ceiling but asked Palin zero questions about her breaking the women’s political glass ceiling. ABC’s prejudice against Palin was wrong and is blocking women’s progress towards equality. Palin is brave and strong and she, along with her supporters, will battle sexism and other forms of harmful prejudice in order to improve our world. This is a wake up call for ABC and the sexist news media to help them achieve their potential to be fair to candidates because fairness in the media is essential to a democracy. *I will send this to ABC at http://abcnews.go.com/Site/page?id=3068843.
PALIN: There in the state of Alaska, our international trade activities bring in many leaders of other countries.
GIBSON: And all governors deal with trade delegations.
PALIN: Right.
GIBSON: Who act at the behest of their governments.
PALIN: Right, right.
GIBSON: I’m talking about somebody who’s a head of state, who can negotiate for that country. Ever met one?
PALIN:
I have not and I think if you go back in history and if you ask that
question of many vice presidents, they may have the same answer that I
just gave you. But, Charlie, again, we’ve got to remember what the
desire is in this nation at this time. It is for no more politics as
usual and somebody’s big, fat resume maybe that shows decades and
decades in that Washington establishment, where, yes, they’ve had
opportunities to meet heads of state … these
last couple of weeks … it has been overwhelming to me that confirmation
of the message that Americans are getting sick and tired of that
self-dealing and kind of that closed door, good old boy network that
has been the Washington elite.
GIBSON: Let me ask you about some specific national security situations.
PALIN: Sure.
GIBSON: Let’s start, because we are near Russia, let’s start with Russia and Georgia.
The
administration has said we’ve got to maintain the territorial integrity
of Georgia. Do you believe the United States should try to restore
Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia?
PALIN:
First off, we’re going to continue good relations with Saakashvili
there. I was able to speak with him the other day and giving him my
commitment, as John McCain’s running mate, that we will be committed to
Georgia. And we’ve got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have
exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic
country, unprovoked, is unacceptable and we have to keep…
GIBSON: You believe unprovoked.
PALIN: I do believe unprovoked and we have got to keep our eyes on Russia, under the leadership there. I
think it was unfortunate. That manifestation that we saw with that
invasion of Georgia shows us some steps backwards that Russia has
recently taken away from the race toward a more democratic nation with
democratic ideals. That’s why we have to keep an eye on Russia.
And,
Charlie, you’re in Alaska. We have that very narrow maritime border
between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia. They
are our next door neighbors.We need to have a good relationship with
them. They’re very, very important to us and they are our next door
neighbor.
GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?
PALIN: They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.
GIBSON: What insight does that give you into what they’re doing in Georgia?
PALIN:
Well, I’m giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how
important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with
all of these countries, especially Russia. We will not repeat a Cold
War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also,
helping us to remind Russia that it’s in their benefit, also, a
mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.
Sarah Palin on Russia:
We
cannot repeat the Cold War. We are thankful that, under Reagan, we won
the Cold War, without a shot fired, also. We’ve learned lessons from
that in our relationship with Russia, previously the Soviet Union.
We
will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our
allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it’s in
their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to
be getting along.
GIBSON: Would you favor putting Georgia and Ukraine in NATO?
PALIN: Ukraine, definitely, yes. Yes, and Georgia.
GIBSON: Because Putin has said he would not tolerate NATO incursion into the Caucasus.
PALIN:
Well, you know, the Rose Revolution, the Orange Revolution, those
actions have showed us that those democratic nations, I believe,
deserve to be in NATO.
Putin thinks otherwise. Obviously, he thinks otherwise, but…
GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn’t we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?
PALIN:
Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is
if another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be
called upon and help.
But
NATO, I think, should include Ukraine, definitely, at this point and I
think that we need to — especially with new leadership coming in on
January 20, being sworn on, on either ticket, we have got to make sure
that we strengthen our allies, our ties with each one of those NATO
members.
We have got to make sure that that is the group that can be counted upon to defend one another in a very dangerous world today.
GIBSON:
And you think it would be worth it to the United States, Georgia is
worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to invade.
PALIN:
What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a
larger power is something for us to be vigilant against. We have got to
be cognizant of what the consequences are if a larger power is able to
take over smaller democratic countries.
And
we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the support, in this
case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is economic sanctions
perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to.
It
doesn’t have to lead to war and it doesn’t have to lead, as I said, to
a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again,
counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping
our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to
control much more than smaller democratic countries.
His
mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and
through Russia, that’s a dangerous position for our world to be in, if
we were to allow that to happen.
Sarah Palin on Iran and Israel:
GIBSON: Let me turn to Iran. Do you consider a nuclear Iran to be an existential threat to Israel?
PALIN:
I believe that under the leadership of Ahmadinejad, nuclear weapons in
the hands of his government are extremely dangerous to everyone on this
globe, yes.
GIBSON: So what should we do about a nuclear Iran? John
McCain said the only thing worse than a war with Iran would be a
nuclear Iran. John Abizaid said we may have to live with a nuclear
Iran. Who’s right?
PALIN:
No, no. I agree with John McCain that nuclear weapons in the hands of
those who would seek to destroy our allies, in this case, we’re talking
about Israel, we’re talking about Ahmadinejad’s comment about Israel
being the “stinking corpse, should be wiped off the face of the earth,”
that’s atrocious. That’s unacceptable.
GIBSON: So what do you do about a nuclear Iran?
PALIN:
We have got to make sure that these weapons of mass destruction, that
nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that
he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use
them. So we have got to put the pressure on Iran and we have got to count on our allies to help us, diplomatic pressure.
GIBSON:
But, Governor, we’ve threatened greater sanctions against Iran for a
long time. It hasn’t done any good. It hasn’t stemmed their nuclear
program.
PALIN:
We need to pursue those and we need to implement those. We cannot back
off. We cannot just concede that, oh, gee, maybe they’re going to have
nuclear weapons, what can we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do
not have to stand for that.
"Throughout her political career, she has pursued
vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line
between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public
records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local
officials."
UPDATE: Carolyn opined, "This
is - this is - ohmigod, this is like so shocking it totally eclipses
that story the Times also wrote - you know, the one about Obama not
firing corrupt slumlord Rezko but even moving into the mansion next
door to him. Yeah, the same story where the Times also reported on how
Obama received $110 million from unrepentent terrorist Ayers in 1995 to
raise student's test scores in Chicago - only for all that money to
disappear in just 5 years with not a damned bit of improvement on those
scores? Ahuh, and it also asked why Michelle's salary doubled after
her husband earmarked millions of dollars to the hospital she worked
for?
Oh, what - what - excuse me? You say the Times didn't investigate all
this about Obama? But - but - that can't be! I mean, if the Times can
take less than a week to dig up personal emails of an obscure governor
of a distant state up north, then why - a quarter century later - can
it still NOT dig up Obama's mysterious grades at Columbia? For God's
sake, Columbia is in the same city as the Times?
For more than five weeks during the brutally cold winter of 1997, tenants suffered without any heat
in a government-subsidized apartment building. The 31-unit building in
Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood had been “rehabbed” just four years
prior at taxpayer expense, no less.
How
cold was it? Temperatures routinely dipped around ten below zero. With
wind-chills factored in, the effective temperatures approached 30 below.
And the residents of the building had no heat for more than a month.
The
building’s owner — Rezmar Corporation — didn’t bother to turn on the
heat for weeks. In fact, it didn’t do so until it was sued.
And the Englewood building wasn’t the only one of Rezmar’s properties that had scores of code violations. At least a dozen times, Rezmar had to be sued in order to simply turn on the heat in its properties.
17
buildings ended up in foreclosure, 6 are boarded up, hundreds of
apartments are vacant and require repair… and taxpayers were stuck with
millions in unpaid loans.
All
of these buildings were in — or just blocks away — from a single state
senator’s district. A district belonging to a young, up-and-coming
politician named Barack Obama.
In
fact, during the brutal winter of 1997, even while Rezmar refused to
heat its Englewood apartments, it was donating $1,000 to state senator
Obama’s campaign fund.
During the winter or the scores of subsequent code violations, did state senator Obama ever lift a finger to protect his constituents from “predatory slumlords” like Rezmar?
The answer appears to be a resounding “No“. In 2007, Obama’s own campaign staff stated, “Senator Obama does not remember having conversations… about properties that [Rezmar] owned..”
The
shivering tenants in in and around the district were left defenseless.
Assailed on one side by predatory slumlords like Rezko, they were — for
all intents and purposes — left out in the cold by their state senator,
Barack Obama.
There’s
a simple reason Obama didn’t lift a finger to protest these horrific
violations. His political patron, Tony Rezko, was a driving force
behind the Rezmar schemes. And Rezko helped raise a quarter of a million dollars for Obama’s various campaigns.
While Obama didn’t expend an ounce of energy to protest Rezko’s outrageous violations, he did take time to write letters on behalf of Rezko in his efforts to secure an additional $14 million in taxpayer funds.
Sarah Palin .... an inspired choice, a choice Mistuh Change
should have made ... instead "the one" picked a retiring appeasing
dinosaur. What a tired old pic. I think Palin is a genius move. Come
on over PUMA's the water is just fine. (pic hat tip never forget)
She's a total mom (of five) - I love that!
It's bold, it's brash .....CHANGE indeed. I say Obama is toast.
My friend Irwin opined, "A lifetime member of the NRA, she enjoys hunting, fishing ..."
A woman with balls. That makes four on the ticket". I love Kathry Lopez's take -three words: "hot librarian look". And they look great together.
McCain's take:
Sarah Palin is a trailblazer and a
reformer. As the first female governor of Alaska, she challenged a
corrupt system and has been a tireless advocate for reform - passing a
landmark bill on ethics reform. She has taken on the old politics in
Alaska and reformed the state's energy industry. She rejects wasteful
pork barrel spending. She's fearless - exactly the type of leader I
want at my side and the type of leadership we will bring to Washington.
The conservatives love it!
The key article on Sarah Palin was written a year-and-a-half ago by Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard. It's called "The Most Popular Governor: Alaska's Sarah Palin is the GOP's Newest Star."
Her rise is a great (and rare) story of how adherence to
principle--especially to transparency and accountability in
government--can produce political success. And by the way, Palin is a
conservative who only last month vetoed 13 percent of the state's
proposed budget for capital projects. The cuts, the Anchorage
Daily News said, "may be the biggest single-year line-item veto total
in state history."As recently as last year, Palin (pronounced pale-in)
was a political outcast. She resigned in January 2004 as head of the
Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission after complaining to the
office of Governor Frank Murkowski and to state Attorney General Gregg
Renkes about ethical violations by another commissioner, Randy
Ruedrich, who was also Republican state chairman.State law barred Palin
from speaking."
Real Clear Politics endorsed Sarah Palin for V-P on June 4, 2008 in an article titled, "McCain Should Pick Sarah Palin for V-P"
Real Clear said of her:
Sarah Heath Palin is both the youngest and the first female governor in Alaska's relatively brief history as a state. She's also the most popular governor in America, with an approval rating that has bounced around 90 percent.This
is due partly to her personal qualities. When she was leading her
underdog Wasilla high school basketball team to the state championship
in 1982, her teammates called her "Sarah Barracuda" because of her fierce competitiveness.Two
years later, when she won the "Miss Wasilla" beauty pageant, she was
also voted "Miss Congeniality" by the other contestants.Sarah
Barracuda. Miss Congeniality. Fire and nice. A happily married mother
of five who is still drop dead gorgeous. And smart to boot.But it's
mostly because she's been a crackerjack governor, a strong fiscal
conservative and a ferocious fighter of corruption, especially in her
own party."
Sarah Palin's story? It may be the most remarkable in the
history of American politics. I look at her with admiration
approaching awe.
CONSERVATIVES HAIL MCCAIN VICE PRESIDENTIAL PICK
(Minneapolis, MN) - David Keene, Chairman of the American Conservative
Union, has issued the following statement on Republican Presidential
Candidate John McCain's pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his
running mate. "The selection of Governor Palin is great news for
conservatives, for the party and for the country. Her dedication to
principle, her courage both before and after her election as Governor
of Alaska and her personal qualities make her a perfect choice for Vice
President. I predict any conservatives who have been lukewarm thus far
in their support of the McCain candidacy will work their hearts out
between now and November for the McCain - Palin ticket."
Fred Thompson loves it:
Senator
Fred Thompson Praises Senator McCain’s Vice Presidential Pick
(Nashville) – U.S. Senator Fred Thompson issued the following statement:
"I am absolutely delighted by this selection. Once again, John
McCain has shown that he is an independent thinker who paints in bold
strokes. Sarah Palin is a conservative reformer with executive
experience who will bring a breath of fresh air to Washington. She will
be an ideal running mate for John McCain, and will make a major
contribution to our country's future."
Meanwhile the left is vomiting. Can you say grand mal seizure?
Replace Palin with Obama and you've got the case against Barack for
president, not understudy, president. heh
During the 9 a.m. EDT hour of “CNN Newsroom,” “American Morning” co-anchor
John Roberts gave an analysis of Governor Sarah Palin during discussion of
Senator John McCain's vice presidential choice. Roberts focused on Palin's lack
of experience, saying that a prerequisite for the vice presidency should be the
ability to step right into the office, especially because of McCain's age.
Roberts stated:
She's only been in office for a couple of years now, which really raises the
experience issue here.[...]
Now, she is a manager. She is the governor of a state. She does have
limited experience, though. She's also been the mayor for a city in Alaska. And
for a time she was the ethics chairman of the Alaska oil and gas conservation
commission. But that does not add up to broad experience, particularly the type
of broad experience you think should launch you to the national
level.
Of course, Senator Barack Obama, who is running for president of the United
States, has no executive experience and has only been in the U.S. Senate since
2005. But apparently, Roberts finds Palin to be too inexperienced and young to
be vice president.
Fausta adds, wow many days has Obama shown up at the Senate floor in his entire carreer, 176 or so?
Sarah
Palin is an anomaly in American politics. It's not because she's a
woman, not because of her blue-collar background, and not because of
her ability to juggle the titles of "governor" and "committed mother of
five". Forget about all of that stuff for a moment; it's interesting,
but if Barack Obama has taught us anything, it's that a compelling
biography is not a qualification for leadership. Instead, Palin is
unique because she can claim one of the broadest bases of support of
any leader in our country. Other than the lunatic fringes of Alaska's
kleptocratic political establishment, nobody hates her. Most
politicians rise to power because they represent a certain wing of
their party, and even some of their own partisans detest them. Mike
Huckabee will never resonate with libertarian republicans, social
conservatives cannot support Rudy Giuliani, certain evangelicals will
always have a problem with Mitt Romney, and frankly I doubt that
hard-core conservatives will ever fully embrace John McCain. That
doesn't make them bad candidates; it just means that they face
significant opposition within the Republican Party. Sarah Palin does
not have that problem. I have been working to draft Gov. Palin as Vice
President since February of 2007, and I can recount first hand how she
has united divergent views among Republicans and is now even gaining
Democratic support. The key is that she offers a combination of
qualities that make her a hero to many, many different groups. For
instance, two of our strongest bases of support have been social
conservatives and libertarian republicans, who are normally at each
other's throats. However, she offered both groups something that they
desperately wanted without compromising any appeal to the other. The
SoCons loved her pro-life, pro-family, and pro-gun positions, while the
libertarians and fiscal conservatives cheered her on as she vetoed
hundreds of millions of dollars of wasteful government spending.
Getting those two groups to sing kum-ba-ya was enough of an
accomplishment, but now it appears that a third group has found what it
wants in Gov. Palin: McCainocrats.
For those Democrats who are considering abandoning the Obama ticket
(primarily disillusioned Clinton supporters), Palin represents the
final push into the Republican camp. Not only is she a woman (which,
like it or not, is an issue for some voters), but she also puts a
fresh, future-oriented face on the McCain campaign. By upending
Alaska's corrupt political class, Palin has actually produced the type
of change that Barack Obama can only talk about; and her collar is far
bluer than Joe Biden's ever was. Furthermore, she is arguably the only
candidate who has the necessary expertise to address the single most
pressing issue in this election: gas prices. As Governor of Alaska,
Chair of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (America's
largest interstate organization), and a former Chair of the Alaska Oil
and Gas Conservation Commission, Sarah Palin can run rings around
almost anyone when it comes to oil.
The last candidate to assemble such a broad coalition of support was a
gentleman by the name of Ronald Wilson Reagan. He not only won the
presidency in two successive landslides, but went on to become one of
the most beloved and effective presidents in recent history. Now, I
realize that it is somewhat presumptuous of me to make this comparison,
but I personally have no doubt that Sarah Palin has the capability to
become the next Reagan. In fact, the only real question that I have
heard is whether we should bring her to the forefront now as a VP
candidate or save her for later as a full-fledged presidential hopeful
in 2012. I personally choose the former, because the latter involves
the defeat of John McCain and the election of President Obama and Vice
President Biden. 2008 will be a crucial election year, with the winner
being handed the responsibility for the Iraq war, the gasoline crisis,
the Russo-Georgian conflict, and any number of other issues. The stakes
are simply too high to throw McCain under the bus and bide our time.
Likewise, Sen. McCain should realize that the stakes are too high for
him to select a VP candidate who simply "does no harm" rather than
pushing his ticket over the top.
There is one sure fire solution to this problem, one way to
guarantee a McCain surge, one way to put Obama on the defensive, and
one way to steamroll to victory in November. Her name is Sarah Palin
She is a real maverick in Alaska politics she accused two fellow
Republicans of corruption and when no one would listen she quit a prestigious
post on the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Eventually the two accused were
thrown out of office, enhancing her reputation in Alaskan politics to no end,
and eventually leading to her being elected Governor. So she's obviously no
nonsense. She's on the right side of all causes that are important to
conservatives, and she actually favors more drilling for oil and gas on Alaskan
property than does McCain. But will Hillary supporters vote McCain because
there's a woman on his ticket? Will other voters accept the idea of a
44-year-old Vice President with so little experience?
But
but they are supposed accept it in a President? I'd take an
"inexperienced" person with integrity and courage over an old beltway
whore any day.
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