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Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, is still mum on her 2012 intentions, but her support of a gay conservative group’s inclusion at the national Conservative Political Action Conference has led many to wonder whether she has tacked to the center on gay rights.
ABC News reports that several conservative groups that headed to this week’s CPAC are uncomfortable with the inclusion of one other “right-leaning” group, GOProud, which advocates on behalf of “gays and their allies” for federal policy promoting “a traditional conservative agenda that emphasizes limited government, individual liberty, free markets and a confident foreign policy.” Some groups are so uncomfortable — including the Heritage Foundation and the Families Resource Council — that they have decided to boycott the convention.
Palin has for the fourth year in a row declined an invitation to CPAC. She told the Christian Broadcasting Network that it was a “scheduling conflict” that prevented her appearance, not GOProud’s presence at the convention. And she went one step further, telling CBN that conference attendees should not so quickly dismiss the opportunity to provide a full spectrum of conservatism.

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Political chatter is heating up. Ditto political betting. So let’s look at some of the latest and newsiest nuggets on the next U.S. presidential race through the betting odds at the United Kingdom’s William Hill, one of the word’s largest and most influential

Side by side, Sarah Palin appears more polished and media savvy than Michelle Bachman. Palin’s outfits are sharper and her social media outreach is one of the best there is. However, not too long ago, Palin was a little rough around the edges. The McCain campaign essentially pulled a What Not To Wear on Palin and transformed her into a stylish and savvy

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet but, apparently, (and perhaps soon legally) Sarah Palin and Bristol Palin have no substitutes. Both mom and daughter have applied for trademark protection for their respective names. Sadly, my iPad does not have the symbol for registered trademark, which is now causing me anxiety as I type their names.
The idea of trademarking the Palin name is puzzling but fascinating. Imagine, for example, the value of a DVD box set of Official Bristol Palin branded inspirational

Cairo. Midnight. The Presidential Palace.
Good evening, Mr. President.
Who are you? How did you get in here? And why are you on fire?
The name’s Johnny

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Concerned that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak did not receive his message to begin a peaceful transition to democratic reforms, President Barack Obama said today that he would resend the message, “but this time in all caps.”
Mr. Obama said that while he hoped sending a capitalized version of the message would be effective, “we have a variety of other options at our disposal, including resending it in bold.”
In the days since it became clear that Mr. Mubarak did not receive the White House’s initial message, Mr.

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At this point one would have to bet heavily that Barack Obama will be re-elected in 2012 to his second term as president.
Where in the world are the people on the Republican side who are going to challenge Obama for the right to sit in the Oval Office starting in January, 2013?
Why are the 2012 presidential possibilities on the GOP side being so coy and lackluster and saying it is too early to make the decision to run for the White House?
Surely, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney is not going on David Letterman to do his top ten list for no reason after being on CNN earlier discussing his religion and politics.
The former Governor of Massachusetts told the viewers on the Piers Morgan show that he had not made up his mind-right -and that is why he is on two national talk shows in one night in February
.
While President Obama is on the job discussing the events from Tunisia to Egypt and what the United States should be doing in these tense and chaotic situations his potential GOP opponents are on the sideline not commenting on the proper role for the United States.
At least a member of the Obama Administration seems inclined to run for the White House in 2012. The former Governor of Utah Jon Huntsman is leaving Beijing to come back and see if the time is right for him to throw his hat in the ring. It might be a little difficult to criticize the Obama foreign policy especially towards China since he was our spokesman for the policy while serving as American Ambassador to China.
Huntsman brings some foreign policy credentials to the job if he decides to run which it looks as if he will when he resigns his post in April.
It is interesting that many analysts suggest that Romney couldn’t make it to the White House because of his Mormon religion but I have heard very little about Huntsman being held back by his Mormon religion.
And, the question has to be asked: Why are some Americans so skeptical of Romney and his religious beliefs? Why do some American voters feel a sense of unease over the Mormon religion? Hopefully, Romney put that question to rest in 2008 and he and Huntsman won’t have to face this issue in 2012.
In 2007, Mike Huckabee had already announced for president by this time but now he says he has all the time in the world to announce as he makes his mandatory trip to the Middle East to show his foreign policy credentials.
Sarah Palin seems to not be setting up any type of national organization to launch her expected run for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She needs to get a positive message going and establish some gravitas if she seriously wants to run in

Conservatives are outraged over decisions by two federal judges ruling against the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare as they wont to call it). They point out that the legislation was duly enacted by both the House and Senate, the elected representatives of the people and signed into law by the President of the United States, who was elected by a substantial majority of the American people. Rush Limbaugh declared it a perfect example of the men in black robes “thwarting the will of the people”. Senators Hatch and Sessions issued a joint statement reminding that they had warned about judges who would “legislate from the bench and impose their own agenda” rather than upholding and enforcing the duly adopted law of the land.
Glenn Beck cried out in despair that the decisions reminded him of what had happened in Nazi

(A table set under a tree. Starched Hair and the Mad Hater throwing teacups at each other.
Enter Sarah, dressed as Alice.)
THE MAD HATER
Who are you? Get out. There’s no more room at this Tea Party!
SARAH
My name is

MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report) – In her official Tea Party response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) offered a bold new policy initiative she called “Don’t Add, Don’t Spell.”
Rep. Bachmann called the proposal “a reflection of core Tea Party values” and said it would “deliver the American people from the tyranny of arithmetic, spelling, and punctuation.”
In addition to “Don’t Add, Don’t Spell,” Rep. Bachmann suggested slashing the Federal budget by eliminating nine of the first ten Amendments to the Constitution.
“I think you know which one I’d keep,” she chuckled, miming a Western gunslinger with her index fingers.

Mark Green
It’s only been three weeks but House Republicans are already losing momentum on health care, deficits, civility, guns, Issa’s investigations. Was Nov. 2 their high-point?
Republicans earned bragging rights certainly when they captured 53% of the national vote and netted 63 seats in the House in the mid-term elections. But now, rather abruptly, if Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday is any indication, the new GOP House majority is on the defensive.
What went wrong? Two things — President Obama raised his level of his performance (see John Heilemann’s excellent piece in New York magazine) and the GOP’s patriotic rhetoric collided with a thick stone wall called

Steampunk — a style of dress, and for some a way of life as best it can be in the mundane — is based in the worlds of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Anton Wilson and Alan Moore. Think an alternative Victorian England where steam power runs elaborately geared machines, women wear corsets and — as in The Wild, Wild West TV series and its unfortunate cinematic remake — there’s a nutty villain and outrageous gadgets.
Now The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has transmuted what could be called The Legs of an Extraordinary Woman into the new comic book/graphic novel Steampunk Palin. And it’s not

Black and white is easy; nuance is hard. Which is why it’s much easier to just lump media outlets and personalities into simple boxes: left v. right, or partisan v. objective, for example.
So if you want to play that game, it’s easy to dismiss Keith Olbermann, who broadcast his final episode of Countdown on MSNBC

With some regularity, this column excoriates the mainstream news media for all sorts of continued idiocy in the way it conducts its business. But every once in a while, we have to applaud them when they get something right. This week, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post deserves mentioning, for pledging to stay Palin-free for the month of February. Details on this in a moment.
It’s rare for members of the media to perform such self-examination (and

By federal order, hundreds of Alaska halibut charter businesses will be forced to close their doors Feb. 1. Most of them are small, mom-and-pop operations.
Exactly how many will fall victim to a U.S. Department of Commerce decision to impose limited entry on halibut charters, no one can

When Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords opened her eyes for the first time five days after the shooting in Tucson, she saw her husband to her right and three strong women at her left. Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senator Kirstin Gillibrand (D-NY), and Representative Debbie Wasserman Shultz (D-FL) had been alternating holding Giffords’ hand when she showed the first of many hopeful signs of recovery. They were at her side as friends and as women bound by the common experience of elected office.
“We witnessed almost a miracle,” Pelosi

Just so you know: There are plenty of perfectly good reasons to buy high-capacity magazines for your favorite firearm. Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced my list. So we’ll have to figure out some of those perfectly good reasons for ourselves. Feel free to chime in — it’s like the ammo makers always say: The more, the

Many people take their ability to think for granted. For some people, thinking seems to happen automatically. Others struggle to understand a concept. Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell often seem defiantly proud of their ability to demonstrate that ignorance is bliss.
A tiny percentage of the earth’s population focuses its attention on topics like neural networks, the chemical or electrical functions of a synapse, or how to recreate a particular thought

Juneau, Alaska — House Democrats say they are hopeful that a large-diameter natural gas pipeline is not just a pipe dream anymore and that real progress can be made this legislative session on the major project.
The leaders of the minority caucus met with reporters on Tuesday morning to talk about what they see as significant issues in the 90-day session that began Tuesday with formal ceremonies in the House followed by a similar event in the Senate.
The gas line that is being developed under the controversial Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA), envisions a 48-inch diameter pipeline from the North Slope into Canada or Valdez, depending on where potential customers would rather ship. A “Y line” would take the main gas line into Canada with a spur into Valdez. The Legislature chose a joint venture of Calgary-based TransCanada Corp. and Exxon Mobil

Since the tragic events in Tuscon, Sarah Palin has once again been at the center of American politics. An image on her website, which included a map of the US with crosshairs over Gabrielle Gifford’s congressional district as well as several others that Palin was targeting for the midterm election was viewed by some of Palin’s critics as evidence that the former Alaska governor, who has certainly been prone to aggressive and heated rhetoric and not afraid of violent imagery and language, was somehow in some way partially responsible for the shooting in Tuscon. This interpretation proved somewhat presumptive as in the days following the shooting, it became increasingly clear that Jared Lee Loughner, the man who shot Gifford and the others, was a mentally unstable man without any cohesive political views. Therefore, while it was legitimate to express concern over Palin’s rhetoric, the direct link between her and Loughner did not exist.
After being thrust into the middle of these events, presumably against her will, Palin stumbled

Sarah Palin’s image problems have gotten even worse. A new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted January 14-16 (immediately after the controversy over her ham-handed response to the shootings in Arizona) finds that perceptions of Palin have declined significantly since October:
A new USA Today/Gallup poll conducted during the same three-day period recorded nearly identical results (38% favorable, 53% unfavorable), though the estimated decline since the previous Gallup poll (November) was less dramatic.
If Palin is indeed considering running for president, it’s worth noting just how unsuccessful she’s been at building the necessary public profile. Since last year, I have been tracking her poll numbers relative to the most obvious comparison — Hillary Clinton, another polarizing female politician. Clinton could never fully shed the high unfavorable ratings she acquired during her husband’s presidency, but she worked hard to improve her image and maintained higher favorable ratings during the period before the Democratic primary campaign began in

Roy Sekoff appeared on “The Joy Behar Show” Tuesday to discuss Sarah Palin’s defense of her controversial use of the term “blood libel” in her response to the tragedy in Arizona.
Sekoff explained that many Republicans and especially Palin “are geniuses at playing the victim.

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SEATTLE, JANUARY 12 – So now we know: The American right wing knows no shame and apparently will stop at nothing to bully the rest of us into shutting up and taking whatever they dish out.
On the sound principle — understood by right-wingers but not by liberals — that the best defense is a good offense, Sarah Palin has released a self-exonerating video statement asserting that “acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own.” The right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin has coined the phrase “Tucson massacre opportunists.” And the tendentiously “moderate” New York Times columnist David Brooks — whose previous low point, a year ago just after the earthquake, was blaming the victims in “places like Haiti” for lacking “middle-class values” — writes of “vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.” Meanwhile, a CBS News poll tells us that 57% of Americans reject any connection between the attack and the country’s political atmosphere. That’s the problem with democracy: sometimes the majority can be dead wrong.
And, as I said in my last article, if we Americans are going to dish it out to countries like Pakistan about how they should keep their radical elements in check, we need to be able to take it too. “The best way to forestall the development of a scenario is to keep your events episodic,” wrote Norman Mailer in his book Oswald’s Tale. This is what the American establishment and its media machine are masterful at: chopping the world up into distinct “stories” and doling them out severally, semi-intentionally creating what Ronald Reagan’s people called plausible

News flash: The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother wasn’t the original title of the memoir du jour. The publisher wanted The Helicopter Mom from Hell, but rumor has it that author Amy Chua had a temper tantrum, and that was that.
When the publisher offered another, The Battle Hymn of the Narcissistic Mother with Borderline Tendencies, Amy declared, as she does in the book, “There are all kinds of psychological disorders that exist in the West that don’t exist in Asia.” Since Chua dwells in the fantasy that the ways of the West don’t not apply to her, even though she was born in the U.S., that title was toast too.
I’m kidding about the titles — though they would be apt for this repellent little book — but the above quote belongs entirely to Amy Chua. It reveals that Chua never lets the facts get in the way of her opinions. And now that her book is out and her phone is ringing off the hook with charges of child abuse and more, she is claiming in the New York Times that the monomaniacal memoir “was meant to be ironic and self-mocking.”
Like the textbook narcissistic she appears to be, Chua is now trying to rewrite the narrative and wants us to buy into another version of her demented