Further Insights on the Governor of the Welfare State

Three more thoughts on Sarah Palin:

1) Is she dyslexic? I mean this in the nicest way possible. I started thinking about this after her malapropism from the debate with Biden:

I'm not one to attribute the actions of man to climate change.

Well, I thought it was a malapropism, but then she said the same thing, in exactly the same words, in a TV interview a week or so later. Maybe she just hadn't memorized her talking points very well. I wonder, though, whether she might have at least a mild learning disability? I suggest this as it might be a reason she bounced between colleges (as at the time she attended college, there would have been little support for dyslexic students).

2) Do her children go to school? My mom brought this up before Andrew Sullivan did (after all, she is a teacher). It's problematic enough to have a governor who is anti-intellectual, anti-science, even anti-reading (and how I wish that was an unfair slur), but to hold her up as some sort of "hockey mom" while her children appear to be ever-present at campaign events (and not only at weekends) raises the question. Although point no. 1 above might explain why she's not a reader, and wouldn't place such a value on education (even in her own family . . .)

3) How can she possibly have a shot in 2012? I don't mean just because of her completely disastrous rollout on the national stage. Leave that aside, and consider: she is the governor of the Welfare State. No wonder she said "The government doesn't have to worry about money," because, in Alaska, they don't. They don't tax their citizens; they tax corporations, and then cut their citizens an annual check, to the tune of several thousand dollars a year for every man, woman, and child in the state.

Earlier this year, Palin imposed a windfall profit tax on the oil companies, and gave all her state's residents a second check, in addition to the one check they were already going to get this year.

Here's my point: without McCain as the focus, and with four years till her next shot at national office, surely there'll be more attention on this. And should the civil war for the future of the Republican party that I expect actually ensue, won't her fiscal record make her anathema to her party's base?

I repeat: she imposed a new windfall profit tax to give every person in her state an extra check this year. If Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid wanted to impose a windfall profit tax, the GOP would call it socialism. But, hey, she's a MILF, she's not hot on book-learnin', and she didn't have an abortion, so it's fiscal-schmiscal.