Didn't Ronald Reagan used to say, "Mr. Gorbachev, put up those walls"?

Invisible Hand vs. Regulator
Can Invisible-Hand-of-the-Free-Market Man ever be stopped -- or lose popularity?
BY TOM TOMORROW

[Don't forget to click on the cartoon to enlarge it.]

by Ken

Just this morning Howie was writing once again about the craziness of this election season, and quoted this nugget from Digby, who's been chronicling the craziness perhaps more closely than any still-sane person might sensibly dare:

This is an ugly election-- one of the worst I've ever seen-- financed by billionaires who are very happy to let the GOP run completely wild as long as it takes care of the owners. But it isn't ugly because the Democrats have been hurling mud. It's ugly because this ugly political movement is fighting as dirty as candidates can fight.

The craziness is so extreme and so widespread and so widely accepted as, apparently, the New Normal that outside of the people we all read and watch, it's going virtually unremarked on. Oh yes, the infotainment newsterriers may occasionally yip good-naturedly over some little gaffe, but to step back and note the blanket ignorance, incompetence, and sheer craziness of this lot of wackos? Not so much.

So we have to turn to the alternative media -- to, for example, AlterNet's Adele Stan writing about the astonishing surge in the Colorado governor's race of the godfather of Major-Party Wackadoodlery, former Rep. Tom Tancredo (links onsite):

If the latest Rasmussen survey of likely voters is to be believed, in the Colorado governor’s race, anti-immigrant gadfly Tom Tancredo is polling within four points of the frontrunner, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat. The Rasmussen poll shows Hickenlooper at 42 percent, Tancredo at 38 percent and Republican Dan Maes at just 12 percent.

When Tancredo jumped into the Colorado gubernatorial race, most political analysts simply rolled their eyes. After all, this was the guy who, at the Tea Party Nation convention in Memphis earlier this year, advocated a return to literacy tests for voter registration, a practice that was used and abused for decades in the South to keep African-Americans from the voting booth. And this was the guy who called Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor “a racist” who should be “disqualified” from serving on the bench, and a member of “a Latino KKK.” The most Tancredo could hope for, the thinking went, was to be a spoiler by splitting the right-wing vote between himself and Maes, the Tea Party-backed candidate who won the G.O.P. nomination in an upset.

If you think his rhetoric is scary, consider this: To make his third-party bid, Tancredo signed on with the American Constitution Party, which despite its secular-sounding name, is a party based upon the principles of Christian Reconstructionism, whose adherents seek to have biblical law — including the execution of LGBT people and the stoning of adulterers — instituted as the law of the land. (Both Rand Paul and Sharron Angle have links to the Constitution Party, as we reported here.) . . .

Also on AlterNet, there's a post by Brad100 called "Christian Conservative Leaders Ignore Their Values in 2010 Election," pointing out that those reliably right-wing "religious leaders" such as Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and Focus on Family, Moral Majority, and Family Research Council, who could always be counted on to go all fire-and-brimstone on any pol in whom they detected (or if necesssary imagined) any moral shortcoming, have lost their voice in the face of people like lech and perv Carl Paladino, the R candidate for governor of New York; WWF depravity entrepreneur Linda McMahon, the R candidate for U.S. senator from Connecticut; and the apparently former witch Christine O'Donnell, the R candidate for U.S. senator from Delaware.

Then there's Crazy Joe Miller, the official R candidate for U.S. senator from Alaska. Howie was writing just this morning about Joe:

Sunday night, during a town hall in Anchorage, crooked Tea Party thug Joe Miller -- who has already announced he will not be answering any questions about his shady background -- had members of his private militia attack and kidnap Tony Hopfinger, a journalist who asked him some embarrassing questions. Do you think any conservatives have come out and chastised Miller? Let me know if you find any. After all, Miller's professed love of the Constitution is just a talking point, nothing something he or his followers take seriously.

Unfortunately, we haven't heard the last of Crazy Joe. Today on Greg Sargent's Plum Line blog featured a post by The American Prospect staff reporter Adam Serwer, which began:

Joe Miller, tear down this wall

Yesterday, my colleague Tim Fernholz had this to say about the news that bodyguards of Alaska Senate Candidate Joe Miller had handcuffed a journalist:

What is it about the fear of big-government fascism that makes Tea Party candidates act like big-government fascists?

For Miller, this irony doesn't end with his private security handcuffing reporters he sees as hostile. As a way to stop illegal immigration, he suggested emulating Communist East Germany by simply building a wall:

"The first thing that has to be done is secure the border. ... East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow. Now, obviously, other things were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could do it, we could do it."

This seems to be one of those moments where it's worth reflecting on what the reaction at Fox News would be if a liberal, sarcastically or otherwise, suggested replicating the "triumphs" of East German communism, or had his private security detain a journalist they thought was being hostile.

None of which is to suggest that in other years we are vouchsafe nothing but, or even large quantities of, candidates radiating wisdom and mental health. But really, are there limiits? Well no, apparently not.

My impulse is to leave it at that, but I think I had better finish the thought of Digby's which I quoted above.

Where I began quoting, she had just written:

When this new progressive movement started, one of its tenets was that if progressive candidates would take risks, would be aggressive against the Republicans, would shake up the establishment and stop being the milquetoast campaigners that had turned the Democratic party into an embarrassment -- we would get their backs. Some of them believed us and they went outside the normal cautious "don't make trouble" approach and came out swinging. It's risky, and sometimes it misses. But taking risks is what we asked them to do and that's what we signed up for.

Here, then, is the full paragraph that follows:

We have two weeks to go and some of these races are very, very tight. They may all lose, some might win, we just don't know. This is an ugly election --- one of the worst I've ever seen --- financed by billionaires who are very happy to let the GOP run completely wild as long as it takes care of the owners. But it isn't ugly because the Democrats have been hurling mud. It's ugly because this ugly political movement is fighting as dirty as candidates can fight. Some Democrats aren't rolling over and playing dead. The least we can do is have their backs as we promised we would.

Digby went on to provide a link for donating to the campaign of Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Jack Conway, the target of the savage campaign being waged on behalf of quasi-libertarian Rand Paul, whose libertarianism disappears whenever it becomes inconvenient to his financial backers and Teabagger fans.

The link is for the Blue America "Senate Candidates Worth Fighting For," including Scott McAdams, the Alaska Democrat running against Crazy Joe Miller (and, as a write-in candidate, incumbent GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, current representative of the state's famous family of political kleptomaniacs) -- and also including Roxanne Conlin (IA), Paul Hodes (NH), Elaine Marshall (NC), and Joe Sestak (PA). Imagine what a different place the Senate might be if they all won.

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Is Joe Miller More Of A Crackpot Than Palin, Angle & Aqua Buddah?

As you know, Sitka Mayor/Democratic Senate nominee Scott McAdams will be the Blue America guest at Crooks and Liars this coming Saturday. You can contribute directly to his campaign here. And with the Alaska Libertarians having withdrawn their offer to allow corporate shill Lisa Murkowski to run on their line, this is looking like a head-to-head race between a populist Democrat and a... well... I can't think of a word that works better to describe Joe Miller than "crackpot," although I guess "extreme right-wing ideologue" works too.

As TPM pointed out, Miller washes up better than kooks like Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, Kent Buck, Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio and Ron Johnson, but he's at least as far off the mainstream as they-- or any of the Jim DeMint candidates-- are.

Among Miller's views: He wants to eliminate the Department of Education, believes the government shouldn't pay for unemployment insurance and says of climate change on his campaign site that it "may not even exist." Among the more mainstream GOP positions he's taken: Miller would cut welfare; eliminate health care for the poor by scrapping Medicaid; and the Anchorage Daily News reported that he has called for sweeping cuts to Medicare and Social Security with a goal of phasing them out entirely in favor of total privatization... Miller is backed by the Family Research Council and opposes abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, a view far to the right of the mainstream of the GOP.

... Miller told ABC's TopLine in July that he wants to look at the constitutionality of the government paying for unemployment benefits. He's also said he would repeal health care reform entirely, a view differing from most GOP leaders who want to just repeal the unpopular parts and keep the rest.

"I don't think Alaskans are that crazy, and Miller is very fringe," an Alaska Democrat backing Democratic nominee Sitka Mayor Scott McAdams told TPM in an interview. The source added that McAdams is "not a flaming liberal" and can appeal to sensible members of both parties, adding a predication that because Murkowski supporters are mainstream, they will flock to McAdams in November.

Another source who has worked in Alaska Democratic politics said Miller is "radically outside of the mainstream" and "makes Sharron Angle and Rand Paul look normal."

That may be stretching the point since it would take a lot more than a picture of Joe Miller crawling around on all fours on a dark Alaska night scraping up the permafrost to bury guns in his backyard to make Angle or Mr. Aqua Buddah ever look "normal." Nonetheless, yesterday's Anchorage Daily News carried a very damaging report on Miller's calls for Alaskans to ween themselves off federal subsidies. I suspect a lot more Alaskans like the theory of no government handouts and no pork than who actually want to see America's biggest welfare recipient and pork state go without. His call for actual "belt tightening" might not have the same ring when Alaskans start thinking about what he's talking about.

Miller holds that position, articulated throughout his campaign against incumbent GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, despite Alaska's historic reliance on federal resources, needed to develop the vast territory of the young state.

"The government is going bankrupt. I don't think anybody can deny it," he said in an interview on CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday. "I think the answer to this is to basically transfer the responsibilities and power of government back to the states and the people. That is really the only answer, I think, out of this crisis."

Meanwhile, Miller is showing himself to be delusional and paranoid by running around insisting that John Cornyn of the NRSC is trying to steal the election for Murkowski. He's come pretty close to saying that if Murkowski is declared the winner-- an unlikely event in any case-- it will only be because of fraud and he'll go dig up the guns he buried in his yard. This guy is really... well, like I said, a crackpot.

Meet Scott McAdams, Alaska Populist

Did I ever love Michael Chabon's book, The Yiddish Policemen's Union! And until this week, that's all I-- or most Americans from the Lower 48 who haven't cruised Alaska-- knew about Sitka, Alaska. I know a lot more now because Sikta's mayor, Scott McAdams, won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by super-corrupt ex-Senator/Governor Frank Murkowski's appointed daughter Lisa. (Yeah, ole Frank appointed her when he left the Senate to become governor.) Anyway, the Beltway Democrats didn't think much about Alaska because they figured Lisa had a lock on the seat. Bob Menendez at the DSCC had been absolutely wrong about everything since he started running that show and, right now, it looks like Murkowski was defeated by radical right teabagger Joe Miller-- the Sarah Palin candidate who ran on an anti-Choice platform (with an anti-Choice referendum on the ballot to pull he loons out to the polls). We won't know who won the GOP nod until Tuesday, when the dog sleds bring the last of the ballots in for counting but Miller is around 1,700 votes ahead of Murkowski and Murkowski is threatening to run as a Libertarian spoiler. Which means this is now a key race.

So while the DSCC wonders if they can somehow maneuver perennial loser Tony Knowles onto the ticket instead of McAdams-- or perhaps the brilliant Menendez can figure out how to get Cal Cunningham to be the candidate-- actual Alaskans are uniting behind McAdams with great enthusiasm-- and for all the same reasons the DSCC is so uninterested. He isn't a conservative corporate shill and isn't interested in enriching himself at the public's expense. The DSCC doesn't know how to deal with that kind of candidate. Grassroots Alaskans do. Our most dependable correspondent in Alaska, Phil Munger, has been raving to me about McAdams for months. And this week I finally spoke with him on the phone. He seemed committed to a kind of economic populism that results in winning campaigns in the West. In other words, Scott McAdams is more interested in solving real problems real American families face than in staking out ideological positions. So while his half-crazed probable opponent, nutty Mr. Miller, runs around burying guns in his backyard, Scott is talking with Alaska voters about jobs, the economy, the environment, energy and housing. Next weekend he'll be the Blue America candidate at Crooks and Liars (Saturday 11am, PT). I hope you'll come by to say hello and hear what he has to say. Meanwhile, if you want to help him get his message out, we added him to our Senate Candidates Worth Fighting For page. And if you want to prepare for next week's session, here's an extensive interview with Mayor McAdams that was done on Mudflats early in June.



Joe Miller was on Face The Nation today. I'm not sure if he's just terribly ignorant-- on a Sarah Palin level-- or a boldfaced liar, but his vision for America could arguably work if he figures out how to turn back the clock to the 17th or perhaps 18th Century. The Law of the Jungle just won't do in the 21st-- not even in Alaska, not even if we were all to follow his lead and start digging up the permafrost and burying guns in our backyards. This guy is clearly in a category of dangerous Know Nothings right up there with Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, Mike Lee, Pat Toomey, Ron Johnson and Marco Rubio-- the whole anti-USA Jim DeMint crowd of sociopaths and nihilists, who want to abolish Social Security, let Wall Street and Big Business "regulate" themselves, and make little things like healthcare, safe food and water and education the exclusive realm of the wealthy.