Who is Dylan Ratigan, and why is he becoming a trending topic on Twitter?:
Dylan Ratigan is a nazi and a murderer.
Dylan Ratigan eats fetuses.
Dylan Ratigan killed all the Kennedys.
Dylan Ratigan causes cancer.
Dylan Ratigan’s pact with the devil caused the earthquake in Chile.
Dylan Ratigan is jack the ripper.
He sounds like an awful, awful man!
OH:
He is an awful, awful man!
Lori Ziganto, (Snark and Boobs) has more at Red State.
Hat tip: Caleb Howe on Twitter.
Here is Al Gore’s dramatic poetry reading from his appearance on CBS’s Early Show in December. Some special effects may have been added:
Since it’s kind of hard to hear the audio, here’s the words to Gore’s “bleak climate change poem”:
One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sun
Vapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea
Neptune’s bones dissolve
Snow glides from the mountain
Ice fathers floods for a season
A hard rain comes quickly
Then dirt is parched
Kindling is placed in the forest
For the lightning’s celebration
Unknown creatures
Take their leave, unmourned
Horsemen ready their stirrups
Passion seeks heroes and friends
The bell of the city
On the hill is rung
The shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools
A Huffpo writer said the poem was “one that Yeats might have been proud of”…Rush said it was “stupid”.
Mare in the comments said, “It blows”.
Hat tip: My hubby, who made the video for me.
“Wake up and smell the ‘turf”
The glowing reports on the new “Coffee Party” in the Washington Post and NYTs seems to have missed this angle in covering its creator, Annabel Park. Look what William Jacobson has dug up:
The Coffee Party is a political parasite which presents itself as something it is not. As reported in the NY Times, Park presents herself as not hostile to the Tea Party movement, and in fact, hopes to bring some Tea Partiers into her group:
“We’re not the opposite of the Tea Party,” Ms. Park, 41, said. “We’re a different model of civic participation, but in the end we may want some of the same things.” ….
Ms. Park and chapter organizers said they would invite Tea Party members to join their Coffee counterparts in discussions. “We need to roll up our sleeves, put our heads together and work it out,” she said. “That’s, to me, an American way of doing this.”
In fact, a simple internet search (which the NY Times apparently is not capable of doing) reveals that Park organized the Coffee Party for the specific purpose of undermining the Tea Party movement.
Park is a former Strategy Analyst at the NY Times who was one of organizers and operators of the United for Obama video channel at YouTube:A Korean-American filmmaker is in charge of creating video clips that are playing a role in increasing support for Senator Barack Obama, the frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
See Legal Insurrection for the full story.
Yes, Nice Deb could have done a simple Google search, too, while I was writing my Coffee Party post, yesterday, but honestly, I just found them so tedious, and lame, hopefully you can forgive my lack of curiosity. I was more interested writing about the disgusting media double standard in covering these tedious astroturfers.
Note to all new Coffee Partiers: You guys do realize that you’re dupes, right? This isn’t a ground-up movement, but a top-down one.
As long as they’re okay with that…
MORE:
Annabel Park was also part of a pro-illegal immigration YouTube project in 2008:
Filmmakers Eric Byler, Annabel Park, and Jeff Man run “9500Liberty”, a pro-illegal immigration online documentary project discussing issues in northern Virginia (youtube.com/user/9500Liberty). In the past they’ve resorted to re-re-re-repurposing supposedly controversial comments from an older white gentleman in an attempt to racially demagogue the issue, but now they’re back with a new video called “IMMIGRATION Crackdown HURTS Our Economy”
The website for 9500Liberty is here.
Don’t look now, but:
There’s another new party in town, called The Cocoa Party!
Tired of the Coffee Party and the Tea Party? We’re the newest game in town!
I woke up this morning and realized I didn’t want tea or coffee. I wanted hot cocoa!
So I turned on my computer and in a few minutes founded a new political movement — The Cocoa Party!
Yes, it was that simple.
Then I got one of my friends at the newspaper where I used to work to violate all professional journalistic ethics by writing a puff-piece about me without revealing that I used to work there. Thanks!
Also, thanks for not mentioning that I used to really really really like Kool-Aid.
Now, in between fielding 100 emails an hour from new members wanting to start chapters from Wasilla to Waco, Twittering 17 witty tweets per minute, fielding calls from TV producers and journalists, and weeping with joy and sincerity about our wonderful country, I barely have time to consider that I’ve just revolutionized politics — all before lunch!
But enough about me. This is about The Cocoa Party!
I may hafta join Zombie on this one…it sounds like the next big thing!
Well, lookie here:
The Cocoa Party now has a Facebook page, go sign up if it floats your boat.
Thanks to Little Miss Attila
The pressure is on Pelosi to pass the Senate bill in the House, before it goes on to reconciliation in the Senate, but there continues to be a question as to how she’s going to get the votes.
The Politico reports:
After a year of competing proposals and controversy, the fate of the president’s health care proposal rests with a small pocket of Democrats who are caught between the demands of party leaders in Washington and the discontent of angry voters back home. Some voted for earlier bills. Others didn’t.
“I just don’t know where they get the votes in the House,” said Pennsylvania Rep. Jason Altmire, a Democrat who opposed the House bill but now says he’d consider supporting the final package. “It’s a huge challenge because … the people who voted yes would love a second bite at the apple to vote no this time because they went home and had an unpleasant experience as a result of their ‘yes’ vote. I don’t know if there is anybody who voted no that regrets it.”
So here comes Plan C, which I’m guessing won’t be much smaller than the bill Obama introduced last week but will, as Barnes hints, incorporate a few GOP ideas like tort reform. The hope is that liberals will be placated by its sheer size while Blue Dogs will be tempted by the inclusion of a few token conservative proposals to make their vote more defensible to red districts. Pelosi gave you a sneak preview of the new spin yesterday: The bill doesn’t need Republican votes to be “bipartisan,” all it needs are Republican ideas. And if it has Republican ideas, why shouldn’t it be rammed through with reconciliation, right? Voila — Plan C, the first “bipartisan” bill in history aimed at a party-line vote.
Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama has been able to watch the health care debate from both sides of the aisle. Elected as a Democrat in 2008, he was part of the House Democratic caucus until last Dec. 22, when he switched sides to become a Republican.
Given Griffith’s unique perspective — he is also a doctor, with 30 years’ experience as an oncologist — perhaps he has some insight into why the White House and his former Democratic allies in Congress continue to press forward on a national health care bill despite widespread public opposition.
It’s gotten personal, Griffith says. “You have personalities who have bet the farm, bet their reputations, on shoving a health care bill through the Congress. It’s no longer about health care reform. It’s all about ego now. The president’s ego. Nancy Pelosi’s ego. This is about personalities, saving face, and it has very little to do with what’s good for the American people.”
Conflicts driven by personal feelings can lead to self-destructive outcomes. Ask Griffith whether Speaker Pelosi, his old leader, would accept losing Democratic control of the House as the price for passing the health care bill, and he answers quickly. “Oh yeah. This is a trophy for the speaker, it’s a trophy for several committee chairs, and it’s a trophy for the president.” It does not seem to matter that if Democrats lose the House, the speaker will no longer be speaker, the chairmen will no longer be chairmen, and the president will be significantly weakened.
As Griffith sees his former colleagues, Democratic leaders have become so consumed with the idea of achieving the historical goal of a national health care system that they are able to explain away the scores of opinion polls over the last six months that show people solidly opposed to the Democratic proposal.
And now Democratic leaders are showing signs of weakness. Why would they suddenly express interest, even feigned interest, in Republican ideas they derided for months? Why would they invite GOP lawmakers to a high-profile discussion of health care? Because they don’t have the votes to pass the bill. “If they had the votes, we wouldn’t have had the summit,” said Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn on CBS Sunday.
That’s a change from the heady days of last year, when Democrats, as Griffith says, “never really wanted anyone else’s input” on health care. When a Republican offered a suggestion, “There was a polite smile and a comment like, ‘That’s very interesting, and we’ll take a look,'” Griffith recalls. Of course, they never did. Now, they make a big show of listening.
But it’s too late to make the fundamental changes that would be required to improve the bill. It’s too late to change public opinion. It’s too late to reassure nervous lawmakers. The Democratic leadership has made the decision to push the bill to the very end, and so they will.
It’s personal.
Just a thought…
If as Karl Rove says, Pelosi tries to strong arm wavering blue dogs by threatening to make their lives hell in the House, what’s to stop them from switching sides like Griffith did? That would be one way to keep their jobs…
It’s unfortunate that we have to revisit the Van Jones story, because everything you need to know about him has already been said (by he himself), and is readily available on YouTube. But there is now a concerted effort in the media to change the narrative and resurrect his reputation.
In other words, they’re lying as usual.
Katrina vanden Heuvel demonstrates:
Van Jones, who resigned from the White House Council on Environmental Quality last fall in the face of a coordinated smear campaign by conservative activists, has reemerged from his self-imposed exile. He’ll be teaching at Princeton University and taking up a senior fellowship at the Center for American Progress, where he will head a “green opportunity initiative.”
It was a coordinated smear campaign, huh? Coordinated by whom, I wonder? The mythical leader of the tea party movement? Rupert Murdoch? And how is bringing peoples’ attention to the man’s own words and past deeds, “smears”? We’re not allowed to know he’s a commie, so to say so is a smear, apparently.
Vanden Heuvel goes on:
In giving him the NAACP’s President’s Award, Jealous referred to Jones’s missteps, including political statements made years ago. Yes, it was a misstep to sign a 911truth.org petition. But Jones repudiated his signature and said the petition’s wording didn’t then and doesn’t now represent his views. In a saner political environment, that would have been the end of it. Or, as the NAACP’S Jealous put it, “we can never afford to forget that a defining trait of our country is our collective capacity to practice forgiveness and celebrate redemption. This is a nation built on second chances.”
So she focuses on one “misstep”. As if that was the main issue. How about the misstep of him being a self described Communist revolutionary?
“Clownish demagogue”, Glenn Beck, bless his heart, is having none of it. He made Jones the subject of his show, yesterday, again:
Part one:
Part two:
Hat tip: Weasel Zippers.
UPDATE:
David Swindle at The Newsreal Blog decided to fisk Vanden Heuvel, too.
Ya gotta love ’em.
The tea party movement, which just celebrated its one year anniversary, was all but ignored by the MSM until the week of April 15, when tea parties were scheduled all across the nation, and were expected to be huge. By tax day, the MSM went from snubbing, (which was no longer credible) – to ridiculing, and the term, “tea bagger” was born.
The tea parties sprung up spontaneously, as citizens recoiled in horror from the “audacious” deficit spending in Obama’s Stimulus, and Omni spending bills. A year later, our fears have proven to be true. Jobs have been lost as the country limps towards an economic recovery that would have happened sooner without the government intervention. I went to several tea party events between the Feb 28 snowstorm protest on the Plaza, and the three I went to on April 15th. At each of these tea parties, I wondered, “Where is the media?” Tea party events were happening all across he nation, and the only ones covering them, were right wing blogs.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when a progressive copycat group called, “the coffee party”, emerged with its own blog.
With mainly complaints about the the divisive nature of politics, and echos of the latest media meme: “The process is broken”,…there’s not much to go on, but it sounds like a progressive backlash to the tea party movement.
So naturally the MSM has perked up its ears, and a “movement” that started less than a month ago, has already been the subject of glowing profiles in the New York Times, and Washington Post.
Allahpundit notes:
The first blog post on the CP website is dated February 23, as is the “About Us” page, which means it took the two biggest papers in America less than a week after the new site started posting in earnest to catch lefty grassroots Coffee Party fee-vah. (Their Facebook page has been up since last month.) Fancy that.
Really.
Thirty people turned up at the LA chapter meeting this past Sunday; I assume they’ll be getting a full NYT Sunday Magazine profile when they hit 50
30 people showed up in sunny LA for a meeting, last Sunday?
A year ago, 200 of us met on the Plaza in KC, for a tea party during a friggin’ snow storm:
It got no mention in the local paper. Neither did the Olathe tea party, or the Leawood tea party. Nationwide tea parties that were attracting protesters by the thousands got little to no coverage by the MSM, either.
The tax day tea parties changed all that, of course. The media started paying attention to us, alright, but not to give us glowing profiles in leading papers and magazines. Mainly to laugh, and point, at first. The attacks came a little later. And of course now, a whole year later, any maniac who has ever expressed a dislike of paying taxes, is given he title of “tea partier.
The NYTs crows that he Coffee Party movement has already garnered close to 40,000 Facebook fans by Monday afternoon. Not surprising, considering they’ve been profiled in two major newspapers, as well as countless other news outlets.
By word of mouth, the “Scrap the Bill” movement on Facebook has managed to attract 17,000 fans. (Nows your chance to join, if you haven’t already).
See also:
Big Journalism: WaPo Ignores Tea Parties, Astroturfs the ‘Coffee Parties’ — World Amazed
UPDATE:
Legal Insurrection: Coffee Party Parasites:
Astroturf alert: Coffee Party creator is not what has been advertised…
Park is a former Strategy Analyst at the NY Times who was one of organizers and operators of the United for Obama video channel at YouTube.
Previously:
Beware The Fake Tea Partiers and Lefty Wannabes
Nice Deb 
