Day: October 20, 2010

Tea Party Thuggery: ‘When Fascism Comes to America, It Will Be Wrapped in the Flag, Carrying a Cross’

Jon Ponder
Left: Private security thugs arrest a reporter after a Joe Miller town-hall event in Alaska – Right: News segment on leather-clad veterans physically intimidating a Democratic operative at an Allen West event in Florida.

“When fascism comes to America,” Sinclair Lewis supposedly predicted in 1935, “it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Note that the quote sets up the arrival of fascism as certain — “when,” not “if,” it comes. Watch the two videos above — both taken within the last week or so — and you may wonder if that day has finally arrived.

[…]

Indecipherable Palin Tweet Translated: “I Don’t Know What I’m Talking About”

Trish

sarahtweet

Pennsylvania, West Virginia, who can keep them straight? Not Sarah Palin, tweeting one of her highly-sought and overwrought endorsements for U.S. Senate candidate John Raese – to voters in the wrong state. CNN reports that, like all things Sarah does and then regrets, the tweet has been pulled from her Twitter feed.

The West Virginia Democratic Party took the opening on behalf of candidate Joe Manchin, releasing this swipe:

“With John Raese, it is easy to get confused as to where he actually lives. He may be running for Senate in West Virginia, but he really could choose to run in any of the states in which he belongs to a country club,” Chairman Larry Puccio said in the statement. “West Virginians can’t really fault Sarah Palin for getting confused – we are too.”

NC Sen: Dem Elaine Marshall Moving Up – Kos: ‘Most Winnable Race of Cycle Ignored By DSCC, This One Ain’t Over’

Jon Ponder

As a long-time Tar Heel in my past life, N.C. Secretary of State Elaine Marshall‘s campaign to unseat GOP Sen. Richard Burr has been on my radar for months. Burr — an ideological intellectual featherweight along the lines of Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell and former Sen. Lauch Faircloth — is the biggest political embarrassment to my home state since the retirement of the bizarre racist homophobe Jesse Helms.

Marshall is North Carolina’s first woman secretary of state — she defeated NASCAR legend Richard Petty for the job in 1996, 53 percent to 45 percent. She has been running a smart, effective campaign on a shoe string, but with no cash to buy ads, her polling has been so anemic that Sen. Burr has already taken a “victory lap” tour around the state. Talk about measuring the drapes.

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Verbatim

Buck Banks

The one sobering thought that veteran Republican consultants are already contemplating is that the larger the wave this year, the more difficult it will be to hold onto some of these seats in 2012 and 2014 in the House and 2016 in the Senate. The bigger the wave, the weaker the class and the harder it will be to hold onto those seats. Democrats only have to look at their 2006 and 2008 classes for plenty of examples …. What this means is that we will likely have our third wave election in a row this year, and the bigger this one is, the more likely that there will be a countervailing wave in either 2012 or 2014.

— Political analyst Charlie Cook, looking ahead past the 2010 midterms.