OBAMA HAS A WOMEN PROBLEM
Let’s see if the media spend as much time talking about President Obama’s treatment of women as they have spent and will spend on whether Sarah Palin had sex with an NBA player 30 years ago.
Tag » SARAH PALIN
NEW YORK TIMES:PALIN MAY BE ON TO SOMETHING
Someone at the New York Times actually took the time to listen to what Sarah Palin said and came away with a different opinion.
Some of Sarah Palin’s Ideas Cross the Political Divide
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Let us begin by confessing that, if Sarah Palin surfaced to say something intelligent and wise and fresh about the present American condition, many of us would fail to hear it.
That is not how we’re primed to see Ms. Palin. A pugnacious Tea Partyer? Sure. A woman of the people? Yup. A Mama Grizzly? You betcha.
But something curious happened when Ms. Palin strode onto the stage last weekend at a Tea Party event in Indianola, Iowa. Along with her familiar and predictable swipes at President Barack Obama and the “far left,” she delivered a devastating indictment of the entire U.S. political establishment — left, right and center — and pointed toward a way of transcending the presently unbridgeable political divide.
The next day, the “lamestream” media, as she calls it, played into her fantasy of it by ignoring the ideas she unfurled and dwelling almost entirely on the will-she-won’t-she question of her presidential ambitions.
So here is something I never thought I would write: a column about Sarah Palin’s ideas.
There was plenty of the usual Palin schtick — words that make clear that she is not speaking to everyone but to a particular strain of American: “The working men and women of this country, you got up off your couch, you came down from the deer stand, you came out of the duck blind, you got off the John Deere, and we took to the streets, and we took to the town halls, and we ended up at the ballot box.”
But when her throat was cleared at last, Ms. Palin had something considerably more substantive to say.
She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).
In supporting her first point, about the permanent political class, she attacked both parties’ tendency to talk of spending cuts while spending more and more; to stoke public anxiety about a credit downgrade, but take a vacation anyway; to arrive in Washington of modest means and then somehow ride the gravy train to fabulous wealth. She observed that 7 of the 10 wealthiest counties in the United States happen to be suburbs of the nation’s capital.
Her second point, about money in politics, helped to explain the first. The permanent class stays in power because it positions itself between two deep troughs: the money spent by the government and the money spent by big companies to secure decisions from government that help them make more money.
“Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done?” she said, referring to politicians. “It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed — a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.”
Because her party has agitated for the wholesale deregulation of money in politics and the unshackling of lobbyists, these will be heard in some quarters as sacrilegious words.
Ms. Palin’s third point was more striking still: in contrast to the sweeping paeans to capitalism and the free market delivered by the Republican presidential candidates whose ranks she has yet to join, she sought to make a distinction between good capitalists and bad ones. The good ones, in her telling, are those small businesses that take risks and sink and swim in the churning market; the bad ones are well-connected megacorporations that live off bailouts, dodge taxes and profit terrifically while creating no jobs.
Strangely, she was saying things that liberals might like, if not for Ms. Palin’s having said them.
“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest — to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners — the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”
Is there a hint of a political breakthrough hiding in there?
The political conversation in the United States is paralyzed by a simplistic division of labor. Democrats protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big money and enhanced by government action. Republicans protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big government and enhanced by the free market.
What is seldom said is that human flourishing is a complex and delicate thing, and that we needn’t choose whether government or the market jeopardizes it more, because both can threaten it at the same time.
Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism.
On one side would be those Americans who believe in the power of vast, well-developed institutions like Goldman Sachs, the Teamsters Union, General Electric, Google and the U.S. Department of Education to make the world better. On the other side would be people who believe that power, whether public or private, becomes corrupt and unresponsive the more remote and more anonymous it becomes; they would press to live in self-contained, self-governing enclaves that bear the burden of their own prosperity.
No one knows yet whether Ms. Palin will actually run for president. But she did just get more interesting.
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She has a better understanding of what’s wrong with the country than most of the “experienced” and “qualified” politicians who are taken much more seriously.
SARAH PALIN IS NOT TINA FEY
I was one of the first media people in the country to say that John McCain should pick Sarah Palin as his running mate.
At the time, very few people had heard of her.
I discovered her before Tina Fey did and I liked her because I had read about her record and because she wasn’t the typical politician.
I also liked her because she went against her own party and stuck it to everybody who underestimated her.
Unfortunately, after the media got a hold of her, she became a caricature of herself and people began to look at her as a stupid hillbilly.
They focused on her folksiness and exaggerated her gaffes.
Contrary to popular belief, she never said she could see Russia from her house.
Based on what she accomplished in Alaska, compared to what Obama didn’t accomplish in the senate, she was much more qualified to be president than he was.
She may be announcing that she’ll be running for president soon.
I don’t think she’ll be able to overcome how she has been portrayed by her enemies, but I don’t know how a fair minded person could read this list and dismiss her as an incompetent bimbo.
- As governor in 2007, Palin was responsible for the largest veto totals in state history, while investing $1 billion in forward-funding education and fulfilling public safety and infrastructure necessities.
- Palin invested $5 billion in state savings during a time of economic surplus.
- Palin reduced spending by 9.5% from 2007 to 2010 and slashed earmark requests by over 80% during her time as governor.
- Under Palin, Alaska’s total liabilities were reduced by 34.6% overall.
- As governor, Palin was the CEO of the state and had substantial authority. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, “In Alaska, the Governor has line-item veto power over the budget and can only be overridden by a three-quarters majority of the Legislature.”
- Palin’s free-market approach to AGIA (Alaska Gasline Inducement Act) featured full transparency with respect to competitors and no back-door meetings. It also unlocked the ConocoPhillips, BP and ExxonMobil monopoly and marked an enormous step toward energy independence.
- Palin tossed out the corruption-ridden, structurally-flawed Petroleum Profits Tax of the Murkowski administration and put forth ACES (Alaska’s Clear and Equitable Share), which incentivized development while seeing to it that Alaskans — resource owners as per the Alaska Constitution — would receive “A CLEAR and EQUITABLE SHARE (ACES) of the value of their commonly-owned oil and gas.” The result? Alaska was left with a $12 billion surplus. Also, as reported at Big Government, “The number of oil companies filing with the Alaska Department of Revenue has doubled, indicating that competition has indeed increased. Alaska has the second most business friendly tax set-up — up two spots since the passage of ACES. Additionally, a report from Governor Parnell’s Department of Revenue indicated that 2009 yielded a record high in oil jobs.”
- Palin held ExxonMobil’s feet to the fire when it wasn’t abiding by a lease agreement to drill in Point Thomson. (You thin-skinned hockey mom, you!) After over 25 years of sitting on leases with no activity, ExxonMobil finally got to it.
- Palin served as president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors, chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, vice chair of the National Governors Association Natural Resources Committee and chair of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission.
- Palin’s commitment to free-market competition and transparency is well-evidenced by her establishment of the Alaska Health Care Strategies Planning Council (HCSPC) and her introduction of the Alaska Health Care Transparency Act. The American Spectator points out that although it didn’t make it through the legislature, “The Alaska Health Care Transparency Act confirmed that Sarah Palin means it when she says she’s in politics to ‘challenge the status quo and to serve the common good.’ Moreover, her push for greater competition also demonstrates that she understands the potential of the free market to cure much of what ails American health care.”
The posters to this blog who like to make fun of her and call her stupid couldn’t dream of accomplishing what she accomplished.
On her own.
Not because of who she married or who her father was.
I don’t know if she’ll ever get one vote for president, but, in my book, this is one cool broad.
PALIN EMAILZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz
Sarah Palin likes to call the dinosaur media the lamestream media and they proved her right last week with the frenzy over her emails.
I’m sure the media, now that they have some time on their hands, will turn their investigating skills on President Obama.
They wouldn’t have to look far. They could just look into what Stanley Kurtz pointed out in “Radical in Chief.”
“The revelations in Radical-in-Chief include a reconstruction of socialist conferences Obama himself admits attending in the mid-1980′s; heretofore unknown documents from Obama’s initial stint as a community organizer in Chicago; documents closely tying Obama to a hard-left community organizer training institute; documents detailing Obama’s ties to ACORN and the ACORN-controlled New Party–and revealing his public account of those ties to be false; documents shedding new light on Obama’s foundation work and his sustained political alliances with Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright; documents shedding light on Obama’s endorsement by the Democratic Socialists of America in 1996, and much more.”
Obama supporters who were apoplectic when they found out that Todd Palin may or may not have been a member of the Alaska Independence Party which may or may not be in favor of Alaska seceding from the union, will say, “Who cares what meetings he attended or who he hung around with.”
But let’s dig into those emails to find out what Sarah was saying about Piper’s homework assignment.
PALIN RIGHT AGAIN
The media are having fun with Sarah Palin again. She’s being ridiculed for saying that Paul Revere warned the British.
A lot more than Joe Biden was ridiculed for saying that FDR went on TV to calm people down after the 1929 stock market crash –the dumbest thing ever said by a national candidate.
Maybe everybody who’s laughing at Palin should read Paul Revere’s version of what happened on his ride.
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It began, he writes, when “it was observed, that a number of [British] Soldiers were marching towards the bottom of the Common. About 10 o’Clock, Dr. Warren Sent in great haste for me, and beged that I would imediately Set off for Lexington, where Messrs. Hancock & Adams were, and acquaint them of the Movement, and that it was thought they were the objets.”
And then he offers this account of being captured and telling the British that there was a militia waiting for them:
“I observed a Wood at a Small distance, & made for that. When I got there, out Started Six officers, on Horse back, and orderd me to dismount;-one of them, who appeared to have the command, examined me, where I came from, & what my Name Was? I told him. it was Revere, he asked if it was Paul? I told him yes He asked me if I was an express? I answered in the afirmative. He demanded what time I left Boston? I told him; and aded, that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that There would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the Country all the way up.”
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Sounds like a warning to me.