Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Monday, December 14, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Right wing Bob affirms he's a true believer
Bill Flanagan's Christmas chat with Bob Dylan:
BF: You really give a heroic performance of O’ LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM The way you do it reminds me a little of an Irish rebel song. There’s something almost defiant in the way you sing, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” I don’t want to put you on the spot, but you sure deliver that song like a true believer.
BD: Well, I am a true believer.
ALSO:
BF: Do you have a favorite Christmas album?
BD: Maybe the Louvin Brothers. I like all the religious Christmas albums. The ones in Latin. The songs I sang as a kid.
BF: A lot of people like the secular ones.
BD: Religion isn’t meant for everybody.
BF: What sort of gifts do you like to give?
BD: I try to match the person with the gift.
BF: Are you a last minute shopper?
BD: Always.
BF: Do you drop any hints about what you hope to get from your family?
BD: Nope. Their well-being – that’s enough of a gift for me.
BF: I know we’re out of time but I have to ask, what’s the best Christmas gift you ever got?
BD: Let me think… oh yeah, I think it was a sled.
Audio Samples from Amazon!
BF: You really give a heroic performance of O’ LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM The way you do it reminds me a little of an Irish rebel song. There’s something almost defiant in the way you sing, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” I don’t want to put you on the spot, but you sure deliver that song like a true believer.
BD: Well, I am a true believer.
ALSO:
BF: Do you have a favorite Christmas album?
BD: Maybe the Louvin Brothers. I like all the religious Christmas albums. The ones in Latin. The songs I sang as a kid.
BF: A lot of people like the secular ones.
BD: Religion isn’t meant for everybody.
BF: What sort of gifts do you like to give?
BD: I try to match the person with the gift.
BF: Are you a last minute shopper?
BD: Always.
BF: Do you drop any hints about what you hope to get from your family?
BD: Nope. Their well-being – that’s enough of a gift for me.
BF: I know we’re out of time but I have to ask, what’s the best Christmas gift you ever got?
BD: Let me think… oh yeah, I think it was a sled.
Audio Samples from Amazon!
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Ideal FB Response to Al Gore
Palin Responds to Gore on her Facebook Page:Steven Hayward has a great article in The Weekly Standard on the Climategate scandal. Be sure to check it out.
The response to my op-ed by global warming alarmists has been interesting. Former Vice President Al Gore has called me a “denier” and informs us that climate change is “a principle in physics. It’s like gravity. It exists.”
Perhaps he’s right. Climate change is like gravity – a naturally occurring phenomenon that existed long before, and will exist long after, any governmental attempts to affect it.
However, he’s wrong in calling me a “denier.” As I noted in my op-ed above and in my original Facebook post on Climategate, I have never denied the existence of climate change. I just don’t think we can primarily blame man’s activities for the earth’s cyclical weather changes.
Former Vice President Gore also claimed today that the scientific community has worked on this issue for 20 years, and therefore it is settled science. Well, the Climategate scandal involves the leading experts in this field, and if Climategate is proof of the larger method used over the past 20 years, then Vice President Gore seriously needs to consider that their findings are flawed, falsified, or inconclusive.
Vice President Gore, the Climategate scandal exists. You might even say that it’s sort of like gravity: you simply can’t deny it.
- Sarah Palin
Michelle Malkin Thanks Sarah for Her Strong Advocacy of Life & Patriotism
By Michelle Malkin • December 9, 2009 12:24 AM
We had frigid weather and several inches of Goreflakes on the ground here in Colorado Springs, but Sarah Palin lit up the town for a Borders signing earlier this evening that drew yet another massive crowd on her nationwide “Going Rogue” book tour.
My family and I had the great honor and pleasure of meeting the governor, her husband Todd, adorable baby Trig, her lovely parents, relatives, and friends from near and far. Sarah’s energy is boundless and her ability to connect is unparalleled with any public figure I’ve met in covering politics over the last 17 years. I spoke, for example, with the first family in line for the book signing. They arrived at 4:30am with four kids in tow. Sarah, the father of the family told me, had written a personal letter sending prayers and good wishes for one of their children battling cancer. On the way out, I ran into a soldier in BDUs rushing through the door with Palin’s book in hand. Breathless, he asked: “Do you think there’s any hope I’ll get my book signed?” Given the special attentiveness Palin’s staff paid to military and their families (several Blue Star families got VIP access), I’m sure he got his autograph. There are countless stories like this in every single city she has visited.
The governor and I talked briefly about Copenhagen (here’s her latest piece in the Washington Post calling on President Obama to stay home in the wake of ClimateGate), left-wing attacks on conservative politicians (Michele Bachmann is the latest target of specious ethics complaints), and the blessings of living outside the Beltway. Most of all, I’m glad I got a chance to simply say “Thank you” in person — for her strong conservative voice, for her relentless optimism in the face of unrelenting attacks, and for her public service as a defender of life and advocate of the American dream.
Post-Modernist at theTimes Hails Sarah's Claim on Her Truth
Sarah Palin Is Coming to Town
By STANLEY FISH
When I walked into the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan last week, I headed straight for the bright young thing who wore an “Ask Me” button, and asked her to point me to the section of the store where I might find Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.” She looked at me as if I had requested a copy of “Mein Kampf” signed in blood by the author, and directed me to the nearest Barnes and Noble, where, presumably, readers of dubious taste and sensibility could find what they wanted.
Going Rogue cover Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
A few days later, I attended a seminar on political and legal theory where a distinguished scholar observed that every group has its official list of angels and devils. As an example, he offered the fact (of which he was supremely confident) that few, if any, in the room were likely to be Sarah Palin fans. By that time I had begun reading Palin’s book, and while I wouldn’t count myself a fan in the sense of being a supporter, I found it compelling and very well done.
My assessment of the book has nothing to do with the accuracy of its accounts. Some news agencies have fact-checkers poring over every sentence, which would be to the point if the book were a biography, a genre that is judged by the degree to which the factual claims being made can be verified down to the last assertion. “Going Rogue,” however, is an autobiography, and while autobiographers certainly insist that they are telling the truth, the truth the genre promises is the truth about themselves — the kind of persons they are — and even when they are being mendacious or self-serving (and I don’t mean to imply that Palin is either), they are, necessarily, fleshing out that truth. As I remarked in a previous column, autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say will truthfully serve their project, which, again, is not to portray the facts, but to portray themselves.
The questions to ask then are (1) Does Palin succeed in conveying to her readers the kind of person she is? and (2) Does she do it in a satisfying and artful way? In short, is the book a good autobiographical read? I would answer “yes” to both.
First, the art. The book has an architectonic structure that is built around a single moment, the moment when Palin receives a call from John McCain inviting her to be the vice-presidential candidate of the Republican party. When we first hear about the call it is as much a surprise to us as it was (at least as reported) to her, because for six pages she has been recounting a wonderful family outing at the Alaska State Fair. When her phone rings, she hopes it might be a call from her son Track, a soldier soon to deploy to Iraq, but “it was Senator John McCain asking if I wanted to help him change history.”
And that’s the last we hear of it for 200 pages. In between we hear a lot about Wasilla, high school, basketball, college, marriage, children, Down syndrome, Alaska politics, the environment, a daughter’s pregnancy. The re-entry of John McCain into the narrative on page 208 introduces Palin’s account of the presidential campaign and its aftermath, especially her decision to resign the governorship before the end of her term. In the epilogue, another 200 pages on, the famous call serves as a bookend: “It is one year ago this week that I got the call from John McCain.”
Paradoxically, the effect of the neatly spaced references to the call is to de-emphasize it as a dramatic moment. It is presented not as a climax, but as an interruption of matters more central to Palin’s abiding concerns — her family, Alaska’s prosperity, energy policy. (She loves to rehearse the kind of wonkish details we associate with Hillary Clinton, whom she admires.)
Indeed, it is a feature of this narrative that events we might have expected to be foregrounded are elided or passed over. Palin introduced herself to the nation with a powerful, electrifying speech accepting McCain’s invitation to join the ticket. It gets half a sentence (“I gave my speech”). Chapter Two ends with Palin, no longer a mayor, wondering what she is going to do next. Four paragraphs into Chapter Three we learn, almost parenthetically, that she had decided to run for governor. (When and how did that happen?) The only event that receives an extended discussion is her resignation. It is important to her because as an act it reflects on her integrity, and she has to be sure (as she eventually was) that she was doing it for the right reasons.
Resigning was a moral act for which she was responsible. The vice-presidential candidacy just happened to her; her account of it reads like an extended “what-I-did-on-my summer-and fall-vacation” essay. For many politicians, family life is sandwiched in between long hours in public service. Palin wants us to know that for her it is the reverse. Political success is an accident that says nothing about you. Success as a wife, mother and citizen says everything.
Do I believe any of this? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she does, and that her readers feel they are hearing an authentic voice. I find the voice undeniably authentic (yes, I know the book was written “with the help” of Lynn Vincent, but many books, including my most recent one, are put together by an editor). It is the voice of small-town America, with its folk wisdom, regional pride, common sense, distrust of rhetoric (itself a rhetorical trope), love of country and instinctive (not doctrinal) piety. It says, here are some of the great things that have happened to me, but they are not what makes my life great and American. (“An American life is an extraordinary life.”) It says, don’t you agree with me that family, freedom and the beauties of nature are what sustain us? And it also says, vote for me next time. For it is the voice of a politician, of the little girl who thought she could fly, tried it, scraped her knees, dusted herself off and “kept walking.”
In the end, perseverance, the ability to absorb defeat without falling into defeatism, is the key to Palin’s character. It’s what makes her run in both senses of the word and it is no accident that the physical act of running is throughout the book the metaphor for joy and real life. Her handlers in the McCain campaign wouldn’t let her run (a mistake, I think, even at the level of photo-op), no doubt because they feared another opportunity to go “off script,” to “go rogue.”
But run she does (and falls, but so what?), and when it is all over and she has lost the vice presidency and resigned the governorship, she goes on a long run and rehearses in her mind the eventful year she has chronicled. And as she runs, she achieves equilibrium and hope: “We’ve been through amazing days, and really, there wasn’t one thing to complain about. I feel such freedom, such hope, such thankfulness for our country, a place where nothing is hopeless.”
The message is clear. America can’t be stopped. I can’t be stopped. I’ve stumbled and fallen, but I always get up and run again. Her political opponents, especially those who dismissed Ronald Reagan before he was elected, should take note. Wherever you are, you better watch out. Sarah Palin is coming to town.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
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