Harold Ford was the best thing that ever happened to Kirsten Gillibrand.

America will have a woman president. But it is not likely that the first one will be Sarah Palin.

With a nod to Rick Perlstein, Welcome to Palinland. Atop Palinland's Mount Rushmore are Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater. Palinland's Bill of Rights has been edited and redacted, reordered and revised with red ink: in Palinland, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments that ensure due process and the rights of the accused are merely suggestive measures to be administered based on the emotional whim of a carefully-harnessed fear and a fervently-stoked anger. And in Palinland, the Tenth Amendment's reservation of power for the individual states is paramount, a necessary protection for a people whose government is supposedly hell-bent on destroying them.

President Obama has labored to unite different political factions with policy compromises and conciliatory speeches. But it was Obama's incisive grappling at the Republican retreat last week that really lit a bipartisan fire, drawing politicos and commentators of all stripes to call for more questions sessions for the President and the opposition party.