failblog/FML friday

here again...












Now FML

Today, I got into my first car accident. Extremely upset, I called my parents, because it was their car and I didn't know what to do. I told them what happened, and asked if they were on their way to where I was. My dad's response was "Hell no, we're eating dinner." FML

Today, the girl I like came over to my house to watch a movie. We had seen pretty much every movie that I suggested, so we ended up watching The Lion King. I forgot how sad that movie is, because once Mufasa died I started bawling my eyes out. FML

Today, I turned 22. Instead of cutting my own cake, I stood by and smiled at a friend's belated birthday party. She celebrated her birthday two months ago. She decided to have her party on my birthday. No one remembered mine but everyone got her beautiful gifts. FML

Today, I had to give a presentation about Adolf Hitler. I wanted to point out he was a very good speaker, and could incite a crowd. Instead, what came out was 'Hitler's oral skills made everyone go wild with excitement" FML

Today, I got an invitation to my ex-boyfriend's wedding. We broke up because "he didn't believe in marriage." FML

Today, I had a really big debate in my English Class about the legalization of weed. My group had to state reasons why weed shouldn't be legal and no one except me had prepared. My partner came to class totally stoned. Our group lost the debate. We got a F. FML

Today, I was in Walmart with my mom. I was looking for some CDs I wanted and saw a cute guy. Then he nodded at me and as he started to walk towards me, I hear my name being called over the intercom. Apparently, according to my mom, it was time to go. FML

Today, I had to rub my turtle's anus with a wet Q-tip, which is supposed to help with his constipation. I think he liked it. FML

Today, my mother offered me $1.00 for each piece of asparagus I would eat at dinner. I made $14.00. I am 17 years old. FML

Today, I was working my job as a waitress near my college. I handed a customer her check, and she noticed that I had added her bill wrong. I apologized, and she pointed to my "student" labeled nametag, asking what I was studying. I said English. I'm a math major. FML

Today, I went to the pool. When I hit the water the top of my swimsuit came off so I tried to put it on underwater. The lifeguard thought I was drowning and pulled me out in front of everyone. Topless. FML

Today, at my graduation for my high school GED, my parents said they were getting all my family and my girlfriend together. So we all went out to a steakhouse down the road, everyone ordered steaks. Turns out the 'surprise' was me paying. I only got 50$ grad money, and the bill was 159.98. FML

Today, my very conservative aunt was giving me money. She thought it would be funny to secretly stick it in my pocket like a drug deal. She ended up pulling out my pot. FML

Today, while working at the hospital, I had a patient with a blocked bowel. It was so bad, feces were entering into her stomach. While leaning down to talk with her, she proceeded to throw up. I was both vomited and defecated on at the same time. FML

Today, I was taking a bath and out of boredom started making sheep noises. I then had a conversation with myself in farm animal noises. When I got out of the bath, I walked to my bedroom in my towel, passing the living room... where my little brother's soccer team burst out laughing. FML

Today, I went to watch the Movie "UP." At one point in the movie I got really sad and started to cry a bit. The 7 year old girl next to me noticed and told me to shut and man up. FML

Today, I took a nap with a kitten I just adopted from my mom's house. To make her feel more comfortable, I took a nap with her on my bed. In my dream, I kept smelling poo and I felt around on the bed to find the kitten. She apparently had diarrhea on my bed and I had stuck my hand in it. FML

Today, I checked my bank account that i've been saving money in since I was a kid for college. I have $100 left out of the $10,000 I had last month. Apparently my parents thought buying a pool and an HDTV for themselves was more important than my college education. FML

Today, my cousin and I found out that when a girl puts a flower in the right side of her hair, it means she's available. The bigger the flower, the more available she is. My eleven year old boy cousin told me to "cut down a palm tree and put it in my hair". FML

Today, I discovered my boyfriend of 5 months runs a website where men can submit nude or semi nude pictures of their ex's for revenge. FML

Today, I bought my cat a nice big bag of expensive anti-hairball catfood, so she'd stop puking hairballs on my things. After eating it, she started running around wildly, howling and projectile vomiting on EVERYTHING. FML

Today, I work for a company that sells a leading brand of condoms. They give away free condoms to employees at the office. I haven't gotten laid since I began working here. FML

Today, I decided that I was going to get my front license plate put back on my car after two years of having it off. In these two years I somehow never got pulled over for it, as it is illegal to drive without one in MD. On my way there, I got pulled over for not having a front license plate. FML

Today, I went to a Dodger game with my crush. Between innings, the "Kiss cam" came up on the big screen. The camera happened to land on us, and when my crush saw us on the screen, he leaned away from me and buried his face in his hands. Everyone saw, and sympathetically said "Awww." FML

Today, I was vacuuming my car and started to joke around with my six year old brother by sucking up his shirt and hair with the vacuum. I accidently sucked up his penis. My mom has caught him three times with the vacuum now. I turned my brother into a pervert. FML

Today, I was playing a medieval game with my brother, when he took all of his character's clothes off and said, "Let's have sex!" I looked at him and said, "UH YOU ARE MY BROTHER!" He turns and looks at me, smiling and says, "But not in the game!" I am a 19 year old girl. He is 12. FML

Today, my band had a show. We played a love song, and during the bridge, I ask out a friend of mine who was in the crowd, over the mic, in front of at least 200 people. She said no. FML

Today, In my science class I sit next to my friend Jill. My teacher always gets our names confused caling me Jill & her Liz. She decided to combine our names. I'm now known as Jizz. My teacher clearly has no idea what it means. FML

Today, I went on a date with my boyfriend. Suddenly he starts speaking gibberish. I ask what's wrong? He says, "I was just talking to my unicorn. He says you're pretty," and winks at me. What have we learned today? The person I like is a freak, and apparently unicorns are real. FML

Today, I got my drivers license suspended until I am 18 for driving without a license. Where was I driving to? My last day of Drivers Ed. The high school where I take Drivers Ed. classes at is across the street from my house. I gave up 3 years of driving to drive 100 feet. FML

Today, I had my first appearance in a court as an attorney. I called the prosecution the prostitution. FML

Today, I was smoking in my car and flicked the butt... into the face of a cop on a motorcycle going the other way. FML

Today, I was cleaning out my fiance's room while he was away so we could move into our new home. Not only did I find a few gay nudie mags, but also some interesting love letters from a nice man named Pablo. Apparently I need to do a lot more than cleaning his room to excite him. Like grow a penis. FML

Today, was my senior prom. I've had a crush on my date for months, but after many attempts at grinding with him and sexy seduction, he rejected me saying he was a good Catholic boy. I later found out that not only is he in touch with his religion, but intimately in touch with other boys. FML

Today, I had to water my entire garden. After an exhausting hour of watering hundreds of plants, I turned off the hose and started to feel good about the grueling job. That is, until it started pouring rain. FML

Today, as a prank, my friends put a big bucket of water on my door so that it would spill on me as I exited my room. It would have been funny if I hadn't been holding my $900 laptop as I was walking out. FML

Today, after buying the plane ticket to Glendale, CA to visit 17 year old Courtney who I met on a dating website, she called me for the first time to say that she was actually 19 year old Seth from Atlanta, GA. FML

Today, my dad decided to clean out my car and "accidentally" threw away my $520 tax refund check. FML

This will make liberals heads explode

Its amazing for all the grief and wrath that a certain news network gets (Fox) that there is a poll that shows this, from Politico...

Fox is the most trusted television news network in the country, according to a new poll out Tuesday.

A Public Policy Polling nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters Jan. 18-19 found that 49 percent of Americans trusted Fox News, 10 percentage points more than any other network.

Thirty-seven percent said they didn’t trust Fox, also the lowest level of distrust that any of the networks recorded.

There was a strong partisan split among those who said they trusted Fox — with 74 percent of Republicans saying they trusted the network, while only 30 percent of Democrats said they did.

CNN was the second-most-trusted network, getting the trust of 39 percent of those polled. Forty-one percent said they didn’t trust CNN.

Each of the three major networks was trusted by less than 40 percent of those surveyed, with NBC ranking highest at 35 percent. Forty-four percent said they did not trust NBC, which was combined with its sister cable station MSNBC.

Thirty-two percent of respondents said they trusted CBS, while 31 percent trusted ABC. Both CBS and ABC were not trusted by 46 percent of those polled.

“A generation ago you would have expected Americans to place their trust in the most neutral and unbiased conveyors of news,” said PPP President Dean Debnam in his analysis of the poll. “But the media landscape has really changed, and now they’re turning more toward the outlets that tell them what they want to hear.”

The telephone poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

It is also important to note that Public Policy Polling (PPP) is a Democratic polling organization, that's got to sting.

Obama State of the Union Drinking Game

This is from Huffington Post of all places, I heard it on the Hugh Hewitt show last night and couldn't stop laughing. I will tape the speech (I'm going to an event tonight) and play it over the weekend. Probably on either friday or saturday night because I will no doubt have a hangover. Here is the game...

NOTE: The Huffington Post in no way encourages binge drinking. This is the comedy section. If you actually drank as much as we suggested you would die, so do not do that.
(I'm still going to do it

Event Instructions
Obama says "let me be clear" Do one shot

Obama says "change isn't easy" Do one shot

Obama says "make no mistake" Do one shot

Obama says "Let me be clear,
change isn't easy, make no mistake."
He's screwing with you to get you drunk, so five shots

Joe Wilson yells something Do two shots

Obama yells back Finish the bottle

Obama says "jobs" Do one shot, two if you're unemployed

Obama says "health care" Do not drink, you will not be given a replacement liver

Nancy Pelosi claps like a seal Do one shot

Nancy Pelosi becomes a seal STOP DRINKING FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

Obama mentions Bo Put beer in your dog's water bowl

Michelle Obama wears a slinky dress Go immediately to the HuffPost Style page for close-ups

Joe Biden nods-off/laughs inappropriately/starts talking
before the speech is over Do three shots

Obama uses the term "Congressional leadership" Do two shots carefully as all
that laughing will make it difficult to swallow

Obama says he's "fighting for you" Do one shot, two if you believe him

Obama mentions Haiti Text “Haiti” to the number 90999 and donate $10 to the Red Cross

A real article on the TeaParty movement

When I first saw this on real clear politics; I thought it was going to be another slam on the movement that I am unexpectedly a part of, but it wasn't its actually a pretty fair article. Let me start of by saying I am not a typical "tea party" person. I have been actively involved in politics since 2004 (before I even turned 18 actually) I have worked on 10+ campaigns including both the Bush and McCain campaign. I was a 4 day volunteer at the Republican National Conventional in the fall of 2008. I am one of the youngest members of my BPOU and have future political ambitions (that I care not to share here now, for various reasons). That being said I brought some organizational knowledge to the movement that was sorely lacking in the beginning. They have caught up though which is good; I have to note that this is a LONG article (8 pages online) and while I will copy all of it and put it below it might be hard to read.


My first immersion in the social movement that helped take Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat away from the Democrats, and may have derailed the President’s chief domestic initiative, occurred last fall, in Burlington, Kentucky, at a Take Back America rally. My escort was an exceptionally genial sixty-seven-year-old man named Don Seely, an electrical engineer who said that he was between jobs and using the unwanted free time to volunteer his services to the Northern Kentucky Tea Party, the rally’s host organization, as a Webmaster. “I’ve never been a Webmaster, but I’ve known Webmasters,” he explained, with a chuckle, as he walked around a muddy field, near a horse-jumping ring, and introduced me to some of his colleagues, one of whom was a fireman. “And he’s also our finance guy.” Being the finance guy, from what I could gather, entailed volunteering a personal credit card to be used for the group’s PayPal account. The amateur nature of the operation was a matter of pride to all those who were taking an active interest, in many cases for the first time in their lives, in the cause of governance. Several of the volunteers had met at Bulldog’s Roadhouse, in a nearby town named Independence, where they assembled on weekdays for what you might call happy hour, were it not for the fact that Bulldog’s is a Fox News joint and five o’clock is when Glenn Beck comes on, warning from a studio that he likes to call the “doom room” about the return of a Marxist fifth column.

Seely wore a muted plaid shirt, rumpled khakis, and large, round glasses that seemed to magnify his curiosity, a trait that he attributed to his training as an engineer—an urge to understand the way things work. He told me that he used to listen to Beck on the radio, before Beck got his Fox show. “I didn’t like him,” he said. “He was always making fun of people. You know, he’s basically a comedian. But the reason I like him now is he’s kind of had a mind-set change. Instead of making fun of everybody, he started asking himself questions. His point was ‘Get out there, talk to your neighbor, see what they feel. Don’t sit back under your tree boohooing.’ ” The Bulldog’s gang was a collection of citizens who were, as one of them put it, “tired of talking to the TV.” So they watched Beck together, over beer, and then spent an hour consoling one another, although lately their personal anxieties had overtaken the more general ones of the host on the screen, and Beck’s chalkboard lectures about the fundamental transformation of the Republic had become more like the usual barroom ballgame: background noise. “We found that you really have to let people get the things off their chests,” Seely said.

Burlington is the seat of Boone County, and the rally took place at the Boone County fairgrounds, on an afternoon that was chilly enough to inspire one of the speakers, the ghostwriter of Joe the Plumber’s autobiography, to dismiss global warming, to great applause. A second-generation Chrysler dealer, whose lot had just been shut down, complained that the Harvard-educated experts on Wall Street and in Washington knew nothing about automobiles. (“I’ve been in this business since 1958, and what I know is that the American public does not want small cars!”) The district’s congressional representative, Geoff Davis, brought up the proposed cap-and-trade legislation favored by Democrats, and called it an “economic colonization of the hardworking states that produce the energy, the food, and the manufactured goods of the heartland, to take that and pay for social programs in the large coastal states.”

Boone County borders both Indiana and Ohio, and was described to me by a couple of people I met there as “flyover country,” with a mixture of provincial anxiety and defensive skepticism—as in “What brings you to flyover country?” The phrase is not quite apt. Home to the Cincinnati airport, which serves as a Delta hub, the county owes much of its growth and relative prosperity over the past two decades to large numbers of people flying in and out, not over. But Delta’s recent struggles, and rumors about the impending contraction of its local subsidiary, Comair, have contributed to a deeper sense of economic anxiety. “You go to the warehouses around the airport, probably at least a third or twenty-five per cent are empty,” Seely said. “We need to give somebody a break here, so people can start making money.” As it happens, the largest employer in northern Kentucky today is the I.R.S.

Another Bulldog’s regular, a middle-aged woman dressed in jeans, a turtleneck, and a red sweatshirt, stood beside some stables, hustling for signatures to add to the Tea Party mailing list. “I tell you, it’s an enthusiastic group,” she said. “Talk about grassroots. This is as grassroots as it gets.”

“And she works full time,” Seely added.

“Not as full time as I’d like.”

About a thousand people had turned up at the rally, most of them old enough to remember a time when the threats to the nation’s long-term security, at home and abroad, were more easily defined and acknowledged. Suspicious of decadent élites and concerned about a central government whose ambitions had grown unmanageably large, they sounded, at least in broad strokes, a little like the left-wing secessionists I’d met at a rally in Vermont in the waning days of the Bush Administration. Large assemblies of like-minded people, even profoundly anxious people anticipating the imminent death of empire, have an unmistakable allure: festive despair. A young man in a camouflage jacket sold T-shirts (“Fox News Fan,” for example), while a local district judge doled out play money: trillion-dollar bills featuring the face of Ben Bernanke. An insurance salesman paraded around, dressed as though guiding a tour of Colonial Williamsburg. “Oh, this is George Washington!” Seely said. “Hey, George, come over here a minute.”



“I’m back for the Second American Revolution,” the man said. “My weapons this time will be the Constitution, the Internet, and my talk-radio ads.”

If there was a central theme to the proceedings, it was probably best expressed in the refrain “Can you hear us now?,” conveying a long-standing grievance that the political class in Washington is unresponsive to the needs and worries of ordinary Americans. Republicans and Democrats alike were targets of derision. “Their constituency is George Soros,” one man grumbled, and I was reminded of the dangerous terrain where populism slides into a kind of nativist paranoia—the subject of Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay linking anti-Masonic sentiment in the eighteen-twenties with McCarthyism and with the John Birch Society founder Robert Welch’s contention that Dwight Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” The name Soros, understood in the context of this recurring strain—the “paranoid style in American politics,” Hofstadter called it—is synonymous, like Rockefeller or Rothschild, with a New World Order.

The Soros grumbler, who had also labelled John McCain a Communist, was dressed in jeans pulled up well above his waist with suspenders, and wearing thick, oversized shades. When he saw my notebook, he turned to Seely and asked, “Where’s he from, supposedly?” Informed that I live in New York, he replied, “There’s a nightmare right there.” What he had in mind was not a concentration of godless liberals, as it turned out, but something more troubling. “Major earthquake faults,” he said. “It’s hard in spots, but basically it’s like a bag of bricks.” Some more discussion revolved around a super-volcano in Yellowstone (“It’ll fry Denver and Salt Lake at the same time”) and the dire geological forecasts of Edgar Cayce, the so-called Sleeping Prophet, which involved the sudden emergence of coastlines in what, for the time being, is known as the Midwest. I asked the man his name. “T. J. Randall,” he said. “That’s not my real name, but that’s the one I’m using.”

Seely saw our encounter with the doomsayer more charitably than Hofstadter might have. “That’s an example of an intelligent person who’s not quite got it all together,” he said. “You can tell that. But he’s pretty interesting to talk to.” Seely’s own reaction, upon learning where I’d come from, had been to ask if I was familiar with the New School, in Greenwich Village. His youngest daughter, Amber, had gone there.

I asked Seely what Amber thought of the Tea Party. “We kind of hit a happy medium where we don’t discuss certain things,” he said, and added that at the moment Amber, who now works for a nonprofit that builds affordable housing in New Orleans, was visiting his son, Denver, who is enrolled in a Ph.D. program in mechanical engineering at Mississippi State.

By most accounts, the Paul Revere figure of this Second American Revolution is an excitable cable-news reporter named Rick Santelli, a former futures trader and Drexel Burnham Lambert vice-president who stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange last February and sounded the alarm on CNBC about the new Administration’s planned assistance for homeowners facing foreclosure. He proposed a nationwide referendum, via the Internet, on the matter of subsidizing “the losers’ mortgages,” winning both the attention and the vocal support of the working traders in his midst. “President Obama, are you listening?” he shouted, and then said that he’d been thinking of organizing a Chicago Tea Party in July, urging “all you capitalists” to come join him on Lake Michigan, where “we’re going to be dumping in some derivative securities.” It was a delicate pose—financial professionals more or less laughing at debtors while disavowing the lending techniques that had occasioned the crisis—but within a matter of hours a Web site, OfficialChicagoTeaParty.com, had gone live, and by the end of the following week dozens of small protests were occurring simultaneously around the country, invoking the legacy of early New England colonists in their revolt against King George.

Santelli’s rant was delivered at 7:10 A.M., Chicago time, but it was highly YouTube-able, and all the more effective to the alienated masses—“the rabble,” as some have taken to calling themselves—because Santelli was not a known conservative mouthpiece like Rush Limbaugh or Beck or Sean Hannity. The primal narrative of any insurrection benefits from the appearance of unlikely spontaneity. Another early agitator who merits a retrospective footnote is Keli Carender, a.k.a. the Liberty Belle, a blogger and “random woman,” as one admirer says, “from Seattle, of all places.” Carender was a week ahead of Santelli in voicing her dissent; her mistake was choosing the wrong animating metaphor. Borrowing terminology from Limbaugh, she organized a Porkulus Protest in response to the economic-stimulus bill, and tried tagging Democratic leaders with epithets like Porky and Piggy and Porker. (Not the least of tea’s advantages is the ease with which it can be converted into a handy acronym: Taxed Enough Already.) But Carender identified a tactic that would prove invaluable in the months of raucous town-hall meetings and demonstrations to follow: adopting the idealistic energy of liberal college students. “Unlike the melodramatic lefties, I do not want to get arrested,” she wrote. “I do, however, want to take a page from their playbook and be loud, obnoxious, and in their faces.”



Spring brought the founding of the Tea Party Patriots, a centralized Web destination for decentralized malcontents, and the start of Glenn Beck’s side gig as a social organizer, through his 9.12 Project. The numbers nine and twelve referred to a checklist of principles and values, but their greater significance lay in the allusion to September 11th. “The day after America was attacked, we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties,” the project’s mission statement read. “We want to get everyone thinking like it is September 12, 2001, again.” The chosen values were inarguable: things like honesty and hope and courage. Only two of the principles (“I believe in God and He is the center of my life”; “I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable”) indicated any kind of political agenda. Inclusiveness was the point.

As spring passed into summer, the scores at local Tea Party gatherings turned to hundreds, and then thousands, collecting along the way footloose Ron Paul supporters, goldbugs, evangelicals, Atlas Shruggers, militiamen, strict Constitutionalists, swine-flu skeptics, scattered 9/11 “truthers,” neo-“Birchers,” and, of course, “birthers”—those who remained convinced that the President was a Muslim double agent born in Kenya. “We’ll meet back here in six months,” Beck had said in March, and when September 12th arrived even the truest of believers were surprised by the apparent strength of the new movement, as measured by the throngs who made the pilgrimage to the Capitol for a Taxpayer March on Washington, swarming the Mall with signs reading “ ‘1984’ Is Not an Instruction Manual” and “The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin’ African!”

Politics is ultimately a numbers game, and the natural excitement surrounding 9.12 drove crowd estimates upward, from an early lowball figure of sixty thousand, reported by ABC News, into the hundreds of thousands and across the million mark, eventually nearing two million—an upper limit of some significance, because 1.8 million was the figure commonly reported in mainstream or “state-run” media outlets as the attendance at President Obama’s Inauguration. “There are more of us than there are of them, and we know the truth,” one of the Kentucky organizers, who had carpooled to D.C. with a couple of co-workers from an auto-parts warehouse, told me. The fact that the mainstream media generally declined to acknowledge the parallel, regarding the marchers as a loud and motley long tail of disaffection, and not a silent majority, only hardened their resolve.

Consider our peculiar political situation at the end of this first decade of the new century. An African-American Democrat is elected President, following the collapse of the two great symbols of postwar prosperity, Detroit and Wall Street. Seizing on the erosion of public trust in élite institutions, the C.E.O. of World Wrestling Entertainment, Linda McMahon, announces her candidacy for the U.S. Senate, touting her opposition to a federal banking bailout whose principal beneficiaries include many of her neighbors in Greenwich, Connecticut. Another pro-wrestling eminence, the former Minnesota governor Jesse (the Body) Ventura, begins hosting a new television show called “Conspiracy Theory,” evincing a distrust in government so deep that it equates environmental crusaders with the Bilderbergs. A multimillionaire pornographer, Larry Flynt, is moved to branch out from his regular perch as an enemy of moral hypocrisy with an expanded sense of purpose, lamenting the takeover of Washington by “Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich,” in an op-ed for the Huffington Post, and calling for an unspecified form of national strike inspired by Shays’s Rebellion. And an obscure state senator who once posed naked for Cosmopolitan emerges, after driving a pickup truck around Massachusetts, as a leading contender to unseat the aforementioned President.

American history is dotted with moments like this, when, as the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz says, “panic and vitriol come to the fore,” occasioning a temporary realignment of political interests. Flynt cited Franklin Roosevelt’s use of the phrase “economic royalists,” which was itself an echo of the moneyed interests targeted by Andrew Jackson, who earned the nickname King Mob after his Inauguration, in 1829, brought hordes of precursors of the Hustler subscribers and WrestleMania fans of our time to the White House lawn. Jackson’s staunch opposition to the Second Bank of the United States set a precedent for generations of Wall Street resentment to come.

Between the demise of the Whig Party and the consolidation of the modern Republican Party, under Lincoln, there came a nativist movement of Know Nothings, as they called themselves—or “the Lou Dobbs party,” as Michael Kazin, the author of “The Populist Persuasion,” now says. Marx and Engels had just published their manifesto, and German immigrants were suspected of importing Socialist ideas. The new waves of Irish Catholics couldn’t be trusted, either: who was to say they wouldn’t take their orders from the Pope instead of the President?

Gilded Age excesses gave rise to a new People’s Party, a movement of Southern and Western farmers and miners united in opposition to railroad speculators, and the panic of 1893 accelerated their cause. By 1896, William Jennings Bryan was addressing the Democratic Convention with his famous critique of “the idle holders of idle capital.” (The convention, held in Chicago, loosed “a wild, raging, irresistible mob which nothing can turn from its abominable foolishness,” as the Times put it.) “That basic kind of vocabulary, against the monarchy and the aristocracy, has informed every conceivable American dissident group in one way or another,” Wilentz says. “Lyndon LaRouche does that whole Queen of England thing. He’s still fighting the American Revolution."



The Tea Party movement, identified by some commentators as the first right-wing street-protest movement of our time, may be a reflection of how far populist sentiment has drifted away from the political left in the decades since the New Deal. “The original Populists were the ones who came up with the income tax,” Charles Postel, the author of “The Populist Vision,” said recently. “They were for the nationalization of everything. Their idea of a model institution was the Post Office.” Bryan believed that the “right to coin money and issue money is a function of the government,” and railed, most memorably, against the “cross of gold.” Yet few ideas stir the Tea Party faithful more than a fear of creeping nationalization and the dangers—both moral and practical—associated with printing money to suit momentary needs. The sponsors of Glenn Beck’s nightly history lessons on the depredations of American progressivism frequently include purveyors of gold.

One historical comparison that some Tea Party champions have made is to the civil-rights movement, and, to the extent that the analogy holds, it may reflect the fact that the Tea Party seems to derive much of its energy from the members of that generation who did not participate in the cultural revolution of the sixties, and are only belatedly coming to terms with social and demographic trends set in motion fifty years ago. Don Seely invited me to his house for coffee the day after the rally at the Kentucky fairgrounds, and showed me his Air Force Commendation Medal, awarded for meritorious service from 1967 to 1971. “At this age, I was so ignorant,” he said. “Every once in a while, you’d catch a glimpse on TV of Martin Luther King—all that kind of stuff was going on. I graduated college in December of ’66. About a year after I left, that’s when all the riots happened. I’m thinking, What is going on?” Seely had always wanted to be a pilot, but, because of poor eyesight, he ended up an engineer in a satellite-control facility. The medal was accompanied by a photograph of Seely in his captain’s uniform, and he said that Amber, after looking at the image, had proclaimed that he was the only person she knew who’d kept the same hair style for nearly fifty years: short, straight, and parted neatly on the far right.

Seely grew up across the street from a dairy farm that his father owned, in Ohio, and he considers himself a “green,” by the mid-century standards relating to productive use of the land, in contrast with the “weirdos” whom he now associates with environmental causes. “If they had their way, all the buildings, all industry, all fossil fuel would stop,” he said. “And you can’t have that.” He and his wife, who works at the Creation Museum, an institution dedicated to promoting a Biblically literal account of the earth’s origins, raised their family in a Columbus suburb and moved south across the Ohio River about a year ago, to be closer to their grandchildren. Their new Kentucky home has a large expanse of freshly mowed grass out back that Seely’s brother-in-law at first mistook for a golf course. “Those towers over there, that’s actually Ohio,” Seely said, stepping onto his back porch and pointing at the nearest tall buildings. “Ohio has a problem: money is leaving, educated people are leaving. ’Cause we have a lot of good universities in Ohio, but there’s no jobs there, so you educate your kids and then you send them off.”

Seely had a history in local politics to reflect on as he thought about how to reverse the tide of urban progressivism. Many of his cohorts did not, however, and he worried about the transition from the strange euphoria of collective exasperation. Like the sixties radicals, they risked suffering from a kind of idealistic naïveté. “I don’t think the Tea Party quite understands how the system actually works,” he said. For about a decade, he served as a Republican central committeeman, a volunteer position, in Ohio’s Franklin County, where the general level of civic engagement was such that politicians were known to be willing to appear at any home where five or six neighbors might assemble. Democracy as he experienced it was practiced in a largely backroom fashion, with the committeemen and the county chairs trading favors for endorsements. The local Republican Party, in his telling, consisted of three competing factions: moderates, fiscal conservatives, and Seely’s group, the social conservatives. A few years ago, when the longtime Franklin County chair, a friend of Seely’s, stepped down, the first two groups banded together to block the social conservatives from retaining power. “And guess who they elected to be the chairman?” he asked me. “An open homosexual!”

“People are finally getting to the point where they want to educate themselves,” Seely went on. “We’ve got to get to the point where people are educated enough to find out about ‘Well, how do you endorse candidates?’ That’s really where the power is. It’s been very frustrating to me, because I tell people about my experience and it goes pffft pffft”—he gestured to indicate something passing over his head. “They say, ‘You know, we’re not interested in local things. We’re interested in national things.’ I go, ‘Well, fine. That’s good. But, really, you got to be local.’ ”

After we finished our coffee, Seely took me to the Creation Museum, a mile down the road. The museum, which opened in 2007, at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars, features a planetarium, animatronic dinosaurs, and a partial replica, built to exacting scale, of Noah’s Ark. Several staff Ph.D.s work on site. The first exhibit showed two paleontologists, a Darwinist and a Biblical literalist, examining a fossil. “Depending on what your world view is, and what you believe and what you’ve been taught, you can look at the same thing and come to a different conclusion,” Seely explained. The exhibit, called “Starting Points,” was intended to demonstrate the plausible divergence in theories about man’s relation to dinosaurs, but it could just as easily have spoken for the assumptions we make about Barack Obama’s past associations with figures like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Obama’s selection last summer of the Republican congressman John McHugh to be his Secretary of the Army created the need for a special election, and provided the first opportunity for Tea Party activists to make an electoral impact both locally and nationally. It served as a dress rehearsal for the Massachusetts Senate race, and enabled activists to learn from their mistakes. McHugh’s district, New York’s Twenty-third, covers most of what locals call the North Country, from the Adirondacks to the St. Lawrence River and extending west to Lake Ontario. Primarily rural, its politics and class markers have more in common with Kentucky than with Manhattan, and the Republican Party had been in control since before the turn of the twentieth century. But Obama carried the district, with fifty-two per cent of the vote, and the eleven Republican county chairs made what seemed like an expedient choice in nominating the veteran state assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava to run for McHugh’s seat. Scozzafava was a big-tent selection: pro-choice, in favor of gay marriage, and a friend of the teachers’ union.

Tea Party adherents responded by backing a third-party challenge from an earnest accountant named Doug Hoffman, who had served as the C.F.O. for the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980. “We formed the foundation that created the Miracle, and I think the miracle was the start of the Reagan Revolution, and it eventually brought down the Soviet Union,” Hoffman told a group of supporters. “Since this is the first congressional race of 2010, we’re going to break down the wall again. And the miracle is we’re going to take America back, and we’re going to get our freedom back.”

Shortly before the election, I went to Cicero, New York, to hear the former House majority leader Dick Armey address what one listener referred to as a “glorified sticker club.” A group of about thirty people had assembled in the cavernous interior of Drivers Village, a cluster of adjoined auto dealerships. They had been meeting regularly for months to talk politics. “This could be the single most important election that any of us will ever get to work on in our lifetime—the game-changer,” Armey, who now heads a supply-side nonprofit called FreedomWorks, declared. He predicted—correctly—that Scozzafava would end up conceding before Election Day, and said that the only remaining question was whether Hoffman, who was polling in third place, could manage to overcome the Democrats’ likely election fraud, which he estimated to be worth three percentage points. “In ’93, when the worm started to turn, it started to turn with a special election in Kentucky,” he said, referring to a 1994 contest that was prompted by the death of an incumbent Democrat, and won by a little-known Republican, a Christian-bookstore owner named Ron Lewis. “That election changed everybody’s mood,” Armey said. It also paved the way for the Republican takeover of the House in the ’94 midterms.

“None of us knew this was going to hit,” a young woman named Jennifer Bernstone said, looking up from a laptop. “We all went to D.C. in September: ‘Woo hoo, that was awesome!’ We all came home. ‘Now what?’ This is the what. Who the heck knew? I sing for a living. I’m an actress. I don’t do this stuff.” Her immediate concern was the effective deployment of Hoffman supporters from Connecticut and Westchester, with whom she’d been e-mailing. They were coming to canvass for the weekend, and needed places to crash.

“I feel a kinship with the Afghan hill men,” a young man with wavy hair and glasses said, eying Armey’s young associates with an air of caution. “We’re a bunch of ordinary people, and a bunch of very powerful groups are coming in with very different philosophies—maybe sometimes I agree with them, most of the time I don’t—and they’re having a proxy war in our back yard.”

The group at Drivers Village had organized through Meetup.com under the name Central New York 9.12, and, according to one of them, a Constitutionalist, they represented about eight political subgroups, including that most prized Tea Party scalp: Obama voters. They had brought no props, and none were dressed in period garb. They seemed united principally by their acute sensitivity to the raging-teabagger stereotype, and, as if to reassure each other, compared notes of their experiences on the Mall:

“You saw the lack of litter.”

“I think it had more to do with the calibre of the people involved.”

“As you can see, we’re not really what a lot of people portray us as,” William Wells, the Afghanistan analogist, told me, after apologizing for the mud stains on his jeans, which he attributed to harvesting pinot gris earlier in the day. Wells’s father is an astronomer turned vintner, and his mother is a doctor. “I used to work at Fannie Mae,” he said. “I was a research analyst in the loss-forecasting division. If you understand that, you understand kind of why I’m here. In some ways, this, for me, is paying off my debt when I should have said something.” He added that Sean Hannity and Keith Olbermann had each got the story of the housing crisis about half right, despite “very different angles of approach,” and that Glenn Beck, “whatever you think of his histrionics,” had been closer to ninety per cent correct.

As the meeting was breaking up, a soft-spoken project manager, and father of six, named Paul Dopp asked me if I knew who had won the Battle of Saratoga. “It was General Arnold,” he said—Benedict Arnold. “Part of the reason he turned traitor was that he didn’t get the recognition for it. He got ticked. But what he did is he rode right out in front between the soldiers, looked at the Americans, and said, ‘I’m fighting. Are you coming?’ And they came. Someone is going to stand up for principle.” Dopp said that his brother had travelled to the Soviet Union in the nineteen-eighties, while studying détente, and returned with a sober lesson on the corrupting effects of power. “For a lot of people, government is their religion,” he said. “That’s their place of worship, because they truly believe in the betterment of man.”



At night, with the dealerships closed, Drivers Village felt vast and lonely. “This used to be a mall before the economy crashed around here,” Dopp said, referring not to the recent tumult but to the Rockefeller era. “We’ve been ravaged so well, so long, we’re kind of like, ‘The last person that leaves Schenectady, please turn the lights off.’ The only reason we’re still alive is because of the bubble created by the financial system down in the city.” The mall had been resuscitated by a born-again car salesman whose political sympathies inclined him to let the Commons, as the interior corridors of Drivers Village are known, be put to revolutionary use.

Without paying attention, I followed the group out a different exit from the way I’d come in, and quickly realized that it would take a long time to find my car—parked amid acres of cars awaiting sale in a recession. One of the men at the meeting offered to drive me around the lot to speed up the search, taking the opportunity to show me a three-ring binder that he kept in the back seat of his van, full of homemade graphs showing the growth of the national debt, and Internet printouts that hinted at links between, for instance, ACORN and an Obama campaign office in Louisiana. “That’s what got us mad, those sorts of things,” he said. “You know, it drives us nuts. I would love for someone to actually come out and say this—someone that is credible, other than myself, in my own mind.”

The involvement of people like Dick Armey in the Tea Party movement led many Democrats, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, to dismiss the significance of the activism as a creation of right-wing moguls. FreedomWorks and a host of lobbying firms and think tanks, including Americans for Tax Reform, the Club for Growth, Campaign for Liberty, and the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, sponsored the march in Washington last September. Lobbyists and think tanks in turn rely on financial support from corporate interests with enormous stakes in much of the prospective legislation on Capitol Hill. “Astroturfing” is the critics’ preferred term for this phenomenon, with its imputation of a synthetic, top-down structure to contrast with the outward appearance of grassroots independence. Yet the presence of paid FreedomWorks operatives at meetings like the one in Cicero, handing out Obamacare Translator leaflets and legislator “leave-behinds,” would be cause for greater skepticism if the civilians in attendance weren’t already compiling binders of their own and reciting from memory the troublesome implications buried on page 59 of House Resolution 3200. The blogosphere can make trained foot soldiers of us all, with or without corporate funding.

“If you listen to the Democrats, they’re completely convinced somebody’s in charge of all this,” Dick Armey said, sitting at a hotel café in Syracuse with a press aide, the day after his pep talk to the sticker club. He took off his Stetson and said that he’d only just learned about the existence of the Tea Party Patriots and “a group that call themselves the 9.12 Project, and I’m not quite sure where they come from.”

“It’s Glenn Beck,” his press aide interjected.

“I don’t know Glenn Beck,” Armey said. “I think I was on his show one time. Was I?”

FreedomWorks has an annual budget of only seven million dollars and a paid staff of eighteen, most of whom travel comfortably within the Washington establishment, where debating the sanity of Beck remains a common cocktail-party gambit. Its employees are well versed in the differences between the Austrian and Chicago economic schools, and in the biographical details of Howard Roark and John Galt, but tend to cringe at some of the paranoid elements within the Ron Paul contingent. They provide logistical support and tactical know-how, like the dreaded community organizers mocked by Rudy Giuliani, to a network of some four hundred activists scattered around the country. In their advisory capacity, their aims are to push fiscal concerns, not social issues, and to deëmphasize personal attacks on Obama, which could be perceived as having racial overtones; instead, they take on Pelosi and Harry Reid.

“Where did MoveOn.org come from?” Armey asked, citing the grassroots liberal group that was until recently the envy of all its conservative counterparts, and then answered his own question, incorrectly: “From George Bush.” In fact, as Armey’s aide was quick to point out, MoveOn originated in the Clinton impeachment proceedings, and subsequently gained wider attention under Bush, and specifically through its unofficial association with the grassroots campaign of Howard Dean—or “the governor from back East that ran for President,” as Armey put it, adding, “His name will come to me tomorrow.”

An absent-minded professor in cowboy boots, Armey saw his role as eliciting coverage of the growing conservative opposition from news organizations (like this one) that exist outside the Fox and Friends echo chamber. “I don’t know if you noticed, but in August, all of a sudden, I became the bogeyman,” he told me, with undisguised pleasure, and said that he’d received an e-mail from an old friend, “a liberal English prof from a small college down the road,” in Dallas, that read “Shame on you.” The outburst had been prompted by a blog post linking FreedomWorks to a town-hall strategy memo distributed by activists in Fairfield County, Connecticut. (The memo, which was written by a Tea Party Patriots volunteer, included such suggestions as “Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early” and “The goal is to rattle him.”) In his defense, Armey offered the folksy alibi of having been “back in Texas, tending to two sick goats,” on the weekend of the town-hall event in question, with the veterinary receipts to prove it. “They made a walking, talking, attention-getting device out of me,” he said.



Even as Armey welcomes the attention, he must be wary of attracting too much. The Tea Party Express, a road show funded by a PAC called Our Country Deserves Better, has earned the scorn of many activists for being too slickly produced—its buses too flashy, its steak-house tabs too high. Some even call it the Astroturf Express, in an attempt to own the opposition’s slur. “That’s a Republican PAC,” one board member of the defiantly nonpartisan Tea Party Patriots declared recently, and, to be sure, Armey’s aide recommended “a great YouTube” in which the Republican Senator John Cornyn can be seen being booed and heckled on a stage in Austin for his support of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. TARP, because it happened on President Bush’s watch, makes for a better Tea Party litmus test than anything since.

“There you are, Leader,” the aide said at another point, drawing Armey’s attention to a television above the hotel bar, which was showing the local news. Armey was standing behind a lectern, touting the virtues of a flat tax, while Doug Hoffman stood off to the side, smiling. The footage was from a boisterous rally in downtown Syracuse, which is not part of District Twenty-three.

Most liberals mistook Hoffman’s eventual defeat, which came after a bitter Scozzafava endorsed the Democrat Bill Owens, as a sign that the movement had overshot. “If the tea party right can’t win there, imagine how it might fare in the nation where most Americans live,” Frank Rich wrote in the Times, noting that New York’s Twenty-third District is ninety-three per cent white. The headline over Rich’s column was “THE NIGHT THEY DROVE THE TEA PARTIERS DOWN.” Rich and others, including senior members of the Obama Administration, underestimated the strength of the movement, and the extent of the resentment that fed it. By fixating on the most egregious protest signs, and making sport of Tea Party infighting, they ignored the movement’s gradual consolidation.

Meanwhile, FreedomWorks and other activist groups refocussed their attention on Florida, where a thirty-eight-year-old fiscal conservative named Marco Rubio was mounting a strong primary challenge for the Senate against the popular but moderate governor, Charlie Crist. Rand Paul, son of Ron, caught up with Kentucky’s Secretary of State, Trey Grayson, in the race to succeed Senator Jim Bunning. And in Tennessee’s Eighth Congressional District, earlier this month, a conservative named Donn Janes opted out of the Republican primary in order to run as “an independent Tea Party candidate.” Bill O’Reilly, who has never seemed entirely comfortable with the anarchic impulses of the activist fringe, told his new Fox News colleague Sarah Palin that he wouldn’t be surprised to see her lead a Tea Party ticket in 2012. “Well, there is no Tea Party ticket,” Palin demurred. “There could be,” he said. If a registered national Tea Party existed, a recent Rasmussen poll suggested, its popularity would exceed that of the Republicans. Among independent voters, a hypothetical Tea Party candidate beat a Democrat, too.

The lesson that the Republican establishment drew from upstate New York was not to shun the movement, for fear of losing moderates, but to court it (the embattled Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele recently used teacups as props during a speech) or get out of its way, as evidenced by last week’s special election in Massachusetts. While Scott Brown, a telegenic state senator, visited the kinds of coastal New England towns that had always counted Ted Kennedy as their own, the National Republican Senatorial Committee deliberately chose not to offer him much public support, because of voters’ dissatisfaction with party politics.

As in upstate New York, volunteers from elsewhere flocked to canvass and man phone banks: not crazed sign-carriers but quietly dedicated engineers and winemakers and singers. By the end, Brown was raising a million dollars a day from donors who saw an opportunity to make the election a referendum on health care.

The Democrats were “caught napping,” as David Axelrod admitted to the Times. Massachusetts already has a more generous health-care system than anything that either the Senate or the House has yet proposed. Attorney General Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, appeared at times barely to campaign at all, and flubbed the kinds of exchanges—about the Red Sox, say—designed to showcase blue-collar cred. While Coakley carried the city of Boston, the site of the original Tea Party, with nearly seventy per cent of the vote, Brown, notably, won the neighborhood of South Boston, where the sting of forced busing still lingers from the seventies.

The lesson that the Tea Party movement seems to have learned is, in effect, Don Seely’s: to respect local preferences and work selectively within the system. Rather than back a libertarian third-party candidate, the activists this time rallied behind the equivalent of Dede Scozzafava. Scott Brown at one point likened himself to a “Reagan Democrat” and is something of a moderate on abortion rights. One of Dick Armey’s associates told me in November, “We have got to show that this movement can be successful outside the South.” Now they have, and New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer, who made the mistake of describing Brown as a “far-right teabagger,” in a last-ditch fund-raising appeal on behalf of Coakley, has invited talk of a movement to depose him in November by drafting Rick Santelli’s CNBC colleague Larry Kudlow.

What remains to be seen is whether the anti-establishment bent of the Tea Partiers will drive them to disown their greatest coup in the weeks to come. Less than twenty-four hours after the victory, Glenn Beck was suggesting that Brown might be morally unfit for office. (“This one could end with a dead intern. I’m just saying.”)
ack in New York City, you can feel the tremors in the social bedrock, if not in the earth’s crust, as T. J. Randall would have it. An online video game, designed recently by libertarians in Brooklyn, called “2011: Obama’s Coup Fails” imagines a scenario in which the Democrats lose seventeen of nineteen seats in the Senate and a hundred and seventy-eight in the House during the midterm elections, prompting the President to dissolve the Constitution and implement an emergency North American People’s Union, with help from Mexico’s Felipe Calderón, Canada’s Stephen Harper, and various civilian defense troops with names like the Black Tigers, the International Service Union Empire, and CORNY, or the Congress of Rejected and Neglected Youth. Lou Dobbs has gone missing, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh turn up dead at a FEMA concentration camp, and you, a lone militiaman in a police state where private gun ownership has been outlawed, are charged with defeating the enemies of patriotism, one county at a time.

Not long ago, at a restaurant in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, I stood next to Kellen Giuda, a twenty-seven-year-old self-described “party guy” (in the night-life sense) and the proprietor of a Web site, parcbench.com, that he describes as a “Rolling Stone from the right.” He was listening to a couple of deficit hawks from Hoboken who were worried about potential demagogic influences on the Tea Party movement from the likes of Sarah Palin. Giuda is a co-founder of Tea Party 365, a local New York City battalion, which had convened this particular meeting, as well as a national board member for the Tea Party Patriots. While the Hoboken pair were making their case, he glanced at his iPhone and skimmed a newly arriving e-mail from yet another upstart organization, Tea Party Nation. It announced a national convention to be held in Nashville on the first weekend in February, with Sarah Palin as the keynote speaker.

Dick Armey, despite his contention that “the Republican Party is undergoing the most massive identity crisis in the history of politics,” was nearby, talking happily with Ed Cox, the newly elected chair of the New York Republican State Committee, who seemed to recognize that a shift in the power center had occurred.

Eventually, a couple of men dressed in black silenced the crowd with an impassioned presentation that called to mind lefty gatherings of the sixties, or even the thirties. One of them was from Maine, the other from Fresno, and they were driving across the country to raise awareness of the plight of farmers in California’s Central Valley, where a water shortage had been creating a “new dust bowl” and threatening the local way of life. Women handed out flyers for a campaign called Saving the Valley that Hope Forgot. (“Americans need to ask themselves whether they are willing to settle for foreign food, like they have settled for foreign oil.”) A gray-haired man in a blue velvet jacket and sneakers started inching toward the center of the room with an acoustic guitar. He had a “Reagan for President” button on his shoulder strap and a “Hoffman for Congress” sticker on his case.

The cause of the water shortage was not a natural drought, the men in black explained, but “radical environmentalism”: a government effort to protect an endangered “two-inch bait fish” called the Delta smelt. (They had recently barbecued a smelt and found it wanting.) And they had opted for a four-wheel-drive S.U.V. instead of a beat-up van for their road trip. But they invited the guitarist to play, and before long Hank from Gravesend and Julie from Chelsea and Kellen from Morningside Heights were singing along to the chorus of a folk anthem in that great American tradition:

Take it back,
Take our country back.
Our way of life is now under attack.
Draw a line in the sand, so they all understand
And our values stay intact.
Take it back. ♦

5 questions for right-wing "whackos"

This is from DSCC chairman Brian Meledenez. I will respond below.

1. Do you believe Barack Obama is a US citizen?

Yep I do

2. Do you think the 10th amendetment bars Congress from issuing standards like minimum health care coverage?

NO, I KNOW it does. Read the damn amendment dude

3. Do you think programs like social security and medicare represent socialism and should have never been put in in the first place?

Yes, we managed without it for 150 years.

4. Do you think that Barack Obama is a socialist?

Only since about March 2008.

5. Do you think that America should return to a gold standard?

No, because we can't. Because there isn't enough gold in the world to finance what we do now. How about fiscal sanity? Stop the trillion dollar deficits.

Republican governors forum...

There are 5 candidates that are currently before me in a College Republican forum. I will give a brief grade and overview of each

Marty Seifert- Intro: good, a farmkid with basic conservative principles (Grade: B-)
First thing as Governor: cut spending and reduce taxes.
First 3 programs cut to reduce state deficit: 70 different job training programs, closing a private prison
How to protect MN jobs: end regulation overkill, 3rd highest corperate tax rate,
How to keep higher ed affordable: sponsered legislation for tuition freeze, opt out of certain fees.
what makes you the most electable candidate: articulate message, humble background, have to be able to raise resources

Phil Herwig- private sector conservative with no previous political office held
(Grade: A)
First thing as governor: jobs. Re-district schools, welfare reform; dismatling the welfare state for able-bodied people.
First 3 programs cut to reduce state deficit: re-district school district, save 600 mil a year, dismantling Health and human services, selling off of lands
How to protect MN jobs: end regulation
How to keep higher ed affordable: tuition should be free. Dismantle social fees, very radical idea but might work.
what makes you the most electable candidate: all people were elected officials, only candidate who farmed, also worked off the farm, worked for a machinest union for 15 years, run businesses.

Bill Hass- has legeslative experience, the most out of all candidates combined. Not neccescerily a positive. (Grade: D)
First thing as governor: not just one thing; budget will be #1. Dismatle the tax system, and simplify that. Lower taxes for businesses
First 3 programs cut to reduce state deficit: Go after everything
How to protect MN jobs:
How to keep higher ed affordable: re-do the way we educate kids in college.
what makes you the most electable candidate: looking for a leader, turned a city around as a mayor.


Tom Emmer- talked about family, did a pitch. (Grade: B)
First thing as governor: #1 priority is putting Minnesota back on a track to prosperity. Government destroys wealth and prosperity. Must re-design government, must reduce cost of doing business, work comp and tort reform.
First 3 programs cut to reduce state deficit: Go to dept. of human services and change MinnesotaCare. Put forth that reform in the legislature. Sell DNR land, MPCA is no longer a regulatory agency put a resource.
How to protect MN jobs: lower taxes, tort reform, workers comp reform, end unnecessary regulation
How to keep higher ed affordable: payed on way through college and law school, make sure everyone has the oppertunity to college, instead of offering transgender courses offer more business like courses. Have
what makes you the most electable candidate: sick and tired of career politicians, people that are interested in doing whats right for the state not themselves as an individual.


David Hann- talked about family.(grade: C+)
First thing as governor: cut taxes across the board and regulatory simplification. Cut budget and re-organize government
First 3 programs cut to reduce state deficit: Vouchers for schools, welfare entitlement system
How to protect MN jobs: Government doesn't create jobs
How to keep higher ed affordable: dodging the question, sort of. Stop funding Universitys directly, but funding it as grant and aid money and let the people choose their own school. Stop subsidizing schools.
what makes you the most electable candidate: has business background, represents a very liberal district as a conservative.

It was a great forum, the candidates did a great job. The biggest surprise for me was Phil Herwig, he really stood out. I am still an Emmer supporter but Phil did an amazing job debating.

Does this instill confidence in you?

The saying a picture is worth a thousand words is used a lot. This is one of those times that make you want to laugh, or cry. All I can say is can you imagine if Bush did this?!?!?


President Barack Obama, accompanied by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, speaks to the media after a discussion with 6th grade students at Graham Road Elementary School in Falls Church, Va., Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010

Will the Vikings win?

In reflection of how badly I've been burned by local teams (read below), I just can't get too excited about the game today. Unlike most Vikings fans I approach tonights game with a sense of dread not optimism, if they win it will be a unexpected joy for me if not, well it won't be as devestating as 1998 but its still going to hurt. This is a comment I left on Shot in the Dark about a half hour ago.

I am so beat down by local sports I’ve already basically prepped me for the dissappointment. My most heartbreaking moments in order (locallly); #1 the 1998 Vikings, I mean seriously 15-1 unbeatable and they lose to the damn dirty birds. #2 2003-04 Minnesota Timberwolves, up 2-1 on the Lakers in the Western Confrence finals and go on to lose 3 in a row. #3 2002 Minnesota Twins, after doing the impossible with beating the A’s in the ALDS they go up 1-0 on the Angels with home-field 2 months after they were nearly contracted out of existence. They go on to lose 4 in a row to the eventual World Champs. If the Vikings win it will be a fluke. The 2 national championships by the Gophers hockey team doesn’t count because they are minor, and had actually won championships before. I can’t explain how the Twins won in 87 and 91, those are exceptions to the rule not the rule.

An open letter to the President...

Dear President Obama,

My name is Ben Rider and I am a student who is studying political science and history at the University of Minnesota. Those are 2 subjects you should be very familiar with and if you aren't you WILL be leaving office on Jan 20. 2013. Last night was a disaster for your party much more than it was a victory for us Republicans. I mean losing Ted Kennedy's seat?! Come on man, you guys talk about a "civil war" going on in our party you should listen to the sniping going back and forth between who messed up on your party is amazing. You need to call a meeting of all top Democrat organizers otherwise you will be praying that this November is 1994 because its looking like that could be the best case scenario for your party at this point.
I know its weird for me a staunch conservative "tea-bagger" giving advice to the most liberal, or progressive, President we have ever had but I want to see 2 viable parties. Remember 2004? I thought you guys were on the verge of total collapse after we had gains in the last 3 election cycles. Now, a year ago today I was having the same concerns about my party. James Carville came out with a book called "40 more years" which I need to read now for a good laugh. You came in with a nearly 75% approval rating, you could do no wrong. Then you passed the "stimulus" package and it only seemed to go downhill from there. You have been trying to get healthcare through since May. Scrap this "bill" and start over. I warn you, if you insist on ramming this through it will be the last policy bill you ever pass as president. The American people are pissed and independents are running to the right because they don't like what you Reid and Pelosi are doing. Take a hint from Bill and run to the center. I know there are crazies out there who will say your betraying your base but Daily Kos shouldn't dictate how you govern, the American people should and they just bitch-slapped you last night and told you to wake up or else. You won independents in 2008 because you said you were a moderate and they believed you. I wasn't that stupid, I saw your connection with Ayers and Wright and knew you were selling a bag of shit.
Please for the good of the country Mr.President run to the center. Yes, healthcare needs massive reform, how about you start with caps on malpractice? That way docs won't have to do so much defensive medicine and we will be able to cover people with "pre-existing conditions" with the savings.
Here's another tip, STOP BLAMING BUSH FOR YOUR PROBLEMS. You have had the presidency for a full year now, stop bitching about inherited problems. Yes things were bad a year ago, but you haven't done much to help the situation. You main goal now is to pass a bill that would probably push unemployment to near 15% with all the mandates it has in it. The people are sick of your whining. Also, fire Robert Gibbs, he is possibly the worst press secretary I have ever seen. You need a better spokesman for you administration if you have any hope of getting re-elected.
Every president has his defining moment, Bush had 9/11, Clinton had his Lewinsky disaster, Reagan had his showdown with the Soviets. You might have already had yours with the Christmas plane bomber but I'm saying this is "bigger". You have 2 come to a fork in the road; you can go down the center and try to rethink your insane and increasingly unpopular policies or you can "double-down" and stay hard left. The choice is yours, the American people are watching.

The Daily Show clip as promised...

Here it is as I promised, its 10 minutes but its the best 10 minutes that Stewart has done in a LONG time.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mass Backwards
www.thedailyshow.com
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Second to last MA-Senate post....

My final post will be Jon Stewart shredding the dems about how they handled this election. He did a great job at it. My favorite line from this, "It's not like the Democrats are playing checkers while Republicans are playing chess; its like the Republicans are playing chess while the Democrats are in the nurses office because once again they glued their balls to their thighs." This is from PPP yesterday...

Raleigh, N.C. – Scott Brown leads Martha Coakley 51-46 in Public Policy Polling’s final survey of the Massachusetts Senate special election, an advantage within the poll’s margin of error.

Brown’s lead comes thanks to an overwhelming advantage with independents and the
ability to pick off a decent number of Democrats. He’s getting the support of 19% of
voters in Coakley’s party, while she is winning just 8% of the Republican vote. The lead with independents is 64-32. Each candidate has seen a large decline in their favorability numbers as the campaign has taken on an increasingly negative tone. Brown’s +19 at 56/37, down 13 points from his +32 (57/25) standing a week ago. Coakley’s now in negative territory at 44/51 after being at a positive 50/42 previously, a 15 point net decline.

Republicans continue to show much more enthusiasm about the election than Democrats,
with 89% of them saying they’re ‘very excited’ to go vote compared to 63% of Dems
who express that sentiment. Brown has a 59-40 lead among voters in that category.
The likely electorate for Tuesday’s election continues to express skepticism about the Democratic health care plan with 48% saying they’re opposed to 40% who support it. President Obama’s approval stands at 44/43. “Brown has a small advantage right now but special elections are unusually volatile and Martha Coakley is certainly still in this,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “She just needs to get more Democrats out to the polls.”

PPP surveyed 1,231 likely Massachusetts voters from January 16th to 17th. The margin
of error is +/-2.8%. Other factors, such as refusal to be interviewed and weighting, may introduce additional error that is more difficult to quantify.

I was going to post the polls but here is a summary: Brown +9,+10,+5,+7, and tied. One of them was a Daily Kos poll, take a wild guess at which one... Now for my prediction. I believe Brown will win 57-41 (2% goes to the losertarian candidate). Polls almost always, and I mean always underclock the support of Republicans, Brown is averaged at 52% or so according to the last polls taken and Coakley around 43% so I just add 5% for Brown (due to increased turnout) and Coakley stays where she is. So there you have it 57-41 Brown. Brown wins by 16, 15 minimum.

Ed Schultz Freudian slip

Apparently on Friday Ed Schultz said this on his radio show...



Oh my, I need to start pulling some stuff from "If its not close they can't cheat" by Hugh Hewitt. Spread this EVERYWHERE

Spaz- aka why the Germans will always be an easy target...

Can't make this stuff up, its funnier because its in German and has some Hitleresque qualities to it. It just wouldn't be the same in english

A full analysis of the MA Senate race...

One look from inside (Boston Herald) and another from the outside (Pollster.com).

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From the Boston Herald...

Rattled Dems fret over health of Senate seat

It’s all about health care.

The race to replace Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate has come down to one issue, and it’s not Sen. Ted Kennedy’s “legacy.” It’s the misshapen health-care bills that have scared the bejesus out of an ever-growing majority of American voters, even in this bluest of states. Asked his view of the bill, the Republican candidate, state Sen. Scott Brown, says succinctly: “It kinda stinks.”
A month ago, he was 30 points behind his Democratic opponent, the don’t-make-no-waves attorney general, Martha Coakley. She was cruising, playing the one card she never leaves home without - the gender card. Then the specifics of ObamaCare started leaking out. The cuts in Medicare - $500 billion, or as Brown prefers to say, “half a trillion dollars.” Then the state’s union members began to hear about the president’s insistence on a 40 percent tax on their “Cadillac” health care plans.
Overnight, the old dichotomies, Democrat-Republican, red-blue, lost their resonance. This has become a struggle for self-preservation - medical and fiscal. As the old folk song goes, Which side are you on? “This race affects everyone - everyone,” Brown says over and over again. “Forget about the letter after my name. If I win, this broken health-care bill goes back to the drawing board.” Which is why the city was buzzing yesterday with unconfirmed reports that Barack Obama may have changed his mind about staying out of the race. The rumor was that he may fly into Boston this weekend on behalf of the flailing Coakley, whose lead in the latest poll has shrunk to two points. Coakley is still favored to win, but what Brown calls “the machine” is stunned. In the most recent Rasmussen poll, Brown leads Coakley among independents 71-23.
“They are in an absolute panic mode,” one prominent Bay State Democrat was saying yesterday. “They don’t care if bringing in Barack energizes the Republicans and independents - how much more energized can they get? Obama’s people have to get the minority vote out, and Coakley sure can’t do it herself. It’s risky, but it may be the only way now to save her.” The national Democrats are pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the race in the final days. On TV and radio here, Scott Brown’s first name is now “Republican,” as in “Republican Scott Brown.” The SEIU, moveon.org, NARAL - all the usual suspects are on board. The “A” word - abortion - is heard once more in the land. But Coakley’s first 30-second hit piece fell a bit flat when, at the end, the campaign misspelled the name of her state as “Massachusettes.” “Maybe Martha should talk to some people who actually live here,” Brown said yesterday. The deluge of attack ads began a couple of hours after the final debate Monday night, just after Coakley left the spin room. She’d turned in yet another lackluster performance, informing the audience that there were no terrorists left in Afghanistan, two days after one of the slain CIA operatives was buried in nearby Bolton, and on the same day that three U.S. servicemen were killed in the war that she seems to think is over.
But Brown won the debate when he fielded a question from the hyper-liberal moderator, David Gergen, who asked him how he could possibly vote to kill health care while sitting in Ted Kennedy’s seat. “With all due respect,” Brown told the Sunday chat-show fixture, “this is not Ted Kennedy’s seat, it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat.”
Brown was in the midst of an Internet “money bomb” fund-raiser, and after slapping down Gergen, by the end of the night he had raised $1.3 million - $800,000 above the campaign’s goal. In the state’s suburban town halls, voters are lining up to get absentee ballots, just in case the weather takes a turn for the worse Tuesday. For example, in Yarmouth, on the Cape, during the primary last month, 183 residents voted absentee. By Monday, the number of absentee ballots given out in Yarmouth was 543. It’s the same in all of the more conservative cities and towns.
Despite the bitter January cold, the Brown campaign has been swamped with volunteers. On the weekends, there are Brown “standouts” at every major intersection. Representing a gerrymandered, heavily Democrat district in the state Senate, Brown is used to having his yard signs disappear, but this time there’s a difference. “My own supporters are stealing them from each other,” he said. “They say, I need it more than you. I live on a busier street.”
The Democratic establishment is relying on yesterday’s tactics. On Tuesday night, a reporter for the Weekly Standard was assaulted outside a Coakley fundraiser in D.C. by a Democrat operative. The video was quickly posted on the Internet, but the Boston Globe, the Kennedy family house organ, pretended it was still 1973. Their headline: “Reporter takes stumble.” Just like Martha Coakley. She may yet hang on to win, but even she does, one thing is certain. As Scott Brown said, it’s not Ted Kennedy’s seat anymore.

Now from pollster.com

We have two new polls out in Massachusetts on the January 19 special election to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, and their results could not be more different. The new survey conducted Saturday through Wednesday last week by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center on behalf of the Boston Globe shows Democrat Martha Coakley leading by 17 percentage points (53% to 36%), while a new automated poll conducted on Thursday and Friday by Public Policy Polling (PPP) shows a dead heat, with Brown one point ahead (48% to 47%). A third survey conducted on Monday by Rasmussen Reports has Coakley ahead by nine (50% to 41%).

The disparity of the results is likely to provoke the usual angst about inconsistent polls, debates about past pollster accuracy and the customary conspiracy theories about intentional bias. Forgive me if I don't join in, because as different as these results seem to be, I think the discrepancies actually add up to a consistent and important finding on the state of voter preferences this past week.

Here are three things to keep in mind about polls on the special election:

Turnout Will Matter -- The big spread in results among the polls, and differences apparent within two of them, are all consistent in supporting one finding: The lower the turnout, the better the odds for Scott Brown. These differences indicate that the voters most interested and most likely to vote are Republican, while Democrats are more blase.

Consider the differences in the table below from within Globe/UNH and Rasmussen surveys. Both show a dead even race among the most interested and certain voters, while Coakley leads by huge double-digit margins among all other voters.

Those differences mean the overall results reported by any poll are going to be very sensitive to the "tightness" of the screen or likely voter model used. The more restrictive the screen, the closer the result. My assumption is that the "if you do not intend to vote...please hang up" automated methodology employed by PPP produced an effectively tighter screen and, thus, a likely voter sample closer to the "certain" or "extremely interested" subgroups of the Boston Globe and Rasmussen polls.

Pollsters can't predict turnout - I have yet to see any poll or statistical model that can predict voter turnout with precision, especially in an oddly timed special election like the one in Massachusetts. What pollsters try to do is monitor self reported enthusiasm and interest as compared to previous, comparable contests and try to calibrate their screens and models appropriately (although there is much debate among pollsters about the accuracy of those calibrations and their necessity).

The bigger challenge in predicting turnout, however, has to do with something more fundamental: The size and makeup of the electorate will depend on decisions not yet made by those who may or may not vote on January 19. How many will become more interested and decide to vote over the next 9 days? I'm not sure any poll or methodology can predict that with confidence.

Keep in mind that as of this past week, most Massachusetts voters assumed that Coakley would win in a walk. According to Globe/UNH poll, nearly three quarters (74%) of Massachusetts voters believe Coakley will win, while only 11% say the same about Brown. In that sense, news of a narrowing race could work to Coakley's advantage if it convinces Democrats that their votes are needed and that Ted Kennedy's seat could be lost to the Republicans without their help.

Turnout differences complicate trend tracking - The big spread in these poll results complicates our ability to spot trends. For example, PPP's Tom Jensen last night noted that they fielded their poll on Thursday and Friday, while the Globe/UNH poll was fielded in the first part of last week (Saturday through Wednesday). The earlier start to the Globe poll, he wrote yesterday, "could make a diff[erence] when things are moving fast." That's true in theory but difficult to evaluate in this case because we have to assume we are comparing an apple (the Globe/UNH results) to an orange (PPP) in terms of their likely voter samples.

Now that we have more than five polls released for this race, we should have our tracking chart posted (along with the tracking table, probably later tonight), but be forewarned: The small number of polls and the big "house effects" among them mean that we will really need to limit ourselves to same-pollster comparisons to evaluate trends over the last week. Coakley lead by an average of 29 percentage points on three surveys conducted before the primary last year, but leads by an average of 8 point on the three surveys conducted this past week. So we will see narrowing of the margin between the trend lines on our chart. Has Brown continued to gain over the last week? To answer that questions, we will need o watch tracking polls conducted next week by the same pollsters in the field this week.

Do we have a clear picture today of who will win on January 19 and by how much? Probably not, but we do have a sense of the dynamics that will ultimately determine the outcome.

And one last thought for those covering and commenting on this race: please spare us the cliche about the outcome depending on which campaign's "troops" do the best job turning out their supporters. Field organizations can make a difference, especially when contests are close, but the discrepancies in enthusiasm we are seeing are unrelated to canvassing and phone banking. Conservative Republicans are angry and ready to walk on hot coals if necessary to register their discontent with the direction of government. If he enthusiasm gap narrows, it will be because Democrats come to believe that Martha Coakley shares their priorities, Scott Brown threatens those priorities and the outcome of the election is in doubt.

Update: Via Twitter, Alex Lundry notes that the Globe Poll tests independent Joseph L. Kennedy (no relation to the famous family), while the PPP poll does not. What's interesting about that is that the presence of a "Kennedy" on the ballot appears to cos Republican Brown more support than Democrat Coakley . Also, for what it's worth, roughly 90% of those who support "Kennedy" (4 of his 5 percentage points) have not yet "definitely decided on a candidate, and about the same number (90%) are voters that are less than "extremely interested" in the Senate race.

Shep Smith Condemns Pat Robertson's 'Devil' Comments

Way to go Shep, put him in his place. Pat Robertson may your soul burn in hell. I hate you with every fiber of my being and your dragging down the conservative brand you worthless piece of shit. Somebody please investigate the 700 club because I bet he's diddling little boys on the side. How anyone can say something so stupid and out of touch is truly beyond me.

Things that are really important

With all that is going on politically in this country now nothing makes you stop and realize how lucky you are to even being able to debate politics. In case you live under a rock, late last evening, Haitian time, a 7.0 earthquake struck the island of Haiti. Haiti is this, according to CIA Factbook...

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with 80% of the population living under the poverty line and 54% in abject poverty. Two-thirds of all Haitians depend on the agricultural sector, mainly small-scale subsistence farming, and remain vulnerable to damage from frequent natural disasters, exacerbated by the country's widespread deforestation. While the economy has recovered in recent years, registering positive growth since 2005, four tropical storms in 2008 severely damaged the transportation infrastructure and agricultural sector.

Here are some economic numbers, to say they are grim would be too kind...

GDP - per capita (PPP):
$1,300 (2008 est.)
country comparison to the world: 203 (out of 227)
$1,300 (2007 est.)
$1,300 (2006 est.)
note: data are in 2008 US dollars

To give you an idea how bad it is there, the Dominican Republic (the other side of the island) shoots people on site that try to cross the border there. The average Dominican makes 6X ($8100) as what Haitians make. And here is something I found that is tragically prophetic today (link is in the title)


yes it can, and it did. Reports are coming in that the city has been reduced to rubble...
Oct 11, 2008
A recent article in Haiti’s Le Matin newspaper has quoted 65 year old geologist and former professor at the Geological Institute of Havana, Patrick Charles, as stating that “conditions are ripe for major seismic activity in Port-au-Prince. The inhabitants of the Haitian capital need to prepare themselves for an event which will inevitably occur...” According to him, the danger is imminent. He ads “Thank God that science has provided instruments that help predict these types of events and show how we have arrived at these conclusions.”

According to Patrick Charles, Port-au-Prince is traversed by a large fault which is part of the Enriquillo Fault Zone. The fault starts in Petionville and follows the Southern Peninsula ending at Tiburon. In 1751 and 1771, this town was completely destroyed by an earthquake. As proof to his claims, he referred to recent tremors that have occurred in Petionville, Delmas, Croix des Bouquets, and La Plaine. Minor tremors such as these usually signal a larger earthquake to come.

Haiti is no stranger to large quakes with the destruction of Palais Sans Souci near the Citadelle in 1842. It has also been 200 years since any major seismic activity has occurred in Port-au-Prince. This means that the level of built up stress and energy in the earth could one day be released resulting in an earthquake measuring 7.2 or more on the Richter Scale. This would be an event of catastrophic proportions in a city with loose building codes, and an abundance of shanty-towns built in ravines and other undesirable locations. Even the super-rich may not be immune as many own homes with great views, but precariously perched on the mountainsides above Petionville, on ground which is also susceptible to landslides.

Although city officials often discuss this, it is noted that no measures have been put into place to address the situation. Mr. Charles mentions the following devastating scenarios: A giant tsunami reaching all the way to Lake Azuéi (aka Étang Saumâtre) flooding La Plaine, and the complete destruction of Morne l’Hopital which is currently dotted with flimsy shantytowns. If we thought the recent back-to-back hurricanes were devastating, they surely will pale in comparison to a major earthquake in the densely populated Haitian capital.

The population of Port-au-Prince is very dense and would result in many casualties if a strong earthquake were to hit.

The city is full of shantytowns built in ravines and on mountainsdes which would not fare well if disaster struck.


This picture from Mòn Kabrit shows La Plaine and Étang Saumâtre in the background. Patrick Charles believes a large tsunamui could completly inundate this area if a big quake struck.