As Dr. Arthur Robinson, writer of the "Pro-Science, Pro-Technology, Pro-Free Enterprise Monthly Newsletter" Access to Energy describes it, the American national railroad train is heading toward a fatal intersection. He writes, "There is a switch at that intersection. One direction leads to a wonderful valley of lower taxation, lower regulation, lower litigation, and less government – a valley labelled u2018freedom' and u2018technology prosperity.' The other direction leads to a destroyed bridge over a very deep canyon. The rocks at the bottom of the canyon are littered with the remains of many earlier civilizations. They are labelled u2018statism,' u2018totalitarianism,' u2018Marxism,' u2018fascism,' and u2018the tyranny of democratic socialism.'"
Now operating as a free agent in the Lower 48 (states), Sarah Palin is likely to play a critical role in helping to turn the switch that turns America's train in the direction towards less government.
When she came on the national stage as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, LRC's Walter Block wrote: "Here is a rifle toting, moose killing, basketball playing, beauty contest winning, charismatic and eloquent long happily married conservative hockey mom who has made something of herself in a very competitive field, who has not gone to finishing school at Harvard, Yale or Princeton… She is a breath of fresh air blowing in from our northernmost state."
This is how Lew Rockwell viewed her arrival on the national scene:
"The frenzied reaction of the middle class all over the country toward Sarah Palin has no real precedent that I can remember. Indeed, the reaction especially among women is completely understandable. She provides a much welcome cultural break from the chip-on-the-shoulder, grudge-against-the-world model of public women that have been held up to us for years, embodied in the belligerent and insufferable person of Hillary Clinton.
"Sarah, on the other hand, is both beautiful and professionally accomplished, a wife and mother and a natural politician, both religious and secular, both feminine and fears no tasks such as hunting that are usually associated with men. She offers a different model of a woman who has excelled not through intimidation and aggressive demands for reparation, but through her own efforts, charms, and intelligence."
Jack Wheeler points out (in his To The Point News) this special quality that Palin has: "A lower-middle-class woman who speaks the language of the country's ordinary voters and has a profound personal understanding of the hopes and worries of a vast swath of the public."
Feminists, intellectuals, academics, the Beltway (Washington, D.C.) culture and its media acolytes hold a different view of her. Sarah Palin provokes a visceral hostility in these special people, which compels them to make statements about her like these: "Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy" (Maureen Dowd); a "religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus" (Christopher Hitchens); "anti-abortion, a member of the NRA and thinks creationism should be taught alongside evolution" (Susan Reimer); "it's her extreme narcissism that gets to me" (Pepper Schwartz, a professor at the University of Washington [yes, I know her]); and "her greatest hypocrisy is her pretense that she is a woman" (Wendy Doniger, a professor at the University of Chicago).
The Deniers
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While the intellectual elite (liberal and conservative) and feminists loathe Sarah Palin, a substantial proportion of the U.S. population quite likes and admires her. This is particularly true with people who live in "flyover country" – that part of America that lays between the Beltway/East (establishment) Coast and the West (left) Coast. A lot of people in flyover country revere her. In the 2008 campaign, adoring throngs in the thousands, and sometimes as many as 60,000 people would greet her at rallies held around the country. She became a national sensation. The song "I am a Woman," written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and wonderfully sung by Peggy Lee captures the attraction Sarah Palin has for many people, especially this verse: "I can make a dress out of a feed bag and I can make a man out of you."
Now operating in the Lower 48 (states) as a free agent, Palin will be speaking at fundraisers for Republican House and Senate candidates in the run-up to the 2010 election. They will welcome her aid, not only because she draws large crowds wherever she goes, but most importantly for her fundraising ability. No Republican comes anywhere close to her in that regard. She has announced that she will also campaign for conservative Blue Dog Democrats (those "choked blue" by "extreme" Democrats from the left) who agree with her views on "Cap and Trade" and health care reform – and against those who voted for them. Her focus will be on the composition of Congress elected in 2010. More immediately, it will be on these two bills in Congress: the global-climate change Cap and Trade bill, H.R. 2454, which the House has already passed; and the "ObamaCare" health plan, H.R. 3200. These bills, if signed into law, will point America's train, with increasing speed, towards the canyon of collectivism.
In a July 14, 2009 article in The Washington Post, titled "The u2018Cap and Tax' Dead End," Palin writes, "I am deeply concerned about President Obama's cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage."
Good scientific evidence, ignored by proponents of Cap and Trade, like Al Gore, who stand to profit handsomely from its passage, shows that rising atmospheric CO2 levels do not cause global warming and are not harming the environment. Instead, higher CO2 levels increase plant growth. For a carefully considered and solid refutation of the CO2/Human-Caused Global Warming hypothesis see this (12-page) paper (with 133 scientific references), Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide by A. Robinson, N. Robinson, and W. Soon.
The case for human-caused global warming is based on 1) worst-case computer models, which have no basis in fact and do not consider solar and celestial (cosmic ray) causes of climate change (see here) or the influence of the Southern Oscillation on global temperature (see here); and 2) on "consensus." Modern empirical science began in the 17th century, replacing medieval science based on authority, belief (unsupported by empirical evidence), and consensus. The dogmatic belief that Man is the cause of the recent warming harks back to medieval science with its claims of consensus, submission to the authority of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and on (empirically unsupported) computer models.
The Beltway politicians' main motivation for implementing Cap and Trade is to raise taxes and to increase government power and control over Americans, and to lower their standard of living. To this end, as the Science and Public Policy Institute's recently published (19-page) Climate Money (by Joanne Nova) reveals, "The US Government has spent more than $79 billion of taxpayers' money since 1989 on policies related to climate change [human-caused global warming], including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks. Most of this spending was unnecessary." (The government will not fund research on other theories of global warming.)
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As Sarah Palin warns, Cap and Trade would adversely affect every aspect of the U.S. economy. Among other things, it will increase unemployment in the energy sector, raise the cost of doing business, increase the cost of farming and drive up grocery prices. The best recipe for energy independence, and for a sufficient supply of affordable energy necessary to restore American prosperity, is to cleanly tap abundant hydrocarbon resources in American soil (coal, oil, and gas) and build more nuclear power plants (see here and here).
Asking the question, "Can America produce more of its own energy through strategic investments that protect the environment, revive our economy and secure our nation?" Palin replies, "Yes, we can. Just not with Barack Obama's energy cap-and-tax plan."
The purpose of the 1,018-page ObamaCare health plan is "To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes." [Emphasis added.] This includes 45+ million Americans who currently have no insurance, which includes some 10 million illegal aliens that the plan will cover. It will raise taxes on small businesses and wealthy Americans and cut costs by rationing and denying care. Like the UK's National Health Service, the ObamaCare plan creates a National Health Care Board, which will approve or reject surgery and medical treatments like chemotherapy based on its cost divided by the number years the patient is expected to benefit from it. As one observer explains, this means "If you are over 65 or have been recently diagnosed as having an advanced form of cardiac disease or aggressive cancer…..dream on if you think you will get treated…..pick out your coffin."
The plan empowers The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information and Technology (in the Department of Health and Human Services) to "monitor treatments being delivered to make sure doctors and hospitals are strictly following government guidelines that are deemed appropriate." And it states, "Doctors and hospitals not adhering to guidelines will face penalties" (i.e. fines and possible imprisonment). The Plan empowers the newly established Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research "to slow the development of new medications and technologies in order to reduce costs."
The plan also contains provisions, such as the "Limitation on New [individual private coverage] Enrollment" clause on page 16, that give government the power, with its tax-subsidized coverage, to squeeze out and eliminate all private health care plans and nationalize America's health care (which comprises 20 percent of the economy). Worse, Section 1233 of the bill requires "senior citizens to meet at least every 5 years [every year for people with chronic illnesses] with a doctor or nurse practitioner to discuss dying with dignity." In these "Advanced Care Planning" sessions people over 65 will learn "how to decline hydration, nutrition and how to initiate hospice care."
ObamaCare is medical fascism with a vengeance.
Sarah Palin opposes government intervention in health care and will strive to convince Americans that Beltway politicians have no constitutional or moral authority to outlaw private health insurance, which they will do if the House and Senate pass this bill, and nationalize health care.
Shortly before she resigned as governor of Alaska, Palin signed a resolution (House Joint Resolution 27) declaring Alaska's sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which states, "Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States." (Thirty-five other states are considering a sovereignty resolution, and the legislatures in six states have passed such a decree. Currently, along with Sarah Palin, only one other governor, Phil Bredesen in Tennessee, has signed the legislature-passed sovereignty resolution in these states.) Sarah Palin has taken the lead in this important movement. Florida State Senator Carey Baker puts it well when he says, "Now more than ever, state governments must exercise their Constitutional right to say no to the expansion of the federal government's reckless deficit spending and abuse of power."
Sarah Palin was the only top-tier candidate in the 2008 Election who had anything good to say about Ron Paul. In an MTV interview (on August 29, 2008), Palin said Ron Paul was “cool.” “He’s a good guy,” she added. “He’s so independent. He’s independent of the party machine. I’m like, u2018Right on, so am I.'” Now free, Palin would do well to study with Ron Paul. The country not only needs to have less government, lower taxes, fewer regulations, and to achieve energy independence, but it also needs to dismantle its empire (which is being run on borrowed money) and bring the troops home. Her support for the ruinous U.S. military interventions abroad reveals a lack of understanding on how harmful trying to maintain an empire is to America. She is a quick study, and she would benefit by having Dr. Paul tutor her on economics and politics.
Along with Sarah Palin and Ron Paul, other people who are working hard to set the switch to send America's train in right direction include Glenn Beck; Judge Andrew Napolitano; Lew Rockwell, Thomas Woods, and other proponents of the Austrian School of Economics; the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama; Senator Jim Demint (South Carolina); Peter Schiff, and Dave Redick.
The Anchorage Daily News called Sarah Palin "the Joan of Arc of Alaska politics, marching into battle against long odds on such big local issues as oil taxes and construction of a natural gas pipeline only to see her opposition crumble." In the Lower 48, Sarah could wind up being the "Joan of Arc" of America's white, working poor. If she can do to American politics today what Joan of Arc did to French and English politics in the 15th century, there will be a lot of senators and congressmen elected in 2010 who will be beholden to her. Next comes 2012.
Politicians in the Beltway who seek to turn America into a full-blown socialist/fascist state have good reason to fear Sarah Palin.
AN UPDATE (December 9, 2010)
In this 2009 article I wrote, u201CPalin would do well to study with Ron Paul. The country not only needs to have less government, lower taxes, fewer regulations, and to achieve energy independence, but it also needs to dismantle its empire (which is being run on borrowed money) and bring the troops home. Her support for the ruinous U.S. military interventions abroad reveals a lack of understanding on how harmful trying to maintain an empire is to America. She is a quick study, and she would benefit by having Dr. Paul tutor her on economics and politics.u201D
Unfortunately, instead of turning to Ron Paul, Sarah Palin has come under the spell of the neoconservative Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and “the punditocracy's best-known neocon.” And to make matters worse she now is attacking WikiLeaks and its director Julian Assange, who she says should be hunted down like a terrorist. She writes, u201CWhy was he [Assange] not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?u201D
Despite her creditable views on energy policy and health care, Sarah Palin's support of the U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and for maintaining an American Empire with its troops stationed around the world, along with her attacking whistleblowers that expose government malfeasance, disqualifies her for leading the country out of its current dilemma. I was wrong. Sarah Palin should not be at the switch. At this point, Ron Paul is the only one who can switch America's train, which is heading towards a destroyed bridge over the canyon of totalitarianism, in the right direction.”
July 30, 2009
