Andy Barr: Why Sarah snubbed CPAC

"Special interests over core beliefs"
*
Politico's Andy Barr opines :

A Palin source bashed CPAC and its leader David Keene in an interview last year with POLITICO announcing that the former governor wouldn’t be attending – even though CPAC had listed her as an invited guest for the second year in a row. The source called the annual gathering an example "special interests over core beliefs" and "pocketbook over policy."

"That's not what CPAC should be about and people are tiring," the source said. "Palin is taking a stance against this just as she did in Alaska."

The criticism of CPAC was fueled by a report that David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union, had asked FedEx for between $2 million and $3 million to get the group's support in a bitter battle on Capitol Hill with rival UPS. This was not the first reported allegation of Keene selling his influence with the conservative base, and is a large part of the reason why the ACU and its annual conference have waned in influence over the years.

The previous year, Palin’s camp and CPAC feuded over them listing her as a speaker at the conference despite the fact that she had not confirmed.

Keene didn't help mend the rift between CPAC and the Palin camp two years ago when he told Newsmax that Palin was “whining” about how the media was viciously and constantly attacking her. Even though Gov. Palin's team was in negotiations with CPAC, Barr believes that her appearance at the conference "was never in the cards." The lamestream media always knows better than those who were actually involved in the process they speculate about.

- JP

ABC News: Palin Turns Down Coveted CPAC Keynote Speaking Slot

Along with DeMint, Heritage, and FRC, she'll be conspicuous by her absence
*
For the fourth year in a row Gov. Palin has turned down a request to speak at CPAC. ABC News reports that the first woman to be the vice presidential candidate of the Republican Party has once again declined an invitation from CPAC officials to address the conference:

CPAC organizers invited Palin to deliver the closing-night keynote speech on Saturday Feb. 12, immediately following the announcement of the results of CPAC’s annual presidential straw poll, but after several days of negotiations, she declined.

“We’re disappointed that she wasn’t able to make it this year,” American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene said through a spokesman on Thursday. He noted that Palin "expressed interest in wanting to come this year," but said that it came down to "a scheduling issue."

The former Alaska governor has a rocky history with the group. In 2010, she stayed away from the event citing the business dealings of the American Conservative Union and Keene, who is a lead organizer of the event.

In 2009, while still serving as governor of Alaska, she initially accepted an invitation to speak on the conference’s opening day, but later dropped out saying that she had to attend to the “duties of governing,” according to a CPAC spokesman. She sent a taped message to the conference instead.

In 2008, CPAC organizer Lisa De Pasquale said that Palin had to drop out of CPAC “at the last minute.” At that point she had not yet been named Sen. John McCain's vice presidential nominee, but was regarded as an up-and-comer in the Republican Party.

This will be her fourth year skipping the event. While Palin will not be there in person, her political action committee, SarahPAC, is sponsoring a Diamond Reception on the CPAC’s opening night -- Thursday, Feb. 10.

[More]

Though a number of her potential rivals for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination will be speaking at CAPC 2011, Gov. Palin joins U.S.Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida, the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation as prominent conservatives and organizations not attending this year's conference. She's in some pretty good company, in other words.

- JP

Mitch Daniels is no Sarah Palin

Not a good start for the Daniels campaign
*
We don't always see eye to eye with Rick Moran, but we're in full agreement with his latest post on the American Thinker Blog:

Governor Mitch Daniels is a great wonk, a good governor, but it appears that he isn't much of a politician.

Earth to Mitch: You don't start out a presidential campaign by alienating 1/3 of your base:

The other day on Laura Ingraham's radio show, Daniels re-iterated his call for a "truce" on social issues while America gets its economic house in order. He now says he'd like to "mute" those issues for a little while.

[...]

If Daniels gets in the race you can be sure that some other candidate is going to call him out on this. Whoever does it first will immediately endear himself or herself to social conservatives nationwide. Who's going to do it?

OK - we get it. Fixing the deficit is titanically important. But you don't ask voters - especially when it comes to issues that touch their conscience in very personal ways - to turn off their emotions and engagement just to achieve some nebulous "peace" on social issues. First of all, it takes two to make peace and it is doubtful that the other side would be quite so accommodating. Secondly, it would be like ripping the heart out of the Republican party.

[More]

Moran points out that despite his lackluster campaign, John McCain would have made the 2008 presidential race a much closer contest had he only sharply defined the difference between himself and Barack Obama on social right issues. And despite naming Sarah Palin on his ticket, millions of conservatives still stayed away from the polls on election day -- far fewer than those who turned out to vote for Bush.

There has been a pro-life plank in every Republican Party platform since at least Ronald Reagan, but prior to 2009, there was not a pro-life majority to support it. But all that changed in May of 2009, when Gallup polling began to reflect a shift in the attitudes of Americans in favor of the protection of innocent life. Why should Republicans abandon this principle when they finally have the majority of their countrymen on their side on the issue? But Daniels wants to turn his back on that majority and on the conservative base.

Sarah Palin would never even consider abandoning social conservatives on the issue of life. It is part and parcel of the Declaration of Independence, which defines life as the first of three "unalienable Rights" with which the Creator has endowed us. Without life, there is no liberty nor the pursuit of happiness. Gov. Palin has been a consistent and tireless defender of the innocent unborn. And she has lived by what she advocates, giving birth to child which she knew before his birth would be a Down Syndrome baby.

Mitch Daniels is no Sarah Palin, and by giving short shrift to what has been one of the most important planks in the GOP platform for decades, not much of a conservative nor a Republican.

- JP

James Taranto: 'Death Panels' Revisited

How Sarah Palin helped defeat ObamaCare's deceptive advertising
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The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto argues that U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson's recent ruling declaring The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would have been a more difficult judicial decision had ObamaCare been politically popular:

But it did not and does not. Americans never bought the bill of goods that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and their supporters in the formerly mainstream media tried to sell. A good deal of the credit goes to Sarah Palin, for coining the phrase "death panel" in an August 2009 Facebook post.

Four months later PolitiFact.com, a project of the left-leaning St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, named the phrase "lie of the year"

[...]

In truth, PolitiFact was more vulnerable to the charge of lying than Palin was, for its highly literal, out-of-context interpretation of her words was at best extremely tendentious.

[...]

Palin put the term "death panel" in quotes to indicate that she was using it figuratively. She was not lying but doing just the opposite: conveying a fundamental truth about ObamaCare. Proponents were describing it as a sort of fiscal perpetual-motion machine: We're going to give free insurance to tens of millions of people and reduce the deficit! As a matter of simple arithmetic, the only way to do that is by drastically curtailing medical benefits.

"Health care by definition involves life and death decisions," Palin wrote. ObamaCare necessarily expands the power of federal bureaucrats to make such decisions, and it creates enormous fiscal pressures to err on the side of death. Whether it establishes literal panels for that purpose is a hair-splitting quibble. By naming this "lie of the year," PolitiFact showed itself to be less seeker of truth than servant of power.

President Obama, meanwhile, treated Palin's criticism as a joke. As we noted at the time, he told a New Hampshire town meeting: "The rumor that's been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for 'death panels' that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we've decided that we don't--it's too expensive to let her live anymore." The transcript records that the audience laughed at this callous "joke."

The perpetual-motion claim wasn't the only deception at the heart of the argument for ObamaCare...

[More]

h/t: Benyamin Korn

- JP

Day By Day (February 3, 2011)

At least Sarah Palin knows the difference between waiters and top brass
*
Good morning! It's a wonderful life if we just take it Day By Day:


Please support Chris Muir's pro-Palin Day By Day.

- JP

Quote of the Day (February 2, 2011)

We are dependent on shaky governments for crude oil
*
Steve Markowitz at EnduringSense:

"The current Egyptian events again bring the forefront the issue of America’s dependence on oil from unstable regimes in the Middle East. While Egypt is not an oil producer, the Suez Canal is important in the supply chain for oil. In addition, the instability with other Middle Eastern countries increases the shipping risk at the chokepoint that is the Straits of Hormuz. The danger of America’s oil dependence on risky sources should have been addressed years, if not decades ago. However, politicians, mainly on the Left, banded together with radical environmentalists to hinder America’s production in coal, oil and nuclear energy... During the presidential campaign, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin used the slogan; 'drill, baby, drill'. This should be a national rallying cry for what should be America’s most important program of this generation."

- JP

Mitt Romney: Sarah Palin would be a 'great' President

"Be careful what you say about her. She has a rifle, you know."
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Although Mitt Romney claims that he hasn't made up his mind if he'll run for President in 2012, he says his wife is all for the idea and is urging him to throw his hat into the ring. The veteran of the 2008 race for the GOP nomination also says another former governor he knows would do a "great" job -- Sarah Palin:

During an interview on Tuesday night with Piers Morgan on CNN, the former GOP Massachusetts governor said Palin would bring a lot to the political table.

"I believe she is an extraordinarily powerful and effective voice in our party, that she has generated a great deal of support and attention, that she'd be great in a primary process," he said of the former vice-presidential nominee and Tea Party darling. "She'd bring attention to the process, and frankly, the more people we have on the stage in those debates talking about different ideas and different approaches, the better."

[...]

When the CNN host asked whether Romney could beat Palin, he replied, "I don't know the answer to that."

Romney has been making thge media rounds to promote his new book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.

- JP

Dana Milbank: My dog wrote my homework

Trust him, he's just like a virgin on this
*
Caught red-handed breaking his own moratorium and then being ridiculed for it, now Dana Milbank is claiming that he is not the author of the Post Partisan item about Sarah Palin which appeared under his byline February 1 in the Washington Post. According to Politico's Andy Barr:

Dana Milbank just shot over an e-mail letting us know it wasn’t him who posted – under his name – an item on the Post Partisan blog pointing out that he had "survived" the first day of his month-long Palin "moratorium."

[...]

We asked Milbank for comment, and he wrote back: "Say it ain't so, Joe! I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. I didn’t know about the text on the Post-Partisan item with the ABC video, and I had our website fix that. So as far as the moratorium goes, fear not: I am still a virgin."

The old text has been crossed out on the site, and under the video is an update that reads: "The sentence as written above was posted by an editor, not Dana. So Dana's moratorium remains intact."

Now wait a minute. Dana Milbank, from the same Journolist community which claims that Sarah Palin doesn't write her own op-eds, now expects us to believe that he doesn't write all of his own material published by the Washington Post?

Our first inclination is to wonder just how sweet a writer's job can be when the writer doesn't even have to write his own stuff? Nice to know that the editors will write copy for their contributor and publish it under the writer's byline. Wish we could find editors like that to work for.

Our second thought is that this is a creative new twist on the old "My dog ate my homework" excuse. Except in this case, it's "My dog did my homework for me." That's an even more imaginative excuse than Rachel Maddow blaming Glenn Beck for her "lust" to push bad Palin news, even if it isn't really about Palin and it isn't really news. Dana, if you can sell this one, you're in the wrong business. That's the kind of salesmanship that could lift the housing market right out of the tank.

- JP

More Quote of the Day Honorable Mention, Part 208

"Can't Quit Her" Edition
*

JammieWearingFool:

"It took the Washington Post a mere nine hours before churning out their first Sarah Palin item of the day, on the very day their own Dana Milbank said he'd be beginning his month-long boycott of all things Palin. Well, he just can't quit her. He lasted until 3:45 pm. 'I survived Day One of my February Sarah Palin moratorium, defeating the evil plans of ABC News's Rick Klein.' Um, no, you didn't survive, idiot. You already lost."

Vicki McClure Davidson at Frugal Café Blog Zone:

"If you’re mentioning her name to talk about NOT mentioning her by name… well, you can’t miss the hypocrisy, I’m sure. You know I’m right, Dana…"

Sandra Fish at Politics Daily:

"She's written two best-selling books, starred in her own TV series, 'Sarah Palin's Alaska,' and creates her own words... There's even a Sarah Palin comic book. The 2008 vice presidential nominee is a newsmaker, for heaven's sake. How can we possibly ignore her? ... Frankly, there are some men [we] would like to ignore this month instead... Dana Milbank. He's the easy one on our list. He isn't all that interesting. Everyone from Fox News to Mediaite is making fun of Milbank for his 'No-Palin February.'"

Denny at Grouchy Old Cripple:

"The next time that Chris Matthews calls Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann stupid, ask him where the Panama Canal is."

Tom Maguire at JustOneMinute:

"One More For The 'Only Stupid If Sarah Does It' File... Rachel Maddow plays the fool as she and her crackerjack staff fail to distinguish between truth and satire... Maybe the Palin 24/7 network could dial it back a bit and wait for Ms. Palin to actually say or do something before commenting on her. Oh, what am I saying?"

The blogprof:

"Rachel Maddow - giving lamestream media it's meaning. Some policy 'wonk' she's turned out to be, complete with her not knowing that the US Constitution has a preamble..."

Dan Riehl at Riehl World View:

"It seems grossly unfair to criticize Rachel Maddow for falling for a bit of satire. The very notion that she's a legitimate source of political information and commentary is satire writ large and in bold. Reporting as satire isn't only her whole shtick, it's right in line with the whole MSNBC Lean Forward branding nonsense, don't you think? I don't see any point in criticizing her for doing precisely what's she been paid to do at MSNBC all along."

John Hudson at The Atlantic Wire:

"C'mon people. Google searches! They're not that hard."

Pat at The Pitty Pat Papers:

"Rachel, really honey, you lost your credibility a long time ago. I would have thought you'd at least try to be a little more careful, what with MSNBC being sold recently and some folks around you being chopped. (Sorry, was chopped too harsh in this new climate of civility? uuhmmm...I mean cut. No, darn, that's too scarey, too. uhmmm....let go. Ahh...that's better.) Fake news relating fake news. Something like the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert shows. Sad thing is, the liberals today don't seem to have a filter to know what's news and what's comedy. They actually get their news from people like this."

FreeThinkerNY at Weasel Zippers:

"Let us imagine Joy Behar with her mouth sewn shut…"

Sal at Axis of Right:

"It is becoming clearer and clearer that, not only do Liberals not believe in the Constitution, they don’t even know what it says... The House, the Senate, and the Executive. The three branches of government according to Chuck Schumer... Sad that I even have to point this out, but if a sitting United States Senator doesn’t know this, I feel I must. Now, I am waiting to hear the same State-Run media outcries against Schumer for his lack of intelligence as I have heard against Sarah Palin for her supposed slip-up on the Bush Doctrine (which wasn’t really a slip-up, but don’t tell the media that). I won’t hold my breath."

United Citizens Council at Tyranny Sentinel:

"One of the digs at Sarah Palin is that she quit her job as Governor of Alaska; I hope those people aren't supporting John Huntsman. John Huntsman quit as Governor of Utah to work as Obama's Ambassador to China. Now he is quitting that job to run for President."

Ken Homa at The Homa Files:

"Palin got criticized last week for her reaction to President Obama’s State of the Union Address. She simply noted that the President coined the slogan “Winning the Future” … and suggested the obvious: perhaps we should all start wearing buttons with the slogan’s initials 'WTF'. Well, liberal pundits hammered her for being crude and divisive. Hmmm. They didn’t squawk when Vice President Biden called ObamaCare a 'BFD'. Double standard, anybody?"

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit:

"Why They’d Rather Talk About Sarah Palin (Cont’d): Nearly 11 Percent of US Houses Empty."

Townhall.com via Facebook:

"The Townhall.com Presidential Straw Poll... Thank you to everyone who voted in January 2011! ...the results:
Sarah Palin - 22.27%
Mitt Romney - 14.48%
Ron Paul - 11.52%
Mike Huckabee - 10.76%
Newt Gingrich - 10.03%
Herman Cain - 7.14%
Chris Christie - 5.55%
Tim Pawlenty - 3.02%
Jim DeMint - 2.97%
Mitch Daniels - 2.90%
John Bolton - 2.57%
Undecided - 2.55%
John Thune - 1.55%
Haley Barbour - 1.03%
Rick Santorum - <1%>"

- JP

Barr: PalinLand calls Milbank's 'moratorium' a sham

Politico story mentions TX4P
*

The fact that the Washington Post's Dana Milbank is something less than a man of his word hasn't escaped the notice of Politico's Andy Barr, who has apparently been following Milbank's failed moratorium and the response to it in the Palin blogging community:

Milbank highlighted his lack of commentary by posting on the paper’s website a link of his interview – rife with allusions to and jokes about the former Alaska governor.

Palin’s supporters weren’t happy.

“Milbank couldn't even get through the first day of his bogus boycott,” wrote a blogger for Texas for Palin, one of a network of Palin-defending sites that dinged the columnist. “This afternoon on the Post Partisan blog, Milbank wrote: ‘I survived Day One of my February Sarah Palin moratorium...’ Sorry, Skippy, but you weren't even going to mention her name, remember?”

PalinTV – a site set up by Palin supporters to show the governor’s comments in full without the media filter – also smacked Milbank with a sarcastic tweet. “Dana Milbank on ABC today talking for 5 minutes about how he's not talking about Palin,” it read.

Conservatives4Palin, the chief Palin defending vehicle online, has so far stayed off Milbank’s so-called moratorium, but has taken repeated shots at the columnist in recent weeks.

Milbank was bashed by the site after he wrote a column in the wake of the Tucson shooting arguing that even though the shooter was not influenced by Palin or Glenn Beck, they both were deserving of finger pointing after the incident...

[More]

To his credit, Barr is the only mainstream media journalist to acknowledge that Milbank couldn't even make it through one day of his Super Sham WaPo moratorium without mentioning Gov. Palin.

- JP

Maddow explains why she fell for Palin/Egypt hoax

She blames -- wait for it -- Glenn Beck!
*
We posted Tuesday about how MSPDS host Rachel Maddow, whom the left touts as "brilliant" (like Bill Clinton, she's a Rhodes scholar), fell hook, line and sinker Monday for an internet spoof by a satirical website that Gov. Sarah Palin was advocating an attack on Egypt.

Maddow took 24 hours to come up with an excuse, and, as Noel Sheppard reports, on Tuesday's program explained that it was all conservatives' fault, in particular that diabolical Glenn Beck:

And that was Maddow’s explanation for getting duped by a satirical website: in her view, conservatives – especially Glenn Beck – are saying all kinds of crazy things. As a result, it’s become difficult for her to know what’s real and what’s a spoof.

If this is the case, then maybe she should stop reporting on what conservatives are saying.

If she can no longer discern between fact and fiction, serious commentary and satire, she can’t possibly be trusted or taken seriously about anything, for who knows what her next source will be and whether or not it’s actually legitimate.

Maybe more importantly, how can anyone on television – Rhodes scholar or not! – be deserving of the public’s trust if she blames her own mistakes on others not at all involved in her program?

Sadly, this is par for the course on MSNBC as well as other liberal media outlets.

These are the same people that disgustingly blamed conservatives for the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) last month. They’re used to pointing fingers at others without merit.

Leftists have been mocking University of Idaho graduate Sarah Palin for two years for biting down on a prank by two Canadian DJs pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy, claiming it makes her dumb as a rock. By their thinking, then, Rhodes Scholar Rachel Maddow, because she fell for an internet spoof, should be dumb as a bag of dirt.

After all, the DJs got Gov. Palin's telephone number and called her, putting the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate on the spot. But Maddow and her producers, on their own initiative, found the spoof story and ran with it without bothering to take a couple of seconds to do a Google search to verify the story. So by the left's own standards, Sarah Palin is not just smarter than the average Grizzly Bear, she's just as smart -- if not smarter -- than a Rhodes Scholar.

- JP

Day By Day (February 2, 2011)

Squeeze Box
*
Good morning! It's a wonderful life if we just take it Day By Day:


Please support Chris Muir's pro-Palin Day By Day.

- JP

Quote of the Day (February 1, 2011)

Dana Milbank’s ‘Palin-Free February’ Lasted a Whole 15 Hours
*
Doug Powers at The Powers That Be:

"Charlie Sheen gave up coke and porn stars longer than Milbank quit Sarah Palin this month."

- JP

More Quote of the Day Honorable Mention, Part 207

"Pigs on the Left Wing" Edition
*

Van Helsing at Moonbattery:

"It looks like the 'civility' piously demanded by elitist moonbats in the wake of the Tucson Massacre has made it to Montana... As the Wall Street Journal points out, Missoula is hardly the only place the infantile yet condescending artsy-fartsy community indulges in inappropriate attacks on its perceived enemies in the culture war. The lectures we've been receiving from moonbats about civility in political discourse are like having to listen to a sty full of pigs grunt through dripping mouthfuls of slop about the need for better table manners."

Marooned In Marin:

"So when liberals issue death threats, it's called 'satire,' just like films, books and paintings illustrating the assassination of President George W. Bush was called 'art.'"

Steve Mac Donald at Live Free or Die:

"The left is chock full of violent musings they can’t seem to keep a lid on, one of which just made an appearance at a Children Theater in Missoula, Montana... Progressive calls for civility are no different than their calls for bi-partisanship, cutting spending, keeping lobbyists out of the White House, Pay-go, or even the US constitution; there are exceptions–those things were never meant to limit democrats... No one just throws together a play in a few days. There are usually weeks or months of auditions, readings, rehearsals, set construction, so you have to wonder…was the line about beheading Palin added to the script before the Tuscon shootings or did they add it after? And does either circumstance make them more or less the raging violent, clueless, hate-mongering hypocrites they continue to show themselves to be?"

Jack Kemp at American Thinker:

"I'm sure the wife and family of the late Daniel Pearl, whose death was dramatized in the movie 'A Mighty Heart,' would also fail to see the humor in this joking about beheading Sarah Palin."

Northern Exposer at Conservative Jedi:

"The left keeps on track with their version of civility. Apparently death threats to Conservative public figures doesn't count, especially a certain female conservative. Man! What has this woman done to warrant such hatred and fear? And where is the talk of left-wing vitriol? What happens if and when harm comes to her? What lefty will stand up to this? How much sleep will be lost a Camp Liberal? How much celebration?"

Dan Ford at the Warbird's blog:

"Um, how do Gail Collins and the ever-so-sensitive editors of the NYT plan to make Ms Palin go away? Not with the flick of a limp hand, I don't think."

Rob Houck at No2Marxism:

"Palin is the object of unwarranted hate. The Leftists who accuse her and other conservatives of committing hate speech are bitter, angry socialists who exude hate, and lack logic and intelligence. Those idiots in the media, the bone-headed sheriff in Tucson, among others, are out of their minds if they think that Palin, the Tea Party, Michele Bachman, or any other conservatives had any influence over that deranged shooter... As I've said before, they despise the Constitution, freedom and individual liberties. They also hate conservatives because most are people of faith"

David Riehl at The Riehl Renegade:

"Sarah Palin never called for the death of anyone... Sarah Palin has never called for violence, but for people to fight with their votes for what is right."

Greg at Rhymes With Right:

"Remember that guy... who threatened to blow up the mosque? Well, some inconvenient truths have emerged about him that make the effort to blame 'hate speech from the Islamophobic Right' an utter failure. Let's look here...
1. Hates George W. Bush and threatened his life.
2. Claims to be a Muslim out to commit jihad.
3. Angry at government agencies that he feels aren't doing enough for him.
4. Crazy as a loon.
By my calculation, at least three out of the four would put him in the Democrat column... So once again, there is no way to pin this on Sarah Palin, Fox News, the Tea Party, or anyone else on the right. Well, at least not if you are going to be intellectually honest about things."

JammieWearingFool:

"Great News: Tracy Morgan Escalates His Creepy Obsession With Palin... This is likely a career move for Morgan. The next job he loses he can just blame it on Palin."

Blackiswhite at Nice Deb:

"In my short life, I have never seen any political figure treated the way she has been. And I have never witnessed anyone so relentlessly pursued in private life. And it seems to me that it isn’t because they want us to pick her because they think they can beat her. I think it is because she is the opposite of everything they hold dear, and they know it, and that she represents the best chance we will have in a long time to break their hold on power... I don’t want regimented thinking in the Oval Office anymore. I don’t want any more Ivy League lawyers who believe that nothing is beyond their expertise. I want someone who has integrity. I want someone who doesn’t shy away from a fight, and refuses to have other people tell them HOW to think. I want someone who is willing to lead not one segment of society, but our entire nation. If Sarah is the best candidate to do this, then she gets my vote, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to just let the self-appointed cognoscenti decide for me, nor am I willing to let myself be bullied by the self-appointed deciders on our side of the aisle either."

Smitty at The Other McCain:

"Given a challenge by Sheppard to write a poem for Sarah Palin... I should like to submit: Haiku Sonnet For Sarah Palin..."

David Limbaugh at Creators.com:

"Though tolerance is not the highest virtue and hypocrisy is not the lowest sin, liberals have a dearth of the former while demanding it and an abundance of the latter while forbidding it. Washington University's withdrawn speaking invitation to Bristol Palin is a textbook example both of liberal intolerance and hypocrisy... Washington University student liberals showed their ugly side in this sordid episode -- displaying their intolerance for certain people and ideas in the name of tolerance, and their rank hypocrisy in the name of banning hypocrisy. Sadly, they're too eaten up with their own self-righteousness to see through their mirrors clearly."

The Conservative Pup:

"The only purpose and intent that I can see that NOW now has, is to attack successful women who don’t need NOW. Especially Sarah Palin. She drives them absolutely nuts."

Idaho Conservative Blogger:

"For the life of me I don’t understand why Meghan McCain appears on television and radio as a pundit. I take it back, I know why the Liberal channels invite her on, She trashes Republicans.... Complaining about Palin, 'I longed for a simpler scene and a simpler running mate; a straight ahead and experienced politician like good, old Joe Lieberman, who always kept it real and didn’t make himself the center of drama or chaos' ... It appears to me the biggest Drama queen was Meghan McCain... My goodness, McCain seems to be the Paris Hilton of politics. Famous for her family name, not for anything she had done. She is a spoiled, self-absorbed, conceded, narcissist."

- JP

Doh! Dana Milbank breaks own moratorium on day one

How about a nice cup of EPIC FAIL?
*
When he declared that February would be a "Palin-free month" on January 21, Washington Post op-ed columnist Dana Milbank wrote:

"...I hereby pledge that, beginning on Feb. 1, 2011, I will not mention Sarah Palin -- in print, online or on television -- for one month."

How's he doing so far? Not too good. Milbank couldn't even get through the first day of his bogus boycott. This afternoon on the Post Partisan blog, Milbank wrote:

"I survived Day One of my February Sarah Palin moratorium..."

Sorry, Skippy, but you weren't even going to mention her name, remember?

EPIC FAIL

- JP

Gov. Palin's Reagan 100 keynote address will be on Ustream

Friday, February 4, 10PM CST
*
Audio of Sarah Palin's February 4th keynote address at the Reagan Ranch Center in California for the 100th anniversary celebration of President Reagan’s birthday will be lived streamed online by Ustream.com. Gov.Palin will reflect on President Reagan's, “A Time for Choosing,” a seminal address that dealt with challenges facing our nation when America was at a crossroads, not unlike today.

Vice President Dick Cheney, whose speech will also be live streamed, will deliver the keynote address Feb 5. at the closing of the Reagan 100 Dinner Banquet.

This weekend event seems like a natural for C-SPAN, but so far it hasn't been added to the public affairs channel's schedule. We will keep checking.

- JP

Nolte: Jon Stewart Should Get History Lessons From Gov. Palin

"Five days on destroying Bachmann means no one’s talking about Obama"
*
Big Hollywood Editor-In-Chief John Nolte not only pwns John Stewart in his latest op-ed, but he makes the more important point that the left's media front men -- Stewart, Colbert, Mediaite, MSNBC's talking heads and others -- are employing a “Two Minute Hate” tactic to keep the focus off of the Obama administration's failures:

Uncharacteristically, Jon Stewart is pretty late with his latest intellectually dishonest attempt to dehumanize Sarah Palin into a punchline. This phony Sputnik kerfuffle was settled last week. For those of you who only get your news from The Daily Show, I’ll set the stage and try to keep the words below three syllables: As is always the case, whenever Palin says a word, the left-wing media loses their collective minds and then proceeds to make fools of themselves looking for some way to further the dishonest narrative that the former governor is dumb or mean or crazy or all three. Stewart is a main player in this nasty business of character assassination but again, this entire matter was settled last week by our own Peter Schweizer, the Editor-In-Chief of Big Peace and a man who knows of what he speaks.

[...]

Last week, immediately after Palin’s appearance on Greta, Steve Stromberg at the Washington Post used the same dishonest arguments as Stewart to ridicule Palin. This is when Peter Schweizer, someone whose knowledge base, unlike Stromberg’s, extends beyond Wikipedia, stepped in. Here’s his main point, but you’ll want to read the whole thing:

Palin’s other point is that Sputnik was the sort of government bureaucratic program that got the Soviet Union in trouble; it’s an example of what eventually did them in. Citing Wikipedia (what journalistic ingenuity!), Stromberg argues that actually the Soviet Union didn’t have a debt problem until some “thirty years after” Sputnik. Perhaps instead of relying on Wikipedia, Stromberg might have consulted Robert Gates’ book From the Shadows which chronicles, in part, his career as a Soviet analyst at the CIA. (Just in case they are unaware at the Post, this is the same Robert Gates who is now the Secretary of Defense.) On page 173, he accurately points out that the CIA knew early on of the “Soviet economic crisis. From the late 1950s, CIA had clearly described the chronic weaknesses as well as the formidable military power of the Soviet Union.” Hmmm. Do you think this “chronic weaknesses might have had something to do with excessive bureaucracies and the size of government? Note to Stromberg: you will have to close Wikipedia and actually crack a book for this one.

Note to Jon Stewart: you will want to close the Washington Post and actually crack a book for this one. Maybe Palin can lend you whatever she’s reading.

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- JP

Watch leftist Rachel Maddow make a fool of herself

She does that every weeknight, of course, but this is special...
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Even Palin hypercritc Glynnis MacNicol has to admit that "This is pretty lamestream":

Alas, apparently the story sounded solid to the Maddow team because they ran with it last night.

Maddow's people caught the mistake a short while later (as the Atlantic Wire notes, more than can be said for HuffPo). But so much for Sarah Palin making it through the month without getting connected to Egypt.

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Wow, leftist anti-Christianist Rachel Maddow gets punked by a leftist anti-Christianist satire site. Who says God doesn't have a flair for irony?

Update: NewsBuster Noel Sheppard is all over this story.

- JP

The Missoulian: MCT apologizes for lyric about beheading Palin

"We made a mistake. Oh man, we made a mistake."
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After wrapping up its two-week run of Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Mikado" Sunday night, MCT Community Theatre MCT executive director Michael McGill Monday morning was in full damage control mode in the wake of the internet firestorm in reaction to the MCT production's call for the beheading of Sarah Palin:

What began with a single letter to the editor, published in last Friday's Missoulian, quickly erupted into a nationwide controversy after dozens of political bloggers picked up the thread and ran with it - some adding their own colorful (and inaccurate) amendments to the story.

In the face of it all, McGill had one simple message on Monday.

"In retrospect, we made a mistake," he said. "Anybody that gets singled out in such a way as that, whether it might be (President Barack) Obama or Palin or whomever, it's inappropriate. I take full responsibility for that."

At the center of the controversy was a single couplet, inserted by director Curt Olds into a song sung by the character Ko-Ko, a pacifist executioner. Listing off those people whom he intends to behead, the singer in the Missoula production noted, "That crazy Sarah Palin needs a psychoanalyst / She never would be missed, no she never would be missed."

"It's very common practice to amend those lyrics," said McGill. "It's how they were amended in this case that's an issue. There's a lot of misinformation about what happened, but I don't want to shirk our responsibility for what did happen.

"The important part to me is that the apology is clear and that the responsibility is taken by this organization."

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Okay, so where exactly is the apology to Gov. Palin in all of this? Anyway, just goes to show that writing letters to the editor isn't always a waste of time.

- JP

Day By Day (February 1, 2011)

Egypt?
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Good morning! It's a wonderful life if we just take it Day By Day:



Please support Chris Muir's pro-Palin Day By Day.

- JP