Sarah Palin in a funk? Not even, she says

Hello. Welcome to O-Pinion, the editorial board's place for discussion and commentary. I'm associate editor Fannie Flono, your host today. Budgets, Palin, contraceptives, deficits are in the news.

Sarah Palin in a funk? Not so, she told Fox News' Chris Wallace, about her portrayal in an upcoming HBO movie called "The Game Change". Julianne Moore plays Palin.
"I was never in a funk," she said of the contention about her preparation for vice president debates in the 2008 presidential race. "Thank God I have the right perspective on what really matters in life and there is no reason to be in a funk when you know what right priorities are and what really matters."

She was certainly in no funk in her appearance over the weekend at CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. A Washington Post piece by Melinda Henneberger called her the "Motivator-in-Chief" for how she revved up the base to take on President Obama.
Among her one-liners:

“He promised to transform America, and that’s one promise he’s kept; he transformed a shining city on a hill into a sinking ship.”
“This government isn’t too big to fail; it’s too big to succeed.”
“Hope and change? Yeah, you gotta hope things change.”
"We say keep your change; we’ll keep our God, our guns, our Constitution!”
It was enough for some in the crowd to come up with this one liner of their own: “If we picked our candidate with the applause-o-meter, we’d have our nominee.”

Obama budget DOA?
The Obama budget that went to Congress today is getting a lot of attention - mostly because it's DOA (Dead on Arrival) as far as Republican members of Congress are concerned. Nothing much is going to happen with the current partisan gridlock and the Election season in full throttle. But the Washington Post's Ezra Klein does break down five things to look for, including the dreaded "d" word - the deficit. Ed Rogers writing in the Post said the budget is an issue Republicans can use to their advantage, arguing that "if (candidate Obama) had pledged to get us to this point, he would have been laughed out of the race... It will be interesting to see who among the GOP leadership can make this fact come to life and sustain some alarm among voters. It will be discouraging if the political commentariat simply yawns and moves on."

Speaking of the deficit, the liberal Huffington Post is sounding the alarm about another possible debt ceiling debacle over the deficit. In what one top congressional aide calls a "nightmare scenario," the HuffPost writes, the federal government could wind up hitting the debt ceiling at the height of the presidential campaign. The Treasury Department is now contemplating the prospect of invoking "extraordinary measures" to keep the government funded through November, it says. Oh boy.

Reinvigorating Tea Party?
The Obama administration might think it's out of the line of fire now that it has modified its mandate on contraceptive coverage in health plans - saying insurance companies not religiously affiliated organizations must make such coverage available. But not so fast, say conservatives. The Sunday talk shows was filled with Republican leaders saying they would keep the issue in the public eye, with Senate Republican Leader Mitch saying he would push to have the requirement overturned.

William Kristol of the conservative Weekly Standard asked in his blog today, "Could the New Obamacare Mandate Reinvigorate the Tea Party?" Then he proceeds to tell why it can. "The regulation isn't a bug or an overreach at all. It's a feature. It's a feature that follows directly from the very structure, from the heart, of Obamacare," he writes. And the Obama health care law is the problem, he's declared. "A politics shaped by Obamacare and its ilk leads to an unhealthy corporatist pluralism," Kristol writes. "At its core, the spirit of the Tea Party has always been a reawakening to the threats today's big-government liberalism poses to our constitution of liberty. If our leaders can't quite grasp this, perhaps Tea Party activists can instruct them..."