This may explain the origin of "refudiate".

[no_hypocrisy]

http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2010/11/sarah-palin-pac-joshua-livestro

A search of British business records turned up a company called Paideia Limited. Livestro is its sole director and shareholder.

The 40-year-old is not your typical hire for an American political operation. He has worked as a columnist for the Benelux version of Reader's Digest and the Dutch newspaper De Telegraf. He's also the founder and editor-in-chief of De Dagelijkse Standaard (or, The Daily Standard), a right-wing political blog that weighs in frequently on Palin. In the 1990s, he worked with England's Conservative Party; he went on to become an assistant to Frits Bolkestein, then a European Commission member for internal market and financial services.

More recently, he's been a combative contributor to the website Conservatives4Palin. There he took on Palin's critics on the left and the right, attacking journalists including Marc Ambinder (then of The Atlantic, now of National Journal), Politico's Ben Smith, and National Review's Jonah Goldberg, among many others.

Not surprisingly, Livestro's views skew to the right. He helped to found the Edmund Burke Foundation, a right-wing Dutch think tank created to push back against progressive politics in the Netherlands. In one manifesto, citing the number of Muslims in the Netherlands, the foundation warned of ethnic conflict and said the country's borders should be closed. In the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland, Livestro once wrote that the gruesome photos depicting detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib resembled little more than an out-of-control frat party; he complained that Abu Ghraib critics were "cry-babies" exaggerating the episode's signficiance. On his blog, Livestro similarly quipped that the CIA's torture techniques—with the exception of waterboarding—were milder than the hazing methods of fraternities. On the issue of climate change, Livestro falls into the denier camp: Last year, he wrote that the Climategate e-mail scandal showed there was no need for tackling a global climate treaty.

SarahPAC's filings note that Paideia provides "research consulting." On Friday, in an article about Palin's 2012 aspirations, Real Clear Politics reported in passing that Livestro had been hired by the Palin camp to advise her on the European debt crisis. (The story didn't mention Livestro's company, Paideia.) Recently, Palin, who is positioning herself for a possible presidential bid, has increasingly been weighing in on financial matters. Earlier this month, she panned the Federal Reserve's decision to buy billions in Treasury bonds to boost the economy. And she jousted with the Wall Street Journal, which had debunked some of her views on monetary policy.

-more-

[dipsydoodle]

1. But it doesn't provide any information

regarding which actual variety of cabbage seeds she was grown from.