Move over, Don Juan Matus. Joe Miller is about to explain the nagual and tonal of the Tea Party’s “Yankee Way of Knowledge.”
He’s well-spoken, went to Yale and wears a suit. Otherwise, he’s a standard-issue Bircher from 1967, pitching 1930s-style nationalist chauvinism, Robber-Barron Rules of prosperity and a denial of the necessity of Global Engagement that became untenable with the invention of radio, the rise of cheap international shipping, the proliferation of computers throughout the developing nations and the discovery that China has a monopoly on the world’s supply of the Rare Earth elements that make all of our gizmos work.
I know it’s only a :90 clip—but, Christ: Does this yokel have any policy positions that don’t boil down to all the Freedom-Good-Obama-Bad power-stones he can fit in his Feathered Bag of Exceptionalism?
A newly designated protected class, “T-Party Americans,” got a Snowflake Snooki shout-out for being praised by a wingnut radio talk show host. Truly it is a remarkable thing when an objective, disinterested, nonpartisan figure like Levin recognizes the contributions of a patriotic, grassroots, nonpartisan group like “T-Party Americans.”
Kinda puts that whole “Nobel Peace Prize” thing into perspective, huh?
I’ve seen a number of critiques of the Beck-Palin phenomenon lately that attribute The Rise of the Silver Slurpers to a simple longing for leadership in these tumultuous times. There was this NYT op-ed over the weekend by Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister, lefty feminists pining for “A Palin of Our Own.”
Since the 2008 election, progressive leaders have done little to address the obvious national appetite for female leadership. And despite (or because of) their continuing obsession with Ms. Palin, they have done nothing to stop an anti-choice, pro-abstinence, socialist-bashing Tea Party enthusiast from becoming the 21st century symbol of American women in politics.
The left’s failure to nurture and celebrate female politicians has had a significant effect on its policies. In recent years, Democratic majorities and progressive legislation seem to have been built on steady trade-offs of reproductive rights, culminating this year when the first female speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was forced to push through health care reform with a compromise on abortion financing.
An older generation of female Democrats, including Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Pelosi, are about as eager to mount a Palin-style girl-powered campaign as they are to wear a miniskirt on the House floor. For them, proudly or aggressively touting one’s feminist credentials (if you’re actually a feminist, that is) is taboo. It’s considered too, well, female.
I call bullshit on this. First of all, let’s look at the examples they cited: Clinton, Pelosi and Palin. Hillary Clinton is arguably the most powerful woman on the planet, busily running the foreign policy apparatus of the world’s only super power. Nancy Pelosi is the only female Speaker of the House—ever—and a highly effective legislator in that role by any objective measure. And Sarah Palin is…an occasional Fox News contributor, a former second-fiddle on a losing presidential ticket and a half-term governor who quit every important job she ever held.
Sorry, ladies, but I’ll match our record up with the GOP’s on women’s leadership any day of the week. Sure, Palin has a creepily devoted fan base and scads of Facebook friends. So does Lady Gaga. And Lady Gaga has more progressive policy chops.
Silly media reports“maybe thousands”@Beck’s “irrelevant” event;insinuating MSM sheeple mustn’t believe their own eyes&ears re: event’s truth about 4 hours ago via Twitter for BlackBerry® Retweeted by 100+ people
SarahPalinUSA
Snooki should have stopped typing after “Silly me.”
The Kwittin’ Image swooped in for a cameo, the Weeping Hamster thrilled to his own voice while conferring Wingnut Decorations upon some Rotary Club presidents, and there were more black entertainment acts than the Stax 50th anniversary concert. The Special Ops Warriors Foundation gets a boatload of money in exchange for providing cover for the Cuddly Savonarola, and everybody’s happy! Isn’t that what counts?
Richard Trumka had some tough words for Alaska’s Miss Pre-Teen Pretender in a preview of his planned remarks to the Alaska AFL-CIO Biennial Convention.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is calling Sarah Palin “almost a parody of herself” who will “go down in history like McCarthy” in a speech in Alaska today.
Note to Sarah: When someone accuses you of being a parody of yourself, don’t react by by being a parody of yourself.
Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin will speak at the Lincoln Memorial this Saturday on the anniversary of the date when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at that very same spot.
It’s totally a coincidence that Beck scheduled his “Restoring Honor” rally on that date and at that place. He’s just trying to reclaim the civil rights movement. Black people don’t own MLK, you know.
Now, MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech is perhaps the most inspiring, soaring rhetoric ever produced in the history of this country. That makes it a tough act to follow, even 47 years later.
Are Beck and Palin up to the challenge? Let’s compare and contrast:
I dunno. Somehow I think MLK will still kinda own that venue—even after Saturday.
The NIH has issued a public health advisory about yet another outbreak of the persistent opportunistic contagious inflammatory disease quitterrhea among vulnerable populations.
The etiology of quitterrhea is well understood. The causative bacterium, Wackaloonia me-me-memensisMcCain, is spread by contact with exudate from an agent infected with Twitterrhea. This can be exacerbated by repeated exposure to the closely associated logorrhea.
If untreated, it may lead to relatively shortlived, unfocused outbreaks of blogorrhea, which can be remedied successfully by liberal application of topical preparations.
In an informal briefing, an NIH spokesperson reported yesterday: “We’d be more worried, but all the evidence is that this strain of Wackaloonia has one fatal flaw in its genetic makeup. Its half-life among the general population is relatively short.”
When asked to clarify this in lay terms, she said: “Well, at a certain point in the development of each episode, it just seems to give up and go dormant until it moves on to its next set of victims.”
I think Tbogg is onto something here. Citing Palin’s hand-picked protégé Joe Miller’s relentless pimping of his rugged outdoorsy-ness, moose-bloodlust, etc., Tbogg says:
We get it. You’re an outdoorsman and you’re all macho and shit with your manscaped beard, but, seriously, after the last couple of years of listening to that babbling snowbilly grifter natter on about your Alabama-with-a-snowpack hellstate, we’re kinda of Alaska’d out about the Great White North and we wish you guys would just take our tax dollars and shut the fuck up about your bullshit last frontier self-sufficiency.
Yep. And yet, I pity the Alaskans not named Joe W. Miller and Sarah Palin, for they are being stereotyped by the Snowflake Snooki Moose-Killin’, Salmon-Slayin’ Minstrel Show.
I know what it’s like to have your state thrust onto the national political stage because of the antics of a handful of dumbasses. No one who lived in Florida during the 2000 election recount will ever forget the shame of “Floriduh”—the officials staring at hanging chads in slack-jawed amazement, the Condo Commandos accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan, etc.
Or maybe not. But whatever it is that’s keeping her away from her Blackberry today, I’m sure she hopes that all good Americans will go to the polls and vote for the Teabagger/RINO/Sociopath of Sarah’s choice.
John McCain, Joe Miller, Paul Gosar, Allen West and Pam Bondi (Did I miss anyone?) are all in play today. I’ll be monitoring the AK returns, since I have to be up all night anyway.
For sheer krazy-on-krazy action, Quayle vs. Gorman is worth watching, even though Sarah—surprisingly—doesn’t have a horse in that nutjob-rich race.
I get tired of hearing that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution are rooted in Judeo-Christian law, and Betty’s post on Erick al-Amriki convinced me to finally publish my Quick-Scan Bible-America Concordance:
1 And God spoke all these words:
2 “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
3 “You shall have no other gods before [a] me.
4 “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7 “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
8 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. 11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
12 “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.
13 “You shall not murder.
14 “You shall not commit adultery.
15 “You shall not steal.
16 “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
Yep, that’s it—America and God share prohibitions against Murder, Theft and Perjury, and all the rest is a) safety tips for stress-free nomadic living and b) God demanding Evian water, BLUE-ONLY M&Ms and 10% of T-shirt sales.
Suck it, Sarah. America isn’t based on Biblical Law; Biblical Law is based on cave paintings. Anyway, Hammurabi did it better—and way ahead of the Jews.
