Pretty clever little trailer here:
I haven’t seen it so I don’t have an opinion of it yet, but so far, so good.
Here is a list of places you can go to see it for yourself.
And to toot my own horn, I was in some b-roll footage of the protests from the 4th night of the RNC on Rachel Maddow. OK, it was like a 15th of a second. But there I was. I was on Rachel Maddow. So now I will include “As seen on Rachel Maddow” as much as possible.
Get one now. Before watching this. If you don’t need it, I’m voting you off the island.
Fox is reporting that Gov. Sarah Palin is going to vote—on Election Day—in Wasilla, Alaska.
Although it’s not official just yet, that must mean she’s not going to be in Tempe or Flagstaff or Tucson or Phoenix or wherever it is John McCain is going to give his big speech from.
And if she’s planning to be absent… That must mean they’re not expecting that big speech to be one of victory. I mean, Alaska’s Mean-Girl-in-Chief wouldn’t miss her first chance to scrunch up her nose on live television before she has to go run that boring old Senate.
You’re in the voting booth. You know what to do for President. Ditto on the Senate race. House race is a no-brainer. You may not recogize the names for state legislature candidates, but the handy party id probably makes the choice an easy one on the spot.
But then you turn the ballot over. Judges. Lots of them. Soil and Water Conservation district. Egad. I’m what you call a “high-information” voter and I’m usually clueless on these things. To fix that I did my homework this year. I looked at all the contested races for judgeships. I was going to put up a long post with my findings and personal endorsements. But then I saw the endorsement slate from the League of Young Voters PAC. Well, they did their homework, too. And came to many of the same conclusions.
You can find the endorsement slate here. Read up. Don’t dread the back-side of the ballot.
Just off the wires.
This makes me happy.
Allow me to introduce the junior Senator from Alaska. Mark Begich.
UPDATE: Bye, Ted. —Matthew
I hadn’t checked out the U.S. Senate race for Minnesota in a while…
That’s, uh… Pretty impressive.
The kings and queens of Japanese culture in Minneapolis are supporting Barry:
I can’t even go into how mad this makes me. A friend of mine, who has never been a Republican in their lives, got this in the mail today. They were kind enough to let me share it with you.
I don’t have the time and don’t really think I need to go through point by point everything that is wrong with this.
This piece of mail is what the Republican Party of Minnesota is sending on behalf their members with the money their members gave them (Michele Bachmann’s, Norm Coleman’s Arne Carlson’s ALL of the MINNESOTA GOP).
Sorry you’ll have to click on the page numbers to see the actual hit piece. But it was the quickest way to do it.
If you felt like I did, you called the MNGOP at 651-222-0022 at told them what you thought of this.
The national GOP (in the form of the NRCC) has pulled all support for Michelle Bachmann. No advertising support. No money. Certainly it’s odd that it’s her latest spewing of shit that got her axed…they seemed happy to put up with it until now…but, you know, better late, etc.
In the days after 9/11, much thrill was made out of the French newspaper Le Monde’s headline, “Nous sommes tous Américains”: We are all Americans. How far we have come. For today, we are all not Americans. Today Rush Limbaugh has said in regard to Gen. Colin Powell’s endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama:
“I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I’ll let you know what I come up with.”
You know, Rush, just because you and your ilk think everything’s all small-minded identity politics and just because you and your ilk are knee-jerk reactionaries doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be. Maybe some of us—maybe most of us, even—have a vision of America that transcends loyalty to a race or a party or an economic class or a region and actually, you know, embraces the idea of a whole country and all of the people contained inside it.
Yes, even the fat, mean, cynical drug addicts have a place.
I understand it’s difficult—if not impossible—for the closed-minded to understand open-mindedness, for the self-satisfied to understand the aspiring. There is an anxiety, a panic that consumes them, because they look at the rupture of their supremacy as a rupture of the country. They believe there is no America without a conservative Republican at the top of things. Everything else is illegitimate, the object of ridicule. This election might very well be a wholesale repudiation of that.
But it will (inshallah) be more than a rejection of something wrong: It may be an affirmation of what America really is all about, in all its splendid complexity and smarts and creativity and commitment to not just one another but to the idea that humans are free and equal, and all that other junk that gives people of goodwill goosebumps.
Maybe that’s why Rush and his ilk are on track to lose: They cannot see what French headline writers plainly can. Maybe that’s why these days they’re slipping from the merely offensive to the outwardly abhorrent. They’re forgetting that nous sommes tous Américains and they can’t take that away from not one of us, no matter how selfish they are, no matter the depths of their chauvinism.
Because, despite their best efforts to win through their various obscenities, we still are America:
So! Michele Bachmann’s comments have raised $438,346.57 (and counting) for her opponent.
Live by the outrage, die by the outrage.
Update: MPR’s reporting he’s up to $620,000. Squee! Also, Michele got a shout-out in Gen. Colin Powell’s post-Meet the Press remarks:
I have no idea how popular Gen. Powell is in the sixth district—if I were to venture a guess, I’d say extremely—nor do I have any idea how his mini-smackdown against Rep. Bachmann will play. But, still, this is all good news, all the way ’round.
So, Rep. Michele Bachmann was on the teevee tonight making a royal jackass out of herself and, if this was any less a tolerant country, people would be burning tires in her front yard right now. Because that’s what she deserves by any objective measure. Michele: You are not the arbiter of patriotism. Get that through your thick goddamn skull right the fuck now. You are a hack, nothing more.
And there are videos being distributed throughout the land where Angry White Working-Class Americans talk about things they don’t have any sort of rational grip on, like socialism and Arabia and Yahweh-only-knows-what-else, and how it’s coming to rape their daughters to death or tax their small businesses to death or convert their sons to homosexuality which, as we all know, leads to death, AND WE’RE MAD.
And so on.
It’s all very boring and terrifying all at once, and rapidly turning into a predictable parody of itself. Kind of like a weak Vonnegut novel when the subject turns to the selfishness and lack of self-awareness of the American people. “Hocus Pocus,” say.
And everyone is acting so coy that now that the left has a decent chance of making huge inroads in this country that it’s shocking and incomprehensible that people should behaving like this!
I hate to call bullshit, but bullshit. The horrorshow of Joe Fuckwad and his Pennsylvania nightmare of a homey Curious George doll named “Hussein Jr.,” that’s not new to the American scene.
Right-wing radio has been breast-feeding these people for twenty years, egging them on to these dizzying heights of rabid stupidity. And we’re not even allowed to call them what they are: stupid fucking bigots. Why? Because they’re “real” Americans from the “Heartland” or some fucking David Brooks bullshit sentimentality that belongs not in politics but on a fucking collectible spoon. They’re a group invented by elites for the elites’ purposes: These are the people who can’t be wrong because they can’t be wrong because they’re so “authentic” and their “narrative” holds up in the focus group, and they’ll buy the books in hardcover and tune in every night. Apparently, the first step on the relatively short path to fascism is just telling people that they’re smart and pretty.
These are the people who have been praised beyond measure in order to whip them into enough of a frenzy that they would part with enough money to make bajillionaires out of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly and Matt Drudge and all the other media monsters who have gleefully strip-mined democracy for a quick buck. The conservative sludge are a useful mass of humanity: a great unwashed who happily become greater and more unwashed, and pay for the privilege.
They’re dupes. I’m saying it now. Dupes. They’ve been had. And it’s time to stop respecting them because the more we respect them for their gullibility, the more gullible they become.
I find it both telling and sad that the right wing has always accused us on the left of corrupting people because of our moral relativity and “I’m okay, you’re okay” philosophy. Yet, that is exactly how the GOP has formed their coalition and won elections all these years. Everyone was the prettiest girl at the dance, everyone the strongest cowboy: There was no lie the Republicans wouldn’t tell in order to score in the back seat of the little red electoral college.
Well, smarty-pants conservatives, what the fuck happens when you tell your constituents they’re the smartest, most perfect Americans and that Americans are the smartest, most perfect people God has ever created?
THEY BECOME CRAZY, THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS. You can’t tell flawed people they’re flawless. Because, instead of dealing with problems, they retreat into the delusion of perfection and go insane (it happens to celebrities all the time).
And so crazy is now what we have from the right, all in thanks to a bunch of businessmen, media moguls and religious leaders who thought they could control a reactionary populist sentiment in order to take financial advantage of it. Well, fuckers, you can’t. No one can. You can’t make a quick buck off of the backs of resentment, not without unleashing a lot of danger. Thanks for the mess, Hannity. Thanks for the sewer, Malkin. Now shut up.
The grown ups have to take care of the mess now.
Words just failed me when I watched this on Hardball with Chris Matthew’s. Expect more of the same in the remaining time until the election:
Germans would call her a “spiritual arsonist”. And it’s true, with attacks like these, Bachmann and her ilk are lighting fires in the soul of the American people that might be hard to extinguish.
(Update by Bill) Let’s throw Michele as many of our anti-American anvils as we can and get El Tinklenberg elected. Donate Here.
(Update #2 by Natascha) Done. Just gave him 20 bucks.
(Update #3 by Matthew) Rachel Maddow just said Tinklenberg received $30k after the remarks aired. Heh.
(Update #4 by Rik) SHE FUCKING CALLED FOR A NEW MCCARTHY ANTI-AMERICAN WITCH HUNT AT THE VERY END OF THIS CLIP! (mostly I added this so Natascha could get some kind of LME record for updates to a post…but, jesus, lady michele IS trying to revive tail-gunner Joe)
Yes, another YouTube sing along. This stuff just makes me happy right now.
I think he got Tina Fey to write this one for him.
Barack isn’t a born comedian. His timing and delivery are just a shade off the mark. Regardless, I think I woke my roommate up from laughing so hard. This campaign season’s greatest hits lampooned with near perfection. Give it a watch.
28 seconds. At the very least, 56 blinks.
Count them.
Dude, John, I know you like to gamble, so this might make some sense to you. Poker Face, buddy. Poker Face.
Also, they’re having a caption contest for this shot over at The Kos.
WTF? I’ve yet to actually watch the debate, but WTF?
As opposed to being in Paris, you get a real sense in Washington just how decentralized this country is culturally, economically and (often) politically.
The World War II memorial is devoid of personality: it says nothing because it’s trying to say everything. It commemorates all the glory and none of the pain. The Greatest Generation believes its own hype and here it is in concrete-and-fountain glory.
The Vietnam memorial is perfect for the Baby Boom generation: everything reflects on the viewer, elevating an individual’s experience over the collective grief and regret. It’s a memorial for the people who were left behind; of course, that’s a general explanation for memorials’ existence. But the Vietnam one is just so damn shameless about being a mirror, pain as an exercise in vanity.
The Lincoln memorial, on the other hand, is extraordinary—mostly because if you’re standing at the top and looking down the steps, you see a cross-section of the United States (and the world, really) that you cannot see anywhere else. Every race, shape, class, kind of person is there—right there—and you’re really forced to stand outside of whatever bubble you live in, be it ethnic, sexual, political or economic. Fitting, really.
Americans who misbehave abroad are “ugly.” I have yet to find a suitable term for tourists who misbehave on our shores. “Fucking German dildo” comes close.
There should be tattoo and piercing parlors in airports. I’d totally be all over that shit to pass time.
Perchance the smartest thing that James Carville ever said: “When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil.”
Time to fire up the ol’ Anvil Launcher. This year is shaping up to be an absolute ROUT of the Republican Party and all it stands for. For one thing take a look at current battleground states in this election:
West Virginia? So much for Obama’s “Appalachia Problem” Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight is projecting about 360 EVs for Obama. I know most of us have donated. Some of us are volunteering. Barring Obama proposing a new Federal “Kill Whitey” Czar at the debate tonight, it’s not a question if he will win, but by how much.
McCain is Drowning.
Anvil’s Away!
Donation Anvils
Volunteering Anvils
But that’s not the really good news. The Democrats position in Senate races went in the last few weeks from awesome to HOLY EFFIN’ SHIT! Let me put it this way: Georgia went from Solid R, to Toss-Up over the course of about a week and a half.
Democrat Jim Martin isn’t just a Democrat, but a better Democrat, going against Saxby Chambliss. Recall that five-time deferred (bad knees) from Vietnam Chambliss ran the dirtiest campaign in history against triple-amputee and Vietnam Vet Max Clelland (no knees). Democrats everywhere should be salivating over this one. This is one son of a bitch that deserves nothing our finest anvils.
In our own backyard, Franken has taken the lead in the polls, needs our help to seal the deal. Because, seriously, who here wants to wake up on Nov 5. to 6 more years of Senator Coleman?
On to house races. There are too many to count. Dems could pick-up another 20 or so seats.
Break Their Backs. Crush Their Spirit.
Close to Home:
Ash Madia (MN-03) has a great shot at beating Eric Paulsen and picking up Ramstad’s old seat.
Elwyn Tinklenberg was just added to the DCCC’s Red To Blue list. There must be some movement in his campaign to knock off Minnesota’s favorite wingnut Michele Bachmann. Let’s lend a hand.
Farther Away:
Darcy Burner running in Washington’s 8th District came within a few votes of beating incumbent Dave Reichert. Recent internals show her with a slight lead this year, but the polling has generally been erratic.
We also have a chance to pick-up Cheney’s old seat. Yes, you read that right. A Democrat could be sitting in Dick Cheney’s old seat in the house. Meet Gary Trauner. He fell about 600 votes short in 2006. Could there be a better coda to the Bush/Cheney years than this?
I could add more to this list. But I think you get the picture.
Break Their Backs. Crush Their Spirits.
