Should we let those terrorists build that mosque on what Chris Matthews keeps calling hollowed ground? Or not until they let us build a megachurch in Mecca? Or until hell freezes over? Or is the whole squalid fuss actually, literally, about nothing? It looks that way, to judge by a Politico story which has so far attracted zero attention.

In GOP World, however, enormous structures can be fabricated easily and profitably on the basis of impossible hypotheticals. One might think the suckers would have wised up by now, but one would be wrong. Look at the birther myth, which has no more substance than a floating figure in a Macy’s parade. Or than a nonexistent non-Mosque never to be built on the unhallowed ground formerly occupied by a Burlington Coat Factory.

When President Barack Obama turned the battle over a planned New York Islamic center into a national debate over religious freedom, he unwittingly allied himself and his party with an ill-planned, long-shot development project described by one of its most prominent allies as “amateur hour.”

The efforts to launch the $100 million Cordoba House (now dubbed Park51) two blocks north of the World Trade Center site have been an uphill battle from the start, and not just because of controversy. And even as the “Ground Zero Mosque” emerges as a hotly debated national symbol, New York government officials and real estate insiders are privately questioning whether the project has much chance of coming to fruition.

The Cordoba Initiative hasn’t begun fundraising yet for its $100 million goal. The group’s latest fundraising report with the State Attorney General’s office, from 2008, shows exactly $18,255 — not enough even for a down payment on the half of the site the group has yet to purchase…

Except for the pecs and the lats and the delts and the abs, this could be John A. Boehner getting made up for a Fox News love-in with Chris Wallace. But actually, Reuters says, it’s just some guy with a severe case of melanin envy getting all pretty for a bodybuilding contest in Tehran.

From the Times coverage of the Reverend Glenn Beck’s revival meeting:

Becky Benson, 56, traveled from Orlando, Florida, because, she said, “we believe in Jesus Christ,” and Jesus, she said, would not have agreed with the economic stimulus package, bank bailouts and welfare. “You cannot sit and expect someone to hand out to you,” she said. “You don’t spend your way out of debt.”

People in the crowd echoed Mr. Beck’s ideas that “progressives” were moving the United States toward socialism and that entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid must be ended.

You may have noticed, to the point of nausea, how deeply in love Republicans are with small business. They just have a funny way of showing it, as George W. Bush demonstrated after Katrina:

While stories of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s contaminated trailers and the Army Corps of Engineers’ inability to shore up the levees captured the headlines in the aftermath of the deadly storms of 2005, the bungling of the SBA, the lead federal agency helping people rebuild their homes and businesses, has largely been untold.

The sagas of Schmitz, Bazile and the SBA’s Young, who worked out of the agency’s massive loan processing center in Fort Worth, Texas, collectively reveal how the SBA failed in so many ways, an ominous experience as the agency prepares to play a similar role in the aftermath of the massive BP PLC oil spill.

These are stories of a mismanaged bureaucracy that still hurt half a decade later: tales of applications for low-interest disaster loans that should have been approved but were not, of applications deleted from the SBA computer system for no valid reason, of impossible-to-meet deadlines manufactured to clear backlogs, and of a process so chaotic and painful that thousands simply gave up…

However… [my note]:

• Country clubs, yacht clubs, exclusive private schools and megachurches received millions in loans from the agency founded in 1953 with a mission to “aid, counsel, assist and protect the interests of small business concerns.” Some of the more substantial operations rebuilt bigger and better, often contradicting SBA rules that say damaged buildings should be repaired only to their original state.

• Homeowners and businesses in higher-income areas were more likely to get a loan than those in lower-income areas, according to AP’s analysis of SBA data by ZIP code. “The truth is that only the wealthy moved through the system easily,” said Gale Martin, another former SBA loan officer. “If you were of a certain income, we funded you first, which is not the way the system is supposed to work.” Martin contended that contrary to the SBA mission to especially help people who didn’t always have the means to rebuild, applicants with higher credit scores and bigger incomes were cherry-picked for processing first because those files could be closed quicker.

Before we go all warm and fuzzy over Vaughn R. Walker, the federal judge who just knocked down Prop 8, remember this. He may have a soft spot in his heart for gays, but he is a vicious, torture-loving son of a bitch when it comes to helpless prisoners. Tell me that holding four women’s eyes open and daubing their eyeballs with pepper spray isn’t torture. Go ahead, tell me.

More on the good judge here.

From the Colorado Independent:

The program in question? Denver’s bike-sharing program, B-Cycle. [Republican candidate for governor] Maes later told the Denver Post, “At first, I thought, ‘Gosh, public transportation, what’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with people parking their cars and riding their bikes? And what’s wrong with incentives for green cars?’ But if you do your homework and research, you realize ICLEI is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.”

From the Washington Post:

At a media breakfast Wednesday, House Minority Leader John Boehner attempted to show that he sympathizes with the unemployed. But in the process he admitted that he didn’t even know whether his own siblings had jobs.

“I’ve got real empathy for those who are unemployed,” the Ohio Republican said. “As most of you know, I’ve got 11 brothers and sisters. I know that three of my brothers lost their jobs. I’m not sure whether they’ve found jobs, yet, so I’ve got a lot of empathy for those caught in this economic downturn.”

Steve Benen picked up this seriously weird column by some seriously weird columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Excerpt below, but you can read the whole pathetic thing here, and the best part is — “It’s free!”

His fiancée smiled and commented, “Isn’t that cute. They have the spirit of giving…”

“No!” I exclaimed from the back seat. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They’re giving away their parents’ things — the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”

I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.

“You must charge something for the lemonade,” I explained. “That’s the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs — how much the lemonade costs, and the cups — and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money…”

If that’s what America’s children think — that there’s a free lunch waiting — then our country has larger problems ahead. The Declaration of Independence promised “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It didn’t promise anything free. Something to think about this July 4th holiday weekend.

Below is the revenge of Lance Baxter. He’s the actor who drunk-dialed the freedom lovers at Freedom Works, who got him fired from his voice-over gig in the Geico ads. Probably everybody in the world has already seen this clip, but since I hadn’t, maybe you haven’t.

From the Portland Press Herald:

Late Friday afternoon, as Maine’s Republican State Convention fanned out from the Portland Expo to county caucuses at nearby King Middle School, GOP loyalists from Knox County found themselves directed to Classroom 110 — the domain of eighth-grade social studies teacher Paul Clifford…

When he went home for the weekend on Friday, one of Clifford’s most prized teaching tools — a collage-type poster depicting the history of the U.S. labor movement — was affixed to his classroom door. Clifford uses it each year to teach his students how to incorporate collages into their annual project on Norman Rockwell’s historic “Four Freedoms” illustrations…

Details are sketchy — as they often can be when political passion gives way to apparent criminal activity. But this much we know: When Clifford returned to school Monday morning, his cherished labor poster was gone.

In its place, taped to the same door, was a red-white-and-blue bumper sticker that read, “Working People Vote Republican…”

[Republican callers] also objected to the contents of a closed cardboard box they found near Clifford’s desk. Upon opening it for a look-see, they found copies of the U.S. Constitution printed and donated to the school by (gasp) the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mississippi governor Haley Barbour tells the Associated Press:

Oil has not started washing up on shore in any large quantities, and Barbour likened much of the spill to the gasoline sheen commonly found around ski boats.

“We don’t wash our face in it, but it doesn’t stop us from jumping off the boat to ski,” Barbour said.

The real, immutable core concern of the Republican Party is, and has forever been, to shift taxes from the very rich to the rest of us. Everything else — abortion, immigration, creationism, small government, law and order, gay rights — is just bait to lure the suckers into the net. Here’s Daniel Larison at The American Conservative, cutting to the chase:

On the other point, it is not all that remarkable that Republican officeholders are being punished entirely for their fiscal errors. It is difficult to think of incumbent Republicans abandoning their party because of a backlash against their social liberalism, but it is fairly easy in recent years to find examples of fiscal moderates and liberals in the party that the rank-and-file have turned against or liberal Republican incumbents who switched parties at least partly because of disagreements over fiscal policy (e.g., Jeffords).

Indeed, we can look at Arlen Specter’s recent political career as proof that social conservative litmus tests frequently count for a lot less than fiscal conservative tests in the modern GOP. In 2004, the party establishment rallied around Specter on the grounds that the party supported incumbents against primary challengers. To his lasting embarrassment and discredit, Santorum endorsed Specter over Toomey.

Pro-lifers’ objections to Specter’s position on abortion weren’t important enough to Santorum or to the administration to risk losing that seat to the Democrats, and in the end they weren’t quite important enough to the primary voters, either. Five years later, one vote Specter cast for the stimulus made him persona non grata in the Pennsylvania GOP. Had Specter not cast that vote, it is questionable whether Toomey’s challenge would have still driven Specter to switch parties.

In practice, fiscal issues tend to be more important to more Republican activists and primary voters than social issues in almost every contest, except perhaps presidential primaries, and even in these contests it depends. Huckabee translated his strong social conservative record and evangelical Christianity into a sizeable following by the end of the primaries, but he never won outside the South and he was widely loathed in the conservative movement for his fiscal record as governor. His combination of social conservatism and economic pseudo-populism went over very badly with party and movement leaders generally, even though there is some reason to think that socially conservative and economically populist candidates could tap into a much broader base of support nationally.

For party and movement leaders, Romney had become sufficiently conservative on social issues to pass muster, despite having zero credibility on these issues, and what really mattered to them was his position on fiscal and economic issues. McCain took a lot of grief from activists and conservative voters for several reasons, but his opposition to Bush’s tax cuts earlier in the decade was always high on the list of McCain’s errors.

In a world that has elevated hypocrisy to an art-form, an unprepossessing, virtual unknown emerged this week as the solid frontrunner for the 2010 Superheroes of Hypocrisy Title. By day, George Rekers is a 61-year-old father of three; a Baptist minister; co-founder, with James Dobson, of the Family Research Council – the lobbying arm of US Christianity; a professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina; a sex therapist specializing in teenage gender identity “issues”; an officer of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH); and a prolific author with a bad back. That’s enough to keep two men busy. But, lo and behold, when Daddy gets his ticket punched and slips out of his mild-mannered “Professor George” persona he’s a wild man worth every inch of that Superheroes title.

Professor George’s “closet” is bigger than a walk-in and needs to be, because that’s where he likes to spend his quality time with rent boys younger than his own kids. Not for Professor George, the quick grope in a public restroom or sexting with Congressional aides — no, Professor George is a stylish man of means who knows how to do things right. Professor George took his rent boy on a ten-day tour of Europe, a sublime getaway for man and boy, that might have been a totally fabulous performance except that the good Prof didn’t quite “stick the landing.” George Rekers (gotta love that name) was “caught on camera” coming down the stretch on his triumphal return to Miami International Airport with his rent boy — er, travel assistant — still in tow.

Rekers is an old hand at his chosen lifestyle, though, and immediately flew into damage control mode … which makes for entertaining reading because Rekers is no ordinary closet-case; this Extreme Gay Makeover has constructed his entire life around secretly embracing and publicly denying his gender identity. Every waking minute of Rekers day is spent on some aspect of homosexuality. He has two websites dedicated to counseling teenagers who are troubled by gender identity issues — one is called “Professor George” (gimme a break) and the other is called TeenSexToday.com that promises that readers who submit questions can “count on me to be logical, ethical, and scientific in my answers.” Right. This is Rekers’ favorite subject and favorite age group — color me cynical but this is just a front for a cyber-peeping Tom.

Rekers was recently paid a handsome $87,000 to serve as an “expert” witness in a case to determine whether the state of Florida’s ban on gay adoptions was legal (the judge ultimately ruled against the state). Reker’s testified that gay couples should not be permitted to adopt for the usual fact-free homophobic pseudoscience reasons. For whatever reason, while he had the microphone, Rekers also decided to throw Native Americans under the “no adoptions” bus. At the end of that trial, Judge Cindy Lederman singled out Rekers’ testimony for Dishonorable Mention thus:

“Dr. Rekers’ testimony was far from a neutral and unbiased recitation of the relevant scientific evidence. Dr. Rekers’ beliefs are motivated by his strong ideological and theological convictions that are not consistent with the science. Based on his testimony and demeanor at trial, the court can not consider his testimony to be credible nor worthy of forming the basis of public policy.”

The usual suspects have dealt quite expertly with the more salacious details of Rekers’ “Roman holiday” which leave little room for doubt about the true nature of Rekers’ tryst — in other words, I, happily, do not need to go into detail over what did and did not occur. For me, and other Hypocrisy Epicures, the juiciest tidbits lie in how the cornered hypocrite chooses to extricate him/herself from a world of trouble.

At 61, Professor George has set himself up pretty well, none of his lucrative gigs — ministry, expert witnessing, screed publishing, teen sex therapy etc. require any “heavy lifting.” The only thing that could put a dent in his little homo cottage industry would be exposure as a cynical, hypocritical charlatan making money giving advice to others from a thoroughly self-delusional background. That could mess up everything …

So it is that the good professor has decided to go the absolute denial route — and, as he thinks of even better excuses, he piles them on as he goes. He started, of course, with the lame story that his hunk-y “rent boy” was selected for his baggage handling skills. Professor George isn’t getting any younger and his doctor warned him to do no heavy lifting. Since the Prof was interested in “renting a boy” to lug his bags all over Europe, rentboy.com was the logical place to look, right? Now, I defy anyone reading this article to spend just a few minutes trolling through the rentboy.com site and come back and tell me (with a straight face) that you never would have guessed that those boys were gay male prostitutes. Our “expert witness” claims that he was fooled, indeed he claims it wasn’t until halfway through the trip that he guessed that his travel assistant was a male prostitute.

How unreasonable is it to expect that a man who has dedicated his life to counseling teenagers on gender identity and offering therapy to “cure” unhappy gays, would immediately recognize rentboy.com for exactly what it is?

After the media responded with a collective snort of derision, Reker amended his position on his Facebook page (which is predictably MIA, at the moment) in this way:

“If you talk with my travel assistant you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.”

“My hero is Jesus Christ who loves even the culturally despised people, including sexual sinners and prostitutes. Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them.”

From having Jesus as his hero, Rekers made the leap to litigant declaring that he would be suing the Miami reporters who wrote the original Rekers story for defamation. Which just goes to show that Rekers is living in his own nasty little world where being gay is grist for the “defamation” mill. The juridical trend, these days, is that calling someone “gay” is not defamatory. Such rulings have been made in many states; although I wouldn’t recommend testing it, yet, in states like Texas, Arizona or Arkansas.

As usual in such cases, former associates “vote with their feet” lest they get some of this doody on them. The CEO of Family Research Council was quick to point out that he never heard of Rekers and that when he did a little digging he found that it had been decades since Reker played an active role in FRC.

NARTH, for its part, weighed in with this:

“While NARTH is focused on the science of homosexual attraction, personal controversies often deepen the existing cultural divide on this issue. Such is the case in the recent news stories concerning one of our members, Dr. George Rekers.”

“NARTH takes seriously the accusations that have been made, and we are currently attempting to understand the details behind these press reports. We are always saddened when this type of controversy impacts the lives of individuals, and we urge all parties to allow a respectful and thorough investigation to take place.”

“NARTH continues to support scientific research, and to value client autonomy, client self-determination and client diversity.”

In closing, I’ll say that I honestly feel bad for George Rekers. Not because he appears to be gay – I’m gay and surrounded and supported by a mixed gay and straight community of gifted and loving friends; and, despite Professor George’s dire warning about gays’ parenting abilities, I raised a son who is brilliant, successful, heterosexual and who has presented me with an equally marvelous granddaughter. My life is rich and full and ultimately very satisfying. The reason that I feel bad for George Reker is because I seriously doubt that the life that he has built to “fix” his gender identity crisis and live a lie is cold comfort to him today.

In Stieg Larsson’s best-selling mystery, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, an elderly Swedish industrialist remembers his long-dead brother:

“In 1924, now seventeen, Richard was a fanatical nationalist and anti-Semite. He joined the Swedish National Socialist Freedom League, one of the first Nazi groups in Sweden. Isn’t it fascinating that Nazis always manage to adopt the word freedom?”

In Doonesbury, yesterday:

Greg Palast tells us, in the article from which the following is excerpted. (h/t to Reconstitution 2.0)

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote — and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas…

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer’s command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected…

The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as “Prop 200,” which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans’ latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party’s desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box.

[By the way, no one elected Brewer. Weirdly, Barack Obama placed her in office last year when, for reasons known only to the Devil and Rahm Emanuel, the President appointed Arizona’s Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano to his cabinet, which automatically moved Republican Brewer into the Governor’s office.]

Republican consultant Ed Rollins has spent much of his life working for monsters, but that doesn’t make him stupid. He just fell in with the wrong crowd at a young age. After a talk he gave years ago at the Kennedy School, I came away hoping he’d change sides some day.

He was too smart for the 1980s GOP, and he’s way too smart for the malformed creature it has now become. Which I’m sure he knows. This is from a piece he did today for CNN. Goldman Sachs should hire him, but won’t. He’s too smart for them, too.

…Goldman denied the charges, and its sympathizers accused President Obama — who got nearly $1 million in campaign contributions from Goldman employees — of orchestrating the SEC lawsuit to sell his banking reform package. And then, it turns out that Goldman has done something else dumb — by hiring Obama’s recently departed White House lawyer, Gregory Craig, to help handle its legal strategy.

Craig is an extremely competent and respected lawyer. He knows the town and the players. But Washington is full of competent lawyers and people who know the game. Obama said his administration was going to be different and the revolving door of government service and back to the private sector was going to stop. It hasn’t. This is not the president’s mistake. It is another Goldman Sachs mistake.

And then Monday, Goldman announced its “good news.” In the first quarter of this year, the bank’s earnings of $3.46 billion were 91 percent higher than a year ago. It also announced it has set aside $5.5 billion (up 17 percent) to pay salaries and bonuses to employees…

…where it is no longer legal to hold you down and insert a microchip in your head:

In Gov. Roy Barnes’ stump speech, the bill has become a routine example of the Republican tendency to attack problems that don’t exist, and ignore the ones that do. Besides, Barnes argues, if someone holds him down to insert a microchip in his head, “it should be more than a damned misdemeanor.”

Three states have instituted bans, and others have considered the legislation. In Virginia, a bill supporter declared microchips to be the “666” mark of the beast referred to in the Book of Revelation…

At the House hearing, state Rep. Ed Setzler (R-Kennesaw), who is shouldering the legislation in the House, spoke earnestly for better than a half hour on microchips as a literal invasion of privacy.

He was followed by a hefty woman who described herself as a resident of DeKalb County. “I’m also one of the people in Georgia who has a microchip,” the woman said. Slowly, she began to lead the assembled lawmakers down a path they didn’t want to take.

Microchips, the woman began, “infringe on issues that are fundamental to our very existence. Our rights to privacy, our rights to bodily integrity, the right to say no to foreign objects being put in our body.”

She spoke of the “right to work without being tortured by co-workers who are activating these microchips by using their cell phones and other electronic devices.”

She continued. “Microchips are like little beepers. Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission,” she said.

It was not funny, and no one laughed.

“Ma’am, did you say you have a microchip?” asked state Rep. Tom Weldon (R-Ringgold).

“Yes, I do. This microchip was put in my vaginal-rectum area,” she replied. Setzler, the sponsoring lawmaker, sat next to the witness — his head bowed.

“You’re saying this was involuntary?” Weldon continued. The woman said she had been pushing a court case through the system for the last eight years to have the device removed.

Wendell Willard (R-Atlanta), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, picked up the questioning. “Who implanted this in you?” he asked.

“Researchers with the federal government,” she said.

“And who in the federal government implanted it?” Willard asked.

“The Department of Defense.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

The woman was allowed to go about her business, and the House Judiciary Committee approved passage of SB 235.

Here is Ezra Klein, the Great Explicator, explaining why Br’er Mitch is hollering so hard for Br’er Barack not to throw him in dat brier patch:

A bank is judged failing. The FDIC submits a plan for the bank’s liquidation — which includes firing management, wiping out shareholders, handing losses to creditors, and selling off the firm — and gets it approved by the Treasury secretary. Then the FDIC takes over the banks. The $50 billion fund is used to keep the lights on while all this happens. It’s there to prevent taxpayers from having to foot the bill for the chaos that will occur between when we recognize a bank is failing and when we shut it down.

Whatever you want to call this, it isn’t a bailout. It’s the death of the company. And the fund is way of forcing too-big-to-fail banks to pay for the execution. But stung by Republican criticisms, the administration is telling Democrats to let the fund go. And they’re not all that unhappy to see it die. “The fund isn’t a priority for the Obama administration,” reported Business Week, “which instead proposed having the financial industry repay the government for the cost of disassembling a failed firm, an approach preferred by the industry.”

So let’s just be clear: The alternative to the liquidation fund is Wall Street’s preference. That should tell you pretty much all you need to know about whether the industry really views this as a bailout.

Who says the Tea Party is racist? As long as you’re clueless, folks, step right on in. We’re like Stephen Colbert that way. We don’t see color.

The photo is from Generik, who took his camera to a Tea Party rally Thursday in San Francisco. Follow the link to the best collection of Tea Party art I’ve ever come across.

Today’s Waterbury Republican-American carried this story on the appearance of beloved elder statesman Henry Kissinger at the Kent, Connecticut, Lions Club:

Kissinger delighted the audience with his humorous remarks and took his time answering a half-dozen different questions.

First Selectman Bruce K. Adams was the last in line and he took the opportunity to ask Kissinger for advice in governing and leading the small town he lived in. Kissinger candidly admitted that he has been focused on foreign policy rather than local politics. “I’m counting on you in making this the special place it is.”

Also today, the Associated Press carried some earlier advice from the retired Sage of Foggy Bottom:

WASHINGTON — As secretary of state, Henry Kissinger canceled a U.S. warning against carrying out international political assassinations that was to have gone to Chile and two neighboring nations just days before a former ambassador was killed by Chilean agents on Washington’s Embassy Row in 1976…

In 1976, the South American nations of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay were engaged in a program of repression code-named Operation Condor that targeted those governments’ political opponents throughout Latin America, Europe and even the United States.

Based on information from the CIA, the U.S. State Department became concerned that Condor included plans for political assassination around the world. The State Department drafted a plan to deliver a stern message to the three governments not to engage in such murders.

In the Sept. 16, 1976 cable, the topic of one paragraph is listed as “Operation Condor,” preceded by the words “(KISSINGER, HENRY A.) SUBJECT: ACTIONS TAKEN.” The cable states that “secretary declined to approve message to Montevideo” Uruguay “and has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter…”

“You can instruct” the U.S. ambassadors “to take no further action” on the subject of Operation Condor, said the Sept. 20 cable by Harry Shlaudeman, assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, to Shlaudeman’s deputy.

The next day, on Sept. 21, 1976, agents of Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet planted a car bomb and exploded it on a Washington, D.C., street, killing both former Ambassador Orlando Letelier, and an American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt [below]. Letelier was one of the most outspoken critics of the Pinochet government.

This is Shelby Steele in The Wall Street Journal, telling it like he thinks it is:

The old fashioned, big government liberalism that Mr. Obama uses to make himself history-making also alienates him in the center-right America of today. It makes him the most divisive president in memory — a president who elicits narcissistic identification on the one hand and an enraged tea party movement on the other. His health-care victory has renewed his narcissistic charge for the moment, but if he continues to be a 1965 liberal it will become more and more impossible for Americans to see themselves in him…

Mr. Obama’s success has always been ephemeral because it was based on an illusion: that if we Americans could transcend race enough to elect a black president, we could transcend all manner of human banalities and be on our way to human perfectibility. A black president would put us in a higher human territory. And yet the poor man we elected to play out this fantasy is now torturing us with his need to reflect our grandiosity back to us.

Many presidents have been historically significant in retrospect, but Mr. Obama had historic significance on his inauguration day. His inauguration told a transcendent American story. Other presidents work forward into their legacy. Mr. Obama is working backwards into his.

Mr. Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author most recently of “A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win” (Free Press, 2007).

Which last paragraph leads irresistibly to the question: “So Why Should We Be Excited About What Shelby Steele Thinks?” Which in turn leads to the question: “Is Shelby related to Michael?” (No.) Which of course leads to this final question: “Was Michael Steele’s sister once married to Mike Tyson?” (Yes.)

Back in the early days of our Southeast Asian War Games a Washington Post and Times-Herald editor sent me to the District Building to cover what he figured had to be a mob scene at the marriage license bureau. After all, the White House had just announced that married men would become eligible for the draft in just a few days’ time. I reported back that there was no mob and consequently no news. “There you go,” the editor said. “There’s your story.”

When I bitched about this nonsense to an older reporter he said, “Don’t sweat it, kid. We call that a ‘no-snow story.’ Some idiot on the desk looks out the window and sees it isn’t snowing when it said in his own paper it would. To an idiot it’s news when the world fails to cooperate with him.”

I have been sensitive to no-snow stories ever since, and once you start looking, they’re everywhere. Thus I sympathize with a certain Jonathan Strong who writes for Tucker Carlson’s new conservative website, The Daily Caller. Poor Strong did the best he could with what he had.

The idiots topped his story with this headline, which is almost totally divorced from the perfect blizzard of no-snow that follows it:

Meet Texas congressman Randy Neugebauer, the ranking Republican on the Agriculture Committee's Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Subcommittee. He’s opposed to killing babies, too!

…or so says former Bush speechwriter David Frum. Myself, I would never impute ulterior motives to the fat freak.

When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say — but what is equally true — is that he also wants Republicans to fail.

If Republicans succeed — if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office — Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less and hear fewer ads for Sleep Number beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished.

For the cause they purport to represent, however, the “Waterloo” threatened by GOP Sen. Jim DeMint last year regarding Obama and health care has finally arrived all right: Only it turns out to be our own.

Peggy Noonan, in The Wall Street Journal:

Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns this newspaper, so one should probably take pains to demonstrate that one is attempting to speak with disinterest and impartiality, in pursuit of which let me note that Glenn Beck has long appeared to be insane.

Well, Washington, DC hosted “Armey’s Last Stand” yesterday. About two weeks ago Health Care Reform was officially designated a Tea Party “Code Red situation” calling for urgent mobilization; forthwith a couple hundred TPers dutifully shaped up at the Capitol in their signature Tea Party regalia, carrying their signature “down with everything” posters and placards.

This group has evolved, since their first appearance last year around this time, in ways that would have been impossible to predict. Yesterday’s street theater successfully demonstrated that evolution, if not much else. Over time, Republican Party outpourings of solidarity and support for Tea Party activism have dwindled, coincident with the Tea Party’s repudiation of Republican apparatchiks as just as undesirable as any other target “government-as-usual” group which the TP has singled out for extinction.

Signs of strain were not that difficult to sniff out. By now, everyone has probably seen pictures of the TP placards that were supplied by the RNC earlier in the game. This time around, RNC was still distributing the things but had gone to the trouble of placing “blackout” stickers over their endorsement. Then, too, GOP notables were conspicuously absent from yesterday’s pep rally, signaling Republicans’ wariness of how truly the Tea Party actually speaks for the “silent majority” they profess to represent…

A few die-hard Washington wing-nuts still turned out for Code Red — Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Steve King (R-IA) and Joe “You Lie” Wilson (R-SC) were there to incite hundreds to new levels of insanity. Fox News, doing the best with what they had, described the Code Red Rally as featuring “a host of Republican speakers, including Reps. Mike Pence (R-IN), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Tom Price (R-GA) and Marsha Blackburn, (R-TN).”

Notably missing from that lineup was Sen. Jim DeMint who has been working assiduously at being the Tea Party’s Best Friend in Washington, according to a recent article in Politico. And while DeMint’s efforts might be scoring him points with the Tea Party (although there’s not a lot of evidence of that yet) it’s definitely not making him any more popular with his own party, which appears to have decided to give the TP a wide berth, for now at least.

So, it appears that the past year has brought evolution, some contraction as well as greater “clarity” (if you can call it that) to both the Tea Party and the Republican Party platforms. The Tea Party, despite its astro-turf beginnings, has gelled into what looks like a fairly adamant anti-government movement, strong on fear and loathing and short on solid facts – but, then, in the Tea Party world, facts and people who deal in facts are not to be trusted; history, like the Bible, is meant to validate their views and effectively rubber stamp their agenda “best for everyone involved.”

The Tea Party has morphed into a conservative populist movement willing to take conservatism to new extremes to represent the wishes of a (largely mythical) “silent majority.” I think that the “silent majority” notion is part and parcel of a mythology of fear and imagined oppression; freedom and liberty, in this mythology, are freedom “from anything I don’t like or agree with” and the liberty “to do as I please” without regard to how it affects the common good. Proponents of this mythology populate their world with like-minded fellow travelers who are too meek to speak up – but they’re out there. There also seems to be that Christian Conservative, homespun American Puritan influence that says “this is right and this wrong for all God’s children, end of argument” substantiation not required. And so it is that the Tea Party quickly gets to a place where facts are subordinate to ideology and the ends always justify the means.

If you think I overstate, here are a few samplings of yesterday’s commentary coming from the Tea Party itself:

The following “sentiments” appeared on the America’s News Online website which describes itself thus:

“As a company, AmericasNewsOnline.com is a dedicated group of writers covering the topics that are making a difference in people’s lives. Our goal is to give the reader a balanced perspective of both sides of the news. In our opinion, it should be up to the reader to decide the real truth.

“We have a team of 6 researchers submitting breaking news everyday. With our team’s diverse background, we are able to cover news from different points of view.”

“The Tea Party Movement along with a little help from Rush Limbaugh turned the face of Washington red today. Even Barrack Obama is coming with his tail between his legs and is to appear for an interview with Fox News.

“There are members of the Tea Party Movement, in fact all of the Tea Party, that are outraged on the way that the Obama administration and the Dems in Congress are trying to find the sneakiest ways imaginable to pass the healthcare bill. Americans are very much in shock that the Dems would try to ram this bill through with an 80% disapproval rating.”

“Pelosi was heard to be paraphrased saying, ‘Americans aren’t smart enough to figure out how we’re doing this and aren’t interested in the process.’ She went on to same (sic) we will pass this bill for the good of American citizens. The Tea Party is holding strongly to ‘kill the bill.’”

Really, really awful writing aside, this stuff is pure propaganda, not to mention poppycock; but it is emotionally appealing to a crowd that believes that all of their ills have been caused by government and that, furthermore, they don’t need or want anything that government provides. It’s not that they have conflicting views on how the government should operate, no alternative methods are ever promoted beyond “sending Obama’s socialism ‘back to Russia.’”

Speaking to a CNS News interviewer, a woman who would only identify herself as “Jamie” said congressional arrogance is the main reason she came to the rally.

“I’m here, because I’m really concerned about how the legislative process is being bastardized to push this through. Whether you’re for it or against it, if they can bastardize our legislative process like this, what’s to stop them for anything? Why do we even have elected officials?”

Russ Cote of New Jersey told CNS this is the third event he has attended to protest a proposed health care system that he said is unsustainable and unconstitutional: “It’s simple economics. We’re going to go broke. We’re going to go broke fast.”

What these people seem to be saying is that they are afraid – afraid that something is terribly wrong with the day-to-day operation of government that they have, by and large, chosen to ignore lo these many years. They are afraid of “bastardized legislative processes,” the passage of unconstitutional legislation, death panels and socialism — now; despite the fact that extrajudicial renditions, assassinations, the use of torture, and warrant-less wiretapping caused barely ripple in their deeply-running still waters.

Neither do these emotional, impressionable people seem to care a fig about unsustainable health care costs in the status quo, or rampant US global militarization, or rapacious defense corporations defrauding the US government as a matter of course. They don’t even seem to worry much about the erosion of their constitutional rights to privacy and due process or the loss of America’s moral standing in the world due to high officials condoning, even expressing pride in having committed war crimes.

Why do you suppose that is? My theory is that it’s all in the packaging. People enjoy a good scare, sometimes. Generally, when things are not going so well, it helps to believe that the problem is “larger than life” and that we’re “all in this together.” Anyone with “I told you so, on their lips” is cruisin’ for a bruisin’ and it’s human nature to try to deflect blame and shame.

Republicans have suffered some electoral humiliations over the pickle we find ourselves in and they are more than ready for that to change. The trick is to make enough people believe that the Democrats are even worse or that Republicans, having made the mess in the first place, are the only ones who can effectively clean it up. Clumsiness over this messaging, so far, has engendered some pretty entertaining political positions on both sides of the aisle. For a while the large number of uncommitted Tea Partiers looked pretty attractive to the GOP with its 28% approval rating. In order to come roaring back, Republicans needed some fresh voters. From the beginning, it was pretty obvious what the TP hot buttons were and, in an effort to court them, the GOP made the Tea Party causes their causes.

A year later, clearly Republican leadership is rethinking that one. Appealing to the Tea Party is a lot like herding cats…

Nevertheless, a few stalwarts are still banging that drum for lack of anything better to do. One of those is Rep. Steve King from Iowa who has always had a lot to say that made little sense. The problem with King’s embrace of the Tea Party is that clearly, these Tea Partiers either can’t or don’t want to distinguish between fact and fiction and to them King represents a voice of authority (telling them it’s quite all right to be crazy).

King’s contribution, this time around, was to whip the Tea Partiers into an anarchic frenzy to paralyze the Capitol. He said, “Fill this city up, fill this city, jam this place full so that they can’t get in, they can’t get out and they will have to capitulate to the will of the American people.”

Elsewhere in his speech, he spouted his usual disinformation about the health care bill funding abortion as well as care for 6.1 million illegal immigrants, winding up with an impassioned plea for concerned citizens to “continue to rise up.”

I haven’t yet decided whether I think King is just simple-minded or whether he’s a world-class demagogue – either way, King has spent his years in Washington filling the air with a giant load of misleading crap – below are some samples of King’s wit and wisdom, taken from Wikipedia, which lists links for all comments.

On Joseph McCarthy:

In 2005, King whipped up a group to oppose honoring a Berkeley, California councilwomen because of her “affiliation” with the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Berkeley. Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee claimed that King’s “campaign of innuendo and unsubstantiated ‘concern’ is better suited to the era of Joseph McCarthy than today’s House of Representatives,” King claimed that history showed McCarthy to be “a hero for America.”

On the May 1, 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” rallies, King offered his opinion to the Op-Ed editor of the Des Moines Register:

“What would that May 1st look like without illegal immigration? There would be no one to smuggle across our southern border the heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines that plague the United States, reducing the U.S. supply of meth that day by 80%. The lives of 12 U.S. citizens would be saved who otherwise die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day. Another 13 Americans would survive who are otherwise killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals. Our hospital emergency rooms would not be flooded with everything from gunshot wounds, to anchor babies, to imported diseases to hangnails, giving American citizens the day off from standing in line behind illegals. Eight American children would not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime.”

[Critics immediately argued that King's daily numbers in the editorial are inflated, based on the incorrect premise that 28% of all prisoners in all American jails and prisons are illegal aliens. King cited an April, 2005 GAO report as the source of that statistic; that report actually says that 27% of federal prisoners were "criminal aliens," a term that includes both legal and illegal aliens. "Criminal aliens" doesn't mean "illegal aliens". State prisons and local jails together hold 92% of US prisoners. The actual percentage of illegal aliens held at the time in state prisons and local jails can be determined by comparing figures for SCAAP federal compensation to states and localities with federal Bureau of Justice Statistics prisoner censuses. Such a comparison reveals that the accurate illegal alien percentage being held was less than 4%, rather than the 28% claimed by King.

In May 2008, King downgraded his original claims about the contents and reliability of the GAO report from which he "extrapolated" them saying: “ . . . that report came back not quite apples to apples.”]

On Washington, D.C.:

“My wife lives here with me, and I can tell you… she’s at far greater risk being a civilian in Washington, D.C., than an average civilian in Iraq.”

King said that there were 45 violent deaths per 100,000 in Washington, D.C., in 2003 while he calculated that there were 27.51 per 100,000 in Iraq as a whole.

The Iraqi Health Ministry casualty survey, however, estimated 151,000 violent deaths in Iraq due to the war from 2003 to 2006, or roughly 162.37 per 100,000 per year. The Lancet survey published in 2006 estimated that 2.5% of the population of Iraq had died from the war as of June 2006.

On State Department appropriations:

On June 21, 2007, King introduced an amendment to the $34 billion State and Foreign Operations bill to prohibit funds from being used by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to travel to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan or Syria. When asked why the measure did not apply to Republican House members who had also made trips to the countries in question, King’s spokesman replied that he was unsure whether that had been considered, or why it might not have been.

UPDATE: At the end of 2009, Rep. King went on his own “fact-finding” junket to Afghanistan. Upon his return he reported that he met with President Muhammad (sic) Karzai and found him to be “human.”

On Barack Obama:

On March 7, 2008, during his press engagements to announce his reelection campaign, King made his now famous remarks about Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and his middle name, saying:

“ … if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al-Qaida, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they will declare victory in this War on Terror.”

[At the time, Obama said he did not take the comments too seriously, describing King as “an individual who thrives on making controversial statements to get media coverage.” The McCain campaign disavowed King's comments, saying "John McCain rejects the type of politics that degrades our civics…and obviously that extends to Congressman King's statement.”

On the Iowa Supreme Court:

In April, 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a state ban on same-sex marriage violated the Iowa constitution. King opined that the judges "should resign from their position" and the state legislature "must also enact marriage license residency requirements so that Iowa does not become the gay marriage Mecca."

On the IRS building bombing in Austin, Texas:

Last month, in his closing remarks at CPAC, King said he could “empathize” with the man who flew a plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and an IRS employee.

On Washington lobbyists:

On the House floor in February 2010, King made remarks defending and supporting lobbyists as a source of “valuable information”:

“Lobbyists do a very effective and useful job on this Hill, and if anyone gave me information that wasn’t accurate or honest, if they found out about it they would bring it back and correct it to me first. If I thought they were doing so intentionally, they would not come back to talk to me ever. There is credibility there, in that arena, that I think somebody needs to stand up for the lobby. It is a matter of providing a lot of valuable information.”

One might reasonably ask whether Rep. King would recognize “valuable information” if it bit him in the ass …

After King’s latest outing a Huffington Post reporter asked him about his comparison of the Tea Party protest with the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Prague. Here’s how that went:

HuffPo: “So this is just like Prague under communist rule?” the Huffington Post asked.

King: “Oh yeah, it is very, very close,” King replied. “It is the nationalization of our liberty and the federal government taking our liberty over. So there are a lot of similarities there.”

“I look back 20 years ago in the square in Prague ... when tens of thousands showed up there and they shook their keys peacefully and they took over their country and they achieved their freedom back again,” he said. “If you can keep coming to this city, fill up the congressional offices across the country but jam this city. If you can get on your cell phones, and get on your Blackberries and your email, and ask people to keep coming to this town. Storm this city, fill up Washington D.C., jam this capital so they can’t move. And if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of you show up, we will win. We will defeat this bill and you will have your liberty back.”

Of course, part of the reason that Prague is so idyllic is because they have government-sponsored health care — just like you do, Rep. King…

From the Washington Independent:

Kathy Ropte — like Jackson, a member of the Harris County, Ga. Tea Party, had started to move beyond lobbying. As cameras snapped away, she stood in front of the Cannon Building and announced the termination, “to take effect in November,” of pro-health care reform members. One activist chided her for the display, which included a massive sign reading “Waterboard Congress.” Jackson didn’t care. She was in the fight, whether or not health care reform passed.

“One day I turned off American Idol,” Ropte told TWI, “and I turned on Fox News. Before this year I’d never voted in my life.”

From Reconstitution 2.0:

According to the Reverend John Hagee, Adolph Hitler was a “hunter,” sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God’s will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.

Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: “‘And they the hunters should hunt them,’ that will be the Jews. ‘From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.’ If that doesn’t describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can’t see that.”

Yes, Hitler the Hunter came to the Earth to do the Lord’s work. This attitude among Jesusistanis is not an uncommon one; the simple fact of the matter is that most Jesusistanis are more or less open anti-Semites. A lot of people seem to think that the unwavering support the Jesusistanis have for Israel “proves” that they aren’t anti-Semites, but that belief is wholly mistaken. In order for the “Rapture” dogma of the Jesusistanis to come to pass, the Jews have to be in Jerusalem to be burned alive and sent to Hell. Understand that this, and only this, is why the Jesusistanis are such unabashed, staunch supporters of Israel.

Again the Rude Pundit nails it. (Image by Ben Tolman)

Our unending state of stress-out is al-Qaeda’s greatest victory against the United States. As the AP reports today, al-Qaeda got one big message from the Underwear Bomber’s failure: “the group that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and has prided itself on its ideological purism seems to be eyeing a more pragmatic and arguably more dangerous shift in tactics. The emerging message appears to be: Big successes are great, but sometimes simply trying can be just as good.”

Yeah, it seems like the simple cave dwellers have figured out big, complex, allegedly bad-ass America: we’re just a bunch of sticky fat kids crying because our ice cream fell off the cone. That wedgie-bait, Adam Gadahn (née “Pearlman”), an American in al-Qaeda, taunted, “Even apparently unsuccessful attacks on Western mass transportation systems can bring major cities to a halt, cost the enemy billions and send his corporations into bankruptcy.” He may be a traitorous asshole who can’t grow a decent beard, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Ask anyone who was at Newark Airport in January, where security imprisoned thousands of innocent people for six hours because some idiot took a shortcut…

Indeed, the right has so successfully torqued the country into what our enemies believe it is, it’s almost as if the GOP is a subversive arm of al-Qaeda. They have nearly bankrupted us, thus making any great social advances impossible; they have turned mild dissent into sedition; and they have turned the Constitution into a loophole-ridden contract, filled with more fine print than a subprime mortgage. They did most of that shit when they were in power. Now, out of power, the right is seeking, as it did in the Clinton years, but even more insidiously, to undermine the very functioning of government…

You’d expect this sort of thing from the Rude Pundit or the Huffington Post. But the Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson’s new cybersheet?

Sarah Palin took a leave of absence from her Russia-watching post in Alaska to become a Fox News contributor. Who could have seen that coming? She represents diversity on Fox as that network’s only non-blonde correspondent…

Sarah Palin does have charisma and a certain following. A woman resembling her once walked into a Florida breakfast place and nearly caused a riot. Folks soon realized she was not the former Alaska governor when she started reading a newspaper.

From TPM:

A California Republican family values legislator who was arrested early Wednesday morning for drunk driving had recently left a gay club, sources tell a local news channel… [Roy] Ashburn, who has a history of opposing gay rights, issued a contrite apology for the drunk driving arrest yesterday.

Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman are onto something in this excerpt. Klein used the word “thoughtful” in the quote below. He meant “smart,” of course, but was too thoughtful to say so.

[Jonathan] Chait professes himself puzzled by the right’s intellectual insecurity. Me, not so much. Here’s how I see it: in our current political culture, the background noise is overwhelmingly one of conservative platitudes. People who have strong feelings about politics but are intellectually incurious tend to pick up those platitudes, and repeat them in the belief that this makes them sound smart. (Ezra Klein once described Dick Armey thus: “He’s like a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”)

H/T to Swiftspeech for this excerpt from Robert Paul Wolff’s excellent blog, new to me but not for long, The Philosopher’s Stone.

…Do we want to live in a country in which the fortunate (medically speaking) accept additional insurance costs in order to provide for the unfortunate? Or do we wish to live in a country in which the fortunate are permitted to separate what happens to them from what happens to the unfortunate? Notice that by “fortunate” and “unfortunate” I do not mean “those who do not get sick” and “those who do get sick.” That would be looking at the matter ex post. I mean by fortunate “those less less likely ex ante to get sick,” and by “unfortunate” I mean “those more likely ex ante to get sick.” We are still talking probabilities here, of course. Even the young and healthy sometimes get cancer and have heart attacks. They just do so much less often. And by the same token, even multiple cancer sufferers sometimes go cancer free for the rest of their lives. But that too occurs much less often.

When we clear away all the bafflegab, all the confusion, all the posturing and bickering and procedural wrangling, all the political maneuvering, what we find is that the Democrats want America to be a country in which the fortunate shoulder some of the burdens of the unfortunate. And the Republicans want America to be a country in which they do not. In short, if I may put it this way, the Democrats want America to be a Christian country, and the Republicans want America to be a Godless country…

Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one of the increasingly few reasons America’s newspapers should not be taken out behind the barn and shot, gives judicious consideration to the speech given by the GOP’s Heart Throb of the Week, Marco Rubio, before the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday. Rubio outlined a bold new agenda of cutting taxes on estates, capital gains, interest, dividends and corporations.

To which Bookman replies:

Let me be blunt: That’s infantile. It’s an infantile appeal to an infantile sentiment. Politicians of every stripe make promises they can’t keep and tell us things we want to hear, but rarely is the disconnect from reality so blatant.

I mean, let’s just do away with taxes altogether — nobody likes ’em, right? — and then the national debt will surely vanish altogether! It’s like shooting yourself in the face and calling it cosmetic surgery. It’s like saying four minus two equals eight, and then building your economic future on that “fact.” It’s a world of fantasy.

Or as the great Merle Haggard would put it:

“When they find out how to burn water,
And the gasoline car is gone.
When an airplane flies without any fuel,
And the satellite heats our home.
One of these days when the air clears up,
And the sun comes shinin’ through.
We’ll all be drinkin’ free bubble-up,
An’ eatin’ that rainbow stew.”

And when that happy day comes, Marco Rubio will be right there, dishing out heapin’ servings of that delicious rainbow stew for everybody, with Jim DeMint looking on, crying in happiness.

Emanuel Rahm’s “retard” has become an increasingly complicated political bankshot: from the White House to Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh, back to Palin and now to Connecticut’s Senate race:

One of the two candidates, Linda McMahon, was the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment — and it turns out that there was a mentally handicapped WWE wrestling character who was savagely beaten in a steel cage and worse. And in light of the flap over Rahm, I’m told that McMahon’s opponent, Rob Simmons, is going to demand that she account for it…

“Eugene” is the stage name of a mentally handicapped wrestling character who performed on WWE’s “Raw” brand. When he was introduced in 2004, according to press reports at the time, viewers complained to WWE, forcing them to issue a statement saying they intended him to be portrayed as a “hero” who would inspire “other people with disabilities to strive to achieve their dreams.”

But there’s footage all over the internet of Eugene getting savagely stomped and beaten, and even demeaned, and one storyline even ended up with him getting savaged in a steel cage. And the Simmons campaign is going to demand that McMahon account for this.

Markos Moulitsas, as you probably know, has commissioned a poll of the views held by self-identified Republicans on a number of issues. The results are here. In a way they are unsurprising — 60% think Obama is a socialist, 21% think ACORN stole the election, while 55% aren’t quite sure. These things can be put down to a stew of misinformation, ignorance and racism.

But what can explain the 31% who believe contraceptives should be outlawed? They may not know what ACORN does or what socialism is, but they’re pretty clear about condoms and the pill. Is this a partisan or a religious issue that I’m unaware of? Are they afraid that dusky immigrants are going to outbreed them? What?

Here is an economic primer for all your teabagger friends from Fred Clark at slacktivist. It deserves as wide circulation as it can possibly get. Now I’ve done my part. Do yours.

Hey you. You there in the Glenn Beck T-shirt headed off to the Tea Party Patriot rally.

Stop shouting for a moment, please, I want to explain to you why you’re so very angry. You should be angry. You’re getting screwed. I think you know that. But you don’t seem to know that it doesn’t have to be that way. You can stop it. You can stop it easily because the system that’s screwing you over can only keep screwing you over if you keep demanding that it do so.

So stop demanding that. Stop helping the system screw you over.

Look, you can go back to yelling at me in a minute, but just read this first.

1. Get out your pay stub.

Or, if you have direct deposit — you really should get direct deposit, it saves a lot of time and money (I point this out because, honestly, I’m trying to help you here, even though you don’t make that easy Mr. Angry Screamy Guy) — then take out that little paper receipt they give you when your pay gets directly deposited.

2. Notice that your net pay is lower than your gross pay. This is because some of your wages are withheld every pay period.

3. Notice that only some of this money that was withheld went to pay taxes. (I know, I know — yeearrrgh! me hates taxes! — but just try to stick with me for just a second here.)

4. Notice that some of the money that was withheld didn’t go to taxes, but to your health insurance company.

5. Now go get a pay stub from last year around this time, from January of 2009.

6. Notice that the amount of your pay withheld for taxes in your current paycheck is less than the amount that was withheld a year ago.

That’s because of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan, which included more than $200 billion in tax cuts, including the one you’re holding right there in your hand, the tax cut that’s now staring you in the face. Republicans all voted against that tax cut. And then they told you to get angry about the stimulus plan. They didn’t explain, however, why you were supposed to get angry about getting a tax cut. Why would you be? Wouldn’t it make more sense to get angry at the people who voted against that Obama tax cut?

But taxes aren’t the really important thing here. The really important thing starts with the next point…

7. Notice that the amount of your pay withheld to pay for your health insurance is more than it was last year.

8. Notice that the amount of your pay withheld to pay for your health insurance is a lot more than it was last year. I won’t ask you to dig up old paychecks from 2008 and 2007, but this has been going on for a long time. Every year, the amount of your paycheck withheld to pay for your health insurance goes up. A lot.

9. Notice the one figure there on your two pay stubs that hasn’t changed: Your wage. The raise you didn’t get this year went to pay for that big increase in the cost of your health insurance.

10. Here’s where I need you to start doing a better job of putting two and two together. If you didn’t get a raise last year because the cost of your health insurance went up by a lot, and the cost of your health insurance is going to go up by a lot again this year, what do you think that means for any chance you might have of getting a raise this year?

11. Did you figure it out? That’s right. The increasing cost of health insurance means you won’t get a raise this year. Or next year. Or the year after that. The increasing cost of health insurance means you will never get a raise again.

That’s what I meant when I said you really should be angry. That’s what I meant when I said you’re getting screwed.

OK, we’re almost done. Just a few more points, I promise.

12. The only hope you have of ever seeing another pay raise is if Congress passes health care reform. Without health care reform, the increasing cost of your health insurance will swallow this year’s raise. And next year’s raise. And pretty soon it won’t stop with just your raise. Without health care reform, the increasing cost of your health insurance will start making your pay go down.

13. I wish I could tell you that this was just a worst-case scenario, that this was only something that might, maybe happen, but that wouldn’t be true. Without health care reform, this is what will happen. We know this because this is what is happening now. It has been happening for the past 10 years. In 2008, employers spent on average 25 percent more per employee than they did in 2001, but wages on average did not increase during those years. The price of milk went up. The price of gas went up. But wages did not. All of the money that would have gone to higher wages went to pay the higher and higher and higher cost of health insurance. And unless Congress passes health care reform, that will not change.

Well, it will change in the sense that it will keep getting worse, but it won’t get better. Unless the problem gets fixed, the problem won’t be fixed. That’s kind of what “problem” and “fixed” mean.

14. Sadly for any chance you have of ever seeing a raise again, it looks like Congress may not pass health care reform. It looks like they won’t do that because they’re scared of angry voters who are demanding that they oppose health care reform, angry voters who demand that Congress not do anything that would keep the cost of health insurance from going up and up and up. Angry voters like you.

15. Do you see the point here? You are angrily, loudly demanding that Congress make sure that you never, ever get another pay raise as long as you live. Because of you and because of your angry demands, you and your family and your kids are going to have to get by with less this year than last year. And next year you’re going to have to get by with even less. And if you keep angrily demanding that no one must ever fix this problem, then you’re going to have to figure out how to get by on less and less every year for the rest of your life.

16. So please, for your own sake, for your family’s sake and the sake of your children, stop. Stop demanding that problems not get fixed. Stop demanding that you keep getting screwed. Stay angry — you should be angry — but start directing that anger toward the system that’s screwing you over and taking money out of your pocket. Start directing that anger toward fixing problems instead of toward making sure they never get fixed. Instead of demanding that Congress oppose health care reform so that you never, ever, get another pay raise, start demanding that they pass health care reform, as soon as possible. Because until they do, you’re just going to keep on getting screwed.

And it’s going to be that much worse knowing that you brought this on yourself — that you demanded it.

Thanks for your time.

This is from a speech by another of South Carolina’s many statesmen, Republican Lieutenant Governor Rudolph Andreas “André” Bauer. For the full flavor, listen to it all. Bauer is shown below with another college varsity cheerleader, George W. Bush:

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer told a Greenville-area crowd. “You know why? Because they breed.

“You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

Let’s continue the Hard Hitting Songs Series for those mentioned in the headline and George Bush and Tom Corbett too. Hey Tom, Legal Ethics take precedence over prosecuting political opponents, guilty or not. You better read up on that. I was taught in a system that made legal ethics the number one educational priority. Legal Ethics don’t seem to be something they teach well over there in Pennsylvania. It's quite ironic that the one doing the prosecuting is engaging in conduct as egregious as that of those who he is prosecuting. Even Ralph Nader has asked that law firms that gave Corbett money and has complained about this conflict of interest and wanted the money to be paid back by the law firm Corbett received from a law firm he was investigating. Corbett refused. Ethics 101 here again, but it may just be meanness as Woody sung about.

So it goes.

Well, anyway, this song is dedicated to all you fascists and obstructionists and otherwise just plain mean people, or as former Republican John Dean notes, mean authoritarians and their mean followers. Barry Goldwater was ashamed of you before he died. Dean knows.

A Teddy Roosevelt quote (h/t to The Epicurean Dealmaker) from the distant — the very distant — ideological past of the Republican Party:

We stand equally against government by a plutocracy and government by a mob. There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a democrat like myself must admit this. But there is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with “the money touch,” but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.

Breaking news from the party of family values:

Blake Hall, a leading figure in Idaho and national politics for 25 years, was fired Monday as a deputy prosecuting attorney in eastern Idaho and has resigned from the Republican National Committee…

Idaho Falls police reported that witnesses said Hall disposed of used condoms on the lawn of the woman’s house. Nineteen condoms were turned over to police, collected on 10 different dates, according to a police report. Both Hall and his lawyer acknowledged the condoms belonged to him, according to a police report.

Seems odd that they would “acknowledge” whose condoms those were. Gosh, anybody could have thrown those condoms onto the lawn, couldn’t they? Or at least before DNA testing they could have.

He’s not a Blue Dog and he’s not a Red Dog. He’s not the Hit Dog and he’s not a hot dog. So what kind of dog is he?

He is Lieberdog, the only one of its kind in all of nature, a species unto itself, sui generis, the one and only. In Connecticut, where he lives and pontificates, Lieberdog even has his own political party: the Lieberdog for Senator Party.

Well then, what sort of creature is Lieberdog? Also known as Stealth Dog, Lieberdog makes very little noise, looks like a shoe store clerk, and does not show up on radar. Lieberdog appears to be harmless but is known for his treachery. Although he has an unusually big mouth, he speaks through his nose. What he says, especially on the subject of health care reform, makes no sense except to the people who run the insurance industry, particularly the healthcare part of it. Lieberdog is an insurance man’s best friend.

Lieberdog is also a faithful companion to Republican presidential candidates who flap their arms like flightless birds and speak in riddles. He will perform any number of clever tricks on command and loves nothing more than rolling over. He will fetch and play dead. He will do anything for attention, sometimes to the point where his sniffing and licking can cause embarrassment to sniffee and lickee alike.

Not very long ago, in a public career that has gone on far, far too long, Lieberdog was a Democrat. Indeed, he was the party’s candidate for vice president when Lock Box Man headed the ticket in year 2,000 of the Modern Era. How soon we forget, but it is a matter of fact that this dynamic duo actually won the election, and not just the popular vote. But for a few hanging chads and a shameless Supreme Court, Lieberdog would have stood the proverbial heartbeat from the presidency for four, and most likely eight, years.

He would then have been in a favorable position to grab the Democratic nomination for The Big Job, and instead of traipsing around the country holding John McCain’s privates, he would have been running against him, holding his own. There were plenty of reasons to vote against McCain without any help from Lieberdog. Yet there he was. Wherever McCain went, he went. At every picnic, in every auditorium, at every GOP rubber chicken dinner, at every “spontaneous event,” there was Lieberdog, tongue lolling, tail wagging, fetching, licking and sniffing for the Republican candidate.

But … but, we thought he was a Democrat. What was he doing at that rally introducing Old Ironsides, the Republican candidate, for the four hundredth time? No, no, no, you don’t understand. He used to be a Democrat. But the Democrats in Connecticut turned their backs on him and nominated someone else. So he did what any beaten dog would do. He got mean and he got even.

And as the sole member of the Lieberdog for Senator Party he beat the candidates of both major parties and he’s still a senator and he still caucuses with the Democrats and he’s still the chairman of the homeland security committee. This doesn’t say much for Democratic Party discipline but does Lieberdog care about that?

Lieberdog is a religious dog, a dog of conscience. He has never voted against his principles and he never will. He believes passionately in the right of the big insurance companies to block any meaningful healthcare reform and he thinks we should stay in Iraq forever. He thinks Israel is right in everything it does even when it costs the lives of hundreds — thousands — of innocent people.

Lieberdog is a fiscal conservative except where Iraq is concerned. You can’t spend too much to support our brave boys and girls over there and anybody who suggests winding down that Bushian enterprise isn’t much better than a rotten coward.

If Lieberdog hadn’t defected from the party he might be considered a Blue Dog Democrat, whatever that is. The term’s derivation is as murky as its politics, but it seems to have had something to do with turning blue as a result of choking, the very thing that many exasperated Democrats would like to do to Lieberdog. Besides, Blue Dogs are all members of the House. Lieberdog disports himself in more important company, in the Senate, where the fire hydrants are the best that insurance money can buy.

Here’s the Word of the Lord from John Hart, who is communications director for famed Christian Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma:

Coburn’s opposition to government programs, Hart said, stemmed from his concern for the poor. “His faith informs everything he does,” Hart said. He went on to say that, in the New Testament, Jesus mentions the poor some 300 times. “He doesn’t view the Bible as a think-tank document.,” Hart said. So, Coburn, before he contemplates a policy, Hart said, first asks himself, “How will it impact the people least able to fend for themselves?”

“He has come to the conclusion that large government enterprises harm poor more than help them,” Hart said, offering Medicaid as an example. He conceded that the government health-care program does help some poor people, but he contends that it hurts others, because “40 percent of doctors refuse to accept Medicaid.” (Coburn is an MD himself.)

Hart said that the expansion of Medicaid beyond the ranks of the “truly poor” will only hurt more people.

And, in a not unrelated story, we learn that, “Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can name the first President of the United States, according to a survey released today.”

The snippets below are from a survey of the Right of the Right, carried out by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. Not much you didn’t know, perhaps, but the words are often interesting even if the tune is familiar.

Most fascinating to me was the way the respondents talked about President Obama himself. They thought he was a socialist, Manchurian candidate control freak, sure. But it kept peeping through that they couldn’t help respecting and admiring the guy — maybe even liking him. Most peculiar, Obama…

For the complete text, download file.

The conservative Republican base represents almost one in five voters in the electorate, and nearly two out of every three self-identified Republicans…

Asked about the issues of greatest importance to them in choosing a candidate for Congress, health care ranked sixth among the Republicans, below issues such as tax cuts, immigration, and a candidate’s personal values and faith; but for the independents, health care was number one…

—I think it is another media attack on people who have views other than their own… It almost makes you think they are trying to create some kind of a divide… Tearing us up. Fabrication to prove the point that they want to prove that may or may not be truth. It is relative to their need to get a headline and they are stupid if they think we’re not seeing this stuff. They’re stupid if they think we’re so stupid.

—There’s a school of thought that if you overload the system with programs and bailouts and all that, that it will create an opportunity, some people believe it started in the 60’s with welfare and Medicare and Medicaid; if you load the system down enough till it totally collapses it, I mean, I know it sounds kind of like a conspiracy theory, but it opens the door for this whole new way of governing. I’m not saying he’s a sleeper or anything like that, but it is something to think about…

—I think [Glenn Beck’s] brilliant. No one goes after him because he does his homework. He checks, double checks, triple checks and he says he refuses to put it on the air unless it’s been checked a hundred different times. So when you can’t get at him, you start calling him names and start digging into his past.

Assuming you need a scapegoat to make you feel better, the Republican Party has a rep for you. Eric Hoffer is rolling over in his grave I’m sure. Since we don’t watch television anymore, I wasn’t aware that this parody is based on an Apple app commercial until I read about it, but all you television watchers already know that I suppose. Thanks to the author of this video who has a great new blog, Waking Up Now that will undoubtedly be worth keeping an eye on and also has a detailed explanation of how and why he created the video with intricate explanations for each rep. Watch the video first, then read the explanations. That’s the creator of the video’s advice.

Posted by Buck Batard at 07:55 AM

This is the greatest political TV ad ever made (h/t Jay Bookman), and I’m pretty confident we shall not see its like again. John Oxendine is the Georgia insurance commissioner, hoping to be the next governor. The rat is onetime governor Roy Barnes, for whom see this.

Below we see the famed Republican moralist, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, as he explores the subtleties of President Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. A written excerpt, followed by the Full Monty on tape:

If you’re oriented toward animals, bestiality, then, you know, that’s not something that can be used, held against you or any bias be held against you for that. Which means you’d have to strike any laws against bestiality, if you’re oriented toward corpses, toward children, you know, there are all kinds of perversions…

Next thing you know, it’ll be perfectly legal to mate with anything at all, even Republican Congressmen from Texas.

I run the following first as an admirable piece of snark, but also read Colin McEnroe’s whole posting here, for news on why Japan is buying up American political blogs — and for more on the wonderful candidacy of wrestling queen Linda McMahon for Chris Dodd’s senate seat.

While were on the subject of Chris Dodd, I wholeheartedly support his reelection, not in spite of the fact that he accepted a handcrafted mortage on his home from subprime grifter Anthony Mozilo but because he did.

Dodd’s indiscreet mortgage was pretty tame stuff as Congressional behavior goes, but nevertheless he is now obliged to be a bulldog on reform of the financial sector. And that particular strain of bulldog is pretty scarce on Capitol Hill.

Okay, back to the snark:

Alan Schlesinger was the Republican nominee for Senate in Connecticut, and it’s generally accepted that he would have found that experience a lot more enjoyable if the Republican Party had actually decided to support him. Instead, Joe Lieberman ran on the slogan, “There is no principle of the Democratic Party that I am not prepared to swap for a reasonably good chocolate chip cookie,” and Republicans took that as a sign they should probably vote for him.

We here in Connecticut are sick and tired of all the attention South Carolina has been getting for being ridiculous. So here’s what we’re doing about it:

WASHINGTON – Pro wrestling executive Linda McMahon has never been shy about wading into the ring — and now she’s plotting a smackdown of Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd.

World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. said Wednesday McMahon has resigned as the company's chief executive to seek the Republican nomination for Dodd's Connecticut seat, providing a show-business twist to one of the nation's marquee Senate races…

McMahon, who typically worked behind the scenes at World Wrestling Entertainment, has said she’s appeared in portions of the shows at least several dozen times during her more than 25-year-career. One video on the Internet shows her in the ring, appearing to kick a man in the groin.

“If you’ve been in a poker game for half an hour and you don’t know who the patsy is yet, you’re the patsy.”

Republican appointees outnumber Democratic justices two to one on the Supreme Court. Of the six Republicans, five were named by multimillionaires (the Bushes and Reagan; Ford appointed the other).

These things render tomorrow’s arguments over Austin and McConnell all but irrelevant. The fix is in. The Roberts court wouldn’t have taken the case at all if the Chief Justice didn’t intend to use it to scrap the last few limits remaining on the power of the rich to buy our government.

A few shreds of today’s legal fig leaf may survive, but basically the game is finally over. Democracy lost. If Joe the Plumber and the government-hating tea-baggers had even the dimmest grasp of who was really responsible for their troubles, they would be rioting in the streets already.

Here’s why:

Today, one political class is the overwhelming majority — we express our preferences with our votes or volunteer efforts. The other class consists of those wielding real power — the ability to finance the bulk of candidates’ campaigns and effectively “set the menu” of candidates from which the rest of us may choose.

The justices’ motivation for treating money as speech may not be racist, but the impact is. Major political donors are fully unrepresentative of Americans. According to a 1996 study by the Joyce Foundation, eighty percent of people investing $200 or more in political candidates are males from households with annual income exceeding $100,000, and about 95 percent are white.

Not surprisingly, Congress closely mirrors those distinctly unrepresentative demographics.

When you get into the real money — donations of $1,000 or more — the picture is skewed even further. Just one in a thousand adult Americans contributed $1,000 or more to any candidate in the last election, yet candidates for the 2004 presidential nomination raised more than 80 percent of their individual investments from these elites. And people wonder how Congress can consider repealing inheritance taxes for multi-millionaires while plunging us ever-deeper into debt.

The power of that 1% of citizens making thousand-dollar investments is further amplified by their ability to “bundle” contributions in the name of family members, co-workers or employees to offer many thousands of dollars to a candidate in a lump sum. In George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, bundling $200,000 was the measure by which donors gained serious influence.

Most days David Brooks’s columns just make me mildly impatient. Not this time. Read what he says in today’s New York Times about President Obama and healthcare.

And while we’re on the subject, take a look at this depressing story out of Wisconsin, where a group of merciful and compassionate doctors tried to apply intelligence to end-of-life decisions — only to run into Sarah Palin and her fellow deathers. Of all the lies and hypocrisies spread by the GOP in this summer of discontent, surely this has been the most ignorant, the most cruel.

From Stephen Talbot’s letter to the editor in the current issue of The Nation:

I interviewed both men in 2001 for a PBS documentary, The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation. McNamara told me that he’d come to realize the war was a tragedy that could have been avoided…

But Kissinger was unreconstructed, unapologetic. “If you are going to ask whether I feel guilty about Vietnam, the interview is over,” Kissinger said before I asked my first question. “I’ll walk out.”

I told him I had just interviewed McNamara. That got his attention. And then he did something I’ll never forget: he began to cry. Actually, he pretended to cry.

“Boohoo, boohoo,” Kissinger blubbered, rubbing his eyes. “He’s still beating his breast, right? Still feeling guilty.” He spoke in a mocking, singsong voice and patted his heart for emphasis.

It was one of those moments, before the camera rolls, when you get a rare glimpse into someone’s character and it’s even darker than you ever dreamed.

From Politico:

George F. Will, the elite conservative commentator, will call in his next column for U.S. ground troops to leave Afghanistan, according to publishing sources.

“[F]orces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters,” Will writes in the column, scheduled for publication later this week.

One wonder why this sage policy guidance never occurred to the tweety-bird of the right while George W. Bush was wandering around Afghanistan’s plains for all those years.

Alas, a lack, one supposes, of balls. One didn’t want to lose one’s access to the very best soirées, did one? But now that the albatross is around the other guy’s neck, Will’s equation has changed.

Pulling out of Afghanistan begins to look like a win-win proposition for the Party of No. It would give the chickenhawk patriots of the GOP a chance to holler surrender monkey at Obama in 2012 — an act akin to handing Jascha Heifetz a Stradivarius.

And not pulling out would be even more certain to defeat Obama’s reelection bid, since he would be hip-deep in his very own Big Muddy by 2012. And Mitt Romney could win just as Eisenhower did against Stevenson, on a promise to get us out of Afghanistan.

Whether Romney actually kept his word once in office would depend on whether he’d rather be remembered as Eisenhower or Nixon.

Watch the repulsive physician/senator Tom Coburn as he comforts a grief-stricken Oklahoma constituent with a sick husband. Oklahoma voters (their other senator is James Inhofe) have a lot to answer for.

Republican Tom Coburn is a medical doctor, a church deacon, and the junior U.S. Senator from Oklahoma. Here he is on Meet the Press yesterday:

Look, the, the idea that we ought to talk about our future health and what our family and what we want done is a good idea, it’s legitimate. What is not legitimate is having government even weigh in on it. It is intensely personal; your health care, your plans, your family. There is no role for government in that. And where we’ve seen a role — and, and this happens all the time, which goes to one of the things that never gets talked about in health care — is we have statements, living wills. We have people who have made those very tough decisions. And then, because they’ve made them, but because of the malpractice situation and liability, they’re ignored. And we still intubate and put people onto ventilators that never wanted it because a family member threatens through a situation, even though you have that end of life counseling there.

Isn’t that little Rove boy just the cutest thing?

Robert Luskin, a lawyer for Mr. Rove, said the material released Tuesday demonstrated that there was “absolutely no evidence” the White House had used inappropriate political motivations to punish federal prosecutors. Mr. Luskin said Mr. Rove and other White House aides were legitimately concerned about voter fraud and were debating “completely reasonable and legitimate policy questions.”

Watch closely at the very beginning, as the polished debater in the red cap gets his lines from Coach before vomiting them up:

Here’s a post by Papa Bonk on Ketchup is a Vegetable. What think?

Benito Mussolini and Adolpf Hitler both came to power with the aid of hoodlums and thugs who showed up at political rallies, shouted down the speakers and beat up opposition leaders. As time went by, normal citizens learned to stay out of their way and shut up.

Politics by thuggery is a defining element of facism. That’s what the GOOP and the health care industry is practicing now in an attempt to derail real reform in health insurance. We are seeing it in town hall meetings held by Democratic Party leaders across the country. Hordes of unkempt, illiterate dumbasses shout down other speakers and drown out debate, the threat of violence simmering just below the surface. Their whole game is to disrupt and delay the health care agenda and ultimately defeat President Obama by forcing a failure on his most important policy objective.

Wiser heads tell us that we can use this behavior to our advantage. It demonstrates the true colors of the opposition, it is said, and will ultimately turn public opinion in our favor. I am sure the people in the choir believe that. I am not so certain.

There is a frightened, mindless wasteland out there. A landscape of uneducated clerks and real estate agents and shoe salespersons and Mary Kaye clients. They are frightened as sheep, and easily stampeded. A show of force, a hint of instability, a suspicion that the President of the United States may not be one of us after all, may be all it takes to return us the nightmare days of Busch GOOP leadership.

It’s a dangerous game and should not be taken lightly. I am very happy to allow the public relations boys and the political experts to take on this threat and solve it by peaceable means. But I think it shows us graphically why it is that liberals should forget about gun control and learn something about guns.

Speaking as one who was paying taxes back then, I would gladly have kicked in to give Todd Tiahrt’s mom the chance to deny us his great mind:

From McClatchy Newspapers:

…Speaking on the House floor, Representative Todd Tiahrt wondered: What if President Obama’s mom had had the chance for a taxpayer-funded abortion?

“If that financial incentive was in place, is it possible that his mother may have taken advantage of it?” he asked.

Tiahrt reasoned, “If you think of it in human terms, there is a financial incentive that will be put in place, paid for by tax dollars, that will encourage women who are single parents, living below the poverty level, to have the opportunity for a free abortion. If you take that scenario and apply it to many of the great minds we have today, who would we have been deprived of? Our president grew up in a similar circumstance.”

Tiahrt, who is running in the Republican Senate primary in Kansas next year, mentioned Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, too, asking “is it possible that we would be denied his great mind?”

You’ve been hearing about the C Street house where Sanford and Ensign and Wamp and many another sinner of the GOP lived and loved and laughed together.

But it’s all a whole lot creepier that you even think, unless you happen to remember Jeff Sharlet’s 2003 piece in Harper’s called “Jesus plus nothing: Undercover among America’s secret theocrats.”

The book which grew out of it, The Family, is just out in trade paperback, and I urge you to buy it. And you will, once you read the 2003 piece. Excerpt:

It is April 2002, and I have lived with these men for weeks now, not as a Christian — a term they deride as too narrow for the world they are building in Christ’s honor — but as a “believer.” I have shared the brothers’ meals and their work and their games. I have been numbered among them and have been given a part in their ministry. I have wrestled with them and showered with them and listened to their stories: I know which man resents his father’s fortune and which man succumbed to the flesh of a woman not once but twice and which man dances so well he is afraid of being taken for a fag. I know what it means to be a “brother,” which is to say that I know what it means to be a soldier in the army of God…

Now that Al Franken is on his way to join the other comedians in Washington can we expect the Senate to be more fun than ever?

Franken, a professional funnyman and avowed liberal, will finally take his seat as the junior senator from Minnesota after seven hilarious months of legal wrangling over the vote count with the (finally) outgoing Republican incumbent, Norm Coleman, who is a joke but a bad one.

The big question is whether Franken, for all his success as a satirist, book writer, radio guy, and onetime stalwart of Saturday Night Live, can match wits with the likes of Orrin Hatch, Jon Kyl, John Cornyn, and Chuck Grassley, four of the funniest Republicans ever to crack wise on the Senate floor.

Orrin Hatch is probably best known of the current crop of GOP wits because he has been around forever and has never been able to open his mouth wide enough to say anything controversial. Orrin is from Utah and looks rather like one of those scary clean-cut missionaries, which he was, who periodically show up at your door wanting to talk to you about Jesus. Because no one can understand what he is saying, Hatch always gets re-elected.

He is also wonderfully funny, but not as funny as Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who has made a huge contribution to the public weal by making life difficult for foundations and other philanthropic organizations that think their tax-free status gives them the right to give away money to good causes without asking him first. Chuck has kicked some eleemosynary ass and shown those smug foundation types a thing or two about who makes tax policy in this country. He’s funny but he’s also tough.

Funny and tough seem to be traits common to all the members of the Senate Finance Committee, which has set itself the daunting task of thwarting President Obama’s effort to reform the country’s perfectly healthy healthcare insurance system. You need a good sense of humor to go against overwhelming public opinion. Just because health care reform was one of the main reasons Obama got elected is no reason for smart, tough, funny Senators to get stampeded into something stupid, something that smells suspiciously like SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!

Do you want the government telling you what to eat, how many aspirin to take, how many hours of sleep you need? Do you want the government examining your prostate? Well, that’s what’s going to happen if Obama’s plan goes through. So let’s be thankful that the finance committee has some members smart, funny and tough enough to just say no. Solid, fiscally responsible Republicans like Jon Kyl of Arizona, John Ensign of Nevada, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, and Mike Crapo of Idaho, men elected by the few to block the will of the many.

And let’s not overlook the Democratic comedians whose tough, smart, funny performance as members of the Senate Finance Committee ensures their place in the history of tomfoolery. Senators Blanche Lincoln — who? — of Arkansas; Ron Wyden — huh? — of Oregon; Tom Carper — who’s he? — of Delaware; Jeff Bingaman — oh, him — of New Mexico, and some other jokesters you probably never heard of.

Then there are other Democratic Senators not on the committee who have joined the hallowed ranks: Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, to name three.

How do you feel about some clown from North Dakota, who represents about 140 people, wrecking the health plan that you sent Obama to Washington to enact? Pretty funny, eh? But this is the new fiscal responsibility. It’s okay to spend a trillion dollars smashing up a country where we’re not wanted but let’s not put money into creepy, creeping socialistic ideas about health care. Let’s be responsible.

It’s all pretty funny; well, not that funny. The big question is whether a true funnyman like Al Franken can fit in in the Senate. Maybe, in time, but it will probably cost him his sense of humor.

South Carolina’s governor just retired the Wandering Politico’s Apology Cup for all time.

He apologized to his wife. He apologized to his four sons. He apologized to his staff for “creating a fiction in regard to where I was going.” He apologized to his friend Tom Davis and to “all the Tom Davises of the world.” He apologized to people of faith in South Carolina and throughout the nation. He apologized to his spiritual adviser. He apologized to his father-in-law. He apologized to his “dear, dear friend” from Argentina, where he had “spent the last five days of my life crying.”

He did not apologize to me, but he didn’t need to. What he does with his dick is none of my damned business, and that goes for the dicks of McGreevey, Spitzer, Clinton, Edwards, Vitter, Warren G. Harding and so on and so forth throughout the long annals of American politics. It does not go for specimens like Ensign and Craig, who obsess unwholesomely over the uses to which other people put their dicks.

Actually I thought Governor Sanford handled himself with a certain amount of class during his public ordeal, and I applaud him for it. And I particularly applaud his wife for the dignity she displayed in not standing by her man during his self-crucifixion.

It behooves us all to STFU until we figure out what’s actually happening in Iran. I’m talkin’ to you, McCain.

This from McClatchy:

TEHRAN, Iran — Supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his main rival in the disputed presidential election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, massed in competing rallies Tuesday as the country’s most senior Islamic cleric threw his weight behind opposition charges that Ahmadinejad’s re-election was rigged.

“No one in their right mind can believe” the official results from Friday’s contest, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri said of the landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime of handling Mousavi’s charges of fraud and the massive protests of his backers “in the worst way possible.”

“A government not respecting people’s vote has no religious or political legitimacy,” he declared in comments on his official Web site. “I ask the police and army personals (personnel) not to ‘sell their religion,’ and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before God…”

Carl Sandburg once wrote, “Why does a hearse horse snicker/ Hauling a lawyer away?”

And why should I snicker when yet another Republican pol is caught with his zipper down? Gingrich, Craig, Vitter, etc., etc., and now the beat goes on: Nevada senator John Ensign.

Snicker? When I gave Clinton and Edwards and Spitzer a pass?

Here’s why (h/t to Doonesbury):

“Last year I had an affair. I violated the vows of my marriage. It is the worst thing I have ever done in my life.”
— Senator John Ensign

“I came to that conclusion recently, and frankly it’s because of what he has put the country through. He has no credibility left.”
— Ensign, calling for Bill Clinton to resign over the Lewinsky affair

Father knows best, except, just maybe, when he’s sold us out to his campaign contributors in the insurance industry. Robert Parry at Consortium News:

As the health insurance industry and its defenders in Congress lay out their case against permitting a public option in a reform bill, perhaps their most curious argument is that some 119 million Americans are ready to dump their private plans and jump to something more like Medicare – and that’s why the choice can’t be permitted.

In other words, the industry and its backers are acknowledging that more than one-third of the American people are so dissatisfied with their private health insurance that they trust the U.S. government to give them a fairer shake on health care. The industry says its allies in Congress must prevent that.

The peculiar argument that 119 million Americans must be denied the public option that they prefer has been made most notably by Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which is one of two panels that has jurisdiction over the health insurance bill…

Talk about your great bumper stickers, huh? Here’s one Pennsylvania Democrat’s welcome to her party’s newest senator:

Pam Janvey, a Democratic committeewoman from Bucks County, found Specter’s presence at the gathering more than a little odd. “Am I in a dream?” she asked.

Janvey said that Specter hit all the right notes in his speech on Saturday and that although she had worked to defeat Specter in the past and never voted for him, she would back him this time around.

“Even when I have worked against Arlen over the years,” Janvey said, “I never felt the kind of fear that I did when I worked against Santorum…”

Here’s Rush Limbaugh again, still scribbling away on the walls of America’s toilets:

They don’t like Gitmo, we have to shut it down. They don’t like what we’ve done, fine, Obama will run around and apologize. I’m telling you, folks, it is not the United States of America that serves as Barack Obama’s role model. It’s other socialist nations that have failed and the concept of socialism that is his role model. I’ll tell you what, stupid little community organizer, organize this.

Sparky Satori at Shorts and Pants reminds us of a former racist activist on the Supreme Court — Chief Justice William Rehnquist. A superior work of snark, found in its entirety here.

November of last year, it was assumed that the USofA had finally vanquished the lingering ghosts of racism and was poised on the cusp of a new post-racial dawn. The long dark night of lynching and discrimination was finally over. “Huzzah!” bleated the media, smugly self-congratulatory.

But that was then. This is worse. And leave it to the hyper-sensitive Republicans to sniff out whiffs of the new racism being foisted upon the nation by its first black President. GOP stalwarts Newt Gringrich and Rush Limbaugh were quick to alert the country to a leading practitioner of this new racism, Sonia “Maria” Sotomayor ["SoSo" to her non-friends]. But she’s not your average garden-variety racist, according to the GOP braintrust. Per Newt and Rush, she is a “reverse racist,” rarer than even the “Albino Negro.” This alone should disqualify her from sitting on the Supreme Court, which has never, ever had any benchers who suffered from an iota of racial insensitivity…

Here’s a snippet from the Nixon tapes to give you an idea of the vetting process from which Rehnquist emerged. Full transcript here. As always with Nixon, fascinating stuff. Sure he was evil, but nobody ever called him dumb.

RMN: Yeah, all right, call me back when you get it. But remember, let’s figure on the Rehnquist thing. The political mileage basically is the same kind of mileage if we were to go with Smith. The idea being that we are appointing a highly qualified man. That’s really what it gets down to.

[Attorney General] John Mitchell: Yeah.

RMN: And also he doesn’t smack of the corporate lawyer as much as Smith.

JM: No, he’s more of a general practitioner.

RMN: Incidentally, what is Rehnquist? I suppose he’s a damn Protestant?

JM: I’m sure of that. He’s just as WASPish as WASPish can be.

RMN: Yeah, well, that’s too damn bad. Tell him to change his religion.

JM: All right, I’ll get him baptized this afternoon.

RMN: Well, get him baptized and castrated, no, they don’t do that, I mean they circumcise— no, that’s the Jews. Well anyway, whatever he is, get him changed.

That rancid rust-bucket that is the Republican Party sits ever lower in the water and appears to be foundering. Should we attempt a rescue or let the wretched old tub sink to the bottom? The vote here is for the coup de grâce. Put a torpedo into her amidships and let her go down without further ado. Glub, glub, GOP; it’ll be a far better world without you.

There was a time when the Republican Party stood for something, or at least appeared to stand for something. It took its name and founding philosophy from the Jeffersonian republican ideal, although the party would soon enough make a mockery of its idealistic name by becoming the champion of short-sighted greed and selfishness, the party of business.

But it started out as the party of the antislavery activists in the 1850s and came to power with the election of Lincoln in 1860. It was the party of the Tafts, dull, toothy Ohioans, who championed a conservative philosophy of self-reliance and fiscal responsibility, a credo now honored mostly in the breach. For reckless economic policy, no party has ever come close to the modern GOP. And it started with Reagan and his supply-side shenanigans. You may recall that Bush Senior referred to this nonsense as “voodoo economics.”

It was the party of Teddy Roosevelt, who took on the big corporate monopolies and, when he wasn’t starting wars or shooting beautiful animals, upheld a certain maverick standard of governmental integrity. It was the party of Grant and Eisenhower, successful warriors, each of whom served two terms in the White House without ever quite getting the hang of the job or looking like they really wanted it.

Then there was handsome, hapless Warren Harding, another Ohioan, and his equally inspiring successor, Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge famously said, “The chief business of the American people is business.” He is remembered mostly for wearing an Indian headdress. And don’t forget Hoover, who said, after the great Wall Street crash, that the markets would restore financial order if given the chance.

And, of course, there was Nixon and his infamous Committee to Reelect the President, aptly shortened to CREEP. And Reagan, who played the part so well many people believed he actually knew what he was doing. And Bush Two. And Bush Two again.

Somehow the country survived two terms of W., but will his party? How can any self-respecting Republican even whisper words of fiscal integrity in the mountainous shadow of a Bush-incurred debt so high it blots out the sun? Well, silly question. Of course they can, have, and will again, but the difference is that now nobody takes them seriously. When Newt Gingrich emerges from under his troll’s bridge to test the presidential waters, is this not a sign that the party is in its death throes?

Meanwhile, all those Wall Street banks, those bastions of fiscal discipline and Republican virtue, have lined up for billion-dollar hand-outs from a Democratic administration. Whether or not the big bailouts were a good idea is debatable. What is not debatable is the spectacular hypocrisy of the big shots that flew down to Washington in private jets to beg Congress for public money. How many of them were not Republicans?

Sure it’s like kicking a cripple, but let’s explore the crossed synapses of the Newt brain anyway. Here’s Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal’s house liberal:

…As an example of this habit of mind, consider the essay that Mr. Gingrich published in Human Events last week. “The current liberal bloodlust over interrogations,” he wrote, referring to the Nancy Pelosi-CIA flap, is merely “the Left’s attempt to hunt down and purge its political opponents.” And yet, in a different essay he published on the very same day (this one in the Washington Times), Mr. Gingrich regretted that, in all the years of Republican rule, “there was a strategic failure to root out the left and the special interests of the left.”

Mr. Gingrich’s side failed to “root out” and destroy their opponents; now he imagines that this is what is being done to his team.

Psychotherapists might call this “projection,” and something similar pervades the essay the remarkable Mr. Gingrich published only two days later in the Washington Post. Here the former speaker can be found calling for a populist revolt in the “great tradition of political movements rising against arrogant, corrupt elites.”

A healthy sentiment, to be sure, except for the fact that “elites” are exactly what decades of conservative rule gave us by unleashing the banks, smashing the unions, and funneling the economy’s gains into the hands of the rich…

Facts have trouble making themselves heard over the orchestrated noise from offstage, right. But here are a couple anyway, from Paul Krugman’s blog:

Everyone knows that lots of Canadians come to America in search of medical care. But what everyone knows is wrong: a careful study concluded,

The numbers of true medical refugees—Canadians coming south with their own money to purchase U.S. health care—appear to be handfuls rather than hordes.

On the other hand:

Driven by rising health care costs at home, nearly 1 million Californians cross the border each year to seek medical care in Mexico, according a new paper by UCLA researchers and colleagues published today in the journal Medical Care.

In which The Rude Pundit reminds us of how dewy-eyed the affirmative activists of the GOP got over Torture Boy Gonzales:

Here’s what Senate Judiciary Committee member Orrin “Still Crazy After All These Years” Hatch said back in 2005 about the opposition to Alberto Gonzales when the White House counsel was nominated to be Attorney General:

“Look, this is not just any nomination. This is a nomination for the Attorney General of the United States of America. This is the first Hispanic ever nominated for that position, or for any of the big four positions in the Cabinet of any President... I personally love Hispanic people. Frankly, I know my friends in the Hispanic community, and Hispanic people all over America, are watching this debate, and they are sensing something very unfair going on here…”

Of course, that was way back when, eh? A couple of weeks ago, in response to a remark by Judge Sonia Sotomayor that “the court of appeals is where policy is made,” Hatch said that it was “a problem... She would have, I think, a more difficult time if she was nominated because of statements like that... I’m not very happy about judges who will substitute their own policy preferences for what the law really is, who think that they can run the country from the bench when they actually have a limited role.”

Man, it’d be awesome to live with no self-awareness…

Brady Bonk already wrote it, so I don’t have to. Read his full post here:

The timeline in my head: President Bill Clinton is pursued on a variety of trumped up charges by insane people who clinch their teeth whenever they speak his name, mostly probably because President Bill Clinton gets more pussy than any of them could ever imagine. I am just speculating. One ridiculous charge sticks: He lied about sex. On that one silly charge they can hang a million silly hats. To this day, say “Bill Clinton” in front of a conservative. I guarantee you he will not be able to resist joking about Clinton and women and cigars and the blue dress.

Based on Monigate, the newly-appointed Bush administration could declare it opposite day in America. They are warned by transition team officials that international terrorism might be their biggest dread. The warnings are largely ignored in favor of a general consensus to fight the Cold War all over again and, as was likely discussed though we’ll never know in Chaney’s super-duper top-secret energy meetin’s, to go get all of that frickin’ oil. But the Bush Administration could turn its back on the Israeli peace process, could abrogate treaties, could and should, according to their wisdom, do everything the opposite of how that dumb bubba did it, because, you know … he got a blow job…

Every day in every way, the manufactured debate about closing Guantánamo gets sillier and sillier. Here’s a specimen from Texas laying out the logic:

“No good purpose is served by allowing known terrorists, who trained at terrorist training camps, to come to the U.S. and live among us,” said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the senior Republican on the committee. “Guantanamo Bay was never meant to be an Ellis Island.”

The picture below shows the GOP firebrand himself in a rare non-whimpering moment. A Vietnam non-vet, he fulfilled his military obligation by attending the Texas Military Institute, an Episcopal prep school in San Antonio.

From Paul Krugman’s blog:

So I see Richard Posner has decided that modern conservatism is intellectually bankrupt. And Bruce Bartlett has a new book saying it’s time to let go of Reagan.

At one level it’s good to see decent people showing some intellectual flexibility (Bartlett, in particular, has always come across as someone with whom one can have honest disagreements.) And yet — why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? I mean, anyone who actually listened to what Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were saying in 1994, let alone what passed for thought in the Bush administration, should have realized long ago that if there ever was an intellectual basis for modern conservatism, it was long gone.

And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

I once sat next to a woman on a plane who told me she had a neurotic fear of Robin Williams. Lurid images of his face materialized in her mind when she tried to go to sleep at night, she told me, visibly shuddering as she described it. Poor woman, I thought. She’s obviously on the verge of some kind of breakdown. Little did I know I would soon fall prey to a similar neurosis, except the object of my revulsion isn’t Robin Williams, but Newt Gingrich.

Everything about the man fills me with neuralgic horror. If he comes on TV when my nephew and niece are in the room I instinctively shield them. He reminds me of the pushy, aggressive, stinky fat kid who sucked up to the teachers but made faces behind their backs in an effort to win friends; the first one to misbehave but the first one to go tattle on someone else; or the precociously horny perverted kid who rummaged through his own mother’s panty drawer and got caught masturbating in the bathroom in fourth grade. Now he’s like the guy whose eyes dart around your living room when he’s standing at your front door talking to you, and he leaves a slimy film on your hand after he shakes it.

He sits just a little too close to your eleven year old daughter, talks to her just a little too much, and looks at her just a little too long than is proper. He’s the kind of sleaze who would not only molest a girl scout, but steal her cookies too. Why is it so easy to imagine him in an oversized army surplus jacket lurking near a playground, jerking and twitching in the bushes, a dog-eared copy of The Third Wave falling out of his pocket? “Psst, little girl, come sit on Uncle Newty’s lap and he’ll tell you why women can’t live in foxholes.” He just seems to be, I think, what the pre-Clarence Thomas Supreme Court would have called prurient.

Just when I’m about to admit I have a problem, head down to mental health and beg for zoloft or prozac or valium, I tell myself no, it’s okay. I’m not crazy, American political culture is crazy. To prove it, I do a simple web search for some of Newt’s greatest hits, and it quickly yields the following:

If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for thirty days because they get infections and they don’t have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they’re relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn’t matter, you know. These things are very real. On the other hand, if combat means being on an Aegis-class cruiser managing the computer controls for twelve ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.

Men are basically little piglets, you drop them in a ditch, they roll around in it, doesn’t matter …

I rest my case.

Then I feel better, and I no longer worry about Newt’s efforts to become the Republican leader again. Any party that nominates that viscous worm to be their chief can’t possibly succeed, right?

Then I think about Mussolini, and Hitler, and Karl Rove, and all the other ugly little men who fomented even uglier coups and I’m back to square one. It is precisely these kinds of toad-like imps that are forever angling and scheming and plotting to gain power and upset the peace of the world. That’s why he bothers me so much. It’s enough to make we watch re-runs of Mork and Mindy in an effort to replace his face with the goofy but harmless image of Robin Williams in my mind.

Here’s The National Review’s recipe for bringing the Zombie Party back to life:

Strange as it may seem, the best GOP spokesman right now appears to be former Vice President Dick Cheney. He has taken the Obama administration to task over its declassification of CIA torture memos. He says Team Obama has made America less safe. He’s right. Perhaps he can rally the party?

This will be all over the news, of course, but I can’t resist putting it up. Fascinating and truly, truly important. Heute Specter, Morgen die Franken, as Hitler used to say. Well, something like that anyway.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Veteran Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter told colleagues Tuesday that he switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party, Sen. Harry Reid says.

The Specter party switch would give Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate majority of 60 seats if Al Franken holds his current lead in the disputed Minnesota Senate race.

“Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right,” Specter said in a statement posted by his office on PoliticsPA.com.

“Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”

Theoretically the New York Times’ new conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, is supposed to run Tuesdays, starting today. He doesn’t appear on today’s website, though. But if you search for his name, his debut column shows up — datelined yesterday. It didn’t run in yesterday’s print edition, however, nor does it appear in the Opinion section of yesterday’s web site.

So who the hell knows what’s going on? Anyway, here’s the link to that damned, elusive columnist. And below is a sample. The improvement over his predecessor, the hapless and clueless William Kristol, is already striking.

At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise…

As a candidate, Cheney would have doubtless been as disciplined and ideologically consistent as McCain was feckless. In debates with Barack Obama, he would have been as cuttingly effective as he was in his encounters with Joe Lieberman and John Edwards in 2000 and 2004 respectively. And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might — might! — have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that’s necessary if it hopes to regain power.

David Brooks put his finger right on our main problem as a people today, although he doesn’t seem to recognize it as a problem. We are not individuals, standing squarely and independently on our two feet like mountain men. Neither were the mountain men.

We are herd animals, social animals. We cannot and do not live alone. Anyone who tries to tell us different is either a damned fool, ignorant of history and science, or a con man trying to hustle us. Or a Republican. Or do I repeat myself?

So whom do they turn to in times like these? Themselves. Americans have always felt that they are masters of their own fate. Decade after decade, Americans stand out from others in their belief that their own individual actions determine how they fare. That conviction has been utterly unshaken by the global crisis. In question after question, large majorities say their own actions will determine how much they will make, how well they will endure the recession, how healthy they will be and so on.

The crisis has not sent Americans running to government for relief. Nor has it led to a populist surge in anti-business sentiment. In a recent Gallup poll, 55 percent of Americans said that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 32 percent said big business. Those answers are near historical norms.

The Rude Pundit is shocked, shocked— You can tell because he got through an entire paragraph without potty-mouthing.

But what doesn’t come through immediately is the answer to a simple question: why? Why did the Bush administration commit and allow (and encourage, if not force others to commit) what are, seemingly without a doubt, treaty-busting crimes? Because, see, you read something like footnote 10 on page 2 and you come across this line: “According to Gonzales, the ‘positive’ consequences of setting aside the Third Geneva Convention include ‘preserving flexibility’ and ‘substantially reduc[ing] the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act,’” and you realize that, whatever the motivation of the people involved, they didn’t care. And they didn’t care for a simple reason to answer that simple question: the Bush administration thought it was the beginning of an ascendant Republican reign and that they’d never be investigated.

From Paul Krugman’s blog:

Matthew Yglesias notes that Tom DeLay is under the strange misapprehension that Texas is rich thanks to its low taxes and lack of regulation.

Just one minor issue: you really shouldn’t use median income, which can be distorted to the extent that inequality differs across states. You should instead use income per capita. As it happens, the comparison is even more striking. Texas, with its glorious free market regime and deeply incentive-creating 25 percent rate of health uninsurance, has a per capita income of $37,187; nanny-state New Jersey, with its oppressive taxes and regulation of everything (what it takes to get permission to cut down a dying tree … ), has a per capita income of $49,194.

Here’s a terrifying look into the mind of McCain, excerpted from a Politico posting. One wonders — well, one doesn’t really wonder — just how far out of the ball park Governor Palin’s answers were.

John McCain’s lead vice presidential vetter said Friday that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin “impressed” in her interview, knocking the senator’s most important questions “out of the park.”

A.B. Culvahouse, a powerful Washington lawyer and former counsel to President Reagan, told an audience of Republican lawyers that for McCain, selecting a vice president came down to three questions: Why do you want to be vice president? Are you prepared to use nuclear weapons? And the CIA has identified Osama bin Laden, but if you take the shot there will be multiple civilian casualties. Do you take the shot?

“She knocked those questions out of the park,” he said at an event held at the National Press Club by the Republican National Lawyers Association. “We came away impressed.”

Here and there small groups of misinformed and manipulated citizens are gathering today throughout this great land for the purpose of dropping tea bags into liquids. They have been told by Fox News and a billionaires’ lobbyist named Dick Armey that this orgy of tea bagging will put an end to taxation with representation. Or something.

Most of the foot soldiers in this army of Dick’s seem not to know that tea bagging has a very specific meaning in the adult entertainment world, a meaning which has nothing to do with relieving the anguish of the very richest Americans at the prospect of being taxed once more at the same rate that existed the last time the nation’s budget was balanced.

Nor are most of these poor saps likely to be aware that their movement has its very own song, like The Internationale, or Boola Boola. The tea baggers’ fight song is called “I Love It When They Bounce,” and Karen Marie has been kind enough to call it to our attention. Here it is, performed by Supafloss:

For those of you who don’t know (I didn’t), John Batchelor is a conservative radio host whose show is heard in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and many other markets. The sample below comes from an extended and astonishing rant he published today in The Daily Beast. If you could use a true Holy Shit moment, and who couldn’t, go read it all.

…What about the Republican Party right now? Isn’t it on radio and TV claiming to be the party of fiscal responsibility and American power? Bypassing the stupidity of these claims, I am on radio, on what is called right-wing radio, and it is easy for me to see that my loudest colleagues, who compulsively repeat the cant of Conservatism for Dummies, are not sincere students of the Republican Party but rather barkers, hookers, establishmentarian jesters, cultists, and, in the worst instance, just thatch-headed whiners.

Fox News is a parade of wet-eared Republican office holders, yet there is usually just one each allowed of the categories the Democrats own in multitudes: a Jewish-American, an Asian-American, an African-American, a Hispanic-American.

Then there is the beauty pageant of fast-talking, rude Fox blondes — if they are not all the same woman in mood swings — who stridently mock the Democrats, yet have almost nothing to say about the Republicans, as if the party was a disappointing ex or mother’s latest beau.

The party’s death 76 years ago was never more obvious than over the last six months of the financial crisis. The Democrats sensibly blamed the feckless, bootless Bush administration for the collapse of the markets. Tongue-tied Bush and dyspeptic Cheney defended themselves with grunts and sarcasm before they surrendered to Congress by sending out the plutocrat Hank Paulson with a plan called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program).

A breathing Republican Party would have brought out the flintlocks, boarded the windows, and settled down for a defense of the republic. Instead, the Republican leadership in the House and Senate rushed to grab the pork bribery and vote with the Democrats. John Boehner, Roy Blunt, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, and Judd Gregg distinguished themselves as dhimmis and were later rewarded by the victorious Democrats by being granted parakeet cages for offices in the new Congress.

The House Republicans now boast that they voted a goose egg against the stimulus package, but this was just the twitching of the corpse. The truth about the House Republicans — cowards, sycophants, and snobs just like 1930s lot — is illustrated by the fact that 85 of them voted for the ludicrous AIG bonus-confiscation bill written on the back of a parking ticket.

The Republican Party’s death doesn’t really threaten anyone, and I puzzle why Democrats and independents who vote Democratic spend words and worry debating the look of the corpse. We few Republicans with long memories wander around the cemetery admiring the tombstones and enjoying the rain.

I can hear you doubting that this could truly be the end. The final stage of grief is acceptance.

See? The Peruvians can do it.

LIMA, Peru — A special tribunal convicted former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori of murder and kidnapping on Tuesday and sentenced him to 25 years in prison, saying he authorized a government death squad during the Shining Path insurgency.

The 70-year-old former leader, who remains popular for rescuing Peru from the brink of economic and political collapse in the early 1990s, was convicted of what the court called “crimes against humanity,” including 25 murders by a military hit squad.

Presiding judge Cesar San Martin told a hushed courtroom there was no question Fujimori authorized the creation of the Colina unit, which the court said killed at least 50 people during its 15 months as the state crushed the fanatical Shining Path rebels.

Interesting development. Maybe we’ll find out if my theory (two posts down) has anything to it. Judge Sullivan is an old friend and former colleague of Attorney General Holder, who is by today’s announcement taken off the spot.

Holder no longer has to investigate his own department — a job which, if vigorously done, might alienate DOJ’s career bureaucrats and would certainly bring charges of partisanship from the GOP. If the investigation turned into a whitewash, on the other hand, the attacks would come from the Democratic left.

But if done by Judge Sullivan, tough noogies. He’s got life tenure.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge today set aside a jury’s guilty verdict and the indictment against former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, then announced he was appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the government attorneys in the case for failing their constitutional duties to ensure a fair trial…

Holder said an internal investigation had been launched into the matter, but Judge Sullivan said he was not content to allow the Justice Department’s probe to serve as punishment for the lawyers involved in the case. He said he had asked a former military judge, Henry Schulke III of Washington D.C., to investigate the conduct of five prosecutors in the case for potential obstruction of justice.

They are: the head of the Justice Deparment’s Public Integrity Section, William Welch; the lead trial attorney, Brenda Morris; two trial attorneys in the Public Integrity Section, Nicholas Marsh and Edward Sullivan; and two assistant U.S. Attorneys in Alaska, Joseph Bottini and James Goeke…

I need a little help from all you lawyers out there. In the coverage of the prosecutorial misconduct in ex-senator Ted Stevens’s trial, I haven’t seen a single mention of what seems to me at least a strong possibility.

Did the prosecutors from Bush’s Justice Department throw the case deliberately?

Consider the time line. The longest-serving Republican senator in history is facing corruption trial on charges so solid the chances of an acquittal were almost nonexistent. And at the same time, he’s up for reelection.

Normally the trial would have dragged on till the election was safely past, but unfortunately the charges were already public. Made public by whom? Why? Wouldn’t Rove’s sock puppets in the Justice Department simply have buried the whole matter?

Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe they knew somebody in the Alaska office would blow the whistle if a cover-up occurred. Was there such a somebody? We’ll get back to that.

Meanwhile, indulge me. Assume the prosecutors were afraid to deep-six the case for fear of being exposed. They make this known to Stevens. How can they possibly get him off the hook and back in the Senate so the Democrats won’t have a filibuster-proof majority?

The only thing they can come up with is for Stevens to ask for the trial to be speeded up so as to get it out of the way before the election. But that would only serve everybody’s purposes if the verdict were not guilty — and the evidence against him is overwhelming. Maybe that doesn’t matter, though.

Knowing that a guilty verdict (reached eight days before the election) was otherwise inevitable, mightn’t they have sabotaged their own case so that the judge would declare a mistrial — as he almost did on one occasion.

That would position the Republicans to argue that Stevens was an innocent man who deserves re-election — exactly the argument that they are in fact making today, now that Obama’s attorney general has moved to drop all charges.

Now let’s go back to why the case wasn’t just buried in the first place. Yes, there was a straight arrow on the prosecution side who was very likely to go public if the Bush Justice Department tried to bury the case. He is FBI agent Chad Joy, and he did indeed wind up filing a complaint against the FBI’s lead agent in the investigation.

I admit this sounds far-fetched, but then desperate times may have called for desperate measures. The thing that has puzzled me from the beginning is the blatant tactics of the prosecution. Time after time they seemed to be begging the judge to call them on their unconstitutional concealment of exculpatory evidence from the defense team.

And there wasn’t even any point to hiding that evidence: the charge was taking something of value in return for services rendered, not whether the renovation of Stevens’s chalet was only worth $80,000 rather than three times that. Either way Stevens is whoring out his office; how much he charges clients is legally irrelevant.

The only explanation for the prosecutors’ conduct that even vaguely makes sense to me is a calculated decision on their part to shoot themselves in the foot.

A big piece of the puzzle still missing — at least from any of the stories I’ve read — is the actual makeup of the prosecution team. The U.S. Attorney in Anchorage may be assumed to be a creature of Rove’s, but maybe not. The office seems to have been headed for the last couple of years by interim appointees. Career prosecutors, Bush hacks? Both? Were they vetted by the ineffable Monica Goodling?

If my idea is crazy or impossible, somebody explain to me what other explanation there could be. As Rachel Maddow says, talk me down.

Here’s TPM on how the GOP is twisting a scientist’s study of how much cap-and-trade legislation would cost. Cops, who are intimately familiar with this process, call it “testilying.”

• April, 2007: Reilly and several coauthors release a paper titled "Assessment of U.S. Cap-and-Trade Proposals, which estimates early annual revenues from such legislation would run $366 billion.

• Sometime between April, 2007 and March, 2009: House Republicans get a hold of his paper, divide $366 billion by the number of households in America, and conclude, erroneously, that the quotient ($3,128) will be the average cost per home.

• March, 2009: Republicans begin using this number in press releases, citing Reilly's study.

• Shortly thereafter: The Obama administration gets in touch with Dr. Reilly and asks him to explain his study and the number — he corrects the record.

• A week or so ago: Independently, a woman who says she's with the House Republicans calls Reilly — aware of the number, she invites him to come testify against cap and trade legislation. Reilly informs her that her number is probably wrong, and that he supports cap and trade legislation.

• A couple days ago: A group contacts Reilly to inform him that a large number of press releases were being issued, still trumpeting the false cost…

Larisa Alexandrovna is properly outraged that the sleazy Alaskan bagman Ted Stevens is catching a break from Obama’s Justice Department while the Bush holdovers who railroaded Don Siegelman, et al., for Karl Rove are still in their DOJ jobs. See it all here.

Misconduct won't be tolerated, right? Then someone explain to me why Alice Martin and Leura Canary are still US Attorneys? And someone also explain to me why Stevens is the priority? No really, not Don Siegelman, not Paul Minor, not Wes Teel, not John Whitfield, and not countless others. Ted Stevens apparently gets to go to the front of the line. Why?

Every good brainwashed American knows that the government couldn’t run a two-car funeral. Only the cleansing, invigorating winds of free competition can bring efficiency to large organizations. Without that what have you got?

The DMV, that’s what. Overpaid, lazy, surly bureaucrats. Poor service, long lines, arrogant indifference, cronyism. Yatata, yatata. You know the drill, because you’ve heard it all your life from the corporate community and its fully-owned subsidiary, the Republican Party.

Now think back over all the times in your own life that you’ve been scorned, cheated, ignored, defrauded, neglected and otherwise screwed over by giant, faceless, impersonal, uncaring bureaucracies. Was it the Post Office? Was it the Social Security Administration? Was it Medicare?

Or weren’t your most maddening experiences of all, now that you think about it, those losing battles with the power company, the cable company, the phone company, the insurance company, and the credit card company?

If so, you shouldn’t be surprised to read this:

As Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation explains in the new issue of the Washington Monthly, there is a bright shining example from not so long ago of government bureaucrats engineering the revival of an industry easily as troubled as today’s automakers and, if anything, more central to the economy.

In 1976 Washington took over Penn Central and five other bankrupt railroads and folded them into a government-sponsored entity, Conrail. New management was recruited, federal dollars pumped in, major structural reforms instituted. A decade later, a thriving Conrail was sold off in what was, at the time, the largest IPO in U.S. history. A fluke? Hardly. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson put the entire railroad industry under government control, and later placed it back in private hands in much better shape than when he got it.

While the parallels with yesterday’s railroads and today’s auto industry are not exact, they are close enough to provide many useful lessons. The most important is this: as the automakers return to Washington for a second round of assistance, the greatest danger may well be not that government will intervene too much, but that it won’t intervene enough.

No wonder the hopelessly incompetent Bushies mounted their failed 2002 coup attempt against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. This (via BoRev) is what terrifies the GOP about “socialism.”

“Changes in the structure of income distribution between 2002 and 2007 reveal three clearly distinct situations. Nine countries (Argentina, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and Paraguay) have significantly narrowed the gap between the groups at the extreme ends of the spectrum, both by increasing the poorer groups’ share of total income and by lowering that of the highest-income households.

“The most notable reductions in the two aforementioned indicators (36% and 41%, respectively) were recorded in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Significant improvements were also observed in Bolivia, Brazil and Nicaragua, where both indicators fell by about 30…”

What Cepal fails to point out, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the politics of all this. Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela as the fastest improver? A pile of centre-left governments (Evo Morales in Bolivia, Lula in Brazil and — ahem — Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua) following close behind? This is provocative stuff.

Don’t get too excited, though. These improvements only get us back to the level of the early 1990s, (though that’s no small achievement in a world where inequality generally goes in the opposite direction). Moreover, a lot of these positive trends are now under threat from the impact of the global crisis, which is cutting regional growth to zero (from 5%), hitting employment and wage levels and reversing the trend towards formalization. Sigh.

William McGurn has been variously employed as a writer for the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch and George W. Bush, entitling him to the soft bigotry of low expectations. In today’s WSJ, he manages to clear the bar:

By choosing Fort Bragg for her first official trip outside the capital last Thursday, Michelle Obama signaled that she will use her position as First Lady to promote one of America’s most deserving causes: our military families. Plainly the families loved it. Just look at the smiles on those children as she read them “The Cat in the Hat.”

So it was just a little disconcerting the next morning to hear the First Lady explain how she came to this issue during last year’s campaign. “I think I was like most Americans,” she told ABC News. “Pretty oblivious to the life of military families. Sort of taking it for granted.”

Perhaps Mrs. Obama did take these families for granted. Surely, however, it’s extraordinary to suggest that “most Americans” did the same.

The game here is to whelp a meme that attacks the enemy’s strong point, as the McCain campaign did when it tried to turn candidate Obama’s crowd appeal into a thing odious to all Americans: celebrity.

Look at McGurn’s last paragraph above to see how the trick is done. Mrs. Obama had said that she was “oblivious to the life of military families.” And that most Americans were too.

This is true beyond argument. William McGurn is also oblivious to that life, and so am I. Perhaps less oblivious than McGurn, since I once comprised half of a military family. But that was long ago, and now I, too, am oblivious. So are Rupert Murdoch and George W. Bush and most of the members of the latter’s administration and for that matter most of America. Nixon had that very outcome foremost in his mind when he ended the draft in 1973.

Now look at what McGurn has done with Mrs. Obama’s unexceptionable words. The First Lady is no longer taking the “life of military families” for granted; all of a sudden she is taking the families themselves for granted.

“It,” as you and I and McGurn know perfectly well, is a singular pronoun referring back in this case to “life.” Big difference, but McGurn knows his readers won’t notice. So he segues into the “extraordinary” news that Michelle Antoinette has the colossal nerve to think that real Americans are as ungrateful for the sacrifices of America’s military families as she is herself — her with her fancy Chicago designer dresses and her big arms and her disgusting “popularity.”

It will be interesting to see if this swill makes it into the media mainstream. Don’t be surprised if it does. Remember how a draft-dodging dry drunk turned Kerry from a war hero into a cowardly malingerer with insufficiently large pieces of shrapnel in his body?

And remember back in 2000 how the same smear machine used the same truth-twisting methods as McGurn’s to turn a future Nobelist into a pathetic pathological liar? If your memory is hazy, take a look at this careful dissection of Washington’s media manipulation by Robert Parry.

These sleazy techniques worked to get George W. Bush into the White House and they are already being used to drive Barack Obama out of it.

Good rant from The Rant:

…The desperation of the Republicans at this stage is a truly funny thing to behold. Jindal is being discussed as a possible nominee to run against Obama in 2012. The reason for that is obvious as well. There is no way in hell they’ll be able to run a white guy in four years. It will either be Bobby Jindal - or a white woman. Take that to the bank. Better yet, stuff it under your mattress.

Keep your eyes on these jackasses in the next few weeks. They’re going to to everything humanly possible to ensure that the president’s stimulus package is a complete and utter failure. Count on them to make statements in the press so reckless that the market responds in a negative way. As has been stated on this site before, they know their history. After FDR was inaugurated in 1933, they would not control the executive branch of our government for a full twenty years. Their very survival depends on the destruction of this country’s infrastructure. To hell with the American people…

The title above is a quote from Ronald Reagan at the 1988 Republican National Convention. He was trying to access a John Adams quote, “Facts are stubborn things,” but something more appropriate to the man and the occasion popped out.

The essay below is from my neighbor Jim, more of whose stuff can be seen here.

Compare and contrast:

1980 may seem kind of arbitrary as the jump off for the end of empire, but the economics bear it out. Under Reagan, government disbursements and revenues, as a share of GDP, jumped a full six percentage points. More, if you include his unfunded moral hygiene mandates.

All the Republicans talked Rand, Friedman, inter alia, but they acted like straightforward right wing military Keynesians. Military Keynesianism is of course nothing new in the US. But prior to 1980 there was a dominant Bismarckian consensus (have I dropped enough names yet?) that it had to be matched by social spending, otherwise the exercise of hard power would eventually become financially unsustainable.

You cannot extract surplus value — i.e. have capitalism — in great heaping bushel baskets unless you have a government willing to exercise single payer monopsony power over basic human needs, basic scientific research and renewable sources of the energy needed to drive all this. Lo and behold, the exercise of hard power is now done on credit, with only the threat of mutually assured destruction holding our creditors at bay.

I suppose one could point to a cultural shift in the eighties, as there certainly was one, but I prefer a bit more systemic determinism.

The political economy of capitalism is easiest to manage through psychological terrorism. It’s a cheap and effective way of outsourcing the quotidian enforcement of corporate feudalism to vigilante moral panic artists. There’s no shortage of people willing to enforce for free. Hell, they’ll even pay for the dubious privilege.

People become inured to this, querulous and rebellious, and the terrorism has to be stepped up. Red scares have to be coupled with ethnic scares, drug scares, satanic child care scares and so forth. Going against that, as Carter did in an achingly minuscule way, is a positive step for capitalism and a negative step for capitalists. Their enforcement costs look to climb. People who aren’t constantly depressed and frightened get a little feisty.

Under Reagan, the “clever” work-around was burgeoning unfunded mandates to make the states take on domestic psychological terrorism, and yanking the social safety net away, while the central government threw surplus value to the cretinous capitalists, hand over fist. It’s been down hill ever since.

I can’t see why anyone would want to be president after Bush. It’s not a sane thing to do. I thought, and still think, that the Democrats would have been better off throwing the election. McCain would probably not have lasted four years and right wing military Keynesianism would have been discredited for a good long time. Getting stuck with cradling the appalling, ghoulish offspring that are roving mindlessly over a dying empire would have ruined him, and the most cretinous of the cretinous capitalists.

The Democrats could have trotted out old social democratic wine in new bottles and enjoyed thirty or forty years of crowing from the top of the DC shit hill. So it goes, I guess. And my goodness, doesn’t Carter look like a saint in comparison to every asshole that’s come since.

For Jim Kunstler it’s all about the oil — and who am I to argue? I remember Jimmy Carter putting the solar panels on the White House roof and Ronald Reagan tearing them down as one of his first acts in office. I remember the Republicans laughing at “moral equivalent of war,” and pointing out — oh, clever, clever Republicans — that its acronym was MEOW. But why go on. You remember too.

…Then, in 1979, the Ayatollah tossed out the Shah of Iran, we got another dose of oil problems, and a year later, President Jimmy Carter’s clear-eyed view of the oil situation as “the moral equivalent of war” got overturned in favor of Ronald Reagan’s dreadful Hollywood nostalgia projector. As usual in times of severe social stress, the public got delusional. Mr. Reagan was very lucky. During his tenure, two of the last great non-OPEC oil discoveries came into full production — Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and the North Sea — and took the leverage away from the Islamic oil nations who had been making us miserable with their threats, embargos, price-jackings, and hostage-takings.

Americans drew the false conclusion that Ronald Reagan was an economic genius (a similar thing happened in Great Britain with Margaret Thatcherism). The price of oil went down steeply while they were in office. Britain could kick back and enjoy it’s last remaining industry, banking, on a majestic cushion of energy resources. The USA resumed its major post-war industry: suburban sprawl building. Reaganism got elevated to the status of a religion, though it was little more than a twisted version of Eisenhower-on-steroids. Under Reagan, WalMart embarked on its campaign to destroy every main street economy in the nation. The Baby Boomers came back from the land, clipped their pony tails, discovered venture capital, real estate investment trusts, securitization of “consumer” debt, and the Hamptons. Greed was good. (No, really....)

Opposite Land, from the New York Times:

Most Senate Republicans remained opposed to the measure, criticizing it as a case study in excessive spending that would do little to lift the economy. Some conservatives indicated Friday night that they would push for time to study the new legislation before any final vote.

“We want to stimulate the economy, not mortgage the future of our children and grandchildren by the kind of fiscally profligate spending embodied in this legislation,” said Senator John McCain of Arizona, the defeated Republican presidential nominee, who has emerged as a chief opponent of the proposal.

Real World, from Media Matters:

Economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, explains: “Spending that is not stimulus is like cash that is not money. Spending is stimulus, spending is stimulus. Any spending will generate jobs. It is that simple. ... Any reporter who does not understand this fact has no business reporting on the economy.”

Unfortunately, many of the reporters who have shaped the stimulus debate don’t seem to understand that.

ABC’s Charles Gibson portrayed spending and stimulus as opposing concepts in a question to President Obama: “And as you know, there’s a lot of people in the public, a lot of members of Congress who think this is pork-stuffed and that it really doesn’t stimulate. A lot of people have said it’s a spending bill and not a stimulus…”

If there’s one fact that should be made clear in every news report about the stimulus package working its way through Congress, it is this: Government spending is stimulative.

That’s a basic principle of economics, and understanding it is essential to assessing any stimulus package. So it should be an underlying premise of the media’s coverage of the stimulus debate. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case. Indeed, reporters routinely suggest that spending is not stimulative.

Economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, explains: “Spending that is not stimulus is like cash that is not money. Spending is stimulus, spending is stimulus. Any spending will generate jobs. It is that simple... Any reporter who does not understand this fact has no business reporting on the economy.”

Unfortunately, many of the reporters who have shaped the stimulus debate don’t seem to understand that.

ABC’s Charles Gibson portrayed spending and stimulus as opposing concepts in a question to President Obama: “And as you know, there’s a lot of people in the public, a lot of members of Congress who think this is pork-stuffed and that it really doesn’t stimulate. A lot of people have said it’s a spending bill and not a stimulus.”

That formulation — “it’s a spending bill and not a stimulus” — is complete nonsense; it’s like saying, “This is a hot fudge sundae, not a dessert.” But nonsensical as it is, it has also been quite common in recent news reports.

There’s another problem with Gibson’s formulation, though — in describing the stimulus as a “spending bill,” he ignores the fact that the bill contains tax cuts, too. Lots and lots of tax cuts. And those tax cuts, by the way, provide less stimulus than government spending on things like food stamps and extending unemployment benefits. It probably goes without saying that Gibson didn’t ask if the bill would be more effective if the tax cuts were replaced by additional spending.

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, among others, has repeatedly suggested “welfare” provisions in the bill wouldn’t stimulate the economy. This is the exact opposite of true; those provisions are among the most stimulative things the government can possibly do. There are some fairly obvious reasons why that is true, beginning with the fact that if you give a poor person $100 in food stamps, you can be pretty sure they’re going to spend all $100 of it; but if you give a rich person $100 in tax cuts, they probably won’t spend much of it at all.

But we needn’t rely on logic and common sense to know that welfare spending is stimulative; economists study these things. One such economist is Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com, who served as an adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign. Zandi has produced a handy chart showing how much a variety of spending increases and tax cuts would stimulate the economy. According to Zandi, a dollar spent on increasing unemployment benefits yields $1.64 in increased gross domestic product, and a dollar spent on food stamps yields $1.73 in GDP.

As for tax cuts, Zandi says the most effective form is a payroll tax holiday. A one dollar reduction in federal revenues as a result of such a tax holiday would produce a $1.29 increase in GDP — far less than the benefit realized from extending unemployment benefits, increasing food stamps, providing general aid to state governments, or spending on infrastructure.

Yet if you turn on MSNBC any given morning, you’re likely to find Mika Brzezinski saying something like, “I want to look at the plan and how much of it is sort of welfare programs and how much are things that we know, either from history or because economic experts somehow know this, actually stimulates the economy.” Or like this: “Does this plan add up to the definition of stimulus? I don’t think it does. And I don’t question the value of food stamps and helping low-income people pay for college. It just shouldn’t be in this bill.” Or this: “If you’re gonna have welfare programs in this bill, call them welfare programs and pass them, but don’t call them facets of the bill meant to stimulate the economy. I do feel like there’s some old politics at play here.”

There’s old politics at play, all right — the old politics of demonizing “welfare spending” without any regard for the simple truth that such spending not only helps those Americans who are struggling the most feed their families, it also does more to stimulate the economy than anything else you can think of.

What you probably won’t see is Mika Brzezinski or Charles Gibson or any other TV reporter suggesting that the tax cuts in the bill are not stimulative and should be stripped — even though they are less effective as stimulus than unemployment benefits and food stamps.

At this point, it becomes impossible to ignore the elephant in the room: Television anchors like Charles Gibson are not going to qualify for food stamps anytime soon. But they would certainly benefit greatly from some tax cut provisions that wouldn’t do nearly as much to stimulate the economy.

(This is not the first time Gibson has shown himself to be badly out of touch on basic economic issues. During a Democratic presidential primary debate, Gibson challenged the candidates on their support for repealing President Bush’s tax cuts for people making more than $200,000 a year by saying that a family in which both parents are schoolteachers would be hit by the repeal. Gibson’s cluelessness was so apparent, the audience actually burst out laughing at him.)

So far, the news media’s coverage of the stimulus debate has consisted largely of repeating false Republican spin and pontificating about which side has been making their arguments more successfully (all the while ignoring the media’s own role in aiding the GOP.)

The bright side is that if reporters care about informing the public, it’s pretty easy to do — they just have to start basing their reports on the true premise that government spending is effective stimulus, rather than on the false premise that it isn’t. Everything else flows easily from there; for example, asking Republicans why they want to lard up the bill with less-stimulative tax cuts rather than unemployment benefits.

(Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.)

Another Bush League bait-and-switch operation, brought to you courtesy of the xenophobic /racist wing (is there any other?) of the GOP?

The raids on homes around the country were billed as carefully planned hunts for dangerous immigrant fugitives, and given catchy names like Operation Return to Sender.

And they garnered bigger increases in money and staff from Congress than any other program run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as complaints grew that teams of armed agents were entering homes indiscriminately.

But in fact, beginning in 2006, the program was no longer what was being advertised. Federal immigration officials had repeatedly told Congress that among more than half a million immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, they would concentrate on rounding up the most threatening — criminals and terrorism suspects.

Instead, newly available documents show, the agency changed the rules, and the program increasingly went after easier targets. A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either.

Here, as promised some time back, is a second installment from the oral history of Bush’s administration in the current Vanity Fair. The speaker is Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department:

John [Bellinger] and I had to work on the 9/11-commission testimony of Condi. Condi was not gonna do it, not gonna do it, not gonna do it, and then all of a sudden she realized she better do it. That was an appalling enterprise. We would cherry-pick things to make it look like the president had been actually concerned about al-Qaeda. We cherry-picked things to make it look as if the vice president and others, Secretary Rumsfeld and all, had been.

They didn’t give a shit about al-Qaeda. They had priorities. The priorities were lower taxes, ballistic missiles, and the defense thereof.

Ballistic missiles. Interesting that this seems to have been one of “their” two top priorities. Probably we can trace this back to Reagan and his Star Wars dreams. Reagan, like so many conservative Republicans, was a magical thinker. Their magic is Science. Ice cap melting? No problem, Science will take care of it. Peak oil? Relax and keep drilling, Science will turn sewage into electricity pretty soon. You’ll see.

So don’ worry, be happy.

Steve Benen says:

Once in a while, a politician drops the pretense and lets his true colors come through. In this brief interview, Dick Armey, perhaps best known for calling his then-colleague Barney Frank "Barney Fag," showed just what he's made of, before a national television audience.

Here’s the silver-tongued former House Majority Leader on Hardball, debating Joan Walsh, editor-in-chief of Salon.com:

In that spirit of frank and open-hearted goodwill toward even the most pathetic GOP hacks which lies at the very heart of Bad Attitudes, I offer this moving video:

From today’s New York Times:

[South Carolina Governor Mark] Sanford, a wealthy real estate investor, is often mentioned as a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2012, in part because he is seen as an exemplary adherent of the party’s low-government, antispending philosophy. He recently wrote an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal saying he was opposed to a “bailout” for states…

Mr. Sanford once carried two piglets onto the floor of the House chamber to symbolize his opposition to what he considered wasteful spending. One of the piglets promptly defecated; lawmakers were not amused. Indeed, though Republicans dominate both chambers, they have overriden hundreds of his vetoes on spending over the years, including, in one recent session, money to expand children’s health insurance, indigent defense, and to provide cost-of-living adjustments for retired state employees.

…here’s Down with Tyranny, reminding us of who funneled all that dough to the three monkeys from the auto industry so they could afford to fly their own cool corporate jets to Washington and rattle their tin cups at Congress for more:

Midway through Bush’s first term, the attempts to encourage U.S. car manufacturers to invest in fuel efficient vehicles were beaten back by Tom Delay and the Republican Party through manipulation of the tax code.

The GOP made it far more attractive to buy a big gas guzzling SUV than a small car by offering enormous tax loopholes for Escalades, Hummers, Lincoln Navigators, Suburbans and other mammoth monstrosities. They defiantly pushed Detroit into making more clunkers.

Except for a small handful of reactionary Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party — like Jane Harman, Steve Israel, Bud Cramer, Lipinski — this kind of human refuse — all the Democrats in the House voted no and all the Republicans but one moderate (Connie Morella from Maryland) voted yes.

So today we hear Republicans like Jon Kyl braying about how we should let the car companies go bankrupt because they were so stupid and incompetent for making the wrong product choices. What about Republican congressmen who mandated those decisions with their votes—

Then representatives/now senators like Jim DeMint (R-SC), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), David “Diapers” Vitter (R-LA), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and John Sununu (R-NH); and then backbenchers/now GOP leaders like John Boehner (R-0H), Eric Cantor (R-VA), David Dreier (R-CA), Adam Putnam (R-FL), Roy Blunt (R-MO), and Mike Pence (R-IN)?

Today they’re not braying about their past votes, only working diligently to further cripple the American labor movement and continue the economic enslavement of the working and middle class.

Abraham Lincoln: Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Theodore Roosevelt: When all is said and done, the rule of brotherhood remains as the indispensable prerequisite to success in the kind of national life for which we strive…

Our aim is to recognize what Lincoln pointed out: The fact that there are some respects in which men are obviously not equal; but also to insist that there should be … an equality before the law, and at least an approximate equality in the conditions under which each man obtains the chance to show the stuff that is in him when compared to his fellows.

Warren Harding: We drew to a pair of deuces, and filled.

Ronald Reagan: Facts are stupid things.

George W. Bush: You’re working hard to put food on your family…

Let’s take a stroll down history lane with Irving Kristol’s little boy Billy, okay?

In other words, this was a good Democratic year, but it is still a center-right country. Conservatives and the Republican Party will have a real chance for a comeback — unless the skills of the new president turn what was primarily an anti-Bush vote into the basis for a new liberal governing era.

Those were my thoughts when, a few minutes into his victory speech, just after midnight, Obama told his daughters, “And you have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the new White House.”

I gulped.

Not out of my deep affection for dogs, fond of them though I am. But because while we’ve all known that Obama is a very skillful politician, he hasn’t until now been a particularly empathetic one. Competence plus warmth is a pretty potent combination. Suddenly visions of the two great modern realigning presidents — Franklin Roosevelt (with his Scottish terrier Fala) and Ronald Reagan (with his Cavalier King Charles spaniel Rex) — flashed before my eyes. Maybe a realignment could be coming.

And let’s not forget the great political realignments sparked by George W. Bush’s Scottish Terrier Barney, Clinton’s Chocolate Lab, Buddy; Poppy Bush’s Springer Spaniel, Millie; Amy Carter’s Grits; Gerald Ford’s Golden Retriever, Liberty; Nixon’s Irish Setter, King Timahoe; Johnson’s Beagle and Little Beagle; Caroline Kennedy’s Welsh terrier, Charlie; Eisenhower’s Weimaraner, Heidi; Truman’s Irish Setter, Mike; and Hoover’s police dog, King Tut.

And, most notably of all, Coolidge’s Terrier Peter Pan, Airedale Paul Pry, white collie Rob Roy, Shetland sheepdog Calamity Jane, his two Chows, Tiny Tim and Blackberry, the brown collie Ruby Rough, the bulldog Boston Beans, King Kole, a police dog, Bessie, a yellow collie, and the family bird dog, Palo Alto.

This menagerie led directly to the political realignment, tectonic in its scope, which occurred when Hoover succeeded Coolidge. The latter, historians agree, was the only president Vermont has ever produced. He was known as “Silent Cal.” Cal (along with Calif) was then a common abbreviation for California, but in this case it was short for the president’s given name, which was “Calvin.”

No other president has borne the name Calvin, although there have been five Jameses, four Williams, four Johns, three Georges, and one Ulysses. The significance of this is unclear.

According to the Raleigh News & Observer:

Democrat Barack Obama is the unofficial winner in North Carolina, but the victory over Sen. John McCain won’t be sealed until provisional ballots are counted and certified next month.

Unofficial returns show Obama ahead by 13,746 votes.

Trends over the last 14 years point to Obama having a wider lead after the provisionals are counted, said Gary Bartlett, executive director of the State Board of Elections.

“I’m going to hold my breath until I die and then you’ll all be sorry” department: from The Kansas City Star—

As of late Wednesday, just more than 121 million votes had been counted in the race for president. In 2004, there were 122.3 million voters.

This year’s number may grow as returns from California and Oregon are added. Still, experts’ predictions that this year’s turnout would far surpass that of 2004 may have been too optimistic.

The main culprit: While Obama’s total vote exceeded that of George Bush’s four years ago by more than a million ballots, McCain’s total votes ended up far short of John Kerry’s losing effort in 2004.

In other words, Republican turnout dipped substantially.

“I always said there was going to be a downturn in the Republican turnout,” said Curtis Gans, a nationally known voting expert.

“There was discouragement about an election it didn’t look like they could win … and right-wing Republicans didn’t see McCain as one of their own.”

This clip, courtesy of Outta the Cornfield, was made at a GOP rally in Denver.

More good news for Obama, from Sarah Palin and her team of mavericks:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Gov. Sarah Palin’s signature accomplishment — a contract to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48 — emerged from a flawed bidding process that narrowed the field to a company with ties to her administration, an Associated Press investigation shows…

Despite Palin’s boast of a smart and fair bidding process, the AP found that her team crafted terms that favored only a few independent pipeline companies and ultimately benefited the winner, TransCanada Corp.

The leader of Palin’s pipeline team had been a partner at a lobbying firm where she worked on behalf of a TransCanada subsidiary. Also, that woman’s former business partner at the lobbying firm was TransCanada’s lead private lobbyist on the pipeline deal, interacting with legislators in the weeks before the vote to grant TransCanada the contract. Plus, a former TransCanada executive served as an outside consultant to Palin’s pipeline team.

Under a different set of rules four years earlier, TransCanada had offered to build the pipeline without a state subsidy; under Palin, the company could receive a maximum $500 million…

This comes from a left-minded friend of mine who finds herself working indirectly for McCain-Palin — her marketing firm has a contract with the campaign. To save her soul, she passes on these pocket-picking tips:

If you have time to waste, and want to help the home team at no expense to you, here's a fun game to play:

1. Surf the Internet (political sites are good), looking for McCain-Palin banner ads.

2. Click on them to open up the McCain-Palin website.

3. Close that site (Firefox works great since you can just open and close a new tab).

4. Repeat (even on the exact same site) until your fingers fall off.

McCain and Palin are buying those ads in either the CPM (cost per thousand) or CPA (cost per action) marketplace. If the URL that you see when the McCain Palin-site opens up contains the keyword Google, then it is likely CPA. That means the Repubs are literally paying the site owner (via Google’s marketplace) for your actual click. I’m guessing they’re spending at least a quarter per click.

If it is CPM, the cost to the bad guys is more indirect. In that case, your click will tell their automated buying systems that their ad is effective, and they’ll automatically buy more of them, even though the ads themselves weren’t actually as effective as the click counts suggest.

The goldmine is a McCain-Palin banner ad on a site you approve of — or even better, the site of a friend. Then you can actually engineer a payment almost directly from the GOP to someone you like.

The only risk is that a huge number of clicks would cause them to remove the site from their ad-buy rotation, but I seriously doubt they could catch that. Click fraud is extremely hard to prove. The algorithms are tune to catch robot/auto-scripted clicks, not private individuals.

Happy clicking!

Joe the Plumber was constantly mentioned by John McCain at the debates last night. But I’ve been wondering. Is Joe really going to be taxed higher under the Obama Plan? Notice how Joe doesn’t state what the after tax earnings of his business are going to be. He states “I’m going to buy a company that makes $250-$275 Thousand Dollars a Year”. Now let’s examine that statement. Notice that Joe didn’t mention after tax earnings. He only said it “makes” $250-$275,000.00 per year. Is that gross income or gross receipts or the bottom line on his 1040? The cost of running the business would be deducted from the gross receipts and Joe is likely to earn after paying his workers and the cost to run the trucks perhaps at most $75,000.00 to $100,000.00 per year if he just stated his gross receipts. Because Joe wasn’t clear about the earnings of the company, but only stated what it makes, we are left in a confused state about what Joe is really going to make in real income from this company.

And let’s assume the business does net $275,000 a year after taxes. If Joe is purchasing this business outright at the start of a recession, we might assume he is getting the business cheap at a price to earnings ration, or as the term is commonly referred to, a PE of 6 to 8. That means he'll be paying six times earnings at a minimum. So Joe is perhaps coughing up One Million Six Hundred Fifty Thousand Dollars to buy this business. I’d say that if Joe actually has that kind of cash or financing in this era of non financing for businesses, he is doing extremely well. Better than ninety percent or more of the American public. Why doesn’t someone ask Joe to submit his business plan so we can know what he’s talking about? Because his question seemed to me to be carefully crafted and parsed to not reveal what this business is really making. It is very likely that Joe is going to be paying substantially less under the Obama plan assuming my assumptions here are correct. Does anyone out there live in Joe’s town? Can you fill us in on the details of Joe’s finances and a picture of the modest house he says he lives in? Inquiring minds want to know.

I’m not sure that Obama presented his plan very well either, because he refers to the gross as if it were income, which is decidedly not the case in any business in the country, unless the business has no tax deductions. I’ve never heard of a business like that in my life, and I was an accounting major in college, and on top of that just an old dumb country lawyer.

[UPDATE FROM BLOOMBERG NEWS: Not Taxable Income

It’s far more likely that the $280,000 Wurzelbacher told Obama he’d earn would be in the form of gross receipts and not taxable income, said Steven Bankler, a certified public accountant in San Antonio, who counts plumbers and other trade professionals as his clients.

According to an analysis by Dun & Bradstreet on Wurzelbacher’s employer, A. W. Newell Corp., the plumbing and heating contractor has annual sales of $510,000.

If Wurzelbacher bought the company, by the time he took proper business deductions, Bankler said, he’d be left with between $150,000 and $200,000 in taxable income and wouldn’t be affected by Obama’s proposed increase in the top rates.

Wurzelbacher might eventually have to pay more employment taxes under Obama’s plan to impose a rate of between 2 percent and 4 percent on wages over $250,000, Bankler said, but Obama has said that change wouldn’t take effect for a decade.

Wurzelbacher doesn’t have a plumber’s license and isn’t registered as a plumber in Ohio, the Toledo Blade reported on its Web site today. His employer has a state plumbing license, the newspaper said.

So the whole question is moot. If the plumber were an honest man, Obama wouldn't need to have answered that question. Obama’s plan would have certainly saved “Crooked Joe” plenty on his taxes!

I guess an old accounting degree and a good teacher on parsing words, the guy who taught me that “words matter” helped me see through the scam the guy tried to pull on Obama. My hat is off to that guy. (And that teacher should know who he is, right Jerry?).

From Politico:

Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman thinks that in order for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to beat her Democratic rival, Sen. Joe Biden, in tonight’s debate, she needs to keep it from turning into an “IQ test.”

“What she needs to do tonight is get this public consideration of her back to who she is and her strong points and, frankly, get it away from being a, kind of, IQ test — she's plenty smart — getting it away from being a, sort of, final college exam,” Lieberman said on MSNBC…

How much IQ does it take to avoid admitting in public that your vice-presidential candidate couldn’t pass an IQ test?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Lawyers for Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska urged a judge Thursday to dismiss the corruption case against him because they said prosecutors had withheld evidence helpful to their defense…

The information involved an interview by an FBI agent with Bill Allen, the prosecution’s star witness. In the interview, Allen said he believed Stevens and his wife would have paid for the renovations to their home in Alaska if Allen had sent them a bill…

Stevens normally sits expressionless during the trial, but during Thursday's session he nodded his head vigorously while the judge rebuked the prosecutors.

The judge ordered the prosecutors to turn over to the defense all FBI interviews with witnesses without any redactions.

The new evidence involved an interview that had been turned over to the defense, but the key part of what Allen said — that the couple would pay if they had been sent a bill — had been blacked out.

And this is helpful to the defense how? Stevens has had his hand out for 40 years and every sentient businessman in Alaska must know by now how the game is played. You don’t leave a paper trail. And if you do leave one, the bill is paid and nobody in the senator’s office returns your phone calls. Ever.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t help myself. I’m in love. Here’s another of Sara Benincasa’s small masterpieces. In this one she discovers Africans, Joe Lieberman, and other exotic fauna native to the lower 48.

More from the Metternich of Alaska. In a rational world, Katie Couric would be running for Vice President and Sarah Palin would be the bimbo interviewing her. (Video here)

COURIC: You’ve cited Alaska’s proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

PALIN: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land — boundary that we have with — Canada. [...]

COURIC: Explain to me why that enhances your foreign policy credentials.

PALIN: Well, it certainly does because our — our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They’re in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia —

COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We — we do — it’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where — where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is — from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to — to our state.

Bet you’ve been wondering why Sarah Palin has been ducking the press. No, of course you haven’t. And you were right, because take a look. The potential president was just permitted to hold the world’s shortest Q & A with her traveling press corps — her first.

Jesus, this so embarrassing:

CNN: On the topic of never letting this happen again, do you agree with the way the Bush administration has handled the war on terrorism, is there anything you would do differently?

A: I agree with the Bush administration that we take the fight to them. We never again let them come onto our soil and try to destroy not only our democracy, but communities like the community of New York. Never again. So yes, I do agree with taking the fight to the terrorists and stopping them over there.

POLITICO: Do you think our presence in Iraq and Afghan and our continued presence there is inflaming islamic extremists?

A: I think our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan will lead to further security of our nation, again, because the mission is to take the fight over there. Do not let them come over here and attempt again what they accomplished here, and that was some destruction. Terrible destruction on that day. But since September 11, Americans uniting and rebuilding and committing to never letting that happen again.

Here’s Timothy P. Carney of the Evans-Novak Political Report. The noncrazy wing of the Republican Party seems to be in a state of deep despair.

3. Congressional Republicans and conservatives, meanwhile, are almost completely at a loss. Republicans are still finding their footing after denying for months that the economy is endangered. Frantic behind closed doors, they seem unable to propose any solution that approaches the magnitude of the problem. Promising more drilling, capital-gains-tax cuts, and full business expensing comes across as laughable — the same things the GOP was pushing while saying the economy was strong.
4. At the presidential level, it’s not only that McCain and Palin lack credentials and knowledge about economics, but McCain also lacks a real rudder. As the GOP nominee, he has taken up free-market talk, but does he really have any roots in a philosophy? Does Palin have the clout or the know-how to guide McCain? The answer to both questions is probably not.
5. When Republicans highlight the Democratic big-government programs that contributed to the mess — Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act directing private capital in low-income housing — they lack conviction and credibility, having long been champions of policies such as IRAs and 401(k)’s driving money to Wall Street, or the home-mortgage interest deduction and the “ownership society.”

Gail Collins, God love her, in the Times today:

On Friday, McCain looked steamed when he gave a new policy speech in Wisconsin with Sarah Palin at his side. The Republicans have discovered that McCain can’t draw a crowd without Palin, and the dangers of letting her float off by herself are apparent. So the two are manacled together these days like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in that old escape-from-a-chain-gang movie.

Remember how the Republican smear squads scored with the lie that Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet? Well, it turns out John McCain gave us the Blackberry:

Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

…and so I won’t even try. These are excerpts from Women Against Sarah Palin, the wonderful website to which my sister Pat alerted me, and about which I blogged earlier this week.

Sarah Palin is the classic example of a woman being used by those in power to remove power from women.

I want to love a mother, governor and VP candidate, but Palin horrifies me, she seems to epitomize the American inability to be introspective, to polarize and see everything in terms of black and white, good or evil, right or wrong. This intolerance and inability to get out of a narrow perspective and see the divine spark in all is at the core of the danger America is creating for itself, and feeds the dissension in America. She has a sharp, but not a deep mind fast with the comebacks, but more interested in bullying an argument than in understanding the truth.

Even in this very red state of Alabama, we know the difference between a show horse, a hobby horse, and a work horse. You do not represent working class women, farm wives or single mothers — ALL of whom turned to Hillary Clinton with great hopes. You charged women for their own rape kits when you were mayor in Wasilla. You use housekeepers and nannies to care for your kids. You don’t want sex education in schools, but you let your daughter get pregnant! You do not now, nor will you ever speak for us!

I can hardly begin to express the depth of my anger at hearing Ms. Palin denigrate the many community organizers I worked with and proudly call my friends. Community Organizers make the world a better place, doing God’s work day in and day out, night after night. To hear that convention audience laugh in response to her snide remarks really pissed me off. I didn’t realize just how steamed I was until a dear friend (another longtime community activist) sent me an e-mail with this message: Jesus was a Community Organizer. Pontius Pilate was a Governor.

Sarah Palin represents the slap of the dinosaur’s tail — a deadly, horned swipe of a breed going extinct; quite likely, in her throes of excited thrashing, to kill off many individuals, many careers, many dearly held gains, won since 1963, for which many of us fought with our brains, our convictions, our blood, our time, our eloquence, and our money…

Are we ready to stand idly by while an old, ill man, watches Sarah’s shapely behind, while fingering his wedding ring? Are we ready to give up our time to choose, our right to decide and let this mockery of a modern woman, this poorly educated bigot tramples our civil rights? Are we ready to die if our life is endangered by an unhealthy pregnancy? Are we willing to let Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and the other megalomaniacs at the helm of the Republican party decide the course of our lives, our daughters’ and granddaughters’ lives?

Even the power she gained as the mayor of a town of a mere 5000, immediately corrupted her; her wide swipes through the administration she inherited were so disruptive to that small government entity that an immediate remedy was set in place — an administrator had to be hired to do the job of running the town while she was mayor. And still, the surplus she inherited turned into a deficit — IMAGINE the damage she could orchestrate on a national level.

The Alaskan legislature took to wearing buttons that said, “Where’s Sarah?” because she spent so little time in Juneau. Once again, the GOP is deceiving the American people in a most callous and calculating way — just because they put a skirt on this time doesn’t change a damned thing!

Women in particular should project hope and love and caring for others, and Ms. Palin does none of this, choosing instead to be mean-spirited and accusatory in every single speech and action. I can only hope that with time, people will recognize this and realize that we need someone quite different from her to take us down the road to respect and REAL morality.

But she is not the problem — our problem is the white old men that insist on running this country with their need to control, their archaic laws and ideas. Their lives are based on fear and ridiculous needs to dominate our pocketbook, our bodies and to shoot before thinking and talking. They also have a great need to distort the truth — in other words LYING. This young woman from Alaska is being fooled with — she is their decoy — but she might be elected and then she could be a heartbeat away from being in charge of our lives.

The American people have become distracted. Palin, participating in this election as a trojan horse, has come with phrases that involve animals and lipsticks, bridges to nowhere, and eBay, leading americans in to an abyss of distractions pulling away from the very sobering facts that who she represents and the policies she supports are a complete replica of the current Bush administration, on paper, and without personality mud-slings, the Palin/MCCain ticket represent four more years of the same policies the world has come to hate.

Here we have the ideal ticket for anyone who supports women’s rights — Obama and Biden — versus two people who think women are brainless fools. The fact that Palin wears a skirt doesn’t mean she has respect for women. On the contrary. It just means that she uses her sex to stop any questions about her competence by accusing the questioner of sex-discrimination. Frankly, I didn’t buy that argument when Hillary made it and I’m certainly not buying it from Palin.

This classic bait and switch move has the electorate once again focusing on the culture wars instead of the real ones, on pseudo-feminism instead of tolerance and equality.

Her extreme beliefs regarding abstinence-only education did not work even for her own daughter! and yet she wants to force it on our daughters! We will not have it. We can do better, there are stronger, more thoughtful and fair minded women in this country who are fit to run it.

Is Ms.Palin really the best the Republican party has to offer in terms of a female? I guess there are slim pickings for a woman who will support an antiquated and sexist Republican agenda.

The cruel irony of Senator Clinton blooding herself on that glass ceiling only to have a puppet escorted through on the arm of a warrior…

These people are two loose cannons on a rolling deck and I genuinely fear for the future of our great country. If John McCain is unable to see his term through, Sarah Palin is next in line as leader of the Free World.

“To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House.” Really? Because the parents of children with disabilities in Alaska don’t have much of a friend or advocate right now. Even in years of great surplus, she actually cut state funding for special education services and Medicaid — the program that children and adults with disabilities rely on for health care.

Ms. Palin is also well documented as a local bully who tries to fire anyone who disagrees with her. After eight years of an unqualified President who has done everything in his power to position America as a global bully, this characteristic is the last quality we need in the White House for four more years.

Sarah Palin sees the hand of God in a $30 billion Alaskan national gas pipeline. “I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that,” she has stated.

Ms. Palin and I clearly worship very different gods. I see the hand of God not in the wallets of the oil companies, but in the pristine Alaska coastline, its majestic polar bears, whales, and glaciers — all of which Big Oil will despoil. Perhaps Ms. Palin has made the mistake that afflicts a frightening number of our citizens: confusing God with money.

One of the joys of reading The Atlantic blog of Jerry’s former compatriot Jim Fallows is seeing a bit of the Hunter Thompson spirit dancing behind the White House polish. Here he is on Mike Huckabee’s speech.

If you didn’t hear it: a long, folksy story whose payoff was important and completely true: every generation of Americans owes its liberties, its institutions, its prosperity, and many of its other bounties to previous generations who have fought for, built, and preserved the elements that make America free, rich, and strong.

(Story in a nutshell: on the first day of school, students are puzzled to see no desks in one classroom. The teacher won’t let them have desks until they explain how students "earn" a desk. Punchline, delivered as a row of decorated veterans bring the desks in: You don’t have to earn them! These people already earned them for you.)

Why the story is weird, apart from the fact that the teacher was putting the question in a deliberately obscure way: Every country has desks in the classrooms! This has absolutely zero to do with what make[s] America great and what Americans have died to protect and defend. Burma has no freedoms, but I have seen its students sitting there at desks. I have seen the same in Kenya and Vietnam. There are school desks in Cuba and North Korea. The old Soviet Union was full of ’em.

I grew up with the people stories like this are meant to enchant. Kentucky was one of the states, along with Maryland and West Virginia, divided by the Mason-Dixon line: in the Civil War, one brother would go north, the other south. (Pynchon fans are granted a moment here for a centering breath.) On the alternate axis we straddled the Appalachians, in whose cricks and hollers all sorts of non-conformists have hidden.

Sarah Palin will motivate these people to come to the polls in November. John McCain will be mashed, but Mitch McConnell’s seat is safe. Elizabeth Dole might survive. God help us, Lieberman might be undumpable.