Friday 11 June 2010

Chick Chick Chick Chick Chicken, Lay a Little Egg for Me.


"Only in America", as Danny, our mate from Missouri and "Letter From America" fame would say.

Yes, once again they’ve done it... just when you wouldn’t have credited that they could. Danny relates the story... as follows:

It's been big news that the majority (Democratic) leader of the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada, might well lose his Senate seat which is up for re-election this year. Nevada voters are pissed at him for various reasons, and of course the loss of a Senate leadership position due to an election loss would be very big news.

It was almost taken for granted that a mainstream conservative Republican, Sue Lowden, would win the Republican primary and pose a big challenge to Reid in the general election.

BUT, in a television interview during the primary campaign, Lowden was expressing her opposition to Obama's health care bill. When pressed to explain how she thought poor people should pay their doctors for medical care, she pointed out that in earlier years people would barter for their doctor's services. She said that in the past, people might pay their doctor with a chicken. So you see, she opined, people should be sort of creative about how they pay their medical expenses.

INSTANTLY, she became the CHICKEN LADY. She was laughed at not just in Nevada....but all over the country. And her campaign headed into the crapper. She was followed around for the rest of the campaign by people dressed in chicken costumes.

OK. That’s pretty cool I think, but there’s more to come. Danny goes on.....

The primary election was last Tuesday. There was a ruling in Nevada that people in chicken outfits could not be posted at the polls......but that if any voter wanted to dress like a chicken to cast his vote.....well, there was probably nothing that anyone could do about that. Yep, she was defeated. The Republican winner was Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate......a far right wing loony who wants to abolish Social Security, do away with the federal Department of Education, and promote Nevada as a nuclear waste dump. And...get this.....she once suggested a reinstatement of national prohibition of alcohol. (Alcohol prohibition in a state where the majority of the entire state population lives in Las Vegas?)

So Harry Reid will face this crazy right wing teabagger instead of the mainstream Republican in the general election. His sigh of relief could be heard all the way back to Washington.

And you thought that Gordon “bigot” Brown was an electoral disaster.... huh!

Nevada makes him look like a rank amateur.... Come to think of it.....................

27 comments:

  1. I don't know if she'll win or not, I don't really care one way or the other. However if she does I will laugh myself silly at the democrats in Nevada at getting themselves into a situation where they might have a nutter running their state at Senate level.

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  2. QM: It was the Republicans that got themselves into that state. The Democrats really did nothing. Nevada already has a Republican Governor and another Republican Senator.

    The senator up to re-election is the Democrat. But for that stupid woman's chicken suggestions she was his challenger and probably a winner. But now the Republican's have binned her because she's a liability and chosen instead a tea bag.

    Well...a tea bag instead of a silly bag.....

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  3. Ah, but it was the Democrats in chicken outfits though.

    Be careful what you wish for.

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  4. Right... in chicken outfits ....and in the senate.....

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  5. Indeed the Democrats lost no time scrambling into chicken outfits to ridicule the Republican candidate, Sue Lowden. She had simply lost her mind by suggesting that patients should begin bartering with their doctors for medical services. Even then, this silly idea might have gone unnoticed in the heat of the Republican primary campaign if Lowden hadn't brought up the chicken example. That was just too good for Senator Reid and the Nevada Democrats not to exploit.

    Lowden had promised to be a strong candidate against Reid for the general election to the US Senate in November. Harry Reid is in a political bind. He is a Democrat who holds the powerful position of Majority Leader of the US Senate...serving the liberal agenda of the Obama administration...while facing reelection to his six year Senate term back in conservative-leaning Nevada. He should have a much easier time defeating the wacky Tea Party candidate who took the primary election from Lowden and will carry the Republican banner in the general election.

    BTW, Nevada politics have been more fun than usual to watch this year. Earlier in the year, a news crew from a Reno TV station spotted Jim Gibbons, the (married) Republican Governor of the state, at the Reno airport, returning from the National Governors Association meeting in Washington with his mistress. The reporters cornered the governor and asked embarrassing questions. The governor lied his head off. Meanwhile, his mistress tried to hide in the women's restroom. But the news crew found her. Something of a chase ensued. Bottom line.....Governor Gibbons was defeated in last Tuesday's Republican primary. So he became the first incumbent Governor in the history of Nevada to lose the nomination of his own party for reelection.

    Between the chicken lady and Governor Gibbons, it's clear that Las Vegas doesn't provide ALL the excitement in Nevada.

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  6. LOL Danny.

    I'd forgotten you sent me the video stuff of the unlovely Governor Mr Gibbons being questioned and lying through his teeth about his trip with his bit on the side, or paramour as we should rightly call her. Then his young lady friend coming out and lying in turn through her teeth. She was only sharing a ride home with the Governor as they had met on the plane.... yeah of course.


    Makes you wonder how a fat ugly rude old man can get such an attractive young lady with a beautiful figure, who could have landed herself a young slim good looking guy.....

    Still, he must have something. Wonder what it could be.

    Ho hum... the mysteries of life.....


    Did you ever find out if Mrs Governor Gibbons told him to sling his hook after that embarrassing episode caught on MSNBC, or if she was rather attached to his wallet too?

    The Chicken Lady is the director of a big gambling organisation in Vegas, I think you already told me. I note there is speculation as to whether she would accept a chicken in repayment of gambling debts!!

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  7. PS..... But right enough... in all that excitement it's easy to forget that the Democrats have made complete fools of themselves by dressing up as chickens.

    Tut tut, how childish.

    Perhaps it could be looked into. Of course the average doctor maybe sees 15 or 20 patients in a day, and depending on the kind of costs they have built up with drugs and all, perhaps by the end of the first week of Ms Lowden's scheme they would all have enough chickens to last three or four life times, and houses painted 15 different ways...

    Silly old fool. Really, these people that don't live in the same world as everyone else should shut their stupid mouths.

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  8. Yep Tris....the Democratic operatives undoubtedly sacrificed some dignity while dressed in chicken outfits...LOL. But the tactic certainly worked in terms of keeping attention on the Chicken Lady's insane proposal to barter goods and services for modern medical care. And indeed, there was much discussion during the campaign about whether her gaming and investment company, the Archon Corporation, would start adopting bartering arrangements in payment for debts to their gambling casinos in the state.

    As for the soon-to-be ex-Governor Gibbons, it is, as you imply, amazing how money and power can make balding, overweight middle aged men attractive to young beautiful women. As for Dawn Gibbons, a divorce from the Governor is now pending. She actually moved out of the Nevada Governor's Mansion in May of 2008.

    State politics can be complicated. Dawn Gibbons is herself a three-term Republican Nevada Assemblywoman (member of the state legislature), and she ran for Congress in 2006. But she is now supporting Harry Reid in his campaign for reelection to the Senate. However she's not taking sides in the race to replace her husband as Governor. That race (now that Jim Gibbons lost the Republican primary) is between Republican Brian Sandoval and Democrat Rory Reid (Harry's son).

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  9. This is all very hilarious. Can we please have the governor Gibbons video as well if it is available on you tube?

    One point: I assume Democrats can’t vote in Republican primaries so why the ruling concerning dressing up as a chicken to vote?

    What can you say about the notion of bartering for modern medical care? And she was the reasonable one?

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  10. This Tea Bag thing is that a party within a party?

    Not that I’m not all for something that increases the amount of tea drunk in America. No offence Danny but I’ve never met an American who can actually make tea that is drinkable to our colonial palate. Must be something to do with chucking it into Boston Harbour (no u in America?). You guys better stick to coffee!

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  11. Wanting to abolish the department for education isn't that bad frankly. What was it that 'Yes Minister' said? The department for education marks the death of education in this country...

    I can't say that its such a bad thing to abolish needless government departments. Frankly given that I agreed with Katie Holden on QT last time about the need to privatise our university system, I can't blush at the chance to do it elsewhere.

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  12. I agree Dean: they could start with the office of the deputy prime minister, we don't need that. Old pickled egg's department of communities we don't need that. The Home office, that never gets anything right anyway, better off without that. And in the Dunkirk Spirit they could abolish the department of health, people could do without health for a couple of years that should plug the defecit.

    Private Universities what a great idea. We could have the University of Stirling plc© where they hold a weekly auction of PhDs. A chair in carpet laying can be yours if you donate a shelf of books for the Margaret Thatcher memorial library.

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  13. Danny can I just wish the USA the very best good fortune today in their soccer match against England today. I hope you trounce them.

    And not that you need it but I wish President Obama all the best when he calls that upper class twit we have as a PM and tells him what he is going to say and do about the BP oil spill.

    It’s funny isn’t it that when its bad they don’t want the B in BP to have any association with Britain or Britishness, as if the USA needs this tawdry little island in any capacity other than as a finger puppet. Incredible when you think that they insist on calling HBOS a Scottish bank because the S stood for Scotland despite the H standing for Halifax which is in England. If half the bank is English and half Scottish does that not make it a British bank. Well no, you see they can’t have British associated with anything bad hence HBOS is Scottish because it brought down the British banking sector and BP is not British because it pissed off our major ally and puppet master.

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  14. Munguin.

    I think the video was a current one on the Keith Olbermann show on tv, and as such, is long since gone. I can't find it on youtube.... but there's plenty more of him there. Sex assault allegations and illegal immigrant nanny hiring, texting his girlfriend in the middle of hearings etc. He's a fun guy. Just what we've learned to exdpect from people given the freedom of deference.

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  15. Dean:

    I agree that a good deal of the department for education could be dumped. But however much it would be better in some ways to have totally local education, we do have to have national standards because people are so mobile.

    That is to say we need standards and highers so that Aberdeen University can take people from Lewis or Dunbar, knowing that their standard of education is the same...more or less.

    Likewise employers need to know what they are taking on. In a way it's a pity, but it's part of modern life, and like many otehr aspects of it, it sucks.

    As we've said before on other threads, it's a pity in some ways that we have become a highly technological society, with jobs to match but we still produce people who are barely capable of learning to read and write functionally.

    It's not pc to say so, but that's what we do. Unfortunately though life is largely a pile of circumstances that suck.

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  16. Danny:

    I see that like some families over here, they have made it a family business to make money from the state.

    Here in particular we have Lord and Lady Kinnock and all the little Kinnocks. And spectacularly in Northern Ireland we have the Robinsons who, it seems, managed to take every single possible post in government, local, national and UK wide, and milk them for every last bit of expense money (and find time for extra marital affairs with lads just out of childhood by a few weeks).

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  17. I don't know how it works either Munguin. I think though from what Danny was saying that everyone must have a vote.

    The Tea Bags are, I think, a loony right wing faction of a loony right wing party. Clearly Sarah Palin, the lunatic from Alaska, is some nationally reknown figurehead kind of person, although she's not their leader. (She's not bright enough for that.)

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  18. Dean....You make an excellent point. I think that abolishing a cabinet level department is Sharron Angle's least oddball proposal. George Washington presided over America's very best cabinet with all of four cabinet secretaries.....Thomas Jefferson at State, Alexander Hamilton at Treasury, Henry Knox at War, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. It's been mostly downhill from there. The White House website tells me that the cabinet now comprises the Vice President and the heads of no less than 15 executive departments. As a major federal presence has appeared in some area of governance, a new cabinet department has always been created. So we now have the cabinet departments of "Agriculture," "Labor," "Urban Development," and, after the 9/11 attacks, "Homeland Security." And then "Interior," "Commerce," "Energy," "Education"......well, you get the idea.

    And it's nearly impossible to abolish a cabinet level department once it's been created. For one thing, the federal programs it administers will just go on under the management of other departments. And in any event, Presidents and their appointees at the top come and go, but the gigantic federal civil service (which really runs things) goes on forever. Sir Humphrey, after all, was the one who really ran Jim Hacker's "Department of Administrative Affairs"....and was later the Cabinet Secretary under Hacker's premiership. It's really the same in the US. Here, we just don't have that Cabinet Secretary post (in the British sense of the term).

    Ronald Reagan was determined to do away with the Department of Education (perhaps mostly as a symbol).....which had just been formed by Jimmy Carter the year before Reagan took office. (The old Department of "Health, Education and Welfare" had been divided into the "Department of Education" and the "Department of Health and human Services.") Reagan appointed a Secretary of Education with the assignment of doing away with his own department.

    Today, the Education Department remains in very good health.....while the Reagan administration is an historical memory. It seems that it takes a lot more than a popular president and his top level appointees to kill a cabinet department. So, a Senator from Nevada (should Sharron Angle actually be elected) would be pretty much irrelevant in her opposition to a cabinet department....LOL.

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  19. Yep Tris....it seems politics is very often a family business in both our countries. Just looking at recent times, the political family names are legion in the various states....the Carnahans and Blunts of Missouri, the Dockings of Kansas, the Bayhs of Indiana, and more recently the Reids of Nevada. Famously, we now have Ron Paul of Texas and Rand Paul of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. And then there are the political family names known to the nation and the world, such as the Kennedys of Massachusetts and the Roosevelts of New York.

    When Eleanor Roosevelt (yes, she was already a Roosevelt) married FDR, she was given away by her Uncle Teddy (he was Franklin's cousin) who was, at the time the President of the US. Poor Eleanor and Franklin were mostly ignored at their own wedding reception while people surrounded the President.

    So when FDR was elected president, he and Eleanor already knew the White House very well....Eleanor perhaps better than FDR. FDR after all had only been Teddy's cousin, but Eleanor was his favorite niece. (Her father was Teddy's younger brother.)

    Eleanor later related a bad girlhood experience she had in the White House swimming pool. Seems that Teddy found out that she couldn't swim, and decided one day to teach her. So he just threw her into the pool and waited for her to...well.....LEARN. She said that she sat motionless on the bottom while praying for rescue. Fortunately, Teddy realized in time that his teaching technique was not working with Eleanor.

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  20. Tris and Munguin....the primary system of choosing candidates for the general election varies widely in form from state to state. Both parties chose candidates last Tuesday in Nevada. There are two possibilities. Either both parties held their primaries on the same day, or, as is very often the case in the states, Nevada has an
    "open" primary. In the open primary system, the ballot has all the candidates of both parties on the ballot, and all voters are eligible to vote for the candidates of either party. (Some states don't like the open system, since it allows strategic crossover voting.)

    Interestingly, California voters passed "Proposition 14" last Tuesday which changed the state Constitution to require a new version of an "open" system. Starting in 2012, the primary ballot will have the names of all the candidates on the ballot (as in the traditional open system). But, at the candidates' option, they may or may not declare a party affiliation. Then, the top two vote getters in the primary voting will go on to a runoff in the general election....regardless of their party affiliation (if any). So two members of the same party can find themselves contesting the same office in the general election. (The political parties in California opposed Prop. 14 of course.)

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  21. Munguin....

    As Tris said, that video of the Governor of Nevada caught by a TV crew with one of his mistresses at the Reno airport seems to have mostly disappeared from the web. But I did find the five minutes of raw video still posted on the website of the TV station, KLAS, Channel 8 in Las Vegas.

    So if you have Flash Player on your browser....and the KLAS website works internationally, you can see it here. It's GREAT.

    http://www.8newsnow.com/Global/category.asp?C=28259&clipId=4568609&topVideoCatNo=undefined&autoStart=true

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  22. PS....Munguin:

    The KLAS video is not a clickable link on my computer, but it worked fine when I copied and pasted it into the address line of my browser.

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  23. Munguin....a few more points:

    Tea Party candidates: The Tea Party exists as more than one formal organization, any one of which may support a candidate. The term "Tea Party" seems to mostly be a free form thing that implies the far right wing of American politics. So Tea Party support may be conveyed informally via the media, and accepted by candidates who self-identify with the term. Recently, Rand Paul, a Tea Party darling, won the Republican nomination to the US Senate in Kentucky. He raised eyebrows when he mentioned the Tea Party nine times in his victory speech, and the voters of the Commonwealth of Kentucky exactly ONCE. Not sure if he mentioned the Republican Party at all.

    As for tea. Yep, I think that any chance of a decent tradition of drinking (or properly brewing) tea in America died in 1773, when those revolutionaries boarded the British ships in Boston Harbor (Harbour...LOL) and dumped the cargoes of tea overboard. When the Queen pops over for a visit from time to time, I think she generally serves coffee to her American guests at the embassy. I have no idea if the Queen is any better at brewing coffee than the Americans are at brewing tea.

    Football (Soccer in America): Thanks much for the good wishes to the American team. I must find out how the game came out. I really have trouble actually watching a game, since there is SOOOOO much kicking that ball...endlessly.....up and down the field. It would be great if an actual score was not such a rare event in the game....LOL.

    BP and the oil in the Gulf: I must also find out if David Cameron and the President have talked about this yet. Some posturing American politicians are advocating such draconian liability responsibilities on BP that it may actually endanger the future corporate viability of BP itself. It's been reported that Tony Hayward will meet with Obama at the White House next week. One issue will be the payment of dividends in a week or two. Some here are demanding that BP not pay any more dividends until after BP pays the damage claims. Bad for Britons (and others) who depend on those dividends of course. I read that Tony Hayward may offer to do something about the dividends if Obama will get American politicians to tone down the incendiary rhetoric. Good luck with that one. Tony has a lot to learn about American politics and politicians it seems.

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  24. It did work and was very funny. Thanks!

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  25. LOL. Thanks for all your explanations Danny. Much appreciated. It must have taken you all afternoon/morning/whenever it is in America right now. Hé hé.

    I see from Munguin's comments that it worked, so I'll have a look... I remember seeing it at the time and it was damned funny.

    I just love it when self serving nobs who think that they’re above that kind of questioning, get it right in the face from lesser beings.

    For a good cup of tea, there's nowhere better than Scotland... although my Indian friends say that it's tastier in India... and My Chinese mate says that Indian tea is disgusting and the only possible drink is Green Tea.....

    For coffee, I once had a little espresso in St Mark's Square in Venice which was sheer heaven in a cup, but cost about €15 if I remember right. On the other hand a decent cup of breakfast coffee (served in a huge bowl with a handle) in France is a delight not to be missed, and something well worth getting out of bed for. (I'm pretty bad at getting out of bed...even when I'm in France.)

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  26. PS Brilliant clip Danny,

    Just enjoyed it again. Broavo to the tv reporter who called the lying git out....

    D I V O R C E.

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  27. Danny,

    I was unawares of Regan's attempt to end the US dept. of state for ed. Cheers, it only makes me respect him all the more.

    But an interesting aside to Munguin, privatisation of universities doesn't necesserily mean less acess for poorer background kids.

    Look at the stats, since Labour reintroduced tuition fees, the number of students from poorer backgrounds has went up proportionately. So the link between tuition fees, private capital and discrimination against the poor isn't as straight forward as your wit would let slip!

    :P

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