The Worm has Turned-over. The press backlash on lipstick, pigs and pitbulls

Obama in April, 2008: Today he says "Don't Swift-Boat me!" to the very same media folk?


DRUDGE: AS THE PRESS TURNS: OBAMA SAYS 'ENOUGH IS ENOUGH'

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Phraseology Lesson:

Where does the phrase "the worm has turned" come from? from Maven Phrases:

It's one of many derived forms of an old proverb, the base of which is either tread on a worm and it will turn or even a worm will turn. It means 'even the most humble will strike back if abused enough'.

The proverb is first recorded in John Heywood's 1546 collection of proverbs in the form: "Tread a woorme on the tayle and it must turne agayne." Shakespeare uses it, of course: "The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on" (Henry VI, part III). It has remained common in all sorts of literature: "He's a very meek type. Still, the worm will turn, or so they say." (Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack'd).

The proverb's first American attestation is in 1703, and there are a number of eighteenth-century American examples, showing that it has been popular for some time.

In the form the worm has turned, the proverb is often used in the broad sense 'the situation has changed', which suggests that people aren't really clear about what it really means: The day was one short, flippary (sic) sound bite or two on how one Sen. Barrack H. Obama could say "fishwrap" and "lipstick on a pig" in two or three sentences and watch the worm turn 360 degrees in favor of Mr. McCain and running mate _____ (you know who!). Oh! And how the worm has turned for Mr. McCain--whose approval ratings now rise above Mr. Obama's s in my state by 10 percentage points! (re-tread on a quote from the venerable nyt)


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This is precisely what Hillary Clinton said she started -- and now what Sarah Palin is going to finish -- for us. The womenfolk. All 18 Million.

---from the Washington Post.




Palin Energizing Women From All Walks of Life



By Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post Staff Writer - Wednesday, September 10, 2008; A04



LEBANON, Ohio, Sept. 9 -- Susie Baron is a Republican, a mother of two and a home-schooler. She voted for Mike Huckabee in the Ohio primary, but now -- because of Sarah Palin -- she thinks she is part of something much bigger.



"I wouldn't even call it a Palin movement, I'd call it a sleeping giant that has been awakened," Baron, 56, said at a rally here Tuesday. She described its members as a silent majority of women in Middle America who "are raising our families, who work if we have to, but love our country and our families first."



"And until now, we haven't had anyone to identify with," Baron said, adding that traditional feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women do "not represent me."



Since her rapid transition from obscure Alaska governor to GOP vice presidential nominee, Palin has reenergized the presidential race and also further polarized it, setting her instant fan base, which sees her as a pit bull with lipstick, against those who dismiss her as just another Republican who happens to be a woman and seems intent on rekindling a culture war.



The crowd that came to see her here Tuesday showed that Palin's support is rooted in conservative women such as Baron, with the addition of some independents and even Democrats -- women who are "fed up with a man's world," as one rally attendee said, and in some cases dispirited by the treatment of Palin and of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primary race.



On the campaign trail, Palin has read the same remarks at each stop from notes or a teleprompter. She has answered no questions, except from People magazine, although she will give her first sit-down interview, to ABC News, this week. But her mere presence has been enough to generate huge enthusiasm.



The McCain and Obama campaigns are rushing to assess what the Palin force will represent. If it is a small but energized group of Republican women, it could have only marginal impact; if it is more, it could tip the balance of the campaign. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Palin has also mobilized liberal women.



"There's no doubt she has helped solidify and energize the right wing of his party," senior Obama adviser Anita Dunn said of Palin and McCain, while acknowledging that Palin has drawn the curiosity of people "who are not movement conservatives."



"She's new, and a good performer of that speech that she reads, but that doesn't necessarily translate into votes eight weeks from now," Dunn said. "Obviously, people are going to be interested, because she's new, but the more you learned about her, the more you see she's like any other politician, male or female."



Other Obama advisers said that once women across the board begin considering Palin's stands on social issues such as human embryonic stem cell research and legalized abortion -- she opposes both -- their interest will fade. That was a line of attack used by Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic vice presidential candidate, when he was asked Tuesday whether Palin's election would mean a step forward for women. "Look, I think the issue is: What does Sarah Palin think? What does she believe? I assume she thinks and agrees with the same policies that George Bush and John McCain think," Biden said. "And that's obviously a backward step for women."



The Republican National Committee responded by calling Biden's remarks "appalling and arrogant" and saying they are "better suited for the backrooms of his old boys' club."
"Sarah Palin's nomination as the Republican vice presidential nominee is a historic opportunity to break the highest glass ceiling," RNC spokeswoman Amber Wilkerson said.
Several senior officials in both parties said they think Palin's attraction is the result, in part, of a generally negative mood among some female voters this year, first, as Clinton faced a "boys' club" mentality in the Democratic primaries and then as Palin faced intense questioning, much of it highly personal, after McCain named her as his running mate.



To Republicans, Palin's burst onto the national scene could be a chance to redefine the nature of feminism in politics, recasting it beyond traditionally liberal issues such as abortion rights. "I hope so, because I think it's been unfortunate that it's been so closely pegged, so closely defined, to just a few issues," said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).



Murkowski, whose father lost to Palin in a 2006 gubernatorial primary, said Palin represented a "generational shift" for voters in her state, something that will bode well for her ability to appeal to younger female voters.



While Democrats reject the notion that Palin will somehow transform gender politics once her views are known, a few acknowledged that they have had little success in trying to define her. "I think there may be some hand-holding, but nobody's gone on a date yet," said Sen. Claire McCaskill (Mo.), a prominent Obama supporter who predicted that female voters will eventually return to his camp.



Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) said the issues that matter to female voters, not Palin's sudden rise to the national stage, will determine their votes in November, but she said the Democrats need to explain those policy differences. "I think it's our job to show the truth. They are more focused on an agenda than a gender," Klobuchar said.



After just a week, Palin is as popular as either Obama or McCain. White women in particular express favorable views of the Alaska governor, according to a newly released Washington Post-ABC News poll. Positive ratings of her spike to 80 percent among white women with children at home and among white women who are evangelical Protestants.



The percentage of white women with "strongly favorable" opinions of McCain jumped 12 percentage points from before the parties' national conventions. And nearly six in 10 white women in the new poll said McCain's selection of Palin increased their confidence in the decisions he would make if elected. In the Post-ABC poll, it is white women who helped McCain erase Obama's late-August advantage and seriously cut into the Democratic nominee's lead as the one who would bring more needed change to Washington.



Republican adviser Juleanna R. Glover calls Palin "the future of the GOP," and that was certainly the consensus at this stop in Ohio on Tuesday. McCain and Palin performed a ritual of Republican politics, speaking from a stage in front of the Golden Lamb Hotel, billed as Ohio's oldest inn. More than 5,000 guests filled the streets, packing it as fully as it had been four years earlier, when President Bush made the same stop.



But this event was more reminiscent of the Clinton campaign earlier this year: Mothers held their young daughters on their shoulders to catch a glimpse of Palin. Women held up pro-Palin signs and wore "I Love Sarah" stickers. One sign read "Working Mom 4 Palin." Another: "Strike Oil with Sarah." And another: "Outspoken Conservative Moms for Palin."



Like other women in the crowd, Baron, the home-schooler from Maineville, Ohio, expressed frustration that feminism and women's issues have seemingly been owned by Democrats whose values she does not share.



Julia Burns, 72, a Republican from Lebanon, cut in: "Men had better jump back. Women are going to take over. We're sick and tired of playing by men's rules. We're coming out of the ground, and they had better move out of the way."



Staff writer Paul Kane and polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.





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"You are not just a *p l a s t i c* Ken Doll. Or a slip and fall lawyer. I have VAGI--power!(sm) I will re-shape you!'

The power of Reille Hunter, who once upon a time in America reinvented herself leaving Sue Drucker + FLA for Bright Lights, Big City...and then..... *

http://www.newsweek.com/id/151783 *


(( Oh, Abbe, you vicious Miss Thing! Sink in those claws, babay! ))

But could she do it better than the truly victimized wife, Elizabeth (who has a true terminal illness?) :-(

Stay tuned.

(( Say, aren't we women all BIG CATS? Meee -owww --ch! But Reille Hunter could have easily been me or several women that I know, who have frizzy hair and wear bright red nail polish and read Tolle. Oh. My. Goodness. ))


*FIRST PERSON
What Rielle Hunter Told Me
A seeker and a New Age spiritualist, John Edwards's other woman believed she could help him make history.

By Jonathan Darman NEWSWEEK
Published Aug 9, 2008
Aug. 18-25, 2008 issue

The first time I laid eyes on Rielle Hunter, I could tell she was a story. She had frizzy blond hair with DARK roots, wore bright nail polish and moved like someone who knew how to work a room. She was on a cramped commuter flight and she was flirting with a candidate for president of the United States. It was July 7, 2006. I'd been sent to Iowa to write a piece on John Edwards. We were on our way to Des Moines, where I would be the only national reporter following him around the state for two days. From a few rows back, I tried to observe Edwards before the plane took off. Most of the other passengers seemed to have no idea who Edwards was. But this blond woman, putting away her bags, was visibly captivated by him. She tried repeatedly to engage him in conversation, but he seemed uninterested in talking. How the mighty have fallen, I thought. As John Kerry's running mate in 2004, Edwards had his own campaign bubble around him all the time; now he had to deal with strangers who flirt with him on planes. Of course, she wasn't a stranger. Edwards now admits that he had an extramarital affair with her. But at the time I had no reason to suspect there was anything between them.
She showed up at his first event that day in Des Moines with a video camera. She was trying to get as close to the candidate as she could. "Does she work for the campaign?" I asked Edwards's press secretary, Kim Rubey. "Oh, she's working on a documentary project," said Rubey. "We're not sure if it's going to work out." But it was soon clear that she was on Team Edwards. When it came time to drive to the next event, she rode in the car with the candidate. I drove behind in a rental car.
I struck up a conversation with the woman at the next event, as we waited outside. She told me her name and asked me what my astrological sign was, which I thought was a little unusual. I told her. She smiled, and began telling me her life story: how she was working as a documentary-film maker, living with a friend in South Orange, N.J., but how she'd previously had "many lives." She'd worked, she said, as an actress and as a spiritual adviser. She was fiercely devoted to astrology and New Age spirituality. She'd been a New York party girl, she'd been married and divorced, she'd been a seeker and a teacher and was a firm believer in the power of truth.

She told me that she had met Edwards at a bar, at the Regency Hotel in New York. She thought he was giving off a special "energy." I didn't pursue the topic, and when I filed my story, I made no mention of Rielle. But I was, to say the least, curious. I tried, unsuccessfully, to track her down in the weeks that followed. I thought she would make a good source. She clearly knew I was a reporter, yet she spoke freely and openly about her own life and the Edwards campaign.
Four months later, Rielle found her way to me. It was November 2006. I received an e-mail from her, complimenting me on some stories I'd written on the midterm elections. She wanted to give me a story. Could I come for lunch in New York?
We agreed to meet at Aqua Grill in SoHo on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. When I arrived at the restaurant, she was already seated. She greeted me warmly with surprising intimacy, rising for two kisses on the cheek. "So it's afternoon," I said with a smile. "What do you think, are we drinking wine?" She smiled back at me. "Bottle or glass?"
I would soon learn that there was no such thing as small talk with Rielle Hunter. She told me that she'd felt a connection to me when we'd first met, that she could tell I was a very old soul. This meant a lot to Rielle. Her speech was peppered with New Age jargon—human beings were dragged down by "blockages" to their actual potential; history was the story of souls entering and escaping our field of consciousness. A seminal book for her had been Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now." Her purpose on this Earth, she said, was to help raise awareness about all this, to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves.
Her latest project was John Edwards. Edwards, she said, was an old soul who had barely tapped into any of his potential. The real John Edwards, she believed, was a brilliant, generous, giving man who was driven by competing impulses—to feed his ego and serve the world. If he could only tap into his heart more, and use his head less, he had the power to be a "transformational leader" on par with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. "He has the power to change the world," she said.
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had been nodding and sipping my wine through all this. "Do you talk about this stuff with the candidate?" I asked. "All the time," Rielle replied. "I'll lecture him on it when he's getting too much up in here," she said, gesturing toward her head. "He'll see a look on my face and say, 'Yes, I know, Rielle, "Power of Now" says …' " Rielle wanted me to know all these things because she wanted me to write about them. For the past five months, she said, she'd been traveling with Edwards with a video crew, capturing him in a variety of settings, public and private. She had cut her footage together into a series of short films, "Webisodes" that would run on the Internet. She hoped that with her unique eye for Edwards's true potential, she could show the world the real John Edwards and, in the process, help him to become the better version of himself. She wondered if I might be interested in writing a story. "Sure," I said, "if you let me see the films, we can talk about that."
By this point, we were each well into our second glass of wine. "So tell me," I asked, "what do you think of Elizabeth Edwards?" "I've only met her once," Rielle said. "She does not give off good energy. She didn't make eye contact with me."

In NEWSWEEK, I wrote a short story about how Edwards had brought this rather unorthodox woman, whom he'd met in a bar, into his campaign to make videos that showed off his unseen side—a less slick, packaged Edwards. We ran it in the PERISCOPE section under the headline EDWARDS UNTUCKED. I didn't mention Rielle's belief in Edwards's potential to be Gandhi or her distaste for Elizabeth. I wanted to keep her as a source.

When I next saw Rielle weeks later, she told me that she'd been fired by the Edwards campaign. She seemed perfectly cheerful about it, but she proceeded to tell me a tale of woe—how the campaign hadn't understood her, how they'd ruined the Webisodes, how they'd impeded her vision and how Edwards himself had failed to defend her. The chief villain in this saga was Elizabeth Edwards. "Someday," Rielle said, "the truth about her is going to come out."
By then, I had decided that Rielle was a less than reliable source. I continued to see her, but more out of curiosity than a belief that I was going to learn much about Edwards from her. I liked Rielle. I let her do my astrological chart. I began to feel a little like the nun in that old joke who complains about receiving a three-hour obscene phone call …Why didn't I just hang up?
But I didn't. I stayed in touch with Rielle for months. At lunch at the Soho House in late spring of '07, Rielle told me that she and novelist Jay McInerney were working on a "genius" idea for a television show about women who help men get out of failing marriages by having affairs with them. She said they wanted to pitch this idea to Darren Star, creator of "Melrose Place" and "Sex and the City." At lunch early that summer, I asked Rielle if she was dating anyone. She answered simply, "I'm in love." I asked, "Who with?" "I can't tell you," she said, "but maybe someday we'll all be friends."
That October, the National Enquirer wrote a story claiming that Rielle and Edwards were having an affair. Rielle called me to ask, should she put out a statement denying it? I asked her if she would give a statement to NEWSWEEK, which seemed to make her mad. She said she was talking to me as a friend, not a journalist. Though she said that our conversations had been "between you and me," we had never actually gone off the record. Our conversation ended abruptly. I never got to ask her the most important question: whether she had had an affair with Edwards. I tried to contact her several times in the months that followed, but she didn't return my calls. It occurred to me she was saddened that she had come to think of me as a friend, but I saw her as a story. In December, the Enquirer ran an article claiming she was pregnant with Edwards's child. (Edwards denies he is the father, and has offered to take a paternity test to prove it. Prior to the child's birth, an Edwards aide, Andrew Young, told the Enquirer he was the father of Rielle's child. An Edwards adviser, speaking on Edwards's behalf, declined to comment for this story. Rielle did not respond to e-mails I sent her last week seeking comment.) In early January, I was surprised to receive an e-mail from her saying she was thinking about me and hoping I was OK. I haven't heard from her since. But I believe she really did hope I was OK. When my father died later that month, she sent me flowers.
© 2008

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Mike Huckabee and I did it the hard way - we had to! We had to PUT IT DOWN!

Me, then --- and me now (three years later -)

I heard my hero, Mike Huckabee substituting for Paul Harvey this morning while I was listening to Fred Grandy & Andy Parks (--the political comedy show on WMAL 630 am, WASHINGTON, DC, this morning). I believe he is subbing all week. Cool!

So, why is Mike my hero>? And why is Dr. Oz's diet so vital? --- Well, if you have been reading this blog, or abbebuck pr, or google abbebuck pr + mike huckabee entries will come up about spectacular weight losses -- Mike's own 110, and as he inspired me, my whopping -145. How did we do it? We put down the knife and fork (Mike's book title, in part), to stay alive.

Mr. Huckabee mentioned his weight loss during a news story of a woman originally thought to be morbidly obese, but no, she had a VERY LARGE TUMOR, which is perhaps .0001 of our population. A second or third opine of a doctor found it. But Mike did talk about how we must STOP EATING--- as does another book --- a realy honey -- embracing good food, and why we eat BAD food, or how, where when and how we EAT it: It is called "In Defense of Food"

Do you remember a couple of weeks ago, when Barack Obama (also) made food political ("we eat too much") well, we do, and we are conditioned to -- we are living in a country , a world of over-abundance - the chinese are NOT supposed to be morbidly obese but they are overrun by the Golden Arches!

And how about this bit of mindless information: Have you ever noticed when you get gasoline at an EXXON you see a conveience story called "on the run" -- get the picture? and that phrase, get the picture, used to mean that a photog, now known as our erstwhile papa-rat-zi (pun intended!) snaps the photo that shoots around the world via cell and iphone fethching $2 Million +++ -- but that is another rant for another day, damnit!

----from Abbe Buck, perhaps ready to go on Oprah, who is asking for former fatties to share their stories -- then again, perhaps not. What's the point? I blog. But maybe it's time...

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