Blog Moved

To everyone reading this post. I have moved this blog to a new location and a new name. I've decided that trying to convert a once World of Warcraft blog to a Political Blog just wasn't going to work for me. I wll most likely not post here again. I have moved the political posts and all future posts will be found at Dead Peasant Show. I hope those few of you reading this will follow me there and please update your bookmarks.

Thank you - Vidi

When words are meaningless

Jared Lee Loughner once asked Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, "What is government when words are meaningless?"

Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with words and their meanings. He demanded deductive arguments and rejected inductive arguments completely, but couldn't recognize the difference between the two. Lost in his own incoherence, Jared's mind saw only his own dreamstate as reality, and this reality as the dream. And who can blame him.

Words have meanings. These meanings are agreed upon and placed into a big book which we call the dictionary. But over the last decade or so, we as a culture have been changing the language, blurring the meanings of words. We call things that which they are not and demand that everyone accept this new definition. Communist, Anarchist, Socialist, Fascist. These words have meanings. And we have allowed the punditry to usurp their meanings and label those around us with false terms used only to incite fear and illicit the desired response.

In an educated America, this false labeling could not occur. So, the punditry rejects the educated and chooses instead to follow a shout the loudest and it's true method. Death tax. The Angry Left. Death panels. Hillarycare or more recently Obamacare.

Espoused beliefs that are never followed like: Fiscal responsibility, Never forget the heroes of 9/11, Support the troops, A pledge to America, all lead to a world where the words that are being said are meaningless, because those saying them are not telling the truth, they are not being real, they are fake. And in Jared's disturbed mind, these people who were not real they were fake people.

Jared once asked Rep. Giffords a question, when she didn't answer the question to his liking, he told his friends that she was a fake. And from that point on, if he saw or heard her name, he became upset. He didn't bring it up, but if it was already there, he expressed his discontent and his belief that she, like all in Washington, were fake, a feeling many of us have had and would readily agree with were we there to hear Jared say it.

But, Jared took it further than the rest of us. He saw something dire in the way language was being used. Something sinister and ultimately infinite. He saw a conspiracy that changed the date to an infinite year, one that could never change and could not be escaped from. He saw alternate realities in which the world was not like this and found that he could visit those worlds through lucid dreams. He saw pictures from Mars and saw a conspiracy in which NASA was doctoring up images of space to fool the American people. He believed the Mars Rover mission and all of the Space Shuttle missions had been faked. There simply was no real in this reality.



The image above is a billboard for Tuscon radio station, KNST, Tuscons Conservative talk radio. It is located just three miles from the Safeway where Jared Lee Loughner opened fire. And it is a perfect example of how we usurp the meanings of things.

straight shooter
n. Informal
One who is honest and forthright.

But, if we place bullet holes around that title, it changes it's meaning. It no longer just means honest. It means something else entirely. Blood libel means something too, or did until Sarah Palin used the term the other day and now it means something completely different. Because she ( or rather her handlers )says so. We allow these people to invent their own meanings for things and redefine our culture in the process. Without definitive meaning, there is no discourse, no debate, no consensus , no compromise. We spend our time debating the meanings of words, instead of the actual issue at hand. Without definitive meaning, the words just become a white noise. Like the people of Babel, our speech has become confounded. Our words have become meaningless.

You don’t allow the government to control your grammar structure, listener?

Jared Lee Loughner is a disturbed young man. This is not up for debate. The question is what disturbed him?

Amidst all the rhetoric being thrown around, the rush to judgment, the finger pointing, the press is now trying to spin a picture of a young man with no political agenda at all. According to them, Jared is just some loon who shot people.

But, nothing could be further from the truth. Jared is a loon with a political agenda. One that may not be instantly recognizable as either right or left but an political agenda nonetheless.

Jared placed a video on YouTube entitled Introduction: Jared Loughner. It is just text on a black background with soft music playing. The first words seen by the viewer are: My final thoughts: Jared Lee Loughner!

The introduction alone tells us that this is Jared's message to the world, his explanation for the crime he was about to commit. His explanation for what drove him to this place. It is a picture into the very troubled mind of this young man.

You don’t allow the government to control your grammar structure, listener?

a terrorist is a person who employs terror or terrorism, especially as a political weapon.

The majority of citizens in the United States of America have never read the United States of America’s Constitution.

You don’t have to accept the federalist laws.

Nonetheless, read the United States of America’s Constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws.

The property owners and government officials are no longer in ownership of their land and laws from a revolution.

The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar

No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver!

These are not the statements of someone who is non political. His actions, attempted assassination of a sitting Congresswoman are not the actions of someone non political.

Was Jared reacting against Tea Party politics? Was he in support of Tea Party politics? Only Jared knows. Someday, he may make that known to all of us. Right or left? doesn't matter. What matters is the attempt to turn Jared Lee Loughner into a non political ignores the truth and , in my opinion, dishonors the dead. they died for a reason. It is Jared Lee Loughners reason, but there is a reason. We need to remember that.

Jared Lee Loughner will be reduced to a name in the rhetoric soon enough. But the rhetorical Jared Lee Loughner is not who this disturbed young man really was. He is not some non political kid. He had a message. One that may have been misguided and crazy but a message that was his. If we do not attempt to understand that message, if we write him off as a non political nut job, then we run the risk of creating more like Jared Lee Loughner.

The Blame Game is more than justified

The condemnation of those that rushed to judgment concerning the motives of Jared Lee Loughner, the man who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) is valid. We shouldn't rush to judgment. We had and still have almost no idea why this young man decided that violence was the answer.

But, is anyone really surprised by the judgment itself? Take a schizophrenic young man and place him into an environment of angry hate filled rhetoric and the surprise isn't Loughners crime, but the fact that it's not happening more often.

And let's not forget Jim David Adkisson, who some on the very very far right consider a hero after he walked into a church with a shotgun and opened fire killing 2 and injuring 7 before he was done. Adkisson's prime motivation was, in his own words, "he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office."

When searching the mans home, officers found "Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder" by radio talk show host Michael Savage, "Let Freedom Ring" by talk show host Sean Hannity, and "The O'Reilly Factor," by television talk show host Bill O'Reilly.


The Tea party's message is Don't blame us, but how can we not look to the environment of violence that they have bred and not place at least some of the blame squarely on their shoulders? They claim that because Jared Lee Loughner was not on their membership roles then, of course, he wasn't a Tea Partier who turned violent. After all, the Tea Party and it's member have never promoted violence right?



Right?



Never.


Nope, not them.

Want more money? Vote Democrat!

There are many reasons people vote Republican. One of them is the fear the Democrats will take their money and the Republicans will cut taxes and put more money in your pocket.

But look at these numbers from the Wall Street Journal:

President	Jobs created	Jobs when leaving office	Jobs when enetering office	Payroll expansion
George W. Bush	3.0 million	135.5 million	132.5 million	2.3%
Bill Clinton	23.1 million	132.5 million	109.4 million	21.1%
George H.W. Bush	2.5 million	109.4 million	106.9 million	2.3%
Ronald Reagan	16.0 million	106.9 million	90.9 million	17.6%
Jimmy Carter	10.5 million	90.9 million	80.4 million	13.1%
Gerald Ford	1.8 million	80.4 million	78.6 million	2.3%
Richard Nixon	9.4 million	78.6 million	69.2 million	13.6%
Lyndon Johnson	11.9 million	69.2 million	57.3 million	20.8%
John F. Kennedy	3.6 million	57.3 million	53.7 million	6.7%
Dwight Eisenhower	3.5 million	53.7 million	50.2 million	7%
Harry Truman	8.4 million	50.2 million	41.8 million	20.1%

Here's whats interesting. In average, Democratic presidents create nearly two times more jobs and salaries increase almost three times faster than under their Republican counter parts.

On average, Democrat president created 11.5 million jobs per president while Republicans created only 6.03 million jobs per president. Additionally, averages payrolls expanded by 25.1% per president under Democrats while Republican presidents were only able to generate a comparably meager 7.5% per president.

So, if you're struggling and need a job or a raise...who are YOU going to vote for?



Source: Wall Street Journal January 9, 2009

112 - Day 4 - Transparency Republican Style

GOP lawmakers in the House, true to form, voted to remove the rule, from their own promised rulebook requiring them to post committee meeting attendance publicly.

from their own Pledge to America:

We will fight to ensure transparency and
accountability in Congress and throughout
government

This clear violation of the Pledge to America is just the latest in a string of gaffs from the not even a week old House majority. Where is accountability if the American Voter can't even check to see if his/her Congressperson is even in attendance?

from their own Pledge to America:

Cut government spending to pre-stimulus, prebailout
levels saving at least $100 billion in the
first year alone

Now down to $50 billion, though most predict they wont come anywhere close to that.

from their own Pledge to America:

We will adhere to the Constitution and require every
bill to cite its specific Constitutional Authority

Except where it requires them to leave a party to be sworn in before actually voting.

from their own Pledge to America:

We will fight efforts to use a national crisis for
partisan gain

Except, of course, when it applies to the Right scoring political points with grand meaningless gestures like the doomed to never pass the Senate or be signed by the President, Health Care Repeal. Then, its completely ok to waste the time and money of the taxpayer.


Source

112 - Day 3 - Killing construction jobs Republican style

So whats has united the Associated General Contractors of America,the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Trucking Association, the Ironworkers,and the Laborers International Union?

One of the not emphasized rule changes the GOP brought to the Congress this week.

In a move that will potentially cause further destabilization in the buiding trades sector and decimate the already struggling workforce, the GOP have made a job-killing proposal that reneges on a commitment made by Republican in 1998 led by then Republican Congressman Bud Shuster.

The new rules package reverses a policy in effect for over a decade that required that all revenues paid into the Highway Trust Fund be used for eligible highway and transit projects. Enacted in 1998 by Republican Rep. Bud Shuster, this rule provided the kind of certainty and stability that the industry and state and local governments need to plan long-term major infrastructure projects.

Source

Already facing Depression era unemployment, the Republicans throw a curve ball of uncertainty into the industry in a blatant display of political posturing.

After all, we already know after just two days, they are willing to break their own new rules and the Constitution to suit their political purposes.


Breaking the Pledge to America: Refusing Amendments on Health Care repeal
Republicans miss oath, unconstitutionally vote anyway

Now, they inject more uncertainty into an already uncertain industry, which will lead to the killing of more jobs for working class Americans.

So here we are Day 3, and instead of working to bring jobs back to America, the Tan Man and his cohorts are working to place the killing blows on an already ailing industry in the name of their backwards approach, or downright disregard to fiscal responsibility and the American working class.

112 - Day 2 - Perhaps they should have read the Constitution yesterday

Rep. Pete Sessions ( R-Texas )

Two Republicans, including a member of the GOP leadership, voted on the House floor several times despite not having been sworn in, throwing the House into parliamentary turmoil Thursday — the same day the Constitution was read aloud on the floor.

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) missed the mass swearing-in ceremony on the House floor Wednesday but proceeded to cast a series of votes. Sessions, appointed to the Rules Committee, participated in some committee activities, and that panel was forced, at the suggestion of House parliamentarians, to suspend consideration of a rule for the repeal of last year’s health care overhaul until the matter was resolved.

Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.)

Republican leaders hoped to get a unanimous agreement from the House to retroactively approve of their votes and Sessions’ work at the rules committee after they took the oath on the floor around 3 p.m. Thursday.

Failing that, their votes — which were not difference makers on any of the roll calls in which they participated — would likely be subtracted from the final tallies. House officials were searching for a precedent to follow but had not yet found a previous instance of members-elect voting without having taken the constitutionally required oath of office.

Fitzpatrick participated in a reading of the Constitution on the House floor Thursday. If he paid attention to the reading of Article 6, he heard these words “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

Democrats jumped on the flub — which will surely be taken by some as a serious breach of the nation’s governing principles and by others as an embarrassing blip to the start of the 112th Congress.

“Perhaps they should have read the Constitution yesterday rather than today,” said one senior Democratic aide.

And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out a release pointing out the contradiction between the votes of the unelected and the attention the new Republican majority has given to the Constitution.

“Jokes aside, Congressmen-elect Pete Sessions and Mike Fitzpatrick’s actions raise serious questions: What in the world was more important to Congressmen-elect Pete Sessions and Mike Fitzpatrick than taking the oath of office, committing to support and defend the U.S. Constitution?” said Jennifer Crider, a senior official at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Why did Speaker Boehner and House Republican leadership allow two people who were not sworn Members of Congress to vote and speak on the House floor? Republicans have spent a lot of time over the past two days proselytizing about House rules, but they don’t seem very keen on actually following the rules.”

Sessions and Fitzpatrick each voted six times, including appearing for a quorum call, after Speaker John Boehner was elected and administered the oath to all other members on the House floor Wednesday.

source

112 - Day 1 - The $100 billion dollar broken promise

Boehner: The second woman Speaker of the House?

WASHINGTON -- The GOP "budget cut" numbers are getting squishier by the minute. At least it seemed that way in the hallways of the Capitol on a ceremonial first day of swearing-ins, family photo ops and back-slapping goodwill.

Republicans campaigned coast to coast on, among other things, a promise to cut $100 billion out of the federal budget.

But now they are talking about cuts as slim as $30 billion, blaming the change on the fine print that no one read -- or if they read, did not understand.

It turns out the $100-billion figure meant $100 billion from a budget that President Barack Obama proposed, which was never passed. And now that the fiscal year is nearly half over, well, there's just no way ...

Even some Tea Party types who are sticking to the original goal concede that it'll be hard to reach as long as the GOP exempts -- as it plans to -- funding for defense, homeland security, veterans and entitlements. "I still think it's realistic," freshman Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) said of the $100-billion target, "but the trick will be how we get from here to there."

Yeah.

But at least Griffith, a former leader of the Virginia legislature, expressed a determination to give it a go. He's a solid, earnest fellow from the mountains, and when you make a promise there, you try to keep it if you can.



A lot of other Republicans are more "realistic." Rep. Peter King (N.Y.), who's been in Congress since 1993 and now chairs the Homeland Security Committee, told me that $100 billion is of course unrealistic and the cuts will be $50 billion, tops. Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), the new chair of Oversight and Government Reform, told me to forget this year's number and explained that his goal is to cut $200 billion over two years. Rep. Ron Paul (Texas), the incoming chair of Financial Services' domestic monetary policy subcommittee, said that all of these numbers are chicken feed and a waste of time.

And over in the Senate, a top GOP aide told me that the real bottom line is a max of $30 billion for the rest of this fiscal year.

All these numbers can expand or contract depending on the baseline used. The cuts may sound bigger or smaller, for example, depending on whether you use the numbers the Democrats were talking about or the figures in President Obama's original 2010-'11 budget.

As for health-care reform, some Republicans are eager to focus on repealing and dismantling it. "My people are scared of Obamacare," said Griffith. "They want me to do what I can to get rid of it, and I'll have credibility with them to the extent that I do."

But King said the GOP had to be careful. "We'll vote to repeal and then move on," he said. "Then the experts on the committees will figure out what else we should vote on later. In the meantime, we have to focus on other issues."

source

Republican death panel claims a second life

Amid all the screaming about end of life planning, inaccrately labeled as death panels by the right, Gov Jan Brewer, in a stricty political move to earn more conservative cred during an election year, cut funding to Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, labled socialized medicine by the right. Those cuts will save Arizona 5.3 million dollars this year, but it loses the state 20 million in federal funding.

Cutting the funding cut benefits of 1.3 million adults living in Arizona. Just about 100 people who were on the transplant waiting lists were removed from the list due to these cuts after their life saving transplants were deemed "optional" by Arizona Republicans.

The 2nd of which died on Dec 28th.

Whats worse is medical professionals have said that the cuts were based on flawed data.


"The exclusion of coverage for these specified transplants is baseless," says ASTS President Michael M. Abecassis, MD, MBA. "We have made the case convincingly, yet several patients awaiting transplants are still being denied coverage, putting the lives of Arizona citizens in serious peril."


So the next time someone tells you no one in America dies from lack of coverage. Remember the story of Gov Jan Brewer and the 100 patients now awaiting death instead of the life saving transplants they need to survive. And remember their families who will lose their loved ones to flawed data, fiscal irresponsibility and political manuvering.

9 Major Stories Everyone Got Wrong This Year

By Daniel O'Brien, Robert Brockway, Jack O'Brien, Kristi Harrison, David Wong Dec 29, 2010

Earlier this year we took a look at the "Epic Beard Man" meme, which the Internet sold to us as "elderly white war vet stands up to young black thug" instead of the more accurate "mentally disturbed old man has yet another in a long line of violent outbursts on a confused victim." It turns out that's not exactly an isolated incident. If we wrote an article every time something went viral based purely on a lack of context, that's all we'd write about. So we've narrowed it down to the biggest stories that the media and the Internet got the most wrong in 2010.

#9. Conan vs. Leno




The way we heard it:

In 2010, smart, creative, genuinely funny comedy lost out to hackneyed 90s stand-up bullshit once and for all. And it was all Jay Leno's fault.

It went like this: In 2009 The Tonight Show was finally taken away from Leno and given to Conan O'Brien -- the voice of a new generation. We didn't think Leno was funny, but we had to admit it was pretty cool of him to make way for the new guy. He stepped down with grace and class ... only to turn right back around a few months later, when his stupid new show couldn't get its own ratings, and steal the The Tonight Show back. We'd call him an Indian giver, but that's a pretty offensive term, so we'll just call him a giant gaping asshole instead.
Across the internet the story and outrage spread like wildfire as NBC inexplicably folded before the juggernaut assault of Leno's evil team of Hollywood lawyers, morally bankrupt agents, powerful connections and possibly shadow assassins. The network offered to move Conan's Tonight Show to a much later time slot to make way for Leno in the 11 o'clock hour. After trying valiantly to defend himself with elegance, wit and dignity, Conan was ultimately fired, Jay was moved back, and the only people left happy by the whole thing were some ... some old people probably, like in fucking Kansas somewhere, who wouldn't know good comedy if it farted in their mouths.

But the truth is ...

Leno had nearly nothing to do with Conan getting fired. The popular phrasing is that Leno "took back The Tonight Show" after "giving it to Conan." But Leno doesn't "own" The Tonight Show -- NBC does. It was never Leno's choice to make. The sad reality is that Conan signed a tragically shitty contract with NBC -- a contract that held no specifications for his timeslot -- and it came back to bite him. And he should have seen it coming: Both Leno and Letterman have timeslot clauses built into their contracts to avoid this very thing. As Matthew Belloni, an entertainment lawyer and journalist, explains:

"Any talent lawyer worth his five percent fee is probably calling to ask for timeslot guarantees."

So then it was NBC exploiting an oversight in Conan's contract so it could keep their precious Leno waggling his chin and over-explaining his punchlines, right? Actually, the explanation is much simpler and more logical: Both programs were failing. Neither host's audience followed him to his new spot. Team Coco blamed that on Leno's new show providing a terrible lead-in to Conan's, but Leno's new show didn't start until several months after Conan's. Even without Leno's comedy black hole shitting up his lead-in, O'Brien's Tonight Show ratings were still in the toilet.

The only crime Leno committed was having better lawyers than Conan. Conan's contract forced NBC to pay him $45 million if it fired him. But Jay's early termination fee was a ludicrous $150 million. But -- and this is important -- he gets that $150 million only if the studio fires him.

His bosses essentially came to him and said, "Listen, we have two options here: We fire Conan and put you in his job. Or we fire Conan and you refuse to take his job, thus rendering you and your entire production staff unemployed."
What would you answer in that situation? Keep in mind that any way you cut it, the other guy is fired; the only decision in your hands is whether you want to lose your job too. Then also keep in mind that it's not just you -- but all of your friends and co-workers -- whose jobs are on the line.

We can't hate Leno for "taking" anything away. It was the only thing he could have done. We can only hate him because really -- fuck that guy. No real reason we can pin down. He just seems like kind of a dick is all.

Also, he didn't write the best Simpsons episode ever.


#8.Christine O'Donnell and the Tea Party



The way we heard it:

"The Tea Party is just a swarm of redneck doofuses, not only unworthy of serious consideration from the rest of us but 100 percent deserving of scrotum-based epithets. Because they're just that ridiculous."

And Christine O'Donnell was the new Queen of the Crazies. It didn't take long for us to find out that she was personally bankrupt, a dabbler in witchcraft and not all that knowledgeable about this holy document she swore she was building her candidacy around. Plus, everything that came out of her mouth was pure hilarious moonshine. Which was probably why she stopped giving her mouth a national platform six weeks before the election. But that didn't stop the media from talking about her, because O'Donnell so perfectly represented everything else about the Tea Party.



There were blatant racists and blatant Obama-to-Hitler-comparison-makers. All year we saw misspelled signs and angry, red-faced Colonials. People like Anderson Cooper and President Obama showed how seriously they were taking the party by calling them "tea-baggers." And nobody blamed them, because all year long, the media gave us a picture of the Tea Party that made it perfectly clear: This is a joke.


But the truth is ...

It wasn't a joke.

For all those wackjob birthers captured on film wearing frilly lady blouses and triangle hats, there were thousands of ordinary people just living their lives, being regular, and not liking how their Republican Party had turned out. And even though Tea Party members tend to skew toward older, middle-class white guys, their overall demographics aren't that far from the rest of the country. Of course, regular people are about as riveting as dry toast, so they didn't get much screen time. Which is why it came as such a shock to everyone when 32 percent of Tea Party-affiliated candidates won their elections.

By focusing in on the assclowns the media painted a picture that not only wasn't accurate, but pretty much made constructive political discourse impossible. They didn't just fail to do their job -- they did the opposite of their job, and they've been doing it for years.

Like back in the 1960s, when they homed in on long-haired hippies dancing like spazzes and plugging every orifice they could with flowers, then declared these ding-dongs the voice of their generation. In reality, most kids from the 60s never looked like that or behaved that way, but that doesn't mean they inherently supported the war in Vietnam or were opposed to civil rights. They just weren't part of the hippie fringe. Look at your mom's (or grandma's?) yearbook if you don't believe us.

Or look at this picture from Woodstock.


In case you can't tell, most of the guys are sporting relatively short hair ... at Woodstock.

So when we watched coverage of O'Donnell and the Tea Party this year, we were only getting the bonkers half of the picture. Now that CNN is teaming up with the Tea Party Express to host the Republican debates next year, we'll probably see a lot fewer costumed revolutionaries. But everyone will just assume the Tea Party cleaned up its act, when in reality it will be CNN.

#7.Kanye West


The way we heard it:

"Kanye West's career is as done as yesterday's jeggings. After all, there are plenty of perfectly good rappers who don't throw temper tantrums like a spoiled toddler."

Three months before 2010 got under way, Kanye made the blunder of a lifetime when he swiped Taylor Swift's microphone at the MTV Video Music Awards and gave his gaffe-tastic "Imma let you finish" speech. What Kanye didn't know was that somewhere on that stage was a magical, invisible line of pariahdom. The consequences of that stunt would play out in the form of disses from American presidents, current and former, a cancellation of his tour with the biggest pop star in the universe, dozens of fellow musicians shaming him publicly and a call to boycott him by Joe Jackson. Yes, Kanye had sunk so low that Michael Jackson's father thought he had the moral authority to call for his blackball.

By the beginning of 2010, our minds were pretty much made up on Yeezy. At best, he was a retarded buffoon who had somehow duped us into buying his records for five years. At worst, he had something very seriously wrong with him. Just about everything he said, did, or wore in 2010 made him look like it might be the latter. Like when he compared himself to Maya Angelou or covered his teeth in diamonds. And especially when he discovered Twitter and started spewing all sorts of incoherent diarrhea. It's almost like Kanye collaborated with the media to present the worst possible image of himself, and we ate it up, because why wouldn't we? Who acts like that, right?

But the truth is ...

None of it mattered.

Kanye's latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is being called the "Sgt. Pepper of hip hop" and a "masterpiece" by critics. For a while there, we forgot that Kanye has been making the music half of "rap music" since he was 20-years old. Before he ever picked up a microphone, other big names, such as Jay-Z, Nas and Ludacris, were clamoring to rap over his beats. So when he actually got around to doing the one thing that made him famous in the first place, we probably shouldn't have been so surprised that he was good at it.

This isn't the first time we've seen an artist create like a genius while acting like a lunatic; we're just not used to seeing it in rap music. Brian Wilson had a reputation as a tortured genius, crippled by shyness and stage fright but with a head full of opaque brilliance that the rest of us could appreciate only when he sat down at his piano. It might be time to start thinking of Kanye West as the opposite of Brian Wilson. Instead of struggling with crippling shyness, Kanye forces his fans to deal with his crippling case of whatever the opposite of shyness is.



There was even a moment at this year's Video Music Awards when Kanye made us think, if only for a split second, that maybe he'd orchestrated the whole controversy on purpose just to keep us talking about him. He returned to the scene of the crime, and performed his new album's hit single, "Runaway," mixing every layer of the song together on his keyboard as if to remind us that, yes, he's a musician. The chorus "Let's give a toast to the douche bags" had such feeling that you almost forgot that he was making fun of himself while simultaneously making everyone else who'd made fun of him in 2010 look like they weren't in on the joke.

Granted, that's a lot of self-awareness to award a guy who wears shit like this:



In the end, it doesn't matter if he's self-aware, retarded like a fox or retarded like Rain Man. As long as he makes music that critics fawn over and that the rest of us buy it probably doesn't matter.

#6.Jessi Slaughter (aka "You Dun Goofed!")

The way we heard it:

"It's an impotent ignorant redneck vs. super-cool all-powerful Internet geeks Anonymous! And Anonymous wins! LOL!"

Some of you were exposed to this story only via memes, usually a screen cap of a hillbilly screaming "YOU DUN GOOFED!" at a camera while a girl cries in the foreground.



Or maybe you've just heard people joking that they'll "backtrace" you, or report you to the "cyber police."



It's all referencing the same video, where a girl is receiving harassment from Anonymous (aka the most tech-savvy and malicious posters at 4chan) and her father screams a bunch of hilarious threats that he in no way has the power or expertise to follow up on. It's funny because he's clearly an old, uneducated redneck, the kind of guy who would beat up on a geek if he saw one in real life. And all he can do is impotently shake his fist into the camera and make a bunch of nonsense threats.

It's the stuff memes are made of, a perfect geek victory we can all celebrate. The video exploded on Digg, Reddit and everywhere else. The family wound up on Good Morning fucking America.

But the truth is ...

It was 4chan making sexual advances to, and then real-life death threats toward, an elementary school girl.

Let's back up for a moment.

4chan isn't entirely pedophiles, but it has a lot of pedophiles. Historians may never know whether it started with real pedophiles or simply hipsters making pedophile jokes in order to be shocking (they invented the "Pedobear" meme, a child-molestation themed mascot), but we know that the No. 1 job of 4chan moderators is trying to stem the tide of child porn (or "CP," as it's referred to in 4chan jargon) that floods the site. Surf /b/ for an hour, and you'll wind up with naked children thumbnails on your hard drive.

So the girl in the video, who goes by Jessi Slaughter, showed up on /b/ one night and, as they tend to do, /b/ tried to get the fifth-grade girl to strip. She refused to show enough skin and eventually took to her webcam to call /b/ a bunch of losers (4chan keeps no archives, but you can find the screen grabs of all this if you Google it and hate yourself).

Anonymous sprung into action. This is the type of cause Anonymous really gets into. Some of you may know them only for their attacks on Scientology or their defense of the WikiLeaks leakers. You probably don't know that for every one "good" deed, they perform several hundred like this. And by "like this," we mean they hunted down the personal information of an 11-year-old girl, including her home address and phone number, and began calling her house at all hours and making death threats. Hundreds and hundreds of 4chan posters jumped onboard, unified in their drive to terrorize a small child.

She was eventually placed under police protection, and her father flipped out and made his hilarious rant into her webcam to try to get Anonymous to back off. A meme was born.

They say one of the worst things you find out about the world as an adult is the way the oppressed, when given the chance, can be just as horrible as their oppressors. Nerds who get wedgies all day at school don't dream of equality -- they dream of being the one doing the beating and humiliating. For proof, all you have to do is look at how Anonymous behaves when given the chance to terrorize someone who they know can't strike back. They find themselves operating by the same rules as any bully: They don't harm the people who most deserve it, but rather the ones who are least able to retaliate.

But most of us who find ourselves on the "geek" side of the equation want to see ourselves as the oppressed and righteous minority, so we cheered on Anonymous and mocked the ignorant hillbillies. Meanwhile, Anonymous went back to their favorite hobby: Defacing Facebook memorial pages of dead children. LOL!

#5.The Social Network



The way we heard it:

"The Social Network is a scathing, and probably unfair, portrait of Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook doesn't want you to see."

If you found yourself crapping next to a basket of magazines in the months before The Social Network hit theaters, you were well prepared for the public execution of Mark Zuckerberg. The Sunday Times of London promised a movie about the "seamy life of (the) Facebook boss" who is "driven not just by money or fame but also sexual insecurity." New York Magazine ran a cover article that set the stage for a media throwdown.



Zuckerberg weighed in with the complain brag of the year, saying "I just wished no one had made a movie about me while I'm still alive" (before going on to complain, "I also wish the supermodels I have sex with on top of my money pile would stop getting altitude sickness").

Once the movie came out, the real fact-checking began. The Orlando Sentinel compared the film's "ugly portrait" of Zuckerberg to Oliver Stone's "J.F.K., a dazzling con job fabricated on faulty data and a single point of view." Slate pointed out that the story we get in the movie, that Zuckerberg invented Facebook to get back at a girl who dumped him, is almost definitely made up.

It would have been easier to defend the movie if its screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, didn't openly admit that he wasn't even trying to tell the truth, saying "I don't want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling", or roughly translated, "If lying made the story better, I lied."

But the truth is ...

Everyone was completely right that the movie is full of lies and half-truths. They just all seemed to miss that almost every single one of those lies was designed to make Zuckerberg look awesome.

Aaron Sorkin needed to lie because he couldn't write an interesting movie about the kid who gave a rambling 45 minutes interview at the D8 conference earlier this year when confronted about Facebook users' well-documented privacy issues. Sorkin's version of Zuckerberg would have ice skated circles around those interviewers. The only information the real Zuckerberg conveyed was that he may in fact be a very sweaty robot.

The Social Network's Zuckerberg is only "uncool" in the way that nerdy girls in teen movies are "ugly" until they take off their glasses. He occupies the physical space of an "uncool" person and is referred to as such by other characters. But he dominates every conversation and room he enters with quiet, savant-like intensity. No, movie Zuckerberg doesn't smile or engage in social niceties. Anyone claiming that makes him less cool might as well be arguing that Brett is the coolest character in Pulp Fiction because he has better manners than Jules.

The movie took a lot of heat for its theory that Zuckerberg created Facebook to get back at an ex-girlfriend. Slate complains that the entire story line appears to be based on one sentence Zuckerberg wrote on his blog, which read "Jessica Alona is a bitch." But in the film's last scene, we learn that the "bitch" is the answer to the riddle that is Mark Zuckerberg. Slate points out that he might not have even had a relationship with her.

So to recap, the real Zuckerberg called a girl a bitch on his blog, and the movie makes that the salutation on the most epic unsent love letter in the history of unrequited love. Fine. Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook out of puppy love. But that feels less like slander and more like the type of lie you tell about yourself while trying to get laid.

The magazines and sites that criticized the movie for being unfair to Zuckerberg accomplished the rare feat of getting it exactly wrong. If the movie's version of the truth is irresponsible in any direction, it's for letting the real Zuckerberg off too easily. Movie Zuckerberg's low point comes when he's persuaded to screw over his best friend by Napster founder Sean Parker. Real Zuckerberg's low point might have been the time he used Facebook to hack into other students' email accounts.

Or maybe it was the AIM conversation where he called Harvard's student body "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their private information, or the chat log where a friend asked him what he planned to do about the Winklevoss twins (who in the movie and in reality accuse him of stealing the idea for Facebook from them) to which the real Zuckerberg replied:

ZUCK: yea i'm going to fuck them

ZUCK: probably in the year

ZUCK: *ear

Look, we've all had conversations that we'd rather not see surface. Some of us may have even threatened to perform that exact sexual act on Harvard's entire student body without a trace of irony. We're not suggesting that Zuckerberg should be judged for something he wrote as a 19-year-old. Just that he really shouldn't be defended as though The Social Network wronged him in some way. It turned the world's youngest billionaire into something that should technically be impossible: A punk rock billionaire. It was because of the movie, not in spite of it, that Zuckerberg seemed interesting enough to be Time's person of the year. The movie made him Gordon Gekko for a new generation, and with a heart of gold. If you don't understand why that's good for Zuckerberg, ask Michael Douglas about "the number of people who tell him that his Oscar-winning role was the reason they went to work on Wall Street."



#4.Project Natal/XBox Kinect



The way we heard it:

Project Natal was announced late in 2009, and for most of the next year, the Internet creamed its collective jeans over it. This isn't a motion-sensing controller, like the Wii -- this is fucking body recognition! Facial recognition! Voice recognition! This is your Xbox coming to life, becoming best friends with you and then taking you on fantastic adventures! It's not going to be a toy or a novelty item; it's going to be the future of gaming itself!

Then, Project Natal was finally released as the Kinect, and we got exactly what we didn't want: Another Wii built around the cheapest, shallowest gimmick possible. Just look at each system's bestselling games:

Wii: Wii Sports, Wii Party, Just Dance, Wii Fit Plus, the Petz series

Kinect: Kinect Sports, Kinect Adventures, Dance Central, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, Kinectimals

Kiddie bullshit and housewife fodder, all of it. We wanted to lightsaber duel in a fully interactive digital environment -- perhaps a bar fight, so we could pick up in-game chairs and bash virtual Chewbaccas to death with them -- and instead we got to molest virtual tigers and go bowling. Again.

The scenario shouldn't have been a surprise: This is what nerds do. We get way too excited about the potential of something, then, when faced with the disappointing reality, we howl in impotent rage and set out to destroy it. We put these things up on a pedestal, then immediately stand at the bottom of that pedestal with an ax, just waiting for the moment we get to chop it down. And the Kinect definitely deserved it.

But the truth is...

In the right hands, the Kinect actually does all it promised and more. You just have to head out to the fringes to see it:

For starters, it's effectively changing the future of graphic user interfaces. The medical field is making use of Kinect's software to enhance and tweak how technicians interact with radiological scans. Instead of awkwardly manipulating a 3D image with 2D tools like a mouse and keyboard, a Kinect-driven interface uses voice recognition, body position and hand gestures to attain an entirely new level of precise, intuitive control.

And all without any sort of physical controller -- hell, even Minority Report had to use gloves to accomplish the same thing.



The current Kinect games mostly recognize only a few predetermined gestures and broad, sweeping movements, but it's not the software's fault. For example, this Japanese gamer built a full-body 1:1 motion recognition mod. Every single movement he makes, his avatar makes in kind. Of course the Japanese guy uses it to inhabit the body of a slutty anime schoolgirl -- that's the endgame of literally every technological development Japan's made in the last century -- but think of other potential uses for this: With some collision detection, this could easily bring about the aforementioned lightsaber fantasy that takes place in a fully interactive digital environment.

Kind of like this: A fully rendered (if glitchy and unintentionally hilarious) environment with two-way interaction. He lifts up, moves and repositions digital objects inside the space, and the space, in turn, renders the real objects he places in it -- his chair, for example, is present in both reality and the game. And that's just what the Swedish version of Kip from Napoleon Dynamite here can do; if you throw some real funds and a professional development team behind it, you've got the closest thing we've ever had to true virtual reality.

Oh, and what's this at the end? Yup: lightsaber duel. Fucking told you.

Finally, as if that wasn't enough to foster painfully fierce nerd erections around the world, there is the inevitable end point: VR porn.

For now, all ThriXXX does is render a virtual hand that you can use to cavity-search dead-eyed whores in a shady motel, but again, these are the very early stages of a completely new technology. With the right amount of money and expertise behind this kind of software, you could be standing in an empty room that, at the touch of a button, fills with your virtual office. You could manipulate programs in the air in front of you. Come break time, you could play a few holes working on your actual, physical golf swing. Or, if the mood strikes, you could just lock the doors, turn the lights down and air-hump some digital poon until the shame overcomes your horniness.

#3.Inception



The Way We Heard It:

"THE FINAL SCENE ISN'T CLEAR! WE MUST ANALYZE EVERY FRAME TO DETERMINE HOW THE STORY ENDED! SURELY THE ANSWER IS ENCODED DEEPLY IN THE SUBTEXT!"



Inception was entirely about characters not knowing the difference between dreams and real life. In the final scene, Leo DiCaprio is reunited with his long-lost children, and as he greets them, he spins a top (it's established earlier that if in a dream, the top spins forever, while in reality, it eventually topples). The camera hangs on the top for a few seconds and then ... cut to black. The audience groans. What happened?

Ever since, the Internet has been on fire with analyses to find out how the film "really" ended, picking apart every detail. Someone floated the theory that because DiCaprio's children are wearing the same clothes in every scene, it must all be in his head, so someone interviewed the goddamned costume guy to find out if they were wearing the same outfits (they weren't). The conclusion:

"That's huge. If the kids, clothing really is different, then Cobb, who always imagined them the same way when in a dream, is no longer in a dream and actually in reality. On my second viewing of the film ... the clothing looked identical. But Kurland dressed them, and ... I'm inclined to take his word for it."

Someone else pointed out that the children don't age in the film. Immediately the Internet scrambled to find out who played the children and determined that different, older actors were cast for the later scene.

On our own forum, we actually had to moderate pages of discussion extensively analyzing the exact spin of the fucking top to determine whether the lean exceeded the amount allowed by gravity and thus whether, by the laws of physics, it was destined to topple after the final frame.

And on and on and on.

But the truth is ...

Christopher Nolan did not run out of film. It was scripted, and shot, to end exactly the way it did. It's an ambiguous ending. Lots of movies have them. Not an "encoded" ending or a "secret" ending or a "hidden" ending. Ambiguous. On purpose.

We're not trying to be dicks here, but to this day, fans act like we were watching a live news event when the feed to the camera just got cut, and we're just waiting to hear from somebody else who was on the scene with additional information. But the movie didn't cut to black because the power ran out, or the budget fell a hundred bucks short of what they needed to shoot the whole final scene. The ending wasn't left up in the air. What you saw was the ending.

Again, we are not mocking nerds for overanalyzing pop culture. We're professional nerds who overthink pop culture for a living. But we're kind of disappointed that even the hardest of the hardcore movie geeks seem totally unfamiliar with the concept of an ambiguous ending. Nobody has seen The Thing (where the credits run with it still unclear whether the main character is the shape-shifting monster)? Or Total Recall (was everything part of the virtual reality fantasy)?

Nobody had to read The Lady, or the Tiger in school?

It's a common, age-old technique. The idea is to make you feel uncertainty, in the same way horror movies make you feel scared or pornos make you feel a boner. Asking what ending the director "really" intended is a total nonsense question, and it's kind of ruining your own enjoyment of the film. It's like refusing to accept the events of Lord of the Rings until somebody tells you exactly where Middle-earth is located. If Chris Nolan wanted you to leave the theater knowing it was a dream, he would have goddamned filmed that. He didn't. He wanted you to leave never knowing, because the main character himself doesn't know.

That's the point.

The whole thing is threatening to turn into another Blade Runner "is he a robot" debate, which continued for two decades. If only the filmmakers would just tell us!

Good news, gang -- they totally have! Harrison Ford and Michael Deeley (the film's producer) both have come forward and said Deckard is a human. There's your answer! Oh, wait. Ridley Scott, aka the director, aka the guy deciding every shot and edit and how the overall story is told, says he was a robot. Because even in the minds of the people who made it, there is no answer. Because it's an ambiguous ending, and that's exactly how they intended to tell the story.


#2.LeBron James


The way we heard it:

"LeBron James ditching Cleveland for Miami Heat is the worst thing that has ever happened to the NBA, he should be ashamed of himself."

Freakishly giant and impossibly talented basketball star, LeBron James, did what a lot of players do every single year: He went from one team to a different team with the hopes of winning more basketball games. But Cleveland was LeBron's first team, located in the same state where he grew up, and he intended to treat them with respect and fulfill his promise to bring a championship home ... right up until he ditched them in favor of a stellar team of superstars in Miami. Just as sports fans had been fearing all along, it wasn't about heart, or loyalty -- it's strictly about LeBron: The Brand. And LeBron's brand needed LeBron to win a ring for LeBron.

It didn't help that he drew the process out over months. He dodged direct questions and gave misleading answers about his upcoming free agency. He flew around the country, flirting with New York, Chicago and any other city hoping to win a title. Finally, he reserved an hour of time on ESPN to deliver his horrifying decision in the most douche-chill inducing sentence possible: "In this fall I'm going to take my talents to South Beach."

When that wasn't enough, he came out with that irritatingly long Nike commercial wherein he implies, among other things, that he is in no way sorry for his behavior. Nike even includes a pretty damning visual bit where LeBron literally destroys a basketball court by driving a forklift through it.

And that's basically what he did to the game, if you listened to basketball purists shouting on ESPN about how Jordan, Magic and Bird never would have done this. It was like LeBron was an NBA manchuriancandidate, programmed to make everyone love him, only so he could tear their hearts out and make them abandon the sport he'd made interesting again.

But the truth is ...

LeBron's move, including and especially "The Decision," was the best thing to happen to the NBA since Michael Jordan retired (the first time) 14 years ago. Sports are entertaining, but not as entertaining as sports movies. Anyone who would tell you otherwise hasn't seen Rudy.

People love a good story. Sure, every team has an army of loyal fans that will watch and support no matter what, but if you want to get the rest of the world to pay attention, you need a story.

It's why the New York Giants defeating the New England Patriots a few years ago was so exciting -- it could have easily been a sports movie. You had your undefeated yet morally bankrupt Patriots, with their smug quarterback, and their scrotum-faced coach. Meanwhile you had your quintessential underdogs, the wildcard Giants, featuring Eli "The Other Manning" Manning, and a coach that, swear to God, might be Mick from the Rocky movies.



The Patriots became every blond, strong-jawed, arrogant 80s movie bully to the Giants' scrawny, "aw shucks," wacky best friend who it turned out you were in love with the whole time. When the Giants beat the Patriots at the last minute, the world celebrated, not because America was suddenly a Giants fan, God no, but because America loves an underdog sports movie, and this one happened in real life.

But every such story needs a villain, and LeBron James created one for the NBA. Why else would anyone be paying attention to basketball way back in July? And not just paying attention, but actively thinking about it? Basketball fans and nonfans alike all had an opinion about LeBron's decision. Everyone had something to say. If it didn't work, you wouldn't be hearing so many of your coworkers say things like, "Can you believe that LeBron James fellow? I just think it's shameless, whatever it is that he did." If it didn't work, would Christmas Day's Lakers-Heat game have drawn a 45 percent ratings increase over last year?

For the first time since the early 90s Pistons, basketball had a villain, but not just any villain, the worst villain. He turned on the hardworking, blue collar people of Cleveland, lied to them and then rubbed their faces in his betrayal on national TV! The Heat staged an elaborate introduction ceremony so LeBron, Wade and Bosh could show off because they think they're so great. He only plays basketball for the money and fame, and not the love of the sport. What an asshole. LeBron James stole your girlfriend.

The entire ordeal could've been scripted by the WWE, and the NBA couldn't be luckier.

#1.The iPhone 4 and iPad Disasters

The way we heard it:

It was hard to find a beloved figure who got more bad press than Steve Jobs this year, which is pretty remarkable, since 2010 saw Michael Jordan try to bring back the Hitler mustache.



The great unraveling of Jobs' mythos started almost immediately after the keynote address in which he unveiled the much-hyped iPad to a unanimous "Whaaaa?" Depending on which tech blog you read, it was either the least-powerful laptop released in years or it was a giant iPod Touch that didn't fit in your pocket unless you were a kangaroo. What was supposed to be yet another of Jobs' spellbinding magic shows created such bad buzz that Apple's stock price went down before it was even over.

With the stink of his last brain fart still hanging thick in the air, Jobs tried to reset the stage by releasing the iPhone 4 well ahead of schedule. The day it hit shelves, reports began pouring in that it was about as good at being a phone as the iPad. If you picked it up with your left hand, it dropped calls.

Rather than admitting he'd made a mistake and recalling the product, Jobs stuck his fingers in his ears and then his head in the sand. Tasting blood in the water, the tech blogs rushed in, forcing Jobs into one embarrassing news conference after another until he admitted he was wrong.

But the truth is ...

If you read only the headlines in the days before and immediately after the launch of the iPad and the iPhone 4, that's the story you got. It might still be what your brain pulls out of the filing cabinet when you hear either mentioned. Well, it turns out that both products did all right for themselves. And by all right, we mean that they were the most successful products in the history of Apple. They beat the shit out of the iPod and the original iPhone.

The real problem was something that social scientists, borrowing a phrase from movie theater racism, call the loud minority. The idea is that a small group's niche point of view is overrepresented simply because that's the group that's more likely to share it. In the case of the iPad, the loud minority were tech bloggers -- people who write and think about cutting-edge technology. The problem is that the more they know about technology, the less they're like most Americans.

If you trust census data over Whitney Houston lyrics, old people are the future of America, mostly thanks to the post-WWII baby boom. And according to an informal survey conducted in line at a Best Buy, not a single damn one of them knows the first thing about operating a computer. The iPad was a computer that finally made sense for people who didn't know how to use a mouse. It responded to your touch in exactly the way you, or even a marginally intelligent orangutan, would anticipate. Push the page you're reading left, and that's where it moved. If the link at the end of that gypsy-cursed email leads you to a scary page full of dicks, you just had to hit the only button on the machine to get back to your pretty, tiled home base.

But if the iPad launch showed that the loud minority had lost touch, the iPhone 4 was the point at which the loud minority found itself shaking a stranger by the neck while screaming "look what you make me do." As Jobs pointed out, they seemed to be willfully ignoring a few things: All smartphones have places you can touch that will make them lose a bar or two; it couldn't have been that big a problem, since Apple was selling more of the iPhone 4 than any iPhone ever and seeing fewer people return them.



Of course, when you're arguing with someone who's already made up his mind to disagree with you, logic only makes him louder. This time, they got so loud that Apple's stock dropped nearly eight percent. For weeks, it was all the Internet was talking about, and then, with a suddenness that was almost startling, the Internet shut the fuck up about the iPhone 4. Jobs had agreed to waive the restocking fee if people wanted to return their phones, and nobody returned them.

In a rare moment of candor, the blog CrunchGear, which had been one of the leaders of the scandal dubbed Antennagate posted an apology titled: "We have met Antennagate, and it is us" in which they admitted that they were "grasping at factual straws and thrusting them into the faces of everyone we encountered " because "controversy generates traffic." Of course, this was a marginally popular post on a site whose most popular iPhone 4-related post is still "The top four iPhone 4 hardware issues so far."

The rest of the silent majority, and even The New York Times just shuffled their feet around and avoided making eye contact by playing with their iPads and iPhone 4s.







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The 10 worst decisions of 2010

By: Molly Ball
December 31, 2010 05:34 AM EST

They must have seemed like good ideas at the time. But the politicos who made these bad decisions are surely looking back on 2010 and kicking themselves.

A bad decision isn't just a gaffe — something that slips out when your mouth runs ahead of your brain. It's something you do on purpose, like doubling down on that thing you shouldn't have said, talking trash about your own state or getting blown up by your own political grenade.

What follows are 10 choices that those involved would almost surely take back if they could.

Delaware Republicans' nomination of Christine O'Donnell:

It's easy to play coulda-woulda-shoulda with primary candidates, speculating about whether a primary loser could have won the general election. But few nominations so clearly cost their party the seat as the Delaware GOP's selection of the gadflyish perennial candidate O'Donnell over moderate Mike Castle. Overnight, Democrat Chris Coons went from sacrificial lamb to senator-in-waiting, and the GOP's hopes of taking the Senate were essentially dashed.

Jack Conway's "Aqua Buddha" TV ad:

Kentucky Democrat Conway was desperate for a way to halt the momentum of his opponent, tea-party-allied Republican Rand Paul. So he cut an ad hitting Paul on his alleged collegiate pranks: "Why did Rand Paul once tie a woman up, tell her to bow down before a false idol and say his god was Aqua Buddha?" In a state in which large swatches of the population reflexively view Democrats as suspicious heathens, painting your GOP opponent as a suspicious heathen might seem like a nice move. But it backfired in a big way. Paul accused Conway of attacking his religion and ended up winning by 12 points.

Eric Massa's tickle defense:

Upon the sudden announcement that the erratic New York Democrat was stepping down in March, word began to leak that he had been under ethics investigation for alleged sexual harassment of staffers. An indignant Massa insisted his retirement was for health reasons. He didn't help his case any by going on Glenn Beck's show and describing the alleged groping incident as drunken horseplay: "Not only did I grope him, I tickled him until he couldn't breathe!" Massa later tried to claim the allegations were payback from Democrats angered by his health care stance, making him very briefly a cause célèbre on the right, until he became too radioactive even for Rush Limbaugh and faded into the woodwork.

Sharron Angle speaks to Hispanic high schoolers:

The tea-party-backed Nevada Republican was declining most mainstream press interviews and campaigning out of public view after her handlers realized she had a knack for sticking her foot in her mouth. So why did the campaign think it was a good idea for her to speak to a Hispanic students' group at a Las Vegas high school in October? Confronted about her ads featuring Latino-looking gangsters, Angle said she had no way of knowing that's what they were: "I don't know that all of you are Latino. Some of you look a little more Asian to me." She also claimed she'd been mistaken for Asian while serving in the state Legislature. Reid's campaign's attempts to paint her as an off-the-wall fruitcake couldn't have asked for a better Exhibit A.

***BONUS BAD DECISION: Harry Reid and Sharron Angle agree to debate: Normally, debates are an important means for voters to see the unfiltered contrast between two candidates, but "the dud in the desert" did neither candidate — nor the public — any favors.

Martha Coakley riles up Red Sox Nation:

The Massachusetts Democrat thought she was headed for an easy win in the January special election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. But between derisively asserting she was above such political duties as shaking hands outside Fenway Park, and mistaking Red Sox hero Curt Schilling for a Yankee fan, Coakley couldn't have seemed more out of touch with the voting public. By losing to Republican Scott Brown in the bluest of blue states, she deprived Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority and ability to easily pass legislation — and put the party into the defensive crouch it would stay in all the way through November.

Joe Barton's BP apology:

The Texas Republican just couldn't stand to see BP CEO Tony Hayward take a tongue-lashing from the rest of the House Energy and Commerce Committee at a June hearing. So in a classic case of boldly standing up for the not-so-little guy, Barton, the GOP's ranking member on the panel, seized the floor to offer his regrets. "I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown," Barton said. Outrage over the apology was swift, dragging Republicans off their preferred message of populist anti-Washington fervor for several days. Yet it didn't stop Barton from making an unsuccessful play for the committee gavel after the election.


Joe Miller's journalist detention:

After winning the Republican primary in the Alaska Senate race, the tea-party-favored Miller should have had it in the bag. But amid reports that Miller's work as a local government lawyer was being scrutinized, security guards working for the campaign handcuffed a reporter for a news website and detained him for half an hour, apparently for the infraction of trying to ask the candidate questions. The Anchorage police promptly freed the journalist. The incident, meanwhile, only intensified the impression that Miller was an angry loose cannon, and Miller lost to primary loser Lisa Murkowski's long-shot write-in bid.


Sue Lowden's "Chickens for Checkups":

Nevada Republican primary candidate Lowden might have survived advocating "barter with your doctor" as one way to reduce health care costs. But it was when she chose to amplify and defend those remarks with a vivid image — "In the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor" — that a late-night joke was born. Lowden's unforced error paved the way for an ascendant Sharron Angle to win the primary, and Republicans' chances of knocking off Harry Reid took a possibly fatal blow.

Raul Grijalva's home-state boycott:

For a Democrat with a safe seat in the House of Representatives, this was a year to duck and cover as your more vulnerable colleagues got swept away by the GOP tornado. Instead, Grijalva stuck his head up: In response to Arizona's passage of a controversial anti-illegal immigration state law, Grijalva joined those calling for a boycott of his own home state. Cue the Republican bumper stickers: "Boycott Grijalva, not Arizona." His opponent, a 28-year-old first-time candidate, drew close in the polls, but Grijalva ended up surviving with less than 50 percent of the vote.

**BONUS BAD DECISION: MSNBC's Keith Olbermann donates to Grijalva (and two other Democrats) the same day the congressman appears on his show, earning a suspension when the donation comes to light.

Charles Rangel fires his lawyer:

Rangel, the longtime Democratic New York congressman, unexpectedly walked out of the first day of his House ethics trial last month, saying he deserved legal representation and didn't have it since parting ways with the law firm to which he'd paid $2 million in fees. It was a dramatic bluff, and the committee called it. Instead of giving Rangel the delay he sought, the panel decided it didn't take a trial to see that the charges against Rangel were "uncontested." The venerable 21-term representative was found guilty of 11 charges and later censured.

© 2011 Capitol News Company, LLC

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