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Saturday, May 24, 2008

Stay Classy! 



"There was a little girl, Who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, She was very good indeed,





But when she was bad she was horrid."


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Thursday, May 22, 2008

Hillary Peron? 

While John McCain is busy being Jesus some champion or another at this quarter slot haywire flim-flam machine has suggested that Hillary Clinton (aka: the "Sun Queen") is also a dead ringer for Eva Peron. Yup:
Hillary as Sun Queen — beautiful, strong, iconic — is a rather unusual move at the end of a campaign. She radiates power, empathy, and the vulnerability of John F. Kennedy and is strikingly similar to another woman of the people, Eva Peron:




(< click for slightly bigger image)

Like, okay, jeepers, but why stop there... she's also like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Rosa Parks, David Boies 2000, and Robert Mugabe (oh, no, wait, he would be like Barack Obama, the scary black villian in the historical analogy set) but anyhow... see:
Okay, today we found out that... according to Hillary Clinton...



So then, as John Cole at Balloon Juice asks: What Else... (is Hillary Clinton a lot like?)

Well - in the spirit of overextended historical analogies -
I'll play along. Here's my contribution to the effort
:




A woman married to a popular former president and iconic leader of a powerful political dynasty. A woman, "beautiful, strong, and iconic" in her own right, positioned to fullfill her own destiny as leader of her people in the storied tradition of that family dynasty.

A woman who surrounded herself with personal fortune tellers and profiteers and powerful self interests who would asuage her insecurities and drive her ambitions to greatness. A woman who aligned herself with military generals and political party comeback Cids against a rising insurrgency opposed to her historic candidacy and campaign for the presidency of her country. A woman who fought back with a fierce vengence against all those who would attempt to deny her the office she had come to believe was rightly hers and hers alone.

A woman who would command her military generals to "annihilate" her enemies and willingly align herself with right wing operatives and agents and ideologies when it suited her ends in order to subvert a gathering domestic opposition of "creative class" intellectuals and academics and youth resiting her ascention to power from within her own political party legacy. A woman who would not only acerbate divisions within her own political party ranks but also eventually come to represent the catylst which would split that historic political party into warring factions and ultimately plunge her entire country into a brutal civil "dirty war" of fearsome and horrible proportions, lasting years, that would result in the torture and murder and disappearence of thousands of her countrymen, and nearly destroy her nation.

The woman (center stage in the black and white photo above) is Isabel Peron. The third wife of Juan Peron, installed following the death of the "iconic" Eva. It was Isabel Peron's candidacy and election to office of the president of Argentina from 1974 to 1976 which ignited a backlash reign of terror against her enemies - Jan, 12 2007 - Spanish police detained Argentine ex-President Isabel Peron - until she was deposed in a coup (March 1976) orchestrated and carried out by her own military generals and the murderous military junta that supplanted her own awful presidency.

Hillary Clinton = Isabel Peron. So there.

Had enough? Me too. In general I don't think these kinds of broadwash brush stoke historical analogies work too fairly well most of the time (unless you want to get right down to arguing applications of specific detail) but, since the Clinton campaign seems intent on lifting a cocktail salute to Hillary as everything from some kind of shit kicking tri-testicled working class saloon tosspot to a Barachiel clutching a white rose against her breast, well.... okay then - or behaving like some kind of weird traveling vaudeville medicine show... See the Amazing Pantsuit Lady juggle cans of gasoline while changing the expiration dates on perishable goods and shaving numbers in exchange for gambles on future championship games all the while simultaneoulsy lighting retrospective candles to those who came and did and went before... and on and on and on and on it goes.

Tbogg, puts it another way:
To put it another way: Hillary Clinton is like a mother standing on a bridge threatening to throw her baby in the river unless she is named Mother of the Year.


Then again - Aravosis throws in with another analogy. This time with a bloody popular entertainment industry twist.

Make of it all what ya will. I have an intermission to accomplish.

-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-


The search for the truth must go in every direction. ~ Adolfo Perez Esquivel



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Wednesday, May 21, 2008

intermission 





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Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Generating WOM - Mark Penn's cookies 

ATTN: Dept. of Emerging Market Segments

Walkback: American Prospect, March 22, 2007:
Penn, Inc.

[...]

While Penn did indeed invent the male category of "office-park dads" (all these evanescent categories are defined by Penn on the fly so they can never be tested), he has generally put more emphasis on winning over prosperous white women than on men. A year ago he published an op-ed in which he said, "In 1996 we identified soccer moms as the critical swing voters. Today they remain at the center of the swing vote, but they're a decade older and their kids are going off to college." This claim is inseparable from Penn's case for Clinton's electability: Well-off white women love her, well-off white women are the only voters who matter, therefore ...

[...]

But the real prize on the Burson-Marsteller web site is the one substantive product headlined on the front page: "The Mom-fluentials Research." Who are "Mom-fluentials"? They seem to be the ultimate Penn category -- and indeed, Penn calls them "the single most important new emerging market segment." They are soccer moms who are also wired workers -- sort of a group of wired-office-park-soccer moms. Like soccer moms and wired workers, they are identified using "a proprietary formula" developed by Penn.

Basically, Mom-fluentials seem to be wealthy, perfectionist busy-bodies. We're told, for example, that where regular non-fluential moms use e-mail to send jokes, mom-fluentials send coupons or product recommendations. They "generate WOM and shape key buying decisions." If you're a parent, you've probably seen a few mom-fluentials -- they're the ones you avoid on your way into school. Unless you actually want some coupons or product recommendations.

There's a lot of stuff on mom-fluentials all over the internet, though it all goes back to a single Penn survey. The best is this marvelous FAQ, in which the answers are delivered by a robotic avatar of a mom-fluential, with short blond hair and pearls, and a flat mechanical voice. I kept expecting the robo-mom-fluential to invite me to join some sort of national conversation.


Sound familiar? As our pot luck would have it...

Recipe: Light the short fuse of misogyny, toss the old darky winking at the white "sweetie" in the elevator charge into the mix... shriek! -- break glass, pull alarm, and WOM! -- you got yerself a "proprietary formula" for a regular fluential white-knuckle political squall. Just bake and serve.

What? You don't think anyone at Burson-Marsteller ever heard of the "perception management" cookbook?

(Next week: How to put out a grease fire; Elizabeth Edwards puts a lid on it)

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Sunday, May 18, 2008

Staybenider open stage 





Tbogg: The Best Whatever


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Oregon Trail - Obama rally in Portland (AP photo)




(click image for larger view)

UPDATE: 60,000 Clinton supporters overwhelm small Obama gathering in Portland.

4 Tbogg has details: Get Me Rewrite

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corrente SBL - New Location
~ Since April 2010 ~

corrente.blogspot.com
~ Since 2003 ~

The Washington Chestnut
~ current ~



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