Steve DiBrienza, a former City Councilman
">known for
">jousting with former mayor Rudy Giuliani, confirmed he plans to run for his old job again in Brooklyn’s 39th District.

“Yes, I am looking to run for City Council,” he said in a telephone chat.

When asked about his battles with Giuliani, DiBrienza said they were always rooted in his advocacy for the district.

He said those fights were “important and necessary” in order to protect “the most vulnerable New Yorkers."

He was forced out of the Council in 2001 because of term limits, and ran unsuccessfully for Public Advocate. He considered running for state senate the following year. But since then, DiBrienza said he’s “been teaching at Baruch, practicing law in Windsor Terrace,” and that he feels “completely connected to the district. It’s where I live, work and struggle, just like everybody else.”

DiBrienza declined to state his position on the term-limits extension that the City Council voted for late last year, saying “I’d have to give you a whole discussion about that." He also did not say who he was supporting in the mayor’s race later this year.

The district is currently represented by Bill de Blasio, who is vacating his seat to run for public advocate. Already running for the seat are Brad Lander, Bob Zuckerman, Gary Reiley, Josh Skaller, Craig Hammerman, and John Heyer.

On a recent weekday afternoon, a handful of policy wonks sat in a corner office adorned with maps and books in the Vanderbilt Street headquarters of the Manhattan Institute discussing a political opportunity presented by the current financial crisis.

“We feel that the moment is here,” said Steve Malanga, an economic policy expert at the Institute.

After losing the presidency and both houses of Congress for the first time in 15 years, Republicans are scrambling to find something different. Different is the Manhattan Institute’s specialty.

Socially eclectic, fiscally conservative and proudly contrarian, the institute is home to people like Myron Magnet, who wears mutton chops and capes and carries gold-knobbed canes, and fellow sartorial pioneer Tom Wolfe, who, while not a member, considers himself the institute’s biggest fan and unofficial biographer.

The Manhattan Institute is most well known for its work on the “broken windows” theory of policing—which argues for the strict enforcement of laws involving small crimes to prevent more serious ones down the road—welfare-to-work and charter schools. Recent headlines in the institute’s City Journal include Mr. Malanga’s “We Don’t Need Another War on Poverty”—“Nothing could be more misguided than to renew this ‘tin-cup urbanism,’ as some have called it”; Curing Diversity,” about how biochemical regulation threatens natural inequality; and “Storm-Proofing the Economy: We Can’t Prevent Wall Street Turmoil, but We Can Make It Less Destructive.”

For a time, it looked like the institute’s star disciple, Rudy Giuliani—who, during his Broken Windows mayoralty, proudly expressed a desire to blow up the city’s Board of Education—would bring their ideas to unprecedented national prominence. But he flamed out in the Republican primaries. Now the lack of a coherent Republican economic philosophy in a time when free markets are under siege offers this group of distinctly urban conservatives another shot at having a national impact. 

In what was perhaps an early indication of its place in the post-meltdown world, on Nov. 13, President George Bush chose to make a major financial address defending capitalism and his bailout of financial institutions at an institute-sponsored event at Federal Hall National Memorial.

“I thank the Manhattan Institute for all you have done,” said Mr. Bush, before adding, “We are faced with the prospect of a global meltdown. And so we’ve responded with bold measures. I’m a market-oriented guy, but not when I’m faced with the prospect of a global meltdown.”

The fellows at the Manhattan Institute say that they are in no rush to claim an intellectual leadership role on one side of the coming civil war over the identity of the Republican Party. They portray themselves as unassuming wonks and point out that they work with anyone interested in tackling tough problems, including Democrats, like Newark mayor Cory Booker, who supports vouchers and charter schools.

But in the corner office of Brian Anderson—decorated with posters of the institute’s City Journal magazine, which he edits; an antique map of Europe showing how the continent’s political borders changed between the two World Wars; and books including Niall Ferguson’s Empire, about the rise and fall of the British Empire—the fellows did articulate what might be considered a sort of manifesto for the role of conservative thinkers in promoting free-market ideas in the 21st century.

Mr. Anderson sat grimly behind his desk in a pin-striped blazer, clicking a computer mouse. New economic ideas, he said, are “important to any vital conservative political movement.”

His colleague, Nicole Gelinas, sat in a straight-backed chair against the wall with perfect posture, wearing a blouse and gray skirt, and explained in complete professorial paragraphs why the failure of financial institutions required a bailout and innovative regulation that would allow banks to fail in the future without endangering the entire economy.

“It’s hard to say with a straight face that this was not a failure of free markets. But this is true,” Ms. Gelinas said with a straight face.

“Something that allows for failure but doesn’t create systematic failure,” chimed in Mr. Malanga, a gregarious and cheerful former editor of Crain’s New York Business, who sat on a leather couch. He was wearing four shades of green. (Socks, pants, shirt and tie, but brown shoes.) 

Expressing the general consensus of the room, he said that the Republican Party needed to focus more on the economy, which he said John McCain did a bad job of during the campaign. Strong religious beliefs were important, he said, but voters showed themselves to care more about the economy and non-ideological policies geared toward improving society. He said that’s what the institute did best.

“Moderate independents and moderate conservatives,” said Mr. Malanga, “I think there is a home for them here because they agree with most of our ideas.”

“Economically,” Ms. Gelinas added later in the conversation, “the room for ideas is wide open to help Republicans stay relevant.”

The fellows all said they prefer to keep their heads down in their drab, green-cabinet-lined headquarters near the Yale Club, but that they would be ready to speak up when the time came.

But in the wake of the Election Day drubbing, the academically inclined, fiscally conservative, culturally agnostic wing of the party quickly began declaring itself loudly.

Last week, another element of Mayor Bloomberg's plan for sustainable transportation was dealt a significant, but by no means fatal setback. A federal judge blocked implementation of the requirement that all of the City's cabs be powered by hybrid engines. According to The New York Times' Sewell Chan: "In his ruling, Judge Crotty, who was the city's corporation counsel from 1994 to 1997, under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, agreed to block the city from enforcing the rule because the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their key legal argument - that the new regulations were pre-empted under federal law, which reserve regulation of fuel economy and emissions standards to federal agencies."

While the City has the right to regulate cabs through its system of licenses or medallions, and has been allowed to issue new medallions targeted at hybrid cabs, the blanket regulation requiring hybrids was thrown out. Although gasoline prices have recently dropped, most people expect them to rise again - and sooner rather than later. Why then would the fleet owners resist regulations requiring them to use more cost-efficient autos? The answer is simple and has a lot to do with the economics of the cab industry. For the most part, the people that own cabs don't drive them and don't pay for the gas. Drivers lease the cars from the fleet owners and the drivers pay for the gas. As anyone who prices a hybrid vehicle knows, there is a premium on hybrid engines. Hybrid cars and trucks cost more. The fleet owners, not the drivers, would incur the costs of upgrading to hybrid cabs. The drivers would save money on the gasoline.

Of course, the fleet owners could and would pass the increased costs of the hybrids along to the drivers in their lease charges, but apparently the fleet owners and their trade association just don't like being told what to do by the big bad Bloomberg administration. Perhaps they think that drivers are incapable of doing the math. The extra fee in their lease for hybrids would be more than offset by savings in gasoline. It just makes sense. Given the distances taxis drive and the amount of gas they take to run, hybrid cabs would provide a return on their extra cost much faster than you or I would make back our extra investment.

The fleet owners' arguments against hybrids are that the hybrids now on the market are too small and fragile to handle New York's streets. Perhaps they have not been to Bogota, Colombia, or Mexico City, where most of the cabs are small micro compacts that bounce along streets that are much worse than New York's. Perhaps no one has told them that the Chevy Malibu and Tahoe, Cadillac Escalade, Saturn Aura, and GMC Yukon are now all available with hybrid engines. And let's not forget Ford, with its Escape hybrid or the hybrid Toyota Camry.

Fortunately for New York City, higher fuel efficiency standards will be coming from Washington in 2009. The American auto industry is closing its SUV plants and seems to be slowly figuring out what its Japanese and Korean competitors figured out a while ago. While Americans have a love affair with big, comfortable cars, they drive too much to afford all of the gasoline it takes to power them. The fleet owners may be preventing New York City from getting ahead of the federal rules, but it's a temporary victory for them at best.

Meanwhile, instead of requiring hybrids, why not find a way to tax the fleet owners in a way that makes hybrid cabs more cost effective for them in the first place? Let's encourage rather than require energy efficiency. Perhaps the city should charge an extra licensing fee for cabs that don't have hybrid engines. If fleet owners insist on using gas-guzzlers, perhaps an annual charge of say, $1,000 might get them to rethink their priorities. If that doesn't work, perhaps in the interest of reducing congestion (not regulating fuel efficiency), the surcharge might be based on the weight of the cab, rather than the engine type or gas mileage. That might encourage the use of smaller and more energy efficient cabs. Smaller cabs would take up less of the scarce space on our city's congested streets. While mandating hybrids might be illegal, it seems to me that the City has a number of other powers that could be used to encourage a more fuel efficient cab fleet. I think it's time to get creative.

At the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Rudy Giuliani set the tone for Governor Sarah Palin and the sharp, well-delivered attack speech that brought her to national prominence. Then, last night, after a poor stretch for Palin highlighted by embarrassing interview performances, Giuliani was back to confidently herald Palin’s return to form.

“I mean, this was a fabulous performance,” said Giuliani, walking at a two-step-per-minute rate with his wife, Judith, in a frenzied scrum of reporters in the media center at Washington University in St. Louis on Oct. 2. “She displayed tremendous intelligence, she displayed total grasp of the issues, and she did a very effective job of attacking Joe Biden and Barack Obama with a lot of style and a lot of grace. And I think she knocked Joe Biden out. Her best moment was when she said, ‘There you go again,’ pointing out that Joe Biden is constantly talking about the past, represents the past, represents all that’s worst in Washington.”

He took two more steps and ducked into a television studio. A little later he emerged and added, “I think he was on the defensive so much that I think Sarah Palin induced those mistakes. Because I don’t think Joe Biden ever expected this woman to attack him so effectively. She did it with a velvet glove.”

He moved the scrum a few more steps and disappeared into another black curtained television studio. When he emerged he added, “I think any fair-minded person, who was not going at it from a liberal bias, or a liberal media bias, would say that this is one of the most effective debate performances they have ever seen.” He called her a “smart person,” and “one of the best debaters I have ever seen.”

Told of Giuliani’s broadside, Obama senior strategist David Axelrod, standing in his own media circle across the room, replied nonchalantly, “Given the spectacular success that Mayor Giuliani had in his race, far be it from me to challenge his political judgment.”

While Giuliani and other McCain surrogates in the media center "spin room" after the debate attempted to portray the more stylistic aspects of Palin’s performance, in which she professionally delivered attack lines in folksy wrapping, as hard evidence of her superior intellectual hardware, political skills and mastery of policy issues, the Obama campaign sought to pick apart what they depicted as a lack of substance in her answers.

Axelrod, who before the debate had argued to reporters that “she’s a very proficient debater and I think she’ll come in here well prepared,” now said he wasn’t just “spinning,” before. But her zingers were not what counted, he said.

“This was a folksy rendition of the same Bush policies,” he said, encircled by reporters with notebooks, television cameras and tape recorders immediately following the debate’s conclusion. “McCain and Palin, essentially, support the same direction for this country.”

Referring to Palin’s response to a question about nuclear proliferation, he said, “She said that a nuclear incident would be the ‘be all and end all’ for a lot of people. Well, yeah, that’s not news. The question is what are you going to do to try and prevent that from happening.” Asked how Biden did, Axelrod said, “Rather than offering them a wink and a smile, he offered them hope. He offered them a plan, he offered them a way out of the mess that we are in.”

The festivities began well before the candidates arrived on campus.

Hours earlier, as reporters started trickling in and retrieving their bags of shwag in the Science Laboratory building where lectures still took place in front of chalked up black boards, it was clear that the bar for Palin was extremely low. Two sign language translators standing by the debate entrance jokingly practiced tumbling their hands over one another in what one of the young women called the “fragments of sentences” sign.

On television, CNN showed Palin deplane. She carried her infant son, dressed in white pajamas, and carefully negotiated the staircase, holding onto the banister. Her husband stood behind her in sunglasses.

Just off the campus quad, where some students tossed Frisbees and played croquet, MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews set up a stage behind which students clamored with Obama and McCain signs in hand. (A few especially slim girls wore Obama stickers on the bellies of their shirts.) One young woman held a sign that said “McFailin 2008” next to a man who held a cardboard cut-out of Abraham Lincoln holding an Obama placard. A blond woman distributed yellow, pink and blue pieces of oak tag with pro-Palin messages written in paint or glitter, so as to seem homemade. They weren’t, but they were popular nonetheless.

John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin disagree on at least one thing: the importance of community organizers.

“Of course I respect community organizers,” said McCain, responding to a question about whether he agreed with the evisceration of community organizers at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. (During the convention, Palin and former mayor Rudy Giuliani, among others, mocked the community organizer job, which Obama had after law school, as meaningless and without real responsibility.)

Speaking during a forum about service tonight at Columbia University, McCain added, “And Senator Obama’s record in that area is outstanding.”

McCain also blamed the poisonous tone of the presidential debate on Senator Obama’s decision not to accept his invitation to appear in town hall meetings together around the country, which he suggested would have gone a long way in keeping things civil.

He tried to defend Palin, saying her remarks were in answer to assaults on her own experience (or lack thereof). He then said, “I feel a small-town mayor has great responsibility,” and “mayors have the toughest job I think in America.”

You may not see much today of Bernard Kerik, the former NYPD Commissioner who was on duty during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but he is staying busy.

I spoke with him by phone yesterday as he was planting 23 flags outside his home to commemorate each of the police officers he lost that day. He said he was going to a funeral for a New Jersey police officer who worked with his son and would be coming to New York City for interviews later in the day.

He declined to speak publicly about politics or his former boss, Rudy Giuliani, which he said was out of respect for those who are mourning today. Then, he referred me to his FaceBook page, where at 8:24 a.m. today, he posted his thoughts on the anniversary of the attacks:

In two separate speeches yesterday, Rudy Giuliani lauded the virtues of Sarah Palin’s small-town executive experience.

During an address to the New York delegation at the Marriott hotel in Minneapolis, he said “Sorry Senator [Obama], if the city is not big enough for you--they are probably that group of people who cling to religion and guns.”

And during his keynote address to introduce Sarah Palin at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul later that evening, he said “I’m sorry Barack Obama doesn’t feel her hometown is,” he paused, “cosmopolitan enough.”

But during his own run for president, the size of the city apparently mattered to Giuliani. In fact, the rationale for his executive experience was predicated on New York being a large cosmopolitan city.

Speaking in Florida in January 2008, he compared himself favorably to John McCain, saying, "I think it comes from the fact that he hasn't had the kind of experiences that I have—running America's largest city, being involved in America's 17th largest economy, running the second- or third-largest government."

At a Republican debate in Florida in November he said, “And the reason that I believe I'm qualified to be president of the United States is not because of September 11th, 2001; it's because I've been tested. I've been tested in a way in which I ran the third-largest government in this country, the 17th-largest economy in the world, and I got very, very remarkable results. And that is the evaluation of other people, not me.”

Speaking to the Federalist Society in November of 2007, Rudy spoke in favor of a flexible system that allows local autonomy.

“Federalism gives us flexibility to solve our own problems, it encourages experimentation and innovation. And I believe I understand this probably better than most because it’s rooted in my own executive experience. I ran a local government, now when I say local government most people in New York don’t think of themselves as having a local government. Because New York is so big, it’s the seventeenth-largest economy in the world, the third-largest government in terms of numbers of employees, one of the largest budgets in the country, but still it’s a local government.”

The population of Wasilla, where Palin served as mayor, went from 5,469 in 2000 to a projected 9,780 in 2007, according to the census bureau.

Yesterday, Republicans, seemingly at once, started attacking Barack Obama's experience as a community organizer.

"What in God's name is a community organizer?" asked George Pataki at a breakfast.

"What do they do?" Giuliani implored during his speech last night.

And Sarah Palin, in her enthusiastic address, said, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities."

So community organizers are now organizing themselves.

John Raskin of the West Side of Manhattan, founder of Community Organizers of America, has already launched a Web site (Community Organizers Fight Back) demanding that Palin apologize.

Of course, they're not exactly the target demographic for Republicans, especially in New York.

When he heard about the Web site, one Republican at the Marriott Hotel in Minneapolis, where the New York delegation is staying, jokingly slammed his hand on a wooden table and said, "Damn! We lost the West Side."

ST. PAUL--For much of Wednesday night, the delegates on the floor of the Republican National Convention had to make the most of the tiny rations of red meat offered to them by the speakers on stage.

They happily chanted “drill baby drill” with former Senate candidate Michael Steele, but few jumped out of their seats. They applauded approvingly at Mike Huckabee’s zinger that Sarah Palin “got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States,” but they seemed a bit mystified with how his long anecdote about school desks connected to John McCain and military service. And Mitt Romney’s liberal-baiting was fun, but it also felt a little nostalgic, and the former Massachusetts governor and political scion didn’t seem the ideal messenger of lines like the following: “For decades, the Washington sun has been rising in the east - Washington has been looking to the eastern elites, to the editorial pages of The Times and The Post, and to the broadcasters from the coast.”

It took Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin to finally give them what they had so hungered for. The New York and Alaska delegations, seated one in front of the other respectively, were primed.

Giuliani went first. Representative Pete King, seated in one of the front rows of the delegation, started snapping pictures as Giuliani walked onto the vinyl black stage bordered, disco-like, by a flashing pink neon light. Giuliani railed against the “left-wing media” and “Hollywood celebrities.” John Faso, who was creamed by Eliot Spitzer in a 2006 race for governor, applauded and then checked his Treo. Giuliani started questioning Barack Obama’s experience and "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature as the screen behind him showed a modest skyline at sunset that some people in the crowd thought was New York. (“Must be somewhere in Alaska,” said Craig Eaton of Brooklyn.) The New Yorkers and everyone else cheered when Giuliani, who has made a new career from his magazine-cover gracing celebrity status as “America’s Mayor,” called Obama “a celebrity senator.”

“American Idol, American Idol,” screamed a Wisconsin delegate seated next to the New Yorkers and behind a man wearing a foam cheese triangle on his head. Giuliani said, “It’s not a personal attack. It’s a statement of fact. He never ran anything, nothing, nada.” Nada cracked the hall up. They started chanting, "Naaada, Naaada, Naaada." “We love you, Rude,” cried out Ruben Estrada, a New York delegate wearing a plastic hat sponsored by Fox News. A Latino member of the delegation predicted that all the reporters were going to come to him to talk to him about the "nada" line. Volunteers squeezed through the aisles passing out homemade signs that said “Hockey Moms 4 Palin" on big pieces of white oak tag. John Harrison, a member of the committee on the arrangements implored delegates not to raise the signs while the former mayor was speaking.

Giuliani was now openly mocking Obama from the stage. “I’m sorry Barack Obama doesn’t feel her hometown is,” he paused, “cosmopolitan enough.” The New York delegation forgot his love of opera and exclusive steakhouses and cigar bars and clapped uproariously. Faso waved a McCain-Palin sign above his head. Joseph Savino, a delegate from the Bronx who flew into Minnesota with Rudy Giuliani on the private plane of supermarket magnate and former Hillary Clinton bundler John Catsimatidis, screamed, “Rudy, Rudy, Rudy!”

The crowd suitably amped, Giuliani left the stage and triumphantly reappeared in the box of honor across from the stage. He received a kiss from his wife, Judith, who called him “incredible,” and gave Huckabee an avuncular tap on the cheek. Below them the Palins sat with Cindy McCain, who wore an emerald green dress and, to demonstrate, literally, the togetherness of the McCain and Palin families, held in her arms Palin’s infant son, Trig, who looked remarkably sedate. To McCain’s left sat Todd Palin, who affected a proud bearing, and then his young daughter Piper, who dug the crust out of her eyes. To her left sat Levi Johnston, the young man who is the expectant father of the child of Bristol Palin, the Alaska governor’s teenage daughter. Johnston, dressed in a blazer and striped boarding school tie, looked as though he hadn’t exhaled the entire night. Bristol, dressed in slimming black, made sure to hold his hand at all times, except when they clapped, so that all the television cameras could see.

When Palin appeared on the stage in her glasses and a-little-bit-up-a-little-bit-down hair, her family rose to their feet. Back on the floor, members of the Alaska delegation jumped on their seats. Nick Stepovich, the Alaska delegation’s whip, waved an Alaska state flag. In the New York delegation, Savino wore the “Hottest Vice President in the Coolest State” button for which he had traded his “Catholics for McCain” button. Behind him, Eaton said “Oh. She’s good. Oh. She’s good,” as she started laying into Obama. “Didn’t I tell ya?” said Savino. “I fall in love for a reason.” When Palin introduced her husband as a champion snowmobile racer, prompting him to jump up from his seat and raise his arm as if he had just won another tournament, the New York delegation pointed at Savino and in unison chanted, “Jealous. Jealous. Jealous.”

Palin spoke and snow-capped mountains appeared on the screen behind her. Then a gushing geyser. She attacked the elite media, and the Alaskans started chanting "NBC, NBC." An NBC sound guy standing next to them, with the network’s trademark peacock on his antennae, froze.

Palin, it turned out, was something of a firebrand. She trashed Obama’s experience, saying he authored two memoirs but no laws, ripped into his perceived presumptuousness, reminding the crowd of the “Greek columns” Obama spoke in front of at Invesco Field in Denver a week earlier. She commanded cheers when she needed cheers. Boos when she wanted boos. After days of doubt surrounding her small-town credentials, her effectiveness as governor, her seriousness and the soap operatic twists and turns of her family, Palin’s aggressive, homespun and competent speech assured the Republicans in the hall.

“Oh man, she hit it out of the park,” said Savino. “I’ve got three hairs left on my head and I was ripping them out.”

Palin was the first prominent Republican messenger to tie together, in one place and time and speech, the entire case that G.O.P. has built piecemeal against Obama over several months. The speech was an articulation of the case against Obama. It was also an effort to immunize Palin against any more media criticism or even inquiry on matters substantive and not. Palin delivered that speech proficiently, maybe even expertly. It was a high point.

In a couple of days, with the convention over, she'll start getting actual questions from reporters and opponents that she actually has to answer. And then America may get to know what Sarah Palin is really made of.

Ad libbing as he warmed up the Republican convention crowd for their vice presidential nominee, Rudolph Giuliani quipped: “She got an 80 percent approval rating. You don’t get those kinds of numbers in New York!”

Of course, getting those numbers would be just as easy for a New York mayor or any other mayor or governor if they were able – like the charming hockey mom -- to send $1200 to every man, woman and child in their jurisdiction thanks to a windfall profits tax on the oil industry.

But wait a second. Didn’t Rudy tell us that she had reduced taxes and cut government spending?

Actually, for all her boilerplate conservative rhetoric about the wonders of freedom and the evils of taxation and government, her career reflects a penchant for raising taxes and redistributing wealth. From a traditional Republican perspective, her policies seem suspiciously socialistic.

Last year, Palin imposed a substantial new tax on the profits of corporations pumping oil from state lands, escalating along with the market price per barrel. With proceeds amounting to more than $10 billion, or more than double the amount of revenue collected in fiscal 2007, she and the state legislature set aside $1.2 billion to fund the rebate checks as well as a one-year suspension of the state gasoline tax. Those generous special payments to the Alaskans came on top of the $2000 “dividend” each of them receives annually from taxes on the state’s oil production.

Palin’s heavy new levy on oil company profits is precisely the kind of taxation that Senator McCain, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and all the other faithful friends of big oil vehemently oppose (and that Senator Obama supports, along with a rebate for Americans who don’t happen to live in Alaska). For his part, Senator McCain has angrily denounced windfall profits taxes for discouraging domestic oil production -- an argument that prevailed in Washington when Republicans killed exactly such a tax last June. There is at least some evidence that McCain is correct, since both Conoco and BP have protested Palin’s new taxes by suspending new development projects in Alaska.

Meanwhile, the revenue she raises to send checks to her constituents essentially comes from the US Treasury, because the oil companies deduct every dollar of state taxes from their federal tax payments. In other words, the rest of the US taxpaying public is actually subsidizing her state’s enormous welfare program.

That image of the tough, self-reliant Alaskans eking out their survival on the tundra with rod and rifle is mythical. Like the red states that rely on defense contracts and Social Security checks, Alaska is utterly dependent on government spending and taxation of oil resources. Nothing inherently wrong with those policies, but in Alaska -- as in petroleum economies around the world -- they have led to gross corruption and waste.

As for Palin, she should stop pretending to be a tax-cutter and a fiscal conservative. She’s a tax-and-spend, big government mama whose record in government is a complete repudiation of conservative principles. If they still had any principles, that is.