NY Sun Editorial: The Palin Precedent

"If the joke is on anyone, it’s not Mrs. Palin."
*
The editors of The New York Sun question whether the media will follow the precedent it appears to have established with its Sarah Palin email fishing expedition:

The hunt for something to pin on Mrs. Palin seems to have descended into a kind of parody in which, if the joke is on anyone, it’s not Mrs. Palin.

The question is whether there is a precedent to be established. Are the other politicians going to release the emails from their times in public office?

[...]

Now it may yet be that the press will find something scandalous in the emails from Mrs. Palin’s tenure at Juneau — other than the impression that she was a hands-on chief executive who paid attention to the details of both policy and her political persona. It may be that the precedent the press will pursue is that our public figures will have to make available not only their official emails but their private ones, as well, particularly if they used private mail for public business. Or it may be that the press will have to look for consolation in the old saying that God doesn’t deduct from a man’s allotted span the time he has spent fishing.

[More]

Another fishing quote comes to mind, one from stand up comic Steven Wright:

"There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like an idiot."

h/t: JewsForSarah.com

- JP

Quote of the Day (April 24, 2011)

A raft of economists have concluded that Mrs. Palin’s early warning was right
*
The New York Sun:

“Disappointment in the Fed’s policies is being reported this morning at the top of page one of the New York Times... It’s a terrific story, and well-timed, given that on Wednesday Mr. Bernanke will break tradition and meet with the press. It is part of the Fed’s effort to get ahead of what is emerging as a public relations catastrophe, as gasoline is nearing six dollars a gallon at some pumps, the cost of groceries is skyrocketing, and the value of the dollars that Mr. Bernanke’s institution issues as Federal Reserve notes has collapsed to less than a 1,500th of an ounce of gold. Unemployment is still high. Shakespeare couldn’t come up with a better plot. But how in the world did Mrs. Palin, who is supposed to be so thick, manage to figure all this out so far ahead of the New York Times and all the economists it talked to?”

- JP

NY Sun: Sarah and Sarah

Her mantra of constitutional conservatism welcomes everyone
*
An excerpt from Sunday's editorial in The New York Sun

One of the things that Sarah Palin did on her stopover at Israel was announce that she was eager to return for a longer visit, and we found ourselves wondering whether she will eventually make a visit to the Machpelah. For the first body laid to rest there in the cave purchased by Abraham was that of Mrs. Palin’s namesake, Sarah, Abraham’s wife and the mother of Isaac. We have sometimes found ourselves wondering whether the affection Mrs. Palin exhibits in respect of Israel is related to the fact that the former governor — the Alert Alaskan is our favorite alliteration for her — is named after the first, the most beautiful, and the most prickly of the Jewish matriarchs.

We were put in mind of this not only by Mrs. Palin’s visit to Israel but also by the contretemps that followed the suggestion by a leading journalist in Washington, David Frum, that Mrs. Palin was alienating Jewish voters by failing to arrange her visit through a the Republican Jewish Coalition, of whose board Mr. Frum is a member. The RJC has been paving the way for one of the most important migrations of American Jews, from the Democratic Party to the party of Lincoln and Reagan. It’s sometimes lonely but always heroic work, and no doubt there were those in the RJC who wished they could have been the organizing party of Mrs. Palin’s first visit to the Jewish State.

The contretemps, however, was a matter of politics rather than principle, and how could it be otherwise? For on the substance Mrs. Palin has been a passionate supporter of Israel. This seems to be well-recognized by the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition Matthew Brooks, who made a point late last week of defending Mrs. Palin’s most recent critique of President Obama...

[More]

- JP

India visit offers Gov. Palin opportunity to draw contrast with Obama

"In India... Mrs. Palin is certain to be well received."
*
New York Sun contributing editor Pranay Gupte weighs in on Gov. Palin's keynote address scheduled for March 19 in India, saying her decision to accept the invitation to speak in New Delhi was a canny one, giving that the India Today conclave "arguably possesses the biggest private-sector megaphone in the world’s largest democracy":

Mrs. Palin’s choice is also shrewd because her visit to India will come barely three months after a celebrated one by President Obama. Her appearance is certain to elicit comparisons, however superficial. A presidential visit, replete with pomp and pageantry, is far more of a visual and verbal feast than that of a private citizen, even if she happens to have been an erstwhile governor of Alaska and a former running mate in an American presidential election.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Palin’s India journey is an important one. For one, Indians would like to hear a clearly defined sense of America’s political and economic trajectory. Mr. Obama’s message during his trip last November was replete with predictable bromides and the usual rhetoric of bilateral friendship.

[...]

But it is in India that Mrs. Palin is certain to be well received; there will be quite of bit of curiosity, too, since she will be a newcomer — although not a new face media-wise — for Indians. That has little to do with her controversial public persona. Rather, Indians have traditionally looked favorably at Republicans, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon, during whose presidency Washington openly sided with Pakistan as India assisted the former territory of East Pakistan to gain independence from Islamabad and establish itself as Bangladesh. Two years after George W. Bush retired from the White House, he’s still held in high regard in New Delhi on account of his unflinching support for the deal under which India has been allowed to buy equipment for its civilian nuclear program.

The other reason that Mrs. Palin will be warmly received is that Indians like women leaders. After all, the country’s most powerful politician is Sonia Gandhi, president of the Indian National Congress; the INC is the lead party in the coalition that rules India. It has often been said that Mrs. Gandhi, daughter-in-law of the assassinated prime inister, Indira Gandhi, is the person that the current prime minister, Manmohan Singh, consults on every major decision. Mrs. Palin is bound to be impressed by how many women legislators there are in India’s national parliament, and in the assemblies of the countries 28 states and seven federal territories.

[...]

And given her personality, Mrs. Palin most definitely will make friends in India, which has already begun souring on President Obama for his perceived failure to follow through on promises made on his state visit. Happily, Mrs. Palin will be a political tourist; she will have no obligation to make any pledges, other than of accelerating her personal friendships in a land known for its warmth and hospitality.

[More]

- JP

NY Sun: Palin or Panetta?

Even the LA Times says Obama Admin. had "mixed message" on Egypt
*
A Friday New York Sun editorial addresses the question of who has had the better intelligence, Sarah Palin or Leon Panetta?

For the past day or so the former governor of Alaska has been mocked on some of the most famous blogs in the land for answering a question about Egypt with what the Little Green Footballs ridiculed as “an especially colorful word salad.” The question about Egypt had been asked of her by David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network. “It’s a difficult situation,” she responded.

“This is that 3 a.m. White House phone call,” she added, “and it seems for many of us trying to get that information from our leader in the White House, it seems that that call went right to the answering machine. And nobody yet has explained to the American public what they know — and surely they know more than the rest of us know — who it is who will be taking the place of Mubarak.”

The Internet commentators were still laughing about Mrs. Palin’s circumlocutions when the reports started surfacing that the Central Intelligence Agency was declaring that Mr. Mubarak would resign before the end of the day. The director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, went so far as to make that prediction in testimony before the Congress. He had barely spoken than the Egyptian strongman turned around and announced that he was not resigning.

[More]

So with the news today that Mubarak had transferred his his powers to the military and headed for the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, the political figure in America who called attention to the Obama administration’s "all of the above" responses to Egypt is the same one her detractors have ridiculed for her everyday-American plain language that only leftists don't seem to be able to understand. The sun's editors conclude, "It looks like Mr. Obama would have gained better intelligence all along if he listened less to Mr. Panetta and more to Mrs. Palin."

h/t: Benyamin Korn

- JP

Quote of the Day (January 9, 2011)

*
The Editors of the New York Sun:

"Reagan had a far more tactile feel of the real economy than his critics gave him credit for. And one gets that impression about Mrs. Palin, with her involvement in oil, with her 'Sarah Palin’s Alaska' episode on fishing ('it smells like money,' she tells her daughter as halibut are unloaded at a cannery), and now with her episode on panning for gold. We are in a period in which the connection between the dollar and something real seems ever more tenuous. It’s nice to see a politician who understands the connection and the meaning of gold."

- JP

NY Sun: The Palin Patch

Palin wins again
*
Excerpted from today's editorial in The New York Sun:

Hats off to President Obama for what the New York Times reports this morning is a reversal of course by which the administration will drop the use of a regulation to cover under Obamacare end-of-life planning that the Congress had specifically declined to provide via the legislative process. One could call it the “Palin Patch,” after the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, whose warning that this kind of planning, when funded by the government, could lead to what amount to “death panels.”

It happens that we are not against end-of-life planning.

[...]

It also happens , however, that we share Mrs. Palin’s concern, particularly when the counseling is coming from doctors rather than sages. Covering such counseling via a government program that is also paying for the medical treatment seems all too likely to lead to the kind of death panels of which Mrs. Palin warned, which is no doubt why congress took the funding out of the Obamacare bill in the first place. Better to leave such matters, which involve the nexus of medicine and religion and ethics, in private hands.

That wasn’t what moved the Obama administration to make the Palin patch. According to the Times report — in a story by Robert Pear, who also broke the story of administration’s attempt to sneak end-of-life counseling into use by regulation after Congress had refused to do it by legislation — the administration had come to recognize the procedural error and “political concerns were also a factor.”

[More]

Meanwhile, Politico's Ben Smith was more succinct:

"Palin wins again"

- JP

NY Sun Editorial: Palin v. Bernanke

She is now out in front of yet another issue
*
The Sun's editors say that Gov. Palin's warning to the Fed chairman puts her out front on the debate over the dollar:

One of the questions in respect of 2012 is how it has happened that the only major Republican figure, aside from Congressman Ron Paul, to stand up and be counted on the dollar is Sarah Palin. She is supposed to be an ex-beauty queen without a lot of sophistication. Yet she is reportedly scheduled to be in Phoenix today delivering a major address challenging the plan of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, to inflate the dollar. Snippets of her text were put up Sunday on the National Review Online and began immediately rocketing around the globe, no doubt in part because of the Palinesque phrasing, in which she called on Mr. Bernanke to “cease and desist.”

Now we don’t mind saying that the Sun has been looking forward to the Alaskan breaking out on this issue. In October 2009, we issued an editorial called “Palin and Paul.” We noted that those waiting for a politician to pick up on the monetary issue were perking up to a posting on Mrs. Palin’s Facebook page. In it she had noted that the Gulf oil states were reported to be negotiating with Russia about abandoning the dollar as a unit of pricing, observed that an official of the United Nations had called for a new world reserve currency, and, most importantly, warned that the value of the dollar was collapsing in terms of gold. Her posting, we wrote, suggested that she was ahead of the rest of the undeclared contenders for 2012.

At the time, the value of a dollar had slid to just less than a 1,000th of an ounce of gold. Today it has plunged to barely better than a 1,400th of an ounce of gold. In other words, in the year since Mrs. Palin took up this issue, the Bernanke Dollar — or the Obama Dollar, or the Pelosi, as we’ve sometimes called it — has lost a third of its value. The chairman of the Federal Reserve is now on an announced plan to try to inflate it further. So far the Congress that has oversight of the Federal Reserve has been largely mute, though there have been some notable exceptions (Congressman Paul Ryan, for example, and Dr. Ron Paul, of course; among the big newspapers, only the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has been in front of this issue).

We were struck, reading the Robert Costa’s National Review advance on Mrs. Palin’s speech, with the reach of her warning. She attacked QE2, as the second quantitative easing of monetary policy is called, head on.

[More]

The editors conclude, "she is now out in front of yet another issue as there is about to convene a new Congress of the United States in which she has a brace of allies indebted to her for her help in getting elected. Mr. Bernanke seems to have blithely ignored his other critics, but it will be more dangerous to ignore the Mamma Grizzly."

h/t: Benyamin Korn

- JP

NY Sun: The Palin Platform

Constitutional Conservatism
*
According to a New York Sun editorial Friday, Gov. Palin's success in helping the 2010 candidates she endrsed get elected, although impressive, is not her most important achievement:

The fact is that Mrs. Palin has spied and branded the most relevant, the most inclusive, and the most uplifting theme for the Republicans in the coming contest — the idea of what she calls constitutional conservatism.

[...]

This is an idea for our times, if there ever was one, and it was shrewd of Mrs. Palin to seize on it, as early as she did. It is certainly true that others have gotten the message, and may have gotten it independently of Mrs. Palin.

[...]

The clarity of the idea comes into focus at a time when the Democratic administration is lunging for expanded powers, and she has emerged in a remarkable position. She has written two books. One is a kind of autobiography and declaration of her breakout from what might be called hidebound Republicanism, the other — to be issued this month — a meditation on faith, flag, and country. This sets her up for a third book on the idea of constitutional conservatism. If she goes ahead and writes it, we predict it will have an even greater impact than her first two — and just in time for 2012.

Even if the Alaskan doesn’t turn the idea of constitutional conservatism into a book, Mrs. Palin has marked the idea as her theme. Its great power is that it sets up a methodology for dealing with everything from — to name but a few issues — foreign policy and the war to the dollar, nationalized health care, same gender marriage, taxation, and gun control.

[...]

So let the pundits puzzle over which of Mrs. Palin's candidates prospered and which lost. The better count is which contenders for the national ticket can lay any better claim than Mrs. Palin to an idea as unifying, uplifting, and inclusive as the idea of constitutional conservatism that she has made her platform.

[More]

- JP

NY Sun: Woman of the Year

*
The editorial in today's New York Sun is a must-read and a keeper:

The leader of Big Labor went to Anchorage to give a speech and attacked Mrs. Palin, accusing her of doing everything from writing notes on her hands to coming out with conspiracy theories about President Obama and his “death panels” to getting close to calling for violence. “Sometimes — about Sarah Palin — you’ve just got to laugh,” Mr. Trumka said “... But it’s not really funny.”

Mrs. Palin turned around and gave as good as she got, or better, in one of her patented Facebook postings, an astonishing demarche headlined “Union Brothers and Sisters, Join Our Commonsense Cause!”

[...]

Mrs. Palin signaled her intention to mark the union point the very moment she burst onto the national stage; these columns have written about it before, in “Palin’s Fraternal Greetings.” The last Republican to reach out to union workers in such a premeditated way was Ronald Reagan. And for those genderists who will say that hard-hats won’t respond to a woman, let them look at the clips of Prime Minister Thatcher being hailed by the shipyard workers of the labor union Solidarity at Gdansk.

History will record that Margaret Thatcher Conservative Party and Richard Trumka’s American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations were on the same side in that fight. It was Thatcher, Reagan, John Paul II and — very much not least — Lane Kirkland who understood that the interests of labor were with freedom. This is the principle that Mrs. Palin has picked up in the coming political clash in America, and Mr. Trumka can laugh at her, but eventually he’s going to be confronted with this history. It may be unlikely that the Trumka-Palin feud will have what they call a Hollywood ending, but it wouldn’t be surprising to seek America’s union members discover which strategic course — Mrs. Palin’s or Mr. Obama’s — offers more growth and jobs.

Read the full New York Sun editorial here.

h/t: roy y

- JP

NY Sun Editorial: Palin's Point

*
Another fine editorial in Sunday's edition of The New York Sun. Excerpts:

President Obama, with his back-to-back statements on the proposed mosque at Ground Zero, has managed to get himself in a position where Sarah Palin has both the high ground and the practical route to progress. At the Iftar dinner at the White House, the president endorsed the constitutional rights of all religions in America to build houses of worship where they want to on private property. He spoke with his trademark eloquence, but he was off the point. So, as he toured the Gulf Coast, he took a powder, explaining that he was not commenting on what he called “the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there.” That was off point, too, enough so that the former Alaska governor finally took to her Facebook page...

[...]

Not only does Mrs. Palin manage, in a polite but firm way, to speak more forthrightly than the president and to draw finer distinctions than the president but she also manages to articulate a practical line more in keeping with a harmonious outcome. That outcome is by no means certain, but the Daily News did report on Friday that the sponsors of the mosque at Ground Zero, Park51, are “not slamming the door” on Governor Paterson’s idea of building the mosque and community center somewhere else.

[...]

Clearly there are a lot of questions to be sorted out in this affair. But one of them turns out to be this: How did one of the most intellectual presidents in history, a constitutional law professor with a government-provided staff of legal experts and policy geniuses and an ability, rarely if ever matched, to speak in lofty tones, manage to get himself in a position where he will end up following the lead of an ex-governor who has been constantly set down by the left as but a one-time beauty queen without brains and who has been watching the whole fracas from a lake-side camp at Alaska?

Read the unabridged editorial here.

h/t: Benyamin Korn

- JP

NY Sun: Palin’s Fraternal Greetings

*
In a New York Sun editorial, Seth Lipsky notes that Gov. Palin is the first Republican to reach out "so pointedly" to union members since Ronald Reagan:

Mrs. Palin, in her Facebook posting... did speak of how the president’s lecture to the AFL-CIO “must have been tough for our good union brothers and sisters to sit through, though it may have resonated with some union bosses who desire their members to adopt a herd mentality, too, so as to not dare speak up against what Washington is doing to us.” What struck us about this is that it’s hard to think of a Republican reaching out so pointedly to union members since the man who invented Big Tent Republicanism, Ronald Reagan.

Mrs. Palin’s demarche is one to keep an eye on. What are the Reagan Democrats going to do in November 2010 and November 2012? Mrs. Palin, with her campaign for the Mama Grizzlies and her “whole stampede of pink elephants,” as she put it in the now-famous video, has upended the former left-of-center feminist calculus about women voters, not to mention women candidates. The question her latest post raises is whether she’s going to strive for a similar upset in the calculus among blue collar voters who once could be counted on by the Democrats until Reagan came along and talked to them about inflation, taxes and unemployment.

She’s certainly had her eye on, say, Ohio, where she is invested in the gubernatorial race and where her endorsements and campaign contributions, Politico noted as far back as February, suggest she fully comprehends the outsized importance of the state.

Mr. Lipsky's full NY Sun editorial is here, and we recommend the read.

- JP

NY Sun Editorial: Cordoba’s Opportunity

*
The NY Sun's Seth Lipsky has authored an editorial in Monday's edition regarding the controversy over the Ground Zero mega-mosque. Mr Lipsky suggests that the Cordoba Initiative has an historic opportunity to demonstrate respect, understanding, and forbearance, a move which would diffuse a contentious situation :

The battle over a proposed $100 million mosque and Islamic center at Ground Zero could well be at a turning point, the New York Times reported over the weekend. Its assessment was made after the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, came out in opposition to situating the site adjacent to the epicenter of the attacks on September 11, 2001. We telephoned Mr. Foxman to offer congratulations. It had to have been a hard call for him, with so many supporters of the project suggesting that the sole reason for opposing it had to be bigotry.

That suggestion has struck us from the start as a libel. There may be some bigots in opposition to the project, but they would be a small percentage, in our guess. We thought Mr. Foxman put it exactly right in suggesting that the fact that the Cordoba Initiative may win the right to build at the site where extremists acting in the name of Islam slew so many innocent people doesn’t make building such a center there the right thing to do. We mentioned to him that we’d been impressed with the way Sarah Palin articulated her early opposition to the project.

“She’s got seichel,” we remarked to Mr. Foxman. It was a reference to the Yiddish word that has no single-word English translation but means a combination of intelligence, wisdom, and common sense. Mrs. Palin’s short messages on Twitter were crafted as a call not on the government to prohibit the project but on the moderate Muslims themselves to — in her now classic formulation — “refudiate” the plan. Her call was for forbearance out of understanding of the special nature of the Ground Zero site in the city’s and the nation’s memory...

Read the rest of today's NY sun editorial here.

h/t: Benyamin Korn

- JP

Seth Lipsky: The Palin Doctrine

*
In a New York Sun editorial, Seth Lipsky says that in her speeches and writings on national security and foreign policy, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate is staking out a Palin Doctrine. We've excerpted editor Lipsky's first four paragraphs:

One of the things that’s starting to emerge on the Republican side of the political struggle is a world view that can be called the Palin Doctrine. It’s remarkable that none of the other leading figures in the party has come to be associated with a particular foreign policy trajectory. Can one think, say, of a Pawlenty Doctrine or a Daniels Doctrine or a even a Perry or a Schwartzenegger or a Romney Doctrine? They each have their own bona fides, but developing the outlines of a coherent foreign policy view isn’t one of them.

Governor Palin, by contrast, has been starting to give us a glimpse what could be expected of her in foreign affairs. This has been occurring in public appearances and broadcasts and, most pointedly, in a posting on June 30 her Facebook. So while the left has been mocking her for a supposed lack of depth or learning, she has been filling in, line by line, a picture of her foreign policy views, ranging over topics from the Navy (she’s for an expansion of the fleet), to a view of the war (she’s a hawk), to a view of the dollar (she’s against a weak dollar strategy), to a view of Israel (unflinching support).

This isn't the first time talk of a Palin Doctrine has been in the news. As far back as September 2008, the phrase occurred in, among other places, a column by Arianna Huffington who likened Mrs. Palin’s to “Dick Cheney. With lipstick.” She noted, however, that the governor’s doctrine was still “under construction.” In the two years since then, the Alaskan has honed an increasingly cohesive and detailed world view. We’ve already noted her remarks in respect of the dollar, delivered in a speech in Hong Kong and on her face book page, as well as her willingness to breast the politically correct line on Israel.

One of the features of the Palin Doctrine is that the governor opposes what she calls an “enemy-centric” foreign policy. In marking this point she has picked up on the phrasing of one of the most sophisticated critics of President Obama’s foreign policy, Senator Alexandr Vondra of the Czech Republic. A one-time hero of the anti-Communist struggle, Mr. Vondra is a former Czech envoy in Washington and a former foreign minister...

Read the full NY Sun editorial here.

- JP

Palinism: The Substance of Sarah Palin's World View

A recent New York Sun editorial makes the observation that the essence of Sarah Palin's world view — which the editor has dubbed "Palinism" — is emerging:

"...and it is far more substantive than her detractors suggest or than we gained a glimpse of during the campaign. She has been, in a straightforward way, stepping up on certain issues that her fellow Republicans would do well to emulate."

The 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate's statement on Israel is one example cited in the editorial:

"It provides a glimpse of a leader who would respect Israel’s right to establish, democratically, its own strategy in its own sphere and could restore the standing of America’s president in the eyes in the Israelis, among whom it has plunged since President Obama’s speech in Cairo and his out-reach to the non-democratic Arab leaders."

Sarah Palin is also doing her part to bring other issues to the forefront, including -- but not limited to -- energy security, cap and trade, the value of the dollar, jobs, taxes and runaway federal spending:

"That is not the riff of a lightweight but of someone who has thought about and studied the relationship between high tax rates and high unemployment."

The substance of Palinism grows out of seeds planted long ago by such conservative luminaries as Thatcher and Reagan:

"John O’Sullivan, who was part of the Thatcher brain trust and knows her well... compared Sarah Palin 'not with the Margaret Thatcher that we all have heard of, but with the emerging Margaret Thatcher' whose 'sophistication and ability to articulate issues' were still being honed."

[...]

"Aside from her display of a deeply held commitment to certain basic principles, [Sarah Palin] turns out to share with Ronald Reagan a quality that will stand her in good stead for years to come — people keep underestimating her."

This, the editorial concludes, puts former Governor 180 degrees away from President Obama:

"...who has been credited with a lot more savvy than he has, at least so far, displayed. It puts Mrs. Palin right where she wants to be as she positions herself for the sustantive debate that will be needed to bring our country back."

Read the NY Sun editorial in its entirety here.

- JP

NY Sun Editorial: Palin and Paul

The New York Sun? Yes, it's still around, though only on the world wide web. The Sun published it last print edition September 30, 2008. Here are some excerpts from its October 10 editorial:

Those of us who have been waiting for a politician to pick up on the monetary issue are perking up at Governor Palin’s demarche on the dollar. This came last week in a posting on her Facebook page, where she reacted to a report that Gulf oil producers were negotiating with Russia, China, Japan, and France to abandon the use of the dollar in pricing petroleum. She noted the report in the Wall Street Journal that Arab oil officials were denying the story, but reckoned that “even the possibility of such talk weakens the dollar and renews fears about its continued viability as an international reserve currency.” Then she pointed out that “a United Nations official called for a new global reserve currency to replace the dollar and end our ‘privilege’ to run up huge deficits.” Most importantly, she warned about the price of gold, which that day had hit a record in what she called a “response to fears about the weakened dollar.”

Time will tell, but what this suggests is that the former governor of Alaska is ahead of the rest of the undeclared contenders in 2012.  

[...]

Mrs. Palin’s comments suggest she’s savvier than many give her credit for being. No sooner did she issue her warning about the dollar than Reuters found a number of Republicans declaring she was right.

[...]

It is true that the only politician who has been campaigning on this issue, Ron Paul, failed to prosper at the polls. We would argue that had less to do with his monetary policy than other issues, the war among them, on which he has been in error. But maybe he should have been a bidder for that famous lunch with the former Alaska governor. We’re not ready to make endorsements, but Palin and Paul could make a whale of a ticket.

- JP