Planet Wingnut News for Tuesday

Arizona cracking down on teachers with heavy accents




Absurd: Governor defends immigration law with frog puppet


CA GOP Guv. candidate Chuck DeVore: 'Jack Bauer' Would Support Me (VIDEO)


Chuck DeVore, a California state legislator and Tea Party-backed candidate for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, has a new Web video claiming that "Jack Bauer," the protagonist of the action-adventure show 24, would support him for Senate.

"Ask yourself this question, Jack Bauer fans: Which person would Jack want as his U.S. Senator?" the announcer says. "Barbara Boxer, a Guantanamo-closing, tax-raising, big-government growing ultra-liberal who reads Miranda rights to foreign terrorists? Or Chuck DeVore, a U.S. Army Reserve intelligence officer, who likes Guantanamo Bay as it is, thinks foreign terrorists should have an interrogator, not a lawyer, and supports lower taxes and smaller government?"

Of course, it should be noted that "Jack Bauer" is a fictional character portrayed by the actor Kiefer Sutherland. In real life, Sutherland is a Canadian democratic socialist whose grandfather, the late Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas, was the founder of his country's single-payer health care system. The real-life Kiefer Sutherland remains a staunch supporter of his grandfather's left-wing New Democratic Party, and is a vocal advocate for single-payer health care.

Palin gives ‘disastrous speech’ at real estate conference, doesn’t bother talking about real estate.


Fox News analyst Sarah Palin reportedly charges $100,000 to give a speech, and has some pretty big demands, including “first-class airfare for two, several luxury hotel rooms and water bottles with ‘bendable straws.’” For this price, one might expect Palin to tailor her message to her audience, instead of giving the same tea party rant every time. But her keynote at a commercial real estate conference in Las Vegas this weekend was “disastrous” and went over like a ton of bricks, owing to the fact that she didn’t touch on real estate.” Industry blog The Dirt Lawyer’s Blog reports:

Speaking of disappointment, let’s talk about the keynote address from Sarah Palin. In short, it was a standard stump speech with a few superficial comments about shopping centers and retail real estate. It was awful and a borderline train wreck in my opinion. All Palin had to do was add in a paragraph about the pending disaster of carried interest and she would have not only won over the crowd but gotten significant fundraiser cash from the industry if she runs in 2012. As it stands, I do not know if she knows what carried interest is.

David Bodamer of TrafficCourt, another industry blog, reports “most people I spoke with were massively disappointed with Sarah Palin’s keynote.” “[M]any felt disappointed that Palin didn’t make more of an effort to talk about issues important to the industry,” Bodamer added. In her speech, Palin rolled out the standard trope about how President Obama is ruining the country with big government, and also said he is an “addict of other people’s money — OPM, which she pronounced ‘opium.’”