Sarah Palin at Politicon.

Courtesy of Snowdrift Snooki's Facebook page:

In the hot seat with moderator James Carville at Politicon today (the convention is like comiccon minus the costumes... though I consider politicos' bowties as costumes). I love a challenge when sharing diverse worldviews - which Clinton's former chief strategist and I certainly pressed into on the stage today! Disagreements on the 2nd Amendment were pretty fierce (I'm a fan, not a dimwit opponent of that most important right); as were par-for-the-course false suggestions of racism. Liberals didn't change my mind one iota, and I'm sure they weren't swayed by me, but our civil discourse reflected the general passion both sides feel as we vet our next President. I respect Carville's politically encyclopedic mind. (Though I insist he's dead wrong on who's fit to serve as America's next Commander in Chief.) 

At least is was a blast catching up, sharing laughs with my buddy and former Fox colleague, Sally Kohn (now with CNN); laughing backstage with "Cheers" John Ratzenberger (I'm the biggest Cliff Clavin fan!); and was floored with how pretty Roseanne Barr looks as she graciously shared with me her concerns for our country's challenges. 

It was an interesting day "entertaining democracy" in beautiful Pasadena. Thank you to all the tremendous law enforcement personnel there for protecting our First Amendment rights!

 - Sarah Palin

(Nice to see that Palin is reinforcing the importance of 1st Amendment rights, let's see how she feels about that in the next coming days and weeks.)

Here is the video of the entire interview conducted by James Carville.

As we feared Carville mostly lobbed softball questions at her and there was very little substance to her answers.

Of course she took inordinate credit for Trump's success and kept inferring that she was connected to the way "real Americans" think. Gag me.

Here was one exchange that did get a little more heated courtesy of Variety:

Carville, the Democratic strategist, said to the former vice presidential nominee: “When you say you want to take back the country, what is it you want to take back?” 

“I want to take back the interpretation of our constitution that is being wrongly interpreted today,” Palin said. 

“Where are we going haywire on the Constitution?” he asked. 

Palin’s response: the Second Amendment. 

“It is black and white, and we have a right, of course, to bear arms,” she said. “People who can interpret that to, ‘Oh that means not everybody has that right.’ Or to take certain things like ammo, ‘Well that doesn’t apply.’ Or we can get rid of AR-15s because AR-15s weren’t invented for hunting. I say, ‘Yeah, the Second Amendment wasn’t written in the case the moose turn on us.’ Of course it wasn’t mean for hunting.” 

Carville, though, pressed her further. 

“Do I have a right to possess a bazooka? Do I have the right to have a surface to air missile and live close to the Los Angeles Airport?” 

“Well, that is such a stupid question,” Palin responded.

As it turned out the hardest question for Palin seemed to come from a ten year old reporter in the audience:

The first question from the audience came from a ten-year-old boy who also said he was a reporter. Carville asked him to come up on stage, and the boy noted that Palin had said that she “hated” countries that didn’t treat women right and didn’t want them to be part of the United Nations. 

Palin tried to interrupt, but the boy asked her to “please” let him finish. 

Given her comments about those countries, the boy said, “How come you are endorsing Donald Trump after he said, Megyn Kelly ‘has got blood coming out of her wherever.'” 

There were cheers and some laughs from the crowd. 

Palin answered, “Donald Trump isn’t sexist. If he were, I wouldn’t be endorsing him.”

Yeah, right. Sexism only exists in the minds of the Palins when they think it is directed at them.

Perhaps Carville should ask that ten year old boy for some pointers. 

Essentially this is Palin continuing her role as a political oddity who can always be counted on to say something scandalous or idiotic which the media can then latch onto for the purposes of mocking her.

Clearly at this point she simply doesn't care so long as people are still paying attention to her, and of course paying her, for the privilege of those laughs at her expense.

Sarah Palin to debate James "The Ragin' Cajun" Carville? Oh please let this happen.

Courtesy of Politicon: 

This June, Politicon will be toasting to a second term as the quintessential non-partisan event of the year. In honor of the impending presidential election, we’re upping the ante with some of the biggest names in politics and the wittiest voices in comedy and entertainment, representing all sides of the political spectrum. 

Join us at the Pasadena Convention Center for a full weekend of panels, debates, TV and movie screenings, art, podcasts, comedy shows, Q&A’s, book readings, interviews, meet & greets, art exhibitions, and music performances. 

With 12 rooms ranging from 50-seaters to large-scale auditoriums, you’ll be able to get up close and personal with political heavyweights, revel in the endless humor with the likes of James Carville and Sarah Palin, dissect documentaries and parodies with filmmakers, and maybe even interact with a few of history’s greatest leaders.

I cannot even BEGIN to imagine how desperate Sarah Palin must be for money to agree to something like this.

Carville is famous for ripping debate opponents apart and his dislike for Sarah Palin is well known. (Though to be fair he and his wife did let her interview them one time.)

Yeah, unless Carville pulls a Joe Biden and lets her off the hook, this is going to be a slaughter.

James Carville calls out both Trey Gowdy and the Benghazi Committee as creations of the Koch brothers.

Carville: "I got an idea for somebody in the media. Why don't you see if this is true, that Trey Gowdy is a creation of the Koch brothers, and the whole crime of denial industry. And this committee is nothing but a creation of Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brother. You know Fox ran over one thousand segments in twenty months after this thing."

I think we all know that Carville is big supporter of the Clintons, and just about as partisan as they come.

However he just issued a challenge to the media to prove him wrong, let's see if they take him up on it.

I think we all suspect what they will find.

In other news top Democrats are now calling for Republicans to reimburse the tax payer money that they wasted on this most recent "investigation."

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

Top Senate Democrats want to shut down the House Benghazi committee amid allegations it seeks to attack Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. And they want Republicans to reimburse taxpayers for the committee's more than $4.5 million cost. 

The senators, including Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), accused the GOP Wednesday of "operating a political opposition machine against Secretary Clinton," and called the House Select Committee on Benghazi's use of taxpayer funds "wholly inappropriate." 

"Over the past several weeks, several House Republicans have made clear what many observers have suspected all along: that the Select Committee has conducted a political inquisition aimed at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton," the senators wrote in a letter to Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus. 

"We firmly believe the Committee should be disbanded, and that every penny of taxpayer money that has financed this purely political committee ought to be repaid," the letter continued.

Hear, hear!

Tomorrow Clinton steps into the lions' den essentially wearing fang proof armor.

Not only should that be a show well worth watching I think it might also be the Benghazi committee's last hurrah.

(H/T to Democratic Underground.)

James Carville apologizes for calling Grover Norquist "pond scum." Well kinda.

So a couple of days ago James Carville wrote a letter to the editor of The Daily Reveille, the Louisiana State university's student newspaper.

Here is what he wrote: 

The news from the Governor’s office and the State Legislature has attained a level of buffoonery and comedy before unseen; in a state with a long history of both. Our beloved university is being systematically dismantled and as a result of our Governor and a significant portion of our Legislature (twenty-six) pledging allegiance to a Washington lobbyist with the long history of shady dealings. Your future earnings and the quality of your education is being adversely affected by the fact that a pledge was signed to a Washington operator by the name of Grover Norquist that under no conditions could taxes be raised. 

Three things you need to know about Grover Norquist: 

1-The anti-tax fanatic founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 and his shady dealings was linked by a congressional committee to Jack Abramoff. 

 2-Norquist was described by fellow conservative, Tucker Carlson, as a, “cash-addled, morally malleable lobbyist.” Norquist is the human equivalent of pond scum. He was a fellow traveler of pond scumite Abramoff and according to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, Norquist’s organization served as a “conduit” for funds from Abramoff’s clients and conservative lobbying campaigns. 

 3. Our elected officials have allowed him to become the most powerful person in our state. Proposed legislation is routinely sent to him by the Governor to seek his approval. Trust me its true. 

Now for the comedy part, the Governor and Legislature constantly refer to how can they maintain their purity, or as it is sometimes referred to, their “tax virginity.” You have to be kidding me. This reminds me of two over-sexed teenagers dry humping in a backseat of car parked behind a levee wondering how far they can go while maintaining their purity or virginity. We are literally at the mercy of buffoons and comedians. While they’re humping, our university burns. Our only recourse is to stand up and fight for ourselves. Geaux Tigers. 

James Carville 
Political consultant, political science professor of practice 
Tulane University

Apparently after writing that Carville received quite a lot of blowback from outraged conservatives over the fact that he called Grover Norquist "pond scum."

This was his response:

"Since the publication of my Letter to the Editor yesterday, I have received a considerable amount of comments on my comparison of Grover Norquist to pond scum. As someone who has spent so much time in the public square, I understand how words and characterizations can be hurtful and unfair to those involved in the comparisons. After prayer and deep reflection and consultation with my spiritual and ethical mentors I am forced to take a step I rarely approach in my public life and that is to apologize to- pond scum."

I am not always in agreement with Carville, but considering the damage that Norquist has done to this country due to his ridiculous "no raising taxes" pledge,  I agree that pond scum should be angered at the comparison.

James Carville: "If it loses the 2016 presidential election, the Republican Party as we know it today will be extinct."

Courtesy of the YouTube page:  

"Fast forward to January 2016," Carville said. "The most likely, though not the only scenario is Hillary Clinton is the presumptive nominee. Everybody's going to have a poll in the field showing how they fare against Hillary. They're not going to not nominate somebody because of Common Core [i.e., Jeb Bush]." 

"Trust me," Carville warned. "The party knows, and I use this word advisedly, that if it loses the 2016 presidential election, the Republican Party as we know it today will be extinct." 

"We heard that in 2008, too," Laura Ingraham said. 

"This will be the sixth out of seven elections in which they've lost the popular vote," Carville replied. "The Republicans want to win this. That will be the biggest issue in January 2016: how can we beat Hillary Clinton?"

I am going to go on record and agree with this assessment.

I think the Republican party will still be able to win local elections, especially in red states, but even that could start to fall off if their national image is one of the always second place opposition party only.

I also think that if they lose in 2016 there will be a legitimate opening for a third party.

Not a Tea Party either, they are too enmeshed with the GOP, I think if a true competitive third party emerges it will have to place itself somewhere within the ideological chasm which separates the Democrats and the Republicans.

That's my opinion, anybody have a different one?

Let's start the day with a little James Carville shall we? ”Any day that you have more Sarah Palin and less Chris Christie is a good day for James Carville.”

Courtesy of Mediaite: 

“I think this one is somehow another one that’s particularly hard for the Republicans and they like are mad at each other right now to me in an amusing way but if i were a Republican, almost an unhealthy way. They’re really lashing out at each other and blaming back and forth every day. The Club For Growth story was kind of my idea for a significant story that they’re really going after — naming the people they’re going after right now which, of course, is gonna have a chilling effect on other Republicans who think they may be up,” said Carville. 

“CPAC to me has totally diminished its credibility as an organization. When you basically, Chris Christie s a national leader, and their explanation about why, the next day about why…It’s like an All Star Game, they said he didn’t have a good year,” said Matthew Dowd, a frequent This Week panelist and Republican strategist. 

“They invite Sarah Palin who wasn’t competent enough to keep a Fox News contract? But she’s invited to a CPAC meeting? I mean to me, they basically, many people, Karl and many people, decided that the voters out there don’t know what they’re doing. That the votes who like Chris Christie, and the votes who like other candidates, they’re really mixed up and we’re going to tell them what the truth is. And whatever that’s a strategy on either side, when you’re trying to tell the voters they’re wrong, it’s a bad move,” said Dowd. 

Carville got the last laugh, of course, saying,”Any day that you have more Sarah Palin and less Chris Christie is a good day for James Carville.”

"They invite Sarah Palin who wasn’t competent enough to keep a Fox News contract?" Gotta love that!

I assume that the folks over at the Sea O'Pee have not seen this one yet, as they have not managed to drum up the same sense of outrage that they demonstrated over Steve Schmidt's remarks from Saturday night's Real Time.

Personally I thought this was much more of an insult to Palin and the people who still fawn over her.

Oh well they have a lot on their plates what with charging up their scooters and waging that constant battle against reality.

Bill Maher's New Rules from last night. Update with link to entire episode.

Courtesy of HuffPo:

 "White people vote for white people like it's going out of style," Maher said during the New Rules segment at the end of his first post-election episode. "And like most things white people do, it's going out of style." In other words, Maher quipped that Republicans have "the same problem as the Beach Boys: Their fans are dying."

This is going to make some racist heads explode.

It was a great show last night with a panel that included Andrew Sullivan,  James Carville, and later Samuel L. Jackson, But it was almost ruined for me by the inclusion of S.E. Cupp, who spent the entire show spreading stupid all over the set.

Though I enjoyed watching Sullivan and Carville shut her down, it all seemed a little unnecessary so soon after the smart people won such a huge victory last Tuesday. (By the way I have NEVER struck a woman, but I REALLY wanted somebody to knock that ignorant bitch on her ass. That was wrong of me right?)

Update: For those who missed the show, here is a link so that you are not left out of the fun.

Republican establishment still hoping to find some way to get a GOOD candidate into the nominating process.

Courtesy of the Huffington Post:

Efforts are underway by some wealthy Republican donors and a group of conservative leaders to investigate whether a new Republican candidate could still get into the presidential race. The talk is still preliminary and somewhat wishful, but it reflects dissatisfaction with the two leading candidates, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. 

Conservative leaders are looking into whether it is feasible for a dark horse to get on the ballot in select states. The deadline to qualifying for the ballot has passed in Florida, South Carolina, Missouri, and New Hampshire. But a candidate could still get on the ballot in states like Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Michigan and Texas. At the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, voters write in their choice, so there is no formal filing deadline.

Somehow this reminds of the girl in the bar at closing time who keeps looking past the two drunken losers offering to give her a ride home, in the desperate hope that there is SOMEBODY better still in the bathroom, or maybe around a dark corner somewhere. Except of course there isn't, and she is destined to wake up in a broken down trailer, lying next to a guy with two missing teeth and a bright red rash all over his nether region.

(Oh come on! If that does not describe Newt Gingrich then I don't know what does.)

However, according to James Carville, the reason the pickings are so slim is because that is really all the Republicans deserve anymore:

We have watched GOP debates where audience members booed gay soldiers and cheered the prospect of someone dying without health insurance. We've seen a candidate who wasn't penalized in the least for not knowing that China has had nuclear weapons since 1964 but had to drop out because of a consensual sexual relationship. We have seen a member of the House Intelligence Committee who apparently didn't realize that we haven't had an embassy in Iran for the last 30 years, candidates who don't believe in evolution, and a candidate that didn't even know the voting age in the United States. Maybe Bush, Daniels, Christie, Barbour and Thune figured out ahead of time what Fairleigh Dickinson University uncovered just recently: that people who watch Fox News are actually more ignorant than people who watch no news at all. Could you imagine what they would have found had they studied people listening to talk radio? 

Perhaps the Republicans are getting exactly the kind of candidates that best match the intellectual composition of the majority of the people in their party -- just a thought, but it's my only explanation of our low bidders. Looks like their chance at the presidency is going, going, gone.

In other words, it looks like the Republicans live in an alternate reality where anybody with enough intelligence to actually perform the job of President, is way too smart for the brain damaged viewers of Fox News, and listeners of Talk radio, to trust with the job.

You know Republicans I believe this is the part of the movie where the main character wakes up screaming, only to realize it was all a bad dream. Go ahead. pinch yourself.

James Carville: BP is "going to take you (Obama Administration) down"!

I have tried to give my President the benefit of the doubt but I am no longer able to figure out why in the hell he is not doing EVERYTHING IN HIS POWER to get a handle on this crisis in the Gulf of Mexico!

James Carville is a crazy Cajun lunatic sometimes, but he is absolutely correct about how badly our government is handling this.  The Obama administration is committing political suicide and they are using BP's illegally purchased handgun to do it.

Last night's SNL makes fun of the fallout over President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize.

I love this James Carville impersonation!