Shorter Erick Erickson: "It's because he's black!"

And he is Jimmy Carter too!

"I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for it, but that is the only thing I can think of for this news. There is no way Barack Obama earned it in the nominations period."

Per usual, Red State's Trike Force always keepin' it classy...

A better summary of Obama's accomplishment:

"Recognizing the severity of John McCain's issues with violence and its appropriate use, the Nobel Committee awarded Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize primarily just for beating him. [...snip...] You award accomplishments. And Obama's main accomplishment in the area of peace is that he denied the Gods of War their choice of president." - BooMan

Senator Arlen Specter Dumps the GOP

Holy Crap! Senator Arlen Specter dumps the GOP for the Democratic party:

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter shocked the political world Tuesday by jumping from the GOP to the Democratic Party – likely handing President Obama an EZ-Pass to drive his agenda on Capitol Hill.

The sudden move, coming as the veteran lawmaker already faces a fierce 2010 primary challenge from the right in the Keystone State, all but gives Democrats and Obama a roadblock-free Senate, putting them on the cusp of a 60-vote majority.

"I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans," Specter announced on his campaign Web site.

I really thought he would become an independent...

[update] Via William K. Wolfrum, The batshit loopy GOP base lays its cards on the table:

From Twitter, Erick Erickson of Red State - which is truly the base of the GOP these days - had this to say about Arlen Specter’s move to the Democratic Party:

Guess now that Larry Craig is gone & Specter realized there was no teabagging at the #teaparty, he had to go Dem for Frank to fondle him.

Today’s conservatives - if someone upsets you, call them gay.

Truly dealing from the bottom of the deck on a sinking ship of fools...

If it were really socialism..

Red State's Trike Force would be calling it communism. They never were the brightest bulbs in the bunch when it came to defining the opposition.

Just a liberal here - pretty darned moderate too - and damned proud of the fact that it has (almost) always put me on the moral high ground and the correct side of the political arguments.

Anyways and again for the slow learners on the wingnutty side of GOP/wrong:

Welcome to liberal America.

Whiny-assed right wing trike riders are welcome to take their brain farts to the all you can eat Cheetos buffet in the basement. But, for a change, please clean up your own damned messes when you leave?

Red State Trike Force

The Red State Trike Force has lost their way and is desperately recruiting more people to push the GOP's continued descent into obscurity...



Eric Cantor and Michael Steele are doomed to kill off any support from the remaining base in their already splintered party if they try to win new voters over by repudiating the radicals on the right, and doomed to remain in the minority and even more likely to make the GOP a third party in the political pecking order if they continue to appease the batshit loopy base they have to work with now.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't... And just too damned funny to not watch!

Red State Should Check Their Dictionary

Before they start a laughable attack on Joe Biden...

We know that Sarah Winky Palin's flub with the General's name was a minor one, the issue is more the fact that Winky Palin said the opposite of what the General said concerning a "Surge" (escalation) in Afghanistan not being useful in that country and, also, seemed to think reciting his statements on counter insurgency operations and other issues given by the mis-named General justified her lie.

But Red State thinks that the GOP giggle gaggle should be making fun of Joe Biden for dropping names:

"The Vice Presidential Debate
Posted by: Pejman Yousefzadeh
From what I heard, her worst gaffe was calling General McKiernan in Afghanistan "General McClellan," which appears to indicate that Sarah Palin was having a Civil War flashback. Of course, Joe Biden referred to "Bosniacs" so the gaffes were not one-sided and for a Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to refer to "Bosniacs" . . . well, it's kinda interesting, to say the least. I wonder if people will make an issue of it. They should and they most certainly would if Sarah Palin made that comment. Again, it is kind of silly that we are penalizing candidates for innocent verbal flubs that have little to nothing to do with how they would govern, but fair is fair and this gaffe deserves a fair amount of ridicule. Wonder what the Bosnians thought about this statement."

Now... I know that Winky Palin may have had you, the willingly uninformed right wingers, mesmerized with her non-answers to questions - How can you win a debate when you don't, NO, you REFUSE to even answer the questions? Anyways - but your entire right wing giggle gaggle of Grade 3ers that she winked at all night would do much better to check your dictionary before you get all falling over yourselves silly OR, at least, read up a bit on Bosnia and other foreign countries so you might actually have a world view worth commenting on:

Although the international community has done a laudable job in getting refugees and displaced persons back into their homes, the effort to find enough common ground amongst Bosniacs (Bosnian Muslims), Croats and Serbs to run the country on their own, or to develop a sense of loyalty to their common state, has failed.
Davos man meets Homo Balcanicus by Bardos, Gordon N. / The National Interest

As the Bosniacs retreated, a plain-clothes policeman discharged a pistol in the air, and "at least two plain-clothes officers" then fired into the retreating marchers, killing 1 person and wounding 20.
Former Yugoslavia by UN Chronicle

That had resulted in another round of population movements along ethnic lines, further separating Bosnian Serbs and Bosniacs and delivering a "telling blow to the multicultural nature of Sarajevo society",
'Relatively stable military environment' established by collective ... by UN Chronicle

When you do finally learn to check your dictionaries, you might be well on your way to graduating 3rd grade and - one day, maybe 10 or 20 years down the road - you might even merit being a front page Blogger somewhere...

Some remedial homework for you Red State kids... Since you won't be getting extra credit... And don't spill your right wing koolaide on it at snack time!

And as a side note: Isn't it nice that we have a Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who actually knows what he is talking about? Imagine that kind of competence in the White House?

Classic Republican Fiscal Conservatism at RedState

Spend it even when ya ain't got it:

"So we’ve decided to move ahead with our upgrades without delay, and despite not having the cash on hand – hoping and praying that RedState.com readers like you will help us make up the shortfall with a generous donation."

Just like their puppet masters in the GOP. Atrios has this up:

Dear RedState Reader:

I have, as they say, some good news and some bad news.

(Short version: We need you to open your wallet and give what you can to build RedState 3.0. Go here to help. We need the money ASAP.)

The good news first: RedState.com is about to embark on a major upgrade of our website that will make it easier, more informative, and just plain more fun for you to visit.

The bad news: our liberal “friends” – you know, the ones who believe so strongly in free speech and open debate – have done what they can to prevent us from making these improvements, so that our influence will be minimized just as we head into the 2008 presidential primary season.

No, our Blue State buddies haven’t succeeded in stopping us from improving our website. But they’ve made it more difficult and more expensive – which is why I’m coming to you for help.

Let me explain …

You see, when we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop — the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us.

If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.

Needless to say, we always regarded those “downgrades” as temporary, and we hoped to restore the eliminated features – and to add new and even better ones – as soon as we could afford to.

Unfortunately, we still can’t afford to. But we’re convinced that America can afford even less to have us operating at anything less than our absolute peak potential during the coming presidential election season.

So we’ve decided to move ahead with our upgrades without delay, and despite not having the cash on hand – hoping and praying that RedState.com readers like you will help us make up the shortfall with a generous donation.

Here, specifically, is what we’re planning to accomplish with your generous financial support …

There's more, but you get the idea. It's the fault of liberals that they can't run their website because... hell I don't know.

If we click on over to redstate and donate one penny online to their cause... Would it cost them more to process the payment than they would take in? evil grin

I know, I know! A penny for their thoughts is overpaying...

[update] American Street has some more to add to this:

...this bit of blegging by redstate.org not only caused much laughter but charges they were fleecing their readers due to their parent corporation’s profit margins. How many bloggers have had grander designs than they ever could afford to build? How many don’t have corporate sponsors and work for free? Plenty, which is why some can be justifiably outraged. But, on the other hand, if their readers have that kind of cash that they’re willing to be snookered out of, that provides some room for mirth.

Atrios, then Kos, then Jane Hamsher weighed in on that one. Maybe they should hire a Mexican to do the geek work no conservative knows how to do.

And much laughter was shared amongst the left...

[update deux] I am glad I didn't waste my time overpaying with that penny... From Jane Hamsher at FDL:

Yesterday Daily Kos readers decided to make fun of Red State's "Vast Left Wing Conspiracy Fundraising" pitch by calling for PayPal donations of 1 cent. The logic was that PayPal charges a minimum of .30 for a transaction, so Red State would be paying .29 cents per donation.

Which is ridiculous. I don't approve of screwing with someone's fundraising like that, but that's beside the point -- PayPal doesn't charge you more than the amount of the transaction.

So Erick Erickson of Red State should've just left it there, but he couldn't, and instead decided to by issuing threats regarding the personal information of PayPal donors:

But, we do get their name, credit card billing address, and email address. Those are actually valuable pieces of information.

Coming from someone else, it might sound quite idle. But RedState bloggers have a history of outing the identity of anonymous online folks, so I think it's a threat that can safely be take seriously, and abusing that information would be a violation of PayPal's terms of service.

RedState Founder GBCW Diary Rips GOP Candidates

BWAHAHAHA! And from BooMan:

If you are a fan of Goodbye Cruel World (GBCW) diaries you can't do much better than reading RedState founder Thomas Crown's rambling masterpiece where he tells the GOP presidential contenders to 'go Cheney themselves' and also insults many of our friends.

Actually, BooMan... It gets even better when you read his diary from the day before where he rants on why their GOP candidates (and their party) is in pitiful shape:

"And the horses you all rode in on, one at a time, then rotate.

You all have no idea how long I've wanted to write this. For the reasons set forth in my next diary, I can, and am; but I've been saving this up for a while. Pardon the spleen.

Dear Senators Thompson and McCain; Governors Romney and Huckabee; and Mayor Giuliani: You all suck.

Read on to see why. Or don't; I figure only two of you are smart enough to care why a conservative, Mass-going Catholic would personally drive the buggy to take you all to Hell.

Before I go any further, to any outraged supporters of any of these candidates: Toss it. So many of you have spent so much time shilling for your preferred choices, you've lost track of first principles. I have no time for far too many of you, and those of you with the brainpower to actually merit notice have picked the wrong company in which to travel."

Tell us how you really feel about how the "Great and Failed Republican Experiment" got you to where you are now? No... We know you won't admit that part, but that is the horse you all rode in on, then rotate.