I think Rush tried to warn us about this specifically

News item: WASHINGTON — On Friday, Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of White House lawn to plant a vegetable garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets (the president doesn’t like them) but arugula will make the cut.

annudder nitpicking, America-hating, smarty-pants elitist mouths off in the New York Times (of course)

Obama and the War on Brainzzz

We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers* as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.

Oooooh, listen everyone, Mister Science is talking!

* Was dat a swipe at Da Elf?

Did K-Mad write this when he was a fetus?

I'm Glad I Don't Have A Brain Yet, Because I Hate Elitism

POSTED BY: Gary Brunson, 5-Week-Old Fetus

Nov 03, 2008, 4:00 pm

If there's one thing I am sick and tired of listening to as I sit here growing clusters of nerve cells that will eventually form ears, it's the elites . And the worst elite of them all is this Washington insider, career politician, and writer of too many books Joseph R. Biden. Just listen to him talk! Every single time he appears on TV, it's "analysis of the issues" this and "informed opinion" that. Blah blah blah! Even I make more sense than this asshole, and I don't have a fucking speech center!

Seriously, doesn't Mr. Biden and his kind know how sick of all their fancy "thinking" we are? I'd rather spend all day listening to the monotonous beating of my mother's heart than hear one more word from this jackass. At least, my mother's heart doesn't as often.

As a pre-born entity who has yet to develop any higher brain functions, I am uniquely in touch with what voters are looking for this election. They are looking for 3 things: heartfelt emotion, righteous rage, and good old-fashioned Joe Six-Pack-style values. … three things that an elitist like Joe Biden will simply never understand.

I'm sorry but that's the facts, elitists! And if you don't like it, as soon as I grow a digestive tract you can kiss my ass.

~

speaking of shockers -- who's hating America today?

The New York Times.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole...

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

quit making sweeping generalizations about rednecks

He's writing to the Economist, but he might as well be talking to the elitist effete snobs at LoC.

SIR - In America, the redneck is not as homogeneous as Bagehot presumes. In Sarah Palin's state of Alaska, there are only two species of tree squirrel. They are both classified as "fur" animals: one has a very minimal amount of meat and the other is nocturnal. Hunting for either, while legal, is non-existent. Consequently, if you did come across someone eating "squirrel gumbo" it would be a very rare occurrence indeed.

By the way, gumbo is a dish of the American South, and is thus less likely to be found on the table of an Alaskan redneck than bear bourguignon.

Why does Neil Steinberg hate God? Oh wait, he's... never mind

Dumb isn't the answer - Nation is at crisis stage on multitude of issues that will get worse with time and will require intelligence -- not prayer -- to solve

Something to consider while you're fluttering your hands to heaven and declaring that dumb is now chic, that dumb is the new black.

Scum-Slimes tackles the tough questions (cont'd)

Page one, above the masthead:

WHAT A SPECTACLE
ALL EYES ON SARA PALIN'S UNIQUE GLASSES

Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin made all kinds of political statements during her convention speech, but the fashion statement she made with her glasses is what intrigued eyewear professionals.

Italee Optics of Los Angeles has increased its imports of the frames in response to Palin's appearance, a company manager said.

"We were just talking about that,'" said Judy Sulier, an optician at Pinnacle Eye Group in Bedford Township, Ohio. "I was going to go online to pull it up and see what... (zzzzzzzzz... What? Oh... sorry Ed.)

Palin, the governor of Alaska, wears customized glasses and frames from Japanese designer Kazuo Kawasaki.

The high-end eyewear -- the prices start at $600 -- are frameless and allow the customer to choose from a nearly limitless variety of lens shapes.

Shop owner Georgeann Kohn in Toledo, Ohio, said she had received "just a couple inquiries" from... What what whaaaaaa? Back up a second there...

Start at $600? More than John Edwards's haircut? More than John McCain's phokking Salvatore Ferragamo 'Pregiato' Phokking Moccasins for phokk's sake? That's hockey mom folksy? My phokking @SS.

Top story on the SS website is far more hard-hitting:
Ten fittest, least fit presidents

The Sliming of Osama in Venn Diagram Format, If You're Having Trouble Visualizing It... I Mean Obama

I wonder where the "uppity" bubble should go.

Nate Silver stuffs it in Washington Post's face

So indeed, Obama received a "discount" -- the same discount that any borrower in his position would have received.

At last, our dream of a Nation free of annoying, pointy-headed elitists is within our ham-fisted reach

America’s human capital is tested

A startling and profoundly important fact about the US economy has received surprisingly little attention. The educational quality of the country’s workers is starting to decline – not just relatively (because other countries are catching up and moving ahead) but also, for the first time, in absolute terms. Over the coming years, baby-boomers departing from the labour force will have better educational qualifications than the younger workers replacing them.

the elitist menace among us

we don't want nobody nobody sent (cont'd), or, since when is the Wall Street Journal wid da tarrists?

Mister Maverick, Meet Da Machine
By THOMAS FRANK

...True, there is a clique of professors in Hyde Park who are "alien" to working-class interests, as I know from having lived there for 15 years. Those professors are conservatives, however: members of the University of Chicago's law and economics departments who have given that institution much of its world-wide fame.

Their hostility to the working class is not to be doubted. They have dreamed up ways to get the New Deal ruled unconstitutional. They have railed against labor unions and higher minimum wages while cheering lustily for Nafta and grotesque pay inequality. At this very moment, in that diabolical neighborhood of Hyde Park, the university is setting up a lavishly funded Milton Friedman Institute in order to better worship the greatest free-market evangelist of them all. (Fittingly, it will occupy what used to be the Chicago Theological Seminary.)

But these professors get a pass when Hyde Park's "academic world" comes under fire. These are intellectuals conservatives love; indeed, if the GOP ever was the "party of ideas," as many insist, those ideas pretty much came from Hyde Park.

What the culture warriors mean is something much cruder: that the neighborhood of Hyde Park (1) harbors a lot of academic types and (2) has a very liberal political tradition. Stereotype, meet cliché: Professors plus liberalism equals "elitism."

Maybe it will work. But first our Republican friends should know something about the company they are keeping as they line up with the neighborhood's detractors.

The distinguishing characteristic of Hyde Park's political history – the feature that sets it apart from every other neighborhood in the city – is its longstanding defiance of the Chicago machine.

Over the years, the neighborhood stubbornly insisted on sending a series of independents and clean-government types to be its representatives in Congress and on the City Council. They have included alderman Leon Despres, who fought the machine for years; mayor Harold Washington, who finally beat the machine; and Sen. Paul Douglas, whose endless battles against corruption won him the appellation – yes – "maverick."

The machine hated them right back. It gerrymandered Hyde Park to dilute the neighborhood's vote; it routinely shut off Mr. Despres's microphone when he spoke in the City Council. Abner Mikva, whom Hyde Park sent to Congress in the 1970s (he is now an informal adviser to Mr. Obama), later wrote of his own introduction to the Chicago machine when he tried to volunteer in 1948:

"'Who sent you?' the committeeman said. I said, 'Nobody.' He said, 'We don't want nobody nobody sent. . . . Where are you from, anyway?' I said, 'University of Chicago.' He said, 'We don't want nobody from the University of Chicago in this organization.'"

And now, 60 years later, comes John McCain to embrace the same noble sentiment. Apparently he has seen a glimmer of promise in that stale hate and is ready to pick up where the machine left off. Some maverick.

Then again, why shouldn't he? His party embodies the motto of Chicago politics – "Where's mine?" – even better than the machine's patronage army did 50 years ago.

Wanting to be sure, I contacted the McCain campaign with an email query addressed to two officers, which unfortunately bounced back. But I also emailed Mark Salter, the candidate's right-hand man. Mr. Salter replied in under a minute, both to the others I had addressed and, considerately, to me as well: "Do not respond," he ordered.

But I will respond anyway. Here is my advice to Mr. Salter, as he travels about burnishing his boss's image as a "maverick" who is unafraid to talk to the press. If you're going to drum up some Chicago-style hate, you need to learn some authentic Chicagoese. Next time you brush off a reporter, do it right. Repeat after me: "We don't want nobody nobody sent."

on the other hand, listening to the Bush administration does cast a reasonable doubt on evolution

U.S. Experts Bemoan Nation's Loss of Stature in the World of Science

Speaking at a science summit that opens this week's first World Science Festival, the expert panel of scientists, and audience members, agreed that the United States is losing stature because of a perceived high-level disdain for science. They cited U.S. officials and others questioning scientific evidence of climate change, the reluctance to federally fund stem cell research, and some U.S. officials casting doubt on evolution as examples that have damaged America's international standing.

Where logic "doesn't have no relevance"...

How is she pandering and slobbering today?

a) going on about elites
b) pretending she understands long commutes and pain of gas prices
c) not putting in her lot with so-called "experts"
d) talking about the little people she's meeting
e) all of the above

If you've guessed (e) then you've really got the measure of perhaps the most depressing and dispiriting descent into political opportunism since, oh, 2004.

From the Times:

This morning, George Stephanopoulos began his televised interview with Senator Hillary Clinton by asking if she could name a single economist who supports her plan for a gas tax suspension.

She did not. “I’m not going to put in my lot with economists,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” program. A few moments later, she added, “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans.”

Throughout the exchange, Mrs. Clinton argued that she trusted her own eyes and ears instead. “This gas tax issue to me is very real because I have been meeting people across Indiana and North Carolina who drive for a living, who commute long distances, who would save money,” she said.

Senator Barack Obama has derided the gas-tax suspension as a gimmick that would save consumers little and cost thousands of jobs, and Kara Glennon, a member of the audience at a town-hall meeting, seemed to agree. Gas prices are “not academic” for her, she told Mrs. Clinton, because she makes less than $25,000 a year—and then she accused Mrs. Clinton of pandering. “Call me crazy, but I listen to economists because I think I know what they studied,” she said.

However, in an interview afterward, Mark Moorman, another audience member and a firefighter, said he shared Mrs. Clinton’s mistrust of experts. Political candidates cite economists but they “never say anybody’s name, or where the study came from,” he said. “So as far as me, it doesn’t have no relevance.”

Hillary Clinton, caring about the little people, because you know, the Clintons have always cared about the little people. I mean she was on the board at Wal-Mart, and everybody knows how well Wal-Mart has cared for its employees and in what high esteem they hold them. Hell, Sam Walton, that little person of little people, went so far as to call her "a great friend of ours." And by "ours" of course he meant little people everywhere, not those big nasty elites. And by elites, of course I'm not talking about somebody worth $109 million dollars or the dozens of billions of dollars the Waltons are worth. I'm talking about you and me, so Hillary, I believe you, and I invite you to come to my school and tell my students to their faces why as Senator you have put absolutely no pressure on the state of New York to make sure that our school gets just as much money per student as the schools in Great Neck and Chautauqua and then you can tell them about how you had no problem authorizing the insane president of the United States to use these same little people to go to Iraq seven or eight times each, some of them, to fight a war for the other little people like Haliburton and the various fellows of the Carlyle Fund. Maybe we can talk about what you did on your time at Wal-Mart to help the workers unionize or get higher pay or greater access to health care - after all, health care is so important to you and the little people are so important to you, I'm sure you have all kinds of things you can say. Or you can prattle on about the elites some more and we can all wonder at the inanity of this campaign being run in the middle of a moment when the only important things are the things we are not talking anything about.