Palin Having Trouble with Reading Comprehension?

The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch’s crown jewel, went after a Murdoch employee, Sarah Palin, recently of FOX, on one of her errors, which appear on a regular basis from her Twitter feed or in speeches. 


Palin attacked the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, which is about as far over her head as she ever wants to get, and showed profound ignorance on inflation. She said anyone who’d gone shopping lately would know that “grocery prices have risen significantly over the past year.” A Journal blogger then noted that food and beverage inflation was practically nonexistent for the past year — the lowest on record — and that Palin was having some trouble with reading comprehension (From Liar's Club, by Timothy Egan).


Palin called studies supporting global climate change a "bunch of snake oil science." Well, it's certainly harder to read the climate studies, than it might be to read the business page, but for Palin, the results are the same -- she got it wrong. 

A Republican Legacy

By the end of 2008, the Republicans in the White House and in the RNC were already thinking ahead to the midterm elections of 2010 and the next presidential election of 2012 as George W. Bush’s last, miserable year was winding down. Here’s what they were thinking.

First, the major recession brought on by Bush’s wartime tax cuts, his unfunded Medicare Part D program, and the debacle created by an under-regulated financial sector would saddle the new Democratic Administration with a severely damaged economy.

Second, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would drag on, since Bush and his neocon cohorts never planned an exit strategy, even though they were planning to invade Iraq before 9/11 even happened.

And third, they bet that America’s instant-gratification, memory-challenged populace would forget where the responsibility lay for the country’s problems. Americans would grow weary of the wars, angry at how long it was taking to right the foundering ship of state, and fearful about their job prospects in the dismal economy. Then, looking around the capital grounds, people would blame the new administration and Democratic majority for all their woes. Republicans subscribed to the thinking of Henry Mencken, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

In order to take advantage of their legacy, the Republican leadership decided to “just say no,” and use the threat of filibuster to oppose every piece of legislation proposed by the democrats to improve the economy and pull the country from the brink of another Great Depression. To bolster the chances of this craven strategy working, they played on the fears of the public by labeling the Administration’s attempts to prop up financial institutions, “socialism.” Republicans threw this term around so much it was almost funny. Everything from creating laws against texting while driving to improving the conditions in egg farms to prevent salmonella poisoning was socialism.

Of course the Republican minority’s most shameful episode and one that continues to this day was their reaction to president Obama’s program to improve healthcare and stem the tide of exponentially increasing healthcare costs. Here again, their strategy was supremely simple and supremely dishonest:

• propose nothing substantive of their own
• lie about what was in or intended by the bill moving through congress
• scare some of the most vulnerable members of society, claiming their fate would be decided by “death panels”
• vote “no, no, no” as one, over and over again.

In his book, “What Happened, Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” Scott McClellan, former White House Press secretary, said that under Karl Rove’s influence, governing the country became a continuous political campaign characterized by whatever deception was necessary. Richard A. Clarke, Bush’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism, in his book, “Against All Enemies,” lamenting the then president's meager understanding of al'Qaeda, stated that Bush wasn’t much on reading. Well, let’s hope most Americans read more than their former president, because if they do, they’ll understand how little today’s Republicans really care about America.

Sarah Palin Comments on the BP Gulf Spill

"We still believe in responsible development, which includes drilling to extract energy sources, because we know that there is an inherent link between energy and security, energy and prosperity, and energy and freedom." Sarah Palin's Facebook.

Sarah Palin Snows the Public

Sarah Palin Snowing the Public

In his Wednesday, December 9, 2009 blog, Joel Achenbach, responding to Sarah Palin’s same-day op ed piece in the Washington Post slamming the Copenhagen Climate Conference, writes, “When I want an astute analysis of climate change, or of any complex scientific topic, including the search for the Higgs boson, the mystery of human consciousness, and the Protein Folding Problem, I turn to America's most trusted scientific expert, Sarah Palin.” Achenbach goes on in the same vein, “Ms. Palin lives in the Arctic. She can see the North Pole. She has field-dressed moose on Denali glaciers. What she knows is that there's still a lot of snow out there. There's ice all over the place. Frankly it's way too cold. Warm things up a bit and Alaska might actually be habitable!”

Like so many of her cohorts in the Republican Party, facts are no barrier to Ms. Palin's opinions. Atlantic's political blogger Marc Ambinder has written a point-by-point critique of Ms. Palin’s faulty logic, or to be less charitable, falsehoods, in his December 8, 2009, Politics blog. Responding to Palin’s claim that climate science has been highly politicized by “radical environmentalists,” and here she's referring to the IPCC climate scientists, which she refers to as “so-called experts,” (because they've only been working in climate science all their lives and they aren't dead yet, I guess), Ambinder says, “True -- although the politicization came about as a response to an extremely well-funded political campaign by those whose bottom lines would be most harmed by carbon taxes, cap and trade schemes and the like.”
This gets to my previous post on the matter. I wonder if Sarah wrote her piece herself, or if someone from WPP’s many companies wrote it for her. Whatever the case, like so many of Ms. Palin’s remarks, her opinions on climate are just a lot of hot air.
BTW, for those of you wondering what the hell the Higgs boson is, check it out here.

Sarah Palin to Medical School

Erstwhile Alaska Gov and John McCain running mate Sarah Palin shown wearing a latex glove she’s just used to perform a digital rectal exam on a surprised supporter. “I believe in responsible health care for all Alaska’s citizens,” she pronounced, at the same time she told the red-faced woman that she should have a prostate biopsy.

Palin, who recently lamented that her parents and baby with Down Syndrome will have to step in front of a “death panel” under President Obama’s health care bill, has yet to reveal her future plans, but one can only assume she’s headed for medical school where, in all likelihood she’ll specialize in 'foot in mouth' disease.