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By KASIE HUNT: SEABROOK, N.H. — Sarah Palin’s bus is plastered with a mock-up of the U.S. Constitution. But her entourage — both the three-vehicle motorcade that includes the bus and the smaller, two-SUV version she uses for smaller events — hasn’t been very respectful of traffic laws. They speed. They run red lights and stop signs. They make last-second lane changes to get off the highway, sometimes without signaling.....So do the reporters following them.

MANCHESTER, N.H. - As it played out on TV this week, Sarah Palin’s “One Nation” road trip of U.S. historical sites was a masterpiece of political mischief-making – a wild dash up the East Coast that delighted her fans and cornered the market on 2012 coverage for days on end. That’s not how the bus tour looked to Republicans on the ground, many of whom are more convinced than ever that the former Alaska governor is simply not serious about running for president. While Palin has reveled in giving an extended one-fingered salute to the national press, refusing to give...

Day 2 of Sarah Palin’s bus tour, and the former vice presidential nominee has prompted little more than confusion at exactly what she is up to. Palin started Memorial Day at the National Archives in Washington, but the only reporters who made it to her brief media availability there were those who happened to see tourists posting on Twitter that they had spotted her. SNIP Indeed, Twitter is about the only way to follow the former Alaska governor – unless you’re either Fox News host Greta Van Susteren or her husband, John Coale. The Fox News host is traveling around...

Among the New Hampshire electorate as a whole, Palin is viewed favorably by just 28 percent, according to a recent survey by the Democratic automated pollster Public Policy Polling. In PPP surveys in 31 states over the last six months, just three states had smaller proportions of Palin fans, and all were in the northeast: New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. (Though the firm is partisan, its results generally track with polls by other organizations. PPP’s results were used in this analysis in the interest of consistency across different states.) Continue Reading Text Size -+reset Listen Palin’s highest ratings, in...

With Mike Huckabee's exit from the race, Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin are now on top of the Republican field, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday. Twenty percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters say they'd support the former Massachusetts governor, while 18 percent say they'd support the former Alaska governor. Newt Gingrich comes in third place with 11 percent. In the April 15-20 poll, Huckabee had 16 percent (tied with Donald Trump). Romney had 13, Palin had 10. While Romney and Palin now share the top spot, Gallup's positive intensity tracking shows Republicans feeling less enthusiastic about their two...

Poll: Donald Trump would be fired in 2012 general election By: Kendra Marr April 26, 2011 07:27 AM EDT Half of all Americans and almost a third of Republicans think Donald Trump wouldn't make a good president, according to a new poll. Despite his rapid ascent in presidential primary polls, a USA Today/Gallup survey out Tuesday shows that voters have significant reservations about actually putting the real estate mogul into the Oval Office. Half of all Americans said Trump would be a "poor" or "terrible" commander-in-chief. For Republicans, that number is 31 percent. Sixty-four percent of all Americas said they...

Tim Pawlenty implied Tuesday that there are some less-than-serious presidential hopefuls eyeing the race, with a quip that seemed to lump Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Donald Trump together with wrestling icon Hulk Hogan. "You're going to have, you know, Mitt Romney who will start out as the front-runner with the most name-ID and money..." Pawlenty told CNN’s Piers Morgan in handicapping the race. "And on the other end of the continuum, you'll have perhaps Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump, or I don't know, maybe Hulk Hogan will get in the race too. Who knows? But I think in...

And so it finally happened. Obviously troubled by the fact that Donald Trump’s questions surrounding Barack Obama’s birth certificate are starting to gain some real traction, Ben Smith at the left-wing Politico finally panicked and fired off the Race Card. Hilariously, Smith did so using my favorite brand of agendized journOlism, what I call the “Some Say” tactic. How it works is very simple. In order for Smith to hide behind his dishonest and arrogant veil of objectivity, he simply finds others saying what he wants to say and abuses his position to amplify the charges directly

President Barack Obama is promising to lay out his long-awaited ideas on how to restrain Medicare and Medicaid spending this week — just in time to take the spotlight away from Paul Ryan. But he'll have to do it in a way that doesn't provoke a Democratic revolt or give the Republicans an easy target. And right now, there aren't a lot of Democratic ideas on either Medicare or Medicaid that Obama can just pull off the shelf, dust off and use.

Donald Trump said Wednesday that he's proud to be part of the so-called birther movement, which he says is comprised of "great American people.” "I don't feel heat; I think he's got heat," Trump said of President Barack Obama on the Laura Ingraham show . "Look, he cannot give a birth certificate. You can, I can, I got one yesterday, it took me a day, 24 hours, I got one. "A lot of the so called birthers, these are great people, these are really great American people,” he added. “These are hard working, unbelievable, salt of the earth people." Trump’s...

Here's a part of his post at CNN, where he is apparently a regular contributor, which makes the point: "Ben Smith in Politico reports that the trip was booked through a Christian tour operator. But the real news is who did not book the trip: the Republican Jewish Coalition, the group that brought George W. Bush to Israel in 1998, Mitt Romney in 2007, Haley Barbour in 2011, and many other presidential hopefuls beside. "Very likely you have never heard of the Republican Jewish Coalition. But then again, you probably are not seeking the Republican presidential nomination. If you were...

Any news junkie will tell you that Politico has been on a steady decline in journalistic standards for the past few years. They have taken it to new levels with the latest piece of hackery by the leftist mouthpiece Jonathan Martin and Kendra Marr entitled "For Michele Bachman, a pattern of getting facts wrong." This story, the top "news item" last night on politico.com was a hitpiece entirely about some verbal miscues Michele Bachmann apparently made in New Hampshire. Martin said: "For Bachmann, who leads the House Tea Party caucus and champions a return to the Constitution, to get such...

Sarah Palin has played the sexism card, accusing critics of chauvinism against a strong woman. She has played the class card, dismissing the Bush family as “blue bloods,” and complaining that she is the target of snobbery by people who dislike her simply because she is “not so hoity-toity.” Most famously, she has played the victim card—never more vividly than when she invoked the loaded phrase “blood libel” against liberals and media commentators in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

Aides to John McCain initially added Sarah Palin to his "short list" of potential running mates because McCain wanted a woman on the list, according to his campaign manager. McCain entered the vice presidential selection process with a list of five possibilities: Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Michael Bloomberg, Charlie Crist, and Joe Lieberman, according to Washingtonian's profile (which isn't online) of Washington lawyer A.B. Culvahouse, who led the search. "As the clock was running out, [campaign manager Rick] Davis say McCain asked to have at least one woman on the short list. His advisers went back to the long list...

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s suggestion Saturday that the Revolutionary War began in Concord, N.H., rather than Lexington and Concord, Mass., marks the third time in recent months that the potential GOP presidential hopeful has committed a puzzling gaffe about history and current affairs. Making her first trek to New Hampshire as a 2012 prospect, Bachmann told a GOP crowd in Manchester: “You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world at Lexington and Concord.” The Revolutionary War began, not in New Hampshire’s capital, but in the famous two towns more than 50 miles away in...

<p>Two potential candidates for the Republican presidential nomination have been described as “frontrunners”: former governors Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. According to pollster Scott Rasmussen, they’re the candidates with the most supporters among likely Republican-primary voters: Romney has 24 percent, Palin 19 percent. Intrade, the prediction market, has them as the most likely nominees: Romney is given a 23 percent chance of winning, Palin 15 percent. Each of them has a claim to being “next in line”: Romney because he was arguably John McCain’s strongest rival for the nomination in 2008, Palin because she was his running mate.</p>

Mike Huckabee is going against the grain of conservative pundits and potential 2012 rivals who are merciless in attacking the Obamas, taking a softer tack as he defends the first couple on issues like healthy eating and the president’s citizenship. While conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh trashed First Lady Michelle Obama’s healthy-eating initiative — one of her few forays into public policy — as an effort to have a government-run food program, Huckabee went the other way. “I do not think she's out there advocating that the government take over our dinner plates,” Huckabee, who’s been open about...

Sarah Palin used to pronounce Mitt Romney's name "M-I-L-T." In one of the many embarrassing anecdotes about the former Alaska governor, former aide Frank Bailey writes in a leaked manuscript that Palin actually argued with some of her staffers about how to correctly pronounce Romney's name. During her own 2006 campaign for governor, when Romney was chairman of the Republican Governors Association, Bailey writes that Palin didn't seem to know much about the then-Massachusetts governor. “During the campaign for governor, when Romney was in the background of our Republican Governors’ mess, Sarah didn’t even have a clear idea who he...

Oprah called on President Obama's critics on Friday to “show some level of respect.” "I feel that everybody has a learning curve, and I feel that the reason why I was willing to step out for him was because I believed in his integrity and I believed in his heart," the influential TV host said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in Chicago. Of the negative mood of the country, Oprah added, “I think everybody complaining ought to try it for once.” She said the presidency is a position that “holds a sense of authority and governance over us all,” and that...

President Obama has earned the trust of most Americans on his handling of Egypt’s political crisis, but not by much, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Around 58 percent of respondents said they believe the protests in Egypt won’t affect the United States very much, and around the same number believe the Obama administration has handled the protests well. Obama gets positive marks from a majority of Democrats and independents in the survey, but only 43 percent of Republicans believe he’s done well.