Have you heard of the Online Tax Revolt? It’s a lame-ass wingnut protest that happens to be a perfect metaphor for our age: Chairborne conservatives too lazy to get off their sedentary asses even for a local teabag fest can instead choose avatars for a “virtual” anti-tax march on Washington.
Here’s how it works: You select an avatar and walk it across a map to DC. You can choose to join a team if you like. The teams have names like “Thayrone’s Fair Tax Wolverines.” (I did not make that up.)
Here are some of the avatars you can select to represent yourself:
These avatars were unfortunately not included:
But then it gets weird—the site has a Leaders page featuring personalized avatars for a select group of conservative luminaries.
John McCain just can’t make up his mind. Is he a maverick or isn’t he? As reported by Gawker McCain gave an interview to Newsweek in which he proclaimed “I never considered myself a maverick”.
Say whut? OK, so many of us never really thought you were actually a maverick (I won’t go into what we did think) but you certainly thought so, hell, you said it every chance you got!
But it seems that McCain the Mavericky Maverick is not what John perceives the Arizona voters want this time around. Apparently they want hard-line conservatives who toe the party line and attract smart people like Sarah Palin (yay!) to their campaign rallies. And so, in what may be the maverickiest maverick move of all (drum roll) McCain proclaims himself as never having been a maverick at all!
For those of you who want to fondly remember the now dead-to-McCain old Maverick persona, TPM has put together a little farewell.
Appearing at a John McCain campaign rally in Arizona today, Sarah trumpets that “We’re not the Party of No. We’re the Party of HELL NO!” Which, I think, kind of describes the Half Governor’s direction as much as the Republican Party’s. There’s a short video clip of her speaking at the link which you can listen to if you can stomach it. I couldn’t.
And WTF was up with that middle-age-biker-babe-with-an-updo look that she’s sporting?
Mark Udall, one of Colorado’s Democratic senators, had scheduled a committee meeting Tuesday to discuss Udall’s proposed bill to protect communities in the Rocky Mountain west from the pine bark beetle invasion.
For a little background - partly as a result of overgrown forests and partly as a result of a serious drought in the area a few years back, the Rocky Mountains has suffered a serious infestation of pine bark beetles. The upshot of an infestation is that pine trees, primarily lodge poles which are extremely prevalent in the Rockies, are killed dead in a year. Estimates are that this epidemic will eventually kill around 90% of the lodge poles. This has many consequences including greatly increased fire danger for the few years that the dead trees hold dry pine needles, loss of habitat for wildlife and danger from falling trees blown over by the wind, to name just a few.
John McCain was Udall’s partner on the legislation and, in fact, visited Colorado last summer to review the devastated areas with Udall.
But, UH-OH, McDiapers haz a cranky now because the mean old Dems got health care through. So he invoked a little used Senate rule requiring unanimous consent to hold a committee meeting after 2:00 pm and withheld his consent. Because the livelihood and lives of Western Americans are nothing in the face of his enormous pique.
Oh, and the time of Colorado State Senator Dan Gibbs who flew to Washington especially to testify was not worth a tinker’s damn either.
This is the guy that some people actually thought should be president.
Not wishing to be completely sidelined in the narrative sweep of history, Sarah Palin (R-Grifterville) has twatted a small but perfectly formed malodorous pile of timely homespun wisdom for her followers:
Will the glory of this day never end? Noted angry person John McCain says Americans are even angrier than he is about this damn health care bill!
If I were America’s wife, I’d stop slathering makeup on like some trollop and flee to one of my alternate homes until America’s inchoate rage passes. If I were America’s pet, I’d cower behind the sofa until this blows over unless I wanted my furry butt kicked.
A lot of blogs are posting this CBS news video of an angry teabagger yelling into the door of Rep. Gerry Connolly’s office today (before it’s shut in his face):
I’m pretty certain that this is our ol’ pal Tito the Builder. I’m not a voice specialist, but the man in the video sounds just like Tito, who is also a Colombian immigrant. In addition, the man from today’s video is wearing a wedding band that looks just the one Tito can be seen wearing in this video. I’m not 100% sure since Tito always wore sunglasses and I can’t find any evidence of him boasting about being arrested four times in his former country, but I’d put down a pretty sizable sum on a bet if anyone wants to take me up on it…
UPDATE: It’s gotta be Tito. Gerry Connolly represents VA’s 11th district and he has an office (listed at the bottom of this page) in Woodbridge, the home of Deborn Construction, Inc., the company Tito owns.
Casual observers may believe Obama beat McCain because of things like effective organization, disgust with failed Republican policies, a VP candidate who wasn’t a booger-eating moron, etc. But the GOP poobahs know better: The party that transformed an addled, daddy-dependent, AWOL, prep-school cheerleader into Commander Codpiece understands the power of image.
Before McCain had even delivered his concession speech in 2008, the people who really run the GOP (hint: the money people, not the tea party yahoos, dittoheads, Paultards, etc.) identified the cause of the loss and were busily engaged in developing a new strategy.
Cuz McCain so sux. He ruined *Joe’s* life by catapulting him to a position where he could strut around acting like a celebrity and pretending that he has anything worthwhile to say.
Can’t someone find the hook and jerk this boob off the stage? I mean it seems like his 15 minutes is long over.
According to AP, freshly-minted US Senator from Massachusetts Scott Brown is prepared to “go rogue” in ways that may not delight Conservative supporters who hyped his campaign image as the “anti-Obama,” and viewed his election as a door-slamming rejection of the Democratic Senate agenda.
Scott Brown says he has already told Senate Republican leaders they won’t always be able to count on his vote. The man who staged an upset in last week’s Massachusetts Senate special election, in part by pledging to be the 41st GOP vote against President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday that he staked his claim in early conversations with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Whip Jon Kyl.
“I already told them, you know, `I got here with the help of a close group of friends and very little help from anyone down there, so there’ll be issues when I’ll be with you and there are issues when I won’t be with you,’” Brown said Thursday during the half-hour interview. “So, I just need to look at each vote and then make a proper analysis and then decide.”
Brown’s studly 1982 nude pictorial in Cosmo inspired some of his female admirers to dub him “Hottie McAwesome.” But the thought that “McAwesome” could rhyme with “McCain” is a stick of political mind-candy that makes even us Radical Lefties a little bit horny.
