Palin Watch: Leno show hacks reality

By GottaLaff

My pal Micheal Stinson, aka Symbolman, aka the co-author of The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring & Activity Book, nearly got me to go to The Tonight Show taping the other day. Yes, that one. Where BlueJeans McJokeFest made her stand-up debut. But sadly, or maybe happily, I couldn't make it.

However, Micheal sure did, and he's posted about it in great detail. And he's also graciously given me permission to cross post part of it here.

Enjoy:

[I]t’s my opinion that audio portions of Sarah Palin’s March 2nd appearance on Jay Leno’s Tonight show were added or amplified, edited before broadcast to make it appear that Sarah Palin was more welcome than she was.

I know. I was there.

They added laughter where there was none during uncomfortable portions. Well, there was some laughter. Mine, of derision. During those pregnant pauses in her performance I was laughing long and loud, couldn’t help myself as much of what she was saying was utterly surreal, ridiculous, hypocritical - nonsense, spewed platitudes, pushed buttons. I was seriously thinking of leaving as it was getting hysterically unfunny.

After sitting through the taping of the show in the studio I can recount many portions where there was little or no laughter or response, but at the later broadcast they are smoothed over with applause and laughter that WERE NOT THERE at the taping. Groans, hoots, grumbling, or just dead silence - all missing. [...]

[W]e flew 6 thousand miles round trip from the east coast to be in the audience as a sort of mellow protest, wave copies of the book to freak her out, hand them out to staff & audience at the Studio. Security waved our copies on through, and folks there were reading it during the show and cracking up at the humor. Even the camera guys.

Well, not the one Security guy during the show who told my wife to sit down, she was dancing and waving our book, and to the shows credit we weren’t expelled nor did they confiscate the books.[...]

From my seat to the right of the stage, by the band, I could tell that an average of 70% of the audience did not like Sarah Palin. Many literally sat on their hands. [...]

But when Jay brought out Sarah Palin, she was completely nerved. Watch the video, check out her breathing, she’s Freaked and talks a mile a minute. Both my wife and I agreed - when you actually get close enough, she’s just plain Creepy, and those yech vibes filled the room. [...]

At at least four points in the show she was getting so far out in screwball territory, or was just so damned unfunny that I couldn’t help but laugh when no others were, at the absurdity of her statements. [...]

One: She was so happy to back John McCain’s bid for re-election in Arizona, at least for now, left the audience puzzled, confused. I Chortled with great vigor. Not in the broadcast.

Two: During the monologue when she made a crack about No Tomatoes being allowed, even the Teabaggers in the audience didn’t want to touch that one. The Sarah Sucks crowd, my people, said nothing. Crickets. The whole audience seemed stunned, and again, I howled. Not in the broadcast. Nothing. Nada. [...]

Three: Explaining how it’s cool to write on her hand. She lied about what was on there, then sails to pluto with, “my dad, a teacher, used to come home with notes (answers?) written all over his hands…” again, dead air. No ONE was buying it, it was just too bizarre. The answer? Just ADD canned Laughter. A lie.

Four: Was directed at US. (Of course this joke was written long before we were in the audience, and hey, she kills moose, so, it’s kind of an obvious one) The Moose Joke. [...]

Leno’s show used the ambience to give Palin Cover. They sold her. Her book, her body, her celebrity, her future, all of it. And 70% of an audience weren’t buying it, but you can’t tell from the broadcast.

I know. I was there.

They should bear some responsibilty for hawking a defective product. This is corporate shilling in the worst way, not only to raise Leno’s ratings, but to push Palin on a crowd with fake laughter and applause. [...]

Your reality has been hacked.

But not mine. I was there.

I wanted to say that Leno has earned his ratings, that he’s funny, and he is at times, and deserves his talk show.

Can’t. Not now. Sorry to say, The Tonight Show is a lie, more than ever a corporate shill that’s performing a cultural engineering service. Selling garbage, that is literally ruinous to our nation and women’s rights. That destroys the fabric of our society. It’s real.

I saw it. I was there.

There is a whole lot more to read here.

GOP Stimulus Backlash Collides with Reality

Seems the majority of GOP politics these days clashes with reality. Via Taegan.

Politico notes the governors "threatening to decline federal stimulus money last month read like a list of Republicans considering running for president in 2012:" Governors Mark Sanford, Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin.

"But what began with a bang is ending with something closer to a whimper. All three of those governors have been forced to scale back their expectations, to varying degree, as the push of conservative philosophy gave way to the pull of political reality."

"All three found that praise from the conservative movement in Washington meant nothing to furious state legislators of both parties. And in the end, along with other conservative Republican governors, the three submitted letters in recent days asking to be eligible for federal funds."

Frank Rich: What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us

By GottaLaff

Brace yourselves:

“I don’t want to pretend that today marks the end of our economic problems,” the president said on Tuesday at the signing ceremony in Denver. He added, hopefully: “But today does mark the beginning of the end.”

Does it?

No one knows, of course, but a bigger question may be whether we really want to know. One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly “changed everything,” slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable. Obama’s toughest political problem may not be coping with the increasingly marginalized G.O.P. but with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door. [...]

This cultural pattern of denial is hardly limited to the economic crisis. Anyone with eyes could have seen that Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire resembled Macy’s parade balloons in their 1998 home-run derby, but it took years for many fans (not to mention Major League Baseball) to accept the sorry truth. It wasn’t until the Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame saga caught fire in summer 2003, months after “Mission Accomplished,” that we began to confront the reality that we had gone to war in Iraq over imaginary W.M.D. Weapons inspectors and even some journalists (especially at Knight-Ridder newspapers) had been telling us exactly that for almost a year. [...]

[T]he notion that torture was official American policy didn’t start to sink in until after the Abu Ghraib photos emerged in April 2004. [...]

Steroids, torture, lies from the White House, civil war in Iraq, even recession: that’s just a partial glossary of the bad-news vocabulary that some of the country, sometimes in tandem with a passive news media, resisted for months on end before bowing to the obvious or the inevitable. [...]

For all the gloomy headlines we’ve absorbed since the fall, we still can’t quite accept the full depth of our economic abyss either. Nicole Gelinas, a financial analyst at the conservative Manhattan Institute, sees denial at play over a wide swath of America, reaching from the loftiest economic strata of Wall Street to the foreclosure-decimated boom developments in the Sun Belt. [...]

In states like Nevada, Florida and Arizona, Gelinas sees “huge neighborhoods that will become ghettos” as half their populations lose or abandon their homes, with an attendant collapse of public services and social order. “It will be like after Katrina,” she says, “but it’s no longer just the Lower Ninth Ward’s problem.” Writing in the current issue of The Atlantic, the urban theorist Richard Florida suggests we could be seeing “the end of a whole way of life.” The link between the American dream and home ownership, fostered by years of bipartisan public policy, may be irreparably broken. [...]

Pity our new president. As he rolls out one recovery package after another, he can’t know for sure what will work. If he tells the whole story of what might be around the corner, he risks instilling fear itself among Americans who are already panicked. [...] But if the president airbrushes the picture too much, the country could be as angry about ensuing calamities as it was when the Bush administration’s repeated assertion of “success” in Iraq proved a sham. Managing America’s future shock is a task that will call for every last ounce of Obama’s brains, temperament and oratorical gifts. [...]

Nationalization would likely mean wiping out the big banks’ managements and shareholders. It’s because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all. Wall Street’s last barons still seem to believe that they can hang on to their old culture by scuttling corporate jets, rejecting bonuses or sounding contrite in public. [...]

We are now waiting to learn if Obama’s economic team, much of it drawn from the Wonderful World of Citi and Goldman Sachs, will have the will to make its own former cohort face the truth. But at a certain point, as in every other turn of our culture of denial, outside events will force the recognition of harsh realities. Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word — depression — is next on America’s list to avoid.

Obama Quietly Reverses Stance on 527 Groups

At least they're being realistic, but I'm worried they may be too late.

After a year of telling his supporters not to contribute to 527 groups and encouraging Democratic strategists not to form them, Marc Ambinder reports Obama's strategists "have changed their approach."

"An Obama adviser privy to the campaign's internal thinking on the matter says that,with less than two months before the election and with the realization that Republicans have achieved financial parity with Democrats, they hope that Democratic allies -- what another campaign aide termed 'the cavalry' -- with come to Obama's aid."

The bottom line: "Obama's campaign will no longer object to independent efforts that hammer John McCain, just as, in their mind, the McCain campaign has not objected to those efforts targeted at Obama."