Here's a very bad rhyme:

It wasn't long too ago,
When Sarah ditched her igloo.
Now she's free,
Getting paid by Fox with glee
But why are Conservatives now crying?

Is comparing her to Al Sharpton very mean?
Conservatives flock to her like Charlie Sheen?
Bill Kristol has ditched her
Roger Ailes just snitched her
Oh, how the times have changed.

Al Sharpton is a favorite whipping post for the entire Conservative movement and has been for decades so you know when they start to compare her to him, things are not rosy in Moose Country.

Palin 'becoming Al Sharpton'?

Palin’s politics of grievance and group identity, according to these critics, is a betrayal of conservative principles. For decades, it was a standard line of the right that liberals cynically promoted victimhood to achieve their goals and that they practiced the politics of identity — race, sex and class—over ideas. (Related: Republicans learn cost of attacking Palin)

Among those taking aim at Palin in recent interviews with POLITICO are George F. Will, the elder statesman of conservative columnists; Peter Wehner, a top strategist in George W. Bush’s White House, and Heather Mac Donald, a leading voice with the right-leaning Manhattan Institute.

Matt Labash, a longtime writer for the Weekly Standard, said that because of Palin’s frequent appeals to victimhood and group grievance, “She’s becoming Al Sharpton, Alaska edition.”---

This year, the conservative intelligentsia doesn’t just tend to dislike Palin — many fear that her rise would represent the triumph of an intellectually empty brand of populism and the death of ideas as an engine of the right. “This is a problem for the movement,” said Will about what Palin represents. “For conservatism, because it is a creedal movement, this is a disease to which it is susceptible.”

The line of modern conservatism that can be traced back to National Review founder William F. Buckley would be broken by Palin, Will said. “There’s no Reagan without Goldwater, no Goldwater without National Review and no National Review without Buckley — and the contrast between he and Ms. Palin is obvious.” Asked if the GOP would remain the party of ideas if Palin captures the nomination, Will said: “The answer is emphatically no.”
---
Columnist Charles Krauthammer, without talking about Palin specifically, noted that “there’s healthy and unhealthy populism,” and there is concern about the rise of the latter. “When populism becomes purely anti-intellectual, it can become unhealthy and destructive,” said Krauthammer.
---
When former first lady Barbara Bush recently observed tartly that she thought Palin would be happiest staying put in Alaska rather than running for president, the former Alaska governor responded on Laura Ingraham’s radio show that the Bushes are “blue bloods who want to pick and choose their winners instead of allowing competition to pick and choose the winners.”

Then there was this morning's grim polling news:

Sarah Palin’s ratings within the Republican Party are slumping, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, a potentially troubling sign for the former Alaska governor as she weighs whether to enter the 2012 presidential race.

For the first time in Post-ABC News polling, fewer than six in 10 Republicans and GOP-leaning independents see Palin in a favorable light, down from a stratospheric 88 percent in the days after the 2008 Republican National Convention and 70 percent as recently as October

The GOP Grand Poobahs really don't want her to run for President, because they know the Republican primary will turn into a Tea Party donnybrook.

Can it get much worse for her when Roger Ailes lets it be known that he's unhappy with her too?

Before Sarah Palin posted her infamous “Blood Libel” video on Facebook on January 12, she placed a call to Fox News chairman Roger Ailes. In the wake of the Tucson massacre, Palin was fuming that the media was blaming her heated rhetoric for the actions of a madman that left six people dead and thirteen others injured, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Palin told Ailes she wanted to respond, according to a person with knowledge of the call. It wasn’t fair the media was making this about her. Ailes told Palin that she should stay quiet. “Lie low,” he said. “There’s no need to inject yourself into the story.”
Palin told Ailes that other people had given her that same advice. Her lawyer Bob Barnett is said to have cautioned her about getting involved. The consensus in some corners of Palin's camp was that she faced considerable risks if she spoke out. But, this being Sarah Palin, she did it anyway.

Ailes was not pleased with her decision, which turned out to be a political debacle for Palin, especially her use of the historically loaded term "blood libel" to describe the actions of the media. “The Tucson thing was horrible,” said a person familiar with Ailes’s thinking. "Before she responded, she was making herself look like a victim. She was winning. She went out and did the blood libel thing, and Roger is thinking, 'Why did you call me for advice?'”

Here's the post I wrote about her blood libel response to the criticisms she took over the target map ad: Calling it 'Blood Libel' just opens Sarah Palin to a whole new realm of well-earned criticism

Oh, lookie here....A new Al Palin posting on her Facebook page which is titled: The $4-Per-Gallon President. For a second I thought she meant Bush. I wonder if she even wrote it?

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We've been saying for awhile that for a guy like Glenn Beck to try to claim the mantle of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement for conservatives -- as he is clearly attempting to do with his August "Restoring Honor" rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial -- is nothing short of a travesty -- especially when you consider that he otherwise spends his time promoting the work of a Bircherite Mormon who was otherwise well known for smearing King as a Communist (a practice Beck himself is notably fond of applying to other black liberals like Van Jones) and attacking "progressives" as a "cancer", even though King himself not only was a self-described progressive, but even made speeches proclaiming Beck's great shibboleth, "Social Justice."

Last night, Al Sharpton went on the air with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown and made clear that Civil Rights leaders are indeed deeply offended by Beck's desecration:

OLBERMANN: Read that phrase again: “we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement, because we were the people that did it in the first place.” To your knowledge, who‘s this we he‘s talking about?

SHARPTON: I have no idea. From my study of history, those that claim to be the Tea Partiers and the followers and supporters of Mr. Beck and Mrs. Palin were the ones that today advocate the things that that march was against.

First of all, that march was to appeal to government to intervene and protect the rights of people. They are against big government. I mean, you don't have to get to race. Their idea of government and the idea that Dr. King and Roy Wilkins of—and others espoused is the exact opposite of what they're calling for. Dr. King met with Caesar Chavez and talked about how we protect people, no matter who they are, that come into the borders, and have a sound policy. They're the ones that are rallying against that. So I think that they are absolutely, unequivocally—I don't even have to get to the race side of this. They are against the concept of what the march was about in '63. And for them to now talk about we're going to reclaim or we're going to take back a movement, that they are the philosophical children of the Barry Goldwaters, who opposed it—I think it would be laughable if it wasn't so arrogant.

OLBERMANN: Yeah. What do you think—is there an attempt in here to desecrate Dr. King's memory and what everybody stood for then? Or is this just a publicity stunt by some sort of a megalomaniac?

SHARPTON: Well, whether it's an attempt to do the desecration or whether it's a publicity stunt, it can desecrate. The fact of the matter is the march was 47 years ago. So people that are middle-aged and younger would not understand what it was about if we did not do our rally that we do every year. And Urban League, Marc Morial and others that have inherited those organizations, as I came out as a kid in the aftermath of Dr. King's death from his movement—that's not what the movement is about.

The movement is about what they talked about them. Martin Luther King talked about America giving blacks and poor people a bad check. These people are the ones that don‘t want to even give you an unemployment check today. He talked about us having a judicial system that was fair. These are the people that defend brutality.

So I think that it will be a classic case of they're trying to hijack something. But there will be some of us in Washington, at another location. We're not going to confront them. We're going to do what we always do, affirm the dream to try to complete it, because we're not there yet.

Sharpton says the way to counter Beck's rally is for thousands to turn out for his "Reclaiming Rally" in New York the same weekend. And he said he's not alone in being offended:

SHARPTON: It's going—certainly it's energized by this distortion. I've talked to Martin Luther King III. He's coming and others. A lot of us are offended by it. But we're not going to play into that. We're going to put a clean glass next to whatever they do, wherever they do it.

OLBERMANN: It's a fascinating point that you can subtract the entire element of race out of this, and they've still gotten it wrong, from what Martin Luther King said in 1963.

SHARPTON: And if we had another hour, I could bring the race part up. If you just use government and what Martin Luther King said—read the whole speech. It is the exact antithesis of what they represent and what they‘re saying in the Tea Party.

Glenn Beck, of course, has no shame. It's about time someone called him out for his bizarre and hypocritical hijacking of Martin Luther King's legacy.

George Will with one of his sour-puss looks of the day during the panel discussion on This Week where he was actually outnumbered by those evil liberal pundits on one of the bobble head shows; those being Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Al Sharpton and Bill Maher. How horribly unfair of ABC News to allow him to be ganged up on like that.

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Bill O'Reilly was all worked up last night on his Fox News show, claiming that the "liberal media" are waving the bloody shirt again, using the violence and extremism and racism of a handful of joiners to smear an otherwise entirely innocent movement.

First, his Talking Points Memo segment was devoted to the notion that "the Tea Party as a whole is not responsible for the loons who may lurk among them."

Which is, you know, pretty much true. Unless, of course, the movement seems to attract a high percentage of loons, and especially if the movement itself employs loons as their speakers and representatives.

Which is the case with the Tea Parties.

This is pretty funny, really, coming from the guy -- as Matt Corley at ThinkProgress notes -- who only a couple of years ago was culling off comments at DailyKos to smear the entire liberal blogosphere as the equivalent of Nazis.

O'Reilly brought on Rev. Al Sharpton, who seems to have figured out how not to let O'Reilly make him into a punching bag, because he pretty effectively rebutted most of O'Reilly's points. Nonetheless, Monsieur Falafeloofah managed to assert that the "liberal media smear" of the Tea Parties by blaming them for their kooks is "unfair!"

This was followed by a segment with Mary Katherine Ham and Juan Williams. And Williams set off O'Reilly by pointing out that the Tea Parties are fundamentally a rebirth of the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s:

WILLIAMS: You know, people who's have a lot of hateful attitudes towards President Bush and then somebody who is extremist on the fringe, yes. And if that was also to be then the case with the Tea Party, yes, that's too much and unfair. But, when you start to see militia groups start to associate with the Tea Party --

O'REILLY: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me stop you there. I haven't seen militia groups associating with the Tea Party.

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I suspect most Dems have a caricature in their mind of devious Republican smear artists, who help GOP candidates pander to the public’s worst instincts. These operatives specialize in opposition research — or, “oppo” — which, as the caricature tells us, involves political hitmen digging through dirt and peddling in innuendo, all in the interests of conning voters.

In reality, the caricature is probably a bit of an exaggeration. These smear artists don’t literally dig through Democrats’ garbage; they usually pay someone else to do that. But if we wanted to match this image with a real-life example, we’d have to point to Stephen Marks, who recently published, “Confessions of a Political Hitman,” and who chatted with the NYT’s Deborah Solomon about his career.

What led you to write your new book, “Confessions of a Political Hitman,” which chronicles your rather unsavory career as a Republican Party operative who was hired in hundreds of political campaigns to dig for dirt on Democratic candidates? I wouldn’t use the word unsavory. The voter has the right to know the history of any candidate in order to make the most educated vote.

Why do you make yourself sound as benevolent as a reference librarian? Because opposition researchers perform a needed public service.

In the 2000 election, you produced an infamous anti-Gore commercial, juxtaposing footage of Gore saying Al Sharpton couldn’t be altogether discounted with unrelated footage of Sharpton giving an inflammatory speech. I happened to have gotten some footage from some anti-Sharpton groups where he urged college students to kill cops: to off the “pigs,” as he put it.

How can you justify misrepresenting Gore like that? I’ll admit that the ad was nasty and negative, but it was accurate, just like the Willie Horton ad that finished off Dukakis.

Who paid you to make the commercial? Some folks in Tennessee who didn’t like Al Gore.

How do you sleep at night? Very well, thank you.

Asked specifically if he has any “moral qualms” about his professional efforts, Marks said, “No.”

Marks seems to understand perfectly well that he’s sleazy, and has smeared honorable candidates with garbage, but at the same time, he’s also quite pleased with himself.

Mike Finnigan here. Back layin' in da cut for the first time in three months. I want to thank the intrepid bloggers who stepped up and took care of the Roundup so spectacularly while I was away:

The Vagabond Scholar, Batocchio; Cernig at The Newshoggers; Simbaud of King of Zembla; Joe Ivory Mattingly, The Heretik; Lambert at Corrente; Jon Perr from Perrspectives; the Satirical Political Report's Don Davis; Skippy the Bush Kangaroo; William Wolfrrum; Mark Hoback of The Aristocrats; and my "go-to" sub on many prior occasions, the versatile, always charming, sometimes enigmatic, but consistently fabulous, Blue Gal. That's an All Star lineup, folks. I'm gonna spend the next couple days rounding all of them up! I would be remiss if I didn't also express my gratitude to our fearless leader John Amato and the hardest workin' woman in the blogosphere, Nicole Belle.

Vagabond Scholar: Congratulations on your blogiversary, my friend! Two years in blog years is like five years to a regular human.

The Newshoggers: Re-Framing, Iraq Style

King of Zembla: Right-wingers, disgusted by government waste-and-fraud, seek reflexively to replace it with corporate waste-and-fraud -- at a substantial markup.

The Heretik: Welcome to 'dumb all over again'

Corrente: Lambert's blog

The Satirical Political Report: Al Sharpton claims Michael Vick was framed by a white pit bull

File this under: No F*@king Way!

AP :

The Rev. Al Sharpton is a descendant of a slave owned by relatives of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond _ a discovery the civil rights activist called "shocking" on Sunday.

Sharpton learned of his connection to Thurmond, once a prominent defender of segregation, last week through the Daily News, which asked genealogists to trace his roots.

"It was probably the most shocking thing in my life," Sharpton said at a news conference Sunday, the same day the tabloid revealed the story.

Some of Thurmond's relatives said the nexus also came as a surprise to them. Doris Strom Costner, a distant cousin who said she knew the late senator all her life, said Sunday she "never heard of such a thing." Read more...

via Outside the Beltway

Talk radio king Rush Limbaugh, upon hearing that Rev. Al Sharpton has been the latest figure on the Left given a radio show in hopes of capturing a Limbaugh-like audience, mused about the possibility of having Sharpton on his show and offering pointers. Sharpton has eagerly accepted....read on

I'm not kidding, this is true. James Joyner thinks it could be a lighthearted give-and-take between Sharpton and Limbaugh for a few weeks would be quite fun, akin to the occasional Gordon Liddy - Al Franklen interactions. Seeing Sharpton on O'Reilly, I'm not so sure he would be all that effective but who knows.

The FBI, as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the Rev. Al Sharpton, secretly videotaped him pocketing campaign donations from two shady fund-raisers in a New York City hotel room and then asking for more, it was reported yesterday. One of the donors was later recorded on a wiretap saying Sharpton may not have reported to the Federal Election Commission tens of thousands of dollars in campaign cash, as is required by the law, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer....read on

Update: Sharpton came out firing on O'Reilly tonight. Denying the story and saying that he received only checks and that it had been investigated already. More will be revealed...

Annie spoke with Al Sharpton at the college:

...Both speakers received warm welcomes, but midway into Coulter's speech, some of the crowd got restless. Coulter even had to stop her presentation after someone in the crowd yelled, ''Why don't you talk about the issues,'' followed by booing and catcalls...

I'm sure David Horowitz will be looking into this incident and blame some liberal professors for inciting the students catcalls.