Archive for November 30th, 2009
Hillary and Sarah Christmas ornaments: a crafts project for you
Here’s something we’ll mention now, so you can keep it in mind as you holiday shop — it’s something we started doing during the leadup to the 2008 Iowa caucus that we’ve kept doing ever since, for Arts & Crafts Day here at Buzzquarters.
There’s a thrift shop down the street from us called The Brown Elephant here in Boystown, which is an AIDS charity supporting shop on Halsted that has some pretty remarkable stuff at times (we’ve gotten Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, and vintage Armani jackets from there, for about $8 or $10 each).
One of our best finds happened the week before we were heading out to Iowa for the first time to campaign for Hillary Clinton in November of 2007, when we bought a bunch of Christmas ornaments from there: simple blue and silver balls, six to a box, for something like $1.25 a box. It looked like a card store or something went out of business and they donated their stock to Brown Elephant. That, or someone died and all their Christmas decorations were donated when their apartments were cleaned out. This is, unfortunately, a hazard of shopping at any thrift shop — there are ghosts lurking around a lot of this stuff if your imagination’s the kind that finds them.
We spotted those bulbs and knew immediately what we were going to do with them: we had rolls of Hillary for President round campaign stickers, so we took a sticker and placed it neatly on the blue and silver bulbs and made our first Hillary ornaments. Then, we took some spray glue and a little glitter we had laying around (because, of course, a bunch of gay guys always have plenty of glitter laying around, you know, for emergencies) and we were cranking out Hillary ornaments left and right.
We took them to Iowa with us and passed them out when we were walking door to door. At first, we were going to bake Hillary cupcakes or her oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, but we wondered how receptive strangers would be to eating things someone brought to their door. We personally wouldn’t. But the ornaments were cute, and almost every house we went to in Iowa had a Christmas tree up. Since the Iowa caucus was early in January, and the trees were still up until mid-January or so, the Hillary supporters or Hillary leaners would have a little bit of Hillary in their homes, staring at them every day from their trees, right up until the caucus.
And the ornaments were clearly hand-made by us, so they were very personal. We only gave them to people we made real connections with, and on caucus night quite a few people came up to us and said, “Oh, yeah guys! We got your ornaments on our tree! Go Hillary go!”
We mention this now because if you are a Sarah Palin supporter, you might want to start stocking up on simple bulbs like we did if you see them on sale. Since there are no Palin 2012 stickers out yet, you can use pictures you find of her in magazines and decoupage the ornaments. Maybe we could even find some good photos of Sarah and make some templates for you that you could then just print out and put right onto the ornaments you are making.
January will be just two years before the next Iowa caucus. Just imagine how many ornaments you could make in that time, to have ready to go. If you aren’t planning on traveling to Iowa yourself, you could make them at home and then send them to the Palin offices when they open.
At the beginning of a campaign, especially, money is so tight…and things to give away to people are in such short supply. People wanted Hillary items and kept asking for them and asking for them but the campaign was not prepared in those early days.
What if, collectively, Palin supporters were proactive and started making these personal items now…so the campaign, when it gears up, has all this prep work done for them?
The cost really is very minimal too.
We plan on buying up as many of the sale Christmas bulbs we can find the moment they are marked down. We’re checking the thrift stores now, to see if people who’ve bought new bulbs are donating their old ones. We also keep checking the dollar stores for other small plastic hollow balls we can use to make ornaments.
Personally, we love crafting, so every year people we know get ornaments like this from us at Christmas time. That, or Hillary cupcakes if we run out of ornaments and bake instead. The people we care about deserve something more meaningul than something store bought at the holidays.
And we like knowing there’s Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton smiling at people we know on all their trees. Especially in the Republican households we know. People tell us guests come over and ask, “Why do you have Hillary Clinton ornaments on your tree?” and our friends say, “Oh, HillBuzz gave us those. Used to hate that woman, but she’s grown on us and now we say thank God for her, because we see her in a new light now”.
Just imagine if the same can be done for Sarah Palin, through a little bit of arts and crafts, a bit of foresight, and two years of spirited ornament making by her supporters.
You might not be able to put a copy of Going Rogue into every home in Iowa because of the cost involved, but at about thirty cents a piece (cost of bulbs + glitter + picture + glue) we could very easily, as a giant team, put a Sarah Palin Christmas tree ornament on every tree in Iowa.
It could actually be a fun national project for supporters to run together, so we hope our friends at Conservatives4Palin and TeamSarah see this and suggest it to their readers too.
And in case you are wondering, yes we are making Hillary for President ornaments too. Just in case a certain Secretary of Great needs them in 2012 herself.
One Horseman of the GOP 2012 Apocalypse has been knocked off his horse: kiss Mike Huckabee's political future goodbye
We actually think Mike Huckabee is a very nice man. On a personal level.
We met him, and actually got to have a fairly long conversation with him, when we first saw Sarah Palin speak in person, at a rally at a baseball stadium outside St. Louis days after she was debuted as the GOP VP nominee. Huckabee is genuine and warm when speaking to you, a lot like Bill Clinton is in person. His wife Janet is charming and very sweet. While working the rope line, we saw many people hand her their cameras so she could take pictures of them with her husband — which was odd that they didn’t want her in the picture, too, but she didn’t care. She snapped away, at one point holding about five cameras that we could see, like she had just arrived from Tokyo as a tourist ready to photograph anything that moved.
Too funny, and very, very sweet of Janet.
The two Huckabees are people we’d love to have as neighbors, but never want to see in the White House, the Naval Observatory, or the Governor’s mansion of any state we live in.
Mike should stay on his TV show. Janet, in our opinion, should have a cooking or home show of her own: she’s very Paula Dean and engaging in person; it’s too bad no one has had sense enough to put these two together yet. Just imagine a Husband-Wife Politics and Cooking Show, where Mike could do political interviews on one part of the set and Janet could do cooking, gardening, home, and crafting bits (things she has said repeatedly she enjoys), and all emphasis could be on healthy eating (noting Mike’s weight loss, making Janet a Southern, waist-watching version of Dean without all that butter). It could really be a hoot, and we think a big success. We’d sure watch. Janet could even take pictures of the audience with cameras they’d bring.
In Iowa, the MSM used Huckabee to take down Mitt Romney in the first stage of making John McCain the GOP’s 2008 nominee. It was clear to us on the ground what was happening: Romney would have been a better general election candidate, so Romney had to be knocked out in Iowa. Huckabee was treated with kid gloves, while Romney was savaged, and evangelicals were pumped up to stick it to the Mormon by voting for Huckabee. Romney staffers we know insist, to this day, that if Huckabee had lost Iowa that Romney would have secured the nomination from McCain…and Romney would have been more appealing to voters when the economic crisis “October Surprise” engineered by George Soros hit in September.
We’ve been saying for months that the groundwork is already being laid by the MSM to once again select the GOP candidate MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, and other liberal mouthpieces of the White House wants to run against Dr. Utopia in 2012. Chris Matthews admitted on the air that his job is to make sure Dr. Utopia succeeds. Part of that is to pick a fatally flawed GOP candidate in the next nominating contest, so Dr. Utopia coasts to re-election in a cake walk.
There are five men the MSM wants to push for 2012, all of whom Dr. Utopia will clobber:
(1) Mike Huckabee
(2) Charlie Crist
(3) Mitt Romney
(4) Tim Pawlenty
(5) Jon Hunstman
We remember it was not that long ago that almost every Republican we knew was all about Mark Sanford, and how Mark Sanford was the perfect 2012 candidate. That’s because the MSM was telling them that, and they listened. After Sanford self-destructed early (the MSM wanted his affairs and other baggage released in 2012′s general election, so Republicans dodged a real bullet with all of this happening in 2009 instead), the MSM started building Huckabee up some more, and Republicans here in Chicago started saying to us that Huckabee would be the only one who could inspire conservatives to come out in force (since they sat their butts home in 2008, resulting in the Golden Age of Hope and Change we are all struggling through today).
We remain convinced the winning 2012 Republican will be Sarah Palin. If she continues on the course she’s setting for herself, and does not listen to the MSM or RNC, she will indeed be the nominee and will win the general election — and we pledge every day that we will help her do just that in every way we can.
The MSM is, clearly, committed to destroying Sarah Palin: single-minded, brutal, obsessed, like robots sent from the future by SkyNet after the wrong “Sarah”.
Their commitment to Huckabee as one of the GOP’S Five Horsemen has been shaken, however, with the revelation that Huckabee, as Arkansas governor, pardoned the murderer who executed four police officers in a coffee shop near Tacoma. All of Huckabee’s pardons are now being re-examined, and it seems he never gave a good reason for any of the clemency he doled out to violent criminals. There are probably others who he pardoned that went on to commit futher heinous crimes; it was just this police shooting that brought the whole matter to national attention.
It’s a tough break for Huckabee, because he made that pardon in 2000. It’s a lucky break for all those of us who want to see Dr. Utopia limited to just one term, because Huckabee would have been propped up by the MSM as a spoiler again in 2012. He would have run in Iowa, to take enough votes away from Palin for someone like Pawlenty to win that first round. As far as we can tell, Pawlenty has no real scandals waiting to pop up and is the boring, uninspiring candidate the MSM wants to run for the GOP so he can be drowned in Dr. Utopia’s star power and celebrity charisma. Huckabee stopping Palin would benefit Pawlenty — and cucumber mayonnaise on white bread sandwiches with skim milk and cottage cheese on the side everywhere.
With Sanford and Huckabee out, the next anti-Palin strategy for 2012 could be the rolling out of Huntsman, whom the nation knows little about, but whom Rahm Emanuel wants to run Dr. Utopia against for some reason. Huntsman is a governor turned ambassador, and Emanuel has said several times, ‘Oh, we would be scared of him in 2012. Please don’t let him run. That big strong sexy mountain of a man would make my heart all aflutter and I just don’t know what we’d do to stop him”.
Republicans haven’t learned this lesson yet, but they should never run the candidates the MSM wants them to, or run candidates the White House and Rahm Emanuel want to face in an election.
That seems really obvious to us, but since it just keeps happening, maybe we need to talk about basic things like this some more.
Monday Open Thread: November 30th 2009
What’s on your minds this Monday?
What stories are you following in the news today?
Here’s some of what we’re reading up on to talk about in more depth later:
* The White House and American MSM are doing their best to keep the Climategate scandal under wraps — how do we thwart their efforts and make regular Americans realize what a fraud Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming hoax always was?
* ACORN ally Eric Holder has seen to it that ACORN maintains its funding, despite the recent bill from Congress that was supposed to cut these criminals off. ACORN is also starting to reform under another name. How do we prep to strike at the new heads of this Hydra? Remember, ACORN is the lynchpin of the Utopian re-election strategy. Without ACORN, the SEIU, and the Black Panthers, Dr. Utopia won’t have the intimidation and voter fraud teams to secure that second term. ACORN will not do down quietly and must be battled the next three years. Who’s up for the challenge…and how do we get Sarah Palin to be our great and public crusader against voter fraud?
* Have you seen how massive the Department of Health and Human Services would be under Utopiacare, with Kathleen Sebelius given dictatorial, god-like powers over the lives and deaths of hundreds of millions of people? Under the current Democrat plan, Sebelius would be able to decide, PERSONALLY, accountable to no one, which procedures would be covered by insurance and, essentially, who in the population would live and who would die. That would be a scary proposition if we had someone competent as Secretary of HHS…but Sebelius? After what she did to Kansas? Have you seen this woman? We wouldn’t trust her with watering houseplants properly, let alone deciding anyone’s medical fate. If you weren’t opposed to the government takeover of healthcare before, you should be very scared now.
Congratulations Chelsea Clinton! First Daughter getting married next summer
President Clinton’s office has announced it’s finally official: Chelsea Clinton is getting married next summer, to longtime boyfriend turned fiance Marc Mezvinsky.
We were fortunate enough to be part of several events Chelsea did for her mother in the Chicago area during the 2008 campaign: she is funny, kind, warm, BRILLIANT, and sincerely one of the nicest, sharpest, most grounded and normal young women we’ve ever met.
Everywhere she turned at those events, people told her how proud of her they were, and how proud they are of the Clintons for raising such a wonderful daughter. Everyone who saw her speak as a surrogate for her mother walked away wondering what the future holds for their favorite First Daughter.
We are so, so happy for her today — and so happy for President and Secretary Clinton, as we know Hillary in particular has been so looking forward to this wedding…and hopefully many grandchildren to come if that’s what Chelsea and Marc decide.
What a great after Thanksgiving treat in the news.
Now, let the cottage industry of speculating on Chelsea Clinton’s wedding begin — because without a doubt it’s going to be the biggest social event in 2010, for sure. The little girl we all watched grow up into an amazing young woman is getting married. Cue feeling old in five…four…three…two…one.
