Well lookee, here:

When Sarah Palin made her first trip to western Pennsylvania as GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s fresh-faced running mate, the Arizona senator warned locals that she “doesn’t let anyone tell her to sit down.”

Palin returned to Washington, Pa. on her own Saturday as a “Commonsense Conservative,” a definition crafted on her own terms and in her own words in her own best-selling memoir, “Going Rogue.”

“It’s grass roots America; it’s common sense,” said Joy Koplinski, 62, a retiree from Pittsburgh who waited overnight in the parking lot of a Sam’s Club warehouse store for Palin to autograph a copy of the book. “She’s the female Ronald Reagan.”

[...]

While it’s too early to call it a campaign, Palin’s brand of common sense conservatism crackles with the energy of a burgeoning political movement.

[...]

The term coined by Palin in her book has been around for a while, said Greg Mueller, a conservative strategist and a veteran of Republican presidential campaigns. Palin, however, seems to have seized on something timely by putting her brand on common sense conservatism, he said.

“If Palin is using it,” Mueller said, “there’s a very good chance it’s going to have resonance in certain communities.”

Who could have predicted?

Also. Sarah Palin is “the female Ronald Reagan”? I thought she was the female Margaret Thatcher.

Who knew?

We have heard a lot of outrage over the past several weeks from Tea Party Patriots around the country that no matter how loud we protest, no matter how often we go to DC, no matter how large our crowds are, Congress is not listening to us. We have heard that Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s office is getting phone calls 15 – 1 asking her to vote NO on cloture and against the health care bill. Despite what their constituents want, Congress appears to be doing what they want rather than representing us.

[...]

[T]he most concerning thing we have heard from our membership is that Congressional staff are flat out refusing to listen to their constituents. There have been reports of local offices closing when members show up to talk or protest, when calling DC the phone is never answered, when calling local offices the voice mail is perpetually full, and other such incidents.

I can’t imagine why these people are not taken seriously…

On a programing note, Barabara Ehrenreich, author of the indispensable examination of the invisible American underclass,  Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By In America, will be visiting the FDL Mothership Book Salon tomorrow at 5PM EST to chat about her new book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) delivers a trenchant look into the burgeoning business of positive thinking. A bout with breast cancer puts the author face to face with this new breed of frenetic positive thinking promoted by everyone from scientists to gurus and activists. Chided for her anger and distress by doctors and fellow cancer patients and survivors, Ehrenreich explores the insistence upon optimism as a cultural and national trait, discovering its symbiotic relationship with American capitalism and how poverty, obesity, unemployment and relationship problems are being marketed as obstacles that can be overcome with the right (read: positive) mindset. Building on Max Weber’s insights into the relationship between Calvinism and capitalism, Ehrenreich sees the dark roots of positive thinking emerging from 19th-century religious movements. Mary Baker Eddy, William James and Norman Vincent Peale paved the path for today’s secular $9.6 billion self-improvement industry and positive psychology institutes. The author concludes by suggesting that the bungled invasion of Iraq and current economic mess may be intricately tied to this reckless national penchant for self-delusion and a lack of anxious vigilance, necessary to societal survival.

This is one of the best books I’ve read this year, but then I’m a glass half-empty kind of guy.

The many uses of our wonderful and vibrant language

Oh english, you lingua franca of international business, science, technology, aviation. and new and interesting sexual practices! Is there any neologism we can’t create to fulfill our need to express the inexpressible? While Teabagger has taken the early lead for Most Awesomest Word of the Year, we have a dark horse entrant

ReFounder

As in, (in response to calling teabaggers “ignorant bullying blowhards“):

Those “ignorant bullying blowhards” are the same people who Founded this country. If you read Madison’s notes on the Constitution as well as the debates on Independence, the Revolutionaries didn’t get along or like each other a lot either. But they still founded this country to the values that made as the Greatest Nation the world has ever seen..as these ReFounders will do again.

It’s a noun! As in :

I, a ReFounder, will refind and reestablish the principles that, I have on good authority from some guy I saw on TV, can be found in the Constitution and which, once they have been refounded-ed, will save America from that black Kenyan guy. Amen.

Who could have predicted that the Teabaggers would start going Lord of the Flies on each other:

After emerging out of nowhere over the summer as a seemingly potent and growing political force, the tea party movement has become so rife with internal feuding over philosophy, strategy and money that some supporters fear it will disintegrate before realizing its full potential.

[...]

Disagreements over those issues have spawned personal and institutional rivalries, at least one highly contentious lawsuit and — perhaps most significantly — resulted in the splintering of local, regional and national groups into a patchwork of hundreds of smaller groups that occasionally seem to be working at cross-purposes.

[...]

In Myrtle Beach, S.C., disputes within the local tea party about how much to engage in partisan politics and whether board members were profiting from contracts to print paraphernalia emblazoned with the group’s logo prompted the treasurer to resign and join with defectors from a North Carolina “We the People” group to form a new organization.

“There’s a lot of fighting, and everyone wants to be in charge, and that’s why you have so many splinter groups,” said the ex-treasurer Janet Spencer, who charged her adversaries within the tea party with saying “derogatory things about me that were very unprofessional.”

She said her new group, called Patriotic Voices of America/Carolina Patriots, counts about 100 members and will not coordinate with the Myrtle Beach Tea Party, whose treasurer, David Ognek, said the friction is “just group dynamics.”

In Texas, a handful of thriving tea party groups severed their ties from the national Tea Party Patriots group after it ousted, then sued a founding board member who had affiliated with a rival group called the Tea Party Express.

[...]

In Northern Colorado, meanwhile, a handful of active 9/12 groups — named for the Glenn Beck-encouraged effort to stage the Sept. 12 Washington march — are unhappy with the state 9/12 group’s aversion to fundraising and with its focus on national issues and have discussed forming their own rival statewide group.

I would suggest Patriotic Wolverines of the American Jesus Eagles of Death Metal Liberation Front.

Or Shouty Stupid People because that would be cheaper to embroider on hats and fanny packs.

The 2,074-page Senate health care bill would take 34 hours to read cover to cover — and that’s just what Sen. Tom Coburn wants done on the Senate floor.

The Oklahoma Republican has threatened to invoke parliamentary rules to force the Senate clerk (or more likely, a team of clerks) to read the massive bill before the full Senate begins formal debate on the legislation.

[...]

What’s even more interesting is that Senate Rule XIV (paragraph 2) states that every bill and joint resolution “shall receive three readings prior to its passage.”

That is, like, almost five whole days (with pee breaks included), which is fine with Tom Coburn since he has a lot of time on his hands these days not having to spend his evenings with John Ensign in the combination Confessional/Totally Kickass Foosball Room located at the C Street Spermatorium , counseling Ensign about how Jesus hates it when you covet your senior aide’s wife and then, you know, sex her up.

William Jacobson, who is a Close But No Cigar Almost Professor at Cornell Law School, thinks this (the out loud reading thing, not the covet/sex thing, although maybe) is a wicked cool idea:

Absolutely this should be done. This absurd legislation deserves the theater of the absurd.

A reading out loud of this monstrosity for a day or two will be a great visual and audio montage.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Reading out loud the hundreds of thousands of words in Harry Reid’s bill will be worth million of votes.

Because the whole thing will be televised on every television channel for five straight days and every TV show that currently fills up the wasted hours our empty American existence will be pre-empted.

Except for Tyra’s show. That bitch will cut you if you fuck with her programing. I’m serious. Really. You best back the fuck up when it comes to Tyra.

As the below video demonstrates, it is entirely possible that the Sarah Palin plastic articulated action-figure is capable of jumping higher than the putatively warm-blooded occasionally articulate live action-figure of Michelle Malkin.

For the record: I always lose it when Michelle “makes” an “E”. It never gets old. Never.

Town Called Malice – The Jam
Get The Funk Out Of My Face – The Brothers Johnson
Wolfman’s Brother – Phish
Red Tide – Neko Case
No More Sorry – My Bloody Valentine
Sail Away – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
The Way We Make A Broken Heart – Ry Cooder
Breathe Underwater – Placebo
Prove It – Television
The Mountain – The Stills
and one more: You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch – Aimee Mann

Well, who doesn’t have that one?

My iTunes Top 25 Most Played informs me that I have listened to Grank Funk Railroad’s We’re An American Band 101 times which is one more time than I have apparently played Superfly.

This cannot be right.

This must be wrong.

Please.

Also. My next door neighbor woke up at 4am recently and spent $150 buying the entire Time/Life Flower Power collection (in the Collector box!). He is going to loan it to me to load onto my iPod.

Consider yourself warned.

I wonder if these people realize that the book isn’t a coloring book.

Courtesy of Wonkette