Going Rogue is going gangbusters, and it looks like both Palin and her publisher, HarperCollins, are going to make some serious money off of it. According to industry insiders, Palin got a $7 million advance for her book. She’s earning a royalty rate of 15 percent, which means she makes $4.35 per book sold, and therefore needs to sell 1.6 million books to earn out her advance. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that HarperCollins had printed another 100,000 copies of Going Rogue, bringing the total in print to 1.6 million. Palin would need to sell all of those to earn out her advance, so it’s unlikely that’s going to happen.

But HarperCollins will be making money long before that. There’s a rule of thumb in the industry that publishers net about $10 per hardcover sold, after expenses, but before the cost of the advance. Once she’s sold 700,000 copies, then, HarperCollins is in the black. And what of that 1.6 million printed? An ideal “sell-through” rate is about 75 percent, which means HarperCollins thinks it’s going to sell about 1.2 million copies. At that level, Palin will have made $7 million and HarperCollins $5 million of its own.

A HarperCollins insider told The Daily Beast that the book sold a staggering 300,000 copies on the first day alone, which was Tuesday. “Sales are phenomenal, and we are convinced that the book will continue to sell phenomenally for some time to come,” says the insider. They’re not prevaricating: As of 2:30pm today, the book was #1 on Amazon, ahead of both Stephen King’s new novel, Under the Dome, and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. The latter sold 1 million copies on its first day, but that figure included the UK, and top fiction generally trumps non-fiction. Any way you carve it, Going Rogue looks to be a $12 million goldmine.

On top of that, her favorables are rising.

As Sarah Palin blankets the media on a whirlwind book promotion tour, the former vice-presidential contender is clearly back on America’s radar screen. Despite being characterized by many as a divisive force in her party and the nation, Americans are much more likely to give Palin a positive rating (47 percent favorable) than another prominent female leader — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (28 percent favorable). Moreover, about six in 10 Americans (61 percent) think Palin has been treated unfairly by the press, according to the latest Fox News poll.

Something tells me that the longer Democrats are in power, the more likeable Sarah Palin is going to be to Americans. Love her or hate her (and I love her), you cannot deny that she is on fire right now. 1500 people waited in the freezing cold to meet her. There’s even polling showing that, if the 2012 presidential race were held today, and Palin was running against Obama, they’d basically be in a dead heat among independents, the most important block of voters later. The mainstream media may try to demean and diminish her, but her star is clearly rising. And unless Obama suddenly turns into some kind of fiscal hawk overnight (not likely), she’s just going to keep looking better and better.

2012 is looking like a better and better year.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary or follow her on Twitter!

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Conservative Doug Hoffman conceded the race in the 23rd Congressional District last week after receiving two pieces of grim news for his campaign: He was down 5,335 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted on election night, and he had barely won his stronghold in Oswego County.

As it turns out, neither was true.

But Hoffman’s concession — based on snafus in Oswego County and elsewhere that left his vote undercounted — set off a chain of events that echoed all the way to Washington, D.C., and helped secure passage of a historic health care reform bill.

Democratic Rep. Bill Owens was quickly sworn into office on Friday, a day before the rare weekend vote in the House of Representatives. His support sealed his party’s narrow victory on the health care legislation.

Now a recanvassing in the 11-county district shows that Owens’ lead has narrowed to 3,026 votes over Hoffman, 66,698 to 63,672, according to the latest unofficial results from the state Board of Elections.

In Oswego County, where Hoffman was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, inspectors found Hoffman actually won by 1,748 votes — 12,748 to 11,000.

The new vote totals mean the race will be decided by absentee ballots, of which about 10,200 were distributed, said John Conklin, communications director for the state Board of Elections.

Under a new law in New York that extended deadlines, military and overseas ballots received by this coming Monday (and postmarked by Nov. 2) will be counted. Standard absentee ballots had to be returned this past Monday.

The state hasn’t certified the election yet, but Nancy Pelosi wasted no time swearing in Bill Owens. Owens then, of course, registered one more Democratic vote for Obama’s government run health care. If all the ballots are counted, and the result is changed, then Owens will have to be removed.

With all of this in mind, Doug Hoffman has un-conceded. His victory could still be a long shot, but with 10,000 ballots to be counted, it’s entirely possible that the result could be different. This could be huge for conservatives if Hoffman wins — and it should serve as a powerful lesson to never concede until every ballot is counted.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi scored a giant gain for feminism last weekend. In shoving her controversy-plagued healthcare reform bill to victory by a paper-thin margin, she conclusively demonstrated that a woman can be just as gritty, ruthless and arm-twisting in pursuing her agenda as anyone in the long line of fabled male speakers before her. Even a basic feminist shibboleth like abortion rights became just another card for Pelosi to deal and swap.

Wait, I thought Feminist’s hated when men acted in that manner, so, it is OK that Pelosi does?

Whether or not her bill survives in the Senate is immaterial: Pelosi’s hard-won, trench-warfare win sets a new standard for U.S. women politicians and is certainly well beyond anything the posturing but ineffectual Hillary Clinton has ever achieved.

So, even if her legislation fails to pass, she done good. Except for that failure part. Here comes the cherry on top

As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can’t my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we’re hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors’ offices. They’ll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.

There are so many negatives in that paragraph that attempting to put anything in bold is worthless.But, don’t forget, Nancy rocks. As a failure. But, she rocks.

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Nancy Pelosi, in her own words, talking about “the abuse of power…huge bill with many thousands of pages, containing 9 appropriations bills, 7 of which never appeared… it’s an absolute outrage… members can’t even see what they’re voting on before they vote on it… and something like looking at your tax returns could be sneaked into the bill without any safeguards to protect you from that…” Watch all the way to the end to see what she says about Representative’s responsibilities.
◼ h/t: Holger

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At the last minute Representative Bart Stupak (D, Mich.) was successful in getting Speaker Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership to approve an amendment that would prohibit federal spending on abortion added to its nationalized healthcare bill passed and sent to the Senate over the weekend. But a senior Democrat says that the Stupak amendment will be stripped from the bill if the Senate returns the bill for approval.

Of course, the only reason that the House healthcare bill was passed out of the House at all was because of the Stupak Amendment, still left-wingers in Congress are vowing to strip the final bill of one of the only measures that appeals to moderates.

Far left Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D, Fla.) has vowed that the anti-abortion amendment will be gone by the time the bill comes up for a final vote after the Senate debate. Pro-abortion activist and Democratic Congressman from Colorado Diana DeGette has been passing around a letter to her far left colleagues vowing not to vote for a future healthcare bill that does not include abortion funding. She has announced that 40 House Democrats have signed her pledge.

The truth is that the House bill has bare support and without the Stupak Amendment it couldn’t have passed.

However, the vows of abortion advocates in Congress also proves another thing, here. It proves that “no” doesn’t always mean “no.” The Pelosicare version of Obamacare now says no abortion funding, but that is meaningless the next time the bill comes up for a vote. Congress may pass a nationalized healthcare system that does not include abortion funding but that doesn’t mean anything to a future Congress. Once healthcare become a federal matter, any future Congress can change the rules anytime it feels like it and slide abortion funding right into the rules. Maybe in the middle of night on a Saturday… just like Pelosi did to pass the bill this time.

And therein lies the problem. No matter what this bill says now, the matter is not and can never be settled. Federalized healthcare will be a permanent political football used to solicit votes from favored special interests all the way until the day that the federal government is bankrupted by its onerous financial burdens. No abortion funding may be the rule today, but next time they just might get it through.

It’s all because no leftist idea ever dies. It only sits quietly until another push secures victory. No never means no to a leftist.

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Our world is upside-down. Democratic leaders say they do not share the concerns of the Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee that Nidal Hasan’s red flags were, perhaps, ignored.

Just a few short months ago, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the CIA liars, offered no proof and then refused to talk about it again – leaving the stain on the agency’s  credibility in full view for the world to see.

Yesterday, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) accused Obama of withholding “critical” information. The House Intelligence Committee, chaired by a Democrat, dismissed Hoestra’s concerns.

Rep. Hoekstra went even farther and effectively said the President was not truthful when he claimed that Hoekstra and other intelligence committees had been “briefed:”

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) is blasting President Obama for withholding from the Congressional intelligence committees information on the Fort Hood killings suspect, while at the same time acknowledging the leaders of those panels — including Hoekstra himself — have indeed been briefed on Nidal Malik Hasan.

In his statement, Hoekstra repeated Obama’s plea that we not “jump to conclusions” about the alleged Fort Hood killer:

…but the administration is in possession of critical information related to the attack that they are refusing to release to Congress or the American people,” Hoekstra said

Hoekstra said he was concerned that more information had been provided, piecemeal, to the news media by anonymous sources than had yet been provided to the Committee. He criticized the Obama administration for not being more immediately forthcoming with details and specifically requested information, and for restricting the limited information provided so far to the so-called “Gang of Eight.”

So perhaps the Gang of Eight is the problem? No. Hoekstra is a member of the Gang of Eight. Members are Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Silvestre Reyes, Pete Hoekstra, Diane Feinstein and Kit Bond. So what is going on? Was Hoekstra appropriately briefed as Obama claims, or was he not? And how about Pelosi and Reid? What do they know?

This is the height of hypocrisy and the culmination of evil. The administration and Democrats are salivating over Eric Holder’s investigation into CIA so-called torture of Guantanamo prisoners - after promising the Bush administration that they would drop that atrocious idea.

But today, with the Fort Hood memorial tribute still on the calendar, they have no concern that intelligence and the U.S. Army may have put troops side-by-side with a radical jihadist – with red flags flaring.

Democrats know Americans are fed up with their politically correct posture. We know Americans are dying in this country, in Afghanistan and still yet in Iraq because military fears the wrath of Congress, and the administration, loathes any attempt to profile or point a knowing finger at an extremist. In the video below, Hoekstra speaks about preventing terrorism and keeping soldiers safe…February 2008. Listen as he talks about homegrown terrorism. Democrats told him the “threat is not real.”

Pete Hoekstra  “threat not real”

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As health care legislation moves toward a crucial airing in the Senate, the White House is facing a growing revolt from some Democrats and analysts who say the bills Congress is considering do not fulfill President Obama’s promise to slow the runaway rise in health care spending.

The bills that Democrats have submitted and have forced a vote on, were never about costs but about control of 1/6 of the economy, and control of you, the People.

Mr. Obama has made cost containment a centerpiece of his health reform agenda, and in May he stood up at the White House with industry groups who pledged voluntary efforts to trim the growth of health care spending by 1.5 percent, or $2 trillion, over the next decade.

Now, that might actually be Obama’s goal (how are we to know, he is all over the map when he yaps), yet, there is a whopper of a problem with that, namely, that Obama has really had nothing to do with crafting the House health monstrosity beyond some cajoling and pretty partisan speeches. Then again, Obama says quite a few things, makes lots of promises, and rarely fulfills any of them.

But health economists say it is impossible to know whether the bills, including one passed by the House on Saturday night, would meet that goal, and many are skeptical that they even come close.

That should be a big red flag for everyone, but, then, as stated time and time again, except in the liberal MSM, this legislation really has little to do with saving anyone money.

Experts — including some who have consulted closely with the White House, like Dr. Denis A. Cortese, chief executive of the Mayo Clinic — say the measures take only baby steps toward revamping the current fee-for-service system, which drives up costs by paying health providers for each visit or procedure performed. Some senators are also dissatisfied.

?????? Well, yes, health providers are paid for patients coming to see them and providing medical care. Shocking, eh? I guess the cost of birthday cakes goes up because people come and buy birthday cakes.

It couldn’t have anything to do with

There is quite a bit of difference, including cost, between a 1908 Model T and a 2101 Aston Martin, eh?

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This is a priceless 50 year-old cartoon, demonstrating how big and small business thrives alongside labor. Then, as today, one cannot survive without the other – capital and labor working together.

Liberals contend that America is different today, our needs are different, the U.S. Constitution is no longer relevant, but this humorous and desperately serious cartoon shows how the struggle for liberty never ends…until we let “them” end it.

Fifty year old political cartoon predicts future (video)

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It has come to this, America. Democrats have decided that if you don’t agree with their policies, you are to be fined. And if you don’t pay the fine, you are a criminal and will be sentenced to jail. That’s right, Democrats are criminalizing dissent.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has decided to leave language in her heatlhcare bill that criminalizes and prescribes jail time for any American that does not want to buy private healthcare insurance. Think of this, America. I am telling you that the U.S. Congress has decided to force you to buy the product of a privately owned corporation! The power of the U.S. federal government has never been used to purchase something from a private company but here comes San Fran Nancy to do just that. But, let’s face it. She is only taking her cue from the big guy and his “Chicago way” sort of political thuggery.

The Joint Committee on Taxation issued a letter (Download pdf file) in reply to Representative Dave Crump’s inquiry about the matter of the criminal penalties of refusing to buy healthcare insurance should Pelosi’s version of Obamacare pass.

In reply the JCT outlines the exact language in the bill that proves that Pelosi and her Democrat leaders want to turn YOU into a federal criminal if you don’t want to buy her health insurance. Criminal penalties include:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.
• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.”

Is it Constitutional? Apparently they just don’t care.

But what does it matter if the Constitution is violated by members of the Democrat Party? After all, they will rewrite the Constitution to suit their transitory criteria with which they’ll pass whatever bill they want to push. The Constitution serves as no obstacle at all to their ambitions.

Here is a prime example. CNSNews asked Senator Burris if he saw this power to coerce the people to engage in preferred commerce in the Constitution:

CNSNews: Federally, if you look at it from a federal standpoint, what area specifically of the Constitution would give Congress the power to mandate an individual to have health insurance?”

Burris: Well, that’s under certainly the laws of the–protect the health, welfare of the country. That’s under the Constitution. We’re not even dealing with any constitutionality here. Should we move in that direction? What does the Constitution say? To provide for the health, welfare and the defense of the country.

So, Burris has decided that “health” is in the Constitution? Certainly the words “general welfare” appear there, but health does not. But, pffft. What do these “words” mean? Why should we let laws and tradition stand in the way of getting votes for a welfare program. With glittering jewels of ignorance like accidental Senator Burris crafting America’s policies, it is no wonder we are fast losing our nation to enemies of democracy, freedom, liberty and the American way.

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Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who developed a close friendship with President Obama when they served together in the Senate, is threatening to have the entire health care bill read on the Senate floor.
Senior Senate Democratic aides had heard Coburn was considering having potentially thousands of pages read aloud in effort to stall passage. “If he did this it would be even outrageous for a guy who’s become known as Dr. No around here,” one of them told POLITICO.
Coburn’s office confirmed that he is indeed thinking about having the bill read.

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