The Frisky Mole Boy of Groton
Norman Rogers recounts the summer he spent hiding from the stern love of his father and living as the world-famous “frisky mole boy” in the Groton, Connecticut sewer system.
An American Lion
National Democrats believed Martha Coakley(D) did not need more money to win the Massachusetts senate race despite the campaign’s pleas for financial assistance, her top pollster said Sunday.
“It’s not true that the campaign wasn’t focused, but the campaign had no money,” Celinda Lakesaid on CNN’s “State of the Union” when asked about the campaign’s troubles in the closing days. “And there are lots of people that can be blamed for that including national establishment institutions in D.C. that weren’t giving her money, that were turning her down.”
The campaign reached out to the White House and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for financial assistance, Lake said, but officials in Washington said, “You don’t need it.”
Republicans had better seize this opportunity. Oh, wait. They already have.
A winning machine that galvanized the Democrat party and rolled through 2006 and 2008 with impressive victories abandoned a safe seat and left a candidate without a dime. That’s a structural breakdown and a leadership vacuum that won’t last. Whoever this Tim Kaine fellow is, he’d better figure out how to run things. Oh, wait. Never mind. He’s already been supplanted.
Whoever controls the money made a terrible calculation, and you can be rest assured that they won’t let it happen again.
*you get your “-ic” back when I see some progress, sir…
Republicans aim to have a candidate in every congressional district in this fall’s midterm elections, said the top GOP member in the House on Monday.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) asserted that no seat is safe for Democrats after Republican Scott Brown’s victory in a special election for the Senate seat in Massachusetts last week.
“There’s not a seat in America held by a Democrat that can’t be won. Massachusetts proves that,” Boehner said this morning during an interview on Fox News. “My goal is to make sure we’ve got candidates in every single seat in America — 435 of them.”
Otherwise known as “the Fifty State Strategy” of former Vermont Governor and former Democrat* National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, it’s certainly ironic to see the Republicans boasting about using their own version of it now that it is apparent that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel has succeeded in running Dean out of the leadership structure of the party.
The success of getting Scott Brown elected has little or nothing to do with the seat that he must now try and hold on to. More than likely, he cannot hold the seat. It has everything to do with money, and if money flows to the Republican National Committee in the wake of what Boehner is saying, then the Republicans do have a chance to make a number of races competitive. The thing that no one realizes is that the “Fifty State Strategy” wasn’t supposed to win ever race. It was supposed to put a candidate on every ballot so that, in the event of a Mark Foley-like meltdown, there was someone ready to win the seat. It was about repairing a badly-neglected infrastructure.
The Republicans are learning. Are the Democrats learning?
*you get your ‘-ic’ back when I say you get it back
Air America, the liberal talk-radio network that helped boost the careers of Al Franken and Rachel Maddow, said Thursday that it was declaring bankruptcy and going off the air.
The company, founded in 2004 and based in New York, strove to provide left-leaning commentary and call-in programs as an alternative to such popular conservative radio talkers as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage.
It was troubled almost from the start. The company had difficulty lining up affiliates and attracting a sizable audience. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-court protection just 30 months after its inception and was resold to an investor group in early 2007 for $4.25 million.
Charlie Kireker, one of Air America’s principal owners and its chairman, said in a memo to employees Thursday that the company was done in by “a perfect storm” of plunging ad revenues, intense competition, high debt and poor prospects for new financing. A search for new investors, he said, has been fruitless. The company declined further comment.
It helps to actually understand the radio business before you attempt to go into it. No one at Air America understood the radio business. First and foremost, you hire professional radio talent. Then, you develop that talent. If people are buying your ideas and if they’re accepting what your talent has to say, it’s gravy from then on. All they would have had to do is copy—copy—the way successful broadcasters do business. They survive based on their talent. Can they hold the interest of someone listening? Can they speak a common language that the listeners can understand? Can they interview a guest? Can they talk about a subject with some degree of knowledge?
If not, they will fail. There are more Democrats than Republicans in this country, but no one was buying what they were selling. No one on Air America was so compelling to listen to that people would do whatever they could to hear what they had to say. Their stable of talent—God bless them—went on to do things like MSNBC and the United States Senate. At least, that’s what two of them did. Where’d the rest of them go? I have no idea. And neither does anyone else. That’s because they were nobodies, sir. Nobodies.
And I’ll say this until I am blue in the face: if you have nothing but contempt for middle America, guns, hunting, fishing, sports, country music, and just plain old corn pone, then that’s exactly the kind of audience you’re going to have. You’re going to attract three or four people who have nothing but contempt for a good number of Americans who listen to the radio. And, if you can’t get the people who listen to radio to listen to you because your talent can’t do anything except talk down to people and act like high and mighty jackasses, watch your business collapse into a damp heap of nothing.
In October 2006, ABC Radio Networks, then under Disney’s ABC, told its stations to black out all ads from about 90 companies that did not want to have their ads on radio stations that carried Air America Radio. The internal memo from ABC Radio Networks to its affiliates was headlined “Air America Blackout” and was addressed to the Traffic Director who handles advertising for the affiliates. The memo states, “Please be advised that Hewlett Packard has purchased schedules with ABC Radio Networks between October 30th and December 24th, 2006. Please make sure you blackout this advertiser on your station, as they do not wish it to air on any Air America affiliate.”
In any other state, in any other part of this country, there would be howls of laughter at a Republican trying to run for the United States Senate with an old pickup truck:
Brown has said his childhood was rough. He parents divorced when he was young, and he grew up in Wakefield, Mass., living at various times with an aunt and his grandmother. His parents, he has said, were divorced four times each. “I had a weird upbringing… . it wasn’t the most stable home environment,” he once said.
More recently, in an emotional interview, he acknowledged getting arrested when he was 12 for shoplifting. “I was a jerk. I had some issues. You know, I was lost… . Mom was always working… . There was some violence in there where I would be sticking up for my mom and sisters… . One day I was out with some older kids… . I had a pair of farmer overalls, and I stuck some records in them… . I was walking out, and a guy caught me.” He said a judge ordered him to write an essay on how his siblings would feel if he were in jail.
Voters have been drawn to Brown’s energetic demeanor and populist message of cutting taxes and reining in the federal government. They interact with him as if he were an old friend trying to get them out of a financial jam. Brown’s GMC truck, with nearly 200,000 miles on the odometer, became the symbol of his regular-guy campaign, but experts say he also ran a smart net-roots effort, mobilizing conservative activists in the same way President Obama energized liberals in 2008.
Last week, he managed to raise more than $1 million in a one-day online “money bomb.” He also attracted the support of the fiscally conservative grass-roots Tea Party movement, which rails against big government.
Still, it’s the truck that hit a sore spot with President Obama, who dismissively told Massachusetts crowds Sunday, “Anyone can own a truck.”
That’s a tin ear the President developed recently. He needs to get out more. Anyone who thought that the winds were going to blow the same way they were blowing last year is fooling themselves. This President was elected on a clear mandate for change, and he has walked away from his base. He has abandoned the suitor who brought him to the dance. Now he’s round-shouldered and lonely by the punch bowl.
Only in Massachusetts would the pickup truck work. Anywhere else, the Republican candidate would have been told to shove it. Brown played pitch-perfect identity politics and won the Senate seat that had been held by Edward Kennedy.
Let’s be honest. It’s a catastrophe. It’s going to drive more people into retirement. It’s a kick in the nuts with brass-toed boots on a cold day. The Republican Party was beaten and demoralized a year ago. A year ago.
Now?
Now it is a force in American politics again. But, do you know what? Maybe not…
Dear ‘mentally disabled’ Democratzi…forget about it! There is no Plan C or D or E! You are going home! We are cleaning house in Washington…all cockroaches must be eradicated and all who voted with them! The people have spoken and you would not listen…now you will…but now it is too late to redeem yourselves! One (1) down…fifty-nine (59) to go…and you will go sooner rather than later! Then onto 2012 to finish the job to take back our government and put it into the hands of ‘we’ the people where it should be! THE REVOLUTION OF THE SILENT MAJORITY BEGINS TODAY! 1) WE ARE INFORMED 2) WE ARE INVOLVED 3) WE ARE GETTING OUT THE VOTE! WE WILL REMOVE THE ‘SLUGS OF 60’ - GUARANTEED! IMPEACHMENT OR THE ‘ORIGINAL KENYAN BIRTH CERTIFICATE…IT IS JUST A MATTER OF TIME…AND 2010 WILL BE THE TIME!
Posted By: Eileen for Freedom/Liberty | January 19, 2010 at 10:08 PM
Eilieen sure is fired up. You can hear the spittle hitting the wall after that.
Out of that, you’re going to try to create a movement? Good luck with that, sir.
Governing is hard. Governing is a pain in the ass. Don’t think for a moment that these Republicans remember that. They are consumed with short-term hubris. They know they cannot govern. Their track record is abysmal. They can throw stones inside of the glass house, and, tonight at least, they shattered one of the third rails of American politics, and that is, they took the Kennedy seat away from the Democrat Party.
I have stayed away from this story, but even I can’t ignore the blatant incompetence of Martha Coakley, heir apparent to the Kennedy Seat* in the United States Senate:
In the intensifying Democratic precriminations game over who to blame if Coakley loses, here’s one for the blame Coakley camp: On another talk radio show, “Nightside With Dan Rea,” Coakley jabs Rudy Giuliani as a Yankee fan, then goes on to describe Brown supporter Curt Schilling, the great former Red Sox pitcher, as a Yankee fan as well.
The host sounds incredulous — “Curt Schilling? The Red Sox great pitcher of the bloody sock?” — and Coakley initially sounds unfamiliar with him. She eventually reverses herself, but it’s an odd moment in a state that was transfixed by Schilling’s performance in the 2004 World Series, where he helped the Red Sox win for the first time since 1918.
A Republican supplied the audio (and the YouTube caption). Coakley spokesman Alex Zaroulis described it as a “very, very deadpan” joke, and another Coakley spokesman emails to note that she has Sox among her supporters and that “Curt Schilling has been involved in a lot of strike outs over time. I guess Martha whiffed on that joke.”
Schilling is, of course, a problem. He’s an Internet-savvy conservative who has long interacted with his fans via his website or through Internet comment threads and the like. The thing with Schilling is, he’s a part of the valuable legacy of the first Red Sox World Series win since forever and a baseball hero whose dedication to the success of the Red Sox was due to his “playing through” a foot injury that caused blood to appear on his sock while pitching. What he really is is a guy who can stand there behind the wall of adulation and love that comes with his baseball legacy and he can take shots at you and all you can do is say nice things. If you can’t say nice things, then you have to say something to the effect of, “Curt Schilling is an interesting guy!” And you can’t say “he’s no Greg Maddux!” because Greg Maddux never played for the Boston Red Sox.
The way you handle him, then, is you don’t say anything about the Red Sox. You say you love Curt Schilling but you’re just too busy to read what he writes on the Internet because he’s always saying this or that. Then you say, “if I were a sportswriter, I’d vote him into the Hall of Fame.”
Someone advising Coakley fed her the “Yankee fan” line and she used it against the wrong person criticizing her. It works against Guiliani, since he was in the stands all those times when the Yankees were beating the Red Sox. It does not work against a man who helped beat the Yankees, and she should be well versed in that folklore. She should have said “I think that Curt’s 11-2 record in the postseason guarantees that he’ll get into the Hall of Fame.”
After betraying the progressives with health care reform, and after being caught in quite a whopper of a gaffe, Nevada Senator Harry Reid is just fine with the kool kidz because, well, who knows why:
Harry Reid doesn’t owe me an apology.
Sure, it was a little odd to see the term “Negro” used outside of a history class or documentary. Sounds like Reid is stuck in the last century.
But the Senate majority leader didn’t say anything many Americans — especially us Negroes — don’t already know.
If you’re black, it is easier in this country to be light-skinned.
That’s borne out not just by anecdote and experience, but by research documenting favorable treatment for fair-skinned blacks in criminal cases, employment prospects, even social and romantic liaisons.
Studies have shown that darker-skinned blacks are more likely to be unemployed, earn less and hold lower-prestige jobs. In the criminal justice system, convicted murderers with “stereotypically black” features are more than twice as likely as light-skinned defendants to receive death sentences from juries.
Don’t blame Reid for the preference. Blame bigotry. Blame history.
Right. Just don’t blame a powerful politician who perpetuates the bigotry by speaking openly to others about his belief that President Obama sure is articulate when he wants to be, for a black guy—a stereotype that reinforces how juries deal with defendants who are not “articulate.”
I would condemn anyone, equally, who held that sort of outdated belief. Life sure is easy when you drop the phony-baloney need to always defend your party and to always attack the other party. Wrong is wrong, and you can’t be more wrong than Senator Reid. What he said was an extension of a paternalistic belief in inherent superiority. It’s an elitist and patronizing tone to take. It’s amusing to watch the left do backflips to try and excuse what Reid said. I have no idea what country I’ve been living in, I guess. I thought I lived in the country where a man could get hounded out of his job at the drop of a hat for saying anything remotely racist in nature.
Even though Senator Reid is a good guy, and even though he’s on “your side,” you can still condemn his statement without losing your place at the table. You can oppose him because, well, he’s not really on your side, now is he? If he was on your side, wouldn’t you have some real health care reform right now? Wouldn’t Senator Joe Lieberman be riding the bench on the Agriculture Committee? Wouldn’t there be good legislation being sent to the President’s desk?
Now, had Senator Reid been a Republican, he’d have already resigned by now. And that’s why our modern political discourse is so jacked up right now, pardon my French.
Rachel Ray’s Magnificent Ass
Monday, January 25, 2010 
What do you mean we don’t have any money? Did you check under the dirt clod in the master bedroom?
