Wednesday 31 August 2011

Open Thread - Wednesday

There are many compilations of these funny talking animals on youtube. We had one of them posted in the comments a while ago and now I found quite a good one. They're always good for a laugh.



The next clip features elephants and it's very funny...

It looks like Sarah Palin quit on the Tea Party rally on September 3 - or maybe not...

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Sarah Palin canceled her Saturday appearance at a tea party rally in Indianola, Iowa, a person close the former Alaska governor told The Wall Street Journal.


The person cited “continual lying” from event organizers at Tea Party of America, including a recent mixup over whether former U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell of Delaware would also speak.


Later in the same article:

Ms. Palin may still hold an event Saturday, the person said, though she has no firm plans. It’s also possible she could still attend the Indianola tea party rally, the person said.

Is she going? Is she not going? Is it because O'Donnell is going again?

The Tea Party of America call themselves the organizers of the event. Organizers? They don't seem capable of organizing anything!

And maybe Sarah Palin quit again... or not.

Whatever...

A Christian God in the White House?

OzMud posted this video, one of our readers drew my attention to it and I would like to repost it here, adding a couple of videos I put together.



These people would take their beliefs into the White House and promote policies based on them, affecting a great number of people who don't share those beliefs:



They advocate freedom from government when it comes to services and "entitlements." They want to keep government out of people's lives when they need help from the government. But they would have no hesitation in bringing the full force of the government into people's lives when it comes to sexuality and women's wombs.

They would also open the door even wider to the extreme religious fundamentalists who preach that all aspects of society should be infiltrated by their God, a trend started by GW Bush.


Considering that these people "quote" the Constitution ad nauseam, it seems clear that they don't understand it all!

[H/T to Sleuth]

Tuesday 30 August 2011

Open Thread - Tuesday

Mrsgunka sent me a link to a site showing a fascinating video, with explanations:

What it shows: Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and random motion. One might call this kinetic art and the choreography of the dance of the pendulums is stunning! Aliasing and quantum revival can also be shown.

How it works: The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The length of each successive shorter pendulum is carefully adjusted so that it executes one additional oscillation in this period. Thus, the 15th pendulum (shortest) undergoes 65 oscillations. When all 15 pendulums are started together, they quickly fall out of sync—their relative phases continuously change because of their different periods of oscillation. However, after 60 seconds they will all have executed an integral number of oscillations and be back in sync again at that instant, ready to repeat the dance.

Setting it up: The pendulum waves are best viewed from above or down the length of the apparatus. Video projection is a must for a large lecture hall audience. You can play the video below to see the apparatus in action. One instance of interest to note is at 30 seconds (halfway through the cycle), when half of the pendulums are at one amplitude maximum and the other half are at the opposite amplitude maximum.

Perhaps there's too much science in the explanation, but the video is beautiful!



And here's a very artistic version of a similar set-up:



Thank you, Mrsgunka, for making our minds boggle (in a nice way...).

Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell - Grifting for America


The teabaggers seem to go by many different names. It's not a single organization and new tea parties pop up here and there all the time...

I googled "tea party" and found teaparty.org, teapartyexpress.org, teapartynation.com, teapartypatriots.org on the first page. I'm sure there are more.

Wikipedia lists some of the supporters of the Tea Party Movement:

The movement has been supported nationally by prominent individuals and organizations, including:

501(c)(4) Non-Profit Organizations:

- Tea Party Patriots, an organization with more than 1,000 affiliated groups across the nation that proclaims itself to be the "Official Home of the Tea Party Movement.
- Americans for Prosperity, an organization founded by David H. Koch in 2003, and led by Tim Phillips. The group has over 1 million members in 500 local affiliates, and led protests against health care reform in 2009.
- FreedomWorks, an organization led Dick Armey. Like Americans for Prosperity, the group has over 1 million members in 500 local affiliates. It makes local and national candidate endorsements.
- Tea Party Express, a national bus tour run by Our Country Deserves Better PAC, itself a conservative political action committee created by Sacramento-based Republican consulting firm Russo, Marsh, and Associates.

For-Profit Businesses:

Tea Party Nation, which sponsored the National Tea Party Convention that was criticized for its $549 ticket price.[103][104][105][106] and because Sarah Palin was apparently paid $100,000 USD for her appearance (which she put towards SarahPAC.)

Informal Organizations and Coalitions:

- The National Tea Party Federation, formed on April 8, 2010, by several leaders in the Tea Party movement to help spread its message and to respond to critics with a quick, unified response.
- The Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, a loose national coalition of several dozen local tea party groups.

Michele Bachmann will be addressing a rally in Des Moines tomorrow, an event organized by the long established Tea Party Express.


Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell will appear at another event on September 3, organized by the newly formed Tea Party of America. One of the co-founders left Herman Cain's campaign to form this new group. Both Palin and O'Donnell took part in earlier Tea Party Express rallies.



I find this teabagging thing very confusing. It looks like a bandwagon, with people jumping on it for reasons that don't appear to be very clear.

The formation of his latest arm of the so called Tea Party, by being associated with two grifters like Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell, may have been motivated by opportunism and greed.

Some people have been talking about Sarah Palin running for a third party, but I can't see all these different groups coming together to form a single party. The organizers of each group would have to get off their individual gravy trains and defer to a single central entity. Also, if they form a party for Sarah Palin's benefit, what would they do with Michele Bachmann?

There must be a deadline for registering a new party in time for the 2012 elections, but I couldn't find much about it.

The Tea Party rhetoric is disruptive and poisonous to the political discourse, but as a party they simply don't exist.

When I started researching this post, I hoped to write something enlightening, but ended up more confused about the whole thing than before...

I suspect that's exactly the goal of the Tea Party Movement: To spread confusion.

Monday 29 August 2011

Open Thread - Monday

Lets' have a couple of cute cat videos. The first one is about love...



And here's a compilation featuring the famous cat Maru:



Maru is a seriously funny cat...

Recent bits and pieces about Sarah Palin

I was going to do one of my "Recent bits and pieces about Sarah Palin" posts and all I found was this:


The latest thing is still about Rove's prediction that she'll run and the rebuttal on Sarah Pac's blog.

As there isn't very much about her at the moment, and the major speech (will she, won't she?) at the teabaggers rally on September 3 has already been covered, I looked further ahead.


Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are going to defend the Republic. That's very strange. I didn't know there was a king or queen trying to usurp power in the US. Hey, they must know, being intellectuals and all that, and somebody has to prevent America turning into a monarchy!

Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are coming to town for a once in a lifetime event and you don't want to miss it.

Do not miss this once in a lifetime opportunity to witness the fusion of two intellectual conservatives as they Defend the Republic on the Family Arena stage.

After I stopped laughing at the description of these two as "intellectuals," I turned my attention to the sponsors of the event: Hansen's.

I visited their website and in the section about pests and diseases, I found this:

It's frustrating to watch a tree that was once as strong and colorful fall victim to disease or insect infestation. Sometimes you can treat a sick tree; other times, removal is the best option. Either way, you have to know what you’re dealing with – and fast before it spreads to your entire tree or plant population.

I couldn't help comparing the diseased tree to the GOP...

*****

Unless Sarah Palin does something spectacular before September 3, we'll need to wait until then to have some recent bits and pieces about her...

Sunday 28 August 2011

Open Thread - Sunday

Our more mature female readers send me some very funny jokes, sometimes a bit blue... This one came from view_from_here and it's hilarious! We're all adults here and I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

The year is 2222 and Mike and Maureen land on Mars after accumulating enough Frequent Flier miles.

They meet a Martian couple and are talking about all sorts of things. Mike asks if Mars has a stock market, if they have laptop computers, how they make money, etc.



Finally, Maureen brings up the subject of sex.

'Just how do you guys do it?' asks Maureen.

The Martian responds, 'Pretty much the way you do.'

A discussion ensues and finally the couples decide to swap partners for the night and experience one another...

Maureen and the male Martian go off to a bedroom where the Martian strips.

He's got only a teeny, weenie member about half an inch long and just a quarter-inch thick.

'I don't think this is going to work,' says Maureen.

'Why?' he asks. 'What's the matter?'

'Well,' she replies, 'it's just not long enough to reach me!'

'No problem,' he says, and proceeds to slap his forehead with his palm. With each slap of his forehead, his member grows until it's quite impressively long.

'Well,' she says, 'that's quite impressive, but it is still narrow.'

'No problem,' he says, and starts pulling his ears. With each pull, his member grows wider and wider until the entire measurement is extremely exciting to the woman.

'Wow!' she exclaims, as they fell into bed and made mad passionate love.

The next day the couples rejoin their other partners and go their separate ways. As they walked along, Mike asks, 'Well, was it any good?'

'I hate to say it,' says Maureen, 'but it was wonderful.

How about you?'


'It was horrible,' he replies. 'All I got was a headache ...


She kept slapping my forehead and pulling my ears.'


Thank you, view. Very funny!

Small government for the little people










The GOP and a certain undecided political celebrity have this weird mantra about small government and disparage the "Feds" at any given opportunity. And yet, they seek federal government jobs. The most vocal among them want the biggest federal job of them all, that of President.

"Keep government out of our lives," they chant. "Decisions should be made by individual states," they moan. But state jobs are not satisfying enough for them, they want to go to Congress, to the Senate or to the White House.

They twist the poor old Constitution, mangle the history of the country and make stuff up in the pursuit of power inside the bad, bad federal government they despise so much.

When the Bush administration was spying on "we the people," they didn't say boo. They didn't ask the government to stay out of people's lives. They want to repeal Roe vs Wade and invade women's wombs. They want to regulate people's sexuality, interfere in education and make some religions better then others.

Staying out of people's lives has nothing to do with the people. The translation of their chant is: "Stay out of the corporations' lives." No regulations, no taxes, no obligations for their masters. People only qualify as "we the people" when they have millions of dollars in the bank. The more money they have, the more "people" they become. Their servant's hearts want to serve these people.

Small government is for the little people: Less services and less benefits for their tax dollars. All the juicy benefits go to the other, "proper" people, the ones that don't pay taxes.

Take from the poor and give to the rich. The fiscally conservative mob want to balance the books by cutting services and entitlements so they can continue to give the corporations and the billionaires their daily blow-jobs. I'm sorry I used such coarse language, but what these politicians advocate is obscene.

So they want to go to Washington DC to screw the "little" people, interfere in their personal lives, squeeze every last little dollar out of them and reward them with no services, deny them the "entitlements" they paid for, so the big people, the so called "job creators" can have it all?

Invading the little people's lives and screwing them royally give these hypocrites a feeling of power. Staying out of the big people's lives gives them... $omething.

It may explain why they want to make the sacrifice of joining an institution they despise. They have servants' hearts that long to serve themselves and their corporate masters.

Serve "we the people?" What an obscene joke!

Saturday 27 August 2011

Open Thread - Saturday

Today we have another very special open thread.

Pallottine wrote to me a while ago, saying he was looking forward seeing some friends coming all the way from Ireland for a visit. We have seen Luke before. He's the grandson of Pallottine's good friend Paul:


Luke and his girlfriend Edna had a good time in Las Vegas before going to Arizona, where the following photos were taken. Pallottine was thrilled to get a hug and a kiss from a genuine Irish lass. Edna is beautiful and speaks Gaelic!

Now... surprise, surprise!

Our resident leprechaun Pallottine, his lovely wife Annette, Edna and Luke.
Pallottine doesn't like his looks and I told him he should have said
"cheese" instead of "mustard..."

Pallottine dedicated the next photo to Tumbleweed.

Greetings from Edna and Luke

I hear that Paul, an original Scot, wears a bib when he drinks his whiskey. I suppose he's either a wee bit sloppy or doesn't want to miss a single drop! Here's Paul with grandson Luke (what a handsome young man...)



It's no wonder Pallottine was happy to get a genuine Irish hug from Edna. She's gorgeous.




They had a jolly good time at Paul's beautiful home:



If Paul gets an unexpected visit from a bunch of Palingates readers, blame the good company and the fantastic swimming pool!



The approaching storm didn't dampen their spirits:


That's it for today. I'll just add a picture of Edna's parents' cottage in Ireland because Pallottine tells me he dreams of going there and staying forever. It's definitely a dream cottage, looks like a postcard.


Thank you, Pallottine, for sharing the good times with us.

Go raibh míle maith agat!

Special Open Thread - Irene

In 1987, southern England was not prepared for a storm that devastated a large area.



In the early hours of 16 October 1987, winds reaching 122mph ripped across the south-eastern corner of England, taking the sleeping nation by surprise.

As dawn broke, 18 people had lost their lives and 15 million trees had been uprooted.

We were awaken by a terrifying crashing noise. All the ridge tiles from our roof had landed on our car!

I had a driving lesson on that day (in a different car, off course) and I learned to do 3-point turns very well. There were fallen trees all over the place and we couldn't get very far before finding roads completely blocked.

It's easy to remember that event with some humour so many years on, especially as the forecaster in question decided to deny that he ever reassured the public that there was no hurricane, but it was very frightening and distressing at the time. That afternoon I came across a car completely flattened by a large tree and later found out that the passenger had lost his life. He was an old actor who lived in Brinsworth House, a nursing home for people in the entertainment industry. His wife was dropping him back at the home when the tree fell. Incredibly enough, she survived.

These days, thanks to sophisticated new technology, the weather can be predicted much more accurately than in 1987 and people can take precautions.

I hope Irene loses her oomph and that people on the East Coast will stay safe and won't suffer too much damage from this storm. You are better prepared to deal with it as the authorities, from the President to mayors to specialized agencies, are working on keeping people safe.






WayOfPeace reposted some tips he found on Andrew Sullivan's blog:

Hurricane tips from a reader in New Orleans:

1. If you leave, put all of the food in your freezer and fridge into
“contractor” garbage bags. If you lose power, you can throw it out
when you get back and save yourself from the stench of having to clean
out the fridge, and it can also ruin your fridge. If you don’t lose
power, you can just pull it out of the bags and all is normal.

2. If you have an answering machine and a land line, make sure it is on
so you can check to see if you have power or not while out of town.

3. If you stay, make your own ice by freezing full water bottles. Keep
them in an ice chest so they can keep other items cold. Save your
cubes for your cocktails. When power goes out, ice is like gold.
After the ice melts, you have more drinking water in case the water
systems is knocked out.

4. Also, place as much as you can in your freezer.
It will help the freezer stay colder, longer. You will
be eating the food in it in the days that follow. Place things that
you go to often in your ice chest. Try to open the doors to the fridge
as little as possible. Your fridge will keep things cold for about two
days.

5. And lastly, if you are going to leave, leave now and
take the mandatory vacation. Go far if you can. Don’t go 90 miles away
so that you lose power in your hotel room with sealed windows.

Friday 26 August 2011

Open Thread - Friday

Here's some internet fun...





Have a break, Sarah Palin

The weather is a bit unsettled over here. We woke up in the middle of the night because of the thunder and lightning. It died down long enough for me to put this post together, but dark clouds are gathering again, so this will be short, just to keep things going.

Sarah Palin is still honourably giving advice to the President, still helping him progress the nation, just like she promised.


She knows sooo much about Libya and other Arab countries! President Obama is a lucky guy to have an insightful person like Sarah Palin sharing her wisdom with him so selflessly.

Can you just imagine the mess the country would be in without her? She was so helpful to the President and the country when she campaigned to elect all those clever teabaggers to Congress! Their contribution to the debt ceiling debate was priceless.

Her Facebook notes and clever tweets are loaded with precious advice and support for the President she respects so much. She's true to her word. She said she couldn't put all the pressure on one individual's shoulders and she's dutifully sharing the burden with him, always ready to help and encourage him with her kind words.

Every time she appears on Fox News she reinforces her support for the President, doesn't she?

What a girl!

The President and the country (hey, the world!) would like to thank Sarah Palin, but she must be tired by now, so we think she should take a looong vacation somewhere without any cameras, without the internet, without anything and give her fantastic brain, her sweet mouth and that busy tongue a well deserved rest.


You've done enough, Sarah. Really. Just go and relax. Take your family with you.

We'll manage, somehow.

Thursday 25 August 2011

Open thread - Thursday

I'm feeling a bit homesick for Brazil, so here's some Brazilian music:

Sarah Palin, in 2009: "It would be my honor to assist and support our new president."

Today's post is very late due to some technical glitches, but I finally managed to improvise something...

Sarah Palin, just after the 2008 elections:

'I wish Barack Obama well as the 44th President of the United States,' she told the Republican Governors Association Meeting in Miami yesterday.

'If he governs with the skill and the grace and the greatness of which he is capable, we're going to be just fine.'

"It would be my honor to assist and support our new president and the new administration," the former Republican vice presidential nominee told CNN.

The following clip is from an interview given around the time of President Obama's inauguration:


She has changed her tune quite drastically since she first expressed her support for the President and has attacked both occupants of the White House relentlessly for over two years.

It looks like Sarah Palin finds it more honourable to spew vitriol for money than to support a President who puts the people ahead of the corporations. The very people she mentioned in the clip...

Wednesday 24 August 2011

Open Thread - Wednesday

Mrsgunka sent me this and it's very, very funny! It's easier to read it if you click on the image to enlarge.


Thank you for such a good laugh, Mrsgunka!

Sarah Palin's announcement speech (Satire)

Sarah Palin's announcement speech has been leaked and I was lucky to receive a copy:


My fellow teabaggers, do you love your freedom?

What a great city you have here in Indianola! The balloon city of the heartland! I must tellya, we use only genuine Indianola balloons to decorate the house when our kids have birthday parties, don't we, Todd?

It's good to see so many little people together and we're happy to announce that we'll be runnin' for President of this fine country.

We're goin' to plow through that door of the White House because God opened it a crack and we'll act according to his mandation. He created America as a Christian, exceptional nation, like a shiny hill in the city, for the true patriots.

I was just talking to Piper yesterday when we were out huntin' for the freezer and the wisdom of a child is a miracle. She asked "Mom, if the Founding Fathers were true Christians, shouldn't they be called Christian Fathers, or Founding Christians?"

The lamestream media will criticize little Piper Diaper for her wisdom, but we'll amend the doggone foundin' documents when we're President because in God we trust and they'll have to take all that money with those words out of my cold dead hands.

Mama grizzlies don't go with flow, only dead fish do that, it's a time tested truth that my science teacher dad has been teachin' up there in the great state of Alaska for ions. You little people don't go with the flow and I don't go with the flow of politics as usual of the elitistic crowd of Washington DC.

No more old boys club, we'll start a new grizzly club, but not for the cackling rads. We'll refudiate all the Supreme Court decisions that we don't like and take government out of our lives and with all my executive experience as a businesswoman and fish wife we'll reform that Department of Law there in the White House.

My science teacher dad and his wife Sally and also too my precious little boy with those special needs escaped Obama's death panels because I warned the country about the blood libel and it's time to end Medicaid and Medicare because we're not having no entitlement programs if we're goin' to have real energy independence with good smellin' emissions and rein in spending. I learned the five Ws of governin' in college and will clean the sorry state that journalism is in so it's fair and balanced in the White House.

I'm sorry we took so long to make this announcement, but I didn't blink before when I ran on the Palin/McCain ticket and you saw what happened. Obama encouraged the media to attack my family and they kept asking for medical records and about my record as the CEO of Alaska in a sexist way when they didn't even ask questions about Obama pallin' around with Bill Ayers since he was eight years old! I'll tellya, what kind of vetting was that? So I blinked this time, just to make sure. But we didn't retreat, we reloaded.

We took our time to decide to throw my servant's heart in the ring, didn't we, Todd? But the family is doing good, hell yeah, they are. Bristol the Pistol and her sister Willow the Pillow are doing just great in LA with no boys upstairs and my precious gift from God is somewhere in Alaska, walking around with his hand in front of him, looking for the North Star, I'm so blessed! My veteran son that nobody can take away from me shrugged his shoulders in a very encouragin' manner and said whatever, Piper will travel around with me on this vaca... campaign, so we're good to go.

I have to ask Track to do some goggling for me. What is it the president does all day, everyday?

God bless Real America!


Ah, before I forget: Send all your money to my new Pac, the old one is no good anymore.


As I'm in a wicked mood today, here's a very short video (no voice, just a bit of music):


Tuesday 23 August 2011

Open Thread - Tuesday

Sleuth posted this charming video late on Saturday's open thread and we think a lot of people missed it. So here it is for first timers. If you've seen it before, watch it again, it never gets tired!



Thank you, Sleuth.

Babygate made simple

The MSM won't touch this:

Sarah Palin seven months pregnant




That's simple enough and yet...

There are a number of theories about Babygate, different people have their pet angles and some of the theories are very complicated. I respect their tenacity and praise them for the time spent on elaborating their ideas.

I'm not a Babygate researcher. I don't know any details about Sarah Palin's "pregnancy." I rely only on my eyes and my ears and only on evidence offered by Sarah Palin herself. So I don't have a theory, I can't offer any further evidence of anything.

As I see it, the photo and her own account of the wild ride tell me everything I need to know to reach the conclusion that Sarah Palin didn't give birth to Trig.

The MSM won't look into this very simple scenario, probably worried about being compared to the Obama birthers.

What could possibly motivate them to embark into an investigation of the much more complicated Babygate theories that pop up from time to time?

They could all be true, I wouldn't know. But I can't see them going beyond the blogosphere.

A book has been written about it by Floyd Orr, but it wasn't discussed in the MSM, as far as I know.

We'll have to wait for Fred's book to see if it makes a difference. I sincerely hope it does. Perhaps Brad Scharlott will find a wider audience for his revised paper on the topic. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Perhaps all three together will do the trick.

It's been a long road this far and I do hope the final destination is not too far ahead.

In the meantime, I'll keep a low profile and stick to the simple stuff...

[Bonus VIDEO for beginners.]

Monday 22 August 2011

Open Thread - Monday

I'm feeling very Latin today, it must be the heat...



This makes me want to dance, dance, dance!

Sarah Palin and other religious nutjobs need to be stopped

The infiltration of all aspects of society by people with extreme religious beliefs is a very frightening prospect.



Leah Burton's book, God, Guns and Greed will come out on September 4 and can be ordered from this dedicated site.

[The other books that appeared on the video are available on Amazon.]

Sunday 21 August 2011

Open Thread - Sunday

Today we have a joke sent in by Grammy97. I've heard different versions of it, but this one is the cutest!




Two young boys walked into a pharmacy one day, picked out a box of tampons and proceeded to the checkout counter.

The man at the counter asked the older boy, "Son, how old are you?"

"Eight," the boy replied.

The man continued, "do you know what these are used for?"

The boy replied, "not exactly, but they aren't for me. They're for him. He's my brother. He's four. We saw on TV that if you use these you would be able to swim and ride a bike.

Right now, he can't do either."


Thank you, Grammy. It's a welcome laugh when things are not so funny in real life!

Sarah Palin - Mission accomplished

Karl Rove is predicting that Sarah Palin will run. I'm not convinced that she will, but that's besides the point. She quit on Alaska to become a very well paid talking head with a lot of star appeal. She's been making the headlines for the past two years for a variety of reasons.


Sarah Palin's tweets, Facebook notes and Fox News appearances have guaranteed exposure in the media, perhaps because they've been kept at arm's length. It's a very clever strategy.

She has achieved a great deal for her masters. Coming from anybody else, her statements would have been taken apart, rebutted and eventually dismissed. But this intriguing, unconventional myth of a person gets a pass. She sells copy. Love her or hate her, people can't resist reading her latest tidbit. And she plodded on, publishing ghostwritten notes, tweeting idiotic, snarky attacks on the President and indulging in her usual word salad on Fox News. In a process of repetition, repetition, repetition, she made the outrageous sound normal.

Now a number of GOP candidates feel free to say the most ludicrous things and manage not to get laughed off the stage.

The most notorious candidates are as bad as each other and definitely as bad as Sarah Palin. They're radical and divisive, but it seems that this is exactly what's expected of whoever emerges as the winner in the primaries. Moderates need not apply. Sarah Palin set the tone over these two years, helped the teabaggers win seats in Congress, derailed a few serious debates with her rhetoric and achieved a radical shift to the extreme right.

Most people know that Sarah Palin is profoundly ignorant and incredibly shallow. People laughed at her reality show, her tweets, her choice of clothes, hair, pedicure, you name it. The tabloids go on overdirve about her dysfunctional family. She appears to be harmless, a mere sideshow.

But has any other rightwing talking head had as much influence on the political discourse as she had in the past two years? Sarah Palin was paid to do a job and she did it, under a cloak of innocence, because she's too stupid, too tabloidy, too vulgar.

Ridiculous as she is, her fridge magnet philosophy became mainstream and her idiotic talking points incorporated in everyday political jargon.

Outrageous is the new normal and the declared GOP candidates are banking on it.




Thank you, Sarah Palin.

(There she goes, laughing all the way to the bank...)


Saturday 20 August 2011

Open Thread - Saturday

Yesterday we visited Spike's garden. Just before that post went up, Grasshopper sent me three short videos of his very peaceful garden and I put them together in one single video:



[Grasshopper, even though it's on youtube, it's unlisted and will not appear in searches. I made it just for us...]

I love the use of water in this garden and the frog sitting next to the Buddha is a gem.

Thank you, Grasshopper, these visits to your garden are always very calming.

Sarah Palin's religious confusion (and cynical opportunism)





Sarah Palin's love affair with the Star of David is bizarre.

In her 1996 mayoral campaign against John Stein, her former mentor, rumours were circulated that Sarah Palin would be "Wasilla's first Christian mayor," implying that Stein was Jewish. Her campaign used Jew as a "smear" against a Lutheran whose surname sounded Jewish.

Sarah Palin's most consistent religious home has been the Pentecostal church. Though her family left the Wasilla Assembly of God in 2002, just before she launched her campaign for lieutenant governor, Sarah Palin has returned again and again. The now famous prayer to protect her from witchcraft took place during a visit in 2005, three years after Palin's official departure. She returned in June 2008, making reference to that earlier service and crediting the African pastor's prayer with leading her to gubernatorial victory. And when she worked from the state capital, Sarah Palin attended the Juneau Christian Center, an Assemblies of God congregation.

Muthee, on the day he prayed upon Sarah Palin, advocated for Christian bankers and bashed the Jews:

Muthee gave a short speech, during which he advocated that the Christian church should "infiltrate" seven key sectors of society (including business, government, education, and media). During that speech, Muthee claimed that "Israelites" "run the economics" of America.

In June 2008, Sarah Palin addressed the congregation of the Assemblies of God church in Wasilla. She made a reference to Pastor Muthee right at the end of this footage, saying he's bold. [The video is not directly connected to Jews, but I included it because it's a classic.]



A few weeks later, already the Republican VP candidate, Sarah Palin tried to distance herself from the Assemblies of God. She told Katie Couric:

"I don't have a church, I'm not a member of any church. I get to visit a couple of churches in Alaska when I'm home, including one, Wasilla Bible Church."

In mid August 2008 she had attended a talk at the Wasilla Bible Church:

David Brickner, the leader of Jews for Jesus, was invited to speak to the faithful at the Wasilla Bible Church, Sarah Palin's fundamentalist congregation. In his talk at Wasilla on August 17, 2008, with Palin in the audience, Brickner described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's "judgment of unbelief" on Jews who have not converted to Christianity.

In November 2009, Sarah Palin was interviewed by Barbara Walters:

Walters asked, "Now let's talk about some issues - the Middle East. The Obama Administration does not want Israel to build any more settlements on what they consider Palestinian territory. What is your view on this? " Palin responded, "I disagree with the Obama Administration on that. I believe that, um, the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon because the population of Israel is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead."

Sarah Palin's views Israel in the context of the Rapture, not as a friend of Israel. As far as she's concerned, a good Jew is a Jew for Jesus.

Another handy accessory:
The crucifix

She uses the Star of David as a fashion accessory, in the same way she used the Israeli flag to decorate her office in Juneau. This screenshot is from footage taken in late February 2008. A few weeks later, in early April, Elan Frank arrived in Juneau to film Sarah ("I don't believe in coincidences") Palin for a documentary. He's Israeli.


Recap: She used Jew as a smear against a political opponent, was prayed over by a guy who wants to get rid of "Israelite" bankers, chose to attend a talk by the leader of Jews for Jesus and seems to believe (reformed) Jews will flock to Israel to be saved.

The following celebrity was lambasted for daring to wear a Star of David to please her boyfriend:


[Sarah Palin will appear at an event with Glenn Beck on October 3. His rally in Israel seems to be running into trouble.]