America's Other Original Sin: 'Preserving the Union'

by Thomas Neuburger

Almost all of America's ills — but not whole set — stem from a single source, its "original sin" if you will. America's real original sin was not its founding as an elite-dominated republic in the 1780s, but the importation of a large population of African slaves starting in the early 1600s. It's a commonplace to say that if slavery had never touched these shores, we'd be a vastly different nation today. 

But America may have a second original sin, a follow-on, and it's one that may surprise you. Consider this, from the opening of a good piece on the history of the Electoral College by Justin Fox published at Bloomberg:

The Many Unintended Consequences of the Electoral College

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- When it came time in 1787 to set the rules for choosing a president of the U.S., three of the principal authors of the Constitution — James Madison, Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson — argued that the best approach, the one most likely to inspire public confidence and national feeling, would be a nationwide popular vote.

All three also understood the prospects of this happening were, as Wilson put it, “chimerical.” It was obvious the method would instead have to reflect the two great (or awful, if you prefer) compromises hammered out at the Constitutional Convention over political representation. To keep the slave-holding states on board, the delegates had apportioned seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of a population count that considered slaves to be three-fifths of a person. And to assuage the smaller states they had created a Senate with two members per state, regardless of population. [emphasis added]

Consider the next-to-last sentence: "To keep the slave-holding states on board, the delegates had apportioned seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of a population count that considered slaves to be three-fifths of a person."

Now consider the American Civil War. That war was a violent and successful attempt, in essence, to also "keep the slave-holding states on board." It stripped them of their slaves, but not their deep history of racial animus, anger, exploitation, constant fear of rebellion. 

What if America's second original sin was this — the attempt to "keep the slave-holding states on board" at all? It wasn't at all a given that it should do this.

What if, in other words, the framers of the Constitution had written rules for only the non-slave states? It's entirely possible that the all of the states north of Maryland would have joined the Union, and left those south of that line to do ... what? Stay separate from each other? Form a proto-Confederacy? 

Who knows what they would have done? And why should we care, given what they've done to us since, from 1789 to today, as part of the "union" we so desperately cared about?

Had they departed the Constitution, or never been folded in, the rest of us would have been rid of them, having never been made to lie with them in the first place. And we certainly would not have had the Electoral College. Madison may well have won.

What If Lincoln Had Just Said, 'Fine, Go Away"?

Consider another juncture in our history when we could have been freed of them. What if Lincoln had not been so hell-bent on "preserving the Union" — had just said, "Let the slave states go and good riddance to them all"? 

By then the slave-induced wounds on the republic had already festered — the compromises that led to war left a mess in the west — but the massive national bloodletting might have been avoided, and the new, non-slave nation of the Northern Union would not have been continuously and politically roiled by the slave-holding South from the day of Emancipation till now. 

We're poisoned today by Lincoln's determination — at least that's one way to look at it.

But What About the Slaves Themselves?

The greatest obstacle to this way of thinking involves the state of the slaves themselves. The benefits of freedom as a result of the Civil War should not be understated or underestimated. It's certain that the history of Africans on this part of the American continent would have been vastly different had they not been freed in 1862. 

It's true that men like Frederick Douglass would still have achieved their greatness — he escaped slavery to Pennsylvania well before the war — but everyone who failed to escape would have remained in the wretched condition she or he was subject to prior to emancipation. So we cannot consider this thought lightly.

Yet we should consider it, at least in an alternative-history sense. What may have happened indeed had the Founders not bent the Constitution to include the slave states? What may have happened had Lincoln not valued union over peace?

In the first case, a number of possibilities present themselves, among them the non-consolidation, at least for a time, of the slaves states into one entity. This would have left each of them vulnerable, considering the smaller size of their individual economies, to shrink even further when the northern industrial powerhouse began to dominate the continent. 

As they watched the Northern Union grow stronger, would the southern states have sought to join with them, their hats in hand? Perhaps some of them might. 

More likely, though, they would eventually have banded together, but as the industrial North became the engine it was to become, even a united Southern Union would have been no match for it in real wealth, and the need to trade with the North would have placed natural restraints on southern power. 

In addition, a look at the history of Haiti is instructive. The Haitian Revolution occurred at the end of the 1790s and concluded in 1804. Would a weakened South have been subject to a similar rebellion, or many of them? If revolts had occurred, the Northern Union (I certainly would hope) would have found it in its interest to stand aside. (If they would actually have stood aside is another matter, but abolitionist voices were strong.)

A war may well have emerged between the Northern Union and the South, caused either by skirmishes launched by separate southern states or by the South itself united. But would it have gone the same as the actual war? It may well have ended earlier. 

In addition, if after the war the Northern Union had not tried to force the slave states back into the fold, the price of victory could simply have been to declare all the South's slaves free, with right of passage and citizenship to the non-slave Northern Union. 

Thus no Reconstruction. The occupying Northern Army could guarantee (to the extent that it could) the safety of every slave who wished to emigrate, then let the slaves states do what they wished to do without more interference, and left. 

The myth of the "war of Northern aggression" would never have been born, since the only way a broad war could have started would be by Southern aggression against its sovereign neighbor to the north.

Food for thought. Life for Africans and their descendants was horrible in the South before the actual Civil War, and after Reconstruction, ended by the corrupt bargain of 1876 (a "third original sin," if you will), life for African descendants became returned to terrible. The South did rise again, with lynchings, poverty, fear and social isolation replacing the slave cabins, whips and guns. 

Not an exact trade — slavery was still far worse — but not a good one either. This new bad life for African descendants lasted at least till the end of Jim Crow, if it ever ended at all.

The New Secessionists

Today many dream of a kind of new secession, one where California and the Pacific states are free of rules imposed by Alabama and Idaho; where Texas doesn't write creationist textbooks for Vermont; and one small-minded, power-hungry conservative from Kentucky can't put gay-hating climate deniers on the Supreme Court for the next four decades, to rule us from the bench.

Was the price of "union" worth it? Do we even have "union" at all, after all that effort and pain? Or would have been better for everyone concerned if the North were rid of the South from the very start?

Food for thought.

 

How Many Texans Will Fall For Russia's Secession Tricks? More Than Californians

Yesterday was California Admission Day. We became a state on September 9, 1850, the U.S. having forced Mexico to give up what is now the state after the Mexican-American War (1848). British and Spanish ships began exploring the coast of California by the mid-1500s. By the 1700s Spanish missionaries started building missions and the Spanish military started building forts and towns-- including what are now Los Angeles and San Jose. In 1821 when Mexico won its independence from Spain, California was part of the deal. Earlier (1812) the Russians had set up a trading post at Fort Ross in what is now Sonoma County and held onto it until 1841 when the Russians sold it to John Sutter. The Russians never had much of a presence beyond trapping sea otters and other furry creatures.

Fast forward to Trumpanzee America and there's a pitiful Russian effort underway to get California to secede from the U.S.-- Calexit. Two GOP morons Louis Marinelli, a Russian spy and obsessed homophobic fanatic, and Marcus Evans, a typical right-wing hate talk radio blowhard started "the movement," which is meant to appeal to low-info, self-identifying "progressives" and is headquartered in... Yekaterinburg, at once the 4th biggest city in Russia and the scene of the gruesome 1918 murder of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their children Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Tsarevich Alexei. Marinelli's "movement," Yes California, has "an embassy," paid for by the Kremlin, in Moscow. They need to get over half a million signatures to get the beginning of their secession plan onto the ballot next year. The chance of that happening is generally rated zero. However... the Russians may have more luck in another part of the U.S. that was once part of Mexico: Texas, a;best as part of an appeal to right-wing imbeciles, not left-wing imbeciles.

Earlier this week, Facebook announced that they had shuttered almost 500 accounts they believe were associated with a Russian company that spent some $100,000 on ad buys since June 2015. As a release from Facebook noted, “these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia.” Tabbing the accounts as “inauthentic,” Facebook added that the accounts and affiliated ads “focus[ed] on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum--  touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”

One other arena these actors may have targeted: secession movements within the U.S. At this point, it’s little secret that a number of American secession movements--  including Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and both white and black nationalists--  have constructed links with Russian actors, including those funded by the Kremlin... As Jonathon Morgan, the founder of Data for Democracy, noted a few months back in detailing the online footprint of Russia and California secessionists, the primary group pushing #Calexit was further “amplified by many of the same accounts that infiltrated conservative Twitter communities and promoted a pro-Trump, white nationalist agenda.” Not exactly an organic upswell.

But for all of the egregious links between Russia and California separatists, the earliest foray into ties between Moscow-linked actors and American secession movements, per my research, was found in my former home: Texas. Back in 2015, I put together a piece for Politico Magazine detailing the ties between Lone Star secessionists and Russia, dovetailing off a recent visit from the Texas “foreign minister” to St. Petersburg, where the Texan turned to Russian media to fan the flames of secession. As local Russian officials were threatening to deliver arms to Mexico (and unidentified “guerrillas”) to allow Mexico City to reclaim Texas, Texas secessionists themselves were finding sympathetic ears in Moscow.

...“Heart of Texas,” the Facebook site, for the past two years, existed as the most prominent Texas secession social media presence online. With over 225,000 followers as of summer 2017, the page, at one point last year, boasted more Facebook fans than the official Texas Democrat and Republican pages combined.

The page was laced with the kind of xenophobic, nativist, and anti-immigrant material many still associate with the Texas secession movement. Plenty of posts targeted Muslim immigrants and refugees, slammed liberals and LGBT activists, condemned vegetarians and Hillary Clinton. Taken on its face, the “Heart of Texas” page plugged material largely associated the American far-right--  an amalgamation of InfoWars conspiracy, neo-Confederate separatism, and white nationalist calls for a return to an America past. The page supported the armed insurgents in Malheur, pushed conspiracies surrounding Jade Helm and Antonin Scalia’s death, shared fake Founding Father quotes, and came with the type of Texas-first chauvinism few other states can match:

But there was always something off about the “Heart of Texas” page. There was no contact information ever listed, for instance. Unlike TNM, there was no address, no phone number. No individuals identified behind the “Heart of Texas” page. Unlike those fake news pages run by Macedonian teens, there were never any ads placed on the pages, meaning the project was either a bizarre labor of love or something backed by some kind of money. Likewise, while it’s unclear when the Facebook page was founded, the site’s Twitter page (twitter.com/itstimetosecede) went live in November 2015--  within the time-frame listed by Facebook for its surge of Russia-linked “inauthentic” accounts. And when it came to the site’s paltry “about” section, all we learned was that “Texas’s the land protected by Lord [sic].”

And then there were the typos. Horrible, no-good, laugh-till-you-cry typos, lining every other post, especially through 2016. There’s no possible way I can capture the types of aggressively strange typos-- often complete with Russian grammatical structures, no less--  in a synopsis, so I’ll let these posts provide an overview of the type of grammar and spelling the “Heart of Texas” page brought to bear:

If the site was limited to eye-bleeding typos and paeans to Dr. Pepper and Whataburger, the page might have been simply another odd, tone-deaf attempt from actors trying to collect fans who don’t care about things like literacy or fact-based analysis. Idiotic, sure--  but largely harmless.

Last November, however, the “Heart of Texas” page tried to roll into the real world, organizing a series of Nov. 5 rallies across the state. Claiming that “It’s time to say a strong NO to the establishment robbers,” the page said a Clinton victory would lead to “higher taxes to feed undocumented aliens,” more “refugees, mosques, and terrorist attacks,” and even the outright banning of guns. “We are free citizens of Texas and we’ve had enough of this cheap show on the screen,” the organizers wrote.

...As it is, the rallies didn’t generate much participation — only a few dozen people showed up at scattered sites across the state, if memory serves correctly. (In combing my screenshots, it doesn’t look like I snagged any screen-caps of the small turnout, unfortunately.) But in transferring its support from online to on-the-ground participation, the move mirrored, in a certain sense, the Columbian Chemicals plant explosion hoax in Louisiana, perpetrated, presumably, by Russian actors.

But the rally organization did do one thing. In gathering online support, the “Heart of Texas” page obtained identities of potential supporters of Texas secession-- supporters whose information the folks at the “Heart of Texas” said they would pass along to the TNM. That is to say, the “Heart of Texas” page-- a page likely run by foreign, presumably Russian, actors-- was putting its talents toward recruiting for a very real Texas secession organization, one that had already received funding from a Kremlin-backed group.

For the past few months, things seemed hunky-dory for the folks behind “Heart of Texas.” They chugged along, posting much of the same material, albeit recently (and unfortunately, for those laughing along) cleaning up many of the site’s typos.

Then, Facebook announced it was cleaning up hundreds of “inauthentic” accounts linked to Russia. And like that, the “Heart of Texas,” along with its Twitter page, was gone. Just like that, Facebook’s most popular Texas secession page was no more.

While no Russian actors have come forward to claim responsibility for the site, there’s any amount of circumstantial evidence--  the typos and grammatical structure; the strategic goals behind the site, and the fact that it was shuttered at the same time as hundreds of other Russia-linked fake pages; the parallel rhetoric put forth by other Russia-linked, U.S. domestic politics-related pages; even the ties with the TNM, a group already supported materially by a Kremlin-financed outfit--  pointing to actors in Russia as the ones pulling the site’s secession strings.

So RIP, “Heart of Texas.” We hardly knew ye. (Literally.) Looking forward to seeing where pro-secession foreign actors turn to next on Facebook--  and where we can enjoy those wonderful typos once more. After all, as “Heart of Texas” told us, for those in love with Texas shape, always be ready for a Texas size.

Is Civil War Brewing in the Democratic Party? A Guest Post By J.C. Peters

For weeks, it appeared the Republican Party was headed for imminent civil war. Eminent Republicans disavowed their own presidential nominee, Senators and Representatives seesawed, there were the #NeverTrumpers and the #RepublicanwomenforHillary. It seemed all but certain that Donald Trump would cause a split within the GOP and start his own party (and media empire) after inevitably losing the election.

But after Trump’s stunning victory the shoe is suddenly on the other foot. On Wednesday evening, angry progressive millennials took to the streets in several cities to protest Trump’s victory, carrying their favorite anti-Trump signs and chanting ‘Not my President’, in defiance of that one cardinal rule without which democracy cannot function: that the losing side must accept defeat and acknowledge the mandate of the side that prevailed.

Meanwhile, in California there is talk of secession. Yes, secession. Apparently it is no longer the exclusive go-to implausible option of deeply conservative Americans howling at the liberal course of the country, now progressives, too, have begun dreaming about their own Shangri-La, where life is communal, organic and morally superior.

For progressive millennials it was quite the year. First they were energized by an angry white voter from Vermont who made European-style socialism cool again, talking about the need for a political revolution, of fixing a rigged economy, making education and health care free for everybody and doubling the minimum wage.

Then they were zapped by the ugly reality of party politics, learning the hard way that support and favors typically don’t go to the outlier who wants to shake up system, but to the candidate who will defend the status quo, who has rubbed elbows with the establishment and knows what they want to hear.

But in a time where many are fed up with a gridlocked Washington that seems more intertwined with Wall Street and corporate America than with the will of the people, running a Washington insider whom big banks pay $250,000 per speech against a populist outsider who says he is going to fix Washington and bring back jobs, turned out to be a political blunder of epic proportions.

If the Democratic Convention had instead nominated Bernie Sanders, things could have turned out very different. For one, he might have been more successful in getting Democrats-- especially millennials-- to the polls.

But perhaps even more important is that Sanders, like Trump, is a populist, and even after almost thirty years in Washington, he is still perceived as an outsider. He has railed against the moneyed interests, against the rigged economy, against globalization. And when it comes to the economy and how to make it work again for the middle class, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump’s views really aren’t all that different.

This election was never about race, at least not for the people in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, who propelled Trump to victory. It was about jobs. They didn’t vote for Trump because he is white and male, they voted for him because instead of calling them a basket of deplorables, he vowed to be their champion and bring back their jobs. Many of them could have voted just as easily for Bernie Sanders.

One thing is certain: Donald Trump is not a classic Republican and Bernie Sanders is not a classic Democrat. They are essentially third party candidates running on the platform of two parties who between them have nominated all the presidents since the mid-1850s. The fact that they did so well, tells us something about the direction these two parties must move in if they are to remain relevant in future elections.

Because oddly enough, these two septuagenarians are the political bellwethers of a new age, where rapid technolization and robotization, together with ever expanding globalization, are pushing blue-collar workers outside of the production process at an alarming rate, forcing the federal government to step in on a scale not seen in the United States since Franklin Roosevelt introduced his New Deal in the 1930s.

Considering this and the stinging defeat it just suffered running a status quo candidate, the Democratic Party would do well to heed the call of progressive millennials and move to the left. If it doesn’t, it could well be looking at a strong, new progressive party to its left before the next presidential election.

J.C. Peters is a legal philosopher and historian who frequently publishes about U.S. constitutional law, American and European history and foreign policy issues. He is also the author of the political thriller The Dog and its Day, about an assassination attempt at the Republican presidential candidate.

Crackpot Utopia: The Year in Republican Crazy, 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)
• The final Crazyspeak of the Year nominee -- and also the winner!


Yes, it's Sarah Palin TeeVee!

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. TV for Dummies: Sarah Palin launches her own channel

America's biggest, most strident attention whore (eat your heart out Louie Gohmert) just couldn't get enough. It wasn't enough for her to have ruined any chance (thankfully) that John McCain ever had of becoming president. And it wasn't enough that FOX "News" gave her a platform for her brand of incoherent babble from the republican alternate universe. It also wasn't enough that she'd already had some sort of Sarah Palin's Alaska show that apparently appealed to those who watch things like Gator Boys,Swamp People, and Ancient Aliens. Nope. She had to go and announce the formation of her own Internet TV channel.

Here in New York we already have what is known as Public Access Television, which basically consists of shows like Tele-Psychic, where viewers can call in and get their fortune told. There are also all manner of interview shows replete with ranters and cranks that any of us would quickly sidestep on the sidewalk, but hey, presumably at least a few people do watch these things. On my TV, it comes with my regular Time Warner Cable.

Ah, but Palin doesn't even have her show on cable. She's Internet-only, right along with shows that people run from their back porches and basements where they spout on about everything from how to win millions playing cards to surefire dating tips to having been abducted and the superiority of the "Aryan race."

There is a difference, though. With Palin TV, you have to pay for the privilege! $9.95 a month! Worth every penny? I doubt it, but her channel was launched by TAPP, a backer of online personality-driven programming. Jon Klein, formerly of CNN, is the founder and CEO of TAPP, and he explains the details in this clip from Bloomberg News-



As the clip describes, Palin is doing the show from her own house, with cameras everywhere. Talk about wanting exposure! Anyway, with all of this in mind, and feeling full of compassion, I thought I might try to help Ms. Palin out with some programming suggestions. My idea is to provide her with something she badly needs: focus.

Some concrete, common-sense shows may just make her enterprise a success. If not, she can try being a televangelist next, and get her money by persuading old ladies to send her checks. Frankly, I think that's inevitable, but in the meantime, here's what I've come up with:

If at First You Don't Secede
Sarah revisits her support of the Alaska secession movement.

A Tour of Russia from My House

Sarah's Magazine Club
Remember when she told CBS she gets her news from "all of the magazines"?

My Man Zimmerman
Florida killer gets his own hunting show, where he hunts down Skittles-carrying youth from the channel's helicopter. Or, sometimes, just walks around the neighborhood trying to find someone to provoke a fight with.

The Exxon-Valdez Hoax
Palin hosts a weekly five-hour documentary that claims that the grounding of the Exxon-Valdez and the resulting catastrophic oil spill never happened.

The Weather with Alex Jones
Get up-to-date info on where President Obama is spraying chemtrails to feed the next Sandy-style superstorm.

Snowmobile NASCAR!

Cooking with Sarah!
Get her special recipes: moose chili, Mama Grizzly pepper steaks, baby seal paté, etc.

Sarah Palin Gear
Her version of QVC, where she and Ted Nugent model all the latest in her own line of heavily logoed Alaska outdoor and indoor wear and demonstrate how to kill anything that moves.

Adults Say the Darndest Things
Palin turns the rest of the 24 hours into meth-inflamed viewer content, filed with republican ravings about gays, secret Muslims, birth certificates, and whatever else viewers want to discuss. Brought to you by Reynolds Aluminum Foil!

Well, Sarah, I hope this helps, but you do need to get a grip. Posting those pictures of Trig using the dog as a stepstool and thinking this shows something great? Not a great way to go.




2. Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 17: Arizona schools superintendent John Huppenthal (rhymes with Neanderthal)

Wait, wait, don't tell us! You're, uh, Falcon9! Are we right?

For a long time Huppenthal, the Arizona superintendent of public instruction, was cowardly, throwing out his vitriolic bigotry behind a secret Internet identity. Calling himself Falcon9 -- among other noms de spam, apparently -- this Internet troll offered, among other genius utterances:

• "The Mexican American Studies classes use the exact same technique that Hitler used in his rise to power. Take an historical example of injustice, cast it in racial terms, and fan the flame of resentment."

Jeez, and all this time I thought it was people like Roger Ailes, Drudge, Breitbart, entire petri dishes of republican congresscreeps, and crazy old Dr. Strangelove Cheney that did that.

• "I don't mind them selling Mexican food as long as the menus are mostly in English."

But Superintendent Neanderthal, what about Italian-restaurant menus? Or French-restaurant menus? Why do you single out Mexican-restaurant menus? Hmmm.

• "We all need to stomp out balkanization. No Spanish radio stations, no Spanish billboards, no Spanish TV stations, no Spanish newspapers."

I can walk a half block from where I'm writing this and buy Italian newspapers, German newspapers, Greek newspapers, Russian newspapers, but you, Superintendent Neanderthal, you single out the Mexican ones. My cable service provides all sorts of TV stations, including some that speak only republican 24 hours a day. How, shall I say it?, how angry white bozo republican of you! You like FOX and CNN idiots that turn English into some sort of fourth-world mental-hospital gibberish, but you can't stomach even the idea of a Spanish TV station? Whatsa matter, moron, did you eat a bad enchilada?

Upwards of two million Latinos live in this idiot's state, the state where he is the superintendent of schools! Children of all backgrounds will learn how to speak English in those schools, just like they always have. They will become bilingual, a definite advantage in today's world. I personally know a young woman who speak eight languages. She lost her job at Sony and applied for a job at the United Nations. They hired her in a heartbeat.

Oh, that's right, you wingnut clowns hate the U.N.; black helicopters and all that. I hear it even promotes peace in the world! What's a munitions manufacturer or war profiteer to do?

Note to readers: No prejudicial insult to Neanderthals was intended in my effort to make a point here about a certain class of people who long to return us to the distant past. A group of people called scientists, not recognized by modern-day republicans, now tell us that Neanderthals had a brain capacity equal to our own. Whether or not they used those brains is another question, and the answer may have something to do with why they no longer walk among us. Or do they?


3. And now, the final Crazyspeak of the Year nominee -- and also the winner!

Before revealing his identity, let me stress that all of the nominees are honored just by being nominated. And not just the formal nominees. In fact, I considered all of the crazyspeakers I wrote about in all 13 parts of "Crackpot Utopia: The Year in Republican Crazy." They all do their best to represent their plague of a political party.

But this particular nutball went a step farther. He showed what kind of country republicans are aiming for by writing it down in a book: his dream of Reagan's "shining city on a hill." I give you --

Crazyspeak of the Year Award winner:
Former Reagan aide Douglas MacKinnon

Douglas MacKinnon is not only a former aide to one of the worst presidents this country has ever had, he is the author of The Secessionist States of America: The Blueprint for Creating a Traditional Values Country . . . Now. In his book Mackinnon describes his vision for a new country made up of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. It's a country based on the warped, twisted republican definition of Christianity. He even claims to speak for the Founding Fathers when, in full flaming paranoia mode, he bitches about rights for gay people.

His easy fix for all of this? Secession by those three carefully chosen states. Perhaps the only surprise is that he does not include Texas, but he has his reason. Even though he declares himself "a big fan of Texas," he notes, "There have been a number of incursions into Texas and other places from some of the folks in Mexico." Impure! Impure! Mongrelized! Shame on you, Texas! So for him the three nutball states he has chosen will be just fine, thank you.

MacKinnon wants to go back to 1860 and start over. The South should secede once again. After all, for the righties the Civil War never ended. It just became a war without borders, and that is what the republicans are up to. It's not just a culture war as the media would have us believe. It is a war, period. And MacKinnon's solution is to get his parcel of land where all his kind can set up an ideal republican country. Frankly, if they'd all leave us and go there, it might not be an entirely bad idea. Good riddance.

About the first Civil War, Mackinnon says that President Lincoln (a Republican back when being a Republican meant something very different than it does today) --

waged an illegal war that was in fact not declared against the South after the South basically did what we're talking about in this book now, in terms of peacefully, legally and constitutionally leaving the union.

Mackinnon wants his new "traditional values" country to be named Reagan. Let that sink in; a country named Reagan.

I can't imagine anyone not wanting a dollar for every time the word "Reagan" spews out of the mouth of a republican. You can have a debate stage of nine presidential wannabes and all nine will be falling over themselves and each other to say their magic word the most times. You half expect them to have a fistfight just to be the first to say it. To them and their gullible listeners, the magic word stands in for Ronald Reagan's idea of America being a "shining city on a hill."

But what do "shining city on a hill" and the word "Reagan" actually mean, below the surface, to today's republicans?

It's clear from both republican policies and rhetoric that that "shining city on a hill" is a land where the oppression of minorities is the status quo. Any minority is to be kept down. It is a land where there is to be no minimum wage. It is a land where advances in medical science are to be available only to a small but powerful ruling class. It is a land where gay people must shut up and retreat to the nearest closet. It is a land where even voting privileges that have been fought for and died for are to be taken away. It is a land where there is no middle class, only the very rich and the impoverished who are forced to subsist on fast food of ever-lowering quality, the modern-day equivalent of a bowl of gruel. "Please sir, I want some more." No, you can't have more! Hell, no, you can't!



In the republican "shining city on a hill" there are no regulations that might keep beaches clean, keep banks from robbing us, prevent cancers, or even give the lower rungs of society a fair chance. A land of no regulations is a land of anarchy with the ruling class thinking that it will always be above the fray.

That "shining city on a hill" is Crackpot Utopia.

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.

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America Would Be SO Much Better Off Without Them

This week, Harry Reid says he's bringing the Energy Savings and Industrial and Competitiveness Act (S. 2262), sponsored by Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Rob Portman (R-OH) to the floor for a vote. Support for a bill that should be the height of uncontroversial is widespread... on both sides of the aisle. But Republican obstructionists, content with nothing less than the complete disruption of an orderly functioning of government have vowed to prevent passage. The obstructionists, led by extremists like Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Mike Lee and the Southerners, still refuse to recognize Obama as a legitimate president and vote against virtually everything and use any and all opportunities to cause dissension and discord. They were right in the 1860's and the North was wrong to keep them in the Union. They should secede, the sooner the better.

The vote on the bill, which seeks to boost building codes, train workers in energy-efficient building technologies, help manufacturers become more efficient and bolster conservation efforts at federal agencies, will probably come tomorrow. Obstructionists wanted to attach another Obamacare repeal to it but are now pushing for a binding vote on the Keystone XL Pipeline.



One of the neo-fascist Republican groups, Heritage Action, Jim DeMint's far right PAC, is demanding GOP senators vote NO. They claim the bill is paternalistic. "When the government forces efficiency measures on people," they said in a memo to right-wing true believers on behalf of their financiers at the Big Oil companies, "it takes away choices or, at the very least, overrides them. When families and firms are not spending money for the most energy-efficient technology, it is not that they are acting irrationally-- they simply have other preferences, budget constraints, and other tradeoffs."

Other GOP obstructionists are working to attach amendments to push for natural gas exports (which will drive energy prices up in America, something many of the top Republican donors would like to see) and others are trying to add wording that blocks the Environmental Protection Agency's carbon emissions limits for power plants.

Do you think I was being rash above when I was advocating allowing them to secede? They add nothing at all worthwhile and prevent any kind of progress. America would be so much better off without them. Just let them all vote and make up their own minds about who goes with Texas and Mississippi and who stays with America. Let's hope Florida, Virginia and North Carolina stay.

If Secession Is Good Enough For Scotland, Why Not Texas?

We'll never know for sure how deeply involved Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) was in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured another 700. But we do know that the militia groups involved were in touch with his office about the bombing and that he has been highly sympathetic to their paranoid-- if not psychotic-- cause. And now he seems to be gaining traction on the far right fringes of the Texas Republican Party in his deranged primary run against John Cornyn.

A former drug addict and derelict who dropped out of school for what he calls "partying syndrome," the Michigan-born Stockman would love to see Texas and other Confederate states secede from the United States. And with Scotland getting ready for secede from the U.K., don't be too surprised if a Stockman victory against Cornyn leads to a more open discussion about Texas leaving the Union again. Wait… you didn't know Scotland is in the process of breaking up with the rest of the U.K.? David Bowie asked them not to last night-- though he himself abandoned the U.K. for NYC long ago and didn't even attend the award ceremony where he "made" the remark.

Texas departing-- hopefully with Mississippi-- doesn't have to be as wrenching as it was the first time they tried going it alone. And, writing for the Financial Times yesterday, Gideon Rachman offers Scotland as the example of a good breakup, while admitting that "there are remarkably few examples of nations breaking up in a civilized way."

George Osborne, the UK chancellor, had travelled to the Scottish capital to give a speech warning that an independent Scotland would not be allowed to keep the pound as its currency. A few days later, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said that it would be “very difficult, if not impossible” for an independent Scotland to join the EU. This is tough, even brutal, politics-- and it has provoked complaints of bullying from pro-independence campaigners.

The international reaction to the Scottish debate makes me think that the prime minister got something wrong in his speech on February 7. Mr Cameron argued: “If we lost Scotland... we would pull the rug from our reputation.” On the contrary, I think the UK government’s willingness to allow the centuries-old union to be dissolved peacefully is a boost to the country’s reputation. To adopt Mr Cameron’s marketing speak, the British brand is built around tolerance, the rule of law and democracy. There is no better demonstration of those values than the Scottish referendum.

There are remarkably few examples of nations breaking up in a civilised way. The most famous is the velvet divorce between the Czechs and the Slovaks in 1993. A better analogy to Scotland’s situation may be Norway’s referendum on independence from Sweden in 1905. After briefly contemplating war, the Swedes thought better of it and negotiated a divorce.

Given its brutal history, the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 was surprisingly peaceful-- but the Russians have since fought a savage war to prevent the secession of Chechnya. Even in democratic Europe, Spain is refusing to contemplate the idea of an independence referendum for Catalonia. The US, of course, fought a civil war to save its union. If modern-day Texas decided to secede from the US-- as Rick Perry, its governor, once hinted that it might-- my guess is that Washington would once again fight to keep the country together.

So why is the UK government behaving differently? Why has it decided to imitate Canada, which allowed Quebec to hold a referendum on independence, rather than China or the US which take a harder line with Taiwan and Texas? Probably because the government in Westminster recognises that the UK is a union of separate nations with historically distinct identities: morally and practically it can only be kept together on the basis of consent. Britain did put up a fight to prevent Irish independence, almost a century ago, and that was clearly a mistake. Ending the long-running Troubles in Northern Ireland also involved making it explicit that the province’s destiny is ultimately up to the people who live there.

The Idiocracy Files (Redux), Part 3: Republicans Seek to Create a New Country. It's Called Crackpotopia!!!

[We continue our encore presentation of Noah's Idiocracy series. And don't forget Noah's new "Need a last-minute Christmas gift suggestion?," "50 Years Ago Today: The Beatles," and "A Tale of Two Popes -- the one in the Vatican and the one in North Carolina."]

[On Wednesday Noah began chronicling a spate of 2012 "Idiocracy moments" that recalled for him Mike Judge's 2006 film Idiocracy, a look 500 years into the future at a world gone, well, you know. Yesterday he was back with more, and still his list of sightings overflowed. So today we have Part 3. -- Ed.]

by Noah

All hail the new confederacy -- of dunces! For those about to secede, we salute you, with a finger raised high!

We knew that, if President Obama were to be reelected, the Republicans would completely lose what tiny remnants of sanity they had left. The precedent was there back in 2008, when their leaders at the FOX "News" channel and the rest of the hate-pundit universe went all crackers all the time after the first election of the man Republicans refer to as Barack Hussein Dark Lord Muslim Obama. They just keep going and going and going, beating their drum like some Energizer Bunny of doom, pushing the envelope of crazy into regions known only in asylums.

Sadly though, there can never be enough syringes of calming thorazine or other antipsychotic medications for all of the media wackjobs and health-hatin', gun-totin' citizen nutballs out there. With the reelection of their imaginary black-skin boogie man, they, their political allies, and the gullible subjects of their psychotic propaganda have entered a universe from which there seems to be no return. We are fully in a Civil War now, and the disgruntled want to secede.

IT'S NO SURPRISE THAT TEXAS LEADS THE WAY!

Even their freely chosen governor, Rick Perry, has hinted as much (with video at the link) as far back as 2009.

Even better, "actor" and McCain cheerleader Chuck Norris wants to be the president of Texas when that glorious day comes.

I may run for president of Texas. That need may be a reality sooner than we think. If not me, someone, someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star state, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state.

Chuckie wrote all that in his column in WorldNetDaily (link above). Yes, the folks who gave us "Hillary killed Vince Foster" and, much more recently, had their Erik Rush (who is also a regular FOX "News" contributor) tweeting that armed resistance may be just the ticket.

I suppose suggesting that we shoot them wouldn't be taken very well, although that is precisely what it came down to 236 years ago.

Here's the video that Rush tweeted at the time.



It's by a guy named Christopher Greene, who says that not only is President Obama using the horrific Sandy Hook murders to take away guns and subvert liberties, but concentration camps for those in Obama's way are next on the horizon. To the gullible low-information, angry citizen, this kind of thing is all too plausible and provides a target for their fears and frustrations. To people like Rush and Greene, what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School was some sort of CIA psy-ops job. Greene is all over the place, as you will see. It's a fascinating look into the minds of the deranged, but Greene's brand of psychotic lunacy reaches a lot of people, especially when it is being promoted by FOX on-air personalities like Erik Rush.

It's not just about what we can see on FOX "News." It's about the people they promote and their views. When you take it all in together -- FOX, the WorldNetDailies, and the Christopher Greenes that do Internet broadcasting from the basement fringes or even abandoned-missile-silo survivalist encampments -- can it be any wonder that so many of the angry and foolish now talk about secession?

Remember Michele Bachmann's pronouncements about FEMA Camps? People believe this stuff, for real. Let's not forget that the Republican Party has already run a candidate for vice president who has ties to the Alaskan Secession movement and 50 million people voted for the ticket. She now has a job on FOX.



IT'S AMAZING HOW A BROADCAST CAN
MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE ANYTHING!

Back on Halloween night in 1938, Orson Welles, then only 23, did his now-famous radio broadcast of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds over the CBS network. It was a story about an invasion of Martian monsters.



It set off a panic among many of the listeners as they believed an actual Martian invasion was taking place in New Jersey. Just being on the radio gave the story a sheen of credibility, just like being on the TeeVee or Internets does in today's world. You think Roger Ailes doesn't know this?

Times were already uneasy. The economy was showing some signs of recovery from the Great Depression but was still shaky and news of war was in the air. So was paranoia. Sound familiar? Watch the clip. Note the call for able-bodied citizens to report to the sheriff to do battle with the monsters. Note the mention of "being watched" by the enemy as they planned our demise. To way too many Republicans, that monster is a Marxist secret-Muslim Martian who has already taken over the White House.

************

SO WE CAN LAUGH AT THE 2012 FREAKSHOW . . .

. . . that was Rick Perry and Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum and Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann and, finally Willard Mitt Romney, as seemingly each week another of these people became the leading spokesperson or candidate of the Republican Party. We can laugh at the real leader of the party being an obese, sweaty man with a bag of Oxycontin in one hand and a bag of Dominican Viagra in the other who makes millions feeding the paranoid hate-filled frenzy.

We can laugh at the fringe hucksters and the fringe true believers alike, but, as we well know, not everyone is laughing. People who have critical-thinking powers will always laugh at such people -- laughing at some more than others. But half of the country is taken in by their warped messages about banning contraception, about rape just being another form of insemination, about how the president of the United States wasn't born here, about gays not being equal, about the evil of teachers unions (which among other things create gun-free zones), about how the very air isn't in danger, and how certain voters just "want stuff" (you know, free stuff), and, lastly but not the least, you better stock up on some weaponry and do it fast, because Obama is a-comin' for ya, you betcha.

WHERE WILL IT END?

Where does FOX want it to end? What violence does Rupert Murdoch crave? In service of whom? What will set the employees of FOX off into a wave of high-fiving? We now have a Civil War without borders so it's not just an issue of which states want to go. Republicans are everywhere. I'm very tempted to say, "Just let the South go again." They will never stop fighting the first Civil War. When Texas goes, we can keep Austin and San Antonio and just set them up like postwar Berlin.

People in the other states who want to go too can go, I suppose. I'll even give 'em a choice: They don't have to call their new country Crackpotopia. They can call it Transvaginalia, for all I care. If they don't want to be here, get the fuck out. Let them all go. They blather on about the founding fathers and the Constitution a lot, but they don't seem to understand that we were originally built as a confederation of disparate colonies/states working together.

Let them all go and take all their passionate negativity and nihilism and set up their dream Taliban in their right-to-work-for-less states. They can all go, as soon as they agree to accept no more money whatsoever from the United States federal government. They must service and secure their own ports with their own money. They must close their military bases, which the U.S. government pays for with our taxes. They must form their own Coast Guard and Navy to protect their shores. Let their highways disintegrate into nothingness, and let their bridges collapse. Let them be responsible for their own borders with no foreign aid -- that dreaded foreign aid, from us.

Let them turn to full-time moonshining and meth-cooking to raise whatever money they need. Let them teach their kids that their forebears rode dinosaurs at the beginning of time 6000 years ago. Let them feed themselves as their states turn into modern-day dustbowls because of the global warming they don't believe in. They can live on a diet of Twizzlers and jerky. Twinkies are no longer on the table, since those mean, mean union workers wanted a fair shake.

There must also be no federal involvement from us in regulating the safety of any other food they can process or water they drink. They can get their own Centers for Disease Control. They are on their own. Let them all die of ebola, cholera, and, perhaps the inevitable, cannibalism. Eventually, of course, they will form their own versions of Hamas, and we will begin shelling eachother. They will miss the irony.

THE IDIOCRACY FILES

The world of Mike Judge's 2006 film Idiocracy, projected for 500 years into the future, arrives 494 years early!

"As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent, but as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution doesn't necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species."

-- The Narrator, Idiocracy

Part 1: 2012: The Year That Idiocracy Moments Broke the Scale
Part 2: Beware the Girl Scouts, Sheldon Adelson, and more
Part 3: Republicans Seek to Create a New Country. It's Called Crackpotopia!!!
Part 4: Special Arkansas Edition
Part 5: The U.S. $enate Meets with Its Landlord

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"The problem with modern Republicans is not fanaticism in the few but cowardice in the many" (Garry Wills)

Why isn't this man crying?

"Republicans say, 'Remember one thing. We are standing up for an important principle. And as soon as we figure out what it is, you will be the first to know.' "

-- Bill Maher

"John Boehner holds the nation hostage because the Tea Party holds him hostage. The problem with modern Republicans is not fanaticism in the few but cowardice in the many, who let their fellows live in virtual secession from laws they disagree with."

-- Garry Wills (see below)

by Ken

By the time you read this, it's possible that somehow the deal agreed to by Senate Majority and Minority Leaders Harry Reid and "Miss Mitch" McConnell will somehow have slithered through the Republican-"controlled" House, thereby triumphantly punting the CR and debt-limit crises down the field all the way to . . . February! When we can pencil in a crisis do-over, to play out in the new Congress. [No, of course not! As a commenter pointed out, I've jumped the gun a year here.]

Or then again, maybe not.

Amid all the chatter about what House Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner should or shouldn't have done in the present crisis, and what he can and can't do, and whether his speakership can survive his party conference's current woes, it's well to remember that it's not as if he ever had any credentials for the job, or any larger ambitions for it, beyond his political lifetime of doggedly loyal service to his party and the moneyed interests it represents.

I had to laugh -- what are you going to do, laugh or cry? -- when I read the Washington Post's political Mr. Fix-It, Chris Cillizza, in a post called "How John Boehner couldn't win," purporting to challenge the conventional wisdom about Sunny John: which is to say that he "gambled and lost," that he "picked a strategy and he picked wrong." The challenge to the CW came in the form of an e-mail from an unidentified "Republican consultant loyal to Boehner," who wrote him:

Had Boehner not pursued his course of action the past two weeks, the conference would have fractured and the entire leadership would have faced some sort of challenge. Even some of the more rational members of the conference needed this confrontation over the debt and Obamacare. He did what he had to do to keep his conference intact.

The only thing is, in the end our Chris doesn't buy it, arguing: "Boehner’s error was in realizing far too late that consensus [among House Republicans] was a pipe dream." He thinks Sunny John should have "force[d] people to pick sides way back when," to choose between being "either on the team or off the team," though he realizes that quite possibly "saying something like that would have meant that Boehner would never have become Speaker in the first place."

Well, I think it's hard to disagree that the idea of a "mission as speaker as, well, speaking for the entirety of the Republican conference" was an error. But it passes over what seems to me a more glaring error, maybe even "the" error -- the one expressed in the highlighted sentence.

It shows up in harshly spotlighted form in a post filed last night by the Post's Rosalind S. Helderman and Jackie Kucinich, "Boehner sees his control of House Republicans slip away." Therein, Helderman and Kucinich note that "as evening fell over the Capitol, it was increasingly clear who had control over the House GOP: no one." They go on (boldface emphasis added):

Boehner struggled to accommodate his most vocal and hard-line members, adjusting his plan to address their concerns only hours after laying it out in a morning meeting with his caucus.

But even after the rewrite, even after cajoling lawmakers in small groups -- attempting to convince them that passing a Republican plan in the House would give the party more power to win concessions from Democrats than if they allowed the Senate to take the lead -- there were still not enough votes to pass it.

Before the defeat, some of Boehner's friends, particularly former House members now in the Senate, fretted about the impact of another failure.

"Of all the damage to be done politically here, one of the greatest concerns I have is that, somehow, John Boehner gets compromised," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who entered the House in 1995 and was involved in several coup attempts at the time against Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). "You know, I was involved in taking one speaker down; I'd like to be involved in keeping this speaker, because, quite frankly, I think he deserves it."

I've let the quote run on to include the business about Lindsey Graham and Newt Gingrich mostly 'cause I think it's hilarious. By the time we're reduced to talking about whether Sunny John is more worthy of keeping his job than Newt was, with Lindsey Graham as arbiter, we've entered the realm of pure farce. No, what I really wanted to quote is that first sentence, and in particular the first part: "Boehner struggled to accommodate his most vocal and hard-line members, adjusting his plan to address their concerns . . . ."

Probably this hit me so forcefully because I was coming off a new New York Review of Books blogpost by Garry Wills, "Back Door Secession," in which Wills writes: "It is not much noticed that parts of the country act as if they had already seceded from the union."

They do not recognize laws and Supreme Court decisions, or constitutional guarantees of free speech. For instance seventeen states have violated the First Amendment by preventing or hindering the work of "navigators" -- organizations and businesses funded by the federal government to educate people on ways to follow the rules of the Affordable Care Act. Some groups routinely attempt to block health centers from advising women on the legal right to contraception. Eight state legislatures this year have passed voter restrictions that may violate the Fourteenth Amendment, and similar measures are pending in other states.

"The people behind these efforts," Wills argues, "are imitating what the Confederate States did even before they formally seceded in 1861. Already they ran a parallel government, in which the laws of the national government were blatantly disregarded."

Just as the Old South compelled the national party to shelter its extremism, today’s Tea Party leaders make Republicans toe their line. Most Republicans do not think laws invalid because the president is a foreign-born Muslim with a socialist agenda. But they do not renounce, or even criticize, their partners who think that. The rare Republican who dares criticize a Rush Limbaugh is quickly made to repent and apologize. John Boehner holds the nation hostage because the Tea Party holds him hostage. The problem with modern Republicans is not fanaticism in the few but cowardice in the many, who let their fellows live in virtual secession from laws they disagree with.

Republican leaders in Congress are too cowardly to say that the voting restrictions being enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures are racially motivated. They accept the blatant lie that they are aimed only at non-existent "fraud." They will not crack the open code by which their partners claim to object to Obama because he is a "foreign-born Muslim" when they really mean "a black man." They will not admit that the many procedural laws adopted to prevent abortion are in violation of the law as defined by the Supreme Court. They go along with the pretence that all the new rules are "for women’s health." De facto acts of secession are given a pseudo-legal cover.

Thus we get people who say they do not want the government in control of women’s health under Obamacare -- just after they order doctors to give women vaginal probes the doctors do not consider medically necessary. Or that they do not want the government telling Americans what they should do about their health -- just before they prohibit "navigators" from even discussing choices about their health. The same people who oppose background checks for gun purchases now want background checks for anyone the government authorizes to explain the law to people. This is a gag rule to rank with antebellum bans on the discussion of slavery.

Wills argues that we already have two basic conditions that "resemble the pre-Civil War virtual secessionism: "the holding of a whole party hostage to its most extreme members," and "the disproportionate representation of the extreme faction" -- "thanks to carefully planned gerrymandering of districts by Republican state legislatures," an advantage that "will be set in stone if all the voter restriction laws now being advanced block voters who might upset the disproportion."

"The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism," Wills says, "is a resistance to majority rule."

The Old South went from virtual to actual secession only when the addition of non-slave Western states threatened their disproportionate hold on the Congress and the Court (which had been Southern in makeup when ruling on Dred Scott). It is difficult to conjecture what will happen if the modern virtual seceders do not get their way. Their anti-government rhetoric is reaching new intensity. Some would clearly rather ruin than be ruled by a "foreign-born Muslim." What will the Republicans who are not fanatics, only cowards, do in that case?

Viewed from this angle, Sunny John's "error" set in when he "struggled to accommodate his most vocal and hard-line members." And "the Republicans who are not fanatics, only cowards," sat by and watched. I mean, it's not as if the non-crackpot members of Sunny John's caucus are reasonable or even necessarily sane people, except by comparison with the Total Loon Faction. So perhaps it's not so surprising that they can't or won't see the line that has been crossed.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Sedition, Secession... Right Wing Dogs Are Not Giving Up No Matter What The Polls Say

Please watch the Bill Moyers video above. We're going to talk a little about it in a moment. But before we do, I want to remind you who Paul Ryan is. If you had just landed from Uranus or Neptune and perused the Beltway media, you would come away thinking Ryan is a "serious" and "thoughtful" mainstream political leader. He isn't. He's a phony, a fraud and a film flam man, just like Paul Krugman has been pointing out for years. And now he's leading the House Republicans in a dangerous game of chicken with the economic well-being of the entire world. While Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was acknowledging that “You can blame us [Republicans], we’ve overplayed our hand, that’s for damn sure," Eric Boehlert tweeted that "If you think GOP is unpopular now wait until they default and gut every retirement fund and every college saving plan in America." You may not have to wait long-- not if Ryan and his deranged and desperate colleagues keep up the game-playing. When the House Republicans met in conference Friday, Boehner and Cantor "began the meeting trying to prepare their troops for the likelihood that they would have to adopt a deal cut in the Senate. Both leaders explained that the White House is no longer willing to negotiate with the House, that McConnell and Reid were talking, and that a bipartisan agreement is likely to emerge that will need the House’s approval.

But instead of absorbing this painful reality, some rank-and-file Republicans grew visibly excited about the prospect of opposing such a deal, said one person in the room. This defiance was fed by Ryan, who stood up and railed against the Collins proposal, saying the House could not accept either a debt-limit bill or a government-funding measure that would delay the next fight until the new year.

According to two Republicans familiar with the exchange, Ryan argued that the House would need those deadlines as “leverage” for delaying the health-care law’s individual mandate and adding a “conscience clause”-- allowing employers and insurers to opt out of birth-control coverage if they find it objectionable on moral or religious grounds-- and mentioned tax and entitlement goals Ryan had focused on in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

Ryan’s speech appeared only to further rile up the conservative wing of the GOP conference, which has been agitating the shutdown strategy to try to tear apart the health-care law.

With such fervor still rampant among House Republicans, there was bipartisan agreement in the Senate that Boehner’s House had lost its ability to approve anything that could be signed by Obama into law. Republicans decided the Senate must act first, hoping that the pressure of the Thursday debt deadline would lead to the House passing the measure even if it meant just a small collection of the GOP’s House majority joined with the Democratic minority to approve a deal.

“At this point, they have dealt themselves out of this process. They cannot agree among themselves,” Durbin said. “And that makes it extremely difficult to take them seriously.”

This might be a good time to mention that though Ryan has no opponent yet in his 2016 reelection race-- Rob Zerban is likely to announce he's running again next week-- and though the DCCC gave him immunity last year and is likely to give him immunity again this year (unless Pelosi fires Steve Israel as head of the DCCC), Ryan is more vulnerable to defeat than ever. Even with no opponent, new PPP polling shows him leading an unnamed Democrat 48-46% when voters are made aware that Ryan voted for and backs the Tea Party government shut down. And that brings us back to the ever-prescient Bill Moyers. Did you watch the video?

"Republicans," he reminds us, "have now lost three successive elections to control the Senate, and they've lost the last two presidential elections. Nonetheless, they fought tooth and nail to kill President Obama's health care initiative. They lost that fight, but with the corporate wing of Democrats, they managed to bend it toward private interests… Despite what they say, Obamacare is only one of their targets. Before they will allow the government to reopen, they demand employers be enabled to deny birth control coverage to female employees; they demand Obama cave on the Keystone pipeline; they demand the watchdogs over corporate pollution be muzzled and the big bad regulators of Wall Street sent home. Their ransom list goes on and on. The debt ceiling is next. They would have the government default on its obligations and responsibilities.

When the president refused to buckle to this extortion, they threw their tantrum. Like the die-hards of the racist South a century and a half ago, who would destroy the union before giving up their slaves, so would these people burn down the place, sink the ship. …At least, let's name this for what it is: sabotage of the democratic process. Secession by another means." And Republicans are hearing this kind of seditious and secessionist talk from many of the media outlets they go to for their opinions. Crackpot right-wing blogger and Georgia secessionist, Erick Erickson, sounded on Friday like he's ready to fire on Fort Sumter.

Surrender should not be an option. This fight has been and remains about Obamacare. A Republican Party fretting over polling should consider that polling will rebound in their direction with a victory. The GOP should also consider that some of the negatives in the polls are from their own side angry at their reluctance to actually fight the good fight.

Republican leaders who have never wanted this fight have tried at all costs to avoid fighting it. They have tried to wrap the continuing resolution into the debt ceiling then into a grand bargain.

Conservatives should keep the fight squarely on Obamacare.

What is most eye opening is that the Republican leaders have grown so detatched from their base that they will willingly push a medical device tax repeal on behalf of K Street lobbyists while ignoring the very people who actually vote for them.

Republicans reeling from polls should consider what the reaction of their base will be if they have gone this far and surrender with nothing-- or with only a sop to special interests on K Street.

The path forward is simple. Keep the debt ceiling and continuing resolution separate... The GOP should have this fight and make this case. It is sellable. The only problem is the GOP leadership does not want to sell it. They’d rather surrender and shift blame to conservatives.

Speaker Boehner has previously said he would stop doing back room deals with the White House. He should do as he said. He should keep the government closed until Democrats agree to delay Obamacare.