New York: Republican Party

Have you found yourself increasingly tilting your head at the news over the past few months? Squinting a bit? Cocking your head at an angle?

Does it seem like something just doesn't seem right - but you can't quite put your finger on it. Like when you hear a faint buzzing but you can't quite figure out what's making it.

Maybe I can help.

It's really this whole bizarro, pathetic Dede Scozzafava thing that finally brought the light on over my head. Particularly with headlines like this:

The Collapse of Dede Scozzafava, Moderate Republican

Scozzafava and the GOP civil war
Besieged by the hard right, moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava withdrew from NY-23: Is the GOP going too extreme?

I slack off for a week, you pay the price with a long Random Saturday :)

Michelle Malkin explains to the liberals in and our of the press about the speech that was and the speech that wasn't:
This same "Do Something" ethos infected the U.S. Department of Education teachers guides accompanying the announcement of Obama's speech -- until late Wednesday, that is, when the White House removed some of the activist language exhorting students to come up with ways to "help the president." Education Secretary Arne Duncan had disseminated the material directly to principals across the country -- circumventing elected school board members and superintendents now facing neighborhood revolts.

Bonus...heh...good one.

IBD on California lyin':
Did Proposition 13 ruin California? Yes, says a now-popular myth, which explains the state's budget crisis as punishment for keeping taxes too low. But statistics are stubborn things.

There are only two ways to get into a fiscal mess on the scale seen in California right now: You either spend too much or tax too little...

At the "root of California's misery," says Time, "lies Proposition 13, the anti-tax measure that ignited the Reagan Revolution and the conservative era. In Washington, the Reagan-Bush era is over. But in California, the conservative legacy lives on."

This sort of argument is emerging now, we'd guess, to help soften voter resistance to higher taxes not just in California but, sooner or later, at the federal level to pay for the spending frenzy of Congress and the Obama administration.

I'm just going to do an MRC roundup here and keep it simple without excessive blockquoting and linking:
In the wake of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s admission to having an affair, evening and morning newscasts on NBC, CBS, and ABC all immediately identified him as a Republican. In contrast, in March of last year, the networks rarely identified disgraced New York Governor Eliot Spitzer as a Democrat in the wake of his affair with a prostitute.

In a 2008 study of evening and morning network newscasts following the Spitzer scandal, NewsBusters’ Rich Noyes found that within the first week of news coverage Spitzer was only identified as a Democrat 20% of the time.