Maybe Sarah Palin is the Nanny and Mike Huckabee the Professor
Michelle Malkin named Mike Huckabee one of her 10 biggest nanny-staters. Here is part of what she said about Huckabee (emphasis mine):
Nanny State Republican Mike Huckabee, who used his bully pulpit position as Arkansas governor to campaign for Big Government-endorsed “healthier living” in public schools and private life, naturally sided with Mrs. Obama — and took a swipe at Sarah Palin last week for criticizing the White House usurpation of parental responsibility and rights. Huckabee scoffed at the idea that the feds are “trying to force the government’s desires on people.” But school bake sales are already under siege, and Mrs. Obama’s childhood obesity task force has already called for new and dramatic controls on the marketing of unhealthy foods. Did Huckabee miss (or does he agree with) Mrs. Obama’s officious rallying cry on child nutrition: “We can’t just leave it up to parents”?
If Malkin wants governors to mind their own business when it comes to school lunches, she needs to add former Governor Sarah Palin, and Texas Governor Rick Perry to her list of nannies.
After the 2008 election, but before she resigned in 2009 and Michelle Obama’s intitiatives had begun, Palin implemented and promoted “healthier living” programs in her state.
Below is an excerpt of those (all italics below are mine):
No. 08-194
Governor Palin Announces Health Priorities
December 4, 2008, Anchorage, Alaska – Governor Sarah Palin today announced her goals to improve Alaska’s health and education through fiscal year 2010 budget requests, the formation of a health care commission, support for legislation and an informational campaign to help Alaskans take better care of their own health.
She also increased funding for Denali KidCare (Alaska version of SChip) and raised the eligibility threshold to 200% of the federal poverty level (the federal government only required funding for up to 150%, Palin had earlier raised it to 175%). She did this to maintain federal funding and “said that the state could have lost $3 million in federal funding if its income threshold fell below 150% of the current poverty level (Kizzia, Anchorage Daily News, 5/16).
Governor Huckabee on the other hand, resisted federal mandates(!) with his ARKids First alternate plan called “Arkid B”. Surely how politicians actually governed is more important than statements about President Obama’s wife, Michelle. Here is one example of Huckabee’s stand for state rights:
The B waiver program requires a “small” copayment and offers fewer services than the traditional Medicaid program. Proponents of the B plan say free coverage under the traditional A program carries a “stigma” that not all families want to subject themselves to.
According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Huckabee has wanted to allow parents of Medicaid-eligible children to choose between the two programs. Huckabee added that some “prideful” parents would prefer to enroll their children in ARKids B because they “want to contribute to their children’s health coverage” through the copayments.
A Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report noted, “Despite the Clinton administration’s order to place all Medicaid-eligible children into ARKids A, Huckabee resisted ‘in the hopes that Bush would be elected.’” After daring the Clinton administration to pull his state’s federal funding for not following the order, Huckabee said he thought the Bush administration, with Tommy Thompson as HHS secretary, would allow Arkansas to manage the programs as it saw fit.
At the same time Governor Palin was promoting her increases in funding, she also created a new health care commission, increased “state funding to reverse childhood obesity and improve diagnosis of autism, and increased funding for Alaska’s Head Start preschool programs”.[1]
And she did this “for the children” (which we conservatives are all want to mock when it comes from the left): Palin said “Children are the most valuable resource in Alaska…We have to do more to support health coverage and health care, because it plays such a big role in a child’s success in school, and in life. Our state agencies are partnering to better equip Alaskans to lead healthier lives and to meet health care needs across the state.” Notice that Palin’s reasons are the same ones Malkin criticized in Huckabee: Poor health’s impact on School and Life.
She also decided to “develop a statewide initiative called Live Well Alaska. The interactive web-based campaign will provide the best recommendations for eating healthier, being more physically active and quitting tobacco use.” Perhaps she was copying Mike Huckabee’s program called Healthy Arkansas.
Palin also spent “$2 million for the Department of Education to implement a pilot preschool program. School districts would receive the funding through grants. The half-day preschools would serve up to 500 children statewide.”
I don’t want to be misunderstood. I think that, generally speaking, both the Federal Government and state governments should stay out of the health care business. But this is yet another example of hypocritical anger by Malkin who nitpicks Huckabee on things her own pet candidates have supported.
Cross posted at Caffeinated Thoughts
Erick Erickson, Editor-in-Chief of Redstate.com, has formally endorsed Mike Pence for the Republican nomination. You can read Erickson’s front-page post here.
Politico surveyed the 168 members of the RNC over the last week, and found 88 of them who said they would not vote to re-elect Michael Steele.
For those of you who are a little slow at math this morning, that would be a majority.
I say: goodbye and good riddance.
Hotline has the latest public endorsement counts:
1. Priebus – 30
2. Steele – 15
3. Wagner – 12
4. Anuzis – 10
5. Cino – 6
As long as it’s not Steele or Anuzis, I’ll be satisfied. The vote, again, will take place on Friday, January 14th.
Former Republican National Committee political director Gentry Collins will end his bid to become the next chairman of the party, he said late Sunday night.
Collins, who resigned from his position in November with a letter offering a scathing commentary on incumbent chairman Michael Steele’s leadership, said he has entered the race to provide an alternative to Steele’s leadership. But the entry of other qualified candidates helped Collins toward an exit.
Collins’ candidacy itself was seen as a powerful indictment of Steele’s tenure as RNC chairman. In a letter to the RNC’s executive committee announcing his resignation November 16, Collins said a better-funded RNC would have been able to deliver Republican wins in two additional Senate seats, two more governorships and nearly two dozen House seats that Democrats ended up winning in the midterms.
That memo, Collins said, was “a game-changer for Chairman Steele’s re-election prospects.”
It was increasingly likely that Collins wasn’t going to make the ballot anyway (lacking the six RNC member endorsements necessary to compete), but his dropping out just before the candidate debate was surprising. He only had three public endorsements – not enough to be a game changer, but it will be interesting to see who they go to.
This departure leaves Reince Priebus, Saul Anuzis, Ann Wagner, and Maria Cino to challenge Michael Steele for his job.
It’s been about two years since President Obama took office, meaning that it’s time to adjudicate liberals’ claim that the former senator from Illinois would fill the role of a “transformational president” who managed to enact a sea change in American politics, governmental policy, and in the socio-political attitudes of the American people. Liberals had hoped that Obama would be a sort of left-wing version of Ronald Reagan, believing that the president adequately replicated the formula that brought about the Reagan Revolution, complete with an economy in the gutter, an embattled out party, and a charismatic, ideological president who could sell the nation on liberalism just as Reagan sold it on conservatism.
The last two years, though, have been anything but a left-wing revolution. The president’s signature domestic accomplishment, health care reform, passed by a hair despite a heavily Democratic Congress, and the blowback was so severe that the midterms saw the greatest Republican victories in the House since the 1940s. The country isn’t always in line with movement conservatism or the Republican Party line — DADT, START, and other policies that are considered left-of-center remain quite popular. But the country certainly hasn’t gotten more liberal over the past two years, and has in many ways become more conservative. So why didn’t the Left’s reverse Reaganism work?
The part of the equation that Democrats missed with regard to Reaganism was the reality that the Reagan Revolution was as much a product of its time as it was an agent of change. In 1980, the country was undergoing major rightward movement at the grassroots level. The rise of conservatism during the ’80s wasn’t simply a fad that resulted from a silver-tongued orator. It was a real shift in the tectonic plates of American politics and society, and Reagan’s presidency was a symptom of this movement even as it assisted this movement in its political victories.
That’s why simply electing a charismatic, ideological president does not the Reagan Revolution make. President Obama’s fate is much more similar to that which may have faced Reagan had the latter’s very first presidential run in 1968 been successful. Had Reagan managed to win the 1968 GOP nomination, he just may have bested Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey, especially given that many political observers believe that pretty much any Republican would have won during a year that stands out as the low point for the Democratic Party in modern presidential history. But what would a Reagan presidency have been like had it taken place during the late ’60s, the era of making-love-and-not-war, as opposed to the early ’80s? Things may not have gone so well for President Reagan. He probably would have gone forward with plans to dramatically slash marginal income tax rates, a plan that would have been opposed by all of the Blue Dog Democrats in the South who, just a dozen years later, were helping to lead the tax cut to passage on Capitol Hill. That’s because there would have been no grassroots pressure for Democrats from what we now refer to as “red” states and congressional districts to support the Reagan policy agenda. A Reagan presidency without the conservative grassroots movement of the late ’70s and early ’80s would have been a much more complicated endeavor.
As such, even if Obama is re-elected, he will likely not be remembered as the transformational president that the Left has hoped for. That said, as I have touched on in recent days, the power of the presidency remains quite potent, and even though popular sentiment in the nation is most certainly not moving leftward, the president’s ability to enact regulatory policy, appoint judges, and sign legislation like ObamaCare has the potential to structurally change the country over time in a way that will drag the goal posts leftward, popular will be damned.
On Meet the Press this morning, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said that Mitt Romney is the “most electable conservative” of all the potential 2012 candidates after saying that the “most electable conservative” would win the primary. Here’s the quote from Graham on Romney:
Mitt Romney has his problems as a candidate, but so does everyone else…But it’s a changing environment. And the one thing you got to prove to the people of South Carolina is not only are you conservative, but you can carry the day.
You can watch the video over at Politico here. Graham has mixed support among conservative voters in South Carolina. It also makes me curious if this was meant to imply that he’s willing to endorse Romney.
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The death panels Health Care memo. (Hat Tip: Right Mind.)
Taking on Public Pension plan crisis. (Hat Tip: Doug Ross.)
80% of California expenditures go to public employee pay and benefits. (Hat Tip: Right Mind.)
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal undermines Afghanistan mission. (Hat Tip: Wizbang Blog.)
75 year old teacher accused of sexual assault making working in rubber rooms for 13 years. (Hat Tip: Don Surber.)
The danger of children being exposed to pornography.
Parents sue over homosexual son’s death.
Vietnam still persecutes Christians.
Young pro-life activist making an impact.
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Adam Graham is a Pajamas Media Contributor. He is the author of the Novel, “Tales of the Dim Knight” with his wife Andrea. His personal blog is Adam’s Blog. You can follow him on Twitter and he’s on Facebook and available by e-mail.
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Where were all the presidential candidates* as the vote to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was nearing? The collective silence was loud. Only Rush Limbaugh brashly called the repeal, “gays in the military, show and tell”. But at the end it was largely a GOP candidates no-show and no-tell.
Before the recent votes in the lame-duck session of Congress repealing DADT (a policy that dated back to the Bill Clinton administration), I called on politicians to come out and announce their positions. Former governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson wrote a piece for the Huffington Post saying he was against DADT, while 2008 nominee John McCain spoke in the Senate to retain it. Otherwise, I was mostly ignored. In fact, I was completely ignored (Does anybody but me really think Johnson or McCain announced because of me?) But I digress.
Speaking of surprises, we shouldn’t be surprised when candidates without principles stick their fingers in the wind and change their votes as often as President Obama changes batteries on his teleprompter. But when candidates like Ron Paul claim their position is a principled one (based on the U.S. Constitution), their changes in position almost certainly mean one of two things: Either the candidate has not been candid all along, or he or she is going soft.
Ron Paul previously supported DADT. His recent vote to repeal it is one more thing that shouldn’t surprise us, however. Though Paul professes Christianity, years ago he said he does not even think homosexuality is a sin. He says this because he is a doctor, not because he can find support for his position in the Bible. As I have pointed out elsewhere, without the Word of God as a standard, there could be no successful stand against moral degradation. I believe abortion has become established in the USA, partly because Christians have been afraid to use the Bible as the Sword of the Spirit. Homosexual “marriage” may be next.
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*Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Tim Pawlenty. Some have spoken plainly in favor of the DADT in the past (Huckabee and Santorum), one has flip-flopped (Guess Who?), and one has punted (Sarah Palin). But none made an issue of it during the lame duck session. Is this a portent of things to come? Will they join Ron Paul?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_krYcGZhJk
Cross-Posted on Caffeinated Thoughts
Our long national nightmare is indeed over. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is considering jumping into the presidential race:
Asked whether he is prepared to rule out a run in 2012 (since it would require him to campaign against his current boss), he declines to comment.
The winking response—about as close to a hat-in-ring announcement as you’ll get from a sitting member of the incumbent’s administration—could just be a hollow cry for attention. But sources close to Huntsman (who requested anonymity to speak freely without his permission) say that during his December trip to the U.S., he met with several former political advisers in Washington and Salt Lake City to discuss a potential campaign. “I’m not saying he’s running,” says one supporter who has worked with him in the past. “But we’re a fire squad; if he says the word, we can get things going fast.”
So what makes Jon Huntsman any more significant than, say, John Thune? Well, the fact that he’s a young-ish, articulate former governor is certainly a plus, but more to the point is the niche that Huntsman would fill in the GOP primaries. Huntsman is sort of the ideal candidate for the Republican reformers who spent most of the latter part of the last decade telling us that the Republican Party had to change. He’s got the supposed “next generation” positions on social issues that the GOP is reportedly going to have to adopt, such as his stance in favor of civil unions, and he uses the same eco-friendly, economic pragmatist language employed by his fellow governors Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty in order to reach beyond the traditional Republican economic checklist of tax cuts and more tax cuts. Jon Huntsman is pretty much the candidate you’d get if you locked Ross Douthat and Megan McCardle in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab for a week and told them to build their ideal GOP nominee.
The problem, of course, is that pretty much no one in the actual Republican grassroots wants this kind of candidate. A Huntsman nomination would be ideal in order to attract urban and suburban swing voters to the GOP ticket, but those same swing voters are Huntsman’s base. The mood of the GOP right now is a back-to-basics one, and that doesn’t make it easy for someone like Huntsman, who sees his job as moving the ball forward. Huntsman may have some good ideas when it comes down to raw policy, but in order for those ideas to be heard, he’d have to first win the Republican nomination. And to do that he’d have to throw so much red meat around that he’d make Mitt Romney, circa 2008, seem like Nelson Rockefeller. Which, of course, would ruin him with the very swing voters he’s supposed to attract.
Huntsman may be a dog who has his day in 2016 should Obama be re-elected, and should the Tea Party movement subside, but it certainly won’t be his year in 2012. A much better strategy to reach out to swing voters in 2012 would be for the GOP to select a nominee who has established enough ideological street cred with enough of the GOP base that he or she could propose solutions and compromises without being branded a RINO. Gary Johnson, for example, would probably also appeal to white collar, suburban independents, but would do so running as a representative of the Ron Paul wing of the GOP, thus giving him a foundation to fall back on once the MSM inevitably turns on him in the general election, and once a good portion of swing voters ultimately drift back to Obama.
A recent Clarus poll was apparently designed to promote the candidacies of moderate Mitt Romney and a liberal mayor, Republican Michael Bloomberg and diss Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin.
Just below, has to be one of the worst polling questions in the history of presidential politics.
If you had to pick between the two––would you prefer the next Republican presidential candidate be a moderate conservative who has a good chance of beating Barack Obama …or… someone who is an outspoken conservative who has only a fair chance of beating Barack Obama?
It is unclear whether folks taking the poll were also forced to choose between the following two descriptions:
1. A moderate, pragmatic conservative 61%
2. A staunch, outspoken conservative 29%
How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.
1. The initial premise is flawed. Whenever a poll question forces you to choose, (“had to pick”) it is quite certain you are being had.
2. The question pairs ideas in a manner deliberately created to push one kind of candidate over another. Notice that the moderate candidate is presented as having a good chance to beat Obama while the conservative is only given a fair chance. If a respondent to the poll believed that the conservative had a better chance they would have no place in the poll to make the case.
The poll also asked voters to ”vote” in a three-way race between President Barack Obama, a Republican (Palin or Romney) and Michael Bloomberg. Romney did better than Palin in comparative races, for obvious reasons. Palin is unquestionably considered more “divisive” than Romney at this time, but it is quite doubtful anybody outside of New York even knows who Bloomberg is. This question at best shows a general disdain with party politics, and could not possibly indicate a positive attitude towards Bloomberg.
All of this shows not only the futility of putting too much stock in polls generally, but also the need to be aware of the shenanigans going on behind the scenes. Polls like these are not only unscientific, they are downright deceitful.
Crossposted at Caffeinated Thoughts
