One of my daily stops has become The Mudflats where I find a nice dose of political reality from the far north. Yesterday was a sad one because it seems that one of the duly elected Democrats up there has taken it upon himself to “out” the author of that blog.
Why did he do it? It was her choice to remain anonymous and she probably had a very good reason for doing so. He chose to use public time and money to hunt her down and make her public.
Blogs are not journalism. She was not writing for pay but to express her opinion about the state of Alaskan politics. Her blog, her rules.
So today I’m reading about the aftermath and came across another blog which is going into my list of faves. And this is where I have to ask where all this hate and vitriol and just pure fugliness is coming from.
Go on. I dare you. Go to this blog and read the hate mail this woman has received and tell me this is America. I’ll wait.
The vileness of those people makes me ill. As angry as I was over the last 8 years during the Bush (mis)administration I NEVER resorted to that kind of verbal violence. I wrote letters to the editor of the Casper Star Tribune and got bashed almost as badly as Diva has been. Being print, of course the CST wouldn’t print foul language but I took some major personal hits.
What is it with the personal attacks? You don’t like someone’s opinion why do you feel the need to attack them?
You tell me … what has happened to us that we have sunk so low.
OK first off I have a receipt from Big A Convenience in Wheatland, WY dated 11/21/08 (hubby was headed to Colorado and stopped to gas up) and the price for unleaded was
are you ready?
$1.229 a gallon!!
Seems they were having a price war (WTF?! I haven’t heard that term since the early 70’s!)
So I ask you. Just WHAT do you think Big Oil is pulling here? Last summer we were paying over $4 a gallon here in Wyoming (yeah, that’s right. We’re one of the “energy” states. Coal, oil, uranium, etc). And now that dubya is a dead duck (he passed “lame” about midnight EST on November 5th) and the bank barons and automotive dukes are looking to rob the taxpayer one last freaking time before the Big O takes over, we’re seeing TRUE prices at the pump.
I’m not going to get into a rant on the bailouts. Not today I’m not. I’m trying to protect my digestive tract so I can enjoy my turkey. Instead I offer up for today’s amusement a couple of “thank you, Sarah Palin” ads:
And yeah, sure, you betcha that funny group is dead serious.
So to ease your digestion a bit, here’s a more appropriate thank you:
Can’t get enough Palin? Yeah right, me too. And also. I wish she’d shut up.
Except. Well, the fun thing is finding gems like this one from Dick Cavett about the twit from Alaska:
Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn’t ailing. Three out of these five implements — answering machine, fax machine, printer, phone and electric can-opener — all dropped dead on me in the past few days.
Now something has gone wrong with all three television sets. They will only get Sarah Palin.
I can play a kind of Alaskan roulette. Any random channel clicked on by the remote brings up that eager face, with its continuing assaults on the English Lang.
There she is with Larry and Matt and just about everyone else but Dr. Phil (so far). If she is not yet on “Judge Judy,” I suspect it can’t be for lack of trying.
What have we done to deserve this, this media blitz that the astute Andrea Mitchell has labeled “The Victory Tour”?
I suppose it will be recorded as among political history’s ironies that Palin was brought in to help John McCain. I can’t blame feminists who might draw amusement from the fact that a woman managed to both cripple the male she was supposed to help while gleaning an almost Elvis-sized following for herself. Mac loses, Sarah wins big-time was the gist of headlines.
I feel a little sorry for John. He aimed low and missed.
What will ambitious politicos learn from this? That frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences that ramble on long after thought has given out completely are a candidate’s valuable traits?
And how much more of all that lies in our future if God points her to those open-a-crack doors she refers to? The ones she resolves to splinter and bulldoze her way through upon glimpsing the opportunities, revealed from on high.
What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the syntax-serial-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”
My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.
And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”
It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.
(A cynic might wonder if Wasilla High School’s English and geography departments are draped in black.)
(How many contradictory and lying answers about The Empress’s New Clothes have you collected? I’ve got, so far, only four. Your additional ones welcome.)
Matt Lauer asked her about her daughter’s pregnancy and what went into the decision about how to handle it. Her “answer” did not contain the words “daughter,” “pregnancy,” “what to do about it” or, in fact, any two consecutive words related to Lauer’s query.
I saw this as a brief clip, so I don’t know whether Lauer recovered sufficiently to follow up, or could only sit there, covered in disbelief. If it happens again, Matt, I bequeath you what I heard myself say once to an elusive guest who stiffed me that way: “Were you able to hear any part of my question?”
At the risk of offending, well, you, for example, I worry about just what it is her hollering fans see in her that makes her the ideal choice to deal with the world’s problems: collapsed economies, global warming, hostile enemies and our current and far-flung twin battlefronts, either of which may prove to be the world’s second “30 Years’ War.”
Has there been a poll to see if the Sarah-ites are numbered among that baffling 26 percent of our population who, despite everything, still maintain that President George has done a heckuva job?
A woman in one of Palin’s crowds praised her for being “a mom like me … who thinks the way I do” and added, for ill measure, “That’s what I want in the White House.” Fine, but in what capacity?
Do this lady’s like-minded folk wonder how, say, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, et al (add your own favorites) managed so well without being soccer moms? Without being whizzes in the kitchen, whipping up moose soufflés? Without executing and wounding wolves from the air and without promoting that sad, threadbare hoax — sexual abstinence — as the answer to the sizzling loins of the young?
(In passing, has anyone observed that hunting animals with high-powered guns could only be defined as sport if both sides were equally armed?)
I’d love to hear what you think has caused such an alarming number of our fellow Americans to fall into the Sarah Swoon.
Could the willingness to crown one who seems to have no first language have anything to do with the oft-lamented fact that we seem to be alone among nations in having made the word “intellectual” an insult? (And yet…and yet…we did elect Obama. Surely not despite his brains.)
Sorry about all of the foregoing, as if you didn’t get enough of the lady every day in every medium but smoke signals.
I do not wish her ill. But I also don’t wish us ill. I hope she continues to find happiness in Alaska.
May I confess that upon first seeing her, I liked her looks? With the sound off, she presents a not uncomely frontal appearance.
But now, as the Brits say, “I’ll be glad to see the back of her.”
**********
PS: Lagniappe for English mavens: A friend of mine has made you laugh greatly over the years. David Lloyd is a comic genius (I can hear you wince, David) who wrote for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Cheers,” “Taxi,” “Frasier,” Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and me, not necessarily in that order. As a language fan, he has preserved many gems for posterity in his prodigious memory bank. Here comes my favorite:
A Navy lecturer was talking about some directives on the blackboard that he said to do something about, “except for these here ones with the asteroids in back of.”
An open letter to Sarah Palin and this guy says it SO much better than I could. Be warned it contains an overabundance of exclamation points and 4 letter words:
OK so I’m home, relatively rested back up and trying to get back into the groove. but all the bad news out of the financial sector has me about as mesmerized as the 2008 campaign. Plus I can’t stop going over to Mudflats and reading up on the latest shenanigans in Alaska. Yup. I’ve been palinized. It’s like watching the aftermath of a 20 car pileup during rush hour. I can’t look away. THE HORROR THE HORROR.
Oh what the hell. I think I’ll go watch Casino Royale as a runup to seeing Quantum of Solace.
By now you’ve probably read/heard about the young woman who claims to have been attacked at an ATM by a “dark skinned” man who, when he saw the McCain bumper sticker on her car, knocked her down and scratched a “B” on her face claiming, as he did so, that he was an Obama supporter.
Now wait just a cotton pickin’ minute. Take a real close look. the “B” is backwards, like it would be if you looked into a mirror and scratched it on yourself. But more importantly … what the hell does the “B” stand for? Think about it. Wait for it. come on. You can do it.
give up? Figured it out?
it’s
O
bama
Yes, our would-be victim can’t think anymore than she can spell. Or perhaps her boyfriend, SO, whomever, meant it to be “B” for bitch. However you carve it, our victim is being investigated by the police. Seems she had a rabidly anti-Obama blog and assorted social pages which have suddenly disappeared. Read more here.
Of course the right wingnuts are making hay out of this. Let’s face it they have nothing left. And that includes Palin who appears, now, to be running against … McCain.
You have to wonder how this uneducated, non-thinking, self-styled soccer mom came to the conclusion she is capable of running the United States. I’ve been scratching my head over THAT one for weeks now. Well, someone pointed me to an answer. It’s call the Dunning-Kruger effect. From Wikipedia:
The Dunning-Kruger effect is an example of cognitive bias in which people who are worst at a task show the most illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average.
The phenomenon was demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, both of Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999.[1]
Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (as Charles Darwin put it).[2] They hypothesized that with a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,
Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.
Onward to Closetgate. The right wingnuts are bellowing that all that money spent on a WARDROBE malfunction for Queen Palin was necessary. McCain himself said, “she needed clothes.” WHY? Was her closet totally empty? Like her head????
On another front, I’m getting real tired of the idiots out there (and that includes YOU McCain) calling Obama’s tax plan “socialistic.” Um. hello?
Have you voted yet? There’s already reports of election fraud taking place. Some voters are getting their votes changed from Obama to McCain. Funny how that never happens the other way around. So much for the ACORN dustup.
And just to end today’s roundup on a sour note … all the pundits seem to have FINALLY tripped to the possibility that Palin is setting herself up for a run at the White House in 2012. hello? Where the hell have you been? Of COURSE that’s what she’s doing. The woman’s ego knows NO BOUNDS. See above Dunning-Kruger effect.
Kate Harding has another take on the future of the queen bee. And that’s “B” for bitch btw. One I saw weeks ago. I said it here and I’ll say it again. Unless she is sent to jail by the outraged voters of Alaska I think Ms Palin and the first dud will turn up on Faux news. She could well parlay that gig into a multi=billion dollar career IF she plays it right.
Better there I think than in the White House. She could be a female version of Rush Limbaugh. gag me with a steamshovel.
Well that’s it for a while. I’m headed to Colorado to help out Joe’s SIL who had bilateral knee replacement surgery about 10 days ago. I may only be gone a week or so and I WILL try to keep updates going since I seem to have a tiny handful of folks who stop by daily.
Oh, almost forgot There’s an Obama rally today at noon here in little old Sheridan, WY and we plan to attend. And take lots of pics. So those will be posted tonight.
I found this post over on Mudflats blog yesterday:
Regarding Palin’s $150k wardrobe and makeover:
2 USC 439b(2)(B)
(b) Prohibited use
(1) In general
A contribution or donation described in subsection (a) of this section shall not be converted by any person to personal use.
(2) Conversion
For the purposes of paragraph (1), a contribution or donation shall be considered to be converted to personal use if the contribution or amount is used to fulfill any commitment, obligation, or expense of a person that would exist irrespective of the candidate’s election campaign or individual’s duties as a holder of Federal office, including–
(A) a home mortgage, rent, or utility payment;
(B) a clothing purchase;
(C) a noncampaign-related automobile expense;
(D) a country club membership;
(E) a vacation or other noncampaign-related trip;
(F) a household food item;
(G) a tuition payment;
(H) admission to a sporting event, concert, theater, or other form of entertainment not associated with an election campaign; and
(I) dues, fees, and other payments to a health club or recreational facility.
Hubby forwarded a great joke this morning. I’m still laughing:
Parking Ticket
The other day I went downtown to run a few errands. I went into the local coffee shop for a snack.
I was only there for about 5 minutes, and when I came out, there was this cop writing out a parking ticket.
I said to him, ‘Come on, man, how about giving a retired person a break’?
He ignored me and continued writing the ticket. His insensitivity annoyed me, so I called him a ‘Nazi.’
He glared at me and then wrote out another ticket for having worn tires. So I proceeded to call him a ‘doughnut eating Gestapo.’ He finished the second ticket and put it on the windshield with the first. Then he wrote a third ticket when I called him a moron in blue.
This went on for about 20 minutes. The more I talked back to him the more tickets he wrote. Personally, I didn’t really care. I came downtown on the bus, and the car that he was putting the tickets on had one of those bumper stickers that said, ‘ McCain ‘08.’
I try to have a little fun each day now that I’m retired. The doctor tells me that it’s important for my health.
Hubby bought a copy of How to Win a Fight with a Conservative and when it arrived gave it to me … I think he’s trying to tell me something. I get tongue tied with rage when confronted with idiocy from the right. I’d like to quote from the first chapter:
No one can pinpoint the exact moment it happened, but sometime in the last quarter century, between Ronald Reagan’s withering ridicule of all things liberal and George W. Bush’s bullying crusade to stamp out political dissent, conservatives gave liberalism a giant wedgie.
Liberalism didn’t see it coming. It was busy navel-gazing and admiring itself in the mirror when conservatives snuck up from behind, grabbed it by its tighty-whities, and hung it up on the flagpole, where it kicked and flailed as conservatives pointed and taunted and called it a pantywaist and a loser.
Democrats, even some Republicans, used to wear the liberal label with pride. Time was, liberalism was a word that conjured such core American principles as social justice, national compassion, and human freedom. But then conservatives had an idea. What if liberalism could be turned into an embarrassing perversion, like pedophilia, or a disease, like leprosy? And so they told anyone who would listen that liberals were sick, weak, deranged, traitorous perverts.
The problem is, liberals stood there and took the abuse. They let conservatives bullyrag them, beat them down, and get inside their heads until they ran away with their hands over their ears, screaming, “I’m not a liberal!” And thus a proud ideology was thrown under the bus.
Sure, recent Democratic victories may have given liberals reason to rejoice. But the pattern of victimization continues, with liberals still letting conservatives keep them on the defensive. Enough. If liberals hope to be persuasive and start kicking some serious conservative ass, they need to stand tall, fight back, and confidently declare who they are and what they stand for.
That’s why, as a first step in girding for battle with conservatives, it’s essential to have a firm fix on your own beliefs. Take the following quiz to determine where you fit in the larger liberal mix.
OK, back from the gym. Here’s some totally awesome political cartoons:
And finally, living in Wyoming means being a Democrat in a sea of red. So it was more than heartening to see this:
You’ve probably already read the stories relating to the $150,000 (yes, that’s right) the Republican party has spent on clothing Barbie and Ken. That prompted me to write to my brother, a die hard Republican.
“Somebody came along and said ‘liberal’ means ’soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on communism, soft on defense, and we’re gonna tax you back to the stone age because people shouldn’t have to go to work if they don’t want to.’ And instead of saying, ‘Well, excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic anti-education, anti-choice, pro-gun, Leave-it-to-Beaver trip back to the ’50’s’ we cowered in the corner and said, ‘Please don’t hurt me.’” –NBC’s The West Wing
OK so that’s a good start.
I really don’t consider myself to be a “liberal.” I really prefer the tag “progressive” because I am conservative on finance … HEY you morons that’s MY hard earned money you’re flinging about in Washington as if it were confetti … and I’m socially liberal. I believe I AM my brother/sister’s keeper. I may not be a Christian but I do believe in the Golden Rule. And the 10 commandments. Good rules to live by. Always have been and always will be. BUT just because someone is homosexual doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be allowed to enter into a CIVIL union and have all the benefits associated with that.
I believe we have too much FEDERAL government intrusion in our lives and for that we can blame the Republican party. Goodbye habeus corpus (rule of law in Western society for over 400 years just tossed out along with half our Constitutionally given rights. asswipes. Now we torture. Now we nation build. All thanks to the Republican party.
I’m angry the corporations seem to think, like Bush and Palin, they are above the law (see my rant on habeus corpus above). I’m furious they don’t pay their fair share. Yes they may be TAXED at a 30% rate but they don’t PAY anything. That burden has been shifted over the last 30 years onto the backs of the middle class. That’s you and me bub.
I’m sick of the Republican/McCain party line, having borrowed us into MASSIVE unimaginable debt, continuing to LIE through their teeth about nobody having to pay taxes. Where the hell do they think the money comes from? China?
And as for Miss Maverick. since you aren’t watching the news or reading anything related to the election, you may have missed
1. The $50,000 she used to redecorate the mayor’s office when she was elected mayor of Wasilla. Just helped herself. Took it out of the highway accounts, I believe. Didn’t ask. JUST TOOK IT. And when called on the carpet she replied, and I QUOTE … “I’m the mayor. I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me otherwise.”
2. Troopergate. abuse of power.
3. Spent thousands of taxpayer dollars illegally flying her family here and there all over the place while Governor of Alaska.
4. THINKS THE JOB OF THE VP IS TO RULE THE SENATE. Oh yeah, sure you betcha I’m gonna go in there and make lots of policy changes. dear god.
5. The GOP spent $150,000 on her fucking WARDROBE AND HAIR FOR CRISSAKES. Yeah yeah it’s their money they can fling it about on the campaign trail any way they want. The point is …
This is not being a “maverick.” This is MORE OF THE SAME OLD SHIT.
My dear brother, there is a vast amount of difference between socialism and communism. I find that in my pending old age I am a democratic socialist.
I believe we need to nationalize the oil industry. The sociopathic fat pigs who have raked in jaw dropping profits lately need to take their ill gotten gains and go away. They’re lucky we don’t jail them and seize all their personal property.
I believe we need to get private, for profit, corporations OUT of health care, hospitals, the armed forces and jails. They do NOT belong there. These things should not be for profit. WE used to own them and they worked just fine thank you very much. We need to take them back.
We need to REGULATE THE SHIT out of wall street and the banking industry. Just like we used to before ronnie raygun was installed in the White House.
the FREE MARKET concept of the neo-cons has brought us to the brink of disaster JUST LIKE IT DID IN 1929. It is asking the fox to guard the hen house and then being surprised when all the chickens disappear.
I have said before that the Republican party of Eisenhower no longer exists. It has been shoved to the left by the right wing, “christian” terrorists in THIS country who have spent the last 30 years taking over the party. Sarah Palin, Michelle whatever in Minnesota, Ann Coulter, Rush Limpdick, Sean hannity, etc etc. HATE mongers, bigots, jesus freaks all looking to run YOUR life for you.
THIS IS NOT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY OF 50 YEARS AGO.
This is how the pendulum swings Or, rather, as one of Bill Maher’s guests tried to illustrate, politics is like circle … you know, the caucus race from Alice in Wonderland. We keep chasing each other round and round. The left becomes the right, the right becomes the left. And on it goes.
You have to stop thinking PARTY and start thinking about what’s best for the country.
WE are the government. WE need to take it back. You can’t do that by voting straight ticket. You have to be better informed.
You need to look no further than your own circumstances (hello health insurance) to see that a lot of what you learned from Bob is NOT CORRECT. He was a rabid republican.
I am not rabid anything except when it comes to the Constitution.
the Republicans have shredded it. Were you paying attention?
They led us into an occupation to soothe somebody’s ego. And because even before he took/stole the office he decided (he IS the decider, after all) he was going to be a “war president” because they’re always popular. dear god.
DO NOT parrot back to me the shit from Rush about how Saddam was a bad man. There are lots more like him in the world and we didn’t go after any of them. They don’t have oil.
And just to end things on a weird note, I was listening to Thom Hartman as I was on the way home from the gym and he played this clip from Ronald Reagan circa 1948. You may not believe your ears. Holy alzheimers.
Finally, the ultimate weird moment. Maybe Caribou barbie doesn’t know which animal represents her party either:
I swear, only the Brits still THINK. I found this article about SWMNBN and this paragraph sums up my thoughts exactly. Too bad my brain doesn’t work so good anymore. But I’m still miles ahead of SP in that dept. I don’t care HOW many toady friends of hers say “she’s smart.” This snippet says it all.
Like Wally the Green Monster, Baxter the Bobcat, the Mariner Moose and other giant furry creatures who accompany major-league baseball teams from game to game, Palin is the adored mascot of the anti-fiscal crowd. Her actual performance as mayor and governor counts for little beside her capacity to keep the fans happy during the intervals between play, which she does in the style she developed as mayor of Wasilla and then perfected in her triumphant gubernatorial campaign in 2006. Transcripts and videos from her time in Alaska show her parlaying the barest minimum of rhetorical and intellectual resources into a formidable electoral weapon. The least one can say of her is that she quickly learned how to make the most of herself.
What is most striking about her is that she seems perfectly untroubled by either curiosity or the usual processes of thought. When answering questions, both Obama and Joe Biden have an unfortunate tendency to think on their feet and thereby tie themselves in knots: Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US, it’s a winning technique: told that she has 15 seconds in which to answer, Palin invariably beats the clock, and her concision and fluency more than compensate for her unrelenting triteness.
Sarah may not be smart but she is cunning. As this quote relates:
Surrounding herself with fellow congregants from the Pentecostalist Wasilla Assembly of God and old school chums from Wasilla High, the 32-year-old mayor set about turning the town into the kind of enterprise society that Margaret Thatcher used to extol. She abolished its building codes and signed a series of ordinances that re-zoned residential property for commercial and industrial use. When the city attorney ordered construction to stop on a house being built by one of her campaign contributors, she sacked him.
Having come to power saying that her agenda was to pare down Wasilla to ‘the basic necessities, the bare bones’, she surprised its citizens when she redecorated the mayor’s office at a reported cost of $50,000 salvaged from the highways budget; its new red flock wallpaper matched her bold, rouge-et-noir taste in personal outfits. Another $24,000 of city money went on a white Chevy Suburban, known around Wasilla, without affection, as the mayormobile. She hired a city administrator to deputise for her in the day-to-day running of Wasilla’s affairs and employed a lobbyist in DC to wheedle lawmakers into meeting the town’s ever-expanding list of claims for congressional ‘pork’ (so named from the antebellum custom of rewarding slaves with barrels of salt pork). That expenditure, at least, paid off: during Palin’s six-year tenure as mayor, the federal government doled out more than $1000 for every man, woman and child in Wasilla. Her pet project was a $14.7m ice rink and sports complex, which opened in 2004. It is said to be lightly used, it has left the city servicing a massive debt, and a Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit continues over the bungled way in which Palin acquired the land on which it’s built.
At one point in time I would have voted for Colin Powell for president. He struck me as an honest, thoughtful, caring American. He just went up a little further in my estimation …
Here’s a photo of the woman at her son’s grave that Powell spoke about in the video. The original can be found here along with more information..
The follow up video interview with Powel is even better!
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