Today, at 1 pm (EST), a cache of emails Sarah Palin sent and/or received while Governor of Alaska is set to be released.

How many emails? Figures range from 20,000 to upwards of 24,000. They cover a large time period – December 2006 to September 2008 – and the same media machine that couldn’t find anything wrong, or even worth investigating, as far as Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were concerned, is now asking readers to help them pour through the emails and get the dirt on Palin.

That’s right: both the Washington Post and the New York Times have announced they will publish the emails tomorrow as they get them, and they want readers to read over them, find the things that are “most interesting” or “most noteworthy,” and email notes on those portions to the respective papers. (Any of you who did a research intensive degree in college know what this means: it means the newspaper is then going to take those “most interesting” pieces, paste them on the front page of their website, and say, “Look here folks! We found a chink in Palin’s armor! She’s beatable! She’s beatable!”)

In making this request, both the Washington Post and the New York Times prove they’ve yet to learn how much the people love Palin. But we can help them learn this lesson after 1 pm by sending a ton of emails that have absolutely nothing to with Palin’s correspondence cache.

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Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski – R, has hired former CBS 11 lead political reporter and anchor, Matthew Felling, as her Communications Director.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska has announced Alaskan broadcast journalist Matthew Felling as her new Communications Director.

Felling comes to Sen. Murkowski’s office after being lead political reporter and anchor for CBS 11 News Anchorage. He joined CBS 11 News after a decade of news reporting, commentary and analysis in Washington, D.C — becoming the only TV reporter on the Washington Post’s “Best State-Based Political Reporter” list.

What the article doesn’t say is that CBS 11 is actually KTVA. As reported by both Big Journalism and Big Government back on October 30, 2010, several members of KTVA staff were caught conspiring against Murkowski opponent Joe Miller in a saved voice mail message to Miller campaign spokesperson, Randy DeSoto.

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While we at Big Journalism spend most of our energy correcting bias and falsehoods originating from the left, every now and then we must take a moment to gently correct things that go off track with our friends on the right. This is one such case.

Jim Geraghty started a brouhaha yesterday by criticizing how the makers of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” received $1.2 million in tax credits by filming in the state — and that Palin signed the 2008 law which made it possible. Because she’s now apparently omnipotent, able to see into the future and plan for it by signing into law a complex program with numerous in-house checks and balances. Geraghty questioned Palin’s conservative credentials.

… but it looks problematic for a crusader for small government to end up collecting a seven-figure paycheck from an endeavor that received a seven-figure subsidy, all set up by a program she signed into law.

What’s problematic is to define the tax credit in this issue as a “subsidy.” 

Tax credits are offered as an incentive to do business in a particular area, city, or state as a way to attract business and commerce into said area. These tax credits are usually offered as a percentage of total money spent and the credits can be sold at a discount to businesses looking to alleviate their tax load. The exchange creates a cashflow that helps offset the costs of doing that particular business in that area; in this case filming in Alaska is very expensive. A net gain of dollars flows into those local communities and the credits establish a way for a particular locality to compete with other cities or states for business; over the long term it can they help establish a broader tax base by increasing the number of professionals drawn to the area.

The optimal situation is to have a tax code is low enough where regulations aren’t so restrictive so as to warrant the need for tax credits. That is the real debate. However, it is within every state and city’s right to make themselves more competitive by offering tax incentives to attract business and create a business community. Aren’t we, as conservatives, supporters of the 10th Amendment? You pay for things by increasing your tax base, not by increasing regulations or taxes.

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In her epic competition with Kathleen Parker over who can be the snarkiest towards Gov. Sarah Palin, Maureen Dowd now claims a scene from TLC’s “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” is, in fact comparable to Palin hunting down the President of the United States.

Dowd is feasting on the scene from Palin’s TLC show where the former Governor is hunting a caribou with her father.  Palin eventually shoots and kills the animal, which sent the liberal blogosphere into an apoplectic shock.

Ms. Dowd’s column was pretty typical for an anti-Palin hit piece.  She points out Palin missed the caribou a couple times, which reinforces the “Palin’s a moron” meme.  She pokes Palin for, “her camo, her French manicured nails, her cap that says (in pink) Girls And Guns, her 72-year-old father and her TLC reality show crew.”  This hits the “diva” meme again.  Through it all, Dowd says Palin did everything from “pontificating” to accusing her of “eviscerating animals for fun.”  Heck, she even found a way to insert Former Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident in the fray.

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Chris Matthews reported today that Joe Miller’s campaign arrested a liberal blogger “because [he] dared to ask a question of a candidate in a democracy.” He called them thugs and said he expected to see Bounty Hunter Dog at Millers side.

Chris Matthews has never seen anything like this. Really?

Except in Martha Coakley’s case it was a reporter for the Weekly Standard.

If Matthews is against such thuggish behavior, one wonders where Matthews’s outrage was when the thugs with SEIU violently attacked Kenneth Gladney. Where was Matthew’s outrage of thuggery when Black Panthers intimidated voters at a polling station? Dylan Ratigan also chimed in on the story today when he had an analyst say unchallenged on his show that the guards were a “para-military force” by Miller’s side.

The Make-Believe Media is finally admitting what we knew at least eight months ago: the Tea Party is taking over the GOP. Actually, reviving the GOP and reestablishing its original principles, but the MBM needs a scary angle, and piracy sells well.

Spinning Sarah Palin’s tea party candidate Joe Miller’s victory over incumbent Lisa Murkowski in Alaska’s recent Republican primary, the AP writes:

Is the tea party the new Republican Party? … the tea party has taken hold in the Grand Old Party, unseating lawmakers, capturing nominations for open seats and forcing Republicans to recalibrate both their campaign strategy and issues agenda. Out is talk of delivering federal dollars back home; in is talk of fiscal discipline.

The MBM then spins a fear-mongering tale of Tea-Partiers-Gone-Wild:

And what if the challengers win?

There’s no telling how outsider candidates who want to eliminate the Education Department or phase out Social Security — and who view themselves as independent of the party apparatus even as they get help from the GOP — would act as members of a body that’s the epitome of the establishment.

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For the left and the leftists in the media, no news development favorable to the right is ever subject to Occam’s Razor, which posits that the simplest explanation for any given event is the one most likely to be true. Instead, they prefer to see conspiracies everywhere. In their primitive,  increasingly demented fantasy world, dark forces are always in motion: a team of invisible gunmen took out JFK in Dallas instead of a communist with a rifle and a vantage point; Bush blew up the levees in New Orleans, instead of years of corrupt neglect.

And if Sarah Palin’s somehow involved… well, their heads just can’t rotate fast enough, as this clip from ABC’s lobster-shift program, World News Now, clearly shows:

Why else would Levi Johnston apologize for slandering the Palin family?

It can’t be that he was a teenage boy, caught up in the hostile glare of a national press corps that made it Job One to destroy the only real threat to their beloved Bambi and the fulfillment of the great Narrative many of them had spent their lives fashioning. It can’t be that he was the jilted boyfriend, trying to come to grips with the responsibilities of becoming, prematurely, a father. It can’t be that, as a kid from Nowhere, Alaska, he saw a shot a national prominence, listened to the whispers in his ear, and decided to go for it.

It can’t be that he now feels genuine regret for having allowed himself to be used by the vultures of the press. (more…)

Carpe BP?  – That seems to be a theme heard all across the MSM when it comes to what should be done with British Petroleum.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has called for the temporary takeover of the oil giant – at least until we have the situation under control.  Could you have a vaguer timeline, Mr. Reich?  “Under control” means a lot of things to a lot of people.  Some folks in Alaska believe that the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound is not yet under control.

And then we have the great global wisdom of satellite radio star Rosie O’Donnell who told her audience that she didn’t care if you “call it socialism, call it communism, call it anything you want” but she wanted BP’s assets seized by the government: (more…)

“The former Alaska governor has complained on her Facebook page that [writer Joe] McGinniss is spying on her famous brood as writes a book about her while living next door in Wasilla, Alaska. She says McGinniss can see into her daughter’s bedroom and into her garden as he works on the tome with the working title: Sarah Palin’s Year of Living Dangerously.” The Canadian Press, May 26, 2010.

May 19, 2010:  I’ve arrived in Wasilla, Alaska, home to Sarah Palin!  But it’s clear she’s already prepared an unfriendly reception. When I told the cabbie “I’m Joe McGinniss, the best-selling author,” he tried to act like he didn’t even know who I was.  Well, if these hillbillies think they can fool this newshound, they’ve got another thing coming!

May 20, 2010:  Delighted to find indoor plumbing and electricity up here.  Took a break from unpacking to check out the new place’s view.  As soon as Bristol saw me, she shut her curtains – as if a few strips of cloth are going to protect her deceptions from exposure!  Next, I tried from every angle to see Russia from here but it simply can’t be done.  Just one day on the ground and already I’ve uncovered another Palin lie – Chapter Five has already written itself! Think I’ll call it “Hoop Dreams…”

May 21, 2010 (10 a.m.):  Walked around town today.  I asked a local where the nearest Whole Foods was and he just stared at me.  I sat down at a diner and asked if the mushrooms in my omelet were shiitake.  The owner told me, “This is a family place and we don’t use that kind of language.” I told him, “Well, that language was Japanese, sir, and where I come from – Massachusetts – we don’t appreciate racism!” (more…)

Wasilla, Alaska (UIP)— Shocking news last night as former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin announced that she is following in the footsteps of the noble senator from Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter, and is switching parties to become a Democrat.

This news comes just five days after Palin appeared as the keynote speaker at a Tea Party rally in Searchlight, Nev., where she appeared in her former guise as an angry white female and told the crowd of at least a dozen or so people that she was tired of government intrusion into her life and that she was going to do everything she could to “send Harry Reid back to Searchlight where he would be lucky to be elected as part-time street sweeper.”

Sometime since then, Palin said, she had an epiphany and realized “the weather of Nevada must’ve unfrozen my cold, steely Alaskan heart,” and that she had awakened from her icy slumber of neocon-ism.  “What the hell was I thinking?” She also resigned as a Fox News contributor, effective immediately.

Reaction was swift from the Democrats across the nation. (more…)

The worldwide population of polar bears has doubled in the past thirty years. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s the gist of a report by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee released on January 30, 2008:

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s.  A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations “may now be near historic highs.”

Better yet, let’s listen to a scientist who has been studying polar bears for the past thirty years, both as an academic and as the Canadian government’s director of wildlife research in its most important polar bear habitat, and who is widely regarded as the world’s top authority on the creatures. Here’s Canadian scientist Dr. Mitchell Taylor’s take on the matter: (more…)

Fourth of a series.  Find parts one, two and three here.  And don’t miss this report, either.

Martha Coakley declares that terrorists are “gone from Afghanistan” and has no idea the Taliban are either terrorists or our sworn enemies.

No one ever accused Martha Coakley of having any foreign-policy experience.  After all, as a career lawyer, prosecutor, state attorney general and lifelong Democrat party hack, the “Massachusette” can’t rationally be expected to be as up on the nuances of the “war on terror” as, say, Joe Biden.

Still, her remarks during her one debate with Scott Brown on January 11 should trouble anyone who hopes that a potential successor to the warm body currently occupying the deceased Lion of the Senate’s seat would have, shall we say, a greater grasp of the geo-political situation.

First, in her own words, her foreign-policy credentials:

I have a sister who lives overseas and she’s been in England and now lives in the Middle East.  I’ve spent a lot of time on my own traveling, ‘cause I’m interested in it.  Less so as attorney general, and my responsibilities don’t take me overseas.

Unbelievable?  See for yourself:

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When the news broke yesterday that Sarah Palin had signed on as a Fox News contributor an awful shrinking feeling in the groin must have hit the execs at the network’s competitors. While the old media continues to try to paint her as a crazed redneck, the fact of her ascendancy as a serious power player is now an inescapable fact. Her autobiography, Going Rogue is a publishing phenomenon, having sold 2.7 million copies as of December 1 of 2009.  It’s one of  just four political memoirs to sell more than a million copies.

This from — as the left frames the narrative — a failed vice-presidential candidate who didn’t even finish her first term in office as governor of Alaska.  The old media and its enablers have tried in vain to discredit, demonize and disenfranchise the woman only to make her stronger. Yet still they hammer away at her relentlessly.

In the new book that has evey tongue in Washington wagging, Game Change, by political writers John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, it’s claimed that some McCain staffers who worked directly with Palin began to worry that she could be “mentally unstable.” This claim has been trumpeted by left-wing bloggers and the usual suspects in the press, desperate to keep up the Palin-bashing so they can ignore Obama’s increasingly evident failures. (more…)

Fox News has signed former Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin as a contributor:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, will take her conservative message to Fox News as a regular commentator, the cable channel announced Monday.

“I am thrilled to be joining the great talent and management team at Fox News,” Palin said in a statement posted on the network’s Web site. “It’s wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news.”

Fox said that according to the multiyear deal, Palin will offer political commentary and analysis. She also will host occasional episodes of Fox News “Real American Stories,” a series featuring true inspirational stories about Americans.

Considering the fact that Ms. Palin recently ran a close second behind Sec. of State Hilary Clinton as the most admired woman in America, and considering that Ms. Palin’s book has sold astronomically well since its release on Nov. 17th, it’s a no-brainer that a network would pick her up.  It’s not a bad idea to have such a popular woman affiliated with your brand. (more…)