Where Those Town Hall Protesters Really Come From

Happy Valley News has the exclusive story on the true origins of the town hall protesters.

Death Panels are Real . . .

. . . and Funny or Die has the proof.

The Road to Bootydom; OR, The Conscience of a Horndog

It was sure to be another towering classic of conservative thought.

Talking Points Memo has managed to track down the proofs for Viking’s Spring 2010 catalog, which include a glowing write-up for a new book by then rising Republican star Mark Sanford. Unfortunately, the book deal evaporated along with his marriage while Mark was hiking the Appalachian Trail (the one in Argentina, that is). The book was to be entitled Within Our Means and, according to Viking, it promised to be a “conservative manifesto” in which “Sanford makes the case that the American public needs to turn back to the conservative principles that made this country great.”

Avatar or Delgo: You Decide

Avatar, James Cameron’s super-terrific, 3-D, CG, state-of-the-art, 300 million dollar sci-fi extravaganza, is one of the most highly anticipated movies of the year. How highly anticipated? On Monday, fans crashed the movie’s official website as they frantically sought tickets for an advanced screening of . . . wait for it . . . an extended trailer for the film. It will be released on December 18, 2009.

Delgo, on the other hand, is a 2008 animated science fiction film that set the record for the worst opening weekend ever for a movie playing at more than 2,000 theaters, earning $511,920 at 2,160 sites.

So why do the two movies look exactly alike? Many more examples of this eerie symmetry (dare I say synchronicity?) can be found here.

Update: Movieline has more on this scandalous story.

[Props=Unreality]

Looks Like Sarah is Back at the Keyboard

Last week there was idle speculation that Sarah Palin perhaps was not penning her own Facebook updates when she published a note that was distinctly un-Sarah-like in tone, which is to say that it was well-written, cogent, and did not include a single reference to our troops, her children, the liberal media, or God.

Well, based on yesterday’s note, which addressed a plan by the U.S. Export Import Bank to lend $2 billion to the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, it looks like Sarah herself is back in the Facebook saddle. Here is a taste:

Millions of Americans know it is true: “Drill, baby, drill.” Alaska is proof you can drill and develop, and preserve nature, with its magnificent caribou herds passing by the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), completely unaffected. One has to wonder if Obama is playing politics and perhaps refusing a “win” for some states just to play to the left with our money.

Oh, and it looks like she also managed to get some of her basic facts wrong,

While the Journal lamented the fact that we were exploring for oil offshore in Brazil and not in our own country, it did not suggest the deal would take jobs or income away from Americans. That’s because it won’t. A spokesman for the U.S. Export Import Bank, Phil Cogan, explained to Politico that the bank does not rely on taxpayer money. Moreover, the bank lends money to foreign companies so that they can purchase American goods and services.

Someone is Baking for the Town Hall Meeting

see more Fail Blog

[Props=the Mighty Failblog]

This Country Has Lost its Mind

After appearing on Think Progress and Huffpo today, the first video below is getting a lot of play today, but I wanted to post it again, first, because it is so jaw-droppingly sad and depressing that it deserves to be seen as widely as possible, and second, because I think that, in tandem with the second video posted below, it says something fundamental about the current state of civility in this country.

The title of the first says it all, “Woman Yells ‘Heil Hitler’ to Jewish Man at Las Vegas Town Hall,” but you should take a look, because it’s actually worse than it sounds. The woman shouts ‘Heil Hitler’ at the man because he has the temerity to praise another country’s health care system AT A TOWN HALL MEETING TO DISCUSS HEALTH CARE. Then, when he responds to her provocation with outrage, she makes a crying baby face like a child on a playground.

I know there is a lot of faux outrage out there right now on both the right and the left, but this is really far, far beyond the pale. And it gets stranger still, because the very same woman was interviewed only moments before the altercation (see the second video, below). Turns out she’s a self-identified conservative who believes in “biblical values.” (I’m guessing Old Testament.) Oh, and though she has health insurance, her husband — who has two or three jobs (she finally settles on two-and-a-half) — has no health insurance at all. So she is at this rally shouting racist claptrap at complete strangers in order to prevent Obama giving her husband health insurance. Why? Because “nobody is obligated to give you healthcare. Nobody is obligated to give you anything.” Man, this is a very weird country right now.

I should state that I am not attempting to demonize this woman. In the second clip she comes off as a perfectly reasonable person (albeit one I may fundamentally disagree with), but only moments later it’s as though she’s gone straight from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. (Mrs?) Hyde. It really is a startling transformation. I’m guessing that this dichotomy is attributable to the steady drumbeat of hate spewing from the right wing noise machine, which posits that anyone who disagrees in any way, shape, or form with their current talking points is a traitorous, socialist, confiscatory, etc. etc. and on and on. This attitude permits otherwise reasonable and ostensibly deeply religious people to treat their opponents as though they are not worthy of the most rudimentary notions of respect, dignity, or even common courtesy. And it goes well beyond the racist taunt. After all, even if this woman had not yelled out something as charged as ‘Heil Hitler,’ the very fact that she feels entitled to disruptively call out while another person is being interviewed demonstrates a complete lack of regard for any views that differ from her own. And again, the contrast to her own interview conducted only moments before is quite stark, as she is permitted to give her own views at length and in relative quiet, with no one standing on the sidelines spewing derision and bile.

It’s all quite dispiriting, I must say.

See, There’s Your Problem Right There

Jenny Sanford, wife of South Carolina governor and Appalachian Trail hiker extraordinaire Mark Sanford, recently gave an interview to Vogue about her husband’s highly publicized transcontinental fling, and had this to say about her marriage:

Some marriages begin in fire; the Sanfords’ was more of a slow burn. “We weren’t madly in love, but we were compatible and good friends,” she says.

I smell a ‘nice guy’ who stayed on his leash for as long as he was able. And when he was let off, he ran like hell.

The profile also includes this strange bit of logic from the land of denial:

For the record, Jenny Sanford and most of her friends were as shocked as the rest of America when they learned about the governor’s affair with an Argentinian divorcée. After all, Mark Sanford was the politician who called Bill Clinton’s philandering “reprehensible” and plastered the airwaves during his last election with pictures of his wholesome-looking wife and four children. “We have all been scratching our heads over this one,” says Wentworth.

Nope. That’s exactly the guy we all expect to be running around on his wife.

The Call of the Juggalope

Looks like I owe the Juggalo (and Juggalette) communities an apology. In a recent post I had characterized them as perhaps not the sharpest tools in the rock and roll toolbox, but it turns out they’re just a bunch of misunderstood ninjas experiencing clown love out in the woods. Derek Erdman attended the Gathering and put together the video below, which documents the Juggalos in their natural environment.

And if you just can’t get enough Juggalo-related yucks, check out Tom Scharpling’s Best Show on WFMU from July 21. The Best Show is halfway between a call-in show and improv comedy, and on this episode, Tom and his guest, Paul F. Tompkins, hilariously riff on the Gathering of Juggalos infomercial for nearly an hour. To say it’s funny does not do it justice. I am talking tears running down my face. Click here for the MP3 or here for the pop-up player. The Juggalo discussion begins at 1:26:55.

Then, the following week, Tom receives a call from a disgruntled Juggalo, and the laughs again flow like Faygo at the Gathering. Click here for the MP3 or here for the pop-up player. The Juggalo call comes in at 1:04:30.

Warning: As Juggalos cannot utter more than three words without cursing, this video has ample mature language.

[Props=Videogum]

Moon: Old School SF

On the new movie front, my lady and I caught Moon on its last night at the Amherst Cinema with perhaps a dozen other paying customers.

It’s a shame that this movie isn’t getting more attention because it’s a fine addition to the genre, a tense, character-driven exploration of a classic science fiction premise. I won’t go into detail about its plot because half of the joy in watching it lies in letting it unfold at its own pace, but it concerns the lone human crewmember (Sam Rockwell) of an automated lunar mining colony who’s perhaps been cooped up alone a little too long. Its most obvious precursor is Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I was more reminded of another favorite from the 1970s: Silent Running. Check it out.