Sarah Palin Almost Makes Sense In Her Attack On Mitt Romney

Sarah Palin is not right very often, but I will give her credit for some consistency in her (limited) thought process here.  I’ve often criticized Ron Paul for supporting limitations on the federal government while promoting a states’ rights view which could lead to increased restrictions on civil liberties on the state or local level. Mitt Romney has been trying to get away with attacking Barack Obama’s health care plan, which is largely modeled on Romneys health care plan in Massachusetts, by arguing that a mandate is okay on a state level but not on a national level. If, for the sake of discussion, you accept Palin’s opposition to mandates (a view I’m not entirely unsympathetic towards) at least she is brighter than Romney. If you outright oppose a mandate, then you should oppose the individual mandate regardless of whether it is imposed by a state or the federal government.Palin attacked Romney before he announced he is running:

“In my opinion, any mandate coming from government is not a good thing, so obviously … there will be more the explanation coming from former governor, Romney, on his support for government mandates,” Palin told reporters today.

When a reporter followed up that Romney has distinguished his state mandate from the federal one President Obama signed into law in 2010, Palin responded that even state mandates are problematic.

“He makes a good argument there that it does. States rights and authority and responsibility allowed in our states makes more sense than a big centralized government telling us what to do,” she said.

“However, even on a state level and even a local level, mandates coming from a governing body, it’s tough for a lot of us independent Americans to accept, because we have great faith in the private sectors and our own families … and our own businessmen and women making decisions for ourselves. Not any level of government telling us what to do.”

Of course there is still the problem that her ideas will do nothing to solve the health care crisis. I’d have far more respect for her if she opposed the mandate out of principle, but promoted an alternative  solution which would actually work. It is possible to do, but any solution would still require more government action and regulation of insurance companies than Palin would ever accept.

Attacking Romney today led to speculation that Palin does still plan to run,  but this is hardly conclusive proof. She might plan to run, but there is also another plausible explanation. Palin is primarily interested in publicity which increases her income. Leading people to believe she still plans to run keeps her in the news, and she has no qualms about making news by attacking her party’s front runner.

Actually Jay Leno had a pretty good idea in putting  both Romney and Palin on the same ticket:

“I think Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin would be the perfect ticket. She can’t answer basic questions, and he has two answers for every question.”

Quote of the Day

“Arnold Schwarzenegger fathered a child with a maid. She kept the child secret for 14 years. John Edwards is going, ‘Why can’t I meet a chick like that?'” –Jay Leno

Evidence Appears To Exonerate Anthony Weiner

The available  evidence continues to support Anthony  Weiner’s contention that the controversial weiner picture on Twitter was sent by someone else. It wound up taking  bloggers to determine what happened with social media sites. Cannonfire demonstrated that this technically wasn’t a case of someone needing to hack Weiner’s Twitter account as it was possible to fake the sending of the twitter picture due to a “feature” of yfrog. In order to get the photo  site to send out a photo as a tweet it appears that it is only necessary to find someones yfrog email address:

Believe it or not, when an outsider sends a pic to someone else’s Yfrog account in this fashion, the action creates a message in the “twitterstream.” The message seems to originate with the Twitter account holder — but it doesn’t. It comes from somewhere else — from someone mailing a picture to the account holder.

This is a serious security flaw in the design of Yfrog and Twitter. It allows a malicious outsider to “spoof” a tweet that seems to come from someone else.

In addition, the post looked at problems in the url, arguing  that  “The anomaly in the header indicates that the image was not sent by Weiner. It had to have been sent by someone else.”

Next step was to track down the culprit. It appears that the picture was posted by a conservative who posts under the name Dan Wolfe who first claimed to find the picture. It turns out that the picture supposedly found by Wolfe has irregularities which cast doubt upon Wolfe himself.  “The date stamp on this image is May 30, not May 27. The EXIF data is strange in other ways”   Not surprisingly, Dan Wolfe has been acting pretty strange today:

Explaining his hesitation to speak on the telephone, Wolfe wrote that his ex-wife (working in conjunction with a former girlfriend of his) had twice secretly recorded him and that the resulting tapes had “gotten me in a lot of legal trouble.” As a result, he contended that if his ex-wife’s attorney “got a hold of a call recorded with me on it they’d have a field day with that. I want to try to avoid.”

While not addressing who would make such a recording, how it would surface, or why it would do harm to him, Wolfe concluded, “I am screwed. If all this comes out along with everything I’m dealing with here–I don’t know what to do.”

Update (June 6, 211): Key word in the title is “appears.” Anthony Weiner admits to sending picture. Nancy Pelosi has called for an ethics investigation of Weiner.