Professional Left Podcast Episode 972: Little Note Nor Long Remember

"The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!" --  Tennessee Williams

• 
  

A Tale Told by an Idiot...

...full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Since the topic everywhere today is the 2-hour shit-stain of a State of the Union delivered on Tuesday night by the decomposing remains of the Dear Leader, I feel sort of obliged to talk about the subject.

However, since I took one for the team by watching the whole, grotesque spectacle (and the godawful pre-freakshow pundit vamping, and the excellent post-SOTU response from Virginia's new governor, Abigail Spanberger) in order to be able to speak intelligently on the matter on both The Bob Cesca Show and The Bradcast, I don't feel particularly in the mood to spelunk into that particular midden pile again.

Let us all agree that the bard nailed Trump's SOTU tour de farce 420 years ago with these lines from Macbeth, because Trump is indeed:

a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. 

And his 2-hour long crime against democracy and rhetoric was indeed:

a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

However, since my duty is to inform as well as entertain, let us together venture once again into the forbidden zone of the Before Time and see if we can find the seedlings of what grew into the monstrous, democracy-killing strangler plant that was on display for all to see on Tuesday night.

Yes, it has been more than a minute since the events of the Fake Tea Party's alternative State of the Union which they held off delivering for an hour so the actual Republican party could deliver it's own terrible alternative State of the Union, which followed President Obama's State of the Union on Jan 26, 2011.

What's of interest to me about that night is that I would wager that not one in a hundred of you politics nerds can remember a single word of Paul Ryan's (remember Paul Ryan!) official GOP rebuttal, other than, perhaps, a general and correct impression that while the zombie-eyed granny starver  (h/t brother Charlie Pierce) acknowledged that Obama had walked into a "severe fiscal and economic situation", the balance of Ryan's speech was spent scolding Obama for not dealing with the worst economic catastrophe in 74 years using the only tools in the Republican's bag.

And what tools are those?

If you guessed massive budget cuts, plus a strong suggestion that taxes were too darn high, give yourself a round of applause.

It was weak and dull and forgettable, and honestly he only reason I remember it at all is that "Economic Situation" was the name I DJed under during the late 1980s.

However, I'd also wager that a whole lot of you do remember at least part of Michele "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann staring past the camera for six straight minutes while  delivering some batshit Tea Party nonsense in her aggressively cheerful robot Jesus voice.   

The sum and substance of her breezy twaddle were not terribly different from the  zombie-eyed granny starver's bitching -- OMG, Obama's spending so much money when he should be cutting, cutting and cutting.  ! OMG, "people" are begging him to stop!  OMG, Lookit them deficits!  And OMG, have you seen the unemployment numbers!  Under George W. they were never like this.  

She even had this giant graph behind her showing how much better Bush was than Obama at the jobs thing.  And people remember it because it was something oddball.  Something new.   From The Guardian, January 26, 2011.

Michele Bachmann's state of the union response reveals state of US right

Tea Party leader made surprise intervention after official Republican reaction to Barack Obama's address

A televised attack on Barack Obama's state of the union address by one of the Tea Party's leading lights broke with convention last night and showed just how fractured rightwing opposition has become in the US.

Michele Bachmann, leader of the rightwing movement and a congresswoman from Minnesota, made a surprise intervention after the official Republican response to Obama's second state of the union speech, from congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

Bachmann attacked "a bureaucracy that now tells us which lightbulbs to buy", and used a graph to illustrate that while there had been " unacceptably high" deficits under the Bush administration, these had now "exploded".

She followed a call for a new "miracle" with a reference to the US's 1945 victory at Iwo Jima and the famous picture of soldiers raising the US flag, which she said symbolized "all of America coming together to beat back a totalitarian aggressor".

Bachmann, who is seen as a possible presidential contender in 2012, said she was not seeking to compete with official Republican remarks – her response was made for activists from the Tea Party Express but screened live by CNN – but her approach differed from the more conciliatory remarks made by Ryan...

Bachmann was already under fire for her views on US history, particularly as revealed at a recent Tea Party event in Iowa, when she said the founding fathers "worked tirelessly" to abolish slavery. 

Republicans had insisted before Obama's address that they were not worried by a Tea Party view getting airtime. Michael Steel, spokesman for the House of Representatives' Republican speaker, John Boehner, had said in an email: "Whether it is through a press release, Twitter, the internet, on television, radio, via Facebook, or by other means, virtually every member of Congress will share their thoughts on the president's state of the union."

Not everyone was understanding, however. Columnist Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post said: "Bachmann ignored the fiscal calamity that began on Sept. 15, 2008. She ended her speech, delivered distractingly while looking off-camera, by saying, 'We the people …' Yeah, we the people want to know what that response was all about.

Please not for future reference those last two paragraphs, because what we were seeing – and what many of us were warning about – was MAGA Republicanism in its adolescent state.  

By this point it was already fully nuts and drunk on absurd conspiracy theories.  And when Jonathan Capehart said that Bachmann ignored the fiscal calamity that began on Sept. 15, 2008, that wasn’t the half of it.  She didn’t just ignore the Great Recession:  she pretended it never happened.  

During her speech she had a giant graph behind her “proving” to the bigots and imbeciles how much better Bush was than Obama at the whole jobs thing.  The X-axis represented years, and the Y-axis represented the unemployment rate.

Except the X-axis only showed every other year.  2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009 and so on.

And in her thoroughly whitewashed and rewritten Tea Party version extremely recent history through which the whole world had lived, inn 2007 and 2008, the unemployment rate under Bush was very low, but just a few months after Obama took office, the rate jumped way, way up!  

Clearly Obama is destroying America!  Period.  Full stop.  

Well Jeez oh Pete, does anyone out there in our studio audience remember anything else besides Barack Obama being terrible that might have happened on Bush’s watch – say, around December of 2007– that might have accounted for this sudden spike in the unemployment numbers.

From Federal Reserve History:

The Great Recession – December 2007-June 2009

Lasting from December 2007 to June 2009, this economic downturn was the longest since World War II.

The Great Recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, which makes it the longest recession since World War II. Beyond its duration, the Great Recession was notably severe in several respects. Real gross domestic product (GDP) fell 4.3 percent from its peak in 2007Q4 to its trough in 2009Q2, the largest decline in the postwar era (based on data as of October 2013). The unemployment rate, which was 5 percent in December 2007, rose to 9.5 percent in June 2009, and peaked at 10 percent in October 2009.

The financial effects of the Great Recession were similarly outsized: Home prices fell approximately 30 percent, on average, from their mid-2006 peak to mid-2009, while the S&P 500 index fell 57 percent from its October 2007 peak to its trough in March 2009. The net worth of US households and nonprofit organizations fell from a peak of approximately $69 trillion in 2007 to a trough of $55 trillion in 2009.

As the financial crisis and recession deepened, measures intended to revive economic growth were implemented on a global basis. The United States, like many other nations, enacted fiscal stimulus programs that used different combinations of government spending and tax cuts. These programs included the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. 

Oh yeah.  That's right.  On Bush's watch, the entire world economy imploded and it was only thanks to the massive (if maddeningly imperfect and inadequate) recovery assistance rendered by the Obama administration that the world was saved from a second Great Depression, and the permanent collapse of, among other things, the United States auto industry.

There were and are literally hundreds of articles on the Great Recession at the fingertips of anyone who gave a damn about the truth.  For example:

The New York Times “The Recession’s Hidden Victims”: Stories about homeowners who lost their homes and how families coped with foreclosure.

Los Angeles Times “Lives on Hold”:  A multi-part series following individuals who lost jobs and struggled to rebuild their lives.

NPR “A Decade Later, the Great Recession’s Human Costs Linger":  Audio stories and written accounts of people still feeling the effects years later.

The Atlantic:  “The Lost Decade: What the Great Recession Did to American Families”: A deep look at how long-term unemployment reshaped communities and family structures.

ProPublica “In the Shadow of the Recession”: First-person, in-depth reporting on people dealing with medical debt, housing instability, and job loss.

These are stories about real families who were evicted or forced to downsize after losing income.  Real workers who lost not just jobs, but their careers and their identity.  Young adults delaying homeownership, marriage, or kids. Communities devastated by factory closures and foreclosures.   The long-term damage done to people' mental health and sense of financial insecurity.

But all of this Michele Bachmann just hand-waved away.  Instead, in her Tea Party Republican version of history, unemployment was all Obama’s fault.  

Then Bachmann pitched a fit over all the money Obama is just throwing away for no good reason.  

The sum and substance of her breezy twaddle was not terribly different from the  zombie-eyed granny starver's bitching -- OMG, Obama's spending so much money when he should be cutting, cutting and cutting ! OMG, "people" are begging him to stop!  OMG, Lookit them deficits!  And OMG, have you seen the unemployment numbers!  

Under George W. they were never like this.  

This is from her speech that night.

And what did we buy with all that money?  A leaner, more efficient government?  No.  We bought a bureaucracy that tells us which lightbulbs to buy and put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's healthcare bill. 

Obamacare mandates and penalties may even force many job creators to just stop offering health insurance altogether.   Unless, of course, you're one of the more than 222 privileged companies or "unions" that's already received a waiver under Obamacare.

In the end, unless we fully repeal Obamacare, a nation that currently enjoys the world's finest health care might be forced to rely on government run coverage.  And that could have a devastating effect on our national debt for even generations to come.  

For two years, president Obama made promises just like the ones we heard him make this evening.    Yet still we have high unemployment, devalued housing prices,  and the cost of gasoline is skyrocketing! 

For those of you who were there at the time and paying attention this should cause a shudder of recognition at all that it foreshadowed.  

Then all the golden oldies came a'tumblin' out.  

Gotta gut the "job destroying" EPA.  

Pass a balanced budget amendment.  

Drill baby drill! 

Get rid of some unspecified number of "regulations" which may cost our economy one hundred million dollars.  

And Obama should repeal Obamacare immediately and support "free market solutions". 

Tort reform! 

Allow suckers to buy crap insurance out of the back of a van!

Kick out all the big spending scum! 

And this is just the beginning, because we swept to power in the midterms!

The Alert Reader will have noticed by now how neatly Michele Bachmann's "Obama ruined everything and Bush was awesome" lies from 15 years ago prefigure Trump's "Biden ruined everything and I was awesome" lies in his speech on Tuesday. 

And going back to the 2011 Guardian article, the Alert Reader may have also noticed how Michael Steel’s blasé attitude towards the Fake Tea Party prefigured the downfall of the Conservative elite.   

All the pieces that would grow at lightning speed into a full-grown fascist threat to American democracy led by a corrupt, lying sociopath were there.  All you needed to do was look.  The pre-MAGA Republican willingness to repeat big stupid, easily-debunked lies.  Demonizing Democrats as nearly destroying the country.  Casting themselves as the lone saviors of the republic.   And establishment Republicans like Steel not taking the internal threat seriously.  

So for our recently-former Republican Never Trump "allies" who definitely read his little blog o' mine, I'll leave you with these wise words from Peter Clemenza:

Burn The Lifeboats

America's Swiss Smarmy Wife

A perfect complement to the rest of the standard issue

wingnut toolkit.*


*(Gay blade not included)

While I Pondered, Weak and Weary

Man you shoulda seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.

Overall, my super-ooper-duper meta-opinion of the Reagan Debate was this: "Like I give a shit what these people think."

However, the pure moonshine being huffed the next day by those who have been cast out of Wingnut Paradise and now scamper alongside the cretinous Leviathan they helped create, kicking impotently at its ankles, is kind of hilarious.

A prime example (FrumForum):

...
Republican primary voters have in the past shown themselves very tolerant of candidates with less than perfect mastery of the facts. But those other candidates had something else going for them, even Sarah Palin. What did Perry have?

As the economic news gets worse, Republicans will realize: they are not merely choosing a nominee. They very well may be choosing the next president of the United States. What confidence can anybody have that Perry will come to work as president any better prepared than how he come to this debate or that he’ll show more insight and intelligence than he did in this first national outing ? Not much.
...

Witness the cask-strength wishful thinking of another weak, Ivory tower Conservative on the outs with his Movement because the monster he helped build finally turned on him.

For 30 years we on the Left have watched facts bounce off of the Republican Base voters ever-thickening yahoo carapace like spitballs off of a Rhino Runner, so let me ask Mr. Frum: Where exactly are this hidden reserves of rationality supposed to come from? From what previously invisible treasure cave will physicians suddenly emerge carrying the healing medicines that will break the wingnuts' fever and cure them of the fatal Limbaugh-Hannity Syndrome with which they are so gleefully afflicted?

And once this miracle does occur and the lame are made to walk, the halt are make to speak and the Teabagger is made to see reason, wouldn't the second or third batch of rodents they would put up against the wall for screwing them so badly be goofs like you, Mr. Frum?

Sorry, but no.

No such anti-stupid vaccine is on its way to save us (and if there were, damn betcha the Teabaggers would opt out, because [as we learned last night] the True Blue Conservative solution to Famine and Pestilence [and, presumably War] to the is to leave them for pure laissez faire Capitalism to sort out because, y'know, Freedom!) Instead, these Golem that the GOP constructed to win elections are performing exactly as designed, and as a confirmed Liberal who long ago gave up on trying to convince people to see reason who are actually proud of how fact-resistant they are, there is a certain, gallows humor in hearing the squeal of clowns like Frum as they are eaten alive by their bastard children.

See how they run like pigs from a gun
See how they fly
I'm crying

In fact...there I was...

Sitting on a cornflake

Waiting for the van to come

Corporation T-shirt

Stupid bloody Tuesday

Man, you've been a naughty boy

You let your face grow long

I am the Eggman
They are the Eggmen
I am the Walrus

Mister city policeman sitting

Pretty little policemen in a row

See how they fly like Lucy in the sky

See how they run

I'm crying
I'm cry-'-ng
I'm crying
I'm cry-'-

Yellow matter custard

Dripping from a dead dog's eye

Crabalocker fishwife
Pornographic priestess


I am the Eggman
They are the Eggmen
I am the Walrus
Goo goo g'joob

Sitting in an English garden
Waiting for the sun


If the sun don't come
You get a tan from

standing in the English rain

I am the Eggman
They are the Eggmen
I am the Walrus
Goo goo g'joob goo goo g'joob

Expert texpert,

choking smokers

Don't you think the joker

laughs at you?


See how they smile

like pigs in a sty
See how they schnied
I'm crying

Semolina Pilchard

Climbing up the Eiffel Tower


Elementary penguin

singing Hare Krishna


Man, you should've seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe...

Ephemera, Mistress of the Stark Raving Loony Party

Is scheduled to deliver her own, very special rebuttal to the President of the United States tonight on the network that phone-hacking fascist criminal guy owns.

No, you are not dreaming any of this.

After The Debate

Newt went back to yelling at stray dogs about Mexicans, Muslims and the Secret Liberal Media Conspiracy behind it all.

Fundamentally.

Basically.


Various Tweets sent by yours truly (and subsequently tidied up just a little) during tonight's "Ayn Randier Than Thou" GOP contest:

Lines you will not hear tonight? Romney: My wife doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat...

Lines you will not hear tonight? Gingrich: My 3rd wife doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat...

Halperin, Steele and Noonan on the MSNBC debate panel of idle speculators. This is what it looks like when you shit in zero gravity.


Ron Paul comes out firmly against seat belts and safe baby food. Bless his crazy fucking heart.

Cain proposed Pizza-care with Crazy Bread, but the damn federal gummint wouldn't let him.

Perry: Texas sick people are different than Massachusetts sick people, bitches!

Romney: Massachusetts sick people are different than Iowa sick people, bitches!

Ron Paul comes out firmly against seat belts and safe baby food. Bless his crazy fucking heart.


And now let's hear from the Wingnut Rockettes

(In response to @DLoesch) Because [no jobs or crap jobs] are your two choices in an oligarchy. Now beg little people! Beg!


Mitt: I promise every citizen a nice severance package before shutting the place down.


GOP Ribbed Condoms: Like thousands of tiny fascist fingers urging you to let your democracy go.


Every time there's been a proposed increase to the minimum wage, the GOP has predicted doom. Got it wrong EVERY time. Kind of awesome.


Ron Paul: It was a bad scene, dude!


Ron Paul: Give Me Bimetalism or Give Me Death!


Ron Paul's constant repetition of "Man Date" is making Santorum very nervous.


I see Huntsman borrowed Schwarzenegger's "Goldfinger Tie" from the Republican Nat'l Convention. Why I remember shit like this I do not know


Mitt: Coal mining jobs for all!


Watching Santorum lie about Welfare Reform is very entertaining.


The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the booze of wingnut drinking games.


GOP Consensus: Trust the marketplace to take care of plagues.


Newt: Big adjectives give me an erection.


Bachmann: Immigration worked much better in the 50s when we could legally force Negroes and women to do all the shit work.


Right now they're trying to peel [a gin-soaked Peggy Noonan] off of Reagan Force One, which she was humping while screaming "Fill me with your Reaganbabies!"


Ron Paul promises to convert America to the octal [base 8] system. Sure, everyone will have to lose a finger, but after that everything will work much smoother.


Mitt: As long as we define "Middle Class" to mean "lifetime, corporate indentured debt peonage" I PROMISE to "restore" the "Middle Class".


Santorum: Reagan never cut and run.

driftglass: Really? Beirut? Hello? Ring any fucking bells? Jesus, just how fucking stupid do you have to be to be a Republican Senator?


Santorum: Reagan wasn't a fucking isolationist!

driftglass: Yeah, instead he believed in selling weapons to terrorists and funding his illegal war with the proceeds.


Bachmann: Obama agrees with me that the EPA is with tool of Satan!

Perry: Criminals should be executed. In English.


If you want to know what sort of subhuman goons love torture, just swing those cameras around and point them at the audience.


(In response to Ron Paul) Hey, dumbass! School lunch program was created by the War Dept because huge #s of recruits for WWII had grown up too malnourished to serve.

And, as a public service, let us answer the unspoken question: "Why is it that the nation's young men were showing up for national service severely malnourished?"

Because we were, in fact, using Ron Paul's market-driven Libertarian pixie dust to feed the poor. And you know what? It doesn't fucking work:

...
Throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many state and local school districts provided food for their students to promote learning. The idea of whether the federal government ought to play a role in child nutrition was not raised until the Great Depression, when Congress began to appropriate federal dollars to assist states facing severe economic distress. In the 1930s the federal government began to distribute surplus food to states for use in local schools. Later, when food distribution became difficult during the war years, the government awarded cash grants enabling states to purchase food at local markets. Not only did these programs help states feed poor children, but they also created a market for farm goods, which worked to the benefit of the farmers.

By the 1940s, however, it was still painfully obvious that too many of America's youth, especially in the South, remained grossly undernourished. This lack of nourishment was especially problematic and notable when a number of young men failed armed forces physicals after being drafted for World War II.

Richard B. Russell, a senator from Georgia, proposed a school lunch program in March 1944 to combat the problem of malnutrition. Senator Russell, although not personally touched by poverty, was well aware of the plight of many of his fellow Georgians, especially children. He also represented a rural state, where farmers had suffered for years from chronically low prices for their goods. Russell proved well positioned to champion a federal program that could address both problems.
...

So Ron Paul won the ideological purity Olympics by advocating that virtually the entire federal government be eliminated, and letting the free market figure out such things as air traffic control and food and drug safety. Herman "the federal gummint is incapable of doing anything" Cain took the Silver, and future GOP nominee for President Rick Perry took the bronze.

At the other end of the spectrum, Huntsman looked like Marylin Munster.

Professional Left Podcast #82

“For I can raise no money by vile means. ”

-- William Shakespeare

Links for this week's podcast

Scott Simon’s “Windy City” Romney’s "unemployment" ad problem. FOX NEWS.Com calls for higher corporate taxes. (Turns out Sally Kohn is their token progressive. Still, it’s a very good article and surprising location for it.)

Thanks again to Frank Chow for the graphic at the ProLeft website and Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help. And don't forget, our archives are available for free with no downloads at Professional Left.

Da' money goes here:

The Iron Loony

“They're casting their problem on society. And you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families”

-- Margaret Thatcher, October 9, 1987

"...more than ever, Washington IS the problem, and the real solutions will come from our businesses, our communities, our schools and the most basic and powerful unit of all-our families."

-- Michele Bachmann, June 27, 2011, Waterloo, IA

A bloody-minded True Believer's faith in the Godliness of their dogma.

An unvarnished loathing for all opposition.

An boundless contempt for government.

A ruthless eagerness to sacrifice the lives and futures of the poor, the sick, the weak, the elderly and the outsider on the altar of unfettered oligarchy.

Slavishly loyal acolytes who happily blind themselves to the misery and ugliness their ideology leaves in its wake.

And fuck the facts when they get in the way.

Regardless of what feckless, dorm-room "real" conservatives may tell themselves to balm their wounded egos over being wrong about everything their entire adult lives, these are the real pillars of Conservatism, over here and over there, then and now.

All else is tactic, style and commentary.

Waiting for The Miracle

Baby, I've been waiting,
I've been waiting night and day.
I didn't see the time,
I waited half my life away...

-- Leonard Cohen

Buried deep inside his tragicomic Grand Guignol expose of Our Lady of the Holy Killbot, Matt Taibbi accomplishes something else: The discovery of America.

Not the pastel flyover-country American cartoon that Beltway professionals blur quickly past as they invoke the fiction of th'murricanpipple a thousand times a day, but the real America.

The real, ugly America.

The America that no longer has any functional understanding of this world. The deeply ignorant, deeply angry, deeply paranoid America that has been swallowed whole by Hate Radio. That remakes its own past, present and future into whatever suits today's batshit Two Minutes Hate Fox Special News Alert.

The America where the minds of millions of our fellow citizens have grown so pudding-soft and devolved from crouching in their spider holes and waiting for the Second Coming of The Imaginary Reaganator to save them from their Imaginary Enemies, that they can now effectively be lead any-damn-where by anybody with a Bible, a conspiracy that flatters their psychosis and a big, cheery, teevee smile.

Taibbi explains in autopsic detail why trying to reason with the Pig People is simply impossible, and, I would argue, why trying to hide inside a snuggle sack of Fake Centrism slung between Michele Bachmann and Barack Obama is insane.

Michele Bachmann's Holy War
...

In her runs for Congress, Bachmann discovered — or perhaps it is more accurate to say we all discovered — that a total absence of legislative accomplishment and a complete inability to tell the truth or even to identify objective reality are no longer hindrances to higher office.

Emboldened by the lack of consequences for her early freakouts, Bachmann's self-mythologizing became more and more overt. In October 2006, she stepped before a packed house at the Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and told her life story. All of history's great madmen have had that one gorgeous moment where the cackling hairy hunchback that has been gestating within for years finally comes out and shows itself, strutting up and down the catwalk for the world to see. This was Michele's catwalk moment, a lengthy autobiographical speech in which she claimed "callings" from God had pushed her to every major decision in her life — from studying tax law to running for Congress. She even told the congregation that she and hubby Marcus — who by then had opened a Christian counseling center — had been united not by love but by a unique series of divine visions experienced by three people simultaneously.

Bachmann claimed that back in her college days, she was up one night praying with a female friend of hers when "the Lord gave each one of us the same, exact vision... It was a picture of me, marrying this man, in the valley where his parents have a farm in western Wisconsin." Meanwhile, miles away, Marcus "was repairing a fence on the farm where he worked, and the Lord showed him in a vision that he was supposed to marry me." According to Bachmann, Marcus initially complained to God that he wanted to see the world first, and only later relented.

Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.
...

Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star.
...

There is an orc army on the move in America.

And they are coming for us.

Internet Tradition/Blog Link Note: For you newbies out there, since we bloggers really, really like it when people actually to come to our sites to read the stuff we write (and maybe drop a couple of bucks in our tip jars), it is widely considered a major dick move to just copy someone's entire post -- handmade graphic and all -- and paste it in toto into your own site. Since we have this thing called "hypertext, "Fair Use" is generally understood to be the clipping of a representative excerpt from the piece in question, followed by a link to the original post.

The Quitsatz Haderach

meets the Dumb Jabbar.

Sarah Palin (known in the ancient literature as "the one who can be quit many things at once") signed Michele "Wingnut High-Crazy Human Purity Test" Bachmann's copy of her burn-book today.

Palin to Bachmann: 'We love you'
Last update: December 9, 2009

By Baird Helgeson

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann finally got a signed copy of Sarah Palin's new memoir, "Going Rogue: An American Life."

Bachmann spokesman Dave Dziok said the former Alaska governor signed the book, "Michele, we love you."

Bachmann and Palin were scheduled to be at the same fundraiser in the Twin Cities on Monday night after the former Alaska governor spent the day signing books at Mall of America.
...

And there was much rejoicing.

Also too there were probably other items of media news in all of the newspapers and magazines...any of them...that have been in front of me ...all these years...but about which I'll just hafta get back to ya.