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Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Sarah Palin makes early move
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“In a sign Sarah Palin wants to continue to be a player on the national political stage, the Alaska Governor has started a new political action committee to raise funds, SarahPAC.
The PAC is registered in Virginia and is modeled after HillPAC, Hillary Clinton’s former political committee. Palin’s committee allows her to raise money for other Republicans.
According to the Web site, the committee will also support Palin’s “plans to build a better, stronger, and safer America in the 21st century.”
Palin continues to have a huge political following. As of noon today, she has 464,000 friends on Facebook.com.”
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Atlanta housing prices fell 11 percent in a year … which ain’t bad
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
According to Standard & Poor, November sales data show “continued broad-based declines in the prices of existing single family homes across the United States, with 11 of the 20 metro areas showing record rates of annual decline, and 14 reporting declines in excess of 10 percent versus November 2007.”
The Atlanta metro area is one of those reporting a double-digit decline from a year earlier, with sale prices down 11 percent compared to November ‘07. But overall the picture here isn’t that bad compared to other metro areas.
Yes, housing prices in metro Atlanta have fallen 14.6 percent from their peak in July ‘07. But prices in Phoenix are down 42.6 percent from their peak in June ‘06; in Los Angeles, prices are down 35.6 percent since September ‘06, and in San Diego they’re down 38.9 percent.
If you look at S&P’s Excel spreadsheet, sale prices in those markets went through the roof, essentially doubling between 2002 and 2006. That’s where the bubble was; that’s where a lot of this mess really began.
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Dirty tricks in internal GOP fight
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
South Carolina has a special place in GOP dirty-tricks lore. It was the home of Lee Atwater, the political strategist who specialized in the use of race and wedge politics and dirty tricks. It was the place where the George W. Bush campaign helped to kill off John McCain’s 2000 presidential hopes with a whisper campaign that McCain’s daughter, adopted from an orphanage in India, was actually the product of a McCain affair with a black woman.
And in last year’s GOP presidential nomination fight, someone mailed fake Christmas cards to SC Republicans that supposedly came from Mitt Romney (Romney’s Mormon religion was a problem among the state’s Christian evangelicals).
“It’s a fake card that had quotes out of the Book of Mormon, and it was a Christmas card from the Romneys and said ‘Paid for by the Boston Tabernacle,’ which it was not,” Katon Dawson, then chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, said at the time.
Today, Dawson himself is a target. He’s running for chairman of the Republican National Committee, and somebody among his opponents is trying to make an issue of the fact that for 12 years Dawson was a member of an all-white country club. He resigned in September, only a couple of months before announcing his candidacy for the national office.
The anonymous “reminder” of Dawson’s recent past is being sent to RNC voters via an email campaign. Personally, I think it’s a legitimate issue. It’s the 21st century and we have a black man as president. If the GOP elects a party chairman who felt at home in a club that barred black membership … well, they’ll deserve the criticism they get if they do that.
