Streams Of Consciousness- Nov. 30

Let's Start With A Message From Lady Gaga



And On To The Senate's Hectic Schedule

Today the Senate passed S. 510, Richard Durbin's FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, 73-25. Only 25 hard core obstructionist Republicans, led by DeMint and Miss McConnell, opposed it. Crossing over to the saner side of the asylum were many farm state Republicans like Burr (NC), Grassley (IA), Johanns (NE), Kirk (IL), LeMieux (FL), Lugar (IN) and Voinovich (OH). Before the Senate could vote on it, though, they had to reject a couple of frivolous Coburn amendment, one of which to enforce an earmark moratorium, which only got 39 votes (it needed 60). Miss McConnell was working from behind his closet door to sabotage it. Although they've opposed ending earmarks in the past, cowardly Republicans facing teabagger primaries in 2012-- Kay Bailey Hutchison and Olympia Snowe-- both voted YES this time. Evan Bayh led 7 Democrats across the aisle to vote with the GOP.

Mark Foley Must Be Bored With His Life As A Socialite And Realtor

Perhaps he's feeling empowered by the swearing in of his old crony and fellow congressional closet queen Mark Kirk as a U.S. Senator yesterday, or by the rapid rise of his irresponsible page scandal enabler, John Shimkus, but Mark Foley has been dropping hints again that he wants to run for office. The plan is to run for mayor of West Palm Beach and than use that to... sit down for this... leverage another run for Congress! Presumably he wasn't talking about pages when he told a right-wing blogger today that "my passion has always been in D.C.... I have never closed a door that I wasn't able to re-open."

With about 1.3 million dollars residing in his federal congressional campaign account (money that could only be utilized for federal elections), Foley has the means to mount a comeback.  The open questions are-- does he truly have the desire to return, and will he be embraced by the public once again after leaving Congress under such ? Either way, Foley is considering  the notion of returning to Congress.

After reapportionment, there's no telling who he would be running against, but newly elected homophobic maniac Allen West is one possibility-- at least for a fun primary. As for the City Hall run, there's still a month to go before the filing deadline and Foley says he's waiting 'til the last day before announcing his intentions (December 27). "I do have the luxury that I can be the last man to file if I choose to, and still have the name ID," Foley told a local reporter. County Commissioner Jeff Koons might have been the favorite to win but he was recently convicted of extortion


Blue Dogs Behaving As Badly As Ever

Yesterday Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) introduced a resolution providing for consideration of the Senate amendments to H.R. 4783 to accelerate the income tax benefits for charitable cash contributions for the relief of victims of the earthquake in Chile, and to extend the period from which such contributions for the relief of victims of the earthquake in Haiti may be accelerated. Today Republicans voted against even allowing the resolution to come up for a vote, although it passed 223-168. Nine conservative Democrats, all but one members of the devastated Blue Dog Caucus, crossed the aisle to vote with the Republicans, including recently-defeated reactionaries John Adler (NJ), Bobby Bright (AL), Scott Murphy (NY), and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (SD). Retiring alcoholic Marion Berry (AR), driven by his psychotic hatred of Barack Obama, also voted with the GOP and the other miscreants, who will need to be dealt with in the future, were Dan Boren (OK), Joe Donnelly (IN), Jim Matheson (UT), and Heath Shuler (NC).

When the actual amendments themselves came up for a vote late in the afternoon, it passed 256-152, 16 Republicans abandoning Boehner/Cantor obstructionism, while 3 ridiculous Blue Dogs, Gene Taylor, Jim Cooper and, as always, Bobby Bright, voted with the GOP minority.

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear Isn't A Blue Dog But...

Even if you didn't read Charles Pierce's brilliant book, Idiot America, just the graphic on the cover (on the right) would give you a good clue about the contents, particularly the riveting introduction, "Dinosaurs And Saddles," the story of the creationist theme park in southern Kentucky. I guess Kentucky thought everyone was laughing with them. Today the state's governor, a Democrat, announced that the museum's builders, Answers in Genesis, are building another creationist theme park, Ark Encounter, this one in northern Kentucky.

The attraction is envisioned as a full-scale wooden ark that would include associated museums, theaters, amenities, event venues and outdoor parking.

Preliminary indications are that the attraction could draw as many as 1.6 million guests per year and would cost at least $24.5 million to complete.

Answers in Genesis is an Apologetics Ministry that focuses on the absolute truth and authority of the Bible.

The Creation Museum, opened in May 2007, was estimated to draw about 250,000 visitors per year, but surpassed one million visitors in less than three years.

Its controversial exhibits represent the views of the ministry, including the belief that the earth is only about 7,000 years old and that dinosaurs were among the creatures on Noah’s ark.

...Beshear’s participation in the announcement suggests state incentives for the project may be included.

And... From The Ridiculous, To The Sublime

Mitch McConnell-- Mistress Of Spin Inside The Beltway

America is clamoring for THIS again?

During the last election, the GOP fired up much of the electorate by persuading many voters-- through mindless repetition-- that Senator Barack Obama was the most liberal member of the Senate. Few people bothered to check the facts; if they heard it from Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage, Beck, Palin and the entire Republican noise machine enough-- and then heard it amplified by the brain-dead mainstream media-- well... "if there's smoke, there must be fire" is a tenet of Idiot America. It didn't matter that Obama's voting record was always way down at the bottom of the barrel, tucked in their among reactionaries like Lieberman, Landrieu, Lincoln, Pryor, Baucus, and never anywhere near actual liberals like Dick Durbin, Tom Harkin, Ted Kennedy, Jack Reed, Sheldon Whitehouse, Bob Menéndez, Barbara Boxer or Frank Lautenberg. No, Obama wasn't voting with Russ Feingold or Bernie Sanders or Chris Dodd or even Hillary Clinton. He was voting with Ben Nelson, Tom Carper and Evan Bayh. Evan Bayh may be a liberal-- but only in an alternative universe where Mitch McConnell, Larry Craig and Lindsey Graham are straight men singing the praises of Christian family values as they scurry back and forth to the Senate floor from Washington's public toilets.

It didn't hurt Obama because, it turns out, voters wanted a progressive after 8 years of knee jerk reactionary rule by a claque of corporate-controlled Republican zombies and vampires. So now there is a lot of buyer's remorse when Obama turns out to be... well, exactly what Obama always was, a corporate-friendly moderate with very tepid, overly cautious solutions to problems that call for game-changing solutions. The advisers he close include Wall Street lackeys like Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers and, worst of all, Rahm Emanuel. Worst of all not just because Emanuel is a dyed-in-the-wool Wall Street lackey, but also because he used P.R. as deftly as the Republicans do to give himself the aura of accomplishment and "competent can-do tough guy."

That aura is as in sync with reality as the one about Obama being the most liberal member of the Senate or the new absurdity being floated by Miss McConnell that the current administration is hard left. Hard left? Only in a world where Mark Foley (R-FL) is caught breaking into the boy pages' dormitory after midnight and the Republican congressional leadership promises to hush it up if he agrees to run for re-election and save them the cost of running a candidate in an open seat. That's a dangerous world, although one usually without consequences for any of the perps. John Boehner, you may have noticed, has since risen in the ranks to leader of his party's House caucus. But Inside the Beltway, it just takes some pricey P.R., skillful repetition, cooperative, go-along-to-get-along media hacks and shills, and voilà! Rahm Emanuel is competent and responsible for a Democratic congressional resurgence, and Obama's sickeningly moderate agenda is "hard left."

Roll Call's interview with Miss McC this week reads like the ultimate in well-greased flackery, spoon-fed to teabaggers, dittoheads and other denizens of Idiot America who can certainly believe anything if they believe that the Buy Bull proves men coexisted with dinosaurs-- further proven by the popular television docudrama The Flintstones. See? A page right out of historeeeee:

Democrats “fundamentally misread the mandate of 2008. I don’t think it had anything whatsoever to do with turning America into a Western European country. It was more, kind of fatigue with the previous administration,” McConnell argued during an interview this week in his Capitol office.

McConnell argued that as a result, a “sea change in the political environment” has occurred over the last year that has favored Republicans while causing increasing divisions within Democratic ranks.

“One thing I think is pretty safe to say is that there has been a sea change in the political environment and the confidence, if you will, of the majority that they are in sync with the American people,” McConnell said. “If you look at the political landscape from, say, November of ’08 and compare it to today, we were down 12 in the party generic ballot, and two weeks ago in Gallup we were up four.”

That shift has implications for the president’s agenda on Capitol Hill, McConnell argued, noting that electoral pressures and public interest in issues such as the health care reform bill are driving that change.

“That has an impact on what happens up here, because we don’t exist in splendid isolation here. We are constantly interacting with our constituents, looking at the published polls about how people feel about how we’re doing. ... That explains in my view the difficulty they’re having passing the health care bill. The anxiety is on their side, and the energy and the passion is on our side.”

McConnell argued that Democrats and the White House have, at least on the domestic policy front, pursued an explicitly partisan approach. “The domestic strategy was, unify the Democrats, try to pick off a few Republicans, give it a patina of bipartisanship and jam them. ... I think the bipartisan stuff with them is just talk,” McConnell said.

Well, there you go. Why doesn't Obama just hand the keys to the White House over to Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann right now and announce that Harry Reid is stepping aside as Senate leader for a consensus candidate who bridges the gap between the two parties... Joe Lieberman?

Marco Rubio, Sarah Palin And Idiot America-- Can It Work In Florida?

The election for the Florida open senate seat pits a weak and ethically-challenged Democrat, Kendrick Meek, against either popular mainstream conservative Governor Charlie Crist or an in-over-his-head extremist and teabagger candidate, Marco Rubio. Some of us think we're better off with Crist as the GOP nominee, because he might not be as destructive and obstructionist in the Senate as Rubio. Others of us think we're better off with Rubio as the Republican candidate because he's probably too extremist to win a statewide race. Obviously no one can be sure of how the electoral calculus would really play out. However, I recalled how Charles Pierce started winding down his brilliant survey of our country's political landscape, Idiot America, with the story of what happens when deranged extremists take over a political party. He sets the scene as the last presidential campaign was getting into high gear:

In August, in what was the first major event of the general election campaign, both Obama and John McCain went out to California to a "forum" organized by Pastor Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church. The very notion that an affluent God-botherer like Warren should be allowed to vet presidential candidates was in itself a sign that the opportunity that twinkled briefly in the election [that the country was coming to its senses after the self-inflicted poison and bullshit of the last decade] was largely lost. At one point, Warren turned to Obama and asked, "At what point does a baby get human rights?"

The only proper answer to this question for anyone running for president is "How in Hell do I know? If that's what you want in a president, vote for Thomas Aquinas." Instead, Obama summoned up some faith-based flummery that convinced few people in a crowd that, anyway, had no more intention of voting for him than it did in erecting a statue of Baal in the parking lot. Subsequently, Warren gave an interview in which he compared an evangelical voting for a pro-choice candidate to a Jewish voter supporting a Holocaust denier. And the opportunity went a-glimmering.

While Obama merely bowed clumsily in the direction of Idiot America, John McCain set up housekeeping there. Desperate to disassociate himself from the previous administration, which had spent seven years crafting policies that it could sell to Idiot America while the actual America was coming apart at every seam, McCain instead wandered deeply into Idiot America himself, perhaps never to return. He embraced the campaign tactics used to slander him in 2000, even hiring some of the people who had been responsible for them. He stated that he couldn't now vote for his own immigration reform bill. He spent a long stretch of the campaign in violation of the campaign finance reform bill that bore his name. He largely silenced himself on the issue of torture.

He really had no choice. The Republican party, and the brand of movement conservatism that had fueled its rise, had become the party of undigested charlatans. Some of them believed the supply-side voodoo that so unnerved Jonathan Chait. Some of them believed in dinosaurs with saddles. Movement conservatism swallowed them all whole, and it valued them only for the raw number of votes they could deliver. The cranks did not assimilate and the party using them did not really care whether the mainstream came to them. It simply hoped there were enough of them to win elections. The transaction failed the country because it did not free the imagination so much as bridle it with conventional politics. It niche-marketed the frontier of the mind so rigidly that, by 2008, you couldn't run for president as a Republican without transforming yourself into a preposterous figure.

To win the primaries, you had to placate the party's indissoluble base. (This is what ate poor Mitt Romney alive. He went from being a rather bloodless corporate drone to being a rip-roaring culture warrior and ended up looking like a very big fool.) Having done that, you then had to tiptoe away from those same people without alienating them completely. The more successful you were at this delicate fandango, the more preposterous you had to become, especially if, like John McCain, you'd tried to avoid the cranks for most of your public career.

Once McCain got the nomination, he was denied his first choices for vice presidential candidates because neither of them passed muster with the base he had so debased himself to woo. He ended up with Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, whose hilarious lack of qualifications for the job was interpreted at the Republican nominating convention as the highest qualification of all. She said so herself... If the country took its obligations to self-government at all seriously, the presence of Sarah Palin on a national ticket would have been an insult on a par with the elevation of Caligula's horse. However, the more people pointed out Palin's obvious shortcomings, the more the people who loved her loved her even more. She was taken seriously not merely because she had been selected to run, but also because of the fervor she had stirred among people in whose view her primary virtue as a candidate was the fact that she made the right people crazy.

Marco Rubio is winning every single GOP straw poll among the party's activist base-- and winning them by jaw-dropping landslides. He may well win the closed Republican primary in Florida. But will mainstream voters go along with a die-hard, flip-flopping obstructionist whose only asset is that he's not gay and that he's extreme enough to satisfy the ragtag teabaggers, KKK secessionists, birthers, deathers and lunatic fringe maniacs who call the shots in the Republican Party pup tent these days?

Putting Our Troops In Harm's Way For An Unattainable Goal

In an OpEd in yesterday's Washington Post, Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) there is an attempt to go beyond analysis of Obama's revised Afghanistan strategy and get some kind of clarification of the conditions necessary for a successful drawdown of American forces.

We are ramping up deployment to about 100,000 troops, along with tens of thousands of American contractors and civilians, to implement a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. This greatly enlarged presence runs the risk, well rooted in Afghanistan's history of resisting foreign influence, that the United States will be perceived as an occupying force instead of a presence seeking to assist Afghans in improving their stability and development.

Another key question that remains to be answered is: How do we define our enemy in Afghanistan? When we talk about the Taliban, we interchange terms that aren't particularly interchangeable. Three different types of actors are associated with the Taliban. First came those in a vicious government that the United States assisted in removing. Second, there is an ideologically charged group that operates principally in Pakistan, associated with the forces of international terrorism. Third, we have a separate group, presumably growing with the greatest speed, that is viewed by many Afghans as something of a regional militia defending local interests and that doesn't particularly want to threaten U.S. interests outside Afghanistan.

I have said consistently that countering international terrorism requires highly maneuverable forces able to strike an intrinsically mobile enemy. The departure of al-Qaeda from Iraq and, in large measure, from Afghanistan demonstrates why more maneuverable U.S. forces are to be favored against mobile international terrorist movements. In each instance, al-Qaeda relocated to other areas, including Pakistan and the Horn of Africa. Our military must retain the same maneuverability.

James Jones, who is, when all is said and done, Obama's #1 national security advisor and certainly played a major role in designing the new Af-Pak strategy, says in no uncertain terms that there will be no withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011-- "in no manner, shape or form," a somewhat different emphasis than what Obama said on national TV a few nights ago. I found an account of a trip that a staffer, Michael Shank, for Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) made to Afghanistan a lot more credible than either what Obama or Jones had to say. He wrote it up at Roll Call and one needs a subscription to link to it. Let me quote a few interesting lines though:

“To leave or not to leave” was not the question. The majority of Afghans with whom I met wanted the international community to stay. Do not leave, they said, but do things differently-- the American approach is not working. A quick look around Kabul and I saw what they meant. The lawless streets remain flooded, muddied, potholed and even sewage-filled; power outages are common; and newborns face the second most unhealthy and unstable environment in the world next to Somalia, according to a recent UN report. Eight years in, Afghans are wondering whether Americans are there to truly help the country. If we are trying to immunize the country from insurgencies, Afghans question our approach.

But forget about poverty for a second and consider corruption, a concern among many Congressional minds. With Transparency International’s November report ranking Afghanistan the second most corrupt country in the world, there was an implicit understanding of America’s role in this ranking. In an attempt to mollify the country after tackling the Taliban in 2001, the U.S. supported warlords and corrupt officials, who remain in both parliament and provincial offices. These allies provide intelligence to the military and security to the provincial reconstruction teams, albeit it at a high price morally and financially.

Afghans quickly cry foul on this corruption and are keen to support President Hamid Karzai’s house cleaning, but they note that Karzai cannot do it alone. As long as the U.S. points fingers at Karzai and as long as the U.S. continues to aid and abet the savviest of warlords, locals say, Karzai remains unable to bring to justice warlords and corrupt officials. Additionally, the government is still working out the bureaucratic kinks that exacerbate corruption trends. Getting a driver’s license, for example, requires 51 office visits, which is 50 extra opportunities for skimming funds. This, along with a fledgling judicial system, makes it tough to crack down on crime.

Beyond corruption, consider the inefficacy of foreign aid flowing into the country. Local Afghans see that the provincial reconstruction teams, managed by the State and Defense departments, are operating with little to no community preparation, trust or legitimacy, establishing a highly secure shop reliant on foreign imports for survival (apples from New Zealand, bottled water from Dubai), and depending on security contractors-- at a rate of $14,000 per person per day-- to maneuver. Local Afghans compare this development approach, which leaves 10 cents of every foreign aid dollar in Afghanistan, to their government’s National Solidarity Program, a much more cost-efficient development initiative that works with locally elected community development councils to design and implement village projects.

Yet despite foreign aid’s billions spent, with little Afghan infrastructure, institutions and individual capacity to show, the inefficiency of the military presence is perhaps most striking. For the cost of one U.S. soldier, at $1 million a year, you could train and pay several hundred Afghan soldiers. Only 30 cents of every foreign military dollar stays in Afghanistan, and a 50 percent attrition rate plagues the Afghan forces. After serving three years, most Afghan forces go to private security contractors or the Taliban because the pay is better. Training and capacity is equally insufficient. More than 2,000 U.S. troop trainer positions remained unfilled in 2009, taking its toll on the Afghan National Police especially-- a body that one minister noted exists in name only. As an ANP-coated cop bicycled by me one day on his rickety bike, I got a sense of what the minister meant.

[UPDATE: The Nation has published a linkable post from Shank, which allows one and all to read the whole thing.]

I want to share one more OpEd with you, one written a couple days ago for the L.A. Times by Andrew Bacevich, Obama's Folly, one in which he argues that "rather than trying to salvage Bush's policy in Afghanistan, the president should show real courage and just pull the plug." But before you do, let me bring you back to the bad old days when Bush and Cheney were running the show and Bacevich was one of the few people speaking up. Please join Charles Pierce looking at Bacevich's run in with Idiot America:

"There was no plan except 'Defer to us," explained Andrew Bacevich, Sr., a retired Army Colonel who teaches history and international relations at Boston University... "They said, 'We will cut your taxes and we will not have a draft. Don't worry. The U.S. military is unbeatable, so go to Disney World,'" Bacevich said. "And I think that's the inclination of the American people anyway, and we were all encouraged to do that. Had the president said at the time, 'This requires an all-out national effort. I'm going to increase your taxes. We're going to pay for this... expand the Army'-- in that moment, I think the Congress would have said, 'You got it, Mr. President.' As Americans, we would have said, 'Okay, if that's what it takes.' He said, 'Go to Disney World,' and the moment passed."

You may have read on Thursday, the same day Bacevich's OpEd appeared, that Speaker Pelosi quashed Dave Obey's call for a war tax, probably at the urging of the White House.

Bacevich asks a question that must be plaguing all progressives now, something along the lines of what's worse, a delusional blunderer or... someone who knows better and follows the same path? Like many of us, he seems to be reluctantly coming to the conclusion that for someone who sold us on changing the way Washington works, he sure seems to be a denizen of the bad old status quo there. "What Afghanistan tells us is that rather than changing Washington, Obama has become its captive. The president has succumbed to the twin illusions that have taken the political class by storm in recent months. The first illusion, reflecting a self-serving interpretation of the origins of 9/11, is that events in Afghanistan are crucial to the safety and well-being of the American people. The second illusion, the product of a self-serving interpretation of the Iraq War, is that the U.S. possesses the wisdom and wherewithal to guide Afghanistan out of darkness and into the light."

Through war, Bush set out to transform the greater Middle East. Despite immense expenditures of blood and treasure, that effort failed. In choosing Obama rather than John McCain to succeed Bush, the American people acknowledged that failure as definitive. Obama's election was to mark a new beginning, an opportunity to "reset" America's approach to the world.

The president's chosen course of action for Afghanistan suggests he may well squander that opportunity. Rather than renouncing Bush's legacy, Obama apparently aims to salvage something of value. In Afghanistan, he will expend yet more blood and more treasure hoping to attenuate or at least paper over the wreckage left over from the Bush era.

However improbable, Obama thereby finds himself following in the footsteps of Richard Nixon. Running for president in 1968, Nixon promised to end the Vietnam War. Once elected, he balked at doing so. Obsessed with projecting an image of toughness and resolve-- U.S. credibility was supposedly on the line-- Nixon chose to extend and even to expand that war. Apart from driving up the costs that Americans were called on to pay, this accomplished nothing.

If knowing when to cut your losses qualifies as a hallmark of statesmanship, Nixon flunked. Vietnam proved irredeemable.

Obama's prospects of redeeming Afghanistan appear hardly more promising. Achieving even a semblance of success, however modestly defined, will require an Afghan government that gets its act together, larger and more competent Afghan security forces, thousands of additional reinforcements from allies already heading toward the exits, patience from economically distressed Americans as the administration shovels hundreds of billions of dollars toward Central Asia, and even greater patience from U.S. troops shouldering the burdens of seemingly perpetual war. Above all, success will require convincing Afghans that the tens of thousands of heavily armed strangers in their midst represent Western beneficence rather than foreign occupation.

...Under the guise of cleaning up Bush's mess, Obama has chosen to continue Bush's policies. No doubt pulling the plug on an ill-advised enterprise involves risk and uncertainty. It also entails acknowledging mistakes. It requires courage. Yet without these things, talk of change will remain so much hot air.

Will Obama's Power To Grant Offices, Honors & Emoluments Grease The Path Towards Escalation In Afghanistan?

As our poor overburdened president stumbles inexorably, pathetically towards escalating a tragic and unwinnable war in Afghanistan that the military, the Intelligence community, clueless, defensive hawks in his own administration, and the Republican Party all insist on for their own varied and self-serving reasons-- and that the American people are set against-- I recalled a passage from Charles Pierce's stupendous little book Idiot America that I had read last summer. Ken and I both went to James Madison High School in Brooklyn-- as did Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Carole King, Chris Rock, Andrew Dice Clay, Cousin Brucie, Judge Judy, Frank Torre and Gambino Crime Family head Roy DeMeo. I'm not 100% certain about Ken, but I didn't hang out with any of them. But I've always maintained a fascination with our country's 4th president, the man who, basically, wrote most of the Constitution, much of the Federalist Papers and the Bill of Rights. He and Thomas Jefferson were the progressives to Alexander Hamilton's elitist conservatism.

Madison was very much aware of the power-- and abuses-- of both public opinion and of war. "Public opinion sets bounds to every government," he wrote late in 1791, "and is the real sovereign in every free one... The larger the country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained, and the less difficult to be counterfeited; when ascertained or presumed, the more respectable it is in the eyes of individuals. This is favorable to the authority of government," wrote the man whose chief underlying principle revolved around the need for strong checks and balances to protect individual rights from the tyranny of the majority. "For the same reason, the more extensive a country, the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes. This may be unfavorable to liberty." Nor did his disdain for war keep him from starting one.

"In war, he wrote in 1795 [while a member of Congress from Virginia-- 14 years before his inauguration to follow Thomas Jefferson], "the discretionary power of the executive is extended; it's influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied, and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of seducing the force, of the people... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

Bush was apparently a dummy with some crafty people around him. Obama is a sharp and educated man with the same sort of crafty people are him. Bush craved being a wartime president. Madison didn't but he still started a war with England that nearly bankrupted the country and "was highlighted by Madison fleeing the White House a few steps ahead of the Royal Marines, who burned the place. Not even he could resist wholly the temptations he saw as inherent in any executive." Pierce thinks he tried. Many think Obama is trying as well.

Right now he's desperate to get more troops from mostly very unconvinced allies... and hoping to bribe Taliban fighters into switching sides, a longtime mainstay of war in Afghanistan. My friend Graham Isaacson wrote a song about it that makes far more sense than Obama's tepid strategy for disaster:



I wish I could think, like many of my friends, that Obama will do the right thing. I sincerely doubt he will, unless he's pushed to. And we're the one who have to push him-- we a small band of allies in Congress who think the same way we do about this way.

Charles Pierce's 3 Great Premises Of Idiot America-- And The Health Care Debate

I was writing Friday night when an old friend IM-ed me. He had spoken with a doctor about the health care reform debate and he was all fired up. "The Democrats should end the ability of insurance companies to exclude people with pre-existing conditions and to kick sick people off coverage," he wrote. Where does one start to respond? I tried explaining that that-- and how to pay for it-- is the heart of the debate that has been raging. He blamed Obama for not communicating. I guess if Obama had gone for a koffee klatch in his living room he might have heard him. Other than that, it's much easier to hear the endlessly repeated-- and shouted-- lies underwritten by the Insurance Lobby on Hate Talk Radio ("We want Obama to fail"), Fox News ("We want Obama to fail") and by the bad-faith players who dominate the Republican congressional caucus ("We want Obama to fail"). Much easier. And as Charles Pierce makes clear eye-opening book Idiot America, there are 3 great premises for American idiotism, all of which are very much in play here:

(1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings or otherwise moves units.
(2) Any thing can be true if someone says it loudly enough.
(3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

Yesterday in his weekly address to the nation, President Obama took off the kid gloves for my friend and for the millions of other Americans who haven't been paying attention to anything or, if something, just the stuff that fits in with the 3 great premises. He confronted the Insurance Lobby head on, touching on some very important questions that transcend this particular debate. I've tried to highlight them by picking out the relevant paragraphs and by using the bold functionality of my computer in the search for transcendent evil:

Of course, like clockwork, we’ve seen folks on cable television who know better, waving these industry-funded studies in the air. We’ve seen industry insiders-- and their apologists-- citing these studies as proof of claims that just aren’t true. They’ll claim that premiums will go up under reform; but they know that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that reforms will lower premiums in a new insurance exchange while offering consumer protections that will limit out-of-pocket costs and prevent discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. They’ll claim that you’ll have to pay more out of pocket; but they know that this is based on a study that willfully ignores whole sections of the bill, including tax credits and cost savings that will greatly benefit middle class families. Even the authors of one of these studies have now admitted publicly that the insurance companies actually asked them to do an incomplete job.

It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s bogus. And it’s all too familiar. Every time we get close to passing reform, the insurance companies produce these phony studies as a prescription and say, "Take one of these, and call us in a decade." Well, not this time. The fact is, the insurance industry is making this last-ditch effort to stop reform even as costs continue to rise and our health care dollars continue to be poured into their profits, bonuses, and administrative costs that do nothing to make us healthy-- that often actually go toward figuring out how to avoid covering people. And they’re earning these profits and bonuses while enjoying a privileged exception from our anti-trust laws, a matter that Congress is rightfully reviewing.

Now, I welcome a good debate. I welcome the chance to defend our proposals and to test our ideas in the fires of this democracy. But what I will not abide are those who would bend the truth-- or break it -- to score political points and stop our progress as a country. And what we all must oppose are the same old cynical Washington games that have been played for decades even as our problems have grown and our challenges have mounted.

Last November, the American people went to the polls in historic numbers and demanded change. They wanted a change in our policies; but they also sought a change in our politics: a politics that too often has fallen prey to the lobbyists and the special interests; that has fostered division and sustained the status quo. Passing health insurance reform is a great test of this proposition. Yes, it will make a profound and positive difference in the lives of the American people. But it also now represents something more: whether or not we as a nation are capable of tackling our toughest challenges, if we can serve the national interest despite the unrelenting efforts of the special interests; if we can still do big things in America.

I believe we can. I believe we will. And I urge every member of Congress to stand against the power plays and political ploys-- and to stand up on behalf the American people who sent us to Washington to do their business.

For the sake of our nation, not just health care reform, let's hope he's correct.

Why Has Glenn Beck Captured The Imagination Of Idiot America?

Teabagger-in-chief

In his NY Times column yesterday Frank Rich got to the heart of American's distrust of the Modern Republican Party. In going over Rep. Joe Wilson's recent screaming episode during the Joint Session, he points out that Wilson defended himself by saying his outburst was "spontaneous," which troubles Rich: "It’s not good for the country that a lawmaker can’t control his anger at Barack Obama. It gives permission to crazy people."

Giving permission to crazy people actually seems to be the GOP's #1 grassroots strategy. Even if Republican Party officials can't stir up the enraged masses themselves-- part of the rage is aimed at them-- they have surrogates who do it every single day, from O'Reilly, Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh, Dobbs and Savage to Time Magazine covergirl Glenn Beck. Rich corrects the impression many have that Beck is just a lower rent imitation of Limbaugh. "He is something different. That’s why he is gaining on his antecedents-- and gaining traction in the country’s angrier precincts."

Though Beck’s daily Fox News show is in the sleepy slot of 5 p.m., his ratings are increasingly neck and neck with the prime-time tag team of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and he has beaten them in the prized 25-to-54 demographic. It’s not just because he is younger (45). This self-described “rodeo clown,” who wells up with tears for dramatic effect, doesn’t come across as cranky or pompous, like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. A fervent Mormon convert and proselytizer, he is untainted by association with the old Dobson-Robertson-Reed religious right. Unlike Limbaugh, he bonds with his fallible listeners by openly and repeatedly owning up to his own mistakes, including his history of drug and alcohol abuse. Unlike Hannity, he is not a Republican apparatchik.

Beck has notoriously defamed Obama as a “racist,” but the race card is just one in his deck. His ideology, if it can be called that, mixes idolatrous Ayn Rand libertarianism with bumper-sticker slogans about “freedom,” self-help homilies and lunatic conspiracy theories. (He fanned Internet rumors that FEMA was establishing concentration camps before tardily beating a retreat.) It’s the same crazy-quilt cosmology that could be found in last weekend’s Washington protest, where the marchers variously called Obama a fascist, a communist and a socialist, likening him to Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Pol Pot. They may not know that some of these libels are mutually exclusive. But what they do know is that they need a scapegoat for what ails them, and there is no one handier than a liberal, all-powerful president (who just happens to be black).

Beck captures this crowd’s common emotional denominator-- with appropriately overheated capital letters-- in his best-selling book portraying himself as a latter-day Tom Paine, “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense.” Americans “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT,” he writes, “but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.” This is right-wing populism in the classic American style, as inchoate and paranoid as that hawked by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and George Wallace in the late 1960s. Wallace is most remembered for his racism, but he, like Beck, also played on the class and cultural resentment of those sharing his view that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.

Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won’t remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans. The old G.O.P. Southern strategy is gone with the wind. The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of Wilson’s outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse.

Rich's column is called "Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice A Day" and it is Beck's parroting of Dick Durbin's frustrated cry that bankers shouldn't write the agenda for the United States Senate and his honing in on Durbin's sad admission that Wall Street owns the Senate, that differentiates him from the Greed & Selfishness GOP hate talkers like O'Reilly, Hannity and Limbaugh.

“Wall Street owns our government,” Beck declared in one rant this July. “Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.” He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right’s usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union)... Unlike liberal critics of capitalist inequities, of course, Beck and his claque are driven by an over-the-top detestation of government. Washington is always the enemy, stealing their hard-earned money to redistribute it to the undeserving and shiftless poor (some of whom just happen to be immigrants or black). Though there is nothing Obama can do to stop racists from being racist, he could help stanch the economic piece of this by demonstrating how a reformed government can at times actually make Americans’ lives better. That’s what F.D.R. did, and that’s the promise Obama made, swaying some Republicans and even some racists, during the campaign.

Too many Americans are impatiently waiting for results. It’s hard to argue that the stimulus package reviled by big government-loathers is a success when unemployment continues to rise and most Americans feel none of the incipient “recovery” spotted by Ben Bernanke. The potential dividends to be gained at the end of the protracted health care debate also remain, for now, an abstraction to many who have lost and are continuing to lose their jobs, their savings and their homes.

Last month Public Policy Polling asked Arkansas voters whose vision for the future of America was superior, Obama's or Limbaugh's. 55% picked Limbaugh. I hope they include Beck next time. Or Paris Hilton. Idiot America, as Charles Pierce has elucidated in his brilliant book of the same name, is a many splendored thing. And Glenn Beck is hardly the first huckstering crackpot Time put, straight-faced, on their front cover. Even sillier were Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye.

[S]uppliers of "Christian" products, up to and including the various churches themselves, have created a self-contained and profitable universe in which almost everything that was worthwhile about Christianity's contact with the secular world has been cheapened and fashioned into tawdry souvenirs for the suckers. Sacred music has traded Gregorian chant, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Thomas Dorsey, and Mahalia Jacksonfor "worship anthems" sung by stubby white guys who look like they flunked the audition for Counting Crows. A literature that once produced C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton now sells millions of copies of the Left Behind series, written by Jerry Jenkins and the noisome political preacher Tim LaHaye, in which the end times occur and the Antichrist arrives in the person of one Nicolae Carpathia, so named, perhaps, because the authors didn't think of calling him "Evil J. Transylvania." Carpathia comes to power preaching one-world government based in the United Nations, which, at least, proves that Jenkins and LaHaye have rooted their profitable Apocalypse in the American conspiratorial tradition...

Anyway, he has a good run of it until Jesus comes back to earth and does a lot of bloody slaying and dismembering in and around the village of Megiddo, which has had enough trouble. (Jesus, it seems, had developed a talent for disemboweling people in the years since he left town.) The plot is preposterous.

Preposterous enough to sell millions of copies-- a literary equivalent of the new Zombieland film-- and to have gotten them, like Beck last week, on the cover of Time. And Pierce reminds us that Catholics were once in the business of selling off their saints piecemeal, "and sometimes the finger you bought turned out to be a pig's knuckle, but the vendors of holy relics were absolute pikers compared with those who traffic in the notion of an embattled elect surrounded by a scornful world. Because nothing sells in the modern Christian marketplace like the notion that Christians are beset on all sides by powerful forces desperately in need of a good disemboweling, it was inevitable that religious marketing would flow into the country's politics," where it has been sold as a product and where who better to do the disemboweling (until Jesus comes back, anyway) than a weepy, ex-addict Mormon?

Blame It On The Nature Of Hate Talk Radio And Pundit TV

Think of this post as Part II of today's coming to grips with the fact that, oops, we picked the wrong man to put over us last November-- not that John McCain (or even Hillary Clinton) would have been a better choice. On the other hand, Clinton did look into Rahm Emanuel's dead reptilian eyes early on and recoiled in horror. As we mentioned here at DWT, before Obama had even taken the oath of office, his administration was doomed to failure by his choice of chief of staff. Is it possible that anyone could have succeeded, though? Last night's throwing Van Jones overboard and next Wednesday's throwing meaningful health care reform overboard are symptoms of the increasingly ungovernable nature of what Charles Pierce has so aptly dubbed Idiot America. Or at least ungovernable by someone without great depth of character and courageousness. Obama, it turns out, is just another troll in a long line of trolls who have been occupying the White House.

I can't recommend Pierce's book highly enough. The subtitle, How Stupidity Became A Virtue In The Land Of The Free, opens the door to understanding the mess the country has fallen into, a mess Obama and Rahm Emanuel have no intention of tackling regardless of the fact that it is mooting what could have been/should have been an historic presidency. Pierce's three tenets of Idiot America:

The First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.

The Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.

The Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believed it.

So, yes, smart money has indeed figured out how to get around that pesky concept of Democracy that is nothing but a threat to the status quo and the power of ruling-- as opposed to elected-- elites. I want to share a few passages from Pierce's 5th chapter, Radio Nowhere. We'll start at an "issues-oriented" Talk Radio convention where G. Gordon Liddy is about to be presented with that medium's equivalent of the Oscar For Best Picture of The Year.

[T]hreatening to poison a journalist [Jack Anderson] is a shining gold star on the résumé. Westwood One, a huge radio syndicator, gave Liddy a national platform, and Liddy did with it pretty much what you might expect. On one memorable occasion he gave his radio audience pointers on how to kill a federal agent. ("Head shots," he advised.) The comment caused no little outrage, particularly among federal agents with heads. President Bill Clinton mooed earnestly about the corruption of our national dialogue. This sent the talk radio universe into such collective hysterics that the New Media Conference in 1995 gave Liddy its coveted "Freedom of Speech" award for boldly speaking truth to power.

...[T]he format did not truly explode until 1987, when, in the deregulatory fever of the Reagan years the Federal Communications Commission revoked the Fairness Doctrine. This rule, adopted in 1949, had required licensed broadcasters to air all sides of the debate on controversial issues... After a favorable ruling by a federal court, and after Reagan vetoed a revival, the Fairness Doctrine was dead. Talk radio exploded on the right. As more and more stations became the property of fewer and fewer companies-- the repeal was only a small part of the general deregulation of the public airwaves-- the medium's ideology hardened like a diamond. These days, the conservatives' dominance of AM radio is overwhelming.

... Since right-wing populism has at its heart an "anti-elitist" distrust of expertise, talk radio offers the purest example of the Great Premises at work. A host is not judged a success by his command of the issues, but purely by whether what he says moves the ratings needle. (First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it moves units.) If the needle moves enough, then the host is adjudged an expert (Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough) and if the host seems to argue passionately enough, then what he is saying is judged to be true simply because of how many people are listening to him say it (Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it). Gordon Liddy is no longer a gun-toting crackpot. He has an audience. He must know something.

Talk radio was the driving force in changing American debate into American argument. It moved discussion southward from the brain to the Gut. Debate no longer consists of thesis and antithesis, moving forward to synthesis; it is now a matter of choosing up sides, finding someone on your team to sally forth, and then laying the wood to each other in between commercials for male-enhancement products.



Talk radio provides a template for the clamorous rise of pundit television and for the even swifter interactivity on the Internet. And, because the field of play has moved from the brain to the Gut, talk radio has helped shove the way we talk to each other about even the most important topics almost entirely into the field of entertainment. In doing so, it has created a demand for inexpertise-- or, more accurately, anexpertise-- whereby the host is deemed more of an authority the less he is demonstrably polluted by actual knowledge.

After an extensive study of talk radio, and of the television argument shows that talk radio helped spawn, professor Andrew Cline of Washington University in St. Louis came up with a set of rules for modern American pundits:

1. Never be dull.
2. Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity.
3. The American public is stupid; treat them that way.
4. Always ignore the facts and the public record when it is convenient to do so.

"Television is an emotional medium," Cline explains. "It doesn't do reason well. This is entertainment, not analysis or reasoned discourse. Never employ a tightly reasoned argument where a flaming sound bite will do. The argument of the academic is sort of dull, but a good pissing match is fun to watch. To admit anything ore complicated is to invite the suggestion that you may be wrong, and that can never be. Nuance is almost a pejorative term-- as if nuance means we're trying to obfuscate."

I was working on this clip last night, a song by Rev Boy that a Facebook friend sent me, something you might call "the Republican Fight Song." I didn't know about Van Jones firing at the time. Take a look:



And speaking of Hate Talk Radio, Dave Neiwert, author of The Eliminationists has put together a compendium of examples of Glenn Beck promoting far-right extremist material on Fox News.

Falling Off The Cliff In Oklahoma

Author Charles Pierce had some fun at the expense of Oklahoma's two crackpot senators Tom Coburn and James Inhofe in his latest book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. It was inevitable when he started to explain the direction the book was taking: "If this book seems to concentrate on the doings of the modern American right, that's because it was the modern American right that consciously adopted irrationality as a tactic, and succeeded very well."

Which brings us, for the moment, to the two U.S. Senators from the great state of Oklahoma, a pair of the most entertaining primates ever to sit in the world's greatest deliberative body. Once, they might have been beloved local cranks, amusing their neighbors, scandalizing their friends, and enlivening the meetings of the local town council with their explanations of how everything went to hell once the Illuminati took us off the gold standard. Now, though, they are members of the U.S. Senate. And, given the proud history of the great deliberative body, which includes everything from the fulminations of Theodore Bilbo to Everett Dirksen's campaign to make the marigold the national flower, the Oklahoma delegation is a measure of how far we have come.

Usually states will elect one boring senator and one entertaining one... However, Oklahoma has demonstrated almost unprecedented generosity in sharing with the nation its more eccentric political fauna.

Although I can't recommend Pierce's wonderful book highly enough, let's leave it for a moment and pick up yesterday's Tulsa World, that city's biggest newspaper, where we meet another specimen of the modern American right. Let me introduce non-Oklahomans to Anna Falling, an ambitious wingnut running for mayor, a job that usually leads to higher office. Tulsa certainly has the same problems all cities have, including "violent crime, budget woes and bumpy streets" but if Ms Falling is elected she's already got her #1 priority set: "putting a Christian creationism display in the Tulsa Zoo."

“It’s first,” she said to calls of “hallelujah” at a rally outside the zoo. “If we can’t come to the foundation of faith in this community, those other answers will never come. We need to first of all recognize the fact that God needs to be honored in this city.”

Falling, who has founded several Christian nonprofits and is a former city councilor, also said the next mayor needs to appoint people to city boards, authorities and commissions who will “honor God.”

“We will also look for people who want to characterize the origins of both man and animals in a way that honors Judeo-Christian science that proves God as the creator,” she said.

When asked whether she meant she would recruit Christians to serve the city, Falling said she was talking about “people committed to their churches,” and when asked whether she meant Christian churches, she said, “churches, yes.”

...Controversy over having a creationism display at the zoo dates back to 2005, when it was proposed by Dan Hicks, a Christian activist.

Hicks drew up plans for a 5-by-3-foot panel that would tell the Genesis creation story of God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh.

It was initially approved by the Tulsa Park and Recreation Board, but the board later rescinded its decision in a second vote after a public outcry.

Hicks’ panel, now finished, was on display at Tuesday’s rally.

Ironically, Pierce began his book with a discussion of the Creation Museum in Hebron, Kentucky, also depicted on the front cover. The Museum is "dedicated to the proposition that the biblical story of the creation of the world is inerrant in every word. Which means, in this interpretation, and among other things, that the dinosaurs co-existed with humans (hence the saddles), that there were dinosaurs in Eden, and that Noah, who certainly had enough on his hands, had to load two brachiosaurs onto the Arc..." A couple of T-Rexs too and some raptors. The Museum creator, though, helpfully explained that they were all just baby dinos. Whew!

This morning's Tulsa World-- spoil sports-- jumped all over Falling with an unfriendly editorial asking her to decide if she wants to be a politician or a minister.

It seems to us that God is pretty well represented in Tulsa. Beautiful churches, synagogues and other houses of worship abound. Is Falling saying that all these places of worship and the thousands of dedicated followers in Tulsa have just not been pulling their weight? Have they all done something wrong that has offended God? Are there no believers serving the city now?

Such ideas are as absurd as putting a display promoting Falling's brand of creationism at the zoo. In fact, the subject was decided in 2005 when the Tulsa Park and Recreation Board denied such a proposal.

Zoos are for science. Church is for preaching. It's too bad that Falling doesn't seem to understand that.

We don't think that Falling should have to relinquish her faith to be a politician. We would prefer, however, a politician of faith who understands the needs of the city. Making the city the prime agent in debunking science via a public display is not our idea of good politics-- or good religion.

Zoos are for science? Says who? These editors might need a session with evangelical fanatic Sammy Rodriguez who is certainly looking for leaders like Ms Falling. "We have radical Muslims. Radical homosexuals. Radical abortionists. We need radical, born again, spirit filled Christians to arise ! Do you follow me ? We don't need any sissy Christians, Oprah Winfrey Christians. We need prophetic, devil stomping, demon rebuking, blood washed, Bible believing, free-from-sin Christians!" Blood washed!

Fortunately for the GOP, there are ten other Republicans pursing the mayoral nomination, although none others who claim that the city's myriad problems-- a doubling murder rate and declining high school graduation rate for example-- cannot be solved until God is more honored in Tulsa. She's undeterred-- and blogging:

Unless the churches of Tulsa are brought into City Hall to begin to address our community’s greatest ills-- the City of Tulsa will go bankrupt, spiritually, morally and financially. 

 Jesus has given us so much and yet we turn our back on Him daily in this city.

Today we are announcing that God will be glorified in this City.  He shall not be shunned.

Upon our election, we hereby commit to honoring Him in all ways that He has been dishonored.

...Our city must restore the foundation of faith necessary to rebuilding wholeness in Tulsa by choosing board members who will honor God, love His creation, and care about this community by  restoring focus on faith and family. Specifically, I will look for board members who will not only prosper this zoo tremendously in attendance and improve this zoo's condition and appearance, but we will also look for people who want to characterize the origins of both man and animals in a way that honors the Judeo-Christian science that proves God as creator. Unless we find ways to engage the church back into public policy decisions we will be lost as a city, state and nation.

If they're going to get lost, let's hope they take Coburn and Inhofe-- not to mention lunatics from both parties like Blue Dog Dan Boren and GOP sociopath Mary Fallin-- with them!

When The Crank And The Violent Serve The Partisan And They All Do The Bidding Of The Big Money Elites

Yes, this is what passes for right-wing wit

One of the most enjoyable books I read this summer was the new one by Charles Pierce, Idiot America. He certainly wrote it when Bush was still president but it sounds as though he wrote it this morning.

There is still hope for any country that remains as easy to love as this one, in no small part because this is still the best country ever in which to be a public crank. The United States is an easy country to love because you can take it on faith that, at some point in every waking hour of the day, there is among your fellow citizens a vast exaltation of opinions that test the outer boundaries of the Crazoid. [And he wrote this long before anyone started manufacturing birth certificates proving that Obama was born in Kenya, Indonesia and Mexico and long before Mike Pence and Michele Bachmann came up with the idea of telling senior citizens that Obama's health care reform was actually a plan to kill them.]

Americans can awaken on a fine and sparkling spring morning happy in the knowledge that hundreds-- nay, thousands-- of their fellow citizens believe that space aliens landed in New Mexico, that Lyndon Johnson had John Kennedy killed from ambush, that the Knights Templar meet for coffee twice a month in the basement of the United Nations building, and that the Bavarian Illuminati control everything from the price of oil to the outcome of the fourth race at Louisiana Downs. Let us be clear. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy.

If you've been following the discussion of public events in the blogosphere lately, you probably have the impression that Congress adjourned in the midst of the debate over health care so that congressmembers could rush home to hold town hall meetings with their constituents. Republicans are busy distorting the scope and intent of the legislation and lying to the voters in their districts. And there's a big brouhaha about right-wing fanatics disrupting Democrats' meetings-- there's even a manual for them to follow and some of the disruptions have been pretty violent. Do you know what astro-turf is?

Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, the operation that’s running a national campaign against a public health care option, is now publicly taking credit for helping gin up the sometimes-rowdy outbursts targeting House Dems at town hall meetings around the country, raising questions about their spontaneity.

Some teabagger operations have published lists of townhall meetings around the country they want their troops to show up at and shout down the congressmembers.

Although some of the real GOP dopes, like Long Island Congressman Peter King (R-NY) are insisting that there is no health care crisis and that Americans don't even consider it an important issue, others think they're better off avoiding the whole topic. King, as usual, is wrong but when you have nothing to add to the debate but name calling and obstructionism, you just make things up. According to a poll by Time Magazine in late July around 70% of those surveyed said it was important that Congress and the President pass a major health care reform bill in the next few months. But if King is making an idiot out of himself on MSNBC, many anti-health care Republicans have just fled the country-- and the hell with townhalls or their constituents. The Hill's Molly Hooper reported on all the conservative, anti-reform fanatics going on overseas trips instead of going back to their districts to engage in the public discourse about health care they've been using as an excuse to slow down the passage of the reform legislation.

Midway through the last series of floor votes before members left town for recess on Friday, a pair of young staffers navigating a pulley cart carrying two steamer trunks branded “CODEL BOEHNER” caught the attention of reporters and lawmakers taking care of business in the corridors outside the chamber.

The scene was a visual reminder that House members intend to spend time outside the country on [so-called] fact-finding trips over recess, despite the debate over the president’s domestic agenda dominating Congress.

Citing security concerns, aides close to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) would not disclose which countries the top-ranking Republican was visiting but noted that the congressional delegation trip, or codel, is “dealing with issues surrounding the global economic crisis and national
security.” [Boehner is said to be taking his golf clubs, of course.]

...Boehner’s second-in-command, House GOP Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (Va.), left town on Saturday with more than two dozen GOP lawmakers on a weeklong trip to Israel and the West Bank.

Cantor is the senior lawmaker on the delegation, which is sponsored by the nonprofit charitable organization American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF). House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) will serve in the same capacity the following week when AIEF sponsors a 31-member House Democratic delegation to go to Israel.

Under the new House rules, congressional trips can be sponsored by non-lobbyist organizations such as AIEF as long as those organizations have met the requirements for permissible travel. Members are required to obtain prior approval from the House ethics committee.

According to Cantor aides, the delegation will consist of freshmen and other members who have yet to visit Israel for the first time since being elected to the House.

Cantor has taken $1,410,724 in thinly-disguised bribes from the Medical-Industrial Complex and Boehner has gobbled up $1,206,472 from the same sources. Cantor has taken an additional $706,674 from Big Insurance and Boehner was rewarded by the insurance CEOs and their lobbyists to the tune of $904,156. They decided long ago that debate is useless and all that matters is the cash and the good old Republican racism and divisiveness. But watch this anyway; it's only 30 seconds.



UPDATE: Above, it turns out, is the ad corporate media giant CNN refuses to run

The DNC pushed back against Republican mob violence-- which has even been denounced by John McCain as a disgrace-- today. First, here's a screen shot of McCain's latest tweet against his party's proto-fascist and very un-American tactics:


And here's what the DNC sent out to Democrats around the country:

There's been a lot of media coverage about organized mobs intimidating lawmakers, disrupting town halls, and silencing real discussion about the need for real health insurance reform.

The truth is, it's a sham. These "grassroots protests" are being organized and largely paid for by Washington special interests and insurance companies who are desperate to block reform. They're trying to use lies and fear to break the President and his agenda for change.

Health insurance reform is about our lives, our jobs, and our families -- we can't let distortions and intimidation get in the way. We need to expose these outrageous tactics, and we're counting on you to help. Can you read these "5 facts about the anti-reform mobs," then pass them along to your friends and family? 

• 5 facts about the anti-reform mobs

• 1. These disruptions are being funded and organized by out-of-district special-interest groups and insurance companies who fear that health insurance reform could help Americans, but hurt their bottom line. A group run by the same folks who made the "Swiftboat" ads against John Kerry is compiling a list of congressional events in August to disrupt. An insurance company coalition has stationed employees in 30 states to track where local lawmakers hold town-hall meetings.

• 2. People are scared because they are being fed frightening lies. These crowds are being riled up by anti-reform lies being spread by industry front groups that invent smears to tarnish the President's plan and scare voters. But as the President has repeatedly said, health insurance reform will create more health care choices for the American people, not reduce them. If you like your insurance or your doctor, you can keep them, and there is no "government takeover" in any part of any plan supported by the President or Congress.

• 3. Their actions are getting more extreme. Texas protesters brought signs displaying a tombstone for Rep. Lloyd Doggett and using the "SS" symbol to compare President Obama's policies to Nazism. Maryland Rep. Frank Kratovil was hanged in effigy outside his district office. Rep. Tim Bishop of New York had to be escorted to his car by police after an angry few disrupted his town hall meeting -- and more examples like this come in every day. And they have gone beyond just trying to derail the President's health insurance reform plans, they are trying to "break" the President himself and ruin his Presidency.

• 4. Their goal is to disrupt and shut down legitimate conversation. Protesters have routinely shouted down representatives trying to engage in constructive dialogue with voters, and done everything they can to intimidate and silence regular people who just want more information. One attack group has even published a manual instructing protesters to "stand up and shout" and try to "rattle" lawmakers to prevent them from talking peacefully with their constituents.

• 5. Republican leadership is irresponsibly cheering on the thuggish crowds. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner issued a statement applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

It's time to expose this charade, before it gets more dangerous. Please send these facts to everyone you know. You can also post them on your website, blog, or Facebook page.

Now, more than ever, we need to stand strong together and defend the truth.

Republicans Have Been Very Successful In Minnesota Senate Contest

Oh, there was never any chance they would be able to re-seat Norm Coleman; he did, after all, lose the election and get fewer votes than Al Franken. But that wasn't really the GOP objective. Half the people who vote for John Cornyn and Mitch McConnell may be part of what Charles Pierce refers to in his new book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, but neither of the two congressmen, malevolent as they are, is stupid. They funded a series of frivolous, pesky lawsuits for Coleman, not to get him into the Senate, only to keep Franken out for as long as they could. And it's worked for nearly half a year.

Since January, when the Coleman strategy of keeping Franken from taking his seat emerged-- and Harry Supermouse Reid's boast that he would be seated by the first of April turned into an April Fool's joke-- Franken hasn't been able to vote on any of the crucial issues in the change agenda that Minnesotans were pumpin' for when they cast their ballots for him and for Obama. Worse yet, the Democratic caucus has been at the mercy of a couple of right-wing Democrats who conspire daily with the GOP to water down every reform Obama attempts. Without Franken joining the family-friendly Senate Democrats, the caucus has been stuck catering to the corporate-friendly shitheads like Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln and, now, Arlen Specter.

This morning Michael Falcone writes at Politico that the GOP game plan has finally run its course. Law experts all agree that Coleman has no chance of prevailing and that Franken will be ordered seated by the state Supreme Court, which was astounded that Coleman came before them with his spurious assertions and, after almost 8 months, no evidence whatsoever-- none.

“Each of the five justices asked some questions that seemed to home in on the absence of evidence," said [Peter] Knapp, an expert on the Minnesota Supreme Court who has kept a close eye on the case. "And when each of the five are asking those questions, that’s significant.”

...At one point on Monday, Associate Justice Christopher Dietzen, who was appointed to the court last year by Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, complained to Friedberg that he was offering “no concrete evidence” to back up his theories.

Pawlenty has all but declared that he'll be spending the next three and a half years running for the Republican presidential nomination. He's giving up the Minnesota governor's mansion-- likely to a Democrat-- and will concentrate on burnishing his image as someone who can appeal to Pierce's Idiot America, the only path to the GOP nomination now (which is probably also a path to sure defeat in a general election). Pawlenty wants to get the Franken thing out of the way as soon as possible now; he's already announced that if the Supreme Court tells him to sign the election certification that will allow Franken to take his seta, he'll do so. That isn't something that will go over well with the base and Pawlenty is working overtime to make sure the Republican Party opinion leaders-- Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, the Cheney family, Savage, Coulter-- realize he's one of them. In a speech to the College Republican National Committee Friday night, Pawlenty was playing the "socialism" card and characterizing the Obama administration as a “tyranny” responsible for “nationalizing” the mortgage, banking and automobile industries. And then he coughed up the ultimate offering to the GOP Hate-Talkers:

“The only thing growing faster than the federal government’s deficit is Chris Matthews’ man-crush on Barack Obama."