Photo of the Day: Cheat Sheet Edition

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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.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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