Bella Sinclair Doodlespot

i'm happy to say this piece is all done and ready to be shipped! it was a joy working on this and i truly think it is one of the cutest concepts i've had yet;) it is FOR SALE as a REPRODUCTION/PRINT in my etsy shop and can be found here http://www.etsy.com/listing/70175432/it-s-a-tea-with-milk-and-cookies-kind-of
i "heart" this piece!:)

i LOVE this piece and am enjoying EVERY second of painting it!:) ok...so as well all know, i am the world's worst photographer;) took this pic with my phone really quick so the colors are a bit "off". but, i'm getting there...:) can't wait to finish it!!!

ok...this could be one of my new favorites:) this is a sketch for a comissioned piece for the cousin of the little girl's room i just finished up last week-isabelle.
http://theenchantedeasel.blogspot.com/2011/02/isabelles-roomall-done.html
thank so much to liz for asking me to now adorn her niece's room with my work. i am beyond excited to do another piece for this wonderful family!:)
*a few background notes about this piece-mailee loves loves loves cows! her room is pink and brown AND they used to live in washington d.c.*
so i couldn't resist the cherry blossom trees (which are my favorite) and a sweet little pink and brown stuffed cow. besides, what little girl doesn't absolutely love to have tea parties with her stuffed animals/dolls?! i am super excited to start painting this in the next couple of days...:)

A local politician, David Hedrick, who lost his Tea-Party backed bid has penned a book called Liberal Clause. Self-pubbed, of course. See you if you spot the errors in the description on the website for it, presumably also penned by the author: "In this soon to be best seller, that children will learn from and their politically active parents are sure to enjoy, Hedrick takes the reader on a journey to a North Pole where liberal elves call the shots. In this snow covered socialist wonderland, Santa’s workshop is unionized and central planning controls toy production. In the end, efforts to control “elf made global warming”, excessive debt and the disastrous effects of liberalism, threaten Christmas itself."



He is either clueless or shameless enough to use sarcastic quotes to promote it on his web site, like pulling "powerful political satire" from a mocking review in Gawker.

I'm voting for clueless, because the AP reports, "Hedrick is traveling to New York today to film a Christmas-special segment for Comedy Central's "Daily Show with Jon Stewart." Unless he has a sense of humor and is really agile on his feet, he's not going to come off well.

Hedrick got his "start" in politics, such as it was, when he attended one of those Town Halls on health care where people went to yell about death panels, and became a YouTube sensation. Speaking against federal health care reform, Hedrick yelled at a Congressman Baird, “Stay away from my kids.” He's also had a spot of legal trouble - arrested for hitting his wife in the back of the head during an argument (in which it seems she also hefted a folding chair).

Read more about the "author" here.

It’s printed on heavyweight archival ink jet paper.

11″ x 8.5″ with a 1″ inch white border around the image.

Signed and dated by the artist

Shipped in a clear plastic bag and a stiff envelope.  Buy Now Only $15

In yet another unprecedented scoop, The Indubitable Dweeb has obtained a copy of Christine O’Donnell’s high school diary. Fascinating reading, especially the passages that prove the senate nominee did indeed “dabble in witchcraft.” Rather than politicize this, we’d like to simply present the diary in its unedited form and let the voters decide:

February 7, 1988

The Winter Wonderland dance was completely rad. There was this guy named Kyle who was standing in the corner being a total bummer, and when I asked him why he wasn’t dancing, he told me that “Dungeon Masters do not partake in the rituals of human slaves.” Dungeon Master? My brain was going back and forth between: Creepy? Kinky? Creepy? Kinky?…Cute? Definitely cute. That’s what I thought as soon as he showed me this medallion he wears. It was the sweetest little upside-down star! I asked him if he was into Disney and he licked the star and said, “The Dark Lord animates my black heart.” Cute and mysterious!

February 14, 1988

Valentines Day and my first date with Kyle = Double my pleasure! We went to see Gwar, which was…interesting. Kyle told me to wear something that I didn’t mind getting blood on, and I was like, “Whoa George Michael, slow down! I’m not that ready for that yet.” Now I understand what he meant. O well, I’ll have to throw out the leggings, but now I have an excuse to get a perm! Kyle said he’s going to make me a “Best of Gwar” mixtape. I wonder if they have any ballads. I realize they’re “heavy” and all that, but Danger Danger is also heavy and they had “I Still Think About You” and that song just melts me.

March 1, 1988

I finally got to meet Kyle’s friends. There’s Dozer, and he’s the only guy I’ve ever met who carries a mace. You know, like with the spiky ball and the wooden handle? Then there’s the guy in the black trench-coat who refers to himself “The Shroud.” I don’t have much in common with The Shroud, except we both love Starburst. He let me eat all his red ones! Finally, there’s his Ex. Zoe. Zoe’s a white witch, which means she practices white magic, but all she seems to practice is bad fashion. I know, low blow, but can the girl drape more fake silk on herself? I can’t believe the two of them used to make out in freshly dug graves together.

March 18, 1988

Movie night. Lost Boys! This was my choice. Kyle was begging for yet another Faces of Death marathon, but how many times can a girl watch a parachutist get eaten by an alligator? I thought he’d like Lost Boys cause it has vampires in it and they’re kind of satany. But I didn’t tell him I wanted to see it cause it also has Jason Patric in it! Our little secret, diary? Anyway, he said the movie “sucked donkey nads” and I asked him why and all he did was take a gas can and pour gas on the lawn of a local nunnery and set the grass on fire. I have to say, for a spontaneous flaming pentagram, it was a pretty good flaming pe

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the health-care debate. See his previous OUPblogs here.

As America goes into intensive partisan-battling mode this summer over health-care reform, it may be helpful for President Barack Obama and his advisers to sit back and understand the basis of the rage against their plan. An understanding of the resurrected ghosts of Anti-Federalism in today’s conservative movement may offer him some strategies for bringing the Republicans and Blue-Dog Democrats back to the discussion table.

The rage that is out there among conservatives may seem excessive and irrational to liberals, but it is based on an ancient American quarrel. The differences between the “Birthers” and angry town-hallers and Obama precede the Democratic and Republican parties; they precede the Progressive, the Whig, and the Jeffersonian-Republican Party. They were there from the beginning. For the biggest fault-line in American politics was also the first political debate Americans ever had between themselves. It was the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-federalists about the need for a consolidated federal government with expanded responsibilities.

In 1787 and 1788, Anti-Federalists hurled charges of despotism and tyranny against those who proposed the need for a stronger federal government with expanded responsibilities than was envisioned in the Articles of Confederation. Today, the analogous charges against the neo-Federalist Obama are of fascism and socialism. As Federalists reviled the Anti-federalists for their shameless populism, Obama has likened the angry protests staged by his health-care opponents as mob-like thuggery. Conservatives, in turn, have recoiled at liberal condescension; just as Anti-Federalists fulminated against the Federalist aristocracy.

The Anti-Federalists envisioned a small republic because they could not conceive of their representatives - sent far away into a distant capital and surrounded by the temptations of a metropole - would ably be able to represent their communities. The fear of the beltway and of faceless, remorseless bureaucrats directing the lives and livelihood of honest workers and farmers struck fear into the heart of every true republican (lowercase is advised), as it does the modern conservative. Death-panels weren’t the first Anti-Federalist conspiracy theory.

Today’s “birthers” and “enemies list” conspiracy theories are not new stories in themselves other than the fact that they reveal the visceral distrust conservatives have of Barack Obama, just as many Anti-Federalists turned (Jeffersonian) Republicans accused Alexander Hamilton of illicit connections with the mother country, England. Today’s “Tea Parties” are but the modern conservative articulation that they are, like the Anti-Federalists were, the true bearers of the “spirit of ‘76.’”

As Cecilia Kenyon observed decades ago, the Anti-Federalists were “men of little faith.” This characterization is both accurate and one-sided at the same time, so it is no surprise that contemporary Democrats have taken the same line of attack, calling Republicans the “party of ‘No.’” The Anti-Federalists, like today’s conservatives, cannot bring themselves to trust the federal government or Barack Obama. Conservatives are using “scare tactics” because they are scared.

But their fears are not entirely unfounded and certainly not illegitimate, because a measure of distrust of government is the first defense against tyranny and the first implement of liberty. Liberals who have been so quick to trust the federal government should not only have a look at Medicare and Social Security, but acknowledge the mere fact that with one half of the country unconvinced (legitimately or not), the country’s faith in its government has been and will almost always be a house divided. This is a given fact of a federal republic; it is the blessed curse that is America. That is why in all areas in which there is concurrent federal and state responsibility - such as in education and immigration policy - lines of authority and execution are invariably confused and American lags behind almost every other industrialized country. In areas in which federal prerogative is clear and settled - that is to say in areas in which the federal government acts like any other non-federal, centralized government in the world - such as in foreign policy, the president can typically act very quickly (if not too quickly).

The conservative grassroots movement (staged or not) is a real threat to Obama’s health-care plan. But if the movement doth protest too much, it should ironically also be a source of comfort to the president. That there is so much anxiety and push back suggests that conservatives feel genuinely threatened. With Democratic control of all branches of government (and the open possibility of passing the health-care bill via the reconciliation process which will only need a simple majority in the Senate), conservatives believe that the liberals can transform their America into something their parents and grandparents would no longer recognize.

Here then, is the lesson to be learned. If the president wants to get anything done - he must strike at the heart of the problem: it is one of a fundamental, thorough-going(dis)trust. Barack Obama must convince Republican and Blue-Dog dissenters that he is one of them. Bowing before foreign Sultans and mouthing off about racial profiling did not endear him to conservatives, who only want to feel assured that the president is for them, not against them. These are minor gestures, which is why it won’t be tremendously costly for the president to present them as a peace offering. And calling protesters to his health-care plan a “mob” is definitely not a peace offering. It invokes the very perception of condescension the Anti-Federalists felt in 1787, reinforcing the ancient and original “us” versus “them.” To unite the county, he must transcend not only party, but ideology, and history itself. Barack Obama must break the legacy and transcend the language of our 222-year-old, bimodal politics. Quite simply, he must convince conservatives that he too can feel, and talk, and protest, and hurt, and fear, and agitate like a latter-day Anti-Federalist; and he is no less intelligent, no less rational, no less compassionate, no less constructive,  and certainly no less American for trying to do so.