by Sarah Palin on Wednesday, July 6, 2011 at 12:08pm
Obviously we’ve seen our share of media lies, but the latest fabrications circulated take a big slice of the cake. The UK Daily Mail reports that I was “in tears” as Todd “rages over Hollywood stars ripping” me in the new film “The Undefeated.” Huh? Really? The beautiful town of Pella, Iowa, was flooded with an army of media covering the premiere of this film. You’d think someone would have caught those tears and rages on tape, right? Well, here’s a video of the remarks I made at the Pella Opera House right after viewing the film. The emotion clearly displayed was gratitude to the filmmakers who invested their own time and money into highlighting my team’s record in Alaska. Todd and I were overwhelmed with gratitude, and we hope everyone sees this film.
In fact, you can click here to buy tickets to see the film, which opens in theaters on July 15th. You can also vote here to bring it to a theater near you.
MSM, you should check it out too. (You’ll learn the facts many of you have failed to report for the last three years as you’ve continued to do what makes you less and less relevant in our country’s discourse: you’ve chosen to just make things up.) There’s a story there, but you’ll never find it if you continue lying and carrying water for the powers that be.
Again, we thank the sweet town of Pella, and will forever remember the amazing evening we shared together in Iowa!
President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.
At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation’s budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action.
As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal. The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending.
Can someone please explain to me how McCain would have been worse? At least if McCain was in the White House the Congressional Democrats would occasionally oppose him.
Is there such a thing as a tea party Democrat? The answer, it seems, is yes. Polls show the group exists, but determining its impact is difficult. What role the group could play in the 2012 elections is even murkier, except as a rallying cry for Republicans who say the movement is a bigger tent than it appears.
Recently, Republican leaders have gone out of their way to make the argument that the tea party is more than just a group of (somewhat) disaffected Republicans who are angry about government spending they perceive to be out of control and the large size of the federal government.
Republicans contend that the tea party movement, which surged in the 2010 midterm elections, includes not just Republicans but also independents and Democrats.
In announcing her 2012 presidential bid this month, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) described the tea party this way: “It’s made up of disaffected Democrats. It’s made up of independents. It’s made up of people who have never been political a day in their life.”
In March, former Republican National Committee chairman Michael S. Steele said there are “many Democrats, conservative Democrats, in the tea party movement.”
And at a 2012 presidential forum in New Orleans in June, Bachmann estimated that the tea party consists of 60 percent Republicans, 20 percent independents and 20 percent Democrats.
Democratic leaders, meanwhile, tend to dismiss the tea party as a bloc of voters who are bound to vote Republican.
So who’s right?
This answer lies, as it often does in politics, somewhere in the middle.
Polling has never shown Democrats to be 20 percent of the tea party, as Bachmann claims, but it has shown there are a significant number of Democrats who claim to be part of the movement. Often, that number is somewhere around 10 percent.
The Winston Group, a GOP polling firm, last year showed that 13 percent of tea partyers were Democrats; Gallup put the number at 15 percent.
I don’t know about you but I drink coffee. Or beer.
I’m not alone in marveling at the extent to which Obama has thrown his rhetorical weight behind anti-Keynesian economics; Ryan Avent is equally amazed, as are many others. And now he’s endorsing the structural unemployment story too.
To those defending Obama on the grounds that he’s saying what he has to politically, I have two answers. First, words matter — as people who rallied around Obama in the first place because of his eloquence should know. Yes, he has to make compromises on policy grounds — but that doesn’t mean he has to adopt the right’s rhetoric and arguments. The effect of his intellectual capitulation is that we now have only one side in the national argument.
Second, since Obama keeps talking nonsense about economics, at what point do we stop giving him credit for actually knowing better? Maybe at some point we have to accept that he believes what he’s saying.
Let me repeat that last paragraph:
Second, since Obama keeps talking nonsense about economics, at what point do we stop giving him credit for actually knowing better? Maybe at some point we have to accept that he believes what he’s saying.
I have a message for Mr. Krugman:
Well no shit. Welcome to the party, Paul.
They are gonna be calling you pretty soon to come to the White House for another little pep talk. That red stuff in your wine glass won’t be wine. DON’T DRINK IT!
The Klown
Oh, wait! There’s more:
Update: To commenters saying that I need to have dinner with the president, or vice versa — been there, done that, didn’t help.
This morning, there was a stunning development in Congress’s investigation of the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” gun-running program: it was revealed that on July 4, Kenneth Melson, the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Obama administration’s intended fall guy in the scandal, broke ranks with his superiors. Without their knowledge, he gave an interview to Darrell Issa’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, accompanied only by his personal attorney. While a transcript of that interview is not yet public, it is clear that he blew the whistle on senior officials in the Justice Department.
[...]
The evidence gathered by Issa’s oversight committee suggests that the Obama administration may actually have financed the purchases of firearms by known criminals, which then wound up in the hands of Mexican gangs and were involved in murders, including the murder of an American border patrol agent:
The evidence we have gathered raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities. While this is preliminary information, we must find out if there is any truth to it. According to Acting Director Melson, he became aware of this startling possibility only after the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and the indictments of the straw purchasers, which we now know were substantially delayed by the u.s. Attorney’s Office and Main Justice.
Issa and Grassley link the Obama administration’s effort to slide Melson out of his position, making him the fall guy for the Fast and Furious operation, with Melson’s complaints to Deputy Attorney General James Cole, the number two official in the Department of Justice, about DOJ’s failure to respond adequately to Congress’s requests for information about Fast and Furious:
However, two days after he told Acting Deputy Attorney General Cole about serious issues involving lack of information sharing, the Wall Street Journal reported that unnamed sources said that Melson was about to be ousted.
The full transcript of Melson’s testimony, when released, will be a fascinating document. In the meantime, it appears clear that the Fast and Furious scandal reaches to the very top of Barack Obama’s Department of Justice.
I’m guessing it goes farther than that but somebody will take the fall for Obama. I’m looking forward to another Attorney General with amnesia talking to Congress:
CNN on Wednesday cancelled Eliot Spitzer’s 8 p.m. political talk show, “In The Arena,” after only nine months, and said it would shift Anderson Cooper’s 10 p.m. nightly newscast into the time slot.
Rumors that he is going to move to MSNBC where he will co-host a talk show interviewing porn stars with Anthony Weiner called “Weiner Spitzer” are a figment of my imagination.
A federal appeals court ordered the U.S. government on Wednesday to immediately cease enforcing the ban on openly gay members of the military, a move that could speed the repeal of the 17-year-old rule.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy must be lifted now that the Obama administration has concluded it’s unconstitutional to treat gay Americans differently under the law. The appeals court noted that Congress repealed the policy in December and that the Pentagon is preparing to certify that it is ready to welcome gay military personnel.
Pentagon officials said Wednesday that they will comply with the court order and are taking immediate steps to inform commanders in the field. Col. Dave Lapan, Pentagon spokesman, said the department is studying the ruling.
Gay rights advocates said without an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court — which seems unlikely since the Pentagon already is committed to repealing the rule — the government now is barred from discharging gay or lesbian servicemembers anywhere in the world.
Maybe I’m being overly cynical but considering that they have kept discharging gays and lesbians I think it’s a safe bet the White House will appeal.
Of course the Obots will defend him like they always do.
PELLA, Iowa — Last December, Michelle McCormick penned a letter to Sarah Palin, addressed it to her political action committee, and dropped it in the mail.
An unassuming 28-year-old north Texan who works in the oil and gas industry, McCormick had experienced a family crisis similar to the one that had befallen Palin’s family when the former Alaska governor’s daughter Bristol became pregnant in 2008. McCormick wanted to let Palin know that how the vice presidential candidate handled the situation while in the national spotlight helped guide McCormick through her own family difficulties.
McCormick didn’t harbor much hope that she would get a response, but about three weeks later she received a personal reply from Palin.
Six months later, McCormick now spends every weekend (and an increasing number of weekdays) in the nation’s first voting state of Iowa attending GOP Central Committee meetings, collecting names of activists in counties across the state, and doing other volunteer organizing in advance of a Palin presidential campaign that she considers inevitable.
“If she was willing to take the time to respond to somebody who is a nobody in Texas, that just shows me what kind of heart she has,” McCormick told RCP. “She’s a very high-profile individual, and she’s got a lot of people making demands on her, and I thought this is someone I really want to help get into the White House.”
McCormick is one of the more devoted members of a dedicated nationwide group called Organize4Palin, in which an all-volunteer effort is setting the groundwork for a Palin presidential launch that its members believe is only a matter of time.
Although Organize4Palin purports to have active chapters in over 30 states, the backbone of its operation is in Iowa, where Palin would likely have to win the caucuses in order to remain a viable candidate, if she were to enter the race.
This is why I think Sarah Palin has an excellent chance of winning the Republican nomination. She has a secret army of dedicated supporters.
Unlike the Cult of Obama these people were not sent to camps for indoctrination. Obama spent a good chunk of the $99 million he raised in 2007 creating “Obama For America” which was supposedly a grassroots movement. It was astroturf.
Organize4Palin is the real deal. Whenever Sarah makes a public appearance her supporters come out in droves to see her. They waited in line for hours in freezing weather to get autographed copies of her book.
Back in 2008 she drew big crowds wherever she went – she was not only outdrawing McCain but some people think she was outdrawing Obama too! And she didn’t need to hire rock bands or give away free beer and bratwurst to do it.
Whenever you see a poll saying nobody wants her to run or nobody thinks she can win you can be sure of one thing – those pollsters aren’t asking the right people.
If (when) she declares her candidacy just watch how fast her supporters organize to help her win. Watch how fast the money rolls in. She will have the most motivated supporters of any GOP candidate. Right now they are just sitting back and waiting for her to give the word.
At the start of court Monday, City Court Judge Jack Elliott announced that the television show Inside Editionhad asked to film the criminal proceedings against Emily Good.
Elliott denied the request, but the interest from the cable show was typical of the national interest in the case against a local activist arrested while videotaping a May 12 police stop in front of her home.
The court session Monday was brief, however, as the District Attorney’s Office asked for the charge against Good to be dismissed. There was not evidence to support the particular criminal charge of obstructing governmental administration, First Assistant District Attorney Sandra Doorley said.
[...]
Good supporters maintain that the Rochester officer was peeved at Good’s videotaping and arrested her without legal cause. Others claimed the arrest was justified, the proper answer to a meddling woman who could have put the officers’ and others’ lives at risk.
While the criminal case ended with the dismissal of the criminal charge, the controversy is by no means disappearing. Police have launched two internal investigations — one about the Good arrest and a separate one into allegations that her supporters were selectively ticketed at a meeting in Corn Hill — and Good said she plans to bring civil action against the city.
Her civil attorney, Donald Thompson, said the legal action would be based on “the officer’s unlawful arrest of Ms. Good and his failure to recognize, unfortunately, that it was unlawful.”
Good, in her pajamas, was videotaping a police traffic stop in front of her Aldine Street home when Officer Mario Masic asked her to go back inside her house. He said he felt threatened by her presence; Good refused, saying it was her right to be in her yard.
Believe it or not, in some states it is a crime to record cops in the performance of their duties. Fortunately for Ms. Good, New York isn’t one of them.
Rochester Police Locust Club union President Michael Mazzeo said he worries that the case could signal to people that they can interfere with a police stop or police action.
“The last thing we need is people interfering or distracting officers in the middle of a situation,” Mazzeo said. “It could turn deadly.”
The groundswell of attention has wrongly focused on the fact that Good was videotaping the traffic stop, Mazzeo said. Instead, he said, the issue was whether Good’s actions could dangerously hinder the work of police.
Now that is pure, unadulterated horseshit. Good was standing in her own yard wearing pajamas and holding a loaded iPod. She was in no way interfering or doing anything threatening.
When video cameras first became commonplace in the eighties many people began to see for the first time how cops really behave. If it hadn’t been for citizens recording the incidents then Rodney King and Oscar Grant would have been just two more black men who “resisted arrest” and “got what they deserved.”
We have had “dash-cams” in some police cars for years. They should be in all police cars. Not only that but the technology is now cheap enough to make it feasible for cops to wear cameras that would record everything they say and do.
Rather than relying on viral video from random passers-by as a possible deterrent to bad behavior, police should be required to wear a perpetually running video camera with audio recording while they are carrying out their duties, with undeletable footage that could be subpoena-ed in the case of either an arrest by the police officer or a complaint by a directly affected individual within a reasonable time period.
This is now well within the realm of technical feasibility as far as I can see, and should not be vastly expensive (certainly no more expensive than e.g. the data retention requirements that police and legal authorities impose on ISPs and telcos). I can imagine some significant problems (e.g. with respect to the privacy rights of third parties caught by police footage), but they don’t seem to me to be insuperable. Of course police could have ‘accidents’ with the technology so that it didn’t work at key moments – but if this happened systematically, it would be a boon for defense lawyers. The actual objections would (I suspect) be more based on sociological arguments than on technology or costs. Police claim (see here for an argument to this effect that we guest-hosted on CT) that they require a certain amount of discretion to do their job properly. Giving the public the right to look over their shoulders in the case of arrests or complaints would severely curtail, or perhaps even eliminate that discretion.
Security cameras record criminals all the time. Why not cops too?
Those recordings would be decisive in determining whether there was really probable cause to search or arrest a defendant, as well as whether defendants were properly mirandized. Judges and juries could see for themselves what defendants and witnesses said and whether the use of force by police was justified.
Doesn’t that make you wonder why the cops are adamantly opposed to having their actions recorded? They even oppose having interrogations of people suspected of serious felonies recorded.
Add to the growing list of candidates considering a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 America’s most famous white-power advocate: David Duke.
A former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, member of the Louisiana House of Representatives and Republican executive-committee chairman in his district until 2000, Duke has a significant following online. His videos go viral. This month, he’s launching a tour of 25 states to explore how much support he can garner for a potential presidential bid. He hasn’t considered running for serious office since the early ’90s, when he won nearly 40 percent of the vote in his bid for Louisiana governor. But like many “white civil rights advocates,” as he describes himself to The Daily Beast, 2012 is already shaping up to be a pivotal year.
Former (and current) Neo Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Confederates, and other representatives of the many wings of the “white nationalist” movement are starting to file paperwork and print campaign literature for offices large and small, pointing to rising unemployment, four years with an African-American president, and rampant illegal immigration as part of a growing mound of evidence that white people need to take a stand.
Holy cross burning, Batman! That sounds really scary.
Duke is an anti-Semitic kook who is far more likely in recent years to be hobnobbing with anti-Israel European leftists and Islamists than with anyone associated with the Republican Party or the Tea Party movement.
Yet The Daily Beast trots out a possible (inevitable?) Duke run for President to try to back up a false meme, that there is a “stampede” of Neo-Nazi candidates running in elections as Republicans.
[...]
But the facts elicited in the article defeat the headline. Only nine candidates who expressly spout white supremacist ideology were identified by the SPLC in the article, out of thousands of candidates who run in races nationwide
I’m not going to defend David Duke or any other racist piece of shit. But the truth is the vast majority of Republicans don’t want anything to do with them either.
Duke has run for office as a Democrat, a Populist, and a Republican. The last time Duke ran for the GOP nomination was in 1992 when Republican party officials tried unsuccessfully to block him from participating.
He got to run as a Republican but received less than 1% of the votes. His sole electoral victory was in 1989 when he ran in a special election for a Louisiana House seat. Duke won a runoff with 8,459 votes (50.7%) and defeated John Treen, who polled 8,232 votes (49.3%)
Are there racists in this country? Sure, but not all of them are white.
The point of the Daily Beast article was not to expose the existence of the racists or their hateful beliefs, the point is to tar the entire Republican party with the same brush.
This is very predictable. As the Klown said yesterday:
Obama will raise a gazillion dollars and use it to run the most negative, race-baiting campaign since 2008.
Maybe she’ll get her day in court after all. The Guardian:
The hotel maid at the centre of the attempted rape case against the former head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is suing the New York Post for libel after the newspaper accused her of working as a prostitute.
The lawsuit was filed against the Post and five of its journalists after a stream of articles over the weekend that claimed she had engaged in sex work both in the Sofitel hotel where Strauss-Kahn had been staying at the time of the alleged assault and afterwards when the maid was under the protective care of New York police.
The legal action, reported by Reuters, says that “all of these statements are false, have subjected the plaintiff to humiliation, scorn and ridicule throughout the world by falsely portraying her as a prostitute or as a woman who trades her body for money and they constitute defamation and libel per se.”
I hope they use discovery to prove the leaks came directly from the DSK defense team. Then she can amend the complaint to include them in the lawsuit.
Of course truth is a defense to defamation claims, so maybe we’ll find out what really happened eventually.
The lawyer acting for French writer Tristane Banon says a formal complaint alleging attempted rape has been launched against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The statement ends weeks of speculation over whether Banon would make formal legal moves against Strauss-Kahn.
Dominique Strauss Kahn’s personal and political future looked suddenly brighter after doubts were raised about the credibility of the hotel maid accusing him of attempted rape.
But now, a new allegation will probably turn the situation another way around.
French writer Tristane Banon’s lawyer filed a formal complaint by mail against the former IMF Chief on Tuesday. Banon alleges that Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her when they were alone for an interview in 2003.
