Sarah Palin (left) has President Obama in her sights, telling FoxNews.com she "would be willing" to challenge him in the 2012 presidential race. The former Alaska governor, in an interview Saturday on the sidelines of the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, said President Obama's "lack of experience" has held him back his first year in office and that she would put her credentials up against his any day. "I would be willing to if I believe that it's right for the country," Palin said when asked if she would run for president in 2012. She qualified the statement, adding that she sees "many" other potential candidates who are "in as strong or stronger position than I am to take on the White House and if they're in a better position than I in three years, I'll support them." But the former GOP vice presidential nominee told "Fox News Sunday": "I won't close the door that perhaps could be open for me in the future." ... "I do want competition to allow the cream of the crop to rise (in the GOP contests)," Palin said, adding that her support would translate into everything from donations to campaign rallies. "There are hundreds of candidates on local, state and on the national level that hopefully we'll be able to help." Palin recently endorsed Rand Paul, the son of Texas Rep. Ron Paul, in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate in Kentucky. She said she was attracted to his limited government platform and that she's already donated to the campaign. - Fox News

Dominant Social Theme: A 21st century Joan of Arc?

Free-Market Analysis: Sarah Palin is really a last chance gasp, in our opinion, for the power elite to maintain the integrity of the two-party system in America. We predicted that Palin would run long ago - and that she would set up an alternative political structure in the process. And we received considerable flack, as we recall. But both things are actually happening. Over the weekend, Palin refused to rule out a run for president in 2012 against Barack Obama (who may be unelectable by then anyway) and using the Tea Party movement as a surrogate she's found her third party - though it may not function as a formal entity. See some former articles here:

In all the coverage lately given to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its embattled chairman, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, one rather important part of the story has largely been missed. This is the way in which, in its obsession with climate change, different branches of the UK Government have in recent years been pouring hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money into a bewildering array of "climate-related" projects, often throwing a veil of mystery over how much is being paid, to whom and why. To begin with a small example. Everyone has now heard of "Glaciergate", the inclusion in the IPCC's 2007 report of a wild claim it was recently forced to disown, that by 2035 all Himalayan glaciers will have melted. In 2001 the Department for International Development (DfID) spent £315,277 commissioning a team of British scientists to investigate this prediction. After co-opting its Indian originator, Dr. Syed Hasnain, they reported in 2004 that his claim was just a scare story. Some glaciers were retreating, others were not. There was no way they could disappear in a time-span shorter than many centuries. Three years later, however, when the IPCC produced its 2007 report, it endorsed Dr. Hasnain's claim without any mention of the careful UK-funded study which had shown it to be false. What made this particularly shocking was that in 2008 another British ministry, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) announced that it had paid £1,436,000 to fund all the support needed to run the same IPCC working group which, as we now know from a senior IPCC author, had included the bogus claim in its report. - UK Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: Must be coincidence.

Free-Market Analysis: It's hard to wrap one's head around the prevalence of what we call dominant social themes. The idea that a tiny and incredibly wealthy power elite can orchestrate fear-based promotions in order to offer authoritarian solutions that deprive citizens of yet more wealth and power is certainly "conspiratorial" - and such thinking is naïve, jejune, the product of paranoia and failed life-approaches.

The editors of The Daily Bell are pleased to present an exclusive interview with legendary London Times editor, Lord William Rees-Mogg.

Introduction: Former London Times editor Lord William Rees-Mogg attended Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford and was President of the Oxford Union in 1951. He became a writer for The Financial Times in 1952, and then moved to The Sunday Times in 1960. He was first Deputy Editor and then editor of The Times (from 1967 to 1981). He was also a member of the BBC's Board of Governors and chairman of the Arts Council, With James Dale Davidson, he authored such popular, free-market oriented books as The Sovereign Individual, The Great Reckoning, and Blood in the Streets. He is Chairman of The Zurich Club and also of the London publishing firm Pickering & Chatto Publishers.

A brief synopsis ...

Daily Bell: Why did the elites seemingly stick Britain with the EU? Why won't the British elites allow a vote?

Rees-Mogg: The British elites won't allow a vote because they would lose it. If they had a vote and they won't at the moment, it would have gone against the Lisbon Treaty. As to why, well, in the early 1970s, Europe was a much more dynamic economy than Britain. The British felt they needed to trade inside a very large and more efficient community. It was a loss of confidence at that point.

Daily Bell: Is there a group of banking families in Britain and Europe that secretly exerts power over sociopolitical events. Could this group, in its larger form, be called a power elite?

Last week politicians in Washington made a few things clear about how they really feel about the state of the union. First, they are beginning to hear the growing discontent with the size and scope of government and the broken promises that keep piling up. Certain events in Massachusetts recently made that statement loud, clear and unavoidable. In the face of those events, the powers that be made the determination that some populist rhetoric was in order, and the idea of a spending freeze in Washington was proposed, albeit with several caveats. These caveats to the proposed spending freeze ensure that we are not at any real risk of actually doing anything about spending.

First of all is timing. It wouldn't go into effect until 2011, which allows plenty of time to increase spending levels quite a bit before they are frozen. If the administration really understood and cared about our spending problems they would not freeze spending a year from now, but cut spending immediately and significantly. But, spending cuts almost never happen in Washington, and they are not likely now or a year from now - if the politicians have anything to say about it.

Actually, no one thinks corporations are persons but some do believe they are groups of persons. No one thinks orchestras, or football teams or universities are persons but many do think they are variously configured people. If this is so, then they, as groups of persons, have rights, including the right to private property and freedom of speech.

When people come together for some common purpose, they do not lose their basic human rights. So all the hollering about how the recent Supreme Court ruling about whether corporations have the right to engage in political advocacy, based on the allegation that corporations aren't persons, is off base.

Even those who oppose the ruling implicitly acknowledge the above. Thus Justice Stevens, the major dissenter on the Court, wrote, that "[T]he distinctive potential of corporations to corrupt the electoral process [has] long been recognized." But only persons can corrupt something!