The opinion Americans hold toward President Barack Obama has improved since November, while the image of former Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin suffers from her lowest favorable rating since emerging from the wilds of Alaska as a well-known political figure after the 2008 Republican national convention, according to Gallup’s latest poll on the subject.
Americans now give President Obama a 53 percent favorable rating, up from a low of 47 percent last October. His all-time high of 78 percent came just before his inauguration two years ago.
Palin’s 38 percent favorable rating is her lowest yet, by two percentage points, while her 53 percent unfavorable rating is her worst by a point.
Palin has been a central figure in the recent debate over whether political rhetoric — including hers — was partly behind the Tucson shootings. Last week, she responded to these allegations by posting a much-publicized video response on the Web.
“The recent news has not done much to change Americans’ opinions of Palin,” Gallup concludes in its analysis.
Sarah Palin, who had been silent for days about her “cross-hair” remarks being linked to the horrible tragedy in Tucson, tried to denounce her critics on Wednesday in a video statement that accused pundits of “blood libel” for their rush to blame her gun-toting political rhetoric for the shootings in Arizona.
Will this make her more of a “star” of the political right? Or will it sink her chances of becoming president? Stay tuned…
Meanwhile, the Associated Press now has an analysis story out detailing the history of the term “blood libel.”
When Sarah Palin accused journalists and pundits of “blood libel” in the wake of the deadly Arizona shootings, she reached deep into one of medieval history’s most sordid chapters to make her point, the wire service reports.
The term “blood libel” is not well known, but it is highly charged – a direct reference to a time when many European Christians blamed Jews for kidnapping and murdering Christian children to obtain their blood. Jews were tortured and executed for crimes they did not commit, emblematic of anti-Semitism so virulent that some scholars recoiled Wednesday at Palin’s use of the term.
President Barack Obama leads potential Republican challenger Sarah Palin by 48 percent to 40 percent in a new public opinion poll just out from Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, although the numbers show a large number of people do not believe the first African-American president in U.S. history deserves a second term.
If the election were held today, Obama would be in a statistical dead heat with possible Republican challengers Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas.
Romney, Huckabee, Palin and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are bunched together when Republican voters are asked who they prefer for the GOP’s 2012 presidential nomination, yet 64 percent of Democratic voters do not want anyone to challenge President Obama for their party’s nomination in two years.
“The Democratic base remains squarely behind President Barack Obama when it comes to his re-election, but his weakness among independent voters at this point makes his 2012 election prospects uncertain,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “The demographic splits in the electorate when voters are asked whether the president deserves a second term is a roadmap for his re-election strategists on how they need to focus their appeal.”
Sarah Palin may not have the biggest fan in former first lady Barbara Bush.
“I sat next to her once. Thought she was beautiful,” Barbara Bush said. “And she’s very happy in Alaska, and I hope she’ll stay there.”
Bush, along with her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, spoke to CNN’s Larry King in an interview set to air Monday.
President Bush discussed the Tea Party movement, and although he said “some of the ideas make a lot of sense,” he said he isn’t sure how the new movement will fit into the larger political landscape.
On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the day the New York Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers story on the Vietnam war, I was going on 13, living in the suburbs east of Birmingham, Alabama. About the only news I recall keeping up with in those days had to do with Alabama football and Atlanta Braves baseball.
Summer was fun then (before global warming had started to set in) and you could play outside without dying of heat exhaustion, although the air in Birmingham was pretty bad in those days. On CB radios truckers called it “Smoky City.”
On April 27, 1971, Hank Aaron had hit his 600th career home run, the third player ever to do so. On July 31 that year, Aaron hit a home run in the All-Star Game at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. He would not break Babe Ruth’s all time home run record with number 715 until April 8, 1974, at a time when the end of the war in Vietnam was about a foregone conclusion.
Two big changes came to Alabama football in 1971. Wilbur Jackson was the first ever black player given a football scholarship to Alabama and John Mitchell, who made the team as a junior in 1971, was the first to actually play, eight years after the Alabama student body had been integrated. The Crimson Tide went undefeated that year, but lost to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. I met Paul “Bear” Bryant in person around that time at an Alabama-USC basketball game.
I mention my personal history to try to inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history that has accompanied the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan war logs last week, to make sure readers check in with Frank Rich at the New York Times today, and to make a related point but a different argument about recent criticism of President Barack Obama.
Sarah Palin says ‘Refudiate’ then compares herself to Shakespeare
Obviously, Sarah Palin is no Shakespeare. Perhaps a comparison to George W. Bush would be more in line with reality. He often used non-sensical words as well.
Obviously she was trying to tell so-called “peaceful Muslims” to “repudiate” a plan to build a mosque near the site of ground zero in New York, even though the plan is to try to build better relations with the Arab world — so perhaps we don’t have to continue fighting this religious war between the bin Laden’s and the Bushes for the rest of our lives.
But of course that does not serve the political interests of conservative Republicans running for higher office. They need an enemy to get elected. Rather than simply correcting her mistake and saying she meant to say “repudiate,” Palin made matters worse for herself by putting a tweet on Twitter as seen in the video above.
Playing around on Facebook myself the other day, I posted the line from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, a comedy.
In the interest of helping readers to understand such things, here’s the full passage, followed by some interpretation.
But Sarah Palin, who resigned as governor of Alaska in an ethics scandal, and New Gingrich, who was forced to resign as House Speaker by his own party members in a, you guessed it, ethics scandal, are trying to launch their rebirth campaigns for president by calling President Obama “radical.”
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has it right when she says Newt is now reduced to the role of “angry commenter on right-wing blog,” LOL, ROTFL!
In New Orleans with a bunch of Tea Party nuts, Palin said, “What’s wrong with being the party of no?”
Duh, the vast majority of Americans would like to see government work for a change, that’s what…
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
