Columnist – John Sammon
Pathetic. Disgusting.

In the now-famous picture of the White House big shots watching the raid on bin Laden unfold, Hillary Clinton has her hand to her mouth like she is horrified. She was questioned about this later and told a whopping lie that she was trying to stifle a sneeze.

The truth is, she forgot her image for a second and reacted to the killing of another human being honestly, even one who deserves being killed, with shock. She forgot about the camera and her image for a second and reacted the way any human being should react.

She thus exposed herself as human. Big mistake!

She then had to lie her way out of it so she could appear to be tough like the men around her.

When confronted by a stark truth, a Clinton will always lie.

She should have ordered my “How to be a Man like John Wayne” kit. In this CD and accompanying booklet, only $69.95 while supplies last, I show you the woman political candidate, how you can appear to be tough and surrender your femininity and humanity and be like the men you compete with.

First, I show you how to walk like John Wayne did. He ambled along slow in a deliberate attempt to accentuate his six-foot-four size. Everything he did was slow. He was so slow he couldn’t make first string on the USC football team.

When he hit somebody on screen (the bad guys were always much smaller), he had a massive powerful punch. But he was so slow you had a month to get out of the way.

Next, I teach you how to sneer. Remember women, to be like a man, never show any emotion like Hillary did that makes you appear to be human, or even worse, a woman. You have to maintain a macho act.

And never, but never, but never cry. Crying is being a woman. That will cost you an election.

Being a man like John Wayne means hiding behind a façade of phony bravado and if you’re ever proven wrong—-deny it!

Wayne himself one time said it. “Never say you’re sorry. It’s a sign of weakness.” Thus, Wayne never had to apologize to actress Lee Grant for his red baiting along with Joe McCarthy in 1952 that destroyed Grant’s career for ten years even though Grant was never a communist.

I show you how to swear like a dock worker and spit, how to make dirty jokes while playing cards with sycophantic cronies, nasty traits that reduce men lower on the scale of evolution. You, the woman candidate for office, can abandon your more civilized qualities as a person with a heart and a conscience.

Instead, I show you how to appear like a swaggering bully, like Wayne.

Actor Richard Widmark once said, “Wayne didn’t like me. He didn’t like little guys. But he was like any bully. If you stood up to him he backed off.”

I can also show you how to ruthlessly think only of your career like Wayne did when he became a slacker in World War II and stayed in Hollywood and played all the juicy war parts on the screen and made a fortune while his other actor buddies went off and fought the war and some died. The idea here is to abandon any lingering idealism and never think of anything except how to advance yourself (Hillary is already pretty good at this).

Only 69.95 while supplies last.

I can show you how to become intractable, close-minded, dogmatic, dishonest, ruthless, mean-spirited, demagogic, arrogant, hypocritical, in other words, a he-man, all the things you need to become a successful politician and especially a Republican politician. What are you now? A woman, weak, weepy, indecisive, a miserable wretch who cares about people and deals honestly.

You can become like John Wayne. Congress even gave him a medal for being a slacker during World War II. He became a super patriot during the Vietnam War advising young men to go and do what he wouldn’t because as a rich movie star, he’s too important.

It’s like Arnold the governator. People still love him even though he stinks up the screen with his non-acting talent that runs the gamut from A to B and his Teutonic slaughtering of the English language and cheating on his wife while maintaining a separate second family for years behind her back. You too can be like them, like a tough man with a steel façade.

More like Teflon. Everything slides off. You get to the point where you can actually commit crimes and still escape criticism. Like George W. Bush.
It’s a dream come true.

Be a man. Order my kit today. I don’t claim to be a big man, but I’ve studied those who did. What’s holding you back? Call now. Call 1-800-Phallic.

   By: Peter Beinart
The country may be down on the president. But compared to what? Wait till people get a better look at John Boehner and his band of corporate fat cats. Peter Beinart on the good news for Democrats.

Amid the misery of the moment, here’s something Democrats can look forward to: President Obama is about to get his foil. He’s needed one throughout his career. In 2007, it was the contrast with Hillary Clinton that accentuated Obama’s freshness and authenticity. In 2008, it was during the presidential debates–where McCain looked erratic and uninformed and Obama looked analytical and centered–that Obama put the race away. In 2009 and 2010, by contrast, Obama has had no one to contrast himself with except for George W. Bush, and that stopped working long ago.

He’s remained, for all his troubles, far more popular than Congress. But with Congress in Democratic hands, he hasn’t been able to wield that contrast to his benefit. Instead of a political foil, Congress has provided political baggage. In passing legislation, Nancy Pelosi has proved masterful. But politically, she owns a favorability rating of 15 percent, according to this week’s New York Times, which helps explain why Republican candidates rarely utter the president’s name without mentioning hers as well.

Next week, however, things will change. A lot of Americans are about to be introduced to John Boehner and it’s unlikely they’ll like what they see. Partly, that’s because congressional leaders are usually unpopular. They’re sausage-makers, practitioners of an art that most Americans despise. And they’re rarely good on TV, which is not surprising given that they’ve been elevated within their parties because of their skills behind closed doors.

House Minority Leader John Boehner holds up a copy of the GOP agenda, “A Pledge to America”, Sterling, Va., September 23,2010.

But Boehner is a particularly tough sell. Just as Pelosi, as a wealthy San Franciscan, confirmed popular stereotypes about Democrats as the party of the cultural elite, Boehner–with his coterie of golf-playing, cigar-chomping lobbyist buddies–confirms popular stereotypes about Republicans as the party of corporate fat cats. Republicans may hope that the public, having just voted overwhelmingly for their side, will be inclined to show its leaders some love. But that’s not what the polling suggests. Disapproval of Congress, according to the Times, is an amazing 76 percent, the highest figure ever recorded, which helps explain why Republicans are about to win big. But just as amazingly, the Republican Party’s approval rating is five points lower than that of the Democrats. What that means is that putting the GOP in control is unlikely to improve Americans’ opinion of the legislative branch.

Angered by the lousy economy, and eager to lash out at the people running Washington, many independent voters who backed Obama will pull the lever for the GOP. But there’s not much ideological content to their partisan shift. According to the Times poll, Americans have no more confidence that Republicans can create jobs than Democrats can. Although not wild about Obama’s health-care plan, they don’t want Congress to repeal it. And while Americans give the GOP a huge edge on cutting the budget deficit, they vehemently oppose cutting entitlements like Social Security, which is the only big conservative idea about how to actually get the deficit down.

A lot of Americans are about to be introduced to John Boehner and it’s unlikely they’ll like what they see.

In this economy, Obama’s never going to be wildly popular. But he doesn’t have to be; he just has to be more popular than the other guy. Starting next week, for the first time in two years, he’ll have that other guy. The first time Obama meets Speaker Boehner, expect him to smile.

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   [ By: Tunku Varadarajan ]
The only way Obama can win re-election is with Clinton on his ticket, says Tunku Varadarajan. The Democrats’ least sullied heavy hitter, she’ll hold the party together–and be a magnet for crossover voting. 2012 is going to be a bruising, battling presidential election: Barack Obama is going to need Hillary more than he needs Biden. He’s going to need Hillary, also, because he needs Bill. The vice president’s job is Hillary’s for the asking–and, if the Republicans aren’t careful, the taking.

2012 is still two years away–a veritable lifetime in American, or any other, politics. But that shouldn’t stop us from talking, or even fantasizing, about the next presidential election. After all, what else is there to lick our lips over these days–Linda McMahon? Michaele Salahi? Mad Men?

Given the political imponderables–and there are many, many of those–there are three things one might say for near-certain about 2012:

1.   Barack Obama will run again.

2.   Joe Biden will not be the ideal running mate for Obama.

3.   Hillary Clinton, cocooned at State, will be her party’s least sullied heavy hitter; and the way the Democrats deploy her could make or break
the party.

The vice president’s job is Hillary’s for the asking–and, if the Republicans aren’t careful, the taking.

Obama first. Whatever his failings as a reformer and a president, and however much of a beating he takes in the midterms later this year, there is absolutely no way that this racially peerless president will not offer himself to the nation for a second term. And why should he not? Carter did. And Carter was but the first peanut farmer to be president. Obama, by contrast, was truly cathartic, and revolutionary like no other candidate, ever, and that’s a fact. (Even his opponents will admit to his election being, for America, a historic, civic watershed.)

Biden: Dear old Biden. Let us not be naïve. Obama needed him. Obama, the first serious black candidate for the White House, needed someone reassuringly all-American to run with him. It was a question of political aesthetics. Biden, with his hard-Scranton childhood, was the perfect foil to Obama’s unprecedented blackness-on-the-brink-of-power. He continues to be so in ways big and small: Why else would he have accompanied Obama, for instance, to that seemingly picayune beer summit with Professor Gates and the Cambridge cop? Obama needed Biden, at election and for some time after, to demonstrate that Middle America had no reason to fear him. Yet now, Obama has need for more–much more–than a jolly, ruddy dude who serves as a racial palliative. He needs…

…Hillary Clinton. The secretary of state has been quite magnificent at her job, the only member of the Obama Cabinet who has not looked mediocre or worse in recent months. If The New York Times were functioning as it would, without doubt, under a Republican administration, there would, by now, have been a Page One story–above the fold!–headed: “Clinton Forges Own Path in Foreign Policy.” In an administration that has become a byword for overreach, Hillary has struck a tone of hard-nosed, understated dignity, of no-nonsense professionalism, of a pant-suited determination in telling contrast to the panty-waist in the White House.

My thesis is simple: If Obama wishes to be re-elected in 2012, he would hamstring himself if he did not hire Hillary as his running mate. Biden has served his purpose. He should be offered the vista of a dignified retirement and the prospect of a vice-presidential library in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that “absolute jerkwater of a town” where he was raised. (Would Obama dare to dangle Biden before the nation as a Supreme Court nominee? Don’t count it out. Remember Harriet Miers!) It is quite unlikely that Biden would agree to replace Hillary as secretary of state, as some have suggested.

Of course, if Obama is in as much trouble in two years as he is today, there’s little he can do to stave off defeat, with or without Biden. But the GOP being what it currently is–a sclerotic, brain-dead, knee-jerk outfit at sixes and sevens with the American people and bereft of ideas with which to counter the incumbents (most of the wounds on Obama have been inflicted by Tea Party insurgents)–the chances are that Obama in 2012 will be competitive in a cutthroat election.

But if the GOP gets its act together–if Chris Christie rises to supra-Jersey heights, for example–or Obama implodes, the Democrats will need a frame to hold the party together. Hillary Clinton would be that frame. The way things are going, there is every likelihood that there will be a major personnel shift after the midterms, with Emanuel, Gibbs, Summers, Holbrooke, and some others being bid a well-deserved adieu.

Hillary, I wager, would step down as secretary of state in early 2012, to campaign for Obama–the way that James Baker did for George H.W. Bush’s second run. The campaign deal would offer Hillary the vice president’s job, thereby ensuring–not that she would ever contemplate an insurrection–that she would not challenge Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Do not discount the possibility that Obama, having won once already on the back of the “historic,” would not wish to gamble once more with a historic ticket. An Obama-Hillary pairing, however cynically confected, would change, once more, the face of American politics. Explicit in the equation would be the understanding that a woman, Hillary, would be next in line for the White House, and age is on her side. If the nation, unimpressed by the GOP’s meager menu of candidates and ideas, latches afresh onto an urge to make history, why would it not give Obama and Hillary a vote above some GOP pill who gets into an awful tangle over second-order issues like gay marriage and mosques in our midst? And Hillary–sensible, maternal, cerebral, professional, reassuring–will be a magnet for crossover voting by independents, women in particular.

In sum, 2012 is going to be a bruising, battling presidential election: Barack Obama is going to need Hillary more than he needs Biden. He’s going to need Hillary, also, because he needs Bill. The vice president’s job is Hillary’s for the asking–and, if the Republicans aren’t careful, the taking.

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President Barack Obama is a trained constitutional lawyer. Sarah Palin went through four colleges before fluking a degree in communication and Journalism. (Note: Some of these small colleges in America produce completely useless graduates). Obama is a Harvard graduate — and has clearly demonstrated his keen intellect — in the 2008 campaign leading to several grueling debates with Hillary Clinton and old-man McCain. On the other hand, Cartoon Combatant, Sarah Palin, has demonstrated, thoroughly well — that she is nothing but a two-bit opportunist — feasting on the extremist-racist emotions of one third of this country — who are still drowning in the hot “hyena” juices of White Supremacist Militancy

Obama uses a teleprompter as a productivity tool,…heck — one of the greatest teleprompter users was Ronald Reagan — who without the venerable machine, was frequently lost and wobbly. As age and alzheimer’s disease ate away his mind, Reagan could not operate without a teleprompter or cue cards.

The teleprompter was invented in the 1950′s Fred Barton, Jr., Hubert J. (Hub) Schlafly, and Irving Berlin Kahn. Barton was an actor who suggested the concept of the teleprompter as a means of assisting television performers who had to memorize large amounts of material in a short time. The first “teleprompters” were simply mechanical devices located near the camera. The script was printed on a paper scroll, which was advanced as the performer read. Later, computers took over. Here is a picture of President Lyndon Johnson using a teleprompter while announcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Here is a list all the presidents who have used teleprompters.

•    George W. Bush

•    Bill Clinton

•    George H.W. Bush

•    Ronald Reagan

•    Jimmy Carter

•    Gerald Ford (his teleprompter frequently contained cues telling him what physical actions to use along with the words!)

•    Lyndon B. Johnson

•    John F. Kennedy

•    Dwight D. Eisenhower

•    Harry S. Truman

In fact, every single President since the invention of the teleprompter, including Republican heroes like Reagan…except for Richard Nixon, who used notecards and memorization, but he also was not a natural extemporaneous speaker, and prepared painstakingly for every event.

So, unless Republican idiots like Sarah Palin, want to say every President since Truman (except Nixon) was some sort of cheater for not memorizing every word they said, there’s absolutely no merit in calling out Obama for using a highly useful tool for public speakers.

On the other hand, Sarah Palin has demonstrated over and over, that she is blithering idiot…a shallow, conniving STUNT-WOMAN, who makes George W. Bush look like a Nobel Prize winning Physicist.

Yet, throngs of rabidly racist right-wing NUT-BAGS still look-up to this goofball as their savior. Palin is no intellectual match to Obama, and has neither the capacity(brain power) nor the authority(credentials) to demean the president Obama’s intelligence!

Stupid Palin’s antics and the die-hard approval she gets from right-wing nut-jobs, totally justifies John Stuart Mill’s quote: “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”

Palin’s followers are nothing but twisted idiots intoxicated with excruciating racism and bigotry, …and who will never change.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Palin on The Trail: Andrea Mitchell Mocks Sarah Palin

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Palin’s tea party speech full of false and misleading national security claims

MediaMatters: During her address before the National Tea Party Convention, Fox News contributor Sarah Palin made numerous false and misleading claims about national security and foreign policy, including suggesting that the Obama administration doesn’t use the word “war,” that interrogators didn’t ask alleged Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab about his training and future al Qaeda plots, and that Abdulmutallab has not provided information since he “lawyered up and invoked our U.S. constitutional right to remain silent.” [ READ MORE ]

Elsewhere, during an interview with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, Fox News contributor Sarah Palin falsely claimed that “20 percent of the US domestic supply of energy” comes from Alaska. In fact, according to the most recent data available from the Energy Information Administration, Alaska accounts for no more than 2.9 percent of total domestic energy production. [ READ MORE ]

Palin repeats falsehood that Alaska produces “20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy“

Republican Psychopaths Defend Sarah Palin | Rush Limbaugh Orders Republicans

MediaMatters: Right-wing media jump to defend Palin after “crib note” criticism — Right-wing media figures have rushed to defend Sarah Palin from criticism that she apparently wrote “crib notes” on her hand during her Tea Party Convention appearances by claiming, among other things, that it’s a “non-issue” and that having notes on her hand was “folksy,” “down to earth,” and “just like busy moms.” [ READ MORE ]

The “Fox and Friends” IDIOTS Defend Palin — LOL!

Hannity, Morris join other right-wing media in defending Palin’s use of “crib notes” on her hand

“Starbursts“: Lowry says Palin can overcome lack of “substance” because “it’s not rocket science“

Lowry previously wrote of Palin:

A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It’s one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O’Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat. Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it.

Rush Limbaugh Defends Sarah Palin

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Limbaugh attacks “whiny little r-words” who criticize Palin

GOP leader Limbaugh advises his party: “Wear ‘the party of no‘ … as a badge of honor”

Rush Limbaugh orders Republicans: “This is no time for bipartisanship” on health care reform

References:

1. Media Matters: The politically motivated selective-victimhood of Sarah Palin

2. Did We Just Witness the Beginning of Sarah Palin’s Presidential Campaign? — Palin is now moving front and center as a potential challenger to Obama. That may scare Republicans who worry about their party’s prospects in 2012.

3. Sarah Palin Aims to Bust Up the Republican Party — And the Tea Party Movement — Palin’s speech was her boilerplate of non sequiturs and cognitive disconnections, but in the interview that followed, she revealed her hand in a game for the presidency.

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   [ By: Melissa Harris-Lacewell ]
Joe Biden once remarked that Barack Obama was “clean” and “articulate.” He is now Vice President. During the Democratic primaries Hillary Clinton invoked Robert Kennedy in a way that implied Barack Obama’s assassination was imminent. She is now the Secretary of State. It is foolish to suggest Senator Harry Reid should step down as Senate majority leader because of his 2008 assessment that Barack Obama’s election was more likely because he is “light-skinned” and free from “Negro dialect.”

If President Obama has demonstrated anything at all, it is that he unperturbed by the racially awkward outbursts of his fellow Democrats.

Republicans hope that reports of Reid’s old gaffe might derail his leadership of the health care reform package. But watching Michael Steele go after Reid is more bizarre than convincing. Steele seems to pride himself on the liberal use of black discursive patterns. It’s hard to take seriously the moral outrage of a self-professed “hip-hop Republican” who explains his tenure as GOP chairman saying “brother still here.”

President Obama may be unconcerned and the GOP may be transparently race baiting, but Reid’s comments did create a legitimate queasiness among many Americans that is worth exploring.

President Obama is a forgiving, beer summit kind of leader, but I am less likely to give Democrats a free pass on issues of racial bias. As I wrote a few months ago here on The Notion, any implication that racism is the sole purview of the Right obscures the continuing and troubling realities of racism within the Democratic Party and progressive political movements.

Still, I remain entirely uninterested in a racial McCarthyism that plays “gotcha politics” with elected officials public utterances. Yes, public officials should be particularly careful when talking about race to media (on or off the record). The opportunities for misunderstanding, divisiveness and assumption of ill intent are heightened in this area of political discussion.

But let’s be honest, if we weeded out every public official guilty of racial insensitivity, the halls of Congress would echo with utter emptiness. The point is not so much public gaffes as it is the creation, support, and maintenance of systemic and structural inequalities. This is why Trent Lott’s wistfulness about a Strom Thurmond presidency is in a different class than Reid’s comments. Lott was longing for a bygone era when structural barriers and entrenched inequality were the norm. Reid was enthusiastic that the same barriers were lessening and that America was ready, albeit with caveats, for a new racial reality.

Rather than being worked up about Reid’s awkward assessment of these barriers, we should be asking whether these structural biases actually make academic and political accomplishments easier for light-skinned African Americans. NC State University historian Blair LM Kelley makes this argument in her piece on Salon.com. She points out skin color bias in the 21st century should alarm us. It shouldn’t be a matter of breezy acceptance, as many Sunday morning pundits seemed to suggest. “Accepting this as a matter of course degrades the quality of our democracy.”

Reid’s assertions about “Negro dialect” also should raise structural justice questions far more important than his offensive use of an antiquated term for black Americans. Because of generations of lower class status and legal barriers to quality education, black children are far more likely than their white counterparts to be raised by parents with inadequate literacy skills. But rather than acting as a leveling ground, many public schools only reinforce these disadvantages. These are the same children relegated to schools with fewer expert teachers, larger classroom sizes, fewer educational resources, and fewer literacy support tools.

This is the racism that should worry us: millions of black American children attend and graduate from public schools that leave them utterly unqualified for public office for their entire lives. As adults these children will always be second-class citizens, unable to participate as rule makers rather than simply rule followers in their own country. Not only does this deprive whole group from full participation in government, it also deprives our country of the skills, talents, and ideas that these citizens might have offered, had we not initially deprived them of the capacity to communicate their ideas effectively in the public realm.

Political theorist Nancy Fraser’s describes imagines justice as “a difference-friendly world, where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price for equal respect.” Creating that world is an important task for combating racism.

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