Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota September 3, 2008.

The custody battle between Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin became public last week when two Superior Court judges issued orders unsealing the court record and denying the use of pseudonyms to protect the feuding parents’ identities.

A Dec. 23 order from Judge Kari C. Kristiansen denied Palin’s motion to close the proceedings and opened the case file to public access, while an order issued the same day by Presiding Judge Sharon Gleason denied Palin’s request to use John and Jane Doe in place of Johnston’s and her own real names.

On Nov. 4, Palin filed for sole custody of Tripp Johnston-Palin, the former couple’s son, who celebrates his first birthday today. Kristiansen initially issued temporary orders limiting access to the case file and allowing the parties to file under pseudonyms.

Johnston wasn’t playing along, however. In an opposition to Palin’s motion for a gag order, Johnston’s attorney, Rex Butler, said: “Simply put, this matter is public in nature, the courts are not refuges for the scions of the elite to obtain private dispensation of their legal matters because the public at large has an interest in the proceedings.”

There’s another factor in the mix, of course: Palin’s mother, former governor Sarah Palin, with whom Johnston has repeatedly locked horns in the press, and from whom he claims to fear retaliation.

“I do not feel protected against Sarah Palin in a closed proceeding,” Johnston said in an affidavit accompanying Butler’s filings. “I hope that if it is open she will stay out of it. … I think a public case might go a long way in reducing Sarah Palin’s instinct to attack and allow the real parties in this litigation, Bristol and I, to work things out a lot more peacefully than we could if there is any more meddling from Sarah Palin.”

Johnston’s affidavit did not disclose exactly what “meddling,” if any, the former governor has engaged in during the custody case’s brief lifetime; however, he theorized that the closed proceedings might be intended to conceal some “fairly aggressive” tactics.

Palin’s attorney, Thomas Van Flein, filed a motion in November requesting a hearing to hold Johnston in contempt based on public statements he’d made about the case; however, Kristiansen denied the motion, stating that the court had closed the custody proceedings at Palin’s request, but had not granted a request for a protective gag order. In other words, while the public couldn’t access the court file, the parties were free to talk about it to anyone they liked.

Van Flein filed a notice to the court requesting the Dec. 23 orders be withdrawn; Butler had agreed to allow him an additional week to file replies with the court on the matters, he stated, but “due to an oversight,” a stipulation for the extension was not filed with the court. (Alaska attorneys commonly grant one another extensions as a matter of professional courtesy.) Van Flein has requested oral argument on the motions for closed proceedings, pseudonym use, and a gag order.

“(It) is in the best interests of (Tripp Johnston-Palin) to allow the use of pseudonyms and the entry of a protective order ensuring that this matter remains out of the press and solely within the Court, where it belongs,” Van Flein wrote.

Kristiansen received Van Flein’s late replies, but issued an order Dec. 24 denying his motion.

Maia Nolan
Alaska Dispatch

The following information is from the Alaska Trial Court Cases Public Access Docket List in the matter of 3PA-09-02261CI Palin, Bristol vs. Johnston, Levi:

Sarah Palin continues to draw negative attention to herself.

There’s an old story that occasionally makes the rounds in Washington. In the 1970s, a magazine (now long defunct) named New Times reported that Sen. William Scott, a Virginia Republican, had been ranked the “dumbest” senator in a survey conducted by a public interest group. Subsequently, Scott held a press conference to deny the charge — thereby proving he was pretty darn dumb. After all, he only called more attention to the accusation.

Sarah Palin has taken a Scott-like position.

Earlier this month, PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times, awarded Palin the not-so-coveted “lie of the year” award for claiming last summer that President Obama’s health care reform initiative would set up “death panels” run by bureaucrats who would decide if seniors and disabled citizens “based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’ ” would be “worthy of health care.” PolitiFact.com explains:

On Aug. 10, PolitiFact rated Palin’s statement Pants on Fire [its highest -- or lowest -- rating]. In the weeks that followed, health care policy experts on both the right and the left said the euthanasia comparisons were inaccurate. Gail Wilensky, a health adviser to President George H.W. Bush, said the charge was untrue and upsetting.

“I think it is really unfortunate that this has been raised and received so much attention because there are serious issues to debate in health care reform,” she said at a forum on Sept. 3.

Responding to the initial Pants-on-Fire designation, Palin tried to have it both ways, claiming her phrase was metaphoric and accurate. In a Nov. 17 interview with National Review, she said she didn’t regret the remark:

“To me, while reading that section of the bill, it became so evident that there would be a panel of bureaucrats who would decide on levels of health care, decide on those who are worthy or not worthy of receiving some government-controlled coverage,” she said. “Since health care would have to be rationed if it were promised to everyone, it would therefore lead to harm for many individuals not able to receive the government care. That leads, of course, to death.”

“The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally,” said Palin. The phrase is “a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire.’ He got his point across. He got people thinking and researching what he was talking about. It was quite effective. Same thing with the ‘death panels.’ I would characterize them like that again, in a heartbeat.”

Not literal, but accurate — as in, well, you know what I mean.

Now Palin is again taking issue with being called a liar. In a new Facebook posting, she scoffs at “Nancy Pelosi and friends who have tried to call ‘death panels’ the ‘lie of the year.’ ” She doesn’t mention it was the neutral PolitiFact.com that branded her statement the whopper of 2009. And she claims she has proof she was correct in the first place. The pending Senate health care bill, she says, calls for an Independent Medicare Advisory Board to find ways to cut costs. This, she writes, “is also known as rationing.” If that’s the case, then every insurance company and health care firm in America is a death panel, for that’s what they do each day: seek ways to trim costs to bolster profits.

But there’s more. Palin cites a letter Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week, referring to the bill’s call for reducing Medicare spending by 2 percent. “It is unclear,” Elmendorf noted, “whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.”

Aha, Palin proclaims: This reduced ” ‘access to care’ and ‘diminish[ed] quality of care’ – is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.” (She’s back to calling it a metaphor.)

Not really. As Greg Sargent has pointed out, Palin is changing her definitions. When she first referred to “death panels,” she was portraying them as medical tribunes that would decide the fate of specific individuals. (“You’re IQ is too low, so no dialysis for you!”) Now, she’s essentially claiming that any cost-cutting that might influence access to care constitutes establishing a “death panel.” Not only is she being shifty; Palin is poisoning one policy debate that the nation needs to have about health care. Does this ardent foe of socialism really believe that the U.S. government ought to pay for any medical procedure that a Medicare recipient might want? What if a treatment costs several million dollars and at best can extend the life of a dying patient by a week? If you question such a practice, then, in Palin’s book, you’re for rationing and can be a charter member of a “death panel.”

Tough policy matters aside, Palin is playing loose with the facts about her own pronouncements — and calling even more attention to her dubious distinction of promoting the lie of year. The big question is, in this category, can she top herself in 2010?

David Corn
Politics Daily

And the "Lie of the Year" winner is ... Sarah Palin!!

Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.

“Death panels.”

The claim set political debate afire when it was made in August, raising issues from the role of government in health care to the bounds of acceptable political discussion. In a nod to the way technology has transformed politics, the statement wasn’t made in an interview or a television ad. Sarah Palin posted it on her Facebook page.

Her assertion — that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care — spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, “Death panels? Really?”

The editors of PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking Web site of the St. Petersburg Times, have chosen it as our inaugural “Lie of the Year.”

PolitiFact readers overwhelmingly supported the decision. Nearly 5,000 voted in a national poll to name the biggest lie, and 61 percent chose “death panels” from a field of eight finalists. (See the complete results.)

This is the story of how two words generated intense heat in the national debate over health care.

• • •

The former governor of Alaska had been out of the headlines since she announced her resignation on July 3; the Facebook message instantly brought her back to the political stage.

“As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!” Palin wrote.

“The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

It wasn’t the first time opponents of the Democratic plans for health care had raised the specter of euthanasia. In February, the conservative editorial page of the Washington Times compared plans for more funding for health information technology with eugenics programs instituted in Nazi Germany.

Democrats in the House introduced a bill July 14 that closely mirrored President Barack Obama’s campaign promises on health care. The bill increased regulation of insurance companies, proposed a national health insurance exchange where individuals and small business could shop for plans, expanded health programs for the poor, and gave incentives to doctors and hospitals for efficiency and improved care. It did not promote euthanasia.

On July 16, Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York and a conservative health care commentator, suggested that the Democratic plan included a measure requiring seniors be told how to end their lives. “Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner,” she said on a radio show hosted by conservative Fred Thompson.

PolitiFact gave McCaughey a Pants on Fire rating for that statement. There were no mandatory sessions proposed. Instead, for the first time, Medicare would pay for doctors’ appointments for patients to discuss living wills, health care directives and other end-of-life issues. The appointments were optional, and the AARP supported the measure.
Nevertheless, Republican officials began amplifying McCaughey’s comments.

House Republican Leader John Boehner issued a statement July 23 that said, “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.”

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., said on the House floor July 28 that a Republican alternative for health reform was “pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.”

Palin’s statement then launched the health care debate into overdrive. The term was mentioned in news reports approximately 6,000 times in August and September, according to the Nexis database. By October, it was still being mentioned 150 to 300 times a week.

• • •

The phrase “death panels” appears to be original to Palin. A search of news databases showed no use prior to her Facebook posting.

History professor Ian Dowbiggin, who has written several books on medical history, euthanasia and eugenics, said he had never heard the term before Palin used it. He said the phrase invokes images of Nazi Germany, which denied life-saving care to people who were not deemed useful enough to broader society. Adolf Hitler ordered Nazi officials to secretly register, select, and murder handicapped people such as schizophrenics, epileptics, disabled babies and other long-stay hospital patients, according to Dowbiggin.

“It’s not far-fetched to make the historical argument that as you get government more and more involved in health care, you create an environment that is more hospitable to the legalization of forms of euthanasia,” Dowbiggin said. “But the Nazi example should be used very advisedly.”

“This is an issue that’s being exploited by political figures who are opposed to the health care legislation,” he added. “They’re trying to sensationalize the issue as much as possible to drum up opposition.”

On Aug. 10, PolitiFact rated Palin’s statement Pants on Fire. In the weeks that followed, health care policy experts on both the right and the left said the euthanasia comparisons were inaccurate. Gail Wilensky, a health adviser to President George H.W. Bush, said the charge was untrue and upsetting.

“I think it is really unfortunate that this has been raised and received so much attention because there are serious issues to debate in health care reform,” she said at a forum on Sept. 3.

But some prominent Republicans didn’t reject the death panels claim.

Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, told people at a town hall meeting on Aug. 12 that people “have every right to fear. You shouldn’t have counseling at the end of life; you ought to have counseling 20 years before you’re going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don’t have any problem with things like living wills, but they ought to be done within the family. We should not have a government program that determines you’re going to pull the plug on Grandma.”

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, asked about the issue on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, said, “You are asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there are clearly people in America who believe in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards.”

• • •

Democrats responded by saying the accusation wasn’t true and highlighting the actual Medicare provision and what it said.

That wasn’t necessarily an effective strategy, said Drew Westen, a psychologist who studies political communication and advises Democrats on messaging. “Instead of stopping and asking themselves, ‘What are Republicans trying to appeal to?’, the Democrats rolled their eyes and said, ‘Isn’t this stupid,’ ” he said. “On one level, it was stupid, but on another level, it was hitting seniors very close to where they live.”

People intuitively understand that health care reform is about lowering costs, and end-of-life care can be quite costly, he said. The “death panels” claim exploited fears that people already had. Rather than just saying the claim wasn’t true, Westen said, a better response would be that there already are “death panels” — run by insurance companies.

“That’s the response that should have been there, from the first day the attack was made,” Westen said. “You never let an attack like this stand or go unresponded to in any 24-hour cycle.”

The charge was raised repeatedly during August town hall meetings. The claim particularly caught the attention of seniors, said John Rother, a health policy expert with the AARP. “That’s who’s most sensitive to any suggestion of denial of necessary care or being told you can’t get the care you need from your doctor,” he said.

The town hall meetings highlighted the partisan divisions when it came to death panels. The claim excited the Republican base along with the Tea Party to mobilize a vocal opposition, Rother said. “If your start-out stance is being distrustful of government, then this fit right into your worldview.” Though nonpartisan, AARP has generally supported Democratic efforts to pass health care legislation.

• • •

Two independent polls showed that about 30 percent of the public believed death panels were part of health care reform, both the week after Palin made the comment and a month later.

Yet seniors were no more likely to believe it than other age groups. The polls showed a closer correlation by party, with Republicans more likely to say that death panels were part of the plans pending in Congress. It’s not clear whether Palin’s comments swayed anyone who was undecided or unsure about health care reform.

“It touched a nerve of anxiety, and then there was a big response from the press and from experts that assured people that euthanasia wasn’t anywhere near this debate,” said Robert Blendon, a Harvard University researcher who studies public opinion on health care. “Most people, at the end of the day, did not believe it was being proposed.”

As the furor over the phrase settled down, Democrats used it as evidence that Republicans were unreasonably opposing health reform.

President Obama rebutted the claim in a major health care address on Sept. 9: “Some of people’s concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple.”

The phrase has been mentioned in the Congressional record about 40 times since Palin’s Facebook posting, but virtually all were Democrats citing it as an example of Republican intransigence.

“You know, GOP used to stand for Grand Old Party,” said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., on Nov. 7. “Now it stands for Grandstand, Oppose, and Pretend. They grandstand with phony claims about nonexistent death panels. They oppose any real reform.” The House voted in favor of health care legislation the same day.

• • •

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, the Oregon Democrat who promoted the provision that allowed Medicare to pay for doctor appointments about end-of-life counseling, said he sees both positives and negatives from the controversy.

On the positive side, he said he’s optimistic the Medicare provision will make it into the final version of health care reform, which is still pending in the Senate, and people had more conversations about making their wishes known for things like living wills or do-not-resuscitate orders.

“It really did energize people who deal with palliative care,” he said. “Ultimately, it helped advance the cause of giving people more control over end-of-life decisions.”

On the other hand, he said, the episode suggests that political distortions need to be confronted faster and more forcefully.

“It’s a sobering prospect that political discourse is going to resemble hand-to-hand combat for the foreseeable future,” he said.

That doesn’t bode well for keeping average citizens involved in the political process, especially those who are independent or not particularly partisan.

“I think they’re losing their appetite to wade through the vitriol, and I’m in the same boat,” Blumenauer said. “We are moving to a point where we drive normal people away, and everybody else gets their news and increasingly opinion prescreened, going for days never hearing an opposing viewpoint. That gives me pause.”

• • •

As for Palin, she told the conservative National Review in an interview on Nov. 17, the same day her best-selling memoir Going Rogue was released, that she didn’t regret her comments. (PolitiFact’s calls and e-mail to Palin were not returned.)

“To me, while reading that section of the bill, it became so evident that there would be a panel of bureaucrats who would decide on levels of health care, decide on those who are worthy or not worthy of receiving some government-controlled coverage,” she said. “Since health care would have to be rationed if it were promised to everyone, it would therefore lead to harm for many individuals not able to receive the government care. That leads, of course, to death.”

“The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally,” said Palin. The phrase is “a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire.’ He got his point across. He got people thinking and researching what he was talking about. It was quite effective. Same thing with the ‘death panels.’ I would characterize them like that again, in a heartbeat.”

Angie Drobnic Holan
PolitiFact.com

Sarah Palin with her husband Todd Palin and family on vacation in Hawaii.

Sarah Palin announced Thursday evening that she has cut short her vacation in Hawaii after paparazzi snapped a picture of her wearing a marked-out McCain campaign visor, Politico reports. Palin reiterated her insistence that the visor was not, as TMZ had asserted, a political statement slighting her former running mate, and said that her family decided to head home early because the media attention was annoying other vacationers.

“In an attempt to ‘go incognito,’ I Sharpied the logo out on my sun visor so photographers would be less likely to recognize me and bother my kids or other vacationers,” she said in a statement. “Todd and I have since cut our vacation short because the incognito attempts didn’t work and fellow vacationers were bothered for the two days we spent in the sun.”

As for the message the visor seemed to send, Palin had earlier issued a statement saying she was “sorry if people took this silly incident the wrong way. I adore John McCain, support him 100 percent and will do everything I can to support his reelection. As everyone knows, I was honored and proud to run with him.”

The former Alaska governor recently completed a nationwide promotional tour for her best-selling memoir, “Going Rogue.”

David Sessions
Politics Daily

Sarah Palin is the personification of America's anti-intellectualism and seems to be determined to exploit her intellectual limitations at the expense of the nation's best interests.

From time to time, I’ll get into a debate with a right-winger about whether Sarah Palin is actually stupid or if liberals are just hopelessly biased against her. They claim this bias comes from the fact that liberals are scared of her electability, her charm, her looks, her femininity, her Christianity, her ability connect to the common man and her overall wonderfulness. So, the theory is that we have all collectively decided that she is the best Republican candidate in some secret liberal meeting and are conspiring against her because we are afraid of how brilliant and electable she really is.

Now, there are a couple of problems with this theory. There are no opinion leaders on the left with Rush Limbaugh-like authority who can command all other progressives to think the same thing and use the same arguments against one person. In other words, we all think she is stupid because she is in fact stupid, not because some liberal cabal told us to think that.

How come we don’t call Newt Gingrich stupid? Or Dick Cheney or Kay Bailey Hutchinson or Elizabeth Dole or Dennis Hastert? And the list goes on and on of heinous and deplorable right-wingers who are not stupid. We don’t make those charges against those people, because as much as we might not agree with them or like them, we know that they are not dullards. They’re all clever in their own way. Mitt Romney is greasy, Michael Steele is a clown and Tom DeLay is dirty, but we don’t go after their mental acuity like we do with Sarah Palin because they’re not as dumb as her (not even Steele).

So, finally we get to the evidence. I thought I’d just do it here and be done with it. Then I can just point people to this post from now on and end this senseless argument.

Now, there are a million examples of this, but I thought I’d go with three knockout punches here. In the first video, we have the classic Bush Doctrine answer, where she does not know the basic foreign policy of the Republican president at the time. How could she possibly be running for vice president and not know this? The only thing more unconscionable is the sad excuses her supporters make for this terribly botched answer.

In the second video, we have a largely overlooked example of her pathetic lack of foreign policy knowledge. She has no idea what Hamas is or what they have to do with the Gaza Strip. If your next door neighbor or plumber doesn’t know this, that’s fine, but they weren’t running for Vice President of the United States. This should be game set and match for anyone, especially self-respecting conservatives, thinking of supporting her. This is when you have to walk away embarrassed.

But remarkably, they didn’t slink away embarrassed after this answer, so we have the latest example of her buffoonery. In this interview with Bill O’Reilly, he asks her if she is smart enough to be president. Her answer has to be seen to be believed. Don’t get me wrong, just because you see it won’t mean you’ll understand it. So, I put a transcript of her answer below so that you can try to decipher it in your spare time.

Bill O’Reilly: Let me be very bold and fresh again, do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?

Sarah Palin: I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have I believe the values that I think are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the uhm, the ah, a kind of spineless, spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite, Ivy league education and, and a fat resume that is based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership, I’m not saying that that has to be me.

Can anyone really be biased enough to think that was a smart answer? The great irony is that he asked her if she’s smart enough to be president and she gave what might be her dumbest answer yet. That answer was so bad it almost made George W. Bush look smart. Can anyone in good conscience defend that answer and say with a straight face that she should be this country’s leader?

If you say yes, then there is no sense in talking to one another anymore because we are not operating in the same reality, or planet. We’ll never be able to agree on anything if we can’t agree that was just about as incomprehensible and stupid an answer as you can possibly come up with. And that settles the debate, because you either live in the reality based world and realize she is obviously not qualified, or in the immortal words of Stephen Colbert you believe that “reality has a well-known liberal bias” and she would make a great president.

Cenk Uygur
The Young Turks

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

America has always had an anti-intellectual streak that grew as an offshoot of anti-elitism from the colonial days but then took on a life of its own. The common American (even many that are intelligent and successful) dislikes and distrusts intellectuals (being intelligent and being an intellectual are not the same thing). So as a result, Americans gravitate toward leaders who demonstrate a LACK of intellectual rigor and ability, who REJECT structured, deliberate thinking in favor of EMPTY folksy rhetoric. In their minds, intellectuals have had a lot of power for a long time, and the world is still messed up, so let’s give some “common people” a shot. Hence Bush, and now one step further, Palin. ~MDBoyd

Sarah Palin is losing ground in the latest national poll among African Americans, Hispanics, women and young people.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin faces major electoral limitations if she chooses to mount a 2012 bid, despite a slight increase in the country’s opinion of her, according to a new public opinion survey.

Public Policy Polling released a study on Thursday revealing that, one year after bursting onto the national scene, Palin still has not made inroads among a variety of key demographic groups. Most significantly, among women the Alaska Republican has only a 37 percent favorable rating compared to a 51 percent unfavorable.

“She has had a reverse gender gap in her numbers since about two weeks since John McCain picked her as her running mate,” explained PPP pollster Tom Jensen. “I think that women voters pretty much decided quickly since she went on the national spotlight that they didn’t like her much and that hasn’t really changed.”

It isn’t just a gender gap that hampers Palin. Only five percent of African-American voters said they had a favorable rating of the former Alaska Governor. Meanwhile, only 37 percent of Hispanics offered a favorable view — which would seem small if not for the fact that only 31 percent of Hispanics voted for McCain in 2008.

Indeed, much of Palin’s political support comes from constituencies that have been trending Republican for many election cycles. Forty-eight percent of white voters have a favorable view of her as well as 50 percent of voters over the age of 65 (a majority of every other age group had an unfavorable opinion). Among geographical regions, Palin was most popular in the South (48 percent approval) and the Midwest (48 percent) — as opposed to the Northeast (32 percent) and West (27 percent).

The former governor was viewed favorably by 41 percent of the country, up two percentage points from the last time the firm surveyed potential voters. But the jump, said Jensen, was due primarily to growing dissatisfaction with President Barack Obama and not to any growing popularity among the masses.

Sam Stein
The Huffington Post

Sarah Palin "can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes" and "any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs."

In the practice of preaching to the choir, Sarah Palin appears to have all but patented the art of saying what a few want to hear — and it’s an all-new tune now.

Palin, who was the Republican Party’s nominee for vice president, is suggesting that President Barack Obama “boycott” an international conference on climate change underway in Copenhagen, because some hacked emails questioning the ethics of some scientists at a university in Great Britain have given the obstinate opposition to the concept of global warming, let alone the science involving man’s hand in climate change, all the fuel it needs to declare the case closed, conference over, thank you ma’am.

The president’s withdrawal from the conference, with an appearance planned near the summit’s finish next week, would come as quite a surprise to a global community that has witnessed the reengagement of the United States in an international dialog about the fate of the planet from which the previous president had all but withdrawn until the end of his second term.

But, for a share of the American electorate which fears the consequences of limitations on the emissions of pollutants that could force the U.S. to find alternative, and in some cases more costly, sources of energy – the fabled “energy tax” – talk such as Palin’s comes straight from the wand of the maestro.

From Palin’s new viewpoint, the consensus of world science on the question of global warming represents “the radical environmental movement” — though this was not the same tune Palin was whistling when she ran for national office last year: “We’ve got to reduce emissions,” she said during the 2008 campaign, and get other nations to “come along.”

From the world’s viewpoint, Palin’s apparent new opposition to any dialog involving the United States in Copenhagen represents the politics of radical retrenchment.

“With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point,” Palin writes in an Op-ed essay appearing in Wednesday’s Washington Post. “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,” Palin writes of the e-mails and other documents obtained from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia by hackers, “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,” the former governor of Alaska writes, “but they would change our economy for the worse.”

“Drill, baby, drill”: A hole so deep that no one but the most radicalized base of the Republican Party might possibly take seriously the pivoting of Palin on the question. Now she has a memoir and a book-tour, Going Rogue, apparently taking the title to heart.

“I’ve always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics,” writes Palin, who also has entertained creationism as a reasonable counterpoint to evolutionary theory, at least something worthy of teaching in the schools.

“I am a proponent of teaching both,” she said during her campaign for governor in 2006. “And you know, I say this too as the daughter of a science teacher. Growing up with being so privileged and blessed to be given a lot of information on, on both sides of the subject — creationism and evolution. It’s been a healthy foundation for me. But don’t be afraid of information and let kids debate both sides.”

“Snake oil,” Palin called the science of climate change in a recent radio interview, suggesting: “The fact is, the Caribou population is increasing.”

Yet Palin was far more generous about the challenge of climate change and what the world should do about it during last year’s debate with Vice President Joe Biden, who then asserted flatly that global warming is “man-made.”

This is what Palin said in debate with Biden in October 2008:

” Well, as the nation’s only Arctic state and being the governor of that state, Alaska feels and sees impacts of climate change more so than any other state. And we know that it’s real.

“I’m not one to attribute every man — activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet. But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don’t want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?

“We have got to clean up this planet. We have got to encourage other nations also to come along with us with the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that.”

And just eight months ago, at an Interior Department hearing, the then-governor of Alaska said this: “We Alaskans are living with the changes that you are observing in Washington, The dramatic decreases in the extent of summer sea ice, increased coastal erosion, melting of permafrost, decrease in alpine glaciers and overall ecosystem changes are very real to us.”

Yet this is no cause for curtailing drilling for new oil, she maintained: “Stopping domestic energy production of preferred fuels does not solve the issues associated with global warming and threatened or endangered species, but it can make them worse….Simply waiting for low-carbon-emitting renewable capacity to be large enough will mean that it will be too late to meet the mitigation goals for reducing [carbon dioxide] that will be required under most credible climate-change models.”

“As governor, I was the first governor to form a climate change sub-cabinet to start dealing with the impacts. We’ve got to reduce emissions,” Palin said in the October 2008 vice presidential debate with Biden. “John McCain is right there with an “all of the above” approach to deal with climate change impacts.

“We’ve got to become energy independent for that reason. Also as we rely more and more on other countries that don’t care as much about the climate as we do, we’re allowing them to produce and to emit and even pollute more than America would ever stand for. So even in dealing with climate change, it’s all the more reason that we have an “all of the above” approach, tapping into alternative sources of energy and conserving fuel, conserving our petroleum products and our hydrocarbons so that we can clean up this planet and deal with climate change.”

Palin has staked a new stance on the issue little more than a year later – no more of that encouraging other nations “to come along with us with the impacts of climate change.”

Now, it’s “come along” for a new ride, preaching to the chorus of “Climate-gate” protesters who maintain that all the world’s science suddently has been reduced to rubble with a pile of hacked emails from England — regardless of all the other science that has been conducted throughout the world.

Mark Silva
Chicago Tribune/The Swamp

Sarah Palin’s column today in the Washington Post calling for President Obama to boycott the Copenhagen summit is pure malarkey. Which is why the Post was absolutely right to print it.

Those who are claiming that the column was factually inaccurate miss the point. Since when has anything that Palin ever said been accurate? It’s like accusing Sarah Silverman of failing to be serious or Hugh Hefner of being promiscuous.

Palin isn’t interested in accuracy, but causing a stir and, above all, positioning herself as a serious candidate for the GOP’s nomination in 2012, which keeps moving to the right, partly in response to Palin and partly because Palin is responding to it. So far, she’s done an excellent job of trying to establish herself as a major voice in the party. Now she needs to tackle policy, and she’s doing it.

Her column epitomizes conservative conspiracy thinking and ventilates her views rather deftly (does anyone think that Palin actually wrote it?). It accuses a cabal of radical scientists of pushing alarmism about global warming. To be sure, Palin, in order to give her views a veneer of sobriety, concedes that warming is actually taking place, just that it can’t be pinned on humans. How come conservatives, who are always stressing individual moral responsibility, suddenly abdicate it when it comes to global warming?

More than anyone, Palin represents the enraged base of conservatism that sees Obama as a traitor, intent on selling out America to the terrorists, globalists, and any other “ists” lurking out there. The column, then, should be a wake-up call for anyone who thinks that Palin and her ilk are going away. It was one of the most terrifying experiences I’ve had in recent years. The thought kept going through my mind: “Imagine if someone with these views actually became president.”

It probably won’t happen. But it could. In allowing Palin to air her wacky views, the Post isn’t doing its readers a disservice. It’s alerting them to what the radical right intends to accomplish if it’s returned to office. The Post shouldn’t be scapegoated for printing Palin’s column, but congratulated for running it.

Jacob Heilbrunn
The Huffington Post

Sarah Palin and her pals Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

While many are pondering what exactly Sarah Palin’s approving radio comments on the birther issue and her subsequent “clarification” mean to her possible 2012 run, there is a more fundamental question: what does this bode for our democracy? The answer is this is yet another indicator that extreme is the new mainstream.

In a radio interview on the conservative Rusty Humphries show yesterday, the former 2008 Vice Presidential Republican candidate answered a question about her possibly using the President’s birth certificate as an issue if she ran again for office:  “I think the public rightfully is still making it [the President’s birth certificate] an issue. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t know if I would have to bother to make it an issue, because I think that members of the electorate still want answers.” She continued: “I think it’s a fair question, just like I think past association and past voting records — all of that is fair game” She later deftly stated on Facebook that she never directly asked the President to produce his birth certificate or suggest that he was not born in the country. True, she only inferred it, when she could have done what both her running mate, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Ann Coulter all did—reject the lie.

Her careful elevation of a foundational conspiracy theory used by extremists to demonize the President as being everything from an illegitimate imposter to high office to a secret radical Jihadist Trojan horse warrants unequivocal condemnation and study from across the political spectrum—just as the horrendous anti-Bush 9/11 truthers do.

If you think that these detrimental wacky theories don’t have traction in this troubled decade of ours look at some recent polling numbers, or alternatively read the comments section that will invariably appear below this post. In a September analysis Public Policy Polling stated, “Is extremism becoming mainstream in 21st century American politics? Our latest national poll would seem to say yes- 35% [of] voters in the country either think that Barack Obama was not born in the United States or that George W. Bush intentionally allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur so that we could go to war in the Middle East.”

Both sides of the political spectrum offer a disturbing picture. One quarter of Democrats think President Bush let 9/11 happen so he could go to war, while a plurality, 42% of Republicans believe the current president was not born in the United States. If that’s not bad enough 10% of voters say that President Obama is the “anti-Christ” with another 11% not sure. Its no wonder that various preachers have outrageously made headlines by publicly praying for the President’s death. President Bush fairs slightly better with only 8% conclusively saying he is in fact the anti-Christ, and another 11% unsure. And here I thought the anti-Christ had to be Gay and (partially) Jewish. If these Biblical “scholars” had thrown in “California resident” I would have advised Adam Lambert to turn down singing at any future Palin fundraisers.

One of the key things our Center analyzes is how the use of tactical falsehoods can create a bridge from the extreme into the mainstream. There are important ramifications at stake here. There is nothing illegitimate about spotlighting a candidate’s views, qualifications, associations, experience, judgment or integrity. However, when clear broad falsehoods become a key currency to delegitimize and demonize institutions and leaders democracy suffers.

First, on a micro level, it relieves the accuser of engaging in an actual debate on real substantive issues as well as clearly articulating their own concrete solutions. As analyst Chip Berlet notes, “ Conspiracism is neither a healthy expression of skepticism nor a valid form of criticism; rather it is a belief system that refuses to obey the rules of logic.” It also does something more damaging, but somewhat subtle on a macro level. These broad conspiracy theories loop together to provide a justification for people to reject not merely candidates or single positions, but the elemental processes and institutions of our pluralistic democracy. At their extreme a sliver of those who angrily opt out of these processes and institutions pose a risk of violence to our country because they view these leaders and pillars not as guarantors of freedom, but rather as direct threats to liberty. Oftentimes, bigots will weave their own racial, religious, or sexual orientation prejudices into a folklore that relies upon conspiracy theories.

There are several things worth noting. First, conspiracy theories exploit real and sincere fears and disagreements that many mainstream people have about actual leaders, policies, events, trends and abuses of authority. Second, while these theories are often intertwined with a small element of truth, factual gaps are filled with a much larger dose of emotion and wild conjecture. Third, they are usually part of a much more broad tactical assault on leaders and institutions. These theorists offer a convenient tool to attract mainstream converts by appealing to their fears, feelings of disenfranchisement, prejudices and the lure of a simple answer to complex circumstances. Governor Palin’s statements are particularly disturbing because they constitute a tacit celebrity endorsement of conspiracies by a former officeholder who is viewed as a legitimate political player.

John McCain demonstrated a different approach as his campaign mostly rejected the overt use of the birth certificate and related “issues.” During a rally in Minnesota he took the microphone back from a supporter who said she couldn’t trust Barack Obama because he was an “Arab.” McCain responded, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign’s all about. He’s not [an Arab].” Notwithstanding, the insulting and regrettable inference that Arabs can’t be citizens and family men, McCain should at least be recognized for his awkward attempt to reject some conspiracy theories. Whatever you want to say about her parsing of words, Palin knows her base—82% of those who say that President Obama is the anti-Christ have a favorable opinion of the former Governor.

Brian Levin, J.D.
The Huffington Post

Sarah Palin, then Sarah Heath, left, with classmate Stacia Crocker at a dorm party at the University of Idaho.

Sarah Palin’s school years come back to haunt again, this time with a quote from father Chuck Heath. During the presidential campaign, the media scrutinized her college history, which begins in — of all places — Hawaii, Obama’s home state. Back in 1982, Palin and her high school buddy Kim “Tilly” Ketchum left Alaska for the Aloha State, eventually attending Hawaii Pacific University. But after one semester they returned to North Idaho College. Both blamed the weather for their departure. [Tip to Hyphen]

Ketchum told the LA Times:

“When you’re used to having some cooler weather, you get tired of the heat.”

While Palin echoed this explanation in her new book “Going Rogue,” her father gave reporters Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe a different reason. The New Yorker’s Sam Tanenhaus points out:

[Palin] is equally circumspect on the issue of ethnicity, pointing out that Todd, whom she met in high school, is “part Yupik Eskimo” and opened her to the “social diversity” of Alaska. (Wasilla is more than eighty per cent white.) Palin, though notoriously ill-travelled outside the United States, did journey far to the first of the four colleges she attended, in Hawaii. She and a friend who went with her lasted only one semester. “Hawaii was a little too perfect,” Palin writes. “Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls.” Perhaps not.

But Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, gave a different account to Conroy and Walshe. According to him, the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” In any case, Palin reports that she much preferred her last stop, the University of Idaho, “because it was much like Alaska yet still ‘Outside.’ “

Whether “they” refers to Asians or to Palin and Ketchum isn’t clear. Either way, the “minority type thing” roused the anti-Palin masses who called her racist and xenophic in her “disgust” and “terror” of Asians and the “too ethnic” Hawaii. A blogger for Hyphen, an SF-based magazine that covers Asian-American issues, also expressed his disdain:

I had heard about “white flight” from Asian Americans before, where white families moved to nearby suburbs to avoid their Asian neighbors, but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone flying 3,000 miles away from a tropical paradise to live in a population that’s 97 percent white. I just looked this up, and it’s a six-hour flight to Idaho. Wow Sarah, Asians must really terrify you.

Supporters shot back, saying the quote was misconstrued and that Palin was just a young Barracuda out of water:

So in the worst case scenario, Palin went to a place where the culture and people were radically different than what she was accustomed to, found it uncomfortable, and wanted to leave for someplace where she felt more at home. Outrageous.

Palin eventually moved on to her father’s alma mater, University of Idaho. She transferred to Matanuska-Susitna College, near her hometown of Wasilla, before returning to the University of Idaho. She graduated with a degree in journalism in 1987.

Aileen Yoo
SFGate.com

Chuck Heath, father of Sarah Palin.

Based on recent comments from her father, it appears that Asian Americans are partly responsible for Sarah Palin’s spotty undergraduate career. Palin’s father suggested that she left her first school in Hawaii, ultimately attending four different colleges before graduating, because there were too many Asians in the tropical paradise. Which made her uncomfortable. Apparently, Palin felt much more comfortable studying in Idaho.

Learning this about Palin doesn’t surprise me in the least. Maybe she couldn’t make out all those Asian Americans in Hawaii from looking outside her window in Alaska.

I had heard about “white flight” from Asian Americans before, where white families moved to nearby suburbs to avoid their Asian neighbors, but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone flying 3,000 miles away from a tropical paradise to live in a population that’s 97 percent white. I just looked this up, and it’s a six-hour flight to Idaho. Wow Sarah, Asians must really terrify you.

I hope Americans like Palin can learn to resolve their disturbing attitudes toward Asian Americans. Interestingly, Palin’s husband, Todd, is part-Asian from his Yup’ik heritage. Not that he’s representative of most Native Alaskans. I just learned that there’s allegedly rampant discrimination against Native Alaskans, who are even called ‘Arctic Arabs‘. Palin’s attitudes may be a reflection of her upbringing or environment. Either way, it goes without saying that many Asian Americans are glad that Palin and John “g–k hater” McCain aren’t running the ship right now.

Hyphen.com

To millions of Americans, Sarah Palin is the one person who can save the US from the perils of communism, gay marriage and gun control. But can she ever win the White House, or will she destroy the American right?

Sarah Palin pressing the flesh in Grand Rapids, on her three-week-long, 14-state promotional "Going Rogue: An American Life" book tour.

It is a freezing night in Indiana. A light drizzle is turning to ice as a crowd of 1,000 people shiver and huddle under umbrellas in a shopping mall car park outside the small Midwestern town of Noblesville. But no one is complaining.

“I came to hear the truth get told,” says Roy Hendrickson, a moustached 66-year-old retiree from the town of Lebanon, about 30 miles away. “I want to see her go rogue!”

She, of course, is Sarah Palin, and Going Rogue is the name of her autobiography. The event tonight is the third stop on one of the most audacious book tours in the history of publishing. It is a 14-state, three-week-long trek through the heartland of America that has already drawn tens of thousands of fans. No other figure on the right of American politics can pull in crowds and generate excitement like Palin. Like Obama with Democrats, people believe in her. But Palin World is a very different place from Obama Nation. In Palin World, America is succumbing to the foreign ideology of socialism, and the lifeblood of the free market is being squeezed by Big Government. The threat of “death panels” haunts the elderly. It is a nation of whispered conspiracies that Obama wants to take away people’s guns, and where communist appointees plot secret internment camps and the forced indoctrination of innocent American youth.

Who could possibly save America from such a fate? The answer rides in on a gigantic bus that pulls up in front of the Noblesville Borders bookstore. It is emblazoned with a huge portrait of Palin staring into the distance against a backdrop of soaring mountain tops and cloud-speckled blue skies. Palin emerges cradling her youngest child and looking a little like the Virgin Mary in a black pantsuit. The crowd surges forward shouting: “There she is!” and local cops spring into action. “Stand back! You’ll all get to see her!” yells one panicking officer.

Palin is not a woman famed for soaring rhetoric. But her one-word opening comment eloquently sums up the reaction of the conservatives who love her and the liberals who are terrified of her. “Wow!” she says.

Sarah Palin is everywhere. It is an astonishing achievement for a woman who holds no elected office and whose career should have flamed out in the wreckage of last year’s defeated presidential ticket. But while the former presidential candidate John McCain has retreated quietly back to the Senate, his former running mate’s profile has soared. She has tapped into a rich vein of discontent among conservative Americans, and as the Republican party has fallen increasingly under the sway of its extreme right wing, she has become its patron saint.

The media blitz surrounding her book tour has been unprecedented. “We’ve had the Stone Age, Ice Age, Jet Age – comes now the Palin Age,” gushed the veteran society columnist Cindy Adams in the New York Post. Palin has been interviewed by Oprah and Barbara Walters and just about every Fox News host. She has graced the cover of Newsweek and hundreds of newspaper front pages. Her book is a runaway bestseller. Its first print run of 1.5m copies looks distinctly modest.

To conservatives, her success comes as no surprise. “She has a very intense charisma that makes her very exciting and attractive,” says Chuck Hurley, president of the Iowa Family Policy Center, which campaigns on behalf of evangelical Christians in the politically highly influential state, one that could decide the identity of the 2012 Republican presidential nominee. “She will be a force.”

There seems little doubt of that. The campaign behind Palin’s book tour is designed to give her power and make her rich. It is going well. Palin’s political stock has never been higher with the millions of conservatives who love her. She has pocketed a reported $1.25m advance, stands to make millions more from royalties, and has signed up with the Washington Speakers Bureau to get on to the lucrative lecture circuit. “Sarah Palin’s rehab tour is more about Sarah Palin Inc than Sarah Palin 2012,” snipes Joan Walsh, editor of the Salon website.

That attitude sums up many liberals’ reaction to Palin. To even moderate Republicans, Palin is a painful political joke. Her staggering missteps during last year’s campaign were indications of a political mind not suited to being a heartbeat away from the presidency. She was lampooned on Saturday Night Live by Tina Fey. She was leaked against by McCain’s own staff, who planted numerous media stories against her. Columnists such as Maureen Dowd of the New York Times called her “Caribou Barbie” and “one nutty puppy”. All that laughter means Palin should be a write-off. But to a significant number of Americans, such attacks are not evidence of Palin’s flaws.

“Watch who the left hates the most – that is somebody with high potential,” says Hurley. “They don’t shoot their bullets at someone who is not a threat to them.”

Sarah Palin’s appeal to her fans is not difficult to identify: mostly, it is the opinion those people have of themselves – she is a hardworking, plain-speaking American patriot. “She is a down-to- earth person. She is like my next-door neighbour. I feel I know her,” says Rachel Barager, 72, as she waits for Palin to sign books at a Barnes & Noble store in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Palin kicks off her tour.

Palin expertly cultivates that image. She refers to herself as a hockey mom, touts her record as mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska, as proof that she knows how to run a world superpower, and admonishes opponents in the way of a disproving nursery school teacher. Her beliefs can be summed up handily around three Fs: faith, family and flag. On the first count she ticks off all the boxes beloved of religious social conservatives. She sees abortion and gay marriage in the black-and-white terms of morality: she is against them. In Indiana, when she hauled her youngest child in front of the crowd, it was not just an act of motherly love. It was political. The child, Trig, has Down’s syndrome and Palin won wide praise for refusing to think of an abortion when she was pregnant. Thus when people in Palin World see her with Trig, they don’t just see a mother, they see a woman who lived her beliefs.

“I am so happy that she brought that child into the world. That is such a statement,” says Rebekah Thairu, who has come to the Noblesville event and carefully points out that the “k” in her name gives it a “Biblical spelling”. A supporter in Michigan is even more blunt. “I think God has chosen her to lead the country,” says Edward Zaagman, 70, a real estate broker.

The second F is family. Again Palin assiduously cultivates an image of the working mom, struggling with the pressures of raising five kids. She married young and speaks in simple English. When she emerges from her bus in Indiana she is careful not to seem apart from her supporters. “I have dedicated my book to all you people who are hardworking, good Americans,” she says. In a country where every politician claims to hate Washington, Palin does not have to pretend.

The final part of Palinism is flag: the uber-patriotism that is common throughout America but which thrives on the right. Palin’s America is a simple place: it worships the military; it believes Islamic terrorists hate American freedom, not American policy, and it thinks America is a God-blessed country that is by far the best to have ever existed. It uses words like “pro-America” with no real definition of what that means beyond drilling for oil, spending money on defence, owning guns and paying less in taxes to a government it distrusts.

To many, such a philosophy seems based on platitudes and a profound disinterest in the complexities of the real world. But Palin World’s strength is its simplicity: its appeal is a black-and-white view of a complex, shifting, frightening world. That is what inspires people like Rachel Barager to endure a long, cold night camping outside a Michigan mall and then a day patiently waiting in line. “I’m getting by on three hours’ sleep,” Barager confesses with a mischievous grin that belies her seven decades. She looks excited and alert. How does she do it? She points to a red sticker stuck to her clothes that says simply: “Palin Power”.

That Palin power is on the rise – and not just in its ability to inspire grandmothers to go through the night – is clear. It is taking over the Republican party in a vicious civil war that is being waged between conservatives and moderates. “We have a Republican party that is willing to tear itself apart,” says Larry Haas, a political commentator and former aide in the Clinton White House.

Language is brutal on both sides. David Brooks, a moderate Republican columnist, said of Palin recently: “She’s a joke. I just can’t take her seriously.” During the campaign he called her “a fatal cancer” on the party. But conservatives have little time for figures like Brooks – they dub them Rinos (pronounced as in the horned animal), which stands for Republican In Name Only. Like their African namesake, they too appear headed for extinction at the hands of ruthless hunters. Moderate Republicans are being purged from the party or forced to toe a more right-wing line when it comes to touchstone conservative issues such as abortion, gay marriage or opposing healthcare reform and the economic stimulus package. “The Republican party is hell-bent on ideological purity,” says Haas.

Going Rogue devotes its fiercest attacks not to Democrats or liberals but to John McCain’s staff. Palin continually insists that if only she had been let loose and free to say what she believes the campaign would not have faltered. That myth has a powerful currency. It says McCain was a poor candidate because he was too moderate and that if Republicans had swung more to the right then they could have captured the White House. The fact that Obama’s victory reduced the party to its core ideological strongholds – which are mostly white, rural and southern – only makes the myth easier for the party to swallow.

“It is the same as the Labour party in the early 80s or the Tories in the late 90s,” says Professor Shaun Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California. “One wing says they need to be more radical to win, the other says they need to move to the centre. The radicals are winning in the Republican Party at the moment.”

That victory charge is like nothing seen in American politics for a long time. Spurred on by a horrendous economic crisis, a widening equality gap and – whether consciously or not – the election of America’s first black president, the Republican right has morphed into a paranoid, angry social movement with a mob mentality. It is also overwhelmingly made up of white people, often from economically suffering sectors, who treat media stars such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh as secular preachers. It takes the form of various groups, such as the Birthers, the Deathers and the Tea Party protesters, depending on which conspiracy theory is in vogue.

Birthers, whose ranks have even spread to the army, believe Obama may not be a legal American citizen. Deathers, who include Palin and many senior Republicans, hold that Obama’s healthcare reforms will deliberately kill old people, while the Tea Party movement, backed by powerful corporate lobbying groups, argues that Obama has embarked on a project to turn America into a socialist or communist country. To enter this world can feel like passing through a looking glass into an alternative universe, where equating Obama – a natural political centrist – with Lenin feels perfectly reasonable. It is an America where white suburban people are a put-upon minority, sidelined by their own country.

“We are heading towards a socialist government,” says Pam Lincoln, 50, who holds up a huge sign declaring herself a “Limbaugh conservative” at Palin’s Michigan kick-off. “The America that we are heading towards is nothing like the America that I know. This is not a capitalist society any more,” she adds, despite the fact that Palin is about to demonstrate the extreme vigour of the free market for her book.

The paranoia is getting uglier. Across America, gun owners have been hoarding ammunition out of a misplaced belief that Obama is planning anti-gun laws. In some areas, stocks have run so low that police stations have had trouble getting supplies. A group called the Oath Keepers has emerged over the past six months, made up of serving soldiers, police and firemen. They believe their government is a threat to its citizens and have vowed to disobey orders they deem unconstitutional. Those orders include rounding up American citizens and helping foreign troops invade America.

“We will not obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps,” reads one part of the group’s manifesto, despite the fact that such an order is nonsensical. It sounds like the delusional workings of an isolated internet nutcase. But the Oath Keepers recently held their first national convention and have thousands of members (nearly all armed) in every state in America. Its leader, Yale-educated lawyer Stewart Rhodes, has been interviewed widely on cable news shows.

These are clearly dangerous times in America, fuelled by a rising unemployment rate and a crash in many Americans’ standard of living. “In this economy there is a search for simple answers, and that is when conspiracy theories take off and play on a fear of the unknown,” says Professor Ken Leicht of the University of Iowa, author of The Post-Industrial Peasant, which charts the collapse of the American middle class. For Leicht, the growing economic disaster gripping America is a recipe for potential disaster. “We have the perfect storm for some pretty uncivil political activity,” he says.

The role that Sarah Palin will play in this is yet to be defined. Could she one day occupy the Oval Office? Palin has been coy about the issue of running for president in 2012. In one interview she revealed that she would if she felt God was calling her to do so. In another she said she simply felt grateful for any opportunity to spread her message, and that returning to politics was not a priority. It is impossible to say what is true. Her book tour certainly looks like a campaign trip. Her stops have all the familiar choreography of political rallies. Yet that is no guarantee she will run.

She could more easily content herself with a behind-the-scenes power, becoming a Joan of Arc figure for conservatives, martyred by the 2008 campaign but revered as the ultimate might-have-been. This theory holds that Palin will use her power to bestow her blessing on other conservatives, who must seek out her endorsement to win over her supporters.

There is certainly much evidence that, since she hit the national stage, Palin’s career has taken too much of a hit for her to make a realistic political comeback at the voting booth. The argument that she emerged from Alaska unvetted, untested and unprepared appears to be strong. “She is extremely charismatic and people are drawn to her. She is fun to be around. The problem is that she skyrocketed on to the national stage without any foundation,” says Beth Kerttula, a Democrat state congresswoman in Alaska who has observed Palin’s career from the beginning.

The incidents of overshoot are copious. Palin’s disastrous interview with Katie Couric of CBS News, where she fluffed a question about which newspapers she read, was almost a career-ender in itself. Her comments that she had foreign policy experience because Alaska was close to Russia revealed a startling lack of insight about diplomatic realities. In response to her attacks on them in Going Rogue, former McCain staffers have leaked emails about her unpreparedness. One, sent by Palin to top McCain aides after an especially bad interview, reads as if it was written by a texting teenager, not a potential vice president. Complete with Palin’s original spelling and punctuation it reads: “I am very sorry – u guys are working double-triple time on this blundered-up stuff that they spin bc of my visits w press – while I apologise I say I love you guys!!!”

Since the campaign ended, she has been dogged by a soap opera-like spat with Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin’s child, her granddaughter. Johnston has gossiped to Vanity Fair about Palin’s marital problems and betrayed a vindictive streak that the media has exploited. After Palin publicly invited him to Thanksgiving dinner, he refused, then posed naked for Playgirl. That all adds up in the national polls. No matter how much her base loves her, 52% of Americans view her unfavourably. Indeed, one study showed only 9% of people would definitely vote for her. An anaemic 28% said she was qualified to be president. It seems Palin World, for all its heat and fire, might be a small place.

Yet in modern America, power does not necessarily come from winning an election. The giants of the new Republican party are not senators, governors or congressmen; they are angry white guys with radio shows and TV programmes. It is Beck and Limbaugh who demand (and receive) apologies from Michael Steele, the head of the Republican National Committee, not the other way around.

Palin’s impact could be felt far more powerfully outside a 2012 run for the White House. She is blending her politics and celebrity into a cultural phenomenon. Take Mandi Sutton, 19. She waited long hours to see Palin but does not appear a typical fan. She is a former college student with a tongue piercing and a T-shirt featuring a quote from JFK. But she goes almost giddy at the thought of meeting Palin. “I love Sarah Palin!” she says, clutching her copy of Going Rogue. She had agonised over what to say when meeting her idol. “I am trying to come up with something a lot more substantial than just ‘I love you’. But I am sure I am just going to stand there and tell her that I love her. I am smitten. I really am,” she gushes.

In order to promote her conservative agenda, Palin might find (like Beck and Limbaugh before her) that trying to get elected is more of a hindrance than a help. Her gift now lies in blending politics and celebrity into power: becoming a “polebrity”. “Palin is a cultural phenomenon, not just a political one,” says Professor Bowler. “She is going to go on and on. She is like Paris Hilton now – she’s famous for being famous.”

But if Sarah Palin is unlikely to ever occupy the White House, what chance does Palinism stand? The conventional wisdom has a straightforward answer: none at all. “There is a base of very angry people, but the ability to broaden that is quite limited,” says Professor Leicht.

The logic is simple. Obama Nation has embraced the demographically changing face of America while Palin World has not. The Democrats have built a multi-ethnic electoral coalition of young or affluent whites, black Americans and Hispanics, who are the fastest-growing minority in America. The Republicans, meanwhile, have been reduced to a base of mostly southern and rural whites, backed by a wealthy corporate elite. One of these electoral coalitions is large and growing larger. The other is growing smaller.

The theory concludes that running a Republican candidate on a Palinist agenda in 2012 would hand Obama a landslide victory. There is strong evidence to support this. Last month, New York State’s 23rd congressional district provided the perfect test bed for the strength of the conservative message. In the American equivalent of a by-election, the local Republican party in the very rural area selected the moderate candidate Dede Scozzafava to hold the rock-solid seat. But Scozzafava’s socially liberal views – she is pro-choice – attracted the outrage of the Palinite wing of the party. Palin herself publicly endorsed Doug Hoffman, a candidate for the tiny but extreme right-wing Conservative party. Other pantheons of the conservative movement, such as Beck and Limbaugh, did likewise. Vicious “robo-calls” suddenly assailed the district’s voters, with computerised phone calls calling Scozzafava a “lesbian”, a “homo” and a “child killer”. She fled the race, leaving the field open for Hoffman. The Palinite Republicans celebrated and prepared for a triumph. Then the voters had their say and the Democratic candidate Bill Owens won, giving the Democrats a seat that Republicans had controlled since 1872 – 137 years of Republican dominance in the region shattered overnight. “Cancer kills the host. Palin and those like her are a short-term strategy that cannot survive in a modern election,” says Bowler.

But there is another, more unsettling theory. The fact is America has an institutionalised two-party system, and while an extremist Republican party might not be able to win 2012, could Obama lose it? The Democrats have not had an easy year in power. The economic crisis has shocked Middle America. The official unemployment rate stands at 10%, but once the long-term jobless and other groups are added, the number becomes 17%, almost one-fifth of the workforce. Obama has failed so far to deliver on his big post-election promises of closing Guantánamo Bay and pushing through healthcare reform. His administration is stuffed with former financiers who have done little more than resurrect the old, flawed and now reviled banking system. And all at public expense. His popularity, and especially that of his party, is sinking. Obama’s approval rating recently dipped below 50% for the first time. Among vital independent voters he has lost 12 points since August, while those who disapprove have risen from 19% to 41% in 10 months. Most observers believe the Republicans will do well in 2010’s mid-term elections, taking back perhaps 20 or more congressional seats from Democratic targets. In short, if the economy continues to tank and core supporters and independents stay away from the polls, Obama could suddenly be vulnerable, even to a Palinite candidate.

With or without Palin herself, power is certainly the dream of those tens of thousands of people flocking to stops along Palin’s tour route. The inhabitants of Palin World are not turning out for the fun of it. They mean business.

In Grand Rapids they turn up a day early to grab the precious orange wristbands that will allow them to have their books signed. Many camp overnight and stand patiently in line throughout the next day. Yet the atmosphere is one of a carnival. Chants of “Sarah! Sarah!” break out sporadically long before Palin arrives. People wear Palin shirts, Palin badges, Palin headgear and Palin stickers. “She’s worth waiting through the night for,” says a gleeful Robin Case, 44, a recently laid-off car worker, who is third in line. She has few doubts that the future of America belongs to her cause, and thinks Obama will soon be swept away by the movement. She gestures at the line of people snaking away behind her. “In a funny way, we needed someone like Barack Obama to be elected to wake us up,” she says.

Paul Harris
The Observer/Guardian.co.uk

On Monday night, Levi Johnston went on the Joy Behar Show to talk about his new roll as a “gay icon.” Johnston seemed comfortable with the position, despite growing up in Wasilla, where he had “never seen a gay guy.”

Behar began the conversation asking Johnston if he “realizes” that he’s a gay icon.

“I do, yeah.” Johnston said.

Behar pressed on: “someone just told me there’s a gay porno movie with a look-a-like of you… how do you feel about all of that?”

Johnston seemed fine with it. “Um… let em do what they’re going to do,” he said, and added that he doesn’t want to do anything he would regret — possibly implying that that is why he, himself, declined to act in the pornographic film.

Behar asked Johnston again how it feels to be a gay icon from a “conservative background,” and observed that he seems “to be very comfortable being a gay icon.”

Johnston concurs, though does mention that “growing up in Wasilla… I’ve never seen a gay guy in Wasilla, i don’t think.” Johnston continued: “once I started doing all these tours and everything… I just.. you know, they’re people too. It doesn’t matter to me, more fans, it’s great.”

The Huffington Post

Sarah Palin once again using darling Trig Palin, a child with special needs, as a "Going Rogue" book tour prop before large crowds during the height of the H1N1 flu season. And BTW, where is his jacket, a hat and some pants long enough to cover his little legs?

In some ways, this is an addendum to this post asking again for any actual evidence that Trig is Sarah Palin’s biological son. In her interview with far right radio host, Rusty Humphries, she said:

Hey, you know, that’s a great point, in that weird conspiracy-theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn’t my real son. And a lot of people say, “Well you need to produce his birth certificate! You need to prove that he’s your kid!” Which we have done.

I noted that this is a lie. The Palins have never released Trig’s birth certificate or proved that he is Palin’s kid. If she had, I would have posted it on this blog. In fact, we all begged for it in the campaign. And yet she simply said so outright on a radio show. The Dish appears to be the only high-traffic blog to point this out. No one in the MSM has noted that her statement is a lie. And when you examine the blogosphere’s response to this, you find the same glaring avoidance of “what is in front of our nose”, as this Alaskan blog notes:

Robert Stacy McCain, dissing Sullivan, fails to mention Palin’s Thursday lie.

David Horowitz, excoriating Sullivan, fails to mention Palin’s lie.

Mark Milian, in the Los Angeles Times, while more critical of Palin over the first part of her Humphries statement, neglects to question the veracity of her own birth certificate claim.

Gottalaff, at the Political Carnival, while quoting Sullivan on his Palin birth certificate question, fails to really get into questioning Palin’s veracity.

Riehl World View and the blog’s commenters wander off to the tea party, blithely predicting Palin as next president, while dissing Sullivan.

Maria Newman, writing an abridged summation of blog posts for the New York Times, on Palin’s Humphries appearance, totally neglects quoting Palin’s lie.

Rick Moran, blogging for Pajamas Media, writes:

And no, not “a lot of people say” that we need to see Trig’s birth certificate. What planet is she on? Who, besides Andrew Sullivan and the same kind of fringe kooks on the left who mirror the righty loons wondering if Obama is eligible to be president, is concerned one whit about Trig’s parentage?

but neglects to observe that Palin’s claim is false.

If Obama had not released his birth certficate but went on the radio and point-blank said he had, do you think the press would simply ignore it and let it go?

Why will they not do so with Palin? What are they afraid of? How long do we have to put up with a press corps unable to do its basic job?

Andrew Sullivan
The Atlantic

Sarah Palin has now made two very clear public statements in the last day about the legitimacy of questions about the maternity of her son Trig. Here’s the first, transcribed from the interview above:

Would you make [Obama's long form] birth certificate an issue if you ran?

I think the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t know if I would have to bother to make it an issue ’cause I think there are enough members of the electorate who still want answers.

Do you think it’s a fair question to be looking at?

I think it’s a fair question, just like I think past associations and past voting record — all of that is fair game. You know, I’ve got to tell you, too: I think our campaign, the McCain/Palin campaign didn’t do a good enough job in that area. We didn’t call out Obama and some of his associates on their records and what their beliefs were and perhaps what their future plans were. And I don’t think that that was fair to voters to not have done our jobs as candidates and as a campaign to bring to light a lot of the things that now we’re seeing made manifest in the administration.

I mean, truly, if your past is fair game and your kids are fair game, certainly Obama’s past should be. I mean, we want to treat men and women equally, right?

Hey, you know, that’s a great point, in that weird conspiracy-theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn’t my real son. And a lot of people say, “Well you need to produce his birth certificate! You need to prove that he’s your kid!” Which we have done. But yeah, so maybe we could reverse that and use the same [unintelligible]-type thinking on them.

And here’s the second, a later Facebook attempt to walk back some of this:

Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask… which they have repeatedly. But at no point – not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews – have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States.

Most bloggers and readers have jumped onto the story line – understandably – that Palin has joined or at least mainstreamed the Birther movement. But this does not strike me as the news here. Palin has always been a brutal campaigner and in her first campaign for mayor, she demanded that her opponent produce his own marriage license to prove that he was in fact married to his wife. Of course, her first opponent did produce his license. And her current target, Barack Obama, has also produced his birth certificate a long time ago, and yet she is still demanding that he produce it.

The news here is that, to her credit, Palin says that all inquiries into a candidate’s veracity, record, associations, and medical history are legitimate forms of inquiry. She therefore backs this blog’s near-solitary attempt to get her to provide evidence – after very serious questions of fact emerged – that she was indeed the biological mother of Trig. To all those Palinites and McCainiacs and right and left bloggers who decried this question as lunatic, Palin has now said she differs. They were more Palinite than Palin.

But here’s the critical sentence:

In that weird conspiracy-theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn’t my real son. And a lot of people say, “Well you need to produce his birth certificate! You need to prove that he’s your kid!” Which we have done.

My italics. Palin has never produced Trig’s birth certificate or a single piece of objective medical evidence that proves he is indeed her biological son. A child with Down Syndrome must have a pile of such records,  tests, assessments and ultrasounds that conclusively prove that he is Sarah’s biological son. It seems bizarre to me that neither the public nor the campaign (so far as I can glean) has ever been given one of them.

Her doctor, Catherine Baldwin Johnson, offered a two-page summary of Palin’s health just hours before polls opened on November 3, a bizarre approach to transparency. The summary omits certain details from Palin’s medical history (two miscarriages, one serious), and does not provide any actual documentary evidence of the pregnancy and birth. It was authored by a doctor who has refused to return any phone calls, even from the New York Times, since the moment Palin’s candidacy was announced. The hospital has three recorded births on the day Trig was born: the governor’s son, by wishes of the parents, was not included on the list. There were only a handful of photographs over eight months that showed Palin pregnant, none showed her as visibly pregnant as with her previous children, and at seven months, her entire staff and all of Alaska’s political class disbelieved her:

People just couldn’t believe the news. “Really? No!” said Bethel state Rep. Mary Nelson, who is close to giving birth herself … “It’s wonderful. She’s very well-disguised,” said Senate President Lyda Green, a mother of three who has sometimes sparred with Palin politically. “When I was five months pregnant, there was absolutely no question that I was with child.”

On the return flight from Dallas to Alaska, which she says she boarded despite having contractions at eight months – a “strange sensation” she had never felt before, according to “Going Rogue,” – the flight attendants on the plane at the time, according to a contemporaneous account in the ADN, had no idea she was even pregnant, let alone in labor of some kind. The questions about this astonishing story are not a function of conspiracy theories and never were. They require no elaborate theory of whose child Trig may actually be. They are simply basic questions anyone would ask of a person who had recounted such an amazing tale. And yet not a single journalist has done so.

This blog has attempted to give Palin the benefit of the doubt on this from the get-go. The Dish was one of the first blogs to post a photograph – of only four – showing Palin somewhat pregnant. At the time, on August 31, 2008, I asked:

Please give us these answers – and provide medical records for Sarah Palin’s pregnancy – and put this to rest.

A short time later, I asked simply:

What harm would it do to release the medical records showing that Sarah Palin delivered Trig on April 18 in Wasilla? This is not hard: there must be an obstetrician, medical records, and data that can easily refute this rumor. It is not out of the ordinary either: candidates routinely issue medical records. So let’s have them. And then we can move on.

On September 3, Palin was cut off from the press for the following reasons:

In an extraordinary and emotional interview, Steve Schmidt said his campaign feels “under siege” by wave after wave of news inquiries that have questioned whether Palin is really the mother of a 4-month-old baby, whether her amniotic fluid had been tested and whether she would submit to a DNA test to establish the child’s parentage.

On September 5, Ben Smith reported that the medical records would be released “very soon”. We kept being told that in the campaign and they never were – until the brief doctor’s note was issued a few hours before midnight before Election day.

I also politely asked the campaign to simply confirm that they knew that Trig was Sarah’s biological son, and they responded not by providing the data but by leaking my email to the press. I asked the campaign personally and off the record in the last phase of the campaign to tell me that they knew these rumors were absurd. The senior official I spoke with simply didn’t know.

So here are the simple questions the Dish has been trying to get an answer for much more than a year. They are easily answered and could have been at any moment since August 31 2008 when I first asked them. Here they are:

Can you please provide independent medical documents/slides/reports that prove that Trig is Palin’s biological child? If this is deemed too private, then please provide them off the record to a reporter who can vouch for them to the rest of us?

Can you please provide Trig Palin’s birth certificate listing his biological mother and father?

Can you please ask Catherine Baldwin-Johnson to discuss these questions with medical reporters so this whole thing can be put to rest for good and all?

If you refuse to do these things, why?

Please, governor Palin, let’s put this behind us. Only you can. I pledge to post any and all material you can provide debunking these stories soon as I receive any. I’d like this line of inquiry to end as soon as possible – for the sake of all of us, but especially the innocent child caught up in something he doesn’t deserve.

Andrew Sullivan
The Atlantic

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is no friend to the endangered Cook Inlet Beluga whales.

In October, 2008, former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin strongly objected, when the US Fisheries Service listed the Cook Inlet beluga whale as endangered. In addition, before making the decision to quit as governor, Palin threatened to sue over the endangered status of the whale.

On December 1, 2009, after an October 29th notice of intent to sue by Center for Biological Diversity, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration finally announced habitat designation for the Cook Inlet beluga whale. The proposal would encompass 3,016 square miles to include parts of Cook Inlet (the whale’s primary summer habitat), mid-Cook Inlet; also the western shore of lower Cook Inlet, and Kachemak Bay on the eastern side.

“While today’s proposal is an important step toward protecting the Cook Inlet beluga, protections for the species remains far from complete,” said Brendan Cummings, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity in Anchorage. “Critical habitat designation should be promptly finalized and expanded to include the lower Inlet. Moreover, the Fisheries Service needs to prepare a recovery plan and stop freely handing out permits to industry allowing the beluga’s habitat to be developed and disturbed.”

The Endangered Species Act was a law enacted in 1973 to protect threatened species and by extension, the specie’s habitat.

Endangered Species Act (5)(A) The term “critical habitat” for a threatened or endangered species means—(i) the specific areas within the geographical area occupied by the species at the time it is listed in accordance with the provisions of section 4 of this Act, on which are found those physical or biological features (I) essential to the conservation of the species and (II) which may require special management considerations or protection.

The ESA law is clear that vital habitat in which an endangered animal lives must to be protected to promote the growth and health of the population. Industry and politics should not supersede the ESA designation, although attempts to do so occur on a regular basis.

Far too often, federal agencies face political pressures and will delay taking action until they are forced by conservation groups, like The Center for Biological Diversity, to uphold the laws within the ESA.

After Sarah Palin left Alaskan politics, lieutenant governor Sean Parnell was sworn in to take her place. Parnell took up Palin’s stand on protecting industry–over wildlife.

“Listing more than 3,000 square miles of Cook Inlet as critical habitat would do little to help grow the beluga population, but it would devastate economic opportunities in the region,” Governor Parnell said. “The beluga whale population has been coexisting with industry for years. The main threat facing belugas was over-harvest, which is now regulated under a cooperative harvest management plan. Belugas are also protected under the Marine Mammal Act.”

Yet, hunting the whales became illegal a decade ago and they have continued to decline. According to statistics from NOAA, the estimated Cook Inlet beluga whale population has dwindled from 1,300 individuals down to 300 whales.

NOAA’s official announcement contends: recovery of Cook Inlet whales is potentially hindered by severe stranding events; continued development within and along upper Cook Inlet; industrial and municipal activities that discharge or accidentally spill pollutants; disease; predation by killer whales and losses of available prey to fishing or loss of prey habitat. Protecting habitat is essential to the beluga whales’ recovery.

The Cook Inlet whale is one of five species of beluga or white whales and is a genetically distinct in comparison to the four other distant populations of belugas. Normally, belugas move from pod to pod, but that is geographically not possible for the Cooks Inlet whales.

Belugas tend to be the most social, playful, and interactive of the cetacean species and are the only whales known to swim backwards, making them popular attractions at theme parks.

NOAA’s announcement signals the opening of a public comment period that will remain open until January 31, 2010. The designation will not be finalized until spring. Once the designation is final, federal agencies would have to consult with NOAA’s Fisheries Services to make sure there would be no adverse effect to the whale’s habitat before permits for new development could be issued.

Sarah Palin has moved on from her failed bid as John McCain’s Vice president and her short stent as governor of Alaska; to the media spotlight of her book tour promoting “Going Rogue.”

But Governor Parnell, true to his predecessor Sarah Palin and her kill-baby-kill attitude toward wolves, polar bears, whales, and other wildlife—has indicated the state will review all legal options regarding the listing and the proposed critical habitat protection.

The fight may not be over, so it is vitally important to encourage NOAA to proceed with the designated protection of the whale’s habitat and restore this vital natural resource for all Alaskans and nature lovers for generations to come.

Send comments to: Assistant Regional Administrator, Protected Resources, Alaska Region, NOAA Fisheries, ATTN: Ellen Sebastian. Comments must be identified by “RIN 0648-AX50” and sent by any one of the following methods:

• Electronic submissions: Submit all electronic public comments via the Federal eRulemaking Portal website at http://www.regulations.gov
• Mail: P.O. Box 21668, Juneau, AK, 99802-1668.
• Fax: 907-586-7557
• Hand deliver to the Federal Building: 709 West 9th Street, Room 420A, Juneau, AK

Perhaps, at long last, the smiling white faces of Cooks Inlet whales will begin to frolic in clean, undisturbed, pristine waters, and be recognized as the valued natural asset they are to the region and to the world.

More information the status of the Cook Inlet Whale—Center for Biological Diversity

Jean Williams
Examiner.com

Andree McLeod, a longtime critic of Sarah Palin on Friday filed an ethics complaint with the state attorney general's office alleging past aides of the former Alaska governor misused state resources during her run as the Republican vice presidential candidate for Senator John McCain.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) faced yet another ethics complaint on Friday: This time, for allegedly using state resources “for partisan political purposes”  during the 2008 campaign.

Under state law, elected officials may not “use or authorize the use of state funds, facilities, equipment, services, or another government asset or resource” for campaigning, stumping or politicking.

But Palin, argues Andree McLeod — a local activist who has filed many ethics complaints against the former Alaska governor — sought political advice from her staff and asked her office to help her arrange media interviews or phone conversations leading up to Election Day, all using their government-issued e-mail addresses.

According to the Alaska Department of Administration, the use of e-mail is key: That medium, too, counts as a state resource, meaning Palin’s e-mail exchanges with her gubernatorial staff about national campaign strategies could have violated the state’s election law.

“State employees are prohibited from using the state e-mail system or using other state equipment, including fax machines, telephones, computers, or copiers, for partisan political purposes,” the department’s commissioner told The Huffington Post. “However, if you receive such a message, you may respond that Alaska law forbids your use of state equipment for partisan political purposes and ask that the sender not send you further messages concerning campaign activities.”

Palin has long struggled to battle back ethics claims stemming from her tenure as governor — an expensive problem, her allies note, that in part triggered her unexpected resignation earlier this year.

Nevertheless, many of those chargers have since been dropped.

Tony Romm
The Hill

Sarah Palin will keynote the Bowling Proprietors' Association Of America's (BPAA) International Bowl Expo 2010 trade show at the Las Vegas Hilton in June 2010.

Of all the things that have ever been said about famed Vice Presidential nominee and occasional Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, none have been as trenchant or as poignant as this: “Her presence underscores the impact and importance of bowling.” HER VERY PRESENCE DOES THESE THINGS.

That’s from the statement proffered by the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America, who “announced today that the bowling industry rolled a strike [ed. note: WITTICISM!], securing Sarah Palin as the keynote speaker at this summer’s International Bowl Expo 2010.”

UHM…BREAKING, I THINK(?!):

“Sarah Palin is a great friend to the bowling industry and we’re so proud and honored to welcome her as our keynote speaker at International Bowl Expo 2010,” said Steven Johnson, executive director of the BPAA.

Of course, the BPAA may end up being disappointed when the obvious benefit of having Palin as a speaker — hyper-intensive, nonstop media coverage of the event — comes to naught when Palin refuses the “gotcha” media entry to the event.

Oh, and here’s real-live bowling columnist Dick Evans, questioning the BPAA’s decision:

If Sarah Palin or any other politician would jump in and help bowling become stronger financially, I would vote for her or him.
But to be honest I think I am dreaming. Politicians don’t seem to give a hoot about championing the great sport of bowling and that bothers me when politicians who know nothing about bowling are invited to speak at a bowling convention and barely mention the sport.

I would venture a guess that a keynote speaker at Bowl Expo earns between $25,000 and $50,000 for maybe 25 minutes of jokes and their beliefs about what is happening in the country…views they probably have expressed numerous times on numerous cable and network TV shows.

In the old days, before 24/7 political related cable shows, I was interested in what politicians had to say at political rallies because that might be the only time you got to hear them speak on national issues.

Now you can’t turn on TV without hearing one political candidate or another speak so I have found three political candidates telling BPAA members the same thing they have been saying on TV for 12 months while serving as keynote speakers at Bowl Expos over the years.

Seriously: Dick Evans is ALL KINDS OF AWESOME. I encourage bowling enthusiasts to bookmark him immediately.

Jason Linkins
The Huffington Post

Members of the foreign press who don't speak English are, in fact, welcome to cover Sarah Palin's book signing on Monday at Mall of America's Barnes and Noble store.

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — She’s no longer the chief executive of Alaska, but Sarah Palin should still be called “governor.” And in English only, please.

That was the message sent out by officials at the Mall of America this week, who told reporters planning to cover the Minneapolis-area stop on Palin’s “Going Rogue” book tour they must address the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate by her former title. The guidelines also banned foreign reporters, allowing “only English speaking press.”

Mall officials said the guidelines were a mistake, and apologized Wednesday to Palin for the mix up, which they called “an internal miscommunication” that was “inadvertently distributed.”

“That should never have been in any kind of press release,” said Tina Andreadis, a publicist for publisher HarperCollins in New York, who added foreign reporters would be welcome at Palin’s Mall of America stop.

“That’s not the message the governor wants to send out,” she said.

The guidelines were likely to be mostly irrelevant either way. Palin hasn’t been speaking to most reporters – either local or from abroad – during her tightly controlled, stay-on-message book tour. A speech scheduled for Wednesday night at the private College of the Ozarks in southwest Missouri was expected to draw a crowd of 5,000, and the school said it agreed to keep out reporters to secure Palin’s appearance.

The few media outlets that did manage to gain access to the speech did so by using one of the free tickets given away to the public, and the college asked they not report on Palin’s address.

“I can’t take their tickets and ask them to leave, but we have asked them (local reporters) not to (attend),” said College of the Ozarks spokeswoman Elizabeth Andrews.

Last week, Army officials initially barred media from attending a Palin book-signing event at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, fearing it might turn political and lead to negative comments directed at President Barack Obama. The Army later relented and allowed coverage of the event, at which Palin did not give a speech.

Alan Scher Zagier
The Huffington Post

No Joke - Sarah Palin has a guest spot in a new right-wing conservative children's book entitled "Help! Mom! Radicals Are Ruining My Country"

Are you blue as a mandrill’s buttocks because you missed the chance on Friday to grab that 60″ flat screen TV on sale at Mallwart for the kids’ playroom? Bummed because your neighbors finally encrytped their broadband router and you couldn’t snag all those Cyber Monday bargains offered online today? Do you even know the difference between xbox, PS3, and mp3?

No? Well, have I got the gift for you.

Folks, it’s never too early to “learn yer kids” about how to drape themselves in reactionary jingoism and drown themselves in rank ignorance and failed business models. No, we’re not talking about buying them Going Rogue at the bargain bin price of $4.97, nosiree. Complete with cartoony versions of Democratic Party leadership, Help! Mom! Radicals Are Ruining My Country! by some crazy named Katharine DeBrecht (hmm, sounds . . . foreign) is a paean not just to exclamation points, but to the regurgitation of every conservative wingnut talking point that has slimed its way into the public discourse over the past year through our good friends at FOX News.

What makes this children’s book so very special isn’t the evil little rat that apparently represents the “radical” media but the cameo appearance of everyone’s least favorite con artist, the Quitter of the Great White North, Sarah Palin. In the laughably amateurish, comic sans serif-riddled press release issued by iTouch Publishers (otherwise known as Katharine DeBrecht), we are provided an excerpt of Palin’s role in teaching two young boys how to navigate the treacherous waters of business and fameballdom:

“I am trying to let all Americans know that these radicals are killing the American Dream and I want to stop them from hurting people that produce products and provide jobs,” the Palin character consoles the frustrated boys. The book then describes an all-out media assault on the Palin figure based on false rumors which discourages the boys:

Unfortunately later that night, while the boys were still ruffling through their bills, they saw a special report on TV. The TV anchorwoman beamed “We have breaking news just in from a 37 year old man who lives in his parents’ basement that Governor Sarah’s mother is actually an alien.”

The anchorwoman excitedly went on, “And from this exclusive source, we can confirm that Governor Sarah feeds her children dog food for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

Where else could a serial grifter from a backwater bedroom community in Alaska bullshit and backstab her way through the political ranks, from town council to governor, without ever following through on any of her responsibilities and STILL wind up as a hero in an illustrated, Fisher Price version of Atlas Shrugged? It’s just the kind of lesson we need to teach our kids, so they can aspire to be the next Octomom or Speidi or even reach the preeminence of the Salahis.

Is this a great country or what?

I can’t wait for DeBrecht’s next instant classic: Help! Mom! The Government Won’t Get Out Of Grandma’s Medicare!

Fire Dog Lake

The many lies of Sarah Palin continue to emerge in "Going Rogue: An American Life."

The lies of Sarah Palin are different from any other politicians’. They are different because they assert things that are demonstrably, empirically untrue; and they are different because once they have been demonstrated to the entire world that they are untrue, Palin keeps repeating them as if they still were true or refuses to acknowledge that she was wrong.

Once again … here are the lies I mean. Go through them. See if you think they are Clintonian type parsings of the truth or artful political hedging or anything like what we find in most pols. They really are not. They are functions of delusion and a worldview that wants things to be a certain way and cannot absorb that they are not. If you find the slightest error or come across a fact that we should add to this list of current lies, please let us know. We want this list to be as accurate as Palin is delusional. We want to create some template of easily-accessible reality as some kind of guard against the fantasies and fabulisms of our post-modern and fundamentalist age.

Palin lied when she said the dismissal of her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, had nothing to do with his refusal to fire state trooper Mike Wooten; in fact, the Branchflower Report concluded that she repeatedly abused her power when dealing with both men.

Palin lied when she repeatedly claimed to have said, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere; in fact, she openly campaigned for the federal project when running for governor.

Palin lied when she denied that Wasilla’s police chief [Irl Stambaugh] and librarian [Mary Ellen Emmons] had been fired; in fact, both were given letters of termination the previous day.

Palin lied when she wrote in the NYT that a comprehensive review by Alaska wildlife officials showed that polar bears were not endangered; in fact, email correspondence between those scientists showed the opposite.

Palin lied when she claimed in her convention speech that an oil gas pipeline “began” under her guidance; in fact, the pipeline was years from breaking ground, if at all.

Palin lied when she told Charlie Gibson that she does not pass judgment on gay people; in fact, she opposes all rights between gay spouses and belongs to a church that promotes conversion therapy.

Palin lied when she denied having said that humans do not contribute to climate change; in fact, she had previously proclaimed that human activity was not to blame.

Palin lied when she claimed that Alaska produces 20 percent of the country’s domestic energy supply; in fact, the actual figures, based on any interpretation of her words, are much, much lower.

Palin lied when she told voters she improvised her convention speech when her teleprompter stopped working properly; in fact, all reports showed that the machine had functioned perfectly and that her speech had closely followed the script.

Palin lied when she recalled asking her daughters to vote on whether she should accept the VP offer; in fact, her story contradicts details given by her husband, the McCain campaign, and even Palin herself. (She later added another version.)

Palin lied when she claimed to have taken a voluntary pay cut as mayor; in fact, as councilmember she had voted against a raise for the mayor, but subsequent raises had taken effect by the time she was mayor.

Palin lied when she insisted that Wooten’s divorce proceedings had caused his confidential records to become public; in fact, court officials confirmed they released no such records.

Palin lied when she suggested to Katie Couric that she was involved in trade missions with Russia; in fact, she has never even met with Russian officials.

Palin lied when she told Shimon Peres that the only flag in her office was the Israeli flag; in fact, she has several flags.

Palin lied when she claimed to have tried to divest government funds from Sudan; in fact, her administration openly opposed a bill that would have done just that.

Palin lied when she repeatedly claimed that troop levels in Iraq were back to pre-surge levels; in fact, even she acknowledged her “misstatements,” though she refused to retract or apologize.

Palin lied when she insisted that the Branchflower Report “showed there was no unlawful or unethical activity on my part”; in fact, that report prominently stated, “Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.”

Palin lied when she claimed to have voiced concerns over Wooten fearing he would harm her family; in fact, she actually decreased her security detail during that period.

Palin lied when asked about the $150,000 worth of clothes provided by the RNC; in fact, solid reporting contradicted several parts of her statement.

Palin lied when she suggested that she had offered the media proof of her pregnancy with Trig to “correct the record”; in fact, no reports of her medical records were ever published; and the letter from her doctor testifying to her good health only emerged hours before polling ended on election day, even though there was nothing in it that couldn’t have been released two months earlier.

Palin lied when she said that “reported” allegations of her banning Harry Potter as mayor was easily refutable because it had not even been written yet; in fact, the first book in that series was published in 1998 – two years into her first term – and such rumors were never reported by the media, only circulated as emails.

Palin lied when she denied having participated in a clothes audit with campaign lawyers; in fact, the Washington Times later confirmed those details.

Palin lied when asked about Couric’s question regarding her reading habits; in fact, Couric’s words were not, “What do you read up there in Alaska?” or anything close to condescension.

Palin lied when she mischaracterized the “$1200 check” given to Alaskans as the permanent fund dividend check; in fact, that fund had yielded $2,069 per person, and she claimed otherwise to obscure the fact that Alaskans also received a $1200 rebate check from a windfall profits tax on oil companies – a tax widely criticized by Republicans.

Palin lied when she claimed to be unaware of a turkey being slaughtered behind her during a filmed interview; in fact, the cameraman said she had picked the spot herself, while the slaughter was underway.

Palin lied when she denied having rejected federal stimulus money; in fact, she continued to accept and reject the funds several times.

Palin lied when she claimed that legislative leaders had canceled a meeting with her to hold their own press conference; in fact, they only canceled it after being told she would not participate, and the purpose of the press conference was very different from the meeting’s.

Palin lied when she announced on the news that she never holds closed-door meetings; in fact, she had just attended a closed-door meeting with the legislature earlier that day.

Palin lied when she said that former aide John Bitney’s “amicable” departure was for “personal” reasons; in fact, Bitney said he was fired because of his relationship with the wife of Palin’s friend, plus a Palin spokesperson later claimed “poor job performance” for his firing – without elaborating.

Palin lied when she said she kept her running injury a secret on the campaign trail; in fact, her bandaged hand was clearly visible in photographs and the story was widely talked about.

Palin lied when she claimed that Alaska has spent “millions of dollars” on litigation related to her ethics complaints; in fact, that figure is much, much lower, and she had initiated the most expensive inquiry.

Palin lied when she denied that the Alaska Independence Party supports secession and denied that her husband had been a member; in fact, even the McCain campaign noted that the party’s very existence is based on secession and that Todd was a member for seven years.

Palin lied when she told Oprah that she desperately wanted to go on Saturday Night Live because it would be “fun” and could push back on the Tina Fey impression Palin says she hated but never actually listened to. Contemporaneous emails show that Palin resisted going on SNL and was therefore lying to Oprah.

Palin lied when she told Oprah Winfrey that she gaffed on the campaign trail in saying that the McCain campaign shouldn’t quit Michigan. She said she had been unaware at the time that the decision to withdraw had already been taken. Contemporaneous emails show she was lying, and had already been told.

Palin lied in “Going Rogue” in accusing two journalists she recognized from a press conference as ambushing her daughter Piper on the street. One of those journalists had never attended the press conference cited by Palin, but Palin has never withdrawn the charge.

Andrew Sullivan
The Atlantic

Sarah Palin at one of her book signing this past week.

There have been so many lies and distortions pointed out in Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue since it was released last week that her memoir has already become something of a gag line.

But perhaps the most embarrassing gaffe so far is her mis-attributed quote to UCLA basketball legend John Wooden.

As the epigram to Chapter Three, “Drill, Baby, Drill,” Palin assigns the following remarks to the Hall of Fame hoops coach:

Our land is everything to us… I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it–with their lives.

Only the quote wasn’t by John Wooden. It was written by a Native American activist named John Wooden Legs in an essay entitled “Back on the War Ponies,” which appeared in a left-wing anthology, We Are the People: Voices from the Other Side of American History, edited by Nathaniel May, Clint Willis, and James W. Loewen.

Here’s the full quote:

Our land is everything to us. It is the only place in the world where Cheyennes talk the Cheyenne language to each other. It is the only place where Cheyennes remember the same things together. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it–with their life. My people and the Sioux defeated General Custer at the Little Big Horn.

Oops! That’s not quite the sentiment that Sister Sarah was trying to convey as she guzzled down sugar-free Red Bull and cranked up Toby Keith’s “How Do You Like Me Now?” while jumping on her patriotic high horse at the opening of the third chapter.

There’s also no small amount of irony in the quote, given Palin’s abysmal record on Alaska Native issues during her truncated term as governor.

I was a huge UCLA basketball fan as a kid. Whenever the Bruins came to the Bay Area, I did whatever I could do to snag a ticket. I loved to watch Wooden coach. But I never figured the Wizard of Westwood as an advocate for radical land distribution.

Obviously this one slipped by Sister Sarah and her crack team of investigative journalists Lynn Vincent, Meg Stapleton and Ivy Frye, as well as all those dutiful fact checkers at HarperCollins. Obviously, they didn’t get the quote from anything Wooden ever wrote, but from a cute little web site called The Quote Garden. Isn’t that sweet?

Okay, I was a little leery reading Palin’s book and wondering if she really had read Aristotle and Plato. Somehow I didn’t think so. But I thought, maybe, just maybe, she might have read Sir John. Apparently not.

But just because we’re all good sports here at HuffPo, I thought I’d save the former Governor (can you imagine what Wooden thought about her quitting?!) a little bit of time, and here are five actual Wooden quotes, courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor, that she might want to take to heart:

1. It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.
2. Failure is not fatal but failure to change might be.

3. What you are as a person is far more important that what you are as a basketball player.

4. Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

5. Never mistake activity for achievement.

We’ll see if the second printing carries a correction.
Award-winning writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn’s book The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power will be released by St. Martin’s Press in spring 2010.

Geoffrey Dunn
The Huffington Post

Have you ever argued politics with a conservative counterpart and felt as if you were speaking two different languages? Well, you were. In order to bridge the divide, we have developed some definitions in the hopes of making things a bit easier.

con-serv-a-tive [kuhn-sur-vuh-tiv] -noun: A liberal who has not yet figured out how to think for himself/herself.

def-i-cit [def-uh-sit; Brit. also di-fis-it] -noun: The amount by which a sum of money falls short of the required amount, which only matters when a Democrat is elected to office.

fil-i-bus-ter [fil-uh-buhs-ter] -noun: The Republican’s health care plan.

sen-ate [sen-it] -noun: an assembly or council of citizens having the highest deliberative functions in a government, easily manipulated by a single Senator from Connecticut who craves power and attention.

sur-plus [sur-pluhs] -noun: A thing of the past.

con-sti-tu-tion [kon-sti-too-shuhn, -tyoo-] -noun: the system of fundamental principles according to which a nation, state, corporation, or the like is governed. Used to discourage health coverage to others, and promote guns. Frequently used as buzzword without ever being read by person using.

stim-u-lus [stim-yuh-luh s] -noun, plural-li: A trip to Argentina for a visit with your mistress, which could potentially cost you your job as Governor of South Carolina.

di-ver-si-ty [di-vur-si-tee, dayh-] -noun-plural-ties: The state or fact of being diverse; variety. Best adhered to by publishing ten rules and excluding everyone unwilling to abide.

gov-ern-ment [guhv-ern-muhnt, -er-muhnt] -noun: something evil and ineffective that needs to be limited to giving tax breaks for the rich, subsidies for powerful interests, and wars fought by the middle and lower-classes.

hy-poc-ri-sy [hi-pok-ruh-see] -no results found

Ken Kupchik
Air America

Outgoing Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (2nd L), her husband Todd (C) look on as incoming Governor Sean Parnell (2nd R) is sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Daniel Winfree (L) during the annual Governor's Picnic July 26, 2009 at Pioneer Park in Fairbanks, Alaska. Parnell' wife Sandy held the bible for the ceremony. Craig E. Campbell was sworn in as the new Lieutenant Governor.

Last July in Fairbanks, with Todd smiling at her side and Piper sitting in her lap, Sarah Palin watched Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell take the oath to fill out her term in office as Governor of Alaska. Then she vanished. For the past four months the Forty-Ninth State has seen neither hide nor hair of the woman. No speeches at chambers of commerce luncheons. No sightings on the street. No Sarah cheering on the sideline at Wasilla Warriors girls basketball games. No Sarah sitting in the pew on Sunday worshiping at the ChangePoint and Anchorage Baptist Temple evangelical mega churches. She’s been gone. Disappeared.

It now turns out that while Alaskans were hunkering down for winter Sarah was in San Diego working for a woman named Lynn Vincent, the ghostwriter HarperCollins hired to cobble together Going Rogue: An American Life, Sarah’s first person account of her it-only-would-happen-in-America rise from small town mayor to small state governor to Republican Vice Presidential candidate to popular culture icon.

Since Tuesday when Going Rogue was released nationwide copies of the book have been flying off the shelves at Barnes & Noble in Boise and Grand Rapids and not flying off the shelves in San Francisco and Seattle.

Since I already have enough to read, I had intended to give Going Rogue a pass until I had time this weekend to motor over to the Anchorage Barnes & Noble and give Ms. Vincent’s word-smithing a skim. But on Monday I learned that I’m in the book. Not surprisingly, that piqued my interest. And then yesterday a friend lent me a copy.

I’ve now read it. Here’s the review.

I usually begin reading a book that purports to be nonfiction by reading the index. But Going Rogue doesn’t have one. So I started with the acknowledgments section at the back of the book. In the first paragraph Sarah explains to her readers: “I’m very glad this writing exercise is over. I love to write, but not about myself. I’m thankful now to have kept journals about Alaska and my friends and family ever since I was a little girl. That practice allowed an orderly compilation over the past weeks and let me summarily wrap up at least some of my life so far.”

Sarah then thanks thirty-seven people (all but four only by his or her first name so that none of the rest of us have a clue who they are) before she thanks Lynn Vincent “for her indispensable help in getting the words on paper.”

If all that is read quickly, it leaves the veneer impression that Sarah wrote her book. But if read carefully that’s not what it says. “Help in getting the words on paper?” Too coy by half.

Decide for yourself when you do your own skim at your own local Barnes & Noble. But start to finish Going Rogue reads to me like Sarah sitting on the sofa in Lynn Vincent’s condo in San Diego, school girl diaries in her lap, talking hour after hour in her you-betcha patois into a computerized tape recorder like the ones court reporters use to record depositions. Then each afternoon when Sarah went off on her jog, Ms. Vincent would begin her real workday sitting at her computer editing and cut and pasting that day’s transcript of Sarah’s ramblings into a narrative.

I can’t prove that. But someone should ask Sarah if that’s how she “wrote” Going Rogue. Lynn Vincent would be a more reliable source. But, no surprise, her contract with HarperCollins contains a non-disclosure provision. Adam Bellow, Sarah’s editor at HarperCollins, also would know. But he for sure is not telling. At least until he has too much red wine during dinner at Elaine’s some night and lets the secret slip.

The book itself is a prosaic hagiography divided into three parts. Part one is Sarah’s autobiography from her birth in Sandpoint, Idaho, to her selection by John McCain as his running mate. Part two is Sarah’s story of her life on the road during the 2008 presidential campaign. Part three is a sanguinolent settling of accounts for the torment to which she was subjected in Alaska after the election – a torment so awful that it brought the operation of the entire executive branch of the government of the State of Alaska to a gridlocked halt and left Sarah no choice but to abandon her governorship in order to earn $5 million in four months talking into Lynn Vincent’s tape recorder.

If that three-part narrative has a unifying theme, the theme is that everything – and I mean everything – that has ever gone wrong for Sarah Palin was someone else’s fault.

Sarah’s lackluster performance during her interview with Frank Murkowski when she somehow made the short-list of candidates to succeed Frank in the U.S. Senate? That was Frank and his Attorney General, my friend Gregg Renkes’s, fault. The Troopergate scandal? Walt Monegan and the Democratic members of the Alaska Senate pulled that mean-spirited prank on a blameless Sarah. The nationally televised interview with Katie Couric that branded Sarah Palin as an ignorant and uneducated laughingstock? Katie sandbagged her. The fabulously disastrous Thanksgiving television interview when Governor Palin pardoned a turkey while in the background unpardoned turkeys were having their heads shoved down a funnel and their throats slit? Sandbagged again. That time by a local TV news cameraman.

Don’t take my word for it. Thumb through Going Rogue on your own. Page after page after page. It’s always someone else’s fault.

When discussing George Herbert Walker and Barbara Bush, Richard Nixon is reported to have said that George was a nice guy. “But his wife. That woman knows how to hate.” Since Dick meant that as a compliment, he would be impressed with Sarah’s penchant for settling scores. Because scattered throughout its content Going Rogue contains an enemies list as long as the list the nation’s Thirty-Seventh President and his henchmen compiled during the run-up to Watergate.

Sarah trashes Nick Carney (the Wasilla city councilman who recruited Sarah into politics), John Stein (Sarah’s predecessor as mayor of Wasilla), Anne Kilkenny (a Wasilla resident whose viral email educated the nation to Sarah’s lackluster record as mayor), an unnamed City of Wasilla librarian, Frank Murkowski (Sarah’s predecessor as Governor of Alaska), Gregg Renkes (Frank’s Attorney General), Lyda Green (the former President of the Alaska Senate), Hollis French (the chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the Alaska Senate), Steve Schmidt (John McCain’s campaign manager), an unnamed KTUU television cameraman [Scott Jensen], Walt Monegan (Sarah’s Commissioner of Public Safety), Randy Ruedrich (the chairman of the Alaska Republican Party with whom Sarah worked at the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission), Bill Allen (the corpulent head of the oil field services company VECO, a odious scum bag whose reputation as the bag man for Big Oil in the state capitol had been a matter of common knowledge in Alaska for a generation when Sarah went with her hand out to Bill for the campaign contributions she used to launch her statewide political career), Mike Wooten (Sarah’s ex-brother-in-law), unnamed executives of the Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum, and Conoco-Phillips oil companies, Pete Rouse (a former Alaskan who was Senator Barack Obama’s chief of staff), Rahm Emanuel (President Barack Obama’s chief of staff), Kim Elton (a former member of the Alaska Senate who is Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar’s Special Assistant for Alaska), unnamed members of the McCain campaign staff who prepped Sarah for her television debate with Joe Biden, John Bitney (Governor Palin’s liaison to the Alaska Legislature), Levi Johnston (the hockey-playing, Playgirl modeling impregnator of Bristol Palin).

That’s not the complete list. There’s no index and I’m tired of typing.

Of all the individuals on the Going Rogue enemies list, the two firsts among equals are Andrew Halcro and Andree McLeod.

Halcro is a former Republican member of the Alaska House of Representatives who ran as an independent candidate against Sarah Palin in the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial election. After the election he started a website that he used to become one of Governor Palin’s most articulate and factually well-informed critics.

It was Andrew Halcro who broke the story that Governor Palin had fired Walt Monegan, her Commissioner of Public Safety, because Walt had refused to fire Mike Wooten, Sarah’s ex-brother-in-law, from his union job as an Alaska State Trooper. That news led to the Troopergate investigation of Sarah (and Todd) Palin’s misuse of the Office of the Governor. In the Troopergate report that Sarah touts as clearing her of wrong-doing, the investigator, a former prosecutor with whom (unlike the Legislature’s investigator) Sarah cooperated, implies that during his investigation either Walt Monegan committed criminal perjury or Sarah Palin committed criminal perjury. But the Legislature had no stomach during the remainder of Sarah’s tenure as Governor to determine whether she was the felon.

In Going Rogue Sarah describes Andrew Halcro as “a wealthy, effete young chap who had taken over his father’s local Avis Rent A Car, and he starred in his own car commercial. He would go on to host a short-lived local radio show while blogging throughout the day, all of which were major steps up from a previous job as our limo driver at Todd’s cousin’s wedding.”

Andree McLeod is where I come in.

I am an attorney by trade and an historian of modest reputation by avocation. In 1987 I briefly convinced an Alaska Superior Court that it was a violation of the U.S. and Alaska Constitutions for the State of Alaska to have a campaign finance system that allows individuals who are not eligible to vote for a candidate to influence the candidate’s election by making campaign contributions. In 1998 I came within one vote of convincing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to uphold the constitutionality of an amendment to the Oregon Constitution that would have mandated a similar result. Over the years since, I have frequently represented individuals for a reduced fee or no fee in cases in which I think the public policy benefits merit my effort.

For that reason, I was not surprised in September 2008 when a friend called to ask if I would have a cup of coffee with a woman named Andree McLeod. By that date, I had been active in Alaska’s (small state) political life for thirty years. But my answer to that query was, “Who’s Andree McLeod?” But I went for coffee and discovered that Andree McLeod is a quite amazing woman.

Short, smart, politically committed, and tenaciously energetic, Andree McLeod is a Republican political activist of Armenian heritage who had once been a personal friend of Sarah Palin’s, who Sarah had endorsed when Andree ran in the Republican primary for a seat in the Alaska House of Representatives.

When I went to her home in east Anchorage to have my cup of coffee I found Andree sitting at her dining room table surrounded by two-foot-high stacks of paper print-outs of several thousand emails that the Office of the Governor had given to her in July in response to a request she had filed in June pursuant to the Alaska Public Records Act. The request had asked for emails that had been sent to or received by employees of the Office of the Governor who Andree suspected had been engaging in partisan – i.e., Alaska Republican Party – political activities during their public employee workdays. Andree submitted her public records request three months before anyone other than those of us in Alaska had ever heard of Sarah Palin.

The reason I had been invited to meet with Andree was that one of the things she had discovered by reading the emails was that when Governor Palin assumed office she had set up a private back-channel email system so that she and her senior staff could communicate with each other about state business without the content of their communications being “captured” by State of Alaska computer servers, and hence being available for public inspection pursuant to the Alaska Public Records Act. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other national media would later report that story.

After researching the Alaska Public Records Act I concluded that, for reasons not worth detailing here, the private back-channel email system that Sarah had created was a violation of the Alaska Public Records Act. As a consequence, representing Andree McLeod, on October 1, 2008 I filed a lawsuit against Governor Palin in the Alaska Superior Court, the purpose of which is to obtain an order prohibiting state officials from using private email accounts to conduct state business.

The month after the McCain-Palin ticket lost the presidential election, again representing Andree McLeod, on December 8, 2008 I filed a second lawsuit against Governor Palin when a further review of the emails that Andree had been given revealed that the Office of the Governor had given to Todd Palin, a private citizen who was an employee of British Petroleum, copies of emails that it was withholding from public inspection on the ground of deliberative process privilege.

That litigation is ongoing. The legal questions of first impression that they present for decision are important enough that my expectation is that both lawsuits will end up in the Alaska Supreme Court.

What does any of that have to do with me and Going Rogue?

Prior to me agreeing to represent her in the two lawsuits above-described, Andree McLeod had begun filing what became a series of complaints against Sarah Palin with the State Personnel Board that alleged ethical transgressions unrelated to the lawsuits. Other Alaskans did the same thing. According to Going Rogue, those ethics complaints have driven Sarah Palin flat-out full-crank nuts.

After trashing Andree McLeod at page 354 of Going Rogue Lynn Vincent aka Sarah Palin moves on to me. Here’s what Lynn and Sarah say:

We always suspected that someone was funding and directing
Andree’s efforts. During the spring of 2009, she was actually still
begging my administration for a job and led others to believe she
hadn’t worked for a couple of years. Yet somehow she had enough
time or money to turn harassment of the governor’s office into a
full-time vocation. Over time, the wording of her ethics complaints
became more and more sophisticated, and we later found out why:
prominent liberal attorney Don Mitchell was advising her. As early as September 2008, weeks before the presidential election, Mitchell had already detailed the ethics attack strategy in an article in the Huffington Post. Later he sat with Andree as her counsel at one of her hearings.

I wish my late mother was still alive. Because I know how proud she would be that I made the Going Rogue enemies list and have been mentioned by name in a book whose first printing is 1.5 million copies. (Because he is not named, the mother of the KTUU cameraman who posed Sarah in front of the turkeys can take no such pride.)

But my number is listed in the Anchorage telephone book. If that failed, Lynn and Sarah could have googled “Donald Craig Mitchell.” And if that had failed, since Meg Stapleton, the increasingly strange combination of Sancho Panza and Odd Job who works for Sarah, and I have mutual friends, Meg could have found me quite easily.

Had Lynn Vincent, Sarah, or Meg called me before Lynn had finished writing Going Rogue, I would have told her that in a single paragraph Lynn/Sarah got almost every one of their facts about me, other than that I am an attorney, wrong.

While I probably once was, I haven’t been a “prominent” attorney in Alaska in years. While I am a registered Democrat, my personal politics are hardly “liberal.” To the extent anyone cares, I am a social libertarian who is an Eisenhower era deficit hawk who agrees with Teddy and Frank Roosevelt that the principal responsibility of government is to save capitalism from itself. And while during the presidential campaign several of my ‘Governor Girl Reports‘ were posted by individuals other than me on the Huffington Post and Atlantic Monthly web sites, none of those musings “detailed an ethics attack strategy.”

But most importantly, not only have I never advised Andree regarding her ethics complaints, to the best of my recollection I have never read an Andree McLeod ethics complaint. Had Lynn, Sarah, or Meg called me, I also would have told them that neither Andree McLeod nor I have been paid a nickel by anyone for anything (although if I win either of my lawsuits I intend to send the Office of the Governor a bill for my attorneys fee, which under Alaska law I am permitted to do).

It is true, however, that, as Going Rogue reports, because she asked me to, I did accompany Andree to her interview with Tim Petumenos, the former prosecutor the State Personnel Board hired to investigate both the complaint Sarah filed against herself regarding the Troopergate affair and a complaint Andree filed against Sarah and Frank Bailey, Sarah’s Director of Boards and Commissions, for violating state civil service rules in order to give one of Sarah’s campaign supporters a job for which he was not qualified. Again to the best of my recollection, I have never read either complaint. And if he is asked, I think Tim will say that during his interview with Andree I pretty much just sat there.

It also is worth mentioning that the State Personnel Board found the ethics complaint that Andree McLeod filed against Frank Bailey meritorious.

Why should anyone care about any of that? The reason they should care is that if Lynn Vincent aka Sarah Palin got as many of the facts, asserted and implied, about me in Going Rogue as wrong as she did, what does that say about the validity of the many other, much more important, “facts” in Sarah’s book?

It’s fully fine by me that billions of federal tax dollars are being spent annually to invent an AIDS vaccine. But it is just as important to someday invent a Pinocchio serum.

If the world had one, before a faux celebrity like Sarah Palin writes a book, doctors from the CDC could roll up the celebrity’s sleeve and inject him or her with a jolt of the serum. And a serum also would have other important uses.

For example, on page 214 of Going Rogue Lynn Vincent reports that when the McCain campaign vetted Sarah, she confessed to Steve Schmidt, the manager of the campaign, that “the one skeleton I’d kept hidden in my closet” (my emphasis) was that she had gotten a D in a college course.

Had Sarah been shot up with Pinocchio serum prior to the vetting, the immediate growth of the length of her nose would have tipped off Schmidt that the more truthful answer to the one skeleton in the closet question would have been, as The National Enquirer subsequently reported with no push back from Team Sarah, “cuckolding Todd when he was working on the North Slope by hooking up with Brad Hanson, Todd’s business partner in the Polaris snow machine sales business Brad and Todd owned in Wasilla.”

Once perfected, Pinocchio serum also would be useful to find out whether Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell really supports health care reform and, before the United States sends more troops there, whether Hamid Karsai really is committed to rooting out corruption in Afghanistan. But before a Pinocchio serum can be widely used, the FDA would need to conduct a clinical trial. Shooting up Sarah while she’s still on her book tour would be a good first test of the potion’s efficacy.

Donald Craig Mitchell
The Huffington Post

Former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin signed a book outside Barnes & Noble Booksellers at Woodland Mall in Grand Rapids on Wednesday evening.

A dangerous divide has been developing for some years in America, between those who are comfortable negotiating the wide array of knowledge and information sources now available, and those who are not. It is in many aspects a class divide, one side characterized by wealth, professional degrees, security and complacency, the other by shrinking incomes and high credit card debt, anxiety about the future, and anger at those in power.

One U.S. Senator, Jim Webb of Virginia, recently called this America’s greatest present danger, more potent than our international entanglements, the financial crisis, health care, energy or environment. The “tea party” protests over health care and immigration policy are one manifestation of that divide. Another, related, is the current response to Sarah Palin.

Palin has become the champion of a new wave of populism. People attracted to her are outraged over federal bailouts for Wall Street bankers, resentful of benefits accorded illegal immigrants, incensed over the notion of federally funded abortions, and perhaps most disturbing, suspicious of education. A fairly consistent analysis of the Palin phenomenon concludes that she is the happy beneficiary of this protest coalition, having happened into her celebrity role by the accident of timing, a willing but passive instrument. But her willing embrace of the role of symbolic embodiment of protest makes her as much a generator as recipient of it.

Populist protest is nothing new in America. Andrew Jackson quite deliberately created the first wave of popular anger at elite power in our political history and rode it successfully into the presidency before the Civil War. Later, William Jennings Bryan captured the wrath of farmers and small merchants displaced and disadvantaged by emerging industrialism at the end of the nineteenth century, running as the standard-bearer of both the Democrat and Peoples’ Parties. But industrialization had benefited too many people, and the reforms he advanced seemed too threatening to a majority of the electorate. Franklin Roosevelt organized populist anxiety over the future of the American economy into an electoral coalition that carried him through four successful elections, and saved capitalism in the offing. The civil rights movement of the 1960s proved too potent for John Kennedy to ignore, hard though he tried initially, and by embracing it he became one of its heroes.

These are populist success stories, even Bryan’s, for much of the reform the Peoples’ Party advocated was realized in the Progressive Era. But populist protest has succeeded only when it has offered a positive program and enjoyed effective leadership. Without these, it has faltered and dissipated. It seems unlikely that Palin, having abdicated as governor, will be able to provide operative direction for the current movement.

While the present tea party unrest follows somewhat this long populist tradition, it is unusual in at least one respect: distrust of education.

Though in her book Palin explains that her college journey was interrupted frequently because she had to work to earn her tuition, at other times she has disparaged education. Her poor showing in the Katie Couric interview and her manifest disinterest in the details of governance suggest someone for whom information is not important. In the election campaign and on her book tour Palin has represented herself as ordinary, a person whose values come from the cultural experience of hard-working, Christian common folk who regard more than rudimentary schooling as unnecessary. There is more than a hint of anti-intellectualism in her message and her demeanor. Impatience with critical analysis and appreciation of the complexities and ambiguities of reality is characteristic of many of the faithful attracted to her rallies and book-signings.

Throughout American history education has been understood as a pathway to economic advance, responsible citizenship and human fulfillment. But that assumption is subject to considerable challenge today. Yet it is still true that high school and college completion leads to higher lifetime earning. And the disadvantaged sense the truth that their powerlessness corresponds to their failure to understand government and other power structures. Thus, as Palin’s populism encourages anti-intellectualism, it represents a significant disservice to the very people she purports to champion. It’s a disservice that’s a danger for them, and for American society.

Steve Haycox
Anchorage Daily News

Former Alaska Public Safety Employees Association Executive Director John Cyr (left) and Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten, Sarah Palin's former brother-in-law and the trooper at the center of the Alaska Govenor Palin Troopergate Scandal.

The Alaska State Trooper at the center of Sarah Palin’s so-called “Troopergate Scandal“–which impeded her run for the vice-presidency and stained her record as Alaska governor–has broken his more than year-long silence since his embattled divorce with Palin’s sister, Molly, became a cause celebre during last year’s presidential campaign.

After reading passages from Palin’s memoirs Going Rogue that deal with his marriage and subsequent divorce, a “fed up” Mike Wooten, 37, who still serves as an Alaska State Trooper in Anchorage, called the book “a pack of lies.”

According to Wooten, Palin and her father, Chuck Heath Sr., have “interfered with my life–and my children’s lives–for at least the last five years. And it is still going on. I’m done with it.”

Characterizing his adversaries as “snakes,” Wooten said he has kept quiet long enough. “From this point on I’m speaking my mind,” he declared. “I’m speaking the truth. Let the chips fall where they may.” He acknowledged that he is considering taking legal action against Palin on multiple fronts.

Although Palin would try to claim otherwise during the presidential campaign, an independent investigation ordered by the bipartisan Alaska Legislative Council (composed of ten Republicans and four Democrats) and conducted by former Republican prosecutor Steve Branchflower, resulted in the finding “that Governor Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.”

The report issued by Branchflower documented more than thirty occasions in which then Governor Palin, her husband Todd or members of her staff tried to influence Alaska’s highly regarded Commissioner of Public Safety, Walt Monegan, to fire Wooten. When Monegan refused, Palin fired him instead.

In addition to the finding that Palin “abused” her office, the Alaska Senate cited Todd Palin and nine other state employees for “contempt” for ignoring legislative subpoenas to testify in the Troopergate investigation.

A native of California whose father immigrated to the United States from Honduras, Wooten served 10 years in the Air Force and three more in the Air National Guard Reserves. He participated in a trio of U.S. military operations in the Persian Gulf War–Desert Storm, Desert Shield and Restore Hope–before returning stateside to Alaska at Elmendorf Air Force Base, about 45 minutes from Wasilla.

Partially disabled from his military service, Wooten pointed out that neither Todd nor Sarah Palin, or Chuck Heath for that matter, served in the armed forces. Wooten said he was particularly “disgusted and incensed” by Palin’s “insincere” dedication in Going Rogue to “our men and women in uniform.”

Wooten further noted with irony that many of those who have been victimized by Palin during her political career–including former Wasilla police chief Irl Stambaugh; Monegan and himself–were all veterans. “Sarah is only about Sarah,” Wooten said. “She doesn’t care about the ‘men and women in uniform.’ It’s all about advancing Sarah’s career.”

Public records from Alaska–some of which have been revealed for the first time–chronicle a half-decade long obsession with Wooten by Palin, her father and, later, by Palin’s husband Todd.

“They’re like poisonous snakes in the grass who spew nothing but venom,” Wooten said. “They just lay in wait and they attack you until you’re dead.”

In Going Rogue, Palin mentions none of Wooten’s military record, but cites many charges that were brought against Wooten that were subsequently dismissed. She contends that there were “ten different” citizen complaints field against Wooten–without acknowledging that all of them were filed by members of her family or close friends. “They filed every stinking one of the charges,” Wooten contends. “But it’s been more like two dozen.”

In an interview conducted in Alaska this past summer, John Cyr, the former Alaska Public Safety Employees Association Executive Director, confirmed Wooten’s charges:

Not one complaint has ever been made about Mike Wooten’s professional performance from any member of the public other than the Palin/Heath family and their closest friends. The troopers that I’ve talked to that have worked with Mike tell me Mike is the kind of guy they’d go through a door with. That he does his work. He’s a professional. You know, just no complaints out there about Mike’s work.

“It’s the product of an ugly divorce and custody battle,” Cyr said of the complaints against the State Trooper. “It’s nothing more than that.”

Wooten has acknowledged several mistakes he made while “I was younger” and admitted there were several things he “would have done differently,” but he chose to remain silent as the McCain-Palin campaign portrayed him as a “rogue” Trooper (note the irony here) who Tased his step-son and went off on violent, drunken binges, to the point of threatening to kill Palin’s father.

Wooten calls the version of events rendered in Going Rogue an “outright lie.” Either it “didn’t happen [the way she alleges],” he says, “or she exaggerated it all beyond recognition. I look forward to telling my side of this story.”

Wooten now joins an ever-growing array of figures from John McCain on down who have challenged the veracity of Palin’s memoirs. The list also includes McCain senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, Palin’s former legislative director John Bitney, her former political ally Andree McLeod, and former Alaska gubernatorial candidate Andrew Halcro. All Republicans. Wooten identifies himself as a “conservative” as well.

Palin contends “the chapter for our family was closed” with the divorce but fails to acknowledge any of the sustained harassment of Wooten, which, he says, continues to this day.

The father of three (two of whom are with Palin’s sister), Wooten, still living in Wasilla, is described by his friends as a “very involved father,” active as a coach in all of his three children’s extracurricular sports activities–hockey, football and soccer. “I’ve committed my life to these children and being a good dad,” he says. “I’m simply not going to allow the Palins or Chuck Heath to interfere in our lives any longer.”

Palin recounts a story in Going Rogue that Wooten “asked me to write him a recommendation for the Alaska State Trooper Academy.” What she doesn’t acknowledge is that she wrote more than one on his behalf. In a letter dated January 1, 2000, written on official City of Wasilla stationery, Palin praises Wooten profusely, though she fails to declare her then-pending familial relationship with him.

It is my pleasure to provide character reference examples for Mr. Mike Wooten. Since I have become acquainted with Mike I continue to be impressed with his integrity, worthwhile community spirit and trustworthiness…
On a personal note, I have witnessed Mike’s gift of calm and kindness towards many young kids here in Wasilla. I have never seen him raise his voice, nor lose patience, nor become agitated, in the presence of any child. Instead, Mike consistently remains a fine role model for my own children and other young people in Wasilla.

I wish America had more people with the grace and sincerity that mirrors the character of Mike Wooten. We would have a much kinder calmer trustworthy nation as a result.

I believe the United States Air Force has been fortunate to have the services of Mike the past 10 years. His work ethic, his American patriotism, his obvious dedication to traditional values, and his strong faith in God and truth is witnessed in Mike’s everyday living.

–Sarah Palin, Mayor

None of which, of course, is mentioned in Going Rogue.

For his part, Wooten recalls a telling conversation with an associate of Palin’s campaign team when she was running for Governor in 2006. “You could probably bring the whole campaign down,” the aide said. “You probably know things about her that she doesn’t want other people to know.”
Award-winning writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn’s book The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power will be released by St. Martin’s Press in spring 2010.

Geoffrey Dunn
The Huffington Post

Fox News host Glenn Beck put to rest any rumors of one possible “dream ticket” team for 2012: Palin-Beck. On his radio show Thursday, Beck said he was “absolutely” ruling out the possibility of running for office with the ex-governor at the top of the ticket. His proffered reason: Palin would always be “yapping,” like they were “in the kitchen.”

Earlier in the week Palin said that she was open to the idea of pairing up with Beck. Palin told Fox News she “got a kick” out of the idea of them running together. She went on cheerfully, “He probably thought it was just a hoot too. I don’t know, we’ll see.” Palin told Newsmax she could “envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I’m not there yet.” She added: “But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He’s a hoot.”

It looks like the respect might not be mutual. From the morning’s radio show:

BECK: I don’t think things are hoots. I don’t. I don’t think it’s a hoot. I would never use the word hoot, and I respectfully ask that every time my name is brought up she would stop using the word ‘hoot.’ [...]No, no I’m just saying — Beck-Palin, I’ll consider. But Palin-Beck — can you imagine, can you imagine what an administration with the two of us would be like? What? Come on! She’d be yapping or something, and I’d say, “I’m sorry, why am I hearing your voice? I’m not in the kitchen.”

Listen:

The Huffington Post

Sarah Palin, feeling unprepared, pulled out of a Univision interview that John McCain wound up doing by himself.

Jonathan Martin
Politico

Gretchen Carlson of Fox News interviews Sarah Palin during her “Going Rogue” book tour. Carlson states Sarah Palin wrote her own book and gives Palin a “hats off to you as a mom” for Palin explaining she had to change a diaper before going out to debate Vice President Joe Biden during the 2008 presidential campaign. Really?? What would a baby be doing back stage at a vice presidential debate? And Sarah Palin really expects us to believe, after all the makeup and wardrobe preparations, that just before stepping on the stage there was Trig with a dirty diaper and NO ONE else around to change it??

Carlson is not sure why women are so divided on Palin …

John Bitney

Former Gov. Sarah Palin’s book, “Going Rogue,” blames her first legislative director for moves early in her term that helped poison her relationship with state lawmakers. But the ex-aide, John Bitney, calls Palin’s account a fabrication and said he wishes his former boss would leave him alone.

“I’m just pilloried right and left and turned into the big bad wolf here for stuff I didn’t do,” said Bitney, who is now an aide to Valdez Republican Rep. John Harris. “It’s like I’m this fictional character that she’s decided to make me out to be this sort of incompetent slob.”

Palin’s lawyer, Tom Van Flein, responded in an e-mail that Bitney and others have been talking about “their perceptions of, and distortions about” Palin for more than a year, since after she was chosen as Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential running mate.

” ‘Going Rogue‘ is Sarah Palin’s book to set the record straight. It is her right to speak about the events that occurred in her administration and neither Mr. Bitney nor anyone else has the right to stifle that speech,” Van Flein said. “The statements in ‘Going Rogue’ speak for themselves, and it is Sarah Palin’s turn to get the truth out there after a year of misrepresentations, half-truths and dissembling by her critics.”

Palin’s writing about Bitney is her most detailed description yet of incidents that helped shape her relationship with legislators. Her bad blood with top legislators of both parties began not long after she took office. By last spring, relationships with many lawmakers from both parties had soured to the point that feuds with the governor overshadowed much of the other legislative business.

Bitney joins a list of people slammed in the book who are calling it fiction, including McCain’s former campaign manager, Steve Schmidt. Bitney, though, has a far deeper relationship with Palin than the others. He was a high school classmate of Palin’s from Wasilla who played a key role as an adviser in her successful 2006 campaign for governor.

Palin’s dealings with Bitney are described on several pages of her memoir, although he is never named and there are no details of his work on her 2006 campaign. Palin refers to him as “my first legislative director” and he comes in for some of the harshest criticism of anyone in the book. That includes observations on his personal grooming, such as, “He turned out to be a BlackBerry games addict who couldn’t seem to keep his lunch off his tie.” Later, in describing one encounter to discuss the budget, Palin writes, “The fact that his shirt was buttoned one button off and his shirt tail was poking through his open fly didn’t exactly inspire confidence.” But Palin’s larger point is that Bitney bungled her relationship with legislators.

Bitney is now swinging back hard at Palin, agreeing to appear over the weekend on a television show hosted by one of the former governor’s most vocal critics in Alaska, blogger Shannyn Moore. Bitney was on a panel of others slammed in “Going Rogue” that included Palin nemesis Andrew Halcro and Anne Kilkenney, who wrote a long e-mail critical of Palin’s leadership in Wasilla that was forwarded around the country during the presidential campaign last year.

Moore asked Bitney if Palin is sane. Bitney’s response: “Is a sociopath sane?”

‘ADULT IN THE HOUSE’

One turning point between Palin and Alaska lawmakers came in 2007 after her first legislative session. Legislators complained that Palin blindsided them with the scope of her budget vetoes and she rubbed it in by saying there had to be an “adult in the house.” Legislators saw it as a slap in the face and the remark was not forgotten.

Palin writes that it was Bitney who advised her to tell lawmakers that they were in need of adult supervision. In fact, she writes, he told her, “Trust me, I know this stuff, they want to hear it.”

Palin writes that she followed his advice and had a “come-to-Jesus meeting” with legislators. But, as it turned out, that’s not what they wanted to hear. She writes that “when the fallout began after that meeting, I looked at the legislative director. He looked at the ground and shrugged as if to say ‘Wasn’t me.’ “

Bitney said in an interview that he joked with Palin in her office about how there needs to be an adult in the room when it comes to the state budget, but he said he never advised the then-governor to say it to anyone. He said Palin then made the comment in an interview with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner editorial board — not in a “come-to-Jesus” meeting with legislators as she recounts in her book.

Bitney left the governor’s office in July 2007 in what Palin’s spokeswoman initially said was an “amicable” termination in which it was mutually agreed that he would leave his post for personal reasons. When reporters raised questions about it during the presidential campaign, the reason given by Palin’s office was “poor job performance.”

Bitney has told reporters he was fired after Palin was informed he was having an affair with the wife of a friend of Palin and her husband, Todd. Bitney, who has since married the woman, has said he was not forthcoming with Palin about it and understands why he had to go.

Palin’s only reference to that in her book is that “later we learned the legislative director had been too busy with his personal affairs to attend to much state business.”

‘LEAVE ME ALONE’

Bitney has influential defenders in the Legislature, including Sitka Republican Sen. Bert Stedman, who has been critical of Palin and said he won’t read her book because she is “entertainment and not news.” Stedman said Bitney is qualified and that he did a good job dealing with the Legislature for Palin. He said he told Bitney at one point to let him know if he was ever looking for a job.

Palin writes that she told Bitney to send a letter to legislators about what sort of spending she would approve but that he didn’t do it. She said he indicated lawmakers were fine with budget vetoes that were coming but it became clear otherwise when they howled about being blindsided. “It soon became obvious just how little the legislative director had done to inform the legislature this was coming,” she writes.

Bitney said it was another staffer in the governor’s office, not him, who was requested to send the letter. The letter asked legislators for suggestions on which of their projects to cut, Bitney said, and not surprisingly they did not rush to answer Palin.

Bitney said he did meet with the four co-chairs of the state House and Senate finance committees to tell them about the coming vetoes, and reported back to Palin that three of them felt that was her prerogative and only one became angry.

But Palin staffers had only identified about $100 million worth of cuts by that point, about half of the final total. Bitney said the following day was when his “troubles” with Palin began. He said he was pulled from the governor’s budget work, and fired soon after. In the meantime, he said, Palin staffers kept cutting beyond what he had told legislators but he didn’t have authority to talk to them about it.

Palin uses Bitney in the book to illustrate a point about government. Bitney had years of experience as a legislative staffer and lobbyist before joining her team. “So much for my idea that I needed to hire an ‘insider.’ Lesson learned,” she writes.

Bitney said he tried to be fair to Palin when national media kept “crawling up my backside” over the past year to interview him about her. But the book is too much, he said.

“I’ve had it. Enough. Just enough; leave me alone,” he said.

Sean Cockerham
Anchorage Daily News

Chase Whitestead and Erick Stroll of “New Left Media“ set out to determine just what was it about Sarah Palin that impelled her supporters to stand in massive lines for hours for the chance to meet her at book signings.

They interviewed several of her supporters who were waiting in line at a Borders bookstore in Columbus, Ohio. These fans expressed very strong support for Palin, but it was mostly couched in vague generalities about her being “real” and “strong” and “fair.”

When pressed to cite specific policies that they favored or thought qualified her for the presidency, most of her fans struggled to come up with anything other than generic lines about cutting taxes and spending and the Palin staple: “drill, baby, drill.”

On the other hand, they were all worried that President Obama has been doing enormous damage to the country. However, again, specifics eluded them.

Nicholas Graham
The Huffington Post

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PLEASE HELP CHASE & ERICK SHARE THIS VIDEO.

On November 20, 2009, Sarah Palin visited Columbus, OH as part of her book signing tour for “Going Rogue.” When her supporters were asked broad questions about why they why they thought she should be president, the responses were vague: She’s “real.” She’ll “stick up for America.”

THERE ARE UNINFORMED OBAMA SUPPORTERS, TOO
It has been said in comments that we would find similarly talking point-driven, substance-less supporters at an Obama rally, and we agree. But no politician has emerged on the national stage as undefined and unqualified as Sarah Palin, and her public persona–which is anti-intellectual by definition–discourages substance. Instead, we get winking. One could hardly imagine her giving a complex speech about race in America, or speaking eloquently about our country’s relations with Islam. Not just because she couldn’t write such a speech (Obama has speech-writers, of course) but because she wouldn’t–such necessarily academic discussion is antithetical to the persona she’s created for herself and that her supporters have come to love.

CHERRY-PICKING
As for accusations of cherry picking, which are commonly thrown at interview-based videos, it simply isn’t what we did. We interviewed only a few more people than ended up in the video, not hundreds, and what was cut was done for time purposes. The people were selected at random–some offered to be interviewed–and we were only there for about 90 mins (it gets dark early and fast in Ohio right now). What didn’t make it into the video was just more footage of people talking generically or about taxes/spending, drilling, and abortion, and we constructed blocks in the piece to represent those issues. Of course the piece was edited to be entertaining (this is YouTube, after all, where the currency is cat videos) but we don’t believe we misrepresented the attitudes of the people at that signing in any way.

This NEW LEFT MEDIA film was produced and edited by Chase Whiteside (interviews) and Erick Stoll (camera).

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The US vice-presidential candidate’s memoir mocks the truth, but she remains a possible future American leader

"Going Rogue" features the lies and half-truths of Sarah Palin.

What can one say about one of the most compelling and bizarre works of “non-fiction” on the market, Going Rogue by Sarah Palin?

I have to say it stymies me somewhat. Treating it as some kind of factual narrative to check (as I began to), or comparing its version of events with her previous versions of the same events (as I have), and comparing all those versions with what we know is empirical reality, is a dizzying task. The lies and truths and half-truths and the facts and non-facts are all blurred together in a pious purée of such ghastly self-serving prose that, in the end, the book can really be read only as some kind of chapter in a cheap 19th-century edition of Lives of the Saints.

It is a religious book, full of myths and parables. And Sarah is fast becoming a religious icon of sorts for what is now the Republican base. On the first day of her tour, she dragged her infant with Down’s syndrome everywhere she went, even waving his hand to the crowds at one point as his little head swung back and forth. Here is the Madonna with child and a child that is an emblem of everything those who oppose abortion believe in.

Yet the book is also crafted politically, with every single detail of the narrative honed carefully for specific constituencies. The pro-life base is nurtured; various Republican allies are flattered; former sparring partners in the McCain campaign are lacerated; the evil liberal media are portrayed as a pack of ravenous hounds (even though they were unable to get an open press conference from her in the entire campaign, a fact unique in modern American political history).

It is also some kind of manifesto — but not in the usual sense of a collection of policy proposals. It is a manifesto for a certain identity — the heartland religious fundamentalist who is bewildered and angry at the world America no longer controls, at the debt and government that now dominate and at the liberal elites they hold responsible (even though the Republicans have been in power for a generation). This image is not, of course, made up out of whole cloth. Palin is indeed a feisty Alaskan and a genuine triumph of red-state feminism. But her narrative is embellished and embroidered to such an extent, it resembles not so much a memoir as a work of magical realism.

If you treat it as a factual narrative you will soon falter. Among the few early reactions were those of Nicolle Wallace — a McCain campaign staffer — who said of one passage: “It is pure fiction. No such discussion took place.” A reporter Palin says targeted her daughter Piper after a press conference was never at the press conference cited. Palin’s claim that she was personally billed $50,000 for vetting is point blank denied by the McCain campaign. Palin’s account of her record in the Exxon Valdez lawsuit was described last week by the chief lawyer for the case as “the most cockamamie bullshit”. I could go on. None of this is particularly surprising. Palin has a long and documented record of saying things that are empirically untrue but asserting them as if her own imagination is the only source of objective reality.

So you simply read the book as if it is fiction and enjoy it. Or you read it as non-fiction and believe that Palin is a magical mythical figure who defies the laws of time and space and normal human nature.

Take one story that every mother will relate to: the drama of her delivery of her fifth child, Trig. She tells us that at eight months pregnant with a child she knew had Down’s syndrome and would need special care at birth, she got on a plane from Alaska to Dallas, Texas, to attend an energy conference. Most airlines won’t allow this but Alaska Airlines did. Palin then tells us that at 4am on her first night in Dallas, “a strange sensation low in my belly woke me and I sat up straight in bed”. In an interview she gave with the Anchorage Daily News just after Trig’s birth, she confirmed that she had amniotic fluid leaking at that point.

So she was a mother eight months pregnant with a special-needs child thousands of miles from home. She wakes up in the middle of the night with contractions and amniotic leakage and she tells her husband she doesn’t want to call her doctor because it would wake her up at 1am. And she is the sitting governor of a state and her doctor is a close personal friend. Not only that, but she gives the speech as planned in the afternoon, during which she makes a rather good joke. She then tells us what happens next: “Big laughs. More contractions.”

After the speech, does she then go to a local hospital to get checked out? Nah. She gets on two separate aeroplanes all the way back to Alaska, with a stopover in Seattle, because she is determined to have the child in her home town and she just knows that the contractions and amniotic leakage are not signs of imminent delivery. She has had four previous kids so she has experience. “I still had plenty of time … It was a calm, relatively restful flight home,” she explains of the next 15 hours.

You might imagine that an airline would have some qualms about letting a woman in some sort of labour at eight months, and pregnant with a Down’s syndrome child, get on a long transcontinental flight. What if the baby were born in mid-flight? The plane would have to be diverted. What if something happened to the baby? The airline could be liable. Palin never told the flight attendants. Couldn’t they tell, one might innocently ask. In the Anchorage Daily News story about the birth, Alaska Airlines said: “The stage of her pregnancy was not apparent by observation. She did not show any signs of distress.” Palin makes Xena, the warrior princess, seem fragile.

It is this image of a frontierswoman, capable of almost anything, fiercely independent, fathomlessly brave, totally unflappable, driven and blessed by faith in God, resisting the evil cynicism and hatred of the eastern elites, ambushed by hostile interviewers, persecuted by her godless enemies and carrying on as an “iron lady” of Alaskan dimensions, that makes her such a powerful cultural and political icon. Her physical beauty doesn’t hurt either.

That is why, despite the fact that she quit the only key political office she had held in her first term for no good reason, she remains a viable candidate for the next presidential election. In a steep recession, with intractable wars abroad, with unemployment rising and paranoia deepening, Palin knows America wants a spiritual and cultural saviour. And God has chosen her.

Andrew Sullivan
Times Online

Andree McLeod sits during opening arguments in an Anchorage, Alaska court room Tuesday Aug. 4, 2009, in a lawsuit brought by McLeod challenging former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's use of private e-mail accounts for official business.

It’s tough getting up to the front of the line of those wanting to call Sarah Palin for the truckload of lies spewed in Going Rogue. Even John McCain has gotten into the act by charging Palin with fabricating a $50,000 bill she claimed she got stuck with for her “vetting” and by praising the two aides targeted by Palin, Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace.

Up in Alaska, the line is just as contentious. Everyone from Palin’s first years on the Wasilla City Council to her gubernatorial aides have challenged Palin’s rendition of her political career in the Last Frontier.

But perhaps the nastiest and most duplicitous passages of all in Going Rogue are those directed at Andree McLeod, the longtime Republican watchdog out of Anchorage who filed many of the Alaska Ethics Act complaints that, by Palin’s own admission, hounded her from office.

Palin’s venom directed at McLeod is both racist and viciously inaccurate. Perhaps a court will one day determine if it’s also libelous.

McLeod, now in her mid-50s and who is of Armenian descent by way of Lebanon, is referred to as the “falafel lady” repeatedly by Palin throughout her book. It’s an intended slur of ethnic derision, loaded with all of Palin’s adolescent fury. It’s also reminiscent of those members of Palin’s “Team Sarah” who referred to Barack and Michelle Obama’s Inaugural Dance as the “Watermelon Roll.” The phrase is as appalling as it is infantile.

Perhaps most importantly–and this is the one issue that astonishes those in the Lower 48 when I talk to them about Palin and Alaska politics–McLeod is a tried and true Republican. So are most of Palin’s staunchest critics in Alaska, from Lyda Green to Rick Rydell to Andrew Halcro.

Never one to let facts get in the way of a good story–especially when it’s her story–Palin identifies McLeod as part of a left-wing conspiracy loaded for bear against her. This is a howler. McLeod actually ran as recently as 2004 for the Alaska House of Representatives as a Republican. McLeod, like many other Palin critics who filed ethics complaints, is a fiscal conservative. Palin continues to lie about the nature of her opposition to those in the Lower 48 because there’s an information disconnect between those who live in the Last Frontier and those who live “Outside.”

McLeod had made friends with Palin after she lost her bid for Lt. Governor in 2002 and before Palin served as the chair and ethics officer of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission. They worked together during Palin’s highly publicized battle with Republican Party Chair Randy Ruedrich. None of that is included in Going Rogue. It’s a lie of omission–one of truly grand proportions.

And guess what else you won’t read in Going Rogue? Sarah Palin actually supported McLeod politically during her runs for the Alaska state house. Prominently displayed on McLeod’s campaign brochure was a supportive quote from the former Mayor of Wasilla:

Like many of us, Andree wants good government. She’s not afraid to stand up for what’s right. Though she ruffles a feather or two now and then, this intelligent Alaskan is exactly what we need during these times.– Sarah Palin

Of course, Palin is possessed of neither the decency nor the integrity to acknowledge any of this history or the depth of her relationship with McLeod in Going Rogue.

There’s a lengthy email correspondence between these two political allies dating back nearly seven years. Palin is often full of praise.

That was a great letter to the ed. this week Andree. I haven’t had time to call but wanted to tell you it was, again, insightful & educational & good writing. I’m still disenchanted with the whole issue of RR and state politics and am not even very optimistic about the call for an independent investigation. We’ll see. I guess I’ll believe it when I see it. Hope you’re doing well, staying warm & staying on top of all these state issues I’m hearing about on the news! Love, SP

Other Palin emails to McLeod refer to her as “intelligent,” “bold,” “powerful” and “encouraging.” In another email Palin wrote: “Ugh! I know you must get so frustrated because you’re all about accountability!”

Yet another, written in Palinese, declares:

wow! again! YOU ARE A WRITER… I’ll bet your son is, too. You will be thanked for summing up for others what many believe: that there’s nothing wrong with healthy debate and challenges to the status quo when something is wrong & it can easily be fixed!

Note Palin’s compliments about McLeod’s writing, but in Rogue she says that McLeod’s ethics complaints got “more and more sophisticated,” indicating that they weren’t being written by her. Palin also claims: “We always suspected that someone was funding and directing Andree’s efforts.”

McLeod calls this charge an “outrage.” There’s not a whisker of proof in Palin’s book (no footnotes, no bibliography, no index, and obviously no fact-check) presented for this in the text. It’s nothing less than despicable.

For the first time, McLeod has released another Palin email to her, written in August of 2003. The email not only reveals the closeness of Palin’s relationship with McLeod but also the ease with which they formerly communicated.

Hi Andree:Did you hear us talking about you on the Mike Pocaro show Monday evening?! It was a hoot! He was impressed with your efforts on the VanEten issue & I called in to say “Kudos to Andree… she’s obviously got tireless energy and desire to keep government and government officials accountable to Alaskans… we need more “Andrees” in this state… etc…” And then that gal, “Michelle” (who calls in a lot) called right after I did to say, “Sarah Palin just needs to stay out of Anchorage politics… blah blah blah…” and the show went on with you as the highlight for callers! It was awesome. Ya’ done good again!!!

Sarah

McLeod has dozens of emails between herself and Palin. But once Palin was elected governor, McLeod was suddenly persona non grata.

In Going Rogue, Palin would like everyone to believe that all of her problems began after she was named as McCain’s running mate, what Palin has defensively dubbed the “new normal.” (Her shameful rendition of “Troopergate,” which commenced in the summer well before her nomination, is astonishingly duplicitous.) In fact, McLeod ’s concerns about Palin began in the spring of last year, when, during the State Republican Convention in March of 2008, McLeod observed two top Palin officials–Frank Bailey and Ivy Frye–closely involved in partisan gamesmanship. That’s when McLeod first became concerned that Palin’s administration was crossing the line in terms of the state’s ethics act.

There was never a “normal” in Sarah Palin’s Alaska–ever.

Perhaps most importantly, Palin’s checkered political legacy in the Last Frontier may not be over yet. McLeod says that she will be filing more complaints involving Palin and her administration.

I’ve discovered emails which prove that Palin officials worked on the campaign while on the state payroll clock. That is wrong and should not be tolerated. Also, there’s the outstanding issue of Palin not turning over the reins to the Lieutenant Governor when she left to campaign as mandated by the Alaska Constitution. We deserve to know who was responsible for leaving Alaska without a master at the helm and why.

Award-winning writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn’s book The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power will be released by St. Martin’s Press in spring 2010.

Geoffrey Dunn
The Huffington Post

BTW ~ Why is Trig Palin not wearing a jacket, socks, shoes or even a blanket on a cold winter day in North Carolina when everyone else is bundled up?

Sarah Palin vs. Pit Bull

At last the American right and left have one issue they unequivocally agree on: You don’t actually have to read Sarah Palin’s book to have an opinion about it. Last Sunday Liz Cheney praised “Going Rogue” as “well-written” on Fox News even though, by her own account, she had sampled only “parts” of it. On Tuesday, Ana Marie Cox, a correspondent for Air America, belittled the book in The Washington Post while confessing that she couldn’t claim to have “completely” read it.

“Going Rogue” will hardly be the first best seller embraced by millions for talismanic rather than literary ends. And I am not recommending that others follow my example and slog through its 400-plus pages, especially since its supposed revelations have been picked through 24/7 for a week. But sometimes I wonder if anyone has read all of what Palin would call the “dang” thing. Some of the book’s most illuminating tics have been mentioned barely — if at all — by either its fans or foes. Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves.

The book’s biggest surprise is Palin’s wide-eyed infatuation with show-business celebrities. You get nearly as much face time with Tina Fey and the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in “Going Rogue” as you do with John McCain. We learn how happy Palin was to receive calls from Bono and Warren Beatty “to share ideas and insights.” We wade through star-struck lists of campaign cameos by Robert Duvall, Jon Voight (who “blew us away”), Naomi Judd, Gary Sinise and Kelsey Grammer, among many others. Then there are the acknowledgments at the book’s end, where Palin reveals that her intimacy with media stars is such that she can air-kiss them on a first-name basis, from Greta to Laura to Rush.

Equally revealing is the one boldfaced name conspicuously left unmentioned in the book: Levi Johnston, the father of Palin’s grandchild. Though Palin and McCain milked him for photo ops at the , he is persona non grata now that he’s taking off his campaign wardrobe. Is Johnston’s fledgling porn career the problem, or is it his public threats to strip bare Palin family secrets as well? “She knows what I got on her” is how he put it. In Palin’s interview with Oprah last week, it was questioning about Johnston, not Katie Couric, that made her nervous.

The book’s most frequently dropped names, predictably enough, are the Lord and Ronald Reagan (though not necessarily in that order). Easily the most startling passage in “Going Rogue,” running more than two pages, collates extended excerpts from a prayerful letter Palin wrote to mark the birth of Trig, her child with Down syndrome. This missive’s understandable goal was to reassert Palin’s faith and trust in God. But Palin did not write her letter to God; she wrote the letter from God, assuming His role and voice herself and signing it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.” If I may say so — Oy!

Even by the standard of politicians, this is a woman with an outsized ego. Combine that with her performance skills and an insatiable hunger for the limelight, and you can see why she will not stay in Wasilla now that she’s seen 30 Rock. The question journalists repeatedly asked last week — What are Palin’s plans for 2012? — is a red herring. Palin has no obligation to answer it. She is the pit bull in the china shop of American politics, and she can do what she wants, on her own timeline, all the while raking in the big bucks she couldn’t as a sitting governor. No one, least of all her own political party, can control her.

The fact-checking siege of “Going Rogue” — by the media, Democrats and aggrieved McCain campaign operatives alike — is another fruitless sideshow. Palin’s political appeal has never had anything to do with facts — or coherent policy positions. The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause. As Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, has correctly observed, “She represents less a philosophical strain on the right than an affect and a demographic.”

That demographic is white and non-urban: Just look at the stops and the faces on her carefully calibrated book tour. The affect is emotional — the angry air of grievance that emerged first at her campaign rallies in 2008, with their shrieked threats to Obama, and that has since resurfaced in the Hitler-fixated “tea party” movement (which she endorses in her book). It’s a politics of victimization and sloganeering with no policy solutions required beyond the conservative mantra of No Taxes. Its standard-bearer can make stuff up with impunity: “Thanks, but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere”; Obama’s “palling around with terrorists”; health care “death panels.”

After the Palin-McCain ticket lost, conservative pundits admonished her to start studying the issues. If “Going Rogue” and its promotional interviews are any indication, she has ignored their entreaties during her months at liberty. Last week, Greta Van Susteren chastised Oprah for not asking Palin “one policy question,” but when Barbara Walters did ask some, Palin either recycled Dick Cheney verbatim (Obama is “dithering”) or ran aground. Her argument for why “Jewish settlements” should be expanded on the West Bank was that “more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” It was unclear what she was talking about — unless it was the “rapture” theology that requires the mass return of Jews to settle the Holy Land as a precondition for the return of Christ.

The discredited neocon hacks who have latched on to Palin as a potential ticket back into power have their work cut out for them. But it’s better for Palin’s purposes to remain as blank a slate as possible anyway. Some of her most ardent supporters realize that she’ll drive still more independent voters away if she fills in too many details. And so Matthew Continetti, the author of the just-published “Persecution of Sarah Palin” and her most persistent cheerleader after William Kristol, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that her role model for 2012 should be Bob McDonnell, the new Republican governor-elect of Virginia, who won on “a bipartisan, center-right approach.”

What Continetti means is that Palin could still somehow fudge her history as McDonnell did; his campaign kept his career-long history as a political acolyte and financial beneficiary of Pat Robertson on the down-low. Even the far right has figured out that homophobia is a turnoff to swing voters, which is why Palin goes out of her way in “Going Rogue” to remind us she has her very own lesbian friend. (What’s left unsaid is that the book’s credited ghost writer, Lynn Vincent, labeled homosexuality as “deviance” in her own writings for World, the evangelical magazine.)

But no matter how much Palin tries to pass for “center-right,” she’s unlikely to fool that vast pool of voters left, right and center who have already written her off as unqualified for the White House. The G.O.P. establishment knows this, and is frightened. The demographic that Palin attracts is in decline; there’s no way the math of her fan base adds up to an Electoral College victory.

Yet among Republicans she still ties Mitt Romney in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with 65 percent giving her serious presidential consideration, just behind the 71 for her evangelical rival, Mike Huckabee. The crowds lining up in the cold for her book tour are likely to be the most motivated to line up at the polls in G.O.P. primaries. They don’t speak the same language as Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner or, for that matter, McCain. They are more likely to heed Palin salesmen like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh than baffled Bush administration grandees like Peter Wehner, who last week called Palin “a cultural figure much more than a political one” on the Web site of the establishment conservative organ Commentary.

Culture is politics. Palin is at the red-hot center of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black president and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those Americans who haven’t benefited from bailouts. As Palin thrives on the ire of the left, so she does from the disdain of Republican leaders who, with a condescension rivaling the sexism they decry in liberals, belittle her as a lightweight or instruct her to eat think-tank spinach.

The only person who can derail Palin is Palin herself. Should she not self-destruct, she will doom G.O.P. hopes of a 2012 comeback. But the rest of the country cannot rest easy. The rage out there is larger than Palin and defies partisan labeling. Her ever-present booster Continetti, writing in The Weekly Standard, suggested that she recast the century-old populist outrage of William Jennings Bryan by adopting the message “You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of Goldman Sachs.” If Obama can’t tamp down that rage across the political map, Palin will at the very least pave the way for a demagogue with less baggage to pick up her torch.

Frank Rich
The New York Times

Sarah Palin picked celebrity interviewers and right-wing pundits for her book promotion tour, probably to avoid embarrassments like last year’s Katie Couric interview.

But even a friendly interview can be treacherous. In a sit-down with Fox News’ Sean Hannity Wednesday night, the former Alaska governor confused Iraq and Iran several times.

Watch: :

Asked about how to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, Palin responded by suggesting we get tough with Iraq.

“We have allies who are as concerned about Ahmadinejad’s actions as we are,” she said. “Cutting off the imports into Iraq, of their refined petroleum products. They’re reliant … on those imports. We have some control over there. And some of the beneficial international monetary deals that Iraq benefits from, we can start implementing some sanctions there and start really shaking things up and telling Ahmadinejad, nobody is going to stand for this.”

Rachel Weiner
The Huffington Post

Diva Sarah Palin left fans out in the cold yesterday. After waiting over six hours in the cold and rain for Sarah Palin at her book signing in Noblesville, Indiana, Palin boosters were left angry, hurt and empty handed.

Palin quit. She abandoned over 300 fans and their families who had waited over six hours for Palin to autograph their purchased copy of her new book.

The crowd was obviously distraught at the news that Palin was abandoning the scene. Over 300 families, having spent over 3 hours getting wristbands and another 3 hours waiting in line to get the Palin book signed, were abandoned by Palin for no apparent reason.

The angry boosters were quick to turn on the inconsiderate Palin. The once admiring crowd was left booing and cursing Palin, calling her a “quitter” and chanting “sign our books” as they surrounded Palin’s tour bus.

Palin’s treatment of her fans is reprehensible. Her penchant for quitting when things get tough, is growing legendary. Granted, the disappointed fans were right wing nuts, and as such, should not be encouraged. Nevertheless, they were her right wing nuts, and she treated them shabbily.

Shame on Sarah! Palin’s protests about media elites, and her claim to hockey mom status, is a complete and utter fabrication. She is just another media elite, taking advantage of the little guy. Right wing nuts need to wake up and smell the coffee.

Palin is a hypocrite. She is a commercial opportunist, out to make a buck, and willing to walk over the voters, or customers, when ever it is convenient.

Michael Stone
Examiner.com

Sarah Palin: Fishing for the truth in "Going Rogue."

Yet another passage from Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” has been called into question. This time it’s her account of the lawsuit against Exxon over the 1989 Valdez disaster. Alaskan experts who were involved in the case say that she’s distorted her role.

“It took years for Alaska to achieve victory. As governor, I directed our attorney general to write an amicus brief in the case, and, thanks to Alaska’s able attorneys arguing in front of the highest court in the land, in 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the people,” Palin wrote. “Finally, Alaskans could recover some of their losses.”

In fact, as Palin herself acknowledged at the time, the decision was a disappointment.

The ruling reduced punitive damages for victims from $2.5 billion to $500 million. Environmentalists and plaintiffs’ lawyers decried the ruling as a slap at the victims and Palin herself said she was “extremely disappointed.”

Meanwhile, one of the lawyers involved says Palin played no part in the case.

“That is the most cockamamie bullshit,” said Dave Oesting of Anchorage, the lead plaintiff attorney in the private litigants’ civil case against Exxon. “She didn’t have a damn thing to do with it, and she didn’t know what it was about.”

The Huffington Post

Former Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska on the presidential campaign trail in September 2008 with Senator John McCain.

“Going Rogue,” the title of Sarah Palin’s erratic new memoir, comes from a phrase used by a disgruntled McCain aide to describe her going off-message during the presidential campaign: among other things, for breaking with the campaign over its media strategy and its decision to pull out of Michigan, and for speaking out about reports that the Republican Party had spent more than $150,000 on fancy designer duds for her and her family.

The most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the news media, but at the McCain campaign. The very campaign that plucked her out of Alaska, anointed her the Republican vice-presidential nominee and made her one of the most talked about women on the planet — someone who could command a reported $5 million advance for writing this book.

In what reads like payback for disparaging comments by John McCain’s aides about her after the ticket’s loss to Barack Obama, Ms. Palin depicts the McCain campaign as overscripted, defeatist, disorganized and dunderheaded — slow to shift focus from the Iraq war to the cratering economy, insufficiently tough on Mr. Obama and contradictory in its media strategy. She also claims that the campaign billed her nearly $50,000 for “having been vetted.” The vetting, which was widely criticized in the press as being cursory and rushed, was, she insisted, “thorough”: they knew “exactly what they’re getting.”

Although Ms. Palin writes that she is “proud of the senator” for being bold enough to put her on the ticket, some of her loudest complaints in this volume are directed at the McCain campaign’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt, ironically enough, was one of the aides to most forcefully make the case for putting her on the ticket in the first place, arguing to Mr. McCain, as Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson reported in their recent book, “The Battle for America 2008,” that she would shake up the race and help him get his “reform mojo back.” Over the weekend McCain aides fired back at Ms. Palin: Mr. Schmidt was quoted on Politico.com saying that charges about him were “all fiction.”

Back in 2008 Robert Draper reported in The New York Times Magazine that neither Mr. Schmidt nor Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, apparently saw Ms. Palin’s “lack of familiarity with major national or international issues as a serious liability,” and that Mr. McCain, a former Navy pilot, saw the idea of upending the chessboard as a maverick move.

All in all Ms. Palin emerges from “Going Rogue” as an eager player in the blame game, ungrateful to the McCain campaign for putting her on the national stage. As for the McCain campaign, it often feels like a desperate and cynical operation, willing to make a risky Hail Mary pass to try to score a tactical win, instead of making a considered judgment as to who might be genuinely qualified to sit a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

In “Going Rogue” Ms. Palin talks perfunctorily about fiscal responsibility and a muscular foreign policy, and more passionately about the importance of energy independence, but she is quite up front about the fact that much of her appeal lies in her just-folks “hockey mom” ordinariness. She pretends no particular familiarity with the Middle East, the Iraq war or Islamic politics — “I knew the history of the conflict,” she writes, “to the extent that most Americans did.” And she argues that “there’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood.”

A CNN poll taken last month indicates that 7 out of 10 Americans now think Ms. Palin is not qualified to be president, and even as ardent a conservative as Charles Krauthammer lamented in September 2008 “the paucity of any Palin record or expressed conviction on the major issues of our time.”

Yet Mr. McCain’s astonishing decision to pick someone with so little experience (less than two years as the governor of Alaska, and before that, two terms as mayor of Wasilla, an Alaskan town with fewer than 7,000 residents) as his running mate underscores just how alarmingly expertise is discounted — or equated with elitism — in our increasingly democratized era, and just how thoroughly colorful personal narratives overshadow policy arguments and actual knowledge. Ms. Palin herself had a surprisingly nonchalant reaction to Mr. McCain’s initial phone call about the vice president’s slot, writing that she was not astonished, that it felt “like a natural progression.”

Ms. Palin suggests that she and her husband, Todd, are ideally qualified to represent the Joe Six-Packs of the world because they are Joe Six-Packs themselves. “We know what it’s like to be on a tight budget and wonder how we’re going to pay for our own health care, let alone college tuition,” she writes in “Going Rogue.” “We know what it’s like to work union jobs, to be blue-collar, white-collar, to have our kids in public schools. We felt our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans, could be a much-needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.”

“Going Rogue” (written with an assist from Lynn Vincent, a senior writer and former features editor of World, an evangelical magazine) is part cagey spin, part earnest autobiography, part payback hit job. And its most compelling sections deal not with politics but with Ms. Palin’s life in Alaska and her family. Despite an annoying tendency to drop the names of lots of writers and philosophers gratuitously — in the course of this book she quotes or alludes to Pascal, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Paine, Pearl S. Buck, Mark Twain and Melville — she does a lively job of conveying the frontier feel of the 49th state, where television broadcasts were tape-delayed in her youth and they shopped for clothes “via mail order through the Sears catalog,” where “we don’t have big-league professional sports teams or many celebrities (except famous dog mushers),” and so regard politics as a local sport.

The self-portrait created in these pages recalls the early profiles of Ms. Palin that appeared just after her debut on the national stage: a self-reliant frontierswoman who knows how to field dress a moose; a feisty gal with lots of moxie and pep; a former beauty queen with a George W. Bush-like aptitude for mangling the English language. (The first paragraph of the book contains the phrase “I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.”) She talks about juggling motherhood with politics, and gives a moving account of learning that her son Trig would be born with Down syndrome.

She recalls her initial feeling — “I don’t think I could handle that” — and her “sudden understanding of why people would grasp at a quick ‘solution,’ a way to make the ‘problem’ just go away,” though her own pro-life stance would deny women the choice of having an abortion.

Elsewhere in this volume she talks about creationism, saying she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the Republican ticket, she sees the hand of God: “My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago, invite Him in to take over.”

Just as Ms. Palin’s planned book tour resembles a campaign rollout — complete with a bus tour and pit stops in battleground states — so the second half of this book often reads like a calculated attempt to position Ms. Palin for 2012. She tries to compare herself to Ronald Reagan by repeatedly invoking his name and record. She talks about being “a Commonsense Conservative” and worrying about the national deficit. And she attempts to explain, rationalize or refute controversial incidents and allegations that emerged during the 2008 race.

She says she “never sought to ban any books” as mayor of Wasilla, and has always had a “special passion for reading.” She suggests that the $150,000-plus designer clothes were the campaign’s idea, that she and her family are actually frugal coupon clippers who shop at Costco. And she says that she was manipulated into doing that famous series of Katie Couric interviews (which would do much to cement an image of her as an easily caricatured ignoramus) by Nicolle Wallace, a communications aide for the campaign, and that Ms. Couric just seemed to want “to frame a ‘gotcha’ moment.”

Along the way Ms. Palin acknowledges that she is a busy, “got to go-go-go” sort of person — and for an average hockey mom, pretty ambitious.

“As every Iditarod musher knows,” she writes of the well-known Alaska dog-sled race, “if you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes.”

Michiko Kakutani
The New York Times

Sarah Palin and her husband Todd Palin waved to supporters at a campaign rally in Virginia Beach, Virginia, in October 2008.

THE most elusive fashion stylist in America was nervous. Sitting on a reporter’s sofa, dressed in yoga pants and a hoodie, she tucked her slender legs underneath her, averted her eyes and explained why she had decided to out herself after avoiding the spotlight for so long.

“I want people to see that I did the best job I could under crazy circumstances,” she said. “I want people to say, ‘Wow,’ you know, ‘Not bad.’ ”

The most elusive fashion stylist in America does not have a reality show, nor does she dress starlets. She is virtually unknown. But she was in the right place at the right time, and now her work is history. Lisa A. Kline, 47, a Manhattan mother of three, is the wardrobe consultant who made an Alaska hockey mom-turned-governor named Sarah Palin into chic vice-presidential material for the Republican National Convention in September 2008, and in doing so inadvertently set off a furor.

“Wardrobegate,” as Ms. Kline’s $150,000-plus fashion transformation became known, undermined Ms. Palin’s carefully crafted homespun image when the news broke two weeks before the election. Details about pricey designer clothes and a whirlwind $75,062 trip to Neiman Marcus outraged both Democrats and Republicans and may have played a role in derailing Senator John McCain’s presidential ambitions. The Boston Globe recently called it “the most damaging piece of information about” Ms. Palin to emerge from the 2008 campaign. In her new memoir, “Going Rogue,” Ms. Palin is still trying to distance herself from the incident.

It was a “trumped up controversy,” she writes. “I never asked the New York stylists to purchase clothes, many of the items were never worn, many others were intended for the use of other people, and in the end the wardrobe items were all returned. It certainly wasn’t true that I or my family had been on any kind of ‘big-time shopping trips.’ ”

All true, Ms. Kline said this week. Her reticence so far, she said, was out of respect to a client. But now that Ms. Palin herself is discussing her unidentified “New York stylist,” Ms. Kline would like to clarify a few details, which she did first in an interview for the campaign biography “Sarah From Alaska” by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, published this month.

Ms. Kline is not, as some news reports suggested, the same Lisa Kline who owns a boutique in Los Angeles. She is not, as Ms. Palin’s book suggests, Katie Couric’s stylist; she has never met Ms. Couric. Most important, the six-figure tab for the Palin family’s clothing during the convention was not as outrageous as it seems, Ms. Kline insists, considering the scope of the job.

“I feel like there’s a misperception,” Ms. Kline said.

As for her fee of $54,900, reported in campaign filings, it also covered an assistant and some expenses. She said the high fee was justified because styling the Palins was a last-minute holiday weekend assignment that had Ms. Kline sleeping no more than a few hours at a time. “It’s very hard to put a figure on a 24-hour day,” she said.

Ms. Kline, a self-employed fashion consultant, specializes in dressing well-heeled corporate executives and television news personalities, including local and network anchors, she said, although she declined to name her news media clients.

Not surprisingly, given her clientele, she eschews Rachel Zoe-esque bling for tailored jackets and simple underpinnings that convey authority, polish and professionalism.

One client, Linda Sawyer, chief executive for North America of the advertising agency Deutsch Inc., said, “She doesn’t impose her style on you, and she just has a great eye.”

Ms. Kline declined to detail how she came to be Ms. Palin’s stylist. It has been widely reported, including in “Going Rogue,” that the plum assignment resulted from a relationship with Nicolle Wallace, a former “CBS Evening News” political analyst who became a senior aide to the McCain campaign.

In the days after Mr. McCain’s defeat, unnamed aides told reporters that they were furious over the wardrobe expenses. Ms. Wallace, they said, had simply told Ms. Palin to buy three suits for the Republican convention in St. Paul and to hire a stylist, with anticipated costs under $25,000.

But as Ms. Kline tells it, her assignment expanded and expenses quickly spiraled, with no one questioning the total or how it might look if the shopping sprees for Jimmy Choo, Kate Spade and Prada came to light.

On the afternoon of Aug. 29, 2008, Ms. Kline fielded a surprise phone call: Was she available to dress Sarah Palin for the Republican National Convention, which was to begin three days later on Labor Day?

“It took a moment to register,” she said. “Then of course I said yes.”

In other circumstances, Ms. Kline said, she could have bought Ms. Palin’s wardrobe for far below retail through her relationships with designers. But it was the Friday of a holiday weekend and “there wasn’t a person around,” she said. “The only avenue was retail, straight retail.”

She set to work in New York, buying elegant pieces at Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys. When she left for the convention Labor Day morning, she had “a pretty decent amount of clothing to choose from,” she said.

Arriving in Minneapolis with a seamstress and an assistant she’d enlisted, Ms. Kline planned a “run through” of outfits with Ms. Palin for an appearance she would make greeting Mr. McCain, as he arrived by plane Wednesday afternoon.

But late on Tuesday, Ms. Kline said she was asked to provide clothes for the entire Palin family, including the candidate’s husband, Todd; their sons Track and Trig, the infant; and daughters Bristol, who was pregnant, Willow and Piper. Levi Johnston, Bristol’s then-boyfriend, was also included.

“The campaign advisers realized the kids, everybody, needed to be dressed,” Ms. Kline said. “This was a family that was about to stand before the world, and they just came with their everyday-life clothes.”

With less than 24 hours before the Palins’ national debut on the tarmac, it was decided that the luxury retailer Neiman Marcus, which has a store in Minneapolis, offered the best available selection for the circumstances. Arrangements were made for a private early-morning trip.

Neiman Marcus opened for Ms. Kline and her assistant at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, she said, and the two split up and spent a rushed 90 minutes or so gathering what they needed. Ms. Palin and her family were not there; nor was anyone from the campaign. Instead, the two stylists relied on a couple of salesclerks and a store manager.

“There was no conversation. There was no chitchat. It was just, ‘We need two pairs of pants in size yadada,’ ” Ms. Kline said. The purchases were rung up, but Ms. Kline was not asked for payment of any kind.

“Apparently it had been prearranged,” she said. (According to election filings, more than $130,000 of clothing charges from New York and Minneapolis was picked up by a Republican consultant, Jeff Larson, who was reimbursed by the Republican National Committee.)

Ms. Kline said she does not recall who asked her to expand her styling to the entire Palin family or who set up the appointment at Neiman Marcus, which later became so controversial because it undermined the candidate’s image as a populist.

Nor does Chris Edwards, the Palin campaign’s deputy chief of staff, who said this week that he does not recall meeting directly with Ms. Kline. “I don’t know where the breakdown of communication occurred,” he said. “I know that Nicolle did not approve $150,000 worth of clothes.”

Back at the Hilton Minneapolis, Ms. Kline and her assistant set up their purchases on racks in Ms. Palin’s suite. One by one, they did a run-through with each family member. “Oh, God, it was just staying focused,” she recalled. “Get each person their outfit, get the clothing tailored right there in the room. The clothes literally went from the sewing machine onto their bodies. It was, ‘O.K., this is good, let’s go, next!’ ”

She described the candidate as a size 4 or 6 and very attractive, with beautiful skin, if a bit dowdy before the transformation. “She was very, very sweet,” Ms. Kline said. “I felt comfortable right away with her. She definitely had an opinion about the clothes, but it was a gentle opinion. If she didn’t like something, it was, ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ ”

Ms. Kline says she never saw or communicated with Ms. Palin after the convention, although she prepared a “look book” for her for the campaign trail, with photos showing how to put together outfits. Ms. Kline avidly followed Ms. Palin’s appearances on television, but as soon as the politically damaging news of the designer wardrobe broke on Oct. 21, Ms. Palin stopped appearing in the clothes, Ms. Kline said.

Ms. Kline recalled sitting with Ms. Palin in the convention hall green room, chatting casually, just before Ms. Palin’s star-making acceptance speech. A few minutes later, Ms. Kline went out to the convention floor. She admired Ms. Palin in the black pencil skirt and $2,500 Valentino jacket from Saks that Ms. Kline had selected. She had thought the jacket was a little too grand and had removed its gold buttons and a big swoop of fabric in front, and she had shortened the sleeves to three-quarter length.

“I felt I had achieved my goal,” Ms. Kline said. “I thought she looked great. I really did. It was perfect for the occasion.”

Lauren Lipton
The New York Times

Is Sarah Palin truly the best our country has to offer as a future world leader and president of the United States of America?

The temperature was close to zero Monday as I left the house to buy Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.” The book was almost impossible to find in Anchorage before its official release Tuesday. The salesman who finally sold me one asked me to promise I wouldn’t reveal his identity if he sold me a pre-publication copy.

I made the pledge and put down my money. I’ve written about Palin since she ran for governor in 2006, interviewed her, moderated campaign debates in which she participated. I wanted to see what she’s like in prose.

In “Advertisements for Myself,” Norman Mailer admitted “a desire to inflict my casual opinions on a half-captive audience.” That’s what Palin has done in her 400-plus-page advertisement for a woman who, at age 45, seems to have permanently attached the word former to her name — former beauty queen, former mayor of Wasilla, former governor of Alaska, former Republican vice presidential nominee.

Palin is now beginning a book tour on which she will do what she does best: draw crowds, create controversy and stir up the conservative base. These things are almost certain to make her, like Mailer, a bestselling author. But they won’t make her the next president of the United States.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Palin, an amateur as a candidate, became a professional victim, blaming others when encountering political turbulence.

Finger-pointing became second nature to her, and it shows in “Going Rogue,” just as it did when she returned to Alaska from the campaign and began feuding with legislators, reporters — and members of the public who alleged she had committed ethical improprieties.

In many of the pages of Palin’s book, she portrays herself as an abused woman: It wasn’t that Palin was unprepared; it was that Katie Couric badgered her and showed bias throughout their widely watched interview. John McCain’s campaign staff censored her. Campaign director Steve Schmidt was callous and condescending. The national media — in suits! — swarmed Wasilla and in their haste and indifference made up stories about her.

Palin’s accounts of her childhood and early life can be charming. She was born into a loving family and married into another.

But there is a big something missing from Palin’s narrative: the voice of a leader.

The book made me think about another outsider’s political memoir, that of Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin (1855-1925). He too was a provincial Republican of modest means who, as congressman, governor, senator and presidential candidate, ran as an outsider like Palin. In his 1913 autobiography, subtitled “A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences,” La Follette’s voice is clear, bold, unafraid and without the trace of a whine. He expects mockery, rejection and contempt from the other side, and sometimes disloyalty from those who said they would stand with him. But he was a leader who remained unfazed by storms of words and emotions, focusing instead on organizing and mobilizing people for the struggle.

Palin neither organizes nor mobilizes. There is no Palin movement — or organization of any depth and substance. There is no Palin philosophy beyond bromides about smaller government, the evils of abortion and the dangers of popular culture (which, right this moment, is making her a rich woman). While she easily won election as governor of Alaska in 2006, her victory was built largely on her fresh, attractive face and her predecessor’s unpopularity.

In “Advertisements for Myself,” Mailer confides — in the first sentence, no less — that he has been running for president “in the privacy of my mind, and it occurs to me that I am less close now than when I began.” Palin is keeping her thoughts about seeking the presidency private, but clearly, her stature as a leader has been in steady decline since McCain introduced her as his running mate. The more she advertises herself — selling books, appearing in television interviews, making speeches — the greater the proof she is not qualified for any title higher than the “formers” she has accumulated.

Michael Carey
The Los Angeles Times

Sarah Palin's overwhelming vindictiveness is apparent throughout "Going Rogue."

Maybe in their business lives, conservatives are the stern, unforgiving masters of capitalist lore. But when it comes to politics, oh, do they love a whiner!

It is her mastery of the lament that explained former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s appeal last year, and now her knack for self-pity is on full display in her book, “Going Rogue.” This is the memoir as prolonged, keening wail, larded with petty vindictiveness. With an impressive attention to detail, Ms. Palin settles every score, answers every criticism; locates a scapegoat for every foul-up, and fastens an insult on every critic, down to the last obscure Palin-doubter back in Alaska.

From Ms. Palin’s masterwork, we learn that the personal really is the political. Every encounter with a critic seems to be a skirmish in the culture wars, from the Alaska debate moderator who didn’t play fair once to the “wealthy, effete young chap” who ran against her for governor but who, in one of the quickest transitions from anti-snob to snob in all of literature, is also said to have served as “our limo driver at [her husband] Todd’s cousin’s wedding.”

We read about the mean things people have said about Ms. Palin’s daughter Bristol, Ms. Palin’s suspicions that the neighbors of the Alaska governor’s mansion disapproved of her kids’ toys, her assurance that she lived a spartan life as governor, “despite what some critics would later accuse me of doing.” There’s the nonscandal she calls “Troopergate,” which is virtually impossible to follow in this telling, except for the insults Ms. Palin directs at one of the men who was (apparently) on the other side of the issue, whatever it was.

In other circumstances, Ms. Palin seems like a woman of grit. When she discovers that her fifth child is going to be born with Down syndrome, she is initially upset, but then writes a letter in God’s voice—incidentally, one of the book’s creepiest moments—instructing the rest of the family to “accept that I [i.e., the Almighty] only want the best for you. . . .”

But the mean things people say and do during her vice presidential run—these are not to be taken in the same spirit. These are to be recalled and deplored, one by one, as if from a master list Ms. Palin has been keeping all this time. She reminds us that someone hacked her email, that she got a prank phone call, and that she once saw someone wearing an insulting T-shirt in Philadelphia.

She claims that what ruined her famous interview with wily CBS News personality Katie Couric was the latter’s “condescension,” which caused Ms. Palin to bungle questions like the one in which she was asked to name her favorite newspaper. And she introduces us to Steve Schmidt, the Republican campaign strategist who is the book’s No. 1 bad guy—almost alone among the book’s characters, he is always referred to by his last name—and who, as Ms. Palin tells it, once implied to an aide that “if there were any more leaks critical of anybody in the handling of Sarah Palin, then a lot more negative stuff would be said about Sarah Palin.”

And, lo and behold, there is. Much more. All of it neatly catalogued, bemoaned, and for sale.

But amid all this score-settling, Ms. Palin wanders into some predictable traps. When explaining her political philosophy, for example, she tells readers that “conservatism is a respect for history and tradition”; on the very next page she instructs readers to accept the creative-destructive whirl of the market, which affects society the way “wildfires in Alaska burn away deadfall to make way for new growth.”

So much for tradition. The respect she shows history, though, is the kind of respect you show the flag when you soak it in kerosene and touch a match to it. “[W]e tried growing government to save the economy back in the 1930s, and it didn’t work then either,” Ms. Palin writes. It is a modest assertion, though, compared to the astonishing finding Ms. Palin reveals in the next sentence: “Massive government spending programs and protectionist economic policies actually helped turn a recession into the Great Depression.” If this is, as it seems, a reference to the New Deal, then history, per Ms. Palin, sometimes goes backwards, with the WPA and its ilk actually bringing about events that took place before they were launched.

But Ms. Palin’s life is meant to be an inspiration. Maybe I should follow her example. The opinion-page equivalent of the Palinesque style is easy enough to imagine: I would use this space to recite the indignities the world forced on me over the course of the week—an effete-looking young person ignored me the other day—plus glimpses of heartland authenticity—I sure do like pot roast—before concluding, darkly, that the reason I suffer is because I am such a sterling American.

I can’t wait to get started.

Thomas Frank
The Wall Street Journal

By the look of Fox News‘ video footage, one would think that Sarah Palin’s new book “Going Rogue” was in such demand, it was drawing tens of thousands of people into overcrowded book stores.

That’s because on Wednesday, the network showed 2008 footage of Sarah Palin on the campaign trail while discussing the “huge crowds” who were attending her book tour.

Fox has since made the following statement:

“This was a production error in which the copy editor changed a script and didn’t alert the control room to update the video,” said Michael Clemente, senior vice president of news at FOX.

This new oversight comes off the heels of Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” calling out Sean Hannity for running video in September of a hugely attended Tea Party protest in Washington. At the time, however, Hannity was discussing a far less attended rally that took place in early November.

Below, watch videos of both Fox News flaps.  Is this a simple accident or a troubling trend?

Michael Langston Moore
Examiner.com

Sarah Palin shrugs off the truth on many, many issues in her new book "Going Rogue."

WASHINGTON — Sarah Palin’s new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven’t become any truer over time.

Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer’s dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.

Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush — a package she seemed to support at the time.

A look at some of her statements in “Going Rogue,” which was released Tuesday:

Palin: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking “only” for reasonably priced rooms and not “often” going for the “high-end, robe-and-slippers” hotels.

The facts: Although travel records indicate she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) overlooking New York City’s Central Park for a five-hour women’s leadership conference in October 2007.

With airfare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000.

Event organizers said Palin asked if she could bring her daughter.

The governor billed her state more than $20,000 for her children’s travel, including to events where they had not been invited, and in some cases later amended expense reports to specify that they had been on official business.

Palin: Rails against taxpayer-financed bailouts, which she attributes to Obama. She recounts telling daughter Bristol that to succeed in business, “you’ll have to be brave enough to fail.”

The facts: Palin is blurring the lines between Obama’s stimulus plan — a $787 billion package of tax cuts, state aid, social programs and government contracts — and the federal bailout that Republican presidential candidate John McCain voted for and President George W. Bush signed.

Palin’s views on bailouts appeared to evolve as McCain’s vice presidential running mate. In September 2008, she said “taxpayers cannot be looked to as the bailout, as the solution, to the problems on Wall Street.”

A week later, she said “ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy.”

During the vice presidential debate in October, Palin praised McCain for being “instrumental in bringing folks together” to pass the $700 billion bailout.

After that, she said “it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in.”

Palin: Says Ronald Reagan faced an even worse recession than the one that appears to be ending now, and “showed us how to get out of one. If you want real job growth, cut capital gains taxes and slay the death tax once and for all.”

The facts: The estate tax, which some call the death tax, was not repealed under Reagan and capital gains taxes are lower now than when Reagan was president.

Economists overwhelmingly say the current recession is far worse.

The recession Reagan faced lasted for 16 months; this one is in its 23rd month.

The recession of the early 1980s did not have a financial meltdown.

Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent, worse than the October 2009 high of 10.2 percent, but the jobless rate is still expected to climb.

Calvin Woodward
Associated Press/San Jose Mercury News

Former McCain campaign staffer Nicolle Wallace tore into Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” Tuesday night, saying the book was “based on fabrications” and exhibited a “bizarre fixation” on past events.

In her book, Sarah Palin wrote that Wallace pushed her to sit down with Katie Couric to boost the anchor’s “self esteem.”

Wallace gave a statement to “The Rachel Maddow Show” calling the anecdote total fiction. “The notion that there was a conversation that I tried to cajole her into an interview with Katie Couric is fiction,” Wallace said. “I am not someone who throws around the word self-esteem. It is a fictional description.”

As for the book in general, Wallace said, “I think she has a legitimate complaint that things could have been better conceived. A book about that would have been painful, but not unfair. What she gets wrong is this personalization that Steve Schmidt and I were lone villains … She hated me from the beginning. I try not to take it personally. The fact is, she wrote a book based on fabrications … This book is a bizarre fixation on things that everyone else has moved on from.”

Watch:

Rachel Weiner
The Huffington Post

Former GOP presidential candidate Senator John McCain comments to "The Hill" on his vp running mate Sarah Palin's new book "Going Rogue."

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who spoke to The Hill Monday evening, denied Sarah Palin’s allegation that his campaign stuck her with a $50,000 legal bill to pay for the cost of vetting her as a potential vice presidential candidate.

McCain said the bill was for legal work related to allegations that Palin made improper use of her influence as Alaska’s governor to press for the dismissal of a state trooper named Mike Wooten. Wooten was embroiled in a custody dispute with Palin’s younger sister, Molly McCann.

“That was addressed by Trevor Potter,” said McCain, “That was over the Troopergate.”

In a statement to the Associated Press, Potter, McCain’s general counsel, denied that McCain’s campaign billed Palin for vetting her.

“To my knowledge, the campaign never billed Gov. Palin for any legal expenses related to her vetting and I am not aware of her ever asking the campaign to pay legal expenses that her own lawyers incurred for the vetting process,” he said.

Palin made the charge in her new book, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” which listed a litany of complaints Palin had with McCain’s campaign, such as its decision to limit her access to reporters. Palin also questioned how the campaign handled the announcement of her daughter’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

McCain told The Hill that he nevertheless enjoyed Palin’s book.

“I hope she sells lots of them,” he said.

Palin received a $5 million advance from HarperCollins, according to the New York Times.

Alexander Bolton
The Hill

Sarah Palin is featured on the cover of this week's Newsweek magazine, in a photo previously used in the August 2009 issue of Runners World.

For the second time since Sarah Palin stepped into the national political spotlight, a photo of the former Republican vice-presidential candidate featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine is sparking controversy. Palin herself blasted the “out-of-context” cover as “sexist” on her Facebook page.

Originally published in the August 2009 issue of Runners World, the photo features the former Alaska governor in short runner’s shorts. It was part of a multi-photograph slideshow that accompanied an article about Palin and her love for the sport titled, “I’m A Runner.” In her Facebook post late last night, Palin took issue with Newsweek using a photo from an article about health and fitness to promote an analysis piece contemplating her relevance as a political figure:

“The choice of photo for the cover of this week’s Newsweek is unfortunate. When it comes to Sarah Palin, this “news” magazine has relished focusing on the irrelevant rather than the relevant. The Runner’s World magazine one-page profile for which this photo was taken was all about health and fitness — a subject to which I am devoted and which is critically important to this nation. The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now. If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin. The media will do anything to draw attention — even if out of context.

The reaction to the Newsweek cover has predictably sparked outrage from conservative supporters of Palin and kudos from liberals who oppose her. CBN commentator David Brady called the cover “a new low” for the “biased” magazine, adding that Newsweek has a history of portraying liberal women as “heroes for the next generation,” while portraying conservative women like Palin as “nuts and dopey.” Meanwhile, documentary photographer Nina Berman hailed the cover as “brilliant” and “shrewd” for using a “propped photo where Palin is an obvious participant … to show how far out she is willing to travel on the road of self promotion” while “shield[ing] themselves from what would have been the inevitable criticism if they had dolled her up themselves and posed her the same way.”

The current cover flap isn’t the first time Newsweek has generated controversy with a photograph of Palin. The October 13, 2008, issue featured an extreme close-up of Palin that seemed to be devoid of the high-tech retouching often employed by magazines. Conservatives claimed this highlighted some of Palin’s supposed “flaws,” like wrinkles around her eyes.

Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham told Yahoo! News that the photo choice was simply the “most interesting image available”:

“We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do. We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard.”

Brett Michael Dykes
Yahoo News

Sarah Palin discusses "Going Rogue" on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Sarah Palin’s interview on Oprah started off newsy, with lots of talk about her McCain campaign handlers and how they restricted her, the Katie Couric interview, etc. There are a few headlines flying around this evening after it finally aired…so here are a few of them. You can pick the scooplet you think is most newsworthy. In no particular order:

1. Asked about 2012, Palin said, “It’s not on my radar screen.”

2. She dismissed the idea of having a talk show of her own: “Oprah, you’re the queen of talk shows. there’s nothing to ever worry about.”

3. She said she didn’t get a say in how Bristol’s pregnancy was announced. The McCain campaign came to her with a press release that conveyed what, Palin suggested to Oprah, was an inappropriate level of glee with her daugher’s teenage pregnancy–then she rewrote it with the aide who brought it to her…and then the campaign sent out the original version instead.

“I did not want the message to be sent out that we were giddy happy to be grandparents,” Palin said.

“We see it scroll across the screen, and there it is, what I didn’t want sent”

4. After all the post-campaign stories about her alleged shopping spree and how much it cost the Republican National Committee, she said that when she realized the campaign would be picking her wardrobe, she thought, “I don’t like to shop, and that’s one less think I’m going to have to worry about.”

5. She took the blame for any problems that arose from her handling. “At the end of the day, I’m the candidate, and if ever I got sucked into that…it’s my fault.”

6. On why the McCain-Palin ticket lost: “The economy tanked under a Republican administration”…”people wanted change”….and “I think our ticket was perceived as status quo.”

7. She said she didn’t think the Katie Couric interview went well, but the McCain campaign scheduled follow-ups anyway. “The campaign said, ‘Right on, good’…and of course, I’m thinking, ‘If you thought that was a good interview, I don’t know what a bad interview is.”

8. She she didn’t tell Couric any newspapers she reads because she was “already so annoyed” with Couric (she says she didn’t like the “kind of badgering questions” of the previous interview she had done with her).

“It was more like, ‘Are you kidding me? Are you really asking me?’” Palin said.

“We had just come off the most amazing rally, working the rope line for I don’t know how long,” Palin said. “And we’re running back stage…and there’s the perky one again, with the microphone and the camera rolling.”

9. Levi Johnson has an “open invitation” to Thanksgiving dinner.

10. She says Levi, basically, is a liar. “I did hear that he said I never really went to hockey games, too, and just so many of the inconsistencies, that’s just Levi’s gig right now.”

11. On why she resigned for governor, she didn’t really produce an answer that satisfied Oprah, but her main point seemed to be that she didn’t feel she could speak her mind about national issues without lawsuits and ethics violations being filed against her.

“Everything had so changed for my administation, there were so many opposition researchers, some of them [sent] by the Obama camp…to start the FOIA requests and the ethics violation charges,” Palin said.

“It was a point where my state…was being hampered by my presence there in the shackles behind the governor’s desk. I wasn’t about to get up there and talk about an issue…otherwise an ethics violation would have been filed,” she said.

“I decided, ‘No, I’m going to get out there and fight for Alaska’s issues…without having to worry that everything that I were to say would result in another lawsuit or an ethics violation charge,” she said.

Marc Ambinder
The Atlantic