Here’s a couple more examples of the ludicrous things Gov. Palin’s opponents have tried to pull. Regardless of what they say, I can’t believe they actually take these things seriously—but they know that their complaints don’t have to be serious, substantive or reasonable to drain her energy and money. This is a campaign of persecution using the legal system as its tool, nothing more, nothing less; honor requires us to try to stop it.
Another look at the ludicrous lengths to which some people are going out of fear of Sarah Palin. No one should have to put up with this sort of nonsense.
In her Evansville speech, Gov. Palin mentioned that
the people of Evansville sent her chocolates on her birthday (which she shared with reporters), some doughnuts (which she served at an Oil & Gas meeting), and a hockey stick autographed by the Evansville Youth Hockey Association.
Does that sound nefarious to you? Bear in mind that folks in Evansville also offered to host a fundraiser for SarahPAC, and the Governor turned them down. Didn’t matter—she got hit with an ethics complaint for the little things she did accept. The complaint was roundly dismissed, but that doesn’t make the legal bills go away.
Why? Dan Calabrese of the North Star Writers Group has part of the answer:
So, Republicans, you’re looking for people who can serve as faces of a party on the upswing. What qualities would we want to see in such people?
Maybe these:
- They’ve served in public office and have actually governed effectively.
- Rather than just talking about fiscal responsibility, they’ve made it happen under their watch.
- When possible, they’ve made sure the private sector would take the lead in crucial initiatives.
- They’ve taken on corrupt, entrenched interests to make government more responsive to the people it serves, even when those interests were fellow Republicans.
- They pull no punches in criticizing Democrats, but they do so with a positive outlook and a pleasant demeanor.
- They’re not intimidated by the inevitable crap they will catch from the media, celebrities and whomever else.
- They have an enthusiastic following upon which to build.
- Finally, if you’ve got all of the above, it can’t hurt if you also look fantastic.
As he notes, there’s one person who fits all eight of those criteria: Sarah Palin.
Calabrese understands that it’s stupid to judge the Governor by the mockery she gets from those trying to take her down. He poses the GOP the key questions:
If you read substance-challenged media like Politico, you think it’s all about unnamed GOP operatives grumbling about the way her scheduler works, or GOP senators (who refuse to put their names on the record) finding her annoying.
Have you ever listened to Palin talk about policy? Have you examined her record in Alaska? Do you know the political courage she has demonstrated achieving crucial goals there?It’s especially important to listen to Palin’s discussion of policy matters now, as compared with during the presidential campaign, because then she was hamstrung by the need to tout the McCain campaign’s discombobulated message. Now that she is free to craft her own message, and can base it on her own record, she is exponentially more compelling.
Those of us who’ve followed her career without prejudging her know that Gov. Palin is strong across a wide range of policy issues; we know she’s an effective, innovative governor who consistently puts principle first, even at the cost of fierce opposition from many in her own party (to say nothing of the folks who are supposed to be the opposition). Still, it’s refreshing to see that Calabrese gets it:
The way she governs Alaska represents a principled, serious approach that is missing in the conduct of far too many Republican officeholders. What’s more, the way she talks about the excesses of the Obama Administration shows that she not only sees the problems we are creating for ourselves, but understands the alternatives we should be championing. . . .
Palin knows her stuff, backs it up with action and expresses herself with the perfect mix of substance and agreeable style.
Calabrese’s column is explicitly not intended to champion Gov. Palin for the GOP presidential nomination; instead, he’s trying to do something much more basic and, I think, more important. His thesis is that the Republican Party needs to embrace, and support, and promote—and lean on—every significant Republican whose track record shows intelligent, successful application of conservative principles to the real issues that face America, not in Washington, but in actual executive roles around this country.
As he says, there’s no need to take sides, because conservatives are really all on the sameside, and the more people we have like Bobby Jindal and Mitch Daniels, the better; but it does mean recognizing that on substance, Gov. Palin belongs at the head of that list (and that those who don’t see that have been “focused on nonsense instead of what really matters”). Calabrese’s advice here is absolutely spot-on, and something the GOP mandarins badly need to take to heart; though he doesn’t quote Ben Franklin here, what he’s saying reminds me of the old sage’s words, which are squarely on point for today’s Republican Party:
“We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
Calabrese’s column is absolutely vintage. Read the whole thing, and pass it on; and if you can, join the webathon and donate.
(Cross-posted, edited, from “Dan Calabrese: ‘Nail, Meet Hammer. BANG!’” at Conservatives4Palin)
It’s no secret, of course, that I’m a supporter of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Even if I weren’t, though—even if I were one of the Beltway types pulling for Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush, let’s say—I would be angry at the way in which Gov. Palin’s opponents in Alaska have chosen to use an onslaught of ludicrous, frivolous “ethics complaints” to try to bring her down by bankrupting her with legal fees. (It’s not just me calling these complaints frivolous; the head of the committee responsible for addressing them, a Murkowski appointee who owes the governor nothing, has dismissed them all with that judgment, and has been musing in recent weeks about ways to make complainants pay for their complaints.) So far, not one of these complaints has passed even the first smell test, yet her enemies will stop at nothing to try to grind her down and bury her with legal debt defending herself for such actions as wearing a warm coat when she showed up for the start of the Iron Dog snowmobile race.
Unlike so many of our professional politicians, Gov. Palin is not a rich member of our nation’s elite class, and she doesn’t have a trust fund or a private fortune to use to pay her lawyer; she’s a blue-collar woman with a blue-collar husband. As such, she started a legal defense fund to cover her legal bills, but her ankle-biting opponents have driven her bills up over a half-million dollars, so she has a long way to go. As such, my colleagues over atConservatives4Palin have launched a webathon, running through June 22, to help retire as much of her legal debt as possible.
I understand that these are tough economic times, and in general, I tend to be one who’s skeptical of donating money to politicians or parties, so I understand that point of view; but if you’re in a position to help, I encourage you to do so—whether you’re a supporter of Gov. Palin or not.
That might seem to be a strange thing to say, but hear me out. I firmly believe that one of the reasons why the political elite has tried so hard to marginalize and destroy this woman—elitists on the Right as well as on the Left—is that she’s not one of them; she’s not from the elite class, she didn’t rise through any of our political machines, and so she’s not beholden to them and they have no leverage on her. Our monoclonal political class likes its grip on power; sure, they have their ideological differences that reflect the differences in beliefs that exist in the rest of the country, but their deepest loyalty is to their class, their deepest commitment to business as usual. They are not truly representative in any meaningful sense.
If we want to change that, we need to elect people—liberals as well as conservatives—from outside that class, people who truly are a part of we, the people rather than “we, the Beltway.” Gov. Palin isn’t just a conservative politician, she’s a complete outsider to the Beltway, someone who came from a normal (if somewhat uncommon) American family, upbringing, and life. As such, she’s a test case for this: can any politician who is truly of the people, by the people, for the people long endure?
I don’t expect many liberals to support her, much less vote for her, because like anyone else, in general, liberals should vote for people who share their political principles, and she doesn’t; but I do think that liberals should be pulling for her to succeed, to thrive, to win re-election in 2010 and the GOP nomination in 2012, even if they then want her to lose in November. Why? Because if she succeeds, if she triumphs, she will show other potential citizen candidates that it can be done, and it can be endured, and it’s worth doing; if she succeeds, she will be followed, she will be emulated, and we will see others—in both parties—walking the trail she blazed. If Republican and Democratic voters are going to reclaim our parties for the principles in which they’re supposed to believe, it’s going to require candidates who are beholden to us rather than to the structures of those parties—and if that’s going to happen in our generation, it has to begin here, with Sarah Palin. We cannot let her be snuffed out if we want to see anyone else who isn’t machine-approved (and machine-stamped) run for anything much above dogcatcher.
As such, I’ll say it again: liberals who would like to see the Democratic Party break free of the corruptocrats who run it have just as much vested in Gov. Palin as conservatives who would like to see the GOP break free of the domination of its own trough-swilling pigs, and just as much reason to help her overcome this challenge. If you can, please give, so that this abuse of Alaska’s ethics laws will cease, and Gov. Palin can be on about the business for which she was elected.
Two good interviews for Gov. Palin today, with Matt Lauer this morning and Wolf Blitzer this evening; they did want to talk about David Letterman’s vile behavior as well (Blitzer only briefly, Lauer at greater length), but beyond that she got substantial time to talk about the progress on the Alaskan natural-gas pipeline, the state of American politics, and the political future. Both Lauer and Blitzer did their jobs very well, I think, conducting interviews that were respectful without merely being puffballs, and Gov. Palin did well in answering their questions and making her points.
It appears that CBS and David Letterman have been feeling some heat for the latter’s vile comments about Willow Palin, since he felt the need to offer a mealy-mouthed half-baked pseudo-“apology” that amounted to “Oops, I meant to make vile comments about Bristol Palin.” Sorry, not buying it, and not buying that that makes it all OK even if I believed him. I think R. A. Mansour summed up my thoughts well in her updates on this post:
We are fighting this because if we let this slide then we are saying that the Palins are fair game for everything. If their 14-year-old daughter is not off limits, then nothing is. If this heartless jerk can get away with this, then what next? Can we expect jokes about little Piper? When is enough enough?
I would be disgusted by this if it were anyone’s daughter.
Are you upset by this? Then make your voices heard. . . .
Call CBS at 212-975-3247. Melt their phones.
Call every women’s organization you can think of. Call every sexual assault victims organization you can think of. Call every child protection advocacy group you can think of. Call every teen pregnancy organization you can think. Get a comment from all of them. Ask them if they have anything to say about David Letterman’s jokes about the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl. Ask them if they think it was alright that David Letterman declared that his joke was really about Gov. Palin’s 18-year-old daughter. Does it make it alright that he was mocking an 18-year-old mother? And if they have no comment, ask them why. Ask them what makes the Palins any different from any other family.
Don’t stand for this. Do you want ordinary citizen politicians? Well, the Palins are ordinary people. They got into politics for the right reasons. They wanted to serve. And this is how they are treated. If you want more people to get into politics for the right reasons, then you had better defend this family—otherwise what other family would put themselves out there when this is how they know they will be treated?
As she goes on to note, it’s also a good idea to put pressure on CBS’ advertisers, and Sebastian Gray at HillBuzz has excellent advice on how to do so productively.
Update: HillBuzz suggests M&M Mars, Olive Garden, and Kellogg’s, with specific strategies for each as well as another general strategy post; and here’s another good list of advertisers to target, courtesy of Judy Silver at The New Agenda:
Aveeno (owned by Johnson & Johnson)
Canon
Charmin (owned by Proctor & Gamble)
Citibank
Downy (also owned by P&G)
Hellman’s
Lexus (owned by Toyota)
Nissan
Rogaine
Is it worth pushing these companies? Gray says yes, that if we’re persistent, we will see results:
CBS is in real trouble right now. Katie Couric just clocked the lowest ratings for a news broadcast on American television in HISTORY. Ad revenues are down everywhere, and once a month when Dr. Utopia gets on the TV and commandeers primetime for one of his ego trip national addresses, the networks lose tens of millions of dollars.
CBS cannot afford to lose M&M Mars or any two other large advertisers. If you direct all of your firepower at three big players like this, all selling products to families, and you heed my advice above, SOMETHING will happen before a month is out. You just have to put a little Al Sharpton in your life, be persistent, and write, write, write.
I would also add that it’s worth calling out CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves on this one. By way of comparison, here’s his statement on Don Imus after Imus called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos”:
From the outset, I believe all of us have been deeply upset and revulsed by the statements that were made on our air about the young women who represented Rutgers University in the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship with such class, energy and talent. While we have already made our disappointment and outrage clear, I would like to take the opportunity to offer my personal apologies to the Rutgers team, its impressive Coach, and the entire Athletic Department and Administration of Rutgers University. CBS has nothing but the highest regard for that establishment and its students, and we are sorry that offense was given in such a brutal and insensitive manner.
I would also like to extend an apology to everyone beyond Rutgers. Those who have spoken with us the last few days represent people of goodwill from all segments of our society—all races, economic groups, men and women alike. In our meetings with concerned groups, there has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society. That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision, as have the many emails, phone calls and personal discussions we have had with our colleagues across the CBS Corporation and our many other constituencies.
And here’s what Moonves has had to say about Letterman’s significantly more vile attack on the Palin family:
*sound of crickets chirping*
Apparently, the head of CBS doesn’t care when “offense [is] given in such a brutal and insensitive manner” to conservative women, or worry about “the effect language like this has on our young people” when the purpose of that language is to hurt a Republican. This sort of hypocrisy is simply not tolerable; call him on it. Contact his office, but also do everything you can to make it clear that Moonves is a hypocrite and a chauvinist fraud.
On this one, we know where the real feminists are standing: liberal or not, they’re standing with the Palins; they understand that “sexism isn’t selective, and misogyny isn’t something that only applies to certain women.” May all of us rise up and say “Enough!”—whether you care about the Palins or not, for your own sake, and the sake of your daughters. For the sake of my daughters. Enough is enough.
Update: Kudos to NOW, which issued a great statement on this. They’re clearly trying to use this as a lever on conservatives, but more power to them:
NOW hopes that all the conservatives who are fired up about sexism in the media lately will join us in calling out sexism when it is directed at women who aren’t professed conservatives.
I’ll second that, and give them credit for putting principle over party, and for being smart enough to do so in a way that really advances that principle. What NOW has done here is the sort of move that could really make a positive difference in political conversation in this country, as I think the response at Hot Air from Allahpundit and Ed Morrissey shows, and they deserve applause for that.
and some people just aren’t willing to let the truth get in the way of taking down a political opponent. It appears that Conor Clarke of The Atlantic fits in at least one of those categories; less than a week after one memorably inept attempt at a hatchet job on Sarah Palin, he’s taken another wild, factually-impaired swing. I’m not sure what he’s trying to prove, but if it’s that he’s a complete tool, he’s managed that much, anyway.
In case you didn’t see it, we have here a case of a 62-year-old white guy, on national television, making crude, cruel sexual comments about a 14-year-old girl and calling them jokes. How is this possible? Well, only because said 14-year-old girl is the daughter of Sarah Palin, and therefore the OSM doesn’t consider her to be fully human, let alone a “real woman.”
I appreciate the statements on this from her parents (posted on Facebook, but not, apparently, on the SarahPAC website):
“Any ‘jokes’ about raping my 14-year-old are despicable. Alaskans know it and I believe the rest of the world knows it, too.”
—Todd Palin
“Concerning Letterman’s comments about my young daughter (and I doubt he’d ever dare make such comments about anyone else’s daughter): ‘Laughter incited by sexually-perverted comments made by a 62-year old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl are not only disgusting, but they remind us Hollywood has a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands—that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contributes to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.'”
—Governor Sarah Palin
This should not be a liberal/conservative issue (as Tommy Christopher has said well)—the divide here should be between people who think it’s appropriate to make crude sexual comments about women, particularly in public and particularly underage girls, and those who recognize that such things are sick and wrong and do not constitute appropriate public discourse. Don Imus got fired for less; in a just world, David Letterman would receive the same fate. Please contact the higher-ups at CBS and Letterman’s advertisers (Joseph Russo has posted the list) and tell them Letterman’s behavior is unacceptable and intolerable.
Here’s a video comparing and contrasting the media’s economic reporting during the Bush administration with their approach now that their man is in the White House:
The creator of that video writes,
By the middle of 2003, a mild recession had ended and the economy turned around big-time, with the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs and whopping GDP growth of 7.5% in the third quarter. Yet month after month, the national media downplayed the good economic news with the dreaded “but,” as in “Positive economic indicator X was released today, but the economy is still in the toilet . . .” (Oh, by the way . . . George W. Bush was President back then.)
Of course, with President Obama now in the White House, the media’s economic coverage is the mirror opposite. As the unemployment rate skyrockets and hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost every month, the bad economic news is spun by Obama’s friends in the media: “Negative economic indicator Y was released today, but it’s not nearly bad as we’d expected, and besides,unemployment can be fun!”
But hey, at least the Pelosi/Obama super-duper extra-special economic stimulus package has softened the blow, right? At least job losses aren’t as bad as projected, right? . . . Well, actually, it hasn’t worked out that way:
All in all, I’d say that’s not exactly the recovery we were promised. I know Newsweek called Barack Obama our first Vulcan president, but offhand, I’d say the media coverage of his economic policy is more likely the result of a few Jedi mind tricks. As Randall Hoven says, I think it’s about time to call this “the Obama recession.” (HT: Shane Vander Hart) Most people aren’t to that point yet, but The Nation is now predicting that if and when the official unemployment rate goes above 10%, they will be.
When the federal government actually acknowledges that the country has a double-digit unemployment rate, when a figure that is above 10 percent becomes that official number—something that the trend lines suggest could happen this summer—the country reaches an emotional and political tipping point. . . .
Politically, it is the point at which people start looking for someone to blame. . . .
If the country is socked with a double-digit unemployment rate, and if the actions of the administration that is in charge are seen as feeding the increase in joblessness, that’s the political point of no return.
Of course, we’d be at that point (and beyond it) already if it weren’t for the way the government calculates things, since as John Nichols points out in that article, the real number is a lot worse than the official one:
America already has double-digit unemployment.
In fact, the real unemployment rate, as opposed to the official rate, is well over 15 percent.
That’s because the official unemployment rate—which as of Friday stood at 9.4 percent, following another leap in jobless claims for May—is not, as economist John Williams has noted, “figured in the way that that the average person thinks of unemployment, meaning figured the way it was estimated back during the Great Depression.”
What happens when we include people who have stopped looking for work because they do not believe there are jobs to be found, along with part-time workers who would like to be working full-time?
Then, we start looking not at the unsettling 10 percent figure but the far more frightening 20 percent number.
Ed Morrissey gives Nichols “high marks for intellectual honesty” in coming right out and saying this;
Normally, the Left likes to trot that out during Republican administrations and leave it in the barn during Democratic presidencies.
Morrissey agrees with Nichols’ conclusion even as he rejects his prescriptions:
Even if we wildly disagree on economics, we agree that Obama will own this unemployment cycle, and soon. The 10% mark is a psychological barrier that Obama simply cannot avoid. Even without it, blaming Bush has a shelf life whose expiration date is rapidly approaching. Bush didn’t spend trillions of dollars in 2009 and promise that it would create “or save” jobs. Voters will get tired of hearing how many jobs Obama thinks he’s “saved” while unemployment continues to rise.
Obama has been in charge for almost five months and got every single bit of economic policy he wanted from Congress. If the economy remains mired and debt keeps skyrocketing, people will start to ask what they got for all of their great-grandchildren’s money.
This will only be exacerbated if the president gets his way, since he’s pushing a change to our nation’s tax structure that will drive more jobs overseas. Don’t believe me? Maybe you’ll believe Steve Ballmer, who ought to know:
Last week, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer came to Washington to announce what Microsoft would do if Obama’s multinational tax policy is enacted.
“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said, “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S.” If Microsoft, perhaps our most competitive company, has to abandon the U.S. in order to continue to thrive, who exactly is going to stay?
In surveying the issue—President Obama’s proposal to end the deferral of multinational taxation—Kevin Hassett (a former advisor to the McCain campaign) asks,
Why does Obama advocate a policy that so flies in the face of everything that economists have learned? How could Obama possibly say, as he did last month, that he wants “to see our companies remain the most competitive in the world. But the way to make sure that happens is not to reward our companies for moving jobs off our shores or transferring profits to overseas tax havens?” Further, how could Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner call a practice that top scholarship has shown increases wages and employment in the U.S. “indefensible?”
I have to admit I am at a loss. Maybe it is good politics to bash American corporations, and Obama isn’t really serious about making this change happen. But if the change is enacted, and domestic corporate taxes aren’t reduced to offset the big tax hike, the result will be a flight from the U.S. that rivals in scale the greatest avian arctic migrations.
Incidentally, that scholarship includes “the same James Hines who recently wrote a sweeping review of international tax policy with Obama’s top economist, Larry Summers,” so the president’s economic team has to be well aware of what the unintended consequences of his proposal would be.
I’ve said this before, I think, that the great flaw in leftist economic theory is that it assumes that people’s economic behavior doesn’t change when tax laws change—and that’s just not true. Make something more expensive, people will buy less of it; make doing business in your jurisdiction more expensive, people will go where it’s cheaper. The Left understands this when it comes to things like tobacco and gasoline, which is why they’re all for higher taxes on both and were unbothered by last summer’s $4-a-gallon gas, but when it comes to taxes, they just don’t seem to be able to see it.
This is particularly problematic since the richer a person is, or a company is, the more they can do to avoid paying taxes if taxes are high enough to make it worth the effort. The more you raise taxes, the more the elite dodge them, and the more the burden falls on the middle class and below; the result is a tax structure which is functionally much more regressive and unfair, regardless of how it appears on the surface. Throw in the fact that under such circumstances, the folks who have the money are much less likely to use it to create jobs in this country, meaning less growth and less money in the economy, and most people get hit coming and going. We’re already seeing that under this administration; from where I sit, I think the economy’s likely to recover somewhat anyway, but the recovery will be weaker and slower and less complete because of this administration’s actions and policies.
And if, as I’m still very much afraid, al’Qaeda pulls off another major attack in the middle of all this, all bets are off.