Well, I know I am relieved.  Just when I was starting to worry about Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was elected three times by New Yorkers, was getting out of control, Sarah Palin, who has never been elected by New Yorkers, has come to the rescue. After quitting her job as governor and leaving her FOX News gig, the network is welcoming her back as a contributor — and just in the nick of time!

Sarah Palin gave this speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition.  Among other sage advice, she said:

• On Syria, “Let Allah sort it out.”
• On New York, “Do New Yorkers feel like you’re just a bunch of little babies, with thank goodness you got this nanny over you telling you what to do everyday, heaven forbid otherwise you couldn’t get through your day?”
• On the Senate, “It needs to on (Ted) Cruz control.”

Oh, the mama grizzly is back and wants another shot at influencing public policy.  And she’s starting off with a serious topic, the “war on Christmas.”  She’s writing a book on the subject and how we can “get Christ back in Christmas.”  Well, that’s a relief!  Maybe she’ll take some of her own advice and this will keep her away from real issues.  Probably not.

Here’s some more of that from Politico.

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Welcome to this weeks edition of The Daily Banter mailbag!! Today, Bob, Ben, Chez and Banter blogger Jessica Furst discuss the NSA eavesdropping story, a potential homicide hinging on Snowden and Sarah Palin’s return to Fox News.

1. I have to know how you can spend so much time tearing down Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden and so little time expressing outrage over what they’ve uncovered. It’s intellectually dishonest and proves that you’re just another authoritarian arm of the mainstream press. Shame on you.

– John

Chez: Because neither Greenwald nor Snowden have proven that they can be trusted and the claims they’re making are massive ones. Greenwald has a history of innuendo, personal smears, hypocrisy, and outright lying in the advancement of a stridently anti-Obama and anti-left-right paradigm agenda, which means that I need his story to be airtight before I believe it because as he’s selling it now it just too perfectly proves his entire worldview. I said it earlier this week but I’ll repeat myself: Despite Greenwald’s smug self-aggrandizing belief that he’s journalistic integrity’s last man standing, he’s actually a terrible journalist. If he were a good journalist he’d be something like a scientist: constantly trying to prove himself wrong as often as he’s trying to prove himself right to guard against confirmation bias or his agenda getting the better of his commitment to the truth. Yes, he and Snowden obviously exposed a program that’s worthy of drawing controversy, but so far it doesn’t live up to the exaggerations they’ve touted it with, and that could very well mean they’re taking everyone for a ride. The story has already been walked back quite a bit, but Greenwald and I bet Snowden as well know full well that it doesn’t matter; all that matters is that first GOTCHA that creates a million headlines. The facts can be sorted out later. Greenwald’s been trying to drop a bomb into the middle of American politics and the Obama administration for years and he just did it — that needs to be eyed with all kinds of suspicion. Also, Snowden gave away information on U.S. cyberwarfare to an enemy of the U.S. In my eyes that turns him from a conscientious objector into an out-and-out traitor. So fuck him.

Ben: Ben: I’ve taken a bit of a back seat on this issue as Bob has done the heavy lifting on the story, so my opinion probably doesn’t carry as much weight. I’ll say this though – the story is important and reveals some things about what the NSA is up to that we didn’t know before. We covered the story in an unbiased way at first, linking to appropriate stories and expressing outrage at the initial findings (see mine and Bob’s responses in the mailbag last week, and Kojo Koram’s critical piece here). The thing is, Greenwald and Snowden’s version of events isn’t holding up to scrutiny and it severely damages their claims. I’m all up for slamming the government, but it needs to be done with accurate FACTS, not conjecture and innuendo. We’re an “authoritarian arm of the mainstream press”? Seriously? There’s nothing ‘mainstream’ about us whatsoever my friend. We’re self run, and have a strict ‘say what you want’ policy when it comes to editorial.

Bob: At this point, Greenwald’s credibility is rapidly shrinking, so there’s very little in his reporting I can actually believe. Beyond that, were you this outraged the numerous other times this story has made news going all the way back to 2006? It’s old news. The NSA gathers data from phone calls and emails. Did you know the Obama administration policed NSA abuses back in April of 2009? Did you know that PRISM was unclassified and generally known among anyone who follows NSA operations? I think you’re outraged because Glenn Greenwald told you this is outrageous. And by the way, I’ve written extensively against government overreach in the war on terrorism, including multiple chapters in my 2008 book, not to mention posts about everything from the TSA and naked body scanners to warrantless wiretapping. Don’t presume to know what I’ve written without actually being familiar with the thousands of posts I’ve published onnline since 2005.

Jessica: Being intellectually dishonest is way better than any other dishonesty. And you’re the first American (John, I’m assuming you’re American) to ever say ‘shame on me,’ to me. This feels like a momentous event. So thank you.

2. My boyfriend is pro-Snowden. I think he’s a traitorous little prick. Do you have any advice on how best to keep us from from killing each other?

– Trish

Ben: I’m wondering how long you two have been dating Trish? I went out with a Republican evangelical some years ago and spent much of the relationship arguing with her. In hindsight, it was completely pointless. She was a great girl who just happened to have diametrically opposed views to my own, and a lot of energy was spent on things we’d never agree on. If you like the guy, don’t talk about it. If you don’t like him that much, bring it up all the time and you’ll probably end up splitting. It’s as simple as that.

Bob: Just send him links to The Daily Banter, and don’t say another word to him about it. We’ll do the heavy lifting for you — and we might just save your relationship.

Jessica: Trish, I’ve always thought of myself as capable of becoming a brilliant agony aunt and you have finally provided me with the opportunity. I’m forever grateful. My advice is as follows: If you hate Snowden so much and your boyfriend loves him, can you just not talk about it? Avoidance in relationships is one of the key points in its very survival (alongside rotating picking up dirty laundry, doing the dishes and not saying that your boyfriend has eaten a few too many burgers lately). I firmly believe if you can get through this, you can get through anything. If it’s not too much to ask, I would like to be notified of when the wedding will be taking place.

Chez: I’d go out of my way to make him believe he was being watched by the NSA. Open up a new WiFi router and call it “PRISM,” pick up the phone when he’s on it and say nothing, etc. Either that or you could just do the world a favor and kill him in his sleep.

3.So Sarah Palin is coming back to Fox. That’s all.

– Mikey

Chez: Yes. Yes it is.

Bob: Fox News focus groups clearly demanded more jutty-jawed, sibilant word salad.

Jessica:  I only wish the UK had its own Sarah Palin. She talks weird, she says really weird things and she looks weird. We’re stuck with a load of men all fighting over who can cut more money from  our ever growing deficit. I want someone like Sarah, all gun-toting and crazy. And for Julianne Moore to play them in a movie. It would be brilliant.

Ben: They’re clever cookies over at Fox. Palin is an idiot who can’t string a meaningful sentence together, but she creates controversy. And controversy sells. Liberals will post clips of her saying idiotic things (including us), conservatives will defend her by getting into fights with liberals etc etc etc and voila – Fox’s numbers go up. That’s the game we’re in, sadly.

———-

In our mission to ridicule politicians, celebrities and anyone vaguely famous, we’re going to be running a quote at the end of each mailbag where you, our readers, decide who you think said something ridiculous. This week’s quote:

“I’m undaunted in my quest to amuse myself by constantly changing my hair.”

Was it John Boehner, Madonna, Hillary Clinton or Cher?

Answers below! (we’ll update at the end of the day!)

UPDATE: And the answer is…..here!

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Welcome to this weeks edition of The Daily Banter mailbag!! Today, Bob, Ben and Chez discuss the government’s decision not to read Djokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights, Sarah Palin’s assertion that everyone who went to the White House Correspondents Dinner was an ‘assclown’, and the penalties for bringing a book back late to George Bush’s new Presidential Library.

1. How do you feel about the government holding off on reading Djokhar Tsarnaev his miranda rights before questioning him at first? I thought it was a bad idea for a lot of reasons, first because it would give people like Greenwald more ammo but mostly because it just doesn’t pass the smell test. 

– Marta

Chez: It wasn’t a big deal and anyone who says it was is a) just looking for something to be pissed about, and b) doesn’t understand how his Miranda rights were held off and why. Nobody ever said Tsarnaev was going to be deprived of Miranda for the entire time he was being held and he wasn’t. The feds had a delay of about 48 hours by invoking the public safety exception, and that’s about all they got. Not a big deal. Greenwald and his ilk were going to make a big deal out of it regardless because that’s how they make their living, but in the end it was much ado about nothing.

Bob: Considering the insanity of the last 12 years I don’t blame you or anyone else for being skeptical of anything to do with these kinds of things. But at the same time, with new levels of transparency and access to the process that we evaluate what’s truly a crisis. In this case, questioning a terrorism suspect without mirandizing him has been done numerous times but we all noticed it for the first time last week. In fact, I was concerned myself until, believe it or not, I caught a tweet from Greenwald who confirmed that questioning a suspect without Miranda is, indeed, okay but only for a short time. Gratefully, that’s exactly what came to pass.

Ben: Hmm, not sure about this one. Given the US government’s propensity to use terrorism to justify increasingly invasive security measures, I’m always skeptical about them doing things like this. But I’ve done a bit of reading into this after I went on Thom Hartmann’s show on Friday, and what they did with Tsarnaev was actually perfectly legal (check here for Adam Goodman’s explanation in the Atlantic). The issue is going to be used by everyone to score political points, but as long as Tsarnaev is treated is afforded the same legal rights every other citizen is, there shouldn’t be too much to complain about.

2. I assume you all saw Sarah Palin’s response to the White House Correspondents Dinner. WTF? Was she just throwing a temper tantrum because she wasn’t invited? Also, how could someone who was once almost elected to the second highest office on earth use the word “assclowns” and not die of embarrassment?

– Todd

Ben: I actually agree with Sarah Palin’s tweet. She’s right, the WHCD is a nerd prom for a bunch of assclowns. But they’re not nerds and assclowns for the reasons Sarah Palin thinks they are. She’s just mad because 1. she wasn’t invited and 2. everyone there is a lot smarter than her. Events like that poke fun at people like her, and she’s so stupid, she doesn’t understand the jokes.

Bob: I’ve never seen anyone quite as ridiculous as Sarah Palin. She’s descended from being a vice presidential candidate to an internet troll. She’s Morton Downey Jr. with less talent. Yet millions of Americans love her and if she’s ever elected to anything  again, her voters deserve her.

Chez: Yeah, my first thought was that somebody was all pissy and jealous because she wasn’t asked to the prom. You know that if Sarah Palin were vice president right now, and she and John McCain hadn’t brought about Armageddon, she’d be loving every second of the attention. But since she wasn’t part of the party she has to be a fucking child about it. And yes, “assclowns.” Again, the fucking bullet we dodged in 2008.

3. What do you suppose happens to you if you check a book out of the Bush presidential library and keep it out for too long?

– AJ

Chez: Nothing you should be worried about. The library will go after the people who live next door to you.

Ben: Depends how rich you are. If you have tons of cash, you can keep it out for as long as you want. The library will even give you other books to keep. If you’re poor, you’ll be charged by the hour and forced to sell your belongings to pay for it. It’s fair though, because the rich might allow some of the knowledge they’ve received from the books to trickle down to everyone else.

Bob: There’s probably a small fine, but on the upside you’ll be able to finish coloring in the drawings.

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Either Sarah Palin is seriously considering a return to electoral politics, or she’s satisfied with her continued role as a psychobomb lurking on the fringes of the discourse, occasionally popping off a new geyser of insanity every now and then just to see how everyone else, specifically liberals, will react. I suppose we could apply either motive to her eulogy of Margaret Thatcher in The National Review, titled “The Grocer’s Daughter,” but one thing’s for sure: it was a screed that was almost entirely about Palin herself than a tribute to Thatcher — not surprising given Palin’s notorious reputation as, among other things, a narcissistic self-promoter and national instigator.

In fact, the essay (clearly ghost-written) reads like one of those awkward confessions that begin with, “I have this, um, friend and, errr, no one understands me — I mean, my friend. Not me. Did I say ‘me?’” In just about every paragraph about the late former British Prime Minister, we could easily substitute the pronouns and proper names with Palin-specific names and pronouns. She was clearly using Thatcher’s death as a means of comparing herself to Thatcher for her own weirdo, grifter motives, which appear to include setting herself up to be The Next Thatcher. The Iron Punchline. The Chick-Fil-Lady. Put another way, Palin basically wrote that she and Thatcher are the same — look at all these examples! — therefore she deserves to be taken just as seriously.

Let’s break it down.

1. “She was a grocer’s daughter from the back of beyond who advanced to the height of power in a class-conscious society.”

We’re supposed to recall that Palin comes from the backwoods of Alaska, from humble means. Palin’s also suggesting here that her Wasilla White Trash background is difficult to overcome given all of the elites who think simple-minded red state folks are dumbstupids. Hmm. I wonder how anyone would get that impression from Palin?

2. “Like her friend Ronald Reagan, she was an underestimated underdog and political outsider. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Evening Standard, once said, ‘There was no Thatcher group within the Tory Party. . . . She was utterly and completely on her own. She simply was an outsider in every way.’”

Naturally, everyone underestimates Sarah Palin as a nobody who’s out of her depth. Being “completely on her own” is, of course, a reference to always “going rogue” — Palin’s coopting of the McCain “maverick” brand.

3. “She was at heart a populist taking on the Conservative party’s old guard, who disdainfully referred to her as ‘That Woman.’ The disdain was mutual.”

This is probably a reference to the “old guard” members of the McCain campaign who tried to suppress her vision for the 2008 campaign — just because she’s a women. Of course she’s not self-aware enough to realize that it had nothing to do with her femininity and everything to do with the fact that she’s totally out of her gourd and utterly incapable of anything deeper than a word-salady zinger.

4. “…she wasn’t afraid of having strong opinions and fighting for them — something the establishment often found distasteful.”

It seems as though Palin’s analysis of her own gaffes and hyperbolic nonsense is that the establishment simply regards all of it as distasteful. They just don’t get her special brand of wisdom. Underscore special. But it’s not just distasteful, it’s entirely inaccurate and poorly-worded. It’s like a cocktail of amateurish, eighth-grade forensics gibberish (with apologies to eighth graders). Distasteful? How about simultaneously and unapologetically wrong, and that’s only the stuff that comes out in the form of a complete sentence.

5. “And, of course, like all conservatives and trailblazers, she had to endure more than her share of vicious media attacks. Sir Archie Hamilton once recounted how he asked Thatcher whether she read the daily newspapers. “‘Oh no!’ she replied, ‘They make such hurtful and damaging remarks about me and my family, that if I ever read the papers every day, I could never get on with the job I am here to do.’” I know exactly what she meant.

There you go. She’s talking about herself and explicitly admits it here. The lamestream media attacked Thatcher just like the lamestream media’s always attacks me. The calculation: if they attacked Thatcher, and they attack Palin, Palin must be doing similarly good things, thus Palin must be like Thatcher.

6. “And as she said, ‘I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.’”

First, both Thatcher and Palin are radically mistaken. In politics, personal attacks come with the territory and are often used to enhance political attacks. That’s not to say ad hominem insults are always well-respected, but noting that someone (Palin) is totally unqualified for presidential office, is intellectually incurious and can barely string together a sentence is a fair observation about someone who could’ve been a heartbeat away from the presidency. Second, is it me or does it seem as if Palin’s personal ghost writer has been collecting Thatcherisms that can be specifically applied to Palin herself. I’ll wager there’s a folder on the ghost writer’s desktop that’s titled “Thatcher Quotes About Sarah.”

7. “A leader of a conservative think tank behind the Thatcher revolution famously said, ‘We were not interested in political office for the Conservative party. We were interested in power for them to get things done.’ And that’s exactly what Thatcher did.”

Perhaps Palin is hinting at her future role in the conservative movement here: not as a candidate, but as a consultant. Certainly this coincides nicely with her latest Look-At-Me-I’m-Awesome movie trailer in which she ballyhoos her knack for helping conservative “outsiders” get elected.

I think you get the idea. Look, I’m no fan of Margaret Thatcher, but history teaches us that she was a considerably more gifted and capable politician than Sarah Palin could ever hope to be. She never quit her post. She never had to write “tax cuts” on her hand or risk forgetting the conservative movement’s biggest policy position. She never exploited herself and her family in a string of self-parodying reality shows. She could probably name some of the newspapers she perused every day, and she would never tell a national television audience that she could handle the Soviets because she could see Russia from London. Thatcher would never embarrass herself by blurting out crap like “lamestream media” or by guzzling a Super Big Gulp like a shitkicking rube during a major address to conservative supporters.

Speaking of which, as we review the above Thatcher quotes, I wonder what words of wisdom future Sarah Palin admirers will use in similar eulogies. Perhaps, “I love that smell of the emissions!” Or, “I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism. And I have a communications degree.” Or, “Who hijacked term: ‘feminist’? A cackle of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/whom they disagree on a singular issue; it’s ironic (& passé)” Or, “Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.” Or, “That thankfully our founders were wise enough to say we have this position and it’s constitutional — vice president will be able to be not only the position flexible, but it’s gonna be those other duties as assigned by the president. A simple thing.”

I could be mistaken, but in the volumes of speeches and remarks penned by Thatcher, I seriously doubt she was ever brazen enough to publish a eulogy for a fallen world leader that was almost entirely a self-conscious defense of Thatcher’s own flaws.

Other than sharing some ideological overlap (anyone can boast such a thing) and two X chromosomes, Sarah Palin has nothing else in common with Thatcher, and she never will.

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After what seemed like a decade of 24/7 coverage of the Republican 2012 primary process, news has come out that there are still untold stories.  Apparently, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum negotiated to team up against Mitt Romney.  Ok, this doesn’t sound like a one meeting kind of thing.  It sounds like something that happened over a much longer period of time and something the political press, who are supposed to be “experts” would have picked up on. (And I am not talking about locals who may not cover politics all the time but the national reporters who do.)

Well, the nation was spared such a spectacularly awesome scary ticket because neither man would accept the veep slot. Phew, and the GOP thought the worst thing they had to fear last year was candidates who like to prattle on about “legitimate rape” and whatnot. (As a satire writer, I would have LOVED a GOP ticket with Newt & Santorum, LOVED IT.)

Of course, the other news that probably won’t actually come out (sorry, I cannot think of a better way to put that right now) is that Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) was NOT asked to take the veep slot for Romney because his son is gay.  Portman was a Romney surrogate and the two men spent a lot of time together. The irony is he had a better shot of picking up a state with Portman than Paul Ryan. I have a hard time seeing Romney ever getting Wisconsin.  Yes, I know people don’t base their pick on the VP candidate.  I guess someone if picked Ted Bundy after he was convicted of being a serial killer it would have turned more than a few people off…  Can you imagine the tagline for that campaign?  Smith/Bundy — because no one knows  more about preventing crime than a convicted serial killer!  (Ps.  I am sure some people were also turned off from John McCain because of Sarah Palin but not enough to swing a state or the election.  Note to any GOP readers:  I am NOT implying any Republican would pick Bundy for anything, ever.)

But I digress.

The GOP has been in overdrive trying to “rebrand” themselves.  I was especially impressed with their chairman, Reince Priebus, this morning.  He was asked if they planned to cut Portman’s national funding off now that he has endorsed same sex marriage.  “Of course not!” Priebus said with a fair amount of moral indignation because of course his decision to not defund Portman is the right thing to do based on current polling numbers that show increasing support for marriage equality.

At the Conservative Union conference last weekend, better known as CPAC, there was a session entitled “How do we look less racist?”  My response to the question was “How about you just BE less racist?”  My advice to the GOP is that superficial changes to messaging materials isn’t enough to convince people you care about their issues.  Priebus deserves some credit for starting to reach out to groups that have not either always or recently been the GOP base.

Getting people to believe you care about the things that matters to them requires you understand what those things are.  Reaching out to talk to them may not get you all the way there but it is a start.  Let’s hope the change Priebus is pushing is part of a long term approach and not a policy du jour.

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I might be one of very few observers outside of the CPAC bubble who thinks Sarah Palin could still be a serious player on the national political stage. In fact, I don’t entirely count her out as a 2016 candidate. It sounds insane, but I still believe (with varying degrees of certainty) that her bumper-sticker, wafer-thin populism and her shit-kicking derpshow continue to be extraordinarily well-received within the dwindling and therefore increasingly loud, monochromatic, Christian conservative right.

And so it was at CPAC over the weekend where Palin ceremoniously reemerged under the klieg lights of the wingnutosphere after being cut from the Fox News Channel wing of the conservative entertainment complex earlier this year.

Contrary to what we might’ve heard recently, Palin was greeted like a rock star by the pasty white neo-Alex P. Keaton groupies who are clearly desperate for a general-in-chief to lead their antiquated ideology back into fashion. And for all of her obvious faults, Palin’s brand of awkward speechifying precisely connected with the dreams, aspirations and simple-mindedness of her starry-eyed fanboys.

If the broader conservative movement has anything in common with Palin’s CPAC audience, she very much remains a player in spite of the fact that 68 percent of tea party Republicans didn’t want her to run for president last time around, and she didn’t break the top five in the CPAC straw poll. Regardless, it’d be a mistake to rule her out as an influential personality, and who knows what else beyond that. The Republicans, after all, have elevated more than a few dilettantes and morons in our lifetimes, and I don’t think they care. They’ll absolutely do it again.

So what about the speech? It was as shrill, sibilant and word-salady as we’ve come to expect, and included all of the mandatory borderline illiterate interjections and bizarre word-emphases which often turned somewhat normal lines (on paper) into utter gibberish. And, naturally, it was filled with childish crowd-pleasers and sloganeering that made Wayne LaPierre’s agitprop seem Shakespearean. But she seemed more relaxed than before, as though she’s become more comfortable with her own herky-jerky delivery and unapologetic incoherence.

Here are some highlights.

After thanking Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for introducing her, she launched into a brief rant about gun control, which ended with this:

“And background checks, yeah, I guess to learn more about the person’s thinking and associations and intentions. More background checks? Dandy idea Mr. President – should have started with yours.”

I get it! A birth certificate joke. Hilarious. I wonder if she knows that Ted Cruz was born in Canada and therefore can’t become president. And I wonder if people like Palin will suddenly begin to rationalize his foreign-born status with the justification that his mother was an American citizen. Cruz’s background is, in fact, the real life version of the Birther lies about Obama, minus the African part. Keep an eye on the far-right as they try to dance around it.

Here’s an interesting passage given what she said about the president’s birth certificate.

“We can come together folks for an adult conversation about the future of our country and heaven knows, we need this. So much of what passes for our national conversation is anything but.”

I’m sure more Birther jokes will help make our national conversation more adult. More of this, too:

Remember ‘No Drama Obama?’ If only. Now it’s All Drama Obama. We don’t have leadership coming out of Washington. We have reality television.

So says the star of the TLC reality show “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.”

“Our president fancies himself as the champion of the Middle Class, yet since he came on scene, even those lucky enough to have a job, they’re working more for less. The median income for families has dropped over $5,000.00 since ’07, even as we work longer and longer hours.”

For the record, President Obama was inaugurated in 2009, not 2007. Secondly, “we?” I would hardly consider the Palins to be members of the middle class. And while middle class incomes have flatlined, here’s Palin describing the reasons for the American hellscape:

“It cost nearly 100 bucks now to fuel up your truck. It costs tens of thousands of dollars to send your child to college. Man, the cost of a case of diapers today…these prices…the cost, the impacts on the American family budget, and the Middle Class Americans, while we’re breaking their budget, the Democrat-controlled Senate refuses to pass a budget.”

Okay, first, the president has nothing to do with gas prices. It’s a function of the free market which Palin claims to adore. Same goes for college tuition, which, yes, we can agree is too high. But what have Republicans proposed as a solution? Regulations and tuition caps for state and private universities? More financial aid and grants? I doubt either solution will win the support of Palin and her fanboys. Oh, and as for diapers, it sounds like she’s complaining about inflation, which was at two percent last month, lower than it was during most of the Clinton and Bush years.

And now, Sarah Palin… Constitutional Scholar:

“…the Democrat-controlled Senate refuses to pass a budget. That was how many years ago that they did? How many Trillions-in-debt-ago? All in violation of Article I Section 9, Clause 7 of our U.S. Constitution. No budget for 4 years. No budget for 4 years is not just bureaucratic bungling. Refusing to pass a budget is refusing to declare what it intends to do with the people’s money.”

No. Wrong. She made that up, or she simply doesn’t know. Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 absolutely doesn’t mandate that Congress or, specifically, the Senate pass a budget. It simply calls for Congress to pass appropriations and, from “time to time,” issue a report of its spending. (Do I need to mention that it’s Democratically-controlled Senate, not “Democrat-controlled?”)

Swinging back around to Palin’s self-contradictions (see the aforementioned “we need adults” remark followed by a Birther joke), here’s another:

“Never before have our challenges been so big and our leaders so small.”

Seconds later:

“Mr President we admit it, you won. Accept it. Now step away from the teleprompter and do your job.”

ZING! A teleprompter joke. How adult. How big! How interesting given this:

That’s a teleprompter.

Brief grammar exercise for you. Diagram the following sentence and see if you can figure out what the hell she was talking about. It appears to start with something about incomes in the D.C. area and ends with something about national security and government waste. Good luck!

But just think about it at a time when Washington is so powerful that seven of the ten highest income counties in the country ring the city, allow yourself to imagine leadership that deems to understand us little people, us clinging to our God, our Guns our Constitution and our grassroots – imagine leadership that actually takes seriously the idea of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and then imagine leadership that knows how to prioritize to ensure national security and to stop government waste.

And then she took a derp-slurp from a Super Big Gulp as a way to tweak Michael Bloomberg. Because she’s such a grown-up.

“Oh Bloomberg’s not around. Our Big Gulp’s okay. Shoot it’s just pop with low-cal ice cubes in it. I hope that’s okay. What did you think was in it? Yeah, you Young Republicans, especially you who went Greek – I am so proud of you guys, all of you. College Republicans, there on campus. You are so bold, in your…well [crowd screaming]. All right.”

It’s almost as if she wanted to say something about how the College Republicans drink too much, but then caught herself, backpedaled and declared, inexplicably, her pride in the fraternity-membership within the College Republicans “there on campus.” But then she wheeled around and offered up a “say no to alcohol” line that sounded like it was torn from a Family Circus comic: “You all need to do more thinking Sam Adams and less drinking Sam Adams.” Bada-boom. I have no blessed idea what that section of the speech was all about.

“…there are no Hispanic issues or African American issues or women’s issues. There are only American issues.”

Well, yes, there are issues specific to those demographic groups. But this cheap knock-off of the president’s “red and blue America” riff intends to diminish the race and gender-based struggles confronted by these groups, even though Hispanics and African Americans continue to face discrimination and racial-demonization (Southern Strategy politics, for example) based on their respective ethnicity, and women continue to be hit with condescension, discrimination and reproductive subjugation — mainly at hands of Republican lawmakers. The rest of America, not so much. To paraphrase a maxim: if every group has equally difficult issues, then no one does. This is what conservatives are trying to do with regards to civil rights.

Here’s a bit of Palin collectivism. I’m not joking here. This is collectivism, and the free market Republicans in the crowd loved it for some reason — probably because they didn’t know.

Realize that the natural resources that God has created for mankind’s use, are not owned by the big multi-national conglomerates and the monopolies. They’re owned by The People. They don’t own them, so don’t let them own you. You have a right for those resources to be developed for our use.

Yes, we the people own the the oil and the government should make sure we get a cut, but, strangely enough, we the people aren’t allowed to have affordable health care or a social safety net.

And here it comes…

It’s about a president claiming power to direct drones to kill whoever and whenever without accountability.

But wait. Didn’t she just call for more national security? And hasn’t she claimed for years that the president is weak on terrorism, chiefly because he “pals around” with terrorists? Yes all around. Just two years ago at a tea party convention, she said, “To win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law.” So which is it?

I seriously doubt that far-right conservatives will ever see the profound danger in elevating a figure like Sarah Palin to a national leadership role — a figure who doesn’t mind posing defiantly on stage with a Super Big Gulp, while an incomprehensible speech scrolls on the prompter. My issue with Palin (and George W. Bush before her) isn’t just about her and her obvious flaws and inadequacies, it’s always been more about this: half the nation’s enthusiastic willingness to endorse tasteless, intellectually incurious, deliberately folksy personalities. White trash, to be specific. The inherent danger isn’t just that these hooples embrace and amplify American mediocrity, but it’s that they’re too damn close to ascending into positions where they’ll make equally mediocre decisions that will ultimately impact all of us. While Palin may never be president (who knows for sure?), she obviously continues to enjoy the attention and respect of a considerable cross-section of the the conservative movement and therefore offers perpetual cover and additional fuel for this dangerous modern trend towards ill-prepared, poorly-educated, out-of-their-depth leaders. Ironic, isn’t it? Sarah Palin, of all people, delivered a speech at CPAC in which she repeatedly called for adult-like seriousness in politics even though she came this close to up-chucking a Big Gulp belch.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Daily Banter Mailbag! Today, Bob, Ben and Chez discuss the Next Sarah Palin, Jim Nabors’ Marraige and our Super Bowl favorites.

The questions:

1) With Sarah Palin now out of the picture, which TV-ready Republican crazy will step up and be the party’s next star?
– J.

Chez: Tough call. If you’re talkin about which woman, like who might come on the stage and once again give Rich Lowry something to masturbate to, maybe it’ll be Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. She’s insane enough to demand proof that President Obama really shoots skeet (and if you’re aware of the alternate meaning of that phrase, you’ll know why I’m doing the Beavis and Butthead laugh to myself right now). But Blackburn doesn’t have the raw charisma Palin had. That’s one thing I’ll give her — the dumb-ass female Lonesome Rhodes sure knew how to work a crowd. I think the next GOP celebrity must be, in the foreboding words of Bishop in “Aliens,” something we haven’t seen yet.

Bob: I still don’t believe Sarah Palin is out of the picture. She’s only departed from Fox News Channel. Honestly, I have a hunch she’ll hunker down and maybe prepare to get back into electoral politics. It’s not too difficult to rehabilitate an image in America — I mean, Elliot Spitzer has his own TV show (for now). She’s a doofus, yes, but she’s not politically inept.

Ben: That’s an interesting one. The Republicans are going to have to be pretty careful about who they appoint to be their next super star. They’ve had some colossal f#$k ups over the past few years, mainly because they were far too eager to swoon all over anyone vaguely charismatic or ethnic. After the Palin disaster, Bobby Jindal was heralded as the antidote to Obama (it turned out he had the charisma of a wet blanket), then Richard Steele was anointed the savior of the horrendously white GOP (it turned out Steele had literally no political instincts whatsoever). The Republicans stopped experimenting with wild cards in 2012 and poured all their resources behind literally the most boring white politician ever in Mitt Romney, and that didn’t work either. So what are they to do? The Republican strategists (ie. Karl Rove) will be doing their research to find a replacement for all of the above, but it won’t be easy. The GOP is made up of phenomenally decrepit old white men, or batshit crazy lunatics – neither of which are electable. I literally cannot think of anyone capable of becoming the next Republican rock star. And to be honest, that’s very reassuring.

2) Did you guys see that Jim Nabors got married to his long-time same-sex partner? Did everyone always know he was gay and I was just oblivious, and isn’t he a legend to conservatives?
– Tracy

Bob: I didn’t even know Jim Nabors was still alive, honestly. But good for him. I’m glad he could experience his full civil right to marriage in America, and good for him that he’s not afraid to boast about it. As for being a hero of the right — is he? Republicans seem more like the party of Goober, the lesser than Mayberry mechanic.

Ben: I must confess that I have no idea who Jim Nabors is. I just did a quick google search – I haven’t seen anything he’s ever been in, or seen him on TV in the 10 odd years I’ve lived in this country. But good for him. He’s marrying the person he loves, and rightly so. A very heart warming story.

Chez: You know, I sincerely was shocked by that too and wondered the same thing. (Did anyone headline the story with “Surprise, Surprise, Surprise!”?) I haven’t seen the conservative reaction but I have to assume it pisses many off because, yes, he was a bit of an icon since in their minds he, the characters he played and the shows he was on all represented that vision of America they’re constantly trying to return to. Here’s to hoping Nabors caused a few heart attacks among the formerly faithful.

3) Who ya got on Sunday, the Ravens or the Niners?
– Max

Ben: I have literally no understanding of American Football whatsoever. Sorry Max. I’m strictly a boxing and UFC fan. I have a ton of respect for the athletes – it’s a tough game and those dudes take some serious hits. I just don’t really know what they are doing half the time. Anyhow, I’m going to a super bowl party on Sunday, so I’ll try to get someone to explain it to me. Hope you enjoy it though, as it seems like a very serious American tradition.

Chez: I honestly don’t care that much. I live in California so I suppose I should go for the Niners. Of course there is that whole dislike-of-gays controversy, but I wouldn’t let that tarnish my support for the entire team. Speaking of which, three members of the 49ers have now made anti-gay or potentially anti-gay comments. Jesus Christ, it’s not like these guys play for Dallas. They play for fucking SAN FRANCISCO.

Bob: Is that who’s playing? I was a 49ers fan for about two minutes in the early 1980s, so I’d be inclined to root for them. But not after Chris Culliver’s remarks. At the end of the day, I don’t worry too much about which group of multimillionaires on PEDs will lose their little ballgame. I know. I’m a dick.

—–

Got a question for the mailbag? Email us at TheDailyBanter@gmail.com!!!

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Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

By Robert Parry

The war for the world’s future – pitting people anchored in reality against others free-floating in make-believe – appears to have begun in earnest with the rationalists scoring some surprising early victories in what is sure to be a long and ugly fight.

In Israel’s recent election, Yesh Atid, a new party of secularists, surged to a second-place finish on a platform that challenged the power of the ultra-Orthodox who have sought to impose a fundamentalist version of Judaism on large swaths of the country, including forcing women to sit at the back of buses and driving secular Jews out of some neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican presidential prospect for 2016, finally acknowledged the obvious, calling his GOP the “stupid party.” And Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, another Republican up-and-comer, signed on to a bipartisan plan for immigration reform that included a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, what the GOP’s nativist wing has long derided as “amnesty.”

These various moves suggest some new respect for the real world. But the ugliness of what lies ahead was underscored at a legislative hearing in Hartford, Connecticut, on Monday when Neil Heslin, the parent of a child massacred in Newtown on Dec. 14, was heckled by pro-gun activists who claimed, falsely, that the Second Amendment guaranteed them the right to own assault weapons. (Not even today’s right-wing-controlled U.S. Supreme Court says that.)

Republicans also haven’t given up on their racist arguments about the need to rig election rules in ways to devalue or suppress the votes of African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and other urban dwellers and to exaggerate the value of ballots cast by rural whites. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Return of ‘Three-Fifths’ of a Person.”]

There is also no indication as yet that the Republicans will budge on other key elements of their “stupid” agenda, including their denial of the science on global warming, their pandering to pro-gun extremists and their resistance to pretty much anything that President Barack Obama is for.

Still, pro-rationalists have to take some encouragement from small signs that the anti-rationalism of the Republican Party is beginning to crack. Fox News parted ways with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a commentator. The GOP’s vice presidential nominee in 2008 — known for her know-nothingism — went the way of the crazy Glenn Beck. It seems that even right-wing propaganda on Fox has its limits.

The even faster disappearance of the GOP’s chameleon-like 2012 standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, is another sign that Republicans want to forget the clown show of their last presidential selection process. It culminated in a national convention built on taking Obama’s “you didn’t build that” quote out of context. Any thinking person knew that Obama was referring to the broader national infrastructure of roads, bridges, etc., not to some individual’s small business, but Romney pretended otherwise.

The Republican Party had reached a point where it seemed to relish the process of ginning up its idiotic “base” around outright lies. If it wasn’t Palin yelling about non-existent “death panels,” it was mogul Donald Trump and Sheriff Joe Arpaio questioning the Hawaiian birth records proving that Barack Obama was born in the United States.

Treating Americans as Simpletons

Of course, the GOP’s decoupling from reality can be traced back many more years, at least several decades to the emergence of former actor Ronald Reagan who demonstrated how a casual relationship with the truth could work wonders politically. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “America’s War for Reality.”]

But the substitution of right-wing ideology for reason advanced dramatically last decade under the presidency of George W. Bush, who empowered a clique of clever intellectuals known as the neoconservatives. The neocons treated the American people as simpletons easily manipulated through techniques of “perception management.”

Aided by Fox News and abetted by a careerist mainstream news media, the neocons felt free to push any hot buttons that worked, scaring Americans with exaggerated stories of foreign threats and impugning the patriotism of anyone who got in the way. The invasion of Iraq to find non-existent WMD was one result.

Similarly, Republican presidents – from Reagan through the two Bushes – stocked the U.S. Supreme Court with ideologues who pretended to be “strict constructionists” on the Constitution but actually applied shoddy scholarship to reach rulings in line with their political preferences.

For instance, Antonin Scalia and the three other right-wing justices, in an angry dissent regarding the Affordable Care Act, cited constitutional Framer Alexander Hamilton in support of their concern about the alleged overreach of Congress in regulating commerce.

In their dissent on June 28, 2012, they wrote: “If Congress can reach out and command even those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in the market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power, or in Hamilton’s words, ‘the hideous monster whose devouring jaws . . . spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor pro­fane.’” They footnoted Hamilton’s Federalist Paper No. 33.

That sounded pretty authoritative. After all, Hamilton was one of the strongest advocates for the federal powers in the Constitution and here he was offering a prescient warning about “Obamacare” from the distant past of 1788. The only problem was that Scalia and his cohorts were turning Hamilton’s words inside out.

In Federalist Paper No. 33, Hamilton was not writing about the Commerce Clause. He was referring to clauses in the Constitution that grant Congress the power to make laws that are “necessary and proper” for executing its powers and that establish federal law as “the supreme law of the land.”

And Hamilton wasn’t condemning those powers, as Scalia’s opinion would have you believe. Hamilton was defending the two clauses by poking fun at the Anti-Federalist alarmists who had stirred up opposition to the Constitution with warnings about how it would trample America’s liberties. In the cited section of No. 33, Hamilton is saying the two clauses had been unfairly targeted by “virulent invective and petulant declamation.”

It is in that context that Hamilton complains that the two clauses “have been held up to the people in all the exaggerated colors of misrepresentation as the pernicious engines by which their local governments were to be destroyed and their liberties exterminated; as the hideous monster whose devouring jaws would spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.”

In other words, Scalia and the three other right-wingers not only applied Hamilton’s comments to the wrong section of the Constitution but reversed their meaning. Hamilton was mocking those who were claiming that these clauses would be “the hideous monster.” [For details, see Robert Parry's America's Stolen Narrative.]

Legal Wording to Go

Though Scalia is typically hailed by the Washington press corps as a brilliant legal scholar, he really is more of an ideological hack who reaches his conclusions based on what he wants the outcome to be and then picks out some legal wording to wrap around his judicial activism.

He did the same in using the Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection under the law” principle to prevent a recount in Florida in Election 2000 and thus hand George W. Bush the presidency. He and four other Republican justices settled on their desired outcome and then went searching for a rationalization, no matter how ludicrous. [See the book Neck Deep for details.]

One of the motivations for the five partisan justices to make Bush the president – despite the people’s electoral preference for Al Gore – was that Bush would then appoint more right-wing Republicans to the high court and thus perpetuate their ability to redefine the Constitution.

Thus, in 2008 and 2010, the right-wing majority reversed longstanding precedents regarding the interpretation of the Second Amendment as a collective right of the states to organize militias. By a narrow 5-to-4 majority, the Republican justices made it a personal right, albeit one that could be restricted by local, state and federal laws.

In 2010, the right-wing court – also by a 5-to-4 vote – unleashed the power of wealthy individuals to dominate the U.S. political process through unlimited financing of TV ads and other propaganda. The underlying motivation was that right-wing billionaires could then, in essence, buy elections for Republican candidates.

So, the nation’s predicament in 2013 is that the Republican practice of using sophistry and spin to control the American political/media system is deeply rooted – in the judicial, political and media structures. Millions of Americans – having watched too much Fox News and listened to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck – believe strongly in a faux reality and get angry when their illusions are challenged.

Of course, it’s not just the Republicans and the Right that are to blame for this mess. They, after all, have been doing simply what works for them politically. It is also the fault of the Democrats, the Left and the professional news media for largely abandoning this field of battle over reality, retreating in the face of well-funded propagandists and angry right-wing activists.

Yes, there also have been cases in which some elements of the Left and the Democratic Party have opted to fight fire with fire, i.e. making up their own fact-free conspiracy theories to discredit Republicans. But the preponderance of this behavior has been on the Right.

Indeed, the emerging backlash against right-wing fantasists could represent an important turning point in the fight for the world’s future. If thoughtful people will plant their flag in the firm ground of rationality and empiricism, they could create a rallying point for a new brand of politics, one based on pragmatism, realism and mutual respect.

Within such a political framework, there would still be vigorous debates over how best to address the world’s problems – including how big a role for government versus the private sector – but those discussions would be based on facts, not nonsense. To build that future, however, rationalists must be as tough and determined as the ideologues.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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I have to admit that in the few months immediately leading up to the presidential election of 2008, Sarah Palin provided me with some of the best material I’ve ever had the opportunity to write about and the result was some of the best political stuff to appear on my site, Deus Ex Malcontent. In the years since the 2008 election and the utter evisceration of her and John McCain’s intellectually insulting gambit at the hands of Barack Obama and the American electorate, I continued to bring up Palin, her family of Beverly Hillbillies and whatever new venture they were undertaking together or separately in the name of grifting more money and mileage from their status as political and pop culture celebrities. I did it because it was entertaining — until the point where the Palin shtick became so pathetic and desperate, her patriotic indignation so contrived, that giving it any attention at all merely fueled an unnecessary yet ultimately destructive fire. After a while, the con got old and the act became stale and so it wasn’t even worth commenting on anymore; doing so did more harm than good. For me and a lot of other people, the line with Palin was crossed a couple of years back, but now we can officially say that it’s been crossed by everyone who matters and Sarah Palin has finally fulfilled her destiny of becoming a pop culture has-been. The political version of Paris Hilton. A former reality TV star nobody cares about anymore.

Leave it to Fox News, the network that cranked the amp on John McCain’s once-naïve ingenue to 11 and made her a political force well beyond the pounding she and McCain took in 2008, to be the one to drop the hammer on her career once and for all. It’s practically Shakespearean that the network that was responsible in so many ways for making Palin is now responsible for breaking her. A couple of days ago, Fox News announced that it wasn’t renewing Palin’s contract as a regular contributor, essentially cratering a deal that had kept Palin rolling in money and at least a minor amount of relevance within the conservative movement and which provided her with her own TV studio in her Alaska home. The reason for Fox’s decision is obvious and can’t be questioned by anyone with a brain and a lick of business sense: Palin’s star has fallen. Even before Roger Ailes made the decision to — in parlance I’m sure Palin herself will understand and would normally relish — take Sarah Palin out into the woods with a rifle and put her down, he knew she had become much more trouble to his network than she was worth. He’d called her “stupid” and had dismissed her dabbling with a run for the presidency in 2012 as a waste of time and was looking for an excuse to drop her; her steady decline as a celebrity, despite her best efforts, ultimately gave Ailes all the reason he needed to kiss her goodbye once and for all. Ailes once said that he hired Palin because she was “hot and got ratings”; these days, she isn’t and doesn’t.

Make no mistake: While Sarah Palin isn’t exactly leaving the pop culture landscape she once thundered mightily across with a bang, she’s also not going quietly. It practically goes without saying that Palin is vowing to fight on despite losing her one remaining forum and the one that gave her the biggest bullhorn with which to push her brand. But with the Tea Party’s fortunes having waned significantly — a large percentage of the population now has an unfavorable opinion of the movement and its mouthpieces — and Palin’s own Q-score having dropped into the toilet with most Americans, her options are limited. If you’re a gambler, the smart money’s on Palin going the way of Glenn Beck, Allen West and the rest of the howling maniacs who were the darlings of the tea-bagging insurrection just a few years ago — namely, she’ll try to make herself into an internet star and/or syndicated talk radio host. While social media can provide a quick and easy infrastructure for scamming gullible and resentful aging conservatives out of their money, talk radio continues to be the primary stomping ground of right-wing blowhards. Certainly, neither option allows Palin to trade on one of the most pronounced qualities that made her famous: her looks. But at 48, those looks, like everything else about Palin, are becoming a thing of the past and definitely not something she can rely on anymore.

Have we finally seen the absolute last of Palin? Probably not. Like all new-millennium celebrities of the reality TV variety — spawned overnight and living from their very inception under the threat of being extinguished from the public consciousness just as quickly — Palin will fight tooth and nail against irrelevance. For the most part it’ll be pathetic and sad — like watching child stars, one-hit wonders and the former subjects of popular TLC shows prostrate themselves on VH1′s Celebrity Rehab just for the sake of keeping their name out there somehow. But Sarah Palin will never be what she once was. And for that we can all be thankful.

Our long national nightmare is over. Finally.

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