Steve King's Celebrity Apprentice 2016

Master of Ceremonies Steve King

I fully expected to see Tea Partiers with bread bags on their feet at this rally, after all the attention Joni Ernst got for her SOTU rebuttal. She was found mingling among the GOP presidential wannabes appealing to the Iowa electorate, dubbed the Freedom Summit, but it was Crazy Sarah Palin who stole the show with her meandering speech that even had many conservative pundits confused as to what she was trying to say. She should have just broken into a refrain of "Bread Bags on My Feet."

It is shaping into a very crowded field for 2016. The religious conservative faction of the Republican Party desperately wants one of its own representing them. Right now you would have to think Mike ❤ Huckabee is the front runner among this group, but after his sausage speech it is anyone's ball game. The two Ricks, Dr. Ben, Cruz Missile Ted, and Crazy Sarah will all be vying for their affections.

Probably the biggest surprise was John Bolton. You figure this old bull had long ago been put out to pasture, but there he was bloviating about Obama's "delusional" foreign policy. He is even being regarded as a presumptive presidential candidate. I guess because he is the only one with anything remotely close to foreign policy "experience." He served the Bush administration as US Ambassador to the United Nations, but the mercurial ambassador preferred empty bluster to diplomacy, lashing out at the UN for its soft pedal approach to reigning in terror around the globe. In Iowa, his bellicose words suited his audience perfectly.

Who us?

The Hair Piece was also there, admonishing Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush (both conspicuously absent) for even thinking about running for President. It seems only the most lunatic right wing candidates need apply for the GOP nomination this time around. It is starting to look like Donald's Celebrity Apprentice reality show. Meanwhile, Mitt and Jeb are having their own summit to discuss their best strategy for 2016.

This gathering was sponsored by Steve King, Iowa's brazen US Representative, and Citizens United, which has done its best to stack the playing field with political candidates to its liking. Citizens United is largely funded by such luminaries as the Koch Brothers, who managed to get the Supreme Court to free up campaign financing laws so that corporations could take a more active role in state and federal political campaigns. The Kochs are purportedly planning to drop $1 billion on the 2016 elections, hoping that money will buy electoral happiness.

I'm not exactly sure, whose "freedom" this summit represents, but certainly not the average Joe, or Jane as the case may be. Yet, there were all those Tea Party hopefuls who saw many of their insurgent state and Congressional campaigns undermined by the big money that has seeped into the elections.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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