My government is my worst enemy. I’m going to fight them with any means at hand.

The quote is from Joe Vogler, the raging anti-American who founded the Alaska Independence Party. Inconveniently for Palin, that’s the very same secessionist party that her husband, Todd, belonged to for seven years and that she sent a shout-out to as Alaska governor earlier this year. (“Keep up the good work,” Palin told AIP members. “And God bless you.”)

Well, gosh darn it, they’re a team of hypocrites too, dontcha know. Please note that Gov. Palin curiously manages to hit all her final ‘g’s’ in her taped address to the Alaska Independence Party. Too bad there wasn’t an opportunity to say ‘nuclear’ in there. She might have nailed that one too.

Props to David Talbot and The Salon for putting this into sharp relief.

After the feature films opening the New Orleans Film Fest, stick around for Nerdcore for Life, the chronicle of techie hip-hop. As one of them says, if you think it’s hard out there for a pimp, try being a nerd. The film traces the movement from disparate basement PCs to actual real time, face-to-face musical shows. For a longer preview, go here. The official Web site (and of course its blog) are here.  The film runs at 11:45 p.m. Friday at Canal Place Cinema. Nerd up.

The Exiles is an intriguing docudrama about an enclave of Native Americans living in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles in the late 1950s. The once stately neighborhood full of Victorian homes had gone downhill and was a gritty and vibrant stretch that sometimes served as the setting in some of the noirish murder and crime novels of Raymond Chandler. Filmed in a sort of cinema verite style, this film follows a group of Native Americans on a weekend night when they carouse in bars, listening to rock ’n’ roll, drinking heavily, split between two worlds. When the bars close, they drive into the hills looking over the city and continue their carousing, but now drumming and dancing in more traditional styles. The remastered film of Kent MacKenzie is an interesting inclusion in the New Orleans Film Festival, which starts Friday night and runs through next Thursday. The Exiles screens at 3:30 p.m. Saturday at Canal Place Cinema. For a longer preview look here. The official Web site is here.

Has there ever been so much multimedia fun to be had with a Presidential election? Really, we think no, indeed - not even the time we found out that Al Gore invented the Internet.Viral attacks, ads and jokes are buzzing through the Interwebs like a swarming infection of political cyberworms in our collective brain. In July, the Republican Party created a fake Facebook page for Barack Obama, mimicking the social networking site’s familiar interface to call attention to connections the Illinois senator has that the GOP considers suspicious; the fake feed on the page has him adding people like Bill Ayers as “friends.” (Although, as the Huffington Post noted, the implications may be lost on the main demographic of Facebook users, and those who will appreciate the joke may not use Facebook.)McCain himself does have a real Facebook page, as does Obama - although folks may remember the Republican governor’s mild snafu in declaring that he does not use the Internet. His webmaster, though, created a hilarious game you can play on the page, called “Pork Invaders” - in a parody of the game “Space Invaders,” players can zap tiny pigs with vetoes to fight McCain’s favorite bogeymen, earmarks and pork-barrel politics. And in a kind of meta-Internet joke, the Onion ran a front-page story last week declaring “Obama deletes another unread email from Moveon.org,” skewering the zealous liberal organizers. (I can feel that - no, Moveon.org, I do not want to host an Obama party at my house, and stop asking me, because I know you’re not buying the beer.)Saving the hilariousest till last - please click here for some cyberwag’s idea of Sarah Palin’s Facebook page. (Gee, I guess MySpace really is over.)

Everyone wants to be Irish on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day. For Germans, the ethnic adulation is less intense but lasts a whole lot longer.

To those for whom October becomes Oktober, the month has many opportunities to guzzle beer by the stein-full and tamp it all down under a mat of sauerkraut and sausage in ad hoc beir gartens. And these are not terribly inaccurate pursuits for those seeking a dose of German culture, or at least Bavarian culture, the type most picturesque for foreign consumption.

While Bavarians do not necessarily zoom along their seamless Autobahns dressed in lederhosen all the time, excellent beer and sausage are indeed had in vast quantities and at regular intervals, like the completely normal lunch pictured above from a tavern in Regensburg.

So after our local month-long Oktoberfest wraps up at Deutsches Haus, and after the specialty German-themed menus are folded up for the year at local restaurants, remember it need not be October to revel in this hearty, comforting cuisine.

The best local purveyor of German food in the city is found in the French Quarter and run by a Czech: Jäger Haus German Bistro and Coffee Shop, reviewed back in the spring.

Curiously, the menu here is short on sausage. But the German beers are first rate, and the variety of schnitzel (think panneed meat), the potato salads (yes, more than one type is available here) and most of all the spaetzle (tiny, irregular dumplings, beautiful in gravy) give the fundamentals for a great German meal any time of year.

– Ian McNulty

Do you have a dirty dog? This Saturday, Whole Foods Market Arabella Station will host the Shampooch Festival — a dog wash and fundraiser for CityPark’s dog park, NOLA City Bark.

The festivities will run from 10:00 am- 2:00 pm and will feature $10 organic dog washes, live music from Some Like it Hot, and games for kids.

If you have a particularly well-dresses pooch who can do an amazing trick- make sure they are there for 1:00 pm for the various pet contests including: the best costume, best owner look-a-like, best mascot and best trick.

Whole Foods Market, 5600 Magazine St., (504) 899-9119

Please click here for all Voodoo Music Experience 2008 posts.

Though the nation may have turned its attention to its dwindling 401(k)s, the Iraq war rages on, and tonight the group Military Families Speak Out (MFSO) will be hosting a jam session at Sweet Lorraine’s Jazz Club to ensure the foreign battlefronts aren’t forgotten.

Local musician Al Bernard, the father of a son who has recently returned from Iraq, organized the event. “While the nation focuses on the Wall Street bailout and the elections, we need to remember that there is still a war going on,” says Bernard.

Proceeds from the event will go towards purchasing a billboard on I-10 to call for an end to the Iraq War.

Sweet Lorraine’s Jazz Club, 1931 St. Claude Ave., 945-9654, 7-9 p.m.

As we (finally) bid farewell to Summer for the next 8 months we must temporarily say goodbye to some of her most enjoyable traditions as well.  My personal favorite is the British summer tradition of drinking Pimm’s No. 1 by the pitcher until the sun goes down.

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Many New Orleanians consider Pimm’s to be a local drink that holds its own against rivals Sazerac, Café Brûlot, Mint Julep and Brandy Milk Punch as an official New Orleans cocktail.  So this might surprise you, but Pimm’s is not of New Orleans origin.  Pimm’s, the liquor, was first produced in 1823 by James Pimm, a farmer’s son from the UK, who ran an oyster bar in the City of London, near the Bank of England.  The stylish gents at the time drank gin with oysters but James found that if he macerated fruits with the gin he made a gin drink that was a much tastier accompaniment to oysters (I suppose he hadn’t given Champagne a shot). Thus the introduction of Pimm’s No. 1, the crucial ingredient in a Pimm’s Cup, to a thirsty audience.  The beverage was a smashing success taking only 30 years to stop selling the concoction out of the back door of the oyster house and actually open a commercial distillery.   The beverage was originally labeled as “Pimm’s No. 1 Cup” but now trades soley as “Pimm’s No. 1″  and the cocktail you make out of it is referred to as a “Pimm’s Cup.”  James took the money and ran in 1865.

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