UPDATE: WUSA9 is showing a head-shot for “James Lee” that’s identical to the “mrfifteen” Gravatar from the Save the Planet Protest site. We may have a match.
UPDATE 2: Well, I guess that’s him. He seems to have a problem with Humans, Civilization, War and Greed, and a soft spot for fuzzy animals. The good news is that nobody can hang the “Liberal” label on a guy who writes stuff like this:
5. Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)
Finally, Obam-Ra can stretch his world-bestriding legs in an office that doesn’t look like he won it in a shooting gallery at the Iowa State Fair.
Long-time WH staffers will miss the plastic bowl of Saddam Hussein commemorative PEZ dispensers and Dick Cheney’s quarter-operated blood-pressure-cuff chair, but they’ll doubtlessly appreciate the novelty of navigating through a room with identifiable surfaces in several colors and textures, and furniture that isn’t desert-camo’ed to match the walls.
Because there’s just not enough Truth in the Public Discourse, Glenn Beck has launched his own high-minded, self-policing, politics-neutral beacon of journalistic integrity, The Blaze:
The image of flame is a powerful [No noun in original text, Ed.]. It has long stood for a burning truth. A truth that is not consumed. The Blaze will pursue truth. Of course we will make mistakes. Honest mistakes. And we’ll be quick with corrections. We intend to earn your trust and keep it day in and day out with hard work and a lot of transparency.
Needless to say, the Truth is in no danger of being “consumed” or even casually bumped by a passer-by on Beck’s clunky, eye-hating billboard for Goldline and Tea-Party-Hijacker Dick Armey. Nor is it likely to be invited to a Midtown lunch-meet by Beck’s All-Star Editorial Farm Team of would-be Conservative media party-crashers who never got let past the Velvet Rope:
♦ Scott Baker, Managing Editor: Former Breitbart VP of Business Development and co-founder of Breitbart.tv. Also, an erstwhile Pittsburgh news anchor who self-produces a Conservative vanity video project called The B-Cast...which aptly describes both the program and the talent.
♦ Pam Key, Associate Editor/Video Producer: Former video contributor to the proudly racist, pathologically Obama-hating Naked Emperor News.
♦ Meredith Jessup, Assistant Editor: Former associate editor for the eminently non-agendized Townhall.com and contributing editor for Townhall Magazine.
No doubt, The Blaze will fill America’s aching void of Must-Read, Small-Bore, Lib-Loathing Flackery in the Age of Restoring Honor.
This was fun to watch live. Please note that even though Beck has stopped gel-spiking his hair, he’s still no closer to morphing into Phil Donahue.
ThinkProgress and MediaMatters are all over this, but it can’t be viewed enough. Beck squirms like a slug-in-salt any time he’s compelled to retrofit an intellectual framework to a worldview that is largely informed by a bubbling stew of unexamined guilt, fear and insecurity. The sad thing is, his self-satisfied confusion seems to be contagious. If you were ever in AA, you’ve seen plenty of Becks:
I don’t know about the poor attendees who paid money they don’t have to travel to DC and listen to Glenn’s manic-depressive radio shtick live, but I feel personally cheated when some guy talks me to sleep for three hours and I still crave cigarettes when I wake up.
At least Geraldo had the decency to perform a Tap Dance of Shame when he finally opened the vault and discovered it was the place where Al Capone stored his fill dirt.
I’ll be posting links to other media reactions as I find them. Me, I’m calling it the Million-Man Fart-in-a-Bathtub.
BBC has a slidehow here, with Special Guest Appearance by popular flag-drag Transpatriotite Cap’n Crunch.
Heh. Under the headline “Taking Over the Streets?” Derbyshire at NRO publishes photos from an email fan which the writer avers are “an accurate picture of every Friday afternoon in several locations throughout New York City where there are mosques with a large number of Muslims that cannot fit into the mosque.” Rather than verify the images up-front, he milks their Wholly Speculative Outrage Content, then leaves it to his readers to do his journalism for him:
If this kind of obstruction of roads and sidewalks is really going on in Nurse Bloomberg’s city — where a restaurateur can get a four-digit fine for placing a chair on the sidewalk without the proper permit — it’s a disgrace. But give me the facts, someone, please.
Personally, I always thought it was kind of unifying and uplifting.
Oh, wait. Issa only has a problem with obviously partisan signs that make America feel better in tough times…or mid-term election cycles. Or, say, signage that promotes a really swell thing that he famously voted against.
Someone should tell Issa that signmakers have jobs, too. Asshole.
Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be broken on the lathe of heaven.
NOTE: This was originally going to be a meta-post on the “Journalism of the Imponderable.” Then I found Chesler’s article and realized the word I was looking for was “Insufferable.” Also, I want Congress to pass legislation outlawing provocative interrogatory headlines, just because.
Although most of them don’t realize it, fans of Buffalo Bob, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bart Simpson and ‘60s beach movies are mourning the death of Ed Kean, the original writer for The Howdy Doody Show.
The coining of “Kowabunga” is generally misattributed by generations of Americans too young to qualify for regular colonoscopies. However, a contributor to the online Urban Dictionary has it right:
This was a term used by Chief Thunderthud on the Howdy Doody show in the fifties. It was picked up by surfers in southern California in the late fifties, then skateboarders. Not Swahili, not Hawaiian, not Mutant Ninja Turtles - Howdy Doody.
Kean scripted the seminal TV kiddie show from 1947 to 1954, and is credited with writing its beloved but earwig-like theme song, “It’s Howdy Doody Time.”
RIP Ed. Thanks for the cultural continuity, and praise God you weren’t Bozo.
PS: Please use this thread to cast your nomination for the Teabagger or Wingnut politician most deserving of the appellation “Chief Thunderthud.”
Manning the barricades at the (not)Ground Zero Rally, was an Indian gentleman wearing a Gandhi T-shirt. I found him arguing heatedly with a couple of young men, also from the great subcontinent, who, after this encounter, turned to me and said, “I hope you’re putting this up on YouTube.” Your servant, guys!
Bottom line: This was your Joe-Basic Tea Party rally, minus most of the Gadsden flags and plus EXTRA anger and different costumery. It was, shall we say, intimate; there were fewer people, it seemed, than the last Tea Party rally in Manhattan, and that one didn’t fill up the space allotted it, either. The rain was only sporadic until after Pamela Gellar’s Mosquetastic Hyster-0-Rama exploitation fantasy concluded, so the unimpressive crowd can’t be blamed on that.
I’m convinced this mosque was Obama’s idea. The notion of it and its location. I think he knows he’ll be a one-term president and wants as much destruction to the American psyche as possible. The legacy this man is now establishing is a continuation of the terrorism unleashed in the 90s and defined by 9/11.
Homer Simpson hates his relentlessly pre-Rapturous neighbor Ned Flanders so much that even when an accident reduced Homer’s brain capacity to a single functioning cell, it was able to spell out the words “Kill Flanders” on an ICU monitor.
That’s where Sarah Palin seems to be at with her multi-generational vendetta against Alaska’s Republican Murkowski dynasty. In 2002, newly-elected Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski snubbed the ambitious Wasilla mayor by appointing his own daughter Lisa to fill the state’s empty US Senate seat. As a political sop, he appointed Palin to the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission, a position from which she would eventually resign. In 2006, the ascendant Palin defeated a by-then-disgraced Murkowski in the Republican gubernatorial primary, subsequently winning and then resigning the Governorship in what is now perceived as her classic pattern of Preemptive Auto-Impeachment.
Two years earlier, in 2004, Palin had declined to run against the younger Murkowski for the first full term of her appointed Senate seat, citing family reasons—i.e., not wanting her family to watch her get shucked and sheaved by a powerful Father/Daughter political combine. After Palin’s unsuccessful 2008 run for Miss Veepoverse, some of her supporters hoped she would use the mystical Cloak of Unearned Importance bequeathed to her by an aging, befuddled John McCain to win and resign Lisa Murkowski’s office in 2010. Instead, she backed plaid-shirted Tea Party fave Joe Miller—because what’s the point of running for office when you control the Universe from a bear-skin-draped Zamboni in your Arctic Fortress of Nebbitude?
Cut to the chase: Most polls had Murkowski with a comfortable lead of 30 points or so over Miller, until Tea Party Express announced an unpublished mystery poll indicating that the gap had astonishingly closed to about 10 points in a matter of weeks. Cue Sarah’s Friday Facebook emission asking for $30,000 in last-minute contributions to Miller’s campaign, coupled with a same-day Tea Party Express mass-email from Todd Palin calling for a $150,000 “money-bomb” for Miller in advance of the Tuesday primary.
