We don’t subscribe to the notion recently floated by Rick Moran in “Did Sarah Palin just ‘Pwn’ the media with divorce rumors?” The theory holds that the Gryphen-Zaki meltdown over the weekend was the result of an elaborate Rovian-style setup brilliantly planned and executed by Sarah Palin:

It’s too pat, the pieces fit too nicely together (an “explanation” for why she resigned) not to raise alarms with real journalists. So I think there is at least the possibility, that either someone in the Palin camp with an ax to grind with the media - or, less likely, Palin herself - whispered a few words to a birdie they were sure would get the word to people who would publish it.

We have even seen some of Gryphen’s fellow travellers advance the same idea. But you have to remember that these are the same people who claim that Sarah Palin is the stupidest woman to come along since Lot’s wife, and she is supported by a cast of characters of such incompetence that they can’t even manage to book her solidly for speaking events. How then, can she be so dang dumb and yet manage to outfox the best liberal minds in Alaska, the Gryphenistas never bother to explain. Go figure…

It’s not that we refuse to believe the former governor is capable of some adept political “strategery”– we’ve seen that demonstrated more than once in her political career. In this case, however, we believe that the anti-Palin hate bloggers roasted their own rear ends without any assistance from the Sarahcuda. It has more to do with a different kind of political animal entirely. For want of a better term, we call it the Wyle E. Coyote Effect.

Read More →

This isn’t a diary; this is a call to action.

Bill Whittle has made a video in which he explains why the left, the media and Vichy Republicans joined in a de facto Axis of Elites to try to destroy Sarah Palin. This is must-see PJTV, and it’s made out of pure 100% awesome.

But it’s about much more than Sarah Palin. It’s about a political struggle the good guys won’t win unless they wake up, smell the Alinsky and stop taking prisoners.

Don’t just watch it. E-mail it to your political friends… and foes.

- JP

Last November, I received an offer that I couldn’t refuse. Erick Erickson invited me to become one of what Newsweek called “his cohorts”:

“Erickson and his team of 25 core contributors—a regular-folks crew that includes a construction worker and a stay-at-home dad—also pick candidates to back in key state-level races and use the site to raise money for them.”

After I pinched my arm a couple of times to convince myself that I wasn’t dreaming, I accepted the offer. Well, to be perfectly honest, I jumped at the opportunity. For an unpublished writer with a conservative bent, the chance to have your diaries fronted on RedState is a pundit’s equivalent of winning the state lottery.

Read More →

Although it has yet to see combat in the air, the F-22 Raptor air superiority fighter is the object of an intense dogfight on Capitol Hill. The debate has made for some strange bedfellows. On one side, there are the antis - the Pentagon, Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin and Sen. John McCain among them - who want to wrap the program up and shut down the production line. One the other, the pros - Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Sen. Chris Dodd and the Air Force Association - who want to see more of the advanced fighters built.

The Raptor is beyond impressive:

The F-22, which entered service three years ago, blends key technologies that formerly existed only separately on other aircraft - or not at all. Its stealthiness will make trigger-happy combatants shoot at birds. It has agility, air-to-air combat abilities and penetrability far beyond that of the F-15 Eagle which entered service 33 years ago. It cruises at Mach-plus speeds without using fuel-guzzling afterburners.

No other fighter on the planet can touch it. So what’s the problem?

Read More →

Hi, Billy Mays here, coming to you from beyond the grave for Jobs That Matter.

Near double-digit unemployment got you down? Out of work since that  temp job as a census-taking clown?

Don’t despair, you can work for *ObamaCare!

We need change like never before — on the economy, climate change and WAIT — there’s more!

Read More →

To: Linda Kellen Biegel, a.k.a “Celtic Diva”
Re: Ethics Violation

As you can see from the attached photograph, this federal employee is in clear violation of Sec. 2635.101 of the Standards Of Ethical Conduct For Employees Of The Executive Branch, Subpart A, “General Provisions” - which states:

(8) Employees shall act impartially
and not give preferential treatment to
any private organization or individual.

Millions of people around the world witnessed this federal employee wearing clothing with visible manufacturer’s logos. I call your attention to his Majestic jacket prominently displaying a large Chicago White Sox logo (We can discuss his Asics shoes at a later date). He brandished this logo jacket while acting in his official capacity as President of the United States and official starter of Major League Baseball’s 2009 All Star Game, where he became the fourth U.S. president to ceremoniously throw the first pitch.

Read More →

That’s right, five months — not six —  bacause as Allah notes at Hot Air — SarahPAC wasn’t fully operational until the end of January:

“By comparison, Romney’s PAC raised $1.4 million through the end of May, but then fundraising is pretty much Mitt’s full-time gig these days and he already has a polished team around him left over from the primaries. Let’s see what happens in the second half when he and Palin go toe-to-toe.”

Not only that, but as Meg Stapleton told Politico:

SarahPAC was actually ‘dark,’ meaning it took in no money, from a period in mid-April until early June as Palin focused on raising money for her legal-defense fund instead.

Most of the money the Palin PAC raised came from small donors:

Read More →

Well, that didn’t take long. Those of us who expected the Democrats, with control over three DC houses — House,  Senate and White House — to blow it didn’t expect it happen so quickly. But it seems that the donkey party, by misinterpreting their 2008 election victory as a mandate (it wasn’t) and by overreaching on the stimulus, abortion, cap and trade, health care reform and other major issues, has managed to destroy what good will they have won for themselves with the electorate.

Pubic polling Top Gun Scott Rasmussen reports his latest findings:

Voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on eight out of 10 key electoral issues, including, for the second straight month, the top issue of the economy. They’ve also narrowed the gap on the remaining two issues, the traditionally Democratic strong suits of health care and education.

Rasmussen’s survey found that for the second straight month, Republicans held their six-point lead over the Democrats on economic issues among all voters, only the second time in over two years of his polling that the GOP has had the advantage on economic matters. Especially worrisome for the Democrats has to be the metric that independents now trust Republicans more to handle the economy by a 46% to 32% margin. What’s behind the shift in trust from the ruling party to the opposition?

Read More →

David Frum has now pontificated on the Palin resignation, so the Vichy wing of the Republican Party can stop holding its collective breath and exhale.

“On reflection” Frum has it all figured out. It’s all about the money:

“2009-2011 will be her peak years for speaking fees. If she runs for president in 2012, she’ll be obliged to cut back her paid speeches in the fall of 2011, and if she does not run, her speaking fees will dwindle away soon after.”

Notice that Frum has nothing to say about about how much money bogus, politically-motivated “ethics” complaints are costing Alaska’s taxpayers, nor does he even mention the legal debts the complaints have imposed on Gov. Palin’s family. He tries to make it seem that the Palin resignation is some sort of coldly calculated  personal enrichment scheme by the governor. Frum also ignores the fact that Sarah Palin’s book contract will provide her with sufficient income that she won’t even need the speakers’ fees which he says motivate her.

Read More →

Like ex-senators and former presidents, ex-governors retain their honorific titles, so Sarah Palin will still be addressed as “Governor Palin” after she officially turns the reigns of her office over to Sean Parnell July 26. The 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate has never been much of a stickler for that kind of thing, though, as she signs “Sarah” to her non-official correspondence.

So what will she be doing after July 26?

Read More →

Gov. Sarah Palin granted interviews to the legacy media yesterday, and each outlet added its own spin to its presentation of the story. One thing is obvious from watching the various videos and reading the stories: they don’t get it. Palin had to scold NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, for instance. “You’re not listening to me,” she admonished the ditzy reporter after Mitchell asked the governor a question she had already answered.

Read More →

In the wake of Gov. Sarah Palin’s announcement that she will resign her office before the end of the month, she has been the target of considerable crtiticism from the punditocracy on both the left and the right who sneer that “she abandoned her post.” John Podhoretz says the charge is disengenuous:

Strangely, neither of these commentators, nor anybody else for that matter, accused, say, Govs. Kathleen Sibelius of Kansas or Janet Napolitano of Arizona of “abandoning their posts” when they resigned to take cabinet jobs in the Obama administration. Nobody accused Rahm Emanuel of dissing his Chicagoland voters when he quit Congress weeks after winning reelection in November to become White House chief of staff. That these elected officials took other jobs in public service is meaningless; they all ran for full terms and decided that they wanted to do something else, so they went ahead and did something else. That’s fine, and so is Palin quitting for whatever reason she chose to quit. Being elected is not a prison sentence; just ask Barack Obama, who didn’t let his promise to Illinois voters that he would serve out a full term impede him from running for office; same with Hillary Clinton, for that matter.

Podhoretz adds that Sarah Palin’s toughest task now is not to study the issues, which he believes she could master in a few months’ time. She needs, he says, to “achieve an image of stability in her private life.” Podhoretz blames Gov. Palin’s children for what he seems to think is her Achille’s heel. Perhaps he would prefer that they become paragons of stability like the Kennedy kids, with all their reported problems with drinking, drugs, rape charges and the like.

William Kristol further deflates the meme:

“Why is it more admirable to run for national office while a sitting governor (or senator), spending a fair amount of time out of your state (or away from Congress), necessarily neglecting or delegating some of your duties — than to turn the office over to your constitutional successor so your constituents have someone working full time on their behalf?”

Why indeed.

Update: James Antle reminds us that “Mitt Quit Too.”

- JP

From Gov. Palin via Twitter:

See letter from my attorney on baseless allegations of past 24hrs @ http://tinyurl.com/l4ct5n(excerpt)

The Palin-hating left has been salivating this weekend over lies that began at an Alaska ankle biter website, percolated up to the national nutroots and got mentioned on several major liberal media outlets.

Read More →

If Sarah Palin had intended to make media heads collectively explode, she couldn’t have planned it better. She called a press conference on short notice, then announced that not only would she not seek a second term as Alaska’s governor, but she intended to resign later this month. All that would remain for her to do is pop some Orville’s, sit back and enjoy the show as the punditocracy begins wildly speculating about that which it does not know. As crazy as this sounds, consider how crazy the reaction has been so far to her announcement

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, claiming she had been talking to people “very close” to Gov. Palin, reported:

“I have been told that she has told her supporters she is out of politics, period. She is fed up with politics. She doesn’t like her life. She feels that she needs to raise her family. She’s sick of the commute from Wasilla to the capitol, and she really does not want to run for higher office. This is not the case where she’s stepping down in order to clear the way for a presidential run. In fact she has told some of her biggest backers in the national Republican Party that they are free to choose other candidates for 2012.”

Sounds very cut and dried.

Read More →

From anchorage television station KTUU:

WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin will resign her office in a few weeks, she said during a news conference at her home Friday morning.

The governor gave no reason why she will resign, but there has been much speculation that she intends to run for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.

Update: A tweet from the governor:

“We’ll soon attach info on decision to not seek re-election… this is in Alaska’s best interest, my family’s happy… it is good, stay tuned”

- JP

From the National Archives:

Drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776, the Declaration of Independence is at once the nation’s most cherished symbol of liberty and Jefferson’s most enduring monument. Here, in exalted and unforgettable phrases, Jefferson expressed the convictions in the minds and hearts of the American people. The political philosophy of the Declaration was not new; its ideals of individual liberty had already been expressed by John Locke and the Continental philosophers. What Jefferson did was to summarize this philosophy in “self-evident truths” and set forth a list of grievances against the King in order to justify before the world the breaking of ties between the colonies and the mother country.

A transcription of the complete text of the Declaration after the break.

Read More →

David Frum has done conservatives a great favor, and we should be thankful. The favor is not that he has written another negative piece about Gov. Palin. No, that’s nothing new for Frum, who has been bashing the governor since she stepped up onto the national stage. Frum’s gift to conservatives is that in the article, he clearly demonstrates why Vichy Republicans cannot be trusted to act in the GOP’s best interests.

Referencing Todd Purdum’s VF hit piece which has caused such a stir, Frum itemizes Purdum’s anti-Palin talking points from the VF smear job, and then he makes this eye-opening statement:

“If true, the leaks constitute an urgent warning and public service. I believe they are true.”

And there you have it. Vichy Republicans of Frum’s ilk prefer to believe liberal Democrat media hacks and anonymous leakers rather than thoughtful and honest GOP moderates such as Fred Malek. Admittedly, thoughtful and intellectually honest moderate Republicans like Malek are all too rare these days.

Read More →

Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board chairman H.R. Crawford told the panel at its Wednesday meeting that he heard some congresscritters talking about removing President Ronald Reagan’s name from DC’s airport.

Read More →

Back in December at a meeting with the nation’s governors, then vice President-Elect Joe Biden asked Governor  Sarah Palin for help in attracting some attention:

Read More →

Twenty years after the United States removed Manuel Noriega from power, and with the recent focus on Honduras, Panama has been well below the radar for most Americans:

But it is a strategically important country that is playing a growing role in global trade. Indeed, it is estimated that 5 percent of all international trade-and a much higher percentage of U.S. trade-goes through the Panama Canal. [Outgoing President] Torrijos has successfully promoted Panama as a tourist hotspot and commercial hub. It is an increasingly popular retirement destination for Americans; indeed, U.S. expatriates helped fuel the recent Panamanian housing boom.

Ricardo Martinelli will officially be sworn in as president of Panama today and will serve a five-year term. The occasion will mark Panama’s fourth peaceful presidential transition since the overthrow of Noriega in 1989. Martinelli, who was the candidate of the conservative Alliance for Change party, won a landslide victory of 59 percent to 36 percent over Hugo Chavez favorite Balbina Herrera in the May elections.

Read More →