Archive for September 18th, 2010
HillBuzz on the radio: The Megan Fox Show 10pm CST 9/18/10
Click to embiggen
HillBuzz will be on the radio tonight, as a guest on The Megan Fox Show. The show airs at 10pm.
We’re going to be talking about spousal rights for gay couples, The Cocktail Party vs. The Tea Party, the Delaware defeat of Mike Castle, and maybe even Transformers, if there’s time.
This is a new show, and we’re the very first guest, so we’re thrilled to help launch this project, broadcasting from our very own Chicagoland.
Tune in and give Megan Fox a listen…and be sure to join her live chat during the show.
Use this thread to let us know anything else you would like us to talk about.
RESEARCH: List all women in public life who have been called a witch in something prominent
Can you help us find instances of women in public life being directly called a witch in something prominent.
We know there are a lot of political cartoons from 2008 that depicted Hillary Clinton as a witch (usually with Obama dressed in drag as Dorothy holding a bucket of water).
Has Jan Brewer been depicted as a witch anywhere?
What about Governor Palin or Congresswoman Michele Bachmann?
We’d like to find about 20 solid references in mainstream media to strong, determined, establishment-bucking women being called “witches”.
Get us sources, authors, publications, and the context of the term.
The more we can find, the better.
*************************************
UPDATE: Here are some images of both Hillary Clinton and Governor Palin being depicted as witches:
When she was First Lady, Hillary Clinton wore this witch costume at Halloween one year. This is the sort of thing that Christine O'Donnell needs to do too. Hillary wore this because she was being called all sorts of nasty names by the Right at the time, so she did it to rub the image in their faces and laugh back at them. Which is her style, and part of why we love the woman.
The Left depicting Governor Palin as a witch
Not only is Hillary drawn as a witch here, but the artist (who is very good, actually) put her in glasses, which is so strange because she rarely wears her glasses. This is probably from when she was still a Senator, with the Capitol below her not the White House.
If you are a woman in politics, you have not made an impact or impression unless someone has called you a witch and put a green image of you on a button.
FREE ADVICE: How Christine O'Donnell can defuse the Democrats' attacks against her
Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell is currently being attacked by Democrats because of a 1999 interview she did where she talked about dabbling in witchcraft.
This actually reminds us a lot of how Democrats tried to use Scott Brown’s ROCKING HOT Cosmo centerfold pictures against him, thinking calling the man “a former nude model” would prevent him from being elected Senator. The Democrat playbook is to find something they think will embarrass a person, attack him or her personally, and drive a wedge between that candidate and voters by turning the person into a pariah and laughingstock.
Remember your Alinsky Rules: target your opponent personally, use ridicule as a weapon, make the contest emotional and superficial and not about the actual issues at hand because voters are more easily swayed with sensation and stagecraft than actual reason.
We came up with a way to disarm the centerfold attacks on Scott Brown, by just embracing his naked awesomeness and flat-out, directly calling the man Hottie McAwesome. Senator Centerfold took back “the Kennedy Seat” from those Hyannis Port spiders and put the first Republican in that Massachusetts Senate seat in as long as anyone can remember. We like to think we had a small part in his win because we coaxed many out there to rally behind him and effectively counter the garbage Democrats were flinging.
Christine O’Donnell has emerged as a candidate we would very much like to help…primarily because a victory for her would be a colossal defeat for not just the Democrats, but for the GOP Cocktail Party Romney Republican establishment. The Romney Guys out there want O’Donnell to lose as much as the Democrats do. Maybe even more, because her Tea Party and Governor Palin-backing gave her the might to take down Cocktail Party-supported Mike Castle. If she wins the general election, after the Cocktail Party and state media have said she doesn’t have a general election chance (just as former nude centerfold model Scott Brown had no change of winning “the Kennedy seat”), then it might actually be a bigger earthquake politically than what happened in Massachusetts.
Our best advice to Christine O’Donnell is this: start using witch imagery in all of your campaign materials.
Witches like Elphaba from Wicked…the heroine of the musical and book by Gregory Maguire…who fought against the tyrannical wizard and the corruption of Oz and became an antiheroine doing the right thing while being attacked from all sides.
O’Donnell should use every opportunity to talk about how often strong, confident women who speak their minds are called WITCHES. She should stand there and say how she feels like a witch being burned at the stake by the Cocktail Party, because she’s speaking her mind and coming out swinging against the establishment.
“Witches”, in the state media, are “polarizing” women with opinions.
We picture campaign merchandise on her supporters that says, “Yup, I’m a witch”. With the election not too long after Halloween, O’Donnell needs to dress up in a big witch’s hat and go campaign trick or treating.
She needs to run photos of every other female politician that’s ever been called a witch by the media…including all those nasty cartoons drawn of Hillary Clinton in 2008 where she was depicted as the Wicked With of the West to Obama’s Dorothy.
The way to disarm this controversy is to get the casual voter to think it’s all about something else.
The reason Democrats win so often is because when Republicans are attacked, they listen to the state media and play the “we’re taking the high road” game. That means, with something like this, they pretend the controversy is not happening and “just ignore it”. That’s why we nudged Scott Brown to fully embrace his nude modeling past, where a typical Republican would have kept saying “no comment” or “let’s just talk about the issues” while the public got more and more curious about why he didn’t want to talk about those photos.
His supporters directly calling him Hottie McAwesome and putting the photos on his campaign materials took the wind out of Democrats’ sails.
O’Donnell can do the same thing with this witch business by shifting the negative energy onto the media…through the magic of disciplined campaign messaging and the embrace of the term “witch” redefined as “a woman who speaks her mind and stands up to those holding power”.
O’Donnell needs to show voters that women with opinions and convictions are demonized as “witches” because they won’t go along with the old boys’ network. She needs to make voters WANT to have a “witch”, in this vein, sent to the Senate to work her particular brand of house-cleaning magic on the Cocktail Party Republicans and corrupt Democrats who have made a mess of this country.
O’Donnell can use brooms as her campaign imaging…which she could say means she’s going to sweep the establishment guys out of power…but this would subtly and psychologically tie into her being called a witch by the Democrats.
Then, whenever Democrats would try to use that 1999 interview against her, voters will have a muddled impression of their meaning. The more O’Donnell embraces the “witch” as a campaign positive, the more voters will think of her “brooms to sweep out the establishment” or her “witches are any woman who dares to buck the system” metaphors instead of thinking of O’Donnell as a kook, the way Democrats want.
Republicans need to stop running and “just ignoring” the Democrats’ lines of attack, and instead start gutting them by repurposing these attacks into Hottie McAwesome-grade positives.
BREAKING: HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy throwing another tantrum; upset HER personally designed logo was not chosen to be new Democrat emblem
Click to embiggen
Click to, uh, um, embiggen
You know, click to, embiggen. You know?
Word in Democrat circles this weekend is that the disastrous toilet-inspired logo Tim Kaine unveiled with great fanfare as “an exciting new direction for the Democrat Party” was a last-minute, intern-produced substitute for a more elaborately crafted logo the DNC hoped would change their electoral prospects this November.
Because she’s not doing anything, much, with her life, the DNC tasked HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy to come up with a new logo. They sent her paper, plenty of crayons, all sorts of markers, safety scissors, glitter glue, and a veritable Michael’s Craft Center full of supplies and asked her house maid Helga to make sure Princess Caroline stayed focused and created something wonderful.
After a few minutes of working on the new logo, Princess Caroline got bored, said it was “hard work”, and started defenestrating crayons and markers down the fifty odd flights from the top of her penthouse to the streets of Manhattan, narrowly missing New Yorkers below. Collapsing into a heap of sobs, Princess lashed out at Helga next, and was only sedated and returned to reason when her loyal maid promised she’d get Princess dressed in one of her favorite shopping frocks for an adventure at Bergdorf-Goodman’s that afternoon. ”To make everything better, mine Princess”.
On the ride to the store, Helga coaxed enough ideas out of Princess Caroline to create the above Powerpoint Presentation, which was dispatched with great haste to Tim Kaine.
Finding Princess Caroline’s work wholly unusable, Kaine soon had egg on his face after making a big deal about announcing a “spectacular new Democrat logo” to the world this week.
Hence, the reason Democrats went with this:
h/t Angelisms
Seriously.
That’s what must have happened…because there is just no other reason we can think of for the unveiling of THIS new Democrat logo.
Spam computers are evolving: have learned to use avatars
One of the unintended benefits, or consequences (depending on how you look at it), of running this site is witnessing all the tricks spam computers use to get their links onto threads.
We’d love someone out there to explain to us WHY they do this, and what the benefit is to the people behind these spam servers. Do they make money the more places they put their links? Do people actually go to these linked sites and buy things? What’s the point of all this spam? These are questions we’ve never gotten any answers for, and would love your input on.
Today, it felt like watching a horror movie where zombies learned to run…because we spotted the very first spam computer that’s learned to us an avatar when posting spam links. Previously, we’d never seen spammers do this.
Click to embiggen
There’s an image of the Vampire Lestat up there, and the spammer’s using a german email account with the address of ad21@arcor.de.
This could be someone at a university, because of how the IP address switches in the span (or spam) of seconds. We’ve been told university computer labs allow people to do this, because every time someone logs out and then logs back into the system they get assigned a new IP address by the university servers. A lot of hatemail and troll comments come from university systems because, unsurprisingly, a lot of college-aged people seem prone to being trolls. But we can’t imagine someone would be able to hook up a spamming computer in a university computing lab…so maybe the IP assignments carry into dorm rooms too, where they can log out and then log back in with their spam computer and use the college’s servers to mask where they are.
Lestat posted two spam messages within the same minute, jumping from IP address 75.132.161.18 to 66.119.9.207, hitting two different threads. One of them was our most recent thread, and the other seems to be just a random thread from yesterday. So we don’t know why those were chosen, or why this person needed to post links to a paintball forum and a breastfeeding site here.
We’d love to hear from any computer experts on what’s going on with these spammers…and if there’s a way to use their IP addresses to identify who these people actually are. We know how to employ the publicly available search engines to zero in on the city and state an IP address is coming from, but wonder if someone out there can get to the actual person behind the spam computers.
Has anyone ever read an article about the point behind spamming? Is this just like Internet graffiti and these guys are “tagging” the Net with this garbage, or do they make money off it somehow?
We still can’t figure out WHY these people do what they’re doing.
