Tancredo knows what the real problem is

"We need to ensure that the ‘American Dream’ remains within reach of American families – and that means enacting some long overdue safeguards that prevent illegal aliens and their unscrupulous allies in the financial industry from undermining its integrity."

Seriously, someone should take Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs, load them in the back of a pick-up truck, give them a liter of Evian and some beef jerky, drive them out to the middle of the Sonoran desert and leave them there.

Gunfight

The U.S. presidential election is a gunfight, and John McCain is bringing a knife. Sarah Palin is bringing green jello salad.
h/t to Ken A.

Freeping the Mothercorp

a new Spiritual Leader of the Moment

Heather Mallick uses her CBC column to makes fun of conservative men's teeny weenies and go up one side and down the other of Caribou Barbie with the iron rod of snark. Predictably, the National Post and Fox News, paragons of rectitude where n'er is heard a discouraging word of hyperbolic invective, cannot let such a grievious, base slander stand unchalleged and unleash their knuckledragging hordes. The CBC, creaking under the load of cheetos-stained missives, caves in , takes the column off its site and begs the indignant troglodytes to holster their crayolas. Alison is among the many majorly ticked off and RossK and I have suggestions. Get those cards and letter sent people.

Heather has often gotten under conservatives skins and is likely to continue to do so. That is why she is our new Spiritual Leader of the Moment.

Required Reading

Sincerest form of flattery and bullshitting
We shouldn't be that surprised by this as Steverino has never, ever had an original idea, but really the bit about the 'roos should have tipped us off. Over at McMagazine, Kady O'Mally, Chris Selley and Aaron Wherry discuss why it matters and what it all means while Andrew Coyne visits a large river in Egypt.


The trifecta
Driftglass on the Choler of Money and the Newtering of the bailout, and yet another reason Tom Friedman is a douchebag.


"Everytime I think I'm out, they pull me back in"
Everyone's favorite Professor of Dangeral Studies has suspended his retirement from blogging to help us through the current crisis.

Harper fails to eat own baby
900 ft. Jesus shows us it isn't just Churchy Spice who uses her children as campaign props. As with all great Republican ideas, Steverino has adopted this one too.

Sarah Palin is not illiterate!

She can prove her parents were married!



from about 3:05

COURIC: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this — to stay informed and to understand the world?
PALIN: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media —
COURIC: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.
PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.
COURIC: Can you name any of them?
PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news.

via Think Progress

Now, I'm not suggesting that Sarah Palin has never read a newspaper, after all she majored in journalism at six different colleges before she graduated, so I think it is safe to assume she must have seen one in class at least, and she must have studied hard since she didn't have time to work on the student newspapers at any of those schools.

I think she was just being polite, after all it would have been rude to tell the scary lady from CBS that gets all her news from FOX, Rush Limbaugh and her church newsletter. And she knew damn well that if she bluffed and said she read the New York Times and Washington Post daily and Time, Newsweek and Foreign Affairs regularly she'd have been in for double whammy. Someone in the rotten, liberal, gotcha media would notice that those publications were nowhere to be found in her home or office and she wasn't on the subscription lists AND she'd have the base mad at her for reading the damned liberal Emm-Ess-Emm.

Fisted by the invisible hand of the marketplace
All those middle and upperclass white retirees that were planning to vote for John McCain might want to think again now that their retirement plans are going to include a lot more Alpo than arugula.

The next person who tells me that government should be run like a business gets a punch in the throat. While bringing back the public stocks (as opposed to the stock market) has a certain visceral appeal, something else is also called for. Maybe John McCain can take another day off from campaigning. After all, he was all in favour of investing America's Social Security funds in the stock market as recently as six months ago and two weeks ago told us the fundementals of the economy were strong, so clearly he knows what he's talking about.
Meanwhile, the peasantry seem to be getting restless. I think the smart money is now in pitchfork and torches futures and the tar and feather commodities.

A message from Stephen Harper's biggest fan

While it is hard to believe something this long could be written in crayon, it is even harder to believe that brain-dead, half-assed, prarie National Review wannabe paragon of conservative intellectual thought - the Western Standard -- would publish this magnum dopus by Adam Yoshida (seen at the left, just one step away from becoming one of these guys) in the midst of an election in which they want to make their guy look less scary to centerist voters.

"Do too much, rather than too little. Don’t shift these things around. Burn them down and salt the Earth. A future Liberal government won’t have the guts, the time, the wherewithal, or the money to recreate them all at once. Sell the land and the buildings. Shred the records. Disperse the staff. It’s easier to destroy than it is to create. A Tory government on a rampage could destroy in a couple of months what it took four decades to create – and what it would take another forty to recreate."

Reassuring isn't it? He burbles on about the need to triple the size of the Canadian Forces, get rid of the CBC, build a couple of aircraft carriers and crank up the Canadian military-industrial complex (no really, he calls it that)

PSA does a proper eviceration. One might think that this would be the craziest thing Adam has ever written and it just somehow slipped through the editing process at the Western Standard. Sadly, no.

Tonight, on a very special episode of ...

Well, you can leave your sitcom name suggestions in the comments (The Frostbacks? Flyboy and Sureshot? The Pitbull and the POW?) but this latest rumour is proof that the GOP brain trust is being run by people who have watched way too much television --and I don't mean 60 Minutes and Nova.

In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one — the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.

Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”

It worked on Rhoda, it worked a couple of times on Friends, it worked on Cheers, it worked on Coronation Street, on the Office, on Beverly Hill 90120 ---almost every television series that lasted more than a single season has a wedding episode. Whenever TV writers are running out of ideas, need a big season-closing climax or just need to get their audience back you can bet that somebody is going to be getting hitched and wacky hijinks will ensue.

And if the wedding plan doesn't work out, maybe McCain can offer Ted McGinley a cabinet post or go waterskiing or take the whole family to Hawaii or London or adopt an adorable orphan-- I know, why not a speech where McCain and Palin sing a duet of "Summer Loving" from Grease!

spot the difference

You know this isn't the real Sarah Palin because Tina Fey is too coherent.