Rolling Stone has more..and it’s funny and maybe not worded safely for work. Here’s a better news source on the issue.
Political Science 101. The longer you’re out of office, the more irrelevant you become over time. Palin will quit her job as Alaska Governor by the end of this month, in what is widely being viewed as a 2012 launch point. I’m going to call that a mistake. She’s either running away from some dirt, or really politically stupid.
Key quotes from her ridiculous, rambling rant of a speech: “We’re fisherman. Dead fish go with the flow.” “We are not retreating, we are advancing in a different direction.” Worded like the finest of French Generals.
“You cannot sustain a campaign of platitudes and clichés over a year and a half if you’re running for the presidency.”
Unless you are Barack Obama of course. The only thing that goober ever said on the campaign trail was a combination of the following phrases: “Hope and Change”, “Yes we can”, “Now let me be clear”, “I am deeply concerned”, and “I’ve been in 57 states”.
Without platitudes and cliches this man had no campaign. It is easier to trick people though if you are a Democrat, for one the MSM gives a you a free pass. They turned a stuttering, mumbling goofball who thinks “Austrian” is a language, thinks we need more Arabic speaking translators in Afghanistan and claimed his father fought in WWII into the “the most eloquent president evah!” Tricking race infatuated Democrats into voting for you is a lot easier with touchy-feely rhetoric than convincing GOP primary voters to support you.
The MSM and the left think all you have to do to win the GOP nomination is have a southern accent, and talk about guns, God and abortion. If that were true then Mike Huckabee would have won the damn thing. If Sarah Palin tries to follow the Huckabee model of populism supported by her Joe Sixpack rhetoric then she will probably fail.
If the election were held today I would not support a Palin candidacy, but 2012 is a long way off and her political savvy and communication skills could skyrocket between now and then. I think anyone who wants to write her off now has a problem not with her, but her ideology.
Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive “salon” at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.
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The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”
The newsboys are playing like this was a marketing department foul up but their own statements show that it wasn’t quite how it went down.
With the Post newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Weymouth said in an email to the staff that “a flier went out that was prepared by the Marketing department and was never vetted by me or by the newsroom. Had it been, the flier would have been immediately killed, because it completely misrepresented what we were trying to do.”
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Weymouth said the paper had planned a series of dinners with participation from the newsroom “but with parameters such that we did not in any way compromise our integrity.”
Whew! Parameters were in place so there was no problem. So the the issue was with the flier and not that you were in fact having these “meetings”?
Some people are shocked at this gross ethics violation. Conservatives shouldn’t be. We have known for decades that the MSM is corrupt and isn’t above soliciting bribes from lobbyists to buy access to reporters. Was the Obama administration complicit in this pay for access to administration officials scheme that the Post was promoting?
Two senior Republican senators sent a letter to President Obama on Wednesday expressing concern over reports that the administration negotiated “directly or indirectly” with terrorists for the release of British hostages in Iraq.
So what was the result of those alleged negotiations?
In a letter made available to The Washington Times, Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Jon Kyl of Arizona said that the U.S. release last month of Laith al-Khazali, a member of a militant Shi’ite group called Asaib al-Haq, may have been part of a deal to gain freedom for three British hostages held since 2007. On June 21, the group sent the bodies of two British hostages to the British Embassy in Baghdad. The other three are still being held.
On Jan. 20, 2007, five American soldiers were killed and three seriously wounded in Iraq. As Bill Roggio relates at the Long War Journal, it was a daring operation: a twelve-man terrorist team disguised as U.S. servicemen attacked our troops as they held a previously arranged meeting with local officials in Karbala. Four of the soldiers were alive when they were abducted from the scene. They were handcuffed and murdered in a remote location when the coalition forces attempting to rescue them closed in.
The man behind this raid was Laith al-Khazali who has now been released by our government. The mullahs in Iran are behind this entire organization, the same people we are trying to appease with our silence right now.
So we now negotiate with terrorists? Ignore state sponsored terrorism? Release terrorists that murdered US soldiers? And he did all this to get the remains of two hostages?
What is the matter with our president, is he mentally deranged?
The adults are in charge in California. Karen Bass, the California Assembly Speaker had this to say regarding the budget negotiations with Gov. Schwarzenegger.
But Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Baldwin Vista (Los Angeles County), was visibly upset coming out of the governor’s office Wednesday afternoon.
. “He broke it. He should fix it,” she said, apparently referring to Schwarzenegger.
Mousavi and Khatami are going all in and siding with the protesters. I don’t think there is any going back for these two.
An eighteen year old boy has been beaten to death by the regime, but Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN won’t say if the Iranian regime is illegitimate.
It’s all about process. As Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush proved in Venezuela, it’s not really democracy that the US wants. It’s legalistic process that matters. Just like the bureaucrat who doesn’t care if you’ve really complied with a regulation, all that matters is the piece of paper that certifies that you did comply. Whether or not you really did. So Chavez can build his dictatorship simply by working through the democratic system and subverting it, and his model has been replicated again and again in the Americas. All to the cheer of do-gooders and demokracy-uber-alles fanatics alike.
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And when the Good Guys step in to stop the nonsense, they are condemned because they are working outside The Process. It’s not about principle.
The Honduran people are dismayed that we are on the side of the “bad guys” here. If it is any consolation to Honduras, so are most Americans.
Jonah:
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I have written you several times over the years. We are “friends” on Facebook and I loved Liberal Fascism.
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I was born in Honduras and my maternal relatives (aunts, uncles, cousins) all live there.
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The country is bewildered that the world, especially the United States, is not on their side. Zelaya was confident of his plans to convert Honduras into a Venezuelan satellite. The Honduran people are proud of their constitution and are proud to have a functioning democratic system. Zelaya was replaced by a member of his own party who vows to see that this November’s presidential election takes place. What happened was not a “coup” but a bipartisan effort to save the nation.
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It is heartbreaking for me to see President Obama throw Honduras under the bus. He did not speak out when Zelaya was attempting to stage a sham “constitutional referendum” with ballots printed in Venezuela.
Read the whole thing. Our president is just another Carter, he never met a leftist dictator he didn’t love.
Step three: Borrow massive amounts of money to prop up the rotten edifice of our financial system with the promise that revenue from repaid TARP loans will go towards paying down the national debt.
Step four: When banks begin to repay TARP loans, subtlety change the law to allow the TARP funds to be plowed back into government funded cheap housing.
Repeat as necessary until no one anywhere has any money.
So in the midst of massive federal budget deficits the Democrats in Congress have gone on a personal spending spree. They have traveled the globe on the taxpayers’ dime and not just to hot spots like Iraq and Afghanistan, you know places where they should be going, but to such trouble spots as the Galapagos Islands, Italy, Jamaica, the Virgin Islands and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
The most egregious to me was a trip taken by Nancy Pelosi in February. She spent one day in Afghanistan visiting the troops after spending eight days in Italy. Cost of meals and hotels alone? $57,697.
This is theft, plain and simple. Are Republicans part of the problem? Hell yes, look at the ramp up in the travel budget after the revolution of ‘94 and in the years preceding the ‘06 elections. Are the Democrats worse? Undoubtedly, but if the GOP had made a habit of respecting the travel budget when they controlled it they would now have a stronger position from which to criticize this madness.
Redstate puts up a friendly reminder to campaigns that they need to get their fund raising ducks in a row. That means portable fund raising widgets that can be used by conservative/GOP blogs to help raise cash and awareness for candidates. Here is Marco Rubio’s:
Not a great design, but at least he has one. Where is Allen West’s? How about Nikki Haley’s? Insurgent campaigns need a web 2.0 edge that established politicians often don’t due to their strong name recognition. Rick Perry (with monster name recognition) has made contribution widgets available on his campaign website, but Ted Cruz hasn’t. Huh?
How nice would it be for Michael Williams to place a fund raising widget on 50 conservative blogs at the height of the Cap and Trade outrage with a little message reminding voters that he would strongly oppose such measures in the Senate?
Robert Gibbs said that the numbers will hit 10% in the coming months. Also, Unemployment hit 9.5% today. Here’s the story from Reuters.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, commenting on the unemployment rate rising to 9.5 percent, said personal incomes had risen and the stimulus plan had created 1,900 road and construction projects.
All of this as minimum wage goes up to $7.25 this month. Expect more layoffs in small business. Also, remember unemployment is a lagging indicator. It could be at 10 by the end of this week for all we know.
The truth of the matter is, we’re going into a deeper crisis. Cap and Trade, Minimum Wage increases, rising gas prices, borrowing more money than we can afford to pay back, and various other Obamunist policies are speeding things up for the worst.
Did you know, one year ago today, unemployment was at 5.5%?
Obama just said on Fox, as I type this, that the “recession is getting better” while his Press Secretary is telling us to hunker down and get ready for the worst. “It took us years to get into this mess, it will take us more than a few months to get us out.” Stop playing the blame game, this is just as much your fault for pushing through radical economic agendas within 7 months of being in office. “I’m pleased to say that we’ve achieved more in the past few months to achieve a clean energy economy than we have in the past few decades before.” Yeah, ok, and look at the cost.
To provide imagery, he has a group of CEO’s standing behind him and is currently giving them all lip service for allegedly running companies that will “double and triple in size over the next few years.”
Is it just me, or is now really not the time to spend trillions on “Change”?
Maria Liasson is wrong in one of her assertions and correct in another. She is wrong to say that the White House “prefers” to see Zelaya out of office; in fact it has been shown that the White House was pretty deeply meddling trying to prevent this check of Zelaya’s overzealous power in Honduras from happening. Not to mention, the Administration has pretty vocally (and irresponsibly given the facts of the situation) said that we would only recognize Mr. Zelaya as the President of Honduras.
Ms. Liasson was correct in her observation that Secretary of State Clinton was a bit more guarded on the matter. This is because, and this should not be news to anyone, for all her faults at least SecState Clinton has better big-boy pants on [no gender joke intended] than HopenChange Obama does when it comes to International Affairs. I’m not saying she is better by much if at all in the way of policy, but she is at the least savvier in her word usage and tact.
The Minnesota Supreme Court has issued a unanimous per curiam ruling against Norm Coleman in favor of Al Franken on Coleman’s appeal of the election contest panel decision awarding the election to Franken. The Minnesota Supreme Court expresses no disagreement with Coleman’s contention that absentee ballots were subject to disparate requirements around the state — the heart of Coleman’s appeal — but finds that any disparate treatment was not intentional.
The Democrats, along with their faithful RINO lackeys, have a filibuster proof super-majority in the Senate. The American people will now reap the rewards of having the Democrats’ legislative agenda enacted.
I am starting to feel badly for Obama. It seems that not only is ousted president Mel Zelaya of Honduras in league with some of America’s worst enemies in the region like the Castro brothers, Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, FMLN leader Mauricio Funes and Evo Morales but he was assisting the Venezuelan government in their efforts to smuggle cocaine into the United States.
The regime that ousted Manuel Zelaya in Honduras claimed Tuesday that the deposed president allowed tons of cocaine to be flown into the Central American country on its way to the United States.
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“Every night, three or four Venezuelan-registered planes land without the permission of appropriate authorities and bring thousands of pounds … and packages of money that are the fruit of drug trafficking,” its foreign minister, Enrique Ortez, told CNN en Espanol.
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“We have proof of all of this. Neighboring governments have it. The DEA has it,” he added.
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U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Rusty Payne in Washington said he could neither confirm nor deny a DEA investigation.
This is the man that Obama now demands be re-instated as president of Honduras? No wonder there was a palpable fear among Hondurans of their government becoming the puppet of Chavez and the Castros.
If you want to read up on the entire Honduran Constitutional Crisis you need to be reading Fausta’s Blog, which you should be reading anyway if you want to know what is going on in Latin America.
I’ll leave you with this thought from an IBD cartoon:
I would like to claim credit for being one of the first people in the conservative blogosphere that recognized the talent that is Robert Gibbs. I had him pegged from the beginning as a first rate comic. His one liners are legendary.
Now we have some more “Gibberish” to enjoy, this time about taxes.
He makes ‘em laugh every time folks! He’s here all week ladies and gentlemen. Try the prime rib and don’t forget to tip your waiter.
– Junk the social conservatism. There’s always been an inherent contradiction in aggressive moralizing by Republicans. On the one hand, the party stands for federalism — asking Washington to do less. On the other hand the party can’t resist moralizing, even when it means expansion of the federal government. Witness the federal foray into schooling that was No Child Left Behind.
Does anyone besides me think it is possible to not “junk social conservatism” and still embrace federalism, instilling a strong live and let live attitude in the GOP? The GOP politician that can simultaneously embody a belief in federalism on social issues and still a demonstrate a healthy respect for family values as an individual is going to be one of our rising stars in the coming years.
The speaker of the house of the California Legislature, Karen Bass is upset about the recent budget crisis. She blames the terrorists.
Q: How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work?
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A: The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue and your career is over.” I don’t know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it’s about free speech, but it’s extremely unfair.
Yeah . . . You can’t make this kind of stuff up. Citizens petitioning their elected representatives? Terrorism. The solution? Maybe we shouldn’t allow that kind of thing to exist anymore. Free Speech? Well it is just extremely unfair when free citizens say and believe things I don’t want them to.
Also I love how she calls tax increases, “voting for revenue” as if revenue was something floating around in the air and not the product of the hard work of the people. Taxes, by their very nature are a theft of the productivity of the citizens of this country. To tax people at all you need a damn good reason. These people are spending and tax junkies.
I hate to repeat myself but I am going to be so happy when people like Karen Bass wake up one morning to face the reality of a bankrupt state.
