Palin asks: Why did the person with 18 million votes get passed over?

Good question.

Late Night: Equal Opportunity Offender

Brook finds some unusual things on YouTube.  Like, today, she found a Blond Joke video.  (Q: What did the blond say was the capital of California?  A:”C”)

Recently, she’s developed a keen sense of the absurd when it comes to politics.  Take a look at this play on the media narrative for each candidate in this Skippy Shorts video of a debate between Obama and McCain:

Hang in there.  Less than two weeks to go.

The Lions Share: Hitting the Wall

Join us at 8:00PM EST tonight for the Lions Share on PUMA United Radio (PURrrr) as we talk about Bill Ayers, tied polls, Glenn Beck, our newest fan? and our recent notoriety.

Oh, and as for Palin’s wardrobe makeover?  Here’s a blast from the past about Michelle Obama.  At least Sarah Palin isn’t just imitating a Kennedy.

What if?

The incomparable Bob Somerby makes a very astute observation:

Why had Klein reinvented things so? We don’t have the slightest idea. But here’s a possible hint: In 2006, the presumptive Democratic nominee was a certain Hillary Rodham Clinton. And make no mistake: If Clinton had run against McCain this year, this campaign would have been covered quite differently by more than a few major “journalists.”

Oh you betcha!  Not that long ago John McCain not-so-jokingly referred to the media as his “base” and they universally portrayed him as a straight-talking maverick.  So when did they suddenly decide that McCain was old and evil?  It wasn’t until after they declared that Barack Uh-bama was the “presumptive” (presumptuous) nominee and Hillary was forced to suspend her campaign.  Then they turned on McCain like a bad dog. 

But what if somehow Hillary had managed to win the nomination?  After-all, she was the popular vote winner, and won all the big states except Illinois, as well as the critical swing-states.  The goofy DNC rules gave Obama a narrow lead in pledged delegates, primarily (pun intended) due to the way his campaign gamed (cheated) in the red state caucuses and the overwhelming (85-90%) support he received from African-American voters in southern (red state) primaries.  Neither Hillary nor Teh Precious won the nomination outright based on pledged delegates, it was decided by the superdelegates.  So what if the SD’s had voted for her instead of him?

One thing is for sure, the media would still be loving them some straight-talking St. Maverick.  He wouldn’t be old, evil, or racist.  Assuming he had still chosen Sarah Palin she would be considered a smart, reform-minded candidate who was uncorrupted by Washington D.C.  She would also be getting praised as something new and exciting, a conservative, christian feminist.

We would still be hearing a lot about racism though, because the media would be constantly talking about how African American voters would be staying home on election day to protest how Hillary had stolen the nomination with the help of racist superdelegates.  Even if Obama was her running mate, voting for McCain (or not voting) would be considered the only principled choice for progressive Democrats (not just AA voters) because the racism and corruption of the DNC could not be tolerated.

If Obama was not her running mate, he would not be out campaigning on Hillary’s behalf.  He would be praised for showing party loyalty by not launching a third-party campaign or (publically) criticizing Hillary, and would already be considered the Democratic front-runner for 2012.  Meanwhile he would continue to demonstrate his awesome post-partisan leadership skills in the Senate.

One other thing – the recent financial crisis would have been laid squarely at the feet of Bill Clinton, and it would be lamented that no one heeded the warnings given by both McCain and Senator Obama.

So, am I right or am I right?

(It’s Not Easy) Being PUMA

As Sheri Tag, host of “No We Won’t” on PUMA UNITED RADIO said on BettyJean Kling’s inaugural BlogTalkRadio show, “Free US Now“:

It’s not easy being PUMA.

So right you are, Sheri, and congratulations to BettyJean on her new show.

Just like Kermit, we may not be as flashy-sparkly as the others. For us, our opponents appear to have so much going, with their money and their trappings. (Huh, didn’t that used to be the Repubs?) But we are heartfelt, true, and committed to our cause.

Paula Abeles, tireless co-founder of Real Democrats, aptly states the case about the crux of our protest: the right to free speech and the right to vote. In this video from their latest canvassing in Ohio, Abeles proffers our beef about ACORN, Obama’s nosing Hillary and us out of her nomination, and his attempted Iraqi October surprise (oh, no, Mr. Bill!)

A case in point. What’s interesting, and very sad for me, is that after I published my first version of this post on Lady Boomer NYC, about it not being that easy to be a PUMA, one of my dearest friends wrote a response to the comments on my blog. She felt like I was separating myself from her and my friends, even inciting hate. Whereas, I feel it’s the other way around, because the Democratic Party has marginalized, alienated, excluded, and demonized us—and our candidate of choice, Hillary Clinton. In these final ten days, you can betcha, the juice is up. People are getting even more inflamed and coming from a place of fear.

Because of the volatile atmosphere we face, I, like many in our movement, have chosen to go underground and separate my political from my personal identity. I have been extremely careful to not speak my views in “mixed company.” For that reason, in addition to being friends for over thirty years, her words stung me deeply.

Is friendship based on shared beliefs? Sometimes. but hopefully it’s bigger than that. How do individuals have differing beliefs and still stay friends? —especially, once the election is over. It is my hope that even when we have hurt feelings, we can move beyond them and work toward the common good. That’s why I have thrown my lot in with PUMA, The Confluence, For Democratic Reform, and others.

Our charge is to continue to support each other and keep the faith in the face of personal and public attack. How do we support each other, given that we’re not supporting McCain, but are working to change the process? Given our protest, and regardless of the winner and the loser, the democratic process needs to be changed. It is my commitment to see that fight through to the end, to realize the reforms that we need in the Democratic Party and the election process.

No matter who wins the Presidency, it’s obvious that we have our big work cut out for us. Buckle up, kids! So we say, it’s not that easy being PUMA, but we like it. Given the situation, we would not and could not be anything else.

Paraphrasing the late, great Joe Raposo’s “(It’s Not Easy) Being Green” —

It’s Not Easy Being PUMA . . .

And PUMA could be big like an ocean
Or important like a mountain
Or tall like a tree

When PUMA is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why
But, why wonder “why”?
Wonder
I’m PUMA
And it’ll do fine
And it’s beautiful
And I think it’s what I want to be

The Racism Game: A Play in One Ridiculous Act.

May The Blessings Of Obama Be Upon You

THE SCENE: A game show set, modeled on “Jeopardy.” The host, DREW CAREY, stands at a podium, behind which is a giant flat screen. It currently shows President Barack Obama’s smiling face, with the Possum seal behind it.

Across the set from CAREY are three podiums, with a contestant standing at each podium. The contestants are BOB HERBERT of The New York Times, LOUIS DIUGUID of The Kansas City Star, and JOE THE PLUMBER. The lead-in music – “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist,” from Avenue Q – concludes as the lights come up. The audience applauds wildly.

CAREY: Thank you, thank you everyone! Gosh, it’s great to be here with you. You may not know this, but we’re celebrating a very special occasion tonight – the 100th episode of America’s favorite game show, everybody say it with me now:

AUDIENCE and CAREY (shouting): “Guess Who’s The Racist!”

CAREY: That’s right! Every Tuesday night on “Guess Who’s The Racist,” we all come together and find the hidden racism within people like you and me! The panelist who has the most correct answers gets an all-expenses-paid trip to ObamaWorld, located right next to Universal Studios in lovely Hollywood, California.

AUDIENCE (on cue): Oooooh!

CAREY: Ooooh indeed! Well, let’s start the show. Because it’s a special night, we’ve got some celebrities with us! First, we’ve got Bob Herbert, columnist for The New York Times, who was savvy enough to spot racism in all of its nasty forms during the 2008 election.

HERBERT (waving): Hello, America!

CAREY: And next, we have the incomparable Louis Diuguid of The Kansas City Star, who proved to Americans that the word “socialist” was a racial slur in October of 2008!

DIUGUID (waving): Helllloooooo!

CAREY: And finally, we have Joe The Plumber, who was used by both President Obama and John McCain in the primaries as a campaign prop. Joe has been spending the last few months in a Racism Rehabilitation Camp in Walla Walla, Washington. Let’s give him a big hand, and hope he’s learned enough to match the competitiveness of these two amazing players!

JOE (waving): Hi!

AUDIENCE: BOOOOOOOO!!! RACIST! WHITE SUPREMACIST! BOOOOOOO!

(Joe looks puzzled and hurt, and drops his hand.)

CAREY: All right, take it easy, folks. It’s not Joe’s fault he’s a racist; it’s just because he’s from a rural area and bitter about it. He’s trying really hard, honestly he is. Let’s see how he does on our first question. Are you ready, panelists?

PANELISTS: Yes!

Wednesday: Joe the Plumber- To the Barricades!

RD the Chemist here.  This is not the first time in history that the average Joe has been told to give up and accept his fate.  It’s not the first time that the people have resisted either:

It was Tito the Construction Worker who put his finger on the problem:

Someone asked why Munoz had come to the rally. “I support McCain, but I’ve come to face you guys because I’m disgusted with you guys,” he said. “Why the hell are you going after Joe the Plumber? Joe the Plumber has an idea. He has a future. He wants to be something else. Why is that wrong? Everything is possible in America. I made it. Joe the Plumber could make it even better than me. . . . I was born in Colombia, but I was made in the U.S.A.”

The scene turned into a mini-fracas when David Corn, of Mother Jones, defended press coverage. Munoz was having none of it. Why, he asked, would the press whack Joe the Plumber when it didn’t want to report on Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber? “How come that’s not in the news all the time?” Munoz said. “How come Joe the Plumber is every second? I’m talking about NBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN.”A black woman with a strong Caribbean accent jumped in the fray. “Tell me,” she said to Corn, “why is it you can go and find out about Joe the Plumber’s tax lien and when he divorced his wife and you can’t tell me when Barack Obama met with William Ayers? Why? Why could you not tell us that? Joe the Plumber is me!”

“I am Joe the Plumber!” Munoz chimed in. “You’re attacking me.”

Let us review all of the lovely things the media has brought us in the past 15 years, shall we?

• Whitewater
• Paula Jones
• Travelgate
• Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
• Rose Law Firm Billing Records
• Ken Starr
• Newt Gingrich’s Contract on America
• Monica Lewinsky
• Impeachment of Bill Clinton
• 12 years of Movement Conservatives in Congress
• George Bush (2000)
• Code Orange after 9/11
• George Bush (2004)
• Iraq War II and over 4000 dead
• The intentional neglect of Valerie Plame’s outting by a sitting VP
• *NO* impeachment of George Bush
• The trashing of Hillary Clinton
• Coverup of the manipulation of the Democratic primaries and delegates
• Unchecked misogyny in the service of their chosen candidate

If the Republicans destroyed the country, they had a LOT of help from the media, especially the Broderites of the Village who presume to tell us what we think and believe.  Over and over again, they have been wrong, misleading, pretentious and cruel.  They are the prime instigators who force their predetermined outcome on us.  Instead of merely reporting the news, they are determined to make it.

And Tito the Construction Worker, Joe the Plumber and RD the Chemist are calling them out. This year, instead of having the candidate we respected and trusted, the media has forced us to make a choice between two unacceptable men.  Neither one of them are going to be working for our best interests.  Obama has no interests but his own and McCain is constrained by his own party’s ideology.  Now we must make a choice based on character.  Which candidate is more honorable.  Barack Obama is coming up short in this department with all of his past associations, ruthless campaign tactics and corruption.  Yet the media would attack private inividuals if we dare to question Obama?  Who put them up to this?

It is time we took control of our lives back from the people whose goal is to manipulate our perceptions.  We must trust one another and resist the power of the media narrative.  When we put them back in their place, we’ll be back in charge of our own lives for the first time in 15 years.

To the barricades!

Something Tells Me I’d Better Get Used To Exile

Note: To the late-nighters. This makes absolutely no sense, I know. I just wrote it. Feel free to ignore it.

I had the funny experience tonight of being locked out of a post. It wasn’t intentional and I have no reason to believe anything other than crappy Vista is at fault but for the 45 minutes it took for me to get the attention of the usual suspects and bring the Party to the only room I could get to, I felt a little bit panicked and very alone.  Here’s  why:

These last 11 months I’ve dedicated myself pretty solely to one goal and that goal was to see Hillary Rodham Clinton become President of the United States. I don’t need to give you the long narrative. You’ve read it from me once or four times; you could probably ghost-write my story under power of hypnosis. I won’t bore you with that.  I will say what it’s done to me though.

Because of the sheer anxiety of this election, I lost 15 lbs.  Don’t misunderstand me, I was glad to see them go. I’ve been trying to lose weight since I was 5 and this was the first step in a positive direction I’ve ever taken but I don’t think the doctor wanted me to lose them like this.  Any day of the week, these many months you could find me screaming at my television; pacing the length of my hallway; or tapping away at my keyboard for one partisan, single-minded cause.  It was sunrise to sunset to sunrise again. I’ve never had much use for sleep and I learned how to function on even less during the Democratic Primary.

I also learned how to function on high-blood pressure and a racing heart.  Not a day went buy that I wouldn’t sit in my class in abject terror that the election was going to come up. It was all over the radio waves and the television broadcasts. It was all over the internet. There was no escaping it; and who was I to want to escape it? I lived for this election. And yet, at the same time, I dreaded having to face my friends and call them wrong, to face my teachers–some of whom have choice words for me now that they know where I stand–and call them ill-informed, though they were.  I used to shake in my seat like a leaf, or maybe that was just my heart. I knew I was in the minority of my senior class to prefer Hillary and I wasn’t so bothered by that. It was the stories that bothered me, the stories I’d read nationwide over how people had been treated for voicing their decision to support the competent woman over the lackluster man. Maybe I feared that one of those events would befall me. Sometimes, like now, I still do.