Police State Awareness Day

Posted: January 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights | Tags: , , , | 9 Comments

I’ve found 2011’s list of Top MuckReads at ProPublica and wanted to highlight the investigative articles involving homeland security.  I have to admit that the patterns are ominous.  It seems that domestic surveillance is the new reality.

First up is an article that shows how NYPD sends spies to Mosques.

Highlights of AP’s probe into NYPD intelligence operations, Associated Press
“Mosque crawlers” who monitor sermons and “rakers” who embed themselves into minority neighborhoods are among the tactics the New York Police Department has used since 9/11. It was done with the assistance of the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans.

Next is one that shows that the FBI isn’t beyond setting folks up for fun and arrest numbers.

Terrorists for the FBI, Mother Jones
Almost all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings. The story details “how informants are recruited and used and how and why agents are pursuing these aggressive sting operations.”

Here’s an interesting one on the use of force by the Las Vegas Police.  This would make me rethink vacations plans.

Deadly Force: When Las Vegas police shoot, and kill, Las Vegas Review-Journal
Analyzing each police shooting in the region since 1990, the Review-Journal found “an insular department that is slow to weed out problem cops and is slower still to adopt policies and procedures that protect both its own officers and the citizens they serve.”

Here’s an interesting set of stories from the Center for Investigative Reporting  published as a project called “Under Suspicion”.  Basically, investigative reporters have looked at the reports of suspicious activity at The Mall of America and how the Homeland Security programs have worked. Ever visited the Mall of America?  You could wind up in counterterrorism reports!

On the week of the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, the Center for Investigative Reporting and NPR published “Under Suspicion,” a joint yearlong investigation that looked at suspicious activity reports at the Mall of America and how the U.S. government has gathered intelligence since Sept. 11.

For CIR’s first live Behind the Story event, we teamed up with the San Francisco Film Society to give people a full look at how we put together an investigation in this digital age. “Under Suspicion” was published in print, broadcast, radio, as an animation and with multimedia components. Watch CIR reporters, producers and editors discuss their methodology and how they put together this innovative package.

There’s a lot of videos and interviews in the link.  You can check out NPR’s role in the investigation here.

Since Sept. 11, the nation’s leaders have warned that government agencies like the CIA and the FBI can’t protect the country on their own — private businesses and ordinary citizens have to look out for terrorists, too. So the Obama administration has been promoting programs like “See Something, Say Something” and the “Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative.”

Under programs like these, public attractions such as sports stadiums, amusement parks and shopping malls report suspicious activities to law enforcement agencies. But an investigation by NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting suggests that at one of the nation’s largest shopping malls, these kinds of programs are disrupting innocent people’s lives.

One afternoon three years ago, Francis Van Asten drove to the Mall of America, near Minneapolis, and started recording. First he filmed driving to the mall. Then he filmed a plane landing at the nearby airport, and then he strolled inside the mall and kept recording as he walked. He says he was taking a video to send to his fiancee in Vietnam.

As he started filming, he didn’t realize that he was about to get caught up in America’s war on terrorism — the mall had formed its own private counterterrorism unit in 2005. And now, a security guard had been tailing Van Asten since before he entered the mall. Van Asten was first approached by a guard outside a clothing store.

“And he asked me what I was doing. And I said, ‘Oh, I’m making a video.’ And I said, ‘Are we allowed to make videos in Mall of America, and take pictures and stuff?’ He says, ‘Oh sure, nothing wrong with that,’ ” explains Van Asten. “So I turn to start walking away, and then he started asking me questions. Why am I making a video, what am I making a video of, what I did for a living, and he asked me, what’s my hobbies?”

The guard called another member of the mall’s security unit, and they questioned Van Asten for almost an hour before summoning two police officers from the Bloomington Police Department.

“I hadn’t done anything wrong. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, according to them even. I asked the policeman why I was being detained,” says Van Asten. “He said, ‘Listen, mister, we can do this any way you want: the easy way or the hard way.’ ”

And then, the police took Van Asten down to a police substation in the mall’s basement.

Oh, and let’s not forget this.

He waited until New Year’s Eve to do it…but he did it. While expressing “serious reservations” about the bill, President Barack Obama on New Year’s Eve signed legislation that cements into law two highly controversial tenets of the war on terror: indefinite detention of terrorism suspects without charge, and the jailing of American citizens without trial. It also takes terrorism-related cases out of the hands of the FBI and the civilian court system and hands them over to the military.
Obama approved the bill (known as the National Defense Authorization Act), but at the same time, in a signing statement, claimed his administration would not allow the military to detain Americans indefinitely.
Civil libertarians were nonetheless outraged by Obama’s approval of the legislation. They claim that Obama is taking a “Trust me; I won’t do it” position. However, even if he does refrain from abusing the law, there is no guarantee that future presidents won’t imprison Americans and others indefinitely without trial or even without charge.
Next time, they just might disappear you!

 

Forget “frothy”, Slimy is a better adjective

Posted: January 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign, lobbyists, Republican politics | Tags: , , , , | 31 Comments

I really never thought we’d have to front page Rick Santorum.  He’s a two term senator from Pennsylvania with more corruption and crazy problems than Newt Gingrich and Michelle Bachmann combined.  Yesterday, TV news was full of reporters following the man around New Hampshire.  I spent a bit of time on twitter trying to get them to ask relevant questions like “Do you regret your association with Jack Abramhoff?”  It took a group of college students to get “man on dog”, sex-obsessed Santorum to get his freak on.  He was heartily booed for suggesting gay marriage would lead to polygamy.  Yes, Santorum’s culture war is probably his hallmark.  That and his battle with Google and the man on dog sex attribution.  Cannonfire has a piece up today on Santorum’s really weird brand of Catholicism.  (Think Mel Gibson.) However, what really has me jumping up and down is the level of corruption that characterized Santorum’s years in the senate.

Santorum’s tenure includes a fake charity, a fake leadership PAC and a level of man on lobbyist coziness that would make Tom Delay blush.  It actually makes me wonder why Santorum isn’t sharing a jail cell with Delay or wasn’t taken down during the Abramhoff scandal. When you Google Santorum, the results should read a slimy mixture of corruption and sanctimonious blather.  Philly News Writer Will Bunch has a laundry list of Santorum’s shocking abuse of public office. It’s enough to make me mourn for the loss of Michelle Bachmann.  She was just plain crazy.  Santorum takes corruption to a whole ‘nother level.  These are only Bunch’s top 5.

1. This compassionate Christian conservative founded a charity that was actually a bit of a scam. In 2001, following up on a faith-based urban charity initiative around the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, Santorum launched a charitable foundation called the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation. While in its first few years the charity cut checks to community groups for $474,000, Operation Good Neighbor Foundation had actually raised more than $1 million, from donors who overlapped with Santorum’s political fund raising. Where did the majority of the charity’s money go? In salary and consulting fees to a network of politically connected lobbyists, aides and fundraisers, including rent and office payments to Santorum’s finance director Rob Bickhart, later finance chair of the Republican National Committee. When I reported on Santorum’s charity for The American Prospect in 2006, experts told me a responsible charity doles out at least 75 percent of its income in grants, and they were shocked to learn the figure for Operation Good Neighbor Fund was less than 36 percent. The charity – which didn’t register with the state of Pennsylvania as required under the law — was finally disbanded in 2007.

2. Likewise, a so-called “leadership PAC” created by Santorum that was supposed to fund other Republicans instead seemed to mostly pay for the lifestyle of Santorum and those around him. My investigation of the America’s Foundation PAC showed that only 18 percent of its money went to fund political candidates, less — and typically far less — than any other “leadership PACs.” What America’s Foundation did spend a lot on with what looked like everyday expenses, including 66 trips to the Starbucks in Santorum’s then hometown of Leesburg, Va., multiple fast-food outings and expenditures at Wal-Mart, Target and Giant supermarkets. Campaign finance experts said the PAC’s expenses – paid for by donations from wealthy businessmen and lobbyists – were “unconventional,” at best and arguably not legal. Santorum also funded his large Leesburg “McMansion” with a $500,000 mortgage from a private bank run by a major campaign donor, in a program that was only supposed to be open to high-wealth investment clients in the trust, which Santorum was not, and closed to the general public.

3. Santorum was never above mingling his cultural crusades with the everyday work of raising political cash. In 2005, Santorum made headlines – not all positive – for visiting the deathbed of Terri Schiavo, the woman at the center of a national right-to-die controversy.What my Philadelphia Daily News colleague John Baer later exposed was that the real reason he was in the Tampa, Fla., area was to collect money at a $250,000 fundraiser organized by executives of Outback Steakhouses, a company that shared Santorum’s passion for a low minimum wage for waitresses and other rank-and-file workers. Santorum’s efforts were also aided by his unusual mode of travel: Wal-Mart’s corporate jet. And he canceled a public meeting on Social Security reform “out of respect for the Schiavo family”  even as the closed fundraisers went on.

4. Santorum didn’t seem to be against government waste when it came to his family. During his years in the Senate, Santorum raised his family in northern Virginia and rarely if ever seemed to use the small house that he claimed as his legal residence, in a blue-collar Pittsburgh suburb called Penn Hills. So Pennsylvania voters were shocked when they found out the Penn Hills School District had paid out $72,000 for the home cyberschooling of five of Santorum’s kids, hundreds of miles away in a different state. The cash=strapped district was unsuccessful in its efforts to get any of its money back from Santorum.

5. Washington’s lobbyist culture — Santorum was soaking in it. The ex-Pennsylvania senator spent much of his final years in government trying to downplay and defend his involvement in the so-called “K Street Project,” an effort created by GOP uber-lobbyist and tax-cutting fanatic Grover Norquist and future felon and House majority whip Tom DeLay. By all accounts, Santorum was the Senate’s “point man” on the K Street Project and he met with Norquist — at least occasionally and perhaps frequently — to discuss the effort to sure that Republicans were landing well-paying jobs in lobbying firms that were seeking to then access and influence other Republicans.

Marcus Stern and Kristina Cooke at Reuters remind us that Santorum was knee deep in the excesses of the K Street Project.  What I wonder is if this information will come out soon enough to stop Santorum’s momentum? Santorum has so many questionable ties to lobbyists that it’s hard to come away from any reading of articles about him not feeling the need for a shower.  It’s not just his senatorial past that is in question, however.  This particular item is from his current antics as a lobbyist.  Santorum has made his millions in the last few years on deals like this.

For example, his million-dollar-plus 2010 income included payments from a lobbying firm, an energy company engaged in controversial “hydrofracking” and a hospital conglomerate that was sued for allegedly defrauding the federal government.

Again, his past is even more fraught with behavior that looks a lot like being a senator for hire. So much for hyper-morality.

But the rubric “K Street Project” came to encompass the entire climate of cozy cooperation between Republicans and lobbyists.

When Republicans won control of the House in 1994, House Majority Leader Tom Delay and others organized regular meetings with lobbyists that reviewed K Street job openings with an eye toward filling them with party loyalists, who would in turn steer support and donations to the members.

By 2001, Sen. Santorum was also holding one-hour breakfast meetings with lobbyists on alternating Tuesday mornings at 8:30 a.m.

In 2004 he denied being involved with Norquist’s effort to staff K Street. But Santorum convened Senate Republicans to discuss the appointment of Democrat Dan Glickman as head the Motion Picture Association, according to Roll Call, a newspaper covering Capitol Hill.

“Yeah, we had a meeting, and yeah, we talked about making sure that we have fair representation on K Street. I admit that I pay attention to who is hiring, and I think it’s important for leadership to pay attention,” he told the paper at the time.

In 2006, as the influence-peddling scandal that sent lobbyist Jack Abramoff to jail unfolded, Santorum said he was ending the breakfasts in his conference room. However, his staff confirmed to Washington newspapers that they resumed almost immediately, on the same day and at the same time, at a location off the Capitol grounds.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington  named Santorum among three “most corrupt” senators in 2005 and 2006.  The 2006 report accuses Santorum of “using his position as a member of Congress to financially benefit those who have made contributions to his campaign committee and political action committee.” 

Despite a number of denials, there is evidence that Santorum and Abramhoff had met on the infamous Marianas Islands scam.  I wrote about this last March.  It is a horrifying example of modern slavery.  The story includes all kinds of immoralities like forced prostitution and abortions of young girls that were supposedly hired to work in garment factories in this US commonwealth territory  that is not covered by US labor laws.  The Delay Republicans held the associate companies up as beacons of capitalism.  Abramhoff says that he didn’t have any associations with Santorum but Roll Call and other sources show quite the opposite story.

Santorum definitely left the Senate through the revolving door.

Within months of leaving the Senate, Mr. Santorum joined the board of Universal Health Services, where he collected $395,000 in director’s fees and stock options before resigning last year. He also became a consultant to Consol Energy, after years of advocating drilling and extraction policies helpful to the company, a Pennsylvania gas and coal producer. And he consulted for the American Continental Group, a lobbying firm whose clients won earmarks he sponsored.

Its hard to reconcile this level of prostitution with a morality crusader, isn’t it?  But, there it is and if you goggle Santorum’s name and add lobbyist, corruption, K Street or any other number of combinations that go beyond the frothy mix definition, you’ll see the vast documentation.  It’s hard to imagine the tea party diehards getting behind a man with this kind of background.  Even Bill O’Reilly took issue with Santorum’s views on the rights of states to outlaw contraception with Santorum’s odd explanation that contraception put things out of the proper ‘order’.  Every thing about Santorum screams odd and narcissistic.

There’s been a reason that this man has been scraping along the bottom of the Republican presidential wannabe heap for some time.  My only hope is that when he is sent packing, that nearly every politician will want to avoid the stench and that will put an end to Santorum’s lucrative lobbying career as well.  In the mean time,  get ready for a few weeks of  the puppy dog press following Santorum around New Hampshire and South Carolina asking banal questions when they should be shouting  “show us your ill-got money”.  This guy may have had a coal miner grandfather, but he’s a total gold digger now.  What’s worse?  One man and one dog or one Senator and an army of lobbyists?  Evangelical Republicans, you’ve been Rick-Rolled!

I apologize to any earth worms I may have unintentionally insulted by the title of this thread.

Friday Reads

Posted: January 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, John Birch Society in Charge, morning reads | Tags: , , , | 13 Comments

Laissez les bontemps roulez! It’s the start of the Carnival Season!

Tonight is 12th night which means it’s the official start of the carnival season or the lead up to Mardi Gras Day.  The season kicks off on Epiphany and ends on Fat Tuesday.  Fat Tuesday is always the day before Ash Wednesday.  There are two huge parties tonight!  The first one is held on a St. Charles Street Car and The Phunny Phorty Phellows.  They herald in the season.  We also celebrate Joan of Arc’s birthday with a parade in the Quarter.  If you make it down here, you will see many folks in medieval costume and many maskers.  Tonight is undoubtedly one of my favorite holidays because it’s just an incredibly colorful, local celebration.

If you’re going to hang out with native New Orleanians who grew up with Mardi Gras, there are a few things you must know. Here are the top ten.

Number 10

How to spell “krewe.”

Number 9

Carnival is a season, Mardi Gras is a day.

Number 8

The Mardi Gras colors are purple, green and gold, and the official Mardi Gras song is “If Ever I Cease To Love.”

Number 7

The Captain of the Krewe is more important than the King.

Number 6

If you miss a doubloon thrown from a float, never reach down to pick it up. Always put your foot on it. If you go with your hand, you’re either too late or you’ll get your fingers stepped on.

Number 5

If you bite into a plastic baby in a King Cake, that’s a good thing

Number 4

Any beads shorter than two feet long are unacceptable unless they are made of glass.

Number 3

The national press has no clue about Mardi Gras.

Number 2

The vast majority of people in the French Quarter during Carnival are people from out of town.

Finally, the Number 1 thing you must know about Mardi Gras is

You can always judge how bad hurricane season has been by riding down St. Charles Avenue in late fall to see how many Mardi Gras beads are still hanging in the trees.

Every office in the city will be serving King Cake!  Watch out for that baby because you’ll have to buy the next one!  It’s only 46 days until Mardi Gras!

The tea party has found a primary challenger for Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.  Who could possibly think that Hatch isn’t extreme enough?  Yup, it’s the usual group of whackos.

Conservative groups that want to send a message that centrists won’t be allowed to hide behind the GOP label have made a prime target out of Hatch, Utah’s six-term senior senator. Although firmly in the conservative camp on social issues, Hatch has built a reputation for reaching across the aisle to work with Democrats on economic policy, and shies away from the red-meat rhetoric many grassroots conservative groups demand.

The Club for Growth, a deep-pocketed fiscal conservative group, eagerly courted Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) to run against Hatch, but Chaffetz quashed their hopes in August when he announced he would seek reelection to the House instead. Rep. Jim Matheson, a Utah Democrat, also considered challenging Hatch, but opted out in October.

FreedomWorks, a national Tea Party group that has set its sights on Hatch, placed its hopes in Liljenquist early, naming him its “Legislative Entrepreneur of the Year” in November and warmly welcoming him to the race on Wednesday.

“We are very pleased to see a dedicated and proven conservative like Dan Liljenquist step up and challenge the status quo in Utah,” said FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe. “His record in the state Senate shows clearly that Liljenquist has the ability to produce innovative solutions to budget woes, and to effectively turn those ideas into action and real legislative change.”

I guess my gut feeling yesterday about the Obama plan to decrease the size of the military was right.  It is an old rehashed Rummy idea.  Это интересно.  (That’s interesting in Russian with apologies for my Parisian accent to my Russian language teacher at university.)

The Obama administration plans to revert to a Bush-era plan to cut the number of U.S. Army combat brigades in Europe in half as part of the Pentagon budget cuts to be announced within weeks, U.K. Defense Secretary Philip Hammond said.

The decision is a retreat from the administration’s previous determination, announced last April, to leave in place three of the four brigade combat teams now stationed in Europe, three in Germany and one airborne brigade in Italy. A brigade combat team usually has 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers.

“My understanding is that there will remain two brigades,” Hammond said in an interview yesterday in Washington after meeting U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for their first talks at the Pentagon since they each took office. “But in addition to that, there will be some rotating presence” for training and exercises, he said.

Speaking of interesting, here’s something a little offbeat from AJ.  It’s about fertility problems in “Mother India”.  Who would think that a country with severe population problems would have a booming fertility clinic business?

Jhuma and Niladri are a couple from Burdwan in the state of West Bengal. They have been married for eight years and have no children. This is a major problem, especially in India where a childless married woman is considered impure. A few years ago, Niladri would probably have abandoned Jhuma, and her life would have become a misery, her presence taken to be an inauspicious sign at social events or religious ceremonies.

Today, cutting-edge research and the boom in the assisted reproduction industry offer them new possibilities, new hopes, new dilemmas. The couple set off for Hyderabad, the heart of Indian medical and assisted reproduction research, on a journey of hope, a journey that will take them to Dr Rama’s fertility clinic.

Dr Rama is the owner of a number of clinics in southern India and is expanding her business into the Gulf States and the Caribbean. At the Hyderabad clinic, Jhuma comes into contact with doctors, embryologists, other infertile women and surrogate mothers who are driven by poverty to sell their wombs to earn the surrogacy fees that give them and their existing children a chance of a future.

Drink your coffee before you follow this link. What Would Hillary Clinton Have Done?  I wish I’d have bought some hip waders first, but oh well.

The empirical choice between Clinton and Obama was never as direct as those on either side made it out to be; neither was obviously more equipped or more progressive than the other. The maddening part, then and now, is that they were utterly comparable candidates. The visions — in 2008, of Obama as a progressive redeemer who would restore enlightened democracy to our land and Hillary as a crypto-Republican company man; or, in 2011, of Obama as an appeasement-happy crypto-Republican and Hillary as a leftist John Wayne who would have whipped those Congressional outlaws into shape — they were all invented. These are fictional characters shaped by the predilections, prejudices and short memories of the media and the electorate. They’re not actual politicians between whom we choose here on earth.

If she had won her party’s nomination and then the general election, Hillary Clinton’s presidency would probably not have looked so different from Obama’s. She was, after all, a senator who, for a variety of structural and strategic reasons, often crossed party lines to co-sponsor legislation with Republicans, who voted to go to war in Iraq, who moved to the center on everything from Israel to violent video games. You think Obama’s advisers are bad? Hillary Clinton hired, and then took far too long to get rid of, Mark Penn. And her economic team probably would have looked an awful lot like Obama’s.

Yup.  It’s the no difference trope!  I tried to warn you.

Alrighty.  That’s my contribution for the day.  Wonk will be hostessing the live blog for the Republican debates tomorrow night.  I have the makings of cosmopolitan martinis and a spinach/feta pizza.  Youngest daughter is coming in for the LSU blow out with two of her roommates.  At this point, some one is bound to find out that I faked the thanksgiving hand holding deal.  The thangka of lion faced dakini is sure to be a give away! So, be sure to join us for  what promises to be another whack event!  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Changes coming to the Pentagon

Posted: January 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Team Obama | 9 Comments

Obama had a presser today announcing a pared down role and size for the US Military.  Panetta followed with some details.  The budget implications will be announced in a few weeks.  I’m sure this will be discussed a lot in the coming weeks.  Here’s some information and links on what’s out so far.

WAPO: Obama announces new, leaner military approach

The Obama administration on Thursday unveiled a new military strategy that shifts the Pentagon’s focus towards Asia and says the country’s dire budget problems necessitate a more restrained use of military force and more modest foreign policy goals.
The strategy will almost certainly mean a smaller Army and Marine Corps as well as new investments in long-range stealth bombers and anti-missile systems that are designed primarily to counter China’s military buildup. It explicitly states that America can make due with a smaller nuclear force.

“Our nation is in a moment of transition,” President Obama wrote in an introduction to the document outlining the new strategy. “As we end today’s wars, we will focus on a broader range of challenges and opportunities, including the security and prosperity of the Asia Pacific.”

A major thrust of the new approach is its insistence on more modest goals for the military, which has spent years fighting difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aimed at ousting brutal, anti-U.S. rulers and rebuilding fractured societies .

The strategy explicitly rejects the notion that the U.S. military should be structured to fight such wars on a regular basis. In many ways, the new approach can be seen as a rejection of the Bush administration’s ambitious foreign policy goals of the last decade.

BBC: Obama unveils new strategy for ‘leaner’ US military

Mr Obama said during a speech in Australia in November that the Asia Pacific was now a top priority for the US, in what was seen as a challenge to the rising regional power of China.

Joined by Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, President Obama stressed that the defence budget would still grow, but at a slower pace.

He said the US was “turning the page on a decade of war” and faced a “moment of transition”.

“Even as our troops continue to fight in Afghanistan, the tide of war is receding,” he said.

Oddly enough, this strategy sounds awfully familiar to the Rumsfeld Doctrine of blow them up and forgot about the aftermath.  But, that’s just my first gut take on the announcement.

They are Shocked, Shocked I tell you!

Posted: January 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: John Birch Society in Charge, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd | Tags: , | 51 Comments

I’ve written a lot about my experience watching the Republican party gut support for the ERA, women’s reproductive rights, and eventually mainstream economics, science and rational thought. I became an unintentional activist in the 1980s when the Nebraska State Chair of the Democratic Party signed me up for a Republican county convention and told me to go fight to keep women’s rights in the Republican Party Platform.  Starry-eyed kid that I was, I said that I’d give it a try even though I really wanted to just work on the issues I cared about like the ERA.  Every time I wanted to give up, she sent me back in to try again.  She told me that nothing good would ever come to the country if both parties weren’t filled with reasonable people.

What I witnessed in the 1980s in Omaha, Nebraska was a series of elections where storefront churches sent women and men into Republican conventions and organizations with little white cards that basically had marching orders and talking points.  The women had long, straight, lifeless hair and faces.  The wore empire waist, gingham, home made dresses.  I came in with my dress for success power suit and my newly minted economics MS.  I was no match for what I discovered was Eric Hoffer’s True Believer in the flesh.  I’d read that book for a  High School English class and thought it only explained Nazis.  The fembots read their objections to the ERA and to birth control and abortion access from their cards written by their male pastors with their nodding, smiling husbands at their side.  I never considered sisterhood to be universal after that.

By about my second convention, I was being shouted down and called names that I won’t mention here.  The Party establishment–mostly members of the Omaha Country Club–represented the city’s business interests, lawyers and doctors.  They were completely unprepared for the ruckus.  The meme for the decade was that platforms don’t matter.  Let them put in whatever they want.  They needed the votes for their own agendas.  It was implied that all of this was lip service.  I left the party quite a few years before Pat Robertson won Iowa but let me tell you I wasn’t surprised.  My own run for the unicameral was an eye-opening experience.  You’ve never experienced fascism in quite a personal way until you have a campaign run against you from the pulpits of catholic and evangelical churches.  Those folks will do and say anything, literally. Forget Stalin, christofascists believe their ends justify the use of any means necessary, and the scary thing is that their neighbors will believe them.  It’s nothing less than a crusade of lies, anger and mean.

I’ve been reading The Politics Blog written by Charles P. Pierce at Esquire Magazine with encouragement from SkyDancing reader Ralph.  He’s got a great piece up today on how the chickens are coming home to roost for those country club Republicans that really, really want Mitt Romney or some other country club Republican to be likable enough to beat Barack Obama.  The powers that be want to gut Frank-Dodd and ensure that we can drill relentlessly in whatever garden of Eden they choose. They are fully aware that independents like me will run from the likes of Santorum and Perry.  Rove and his cronies are salivating over the vulnerability of the president.  They are also savvy enough to know they are riding in a clown car that they bought and paid for with funds and fundie ass-kissing.  They should’ve thought a bit more about the ride before they gave the keys to insane people.

Precisely how many times are we going to be treated to public expressions of mock horror from Important Conservatives that 40 years of allying themselves with nativist hooligans, anti-intellectual crackpots, Christomaniacs, and the sad detritus of American apartheid finally has produced a field of presidential candidates that these same Important Conservatives find less than adequate? Once again, the whole exercise requires both the writer and the reader to ignore the obvious consequences of four decades of political history and conclude that the Republican party has lost its mind only recently. And it requires both the writer and reader to convince themselves that out there, somewhere, is a superior candidate to the ones presently available, and to ignore the obvious conclusion that titans like Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, and Paul Ryan chose not to run because they suspected they might get beaten like gongs, if not by President Obama, then by the wholly unacceptable Willard Romney.

And Bobby Jindal? Just stop, okay? You’re killing me.

(By the way, Politico? Quoting Fred Barnes on anything is the recognized international I Got Nothin’ signal. Quoting Fred Barnes on American politics is the functional equivalent of asking a fruit bat what it thinks about the trade deficit.)

Yes, the stern father is trying to get the keys to the clown car back from people completely dedicated to a crusade to turn the US into something completely disdained by the founders; a theocracy. The delightful Pierce read is a response to this “think” piece at Politico on the batch of wackos and the dull ideal-less Willard that have gone in and come out of Iowa. Not one of them is wholly acceptable to the mishmash of sociopaths associated with today’ Republican party.  Some are anathema to the Tea Party.  Santorum and Gingrich are the ultimate corrupt, lobbying insiders.  Others are not trusted by the christofascist crusaders.  The two sane candidates on deck are Mormons and way too reasonable–in the manner of reason that only today’s Republican faithful can define–and way too attached to reality to be acceptable to a group of people who reject modern civilization. Huntsman and Romney can’t be enthusiastically elected in today’s pared down Republican party which requires a pathological detachment from reality. Examine the evidence of Eric Cantor, who went into a state of apoplexy on 60 minutes last week when being told that Ronald Reagan raised taxes 12 times and compromised with Democrats many more times than that.

This is what happens when you sell your souls for votes and unfettered greed.  We’re in about the 7th ring of a Republican-made hell right now and the country club dudes want out of their Faustian bargain so they can stay there.  Their compadres at the wheel want to go straight to ring 10.  We’re living their Divine Comedy with the rich grabbing everything, endless unemployment driving wages down, and absolute lax enforcement of the remaining Nixonian regulation. Yet, they could capture both the Senate and the White House.

Republicans this year find themselves in something of generational slackwater in this election cycle.

There are younger, talented Republicans, such as Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who judged themselves not ready to run for president this time.

There were also a number of potentially formidable Republican governors — Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels — of an older generation who chose for various reasons not to run.

This left Romney not competing against the most promising presidential-level talent this time.

“It’s not like the old days of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan,” said Washington Examiner columnist Michael Barone. “They were all pretty well-known candidates. It’s just sort of a weak field.”

Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes went a step further, asking: “Would Romney be odds-on to win the nomination if Mitch Daniels or Chris Christie or Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush were in the race?

Not likely.”

That doesn’t mean, Barnes and others argued, that Romney couldn’t grow into a more forceful standard-bearer for his party in the process of campaigning against President Barack Obama.

Whoever wrote this piece has never spent any serious time researching Bobby “the exorcist” Jindal who has absolutely gutted our state’s universities and hospitals so that he can say he didn’t increase the number of people on the state’s payroll.  They haven’t checked the state’s unemployment rate which has doubled under his watch.  They certainly haven’t listened to him speak.  You have to be a speed listener to do that.  It takes special powers  Then, there is Paul Ryan that’s as big of a crank as any one I’ve seen in public office recently.  Even Newt Gingrich recognized his entitlement reforms as right wing engineering before he was called out by the other cranks.

This is the problem.  The Republican Party has spent 40 years purging their ranks.  There is nothing left but candidates so flexible with their positions they’ve been on every side of every issue or people so frightening that you wouldn’t want them near your children.  Consider Senator David Vitter whose record is simply impeccable for every one in the clown car.  Ask people if they’d want to spend time with him and every one runs for the door and hides their daughters.  Consider the number of Republicans from which you’d hide your young sons.  You name any Republican these days and you can point to either the freewheeling old school hypocrisy or the creepy “I don’t believe in science, math, history, and reality” factor.  They elect soci0paths in safe districts because they are reliable voters for the party’s special interests.

Consider Bachmann’s insistence today–as she headed for the hatchback door–that Obama is a socialist as best represented by Obamacare. It seems her evangelical fundie friends just couldn’t do it for a woman. She hit the eject button.  But, she’s still doling out the crazy.  Consider that Obamacare with its individual mandate is the Heritage Foundation/Republican Senate Health care response to Hillary Clinton’s health care study.  Republicans got a Republican plan that both Romney and Gingrich supported in the 1990s because it was the Republican plan and came from the Heritage Foundation.  Some how they’ve pinned it on Obama and deemed it socialist.  How can any one reconcile this with out some part of their brain imploding?  The individual mandate was the hallmark of the Republican plan.  All you have to do is check the Legislative record or the press articles of the day.  It was one of the things Obama supposedly opposed when he ran as a Democrat.  How can any Republican candidate that’s had enough experience to be the president run away from former Republican policy initiatives and conveniently forget that Obama opposed it before he loved it?

The concept of the individual health insurance mandate originated in 1989 at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 1993, Republicans twice introduced health care bills that contained an individual health insurance mandate. Advocates for those bills included prominent Republicans who today oppose the mandate including Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Robert Bennett (R-UT), and Christopher Bond (R-MO). In 2007, Democrats and Republicans introduced a bi-partisan bill containing the mandate.

In 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama was opposed to the individual mandate. He stated the following in a Feb. 28, 2008 interview on the Ellen DeGeneres show about his divergent views with Hillary Clinton:

“Both of us want to provide health care to all Americans. There’s a slight difference, and her plan is a good one. But, she mandates that everybody buy health care. She’d have the government force every individual to buy insurance and I don’t have such a mandate because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance, it’s that they can’t afford it. So, I focus more on lowering costs. This is a modest difference. But, it’s one that she’s tried to elevate, arguing that because I don’t force people to buy health care that I’m not insuring everybody. Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t.”

The Republican clowncar ride these days enforces a strict policy of historical amnesia.  Pierce sees the contortionist sideshow that’s become the Romney candidacy.  Romney’s put himself into a denial pretzel to runaway from Republican past.

It is at moments like this in which I feel just the faintest twinge of sympathy for our man Willard. I mean, what more does the poor sap have to do? He’s walked back his previous ironclad commitments and then he walked back many of his own walk-backs. He has abased himself before all the steaming iron gods of modern conservatism. He’s grabbed control of the wild-west landscape produced by the Citizens United decision and demonstrated that he has absolutely no conscience regarding using anonymous corporate button men on the opposition while pretending all the while that he’s Michael Corleone at his nephew’s christening. And still he’s got people sniping at him, and dreaming their dreamy dreams about thuggish governors of New Jersey, diminutive governors of Indiana, and zombie-eyed granny-starvers from Wisconsin. It can’t be easy being the cousin that every Important Conservative winds up having to take to the prom.

Willard, if you want to play up to today’s Republicans, you’re going to have to literally have a come to Jesus moment.  Like Bobby Jindal, you’re going to have to give up the religion of your family and force your wife and kids to convert.  You’re going to have to say you were deceived by Satan and that explains the entire Massachusetts Governor thing.  It almost worked for Newt right?  The best deal is that you can contort yourself into the new Willard and Newt will forever be Newt.

I have no intention of ever voting Republican again.  That does not mean, however, that the Democratic Party gets my vote by default as I think Obama and others are expecting.  I am clearly looking for something else.  I do not intend to sell out all of my education and principles to settle for the anti-war but otherwise incredibly cracked crackpot Ron Paul who is a throwback to the confederacy. There is no way Donald Trump’s narcissism and hype traps me into forgetting how he took all that parental money and government money and parlayed it into bankruptcy.  He is not the greatest showman on earth.  Nader pretty much encompasses all of those complaints and more.  Bloomberg?  Forget about it!  This could very well be the first major election that I will give a resounding pass.  In that case, consider Mary Landrieu a lost cause.  She’ll never squeak through in today’s Louisiana where the electorate was changed by a Rovian exodus.  The only thing that could drive me to the polls is fear of Mitch McConnell as majority leader.  Is this what the democratic experience has come to?

This maybe the worst election year ever.

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