Libertarian Leanings

Sarah Comes To Manchester

I can't begin to tell you how thoroughly annoyed I am.  I missed Sarah Palin today.  It's my own fault.  She spoke for 35 minutes at the Veterans Memorial Park in Manchester, but I managed to arrange our comings and goings so as to completely miss her speech.  We had it on good authority — or so we thought — that Sarah was going get the last word so we wandered off to grab a bite to eat and wait for the grand finale. When we got back, walking through the crowd and wondering aloud at how small it was, someone said, "Oh yeah, the place emptied right out after Sarah left."  What?  She's already been and gone?  Ordinarily I'm not burning with desire to meet with celebrities and political dignitaries, and I didn't have any particular sense of urgency about getting to see Sarah.  But I have to confess, I was tremendously disappointed. But the big news is there is no news.  Though the crowd drowned her out at times chanting "Run, Sarah, run," Sarah is keeping her options open. ...Palin did not announce her candidacy, and instead focused on a critique of President Barack Obama in a speech reverential in its treatment of the tea party and dismissive of several of her opponents, of Washington and of politics as usual. The tea party icon took a swipe at Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who rearranged his campaign schedule to speak at two tea party events this week, and implied he is a reluctant convert to the activists' power and scope. "Now, we're seeing more and more folks realize the strength of this grass-roots movement," she said. "And they're wanting to be involved. I say right on. Better late than never – for some of these candidates especially. Okay?"

Here the full speech, courtesy of therightscoop.com and CNN.

On the brighter side.  Though I missed the chance to hear Sarah speak in person, I did get to meet up with a couple of well known bloggers — bloggers more serious than I, I must confess.  Stacy McCain came up from Maryland. My rough eyeball estimate was about 800 people. There were lots of chants of “Run, Sarah, run!” BTW, this photo nearly got me the bum’s rush from security. I went up the stair backstage to get the photo and was then, um, asked by security to leave the backstage area. Hazards of the trade. But the point is — I got the photo. Follow the link above to see Stacy's photos. Stacy was staying with Da Tech Guy, Peter Ingemi.  Da Tech Guy does a radio show out of Worcester on WCRN 830AM every Saturday morning.  I've been on it a couple of times and it's great fun. The Palin fans were convinced that she IS running but are not sure when she will be announcing. The initial crowd was small but as we got closer to the start of the program there was crowd burst that filled up the park rather quickly. Much to my surprise the Governor was put on early in the program... Surprised me, too.  Damn.  Follow the link above to see Pete's photos. Still shots courtesy of SarahPAC are here. Stacy and Peter rode up together from Leominster, Massachusetts to hang out with Dan Collins of the Conservative Commune. Thanks to the generous contributions of Stacy McCain, CJ Norris, Jim Jamitis, and Sissy Willis, I’m off to hang with Stacy, Da Techguy, Jay Tea of Wizbang, and possibly American Glob in Manchester, where Sarah Palin’s going to be addressing another TEA Party crowd, possibly in another drizzle. It turned out not to be a drizzle, and in fact the weather was pretty good.  The Tea Party is alive and well, and though all may not be right with the world, I'm optimistic that things will be much better in about a year and a half.  In the meantime I'll say a prayer that my younger daughter taught me.  It's appropriate as I look a year and a half down the road, and it was a prayer that might have been helpful today "Dear Lord, grant me patience, and if you would, be quick about it."

Stacy, Dan, and Pete in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Sarah Palin Eyes

When Rhett saw through her ruse, Scarlett was enraged.  She'd made the journey to Atlanta in a gown made from the dining room drapes determined to convince Rhett Butler to marry her.  Rhett's money would save Tara.  But she found him in a Yankee jail, and he found her out.  When her work roughened hands gave her away, seduction gave way to a negotiation that held no hope of success.  Rhett couldn't lay hands on the money she needed even if he wanted to. But he did have advice to give.  If Scarlett hoped to catch a man to save Tara, she needed to be more seductive.  "I've seen eyes like yours above a dueling pistol at twenty paces from me," he said. I thought of Scarlett as I watched Sarah Palin on Fox News Sunday this morning, not because Sarah is a seductress, but because of the fire in her eyes.

Sarah's been breaking the rules of American politics ever since those progressive activists launched a series of frivolous lawsuits to interfere with her governorship of Alaska.  When she resigned rather than spend all of her time and a half million dollars in legal fees to fight them, conventional wisdom had it that her political career was over.  Surprise, surprise. It's not.  We don't know where her career is going but we know it's not over, not by a long shot.  That was more than apparent after enough of Palin's endorsed candidates won their races in the midterm election that Nancy Pelosi's reign as Speaker of the House of Representatives came to a rather abrupt finish.  Now, when media types aren't busy predicting the Republican electoral debacle if Palin should become the nominee, they're complaining that she hasn't formally announced her presidential campaign.  She might.  And then again, she might not.  But I, for one, would welcome it if she does.  She has what it takes.  She's forcing the media to play her game, and they're not doing all that well at it.  They don't understand the rules.  She takes policy positions based on common sense instead of electoral appeal.  She has a game plan.  WALLACE: I just want to make sure I'm clear. So, you're saying no deal for deficit reduction. Don't raise the debt limit. PALIN: I have -- I know that the debt ceiling will be raised, whether I want it to be raised or not. There is a majority in Congress, both sides of the aisle, that will raise the debt ceiling. If I were in Congress, though, I would be a "no" vote to raising that debt ceiling. I would send that message that it is failed leadership in the White House and with our elected officials when they have allowed to us to get this breaking point, if you will, that Moody's is warning about. So, I vote no on the debt ceiling. It's just going to allow the big spenders another tool to continue to increase debt. So, I believe that the debt ceiling will be raised. But for those who are already committed to voting for it, they better get something out of it for "We the people." They better get a balanced budget. They better get commensurate cuts in federal spending that equate to that increase in debt, because they're going to keep incurring more and more. How about people like Senator Begich, a Democrat from Alaska. He better get ANWR in this bill, opening another domestic source of energy up there in Alaska when he votes yes for increasing the debt ceiling. WALLACE: Let me -- PALIN: These folks better get something out of it. Sarah will get what she's after, in large part because liberal media luminaries have no idea what that might be.  They don't get Sarah, but Sarah gets them and she means business.  In that way she's very much like the headstrong Scarlett, who also broke all the rules to save the things important to her.  For Scarlett it was Tara.  For Sarah it's America.

Sarah On Paul Revere

Sarah Palin is once again drawing fire from progressive news readers, this time for a supposed gaffe on Paul Revere's ride.

One moment that you won't find posted on the blog is Palin's response to reporters when they asked her who Paul Revere was. Instead of saying, "Come on, everyone knows who Paul Revere, the silversmith and patriot is," she stammered while saying this:

"He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed."

Needless to say, the lamestream media are having a field day with that gaffe.

Mediaite was one of those who was quick to point out the errors in Palin's version of American history.

Palin’s version wasn’t exactly the official History Channel rendition of the tale, and she delivered it in a somewhat stumbling fashion, but the thing about the Midnight Ride is that it is precisely the sort of historic event where everyone seems to have it wrong. For one, Revere didn’t warn the British were out to take anyone’s arms, as he didn’t yell out “the British are coming!”, as the myth goes. He had to be quiet to not let the British know that he knew (sorry, but no bells either) they were coming– to seize weapons stores, actually– and history notes that his warning was likely something far less epic-sounding, like “the Regulars are coming.”

ABC News jumped in with this:

Of course, Revere was in fact trying to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams about the approaching British army. And he didn't rely on bells. He was on a covert mission. Had he used bells, or had he warned the people with whom America was at war, Palin's tour bus might have chugged through the northeast on the left side of the road.

But International Business Times points out that Palin's version was closer to actual events than American history according to her critics.

According to a history of the ride by David Hackett Fischer in his 1995 book "Paul Revere's Ride," after Revere awakened the community in Medford, just north of Boston, Revere rode to the house of Captain Isaac Hall, commander of Medford's minutemen, "who instantly triggered the town's alarm system. A townsman remembered that 'repeated gunshots, the beating of drums and the ringing of bells filled the air.'"

In the book, Fischer recounts what British troops marching north heard. The "meeting bells" were "not very loud - nothing like the carillons of ancient English churches," Fischer wrote.

"These were small, solitary country bells, clanging faintly in the night, but the sounds came from every side - west, north, and even east behind the column" of troops.

Non-bell alarms included beacon fires. Fischer writes about one soldier who also recalled seeing visual warnings.

"On distant hilltops he began to make out beacon fires burning brilliantly across the rolling landscape," Fischer writes.

So in an off the cuff reply, Palin clumsily stumbled through a telling of Paul Revere's midnight ride that turns out to be more accurate than the scripted and rehearsed interpretations of liberal news readers whose only aim is to heighten their own popularity by putting down Palin.  Charlie Martin has advice for like minded liberals.

In this Paul Revere thing, we’ve got Palin, who probably made a verbal slip that turns out to be true, or possibly knew an obscure part of Revere’s memoirs of the event, but in the mean time is shaping the “national conversation” about most of the major political issues today, and doing it with a Facebook page...

I’d suggest that anyone who thinks Sarah Palin is stupid should never, never ever, take the other side of a bar bet with her.

Update:  When I originally read her clumsy remarks I assumed she misspoke, meaning say "warned that the British were coming" instead of "warned the British."  But when asked by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, she replied that she meant what she said the first time.

WALLACE: I got to ask you real quickly about that, though. You realized that you messed up about Paul Revere, don't you?

PALIN: You know what? I didn't mess up about Paul Revere. Here is what Paul Revere did. He warned the Americans that the British were coming, the British were coming, and they were going to try take our arms and we got to make sure that we were protecting ourselves and shoring up all of ammunitions and our firearms so that they couldn't take it.

But remember that the British had already been there, many soldiers for seven years in that area. And part of Paul Revere's ride -- and it wasn't just one ride -- he was a courier, he was a messenger. Part of his ride was to warn the British that we're already there. That, hey, you're not going to succeed. You're not going to take American arms. You are not going to beat our own well- armed persons, individual, private militia that we have. He did warn the British.

And in a shout-out, gotcha type of question that was asked of me, I answered candidly. And I know my American history.

WALLACE: Well, I got tell you, I wasn't sure entirely before I ask you that question. So, I went to Google to make sure that I knew as much. And we both know now.

Legal Insurrection has Paul Revere's version of it from the historical text.

In fact, as pointed out at Conservatives4Palin, Revere did in fact tell the British that the colonial militias, who had been alerted, were waiting for them.  Here is the original historical text written by Revere (spelling in original, bold added):

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. He imediately rode towards those who stoppd us, when all five of them came down upon a full gallop; one of them, whom I afterwards found to be Major Mitchel, of the 5th Regiment, Clapped his pistol to my head, called me by name, & told me he was going to ask me some questions, & if I did not give him true answers, he would blow my brains out. He then asked me similar questions to those above. He then orderd me to mount my Horse, after searching me for arms

She has them all confounded on the left.

The Elusive Sarah Palin

Dan Hirschhorn and Politico try their hands at knocking down Sarah Palin with two articles featured on Memeorandum.  First we learn that New Hampshire Republicans are left cold by Palin's One Nation tour.

MANCHESTER, N.H. - As it played out on TV this week, Sarah Palin’s “One Nation” road trip of U.S. historical sites was a masterpiece of political mischief-making – a wild dash up the East Coast that delighted her fans and cornered the market on 2012 coverage for days on end.

That’s not how the bus tour looked to Republicans on the ground, many of whom are more convinced than ever that the former Alaska governor is simply not serious about running for president.

While Palin has reveled in giving an extended one-fingered salute to the national press, refusing to give out details about her travel schedule and forcing reporters to literally chase her vehicle up I-95 in order to cover her, she reached out to precious few activists and party leaders in the states she visited.

Now, I'd be willing to bet that reporters Alexander Burns and Dan Hirschhorn are speaking metaphorically when referring to an extended one-finger salute.  But, by using it they leave no doubt that they're quite annoyed.  And the annoyance extends into the second featured article which is by Kasie Hunt with Hirschhorn listed as a contributor. Sarah Palin's tour a rolling menace, they say.

SEABROOK, N.H. — Sarah Palin’s bus is plastered with a mock-up of the U.S. Constitution. But her entourage — both the three-vehicle motorcade that includes the bus and the smaller, two-SUV version she uses for smaller events — hasn’t been very respectful of traffic laws.

They speed. They run red lights and stop signs. They make last-second lane changes to get off the highway, sometimes without signaling.

So do the reporters following them.

Journalists in the caravan trailing her “One Nation” tour bus describe the experience as harrowing, a rolling menace careening up the East Coast in hot pursuit of the former Alaska governor who declined to provide any advance itinerary of her tour over six days on the road.

They must wonder, why can't she just suck up to us like everybody else?  How humiliating that they have to chase her down, and quite obviously without much success.  But Sarah isn't giving them the time of day.  Based on their stories, should she?

Meanwhile, as the media herd breathlessly speculates, will she or won't she run, Byron York points out that Sarah has been laying out substantive policy positions all the while.

One thing many viewers have probably missed in all the horse-race speculation is that Palin is perfectly willing to discuss her positions on key issues, if anyone wants to ask. In fact, in recent days, weeks, and months, we've seen a lot of policy commentary from the former Alaska governor.

For example, during the bus trip, Palin took a stand on an issue that is crucial for candidates considering a run in the Iowa caucuses. "I think that all of our energy subsidies need to be re-looked at today and eliminated," Palin told RealClearPolitics. "We've got to allow the free market to dictate what's most efficient and economical for our nation's economy." What that means is Palin opposes the infamous ethanol subsidy that some presidential aspirants are afraid to question, lest they lose support in heavily agricultural Iowa.

And wasn't this right after presumptive front runner Mitt Romney announced his support for ethanol subsidies, who also happened to be in Iowa when he announced it.   So it shouldn't surprise anybody if Republican bigwigs are put off by Palin, who turned up in New Hampshire on the day Mitt Romney formally announced his candidacy for the 2012 presidential race.  She's always ticked off the bigwigs.

I guess the reporters count themselves as bigwigs.

Will She or Won't She?

Is Sarah Palin preparing for her presidential run?

Campaigns are filled with routine work. For example, on Thursday, the Pawlenty team sent out a message headlined, "Governor Pawlenty Unveils Florida Finance Team." It's not newsy, but it's the kind of thing presidential campaigns have to do. Palin's not doing it. There are no Palin campaign organizations in early primary and caucus states, or anywhere else, for that matter.

Nevertheless, the political world is filled with speculation about Palin's intentions. Until recently, most Republican insiders believed she would not run. Then...

A Palin Documentary

A two-hour Sarah Palin documentary is expected to be released in June.

The film's coda is introduced with an on-screen caption that reads, "From here, I can see November." It is here that Mark Levin alludes to Ronald Reagan as a Palin-like insurgent who was also once distrusted by the GOP establishment.

Sarah's getting ready to run.

Rogue Sarah Flexes Some Political Muscle

In what may become the most stunning of upsets this season, incumbent Republican Senator from Alaska, Lisa Murkowski, trails TEA Party favorite Joe Miller in the Alaska Republican primary.  Miller was a virtual unknown with $84,000 in the war chest compared to Murkowski's $1.86 million, until Sarah Palin endorsed him.

How Lisa Murkowski (might have) lost

1. The stunning news that developed over night in Alaska -- with 98 percent of precincts reporting, attorney Joe Miller (R) leads Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) 51 percent to 49 percent -- reveals the depth of anti-incumbent sentiment in the country, the power of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (and the tea party movement) and the perils of prognostication in low turnout intraparty fights.

First, the numbers. With 429 of 438 precincts reporting, Miller stands at 45,909 votes while Murkowski has 43,949 votes. According to the Alaska Division of Elections, more than 16,000 absentee ballots were requested and fewer than half (7,600) had been returned as of Monday night.

Absentees won't start to be counted for another six days and there are clearly enough outstanding votes for Murkowski to stage a comeback. If she was to lose, however, Murkowski would be the third Senator to fall in a party re-nomination contest this year.

How did we get here?

Yes, that is the question progressives must ponder.  How did we ever come to this!  Journolister extraordinaire David Weigel was at a loss.

There was evidence that Miller could win. It was just obscure, because Alaska handicappers didn't see evidence that a combination of lucky factors were breaking his way. (Gutierrez quoted Alaska sources exclusively.) The Palin endorsement got him uncritical national media attention. The Tea Party Express bought $500,000 in ads for Miller, which was the largest single buy in the state. Perhaps most importantly, the Measure 2 anti-abortion proposition was bringing out conservative voters. Meanwhile, Miller hadn't exactly lit the state on fire (one rally brought in nine people).

Did the rest of the media ignore Miller because of bias, then? I don't think so...

Media?  Biased?  Couldn't be!  Though Weigel admitted he was embarrassed to have badly underestimated Miller, his analysis of the primary results suggest he is still doesn't have a clue.

Yes, but since at best Murkowski is going to win closer than any polls suggested, here are two things that affected the race. The first: The Tea Party Express threw around $500,000 into the campaign on Miller's behalf. That's huge money in Alaska. Second: Measure 2, a parental consent ballot initiative, brought out pro-life voters who have never trusted Murkowski. Sarah Palin's early endorsement also handed Miller credibility and media attention which, in a GOP primary, was more important than Palin's increasing unpopularity in the state.

Weigel must get his news from the mainstream media.  Among media luminaries Palin is hugely unpopular and becoming more unpopular by the day.  Outside of the media echo chamber, she may not fare so poorly.  Weigel's misperception of Palin's unpopularity could be the reason he blew it so badly. 

He was not alone.  On Monday Slate's Alexandra Gutierrez predicted Miller's defeat, a defeat she seemed to relish as an embarrassment for Palin.

On Tuesday, in her home state, Sarah Palin's favorite will probably get trounced. Joe Miller is widely expected to lose by a large margin to incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary—an embarrassing defeat for the former governor, who has endorsed Miller, but also to Miller's other major backer, the Tea Party Express.

Well that didn't happen.  But how else could you explain it?  MSNBC's First Read has the way.  The MSNBC crowd figures that Anger Trumps Accomplishments.  After all, there couldn't very well be any thought process involved.

Stunning development: Murkowski trails Miller by 1,960 votes in AK GOP Senate primary… We might not know the final result for days... How to explain why McCain easily won in AZ but Murkowski is in trouble: Anger is trumping accomplishments… That’s a lesson vulnerable Democrats might want to learn…

About that lesson.  Everybody knows there is a bit of anger out there among the electorate, but Democrats and other incumbents may want to consider the possibility that anger is a direct result of their accomplishments.  Especially their accomplishments over the last 18 months, but before that as well. 

They may consider it, but I suspect it won't take.  Progressives will regroup to refine their message.  The question will always be, "Why don't those rubes get it?"

Meanwhile Sarah Palin's endorsements have been doing pretty well recently.

Tuesday’s Republican primaries showed that Sarah Palin's power should not be discounted.

Four candidates backed by the former Alaska governor pulled off primary victories, while a fifth, Alaska attorney Joe Miller, appeared to be on the verge of pulling off a major upset by defeating Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

People are naturally drawn to a winner, and right now Sarah is looking like the big winner.  It's going to be an exciting November.  Most exciting is going to be to watch the meltdown in the mainstream media and other hotbeds of progressivism.

Confirming What We Already Knew

More and more Journolist sewage is seeping into public view.  The Daily Caller has the Journolist conversations about McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].”

Isn't that exactly the knock on Palin that the mainstream media promoted?

Boycott Copenhagen?

Fat chance, but that's what Sarah Palin urges Barack Obama to do in an editorial column in today's Washington Post.

With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.

"Climate-gate," as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle -- the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.

As you might expect, I would agree.  Obama shouldn't be dragging American into some treaty that is going to put us at a competitive disadvantage, particularly when unemployment stands at 10%.  But if anything has been made clear by the email scandal, fighting climate change is not about the climate or the weather.  It's all about extending the reach of government, and that continues to be Barack Obama's primary goal. 

Calling a Spade a Spade

David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen, admires Sarah Palin for knowing when to call a spade a spade as she did when she referred to those bureaucratic arrangements for deciding who should be entitled to medical treatment as "death panels."

Candour is when you tell a truth that is disturbing, in language so unambiguous that persons in polite company will not want to hear you. It is a way to lose the respect of the genteel -- of those who are "respectable" in the shallowest sense. Rude language is quite unnecessary to this end: the hard truth itself, spoken plainly and publicly, will give sufficient offence.

Thuggery is unrelated to this. It consists not of candid argument but of naked intimidation. It may be done crassly -- for instance, by the union thugs who have begun to appear at U.S. townhall meetings, to confront opponents of the Democrats' health-care agenda. Or it may be done smoothly, with the politically correct gesture, that conveys the threat of later reprisal against anyone who utters the contrary, "incorrect" thought. A good example would be the "[email protected]" e-mail address that was set up on the official White House website, to which Obama supporters across the country were invited to report "fishy" opposition to that health-care agenda.

[...]

It is assumed she will be running for president on the redneck ticket. But as we saw last week, she does not need any office to get results. For after many nice legislators had condemned her for her "unreasonable" criticisms, the U.S. Senate finance committee this week dropped a key provision to which she had referred, from the House health-care bill before them. According to the ranking Republican member, it was dropped "because it could be misinterpreted or implemented incorrectly."

The truth is, Sarah doesn't have to run for office, or even be in office to to have a profound impact on politics and political outcomes.

Via Real Clear Politics.