Five Reasons Michele Bachmann is a Serious Threat

photo credit: the original Jeff Martin

Prior to last night's GOP "debate" you could count me among those who hoped cheerfully for a Bachmann nomination on the grounds that she'd be an easy beat, but I am now reconsidering that position. It wasn't much of a debate, if anyone was expecting any kind of ideological breadth, but it did give us a glimpse of Bachmann's range, which has a much wider appeal than previously suspected.

Reason One: Formally announcing her candidacy during the debate was a definite P.R. coup, effectively insuring she would receive major coverage in the news stories that followed. She has reportedly hired Ed Rollins (a seasoned political veteran and the architect of Reagan's 1984 win) to run her campaign. There's a decent-sized demographic of conservative traditionalists who have a bad taste in their mouth from the Bush/Cheney/Rove era, but harbor serious nostalgia for beloved St.Ronnie.

Reason Two: Solid support from the Tea Party, even the fringier elements, with their stellar record of turning out at the polls, combined with her new-found ability to dial down the crazy after only a short period of intensive coaching from her new advisers. Not everyone is a political junkie who follows the daily antics of their favorite political heroes and villains, so the new audience she reaches may not be as acutely aware of her erratic track record.

Reason Three: She's female. The misogynist tendencies of the GOP aside, if you look at the older population, the demographic skews heavily female, and consists of women whose mothers and grandmothers were first-generation voters. As long as she stays away from Social Security and Medicare, she has a potentially strong core of mid-century American women whose biases include wanting to see a woman President in their lifetime.

Reason Four: If she gets the nomination, the Koch machine will be a driving force in her campaign, or at least keeping the gas tank full. She already shares their core economic values and there is an established network of astroturf PACs already in place to keep the propaganda flowing.

Reason Five: Complacency. The biggest danger in 2012 isn't tough old broads or rich white men or misty-eyed Reaganites, it's disaffected progressives. Dismissing a Bachmann candidacy as a non-threat increases the chances that this group will sit home on election day rolling their eyes and emitting exasperated sighs, bickering amongst themselves. You'd think that the clear and concrete evidence that the 2010 collapse in voter turnout yielded some truly disastrous results would have shaken this group up, but no.

I have personally spent my share of time snarking about Bachmann's various gaffes and her sketchy relationship with facts. I may have even called her stupid, based in part on her apparent failure to surround herself with smart people whose job it is to keep her from screwing up like that. I used to consider her in the same basic category as Palin, a Tea Party spokesmodel with questionable substance; however, there is one very major difference: Bachmann appears to be capable of learning from her mistakes.

If Bachmann continues to listen to her handlers and accept their coaching and counsel, she may turn out to be a more formidable candidate than previously expected.

Schadenfreudian Tendencies

On Sunday, Gabrielle Giffords' team released several photos of the congresswoman, looking radiant and focused, no make-up, no wig to hide her scars. The photos offered a couple of angles which show clearly the damage (to satisfy our curiosity) but also show how amazingly whole and beautiful she is, a scant few months after such a devastating injury.

These photos were released only when Rep. Giffords was well enough to decide she was ready, all previous photos were very, very respectful of her privacy, which remained intact throughout the duration of her hospitalization. This left me wondering how in the world they managed that in this age of WikiLeaks and Lulz Security and the WeinerPhone of Doom. Think of the number of people who worked in the various medical facilities, her trip to watch her husband's space shuttle launch, all the opportunities to get that tantalizing photographic glimpse that probably would have carried a six figure price tag to the right tabloid, and yet that did not happen. Certainly the professionals entrusted with maintaining her privacy have a duty to do so, but this sort of duty is often for sale if the price is right. I'm completely in awe of the way Giffords and her family were able to pull off this nearly unheard-of level of privacy in these intrusive modern times of ours, however they managed it. Editorials are already calling into question what remaining privacy Giffords has a right to, but as a public servant injured in the line of duty I think she deserves at least enough time to recover sufficiently in order to present a positive impression in her first public appearance.

This actually kept me up last night, contemplating the TMZ-ified times we live in, and how our culture of celebrity has warped our ideas of privacy. How easy it would have been for a Drudge or a Breitbart to justify publishing photos that violated medical privacy, claiming the public's right to know outweighed the expectation of confidentiality and the family's wishes. How socity and the media have come to expect, even demand unfettered and unlimited access into every aspect of our public figures' lives. The ubiquity of pocket-sized devices capable of recording and transmitting images and video has expanded the theoretical level of this access, and we have adjusted our expectations accordingly.

I don't know how to find the fine line between our right to know, and our Schadenfreudian tendency to want to know. Do Giffords' constituents have the right to monitor her recovery? Do Anthony Weiner's constituents need to hear from every comely coed who has gazed upon a digitized version of his chiseled abs (or ... whatever)? On the surface these two situations seem almost opposite, but it all comes down to boundaries. We seem to be headed in the direction of breaking them down -- do we need to put some of them back up?

Cicero on Fox News

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague."

Marcus Tullius Cicero

The Best Information to Come Out of Sarah Palins Emails...

is the fact that Palin ALWAYS depends on a teleprompter even when she's on her friendly FAUX NOOZ show and especially when she's asked pre-screened questions. Palin made much snark out of the fact that Mr. Obama uses a teleprompter, and her followers thought she was massively cute and incisive by making fun of the president. But like all hypocrites, Palin mocked while doing EXACTLY the same thing.


The only time we can be sure Palin is NOT using a teleprompter is when she reveals herself in the mangling of the English language and American history. When that happens, we're looking into the heart of Palin's darkest and most sincere ignorance.

All modern presidents use and have used the teleprompter--even St. Ronnie, The Great Communicator. Why Palin, who also used the teleprompter when she was governor, felt she needed to denigrate Mr. Obama for doing what she routinely did, is not a mystery. As surely as patriotic family vacations require national bus tours and media attention, mean-spirited and petty people like Palin try to mask their own inadequacies and short-comings by ridiculing those who are their betters, using lies and misrepresentation to shore up their small-minded deceptions.

Except now we know that Palin was all moose and no antlers when she made fun of Mr. Obama's teleprompter use.

The rest of Palin's emails seem to be, like her, unexceptionally mundane and boring.


"Gotcha: Sarah Palin’s Emails Confirm She Needs Teleprompter For Interviews

And now, for a little...levity in the Palin email saga after the dark seriousness of the earlier revelations regarding Palin’s use of these emails to intimidate critics: It’s always nice to have confirmation in writing from the source. As I’ve been explaining for the last year, Palin uses Teleprompters in interviews and as a “contributor” on Fox News. This isn’t a terrible sin, but since she bashes Obama for it every chance she gets, this is just one more example of Palin’s values failure (of which there are too many to enumerate here).

The worst part about Palin’s use of Teleprompters, though, is that she doesn’t even draft her own answers. Everything you hear her say is scripted. The only time she’s unscripted, we get “Paul Revere warning the British” and the Bush Bailout “so important for the healthcare” type answers."

A horse of the same color

Take Herman Cain -- please. Take him far away from any office that allows him to rule and ruin other people with his beliefs; allows him to substitute his beliefs for law and invent crimes at will. Cain, you see, says that homosexuality is a "choice" and is a sin and he believes it because he believes it and that makes it true.

“I believe homosexuality is a sin because I’m a Bible-believing Christian, I believe it’s a sin,”

he says and yes, that's just the sort of thing Republicans like to pass off as reason and package this fear of retributive and divine bogeymen with fear of communism and common decency like Wall Street packages bad loans.

Sin, Mr. Cain, is not crime, it's a tool used to tyrannize the mind and because the sin of one frame of reference is not the sin of another and because we are a government of laws and not of prophets and because those laws are designed to protect liberty and property and not to protect your tangled web of beliefs or promote them or ennoble them or sanctify them or elevate them to the status of law and permit them to persecute others: and because sir, you are a man like the rest of us, neither better nor worse nor more to be obeyed because of your beliefs, you should save them for Sunday and leave the rest of us the hell alone with your damned arrogant beliefs. No man is elevated by standing on Bibles.



Preacher Cain of course would be a good choice for the GOP at this point -- evidence that they're not really racists and have only set the dogs on that other black man because he's not Christian enough or as concerned with the things God hates like Medicare or the Minimum wage. A different shade of black man and one more easily used as a tool to get things back to the way they used to be when there was a place for everyone and everyone was in his place.

Weiner done wrong

Excerpt from Michael Baden's piece on the Psychology Today website:

"There's only one legitimate reason to be upset with Anthony Weiner, and that's because his behavior and its discovery has taken away a bold and effective voice in the Democratic party. Everything else you think and feel about him is bull.

"By bullshit, I mean it has nothing to do with him, and also little to do with broad generalizations made nowadays about the sex and powerful men. The first is too personal and private for anyone to ever know. And the second is so abstract as to be useless in understanding any individual situation. What it does have to do with is you and me, with all of us, who are repeatedly enticed to either buy-in to or create fictive stories about sexual scandals that are little more than projections of our own forbidden or feared desires..."

For more go to: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-is-he-thinking/201106/everything-said-about-anthony-weiner-is-wrong

So, the question is, is it?

How Bush-Era Tax Cuts Damaged America

Still moving house, I don’t have time for a longer post with commentary, but this issue is important enough to merit a consciousness-raising discussion. You can read the source document here. The graphs are self-explanatory:

Meanwhile, the current gaggle of GOP presidential candidates are repeating the same Reagan to Bush-era catechism as if they have learned nothing from history and still can't read a balance sheet.

Koching up some trouble

By Capt. Fogg

"Good Lord. These are truly evil people"

says The Impolitic and it's hard to disagree. Of course the people that thought it would be a "conservative" thing to do; giving struggling Detroit homeowners fake foreclosure notices, don't think they're being vandals trying to destabilize civilization and built a "conservative" Utopia on the ruins. In fact the Koch brothers who seem to be behind this prank have a vision for the future that more resembles an Orwellian horror with the part of Big Brother played by corporate robber barons like them and the sinister, black menace portrayed by Barack H. Obama. Their lackeys see it otherwise, I'm sure. A step in the final solution of the "colored problem" that the Liberals and do-gooders brought upon Detroit and a reaction to the stunning affront of ACORN having forced a black president on us -- a man nobody voted for, of course. The new North. It's the old South without the sheets.

It's truly hard to describe this sort of thing in the way we describe rational human conduct, because it isn't any more rational than drunken football hooliganism or beer hall riot -- and a hell of a lot more dangerous. It's all the more dangerous for the lack of attention given. CNN.com today provides a bright colorful farrago of sex scandal, new Facebook features, the exploits of rappers and little else. Indeed what else concerns us?

American "exceptionalism"?

Well, Rick Santorum, everybody's favorite frothy mixture, came out a few days ago to explain how "America was a great country before 1965."

Now, in context, he chose 1965 because that was the year that Medicare and Medicaid were put in place. Funny how that was the same year that America passed the Voting Rights Act of (weird how that works) 1965, and Martin Luther King's march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery.

Yes, children, Sesame Street is brought to you today by the word "dog-whistle."

I suppose I could also bring up the Fair Housing Act of 1968, but flogging that horse won't make it run again, will it?

I mean, it's an easy speech to fisk, full of lies and misquotes, but, you know, on second thought, there's a whole line of horses lying there, and maybe one will be motivated to stagger a few steps.

Until 1965 and Griswold v. Connecticut, there were still parts of America where it was illegal for married couples to use contraceptives (of course, Frothy probably thinks that was a sign of America's decline).

Until 1963, it was still legal to pay women less than men for doing the same job (as opposed to sneaking it in, like they do now).

In 1964, the US passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and in 1965, we began air raids in North Vietnam and Communist-controlled parts of the South; on March 8, the first American combat troops arrived in country (I think my father began his first tour there two years later).

Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, but I have no evidence that Santorum would admit to supporting it.

Leslie Ann Warren made her TV debut in Rogers and Hammerstein's Cinderella in 1965 (as if that wasn't bad enough, it cleared the way for her to co-star in the Christopher Atkins disco vehicle A Night in Heaven almost 2 decades later, and that is unforgiveable).

At the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, Bob Dylan went electric, which many saw as the death of folk music (others accept that it had already died a horrible death three years earlier when Peter, Paul and Mary recorded Lemon Tree).

And Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 in October, which prevented the US from using racial quotas to determine immigration policy; maybe that was what whipped Santorum into a froth.

In general, I'm having a hard time seeing what was so wonderful about America before 1965. Unless you were a white male.

Like Rick Santorum.

Albuquerque skies

The sky was gray again tonight. It's been going on almost a week now.

We first noticed it Thursday evening. As we got out of the car, I sniffed and said, "Huh, somebody's grilling." (As a life-long allergy sufferer, if I can smell something, it's strong.)

The Wookie shook his head. "No, there's a housefire somewhere in town. We were smelling it at the store." We shrugged in unison and went in.

But the smoke didn't go away.

As it turns out, Arizona's on fire. The third largest fire in Arizona history is over 200 miles away, and is still managing to screw up our lives.

I smelled smoke all evening Thursday, and then on Friday, I noticed a fine layer of pollen on everything. Until I took a deep breath, and realized that it was from trees that would never throw out pollen again.

It was interesting on Friday. Irritating on Saturday. And sincerely annoying on Sunday.

Guess what? We're going into Tuesday now.

I suspect that this is what it was like in Venice when Pompeii went down for the count: all the irritating smoke, but none of the exciting lava and fear for your lives.

It's giving people health issues, it's causing flights to be diverted away from the airport. Health officials are warning asthma sufferers to stay indoors. Not that everybody can.

I went out to help the Trophy Wife (an asthma sufferer) get into the house, and got soot in my eyes, blinding me for a few seconds. And it's not as bad here as some parts. The west side of the city (including places like Rio Rancho and Belen, who really don't want to admit that they're suburbs of Albuquerque) apparently has ash falling like snow in places, according to people who live there.

And the sky is gray, every morning and every evening.


It's basic physics, really. As the sun rises, the particles in the air warm, and can rise into the sky with the breeze and blow elsewhere. The sky clears. But as the sun goes down, things cool off and the particles sink.

And everything is gray once again.

Perhaps it's a metaphor for life.

And death.