Take Five (What a Fool Believes edition)

ONE: Bleatings from Asbury Park, N.J.

Which little city has the sixth-best beach in New Jersey, was famously name-checked in a Bruce Springsteen album title, and just got a self-appointed Republican nanny? If you guessed Asbury Park, then kudos to you, even if you only got it from the subtitle above.

Louise Murray used to serve on Asbury Park’s city council, and although the predominantly blue burg no longer has to put up with her in that role, it will have to endure her tenure as chair of the local Republican Party, a position she assumed this week. Murray’s avowed first order of business is to “concentrate on re-energizing the Republicans in the city,” and if you’d like an example of what it apparently takes to re-energize Republicans, here you go...

TWO: Joe Rockhead

Viewers of The 700 Club got a rare treat recently when Congressional aspirant Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher related to the program how he came to Christ. It all began when his youth pastor invited him out for a bite and told him to bring along a science book...

THREE: Birth of a Notion

A chastened Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett appeared in Take Five late in May, apologizing for having made his state a laughingstock by pestering Hawaii to provide proof that the President was born there...

FOUR: “And they’re both named Hussein!!!”

While Ken Bennett finally conceded that the President was born in Hawaii, a recent poll finds that nearly 64% of Bennett’s fellow Republicans disagree. Professor Benjamin Valentino of Dartmouth put a variety of questions, mostly centered on foreign policy, to self-identified Republicans, Democrats and Independents. Can you guess which group’s views were the most ridiculous?

FIVE: Fables of the Reconstruction

Southern Baptists recently held their annual get-together in the City That George W. Bush Forgot, and they did something unprecedented...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2012/06/28/take-five-what-a-fool-believes-edition/

Take Five (Summer of Shove edition)

ONE: Piggies

Summer began yesterday, and with both the weather and election campaigns heating up, intelligent public discourse and basic civility continue to decline at alarming rates. Dearborn’s 17th Arab International Festival last weekend drew thousands of Arab Americans and a dozen bigoted morons. The “Bible Believers” are a group of so-called Christians who staged a missionary event on Friday evening near the festival site. One of them carried a pig’s head on a pole...

TWO: “If we appear to seek the unattainable…”

Last Friday marked the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, the foundational manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society. After half a century, what’s most striking about the Port Huron Statement is its undiminished immediacy, and while that is partly attributable to the timelessness of its themes, it is also because so many of its goals are as dauntingly beyond reach now as they were then...

THREE: V for Vagina

I can’t imagine what the SDS founders would have thought about the “vagina” controversy unfolding 50 years and 100 miles away in Lansing. For starters, they would might shocked to see the word “vagina” appearing in print outside a medical textbook, but of course a lot of things have changed in half a century. Or have they...

FOUR: What Not to Watch

This all prompted none other than Meghan McCain to comment in an interview on The Ed Show Tuesday:

“… I just think that we’re regressing as a culture when you can’t even say the word ‘vagina.’”

Which is a commendable thing to say, especially coming from a conservative...

FIVE: Nyet, Nyet Soviet

Despite being stupider than a bowl of oatmeal, Monica Crowley has a doctorate in international relations (from Columbia, no less). Her complete ignorance about one country, at least, was demonstrated recently during a book-hawking appearance with Bill O’Reilly...

Nance Greggs: Ain’t Buying It

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I realize that with the upcoming presidential election in November, the MSM will be doing what it does best over the next few months: i.e. not reporting the actual news, but using every effort to boost their viewership – which, sadly, is what the MSM is now all about.

The importance of this election is of no interest to the talking bobble-heads. The importance of ratings and audience share is.

As a result of the aforementioned, the issues will be ignored, the facts will be forgotten, the statistics will be skewed, and the ever-changing opinions of self-proclaimed political experts will be trotted out like an all-you-can-eat bread basket at a cheap restaurant – in hopes that the patrons will be too stuffed to notice that the meal they’ve ordered will be not only be slow in arriving, but equally lacking in substance.

The MSM doesn’t just want a horserace – they need one. Whoever is in the lead one day will be relegated to also-ran status the next. Poll results that favor one candidate will be loudly touted in the morning; completely opposite survey findings will be proclaimed by eight p.m.