From The Minnesota Independent:

[O]rganizers of the National Tea Party Convention tweeted that Bachmann would be a speaker at the Feb. 4–6 event in Nashville. Palin keynotes the convention, which is “aimed at bringing the Tea Party Movement leaders together from around the nation for the purpose of networking and supporting the movements’ multiple organizations principle goals.”

The Nashville Post reports that Palin’s keynote address will be closed to the press.

Tickets for the convention are available for the bargain price of $549. The fine people at the Opryland inform me that the ticket does not include the price of the hotel, where a three-night package starts at $436.99. You’d better book soon, because the Opryland reservations agent told me that just 160 of the hotel’s 2,881 rooms remain available as of this morning.

The results are so strange that PPP’s Tom Jensen doesn’t have a theory. One possible explanation, though, is how health care has dominated the national political debate since early summer. It the spring, Romney bounced as high as 67 percent. The summer and fall have taken a toll on him. As Andy Barr astutely pointed out in September, Romney has been hamstrung by his health care record. As governor of Massachusetts, he compromised with Democrats and signed a mandate-driven health care bill, and ever since then Republicans have used that against him.

Inside the beltway, Romney is seen as a classic front-runner who’s picked his issues wisely–he’s four months away from publishing a book on “American greatness”–and retained smart campaign staffers. But Huckabee is leading the field in national and Iowa polls, and Palin clearly has the biggest following of any possible 2012 candidate.

One example of how the divergence squeezes candidates came in 2000, when most voters approved of President Bill Clinton’s work, but most had an “unfavorable” view of his post-impeachment character. That flummoxed Al Gore’s campaign when it thought about how to handle Clinton. According to Gore campaign vets like Bob Shrum, Clinton was toxic in states that he’d won twice and where the economy was booming, like Iowa.

Since Sarah Palin doesn’t have a job outside of her book tour, her “favorable” rating is all she has. Not only is it lower than Barack Obama’s favorable rating, it’s lower than a credible national candidate can really stand — Republicans argued that Hillary Rodham Clinton might be unelectable as a presidential candidate when her “unfavorable” rating was a good 10 points lower than Palin’s.

“I have no idea,” said Fiorina. “You’ll have to ask Sarah Palin. She’s on a mega book tour right now — that’s exciting to see. I share Sarah Palin’s values, and I suspect, I hope, that Sarah Palin thinks it’s important to win. That’s up to her.”

Audio is here, if the link below does not work.

Palin’s apparently eschatological comment doesn’t appear to be an accident. The Charlotte Observer reports that she’s taking dinnertime advice on Israel from the Graham family:

The former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate told Billy Graham about how she came to faith in God as a girl in Bible camp.

She quizzed him on the presidents he’s known and wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq, Franklin Graham reported.

The Rev. Billy Graham is a credit to this country, and has for all of his life eloquently melded evangelical Christianity with a civic-mindedness and a broadmindness that have appealed to people of all faiths and no faith. (He apologized for an unfortunately antisemitic comment with President Nixon that was caught on tape and recently released.) Franklin Graham is a much different story. A Christian Zionist leader, Franklin has described Islam as “a very evil and wicked religion” and suggested erroneously that the Christian God and the Muslim God are two different deities. He even asked President Obama on the campaign trail if he was a Muslim. And unfortunately, Billy Graham is not long for this world, so if Palin is trying to yoke herself to the Grahams, then she’ll be palling around with Franklin more and more.

“The reason I ask you,” said O’Donnell, “is that I think there’s some confusion about Sarah Palin’s policies.”

It wasn’t a man-on-the-street interview with a dopey tourist being asked a surprise question, of the kind John Ziegler conducted with Obama supporters to “prove” that they had no idea what Obama believed. Jackie was a political activist with a political message. And the history of the bailouts has really been mangled by conservative spin since September 2008, when, in a panic, most Republicans (in Congress) supported them. When former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney gave a speech at the Value Voters Summit this year and attacked “bailing out banks,” few people in the crowd remembered that Romney had supported the bailouts.

By and large, I’ve found that Tea Party activists and conservatives do not forgive Republicans who supported the bailouts — there is a lot of anger toward former President George W. Bush, and more toward former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. And here is what Palin said about the bailouts in her debate with Joe Biden.

John McCain thankfully has been one representing reform. Two years ago, remember, it was John McCain who pushed so hard with the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reform measures. He sounded that warning bell.

People in the Senate with him, his colleagues, didn’t want to listen to him and wouldn’t go towards that reform that was needed then. I think that the alarm has been heard, though, and there will be that greater oversight, again thanks to John McCain’s bipartisan efforts that he was so instrumental in bringing folks together over this past week, even suspending his own campaign to make sure he was putting excessive politics aside and putting the country first.

In September 2008, McCain suspended his campaign to go to Washington to help negotiate a government response to the financial crisis, resulting in a $700 billion bailout bill.

And here is what Palin says in “Going Rogue” about the bailouts, on page 270.

[T]he House of Representatives rejected a Bush-backed economic bailout plan in a vote in which two-thirds of Republicans voted no. The impression this made on the electorate was not helpful to our cause. Millions of Americans were poised to go bankrupt or lose their savings, and the perception was that Republicans had failed to respond.

I don’t think you can avoid the conclusion that Palin supported the bailout package. If a Palin supporter doesn’t know this, it’s perfectly legitimate to find out why. And yet The Weekly Standard, not alone in the conservative media, takes this exchange and makes it all about a brave 17-year-old girl battling back against an “ambush” from MSNBC.

Went to the book signing in Noblesville, IN. Waited three hours in the cold to get a wristband to reserve my spot at the book signing tonight. We were told she would sign book for the first 1000 people. Not so. The event ended promptly at 9:00pm, though there were still at least 150 people left. Wasted my day, wasted money on a babysitter, and wasted my money on this book.

The video (after the jump) of the scene in Noblesville is even worse. “You want somebody who’s gonna be quittin’ on the job?” yells one heckler. “Right there! Quittin’ on the job.”

HANNITY: Look, you supported [Conservative Party candidate] Doug Hoffman in the New York 23. And when you did that, though, it was a big jolt to his campaign. As a matter of fact, according to the latest numbers he has a chance to win this thing.

PALIN: That’s exciting.

This is not really true, but it jibes with what Hoffman is saying.

Sitting in a coffee shop, this 28-year-old associate editor of the Weekly Standard explains that despite the highly politicized subjects of his books and articles, writing—not politics—is his real passion. Political journalism was simply “a way to get paid writing.”

… He got assigned his first piece for the magazine—a profile of General Wesley Clark during the 2003 presidential primaries—when the editor who had previously covered the general “didn’t feel like writing about him again.” And the contract for The K Street Gang fell into his lap after another Standard writer, Andrew Ferguson, passed it up: “Andy had already signed papers to write his book on Lincoln [Land of Lincoln]…At that point, I was 23, and again, had no clue what I was doing.”