"I pressed an F instead of a P and people freaked out," said Sarah, pointing out that her blunder was the second-most-searched word on Google trends. "Make lemonade out of lemons," said Sarah.
I sent Palin's office a request for all emails written by her, received by her, or cc'ed to her during her tenure as governor. In subsequent weeks other news organizations, including the Associated Press and MSNBC.com, the state Democratic Party, and individuals (such as Alaskan citizen watchdog Andree McLeod) filed similar requests.
On Wednesday (Dec. 15), in a break in her trailer between takes during a guest-starring appearance on CBS' "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," tentatively scheduled to air on Thursday, Feb. 3, Matlin tells Zap2it in sign language, through an interpreter, "My opinion on Bristol is that I really applaud her. I saw, from the very beginning, that she wasn't a good dancer, but she had her own identity. She didn't give a f**k that she was the daughter of Sarah Palin, and I could see that.
"Then I saw, week-by-week, the transformation of her really blossoming. She didn't deserve to be the top winner, she didn't deserve that, but I think she she deserved to be in the third slot -- maybe fourth spot would have been better. I didn't think Brandy should have been knocked off.
"She did come a long way. I mean, that's what the show is about -- be a crummy dancer or have no talent at all and grow. There was evidence of that. I got a chance to tell her mother, in an elevator, in New York."
Turns out that fate brought together Matlin and the former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential candidate, who is now a Fox News contributor and has her own documentary series, "Sarah Palin's Alaska," airing Sunday on TLC.
"I was in the elevator already," says Matlin, "and she walked in, without a bodyguard. She and her husband walked in. I said, 'Well, well, Mrs. Palin,' and she turned around, 'Marlee Matlin!' I said, 'Hello, it's nice to meet you.' And she said, 'You speak very clearly.' And she said, 'My son is learning to sign, the son with Down's Syndrome.'
"And I said, 'I heard that, and I think that's great.' We spoke as two mothers back and forth. Then I said to her how proud I was of Bristol, and that she should be, too, and I told her why, with my observation.
"She said, 'Thank you, thank you, thank you,' and gave me a hug. Elevator opened, and she walked out. My interpreter said that he heard her say, 'Wow!'
"You understand, I don't support her politics, but as a woman and as a mother, yes, just like any other mother. And she's really pretty."
Reached by email, Gov. Palin recalls the encounter, writing, "That is so nice! She was so gracious when we met, and we got to talk about Trig learning sign language. Having that small but meaningful connection was sweetly surreal. I have always admired Marlee."
Encourage the people of Haiti and bring awareness to the needs that still exist there.
The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying,
Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh...
Now that the tax fight is over, Sarah Palin has quickly zoomed to the next huge issue: The possible bailout of insolvent states.
In a post on her Facebook titled Bailouts Reward Bad Behavior, she slams the idea of helping fiscally reckless states (like California, whose finances have deteriorated under the stewardship of her enemy Arnold Schwarzenegger), while talking up the finances of Alaska (not mentioning, of course, the incredible oil bounty it sits on).
Anyway, she's shrewd. This is an issue that will probably grow, and she recognize that. Here's her post.
My home state made the switch from defined benefits to a defined contribution system, and as governor, I introduced a number of measures to build on that successful transition, while also addressing the issue of the remaining funding shortfall by prioritizing budgets to wrap our financial arms around this too-long ignored debt problem.
When my state ran a surplus because we incentivized businesses, I didn’t spend it on fun and glamorous pet projects for lawmakers – though that would have made me quite popular with the earmark crowd. In fact, I vetoed more excessive spending than any governor in our state’s history, and I used the state’s surplus to bring our financial house in order by paying down our unfunded pension plans that some other governors wanted to ignore. This fiscal prudence didn’t make me popular with the state legislature.
In addition to vetoing hundreds of millions of dollars in wasteful spending, I put billions of dollars into savings accounts for future rainy days, much like most American families do in responsibly planning for the future. I also enacted a hiring freeze and brought the education budget under control through a commitment to forward-funding.
I returned much of the surplus back to the people (it was their money to start with!) through tax relief and energy rebates. I had proven as the mayor of the fastest growing city in the state that tax cuts incentivize business growth, and though the state legislature overrode some of my veto cuts and thwarted an additional tax relief request of mine, the public was supportive of efforts to rein in its government.
It’s one thing to veto spending and reduce the size of government when your state is broke. I did it when my state was flush with revenue from a surplus – though I had to fight politicians who wanted to spend like there was no tomorrow. It’s not easy to tell people no and make them act fiscally responsible and cut spending when the money is rolling in and your state is only 50 years shy of being a territory and everyone is yelling at you to spend while the money is there to build.
My point is, if I could fight this fight in Alaska at a time of surplus, then other governors can and should be able to do the same at a time when their states are facing bankruptcy and postponing this fight is no longer an option.
I met so many interesting people on Dancing With The Stars. It was an incredible experience that I will cherish the rest of my life. I have explained my own motivations for accepting the invitation to dance, which included the simple fact that I was ready to get out of my comfort zone and try something new and challenging. I thought dancing would also be a great way to exercise--and it was. I thought it would boost my confidence--and it did. Notably absent from this calculus were political considerations. You want to talk politics, talk to my mom. You want to talk rumba, waltz and the beautiful Spanish paso doble, I'm your girl (but if you want to talk to the expert, call Mark).
So with this in mind I was somewhat taken aback to read about me in a blog by my friend and fellow contestant, Margaret Cho. In a post she called "Pistol Whipped" she wrote that "the only reason Bristol was on the show was because Sarah Palin forced her to do it. Sarah supposedly blames Bristol harshly and openly . . . for not winning the election,and so she told Bristol she "owed" it to her to do DWTS . . . ." Let me shamelessly steal from Saturday Night Live: "Really, Margaret? Really?"
I will give my friend credit for creativity, and extra points for getting so many "facts" wrong in so few sentences. Let me be blunt: my mom did not "force" me to go on DWTS. She did not ask me either. The show approached me. I thought about it. I made the decision. After first worrying for me in terms of being exposed to those who hate us for what we believe in, both my mom and my dad became my number one supporters. Anyone who watched the show could tell I performed better, and I felt better about myself, when they were in the audience. I wanted to make them both proud, but politics had nothing to do with it. Loving my parents had everything to do with it.
It saddens me that people would think that my mom would "blame" me for anything that occurred in the 2008 election--much less "harshly" and "openly." I think that canard (there, I said it again), has been floating around since then also. I will set the record straight, though my mom already did in her bestselling book "Going Rogue"; there were a number of reasons President Obama won in 2008, but the primary reason was that the economy was starting to falter and the majority of voters thought Obama could do a better job than my mom and John McCain. It turns out, two years later, the majority of voters were wrong, but we can talk about that another time. The point is, I seriously doubt anyone who considers herself a student of American politics truly believes I impacted even one vote in that election.
There you have it. Why do I want to set the record straight? Because it is this type of hurtful and false narrative that people promote to make my mom look bad. For 20 years my mom had my back--and for the rest of my life I will have hers.
To my friend Margaret Cho, if you ever have a question, call me girlfriend. Don't ever rely on "sources" who claim to know me or my family. You will be taken every time. And we need to talk. You say you "don't agree with the family's politics at all" but I say, if you understood that commonsense conservative values supports the right of individuals like you, like all of us, to live our lives with less government interference and more independence, you would embrace us faster than KD Lang at an Indigo Girls concert.
P.S. If you want to baby-sit Tripp, I could use a night off.
Bristol Palin
Palin is absolutely correct that the children of politicians ought to be off-limits to the media, or at least, that there ought to be a high bar set for newsworthiness. Similarly, Palin’s skill as a parent should not be considered fair game. Neither subject has any relevance to Palin’s career as a politician, or as a media figure, and decency dictates that they remain private.
What is relevant, though, is how Palin chose to respond to the incident.
Here’s a transcript of the relevant portion:
People probably think that my greatest frustration is the lies that are told in the tabloids and on hateful blogs full of anonymous sources about my family … and there are constant everyday lies that we have to read that are out there in the public. But my family and I…thick skin…we can take it, you know…we can take what the haters say despite the fact that there’s injustice in the situation.
I mean, look at the other day. Willow, finally, my 16 year old, she had had it up to here with somebody saying very, very hateful things about the family and saying mean things about her little brother Trig, and Willow finally responded and she used a bad word when she responded in defense of her family. And her response became national news, even hard news copy it turned into, so that’s ridiculous and I had to explain to her, “Willow, there is no justice here but you have to just zip your lip and let’s move forward.”
Perhaps most glaring is the fact that, in an interview in which she promises to restore journalism, Palin gets her facts wrong. The exchange to which she refers contains nary a mention of Trig Palin, and was touched off by a single negative comment about Palin’s reality show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska. Palin would have been perfectly justified had she chosen not to get into the details of the story, but since she did, she ought to have described them accurately.
When it was announced, in the spring, that Sarah Palin would be making a reality show about Alaska, the state she grew up in and then, last year, blew off, by resigning the governorship, I’m sure I winced and groaned and rolled my eyes, before hanging my head, shaking it, and emitting a deep sigh, and then repeating the sequence several times.
And what could Palin’s agenda possibly be? Supposedly, it was to show us the wonders of Alaska (the show is called “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” after all), to acquaint us with the state’s resources and its people, and, to some extent, with her own family.
Moreover, you might ask, how seriously will people take her as a political candidate—a Presidential candidate—once she has participated in a reality show? ....
But if Palin fails to win elective office in the future it probably won’t be because she did a reality show; it will be because of real-world reality—a shift in the political climate or a strong opponent.
Why she thought that was a good idea, considering that she complained regularly about the media’s intrusion into her family life when she was John McCain’s running mate in 2008 (while, at the same time, frequently putting her children on display), is a mystery.
Palin has an interesting family background, which she describes in her book “Going Rogue,” and I was hoping that she might explore that, and that she might reveal something profound about her avowed love of nature. I’ve seen only one episode of the show so far, but I’m not optimistic. We do meet her parents, but nearly every other moment comes across as calculated—including, in the first episode, the absence of her daughter Bristol—and we find out nothing about Alaska that we didn’t learn in elementary school. I know that some Americans think Palin is stupid, but I never realized that she thinks we’re stupid.
When a bear growls, Palin says, “You hear that? That is a growl.” And then, “Wow.” And then “Wow” again. And then “Wow” again.
Next, we go to Denali National Park. This time, Palin’s sixteen-year-old, Willow, gets dragged along, but when weather forces the plane to turn back, and the Palins have to postpone for a day, Willow is allowed to beg off. (“My back hurts,” she says. Right. What probably hurts is that she’s stuck in this family.
I can’t say what Palin is really up to with this show. She seems to want viewers to think that she’s conflicted about public life. She says that she’d “rather be doing this than in some stuffy old political office” and “a poor day of fishin’ beats even a great day of work.” In that spirit, I wish Palin many, many days—years—of fishin’, starting now.
Even a vast political victory does not change an iron law of politics: The quality of candidates matters. Serious, mainstream Republican Senate candidates could have won in Delaware and Nevada. But Christine O'Donnell was not serious. And Sharron Angle - warning of "Second Amendment remedies" in case of political loss - was not mainstream. Weak, poorly vetted Senate candidates were the main reason that while Republican gains in the House were historic - the largest in 72 years - gains in the Senate were not.
O'Donnell and Angle were gifts of Sen. Jim DeMint and Sarah Palin to their party. Tea Party enthusiasm and shallow ideological purity were supposed to be better than outdated, "establishment" attributes such as achievement, wisdom or qualification. This approach to politics is expected of DeMint, who has gained national prominence by accusing his Republican colleagues of compromise. Coming from Palin, however, it is a threat to the Republican future.
Palin's support for O'Donnell showed poor political judgment. But Palin went further, also endorsing Constitution Party gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo in Colorado, one of the most divisive figures in American politics.
FTR: Palin didn't endorse anyone in the NV GOP Senate primary.But she got behind Angle when she won - just as all good conservatives should.
FTR: Palin endorsed Tancredo days before the election (when the GOP candidate was polling at 5%).
When something needs fixing, who do you call? "Moooooom!!!"
Deficits, government out of control... "Mooooooom!!!"
We're all here for a reason. That's her reason. That's why she's here.
