Five Years

Today Falling Panda celebrates 5 years since our first post. I have not always updated as consistently as I should. Sometimes my political predictions have been way off. But I'm proud of my work here and want to thank every visitor and commenter who has participated in these debates over the last half-decade.
-Dan

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Chillax America!

I have to be honest. I never imagined that the new screening procedures at U.S. airports would cause such enormous controversy. I really don’t see the problem with TSA screeners being able to see the silhouette of “my junk” when I’m walking through a security checkpoint. I’m not worried that my scan is going to end up on the internet and even if it did, with all of the non-airport related porn availiable online these days,why would anyone care? It would seem that our country’s qualms about nudity, stemming from its puritanical roots, are still deeply engrained. For all of the differences with the Islamic world that we tout as making us culturally advanced, we still get stuck on the humility thing.

Of course this controversy wouldn’t be necessary at all if not for the American Left’s infantile insistence that an 80 year old nun carrying a bottle of Gatorade is just as likely to blow up an airplane as a 25 year old Middle Eastern looking male speaking Arabic. We all know the Left doesn’t actually buy into the idea that profiling wouldn’t work, but adopting the policy would go against the Left’s longstanding goal of preserving equality, which, for them, consists of striving to make everyone in the country equally miserable.

The typical leftist response to calls for racial and ethnic profiling is to say that if we start singling out individuals who we know are most likely to have terrorist tendencies, then Al Qaeda will start recruiting elderly Jewish women, or other unlikely candidates, to carry out their underwear bombings. Of course, this Jihadist strategy hasn’t developed in Israel, where El Al airlines remains the safest in the world thanks largely to profiling. But no! According to liberals, it is a national security imperative that toddlers of Norwegian descent undergo an invasive series of “love pats” to make sure that they’re not carrying c-4 in their diaper.


In the wake of the videos of crying 3-year old girls, x-rated jokes, skyrocketing latex glove sales and C.A.I.R’s efforts to try and secure a waiver from the new screening procedures--which, if achieved would pretty much render the entire exercise pointless--the federal government’s incompetence in this whole matter has gone largely unnoticed.

Americans who pay attention have known for a while that these new scanners were on the way. The media--particularly Drudge--has been talking about them for two years. Yet, the administration and the TSA made no visible effort to raise awareness about what the American people could expect once the new procedures were implemented. As a result, this whole thing is blowing up two weeks before the busiest travel day of the year and will undoubtedly cause plenty of airport chaos before the holiday season is over. Great timing! We would have all been better off had Americans been given a few months over the summer to come to terms with the idea of being seen naked by a TSA screener and the possibility of being groped by a government employee. This entire debate would have had time to play itself out and then………ELECTION!!!!..............Oh. Right. Never mind.

Your government at work ladies and gentlemen. Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Just make sure you bring something to read for the security line and eat something before you go. Unlike most dates, the TSA guy isn’t going to buy you dinner before he gets down to business.

- Dan Joseph

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STEVEN WEBER MAD!!! STEVEN WEBER SMASH!!!!

Huffington Post provides a service. It allows actors and comedians--regardless of intellectually capacity or political knowledge--to vent on the issues of the day. HuffPo provides these celebrities with a big platform on the most popular left-leaning “news” site on the internet.

One of the sites regular contributors is former "Wings" star Steven Weber.

A particularly angry leftist, Weber was clearly upset by the Republican's smashing victory at the polls last Tuesday. Fortunately, HuffPo was there to let him blow off some steam. And blow he did. With a 444-word screed that would have conveyed just as much in two sentences.

"Conservatives are evil. They are also stupid."

That's basically what he said but, in typical leftist fashion, it took him forever to say it. Like a speech by Jesse Jackson, Weber's posts are filled to the brim with impressive vocabulary. But his clever wordplay never masks the fact that his writing is completely void of meaningful or original content.

His discombobulated thoughts are messily dumped on the page amounting to nothing more than an exercise in name-calling. There is no thesis. No organization. And yet Ariana Huffington has decided to give Weber a weekly column from which to rant wildly. One has to assume that he qualified for this valuable piece of Internet real-estate solely because of his life as semi-famous actor, because he’s certainly not a writer.

In his "article" Weber makes the following keen observations about conservatives and Republicans:

We are "twisting the truth."

We "Tread over the confused, abused, unknowing masses."

Our candidates are "trolls and drones."

We're "moronic," "frothing," "dirty" and "mean."

Our "scorched-earth approach to all things is like a nightmare!"

All this while the "Moderate Middle and its liberal allies" waste time with its "adherence to the rules of play in the face of an opposition which has dispensed with boundaries and absolutely, fundamentally loathes rules."

Weber has penned dozens of these rants. They are each the same. Take a news item. Mention it at the beginning of your piece then spend the next 400 words telling readers that conservatives are awful, dangerous, knuckle-draggers with a tendency towards "teabagging."

All the while "truth and decency have a liberal bias."

I don't want to give Weber too much attention. He's representative of the political discourse problems we've been having in this country since the Bush years drove the Left to the brink of setting themselves on fire in front of the White House like a bunch of depressed monks.

Arianna Huffington is really to blame here. Clearly she'll give just about anyone on the Left their own Huffington blog, while providing little to no editorial oversight. While she has hundreds of pseudo-political commentators blogging under her banner, quantity certainly trumps quality in most instances.

Keep in mind that Huff Po is the first place that a significant portion of the Left goes for their news every morning. I think we can all agree that reading a Steven Weber column and assuming that your mind is expanding in any way is insane.

And yet, it's Huffington herself who co-opted John Stewart’s rally in an attempt to secure the mantle of “sanity” for those on the left. Like Huffington, Weber has deluded himself into believing that the far-left is more ideologically in synch with the “moderate middle” than are conservatives despite the fact that conservatives just spent the last two years successfully reminding Independent voters of why they’ve always hated the progressive agenda.

A lot of decent journalism ends up on HuffPo’s homepage. But wasting quality bandwidth on Weber makes it difficult to take the site seriously. Ditto for celebrities like Russell Simmons, Alec Baldwin, John Cusack and of course, Hugo Chavez pal Sean Penn. But it was these very celebrities and their crazed rants against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that made the site the powerhouse that it is today. Just goes to show you how powerful, uninformed celebrity anger can be when building a leftist coalition. Just make sure you cut them loose once you get the power you’ve been trying to achieve. For a good example of how to do this, see Barack Obama.

But please Arianna, for the sake of your less sophisticated readers. Don’t present celebrities like Weber as having any sort of above average insight into the American political scene. It doesn’t benefit anyone. Well, except Steven Weber, of course.

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James Carville's Epic FAIL!

"Today, a Democratic majority is emerging, and it's my hypothesis, one I share with a great many others, that this majority will guarantee the Democrats remain in power for the next forty years."

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10 Insane Signs I Saw At the Rally To Restore Sanity

Let's get something straight right off the bat. This was a LIBERAL rally. Jon Stewart may have promoted it as and intended for it to be a "non-partisan" event aimed at mocking hyperbolic ideologues on both sides, but that's not how it turned out.

The event was totally co-opted by the Left, whose interest groups took advantage of the "moderate" label that both Stewart and many in the MSM bestowed upon the rally before it even took place.

The hard leftist slant of the rally was on full display in the signs that rally attendees were carrying. Many of the signs were bipartisan attempts at humor that succeeded more often than not. However, at least half of the signs specifically targeted conservatives. Some in an angry, classless fashion that Stewart himself would probably have condemned.

Here is a sample of some of the more offensive and ridiculous signage that I saw on Saturday.

1.Republicans as Hitler

Jon Stewart specifically said that the rally was intended to mock the people who use rallies as opportunities to portray those that they disagree with as the Fuhrer--and Rightfully so. Ideologues on both sides have been waving signs that show George W. Bush and Barack Obama with Hitler mustaches for years--and it's incredibly stupid. One of most popular catchphrases of the entire "restoring sanity" movement was "I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler." But, sure enough there they were. People carrying large signs showing members of the Republican leadership with scary Hitler 'staches. Of course, the intention of these signs could have been to compare these G.O.P. favorites to Charlie Chaplin, but I seriously doubt it.


2. Glenn Beck is a Rapist

Say what you will about Glenn Beck. Seriously! Say anything you want! That was a big theme on Saturday. You couldn't walk five feet without seeing a sign viciously attacking the controversial Tea Party leader who had managed to bring hundreds of thousands of people to the mall a month earlier for what was an actual non-partisan rally to "restore honor." But little did I know that all of Beck’s talk about faith and charity is really a cover for the fact that he is a rapist who kills people. One rally attendee was anxious to bring attention to this fact. Another was apparently one of Beck's victims of who was graciously spared after being violated by the Fox News personality.


3. That Being Said.....
The fact that Glenn Beck's genitalia is apparently miniscule must make raping people more difficult. Maybe the reason he murdered that poor woman was because she laughed at his junk. Either way, this sign really classed up the joint. Katie Manos must be really proud that her friend is so politically sophisticated.


4.“Truthers”

Any time large groups of leftists converge on a location you can pretty much guarantee that the despicable 9/11 truth movement will be represented in some capacity. These morons are still pushing the idea that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks, ordering the deaths of 3,000 of their fellow Americans in order to raise flag sales or something like that. Again, Stewart pointedly mocked “truthers” in the lead up to the rally, singling them out as examples of what's wrong with America's political discourse. Apparently the “truthers” didn't get the message--probably due to the fact that most of them probably can't figure out how to work the remote for their TV set.


5.Tea-Bagger References

Nothing raises the level of political discourse like implying that your political opponents like to put their scrotums in people's mouths. Pretty much everyone on the Left from bloggers to the president himself has been referring to Tea Partiers by using this sexually explicit moniker since the movement's inception. Thus proving that a significant portion of liberal America's brains never developed passed the level of a 13 year-old boy.


6. Sad Elephant Poop
This one confused me. Is this guy's sign implying that the Republicans--represented by the elephant--are going to eat the American people and then excrete their heads? I mean, of course that would put a frown on anyone's face assuming that you lived through the process of being eaten and digested by either a Republican or a pacaderm.

I think it's more likely that the guy was trying to say that the Republicans do things that are equivalent to an elephant pooping on the heads of the American people and sometimes they also steal thier bodies. But if that's what he was trying to get across, he should’ve made the poop bigger and more poop like.


7. Legalize it Dude!


One of the most popular pet causes of the rally attendees was the California ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes. Signs like these were everywhere. But, based on the smell wafting from the crowd and the fact that there were hardly any cops nearby, it seems pretty obvious that the proposition itself is totally unnecessary.

8. Corporate America is bad but it also provided me with the opportunity to show everyone how much I hate it.
I've seen this sign before. It's quite popular with the segment of the Left that believes that big corporations control every aspect of our lives.

Of course, no one would have seen this guy's sign at all had Viacom--the corporation that owns Comedy Central--not thrown down the money to hold the rally in the first place.

Had it not been for a big, evil corporation this guy would be sitting out on the street corner waving his sign all by himself as passersby looked upon him with sympathy in the knowledge that the only people who go wave signs by themselves on street corners are mentally ill.

This guy should really write Viacom a thank you letter for making him look less crazy.

Liberals are Smart!

9. Signs With Too Many Words

Ok look. I have things to do. There are a lot of signs to see at this rally. I don't have time to stop dead in my tracks and risk being trampled by hordes of people so I can read your sign that is roughly the length of a master's thesis.

You're not that clever. Pick a few words that rhyme like the very popular "Sanity Not Hannity" sign that I saw roughly 1000 times and move along.


10. Obama is the Sane One

This was a "Rally to Restore Sanity." The Tea Party was clearly the target, so if the Tea Party is "insane" and the Tea Party is made up of conservatives then it only stands to reason that the opposite of the Tea Party is the epitome of "sanity." Who is the Tea Party movement against? President Obama, of course. His liberalism is "sanity." Like Stewart himself--many of the rally attendees were clearly to the left of Obama. So to these Castro style progressives Obama looks like a moderate. In essence, this was exactly what the Left hoped to accomplish by making Stewart's rally their own.

That's why Ariana Huffington bussed people in by the thousands. That's why Oprah and Obama both endorsed this thing. They were trying to make themselves look like the moderates when in fact they are to the left of most people in this country. It was clever. But no matter how much the MSM fawns over Stewart's rally and labels it as a gathering of “reasonable” Americans politely asking "Can't we all just get along?" with one loud voice, the truth is that most of the people who showed up at this thing despise conservatives and everything they stand for.

But not to worry. In the eyes of a majority of Americans the real "Rally to Restore Sanity" is happening tomorrow.


Honorable Mentions
I have no idea what this sign means. I’m sure it made perfect sense to the guy holding it though.



What is Vampire Palin holding in her left hand? Is that meat? Why is Palin holding meat?

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Pictures From the Rally to Restore "Sanity" A.K.A. Rally to Mock Conservatives

Here's the companion piece to this post. The 10 Insane Signs I saw at the Rally to Restore Sanity. Uh? Didn't Stewart specifically say not to do the Hitler thing? Liberals are NOT good listeners.

Who said they were?

What does she mean "our surplus?" Is she a member of Congress?

Thanks for the visual lady!

Wow! Blaming Bush and playing the racce card on one t-shirt! I'm impressed!

Of course, the first thing I associate with the word "sanity" are the ladies of Code Pink.

I have no idea what this sign means.

It wouldn't be a leftist rally without a Socialist table.

This opportunity to bash corporate America has been brought to you by Comedy Central.

Legalization of pot was a very popular pet casue at the rally. I guess O'reilly was right about the whole "stoned slackers" thing. In fact, I know he was right. I could smell it!

Video of me interviewing attendees coming next week!

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