Sarah, Proud and Tall wrote at Balloon juice from 2011-17.

Sarah, Proud and Tall

Commence the making of popcorn… now

by Sarah, Proud and Tall| May 13, 20113:17 am| 27 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Torture, Assholes, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Clown Shoes, Fucked-up-edness, Good News For Conservatives, I Can't Believe We're Losing to These People, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To, I Smell a Pulitzer!, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue, Our Failed Media Experiment, Schadenfreude, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot, Sweet Fancy Moses!, The Wingularity, Wingnut Event Horizon, WTF?

Erickson & Trump. One on One.

By RedState on May 11, 2011

Yes, it is true. On Tuesday, I will be going one on one with Donald Trump in his office in New York.

He has agreed to sit down and have an unfiltered conversation with no topic off limits. Thus I will ask him those questions many of you have wanted to ask him and flesh out why he thinks he is a conservative, why he might run, etc.

You can watch the interview live and for free. But you must register by going here.

RedState

H/t: Spaghetti Lee

Commence the making of popcorn… nowPost + Comments (27)

Laugh, clowns, at your broken loves

by Sarah, Proud and Tall| May 12, 201110:30 am| 28 Comments

This post is in: Election 2012, Lizard Blogging, Daydream Believers, Good News For Conservatives

I don’t often visit the New York Times website.

There is far too much risk that I might accidentally be exposed to something written by David Brooks, at which point I would have to poke out my own eyes with a pair of chopsticks to save my sanity. At 92, I need to hang on to as many of my senses as I have left. As I noted on a thread the other day, when I was younger and had fortified myself with a good dose of anti-psychotics, I once tried writing a detailed critique of one of Brooks’ articles, only to end up with a page with the words “David Brooks is a dickhead” scribbled one hundred times.* Ever since then, I have limited myself to writing nasty stories about him being humiliated by old ladies and then posting links to them on his Facebook Wall.

Anyway, yesterday evening I was searching for shirtless photos of Aaron Schock – I know it’s wrong, but I have a weakness for men who look like they’d cry for their mommy during sex – and must have clicked on the wrong link.

On its Room for Debate page, to which Mistermix has already referred, the Times has collected together a team of crack political analysts (assuming that by “crack” one means the wide space between the top of a plumber’s shorts and the bottom of his shirt) to debate the question “Who’s Missing From the G.O.P. Race?“.

Surprisingly, the answer is apparently not “Everyone with an IQ over 4 and Sarah Palin”.

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Linda Chavez (whose article is wonderfully entitled “Big Egos Need Not Apply”) distinguishes herself by noting that:

The G.O.P. has a deeper bench than the Democrats…

follows it up with the suggestion that:

the Democrats are going to have a tough time with Hispanic voters, who may choose to stay home on Election Day.

and then plumps for John #notintendedtobeafactualstatement Kyl, who would surely have the brown people and the womens lining up twelve deep to vote for him.

As noted, Ramesh Ponnuru’s choice is Jeb Bush. Ramesh is careful to remain forked-tongue-in-cheek:

6) And if nominated, he could save Republicans the expense of buying new bumper stickers by picking Elizabeth Cheney as his running mate.

and even says that:

4) His presence in the race would also force an overdue Republican reckoning with his brother’s legacy. If Republicans really want to repudiate George W. Bush as a big-government conservative, rejection of Jeb Bush would allow them to do so definitively.

Nevertheless, you can feel the hope for eight more years of Bush oozing out of Ramesh like flop-sweat out of Rush Limbaugh’s back at a Snoop Dogg concert.

Fergus Cullen, aware enough to notice that the GOP has little chance of winning with the pack of whackaloons, assholes and magic underpants wearers who have currently thrown their tinfoil-hats into the ring, pines for “A Mainstream Alternative”. One of his choices is Mitch Daniels, which suggests that by “mainstream alternative” Fergus simply means “doesn’t dribble on himself that much when he speaks”.

John J. Pitney Jr and Dan Schnur each disappoint by actually making sense for whole sentences at a time, concluding that only a fucking idiot would choose to enter the race at this point anyway.

My favorite though is Peter Wehner, who inserts his tongue lightly into Mitch Daniels:

… recently delivered the best speech any major G.O.P. figure has given in years.

– frankly a pretty low bar – but then gets so excited about Paul Ryan I expect Petey had to Windex his computer keyboard afterwards:

He’s the author of the most impressive conservative governing blueprint in decades, and maybe ever … offered a comprehensive, wise and politically courageous answer … rock-solid … extremely popular … excels in his style and public discourse … philosophically well-grounded, a passionate and scrappy advocate for his views … eschews dishonest and ugly rhetoric …. personally modest and unpretentious rather than arrogant and morally preening. Paul Ryan, in other words, is the antithesis of Barack Obama.

Personally, I hope all of these people run. The more clowns there are in the primary clown car – painting their faces black and white, honking their horns, squirting each other with confetti made of hanging chads, and waving fetuses made up with sad clown makeup – the better.

* A fond shout-out to JGabriel, who noted that writing out “David Brooks is a dickhead” 100 times is actually surprisingly entertaining.

[Image: Le Trapeziste Et Le Clown – Charles Giron (1850-1914)] [Cross-posted at Sarah, Proud and Tall.]

Early morning music

by Sarah, Proud and Tall| May 9, 20111:40 am| 32 Comments

This post is in: Music, Open Threads

Will you kids quiet down in there?

It’s all coming back to me now – an aging Eva Peron, drunk and in a teeny weeny bikini trying to pick up a very young and very green Officer Chief of Staff called Augusto Pinochet. The horror.

Early morning musicPost + Comments (32)

Yes I would give my heart gladly

by Sarah, Proud and Tall| May 8, 20118:46 pm| 22 Comments

This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights

The Supreme Court of Brazil has recognized gay civil unions (although not “marriage”) in deciding two lawsuits brought by the state government of Rio de Janeiro and by the Ministério Público, the Brazilian body of independent public prosecutors.

In a 10-0 vote, with one abstention, the justices said gay couples deserve the same legal rights as heterosexual pairs when it comes to alimony, retirement benefits of a partner who dies, and inheritances, among other issues. The ruling, however, stopped short of legalising gay marriage. …. Brazil’s ruling sets a judicial precedent that must be honoured by all public institutions, including notary publics [sic] where civil unions must be registered.

Oh, and the 11th justice apparently abstained because he had previously spoken in favor of same-sex unions when he was Attorney-General.

Of course, it’s not all caipirinhas and tighty-whitey undies:

Among the dead, [there were] 140 gay men (54%), 110 transvestites (42%) and 10 lesbians (4%). Brazil confirms its position as the world champion of murders of homosexuals: in the United States, which has 100 million more people than our country, in 2010, 14 murders of transvestites were reported, while in Brazil, there were 110. The risk of a homosexual being murdered in Brazil is 785% higher than in the United States.

Given its huge religious population, long history of internal conflict and torrid political divisions, it’s not surprising that it taken Brazil so long to catch up with the the Land of the Free and the Brave in granting its gay and lesbian citizens equal parity with all of its other citizens.

[Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) – Male Nude known as Patroclus]

Edited for additional snarkiness.

Yes I would give my heart gladlyPost + Comments (22)

Open Thread – What the rest of the world is up to…

by Sarah, Proud and Tall| May 8, 20111:54 pm| 57 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Decline and Fall, Fucked-up-edness

Hello, my dears.

My apologies for being off the air. The Royal Wedding™ took a lot out of me.

It takes a while to recover from having seen Camilla cantering down the corridors of Buck House at 3am wearing only a toothy grin and a horse-tail-butt-plug, to say nothing of hearing what young Harry said when he found out he didn’t automatically get to sleep with Pippa Middleton. I won’t even mention James Middleton bringing out his maid’s outfit for another airing. Nice buttocks on that boy, by the way.

I know that some of you like my little stories – Hello, Corner Stone, I have a nice story about Ron and Nancy on the way, just for you – but in the meantime, I have been trying to think of some other kinds of posts to put up for your entertainment and edification.

This one is inspired by a gentleman on Daily Kos who complained about me writing about the Royal Wedding™ because, and I am paraphrasing him horribly to his detriment, Americans didn’t need to know about irrelevant rubbish.

Had I not been sleeping off six bottles of Krug and an ounce of finest Columbian, my response to him would have been that, setting aside the mindless frippery of the wedding itself, the marriage of the future king of one of America’s oldest enemies and greatest allies is probably an event that Americans should show a modicum of interest in, even if it requires them to drag their eyes away from yet another story about Donald Fucking Trump or Lady Googoo.

As <a href=”http://sarahproudandtall.com/2011/04/27/why-does-peggy-noonan-hate-america/”>Peggy Noonan might have said</a>, had she not just fallen off her chair and into a vodka-coma:

<blockquote>The whole world is on the train, in the airport, judging what it sees, and likely, in some serious ways, wondering why most Americans almost entirely ignore the rest of the world unless it’s a country they want to conquer, mine or fuck.</blockquote>

Anyway, in the rest of the world, Singapore had an <a href=”http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-08/singapore-s-election-watershed-may-loosen-political-hold-of-lee-s-party.html”>election</a>, and the ruling PAP flirted with disaster by accidentally allowing opposition politicians to win actual seats.

In Dusseldorf, the greatest annual celebration of European culture (assuming that by “culture” you mean big hair, skinny jeans, tortured vowels and women in lycra climbing out of pianos) is about to take place. The appalling entries of Portugal and Greece won’t bring them any joy. Terrifying that the countries that produced this (h/t Steep) and this could fall so low. However, at $25 million a pop to stage the competition, no country actually wants to win anyway, particularly those who are going to be forced into a two year recession as “the price” their population has to pay for wanting a flat screen tv, a roof with no holes in it and a cheap bottle of red on the table after fifty years of dictatorship.

What else? South Africa is fucked up:

A 13-year-old girl became the latest victim of “corrective rape,” South African media reported Saturday, as the trend of violent attacks on lesbians showed no signs of letting up.

as is North Korea:

The U.N. World Food Program is appealing for the provision of 430,000 tons of food to North Korea to feed 6 million needy people there. Some critics claim Pyongyang has been exaggerating its food shortages so that it can hoard food in preparation for its distribution on the centennial birth of its late leader, Kim Il-sung, the father of current leader, Kim Jong-il, which falls on April 15 next year.

People died in Syria, in Egypt, in Cambodia and Thailand but not, happily, in Sudan. The slide show at that last link is quite wonderful, by the way.

Grammy needs to pour herself a big drink and spend half an hour looking at more pictures of baby aardvarks.

ETA: Open Thread. Feel free to point out what’s happening in your part of the world.

[Sarah, Proud and Tall]

Open Thread – What the rest of the world is up to…Post + Comments (57)