Will Kasich Try To Steal The Ability To Steal The GOP Nomination From Paul Ryan? Multi-Dimensional GOP Riots?

Do you remember the crackpot-- "I'm not a witch"-- teabagger Christine O'Donnell from Delaware? She has no illusions about stopping Trump but indicated to CNN's Brooke Baldwin that the Democrats' conservative establishment pick might be a better option than Trump. "Clinton, if you look at some of her policies, she's a moderate. She's not a far-left liberal... I don't know what I would do if Trump became the nominee... He did nothing to liberate the middle class from political correctness until he decided to run for president. He's not actually doing anything except inciting riots."

There's a growing list of Republicans who have said they will never vote for Trump in the general-- but very few of them are GOP elected officials, other than a few who aren't running for reelection, like Richard Hanna (NY), Reid Ribble (WI) and Scott Rigell (VA), all of whom announced they'd never vote for Trump and that they're retiring from Congress. The only ones I've found who are running for reelection and may find themselves on a ticket with Don Trump are Justin Amash (MI), Mark Sanford (SC), Ben Sasse (NE), Bob Dold (IL) and Carlos Curbelo (FL). That's 5... + Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker. Another governor, Florida crook Rick Scott, is now urging Republicans to unite behind Trump.

In fact, conventional wisdom is starting to form around the idea that-- sure enough-- Republicans are falling in line. "The Republican surrender has begun," wrote Fareed Zakaria this week. Having described Donald Trump as an unacceptable, unconservative, dangerous demagogue, the party establishment appears to be making its peace with the man who keeps winning primaries. The Wall Street Journal editorial page argued vociferously against Trump for months, pointing out that he is a huckster and a catastrophe, warning that 'if Donald Trump becomes the voice of conservatives, conservatism will implode along with him.' Yet this week, it ended a lead editorial urging Republicans to 'continue to see if Mr. Trump can begin to act like a President . . . and above all to decide who can prevent another progressive-left Presidency.'" Forget that Trump's reaction was to start throwing his own feces at them from his crib. Even Rove has lightened up on the public Trump-loathing lately. Will Glenn Beck and David Brooks be the last Republicans standing against Don Trump in the end? "Voters," Brooks wrote, "are rarely wise but are usually sensible. They understand their own problems. And so deference is generally paid to the candidate who wins." But not this time! He asks "Should deference be paid to this victor? Should we bow down to the judgment of these voters?... Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else." (He doesn't call them Life's Losers but...)

And yet reality is reality.

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.

Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.

This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes.

“His remarks represent an extraordinary mix of inaccurate claims about domestic and foreign policy and personal and professional boasts that rarely measure up when checked against primary sources,” they wrote.

He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12. He surrounds himself with sycophants. “You can always tell when the king is here,” Trump’s butler told Jason Horowitz in a recent Times profile. He brags incessantly about his alleged prowess, like how far he can hit a golf ball. “Do I hit it long? Is Trump strong?” he asks.

In some rare cases, political victors do not deserve our respect. George Wallace won elections, but to endorse those outcomes would be a moral failure.

And so it is with Trump.

History is a long record of men like him temporarily rising, stretching back to biblical times. Psalm 73 describes them: “Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence... They scoff, and speak with malice; with arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance.”

And yet their success is fragile: “Surely you place them on slippery ground; you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly they are destroyed.”

The psalmist reminds us that the proper thing to do in the face of demagogy is to go the other way — to make an extra effort to put on decency, graciousness, patience and humility, to seek a purity of heart that is stable and everlasting.

The Republicans who coalesce around Trump are making a political error. They are selling their integrity for a candidate who will probably lose. About 60 percent of Americans disapprove of him, and that number has been steady since he began his campaign.

Worse, there are certain standards more important than one year’s election. There are certain codes that if you betray them, you suffer something much worse than a political defeat.

Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and citizenship. He pollutes the atmosphere in which our children are raised. He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.

As the founders would have understood, he is a threat to the long and glorious experiment of American self-government. He is precisely the kind of scapegoating, promise-making, fear-driving and deceiving demagogue they feared.

Trump’s supporters deserve respect. They are left out of this economy. But Trump himself? No, not Trump, not ever.

Yes, yes, David Brooks is an inherently intellectually dishonest man but... he has a role to play in preparing the ground for the rise of the great reluctant compromise candidate to save the GOP, Paul Ryan. Kasich may be flipping out over it-- and Cruz may be planning a riot of his own-- but Ryan is the one the establishment is behind. Ryan secretly supped at Daniel Boulud's restaurant inside the Brazilian Court hotel with Paul Singer, Todd Ricketts and the other Republican moneybags financing the Our Principles PAC ads against Trump in Palm Beach Thursday night. Other GOP candidates taking part in the 2 day secret anti-Trumpfest in Palm Beach included GOP establishment candidates for the Senate, Joe Heck (NV) and Todd Young (IN).

The National Review is being less secretive about what to do about Don Trump: Steal the nomination, David Harsanyi, author of The People Have Spoken (and They Are Wrong): The Case Against Democracy, demanded Friday. "No team-building exercise is going to fix the 2016 iteration of the Republican party," he wrote. "There is only going to be a crackup, no matter who captures the nomination. If that’s true, and if it means one side has to prevail, why not save your party from a hostile takeover that could potentially cost it both the Senate and the House?"

The key would be denying Trump the 1,237 delegates necessary to secure the nomination. Cruz (maybe with Governor John Kasich) could still pull together the requisite number of delegates to block Trump from winning before the convention.

Voters don’t decide the nominations; delegates do-- preferably in smoke-filled rooms where rational decisions about the future of a party can be hashed out. The Republican party is not a direct democracy. It crafts its own rules, and it can change them. Here are questions that Republican delegates should be asking themselves: Is it worth upsetting a bunch of angry, marginally conservative voters who often have a minor fidelity to the doctrines of your party? Or are you prepared to put your political infrastructure and full weight behind a cartoonish George Wallace–like character who’ll probably inflict more damage than you could ever hope to repair?

RNC chairman Reince Priebus says that he expects every GOP presidential candidate to uphold a pledge to support the eventual nominee. Considering what we heard in Senator Marco Rubio’s concession speech, I find this difficult to believe. At best, Priebus is going to have a bunch of politicians tiptoeing around Trump in tacit nonsupport. And if enough big-name Republicans end up supporting Trump, it only accentuates the need for a new party.

An ABC exit poll-- with all the usual caveats about the unreliability of exit polls-- said that six in ten non-Trump-supporters say they would “seriously consider a third party if he became the GOP’s nominee.” The more disgust his big-government positioning and ugly rhetoric generate, the higher that number rises. And there are a number of rational reasons to support such a run.

For starters, Trump supporters are already very angry about everything. It’s not as if they could be any angrier with the establishment. Once Trump is gone (and he’ll leave with no coherent movement), these voters will either have to come back and look for alternative candidates with compelling messages, or leave the party altogether.

In the short run, a third-party candidate might insulate down-ballot candidates from Trumpism. You do remember Todd Akin, I’m sure? Imagine a candidate being ceaselessly asked to comment on the various impulsive and unsavory positions that the presidential nominee has taken. For example, “Do you agree with the GOP nominee that children of terrorists should be executed?”

Offering a conservative alternative-- whether it be Cruz, Senator Ben Sasse, or whoever-- would allow candidates to endorse someone who jibed more faithfully with their beliefs. This could shield them somewhat from this dynamic.

A third party would also help sink Trump and elect Hillary Clinton. Electing a weakened and corrupt Democrat that Republicans would unite against in Congress is a far better reality than allowing a charlatan to hollow out a party from within.

It is an utter disaster, not only for Republicans, but for the entire nation, to have one functioning political party. Despite some wishful thinking on the left, conservatives have often held their own in Congress these past eight years. Supporting gridlock is a conservative position, even if it’s not ideal. In fact, GOP voters would be better off thinking about Washington, D.C., as a collection of institutions, with the legislative branch being the more realistic center of conservative power.

Earlier this week, Rubio (the most hated man from the establishment since Jeb Bush helmed the ship) argued that conservatives who back Trump will one day ask themselves, “My God, what have we done?” This gives politicians such as Governor Chris Christie far too much credit for introspection. But for those who still care about the underlying principles of their party, it probably still matters. And it’s important to remember that the primary-process rules are neither chiseled into stone on Mount Sinai nor part of the Constitution.

Exciting times. Remember, Ryan was instrumental in getting guns banned from the Cleveland convention in July. Only you can help save America from these sociopaths:

Primary Season Ends For Another Cycle

Christine O'Donnell must be missing student loans payments or mortgage payments again. She's threatening the Republican Party that she may run for the U.S. Senate again. Her successful primary challenge to popular mainstream Rep. Mike Castle in 2010 in universally thought to be the reason the GOP doesn't hold the Delaware Senate seat occupied by Chris Coons now. “I think I owe that to my supporters, to at least consider a run,” O’Donnell said in an interview last week. “People sacrificed. Not only came out of their comfort zone-- sacrificed to work hard in order to win the primary. And I think that I owe it to them to give it every consideration.” (She has also said she is available for a paying gig in a Romney Administration if he wins the November election.)

If Democrats are cheering, mainstream Republicans must be rolling their eyes at the thought. Primaries by right-wing extremists like O'Donnell have hurt the GOP in general elections, not so much in deep red states where the brain-dead citizens would vote for a lump of shit labeled "Republican"-- think Utah or Texas-- but in normal states. This primary cycle, for example, saw 15 congressional incumbents defeated-- 8 Republicans and 7 Democrats, although, to be fair, one of the Republicans, Bob Turner, was gerrymandered out of his district and then lost the GOP Senate primary.

All but 2 of the Democratic losses were incumbent vs incumbent matches-- Jason Altmire lost to Mark Critz in western Pennsylvania. Both are extremely reactionary right-wing Democrats who commonly vote with the GOP. In New Jersey moderate Steve Rothman lost to more progressive Bill Pascrell. In Ohio, quirky economic progressive/social conservative Marcy Kaptur beat progressive icon Dennis Kucinich, in a district that was drawn to predict those results. In Michigan under-funded progressive Hansen Clarke was beaten by ConservaDem Gary Peters and St. Louis political fixture Russ Carnahan, a moderate, was beaten by the more progressive William Lacy Clay in a 63% to 34% landslide. In the two districts where there were actual non-incumbent challengers, corrupt Blue Dog Tim Holden was beaten by a more progressive Matt Cartwright, 57-43%, a stunning and rare upset. A few weeks later a similar primary battle in El Paso resulted in longtime Establishment Democrat Silvestre Reyes going down to defeat at the hands of popular young reformer, Beto O'Rourke, 50.5 to 44.4%. (Beto, pictured on the right, will be the Blue America live guest at Crooks and Liars tomorrow at 11am (PT, noon El Paso time.)

In Republicanville, there were 3 incumbent vs incumbent races. Florida Establishment shill John Mica swamped teabagger Sandy Adams, widely considered the stupidest Member of Congress (yes, dumber that Gohmert). He swamped her financially, spending $1,214,486 to her $451,281, and beat her 60-40%. The Republican Machine wiped out an annoying teabagger without much effort. In Illinois, the GOP Machine got behind freshman zombie Adam Kinzinger and helped him beat Don Manzullo, 56-44%, even though the redrawn 16th CD included 44% of Manzullo's constituents and 31% of Kinzinger's. Kinzinger spent $1,548,515 on the primary and Manzullo spent $1,257,113 but outside groups orchestrated, possibly illegally, by Eric Cantor and Aaron Schock (widely rumored to have a gay crush on Kinzinger) spent a great deal of money to defeat Manzullo. The third incumbent vs incumbent race pitted Dan Quayle's lunkhead son, Ben, a leadership lackey, against David Schweikert. Ben Quayle was never popular in the Arizona district and was remembered for having been an on-line pornographer (DirtyScottsdale.com/Brock Landers) before narrowly winning a wild primary against 10 other Republicans (outspending all his rivals combined). This year Schweikert spent $1,289,381 and Quayle spent $1,537,407. An Adelson-funded superPAC, Friends of the Majority, spent another $1,120,000 in negative ads against Schweikert. But Arizona voters were tired-- after just one term-- of being embarrassed by the clownish Quayle and he went down 53-47%.

Far more interesting were the 4 races where non-incumbents beat incumbents. The headliner, of course, was far right extremist Richard Mourdock beating Indiana GOP icon Richard Lugar with a stunning 60% of the vote. Lugar was viewed (disapprovingly) as a mainstream conservative when the GOP primary voters wanted someone more like... Christine O'Donnell. Mourdock spent $3,162,191 on the primary and Lugar spent $8,301,994. But outside spending, mostly from extremist groups, was tilted in Mourdock's favor. Club For Growth spent $947,991 in negative ads against Lugar and $517,810 in favor of Mourdock. The Koch brothers' FreedomWorks spent $341,503 against Lugar and another $330,129 in favor of Mourdock. Similarly the NRA spent over a quarter million dollars tearing down Lugar and approximately $638,000 bolstering Mourdock.

In the Tulsa, OK-area and Jacksonville, FL-area House races, unknown challengers came from nowhere to beat, respectively, John Sullivan and Cliff Stearns. Jim Bridenstine beat Sullivan, an extremist and drug addict, 54-46%. Sullivan spent $1,113,091 on the primary and Bridenstine spent $293,890. The PACs from opthamologists and anesthesiologists, who had felt dissed by Sullivan, spent around $100,000 against him and seem to have made the difference in the race. And in the case of the never-popular Mean Jean Schmidt, it was podiatrists who did her in. In fact, a podiatrist, Brad Wenstrup, beat her 49-43%, in a district east of Cincinnati. Wenstrup sent $357,260 and Mean Jean spent $657,489. The good government group, Campaign for Primary Accountability, spent $132,022 against Schmidt. (It's worth noting that they also spent $240,000 against Reyes, $130,875 against Hoden and $224,529 (some of it funneled by Cantor and Schock) against Manzullo.

Primary season is over and it's time to get serious about November. Normally this would be a time when we could safely say that there isn't a single congressional race anywhere in America where the GOP nominated someone better than the Democrats. That may not be the case this year. We're still investigating, but Republican rebel and libertarian may well turn out to be a less odious choice for voters than anti-Choice fanatic Steve Pestka in the Grand Rapids/Battle Creek area of south-central Michigan. We'll get back to you on that one.

Republicans in Their Own Words -- Quotations of a Party on Crack, 2010 Version: Part 2, When Cousins Marry

Christine O'Donnell demonstrates that she's equally knowledgeable about the Constitution and science. (See No. 2.)

by Noah

There’s nothing much to say, nothing much to add to yesterday's explanatory note. Not much spin: just the words as they left the twisted minds of some very sick people. Well, OK, a few contempt-filled snide comments from me.


1. “I’d like my life back.”

-- BP’s Tony Hayward

Yeah, I know, he’s not a Republican. But can there be any doubt as to what his party affiliation would be if he were a U.S. citizen?

OK, jackass Tony is out of the way. He’s a pompous, stuck-up, sanctimonious Brit. They’re a dime a gross over there in that tiny island of the inbreds. What else is new? Let’s get to the Repugs.

2. “You’re telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?”

-- Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell, during her debate/sitcom with Democratic opponent Chris Coons

The most pathetic thing may be that the ultra-smug O’Donnell thought the audience of lawyers, law professors, and law students was laughing with her.


3. “Do you know, where does this phrase ‘separation of church and state’ come from? It was not in Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists. . . . The exact phrase ‘separation of church and state’ came out of Adolf Hitler’s mouth, that’s where it comes from. So the next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of Church and State, ask why they’re Nazis.”

-- Glen Urquhart, Tea Party Republican nominee for Congress in Delaware

Forget about that book What’s the Matter With Kansas? Think about what’s going on in this little state, one-third of which is practically suburban Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love.” The other two-thirds of the state is totally Teabag and rural, very rural, and the evidence is pointing to a different kind of love between close relatives.

4. "I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that here was a relatively small country that from a strictly military point of view accomplished incredible things.”

-- Ohio Republican darling (and friend of soon-to-be-House Speaker John Boehner) Rich Iott, explaining his penchant for dressing up in a German Waffen SS uniform to join in on Nazi reenactments

Republicans certainly seem to spend a lot of time thinking about Nazi Germany.

5. “There’s a good question today if you are standing on the gulf, and that is: Where is the oil?”

-- Fox News anchor Brit Hume, on May 16, mocking the very idea of an oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico

Ask a dead pelican or sea turtle, Brit. In fact, ask anyone who doesn’t watch Fox News.

6. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you.”

-- Rep. Virginia Foxx, North Carolina’s human Nothing Box

And shame on NC for sending Foxx back to Congress for another term. You can “get fooled again.”

7. “I hope that’s not where we’re going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying, 'My goodness what can we do to turn this country around?' I’ll tell you, the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”

-- Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle, in an interview with hate radio host Lars Larson back in January

8. And, speaking of hate: “The only way to reduce the number of nuclear weapons is to use them.”

-- Rush Limbaugh

9. "[An] Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug.”

-- National Tea Party Express spokesbozo Mark Williams, on President Obama

10. “Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we’ll teach people how to earn their check. We’ll teach them personal hygiene . . . the personal things they don’t get when they come from dysfunctional homes.”

-- New York Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino, discussing why people are poor, August 2010

11. “It may be a blessing in disguise. . . . Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. Haitians were originally under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon the Third, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.' True story. And so, the Devil said, 'Okay, it’s a deal.' Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

-- Pat Robertson, back in January, explaining why Haiti suffered such a devastating earthquake

Well, maybe he’s right, if we accept that the International Monetary Fund is the Devil that has kept that country in a state of chaos for so long.

13. “I’m telling you that this works. You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor. They would say, ‘I’ll paint your house.' I mean, that’s the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I’m not backing down from that system.”

-- Nevada Republican Senate primary candidate Sue Lowden, explaining her “Health Care Made Easy” plan to voters in April

The voters decided that Sharron Angle was the sharper candidate. Someone needs to tell Area 51 that a couple of their aliens have gone missing.

14. “They intend to vote on the Sabbath, during Lent, to take away the liberty that we have right from God. This is an affront to God.”

-- Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King, to Glenn Beck, in March

King was expressing his feelings about voting on the health care bill, and sounding not unlike a jihadist while he was at it.

15. “We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada. And I think now, isn’t that ironic?”

-- Sarah Palin, demonizer of Canadian health care as a socialist death-panel creator

"Ironic" wasn’t quite the word I was thinking of, but it rhymes!

16. “I’m not a witch . . . I’m you.”

-- Delaware’s fine Republican Senate candidate (again!)

You are definitely not me, Christine. I’m not even sure that we are the same species. Yours needs an emergency influx of fresh genes, or else you will reach an evolutionary dead end. Fortunately, you do not believe in evolution. Bye-bye!

#

Random Musings on 2010 (3)

Beck ‘s TV show is Invaders From Mars every damn day -- a fake drama that panics its gullible audience (No. 4).

by Noah

1. OK, I’m not bitter because not one single TSA employee has given me her card or tried to chat me up after I went through their Michael Chertoff Porno-Scanners. Hell, I get it. I’m past my peak, if ya know what I mean. But does anyone out there really doubt that there's a TSA office out there somewhere deep in the bowels of some airport which has a bulletin board that features a “Scan of the Day”? And it’s autographed?

2. It amuses me that the same people who can support Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy turn around and whine about exorbitant CEO pay scales. Since when does how we give the rich ridiculous amounts of money to screw us matter? Isn’t it more logical or saner to be either for both or against both?

3. Will Politico win a Pulitzer for its attacks on President Obama? Back on November 23, third-quarter corporate profits were announced as being the highest in 60 years. GM WAS SAVED AND THEIR STOCK WAS TRADING briskly. The president went to Kokomo, Indiana, where, due to his stimulus program, factories were hiring again. What was Republican Pravda, er, Politico’s response?

Imagine if Obama went to the wilds of Pakistan and personally captured Osama bin Laden and emptied a Tec-9 into his skull. Politico headlines would read: “Obama Murders Saudi Businessman!” and “Vigilante President!” Beck would do an hour on “Why did he silence bin Laden? What would bin Laden have said? Would Obama have been implicated in a Muslim terror plot?”

4. Beck ‘s TV show is Invaders From Mars every damn day. It’s a fake drama that panics its gullible audience just like the original Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio show did in 1938 -- on Halloween, no less. How appropriate! Making something sound like news doesn’t mean it is news, but a public that lacks critical thinking can’t discern the difference.

5. Christine O’Donnell said God told her to run. Maybe he didn’t mean for office?

6. A student of history he isn’t: A loon of Irish descent on Fox says we have a “Muslim problem.” A hundred years ago bigoted men very much like him were saying, “We have an Irish problem.” Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

7. The same folks who find the content of the WikiLeaks to be shocking will someday be shocked and completely surprised to find that Tim Geithner is a Wall Street sleazebag. Who could have known?

8. The DCCC, led by Rep. Chris Van Hollen, didn’t give any money to Rep. Alan Grayson. Why? They wanted to be rid of him almost as much as the Repug Party. Grayson violated the 11th Commandment in Washington: Thou shalt not speak the truth in Congress.

9. Michelle Bachmann says she wants to “return to the original Constitution.” I was unaware that there were two Constitutions, but apparently she means that she wants to return to the Constitution as it stood before the Bill of Rights. I’m guessing she means that we need to go back to a time when black people counted as three-fifths human; only those who owned land could vote; and no women at all could vote. Does this mean that Bachmann has never voted for herself and doesn’t even want that right? Obviously, if we follow her “logic,” she couldn’t run for office. Simple deductive reasoning: It’s time to resign, Michelle!

10. Remember the Dr. Laura 11X N-Word Schlesinger? She just got a big new corporate deal to broadcast her brand of hate on satellite radio. But then, the media let her off the hook when the N-word flap broke out. They concentrated on her multiple repetition of the N-word while letting her dance and spin around her use of the objectionable word, claiming “free speech” and “just making a point.”

But context is everything, and this time the media did take Schlesinger's fire-belching statement out of context, which for her was a good thing. Had the media been so inclined and really gone after her, they would have focused on, not the dreaded N-word, but on two other things that, to me, leave no doubt about her stance on race. (1) Her blaming the victim who called in by saying she should have thought before she married “outside her race,” as if that were wrong somehow, and (2) her expressing the idea that demonizing white people who hate black people is wrong. She got off way too easy, and then ended up with a better job. Our softball-tossing media is as wrong as Schlesinger in this matter.


NOAH'S YEAR 2010 IN REVIEW

10 Random Musings (1)
2010, Looking Back: To Republicans, It Was So Much More Than Just a Speech to Kids
Random Musings on 2010 (2)

And don't forget 2009's 12 Days of Christmas Scorn!

#

The Whole Nation Ponders: Whither Christine O'Donnell Next?

Elizabeth Montgomery she'll never be, but crackpot anti-masturbation teabagger Christine O'Donnell, who has been threatening to run for public office again, also says she's open to a TV show. Many had expected her to go right from her landslide defeat in Delaware on November 2 to a Fox News position. O'Donnell, an unemployed gadfly with a demonstrably false resume, claims to have been getting offers to write a book and be part of a TV reality show.

She was "not necessarily interested" in the reality show offer unless it was a "watchdog-type show," she said, noting she ran a 30-minute TV ad during the campaign. "I would like to do something like that."

If they do decide on a remake of Bewitched, Palin could certainly take on the Agnes Moorehead role, but, wonderers and wondering, who would play Darrin? Jim DeMint? Actually, almost anyone from Right Wing Watch's Ten Scariest Republicans Heading For Congress could play across from O'Donnell. Looking down the list so far, it's clear that Allen West is most likely to be a one-termer so maybe he's meant for the part. Joe Miller will probably be looking for gainful emplyment soon as Lisa Murkowski racks up more and more votes in the Alaska election canvas.

O'Donnell's definitely too old if they decide to remake Sabrina but she could certainly fight it out with Virginia Foxx for the lead role in The Bell Witch when they finally make that into a movie. For now though, she can continue to be an empty celebrity, kind of a political Paris Hilton while Republicans fight amonst each other over whether she cost the GOP control of the Senate and if she's destroying the party's reputation.

[I]mmediately following the results of Delaware’s Republican primary, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina remarked, “If you think what happened in Delaware is a ‘win’ for the Republican Party then we don’t have a snowball’s chance to win the White House. If you think Delaware was a wake-up call for Republicans then we have a shot at doing well for a long time.”

O’Donnell has been a point of contention for the GOP establishment since her victory on September 14. After her defeat of Mike Castle, a politician who served the state of Delaware for two decades in multiple capacities, both the media and the establishment targeted her as a weak and ultimately extreme candidate for the senatorial race. The Tea Partiers, however, asserted that O’Donnell represented the core values of the Tea Party movement, pointing to Mike Castle’s multiple failures to adhere to conservative principles.

Tea Party Express chairman Amy Kremer defended the Tea Party’s nomination of O’Donnell following the GOP primary:

If Mike Castle is not the most liberal Republican in Congress right now, he is one of them. He voted for TARP and cap-and-trade, ‘cash for clunkers,’ I could go on and on. If we send him back to Washington, he’ll vote with Obama-Reid-Pelosi the majority of the time. At some point you have to stand on principle and stop playing these party politics.

On Meet the Press, Senator DeMint, an active supporter of Tea Party candidates in the 2010 elections, said he believes that the Tea Party did not cost the GOP the Senate as stated by Meet the Press host David Gregory, and in fact, “is responsible for every Republican win this election.”

“I supported all the Republican candidates including Christine O’Donnell," declared DeMint. "Unfortunately, she was so maligned by Republicans, I don’t think she had a chance. But we had historic gains in the Senate.”

Gregory responded, “Senator, you’re not really saying it was really lack of Republican support that tanked her candidacy, are you? This is a woman who said in a national ad that she was not a witch.”

To this, DeMint replied, “I think we did see in the wake of her primary win that a number of Republicans suggested she was not a viable candidate. That did make it difficult for her to start on the right foot.”

Even the best possible outcome Tuesday is depressing and scary -- but it's still the best possible outcome

That patriot's patriot Gen. JC Christian, better-known as Jesus' General, knows a real patriot when he sees one, and he's arm in arm with the Teabaggers' juggernaut poised to send sniveling jackass Rand Paul to the U.S. Senate.

"Right now all that should matter to any of us is defeating the most radical, authoritarian, anti-intellectual Republican class in modern memory (and that's saying something.) They were thoroughly repudiated at the polls in the last two elections and they haven't learned a thing from those losses. Indeed, the lesson they took was that they hadn't been aggressively wrong enough. Instead of seeing where they went wrong and making adjustments, they've doubled down on their worst policies and are prepared to go even further." 

-- Digby, in the post "They're From The Tea Party
And They've Come To Take Your Country"

by Ken

Howie has already called attention to this remarkable post by Digby highlighting the stakes in next Tuesday's voting. In it she calls attention to a quick list compiled by our friend Mike Lux, in the wake of the Kentucky curb-stomping incident ("Tim Profitt -- and a Contemporary History of Political Thuggery," of incidents of actual right-wing violence. A lot of other sources have been augmenting the list (I see that MediaMatter's Adam H. Shah has a list of 17), but here's Mike's original, with the bare bones of his take on the subject:

From relatively isolated incidents to ones even more violent and troubling, there's a growing pattern here, and as someone who reveres American democracy, I find it quite frightening. Here's just a few examples from the current era:

* Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller hires a group tied to a paramilitary militia to do security for him, and his paratroopers assault and handcuff a citizen journalist just trying to get a question answered.
* a bullet is shot through Rep. Grijalva's campaign office window, and obscene threats are delivered to his ofc as well.
* Rep. Perriello's gas line to his house was cut.
* Republican congressional candidate Allen West using a motorcycle gang known for violent criminal activity for security, and then gang members actually harassed and bullied a Democratic staffer trying to videotape a public event.
* Vandalism and assassination threats occur at offices of Congressional members during the health care fight.
* a doctor who performs abortions in KS is brutally murdered while coming out of his church on a Sunday morning.
* a guard at the Holocaust Museum is murdered by an anti-Semitic racist stoked by listening to Limbaugh and Beck.
* a lunatic also stirred up by Glenn Beck shows about the Tides Foundation is stopped on his way to murder people at the Tides office in San Francisco.

These are just the actual acts of violence. In the meantime, we have people coming to town hall meetings and Presidential rallies with assault weapons, Republican Senate candidates talking openly of having to use "Second Amendment means" in case regular politics doesn't work, Republican Governors (both Rick Perry and Sarah Palin) meeting with secessionist groups with ties to racist leaders. Rand Paul's wimpy statement about civility is only the latest in Republicans' utter unwillingness to clearly condemn violent acts or rhetoric on the part of way too many of their supporters.

Surely no one who's been paying attention can be surprised. Just as the New Right shuns any obligation to facts or reality of any sort, its thugs and delusionaries have been making clear that they feel empowered to use any means at their disposal to enforce (and I do meant "force") their crazinesses.

And just as the lamebrains and hoodlums of the Right have delighted in deriding us when we've warned about the threat of right-wing violence, they feel utterly entitled to lie their guts about it after the fact. And so, while Paulist thug Tom Profitt admits to the absolute minimum that can be confirmed from the bit of blurry video that exists of his assault on MoveOn.org volunteer Lauren Valle (my favorite part is his argument that the police should have been called, apparently suggesting that he's not responsible for his behavior because it was the somebody else's job to prevent it), the whole mob feels free to tell whatever lies they feel like about the incident. Only an idiot would take the word of people who -- and I'm choosing my words carefully here -- literally don't have the most basic understanding of the concept of "truth" over that of the victim, but the American public seems to have reduced itself to a gaggle of idiots.

Of course it's not an exclusively Republican problem. As Howie points out on an almost daily basis, and I do my share of piling on, there are an awful lot of Democrats who toe the same line, out of either ideological camaraderie or cynical opportunism. The more of them who are swept away Tuesday, the better for all concerned. But as Digby argues so eloquently in her post, there's a lot more at stake in this election, in which everyone who finds his/her way to DWT has a stake.

Looking beyond Tuesday, though, there has to be an ongoing concern that the hate-mongering liars, fact-denying hordes, and garden-variety thugs who have now become the "mainstream" of both the New Right and the New Republican Party, at the beck and call of the sociopathic ideologues and profiteering megacorporate predators who yank their chains, can still stitch together something like half the vote in the U.S. electorate at large. It will be a relief if that turns out to be slightly less than half, but even that happiest available outcome would hardly be cause for resting easy.

#

Texas Crackpot Louie Gohmert Wants Christian Zombies To Take Over America So "God Has Something To Smile About"

Yesterday Christine O'Donnell (R-DE) three-time GOP Senate nominee-- and widely acknowledged nincompoop who even Karl Rove said was insupportable-- insisted the Constitution (the U.S. one) doesn't provide for a clause separating Church and State. At a law school debate with Chris Coons she demanded to know "Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" Hanging around teabagger/faux Constitutionalists it's understandable why she might not be aware of one of the most important achievements of the Founding Fathers. Presumably, the laughter of the students has now made her aware of her own preposterous and abject lack of knowledge. An astonished Coons quoted the relevant part of the First Amendment to her: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Another one for the teabaggers to try to eliminate!



You can barely blame a dim bulb and former professional Bill Maher guest like O'Donnell, who has apparently spent more time learning witchcraft than studying the Constitution she professes so much love for. After all, look at the company she keeps! Also yesterday, Texas extremist Louie Gohmert (R-TX) popped out of his garbage can again for moment to shriek some incoherent screed of the American Taliban:

You are God’s minister to punish evil and reward good conduct. But, too many Christians have refused the figurative “sword” or the power that in this great country, this little experiment in democracy as a republic, is supposed to be held by YOU. You are the one God has ordained to run the country, but you haven’t even participated ... That is also why we have penalties for societal good things like marriage (the income tax “marriage penalty”) and for 45 years we have rewarded having children out of wedlock instead of helping incentivise such women to finish their education. It is why we have a death tax that says you were too successful so we must take 55% away and give to the government. It is why people have in the past been threatened with removal from low-rent government housing for saving too much money for a down payment on a home. We punish good behavior too often and reward potentially hurtful conduct. It is also why we passed a Wall Street bailout to reward uncontrolled and irresponsible greed. It is also why TARP has not already been repealed, since it would mean admitting that maybe those who voted for it, including Republican leaders, had made a mistake.

"It is high time," goofy Gohmert scolded his Amen choir, "that we gave God something to smile about again." God already is smiling! After all, a once profitable satanic coven in Orange County, disguised as His House, just went bankrupt. YES... the Crystal Cathedral filed for bankruptcy in order to avoid paying its debts. Hundreds of creditors could be owed between $50 million and $100 million, according to documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Ana on Monday.

The church was started by the Rev. Robert H. Schuller in a rented drive-in movie theater in 1955 and came to prominence through the "Hour of Power" television show. But in January, faced with a $55-million budget deficit and a 27% drop in revenue over the last two years, it eliminated some of its signature offerings and sold property.

The church slashed dozens of jobs, pulled the "Hour of Power" from seven stations and canceled its annual Christmas and Easter pageants, which drew thousands of people.

I've never been to the Garden Grove megachurch, which isn't really a cathedral, just a business venture selling a bunch of religionist mumbo-jumbo to the suckers. But that's not to say I've never had any run-ins with them. I want to pull away from writing about politics for 10 minutes to recount a story from the not too distant past.

I had just retired as president of Reprise Records and a wealthy friend asked me if I'd like to serve on a board of directors. I explained that I was already on the board of a public service and civil liberties organization. He laughed and explained that instead of working my ass off and paying to be on the board of a do-good group like the one I'm on, he could get me on a board that would pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to just nod and grunt. I'm good at that so I said ok. About a week later I got a call from someone looking to place someone on the board of McDonald's. I was repulsed by the idea and explained why. They never called me back. But my friend decided he needed to talk with me about my bad attitude.

He called a few days later and said he was flying to Vegas on his private jet in 2 hours and asked me to come along. I like him and I know he meant well with the McDonald's thing and maybe I had forgotten to tell him that I'm a raw vegan. So I drove down to where he parks his plane and we went to Vegas to see some band play that he was involved with. There were two other guys on the flight, one of whom is also a good friend of mine and one, who I had never met, a good friend of my host's. The other guy-- let me call him George-- had the most offensive, foul mouth I had ever heard. The entire hour we spent flying to Vegas was a repulsive nonstop barrage of what he planned to do to women who fell into his clutches in Las Vegas. He wasn't quite as bad as the Allen West (R-FL) supporters who routinely refer to women as oral relief stations... but almost. And he was, proudly, a deacon at Crystal Cathedral. He bragged and bragged about how he's able to use his position to seduce other men's wives. That's his business; what pissed me off was all the chatter about body parts and lewd acts.

Once we arrived at the hotel I was determined to avoid seeing George again. But he waylaid me and insisted I go with him to a whorehouse, the other two guys being married and uninterested. "I'm gay," I shouted as loudly as I could (in the casino), "and I guarantee you, I'm less interested than they are!" He literally tackled me and dragged me down to the floor to get me to pray with him for my soul. I pushed him away and told him what I thought about him and asked him to not come near me for the rest of the trip. He babbled the entire time about saving my soul. I hope he and Christine O'Donnell and Louie Gohmert all find some kind of salvation at some point and stop making other peoples' lives miserable.

What's A Wanker To Do?

-by Noah

I think Christine O'Donnell has ruined masturbation for me. She's in my thoughts now, polluting my inner world.
     
The teabaggers, Republicans, republikooks, or whatever we're supposed to call our culture's wackjob element these days are always fine ones to talk about things like "personal liberty" and "taking away our freedoms" but, the Republican nominee for senator from Delaware (who is also an evolution denier) has given us a quick peep at what the Repug set have in store for us in the future if they yank the power of Congress away from the Democrats. They always push it further and further and further. For the Republicans, it's no abortions, no condoms, no birth control of any kind. The kook running against Alan Grayson is opposed to divorces. Their next frontier? No masturbation! No wanking! Will stiff prison sentences be proposed? Who will be checking? Will this require some new "big government" agency with a spanking new building? What will outside columns and the statue in the lobby look like? Expect a rise in juvenile crime. And, of course, Republicans will soon be requiring all women to wear burkas (but don't you dare mention The American Taliban which is so mean to rightists). Who needs crazy Muslim fundamentals when we have plenty of crazy Republican fundamentals right here, right now. Made in America!  

As worried as we are about this development, a kind of GOP de-evolution in thought, or dogma, our friend Andy Borowitz reported on this morning's demonstrations in Wilmington, which have since spread to Dover:

Galvanized by Republican senatorial nominee Christine O’Donnell’s anti-masturbation stance, masturbators from across the state converged on Wilmington today in what some are calling the largest pro-wanking protest in American history.

Carrying signs reading, “O’Donnell: Hands Off Our Masturbation,” the angry masturbators clogged downtown Wilmington, stopping traffic for blocks.

Harley Farger, a leading Delaware masturbator and planner of the Million Masturbators March, said it was difficult to organize masturbators “because they’re used to acting alone.”

Mr. Farger, the executive director of the pro-monkey-spanking group MasturNation, said that the “wank and file” of his organization believe that masturbation is an inalienable right guaranteed by the Constitution.

“Our country was founded by rugged individualists,” he said.  “And you know what individualists like to do.”

He said that Ms. O’Donnell’s anti-whacking position was “ill-timed,” adding, “In this economy, masturbation is one of the few simple pleasures people still can afford.”

Tracy Klugian, a homemaker and masturbator from Dover, Delaware, said she is “puzzled” by what she sees as the contradictory nature of candidate O’Donnell’s position: “If you’re against masturbation, why would you want to serve in Congress?”

A spokesman for the Wilmington Police Department, Crandall Darlington, said that the Million Masturbators March could cost the city tens of thousands of dollars, “especially when you include the cost of cleaning up afterwards.”

Christine O'Donnell (T-DE) Has A Problem With The Military-- And West Point Grads Justin & Amanda Coussoule Take Issue With Her Ignorance

All this crazy talk from Delaware's far right extremist Christine O'Donnell, putting condoms on dogs... or whatever Church Lady nonsense she's babbling incoherently about now, is a bit of a distraction from the danger that lurks behind the clown mask. As we read that one in seven Americans (43.6 million people-- think about it) are living in poverty, and that the number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 46.3 million in 2008 to 50.7 million in 2009, we have a whole bullpen filled with crackpots like O'Donnell-- Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, Ron Johnson, Ken Buck, Mike Lee (Team DeMint)-- who want to reargue the goal of striving for a just and equitable society. O'Donnell and the other candidates like her want to fulfill the Republican dream of dismantling Social Security, abolishing laws that protect workers and ordinary citizens-- and society in general-- from the intrinsic excesses of capitalism's selfish greed.

And because these efforts are backed by some of the wealthiest and most corrupt families in America, as well as by right-wing corporate media (from Fox to Hate Talk Radio)-- and because the general mood is sour over the economy (nevermind that these same right-wing sociopaths caused the economy to go south)-- we may be in for a right-wing revival. It isn't likely that O'Donnell's getting elected to anything, except maybe chairman of the RNC, but Mike Lee (UT) is assured a seat and some of these other nutbags are neck and neck against mainstream Democrats. They share a bleak, if not horrific, worldview-- a Randian dystopia that voters will be embracing without a clue to what it means.

Wednesday for example, a veteran's organization warned about O'Donnell's clarion call against women in the military. She claims women in service colleges damage national security. She insists that West Point "has had to lower their standards ... in order for men and women to compete." By lowering standards, she added, "we have reduced the effectiveness of our military... By integrating women into particularly military institutes, it cripples the readiness of our defense. Schools like The Citadel train young men to confidently lead other young men into a battlefield where one of them will die. And when you have women in that situation, it creates a whole new set of dynamics which are distracting to training these men to kill or be killed. And these dynamics between men and women are what make the relationship between men and women beautiful. So I don't think that we should try to desensitize men to the differences."

A few months ago, when we were just getting to know Justin Coussoule (D-OH), he did a guest post here at DWT for Memorial Day. A West Point graduate and a former captain in the U.S. Army, I told him to write about any aspect of his military service he wanted to share. A few days earlier he had been over at Daily Kos explaining why, as a recent U.S. Army officer and leader of soldiers, he is strongly supporting the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. His real-world experience informed his decision the same way his military service helped him come to conclusions about the status of women's rights in our society. He did a post called In Uniform or Out, Women Deserve Equal and Fair Pay. Justin's perspective is the polar opposite of O'Donnell's and of the Republicans'. Yesterday's Dayton Daily News made it clear Boehner is too scared and too arrogant to debate Coussoule; maybe he can debate DeMint's little wingnut, Christine O'Donnell!

When you think of the armed services, you wouldn’t be alone if you immediately conjured up images of young men in uniform, close shaven with hair so short it’s barely there. The reality, though, is much more reflective of our society as a whole, where men and women work side by side to accomplish the unit’s mission. 

As a cadet at West Point and then an Army officer, I worked alongside highly trained, highly effective, and highly competent soldiers, many of whom were women. In fact, my wife and my sister-in-law are both veterans, and they along with the female soldiers I led served as honorably and ably as the men in their units. The same is true for women in the workplace today, where women contribute in all industries at all levels. Unlike in the Army, though, women today only earn about 75% of what a man in the same job is paid. Women deserve equal pay for equal work. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was a step forward, but there are still those who would oppose equality in pay, like my opponent, John Boehner. In the 21st century, what possible reason could one give for not supporting equal pay for equal work? 
 
As a society, we will always be better for affording equal chances to those who want to succeed.  We cannot discriminate against or oppress those who would make our nation better simply because of gender. I learned in the Army that from Private to General Officer, pay is based on rank, not gender.  The same should be true in the civilian workforce, where pay is based on performance, and gender has no impact. Women today serve from the assembly line to the board room, and the gains made in the last fifty years must be protected with continued fair and equal access to the same opportunities men have.

I ran O'Donnell's remarks by Amanda Coussoule, another former Army office and, like her husband, a proud West Point graduate. She gave me permission to share her remarks today:

This is appalling... For decades women in America have worked hard so that future generations of American women will have choices and options equal to men. Does Christine O'Donnell also oppose women in the military? Does that "lower the standards" of our fighting forces? Should we go ahead and reduce our already stretched fighting forces by 20%? Or should we only limit the leadership training opportunities, so that women can work for men who had access to the greatest leadership education in the world?

Next time you talk to her, let her know that you know a female West Point graduate who would like to demonstrate those "lower standards" in person.

Apparently, the answer to Amanda's rhetorical question is yes! O'Donnell, who bills herself as a "traditionalist," says women should "graciously submit" to her husband. In her "traditional" world" women get on their knees for their men. Here she was on CNN: "This is a biblical doctrine."

Today's Republican Party is very different from your parents' Republican Party. In fact, it's hardly recognizable. It's hardly American. And they're not just making believe. We're getting very close to our thermometer goal to keep our TV ads up on cable in Ohio. Please take a look at them and consider helping us pay to keep them on the air. The Supreme Court has it fixed so that if they take over again, we're never getting rid of them!

Oh, and if you were wondering why Boehner is so scared to debate Justin, maybe this short video will give you some insight into that. Boehner's 20 year decade in office has worked out extremely well for him... but not all that great for the folks he "represents."

Boehnerland

Born out of the GOP's politics of resentment and self-victimization, surly and ignorant teabaggers managed to cut off their collective noses to spite their face Tuesday. And their fuehrer, South Carolina secessionist and C Street cult member, Jim DeMint, says it's worth losing a sure GOP pick-up in Delaware-- with mainstream conservative Mike Castle-- to send a message to the Republican Establishment that it has to move even further right, via the increasingly controversial Miss No Turning Japanese Allowed (above). As Fred Barnes reminded Weekly Standard readers yesterday, Castle "voted against ObamaCare and is a co-sponsor of repeal legislation.  He voted against the stimulus. He’s for extending all the Bush tax cuts."

And he's exactly like John Boehner, leader of the House Republicans, in many other ways as well. Both are more corporatist than ideological and both are grateful to the corporate interests that have financed their long, long political careers. (Remember, Boehner, a freeloader who hasn't really worked since he was a teenager, lives in the only gated community in Ohio's 8th congressional district, more than symbolically separated from his own constituents.) Both of them were leaders in the passage of George Bush's no-strings-attached Wall Street TARP bailout and both have been relentless backers of deregulating banks and relentless backers of the job-killing trade policies-- from NAFTA and CAFTA, to the WTO/GATT that have wrecked America's manufacturing base and shipped millions of middle class jobs overseas to low wage countries (killing, in the process, business' consumer base as well, of course). Castle, in a deeply blue, more politically competitive environment, has had to handle the p.r. a little differently than Boehner. Basically, though, both have just wanted their constituents to go away and stop bothering them while they profited mightily in Boehnerland, a proverbial land of milk and honey for well-connected legislators with a loose set of ethical standards.

Today's Dayton Daily News highlights Boehner's fear and arrogance in an article about Justin Coussoule. Like the other media outlets in the district, the Daily News in not happy Boehner is ducking debates and behaving imperiously towards them and towards Ohio voters.

[S]o far, Justin Coussoule, a Liberty Twp. Democrat, said Boehner, R-West Chester Twp., hasn’t accepted-- and doubts he will.

“Boehner as the incumbent seeking re-election has an obligation to stand before the voters to make a case to be rehired,” Coussoule said.

The first-time public office seeker said he also must make his case if he hopes to oust the incumbent. Coussoule said Boehner is either “afraid” or “too arrogant” to debate.

“We ought to have an opportunity for the voters to hear us both in the same room on the same topics and be able to answer questions and be able to compare and contrast,” Coussoule said... In a Sept. 8 Butler County News and Issues blog posting at journal-news.com titled “The ‘debate’ debate,” some respondents said they wanted to see a debate, and one poster said Boehner is “ignoring his own constituents.”

Back t Delaware lunatic fringe teabagger for a moment. I doubt O'Donnell has a real chance of winning in November, but I agree with those who think she'd be a better choice for the right than Castle-- at least for a year... until her natural instincts as a crook kick into high gear. Someday she may be as good at crookedness as a John Boehner. Meanwhile, though, America is stuck with John Boehner either as an obstructionist Minority Leader or, worse, as Speaker of the House.


Notice Boehner's tie above. That isn't photoshopped. That's what he was wearing the other day: a big fish eating a little fish. It's his world. It's an integral part of Boehnerland. He's willing to block tax deductions for 97% of taxpayers if Democrats don't allow tax breakers for the already fat and sassy 3% of wealthiest families. The small fish getting eaten by the big fish, the big fish who have been so good to John Boehner that he'd screw over the people who vote for him in Butler, Miami, Mercer, Darke, Montgomery and Preble counties. That's the other side of Boehnerland.

Blue America and the Americans For America PAC know full well that there's only one person who can stop John Boehner. It isn't Barack Obama and it isn't Nancy Pelosi. It's not the DNC or the DCCC, although it would be nice if either or even both, would lend a hand; it's Justin Coussoule, the progressive Democrat running for the Ohio seat Boehner has been disgracing for two decades. Below is the latest ad we made to hammer home to southwest Ohio voters that, for the first time ever, they actually have a viable alternative to more Boehnerland. If you feel the spirit, please help us keep our ads on TV in Ohio from now until November. You can do it here on our Blue America ActBlue page or by sending a check to Blue America PAC, PO Box 27201, Los Angeles, CA 90027.

Joe Miller (T-AK), The Craziest Catch

Last night we all marveled at how the teabaggers and their billionaire backers struck another blow at the heart of the already far too conservative Republican Party. This time they ended the political career of mainstream conservative Mike Castle and nominated bizarre extremist and anti-masturbation fanatic Christine O'Donnell. This was the mirror image of what Palin and the Tea Party Expressed accomplished in Alaska by defeating Lisa Murkowski and handing the GOP nomination over to far right fanatic Joe Miller.

Blue America and our allies at the Americans For America PAC are working with Alaska bloggers to make sure voters from Nome to the Ketchikan Gateway and from Atka and Kodiak to Barrow and Kaktovik know just who Joe Miller really is. Our plan is to run this ad in Alaska's relative inexpensive cable TV markets. Please take a look-- and if you like it, please chip in here.



This will be the first of a daily-- or almost daily-- video release we'll be doing. Most won't be for TV but you'll be able to see them here at DWT, at Crooks and Liars, at Digby's place and, of course, at the Blue America Facebook page. As you can see, this first video, masterminded by Manatt Media, presents Miller’s radical tea party agenda as part of a parody of the hit Discovery Show The Deadliest Catch.

Brett Di Resta, Americans for America PAC's co-founder, said of their debut video and its target, Joe Miller: "It's hard to fathom that there would be an Alaskan politician more extreme than Sarah Palin. But after looking at his record, Joe Miller made a believer out of us. Republican primary voters hooked him, but in the general election Alaskans should throw back in the water."

Dangerous Sociopaths Have Taken Over the Republican Party-- I Mean It!

I'm praying that bizarre sociopath Christine O'Donnell wins the GOP Senate nomination in Delaware on Tuesday. We wrote about the race as the weekend began in terms of humor. Now, as the weekend is ending, it looks like O'Donnell is pulling it off. If she does, as the NRSC knows, she will delivering a sure GOP pick up back into the safe column for Democrats. (The latest polls show that although she could win the closed Republican primary, when normal people vote, it will be a pasting and she'll lose by double digits.) PPP, the most accurate polling firm so far this year says the race is too close to call, with O'Donnell leading Castle within the margin of error.

Castle, a mainstream conservative, an at-large congressman (so exact same constituency as the senators) and a former governor, is arguably the most popular politician in the state short of Vice President Joe Biden. But many Republicans, taking their cues from Fox News, Jim DeMint, Sarah Palin, the NRA, Hate Talk Radio and the Tea Party Express, say he's "too liberal."

If Castle is indeed defeated Tuesday night it will be yet another sign that conservatives have a strangle hold on the Republican Party and moderates may or may not be welcome anymore. Castle has an overwhelming 69-21 lead with moderate voters but they only make up 33% of the likely primary electorate. O’Donnell has a 62-31 lead with conservatives that’s more than enough to propel her to the overall lead.

It’s clear that Castle’s popularity has taken a sharp turn in the wrong direction over the last month. An August PPP poll found his favorability with Delaware Republicans at a 60/25 spread. Now his favorables within the party are negative at 43/47. That’s largely a product of 55% of voters in his party saying they think he’s too liberal compared to 37% who think he’s about right.

GOP voters are pretty sharply divided about O’Donnell as well. 45% have a favorable opinion of her with 41% seeing her unfavorably. Only 50% of primary voters think she’s fit to hold public office but she does much better than Castle on the ideology front- 53% think she’s about right.

If O’Donnell pulls it out Tuesday night it will be a major victory for Delaware’s small but united group of Tea Party voters. Just 25% of Republicans in the state consider themselves to be members of that movement but they give her a 79-18 advantage that’s more than enough to overcome her 52-39 deficit with everyone else.

Mainstream Republicans are slitting their wrists over the prospect of an O'Donnell victory Tuesday. This morning the very conservative Weekly Standard tried discrediting her with a major feature about how she launched the kind of fluffy frivolous lawsuit conservatives claim to hate.

O'Donnell's finances, honesty, and stability have been called into question in light of her false and strange claims. The court complaint raises further questions on all fronts. O'Donnell, who made an annual salary of $65,000 at ISI as director of communications and public affairs, sought up to $6,952,477 million in damages, claiming, among other allegations, that ISI had defamed her and had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... O'Donnell claimed that ISI had caused her to suffer "mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, mental and physical pain and anguish"-- and that, according to an amended complaint, she had to "seek treatment for her distress."

All of the above, in Right-wing-Speak, is a serious indictment and a disqualification for public office. They clearly do not want another mentally unbalanced candidate like Rand Paul or Sharron Angle running as a Republican.


UPDATE: Castle Plays The Nut Card

Tomorrow's primary day in Delaware and mainstream conservative Mike Castle is seeing the polls start to favor teabaggy fanatic Christine O'Donnell and he's sweating. Today he said, flatly, that if she wins, the GOP forfeits the seat. And it doesn't look like Castle will be one of those GOP extremist types who will try replacing McConnell with DeMint as Minority Leader. The transcript, in part:

K. O'DONNELL: You’ve tried to disqualify her. Why does she have support?

CASTLE: This is a primary election, where a limited number of people turn out, so the results get skewed for that reason. The second issue, I’ve yet to see a poll that shows her having any chance to win the general election.

Bottom line is if she’s nominated, Republicans lose the election automatically. It’s that simple.

Her appeal is to a hard core base of the Republican Party, but when people go in to vote, they’ve got to make the decision: Do we want to give up the general election by casting this vote? And that’s gonna be hopefully in the minds of a lot of voters which is one of the things we’re trying to appeal to.

K. O'DONNELL: Could you support her if she wins?

CASTLE: Ahhh, I will answer that question -- that’s very hypothetical -- and I’ll answer it at some point in the future, if it were to happen, and it might not even be tomorrow. I would look at that, as you know, this has not been a very pleasant experience for anybody and the concept of supporting one another in this circumstance is gonna be difficult for anyone.

K. O'DONNELL: There were reports of a death threat against state GOP party chair and infighting.

CASTLE: There has been some unpleasantness between state party officials and the O’Donnell campaign and manifested itself in whatever this threat is perhaps in other…

K. O'DONNELL: Have you ever felt this kind of pressure?

CASTLE: I would say this primary is different than any. First of all, it’s only the second primary I’ve ever had. I’ve never seen so much outside influence in any election in Delaware. This election is totally outside of Delaware, the Christine O’Donnell election on the other side. There is a lot of misinformation about what I’ve done and my record, and there’s a lot of misrepresentation I think in terms of her background issues which are slight at best. Fired from a job, not holding a job for several years. Basically running a very ideologically driven campaign, so it’s been a different forum, approach to an election that we’ve seen heretofor. I basically have not seen her out publicly campaigning, so there’s that as well. It’s essentially the Tea Party Express and others who are coming in with money and running their ads and that’s what it’s all about, so its different than the others. There’s some pressure that comes from that, sure.

K. O'DONNELL: At first, you ignored her. Do you regret that? Do you think you reacted in time?

CASTLE: I don’t regret anything at this point. We made the decision NOT to engage n the basis she was misrepresenting so much with personal slander and a variety of things I found distasteful. And, in don’t, I don’t regret that. I hope that our strategy is effective as far as the election is concerned, and I’m pretty confident it is. That’s something the voters will tell us tomorrow.

K. O'DONNELL: Is there a moment where you say, how did you get here?

CASTLE: Oh yeah, you think about why did it toughen up? Why did, is there a squeeze there, sure you think about those things, but I had a primary back in '92. I had I think a much more qualified opponent, couple opponents, than I do now. That was tight too, but it didn’t have the money influence that this one has. I’ve been sitting here thinking about Sarah Palin and wondering if she’s ever been in Delaware. I don’t know if she has or not or even through Delaware for all that matters. You know, ah there are all these various influences that you don’t expect and you hope people will pay attention to how outside all of it is.

K. O'DONNELL: Senator DeMint endorsed your opponent, surprised?

CASTLE: Doesn’t surprise me. That’s where Jim DeMint is coming from and remember every other Republican senator endorsed me. Jim DeMint has made it his crusade to find the most conservative people he can support and is supporting [them]. I’ m not remotely surprised that he endorsed her. I’m just surprised it didn’t happen sooner.