Washington DC Reboot!

by Ward Sutton, Village Voice

at Daily Kos

Fox News President Roger Ailes thinks Sarah Palin ‘is an idiot’

By Eric W. Dolan - RAW Story
Sunday, May 22nd, 2011 

Roger Ailes, the president of the Fox News Channel, is not fond of former Alaska governor and Fox News contributor Sarah Palin, according to sources.

“He thinks things are going in a bad direction," a Republican close to Ailes told Gabriel Sherman of the New York Magazine. "Roger is worried about the future of the country. He thinks the election of Obama is a disaster. He thinks Palin is an idiot. He thinks she’s stupid. He helped boost her up. People like Sarah Palin haven’t elevated the conservative movement."

Ailes was also frustrated with Palin after she refused to heed his advise in the aftermath of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, referring to Palin as a "loose cannon."

He advised Palin to "lie low" and wait to respond to media reports highlighting some of her violent rhetoric, but instead of waiting, Palin accused her critics of "blood libel."

"Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn," Palin said via Facebook. "That is reprehensible."

She joined the Fox News Channel as a contributor in 2010.

Despite his alleged troubles with Palin, Ailes recently defended her from MSNBC host Chris Matthews, who said it was "so pathetic that Roger Ailes has put her on television."

"People tell me all the time it was truly pathetic that I was the one who gave Chris Matthews his start on television," Ailes said, according to MediaBistro. He gave Matthews his first show “Politics with Chris Matthews” in 1994.

Fox News gave GOP presidential candidates $55 million in free advertising

By David Edwards - Monday, January 24th, 2011 

Being on the Fox News payroll has its advantages.

Not only did five potential Republican candidates get regular paychecks from the network last year, but they also got something even more valuable: airtime.

Liberal watchdog group Media Matters found that the five received about $55 million in free advertising over the course of more than 85 hours of appearances in 2010.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee appeared for almost 48 hours. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin had nearly 14 hours of appearances.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was given close to 12 hours. Former senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum and former UN Ambassador under George W. Bush John Bolton both received about six hours.

Because Huckabee hosted a show on the network, Media Matters estimated that he received the bulk of Fox News' donation at $31 million.

Advertisers would have spent about $7.5 million each for Palin and Gingrich to appear.
Santorum and Bolton received less than $5 million each in ad-value equivalency.

Each of the five has hinted at a possible presidential run in 2012.

"I'm engaged in the internal deliberations candidly," the November 21 issue of New York Times Magazine quoted Palin as saying.

The Des Moines Register reported in November that Gingrich said he was "making personal arrangements that would allow him to launch a campaign."

On November 15, Huckabee told Fox News' Alan Colmes, "The one nice thing, whether I should decide to run or not, is that more people at least would know me by what I actually believe and say, as opposed to what some opponent has defined me to be, and that's kind of encouraging."

"If I were to get into this, I would certainly not be one of the favorites, so doing well out of the box would be much more important to me than to some of the more well-known candidates," Santorum told National Review Online in October.

In September, Bolton told Fox Business Network, "I'm thinking about it."

Chris Wallace, the network's lead news anchor, revealed late last year that the network plans to turn the Republican Party's 2012 primary elections into a "production of Fox News," similar to American Idol.

That may be good news for GOP financiers but not so much for voter awareness. A University of Maryland study published last month found that extended exposure to Fox News had the tendency to confuse voters, making them more likely to believe a number of pervasive untruths.

Ron Paul’s Unexpected Message To The Tea Party

Posted on August 28, 2010

Ron Paul has some surprising news for the Tea Party: You’re being taken for a ride.

At least this is what many libertarians like Ron Paul believe when they see someone like Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin trying to lead the Tea Party at the “restoring honor” rally this weekend. In fact, Ron Paul believes, if you’re looking for real freedom, you should really go back to the core of the constitution and the bill of rights, which Beck and Palin do not fully endorse when you really look at their beliefs. Whether it be Palin’s support for starting more wars or Beck’s beliefs on paying the private Federal Reserve MORE interest on our money by means of a VAT tax.

Ron Paul believes in neither of the above.

Here was Ron Paul’s message to the Tea Party via The New York Times just the other day:

“As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world. We cannot talk about the budget deficit and spiraling domestic spending without looking at the costs of maintaining an American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 foreign countries. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for cutting a few thousand dollars from a nature preserve or an inner-city swimming pool at home while turning a blind eye to a Pentagon budget that nearly equals those of the rest of the world combined.”

While the Tea Party will be out supporting Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin this weekend, you wonder how many of them will be in full support of more wars and paying more interest to a group of untouchable and unauditable private bankers otherwise known as the FED? This is precisely what Ron Paul is asking the American public to consider when looking at the Tea Party leaders and see if they really stand for what they believe in.

Ron Paul believes the Tea Party is not about “left” or “right” like a lot of political pundits make it out to be. It’s about the constitution, and limited government.

Sarah Palin: Fiscal Conservatism Shouldn’t Apply To Defense Spending

DOUG MATACONIS | FRIDAY, JULY 2, 2010

It looks like Sarah Palin is trying to convince her Tea Party admirers that their devotion to fiscal conservatism shouldn’t apply to defense spending:

Sarah Palin is waging a battle inside the Tea Party movement to exempt defense spending from the group’s small-government, anti-deficit fervor.

There’s growing concern among Republicans — and especially among the pro-defense neoconservative wing of the party — that national-security spending, which is under a level of scrutiny and pressure not seen since the end of the Cold War, could fall victim to the anti-establishment, anti-spending agenda of the Tea Party movement. Palin, as the unofficial leader of that movement and its most prominent celebrity, is moving to carve out such funding from any drives to cut overall government expenditures.
(…)
Palin’s drive to lead the charge against defense cuts on the right was on display in a June 27 speech at “Freedom Fest,” a conservative gathering in Norfolk, VA, where she sent a clear message to Republicans that deficit reduction can’t come at the expense of the military.

“Something has to be done urgently to stop the out of control Obama-Reid-Pelosi spending machine, and no government agency should be immune from budget scrutiny,” she said. “We must make sure, however, that we do nothing to undermine the effectiveness of our military. If we lose wars, if we lose the ability to deter adversaries, if we lose the ability to provide security for ourselves and for our allies, we risk losing all that makes America great! That is a price we cannot afford to pay.”

Palin also directly took on Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Republican, challenging his drive to reign in procurement spending and reevaluate the need for certain huge weapons systems and platforms.

“Secretary Gates recently spoke about the future of the U.S. Navy. He said we have to ‘ask whether the nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines, and $11 billion carriers.’ He went on to ask, ‘Do we really need … more strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?’” Palin said. “Well, my answer is pretty simple: Yes, we can and, yes, we do, because we must.”

Palin’s enthusiasm for defense spending without regard to whether it’s actually useful isn’t shared by all Republicans, though:

Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma sent a letter to the commission explaining exactly why he thinks defense spending is ripe for cost-cutting. “I appreciate that some of these thoughts are controversial,” he wrote, “even to the point that I have some reluctance in suggesting them” — highlighting the sensitivity of even challenging increased defense spending, something of a third rail in GOP politics. “However, if we are to fulfill our mandate, we must make some difficult choices, not just recommend that others do so,” he said.

Coburn, of course, is absolutely right on this one, and Palin is completely wrong. If we are going rein in Federal spending and make a serious move toward cutting the budget deficit, then there is no area that can be completely off the table, including a $ 700 billion defense budget. To say otherwise while claiming the mantle of fiscal conservatism is to be a completely hypocrite and, if Palin is serious about her comment that defense spending is untouchable, and similarly serious about her previous comments that tax increases are out of the question, then she is demonstrate an astounding amount of economic illiteracy.

You can’t pay for something with nothing, Mrs. Palin, and you can’t call yourself a fiscal conservative if you’re not really serious about spending cuts. And your comments demonstrate a distinct lack of seriousness.

‘I joined Fox’ because there’s too much ‘opinion in the mainstream media' - "Failin'" Palin

Palin: ‘I joined Fox’ because there’s too much ‘opinion interjected in hard news’ in the mainstream media.

In January, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) joined other potential 2012 Republican presidential nominees at Fox News as a paid contributer. Last night, she appeared on Jay Leno’s show and decried the state of the mainstream media as “quite broken,” and — touting her employer’s slogan — in need of more “fairness” and “balance”:

PALIN: I studied journalism, my college degree there in communications.And now I am back there wanting to build some trust back in our media. I think the mainstream media is quite broken and I think there needs to be the fairness, the balance in there — that’s why I joined Fox. Fair and balanced, yes. You know because, Jay, those years a go that I studied journalism it was all about the who, what, when, where, and why, it was not so much the opinion interjected in hard news stories. … As long as there is not the opinion under the guise of hard news stories — I think there needs to be clear differentiation.

Watch it:



If Palin wanted to find a place where hard news is not mixed with opinion, she could not have made a worse choice than Fox News. The cable channel claims that while its editorial shows present “vibrant opinion” — all of which have a decidedly rightward lean — its straight news slots are objective. But as ThinkProgress has repeatedly documented, opinion leaks into Fox’s supposedly straight news, with breathless promotion of the Tea Party movement, distortions of facts and outright parroting of GOP talking points. Even the company’s own president admitted yesterday that the White House had some “ legitimate complaints” during its spat with Fox News last fall. It’s also ironic that Palin would suggest that Fox is not part of the “mainstream media,” considering that its rating consistently beat rivals CNN and MSNBC.