Palin at Rolling Thunder
Thank God, Sarah Palin is back! Politics is fun again.
Sarah Palin, the candidate the media, dismisses – and can’t stop talking about her, her political intentions, and the fact that she showed up at the Rolling Thunder rally at the Pentagon Sunday, May 29, 2011, during the Memorial Day weekend in Washington.
Sarah Palin is Getting Ready to Run
Now that it has been confirmed that Sarah Palin has bought a home in Scottsdale, AZ, it seems pretty certain that she is getting ready to run for President.
Democrat Party partisan Jonathan Bernstein at the Washington Post concedes that she’s got supporters in place, policy positions that are agreeable to mainstream Republicans, and yes, she’s got credentials:
On the plus side, Palin still has something that, as far as I can tell, only Ron Paul of the current Republican field brings to the table: a large, dedicated group of supporters. That’s a valuable resource. She is also conventionally credentialed; yes, she didn’t even make it through a full term in Alaska, but the VP nomination basically clinches it; the Republican Party is already on record as saying that she is qualified to be president. On top of that, Palin has, as far as I know, not a single position on the issues that would get her in trouble with any important Republican organized group or constituency. All of those things make her a plausible Republican nominee for President of the United States.
Actually, that is an important point that Bernstein makes: it doesn’t matter that she didn’t complete a 4-year term as Governor of Alaska, because had she become the Vice President of the United States, she would have resigned as Governor anyway in January of 2009 rather than when she did leave in July 2009.
Palin Film to Debut in June
An epic Sarah Palin documentary will premiere next month, in of all places … Iowa, a crucial launching state for republicans candidates running for president.
Real Clear Politics reported last night on a new Sarah Palin film that will be releases next month in Iowa: “This film is a call to action for a campaign like 1976: Reagan vs. the establishment,” filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon said. “Let’s have a good old-fashioned brouhaha.”
Actually, Palin was a Great Governor
They still hate her, but the left Atlantic Magazine offered the following concessions admitting that Sarah Palin did some remarkable things during her two-and-a-half years in the Alaska governor’s office:
As governor, Palin demonstrated many of the qualities we expect in our best leaders. She set aside private concerns for the greater good….She succeeded to a remarkable extent in settling, at least for a time, what had seemed insoluble problems, in the process putting Alaska on a trajectory to financial well-being.
…Palin came out hard on the other side of the philosophical divide from Murkowski—and made it personal. She announced she would challenge him for governor. She assailed the “secret gas line deal” and the “multinational oil companies that make mind-boggling profits off resources owned by all Alaskans.” She put an “all-Alaska” pipeline at the center of her campaign. And she declared her intention to hire Tom Irwin to negotiate the deal. “She’s what I call ‘alley-cat smart,’” Tony Knowles, the former Democratic governor, told me. “It’s not about ideology. She knows how to pick her way down the political route that she feels will be the most beneficial to what she wants to do.”
…Palin has gained a reputation for being erratic, undisciplined, not up to the job. But that wasn’t how she looked as governor. She began by confronting the two biggest issues in Alaska—the gas pipeline and the oil tax—and drove the policy process on both of them.
…Four years later, Palin’s gas line hasn’t gotten going, but it’s not really her fault. Plunging natural-gas prices have made the project uneconomical. Her oil tax is a different story: though designed to capture more revenue under most scenarios, ACES has raised a lot more money than almost anyone imagined. That’s largely because of high oil prices. But it also shows that the law is working. ConocoPhillips, BP, and ExxonMobil have reported record profits—so it’s fitting that, in a sense, Alaska has, too. It’s no exaggeration to say that ACES has made the state one of the fiscally strongest in the union. Flush with cash, Alaska produced large capital budgets that blunted the effects of the recession. Moody’s just upped the state’s bond rating to AAA for the first time. While other states reel under staggering deficits, budget cuts, and protests, Alaska has built up a $12 billion surplus, most of it attributable to Palin’s tax. Galvin estimates that it has raised $8 billion more than Murkowski’s tax would have. But given the corruption that plagued the PPT, a better benchmark might be the tax it supplanted—the one put on the books after the Exxon Valdez spill. By that measure, Palin’s major achievement has probably meant the difference between a $12 billion surplus and a deficit.
Palin’s achievement was to pull Alaska out of a dire, corrupt, enduring systemic crisis and return it to fiscal health and prosperity when many people believed that such a thing was impossible…“
SF Chronicle Reports Truth, Conservatives Threaten to Subscribe
In the current spat between the White House and left-coast left-wing San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, the paper has won – calling the WH out on a lie that it did, in fact, threaten to remove one of the newspaper’s pool reporters from a presidential press conference in SF. It was self-defense, but SF had to go all FoxNews and accurate on the WH by reporting The Truth. In response, conservatives in the bay area writing to the Chronicle saying that if the paper keeps this up, they may actually subscribe to read the paper again. Read the comments.
Sarah Palin Predicted This
In November, Governor Sarah Palin predicted that QE2 would have inflationary repercussions, that is, the higher gas and food prices Americans are feeling more and more each week. To quote Palin then: “We don’t want temporary, artificial economic growth bought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings.”
Sarah Palin said that last year. She was right and it is all coming true. Trying to artificially stimulate the economy did the opposite of what it intended, causing us to pay more out of our paychecks for fuel, energy, food, and more. We can’t continue to borrow and spend money we don’t have. And the left tries to paint Palin as stupid?
An editorial in the New York Sun discussed this today:
It happens that Mrs. Palin’s demarche coincided with a piece in the Financial Times by the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, suggesting that a new international monetary system centered on the major currencies “should also consider employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values.” The FT is such a Keynesian bastion that the Journal likened Mr. Zoellick’s mentioning gold in its pages to mentioning Sarah Palin’s name at the Princeton Faculty Club. The FT issued an editorial attacking its own op-ed piece, while Mr. Zoellick’s scoop so startled the New York Times that it brought in no less a heavyweight than James Grant of the Interest Rate Observer to write a piece on the virtues of the gold standard.
And now the Times itself is out with its a story about how the Fed’s quantitative easing has been a disappointment. It may have, as the Times puts it, “pumped up the stock market, reduced the cost of American exports and allowed companies to borrow money at lower interest rates,” but “those benefits have been surprisingly small.” Will any of this bring some humility to the Fed and its chairman? It will be something to watch for in his first big press conference Wednesday. No doubt it will be one of the most crowded press conferences in recent memory, and there will be lots to ask about. But one of the questions will be how in tarnation Mrs. Palin figured it out so far ahead of everyone else.
Yesterday Don Surber did a brilliant piece discussing why Palin saw the folly of the QE2 and boldly said so, while leftist economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman continues to believe that only a spend, spend, spend government policy will float the economy in good times and bad times.
Fight Like a Girl!
Sarah Palin in Wisconsin: “… to the GOP establishment, if you stand on the platform, if you stand by your pledges, we will stand with you. We will fight with you GOP. We have your back. Together, we will win because America will win. We didn’t elect you just to rearrange the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. We didn’t elect you just to stand back and watch Obama redistribute those deck chairs.
What we need is for you to stand up, GOP, and fight. Maybe I should ask some of the Badger women’s hockey team, those champions, maybe I should ask them if we should be suggesting to GOP leaders they need to learn how to fight like a girl.”
Read a full report at conservatives4palin.com
HuffPO Concedes that Palin Has Abilities
What in the world is happening if even the far left-wing Huffington Post admits that Sarah Palin has the chops to meet and greet foreign leaders and does so with ease, even looking “comfortable on the world stage?”
While there are a few unnecessary criticisms, the HuffPo writer at least admits that the Question and Answer session in India had no gaffes, as well as a claim that Palin is “no longer awkward in speaking publicly and to the media on issues involving the international arena”:
If Sarah Palin should declare her candidacy for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, the past few days may be looked back at by political historians as an important marker. While pundits continue to dwell on the supposedly collapsing poll numbers for Palin and trumpet the erosion of her presidential ambitions, the former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee was abroad, buttressing the one area seen as a major weakness in Palin’s ability to project herself as a national political leader, foreign policy. Palin was the keynote speaker at the India Today Conclave in New Delhi, an assembly of the most prominent Indian business leaders. Her speech dealt with her vision of America, with a major focus on energy independence and oil drilling, a possible key issue for a future Sarah Palin for President campaign.
After her speech to India’s elite, Sarah Palin went off to Israel for a brief visit, which included a private dinner with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The dual visits to India and Israel within such a compressed period of time showed Sarah Palin as not only comfortable but even self-confident on the world stage. In New Delhi, she answered questions in an unstructured Q & A session that was devoid of major gaffes. The interview she granted Fox News upon her return from Israel, in which she commented on events in Libya and the Middle East, revealed a Palin that was no longer awkward in speaking publicly and to the media on issues involving the international arena.
It seems clear that Sarah Palin has been working hard on buttressing her knowledge of foreign policy issues, and her facility in discussing international affairs in a public setting. No doubt, Palin has been helped by some serious coaching from others who are much more knowledgeable on foreign policy. The question that surfaces is this: for what purpose has Sarah Palin devoted time and effort towards enhancing her grasp of foreign affairs? Critics on the left, and even within the establishment of the Republican Party, will argue that this is merely for the purpose of increasing her marketability and fees as a celebrity speaker. I think these critics do not fully comprehend the objectives and political ambitions of Sarah Palin, and her determination and focus in pursuing them.
The Palin Doctrine Emerges
… and a REAL leader emerges?
“The call by the Arab League for Western military intervention in an Arab state — in this case asking that a UN “no-fly zone” be imposed over Libya – is not only without precedent but it puts in formal terms what Governor Palin stated three weeks ago should have been America’s response to the political and humanitarian crisis now unfolding there.”
In addition: “Mrs. Palin also continues to link America’s energy policy — a realm in which she has experience — and U.S. foreign and anti-terrorism policies. She recognizes that the ongoing transfer of billions of U.S. petro-dollars to unstable or even hostile Mideast regimes has, since the formation in 1973 of the Organization of Petoleum Exporting Countries, been an drain on U.S. financial resources.”
Read: Palin Doctrine Emerges as Arab League Echoes Her Demarche on Libya
By BENYAMIN KORN
Palin’s Courage: The Central Virtue
British historian Paul Johnson writing in the The Wall Street Journal is optimistic that Americans will pull through the current crisis as they have been doing for over 200 years.
As for his impression of Sarah Palin, he told writer Brian Carney that pessimists have been predicting America’s “decline since the 18th century.”
But whenever things are looking bad, America “suddenly produces these wonderful things—like the tea party movement. That’s cheered me up no end. Because it’s done more for women in politics than anything else—all the feminists? Nuts! It’s brought a lot of very clever and quite young women into mainstream politics and got them elected. A very good little movement, that. I like it.”
Then he deepens his voice for effect and adds: “And I like that lady—Sarah Palin. She’s great. I like the cut of her jib.”
The former governor of Alaska, he says, “is in the good tradition of America, which this awful political correctness business goes against.” Plus: “She’s got courage. That’s very important in politics. You can have all the right ideas and the ability to express them. But if you haven’t got guts, if you haven’t got courage the way Margaret Thatcher had courage—and [Ronald] Reagan, come to think of it. Your last president [Bush] had courage too—if you haven’t got courage, all the other virtues are no good at all. It’s the central virtue.”
It’s a good read.
Palin/Qaum Currently Lead in Iron Dog
Todd Palin and Eric Quam have not teamed together before to run the Iron Dog race, but both are former champions and are currently Team #1. You can see the route the Iron Dog racers will travel here and race tracking here.
