Sarah Palin comes to Calgary: laugh track not required

Sarah Palin stormed into Canada Saturday, speaking to 1,200 people who paid between $150 and $200 each to fill the Palomino Room of the BMO Centre in Calgary, another coup for tinePublic — the somewhat mysterious company that has repeatedly brought the likes of Bill Clinton to Toronto, just by being persistent. Now questions are being raised about the decision of taxpayer-funded public utility Enmax to co-sponsor the event, although Palin did touch on the topics of clean and renewable energy, they guess? “The problem was that Palin clued into the audience’s unconditional agreement with her worldview pretty quickly,” surmised Colby Cosh of Maclean’s, “and grew impatient; as fast as she was speeding through the statistics and the chuck-on-the-shoulder good-for-yous for Canada, many of us probably would have preferred it ten times faster.” Alberta is just Alaska without the igloos, after all. A blogger who paid to be there deemed it “uneventful” — the sycophantic Senator Pamela Wallin appeared to ask a few questions, only to give the former Republican vice-presidential candidate more opportunities to cite “the common sense values” of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, of course, was never caught writing notes on his hand, something Wallin teased Palin about. Her response was a quotation from Isaiah 49:16: “Behold I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.” But, as Kevin Libin notes in the National Post, an act calling global warming “snake oil” wouldn’t likely play in any other Canadian city. Ann Coulter, however, has the guts to first visit London and Ottawa later this month — all the better to tell Calgarians how cowardly those Ontario towns are.