Nine days ago we noted how the Drudge Report, which pushed the bogus Ashley Todd “mutilation” story relentlessly, didn’t have anything up about a black Staten Island teen who was allegedly beaten with baseball bats by white men yelling “Obama!” Well, it’s not alleged anymore. Two men were charged with assault this morning (you’ve gotta see the picture of one of ‘em):
Two Staten Island teen-agers have been arrested this morning in connection with the beating of a black Muslim teen, allegedly at the hands of a carload of white men furious over Barack Obama’s election victory.
Ralph Nicoletti, 18, of Wadsworth Avenue, Fort Wadsworth and Bryan Garaventa, 18, of Maryland Avenue in Rosebank, were arrested yesterday and charged by police with second-degree assault, a hate crime, and criminal possession of a weapon, according to police.
More from the Daily News and NY1. Absolutely nothing about it on the Drudge Report.
RELATED: New Jersey, any chance you wanna take Staten Island off our hands? Seriously. We’ll even throw in the ferries.
Just 45% of Americans would like to see Sarah Palin become a major national political figure for many years to come, while a slight majority of 52% say they would not. These sentiments are sharply divided along partisan political lines.
Over three-quarters of Republicans would like to see the former vice-presidential nominee and current governor of Alaska become a major national political figure in the years ahead, in sharp contrast to the 43% of independents and 20% of Democrats who share that attitude.
I know a few commenters have self-diagnosed themselves with extreme cases of SPF (Sarah Palin Fatigue), but count me among the 20% of Democrats who never want her to go away.
RELATED: Looks like we won’t be seeing her in the Senate any time soon. Begich now leads Steven by over 800 votes.
BLITZER: Does that mean you want to come up with a new Sarah Palin initiative that you want to release right now.
PALIN: Gah! Nothing specific right now. Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.
After watching this I feel really sorry for Piper Palin. A lot of folks were asking why Sarah Palin, aka the World’s Greatest Mother, was dragging her two youngest daughters around with her everywhere on the campaign trail (and occasionally using them as human boo shields). It’s pretty obvious from this quick chat with Matt Lauer that Piper would have rather been home going to school like Malia and Sasha Obama instead of being exploited like a political show pony. I’m sorry, but that’s just plain sad (and wrong). And you can tell from how Sarah’s voice trails off at the end of this clip ("Yeah, that was fun...") that she knows it, too.
How can the GOP counter Obama’s appeal to a country weary of war, economic crisis, incompetence and mindless ideological attacks? Here’s Bill Kristol’s brilliant solution:
And it wouldn’t hurt for Governors Sarah Palin, Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal and the other possible 2012 G.O.P. nominees to begin bringing some puppies home for their kids.
No, really. I’ve heard rumblings about Kristol’s NYT contract not being renewed at the end of this year. This is the man who brought us Palin. He is indispensable to our cause. Perhaps a letter writing campaign to retain him is in order.
There was grumbling that Palin had jumped the gun by bringing up [William] Ayers at her rallies before the campaign could properly do the groundwork with a rollout strategy and ads. (At one rally, she had talked about Obama “palling around with terrorists.") Palin was mad at her handlers. Reportedly, she felt that [Nicole] Wallace and [Steve] Schmidt had poorly coached and advised her. One adviser later speculated that she impulsively talked about Ayers because she felt thwarted—she had really wanted to bring up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Actually, Palin was feeling hurt and angry over the tabloid treatment of her 17-year-old daughter Bristol, and decided—on her own—that Ayers should be fair game. McCain’s advisers were working on a strategy that would launch an Ayers attack the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and [Mark] Salter was resisting.)
A lot of folks have been chattering about how Palin “jumped the gun” on the Ayers rollout with the implication being that she went “rogue” because she felt McCain’s advisers weren’t being politically aggressive enough, but the video interview with Newsweek‘s Katie Connolly at their site sheds light on the real reason Palin brought up Ayers earlier than planned:
“She was feeling very betrayed by what happened with her daughter and having seeing her daughter Bristol splashed across all of the tabloids because of her pregnancy and when her email account got hacked she found that incredibly difficult to deal with and Bristol Palin started getting awful emails and text messages from random strangers about her pregnancy. Palin herself was feeling that if her family can become under this sort of attack why can’t we bring up some of Barack Obama’s associations?”
Here’s the video. The relevant portion starts at about the 45 second mark, including some additional insight from Evan Thomas:
In short, Palin was frustrated about occurrences the Obama campaign had nothing to do with and she lashed out at Barack to make herself feel better. That’s a classic example of anger displacement and not the kind of behavior you’d like to see from a vice presidential candidate. America dodged a bigass bullet keeping this spiteful ignoramus one heartbeat away from the presidency. We all know she doesn’t have the necessary intellect for the job, but it should be fairly obvious after this revelation that she doesn’t possess a modicum of the required temperament either.
Can someone please HELP me. I can’t turn off the video of Sarah “One Million Strong”. I closed out all of the pages, including all videos and every time I reboot, it starts playing????
... and linked to a Newsweek article with this headline:
The Cantor Brand
A rising star in the GOP wants a new leadership role
Matthews eats him alive in the clip, but it’s not the first time. In the February 2007 Hardball episode below, Cantor asserts, unequivocally, that it is the President, not Congress who is given power by the Constitution to declare war. Cantor even cites the War Powers Act, getting it completely backwards. You have to see it to believe there is actually an elected politician who is dumber than Sarah Palin.
I’ve checked out Van Susteren’s “GretaWire” blog a few times this election cycle and every time I do, she’s serving up steaming bowls of stupid:
This picture is on the front page of FoxNews.com…I don’t want to have the role of the defender of women…or defender of any particular women…but what’s with this pic? Governor Palin has drawn bigger crowds than any of these men ….even her state (Alaska) is bigger than any of the three governors (Florida, Louisiana, Minnesota) whose pictures appears here…
Okay, I’m going to ask it: Why are so many gay men who supported Hillary vehemently against Obama and rabidly supporting McCain and Palin now? The reason I’m asking is that the video Drudge is promoting currently of Obama allegedly giving McCain the finger (yes, here we go again) came from a gay Hillary-to-McCain supporter and a lot (a majority?) of the men who self-identify as PUMAs appear to be gay. I’m baffled as to why so many of them loathe Obama. Sure, he’s against gay marriage (for the record, I’m not), but so are a lot of Democrats. A McCain/Palin administration would be awful for gay rights and Obama has come out in opposition of Prop 8 (good luck getting McCain or Palin to do that). I just don’t get it. Any ideas? It’s gotta be about more than McClurkin, right? Or did that bad idea snowball and not stop rolling?
Everyman’s everyman Joe “Gumby Head” Scarborough, with help from Mika Brzezinski and Tucker Carlson, was just on MSNBC extolling the abundant virtues of Sarah Palin after viewing a live feed of her rally in Lakewood, Ohio. She’s so smart, mismanaged and misunderstood, they opined; Scarborough gushing that she was a “political animal” and “the future of the Republican party” (woo hoo!—say it’s so, Joe!). He then offered up the ratings she garnered on Saturday Night Live and during the vice presidential debate as proof that America loved her. No, you beady-eyed ignoramus, Americans love train wrecks. Gigantic, flaming train wrecks:
McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate doesn’t appear to be wearing well with most Americans. In the poll, 45% of registered voters rated the choice as “poor” and another 18% said it was “only fair,” while 19% called it “pretty good” and 16% excellent. [...]
Palin has a favorable-unfavorable rating of 42%-49%.
Compare that to the future of the Democratic party:
One more historic tidbit from the survey: Obama’s favorable rating is 62%—the highest that any presidential candidate has registered in Gallup’s final pre-election polls going back to 1992.
RELATED: I really wish someone would do a study regarding “train wreck traffic” for wingnut and PUMA blogs (I know, same thing). I’d put money of the fact that at the very least 33% of their traffic is culled from snickering rubberneckers.
McCain addressed a small crowd in Tampa, estimated at about 1,100 people.
Local reporters pointed out that just before the 2004 election, President Bush drew about 15,000.
RELATED: As noted above, Tucker Carlson crawled out of whatever dank little hole MSNBC stuffs pundits with shitty ratings into to pump up Sarah Palin this morning. At one point he raved that she didn’t even use a teleprompter during her rally in Lakewood.
