Sarah in the news--she'll be on Glen Beck's new show on Monday. Her interview with Breitbart's new Big Hollywood site was a big success. As her interviewer John Ziegler notes, the reaction of the MSM proves his point. And the public seems to agree, as her numbers bounce back. RedState:

A majority of those polled agree with Gov. Palin’s criticism of her treatment at the hands of the media during and after the 2008 campaign. When asked the question “Do you think Sarah Palin has been treated fairly or unfairly by the press?”, 58 percent said she was treated unfairly. Only 35 percent responded that she had received fair treatment. Among Republicans the margin was 85-12, among independents 58-36. Even 41 percent of Democrats agreed that press treatment of Gov. Palin had been unfair. These results appear to contradict the claims made by some columnists that the governor’s recent criticism of the media for its treatment of her and her family was “not credible” and that she “overplayed her hand“.

Grounded and upbeat as ever. Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska on Glenn Beck's first show on Fox. This is from Monday. Whether she runs next round or waits until 2016, at least we have a fresh alternative to tune in to. Here's the clip: Meanwhile, in the Alaska town of Fairbanks, an ice sculptor has unveiled the figure of a shivering Al Gore. All 5 tons.

NY Post, Caroline withdraws when she learns she won't be the pick:

Kennedy's brief foray into politics lasted just under a month, from the time she roiled New York politics shortly before Christmas to say she was interested in being picked for the seat to today.

Just because you're a child in the White House doesn't mean you're entitled to serve in the Senate I guess. At least someone has drawn the line somewhere.

Maybe we'll just get professional pols from here on out. What a relief.

Mick Intones.

The scuttlebutt is that she wasn't getting the appointment, so Patterson allowed her the present the fiction that she withdrew her candidacy to spend more time with Uncle Ted.

King Pyrrhus was alleged to have said, after defeating the Romans, "another victory like that and we'll be ruined."

Obama has his bill, but at a very steep price. A recent CBS News poll show that 62% of Americans thought tax cuts are the right approach to stimulate the economy. NBC News/Wallstreet should that 60% worry that the government will spend too much to boost economic activity. Obama has doubled his disapproval ratings in only two weeks (from 10, to 21) and seen his overall job approval drop by 6 points in the same period.

Such an abrupt end to the honeymoon even surprised veteran political grandmaster Michael Barone.

Astonishing news on the generic ballot question. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that Democrats are currently ahead of Republicans by only 40 percent to 39 percent. Given that this generic ballot question over the years has tended to understate Republicans' performances in actual elections, one gathers that if the 2010 election for House seats were held today, Republicans would win or come close to winning a majority of seats—which is to say, they would gain about 40 seats. By way of comparison, they gained 52 seats when they won their majority in 1994.

Notably, a survey of liberal and conservative pundits has the former trying to explain it away, while the latter are cautious about making too much out of this so early in an election cycle. Karl Rove:

...if Republicans predict economic doom, they will overplay their hand. The Democratic stimulus will slow recovery, but not stop it. Recessions don't last forever and, if history is a guide, sometime late this year or early next the economy will rebound on its own. When that happens, Democrats will argue that their untargeted, permanent spending actually revived the economy.

Nobody is saying it, so I will. The poll results are a case of the sleeper awakening.

Created by LPUK

From the site:

The term liberal is one of the many words in the English language whose meaning has been utterly corrupted. It now means something entirely different to its original historical and philosophical meaning. Funnily enough, this has generally been the fault of those on the right who have wrongly used the word to attack those on the left for being soft or 'progressive'.

In many respects this is a little like calling a cat a dog. To be a liberal basically means you believe in individual freedom. And that you accept the responsibilities that this entails. As is clear, this outlook is worlds apart from the collectivist ideologies of those on the left.

Via the feline enumerator at Counting Cats in Zanzibar.

Created by LPUK

I agree with something I read on the far-left MyDD.

Burris is getting to a point where his legal guilt and innocence are irrelevant; that's a very bad place to be. As clammyc puts it, "Political guilt is different from guilt in a court of law" and it's pretty clear that Burris is tainted by the former if not the latter. At the very least, as WaPo states plainly, Burris has violated the public trust. His constant protestations to the contrary just become all the sadder with every new revelation.

The next step must be for Democratic Senate leaders to demand his resignation and for the Illinois legislature to do what it should have done much earlier: call for a special election to fill the seat. I agree with The Tribune:

Strip this whole wretched process out of the hands of the politicians and give it back to the people.

The Senate Ethics Committee has launched an investigation.

Patterico provides the big picture:

In unrelated news, today Barack Obama (one day earlier than promised) signed the death warrant for our children’s financial future — which passed by exactly 60 votes in the Senate. A Senate where we have one Democrat who made it in by hiding the fact that he was asked to pay to play — and where a Republican lost an election after losing a criminal trial where the government hid evidence from him.

That may be a little too "inside baseball" if you're not keeping up with the news--Burris of course is the disposable Democrat brought on to vote on the stimulus and now being discarded. Ted Stevens, long-serving Senator from Alaska, was defeated on the basis of federal allegations that he was a crook. Now as it turns out, its the federal prosecutors who are the crooks.

Info on city by city events here.

The lead story here has been the resignation of a key aide to Gordon Brown. The aide has been outed concocting a sex and drugs and mental health smear campaign against the Conservative leadership and their wives. So far, so sordid, but the big point is that this is a terrific scoop and scalp for blogger, Guido Fawkes, who obtained the smoking gun emails and skilfully played the quiet Easter news cycle to maximum effect. (Guy Fawkes, by the way, tried to blow up the House of Lords and King James I in 1605 as part of a Roman Catholic plot. His effigy is burnt every November the 5th on Bonfire Night).

The story is rife with British comic detail and vendettas all around, not least the envy and treachery of Guido Fawkes' MSM competitors, up to and including a pre-emptive betrayal of Guido's scoop by the supposedly conservative Daily Telegraph. An irony is that anyone can open a blog on the Telegraph site and Guido Fawkes himself has done just that - to embarrassing effect, writing:

Telegraph Has Behaved Terribly Over Smeargate

Sunday, April 12, 2009, 01:38 PM GMT [General]

There are a lot of bitter, jealous journalists at the Telegraph and you have behaved shamefully over the McBride story. You even tipped off Downing Street in advance as to exactly what I was up to. It reflects on you a lot more than it does on me.
You revealed sources, broke a confidence, breached a signed non-disclosure agreement and behaved like patsys for McBride.

You still failed to spoil the story. Your political team is about as weak as it gets, that is why you sucked up to Downing Street.
The Telegraph was once run by gentlemen for gentlemen. This would never have happened under Deedes or Charles Moore.
Do your worst.

So politics in both London and Washington would be tragic were it not so funny. Look on the bright side. Things change.

***Update: uh-oh.

DanHan:

Socialists....emphasise motive over outcome.... the key thing, for Lefties, is to show that you're a caring person.

I've just been talking to a very clever man. He's called Thompson Ayodele, he's from Nigeria and he thinks that overseas aid is making African countries poorer.

Foreign aid, he suggests, isn't useless; it's actively harmful. It discourages enterprise, fosters dependency and bolsters corrupt regimes.

As Thompson puts it: "The British Treasury is empty. So you are going to be borrowing money in order to give it away. And the countries that get it will be poorer as a result". Yup: but at least we'll have shown everyone how nice we are.

Nietsche called it 'der Wille sur Macht'; the will to power.

I was in my mid-thirties before I finally figured out that ambition has to have a point or it becomes a destructive force in one's life. A lot of people never figure that out from what I can tell.

I'm chagrined to see that the Republican party establishment appears to be among that number.

Party strategists worry that well-funded, well-organized challenges from the right could force Republicans to exhaust precious resources on messy primary fights — or force moderate candidates to adopt more strident positions early on that could haunt them during the final months of the campaign.

“For me, what this says is, we need to take a deep breath and decide whether [moderates and conservatives] work together or not,” said Tom Davis, the former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “And if we don’t, it can get very, very ugly.”

The party guys just want their offices back. The people want political power directed to specific ends--namely the freedoms inherent to the idea of the United States.

The establishment can whine all it wants, but conservatives understand all too well that electing 'Republicans' is absolutely indistinguishable from electing Democrats, and the Scozzafava fiasco in New York is about as extreme a case as we've ever seen. The woman endorsed the Democrat in the race when her position became untenable!

Republican officials may not get their chairmanships back and the nicer offices at the Capitol building, but the Republicans candidate who are reelected will actually be true representatives and will wield what power they have in the manner it was intended.

Thank God! Maybe Christie is wishywashy on policy, but Obama/Corzine is toast. I'll celebrate in NJ with friends and family in a couple of weeks. This will hasten the exodus from NY to NJ. Above all I want the state-dependent black cities in NJ to get their funding withdrawn. It simply pays them to be peons and underperform their whole lives in return for a tainted vote. By geography and talent NJ should be one of the most dynamic, attractive places in the world. Great beaches, lots of open space, family friendly towns, urbanity, international access, interesting weather but not too interesting. Instead NJ's been stuck with a vicious corruptocracy, keeping the middle-class on life support. Hope and change...we'll see. Christie's number 1 job should be to make stealing elections harder. Next de-fund government and attract investment. That means cutting taxes and getting a head start in the competition with the rest of the USA, especially the North-Eastern socialist states.

BTW Mick's quite right in his characterization of brainwashed attitudes to the National Health Service in the UK. This is no exaggeration:

In other western democracies like Canada and the UK, government-run health care is a very, very sacred cow, no matter how obviously dysfunctional the system is and no matter how many people have to die to keep every bureaucrat in their job.

Anyway down with thieves and liars and let me have men around me who are fat!

Ladies and Gentleman, a new era in global politics has dawned, probably a decade ago, but we are just now starting to realize what has happened.

A year ago, the Democrats had obliterated the Republican party and gained super-majorities in the House and Senate. The Messiah-elect was preparing to ascend to his throne. Anthropogenic global warming was "settled science", and the free market economy had been discredited. The media closed ranks around a new industry mission statement: Keep stuff uncomplimentary of Democrat officials and the party agenda, out of the news...

It has all gone to hell in a remarkably short time--mere months. I don't think there is a single reason for this, but all the reasons there are seem to derive from the advent of single enabling technology.

The Internet.

One of the reasons we are here is the reemergence of radical left-wing ideology out of seeming nowhere. Going only as far back as the 2000 election, the far-left, represented by Ralph Nader, was fringe politics of the Lyndon LaRouche stripe. No one took them seriously as a political force, yet only nine years later, the government is full of appointees with notable communist sympathies and affliations. What changed was the ability of the widely-scattered extremists to find each other, organize and most importantly--create a funding mechanism for their political ambitions. The left now had their political equivalent of Evangelical congregations.

Yet, sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. Conservative and libertarian elements were able to quickly replicate left-wing success to mount a challenge every bit as intense as the anti-war effort, but directed at the Obama administration, its spending and legislative agenda. I get emails every week from my local meet-up group, and they've been very successful in engineering protests, high-profile voter education and townhall meeting attendance.

Ironically, as an outgrowth of this on-line social networking, we've also seen a new kind of journalistic activism--all of it almost exclusively on the Right. That's not terribly surprising since the left has no need of an investigative journalism elan, since the mainstream media seems perfectly willing to oblige. The left's efforts in this area seem to have been largely confined to outing homosexuals.

The Internet has effectively destroyed the political control the Democrats exercised over the media, to the extent where years spent in engineering an elaborate and expensive international conspiracy to destroy globalism (otherwise know as the global march of capitalism...), have been nuked by a stubborn, internet-resident resistance and a single leak of erstwhile private communication between conspiring scientists. Not since rickety bi-planes rendered the floating rafts of gold bars called battleships obsolete, have we seen such innocuous actions destroy such an elaborate infrastructure.

Literally every element the Democrats were relying on to extend an iron-fisted grip on American lives has crumbled to dust in a remarkably short period of time, mostly because they built their house of cards on an old foundation of information control.

Its worth noting that the Bush administration survived eight years in this environment. They must have been doing something right.

We've seen that the internet is a fine weapon of political mass destruction. It remains to be seen if it can yet be harnessed to build political consensus.

Michael Graham, of the Boston Herald,tallys the upside.

Scott Brown, the Republican candidate running for the Massachusetts senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy, is making the Democratics earn the seat this time. He even has a shot at winning. If the Democrats didn't think Obamacare motivates opposition, they need to mull over yesterday's campaign moneybomb. The Brown campaign sought to raise $500K in a one day drive - they more than doubled their goal at $1.3M.

A few shots from the Reclaim American Liberty conference I attended in NYC recently: the speaker in this shot is Andy McCarthy - unanswerable on the upcoming off-Broadway Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Show; far left is General Richard Myers, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - I found his speech and demeanour bureaucratic; second left is Colonel Allen West, congressional candidate - outstanding, succinct, historically literate, an anti-Obama:

A General Election looms, so naturally the press is full of demeaning stories about politicians (all true). There's a labyrinthine meme about Gordon Brown as bully. 'Bullying' is the new black in un-pc vices, often in the eye of the beholder, and so a deliciously malleable accusation for modern witchfinders. Since the witchfinders are usually Nu-Labour apparatchiks, it's apt that Brown is on the receiving end of strongly sourced charges that he hits his flunkies and pushes secretaries around. His answer is to go all weepy in a cringeworthy, humanising interview with Piers Morgan. It is sad, but what kind of scumbag uses such personal grief to win votes ? But this reconstruction from Taiwan almost makes me want to vote for him. If he socks Obama between now and May, then I will.

I was asked this by a super-intelligent young lady whom I accuse of being brainwashed into her illiberal liberalism:

Btw, I'd be genuinely interested to read your manifesto if you're willing to engage in debate without using ad hominem arguments or suggesting I'm brainwashed.

I'd be particularly interested to hear how your system deals with natural monopolies (air traffic, transport, broadband, post, police, courts, army)
and things that affect the vulnerable (health care for poor children/parents, education) and whether you legislate for and enforce laws around things like farming of animals, insider trading.

Air traffic - not a natural monopoly.
transport - ditto.
broadband - ditto
post- ditto

If you're thinking of the 'pipeline' for broadband, water, power, etc as a natural monopoly then one way to handle it is as it's done now - combination of public regulator and private franchisee monopolist, but it's a technical rather than political question.

Air traffic control may be a natural monopoly and should be state regulated tho privately run perhaps.

Courts should be in the public sector, but have become corrupted by social engineers in the Anglosphere, cf atrocities like Roe v Wade, atrocious for it's substance, yes, but intellectually atrocious as having no basis in law other than an invented right to privacy which is then tendentiously extended to the right of a mother to kill her baby as tho any of the Framers would have contemplated anything of the sort.

Police should be in the public sector probably, tho not necessarily. Again control by social engineers has been disastrous.

Army ditto.

The question is not whether a private corporation runs something, but who appropriately regulates that corporation - the free market or the state. The principle is that all activities should be free from state interference other than enforceability of voluntary contracts.

The exceptions should be few and have compelling ideological or practical justification such as 'the state should have the monopoly of force' or 'children must be protected.'

The reason for that is ideological - freedom is an absolute good - and practical - the government is sometimes useless, but more often worse than useless at effecting good results. It has neither the skills nor the correct motivation. Your suggestion that the answer to that is better government has been so comprehensively disproved in practice and theory, in history and in the present, all over the world and probably on Jupiter, that it takes cognitive dissonance to persist with it.

Children are the reason for society to exist and should be protected consistent with minimal displacement of the family by the state.

Other animals should be protected by law. Factory farming and vivisection should be crimes. How to get from here to there is discussable, but that's what 'there' looks like.

Insider trading is fine providing everyone knows it might happen and there are no voluntary contracts - eg contracts of employment - to bar it. Risks are far more manageable when they are in the open.

I'd add that anybody should be sackable for any reason and there should be no state healthcare other than fallback provision for children and those injured in the front line of military service.

Yes the government should ensure that water is clean and power stations don't blow up.

This will sound ruthless to you, but the outcomes are much better spiritually, politically and practically except IN ONE RESPECT: it doesn't allow liberals to feel good about themselves at others' expense. But that's not a bug, it's a feature.

Professor Gingrich struts his stuff in a tutorial setting. I'm pleased that he recognizes Chris Christie as the most important governor in the United States for what he's attempting in New Jersey. What's so attractive about Gingrich is that he integrates the nitty gritty of politics with the ideas of politics and does so with the utmost fluency; a beautiful mind.