Archive for May, 2010
PHOTOS: Sarah Palin in Rosemont, IL 5/12/10, "An Evening with Sarah Palin" speech
Here are some photos from the Sarah Palin event last night — “An Evening with Sarah Palin” — at the Rosemont Theater in Rosemont, IL. Panda snapped them on his phone, so they are not the best quality in the world, and there’s an inordinate number of photos of blurry people that look like ghosts, but aren’t ghosts. They aren’t dizzy, either, but you will be after seeing them all whirl around in front of you. Other people look like they are being beamed up into a starship under bright lights. What was Panda’s major in college again? Oh, yah, Visual Arts and Photography.
"An Evening With Sarah Palin", Rosemont, IL 5/12/10. This shot is what Panda calls, "Setting the stage". It was also taken because he couldn't figure out how they got that up on the wall like that. They used an overhead projector. Not magic, as he first thought.
One of the booths at the theater. There were dozens of these, all scattered around, and there was a raffle where you had "passport" and had to get a stamp from each of these people to enter to win an autographed copy of Going Rogue. We never like entering contests because we'd prefer someone else have the joy of winning something. Superstitiously, we always feel like it would be using up luck we'd rather reserve for something we really need, instead of wasting it on a contest. Note the excellent photography capturing the fast-moving, blurry people -- who are all seated.
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Who's Best Dressed and Happiest to Be There?
Click to embiggen
Who is best dressed and happiest to be there?
The FLOTUS?
The Bat?
The shark?
Thursday Open Thread: May 13th, 2010
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What’s on your minds this Thursday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
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Did you know that we are on Twitter and Facebook?
We tried using that Twitter thing last night at the Sarah Palin event, and were able to let everyone know a sing-a-long had commenced. Nationwide, we imagine that information was very important. Claire McCaskill tweets on Twitter about various dogs she sees, or what kind of sammich she is having for snack time. We don’t think we will ever go that far, but it was kind of fun to let people know those little bits from the event as they were happening.
We think we will try to do more of that…so if you are not our friend on Twitter and Facebook, totally check that out, and then you’ll know if the singing has started again.
Sarah Palin in Rosemont, IL open thread
If you were at the Sarah Palin event in Rosement, IL tonight, share your impressions and experiences here. If you weren’t there, leave any questions you might have had about the event and we’ll try to answer them in our write-up. It’s a very rainy night here in Boystown, so we’re going to take our notes from the adventure and type them up tonight, hopefully having them up tomorrow and cross-posting them over at Conservatives4Palin too.
Interestingly, Ed Morrissey from HotAir was in the audience, and we got to meet him, which was fun. He’s Michelle Malkin’s cohort on that site, and very nice in person (as is Malkin herself).
This was very much a presidential campaign speech by Palin — as she continues to work out her platform, sound out her supporters, and hone what works for her. We’d call it a tour-de-force, but Palin still has a year or so to go before she declares her candidacy…so we need to leave her room to improve between then and now. If she’s this good today, in May of 2010, we don’t know what to call the caliber of what she’s capable of with more than a year more of this under her belt.
She was funny, sharp, relaxed, natural, and unapologetically conservative while pointedly criticizing the disaster that is the Obama Administration — while offering her own solutions to remedy this president’s many defects.
It would be hard to imagine 5,000 people hanging on Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty’s ever word the way they do with Palin.
Do 5,000 people even know who Pawlenty is?
Can 5,000 people pick Romney out of a lineup?
These are questions the RNC needs to ask itself every day — while it gets the heck out of Palin’s way and lets her do her thing.
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PS — We took some video of the speech. It was just on a cell phone, so we have no idea how it came out, or if you will be able to hear anything, tonight’s project is to see if we can load this up to YouTube. If we can, maybe some of you out there can take it, clean it up, make it spiffy, and repost it so that others out there who couldn’t be at the event can see a bit of it for themselves. We didn’t want to be rude to others in the audience and record the whole thing, with the view screen light shining on their faces, so we only took a few clips — but got a memorable stretch on tape where Palin paid tribute to President Reagan and talked up the virtues of the Tea Party Movement.
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Update: PalinTV is helping us upload the clips we took. That should be ready sometime today we hope.
Here are some photos Panda took of the event with his cell phone.
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UPDATE: Our full write-up of Palin’s Rosemont speech.
QUESTION: Shouldn't the White House start with banning its own Deep Fryer?
As the First Spouse likes to say, "If you can't control your own house". Or your own butt, we'll paraphrase.
We’d love a little help with the research on this — where we’d like to show what the current First Family consumes in the White House…both what it orders Head Chef Cristeta Comerford to make them at all hours of the day and night, and what the Obamas consume while out in public.
Before Michelle Obama can talk about taking the deep fryers out of public school across the country or hectoring working Americans on what they eat, maybe the deep fryer at the White House needs to be removed.
Comerford has a lot of family and friends in Chicago. Many of them work for the City. We used to do gigs for the City as freelancers. Still hear a lot of White House kitchen stories through back channels.
Everyone made fun of Bill Clinton and what he ate — and all those stops at McDonald’s — but we’ve never heard of the White House making as much junk food as the Obamas order up. And it appears this is all mainly for Michelle.
It would be fun to build a table of what she orders up, and then maybe add a column with healthy suggestions for her. Then, perhaps we could convince Chrissy the Hyphenated to create a postcard graphic we could post, and you can print out — and maybe tens of thousands of you could send these to the White House so that Michelle Obama can begin her crusade against deep fryers in, as HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy would say, “like, you know, uh, um, dur, her own, like, you know, KITCHEN, and stuff”.
What was it Michelle said during the 2008 primaries about someone not being able to keep her own house in order?
Well, how does that logic apply to someone who has the gaul to lecture anyone else on obesity without first looking in the mirror and secondly walking down to the kitchen (not taking the elevator) and speaking with the Chef about eliminating her own steady intake of fried foods?
Who's Dressed Better? The current First Spouse, or Some Guy Trussed Up As a Unicorn in Pink Leather?
Who looks less ridiculous, in context, appearing in person, considering their station in life?
The current First Spouse, or some random guy trussed up in pink leather as a unicorn?
Who would you rather play ring toss with?
It's time for John McCain to retire and for the entire McCain family to get off the stage
This is very hard for us to write, because some of the best times we’ve ever had involved being part of the McCain 2008 campaign, and running Democrats for McCain efforts here in Illinois.
It’s unbelievably difficult for us to ever side against people we like — even when they are wrong. Typically, we just keep our mouths shut because we don’t want to be disloyal.
BUT sometimes things reach a point where the needs of the nation outweigh that personal loyalty, and in looking at the Republican Party, America would be much better served if people like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and others like them would just retire at the very first available opportunity.
John McCain is an American hero. What he went through in Vietnam is horrific. He is a good and decent man whom we respect and admire very much. Cindy McCain would have been one of our greatest First Ladies. Roberta McCain is an inspiration to us all. The McCain sons are hot. Like, Chippendales calendar hot.
Meghan McCain we can do without.
The other McCain daughter seems very nice, though, but we can’t remember her name.
We wish, however, that this whole family would just go away. Retire. Focus on Cindy’s work overseas helping children get the operations they need. Find some purpose in life for Meghan so she can stop embarrassing herself with such regularity.
Arizona has one heck of a Governor right now with an abundance of testicular fortitude (to borrow a phrase used for Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries). Jan Brewer is awesome. Arizona needs more awesome. Every state needs that kind of awesome.
John McCain is the opposite of awesome.
He’s the media’s idea of what a Republican should be, and that’s the last thing this country needs.
The only way we’re going to pull this nation out of its Obama-induced death spiral is to elect solid conservatives who are prepared to go to Washington and KICK ASS and TAKE NAMES.
McCain will never do that. He’s posturing now, claiming he’ll be tough on illegal aliens, but if re-elected he’s just going to head back to the Senate and allow these criminals to run roughshod over American law the way they always do — the way McCain has always done.
We’re tired of this garbage.
We’re tired of the Republican Party allowing Democrats to be so moonbat crazy, and for letting them get away with so much madness. Every spineless, lily-livered, wishy-washy, McCain/Graham/Snow/Collins-brand Republican needs to retire…and let people like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann be the new face of the party.
This country is in desperate need of strong, determined, take no prisoners leadership to counter the current Socialist-Democrat party and everything wrong the White House is currently doing to America.
We do not need John McCain’s particular brand of dhimmihood to the Left.
We do not need to hear from Meghan McCain anymore, or be informed of her latest vacuous opinion on things she knows little about.
We do not want the Republican Party to continue doing the same lame things it’s always done, while expecting America to still recognizably be here after they’ve so thoroughly forfeited the sworn duty to do everything in their power to prevent its destruction.
McCain should step aside.
It’s intervention time.
Someone should tell him he’s served the country well, but that his particular brand of “maverick” is not what we need going forward.
Please appreciate how hard this is for us to say out loud, because we sincerely do like the man and are grateful for all the experiences we had on his campaign.
But, he needs to retire.
Tomorrow.
Because we know dozens of you will ask this today — here's how we stand on 2012
Some of you really love playing broken records, and you love it even more when we repeat ourselves, so we’ll answer a question we know you are going to ask. Again. For the millionth time. We’ve been doing this long enough to anticipate all the “What will you do if Hillary and Sarah run in 2012 against each other?” questions we’ll get, after you read the earlier post about the weird fundraising Team Hillary is doing this week.
Here’s how we respond to that: honestly, we don’t know how we could ever vote for another Democrat again.
We are THAT disgusted with the party, and with every Democrat in office who has been supporting the madness of the Obama Administration. We’ve been asked to help a few campaigns, and we’ve politely refused. We stopped helping Senator Roland Burris after his vote for Obamacare on Christmas Eve — and that was hard for us, because we like the man, and we are good friends with many of the people supporting him. We just can’t help any of the Democrats who rammed through that unconstitutional Frankensteinian bill without even reading it, or understanding the damage it’s going to do to our economy and nation.
Can’t do it.
Some of you might not ever understand this, but we are 100% loyal to the Clintons. All of us have different stories in terms of how we got there, but for various reasons, Bill and Hillary Clinton connected with us, and through the years we got to know both of them, in a very small way, and we came to believe these two love this country more than anything else. The Democrat Party they presided over was moderate, sensible, fiscally responsible, and patriotic. That’s not the same party that exists today, and the DNC zealously continues to purge anything Clintonian — and Jacksonian too — from what’s become the Socialist-Democrat party.
It will forever haunt us that we were unable to secure the nomination for Hillary in 2008. We continuously replay the two years we worked on the campaign looking for anything we could have done differently to tip the scales in her favor…and mainly focus on the fact that we didn’t launch HillBuzz until February of 2008. If we had existed in 2006, maybe we could have pushed the truth about John Edwards into the forefront…and maybe we could have gotten more people in Iowa to see Edwards for who he really is…and maybe then Obama would not have won the Iowa Caucus by splitting Hillary’s vote between herself and Edwards.
We honestly and truly do love this woman, and believe in all of our hearts she would have made an excellent president and that America would not be in the shape it is today if she was in the Oval Office — so it pains us continuously we failed our champ. Clearly, we were not alone in this failure…and you would be surprised just at how much ALL of the Team Hillary members we know are still haunted by 2008.
We all did everything we could to stop Obama from ruining this country. Our best was not enough in the end, and all of us wish we had the chance to do the last four years or so over again to prevent any of this from happening.
So, when we look towards 2012, all of us are keen for a battle royale for the Democrat’s nomination…and all of us want very much for Hillary to challenge Obama and absolutely clobber him. We want this to happen very, very much.
Will it happen?
We don’t think so.
Obama’s begun preparations for 2012 already. He never stopped running for president. The only thing that will stop him from being the nominee in 2012 is if he comes clean about his Parkinson’s and steps aside “due to illness”, like LBJ did in 1968.
We do not believe his ego will allow him to do this…so we do not see a scenario where Hillary runs for president again…or where we vote for another Democrat in all our lives.
So, we are very much committed to supporting Sarah Palin in 2012. We believe she’s been called to stand up for America when we need a champion most. She’s the Kendra to Hillary’s Buffy — when one champ went down for the count, a new heroine arose to battle the Obots and Kool-Aid Gang zombies, and to save this great nation from Dr. Utopia and his special brand of madness.
Sarah Palin has a standing offer from us for free labor in any capacity she needs it. We’d work 24/7 for her, the way we sunk everything into Hillary’s 2008 campaign. Her team certainly knows how to get ahold of us. All they need to do is say it’s go time, and we’re on board.
We don’t, however, honestly know what would happen if Obama stepped aside, gave Hillary the nomination, and a Hillary vs. Sarah matchup really transpired.
Our default would be to reform Team Hillary here in Chicago, which would be a very natural thing to do, as we’ve stayed in touch with almost everyone from 2008 and the framework is already built for us to go another round for our champ.
BUT, we just don’t want to see Democrats in the White House…not after the mess they’ve made. We don’t want them in the House or Senate either.
THEY WENT TOO FAR WITH TOO MANY CRAZY, SOCIALIST MANEUVERS FOR US TO EVER FORGET.
We don’t think America can trust the Democrat Party with elected office. And we don’t think that would magically change if Hillary was made the new standard bearer. The brand is just too damaged for it to change spokeswomen and make everything right again.
If Palin really runs, we think we’d be behind her all the way, regardless of what else happens on the Democrat side. We just think America will be better served with a Republican president in 2012…someone who can kick butt and get things back under control, and repeal and rectify as much of the Obama damage as possible.
If Hillary would run in 2012, that’s the platform she’d have to run on — to completely erase “The Golden Age of Hope and Change” as if it never happened. That’s what we want Palin to do as well. Undo all of it.
Make sure it can never happen again.
Whichever woman wants to do this, and has a solid plan for achieving it, has our undying and permanent loyalty.
You betcha.
Very Interesting Development in Hillaryland: Why is President Clinton fundraising for Hillary '08 debt again — when it was all repaid in 2008?
We don’t know what’s going on here, but this is incredibly interesting.
President Clinton sent out an email a few days ago, with another of the contests he’s used in the past to fundraise for Hillary Clinton’s campaign — this time, it’s a contest to win a day with him in New York City, where each donation is an entry into a raffle for this prize. During the 2008 campaign, there were several of these opportunities offered — but the last time the Clintons did this was in December of 2008.
Here’s the email:
Do you notice something interesting right off the bat?
The “Hillary Logo”, used during 2008 is back, just without the “for President” underneath it next to the American flag swirl.
Now, this logo has not appeared for a while.
Usually emails from President Clinton come to us from the Clinton Foundation, or by way of NoLimits.org, which is the organization Ann Lewis is running for the Clintons, to keep all of Hillary’s campaign volunteers and friends in contact. NoLimits.org effectively took the place of HillPAC — since Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State and removed herself from politics.
In December 2008, two big events at the close of the year were supposed to clear all of Hillary’s campaign debt: one was the “Conversation with Hillary Clinton” hosted by America Ferrara, and the other was the John Mellencamp concert a week or so later. We remember hearing in January 2009 that all the campaign debt was gone — and we heard several times that all of the 2008 books had to be closed by the time Hillary was sworn in as Secretary of State.
We have not heard anything else about campaign debt since 2009.
Now, almost a year and a half later, there’s this email from President Clinton fundraising for the debt again.
It just doesn’t make any sense.
UNLESS what’s happening is that HillPAC is back up and running again, clandestinely, and the Clintons intend to use this fundraising to funnel money into candidates nationwide they support, but the DNC doesn’t.
This trick was used by the Obots in Missouri recently. Claire McCaskill pretended to hold a fundraiser for herself last month, because Robin Carnahan did not want to stand on the stage with Obama. So, McCaskill did it instead, and then funneled all the money raised at the event to Carnahan. She probably kept at least $1.00 — but said “the excess” went to the Democrat actually running for office in 2010 (which would be Carnahan, since McCaskill isn’t up for re-election — and humiliating defeat — until 2012).
Now, the last part of all of this that’s truly fascinating is that late last night we emailed someone from Hillary’s 2008 Illinois Finance Committee and asked him what was up with all of this. This is a guy who’s very important, and doesn’t respond to every email, especially if we’re asking about something crazy, or badgering to know whether Hillary will run for president again. The guy wrote back this time, and told us “that is interesting” and then told us to contact another person we know, who talks to the Clintons regularly.
So, there’s something there.
SOMETHING is going on.
We just don’t know what yet.
If we had to guess, we’d say this is about how bad of shape the Democrat Party is in right now. Obama is dragging down Democrats all across the country. Anyone he campaigns for fails miserably. Obots are losing primaries left and right. Fundraising is way down. The party is clearly Whigging out of revelance.
Are the Clintons being called in as the last-ditch effort to save the party…or is this Clintonian 11th dimensional chess for 2012?
We’ve also noticed several instances where Hillary Clinton has been noting lately how tiresome it is to be traveling the world so much…and all the comments she’s been making about looking forward to daughter Chelsea’s upcoming wedding and finally being a “Mother of the Bride”.
So, to recap:
(1) NoLimits.org is not only still very active, but recently went through an upgrade
(2) Several “Hillary is 45″ and “Hillary 2012″ groups recently energized email updates and reaffirmed their contact lists
(3) The old Hillary campaign logo is alive and well and living on in President Clinton’s emails — for the first time in a year and a half
(4) The Clintons are fundraising again for Hillary’s campaign apparatus
(5) Team Hillary here in Illinois agrees “something” is going on
(6) The Democrat Party is in real trouble, and everyone knows it
(7) Hillary Clinton keeps making statements that make it appear she’ll be resigning as Secretary of State after November’s elections
Your guess is as good as ours as to what the real deal is…but it’s all very, very interesting.
Wednesday Open Thread: May 12th, 2010
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What’s on your minds this Wednesday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
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We want to send a special thanks to longtime reader “The Tundra in PA” for the wonderful Sarah Palin chocolate bars, sent to us all the way from Alaska.
Now, that was a really special treat, let us tell you — and we’re going to frame the wrappers and put them up on the wall next to our photos with Sarah and Todd Palin themselves. They are so fun, we wish these candy bars were available nation-wide…and we feel so blessed and special to have them.
We just love them, and can’t wait to go to Michael’s and get matting and a shadowbox frame to do them justice. Any excuse to craft and frame things around here is a good excuse.
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