Monday night:

Wan Fratboy Humor purveyor Wonkette publishes “Greatest Living American: A Children’s Treasury of Trig Crap On His Birthday”, which includes (among a dumpster of other items) a commemorative poem from Team Sarah:

Oh, little boy what are you dreaming about
A mother’s soft lullaby…the soft touch of her hand…the soft sound of her voice as she says “I Love You”
Dream on little boy as the Angels stand guard

“What’s he dreaming about?” asks Wonkette professional satirist Jack Stuef. “Nothing. He’s retarded.” “Retarded” links to a video of Levi Johnston claiming Sarah Palin used the same word for her 2008 Stinque Award-winning son.

Wednesday:

Mission Accomplished! Newsbusters takes the bait:

What has become of today’s liberalism that makes it acceptable to attack the mentally handicapped if they or their parents are conservatives?

And Wonkette editor Ken Layne defiantly responds to a Mediaite inquiry:

Read more »

So apparently Trig Birtherism is heating up, The Preznit of These United States said some Fine Things yesterday that we’ll wait to see translated into actual policy before we give a shit, and Teabaggers are collectively demanding to Keep Government Out Of Their Medicare.

But in weighing the relative significance of these stories against a Penguin Tickling Video, we’re reminded yet again how easily our editorial priorities are subverted.

Watch Cookie the Ticklish Penguin go viral in real time [Salon, via Sully]

Our guest columnist this morning is David Caton of the Florida Family Association, working hard to make your teen’s life as miserable as possible.

MTV is airing through their Teen Nick channel for kids episodes of the show called DeGrassi which affirms and promotes the transgender lifestyle to an audience of millions of young teens and children.

You would think by the number of episodes that MTV devotes to including the relationship between a female to male transgender high school student and a bi-sexual lesbian student that such relationships are a common occurrence in America’s high schools.

The odds of this bizarre relationship occurring in high school are likely less than one in a million. Yet, MTV feeds this salacious and irresponsible propaganda to an audience made up almost exclusively of young teens and children as if it were common place.

MTV airs a free promo for PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) on DeGrassi which directs kids to an organization that will encourage our youth to embrace a different sexual identity that may stay with them for life.

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The blogosphere was making merry Monday with this passage from Ross Douhat’s NYT column:

Today, for instance, a family of four making the median income — $94,900 — pays 15 percent in federal taxes. By 2035, under the C.B.O. projection, payroll and income taxes would claim 25 percent of that family’s paycheck.

Apparently that “median income” was about twenty-large high, at least until Mr. Douhat clarified that the CBO estimate “includes employment-based health insurance and the employer’s share of payroll taxes”.

Which is all well and good. Unless, like us, you’re self-employed, in which case those two items may cause uninsured fits of hysterics.

Because, really, we’d love to pay only 15 percent in federal taxes. We’d also love to take in that High Five income, but that’s another issue.

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There’s a game being played in the blogosphere that we’ll call When Did Sarah Palin Lose It? The nominees for Moment Lost, working backwards, include the following:

• Her self-pitying response to the Tucson shooting.
• Her self-aggrandizing reality series.
• Her daughter’s self-aggrandizing dance-show appearance.
• The 2010 election, which popped the Teabagger Bubble.

(That last item is also an entry in the When Did Glenn Beck Lose It? game.)

The presumption underlying the game, which we have no interest in contesting, is that Sarah Palin has lost it. The latest evidence — aside from multiple polls showing her trailing the wingnut competition — comes from her weekend appearance in Madison, Wisconsin, which drew an audience of millions hundreds of tens of thousands, hundreds of whom showed up to heckle her, and which you didn’t hear about because nobody is paying attention to her, and did you hear that Trump says Bill Ayers ghostwrote Obama’s book?

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Following the discovery yesterday of That can be my next tweet, a new Internet service that creates a meta-tweet from your existing messages, we thought we’d test it against the Twitter accounts of potential Republican Presidential candidates to see whether we can gain some electoral insight. We think you’ll agree that they make much more sense this way.

Candidate		Composite Tweet
	Donald Trump	I’m real scared. airs tonight on The Apprentice back to tune in on Donald Trump Fabulous World of your.
	Michele Bachmann	With safety protocols, companies must be on Fox News. This Deal is just released budget.
	Mitt Romney	Laughing with Tagg, Ann and pointing out my video opposing the world. Thank you for doing what’s?

Read more »

The most significant passage of President Obama’s speech has to be the following:

You will have your choice of a number of plans that offer a few different packages, but every plan would offer an affordable, basic package… And I believe one of these options needs to be a public option that will give people a broader range of choices and inject competition into the health care market, so that we can force waste out of the system and keep the insurance companies honest.

Whoops, we’re sorry! Bookmarked a June 2009 speech by mistake.

But while we’re there, can we just say that we count our blessings every day knowing that, with the electoral winds at his back and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, President Obama was not only able to get the healthcare package he envisioned, but was also able to pass his 2011 budget and avoid nasty showdowns over mid-year funding?

Apparently we can’t.

So reading Wednesday’s speech — the right one — you’ll forgive us if we don’t get excited about the passages where President Obama said the right things. Maybe during the campaign, maybe a couple years ago, but we’ve learned to wait for the hostage crisis to see what gets bargained away. And right now the next capture is looking like May 16, when our National Plastic gets cut off.

Remarks by the President on Fiscal Policy [White House]