Since our update yesterday, it has come to light that the dealerships that dodged (sorry, couldn’t resist) Chrysler’s silver bullet have circled their wagons minivans and are doing their fair share of PR work for the government-controlled reorganization of what was once the country’s third largest automaker.

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Gov. Sarah Palin’s promised op-ed has finally been published by the Anchorage Daily News. In the opinion piece, the governor gives a federalist explanation of why she vetoed $28.6 million of the Obama administration’s stimulus funds:

“My record is clear. I support conserving energy through weatherization and I’m an advocate for harnessing renewable sources of energy. But conditions here required more ‘big brother’ government involvement than most Alaskans want and the new [universal energy building] codes could cost Alaskans thousands of dollars per new home and renovation.”

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Since we last checked in, here are the latest developments in the rope line of strange occurrences Doug Ross has dubbed Dealergate (Some bloggers prefer Mopargate, but many non-motorheads won’t get it. Dealergate it is).

In another of the many pesky coincidences to be found in this story, car czar Steven Rattner, the real head of President Obama’s auto task force, is married to Maureen White, a former fundraising chair for the Democratic National Committee. Need dealer donor data? No problem…

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Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago held a press conference just moments ago and announced an 11-count indictment against Windy City Alderman Ike Carothers, who chairs the City Council’s police and fire committee. Carothers and a real estate developer are facing federal fraud and bribery charges.

Fitzgerald’s indictment alleges that the alderman received $40,000 worth of home improvements from the developer, plus meals and tickets to sports events in return for supporting the rezoning of an industrial site on Chicago’s West Side.

Now let’s all play, “Name That Political Party” (Hint: It’s *not* the GOP).

- JP

On May 20, the Anchorage Daily News ran a story with the headline: “Is Obama closing the Soldotna dealership?”

Staff writer Sean Cockerman in Anchorage wrote the following:

Gov. Sarah Palin’s new statement criticizing Barack Obama blames the president for the closure of a Soldotna car dealership.

But the dealership tells me it’s not closing.

Here’s the relevant part of the statement Palin put out through SarahPAC.

“Today, we learned that Obama’s decisions continue to impact Alaskans; while we as taxpayers now own General Motors, Obama closes another dealership – this time in Soldotna as more of Alaskans’ hard-earned money and jobs are lost to big government.”

Eric Dondero interviewed the Hutchings brothers for RedState.com, and got a different story from what the Anchorage Daily News was asserting.

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The investigation into how the apparent redistribution of Chrysler dealer franchises we reported on here and here continues. Joey Smith, Gateway Pundit, Reboot Congress and Libertarian Republican are just some of the new media warriors on the case. What the intrepid bloggers are sifting through is the toxic fallout from the Obama administration’s journey to the dark side of corporatist policy – economic fascism:

From an economic perspective, fascism meant (and means) an interventionist industrial policy, mercantilism, protectionism, and an ideology that makes the individual subservient to the state. “Ask not what the State can do for you, but what you can do for the State” is an apt description of the economic philosophy of fascism.

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Way back in the 1960s, Chrysler Corporation had a very successful ad campaign for its Dodge Division, portraying their Dodge dealers as “the good guys in the white hats.” Some ongoing research about the way the closings of Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep dealerships are being handled indicates that the Obama administration might think that some of the “good guys” are much better than others.

Since Doug Ross reported that many of the dealers on the list of Chrysler outlets to be closed were donors mostly to Republicans, attention has now been focused on the list of dealerships which are slated to remain open. Some preliminary findings, as well as related news, have bombshell potential.

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Is the Obama administration punishing Chrysler dealers for their politics? A preliminary analysis by Doug Ross suggests that could be the case.

There were too many things about the selection of dealerships to be closed that just didn’t add up. Some of the dealers chosen to be terminated were among the more successful outlets in the Chrysler dealership network, and many of them had been loyal Chrysler and Dodge agents who had maintained an excellent working relationship with the Detroit automaker for decades.

Some dealers who got a thumbs down from Obama’s automotive panel told compelling stories about their situations that raised doubts about the process of selecting them for closing. One example, a dealership in Alvin, Texas, had increased its new car sales by 50% in the first four months of 2009, while other MOPAR dealers’ sales were in the tank. Another in Melbourne, Florida, had, at Chrysler’s insistence, totally renovated its facility financed by incurring millions of dollars of debt in the form of a bank mortgage. The are just two of many stories which highlight the incongruities to be found on the list of dealerships not deemed worthy to remain in operation.

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If you’ve used put gasoline in your tank recently, you’ve noticed the per gallon price steadily rising:

The national average pump price increased nearly 3 cents overnight to $2.391 a gallon, according to auto club AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service. Gasoline prices ticked higher every day this month.

A good part of the reason for the escalation is seasonal in nature. Pump prices always rise just before the Memorial Day weekend which marks the start of the summer “driving season.”

But there’s more to it than that. Various factors are at play, including recent refinery fires, optimism in the equities markets and the strength of the dollar. A new report from the U.S. Energy Department on Wednesday said crude-oil stockpiles dropped by 2.1 million barrels for the week that ended Friday. One factor keeping prices lower was the glut of oil sitting in storage tanks around the nation. As those supplies get drained down, we should expect to see gasoline above two dollars for quite a while.

With oil above $60 per barrel and climbing, the oil companies are talking about ramping up exploration and production activities again. Once the price moves into the $70 to $80 range, they move beyond just talking and start doing. But they will be looking for and extracting oil in pretty much the same places where they left off when oil prices dropped through the floor.

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The daughters of two famous Republican politicians have been getting some serious face time in the media lately. Meghan McCain has a head start, thanks to her blog, her father’s campaign for the presidency last year and a set of beliefs which the Obama-loving drive-by media finds very close to their own. So she has been given a wealth of video footage and column inches to get out her message that even her father’s GOP is still not sufficiently Democrat Lite to successfully suck up to the generation she assumes to speak for.

McCain The Daughter has gotten so much media exposure that she’s starting to wear thin, even on the mellow nerves of crunchy cons, conservatives who are okay with some of the ways of liberalism. Meghan’s ways, especially her attitudes about sex, are not those aspects of liberalism that the crunchies are comfortable with. Rod Dreher, in his latest BeliefNet post, calls her “moronic” and “a useful idiot for the media left.”

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From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, an AP report that Congress has voted to allow licensed gun owners to carry loaded firearms in national parks and wildlife refuges. The bill easily passed Wednesday in the House by a vote 279-147. On Tuesday, the Senate passed a similar measure.

The House and Senate votes mark a return to Bush administration policy that briefly allowed loaded guns in national parks before being set aside by a federal judge in March. The measure was included as a rider on a bill which imposes additional restrictions on credit-card companies. The newly-restored right to carry in national parks and wildlife refuges only applies where it is also permitted by state law.

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The Obamobile is coming to a dealer showroom near you. Well, it may not actually be that near to you, now that GM (Government Motors) and CFUG (Chrysler-FIAT-UAW-Government) are throwing so many of their dealers under the bus. Say, this is a hybrid bus, isn’t it, citizen? But I digress. It’s only those in rural areas clinging to their guns and bibles who will have to drive to another town to find a dealer. But that’s their problem, citizen. The  former Big Three Detroit automakers are now right where they deserve to be – under the thumb of The One who says, “I won!”

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It seems like the announcement came out of nowhere this weekend:

Governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. will resign and accept an appointment as ambassador to China, ABC 4 has confirmed.

The official announcement came during a press conference held by President Obama Saturday morning at the White House in the Diplomatic Room.

President Obama asked the people of Utah to forgive him for taking their
Governor but called the China ambassadorship a job, “as important as any
in the world.”

Governor Huntsman said Saturday that he wasn’t looking for a new job,
but “When the President of the United States asks you to step up and serve in a capacity like this, that to me is the end of the conversation.”

The reaction by many shocked political junkies was, “What?” The reaction by most others was, “Who?” Huntsman had very little name recognition before the president’s announcement, but his name had surfaced in various places in the past few weeks.

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In a column for Townhall.com, The Quayling of Sarah, David R. Stokes lays out the strategy being used by the Democrats and their Vichy Republican fellow travelers to shoot down former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s national political possibilities:

Any nine-year-old child or MSNBC show host (pardon the redundancy) understands that the idea is to vex and therefore hex Sarah Palin. The goal is to click repeatedly on her image and drag her into a folder marked either “too dumb to lead,” or “demonize by caricature.”

The strategy is nothing new. It has been tried in the past, without success against Ronald Reagan and more effectively against Dan Quayle (whose quixotic battle with “Murphy Brown” was doomed from the outset – he should have taken on real villians instead of television characters).  It will fail to stop Sarah Palin. She has chosen to fight not the liberal characters of “Sex in the City” but the very real evil of abortion.  And her  son Trig, born a Downs baby, is a living testament that she’s not just a weekend warrior.

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The results of new independent polls from credible opinion research houses indicate that Americans, concerned about Obama’s radical spending and abortion policies, appear to be moving to the right. The usual obligatory disclaimers: It’s only four polls. We need to see more data before we can identify any trends, if they do indeed exist. But there is reason for conservatives and right-leaning independents to find encouragement here.

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The Washington Times:

Dealers from across the country lobbied desperately on Capitol Hill on Wednesday on the eve of bankrupt Chrysler’s expected announcement that it will close 800 of its 3,200 dealerships. GM is expected to close 2,600, or 40 percent, of its 6,300 dealerships

As part of their plans to get taxpayer-funded bailouts from the Obama Administration, GM and Chrysler both had to promise to sharply reduce the number of dealerships across the country which sell their products. But this is mostly smoke and mirrors. Too many dealerships is not even one of the more serious ailments which afflict the two car makers.

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It’s a Sarah Palin Twofer for Huffington Post today. We have already debunked a distortion made by one of that website’s diarists today.

Now another diarist, Shannyn Moore, who uses her personal blog and a two-hour weekly talk show on an Anchorage radio station mostly to kick Sarah Palin around, has shown that she never lets facts get in the way of a good Palin-bashing. Moore begins her HuffPo diary today with this:

“Writing is hard. I struggle…”

Then she goes on to show that she’s not up to the task. Speculating on Gov. Palin’s recent book deal, Moore cites Alaska law on outside employment, then adds:

“I’m not an attorney, but, after reading the details of the statutes, they seem specific and unambiguous; the governor can’t be paid for other employment.”

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Susan Crile proves that Huffington Post willfully distorts any fact that can be found about Sarah Palin. In a HuffPo post about the attempted hijacking of a State of Alaska web page (See Web Page Hijack FAIL), Crile says:

“Sarah Palin’s lawyers — already busy handling the dozen legal complaints that are pending against the Alaska governor — are now doing legal battle with a website called Crackho.com.”

The Crile/HuffPo parenthetical prevarication – that there were a dozen legal comlaints pending against Gov. Palin – is easily exposed as moose manure. The post is time-stamped 05/12/09 04:40 PM. At that point in time, only five of the bogus “ethics complaints” could have reasonably be said to still be pending, nine having been disposed of with no finding that any law had been broken by the governor or her aides.

Two more of the nuisance complaints were dismissed yesterday, bringing the number of pending baseless complaints down to just three. I haven’t bothered to check whether the last two were thrown out before Crile’s post went up, given the time zone difference between Alaska and whatever cukoo clock HuffPo uses, but it doesn’t really matter. A lie is a lie. Huffington Post and its posting prevaricators have been busted yet again.

- JP

Gov. Sarah Palin has been on a “good news” roll lately, and on Tuesday, the trend continued. First, there was breaking news that she had negotiated and signed a book deal. Just hours later, the office of Alaska’s chief executive announced that yet two more ethics complaints filed against the governor have been dismissed. Gov. Palin’s office was quick to point out that the latest two actions are just part of the mounting evidence that accusations of wrongdoing by the governor lack merit and have been motivated by politics or personal animosity.

The complaints, one by Zane Henning of Wasilla, filed on November 13, and one by Anthony Martin of Talkeetna, filed on December 2, were dismissed by Michael Geraghty, an investigator for the State Personnel Board. Geraghty concluded “that the conduct asserted, if true, would not constitute violation of the ethics act.”

Out of 14 ethics complaints filed against the governor or her staff, eleven have now been resolved without any finding that the law was broken. Just three complaints are still pending:

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This just in from Politico’s Andy Barr:

Hoping to recapture the grassroots energy of last month’s “tea parties,” Republican Govs. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Rick Perry of Texas will host a tele-town hall Thursday that’s being dubbed “Tea Party 2.0.”

The Republican Governors Association said it is expecting 30,000 people to participate in the town hall, which will take place roughly one month after the much-publicized anti-tax tea party rallies held in hundreds of locations across the country on April 15, the tax filing deadline.

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