Palinstein

About three-quarters into the great HBO movie, Game Change, I realized what genre the director Jay Roach and screenwriter Danny Strong were playing with. Sure, it's a great political genre movie, up there with their 2008 triumph, Recount, which did great service to the 2000 Florida recount battle which led to George W. Bush becoming President without winning the popular vote (and subsequently led to the debacle in Iraq, the crash of the economy that plays a part in this new movie and, now, the massive GOP amnesia about the eight years they controlled the Executive branch of our government). But it's something more: Game Change is a monster movie.

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The monster is, of course, 2 1/2 year Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Not only does the movie recreate her origin story as a force of hate-pandering and resentment reinforcing on the national stage, but it does a terrifying job of treating her as both representative and contributing cause to the nightmarish Republican Primary of 2012, as reactionary as any in national political memory. The fact that Willard Mitt Romney, a supposed moderate and former Governor of the generally Liberal state of Massachusetts, has veered psychotically Right trying to outflank and outpander his highly Conservative opponents, the fact that this very week past he was incapable of summoning the courage to strongly vilify Rush Limbaugh for his misogynistic smearing of citizen Sandra Fluke, proves that whatever prairie fire Sarah Palin ignited in 2008 has yet to burn out.

The progression is like something out of a 1950's sci-fi movie, only instead of an unknown virus reeled in by inquisitive scientists, it's an unknown, unveiled GOP Governor from the most remote state in the Union. Coming from the coldest state as well, it hearkens back to The Thing. She's let in through all decontamination barriers almost by accident to positive fanfare, sparking all sorts of activity including massive investment (here a rush of small-donor campaign contributions), then she begins to falter, unable to adapt to this unfamiliar environment.

But have no fear (or, rather, have dread), because like Frankenstein's monster and most others, it has the ability to learn. Palin studies the television coverage as it goes from ridiculing her to reveling in her speaking power, and she goes through a classic movie-monster chrysalis stage. In the middle of the movie Palin (played to genius perfection by Julianne Moore, ditto Ed Harris as John McCain and, carrying the main story with ease, Woody Harrelson as campaign chief Steve Schmidt) goes silent. She doesn't respond to her handlers, sinks into funks, rattles around on her Blackberry, essentially seems to fall into some sort of catatonic state that ends up feeling more like gestational hibernation.

When she emerges she's unstoppable. She can't be controlled by the campaign, takes on her signature disregard for the truth (and outright lying), whips up crowds with various degrees of hate speech and gets that scary Palin gleam in her eye. The movie doesn't hit it too hard -- it's a smart piece of work -- but it's that gleam that haunts.

In the framing device, Steve Schmidt (Harrelson) is interviewed by Anderson Cooper, and it's clear the scientist no longer has any control over the monster, just a wary, chastened point of view he didn't have at the beginning. To Schmidt's credit, he was just as penitent on The Morning Joe Show this a.m. Unlike the party of Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, Cain, etc. etc. he's emerged as a man of honor. His party could use more of his type of candor and reality.

On the other hand, Palin is still in the celebrity politics business, the recidivist Tea Party will celebrate it's fourth anniversary this year, and 52% of Mississippi Republicans think President Obama is a Muslim.

There you have the bigger monster: the GOP electoral base.

All-American Girl

Yep, Sarah Palin appears to have snorted cocaine with her addict husband, cheated on him with his best friend business partner, and she had a spate of jungle fever -- which she consummated, prior to marriage.

If she ran on all that, even I might vote for her.

But, then again, she's a quitter.

Re-Revering History

One of the key ways to identify fascists is that they rewrite history to alter, erase, disguise or bend the facts their their political contingencies. One of the least discussed aspects of grifter Palin's appeal and following is that they are immune to facts, they just channel their resentment into her cult of personality, since she plays the smugly self-righteous card better than anyone else. It's blind following.

In her typical modis, she created Palinesque word salad version of the great ride of Paul Revere, essentially inverting the story in order to show, I think, that she likes guns. Paul Revere was warning the colonists, a top secret plan (one-if-by-land, two-if-by-sea) that Palin turned into another example of her particularly fanciful American braggadocio, that Revere was somehow stickin' it to the British with his trash talk warning that we're gonna whup her butt. You know, truthyistory:



And, in typical Sarah fashion, she doubled down on the lie.

Her acolytes appear to be taking her lead. They are attempting to rewrite the Paul Revere Wikipedia page to make it conform to Sarah's lie. They are acting like good little fascist operatives, and the good people, the white hat editors of the Wikipedia community are fighting the good fight against them.

This is seriously chilling. Just like Goebbels moving from Nazi Party to German government, these are the digital thugs who will come with any Palin Administration, should that science-fiction disaster come to pass.

Do you take that threat seriously?

Smart Analysis

Lawrence O'Donnell does a great job of debunking the notion that former half-term Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin will run for the GOP 2012 Presidential nomination, while simultaneously eviscerating the news media for covering her like she is -- i.e., falling into her p.r. generating trap:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As I've said before, there's a relatively new grifter class of Republican conservatives who are vying for shows and appearances on Fox News, at GOP and Tea Party-type events, churning out books and generally competing for the guaranteed Conservative Dollar. This means that Sarah Palin is actually rivals with Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and even, now, Mike Huckabee. (His declining to run in order to preserve his current income made that clear.) Fox News is built on narrowcasting to their rightwing viewership base, and the game for individuals is all about being outrageous enough in your pandering to prejudice and ideology to beat your comrades in conservatism to that audience's paycheck.

While I find them dismissible for other reasons, I do not put Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty or John Huntsman in the grifter category. They may pander, but they are still politicians rather than solely con artists. I'd even, for the moment, put Rick Santorum in the non-grifter category. (I would not, however, put him in the "intelligent" category.) Ron Paul is at a higher level altogether, because I don't see him lying or bending his positions to try and win any nominations. He's essentially as honest as Obama, if ideologically opposed.

As O'Donnell points out, the pity isn't that Palin et al are grifters or that her chump fans waste their cash on her.

It's that our national political media even pays attention.

Just Funny

With Nightmare Sarah coming back to suck some air out of the room, it might just be better to laugh, absurdly:

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Will Ferrell from Will Ferrell

PS: Good movies: Bridesmaids, Midnight in Paris, Hanna, 13 Assassins, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Double Hour, Fast Five (guilty pleasure).

Done

Peaked:

From Russia With Gov

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Thanks to Tucson, everyone now knows she's on the grift. Aside from her hardcore marks, her rubs, but anyone with half a brain is keeping their money away from her.

On the Rise

President Obama's job approval ratings are polling close to 50%. In some cases hitting it. This is, no doubt, due to his Arizona speech and to his legislative wins during the lame duck Congressional session. We'll see what happens after Tuesday night's State of the Union address, when some Dems and GOPers will be breaking tradition with mixed seating and the President will call for infrastructure spending.

We are entering a very interesting political period. While unemployment remains way too high, corporations are making big profits again, and there will surely be lots of acquisitions this year. The President was handed a favor by voters in that he now has a Republican House of Representatives to make him look moderate. In fact, it's the GOP that has the most difficult task, to my mind, in that they must keep their extreme wing in check -- right after it won them the election.

The past week has seen Republicans making their most pointed criticisms to date of half-Governor Sarah Palin, while Presidential candidate Mitt Romney just won the New Hampshire straw poll, the first (non-binding, but indicative) race of the GOP Primaries. Romney is from the business wing of the Republican Party, but with President Obama reaching out to businesses and, it appears, already helping them to grow profits, I'm wondering what he'll be able to sell America. Elect him because he laid off workers when he was in private industry? Uh, ok.

President Obama's Presidential re-election campaign, whether he means for it to or not, begins on Tuesday night. One imagines that his opposition, having been burnt yet again for having mis-measured him as wounded, defeated or failed, will be more wary moving forward.

Or maybe just a little more flustered.

Our Nation's Leader

Compare and contrast:

She's so little now. She will be shunned by more than before her response.

Obama did the right thing - he raised our national spirits. He tied this tragedy into the American democratic tradition. The timeless practice of constituents meeting with their democratically elected representatives. To the democratic dreams of a young girl who will not live to put her ideas into practice.

This was big narrative. He told an epic tale of the tapestry of decent, admirable, everyday heroic people killed, and noted their political divisions to emphasize how much more alike we are -- humanity is more important than politics. And he smiled in a surprisingly reassuring way when he did it, warm but strong daddy stuff. All that we're grateful for, spreading credit, not blame.

His goal: to inspire out of the darkness. "Gabby opened her eyes for the first time. Gabby opened her eyes for the first time. Gabby opened her eyes."



He led big time tonight. He's leading again. We'll see how it goes with the legislating, but his bipartisan schtick seems to be sincere. He hasn't wavered from his One America theme but he's not shying away from acknowledging the hard stuff in doing it. And he ended up inspiring hope.

This photo caught my eye:



Obama with the young hero who was so valiant and just happens to be a gay American. And there's Sen John McCain (R-AZ) looking on so irrelevant from somewhere in back.

You know, the man who gave America Sarah Palin.

For the record, I agree with Matt Osborne, "I Blame Jared Lee Loughner." I can't even bring myself to reprint his already iconographic mug shot in this blog. I took one look at that picture when they first released it and got it immediately. This guy is just going out of his way to look like the most major asshole he is. The type of asshole who would assassinate a politician and not care who he took down along the way, the most selfish type of organism alive, doing it for some psychotic pleasure, that itch that can never be scratched enough.

Maybe someone out there has the heart to pity his soul, but the way I see it, that's a long way off. He hasn't done the work.

So I don't blame Sarah or Rush or his poor parents or anyone else for this tragedy but the really awful malformation of humanity who planned it all himself and ruined countless lives just to satisfy his sick urges. All the hate mongers out there who feed off of the most atavistic American forms of resentment and fear, who make their living off of stoking it, they are just a more modest form of asshole.

That toxic young man is the real deal.

A Rolling Tragedy

Does anyone believe that the political violence in Arizona this weekend that seriously wounded a Congresswoman, killed a U.S. District Judge, a 9-year old girl, a 30-year old community activist, a 76-year old pastor and two other septuagenarians along with wounding another 14 people, is going to be the end of it?

Does anyone believe that any of the violent rhetoricians, from Beck to Palin, are going to take even a modicum of responsibility for shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater?

I think we're about to see the shunning of Sarah Palin, especially by the GOP elite. You can't propagate something like this:



..and try to justify it by saying that it's "It was simply crosshairs like you'd see on maps," as Palin's spokeswoman, Rebecca Mansour, has laughably tried to ass-cover with on TV, post-shootings. This is just too yucky, too ugly, and since everybody knows that Palin is essentially a grifter with no cause other than herself, and no policy intelligence beyond mean and pandering to the lowest resentful denominator, she'll be on the downward slope. Watch to see if they start cutting her time on Fox.

As for Arizona, it's the new Florida, the new South Carolina, the new Texas:

But after the fatal shooting of six that left Representative Gabrielle Giffords critically injured, Arizona has shifted from a place on the political fringe to symbol of a nation whose political discourse has lost its way.

The moment was crystallized by Clarence W. Dupnik, the Pima County sheriff, who, in a remarkable news conference on Saturday after the shooting, called his state “the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.

...

While many states have nonrestrictive gun laws, Arizona’s zeal for weapons has often made headlines. It recently became one of just a few states with a law that allows people to carry concealed guns without a permit. Last summer, Ms. Giffords’s Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly, had a campaign event in which voters were invited to “shoot a fully automatic M-16” with him to symbolize his assault on her campaign.

The state also allows for weapons in bars, which is unusual. Last year, an unsuccessful candidate for Congress, Pamela Gorman, ran on a pro-fun platform; a campaign video depicted her firing off rounds several times.

This is the state that made ethnic profiling a police responsibility. Add to it this piece of Arizona Tea Party electioneering:



I don't see Arizona tightening up their guns laws anytime soon, not with a non-leader like hack Governor Jan Brewer, not with such hatred for "the other" in their legislative body. America has long had a love affair with guns and if Columbine didn't end it, high school students for heaven's sake, than why should this?

The nation will be keeping an eye on how our leaders -- particularly those on the Right -- respond to this event over the next few days and weeks ahead.

Liar of the Year

Always so many to choose from, never such a clear winner:



At least since Dick Cheney was co-President.

Baggin' with the Stars

I'm not a fan of this show, so it's somewhat hilarious to me that their money-grubbing decision to enter the Palin Family Enterprise may backfire bigtime:

At first, having Bristol Palin participate in 'Dancing With The Stars' seemed like a brilliant idea. Just like Kate Gosselin before her, casting an admittedly bad dancer who was shrouded in controversy has raked in big ratings and tons of press. But now the joke is on the show's producers, as they fear Bristol is actually going to win this thing.

"This will be a disaster for the show if Bristol wins," one TV insider tells me. "Any creditability the show had will be over. It will go from being a dancing competition to a popularity competition where whoever has the most rabid fan base will always win no matter how little talent they have."

Plus:

"Another problem the producers foresee is that after Bristol wins no one in Hollywood will ever want to be on the show again," a well-placed ABC source tells me. "Why would a real star want to compete and lose against someone like [former U.S. Senate candidate] Christine O'Donnell or Levi Johnston."

Bonus:

A friend of one of the judges tells me Bristol has made a fool out of all of them. It's now painfully obvious that the judge's scores and opinions mean nothing.

I'm sick of hearing people say that Palin is winning because people identify with her failings. This is the exact opposite of what Conservatives claim to believe, that it's all a meritocracy and we shouldn't be dumbing down classrooms to make it nicey-nice for the less talented. No, this is massive Tea Party drone voting, making their political point, whether or not they're using computerized means to generate "legitimate" email addresses and flood they system. Does anyone, anywhere, honestly doubt this is all about Sarah?

I'm starting to think that Palin's world and that of her drones is an even more self-aggrieved subset of the Glenn Beck audience, your true talent is, ostensibly, your adherence to the Sarah-approved ideology, no matter have provisional or acausal the selection. Because the apparatchik reason isn't even what it's all about; the only ideology that matters is that which reinforces the vanity production of Sarah Palin that is her politelebrity career.

And this is where Sarah Palin is, for once, a true pioneer. Her grifter roots are clearly Amy Semple McPherson, Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy but no one has ever done what she's doing before in world political history, mainly because there wasn't a mass media quite like this one before. With so many outlets, so much hunger for content, this rapacious time of widening rich-poor gaps as our corporate feudalistic solidifies for what may be centuries, with so many buyers out there, mass media networks of books, cable, digital, social, Sarah Palin has engineered the very first political campaign where the networks have paid candidate for the honor of creating their long-form campaign commercials and giving them huge hours of airtime, frosted with dominating amounts of free publicity

TLC has given Palin her biggest TV deal, paying her production company to make the shows, with their staged scenes and obvious cutaways, semiotics gone haywire in the ultimately lumpen service or reinforcing Palin's brand messaging and image, endlessly tiresome, endlessly smug, endlessly mean high school girl in the big leagues.

The Obama Family and the Democratic Party had better start adapting immediately. If you think this is polarized nation now, just wait until we're watching entirely separate television shows.

Wait, we already are:



I don't care how serious a candidate, politician or statesman you are. You have to at least acknowledge that this new evolution of bullshit is the most significant since Sen. John Fitzgerald Kennedy bested Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon in the first nationally televised Presidential debate.

One can only hope that, thanks to some combination of narcissistic ambition and aggrieved venality, just as Nixon ultimately lost control of his brand image Palin and her family will lose control of theirs. I mean, even the type of vile use of "gay" and "faggot" as a vicious insult by a teenager, the type of language parents are generally held responsible for teaching their children is wrong, hasn't led to a single admonition of Sarah Palin's mothering skills. Is this the kind of language Mama Grizzlies teach their little grizzlies? Grrr.

The fact is that Palin is media ascendant. There's a rule in Hollywood that you're only a superstar for three years, then the public moves on. You can still be in the firmament, even at your peak earning, but the audience for and against you is already formed, and you're not dominating their fantasy lives anymore.

So can we date Palin's superstardom from when she spoke at the 2008 Republican National Convention? I think maybe from when her book came out last year, her first purely commercial endeavor (and a huge success -- her big step-up that caused her to ditch her elected office about halfway into her commitment). If that's the case, she'll peak next year, and start fading in 2012, just in time for the GOP Primaries.

But is the answer more ominous. Is the TLC show where she really starts, taking over the airwaves? Even on Fox, she's not in control, and you can see the short-circuits behind her eyes, her hard little smile growing tight or tipping downwards when O'Reilly catches her out as is his sport.

This is the playing field now. The killing field. The battleground. This is where political war is now being waged. Politicians on the Left may develop a different flavor, maybe one that doesn't seem so constructed, really candid and unedited as Obama can be in ways she never will. The key is to leverage your celebrity as a brand that attracts curious, interested and engagement-starved viewers. If you're not already a politelebrity you need to become one, and if you already are then you need to exploit it with speed and savvy to get control of your image and blast away with your messaging.

This will also become a new discipline in political consulting. I recommend the talent agencies getting their Blue and Red political teams on and integrated with production and network sales. I even mean Below the Line crew. Control everything.

It's post-1984. 1984 has nothing on this. Orwell meets McLuhan. Makes you want to burn the whole mother****ing thing down.

Vote Bristol.

Snap Judgements

F*** you.

Yeah, right.

Right on.

Double Trouble

I was prepared to continue touting the Democratic Party's chances in the next election, until this and this. So the Dems punt on the incredibly popular vote to let the Bush tax cuts on the rich fade while keeping them for the rest of us, and the Obama Administration loses the gay vote for at least this cycle maybe more. WTF -- DC insider thinking?

Here's the thing: we want something to fight about. The Teapublicans have something. Even the establishment Republicans. They want power. They want to defund the entire Federal safety net, roll us back into the Robber Baron era. But Obama and the Dems aren't rallying the base. They aren't whipping up the enthusiasm. They aren't making me want to fight for them -- not today.

We still remember how El Presidente Bush didn't care what the law was, he just did what he and puppetmaster Cheney wanted. I don't know the details behind the Executive Branch obligation to defend laws the Congress has passed against judicial review, but why not just let it slide? Bush would have, if he didn't believe in it.

Yep, the GOP are worse. The Dems are vexing, but they aren't equivalent, not if they let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire and take the Middle Class out of the hostage position. The Republicans have already brought down our banking and housing system, and their only ideas are the same ones that got us there. Paul Krugman's review of their "Pledge" (I prefer the furniture polish) is blisteringly accurate on the direct threat to our Republic if they regain power:

On Thursday, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.

True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

Drown it in a bathtub. Right.

And then there's that GOP propensity to paint our President as The Other. Bitter Palin spewing "Barack Hussein Obama" as her evil tentacles grow. Quitter Governor Reality Politics Star as harbinger of the apocalypse.

As Jon Stewart said in response to a question from Bill Reilly, Obama ran as a visionary but appears to govern as a functionary. I don't think that is entirely fair, and I think in retrospect the Obama Administrations accomplishments will add up to visionary.

But did he have to file in support of DADT?

Condescension

She really is a reptile, isn't she?



Yep, she rolls her eyes when she finds out this woman who is challenging her crass moneygrubbing opportunism is by profession a teacher. A teacher, for heaven's sake, but for Palin and her smug Fox identity legion, there's always a reason to roll one's eyes at someone who challenges the sacred tenets or icons, especially if they're educated. See Palin look for it, find it and in her smug way she's struck her goldmine, such is her bigotry and condescension.

Is there a lower form of life on earth than Sarah Palin? More greedy or egocentric, more cult of self, more opportunistically anti-intellectual? Her very response to this woman, that she's doing greater work for America, sounding so shopworn so instantly, defending with her patented Word Salad, which doesn't make sense, not to her, not to her followers, it's all just pure semiotics.

Yep, she's gone well beyond Reagan, who's words actually made sense strung together and spoken, referring to an American past in an attempt to fuel his contemporary policies, agree or disagree. With Word Salad Sarah, it's meaningless, just the movement of her mouth (indicating to her supporters that she is alive to lead them) and the mindless catchphrases, what she understands merely needs to be her bag of tricks, moored to no morality save that of self responsible to exactly no one, and certainly not even to her customers; that is to say, core constituency.

In comparison, certainly, Barack Obama is a humble man. I don't think I've ever seen him rolls his eyes at anyone -- on Fox? He engages them, even on Fox, particularly O'Reilly.

Can you even imagine him rolling his eyes at a teacher? Of course, he wouldn't.

Even at her.

Buying Her Way In

Boss Palin.

Underwater Oil Volcano

Worse than expected. Much, much worse:

The problem with the April 20 spill is that it isn't really a spill: It‘s a gush, like an underwater oil volcano. A hot column of oil and gas is spurting into freezing, black waters nearly a mile down, where the pressure nears a ton per inch, impossible for divers to endure. Experts call it a continuous, round-the-clock calamity, unlike a leaking tanker, which might empty in hours or days.

"Everything about it is unprecedented," said geochemist Christopher Reddy, an oil-spill expert and head of the Coastal Ocean Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "All our knowledge is based on a one-shot event…. With this, we don't know when it's going to stop."

Accidents have occurred before in which oil has gushed from damaged wells, he said. But he knew of none in water so deep.

...

To BP falls the daunting task of trying to stop the gush before it becomes the most damaging spill in American history. If the flow is not stopped, it will exhaust the natural reservoir of oil beneath the sea floor, experts say. Many months, at least, could pass.

Imagine months, even a year of oil bleeding into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning the Gulf, the land around it, leaking into the Atlantic and poisoning the East Coast, creeping up while commercial fishing disappears and all the animals up the food chain start dying as well.

We've ripped a hole in Mother Earth and now she's bleeding out.

Drill, baby, drill?

Assholes.

Squares

Sarah Palin is the squarest woman in all fifty United States. I mean, sure, she's wearing, like, Russ Meyer leather, but she opens her mouth and the squarest shit comes out of it, like the musty, loser gag about teleprompters, and John McCain laughs like a square old man at the speaking skills of one of the most eloquent men in America.



The team is back together again. The losing team.

Here's what the squares are doing: they're getting their backs up. They're lying about being attacked to to take the pressure off themselves for their enabling hate rhetoric:

The call to arms was issued at 5:55 a.m. last Friday.

"To all modern Sons of Liberty: THIS is your time. Break their windows. Break them NOW."

These were the words of Mike Vanderboegh, a 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama, who took to his blog urging people who opposed the historic health-care reform legislation -- he calls it "Nancy Pelosi's Intolerable Act" -- to throw bricks through the windows of Democratic offices nationwide.

"So, if you wish to send a message that Pelosi and her party [that they] cannot fail to hear, break their windows," Vanderboegh wrote on the blog, Sipsey Street Irregulars. "Break them NOW. Break them and run to break again. Break them under cover of night. Break them in broad daylight. Break them and await arrest in willful, principled civil disobedience. Break them with rocks. Break them with slingshots. Break them with baseball bats. But BREAK THEM."

In the days that followed, glass windows and doors were shattered at local Democratic Party offices and the district offices of House Democrats from Arizona to Kansas to New York. At least 10 Democratic lawmakers reported death threats, incidents of harassment or vandalism at their offices over the past week, and the FBI and Capitol Police are offering lawmakers increased protection.

The kicker:

Vanderboegh said he once worked as a warehouse manager but now lives on government disability checks. He said he receives $1,300 a month because of his congestive heart failure, diabetes and hypertension.

Those crazy squares with their "hypocrisy" and violence entwined together, like a cocktail, flavored with Malatov. You know, criminality.

There's no problem with squares when they chill out and just act like human beings. But when they get their dander up with lies and the type of profound irresponsibility they claim to hate in others, they are deserving of ridicule. And everybody else -- regular folks -- laugh at them.



And in November keep America moving forward by defeating them yet again.

Oink

The family of little Sarah Palin used to sneak across the border from Alaska to Canada to take advantage of their socialized health care system. Which would count as hypocrisy, if Palin could spell the word:

"We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada," Palin said in her first Canadian appearance since stepping down as governor of Alaska. "And I think now, isn't that ironic?"

If she can spell ironic.

Meanwhile, big ol' Karl Rove is still peddling lies in his new "memoir." The summary (with full details at Media Matters):

1. Rove distorts Senate report to claim Bush didn't "lie us into the war"

2. Rove falsehood: Obama claims "Obamacare would not add to the deficit ... evidence shows just the opposite"

3. Rove revives tired smear that Gore wrongly said "that he had created the Internet"

4. Rove revives Gore-Love Story smear

5. Rove falsehood: Gore said he had "discovered the Love Canal chemical disaster"

6. Rove pals around with falsehood that Ayers was "Obama's great friend"

7. Rove wrong on number of presidents who left office by "assassination or resignation"

Lastly, spawn of Satan herself, Liz Cheney, is even pissing off Conservatives with her newfangled McCarthyist smears:

A group of 19 prominent Bush administration officials and other lawyers launched an offensive Monday, attacking Liz Cheney for a recent ad by her group, Keep America Safe, that questioned the loyalties of Department of Justice lawyers that had represented Guantanamo detainees.

In a statement signed by nine former Bush officials and 10 other lawyers, critics condemned the ads as a "shameful series of attacks...both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications."

We'll see again if the Washington press corps takes the Cheney family's dictation on this one.

Trashy

It appears that the Palin entourage is taking everything from Hollywood that it can, grabbing goodies from the Oscar suite:

Or, in common-sense language, Palin and her handlers, "practically cleaned out the suite." Another unnamed source from HollywoodLife.com says that the former Vice Presidential candidate intent on spreading all that wealth around her own circle. "She insisted every person in her huge entourage get something, and there were assistants, nannies, security - insanity!" The same source also said that security swept the venue and would not allow photos, which are often expected by companies to use as promotion in exchange for the free products.

Class all the way. But she's not the only Republican acting like they were raised the wrong way -- there's the leaked Republican National Committee memo showing exactly what they think of their donors:

The small donors who are the targets of direct marketing are described under the heading “Visceral Giving.” Their motivations are listed as “fear;” “Extreme negative feelings toward existing Administration;” and “Reactionary.”

Major donors, by contrast, are treated in a column headed “Calculated Giving.”

Their motivations include: “Peer to Peer Pressure”; “access”; and “Ego-Driven.”

R-e-s-p-e-c-t!

Not on Their Watch

Don't be surprised if, somewhere down the line, we start finding out that Sarah Palin felt slighted in some way by her new employer, Fox News, or -- more likely, she gets some sort of chip about Glenn Beck and, to a lesser extent, Bill O'Reilly. Or, she'll say, their people -- maybe try to get a producer fired.

I say this because I've watched a few minutes of her debut interview with O'Reilly and then a few minutes of her hour with Glenn Beck the last night, and thought it was pretty evident that these big dogs were protecting their turf quite a bit more than enhancing her star. They were essentially fitting her into their script and using her draw as a way to enhance their own power -- O'Reilly by nailing her in the first few minutes by saying they'd covered the ground she was starting to trod the night before, Beck by calling her out on her "Bull crap!" when she starting doing her "I love them all" schtick on the favorite Founding Father question -- as she had when Katie Couric asked her what publications she reads:



When all else fails, who doesn't know that George Washington was the first President (the only job she wants that pays less than a million bucks a year)? "He 's got to rise to the top," like cream, I guess, letting us not only watch but hear her think. Beck asked her the simplest of questions in that anyone who's spent any time reading American Revolutionary history can name at last three other guys, Adams, Jefferson and Franklin. Or maybe she missed the HBO series.

Andrew Sullivan has an correct view on how she's being positioned by the FNC party (now having defacto control of the RNC at this point in history), to be the Washington-type reluctant candidate. You know, the thing that happens with the hero for most of the first act of every movie, until he's forced into action. Like, by acclamation of a Teabagger convention.

So it's clear she was set up with the Washington line, as she has to be set up with everything, a shiny vessel for reactionary political positions, but if she doesn't know yet, she's not their final tool of choice yet. Maybe it's their traditional sexism, maybe it's that she really is an outsider and they only see use for her as a fundraising vessel so far, but I think it's that they will do and say anything necessary not to make their own careers submissive to hers. Especially the ones competing for the limelight, for the television camera.

Not on their watch.