Sunday Funnies

GOP searches for relevance *update*

They won't be able to find it with a mirror and both hands:

Who am I? Why am I? Where am I going?

So very, very much for the Republicans to ponder in this Winter of the Democrats' Contentment. So many questions. Even the reliable color scheme has gone blurry. Isn't that big-shot GOP strategist Alex Castellanos swirling Republican red with Democrat blue, and coming up with a Washington consulting shop called -- heavens! -- "Purple?" Why, yes.

"Sit tight," the new firm's Web site says. "We are still mixing the colors."

...

"We're in this rebuilding time," Monica Notzon, a Washington-based Republican fundraiser, helpfully explained this month. "Trying to figure out who we are."

It is into this new world order, this Washington version of an existential whorl, that a steadfastly loyal group of Republicans descend this week, skidding into an iced-over landscape and holing up at the Capital Hilton beginning yesterday for a four-day winter meeting of the Republican National Committee. (Not to be missed on the restorative agenda: a "Reboot the RNC" open house.) They've themed the whole get-together "Republican for a Reason," and left it at that.

"Republican for a reason?" says Stephen Scheffler, a committeeman from Iowa, pausing before a banner carrying the slogan. "I don't know what that means."

Why, it means obstruction and blockage. It means they are against American economic recovery because not a single one of them voted for an American economic stimulus plan. It means they don't want torturers in the past administration prosecuted, and it means they still hate France.

Contenders for the RNC slot include former Ohio vote suppressor Ken Blackwell, and and the Great State's very own Tina Fish of Texas, who promise more kow-towing to the extreme right-wing.

I think that's going to work out real well:

The more conservative, partisan, and strident their message becomes, the more they alienate non-base Republicans. But the more they alienate non-base Republicans, the fewer of them are left to worry about appeasing. Thus, their message becomes continually more appealing to the base -- but more conservative, partisan, and strident to the rest of us. And the process loops back upon itself.

No matter how miserably the GOP may fail at a comeback nationally, I would imagine that the freaks here in Texas who keep electing them will remain at least ten years behind the times.


Update: Annnnnnnnnnd it's Michael Steele.

Limbaugh found dead, thousands commit suicide

Popular right-wing radio host and titular head of the Republican party Rush Limbaugh was found dead tonight in his home of an apparent heart attack.

Preliminary results indicate a prescription drug overdose aggravated by Limbaugh's morbid obesity. Several empty bottles of the prescription drugs Viagra and Oxycontin were found littering the scene.

An attending coroner said that Limbaugh had ingested enough medication "to kill Elvis ten times over", and admitted to having never seen such a high level of the drugs in any human being. Limbaugh was found in an upright position on his $743,000 solid gold, extra-large commode, with a microphone in one hand. (The toliet had recently been acquired from former Texas House speaker Tom Craddick, who previously had it installed in the plush living quarters afforded the head of the Lone Star State's legislative body.)

As initial reports of Limbaugh's demise hit the airways, thousands of his devoted listeners began to take their own lives in various gruesome ways, many leaving behind suicide notes indicating that they simply couldn't go on without their daily 3 hours of right wing propaganda five times a week.

Hundreds of mortuaries across the nation are overflowing with deceased dittoheads, and emergency rooms are full of botched suicides and hundreds of 'walking dead' Limbaugh devotees, all of whom seem to be in a semi-catatonic state. Numerous accounts from around the nation report that conservatives are walking into heavy traffic, into the sea, off of cliffs and high buildings, and killing or injuring themselves in bizarre mass suicides from copycat drug ingestion to group shootings.

Law enforcement agencies in all fifty states are urging citizens to be on the lookout for the large numbers of the radio host's listeners wandering the streets of America, trying to take their own lives by any means available.

"Obviously anyone who looks or behaves like a zombie is to be considered a Rush Limbaugh fan, but other indications are a blank stare, profuse drooling and speaking in gibberish", said Sergeant David Scroggins of the Houston Police Dept.

Hundreds of bodies of dead and rotting dittoheads clutter the streets around the various radio studios across the country from which the deceased entertainer's radio show was broadcast, and more are stumbling to the scenes in various stages of catatonia, leaving traffic at a standstill and overwhelming the makeshift morgues popping up along the streets. "I haven't seen anything like this since those Jim Jones cultists drank the Kool-Aid," said HPD Captain Leon Jones.

Funeral services pending at this time, but preparations are being made to dig the largest grave in history to inter Limbaugh near one of his favorite places, the parking lot of the Denny's in Palm Beach, Florida where he was rumored to have acquired the drugs that took his life from his former housekeeper.

Notable deceased fans who have been identified to date include former Texas congressman Dick Armey, Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana and Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, and former White House staffer Mary Matalin.

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Too bad it's just satire, isn't it?

John Updike 1932 - 2009

Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor, John Updike — who died on Tuesday at 76 — was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters. He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.

It is as a novelist who opened a big picture window on the American middle class in the second half of the 20th century, however, that he will be best remembered. In his most resonant work, Mr. Updike gave “the mundane its beautiful due,” as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision. In Kodachrome-sharp snapshots, he gave us the 50’s and early 60’s of suburban adultery, big cars and wide lawns, radios and hi-fi sets, and he charted the changing landscape of America in the 70’s and 80’s, as malls and subdivisions swallowed up small towns and sexual and social mores underwent a bewildering metamorphosis.

Mr. Updike’s four keenly observed Rabbit novels (“Rabbit, Run,” 1960; “Rabbit Redux,” 1971; “Rabbit Is Rich,” 1981; and “Rabbit at Rest,” 1990) chronicled the adventures of one Harry Rabbit Angstrom — high school basketball star turned car salesman, householder and errant husband — and his efforts to cope with the seismic public changes (from feminism to the counterculture to antiwar protests) that rattled his cozy nest. Harry, who self-importantly compared his own fall from grace to this country’s waning power on the global stage, his business woes to the national deficit, was both a representative American of his generation and a kind of scientific specimen — an index to the human species and its propensity for doubt and narcissism and self immolation.

He wrote about the mundane, and underneath his pen it became spectacular.

“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to,” he told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”

His essays and criticism alone filled more than a dozen volumes, and ranged from “Golf Dreams: Writings on Art” (1996) to “Just Looking: Essays on Art” (1989) and “Still Looking: Essays on American Art” (2005) to “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs” (1989) to his famous piece on the baseball star Ted Williams’s last game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” (1977), which first appeared in The New Yorker on Oct. 22, 1960.

While his vast output of poetry tended toward light verse, in “Midpoint and Other Poems” (1969), the title work undertakes a self-examination at age 35, comically combining a homage to past great poets, autobiography and experimental typography in what the author called “a joke on the antique genre of the long poem.”

The poem concludes:

Born laughing, I’ve believed in the absurd,
Which brought me this far; henceforth, if I can,
I must impersonate a serious man.

As his fiction matured, Mr. Updike’s prose grew leaner and more muscular, and his novels waxed more exotic in form, locale and subject matter, especially in “The Coup” (1978), set in an imaginary African country; “Brazil” (1994), a venture in magic realism; “Toward the End of Time” (1997), whose story occurs in 2020, following a war between the United States and China; “Gertrude and Claudius” (2000), about Hamlet’s mother and uncle, and “The Terrorist” (2006), a fictional study of a convert to Islam who tries to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel.

Godspeed to one of the great American authors.

The demise of Jared Woodfill (?) *update*

Perhaps exaggeration, but Alan Bernstein passes it along anyway:

Smarting over their party's losses in the November election in Harris County, some local Republican precinct chairmen are poised to try to restructure party leadership, effectively deposing party chairman Jared Woodfill -- tonight.

Precinct leaders meet at 7 p.m. at the Houston Community College campus on the West Loop, and the show is free and open to the public.

Restive GOPers will try to get the assemblage to create a seven-member steering committee to set a new course for the party and then yield to whomever is elected party chairman in the county's March 2010 primary.

They allege that under Woodfill, the party failed to coordinate effectively with like-minded folks in adjacent counties, to raise enough money to run party operations, to recruit enough candidates for public office and to expand the party's voter base, among other things.

Woodfill has been preaching some of the same goals: expand the party's appeal to new voters; use new technologies to spread the word. But he's the one who was in charge when the party lost two-dozen judgeships and other local seats in November in the face of a Democratic vote wave that was generated by President Obama's candidacy, scandals involving local GOP officials (as depicted here by Democrats) and other factors.

I'll believe it when I read about it, Alan. And I'm standing by ready to update the news here when you report it.

Update: Kevin Whited, in the comments to the above, links a Twit who reported that Woodfill repelled the overthrow attempt. Alan followed shortly after with this:

The Rev. Gene Pack prayed at the start of tonight's 7 o'clock Harris County Republican leadership meeting for blessings upon party chairman Jared Woodfill "in these times of rebellion."

When the meeting was adjourned after 9:30, Woodfill's critics hadn't even tried to introduce a resolution that .. would have essentially taken away much of his authority.

Pre-Super Week Wrangle

It's the first Monday of the new Obama Administration, and that means it's time for another edition of the Texas Progressive Alliance Weekly Round-Up.

Would you like a Cheeseburger in Paradise made from Texas Black Angus raised on drilling waste? Get yours at Bluedaze: Drilling Reform for Texas. Served up by TXsharon.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wonders why John Cornyn is dropping poo in our collective punch bowl. Why be reasonable when you can be a Republican?

WhosPlayin was glued to the TV all day Tuesday, popping the cork on champagne at 11 AM. But ultimately there were more important things.

jobsanger thinks it was wrong for federal and state representatives to threaten the El Paso city council with cutting off state and federal funds if they passed a resolution asking the government to reconsider the failed "war on drugs" in Legislators Threaten El Paso Council.

At McBlogger, we're all about things that make your taco go POP!

Off the Kuff commented on the actions of the State Board of Education in which efforts by religious conservatives to weaken science education were (mostly) thwarted.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston has posted how much money Bob Perry has donated in 2008.

Gay divorce comes to Texas once again, forcing the hand of the judicial system to do what is right in civil law. The Texas Cloverleaf examines the case in Dallas.

Neil at Texas Liberal inquires about Barack Obama's urban policy.

The Texas Congressional GOP delegation is still voting to deny poor children their health insurance, and John Cornyn continues acting like a massive bleeding hemorrhoid. It's just a gambit to establish himself as the conservative foil to President Obama, and perhaps presage a White House bid of his own in 2012. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs has the bloody details.

BossKitty at TruthHugger illustrates how Homeland Security can justify any risk. All euphemisms aside, taking the most lethal pathogens in the US arsenal into America's heartland and breadbasket seems suicidal. Plum Island to Manhattan - Pathogens On The Move. Instead of taking researchers to the lethal experiment, they are placing the experiment among us.

Burnt Orange Report formalizes and announces its Right to Respond Policy.

Though the Three Wise Men have been as critical of Israel's actions in Gaza as anyone, we're as quick to point out -- as historian Mark LeVine makes clear -- that Hamas' embrace of violence hasn't exactly helped the cause of Palestinian self-determination either.

Vince from Capitol Annex takes a look at Houston mayor Bill White's campaign finance reports and notes that White is spending money from his municipal campaign account on his race for U.S. Senate.

Sunday Funnies