Tea party supporters are upset with the mainstream media for reporting that the number of people at the 9/12 rally in Washington, D.C., totaled in the “tens of thousands.” Some conservatives have said that the total was more than a million, and they see the disparity as another example of liberal bias. Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander explains the process his newspaper went through to try to estimate the crowd size. Meanwhile, an aerial photo circulating on the Internet supposedly showing a huge crowd at the 9/12 rally turns out to be from a different rally in the 1990s.
The conservatives who used a hidden camera to film meetings with ACORN employees released another video this week. This one was from an ACORN office in San Bernardino, Calif. An employee there was unfazed and supportive as the undercover activist explained that he wanted to open a whorehouse with underage children and use the profits to help finance his political campaign. Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., urged the Justice Department Tuesday to investigate ACORN.
Among the new names surfacing as potential GOP presidential nominees in 2012 is that of Gen. David Petraeus (in photo), who now heads U.S. Central Command. “I’d like to see Gen. Petraeus warm up,” former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole told Politico. “I don’t know anything about his politics, whether he has an interest. It’s kind of a time for another Eisenhower, in my view.” Others newly mentioned include MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker. “Several GOP candidates are coming to the view that the way to run against Obama is not to out-Obama Obama with flash or sizzle,” said Dan Senor, a Bush administration veteran. “They want to go in the opposite direction: smart, back-to-basics, competence.”
Good for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for trying to maintain some civility in the health care debate. After a women at a town hall meeting in Arizona this week asked McCain if Obama knows we still live under a Constitution, McCain assured her that, yes, Obama knows that and respects the Constitution — which many audience members booed. But McCain continued, adding that Obama is sincere in his beliefs (more boos) but that he and Obama have a fundamental difference in philosophy about the role of government — which is why, McCain noted, we have elections and competition among political parties. “He is the president of the United States,” McCain said, “and let’s be respectful.”
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen indicts the vast majority of Republicans for failing to call former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on her “death panel” lie and other distortions, which he says are helping turn health care reform into “the Red Menace of our day.” Cohen writes: “Sadly, the list of the meek includes Palin’s Geppetto, Sen. John McCain, who fashioned her out of political desperation and has yet to whittle her down to size. In an update of the folk tale, I’d like to think that whenever he praises Palin, his own nose grows.” Cohen concludes that Palin “has gone from a 57 percent favorable rating soon after McCain picked her as his running mate to a current 39 percent — a negative landslide of justifiable proportions. Before she fades into fringedom, she will do one bad and one good thing — hurt the very people she supposedly champions and expose the appalling opportunism of the Republican leaders. I have in my hand a list of their names.”
Meanwhile, Palin captured 20 percent in a new Marist poll about potential GOP presidential nominees for 2012, compared with Mitt Romney’s 21 percent and Mike Huckabee’s 19 percent.
The death of 78-year-old columnist Robert Novak seems like the end of an era of political reporting and conservative commentary. Some may know him only as the guy who identified Valerie Plame as a CIA agent (and got away with it). But his insider status and corrosive way with words made him a force in national politics and policymaking, as well as the rise of cable news. The editorial board at his home newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, recalled this Novak nugget: “Always love your country — but never trust your government!”
There have been a lot of weird “stars” on “Dancing With the Stars,” but perhaps none more so than former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. The former exterminator known on Capitol Hill as “The Hammer” will be part of the cast for the ninth season of the ABC reality show, which debuts Sept. 21. His competition includes Donny Osmond, Macy Gray, Kathy Ireland, Kelly Osbourne, Natalie Coughlin and Michael Irvin. “I couldn’t believe they asked me to do this,” DeLay said. “It didn’t take me five minutes to agree. I’ve been working out like crazy.” Wonder how a guy who titled his memoir “No Retreat, No Surrender” will handle being judged by the likes of Len Goodman, Bruno Tonioli and Carrie Ann Inaba.
You couldn’t make this up: Rod Blagojevich does Elvis (as Fabio looks on). “Now I’m going to sing a song, because you can’t vote against me anymore,” the ousted Illinois governor told a Chicago block party crowd, before putting hair and hips into “Treat Me Nice.”
Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, contends that the GOP is too tied to Southern Republicans. Columnist Kathleen Parker, herself a Southerner, agrees. “It is true that the GOP is fast becoming regionalized below the Mason-Dixon, and becoming increasingly associated with some of the South’s worst ideas,” she wrote. Parker noted a poll showing how only 47 percent of Southerners think Obama was born in America. “Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity,” she wrote. But she also recalled how the GOP has been pandering to Southerners for decades, noting Nixon’s Southern political strategy. “Before the party of the Great Emancipator can rise again,” she said, “Republicans will have to face their inner Voinovich and drive a stake through the heart of old Dixie.”
It took four years, but former Rep. William “Cold Cash” Jefferson was finally convicted Wednesday of charges that included accepting bribes and engaging in money laundering. The Louisiana Democrat could get more than 20 years in prison, though he is still free on bail pending an appeal. Jefferson was filmed in 2005 taking $100,000 in bribes from a government informant, and FBI agents found $90,000 in marked bills in his freezer.
“The red-blue contrast is often overdrawn. But it’s a sensible way to understand Obama’s summer struggles,” wrote columnist Ross Douthat. “On health care, energy, taxes and spending, he’s pushing a blue-state agenda during a recession that’s exposed some of the blue-state model’s weaknesses, and some of the red-state model’s strengths.” Douthat noted how Texas has survived the national recession pretty well while California has been a fiscal disaster area. “In state capital after state capital,” he wrote, “the downturn has highlighted the weaknesses of liberal governance — the zeal for unsustainable social spending, the preference for regulation over job creation, the heavy reliance for tax revenue on the volatile incomes of the upper upper class.”
Pondering the new adventures of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, Washington Post blogger Chris Cillizza led his latest list of possible women presidents with retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., also mentioning Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan and Florida CFO Alex Sink (for the Democrats), and former New Hampshire Attorney General Kelly Ayotte and former eBay president Meg Whitman (for the Republicans). Of Kathleen Sebelius, Cillizza wrote: “Before she became head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sebelius was in the mix for vice president — thanks in large part to her resume as a two-term governor from ruby red Kansas. Those who know her best insist she needed more seasoning before stepping into the limelight nationally, but that’s just what she’ll get as a member of the Obama Cabinet. And, she certainly has the political pedigree; her father, John Gilligan, served as the governor of Ohio.”
Vice President Walter Cronkite? Frank Mankiewicz, director of Sen. George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, writes in the Washington Post that the idea was discussed but rejected, on the assumption that the CBS newsman would decline. (McGovern eventually went with Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton, who withdrew after revelations of his hospitalizations and shock treatments for depression.) According to Mankiewicz, Cronkite told McGovern decades later, “I’d have accepted in a minute; anything to help end that dreadful war.” But would it have mattered? The ticket of McGovern and replacement running mate Sargent Shriver lost to President Nixon 61 to 37 percent.
As she stepped down Sunday as Alaska’s governor, Sarah Palin said she didn’t need a title to fight “for what is right, and for truth.” For most politicians, quitting midway through a first term wouldn’t further their careers. But Palin makes her own rules. Her immediate future appears to hold an Aug. 8 speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, work on her book and campaigning for like-minded Republicans, as well as more speaking out via Twitter. But “there is absolutely no plan,” she told the Associated Press. Meanwhile, a New Republic article paints a grim picture of her final months in office and relationship with state legislators. None of her major bills passed, and “she managed to alienate most of the 60 members of House and Senate,” said an aide to one GOP lawmaker. “It wasn’t a matter of burning bridges — she blew them up.”
Shame on CNN’s Lou Dobbs and some GOP members of Congress for fanning the conspiracy theory that President Obama was born in Kenya and therefore isn’t eligible to be president. This canard has been thoroughly debunked, and they know it. Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has done his part by joking that Obama and God have something in common — the lack of a birth certificate. Kansas attorney general candidate Kris Kobach repeated that joke at a GOP gathering this month. But as smart Republicans are realizing, nutty conspiracies don’t help the GOP; they only make it look nutty.
“If political figures stand for ideas, victimization is what Ms. Palin is all about,” Thomas Frank wrote in a Wall Street Journal column. “It is her brand, her myth. Ronald Reagan stood tall. John McCain was about service. Barack Obama has hope. Sarah Palin is a collector of grievances. She runs for high office by griping.
“This is no small thing, mind you. The piling-up of petty complaints is an important aspect of conservative movement culture. For those who believe that American life consists of the trampling of Middle America by the ‘elites’ — that our culture is one big insult to the pious and the patriotic and the traditional — Sarah Palin’s long list of unfair and disrespectful treatment is one of her most attractive features. Like Oliver North, Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, she is known not for her ideas but as a martyr, a symbol of the culture-war crimes of the left.”
Only 22 percent of Americans — and only 33 percent of Republicans — think that Sarah Palin has the ability to be an effective president, according to a new CBS News survey. But since she announced her plans to resign as Alaska governor, contributions to Sarah PAC, her political action committee, reportedly have surged. Meanwhile, perhaps in an effort to be taken more seriously on policy issues, Palin had a commentary in Tuesday’s Washington Post arguing that the cap-and-trade bill before Congress is “an enormous threat to our economy” that “would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.”
Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan didn’t pull any punches in expressing her opinion that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is bad for conservatives and was disastrous as a national candidate. Though she credited Palin for being a gifted retail politician, Noonan said Palin “was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. . . . She wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. ‘I’m not wired that way,’ ‘I’m not a quitter,’ ‘I’m standing up for our values.’ I’m, I’m, I’m. In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.”
One encouraging sign of life for the Republican Party is that it is recruiting some quality candidates to run for Congress next year, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post reported. One reason for this success is that, though President Obama’s personal approval rating remains high, some of his policies don’t poll as well, which creates openings for Republicans. Another key has been the public disapperance President George W. Bush, who harmed Republican candidates in recent election. The GOP is particularly targeting districts that voted for John McCain in the presidential race but elected Democratic members of Congress.
It’s silly to claim Palin has no chance to win the nomination or the presidency. The fact is, despite a rough campaign in 2008, Palin has been (for what it’s worth at this stage) a co-front-runner in polls of GOP primary voters for 2012, along with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. In a recent Pew survey, she had the strongest favorable-unfavorable numbers of the likely candidates among Republicans.
She has fervent supporters, which would presumably help her in primaries and caucuses. Among the general public, she has a not-great but not-unmanageable 45-44 favorability rating.
Will her poll numbers fall because she has opted to step down early from the Alaska governorship? Perhaps. But the short-term effect of that decision will soon be swamped by judgments people make as they see her out and about, speaking and opining on the issues of the day.
— William Kristol, Washinton Post
What can you say about a public official who ridicules those who would take the “quitter’s way out” — as she faces reporters to announce that she’s quitting? A governor who claims that “the worthless, easy path” would be to serve out the remaining 18 months of her term? An ambitious politician who says that “life is too short” to worry about, you know, boring things such as responsibility or duty?
You can say that all of us who ever took Sarah Palin seriously — or pretended to take her seriously — should be deeply ashamed. And you can say that John McCain should publicly apologize for putting the nation he loves at risk by choosing Palin as his running mate.
The reasons she gave for stepping down are not just contrived or implausible but literally nonsensical. But I’m stating the obvious. The thing is, Palin’s unsuitability for high public office has been obvious all along. Tina Fey got it right; the rest of us were far too reluctant to state plainly that the emperor, or empress, has no clothes.
— Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
The parents of Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., gave $96,000 last year to the staffer who was his mistress and to her family, supposedly “out of concern for the well-being of longtime family friends during a difficult time.” The payments roughly coincide with the resignation of the staffer and her husband, who has Ensign’s chief of staff, the Washington Post reported. Ensign had denied that he provided any severance payments or other financial assistance for the couple _ which, I guess, is technically true.
The saga of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has inspired a rewriting of “Casey at the Bat,” which concludes:
“A hundred eyes were on him as he fumbled with his thoughts,
“They watched him struggle with the trouble his actions had done wrought;
“He labored more of other women of whom he shared some wine,
“Though quickly added he hadn’t crossed the forbidden line.”
“Oh somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
“The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
“And somewhere men are laughing, and little children shout,
“But there’s no joy in Charleston—mighty Sanford has struck out.”
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has decided to resign. Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will take over on July 26, according to the Anchorage Daily News. “Once I decided not to run for re-election, I also felt that to embrace the conventional ‘lame duck’ status in this particular climate would just be another dose of ‘politics as usual,’ something I campaigned against and will always oppose,” Palin said at a news conference in Wasilla. “It is my duty to always protect our great state. With that in mind, my family and I determined that it is best to make a difference this summer, and I am willing to change things, so that this administration, with its positive agenda, its accomplishments, and its successful road to an incredible future, can continue without interruption and with great administrative and legislative success.”
What’s next? “I look forward to helping others — to fight for our state and our country, and campaign for those who believe in smaller government, free enterprise, strong national security, support for our troops and energy independence.”
If this is her way of building up her executive experience and reform record toward a 2012 presidential run, it’s a funny way to do it. “We’ve seen a lot of nutty behavior from governors and Republican leaders in the last three months, but this one is at the top of that,” GOP strategist John Weaver said. Then again, there is nothing conventional about Palin.
Pressure is mounting on South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to resign after he admitted this week that he “crossed the lines” with several other women, though he said he never had sex with them. “A lot of us are talking to him behind the scenes in hopes that he’ll make the right decision about what needs to be done,” Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said today. Sanford says he is trying to reconcile with his wife, but that could be difficult given that he told Associated Press he still loves Maria Belen Chapur, the Argentine woman Sanford called his “soul mate.”
The uproar over David Letterman’s unfunny joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter demonstrated that even a deft comedian gets his timing wrong. According to the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs, the late-night tally of jokes about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy included, as of mid-March: Conan O’Brien, 20; Jay Leno, 15; Letterman, eight; Jon Stewart, four. Some were twofers, joking about the sexual activity of John Edwards and pro hockey players. “Saturday Night Live” even did a joke about incest — just a few weeks before Sarah Palin was a guest on the show. Letterman didn’t help himself by getting his teenage Palins confused in the latest joke. But “why did this one draw such a reaction?” asked Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Michael Smerconish. “Letterman’s timing was waaaay off.”
