We Don’t Need a Fortune Teller to Read Palin’s Palm

ecardimageMore evidence that Sarah Palin’s hand isn’t going away. A new Valentine’s Day card design is available from my favorite free ecard resource, someecards.

Palin’s cynical hypocrisy has been highlighted repeatedly during her short but riveting time in the national eye. In her speech to the Republican convention after being named John McCain’s running mate, she boasted that she refused funding for a proposed public works project that came to be known as the Bridge to Nowhere. In fact, Palin lobbied for the money. Her expensive, donor-funded wardrobe, make-up, and personal stylist during the presidential campaign flew directly in the face of her claims of humble hockey momdom, as did the tanning bed she had installed at taxpayer expense in the Alaska governor’s mansion. Then there was her book tour, which utilized a Lear Jet between stops, with Palin climbing into a bus only to pull up to her adoring fans. And most recently, there was the matter of the $100,000 speaking fee for the Tea Party convention itself, which Palin claims she will spend not on herself but on other candidates and causes (she just hasn’t named any). I could go on, but it would take too long.

At the same time, Palin’s fierce defense of sheer dumbness over what she terms “elitism” has been shown to be personally motivated. Her claims to CBS’s Katie Couric that she read tons of newspapers and objected to scads of Supreme Court rulings, yet couldn’t name a single example of either, is the stuff of legend. The staged pardoning of a turkey during her aborted tenure as Alaska governor took place as another bird was slaughtered on camera in the background. She showed how easily she could be pwned when she took a call from a prankster claiming to be the president of France, and failed to catch on to the rouse. Again, I could go on almost without end.

As quickly as each of those news cycles ended, it looks like there is something enduring about the scribbled notes in Palin’s hand as she snarked away at Obama with sour teleprompter shots. Like the “changey-hopey” line Pain stole from the Tea Baggers themselves, the teleprompter meme is so ten minutes ago. Obama himself dispelled it forever* when he appeared at the recent House GOP retreat and answered hostile questions extemporaneously – and nimbly – for 90 minutes. Not once during the exchange did he duck his head to peak into his left palm.

Like her claim of foreign policy experience based on Alaska’s proximity to Russia’s Chukchi Peninsula, Palin’s ink-stained hand provides ample and abiding evidence that she is not so bright. For those who share that trait, Palin is a rock star. For all others, we don’t need to visit Madame Ruby to see Palin’s future: it holds more of the same tired, faux opposition to any progressive thought, and more successful manipulation of those who were telling the truth when they said in 2008 that they “weren’t ready” for a black man to be president.

*”Forever” in the sense of appealing to rational minds, so this would exclude Birthers and Tea Baggers

Tea Bag Party to Hold First Convention – Palin Reportedy Being Paid $100k to Speak

Sarah Palin in full Tea Bagger regalia (found on the Internets)
Sarah Palin in full Tea Bagger regalia (uncredited photo)

With the mid-term elections looming, it is clear that the Tea Baggers’ populist, anti-Obama energy is being channeled into the the formation of a new national political party. With funding from wealthy right-wing extremists, including the Koch brothers and others, political operatives like former House Majority Leader-turned lobbyist Dick Armey have masterfully astroturfed the Tea Baggers into a new power base comprised of the most easily duped and manipulated segment of American society: poorly educated, white Southerners and their counterparts in other regions.

The objective of the astroturfing is to organize working-class opposition to government regulation of the sources of corporate wealth — energy, health care, the media, etc. — and roll back and eventually kill government policies and programs such as Medicare, Social Security and Civil Rights protections that help, yes, working class Americans. It could be said that the corporate oligarchs are attempting to create a 21st century version of the Dixiecrat Party, which, in 1948, had a platform that is nearly identical to Tea Bagger positions today: local control, shrinking the federal government and — although this goes unstated, it’s there in the optics at the rallies — racial segregation.

The connections between the corporate oligarchs and their rent-boys like Armey are relatively easy to research. But Tea Baggers themselves are oblivious to their roles as the pawns in this new power grab. They have been kept in the dark because, over the past decade and more, conservatives have trained their base to trust only right-wing media outlets like hate radio and Fox News, and these outlets scrupulously avoid reporting on who is pulling the strings and why.

For regular Americans, however, the connections are hard to miss. In the weeks leading up to the Koch-funded Freedomwork’s Tea Bagger rallies last summer, for example, right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News gave the rallies hundreds of hours of free promotion. On the day of the rallies, Fox covered the live events wall-to-wall, frequently displaying racist anti-Obama signs on its air without comment. Just last month, Bill O’Reilly, the senior propagandist at Fox, did a segment cheerleading the formation of the Tea Bag Party (TBP), citing a poll that found that 41 percent of Americans favor the TBP over Democrats (35 percent) and Republicans (28 percent).

“Well, look,” O’Reilly told his panel of TBP supporters — no representative of the other parties were included to make the discussion, you know, “fair and balanced” — “if you want a viable third party, you got to break it down. I mean, you just got to kick the door in like [1992 third-party candidate Ross] Perot did and other people did.”

There’s even a Tea Bagger social-network group on Murdoch’s Wall St. Journal website promoting the formation of a national political party because — speaking of easily duped — the GOP and Dems are too cozy with corporate interests:

This is good news for the nation. Both the Republican and the Democrat party have been serving the private corporations for a long time. Everyone sees what has happened to this country are [sic] both their watches; they have failed. Leaving, or not running again is best for the USA. The ststaes [sic] need to fill out the proper forms and certify the TEA polictical [sic] party in their state. Do it, stop talking and blogging about it, actually do it and register a few TEA candidates for 2010. The time to act is now, not later. Returning to the American Constitution is correct, turning away from corporation bylaws is correct, watching these unAmerican kickbackers leave in [sic] good for the country. Jorge Lovenguth TEA Florida

At least one state group has made it official. Last November, right-wingers in Florida filled out the paperwork to register the TBP as an official political party in the state.

Around the same time, organizers announced that Tea Baggers would be holding a convention, Feb. 4 – 6, in Nashville. As it stands now, Sarah Palin has agreed to address the mob as the keynote speaker for the closing-night banquet. (There will be bibs.)

Palin is, of course, most famous for quitting and/or not showing up, and one pro-Tea Bag insider (he says he believes that “Palin and the grassroots Tea Party efforts are forces for good”) reports that Palin will be paid as much as $100,000 for the gig.

This calls into question the legitimacy of the Tea Baggers’ meeting in Nashville. Is it a step toward the birth of a national racist political party, or is it just a for-profit mass meeting to shake down America’s most hapless half-wits — a political version of an Amway convention?

If it is the former, it represents the first time a putative front-runner presidential candidate required payment to address her party. If so, it also shines a light on the astroturfing of this movement. If the Tea Baggers were a legitimate grass roots movement, they could have easily invited Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., a whackjob easily as looney-tunes as Palin, who would have spoken for free.

Writing back in November, even the Tea Bagger sympathizer is suspicious about the real purpose of the convention:

The schedule mentions break-out and discussion sessions with no topics, no list of moderators, etc. It’s unclear what anyone will be doing in Nashville for three days other than waiting for Sarah Palin. On top of that, the planning looks to be very poorly done.

The conference sessions, whatever they may be, end at 12:30 PM Saturday afternoon. There’s nothing happening again until the banquet at 6 PM that night. In most cases, all that will achieve is driving up participation costs due to the need for another night in a hotel. Attendees traveling any distance to the event would be all but forced to travel home on a Sunday. That may be fine if one is looking to maximize revenue for the area and some hotels. But it doesn’t seem to take Tea Party goers interests in mind at all.

But if the past is prologue with Palin, the controversy over whether she’s being paid to speak to her followers will soon be shoved aside for the eternal question about her: Will she show up, or will she quit the event before Feb. 6?

Read the Bill: Complete Text of Section of House Bill with Purported ‘Death Panel’ Provision

It’s a dead cinch that none of the folks screaming “Read the bill!” at members of Congress at health-care reform town hall meetings this month have actually read the bills themselves.

Top Republicans, including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, House Minority Leader John Boehner, former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey and others, are lying when they claim a provision in Section 1233, “Advance Care Planning Consultation,” sets up “death panels.”

By not reading the House bills — in particular, the one called “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009” — town hall disrupters who have also been railing about a purported provision in the bill that establishes “death panels” have revealed themselves to be hypocrites as well as willing dupes in a campaign by the medical lobbies and Republican leaders to kill reform in order to protect health-care profits.

Top Republicans, including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, House Minority Leader John Boehner, former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey and others — and just today Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa — are lying about the contents of Section 1233, “Advance Care Planning Consultation,” which they say requires elderly and infirm people to be evaluated by “death panels” every five years.

What the bill actually does is extend payments to Medicare recipients who seek professional counseling on end-of-life issues like setting up a living will and issuing “do not resuscitate” instructions to their families.

Facts do not matter to right-wingers, of course, but normal Americans who might take the Tea-baggers’ and Birthers’ venting about euthanasia at face value instead of seeing it for what it really is — rage over having a black president — need to know the truth.

The full text of Section 1233 follows:

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