HuffPost editor Roy Sekoff joined Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s “Countdown” Thursday night to assess the electoral prospects of the candidates who seem to be vying even now for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. That group includes former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, and even Bush-era Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton. “I actually thought it would be impossible to top the 2008 group in terms of freak-showishness, when we had Sam Brownback running against Darwin and Tom Tancredo running on the xenophobia ticket,” Sekoff said. “But this group, they have so many loose cannons, it almost is enough to make one pine for Duncan Hunter.” Read More… More on Video
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HuffPost TV: Roy Sekoff On Olbermann: 2012 GOP Hopefuls Are A ‘Freak Show’
“If we are to remain leaders in the green economy, then we have to be relentless in our pursuit of clean energy. We have to constantly evaluate all aspects of our energy footprint. Find opportunities to collaborate and partner with other companies and organizations. And as one of Nike’s long-held business maxims so aptly declares, never stop evolving, especially when it involves doing the right thing.”– Sarah Severn , director of stakeholder mobilization for Nike Inc., August 17, 2010 So much for evolution, NIKE. Still embroiled in infamous sweatshop practices , NIKE is now running an ad with a background of a massive strip-mine or mountaintop removal operation in one of the most bizarre panders to Big Coal–and one of the most disrespectful slights of coal miners. Read More… More on Football
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Jeff Biggers: Scandal of the Week: NIKE Runs Mountaintop Removal Football Ad, Disrespects Coal Miners
Rasmussen is moving Alaska from solid GOP to lean GOP following Joe Miller’s primary defeat of Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Their first poll in the Alaska Senate race (grain of salt as usual) has Miller with just a 6 point lead over Dem Scott McAdams, 50-44. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate and two percent (2%) are undecided. This survey was conducted Tuesday night just hours after incumbent GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski conceded the Republican nomination during a recount of the August 24 primary. Miller, a lawyer and military veteran, benefited from support from the state’s former governor Sarah Palin and Tea Party activists. Ninety percent (90%) of Democrats back McAdams while 79% of Republicans throw their vote behind Miller. McAdams holds a 22-point lead among voters not affiliated with either major political party. That’s pretty low undecides for this early and two relative unknowns, though Alaska is small enough (population-wise, anyway) that any politician is going to have a fairly high degree of name recognition. The NRSC released a poll that has Miller leading 52-36. That one was conducted over last weekend. At the same time, PPP was in the field and found an 8 point difference , Miller over McAdams 47-39. Murkowski was included in both polls. Here’s where it gets interesting, taking Murkowski out of the mix and considering that she has as of yet declined to endorse Miller , leaving it at “no comment” for the moment. PPP did some exit polling in Alaska among Republicans, finding Only 18% of Alaska Republicans identify themselves as Tea Party members but Miller won them by an 80-20 margin, enough to make up for Murkowski’s 63-37 lead with ones who don’t actively identify with the movement…. Joe Miller’s victory was driven by conservatives who think their party and more specifically Lisa Murkowski have gotten too liberal. Tea Party identification in Alaska is actually not that high, but Miller’s advantage with that group was so overwhelming it gave him the win. Palin’s endorsement certainly helped Miller and it’s unlikely he could have won without it, but it doesn’t appear to have been the driving force in his upset. The very bad blood built up between Miller and Murkowski in the past week could come back to bite him with non-Tea Party Republicans and fence-sitters (few though they may be). From what we’ve seen of Miller so far –the attacks on Murkowski, on the NRSC–it doesn’t seem like he’s going to be making nice with the establishment Republicans. McAdams is going to have to hit this guy hard and drive his already high unfavorables (52 percent, according to PPP) up among disaffected Murkowski supporters.
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AK-Sen: New polls, Murkowski mum
Last night, Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski conceded something that had been obvious for a week: She won’t be her party’s nominee this fall. She lost her primary for being insufficiently anti-abortion. (Here’s what that means for a Republican in Alaska: She and her opponent both endorsed a parental notification ballot measure, but he endorsed it harder .) Because there’s no more important issue, and nothing worse, than teenagers having sex. Also this week, Alaska’s most famous birth control eschewer, Bristol Palin, told People magazine how excited she was to be joining Dancing with the Stars . “I see this as something that’s fun and that’s positive and I’m going to be able to show my work ethic to people out there.” Read More… More on Sarah Palin
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Chris Kelly: Bristol Palin Dances, Pregnant, on Lisa Murkowski’s Grave
Though he served as Prime Minister of Japan for a mere two years in the early ’70’s before being driven from power in Nixonian fashion in a Watergate-like scandal, for the next decade and a half Kakuei Tanaka served as Japan’s shadow leader, known forever as The Kingmaker for his uncanny ability to govern Japan from the shadows, often hand-picking who would lead the country by controlling a powerful bloc of legislators. In modern American political history we haven’t had a Tanaka-like Kingmaker, until now, when Sarah Palin’s handpicked candidate Joe Miller came out of nowhere to defeat Lisa Murkowski. The Miller victory was but the latest in the successes Palin has had in races across the country, but it was clearly the most dramatic and portends what could be a political presence far more powerful than even a Palin presidential run and it raises a most interesting question: Why should Palin even try to run for President when she can essentially govern from her kitchen table in Alaska by endorsing candidates who share her political beliefs? Like Kakuei Tanaka who wielded power far more powerfully and effectively through others, Sarah Palin may find that she can pursue her agenda far more effectively through the likes of Nikki Haley and Joe Miller than she ever could by running for President herself. Read More… More on Sarah Palin
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Mark Joseph: Why Be President When You Can Be King(maker)?
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Sen. Lisa Murkowski was booted from office in the Republican primary Tuesday by a little-known conservative lawyer in arguably the biggest political upset of the year. Joe Miller, backed by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Express, became the latest newcomer to the national political stage to take down an incumbent in 2010 amid deep dissatisfaction with the Washington establishment. Read More… More on Tax Day Tea Parties
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Murkowski Concedes Alaska GOP Senate Primary To Joe Miller
As an American Muslim and a mother about to send my child to a high school located just blocks from Ground Zero, I add to the list of a mom’s first day of school worries: how safe will my son be? Read More… More on Islam
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Sarah Sayeed, Ph.D.: Building Shared Cultural and Spiritual Spaces: Lessons in the Mosque Debate
Sarah Haskins, HuffPost Comedy favorite and deeply funny lady, is preggers. Many of you may think that being pregnant brings love and light to life. WRONG. Haskins wants booze, cigarettes, and hate. Luckily her annoyance is hilarious so it doesn’t make you want to switch to a life of abstinence (just a life of condoms). Here’s her talking about her life as an incubator on the Paper Machete Show. LISTEN: Read More… More on Babies
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Sarah Haskins: Pregnancy Is A Dark Time Of Sobriety (AUDIO)
We’ll see if my schedule allows me to do a compressive ‘end of summer’ box office wrap-up, but since summer 2010 doesn’t officially end until September 3rd, I figure I’ve got time. But for now, here is a rundown of the various scenes, performances, moments, and miscues that defined the summer just past. Because sometimes, discussing the ‘parts’ is more fun than discussing the ‘whole’. I’ll try to avoid divulging plot twists and the like, but consider this a SPOILER WARNING. Funniest moment of the summer: the demonstration goes horribly wrong in Splice . No fair spoiling it here, but there’s a moment about halfway through the otherwise taut and terrific sci-fi horror picture where Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are giving a corporate presentation regarding their recent scientific endeavors. Let’s just say it’s easily the most outrageously funny scene of this nature since ED-209 told that unlucky executive to put down the gun in Robocop . Read More…
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Scott Mendelson: 2010 Summer Movie Review part I: The Moments That Mattered.
My new book, American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right is officially released on Wednesday (though Amazon and others have been selling it for several weeks). I wrote a synopsis of the book here . The early reaction: 1.) Judging the book by its cover It used to be that people read books before opining about them. Apparently, that’s too much effort for some people. 2.) Weenie liberals You know the kind, the type of people that get the vapors when any progressive gets aggressive. Moulitsas … is primarily concerned with building a movement. And he may be right to suggest that the right’s rhetoric is sometimes so intemperate that mockery and reason are insufficient to fight it. Fine. If the Democrats run the country for the next 50 years because Moulitsas has taught them to fight fire with fire, then I guess I won’t complain. I just wish reading American Taliban didn’t make me feel like a member of the Conservative Book Club. I’ll be happy to stipulate — if you don’t believe fighting fire with fire is acceptable in our modern political world, as we face off against the Palins, Becks, Limbaughs and O’Reillys of the conservative world, then this book isn’t for you. Nor this site, for that matter. On the other hand, it’s nice to see the anti-weenie liberals emerge . 3.) Attack the blurbers! This frankly bizarre piece in the libertarian Reason goes after two blurbers for the book — Roger Ebert and Rachel Maddow — because they don’t like Sarah Palin and the crazed rhetoric from the Right. Therefore, they are hypocritical because Right-wing lies are exactly the same as pointing out that Islamic fundamentalists and the crazy Right both hate gays. And then there’s a bunch of stuff about Nazis. 4. Praise Okay, this stuff isn’t as fun as the hysterical reactions to the name or the presence of a fighting liberal. But all the same, can’t ignore it: Amid much crowing about the GOP’s 2008 implosion, he was more prescient than many on the left about how the far right would react to the reality of a black man in the White House who wasn’t a butler or a cook. But in American Taliban, even Moul itsas sounds shocked by the degree to which the virulent attacks on President Obama and his agenda echo the ideas—on war, power, sex, culture, and gay and women’s rights—of the terrormongers who brought us 9/11 … His brilliance lies both in his ability to discern patterns that others miss and in his talent for not mincing words. Like Moulitsas’s previous two books, this one promises to be a conversation changer for those who can stomach reading the whole thing. Too bad that what’s left of the mainstream media will dismiss its insights as mere ideological bile. — We’ll see far more reaction as the book officially hits the shelves on Wednesday, but I expect much of the same. Conservatives will hate it, for obvious reasons. Weenie liberals will hate it, for obvious reasons. A bunch of “serious people” will tsk tsk the lack of civility in our discourse — now that a liberal is throwing the punches. And some people will appreciate that I’m throwing those punches. Because look, this book, ultimately, is a big “fuck you” to every conservative who has ever accused us of wanting the terrorists to win. Why would we? The reasons I hate the crazy Right is the same reason I hate Jihadists — their fetishization of violence, their theocratic tendencies, their disrespect for women, their hatred of gays, their fear of the “other”, their defiance of scientific progress and education, and their attempts to hijack popular culture. It’s a good book, and it’s paperback, so it’s cheap. Pick up a copy at your favorite online retailer or bookstore, and come up with your own opinion on the matter.
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Early reaction to American Taliban