Recently in Elections Category

Frank Luntz of the Washington Post has an interesting piece dealing with the 5 Myths About Conservative Voters. Luntz attempts to address those myths that Democrats believe about conservative voters.

For the most part I agree with his points, but at times he gets a little mushy as if he doesn't want to offend the sensibilities of his liberal readers. On his very first "busted" myth he doesn't quite make the connection between what conservatives want in regards to government and what it means.

Conservatives care most about the size of government.

Today, conservatives don't want a reduced government so much as one that works better and wastes less.

In a poll we completed among self-identified conservatives just before the 2010 elections,"efficient" and "effective" government clearly beat "less" and "smaller" government. For conservatives, this debate is less about size than about results, along with a demand that elected officials demonstrate accountability and respect for the taxpayer, regardless of whether they're spending $1 million or $1 trillion.

--snip--

It used to be that conservatives supported smaller government on theoretical grounds: The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen; government should only do for people what they truly cannot do for themselves; government isn't the solution, it is the problem.

I think Luntz missed the point. A government that works better and wastes less will be smaller. There won't need to be nearly as much government (and attendant bureaucrats) in order for government to perform its functions. One begets the other.

We want smaller government because it costs less and is more efficient. If being more efficient and less costly creates a smaller government, so be it. Just so long as they stop wasting taxpayer dollars on things we neither need or want.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

As Glenn Reynolds notes, here it is, four years later, and Obama is still running against Sarah Palin.

There's only one problem: She's not running for office. Seems like a waste of time, money, and effort, but then they've really got nothing else. They certainly don't want to run on Obama's record.

During the 2008 campaign the Democrats kept making comparisons between Obama and Palin, trying to paint her as not capable of being vice president while at the same time claiming Obama was eminently qualified to be president. They almost totally ignored McCain. I always thought that was strange, the Democrats comparing the GOP vice presidential candidate to their presidential candidate. Could it be that even then they were scared of her? Four years later and they still go after her and her family, putting them under the kind of scrutiny Obama and his family would never survive.

The results of Super Tuesday show that no single candidate has a lock on the GOP nomination, meaning all of them will have to put in maximum effort over the next four months to even have a chance.

I'd like to think this turn of events means we have more than one viable candidate for the nomination, but it seems to me it's more of a sign that none of the candidates are generating the kind of buzz that can guarantee a win at the GOP convention.

And whoever the nominee ends up being I think it's going to be the choice of running mate that will make or break the chances of the GOP retaking the White House in November.

Received via e-mail:

I can almost picture this routine when I close my eyes. Too bad that it's all too true.

COSTELLO: I want to talk about the unemployment rate in America .

ABBOTT: Good Subject. Terrible Times. It's 9%.

COSTELLO: That many people are out of work?

ABBOTT: No, that's 16%.

COSTELLO: You just said 9%.

ABBOTT: 9% Unemployed.

COSTELLO: Right 9% out of work.

ABBOTT: No, that's 16%.

COSTELLO: Okay, so it's 16% unemployed.

ABBOTT: No, that's 9%...

COSTELLO: WAIT A MINUTE. Is it 9% or 16%?

ABBOTT: 9% are unemployed. 16% are out of work.

COSTELLO: IF you are out of work you are unemployed.

ABBOTT: No, you can't count the "Out of Work" as the unemployed. You have to look for work to be unemployed.

COSTELLO: BUT THEY ARE OUT OF WORK!!!

ABBOTT: No, you miss my point.

COSTELLO: What point?

ABBOTT: Someone who doesn't look for work, can't be counted with those who look for work. It wouldn't be fair.

COSTELLO: To who?

ABBOTT: The unemployed.

COSTELLO: But they are ALL out of work.

ABBOTT: No, the unemployed are actively looking for work. Those who are out of work stopped looking. They gave up. And, if you give up, you are no longer in the ranks of the unemployed.

COSTELLO: So if you're off the unemployment rolls, that would count as less unemployment?

ABBOTT: Unemployment would go down. Absolutely!

COSTELLO: The unemployment just goes down because you don't look for work?

ABBOTT: Absolutely it goes down. That's how you get to 9%. Otherwise it would be 16%. You don't want to read about 16% unemployment do ya?

COSTELLO: That would be frightening.

ABBOTT: Absolutely.

COSTELLO: Wait, I got a question for you. That means they're two ways to bring down the unemployment number?

ABBOTT: Two ways is correct.

COSTELLO: Unemployment can go down if someone gets a job?

ABBOTT: Correct.

COSTELLO: And unemployment can also go down if you stop looking for a job?

ABBOTT: Bingo.

COSTELLO: So there are two ways to bring unemployment down, and the easier of the two is to just stop looking for work.

ABBOTT: Now you're thinking like an economist.

COSTELLO: I don't even know what the hell I just said!

And now you know why Obama's unemployment figures are improving!

Indeed. It's amazing how many people either don't know or choose not to know the truth about the true unemployment rate.

With about 54% of the districts reporting, it looks like Mitt Romney has won the New Hampshire GOP primary with ~37%, with Ron Paul coming in second with 24% of the votes.

After work I headed down the our local election polling place, in this case located in the gym of our middle school. One thing I noticed right off was not so much something that was there but something that wasn't: volunteers holding election signs. There were none.

It wasn't until I got to the entrance to the school that I saw a few campaign signs lying side by side on the ground. But no one was outside holding the signs of their candidate. That is something I haven't seen in all the years I've been voting. It could have been the time of day as I got out of work a little earlier than usual as I wanted to avoid the post-work crush at the polls. The volunteers may have shown up after I had already voted and headed home.

While there was a lack of campaign volunteers, that was not the case for voters.

When I finally entered the gym there were moderately long lines at voter check-in. And while I didn't have to wait more than a couple of minutes in my line (the lines are separated alphabetically), others had more than a dozen or so people in front of them waiting to check in and get their ballots.

Voting itself took all of 30 seconds, with the most of that time spent looking for my candidate's name. (The candidates are listed in random order chosen by lot rather than in alphabetic order, a change made to New Hampshire's election laws some time ago.)

On my way to drop off my ballot in the ballot box I asked the town clerk if it had been busy. Her response: "Since the moment we opened the doors!" Apparently that's been the case just about everywhere across the Granite State, with a heavy turnout, particularly for the Republicans.

As I write this the last of the polls should be closing and we should start hearing the results any time now.

It's voting day in New Hampshire, where the voters will make their preferences for president known. More to follow later!

The GOP primary madness in New Hampshire is starting on its upward swing, with so many media people in the Granite State that you can barely go anywhere without running into someone from the multitude of media. I figure we've just about reached saturation, with the peak to come some time Tuesday after the polls open.

One thing I have noticed is the very large number of campaign signs, specifically GOP signs, in places you wouldn't necessarily have seen them in previous election seasons. This is something that has also been noticed by Andrew Boucher, and as he writes, it means trouble for Obama.

With the exception of a few die-hard Obama-Is-Our-Savior brainwashed Leftists, most folks in the Granite State know he's been a dismal failure. A lot of them are unabashed Republicans, Libertarians, or contrary independents and they are making their displeasure with the president known. Some are disillusioned Democrats. All one has to do is look out on lawns and along streets to see the signs everywhere.

In any case, many of us here in New Hampshire are waiting to get past the campaign insanity and get back to living our lives. We're waiting for the media hoopla to die down and the myriad campaign volunteers to move on to other venues. We'll have a respite until the full blown presidential campaigns start early next fall.

I must admit to watching the coverage of the Iowa Caucuses with slightly bemused boredom.

It would be far more interesting if the candidates had to fight it out in a winner take all cage match.

UPDATE: I have to like Jon Huntsman's response to a query made in Peterborough about what he would say to the Iowa Caucuses winner (who at the time was unknown): "Welcome to New Hampshire! Nobody cares!"

Now that we've made it past the first of the year, the focus here in New Hampshire turns in two directions: the upcoming Presidential Primaries and annual town/state budgets. Of the two, the primaries are receiving the most attention by both the populace and the media.

With the New Hampshire primaries scheduled for January 10^th, the media attention has been cranked up to "11". The various presidential wannabes have been spending every free moment in the Granite State, minus time in Iowa in preparation for tomorrow's Iowa Caucuses. (The one exception seems to be Jon Huntsman, who sees New Hampshire as the key to his moving forward.) There will be one last 'big' debate amongst the GOP candidates on the 7^th, with national coverage by ABC.

It's going to be intense for the next eight days.

The lesser of the two events, the annual battle of budgeting for the towns also start in earnest. Not that there hasn't been a lot of behind the scenes work on assembling proposed budgets for the various departments and schools.

Here in my small town the town and school budgets have been undergoing a lot of scrutiny by the board of selectmen, school board, and the budget committee. Everyone wants to cut spending, but of course it's always "someone else" who should cut their budgetary requests. It's never a pretty process and at times emotion can get in the way of logic and reason. When a position is cut in one of the town departments, many of us realize it means that someone we know, perhaps a friend, will lose their job. (That's happened to a friend of mine in the planning department. Her full time position - with benefits - was cut to part time. She couldn't justify staying there under those conditions and left for another job.) In some cases open positions have been eliminated for the time being, leaving some departments short staffed. But those are the choices that have to be made in order to keep spending in check when everyone is having a difficult time making ends meet, particularly those on fixed incomes within our town.

Once the various boards and committees have done their thing it will be up to the voters in each town to vote on them, either at town meeting or during the town elections in March. (A few towns hold their town meetings in April or May.) Towns with a board of selectman/town meeting form of government fall in to two categories: traditional town meeting and SB2.

The traditional town meeting is usually held in some time in March, and all registered voters are encouraged to attend. The voters will discuss and vote on all of the articles presented on the town warrant, some covering budgetary items and other with changes in zoning ordinances (assuming a town has any zoning at all). A second town meeting, usually called the school district meeting, deals will warrants pertaining to the towns school expenditures.

SB2 towns do things a little differently, with two different sessions for both the town and school portions of the warrants. The first session deals solely with discussion and amendments to the town and school warrant articles. The second session of each meeting takes place on election day in March, with the voters deciding whether to approve the various warrant articles discussed the previous session.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems, but they seem to work pretty well. In any case, the tax money that will be spent in the upcoming fiscal year is vetted by the very people that will be paying those taxes. (There are a few taxes which the town voters have no control, those being the county and state assessments levied upon them to run county operations and for some education funding, respectively.)

The state will be dealing with some supplemental budget items during the upcoming legislative session (the state runs on a two-year budget cycle). Sometimes adjustments are made if there's an unexpected expenditure needed to deal with unforeseen circumstances. Sometimes it's the other way around, with some line item that was approved but never implemented, meaning there are surplus funds that can go to other purposes to fill shortfalls someplace else. Sometimes the surplus goes towards the state's so-called rainy day fund, a savings account that can be used to fill revenue shortfalls under very specific circumstances.

All we can do is hope they folks in the state capitol don't go on some kind of a mindless spending binge. But then it does help that the GOP holds supermajorities in the state Senate and Executive Council and a majority in the state House.

Don Surber gives us a list of the Ten Things Obama Got Wrong, though I think he could have easily gone well past ten to fifty or a hundred.

A few of my favorites:

2. He got Obamacare wrong. Along those lines, President Obama saw how Hillarycare went and decided to do the opposite. Or likely more accurately, the president heard that Hillary lost on health care because it was written in the White House. He decided he would do it differently and have it written by Congress. This was a formula for failure because he lost control of the bill. This meant he was putting his name and reputation on the line for something he never wrote. And what was written was a mess.

Don acts as if this were unusual for the Presdient, but it's not. Most of the programs and ideas and other acts he should have handled himself he handed off to his czars or Pelosi & Reid. In effect, he phoned it in, voting 'present' when his position doesn't really allow him to do that. Then again, that's how he's handled things most of his adult life. Why change now?

3. He got the economy wrong. He overestimated its strength and went full-speed ahead with spending. Budgets for agencies were doubled as liberals wanted to have a field day regulating everything. But tax revenues tanked. That $400 billion deficit he campaigned against tripled. Guess what? The public noticed. So did S&P. He is now President Downgrade.

No argument there. But then he has no real understanding of how an economy works, only how it's supposed to work according to Leftist ideology. Too bad for him the economy itself shows just how wrong Leftist economics can be. Not that I expect him to learn that lesson as he's not exactly known for being open minded, particularly when it come to anything that conflicts with his beliefs.

4. He got the stimulus wrong. The $787 billion stimulus was a grab bag of political kickbacks papered over with an unnecessary, ineffective and ill-advised tax cut. The unemployment rate would have gone to 9% if we do nothing, he said. We did something and it hit 10%. Again, people noticed.

If every penny of that stimulus had been spent on upgrading or repairing infrastructure, then it's possible the economy could have been turned around. (I still have doubts about that, but I'm willing to admit I could be wrong.) But of all that money, only $55 billion was spent on infrastructure. That's just under 7% of the total stimulus. Seven percent. Where did the rest go? To cronies and supporters who had more to do with creating this lengthy on-going recession than helping us get out of it.

One last one:

10. He got TV wrong. It's called overexposure.

I think just about everyone is sick and tired of seeing him read from his teleprompter, particularly since he's not really saying anything new. It doesn't help that he's now been on the presidential campaign trail for 4 years since he really doesn't know how to do anything else.

Now that Herman Cain has dropped out of the race I must admit to not being sure who, if anyone, I will support for the New Hampshire Primary, just a wee bit over a month away.

I don't particularly care for Newt Gingrich one way or the other. I have no love of Romney as he seems a little too bland for me. (He was governor of the People's Republic of Massachusetts and had to deal with a perpetual Democrat majority in the Massachusetts House and Senate, something that takes a lot of compromise. Perhaps too much compromise, like RomneyCare..er..MassHealth.) Michelle Bachmann is no Sarah Palin. Both Rick Santorum and John Huntsman are non-entities as far as I can tell. The only one I've been taking a closer look at has been Ron Paul.

While I agree with many of his points, there are a few that make me a little uncomfortable. One in particular is his almost isolationist view of what America should be in regards to foreign affairs. I can agree with him that the time is long overdue to bring the troops back home...from Europe. World War II has been over for 65 years. The Cold War for 20. Why are they still there? It seems most of Europe has decided they don't need to spend much for their own defense because we're doing it for them and sticking us with the bill. Maybe it's time for them to deal with their own defense. (About the only EU nation still maintaining it's own defense forces is the UK, and even they aren't at the level they were 10 years ago.)

In any case there's no one candidate that is at the top of my list. That might change the closer we get to the primary in January. Then again, it might not and I'll end up voting for the candidate that offends my sensibilities the least.

Herman Cain's move up in the polls now has him in a virtual tie with Mitt Romney.

Not bad for someone who's never held public office.

His 9-9-9 plan is taking some heat, though the more I look at it the more I like it. Like any plan, it isn't perfect and it needs some tweaking, but it's a lot better than any of the others I've heard, including Obama's "secret plan" that is still secret.

Is Cain the best candidate we can put up against President Obama next November? Of those running, I believe the answer is yes. He certainly has a handle on the cost of government, at least as it affects business and the economy. He has accomplished great things while working in the real world. What did Obama accomplish before he was elected to office other than make $110 million of Annenberg Foundation funds disappear with nothing to show for it?

While Cain is not perfect, neither are any of the other candidates. Every one of them has flaws, weaknesses, and blind spots. But the ability to succeed despite them shows us something about their character and their drive. That's certainly true of Herman Cain.

The shoving match between states in regards to the upcoming presidential primaries and caucuses is heating up, with New Hampshire threatening to move their primary to early or mid December if Nevada goes forward with their plans to move their caucuses to early January. That is certainly going to screw up campaign schedules and make the campaign season far too long. It's too darned long now, and the bigger states like Florida figure they should be the ones to set the tone despite the fact they'll kill off any of the retail campaigning so prevalent in smaller states that helps less well known candidates gain some traction. Should Florida succeed, the only viable candidates will be those with huge bank accounts at the beginning of each campaign season. Better, but less well funded candidates will be locked out because campaigning in states like Florida at the beginning of primary season requires more money than most candidates will have available to them that early in the campaign. Voters already complain that political contributions corrupt the process as it is now. What will they be saying when only the well funded will be able to campaign at all?

This does not bode well for the election process.

Earlier today Chris Christie pulled the plug on any chance of him running for President in 2012. Frankly, I don't blame him.

As he's said more than once, he's not ready to be President after only two years as governor of New Jersey. Plus he's still got plenty of work to do in the Garden State.

Unless someone else, like Sarah Palin, jumps in in the next couple of weeks, the slate we have is going to be the one we'll have to pick from for a challenger to Barack Obama. Looking at the present field of candidates, there are only one or two I might feel comfortable supporting.

At the top of my very short list, Herman Cain. Second is Rick Perry. The rest of the existing field I find wanting. While Ron Paul has some great ideas I think far too many people will feel uncomfortable with his ideology. Michelle Bachmann garnered a lot of interest in the beginning, but I never thought she had the staying power. So far the polls show I'm right. (It must be understood that poll numbers now really have little meaning. At this point in the 2008 campaign Hillary Clinton was way ahead of Barack Obama in the polls and we see how that turned out. Need I say more?)

Mitt Romney is just a little to slick for me.

The rest are political non-entities.

Herman Cain, on the other hand, is generating some buzz. While not a professional politician, he has the street cred Obama dreams of having. This is a man who has accomplished things. He speaks plainly (without the need for a teleprompter). He actually has plans for dealing with our overly complicated and confusing tax code, our economy, and has stated them plainly. There is no "secret plan" so often touted by the Obama Administration. And recent polls have him a close third behind Romney and Perry. He's also generating buzz amongst Democrats, with some of them trying to paint Cain as a racist because he had the audacity to say black Americans have been brainwashed for years to vote for Democrats, many of whom do not have their best interests at heart. So if telling the truth is racist, then I guess Cain is a racist. And by extension, it means telling a lie is not racist, therefore Democrats are not racists, right?

If you want to get a better idea about Cain and how well he understands the costs of government, look at this video of him debating Bill Clinton about HillaryCare back in 1994 and schooling the president about the real costs of his health care program.

This guy is getting more interesting...

The Presidential Primary shenanigans have started. Again.

Florida has decided they want to push the selection process up in an effort to become the deciding factor in the GOP primary process. Never mind that front loading the primaries hasn't worked out so well for either party. Never mind that campaigns in larger states tend to be totally media driven and that average voter rarely has a chance to meet the candidates. Never mind that the best candidate won't necessarily be the one who's selected.

How many times have we seen states jump the gun, pushing the start of the primary season up by months? As it stands, both Iowa and New Hampshire will have to put their respective caucuses and primaries up to early January rather than February. And New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner has stated he'll move the New Hampshire Primaries up to December if he has to in order to stay within New Hampshire election law.

Both the DNC and RNC have stated they won't seat all of the convention delegates from any state that holds their primaries ahead of the schedules set by both parties. That isn't good enough. They shouldn't seat any of them, period. After states start losing their delegates because of their decision to go against their party leadership in this regard, they'll stop all of this nonsense.

The original schedules from decades ago worked quite well and allowed candidates to stretch out their campaigns (and their campaign funds) between March and June. By front-loading the primaries only candidates with a large campaign war chest wile be able to afford to run campaigns in all of the states in such a short period of time (the three months running from January through March). The so-called Super-Primaries, those where a multitude of states run their primaries on the same date, have had the same effect, causing candidates to spread themselves thin because they have campaign in all of those states at the same time. That means less well-funded candidates won't be able to compete effectively against those with the money to burn.

Another negative side effect: with the presumptive candidate all but nominated by April the long campaign to November begins and by the time the election actually takes place just about everyone is sick and tired of it all. The seemingly 'perpetual campaign' gets old real fast. It wouldn't surprise me if a number of voters are so turned off by the time election day arrives they don't bother to vote because they're so sick of the unending media blitzes.

If this wasn't taking place in Massachusetts I'd be more surprised.

We've all been hearing about Elizabeth Warren's beliefs and opinions about such things as the constitutionally defined limits on government, taxes, spending, and now, such fundamentals as private property rights. In a nutshell, she's against them. She believes that no individual creates businesses and jobs, that it's all The State. I'm sorry, but the state is too stupid and too corrupt to create anything other than more stupidity and corruption.

"You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for," Warren says. But the flip side of that equation is that it's the need for markets and goods that helped get the roads built in the first place. It's that need which makes cities and towns, more than public servants do.

The government cannot make towns and cities, China and North Korea have proven that with ghost towns. It is those factories and market that make them.

And the public benefits from having goods and jobs, much more than it does from people like Warren. That is and has always been the black hole in the left's argument. Warren treats the factory as a net benefit for the factory owner-- when it's actually a net benefit for everyone.

She gets cause and effect backwards. Roads won't be built unless there's a reason for them.

Her Marxist colors are showing. I'm expecting her to start talking about the proletariat of the workers and how capitalism is a disease and how it's necessary for the workers to rise up against the bosses.

Little does she realize (or even care) that it's been tried before and it has never worked. It's even been tried here and failed. Does the UAW versus the Big Three provide enough of an example of how not to let "the workers" run the show? ("Workers" in this context refers to the union bosses who work very hard to maintain mediocrity among the rank and file union workers while demanding ever increasing wages and benefits far above what the workers are worth.) I'm not sure shouting her philosophy from the rooftops is going to be a winning strategy in her efforts to wrest away the Senate seat now held by Scott Brown.

We'll see how that's all going to work out for her. It seems the People's Republic of Massachusetts isn't as blue as it used to be, indicated by Scott Brown's election to the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy, and the growing failure of RomneyCare as it takes up even bigger chunks of the state budget while returning less and less care.

I just hope this doesn't give the Left here in the US any ideas, but I'm not holding my breath:

UK Labour Party wants journalism licenses, will prohibit non-licensed journalists.

Oh, yeah, that will go over well. But considering the "shellacking" Labour took during the last election, I'm not all that surprised.

The UK Labour party's conference is underway in Liverpool, and party bigwigs are presenting their proposals for reinvigorating Labour after its crushing defeat in the last election. The stupidest of these proposals to date will be presented today, when Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary, will propose a licensing scheme for journalists through a professional body that will have the power to forbid people who breach its code of conduct from doing journalism in the future.

Given that "journalism" presently encompasses "publishing accounts of things you've seen using the Internet" and "taking pictures of stuff and tweeting them" and "blogging" and "commenting on news stories," this proposal is even more insane than the tradition "journalist licenses" practiced in totalitarian nations.

So the scheme would even ban unlicensed blogging or Internet posts. Of course I can understand why the socialists in the UK would want to do so - control the dialogue and you control the thought of the "proles" and the results of elections. Truth and fact would become a thing of the past because the socialist/statist/authoritarian Left believe they are the only arbiters of the truth.

You know statists like Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid would love nothing better than to control all of the media rather than just the portions of the MSM already in their pockets. If they could silence their critics then everything would be just perfect for them because they'd be able to sell any lie as the truth (Freedom = Slavery, Collective Good/ Individual Bad, and so on).

But there is one big difference between the UK and the US - we here in the US still have our guns and the Left knows it. Our brethren in the UK have been all but stripped of their means to fight back if it ever came to that unless they were willing to emulate the faux Guy Falkes in V for Vendetta.

(H/T Instapundit)

One would think the level of PDS would abate after a while, but it hasn't. The vitriol aimed at Sarah Plain hasn't done anything except grow amongst the leftist shills and drones, at least to judge by the comments made to this article at the Daily Caller wondering if Sarah was on the verge of announcing a run for President.

One would think the shills would at least come up with new claims, but they've been reduced to recycling the same old (and disproven) fabrications. You know the ones:

She's so stupid that she said she could see Russia from her house!

The only reason she's doing what she's been doing is because she's lazy and wants the money.

She's a quitter. She couldn't handle the job of governor.

Trig isn't her kid.

She's in the pocket of Big Oil.

Bristol got pregnant in retaliation for Sarah not aborting Trig.

The list goes on and on, ad nauseum.

One particular commenter kept making the point again and again that she quit her office as governor just to make money. I saw her comment at least a dozen times, meaning she was "pulling a Harrop", named after a regular commenter on the Wall Street Journal opinion section who used copy and paste again and again and again as if repetition would somehow make his words true.

This was the comment I wanted to post, but Daily Caller's comment system, Disqus, was having issues and I wasn't able to post. So here's my response:

Some of the commenters keep calling Palin a quitter because she stepped down as governor. Not once have you mentioned the real reason why she stepped down, have you? Let me refresh your memory since yours appears to be defective.

She quit because her legal fees were bankrupting her and her family. Frivolous ethics lawsuits were filed by a group of thirteen Alaskan Democrats (with help from the DNC). Under Alaskan law she had to cover her own legal fees. Answering those lawsuits took up almost 100% of her time and the time of her staff, meaning she couldn't govern. Those lawsuits were filed just for that reason - to make it impossible for her to govern. It doesn't matter that every single one of those lawsuits were found to be without merit and were eventually dismissed. Every single one of them. But that didn't mean she didn't end up with legal fees exceeding $500,000.

Since then Alaskan law has been changed which now covers the governor's legal fees for such legal proceedings. That didn't help Governor Palin as she still had to pay the fees she accrued during that time. Were you in that position would you have stayed in office even though it would leave your family destitute? Somehow I doubt it.

I have no doubts my words will in no way sway you true believers in Palin's laziness and greed because you have proven yourselves again and again incapable of independent thought. You can only think along those lines your programmers allow. Heaven forbid you should stray from the party line and think for yourself.

Basically, they've got nothing new while Plain has been showing she's far smarter than much of the left has ever given her credit for and has better handle on how things work than the present occupant of the White House. And that scares the Democrats to death.

Too bad.

Over the years I wrote about George W. Bush that he wasn't to be taken lightly. His "aww, shucks" persona hid a sharp mind, constantly leading people to underestimate him.

As Walt Harrington mentions in his piece, Dubya and Me:

As he talked, I even thought about an old Saturday Night Live skit in which an amiable, bumbling President Ronald Reagan, played by Phil Hartman, goes behind closed doors to suddenly become a masterful operator in total charge at the White House. The transformation in Bush was that stunning to me.

As I've written more than once that Dubya's like that good ol' boy who will invite you into his home for a couple of cold ones and some poker, and you'll leave some time later a little drunk and lot lighter in the wallet.

As time has gone by and Obama has been put his stamp on the presidency, George W. Bush's image has been rehabilitated. Those highway billboards picturing a smiling and waving Bush and the tag line "Miss me yet?" may have been a bit of satire, but somehow I think more than a few people, including some Democrats, do indeed miss him.

Though Harrison had known Bush for a number of years, he didn't really understand him until he had the opportunity to have dinner with him at the White House one evening, an informal meal with just Bush, Harrison, and Mark McKinnon, Bush's campaign media adviser. As Harrison described it:

I left the White House in a daze. I even got lost in the pitch-black darkness and had to drive around the small parking lot for a few minutes to find my way to the gate. I called my wife, and she asked how the evening had gone. I couldn't answer.

"I've never known you to be speechless," she said, genuinely surprised.

I finally said, "It was like sitting and listening to Michael Jordan talk basketball or Pavarotti talk opera, listening to someone at the top of his game share his secrets."

It wouldn't surprise me in the least to find others have found themselves feeling exactly the same thing after spending time with Bush, even now, despite the fact that he's been out of office for over two-and-a-half years.

One of the things that surprised Harrison: Bush is a voracious reader. Most of what he read was historical non-fiction. As Harrison tells us, his understanding of history, particularly those parts made by his predecessors, helped him understand the broader context of what he had to deal with as President. It's a shame the present occupant of the White House lacks even a modicum of that understanding.

Is it any wonder George W. Bush is looking better every day as we look back upon his presidency?

(H/T Instapundit)