Well,

Unfortunately, when all you have is lemons, you have to make lemonade. If you think this one is good, wait till you see the one that Carly put out in California.



Whats pretty amazing about this ad, isn't necessarily the content of it by itself, its that its actually an ad endorsed by the candidate that goes negative on the opponent. Typically those types of ads are reserved for the PAC's and surrogate campaigns. People must really not like Senator Ma'am out there.

On the right, hateful words are fired like bullets

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, October 5, 2010

I still ride a bike. I do 12 miles, several days a week, and as I do so I listen to music -- the Pandora service on my iPhone. I have created a station that plays folk rock. Lately, it has repeatedly played the Neil Young song "Ohio": "What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?" On the bike, I have to repress a tear.

"Ohio" has been around for 40 years, and I have heard it over and over again. It's about the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State University during a demonstration against the Vietnam War. The killers were the equally young men of the Ohio National Guard. I was in the National Guard myself once. How did this happen? "This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio."

The hills slow me. I grind at them, going so slowly that when the song comes on I can listen intently to the lyrics. The line about the woman dead on the ground hits with concussive force. I feel I knew her. One of the four killed was Allison Krause, and she went to school in the Washington area. Her father, Arthur Krause, sometimes called me. Arthur had devoted himself to seeking justice for his daughter. He should have known better. He was a Holocaust survivor.

Saturday, on the bike, I listened hard: "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio."

I had been a reporter back when the killings occurred and it was a huge story to me. I longed for a chance to cover it, but I was young and raw, and the journalistic sluggers whooshed out of the newsroom, hailed a cab, jumped a plane and wrote the story -- the story. The story will keep you sane.

But it is a story no more and so, on the bike, the full horror of it came through: My God, American soldiers had shot American college students. This was not China, not Tiananmen Square, and not Iran and the pro-democracy rallies of last year -- not any of those places. This was America, just yesterday (take my word for it) and yet it had happened. How? I thought hard and then I remembered. Bullets had killed those kids, sure -- but they were fired, in a way, from the mouths of politicians.


The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, demonized the war protesters. They were "worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element. . . . We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent."

That was the language of that time. And now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage that fuels too much of the Tea Party and is the sum total of gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino's campaign message in New York. It is all this talk about "taking back America" (from whom?) and this inchoate fury at immigrants and, of course, this raw anger at Muslims, stoked by politicians such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Lazio, the latter having lost the GOP primary to Paladino for, among other things, not being sufficiently angry. "I'm going to take them out," Paladino vowed at a Tea Party rally in Ithaca, N.Y.

Back in the Vietnam War era, the left also used ugly language and resorted to violence. But the right, as is its wont, stripped the antiwar movement of its citizenship. It turned dissent into treason, which, in a way, was the worst treason of all. It made dissidents into the storied "other" who had nothing in common with the rest of us. They were not opponents; they were the enemy: Fire!

On my bike, I recalled those days and wondered if they have not returned. Sticks and stones may break bones, but words -- that singsong rebuttal notwithstanding -- can kill. We lose presidents to words and civil rights leaders to words -- homosexuals and immigrants and abortion providers, too. Richard Nixon is named in the song because he was the president at the time and because his words were ugly. He was enthralled by toughness, violence.

I hear the song more clearly now than I ever did. It is a distant sound from our not-so-distant past, but a clear warning about our future. Four dead in Ohio. Not just a song. A lesson.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!! Stop it!! You're killin' me Sparky.

Christine O'Donnell gets her own action figure.

Vote today!!

Are you Christine O'Donnell?

I'm you.
---Christine O'Donnell

She must be Sparky because if O'Donnell is me, that means I've been sued five times by my university since 1994 for unpaid tuition. It means the IRS placed a lien against me for unpaid taxes and penalties. It means the mortgage company sued me and won a judgment of more than $90,000 against me after I stopped making payments on my house in 2008. It means that the Federal Elections Commission has cited me eight times for not reporting contributions between 2007 and 2009. It means a campaign watchdog group has filed a complaint against me for using campaign funds to pay my bills. And this is just the financial stuff.

If O'Donnell is me, then that means I question evolution; I think masturbation goes against God's teaching in the Bible; I mislead people into thinking I studied at Oxford; I believe that American scientists have made mice with fully functioning human brains, and I believe that the Chinese are trying to take over the United States based on "classified information that I am privy to...."

Definitely Sparky.

Personally I like the odonnell ad better than fiorina. Both good but I like the style of just saying, I'm you. I know what it's like to have a house foreclosed. I know what it's like to not be able to pay student loans. I can look at problems from the same viewpoint as you. Maybe the ONLY one who won't get this point is H1616 because on that particular planet not even gravity makes sense.

I think if I was involved in making the ad, I would have changed the first line. Either say, "Others have tried to paint me as something I'm not." or "Some pretty funny quotes from my past have been used by my opposition to paint me as something I'm not. Let me tell you who I am, really."


I really like the RR ad. Maybe these young gun Republicans are finally smartening up the party. I'm skeptical of both parties but the Conservatives seem to be in control of the ads lately. That has to be a good thing.

Really Sparky? So now it's okay in Sparkyland to be sued five times for unpaid tuition, or be liened by the IRS for unpaid taxes and penalties, or have a mortgage company sue and win a judgment of more than $90,000 after failure to make payments, or be cited by the Federal Elections Commission eight times for not reporting contributions, or using campaign funds to pay personal bills?

If you look up deadbeat in the Sparkyland Dictionary you'll find a picture of Christine O'Donnell.

Is Sparkyland code for the Land of Oz where Christine O'Donnell can be seen skipping down the Golden Brick Road singing If I Only Had A Brain?

Come out from behind the curtain Sparky.

This is a new low.

Teabaggers Hate Healthy Puppies.
October 5, 2010 | 11:19 am

The state of Missouri is known throughout the humane community as "puppy mill central," a state which by some reckonings is home to nearly a third of the nation's wretched breeding factories that churn out litter after litter of puppies that can be high-priced and sometimes less than healthy, from mothers that are kept like brood sows and wind up exhausted and ailing after delivering endless litters -- I know; I've adopted one or two of such poor exploited ladies.

Dog-loving groups have been hopeful that Missouri's Prop. B, the Puppy Mill Cruelty Prevention Act, would help to put a stop to some of this, by requiring commercial breeders with more than 10 breeding females who produce puppies for the pet trade give those dogs clean facilities, enough food and water and exercise, and what I would call decent intervals between pregnancies.

Simple, right?

Well, not according to some. As reported on Talking Points Memo, Tea Partiers are claiming that this is a manifestation of the Humane Society's sinister plan. Some, including people who either can't read or won't read -- to paraphrase Mark Twain, the latter has the same disadvantage as the former -- are applying Tea Party politics to this, declaring that the Missouri measure saving animals from misery and exploitation is part of a "radical" agenda.

The group calls itself the Alliance for Truth -- don't you love the grandiose labels these groups bestow on themselves? -- and one member, astonishingly, told the TPM site that Prop. B supporters "don't like animals."

Now, let's figure this one out. Who doesn't like animals? The Humane Society, with a decades-long track record of trying to give animals healthy and safe living conditions, or the people who seized on this, either with deliberate, cynical political intent or by a misreading of the law, to cast Prop. B as another effort by traitors and socialists to destroy the American way of life, which way of life also evidently includes the right to destroying animals' lives and health if that's what some red-blooded real American wants to do. What does the Alliance for Truth think about dog fighting? Maybe Michael Vick can show up at the next rally, so long as it doesn't interfere with his NFL schedule.

Overlaying the tragicomedy of this is the involvement of not-Joe-and-not-a-registered-Plumber, the supposed Everyman of the John McCain presidential campaign. Here's what he wrote: that the Humane Society is "cowardly [sic] hiding behind animal cruelty, lying to our citizens and taking our constitutional rights away -- one state at a time."

Today, humane conditions in puppy mills -- tomorrow, ending states' rights!

Come on, 'fess up, Comedy Central -- did you sneak a plant into Missouri and start up this group just to gin up good material for your writers?

Another of this group's contentions is that the Humane Society's real goal is "making it more difficult for middle-class American families to be dog owners."

Do I laugh or cry at that one, or both? Humane organizations would love for every middle-class American family to be a dog owner, and there's a really easy way, a cheap way, to make that happen -- without having to pay the hundreds or even thousands of dollars that puppy mills can charge per pet.

Millions of American-born dogs are waiting for you -- to live with your middle-class American family -- in shelters and with rescue groups all across America. There's just about any breed you want, any age, either gender, and all the all-American mutts you could hope for. None of your fancy hundreds or thousands-of-dollar price tags, either. Most shelters, you can walk out with the canine of your dreams for a hundred bucks or so, sometimes less.

In as you folks in the Show-Me State know, that's a demonstrable bargain.


What a bunch of scumbags.

This story has it all. Clowns, over stated credentials, Bozo Truthers, Local Bozos, Willard Scott, certification, the Constitution, part-time Bozo, and the "Greatest Scandal of Our Time.”



Send In the Clowns — and the Truth Squad
By MARK LEIBOVICH

Bozo-gate, anyone?

Since Christine O’Donnell’s upset victory in the Delaware Republican Senate primary last month, the out-of-nowhere Tea Party sensation has been dogged by charges that she inflated her resume, exaggerated her educational record and had said some things over the years, that her detractors found, shall we say, clownish.

The latest suspicion of inflated credentials, which arose over the weekend, involved Ms. O’Donnell’s father, Daniel O’Donnell, a long-ago local television personality in the Philadelphia area whose main claim to fame, according to the O’Donnell family, was that he used to play Bozo the Clown.

The Bozo bombshell was first reported by The News Journal of Wilmington in November 2006, during one of Ms. O’Donnell’s previous Senate campaigns. The detail was included in a profile of Ms. O’Donnell that I wrote for Saturday’s Times. Ms. O’Donnell’s older brother, Daniel, confirmed in a phone call that indeed his father had played Bozo.

“Bozo the Clown is a franchise, and back then, every major city had their own Bozo,” said Daniel O’Donnell, the brother, who is a business manager at a car dealership in Trenton. “He was Philly’s Bozo for a time.” Daniel O’Donnell, the father, declined to comment for that article.

On Saturday morning, I received e-mail from a reader questioning whether this claim was true based on the absence of any “Daniel O’Donnell” listed on the ultimate authority on all things, Wikipedia. The reader demanded proof about Mr. O’Donnell’s Bozo bona fides and a level of specificity and documentation that I was not prepared to provide. My answer – that I had verified the Bozo fact with the O’Donnell family – was woefully unacceptable to her, a position that she laid out in a way that soon convinced me that devoting more time on the subject was not how I wanted to spend my Saturday.

“Given that there is no record anywhere on the Internet that I have been able to verify this claim,” the reader wrote, “and given Ms. O’Donnell’s history with the truth, it seems thick to report it as true without any kind of verification.”

By the end of the day, my new Bozo Truther friend had taken her grievance to a Web site, Stinque (“if it smells, we’re on it”), which happily took up the investigation.

“Welcome to our first installment of ‘In Search of Bozo’,” the Web site wrote, continuing:

“As students of American history know, Bozo is Large and Contains Multitudes. The ur-Bozo is generally accepted to be Larry Harmon, who wasn’t the first to don the pancake and cowl, but was smart enough to secure the licensing rights. Officially blessed Local Bozos followed in his wake, appearing on television nationwide. Notable DC Bozo: Willard Scott. Not found in Wikipedia’s Local Bozo Catalog: Daniel O’Donnell.

But while Wikipedia’s Bozo Roster is commendably extensive, we hesitate to declare it definitive. And since a search for “Daniel O’Donnell” yields pages of links to a popular Irish singer, we must continue our journey in a different direction.

Soon enough, Stinque.com had even launched a billboard campaign, raising the specter that Mr. O’Donnell had lied about his Bozo background. “WHERE’s THE BOZO CERTIFICATE?” the billboards would say.

“Anybody who would lie about a cherished childhood icon is unqualified to serve in the United States Senate,” the Web site concluded, more in sorrow than in outrage. “Really. It’s in the Constitution. Look it up.”

Needless to say, I was mortified to have possibly played a small role in perpetrating such a falsehood. The first call I made Monday morning was to the New Jersey home of Daniel O’Donnell. The previous call I had placed to him – last week – did not go well; he essentially had hung up on me. But he did come to the phone this time.

“Who told you I was Bozo?” he wanted to know.

“Your son,” I said, at which point he confirmed that yes, he was Bozo, but not an official, full-time certified Bozo, more of a part-time Bozo.

“To be an official Bozo, you had to go to a special school in Texas,” explained Mr. O’Donnell. He never did. Instead, he was asked to fill-in for the official Bozos whenever they would have to travel out of the Philadelphia area for acting gigs.

“They would leave, I would come in and work for two or three weeks, whatever, until the regular Bozo came back,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “I was the fill-in Bozo.” He worked out of a local station in Jenkintown, Pa., he said, adding that station employees did his make-up and hair. He would also do remote appearances, got to supermarkets, meet kids, sign autographs and ride around in the Bozo Mobile. His son Daniel was his assistant.

Meantime, Stinque.com was becoming more and more insistent. “We demand that all politics in Our Blessed Nation cease,” the Web site declared, “until we uncover the truth about the Greatest Scandal of Our Time.”

Before I could press Mr. O’Donnell for more information, he ended the phone call abruptly. “Ok, gotta go,” he said, and he was gone, no clowning around.