He's currently neck and neck with a stunning stop-motion of a beautiful young woman facing her quotidian morning in the contest for the best Mental Health Break of 2009. My own favorite was the elk calf splashing around in a woodland puddle. But that's my goddamned hippie side coming out again.
Anyway, Cartman's Poker Face is now getting 24 percent while the beautiful young woman is at 23 percent. Break the tie!
It turns out that the list of banned bloggers from Palin book events was crafted by none other than Todd Palin, whose role in the various lies, cover-ups and mysteries of La Palin is almost certainly under-estimated. Mudflats looks at the list of unmentionable bloggers and tries to see a pattern:
Dennis Zaki – videographer and filmmaker. His videos of Palin have gone viral on the web, and his trip (funded by progressive blogs) to Emmonak last year brought national attention. But what do I really think it is? He reported on the rumor (that still exists) that the Palins’ marriage is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Gryphen of the blog The Immoral Minority – A frequent commenter on the more personal side of the Palins, and a burr under their saddle, he too reported on the dreaded “splitsville” rumor. A kindergarten teacher, Gryphen was threatened with legal action at his place of work by the Palin clan.
Shannyn Moore – A regular on Keith Olbermann, she and Dennis have both transitioned to the moving picture part of the media. Her report of a rumor existing that Palin was in trouble with the law resulted in the infamous Fourth of July threat of legal action by Thomas Van Flein, Palin’s attorney.
Andree McLeod – You’ll remember her as the ‘falafel lady’ in Palin’s fictitious memoir “Going Rogue.” Her watchdogging is surpassed by no one, and her current legal suit regarding Palin administration officials’ use of personal Yahoo accounts to conduct state business “off the radar” has been back in the spotlight lately. As a matter of fact, McLeod was in court on that very matter while the book signing was happening. Guess the Palins weren’t keeping track of that.
Multiple ethics complaints, and coverage in Alaska blogs, and on the Huffington Post have made McLeod Palin’s arch-nemesis. It’s worth noting that McLeod is the only Republican on the list, and was a former ally of the ex-gov before learning what she’s really like.
He must love the Daily Dish.
Seems like a perfect day to revisit this SNL classic. Here in Detroit, I gave myself two hours’ time to get my flight home … and, of course, it was easy as pie. Apparently, it was mayhem earlier this morning, according to my check-in dude, but that had nothing to do with security. Just under-staffing on a busy travel day. Happy and safe travels.
Deer are pictured in the snow in Knole park, Sevenoaks, Kent, England on December 18, 2009, not far from where I grew up. By Carl De Souza//AFP/Getty Images. The Big Picture has more snowy scenes.
Gryphen casts doubt on Levi Johnston's claim that Sarah Palin nagged him and Bristol to allow the governor to fake a pregnancy for Tripp as a way to keep the baby and save her daughter's reputation. But how, Gryphen asks, could that be possible given the timeline of both Trig's and Tripp's births? Good question – and the first real dent in Johnston's credibility.
A reader writes:
Alaska is always a couple years behind the rest of the nation, and the recession is finally hitting us: hard. I was laid off from my job of 5 1/2 years in August and am on my last week completing a project for another firm. My friend Robyn and her wife are being laid off from their jobs as journeyman carpenters w/ one of Alaska's largest contractors for the first time in ten years. Alaska is a prevailing wage state, which is one of the reasons I live here, but that is now hurting us. Lower 48 contractors are underbidding locals right and left. I applied for work at Red Dog Mine along w/ 400 other land surveyors, and did not get an interview. So, it looks like I am moving to Kazakhstan. Temporarily (I think) to train in their surveyors on Leica brand instrumentation and translate old USSR coordinate systems into real world UTM. My only hope is that I get the job.
As the deadline for a nuke deal approaches, the Tehran coup regime, facing massive protests tomorrow, appears to offer something new: sending its nuclear fuel to Turkey rather than Russia and France. Andrew Sprung tries to figure out what, if anything, this means.
Our charming Nigerian Islamist was not on a no-fly list as such, as I wrote earlier:
The sources said the suspect flew into Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on a KLM flight from Lagos, Nigeria, and is not believed to be on any "no fly" list, although his name does appear in a U.S. database of people with suspect connections. He did not undergo secondary security screening in Amsterdam, the administration official said.
It's seasonally quiet in the West, but in Iran, this weekend could be the most important since the June Revolution began. It's Ashura, the mourning festival that begins today and culminates tomorrow. Ashura symbolizes resistance to oppression to the last drop, and because Shia Islam identifies with the oppressed in that story, any government brutality in these days could be a p.r. disaster for the coup regime.
Already there are reports of intense street fights as the Baseej try to prevent any attempt to begin the momentum for demonstrations. Tomorrow, there will be massive crowds on the streets which the legitimate government of Mousavi, Karroubi and their followers will attempt to coopt. Here's a helpful BBC primer on what lies ahead:
Via Iran Unfiltered, a scene of a sudden eruption of protest and chanting from today:
Iran Unfiltered explains the chants:
A note about the protesters' slogans: in one video, the people are chanting "Muawiyah, be ashamed / Abandon your rule." Muawiyah, the first caliph of the Ummayad dynasty, is a hated figure in the Shia world. He is not only hated for his own battle against Imam Ali (the first Imam of the Shia world), but also because he is father to Yazid, the villain of the Shias' narrative of Ashura. The chant obviously compares Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to Muawiyah. In another video, they chant "This is the month of blood / Yazid is overthrown." As mentioned, Yazid is the caliph reviled by Shias for his role in Hossein's death.
More videos here. The Dish will be following tomorrow's critical events very closely. Ayatollah Khomeini cited Ashura as the real spark for the revolution that brought down the Shah.
This National Geographic chart, which I stumbled upon while reading that magnificent magazine on the airplane, truly blew me away. If anyone can look at this and not see a simply insane way to distribute health care, a system so inefficient no socialist country could ever replicate it, then they have stronger rationalization skills than I possess.
Americans are being ripped off. The current reform will only move this line marginally, but it will begin that vital process – because it will almost certainly improve the health outcomes of the 30 million or so people who will soon have access for the first time to insurance. And its cost-control measures, pushing back ever so slightly against fee-for service medicine at a time of limitless healthcare potential, might help too.
What this this graph does do is show why the current system, while providing excellent care for many, nonetheless does so at crippling expense to everyone. Without the kind of reform Obama has initiated, there's no way this will get better. We should think of this health insurance reform as the beginning, not the end, of some public policy sanity. And conservatives would do better to help add more cost-controls than run around screaming socialism when the current system has failed so dramatically in any collective or economic sense.
The Dish 