Justin's Political Corner

Hours after President Barack Obama vowed to defend Planned Parenthood at the organization’s national conference on Friday, Sarah Palin wrote a lengthy missive on Facebook, tying the family planning organization to Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a provider of illegal abortions who is on trial for murder.

“Considering the role Planned Parenthood has played in looking the other way while the mass murdering abortion doctor Gosnell butchered babies born alive from his horrific infanticide procedures and abused his women patients, it’s perhaps not surprising that this same president sees nothing wrong with allowing his name to be so openly associated with this organization,” the former Alaska governor and ex-vice presidential candidate wrote on her Facebook page.

Gosnell, 72, ran an abortion clinic in Pennsylvania where he performed gruesome and illegal late-term abortions that endangered, and in some cases ended, the lives his patients. He faces four charges of first-degree murder and one of third-degree murder. He faces the death penalty if convicted.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Dayle Steinberg, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania, said at a gathering for her organization last week that some women came to Planned Parenthood after visiting Gosnell’s clinic and complained. “We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health,” Steinberg said.

She added, “These are criminal, horrendous … acts and should be appropriately punished.”

Conservative anti-abortion groups, including the Susan B. Anthony List, have used the Gosnell trial to boost support for abortion restrictions and charge that Planned Parenthood should be held accountable for failing to report the conditions at Gosnell’s clinic.

“Planned Parenthood last week admitted to knowing about the conditions inside Kermit Gosnell’s Philadelphia clinic yet chose not to act to help end the killing of newborn babies and butchering of women,” Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement on Friday.

“It seems that nothing – not even eyewitness accounts of Gosnell-style conditions in their own clinics – is enough to make President Obama reconsider his unyielding support for Planned Parenthood, which in a single year performed more than 333,000 abortions and received half a billion dollars in taxpayer money.”

Planned Parenthood receives federal grants through the Title X family planning program, which it uses to subsidize contraception, cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infection screenings and other health services for low-income women. Planned Parenthood patients pay separately for abortion services, because the Hyde Amendment prohibits using federal funds to pay for abortions.

Planned Parenthood contends that it cannot be compared to Gosnell’s clinic because it performs legal, safe abortions in well-regulated facilities. “We have consistently said that this is a horrifying and outrageous case, that Gosnell ran a criminal enterprise, not a health care facility, and that he should be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” said Eric Ferrero, vice president of communications for Planned Parenthood.

h/t: Huffington Post

In the annals of Fox News, October 2012 will likely stand out as a shining moment. Buoyed by a wave of Republican optimism about Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, the network seemed tantalizingly close to realizing one of its key ideological goals: ousting President Obama from the White House. Renewed enthusiasm among conservatives was, in turn, triggering record-high ratings for much of the network’s programming and helping it to beat not just rival news competitors MSNBC and CNN during prime time, but every other TV channel on the cable dial. What’s more, the prospect of an ascendant GOP come January meant Fox News might soon return to the era of access and prestige it enjoyed in Washington during the presidency of George W. Bush. The future looked so bright that News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch signed Fox News president Roger Ailes to a lucrative four-year contract extension, even though the 72-year-old Ailes’s existing contract wasn’t due to expire until 2013.

Then November arrived, and with it reality. 

Fox News’s shellshocked election night coverage, punctuated by Karl Rove’s surreal meltdown upon hearing of Obama’s victory in Ohio and, thus, the election, capped off a historic day of reckoning for the network and conservatives alike. Chastened by defeat, Republican politicians and right-wing pundits have subsequently been grappling with the repercussions of the caustic tone and incendiary rhetoric their movement has adopted. This ongoing debate about whether broadening conservatism’s appeal requires new messages or just new messaging has ignored the 800-pound gorilla in the room, however. Noticeably absent from all the right wing’s public self-criticism is any interest in confronting the potent role played by the Republican Party’s single most important messenger, Fox News.

Standing at the epicenter of the network—and any new Republican Party groundswell—is Ailes. A former political operative of President Richard Nixon, Ailes has inextricably intertwined his professional and political pursuits since founding Fox News in 1996. Indeed, the network chief functions as a kind of proxy kingmaker within the party, frequently meeting with Republican politicians to offer strategic advice. He is a regular confidant of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, and at various times, he (or a network emissary of his) has counseled 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Gen. David Petraeus on their potential future. “Ailes,” says former Reagan White House economic adviser Bruce Bartlett, “is quite open about offering his free advice to Republicans…. If you visit New York City, you go see Roger Ailes and kiss his ring. It’s like visiting the Vatican. My guess is that there’s a lot of back-and-forth between Ailes and whoever is at the pinnacle of power in the Republican Party.” 

To keep relying on a shrinking number of elderly, white and male subsets of the public, whether to win elections or win ratings, has become a strategy of diminishing returns, however. “I think that you can’t separate the problem at Fox [News] from the problem that the Republicans are going through,” Bartlett says. He can speak firsthand to this incestuous relationship, as his 2006 book, Impostor—which broke with party orthodoxy over the Bush administration’s deficit spending—quickly made him persona non grata at Fox News, he says. (Fox News did not respond to questions about his comment.) “The Republicans are trying to retool to win. That’s all they care about, and they’re trying to decide, ‘How can we be more pragmatic? How can we shave off the rough edges? How can we get rid of the whack jobs who are embarrassing us, costing us Senate seats? But at the same time, we can’t do this in such a way that it alienates our base.’” Fox News faces a similar dilemma, Bartlett contends: “It’s ‘How do we modernize? How do we attract new audiences without losing the old audience? How do we remain relevant without abandoning our traditions?’” 

These are fundamental questions, and lately Fox News’s 
fundamentals—audience, ratings and public trust—have faltered. A 2010 study by Steve Sternberg found the network’s viewership to be the oldest (with an average age of 65) among an already elderly cable news audience. (CNN’s was 63 and MSNBC’s was 59.) By comparison, lifestyle cable channels Oxygen, Bravo and TLC were among the youngest, with an average viewer age of 42. And with MSNBC’s recent decision to plug 34-year-old rising star Chris Hayes into the coveted 
8 pm slot, the average age of that network’s prime-time hosts will now be 45, while Fox News’s rotation, anchored by 63-year-old Bill O’Reilly, has an average age of 57. 

Having cable news’s oldest average age for both prime-time hosts and audiences represents something of a double-edged sword for Fox in the cutthroat world of cable TV. One advantage is that older audiences are traditionally more loyal, which is why several industry experts say that Fox News is unlikely to be dislodged from its perch atop overall cable TV news ratings anytime soon. This age-loyalty effect redounds to the benefit of Fox News’s best-known prime-time hosts, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, as roughly two-thirds of their viewers are age 50 or older, according to a recent Pew State of the News Media survey. 

But at the same time, there is an undeniable actuarial reality at work—or as Bartlett bluntly puts it, “Their viewership is quite literally dying.” The most lucrative advertising dollars flow to TV shows that attract viewers “in the demo,” short for “demographic”—industry parlance for people ages 25 to 54. By contrast, Fox News’s prime-time commercial breaks are blanketed with pitches for cheap medical devices and insurance companies aimed at retirees and the elderly. Perhaps not surprisingly, the network’s advertising rates have grown at a much more modest pace in recent years, according to the Pew survey. Similarly, the growth of its ad revenues has diminished every year since 2008. 

Because of the relatively older age and smaller size of the cable news audience, viewership tends to be relatively stable, says Columbia University Journalism School professor and former NBC News president Richard Wald. “Its [ratings] move in very small increments.” To understand why viewers come and go, he compares a TV network’s audience to a target with concentric rings. The core audience—those who are loyal to your channel and watch frequently (and, for partisan media outlets, those who are most ideologically compatible)—is the bull’s-eye. Each concentric ring outward represents a segment of the audience that is less likely to watch because of diminished interest or less enthusiastic partisan sympathies. Dramatic ratings shifts can occur, but they tend to be driven by external events, like elections, rather than programming and thus affect all of the networks simultaneously. Most ratings fluctuations are statistical noise, Wald says, resulting from people in the outermost rings tuning in or out based on varying interest. “I would guess that [Fox News’s] numbers could change by 5, 6, 7, 8 percent and not reflect a change in the loyalty of the audience.” 

But here, too, the news does not bode well. Though the network did retain its status as the top-rated cable news network in 2012—its eleventh consecutive year at number one—the steep drop in ratings that its shows have experienced since Election Day has raised eyebrows, precisely because corresponding shows on MSNBC and CNN have not experienced the same precipitous decline. 

Just how much of a drop are we talking about? According to Nielsen data, Fox News’s prime-time monthly audience fell to its lowest level in twelve years in January among the 25-to-54 demographic. Daytime Fox News programming likewise saw its lowest monthly ratings in this age cohort since June 2008. Even the network’s two biggest stars, O’Reilly and Hannity, have not been immune from viewer desertion: Hannity lost close to 50 percent of his pre-election audience in the final weeks of 2012, and O’Reilly more than a quarter. The slide hasn’t stopped in 2013, either. Compared with a year ago, O’Reilly’s February prime-time ratings dropped 
26 percent in the coveted 25-to-54 demographic, his worst performance since July 2008. Hannity’s sank even further, to the lowest point in his show’s history. 

As Wald points out, short-term ratings snapshots can be deceptive. But in the weeks following Obama’s 2009 inauguration, Fox News’s viewership actually surged, averaging 539,000 prime-time demo viewers versus 388,000 and 357,000 for CNN and MSNBC, respectively. This past January, however, Fox could only muster 267,000 average nightly viewers—a 50 percent drop from that 2009 level, and not much more than MSNBC’s 235,000 or CNN’s 200,000. 

So why are all these Fox News viewers tuning out? Some of the decline may be due to a broader cultural trend of people deciding to avoid cable TV news altogether. However, a recent Public Policy Polling survey of news media trustworthiness suggests there’s more going on than public apathy. In February, PPP found a marked drop in Fox News’s credibility. A record-high
46 percent of Americans say they put no trust in the network, a nine-point increase over 2010. What’s more, 39 percent name Fox News as their least-trusted news source, dwarfing all other news channels. (MSNBC came in second, at 14 percent.)

As might be expected, Fox News’s credibility barely budged among liberals and moderates (roughly three-quarters of whom still distrust the network) and very conservative viewers (three-quarters of whom still trust it). However, among those who identified themselves as “somewhat conservative,” the level of trust fell by an eye-opening 27 percentage points during the previous twelve months (from a net plus–47 percent  ”trust” rating in 2012 to plus–20 percent now). Only a bare majority of center-right conservatives surveyed by PPP say that Fox News is trustworthy. 

“The people who are among the moderate-rights are actually the ones tuning out most,” says Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University who specializes in studying partisan psychology. Last May, Cassino conducted a survey that found Fox News’s viewers were less informed about current political issues than those who watched no news at all. In response, the network’s public relations team mocked FDU’s college ranking in Forbes and belittled its student body as “ill-informed.” This kind of ad hominem attack symbolizes the over-the-top, pugilistic messaging style of Ailes, whose no-holds-barred political instincts have dictated the network’s direction since day one. 

Ailes’s foundational idea for Fox News, explains Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, was to package this bias under the guise of “fair and balanced” news. “It is indeed the artifice of neutrality that makes so much of what they do objectionable, or not just objectionable but noteworthy,” Wemple says. And it is effective, he adds: at a recent Value Voters conference, rock-ribbed conservatives almost involuntarily spouted the network’s motto back at him when he asked them about Fox’s coverage. It’s a maddeningly clever bit of misdirection—the network whose branding is most identified with objectivity and accuracy is, in fact, anything but.

Thanks to its loyal conservative audience and its cozy relationship with the GOP leadership, Fox News has long been insulated from the consequences of its serial misinforming. “If your job is to say the most outrageous thing you possibly can and be rewarded for it, why shouldn’t you?” Cassino points out. “As long as you get ratings, you’re going to keep on doing it.” But the recent erosion in ratings and cracks in the network’s reputation, Cassino says, have created external pressure to make changes inside the network. (Neither Ailes nor anyone else at Fox News would comment when contacted for this story.)

Most notable among these post-election changes involved Fox News ridding itself of contributors Sarah Palin and Dick Morris and replacing them with former Congressman and left-wing gadfly Dennis Kucinich, former GOP Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and RedState.com editor in chief Erick Erickson. To some, this personnel turnover confirmed that Fox News was embracing a more intellectually honest, ideologically diverse worldview. 

But there’s less here than meets the eye. First of all, the impact an individual contributor can have on the network’s overall nature is minimal; permanent hosts like O’Reilly and Hannity drive its day-to-day brand. And in the midst of the 2012 campaign, Ailes locked up O’Reilly and Hannity as well as news host Bret Baier—the Fox News lineup from 7 through 10 pm—all the way to 2016. What’s more, one shouldn’t read too much into the cashiering of Palin and Morris, since, by all accounts, they were terrible at their jobs: the former was criticized internally for being uncooperative with programming suggestions and personally disloyal to Ailes, while the latter was guilty of humiliating the network with his ridiculous election predictions (as well as auctioning off an unauthorized personal tour of Fox News’ studios at a GOP fund-
raiser). “They were only interested in promoting themselves or perhaps promoting an ideology that may not win,” says Bartlett, who singles out Palin’s lack of substance for his harshest criticism. “Totally and professionally, she’s the Lindsay Lohan of cable news.” 

Indeed, Ailes’s new hires are little more than new faces plugged into a well-worn programming strategy. Kucinich fills the slot of house liberal formerly occupied by Alan Colmes, serving as a handy foil for conservatives to shout at or over. The telegenic Brown, a blue-state Republican, endorses textbook anti-woman Republican policies, but does so without giving off an overtly extremist vibe. And die-hard conservative Erickson is there to reassure the Tea Partiers and the netroots—some of whom inexplicably believe that Fox News is drifting left—that they still have a voice on the network. 

Whether these recent, road-to-Damascus conversions are genuine or artificial may not matter much at this point, though. Hannity and many of his Fox News colleagues have invested so much time inciting animosity toward “illegals” and excoriating legislative attempts at “amnesty” that the network has acquired a reputation of harboring anti-Hispanic tendencies. In the aforementioned PPP poll on media trustworthiness, Hispanics ranked Fox News as their least credible news source, with a net four-point negative rating. (Broadcast news networks all enjoyed double-digit positive ratings.) Likewise, a National Hispanic Media Coalition survey from last fall found that Fox News hosts were more likely than those from any other network to negatively stereotype Latinos. It also noted that the network’s audience had the highest percentage of viewers with negative feelings about Hispanics and undocumented immigrants. 

h/t: Reed Richardson at AlterNet, via The Nation

Sarah Palin has parted ways with Fox News, multiple outlets wrote on Friday.

Real Clear Politics was the first to report that Palin — who reportedly signed a $1 million-a-year contract with the network in 2010 — will not be renewing it. The New York Times’ Brian Stelter later confirmed the news with Fox News.

By the time her contract ended, it had been since mid-December that Palin had appeared on Fox News at all.

h/t: Huffington Post

Sarah Palin has weighed in on the September 11 Benghazi attack through Facebook, an online venue where both former half-term governors and everyone else can air their opinions:

 …Why the dissembling about the cause of the murder of our ambassador on the anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil? We deserve answers to this. President Obama’s shuck and jive shtick with these Benghazi lies must end.

Now the investigation can proceed. Or maybe we can spend a day talking about her. The Romney campaign must be thrilled.

h/t: Alex Halperin at Salon

Missouri Republicans on Tuesday will choose between a trio of Senate hopefuls who have been locked in a tight contest in which all three have jockeyed to present themselves as the most conservative in the bunch. The winner will face Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, considered to be one of the most vulnerable 2012 incumbents.

Businessman John Brunner, Rep. Todd Akin and former state Treasurer Sarah Steelman are all vying to take on McCaskill. Brunner led the field in a poll poll released over the weekend with 35 percent; Akin had 30 percent and Steelman had 25 percent.

“It’s very difficult to predict the race at this point,” a Republican source in Missouri told TPM. “I think for the first time in a very long time, at least in Missouri, we are heading into an Election Day where all three of the candidates really all do have a path to victory.”

Akin has a geographic base in the St. Louis suburbs, which he has represented in Congress for 12 years.

Steelman previously represented the state’s central region in the state Senate, and still has support in the southwestern portion of the state.

Brunner, a businessman who has never held elected office, doesn’t have a specific geographic support base but has benefited from blanketing the entire state with TV ads.

Brunner has put nearly $7 million of his own money into the race, and raised $600,000, for a total of $7.6 million — dwarfing Akin’s total fundraising of $2.2 million; and Steelman’s $1.4 million, which included $400,000 she loaned herself, according to federal elections records through July 18.

h/t: Eric Kleefeld at TPM

As the National Governors Association conference kicks off Friday, the nation’s Democratic governors are attacking what they say are lies being told by three current Republican governors — and Sarah Palin — regarding the Affordable Care Act.

The Democratic Governors Association released a web video Friday morning featuring the four GOP leaders discussing health care with DGA captions from political fact checking organizations. The NGA is expected to take up health care reform at the state level during a committee meeting Saturday morning in Williamsburg, Va.

The video includes a recent appearance by Palin on Fox News discussing the Supreme Court’s ruling , with the former Alaska governor elaborating on what she believes are “death panels” empowered by the law. The DGA includes a caption from PolitiFact calling “death panels” the “Lie of the Year” in 2009 and notes that Palin’s clip was recent.

H/T: John Celock at the Huffington Post

Last night, as it became clear the political machine Scott Walker has built in Wisconsin will remain, even if he ends up in jail, Sarah Palin took to the airwaves on Fox News to deliver the glad tidings of austerity and union-busting. She was ‘interviewed’ by fellow Fox employee and sister-in-arms in the War on Knowledge, Greta Van Sustren, wherein they both maintained the fiction that Sarah Palin is qualified to discuss anything more complicated than thermal underwear.

From the 06.05.2012 edition of FNC’s On The Record with Greta Van Susteren:

h/t: Don Hamel at AddictingInfo.org

The dueling candidates for the state’s second highest office met for the first and only time earlier this month for a joint appearance on a Milwaukee Sunday news show.

Their brief time together prompted Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch to describe opponent Mahlon Mitchell as a “really nice guy,” whose decision to become a firefighter is a job she “honors and thanks” him for.

Mitchell, in turn, describes Kleefisch as a bit more polished, a result of her years as a television anchor, and a “rubber stamp” for Gov. Scott Walker’s conservative agenda.

On June 5, the date of Wisconsin’s historic recall elections for governor and lieutenant governor, it will be the voters’ views on the two candidates that will matter. They’ll choose whether the state will switch gears and give Mitchell, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin and a 15-year veteran of the Madison Fire Department, a chance to add the lieutenant governor title to his resume or stick with Kleefisch, who has devoted most of her 17 months in office to job creation, the results of which have not kept pace with her boss’ promise to create 250,000 private-sector jobs during their first term in office.

The incumbent

Kleefisch, 36, rode the tea party wave that swept the state in 2010, handily winning her first bid for statewide office.

In the style of other so-called “mama grizzlies”— female candidates who look out for their young — Kleefisch announced her candidacy via webcam from her kitchen table. She told her audience she was running to make the state a better place for her children. She and her husband, state Rep. Joel Kleefisch, R-Oconomowoc, have two daughters, ages 9 and 6.

That lean approach to government spending continues to earn her the support of other big-name conservative women, including former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who coined the “mama grizzly” term.

“She’s setting an example for every other state in the union because responsible state and local governments will be the entities that defend our republic at a time when there is less and less reason to believe our big centralized federal government will address its self-perpetuated economic problems,” Palin writes on Kleefisch’s website, rebeccaforreal.com.

Named the administration’s “jobs ambassador” by Gov. Scott Walker, Kleefisch cites 23,321 jobs created during 2011, the pair’s first year in office, as a sign the state’s economy is turning around.

Many, however, dispute the validity of that number since it has yet to be verified by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The federal agency will release the verified numbers in late June, weeks after the recall election.

The contender

Mitchell, 35, is the middle child of three boys, all of whom are firefighters. Born in Milwaukee, he spent part of his youth in Illinois before his family moved to Delavan, the same town where Scott Walker grew up.

“I joke that he and I took some different classes,” says Mitchell, who now lives in Fitchburg with his wife, daughter, 13, and son, 8.

Mitchell quickly rose to prominence at the Capitol protests that erupted in February 2011, just days after Walker “dropped the bomb” when he announced he planned to scale back collective bargaining rights for most public employees.

During one of the first of the Capitol protests that would become the norm for the following six weeks, Mitchell was pulled from the crowd by Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin chapter of the AFL-CIO, and told to make a speech.

With no words prepared, Mitchell thought of a phrase a fellow firefighter had started to use that had been running through his thoughts. When he stepped behind the podium, he said it.

“The house of labor is on fire. We’ve got to put it out,” Mitchell recalls telling the crowd. “When I said it, people loved it. It sparked something. I spoke at almost every rally after that.”

Additionally, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wisconsin lost 5,900 jobs in April and 3,600 jobs in March.

“Walker has done an effective job painting all unions as Democrats. It’s how they vilify everybody,” Mitchell says. “Gays, guns and God are the three issues police officers and firefighters are voting on. And that’s got to stop.”

Mitchell says he believes in a woman’s right to control her reproductive decisions and in marriage equality. In contrast, Kleefisch does not. Her views on marriage equality, in particular, drew much attention during her last run for office.

“At what point are we going to okay marrying inanimate objects? Can I marry this table, or this, you know, chair? Can we marry dogs? This is ridiculous,” Kleefisch said during an interview prior to the 2010 election. This time around, Kleefisch is talking less about social issues and more about jobs.

To overcome the conservative voting tendencies of many law enforcement officers, Mitchell started speaking to unions last year about the need to focus their voting power not on candidates that support their social issues but on those who will maintain their union rights.

“The funny thing about Republicans is they say they are for smaller government and less government in your life,” he says. “But they want to be intrusive in everybody’s life on every social issue.”

h/t: Jessica Vanegeren at The Capital Times

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday said that child labor regulations proposed by the U.S. Department of Labor would lead to America’s decline.

The federal agency is considering updating the Fair Labor Standards Act by strengthening current child labor regulations related to work with animals, pesticides, timber operations, manure pits and storage bins.

“The Obama Administration is working on regulations that would prevent children from working on our own family farms,” she wrote on Facebook. “This is more overreach of the federal government with many negative consequences. And if you think the government’s new regs will stop at family farms, think again.”

However, the proposed regulations would not apply to children working on farms owned or partly-owned by their relatives.

The Labor Department said it proposed the new regulations because of studies showing that children are significantly more likely to be killed while performing agricultural work than while working in all other industries combined.

h/t: Eric W. Dolan at The Raw Story

Now years removed from crying sexism over “lipstick on a pig,” former politician and current political pundit Sarah Palin appeared on Sean Hannity’s show Thursday night to weigh in on the latest twists in the “war on women” debacle.

Palin read texts and emails she had received from her sister and “apolitical girlfriends” in support of her cause.

“We don’t look to the president to speak for us,” Palin said, adding that she and her fellow “mama grizzlies” are turned off by the “divisiveness represented by Barack Obama and the people he surrounds himself with.”

h/t: Michael Lester at TPM

Remember the Girl Scouts kerfuffle from last month? An Indiana lawmaker read Something on the Internet about how Girl Scouts are in cahoots with Planned Parenthood to reign terror and abortions on impressionable young girls, and proceeded to rail against the Girl Scouts as a “radical organization” which promotes “homosexual lifestyles” and allows “transgendered females to join just like any real girl.”  Remember how we laughed and laughed and ordered an unreasonable number of cookies out of spite?  Good times.

If you don’t recall the Girl Scout Rumpus, consider yourself lucky. Otherwise, you would have been filled with rage — delicious minty rage — as you stood in solidarity with the Girl Scouts by shoving sleeve after sleeve of spite cookies into your gaping maw just because you could. (I mention this only because it happened to a friend of mine.)

In any event, a lawmaker in Alaska (from Wasilla, no less) decided he just had to go and prove me right.  On Thursday, Rep. Wes Keller held up a resolution in the House State Affairs Committee honoring Girl Scouts of Alaska and the Year of the Girl because he read Something on the Internet that made him nervous about nefarious conspiracy between Girl Scouts of America and PlannedAbortions Parenthood.

Keller’s response to the Girl Scouts Ultimatum was quintessentially FoxNewsy:

“There is a lot of ink and comments about my responsibility as a legislator to ask a question. Unlike Congress we tend to try to know as much as possible about every bill we are going to vote for or against before it passes. The young lady testifying before the committee did an excellent job. The question I posed was based on a rumor I had heard about regarding a connection that presumably should be aired.

“The girl scouts are wonderful and I love their cookies. It is an organization that has the goal of teaching our younger girls about responsibility, leadership, and moral values, skills in the home and outdoors, and the American way of life. If you agree that is what scouting organizations are supposed to do then it is logical that any link with an organization that may compromise those principles needs to be brought to the forefront. I did not establish a link; I simply asked the question, nothing more.

“Presumably the sponsor will provide a response and we can get on with honoring the girl scouts.

It’s part of the job representing constituents to establish a public record. You do that by asking questions and getting answers.”

What’s the big deal? Wasilla Wes is just asking questions. He read some scary shit on the internets about Girl Scouts turning girls into gays, and all he wants is some  answers!  As soon as the Girl Scouts prove they’re not a gaggle of green-garbed degenerates, Wasilla Wes is happy to get on with honoring the pre-teen cookie peddlers.  

h/t:  ABL at Raw Story

Sarah Palin has reacted to an Obama campaign ad in which she is featured in exactly the way you would expect.

On Facebook Monday night, Palin slammed Obama for, she claimed, twisting her words in a hard-hitting new campaign ad that seeks to raise money off the new conservative obsession with Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell.

And here’s the lines from Palin as transcribed by TPM (ellipses indicate edits):

Barack Obama I think has never been seen in the conventional, traditional way of we who would describe a man of valor. … And his profession as a community organizer — what went into his thinking was this philosophy of radicalism … he is bringing us back, Sean, to days that — you can hearken back to days before the Civil War … What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin. Why are we allowing our country to move backwards?

The ad splices together several quotes from Palin’s recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, where she discussed Bell and other topics (like the million-dollar check an Obama-supporting super PAC took from Bill Maher). Palin suggests the splices are unfair, but doubles down on the right-wing claim that a clip of Obama hugging Bell proves Obama is a dangerous anti-white radical. 

Palin has been beating the drum about Obama’s supposed radicalism for years. She’s going down that road again with the Bell video, which other conservatives agree makes the case Palin and others have been arguing for years — that Obama is actually biased against whites.

h/t: Evan McMorris-Santoro at TPM