Hey – we don’t need no small town redneck hicks embarrassing our convention with their backwoods old fashioned attitudes. We need to go rainbow….

Several insiders interviewed for this story said former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will present a unique challenge to Romney’s team: Will they give her a prime spot to satisfy her fans, or reduce her role because of her polarizing nature?
“You want people to generate interest and passion,” said one Republican who has organized conventions before and who, like others, didn’t want to be named. “Sarah Palin goes to a very small segment, relatively speaking, of the Republican Party. And you’re trying to put together a rainbow coalition.”

Ah those Republican insiders – the ones that did so well in 2008…..they really know how to generate interest and passion….

It’s official – the BBC obviously decided to start openly pimping for Obama from the beginning of May and, unsurprisingly, the oleaginous Mark Mardell was selected to kick off the campaign with a shameless piece of brown-nosing about the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Since the BBC is financed by a compulsory surcharge levied on practically every household in the Britain you can now add the UK taxpayers to Obama’s list of campaign donors.

His team won’t allow anyone to run away with the idea that the Navy Seals raid was the inevitable result of obvious decisions taken by shadowy figures within the administration.
Instead, they hammer home the view that the president made a courageous and difficult call, going against the advice of many of those around him.
This is pushed explicitly in a new campaign video narrated by Bill Clinton.
There have been several detailed insider accounts which support the idea of a tough and risky decision-maker at the top.

Fortunately at the moment the media influence of the left leaning BBC is counter balanced by a lively and disrespectful right wing press so readers of the UK Daily Mail were able to get a different perspective from Toby Harnden.

Senior military figures have said that Admiral William McRaven, a former SEAL who was then head of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) made the decision to take bin Laden out. Tactical decisions were delegated even further down the chain of command.
Mr Kyle added: ‘He’s trying to say that Romney wouldn’t have made the same call? Anyone who is patriotic to this country would have made that exact call, Democrat or Republican. Obama is taking more credit than he is due but it’s going to get him some pretty good mileage.’
A former intelligence official who was serving in the US government when bin Laden was killed said that the Obama administration knew about the al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts in October 2010 but delayed taking action and risked letting him escape.

Once the BBC had a reputation for fairness and balance that was unrivalled in any other part of the world. Sadly that gold standard of reporting and commentary has been replaced by a left wing bias more reminiscent of a Polish TV station in the early 1970s.

You know what is even more worrying? They no longer feel the need to even pretend to be neutral….

More evidence of the official media spinning the Zimmerman/Martin shooting incident in Florida before any proper evidence has appeared,

Blogger William A Jacobson at Legal Insurrection (who also doubles up as a law professor) does simple fact check that US media (and the UK Daily Mail) failed to do on the “Armed American White Supremacists Patrolling Sanford, Florida” story…and finds out that it is an unfounded rumour (aka a “lie”)

Mind you he used a very unusual method..he rang the local police. Maybe those highly trained, highly paid “journalists” could learn a thing or two from that….

President Obama’s birth certificate, made public as a result of Donald Trump’s brief “campaign”, is a forgery.

This is an astonishing claim.

Note that nobody has said that Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen of the USA – just that the document purporting to prove his natural born citizenship is not an honest piece of evidence.

With the results of Maricopa County, AZ sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse,” an incredible claim has become an incredible situation: a team of professional investigators, commissioned by a major law-enforcement agency, has determined that the alleged birth certificate produced by the president of the United States is a probable forgery.

One would have expected a veritable tsunami of claim and counter claim as a result of the Mariscopa County investigation with Obama’s supporters and opponents slugging it toe to toe in print and on screen. I expected to see in the Obama friendly BBC and Guardian a line by line dissection of the Cold Posse’s case with a host of experts drafted in via the NYT and the US networks to pour scorn on it’s conclusions. CBS in particular might well have been rather sensitive to the issue of forged documents after its own Dan Rather debacle.

But instead there has been a deafening silence. Not a syllable from the White House. Zilch from the DNC official newsletters at NYT and WaPo. Nothing from Sandra Fluke, the Democrats Presidential candidate for 2028………….and also nothing from any of the scuffed retreads sleepwalking to the 2012 GOP nomination.

I wonder why?

Since the secretive Barclay Brothers took over the UK Telegraph the once highly respected broadsheet has been transformed into a lifestyle paper on a par with those glossy magazines you find in front of you on a long haul flight.

All the experienced hacks were despatched into the ether because they were far too expensive and you couldn’t easily link their output to advertising fashion or furniture, food or flydrives. They were then replaced with cheap gap year students highly skilled in cutting and pasting stuff from other media outlets – in other words the Telegraph became a slightly upmarket version of the Daily Mail.

In yet another brilliant cost cutting wheeze they realised they didn’t really need specialists in reporting politics. Instead they could get one of their lifestyle drones to double up.

Enter Matthew Norman, restaurant critic, wine expert – and ace commentator on UK and US politics.

He writes a Bryony Gordon style “filler” column every Saturday (just to plug up what would be a rather white patch of paper) and this week he gives the US Republican Party some advice culled from his vast experience of eating freebie meals in expensive restaurants….go for the middle.

You see failed lawyer Matthew knows that the GOP needs to copy the Democrats and get a “centrist” candidate like Obama. Forget the wingnut Tea Party, listen to the wise men from New York and Washington and choose an MSM selected safe pair of hands who won’t rock the boat, won’t worry about the deficit and certainly won’t do anything to irritate Iran or North Korea.
Hey and forget about Sarah Palin

Obama’s one serious electoral fear is the imposition of a more dangerous candidate at an open or brokered GOP convention in August. That worry has now receded. The only Republican to show an interest in that, and then only for a tease, is the high priestess of folksy narcissism from Alaska – and even the Republican party isn’t bonkers enough to hand the keys to the asylum to Sarah Palin.

After all, of what use was she or the Tea Party in the 2010 midterms…

Besides if you want to find an expert on narcissism look no further than restaurant critic….

Quote of the year (from Hot Air re this)

Yes, she’s irrelevant, because after that impromptu interview last night with CNN, Wasilla and Sarah Palin were trending on twitter. The buzz of the political world was that Sarah Palin voted in her hometown. The CNN pundits in the studio were giddying like school girls at a Justin Bieber concert. On a Super Tuesday night, Sarah Palin generated more enthusiasm and energy just by casting her vote than the lame ass GOP frontrunner, Mitt Romney and the entire GOP field combined.

Yes, she’s so so so so so…..OVER!/

HerneTheHunter on March 7, 2012 at 9:15 AM

Todd Palin has written a letter to American conservatives spelling out why he supports Newt Gingrich for President. It’s short, sweet and to the point and tells us as much about the man who wrote it as it does about Newt.

I don’t know about you but having this man by my side would mean more to me than 50.000 endorsements from politicians, media pundits or assorted social conservative pontificators.

Remember what Mark Burnett, ex Para and TV producer said?

Todd is like Captain America. This guy, this guy is super tough. He can actually do it all.

On the other hand there is always David Frum….

The March of the Zombies (aka the Republican Party’s Presidential Primaries campaign) suddenly caught fire with this interesting duel between Newt Gingrich and Juan Williams

It is fascinating to watch because Williams clearly played the race card and Gingrich trumped it with the personal responsibility card. He gave a masterclass in detoxifying a liberal left attack point with a rebuttal using cold hard facts delivered in a calm, logical manner.

The audience loved it – not just because the race card was and will always be the key weapon in the Democrats defence of Obama but it is always good for the soul to see an establishment media figure cut down to size.

Even better – it irritated Chris Matthews and Dave Weigel

Straws in the wind? The inevitability of Mitt Romney dented? Who knows – but it earned Newt some kudos from the “totally irrelevant” Frum disdained Sarah Palin and Robert Stacy McCain seemed to put his Rick Santorum lovefest (whoops, nearly said Herman Cain…) briefly on the back burner while he blamed feminism for the Italian cruise ship disaster…..

Allahpundit at Hot Air, ever eager to use the governor to gain traffic, described Palin’s remarks as an endorsement. It wasn’t, of course as can be seen from the clip. But then, of course he could never really get a handle on Palin’s praise of Newt and the impact it might have on Tea Partiers because it would need major surgery and a decade of therapy to unscramble the little neural glitch he has about both Palin and the Tea Party in his brain.

Rick Santelli for President? The man who played a major part in sparking off the Tea Party movement?

Santelli is a financial journalist who previously was a trader at the Chicago Mercantile exchange.

But he’s not a politician.

Surely the only sort of person who can unravel the mess that politicians have created is another politician – and anyway Colin Powell has decreed that nobody who identifies with the Tea Party could possibly win because compromise is the name of the game.

Powell’s sentiment has also been bolstered by the threat of the magisterial David Frum that he will leave the GOP if anyone but Romney or Huntsman is nominated

Still Santelli has one major ace in his hand should he actually make a play for 2012.

UK Guardian left wing AGW guru George Monbiot hates him

the most alarming example of cheap demagoguery you are likely to have seen.

The Occupy protesters in the UK and USA have apparently adopted Guy Fawkes as their role model.

That figures…

For many years he had been a soldier in the Spanish army sent to crush the Dutch rebels who were fighting to win their independence

He was a terrorist who did not mind killing hundreds of people in his attempt to kill King James I

He wanted to turn England into a client state of Spain

He planned to kidnap the young daughter of King James and educate her as a Catholic to rule over a largely Protestant England as a puppet Queen using the Spanish Inquisition to suppress those who opposed the influence of Rome and Spain

By the beginning of the 1600s the English Parliament was beginning to see itself as a counter balance to the power of the monarchy – Fawkes and his Spanish minders believed Catholic monarchs ruled by divine right and should not be challenged

So…let’s see….

Guy Fawkes =Soldier in an army of occupation +Terrorist +Traitor +Kidnapper + Fanatic + Hater of an elected parliament….

Come to think of it – that mask is a perfect fit for those Occupiers…