Republicans: Sarah Palin Is A Joke

Sarah Palin is being blamed by Republicans for their failure to gain a majority in the U.S. Senate. Politico noticed Roll Call Executive Editor (and Fox News contributor) Mort Kondracke's remarks at a midterm election review meeting, which was held in D.C.'s Ronald Reagan Building, which is considered Sacred Ground by the likes of Sarah Palin:

“The people who got slapped the hardest in this election — besides Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama — are Jim DeMint and Sarah Palin,” he said. “Jim DeMint and Sarah Palin are responsible for the fact that the Senate did not go Republican. They’re the ones who are responsible for Christine O’Donnell. They’re the ones who are responsible for Joe Miller in Alaska. They’re the ones who are responsible for Ken Buck in Colorado. They’re the ones who are responsible for Sharron Angle in Nevada.”

Kondracke called Miller, O'Donnell, Buck and Angle "characters." And for the coup de grâce, Politico reported that Kondracke said of the Palin's prospects for becoming the Republicans' nominee in 2012:

"She's a joke even within her own party," Kondracke said. "The idea that she would be the presidential nominee is unthinkable."

Here is the C-SPAN video of Kondracke's remarks:

Karl Rove Pans Diva Palin

The Daily Telegraph has interviewed Karl Rove about Sarah Palin's presidential prospects.

About Palin's upcoming reality show:

“With all due candour, appearing on your own reality show on the Discovery Channel, I am not certain how that fits in the American calculus of 'that helps me see you in the Oval Office’,” Mr Rove told The Daily Telegraph in an interview.

He added that the promotional clip for Sarah Palin’s Alaska could be especially detrimental to any political campaign. It features the mother of five in the great outdoors saying: “I would rather be doing this than in some stuffy old political office.”


On whether Republicans would be wise to make Palin their nominee:

“You can make a plausible case for any of them on paper, but it is not going to be paper in 2011. It’s going to be blood, it’s going to be sweat and tears and it’s going to be hard effort.”


On one of the unwritten qualifications for the office:

“There are high standards that the American people have for it [the presidency] and they require a certain level of gravitas, and they want to look at the candidate and say 'that candidate is doing things that gives me confidence that they are up to the most demanding job in the world’.” ...

... Mr Rove suggested that “outside of the true believers”, most Republican primary voters were still watching the race and would choose the candidate most suitable for the role. “They are going to be saying 'the person who can win is the person who proves to me that they are up to the job’,” he said.


There is an article about The Telegraph's article at The NY Daily News. This post's photo came from the Daily News' article, which also has news of Palin's appearance, tonight, on -- Where else? -- "Entertainment Tonight." Spoiler: Palin is going to run "if there's nobody else to do it."


Rove referred to a promotional clip for Palin's reality show. That clip can be seen, here, at The Hollywood Gossip.


For some time it has been clear that Rove does not consider Palin to be presidential timber. After Christine O'Donnell won her primary in Delaware, Rove challenged Palin to go to Delaware and campaign for her: "Look, if Sarah Palin wants to demonstrate her power and influence, she ought to -- where we started was Delaware -- she ought to go to Delaware and campaign for her favorite Christine O'Donnell."

Diva Palin's Secrets Exposed

Sarah Palin's political dreams are fading fast: Politico's Ben Smith, who has been cited by this blog for carrying water for Palin, praised Jonathan Martin's review of Palin's performance on the campaign trail. Martin wrote, in part:

The election is two weeks away, but the campaign trail reviews of Sarah Palin are already in, and they aren’t pretty:

According to multiple Republican campaign sources, the former Alaska governor wreaks havoc on campaign logistics and planning. She offers little notice about her availability, refuses to do certain events, is obsessive about press coverage and sometimes backs out with as little lead time as she gave in the first place.

In short, her seat-of-the-pants operation can be a nightmare to deal with, which, in part, explains why Palin doesn’t often do individual events for GOP hopefuls. ...

... [T]he high-maintenance aspects of dealing with the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee have angered and frustrated some conservative candidates and aides who once thought highly of Palin and, for more skeptical Republicans, simply reconfirmed their view that she’s self-centered and unhelpful to the cause.

Take that! Sarah Palin.

The Atlantic's blogger Andrew Sullivan also weighed in Martin's article -- with another iconic Palin image -- in his "Her Whole World Is Chaos" post.


And Vanity Fair's Juli Weiner weighed in, too -- we have weighty news here, folks -- with "Politico Calls Sarah Palin a Flake in Dishy New Takedown." Her article includes a video and Palin's feeble my-boyz-r-gonna-git-u, mean-girl tweet in response to Martin's article: "Johnny, Johnny, Johnny...ya just made big mistake lying about Levin, Beck, Rush...U can lie about me, but taking on the Big Guns? Not smart"


And -- bonus, grand finale! -- Gryphen wrote, "Sarah Palin is all about Sarah Palin. I keep waiting for the Republicans, and the Teabaggers, to figure out that very obvious fact, but so far they are still so smitten with her star power they cannot see that she is using them and then discarding them like a snotty tissue."

Palin Family Circus News - Tuesday, October 18, 2010

The circus continues ...

The NY Times' Maureen Dowd called Sarah Palin (and the other Mama Grizzlies) Mean Girls, "grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant."

Palin shot back, according to CNN, but, for now, Dowd has had the last word!

Of course, this blog called Palin a mean girl long before Dowd did, but we don't claim that Dowd reads the blog. If we did that, we'd have to claim that at least one other NY Times writer gets her news here.


So, Sunday we got a new HDTV to see DWTS (just kidding, but did get the TV). It seemed that it was on forever before Bristol danced. Does anyone know why that show is so popular? The TV is nice, though. My public library has about 200 blue-ray movies, and when we're through those no worry, because I've got cards at other libraries. We did buy "The Day The Earth Stood Still," and will buy another to turn the TV into a virtual aquarium. Netflix is a possibility, too. We live in a cable-free, dish-free zone. But I've digressed; back to the circus with Politics Daily, which says,

Responding to judges' pleas to include more performance in her performances, Bristol's partner, Mark Ballas, decided to bring in clowns to work with her on expressing herself. But that wasn't the end of the clowning around. Ballas also elected to begin their jive to the Monkees theme song dressed as, well, monkeys.

Didn't we know there was a circus here?

Alaska's Republican, Tea Party Candidate for U.S. Senate Violated 'Alaska Dispatch' Editor's Constitutional Rights

Guards for Alaskan Senate candidate Joe Miller, a self-proclaimed Constitutional Law expert, detained Tony Hopfinger, editor of The Alaska Dispatch, while he was attempting to ask Miller questions at a town hall meeting, which was held last night at Anchorage's Central Middle School. From The Alaska Dispatch:

... Anchorage Police freed Alaska Dispatcher editor Tony Hopfinger from Senate candidate Joe Mlller's body guards at Central Middle School early Sunday evening. Sergeant Mark Rein of the Anchorage Police Department said Hopfinger is not in custody or under arrest.

Hopfinger had been trying to ask Miller questions when two or three guards told him to leave or risk being charged with trespassing.

When Hopfinger continued to try to ask questions, one of the guards put the reporter in an arm-bar and then handcuffed him.

Hopfinger was released after police arrived.

The reporter was on public property where a public event was being held at the time of the incident. ...

Another Alaska Dispatch story has more of what happened, directly from its editor, Hopfinger, and the security guard, William Fulton. That story notes:

... Despite Fulton telling Alaska Dispatch and various other media outlets that he knew he was dealing with a reporter, the Joe Miller campaign promptly put out a press release saying, "It is also important to note that the security personnel did not know that the individual they detained was a blogger who reporting on the campaign [sic]."

The press release was headlined "Liberal Blogger Loses it at Town Hall Meeting," although Miller knows well that Dispatch, which is involved in a lawsuit to obtain Miller's Fairbanks personnel records, is not a "blog" but an established online news magazine.

Video footage from Central Middle School cameras may have captured the incident, and Alaska Dispatch will be asking the Anchorage School District to release it.

It is not known at this time whether Hopfinger will be filing charges against the men who detained him. ...

Alaska Dispatch, as well as the Fairbanks News Miner and Anchorage's Daily News have all gone to court to obtain Miller's record as a public employee in Fairbanks in order to learn why his employement there ended.


Gryphen of IM went to the Town Hall meeting and has a report, here. Shannyn Moore has posted about the incident at The Huffington Post, here.

Politico has a report, here. CNN's report is here. Anchorage's KTVA has a report, here. The Anchorage Daily News' report is here.

Scary People, Scary Times

Monday, September 13, 2010
by James Howard Kunstler

... There is no theme song for [economic] contraction - at least not one with a hummable tune. The current background music sounds like Stockhausen run through scrap-metal shredder. No wonder everybody's so nervous.

A few hours ago I drove up the immaculately conceived highways north out of Detroit to the drear industrial outlands of Happy Motoring history, north past Flint and Saginaw where an exhausted American Dream is being hunted down by the angry ghosts of the Wyandots. The heartland these days looks like it's preparing for a return trip to the 9th century A.D. Nobody knows what's ailing it, but they're whispering of "last stands" out here around the all-you-can-eat buffet at the year 'round Christmas Shoppe.

And the Tea Party aims to fix all this, to make things right again. I listen to their blather about "freedom" and all I can imagine is the sound of boots outside the door, and men in badly-fitted camo uniforms and buzzcut hair commanding me to accept John Boehner as my personal savior. ...

... You can just feel the heat of emotion rising, ... . We can't speak clearly anymore; we can only beat drums. All across the land self-appointed saviors are stepping up to heroically rescue the squandered entitlements of the bygone day: Rand Paul, the Kentucky physician who (like his dad) subscribes to the idea that the earth is only about 4000 years old; Dan Maes, the Colorado Tea Party candidate for governor who believes that bicycling is a "gateway drug" to communism; Sharron Angle, the Nevada polymoron running John Birch Society scripts to the psychologically-spavined blackjack dealers crowding the unemployment lines. ("The Trilateral Commission and the Bilderburgers did this to you!"); and lonely Joe Miller, the hermit-attorney of Fairbanks, stalking out of his survivalist cave to drive a silver lance through the flaming heart of the ravening liberal windigo. ...

Kunstler's essay can be read in its entirety by clicking the post's title.

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Kunstler's "Rehearsal for a Civil War" is another piece about the Tea Party; his blog is here.

Stockhausen's "Helicopter String Quartet" can be heard here. The recording may not be the best, or my computer's audio isn't the best, because Stockhausen wrote, "The microphone transmission from each helicopter should be such that the sounds of the rotor blades and that of the instrument blend well, and the instrument is heard slightly louder," but when I listened to the MP3 the helicopters weren't that audible.

After listening to Stockhausen's piece (or the tea partiers), you may be ready for Zen. See yesterday's post, "Something to bug you," below.

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Frank Rich, writing this morning in The NY Times, elucidates the origin of the anger and the Tea Party:

... That wave of anger began with the parallel 2008 cataclysms of the economy’s collapse and Barack Obama’s ascension. The mood has not subsided since. But in the final stretch of 2010, the radical right’s anger is becoming less focused, more free-floating — more likely to be aimed at “government” in general, whatever the location or officials in charge. The anger is also more likely to claim minorities like gays, Latinos and Muslims as collateral damage. This is a significant and understandable shift, if hardly a salutary one. The mad-as-hell crowd in America, still not seeing any solid economic recovery on the horizon, will lash out at any convenient scapegoat.

The rage was easier to parse at the Tea Party’s birth, when, a month after Obama’s inauguration, its founding father, CNBC’s Rick Santelli, directed his rant at the ordinary American “losers” (as he called them) defaulting on their mortgages, and at those in Washington who proposed bailing the losers out. (Funny how the Bush-initiated bank bailouts went unmentioned.) Soon enough, the anger tilted toward Washington ...

The Tea Party has, since then, however, become a front for big business and the Republican party.

Something to bug you

Are you going to fight crazy with crazy? Are you going to get emotional every time Sarah Palin says or does anything?

Try Zen. Here is an interactive intro. To make progress, you may have to move or click the mouse. Don't become annoyed. You may eventually get here, where there is more to discover.



The photo of the garden at Ryōan-ji temple is from one at Wikipedia.


Note: The intro requires Shockwave. A lot of the experience will be lost without sound.