My only question: How did they know it WASN'T Glenn Beck lunging for that burger?

"I liked the way he bit off that guy’s hand, and the way he did his business in the middle of the stage. We need more of that in Washington."

-- Jefferson City (MO) Tea Party supporter Gwendolene
Thomason, as quoted by The Borowitz Report (see below)

by Ken

This just in (OK, well, early this morning -- in the grand scheme of the cosmos, that's barely a trice ago):

Rabid Dog Briefly Mistaken for Tea Party Candidate
Receives Standing Ovation at Missouri Rally

JEFFERSON CITY, MO (The Borowitz Report) – A rabid Doberman Pinscher jumped on stage at a Tea Party rally in Missouri on Labor Day and barked at the crowd for nearly twenty minutes before people realized he was not a candidate.

The dog, later identified by its owner as “Mister Buster,” held the crowd spellbound as he barked, growled, and frothed at the mouth, eventually receiving a standing ovation for his exertions.

Gwendolene Thomason, 42, a Tea Party supporter from Jefferson City, was one of the hundreds on hand who were convinced that the Doberman was a Tea Party candidate until he was outed as a dog.

“I liked what he had to say,” she said. ”He reminded me of Glenn Beck, only furrier.”

The Doberman’s canine identity finally became clear when he lunged at a man in the front row and wrested a hamburger from his right hand, taking two of the man’s fingers with it.

While the discovery that Mister Buster was not a Tea Party candidate disappointed many in attendance, Ms. Thomason held out hope that, dog or no, he might consider running for office at some point.

“I liked the way he bit off that guy’s hand, and the way he did his business in the middle of the stage,” she said. ”We need more of that in Washington.”

This might usefully be read against the backdrop of the new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Here are some of the juiciest gleanings of WaPo's Jon Cohen and Dan Balz, in a piece headlined "Obama ratings sink to new lows as hope fades":

The sense of deflation is particularly apparent among Democrats, with nearly two-thirds saying things are pretty seriously off on the wrong track. The percentage of Democrats saying things are headed in the right direction has cratered from 60 percent at the start of the year to 32 percent now.

Among political independents — a prime target of Obama’s new outreach — 78 percent see the country as off-kilter. The percentage saying so in January 2009 was 79 percent. Pessimism was even higher among independents — and everyone else — during the depth of the financial crisis in late 2008. But for Obama, things are back to square one.

Obama’s overall approval rating is down 11 percentage points from the start of the year. The only other time a majority disapproved of his handling of the presidency in Post-ABC polling was a year agoafter another rough summer.

For the first time, fewer than half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 give the president positive marks. Young voters broke overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008, but just 47 percent of those under age 30 now approve of the way he is doing his job; just as many disapprove.

Fewer than three-quarters of Democrats approve of the president; his disapproval rating among independents ties its high from a year ago at 57 percent.

No doubt at Obama reelect campaign HQ they're dancing on the desks over this exciting news:

Obama does, however, rate better than do congressional Republicans, his adversaries in recent, fierce confrontations on federal spending. Just 28 percent approve of the way Republicans in Congress are doing their job, and 68 percent disapprove, the worst spread for the GOP since summer 2008.

This gibes perfectly with the apparent reelection strategy: to pray that the Republicans nominate someone so appalling that the president, following his now-standard practice of positioning himself as "Republican lite," appears to just enough voters to be merely "appalling lite."

Meanwhile that peerless political sage Chris Cillizza went to town ("Vote out the entire Congress? You bet.") on a rival NBC/Wall Street Journal poll,

where 54 percent of those tested said that if they had the opportunity to vote out every single Member of Congress -- including their own - they would take it.

That’s the highest that number has been in the 18 months or so that NBC/WSJ have been asking the question -- and the clearest evidence yet that we may be headed to a “pox on both your houses” election the likes of which we have never seen before.

One of these damned polls, I'm pretty sure I heard on the radio, reported that something like 163 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing. One might feel more sympathy if the respondents hadn't voted these very bums in, and weren't standing ready, to judge by history including the excellent midterm replacements they chose in 2010, to replace these bums with life forms a bare minimum of twice as bad, and ideally 20 to 100 times as bad.

That'll fix the problem for sure.

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Tea? Or Something More Nutritious?

Yesterday I was reading an interesting interview with self-described "recovering Republican" Bob Ney, the Ohio freak show and designated patsy, who went to prison in the Abramoff scandal, which, in reality, should have send at least two dozen Republican congressmen to prison, if not Bush himself. What originally caught my attention was his analysis of the upcoming presidential election. He thinks Romney, the anointed Establishment pick, will be the nominee and he thinks the party's doctrinaire conservatives don't care that much if they beat Obama or not-- Miss McConnell's stated top priority for 2010-12. Ney worries that's an ass-backwards approach.

[F]rom the conservative end, under their breath, well, they think it doesn't matter if we don't beat him. They think if we don't beat him he's going to do such a bad job over the next four years there will be no Democrats standing in the House, no Democrats standing in the Senate, we'll take the whole ball of wax (in 2016). That theory's out there ... to keep the "bad guy" in for four more years and you'll really see what happens. That's not necessarily what reality becomes.

Interesting tangent to follow up on... sometime. But not where I want to go today. Today we're here to examine how the teabagger thing is working out for the Members of the House who joined the Michele Bachmann-led official teabagger caucus of 60. Ney was always a kind of cloddish and superficial establishment Republican but he indicates he has a lot of admiration for the teabaggers, even if he doesn't understand how completely controlled they are by the fascist-oriented Koch family and a tiny handful of predatory billionaires. Ney:

I think the Tea Party has been very good for this country. I really do. ... They raised an issue out there. And they were smart, they didn't get into abortion, gun control, gay marriage. They got into one element of the financial side of it, so I have to give them a lot of credit.

A congresswoman I don't even know was on the floor yelling, They're holding the Congress hostage. First of all, 62 members of the House are "Tea Party" candidates. Only 30 are active in the Tea Party caucus. So this Democrat is standing there saying they're holding us hostage, wow, she's really giving them credit for completely running the congress. The Tea Party wouldn't run my office, but I am very respectful of what they've done. ... The Tea Party has helped the Republican Party morph back into what it was supposed to be.

... I'm currently unhappy with the Republican leadership. They took a debt ceiling issue, a very serious issue, there's 535 members of the House and Senate ... and they said OK, we'll pass the debt ceiling bill with cuts ... but we'll create a committee of 12 people who will speak for all 535 people, so to heck with 97 percent of the Americans who send their members to Congress.

Here's what John Boehner said, and Harry Reid, and Barack Obama. They all three said this: You all aren't smart enough, you can't make those tough decisions, we'll take 12 people as a representative body of the House and Senate and the president and we'll tell them to make a decision by Dec. 23. If I was Standard & Poors or Moodys, I would be like "OK, that gives me a lot of confidence." They should of had a vote, ugly as it could have been, let the process work. ... They punted this down the road to 12 people. They're going to make Jack Abramoff and me look like pikers with the defense lobbyists and the campaign dollars. ...

On the biggest issue to me of importance to my grandchildren and future generations, and currently to all these unemployed people ... you had Harry Reid, John Boehner and Barack Obama and you ended up with something like the 72nd anniversary of the Wizard of Oz: no brains, no heart, no guts. It was Oz. These three tried to do this private secret deal without having votes.
They should have been voting all along. The Republican Party had the biggest opportunity ever to really nail this one.

Ney didn't quite have his numbers right. There are 60 members of the House teabagger caucus, the one led by Bachmann. More than half are from the Old Confederacy. And, of course, all of them are Republicans. This seems to be the definitive list, although there have been a couple of members who have joined and left and rejoined and left again. Freshmen are in bold type:

Sandy Adams (R-FL)
Robert Aderholt (R-AL)
Todd Akin (R-MO)
Rodney Alexander (R-LA)
Michele Bachmann (R-MN)
Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD)
Joe Barton (R-TX)
Gus Bilirakis (R-FL)
Rob Bishop (R-UT)
Diane Black (R-TN)
Michael C. Burgess (R-TX)
Paul Broun (John Birch Society-GA)
Dan Burton (R-IN)
John Carter (R-TX)
Bill Cassidy (R-LA)
Howard Coble (R-NC)
Mike Coffman (R-CO)
Chip Cravaack (R-MN)
Ander Crenshaw (R-FL)
John Culberson (R-TX)
Jeff Duncan (R-SC)
Blake Farenthold (R-TX)
Stephen Fincher (R-TN)
John Fleming (R-LA)
Trent Franks (R-AZ)
Phil Gingrey (R-GA)
Louie Gohmert (R-TX)
Tom Graves (R-GA)
Ralph Hall (R-TX)
Vicky Hartzler (R-MO)
Wally Herger (R-CA)
Tim Huelskamp (R-KS)
Lynn Jenkins (R-KS)
Walter Jones (R-NC)
Steve King (R-IA)
Doug Lamborn (R-CO)
Jeff Landry (R-LA)
Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO)
Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)
Kenny Marchant (R-TX)
Tom McClintock (R-CA)
David McKinley (R-WV)
Gary Miller (R-CA)
Mick Mulvaney (R-SC)
Sue Myrick (R-NC)
Randy Neugebauer (R-TX)
Rich Nugent (R-FL)
Steven Palazzo (R-MS)
Steve Pearce (R-NM)
Mike Pence (R-IN)
Ted Poe (R-TX)
Tom Price (R-GA)
Denny Rehberg (R-MT)
Phil Roe (R-TN)
Dennis Ross (R-FL)
Ed Royce (R-CA)
Steve Scalise (R-LA)
Tim Scott (R-SC)
Pete Sessions (R-TX)
Adrian Smith (R-NE)
Lamar Smith (R-TX)
Cliff Stearns (R-FL)
Tim Walberg (R-MI)
Joe Walsh (R-IL)
Allen West (R-FL)
Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA)
Joe Wilson (R-SC)

Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), a Jew who converted to Mormonism, a Democrat who converted to Republcianism, who was campaign manager and then chief of staff for Governor John Huntsman, defeated a very conservative incumbent Republican, Chris Cannon by running as a hard-core teabagger. His #1 issue was being virulently anti-immigrant. Since being elected he's also been virulently anti-gay. He joined the Congressional Arts Caucus instead of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus, kvetching that "[s]tructure and formality are the exact opposite of what the Tea Party is, and if there is an attempt to put structure and formality around it, or to co-opt it by Washington, D.C., it’s going to take away from the free-flowing nature of the true tea party movement."

Yesterday on This Week Jim DeMint told Christiane Amanpour that "the Tea Party's being thrown around a lot today, but for everyone who calls him a Tea Party-- themselves a Tea Party member, there are hundreds of people who have the same concerns about our spending and our debt. We know over 70 percent of Americans want to balance the budget... I think it's one of the best things that's happened to our country and to politics, because there's a broad cross-section of Americans involved in citizen activism today. And some are called Tea Party; some are not. But all the candidates are going to have to appeal to this new grassroots movement. And that's really what I'm looking for... Any of these [presidential] candidates are going to have to appeal to those Americans who are unified, particularly around fiscal issues." 

DeMint, of course, didn't get into a discussion with Amanpour about the true nature-- the ugly racist nature-- of what's behind the grassroots of the Tea Party or about the billionaires financing it to achieve their own plutocratic goals and agenda. National surveys have all shown that self-described Tea Party supporters are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Republican, overwhelmingly old and overwhelmingly extreme right-wing. They also tend to be wealthier than the average American. Most Tea Party supporters are male (61%) and almost half are evangelicals or "born again." Surveys that have dared delve into it have all found that the teabaggers are deranged racists, which was completely apparent to me when I spent a day with them at their first big Los Angeles event two years ago. A University of Washington study found that teabaggers are "more likely to be racially resentful" than the population as a whole, although, in fairness, most extreme conservatives are racists.

So far this election cycle, only one Blue America-endorsed candidate, Nick Ruiz down in central Florida, is squaring off against an admitted teabagger and actual member of the congressional caucus. Nick's opponent, freshman Sandy Adams, is one of the less bright of an already far from glowing caucus. Yesterday Nick's battle against this lunacy went beyond the lunatic and racist fringes of Teabaggia.

There is a fragile tension that’s growing, but it’s not the tension you think it is.
 
Not the Tea Party lunacy. Not the corporate Republican debauchery. Not even the thirty years gone of abdication on the part of the Democratic Party, that ironic party of the people, to do the right things for the majority of Americans-- by fighting for the America we laud in textbooks.
 
It’s us. Progressives. For too long, we have supported people we know will do us political harm and disservice, by evidence and history and by all reasonable projections of their future actions. Why?
 
We send them our money, our political contributions-- and they squander them on politicians that vote against almost everything we believe in-- and call it ‘pragmatic progressivism,’ the ‘third way,’ the ‘center,’ and of course, ‘compromise.’ But there is little compromise in a room full of sharks.
 
We wear their pins and buttons, we fill out their incessant requests for petitions and email addresses, as they fill their databases and their coffers with our information and our passion and currency-- only to have them commit small token efforts of advertisement and ‘advocacy’ at best, and at worst, the full-fledged endorsement and financing of candidates who will never do one socially just or legally fair thing for us and America.
 
All while the entourage ‘keeps the change’ and pockets the difference.
 
Progressives thus far have failed to produce a New Deal America. In fact, they have been failing for decades. Not even to fail better, but to fail worse-- because indeed, political circumstances are not improving-- they are disintegrating.
 
I say we can turn this around-- but not by proceeding as the status quo.
 
Progressives, there is a New Deal America waiting for you this 21st century. But you will have to do more than you have done to see it through. Don’t be suckerpunched by a silk tie and a white pearl necklace. It takes a progressive to get things done. Ask FDR. Ask MLK. Ask the scientists that proclaim the Gulf is still leaking oil, with no end in sight. Ask the real Harriet Tubman, not the self-proclaimed Harriet Tubman fake, Tea Party Caucus member Allen West (FL-22).
 
How will you support a New Deal America? By breaking the cycle of complicity-- and backing New Deal Democrats that will do what is necessary to bring about a New Deal America for the 21st century. By endorsing candidates that reject complicity and excessively narrow corporate overtures. People like Dennis Kucinich (OH-10) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT). There are others. Find them.

Americans want economic security-- it starts with a federally mandated, livable minimum wage: $15 per hour, not a paltry $7 and change.
 
Americans want to protect vulnerable families-- it starts with a robust, rather than underdeveloped U.S. Social Safety Net. We need better food assistance, housing assistance, unemployment insurance, and ultimately, retirement assistance-- Social Security. For people who need it, when they need it, until they no longer need it.
 
Americans want America to promote equality of opportunity-- not cronyism, legacy and special favors. That’s for royalty-- and no American fits that description. Promoting equality of opportunity starts with freedom-- freedom of good health, with universal health insurance; freedom of religion, speech, suffrage, sexual preference, expression and equal opportunity of education-- essentially, the freedom to be who you are and accepted, rather than tolerated.
 
A New Deal America is going to take more than boldness, pink t-shirts, courage or guts. There is plenty of that to go around, in fact, perhaps too much, because those emotions often become something else entirely. And if that was working-- we’d have seen some results by now, no?
 
A New Deal America needs national coherence. And that means that there must be alliance and allegiance and that means people working together in order to elect dozens of progressives nationwide. Folks, one or two, are not going to be able to accomplish anything on the federal level. We need more than the cult of celebrity and a rock anthem.
 
We need a progressive orchestra and a New Deal symphony.
 
It’s never going to get any clearer.

In 2008 Blue America didn't waste its time-- or its contributors' money-- on supporting middle of the road corporate Democrats like Barack Obama. Nor will we waste our efforts on him this year. I hope we can find the "dozens" of progressive New Deal Democrats Nick says we need. We haven't so far. So far this is what we've got (on the House side): our candidates. After Labor Day (today) we're going to start stepping it up a bit with other progressive fighters from across the country, like Connie Pillich (D-OR) and John Waltz (D-MI). If you want real change-- not small change or backwards reactionary change-- in America, please consider helping us find good candidates and supporting good candidates. And, while you're at it... watch this:

Dan Maffei Wants To Take On Teabagger Ann Marie Buerkle Again... But First He Has To Persuade Democrats He Deserves Their Nomination

Yesterday we mentioned that, by overwhelming numbers, the Democrats who lost last November were either Blue Dogs (more than half of them lost their seats) or their conservative allies. There were, however a tiny handful of progressives who also got swept up in the carnage, half a dozen Democrats who did NOT deserve to lose their seats but whose districts are so red that the Tea Party rage and the right-wing momentum impacted them as well. We've mentioned that Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH) are both running for Congress again next year. Yesterday, Dan Maffei, one of the more conservative Democrats to have lost in 2010, made it official-- he's challenging deranged teabagger Ann Marie Buerkle to a rematch.



Their contest for New York's 25th CD, centered in Syracuse, was the closest election of the year and Buerkle squeezed by with a 648 vote margin-- 104,602- 103,954. Maffei lost because of a swing towards the crazy teabagger in the traditionally Republican suburbs of Rochester. In 2008 Maffei had won the Monroe County section of the district 26,883 (58%) to 19,179 (41%) but last year the Monroe precincts gave Buerkle the lift she needed-- 20,790 (55%) to 17,106 (45%). She picked up over a thousand Republican voters in the county at the same time that Maffei lost over 9,000! The biggest county on the district, by far, is Onondaga (Syracuse) and Maffei still won that one handily-- 76,046 (54%) to 65,632 (46%) but, even there in the most Democratic part of the district, it was a disappointing turn out. In fact in 2008, Maffei had taken 112,856 (56%) and his GOP opponent had only gotten 81,312 (40%). So while Maffei's falloff from 2008 was almost 37,000 votes, Buerkle's falloff from the presidential year to the midterm was only just over 15,000 votes. The two smaller, more rural and Republican, counties voted against Maffei both times but in 2008 he managed to get 47% in Wayne and 42% in Cayuga. Last year Wayne only gave him 37% of its vote and Cayuga 35%.



Clearly, Maffei needs to win back the suburban Rochester swing voters in Monroe County and turn out the disillusioned Democratic base in Onondaga. His dull and uninspiring , centrist message isn't going to get many progressives excited. He'll be counting on Obama's presence at the top of the ticket for Onondaga and he'll be counting on Buerkle's political psychosis for the swing suburbanites. She's been one of the most insane of the radical teabaggers among the House freshmen. Although she represents a swing district equally divided between Democrats and Republicans her voting record is to the right of most right-wing Confederate lunatics from the deepest red districts in the bowels of the South. Her ProgressivePunch score is a dismal 1.64, not just the worst of any New York congressmember, but tied (with two Mississippi KKK freaks, Gregg Harper and Steven Palazzo) for the 14th worst in the entire Congress. Buerkle's voting record is to the right of Darrell Issa's, Mike Pence's, Patrick McHenry's, Eric Cantor's, Paul Ryan's Taliban Dan Webster's, Allen West's, Steve King's, Virginia Foxx's, Louie Gohmert's, Mean Jean Schmidt's... getting the picture? From a political perspective, she's stark raving mad. As Maffei pointed out, "Buerkle has had eight months to show some sort of willingness to compromise and get things done for the district or the country, and she remains as radical as ever."

Buerkle was among 66 Republicans who voted earlier this month against a compromise to raise the debt limit and cut more than $2.1 trillion in federal spending over 10 years.



"It seems like it has been a long time since we were working on how to get things done-- not to shut things down and put the United States literally on the brink of default," Maffei said. "It’s an opportunity I have to represent the people of Central New York again. We cannot continue to allow someone as radical and extreme as Buerkle to do so. I represent a much more moderate point of view."



Buerkle, reached Tuesday afternoon on a trip to Israel, declined to comment about a rematch with Maffei.

Ironically, the congressmembers touring Israel are reassuring Israel that they, unlike the hard-pressed working families of central New York, will feel NONE of the impact of the financial hardtimes disrupting the U.S. and the rest of the world. American aid will see to that.



This is the letter Maffei sent supporters Tuesday morning making his announcement:

Since January a shock wave of Tea Party driven partisanship and inflexibility has rolled across Congress. When I lost my election last November by 648 votes, I hoped that such a close result would convince our new Congresswoman to put aside her radical ideology, and set about finding ways to bring people together and create new opportunities for Central New Yorkers. Instead, she has marched in lockstep with her Tea Party friends, and voted time and again with the special interests who spent so many hundreds of thousands of dollars on the attack ads that helped her win. 



Rep. Buerkle’s actions, now that she is in power, have clearly shown her dangerous priorities. She has already voted to end Medicare as we know it while protecting tax breaks for oil companies and billionaires. She has made her right-wing social agenda her priority while ignoring the real needs in this District for infrastructure funding and public education. And she was part of the extreme group that refused any compromise, and nearly plunged the nation into economic catastrophe.



Over the past 9 months I have done a great deal of listening to friends, neighbors and former constituents across Central New York about what they feel about the direction of the country, and whether I should be a candidate in 2012. The overwhelming refrain has been that it’s time for Congress to stop wasting time, and start working together to solve the very real problems that we face.



Sometimes, people are so frustrated that they are tempted to throw up their hands in disgust and walk away. I understand this feeling. But I know that there is a bright future in front of us as long as we don’t give up on Central New York, America, or ourselves. Working together, we can do better! That is why I am running for Congress in 2012. Our campaign will offer the people of Central New York a better future than the divisive politics of Ann Marie Buerkle.



People have had enough, and they want and deserve a representative who will offer solutions to modernize our infrastructure, to protect seniors and our middle class, and to get our deficit under control while jump-starting our economy. I have always worked hard to find solutions, and have been successful at doing so both inside and outside of government. The people that know me best know how passionate I am for the future of my home and birthplace, Central New York, and that passion gives me great energy. But I can't change things without your help. I am running for Congress and I ask for your active support.

If Maffei gets the Democratic nomination it will be another example of a conservative Democrat-- he's a member of Rahm Emanuel's sell-out New Democratic Coalition-- duking it out against a reactionary Republican. There's no real upside for normal working families. Is he better than Buerkle? Sure. She's an F. He's a C or a D. Oh boy! When he was defeated he went to work against the interests of working families at the right-wing think tank, Third Way, working on repatriating corporate profits at lower tax rates, one of the most regressive proposals floating around Washington circles. And, as the National Journal points out he's a dedicated "moderate."

In the House, he emphasized his moderate stripes and nonideological pragmatism. He joined the New Democrat Coalition, a group of moderate Democrats. He got seats on the Financial Services and Judiciary committees.



He says he keeps a photograph of hard-charging Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff and former Illinois lawmaker, in his office closet as a reminder of the need to raise money.

The other Democrat hoping for the nomination is Brianne Murphy, a 30 year old Syracuse labor attorney. Tom Buckel, who is considerably more progressive than Maffei, was thinking of running for the seat but decided to run for the state Supreme Court instead. Tom told me that Brianne has a compelling personal story. He was right. She's an amazing, passionate candidate who is so lively, intellectually curious and animated that she makes Maffei seem like Mr. Potatohead. I spoke with her last night and my first impression was that she would make an incredible candidate against Buerkle. She told me that people across central New York are looking for "an advocate for their interests in Washington; and a fresh voice that isn’t beholden to any special interests."

"Growing up in Syracuse, raised by a single mother who supported our family with a good, union job and with some help from the government, and now as an employment attorney, I know firsthand the challenges that working families in Central New York are facing.



"I know how important it is that we support working- and middle-class families with strong public policies that create good jobs. I know the values my mother instilled in me-- promoting the common good, supporting our children, and advancing equality-- and won’t be afraid to fight for them in Washington. I believe we must win back the economic debate by fighting for policies that will create the good jobs of the future. I plan to do that in Congress."

New Yorkers will be lucky if she's part of their delegation to Congress-- and everyone else in the country looking for social justice and a muscular approach to old fashioned economic fairness will be as well. She's worth checking out-- especially if you live in the Syracuse area. In 2008 Blue America endorsed Dan Maffei and helped him raise money after he assured us of his progressive agenda. What a disappointment he turned out to be! We didn't re-endorse him in 2010. This year we'll be looking closely at endorsing his primary opponent. For now, if you want to help Brianne's campaign, you can do it here.

Befuddled by the odd coalition anchoring the Farthest Right? Meet Tom Tomorrow's Tea Party Tim and Plutocrat Pete

Tea Party Tim and Plutocrat Pete

by Tom Tomorrow

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

by Ken



As happens so often when Tom Tomorrow is on the job, I really don't have much to add. I'm just pleased to see our man train his gaze on this weird alliance now forming the hunchbackbone of the Farthest Right. Wouldn't you think it would matter just a tad that the Teabaggers and the Plutocrats have practically nothing in common? That, in fact, each comes close -- if we were going by reality -- to being the Thing the Other Hates Most.



Howie has been kicking around various aspects of this chasm, for example in his post yesterday "No New Texans!") on the plutocrats' struggle, now that that Man of No People, T-Paw, has gone down in flames, to find a candidate who can sucker the 'Baggers into thinking he (or she) is one of them, the new hopeful being one of the dumbest and most corrupt and swinish creatures on the face of the earth, Rick Perry. I mean, really, effing Rick Perry???



Yes, they both Hate Government, but of course they mean very different things by hating government. And they all hate Obama, but again, Hating Obama means very different things to them. The Teabaggers have absolutely no idea what Obama believes, has done, or plans to do, while the Plutocrats have a very good idea, and really don't have much quarrel with it -- it's just that once he does their dirty work of getting congressional Democrats to support reactionary initiatives that would have gone nowhere if offered by a Republican president, the nabobs can go back to propping up One of Their Own.



Hey, remember when we thought the 2008 GOP presidential field was about as preposterous as the mind of man could imagine?





UPDATE: TOM TOMORROW LINK



Don't know how I forgot to include the link (as I normally do), but I've added it above (and here it is again). Sorry! -- Ken

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Racism And Fascism: A Marriage Of Convenience Or Inevitable, True Right-Wing Love?

Not all Republicans are racist and not all racists are Republicans. But an extraordinary number of Republicans-- by design (they were recruited by Nixon and Reagan to build the party in the South)-- are racists and they're over-represented in Congress by a pack of shockingly bigoted representatives... and it goes beyond overt or even covert KKK supporters like Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama.

The so-called "fiscal conservatism" the media insists is the one and only raison d'etre of the teabaggers was always demonstrably a hot, stinking pile of bullshit. Two years ago the teabagger movement was still being put together by the fascist puppeteers at Koch Industries and FreedomWorks. Here in L.A., a local racist and neo-fascist organization, Pasadena Patriots, worked with the local GOP and hate talk radio host Kevin James to organize a teabaggy presence at the Alhambra healthcare town hall meeting of Blue Dog Adam Schiff. I went. Although the teabaggers were outnumbered 5 to 1, the were noisy and disruptive-- and entirely racist. Every argument ended in racist epithets against Hispanics and "anchor babies." Every argument! Not 90% of them... every single one of them. I had never encountered a more racist, bigoted bunch in my entire life.

Last week Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee pretty much spilled the beans that plenty of her Republican colleagues in the House have the same bigoted mentality (see famous teabagger art below) and that they're willing to destroy America in the process of delegitimizing the presidency of the first non-caucasian president. Her immediate point is that the raging and disproportionate battle over the debt ceiling is another reflection of the GOP's surrender to the vilest form of racism.

"I do not understand what I think is the maligning and maliciousness [toward] this president,” said Jackson Lee, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “Why is he different? And in my community, that is the question that we raise. In the minority community that is question that is being raised. Why is this president being treated so disrespectfully? Why has the debt limit been raised 60 times? Why did the leader of the Senate continually talk about his job is to bring the president down to make sure he is unelected?”

Earlier in her speech, Jackson Lee said Obama has been targeted unlike any other president.

"I am particularly sensitive to the fact that only this president-- only this one, only this one-- has received the kind of attacks and disagreement and inability to work, only this one," said Jackson Lee from the House floor.

"Read between the lines," she continued. "What is different about this president that should put him in a position that he should not receive the same kind of respectful treatment of when it is necessary to raise the debt limit in order to pay our bills, something required by both statute and the 14th amendment?"

Jackson Lee concluded by saying that she hoped someone would step up and say that what appears obvious to her is not in fact true.

"I hope someone will say that what it appears to be is not in fact accurate," said Lee. "But historically it seems to be nothing more."

Are the Teabaggers really incapable of understanding that the "problem" of voter fraud is a myth?

The "menace" of voter fraud is another of those "truthy" things that sounds like it could be true, maybe even oughtta be true, but alas isn't. Funny how the right-wing apostles of "urban" voter fraud never mention their own very real, very intense years' worth of high-powered election-rigging and -stealing.

"Not only is this legislation anti-democratic, but it comes at a great cost to the state. According to a recent study released by the Democratic National Committee implementation of voter identification will cost Rhode Island between $1.6 -$4.9 million. All to address the myth of voter fraud."

-- statement by Ocean State Action, in response to RI
Gov. Lincoln Chafee's hush-hush signing of two voter-ID bills

by Ken

Lincoln Chafee has never struck me as the strongest-spined of pols, and possibly is so ragdoll-ish that he seems wimpy even when he's doing the macho-patriotic thing. I suppose it doesn't help him that he's equipped with some sort of conscience, a useless appendage for a pol if there ever was one. He knows when he's done something craven and gutless.

So what did the poor dear do over the holiday weekend but try to hide the craven, gutless thing he did Saturday? Yes, he actually kept it hidden until Tuesday afternoon, when his people finally acknowledged that yes, he had signed a bill, or rather two bills, passed on the final day of the legislative session which call for strict ID requirements for Rhode Island voters. (Yes, there are actually two bills, or rather laws now, one initiated by the state's Senate, one by the General Assembly.)

It sounds like a simple blow for democracy, or at least it sounds like this to simpletons, like the Teabaggers, who promptly -- as soon as they heard about it -- hailed the governor for taking "that first step toward freedom from the manipulation of votes meant to benefit politicians and special-interest agendas, particularly in our urban areas." I think it's safe to say that the governor knows perfectly well that this is a "solution" to a "problem" that isn't.

The governor's three days of evasion might have become comical -- if this were in any way humorous. Here's the Providence Journal's Katherine Gregg reporting yesterday afternoon (links onsite):

In the absence of an earlier acknowledgment, the advocacy group Ocean State Action vehemently urged the governor to veto the so-called "voter identification'' bill that, in future elections, will require voters to provide proof of their identity at the polls.

From Ocean State Action came this statement: "On the last day of the session, after an hour and a half of debate and against the strong objections of progressive legislators, the General Assembly passed a voter identification bill that will disenfranchise low-income voters, communities of color, the elderly and students across the state of Rhode Island.

"Not only is this legislation anti-democratic, but it comes at a great cost to the state. According to a recent study released by the Democratic National Committee implementation of voter identification will cost Rhode Island between $1.6 -$4.9 million. All to address the MYTH of voter fraud.'' . . .

A mystified Kate Brock, Ocean State Action's executive director, said she called the governor's office at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday to ask if Chafee had signed the voter identification bills, "and I was told that neither S-400 nor H-5680 had been signed by the Governor. Hence the e-blast.''

In mid-afternoon Tuesday, John Marion, executive director of the citizens' group Common Cause, voiced concern that "there is nothing, nothing on the [General Assembly] or governor's website about this. The GA website doesn't even show it having been transmitted to the governor yet. How can they possibly not tell you whether he has signed it or not?''

At 2:54 p.m. on Tuesday, the governor's office made public a list of the bills that Chafee signed into law Saturday.

So now a blue state, with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature and an Independent governor, has joined the parade of states pretending to uphold democracy -- the Teabaggers' message of appreciation to the Rhode Island legislature and governor described this as -- when anyone with a working brain, starting with the right-wing hoodlums perpetrating this hoax, know full well that the intent is the exact opposite, to step up their already-muscular efforts all over the country to minimize voting by "the wrong kind" of people.

I get that Teabaggers themselves by and large don't understand. They have, after all, at some point made a decision not to try to understand anything about the real world, perhaps to save wear and tear on their delicate brains. By choice, they see nothing beyond the tips of their noses, except for the lying filth concocted for them by the lying devils of the Far Right, who laugh at the grotesque sheep they routinely hornswoggle even as they pull their chains yet again.

But where the demonic forces of the Far Right are involved, reality has ceased to come into it, or anything else. All that matters is the malicious delusions the puppet-masters work so hard to inject into the dormant brains of their stooges. They count on the dopes' insularity, their total unawareness that people of good faith may live lives that differ in any way from theirs, that there are people for whom mounting right-wing restrictions on voting accessibility in terms of polling facilities and hours, not to mention campaigns of coercion and lies about eligibility and hours, may make voting not merely inconvenient but impossible, people for whom the IDs the Teabaggers take for granted may indeed be an onerous burden.

The grotesque truth about the "problem" of voter fraud is that there isn't one. If there were one, by now someone would surely have pointed it out. Even during the intellectual low point of this all-low-points crusade against democracy, the Far Right's gang rape of ACORN for the sin of standing up for non-overprivileged Americans, it was abundantly clear to anyone who had any interest in reality that the voter-registration "scandal" wasn't one, that it resulted from ACORN's own discovery and reporting of paid signer-uppers who were manufacturing registrations for personal profit not ideological advantage, and that not a single fraudulent vote was charged by anyone to have been cast anywhere as a result.

The reality, of course, is that the danger to fair elections comes entirely from those same demons of the Far Right, who over the last decade or two have deployed heroic reserves of manpower and cash to the effort to steal every election they can get their mitts. If as much effort had been spent on, say, curing cancer or achieving world peace, we would all be living to a ripe old age in a world of international harmony.

But of course, for people who have committed themselves to intellectual vacancy, choosing to live as the pawns of liars and thieves, the chances of ever learning any of this are, well, nil.

I'm pretty sure poor Lincoln Chafee understands all of this, just as he understood the destructiveness of the legislative rampage of the Bush regime he witnessed as a Republican member of the U.S. Senate, and understood why his colleague Jim Jeffords decided he could no longer be part of it. I'm sure he suffered in those years, but he -- like his gutless Maine colleagues Olympia Snowe and Suzy Q. Collins -- didn't do a damned thing about it. They didn't just let it happen, they lent their Senate votes to it.

So yes, I expect Governor Chafee knows what it feels like to hold your nose and do something you know is wrong. He's had plenty of practice. And now in his political "second life," he's doing it again. His sop to his conscience, apparently, is that for the three days between his signing of the bills and his office's acknowledgment that he had done so, he could pretend he didn't.

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