Bush pollster Matthew Dowd looks at why he thinks it’s possible - not likely, mind you, but possible - for Sarah Palin to win the White House in 2012. (H/T) Along the way he reminds us that John Kerry was one of the few challengers in memory to lose a race against an incumbent that may actually have been winnable:

Gallup polls over the past 60 years show that no president with an approval rating under 47 percent has won reelection, and no president with an approval rating above 51 percent has lost reelection. (George W. Bush’s approval rating in the weeks before the 2004 election hovered around 50 percent.) The 2012 election will be primarily about our current president and whether voters are satisfied with the country’s direction.

Who the Republican candidate is, and his or her qualifications and abilities, will matter only if Obama’s approval rating is between 47 and 51 percent going into the fall of 2012. Interestingly, in the latest Gallup poll Obama’s approval rating was at a precarious 49 percent.

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While Obama was taking a bow on his Asian Apology Tour, Quinnipiac released a new poll in which the President’s ratings also took a bow, h/t Ed Morrisey at Hot Air.

Obama’s job approval rating fell to 48 percent in the Nov. 9-16 survey of registered voters nationwide by the Hamden, Connecticut-based university, with 42 percent polled saying they disapproved of the job he is doing.

The Quinnipiac Poll also showed a drop in approval of the Presidents handling of the war in Afghanistan. Voters now “disapprove 49 - 38 percent of the President’s handling of the war there”. In October that number read 42 - 40 percent approval.

Now, don’t misread this as support for the war effort losing steam.

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I just had a terrific interview with Governor Sarah Palin this afternoon. Her new book, Going Rogue, came out today. I’d like to say we talked a lot about her book, but I did not get it until 10:00 a.m. and had family stuff to take care of. I gave it a quick thumbing through, but largely asked questions based on readers submissions via twitter etc.

Up front, I asked Governor Palin what she wanted people to take away from her book. She said policy should be a take away. She wants people to read about what she thinks should be done to get the country back on its feet and help “everyday ordinary Americans,” a group she referred to repeatedly during our time together.

We spent a lot of the conversation talking about various policy issues.

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Max Blumenthal is a wholly inconsequential individual whose sole claim to fame is being Sid Blumenthal’s boy. Like his dad, Max has gone into the business of inept Democrat hackery.

I’d generally not worry about something someone riding daddy’s coattails has done except this is a great lesson in the extent to which leftists will go to play the race card.

In this episode, the leftists, led by boy Blumenthal, are claiming Sarah Palin wrote her book, Going Rogue, with a diehard, unapologetic racist. Blumenthal paints Lynn Vincent, the lady who helped Palin with her book, racist through her association with Robert Stacey McCain. Blumenthal goes through extraordinary lengths to misreport, misconstrue, and mischaracterize McCain’s views on race to paint him a racist so Blumenthal can then jump over to Vincent to tar and feather her with McCain’s views Blumenthal made up out of thin air. (You follow all that? It’s hard to keep up with boy Blumenthal’s sleights of hand)

There’s just one problem beyond all the other problems with Sid’s kid’s made up crapola . As Ben Smith at the Politico notes, Lynn Vincent is anything but a racist.

The pastor of the San Diego megachurch Vincent attends (with Carrie Prejean, natch) is black. She’s also spent most of the last few years on a pair of inspirational books about, basically, racial reconciliation in the friendship between a rich white art dealer and a homeless black drifter, the first of them a Times bestseller. More broadly, she hails from a (large) stream of Evangelicalism that puts racial reconciliation very high on the agenda.

Try again.

Hot Air brings us word that Newsweek is declaring war on Sarah Palin. The magazine that has given up all pretense of objective news coverage and now caters to an ever shrinking Upper West Side Elite is making Palin the cover of Newsweek (PDF) with the title “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sarah?” with the subheading “she’s bad news for the GOP — and everyone else too.”

There’s just one problem.

The title comes from “The Sound of Music” and the song “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”

Maria, you see, was the hero and protagonist of the musical and, later, the movie.

And Maria was pursued by the Nazis.

Hmmmm . . . so if Palin is Maria and Newsweek is out to get her, perhaps Newsweeks’s red, black, and white masthead is appropriate.

*Sure, it was the nuns who sang the song, but the Nazis who were out to destroy her. And besides, we can’t really see Jon “God Supports Gay Marriage” Meacham as a nun.

So says Andrew Malcolm, and if true, that is probably the funniest thing that I’ve read all day*. But what Going Rogue: An American Life will have is this:

e) She settles scores with some of those brave McCain folks who as genuine teammates in battle anonymously leaked unhelpful things about her to journalists during the campaign. Ms. P helpfully provides their names.

Andrew’s one of the few mainstream journalists who cares about the Wasilla Church Burning**, so I think that we can safely assume that he’s enjoying the prospect of names being named, too.

Moe Lane

*The joke in DC is that the first thing that anybody in this town does when they see a new political memoir is out is to flip to the back and look him or herself up. Not going to happen on this one, which is perhaps cruel of the former Governor.

**Eleven months, at this point. And no, I don’t enjoy bringing this topic up: while I enjoy hate mail as much as the next person, the kind that I get when I mention this issue typically smells bad. The kind of smell you associate with public restrooms in major metropolitan train stations.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

On allegations that she requested that unofficial Jon Corzine ally Chris Daggett drop out of the New Jersey race, the former governor replied:

So, to the good people of New Jersey, please know that Daggett’s claims are false. I’ve never even suggested he should drop out of the race.

…wait for it, wait for it…

But, come to think of it…

Ouch. You want to keep playing, Daggett?

Moe Lane

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines.)

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Via her Facebook account, of course:

Mark my words - tomorrow is the game changer! Tune in to hear common sense solutions that bury the false accusations that conscientious members of Congress have no solutions to meet America’s health care challenges.

If you’re like me, shaking your head wondering why all the miscommunication between Washington and the American people who have been saying, “Please hear what we’re saying about our desire for health care reform,” then tomorrow will be a refreshing time of clarity for all.

As she notes, preview here. This will be interesting to see for two reasons; first off, as Dan Riehl notes this should provide Rep. Boehner’s address with a bit more traffic than these things usually get.  I’ll be interested to see whether or not it’ll be a significant spike, but it should be something.  Second: if you were holding out hope that former Governor Palin was going to play third-party advocate… you might as well stop.  This is her way of saying that NY-23 is a special case, not a general one; and that she’s still in, and in with, the GOP.

[Insert tired, yet labored Halloween cliche here.]

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Sarah Palin is giving a big endorsement. She’s out swinging for Doug Hoffman, noting he is not a tool of the establishment.

The big loser here is Tim Pawlenty. At the first of this month, he made a great deal out of his new leadership PAC. He made great hay out of going out for real conservatives and not just the same old, same old.

Today there is this:

“You know I haven’t been following that, I haven’t studied the race at all,” he said. “It’s not that I would or wouldn’t, I just don’t know anything about it. I haven’t taken the time to study their positions, their records, so I haven’t taken a position on it.”

That is disappointing and further bolsters the Pawlenty stereotype as milquetoast establishment.

(Via Hot Air) The Democrats in this Politico piece about former Gov. Palin and the VA/NJ races are spouting nonsense about her long term appeal*, of course - they’re aware as I am that she’s going to be very much in demand in Congressional races where the Democratic incumbent is holding down a seat in a district that McCain or Bush won.  Of which there are quite a few; but Democratic strategists can perhaps not be blamed for not wanting to say something along the lines of ‘Well, THAT WOMAN is going to go through all those Southern/Western Blue-on-Red districts like a buzz-saw, so you might as well get used to it.’  The people who need to hear that most will want to hear it least.

That being said, I don’t expect her to participate in the NJ gubernatorial election, although VA’s may yet still see a presence if the McDonnell campaign goes sour.  Virginia’s at best lightly purple, even now; New Jersey’s pretty definitely blue.  Christie doesn’t have a margin for taking chances right now.

Moe Lane

*As might be perhaps witnessed by interest in her book, which is currently at #3 on Amazon after spending over a week at #1. And that was individual pre-order.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

I posted on this three months ago - and in those three months: if there has been anything done by the current government in investigating this hate crime that would merit an update, I haven’t found it.  Somebody attempted to murder several women and children via arson, and it’s becoming depressingly clear that that person (or persons) has gotten away with it clean.

This offends me.  It should offend you.  If it doesn’t, I don’t really care what your excuse is.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

From the diaries, by Erick.

Once again, Barack Obama proves he is not fit to serve as commander-in-chief to our armed forces. In a continuing despicable act, Obama is refusing to honor WWII veterans who fought for our nation in it’s darkest hours.

From the McClatchy News Service:

WASHINGTON — In a strongly worded message to Congress outlining its priorities for a military spending bill, the Obama administration today said it disapproved of including money for pensions for 26 elderly members of the World War II-era Alaska Territorial Guard.

The Guardsmen are among those assigned to protect Alaska from the Japanese during World War II.

….Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who along with Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, sponsored the fix [to the pensions], called the administration move “deeply disappointing, bordering on insensitive.” The legislation honors 26 elderly Native people who are the few remaining survivors of a military unit that served the country with valor, Murkowski said.

“The administration’s justification, which is that the legislation will set the precedent of treating service as a state employee as federal service, defies logic and history,” she said in a statement. “Sixty-two years after the Territorial Guard was disbanded, the Obama administration minimizes the contribution of this gallant unit to America’s success in World War II by calling its service ’state service.’ “

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I’m translating this into English, of course - but not too much; Boehner made it clear Monday that the White House was disinterested in getting anything except a rubber-stamp on health care.

Earlier this year, GOP leaders sent a letter to the president in May stating that they would like to work with the administration to find “common ground” on healthcare reform.

But the administration responded with a tersely worded letter indicating that they had healthcare reform under control.

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Former governor and VP candidate Sarah Palin wrote a pretty good op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on the health care situation - one where she points out, repeatedly, that we’re being asked to blindly fund a government program that will affect every aspect of our life and will not save us money in either the short or long term.  As Ace of Spades notes, this is not going to cover new ground for the people already intimately familiar with the debate - but for those who aren’t, it will give a good idea of conservative objections to Obamacare, not to mention providing the alternatives that the Democrats are pretending that the Republicans aren’t providing.  All in all, useful and timely.

And, as an added, special bonus, it includes the written equivalent of a smack on the nose:

Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He’s asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the president suggested that such a group, working outside of “normal political channels,” should guide decisions regarding that “huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . . .”

Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats’ proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans. Working through “normal political channels,” they made themselves heard, and as a result Congress will likely reject a wrong-headed proposal to authorize end-of-life counseling in this cost-cutting context. But the fact remains that the Democrats’ proposals would still empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death health-care matters. Such government overreaching is what we’ve come to expect from this administration.

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Not a single politically aware person does not remember John McCain’s surprise announcement of Sarah Palin as his running mate on August 29, 2008. The Democrat National Convention was wrapping up, Obama had made his grand speech, but all the political world was abuzz over the impending selection of Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty as McCain’s running mate. The surprise and expertly choreographed announcement of Sarah Palin was one of a few grand McCain campaign moments.

The conservative world, conditioned by a generation of horribly biased media now enchanted by the charismatic Obama, was braced for the media onslaught that would immediately descend on McCain’s choice, no matter who it was.

And still, we were utterly unprepared.

John Ziegler takes us through the experience, and what a year has taught us about Sarah Palin, the media, and the political landscape we now find ourselves in. Ziegler, you will recall, famously exposed in the movie Media Malpractice the true extent of media complicity in the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Previously he helped sink John Kerry’s 2008 chances by bringing to the public eye Kerry’s silly “stuck in Iraq” statement in 2006.

Read the whole thing here:

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Promoted from diaries.  And while I’d like to believe that someone was paying attention, alas… - Moe Lane

Many times commenters quickly pick up and spread the latest news on threads. Today someone at Hot Air mentioned something, that while off topic on that thread, is going to be the topic of news this weekend!

Sarah Palin has another Facebook Note up today . She goes for the jugular with this one:

President Obama’s health care "reform" plan has met with significant criticism across the country. Many Americans want change and reform in our current health care system. We recognize that while we have the greatest medical care in the world, there are major problems that we must face, especially in terms of reining in costs and allowing care to be affordable for all. However, as we have seen, current plans being pushed by the Democratic leadership represent change that may not be what we had in mind — change which poses serious ethical concerns over the government having control over our families’ health care decisions. In addition, the current plans greatly increase costs of health care, while doing lip service toward controlling costs.

We need to address a REAL bipartisan reform proposition that will have REAL impacts on costs and quality of patient care. …

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My newspaper column went up after midnight last night and already one lefty is frothing at the mouth.

What did I do? Nothing more than quote Democrats’ own words.

Oh, and I pointed out that Sarah Palin won the healthcare debate after using the phrase “death panels.”

You can check out the column here. Here’s an excerpt:

Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm Emanuel’s brother and one of Obama’s health-care advisors, wrote in a January 2009 white paper that health care should be rationed in a way that “promot[es] and reward[s] social usefulness.” He said age could play a factor in determining who can and cannot access health-care resources.

Emanuel also wrote, “[S]ervices provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens [in the body politic] are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”

Obama addressed this too, saying, “Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. … And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.”

. . . .

We will spend money we don’t have to pay for health care, or we will prioritize who gets treatment. It is an inevitable fact of life that the more the government outlays to keep you alive, the more your life becomes subject to a cost/benefit analysis.

Be sure to read the whole column and take note of the leftist crying in the comments.

Mind you, this is just from one version of the multiple health care rationing bills that the Democrats tried - and failed - to rush through Congress, but one step at a time.

The Senate Finance Committee will drop a controversial provision on consultations for end-of-life care from its proposed healthcare bill, its top Republican member said Thursday.

The committee, which has worked on putting together a bipartisan healthcare reform bill, will drop the controversial provision after it was derided by conservatives as “death panels” to encourage euthanasia.

Also, note the use of the term ‘conservatives.’ A rather odd term of art there, but if the article were to use the name ‘Sarah Palin’ it might suggest that a portion of the Democrats’ health care rationing scheme could have been neatly derailed by two Facebook posts by that woman.  Which can’t be allowed to happen at all, at all: why, the very idea is absurd!  Everybody knows that you have to graduate from an Ivy League school in order to be permitted to have any influence at all in public domestic policy debates.

Seriously.  It’s in the Constitution somewhere.  Look it up.

Moe Lane

PS: To answer Allahpundit; it’d be a potential win for the President if Gibbs had only kept his mouth shut.  In other words: no, it’s not a win for the President, too.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Yeah, that was really dumb of that Left-blogger, huh? Spreads a malicious rumor (via a CNN Trig Truther with an extremely bad track record at accurately reporting on the former Governor) that the Palins are divorcing, gets debunked pretty much immediately*, has his real name and job (not to mention his habit of attacking children) tracked down and revealed, and faster than you can say “no ‘public figure’ defense” he’s being threatened with a libel suit.

All in all, I don’t think that this was the intended result.

Not being an attorney, I don’t know whether the public figure defense does or does not apply here; but if it does go to trial, this Gryphen fellow will almost certainly lose.  I am given to understand that judges tend not to be sympathetic to people who lose libel cases when it comes to determining who pays for court costs - but if the Online Left wants to keep subsidizing the Palins’ legal team’s administration of some long-overdue negative feedback to the misogynistic crew currently obsessing over that woman: well, I guess that it’s just going to happen, that’s all.

Karma.  It’s what’s for dinner.

Moe Lane

*This is apparently a real quote:

“Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd? I may be just a renegade hockey mom, but I’m not blind!”

Crossposted to Moe Lane.