Time Magazine reveals the real Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin may be a lot of things, like a religious wacko ("Iraq is a mission from God", and not mention her church up until five years ago spoke in tounges), or a pathological liar (I was against the bridge to nowhere), but one thing she is not is a fiscal conservative. Not that that really matters anyway considering the record of our most recent "fiscal conservatives". See graphic below...

Time Magazine had this to say about Ms. Palin's abysmal record:

Of the 50 states, Alaska ranks No. 1 in taxes per resident and No. 1 in spending per resident. Its tax burden per resident is 2 1/2 times the national average; its spending, more than double. The trick is that Alaska's government spends money on its own citizens and taxes the rest of us to pay for it. Although Palin, like McCain, talks about liberating ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, there is no evidence that being dependent on Alaskan oil would be any more pleasant to the pocketbook.

The 5 Conservative Stages of Grief

Hunter @ Daily Kos:

Stage 1: John McCain. In the McCain stage of grief, a conservative is mentally aware of their surroundings but unable to emotionally process the information. The result is a mental short-circuit. Sufferers are especially prone to thinking that the Iraq War is going spectacularly well; they may even wander open-air marketplaces in which they are protected by a hundred or more fully armed United States soldiers, with helicopter gunship support, and remark aloud at how normal and stable and safe their location obviously is. Denial may also exist over the state of the economy, of their own party, or, especially, their own past actions.

The McCain stage of grief is known to last years or even decades. Fortunately, the sufferer usually loses all concept of time, such that they cannot differentiate between any particular six month period, and will eventually declare them all to be "a hundred years" long.


Stage 2: Rudy Giuliani. The Giuliani stage of grief is marked by constant, seething anger. Individuals may reduce their entire range of emotional responses to one, that of constant, self-righteous rage. The stage is usually accompanied by Napoleonic fantasies, declaring the fearsome breadth of their own inner fury to be the only salvation not just of themselves, but of the entire world in which they live. Every situation, every social interaction, and every problem is met with a frequently irrational and always militant response.

Long-term sufferers of the Giuliani stage may eventually suffer from a permanent bug-eyed expression and the onset of sociopathy. They may sometimes be mistaken for necrophiliacs.


Stage 3: Mitt Romney. In the Romney stage, the full impact of the conservative situation begins to become clear to the individual, who then begins to attempt to extricate themselves from their predicament through the process of bargaining.

Sufferers may, upon recognizing the unpopularity of past positions, shift those positions wildly from one year to the next, one week to the next, or even during consecutive sentences. They are driven by a need for popularity and acceptance, and are willing to tailor their speech, behavior, and even their thoughts to whatever may be necessary to obtain it. Sufferers of the Romney stage of grief are aware of their surroundings and the negative situation they are in, and are even aware of how their behavior may have contributed to the failure, but lack the mental ability to then adapt their behaviors as a result of those past failures. Instead, they flit haphazardly from idea to idea, from constituency to constituency, looking to empty sloganeering and focus group ideas to rebuild the trust that they have lost.


Stage 4: Fred Thompson. Eventually, sufferers of conservative grief may become distant and despondent, entering the Thompson stage. Individuals may retreat into isolation, even if they are currently supposed to be running for President of the United States or something. While they can sometimes be goaded into action, say, for an evening debate, they are more prone to minimalist activities, such as making a few phone calls, showing up at a county fair, or merely driving around in a truck.

Sufferers of the Thompson stage are fully aware of past conservative failures, but are unable to make even token attempts at new ideas or substantively critiquing the old ones. They become stiff and emotionless, as if a writers' strike is incapacitating them. They may begin to age creepily and horribly.


Stage 5: Mike Huckabee. Finally, the Huckabee stage may be reached. In this stage, the grief sufferer finally comes to term with the situation for himself and his fellow conservatives. He realizes fully how he has been used; he realizes fully how shallow and insincere conservative behavior has been; he realizes that there is little way to change the situation. He may surround himself with trivialities or attempts at obvious self-deprecation in order to make light of the situation; for example, using elderly b-list television action stars as inexplicable campaign props.

Nonetheless, acceptance of the situation is achieved. In the Huckabee stage, the individual no longer grieves for the losses of conservatism, but comes to accept them as the reality of the movement, and nothing that either can or should be changed. Token apologies for past behavior may be issued, with the full internal knowledge that those transgressions will be repeated in the future.

Individuals that reach the Huckabethan stage of conservative grief may achieve serenity and spirituality; the stage is frequently accompanied by the belief that no matter how bad the situation is, those tragedies and failures were preordained by God, who will return at any moment to kick the asses of all those that may now stand in your way.

These seemingly baseless assertions of preordained destiny and of imminent divine intervention on your personal behalf may not be emotionally rational, but it at least allows the individual a cognitive basis for continuing their conservatism even in the wake of obvious and dramatic movement-wide failures. In this manner, a conservative can continue to remain conservative indefinitely, or at least until their conservatism results in another multi-fronted national crisis.

More from Mississippi to come Monday.

Conservatives Dominate In Mississippi Opinion Media

Conservatives and Republicans like to claim that the media is inherently biased against them. They adopted this strategy several decades ago to explain why Americans didn't agree with their ideas and because they needed to discount things like Iran Contra and science.

We already know that Conservatives absolutely dominate in talk radio with American Family Radio political programs reaching statewide and SuperTalk nearly doing so. In addition there are other stations throughout the state that also carry conservative opinion while others make it a staple of their morning programs.

Well, in addition to radio you can count newspapers in their column (a pun) also. Research by Media Matters, a media watchdog foundation showed the following breakdown in nationally syndicated opinion columns published in Mississippi newspapers.

This represents the total column impressions adjusted to reflect circulation:


This represents the total number of conservative, progressive, and centrist columnists:


This shows the columnists who appear most often with dark representing weekly and light representing at least monthly:


* In Mississippi, there are 23* daily newspapers with a total circulation of 310,695.
* Conservative syndicated columnists appear a total of 41 times per week in Mississippi newspapers. Centrist columnists appear a total of 5 times, while progressive columnists appear a total of 21 times.[1]
* Taking newspaper circulation into account, these columnists have the potential to reach Mississippi readers a total of 1,574,515 times each week.

* Our study includes 20 of the 23 daily newspapers published in Mississippi because The Brookhaven Daily Leader, The Clarksdale Press Register, and The Meridian Star did not return our inquiries about each paper’s lineup of nationally syndicated columnists, nor could each paper’s information be obtained through resources readily available in Washington, D.C.

** These data reflect only regular (at least once a week) conservative and progressive columnists, for the full report go to: www.mediamatters.org/op-ed and to view state-by-state or specific newspaper data go to: http://mediamatters.org/reports/oped/search