Of course it all started well before any of us ever met her. Whatever peculiar combination of insecurities she has, combined with her lovely natural tendency to bully everyone who won’t do EXACTLY WHAT SARAH WANTS THEM TO DO could not possibly have started when she was carelessly selected because of her hot milfy good looks as VP candidate. But surely her discovery of what it feels like to be in the eye of the National Media was the grand trigger that pushed her over the edge, that make her think that any publicity is good publicity.
Losing an election doesn’t necessarily make you a “loser”. But in Sarah dearest’s case, it merely brought to our attention the sad facts of her personality, since she has shown us over and over again that when you can’t think of any other way to get in the news, make up some crap, declare yourself a “victim”, and blame anybody but yourself for the mess you have got yourself in.
But it’s not a mess. It can’t be a mess. God told her to do whatever it took to get ahead.
Right.
The latest non-story that Sarah dearest has created is about the picture that a blogger enemy of hers (Sarah dearest has enemies, sycophants, and people she uses) photoshopped, substituting the face of a right wingnut radio talk show host bosom buddy of hers for her squirmy little one. Keep in mind that this fine upstanding right wing radio host is the same one who called a political enemy of Sarah dearest “a cancer” after she indeed had cancer. And Sarah dearest laughed heartily at that.
Sarah dearest’s complaint, voiced through her spokeswoman:
Recently we learned of a malicious desecration of a photo of the Governor and baby Trig that has become an iconic representation of a mother’s love for a special needs child.
Here’s the image that triggered this outrage that repeatedly brought up poor little Hypotenuse and required them to remind us not once, not twice, but 3 times in a brief 3 paragraphs that he is, indeed, a special needs child (don’t anyone forget!):
Actually, the original “photo” was not a photo at all. It was a cartoon that had shown up the previous week, of Sarah cuddling squirmy baby Dave Letterman. She didn’t complain when she saw that one:
The woman is off her rocker. “Desecrate”? “Iconic”? She actually believes that she is a deity? Her photograph is too sacred to photoshop, except to cover up the plastic surgery scars? She and her baby together are holier than the Blessed Virgin and Child?
I’m just asking because she belongs to a religion where you’re not supposed to worship icons. And here she’s declared herself a deity. Good work, Sarah dearest. I’d call it blasphemy if I believed, but I know that blasphemy is a victimless crime. People like her who believe that God and Satan are watching your every move for a chance to damn you to burn for all eternity, I would think she’d be concerned for the fate of her everlasting soul at this point.
Will the stupidity excuse really get you off from a mortal sin like blasphemy?
What do you suppose that reading this made me want to do? Do you think it made me want to erect an altar in a quiet corner of my home, with a gilded portrait of the Sacred Mother and Infant, maybe a candle or a stick of incense?
I’m laughing. In case you couldn’t guess, it made me want to photoshop all kinds of bizarre heads onto the baby in the cartoon.
If you’re a whacko evangelical Christian who is foaming at the mouth right now, you should be ashamed of yourself for reading something like this. You’re going to hell. Go ahead and link all your friends’ blogs to it, so their sexually-repressed little deviant brains can join my membership site and make me some money. I dare you.
“What happened to the “Revolution” Republicans or Texas talked about? Tea Parties? That’s it?
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
My answer:
“Somehow it turned out that the glorious “Revolution” was just a publicity stunt designed for television. The Republican organizers of this debacle thought that it would be enough to design the event and tell people to show up. Not only would tens of millions of people attend, but they would be so encouraged by the outpouring of support that they would have become activists. They would exert political influence.
Republican leadership has forgotten how to organize, or even worse (not from the perspective of Democrats, of course) they have decided to shun it and vilify it. What better way to guarantee that they will never achieve grass-roots popularity again?
The overwhelming majority of radio listeners and television viewers are couch potatoes. Why would Rush listeners and Fox viewers be different? People like this have no connection to the political process. When they get angry, they don’t write their Congressman, they act as anonymous internet trolls. When they get really, really angry, they grab a gun from their arsenal and shoot someone.
The sentiment on the part of their target group seems to be vague agreement with principles, enough to keep them from switching the station but hardly the basis for a revolution from people who are by nature so unconnected with the political process that they can barely drag themselves to the polls to vote every couple of years. “
Alas, while I was distracted doing things like working and writing this blog, another answer was chosen. But there’s no point in wasting mine.
The issue is not really whether or not the Revolution will be televised, it is whether it will even happen if the only reason for a “revolution” is to generate television content.
What a curious question this was, part of a comment on an article that was posted to digg.com.
patosanpatosan
7 hr 16 min ago
“Want a level playing field? How about getting rid of private health insurer’s immunity to the sort of antitrust laws that prevent collusion and price-fixing.”
The government is a monopoly who cannot be sued in any case unless they say it’s ok and under specific circumstances (i.e. sovereign immunity).
“We’ve got an entire industry who is providing an essential service but their primary motive is profit.”
The same could be said of your local grocery store. Do you object to your local grocer?
How do you feel about this? Of course, you know I’m going to tell you how I feel…
The grocery store, what a curious analogy. I”m trying to picture a system where you pay premiums to a few big distributors that permit you to get partial reimbursements for the food you buy. You must pay your deductible before it kicks in, and there are co-payments that are so expensive that you often decide to go without in spite of your “food insurance policy”.
Food stores are required by the “food insurance industry” to maintain massive billing departments that examine each purchase to make sure it qualifies for reimbursement with the shopper’s “food insurance company” before deciding whether to bill the company or the customer. Often they need to make a great many phone calls to get approval for the customer’s purchase of some item.
People often go bankrupt because of food they must have despite the fact that they have policies, and policies are canceled simply because the companies decide people are getting too much food.
At the same time, people who have no “food policy” must pay 3-100 times as much for the same food. Sometimes when they are shopping the store will decide they must pay in advance before even allowing them to shop, and at other times the food stores will just round them up, put them in vans, and dump them on the street in another part of town in front of a competitor.
That’s where a sick person files a major claim on an existing insurance policy, a policy that they have been paying premiums for for years. Maybe the condition is some kind of cancer or other condition that may require long-term treatment to assure recovery.
The standard insurance company policy is to comb through all the patient’s records to see if there is something they inadvertently forgot to admit to when they first got the policy, something like acne or a sprained ankle. The company then claims fraud, denies the claim and rescinds (or cancels) the policy.
The person who is responsible for discovering justification gets a bonus, and if they cancel enough policies over a year, they get a big raise. For killing people.
At an insurance company hearing this past Tuesday, insurance company executives declared that they would continue this policy, even if they were taking part in a reform plan intended to increase coverage.
Hello? Thanks for clearing up the confusion. We here were under the impression that public mandates or taxpayer spending meant that abuses would be curtailed or, like, go away. Now that we know that bad faith is the plan, we can make out plans, too.
Watch Sicko to understand about how the health insurance industry takes advantage of sick policyholders to reap obscene profits. And kill them. I’m uploading now.
From The Onion, that bastion of pseudo-news, comes a story on how a visit to Denny’s for breakfast left Obama’s confidence in the abilities of the American people shaken to the core. When this was on digg.com, Republican comments indicated they were unable to realize the story was a joke.
The right wingnuts are going after Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor for that statement she made in 2001 that a Latina judge could make a better decision than a white male.
“Was she right or wrong to say what she said in this way?” is the question they are all asking right now, and they are answering it for her, “I’m sure she would have worded it differently”, as though she should have been thinking ahead to what someone would think in the distant future, like when something important came up. Like now.
But first we must ask ourselves, “Was she right or wrong to think it?”
I think she was right. Here’s why:
Let’s indulge in stereotyping. I’ll take an older white male who righteously prides himself on his gender, color, religion, and social class. He is proud that he has no empathy for people who are not just like him, people of the wrong color, gender, religion, or social class, perhaps even someone who was born in the wrong geographical region of the country.
He honestly believes he is a self-made man, even though he may have been born wealthy, gone to the finest schools, and gotten every job in his life through family connections. And he believes that everyone else had the same opportunity, and having chosen not to be just like him, deserves to be exploited and underpaid.
Perhaps this guy is a Southerner, probably he prides himself in being a True Christian, and he looks down on women, blacks, and Mexicans for not knowing their place.
As far as he’s concerned, the fact that he is rich is the way it is supposed to be, just as much as he is white or male. The reason that Hispanics or blacks or women or poor people are not like him is because they aren’t supposed to be. They don’t matter. The only folks who matter are the older rich white guys. They get to make all the decisions about everybody’s life because they’re in power, and they’re in power because God wants them to be in power.
They are rich and imagine they deserve to be even richer, because this must be what God wants, or they wouldn’t be rich at all. It is their destiny.
Who do we know who thinks this way? I’m thinking Cheney, Bush, Rush, Beck, O’Reilly, Newt… The list is too long for me to more than begin, but you know exactly who is on it.
Guys like this do not have empathy. They don’t believe in having empathy. To do so is a weakness. To even want to learn about anyone else’s life experience is a character flaw, which could taint them.
They believe that the elite/rich/Southern white Christian male experience is the only one that matters. It is the default, and it is the natural order of things. To fail to accept this is, well, racist. Not to vote for a rich white male is racist. To presume that a woman, a black man, or even (God forbid!) a non-white woman could be the best, or even good enough for a top position is absurd to their thinking. To them it is obvious that women and minorities who have achieved success would never have done it without affirmative action, by playing the ‘race card’, or by cheating. Their qualifications are empty, meaningless. If there is only one elite white male who wants the job, even if he is not as qualified on paper, he automatically should have it.
A man like this has no idea what happens to a poor woman who gets pregnant and realizes she can’t afford to raise another child, or to a disabled person or minority who is discriminated against. He doesn’t care, either.
An educated Latina like Sotomayor, on the other hand, knows all about the rich white male experience, because she has run into it all her life. She has had it hammered into her all her life as the default experience, the only way to be, which is a lot more than Newt or Tricky Dick 2.0 can say about understanding what women or minorities experience. They have no idea what it is like to be a Latina, whether poor and struggling or a nominee to the Supreme Court with a stellar judicial record.
They have no idea whatever, and they do not care. It matters not a whit if they think that we should have more people just like them on the Supreme Court.
We do not need people on the court who do not care about Americans.
Maybe not really, not a lot of thoughts. Saturday Night Live did the definitive sketch on it, with George Bush giving advice to Dick Cheney on how he should handle the situation. There’s not much more a person can say about it, at least not if they have a real sense of humor, which nobody ever accused the real Dick Cheney of having.
And after you’re done with that, you can take a look at the coversheets that Donald Rumsfeld made for his daily reports to Bush after the invasion, to keep his spirits up by keeping him focused on the “religious crusade” aspect of the war.
Teh Cheney is at it again. Rachel Maddow lets him have it with an investigative piece that cuts to the heart of the question of whether “torture works” and what that even means.
Of course, this completely ignores the fact that when someone says, “torture works”, there may be multiple unstated meanings of the phrase.
Some people are under the misapprehension that the only possible correct interpretation is “torture results in us getting evidence that is timely, correct, and usable”. They have to ignore the fact that we tortured people for years who could not possibly have had new information, some of whom we knew were innocent, and thus could not possibly have had any information. As far as usability, somebody please share hard information on the signal to noise ratio that demonstrates we could even tell the difference.
A more cynical and probably more correct interpretation is that torture gave a lot of sadists a sexual thrill at being able to hurt people who might otherwise have been brought to a rather mundane trial or released for lack of evidence. How boring that would have been!
And don’t get me started on the Bush administration’s attitude toward the concept of truth, that there is no absolute truth. “Truth” is just how you frame what you want people to believe in order to get what you want.
And they claimed liberals are relativists concerning the subjectivity of truth!
And a brilliant piece of satire on the issue of whether the effectiveness of torture should be a consideration.
My personal opinion is that the current administration is playing the public to make it appear that they are following popular opinion, rather than going after the previous administration, which could be (and would be) interpreted as a political act.
Jonathan Mann, who is writing a song a day, and previously gave us “Hey, Paul Krugman” has outdone himself yet again by putting one of the infamous torture memos to music.
