Sarah Palin: Rein In The Rodeo Clowns

That means you, Sen. Reid
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From Gov. Palin via Twitter:

"We're $14,000,000,000,000+ in debt, yet rodeo clowns still want to fund Cowboy Poetry Party.That must be 1 helluvahigh natl priority shindig"
41 minutes ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®

- JP

Quote of the Day (August 21, 2010)

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Sherman Frederick at the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

"So, as summer breaks into fall, the Angle/Reid race shapes up to have President Barack Obama in Reid's corner and Sarah Palin in Angle's corner. In the political parlor game of who helps who the most, it's not even close. One Sarah Palin equals three Barack Obamas when it comes to energizing and connecting with the Nevada voters."

- JP

NY Mag: Harry Reid Agrees With Sarah Palin on Mosque

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Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who is in the fight of his political life in Nevada, has adopted Sarah Palin's position on the Ground Zero Mosque, becoming the highest-profile Democrat to call for mosque's planners to move it to some location further away from ground zero:

"The First Amendment protects freedom of religion," Reid's spokesman, Jim Manley, wrote in an e-mail today after Reid's Republican challenger, Sharron Angle, called on him to take a position. "Senator Reid respects that, but thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else." Reid's office did not elaborate on why Reid feels this way, or on how large the mosque-free (or, Islamic-community-center-free) zone surrounding ground zero should be.

Though Reid was more explicit, it's interesting to note that he doesn't necessarily break with President Obama with this statement — like Reid, Obama also supports the right for the Corboda Initiative to build an Islamic community center two blocks from ground zero, but he refuses to say whether he supports the "wisdom" of the project. And, in fact, Reid is taking the same position as Sarah Palin (as well as a majority of Americans, who oppose the mosque while admitting its legality).

- JP

The DC: Calling Obama agenda ‘backasswards,’ Palin defends Angle

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In a series of Sunday morning tweets, Sarah Palin called President Obama's agenda “backasswards,” slammed Senate Majority Reid Leader Harry Reid for not understanding that "The System is Going Bankrupt," and defended Reid's GOP challenger Sharron Angle from an attack made on the Nevada Republican by the president for Angle's position on Social Security. The former Alaska governor also endorsed a leading Nevada newspaper's editorial which was critical of the president.

The Daily Caller's Jon Ward reports:

“LasVegas RJ editorial recaps Obama lecture 2 Runnin’ Rebs,” Palin wrote to her 187,000 followers on Twitter Sunday morning, referring to the president’s speech in Las Vegas Thursday night and using the name of the University of Nevada Las Vegas’ mascot — the Running Rebels — to characterize to his audience. “He’s got most disconnected, backasswards plan ever imposed on the country we love,” Palin said of Obama. Palin was following up a tweet linking to a scathing editorial in the Review-Journal that blasted Obama for his criticism of Angle on Social Security Thursday evening at a fundraiser for Reid. The editorial also said Obama has offered no alternatives to fix the problem with entitlement programs that are on the path to insolvency and is running the economy into the ground with anti-business measures. Top White House spokesmen David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs were on the defensive during Sunday morning’s talk shows, following a week in which questions about whether Obama is anti-business hit the mainstream.

Though Gov. Palin did not endorse Angle in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate in Nevada, the first woman to be the vice presidential candidate on a GOP ticket came to the defense of one of her fellow "mama bears":

“Sharon Angle’s right,” Palin wrote, misspelling Angle’s first name, “New workers should get to invest some Social Security withholdings in their own savings accounts & Washington to pay promised benefits to older workers.”

Though Angle was criticized most loudly on Social Security by Obama Thursday at a fundraiser for Reid, Palin instead addressed her response to Reid, a Democrat and four-term senator.

“What part of ‘The System is Going Bankrupt’ don’t you understand, Mr. Reid?” Palin wrote.

Obama’s criticism of Angle Thursday had a decidedly derisive tone.

Memo to Jon Ward: You do realize that Twitter limits the length of each tweet to 144 characters, so the Twitterati frequently abbreviate -- yes, even people's names -- to avoid having their messages truncated?

Anyway, The DC's full story is here.

- JP

Andrew Malcolm: Now, it's Sarah Palin's turn to target Democrats

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After having been in the Democrats' cross hairs for the better part of 18 months, now it's Sarah Palin's turn to target them, though they're squealing about the return of the favor like stuck pigs. But Democrats have always been better at dishing trash talk out than taking it.

Saturday in Searchlight, Nevada, Sarah Palin will headline a second major Tea Party event (her keynote speech to the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville earlier this year was the first for the former GOP vice presidential candidate). The target of opportunity will be Senate majority leader Harry Reid and a Democrat Party which is sinking like the sun in the evening desert sky. Searchlight is his home town, but he won't be there. In his absence will be thousands of disaffected voters bent on ending four years of Democrat control of both houses of Congress.

LA Times blogmeister Andrew Malcolm says that although Gov. Palin will not please most Tea Party folks today by campaigning in Arizona for her former Republican ticket mate John McCain, her appearance at Saturday's Showdown in Searchlight may make up for it -- and then some:

Palin will seek to bolster McCain's conservative credentials at a Tucson rally today, a Phoenix fundraiser tonight at the same hotel where they conceded to the Democrat ticket in 2008, and another rally in Phoenix Saturday.

McCain's opponent, former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, paints himself as the true conservative and seeks to dismiss Palin's popular participation as "the very human impulse of gratitude" for plucking her from Alaska's relative political obscurity and dragging her down to a decisive national defeat. Which she's now turned into a bestseller, a newly-confirmed TV documentary series on the Learning Channel, a couple of million dollars and an active SARAHPAC.

Longer term, Palin is doing what any possible presidential candidate should do 32 months out: Hand out her precious personal campaign time and PAC money to potential allies for her own race should she decide to launch one about this time next year.

That's her much vaunted Common sense way.

Though Tea Partiers and McCain supporters may not see eye to eye on many issues, one thing they can most certainly agree upon is that Saturday in Searchlight is not too early to get Harry Reid's retirement party started.

- JP

Sarah Palin Was Right #23: Dan Calabrese on Death Panels

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Posting at The North Star National, Dan Calabrese says not only was Sarah Palin right about the death panels, but Harry Reid is attempting to make them permanent:

It’s no cause for celebration, and Sarah Palin’s not the type for schadenfreude, but she was right about the death panels. So right, in fact, that the death panels are receiving some very special and probably unconstitutional protection in the Senate health care bill.

The creation of the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board – the panel that decides who goes without coverage so costs can be cut – cannot be repealed, according to language Harry Reid has inserted into the bill, without a supermajority vote of two-thirds.

[...]

What Palin said all along was that government-run health care, especially established on the notion that it could somehow cut costs, would inevitably lead to rationing. And she was confident an administration in love with the idea of “experts” designing “systems” would put together some sort of panel to decide how to ration the coverage.

Enter the Independent Payment Advisory Board, so important that Harry Reid seeks to protect its existence forever by requiring a two-thirds supermajority to ever kill it.

The radical liberals in control of the federal government are doing all they can to make this a very scary Christmas and a bankrupt new year. Read the unabridged original Dan Calabrese post here.

- JP