Attendants of this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) heard many topics of contention raised, like transgender rights or tech companies. And also, oddly enough, Alaska's U.S. House race.
In 2020, Alaskan voters approved a new electoral process in which every candidate of any party runs in the same primary, and the four with the most votes advance to the general election. On that ballot, voters rank the candidates in order of preference; if no candidate gets a majority, the lowest performer is eliminated, and their ballots are recounted with the second choices counted first, and so on until one candidate receives a majority. This process is called ranked choice voting (RCV).
After the March 2022 death of Rep. Don Young (R–Alaska), the state held a special election to fill his seat. Sarah Palin, the state's erstwhile Republican governor, was one of more than four dozen candidates competing for the seat. Despite getting a comfortable plurality of the first round's votes, she ultimately lost to Democrat Mary Peltola once all second- and third-choices were counted. The same dynamic played out again for the November general election and Peltola won reelection to a full term.
Last week, Palin traveled to the greater D.C. area to attend CPAC—not as an invited speaker but to inveigh against the voting system she blames for her loss.
Two booths dotted CPAC's event space, one for StopRCV.com, an anti-ranked choice organization, and another from a group calling itself "Alaskans for Honest Elections," dedicated to repealing the 2020 ballot measure. Art Mathias, the latter group's leader, told Insider that Palin was its national spokesperson.
Mathias further said that the system caused intra-party conflict between Palin and fellow Republican candidate Nick Begich III, and that under a traditional electoral system, Palin "would have easily won." At last year's CPAC Texas, Palin herself told the crowd about ranked choice, "It's bizarre, it's convoluted, it's confusing and it results in voter suppression," explaining that "it results in a lack of voter enthusiasm because it's so weird."
Earlier this year, Ryan Williamson, a resident fellow at the R Street Institute, a free market and limited government think tank, published a report evaluating how Alaska's electoral system performed in 2022. Despite Palin's and Mathias's scaremongering, Williamson's report found that "races in the state became more civil and competitive overall," and "despite it being a major change in process, the top-four approach caused little disruption in the composition of government."
Proponents of ranked choice voting say that it leads to more representative government, as one candidate in a crowded field can't win without eventually receiving majority support, and that it lowers the incentives to run negative campaigns. Palin's race against Peltola is a perfect example, as Williamson wrote that "Peltola ran a highly
localized, Alaska-centric campaign tied to issues like fishing, whereas her main challenger, Sarah Palin, appealed to voters through more populist, culture-war-centric issues."
Across the state, 2022 also saw more competitive races, with fewer candidates running unopposed and more candidates who won by narrow margins.
Ranked choice voting is not a panacea to the two-party system: In 2022, 90 percent of Alaskan incumbents retained their seats, only slightly below the national rate of 94 percent. But if the goal in electing a representative is to pick someone who best, you know, represents the whole of their constituency, ranked choice provides an opportunity to do just that.
"RCV leads to less divisiveness, not more," Williamson told Reason. "The new system forced candidates to appeal to a broader range of voters in order to win. That's something Peltola did well that Palin did not.
"Palin probably would have won a closed primary, but that does not mean she would have won the general. If Palin were supported by a majority of voters, then she would have won—just like the Republicans who won in the US Senate, the governorship, and a majority of both chambers of the state legislature."
The post Ranked Choice Voting Worked in Alaska. Sarah Palin Came to CPAC To Complain About It. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After Sen. Raphael Warnock (D–Ga.) defeated GOP challenger Herschel Walker this month, Georgia's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, indicated that he would propose new changes to the state's rules that could benefit not just voters but third-party candidates as well.
Currently, Georgia is one of only two states that requires runoffs for both primary and general elections if no candidate receives a majority. A 2021 law shortened the time between the general and the runoff from nine weeks to four. With only a month in which to vote and barely enough time to request, receive, and return a mailed ballot, voters in large counties contended with long lines at the polls. The state also spent millions to conduct the second election, including more than $10 million in the Atlanta metro area alone.
Speaking to The New York Times last week, Raffensperger said he would petition the state legislature with three separate proposals. One would force large counties to open more locations for voting early. Another would lower the vote total needed to avoid a runoff from 50 percent to 45.
The third proposal is the most consequential, and the most interesting. Raffensperger will also ask state lawmakers to consider switching to a ranked choice ballot for future elections.
In this system, voters rank each candidate on the ballot in order of preference. When the votes are tallied, if no candidate wins a majority, then the lowest performer is eliminated; that candidate's votes are then recounted with the voters' second choices counted first. This repeats until one candidate passes 50 percent. Proponents of ranked choice call it an "instant runoff" system, as it obviates the need to hold a runoff election at a later date.
If voters balk at the idea of a senator representing the entire state while only capturing 45 percent of the total vote, an instant runoff would be a much better option. FairVote, a nonpartisan organization that supports ranked choice voting, argued after the runoff votes were tallied that an instant runoff would do better to capture the feelings of the electorate. Between the November election and the December runoff, it noted, "total turnout dropped from 3.9 million to 3.5 million." In other words, 400,000 fewer voters turned out for the runoff, around five times what Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver received in November.
Walker and Warnock also each received fewer votes overall in the runoff than in the general. It seems illogical to claim that Warnock did not earn reelection with 1.9 million votes, but he did a month later with 1.8 million.
Ranked choice voting has its detractors. But by negating the "spoiler effect," it makes it easier for voters to vote their conscience. Voters can pick a third-party candidate; if that candidate doesn't win, then the ballot will simply be retallied with the second choice first. Voters can also choose to leave their extra spots blank. Many Alaska Republicans did exactly that this year rather than vote for Sarah Palin for U.S. House.
The post Georgia Could Be the Next State To Try Ranked Choice Voting appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For the second time in four months, Sarah Palin's attempted political comeback was foiled by voters in Alaska, who reelected Rep. Mary Peltola (D–Alaska) to the state's lone seat in the House of Representatives.
And, yes, it was the voters who picked Peltola, not the system.
Just as happened when Peltola defeated Palin in a special election during the summer, some conservatives have been quick to blame the former governor's defeat on Alaska's recently adopted open-primary/ranked choice voting system. "Ranked choice voting has once again resulted in an election outcome totally unrepresentative of Alaska sentiments, just as supporters wanted," tweeted conservative columnist Ben Domenech shortly after the results of Palin's race were announced on Wednesday night. Domenech was echoing similar complaints lodged by high-profile Republicans, like Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), who called ranked choice voting "a scam" after Palin lost to Peltola in August's special election for the same House seat.
Those complaints are mostly just partisan hackishness, the sort of excuse making that people on all sides engage in after disappointing elections. Because nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice voting are not commonly used, however, it's worth exploring and debunking these claims.
Far from being a scam or an unrepresentative voting method, ranked choice voting actually encourages voters to look beyond partisan markers and choose (or block) candidates based on their merits.
Under Alaska's new election system, all candidates compete in a single primary contest—rather than in party-specific contests—with the top four vote-getters advancing to the general election. That meant that the general election ballot for Alaska's congressional seat contained four names on Election Day, with Republican Nick Begich and Libertarian Chris Bye qualifying alongside Palin and Peltola.
In the general election, ranked choice voting is used to determine the winner. That means that every voter ranks their choices from one through four. As the votes are counted, there is an "instant runoff" in which votes cast for losing candidates are reallocated to reflect the ranks assigned by individual voters.
To see how this works in practice, let's look at Chris Bye, who finished last in the first round of vote counting. He received 4,560 first-place votes. After being eliminated, those ballots were re-distributed to the other candidates. Begich was the second choice of 1,988 Bye voters, so he received those ballots for the second round. Palin was the second choice of 1,064 Bye voters, and Peltola was the second choice for 1,038 of them.
At that point, no candidate had more than 50 percent of the total, so an additional elimination was necessary. Despite getting a plurality of Bye's votes, Begich was still in third place, so he was eliminated and his votes were reallocated to Palin and Peltola. Voters who had picked Begich as their first choice had their ballots distributed to their second-place choice (unless the second-place choice was Bye), while Bye voters who'd picked Begich second had their votes redistributed to whomever they'd picked as their third choice.
As you might expect since both were Republicans, a majority of Begich's ballots ended up in Palin's pile. But not all of them, and the Begich-to-Peltola pipeline was enough to push the Democratic incumbent over the 50 percent threshold.
Now, here's where the partisan hacks get their boxers in a bind. They look at the first-round totals, see that most Alaskans picked a Republican as their top choice, and conclude that a Republican must therefore represent the state in Congress.
And, of course, that might have been the result if the election was held with single-party primaries and then a single Republican vs. a single Democrat in the general election, as happens in most places in America. But just because that system is more widely used doesn't mean it is more representative, more fair, or more legitimate. Indeed, the chief problem with the more traditional election system is that it forces voters to hold their noses and pick between two bad options. Parties love that, because it means less competition, but the result is a lot of zero-sum politicking and bad policies. And it gives outsized political power to primary election voters, allowing fringe candidates to win power without being broadly endorsed by the general electorate.
Which brings us back to Palin. As in August, she lost because not enough Alaskan voters picked her to represent them in Congress. It's really as simple as that. Ranked choice voting rewards candidates who are viewed as being acceptable even if not ideal by the majority of voters. Palin, for the second time in a handful of months, failed that test.
There are no broader conclusions to be drawn here. Alaska's system doesn't disadvantage Republicans. In fact, in other races, it helped them!
In the state House, Republicans had the lead in just 19 of the 40 districts after the first round of votes were counted earlier this month. After the "instant runoffs" were completed, however, GOP candidates had come from behind to win two additional districts—enough to give Republicans a slim majority in the chamber.
Republicans can also thank ranked choice voting for helping the party hold a crucial seat in the U.S. Senate. In a traditional party-primary system, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska) likely would have been ousted by her Trump-backed challenger, Kelly Tshibaka. Given how other Trump-backed Senate candidates performed in the general election, it's worth wondering whether Tshibaka would have been able to hold the state. Instead, Murkowski narrowly won reelection, in part because she was the preferred second choice of voters who'd initially backed Democratic candidate Pat Chesbro.
Once again, the system rewarded a candidate who was seen as an acceptable alternative. Or, if you like, it punished a candidate who was seen as unacceptable—although Murkowski had narrowly defeated Tshibaka in the first round of voting as well.
This is exactly what the combination of open primaries and ranked choice voting is supposed to do. It encourages voters to express nuanced opinions about individual candidates rather than asking them to blindly mash the "R" or "D" button after being fueled up with months of campaign rage porn. It turns elections into less of a political Super Bowl and more of an actual attempt to gauge the desires of the voting public and triangulate representation around those interests.
"There's every reason to think the wins for Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Mary Peltola reflect Alaska voters' well-considered preferences," tweeted Walter Olson, a senior fellow for constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Ranked choice voting and the universal primary with which it's paired in Alaska performed as one would want them to. More, please."
No election system is going to be perfect all the time, of course. Each will have its own weird wrinkles and produce the occasional unusual result—and ongoing tweaks to produce even more representative outcomes should be considered
But the one thing that absolutely should not happen is judging the merits of different systems based on which party wins. And if Republicans are unhappy about this outcome, then maybe they should run better candidates next time.
The post In Alaska, Ranked Choice Voting Worked appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a stunning upset last week, Democrat Mary Peltola defeated former Republican Gov. Sarah Palin in a special election for Alaska's sole congressional district. The race garnered a lot of attention for its use of ranked choice voting. In 2020, Alaskans approved the new system, which allows voters to rank each candidate by preference. If no candidate wins an outright majority, then the lowest-performing candidate is eliminated and his or her voters' ballots are tallied again, with the second choices counted first instead. This repeats until a candidate passes 50 percent.
After the first ballot, Palin trailed Peltola 40–31, with Nick Begich III in third with 29 percent. After Begich was eliminated and his ballots were re-tallied, Peltola prevailed over Palin 51–49.
In the days after Palin's loss, prominent conservatives and Republicans criticized the new system for contributing to her defeat. After the results were announced, Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) tweeted, "Ranked-choice voting is a scam to rig elections." (Previously, he has referred to it as a "radical scheme.") Palin herself called the system an "experiment" that's "crazy, convoluted," and "confusing." In National Review, Jim Geraghty termed it "a legitimate electoral system…that doesn't make sense."
But it's not ranked choice voting's fault; Palin was simply a bad candidate.
Geraghty complained that ranked choice voting was "more complicated" than "the familiar 'first past the post' system," that "the Democrats came out the big winner, even though their candidate finished fourth in the first round of voting." This is true, though the third-place finalist, Al Gross, withdrew from the race after the June primary and encouraged his voters to support Peltola.
Cotton complained that even though "60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican…a Democrat 'won.'" This is also true, though notably they did not all vote for the same Republican. Begich and Palin collectively accounted for 59.8 percent of the first-round vote, but only about half of Begich's voters chose Palin as their second choice; nearly 30 percent picked Peltola, while 21 percent did not choose a second or third choice.
Under a traditional primary system, Palin likely would have beaten Begich in a Republican primary and faced Peltola one-on-one. But Begich's voters would not necessarily have then turned out for Palin—in fact, they had the opportunity to do so on the ranked-choice ballot, and more than half chose not to. Far from being some radically convoluted "scheme," the most direct effect of ranked choice voting is to serve as an "instant runoff" by letting voters indicate which candidates they would prefer if their first or second choice didn't win.
Many of these complaints elide Palin's actual quality as a candidate. Many Alaskan Republicans were skeptical of her, as was reported by The Washington Post in April when she filed to run. Throughout the campaign, Palin criticized the ranked choice voting system, telling the crowd at last month's Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas, "It's bizarre, it's convoluted, it's confusing and it results in voter suppression…It results in a lack of voter enthusiasm because it's so weird." But as Geraghty noted, 85 percent of Alaskan voters polled by Alaskans for Better Elections found the new system either "somewhat simple" or "very simple."
Ranked choice voting is not a "scheme to rig our elections" by "out-of-state liberal billionaires," as Cotton has alleged. But as Geraghty correctly pointed out, it is also not a panacea for every issue in the current political duopoly. It is merely an alternative that gives voters more options than simply one Republican versus one Democrat. And as with any electoral system, a candidate still needs to convince voters to turn out for them.
The post Don't Blame Ranked Choice Voting. Sarah Palin Was a Bad Candidate. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Wednesday, more than two weeks after Alaskans went to the polls, results finally came in the race for Alaska's sole congressional seat: In an upset, former state Rep. Mary Peltola has defeated two opponents with better funding and name recognition to become the next member of Congress from the state. She will be the first Democrat elected to that seat in nearly 50 years, and only the third Democrat since Alaska became a state. She is also the first Native Alaskan to represent the state in Congress.
Rep. Don Young (R–Alaska) was first elected in 1972, and held the seat continuously until his death in March. In a special election to serve out the rest of Young's term, Peltola faced two Republicans: former Gov. Sarah Palin and Nick Begich, grandson of Young's predecessor.
This was the first election cycle since Alaska switched to a new voting system using ranked choice voting on the general election ballot. Instead of selecting a single candidate, voters rank candidates by preference; if no candidate wins an outright majority, then the lowest performer is eliminated, and that candidate's votes are tallied again with their second choice counted first.
Peltola won the first round of voting, but Palin's and Begich's combined vote shares totaled nearly 60 percent. One might assume that once Begich, the lower performer, was eliminated, his votes would simply be re-allocated to Palin, who would win.
Instead, only half of Begich's voters picked Palin as their second choice: Nearly three out of ten chose Peltola second, and another 21 percent did not choose any other candidate. After all second choices were counted, Peltola prevailed over Palin, 52-49.
Palin is unpopular in the state, and criticized ranked choice voting during her campaign. After the results were announced, Palin blamed the new voting system and said that Begich should have simply bowed out.
Given Palin's unpopularity, it's entirely possible that she would have lost in a head-to-head match-up against Peltola anyway. But with ranked choice voting, voters are freed up to vote their conscience, rather than whoever they think is most electable, without having to worry about voting for a "spoiler" candidate.
Notably, ranked choice was not the reason it took so long to tally the votes. The sparsely-populated state accepts mail-in ballots up to 10 days after election day, as long as they are postmarked in time.
In a statement after the results were announced, FairVote, a nonprofit which supports ranked choice voting, highlighted a poll showing that 62 percent of Alaskan voters approved of the new system, while 85 percent found it easy to figure out.
Peltola will serve out the rest of Young's term, which will end in January. She is also running on November's ballot to serve in the seat in the next term.
The post Alaska Elected a Democrat to Congress for the First Time in 50 Years appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Tuesday, Alaskans voted in their first regularly-scheduled primary since overhauling the state's election rules. Results will not be finalized until the end of August, but the new system is already shaking things up.
In 2020, voters approved Alaska Ballot Measure 2, which threw out the traditional party primaries, in which each political party's registered voters select a single candidate, and one person from each party competes in a general election in November. In its place, Alaskans vote on the same primary ballot, selecting from a list of every single candidate running. The four candidates with the most votes, regardless of party affiliation, all advance to the general election in November.
Then, voters choose among the final four using ranked choice voting, ranking each candidate by preference. If one candidate gets a majority of the first-choice votes, then the election is over; if not, the candidate with the least first-place votes is eliminated, and every ballot that chose the last-place finisher is recounted with the second choice counted first. This continues until one candidate has a majority of first-place votes.
Ranked choice voting obviates the need for runoff elections since voters list their second and third choices on the first and only ballot they cast. But ranked choice can also help third parties and non-traditional candidates gain traction by allowing voters to vote for longshots they align with in addition to the least objectionable major-party candidate.
Tuesday's results demonstrate how such a system can work.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican running for her fourth term in the Senate, will advance to the general election in the fall. In a traditional election, Murkowski would have competed against the seven other Republicans running, most prominently Kelly Tshibaka, a former state official whom former President Donald Trump endorsed more than a year ago. Under the new system, though, Murkowski competed in a field of 19 candidates. Her competition included what would've been her normal Republican primary opponents, as well as all the Democrats running for Senate, a Libertarian, and others.
Preliminary results currently have Murkowski ahead of Tshibaka by about three percentage points. But there is evidence to suggest that Murkowski was helped by Alaska Democrats crossing party lines to pick her, and that in a closed Republican primary, she would have lost outright.
Last month, an Alaska Survey Research poll found that Tshibaka would win on a first-round ballot, 43-35; traditionally, that would be the end of Murkowski's Senate career. But under the new system, the votes would then continue to a second and a third round of counting, at which point Murkowski would pick up enough second- and third-choice votes to win outright, 52-48.
Meanwhile, the same process may deny former Gov. Sarah Palin a seat in the U.S. House.
After Rep. Don Young's death, Alaska held a special election primary in June to choose who would serve out the remainder of his term in the state's only House seat. Palin was one of the four candidates chosen to compete Tuesday for Young's seat, though one other finalist, independent Dan Gross, withdrew after coming in third.
Palin dominated the June vote, garnering 27 percent out of 48 candidates. But with nearly 70 percent of Tuesday's votes counted, Palin is trailing Democrat Mary Peltola by more than five points, 37-32. Nick Begich III, scion of a prominent Alaskan political family, trails with 28 percent. With nearly a third of votes still outstanding and no majority winner so far, the most immediate question will be whether Begich ultimately surpasses Palin, or whether he is eliminated in the second round of tallying.
Conventional wisdom would dictate that in a largely-Republican state, with two Republicans and a Democrat on the ballot, Palin and Begich simply split the Republican vote, and whichever of them survives will simply pick up enough votes to easily defeat Peltola.
But late-July polling showed that if Begich lost, his second-choice votes would be split evenly between Palin and Peltola. In that event, Peltola would become the first Democrat elected to statewide office in Alaska since Begich's uncle in 2008.
Supporters often credit ranked choice voting with giving a voice to third-party or nontraditional candidates. But as Reason's Scott Shackford wrote after Alaska first approved the new system, it can also "change…results if voters are too lukewarm on a frontrunner." Given Palin's unpopularity among Alaskans, that may be exactly what happened.
The post Lisa Murkowski Survives, Sarah Palin Struggles Under Alaska's New Voting System appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Alaska held a special election Saturday to fill the state's only seat in the House of Representatives. The office has been vacant since March, when Rep. Don Young passed away at age 88. Young, a Republican, had held the seat since 1973, less than 15 years after Alaska achieved statehood. While June 11 was the designated date of the election, the vote is being conducted primarily by mail. Ballots postmarked by that date will be accepted until June 21.
This is the first election since the state adopted entirely new voting rules in 2020. While the new methods themselves are not new, the particulars of Alaska's new system are novel, and could signal a creative way to shake up the two-party system.
Traditionally, each political party runs a primary to pick a candidate; then, each party's candidates compete in a general election in November. But Alaska now eschews party primaries, and all candidates run on a single ballot. Voters each choose a single candidate, and the top four candidates advance to the general election. (Since this is a special election, the final four will compete in August. The state will also hold its traditional primary the same day, before a general election in November.)
On Saturday's ballots, Alaskans chose from 48 candidates, some of them registered party members and others of "undeclared" party status. The most prominent is Sarah Palin, the former governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate. Despite not holding, or even seeking, elected office since resigning the governorship more than a decade ago, Palin had already advanced to the final ballot Sunday with 30 percent of the vote in an initial count.
Among the other candidates are Nick Begich III, member of a prominent Alaskan political family and the grandson of Don Young's immediate predecessor; and Santa Claus, a white-bearded, septuagenarian democratic socialist who legally changed his name in 2004 and serves on the city council of North Pole, Alaska. Begich is currently in second place and likely to advance. Claus is likely to be shunted back to North Pole, although ballots will still be received and counted until next week.
On the general election ballot, voters will select among the four final candidates using ranked choice voting (RCV), numbering them in order of preference. If a candidate receives a majority of votes as first choice, then that person wins outright. But if nobody receives a majority, then the lowest-performing candidate is eliminated, and every ballot with that candidate ranked first is recounted with its second choice as if it were the first. This continues until a majority winner is reached. Alaska is the second state to switch to RCV, although some states allow it in local races.
Ranked choice allows multiple candidates to run for a single seat but without having to go to the trouble of holding runoffs. It also broadens the bench beyond the traditional top two, as all candidates—including third-party candidates—compete on a level playing field. RCV allows voters to truly "vote their conscience," without worrying about whether their top choice will play spoiler.
Maine is the only state to have used RCV statewide, and there it has already shaken things up by electing a candidate who would otherwise have lost.
It seems extremely unlikely that any other candidate will be able to top Palin's name recognition (or, failing that, Begich's). But Alaska's unique new system could prove interesting, and useful, for less conventional candidates in the future.
The post Sarah Palin, Santa Claus Among 48 Candidates for Alaska's Open House Seat appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Defamation trial could have ramifications far beyond this specific case. Sarah Palin is suing The New York Times for alleged defamation. The case—which went to trial beginning yesterday—stems from a 2017 editorial published by the Times, in which the paper accused the former Alaska governor's rhetoric of being responsible for the 2011 shooting that injured former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D–Ariz.) and killed six others.
"There was no link established between Governor Palin and that shooting," Shane Vogt, Palin's attorney, said during opening arguments yesterday. "There was no link that demonstrated that Palin was responsible for the death of six people."
Published in the wake of a Virginia shooting that left Rep. Steve Scalise (R–La.) badly injured, the op-ed originally suggested that Palin had contributed to making Giffords a target back in 2011 because a Facebook post from her political action committee (PAC) showed Giffords under crosshairs. The next day, the Times added two corrections to the editorial, saying that the image had shown Giffords' district—not Giffords herself—under crosshairs and that there was no established link between Palin's PAC's post and the crimes carried out by shooter Jared Loughner.
Palin filed a defamation lawsuit against the Times and former editorial page director James Bennet, who added the Palin line to the article.
Will Palin succeed? Legal experts say that it's unlikely. Even Palin's lawyer, in his opening statement, admitted that they were "fighting an uphill battle."
Defamation requires several conditions to be met. To be found defamatory, a statement must be false but alleged as a fact, published or communicated to a third person, and damaging or harmful to the defamed party. A plaintiff must also show that the subject of a defamation suit is at fault, which requires a finding that they were at least negligent.
In addition, the Supreme Court has held—in the 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan—that when statements involve a public figure, they must have been made with "actual malice"—that is, "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." When it comes to determining that actual malice was present, "clear and convincing" evidence—not just a "preponderance of evidence"—must show this to be true.
Since Palin is a public figure, the actual malice standard must apply here.
Palin's team argues that Bennet and the Times intentionally published misinformation about her out of bias against her and/or Republicans more broadly.
"Those prompt corrections and an apology the Times posted on Twitter seem to undercut Palin's claims," notes Politico. "The Times's swift correction of its mistake strongly suggests there was no reckless disregard for the truth, just sloppy editing and poor judgment," agrees Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan.
The facts also undercut the idea that they were motivated by anti-GOP animosity, suggested Times attorney David Axelrod in court yesterday. The op-ed—which called the Scalise attack "evidence of how vicious American politics has become"—commended former President Donald Trump for his words after that shooting and noted that the shooter in this case was a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) "Bennet and the [editorial] board were especially conscious of not writing a one-sided piece.…The goal was to hold both political parties accountable," Axelrod said.
"The piece of journalism at the center of this dispute was a mess by any standard," commented Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple back in 2019. But was it malicious? That's a tougher call.
The bigger picture. A growing chorus has been insisting that the legal standard set forth in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is outdated and needs to be updated.
This case reopens this thorny First Amendment question. As such, it could be "a pivotal moment in press freedom in the United States," writes
"Defenders of the [Sullivan] decision argue that [the actual malice standard] is a good thing, because it prevents politicians and celebrities from using libel lawsuits to punish media organizations that publish critical stories about them. For many decades, this was the consensus view, and it probably still is," notes Lakier. "But over the past few years, a growing number of scholars, judges and politicians have argued that the Sullivan rule does more harm than good, by removing any incentive for journalists and other public speakers to be careful with the truth."
So, while the stakes in this case are "relatively low" for The New York Times, "the stakes for what it means for defamation law are huge," as Business Insider legal correspondent Jacob Shamsian put it.
But whether SCOTUS would actually take up the case is another matter. Here's UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh writing on the issue back in late 2020. "Palin's lawyers have argued that the 'actual malice' test should be overruled or at least sharply limited, and in principle the Supreme Court could agree with them, after the decision at trial and then an appeal to the Second Circuit," wrote Volokh. "In practice, it's very unlikely that the Court would grant review in this case, and I don't see much appetite on the Court for overruling New York Times v. Sullivan."
Under the guise of purging "pornography," thousands of books on race and sexuality have been pulled from library shelves in Texas over the past few months.
'Pornography' isn't a defined category of content. It's anything they want to ban.
https://t.co/Or2PYSJURX via @nbcnews
— Mike Stabile (@mikestabile) February 3, 2022
Been seeing a lot of governors crediting their mask mandates for "defeating" the Omicron wave. Thought I'd plot COVID cases in states with mask mandates vs. states without them, and, well… pic.twitter.com/WdhsyCINjp
— Eric (@The_OtherET) February 3, 2022
Rather pleased with this map ???? pic.twitter.com/YEIamgYb3z
— Erin (@erindataviz) February 2, 2022
• The National Butterfly Center in Texas is shutting down indefinitely in the face of harassment and conspiracy theories related to child trafficking.
• Washington, D.C., cops are accused in a new lawsuit of keeping a FOIA "watch list" of journalists, activists, and known critics of the D.C. government, whose records requests would intentionally be discouraged, delayed, or denied. The department has denied the allegation.
• Shroom legalization may be up for a vote in Michigan. "Activists in Michigan are launching a ballot initiative that would legalize using, growing and possessing psychedelic plants," MLive.com reports.
• Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) learns what loyalty to Trump gets you.
• Jobs numbers for January are out:
The January jobs report showed a gain of 467,000 against expectations of 150,000 jobs added.
Many were thinking it could be a *negative* number after the ADP report, so to say this is a big beat on the jobs number is an understatement.
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) February 4, 2022
• "The early release of ex-Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke, convicted of killing Laquan McDonald, has enraged several civil rights groups, many of whom protested downtown Thursday evening," reports WGN9 Chicago. (Backstory on the shooting here.)
• "The American color line was…much more forgiving to European Jews than the divisions of the old country were. But they are branches of the same tree, the biological fiction of race," writes Adam Serwer, reflecting on the recent Whoopi Goldberg/Holocaust dust-up.
• Electoral map divisions could benefit Democrats: "Conventional wisdom heading into this year was that Republicans would benefit mightily from the decennial congressional line-drawing process, carving up districts and creating a decidedly friendly national map," notes CNN. "But as states rush to finish their House maps in advance of the rapidly approaching 2022 primary season, a new storyline has emerged: Democrats could well break even or possibly gain an advantage when all of the new lines are finished across the country."
The post Palin Faces 'Uphill Battle' in Proving the <i>Times</i> Defamed Her appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week a federal appeals court revived former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, which falsely accused her of complicity in the 2011 Tucson shooting that killed six people and gravely injured then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D–Ariz.). The crucial issue in the case is not the truth or falsity of that thoroughly debunked charge but the mental state of Times Editorial Page Editor James Bennet, who included the canard in a 2017 editorial. Did he make an honest mistake, or did he, because of his animus against Palin and Republicans generally, repeat the smear even though he knew or suspected it was false?
The latter interpretation bolsters Palin's case against the Times, but even the "honest mistake" theory is a mortifying indictment of the paper and the people who run it. If Bennet's editorial is not an example of casual libel masquerading as political commentary, it is at least an object lesson in the cognitive biases that lead smart people astray and feed the mindless partisanship that makes rational debate impossible.
According to the claim that Bennet repeated, a map circulated by Palin's political action committee, SarahPAC, helped incite the Tucson shooter's murderous violence by marking 20 congressional districts, including Giffords', with stylized crosshairs. Yet the map, which was part of the debate over Obamacare, plainly had nothing to do with violence. "20 House Democrats from districts we carried in 2008 voted for the health care bill," the caption said. "IT'S TIME TO TAKE A STAND."
That was obviously a call for opposing the re-election of Obamacare supporters, not for murdering them. And the idea that such run-of-the-mill politicking somehow inspired the Tucson shooter—whose politics leaned left, whose motives were mysterious, and whose behavior and ideas were weird enough to earn him a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia—was risible.
Yet in his editorial, written six years after the Tucson attack, Bennet casually revived this long-discredited idea. "In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear," he wrote. "Before the shooting, Sarah Palin's political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs." Bennet not only said the "link" between the SarahPAC map and the Tucson shooting was "clear"; he falsely claimed the map depicted Giffords and the other legislators.
The next day, the Times ran a correction acknowledging that Bennet had "incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords," when "in fact, no such link was established." It added that "the editorial also incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting."
As Palin was quick to point out, Bennet should have known that what he wrote was not true. Before joining the Times, he had served as editor of The Atlantic for a decade, a period when the magazine he oversaw ran several articles debunking the anti-Palin smear. Furthermore, a 2011 ABC News article to which he linked in the editorial explained the problems with his thesis and plainly stated that "no connection has been made between this graphic and the Arizona shooting."
During a 2017 hearing before U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who was overseeing Palin's defamation case, Bennet testified that he did not recall reading any of the articles contradicting his claim in The Atlantic, the Times, or anywhere else. He also said he did not bother to read the articles collected by the writer who composed the first draft of the editorial, including a column that said "Loughner was likely insane, with no coherent ideological agenda" and a Times editorial that said "it is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman's act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members."
Taking Bennet at his word, Rakoff dismissed Palin's suit. "What we have here," he wrote, "is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Mrs. Palin that are very rapidly corrected. Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not."
On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit unanimously disagreed:
In both the original complaint and the PAC [proposed amended complaint], Palin's overarching theory of actual malice is that Bennet had a "pre‐determined" argument he wanted to make in the editorial. Bennet's fixation on this set goal, the claim goes, led him to publish a statement about Palin that he either knew to be false, or at least was reckless as to whether it was false. The PAC contains allegations that paint a plausible picture of this actual‐malice scenario in three respects: (1) Bennet's background as an editor and political advocate provided sufficient evidence to permit a jury to find that he published the editorial with deliberate or reckless disregard for its truth, (2) the drafting and editorial process also permitted an inference of deliberate or reckless falsification, and (3) the Times' subsequent correction to the editorial did not undermine the plausibility of that inference.
The court concluded that Palin's complaint "plausibly states a claim for defamation and may proceed to full discovery." The Times may yet succeed in arguing that Bennet simply messed up. The paper's quick and embarrassing correction, along with the self-refutation contained in the ABC News article to which Bennet linked, does suggest that he did not deliberately lie, although it is still possible he was reckless enough to meet the "actual malice" standard for proving defamation of a public figure.
The most plausible explanation for this sorry episode is that Bennet vaguely remembered the alleged link between the SarahPAC map and the Tucson shooting, decided it fit the story he was trying to tell about the dangers of extreme political rhetoric, and was thereafter blind to any contrary evidence. His blindness was not necessarily willful, but that does not make it less disturbing.
To the contrary, the likelihood that Bennet sincerely believed Sarah Palin had blood on her hands dramatically illustrates the insidious power of confirmation bias to reinforce an us-versus-them mentality. If you think Republicans are the sort of people who blithely encourage violence through vicious attacks on their political opponents, you will be inclined to accept the notion that Palin is somehow responsible for the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords. And once you've accepted that bizarre theory, facts are unlikely to dislodge it, if you even notice them.
When people think this way, it is hard to take them seriously, even when they are making valid points. Fair-minded readers who know how readily James Bennet accepted a decisively discredited charge against a politician he does not like are apt to be skeptical, for instance, of New York Times editorials blaming Donald Trump for feeding the anti-immigrant bigotry that motivated the man who murdered 22 people in El Paso last weekend. Any cause-and-effect theory connecting the president's ugly rhetoric to that hideous crime is belied by the fact that the shooter's hatred of Hispanics, by his own account, predated Trump's election. But there is a serious argument to be made about the dangerous divisions on which Trump thrives; it's just not one I would trust the Times editorial page to make in a careful and intellectually honest fashion.
That situation is fine, I suppose, if opinion journalists are simply in the business of reinforcing people's prejudices. But if they are actually trying to persuade people, it's a problem.
The post Was Charging Sarah Palin With Complicity in Mass Murder an Honest Mistake? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After a congressional baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia, was interrupted by gunfire on June 14, a New York Times editorial revived the much-debunked myth that a graphic created by Sarah Palin's political action committee had something to do with the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson. Two weeks later, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate sued the Times for defamation, and yesterday a federal judge dismissed the case.
Although it seems correct as a matter of law, the decision should not be interpreted as a vindication of the Times. To the contrary, the details described in U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff's ruling highlight the journalistic malpractice, magical thinking, and blinkered tribalism that led to this stupid and embarrassing mistake.
The editorial, "America's Lethal Politics," used a violent attack on Republicans as a pretext to remind us how awful they are:
Was this attack [on Republicans at the baseball game] evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin's political action committee [SarahPAC] circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.
Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They' re right. Though there's no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right.
The Times thus managed to feign evenhandedness even while suggesting that right-wing rhetoric is more vicious than left-wing rhetoric and more clearly implicated in violence. But as the paper admitted in a correction published the next day, it was all nonsense:
An editorial on Thursday about the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established. The editorial also incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized crosshairs.
Although the editorial was inaccurate and reflected negatively on Palin, Rakoff concludes that she failed to allege facts sufficient to show that it was a product of "actual malice," the standard that applies in defamation cases involving public figures. Actual malice means the person responsible for a defamatory statement—in this case, James Bennet, the paper's editorial page editor—knew it was false or published it with "reckless disregard" as to its accuracy. In Rakoff's view, Bennet was in a rush and screwed up, which does not mean he knew or suspected that what he said was wrong.
"What we have here," Rakoff writes, "is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Mrs. Palin that are very rapidly corrected. Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not."
I think that assessment is basically right, but the direction of Bennet's negligence is telling. It seems unlikely that he would have been so quick to repeat a baseless accusation linking a Democrat to mass murder.
The purported connection between Palin and the Tucson attack was something that stuck in Bennet's mind, even though it had been repeatedly debunked in the pages of his own newspaper and in The Atlantic, which he used to edit. It stuck in his mind even though it was contradicted by the ABC News article to which the editorial linked, a fact that undermines Palin's case even while it underlines Bennet's carelessness. It stuck in his mind because he wanted to believe it, and he wanted to believe it because it was consistent with his preconceptions about nasty right-wingers.
At a hearing that Rakoff convened to clarify how the editorial had been produced, Bennet testified that he instructed Elizabeth Williamson, the editorial writer who composed the first draft, to look up the commentary that the Times had published after the Tucson shooting. Apparently he remembered that attack as motivated by right-wing ideology or hostility toward liberal Democrats, even though there was never any evidence that it was.
Bennet testified that he does not recall reading any of the articles contradicting that notion in the Times, The Atlantic, or anywhere else. Nor did he bother to read the articles he told Williamson to read, which included a column that said "Loughner was likely insane, with no coherent ideological agenda" and a Times editorial that said "it is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman's act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members." Bennet did not even dip into the ABC News article that the editorial cited, which noted that "no connection has been made between [the SarahPAC Map] and the Arizona shooting."
Bennet's ignorance on the subject did not stop him from reinforcing the nonexistent link between Palin and Loughner when he rewrote the editorial. Williamson's draft claimed the Tucson and Alexandria attacks both were motivated by "rage" that was "nurtured in a vile political climate," and it mentioned criticism of the SarahPAC map. Bennet's version said "the link to political incitement was clear" and "direct," citing the map and its banal imagery as evidence.
Bennet testified that he was surprised to hear readers had interpreted what he wrote to mean that Sarah Palin had blood on her hands. He insisted he "did not intend to imply a causal link" between the map and the Tucson shooting, which is hard to believe. By contrast, it is easy to believe that Bennet was disinclined to take even a cursory look at the empirical basis for his assertion that "political incitement" moved Loughner to murder. As far as he was concerned, that was a well-known fact.
Promoting baseless claims because they are ideologically convenient and make your enemies look bad may not be defamation. But neither is it good, or even mediocre, journalism. The best that can be said in Bennet's defense is that, like Donald Trump, he sincerely believed the nonsense he peddled.
The post Decision Dismissing Sarah Palin's Libel Suit Is an Embarrassment to the <em>Times</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When it comes to violence aimed at politicians, it turns out that Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is quick to blame "rhetoric" for gun attacks on politicians only when the perpetrator apparently disagrees with his ideology, isn't the only hypocrite and fool.
In a house editorial that is stunning in its intellectual laziness and mendacity, The New York Times manages to tie the actions of sniper James Hodgkinson not simply to today's over-the-top #NeverTrump #resistance rhetoric but to…Sarah Palin's fictitious role in the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords and a dozen other people in a Tucson parking lot. Seriously:
Was [Hodgkinson's] attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin's political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.
Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They're right. Though there's no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right.
Read the whole thing here. Since its original publication, the Times has graciously seen fit to correct itself thus:
An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established.
Where to begin? For starters, only rankly opportunistic insta-commentary by hardcore Democratic partisans—including Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who wrote "Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin" within hours of the Giffords shooting—drew a connection between Sarah Palin's innocuous fund-raising graphic and the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner. Indeed, it turned out that the madman was not a devotee of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sarah Palin, Fox News, or other right-wing media. Instead, he consumed a diet heavy on what Jesse Walker calls "New Age paranoia."
While the Times sees a "direct" "incitement" between one image from Palin and Loughner, whose online videos and history with law enforcement clearly suggested a fully deranged, psychotic personality, the Paper of Record studiously avoids pointing to Hodgkinson's public allegiance to Bernie Sanders and his violent language toward Donald Trump and the Republican Party (he joined a group that wants to "terminate" the latter). The result is similar to blaming John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas to a virulent climate of "right-wing hate," despite Lee Harvey Oswald's commitments to Cuba, the Soviet Union, and communism.
To be fair, right-wingers are pounding the table in the wake of yesterday's shooting, going so far to shout that "Rachel Maddow Has Blood on Her Hands" for calling Trump a Russian agent. Not to be outdone, Fox News' Eric Bolling called for liberals to censor themselves in the name of saving lives:
How many innocent people have to die before we realize that words do matter? Crazy people act on the crazy things they hear from politicians and celebrities. Think before you utter those blind, hateful words next time, liberals. Because there are crazy people out there taking your metaphors literally.
All of the above assumes that contemporary political speech is both somehow more virulent than ever and responsible for any actual physical violence that happens. In reality, there are no grounds for either belief. In a country where political violence is vanishingly rare, gun violence has declined precipitously despite wider circulation of guns, and mass shootings betray no clear pattern of increase, it's ridiculous to blame words for increases in violence. As important, Bernie Sanders' and other progressives' often-incendiary rhetoric toward billionaires, plutocrats, the 1 Percent or whatever is no more responsible for James Hodgkinson's shooting spree than J.D. Salinger is responsible for Mark David Chapman's killing of John Lennon.
If there is any lesson to be drawn this early from the disturbing and chilling attack that left the House Majority Whip, Rep. Steve Scalise, in critical condition, it's that immediately politicizing everything and seeking cheap, partisan gain yields no meaningful insight and further alienates the vast and growing swath of Americans who already feel a need to escape from political tribes that include fewer and fewer of us.
The post Blame the Shooter, Not the 'Rhetoric' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sarah Palin told CNN's Jake Tapper today that she believed House Speaker Paul Ryan's refusal to endorse Donald Trump once he became the presumptive Republican nominee would lead to him being "Cantored, as in Eric Cantor." She suggested Ryan's political career was over "because he has so disrespected the will of the people."
Earlier this week, Ryan told Tapper he wasn't yet ready to endorse Trump for president, although he's said he would support the Republican nominee whoever it would be. "There's some work to be done here," Ryan said.
Palin offered her own theory as to why Ryan, who has been critical of Trump a number of times, although not by name. "I think why Paul Ryan is doing this is because it screws his chances for the 2020 presidential bid that he's gunning for," Palin offered. "If the GOP was to win now, that wouldn't bode well for his chances in 2020 so that's what he's shooting for." Palin said she'd be open to being Trump's vice presidential nominee but knows she would likely harm more than help him.
A Trump spokesperson said this week that Ryan, who is also going to be chair of the Republican National Convention, shouldn't be House speaker if he was unable to endorse Trump for president. In the CNN interview, Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee and former governor of Alaska, was asked if she'd support Paul Nehlan, who is challenging Ryan in the August primary. "That's a good question, seeing as I haven't even got to call him to tell him I'm supporting him," Palin responded, "but yes, I'll do whatever I can for Paul Nehlan."
Palin said the problem with Paul Ryan and "his ilk" was that "they have become so disconnected from the people whom they are elected to represent, as evidenced by Paul Ryan's refusal to support the GOP frontrunner who we just said is our man."
In an interview on ABC's This Week, Trump said he didn't understand why Ryan didn't endorse him. "Even Governor Perry came out" and endorsed Trump wit ha "very beautiful statement," Trump noted. Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, had called Trump a "cancer" on conservatism when he was briefly a presidential candidate last summer.
Trump said he'd meet Ryan on Thursday, saying everything was fine when he and Ryan talked three weeks ago, "then all of a sudden, he wants to be cute." Trump called Ryan's refusal to endorse "just drama," insisting "we've got to be cheerleaders for the Republican party."
Later in the same interview, while explaining his plan to renegotiate the federal debt, Trump criticized last December's $1.8 trillion omnibus, Ryan's first spending bill as speaker, without mentioning Ryan's role in it.
A tweet from Trump on Friday may reveal most accurately Trump's thought process on Ryan's refusal to rubber stamp him as the Republican nominee. "Paul Ryan said that I inherited something very special, the Republican Party," Trump tweeted. "Wrong, I didn't inherit it, I won it with millions of voters!"
The post Sarah Palin Targets Paul Ryan For Not Backing Donald Trump Fast Enough appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During Mitt Romney's recent speech denouncing Donald Trump as "a fraud," a stark question arose: How did the Republican Party go, in four years, from nominating a sober grown-up with a record of achievement in the public and private sectors to embracing a loudmouthed playboy with a string of bankruptcies and no experience in government?
Remember when George W. Bush vowed to "restore honor and dignity to the White House"? Those qualities are no longer in demand. Say what you will about Romney, you would trust him with your wallet or your daughter. Trump? Not a chance.
It's not always possible to identify the moment when a journey to destruction began. But in the case of the Republican Party, there is no doubt: Friday, Aug. 29, 2008. That day, presidential nominee John McCain announced that his running mate would be Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. It was a test for McCain and the GOP rank and file. Both failed, and the party has never recovered.
The problem is not that Palin was a poor candidate who helped drag the ticket to defeat. The problem is that she was celebrated for qualities that were irrelevant and excused for defects that should have been disqualifying. Instead of recognizing her inadequacy, Republicans hailed her backcountry hockey-mom persona, her scorn for the "spinelessness" of elites, her inflammatory rhetoric and her inexperience in the matters a vice president and president have to handle.
Some conservatives weren't caught up in the adulation, but many who should have known better were. Former Dan Quayle speechwriter Lisa Schiffren gushed, "It couldn't get much better than that." Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger sneered at skeptics who thought Palin didn't "have sufficient experience," commending her as a "grounded, common-sense person."
The late Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., extolled her at the GOP national convention as "a breath of fresh air" and bragged that she was "the only candidate who knows how to field-dress a moose." Her fiery address sent the delegates into paroxysms of ecstasy.
The ensuing months and years exposed Palin as a glib egomaniac with a penchant for lying who knew little about national and international affairs (and cared less). But none of the discoveries did much damage.
Even after abruptly resigning as governor, she remained a Republican star and a tea party favorite whose endorsement was coveted by GOP candidates. Fox News hired her. She became an annual draw at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Her book Going Rogue sold more than 2 million copies.
Through the years, she made it all about Sarah, the fearless "mama grizzly" who scorned the "lamestream media," referred to the president as "Barack Hussein Obama" and defended waterboarding as "how we baptize terrorists." Her hubris, demagoguery and irresponsibility were a heady mixture that many could not get enough of—and that no one could match.
Until this year, that is, when Trump appeared on the scene and captivated a large share of the electorate. His contrasting biography—a luxury-loving, high-rise-living, Ivy League-educated Manhattan tycoon who would rather play golf than shoot big game—obscures the ways in which he resembles Palin.
Like her, he substitutes certitude for understanding. Like her, he revels in self-infatuation. Like her, he heaps contempt on his critics. Like her, he exploits a pervasive sense of victimhood among whites who distrust minorities. As with Palin, it's the distinctive persona and abrasive attitude that attract followers.
They see Trump as a man of great talents who offends the establishment because he understands and speaks for the common folk. Trump supporters don't care that he has only a shaky grasp of vital issues. Knowledge, many of them obviously believe, is overrated. Ideology is secondary. Gut instincts are what really matter.
That was the appeal of Palin, too. So it was no surprise to see her endorse him. Palin paved the way for a trash-talking narcissist to take over the party. Their partnership was destiny.
William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, wrote recently in opposition to Trump, calling him the "epitome of vulgarity" and his campaign a form of "two-bit Caesarism." But in the summer of 2008, Kristol called on McCain to choose Palin, who fits the same description.
In wrapping its arms around her, the Republican Party sold its soul. Trump is just here to collect.
© Copyright 2016 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post How Sarah Palin Led the GOP to Donald Trump appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hours away from the Iowa caucuses,
former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin told the syndicated entertainment news show Extra that she was once skeptical of polling, but now that her preferred candidate for the Republican nomination for president is expected to win Iowa, she's become a believer:
Usually, I say polls are only good for strippers and cross-country skiers, but in this case, I do think that the polls are accurate and are reflecting that the American people, the electorate… we're looking for something different.
Palin credits Trump's rouge-ishness, a quality once attributed to her by exasperated senior strategists in charge of her failed bid for the vice presidency, for his current standing at the top of the polls. With her trademark command of the English language, the woman who could have been a heartbeat away from the nuclear codes said:
He's going rogue all the time, and I think that's what Americans are craving right now is some candidness, some willingness to talk about the issues that are first and foremost on our hearts and our minds to get constitutional government back into the system.
Also in Iowa today, Trump addressed a rumor he heard from one of his security guards that some rogue protesters might be planning on throwing tomatoes. Ever the man of action and understanding of the rule of law, The Donald told the assembled crowd that if they spot any potential tomato-chuckers to "knock the crap out of them…I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees."
The post Sarah Palin Used to Think Polls Were Only For Strippers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Friday Funnies: Palin Endorses Trump appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sarah Palin's bizarre, rambling speech last night endorsing Donald Trump didn't make much sense (it's already been described as "post-apocalyptic poetry," which may not be entirely fair to either poetry or the apocalypse). Here, for example, is a representative passage:
A good, heated, and very competitive primary is where we are. And now though, to be lectured that, "Well, you guys are all sounding kind of angry," is what we're hearing from the establishment. Doggone right we're angry! Justifiably so! Yes! You know, they stomp on our neck, and then they tell us, "Just chill, okay just relax." Well, look, we are mad, and we've been had. They need to get used to it.
The speech name-checks a variety of conservative issues, from immigration to national defense to the build-up of debt, but not in any coherent context. They are not political issues in the traditional sense but free-associative decorations loosely affixed to Palin's freewheeling resentment. At times the speech, with its whiplash-rhythms and word juxtapositions, became downright hypnotic. Just play this on repeat for a while and let it wash over you:
In part this is because making sense isn't really Palin's style. But it's also because there is no coherent defense of Donald Trump's candidacy. His own argument is little more than a simple boast that he will make the country great, like it used to be, followed by a series of insults and a discussion of his poll numbers.
To the extent that he proposes anything resembling actual policies, they tend to be implausible fantasies, designed more as insults and power plays than ideas for governance. His speeches go long on personal boasting, and he dismisses most questions of governance by appealing to his own innate ability to overcome obstaces. You cannot make a reasoned case for Trump, because there is no such case to be made.
Palin's support was incoherent, then, in part because that's how she is, and part because it could be no other way. Support for Trump is not based on reason or argument or logic or even a sense of what Trump would actually do as president, but on his personal appeal as a businessman and political entertainer, and a related sense of how and what the country would be. It is not really a political campaign at all, so much as an extended act of fantasy and wish-fulfillment for both him and his supporters. Donald Trump's presidential campaign is Donald Trump fanfic, with Donald Trump as the Mary Sue.
In a way, then, Palin's speech was the perfect endorsement for Donald Trump's campaign: an incoherent mess of angry, resentful sentiment, delivered in a way designed to provide the maximum in media spectacle. Palin effectively—and, okay, somewhat poetically—captured and amplified the identity-politics-driven nonsense that feeds both the candidate and his supporters.
The post Sarah Palin's Bizarre, Rambling Speech Was the Perfect Donald Trump Endorsement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>So was that what the Tea Party, and "constitutional conservatism," was all about then? Throwing support behind a Constitution-bending, big-government populist who on April 15, 2009—the day that Tea Parties were being held all around the country in protest of the Obama administration's government-aggrandizing agenda—was saying stuff like "I don't march with the tea party," and "[Obama] really has made a great impact on people….I think he's doing a really good job"?
The expected though-unconfirmed and now confirmed news today that 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate turned Tea Party-supporting culture warrior Sarah Palin will be throwing her endorsement behind Trump has driven some conservatives to conclude that, in the pre-emptive words of Townhall.com's Guy Benson, "emotionalist nationalistic populism will have officially—perhaps temporarily—supplanted principled, policy-driven, limited-government conservatism as the dominant strain within the American right-wing."
It's worth noting that Sarah Palin, while popular at Tea Party rallies, is not an elected official and not synonymous with Tea Party sentiment, particularly when it comes to specific policy recommendations (recall that she was pro-bailout, for instance). And certainly, the Trump-hijacked-the-Tea-Party line of argument predates today's announcement. But there is a broader question that's been gnawing at the side of many libertarians and constitutional conservatives in this never-ending Summer of Trump, and that is: What the hell happened? Was the adherence to principled limited-government values just a passing fancy until the right person pushed the right emotional buttons, philosophy be damned?
Over the past 10 days I've been putting versions of that question to people with strong limited-government bona fides, including Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), and former FreedomWorks head-turned pro-Rand Paul superPAC'er Matt Kibbe. The following is a selection from their reflections on the Tea Party and political libertarianism in the age of Donald Trump:
Rep. Thomas Massie: Well, you know, everybody starts trying to write the obituary for the Tea Party, and I can tell you I've got sort of a skewed view of this, because I'm from Kentucky, represent Kentucky, and the Tea Party just won the governor's race. I mean we have not only a Tea Party governor, but a Tea Party lieutenant governor. Our lieutenant governor is a black female who was the Tea Party president in Bowling Green, Kentucky, now she's the lieutenant governor….
So the interesting thing is in Kentucky the Tea Party's still alive. You've got Rand Paul, our senator, you've got me, a U.S. representative, you've got a governor and a lieutenant governor, and we're getting offices below that in Kentucky. So it's looking good there.
But on the national stage, you know, I think it's like Charlie Brown and Lucy. The voting population is so tired of…trying to kick the football, and it gets pulled away from them at the last second. And they have sent some people here to Congress who said all the right things, they ran as Tea Party candidates, then they got up here and they voted for the omnibus bill, or voting for Speaker Boehner on their first day after pledging they wouldn't vote for him. And so what they're looking for is somebody's that's not going to be controlled when they get here.
You know, I'm not voting for Donald Trump—I'm supporting Rand Paul—but I understand the frustration that leads people to support him. I understand it, and Congress is fueling it.
—
Rep. Justin Amash: Donald Trump is the byproduct of a political establishment that has completely ignored Americans. I don't think he's ever talked about the Constitution, but he doesn't have to. He just has to be against Washington and people at home say to themselves, "Well, Washington's not standing up for us and this guy will"….
I think he could be very dangerous as a president, but Americans at home want someone who's going to stick it to Washington, D.C., and he'll certainly do that. And he'll create a lot of havoc in the process and probably violate a lot of rights in the process based on what I've heard from him, but unfortunately the political establishment here hasn't been paying attention to people at home, and conservatives haven't been able to knock the establishment off their pedestal, whereas Donald Trump has been able to.
—
Matt Kibbe: I still talk to Tea Partiers every day, and I find some of the strongest supporters of Donald Trump among the Tea Party, but I also find the strongest opposition from the Tea Party. And I think there's two things going on.
One is sort of more broadly, there's a real paradigm shift going on in politics; it's shifting power away from party bosses, and this democratization, this disintermediation, I think, is a very good thing. And you're seeing it on both the left and the right. You're seeing it with the rise of Ron Paul, he was sort of one of the precursors to this; the Tea Party was part of that.
But it's such disgust with the D.C. establishment that I think some Tea Partiers have just given up, and they view Donald Trump as a bull in a china shop—they love the fact that he's creating such fits with the GOP establishment. And they're not really worried about what he stands for, and I think that's a very dangerous thing.
I'm not one of those guys that thinks that Donald Trump would make a bad president because he's not a conservative; I'm one of those guys that thinks that Donald Trump is dangerous because he has such an authoritarian instinct that we don't know what he would do as president. But he would not follow the rules, he would not respect the differences between the executive branch and the legislative branch. And that's what the Tea Party was supposedly all about. We didn't like executive power. […]
And I hate to use the F-word, but let's go ahead and use it: The technical definition of fascism, and the history of fascism in the world, really wasn't tethered to some sort of ideology the way socialism is. The goals were more random and scattered, but it creates a lot of chaos and it requires a lot of power. And I think we as Tea Partiers, as libertarians, as constitutional conservatives, we should judge a candidate based on whether or not they've actually read and respect the restraints placed on government power by the Constitution….
And by the way we should point out that there's a mythology that all of Trump's support is coming from the Tea Party. The data suggests something quite different–there's a lot of independents, there's a lot of registered Democrats, there's a lot of people that haven't participated in the process before.
So would Amash and Massie vote for Donald Trump if he wins the GOP nomination?
Amash: I'm not going to vote for Hillary Clinton….
So, I have a lot of concerns about Donald Trump. I do not want Hillary Clinton to win. I think she would be the worst president of my lifetime. I think she's much worse than Barack Obama—much, much worse—and President Obama has been a pretty awful president in many ways. I was hopeful that he would actually take steps with respect to civil liberties and wars that would actually reflect what he said were his views. He presented himself as a guy who was going to stop some of the things that were happening under the Bush administration, and he hasn't really taken the steps necessary….
Clinton would be much worse than Obama, and I will do what it takes to make sure that Clinton is not our next president. But yeah, I'm not going to say who I would vote for on Election Day if Trump were the Republican nominee. I've always been a proud Republican and have voted for Republican nominees I didn't always agree with on a whole bunch of issues, but I think we can do better.
—
Massie: Well, if it's between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, I will most certainly vote for Donald Trump, I can tell you that. Or Bernie Sanders, or literally anybody on the Democrat side. So there you have it.
Finally, can libertarians do business with Ted Cruz, and/or have anything to feel good about during this presidential season?
Kibbe: I know him a little bit, and I know his dad even a little bit more. And if you look at Ted Cruz's upbringing, his training, he was immersed in classical liberalism—I think when he was two, he was quoting verbatim Human Action. So he's a fairly unique politician in that sense.
I think we are sometimes too critical of ourselves. You know, we're so frustrated with politics, and what we didn't accomplish over the last five years, it's important to recognize that what I call the Liberty Caucus in the Senate—and I would include Ted Cruz in there, and I would include other senators as well—that, historically is unprecedented. There were no Justin Amashes, there were no Thomas Massies, there were no Raul Labradors. And all of these guys grew up reading Reason magazine. I don't know this for a fact, but I'm sure Ted Cruz was reading Reason as well. And that's different.
And so let's not give up on politics all the time, but let's be picky about our guys. So you know, if I were to choose a second candidate, it probably would be Ted Cruz, but luckily I don't have to do that, because Rand Paul is going to win.
* Headline and text updated with confirmation.
The post Does Sarah Palin's Endorsement of Donald Trump Mean the Tea Party Is (or Should Be) Dead? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yesterday former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP's vice presidential nominee in 2008, horrified conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt by saying marijuana legalization is "no big deal." Hewitt asked Palin about the legalization measure that voters in her state approved last November, saying, "What happened in Alaska? What are you people thinking there?" She replied:
We've got that libertarian streak in us, and I grew up in Alaska when pot was legal anyway. It was absolutely no big deal. I mean, you didn't smoke it because your parents would strangle you. And if you were a jock and you were, you know, a Christian going to youth group, you just didn't do it, right? I still believe that. But when it comes to picking our battles, for many of us in Alaska, legalization of marijuana just was never really a bright blip on the radar screen, so it didn't surprise me when the voters of Alaska went back to legalizing it. For some years there, it had not been legalized….
I look on the national scene and think, "Wow, of all things to be fighting over and battling over." Especially when it comes to medical marijuana, I think, "Hmm. It's just not my baby."
When Palin says, "I grew up in Alaska when pot was legal," she is referring to decriminalization of personal possession, as opposed to full legalization. In the 1975 case Ravin v. State, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the privacy right protected by the state constitution includes the freedom to possess and consume small amounts of marijuana at home. At that point (five years before Palin turned 16) the state legislature already had voted to decriminalize possession of an ounce or less, making that offense punishable by a fine of up to $100. After Ravin, the legislature eliminated the fine.
In 1990, when Palin was in her 20s, Alaska voters approved an initiative aimed at recriminalizing marijuana possession. The legislature later made possession of up to four ounces a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. The ACLU of Alaska challenged recriminalization, arguing that neither voters nor legislators could override the state constitution. In 2009 the Alaska Supreme Court declined to rule on the ACLU's challenge, saying it needed an actual prosecution first.
While private possession of marijuana was legal in Alaska when Palin was a teenager, production and distribution never were. Hence it's rather misleading to suggest that Measure 2, the 2014 initiative, merely returned marijuana to its pre-1990 legal status. Measure 2 did quite a bit more than that, legalizing home cultivation along with commercial production and sales.
This is not the first time that Palin, who has admitted smoking pot in her youth, has suggested that cannabis consumers should not be treated as criminals. "If somebody's gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody else any harm," she said in 2010, "then perhaps there are other things our cops should be looking at." But at the time she also said she opposed legalization because it would "encourage especially our young people to think that it was OK to just go ahead and use it."
[via The Huffington Post]
The post Sarah Palin Says Legal Pot Is 'Absolutely No Big Deal' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Several Alaska bloggers gave their accounts of the incident, describing a scene in which Bristol Palin allegedly threw punches and Sarah Palin screamed, "Don't you know who I am!"
Palin later defended her family in a Facebook post, saying "my kids' defense of family makes my heart soar!"
The post Palin Family Brawl Police Report Released appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Just another Saturday night in Anchorage with the Palins?
Several Alaska bloggers reported a brawl at a house party over the weekend for the Iron Dog snowmobile race (that Todd Palin has won four times). And it allegedly involved the former first family of Alaska.
The post What On Earth Did the Palins Do Now? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sarah Palin, erstwhile Republican vice presidential candidate, took to Facebook tonight to respond to President Obama's address declaring a not-war with the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). She's no fan of Obama and that's the angle in her response, which begins:
War is hell. So go big or go home, Mr. President. Big means bold, confident, wise assurance from a trustworthy Commander-in-Chief that it shall all be worth it. Charge in, strike hard, get out. Win.
Charge in, strike hard, get out. This was one of the arguments about Afghanistan—that the war was "won" in the first few months when U.S. forces helped overthrow the Taliban government and degrade Al Qaeda's presence in the country. Then the U.S. military stuck around to nation build and keep the peace, which has pretty much been an unmitigated disaster. Familiar story?
Meanwhile, supporters of President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq and stay there point to the "early" withdrawal of U.S. troops (based on a timeline set by Bush but executed under his successor, Obama) as the reason ISIS was able to take root in the first place. Here, Palin appears to take the opposite tack. Hit hard and go home. Does she think Bush should've pulled out in 2003 after declaring "Mission Accomplished"?
She seems more interested in reiterating her opinions of Obama than in providing any kind of new (or old, for that matter) perspective on America's latest war.
Palin's Facebook post continues:
Obama famously claims to despise the "theater" and "optics" of the presidency. In tonight's speech he illustrated the "optics" of toughness. He tried to show a war-weary America that he's tough in his speech concerning the threat of ISIS/ISIL. "The One" who believes in leading from behind can't have it both ways. He sure wasn't concerned about "optics" when he let the crisis starring this Islamic death cult reach this point as he dithered and danced and golfed the time away while the Middle East exploded into chaos.
Does Palin think the American president is responsible for security around the world? Maybe. Lots of people do, especially people who want to be president. How can a president prevent chaos from exploding in the normally serene Middle East while charging in, striking hard, and getting out, as Palin suggested at the top of her post? Who knows. Obama likes to golf. Let's point and laugh.
She's not done. She continues by mangling the recent history of U.S. foreign policy in Syria:
Tonight he announced he's flipped and will finally militarily engage inside Syria – the red line he'd set and then forgotten about surfaced again. This, after three and a half years of civil war, 200,000 people killed, and millions displaced amid horrifying humanitarian conditions.
President Obama didn't quite "flip" on Syria. Last summer, Reason readers will recall, the president was very interested in military intervention. Uncharacteristically, members of Congress, propelled by an emerging coalition of non-interventionist Republicans (some of whom Palin endorsed!), refused to rubber stamp Obama's proposed intervention. Not quite the same thing as forgetting about it.
The beginning of the following passage is a continuation of the above paragraph but it's a new thought so we'll quote it separately:
Last month, he authorized U.S. military action to stall ISIS' momentum as it's taken nearly complete control of Iraq.
Tonight, President Obama pledged to fight Islamic militants "wherever they exist" with a very small coalition of the willing. (Can you blame foreign nations for not trusting the resolve of this president enough to join us? Right now he has a coalition of nine; President Bush had over 40 allied countries that could trust America's leadership.)
Perhaps some of that mistrust in "America's leadership" comes from the spectacular disaster that was the Iraq War? As Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), also endorsed by Sarah Palin, pointed out earlier this summer, it's not so much President Obama who's responsible for the chaos in the Middle East but George Bush and his coalition of the willing's misguided war in Iraq. The power vacuum it created allowed Al Qaeda to flourish in Iraq, then in Syria, then to come back to Iraq as ISIS. Obama is, of course, responsible for his share of the chaos too. He blithely threw U.S. support behind an intervention into Libya's civil war, one that has caused thousands of weapons to go missing and spread as far as Nigeria (facing its own virulent Islamist group seeking to challenge the national government's authority) and Syria.
Palin's not finished but I may be. I don't know if I agree or disagree because I'm not sure how to parse it:
Remember the inexperienced presidential candidate speaking from Germany at the Brandenburg Gate (2008)? Or the know-it-all state senator (2002), known for merely voting "present" on the big things, yet lecturing about this "dumb war" he claimed was a distraction from his desire to force income redistribution to create security. Remember him? Today, he seems more worried about contradicting his campaign promises (2002-2008) and typical political poll angst than leading as president (2009-present). These are the "optics" he's worried about.
Palin continues:
The rise of the animalistic terror group, ISIS, is the result of Obama's lead-from-behind foreign policy. He had broadcast his war strategy for all the enemy to see in Iraq, so the enemy could wait us out and strike as soon as America turned tail and turned away from all we'd sacrificed there. Terrorists who we had under control got to regroup and grow after Obama's premature pull out.
As Rand Paul pointed out, however, ISIS is more the result of U.S. intervention in Iraq in the first place not the decision (made by Bush!) to withdraw from Iraq. Also, this passage seems to totally forget that the thesis of this Facebook post was "charge in, strike hard, get out." But by Palin's own argument, that strategy lets the enemy "wait us out." Is it getting out or turning tail? Bet it depends on the party of the president.
The woman who might've been vice president in an alternate reality keeps going:
Those are the facts, and some tough talking speech is still just talk. Ronald Reagan was described by the Soviets as a politician for whom "words and deeds are one and the same." When Reagan said his vision of the Cold War was "we win, they lose," he meant it, and his policies won the Cold War. The real question Americans and our allies must ask is whether Obama-the-lecturer's words will translate into deeds.
What deeds? Going hard and then going home or going hard and then staying the course?
More Palin:
Go big and be real, Mr. President, if you've really changed your mind again and now wish to engage. You must acknowledge reality: the organization calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is, in fact, "Islamic." Not many of us pretend to be experts on the Muslim religion, but these terrorists obviously consider themselves Muslim and they believe what they're horrifically doing to innocents is part of their "religion of peace." So, you can use your soapbox to fiercely encourage the sane, civilized Muslims of the world to tell ISIS and all these sickening terrorists that they're wrong. In the meantime, we must identify and understand the enemy by at least acknowledging their ideological motivation and identity. Our president is naive to ignore this.
I agree with Palin. Not about the president having an obligation to become an advocate of moderate Islam: that's ridiculous. But so is the attempt to trivialize the "Islamic" in the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (which, incidentally, claims sovereignty over Muslims worldwide) or ISIS' nature as a radical Islamist group. This is especially so given the tendency of some Obama supporters to casually compare ISIS, a vicious proto-government that beheads hostages and kills those it disagrees with, with the Westboro Baptist Chuch, a cult whose membership is largely made up of one family, its founder's, and whose actions consist mostly of trolling the bereaved at funerals.
Palin veers off again:
ISIS must be stopped in Iraq and Syria before we need to stop them anywhere else. As they dominate the region they head for us; we're next on the hit list.
I know Palin knows her geography and I assume she doesn't think ISIS is planning on claiming territory in the U.S. next. But it's an important point: the U.S. is not next on ISIS' hit list. The U.S. government acknowledges ISIS doesn't pose a threat. The terrorist group is seeking to provoke a reaction from the U.S. because that legitimizes them and helps them recruit more fighters, from the general population and, crucially, from rival terrorist groups like Al Qaeda.
Palin goes on to hope Obama "means" it about ISIS:
For the sake of peace-loving people in America and throughout the world, let's hope Barack Obama means what he says when he uses terms like "defeating ISIS." He is so inconsistent in leading a failed agenda that it's virtually impossible to put any hope in his new promises, because either his past statements shrugging off ISIS as just a "JV squad" was all talk or tonight's new terminology is just all talk.
She ends with a tip of the hat to the military, whose young members are being sent again into Iraq because most of the politicians in Washington look at the military as a tool of foreign policy and not national defense.
Palin:
We should honor and understand our brave men and women of the U.S. armed forces today more than ever. Please do not support politicians who join Obama in diminishing our military. Our finest, trained to fight for what is right and determined to win, deserve our support. Thank you, military, may you be heard when you pray America's leadership understands that if we're in it, then we're in it to win it; no half measures. Troops, we are always with you.
In it to win it. By going hard and going home. As long as you support our troops.
Semi-related, here's comedian Doug Stanhope's routine on supporting our troops, including a suggestion to let them quit whenever they want. "That way they really have to sell you on the war."
The post Sarah Palin Facebook Post About ISIS Illustrates Republican Confusion on Obama, Iraq, Foreign Policy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sarah Palin has started a new subscription-only web channel that she says will allow her audience to create a community and discuss the news with "no need to please the powers that be."
Good for her, I argue in a new Time.com column:
Palin's new project is the latest sign that we live in world of gloriously fragmented media and culture that allows just about anyone to express themselves more fully than at any time in human history. That's a great thing, even if it means trouble for long-established media companies and empowers conspiracy ranters such as Alex Jones.
Twenty years ago, just as the Internet was developing into a mass medium that catered to individuals' unique tastes and interests in unprecedented ways, critics were foolishly flipping out about "media consolidation" and how a few companies such as AOL Time Warner would control all our news and information (as if!). Now, they are more likely to worry over the loss of a common news culture and the seeming ability of people to consume only self-confirming points of view. That may seem plausible on the face of things, but it's equally wrong….
Far from walling ourselves off in ideological gardens that tell us just what we want to hear, "the majority of Americans across generations now combine a mix of sources and technologies to get their news each week" [according to a study by the American Press Institute]. We go deep on stories that interest us, reading multiple accounts from multiple places to get more information—something that wasn't possible back in the days of three broadcast channels and one or two hometown newspapers. Perhaps most interestingly, we apply a sliding scale of credibility based on sources, with 43% having high trust levels in reports from well-established news organizations, 21% from "word of mouth" ones, and even less from unsubstantiated social media sources.
So welcome to the 21st Century media world, Sarah Palin. New voices and platforms are always welcome, but it's a jungle out here. You don't have to "please the powers that be," but you do have to bring real value to your readers and viewers – and that's no walk in the park in the mediascape of endlessly fascinating and proliferating choices.
More on Sarah Palin at Reason.com.
The post "Why I'm Actually Pretty Psyched For the New Sarah Palin Channel" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When asked about Palin and other Republicans' eagerness for impeachment, Boehner simply repeated twice: "I disagree. I disagree."
His words follow typical Palin-style bravado on Fox News Tuesday night, in which she called Boehner weak for planning a lawsuit over Obama's use of executive power. "You don't bring a lawsuit to a gunfight," said Palin.
I guess for that you bring an op-ed instead?
In Palin's ignorant mess of recent commentary, published by Breitbart.com, she said that the influx of young immigrant hopefuls to America's borders may be "the last straw that makes the battered wife say, 'no mas.'"
Because of Obama's purposeful dereliction of duty an untold number of illegal immigrants will kick off their shoes and come on in, competing against Americans for our jobs and limited public services … Securing our borders is obviously fundamental here; it goes without saying that it is his job.
Because President Obama disagrees with Palin over whether his job requires booting a bunch of immigrant children, Palin says "it's time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment." My oh my. Leave it to Palin to make Speaker Boehner look like the voice of rationality.
The post Guess Who Doesn't Want to Impeach Obama? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Remember when Jesus said "torture thy enemy"? Neither do I, but the walking, talking, life-sized self-parody Sarah Palin apparently does. "If I were in charge," Our Lady of Guantanamo said on Saturday at a National Rifle Association event, "they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists."
In saying this, she did a huge disservice not only to those trying to reform the image of the GOP, but to Christians and gun owners who believe in limited government.
The one-liner was part of a 12-minute speech in which Palin repeatedly sabotaged any legitimate message about gun rights by drifting from government policies to American culture, framing both as an us-versus-them battle between righteous conservative Christians and godless Washington elite liberals (and their "evil Muslim terrorist" allies).
A few small government-type conservatives of different Christian denominations have quickly clarified that, in fact, inflicting painful drowning-like sensations on people who are indefinitely detained for political reasons until they become card-carrying members of Christendom is not part of their belief system, and that the former governor of Alaska, who has described herself as a "Bible-believing Christian," is actually a huge hypocrite.
Andrew Sullivan puts it particularly well. He notes that Palin voiced "a bona fide fascistic sentiment. It revels in violence…. It is the kind of statement you might expect… from the Chinese Communists," and that her statement was "disgusting and blasphemous in the morphing of Christianity into its polar opposite."
What Palin said wasn't taken out of context. It wasn't a slip-up. Republicans who aren't Christian, Republicans who are Christian, and gun owners who don't believe in big government torture programs would all best serve their causes by ditching her.
Bipartisan Bonus: MSNBC's Steve Benen tries to defend Obama's "extremely aggressive" "counterterrorism program" (a.k.a. other forms of torture) against Palin's accusations of softness in the same breath that blasts Palin for advocating waterboarding.
(h/t Stormy Dragon)
The post Sarah Palin: 'Waterboarding Is How We Baptize Terrorists' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a note posted on her Facebook page Monday night, the former Alaska governor calls McCain, "an American hero and a friend."
The message follows a vote Saturday to censure the state's senior senator at the annual meeting of the Arizona Republican Party for what they characterize as a liberal record that has been "disastrous and harmful" to the state and nation.
The post Sarah Palin Defends John McCain From Censure by Arizona GOP appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Mr. President, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all who commit to ending any racial divide, no more playing the race card," the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate wrote in the post published Monday on her Facebook page.
The post Sarah Palin Asks Obama Not To Play Race Card appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Palin re-posted a picture of her meeting with the stars of the A&E show on her Facebook page Wednesday night, writing that "intolerants" were behind the suspension of the show's patriarch, Phil Robertson.
The post Sarah Palin Defends "Duck Dynasty" Star From "Intolerants" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The former Alaska governor will host a weekly program on the Sportsman Channel to celebrate the "red, wild and blue" lifestyle by profiling stories related to hunting, shooting and fishing.
Palin's program, "Amazing America," will debut in April 2014, the cable channel said Monday. It has ordered 12 episodes.
"The network showcases a lifestyle that I love and celebrate every day and it's great to be a part of their team," Palin said in a statement.
The post Sarah Palin Attempting Another Reality TV Show appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"At this point, I'm used to it. That's kind of a sad state of affairs to have to admit that I am used to it," Palin said on Fox News's "Fox & Friends."
She called attacks like Bashir's "par for the course."
The post Palin Comments on Martin Bashir Leaving MSNBC appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The afternoon talk show host, a former co-anchor of "Nightline," says he decided to leave the network after meeting with MSNBC President Phil Griffin.
Bashir had already apologized for what he called "offensive" comments about the former Alaska governor, whom he also called an "idiot" and "dunce." He told viewers in a scripted commentary last month that someone should defecate in Palin's mouth. He was invoking an old slave punishment in response to a speech by Palin, a Fox News contributor, comparing the national debt to slavery.
Bashir took off two weeks for what was billed as a vacation, and criticism mounted as MSNBC took no disciplinary action against him, even as it booted Alec Baldwin over an alleged anti-gay slur hurled at a photographer. In retrospect, it's clear that by failing to suspend Bashir, MSNBC allowed public pressure to build to the point where the only way to control the damage was to sever its relationship with the British journalist.
The post Martin Bashir Quits from MSNBC appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"I love an endorsement by Sarah Palin, what's not to love?" the Kentucky Republican said on CNN on Tuesday.
Over the weekend, the former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee said she was on Paul's side in his recent public spat with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
"I'm on team Rand. Rand Paul understands, he gets the whole notion of 'Don't tread on me, government,' whereas Chris Christie is for big government and, you know, trying to go along to get along in so many respects," Palin said on CNN.
The post Rand Paul on Palin Endorsement: "What's Not To Love?" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two summers ago, after Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels decided not to run for president, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was summoned to meet Henry Kissinger. "When he called me into his office," Christie told Washington Post reporter Dan Balz, "he just said, 'The country needs a change and you connect with people in a way that I haven't seen a politician connect with someone in a long time.'"
Kissinger's pitch is a highlight of Balz's forthcoming campaign book Collision 2012. […] [Christie] told Kissinger that he honestly didn't think he could run yet.
"I haven't given any deep thought to foreign policy," Christie admitted.
"Don't worry about that," said Kissinger, according to Christie. "We can work with you on that. Foreign policy is instinct, it's character, that's what foreign policy is."
Emphasis mine (above and below).
Hmmm, provocative governor with political talent but no foreign policy experience treated as a promising tabula rasa by establishment hawks….Where have I heard that one before?
In June 2007, a cruise hosted by the political journal The Weekly Standard set anchor in Juneau, Alaska. Standard editors William Kristol and Fred Barnes then lunched with Governor Sarah Palin. It was a moment of discovery to equal Hernando Cortez's landing at Veracruz.
The Daily Telegraph's Tim Shipman saw this encounter as the launch of a Neoconservative project surrounding Palin. He interviewed a former Republican White House official now at the American Enterprise Institute about Palin:
"She's bright and she's a blank page. She's going places and it's worth going there with her." Asked if he sees her as a "project," the former official said: "Your word, not mine, but I wouldn't disagree with the sentiment."
Kristol appeared on Fox News on June 30, 2008, confidently predicting that McCain would select Sarah Palin and as a public display of support, oil prices would miraculously fall.
Kristol can fairly lay claim to having "discovered" Palin for Washington political circles. Palin's name appeared in 41 Weekly Standard articles since the Juneau meeting—starting with a paean entitled "The Most Popular Governor" that ran right after the reception.
Palin's running mate, of course, was one of neoconservatism's great blank-slate success stories, with his maverick interventionism, and Standard-supplied Teddy Roosevelt ideology melting the Fourth Estate's heart in the late 1990s:
It was at this time that Marshall Wittmann, one of Bill Kristol's best friends, handed McCain a stack of David Brooks essays on national-greatness conservatism, supplementing it with a little light reading on McCain's old hero Teddy Roosevelt. From that day forward, until well into 2001, it became difficult to determine where the Weekly Standard's imagination ended and McCain's stump speech began. […]
The foundational document for the Standard-McCain fusion project was an April 1999 cover story by David Brooks entitled "Politics and Patriotism: From Teddy Roosevelt to John McCain." […]
Brooks … lets slip throughout the essay the sense that McCain's agenda was a piece of clay in the Weekly Standard's capable, intellectual hands. "Right now his sentiments are vague," wrote the same man who, when introducing national-greatness conservatism, argued that laying out "some sort of 10-point program" would be "silly" because "particular policies are less important than getting Americans to begin to think differently about politics." You could almost see Brooks rubbing his hands together at the prospect of marrying his opaque national greatness with McCain's lofty greater cause: "In fact," he wrote, "if you look at his policies, you can begin to imagine a national narrative and a public philosophy that might be created around them." They had the man; all they needed was the theory.
While it's true that McCain had a pre-existing interest in foreign policy, and a family tradition soaked in Naval supremacy, it was the neocon crowd who literally wrote the speech unveiling McCain's remarkably open-ended "rogue-state rollback" doctrine in 1999.
So what does it say about a smallish group of foreign-policy ideologues that they spend so much energy finding empty but promising vessels with which to contest elections and hopefully carry out a robustly interventionist defense policy?
Among other things, that they're successful. It has proven a useful strategy to populate think tanks and magazines and capital-P Projects while contantly recruiting ambitious politicians into the fold in case they gain proximity to office. (You probably don't remember this, but one of the great Kristol vessels last election cycle was another inexperienced governor, Tim Pawlenty.) Imagine a powerful group of libertarian ideologues who go hunting around for charismatic politicians to whom they say "Don't worry about the ideology part, just win elections!" That this is impossible to conceive of says something about the nature of libertarianism, and of the ineptitude that libertarians usually bring to Washington power politics.
But I'd suggest two other, less flattering interpretations. Maybe they keep searching for moldable clay—or failing that, straight-to-cable true-believer attack dogs like John Bolton and Peter King—because these ideas aren't particularly saleable 12 years after 9/11. If blank-check interventionism was producing its own camera-ready talent, its proponents wouldn't have to spend so much time head-hunting.
Or maybe that's whole attraction in the first place—playing ventriloquist for hand-picked dummies who seek to wield enormous power. I'm sure it must be exhilarating to think that there is something behind the throne greater than the king himself, but what a weird way to go through life.
The post Weird How Interventionists Keep Finding Talented Politicians With Foreign-Policy Blank Slates appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Democratic senator said Palin, who said Tuesday she's considering challenging him for his seat in 2014, might not even be a resident of Alaska and is someone he won't take seriously unless she emerges from a competitive Republican primary.
"I don't know if she's a resident. She's been away from Alaska a lot and has probably lost touch with what's going on. She should go to my webpage," Begich said. "Most Alaskans I see on a pretty regular basis, but I haven't seen her for a long time."
During an interview Wednesday with POLITICO, Begich questioned four times whether Palin is even a resident of the state she once governed and said his campaign won't go on the offensive against Palin unless she can handle Joe Miller and Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell in a primary.
The post Mark Begich Lashes Back at Sarah Palin For Considering Run Against Him in 2014 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Responding to a question from Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity, Palin said Tuesday she's considered a run because people have asked her to.
The post Sarah Palin Says She Has Considered Senate Run in 2014 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Earlier this week, I wrote a story for The Daily Beast titled "Nostalgia Act: The Great Sarah Palin Revival Tour of 2013." The story was reposted at Reason.com on June 20 as well. The thrust of the piece was that, despite recent comments by the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate that were favorable toward libertarian ideas, Palin is not particularly libertarian. With particular reference to the speech she gave at last weekend's "Road to Majority" gathering of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, I argued that she is more of a populist than anything like a libertarian. On social issues, after all, she's against marriage equality and pot legalization, and in her recent remarks seemed dead-set against letting more immigrants legally enter the country. The politician she name-checked at the Faith and Freedom Coalition was Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a Tea Party favorite who is also unambiguously against immigration reform and who just this week came out in favor of invading Syria (to grab that country's chemical weapons). Interestingly, Palin voiced support for NSA leaker Edward Snowden and reluctance to enter Syria, but did so in a way that seemed more partisan than principled (go here to check her various statements about Iraq, Afghanistan, and foreign policy more generally).
I noted as well that if the GOP is actually interested in capturing more independent and younger voters (as various official party spokesmen and members have said), they would do better to look toward libertarian-leaning House members such as Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). They, along with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) aren't down-the-line libertarians but they are not only smart, youthful, and self-evidently electable, they favor decentralizing power and cutting spending. When it comes to gay marriage, for instance, each believes in devolving the matter to the states or getting the government out of the certification business altogether. That's despite them all being believing Christians of various denominations (and all, like Palin, generally anti-abortion).
In my article, I questioned Palin's dedication to reducing government spending, citing a 2010 article for Reason in which I had written that
As a former governor of a state that receives about $14,000 in federal money per resident (only the District of Columbia gets more) and whose total spending increased 16 percent between 2007 and 2009, she is not very credible as a fiscal conservative.
That figure, along with the larger points of my Beast piece, elicited a response from Stacy Drake of Conservatives4Palin.com titled, "Nick Gillespie's Dishonest Daily Beast Article Discredits Him." Labeling me a "hater" whose "disdain" for Palin links me to "a long list of leftwingers and BIG government republican's [sic]," she particularly took issue with my characterization of Palin's spending as governor.
In fact, she argues, "Between 2007 and 2010, Governor Palin cut state spending in Alaska by 9.5%" (emphasis in original). Drake then links to a 2009 post at Conservatives4Palin that says the following:
Governor Murkowski's last budget FY2007: $11,697,400,000
Governor Palin's latest budget FY2010: $10,570,000,000
Total reduction in spending between 2007 and 2010: a whopping 9.5% or $1,127,400,000
Via Twitter, I sent Drake a link to this chart I generated at the site US Government Spending, which shows total spending by state and local governments in Alaska rising from $11.66 billion in 2007 to $14.52 billion in 2009 (in nominal dollars). Those figures are in turn based on Census data showing that state-only spending in Alaska rose from $9.2 billion in FY2007 to $10 billion in FY2008 to $11 billion in FY2009 to $11 billion again in FY2010. That comes to roughly a 20 percent increase in spending between 2007 and 2009 (my original benchmark in my 2010 story) and again in 2010 itself (for a chart of that, go here).
For an alternative accounting of spending in Alaska, I went to the state's OMB archives. There I found that in FY2007, total authorization to spend (including permanent fund) was $11.7 billion (line 47). In FY 2008, which would have been Palin's first budget, the figure came to $11.5 billion (line 54). In FY2009, total authorization to spend came to $12.9 billion (line 53). In FY2010, that figure dropped to $10.6 billion (line 57). That's about a 10 percent decrease in spending between 2007 and 2010.
I don't know what explains the difference between the Census data and the Alaska data, which show radically different results; I am adding a note about the disparity to the article. But Alaska's data shows a sharp decline in spending. Had Palin finished a full term instead of dropping out with 18 months to go, we'd have a better sense of whether the 2010 number was the beginning of an effort to consistently drive down spending over time.
Further notes on the reaction to my story:
Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit dings with me a charge (I think) of "oikophobia," which he says is common among Palin's critics. As someone who has written about Palin a fair amount over the years—and someone who panned Joe McGinniss's vile biography of Palin in the Washington Post—I've always been taken aback by hostility that Palin evokes and I don't consider myself a "hater" towards her. By the same token, I see no reason to soften criticisms of her because her enemies all-too-often trade in lower-than-low insults.
Note: I had originally misidentified Drake as male and have changed the text. Apologies on that score.
The post A Response to "Nick Gillespie's Dishonest Daily Beast Article Discredits Him" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Are you ready for the great Sarah Palin Revival of 2013? The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate is back from her exile at Fox News and, like the former child star played by Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the self-described Mama Grizzly is ready for a big comeback. But to be blunt, she seems more like a relic of a bygone, little-missed era in showbiz-cum-politics. Indeed, she no more represents a viable future for the GOP than her 76-year-old "angry bird" running mate, John McCain.
To give her full credit, Palin is talking what sounds like a whole new game. Specifically, Palin is aiming to channel the ascendant libertarian elements of the Grand Old Party. Back in April, for Time's list of the "most influential people in the world," she wrote the entry for Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who rightly topped the list of political leaders. "His brand of libertarian-leaning conservatism attracts young voters, and recently he inspired the nation with his Capraesque filibuster demanding basic answers about our use of drones," she enthused, before pulling the conversation back to her favorite subject, herself. "I sent him some caribou jerky from Alaska to help keep up his strength on the Senate floor."
Over the past weekend, Palin was one of the main speakers at the Road to Majority meeting of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a group of religious Republicans headed up by Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition. During her remarksshe took partisan shots at President Obama and his supporters in "their itty-bitty purple Volts," but she also sounded specifically libertarian notes, disdaining yet more intervention in the Middle East, giving absolution to Edward Snowden for leaking details of surveillance programs, and casting a pox on both Democrats and Republicans. "The problem," she explained, "is government grown so big that it intrudes into every aspect of our lives … The scandals infecting [the government] are a symptom of a bigger disease. And it doesn't matter if it's a Republican or a Democrat sitting atop of a bloated boot on your neck. With bloated government, everyone gets infected, and no party is immune."
Palin got her biggest applause when she finished that thought by declaring, "That's why, I tell you, I'm listening to those independents, those libertarians, who are saying, 'It is both sides of the aisle, the good ol' boys in the party on both sides of the aisle, they perpetuate the problem.'"
Yet there's every reason to believe that Palin's newfound libertarianism is deeply misinformed, cynically superficial, or some mix of both. At the Road to Majority Conference, she invoked Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) as her model legislator. Congress, she averred, should put itself on "cruise control—Ted Cruz control—just for a week." She's also voiced similar sentiments since going back to Fox News.
While Cruz may be a reliable fiscal conservative, he's nobody's idea of a libertarian, with his McCarthyite denunciations of Harvard professors he claims are dedicated to the overthrow of the government and anxieties about creeping "Sharia law."Despite being an immigrant and Hispanic himself, he has long staked out a hardline position against opening the southern border of the U.S. to more immigrants. That puts him at odds with not only GOP moderates such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and former governor Jeb Bush (R-FL), but also figures like Rand Paul, who has told currently illegal immigrants who have come to work, "We will find a place for you." Palin herself has sneered at immigration reform, dismissing pending Senate legislation as "a pandering, rewarding-the-rule-breakers, still-no-border-security, special-interest-written amnesty bill."
Palin also voiced an embrace not just of religion in the public square, but of a very specific Christianity. You know, she told her audience, "this land was dedicated to our Lord God, and he has blessed it, and we do well to rededicate it at this time to our one, true, heavenly Father." Faced with so many problems, she continued, "we need that divine inspiration. We need to ask that hand of protection and blessings of our Father again to fall upon our nation. Not that we are a deserving people, but that's what God is all about: grace and mercy and forgiveness. And if we do rededicate our land to our Lord, things will turn around."
The proper term for this sort of rhetoric is populist, not libertarian. It is long on laying blame on out-groups and evoking feelings of persecution and appeals to divine or great-man intervention. Despite talking about the need for a positive program of action—Republicans cannot simply point out Democrats' failure, she said—she offered little past clichéd invocations of "restoring" America. Her short record as governor of Alaska offers scant insight into what she really believes in, but it is worth noting that state spending increased 16 percent between 2007 and 2009, belying her claims now about being a budget hawk. [Author's Note (June 21, 2013): Go here to see a discussion about budget numbers under Palin. Federal figures suggest a 20 percent increase in annual spending between 2007 and 2010 while numbers from the Alaskan state budget office show a 10 percent decrease in annual spending between those fiscal years].
Fortunately for libertarian-minded voters, Palin and Cruz are hardly the only fishes in the sea. As the recent report on young voters from the College Republican National Committee pointed out, the GOP is flush with next-generation leaders, among them Chris Christie, Rubio, and Bobby Jindal. None is more popular than the leader of what John McCain pathetically called "the wacko bird" caucus, Rand Paul, who has not only emerged as the public face of a more libertarian Republican Party, but is working to create a cadre of like-minded legislators, not just a one-man band. As The New Republic notes in a critical but ultimately admiring portrait of the senator titled "President Rand Paul: Watch Out, He's Becoming a Better Politician Every Day," he is building up a PAC that will increase his influence and, more important, is giving speeches and authoring legislation—including a federal-budget proposal—that stake out true alternatives to the status quo foisted on Americans by, as Palin accurately notes, past Republicans and Democrats alike.
If the GOP is in fact interested in reaching the youth vote, its timing couldn't be better. The failure of Obama's economic plan to reduce massive unemployment, especially among recent college grads, remains a constant opportunity for the Republicans. A new CNN/ORC poll finds that Obama's approval rating among voters ages 18 to 29 has plummeted by 17 percentage points in the past month, following revelations of politically motivated IRS abuses, administration actions against the AP and other press outlets, and especially the NSA surveillance of phone and Internet data.
But to reach younger voters—and libertarian-minded independents—the GOP will need spokespeople categorically different from Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz. As Vanderbilt political scientist John Geer put it to CNN, "Youth wants to see more tolerance and more inclusion. While the youth has been favoring the Democrats in the past few years, neither (party) should see the partisan leanings of this group as set." The college Republicans found that young voters also insist on intelligence and credibility in their politicians and policy proposals.
The GOP would do well to focus attention on people such as Reps. Justin Amash (R-MI) and Thomas Massie (R-KY). Amash earned the ire of Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) by questioning his party leader's dedication to limited government, and Amash voted against the fiscal-cliff deal because it increased taxes and spending. An American with Palestinian and Syrian parents, Amash is a University of Michigan–trained lawyer and a principled and outspoken critic of interventionist foreign policy, even when propounded by Republicans. A fierce defender of economic and civil liberties, the 33-year-old Amash not only gets new media and youth concerns, he explains all his votes on his Facebook page.
Massie holds two degrees from MIT, started a successful 3-D-imaging company in Massachusetts, and built his old, off-the-grid Kentucky home with his bare hands, planing the timber himself and decking it out with solar panels. "I tell Republicans,"he told me in a recent interview, "you can hate the subsidies—I hate the subsidies too—but you can't hate solar panels. These are rocks that make electricity, so they are incapable of receiving your hate." Like Amash—and Rand Paul and Sarah Palin—Massie is a man of faith, but he prefers not to talk about religion in a political setting, preferring instead to explain his libertarian tendencies with reference to his business and worldly experiences.
Like Sarah Palin when she first appeared on the national scene, characters such as Amash and Massie scramble seemingly settled categories of liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. They may not be able to toss off asides about serving "moose chili and blueberry pie" (as Palin did at the Faith & Freedom Coalition gathering), but they also present a serious—and specifically—libertarian challenge to both the right and left.
Note: This story originally appeared at The Daily Beast on Tuesday, June 18. Read the original by clicking here.
The post The Great Sarah Palin Revival Tour of 2013 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Over at The Daily Beast, I've got a new piece up about Sarah Palin's re-emergence on Fox News and in Republican Party politics.
Here's a snippet:
Over the past weekend, Palin was one of the main speakers at the 'Road to Majority" meeting of The Faith and Freedom Coalition, a group of religious Republicans headed up by Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition. During her remarks (watch the full video at C-SPAN), she took partisan shots at President Barack Obama and his supporters in "their itty-bitty purple Volts" but she also sounded specifically libertarian notes, disdaining yet more intervention in the Middle East, giving absolution to Edward Snowden for leaking details of surveillance programs, and casting a pox on both Democrats and Republicans. "The problem," she explained, "is government grown so big that it intrudes into every aspect of our lives….The scandals infecting [the government] are a symptom of a bigger disease. And it doesn't matter if it's a Republican or a Democrat sitting atop of a bloated boot on your neck. With bloated government, everyone gets infected and no party is immune."
Palin got her biggest applause when she finished that thought by declaring, "That's why, I tell you, I'm listening to those independents, those libertarians, who are saying, 'it is both sides of the aisle, the good ol' boys in the party on both sides of the aisle, they perpetuate the problem.'"…
Yet there's every reason to believe that Palin's new-found libertarianism is deeply misinformed, cynically superficial, or some mix of both.
Find out why over at The Beast.
The post Nick Gillespie at Daily Beast: Has Sarah Palin Turned Libertarian? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The former Alaska governor will return as an on-air commentator on Ailes' Fox News Channel next week, the network announced Thursday. She'll also nab a role on its sister network, Fox Business Network.
The move comes as a surprise after Palin's abrupt exit from Fox News early this year. The onetime GOP vice presidential pick disappeared from Fox after reports of tension between her and network boss Ailes, who according to a magazine article had privately dismissed her to associates as "stupid."
The post Sarah Palin to Return to Fox News as a Commentator appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>But tea party activists appear eager for a comeback, urging supporters to contribute money toward recruiting Palin to run for the U.S. Senate in her home state, where, according to an email sent out this week, she has a "clear path" to defeat incumbent Democrat Mark Begich.
"You and I both know that Sarah Palin is a fighter who will stand up to Harry Reid and his pals in the Senate to protect our Constitution in issues like amnesty, gun control and our nation's crushing debt," said the email from Todd Cefaratti of the Tea Party Leadership Fund.
(Hat tip to Adam Simpson)
The post Some Want Sarah Palin to Run for Senate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Granted, it's one of seven covers:
And here's Palin's ode to Paul:
When the Tea Party movement wanted to send a message to the Senate in 2010, it elected a clear-sighted eye doctor from the Bluegrass State. In a D.C. too often defined by the venal equivocations of a permanent political class more interested in consolidating its own power than in upholding the Constitution or defending the common good, Senator Rand Paul is a voice of reason awakening the public to what must be done to restore our prosperity and preserve the blessings of liberty for future generations. His brand of libertarian-leaning conservatism attracts young voters, and recently he inspired the nation with his Capraesque filibuster demanding basic answers about our use of drones. I sent him some caribou jerky from Alaska to help keep up his strength on the Senate floor. There's more where that came from for this bold Senator with 20/20 vision willing to take a stand for liberty.
The post <em>TIME</em> Puts Rand Paul on the Cover (and Sarah Palin's Endorsement of Him Inside) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate released a fiery ad Wednesday, making it clear she intends to be involved in the selection of Republican and Tea Party candidates in Congressional and Senate contests across the country.
The two-minute ad, titled "Loaded for Bear," emphasizes Palin's recent appearance at this month's CPAC, an annual gathering of conservative activists, as well as her connection to freshman Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a Tea Party favorite.
The post Sarah Palin Releases New Ad Promising Continued Political Work appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Late last week Al Jazeera America announced the former vice-presidential candidate would be joining their news network," the Post's Suzi Parker writes today in a post on the She The People blog, titled "Sarah Palin's plan to reach 'millions of devoutly religious people' through al-Jazeera."
Parker calls this "a cautionary tale about what can happen when politics and celebrity meet."
But Parker's report is a cautionary tale about what can happen when writers cite satirical websites, such as The Daily Currant.
The post <em>Washington Post</em> Falls for Sarah Palin Parody Story appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Unlike nearly all of the other shows and films subsidized so far under the movie incentive program, the salaries paid to Alaska residents on the Palin show account for a majority of the total "Alaska expenses" for the TV show.
Palin and the five other Alaska residents who participated as "talent" on the show collected close to a half-million in wages.
The post Bristol Palin TV Show Received State Subsidy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Really tough format, Sean, for someone like a Paul Ryan or anybody else up against Joe Biden, when the moderator allowed one candidate to absolutely run roughshod over the conversation, over the opponent," Palin told Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity on Thursday night. "That's a tough format. It reminded me…of watching a musk ox run across the tundra with somebody underfoot. In this case, when it came to style, Paul Ryan was underfoot because of the moderator allowing Biden to do interrupting, to kind of take control of the conversation."
The post Sarah Palin: VP Debate Was Like Musk Ox Running Across Tundra With Somebody Underfoot appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Our family is writing a book on fitness and self-discipline focusing on where we get our energy and balance as we still eat our beloved homemade comfort foods!" Palin told the magazine in an email. The former governor mentioned the book, which she calls "unique and motivating," when asked about a photo that shows her looking thinner than usual.
The post Sarah Palin Writing Fitness Book appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"He's inviting himself back into this general election that's coming up, and he's going to get defeated. And that's unfortunate," the former Alaska governor said on "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren." "That is why we have to think pragmatically about this, and we have to think, well, what's another option? Is a third-party another option? If it is, let's go. The status quo has got to go."
The post Palin Chimes in on Akin appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Brady has been taking some serious heat for the past week … over a joke in which he says Sarah Palin hates Jeff Ross because he reminds her of "what Trig is going to look like when he's 40."
The post Wayne Brady Apologizes for Trig Palin Joke appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Sarah Palin: Hillary Clinton Should Replace Joe Biden on Dem Ticket appeared first on Reason.com.
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