Separated at birth: The special guest edition

Turtles in modern conservative history: A very special edition of Separated at Birth

In the beginning, there was Burt the Turtle, who brought the Cold War into the grade school classroom, convincing a generation of American children that horrible death could come raining out of the sky at any instant of the day or night, but that those old flimsy wooden school desks were adequate protection against a fireball hotter than the surface of the sun and a shock wave moving faster than the speed of sound.

Then there was Phil Gramm, who as a notional Democrat from Texas helped push through Ronald Reagan's first Laffer Curve/Trickle-Down/Starve-the-Beast budget – increasing the military budget, slashing social programs, cutting taxes, hoping for the best – whereupon his fellow Democrats threw him off the House Budget Committee, whereupon he resigned his seat, switched to the Republican Party, ran for and won his old seat in a special election, and spent the rest of his career in the House and later the Senate pushing tax cuts and banking deregulation.

And finally, there's Mitch McConnell, Republican Senator who denies he ever supported reasonable gun control measures in the early 1990s, announced in 2009 that he was dedicated to making Barack Obama a one-term president, and has currently been dragged so far to the right by his fear of getting primaried by a Tea Partier that his only accomplishment as Senate Minority Leader – except for pantsing Harry Reid time and again on procedural reform – has been making sure that the Senate has accomplished nothing, lest Obama somehow get credit for anything, ever.

p3 readers, we proudly present the return of Separated at Birth with a three-fer: Terrapene ornata conservatatum, the American conservative box turtle.

Acknowledgment of the works of Rick Perlstein.

Happy to be judged by the company I keep

I launched p3 seven years ago this month with a simple mission: In those pre-WikiLeaks days, where could someone post important information, like the formula to Coca-Cola or the DOD's nuclear launch codes, while remaining secure in the knowledge that no one was ever likely to stumble upon it?

Where, indeed.

Since December 2004, p3 has let me indulge my passions for free speech, civil liberties, and the workings of persuasion and the media, largely uninterrupted by comments or web traffic. It's also let me extend myself in such areas as limericks, celebrity separated-at-birth images, plus classic animation and political cartooning. It has covered a wide base of topics while doggedly retaining what one friend of the site called “an almost Rain Man-like inability to connect with a steady audience.” (Yes, it was a friend.)

Which is why I'm delighted to see p3 among the Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves, a celebration of the “small blogs” we all probably would be reading if we actually knew they were out there. The p3 post in question is this meditation on the difference between the smallpox virus and the (dis)appearance of the word “nigger” in “Huckleberry Finn.” The full list of nominees, as well as the tradition behind the event, are described here by Batocchio, who did the heavy lifting this year in the lamented absence of tradition founder Jon Swift.

Even though it was a self-nomination (what? Markos Moulitsas never promotes his own site?), as I cast my eye down the list of the singled-out, I'm delighted to see such p3 friends as Mad Kane, Lance Mannion, Melissa McEwan, and Batocchio -- none of whom, come to think about it, do I really think of as running a “small blog.”

Reading the list, I also realized there are a lot of other blogs I regularly read when recommended (often by someone else on the list) but should be reading regularly anyway. The annual end-of-year site design overhaul will be a good time to bring more of those onto the p3 blogroll.

Meanwhile, what better occasion to look back at some of the p3 big hits and near misses of years gone by?

Over the years, some of my most-visited posts, not counting five years of railing against All Things Bush (which, statistically speaking, is a little like saying “some of of the top sites on the Internet, not counting porn”) have been predictable, but more often not:

One of the all-time crowd favorites remains this 2009 piece on the Supreme Court's “Mad Magazine exception” for parody as protected speech. I cranked it out in an hour following an appearance by Mad writer and p3 god Frank Jacobs on a PBS special, and it's been drawing hits ever since.

(A thematically-related piece two years earlier was one of my own favorites, but probably got lost in the swell of news that week.)

Another heavily-visited post earned its traffic much less on the merits than on the shameless concatenation of three can't-miss keywords in the title. I saw the lesson there but only partly learned it.

The popularity of one particular heavily-visited post from years gone by was an unfortunate side-effect of my love of Latinisms. The point of the article, a theme I kept to fairly often in the Bush years, was my suspicion that a lot of the current crop of conservative commentators had not merely been recruited and subsidized by the GOP and its funding auxiliaries, but were actually grown from pods in secret farms somewhere in the Plains States specifically to perform their function. Alas, the title contained two unpaired words that, while they seemed innocent enough to me, apparently tripped the search-engine triggers of a narrow but highly dedicated sexual fetishist demographic of whose existence I had been happily unaware. (For obvious reasons, no link on this one.)

One of my all-time favorite posts came in the second month of p3's existence, and combined my interest in free speech with Oregon news and my thing for open letters. It was inspired by this unlikely problem: What happens when the American Nazi Party adopts a highway roadside to clean up?

By tradition, every December I consider whether I'm going to continue p3 in the coming year. See you in 2012.

Separated at birth: A field guide to weasels of North America

Via The Atlantic's James Fallows (or, more accurately, one of his readers) comes this observation about sneaky little two-faced twerps.

Separated at Birth? Or something more sinister?

On one hand, a past-it guy who's been delivering the same predictable material to a steadily aging audience since the early 1990s. You think his pasty face is finally going away but it just never seems to.

And on the other hand . . . wait a minute. Which one's which again?

Come to think about it, this may be more than Separated at Birth: Has anyone ever seen Gingrich and Leno together at the same time and place?

Separated at birth: On the descent of conservatism

Separated at birth: 1950s ur-conservative writer/intellectual William F. Buckley Jr., whose legacy has neither aged well nor passed into the hands of people who are up to the job, and 1950s ur-conservative writer/intellectual Ayn Rand, whose legacy has neither aged well nor passed into the hands of people who are up to the job.

(Images: Buckley and Rand.)

Separated at birth: "Better get a bucket."

Via yesterday's NYTimes, the governor of New Jersey shares what's been rumbling around inside of him for some time, and it isn't pretty:

Mr. Christie had little political experience to define him when he ran for governor in 2009; he had been a lawyer and a lobbyist, a one-term county freeholder and the United States attorney for New Jersey.

During the campaign, the state’s deep financial trouble took center stage. Mr. Christie focused on the state’s high taxes, played down his opposition to abortion, and aligned himself with President Obama on subjects like education reform and promoting wind and solar energy. And the new governor was a blank slate on some issues, like global warming.

In office, he eliminated the state’s Office of Climate Change, cut funding for clean energy programs and eliminated New Jersey’s share of financing for a 10-state greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program that is anathema to many conservatives.

But those were billed as pragmatic, budgetary moves. In November, Mr. Christie went further: He revealed that he was skeptical that human activity was responsible for climate change. Responding to a question at a public forum in Toms River, he said, “I think we’re going to need more science to prove something one way or the other.”

On March 11, he pulled New Jersey out of a multistate lawsuit aimed at curbing greenhouse emissions from power plants, and on March 24, he said he might also withdraw entirely from the cap-and-trade program.

Mr. Christie’s opposition to abortion has long been a matter of public record, but he has barely mentioned it unless asked. Then, in January, the governor addressed a large anti-abortion rally in Trenton, saying, “This is an issue whose time has come.”

In September, he vetoed state support for family planning clinics, a move strongly backed by anti-abortion groups because some of the clinics performed abortions. In February, after the Democratic-controlled Legislature approved a much smaller appropriation for family planning, backed mostly by federal dollars, he vetoed that, too. Mr. Christie also applied for federal money for abstinence-only education, something that the Democrat he unseated, Gov. Jon S. Corzine, had not done.

In February, Mr. Christie made a splash in the national news media with a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, weighing in on issues that are not the usual fare for governors, like changes in Medicare and raising the minimum age for Social Security. He derided President Obama’s talk of high-speed rail and electric cars as “the candy of American politics.”

Hm. Sounds like the governor of the Garden State has indulged a little too much, a little too quickly, at the rich buffet of right-wing politics, not only loading up his plate with lots of hard-to-digest fiscal conservatism, but also starting to knock back glass after heady glass of culture-war vintage.

Thus we proudly bring you the latest exhibit in the p3 Separated at Birth museum: The revolting fellow you wouldn't want to sit next to at a fancy restaurant, because you might find out the hard way what's really inside him . . . and Mr. Creosote.

Better "the candy of American politics," I'd say, than a "wafer-thin mint."

(Images: Mr. Creosote and Mr. Christie.)

Separated at birth: When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good, you will not

One is the once-mightiest of a band of failed guardians of order in the galaxy, now aging and driven into exile -- and the other is a revered Jedi master.

(Images: Newt and Yoda.)

A special post-election p3 Separated at Birth, just for Oregonians

One was an artificially-manufactured fellow whose big smile, earnest demeanor, perfect hair, and natty attire could almost make you overlook that his head might be fundamentally empty and that he only works when he's operated by unseen figures off-camera . . . and the other was a famous Muppet.

Mad props to Carla, who saw it first.

Separated at Birth: Krugman joins the search

[Update: So does Mannion. See addendum below.]

There are those who search for the Grail. There are those who search for the lost Ark of the Covenant. Others pursue the Missing Link, the True Cross, the Comedy of Aristotle, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, moderate Republicans, or Yeti.

And my cousin Tom has this uncanny ability to look down and spot four-leaf clovers.

Here at p3, we proudly welcome Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman to the confraternity of seekers after that rarest of rarities: Public figures who, hitherto unlinked, are actually Separated at Birth.

Today, Krugman identifies the SAB link between someone who has mixed feelings about the Volcker Rule and someone who's a strict follower of the Rules of Acquisition.

We're proud to have him on the team.

Addendum: Lance Mannion found another SAB angle in this story. Both Lance's and Krugman's (Note to Lance -- update your resume: "Got mentioned in same sentence with Paul Krugman!") proffered SAB links share an important connection: Wallace Shawn (linked by LM) played The Grand Nagus Zek, leader of the Ferengi government, who was also an occasional collaborator with and political patron of Armin Shimerman's Quark (linked by PK) on "Star Trek: Deep Space 9." I don't know what it means, but it's got to mean something.

Doesn't it?

Separated at birth

Ripped from today's headlines: The scary figure representing a criminal empire whose ambition is to enslave the world . . . and Frau Farbissina.




(Images: Karen Ignagni, President of the insurance industry trade group AHIP; and Dr. Evil's henchwoman Frau Farbissina.

A very special Separated at Birth

Last week we noted with sadness the passing of Mary Travers, of the iconic 60's folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary.

Today we take comfort in the thought that the torch may have been passed, in this case to Janice, front singer for Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.

Health care reform brings us another "Separated at Birth"

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell takes a page from former President Bush's playbook:

Senate Republicans may have found a way to keep public health care meetings at home from getting out of control: keep the public out.

On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will host a "Health Care Reform Forum" at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri.

"No, it's not open to the public," Jessica Salazar, who does media relations for Children's Mercy Hospital and Clinics, told HuffPost. The meeting, she said, will be attended by 75 invited guests.

It is, however, open to the press, she said.

Let's tally it up:

• The weaselly character: Check


• The "what's in it for me" Republicanism: Check


• The conspicuous comb-over: Check


• The lipless, chinless smirk: Check


• The abject horror of confronting those back on the home front: Check


• The connection to the early 19th century frontier (Louisville KY and Fort Wayne IN, respectively): Check

Yes, it's official: Sen. Mitch "The Weasel" McConnell and Maj. Frank "Ferret Face" Burns are Separated at Birth. (Full posts here.)




(Hat tip to Jason.)

(Image sources: McConnell, Burns.)

Sizemore: The mystery revealed!

Oregon initiative process gamer and convicted racketeer Bill Sizemore is not having a good month.

The word was out last week that the right-wing sugar daddies who've kept Sizemore financially afloat for years are finally turning off the money tap.

Apparently, after the spectacle of Sizemore (and fellow right-wing initiative trust fund baby Kevin Mannix) going 0-for-7 at the polls last November, there are limits to what even a millionaire octogenarian sexual hypnotherapist and plethysmographer will continue to spend his money on.

Now the state Attorney General's office is pushing to have the penalties against him increased for using a tax-exempt charity to promote his political operations in 2003--a tax code no-no. And he's under investigation by the Secretary of State's office for variations on the same theme in the 2008 election cycle.

For many observers, it really is sort of a puzzle: Sizemore is so politically toxic that opponents have found that branding his initiatives with the Sizemore name is almost enough by itself to ensure their defeat.

Others, more cynical, don't find it puzzling at all: Sizemore has found a way--at least until now--to make a comfortable living authoring initiatives with no chance of passing but which serve to annoy and harass his political enemies. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

For myself, I don't completely discount the cynics' argument, but I think it's too clever by half. When you pull a tax scam while running a losing but high-profile initiative campaign, that's dumb. When you get caught, but do it again anyway (and lose again), that's dumber.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to unveil the newest addition to the p3 Separated at Birth gallery: Failed dog groomer Harry Dunne and failed political operative Bill Sizemore.

AK jury to Stevens: "You're a bad banana with a greasy black peel."

A jury has found the Alaska senator guilty of seven counts of felony connected to taking political gifts.

Any excuse to bring this Separated At Birth image out again:



(See the whole p3 SAB gallery here.)

Sunday afternoon toons

Lots of toony goodness this week, and just to give us the extra support we'll need in the next two months until the elections, Bob Geiger, long a staple of the Sunday Morning Toons here at p3, has returned from an undisclosed location with his weekly toon review. Best of Show: Walt Handlesman. It made me laugh.

And Daryl Cagle's still ready with his round-up, in a world where there might be news other than Sarah Palin, but you'd never know it.

The p3 Picks of the Week are especially ripe and juicy this week: Nate Beeler, R. J. Matson, Bob Englehart, David Fitzsimmons, Eric Allie, Adam Zyglis, and Matt Davies.

The p3 Yellow Flag for Necessary Roughness goes to Larry Wright.

p3 World Toon Review: Shocking as this may seem to us, toon artists in the rest of the world aren't necessarily interested in Sarah Palin. Yet, bravely, they soldier on, with only material about the Olympics, international tourism, and Russia (and not its relation to Alaska). The international brigade is led this week by Ollie Johansson, Sergio Langer, and Alen Lauzan Falcon.

Ann Telnaes notices someone's "delicate condition" at the Republican convention.

It's no longer just about a dark suspicion. I don't think there's much doubt that Berke Breathed is preparing us for the Long Goodbye. Today, Opus ponders one of the more awkward questions about the afterlife. Meanwhile, will I have to start figuring out who gets the slot right after Telnaes on Sunday Morning Toons?

Portland homeboy Jack Ohman has a great editorial toon in today's Oregonian, but since most of his stuff never seems to take forever to become available online, you'll have to buy a paper today or wait a couple of months for it to finally turn up on the web. Too bad, too, because it really was among his best.

p3 Special Guest Edition of "Separated at Birth:" I'm not sure why, but the "Daily Show" coverage of the Republican convention seemed much better than the Democratic coverage the week before. Perhaps, in their second week on the road they finally found their groove. Or perhaps, as satirists, they simply had more to sink their teeth into at the GOP love-fest. Whichever, Stewart has inspired fun with the Wednesday night Geezerthon (skip to the three-minute mark):

Yes, through the miracle of precision cross-editing, it can now be revealed: Fred Thompson and Joe Lieberman--and Foghorn Leghorn and Droopy Dog--are Separated at Birth!

We've come a long way from "School House Rock." (And an even longer way from the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Deliquency.) Milwaukie's Dark Horse Comics got a shout-out this week for its part in The Comic Book Project, a collaboration with Columbia University's to create comic-book based learning on topics from grammar, vocabulary-building, and environmentalism to preventing child abuse and understanding epilepsy.

"Wham! A homer! Wham! Anudder homer!" Here's the 1946 standard "Baseball Bugs," directed by Fritz Freleng and voiced by Mel Blanc (with an uncredited cameo by Bea "Wilma Flintstone" Benaderet at the end).

p3 Bonus Toon: If the Oregon Senate contest is a horserace, Jesse Springer notices one rider is working with a handicap. (Click to enlarge.)

It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right.

Pity Ted Stevens. The Alaska Senator is facing federal indictment for, among other things, making false statements to federal investigators, routing federal earmark money to cronies, and corrupt practices involving several Alaska businesses.

Understand, though: The problem isn't the federal investigations, as such--Stevens is one of those archetypal Republicans of the contemporary mold, for whom an indictment is somewhere between a rite of passage, a badge of honor, and a simple cost of doing business.

The problem is that people from his home state won't stop asking him questions about it. As if it's any of their business.

In a classic moment from an appearance on Alaska Talk Radio this week, an increasingly irritated Stevens--the man who made "bridge to nowhere" synonymous with wasteful and probably corrupt government spending projects--finally said this to one caller who persisted with questions about whether Stevens would accept a presidential pardon:

Why would I cross a bridge I haven’t seen? I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that question.

A poor but honest choice of words, Senator.

Hm. Let's review: A mean-tempered old fellow, up there in the cold and snow for fifty-some years, snarling down at the little people below, hatching wonderful, awful ideas . . . could it be?

Yes, it's official: We've got another Separated at Birth!





(Image sources: Stevens, the Grinch)

Larry King: Threat to planetary security?

Larry King is releasing his most recent "written-with" autobiography in time for Father's Day 2009. It's an odd marketing strategy--despite his many marriages, it's probably anybody's guess whether people associate King more with Father's Day or with Arbor Day.

All of this serves no particular purpose other than as an excuse to finally publish a Separated At Birth I've been sitting on for a while: Septaugenarian celebrity interviewer King and thirty-first century human-loathing "Futurama" news anchor Morbo:




Quake in fear, puny humans! Our invasion of Earth is set to begin on the date of your next ritual celebration of male progenitors!

(Note: Wikipedia mentions an unsourced claim that Morbo's appearance is based on the aliens in the 1957 movie Invasion of the Saucer Men. It seems more likely that "Futurama" creator Matt Groening started this rumor to head off the possibility of litigation by King.)

(Images via XMRadio.com and Puny Humans!.)

Tribute to the Dean

David Broder. soi disant "Dean of the Washington Press Corps" (which, after their performance of the last decade, is a little like being called "the best French Restaurant in Rolla, Missouri"), is cashing out.

Veteran Washington Post political columnist David Broder is going to take a buyout from the paper. As of Jan 1, 2009, he will become a contract employee of the Post.

One suspects this move simply means paying him from one pocket instead of the other, for accounting purposes, but it still must be something of a jolt to the man who's spent the entire Gingrich-Bush age nobly insisting that Washington would be a more civil place if only the Democrats, in the spirit of bipartisanship, would not only let the Republicans beat them with a club but would also say, "thank you, Sir, may I have another?".

So, in final tribute to the man who spent the last fourteen years on the Washington Post Op-Ed page with his head in the sand, p3 offers this Separated at Birth homage:




He'll be missed.

(Image sources: Broder, ostrich.)


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Subliminal messages

This picture of Dick Cheney has made the rounds of the blog world this week, because determined viewers worried that they can see a nude (or nearly nude) woman reflected in his sunglasses.

If that's you're thing, go for it (later you can get a whiskey glass with some ice cubes in it, dim the lights, put on some Barry White, and look at it).

But I think the more obvious and important point--nothing subliminal about it at all--is the Separated at Birth angle:




(Cheney image via White House website. Black Spy image from the ultimate reference source for that sort of thing. Hat tip to James the Elder for the Christmas gift that keeps on giving.)