Tom Emmer: The Republican Party's New Super-Villain?

How do you replace Michele Bachmann-- in Minnesota's reddest district? Bachmann's old district (MN-06)-- in St. Cloud and the exurbs north and west of Minneapolis-- has a PVI of R+12. Democrats win the state but Obama lost MN-06 twice and Hillary was crushed there-- with just 33.2% of the vote. When Bachmann was forced into retirement after serious ethics charges, the GOP was determined tp find someone even further right than her. They dug up a guy named Tom Emmer, a crackpot from the state House who had earlier lost a gubernatorial election.

Emmer is best known in Minnesota for deciding the people who don't deserve a living wage are waiters and other people who scrape by on tips. He proposed a change to the law that would count tips toward the minimum wage requirement. "With the tips that they get to take home," he said, "there are some people earning over $100,000 a year. More than the very people providing the jobs and investing not only their life savings but their families' future." Perfect replacement for Bachmann, right?

Now a member of the House Financial Services Committee, he stinks of corruption, having sucked down $1,318,123 in bribes from the same institutions he's supposed to be overseeing. The GOP loves that and it helped for them to decide a couple of weeks ago to skip over Ann Wagner-- a girl-- to give Emmer the chair of the NRCC.

Earlier today, we mentioned Emmer's woman problem, but he has an even more overwhelming problem. The anti-red wave that swept 40 of his colleagues out of Congress November 6, is still raging and likely to be even stronger this cycle-- his cycle. He says his goal is to rebuild the NRCC. Maybe he could take a trip to Germany and ask how hard it was to rebuild Berlin after 1945.

Or maybe he'll learn how much rebuilding it's going to take by participating in the two special election likely to hit the GOP very soon-- one in NC-09 where their candidate, Mark Harris, paid a known felon to collect and destroy absentee ballots from African-American voters, and one in FL-15, where their candidate, Ross Spano, was found to be illegality funneling large amounts of unreported money into his narrowly successful campaign. Those should be fun races for Emmer. Harris "won" by around 900 votes and is now notorious as a vote cheat. Spano won 53-47% but he's been damaged by his scandal and if the Democrats wind up for a stronger candidate they can win that one too. Welcome to the NRCC, Mr. Emmer.

Trumpanzee and Emmer-- good luck!

The National Journal posits that if the impossible happens and "2020 proves to be a comeback year for House Republicans, the foundation for the successful cycle starts here in the midterm ashes and amid the fog of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into President Trump." That doesn't;'t sound very auspicious. "Emmer, who was just elected to a third term in Minnesota's 6th District, is more upbeat than some of his colleagues. Republicans in the lower chamber have begun a public hand-wringing over the future of the party after an electoral drubbing that handed Democrats dozens of districts in suburban areas that were once Republican strongholds." Yeah, they're smarter than Emmer, who is a fool who no one respects in his own caucus.

The GOP lost 40 seats in all, with casualties from Seattle to San Diego to Miami to Maine, and generally in areas where the president is less popular. [With plenty of room for even more districts to fall.]

“There’s a narrative that people are trying to build out there that somehow there’s been this shift, this political realignment in the suburbs,” Emmer said. “That’s not true. It isn’t there.”

Emmer's analysis of the midterms pins the blame on the Republican Party at large for failing to win over independent voters with a cohesive message on the booming economy. He stressed that the party’s focus on immigration in the final days repelled moderates, but he disputed attempts to fault the president specifically and pushed back on assumptions that Trump would be a liability in 2020.

“You’re definitely impacted, but you don’t rise or fall based on the executive,” he said. “You get to run your own race, but I think this is a customer-service business. You have to have your own independent brand.”

That sentiment isn’t shared across the Republican consultant class. Responding to Emmer’s comments, one pollster said it’s clear that women and suburban voters cast their midterm ballots based on how they felt about the president, and there is little reason to believe that either Trump or those voters will change their behaviors in two years. While it may be fixable, the pollster said, the party at least has to admit the problem.

Others agreed with Emmer that the party’s losses can’t wholly be blamed on a suburban realignment. One media consultant pointed to specific tactical errors by both the NRCC (not spending enough in some places, sinking too many resources elsewhere) and the Congressional Leadership Fund (unmemorable ads) that pushed Democratic gains higher.

As Republicans turn to recruitment, it's unclear whether Trump will hinder the party's efforts to rebuild. Emmer said he would begin enticing ousted members to run again in January. But in interviews with about a dozen of them, few sounded eager to mount comeback bids and some raised issues more deep-seated than the national environment.

Rep. Mike Bishop, a second-term Michigan Republican, said in an interview last month after his defeat that he was most concerned about the party’s appeal to women.

“They were generally dissatisfied and maybe even a little bit repelled by the Republican Party,” he said in an interview. “And we have to now be honest with ourselves and figure out what we need to do. So it’s up to these guys to figure it out.”

Some House Republicans have openly called for a thorough examination into their 2018 losses, but Emmer declined to say if there would be such an autopsy.

There are compelling signs that Trump proved to be a massive drag on Republicans, and that disadvantage could potentially increase as he wages a national reelection campaign, as House Democrats open multiple investigations into his administration, and as Mueller presumably wraps up his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Democrats flipped all but three of the 25 GOP-held seats in districts won by Hillary Clinton, felling battle-tested incumbents such as Carlos Curbelo in South Florida and David Valadao in California's Central Valley.

Emmer said his target list will include many of the 31 Democrats in Trump-won seats. He identified Oklahoma's 5th District, Illinois's 14th District, New York's 11th and 22nd Districts, and Virginia's 2nd and 7th Districts as some obvious offensive opportunities. However, the majority of Trump-district Democrats are in predominantly urban and suburban seats where the president's popularity has tended to sag.

He intends to effect some structural change within the committee to allow for more member input, particularly in fundraising and recruitment. And he described plans to further decentralize NRCC operations through more-robust regional leadership teams that could divide some operations based on rural, suburban, and urban areas in each region.

“We’re regionalizing the NRCC,” he said. “We’re trying to take it closer to the Main Street that it represents, closer to the members themselves.”

He has already involved Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, the incoming minority leader and whip, in putting the NRCC leadership team together, and intends for them to participate heavily in fundraising and recruitment, comparing their roles to that of a board of directors.

“We’re asking them to be incredibly supportive of the program that we’re putting here, so they need to have ownership of it, and we’re trying to make sure that they feel like they have ownership of it,” Emmer said.

Other ideas include replicating the “suburban caucus” that former Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois created in the mid-2000s, and forming NRCC teams to focus on Texas and California, where Republicans lost a combined nine seats.

Republicans in the conference have called for an effort to match the success of ActBlue, the Democrats' online-fundraising platform. An in-house fundraising apparatus or an outside vendor could work, Emmer said, and members are already creating proposals.

They also want a review of the independent expenditure decision-making process. On calls to drum up support for the chairmanship, Emmer said he was inundated with complaints about the $5 million spent on TV ads to help Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock in Virginia. It was the committee’s largest expenditure in any district, and Comstock lost by 12 points.

But Emmer has a few messages for his fellow Republicans, too. He said they must work their districts, raise campaign cash, give him a heads-up if they plan to retire, and, despite complaints, pay their NRCC dues for the good of the party’s policy priorities.

“You’re contributing because you want the opportunity to govern, because you believe in our agenda and you believe it will improve people’s lives,” Emmer said. “If you truly believe that, then grab ahold of the rope and pull it with me, because it takes a lot of resources to get that thing moving.”

I think Republican candidates should follow Tom Emmer's advice and just spend all their time and resources talking with independents about Trump and his agenda and personality.

How Will Kirsten Gillibrand Feel About The Al Franken Scalp On Her Belt If Michele Bachmann Wins His Senate Seat?

You remember Michele Bachmann, right? She founded the congressional Tea Party caucus and is married to a bizarre closet case who used to advertise in gay magazines and in 2012 became-- along with Michele-- citizens of Switzerland. She was a crackpot Minnesota congresswoman from 2007 until she was forced to retire in 2014 rather than face trials for numerous campaign finance violations, for bribing Iowa State Senator Kent Sorenson to support her in the presidential caucuses and for stealing a homeschool e-mail list. When she was finally driven from office, she was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, the FEC, the Iowa Senate Ethics Committee, the Urbandale Police Department and the FBI. She was told if she didn’t retire from Congress, she could be spending years behind bars.

Last week during an interview with disgraced televangelist far right and really, really crazier than ever Jim Bakker, she announced that she is considering running for the U.S. Senate seat Gillibrand forced Franken to resign from... but offered one caveat-- she’s waiting for God to tell her what to do before making a final decision. Currently she serves on the Trumpanzee evangelical advisory board and has publicly avowed that Señor T is now a “committed believer” of Jesus Christ and a “man of faith” who has “asked God for help and wisdom.” Just watch that video up top. And thank Kirsten Gillibrand that this monstrosity is back in the public sphere.

The Republican favored to run at this point isn't Bachmann but former senator and current lobbyist Norm Coleman, who Al Franken narrowly defeated in 2008. Coleman was a conservative Democrat (anti-Choice, anti-union... the same kind of turgid garbage the DCCC always loves) but joined the GOP in 1996. I wonder which one Gillibrand would prefer, a former Brooklynite (Coleman-- he went to the same elementary and high school as Bernie, Schumer and I did) or the woman in the race, Bachmann. Here's one of my favorite of many Bachmann memes. It's real... and, needless to say, Fox News was proud to run it:

UPDATE: Many Folks Are Pissed Off At Gillibrand And Her Opportunism

If Gillibrand thinks she can ride her maneuvers against Al Franken to the Democratic nomination, she and her consultants better think again. No one likes her hypocritical move and today Democratic super-donor Susie Tompkins Buell, a huge donor to Democratic women candidates, is reconsidering future contributions to politicians like Gillibrand.

Buell said she is weighing whether to continue her financial support after the calls for Franken's exit last month. The charge for his resignation— led by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and followed almost immediately by a string of statements from other prominent female Democratic senators— came on Dec. 6, before the conclusion of an official Senate Ethics Committee inquiry.

…In two interviews this week, Buell described the push for Franken’s departure as "unfair," "cavalier," and somewhat politically motivated — "a stampede," "like a rampage," she said, speaking in stark terms about senators she has backed for years, naming Gillibrand in particular.

"They need to know that some of their biggest supporters are questioning why they did that," Buell said. "We have to do things conscientiously and fairly. He didn't have the chance to defend himself."

The critique marks a somewhat significant departure for Buell, who is a mainstay in Democratic donor circles and has cultivated a reputation over the years as a fierce and vocal supporter of Democratic women.

…Since 1991, Buell has contributed to nearly every one of the 17 Democratic women currently serving in the Capitol's upper chamber, according to campaign filings. She has given the most to Gillibrand and her PAC, Off the Sidelines, a group dedicated to supporting other female candidates.

…"These are senators that almost unanimously said he should have his opportunity to explain himself with the Ethics Committee," she said. "Then, within hours of each other, they said he should resign. It was clearly, clearly highly organized.”

UPDATE: A Sign From God

Bachmann said she wanted a sign from God before making up her mind about whether or not to run for the Minnesota Senate seat. This week she got one:

Netanyahu Demands $50 Billion From U.S. Taxpayers

Netanyahu and his Arkansas pal Tom Cotton

Israel has a population of 8,157,300, of whom 1,688,600 (20.7%) are Arabs.The U.S. government gives Israel $2.9 billion annually in aid + another $1 billion to the West Bank and Gaza in economic assistance. Israel gets about $18 million in economic assistance and the bulk of the money is in military assistance-- just over $2.9 billion, the most, by far, to any country in the world.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu got to Washington Sunday for 3 days of meetings with Obama, congressional leaders, American Jewish groups, and think tanks-- the GOP's far right American Enterprise Institute and the Democrats' middle of the road Center for American Progress. He's trying to extort more money out of Obama in their first meeting since the the Iran deal, demanding that the U.S. up the annual payments to $5 billion for the next ten years (total in U.S. taxpayer money: $50 billion). He needs to show the folks back home that Israel and the U.S. have a good relationship, despite his extremely unfriendly behavior towards Obama. And he wants to threaten the Democrats, Israel's traditional allies, that he has friends in the GOP and that Israel can sway Jewish-American voters in that direction if he doesn't get what he wants.

The compromise on the money is supposedly $4 billion/year but a much better idea for America would be to start weening Israel off their dependency by cutting the $3 billion annually to half that amount. Obama should do it and he should do it today-- loudly and clearly. And if Netanyahu doesn't like it, Obama should tell him if he'd like 25% instead. That's too much anyway, especially with Netanyahu refusing to make peace with the Palestinians. Jeffrey Goldberg, writing for The Atlantic early yesterday morning reminded us that over a year ago Obama warned that "[t]ime is running out for a two-state solution-- the only viable, practical solution to the crisis-- and he believes that it is up to Israel, as the stronger power, the one that controls the land on which a Palestinian state would be created, to take the lead in establishing conditions for this new state." Goldberg reported at the time that Obama's approach was to ask Netanyahu, basically, "If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who? How does this get resolved?"

Obama has long understood Netanyahu to be the indispensable man of Middle East peacemaking. Obama believes that, alone among Israeli leaders, Netanyahu possesses the credibility to deliver as much as 70 percent of the Israeli public to a difficult compromise with the Palestinians. “[F]or Bibi to seize the moment in a way that perhaps only he can, precisely because of the political tradition that he comes out of and the credibility he has with the right inside of Israel, for him to seize this moment is perhaps the greatest gift he could give to future generations of Israelis,” the president said.

I’ve argued that Netanyahu has long been a plausible candidate for the third seat in the Zionist pantheon: Theodor Herzl, who envisioned the physical return of the Jews to Zion, holds the first seat; David Ben-Gurion, who made that return a concrete political reality, holds the second. The third seat remains empty. This seat is for the person who guarantees Israel a permanent place under the sun, with fixed, recognized borders and something close to universal legitimacy. Yitzhak Rabin was meant for that third seat, but an assassin ended that dream; Ariel Sharon was a credible candidate, but a stroke felled him. Netanyahu has been the most likely living candidate for that seat.

But over the past 18 months, since Obama issued that challenge, Netanyahu has shown very little interest in changing, in any sort of dramatic way, the reality on the ground, in particular the reality of slow but inexorable settlement growth on the West Bank—settlements that are meant, in many cases, to obviate the birth of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu has also shown himself, over and over again, to be deaf to the concerns of Israel’s (dwindling band of) liberal supporters in the West, Jewish and non-Jewish, who worry about the direction his country is taking, and he has appeared to be deaf to the sort of pragmatic concerns articulated by Obama and others regarding the seeming inexorability of a one-state non-solution (I call it a “non-solution” because the idea of a single, even semi-functional state containing two warring Middle East tribes is farcical).

Here is what Obama said last year about the illusion that the current status quo can be maintained indefinitely: “[M]y assessment, which is shared by a number of Israeli observers, I think, is there comes a point where you can’t manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices. Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank? Is that the character of Israel as a state for a long period of time? Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement? Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?”

Unlike Obama, several of his predecessors, and most American diplomats who specialize in the Middle East, I no longer believe that a reversal of the settlement project would necessarily set in motion a process that culminates in the conflict’s end. The 100-year conflict between Arab and Jew was not initiated by the 48-year-old occupation of the West Bank. As the latest round of Palestinian terrorism directed at Israelis suggests, the conflict is about something more than settlements. For many Palestinians, and certainly for many Palestinian leaders, Israel is an illegitimate state, and the Jews are not a people. There will be no permanent end of the conflict until Palestinians bring their understanding of Jewish history into line with reality.

But: There will certainly be no progress toward a possible two-state solution—there will certainly be no chance that the Palestinian narrative will ever soften-- if the settlement movement continues apace. And more to the point: There will be no hope for Israel as a democratic state that is home to a Jewish majority-- the one place in the world in which Jews, after 2,000 years of exile and persecution at the hands of Christians and Muslims and fascists and communists, can take control of their own destiny—if the West Bank is absorbed into Israel proper. The separation of two warring tribes is the actual goal of “peace” negotiations; a reversal of the settlement project is a necessary step in these divorce proceedings.

We’ve gotten word over the past week that the Obama administration has given up, for the time being, the pursuit of a comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is a recognition of the obvious, of course. But I hope that Obama, when he meets with Netanyahu in Washington on Monday, continues to ask the question: “If not now, when, and if not you, then who?” Netanyahu should reverse the settlement project for the sake of the Palestinians, but mainly for the sake of Herzl’s dream.

Netanyahu and his crackpot allies in Israel need to be realistic about their love affair with the GOP, which is very different from the relationship between Democrats and Israel. Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann's psychotic pronouncement about the End Times during her recent trip to Israel with the Family Research Council and the need to convert as many Jews as possible is the basis of what the Republican base feels about Israel and why. From the Jerusalem Post:

Toward the end of the week, she spoke on FRC President Tony Perkins’ radio program, Washington Watch, and discussed the meaning of the recent intensification of violence in Israel and the West Bank. She cast the violence as a signal of the return of Jesus, which would necessitate mass conversions.

“We recognize the shortness of the hour,” Bachmann said, “and that’s why we as a remnant want to be faithful in these days and do what it is that the Holy Spirit is speaking to each one of us, to be faithful in the Kingdom and to help bring in as many as we can-- even among the Jews-- share Jesus Christ with everyone that we possibly can because, again, He’s coming soon.”

..."A statement like Ms. Bachmann’s should serve to remind Jews that missionizing is, unfortunately, alive and well, and that we must always be on the lookout for it," said Agudath Israel of America spokesman Rabbi Avi Shafran. "It also should be a reminder of the importance of Jewish education, since the surest defense against missionizing is authentic Jewish knowledge."

Crackpot Utopia: The Year in Republican Crazy, Part 10

• Newsmax -- Beyond Drudgery
• Crazyspeak of the Year nominees Nos. 12 and 13: Michele Bachmann, Kimberly Guilfoyle


Newsmax, says Noah, "tells republicans what they want to believe." (See No. 1.) And the way Newsmax sees it, who better to tear President Obama down than "political analyst" Dick Morris? In this segment (watch it here), Dick's "news" is that Obama is blowing off national-security briefings -- part of his determined effort to undermine national security.

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. Newsmax -- Beyond Drudgery


Ah, the good old days when we burned witches!

As we all know, republicans live in some sort of comic-book bizarro alternate universe. Unfortunately, that universe overlaps with the real world that normally adjusted people live in. It's a twist of fate that defies the laws of quantum physics, but it is what it is and it's not going to go away anytime soon. The last Dark Ages lasted hundreds of years. Witches were burned and people really thought that plagues are sent by God as punishments for perceived "sins." Sound familiar?

So, you might ask yourself, how has this come about? Is it as simple as what Karl Rove arrogantly said shortly after Bush the Usurper took over the White House? You recall:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

Following that mission, what republicans have since created is indeed their own reality. They might as well be going back to the gory old days when people believed that the sun revolves around the earth. That's bad enough, but they want to take everyone down the drain with them.

To create this world you need more than lies from presidents, you need an alternative media. The selling of the Iraq war would be a case in point. People have a natural tendency to believe what they see on the TV and what they read on the Internet. "It must be true, I found it on the Internet." Orwell knew: People who lack critical thinking or just have the desire to be spoon-fed comfortable, reassuring lies that support their prejudices or superstitious preconceived notions are malleable. Just put it in the media and a certain percentage of people will numbly follow.

Goebbels also knew this. So did Stalin when Pravda was created. So did Roger Ailes when he first proposed his idea for GOP TV to Richard Nixon. But it isn't all just FOX. The corporate media supplies hours and hours of daily right -wing talk-radio lunacy for the acolytes. In fact, over 95 percent of talk radio is of the Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage ilk.

Then there's Newsmax.

Newsmax is not to be confused with Newsbusters. Newsbusters is another, perhaps even weirder republican font of information. Newsbusters is where righties find out about John Kerry faking his wounds and President Obama being secretly gay and married to man -- hence his support of "gay marriage." Newsbusters and Newsmax do have some things in common, though. For instance, both believe that President Bill Clinton's deputy White House counsel, Vince Foster, was murdered by one or both of the Clintons.

The link between Newsmax and Newsbusters is not just republican kookery. The link also exists in the form of one man, Christopher Ruddy. Ruddy literally wrote the book on what is known as the Vince Foster Conspiracy. The book is The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation. It wasn't the first time Ruddy had put forth this tale. Before writing his book, he had "covered the story" as a "reporter" for Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and Richard Mellon Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

When three separate official investigations of Vince Foster's death concluded that the death was a suicide, Ruddy concluded that those official investigations were obviously part of the conspiracy! One of the investigations was even headed up by Kenneth Starr, the man who tirelessly led the impeachment of President Clinton and the attempt to remove him from the presidency. One could argue that the current republican penchant for irrational conspiracy started with the strange mind of Christopher Ruddy and his Vince Foster conspiracy.

Ruddy also came up with what is known as the Ron Brown Conspiracy. Brown, the Clinton secretary of commerce, sadly died in a plane crash in Croatia in 1996. Ruddy claims that Brown's head was found with a bullet hole in it. The medical examiner found no bullet hole. Neither did the United States Air Force. I guess they were part of the conspiracy.

Christopher Ruddy was not to be deterred. He had been impressed with how the Internet virally spread the stories surrounding the Clinton impeachment effort. He decided that he would form his own media outlet and it would be called Newsmax. He's not a stupid man. He is apparently deranged, but that is all too often a characteristic that goes with being a republican. His mission was clearly to spread some derangement around.

Ruddy started Newsmax with money from Scaife, the family of former CIA Director William Casey, and others. Former Nixon and Ford administration chief of staff Gen. Alexander Haig and right-wing talk-radio host Michael Reagan are key players, as are Adm. Thomas Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (chief of naval operations at the height of the Vietnam War), and Jeff Cunningham, former publisher of Forbes magazine. Rape apologist George Will, homophobe Dr. Laura Schlessinger, and bug-eyed frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic Ben Stein are frequent contributors.

Dick Morris says that Newsmax has become "the most influential Republican-leaning media outlet" in the nation. Think about that. Now Newsmax is not just an Internet site, it's also a magazine, and they even have Newsmax Radio and Newsmax TV. People watch it. Lots of people. According to Nielson Online, Newsmax is the most trafficked conservative website, with approximately 4 million visitors per month. It tells republicans what they want to believe.

To illustrate where Newsmax is coming from, I thought a list of 2014 headlines would tell a story. I subscribe in order to see what members of the Crackpot Party are saying. I don't even need to really read the stories; the headlines tell the tales. You can see the agenda behind them. So many times you can also see a lot of wishful thinking. Often you can also see the paranoia. Here's a selection:

1/14/14: FBI Won't File Charges For IRS Targeting; Obamacare Death Spiral At Hand
2/5/14: CBO: Obamacare To Kill 3 Million Jobs; D'Souza Slams Obama Power Grab
2/6/14: Dick Morris: Obama creates 'Nation Of Independents': Rand Paul Warns Of Socialist Nightmare
2/11/14: Colt AR-15 Giveaway [This one was just an announcement of a special promotion -- runs about monthly!]
2/27/14: Sarah Palin Gets Reality TV Show; Son Of God Movie Blows Records
3/5/14: Shocker: Pope Open To Gay Civil Unions; Issa Hits IRS
3/18/14: FEMA Plans For Massive Depopulation? [This one is a sponsored article. Newsmax features a lot of this kind of thing, including Bible verse stuff, and endless warnings of stock-market collapse.]
3/27/14: Ruddy: Rick Perry Emerging
4/3/14: Tom DeLay: Obama Faces 'Armageddon'; Cruz Nabs $1.5 Million
4/11/14: Limbaugh Slams Colbert Pick
4/30/14: 'Smoking Gun' Benghazi Email
5/3/14: Where Was Obama During Benghazi Raid?
5/8/14: Revealed: The One Thing That Will Take Down Obama… Finally! [Another sponsored article. Runs frequently, to give readers hope.]
6/30/14: Obama: I Will Bypass Congress On Immigration
7/11/14: Matalin: Obama Has No Soul
7/15/14: Obama's Secret Plan For Illegals
7/25/14: CNN Poll: 33% Want Obama Impeached
7/27/14: Christians Face Extinction
8/4/14: Record Number Of Illegals Coming From Nations With Ebola Terror Ties
8/9/14: White Students To Be Minority
9/6/14: Franklin Graham Fears End Times Are Near
9/29/14: O'Reilly: Kissinger Agrees With Me
10/15/14: Ebola Droplets Spread In Air
10/20/14: Epidemic Still Getting Worse
11/8/14: Claim: Sharpton Chose Holder Replacement
11/17/14: NRA Warns Of Obama End Run
12/17/14: Obama's Cuba Deal 'Propaganda Coup' For Castro
12/22/14: Giuliani: Anti-Police 'Propaganda' Led To NY Police 'Assassinations'

2. Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 12: Michele Bachmann

Really, I couldn't just let Ms. Batshit Loco -- already featured in Part 4 -- leave Washington without one last parting kick. She'll probably resurface on the telly soon anyway. Something like Blaze TV or Newsmax TV will hire her to dispense her unique "wisdom" and "expertise." Meanwhile, shouldn't there be a big book of Bachmann's Greatest Hits so far?

Here's a great one from this year, where she proposes "a 100% tax on monies that immigrants send home," the idea being that a 100-percent tax will make it all disappear.



Really? All of it? Take it all? Now, that's the republican dream of human suffering for all but the few, and creating the slave class! Hey, why not go for 150 percent? How about yer firstborn is taken from you at age six and forced to work in the oil fields?

Or should we just make them pick cotton all day? Give them a bowl of watered down soup and a tent to sleep in? If they have no earnings in the first place, they can't send any back home either. Save the extra step of giving them money and then taxing it. Less work for the IRS too, and we know how she feels about the IRS. She hates the mere existence of the IRS. So why is she proposing giving them more work to do? Presumably they'd have to hire more people to collect these increased taxes. That was even one of her arguments against Obamacare. Wouldn't the hiring of more IRS agents to tax immigrant money leaving the country be expansion of government? Michele, have you really thought this through?

At first, when Bachmann proposed this, I thought she was referring to illegal immigrants, but she does just say "immigrants." She said this on a conference call with the anti-immigrant group Numbers USA this past summer. Specifically, she wants the 100-percent tax on money that immigrants send back to the Old Country, in this case Mexico and various Central American countries. Her proposal does not apply to, say, Canadians, Brits, French people, Germans, etc.

Then there's the question of what is done with this money once it's collected. Will it be going toward the Bachmann family's socialistic farm subsidies? Or will it be going for her socialistic lifetime health care and pension, whicht all ex-congresspersons get?

Damn, Michele, if you want to raise more money from taxation, it seems to me that you could have raised a lot more by taxing the money that U.S. corporations take out of the U.S. economy and stash in the Cayman Islands.


3. Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 13: Kimberly Guilfoyle



Now who, you ask, is Kimberly Guilfoyle? In the last installment of "Crackpot Utopia," I mentioned Rudy Giuliani's hot man-crush on Russian leader Vladimer Putin. Rudy loves Vlad so much that he rhapsodizes about him being our president. Kimberly is another poor, unfortunate asylum shut-in that Roger Ailes hired to dispense republican kookery on FOX, and she wants Putin or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in charge of the U.S. "for 48 hours."

Can I just make a special request in the magic lamp? Can we get, like, Netanyahu, or, like, Putin in for 48 hours, you know, head of the United States?

Can you imagine if Kimberly had been around in the 1950s or 1960s and said she wanted Russia's leader to be president of the United States? Yeah, Kimberly. That's what we need. Someone who'll go to the UN and pound his shoe on the table! Great idea -- you go, girl!

It wasn't so long ago that none other than Michele Bachmann was calling for a media investigation into "anti-American activities" of members of Congress, along the lines of Joe McCarthy's famous hearings. ("I think people would like to see an exposé like that," she said in 2008.) Maybe it's time to investigate how many of Rupert Murdoch's employees have "anti-American" views? That's how far FOX has sunk. Love it or leave it, a-holes!

And a personal note to Kimberly: Cut your makeup use in half, at least. The Tammy Faye Baker thing doesn't work for you. And you too, Rudy!


UP NEXT IN 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

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

For listings and links, see Part 1 of this year's series.

#

Crackpot Utopia: The Year in Republican Crazy, Part 4

• A celebration of Michele Bachmann: Pray away the crazy?
• What "War on Women"?
• And the "Obama angle" on Malaysian Flight 370

Miss Michele: Praying away the crazy?

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. A celebration of Michele Bachmann:
Pray away the crazy?

Ms. Bachmann has checked out -- of Congress. But we'll always have her words:

John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That's the kind of spirit that I have too.

Of course the John Wayne that was from Waterloo was serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who molested and killed boys before he buried them in the crawl space under his house.

There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.

That pearl of wisdom from Bachmann came as she spoke at a republican leadership conference. Can't you just see them nodding their heads in agreement?

And who could forget Bachmann calling Planned Parenthood the "Lenscrafters of big abortion."

Here's Bachmann channeling Republican idol Joe McCarthy:

I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of people in Congress and find out if they are pro-America or anti-America.

Lastly, here she is, concerned that the Obama White House has a dastardly plan for America's youth, featuring --

.reeducation camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward

Yeah, I left out the bits about the HPV shots causing mental retardation, the railing against socialism while profiting from farm subsidy programs, the FEMA camps, calling Obamacare "the crown jewel of socialism," and so much more. But that would just be piling on.

 As they say: Michele, don't let the door hit ya. No, wait, let it hit ya. I hope it's on a tight spring, like your mind.


2. What "War on Women"?

Hardly a day goes by when we don't hear from the republican pro-rape caucus. Remember Paul Ryan's statement that rape is just another form of insemination? He made it all the way to being nominated for VP by the republican party! How about republicans closing all those Planned Parenthood clinics where most women in this country got screened for uterine and breast cancers? And who could forget "if it's a legitimate rape"?

"War on Women"? What War on Women?


In February, Maine's Lawrence Lockman got around to sort-of-apologizing for a quarter-century of eye-popping public knuckle-dragging. Are the home folks buying it?

For those who worry about who might replace assorted republican nutjobs if and when they do the world a favor and leave the scene, not to worry. The party has quite a roster of up-and-comers, not just in the U.S. House but also in our state legislatures. Here's just one of them, Maine state Rep. Lawrence Lockman. who back in 1990 voiced the repug concept of freedom:

If a woman has [the right to an abortion], why shouldn't a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman? At least the rapist's pursuit of sexual freedom doesn't [in most cases] result in anyone's death.

Somehow, merely calling republicans knuckle-draggers isn't enough. Calling them Neanderthals would be insulting to Neanderthals.

People in Maine voted for this a-hole! He has a long history of such statements. His prime obsessions seem to be abortion and what he calls "the normalization of homosexuality," which he says are "the two cutting-edge moral issues of our time." In 1995, in an op-ed in the Lewiston Sun Journal, Lockman offered the following about anti-gay discrimination measures promoted by activists: "You can bet the rent money they will demand that employers set up goals and timetables to achieve 10 percent homosexual representation in the workforce and in government contracts."

Lockman has also been very vocal in speaking out about anti-bullying and diversity initiatives in his state's schools. He has called them "politically correct liberal fascism." He dared expose what he called the "homosexual rights movement" as "a covert scheme to use federal crime-control funds to transform Maine's public schools into gay-activist indoctrination centers."

Displaying his ignorance of the law and how our government works, Lockman has also justified his anti-tax activism saying, "According to the Constitution of the United States, the federal government has no authority to force people to pay income taxes." He has refused to pay taxes, even though he enjoys the benefits of them right down to supplying the comforts he partakes in to and from work, at work, and, of course, at home -- unless, I guess, he only lights his home with candles and flies to work on a broom. He even expressed his admiration for Gordon Kahl, a tax-resistor Posse Comitatus leader who died in a shootout with U.S. marshals, but not before he and his group killed two of them.

In February, more than 25 years after the original jaw-dropper equating abortion and rape, Lockman actually sort-of-apologized for this and some of his other past statements.

I have always been passionate about my beliefs, and years ago I said things that I regret. . . I hold no animosity toward anyone by virtue of their gender or sexual orientation, and today I am focused on ensuring freedom and economic prosperity for all Mainers.

Like I said, people in Maine voted for this guy. None of the above was unknown when he was elected to the state House in 2012.

There are Lawrence Lockmans in the legislatures of every state, waiting for the chance to move on up to national office. The likes of Sen. Rafael "Ted" Cruz will welcome them with open arms and hearts.


In June, on FX's Outnumbered (a panel show with four crazed ultra-right-wing women undoubtedly "outnumbering" a single male crypto-liberal), Andrea Tantaros declared the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling restricting access to birth control "a huge win for women" -- women, she explained, who own businesses! We'll hear more from Andrea in just a moment.


3. The exploitation of the human tragedy of Malaysian Flight 370: FOX types look for the Obama angle!



Somehow, in the republican mind, the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370 had to be Obama's fault. Isn't everything? Soaring gas prices? You bet! Superstorm Sandy? He created it by seeding the clouds! Benghazi? Say no more!

So, why not the missing plane? Better yet, why not tie the plane tragedy to Benghazi? Two-for-one! It's a win-win! Here's FOX's Andrea Tantaros, one of the most deranged people on FOX (and that is sayin' something), broadcasting from Crackpot Central:

. . . and watching the footage of that Malaysian woman . . . it's just so sad. . . . Living in Malaysia, the government seemingly ignored these people. They didn't want their stories to get out, they weren't talking to them. . . They were saying, "No one has come to my house, no one has told me what has happened." . . . Feels like the families of Benghazi, just saying.

Yep. Just saying, Andrea, that your Obama Derangement Syndrome is so far out of hand that you ain't never comin' back to the real world. It's like your mind itself was on that plane as it sadly slipped, in pieces, below the waves of the Indian Ocean. Just saying.

Meanwhile, Dr. Jim Garrow, fellow FOX nutball and frequent contributor to FOX News' Erik Rush's radio show, had it all figured out: The "America-hating fraud in the Oval office" (i.e., President Obama), working with "the Chinese," blew up the plane! Garrow has it all worked out, much like Glenn Beck when he knew our government was involved in the Boston Marathon bombing.

It all makes sense if your mind lives in Crackpot Utopia!


TOMORROW IN PART 5: The GOP and the kiss heard 'round the world; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 5: Joe the Plumber

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

For listings and links, see Part 1 of this year's series.

#

Lack Of Intelligence Doesn't Hurt Conservative Candidates With Conservative Voters

"You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate, though," giggled conservative Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor on the big screen. He was unseated by an undistinguished right-wing extremist, Tom Cotton, 476,309 (56.5%) to 332,669 (39.5%). I don't know how much his remarks to Bill Maher played into his defeat. I don't know how much Arkansas voters care about IQ test results or intelligence in their elected officials at all for that matter. And this week, a neighboring state's governor, Rick Perry, was playing up on that sentiment in his "I'm back and I'm different this time" plea for support in his quest for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. Perry's polling support hovers around 2% among GOP voters-- better than Rick Santorum, tied with Bobby Jindal.

But Perry's handlers are telling big donors he's kicked his drug addiction problems and he's telling interviewers his awkward, stumbling nature and low IQ don't matter in a Republican primary. He says "life experience is more important than book smarts in a president." Book smarts, though, isn't what IQ measures. IQ measures human intelligence and conservatives, by nature, are extremely distrustful of any such thing. General intelligence refers to the ability to reason deductively or inductively, think abstractly, use analogies, synthesize information, and apply it to new domains. We'll get to that in a minute. Back to Perry first.

"Running for the presidency's not an IQ test. It is a test of an individual's resolve. It's a test of an individual's philosophy. It's a test of an individual's life's experiences," Perry said in an interview at the Governor's Mansion, which he's leaving as his term ends. "And I think Americans are really ready for a leader that will give them a great hope about the future."

Perry said he probably has less "margin for error" after he famously couldn't remember one of the federal agencies he said he'd ax during a November 2011 Republican debate. But "I think, over the course of the last two years, people realize that what they saw in 2011 is certainly not the person they're looking at at 2013, 2014, 2015," he said.

Perry also said he'd have no problem convincing Republicans that he can win in 2016, saying potential backers "are pouring in here to sit down with us, to talk to us."

"The policy individuals that have said 'listen, we want to come help you become even better prepared as we go forward' is already the answer to that," he said.

A few years ago Professor Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics published a piece, Why Liberals And Atheists Are More Intelligent, in the Social Psychology Quarterly that turned political conservatives off to intelligence permanently. His study found that higher intelligence directly correlates with liberal political ideology. "General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Kanazawa. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles." He argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals. Here's how Time covered the report back in 2010, noting that Kanazawa is a libertarian and non-partisan.

The notion that liberals are smarter than conservatives is familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. The College Democrats are said to be ugly, smug and intellectual; the College Republicans, pretty, belligerent and dumb. There's enough truth in both stereotypes that the vast majority of college students opt not to join either club.

...What's new in Kanazawa's paper is a provocative theory about why intelligence might correlate with liberalism. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse "evolutionarily novel" values-- that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan and our only real technology was fire.

Kanazawa offers this view of how such novel values sprang up in our ancestors: Imagine you are a caveman (if it helps, you are wearing a loincloth and have never shaved). Lightning strikes a tree near your cave, and fire threatens. What do you do? Natural selection would have favored the smart specimen who could quickly conceive answers to such a problem (or other rare catastrophes like sudden drought or flood), even if-- or maybe especially if-- those answers were unusual ones that few others in your tribe could generate. So, the theory goes, genes for intelligence got wrapped up with genes for unnatural thinking.

It's an elegant theory, but based on Kanazawa's own evidence, I'm not sure he's right. In his paper, Kanazawa begins by noting, accurately, that psychologists don't have a good understanding of why people embrace the values they do. Many kids share their parents' values, but at the same time many adolescents define themselves in opposition to what their parents believe. We know that most people firm up their values when they are in their 20s, but some people experience conversions to new religions, new political parties, new artistic tastes and even new cuisines after middle age. As Kanazawa notes, this multiplicity of views-- a multiplicity you find within both cultures and individuals-- is one reason economists have largely abandoned the study of values with a single Latin phrase, De gustibus non est disputandum: there's no accounting for taste.

Kanazawa doesn't disagree, but he believes scientists can account for whether people like new tastes or old, radical tastes or Establishment ones. He points out that there's a strong correlation between liberalism and openness to new kinds of experiences. But openness to new experience isn't necessarily intelligent (cocaine is fun; accidental cocaine overdose is not).

So are liberals smarter? Kanazawa quotes from two surveys that support the hypothesis that liberals are more intelligent. One is the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which is often called Add Health. The other is the General Social Survey (GSS). The Add Health study shows that the mean IQ of adolescents who identify themselves as "very liberal" is 106, compared with a mean IQ of 95 for those calling themselves "very conservative." The Add Health study is huge-- more than 20,000 kids-- and this difference is highly statistically significant.

No, that isn't Michele Bachmann above. Still Perry... celebrating. Hard to fathom though, that in the middle of the fight to keep the government open/deregulate Wall Street, the White House not only hosted a Christmas Party, but invited dangerous right-wing radicals to it. I hope they all got thoroughly patted down. Even Michele Bachmann, who is being allowed to walk away from a serious criminal investigation in return for her retirement from Congress, was permitted to attend.

Why would she even bother? She wanted to tell President Obama, in person, to nuke Iran, which has over 77 million inhabitants, more than the population of Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Throw in Libya and Qatar and we're still not there yet. First she promised her family she wouldn't make a spectacle out of herself when it was time to pose with the president for photos. But as soon as they had left the stage, that special Bachmann derangement gene kicked in.

“I turned to the president and I said, something to the effect of, ‘Mr. President, you need to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities, because if you don’t, Iran will have a nuclear weapon on your watch and the course of world history will change,’” she told the Washington Free Beacon.

“And he got his condescending smile on his face and laughed at me and said, ‘Well Michele, it’s just not that easy.’ And I said to him, ‘No, Mr. President, you’re the president, it will happen on your watch, and you’ll have to answer to the world for this.’ And that was it and then I left. Merry Christmas,” she said with a laugh.

...Bachmann now plans to travel across the country, giving speeches and writing op-eds ahead of what she called a “consequential” election in 2016. Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton will simply continue Obama’s widely criticized domestic and foreign policies, Bachmann said. Republicans for their part need to ensure that they do not nominate a candidate who is “changing their stripes just for an election.”

“If we get a very bold conservative who has a strong identification of where they want to take the country, both economically and in terms of national security, we do have a chance to have a major course correction for America in the future,” she said.

OK, If You Were Still Wondering, Teabaggers-- Like The Know Nothing Party They Are Descendents Of-- Hate Immigrants

Wednesday "at high noon," the Tea Party's motley true believers, Michele Bachmann, who resigned from Congress as part of a deal to avoid fraud charges, Steve King and Ted Cruz, called for a massive demonstration in Washington against King Obama's amnesty argle bargle. Bachmann on the TV channel of systemic racism, Fox News: "I'm calling on your viewers to come to DC on Wednesday, December 3, at high noon on the west steps of the Capitol. We need to have a rally, and we need to go visit our senators and visit our congressman, because nothing frightens a congressman like the whites of his constituents' eyes. ... We need the viewers to come and help us." She was backed up by one of the more virulently racist of the Tea Party groups, the Tea Party Patriots, which contacted all their members, urging them to come to Bachmann's rally. 40 people showed up, many in tricorner hats.

President Obama asked the Republicans to stop whining and bitching about his temporary executive actions and pass some legislation addressing the country's dysfunctional immigration situation. Congress' worst racists want to shut the government down instead to make a statement about how much they hate people of color. Others-- some say the less extreme House Republicanos-- want to pass deranged bill by right-wing freak Ted Yoho to deport 11 million of immigrants.

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and the House GOP were hoping that their members, angry at President Obama for stepping up and taking executive action on immigration, would be placated by a bill drafted by Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) that would prevent executive action on immigration and put just about all 11 million undocumented immigrants in America at risk of deportation. This after more than a year and a half of refusing to allow a vote on a popular immigration reform overhaul package that has enough votes to pass the House. As the Washington Post explains, Speaker Boehner “would first allow a vote this week on a bill to ban Obama from changing immigration laws.  The largely symbolic legislation would be quickly discarded by the Democratic-controlled Senate, but the vote would be seen as a victory by some tea party conservatives.”

The second part of Boehner’s immigration response involved funding the federal government through next fall, with the exception of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and immigration agencies, which would only be funded through early 2015, at which point Republicans would stage yet another fight over immigration against the backdrop of a manufactured government funding crisis.

Yet the hardcore anti-immigrant wing of the Republican Party-- which has been the tail wagging the GOP dog for years-- is not satisfied with the idea of a vote against the President now followed by a showdown in March. They want the showdown now, even if it means a government shutdown.

Just as Bachmann's 40 person mass rally was about to start, Politico published a piece about the Hell No caucus of racists and extremists who will settle for nothing less than mass deportations-- rounding people up, parents of American-born citizens for example, and dragging them back over the border. You almost feel sorry for Boehner... until you realize he brought all this hatred and psychosis on himself as part of a conscious electoral strategy too motivate the most primitive segments of the American public to vote for Republicans.

“I think a lot of us, in discussion, we don’t see the purpose of having a long CR. Why not do it the first day we’re in session?” said Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) “I’m not sure it’s going to pass the way they are proposing it. I think it’s likely they are going to have to improve it if they want it to pass.”

These conservatives estimate the number of Republican “no” votes to be near 30 to 40-- enough to derail a vote on the government funding bill if Democrats oppose the measure.

Senate conservatives are beginning to badger House leaders over their plan to fund the government and symbolically disapprove of the president’s immigration action. GOP Sens. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, David Vitter of Louisiana and Mike Lee of Utah all began to blast the House GOP leadership’s plan on Tuesday afternoon, arguing that the House needs to block funding for implementation of Obama’s executive action now, not later.

Lee laid out a detailed road map to taking on the executive action in a statement to Breitbart News, arguing for a short-term continuing resolution that blocks funding for the executive action-- the opposite of what Republican leaders in both chambers want.

Meanwhile, the rally was down-graded to a public press conference, which began with a sort of hate-filled prayer to whatever deity these anti-Jesus lunatics worship: "Our enemies seek to devour us," moaned their shaman. "We are rapidly becoming a lawless nation... Why should we expect an Illegal President to enforce 'Legal' Immigration??!"

Some nut dressed, incongruously, for an 18th Century confrontation with archetypical conservatives-- the British monarchy started screaming "Down with the King."

Ted Cruz took the mic and claimed Obama's executive immigration action is a "constitutional crisis," although all Obama did was extend temporary status to immigrants not unlike what allowed Cruz's own fascist father to remain in the U.S. Could a future Republican president, demanded Cruz, say we are using prosecutorial discretion not to collect capital gains taxes? Several of his Texas colleagues were also eager to chime in. The crackpot congressman from Rand Paul's old district around Galveston and Beaumont, Randy Weber, tried to stimulate the crowd by asking if they could say "dictator"? No reason, he groused, we should be voting for any part of a budget that funds his illegal actions.


Cruz, titillating Hate Talk Radio zombies: "We are facing a full-fledged constitutional crisis. We fought a bloody revolution to free ourselves from the control of monarchs."

One of Boehner's lieutenants, Renee Ellmers, went on CNN to call out Cruz's deranged extremism. "Senator Cruz needs to stay in the Senate. I think Senator Cruz wants to fan the flames here, but I think everyone here has become more savvy to his ways."

Not in the crowd Wednesday: another Texan, Larry McQuilliams (pictured above in his finest teabagger regalia), who was shot by police in Austin on Friday after he went on a shooting spree. Am I saying that Ted Cruz, Steve King, Michele Bachmann and Randy Weber are the same kind of garbage as McQuilliams? Of course I am, just not as able to monetize the inner demons they all share. Just read this:

McQuilliams, who Austin Police officials called a “homegrown American extremist” with ties to a Christian identity hate group, was shot dead on Friday by a police officer outside the department’s headquarters.

Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo told reporters on Monday that officers who searched the gunman’s home found a map with 34 targets, including two churches. McQuilliams had fired bullets into Austin police headquarters, a federal courthouse and the Mexican consulate in downtown Austin on Friday. He also tried to set the Mexican consulate building on fire.

Previously, police said they had not yet determined the motive for the shooting, which left only the gunman dead, but speculated that the current immigration debate could have been a factor. On Monday, federal investigators said the gunman didn’t leave a note that outlined his motive, but that he had previously told friends he was upset he couldn’t find a job, even as immigrants to the United States receive assistance.

On his bed, the gunman left a note and laid out clothes, officials said. A note left behind said the outfit was for his funeral.

“Hate was in his heart,” Acevedo said.

Police believe McQuilliams associated himself with the Phineas Priesthood, an anti-Semitic, anti-multiculturalism affiliation that opposes biracial relationships, same-sex marriage, taxation and abortion. Authorities found a copy of “Vigilantes of Christendom,” a book linked to the Priesthood, in the rental van McQuilliams used during the attacks. Inside of the book was a handwritten note that “discusses his rank as a priest in his fight against anti-God people,” Acevedo said.

“If you look at what he did, he terrorized a city, he’s just an American terrorist trying to terrorize our people,” Acevedo said.

...Among other things investigators need to determine: How McQuilliams got his weapons. He had been arrested in 1998 for driving under the influence and in 1992 for aggravated robbery, Acevedo said. He also served time in prison for a bank robbery.

Phineas Priesthood affiliates were tied to a string of 1996 bank robberies and bombings in the state of Washington.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told The Post that the Phineas Priesthood is a “concept” that originated with “Vigilantes of Christendom,” which came out in 1990. The group takes its name from a story about the biblical figure of Phineas in the book of Numbers.

In the story, Phineas slays an Israelite man and a Midianite woman who were together in a tent. “To the extreme right, this [story] is a biblical injunction against race mixing,” Potok said. Phineas Priests would also use the passage to justify violent acts in the name of their beliefs. “It’s very much a self-calling,” Potok said of those who would identify as Phineas Priesthood members. “If you commit a Phineas act…you can be considered a Phineas priest.”

In a backgrounder, the Anti-defamation league wrote that “the Phineas Priesthood is not a membership organization in the traditional sense: there are no meetings, rallies or newsletters.” The ADL added that “extremists become ‘members’ when they commit ‘Phineas acts:’ any violent activity against ‘non-whites.’” Potok noted that the affiliation does not have a national structure.

There is no organization that would determine whether one is a “member” of the group or not. Its affiliates, like McQuilliams, would be self-designated.

Its members identify themseves as Christians, however, “they are really not Christians in any sense that a christian would accept,” Potok added. Most mainstream American Christians, he said, would find a Phineas Priest’s reading of scripture to be “heretical.”

I wonder if Texas will ever get sick enough of people like this to stop electing them to public office. It guarantees that none of this kind of stuff will ever be seriously addressed by the rabble Texas' Establishment so fears: