SoonerBlue

Just when Scott Lee Cohen's campaign to be Lieutenant Governor of Illinois was off to a good start .. it hit the news that the millionaire pawn broker had rage problems from using anabolic steroids, and he had once been charged with domestic battery because he held a knife to the throat of his hooker girlfriend (who had changed into a "massage therapist" when she became his wife). Oh yeah, he also failed to pay child support and taxes....

Except for the New Orleans Saints winning the Super Bowl (hooray! Who Dat indeed!), and the entire Eastern seaboard being covered by a record snowfall, it was a slow news weekend. The biggest political topic everyone's jawing about is half-term AK governor Sarah Palin's speech at the National Tea Party Convention .. which was carried live by C-SPAN and the three major cable news networks.

Talk about a political rock star .. and don't get me wrong, I'm very happy that the former beauty queen has become such a cultural icon.

Of course, the righties loooved Palin's speech .. some calling her the best thing ever to happen to the tea party movement, even if she did charge them $100,000 for her speech. But some rightie bloggers seemed to perceive her more as the leader of a movement than as a candidate for president in 2012.

Shoot! If they only knew how desperately I want them to run her ...

Meanwhile, some lefties are ridiculing Palin for writing four talking points on her left palm -- Energy, Budget Cuts, Tax and Lift American Spirits. They're calling it her "telepalmter" .. saying she's too addle-brained to use a real teleprompter.

Maybe so, but it's important to point out that those talking points weren't used as she was giving her Tea Party speech -- she worked from cards on the podium for that -- they were used for the Q&A session with Judson Phillips after her speech.

C'mon on, questions from Tea Party activists might be too difficult? 

If you watched carefully, he asked her what Congress' priorities should be if the conservatives became a majority. Palin mentioned spending cuts, then she seemed to forget her next talking point and looked down at her palm, then went on to talk about energy projects.

Which kind of makes it worse .. not being able to remember four talking points without writing them on her hand like some unprepared kid.

The fact that she wrote down these points makes it look like the Q&A session was staged .. like she knew what questions to expect.

But that's not really the point. The real story here is that those notes were to be used when she was asked about her three top legislative priorities.

Now, if you stop and think about it, that's not exactly a hard question .. it's not like she was being asked difficult questions about policy specifics .. she was being asked about generalities.

How hard should that be? Apparently anything beyond parroting talking points is too perplexing for Sarah Palin. It's obvious that she can't think on her feet.

I mean, if Glenn Beck can stump her by asking who is her favorite Founding Father ...

Now I realize that her fans have stars in their eyes and don't seem to care .. but reasonable people should agree that having to be prompted by crib notes about her own vision for the near future is at least a little scary.

I still seem to be obsessed with ice .. here's a story that oughta warm yer insides.

Guess what they found beneath the floorboards of an ancient explorer's hut in Antarctica? There in the dark and frozen ground were five cases of Mackinlay's Scotch whisky left behind 100 years ago by Sir Ernest Shackleton, after a failed expedition to the South Pole.

I heard on TV that he had started out with 25 crates of Scotch when he set off in 1907 .. stands to reason that alcohol was very important to help him and his crew stay warm and cope with insomnia during those long cold Antarctic nights.

Well, now the liquor distillery Whyte & Mackay has started its own expedition to the Antarctic to recover some of the Scotch whiskey that's been laying there lonely and neglected for a hundred years .. they think it needs to come back to Scotland where it was born. After all, it's the family recipe, and they want to try to duplicate the original blend. They stopped making that particular brand of whisky decades ago, and you know they want to study it and possibly reproduced it for sale in the future. Gee, I can just see the ads now .. pure advertising gold.

Speaking of whisky ads .. here is one of the best ever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLSZXxmq_Zk

Read about Shackleton's whisky here.

And I was kidding about the rocks in the header .. no one should ever drink good Scotch on the rocks .. neat is the only way to go, no tellin' what's in the ice water that dilutes it. Wait, did I say "drink"? .. no, no, I meant "sip and savor."

BTW -- I wonder, what the price would be for those bottles now? $1,000? Not to drink of course .. I expect the whisky has gone bad .. but a bottle would be a great collector's item for history and alcohol buffs.

They cut out most of his best stuff .. his best lines! Jon was O’Keefed .. now he knows how ACORN felt. But not to worry, "Gawker" has an excellent rundown of the key moments you missed if you just watched what Fox aired .. and it's far more entertaining and interesting than what actually made it onto the "no spin zone."

Here's Gawker's report about Fox News’ "fair and balanced" editing of the so-called throw-down between Stewart and O'Reilly -- "I’m Not Saying Your Mother’s A Whore: How Fox News Censored Jon Stewart vs. Bill O’Reilly" :

"Fox News has generously placed the full, unedited conversation between Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart online, so we can see precisely how unfairly and deviously Fox edited the interview in order to weaken Stewart’s case: A lot!

Last night on his show—Part Two of a ludicrously overhyped "faceoff" between O’Reilly and Stewart in which Stewart attempted, among other things, to present a critique of Fox as a fear-mongering GOP messaging operation—O’Reilly boasted that his edit of their 42-minute interview for broadcast was "a fair cut" and invited viewers to have a look at the unedited version online to judge for themselves: "Some of these idiots in the press who hate us, ‘O’Reilly cut the interview to make Stewart look’—OK, all of that is bull. It’s a fair cut. And then when you watch the cut and watch the whole interview you’ll see it."

So we took him up on the offer, and guess what? If by "fair cut" O’Reilly means "cut in a manner that left some of Stewart’s best lines, most effective arguments, and most convincing evidence out of the interview and hidden from the broadcast audience," then he’s absolutely right…

Fox News' cut of the following exchange has Bill-O scoring a minor point by mocking Stewart’s use of the word "cyclonic"...

O’REILLY: Cavuto sane?
STEWART: Being the thinnest kid at fat camp. So let’s just get that straight. Here is what Fox has done through their cyclonic, perpetual…
O’REILLY: We’re back to the cyclonic.
STEWART: Their cyclonic perpetual emotion machine that is a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week. They’ve taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao. Explain to me why that is the narrative of your network?" [..]"

Here’s what Stewart actually said about Neil Cavuto’s constant carping about Obama being a Stalinist:

"I know what this is. I come from Jersey—it’s the same thing: "I’m not saying your mother’s a whore. I’m just saying she has sex for money. With people." [F]ox News used to be all about, you don’t criticize a president during wartime. It’s unacceptable, it’s treasonous, it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. All of a sudden, for some reason you can run out there and say, "Barack Obama is destroying the fabric of this country."

Thank you Jon! And thank you Gawker. Stewart does dismantle Bill-O .. it was a pleasure to see.

One should really read the whole thing .. those clips are worth watching in full. Gawker does a great job exposing Fox’s chop job on Stewart. There's also good stuff in Comments .. like this one from a Fox apologist who whines, "The rife condescension in this thread is exactly why more people watch Fox than the Big Three. ... Fox’s viewers watch Fox because it’s the one place in the MSM they don’t get called stupid all day long."

Come on, does he really think more people watch Fox "news" than "the big three"? Assuming he means ABC, CBS, NBC.

FNC got a huge ratings boost with Stewart on and pulled 1.5M viewers. "60 Minutes" gets 12M weekly.

As for nightly newscasts: NBC 9,370,000 .. ABC 8,560,000 .. CBS 6,160,000. Univision comes close to O’Reilly at 1.2M.

More people listen to "All Things Considered" on NPR than watch O’Reilly.

Here's the numbers : http://tvbythenumbers.com/

And it's not hard for me to believe that Fox News viewers get tired of being called stupid ...

It’s just sad that there are so many stupid people, and even sadder that they're proud of it .. they watch Fox because it validates their stupidity. Fox provides an easy way out for viewers who don't want to deal with any alternative views .. who don't want to think for themselves, and who love to share the hate.

In an ideal world, Roger Ailes would be exposed for the hatemonger he is.

Carly Fiorina (former Hewlett-Packard CEO) is campaigning for a US senate seat in California, and has released the most bizarre campaign video of all time .. showing some guy in brown dress shoes on his hands and knees wearing a red-eyed sheep costume to represent her opponent, Tom Campbell. It's so ba-aaad it's good. A viral video hit, but for all the wrong reasons.

Too bad I don't live in CA, I'd love to watch it several times a day. Portraying your political opponent as an evil, menacing sheep with glowing red eyes .. just genius. Saturday Night Live can't even touch this one .. it's perfect as it is.

From sfgate.com: "Carly Fiorina's U.S. Senate campaign has created the nation's newest online star - the "demon sheep" - in its new ad attacking the Republican primary's front-runner, former South Bay Rep. Tom Campbell.

The unanswered question for her campaign: Is that a good thing? Unfortunately for Fiorina, many viewers are laughing at ewe.

"This is Jon Stewart material," said Michael Cornfield, an adjunct professor of political management at George Washington University and a new media expert.

"At 3 1/2 minutes, it's like 'Avatar' (long for an online ad)," Cornfield said. "Except unlike 'Avatar,' the special effects were embarrassing. And by the time you got to the payoff - a 'wolf in sheep's clothing' - it had become a punch line."[..]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo7HiQRM7BA

Warning -- this little jewel runs more than three minutes. Love the Monty Python-like animation .. brace yourself at the 2:25 mark for the appearance of the wolf in sheep's clothing -- the dreaded FCINO. No, it isn't as easy to say as RINO (Republican in Name Only), but it doesn't matter. You've never seen anything like this.

I wonder if it occurred to Carly that this would make fiscal conservatives look like so many mindless sheep? Seems that they'd prefer to be seen as big, manly, predators. Like a wolf maybe? Or at least a *scary* demon sheep .. this is obviously just a guy in a sheep costume with red robot eyes crawling around in the grass .. it just makes people laugh. Some are calling it the first political self-attack ad.

I fully expected a sheep to turn, look into the camera, and say “Tom Campbell is a baaaaad man… a very baaaaaaaaaaaad man…”

Please let her win .. because this silliness will certainly hurt her in her quest to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer. This Demon Sheep Craziness will be Carly's 'Howard Dean Scream.'