Sarah Palin at a recent 2010 midterm election campaign event.

Conservative columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan doesn’t like people demeaning the Gipper’s legacy, not even Sarah Palin, and not even if she’s only talking about the former president’s Hollywood career.

She writes in her latest column of a recent incident in which Sarah Palin attempted to explain away a Karl Rove criticism over her “reality show” by drawing parallels to former president Ronald Reagan’s silver screen career, including his roles in movies such as “Bedtime for Bonzo, bozo or something”:

… “Conservatives talked a lot about Ronald Reagan this year, but they have to take him more to heart, because his example here is a guide. All this seemed lost last week on Sarah Palin, who called him, on Fox, “an actor.” She was defending her form of political celebrity—reality show, “Dancing With the Stars,” etc. This is how she did it: “Wasn’t Ronald Reagan an actor? Wasn’t he in ‘Bedtime for Bonzo,’ Bozo, something? Ronald Reagan was an actor.”

Excuse me, but this was ignorant even for Mrs. Palin. Reagan people quietly flipped their lids, but I’ll voice their consternation to make a larger point. Ronald Reagan was an artist who willed himself into leadership as president of a major American labor union (Screen Actors Guild, seven terms, 1947-59.) He led that union successfully through major upheavals (the Hollywood communist wars, labor-management struggles); discovered and honed his ability to speak persuasively by talking to workers on the line at General Electric for eight years; was elected to and completed two full terms as governor of California; challenged and almost unseated an incumbent president of his own party; and went on to popularize modern conservative political philosophy without the help of a conservative infrastructure. Then he was elected president.

The point is not “He was a great man and you are a nincompoop,” though that is true. The point is that Reagan’s career is a guide, not only for the tea party but for all in politics. He brought his fully mature, fully seasoned self into politics with him. He wasn’t in search of a life when he ran for office, and he wasn’t in search of fame; he’d already lived a life, he was already well known, he’d accomplished things in the world.

Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service. And you need actual talent: You have to be able to bring people in and along. You can’t just bully them, you can’t just assert and taunt, you have to be able to persuade.

Americans don’t want, as their representatives, people who seem empty or crazy. They’ll vote no on that.

It’s not just the message, it’s the messenger.”

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Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury

Former Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin speaks at the "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on August 28, 2010.

Even as Sarah Palin’s public voice grows louder, she has become increasingly secretive, walling herself off from old friends and associates, and attempting to enforce silence from those around her. Following the former Alaska governor’s road show, the author delves into the surreal new world Palin now inhabits—a place of fear, anger, and illusion, which has swallowed up the engaging, small-town hockey mom and her family—and the sadness she has left in her wake.

Backstage in the arena, a little girl in Mary Janes pushes her brother in a baby carriage, stopping a few yards shy of a heavy, 100-foot-long black curtain. The curtain splits the arena in two, shielding the children from an audience of 4,000 people clapping their hands in time to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The music accompanies a video “Salute to Military Heroes” that plays above the stage where, in a few moments, the children’s mother will appear.

When the girl, Piper Palin, turns around, she sees her parents thronged by admirers, and the crowd rolling toward her and the baby, her brother Trig, born with Down syndrome in 2008. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, bend down and give a moment to the children; a woman, perhaps a nanny, whisks the boy away; and Todd hands Sarah her speech and walks her to the stage. He pokes the air with one finger. She mimes the gesture, whips around, strides on four-inch heels to stage center, and turns it on.

And how. Palin and the crowd might as well be one. She’s glad to be here with the people of Independence, Missouri, “where so many of you proudly cling to your guns and your religion”—the first laughline in a 40-minute stump speech that alludes to many of the perceived insults she and her audience have suffered together, and that transforms their resentments into badges of honor. Palin waves her scribbled-on palm to the crowd, proclaiming that she’s using “the poor man’s teleprompter.” Of the Obama administration, she says, “They talk down to us. Especially here in the heartland. Oh, man. They think that, if we were just smart enough, we’d be able to understand their policies. And I so want to tell ’em, and I do tell ’em, Oh, we’re plenty smart, oh yeah—we know what’s goin’ on. And we don’t like what’s goin’ on. And we’re not gonna let them tell us to sit down and shut up.”

The crowd’s ample applause at these lines swells to something vastly bigger when Palin vows defiantly that “come November, we’re taking our country back!” The phrase plays on the name of this event, “Winning America Back,” which has been billed as a Tea Party rally organized by a grassroots Missouri political-action committee that no one had heard of until a few months ago, when the event was announced.

Behind the curtain, Piper plays with other children, oblivious to the speech. She runs in circles, plays hide-and-seek, poses for snapshots, and generally acts as if she were in another world—until she gets the signal to do her job: march to the podium, pick up Palin’s speech, and allow Palin to make a public display of maternal affection.

On cue, Piper parts the curtain. As the child appears, a loud and doting “Awww” melts through the crowd.

Sarah Palin’s connection with her audience is complete. People who admire her believe she is just like them, and this conviction seems to satisfy their curiosity about the objective facts of her life. Those whose curiosity has not been satisfied have their work cut out for them. Palin has been a national figure for barely two years—John McCain selected her as his running mate in August 2008. Her on-the-record statements about herself amount to a litany of untruths and half-truths. With few exceptions—mostly Palin antagonists in journalism and politics whose beefs with her have long been out in the open—virtually no one who knows Palin well is willing to talk about her on the record, whether because they are loyal and want to protect her (a small and shrinking number), or because they expect her prominence to grow and intend to keep their options open, or because they fear she will exact revenge, as she has been known to do. It is an astonishing phenomenon. Colleagues and acquaintances by the hundreds went on the record to reveal what they knew, for good or ill, about prospective national candidates as diverse as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Al Gore, and Barack Obama. When it comes to Palin, people button their lips and slink away.

She manages to be at once a closed book and a constant noisemaker. Her press spokesperson, Pam Pryor, barely speaks to the press, and Palin shrewdly cultivates a real and rhetorical antagonism toward what she calls “the lamestream media.” The Palin machine is supported by organizations that do much of their business under the cover of pseudonyms and shell companies. In accordance with the terms of a reported $1 million annual contract with Fox News, Palin regularly delivers canned commentary on that network. But in the year since she abruptly resigned the governorship of Alaska, in order to market herself full-time—earning an estimated $13 million in the process—she has submitted to authentic, unpaid interviews with only a handful of journalists, none of whom have posed notably challenging questions. She keeps tight control of her pronouncements, speaking only in settings of her own choosing, with audiences of her own selection, and with reporters kept at bay. (Despite many requests, neither Palin nor her current staff would comment for this article.) She injects herself into the news almost every day, but on a strictly one-way basis, through a steady stream of messages on Twitter and Facebook. The press plays along. Palin is the only politician whose tweets are regularly reported as news by TV networks. She is the only one who has been able to significantly change the course of debate on a major national issue (health-care reform) with a single Facebook posting (in which she accused the Obama administration, falsely, of wanting to set up a “death panel”).

Palin makes speeches before large audiences at least a few times a week, on a grueling schedule that has taken her to as many as four locations in three states in one day. She’s choosy, restricting herself to Tea Party gatherings; fund-raisers for charities and Republican organizations and candidates; and moneymakers for herself, mainly business conventions and “Get Motivated!” seminars. Judging from the bootleg videos that sometimes turn up, her basic speech varies little from venue to venue. She presents herself as the straight-shooting, plainspoken, salt-of-the-earth advocate for “hardworking, patriotic, liberty-loving Americans” and as the anti-Obama, the lone Republican standing up to a federal government gone “out of control.” Last July, the quarterly filing by Palin’s political-action committee, SarahPAC, revealed a formidable war chest and hefty investments in fund-raising and direct mail, the clearest signs yet that she may indeed run for president. Republican leaders privately dismiss her as too unpredictable and too undisciplined to run a serious campaign. But on she flies, carpet-bombing the 24-hour news cycle: now announcing her desire to meet with her “political heroine” Margaret Thatcher (the better to look like Ronald Reagan, presumably, though Palin seemed unaware that Thatcher is suffering from dementia); now yelping in theatrical complaint (“I want my straws! I want ’em bent!”), to shrug off revelations that her speaking contract demands deluxe hotel rooms, first-class air travel, and bottles of water with bendable straws; now responding (in a statement read on the Today show) to reports of her daughter Bristol’s re-engagement to Levi Johnston; and all the while issuing scores of political endorsements and preparing a fall media blitz. A TV show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, for which Palin is being paid $2 million, will have its premiere on the TLC network in November. A new book, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, will be published the following week.

This spring and summer I traveled to Alaska and followed Palin’s road show through four midwestern states, speaking with whomever I could induce to talk under whatever conditions of anonymity they imposed—political strategists, longtime Palin friends and political associates, hotel staff, shopkeepers and hairstylists, and high-school friends of the Palin children. There’s a long and detailed version of what they had to say, but there’s also a short and simple one: anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin’s life, a sad and moldering strangeness lies beneath.

Fist of the North Star

It was a baking-hot Kansas afternoon, and from the lobby I watched as three slender, solemn young hairstylists and makeup artists approached a front-desk clerk at the Hyatt Regency hotel, in Wichita. The tallest of them said, “We’re here for North Star.” The desk clerk understood. He nodded and directed the three women to the Keeper of the Plains suite, on the 17th floor, where North Star herself awaited. The North Star is mentioned in Alaska’s state song and appears on its state flag. Fairbanks lies in a region called the North Star Borough. Palin is on the way to making North Star a personal brand. If she ever does run for president, it might well serve as her Secret Service code name.

Hours after the styling session, three bodyguards and one aide accompany Sarah, Todd, and Piper to a $1,000-a-plate V.I.P. dinner to raise money for Wichita’s Bethel Life School. Each guest has a photo taken with Palin and receives a “personally autographed bookplate copy” of Palin’s autobiography, Going Rogue. (The autographs are fake, made with an Autopen.) After dinner, Pat Boone, his skin a taut orange against the trademark white suit, leads the crowd in the singing of a spiritual. Congressman Todd Tiahrt, who will receive Palin’s endorsement in his race for the U.S. Senate, tells everyone to buy a copy of Palin’s book—“so Sarah can buy a Learjet!” (Learjet is based in Wichita.)

Palin delivers basically the same speech she gave 18 hours earlier to the Tea Party group in Independence. You could pretty much replace the word “constitution,” from yesterday’s remarks, with “Bible,” and be good to go. Then Palin departs from the script and speaks as if from the heart, describing her fear and confusion upon discovering that Trig would be born with Down syndrome. “I had never really been around a baby with special needs,” she tells her listeners. For what it’s worth, this statement is untrue. Depicting the same moment of discovery in her own book, Palin writes that she immediately thought of a special-needs child she knew very well: her autistic nephew. Such falsehoods never damage Palin’s credibility with her admirers, because information and ideology are incidental to this relationship. Palin owes her power to identity politics, pitched with moralistic topspin. She exploits the same populist impulse that fueled the career of William Jennings Bryan—an impulse described by one Bryan biographer as “the yearning for a society run by and for ordinary people who lead virtuous lives.”

Palin does not always treat those ordinary people well, however—it depends on who is watching. Of the many famous people who have stayed at the Hyatt in Wichita (Cher, Reba McEntire, Neil Young), Sarah Palin ranks as the all-time worst tipper: $5 for seven bags. But the bellhops had it good in Kansas, compared with the bellman at another midwestern hotel who waited up until past midnight for Palin and her entourage to check in—and then got no tip at all for 10 bags. He was stiffed again at checkout time. The same went for the maids who cleaned Palin’s rooms in both places—no tip whatsoever. The only time I heard of Palin giving a generous tip was in St. Joseph, Michigan, after the owner of Kilwin’s chocolate shop, on State Street, sent a CARE package to Palin’s suite, and Palin walked to the store to say thank you. She also wanted to buy more boxes of candy to take home. When the owner would not accept her money, Palin, encircled by the crowd that had jammed the store to get a glimpse of her, pressed a hundred-dollar bill into the woman’s hand, saying, “This is for the staff.” That Ben Franklin was the talk of State Street the whole rest of the day.

Warm and effusive in public, indifferent or angry in private: this is the pattern of Palin’s behavior toward the people who make her life possible. A onetime gubernatorial aide to Palin says, “The people who have worked for her—they’re broken, used, stepped on, down in the dust.” On the 2008 campaign trail, one close aide recalls, it was practically impossible to persuade Palin to take a moment to thank the kitchen workers at fund-raising dinners. During the campaign, Palin lashed out at the slightest provocation, sometimes screaming at staff members and throwing objects. Witnessing such behavior, one aide asked Todd Palin if it was typical of his wife. He answered, “You just got to let her go through it… Half the stuff that comes out of her mouth she doesn’t even mean.” When a campaign aide gingerly asked Todd whether Sarah should consider taking psychiatric medication to control her moods, Todd responded that she “just needed to run and work out more.” Her anger kept boiling over, however, and eventually the fits of rage came every day. Then, just as suddenly, her temper would be gone. Palin would apologize and promise to be nicer. Within hours, she would be screaming again. At the end of one long day, when Palin was mid-tirade, a campaign aide remembers thinking, “You were an angel all night. Now you’re a devil. Where did this come from?”

The intensity of Palin’s temper was first described to me in such extreme terms that I couldn’t help but wonder if it might be exaggerated, until I heard corroborating tales of outbursts dating back to her days as mayor of Wasilla and before. One friend of the Palins’ remembers an argument between Sarah and Todd: “They took all the canned goods out of the pantry, then proceeded to throw them at each other. By the time they got done, the stainless-steel fridge looked like it had got shot up with a shotgun. Todd said, ‘I don’t know why I even waste my time trying to get nice things for you if you’re just going to ruin them.’ ” This friend adds, “As soon as she enters her property and the door closes, even the insects in that house cringe. She has a horrible temper, but she has gotten away with it because she is a pretty woman.” (The friend elaborated on this last point: “Once, while Sarah was preparing for a city-council meeting, she said, ‘I’m gonna put on one of my push-up bras so I can get what I want tonight.’ That’s how she rolls.”) When Palin was mayor, she made life for one low-level municipal employee so miserable that the woman quit her job, sought psychiatric counseling, and then left the state altogether to escape Palin’s sphere of influence—this according to one person with firsthand knowledge of the situation. The woman did not want to be found. When I finally tracked her down, her husband, who answered the phone, at first pretended that I had dialed the wrong number and that the word “Wasilla” had no meaning to him. Palin’s former personal assistants all refused to comment on the record for this story, some citing a fear of reprisal. Others who have worked with Palin recall that, when she feels threatened, she does not hesitate to wield some version of a signature threat: “I have the power to ruin you.”

Palin’s public voice is an instrument of great versatility. In a few moments, she can turn from kind to hateful, rational to unhinged. At her best Palin can be folksy and pungent. But she needs outside help to give her voice its national range. For messaging strategy, Palin relies on William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, and Fred Malek, who was an aide to Presidents Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush. The lawyer Robert Barnett, the most successful literary agent in Washington—his clients range from Hillary Clinton to Dick Cheney to Tony Blair—negotiated Palin’s reported $7 million advance for Going Rogue, and he helps oversee her speaking schedule, which is arranged by the Washington Speakers Bureau. The small inner circle that shapes Palin’s voice day to day includes lobbyist Randy Scheunemann, a director of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century, who advises Palin on foreign affairs, and Kim Daniels, a lawyer with the Thomas More Law Center, which has been called “the Christian answer to the A.C.L.U.,” who advises her on domestic issues. Palin’s speechwriter is Lindsay Hayes. Doug McMarlin and Jason Recher, both of whom did advance work for George W. Bush, serve as body men and confidants. Both Hayes and Recher were on Palin’s 2008-campaign road team, and both were known for indulging her whims, according to their colleagues. (When John McCain decided to pull out of Michigan, a decision Palin disagreed with, Recher and Palin hatched a plan one day to make an early-morning drive to Michigan anyway. The Secret Service, becoming aware of the plan, asked the McCain campaign what it should do. The answer came: “Shoot out the tires.”) Campaign e-mails indicate that Recher was disrespectful of field staff and support workers. “Our volunteers don’t want to do Palin trips because of the way they are treated by Recher,” wrote one of his supervisors. Of all those who have professional relationships with Palin, only Robert Barnett is generally considered to be at the top of his game, and he is basically just cutting deals, as he would for any client.

Palin’s most unconventional hire is a novice media consultant, Rebecca Mansour, a 36-year-old Los Angeles resident who has been identified in news stories as a screenwriter. Mansour has said that she volunteered for Obama early in the 2008 campaign and then became disillusioned. Not long after the election, with Joseph Russo, a then 23-year-old college student from New Jersey, who would also go to work for Palin, she co-founded the most popular pro-Palin blog, Conservatives4Palin, known informally as C4P (and not to be confused with the “adult swingers” Web site of that name). C4P functions as a hybrid news service, discussion board, and field headquarters for a virtual army of Palin supporters, who pride themselves on brute devotion. “Who We Are and What We Stand For,” a post written by Mansour, declares, “We’re ordinary barbarians here. No one controls us. We’re a horde.” A prominent C4P contributor, Nicole Coulter, told CBS.com this summer, “We would literally walk across hot broken glass for this woman… She’s our family, and you protect your family; it’s like the mafia.”

On C4P, any journalist or public figure who questions Palin in any way is flicked off as a “creep,” a “hack,” a “loser,” a “storm trooper,” a “liar,” or as just plain “slime.” “I assumed the governor was above that,” says Jay Ramras, an Alaska state legislator who has been a frequent target of the site. “Or at least that there was a Chinese wall between her and these people. But then they crossed over—she hired them.” Mansour’s words have continued to appear on the site occasionally, even after she was formally taken on board by SarahPAC. She used to police C4P message boards for dissenters from the party line and, under the name RAM (her initials, shortened from her earlier, more descriptive handle, RAM Hammer), rip them mercilessly: “Now you are banned for life, you sick son of a bitch.” In one comment string, a woman named Sandra wrote, “I wish Sarah would tell us more about what is involved with caring for Trig. I understand there are many professionals involved in his education and training. If we knew more about this there would be more support for organizations that are involved.” Mansour shot back, “Sandra, what are you implying?,” and the comment string went dead. The nastiness on C4P exists alongside an idealization of the former governor, as displayed in the closing lines of “Who is Sarah Palin?,” an 8,000-word posting by Mansour: “C4P has your back, Governor. And when you finally ride out from the north with your banner lifted high, we’ll rally.”

These words resonate with the code name Palin used in Wichita. Palin has invoked the North Star in several of her most important speeches, including her July 2009 farewell address, when she resigned as governor of Alaska (“Wherever the road may lead us, we have that steadying great North Star to guide us home”), her January 2009 state-of-the-state speech (“United, protecting and progressing under the great North Star, let’s get to work”), and her December 2006 inaugural address, in which she used the North Star concept to frame Alaska’s relationship to the rest of the country, much the way Ronald Reagan used the “city on a hill” image to portray America’s relationship to the rest of the world. “America is looking for answers. She’s looking for a new direction; the world is looking for a light,” Palin said. “That light can come from America’s great North Star; it can come from Alaska.” According to an account on US for Palin, another pro-Palin blog, Palin recently told a Christian audience in Georgia that “in Alaska they refer to the North Star a lot,” and indicated that this is sometimes meant as a reference to God.

Palin’s rooms in Wichita were booked by NorthStar Strategies, a Virginia company registered to Jason Recher. When a man in Wichita asked Palin how he could get involved if she decides to run for president, Doug McMarlin offered him a business card identifying himself as a partner in NorthStar. An Amazon.com store called the North Star Group, maintained by a Palin blogger, “sells Governor Palin’s books, and numerous products she has referenced or is known to use,” such as the red Naughty Monkey Double Dare pumps she often wears. As a side project to Conservatives4Palin, Joseph Russo in 2009 contributed to a separate pro-Palin blog called Fist of the North Star. The blog shares its name with a Japanese manga series set in a post-apocalyptic world devastated by nuclear war, in which a faithful remnant work to save their Heavenly Empress, who has been imprisoned by the corrupt Imperial Army. The Fist of the North Star blog once featured a staggeringly obscene mock news item about one of Palin’s Alaska nemeses, the activist Andree McLeod, who had filed a series of ethics complaints against the then governor: “On Friday, an international team of doctors successfully removed the world’s largest parasite from her desperately overstretched colon. One must wonder what kind of freaky shit this ghetto bitch was ingesting… You never know what else that Harpies Twat is carrying!”

As late as April 2009, Palin’s press spokesperson contended that C4P was “not affiliated in any way with the governor.” Mansour’s reaction to that statement suggested otherwise. The next day on C4P, she wrote, “Some readers have wondered if I felt tire tracks on my back this morning,” and went on to say, “I understand” why Palin’s spokesperson denied any connection, adding, “I’m not hurt … much.” Twelve days later she told a reporter for a McClatchy newspaper a different story: Sarah Palin, Mansour said, “has nothing at all, whatsoever, to do with any of what we’re doing here.” In early July, Mansour made a trip to Alaska to meet with Palin, according to a source in Anchorage. By mid-August, her byline, long the most prominent one on C4P, had vanished from the site.

But her voice, or at least a voice that sounds much like hers, was about to turn up in another venue. When it was first set up, in January 2009, Palin’s Facebook page might as well have been a file cabinet for official press releases (“Palin Pushes Parental Consent Legislation”) written mostly in a stiff, third-person form. The same was true of her Twitter feed, which went live in April. After Mansour’s voice disappeared on C4P, however, Palin’s voice on Facebook and Twitter started sounding increasingly provocative and irascible. A company called Aries Petra Consulting was formed in September and registered to Mansour’s home address, but under someone else’s name. (In astrology, Aries is the ram—or “RAM.”) SarahPAC’s first payment to the firm was made in October, about two weeks before Palin began her book tour. By then, Palin’s new virtual voice was growing in intensity. The more shrill it became, the more news Palin made: “QUIT MAKING THINGS UP DNC” … “OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S ATROCIOUS DECISION: HORRIBLE DECISION, ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE” … “ARE YOU CAPABLE OF DECENCY, RAHM EMANUEL?” The payments to Mansour were not made public until February 1, 2010, when SarahPAC had to disclose its quarterly filings with the Federal Elections Commission. The day before the disclosure, knowing what was coming, C4P made an official announcement acknowledging that both Mansour and Russo had left the site months earlier and gone to work for SarahPAC. This summer, in her capacity as a SarahPAC staffer, Mansour insisted to a reporter that “anything that goes out under [Palin’s] name is hers.” Palin’s virtual voice does sometimes have the ring of authenticity. But often it sounds less like Palin herself than someone else’s fantasy version of Palin at her most vitriolic. On one occasion Palin’s virtual voice contradicted remarks she made in a TV interview two days later.

Angels and Demons

Early in the 2008 campaign, when John McCain’s aides discovered that Alaska-size gaps existed in Palin’s general knowledge (among those previously unreported: she had no idea who Margaret Thatcher was), they from time to time would give her some books to read in hopes of improving the candidate’s learning curve. On one such occasion, Palin accepted the books, set them aside, and for the next 25 minutes was held rapt by one of her three BlackBerrys.

Eventually, an aide asked, “What are you working on?”

“I’m reading these great e-mails,” she said, “from the prayer warriors.”

On the road, Palin gives “prayer warriors” regular shout-outs. She did it in Wichita and again in June during “An Evening with Sarah Palin” at Chicago’s Rosemont Theatre. Standing in front of a 50-foot-long American flag, wearing a black leather jacket, Palin thanked prayer warriors in the audience, just as at other events she has thanked them for keeping her “covered” and “providing [a] prayer shield.”

The term “prayer warrior” describes a person who offers a specific kind of supplication: asking God to direct an unseen battle between forces of light and darkness—literal angels and demons—that some Christians believe is occurring all around us. A leading member of Wasilla’s Church on the Rock, the non-denominational evangelical congregation where Palin sometimes attends worship, confirmed this understanding of the term. When Palin thanks prayer warriors for keeping her covered, she is thanking them for calling on angels to shield her from demonic attacks. On the night of the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden, Palin received an e-mail marked “URGENT … Urgent for Sarah to read … ” The e-mail came from pastor Lou Engle, a prominent right-wing activist who identifies himself as a prayer warrior and is a central figure in dominionist theology. (Dominionists believe that, until Jesus Christ returns to earth, society should be governed exclusively by God’s law as revealed through a literal reading of Scripture.) In the e-mail, Engle compared Palin to the biblical Queen Esther. “This is an Esther moment in your life,” he wrote. “Esther hid her identity until Mordecai challenged her to risk everything for such a time as this. Your identity is ‘Sarah Barracuda.’ Esther removed corruption from the Persian government and Haman fell. She didn’t have experience, she had grace and favor. Sarah, don’t hide your identity tonight.”

Palin has often stated that the strokes of luck propelling her political success were divinely ordained: “There are no coincidences” is a favorite maxim. In Going Rogue, Palin casts herself as a reluctant prophet, accepting providential election against her wishes. The reluctant prophet is a character trope found throughout Hebrew and Christian scripture. (Jesus prays, “Father, if it is Thy will, let this cup pass from me.”) The opening scene of Going Rogue, at the 2008 Alaska State Fair, ends with Palin’s BlackBerry ringing. As she reaches to answer, Palin prays, “Please, Lord, just for an hour, anything but politics,” only to find John McCain on the line, “asking if I wanted to help him change history.”

Whenever I heard Palin speak on the road, her remarks were scored with code phrases expressing solidarity with fundamentalist Christians. Her talk of leading with “a servant’s heart” is a dog whistle for the born-again. Her dig at health-care reform as an expression of Democratic ambitions to “build a Utopia” in the United States is practically a trumpet call (because the Kingdom of God is not of this earth, and perfection can be achieved only in the life to come). But it is Palin’s persistent encouragement of the prayer warriors that most clearly reveals her worldview: she is good, her opponents are evil, and the war is on.

Palin’s belief that evil surrounds her may account for the secretive nature of her business arrangements. SarahPAC staffers and contractors have made what seem like concerted efforts to disclose an absolute minimum of information. Palin’s tours around the country are supported by a network of organizations that are not always what they claim to be. The Winning America Back conference was organized by a Missouri political-action committee called Preserving American Liberty (PAL-PAC). The group’s Web site states that “Members of Preserving American Liberty are from the Kansas City metropolitan area and are all unpaid volunteers who want to make a positive difference in the community.” Yet when I asked local politicians (including state representatives, a Senate candidate, and a congressional candidate) and local journalists about who had organized the event, I found that they knew nothing about the sponsors—“maybe because they’re Tea Partiers,” one reporter guessed, “and they’re all new to politics.”

PAL-PAC seems to have been created for a single purpose: to pay Sarah Palin to give a speech. PAL-PAC announced the Palin event at the same time that it announced its own formation. After the Palin event was over, most of the information on PAL-PAC’s Web site disappeared. In effect, PAL-PAC was a disposable entertainment company, set up to put on a one-day show that collected the contact information of thousands of people who came to see Palin in the flesh, and to give her their money. The organization has not been mentioned again anywhere online or in local newspapers. The group’s financial statements are curious. PAL-PAC was registered in Missouri last November; as of April 15, 2010, when it made its second quarterly disclosure report to the Missouri Ethics Commission, two weeks before Palin arrived in Independence, PAL-PAC had only $3,202 in the bank. This was not nearly enough money to reserve the venue, much less cover security, printing, advertising, or any of the other expenses associated with throwing an event for 4,000 people. PAL-PAC’s third disclosure report, filed on July 14, reveals large payments to Wayne Graves, a Kansas City physician, whose wife, Karladine, also a doctor, is the president of PAL-PAC. Wayne Graves performed a key service for Winning America Back: he personally paid the speakers’ fees and travel expenses. On June 23, according to the report, he was reimbursed for these outlays: $15,134.83 for “Reimburse Speak[er],” and $126,000, also for “Reimburse Speak[er].” By fronting the money for these expenses, Graves made it possible for PAL-PAC to keep details such as Palin’s precise fee under wraps. But the lion’s share of that $126,000, it seems safe to assume, went to Palin—that would tally with verified reports of what Palin has been paid elsewhere. When reached by phone, Karladine Graves refused to answer any questions about PAL-PAC: “I’m—we’re just a tiny little group, and we’re not really anything, I just, oh, no, I can’t talk about this.” (Palin is on track to earn well over $3 million in speaking fees for events this year. Washington Speakers Bureau did not respond to an interview request.)

Other stops on Palin’s road show raise questions similar to those surrounding Winning America Back. Palin spoke to a group in Dallas that claimed to be a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group but is not registered as one. That event was advertised as a fund-raiser for the Uptown Women’s Center, whose eponymous U.R.L. redirected visitors to a Web site selling tickets for the event, palin4life.com, which has since disappeared. In June, Palin was scheduled to go to Charlotte, North Carolina, for two events, a $300-per-ticket “Evening with Sarah Palin” and the free “Complete Woman Expo 2010.” Both were sponsored by a newly formed organization, the Blue Ridge Educational Resource Group. Like PAL-PAC, the Blue Ridge group had sprung up from nowhere, and also like PAL-PAC, it somehow landed one of the country’s most-sought-after female speakers to headline its very first event. Local officials eventually expressed skepticism that Blue Ridge was competent to manage the logistics for an expected crowd of 30,000, and at the last minute both events were canceled. The Blue Ridge group’s Web site, like PAL-PAC’s, was reduced to a shell.

Timothy Crawford, the treasurer of Sarah-PAC, presumably has some responsibility for the byzantine structures undergirding Palin’s travels. Before joining Palin, Crawford was the interim finance director of the Republican National Committee. He is currently being investigated by the Ohio secretary of state for his role in Let Ohio Vote, a state-referendum campaign bankrolled in its entirety by New Models, a Virginia organization Crawford owns, which calls itself a nonprofit. Earlier this year, he refused to respond to a subpoena—issued under state laws that prohibit concealment of campaign money—that sought to discover where New Models had gotten the $1.6 million to fund Let Ohio Vote. Ohio secretary of state Jennifer Brunner has called New Models “a ‘straw-person’ out of state corporation.” Also, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, New Models “was behind controversial automated calls to Pennsylvania voters made during the 2008 presidential election. The calls told voters that Barack Obama’s aunt was living in America illegally and that he accepted campaign contributions from his ‘illegal alien aunt.’ ”

If Satan and his associates top Palin’s list of enemies, the legions of anti-Palin bloggers may rank a close second. After the 2008 presidential campaign, when she returned briefly to the governor’s office, Palin became so obsessed with responding to criticism from bloggers that it sometimes paralyzed her administration. In the year since her resignation, independent bloggers have produced some of the most robust reporting about her—for instance, revealing that the Palins did not pay taxes for years on two vacation cabins, and pointing out that, during the “bus tour” to promote her book, Palin in fact sometimes traveled by private Gulfstream. The Anchorage Daily News no longer has a beat reporter assigned to Palin. Owing to newsroom cuts, the paper has no staff to spare, and editors reportedly see Palin as “a nonentity” in Alaska now—a phenomenon primarily of concern to the rest of the country (collectively referred to as “outside”). The blogs that keep closest tabs on Palin include Palingates, Mudflats, the Immoral Minority, and Shannyn Moore: Just a Girl from Homer. Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish and Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post serve as the main conduits of information from the blogs to the mainstream media. Palingates is run by a German attorney who will identify himself only as “Patrick.” Jeanne Devon, who owns an Anchorage retail store, runs Mudflats. Jesse Griffin, a part-time assistant teacher in Anchorage, is the Immoral Minority.

All attend to Palin’s every move with a focus that could be called obsessive, and all are given, in varying degrees of intensity, to juvenile outbursts that can rival C4P at its worst. For instance, among the Immoral Minority’s fictional captions for screen grabs from a Palin interview with Sean Hannity was the following: “Yeah I tole Levi to place his nasty sperm filled nuggets right here before he started his apology to my family. And every time he did not look sorry enough to me, I just gave them a little squeeze.” Still, without these blogs, the world would have much less information about Palin’s life right now.

Of the group, only Shannyn Moore, an Anchorage radio and TV personality, has any experience as a journalist. Moore and Devon, who consider themselves political activists as well as reporters, have become close friends and share a dream of persuading wealthy donors to give them millions of dollars to renovate an old Anchorage theater as headquarters for a foundation, where they would study Alaskan politics and do proper investigative work on Palin. For now, they do what they can with the meager resources they have, which means they spend a lot of time reading tea leaves. Moore, a green-eyed blonde who, like Palin, was once an Alaska beauty queen, albeit a few stripes more self-aware, drives her Subaru through downtown Anchorage, steering with one hand, holding a cigarette and her smartphone in the other. When Devon calls to tell her that Glenn Beck has booked the Dena’ina Center, the largest venue in Anchorage, for a speech on September 11, 2010, she sits bolt upright and yells. Immediately, they start trying to figure out what the news might mean. “Listen, listen, listen: Why in the world do you imagine Glenn Beck would come to Anchorage on 9/11? You think he might have a special guest? With a special announcement? Oh,” she says, her whole face falling as the implications of a Palin campaign kickoff hit her, “Jesus Christ.”

The best-known investigative reporter to insert himself into Alaska is Joe McGinniss, the author of The Selling of the President and Fatal Vision, who moved to Wasilla in May to spend the summer reporting for a book about Palin to be published next year by Random House. McGinniss rented the property next door to Palin, who, upon learning his identity, wrote a scathing Facebook post, accompanied by a snapshot of McGinniss standing outside on his deck: “Wonder what kind of material he’ll gather while overlooking Piper’s bedroom, my little garden, and the family’s swimming hole?”

Overnight, C4P, Glenn Beck, talk-radio hosts, and many other Palin allies rallied around. Within 24 hours, McGinniss had received 5,000 hostile e-mails. Death threats were investigated by the F.B.I. A local man who helped move some furniture into McGinniss’s house had one of his truck’s windows shot out. The author, with his disingenuous response to all this, did himself no favors. On the Today show, McGinniss absurdly claimed that he “didn’t expect any publicity at all” for moving in next door to Palin. On July 3, the first anniversary of Palin’s surprise resignation, I had dinner with McGinniss on the deck of his rented house. “I can’t even see her windows!” he said, gesturing across the way. Actually, from where I stood on the deck, even with the 14-foot-high fence the Palins put up the week McGinniss moved in, it was possible to see several of the Palins’ windows, a fair bit of the yard, and much of the lakefront edge of their property.

McGinniss told me his version of the story of the night Todd came over to ask who he was and what he was doing there. After a tense conversation, McGinniss says, Todd left, and Track Palin, Sarah and Todd’s older son, came out to the front yard “to do sit-ups” while holding what McGinniss assumes was a digital camera—which he figures Track used to take the picture that Sarah posted on Facebook. While McGinniss and I talked, there was no sign of life in the Palin house, and the only noise on the water came from squawking grebes—until about 8:30, when a floatplane roared in for a landing on Lake Lucille. It slowed to a stop directly in front of the Palins’ house, turned, crept closer to the shore, then idled for a long moment in front of us before taking off and heading back in the direction whence it came. The airplane was too far away for me to read the tail number, but it was a white Piper PA-18 Super Cub with red stripes: the same model and colors as Todd Palin’s airplane.

The Palins that night were in Todd’s hometown of Dillingham, about a two-hour flight southwest of Wasilla. If this was Todd’s plane, and if he was flying it, the choice to make the trip up here seemed odd. Given that this was the anniversary of Sarah’s resignation, it perhaps made sense that the Palins would want assurance that no curiosity seekers would trespass. But why make such a long flight, just for a quick look at the house? “Wouldn’t it be easier to hire a guard?,” I asked aloud. McGinniss, whose reporting has put him in the frame of mind of his subject—where everything is fungible, and everyone is suspect—replied, “A guard would have a story he could sell.”

City of Fear

You might be tempted to dismiss such a thought as the product of paranoid contagion—and it does seem at odds with the way Wasilla likes to present itself. Outsiders’ descriptions of the town (population 7,245) usually highlight the strip malls and the drug problems—which are real, but are less salient features of life here than the townspeople’s connection to the landscape, especially the majestic peaks of the Chugach Range to the southeast, visible from almost everywhere. The people of Wasilla, in the main, are reflexively generous and open. During coffee hour after worship at Church on the Rock, where a moose head is mounted over the sanctuary entrance, a member of the congregation invites me to join him for a three-day fishing trip a mere 15 minutes after we meet.

When I ask about Palin, though, a palpable unease creeps in. Some people clam up. Others whisper invitations to call later—but on this number, not that one, and not before this hour or after that one. So many people answer “Off the record?” to my initial questions that it almost seems the whole town has had media training. They certainly have issues with the press. Some tell of reporters who seduced them with promises—Don’t worry, I’ll make you look good—and then published stories that made them out to be hicks, stupid, less-than. “These were people we let into our house,” one Wasilla resident says. “We served them food.” But the real concern is with Palin herself—they don’t want her to find out they have talked with a reporter, because of a suspicion that bad things will happen to them if she does. The salty, seen-it-all bartender at one of the town’s best restaurants says, “I wish you luck—but I like my job.” Has Palin actually had people fired for talking about her?, I always ask, and the answer always comes, Remember that trooper? The reference is to Mike Wooten, a state policeman who fell out with the family after divorcing one of Sarah Palin’s sisters and ended up at the center of the scandal known as Troopergate. The Alaska Legislative Council found in 2008 that Palin “abused her power” as governor in attempting to get Trooper Wooten fired.

Even Palin’s strongest supporters say they feel confused by what their former governor has become. “She quit us,” says one Wasilla woman. “We elected her, and she left us,” says another. (“Sarah was my babysitter,” she later adds, as an indication of goodwill.) Yet they are too nice to turn me away, and they are too honest to completely suppress what they themselves feel unable to tell. After one local Republican delivers 90 minutes of uninterrupted praise for Palin, I ask whom else I should talk to, and the answer comes so fast it’s like a cry for help—which is how, the next day, I end up in the living room of Colleen Cottle, who is the matriarch of one of Wasilla’s oldest families, and who served on the city council when Palin was mayor. She says she and her husband, Rodney, will pay a price for speaking candidly about Palin. Their son is one of Todd Palin’s best friends. “But it is time for people to start telling the truth,” Colleen says. She describes the frustrations of trying to do city business with a mayor who “had no attention span—with Sarah it was always ‘What’s the flavor of the day?’ ”; who was unable to take part meaningfully in conversations about budgets because she “does not understand math or accounting—she only knows buzzwords, like ‘balanced budget’ ”; and who clocked out after four hours on most days, delegating her duties to an aide—“but he’ll never talk to you, because he has a state job and doesn’t want to lose it.” This type of conversation is repeated so often that Wasilla starts to feel like something from The Twilight Zone or a Shirley Jackson short story—a place populated entirely by abuse survivors.

To appreciate how alien Palin has become in Wasilla, how inscrutable to her own people, you have to wrap your mind around the fact that Sarah Palin is more famous than any other Alaskan, ever, and to remember that mass-media fame is a property of “outside.” It still does not quite seem real to most Alaskans that there are all these thousands of people in the Lower 48 turning out for … Sarah. It seems all the more unreal because Palin’s image as an engaging, down-to-earth small-town hockey mom was more or less accurate until two years ago. To be sure, some elements of that image were never true to life. “This whole hunter thing, for Sarah? That is the biggest fallacy,” says one longtime friend of the family. “That woman has never hunted. The picture of her with the caribou she says she shot? She got out of the R.V. to pose for a picture. She never helps with the fishing either. It’s all a joke.” The friend goes on to recall that when Greta Van Susteren came to the house to interview Palin “[Sarah] cooked moose chili and whatnot. Todd was calling everyone he knew the day before—‘Do you got any moose?’ Desperate.” In any event, her life is very different now: flying by private jet, driving a gleaming new Escalade ESV with tinted windows, and speaking to the whole world via a Fox News feed from her house until the network installs a TV studio on her property, where contractors are now also finishing a 6,000-square-foot stone-clad château that will contain an airplane hangar for Todd’s Piper Cub, two private apartments, and an office for Sarah.

Almost any small-town person who makes it big has some slight edge of ruthlessness, or an above-average ability to cut and run. The nickname “Sarah Barracuda” doesn’t come from nowhere, and Palin’s edge was always harder than most people’s. Her sense of entitlement, fueled by persistent feelings that she was underappreciated, came to full blossom in the heat of the 2008 race. In late October, when stories of Palin’s exorbitant campaign clothing budget surfaced, Todd Palin dismissed the criticism in an e-mail (subject line: “Cloths”) to several campaign aides: “How many fundraiser’s has she done for RNC, how much money has she raised and how much has voter registration increased for RNC since she was announced. So what if RNC purchase’s some cloths for her for the work she has done for the party.” Though the clothing issue has been discussed at length, internal campaign documents reveal new information that contradicts the account Palin has given. The shopping sprees continued through late October and were not, as previously claimed, mainly undertaken to clothe the family for the unexpected emergency of the Republican National Convention, in St. Paul. The number and range of items purchased for the entire Palin family—more than 400 in total—is mind-boggling. For Sarah, the campaign bought about 30 pairs of shoes, roughly $3,000 worth of underwear (including many Spanx girdles), a pair of Bose headphones costing more than $300, and even her incidentals and toiletries. Charging a campaign for underwear would appear to be unprecedented. A campaign e-mail shows that one of Sarah’s senior aides requested that an outfit be purchased for Bristol for her birthday, explicitly stating that the items should be charged “via the campaign.” Todd Palin received as much as $20,000 worth of clothing—a wardrobe that would last most men for many years, if not for life.

Even after the campaign was over, and Palin had returned to Wasilla, she continued to try to get what she could. In an e-mail, she wrote, “Remember the five black leather Flyers bags w sweatshirts and jerseys and Flyers propaganda in each bag? Anyone know where they ended up?” At the same time, she was scrambling to contain the damage to her image: “Absolutely amazing … now the negative coverage that is on our local news, all regarding these campaign clothes that are not even mine. Amazing. Where are all the campaign spokespersons on all this?”

During these post-campaign days, according to insiders, Palin’s temper veered wildly. It was as if something had snapped. Visitors to her house witnessed her in core meltdown. To one of her children, she cried, “We weren’t good enough for America. We’ll never be good enough for America.” Sometimes when she went out in public, people were unkind. Once, while shopping at Target, a man saw Palin and hollered, “Oh my God! It’s Tina Fey! I love Tina Fey!” When other shoppers started laughing, the governor parked her cart, walked out of the store, and drove away.

After starting her new career as a national figure, Palin disengaged from the community. When in Wasilla, she rarely leaves the house. At her favorite coffee shop, Mocha Moose, Palin has been seen only once in the past three months. On those occasions when she goes to Church on the Rock, she usually arrives late, leaves early, and sits in the back. For runs to Target, she waits until it’s almost closing time. She has never darkened the doorway of Wasilla’s one independent bookstore, Pandemonium Booksellers, which took part in her Going Rogue book signing at the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center. Sarah’s mother, Sally Heath, is a charter member of the Valley Republican Women’s Club, which sells a batch of Palin-family recipes for $5, but Palin has not been to any of their meetings since resigning as governor.

Her Wasilla social circle has narrowed practically to nothing. People who know Kristan Cole and Kris Perry, her closest local friends and advisers of longest standing, say that the relationships have deteriorated. Her former aides Meg Stapleton and Ivy Frye are said to have parted with Palin on bad terms. (None of the four responded to requests for comment.) Palin’s only employees in Alaska appear to be the staff of True North L’Attitudes, a small scheduling firm in Anchorage. Someone must give the family a hand with errands; the rumor around town is that the Palins have “a Mexican” who helps out, though nobody knows his name. Palin does lean on her parents. Chuck and Sally Heath, together with at least one of Palin’s church friends, handle the mountains of mail that arrive for Palin at the post office. When Piper and Willow are not traveling with their mother, they go to schools east of Wasilla, not far from where the Heaths live in a house that gives some idea of how Charles Addams might have imagined Old MacDonald’s farm. It is full of stuffed and mounted animals ranging from a tarantula to a mountain goat. The license plate on Chuck’s truck reads “EIEIO.” One person at Church on the Rock said that the girls frequently sleep overnight at their grandparents’ because the Heaths’ house, unlike the Palins’, is near their schools. When Trig joins Sarah on the road, Palin’s mother sometimes goes along to take care of the baby.

Every year on July 4, a parade marches through downtown Wasilla, ending at a city park, where the mayor throws a picnic. When I saw Chuck and Sally Heath marching in the parade, behind the campaign float for the current governor, Sean Parnell, I jumped from the curb to say hello. Chuck wouldn’t—couldn’t—talk about his daughter; the strict rule in the family now is no interviews, ever, without Sarah’s permission. After we had been walking for a while, he looked around and asked where Sally had gone. “Sally’s upset,” said the woman marching next to him, glaring at me, “because you are not following orders.”

In whatever remains of Palin’s inner circle, however, most people are following orders. Some details of the Palins’ private life, however, suggest a reality at odds with Sarah’s image. In speeches, Palin pays tribute to the man she still calls “the First Dude.” One of the strangest passages in Going Rogue concerns post-election rumors that the couple was considering a divorce. “That day in sunny Texas when the divorce rumors were rampant in the tabloids, I watched Todd, tanned and shirtless, take the baby from my arms and walk him back to the ranch house,” she writes, like a frontier Barbara Cartland. “Dang, I thought. Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd?” Locally, much speculation surrounds the marriage. Some say Todd is henpecked, and others see him as the heavy. One person who has been a frequent houseguest of the Palins’ says that the couple began many mornings with screaming fights, a fusillade of curses: “ ‘Fuck you,’ ‘Fuck this,’ ‘You lazy piece of shit.’ ‘You’re fuckin’ lucky to have me,’ Sarah would always say.” (This person never saw Todd and Sarah sleep in the same bed, and recalls that Todd would often joke, “I don’t know how she ever gets pregnant.”) Whatever the nature of the relationship, Todd is now as much a part of Sarah as Hillary Clinton is of Bill. Whether they like it or not, the Palins, like the Clintons, are probably stuck with each other.

There’s a general consensus in town that, at least since the start of the 2008 campaign, Todd has been shouldering the bulk of the parenting and that Sarah’s relationship with her children has grown more distant. The children did not, as Sarah has claimed, have a chance to weigh in on her decision to run for vice president. She did not even deliver the news to them personally; as has been reported, she asked McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, to do it for her. Todd reportedly told Sarah that, if the children spent too much time on the campaign trail, they would pay a price: grades would tumble and discipline would fall apart. When she agreed to serve as McCain’s running mate, one of her children was already failing in school, according to campaign aides. But Sarah, these aides say, seemed comforted by having the children around, and she seemed lonely when they were gone. An aide overheard conversations between Sarah and Todd in which Sarah tried to make a self-serving argument sound selfless, holding that the campaign was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, one that she could not deny the children. “I don’t care what it costs,” she said. “I want them here.” Although the couple hired a nanny to help the children with their homework, little homework got done.

On the road, aides say, Sarah spared the rod. When one child refused to sign autographs unless she was provided with pink or purple Sharpies that had been custom-printed with her name, the staff tried to argue that black Sharpies—the only kind they had—would do just fine. But Sarah ordered them to do what the child said, and personalized pink and purple markers were produced. Another time, when one daughter wanted to have her hair and makeup done by Palin’s campaign stylists (the children’s grooming was not part of their job), Palin’s initial response seemed like an old-fashioned lesson in manners. According to an aide, Palin told the daughter that, since she was seeking a favor from the stylists, she should ask them nicely herself and see what they said. When the stylists apologetically told the girl they didn’t have time that day, Palin, incensed, sent the child back to give them a message: “Tell them they don’t have a choice. They have to do it.” And so they did. Despite railing at the press for invading her family’s privacy, Palin showed little ambivalence during the campaign about making some aspects of the childrens’ private lives public to serve her interests. Soon after her nomination, she brought up with McCain aides the subject of Bristol’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy by Levi Johnston: “Would it be good for the campaign if they got married before the election?” she asked, and went on to wonder whether one weekend or another would be more advantageous for media coverage.

Sometimes the children rebelled. A campaign aide remembers that one of the Palin children found her mother’s public displays of piety especially grating. Though Palin prayed and read the Bible every night, aides never saw the family join her for devotionals. “You’re just putting on a show. You’re so fake,” one of the children said when Palin made a point of praying in front of other people. “This is not who you are. Why are you pretending to be something you’re not?”

Managing the Palin family is an increasingly unwieldy business. Track was discharged from active duty in the army at the end of January and now reportedly lives at the Palin house. Bristol, who has said she works as a dermatologist’s assistant, also generates a healthy income from her celebrity and bought a $272,000 condominium in Anchorage. She enrolled in a certified-nursing-assistant program at a local technical school last year but quickly dropped out, according to one of her high-school classmates. In addition to TV appearances, including a guest spot on The View and playing a teen mom on an episode of The Secret Life of the American Teenager, she reportedly received $100,000 from In Touch magazine for rights to photographs of Tripp on his first birthday. The New York Post reported that she and Johnston received another $100,000 for giving the story of their re-engagement to Us Weekly.

A week prior to the engagement announcement, Johnston, who has been critical of Palin, told People magazine that, “against my better judgment, I publicly said things about the Palins that were not completely true. I have already privately apologized to Todd and Sarah. Since my statements were public, I owe it to the Palins to publicly apologize.” It was an odd pronouncement, never indicating which statements were not “completely true,” or where he had said them. (Johnston’s October 2009 article in Vanity Fair, “Me and Mrs. Palin,” was one possibility.) The negotiations that led to Johnston’s statement, like almost everything else about the family’s life, were more complex than may ever be fully known. According to a source close to Johnston, Levi met with Sarah Palin in June in hopes of burying the hatchet. Palin opened the meeting with two questions: “Are you recording this?” and “Are you wearing a wire?” When Johnston said he wasn’t, the source says, Palin told Johnston that burying the hatchet wasn’t good enough. He had to publicly recant his critical remarks about her. Asked whether this account is accurate, Johnston answered, through his attorney Rex Butler, “I do not want to respond to that… I don’t want to stir up that fight again.”

In a conference call involving Johnston, Butler, and representatives of the Palin family, Butler proposed that Johnston make a statement to the effect that “a maturing Levi has decided to reach out to the Palins and end an ongoing feud to bring the families together in the best interests of his son.” That formulation did not go far enough. Butler’s understanding is that Todd Palin wrote the statement that eventually was issued. Johnston, through his lawyer, now says, “I had nothing to do with putting that statement together.” Nor, in the end, did it secure the desired rapprochement. On the day the couple’s US Weekly cover hit newsstands, Bristol called the whole thing off, as she later explained in an interview with People. After that, an agreement for joint custody of Tripp, filed in Alaska Superior Court, forbade both Bristol and Levi to “speak badly about the other parent in front of the child… [or] allow anyone else to speak badly about the other parent or members of their family in front of the child.” A few days later, Johnston declined further comment on his relationship with the Palins, but suggested that the story is far from over. “If I am going to marry Bristol,” he said, again through his lawyer, “responding to that situation doesn’t help anything.”

Why are you pretending to be something you’re not? That is the question so many Alaskans have asked this year as they’ve watched Sarah Palin travel the nation. According to almost everyone who has ever known her, including those who have seen the darkest of her dark side, Sarah Palin has a great gift for making people feel good about themselves. Her knack for remembering names and faces and the details of her interactions with people—and for seeming to be present to the person in front of her—constitute an extraordinary power of engagement. Now she is using that power in a fundamentally different way. In part she is using it in the service of her own ambitions. But she is also planting the idea with audiences that they might not be good enough, by telling them she thinks they’re plenty good, no matter what anybody else may say. (“They talk down to us… They think that if we were just smart enough … ”) To some, the message sounds like an affirmation. But is it really? Or does it seed self-doubt and rancor among her partisans, and encourage them to see everyone else as malign?

Those who once felt close to Palin have followed her public transformation with a confused range of emotions. The common denominator is sadness. “People who loved Sarah Palin are disappointed,” said one woman in Wasilla, “because they found out that Sarah Palin loves Sarah Palin most of all.” I remembered that remark every time I drove past the Palins’ property. The entrance runs through a grove of birch trees, at least eight of which have NO TRESPASSING signs nailed to them. For all that, police have been called to the property only once in the past year, when someone at the house reported a Peeping Tom. The investigating officer found nothing.

The freshly paved driveway is blocked by a new, spiked gate, which, though forbidding, is ornamental and freestanding, and not connected to a fence. From a thin piece of wire looped over one of the gate’s central spikes hangs a large metal decoration. It is five-pointed and two feet high and wide. The North Star has long been seen as a symbol for Alaska—and for God. They can both move over now. It belongs to someone else.

Clarification: Lindsay Hayes, identified in this article as Sarah Palin’s speechwriter, left that position in April.

Sarah Palin Targets House Democrats

With a critical fundraising deadline approaching on Wednesday evening, a host of congressional candidates in tight races are trying to draw Sarah Palin into the race. And not just Republicans.

At least four different House Democrats, who have been specifically targeted by Palin for their health care reform votes, sent out fundraising appeals on Wednesday using the former Alaska governor to solicit donations.

Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL.), in a tough race in Florida, emailed supporters the following under the title, “Help Send Sarah Palin a Message”:

In a recent attempt to mobilize her Tea Party supporters after they failed to “Kill the Bill,” Sarah Palin said “Don’t Retreat, Reload.”
Now Sarah Palin has literally put my Congressional district in the bullseye, attempting to kill our momentum and take back Florida’s 24th Congressional District. She has specifically identified me as one of the top four targets for defeat this November.

Rep. Chris Carney (D-Penn.), a critical vote on health care reform, emailed supporters:

I don’t care who comes after me – Sarah Palin can put a target on our district – it’s not going to stop me from standing up for what we know is right; bringing jobs and resources to PA-10.

Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper (D-Penn), sent the following solicitation from her campaign committee:

With the first fundraising deadline of 2010 fast approaching at 11:59pm tonight, Wednesday, March 31st, Kathy needs your help. After voting YES on Healthcare and standing up for us, she is now being targeted by Sarah Palin and special interests from outside of Pennsylvania.

Rep. Betsy Markey (D-CO), meanwhile, had a fundraising solicitation sent out from Wes Clark’s PAC under the header, “What Palin wants.”

Well, last week’s passage of the historic health care reform bill provided her some clarity. Immediately after President Obama signed the bill, Palin asked her radical supporters to “target” 20 Democrats, complete with crosshairs taking aim at each of them.

Two of them our Clark community helped elect: Rep. Betsy Markey (CO-04) and Rep. Chris Carney (PA-10). When called upon, they stood up courageously and voted for reform. Now Sarah Palin and the right wing have targeted them for defeat.

Each of these four candidates was placed on Palin’s list of 20 House Democrats to be targeted for their votes on health care reform — which it seems they view as a blessing of sorts. Caught in tight races, the lawmakers are using the conservative lightning rod to nationalize the election and draw in more money and attention.

And with little apparent downside — as the prominent Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg pointed out Wednesday morning, Palin, for many, has come to symbolize the edge of acceptable conservative politics (the line of demarcation between Tea Party extremism and mainstream Republicanism).

“Sarah Palin is becoming the face of the Republican Party in part to keep the Republican Party under control,” he said, during a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “But the face of the Republican Party to the country is not the Tea Party, it is Sarah Palin.”

Greenberg’s colleague, James Carville was a bit blunter.

“Do me a favor, call five Democratic consultants and leave them a message and say, ‘I’m doing a story on Sarah Palin’. Then call five Republican consultants and see who returns your call,” he said, pausing for laughter from the gathered reporters. “Democrats will be on the phone so fast.”

Sam Stein
The Huffington Post

Tea Partiers & Birthers continue to claim their Tea Party movement is not based on racism, dispute all the evidence to the contrary.

I was going to open this piece with an analogy about the tea party groups and why they’re treated seriously by the press and the Republicans. The analogy would go something like: “Imagine [insert left-wing activist group here] getting a serious profile in a mainstream newspaper, and imagine serious Democratic politicians appearing at their convention.”

The problem is, when I really evaluated what the various far-left activist groups are all about and compared them with the tea party movement, there really wasn’t any equivalency. At all.

Because when you strip away all of the rage, all of the nonsensical loud noises and all of the contradictions, all that’s left is race. The tea party is almost entirely about race, and there’s no comparative group on the left that’s similarly motivated by bigotry, ignorance and racial hatred.

I hasten to note that I’m taking about real racism, insofar as it’s impossible for the majority race — the 70 percent white majority — to be on the receiving end of racism. That is unless white males, for example, are suddenly an oppressed racial demographic. But judging by the racial composition of, say, the Senate or AM talk radio or the cast members playing the Obamas on SNL, I don’t think white people have anything to worry about.

This isn’t an epiphany by any stretch. From the beginning, with their witch doctor imagery, watermelon agitprop and Curious George effigies, the wingnut right has been dying to blurt out, as Lee Atwater famously said, “nigger, nigger, nigger!”

But they can’t.

Strike that. Correction. TeaParty.org founder Dale Robertson brandished a sign with the (misspelled) word “niggar.” So they’re not even as restrained as the generally unstrung Atwater anymore.

Most of the time, they merely imply the use of the word. Rush Limbaugh referring to the president as a “black man-child,” for example. Every week, a new example pops up on the radio and somehow the offenders are able to keep their job while Howard Stern is fined for saying the comparatively innocuous word “blumpkin.” Limbaugh, on the other hand, can stoke racial animosity on his show by suggesting that health care reform is a civil rights bill — reparations — and no one seems to mind. And no, the impotence isn’t an adequate Karmic punishment for Limbaugh’s roster of trespasses.

The tea party is an extension of talk radio. It’s an extension of Fox News Channel. It’s an extension of the southern faction of the Republican Party — the faction that gave us the Southern Strategy, the Willie Horton ad, the White Hands ad and the racially divisive politics of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. It’s an extension of the race-baiting and, often, the outright racism evident in all of those conservative spheres.

But unlike the heavy-handedness of Dale Robertson and others, the tea party followers are generally more veiled about why they’re so outraged by our current president.

In the New York Times this past weekend, David Barstow profiled a teabagger from Idaho:

SANDPOINT, Idaho — Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.
But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.

Now you might be saying to yourself, I don’t see the racism here. But if you eliminate all of the reasons for Stout’s participation in the tea party movement as being contradictory or nonsensical, all that’s left is race.

Let’s deconstruct.

She claims to be against the bank bailouts, but the tea party is against the president’s bank fee designed to recover the TARP money. They also appear to be against financial regulatory reform. None of this makes any sense. If tea partiers are against the bailouts, basic logic dictates that they ought to be in favor of getting the money back. Or do they prefer that the banks keep the money and orchestrate further meltdowns? Honestly, I’m not even entirely sure they realize that the bailouts and the recovery act (stimulus) are two different things. But they’re also against the recovery act — you know, whatever that is.

She also told the New York Times that she’s tired of politicians “manufacturing crisis.”

Right. Three things here.

First, where was she — where were the teabaggers — when the far-right endorsed and supported a massive increase in the size of government, unitary executive power grabs and unconstitutional measures fueled by fear-mongering over the very remote threat of terrorism? Crickets chirping. The odds of being killed in an airborne terrorist attack are literally 1 in 10 million. You’re much more likely to kill yourself than to be killed by a terrorist.

Second, I refuse to believe that health care is a “manufactured crisis.” People are going broke and dying every day. Even the most conservative estimates show that there are 9/11-level casualties each month due to a lack of adequate health insurance. The horror stories are readily available online. Just Google “health insurance horror story” and see how manufactured the crisis is.

Third, look at any bar graph of the economy as of one year ago or any basic jobs number and tell me if the crisis is manufactured. Hell, Pam Stout’s son lost his house! How can she possibly suggest the economic crisis was manufactured?

I hate to single out one person, but Stout’s incongruous anger is indicative of the entire movement.

From the outset, the tea party was based on a contradictory premise (the original tea party was a protest against a corporate tax cut). And when you throw out all of the nonsense and contradictions, there’s nothing left except race. There’s no other way to explain why these people were silent and compliant for so long, and only decided to collectively freak out when this “foreign” and “exotic” president came along and, right out of the chute, passed the largest middle class tax cut in American history — something they would otherwise support, for goodness sake, it was $288 billion in tax cuts! — we’re left to deduce no other motive but the ugly one that lurks just beneath the pale flesh, the tri-corner hats and the dangly tea bag ornamentation.

Irrespective of whether the president passed a huge tax cut or went out of his way to bring Republicans into the health care process, the seeds of racial animosity from the far-right were sown during the campaign. In those lines waiting for then-vice presidential candidate and current tea party heroine Sarah Palin, their loud noises spread the pre-scripted lies, lies that entirely hinged on the president’s African heritage. A white candidate would never be accused of being a secret Muslim. A white candidate would never be accused of being a foreign usurper. Only a black candidate with a foreign name would be accused of “palling around with domestic terrorists.”

In the final analysis, when you boil away all of the weirdness, it becomes clear that the teabaggers are pissed because there isn’t yet another doddering old white guy in the White House — like they’re used to. That’s what this is all about.

By way of a postscript, one of the many faceless radio talk show wingnuts, Jim Quinn, this week called President Obama a “Kenyan wuss” who should be “slapped silly.” The Kenyan lie and the “slap silly” insult aside, this president is no wuss. You know how I know? He’s a black man who ran for president and won despite the growing mob of gun-toting militant white bigots like Jim Quinn who are sucking air in America. President Obama achieving this despite the hatred and threats against him takes serious guts. Guts that Jim Quinn and the tea party movement will never understand.

Bob Cesca
The Huffington Post

Andrea Fay Friedman, who has Down syndrome, was a voice actor in a recent episode of “Family Guy” criticized by Sarah Palin.

Andrea Fay Friedman, the voice actress who played the role of “Ellen” –the character depicted as having Down syndrome on the Valentine’s Day episode of Family Guy, has responded to the criticism of sometime-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Of special significance, Friedman herself has Down syndrome. Palingates has Friedman’s complete response:

My name is Andrea Fay Friedman. I was born with Down syndrome. I played the role of Ellen on the “Extra Large Medium” episode of Family Guy that was broadcast on Valentine’s day. Although they gave me red hair on the show, I am really a blonde. I also wore a red wig for my role in ” Smudge” but I was a blonde in “Life Goes On”. I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line “I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska” was very funny. I think the word is “sarcasm”.

In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.

I have to say, that’s a pretty good burn.

Friedman also spoke to the New York Times Arts Beat reporter David Itzkoff (see below).

Jason Linkins
The Huffington Post

Since it was shown on Sunday, an episode of the Fox animated comedy “Family Guy” has drawn the repeated condemnation of Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor of Alaska and 2008 vice-presidential nominee.

In the episode, the teenage character Chris dates a girl named Ellen, who has Down syndrome, and who tells him over dinner that her mother is “the former governor of Alaska.” Ms. Palin, whose son Trig also has Down syndrome, has said that the “Family Guy” show “really isn’t funny” and was the work of “cruel, cold-hearted people.” Ms. Palin’s daughter Bristol has written that the “Family Guy” writers were “mocking my brother and my family,” and called them “heartless jerks.”

One person who supports the “Family Guy” staff is Andrea Fay Friedman, the 39-year-old actor and public speaker who played Ellen in that episode. Like the character, Ms. Friedman also has Down syndrome.

In an e-mail message sent on Thursday to The New York Times, Ms. Friedman wrote:

I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line “I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska” was very funny. I think the word is “sarcasm.”

In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life.

Ms. Friedman also spoke by phone with ArtsBeat about her “Family Guy” episode and the controversy that followed. These are excerpts from that conversation.

Dave Itzkoff
The New York Times

Sarah Palin’s Sleight of Hand

Liberals had a blast mocking Sarah Palin last weekend when she was caught addressing the Tea Party Convention with a cheat sheet scrawled on her hand. Even the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, couldn’t resist getting into the act and treated a White House briefing to a Palin hand gag of his own.

Yet the laughter rang hollow. You had to wonder if Palin, who is nothing if not cunning, had sprung a trap. She knows all too well that the more the so-called elites lampoon her, the more she cements her cred with the third of the country that is her base. Her hand hieroglyphics may not have been speaking aids but bait.

If so, mission accomplished. Her sleight of hand gave the anti-Palin chorus another prod to deride her as an empty-headed, subliterate clown, and her fans another cue to rally. The only problem is that the serious import of Palin’s overriding political message got lost in this distracting sideshow. That message has the power to upend the Obama presidency — even if Palin, with her record-low approval ratings, never gets anywhere near the White House.

The Palin shtick has now become the Republican catechism, parroted by every party leader in Washington. Their constant refrain, delivered with cynicism but not irony, is this: Republicans are the anti-big-government, anti-stimulus, anti-Wall Street, pro-Tea Party tribunes of the common folk. “This is about the people,” as Palin repeatedly put it last weekend while pocketing $100,000 of the Tea Partiers’ money.

Incredibly enough, this message is gaining traction. Though Obama remains more personally popular than the G.O.P., Republicans pulled ahead of the Democrats in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, among others, in a matchup for the 2010 midterms.

This G.O.P. populism is all bunk, of course. Republicans in office now, as well as Palin during her furtive public service in Alaska, have feasted on federal pork, catered to special interests, and pursued policies indifferent to recession-battered Americans. And yet they’re getting away with their populist masquerade — not just with a considerable swath of voters but even with certain elements in the “liberal media.” The Dean of the Beltway press corps, the columnist David Broder, cited Palin’s “pitch-perfect populism” in hailing her as “a public figure at the top of her game” in Thursday’s Washington Post.

That Republican leaders can pass off deceptive faux-populism as “pitch-perfect populism” is in part a testament to the blinding intensity of the economic anger and anxiety roiling the country. It also shows the power of an incessant bumper-sticker fiction to take root when ineffectually challenged — and, most crucially, the inability of Democrats to make a persuasive case that they offer anything better.

The Obama White House remains its own worst enemy. No sooner did Palin’s Tea Party speech end than we learned of the president’s tone-deaf interview expressing admiration for “very savvy businessmen” like Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. With that single remark, Obama ingeniously identified himself with the most despised aspects of both Washington and Wall Street — the bailout and the bonuses. He still doesn’t understand that to most Americans, Blankfein is a savvy businessman only in the outrageous sense that he managed to grab his bonus some 17 months after the taxpayers had the good grace to save him from going out of business altogether.

Instead of praising bailed-out bankers, the president might have more profitably instructed his press secretary to drop the lame Palin jokes and dismantle the disinformation campaign her speech delivered to a national audience. Palin, unlike Obama, put herself on the side of the angels, railing against Wall Street’s bonuses and bailout, even though she and John McCain had supported TARP during the campaign. Palin also bragged that she had “joined with other conservative governors” in “rejecting some” stimulus dollars when in reality she rejected only a symbolic 3 percent of those dollars — soon to be overruled by the Alaskan Legislature, which took every last buck.

This disingenuousness is old hat for Palin, who hired lobbyists to pursue $27 million in earmarks while serving as mayor of the town of Wasilla (pop. 6,700) and loudly defended her state’s “bridge to nowhere” until her politically opportunistic flip-flop. What’s new is the extent to which her test-marketed dishonesty has now become the template for her peers in the G.O.P. “populist” putsch. Adopting her example — while unencumbered by her political baggage — the party is exploiting the Tea Party movement to rebrand itself as un-Washington while quietly conducting business as usual in the capital.

There’s “no difference” between G.O.P. and Tea Party beliefs, claims the House Republican leader, John Boehner. Not exactly. The three senators named “porkers of the month” for December by the nonpartisan Citizens Against Government Waste were all Republicans: Richard Shelby of Alabama, Susan Collins of Maine and Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Shelby is so unashamedly addicted to earmarks that he used a senatorial “hold” to halt confirmation votes on 70 Obama administration appointees until his costly shopping list of Alabama pork projects was granted. Or so he did until his over-the-top theatrics earned him unwelcome attention and threatened to derail his party’s pious antispending posturing.

While more brazen than his peers, Shelby is otherwise typical of them. Jonathan Karl of ABC News last week unearthed photographs of various G.O.P. congressmen posing in their districts with stimulus checks that they had publicly opposed. The Washington Times uncovered more than a dozen other Republican lawmakers who privately solicited stimulus money from the Department of Agriculture while denouncing the stimulus to their constituents and the news media, often angrily.

Even the G.O.P./Tea Party heartthrob of the hour, Scott Brown, is not the barn-coat-wearing populist he purports to be. In her speech, Palin saluted him as “just a guy with a truck” who was doing “his part to put our government back on the side of the people.” In reality Brown’s Massachusetts Senate campaign benefited from a last-minute flood of contributions from financial industry donors — with 80 percent of the haul coming from outside the state. It says all you need to know about our politics that his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, matched him by holding a fund-raiser largely sponsored by lobbyists for the health care and pharmaceutical industries.

Now that he’s in the Senate, Brown is likely to junk the truck and side full time with Wall Street against Main Street. To do otherwise would be to buck his party’s entire establishment. Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, has already signaled that he’ll fight the Obama administration’s push for a “Volcker rule” to rein in too-big-to-fail financial behemoths. The conservative message guru Frank Luntz has drafted a memo instructing G.O.P. legislators on how to defeat a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency while camouflaging themselves as populist foes of the very banks and credit card companies that that agency would regulate. That’s a neat trick — Luntz’s nonpolitical clients include Merrill Lynch and American Express — and it helps explain why Wall Street is now tilting its contributions to Congressional Republicans for 2010.

Yet it’s the Democrats who are now most linked to corporate interests, thanks to all the backroom deals over health care. More Americans have heard of the Medicaid money shoveled to the Democratic senators Ben Nelson (the January “porker of the month”) and Mary Landrieu in exchange for their health care votes than of Thad Cochran’s $8.75 million earmark for the “Exchange With Historic Whaling and Trading Partners Program” (a proposed cut in the Obama budget). The Republicans are so disciplined at claiming the fiscal-hawk high road that even Jenny Sanford, the wronged first lady of South Carolina, is still defending her husband, Mark, as an uncompromising defender of “hard-earned tax dollars” in her new tell-all memoir, “Staying True.” Though she gives us the skinny on her husband’s philandering, she never mentions the subsequent revelations that expenses for his trysts and other personal travel were billed to taxpayers.

Before he was done in by his Argentine firecracker — and before the emergence of Palin — Sanford was floated by The Wall Street Journal editorial page and others on the right as an ideal ticket mate for John McCain in 2008. As a congressman he had slept on a futon in his office and voted against a breast cancer postage stamp as wasteful “feel-good legislation.” As governor, he refused to take stimulus money despite the fact that South Carolina had the nation’s fastest-growing unemployment rate. When an unemployed man from Charleston caring for a seriously ill mother and sister called in to C-Span last February begging Sanford for help, he didn’t budge. But he did volunteer to pray for the caller and his family.

So it went with Palin last weekend. Her only concrete program for dealing with America’s pressing problems came in the question-and-answer session. “It would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country,” she said, “so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again.” That pretty much sums up her party’s economic program, at least: divine intervention will achieve what government intervention cannot. That the G.O.P. may actually be winning this argument is less an indictment of Palin than of Washington Democrats too busy reading the writing on her hand to see or respond to the ominous political writing on the wall.

Frank Rich
The New York Times

by Nate Silver @ FiveThirtyEight.com

If Sarah Palin runs for the Republican nomination in 2012 — and I’ve been on record for some time as predicting that she will — what are likely to be her best and worst states? And how do these strengths and weaknesses square with the Republican primary calendar? And what about the other likely candidates?

The first, very, very important thing to notice is that the Republican primary calendar will be different in 2012 than it was two years ago. Although this could change as states jockey for position and rules are amended, for the time being the Republicans have divided the states into five groupings as seen below:

The first states to vote are the traditional early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. These states are shown in light blue. Note that this list does not include Florida and Michigan, which jumped in the queue to try to vote early in 2008 — although who knows whether they’ll be in a more cooperative mood this time around when push comes to shove.

Next to vote are the orange states, which are grouped together by virtue of their small populations. This includes 14 states and several territories, the largest grouping of which is on the prairies and the Western frontier, although there are also several New England states. Notably, no Southern states vote in this group — the Republican calender definitely de-emphasizes the South.

Finally, there are gold, purple and green groupings of some of the larger states. These groups have some geographical integrity — for instance, most of the traditional Midwestern Rust Belt states are in the gold group, whereas the purple states tend to be more coastal and the green more in flyover country — although there are some exceptions. The order in which the gold, purple and green states vote will rotate every cycle and, to my knowledge, has not yet been determined for 2012.

So where is Palin likely to run strongest? Obviously, it would depend on the candidates she’s up against and the type of campaign she might want to run, but I think we can make some basic inferences. What I’ve done is to create an index of how favorable each state is to Palin based on six variables: fundraising totals to date for SarahPAC, and five demographic and attitudinal variables taken from 2008 exit polls.

Fundraising: What I looked at is the ratio of contributions that Palin has received in each state so far through SarahPAC to the amount of contributions received by all Republican candidates in the 2008 cycle. The idea is to see how Palin compares vis-a-vis a typical Republican candidate — indeed, I’ve found fundraising data to have quite a bit of predictive power in the past, even if the data is a little rough at this stage. Relative to other Republicans, Palin’s best fundraising state is, of course, Alaska. Her fundraising has also been quite strong in the Pacific Northwest, and many of the prairie/frontier states. It has been weakest on the East Coast, as well as several other urban and industrial states located throughout the country. The fundraising data receives double weight in our index.

Variables from 2008 Exit Polls: What I looked at is not what a state’s electorate looked like overall, but rather, the characteristics of the McCain (i.e. Republican) voters in each state. This is an important distinction — for instance, although Oregon is a fairly progressive state overall, the conservatives there are quite conservative and rural, and this is what matters in the context of a Republican primary. Note that, although it would probably have been better to look at exit polling data from the 2008 Republican primaries, a lot of states either didn’t have a competitive primary in 2008 or didn’t have exit polling data available; thus, we look at McCain general election voters as our best proxy.

Specifically, the exit polling variables that I evaluated were as follows:

Rural and small town voters. That is, the percentage of McCain voters in each state that come from communities of less than 50,000 people. Palin spent a great deal of time campaigning in exurban and fairly rural areas in 2008, and I suspect that it’s here — not necessarily among soccer moms in the collar suburbs — where her most enthusiastic voters lie. And Palin herself, of course, comes from a very rural area and is appealingly outdoorsy and self-reliant. This variable receives a double weight.

No college voters. Early polls of the 2012 Republican field, such as from Marist and Rasmussen, show Palin overperforming among this group (or, if you prefer, underperforming among college graduates), which certainly squares with my intuition about where her appeal lies. This variable also receives a double weight.

Conservatives. We also look at the number of McCain general election voters who described themselves as conservative in each state, although it receives only a single weight. Although clearly Palin wears the conservative label very comfortably and is liable to be harmed in states where there are a relatively large number of moderates and independents in the primary electorate, there are likely to be at least a couple other capital-C conservatives in the Republican primary field, which means we need to temper this somewhat.

White Evangelicals. Although Palin also polls well among this group, a lot of this may be because a lot of white evangelicals are also rural and lack a college degree. That is, although Palin runs well among the sorts of voters who happen to be evangelicals, it may not be because they’re evangelicals. Nor, although Palin has increasingly invoked religious rhetoric in her speeches, does she have the scholarly religious credibility of someone like a Mike Huckabee or a Pat Robertson. It’s conceivable that Palin could get outflanked by a Huckabee or lose votes to a Santorum among voters who are evangelicals first and working-class whites second. Thus, although we include this variable, we only give it a single weight.

Energy and Terrorism voters. Lastly, although this is a bit speculative, we look at the percentage of McCain voters in each state who said their votes were determined because of energy or terrorism policy, which appear as though they’ll be Palin’s core issues. These issues — particularly terrorism — lend themselves relatively well to the meta-narratives that Palin prefers and require less policy nuance than something like the economy or health care. This variable receives a single weight.

These six variables are then standardized and the z-scores are added up to produce an overall total, with the first three variables (fundraising, rural, no college) counted twice. Ranked from most favorable to Palin to least favorable, the 50 states rate as follows (red indicates a ‘hot’ state that is favorable to Palin, while blue indicates the opposite):

We can also plot these on a map:

Palin’s strengths, roughly speaking, lie in a diagonal belt that stretches from the northwest corner of the country through the Deep South; she may not do particularly well in the Northeast and the Southwest. Looking at the interplay between these states and the calendar:

First Wave States. Among the first four states to vote, both Iowa and South Carolina should be winnable for Palin. Although Iowa is not a perfect match for her — not quite as many no-college voters as she’d like — it holds a caucus rather than a primary, which tends to bring out a more conservative electorate. The most obvious concern for Palin in Iowa, if he runs, is Mike Huckabee, who won there in 2008. She could also conceivably lose a war of attrition if a candidate like Santorum eats away some of her evangelical vote, or if her organization and infrastructure is not up to par. The inclusion of a regional candidate like John Thune or Mike Pence could cut either way for Palin; they are not yet terribly well defined and it’s unclear whether they’ll run to the right-center (in which case they could cause more problems for someone like Romney) or further to the right (trouble for Palin).

If Palin loses in Iowa, she would almost certainly need a victory in South Carolina, which is a decent enough state for her demographically but which has a quirky political culture and tends to prefer candidates from the South. Huckabee could be tough to knock off in South Carolina, especially if he’s won Iowa, and a candidate like Haley Barbour or Rick Perry could be challenging to her (probably less so someone like Newt Gingirch, who is nominally a Southerner but has more appeal to coastal voters). Although the South will be somewhat de-emphasized by the structure of the Republican primary calendar, Palin would clearly benefit from the inability of any bona fide Southerner to gain traction in the polls, in which case she might become the de facto Southern candidate.

Palin is unlikely to perform well in New Hampshire, which apart from being fairly rural does not play to any of her strengths and where she might have to face Mitt Romney or Scott Brown. Nevada, meanwhile, is another caucus state in which Romney dominated in 2008.

Palin is probably fortunate that neither Florida or Michigan will hold an early primary, as we have both rated as below-average states for her. Michigan has a fairly robust track record of preferring moderate Republicans, both in elections to the Congress and in Republican primaries, where the electorate is pushed to the left by the presence of a very engaged set of independent voters in the open primary. Plus, there may once again be the Romney factor to contend with. Florida’s Republican voters, meanwhile, are relatively urban and reasonably well-educated, and my hunch is that Palin will not play well with groups like Cuban and non-Cuban Hispanics and Jewish voters who collectively make up about 15 percent of the state’s Republican primary electorate.

Second Wave States. If Palin survives the four early voting states, the next wave of states — the small states indicated in orange on the map — are potentially very good for her. Five of Palin’s six best states, indeed — Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana and West Virginia — fall into the orange group; she could even do relatively well in a state like Maine, which is quite rural. The one caveat is that smaller states tend to place more emphasis on infrastructure and organization, which may not be Palin’s strength (that’s why Mitt Romney, who excels in that department, tended to do well in these states in 2008). But demographically speaking, they should be very fruitful territory for her.

Later Wave States. The remaining states are divided into green, purple, and gold groups, and it may be tremendously important to Palin in exactly which order they wind up voting in. Whereas the green states are quite good for her, both the purple states and the gold states are rather poor.

The green group contains plenty of good states for Palin, although there would probably be a lot of emphasis placed on delegate-rich Texas, where Palin will need to do well since she’s unlikely to pick up many delegates from coastal states like California and New York. Indeed, Texas may be the most important state on the map for Palin after Iowa and perhaps South Carolina, which may be why she’s spending so much time there.

If the gold group comes up instead, Palin’s best chance for a big win looks to be Ohio, although Georgia, Florida and Pennsylvania are probably also within reach.

The purple group would be very bad for Palin; she’d likely need to win both Indiana and North Carolina to stay alive, and Tennessee is OK for her, but even so she’d probably lose ground in the delegate count because of states like California, Virginia and New Jersey.

Palin’s path to victory, then, would seem to consist of one of the following scenarios:

Palin Plan A. Win Iowa. Win South Carolina. Clean up in orange states. You probably have enough momentum to survive the consolidation of the GOP field which is liable to occur at this point.

Palin Plan B. Lose Iowa narrowly, especially to a Midwestern candidate. Hope that a Southerner isn’t running strongly and win South Carolina. Clean up in orange states. Then you anchor in the South, winning Texas (green group), Florida/Georgia (gold group) or Indiana/North Carolina (purple group). At some point, you need to break through and win a big Midwestern battleground like Ohio or Wisconsin.

Palin Plan C. Win Iowa. Lose South Carolina narrowly to a Southern candidate. Regain momentum in orange states. Hope that green states vote next and aim in particular for a big win in Texas. If it’s the gold states instead, go all-in in Ohio and Pennsylvania. If it’s the purple states, you’ll need some help.

Conversely, Mitt Romney’s paths might look something like this, and are probably somewhat more straightforward than Palin’s.

Romney Plan A. Win Iowa. Win New Hampshire. Game over.

Romney Plan B-1. (If Palin is knocked out) Lose Iowa. Win New Hampshire. Win Nevada. Sweep orange states on the basis of organizational strength. Veer slightly to the left, emphasizing electability and cleaning up in delegate-rich states like California and New York. You probably outlast a Southern opponent like Huckabee, perhaps even fairly easily. A Midwesterner that could win states like Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania might be more challenging.

Romney Plan B-2. (If Palin survives) Lose Iowa. Win New Hampshire. Win Nevada. Split orange states with Palin on the basis of organizational strength. Hope that gold or purple states came up next, in which case you should build up a substantial delegate lead. If so, the party infrastructure may start to close ranks around you. If green states come up instead, Palin is tougher and you’re in for a war of attrition with flagging momentum.

Mike Huckabee, if he runs, really only has one path to victory and it isn’t a very good one since the calendar makes it tough for a Southern candidate to gain momentum:

Huckabee Plan A. Win Iowa. Win South Carolina. Knock out Palin and perhaps angle for her endorsement. Lower expectations for orange states and hope to at least win a couple contests like West Virginia and Nebraska. Hope that there are at least two centrist candidates remaining in the race while you consolidate the conservative vote. If it’s just you and Romney (etc.) one-on-one, you probably need to consistently win border states like Ohio/Florida (gold group), North Carolina/Indiana (purple group) or Missouri/Texas (green group).

Most of the other Southern candidates would have the same problem. Conversely, someone like a John Thune probably has a more versatile set of strategies. If Romney is knocked out (Thune is more likely to pull an upset in New Hampshire than someone like Palin or Huckabee), he can run on electability and is probably conservative enough so as not to feel like a compromise to the base. If Palin and/or Huckabee are knocked out instead, Thune should have some regional strength in the orange states and then would be headed to a key showdown or two with Romney in Midwestern states like Ohio.

It’s also conceivable that a strong Northeastern candidate, like Scott Brown, could run. His path would obviously need to involve winning New Hampshire and sweeping Maine/Delaware/Vermont/Rhode Island when the orange states vote. Then the contest probably becomes about the brute force of the delegate math, with big states like California, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois being key.

Nat Silver
FiveThirtyEight.com

MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews forcefully ripped into Sarah Palin’s advice that President Obama could “declare war on Iran” to improve his re-election chances, repeatedly calling her “frightening” and claiming she’s “an empty vessel” with “nothing going on mentally.”

Palin told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday that if Obama “played the war card” in that manner it “changes the dynamics in what we can assume is going to happen between now and three years.”

“She’s frightening. Mark, that is frightening stuff. Frightening,” Matthews said Tuesday on his show Hardball. “First of all, president don’t declare war. Anybody knows that in high school. Congress has to declare war. To declare war on Iran, I don’t think the most far right, Middle East hawk will talk about declaring war on Iran, a country with 70-some million people, with an advanced air force.

Speculating where her talking points are coming from, Matthews continued, “Why does she talk like that?… Is Michael Ledeen, a real hawk, writing this stuff for her? I don’t know anyone as far right as that, besides him.”

Matthews assailed her ostensible lack of knowledge on military matters and war, claiming she doesn’t understand the matter she’s discussing. “She has no idea what the Korean War was. She didn’t know anything,” he said.

Palin was the headline speaker at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee last weekend, where she assailed Obama and was caught peeking at notes on her hand.

Matthews took a direct swipe at her intellect, alleging that “she has nothing going on mentally.” Referring to her recent interview with Wallace, he said, “Nothing comes out. Nothing. She says nothing spontaneously when you ask her a serious question.”

Time magazine’s Mark Halperin agreed, saying Palin was “obviously flailing” during the interview.

Palin said Sunday she’s open to running for president in 2012 and that it would be “absurd” not to consider it.

“I’d be afraid of her,” Matthews continued. “She’s an empty vessel ready to be filled by ideology she does not understand, and that is really scary.”

Comparing her to former vice president Dan Quayle and former president George W. Bush, he added that “Nothing is more frightening than an empty vessel in power.”

The crib notes in questions on the palm of Sarah Palin's hand.

So, you think Sarah Palin is embarrassed by the crib-notes-on-the-palm incident?

You’re kidding, right?

This woman, like national candidates of both parties, doesn’t draw a breath without a team of political and image consultants vetting her choices. Wardrobe, hair, make-up, speaking style, text, context. This woman hasn’t moved a muscle spontaneously since she was selected as McCain’s running mate.

These gaffes represent a gamble by Palin and her handlers, a bet they are hedging. Republicans and economically weary, anti-Obama independents want W back again. You remember. George W Bush, who, as Ann Richards famously stated, was “born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.” Bush, who stumbled through his eight years with an anti-intellectual, homespun style that embraced malapropisms and a legendarily incurious attitude toward issues and the world. Some celebrated him as honest and more real. That was all calculated, too.

Palin reads off the palm of her hand because she can’t whittle or cast a fly rod or shoot a wild animal while giving a policy speech. (Then again, who knows?) She reads her palm in order to send a message to her anti-Eastern establishment, Obama-hating, OK-You’ve-Had-Your-Black-President-Experiment, Tea Party types. That message is, “I’m just one person, doing the best I can with what God gave me. Like all y’all out there.”

And it was aimed right at that camera. Right at you and me.

I still believe in Barack Obama. Each new president since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 has been faced with an ever-growing mountain of problems that resist solutions, let alone solutions crafted with bipartisan support. Energy, America’s dwindling role in the global economy, health care, terrorism and its impacts.

We may struggle for the remainder of our history to solve those problems and we may come up short. But we are doomed to failure if we choose another incurious, phony populist who pulls off some bad Will Rogers moves and calls that a presidency.

Alec Baldwin
The Huffington Post

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin addresses attendees at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010 with talking points for what appears to be the Questions & Answer session clearly written on the palm of her left hand.

Closer inspection of a photo of Sarah Palin, during a speech in which she mocked President Obama for his use of a teleprompter, reveals several notes written on her left hand. The words “Energy”, “Tax” and “Lift American Spirits” are clearly visible. There’s also what appears to read as “Budget cuts” with the word Budget crossed out.

Closeup photo of Sarah Palin's left hand, complete with notes.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Just to be clear: The notes most likely weren’t for her speech, for which she used prepared remarks, but for the Q&A session that followed, during which she glanced at the hand in question.

But in my opinion that’s even worse.

There were no specifics on there, just general concepts and things she supports.

The takeaway is that this presidential contender apparently can’t remember her supposed core principles and needs a cheat-sheet when simply asked about her beliefs.

To quote Charlie Brown:
Good grief.

-Stefan

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (8 PM CST)

Ahh sweet Earl Grey Revolution! Sarah Palin knew that speech like the back of her hand. The Q&A answers, however, were on the front of her hand.

Or so it appeared.

During the Q&A following her speech at the Tea Party Convention, Ms. Palin appeared to read from her hand in answering.

The following image was caught by some sharp-eyed Twitter users, notably @jryanlaw

Sarah Palin studying her 'crib notes' on the palm of her left hand during the Question & Answer session at this weekend's Tea Party Convention.

UPDATE #2: A high-quality video on youtube seems to prove that something was indeed on the palm of Palin’s hand. The question is what.

Crib Notes? This potential presidential candidate and “movement” leader was using crib notes to answer basic questions?

This would mean:

A) That she knew the questions beforehand and the whole thing was a farce. (Likely.)

and

B) That she still couldn’t answer the previously agreed-upon questions without a little extra help.

If true, this is supremely rich coming immediately after a speech in which Palin took a shot at President Obama for using a teleprompter to read his prepared speeches.

You can bet that the President wasn’t reading scribbles off his extremities while he sparred with Republicans and Democrats in an unscripted format in his recent Q&As.

Palin, on the other hand, seems to need a cheat-sheet just to get through a contrived lovefest with a smitten interviewer and an adoring audience.

I’m no fan of the Tea Party movement – if it can be called such – but if this is their leader I actually sympathize with them.

Stefan Sirucek
The Huffington Post

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

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

Writing about Sarah Palin in Newsweek last month, I pointed out the crude way in which she tried to Teflon-ize herself when allegations of weird political extremism were made against her. Thus, she had once gone to a Pat Buchanan rally wearing a pro-Buchanan button, but only because she thought it was the polite thing to do. She and her husband had both attended meetings of the Alaskan Independence Party—he as a member—but its name, she later tried to claim, only meant “independent.” (The AIP is a straightforward secessionist party.) She didn’t disbelieve all the evidence for evolution, only some of it. She hadn’t exactly said that God was on our side in Iraq, only that God and the United States were on the same side. She says that she left Hawaii Pacific College after only one year because the climate was too sunny for an Alaskan; her father (whom she considers practically infallible) tells her most recent biographers that she quit because of the preponderance of Asian and Pacific islanders: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous. So she came home.” And so on. As I tried to summarize the repeated tactic:

So there it is: anti-Washington except that she thirsts for it, and close enough (and also far enough away to be “deniable”) to the paranoid fringe element who darkly suggest that our president is a Kenyan communist.

Last week, the new darling of the right did her best to vindicate me. She appeared on the radio show of a certain Rusty Humphries, another steaming and hearty slice of good-old U.S. prime, and was asked whether she would make an issue of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Her response: “I think the public rightfully is still making it an issue. I think it’s a fair question.” That was on Thursday, Dec. 3. On Friday, she had published a second “thought” on her Facebook page, reassuring all and sundry that: “At no point have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate, or suggested that he was not born in the United States.”

Well, exactly. Of course she hasn’t. She just thinks it’s a good idea for others to do that, in their “rightful” way, since, after all, it is “a fair question.”

Could anything be more cowardly and contemptible? Alexander Pope came up with a few lines about this sort of second-hand, third-rate innuendo-mongering:

Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings:
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys
Yet wit ne’er tastes and beauty ne’er enjoys.
So well-bred spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.

What price the courageous frontier huntress now—an empty-headed echo chamber for rumor-mongers and freaks who shoots from ambush and then runs away? Some condescending right-wing intellectuals are calling her style “populist” and comparing it with Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan. The true name for it is demagogy, descending from Joseph McCarthy, Robert Welch, and the nastier elements of the old Nixon gang—people to whom slander and defamation was second nature.

I think I can guess why Palin moved so quickly to soften her raw-meat appeal to Rusty’s crowd. On Saturday night, she was due to put on a black dress and be a featured guest at the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C. It was time to don the fake finery of wit and beauty again. (I do hope this isn’t why the press, which gives this annual gala, went so utterly soft on her “birther” garbage over the course of last weekend.) The person who has been introducing Palin into the more exalted social and political circles of the capital, and who has already arranged her appearance at the Alfalfa Club, is Fred Malek. Two things about Malek are worth bearing in mind.

The first is that he was an important member of the Nixon administration, a senior figure on the Republican National Committee, and the campaign manager for the re-election of George H.W. Bush in 1992.  With his Carlyle Group and other corporate connections and his mansion in suburban McLean, Va.,  Malek is almost the prototypical “establishment” Washington insider and consiglieri Republican, against whom Palin’s adoring book-tour crowds, in their pathetic dreams, imagine her to be a crusader. But her preposterous book Going Rogue is larded with praise for the wise support and advice of this leathery old Beltway bandit. Populism? Hah! Unless, that is, you count Jew-baiting as a form of populism, which I suppose in a way it is. (Bryan, that other foe of Darwin, was also a fan of the Klan.)

Because the second thing to note about Malek is that he was the man who drew up a list of Jews to be fired from the civil service under the Nixon administration. I am surprised that so many people have allowed themselves to forget this—and that Palin has never been asked a single question about it. In the early 1970s, Nixon, whose White House tapes show consistent evidence of anti-Semitic paranoia, gave orders that the Bureau of Labor Statistics be purged of what he called a “Jewish cabal.” The job of drawing up the list was given to Malek, whose information led to what was called the “reassignment” of some officials within the Labor Department. Malek later tried to give a weaselly excuse for his conduct, but was caught by my Slate colleague Timothy Noah.

It beats me why such a disgusting character is still received in polite circles, except that now at least he’s back doing the sort of task to which he is best-suited. He has found an unscrupulous and uncultured political neophyte who will happily act as a megaphone for any kind of libel and insinuation—Obama’s “palling around with terrorists” was, I suppose, the money shot of the last campaign—and then later revise and extend her remarks. Nasty work if you can get it. Malek, now so near old age, must be pinching himself at his good fortune.

At least Richard Nixon had the ill fortune to look like what he was: a haunted scoundrel and repressed psychopath. Whereas the usefulness of Sarah Palin to the right-wing party managers is that she combines a certain knowingness with a feigned innocence and a still-palpable blush of sex. But she should take care to read her Alexander Pope: That bloom will soon enough fade, and it will fade really quickly if she uses it to prostitute herself to the Nixonites on one day and then to cock-tease the rabble on the next.

Christopher Hitchens
Slate.com

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

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

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

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

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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"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

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

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's 'Going Rogue' Tour Bus

RALEIGH, N.C. — The U.S. Army said Friday it would open Sarah Palin‘s appearance on Fort Bragg to media, a reversal from earlier in the week when the military wanted the event closed out of fears it would prompt political grandstanding against President Barack Obama.

The attempt to ban media at the event scheduled for Monday was met with protests from The Associated Press and The Fayetteville Observer. The military then proposed limited media coverage, but lifted that plan Friday.

“Given an outpouring over the past two days of media interest in covering the Nov. 23 book signing at Fort Bragg’s North Post Exchange, Fort Bragg will assist interested news media who wish to cover former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin,” said a statement released by Fort Bragg spokesman Tom McCollum.

The Army now plans to allow any interested media to cover Palin’s appearance, including allowing interviews with people who attend the event and rotating journalists into the building where Palin will be signing books.

McCollum said Thursday officials planned to allow the general public on base but prevent media from attending so the Palin book signing would not become a political platform to express opinions “directed against the commander in chief.”

Palin’s visit to Fort Bragg is one of many stops on a tour promoting a new memoir, “Going Rogue.” Publisher HarperCollins said Friday that the book sold 300,000 copies its first day, among the best openings ever for a nonfiction book.