News Roundup for 10/20/10

Meg Whitman sings her favorite Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi song

-Headline of the Day-
"Twitter Typo Sends Meg Whitman Fans to Bassist in Tutu."

Man, is the internet an awesome thing or what? A staffer for Meg Whitman's California gubernatorial campaign left an R off a URL and wound up sending twitter followers to the wrong site. According to the report, they were supposed to see "endorsement from the San Diego Deputy Sheriff's association." What they got instead was YouTube video of a guy in a pink tutu and stockings, playing bass to a j-pop song:

All weirdness aside, the guy's got some skills. That slap-picking isn't easy, especially those quick rolls. I'm actually glad I saw that.

Still, this is not the image a Republican candidate would want to project. The staffer has no doubt been shot. (NBC Los Angeles)


-Not so grassroots-
The tea party is just a bunch of reg'lar ol' folks, fed up with Washington's free-spending ways, right? Wrong. In a piece about Joe Miller's primary win in Alaska, Politico reports that the Tea Party Express did almost all of their campaigning from a cruise ship. No, really.

According to the report, "For seven weeks this summer, staff members of the political action committee coordinated their efforts on behalf of Miller from staterooms aboard Holland America s M.S. Amsterdam, a cruise ship that plied the waters from Seattle to various ports of call from Canada to Alaska. There, while other passengers were shopping or photographing glaciers, Tea Party Expressers held press conferences, rallies and meetings with Miller supporters. Between stops, they used their time at sea plotting strategy and cutting radio ads that they downloaded from a digital recorder and e-mailed to a studio for production." When all was said and done, Tea Party Express had paid "Holland America Line a total of $103,000 to send six of its staffers on four consecutive cruises on the Amsterdam."

Meanwhile, Dana Milbank writes that "the power behind the Tea Party movement" comes, in part, from the US Chamber of Commerce, where you can find "representatives from Pfizer, ConocoPhillips, Lockheed Martin, JPMorgan Chase, Dow Chemical, Ken Starr's old law and lobbying firm, and Rolls-Royce North America." Nothing says "down-home American values" quite like a freakin' Rolls-Royce.

But hey, it's all about the common sense of the conservative voter, right? We can't let the fancypants elitists in their Volvos and Priuses run the show. We need good old-fashioned elitists in cruise ships and Rolls-Royces -- just like the founders intended. (Politico, Washington Post)

-Bonus HotD-
"Clarence Thomas's Wife Asks Anita Hill for Apology."

Only possible response: "I'm sorry your husband is such a horny, porn-addicted, sexist asshole." (New York Times)