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This time, my lovely Venomites, there’s a $10 Amazon.com gift card at stake. So be witty. Be very, very witty.

(And be sure to leave an accurate email address with your caption, or you’ll never know if you’ve won!)

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Earn free gift cards from Amazon and other stores by searching, playing games and clipping coupons here!

Who wrote it?

Naturally, pre-publication suspicions focused on Joe Klein, who penned Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics, the book that tipped America off to Bill Clinton’s true personality long before Bill Clinton’s own actions clued us in.

But Klein swears he’s not to blame for this tome, which is largely partisan and annoyingly sympathetic to the current administration.

Just how sympathetic?

According to Ron Charles, the book largely assumes Obama running as the uncontested Democrat nominee in the next election. If you listen/read the Dem press at all, you’ll know that’s not necessarily a foregone conclusion.

Then there’s this:

In fact, it suffers a bit in that the fictionalized Obama and his GOP opponent—a flattering blend of John McCain and Mitt Romney, devoid of demagoguery—are relatively respectful of each other. In a way, the book is “an uncanny response to this month’s call for a more civil political discourse.” (Newser)

Personally, I’m a fan of the Occam’s Razor approach. As in, now we know what Obama’s been doing on all of those taxpayer-funded vacations (including Obama’s multimillion-dollar vacation in his old Hawaiian stomping grounds). That “little break” he needed? Maybe it was because he was too busy in November to join NaNoWriMo.

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In Steele’s announcement — which was met with a standing ovation from the rest of the committee — he noted “It’s very clear the party wants to do something a little different and maybe a little better.”

All I have to say is: word.

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Take yesterday, for example. I turned on CNN’s Headline News (which, on the weekends, is almost non-stop Clark Howard) to keep me company during a marathon cooking session. While having a snack at the table my son and I both had to hear one political ad after another, this being the final days before the 2010 Midterm Election. After the third attack ad my son reached for the remote and hit the Mute button.

“Mom,” he said, “all last week our school held assemblies about bullying because of those kids who got bullied and killed themselves.”

“Uh-huh,” I replied, only half-listening because I was busily measuring out various ingredients to make bread.

“They said bullying isn’t just punching or kicking,” he continued. “It happens when someone says or writes mean things about another person, or spreads rumors. There’s even a website about it.”

“That’s nice,” I told him, dumping ingredients into the stand mixer.

“So why is it okay for all of these politicians to bully each other?” he wanted to know. “Aren’t they supposed to be setting examples for us kids?”

“I, uh…”.

Really, what IS a parent supposed to say? I explained that adults know these ads aren’t telling the whole story, that they’re really designed to sell us on a candidate so their claims are often exaggerated, if not downright lies.

He thought about this as he polished off the last of his snack. Then he said, “Kind of like that Fushigi ball I ordered because they said it was magic but it turned out to be an expensive piece of junk?”

“Exactly like that, dear.”

Needless to say, the TV is off in our house until Wednesday. And I, for one, can’t say I’m going to miss it at all.

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You may remember Ken Mehlman for his stint as the 62nd chairman of the Republican National Committee, or his 2001-2003 tour as the White House Director of Political Affairs under George W. Bush. So, what’s a former RNC chairman doing with KKR, and how is it helping the environment?

KKR, a global equity firm, has sunk 20% of its portfolio into a program that saves both money and the environment. The :Green Portfolio Program” was initially created in 2008 in partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund.

The portfolio highlights corporations that are improving their bottom lines “greenly” — by reducing their carbon footprints in the areas of paper waste, chemical use and consumption of both energy and water. The initial three companies which participated in the program, Primedia, Sealy and U.S. Foodservice, discovered ways to reduce their impact — while also improving profits — to the tune of $16.4 million. Not surprisingly, other companies paid attention. KKR now has a dozen companies participating in the portfolio program, and no doubt more will soon follow. After all, what’s not to like about saving green and going green?

Kudos to Republicans like Ken Mehlman and firms like KKR for leading the way to a new best practices.

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It must be my lucky day, because today I found out about US of Earth, a MORPG organized by a bunch of Ron Paul supporters. (Really.)

The website notes that this rudimentary World of Warcraft-type multiplayer game—titled “2011 Obama’s Coup Fails”—is merely “an action-packed, satire-filled” entertainment. But it does say, “If current events keep transpiring as they are, then 2011 Obama’s Coup may in fact become a dark chapter in American History.”

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The U.S. pay czar will slash compensation for the 25 highest-paid employees at seven firms receiving large sums of government aid and demand a host of corporate-governance changes at those firms, according to people familiar with the matter.

Kenneth Feinberg, the Treasury Department’s special master for compensation, will lower total compensation for 175 employees by an average of 50%, these people said. As expected, the biggest cut will be to salaries, which will drop 90% on average.

Oh, you don’t work at one of those companies? You run a small business, so you’ve got nothing to worry about? Riiiiiight. Guess who the government wants to help next?

What’s next? Anti-dog-eat-dog legislation?

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Earn free gift cards from Amazon and other stores by searching, playing games and clipping coupons here!

I don’t have a problem with a U.S. President telling my kid to study hard in school. Do I trust him, as SusanHW asked me on Twitter today when I’d said I didn’t care about the speech? Oh hell to the no.

But, see, I already know how little children work: they’ve been indoctrinated for years to idolize the office of the President and until they’re well into their teens it’s difficult for many to separate the office from the man. I also know that kids — and this time I include teens — are insanely curious about anything that Mommy or Daddy is against. Keep a kid home so they don’t listen to Obama then send him to school the next day when all of his little friends are hero-worshiping the guy, and what do you get? A future Democrat.

Oh, I’m fully aware that even if Obama keeps his speech specifically on-point about the importance of a good education, as Malkin points out “Obama zealot teachers like this one across the country will do all the extra-curricular bullying and haranguing for him.”

Living here in a rather conservative county in Kansas, I have the luxury of knowing there aren’t a ton of rabidly liberal, crap-spewing teachers like that one. I also know that, if one of my son’s teachers were to start proselytizing like that, I wouldn’t be the only parent shouting in the school office the next day. (But I might be the meanest.)

Frankly, I like to pick my battles carefully. Those of us in the GOP need to realize that bitching about every little thing the Dems do doesn’t make us sound informed or even draw attention to our primary issues; it just makes us sound bitchy.

Besides which, I know from experience that my boy is going to tune out any speech lasting longer than 30 seconds in favor of poking the little kid sitting next to him.

UPDATE: The White House has backed off of the wording in the teaching materials which was calling for students to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president”. Instead, the call is for students to write to themselves about their short- and long-term educational goals, with teachers collecting and holding the letters then giving them back to the children at a later date so they can see whether they’re keeping in track with the goals they set for themselves. (Source: Fox News).

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