Fascists In Austria, Fascists On Fox News, Fascist In The Oval Office

I have a recollection from a history class that after World War I, the Treaty of Versailles prohibited the unification of Germany and Austria-- Anschluss. Unification was one of the goals Hitler laid out in Mein Kampf. In 1934 Austria's fascist Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated by pro-Anschluss Austrian Nazis in a failed coup. His successor, Kurt Schuschnigg, was also a fascist and also resisted the idea of unification with Germany claiming Austrians were racially superior to the Germans. He had local Nazis rounded up and put in concentration camps. Hitler went crazy and made a series of demands that increasingly exterminated Austrian independence until in March of 1934-- to prevent a plebiscite-- Hitler invaded Austria, breaking the Treaty of Versailles. The Austrians greeted the German troops with wild enthusiasm, flowers and Nazi salutes. Hitler toured the country the next day announced Anschluss. Although there was some rumblings of disapproval from Britain, Italy and France, it was just hot air. Mexico's protests were louder. Austria's Jews were immediately targeted with the aggressive approval of Austria's non-Jews. The following month there was a plebiscite to approve the unification and it passed with 99.7% of the vote and Austria became the German province of Ostmark. In London, The Times likened the union as the same as Scotland having joined England 300 years earlier. Austrians generally became enthusiastic Nazis and in many cases, even more so than the Germans, contributing, aside from Hitler himself, lots of Nazi leaders including monsters like SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Jewish extermination chief Alois Brunner, Nazi operative Otto Skorzeny, and, of course, Adolf Eichmann.

In the early 1970's-- probably '72 or '73-- I got stuck in Innsbruck for about 5-6 months. World War II was long over but the people there came across as a real bunch Nazis, especially the older ones. It was pretty horrible and I would escape to Munich, across the border with Germany or through the Brenner Pass into Italy and to Venice whenever I could. I guess because Vienna was so cosmopolitan and sophisticated it came across as far less of a Nazi bastion that little Innsburuck in Tyrol.

Yesterday, Austria elected a neo-Nazi chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, although U.S. media, or at least those bothering to report on it at all, refer to him and his facsist People's Party as "center right." The People's Party is more known as a cesspool of corruption rather than a cesspool of fascism, but Austrian voters-- overwhelmingly Nazis themselves-- are always happy to embrace both. Kurz's freedom party increased it's share of the vote from 2017 from 31.5% to 38.4% yesterday. The center-left Social Democrats went down from 26.9% to 21.5% and Kurz's junior partner in the coalition government, the even further right Freedom Party did pretty badly-- down to 17.3% from 26.0%, probably because it had worked with the Social Democrats to bring down the People's Party previous government after a video-taped corruption scandal exploded.

The Greens share of the vote went from 3.8% to an impressive 12.4%, making it a major player in Austrian politics. The pro-EU party (NEOs) increased their share of the vote from 5.3% to 7.8%. These are the estimated number of seats in the 183-Parliament each of the main parties will hold:

• People's Party- 73
• Social Democrats- 41
• Freedom Party- 32
• Greens- 23
• NEOs- 14

So, since we're talking about fascists... strange how Trump seems to be working so hard to fracture Fox News! He was certainly storming away on Twitter about Fox over the weekend. He really got into the exchange between Ed Henry and Mark Levin yesterday. Martin Pengelly of The Guardian had the best report I saw, Trump jumps shark with retweets attacking Fox News host. He started by making the point about Señor Trumapnzee's well-known fear of sharks. "Trump," he wrote, "may be the great white hope of the Republican party, but his dislike of sharks is well known. It seemed odd, then, that in a Sunday feeding frenzy of retweets attacking a Fox News pundit, the president gave voice to a bot that seeks to satirise his rampant galeophobia.

Trump appeared to have been watching TV at the White House, before leaving for a second straight day at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia.

On Fox & Friends, host Ed Henry had asked radio host Mark Levin if he thought the president did anything “illegal” in the 25 July phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy which is at the heart of impeachment proceedings.

True to form, Levin reacted angrily. This seemed to please the president, who retweeted more than 20 tweets about the exchange.

One referred to another Fox News anchor whose coverage of the Ukraine scandal has stoked turmoil at the network: “Can we face off Levin and worlds [sic] worst anchor Chris Wallace?”

Others included: “Mark Levin ripped Ed Henry a new one” and “Mark Levin sure put that lying shit head Ed Henry in his place didn’t he?”

In less vulgar fashion, the president also relayed a message from @TBASharks.

The account is a bot, full title Trump But About Sharks, which explains its mission thus: “Trump apparently hates sharks, so this bot does some word replacement on his tweets to make them about sharks.”

The message retweeted by the president therefore read: “RT @BulldawgDerek @foxandfriends A Sunday Morning; Amen Mark Levin, Preach Brother! You shut down Ed Henry and the Pro Shark Media with the fac[ts].”

The original tweet, which Trump also retweeted, referred to “the fake news,” a common target for Trump if not usually including hosts of Fox & Friends.

Trump’s fear and dislike of sharks is well established. In 2013, two years before he emerged Jaws-like from the depths to savage the body politic, he tweeted: “Sharks are last on my list-- other than perhaps the losers and haters of the world!”

In 2018, the adult film maker and actor Stormy Daniels revealed that during the brief affair she claims to have had with Trump in 2006-- which he denies-- he enthused about a TV special about a shipwreck.

“It was like the worst shark attack in history,” said Daniels. “He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks.

“He was like, “I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’ He was like riveted. He was like obsessed.

“It’s so strange, I know.”

Alan Grayson, after reading Trump's deranged threats to stoke up a civil war, had a comment, addressed to Trump: "Note to Donald Trump: nobody gives a damn about you, you self-indulgent fool, and nobody is going to war for you, even though you do exhibit a slaveowner mentality that this country hasn’t seen much in the past 150 years." I thought it would be a good way to end the evening.

A Worse California Candidate Than Gil Cisneros-- Meet Mike Levin

A friend listened in on a phone call between Pelosi and a very well-paid-- and very sleazy-- Mike Levin consultant. The guy, who has rounded up a gaggle of really slimy members of Congress to endorse Levin against Doug Applegate, asked Pelosi to get the DCCC to do likewise. She assured him she would. She was unable to deliver, although she was able to prevent the DCCC from endorsing Applegate, very much inline with what the DCCC is doing in other California districts where the is a chance that 2 Republicans could emerge from the jungle primary in 2 weeks, leaving no Democrat in the general election competition. It was the same way the DCCC screwed over Applegate in 2016 when they stalled until the last minute to endorse him, giving him the most minimal help as he came close to defeating Republican super-villain Darrell Issa. There were so many counts and recounts that it was the last election finalize-- and the final score was:

• Issa- 155,888 (50.3%
• Applegate- 154,267 (49.7%)

Had the DCCC not waited 'til the end of the cycle to jump in against Issa-- and perhaps wasting so much time and resources fighting against progressives instead of fighting Republicans-- Applegate would be an incumbent now and not going into a crazy primary with a dozen candidates including 2 especially vile self-funders, Paul Kerr-- who just wants to get his name out there for his race for the campaign in a neighboring district when rich conservative Scott Peters retires to run for mayor-- and Qualcomm heiress Sara Jacobs who parachuted into the district from Brooklyn to spend a load of daddy's money yelling nothing but he's a woman and deserves the seat. By the May 16 FEC filing report Kerr has lavished $4,112,728 of his own on his campaign and Jacobs had spent $1,587,831 of her own (plus $1.7 million more from her family) on her campaign.

Aside from Applegate, none of the other candidate had shown the slightest interest in defeating Issa in the past. Mike Levin was the head Orange County fundraiser for Hillary's 2016 campaign but never contributed a nickel to Applegate's campaign. As soon as Issa announced his retirement, fearing he could never fend off another challenge from Applegate, The 2 other clowns sensed an opportunity to get a business card that said "Congressmember" and jumped right in. Levin already had his plans in the works before the final count between Doug and Issa was close to being done. Since then "the Janus-faced quality of the Levin campaign--  publicly unctuous and privately defamatory--  was not only repugnant, but also, more importantly, extremely effective. This was immediately obvious to me as Doug’s campaign manager, and I made efforts to force the surreptitious negativity of Levin’s campaign into open public conflict."

Keep in mind that 5 San Diego County Democratic clubs-- including the Democrats of MiraCosta College, Saddleback Young Democrats, Palomar College Democrats, San Diego Democrats for Equality, and Democratic Woman’s Club of San Diego County-- have all taken the unprecedented step of rating Levin "unacceptable" or "unqualified" because of the thuggish nature of his campaign.

A couple of weeks ago Cody Petterson, President of the San Diego County Democrats for Environmental Action, spilled the beans on Levin with a long and powerful post at Medium, Square Deal. It hasn't had enough attention and with the primary coming up on June 5, I figured I'd give it a boost. Levin's character and campaign, he wrote "bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for the demoralizing toxicity that currently plagues the 49th. I believe that his brand of politics has no place in a revitalized, community-rooted Democratic Party, and that exposing it is essential to preventing it from thriving in the future." He couldn't be more correct and sees sees Levin's deceitfulness as nothing less than Trumpish and very much following "the Cohn/Stone dictum, 'Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.'

It’s not a mystery what Levin’s plan was prior to 2016: 1) use his work in corporate government affairs to take home tidy paychecks while developing relationships with donors and government officials, 2) bundle campaign donations to secure an appointment in the HRC administration, 3) climb his diligent way to an undersecretary position, and then 4) run for the 49th in 2020 alongside an HRC re-election bid. It wasn’t a bad plan, as plans go, though a more pious man would have remembered that plans anger the gods. Doug’s wildcat run in 2016 must have been an unsettling disruption of his program, and it’s telling that in spite of multiple direct asks from Doug, Levin, by his own admission, didn’t give a dime or lift a finger to help him. Bear in mind, Doug was a Democratic challenger, neck-and-neck with an eight-term Republican incumbent, in Mike’s own district. It doesn’t take a priest to guess that Mike wasn’t just praying for Hillary’s victory when he knelt beside his bed, Fall 2016.

Though Doug’s narrow loss was undoubtedly some consolation, one can only imagine Mike’s existential terror standing there in Javits Center watching his meticulous plan to jump from corporate government relations (i.e., lobbying) to appointed office implode. By his own account he decided to run on the flight home from New York --  weeks before, it should be noted, the outcome in the 49th was declared. Hillary’s loss dramatically disrupted Levin’s strategy and timeline. The narrowness of Doug’s loss meant that he would have to accelerate his timeline or risk Doug beating Issa and holding the seat for the foreseeable future. But Hillary’s loss meant that Mike would have to run on his corporate career, rather than as an appointed official, as he had planned, and he knew that eight years of directing corporate lobbying would not endear him to voters.

Levin’s strategy was thus born of necessity and haste. The vacuum left by the loss of those four planned years of appointed office is the defining factor in Levin’s campaign. Robbed of the centerpiece of his campaign, Levin settled upon the only strategy available to him: 1) avoid all mention of his career, 2) clone Doug’s 2016 platform in order both to align with the ascendant progressive base of the Party and to force the primary race to center around fundraising and tone, rather than clear differences of values and priorities, and 3) peddle Doug’s decade-old divorce and custody battle behind every closed door. However invidious and unscrupulous I may find the strategy, I can’t fault Levin’s SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis for leading him to it. The 49th has suffered immeasurably for it, and it has put Democrats at much greater likelihood of defeat in November, but it was rational for him personally... The misrepresentations and prevarications of Levin’s “Record on Clean Energy” provide a perfect illustration of the deceit upon which his campaign is predicated.

The first “myth” that Mike set out to ‘debunk’ was that he “is not a ‘real’ environmental attorney, because he didn’t litigate many cases, and there is no record of his advocacy prior to 2016.” Classic misdirection. Levin’s claim to the title of ‘environmental attorney’ isn’t weak because he hasn’t litigated ‘many’ cases. Mike Levin has a law degree and standing before the California State Bar. There’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to lay claim to being an attorney. It is his claim to being an environmental attorney that is weak and deceptive. The only litigation of which LexisNexis has record were three cases at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, Hernandez v. Countrywide, Gallegos v. Countrywide, and Arenas v. Countrywide. Unfortunately for Mike, he was not valiantly representing struggling Latinx victims of Countrywide’s predatory lending; on the contrary, he was defending Countrywide against them and, in the event, was able to help Countrywide successfully foreclose on their homes.

All three San Diego County homeowners had alleged predatory lending, unfair debt collection, and RICO violations. Levin pleaded these cases in the immediate aftermath of the financial collapse and three months after the announcement of Countrywide’s $8.68 billion settlement of predatory lending suits, the largest in history. For precisely the activities alleged in the suits. Levin defended Countrywide against San Diego County Latino foreclosure victims with contracts that were predatory on their face. The Arenas contract had a 2% teaser rate that ballooned after the first month. The first allowable Interest Rate Change Date was the first day of December, 2006--  a month after the contract was signed. The change was determined by adding 3.7% to the twelve-month average yield of US Treasury Securities, which was around 5% in late 2006. That’s potentially an 8.7% interest rate six weeks after signing a contract for a 2% interest rate. Classic predatory lending. The Hernandez contract featured a 6.5% rate-- to a man who had previously been foreclosed upon.

At least one of the plaintiffs, by their own report, was subsequently selected for inclusion in the $335 million settlement of claims against Countrywide of discriminatory lending to Latinos and African Americans. Whatever his private objections may have been, Levin remained at the firm until September 2010. Now, I don’t approve of holding youthful mistakes unduly against any individual, including candidates, if their subsequent conduct reflects contrition and maturation. Unfortunately, the expedient, mercenary quality that these cases demonstrate is the hallmark of Levin’s career, rather than an aberration or youthful error.

The second ‘myth’ that Levin attempted to debunk in his rejoinder was that he “supports a fossil fuel-based energy future.” This is a remarkably clumsy dodge. There is no Democrat, in the current political climate, who actively supports a fossil fuel-based energy future or opposes eventually transitioning to 100% renewable energy. The question is, and has been for the last decade, how aggressive that transition should be. Levin’s challenge here is that, his youth notwithstanding, he is himself a fossil. Levin’s career unfolded in the context of a protracted struggle within the Democratic community between climate hawks who demanded the immediate transition to renewables, and moderates who believed fracked natural gas could serve as an affordable, less carbon intensive alternative to coal.

Levin’s career choices put him firmly on the moderate side of the argument, along with Obama’s ‘all of the above’ energy strategy and HRC’s globetrotting fracked-gas junkets. In September 2010, Mike became Director of Government Affairs for FlexEnergy, which at the time was focused on developing a proprietary technology that oxidized rather than combusted natural or coal gas. Several months after Mike’s arrival, however, FlexEnergy acquired rights to Ingersoll-Rand’s MT250 microturbine, which could, ostensibly, be powered by their oxidizer, but which soon became the primary focus of their manufacturing and sales. At the end of 2012, FlexEnergy spun off their gradual oxidizer technology and focused exclusively on microturbine sales, buoyed by $400 million in projected sales to the Russian oil and gas industry, backed by the US Export-Import Bank, which, however, collapsed in the wake of the Russian annexation of Crimea and US Ex-Im’s moratorium on financing for sales to Russia (See Russia, Notes 12a and 12b). Levin’s participation and equity position in FlexEnergy post-spin-off is unclear, as it became a private corporation and ceased filing publicly available financial reports. Although he was listed as an officer and shareholder in their final Form D filing, V. John White Associates, which FlexEnergy retained as its outside lobbyist in California, lists him as ‘terminated’ as FlexEnergy’s Responsible Officer in their 2012 filing.

Levin continued on as Secretary and VP of Legal and Regulatory Affairs of the gradual oxidizer spin-off, Ener-Core, as it continued to hemorrhage venture capital: FlexPower had lost $7.6 million in 2011, $6.5 million from January to November 2012, and then, after the spin-off, Ener-Core lost $6,923,000 more from November 2012 to December 2013. Levin jumped ship abruptly in mid-March 2014--  three days after the Russian annexation of Crimea--  and it’s likely that he sold his 105,510 of vested shares before the 10-K for 2013 dropped on April 15th, which precipitated a steady decline in stock value. If so, he would’ve gotten out at around $36, a hundred times the value of the stock today.

Levin landed with premeditated ease at FuelCell the following month, where he served through September 2017 as Director of Government Affairs. FuelCell researches, designs, manufactures, and distributes large-stack fuel cell power plants, which run predominantly on natural gas, the majority of which, in the US, is fracked. All evidence suggests that Mike did for FuelCell what he had done for Ener-Core and Flex-Energy before that. When he avers that he “has never been a registered lobbyist,” it reinforces how deceptive the man habitually is. I want to be perfectly clear: Michael T. Levin has spent most of his career lobbying. Some of it was spent planning and directing the lobbying of others. FuelCell has hired a rogues’ gallery of lobbyists over the years. You can search the California or Connecticut registries, where they had legislative and regulatory interests, or the federal registry: Albertine Enterprises, Cassidy & Associates, Podesta Group, Foley & Lardner, White Associates, Evans & Associates, Global Strategy Group, and others. If you select “Financial Activity/Filing History” under “View:” you can see what his corporations were lobbying on: California Air Resources Board (CARB), California Energy Commission (CEC), California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), AB-327, AB-1228, AB-1466, AB-1478, AB-1624, AB-1935, AB-1953, AB-2229, AB-2649, SB-699, SB-874, the AB-32 Scoping Plan, etc). Almost exclusively energy legislation or regulation with the potential to impact FuelCell’s access to subsidies, exemptions, and other government benefits.

But Levin was also himself lobbying. FuelCell apparently decided that he was spending less than “one-third of his…compensated time in a calendar month engaging in direct communication with qualifying officials,” and that he therefore did not meet the FPPC’s threshold for qualification as an in-house lobbyist. Nonetheless, he was certainly lobbying, as can be easily verified by his submissions to various government agencies, primarily the California Public Utilities Commission, California Air Resources Board, and California Energy Commission. Now, lobbying isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I myself have lobbied (without compensation) at the city, county, and state level on affordable housing, smart growth, habitat conservation, and other progressive and environmental issues. Maybe Mike was just doing that?

Except he wasn’t. Mike was lobbying to slow California’s transition to renewables and to preserve taxpayer-funded ‘incentives’ for his company’s fossil fuel-based technology. If you think I’m distorting or exaggerating, get ready for some strong medicine. Mike had done some lobbying of California’s energy agencies at FlexEnergy. As mentioned previously, he is listed as the Responsible Officer for the lobbying firm V. John White & Associates, which had lobbied on FlexEnergy’s behalf before the CEC, CPUC, and CARB. FlexEnergy had been lobbying the CPUC to expand the Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) to include their natural gas-fired combined heat and power (CHP) turbines. In the event, CPUC President and former president of Southern California Edison Mike Peevey--  notoriously favorable to investor-owned utilities--  issued a decision in 2011 that did, indeed, expand SGIP to include their turbines and FlexEnergy was quick to applaud him for it (note that Mike is listed as the company contact on this rapturous bit of corporate fluff).

...With California’s green pastures drying up, FuelCell struck upon a different strategy. In May of 2016, ExxonMobil invested an undisclosed sum in FuelCell, and the two entered into a cooperative agreement to develop carbon capture and ‘clean coal’ technology. Throughout 2016, Trump drew on initiatives like these to tout ‘clean coal’ as a way of bringing jobs back to places like Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Days before the general election, FuelCell and ExxonMobil announced their intention to develop a carbon capture pilot project at Alabama’s mixed-use coal/gas James Barry Generating Station, with support from the US Department of Energy.

In the year and a half following Trump’s election, the company’s enthusiasm for ‘clean coal’ has only grown. Anthony Leo, FuelCell’s Vice President of Advanced Applications and Technology Development, shared the podium with Trump’s Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, at the National Coal Council’s 2017 Annual Spring Meeting (his presentation can be seen here). In 2017, FuelCell derived 9% of its revenue from ExxonMobil (up from 3% the previous year), and 9% from USDoE, in part from its work on the Barry carbon capture project. All told, the ExxonMobil joint venture probably accounted for around 15% of FuelCell’s revenue in 2017. Presumably Levin, as Director of Government Affairs, helped to secure some of the US Department of Energy funding for the FuelCell/ExxonMobil joint venture at the Barry Facility. Perhaps he was also involved in the international negotiations surrounding FuelCell’s joint venture with Alberta Innovates to develop carbon capture technologies for the Canadian tar sands, announced the week after the 2016 general election.

In spite of these injections, FuelCell fell from $31 to $1.50 during Levin’s tenure. The ongoing slide in FuelCell’s valuation undoubtedly reflects the fact that government subsidies are drying up and genuinely carbon-neutral solutions are advancing in capacity and declining in price so rapidly that carbon capture technologies will never be commercially viable at an industrial scale, even if they are one day technically feasible. Attempts like FuelCell’s to make hydrocarbon energy more sustainable are not only consistently failing at great expense to taxpayers, but also retarding our transition to 100% renewable energy by misdirecting government and private sector investment and providing cover to corporations and their Republican servants to prolong our dependency on fossil fuels.

This is Mike Levin’s career. In lieu of a legislative record, this is all we have to go on. Robbed by Donald Trump of three glorious years of kissing up and kicking down in our nation’s capital, Mike had to run on a decade at the trough with predatory lenders, ‘clean tech’ hucksters, and ExxonMobil. From the time he left Bryan Cave in 2010, to his departure from FuelCell in September 2017, Mike has never held a job that was not intimately tied to fracked natural gas. In a world without natural gas--  in a world of 100% renewable energy--  Mike could not have worked a day at any of his jobs. Period. It takes a certain kind of audacity to run on a platform of 100% renewables on the proceeds of a career in fossil fuel ‘bridge’ technologies. A lesser man would have folded under the weight of the irony.

Well, that’s my say. I don’t intend to sway the election with these words. Levin’s done. He needed the California Democratic Party endorsement, which is why he was willing to stoop to attempting to strip the 11 hardest working Democratic activists in the 49th of their delegate status in order to cheat his way across the finish line. Failing that, he’s now just a guy who lost his investors a million bucks, which is chump change compared to the six or seven million he’s helped lose investors every year of his ‘clean energy’ career. No, the couple hundred folks who read this--  only a third of them in the 49th--  won’t change much. But it’s important to send a message to candidates who believe they can deceive their way to power.

I don’t blame his staff, supporters, donors, or endorsers. He surely didn’t come clean to any of them about his career. He didn’t take them into his office and slide his Countrywide defense, or his CPUC comments, or FuelCell’s 10-K across the table, as he did with Doug’s divorce documents to one of the Colonel’s earliest and most faithful supporters. Maybe they should have done a little more due diligence, particularly Sierra Club and other environmental organizations who endorsed a man who has dedicated his career to lobbying against their efforts to remove fossil fuels from California’s energy grid.

Some have pointed the finger at Levin’s General Consultant, Parke Skelton, who by all accounts is among the best in the business. While general consultants are not famed for their strict adherence to principle, they also aren’t paid to offer spiritual counsel. If Mike wanted help distinguishing right from wrong, he could have headed down to lovely Mission San Juan Capistrano and talked to a priest. There’s no political trick, dirty or clean, that Parke Skelton hasn’t learned in the course of a storied career, and he undoubtedly presented to Levin all those strategies and potential activities that he thought advantageous. Mike alone, however, bore the responsibility for maintaining the campaign’s adherence to principle, and failed to do so.

Levin, to me, is cut from the cloth of an old world courtier (in this regard, read de Tocqueville on the “courtier spirit” in American democracy): ambitious, calculating, unscrupulous, sycophantic. A flatterer of donors and doyens. An exploiter of asymmetries of information. Fundraising and endorsement favor those who are willing and able to adapt their self-presentation to the audience in front of them. People of goodwill are often so busy with their own lives and struggles that they must largely rely on candidates’ self-representations. It must be acknowledged, in this regard, that Levin is exceptionally well-equipped. He is diligent in his research, hard-working, ingratiating, and adept at massaging his message to make it palatable to various--  predominantly white, affluent, liberal--  audiences.

The problem, however, is that this is precisely the kind of candidate that undermines faith in our political process. Precisely the kind of candidate that is ill-equipped to provide the authenticity and genuine depth of feeling that citizens crave in this populist turn. And a Democratic Party that continues not only to tolerate, but to aggrandize these candidates is a significant contributor to the calamity in which we now find ourselves. A Democratic Party that slips a velvet glove of social and cultural liberalism over the hand of corporations and their servants. Voters are tired of these Janus-faced parties and their bland, Janus-faced candidates. Of the bundlers, and bagmen, and backroom dealers.

Dishonesty and deceit are commonly considered hallmarks of politics. Over the last year and half, however, I’ve had the opportunity to develop personal relationships with most of the elected officials, candidates, and activists in the San Diego County Democratic Party and have found the vast majority to be principled and sincere. Calculating, cagey, carefully composed--  as is appropriate to the calling--  but not unscrupulous or deceitful. Some of them will present difficulties for me and other progressives when they win. Most will have to be lobbied from time to time to ensure they vote in a manner consistent with our vision and values. But I can’t think of any but Mike Levin to whom I have deep moral objections.

Time To Rehabilitate John Boehner? Not So Fast

Tim Alberta did an exhaustive piece on post-congressional Boehner for Politico over the weekend, based on 3 interviews he did with him over the summer. Boehner, he wrote, has fucked up his golf game horrible since he resigned from the Speakership and Congress. He just can't concentrate anymore. But he hasn't lost his mind. 'Fuck Jordan. Fuck Chaffetz," he told Alberta. "They’re both assholes."

To outsiders, Boehner might just be the happiest man alive, a liberated retiree who spends his days swirling merlot and cackling at Speaker Paul Ryan’s misfortune. The truth is more complicated. At 67, Boehner is liberated-- to say what he spent many years trying not to say; to smoke his two packs a day without undue stress; to chuckle at the latest crisis in Washington and whisper to himself those three magic words: “Not my problem.” And yet he is struggling-- with the lingering perception that he was run out of Congress; with his alarm about the country’s future; and with the question of what he’s supposed to do next. After leaving office, Boehner says a longtime family friend approached him. “You’ve always had a purpose-- your business, your family, politics,” the friend said. “What’s your purpose now?” Boehner says the question gnaws at him every day.

...[T]he story of Boehner’s 25 years in Washington is also the story of the Republican Party, the Congress and American politics in the post-Ronald Reagan era: an account of corruption and crusading, enormous promises and underwhelming results, growing ideological polarization and declining faith in government. The same centrifugal forces that made Boehner’s job impossible have bedeviled his successor, Ryan, and kept the GOP majorities in Congress from passing any landmark legislation in 2017. Now, as the revolutionary fervor that swept Boehner into the speakership degenerates into a fratricidal conflict centered around Trump, the former speaker’s frontline view of the Republican civil war is essential to understanding what went wrong.

...To Boehner and his allies, [Jim] Jordan was the antagonist in the story of his speakership-- an embodiment of the brinkmanship and betrayal that roiled the House Republican majority and made Boehner’s life miserable. Although he would tell me in later conversations that he holds no grudges against anyone, today Boehner unloads on his fellow Ohioan. “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate,” Boehner says. “A terrorist. A legislative terrorist.”

If he sounds exasperated, it’s because this is the central irony of his career: A quarter-century before the conservative insurgency stormed Washington and derailed his speakership, John Boehner was the conservative insurgency.

...The year 1994 didn’t just usher in new leadership to the House and the GOP; it marked a profound shift in Washington’s partisan relations. Gingrich, a master messenger with a zero-sum approach to ideological warfare, perfected the art of launching poll-tested attacks on Democrats as “radicals” who threatened liberty. With a penchant for turning personal disagreement into political Armageddon, Gingrich weaponized the speakership as never before.

“The beginning of the scorched-earth policy really began with Gingrich winning in the mid-’90s, the Gingrich revolution, and the enormous pressure put on moderate Republicans to walk away from anything remotely approaching a compromise,” says former Vice President Joe Biden, who was then a senator from Delaware.

Another change, one that would later inform some of the opposition to Boehner’s speakership, was the consolidation of power at the expense of committee chairmen and rank-and-file members. “Gingrich basically created a process where the speaker was the epicenter of the House,” says Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute.

As the fourth-ranking House Republican-- behind Gingrich, Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay-- Boehner could see the toll these institutional transformations took on GOP members, who felt disempowered by Gingrich’s imperial style. After Clinton won reelection in 1996, Republicans grew restless. The GOP had suffered terribly from Gingrich’s handling of a lengthy government shutdown from December 1995 to January 1996-- a lesson that informed Boehner’s aversion to such tactics years later-- as well as his constant public feuding and a barrage of ethics charges against him. In January 1997, Gingrich became the first speaker ever reprimanded for an ethics violation.

“When I saw that Boehner was becoming speaker, I thought that was a positive thing,” Biden tells me. “I thought there could be actually some work together, some collaboration together, and we could actually get some things done. But I thought, most of all, he was going to treat the president with more respect than some of his colleagues had.”

The class of 2010 wasn’t interested in collaboration. These rowdy freshmen lawmakers saw Boehner’s “Hell no” speech as a blueprint for their slash-and-burn strategy. When they realized after arriving in D.C. that he would not lead accordingly, dozens of them gravitated toward someone who would: Jordan, the newly installed chairman of the Republican Study Committee. When I ask about those factions forming in 2011, Jordan cites the “Hell no” speech and shrugs. “That’s the John Boehner we were hoping for.”

The Republicans Party's incipient civil war moved quickly from the campaign trail to Capitol Hill. The fundamentally irreconcilable approaches of Boehner and Jordan, and the members who followed them, produced an increasingly volatile series of intraparty collisions during the new GOP majority’s first term in 2011 and 2012.

Some of this owed to Boehner’s not taking the campaign rhetoric of his new colleagues at face value. “These were people who ran against Washington and planned on voting that way,” explains Tim Huelskamp, who was elected in the 2010 wave and then lost his Kansas district’s Republican primary in 2016. Boehner rejects the notion that he was ill-prepared to deal with these rookie legislators, but his allies concede there was a blind spot. “He thought of himself as someone who was of the Tea Party mentality before the Tea Party was a thing … so I think there were some assumptions made that he got these people, and that they would see he was one of them,” says Anne Bradbury, Boehner’s former floor director. “But that really never came together.”

Some of the freshmen took one look at Boehner-- the golf-tanned back-slapper who wore handsome, tailored suits and rented his D.C. apartment from a registered lobbyist-- and saw the embodiment of everything they were sent to destroy. “They never gave him a fair shake,” says Kevin McCarthy, the California congressman who was then Boehner’s majority whip.

...The fiscal cliff further diminished Boehner’s standing on the right. When the new Congress convened in January 2013, some two dozen House conservatives plotted to overthrow him. Any speaker needs a majority of votes cast on the House floor on the first day of a new Congress; Huelskamp and others concluded that if 17 Republicans voted against Boehner, that would force a second ballot-- and he would step aside out of shame. Huelskamp says the coup participants “signed their names in blood” the night before the vote-- not literally-- and he was stunned the next day to see just 12 of them follow through. Boehner survived, but was embarrassed by the revolt. It was the first attempt on his speakership, though not the last.

...The Freedom Caucus has begun to squeeze Ryan, much as it did to Boehner-- warning him that without changes his tenure could be similarly endangered. And Ryan, as Boehner did, is telling friends that he’s losing patience with the job. When I tell Jordan about Boehner’s description of him-- “a legislative terrorist”-- and ask about whether he’s holding the speakership hostage, he flashes surprise and eventually irritation. “Oh, my goodness. I feel sorry for the guy if he’s that bitter about a guy coming here and doing what he told the voters he was gonna do. Wow. I feel bad for him,” Jordan says. “But in the end, we were not doing what the voters elected us to do and what we told them we were going to do. We just weren’t. And I would argue the same thing is happening now.”

Jordan’s veiled threat only partially explains the frustration written all over Ryan’s face when we meet: Earlier that day, after Ryan scoffed at a Democratic proposal to pass a short-term extension of the debt ceiling, Trump met with Pelosi and Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and gave them exactly what they wanted. “Um, yeah, that one-- yeah, that’s kind of par for the course these days,” Ryan tells me, his tie loosened and a sense of resignation in his voice. “This is a presidency that offers some surprises.” Weeks later, when I ask Boehner about Trump’s deal with the Democrats, he erupts into a cough-laugh. “My guess is that he thought he was doing everybody a favor. He had no idea he was cutting off McConnell and Ryan’s legs.”

Trump himself is less a source of apprehension for top Republicans than what he represents: a fracturing of the party and a corollary decline in its ability to govern. “We basically run a coalition government without the efficiency of a parliamentary system,” Ryan complains.

When I ask Boehner whether the Republican Party can survive this, he cuts me off. “There is no Rep...” He stops himself. “You were about to say, ‘There is no Republican Party,” I tell him. He shrugs. “There is. But what does it even mean? Donald Trump’s not a Republican. He’s not a Democrat. He’s a populist. He doesn’t have an ideological bone in his body.” So who, I ask, is the leader of the party? “There is nobody,” he says.

I ask Boehner what he thinks historians will make of his speakership. “They’ll be talking about the end of the two-party system,” he replies.

In our months of conversations, Trump was the lone subject about which Boehner seemed reluctant to speak freely... [W]hen I raised the matter of this summer’s march in Charlottesville, and Trump’s equivocations. “I do not believe that he is a racist. I do not believe that he is a white supremacist,” Boehner tells me. “He has clearly done some things to lead people who never liked him to say those things about him.” So, I ask, how can Trump fix that? Boehner arches an eyebrow. “Is it fixable?”

Boehner worries about the deepening fissures in American society. But he sees Trump as more of a symptom than the cause of what is a longer arc of social and ideological alienation, fueled by talk radio and Fox News on the right and MSNBC and social media on the left. “People thought in ’09, ’10, ’11, that the country couldn’t be divided more. And you go back to Obama’s campaign in 2008, you know, he was talking about the divide and healing the country and all of that. And some would argue on the right that he did more to divide the country than to unite it. I kind of reject that notion.” Why is that? “Because it wasn’t him!” Boehner replies. “It was modern-day media, and social media, that kept pushing people further right and further left. People started to figure out … they could choose where to get their news. And so what do people do? They choose places they agree with, reinforcing the divide.”

He continues: “I always liked Rush [Limbaugh]. When I went to Palm Beach I would always meet with Rush and we’d go play golf. But you know, who was that right-wing guy, [Mark] Levin? He went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged [Sean] Hannity to the dark side. He dragged Rush to the dark side. And these guys-- I used to talk to them all the time. And suddenly they’re beating the living shit out of me.” Boehner, seated in his favorite recliner, lights another cigarette. “I had a conversation with Hannity, probably about the beginning of 2015. I called him and said, ‘Listen, you’re nuts.’ We had this really blunt conversation. Things were better for a few months, and then it got back to being the same-old, same-old. Because I wasn’t going to be a right-wing idiot.”

Boehner believes Americans are ill-informed because of their retreat into media echo chambers, one of two incurable causes of the country’s polarization. Another is inextricably related: the unwillingness of lawmakers to collaborate across the aisle, for fear of recriminations from the base. Boehner says the fact he and Obama golfed together only once-- and agreed that it was usually better for him to sneak into the White House-- speaks to how the two parties punish compromise. He doesn’t foresee this toxic political climate improving, ticking off potential fixes-- term limits, redistricting reform-- that he says won’t make a bit of difference. “It’s going to take an intervening event for Americans to realize that first, we are Americans,” he says. An intervening event? “Something cataclysmic,” he responds, gazing upward.

...Boehner’s 25 years in Washington saw the dissolution of a party, the vandalizing of a government and the splintering of a nation. That Boehner watched as the GOP transformed from the party of George H.W. Bush into the party of Donald Trump. That Boehner funded and helped recruit a class of majority-makers who ended up driving him from office and destabilizing the Congress he cares deeply about. The triumph of John Boehner is that he achieved reform and ascended to the speakership and often rose above the uncompromising dogma of both parties; the tragedy is that he came to Congress an insurgent only to be swallowed by the insurgency, and that he wasted key opportunities, as with the shutdown and immigration battles of 2013, to lead in a way that might have quelled it. “At times,” Sommers admits, “we fed the beast that ate us.”

I'm not weeping for Boehner. Meet Rich Iott, an actual Nazi he tried getting elected to Congress from Ohio in 2010. Watch Anderson Cooper interview him:



Boehner's favorite Nazi, who liked dressing up like an SS Officer on weekends used to pretend to be a U.S. military veteran. The GOP made him a Young Gun and Boehner put money into his campaign. The video above shows him defending "valiant" SS volunteers as defenders of "freedom" and "liberty," exactly the same twisted way some people-- basically Republicans-- claim Republicans are defenders of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty for the rich and powerful to exploit the vulnerable? Oh, yeah-- that's just what a normal person thinks of when they think about freedom or liberty! Marcy Kaptur saved Boehner further embarrassment by beating Iott 117,890 (59%) to 81,876 (41%).

John and Grover

The Anti-Trump Conspiracy Outgrows 3-Ring Circus Status

Most normal people don't know who Mark Levin is, But in some ways he's even more of a GOP propaganda tool these days than Limbaugh is, especially as one moves closer to the fringes. He has the 4th most-listened to Hate Talk Radio show in the country-- tied with Glenn Beck. Levin has some credibility with Republicans because he was chief of staff for Edwin Meese, Reagan's Attorney General and is editor of the Conservative Review and president of the far right Landmark Legal Foundation, although he has a tendency to call anyone who isn't a neo-fascist a "moron" or a "puke." He hasn't referred to Trump as a puke yet but that's going to be coming any day now.

A few days ago Levin, who has endorsed Cruz, was calling the #NeverTrump cult "asinine frauds" and cursed them out. He reacted badly to Roger Stone calling him a sell-out and he refers to Stone as a "thug" and a "sleaze-ball," apt descriptions, and made sure his audience knows that Stone is a "hatchet-man" for Trump. In the video above Levin also gratuitously throws in that Coulter is a pathetic sleaze-ball as well. He also went on to say that "As a result of what the Trump supporters have attempted here [pointing out that he's an establishment sell-out], particularly Roger Stone, I am not voting for Donald Trump period!" And he means not ever, not even if Trump is the nominee against Bernie or the establishment Democrat. He predicted that Stone's "bully, dirty tricks, Nixonian tactics" would backfire, "Count me as #NeverTrump... I will not be voting for Donald Trump and he can thank Roger Stone. And if they piss me off one more time, I'm going to urge millions and millions of you, should he get the nomination, not to vote for him either. I'm very serious about this; very serious about this." Does this sound like some kind of right-wing parlor game? Does anyone doubt where this year's Republican fringe candidates got their ideas about what appropriate campaign behavior is?

So what got Levin so worked up and hysterical? Apparently this Roger Stone post at the Daily Caller web site:

The next time you hear Mark Levin on the radio, or watch Glenn Beck on TV, or read Erick Erickson, RedState.com on the Internet, you might just ask yourself who is paying for the message?  And why is it so stridently anti-Trump?

Don’t fool yourself. They’re doing it for the money.

As the spearhead of the “Dump Trump” movement, the same GOP establishment big-dollar donors and PACS that are pushing House Speaker Paul Ryan as a dark-horse presidential candidate, despite the big-government omnibus-budget deals Ryan reached last year with President Obama, are funding Mark Levin, Erick Erickson, and Glenn Beck, to promote Sen. Ted Cruz.

The Conservative Tree House blog exposed the financial nexus supporting prominent “conservative” pundits to promote in their media outlets Ted Cruz as the last, best hope to block Trump in Wisconsin, a state considered by the Washington-based GOP establishment as perhaps the last establishment firewall to block Trump from the GOP presidential nomination.

“These financial/media relationships have largely and historically, remained hidden,” a blogger identified simply as “sundance” noted in an article posted on TheConservativeTreeHouse.com on Wednesday. “They have sure never been publicly, clearly, and regularly stated so the consuming audience would know the presentation was fraught with financial conflict.”

“The Senate Conservatives Fund (PAC) purchasing massive quantities ($400,000) of Mark Levin’s books in exchange for favorable candidacy political opinion. Conveniently hidden by the radio host who avoids mentioning the financial conflict created,” the blog pointed out.

On Jan. 13, Ben Jacobs in an article published by the Daily Beast headlined “Pay to Play?” noted that Politico, in an article that now appears to have been scrubbed from Politico’s website, reported on how the GOP establishment seeks to buy Levin.

The Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF), a “conservative” fund founded by former Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina that backed Cruz in his Senate fight against Obamacare, spent $427,000 to buy copies of radio talk show host Mark Levin’s four-year-old book Liberty or Tyranny” to distribute to donors-- a purchase that should have earned Levin approximately $1 million in royalties.

Despite his many diatribes against Trump broadcast to his national radio audience, Levin hid the fact the son of his fiancé is a full-time staffer for Cruz.

GOP establishment political operative David Barton not only runs “Keep the Promise” one of the most prominent pro-Cruz Super-PACs, he also serves as the chairman of Glen Beck’s “Mercury One” charity.

So, the next time you see Glenn Beck on his knees proclaiming that Ted Cruz is the “anointed one,” deemed by God to be president of the United States, you might ask yourself if God also deemed Barton to put at Beck’s disposal the millions in Super-PAC money he can funnel to Beck, so long as Beck continues to sing Ted Cruz’s tune.

Yet even these political whores do not top “conservative” Erick Erickson, founder of RedState.com, who funds his media venture The Resurgent with Super-PAC money from the Ricketts family of Wisconsin, big backers of Gov. Scott Walker (who incidentally endorsed Cruz).

ConservativeTreeHouse.com documented that the Ricketts family funded Our Principles PAC to the tune of $3 million in February alone. We should not be surprised when FEC filings show money from Our Principles PAC flowing to Resurgent Media, with the box “Oppose Trump” checked off as the Erickson media group’s purpose.

“In addition to all of those in the Salem Media Communications network, along with Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, Erick Erickson and anyone who is hosted upon the various media enterprises they front for…. all paid shrills dependent upon political graft,” the ConservativeTreeHouse.com article concludes.

“Interesting indeed how the intersection of financial dependency drives the political ideology of these modern “conservative voices”. However, this does increasingly explain how those same voices will stand and cheer for Mr. No-Budget/Omnibus, House Speaker Paul Ryan.

” What’s the point, the ConservatieTreeHouse.com asks? Smaller government? Yeah, sure.

Crackpot Utopia: The Year in Republican Crazy, Part 1

• Princess Liz Cheney -- 2014's Smoothie of the Year?
• "Miss Beck regrets" -- Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 1
• And the Crackpot Party reacts to President Obama's SOTU

The Curious Case of the Princess and the Senator (see No. 1)

Crackpot Utopia: A dream world as envisioned by republicans; a manifestation or expression of the deranged, warped alternate universe inhabited by republicans, at least in their minds. See also: Bachmannism, Boehneresque.

by Noah

1. Princess Liz Cheney tries for the Smoothie of the Year Award

Since we're talkin' about crazy crackpot folks, why not start back in early January with the Cheney Princess, Liz, and her surprising -- and then surprisingly brief -- candidacy for the office of U.S. senator from Wyoming, the old home state of her Dr. Strangelovean Daddy Dick. Liz coulda been a contenda, or at least she thought so . . . at least for a while.

First, for purposes of frame of reference, here's a sample of Princess Liz speaking the crazy via Twitter:

Rarely do I disagree with best VP ever* but @SarahPalinUSA is more qualified than Obama and Biden combined. Huge respect 4 all she's done 4 GOP.
-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -
* "Best VP ever" = Daddy Dick -- Ed.

You see, incumbent republican Sen. Mike Enzi (there are only republicans in Wyoming) was thinking of retirement. All Dark Princess Liz had to do was be gracious, courteous, and professional, or even just one of those three, and go ask him if the rumors were true and say that, if so, she would like to run for his seat. If he said that yes, he wanted to retire, she could ask for his blessing which those in the know say would have come.

But nooo! The arrogance apple doesn't fall far from the tree. She just called Senator Enzi and let it be known that she was going to run against him in the republican primary. That didn't sit well with the senator, who went all "Nobody's gonna push me out -- screw you!" on Princess Liz's royal ass. Strike One!

Now, the citizens of Wyoming happen to like Old School things, such as respect for elders, class, and earning your stripes, so Liz's bull-in-a-china-shop approach just didn't play in her state, especially when it turned out that Wyoming wasn't even really "her" state. That became clear when she thought she'd put a veneer of "local" on herself and apply for a Wyoming fishing license. She also bought a $1.9 million mini-castle in Jackson Hole, a place that real Wyoming folks regard as Hollywood East. She even bought brand-new boots and squeaky brand-new blue jeans to "look the part," and claimed to be a resident, but it turned out that Beltway Liz hadn't lived in Wyoming enough to claim resident status. She got fined $220 for her untruthfulness (another family trait!). Nothin' like finding new ways to say "I'm a carpetbagger!" Oh well, at least she didn't go and shoot one of her friends in the face on a fake bird hunt.

Princess Liz did manage, however, to wish death upon the local media when they didn't bend to her will and ran with the fish story. Now, who works in the local media? Local voters, that's who. She later said that she was referring to the liberal national media. Strike Two!

Then there was the open-range dispute with her gay sister Mary over marriage equality. The battle flew all over social and cable media. The princess mouthed the usual "marriage is between one man and one woman" crapola. It got ugly, and if you turn on your own family, why should Wyoming voters think you'll always have their back? Strike Three!

Tanking polls! You're out! Even FOX "News," trying desperately to give her some sort of gravitas, could not save her. Mike Enzi is still senator. He ought to thank Liz for making him look good by comparison. Back to the Beltway, Princess Liz!

Next time, the Cheney family might want to consider running Princess Mary the Gay. She's actually less of a princess than Liz. She's a little better-adjusted, and maybe her party could make an exception and back an openly gay person for national office. Hey, I'm not sayin' this would be sometime in this decade, but maybe in 30 years or so. Her dad will still be around due to his 15th pacemaker, an artificial liver, plenty of Depends, a jet-propelled wheelchair, and a suit made of nicotine patches. Mary's campaign slogan could be: "Wyoming, I Just Can't Quit You!"


2. "Miss Beck regrets" --
Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 1: Glenn Beck



Also back in January, eternal misanthrope and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck put on a faux hairshirt and went on Faux News to confess to Mistress Megyn Kelly about his role in polarizing the United States Of America better than Tokyo Rose ever dreamed.

I remember it as an awful lot of fun and that I made an awful lot of mistakes, and I wish I could go back and be more uniting in my language. . . . I think I played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart and it's not who we are.

I'm moved, I tell ya. I'm moved! Why, this is almost like little Idi Amin saying he's sorry he ate all those people!

Will Beck be giving back some of the millions he's made in the service of evil? What's next? Charlie Manson says he regrets that hot August night at Sharon Tate's? Too harsh? OK, maybe Beck was just trying to chat up Mistress Megyn by showing a "sensitive side."


3. The Crackpot Party reacts to President Obama's State of the Union speech

On January 28th, President Obama gave the annual State of the Union speech. Several republican voices, including foaming-at-the-mouth talk-radio wacko Mark Levin and Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton had encouraged republican senators and representatives to boycott the speech over such issues as "amnesty," the president's "luxurious travels," and of course (say the magic word!) Benghazi. Feeling that a boycott of the speech was appropriate, Fitton said:

Imagine if half the chamber is empty.

Well, for one thing, no goofballs would be mouthing: "You lie!"

The medication-free Mark Levin went even further over the top:

Since these men and women will not use the U.S. Constitution to defend this nation, since they will not use the Constitution to confront a lawless President, worse yet, since they're funding his activities with these omnibus bills filled with all kinds of crap, what the Republicans should do is boycott the State of the Union . . . so half of the House floor, because that's where they meet, is empty.

The immensely reality-challenged Levin rambled on semi-coherently with phrases like "threatens the Republic" and "liberty and tyranny" -- all the usual republican insanity.

Seems to me that if President Obama were half the tyrant these people think he is, they wouldn't have their radio shows, columns, etc. But hey, playing the victim card can rile up the critical-thinking-challenged disciples and rake in piles of money.

In the end, just about everybody,other than far right "Supreme" Court Justices Alito, Thomas, and Scalia showed up, but republican Rep. Steve Stockman did indulge in his version of Crackpot Theater when he got up and walked out halfway through the speech, saying he did it over the usual perceived abuses of the Constitution, Obama's not mentioning Benghazi, Obama's alleged "wholesale violation of his oath," "failed policies," blah, blah, blah. He's from Texas, so say no more -- except, well, he did bring the rockin' racist Ted Nugent as his date. (More on Ted in the next installment of "Crackpot Utopia.")

Another one of Texas's finest, Rep. Randy Weber, tweeted out something about Obama being the Kommandant-in-Chef. Chef? There go those Texas schoolbooks again. But who ever said you needed to know how to spell in order to go into politics? As outgoing Gov. Rick Perry says, it's not an IQ test.

The media reactions were just as bad. FOX's Erick Erickson blanched at the thought of equal pay for women in a tweet during the speech, while Bush's brain Karl Rove reached all the way back to 2005 to find something to whine about on his Twit account.

The man who threatened the full faith and credit of US now lectures congress on the issue.

The biggest media farce, though, occurred the very next day on FOX-Lite CNN, where republican shill Wolf Blitzer was seen tossing soft and fluffy questions to one of his most favorite guests, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), who had given one of the not-the-historically-usual-one-or-even-two-but-three SOTU rebuttals that the laughably called "liberal media" had afforded their republican friends. On his day-after show, Wolfboy asked Cathy if she supported "equal pay for equal work."

"Absolutely!" came the response. She blathered on and on about how the GOP supports pay equality for women in the workplace, etc., etc., blah-blah-blah. Did Wolfie the bearded wonder shill then ask her why she has voted against equal pay four times? Nope, but hey, that's not what he's there to do. He just plays a journalist on TV.

I wonder if McMorris Rodgers handed her interviewer a bag o'cash after the show. "Keep up the good work, Wolfie! Reince loves you! Kiss, kiss!"

•     •     •

Well, that's it for Part 1 of "Crackpot Utopia." And I'm not even done with January yet!


TOMORROW IN PART 2: Republicans wonder why normal people call them racists; Sean Hannity wants to self-deport; and the First Annual Mr. Burns Award

NOAH'S 2014 IN REVIEW --
Crackpot Utopia: The Year in Republican Crazy

Part 1: Princess Liz Cheney tries for the Smoothie of the Year Award; "Miss Beck regrets" -- Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 1: Glenn Beck; and the Crackpot Party reacts to President Obama’s State of the Union speech [12/19/2014]
Part 2: Republicans wonder why normal people call them racists; Sean Hannity wants to self-deport; and the First Annual Mr. Burns Award, to ABC "shark" Kevin O'Leary [12/20/2014]
Part 3: Using fear, loathing, and paranoia to sell stuff; Arizona legalizes crack!; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 3: Bill O’Reilly [12/21/2014]
Part 4: A celebration of Michele Bachmann: Pray away the crazy?; What "War on Women"?; and the "Obama angle" on Malaysian Flight 370 [12/22/2014]
Part 5: The GOP and the kiss heard 'round the world; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 5: Joe the Plumber [12/23/2014]
Part 6: A word about South Carolina; Pat Robertson and his magic asteroid; and I'll have a pack of Twizzlers and an IUD to go, please [12/24/2014]
Part 7: And so it begins: The running of the buffoons; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 7, George Will has no idea what rape is; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 8, Rick Wiles calls for a coup [12/29/2014]
Part 8: Things to come: Forward into the past! (11 Presidential Dream Tickets); Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 9: Former republican VP nominee Paul "Crazy Eyes" Ryan; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 10: Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association [12/30/2014]
Part 9: Pompous Blowhard of the Year Award: Bill O’Reilly; FOX "News" announces new spinoff: the "FOX Benghazi™" Shopping Channel!; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 11: DiGiorno Pizza [12/31/2014]
Part 10: Newsmax -- Beyond Drudgery; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominees Nos. 12 and 13: Michele Bachmann, Kimberly Guilfoyle [1/1/2015]
Part 11: GOP and FOX whip up the hate over a POW exchange; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 14: Iowa asylum escapee Rep. Steve King [1/3/2015]
Part 12: Arizona Republican protests busload of YMCA campers; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee(s) No. 15: the Impeachment Variations (group nomination); Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 16: NM Rep. Steve Pearce [1/4/2015]
Part 13 (and last): TV for Dummies: Sarah Palin launches her own channel; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 17: Arizona schools superintendent John Huppenthal (rhymes with Neanderthal); and the final Crazyspeak of the Year nominee -- and also the winner! [1/5/2015]

NOAH'S 2013 IN REVIEW --
A Prayer to the Janitor of Lunacy*

Part 1: Take a bow, Repugs! (*including Nico's "Janitor of Lunacy") [12/30/2013]
Part 2: Remember when Reagan cut funds for insane asylums? (Storms, guns, bombs, free stuff, and the secret gay life of Obma: Some top Republican lies of 2013) [12/31/2013]
Part 3: No Cruz control (Rafael "Ted" Cruz in his own words) [1/1/2014]
Part 4: A great anniversary approaches! (plus more "Quote of the Year nominees") [1/2/2014]
Part 5: Everyone's a critic, including me -- Some people really try my patience (Bill-O, Howie Kurtz, E. W. Jackson, et al.) [1/3/2014]
Part 6 (and last): In the words of Dan Quayle, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind" (Exploiting tragedy for a buck; Miss America's not American?; "Quote of the Year" winner) [1/4/2014]

#

Only 32 Democrats Had The Guts To Vote No On The Ryan-Murray Budget

What do you get if you cross Paul Ryan and Patty Murray?

This is a budget that is profoundly against the interests of working families. It passed 332-94. 62 crazy right-wing fanatics voted against it because it wasn't harsh enough. These are the 32 Democrats who just said no:

• Karen Bass (D-CA)
• Judy Chu (D-CA)
• David Cicilline (D-RI)
• Yvette Clarke (D-NY)
• John Conyers (D-MI)
• Pete DeFazio (D-OR)
• Rosa DeLauro (D-CT)
• Keith Ellison (D-MN)
• Lois Frankel (D-FL)
• Marsha Fudge (D-OH)
• Raul Grijalva (D-AZ)
• Colleen Hanabusa (New Dem-HI)
• Rush Holt (D-NJ)
• Steny Hoyer (D-MD)
• Barbara Lee (D-CA)
• Sander Levin (D-MI)
• Mike McIntyre (New Dem-NC)
• Gloria Negrete McLeod (D-CA)
• Frank Pallone (D-NJ)
• Chellie Pingree (D-ME)
• Mark Pocan (D-WI)
• Cedric Richmond (D-LA)
• Linda Sanchez (D-CA)
• Loretta Sanchez (New Dem-CA)
• Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)
• Kurt Schrader (New Dem-OR)
• Louise Slaughter (D-NY)
• Bennie Thompson (D-MS)
• Nydia Velázquez (D-NY)
• Pete Visclosky (D-IN)
• Maxine Waters (D-CA)
• Mel Watt (D-NC)

A lot of good Democrats voted "wrong" on this, albeit for good reasons. Here's Donna Edwards (D-MD) apologizing for her vote:

“This is not the bill I would have written. If I had written this bill, some federal employees would not be forced to pay more for their retirement and 1.3 million Americans, including over 22,900 Marylanders, would not be losing their unemployment insurance.

“This agreement is the product of compromise, and is by definition imperfect. Yet, I support this agreement because it preserves the COLA increase for federal workers and rejects the Ryan Budget’s draconian proposal to force those same workers to pay 5.5 percent ($140 billion) more for their retirement. It also uses a mix of spending cuts and revenue to replace sequestration, which has devastated our region’s economy.

“It is now time to focus on the priorities of the American people: investing in our infrastructure to create jobs, raising the minimum wage, passing comprehensive immigration reform, and promoting economic policies that help America’s women and families.”

And here's the voice of the deranged far right. This is why the crackpots like Bachmann, Stockman, Pompeo, Scalise, Huelskamp, Steve King, Gohmert, Broun, Gingrey, McClintock, Coffman, Garrett, Daines, Cotton and Bentivolio voted against the budget. And listen to the rap from this end of the party fringe on Chris Christie: 




UPDATE: Grijalva Explains His Vote Against The Ryan-Murray Deal

Grijalva and other members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus he chairs were stunned that the budget proposal failed to address most of the nation’s pressing economic issues. “The best way to help the American people is to create jobs and get more families back into this economy, and this deal doesn’t do that,” Grijalva said. “I don’t see enough here that helps the people I represent. This package doesn’t help people looking for jobs, it doesn’t help people wondering what they’re supposed to do when their unemployment insurance is cut off, and it doesn’t create any new opportunities for working Americans. It used the flawed Budget Control Act as its starting point, and that meant the finished product wasn’t strong enough to earn my support.”

The sequester portion of the Budget Control Act passed in 2011 included a reduction in payment rates to Medicare health care providers that would have expired in 2021. Last night’s budget deal extends those cuts to fiscal years 2022 and 2023. It also postpones, but does not eliminate, certain scheduled cuts to future budget years’ federal education and job creation funding. Other cuts will go forward on schedule.

In addition to ignoring the impending end of unemployment insurance benefits for approximately 1.3 million Americans later this month, the deal falls well short of necessarily funding levels for major programs that help Southern Arizonans, Grijalva pointed out. The graph (above, on the right) shows how far below historical funding levels this deal falls given its overall $1.012 trillion spending level for 2014-- more than half of which ($520.5 billion) will be spent on the military.

“We started cutting too deeply years ago, and we’ve just been cutting more ever since,” Grijalva said. “It’s as though the only job Congress is here to do is make things tougher for people. If we want an economy that really creates growth and opportunity, all we have to do is look at what we’ve gotten from austerity economics to see we’re not getting results.”

Grijalva agreed with the negotiators’ decision not to cut Medicaid or Social Security benefits at this point and said those programs “should be expanded rather than granted a last-second reprieve.” However, he said, “doing less damage than you’re threatening to do isn’t the same thing as passing a good law. When Congress comes back in January, expanding job opportunities and helping working people succeed in this economy is going to stay my top priority, and I hope my colleagues say the same. We can’t just check this box and say we’ve done our bit for working families. Congress needs to continue a longer and very necessary conversation about economic inequality and job opportunity in this country, and I look forward to doing that as early as possible next year.”