“As Governor, Sarah Palin actualized AGIA, the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, the largest private sector infrastructure project in North American history. Palin’s administration opened up drilling for oil and gas at Point Thomson for the first time in several decades. As Governor, Palin reduced earmark requests for Alaska by 80%, established Alaska’s Petroleum Integrity Office to oversee safe energy development, placed the state checkbook online, and reduced spending for Fiscal Year 2010 by over one billion dollars from Governor Murkowski’s Fiscal Year 2007 budget. Palin signed ACES, Alaska’s Clear and Equitable Share bill, into law, incentivizing development and ensuring that Alaskans would receive a ‘clear and equitable’ share of oil profits. She cut costs by selling a private jet purchased by the previous governor and saying ‘no thank you’ to the Executive Mansion’s personal chef. She has served as Chairperson of the AK Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and Vice Chair of the National Governors Association Natural Resource Committee. Prior to her time as Governor, Palin served as Mayor of Wasilla, AK, and city council member in Wasilla. She has also been involved in running a commercial fishing business with her husband Todd…

“[Moreover,] Sarah Palin has done something that no-one since President Reagan has been bold enough to do: just be herself. Sure, she’s a prominent political figure. Yes, she was a 2008 Vice Presidential candidate. But she’s also a mom, a wife, a hunter, a fisherwoman, and a plain old American just like you and me. In her new TLC show, Palin’s not afraid to show you how proud she is of the beauty of her state, a state which is so often discarded as unimportant – despite extensive energy and national security clout – by the likes of New York and California elites. She’s not afraid to speak in her folksy accent, to invite you inside her very regular American home, to let you watch her accept the challenge to climb Mt. McKinley, and do the dirty work of wiping slime off of newly-caught halibut.

“Simply put, she’s not afraid to just be Sarah Palin. And in our phony, snobby, chameleon-happy political world, that is priceless.”

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“It’s anti-elitism that most defines angry populism in this moment, and, as David Frum, another Bush alumnus (and Palin critic), has pointed out, populist rage on the right is aimed at the educated, not the wealthy. The Bushies and Noonans and dwindling retro-moderate Republicans are no less loathed by Palinistas and their Tea Party fellow travelers than is Obama’s Ivy League White House. When Palin mocks her G.O.P. establishment critics as tortured, paranoid, sleazy and a ‘good-old-boys club,’ she pays no penalty for doing so. The more condescending the attacks on her, the more she thrives. This same dynamic is also working for her daughter Bristol, who week after week has received low scores and patronizing dismissals from the professional judges on ‘Dancing with the Stars’ only to be rescued by populist masses voting at home.

“Revealingly, Sarah Palin’s potential rivals for the 2012 nomination have not joined the party establishment in publicly criticizing her. They are afraid of crossing Palin and the 80 percent of the party that admires her. So how do they stop her? Not by feeding their contempt in blind quotes to the press — as a Romney aide did by telling Time’s Mark Halperin she isn’t ‘a serious human being.’ Not by hoping against hope that Murdoch might turn off the media oxygen that feeds both Palin’s viability and News Corporation’s bottom line. Sooner or later Palin’s opponents will instead have to man up — as Palin might say — and actually summon the courage to take her on mano-a-maverick in broad daylight.”

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“The Republican Party establishment is still in confusion over how to deal with the unorthodox power and popularity of Sarah Palin, but everyone appears to agree that it is too dangerous to be rude about her. Everyone that is, except Barbara Bush, former first lady and grande dame of the Bush family.

“‘I sat next to her once; thought she was beautiful,’ Mrs Bush told interviewer Larry King. Then delivered her blow. ‘I think she’s very happy in Alaska, and I hope she’ll stay there.'”

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“Talk about Sarah Palin running for president continues to mount — in the liberal media. Conservatives smile and look away when the topic is raised. They want to watch her on TV, they want to turn out for her lively speeches, but they don’t see her as a president…

“In the coming months, watch for it: Democrats, liberal journalists, and red-state bloggers will talk up Palin’s chances. Republicans and conservatives who want to defeat President Obama in 2012 will try to change the subject.”

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