by escapedtowisconsin

Well, the old man is a classic Jew-hater, so I guess you could say Franklin’s a chip off the ol’ block.

Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of Rev. Billy Graham, called Islam “wicked” and “evil” on Sunday during a televised town hall-style discussion about American’s feelings about the religion.

“They want to build as many mosques and cultural centers as they possibly can so they can convert as many Americans as they can to Islam,” Graham said on ABC’s “This Week.”

So Graham thinks proselytizing is evil? Don’t Christians go to the Middle East to build churches so they can convert as many Arabs as they can to Christianity?

Graham went on to profess his love for “the Muslim people,” but said he has “great difficulty with the religion.”

Some of my best friends, yada yada yada.

Keep in mind, this is the loopy theocrat George W. Bush selected to speak at his first inauguration. He also claimed, erroneously, that President Obama was born a Muslim.

It’s clear he’s chosen sides, so every single Republican member of the Senate, the House — and all the GOP presidential hopefuls — should be asked to reject and denounce this un-American POS publicly.

I’ll write the question for you, Democrats. “Sarah Palin, do you agree with Franklin Graham that Islam is an ‘evil’ religion? Yes or no?”

Hang this asshole around their bleepin’ necks.

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and Remaking of America

Stanley Greenberg, Host:

Shortly after the 2008 election, I wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times in which I declared I was shifting my focus from studying the white middle class Macomb County, Michigan which I had first examined in 1985 to the neighboring Oakland County, Michigan—the home of affluent Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills. As I noted then, from 1972 to 1988, Democratic presidential candidates lost the county by 20 points. Over the past two decades, the towns of Oakland County began to change from rust belt suburbs to affluent communities that are representative of the new knowledge economy—home to lawyers, high-tech professionals, and the educated elite.

These changes have produced a more tolerant and culturally liberal population in Oakland County—its affluent and well-educated residents are uncomfortable with today’s socially conservative Republican Party. More diverse, more cosmopolitan, and firmly engaged in the knowledge economy, they are socially progressive and trending Democratic. Oakland’s residents typify the major transformation in partisan demographics in recent years described in Fortunes of Change. [cont'd]

Fortunes of Change documents the recent phenomenon of the rising class of super-wealthy liberals—who overwhelmingly financed Democratic campaigns in 2006 and 2008, have donated generously to build infrastructure on the left and center-left groups like CAP, Democracy Alliance, and Human Rights Campaign , and whose participation in political causes and organizations is shaping the progressive agenda.

These are the new rich, who predominantly live in coastal cities, who were educated at elite institutions, and who are the progenitors of the new knowledge economy. Framed in this way, their left-leaning politics seems obvious. Nonetheless, most were not driven to support politically progressive causes until the early years of the 21st century. While many were dedicated to philanthropic causes in the 1980s and 1990s, several forces conspired to drive them to politically active progressivism in the years since 2000—the emergence of the socially conservative, white working class GOP, the Bush administration’s foreign and economic policies, and the more rural worldview that came to dominate the Republican Party during the Bush years.

While many of us welcome a well-funded base of support for progressive causes and candidates, Callahan offers some caution. First, he seems to substantiate the reality of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party’s symbolic enemy—‘the liberal elite.’ Second, he offers caution that “rich ‘super-citizens’” might “drown out the voices of ordinary Americans.” Finally, he fears that “many rich liberals are not in the business of dismantling their class privileges” but are rather more focused on liberal social and environmental causes than mitigating structural economic inequality “Some rich liberals are more apt to champion the plight of polar bears than of the janitors who clean their offices at night.”

Fortunes of Change raises new and important questions. If, as Callahan suggests, and as I suspect, the wealthy and well-educated will be a driving force in liberal politics for years to come, we will need to know much more about their politics and priorities than we do at present. While the book is ethnographic in scope, the research is anecdotal by necessity. Callahan rightly points out that public opinion survey research cuts off at high income earners who make over $150,000 a year. As a result, we know little about their priorities except from their contributions to causes and campaigns. How will they shape American progressivism in the future? We do know that these new liberal elites are not the paternalistic, pandering progressives of the last Gilded Age. Their commitment is real. Liberalism is in their genuine economic self-interest as they rely on the new knowledge economy to supply their wealth.

The book also raises questions for our current environment. Over the last year, big donors have begun to pull back from financing progressive infrastructure and Democratic candidates. While some were angered by the Obama administration’s more forceful approach to regulating Wall Street, many have in fact pulled back because they are concerned that Obama has not gone far enough to push progressive policies. How will they respond to trade issues and the global economy when fissures emerge among Democrats and many progressives? How will they respond if enduring inequality becomes central to the progressive project in years ahead?

This is a good place to start facing these issues.

Did Sarah Palin-backed tea party heroine Christine O’Donnell really study at Oxford?

A public LinkedIn profile under her name appears to claim as much. Under the education heading, it lists “Post Modernism in the New Millennium” at the University of Oxford.

…

O’Donnell… hasn’t yet mentioned an Oxford connection on the campaign trail. So what was the course, and how long ago did she take it? Surge Desk searched Oxford’s course library and did not come across any current class or symposium under this name.

Puzzling! But not to worry, Greg Sargent has figured it out:

Asked to account for the claim about Oxford, Diana Banister, a spokesperson for O’Donnell, told me it was a reference to a certificate she obtained from a course at Oxford overseen by the Phoenix Instutute, which “runs summer seminar programs at universities around the world.” [Note: Not to be confused with the online University of Phoenix, which obviously would not be offering courses on Oxford's or any other campus.]

But Chris Fletcher, who oversaw the Institute’s 2001 Oxford Summer Programme, which included the course O’Donnell took, tells me the course was not overseen by Oxford.

…

“It wasn’t an official course of Oxford University,” Fletcher said. “It wasn’t sponsored by Oxford University. We rented the space.”

“It was our curriculum, and we did the grades,” Fletcher continued. Fletcher’s conclusion about O’Donnell’s Oxford claim: “It’s misleading.”

So it was all just a wacky misunderstanding! O’Donnell took a summer class on the Oxford University campus, and innocently assumed that that was exactly the same thing as taking a course from Oxford University itself! Anyone could have made the same mistake!

Just like when she claimed that she tried to take master’s degree classes at Princeton apparently very unsuccessfully, since there’s no record of her having done so , or when she pretended that she had graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson in 1993, when it was more like, well, this summer. Maybe she was trying to make it retroactively true for her Senate run, but that shiny new diploma doesn’t really erase all her years of lying about it before.

And then there’s her apparent use of campaign funds to pay for her food and rent. I mean, aren’t her Tea Party fans supposed to be all about how everyone needs to get a job instead of mooching off of their hard-earned money? Or is that conditional on political affiliation and skin color?

Where I’m going with this is that what’s really going to sink O’Donnell in Delaware – aside from it being a state of mostly sane people – isn’t that she’s a crazy person who opposes sex and masturbation and thinks “Why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?” is a killer argument against evolution. It’s that she’s a Sarah Palin-like grifter and Mark “Intelligence Office of the Year” Kirk-like serial exaggerator. She may be able to spin her “dabbling into witchcraft” as an inspiring story of redemption, but only if it actually happened. Has anyone from her high school come forward to corroborate her story? Has anyone interviewed her satanic altar date?

But as sleazy and dishonest as Mark Kirk and all the other Republican liars are, at least none of them ever said this:

IZZARD: What if someone comes to you in the middle of the Second World War and says, ‘do you have any Jewish people in your house?’ and you do have them. That would be a lie. That would be disrespectful to Hitler.

O’DONNELL: I believe if I were in that situation, God would provide a way to do the right thing righteously. I believe that!

MAHER: God is not there. Hitler’s there and you’re there.

O’DONNELL: You never have to practice deception. God always provides a way out.

Lying to save Jews from the Holocaust: Bad. Lying to advance your own political career: Totally cool.

The New York Times is reporting this morning that Rove is back in charge of the Republican campaign war machine. Everyone thinks that “master strategists” – as the Times called Rove – earn such a title by mastering campaign strategy. Actually, what they do is stay out of races that can’t be won and put themselves in charge of races that are already won.

If you picked 50 consultants of all stripes and gave them a test, they’d all give the same answers. There are just not that many moving parts in politics. Strategically, it’s easier than checkers. It’s certainly not chess.

The successful consultants, however, do have something the also-rans don’t: the leverage of power. Usually it’s big money or, say, the vengeful Bush family and it’s army of ruthless operatives. They have the stroke to enforce discipline up and down the ranks. I don’t mean this as an endorsement of top-down organization; bottom-up/top down would be more resilient, durable and democratic — we just haven’t seen it yet in contemporary politics.

So, as we meditate today on what awful things we did in previous lifetimes to deserve the presence of a Rove in this one, we should keep a close eye on the secrets of his success: pick only winnable races; don’t get involved unless you have the power of a dictator; toss all scruples aside.

A realist’s view of the authentic sources of Rove’s masterbategery might make his bites a little less itchy. My good friends Wayne Slater and James Moore, who wrote the best book on Rove, Bush’s Brain, disagree with me about this. They think he’s a genius; I think he’s an opportunistic bedbug who hides in the cuffs of the lowest common denominator until he finds just the right environment.

Speaking of bugs, did it really take genius to bug his own office back in 1986 and then sucker the press into writing that his candidate’s opponent had done it? That was a work of shameless deception on a par with a carnival barker’s promise of a live two-headed baby inside his smoky tent. It’s not like Rove discovered the equivalence of mass and energy.

Inflation, however, is the key to American celebrity. Hell, Davy Crockett sold the colorful lies about his abilities with more originality than Rove. But Americans care little about the truth behind a celebrity’s claims. If we did, there’d be no Sarah Palin. For that matter, there’d have been no George W. Bush.

Celebrity inflation, however, is as dangerous as it’s economic counterpart. Our values are worth less and sooner or later the phony bubbles pop. Part of President Obama’s problem is that when we got inside the tent the promised magic was missing. Since we thought he would single-handedly restore civil society and return the nation if not the world to the path toward democracy, Obama’s deflation was inevitable.

The Roves of the world avoid that fate by picking tests they can’t fail to pass. They only take electives, you might say.

Now, it’s going to be argued that the 2000 election was not such an easy test. It should have been, but it wasn’t. A political party has the advantage in the national election that follows the other party’s eight years of power. Nonetheless, Rove failed it. Bush lost the election only to have the decision of voters reversed by a Supreme Court beholding to Bush the Elder.

That points us back to the other key of consultant success: the power to enforce one’s will. And that Rove has. Give today’s freshmen statehouse consultant the ability to give or withhold millions or billions of dollars from candidates and they will be geniuses too.

After the 2000 election and in places where Democrats have a tough time winning, there was a common plaint on the left: “Where’s our Karl Rove?” We were asking the genie the wrong question, and like in all those old jokes, the genie turned the tables on us.

We should have been asking for help in creating a public opinion environment that favored progressive victories. We should have demanded that our wealthy contributors take the long view for once and invest in the kind of communications infrastructure and third-party advocacy structure Republicans built and used patiently for thirty years. So effective was it that a run-of-the-mill if ruthless operative could ride it to millennial success and be credited with Oz-like powers.

We didn’t look behind the curtain, though. Out of some screwy allegiance to celebrity culture, we’re in the habit of pretending there is no curtain. Dorothy and her friends did ask the wizard the right questions. They wanted a heart, a brain, courage. They wanted a home.

It turned out they had to give those gifts to themselves.

In fact, we are flabbergasted.

However, an investigation of site ownership and client lists funding the “Patriotic Revolt” were not what we expected. The “patriots” that were going to replace the armed militia’s of the 1990?s were actually the Republican Party, their phony “think tanks” and the largest multi-national corporations in the world, representing defense, oil, insurance, big pharma, big tobacco and “clean coal,” a veritable “who’s who” of world class criminals.

THE CLASSIFIED LIST OF THOSE BEHIND THE “PATRIOTIC RESISTANCE” MOVEMENT

THE FOLKS WARNING YOU ABOUT THOSE NASTY “WASHINGTON INSIDERS”

AETNA Big Insurance

AFIPAC American Friends of ISRAEL

Alexis de Toqueville Institution Right wing think tank working for Microsoft and Big Tobacco

Allied Pilots Association

American Association of Health Plans Largest lobby group for Big Insurance

American Association of Political Consultants Primary trade group for those who run “backroom politics” in America

American Conservative Union The “neo-con” club with all top Republican politicians as members, Reagan, Bush, Cheney, Delay, the list goes on forever

Americans for Hope, Growth and Opportunity Steve Forbes financed ultra right wing group

American Policy Center Ultra-Conservative group opposed to the United Nations and Global Warming science

American Public Policy Institute Ultra-Right Wing anti Gay Rights group

The American Spectator Right wing publication with history of accepting money from foreign governments. Best known for the discredit Shirley Sherrod attack piece

Australian Barley Board Grain conglomerate group tied to monopoly policies

Black America’s Political Action Committee Alan Keyes right wing group with almost no African American support

Blackwell Corporation Group responsible for organizing personal attacks on progressive politicians run by Washington PR group with ties to extremist militia organizations

Brude W. Eberle and Associates Tom DeLay and John Ashcroft

Business Mail Express

Campaign Solutions Voter suppression, Swift Boat campaign and shady right wing causes, the “hit squad” for the Republican National Committee

Canadian MG Lewis MacKenzie

Capitol Watch

The Carmen Group Major lobbying group working with security, energy and healthcare sectors, top level “fixers” in Washington

Carrying Capacity Network

Center for Individual Freedom Secretive neo-con rights group with ties to the Tobacco Lobby

CIGNA Big Insurance

Citizens for State Power no records found

Citizens United Lobby group that pushed unlimited corporate control of American elections through the Supreme Court

Club for Growth Ultra-right wing group convicted of failing to register as a Political Action Committee

Collegiate Network Right wing group that finances student newspaper “take-overs’ by neo-cons

Conservative Political Action Conference Most powerful right wing group in the US, Glen Beck terrirtory

Ann Coulter Controversial right wing extremist writer with a penchant for inventing “facts”

Crown Publishing Random House subsidiary specializing in right wing publications

David, Manafort and Freedman, Inc. “Go-between” between “Big Lottery” reputed tied to organized crime and Senator John McCain

The Honorable Pete DuPont DuPont family member, one time Congressman and right wing pundit

Employee Benefits Associates Big Business advocacy and consulting for limitation of workplace freedoms and rights

Energy Freedom Alliance no records available

Federalist Society Lobby group promoting “big business” oriented judicial appointees

Flickers Films no records available

Free Enterprise Fund anti-Social Security group

Foley and Lardner Law firm representing Exxon Oil

Forbes for President 2000 Forbes PAC

The Galen Institute Big Insurance lobbists

Grassfire.org controversial ultra-right wing group dedicated to George W. Bush

The Hawthorn Group “clean coal” lobbyists

Heritage Foundation Ultra-right wing group behind neo-conservative internationalist agenda

Institute for Legal Reform Part of US Chamber of Commerce, favors special privileges for Big Business in law

Institute for Policy Innovation anti-Social Security group headed by Dick Armey

Institute for Socio-Economic Studies no records available

The Keene Report no information available

Law Enforcement Alliance of America conservative group active in gun rights

The Limited Israeli owned retail conglomerate

The Manhattan Institute neo-con, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, “War or Terror” lobby group

McDonald Douglas Big Defense/Big War

McGuire/Woods Consulting, LLC Law firm for Big Oil, Big Insurance, Big Lottery

National Audit Defense Network tax avoidance group in trouble for, of all things, tax problems and endless consumer complaints

National Center for Policy Analysis Big Healthcare lobbyists

National Farmers Federation of Australia Australia Big Agriculture lobby

National Rifle Association conservative group funded through scare tactics about imaginary gun seizure legislation

National Taxpayers Union Right wing group funded by Richard Mellon Scaife

News World Communications Reverend Moon’s propaganda arm

Nuclear Energy Institute Nuclear power lobby group

The O’Leary/Kamber Report neo-con funded voice of Tea Party movement

Playcare Incorporated funders of neo-con and Tea Party movements allied to Bush/Cheney

PM Consulting Corporation Advocacy group for lower taxes on wealthy and corporations

Prima Publishing conservative publication division of Random House

Progress & Freedom Foundation Big Telecom lobbyist group

Prudential Big Insurance

Public Safety Systems War on Terror “airport security” company

Republican Majority Coalition The Republican Party

Republican National Committee The Republican Party leadership

Natan Sharansky Top Israeli extremist, Likudists, ultra-nationalist and Zionist Leader

Small Business Survival Committee Big Tobacco packaged to look like something else

Southeastern Legal Foundation Legal arm of numerous right wing causes, a “flat earth” defender

Starboard Response no information available

Stevens & Schriefer Republican Party campaign advertising

United Seniors Association Big Pharma lobby group

University of Phoenix

USA Weekend publishing brand for conservative Gannet newspaper chain

US Chamber of Commerce Big Business/open immigration lobby group

US English right wing anti-Hispanic lobby group

Washington Times Foundation ultra-right wing scandal sheet of the Unification Church “Moonies”

Westinghouse Corporation Big Defense

The Winston Group right wing strategy and polling group

WND Books World Net Daily, right wing extremist publications

Uprooted Palestinian

I do so enjoy reading our new buddy, Michael Knox Beran, who waxes philosophical every time he gets a boner over each and every Tea Bagger FemBot who wanders down the pike. One imagines him sitting in a large comfy leather chair in his book-lined study, idly flipping through many an expensive tome seeking out a lyrical mot juste with which to honor the latest lady of his loins. Finding it, he closes his eyes in silent reverie while gently swirling his snifter of cognac, savoring the moment before masturbating like a capuchin monkey on a weekend Viagra bender.

But haven’t we all been there before?

A recurrent theme in his writings which is to say the two things of his that I’ve bothered to read after going through the box scores on ESPN and, of course, Marmaduke. I confess, Brad Anderson is my muse is his disdain for “the elites”, often given voice by these sloe-eyed ladies of the hinterlands, these succubi of the state college system.

Here he is transported to Raptureville, Population: him by an extraordinary exchange between Falafel Bill O’Reilly and snowtrash grifter Sarah Palin:

Palin Populism
Sarah Palin takes on the pathology of the elites.

BILL O’REILLY: Do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?

SARAH PALIN: I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of spinelessness, that perhaps is made up for with some kind of elite Ivy League education . . .

– The O’Reilly Factor, Nov. 21, 2009

No sooner had I lighted on this exchange than the familiar words of Faust — familiar, at any rate, to us Ivy Leaguers, for whom he is something of a patron saint — were on my tongue:

Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medizin . . .

I have, alas, studied philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine, too,
And worst of all theology
With keen endeavor, through and through —
And here I am, for all my lore,
The wretched fool I was before.

He then goes on to cite Edmund Wilson, Emerson, William Ewart Gladstone, Swift, Lionel Trilling, Paul Goodman, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Burke to support his point about all of those smartypants elitists who think they are all that and a bag of Vol-au-vents. One would have thought Beran would pulled out the big guns and gone with a little Brooks & Dunn to make his populist ecce signum :

She wears snakeskin boots made by Calvin Klein
And cheap sunglasses from the five and dime
All the other girls in school they give her dirty looks
She got an “A” in math and never cracked a book
Sure looks good in her denim and pearls
Rock my world little Country girl

Word to your Mahler.

Tea Party rallies like this one give voice to anti-government sentiments. photo: ragesoss via Flickr

Conservatives, including those of the Tea Party variety, aren’t “anti-government.” In most respects they are pro-government to the point of authoritarianism. What they really oppose is any form of cooperative or collective solution to the problems of a complex industrial or post-industrial society -– especially when the beneficiaries are people they regard with suspicion or fear.

The Tea Party movement has done the larger conservative cause a big favor by giving it a fresh patina of sexiness. I’m not referring here to Sarah Palin, or to Rand Paul’s curly locks, but to the slightly outlaw, vaguely anarchistic, allegedly leaderless image the Tea Partiers like to project – and that the corporate media have bought into so readily. There’s a palpable frisson – an almost pleasurable thrill of danger – that courses through the Republican leadership and the Washington press corps alike when, for example, someone like Christine O’Donnell wins a senatorial primary or a few thousand Real Americans with guns assemble on the Washington Mall.

It all coalesces into a basic characterization of the Tea Party as “anti-government,” more radical than the radicals, or at least more truly nonconformist than those liberal Democratic do-gooders with their lifetime government posts, academic tenure, and subsistence-wage jobs at various non-profits. Sometimes, they push the rhetorical envelope pretty far. Here’s what Mat Staver, chair of Liberty Counsel, a Christian-right legal advocacy group, and dean of the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University School of Law told The Nation’s Sarah Posner. Noting that “there are rights that come from God,” Staver threatened that

when government doesn’t protect [those rights], it’s our duty and responsibility to change it, worst case scenario, throw it off and start over.

Those on the left have tended to take this stuff seriously. Posner writes of the “uprising energy” of the Tea Partiers and doesn’t question whether they really do believe in smaller government, less government interference in people’s lives – or else. This is a remarkable turnaround from just three years ago, when liberal pundit Paul Waldman, anticipating the bedraggled end of the Bush presidency, told us with finality that “there is no political benefit to proclaiming one’s opposition to big government.” . . .

A lot has happened since then, but the fact remains that over the past 40 years, conservatives have become expert at dressing up their causes with a sort of maverick hipness that helps sell their political agenda. The serious question is whether the Tea Partiers, or predecessors like the militia movement or the Libertarian Party, really are anti-government. Because we could all do with some clarity as to what these people really want.

No one who has any fondness for “government” need be alarmed, I’d suggest.

Aside from Rand Paul, no Tea Party or even establishment-conservative candidate or recognized leader supports downsizing the U.S. military, scaling back its footprint abroad, or projecting American power any less forcefully than at present. None has called for decreasing the State’s presence in our lives by giving police officers less leeway to stop, search, and more seriously abuse citizens on the streets except, of course, when they’re attending a Tea Party rally . But in what ways is the power of government more obvious and intrusive than these?

Immigration is one of the primary Tea Party issues, and on this the alleged revolutionaries are close to unanimous that U.S. borders must be closed, barricaded, guarded, and locked down. Undocumented workers must be hunted down and expelled, their employers forced to ID them and turn them in on the slightest suspicion. If ever truly enforced, all this would require a massive new bureaucracy-cum police force with unprecedented powers to pry and surveille.

Many advocates of immigration crackdown call for creation of a national ID card, a system of Soviet-style internal passports completely at odds with American tradition. None express any concern that the Immigration and Naturalization Service now runs a mini-gulag for the undocumented persons it snatches. I suspect a lot of Tea Party candidates think similarly.

Social Security is another example. Most Tea Partiers, in recent polls, place the issue pretty far down their list of concerns. But their candidates delight in labeling the program a Ponzi scheme and a rip-off. Someone who’s anti-government would no doubt call for Social Security’s abolition. But Tea Party favorites like Paul Ryan call for turning a big chunk of the program into a set of private investment accounts that would funnel workers’ payroll taxes into the hands of major financial services firms the rest of Social Security would be slashed and left to wither away .

Conservatives like to argue that this wouldn’t actually be “privatization,” and I halfway agree with them. The government would have a very big job in this scheme, facilitating and administering the systematic transfer of wealth into accounts earning fees for Wall Street. The Social Security Administration would have to get bigger, not smaller, just to handle the recordkeeping involved. “Choice” would be limited to a menu of mutual funds and annuities selected by bureaucrats, heavily influenced by investment firms. Is this a recipe for less government?

Now let’s look at education. Home schoolers of a right-wing bent would seem to be poster families for the Tea Party ideal of rugged independence. But are they? Home schooling families in Maine and other states have successfully demanded that their children be allowed access to such public school resources as textbooks often quite expensive , physical education and science classes, and extracurricular activities.

This means that in some parts of the country, government is subsidizing home schooling. In New Mexico, for example, public school systems have obliged these families by setting up special programs for home-schooled kids who want to transition into public high schools. The bottom line: more expense and more infrastructure, not less.

It takes a lot of government, it seems, to mold a nation of anti-government mavericks.

Turning the Tea Party phenomenon into a coherent political movement has been difficult, because so many conflicting themes percolate just beneath the surface. Some activists express genuine outrage at the bailout of Wall Street banks – although offer few solutions – and movement puppeteers like Dick Armey work hard to ignore Rand Paul’s antiwar views. But if we look at Tea Party-ism as an offshoot of a conservative ideology that’s been evolving for the past 50 years – roughly since the “Draft Goldwater” effort of 1960 – a more consistent point of view emerges.

Looked at one way, Social Security, Medicare, other social services, and public schools are part of government. What sets them apart from other, more punitive aspects of government, however, is that they are attempts to meet human needs through cooperative, collective means. Social Security and Medicare pay out benefits that every working person is entitled to receive – and required to support through a dedicated payroll tax.

The public school model is different, but analogous in that every property owner supports the system through property taxes. The framework is social solidarity: we support these programs because they are aspects of the common good, not because they yield a profit or pass a theoretical cost-benefit test. The economic model is mutual aid: everyone chips in and everyone can depend on the support of society when the need arises.

Social solidarity is anathema to conservative thinking. Margaret Thatcher could have been summing up the last 50 years – if not more – of right-wing thought when she declared ,

Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.

This is where the larger conservative movement and right-wing populists like the Tea Party come together. Conservatives loath all institutions of social solidarity – throw in unions and genuinely leaderless forces like the campaign against corporate globalization and the movements of the landless in developing countries along with national pension and health care systems – because they serve as a refuge from or even an alternative to an economic system that insists on absorbing everything into the market. Conservatism today can be defined accurately as a program to eliminate anything that exists outside that system.

The curious thing about the Tea Partiers is that when you press them on the topic, few have any bad feelings about Social Security, for example. It’s the recipients of benefits, as caricatured in the right-wing media, who they dislike. Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek notes correctly that,

Other than nostalgia, the strongest emotion at Tea Parties is resentment, defined as placing blame for one’s woes on those either above or below you in the social hierarchy.

Or, as one respondent asserted back in April on the conservative NewsBusters Web site,

Most legitimate ‘tea party’ types are responsible, dependable, informed, law abiding people who probably have some sort of job or business or source of income…….and that is one reason they are out there……. The war protestors, the G8 protestors, the abortion protestors…..God…..the list goes on………are often made up of ‘professional’ protestors who are deep deep lib whack jobs who don’t have much responsibility or allegiance to what a lot of us would call ‘normal’ American values………..although a LOT of these people are keeping themselves fed, clothed, and housed because of the sweat off of OUR brows!!!

That kind of resentment isn’t perfectly congruent with the conservative project, but it has no other obvious home to go to. Likewise with their views on government. Tea Partiers aren’t anti-government – they merely insist that government serve their interests alone. What’s understood by the canny purveyors of anti-government rhetoric who increasingly direct the Tea Party movement is that government is a necessary partner in achieving the market society they envision, not an obstacle.

None of which is nearly as sexy as dressing up in a Minuteman uniform and hinting darkly about overthrowing the government, of course. But posing as an anarchist doesn’t make you one.

Enter Project Vote’s new poll PDF , which focuses on the black, youth and low-income voters who are the opposite of the white, old, affluent teabaggers in almost every way. Not only that, but there’s actually more of them: 32% of the electorate to the tea partiers’ 29. And most amazing of all, when you compare their responses to the country as a whole, it turns out that they’re a lot more mainstream and representative of America than the tea partiers are.

Of course, you’d never know it, because the Koch brothers and the tea parties’ other corporate sponsors aren’t paying for them to show up at Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin rallies with, ahem, “colorful” signs, or at health care townhalls to brandish their guns and shout down congressmembers. And they certainly don’t have an entire cable network dedicated to promoting them. They’re more like the Silent Plurality.

Here are some examples of just who looks more like America:

• A 58% of black, youth and low-income voters favor stimulus spending over deficit-cutting, while a 79% majority of tea partiers prefer deficit-cutting. Voters overall favor deficit-cutting, but only by a 49-45% margin.

• 81% of BYLI voters want more education spending, as opposed to only 41% of tea partiers. 65% of voters overall are in the More camp.

• 79% of BYLI voters want the minimum wage set above the poverty line, but only 41% of tea partiers do. 68% of voters overall agree that it should be increased.

• 62% of BYLI voters believe the federal government should provide jobs for everyone who can’t find work in the private sector, vs. 15% of teabaggers. Again, overall voters disagree, but only by a 53-42% margin, which is pretty remarkable for such a… socialist idea.

• 63% of BYLI voters favor reducing the deficit by increasing capital gains taxes, compared to only 29% of tea partiers. Overall, 58% of voters favor or strongly favor.

• 71% of BYLI voters favor reducing the deficit by bringing our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, versus 38% of tea partiers. Overall, the number is 59%.

• 60% of BYLI voters favor raising or removing the Social Security payroll tax cap, only 39% of tea partiers do. 54% of voters in general are in favor.

• 63% of BYLI voters believe that “Government should work to provide for the needs of all citizens,” while 74% of tea partiers believe that “Government should do no more than provide national defense and police protection, so that people are left alone to earn whatever they can.” Overall, voters agree with the first statement 50-42%.

• 66% of BYLI voters have more trust in the government to ensure that banks and credit card companies treat them fairly, while 50% of tea partiers trust the banking and credit card industry more. Overall, voters trust the government by a 63-30% margin. Polling on food safety and fraudulent business practices is similar, but with a slight plurality of tea partiers favoring the government.

So yeah, it looks to me like most Americans are okay with the government doing more than just making the world safe for corporations and rich people. The teabaggers may have the skinny end of the megaphone, but that doesn’t make them representative of anything more than the most anti-government wing of the Republican party.

All this is not to say that the Democrats are in great shape for November; they’re not. But it’s not because everyone’s a teabagger who thinks they’re all radical terrorist-hugging socialists, it’s because Obama and the Democrats have underdelivered for the people and overdelivered for the corporations and wealthy. If they had gone a little bit more socialist and passed a stimulus bill that reduced unemployment and a health care reform bill with a public option and drug price negotiation, I think that most voters would have been just fine with that.

Endorsements by the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee have helped propel a number of upstart Republican contenders to victory in recent primaries, including a double win Tuesday with Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire.

Palin’s cable TV show will debut in November. But first, Iowa.

Palin was the big draw at last night’s Reagan Dinner in Des Moines, the Iowa Republican Party’s biggest fund-raiser. The question on many Republicans’ minds is whether she will run for president in 2012....

To go with the big.... never mind.

Palin has been coy about her presidential intentions and masterful at keeping her name in the news....

Yeah, who gives her a hand with that, NEWS media?

She's just such a tease, right?

--more--"

With a thin victory margin of 1,667 votes, Ayotte overcame a late-charging challenge from lawyer Ovide Lamontagne, who had the support of several conservative Tea Party leaders....

Ayotte, 42, and making her first try for elected public office, enjoyed the support of party officials as well as former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and overcame her rival’s claim that he was the real conservative in the race.

That is why it was so close.

Incumbents, establishment, OUT!

Lamontagne had the backing of local activists of the Tea Party movement as well as Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who has become a force in GOP primaries.

You know, the GOOD PEOPLE of America! Not the usurpers.

Democrats conceded privately that Ayotte would be a more difficult candidate in the general election than Lamontagne....

These are the same head-in-the-sand Democrats that can't see the train coming?

There’s Nevada’s Sharron Angle, the candidate who thinks reporters should only ask questions that she likes, also enjoys using death metaphors when describing her opponent.

Colorado boasts Ken Buck, who believes that incest and rape are piss-poor excuses for getting an abortion.

Rand Paul, or “The Mouth that Couldn’t Talk Straight”, embarrasses Kentucky with collegiate tales of Aqua Buddha and an incomprehensible economic vision for the country.

Joe “Neckbeard” Miller, a carpetbagger from Kansas, won Teabagger Doyenne Sarah Palin’s heart, even as he called for cutting off farmers subsidies to Alaska. In addition to the typical Teabagger list of grievances against the federal government, he’s also a hardcore Tenther.

And then there’s the Homecoming Princess of WTF-ery: Christine O’Donnell. Lies! Witchcraft! Bloody altars! Masturbation! Bowling! And today, a call by CREW for a criminal investigation into Ms. O’Donnell’s slippery campaign finances. Sarah Palin must be so proud of her mini-me.

Save, perhaps, for Ms. O’Donnell, though, none of this batshit insanity can hold a candle, satanic ritual or otherwise, to Carl Paladino. The self-identified “angry” Mr. Paladino is the Tea Party’s candidate for governor –and an aneurysm — in New York. A real charmer, Carl can lay claim to being a racist even if Thurman Thomas says otherwise , a sexist, a homophobe, and a bestiality fetishist. He sends out mailers in Smell-o-Vision to show how much he thinks government stinks. He disseminates angry emails questioning the size of opponent Andrew Cuomo’s testicles.

Paladino the Vulgar bested the comparatively milquetoast, perennial Republican loser Rick Lazio in the primaries, who had some remarkably accurate words about Carl Paladino:

“It’s such a bizarre year and such a bizarre time, and, let’s face it, Carl Paladino is one sentence from dropping the N-word at any moment.”

Paladino is also stinking filthy rich. In fact, he’s so wealthy, he’s self-financing his bizarro world campaign, which I suppose, allows him to do an end run around the whole “campaign finance” problem facing Chastity Queen O’Donnell. In fact, Paladino falls into the category of, in the words of The One Who Is Shrill, the “angry rich“.

Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.

Great. So he’s the best of both worlds.

It makes me long for the days of the preening Harold Ford and idiots who wanted to barter chickens for medical care. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a bicycle horn that needs honking. . . if that’s okay with you, Ms. O’Donnell.

By Nick Egnatz | Online Journal | September 20, 2010

A self-described representative democracy in which the only two political parties are both funded and controlled by elite corporate interests is a contradiction in terms. Control of the population through government propaganda and a monopoly corporate media have made the domination of the American working class and poor by the wealthy corporate elite consensual. The enormity of the crime against true democratic values is so complete that substantive reform of the present system is an impossibility.

A dilemma is a situation in which one is forced to choose between equally distasteful options. That has always been our consignment as Americans when we venture to the polls either vote for a wishy-washy Democrat or let the even worse Republican win . Every two years we are told that the fate of our democracy rests on our decision. Well it doesn’t because we don’t have a democracy, representative or otherwise. We have a plutocracy rule by the wealthy . Our two political parties answer out of necessity to the corporate world. No one represents the people and the monopoly corporate media will not allow for a discussion of democratic alternatives.

The chickens have come home to roost from the last 30 years of economic neoliberal globalization policies championed by both political parties. Supply side economics of massive tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of the very modest checks on American capitalism necessitated by the Great Depression have made us the most unequal industrial democracy on earth. Imperial wars of aggression and massive bailouts of the very speculators who engineered the financial collapse leading to the Great Recession have allowed both corporate parties to take the stance that there is no money left for the people’s needs. This is poppycock. How can a consumer driven economy recover if the working class and poor have no jobs or money?

To cut spending on social programs with political cover, Obama came up with the brilliant idea of a budget deficit commission National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform made up of bipartisan hacks from both our two corporate parties, representatives from the corporate world of greed and a single union president. Green Party and socialists need not apply and in fact there are no even mildly progressive Democrats an oxymoron if there ever was one on the commission. The commission is not a result of legislation from our Congress. It was formed by Executive Order. This is the way dictators govern, but that’s another issue. The commission is charged to cut the Budget Deficit by cutting social programs only and leaving the military spending intact. If and when 14 of the commission’s 18 members agree on policy it will go straight to Congress for a vote with no amendments allowed.

Co-chairman of the commission Alan Simpson, former Republican Senator from Wyoming received some notoriety recently by referring to seniors on Social Security as “lesser people,” calling Social Security a “cow with 310 million tits” and asking the question of Vietnam veterans “what have they done for us lately?’ None of this bothered our President enough to ask for Simpson’s resignation. Their recommendation is due in December, after the midterm election.

We are expected to accept the government propaganda that the unemployment rate is 9.6 percent, when that figure does not include those no longer receiving or who never received unemployment compensation, part time workers desiring full time work or workers disdainfully referred to as having given up looking for work. Including all these would bring the unemployment figure to 22 percent. But that still doesn’t count those working for less than a livable wage, this would easily bring the figure well beyond the 30 percent range. This assault on the working class has been the goal of the neoliberal globalization policy accepted as gospel by both corporate political parties since Ronald Reagan started selling it in the 70′s and 80′s when he set out to save the country from the scourge of a prosperous working class. The Great Communicator pushed his dogma of bad government/good corporations with the same smile he used to push Twenty Mule Team Borax soap to TV viewers years earlier.

More than 3 million families have already been foreclosed and torn from their homes. Another 11 million families are “underwater” owing more that the home is worth . Research firm First American Core Logic reports that Nevada with 65 percent of home mortgages underwater, Arizona with 48 percent, Florida with 45 percent, Michigan with 37 percent and California with 35 percent lead the nation in this foreboding statistic.

The Republicans propose fiscal austerity for the poor and working class and continued tax cuts for the wealthy corporate class to find our way our of the Great Recession. Obama and the Democrats say that economic growth will do the trick. Both so called solutions are illogical. We are expected to believe that if the big bad bankers would just pretty please start loaning money to businesses, the economy will start humming and everything will be hunky dory?

I’m not an economist, but I have been a small businessman and I have been told on more than one occasion that I have half a brain. The road to recovery is both simple and difficult. For businesses to thrive, for the economy to hum, the business owners simply need customers with money in their pockets. The first step is to put our citizens back to work at a livable wage and the economy will flourish. It will be difficult, to the point of impossibility, for corporate politicians to consider the people at the bottom first, but that is what needs to be done.

We are told that the fall elections are for the control of our country. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are told that we cannot allow the Republican Party of No to win Congress, yet the Democrats have controlled Congress for four years, the White House for two and there has been no challenge to the draconian policies of social spending cuts, endless imperial war and progressively greater and greater inequality. All now completely part and parcel of the fabric of a nation once founded on the single statement that “all men are created equal.” Regardless of which party wins and controls Congress, elite domination of the poor and working class will continue.

Understand that the system is beyond redemption. Recognize that we have exported the cancer of elite domination through globalization across the globe and that the struggle belongs to all the poor and working people of the world. Boycott elections that give credibility to this monstrous system of inequality and class domination. Organize on the basis of class and struggle for the equality that was promised in 1776.

Or you can support the Democratic Party and continue to see more of the same; continued wars, huge military budgets, depressed home prices, foreclosures, abandoned underwater mortgages, progressively greater and greater inequality and Depression Era unemployment. All done while the Democrats complain that they would like to change things, but that they just don’t have the votes or the heart or the balls. The last two they won’t admit to, but we all know better.

I’m not painting a pretty picture, because it isn’t pretty and wishing it was better won’t make it so. Voting for third party candidates, independents or so called progressive Democrats only serves to give legitimacy to an undemocratic system. The first step toward a true participatory democracy is to vocally and publicly boycott elections and renounce the American system of money controlled policies and politics through the two corporate political parties.

Right-wingers and liberal Democrats both love to say that I advocate for some kind of nebulous utopian dream. If you want nebulous from the right tune in to Glen Beck and Sarah Palin’s call for restoring America’s honor. If you want the equivalent from the Democratic Party listen to Obama’s calls for hope and change. Both appeals are long on rhetoric and bereft of specific steps to alleviate the misery corporate America and their two lackey political parties have trickled down on the poor and working class.

This socialist utopian will instead give specific plans for a new birth of democracy in America:

• 100 percent federal funding for all national elections. Under the proposal below this figure will become minuscule.
• No election commercials allowed. This just allows money to pollute politics. Instead require all media outlets to publish and broadcast periodic side by side statements of all the candidates positions on the various issues. Mandate debates in which all the candidates get a chance to state their positions on the issues.
• Require run-off elections if no candidate polls more than 50 percent of vote. This will facilitate the growth of alternative parties.
• Either eliminate the anti democratic U.S. Senate or require it to do away with the filibuster rule which allows 41 Senators from the smallest states, representing only 11 percent of the U.S. population to halt all legislation with the exception of certain budget votes.
• Return U.S. income tax rate on the most wealthy Americans to 90 percent for their excess income over $1 million. For 45 years 1935-1980 the top tax rate was between 70-94 percent. It is now 35 percent and the ever widening gap between rich and poor has made the U.S. the equivalent of a banana republic.
• Institute a financial transaction tax on all financial transactions such as stock sales.
• Cancel all free trade agreements and renegotiate into fair trade agreements in which tariffs are re-instituted to even the playing field when dealing with nations with substandard wages and environmental regulations. This is in line with the policy instituted by the first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, done at the behest of George Washington and carried forward for almost two centuries. That is until the neo-liberal globalization crowd made their first appearance after WWII and in the last three decades especially have managed to lower tariffs to an average of 2 percent. The rationale behind tariffs is to level the playing field for our workers. If country A has the same wage rate and basic environmental safeguards as we do, a free trade agreement with them is in order. But if country B has a wage rate much lower than ours and pays little attention to environmental safeguards, then we should have tariffs reflecting these differences. Free trade is fine with equal trading partners, but not with countries paying slave wages and polluting the environment like China.
• Give workers a seat at the table on all corporate boards with veto privileges as a protection for the American people from corporate dominance.
• Do away with the minimum wage and institute a living wage guaranteeing all workers a wage allowing for basic necessities. This will vary with the cost of living in different areas and individual family commitments, but for a single worker with no other dependents in an average area it would presently be about $15/hour.
• Institute a massive program similar to the WPA to put all the unemployed to work at a living wage. There is much work to do, let us do it. Our cities need rebuilding, seniors need care, single parents need parenting help, homes need to be made energy efficient, infrastructure needs repair.
• For small businesses that show through their tax returns an inability to pay their workers the living wage, have the federal government make up the difference until such time as the small business can support its workers on its own.
• Abolish the Federal Reserve Bank and institute a national bank with the power to create money presently given to the Federal Reserve. As the population and economy grows there is a need to create money. If this is not done, it causes deflation and things get progressively cheaper. While that might sound nice at first glance, not creating money would be every bit the disaster that high inflation can be. Imagine buying a home with a mortgage and watching the price drop every year. That’s deflation. We now have that with home prices, but for other reasons. Anyway, the new national bank will have the power to create money and the profit from creating this money will benefit all the people instead of the present banking class.
• The mortgage crisis must be addressed. The megabanks and Wall Street brought it on and should be required to adjust all mortgage balances down by the local percentage that home prices have dropped. The federal government might then consider not prosecuting those responsible for the crisis.
• Capitalism requires continual growth. This is at odds with the earth’s environment. We need to create a sustainable economy which does not wreak havoc with the earth’s delicate ecosystems. Economic growth is good only when it is environmentally sustainable.
• Just as the poor and working class are required to pay social security tax on all their income, require the wealthy to do the same.
• Recognize that healthcare is a human right and immediately institute either 100 percent government single payer healthcare for all or have government take over the healthcare apparatus and be both the employer and the payer of all healthcare bills.
• End the wars for U.S. Empire overseas. Close our 700 overseas military bases. Cut the total military budget now in excess of $1 trillion in half and then half again.
• Disband the Central Intelligence Agency and apologize to the people of all the countries in which our CIA engineered coups to overthrow democratically elected governments. A partial list would include Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, Greece, Congo and Iran.
• End military aid to Israel and break off diplomatic relations with them until such time as they agree to abandon all the illegal settlements in the West Bank, tear down the apartheid wall, end the criminal blockade of Gaza and finally allow the Palestinian people a free and independent state based on the 1967 borders that are recognized by the international community of nations.
• The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Democratic Minority Report in 2005 declared that there was a prima facie case that the Bush Administration broke at least seven federal and international laws in taking us into war in Iraq. If we are to be a country of laws, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell etc. must be investigated and prosecuted.
• Those responsible at the highest level for our policy of torture must be prosecuted.
• Equal diligence should be given to investigating and prosecuting the financial machinations behind the mortgage derivative bundling and trading scams. If they agree to reduce all mortgages by the local percentage drop in value, rework terms for those facing foreclosure, put already foreclosed families back in their homes and donate the rest of their ill gotten gain to charity, we might want to consider not prosecuting.
• The 9/11 Commission Investigation and Report was a complete whitewash. How can there be independence in the investigation when the President is allowed to appoint all the members of the commission? The American people are owed the truth and an independent investigation is absolutely necessary if we are to call ourselves a nation of laws.
• A democracy cannot exist without an informed citizenry. Media purveyors must be required to present the full spectrum of news and opinion.

Politicians from both political parties will avoid these issues like the plague. The question is, should you? Or are you content to support politicians who use soaring rhetoric in describing the plight of our people and then line up in support of corporate friendly legislation that continues the race to the bottom for the poor and working class of America? Will your vote for Congress and the U.S. Senate go to a Democratic candidate who supports not a single one of the above proposals? If the answer is yes and you consider yourself a progressive or liberal, what exactly does that mean?

We can’t fix this system by voting, petitioning, marching or lobbying. We have to change the system. The first step is to call the system what it is; monstrous, criminal and undemocratic. The next step is to refuse to participate in elections and to not be bashful in telling others why. This won’t save the world now, but it’s the only hope for the future.

Fickle Values Voters! At their Tony Perkins confab in DeeCee this weekend, Value Voters picked a new favorite for President. That they also picked the same guy for Vice President does not — it does not! — belie a fundamental misunderstanding of the constitutional system of choosing our leaders. It does not!

Who is the new favorite of the Value-fraut? Why, it’s “Indiana Market” Mike Pence! Otherwise well known as a fierce unreality advocate.

Rep. Mike Pence R-Ind. took the top spot Saturday in a presidential straw poll of social conservatives meeting in Washington, a surprise victory over last year’s overwhelming favorite, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

Pence placed first with 24 percent in the straw poll of 723 social conservatives at the Family Research Council’s fifth annual Values Voter Summit. Huckabee took second place with 22 percent, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney came in third with 13 percent and former House speaker Newt Gingrich took fourth with 10 percent.

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin took fifth with 7 percent. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, another potential 2012 GOP hopeful, took 1 percent of the straw poll vote.

Pence beat out 16 other leading Republicans on the straw poll ballot.

One great speech is all it takes to turn some Values Voters’ heads:

Anne Billings, 72, of Olathe, Kan., said that she made up her mind after hearing Pence address the summit Friday morning.

“I thought his speech was excellent,” Billings said. “I think he’d be very conservative, in the strictest sense of the word. He’ll stand up and say no, even if it’s with his party, he’ll say no.”

Saying “no” is something Mike Pence must have gotten better at, especially since he earlier answered “Yes” to some critically important questions about Iraq. Questions Pence answered “yes” to were “Has America found any WMDs yet, Congressman?” and “Does this Baghdad Market, surrounded by US troops and covered overhead by Blackhawk helicopters, remind you of a market in Indiana, Congressman?”

First, the WMDs:

Washington, D.C. — U.S. Congressman Mike Pence spoke today on the House floor about the recent discovery of sarin gas in Iraq, marking the second time this week Pence has discussed WMDs in a floor speech. His comments follow:

“Despite the national media’s best efforts to minimize the news, I am here to report, as the United States military confirmed in Iraq on Monday, weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.

“They were found in the form of two separate artillery shells containing sarin and mustard gas, shells that had been used by insurgents to create roadside bombs. The 155 mm shell found last week included nearly a gallon of a deadly gas, a drop of which will kill a human being. . . .

‘Where are the WMDs?’ We’ve been asked that again and again. They are where they’ve always been: hidden in Iraq, within the reach of terrorists, a threat to the Iraqi people, U.S. soldiers and the world.”

Except, of course, not hardly:

Experts familiar with Iraq’s chemical weapons program said the shell was likely a leftover from Hussein’s pre-Gulf War stockpile. Iraq acknowledged producing nearly 800 tons of sarin and thousands of sarin-filled rockets and artillery shells between 1984 and 1990.

The experts, including David Kay, the Pentagon’s former top weapons hunter in Iraq, said the discovery did not conclusively prove the existence of stockpiles of concealed chemical and biological weapons.

And we must not forget Mike Pence’s anti-reality bias in describing his visit to the Baghdad market with GOP presidential nominee John McCain:

Another member of the delegation, Rep. Mike Pence R-Ind. , declared that it was “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.”

Of course, the Lamestream Media immediately knocked that assessment back a bit, with their silly “interviewing eyewitnesses” and “recording actual participants’ observations.” Can you imagine Hoosier summertime market vendors describing daily life the way these actual Baghdad market vendors did?

But merchants on Tuesday said they fear for their lives, despite the drop in killings in Baghdad last month reflected in the morgue data.

They said that the only reason McCain and his delegation could stroll through Shorja market was because of the heavy security that accompanied their visit. Scores of U.S. soldiers in combat gear had cordoned off both sides of the street, their armored Humvees parked nearby, the merchants said. Military helicopters hovered above the rooftops. The visitors wore bulletproof vests on the recently fortified area that now bans vehicle traffic.

“The force was extraordinary,” said Hassan al-Aghaedi, Ahmad’s brother. His other brother Ayad, he recalled, told members of the delegation: “Once you closed the road, the economic center of Baghdad died.”

Ahmad pointed at a small wad of bills on his table and said: “That’s all we made today, 10,000 dinars,” the equivalent of about $7.75.

“Before, we made 1 million dinars a day,” said Hassan. “People are afraid to come here. There have been lots of bombings.”

“This was all done just for the media,” said Ahmad, referring to McCain’s visit. “Security means being able to open the street up, to move freely, to be open until late at night.”

As they spoke, they were shutting down their shop, worried about the threat of kidnapping. About two weeks ago, thugs entered a neighboring shop at around this time, handcuffed the owner and took all his money. Around the warren of shops in Shorja market, he was considered lucky.

“They usually ask for ransom, and then behead the hostage,” said Hassan.

Yeah, that doesn’t sound anything like an Indiana summer market to me, either.

But Mike Pence could hardly get a rug merchant to accept any money, so grateful was he to the Americans for liberating Iraqis from their previous lives:

And when he tried to buy a rug, this is what happened:

The merchant almost refused to take my money. He kept touching his heart and shaking his head no. His eyes, like so many others, radiated with affection and appreciation. He wanted to give me the rugs. I insisted that he accept my ten dollars and, happily, he relented.

Mike Pence wants you to know that he has “seen the impact of the surge firsthand,” and in Baghdad, this is the Surge impact he saw firsthand: “lots of people, lots of booths and a friendly relaxed atmosphere.”

Of course, the rug vendor at the market saw reality a little differently, and had quite another story to tell:

NPR went to Baghdad’s Shorja market after the visit, and spoke with the carpet seller, Ahmed al Krudi: “I didn’t accept the money. I said to myself, they must be guests, so I must give them a good impression of Iraqis. After all, we are occuped by these Americans, and they are accompanied by a lot of U.S. security.”

Of course the guy wanted to give you a rug, Mike. You were there with Blackhawk helicopters, having closed the market to all but your security detail, and were accompanied by John McCain, a man who might have then possibly been the next President of the United States.

Glenn Greenwald provides the required caveat for journalists, that you likely won’t find in any descriptions of Mike Pence’s magical one-two punch at the Value Voters Summit this weekend:

Strictly for journalistic accuracy, every article that quotes someone like Mike Pence claiming that things are improving in Iraq and the Glorious Surge is working ought to include a statement that informs readers that Pence has been making exactly the same claims for four years straight, and that he announced in 2004 that we found WMDs in Iraq. Passing along his claims without including those vital facts is misleading.

Mike Pence, Unfamiliar With The Truth — that sounds much more accurate than Mike Pence, Value Voters Choice. Unless, of course, they’re exactly the same thing.

Eye-of-Newt Gingrich is unconcerned about Palin’s Kenyan witch-doctor or O’Donnell’s boil-and-bubble but panicked over the beyond-the-grave powers of Obama’s Kenyan father. Remember how the Right used to complain about cultural relativity and the alleged “situation ethics” of their enemies derided as scary secular humanists ? That was before they fully mastered the dark arts of hypocrisy, which Ambrose Bierce called “prejudice with a halo.”

I am a bit unclear on how the political pundit class continues to take seriously a loose movement led by such obvious loons. Yes, they reported Sharron Angles’ threatened violent coup “…if this, this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies…” . But doesn’t journalism demand more than that? When the band they’re in starts playing different tunes, shouldn’t they at least, well, take five and think about it?

It’s not a matter of covering two sides in an honest debate over policy or ideological differences. We don’t need a reasoned arbiter. We need a balmy-ologist.

These people are nuts, they have no business getting anywhere near the levers of power, everyone knows it, but few are doing anything about it. We are not watching the Weird Sisters of Macbeth. This is real. There’s no theater to leave or late night bistro to repair to for wine and discussion of the evening’s entertainment.

Angle, O’Donnell and so many others are getting within spitting distance of some potential say about the use of nuclear weapons, for pity’s sake. Even the out-of-touch Potomac elite should be alarmed at that circumstance.

Here’s part of the problem. Since I first began covering politics back in the ‘70s, no one really thought the entertaining kooks on the Right would ever amount to much. I still remember the great Pornography Storm, when countless of these fools paraded before countless government bodies with their enormous collections of porn. See how bad it is! they’d cry. Not so bad that they wouldn’t purchase their own porn by the closetful.

Their crazed protests gave them an excuse to say “penis” in public, and they were clearly aroused by the prospect. We all had a good laugh at their expense. Americans are far too sensible to put such people in charge of anything, we thought. Plenty of pundits still think that.

They shouldn’t pretend that 2010 is witnessing some kind of authentic discussion of the role of the federal government or the benefits or dangers of deficit spending. The Tea Party movement, as measured by its chosen candidates, has nothing to do with those matters.

Instead, the Tea Party is a celebration of the newest rage in identity politics, which, of course, was and still is condemned by its newest adherents even as they cry, “The ignorant have rights, too!” They want to take back America, by gums, from those who never attended late-night Satanic picnics or faux exorcisms.

There’s no IQ threshold for participation in a democracy, and there shouldn’t be. I still believe in the wisdom of the broad public, recognizing that the broad public includes a good number of loonies, hustlers and mountebanks. O’Donnell, Palin and the others should not be silenced. But they should be recognized for what they are in venues other than the Comedy Channel.

A couple weeks ago I noticed Glenn Greenwald, one of my favorite voices on constitutional law, had the following post up on Twitter:

Tweet from @ggreenwald

Now I was probably not having a good day but it seemed to me that if people like Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher are out there bashing Obama for being a Bush reincarnate at the same time as people like Glen Beck and Sarah Palin are out there bashing Obama for being a Nazi-Socialist-Kenyan-Colonialist that there is one loser in this equation, the left.

The following exchange ensued:

@ggreenwald If you equate Obama with Bush and the right equates him to a Communist something doesn’t jive. Bottom line = he can’t be both. 5:15 PM Sep 8th via SocialScope in reply to ggreenwald

@MTedesco Hmmm, let’s see – maybe one side is right and one side is wrong. 5:40 PM Sep 8th via web in reply to MTedesco

Maybe or maybe someone is so self -absorbed that he can’t see the forest for the trees. In my opinion Glenn is playing the same “you are either with me or against me” black or white politics that the he has derided conservatives about for years. Just because Obama is not doing everything you want him to do does not mean he is George W. Bush. If he were then he would be a darling of the right.

Governing is much like running a business something with which I am very familiar. Both governments and businesses are systems made up of smaller subsystems each with their own challenges. The system itself is always constrained by the fact that there is a limited amount of resources in form of labor that can be focused on any given challenge. In addition, the energy of those resources needs to remain focused and concerned about delivering solutions. This is what would be called morale in business or motivation in politics. The balancing act every leader or manager is faced with then on a daily basis is to decide which of these challenges to address and when with the limited resources at his/her disposal all the while trying to keep his people focused on the task at hand. Any distraction or lack of focus can cause a downturn in morale which, as any leader will tell you, spells doom.

So in this case Obama’s labor force, the liberal activists who elected him in 2008, have a serious morale problem. They are not seeing any of their concerns being addressed by the President and as a result they are vocally working toward his demise. Case in point, this piece in today’s Salon by Glenn.

So, just as Robert Gibbs before him explained albeit more harshly , if you’re one of those people dissatisfied with large parts of the Obama presidency, that’s only because you have something wrong with the way you think you need drug testing/you “congenitally see the glass as half empty” , and because you are saddled with extremely unrealistic, child-like expectations you’re angry that the Pentagon hasn’t closed yet/bitter that Obama “hasn’t yet brought about world peace: ‘I thought that was going to happen quicker’ Laughter. ” . In other words, you’re just a petulant, unreasonable, unrealistic, fringe child who doesn’t appreciate the greatness and generosity he’s given you h/t Jane Hamsher .

I am not going to bother quoting the entire thing but in effect Glenn lays out many of the problems he has with the president only after all but calling him an elitist for hosting a “$30,000 per plate DNC fundraising event at the “home of Richard and Ellen Richman, who live in the exclusive Conyers Farm development in Greenwich [Connecticut]’s famed ‘back country’ neighborhood,”‘. He goes on to quote the President who foolishly decided to use the fundraiser as a vehicle to hit back at these attacks from the left and then in one of his many updates to the post claims to be shocked when the gossips at the WAPO jump on the obvious “liberal eat their young” display playing out at Salon.

This can not continue. Glenn and his peers have valid points in that the President needs to show that he is willing to work on addressing many of the things that the left sees as differentiating them from the right such as torture, warrant-less wiretapping, foreign policy, etc. At the same time the President has a point and the left needs to acknowledge the the managerial/leadership challenge he is faced with and praise him for the things he has accomplished like preventing a great depression, passing universal health care, passing financial reform, etc.

If this infighting does not stop then in little over one month we will see extremist Republicans take control of the House and possibly the Senate and we are guaranteed a return to the Clinton-era witch-hunts times ten.

Instead, let’s have some real legitimate outrage, international edition. Somebody has observed Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and evolved their outrage for profit model up a notch:

Holocaust denier David Irving will begin leading tours of the former Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka next week.

The British historian is also scheduled to lead a group of American and British tourists in the former Warsaw ghetto. His tour brochure promises an experience far removed from the “tourist attractions of Auschwitz”. He will charge the tour participants $2,650 each.

For those of you unfamiliar with who Irving is, Worst Human on the Planet may be too insignificant a title.

As we explained, it's dangerous for a website to claim that users who breach its terms of use also violate computer crime law. Facebook users can easily make uncontroversial choices that nevertheless violate the plain meaning of Facebook's terms. Furthermore, Facebook shouldn't have the discretion to criminalize certain behavior just by forbidding it in terms of use.

In response, Facebook has written to us to point out the Sarah Palin and Barack Obama profiles we mentioned in our earlier post are Pages — or public profiles — rather than personal profiles. Facebook also noted that its general terms of use incorporate by reference another set of terms of use specifically for Pages, which allow the subject of a Page to authorize representatives to administer her public profile. Those representatives can administer the Page using their own accounts.

There's still a problem, though. Facebook maintains that both creators and administrators of Pages are also bound by the general terms of use that apply to all users. And those terms appear to contain provisions that contradict the Pages Terms.

For example, the Pages Terms say:

• "You may only administer a Facebook Page if you are an authorized representative of the subject of the Page."

While the general terms of use say:

• "You will not solicit login information or access an account belonging to someone else."
• "You will not . . . let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account."

The general terms of use don't explain what Facebook means when it uses the word "account," but they do say "[y]ou will not transfer your account including any page or application you administer to anyone without first getting our written permission." That suggests that Facebook considers a Page to be part of a user's account, so all three of the above provisions apply to Pages.

The upshot is that all users who create or administer Pages are bound by both sets of terms, which contain provisions that appear to be contrary to each other. This lack of clarity is exactly why it's a bad idea to enforce terms of use with computer crime laws, as Facebook is trying to do in its lawsuit against Power Ventures.

We doubt that Facebook would give Sarah Palin or anyone else using Pages a hard time for violating one set of terms to follow the other. But that's not the point. Facebook is arguing that it should be able to use the blunt club of computer crime law to beat down users who violate terms of use. This, despite the fact that users who create and administer Pages can't follow one set of terms without running afoul of a different set of terms.

As the Supreme Court has long held, and reiterated just this year, people must have clear notice of what's a crime. See United States v. Skilling, 130 S. Ct. 2896, 2927-28 2010 . If violating terms of use is a criminal act — as Facebook claims in its lawsuit — and Facebook has contradictory terms of use, then it's impossible for users to know what's actually OK and what could get them thrown in jail.

One month after taking a stand against construction of the proposed Islamic Cultural Center near the destroyed World Trade Center site in Manhattan, the ADL has started an interfaith coalition meant to help US Muslim communities that are facing opposition to the building of mosques. The Interfaith Coalition on Mosques is composed of individuals and Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups, and is meant to provide support to Muslims when their rights are violated. Its charter members include ADL national director Abraham Foxman, Park Avenue Synagogue Rabbi Elliott Cosgrove, and Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, founder of the Center for Leadership and Learning and former chairman of the US Holocaust Museum. The group’s statement of purpose says:

Working as the national Interfaith Coalition On Mosques under the sponsorship of the ADL, our purpose is to assist Muslim communities who are being denied permission to build mosques in their neighborhoods. While we are extremely concerned about discrimination against mosque building in the US, we will also recognize that local governments have legitimate concerns about zoning and other planning issues within the framework of current federal, state and local laws. We believe the best way to uphold US democratic values is to ensure that Muslims can exercise the same religious freedom enjoyed by everyone in the US. They deserve nothing less than to have a place of worship like everyone else.

The statement of purpose cites recent incidents in the US where construction of mosques have been opposed vociferously, and with “ugly rhetoric,” including in Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin and California. Conspicuously absent from the group’s statement of purpose, however, is any mention of New York City. The ADL recently came under fire for its controversial stand opposing the Park 51 Islamic Community Center proposed for a site two blocks away from Manhattan’s Ground Zero. The proposed location of the center has become a highly politicized debate in the US. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg has stood in support of the project as testament to New York’s religious diversity. However, many national politicians, including former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, have spoken out against the center, calling its proximity to the World Trade Center site inappropriate at best and offensive at worst. In August, the ADL released a statement calling for the Park 51 project to be moved from its planned location, citing the objections by relatives of the victims. The ADL’s statement on the issue read:

The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process. Therefore, under these unique circumstances, we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.

At the time, Foxman vociferously rejected claims his organization had betrayed the message of religious tolerance it usually preaches. The ADL’s position on the construction of the Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero was more “nuanced’ than people had been led to believe, Foxman told the JPost last month, and the outcry against the ADL was “very painful.” In an interview about ICOM with the Post, Foxman said the Park 51 issue was completely separate from ICOM’s goals, and that there is “no disconnect” between the ADL’s stance on the two issues. Foxman said of the Park 51 plan:

In New York, there is no issue of legality, and we made that very clear. They have a legal right to do it. It’s just a question of whether they should do it. You know what’s similar? That rightwing lunatic minister has the right to burn the Koran, but it’s not the right thing to do. We raised the question of sensitivity to the location, a position which over 70% of USAians agree with. It’s not a question of their right to do it. What the debate around the so-called ‘Ground Zero mosque’ did was that it surfaced that there is a problem in the US where Muslims were having problems exercising their right to build a mosque. They do have a constitutional right. So we decided to put together an interfaith coalition, where we will ascertain and check the facts, find out whether there has been discrimination and then determine what kind of remedy or remedial help to dispatch, whether legal support, public relations support, or whatever. The US woke up to realize there’s a problem out there. Our purpose to address the issue and problem, and then to make sure there is proper information and proper action.

Insurgent Republican Wins in Delaware 15 Sep 2010 The Tea Party movement scored another victory on Tuesday, helping to propel a dissident Republican, Christine O’Donnell, to a stunning upset win over Representative Michael N. Castle in the race for the United States Senate nomination in Delaware. Mr. Castle, a moderate Republican who served two terms as governor and has been reliably winning elections for the last four decades, became the latest establishment Republican casualty of the primary election season. Ms. O’Donnell won the endorsement of Sarah Palin, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and other leaders of the party’s conservative [Reich]wing.

photo: Josh Thompson

Today effectively marks the end of the primary election season and the true beginning of the general elections. It’s not only one of the last primary days, but one of the biggest including Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Wisconsin.

[Ed. note: Jon will be liveblogging results all night. Delaware polls close at 8pm EDT, with a number of others closing at 9. Look for results and reaction at FDL's Elections page.]

Delaware

Senate – In the Republican primary, establishment-backed and long-time Rep. Mike Castle faces Tea Party insurgent Christine O’Donnell. There are some signs that Castle could suffer the same fate as Sen. Lisa Murkowski R-AK for similar reasons. We will see tonight if the Tea Party Express can pull out another primary upset. Castle has a huge fundraising advantage, but O’Donnell has a lot of outside money being spent on her behalf. The latest PPP poll gives O’Donnell a mere three-point lead at 47 percent to Castle’s 44 percent — within the margin of error.

At-Large – The Republican primary is a battle between establishment choice Michele Rollins and Glen Urquhart. They have each raised and spent roughly the same amount as of the last campaign finance filing date, but most of Urquhart’s money comes from a half-million dollar personal loan. Earlier this year, Rollins won the state party’s convention. A recent PPP poll PDF of the race has Urquhart leading 50 percent over Rollins at 38 percent.

DC

Mayor – In the weird legal bizzaro world that is the District of Columbia, the office of mayor is the highest elected position, with many of the same responsibilities as a state governor. Given how incredibly Democratic the district is, the primary tonight is the election. The battle is between incumbent Adrian Fenty and council member Vincent Gray. A Washington Post poll found Gray with a huge lead over Fenty, 53 to 36, among likely voters. Fenty draws strong support from white voters, while Gray leads with African Americans. A recent Clarus Research Group poll found Gray leading Fenty, 45 to 38.

Maryland

MD-01 – Maryland’s 1st district is one of the most Republican-leaning districts to be represented by a Democrat, Frank Kratovil. In the Republican primary, it is a fight between Rob Fisher and Andy Harris. Harris is the choice of much of the party’s establishment, has a large fund raising advantage, and will likely win tonight. Fisher is trying to run an “outsider” campaign against Harris.

Massachusetts

MA-09 – Probably the biggest primary race in the state is that of labor organizer MacDonald D’Alessandro versus incumbent Democrat Stephen Lynch. D’Alessandro was SEIU’s New England political director and is challenging Lynch from the left. A key complaint against Lynch was his vote against the new health care law. So far this year, several poorly funded left-leaning challengers with fewer skills in campaigning have won relatively large shares 30-48% of the vote in primary challenges against incumbent Democrats; few have actually managed to defeat the incumbents, however.

MA-10 – Rep. Bill Delahunt’s retirement has created a competitive primary for both parties. On the Democratic side, it is a fight between Bill Keating and Rob O’Leary. Keating is the better funded of the two candidates, but O’Leary has recently benefited from the endorsement of the Boston Globe. On the Republican side, it’s a fight between Jeff Perry and Joe Malone. Perry has been endorsed by the NRA.

[New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin after the jump.]

New Hampshire

Senate – Republican Attorney General Kelly Ayotte is the establishment choice to replace retiring Senator Judd Gregg. She is running against Ovide Lamontagne, Bill Binnie and Jim Bender. The latest Magellan poll found Ayotte at 34 percent, Lamontagne 31 percent, Binnie 14 percent and Bender at 10 percent. The most recent PPP poll has it Ayotte 37 percent, Lamontagne 30 percent, Binnie 13 percent, Bender 12 percent. While Lamontagne has raised the least money of the four, he has benefited from the important endorsement from the New Hampshire Union Leader. Not too be out done, Ayotte has been endorsed by conservative standard-bearers Sarah Palin and Sen. Tom Coburn. It looks like Ayotte will win, but that is partly because a divided field is splitting the hardcore conservative vote.

NH-01 – Four well-financed Republicans — Sean Mahoney, Frank Guinta, Richard Ashooh and Robert Bestanii — are all vying for the right to challenge incumbent Carol Shea-Porter. Sean Mahoney is the best funded of the Republicans and leads according to the only recent poll I can find, by Americans for Prosperity. The poll has Mahoney leading the field at 32.6 percent, with Guinta at 25.9 percent, Ashooh at 9.9 percent and Bestani lagging with 5.1 percent of the prospective vote.

NH-02 – Both parties have competitive primaries for this open seat. On the Democratic side, it is Ann McLane Kuster versus Katrina Swett. Swett is effectively the “Queen of the Liebercrats” and would likely become an official Blue Dog. She co-chaired Joe Lieberman’s 2004 presidential campaign, and supported Lieberman in his 2006 independent bid. Kuster, however, holds a significant fundraising advantage.

On the Republican side. former Rep. Charles Bass is trying to win back his seat. He must first defeat radio host Jennifer Horn and pilot Bob Giuda, who are also competing for the nomination.

New York

Governor – The Republican primary is between former Rep. Rick Lazio and self-funded millionaire Carl Paladino. A Quinnipiac poll from earlier this month showed Lazio ahead, 47 percent to 35 percent. Both candidates trail Democrat Andrew Cuomo by a wide margin. A Siena poll released Saturday showed the primary tightening, now neck-and-neck with Lazio at 43 percent to Paladino’s 42 percent PDF .

NY-01 – Incumbent Dem Tim Bishop is thought to be vulnerable this year, and, as a result, three Republicans — Randy Altschuler, Christopher Cox and George Demos — are tearing each other apart for the right to challenge him this November. The race has been bitter and extremely expensive. Cox has spent a million dollars of his own money on the race; not to be outdone, Altschuler has spent two million dollars.

NY-13 – In the all-Michael district, we have Michael Grimm who has the support of Sarah Palin and Michael Allegretti who is endorsed by the previous Representative from the district, the scandal-tainted Vito Fosella, Jr. competing in the Republican primary to take on incumbent Democrat Michael McMahon.

NY-14 – Incumbent Democrat Carolyn Maloney has managed to incur the wrath of Wall Street with votes on credit card and financial reform. She is being challenged by Reshma Saujani whose resume includes work for three different hedge funds. Saujani’s list of donors looks like a who’s who of Wall Street millionaires. Saujani is the ultimate anti-populist, pro-banker challenger in what has been an otherwise very anti-Wall Street election cycle. Maloney was recently endorsed by the New York Times.

NY-15 – Despite being involved in several mini-scandals that would probably have sunk most other politicians’ careers, Charlie Rangel looks like he will survive the primary tonight due to a lack of a single stand-out opponent, a huge fundraising advantage, and a very long history in the district. He is being challenged by former Rangel aide Vince Morgan, union organizer Jonathan Tasini, and NYC government hand Joyce Johnson. It is worth keeping an eye on this race to see how loyal to or fed up with Rangel the voters of the district may be. Johnson has the endorsement of the New York Times.

NY-23 – After losing the special election, Doug Hoffman is really determined to challenge Democrat Bill Owens again. Hoffman is competing against millionaire Matt Doheny for the Republican nomination. Doheny has the support of most of the party establishment and has already dropped a million dollars out of his own pocket into the race. Even if Hoffman loses the Republican primary — which seems likely — he remains committed to running in the general on the Conservative Party ticket. It looks like Owens might just have a chance of keeping the district, thanks again to Hoffman splitting the conservative vote.

Rhode Island

RI-01 – There is a heated four-way Democratic primary between David Cicilline, Anthony Gemma, William Lynch and David Segal to replace Rep. Patrick Kennedy. Cicilline has a large fundraising advantage and strong name recognition as a result of being mayor of Providence. Segal has tried to stand out by claiming to be the true progressive in the field. A poll from early August shows Cicilline leading the field at 32 percent, with Lynch at 15 percent, Gemma at 11 percent, and Segal at 5 percent of voters polled. Given that the poll’s sample size was a mere 174 voters, I would take these results with a big grain of salt.

Wisconsin

Governor – Scott Walker and Mark Neumann are competing for the GOP gubernatorial nomination. Walker is the perceived frontrunner in the primary.

WI-07 – Best known for his role on MTV’s reality television program “The Real World,” Sean Duffy is running against Dan Mielke. Duffy holds a strong fund raising advantage, has the backing of the national party which declared him one of their “young guns,” along with fund raising help from Sarah Palin.

WI-08 – The Republican primary is a three-way race between Reid Ribble, Roger Roth and Terri McCormick. The winner will take on incumbent Dem Steve Kagen in the general.

--more--"

Let's dance, shall we in a most AmeriKan way ?

Left:

"Obama planning big rallies to fuel fall campaign push

WASHINGTON — The events are designed to evoke the good old days of 2008.

Gone and forgotten.

To many Democrats and the liberal faithful, the sight of Obama in full cry back on the campaign trail is a glimmer of light in an otherwise dim season....

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Right:

"GOP focus is jobs, not health care; Candidates mostly avoid issue party pledged to hammer" by Mark Arsenault, Globe Staff | September 11, 2010

WASHINGTON — Republicans had promised to make the fall elections a reprise of the bitter, exhausting debate over what they call “Obamacare.’’ But two months before the vote, the GOP has adopted a more nuanced approach and folded the issue into broader attacks on the Democrats’ handling of the economy.

When Republicans bring up health care, they tend to list it as just one example in a litany of complaints about the “misplaced priorities’’ and “overreaching’’ of Democrats. Even many Democrats are downplaying the new sweeping overhaul, once trumpeted as a signature accomplishment, because they are skittish about being portrayed as advocates of big government.

Related: Why You Will Love the New Health Law

Sick of being lied to yet?

In a sign of how rapidly the ground has shifted, the new health care law, approved in March after a year of legislative struggles and caustic town hall protests, didn’t even come up last week at a marquee US Senate de bate in California between Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer and her opponent, Carly Fiorina.

The reason, analysts say, is clear: Jobs and the economy dominate the concerns of Americans, particularly those coveted independent voters who will tip individual midterm elections.

And the WARS. Please do NOT FORGET THOSE, MSM!!

On health care, polls find, American opinion is more evenly divided and not as easy for either party to exploit for political gain.

The early conventional wisdom that health care would be the top issue did not account for the way persistent joblessness would erode the electorate’s confidence in the economy and in the Obama administration, said Robert Blendon, a professor at Harvard University School of Public Health and a specialist on voter sentiment about medical care....

The issue of health care has not disappeared. Some conservative groups are conducting surgical strikes in select races....

Thus the LEFT-RIGHT THEME!

Everything is a WAR in the NEWSPAPER!

A conservative group, American Crossroads, cofounded by President George W. Bush’s strategist, Karl Rove, has attacked Democratic Senate candidates with ads on health care in a handful of key states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada, Kentucky, and California....

Democrats plan to run on jobs and economic issues this fall....

--more--"

Then they are going to LOSE!

"US poverty rate expected to post a record increase; Overall number could reach 15%, demographers say" by Hope Yen, Associated Press | September 12, 2010

WASHINGTON — The number of people in the United States who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty....

Yes, he has HAD TWO YEARS!!

It’s unfortunate timing for Obama and his party just seven weeks before midterm elections in which control of Congress is at stake. The anticipated poverty rate increase — from 13.2 percent to about 15 percent — would be another blow to Democrats struggling to persuade voters to keep them in power....

I think the House is gone; they probably hold the Senate by a vote or two.

Should those estimates hold true, some 45 million people in this country, or more than 1 in 7, were poor last year....

You are reading the posts of one of them, dear readers.

But if Thursday’s report is as troubling as expected, Republicans in the midst of an increasingly strong drive to win control of the House, if not the Senate, would get one more argument to make against Democrats in the campaign homestretch.

Yeah, they have had their chance and they didn't do what we wanted.

The GOP says voters should fire Democrats because Obama’s economic fixes are hindering the sluggish economic recovery. Rightly or wrongly, Republicans could cite a higher poverty rate as evidence.

Democrats almost certainly will argue that they shouldn’t be blamed. They’re likely to counter that the economic woes — and the poverty increase — began under President George W. Bush with the near-collapse of the financial industry in late 2008.

You know, we are SICK of the BACKWARDS FINGER-POINTING!

It is YOUR SHOW NOW and HAS BEEN for TWO YEARS!!

Although that’s true, it’s far from certain that the Democratic explanation will sway voters who already are trending heavily toward the GOP in polls as worrisome economic news piles up.

Translation: the Democrats blew it.

--more--"

Related: Obama defends Democrats’ efforts on the economy

How do you defend something like that?

Left:

"Obama: Voter anger could hurt Dems in elections" by Tom Raum and Darlene Superville, Associated Press Writers | September 11, 2010

WASHINGTON -- Noting the stubbornly high jobless rate, Obama acknowledged that many voters in the Nov. 2 midterm elections probably will blame him for economic hard times and could take it out on congressional Democrats.

He said that "since I'm the president and Democrats have controlled the House and the Senate, it's understandable that people are saying, you know, 'What have you done?'"

Still, he said, "If the election is about the policies that are going to move us forward versus the policies that will get us back into a mess, then I think the Democrats will do very well."

Polls suggest large-scale Republican victories and Democratic losses in the midterm races....

In a fair and free election, yeah.

Especially after these next remarks:

Obama also used his 75-minute long East Room news conference to note that Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, would be "a national day of service and remembrance."

Related: Negating 9/11

Yeah, things will never be the same.

***********

He defended the continued U.S. combat role in the long war in Afghanistan, saying it remains in the U.S. national interest....

:-

And we all had such hopes for him.

--more--"

Right:

"GOP leader enjoys tight ties to lobbyists

Goldman Sachs, Google, Citigroup, R.J. Reynolds, MillerCoors, and UPS.

They have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio over the years, provided him rides on their corporate jets, socialized with him at luxury golf resorts and waterfront bashes, and are leading fund-raising efforts for his Boehner for Speaker campaign, which is soliciting checks of up to $37,800 each, the maximum allowed.

Related:

"Golf and tennis fees were paid, whitewater rafting and trout fishing guides were contracted, and limo drivers and photographers were hired. Flowers worth about $1,300 decorated tables filled with food.... RNC’s expenditures for office supplies during the same period topped $773,000... including jelly beans for Steele’s office and thousands of dollars’ worth of liquor and wine"

See what your campaign contribution is being used for?

Some of the lobbyists readily acknowledge routinely seeking his office’s help to advance their agenda in Washington. And in many cases, Boehner has helped them out....

Left:

"Democrats could lose eight House seats in N.Y.

Gillibrand is expected to easily capture the party nomination in Tuesday’s primary, and all three top Democrats stand as prohibitive favorites in a state where registered Democratic voters outnumber Republican 2-to-1. Complicating the GOP prospects, Republicans don’t have a single A-list name running statewide this year.

But recession-weary voters probably will not be as kind to some of the lower-profile New York Democrats who control 26 of the state’s 29 seats in the US House.

Democrats captured seven of their eight at-risk House seats in the 2006 and 2008 elections, when they made gains in suburban and upstate districts that had long been dominated by Republicans. They won two of the seats in special elections where turnout and organization were critical. Party strategists fear those two elements will be lacking this year.

They’ve already pretty much written off their chances of holding a seat in the Republican-leaning Rochester area left vacant when Representative Eric Massa resigned in March amid an investigation into whether he sexually harassed male staffers.

See: Massa Probe Touches Pelosi

Just to the east, second-term Representative Michael Arcuri is facing a steep rematch challenge from GOP businessman Richard Hanna, who nearly defeated him in 2008....

“We are your everyday, average, church-going families, we represent the majority of people in this nation, and we’re ready to take back our government,’’ said Pam Pinkston of Fair Oaks, Calif., one of about 4,000 people who attended Sacramento’s “United to the Finish’’ gathering.

Thousands of Tea Party activists also turned up at rallies in Washington, D.C., and St. Louis to spread their message of smaller government and focus their political movement on the pivotal congressional elections in November....

NORRISTOWN, Pa. — Making call after call, a dozen faithful volunteers huddled around a conference table at Democratic Party headquarters here and implored supporters to get out and vote. But just two blocks away, Tammie James spelled out why the Democrats’ campaign efforts — a marvel of election organizing in 2008 — face trouble this year.

Sitting on the steps outside her home, James said she voted for President Obama but has grown dispirited during the first half of his term. She expressed uncertainty over whom she will back in congressional midterm elections....

Congressional Democrats face the threat of a drubbing on Nov. 2, with the distinct possibility they will lose control of the House to Republicans. To limit the damage, the party is counting on superior organization and more money....

Related:

"Party committees spend roughly two-thirds of the money they take in on the care and comfort of committee staffs and on efforts to raise more funds, with lavish spending on limousines, expensive hotels, meals, and tips.... vast sums are consumed with limited accountability.... hefty expenditures in categories such as “office supplies’’ and “tips’’ that consume tax-exempt party funds.... pamper prospective donors with luxurious getaways and gifts... 59 percent of total Democratic revenue of about $100 million.... There is a class of [political] donors who expect to be wined and dined and who expect to have gala receptions.... spending on charter flights, limousines, entertainment, food, and beverages at party headquarters"

See what your campaign contribution is being used for?

Opinion polls and political observers suggest Democrats are struggling this year because many believe Obama has not delivered on his 2008 campaign promise of change — especially an economic rebound.

And the WARS!

Obama repeated Friday what he has been saying around the country in recent weeks: that his policies need more time to work and that the worst thing at this sensitive time would be to restore Republicans to power.

You have had plenty of time.

Getting a big Democratic turnout will be crucial to countering a Republican wave, and Democrats do have more money to spend getting out the vote....

A rigging in the works?

Right:

"Palin/Beck event draws fans and foes

ANCHORAGE — An appearance by Sarah Palin, Alaska’s former governor, and conservative commentator Glenn Beck yesterday brought out two very different crowds. Thousands of fans paid between $73.75 and $225 for tickets. Outside, critics planned a protest to denounce Palin and Beck as intolerant fear-mongers spreading divisiveness across the country Associated Press ."

Related: America's False Choices Beckon

Front-runner Kelly Ayotte, a 42-year-old former attorney general from Nashua, has spent $2 million to push a conservative anti-Democrat, antifederal spending agenda....

A loaded description if I have ever seen one.

Manchester lawyer Ovide Lamontagne, 52, may have been the biggest beneficiary, despite spending only $400,000.

The REAL Tea Party candidate.

In a battle over who is the most conservative, Ayotte got a boost from Sarah Palin’s endorsement in July over Lamontagne, who courted Tea Party movement activists. Palin, the former vice presidential nominee and former governor of Alaska, recorded telephone messages to voters that started Sunday praising Ayotte as “the true conservative’’ — a mantle Lamontagne has tried to claim as his throughout his campaign.

Her endorsement makes me question the candidate.

Multimillionaire businessman Bill Binnie, 52, of Rye changed tactics in the final week, reaching out to social moderates by trumpeting his support for abortion rights....

Sorry, but that's down the list of concerns right now.

See: Slow Saturday Special: S*** Politics

Want to wade few a through a few races?

In Delaware, Representative Mike Castle, 71 and a fixture in state politics for more than a generation, faces a threat from Christine O’Donnell, supported by Palin and the Tea Party Express, which has reported spending more than $200,000 on her behalf in recent days.

The race has rapidly become bitter as O’Donnell has narrowed Castle’s lead in the polls. Republican officials disclosed yesterday they had contacted the Justice Department after Tom Ross, state party chairman, received a death threat. Ross has been among Castle’s most outspoken supporters, saying at one point that O’Donnell “could not be elected dog catcher’’ in Delaware.

Here we go with ANOTHER FALSE FLAG HOAX to discredit the good people!

Democrats MUST be DESPERATE!

In contrast to Castle, a former two-term governor who has held the state’s lone House seat for nine terms, O’Donnell has never been elected to public office. For most of the campaign, Castle seemed to ignore her, but when Senator Lisa Murkowski was unexpectedly defeated for renomination in Alaska two weeks ago, Castle and the Republican Party abruptly switched course.

Related: Palin's Alaskan Pull

Also see: Clinging to the Senate

In New York, a Tea Party movement Republican is trying to ride a wave of voter anger as he challenges the GOP leaders’ choice in the New York governor’s race. A poll over the weekend showed millionaire developer Carl Paladino had drawn even with Rick Lazio, former congressman. Paladino is a political novice and Lazio the choice of leaders of the Republican and Conservative parties.

"Bay State GOP ranks shrink, data indicate" by Stephanie Ebbert, Globe Staff | September 9, 2010

They may have ignited sparks after US Senator Scott Brown’s January surprise, but Massachusetts Republicans are still bleeding voters.

The latest voter data show Republican registration has slipped to a recent low — just 11.34 percent of those registered to cast ballots in Tuesday’s primary.

That’s a smaller share than four years ago, when then-Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey was the Republican nominee for governor and 12.7 percent of voters were registered Republican....

Democrats have lost a small share of voters too, since the last election for governor. Now, 36.65 percent of Massachusetts voters are Democrats — down from 36.95 percent in 2006.

The ranks of unenrolled voters, who are not affiliated with either major party and who often swing statewide elections, increased by 187,383, from 49.51 percent of voters in the 2006 primary to 51.44 percent this year.

Translation: Voters DO NOT LIKE EITHER PARTY!

--more--"

Related: Who's Auditing the Auditors?

That's reason enough to go.

Also see: Selecting a Senator: Brown Beats Coakley

I'm a one-percenter, folks!

So what will the Globe deduce from my turning out to vote?

"Taking a measure of voter mood; Candidates make their final pleas before today’s primaries" by Alan Wirzbicki and Michael Levenson, Globe Correspondent | Globe Staff | September 14, 2010

:-

Do you sense resentment in the room? Frustration?

HAVERHILL — Candidates across the state launched their last-ditch appeals to voters yesterday as the busiest primary season in memory built to a frenetic close, with today’s verdicts at the polls being carefully watched as a sign of the electorate’s mood heading into November....

You already know how we are feeling.

Today’s ballots are unusually crowded, with both parties picking candidates for the state’s open congressional seat and Republican contenders running in districts that have not seen real competitions in November — much less a GOP primary — for years. Republicans are hoping for a strong turnout, often an indication of an energized electorate....

Political analysts said the level of the GOP turnout, and whether challengers in Democratic primaries are able to topple longtime incumbents, will offer the first test of how strong anti-incumbent feeling remains in the Commonwealth eight months after Scott Brown stunned the political world by winning a special election for the US Senate....

I won't be voting for any.

Related: Insurgents vs. Incumbents

Not like the Globe is biased or anything.

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Globe is bringing out the big guns, too:

"Senior women legislators hit trail; Campaigning, they cite history of vote" by Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff | September 13, 2010

MARLBOROUGH — Senior women legislators fanned out across the region yesterday in support of freshman female representatives facing election challenges, saying the push was particularly significant in this 90th anniversary year of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

“The whole point of supporting other women is to make sure that they feel they are supported and that they can run for office,’’ said Patricia Haddad, a Somerset Democrat who is the assistant majority whip of the House....

So we can mark you down for Palin in 2012?

The departures leave open the possibility that the Legislature could see a net loss of women — a change that would mark a comedown from 2009....

I don't care about gender, race, or all the other divisive subgroups.

Will they DO the JOB we WANT THEM to DO?

Massachusetts lags behind a number of other states in its percentage of female state legislators....

What?

Smug, self-righteous Massachusetts?

Priti Rao, director of the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, said, “Women supporting women is how we get to equal representation. Women worked really hard for the privilege so we want to make sure that women are exercising their right.’’

Palin, 2012.

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Our 21st-century American version of the frenzied, torch-bearing mob storming Dr. Frankenstein’s castle is decidely less ambulatory, but no less rabid, than the thugs who ran around breaking windows back in 1930s Germany. Allergic to reason and critical thought, these mobs are hopelessly addicted to the hyperbolic doublespeak of the Palins and Becks, holding them up as the ultimate arbiters of morality for the country.

Then, with Newt “Cancer? Yuck, I Want a Divorce!” Gingrich’s blatant dog-whistle accusations and the nationalistic tone of the fearmongering over the weekend, I began to question whether the United States had somehow wandered into the plot of Lights Out in the Reptile House. It was a chilling display of irrational fear and racism, with just an aromatic soupçon of totalitarianism, down on Park Place on Saturday and again down in D.C. yesterday . Anybody who tells you that the opportunistic politicians and rightwing pundits aren’t driving this narrative can blow it out their tightly puckered portholes:

The cynicism of this rhetorical journey can be traced in the remarks of Laura Ingraham, who interviewed Daisy Khan, Abdul Rauf’s wife and partner in the project, in December. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” Ingraham told Khan then. “I like what you’re trying to do.” Ingraham has since been brought into line. “I say the terrorists have won with the way this has gone down,” she said last month, on “Good Morning America.” “Six hundred feet from where thousands of our fellow-Americans were incinerated in the name of political Islam, and we’re supposed to be considered intolerant if we’re not cheering this?”

[P.S. Political three-card monte dealer Newt Gingrich calling anyone else a "con man" is downright laughable].

And I want to reiterate that the vast majority . . . nay, ALL . . . of the fuckwits who ginned up the Park51 controversy for craven personal gain would be apoplectic if the federal government had inserted itself into a local zoning issue in any other city in the country. But since this is Gomorrah on the Hudson we’re talking about, the city the rightwingers love to hate except when it’s politically expedient to beat their chests, wave their tiny flags, and chant “Never Forget! Ground Zero!”, the rules magically don’t apply.

But I’m not completely giving up hope. Not while there are Qur’an-saving skateboard dudes and people like this around:

A small but growing group of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have signed onto an open letter, provided exclusively to the Huffington Post, which calls on the American public to respect “the values we risked our lives to protect” and to avoid endangering the mission — and safety — of U.S. forces in the Mideast.

…

“America, you gotta have our back,” reads the letter, composed by signatories Roy Scranton, Philip Klay and Perry O’Brien. “Those who would vilify and target Muslims on grounds of their religious belief not only show a deep disrespect for American values, but put American lives at risk. It’s easy to burn a Koran when you won’t feel the heat.”

Or stories like this, submitted to the New York Times’ Metropolitan Diary:

I was in a taxi, late for a doctor’s appointment, when the driver turned around and, with a serious gaze, asked if I was American.

After I told him I was, he asked if I was from New York. Again I replied in the affirmative.

“So tell me,” he asked, “what do you think of the mosque being built downtown?”

Eager to reveal that some New Yorkers believe in religious freedom and civil rights, I exclaimed, “Well, you know, it’s not just a mosque, it’s a whole community center as well, and I think it’s fine for them to build wherever they want.”

I waited for his approval, but he shook his head and said, “Well, I am a Muslim, and I think it is a very, very bad idea!”

Expecting a philosophical explanation, I asked him why.

Clearly agitated, he explained, as though it were obvious: “Because of the parking situation downtown! You can’t find parking anywhere near there!”

Adequate parking — seriously, that should have been the extent of this ludicrous debate. But so long as there’s money to be made and power to be gained by preying on other people’s fears and ignorance, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Pam Geller, and the rest of the shit-stirring attention whores will make mayhem while the sun shines.

by watertiger

So The Quitter and Glenn Beck celebrated the deaths of 3,000 Americans on Saturday by selling tickets to hear them speak at an event in Alaska. There, the rubes stupid enough to fork over the dough up to $225 per ticket learned this historical factoid.

“This Statue of Liberty was gifted to us by foreign leaders, really as a warning to us, it was a warning to us to stay unique and to stay exceptional from other countries. Certainly not to go down the path of other countries that adopted socialist policies,” Palin said to cheers from the crowd.

Aside from the fact that the statue’s presentation tablet celebrates our alliance with France, I’d like to know which countries had “adopted socialist policies” in the 1870s. And what does The Quitter think of “The New Colossus”?

Again, I’ll note the irony that the people who claim to love this country more than anyone are consistently the most pig ignorant about its actual history.

A hat tip to Monty Python’s legendary Spanish Inquisition sketch.

[The White House Oval Office]
Biden [anxiously pacing the room]: Mr President. Mullah Omar, you know, the one-eyed Taliban leader, he just said we have to get the hell out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. And he said the Taliban were winning the war.
Obama [contemplating a basketball]: No wonder I cannot run a business here. Why can’t these COINistas bring me Omar’s head on a plate? Even I know he lives in Quetta. And why can’t they track Osama bin Laden? What are these Special Forces doing, watching Mad Men on cable?
Biden: Mr President, believe me, it’s we who are winning, not them.
Obama: Oh no, no, no, Joe. Get a grip on this AfPak business. The COINistas want nation-building and war against the Taliban, which for them is the same as al-Qaeda. You want only counter-terrorism against al-Qaeda on both sides of AfPak. Whatever we do, we will get clobbered in the November polls. I need a narrative arc of victory here, Joe!
Biden: Mr President, you did finish the Iraq War last week …
Obama: I was not awesome enough, Joe. Besides, Bush did it before me, and it didn’t work.
Biden: I’m afraid there’s more trouble ahead, Mr President. The Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth were in congress and at the National Press Club telling everybody that the Twin Towers collapsed in near free-fall because of pre-set demolition explosives. It says here, Mr President, and I quote, “An international team of scientists found nanothermitic composite material in World Trade Center dust, providing the first hard evidence of the presence of advanced pyrotechnics or explosives in the disaster debris.” They want a Grand Jury investigation of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Mr President.
Obama: For Heaven’s sake Joe, can you imagine if I decided to reopen 9/11? Did you see that poll last week where a majority of Republicans said, let me see if I remember correctly, that I “definitely sympathize with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world”? Who are these people? Whatever I do I’m a racist, a communist, a radical Islam-hugger … I didn’t expect a kind of USAian Inquisition.
[Jarring chord. The Oval Office door flies open and messianic Fox News host and self-appointed God's spokesperson to the US Glenn Beck enters, flanked by former vice-presidential candidate and Tea Party icon Sarah Palin, former speaker of the house and aspiring presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, former US ambassador to the UN and aspiring presidential candidate John Bolton, Texas energy conglomerate billionaires the Koch brothers, and Glenville, Florida fringe extremist Christian pastor Terry Jones, a mini-Koran burning in his hands in homage to his proposed, then aborted, International Burn-a-Koran Day on 9/11.]
Beck [bombastic]: Nobody expects the USAian Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise … surprise and fear … fear and surprise … Our two weapons are fear and surprise … and catchy sound bites … Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and catchy sound bites … and an almost fanatical devotion to God … Our four … no … Amongst our weapons … Amongst our weaponry … are such elements as fear, surprise … I’ll come in again.
[The Inquisition exits]
Obama: I didn’t expect a kind of USAian Inquisition.
[Jarring chord. The group burst in, minus Terry Jones, who had his hands burned by his burning Koran.]
Palin [squeakily]: Nobody expects the USAian Inquisition! We love weapons! Oh you betcha! We have so many of them, fear, surprise, catchy sound bites, an almost fanatical devotion to shooting wolves from my helicopter, these nice red leather pumps … And I can see Russia from my house! Oh, darn! [To Bolton]: I can’t say it – you’ll have to say it.
Bolton: What??
Palin: You’ll have to say the bit about “Our chief weapons are …”
Bolton: [rather impatient]: Nah, let’s get on with it, we gotta rush to the part where we frame all Muslims as neo-nazis.
[The group bundles outside again]
Obama: I didn’t expect a kind of USAian Inquisition.
[Jarring chord. The group enters]
Bolton: Er … Nobody … um … expects … Nobody expects the … um .. the USAian … um …
Beck: Inquisition?
Bolton: I know, I know! Nobody expects the USAian Inquisition. In fact, those who do expect know that we can’t be at the mercy of terrorists, we have to reclaim the date of Sep 11 from these deceptive Islamic supremacists, and that’s why I’ll be running for President in 2012.
Gingrich: OK! OK! OK! Stop! Stop. Ah! … our chief weapons are surprise … blah blah blah. Alright. Glenn, read the charges.
Beck: You are hereby charged that you did on diverse dates commit heresy against the US flag. You are a racist … a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, the white culture, I don’t know what it is. You are a Muslim. You were not even born in the US. You are a servant of Islam …
Gingrich: That’s enough. [To Obama] Now, how do you plead?
Obama: This is ridiculous. Of course I’m innocent.
Gingrich: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! [diabolical laughter]
The Koch brothers [surreptitiously]: We’ll soon change your mind about that!
Bolton: Fear, surprise, and while we’re at it, at war with all servants of Islam, which is taking over the world and it is now the US’s turn to fall. Hush, Glenn, grab the prayer rug!
[Beck produces a stinky prayer rug he got from a Special Forces officer who bought it on Chicken Street in Kabul for $10. Gingrich looks at it and clenches his teeth in an effort not to lose control. He hums heavily to cover his anger]
Gingrich: You … Right! Make him hug the rug.
[The Koch brothers make a pathetic attempt to rub the rug against Obama's lap]
Gingrich: Right! How do you plead?
Obama [imperturbable]: Innocent.
Beck: Ha! Right! Newt, don’t you think he should kneel down and pray?
[Gingrich stands awkwardly, shrugs his shoulders]
Gingrich: I …
Beck: [gritting his teeth] I know, I know you can’t.
Gingrich: I …
Beck: Just pretend for God’s sake. Ha! Ha! Ha!
[Gingrich dreamily grabs the rug and lays it on the floor. Fuzzy focus, dreamy soundtrack... Cut abruptly to the group torturing US Sec State Clinton]
Beck: Now, old woman – you are accused of heresy on three counts – heresy by thought, heresy by word, heresy by deed, and heresy by action – four counts. Do you confess?
Clinton: I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m accused of. Don’t you ever watch my press conferences?
Bolton: Ha! Then we’ll make you understand! Glenn! Fetch … the Islamic cushions!
[Jarring chord. Beck holds out two Islamic-green, made in China cushions]
Beck: There you are. Can you believe they sell these in Manhattan only a few yards away from Ground Zero?
Gingrich: Now, old lady – you have one last chance. Confess the heinous sin of heresy, reject the works of the ungodly – two last chances. And you shall be free – three last chances. You have three last chances, the nature of which I have divulged in my previous utterance.
Clinton: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Gingrich: Right! If that’s the way you want it – Bolton! Poke her with the Islamic cushions!
[Bolton carries out his pathetic torture]
Gingrich: Confess! Confess! Confess!
Bolton: It doesn’t seem to be hurting her. I always thought this woman was evil.
Gingrich [angrily hurling away the cushions]: Hmm! She is made of harder stuff! Glenn! Fetch … the comfy mosque!
[Jarring chord. Beck pushes in a miniature comfy mosque - a model of the Islamic Center projected for Ground Zero]
Gingrich: So you think you are strong because you can survive the Islamic cushions. Well, we shall see! Give her the comfy mosque!
[They roughly push the comfy mosque into Clinton's lap]
Gingrich [with a cruel leer]: Now – you will be prostrated in front of the comfy mosque until dinner, with only a cup of green tea at sunset. Time to pray, lady! [aside, to Beck]: Is that really all there is?
Beck: That should be enough.
Gingrich: I see. I suppose we make it worse by shouting a lot, do we? Confess, woman. Confess! Confess! Confess! Confess!
Palin [squeakily]: I confess!
Gingrich: Not you!