Saturday, July 31, 2010

New Iranian Protest Anthem- Another Brick in the Wall



There are plenty of reasons to love the Floyd, but you can add a big one now. Roger Waters gave permission to a couple of Iranian brothers in Canada with a band called Blurred Vision to re-record the the song as “Another brick in the wall (Hey Ayatollah, leave those kids alone). It is brilliant and it should blow up, and good on Waters for allowing his music to be used to fight for freedom. Green Power! Death to tyrants!






Big Peace

In Arizona Immigration Ruling, Judge Bolton Has No Jurisdiction, And Other Problems For The Obama Regime.

Saturday, 31 July 2010


By Gary P Jackson
Not only is the Obama regime refusing to perform this specific Constitutional duty – it seeks to prohibit the Sovereign STATE of Arizona from defending itself! This lawlessness on the part of the Obama regime is unmatched in the history of Our Country.
~Publius Huldah
From Canada Free Press, a bit of information that should change the entire debate over Arizona’s attempt to protect itself from the invasion from Mexico, and the violent crime it brings. It also brings up many questions that absolutely need answers. (Like why didn’t we figure this out first!)

Look, we all know that Obama, his corrupt Attorney General Eric Holder, and other regime officials never bothered to read Arizona SB 1070 before declaring it “racist” and “unconstitutional.” Of course, the law simply mirrors federal law, only less severe. Other states like California and Florida have similar, but tougher laws. With that said, we know that both Obama and Holder have little more constitutional knowledge past knowing that such a document allegedly exists. I doubt either has read the Constitution fully, or even cares.

With that said, one wonders how Jan Brewer’s defense team missed this one. The Constitution is very clear on this. No wiggle room whatsoever.

Publius Huldah is a retired lawyer who lives in Tennessee. She writes on the U.S. Constitution and posts her papers at publiushuldah.wordpress.com She has this to say about the situation in Arizona:
ONLY the US Supreme Court has Constitutional Authority to Conduct the Trial
Does anyone read the U.S. Constitution these days? American lawyers don’t read it. Federal Judge Susan R. Bolton apparently has never read it. Same goes for our illustrious Attorney General Eric Holder. But this lawyer has read it and she is going to show you something in Our Constitution which is as plain as the nose on your face.
Article III, Sec. 2, clause 2 says:
In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction…
Original” jurisdiction means the power to conduct the “trial” of the case (as opposed to hearing an appeal from the judgment of a lower court). You all know quite well what a “trial” is – you see them all the time on TV shows: Perry Mason, Boston Legal, The Good Wife, etc. Witnesses testify and are cross-examined, etc.
The style of the Arizona case shows quite clearly that the named defendants are:
State of Arizona; and Janice K. Brewer,
Governor of the State of Arizona, in her
Official Capacity, Defendants.
Judge Susan R. Bolton has no more authority to preside over this case than do you
See where it says, “State of Arizona”? And “Janice K. Brewer, Governor of the State of Arizona, in her official Capacity”? THAT (plus Art. III, Sec. 2, clause 2) is what gives the US Supreme Court “original Jurisdiction”, i.e., jurisdiction to conduct the trial of this case. THAT is what strips the federal district court of any jurisdiction whatsoever to hear this case. Judge Susan R. Bolton has no more authority to preside over this case than do you (unless you are a US Supreme Court justice).
In Federalist No. 81 (13th para), Alexander Hamilton commented on this exact provision of Art. III, Sec. 2, clause 2:
…Let us now examine in what manner the judicial authority is to be distributed between the supreme and the inferior courts of the Union. The Supreme Court is to be invested with original jurisdiction, only “in cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers, and consuls, and those in which A STATE shall be a party.”
Public ministers of every class are the immediate representatives of their sovereigns. All questions in which they are concerned are so directly connected with the public peace, that, as well for the preservation of this, as out of respect to the sovereignties they represent, it is both expedient and proper that such questions should be submitted in the first instance to the highest judicatory of the nation.
Though consuls have not in strictness a diplomatic character, yet as they are the public agents of the nations to which they belong, the same observation is in a great measure applicable to them. In cases in which a State might happen to be a party, it would ill suit its dignity to be turned over to an inferior tribunal….[boldface added, caps in original]
Yet Attorney General Eric Holder filed the case in a court which is specifically stripped of jurisdiction to hear it!
So! Counsel for the State of Arizona should consider:

1. File a Petition for Removal before federal district court Judge Susan R. Bolton demanding that the case be removed to the Supreme Court on the ground that under Art. III, Sec. 2, clause
2, US Constitution, only the Supreme Court has jurisdiction to conduct the trial of this case.

2. If Judge Bolton denies the Petition for Removal, file a Petition for Writ of Mandamus in the Supreme Court asking that court to order Judge Bolton to transfer the case to the Supreme Court.
A Petition for Writ of Mandamus is an old common-law “extraordinary writ”: It asks a court to ORDER a lower court or other public official to something which it is its duty to do. In Kerr v. US District Court for Northern District of California (1976), the Supreme Court said, respecting the propriety of issuing writs of mandamus:
….the fact still remains that “only exceptional circumstances amounting to a judicial ‘usurpation of power’ will justify the invocation of this extraordinary remedy.”…(para 13)
When a federal district court judge presides over a case which the Constitution specifically prohibits her from hearing, and even issues a ruling enjoining the enforcement of a State Law, then that federal district court judge usurps power. She is specifically stripped – by Art. III, Sec. 2, clause 2 – of jurisdiction to preside over the case against the STATE of Arizona and against THE GOVERNOR of the STATE of Arizona.

For procedures for filing the Petition for Writ of Mandamus, see Supreme Court Rule 20.
Article IV, Sec. 4, requires the federal government to protect each of the States against invasion.Not only is the Obama regime refusing to perform this specific Constitutional duty – it seeks to prohibit the Sovereign STATE of Arizona from defending itself! This lawlessness on the part of the Obama regime is unmatched in the history of Our Country.
This is quite the pickle Holder and Dear Leader find themselves in. This is pretty cut and dried. Only the Supreme Court has the jurisdiction to rule on SB 1070, because the Obama regime is suing the sovereign state of Arizona. This would seemingly void everything activist judge, Susan Bolton, has done, including staying parts of the Arizona law.
This isn’t the only problem the Obama regime has though. Chris Battle of U.S. News And World Report offers up this:
Congress Passed an Arizona-Like Immigration Law in 1996
Back in 1996 (when fanny packs were still cool, in some circles) it was time to get tough on immigration, and an interesting little law was passed. Congress deemed it appropriate for state and local law enforcement to enforce immigration law. In the inscrutable manners of Washington (where all legislation seems to be named with insufferably cute acronyms or indecipherable legislative codes that read like security passwords), this law came to be known as 287g.
Want to know what 287g says? Well, just read the law in Arizona. Yes, that law. The one causing protests in the streets of Phoenix, hysteria on cable talk shows and confusion in the courts. The one that empowers state and local law enforcement to enforce immigration law.
The federal law that has been on the books for more than decade … empowers state and local law enforcement to impose immigration law. According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more than 60 jurisdictions in states across the country have taken advantage of this law.
Florida, Virginia, Oklahoma, Ohio, New Hampshire, California, and even Massachusetts are among the states in which local police are enforcing immigration law.
Read more here.

There is one caveat to the law. Homeland Security must approve each state, but with these states, and more, already having the blessing, it would be political suicide for the Obama regime, and the entire Marxist-democrat party for Arizona to be denied.
Anyway you slice it, it looks like Obama, as usual, has handed his fellow travellers another massive headache by putting his radical ideology over common sense.

It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out.

 Sarah Net

Friday, July 30, 2010

Will Washington's Failures Lead To Second American Revolution?

By ERNEST S. CHRISTIAN AND GARY A ROBBINS Posted 06:30 PM ET
The Internet is a large-scale version of the "Committees of Correspondence" that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington's failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.

People are asking, "Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?"

Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency.

Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion to make too many open-ended rules controlling too many aspects of our lives. There's no end to the harm an out-of-control president can do.

Bill Clinton lowered the culture, moral tone and strength of the nation — and left America vulnerable to attack. When it came, George W. Bush stood up for America, albeit sometimes clumsily.
Barack Obama, however, has pulled off the ultimate switcheroo: He's diminishing America from within — so far, successfully.

He may soon bankrupt us and replace our big merit-based capitalist economy with a small government-directed one of his own design.

He is undermining our constitutional traditions: The rule of law and our Anglo-Saxon concepts of private property hang in the balance. Obama may be the most "consequential" president ever.

The Wall Street Journal's steadfast Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote that Barack Obama is "an alien in the White House."

His bullying and offenses against the economy and job creation are so outrageous that CEOs in the Business Roundtable finally mustered the courage to call him "anti-business." Veteran Democrat Sen. Max Baucus blurted out that Obama is engineering the biggest government-forced "redistribution of income" in history.
Fear and uncertainty stalk the land. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says America's financial future is "unusually uncertain."

A Wall Street "fear gauge" based on predicted market volatility is flashing long-term panic. New data on the federal budget confirm that record-setting deficits in the $1.4 trillion range are now endemic.

Obama is building an imperium of public debt and crushing taxes, contrary to George Washington's wise farewell admonition: "cherish public credit ... use it as sparingly as possible ... avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt ... bear in mind, that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue, that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised, which are not ... inconvenient and unpleasant ... ."

Opinion polls suggest that in the November mid-term elections, voters will replace the present Democratic majority in Congress with opposition Republicans — but that will not necessarily stop Obama.

A President Obama intent on achieving his transformative goals despite the disagreement of the American people has powerful weapons within reach. In one hand, he will have a veto pen to stop a new Republican

Congress from repealing ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank takeover of banks.
In the other, he will have a fistful of executive orders, regulations and Obama-made fiats that have the force of law.

Under ObamaCare, he can issue new rules and regulations so insidiously powerful in their effect that higher-priced, lower-quality and rationed health care will quickly become ingrained, leaving a permanent stain.

Under Dodd-Frank, he and his agents will control all credit and financial transactions, rewarding friends and punishing opponents, discriminating on the basis of race, gender and political affiliation. Credit and liquidity may be choked by bureaucracy and politics — and the economy will suffer.

He and the EPA may try to impose by "regulatory" fiats many parts of the cap-and-trade and other climate legislation that failed in the Congress.

And by executive orders and the in terrorem effect of an industrywide "boot on the neck" policy, he can continue to diminish energy production in the United States.

By the trick of letting current-law tax rates "expire," he can impose a $3.5 trillion 10-year tax increase that damages job-creating capital investment in an economy struggling to recover. And by failing to enforce the law and leaving America's borders open, he can continue to repopulate America with unfortunate illegals whose skill and education levels are low and whose political attitudes are often not congenial to American-style democracy.

A wounded rampaging president can do much damage — and, like Caesar, the evil he does will live long after he leaves office, whenever that may be.

The overgrown, un-pruned power of the presidency to reward, punish and intimidate may now be so overwhelming that his re-election in 2012 is already assured — Chicago-style.

• Christian, an attorney, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Ford administration.

• Robbins, an economist, served at the Treasury Department in the Reagan administration.

Investors

Real Sherrod Story Still Untold

July 30, 2010 
By Jack Cashil
 
Had Andrew Breitbart dutifully written a column detailing how an obscure USDA official, Shirley Sherrod, and her husband, Charles Sherrod, had scammed the government out of millions, the story would have had the range and lifespan of a fruit fly.
Instead, as the world knows, Breitbart released an edited version of Shirley Sherrod's speech before the NAACP that provoked national headlines and caused the NAACP to denounce her and a panicky Obama administration to fire her from her position as the Georgia Director of Rural Development for the USDA.

Then, of course, when the full version of the speech emerged -- which showed Sherrod as a recovering racist, not as a practicing one -- the Obama White House fell all over itself apologizing, and the media turned their guns on Breitbart.

Breitbart, however, had put a potentially huge story into play the only way he could -- through sheer provocation. As he knew, and as we are learning, the story goes well beyond Sherrod's long-ago racist mischief-making with a poor white farmer.

This past Sunday, in his weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle, "Willie's World," veteran black politico Willie Brown confirmed that "there is more to the story than just [Sherrod's] remarks."

"As an old pro," Brown acknowledged, "I know that you don't fire someone without at least hearing their side of the story unless you want them gone in the first place." Brown observed that Sherrod had been a thorn in the USDA's side for years, that many had objected to her hiring, and that she had been "operating a community activist organization not unlike ACORN." Although Brown does not go into detail, he alludes to a class action lawsuit against the USDA in which she participated some years ago.

In the way of background, in 1997, a black farmer named Timothy Pigford, joined by four hundred other black farmers, filed a lawsuit against Bill Clinton's Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, claiming that the USDA treated black farmers unfairly in all manner of ways, from price support loans to disaster payments to operating loans. Worse, they charged that the USDA had failed to process any complaints about racial discrimination.

The notion that the Clinton Ag Department had spent four years consciously denying black farmers their due defies everything we know about Clinton's use of race and should have made the media suspicious about Pigford's claims dating back to 1983. 

Flush with revenue in 1999 and eager to appease this bedrock constituency, the administration settled with the farmers -- more realistically, their attorneys -- for fifty grand apiece, plus various other perks like tax offsets and loan forgiveness.  If any of the presumably racist USDA offenders were punished, that news escaped the media.

After the consent decree was announced, the USDA opened the door to other claimants who had been similarly discriminated against. They expected 2,000 additional claims. They got 22,000 more, roughly 60 percent of whom were approved for this taxpayer-funded Lotto.

Despite having a year and a half to apply, some 70,000 more alleged claimants argued that they not only had been discriminated against, but also had been denied notice of the likely windfall that awaited them. 

In 2008, for reasons unknown, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa lobbied to give the alleged 70,000 "another bite at the apple." Co-sponsoring the bill was none other than U.S. Senator Barack Obama. In February of 2010, the Obama administration settled with the aggrieved 70,000 for $1.25 billion that the government did not have to give. This money, by the way, was finessed out of a defense appropriation bill.

At the time, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the agreement would close a "sordid chapter" in the department's history, a chapter in which no one seems to have been so much as reprimanded.

The major media reported the settlement as though it were the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. For the last forty years, as the civil rights industry has manufactured more and more absurd grievances -- most notably the Tea Party smear that incited Breitbart's reprisal -- the media have reported on them with increasingly wide-eyed innocence. 

In the various stories on the settlement, not one reporter that I could identify stopped to do the math. Pajamas Media did in a detailed article by "Zombie" titled appropriately, "Pigford v. Glickman: 86,000 claims from 39,697 total farmers?"

Although 86,000 black farmers are alleged to have received payments, at no time in the last three decades have there been more than 40,000 black farmers. Nor is there much turnover in the farming business. No entrepreneurial activity involves more long-term investment.  

Realistically, of the 40,000 or 86,000, how many could have applied for a USDA loan and been rejected while white farmers in comparable circumstances were getting loans? If there were hundreds, let alone thousands, the heads of loan officers should have been rolling around the USDA floors, but I know of no such purge.

More to the point, out of about $1 billion paid out so far in settlements, the largest amount has gone to the Sherrods' New Communities Incorporated, which received some $13 million. As Time Magazine approvingly reported this week, $330,000 was "awarded to Shirley and Charles Sherrod for mental suffering alone."

Unwittingly, Charles Sherrod shed light on the how and why of the settlement in a speech he gave in January 2010. As he explained, New Communities farmed its 6,000 acres successfully for seventeen years before running into five straight years of drought. Then, according to Sherrod, New Communities engaged in a three-year fight with the USDA to get the appropriate loans to deal with drought. 
Said Sherrod, "They were saying that since we're a corporation, we're not an individual, we're not a farmer." Nevertheless, the Sherrods prevailed, but the late payments "caused us to lose this land." In other words, the bureaucratic delay over taxpayer-funded corporate welfare payments cost them their business. 

Then, thanks to their "good lawyers," said a gleeful Sherrod, who seems to have fully recovered from his mental suffering, the Sherrods successfully sued the government for "a large sum of money -- a large sum of money." While saying this, he made hand gestures suggesting $15 million. The land itself was admittedly worth no more than $9 million.

Sherrod gave this talk to announce that the FCC had awarded New Communities a radio station in Albany, Georgia, still another race-based corporate welfare boondoggle. Before the award of this station, he added, the Sherrods "had no means of communicating with our people."

The "our people" in question, of course, are black people. With this new voice, the Sherrods will help "stop the white man and his Uncle Toms from stealing our elections. We must not be afraid to vote black."

Yes, indeed -- these are just the people we want spending the money we don't have.
 

Shirley Sherrod May Make Andrew Breitbart's Day

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Shirley Sherrod is going to sue Andrew Breitbart, she says. The liberal internets are all aTwitter with joy. Andy finally is going to get his comeuppance.

It is unclear what the grounds for the suit would be.

Defamation? For what, showing a two-minute clip of her speech, and not showing the rest of the speech (which Breitbart apparently did not have a copy of)? For calling her comments "racist" when she admitted in the speech, at a minimum, to formerly being a racist?

Interference with her employment? When she resigned and turned down the job when she was offered it after her resignation?

For portraying her in a false light? Really? I'd like to see the movie of her real light.

The legal issues -- was she a public figure? -- may not take this case past a motion to dismiss at the start of the case.

But, let's say the lawsuit does get off the ground, and moves forward into discovery.

Will Sherrod assert that her reputation has been damaged? By claiming reputational harm, Sherrod opens up almost her entire life to scrutiny, which is why so many people are hesitant to assert a defamation claim.

Will Sherrod assert the loss of her job as damages? This would permit Breitbart to take depositions up the chain of command, from the person who made the infamous "pull over to the side of the road" phone call, to Tom Vilsack, to the people in the White House.

Now, I'm sure Breitbart does not want to be sued, even though he probably has insurance anyway, which at least would cover the defense costs.

But, if having to defend a suit of dubious merit allows Breitbart to put Sherrod's life on trial, to conduct an inquiry into the NAACP and Sherrod's connections in the movement, and to take the depositions of administration officials, that might just be a price Breitbart is happy to pay.

After all, the show must go on.

Update 7-30-2010: Real Sherrod Story Still Untold, and Breitbart is just the guy to tell it. Somehow, I don't think she really will sue.

Legal Insurrection

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Rebecca Mansour: Who Is Sarah Palin?

Posted on: July 29, 2010
Today, Governor Palin reached 2 million supporters on her Facebook page, it’s a good time to go down memory lane and have a look at who Governor Palin is. Recently a friend reminded me of the following article written by Rebecca Mansour back in March 2009 for Conservatives4Palin. It’s well worth a read.

Interesting to note: At the time Rebecca wrote the article she had no close ties with the Governor. Now 16 month later, Rebecca works for the Governor and in a recent interview with Radio Talk Show Host Tammy Bruce she affirmed everything she wrote. She didn’t talk about this particular article but everything she said was confirmation that now that she’s worked with the Governor up close and persoanl, Rebecca had gotten it right.
Listen to the interview here.


By: Rebecca Mansour

Last month, I read Lorenzo Benet’s unauthorized biography of Sarah Palin, “Trailblazer,” and this week I watched John Ziegler’s complete interview with Sarah Palin.

The question I asked myself after finishing both is the same question I’ve been asking myself since August 29, 2008: Who is Sarah Palin?

Many who know her say that she is exactly the person that she appears to be. And, yet, no one is ever quite as they appear because they appear to be many things to many people. A person as complex and intriguing as Sarah Palin is certainly not that simple. However, complexity does not imply cunning or deceptive manipulation. A person can be honest, straightforward, and completely without guile and yet still be complex.

I’ve been fascinated by biographies and biography writing my entire life. One of my favorite books on the topic is Janet Malcolm’s “The Silent Woman.” Malcolm tries to get to the truth about the poet Sylvia Plath, and in my opinion comes closer than anyone else, by revealing the agendas of the biographers writing about Plath. Every biographer molds the biographical subject to fit a vision or agenda. Recognizing that is key to reading a biography objectively. We sign on to the biographer’s vision, and we allow ourselves to either agree or disagree with that vision.

Lorenzo Benet’s “Trailblazer” was compelling, but no thanks to any talent on his part. It was compelling because Palin is compelling. Benet is not a particularly gifted or imaginative writer. The book is little more than a compilation of various news stories supplemented by interviews. That’s certainly not a bad thing. Most modern mass market biographies are little more than LexisNexis compilations.

Benet is at his best writing about Palin’s years as a mayor because he can understand “mayor stuff.” He clearly doesn’t understand Palin’s work at the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC) or the issues that propelled her gubernatorial bid and her work as governor. He is a People Magazine writer after all. I find this weakness amusing because the very people who criticize Palin for being an intellectual light-weight would probably have a hard time navigating the complexities of her job as the governor of our largest energy producing state.

It’s clear that “Trailblazer” was not written by an Alaskan, just as it’s clear that Kaylene Johnson’s Palin biography was. Johnson is at her finest in the chapters beginning with Palin’s chairmanship at the AOGCC and ending with her gubernatorial victory because those chapters describe the events that defined Palin as Alaska’s Joan of Arc. Johnson’s biography, like all biographies, constructs a vision of the biographical subject; and Johnson’s vision effectively evokes the sense of excitement and optimism that Palin inspired in ordinary Alaskans.

Benet doesn’t really get that far, but “Trailblazer” isn’t a complete waste. The supplemental interviews he conducted with key figures in Palin’s life are worth the cover price. His best interviewee, in my opinion, is Judy Patrick. She provides crucial insight into Palin’s years as a mayor. Many stories and rumors which were only partially understood are given clear context.

All of this is well and good. We could learn all of it from the articles currently in print. But who is Sarah Palin? Neither Johnson nor Benet’s biographies satisfied me, and Ziegler’s extensive interview only intrigued me more.

If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to take my stab at a biographical sketch of the good Guv. It won’t be exhaustive. I will no doubt return to various themes over time. But here’s a first draft. And it is really only a draft. I haven’t resolved the mystery of her entirely — no one can or perhaps should — but here’s what I think.
Let’s start with her childhood, which is the most crucial section of any biography, and with Sarah Louise Heath Palin we see a childhood that would be quite foreign to most of us. I must commend Benet on his chapter dealing with her early years in Skagway and Wasilla. He really does paint a portrait of Little House on the Tundra.

When Michelle Obama spoke of her childhood in her DNC convention speech, she recalled watching “The Brady Bunch.” Sarah Palin isn’t big on watching television because she never was. Her parents didn’t encourage it. She grew up as an outdoorsy girl in a world where the outdoors was vast and wild. It’s difficult for those of us in the Lower 48 to imagine the vastness of Alaska. The Mat-Su Valley, where Palin spent most of her childhood, is the size of West Virginia. And there were only 400 people living in Wasilla when her family moved there in 1969. Subsistence really was a part of their lifestyle then. That’s how they ate. They had a garden for vegetables, and they hunted and fished.

If there is one figure in Sarah Palin’s life who I think had the most formative influence on her, it’s her father, though he balks at any suggestion that he still has influence on her today. Johnson noted:
When his daughter became governor, Chuck [Heath] found it immensely amusing that acquaintances asked him to sway Sarah on particular issues.
He says he lost that leverage before she was two.
Chuck Heath is everyone’s favorite middle school science teacher. His home is an amateur natural history museum filled with fossils and skulls and antlers. Far from being “anti-intellectual,” Sarah Palin was raised in a home where science was valued and children were expected to bring home good grades and go to college after high school.

Chuck taught his daughter discipline and fortitude, as well as a love of the outdoors. He treated his son and his daughters the same, and taught them all to be self-reliant — in hunting, fishing, and sports.
He was her high school track coach, and he pushed her harder than the other kids because he didn’t want to be perceived as showing favoritism. He was so hard on her that another kid once said, “I’m glad I’m not your daughter.”

The only journalist who seemed to “get” Palin was the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins, perhaps because Jenkins’ background was in sports writing, and she was able to understand the quiet strength, stoic determination, and “non-intellectual” intelligence that defines Sarah Palin’s world. She wrote:
Chuck Sr. drove Palin hard, both as a father and a coach. “She gets her steel, her competitiveness, from him,” says Marie Carter Smith, who was the school statistician. Chuck ran alongside on training runs for miles, barking maxims he picked up in his own career as a high school football player in Idaho, under a farm legend named Cotton Barlow. “Lead by example, not with your mouth,” he said. Or: “Run through it! The more pain you’re feeling, the more it will show in the performance.”
When Chuck chewed her out like a football player, she stared back at him and nodded. “She just looked me straight in the eye, didn’t talk back or anything,” he says. “It’s a wonder she didn’t whack me.”
By all accounts, Palin didn’t need an external motivator. She understood she wasn’t a gifted athlete, so she decided to be a tireless worker. “She ran her guts out,” Smith says. And she did it with an obvious edge. “She was small and thin and active,” Heather remembers. “There was no slacking when that girl was practicing or competing.”
Her sister Heather noted that Sarah was “the strong, quiet one,” in the family.
And here we have the first incongruity in the popular perception of Palin.
It seems astonishing, but it is a fact that everyone who knew Sarah Palin growing up described her as shy and reserved. They also said that she was disciplined, determined, goal oriented, unflinchingly upbeat, and even a natural leader at times, but all agreed that she was quiet and unassuming. The Sarah Palin who burst confidently onto the national stage like a heroine of old was not the quiet girl who grew up in a small town tucked between two mountain ranges in a distant valley far removed from the avenues of power.
It turns out that the woman who has been mocked for supposedly not reading any newspapers was actually a bookworm. Johnson noted:
From the time she was in elementary school, [Palin] consumed newspapers with a passion. “She read the paper from the very top left hand corner to the bottom right corner to the very last page,” said [her sister] Molly. “She didn’t want to miss a word. She didn’t just read it — she knew every word she had read and analyzed it.”
Still, no one ever thought that politics was in her future. Her future husband said she was shy in high school and not someone he would have pictured having a political career. Her mother said the same:
“She didn’t talk about politics or getting into politics,” said her mother, Sally Heath, adding that her daughter back then was “never one to be in the limelight.”
She was a good student in college, but did not stand out. “She was quiet, she took notes, didn’t speak unless she was called on,” according to one classmate. She was even described as “almost a wallflower type.” But her reserve wasn’t indicative of weakness or even timidity. Her friends recognized an inner strength:
Palin was a calming presence who offered to pray for her when [college classmate Stacia Crocker] Hagerty had boyfriend troubles. “She was so ‘steady Eddie,’ so rock solid,” Hagerty said. “She didn’t make a big deal out of things like other people did. She talked about politics and history and what was going on in the world. I was like, whatever, I don’t care about that stuff.”
It would appear that she was always “intellectually curious.”
According to one leftist narrative, Palin has an “Evita” complex and was always plotting to get away from her hick town to do bigger and better things. I found no proof of that. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite. She loves Alaska, and when she went away she was homesick. One college friend noted that she would “gaze out their window missing Alaska’s sunsets.”
She didn’t set out to conquer the world. But she did have a competitive streak, despite her shyness:
Her old basketball coach had this to say about her:
“We called her Little Sarah. She was sort of a quiet type person, but she was really a competitor and wanted to do her best in anything she went to do,” said Jerry [Russell, her basketball coach].
Jerry says Sarah Heath was usually timid, but he remembers a time when he put Sarah on the bench for not doing as she was told.
“And she turned around and looked at me, and said, ‘You’re always telling us that if we see the opportunity to score, to take it, and that’s what I did, so put me back in.’ It was so out of character for her, I had to turn my head because I just couldn’t keep from laughing,” Jerry said.
[...]
But he says Sarah became more outgoing in high school, even becoming known at “Sarah Baracuda” on the basketball team, and her team went on to win the state championship.
“She played that game on a fractured ankle,” said Jerry.
She was short and scrappy and not a natural athlete. She had to work hard to achieve. She didn’t have an overarching ambition in life. Instead she pursued modest goals, one after the other, and built up her confidence. The first goal was winning the state championship, and she succeeded against all expectations. She would later say, “I know it’s hokey, but basketball was a life-changing experience for me. It’s all about setting a goal, about discipline, teamwork and then success.”
Winning that championship was indeed a defining moment for her. The Wasilla Warriors were the scrappy underdogs. They were mocked by the big city team. They were underestimated. And yet they won. This theme would be replayed over and over in her life.
Her next goal was to pay for college, and in order to do that she needed scholarship money. And here we come to an episode in Palin’s biography which she would no doubt wish to forget, but which her critics use as an endless source of mockery: the beauty pageants.
Sally Jenkins’ noted:
In between semesters [Palin] did her famous stint as a beauty queen, which she mainly did for the money. The interesting thing about that is, at roughly the same time, she worked in a fish cannery to make extra money. Glamor and fish slime. Quite a contrast. And somehow very her.
It was never really her thing.
It was the prospect of tuition money, friends said, that led her to compete as Miss Wasilla in the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant — a little surprising, perhaps, since she “wasn’t a high-heels kind of girl,” as one competitor put it, and found the swimsuit competition “painful,” according to her mother.
Yes, I can see that it was painful. In the photo of her swimsuit competition, her shoulders have that slight hunch of a modest girl who feels exposed. And here we have another striking incongruity about Sarah Palin. Lorenzo Benet revealed that she was never the prettiest girl in class. Her future husband thought she was, but he appears to have been struck by love at first sight. As an adolescent she was regarded as rather “dumpy” with her thick black glasses. Sarah Palin was the geeky/jock girl, not the beauty queen type.

I think the reason why she is not vain about her looks is because she doesn’t see herself as beautiful. She sees herself as a jock. Her classmates say that she was never the “coquette” — she was the tomboyish girl who could talk to the boys about sports and fit in just fine with them.

She’s one of those extraordinary people who grow more attractive with age, but that doesn’t seem to have changed her perception of herself. She doesn’t behave like a beauty queen or a “diva”. This is why I don’t understand women who find her looks “threatening.” The truest sign of vanity is someone who is demeaning to those who are less attractive. Sarah Palin is not that person. Not by a long shot. She was not the “mean girl” in high school. She might have many shortcomings but vanity is not one of them.

No woman who is vain about her looks would dress as…well…oddly…as Sarah Palin occasionally does. (Her “square-ness” endears her to me even more.)
It’s true, folks. She hates shopping. She said so in no uncertain terms in a Q&A with the ADN during her gubernatorial race:
ADN: Tell us one thing even your closest friends don’t know about you.
PALIN: My disdain for shopping is pretty extraordinary.
Diane Osborne, one of the sponsors of the Miss Alaska pageant, didn’t think the soft-spoken, unobtrusive, agreeable young Sarah Heath had a prayer of winning the pageant:
“I kind of worried about how she would do up there on stage,” Ms. Osborne said. “You have to have a certain go-get-’em to get up there and stand up for yourself, and she came across as such a shy, sweet girl.”
Never underestimate her determination. The quiet girl pulled it together. She was the second runner up. She got some scholarship money and moved on to the next thing.
Around that time, her college friends discovered that she had a hidden talent:
[Kim] Ketchum discovered…that Palin was a natural in front of a camera, a quality that helped her land her first post-college job as a weekend sports reporter at an Anchorage television station. For a journalism class, they videotaped themselves giving a 30-minute speech for classmates to critique.
“She didn’t have the kind of fear most kids would have had,” Ketchum said. “I could barely handle it.”
She didn’t stand out in the minds of her college professors, but she managed to snag two good internships with local television stations by sheer determination. She was “a go-getter,” according to her academic advisor at the University of Idaho, Roy Atwood:
“She may not have stood out as a brilliant student that people remember well in class, but her record suggests she was a student who went way above and beyond and maintained a sense of drive and initiative that was rare,” Atwood said.
She eventually landed a great job at the Anchorage station KTUU as a sports broadcaster. She got good at it. She probably could have gone all the way with it if she wanted to. But she didn’t. She decided it wasn’t for her. She left to raise her kids.

You’ll notice that her family members say that they didn’t know that she was interested in politics. That’s not surprising really. They also say that she was quiet as a child and that she has always been a very private person. Palin and her husband, Todd, are both quiet and private people. She once said of her husband: “There’s that saying, ‘Still waters run deep.’ That’s Todd.” That’s her too.
It’s quite likely that she never mentioned her interest in politics to anyone. Perhaps she never fully articulated it to herself. But she must have thought about it.

The question remains, Why politics? This is where we unlock another key to Sarah Palin’s personality. It’s an aspect of her life which is both deeply personal to her, and yet something which she’s perfectly comfortable speaking about. I’m referring to her simple spiritual faith as (to use her own words) “a bible-believing Christian.”

I find a great many similarities between Sarah Palin and Ronald Reagan. There are the obvious ones: Like Reagan before her, Palin is a gifted public speaker and a former small market sports broadcaster. But there is another less obvious, but integral, similarity: Both Palin and Reagan inherited their simple and solid faith from their mothers.
When Reagan was a boy, his mother gave him a work of religious fiction — a Christian novel used for evangelization. Reagan biographer Edmund Morris described it:
[Reagan] happened to read a novel which his mother had picked up somewhere called “That Printer of Udell’s.” It’s the story of a young man born in a rather ugly industrial midwestern town, who discovers through a series of bitter experiences with an alcoholic father… that he has got the gift of oratory. And through his good looks and his voice and his convictions he manages to create a whole social movement in this town. The young man, Dick Falkner, goes off to Washington to take his message to the world. [Reagan] went to his mother when he finished that book, and he said, “I want to be like that man, and I want to be baptized.”
Young Reagan, whose own father was an alcoholic, obviously identified with the main character. Like Palin, his career path had twists and turns — through sports broadcasting and acting — before he eventually made his way into politics. I doubt if anyone suspected he would be president someday, but the inclination and the calling was always there. His boyhood writing reveals his fascination with politics and even a tell-tale desire to be president one day. His mother’s faith instilled in him a sense of destiny about his place in the vast cosmic scheme of things. There was no hubris in this; it was a matter of one’s calling, and, as Sarah Palin would later say, you pursue your calling with a “servant’s heart.”
At a young age, Sarah Palin first contemplated her calling. Benet noted:
Pastor Riley [of Palin's childhood church] and his wife like to tell the story of how the church’s former youth pastor, Theren Horn, would remind his adolescent charges that God has a specific calling for them — teaching, parenting, medicine, or politics. Sarah heard the same command, and Horn’s mention of politics stuck in her head. Years later, after Horn had moved to Minnesota and was back in Wasilla for a visit, Sarah, then the city’s mayor, reminded him of the lesson and said, “I was called to politics, and that was the direction I took.”
When she was recruited to run for city council, she took up the charge with all the conviction of her calling. Her sister Heather recalled, “I remember asking her why she was doing this, and Sarah said, ‘I have something to offer, and I want to help. I have some great ideas and a lot of community support.’”

The good old boys who recruited her for city council expected her to sit back and follow their lead. The situation reminds me of the film “Protocol.” They expected her to be the Goldie Hawn character, but just like Hawn’s character in the film, Palin proved that she wasn’t an airhead. Beneath the cheery exterior was a smart and principled politician.

She got into a fight with fellow council member Nick Carney because he wanted to pass a city ordinance mandating garbage pick-up, and his company was the only garbage removal outfit in town. It was an obvious conflict of interest. He recused himself from the vote, but he allowed himself to be called as an “expert witness” to testify on the merits of adopting the ordinance. He was testifying on behalf of his own company for his own financial gain before his colleagues on the council. But he saw no conflict of interest. Palin did. She said that citizens should be allowed to decide whether they want to haul their own garbage to the dump or be forced to pay for the service. Her stubborn insistence on little issues like this didn’t go over well with the good old boys.

There was also the little matter of Mayor Stein’s sense of entitlement. The citizens had voted for term limits, but Stein didn’t feel that they applied to him because the law was passed after he was elected. That might have been legally true, but he was disregarding the spirit of the law. Palin challenged him at a time when Republicans nationwide were taking back government. This was the era of the “Contract With America,” and Sarah Palin was riding that wave with a message of fiscal responsibility. But the real secret to her success was that she went, literally, door to door campaigning. There’s a reason why vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was a natural at the rope-lines — mayor candidate Sarah Palin had a lot of practice at retail politics.

Her critics now make the absurd claim that she started some kind of right-wing “whisper campaign” during her first mayoral race. This is utter nonsense. The only thing being “whispered” was the fact that this smug Cosmo Spacely look-a-like had a sense of entitlement and was planning on building a Taj Mahal city hall for himself and a history museum worthy of a city ten times the size of Wasilla.

The Benet book is especially helpful when it comes to separating fact from fiction in this period of her life. Our leftwing media somehow dug up every Palin critic out there and gave them a microphone. Most of them were from her years as mayor. The media provided no context to their accusations. They just presented them as fact, and when challenged they would claim that the local newspaper backed them up. Well, the local newspaper hated Palin when she first became mayor because the editors were friends with the former administration. The paper delighted in attacking Palin on any pretense until it became clear that such a strategy was not good for business.

Everything Palin critics fired at her ended up backfiring on them. Like all smug bullies, they retreated when the person they were attacking fought back. Bullies are always rendered impotent when their erstwhile victims are no longer afraid. Palin fought back, and they soon retreated.

She had many pitched-battles, and if anyone questions her conservative principles, I recommend that they read the chapters in Benet’s book covering her years as mayor. She had to make tough decisions in order to keep her promise of “more efficient government.” You can’t enact real reform without upturning some apple carts. Entrenched interests and bureaucratic entitlements are hallmarks of every city hall.
Take for example Palin’s battle over Wasilla’s historical museum. It was run by a curator and three old ladies, much beloved by the community, but they ran it very inefficiently. Palin asked them to cut $32,000 from their $200,000 budget, and she left it up to the old ladies to decide how to do it:
“Sarah liked them, we all did, and we didn’t want to get rid of them,” said [Judy] Patrick. “We asked them to decide how to [make the cuts]. We didn’t care how they did it — one could leave, or they could work part-time. But we were portrayed as being mean, and once again it became a personal attack.”
Palin made a reasonable request — the sort of tough request a reformer has to make. But instead of cutting back their hours or working with her to find efficiencies, the three old gals decided to all quit in order to make “a political statement.” They broke out their violins and gave their sob stories to the press, and Palin looked like a heartless meanie. But she didn’t back down:
“I think everyone was in agreement that there were ways to make the museum more efficient, to spend taxpayers’ dollars wiser over there,” Sarah said to the Anchorage Daily News, noting the cost of the museum based on foot traffic was around $25 per visitor. “If you talk to someone in Wasilla about where they want their tax dollars to go, nine out of ten say, ‘Fix my road. I still don’t have water in my area. And protect our lakes with a sewer system.’”
With the old gals gone, Palin hired a new curator and a part-time employee, cut back the museum’s hours, created an annual community holiday celebration sponsored by the museum (to generate revenue and interest), opened new exhibits, and brought it all under budget. The new curator wrote, “[Palin] wanted the history of Wasilla preserved, but with fiscal responsibility.”
Of course, the old curator, John Cooper, couldn’t get to a microphone fast enough to holler about Sarah Palin the minute she sky-rocketed to national fame:
Cooper weighed in from Hawaii, saying he felt his support of [former mayor] Stein and his proposed expansion of the museum led to his dismissal. He packed up his family and moved out of state. “Our lives were really coming together in Wasilla, and Sarah Palin tore it apart,” Cooper said recently from his home in Hilo, Hawaii. He told a reporter in September 2008, that he was a “casualty of Sarah Palin’s rise to political prominence.”
Friends, Cooper deserved to be a political casualty. I want Sarah Palin to be president because I want the Coopers in Washington, D.C. to be slain. I want their political heads stuck on pikes and paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue to the howls of a braying peasant mob. Why do I feel such contempt for this sniveling sanctimonious taxpayer-leech? Judy Patrick explained:
Patrick said John Cooper was a good example of Sarah’s attempt to keep costs under control. “He was making $70,000 a year, and they would get something like one or two visitors a month in the winter. He wanted [to build] a big fancy museum, but we’re talking about Wasilla, Alaska, here. We wanted to turn it into a seasonal museum. She wanted to streamline government and consolidate departments. We were looking for ways to be more efficient.”
And without that intractable leech, she did make it more efficient. Palin learned quickly that you can’t waste your time trying to win over obstructionists. You cut them off. You want to know why Alaska is littered with the bodies of her political opponents? Because she cut them off in order to get the job done.
Palin is a woman of action. She doesn’t suffer fools. There was an anecdote in Sally Jenkin’s profile of Palin that seemed to capture this aspect of her personality perfectly:
A few years ago, [Chuck Heath] watched [Sarah Palin] pilot her husband Todd Palin’s commercial fishing boat in a storm. Todd was working at his oil-field job on the North Slope, and Palin and her father had been fishing on Bristol Bay. “It was the toughest work I’ve ever done, and it wasn’t only hard, it was dangerous,” Chuck says. At the end of the run, they had to get the boat on a trailer amid crashing surf. As cold, metallic-sheened waves tossed the trawler around, Chuck quailed.
“I’m not doing that,” he said.
“Get out of the way,” Palin said. “I’ll do it.”
She did.
“Get out of the way, I’ll do it.” That could be the motto of Palin’s political career.
The City of Wasilla had been talking about building an indoor sports complex for years. In a state that loves sports, the winter months are limiting. But what private enterprise would invest money in something like that for such a remote city? None. They had waited over a decade for that. It wasn’t going to happen unless the community built it themselves. Palin got it on the ballot and convinced voters to temporarily increase their sales tax to pay for it. There were twists and turns to the sports complex saga, but it did get built. And the community loves it. And every year it gets closer to paying for itself.

Everything in her life is based on incremental steps. She was term-limited out of her job as mayor, and she decided to run for lieutenant governor. She lost, but came in a close second despite being outspent four to one and running against well-known state officials.

This is where her biography approaches what I consider the first of the two great tests of her character.
She caught the eye of the new governor, Frank Murkowski, and he appointed her to a plum position as the ethics chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC). It was her first big six-figure job. Once again, the good old boys expected her to be the Goldie Hawn character in “Protocol,” and once again, they were gravely mistaken. We all know the story of how she blew the whistle on Randy Ruedrich, the chair of the Alaska GOP and a fellow member of the AOGCC. Part of her job as the ethics chair was to verify that no wrongdoing was taking place. As one friend, David Murrow, explained:
Once a year all political appointees in Alaska are required to sign a conflict of interest statement. Part of the statement requires commissioners to report any violation by their colleagues. Sarah felt she had no choice but to tell the truth about Reudrich’s abuses, even though she would be turning in a fellow Republican. In the days following her allegations many who follow Alaska politics (myself included) thought Sarah had committed political suicide. But her courageous stand against corruption endeared her to the citizens of Alaska.
Those are the facts. She gave up the job and turned in the leader of her own party, who would later pay the largest ethics fine in the state’s history. She had seemingly committed “political suicide.” It’s dangerous to double-cross the crooks in a crooked state. Palin’s critics now laughably suggest that she quit in order to make herself look good. That’s like saying that a firefighter ran into a burning building to rescue an infant because he knew he would get a medal! The firefighter had no idea whether or not he would survive the fire, and Sarah Palin had no idea whether or not she would survive her whistle-blowing.

Let’s look at what her actions must have cost her at the time to consider what it took to quit. She and her husband had recently built a new house. She brought home the larger salary. They were no doubt counting on that money. If she quit, there was no guarantee that she would ever work in the public sector again. In fact, it was almost certain that she wouldn’t, and she might even be black-balled in the private sector as well because Alaska is a small state, and everyone knows everyone. You cross swords with a powerful man, and you make a lot of enemies.

But she did the right thing. She passed the test.
Her gubernatorial race has been written about elsewhere, so I won’t recount it, suffice to say that she was underestimated yet again and she proved her critics wrong.

Now let’s examine the next great test of her life. It was a phone call she received from her doctor in the fall of 2007, telling her that her unborn child had Down Syndrome. She was a busy woman, the governor of her state, the mother of four. How in the world would she have time to raise a baby with Down Syndrome? No one other than herself and her doctor knew about the pregnancy. She could have quietly had an abortion, and no one would have been the wiser, and there are many people who wouldn’t think badly of her for doing so.

But Palin seems to see every human existence as part of the cosmic plan, and she couldn’t end an existence, even though she was terrified of the challenge. Her husband told her, “We shouldn’t be asking, ‘Why us?’ We should be saying, ‘Well, why not us?’”
Indeed, Palin is uniquely suited to raise a child with special needs because she has a special appreciation for the sentiment behind the words, “Blessed are the meek.”
Palin’s sympathies always run with the underdog, the ordinary man, the meek who are supposed to inherit the earth.
As governor, she told the graduating class of her high school alma mater:
“For those of you feeling like you’re middle of the road, lost in the crowd — that’s most of us.” Every graduate “has a specific destiny,” even the most “undistinguished student has an important role in the final cosmic calculus. Seek what it is you are created to do,” she said. “Nothing is an accident.”
A woman who believes such things was meant to raise a child like her little Trig. A crusty cynic like me was moved to tears at seeing a brief video clip from her interview with Matt Lauer. It showed Palin, obviously just home from work, holding her baby with her husband standing next to her, and both of them were beaming at that little boy as if he was the best thing in the world. The love there was so obvious it took my breathe away.

Ninety percent of Down Syndrome babies are abort. Ninety percent. I imagine that the parents of those lost children can’t bear to look at the Palins. Sarah Palin re-ignited the culture wars just by showing up.
And show up she did. We learned during the campaign that one of her favorite movies is “Rudy,” and when asked her favorite part of the film, she said the very end “where he gets to run out on the field and he gets to participate and make a difference.”

That day in Dayton, they played the theme music from “Rudy,” and Sarah Palin “ran out on the field” at the end of a tangled two year campaign and got to participate and make a difference.
We should always ponder what it is that motivates our leaders to lead. What drives them? It’s a serious question that should be asked of every leader or potential leader because a leader driven by base motives is a dangerous one.

What motivates Sarah Palin? I think she revealed it in that answer about her favorite film: “to participate and make a difference” — to fulfill her part in the “final cosmic calculus.” She was called to politics, and that’s where she toils with a “servant’s heart.” A large digital sign hangs on the wall of her Anchorage office with a stopwatch and the words “Time Left to Make a Difference.” It tracks how many days, hours, minutes, and seconds are left in her term. “To Make a Difference” — that’s what motivates her.

We should not be deceived by the apparent ease with which she gave her RNC speech. We all marveled at it and thought she was some kind of moose hunting wonder woman.
She’s not a super heroine. She’s disciplined. I see the old clips of her early years as a weekend sports anchor, and then I see her now, and I realize that she has worked to be as good as she is. I see her working a room and a rope line like a pro, and I think of her childhood reserve and wonder how she overcame it.

She wasn’t afraid to give that speech at the RNC. Her confidence is astonishing, and I think it’s something she fought hard to achieve.
She seems to posses the double-edged asset and weakness of every driven person. She has extraordinary reserves of energy, but when they’re unfocused she can seem almost hyperkinetic. She wastes no time. She works late and rises early. “Todd jokes I can sleep when I die,” she says.

Her husband understands her better than anyone and is naturally very protective of her. He knows how gifted she is, and yet he must also understand her weaknesses. Her friend and aide Kris Perry also understands this. During the campaign, Newsweek noted:
Next to Todd, says one former aide who did not want to be named discussing sensitive personnel matters, Perry was the person most responsible for “creating a sense of peace around Sarah.” Despite recent media reports of a wild temper, those who know Palin say she is more prone to anxiety and frantic overdrive than tantrums. “She’s the world’s worst multitasker,” says the aide. “She’ll have a cell phone in one hand, the BlackBerry in the other while she is reading two position papers. You have to tell her prior to the debate, ‘Put that down, breathe deep.’ They [the McCain staff] are not going to know that.”
Right before the vice presidential debate, the LA Times ran a story on Palin that relied heavily on two anonymous campaigns aides from her gubernatorial race. Their comments were unwittingly amusing to me because they were familiar. They could easily have been written by anonymous Reagan aides in the 1980s.
Palin, the former aides said, had a sharply limited attention span for absorbing the facts and policy angles required for all-topics debate preparation. Staffers were rarely able to get her to sit for more than half an hour of background work at a time before her concentration waned, hindered by cellphone calls and family affairs. “We were always fighting for her attention,” said one of the aides.
[...]
“If you can sit her down, she has a talent for listening to a policy presentation that is so boring it would bring tears to your eyes,” the aide said. “Then — boom — she will nail it down to its essence.”
In her memoir of her days in the Reagan administration, “What I Saw at the Revolution,” Peggy Noonan wrote:
Those who grew impatient with [Reagan] or frustrated or resentful tried to cover it up. But sooner or later – and you really saw this in the Reagan years – what they were thinking could be seen in a sentence shot out, in a look or a shake of the head. They were thinking something like what Sergeant Warden said of the captain in From Here to Eternity: “He’d choke on his own spit if I weren’t here to clear his throat for him.” They’d say, with a certain edge, “The president isn’t a detail man” (the fool doesn’t know Antarctica’s the one on the bottom!); they’d say, “The president is a big picture man” (He wouldn’t know a fact if it ran up his nose!). You could see it in Deaver’s book, all the unexpressed hostility seeping out in those ‘The president of course has an amiable temperament, but he’s usually content to allow someone else to make the decisions’ sentences.
Even Palin’s enemies admit that she’s positively “Reaganesque” in her ability to win over voters.
And like Reagan after his primary defeat in 1976, Palin lost a race and was sent home to heal.
We shouldn’t overlook how hard her defeat must have been for her. Her critics see her as some sort of Nixonian character filled with class resentment. But that’s not true. I don’t think that’s who she is.
That sad night of November 4, 2008, I watched her closely. The look on her face was familiar, but it was weeks before I made the connection.

What did I see?
A quiet girl of humble origin from the back of beyond with no obvious distinction other than courage, determination, and faith.
Am I describing Sarah Palin? No, actually, I’m describing Joan of Arc. But the description also fits the woman the ADN once called Alaska’s Joan of Arc.
The look on her face that night reminded me of a scene in Jacques Rivette’s film “Joan the Maid.” On the final day of the Battle of Orleans, Joan, portrayed by Sandrine Bonnaire, removed herself to the quiet shade of a tree and poured out her pain and frustration to God. She was recovering from an arrow wound that had nearly killed her earlier that day. Her face was pale, her expression weary and stoic, as she said, “I have no strength. I ache. I feel sick. I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.”

She rested awhile, and then she got her answer. Before evening fell, she rode back to the battlements, lifted her banner high, rallied her weary soldiers and told them, “When my banner touches the walls, victory shall be ours.” And before the sun set, the Maid of Orleans was victorious.
Sarah Palin prays before her battles too:
I know He hears me when I just call out to Him, which I do a lot. Oh, yes, I pray. I talk to God every day. I’ve put my life, so I put my day, into God’s hands, and I just ask for guidance and wisdom and grace to get through one situation after another.

She fought valiantly and was wounded. She told Ziegler:
Throughout the entire campaign we were quite insulated and isolated from what was going on in the world of the media. We would catch snippets here and there either on the campaign bus or looking at a headline in a newspaper as we walked by and we would see some coverage that way, but we were quite isolated really from what was being said about our candidacy in the media… Once I returned from the campaign, got back home, and then realized what had been said throughout, it was very overwhelming and very disappointing.
But she is not whining about it — that would be a capital offense in her mind:
[I] try not to personalize it, or sound whiny about it or sound like I am a victim, I don’t want to participate in that.
She admits that she was naïve in thinking that her opponents would play by the Marquis of Queensbury Rules. In an interview with LaDonna Hale Curzon, Ziegler said:
The only thing I would say about [Sarah Palin] — and she acknowledges this twice in my interview — is that she’s a little bit on the naïve side… probably not so much anymore, but… I think that people are naïve either because they’re stupid, which clearly she’s not, or because they are a good person and they just can’t understand how much evil is potentially possible in others.
In this weakness she is also like Reagan, whose son described him as a guy “who always thinks the best of people”:
[He] can’t believe that anybody who’s… ever met him would ever want to do anything bad to him, would ever want to go behind his back, would ever want to stab him in the back… that’s just not within his realm of thinking. He just can’t conceive of it.
Reagan had his Nancy to watch his back. I think Palin has her Todd for that.

And now she begins the slow process of healing and regrouping. Make no mistake, the beating she took during the campaign was wounding. She’s not as confident as she once was. You can see it in the difference between her pre-campaign interviews and her post-campaign interviews. There’s a stuttering nervousness about her now. She’s trying to get back on her game. We built her up to be wonder woman, but she’s really something much more admirable and courageous — she’s the quiet girl who used discipline and determination to conquer her reticence, who set incremental goals for herself and distinguished herself in the service of her community despite being dismissed by people who thought they were her betters.
She’s lost some of her self-assurance. She’s even cautious with the ankle-biting back benchers in Juneau. But in time, she’ll heal — though I’m sure she was harder on herself than any of her critics were. How do I know this? Call it a hunch. She used to stand silent and unflinching as her father chewed her out over a poor performance on the track field. Imagine how she must have chewed herself out over her performance in that interview with you know who.
She told Charlie Gibson last September that she felt a huge responsibility not to “let women down” during the election. I think perhaps that in part accounted for some of the tears on election night — the fear that she had let women down. I don’t think she let anyone down. I think we let her down. Our “Mrs. Smith” was ready to go to Washington, but instead of rallying behind her, many of us watched silently as she fainted on the Senate floor, and worse yet — some of us joined the crooks and the cynics who laughed at her fallen form.
The most interesting and revelatory part of the Ziegler interview, to me, was when she said:
I’ve questioned — when I’ve taken the time to even question, because I’m busy as a governor and busy as a mom, and I don’t want to have to spend too much time trying to figure out “what the heck just happened” via the media in these last few months — but when I do take the time, I have not concluded yet in my own mind what has taken place. Has this been an exercise — again being under such a microscope and so scrutinized — was that sexism? Was that political? Was this an issue of class differences? What has it been? Obviously something big took place in the media and in many in mainstream media deciding that we’re going to seek and we’re going to destroy this candidacy of Sarah Palin because of what it is that she represents — not me personally, not the mom from Wasilla, Alaska — but what it is that she represents in a conservative movement.
You represent us, Sarah. That’s what you represent in a conservative movement. When they attacked you, it felt like they were attacking us because you’re one of us. That’s why so many of us believed in you almost instinctively.
Ziegler asked her if she would do it again? Oh, yes, it’s her calling:
There is great need for reform… and if there is an opportunity that I could seize to help, I would do it again — just, you know, [I've] got to keep growing that thick skin and try not to personalize the attacks too greatly — very tough to do when the attacks come on my family though. That’s just inherent, I think, in any mom, but I’d do it again if there was opportunity to help.
And what about us, her loyal foot soldiers? What can we do in the meantime to help?
She sent out a call to arms:
I wish that there was opportunity for people — especially in the Lower 48 — to look at my record and my administration’s record — what we were able to accomplish here…those things that I have done in my administration… I wish people in the Lower 48 who perhaps would be tempted to be influenced by this media saying that we’re just incompetent or ill-intended up here — I wish that they could just see our record, let it speak for itself, and perhaps believe the facts there versus being sucked into believing what it is that too many in the mainstream media would want them to believe.
C4P has your back, Governor.
And when you finally ride out from the north with your banner lifted high, we’ll rally.

Palin TV

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

With Friends Like These, Who Needs Keith Olbermann?

Ann Coulter


While engaging in astonishing viciousness, vulgarity and violence toward Republicans, liberals accuse cheerful, law-abiding Tea Party activists of being violent racists.

Responding to these vile charges, conservative television pundits think it's a great comeback to say:

"There is the fringe on both sides."

Both sides? Really? How about: "That's a complete lie"? Did that occur to you simpering morons as a possible reply to the slanderous claim that conservatives are fiery racists?

The most notorious accusations of "racism" at anti-Obama rallies so far has consisted of the allegation that one black congressman was spat on and another called the N-word 15 times at an anti-ObamaCare rally on Capitol Hill last March.

The particularly sensitive Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., perhaps walking too closely to a protester chanting "Kill the Bill," was hit with some spittle -- and briefly thought he was a Freedom Rider! When observers contested Cleaver's account -- with massive video evidence -- he walked back his claim of being spat upon.

The slanderous claim that a protester called the civil rights hero John Lewis the N-word 15 times was an outrageous lie -- never made by Lewis himself -- but promoted endlessly by teary-eyed reporters, most of whom cannot count to 15.

The media never retracted it, even after the N-word allegation was proved false with a still-uncollected $100,000 reward for two seconds of video proof taken from a protest crawling with video cameras and reporters hungry for an act of racism.

When St. Louis Tea Party co-founder Dana Loesch did make the point on CNN that no one spat on any black congressmen at the anti-ObamaCare rally, a liberal on the panel, Nancy Giles, told her to "shut your mouth," while alleged "comedian" Stephanie Miller repeatedly called Tea Party activists "tea baggers."

It's like watching Hitler hysterically denounce Poland for being mean to Nazi Germany while Polish TV commentators defend Poland by saying, "There are mistakes on both sides."

Meanwhile, we do have video proof of the New Black Panthers standing outside a polling station in Philadelphia in 2008 with billy clubs threatening white voters who tried to vote. And there is video footage of Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice as well as a slew of conservative college speakers being assaulted by crazed liberals.

We also have evidence of liberals' proclivity for violence in the form of mountains of arrest records. Liberal protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention were arrested for smashing police cars, slashing tires, breaking store windows, and for possessing Molotov cocktails, napalm bombs and assorted firearms. (If only they could muster up that kind of fighting spirit on foreign battlefields.)

There were no arrests of conservatives at the Democratic National Convention.

Over the past couple of election cycles, Bush and McCain election headquarters around the country have been repeatedly vandalized, ransacked, burglarized and shot at (by staunch gun-control advocates, no doubt); Bush and McCain campaign signs have been torched; and Republican campaign volunteers have been physically attacked.

It was a good day when George Bush was merely burned in effigy, compared to Hitler or, most innocuously, compared to a monkey.

In the fall of 2008, Obama supporters Mace'd elderly volunteers in a McCain campaign office in Galax, Va. In separate attacks, a half-dozen liberals threw Molotov cocktails at McCain signs on families' front yards in and around Portland, Ore. One Obama supporter broke a McCain sign being held by a small middle-aged woman in midtown Manhattan before hitting her in the face with the stick. These are just a few acts of violence from the left too numerous to catalog.

There were arrests in all these cases. There was, however, absolutely no national coverage of the attacks by Obama supporters.

Obama is in danger from the Tea Partiers! The Poles are mobilizing on the border!

Since Obama became president, the only recorded violence at Tea Parties or Town Halls has been committed by liberals. Last fall, a conservative had his finger bitten off by a man from a MoveOn.org crowd in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Two Service Employees International Union thugs have been charged with beating up an African-American selling anti-Obama bumper stickers at a St. Louis Tea Party in August 2009.

Respected elder statesmen of the Democratic Party have referred to Obama's "Negro dialect" (Harry Reid), said he would be getting them coffee a few years ago (Bill Clinton), and called him "clean" (Joe Biden). And that's not including the former Ku Klux Klan Democratic senator, the late Bob Byrd.

So I'm thinking that maybe when conservatives are called racists on TV, instead of saying, "There are fringe elements on both sides," conservative commentators might want to think about saying,

"That is a complete lie."

Liberals explode in rage when we accuse them of being unpatriotic based on 50 years of treasonous behavior. They have zero examples of conservative racism, but the best our spokesmen can think to say when accused of racism is: "Man is imperfect."

Conservatives who prefer to come across on TV as wonderfully moderate than to speak the truth should find another line of work and stop defaming conservatives with their "both sides" pabulum.

I hear BP is looking for a new spokesman. 

Human Events

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost, Thank God



The following article was written by Keith Pickett (aka wilsonpickett) as a guest post for Conservatives4Palin
———-
Part I
Is it karma or merely coincidence? Or better yet, perhaps the chickens really have come home to roost.

One year ago today (July 26, 2009), Alaska Governor Sarah Palin became Citizen Sarah. After speaking to an outdoor crowd of 5,000 following the Governor’s Picnic in Fairbanks, she passed the state CEO mantle to Lt. Governor Sean Parnell in a simple but impressive ceremony.

In her final address to the citizens of the state, Governor Palin talked with pride about “The Last Frontier” — the energy-rich state in which she has lived most of her life — and how important it is to keep championing Alaska’s role in its quest to provide energy independence, natural resources and national defense to America.
But the line that drew wild, prolonged applause was early on in the 19-minute speech. Having visited Alaskan National Guard troops stationed in Kosovo earlier in the year and then having attended a memorial service that week at Fort Rich for three young Alaskan soldiers killed while representing our nation overseas, she got right to the point:

“Together we do stand with gratitude for those who protect all of our cherished freedoms, including our freedom of speech….which I am going to exercise,” she said.
“…..And now for some straight talk for some – just some – in the media because another right protected for all of us is freedom of the press. You (the media) have such important jobs, reporting facts and informing the electorate and exerting power to influence. You represent what could and should be a respected, honest profession……that could and should be a cornerstone of our democracy.
“Democracy depends on you,” the Governor emphasized, with determination in her voice. “And that is why our troops are willing to die for you. So… how about in honor of the American soldier, YOU QUIT MAKING THINGS UP!”
Wow. She drew a line in the sand that could not have been any clearer. And, boy, was she right!

Here we are exactly one year later, and we are learning this very week the many despicable ways in which so-called journalists made up things in plotting to disgrace Governor Palin, immediately after she was announced on national television as the surprise choice of Sen. John McCain to be his Vice-Presidential running mate at the GOP rally in Dayton, Ohio, in 2008.

Just as in her Republican National Convention acceptance speech five days later, when she called out Candidate Obama for steps he would take if elected President, she hit the nail on the head in her Fairbanks speech about what the media’s responsibilities could and should be in a democracy, implying that they were not living up to those ideals. We citizens knew they weren’t, but the widespread collusion and vindictive attitudes we are now witnessing in the transcripts from the JournoList files take your breath away.

Like Governor Palin, I grew up in a small town (pop. 2,500) in the nation’s farming heartland, attended a state university (a land-grant school) and majored in journalism. And like Governor Palin, I still remember the emphasis on the 5 W’s (who, what, when, where, why) and the one H (how). Journalism ethics were taught, including double- and triple-checking sources, verifying quotes, etc.

Having spent 40 years working in journalism on projects all over the United States and in several foreign countries – as a corporate communications executive, public-relations consultant, magazine editor, newspaper writer, U.S. Air Force public affairs officer – I can understand how frustrated and aggravated Governor Palin must be at times.

What we are now seeing is not journalism; it is slimy political advocacy stuck in the gutter, disguised as some form of journalism. The old, once-respected journalistic institutions – The New York Times, many other daily newspapers, major TV networks (except for FOX), even The Associated Press – have fallen into the liberal trough of hogsh*t, and I question if they will ever come out or get cleaned off. Instead of the old journalism stand-bys pulling up the Internet to their standards, the blogosphere yanked journalism down into the gutter.

What we instinctively knew was going on with all the “anonymous sources” but now see in written details with our own eyes is a disgrace to the profession of journalism. I am sure Governor Palin feels the same way.
Thank heavens, though, the chickens have come home to roost…… on the one-year anniversary of Governor Palin’s final address to Alaskans. Poetic justice, don’t you think, Rev. Wright?

Palin TV