The Anti-Greta, Climate Change & the Alaska Senate Race
By Zachary Brown She stood in the roiling crowd, amid clean-cut college kids and potbellied dudes in cowboy hats and media men dashing this way and that. Her stringy blonde hair, her dark eyeliner, her sneakers and the flannel tied round her waist, all gave a picture of punk defiance. How ironic, I thought, given the suit-wearing merchants of the status quo she represents. They chose someone small and thin as a garter snake for their enormous, dreadful task. Meet Naomi Seibt: the anti-Greta. The GOP needed an answer to Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who has gained astonishing traction…
Photos: TheMudflats at the Right Wing CPAC Conference
It’s been an odd couple of months for me. Usually I’m covering the fringes of politics – from OWS to Ferguson protests to civil rights marches. Maybe a third party candidate or an environmental struggle that no one will care about for another couple years. But so far this past year, I’ve covered Presidential Candidates, Koch Brothers conferences (Americans for Prosperity), NRA conventions and now CPAC. CPAC, if you don’t know the initials, it stands for the Conservative Political Action Conference. It’s an annual conference where all of the biggest names in conservative politics get together and conspire for good or evil…
Click Bishop Takes a Page from Palin – Reads Dr. Seuss
Republican Senator Click Bishop, whose district covers land from Fairbanks to Valdez took a page from Sarah Palin and read a story by Dr. Seuss to the Alaska State Senate. Well, it wasn’t quite a Dr. Seuss original – more of a revision of Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham seen through the filter of government overreach. Unlike Half-Term Palin’s teleprompter read at CPAC last year (when she held the book as a prop), Click seems to have actually written the words down in a copy of Green Eggs and Ham. I’m hoping that he bought a new copy and didn’t ruin one of from his grandkids….
Oyster Roundup! Fake Palin, Heckling Cheney & Dirty Valentines
Greetings from CPAC! Former Vice President Dick Cheney got a heck of a greeting at CPAC, the yearly Conservative Political Action Conference where conservatives of all stripes come together to wallow in varying degrees of narrow-mindedness, religious zeal, military might, fiscal conservatism, and social backwardness. There are usually some internal squabbles about things like LGBT rights, and how they do or don’t fit into the conservative platform. But back to Cheney’s greeting. It was spirited and passionate, but not what the former Veep expected. When Rumsfeld’s name was announced, and he took the stage to accept the conferences “Defenders of…