Photo of the Day: Cheat Sheet Edition

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Sarah Palin is a PR genius. The same way that Madonna is a PR genius or Al Sharpton is a PR genius. No matter how tired we get of them, somehow they always figure out a way to keep themselves in the public eye.

Yesterday Palin delivered a routine stemwinder to a medium sized crowd and managed to get a ton of publicity for it. But that’s not all! It turns out that last night’s speculation was right: she really did have a cheat sheet on the palm of her hand that she consulted during the softball Q&A after the speech. Just like your average seventh grader taking an algebra test. Has any politician in history ever done this before?

And even the notes themselves are fascinating. Here’s what she wrote down:

Energy

Budget Tax Cuts

Lift American Spirits

The most obvious question is: why would anyone need to write this stuff down? It’s not like she’s trying to remember the quadratic equation or anything. For someone who swims in the seas that Palin swims in, this is about the equivalent of writing down a note to remember your birthday.

But enough mockery. At this blog we prefer a more high-minded, policy-oriented critique of our major politicians. So here it is: it turns out that Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in budget cuts. In fact, she went to the trouble of deliberately crossing it out. Just like every other garden variety faux fiscally conservative Republican, she doesn’t really want to cut the budget because that runs the risk of annoying some interest group or another. She only wants to cut taxes. Normally, though, we don’t have graphological proof of this. With Palin, now we do.

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate