Rememeber the last two of years when Dick Army’s Tea Party engineered massive astroturf rallies against the Obama Administration by scaring seniors into believing that the President was going to implement large funding cuts to Medicare? The nation saw scenes of seniors on electric scooters attending anti-government TEA party rallies terrified by the prospect that the Obama administration was threatening their access to a Socialist, government run health insurance program.

The juxtaposition was incongruous, to be sure. But nonetheless, there they were with their government supplied scooters and their signs, proving that in politics it is far more effective to scare people with lies than try to convince them of the superiority of your actual policy positions by explaining the intricacies and nuances of your plan. Read more »

One of the advantages of allowing Our Dear Scatterbrained Readers to stray off topic is that you never know what kind of perverse shit they’ll come up with. For example, a polite discussion Thursday about Sarah Palin’s surprising onset of verbal acuity suddenly morphed into nominations for America’s Most Phallic Civic Landmark.

As we were unfamiliar with most of the nominees — clearly we’ve led a sheltered life — we thought it expedient to line them all up for a Stinque Priapic Edifice Challenge. While everyone can agree that Size Matters, we think the most telling observation is this: Which would embarrass you the most around your mother?

And yes, everybody knows about the Washington Monument, which spends its days taunting the totally not gay Lincoln Memorial. We’re excluding that on account of obviousness.

With that out of the way, here are your nominees:

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In what seems to be a first for the Internet Age — including Iran — Egypt has disconnected itself from the planet:

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world.

Our old tabloid colleague Curt Hopkins asks whether other international communications will be cut as well:

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As a native of Eugene, Oregon, home of America’s Collegiate Losers, we’ve always had a wary perspective about the Autumn Attention Whore. During our blessed youth, the local team sucked, which was fine by us: Plenty else to do rather than worry about the results of sporting contests you can’t control.

But this is, alas, America, and even art museums can’t resist betting on the outcome of a match between two professional teams whose combined annual salaries surely dwarf their capital endowments:

Both museums are offering up significant impressionist paintings: The Carnegie Museum of Art has wagered Pierre Renoir’s playful, fleshy Bathers with a Crab (circa 1890-99) on a Pittsburgh Steelers victory. The Milwaukee Art Museum has put on the line Gustave Caillebotte’s serene Boating on the Yerres (1877).

Now before you start ranting about The End of Civilization As We Know It, bear in mind that the bet involves loans, not exchanges of possession. And if you’re wondering when the Packers moved to Milwaukee, there’s a simple explanation:

Green Bay doesn’t have an art museum.

We have a Super Bowl bet! [ArtInfo, via Kottke]

[Winston-Salem Journal]

“Placing Mike Lee in charge of overseeing the Constitution is a bit like putting Dick Cheney in charge of hunting and gun safety, yet the Senate GOP was so eager to put this radical tenther on the Judiciary Committee that it waived a rule prohibiting both of a state’s senators from serving on Judiciary in order to ensure Lee’s membership.” [ThinkProgress]

“That was a tough speech to have to sit through and kind of try to stomach because the president is so off-base in his ideas. And his theme last night in the State of the Union was the ‘WTF,’ you know, ‘Winning the Future.’ And I thought, ‘OK, that acronym, spot on.’ There were a lot of ‘WTF’ moments throughout that speech.” [WaPo, via Political Wire]