Sarah Palin’s stepping down as governor of Alaska. Vodkapundit’s take is this:

I can describe this move in three words: Stupid, stupid, stupid. And the reason doesn’t matter.

She needs more time to run for President? What does she think holding the job is like, time-wise? President Obama could manage to serve as a totally undistinguished Senator while running for the White House; surely Palin could manage to govern half a million people a bit.

She wants to protect her family? Heat, low tolerance, kitchen, stay out of. And again, if she wants to be President, how does she think her family would fare in the White House?

…

No matter the reason, however, Palin made a commitment to the people of Alaska, and she’s turning her back on them. Maybe I’m rash in saying this, but I think that makes her unfit for higher office.

My sense is that Steve Green would normally be correct, but it’s become obvious since her nomination last year that her supporters (like her detractors) don’t apply the same standards to her that they purport to apply to others. It’s possible that if she seems to have been driven out of office by elitist nastiness, the experience could come to be regarded as, for lack of a better word, sanctifying. If she reemerges when her children are older, who knows? We’ll see what develops. Whatever the case, I wish her the best. I’ve doubted whether she was cut out for national office since not long after her famous first speech at the RNC, but no politician deserves the kind of shredding she got.

Added before giving myself wholly over to my inalienable right, with which I’m endowed by my Creator, to more Scotch (because Scotland was a center of the Enlightenment, of course): Heather Mac Donald, unsurprisingly, has commented on the Palin resignation at her current berth at Secular Right:

Now it’s Sarah Palin’s turn.   That icon of right-wing identity politics, revered for her populist authenticity  and lack of any taint of elite intellectualism, shows herself either to be involved in an as-yet-to-be-revealed scandal, or so nakedly ambitious that she lightly breaks her commitment to the people of Alaska.   Can’t wait to see how her apologists will spin this bit of hypocrisy.

She cites her City Journal articles from last year at those links. (Am I prescient, or what?)

The Unreligious Right has a similar take:

I’ve seen nothing to indicate that Palin would be a better candidate in 2012, or that she in any way deserves a presidential or even vice-presidential nomination. Her followers among the base of the party are fanatical worshippers who can’t tolerate any criticism of Palin, no matter how well deserved. They remind me of some Obama-supporters.

A few weeks ago, Freeman Hunt wrote a post about why we may not be able to expect another Reagan or Thatcher, let alone Jefferson:

Who will be the next Reagan? Who will be our Thatcher? Who will show encroaching statism for the tyranny it is and turn the tide against it? Nevermind that Reagan and Thatcher, while they did make great gains, did not turn that tide permanently. We expect some even greater personage. The minute a promising face appears we ask, “Could it be? Is this the one?”

…

He is not coming. And he is not coming because we have not produced him. From whence would he come? We are an ignorant people. Our best and brightest, outside of the hard sciences, are a sorry lot by historical standards. Intelligence, we have. Wit, we have in surplus. But knowledge? Real, discriminating knowledge, where is it? Our standards for knowledge are now so low. Now we are only required to sound as if we know. We are masters of rhetorical style, but of wisdom there is a dearth.

I don’t know that I buy the implication for politics there. That there are far too few comprehensively learned people running about, considering the money and hot air we expend on the educational system, I do agree with wholeheartedly. I suspect, though, that there are enough to go around (especially if you believe in smaller government). The problem is convincing them to leave the private sector, where they’re usefully serving markets and probably deriving immense satisfaction from concrete accomplishments.

And here’s a great way conservatives can ensure that tough-minded persons of deep learning about history and deep commitment to applying them to the American enterprise stay as far away from politics as possible: keep pulling the crap you did with Palin. Like Eric, I’m a libertarian rather than a conservative myself, but one issue on which I was always willing to get behind the right was the value of encouraging people to strive for such greatness as they could achieve in whatever they did. The highest possible standards.

Then Sarah Palin came along, and all that lofty stuff went straight out the window because she was the right kind of person. I found Palin’s family charming and her story inspiring, but it was most assuredly not charming to see commentators on the right attributing any aspersions cast on Palin’s qualifications to envy or secret leftist sympathies. That’s the kind of flim-flamming that convinces Independents that conservatives are as manipulative and unprincipled as liberals.

The MOF has been looking into some of the projects Tokyo’s funding, and—surprise!—there’s waste:

The Finance Ministry said Friday it found wasteful or inefficient spending for all 57 government projects it has examined, including 11 projects that simply are not needed.

The 57 projects, worth 2.1 trillion yen, are among 73 projects at 14 ministries and agencies that the Finance Ministry is examining this fiscal year concerning budget allocations.

“A thorough checking is done when the budget is formed, but some of the wasted spending turns up due to differences in value judgment,” Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano said at a news conference Friday. “We will thoroughly remove the obvious wasteful spending.”

…

The ministry will ask the Defense Ministry to find a more efficient way to buy weapons and other equipment.

Inefficient spending was found in all eight projects involving contracts with outside businesses.

The Finance Ministry will order corrections to the Fisheries Agency’s project to research next-generation fishing boats because it may unfairly restrict entries of new business operators in the project.

…

The ministry said its fiscal 2008 examination led to savings of 32.4 billion yen, which was carried over to the current fiscal year’s budget.

In a weirdly complementary way, dead and non-existent people have been wasting their money, too…on donations to the DPJ (the major opposition party).

Yukio Hatoyama, president of opposition Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan), on Tuesday acknowledged fabricated donations and apologized.

Dead people and people who had never made political donations were listed as individual donors in his political fund reports, Hatoyama said.

…

Hatoyama’s state-funded aide in charge of accounting used part of the opposition leader’s own money for the nonexistent donations. The aide did so to conceal his failure to collect donations from individuals, Hatoyama said.

Hatoyama claimed the aide, who had served the politician for over 20 years, acted on his own without the knowledge of the Minshuto chief.

Even so, Hatoyama’s political fund reports clearly contained false information about donations in violation of the Political Fund Control Law. Hatoyama bears a heavy responsibility for the wrongdoing.

Between 4 million yen and 7 million yen of Hatoyama’s money was diverted every year for the misdeed.

Although he is known for his immense personal wealth, Hatoyama’s annual income is less than 30 million yen, according to data published Tuesday.

Hatoyama entrusted more than 10 million yen to his aide to cover his personal expenses. But was the money really Hatoyama’s? Or did it contain illegal donations whose sources had to be kept secret? There are many other questions that remain unanswered.

Happily, there’s always a new dirty-money scandal to wick away attention from the current one. The latest, fortunately for the DPJ, involves the ruling coalition (as it usually does, of course, since it’s the LDP and its partners that have power to sell). Indeed, it involves a new cabinet member:

The LDP’s local chapter in the 10th constituency in Chiba Prefecture did not report 200,000 yen donated by a local civil engineering company in its political funding report for fiscal 2005.

…

While admitting the negligence in the financial records and that he had been personally acquainted with the company president, Hayashi denied personally receiving any funds.

The problem was covered in the July 12 issue of the Sunday Mainichi weekly magazine, in which the 56-year-old president of the civil contractor revealed that he had been footing the accommodation and meal costs for Hayashi’s secretary under his own name, in a bid for Hayashi’s assistance in securing a Haneda Airport project contract.

“It’s nothing but fraud. They just took money and gave us no contract,” said the president in another interview with the Mainichi Shimbun Thursday.

JPY200000 is only about USD2000, so we’re not talking huge amounts of money here. I do like, however, the contractor’s bald-faced admission that he was trying to buy a government contract and froth of righteous indignation that it didn’t work.