After her Tea Party Convention speech this weekend, Sarah Palin flew to Houston to continue campaigning for herself. The news focused on her appearance at a Rick Perry rally, but Palin also appeared at another event in Houston: a "motivational seminar" at the Toyota Center at which she was the featured attraction.

As Richard Connelly reported:

The other event here was the motivational seminar at Toyota Center. The event seemed to be grossly oversold (Tickets were just $19 for entire office staffs to attend), perhaps because organizers thought people would only attend parts of the all-day event.

But no one told attendees that Palin would be speaking at 8 a.m., so bitterly disappointed fans standing in line at 10:30 a.m. weren't happy.

Palin presumably was, having pocketed her fee for a 30-minute speech.

C&L had one of its friends at the seminar: Josef Jarod is a reporter in Houston, Texas with a background that includes work for Fox and CBS News. He presently is on a "mystery" assignment in the Bayou City.

Here's Jarod's report:

"I wasn't motivated" one man said to me in the elevator as I left the speech, "she sounded un-prepared and erratic and focused an awful lot on her script."

It was 9:30 AM, and Just half an hour earlier Sarah Palin had wrapped up a "motivational" speech about "achievement" at the Toyota Center in downtown Houston. Though Palin was to be the headliner of the all day business seminar which featured a dozen other speakers like General Colin Powell and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. She was the first to perform.

"I was also kind of amazed that they let her go first, I mean, we weren't even all seated yet when she started." Palin started her speech at 8:00 AM sharp, she was the first person out of the gates - there wasn't even a Master of Ceremonies. And given the fact that morning rush hour in Houston was exceptionally bad today, it meant there were going to be a lot of unhappy ticket holders(particularly as some paid as much as two hundred dollars.)

"She already gave her speech?!" One man exclaimed in the lobby after arriving minutes too late, "What the hell, I was stuck in traffic... why wouldn't they save the best for last?!" Several elderly women with Palin lapel pins who were trying desperately to hurry through security were also distraught when they heard the news, "Ohhh Noooooo! Nooooo!"

Sarah Palin had another engagement in California later in the afternoon and didn't have a minute to waste. The speech itself seemed more like a sermon, Sarah frequently attributed "God" and "Jesus Christ" to lifting her out of despair. She gave several long rambling examples of tough times in Alaska, during which she would occasionally lose her footing and immediately jump to praising the state for it's beauty.

She also focused heavily on her trade mark lines as a crutch. During one incredulous example of a way to get motivated describing a bed time fairy-tale she told to her daughter: "Last night Piper asked me to tell her a bedtime story and I said 'YOU BETCHA,' let me tell you about two brothers named Abel and Cain..."

The crowd was made up mostly of office-workers who opted to come to an "all day business seminar" instead of sitting in their cubicle and so the fanfare was minimal. As I gazed around the audience from my VIP seat - just feet away from the stage - I had the impression that most of those sitting near me were insulted. Sarah Palin was clearly still in campaign mode, but this wasn't a crowd looking for a stump speech.

She ended by spending several minutes with her head down reading from the podium and gave a very abrupt and final "God Bless America" before departing the stage. As she left one man with a thick country drawl leaned over to me and said "you know, she's not that impressive in person."

She's not that impressive on TV, either.

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If anyone now believes that the Tea Party movement is some third party movement based on frustration with our two-party political system, and that it will send candidates to oppose even the Republican Party, is a fool.

Sarah Palin made that plain in the Q&A after her Tea Party Convention speech:

Palin: The Republican Party would be really smart to start trying to absorb as much of the Tea Party movement as possible.

Without Fox News, the teabagger "revolution" would have been a minor blip on the conservative Richter scale, but because Roger Ailes saw a golden opportunity to lash out at a newly elected and highly likable black president in a hateful fashion he jumped in--feet first.

Knowing that the media are too lazy to properly put them in context, and being able to hide behind them to cover his ass, Ailes put his weight behind them. As disappointed as liberals and progressives are in the Obama administration, Fox News ginned up the Tea Party protesters and gave them a huge media platform to help wield the blade that issued a tiny cut at a time. Knowing the economy would not bounce back, it's not a surprise that Americans would not be happy with the Democratic party, but the level of vitriol and hatred helped to it initially began with a blog post from a republican voter who knew conservatives were in trouble of being a bad memory for a while.

The Bill Kristols of the right have always longed for a right-wing populist movement that could make headway in America, but they also have believed they could firmly control them. That's why Dick Armey was dispatched with boatloads of cash, along with other right-wing billionaires, to pump in the necessary cash to keep it percolating.

A.C. Kleinheider opines:

Beginning Of The End: Sarah Palin Hijacks The Tea Party Movement

The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience.

Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.

The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.

Sarah Palin is no independent voice, but a GOP politician. The Republicans need to co-opt the movement completely in order to capitalize on them, because really most of the movement is based on the ideology of arch-conservatives who will never vote for anything that is progressive. Indeed, a lot of what drives them is the hatred of all things progressive. See Glenn Beck as only the most recent and glaring example of this.

Carl Cameron described the teabaggers on Fox yesterday as people who support the Constitution and conservative values. Yep, that's about right.

Bloggers on the left can try to align themselves with the Tea Partiers, but it will only happen on issues that will not otherwise endanger votes being taken away from conservatives. You won't see Grover Norquist do anything that would jeopardize his long-term strategy of "defunding the left" and turning every voter against progressive values. And he's more than happy to use progressives as props to achieve that. It's really that simple.

(h/t Media Matters)

Just further proof that Sarah Palin's political career is entirely due to all these Republican men thinking with their GOPenises.

In an appearance on Imus in the Morning (now airing on the Fox Business Channel, which is why you probably didn't know it was back on the air), Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace** exposed a little more of his psyche than he probably should have:

WALLACE: We are going to have the first Sunday show interview ever with Governor Sarah Palin. We’ll be down in Nashville with her at the National Tea Party Convention and…I’m excited. First of all, I’m excited to finally meet and interview Sarah Palin. We’ve been chasing her like Captain Ahab and the great white whale for the last year and a half, so it’s going to be interesting to sit down with her and talk. And in addition, I’m interested in going down to the Tea Party convention and get a sense of other than seeing them on TV what they’re…what their platform is, what they’re interested in.

IMUS: When she…when you interview her, will she be sitting on your lap? [laughter]

WALLACE: One can only hope. [laughter]

Ewwww. The dirty old man chuckling made me more than a little nauseated. This is not the first such occasion where Wallace has made really inappropriate statements, as documented by our friends at Media Matters:

Wallace on Brown's looks: A female Fox anchor said, "you guys have all had Sarah Palin, now we've got Scott Brown"

Fox's Wallace asks conservative host Gallagher to "do me a favor ... put in a good word for me" with Palin

Fox's Wallace on ACORN booking: I wish we "were going to have the prostitute [Giles] because she's pretty cute"

Fox's Wallace: NTSB chair Hersman "a babe ... you would not expect a government bureaucrat to be an attractive woman"

However, this time, Wallace got the condemnation of none other than GOP also-ran Fred Thompson and wife, Jeri. Dude, when Fred Thompson wakes up enough to say you're out of line, you have really messed up.

**Corrected. No one should confuse the quasi-journalism/propagandizing of Chris Wallace with any other family member

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Sarah Palin's followers no doubt thought she gave a great speech at the National Tea Party Convention last night. Actually, it was pretty much cookie-cutter stuff, sprinkled with the requisite cheap shots at President Obama. If red meat is your thing, there was plenty. But as always with Palin, there was no substance, and the delivery was pretty close to fingernails clawing their way down a blackboard.

Mostly, she staked out the core political position of the Tea Party movement as the right-wing populism we've already recognized it as. But she repeated that the movement was about "the people," and indeed wrapped it up with an incoherent bit of babble featuring "the people."

There was the requisite nod to the ah, "revolutionary" component of the movement:

Palin: And I am a big supporter of this movement, I believe in this movement. Got lots of friends and family in the Lower 48 who attend these events and across the country, just knowing that this is the movement, and America is ready for another revolution, and you are a part of this.

Of course, the Tea Partiers like to insist that this is a non-violent revolution. But the way they keep packing guns around at public gathering as demonstrations of their constitutional rights, the rest of us aren't feeling all that assured.

Palin also made an interesting remark about Tea Party candidates taking out regular Republican candidates:

Palin: A lot of great common-sense conservative candidates -- they're gonna put it all on the line in 2010, and this year, there are gonna be some tough primaries. And I think that's good. Competition in these primaries is good, competition makes us work harder and be more efficient, and produce more. And I hope you'll get out there and work hard for the candidates who reflect your values, your priorities, because, despite what the pundits want you to think, contested primaries aren't civil war. They're democracy at work, and that's beautiful.

Yeah, we bet John McCain thinks it's just beautiful that he's facing a tough primary challenge from Tea Party favorite J.D. Hayworth this year. Palin later told the audience how proud she was to run with McCain on his ticket, but she seemed to be encouraging candidates like Hayworth. Sounds like some serious cognitive dissonance going on there.

Mostly, Palin spent a lot of time slagging Obama:

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I just put her teabagger speech on and man it's tough to listen to her. Her voice has this weird off putting quality to it. Not quite like chalk against a blackboard, but just as annoying.

Take a drink every time she says "common sense," but don't drive.

I'd rather be watching the Rangers vs the Devils hockey game right now. Brodeur and The King is a great goalie match up, but it's my job on a Saturday night so here I am.

When he was elected in 1992, Bill Clinton openly admitted that Hillary Rodham Clinton would be an active and engaged member of his inner team, with jokes about "two Clintons for the price of one!", much to the disgust and outright hostility of the right wing. How dare Hillary Clinton be so presumptuous as to believe that her non-elected status as the spouse of the President gave her the right to sit in policy meetings and advise her husband on matters of national importance?

Don't look now, GOP, but it appears we have another case of "two for the price of one":

Nearly 3,000 pages of e-mails that Todd Palin exchanged with state officials, which were released to msnbc.com and NBC News by the state of Alaska under its public records law, draw a picture of a Palin administration where the governor's husband got involved in a judicial appointment, monitored contract negotiations with public employee unions, received background checks on a corporate CEO, added his approval or disapproval to state board appointments and passed financial information marked "confidential" from his oil company employer to a state attorney.While 1,200 separate e-mails were released this week, 243 others were withheld by the state under a claim that executive privilege extends to Todd Palin as an unpaid adviser to the government. Still, just the subject lines of those e-mails provide a glimpse of the ways the Palins divvied up their responsibilities when she became governor in December 2006, less than two years before Republican Sen. John McCain pulled her onto the national political stage by nominating her as his vice presidential candidate.You can read all those e-mails in msnbc.com's searchable online archive.

While there is no instruction manual for First Spouse involvement, there's little doubt that Todd's input on Alaskan governmental issues was more than merely 'advising' Sarah Palin. Given that they sought to suppress knowledge of Todd's membership in the extremist AIP party, it does beg the question how much his far-right secessionist beliefs played into his influence on matters of judicial appointments and other matters of state.

It also shines a new light on the news that the Palins jointly cheated on their taxes by never declaring two properties built on parcels they owned as Palin ran on a platform of cleaning up Alaskan corruption:

It was things like this that really made Sarah Palin stand out as a gubernatorial candidate. Republicans in the state were sick of the corruption that was running rampant in their own party, and they wanted change. They wanted a "fresh face" who had new ideas and ethical standards. They wanted someone who was actually bothered by a public official who would cheat his community by passing his personal tax burden on to others.

Ironically, Palin refused to do a commercial endorsing another candidate when it came out that he had an unpaid tax debt.

Last June, soon-to-be ex-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin praised Michael Reagan, lauding his propensity to "to call it like he sees it, and to screw political correctness that some would expect him to have to adhere to." As she headed out the door six weeks later, Palin promised to be "less politically correct" after her leaving office. Then after the Ft. Hood shootings in November, Palin said "profile away!" because such political correctness "could be our downfall."

As it turns out, Palin's crusade against political correctness was a bogus one. As her manufactured outrage over Rahm Emanuel's closed-door comments show, Sarah Palin's new mantra is "political correctness for me, not thee."

On Tuesday, Palin took to Facebook to call for Emanuel's resignation following a Wall Street Journal story that the White House chief of staff called liberal activists "f**king retarded" during a meeting last August. But while Emanuel already apologized last week to Special Olympics Chairman and CEO Tim Shriver, Palin demanded his head on behalf of her son and those like him:

"Just as we'd be appalled if any public figure of Rahm's stature ever used the "N-word" or other such inappropriate language, Rahm's slur on all God's children with cognitive and developmental disabilities - and the people who love them - is unacceptable, and it's heartbreaking."

Of course, in two days Sarah Palin will collect a $115,000 pay day speaking to those who traffic in the "N-word" at the National Tea Party Convention.

For Palin, who called for the merger of the Tea Party movement and the Republican Party, the audience will be quite familiar. During the 2008 campaign, attendees at McCain-Palin events displayed toy monkeys to represent her African-American opponent. Self-proclaimed Tea Party "founder" Dale Robertson carried a large sign bearing the N-word at one of the movement's events. Only last week, Robertson distributed a fundraising email which portrayed President Obama as a pimp. It's not hard to imagine that the assembled Tea Baggers would buy "Obama Waffles" and sing along to the words of the "Barack the Magic Negro" song so beloved by Rush Limbaugh and would-be Republican National Committee chairman Chip Saltsman. Still, as Palin wrote in her USA Today op-ed Tuesday:

"They have the courage to stand up and speak out.

Their vision is what drew me to the Tea Party movement. They believe in the same principles that guided my work in public service..."

No doubt, the conservative commentariat will join Sarah Palin's call for Rahm Emanuel's ouster. Sadly, that may be difficult to do.

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Sarah Palin confirmed on Greta Van Susteren's show last night that she's very much planning to show up and speak at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, despite the distinct odor of Scam the whole affair is giving off.

Palin: Oh, you betcha I'm going to be there. I'm going to speak there because there are people traveling from many miles away to hear what that Tea Party movement is all about and what that message is that should be received by our politicians in Washington. I'm honored to get to be there.

This, even as some of her fellow wingnuts are catching the same whiff -- namely, Reps. Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn, who have pulled out of the event:

In separate statements, released by their congressional offices, the lawmakers said that appearing at the convention might conflict with House ethics rules. But they also said they are concerned about how money raised from the event will be spent.

Palin last night had no such concerns -- and said no one should be concerned about that big wad of cash the convention organizers are paying her:

Palin: The speaker's fee will go right back into the cause. I'll be able to donate it to people and those events, those things that I believe in, that will help perpetuate the message, the message being: Government, you have constitutional limits. You better start abiding by them.

Hmmmmm. It sounds like we're going to have to rely on Sarah's say-so when it comes to how she actually spends the money. Smells even more like Scam, doesn't it?

Of course, the whole scenario, as David Corn explored with Keith Olbermann last night, is developing into quite a fiasco -- mainly because Tea Partier and Birther J.D. Hayworth has decided to challenge Palin's former running mate, John McCain, in the Arizona Senate primary.

Palin is staying loyal to McCain. This has outraged the Tea Partiers, as Alan Colmes points out:

She has now chose to align herself with several bad actors. What should this be called, the Rinoization of Sarah Palin. [...]

She is certainly entitled to write a book and make money for her and her family, but other than what has she has done to support Republican and patriotic candidates. … Perhaps, Sarah was too busy talking to her agent about her Fox deal. Where the hell was Sarah?

This is what you get when you build a movement around paranoid right-wingers. There is probably no faction more historically famous for viciously turning on each other in struggles over money and power than right-wing populists.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch.

David Letterman talks about his old pal, Sarah Palin in his top ten.

10. Ruined office floor by drilling for oil

9. Detached a retina from winking at the camera

8. Got confused-- thought she signed with QVC

7. Pistol-whipped three guys who called her "Tina"

6. Released a statement saying she won't follow Leno

5. At lunchtime, Todd picked her up driving snowmobile through lobby

4. Sad to learn there was no actual fox to hunt

3. Hosted a "Fire Dave" roundtable

2. Actually found a place with more white people than Alaska

1. Announced plans to run for President in 2010

And Howie Klein has some good news for a change.

Yesterday I had to put off a meeting with the Blue America attorney because he was manning a northern Virginia polling station. I hadn't realized there was a special election, but he reminded me that when lunatic-fringe sociopath Ken Cuccinelli was elected Virginia Attorney General, his state Senate seat came open. It's a Republican-leaning district and no one really expected it to go from insanely die-hard Republican to unapologetic Democratic. But I had to postpone the meeting again today because he was celebrating. His candidate, state Delegate Dave Marsden, a former Republican, won the seat last night!

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There's a reason the Tea Party crowd still believes in "death panels" -- namely, because Sarah Palin, who coined the term, keeps claiming that they really do exist still.

Nevermind, of course, that it has long been exposed as a complete falsehood, and was named "Lie of the Year" by PolitiFact. To right-wingers like Sarah Palin, though, you can lie through your teeth, tell the press that up is down, that a report finding you guilty of various abuses of power as Alaska's governor in fact actually "completely exonerates" you -- and everyone will stand around and pretend like it's just another point of view.

So she repeated it again last night on Hannity:

Hannity: You stand by those comments because you think it still exists in the bill.

Palin: I do. It's a commission, it's bureaucracy, it's bureaucrats who will ration care if the bill goes through as Obama wants it to go through. Yes -- it's modeled, in essence, after a British system that does have people to decide whether, based on your quality of life, your age, whether you're gonna deserve health-care coverage or not -- that's what's gonna happen in America if this health-care bill isn't stopped, and it needs to be stopped soon, and that's why the people of this land can't give up in demanding that their voice be heard, demanding that the White House understand that this is a representative form of government, we do expect that the will of the people is listened to and adhered to and implemented via our representatives, who we elect.

Eh? The British system has no such "commissions." As the AP recently reported, officials in Britain recently repudiated claims like Palin's:

The criticism, widely covered in the U.K. media, has clearly stung Britain's left-leaning Labour government. The Department of Health took the unusual step of contacting The Associated Press and e-mailing it a three-page rebuttal to what it said were misconceptions about the NHS being bandied about in the U.S. media – each one followed with the words: "Not true."

At the top of the list was the idea that a patient in his late 70s would not be treated for a brain tumor because he was too old – a transparent reference to Grassley's comments about Kennedy.

And what of Republicans' claim that British patients are robbed of their medical choices? False again, the department said.

"Everyone who is cared for by the NHS in England has formal rights to make choices about the service that they receive," it said in its rebuttal.

Then followed a fact sheet comparing selected statistics such as health spending per capita, infant mortality, life expectancy, and more. Each one showed England outperforming its trans-Atlantic counterpart.

The British government offers health care for free at the point of need, a service pioneered by Labour in 1948. In the six decades since, its promise of universal medical care, from cradle to grave, is taken for granted by Britons to such an extent that politicians – even fiscal conservatives – are loath to attack it.

Apparently Palin is referring to British cost-containment measures:

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It was Glenn Beck's turn to host new Fox News Analyst Sarah Palin yesterday. It was actually an incredibly boring interview, since Beck mostly seemed interested in whether Palin hung on his every word or not and bought into his theory that Obama is a radical black Marxist bent on destroying America. She did, of course.

It featured all of Beck's tired schticks, including his claim that Republicans like George W. Bush and John McCain are actually "progressives":

Beck: It killed me to vote for John McCain. And I voted for John McCain because of you. Um, John McCain is a progressive. John McCain -- he's an honorable man.

Palin: He is an honorable man.

Beck: He is an honorable man. And that goes a long way -- there's, I mean, that's a rare island to find. He's an honorable man. But he's also a progressive.

He's big government, he was for the bank bailouts, he was for the uh, uhm, health care. He's for all of it. He's for all of it.

Palin played along, pointing out: "Look what he's doing now!" and generally suggesting that those naughty wayward conservatives had gotten the gospel of Glenn and were back on the right track.

Beck seems utterly unaware that, in fact, Palin was for the bank bailouts too.

As you can see from the additional footage we included in the above video, Palin vocally supported the bailouts in her vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden, praising McCain's supposed work in trying to get the bailout package passed:

John McCain thankfully has been one representing reform. Two years ago, remember, it was John McCain who pushed so hard with the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reform measures. He sounded that warning bell.

People in the Senate with him, his colleagues, didn’t want to listen to him and wouldn’t go towards that reform that was needed then. I think that the alarm has been heard, though, and there will be that greater oversight, again thanks to John McCain’s bipartisan efforts that he was so instrumental in bringing folks together over this past week, even suspending his own campaign to make sure he was putting excessive politics aside and putting the country first.

As Dave Weigel noted awhile back, this was just after McCain had "suspended" his campaign to return to Washington to attempt to push the bailout through.

In late September, Palin also defended the bailouts in her interview with Katie Couric:

Palin: That’s why I say, I, like every American I’m speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the tax payers looking to bail out.

But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up the economy– Helping the — Oh, it’s got to be about job creation too. Shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americas. A

And trade we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive scary thing. But 1 in 5 jobs being created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation.

This bailout is a part of that.

That is, it's a defense of sorts. Actually, it makes no sense whatever -- it's just a big pot of policy-wonk words thrown together in a way that I think Palin hoped sounded like it made some kinda sense.

The only thing that's really clear from all this is that not only was Palin a full supporter of the bailouts, she was a big fan of health-care reform. In fact, she seems to have believed the bailouts would help reform health care. Eh?

No wonder her followers are similarly awash at sea.

Not to mention her interviewers.

I scratched my head the other day when I heard that Sarah Palin had been invited to be a celebrity guest at a fundraiser for Canadian hospitals. Palin has railed against the Canadian health care system and continues to spread fear and lies about health care reform and lead the right wing rallying cry to keep Americans enslaved to giant insurance companies.

I don't know what genius came up with the idea, but apparently, the backlash was so great that organizers had to rescind their invitation:

HAMILTON, Ont. - Sarah Palin has been given the boot as a celebrity fundraiser for hospitals in Hamilton, Ont., but she will come to town raise money for a local children’s charity instead.

Palin has brought the American health care debate to Canada and it is causing a storm of controversy as concerned hospital supporters have protested her appearance to raise money for two local institutions in April.

The former vice-presidential candidate was supposed to speak at a fund-raising event for the Juravinski Cancer Centre and St. Peter’s Hospital in Hamilton. But a backlash of negative publicity cancelled those plans. Read on...

You may recall Palin being punked last month by Canadian comedian Mary Walsh, who posed as a conservative reporter. Palin told Walsh, “Canada needs to dismantle its public health-care system and allow private enterprise to get involved and turn a profit.”

Which made her a perfect candidate to come to Canada to raise money for their hospitals? I'm still scratching my head on this one...

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Sarah Palin, discussing President Obama's Nobel Prize speech, sounded like she wanted credit for it:

I liked what he said. In fact, I thumbed through my book quickly this morning, saying, 'Wow, that really sounded familiar. I talked in my book, too, about the fallen nature of man and why war is necessary at times, and history's lessons when it comes to knowing when it is when we engage in warfare. A lot of Americans right now are getting to read my take on when war is necessary.

No, Sarah, he didn't steal your idea.

Among the qualities that uniquely define Sarah Palin is that she doesn't know what she doesn't know. But as her confusion about climate change, the First Amendment and even Alaska's energy production showed, Palin's ignorance of a subject is no barrier to her speaking out with great conviction about it. So it is once again with talk of potential tax increases to fund the escalating war in Afghanistan. War time taxes are never necessary, Sarah Palin seemed to suggest this week, because during World War II "many Americans gave what little money they had to buy the war bonds that funded it all."

As Andrew Sullivan noted here and here, the Quittah from Wasilla used this week's anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to invent a new myth about how the United States mobilized and paid for the war which followed it. Palin wrote this December 7:

The attack on Pearl Harbor launched America into the Second World War, and our Greatest Generation did not hesitate when asked to sacrifice for their country. American men enlisted in droves, American women went to work in the factories that became our "Arsenal of Democracy," and many Americans gave what little money they had to buy the war bonds that funded it all.

Of course, in reality Americans funded the war through massive debt and massive tax increases (above).

As NPR recalled in August, Americans starting in 1942 began paying dramatically higher taxes, with the richest paying the most of all:

During World War II, tax rates for the wealthy soared as high as 94 percent. But poor and middle-class families also paid taxes at rates substantially higher than today's. Despite those high taxes, the vast majority of Americans surveyed by Gallup back then said the taxes they paid were fair.

Just two weeks ago, former Reagan Treasury Department economist Bruce Bartlett quantified those war time taxes and how that vast new burden was shared across the Greatest Generation:

During World War II, federal revenues roughly tripled as a share of the gross domestic product (GDP) and the number of people paying income taxes expanded tenfold, from 3% of the population in 1939 to 30% by 1943. In 1940, a family of four needed close to $80,000 of income in today's dollars before it paid any federal income taxes at all. By the war's end, it saw its effective tax rate rise from 1.5% to 15.1%. (Today such a family only pays a federal income tax rate of about 6%.) But taxes weren't the only way the war was paid for. Spending on nondefense programs was cut almost in half, from 8.1% of GDP in 1940 to 4.4% in 1945.

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Andrea Mitchell, Pat Buchanan, the Morning Joe crew and Bloomberg's Al Hunt were fawning over Sarah Palin's visit to the Gridiron Club over the weekend. It's interesting that she went to talk to the group of people she says she despises the most. An outside observer would say that Sarah is trying to butter them up so they will report her in a much more sympathetic way. And looking at Al Hunt's literally foaming at the mouth over her indicates that her ploy is working out perfectly.

Mika: He escorted Sarah Palin to Saturday Night's Gridiron dinner.

Joe: How exciting.

Mika: That's a black tie event for the media and she was pretty good I hear.

Hunt: I did, ahhh she went into the lions den and I gotta tell you something, the lions were absolute pussy cats.

Group laughing and howling: Ahhhh, hahahaha

Hunt: They wanted to have their picture taken with her. They wanted to have her autograph and it was just say I thought we, being the Grid Iron Club did as well as ever. Our two speakers were Sarah Palin representing the republicans and barney Frank representing the Democrats. Can you think of a better pair than that? They both were quite good.

I'm sure they were, Al. Did you get a snapshot with her? She should have charged 20 bucks for a Polaroid and would have made a killing from these journos. The media were just such pussycats to Palin even though she's making her living off of blaming them for every mistake she's made or problem she's created for herself. She's a lion I tell you. And you wonder why America is so ill-informed...

Here's some coverage from US News:

"Who would have guessed I'd be palling around with this group?" she asked, and surely there are Sarah fans wondering why she was there going vogue, instead of rogue. Well, a gal's gotta make her millions, and the media helps sell books. Besides, being anti-everything can wear a person down. "The view is so much better from inside the bus than under it," she noted.

The only mousse was for dessert (rim shot, maestro please), but Palin did some field-dressing of her egotistical audience. It was fun to be among the capital's "leading journalists and intellectuals," she said. "Or as I like to call it, a death panel."

She noted that the journalists may have missed out on the policy prescriptions in her memoir, Going Rogue, when focusing instead, as they are apt to do, on how many times she mentioned their names. What a group of heavy thinkers, Palin said: "You read a book in its entirety—from the first page of the index to the last."

She'll keep reaching her hand out to the media; they will take it and then she'll bite it firmly and painfully. And then they will stick out their other hand and ask for more...

Palin's book tour had the media also fawning over her, which has helped her with a small bump upward in a CNN poll. Now only 46% of people have an unfavorable opinion of her while 46% approve her.

That's a small jump after the media gave her the Anna Nicole Smith coverage. She's had the best coverage she will ever get. And what's up with the hat?