Mock, Paper, Scissors

Um, where to start…

(How about by blaming/hat tipping Scissorhead Skinny-D?)

Apparently, New York State is the new Eastern Europe of 1943, with the American border patrol agents playing the role of Nazi soldiers demanding everyone’s papers on the train. Have you heard this story?

To see what immigration hard-liners really have in mind, ride the Lake Shore Limited between Chicago and New York or Boston. It is a daily Amtrak train that is regularly boarded and searched by the Border Patrol, even though it does not cross any international border.

That’s in yesterday’s NY Times, and refers back to this story earlier in the week, also in the Times.

The federal government is authorized to do just that at places where people enter and leave the country, and at a “reasonable distance” from the border. But as the patrol expands and tries to raise falling arrest numbers, critics say, the concept of the border is becoming more fluid, eroding Constitutional limits on search and seizure.

And unlike Arizona’s law, the change is happening without public debate. “It’s turned into a police state on the northern border,” said Cary M. Jensen, director of international services for the University of Rochester, whose foreign students, scholars and parents have been questioned and jailed, often because the patrol did not recognize their legal status. “It’s essentially become an internal document check.”

Why isn’t this on the front page of every newspaper and at the top of every news program. This is America! We shouldn’t have to prove our citizenship every time we come within 100 miles of any border. What’s next? Flags on our sleeves?  And where is the debate on this issue?

Porn watching trucker
now faces three-to-nine years
of rear-end action.

Ben Smith at Politico wants us to know that we should not trust the Vanity Fair profile of Mooselini because Trig (the likable Palin) was not at the Kansas City event that was mentioned.

Ben Smith is a professional journalist. He has a desk and everything.

(Politico)

I explain it all over at The Magpie.

Ultimately, if you were a HUGE fan of the 2008 campaign, the book is worth a skim. It’s not a crime that she wrote it, though it often feels like a misdemeanor reading it.

Who woulda thunk that Little Miss Entitlement’s book would feature yard sign theft (oh, the madcap hijinx of an heiress!) and hair styling bitch sessions? Yeah, me too.

(Time)

The DLC (Democratic Leadership Council), home to Bill Clinton, Traitor Joe, and so many other so-called centrists, is usually seen as being the Neville Chamberlain of the Dims: appease, appease, appease. What cannot be weakened or watered-down must be abandoned. GOP-lite is their motto, and they always point to Bill Clinton as Example 1 that to be successful, the Left has to make concessions to the Right, and never the other way around.

The DLC crowd are the ones during the ’90s who created the triangulate model of politics and lead to Bill Clinton being the greatest GOP President ever, when he enacted the entire GOP agenda for them, amongst many other things ending Welfare as we know it, signing DOMA, approving on NAFTA, and so on.

Would you be surprised to learn that membership in the DLC is based upon large donors? Probably not. Would you be surprised to learn that amongst the members of the DLC is Koch Industries, the same oil company that is funding the Tea Party? You shouldn’t be. The Executive Director of the Cat Food Commission, by the way, is Bruce Reed, who was the long-time CEO of the DLC.

News you can use all day

Carly “Fire ‘Em All” Fiorina prepares for a debate with Barbara Boxer.

• Midget with bad hair beats up cancer survivor – These are the things we know from Carly Fire ‘Em All Fiorina: Barbara Boxer has bad hair and that’s why she must be replaced in the Senate. Oh, and Fiorina would outlaw abortion and stop global warming legislation. And these are just the things she admitted in her debate with Boxer last night.
• Bribery Today - Harley Barbour thinks he would make a nifty president, because, he made a nifty lobbyist… “because that’s what Presidents do, and I feel like it’s an advantage for me to have the chance to do that.” (Politico)
• Arrest the Bad Eggs! - Has a criminal investigation begun of the bad eggs in the largest recall of bad eggs in modern history in Senator Chuck I AM NOT A NAIL Grassley’s home state of Iowa? Some say yes! (Food Safety News)

Spike can dance. But still, no return of Cheryl.

Media Matters

Icky. He must be all worm-ridden by now. Just like Nancy.

A classy affair…
She died stuck up a chimney
But has his respect.

(Our Poet Laureate returns… with a jaw-dropping tidbit.)

I wonder if you have to provide your own dead squirrel?

(Hat tip: Scissorhead Skinny-D who has never told us his hobbies.)

It’s so bad that illegal immigrants have stopped coming. Yup, down by two-thirds.

Oh, No! The Minnesota State Fair has trampled on the free speech rights of Jim the Election Guy who only yesterday was telling us about the evils of taxing corn dogs and deep fried bacon, the national foodstuffs of Minnesotastan, at the State Fair.

It seems that the State Fair is in the dark clutches of the Liberal Elites and they demand that Bachmann-the-Nut cease and desist using their logo in her advertisements.

It’s a slippery slope, first they come for their logo, next will they come for Jim the Election Guy? Where does it end, Bachmann, where does it end?>/p>

Meet the NY 5, who kinda-sorta hate-attacked an upstate NY Mosque:

Five teenagers have been arrested for disrupting religious services at a mosque in upstate New York after allegedly driving by the mosque during Ramadan services, honking their horns and firing a shotgun.

After they left, several members of the mosque got into their cars and drove to a boat dock on nearby Lake Ontario looking for them. They found the teens and cornered them for half an hour until police arrived to arrest them.

Four have been released until a court date later this week, according to the sheriff’s department. The fifth, charged with a felony, is being held on $10,000 bond. Their names are Mark Vendetti and Tim Weader, 17, and Dylan Phillips, Jeff Donahue and Anthony Ogden, 18. Vendetti is accused of firing the shotgun.

The D.A., Joseph Cardone, said the teenagers admitted to being at the mosque and to firing the gun. Their explanation for the shot, he said, was that they were scared when they saw mosque members coming outside.

“I don’t know what sense that makes,” he said. “They’re the ones who drove to this location.”

Gee, where do kids learn to behave like that?

(TPM)

“The irony (is) that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess,” said Simpson, an Army veteran who was once chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

“It’s the kind of thing that’s just driving us to this $1 trillion, $400 billion deficit this year,” Simpson said. “It’s not that I’m an uncaring person, but common sense is the most uncommon thing in Washington.”

Shorter Simpson: “Hurry up and die, veterans. It’s patriotic.”

(Simpson is on the President’s Deficit Commission, so look out! It’s high tide.)

(AP)

The Vanity Fair story on Mooselini is out, and while it makes it clear that she is a fraud and a fameball grifter with the brain of a disoriented gerbil, there are some gems in the article.

But the best part is the side bar, Sarah Palin’s Shopping Spree:

On October 23, two days after stories about Palin’s exorbitant campaign clothing budget first surfaced, Palin e-mailed aides in a fury: “Ridiculous – I’ll try to be patient through this, but this is ridiculous and hypocritical in terms of my values, and prudent use of ‘other people’s money’ – It’s puzzling, even infuriating, why the clothes issue is what it is now. My family was never told that all must be returned … Not until two days ago when I read we may have a challenge in tracking down [her son] Track’s very expensive sweater(s) (that he didn’t request), as they’re either on base at Ft. Wainwright somewhere, or perhaps even overseas … I’ve asked many, many times how this was all supposed to work with clothes that were presented me and the kids – who was paying … ” (A close campaign aide says that this is untrue, and that Palin never asked any such questions.)

But in the very next paragraph, Palin was trying to figure out a way to hang on to some of the items: “Do they want the nylons and other things that are pretty worn, returned?” (And she asked a campaign aide, “Do they really want my dirty undergarments?” Indeed, Palin had something of a fixation on the handling of her undergarments, and insisted, when hotel maids did her laundry, that only campaign aides be allowed to touch those particular articles.) Attempting to wrest some control over the situation, she added, “I want say in the charities these will go to.”

By the time she returned to Alaska, after Election Day, Palin’s transformation was complete. An e-mail string dated November 7 includes terse directives to aides to search for particular items of clothing that she wanted to keep: “Remember the five black leather Flyers bags w sweatshirts and jerseys and Flyers propaganda in each bag? Anyone know where they ended up?” One of the aides who were sent to Alaska to retrieve and catalogue the items purchased for Palin recalls that, during these days, mysteriously, “all of a sudden, she couldn’t find stuff.”

I’m sure the Koch brothers would ante up for some panties, Mooselini. Think of the money you could rake in.

(Vanity Fair)

News you can use all day

John Boehner says he’s really sorry, Charlie.

• We Won! – President Carebear declares Victory (though no one, no one at all knows what we were fighting for), and tells us he is going to use the same laser-like focus to um, win the economy. Uh-oh. (TPM)
• Welfare State votes to end welfare - Lisa Murkowski, noted socialist and mainstream GOPer, has conceded her race for lifetime tenure in Chinless Mitch’s Jamboree. Anyway, this leaves moose-savant Joe Miller, who some say (me, for instance) is Mooselini’s beard (or at least her love-child with Sasquatch) to duke it out with some Dim, whom will not get any support from DC. Anyway, the Moose-Savant wants to end all Federal spending, so Alaskastan will become the Ice Planet from Star Wars. The End. (Raw Story)
• Guns or Butter? - Here we go again. The White House is considering tax cuts as stimulus, thus giving the GOP agenda legitimacy. Why fight ‘em? (WSJ)

See, even from the beginning of time, we Americans liked our second amendment remedies.

(Hat tip: Scissorhead DK)

Sorry Scissorheads, the last three liveblogging extravaganzas had zero participation, so we’re not wasting our time.

I’ve been back at work in the city schools for the last three weeks and have had six days with my newest batch of 9th-11th graders. (Yes, this does explain at least some of my absence from MPS.) Many of the students I know, including my own son, would LOVE to eliminate morning classes and a few of the subjects they don’t find interesting. But they all actually see a purpose to education.

They are not Sharon Angle. (Thank God!)

In other words, Angle supports a two-step process to reform education in the United States:

• Phase One: Eliminate all federal funding of education.
• Phase Two: Eliminate all other funding of education.

via Think Progress

Oy! This woman could become senator. PLEASE vote for Harry Reid and support him in this election!

Now try that with a cat! I rest my case: Dogs rule.

So many questions… I think just from a semantic point, this idea is going to lead to confusion, and I can recall some jokes from my Boy Scouts daze that relate to this concept exactly.

(Metro UK)

OK, we know that Bachmann-theNut’s voice is like a thousand fingernails on a thousand chalkboards (trying to write Shakespeare or a Hallmark card or something), but what’s up with some bow-legged dork wearing a v-neck tee under a sport coat talking about deep fried bacon as Jim, the Election Guy?

Is her opponent really going to lose the election because of a corn dog? What about french fries, Jim? What’s Bachmann’s stance on taxing french fries? Is she jiggy with that?

Yipes! What’s going on here? Orrin Hatch is in cahoots with Osama Bin Laden? Is there a sleeper cell in the Senate? Was Sharron Angle right about domestic enemies within those hallowed walls? Is this just one distrusted and loathed religion sticking up for another distrusted and loathed religion?

…if the Muslims own that property, that private property, and they want to build a mosque there, they should have the right to do so… And there’s a huge, I think, lack of support throughout the country for Islam to build that mosque there, but that should not make a difference if they decide to do it. I’d be the first to stand up for their rights.

Oh, wait. Property rights are more dear to the GOP than life itself (unless that life is a fetus, in which case all bets are off until the baby is born and then is deprived of its rights).

(TPM)

You are infringing upon our right to beat up faggots.

Yes, it’s exactly parallel to Maggie Gallagher’s screaming that marriage equality infringes on her right to discriminate against gays.

“We feel more and more that activists are being deceptive in using anti-bullying rhetoric to introduce their viewpoints, while the viewpoint of Christian students and parents are increasingly belittled,” [Candi] Cushman told the Post.

(TPM)

Eleven-dimensional chess, my pretty-pink ass!

Gee, enthusiasm from the base falls off a cliff in mid-August, right after Gibbs tells the base to f***-off:

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”
The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

For the record, Gibbs was part of a group that smeared Dr. Dean during the 2004 campaign comparing him to Bin Laden. He has a long track-record of smearing the left.

(An earlier version of this post broke the template, and had to be tossed out. Sorry for any confusion.)

News you can use all day

Self-promoter, Glenn Beck, announces his new website.

• Generic GOPers are Winning (Uh-oh) - The latest Gallup Poll tells us that on a generic ballot, a generic Republican (white, male, classist, sexist, racist, theocratic?) is winning over a generic Dim (all goodness and light) by 10% points. That said, freaky goose-stepping reprobates like Sharron Angle are real and not generic, and are trailing their Dim opponent.
• Conspiracy Theorist Launches Website - Glenn Beck, America’s Favorite Roasted Nut, has decided to compete with that dancing fool, Tucker Carlson, to make his own Tina Brown-HuffPo. Anyway, it is called The Blaze, because, I guess Prickly Heat was already taken. Look in your review mirror, Drudge!
• Soft-core for Soft-headed GOPers - Hahahaha, Young Guns, a GOP spank-bank novella is selling for 30% on Amazon. Hubba-hubba, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy are the young’uns, all hot and sweaty with an average age of 44, these young guns are about 1,000 years younger than most of the GOP. My guess is that the buyers of this thing will be shooting blanks into Kleenex.