Needlenose

With Halloween coming up on Monday, there’s going to be a lot of grown-ups attending masquerade parties this weekend. Which, unfortunately, has meant a lot of long, last-minute lines in crowded costume stores — including the one in Washington, D.C., where all the Republican presidential candidates went shopping earlier this week.

As you might expect, they all wanted to dress up as Ronald Reagan, but someone had already snatched that up before the GOP contenders got there… and things just got uglier as they all scrambled for other choices.

Michele Bachmann took the easiest route, deciding to go as Bat Boy.

Jon Huntsman settled for being the Invisible Man.  (Some thought Tim Pawlenty did, too, but it turned out he didn’t stay long enough to buy a costume.)

All of his fellow candidates wanted Ron Paul to be the Invisible Man, but he kept asking if he could be Ross Perot.  Amid all the crosstalk, he wound up as Perot’s crazy aunt in the basement.

Sarah Palin, who showed up even though she isn’t running, opted for Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

Herman Cain decided to go as Sarah Palin, but people are just beginning to figure that out.

Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich both wanted to be Elmer Gantry, which resulted in a terrible fight where they tore the costume in half.  Perry completed his outfit with a cowboy get-up once worn by George Bush — and when he worried people might recognize it, he dyed a Jimmy Carter wig to put on top of it all.  Newt combined his half with a science-fiction robot costume.

Mitt Romney took the same concept way too far, stitching together pieces from so many different costumes that no one really knows who he’s trying to be.

(Adapted from a post at Firedoglake.  Tip of the ‘Nose to Green Boy for his suggestions!)

Consider yourselves warned.  You can only hide for another week.  Because next Friday, July 15, Sarah Palin’s hired hagiographic film The Undefeated (sadly, probably not based on the Iggy Pop song of the same name) will be released in multiple cities across the United States.

If the trailer (see video above) is any indication, the pseudo-documentary is chock full of the same unintentional self-parody that has made Palin herself so popular on the left side of the political spectrum.  Really, with the melodramatic opening music and silent titles proclaiming “DAUGHTER – WIFE – MOTHER – WARRIOR,” what viewer can help wondering if we’re about learn that Palin is secretly a programmed-from-birth assassin (sort of The Manchurian Candidate meets Hanna)?

You also have to love that first spoken words in the trailer are, “Like a marine, she runs toward the danger” — this about a woman whose most notorious achievement is quitting midway through her term as governor of Alaska to market herself and her family as reality-TV fodder, and who is too terrified of unscripted questions to appear in anything but the most staged public settings.

Meanwhile, in other faux-populism news, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Death to Medicare) — last seen being portrayed as a heroic, humble man of the people attending town halls in Wisconsin — got caught Wednesday night in a fancy Washington, D.C. restaurant sharing a couple of $350 bottles of wine with two “economists” (who may or may not turn out to be lobbyists).

Ryan later claimed not to have realized the wine was anywhere near that expensive, even though the waiter’s presentation of it was so elaborate that it drew the attention of nearby diners (who took photos to document Ryan’s high living).  Fortunately, one of the diners apparently confronted the congressman in time for him to pay for one of the bottles — even though he purportedly hadn’t ordered it himself — and thereby avoid trouble for accepting an illegal gift.

Kind of like those fancy clothes the Republican National Committee forced on Palin in the fall of 2008 without her knowledge, I guess.  I tell you, there’s danger everywhere when you’re a culture warrior fighting for the common folks.  But y’know, leaders like Ryan and Palin are so fearless they can’t help running toward it.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

…if it’s taken them so long to realize that weapons of mass destruction are readily available at gunshows across America.  Or maybe all the hoopla about ‘sleeper cells’ was total Bush bullshit, as I’ve suspected for years.  If there were any sleeper cells, and they had any brains, they’d do the next attack American style, driving Monster Trucks into Oil Refineries in Texas, with retrofitted fully automatics blazing.  At that point they may as well convert to Fundee Christianity and attack abortion clinics…then they’d have Palin and the rest of the Reactionaries rooting for them.

Trumpo the Magnificent & The Palindrome in 2012!

Peter Grier of the Christian Science Monitor muses that a Trump/Palin ticket could be the GOP ‘winning ticket’ in 2012, presumably with Trumpo the Magnificent appealing to the Looney Libertarian branch of the party with Palin appealing to the Gods, Guns & Gays crowd.

Great thinking, Peter, except that they’d probably kill each other in the argument over whether it would be Trump/Palin or Palin/Trump in 2012…

Still, a great opportunity to pull out the old ‘Superhero’ creation tool

Hates Non-Whites Immigrants & Government.

Jared Lee Loughner.  6 dead, 15 wounded.

Hates Liberals, Jews, Abortionists, Non-Whites & Government

Scott Roeder.  Killed 1.

Hates Liberals, Jews, Non-Whites & Government.

James von Brunn.  Killed: 1

Hates Liberals, Abortionists, Non-Whites & Government.

Eric Robert Rudolph.  Killed 1, Wounded 111.

Hated Liberals & Government ?

Unknown Anthrax Letter Bomber(s).  Killed 5, Infected 17.

Hated LIberals, Non-Whites & Government

Timothy McVeigh.  Killed 168, Wounded 450.

Notice anything?  For the last 20 years, America has been under attack by Reactionary Nut Jobs, not a Liberal among them.  Makes it easy to profile terrorists, at least!

*Update 1-10-11* Sarah Palin ‘reloads’ her targeting system – “surveyor’s symbols” not gun sights !!!  10A – Glenn Beck urges Palin to ‘get protection’ because there are “nutjobs on all sides.”  Yeah, Ass Clown, but the ones on *your* side are the ones stalking around Town Hall meetings with guns and shooting people!  11A – Jane Hamsher lays out the history of escalating reactionary violence alongside the inciting rhetoric (not exhaustive, doesn’t include all the guys stalking around town hall meetings with guns, nor the loons that plotted to kill Obama.  12:30A – LimpBoy squeals out apologia.

*Update 1-11-11* Poor Bill-O The Clown – what about his security needs? Boo Hoo!  1:30P - LimpBoy has proclaimed that the Reactionary shooter is in fact a Democrat, backed by the Democratic Party!!

*Update 1-24-11* Being a true Republican, Jared Loughner won’t take responsibility for his actions.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!  Found a picture of a couple of turkeys to help you celebrate (or lose your appetite, as the case may be).

Gingrich has been gradually creeping out from the shadows into the limelight since his fall from grace when leading the impeachment crusade against the very popular Bill Clinton.  But the Gingrich of the 90s seems relatively tame compared to the teabaggers and birthers of today – and even compared to Gingrich 2010!

In a recent speech to the reactionary American Enterprise Institute, Gingrich seems to have planted one foot firmly amidst the teabagger camp with his calls to forbid the so-called Ground Zero Mosque (which is neither a Mosque nor at Ground Zero), and the other solidly planted in the Wolfowitz/NeoConArtist era of never-ending war on Radical Islam:

“I believe [Bush] was right but in fact could not operationalize what he said. That is, there was an Axis of Evil, Iran, Iraq, North Korea. Well we’re one out of three. And people ought to think about that. If Bush was right in January of 2002 — and by the way virtually the entire Congress gave him a standing ovation when he said it — then why is it that the other two parts of the Axis of Evil are still visibly, cheerfully making nuclear weapons? And it’s because we’ve stood at brink, looked over and thought, “Too big a problem.”

“If Franklin Roosevelt had done that in ‘41, either the Japanese or the Germans would have won,” Gingrich said. The U.S. has to “over-match the problem,” he said, adding, “That’s what Americans are all about.”

I wonder if he got the memo that various Repug leaders were starting to bail on Shrubya’s Afghanistan Folly?  Palin/Gringrich in 2012 – the worst of 3 eras of Repug misleadership!  It would be kinda luck the Germans in WWII – invading a bunch of weak countries (Iran, N. Korea), then going crazy and attacking Russia from Palin’s house…I don’t even want to think about the hell they’d create.

PRC ‘take’ on Sarah Palin:

Wish they would make this into a video game!

It seems like only yesterday when politicians were shouting Drill, Baby Drill to a growing chorus of SUV-drivin’ whiners.  Frankly, given the history of oil spills, I couldn’t help but wonder how politics in the U.S. could have shifted so sharply in my lifetime from a moratorium on new drilling to supposed Totalitarian Liberals like Obama and a ‘moderate’ Repug like Schwarzenegger pushing for renewed coastal drilling.

What a difference a multi-million gallon oil spill off wetlands, fisheries and resort beaches makes.  Now, thanks to BP’s fuckup and the failure of an oil rig that was supposedly spill-proof, it looks like additional coastal drilling may be off the table…at least while this is still in the news.

It really comes down to this – I don’t believe Americans can really remember stuff that happened before the current news cycle.  Seriously, just watch – somebody will discover some politician or celebrity’s reproductive organ lodged somewhere it isn’t supposed to be, the oil spill will fade from memory (along with countless threatened and endangered spills in the Gulf of Mexico), and Palin et. al. will be out screaming Drill, Baby Drill with renewed vigor.

It’s like all that talk a few years ago about how nuclear power was gaining new support. Obama even included building a few new of the unstable light water reactors in his energy plan.  What the hell will it take to take that option off the table, another Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl (history of those nuclear power accidents, in case you too have amnesia)?

Just throw a stone into any gathering of conservatives and you are guaranteed to hit one! Two in this case. Sarah “Death Panel” Palin reveals that she is an erstwhile socialist medicine tourist, and anti-gay rights crusader and Repug California State Senator Roy Ashburn admits that he is more gay than Adam Lambert.