RIP Mr. Rove

I’ve watched Jon Stewart wade through years of political muck and offer it up on a skewer — but I’ve never seen him furious … until last night. The links haven’t gone up yet at Huffy, although I expect they will — and my computers too slow to load just the ones I want, but go here and watch three bits … Pfriend or Pfoe … Quiz: Are You a Real American … Understanding Real America in Wasilla. Beauty!

It’s over, kids — the long dark years of George and Karl leading an unquestioning public around by the nose, feeding them fear and division and low-hanging fruit. Arianna gives credit to the net … that’s us, pat yer own back … for “outing” the events, hit by hit, day by day — instant vetting, instant replays, instant response. She’s spot on; the web folds time, as do with the energies that drive us forward into enlightenment.

McCain/Palin are reduced to throwing stuff they find under rocks, trying to slow the momentum. Brace yourself for a wave of Rev. Wright nonsense. It’s all they’ve got left, now that Ayers and the anachronistic ’socialist’ meme hasn’t stuck.

The “real American” dialogue has become a focal point for unity; frankly, how much respect can you give a campaign that didn’t see that coming! From a Baltimore sun op/ed titled Desperate Republicans are sinking to new lows:

Here’s what real Americans are doing: writing checks to Mr. Obama.

In September alone, more than 632,000 new donors helped the Obama campaign raise a mind-boggling $150 million. Until this year, no American presidential campaign had ever attracted 1 million unique donors; Mr. Obama has 3.1 million donors.

Mac doesn’t grok the awareness that’s sweeping the country — he’s using not only the tactics that beat him in 2000 [and hiring those that did it to him to do it to Obama] but the ones that have dropped him into a dark hole that’s lost him Iowa, Colorado, and New Mexico. The point is well taken by those watching — this man doesn’t learn from his mistakes … remind you of anyone?

His fits of pique look like tantrum — he barred Maureen Dowd from his plane a few weeks ago, now he’s axed Joe Klein [no Lefty] of TIME. Mac’s embrace of Dubby’s “don’t speak to the enemy” belligerency continues to erode his possibilities until now he only speaks to “real Americans” … the kind Stewart shows us … and the kind who wouldn’t move forward into a new political awareness if their lives depended on it. Certainly their economic lives do; but they’re better at running their mouths than listening.

Obama’s gone to Grama’s side [bless her!] for a couple of days, but I don’t think that will put a kink in the works — it’s not the man, now: it’s the movement. Meanwhile, John is defending his robocalls; Obama was “friends with a terrorist,” doncha know. Mac doesn’t remember his Iran/Contra days … or doesn’t understand the power of Google to instantly retrieve his past associations, more likely.

In courting the wingnuts, John’s gotten weirder and more erratic — he’s turned into Capt. Quig in The Caine Mutiny, hunting down the stolen strawberries. He’s not just the grumpy old dude that yells to get off his lawn — he’s turning into the bizarre old recluse that stacks newspapers in his front room. He even did a Bob Dole impression the other day, referring to himself in the third person and telling us not to “feel sorry for John McCain.”

Jeeeeez — increase the meds! [Or borrow some from Cindy. Cheap shot, you say? Listen, if I was Cindy, tied by expectation to McCranky as the trophy wife and face-to-face with younger, bouncier Sarah Barracuda all the time, I'd be self-medicating for all I was worth!]

The best news of course is that, clearly, Rove’s ability to turn us all into weak-kneed, paranoid silently-suffering enablers has taken it’s last breath. What comes around goes around, even if you have to wait and wait and wait for it.

Heads up on Stewart, tonight — Chris Buckley is his guest; I’d bet his “gets” will be much more interesting now that there ARE no Rove Republicans left except in Appalachia and Wasilla. And the remainder of “real Americans” interested in their highjinks only want to watch them in the same way they thrill to Dog the Bounty Hunter kicking in the door of some poor shmuck on the run.

Here’s a couple of reads on this topic; and I’m including links to the voting scandal, which is heating up — the bonus reads are a tongue-in-cheek op/ed and a good screed from the Bagala/Carville team … both amuse and elucidate. Last one is an Andrew Sullivan that will both entertain and annoy — he’s been doing a TERRIFIC job of working for Obama and against Palin, by the way; my kind of conservative!

Jude

The Real Scandal
BOB HERBERT, NYT
October 20, 2008

It never ends. The Republican Party never gets tired of spraying its poison across the American political landscape.

So there was a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, telling Chris Matthews on MSNBC that the press should start investigating members of the House and Senate to determine which ones are “pro-America or anti-America.”

Can a rancid Congressional committee be far behind? Leave it to a right-wing Republican to long for those sunny, bygone days of political witch-hunting.

Ms. Bachmann’s demented desire (”I would love to see an exposé like that”) is of a piece with the G.O.P.’s unrelenting effort to demonize its opponents, to characterize them as beyond the pale, different from ordinary patriotic Americans — and not just different, but dangerous, and even evil.

But the party is not content to stop there. Even better than demonizing opponents is the more powerful and direct act of taking the vote away from their opponents’ supporters. The Republican Party has made strenuous efforts in recent years to prevent Democrats from voting, and to prevent their votes from being properly counted once they’ve been cast.

Which brings me to the phony Acorn scandal.

John McCain, who placed his principles in a blind trust once the presidential race heated up, warned the country during the presidential debate last week that Acorn, which has been registering people to vote by the hundreds of thousands, was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history.”

It turns out that a tiny percentage of these new registrations are bogus, with some of them carrying ludicrous names like Mickey Mouse. Republicans have tried to turn this into a mighty oak of a scandal, with Mr. McCain thundering at the debate that it “may be destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Please. The Times put the matter in perspective when it said in an editorial that Acorn needs to be more careful with some aspects of its voter-registration process. It needs to do a better job selecting canvassers, among other things.

“But,” the editorial added, “for all of the McCain campaign’s manufactured fury about vote theft (and similar claims from the Republican Party over the years) there is virtually no evidence — anywhere in the country, going back many elections — of people showing up at the polls and voting when they are not entitled to.”

Two important points need to be made here. First, the reckless attempt by Senator McCain, Sarah Palin and others to fan this into a major scandal has made Acorn the target of vandals and a wave of hate calls and e-mail. Acorn staff members have been threatened and sickening, murderous comments have been made about supporters of Barack Obama. (Senator Obama had nothing to do with Acorn’s voter-registration drives.)

Second, when it comes to voting, the real threat to democracy is the nonstop campaign by the G.O.P. and its supporters to disenfranchise American citizens who have every right to cast a ballot. We saw this in 2000. We saw it in 2004. And we’re seeing it again now.

In Montana, the Republican Party challenged the registrations of thousands of legitimate voters based on change-of-address information available from the Post Office. These specious challenges were made — surprise, surprise — in Democratic districts. Answering the challenges would have been a wholly unnecessary hardship for the voters, many of whom were students or members of the armed forces.

In the face of widespread public criticism (even the Republican lieutenant governor weighed in), the party backed off.

That sort of thing is widespread. In one politically crucial state after another — in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, you name it — the G.O.P. has unleashed foot soldiers whose insidious mission is to make the voting process as difficult as possible — or, better yet, impossible — for citizens who are believed to favor Democrats.

For Senator McCain to flip reality on its head and point to an overwhelmingly legitimate voter-registration effort as a “threat to the fabric of democracy” is a breathtaking exercise in absurdity.

Miles Rapoport, a former Connecticut secretary of state who is now president of Demos, a public policy group, remarked on the irony of elected Republican officials deliberately attempting to thwart voting. Some years ago, he said, he “and all the other secretaries of state” would bemoan the lack of interest in voting, especially among the young and the poor.

Now, he said, with the explosion of voter registration and the heightened interest in the presidential campaign, you’d think officials “would welcome that, and encourage it, and even celebrate it.” Instead, he said, in so many cases, G.O.P. officials are “trying to pare down the lists.” ++

MN-06: Bachmann screwed
brownsox, Daily Kos
Mon Oct 20, 2008

When it rains, it pours.

Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s ill-advised comments last week have had a great deal of unintended fallout. First of all, Bachmann was only narrowly winning her race for reelection over Democrat Elwyn Tinklenberg, the mayor of Blaine, Minnesota.

In the wake of her comments, Tinklenberg has raised over $700,000, which is just an astonishing total. The Democrat had raised $1 million total for the entire cycle as of Q3 filings this year.

Coupled with Tinklenberg’s sudden huge influx of cash is the news that the DCCC is investing heavily in the district, to the tune of $1 million.

The party plans to spend $1 million against GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who recently said Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama ”may have anti-American views.” President Bush carried her district by 15 percentage points over John Kerry in 2004.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently borrowed $15 million to pursue such opportunities, the largest loan in its history, said spokeswoman Jennifer Crider.

Meanwhile, Bachmann has been chided by Republicans such as Colin Powell…and even her role model Sarah Palin:

Speaking with reporters in Colorado yesterday, Palin said she does not agree with Rep. Michele Bachmann’s recent comments suggesting that some congressmen hold “anti-American views,” NBC/NJ’s Matthew E. Berger reports. “Well that’s quite subjective,” she said of Bachmann’s comments. “I would think that anybody running and wanting to serve in Congress is quite pro-American because that’s what the mission is, to better this country, so I would question the intent of that.”

You’ve got to hand it to Bachmann; you’ve really hit the big time when you make Sarah Palin look reasonable.

Swing State Project has moved their ranking of this race to “Leans Republican”. We have done the same. The race was fairly close to begin with, and Bachmann’s comments have given Tinklenberg an almost unimaginable influx of money, they’ve brought the DCCC on board…and they’ve given Bachmann untold negative press and a party scrambling to distance themselves from her.

While she represents a conservative district, she also represents a district where 45% of voters figure to support Barack Obama. I can’t figure they like being called “anti-American”. That’s certainly not what we would call “Minnesota nice”.

The term “macaca moment” has been overused over the last two years, but if any incident since the original has befit the usage, it is this one.

And let this be a lesson to other right wingers out there who would tar their political opponents as anti-American (Mike Rogers and Robin Hayes, we’re looking at you): you slander your fellow Americans at your peril. You’re held to some standard of decency as public servants, and when you cross the line, you pay. ++

A Mighty Hoax from ACORN Grows
Michael Winship, Common Dreams
Monday, October 20, 2008

ACORN and election fraud. Hang on. As soon as I can get the alligator that crawled out of my toilet back into the New York City sewers where it belongs, I can turn my attention to this very important topic.

You see, the ACORN “election fraud” story is one of those urban legends, like fake moon landings and alligators in the sewers, and it appears three or four weeks before every recent national election with the regularity of the swallows returning to Capistrano.

First, the basics: ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is an activist group working with low and moderate income families that, among many other things, registers voters. To do this they hire people to go around signing up the unregistered, killing two birds with one stone — giving employment to people who need it (some with criminal records) and providing the opportunity to vote to members of minority communities whose voices all too often go unheard.

What happens is that some of those hired to do the registering, who are paid by the name, make people up. As a result, you’ll discover that among the registrants are such obvious fakes as Mickey Mouse and the starting line-up of the Dallas Cowboys, among others.

This is where the Republican meme kicks in. As they have in past elections (although now louder and more angrily than ever), the GOP has made ACORN the red flag du jour as the party tries to mobilize its conservative base and, allegedly, attempts to suppress the vote and distract attention from accusations of election tampering made against them, too.

The charge is that these fake registrations will create havoc at the polls. On Tuesday morning, former Republican Senators John Danforth and Warren Rudman, chairs of Senator McCain’s Honest and Open Elections Committee, held a press conference and described the results of the bad seeds in ACORN’s registration program as “a potential nightmare.” Danforth said he was concerned “that this election night and the days that follow will be a rerun of 2000, and even worse than 2000.”

John McCain raised it at Wednesday night’s final debate and went further, adding, “We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama’s relationship with ACORN, who [sic] is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy…”

Obama replied, “ACORN is a community organization. Apparently, what they have done is they were paying people to go out and register folks. And apparently, some of the people who were out there didn’t really register people; they just filled out a bunch of names. Had nothing to do with us. We were not involved.”

Which is not to say Obama has not been associated with ACORN in the recent past. He has. As he said in the debate, as a lawyer, he joined with the group in partnership with the US Justice Department to implement a motor voter registration law in Illinois — allowing folks to register to vote at their local DMV. His work as a community organizer bought him into contact with ACORN, the organization received money from the Woods Fund while he was a board member there and his presidential campaign gave ACORN more than $800,000 to help with get out the vote campaigns during the primary season — but not, apparently, for registration drives.

All of this distracts from several important points. ACORN has registered 1.3 million voters, and maintains that in virtually every instance they are the ones who have reported the incidents of fraud.

As the organization asserted in a response to Senator McCain, “ACORN hired 13,000 field workers to register people to vote. In any endeavor of this size, some people will engage in inappropriate conduct. ACORN has a zero tolerance policy and terminated any field workers caught engaging in questionable activity. At the end of the day, as ACORN is paying these people to register voters, it is ACORN that is defrauded.” Arrests have been made, as well they should be.

Add to this the simple fact that registration fraud is not election fraud. Seventy-five, made-up people who are registered as, say, “Brad Pitt,” are not likely going to show up at some polling place on November 4 to vote in the election. Because they don’t exist. (Besides, Angelina would never give them time off from babysitting duties.)

Granted, there are ways to mail in an absentee ballot under a fake name and, too, from time to time some joker is going to come to the polls and try to bluff his or her way in. But despite the charge that thousands and thousands of fakes will flood the machines and throw the count, it does not happen very often. And according to ACORN, “Even RNC [Republican National Committee] General Counsel Sean Cairncross has recently acknowledged he is not aware of a single improper vote cast as a result of bad cards submitted in the course of an organized voter registration effort.”

Not that this has stopped the GOP from banging the same drum every national election. And amnesiac members of the media and some government agencies from buying into it every time. Last year, The New York Times reported that the federal Election Assistance Commission, created by the Help America Vote Act, legislation enacted after the Florida debacle, was told by a pair of experts — one Republican, the other described as having “liberal leanings” — that there was not that much fraud to be found. But their conclusions were downplayed.

As per the Times, “Though the original report said that among experts ‘there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud,’ the final version of the report released to the public concluded in its executive summary that ‘there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.’”

Which raises the ongoing investigation of the Justice Department’s firing of those eight US attorneys shortly after President Bush’s re-election. It shouldn’t be forgotten that despite official explanations, half of them were let go after refusing to prosecute vote fraud charges demanded by Republicans. The attorneys had determined there was little or no evidence of skullduggery; certainly not enough to prosecute.

(In an interview with Talking Points Memo on Thursday, one of those fired, David Iglesias, reacted to reports that the FBI has launched an investigation of ACORN: “I’m astounded that this issue is being trotted out again. Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it’s a scare tactic.”)

What’s equally if not more scary are continued allegations of Republican attempts at “caging” minority voters — making challenge lists of African- and Hispanic-Americans registered in heavily Democratic districts. Just this week, a Federal judge in Michigan ruled that voters could not be purged from the rolls in that state simply because their mailing address was invalid — this followed a failed attempt by a Michigan Republican county chairman to use a list of foreclosed homes as the basis of voter challenges.

This comes on the heels of a recent report from the Brennan Center at New York University documenting how state officials — often with the best of intentions — purge huge numbers of perfectly legal voters from the rolls.

As my colleague Bill Moyers reported, “Hundreds of thousands of legal voters may have been dumped in recent years, many without ever being notified.” The report describes a “process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation.”

Hardly reassuring words if you want democracy to work, and sadly, not an urban legend, but the simple truth. ++

Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS.

Could the US election be stolen?
AFP via Raw Story
Monday October 20, 2008

GOP admits plan to use foreclosure list to challenge voters
Raw Story

Analyst: GOP voter fraud scandal ‘really serious’
Raw Story

McCain employing GOP Operative Accused Of Voter Registration Fraud
HuffPo

Critical US Supreme Court Ruling Against Rovian GOP Vote Meddling May Prove Temporary
Common Dreams

bonus

Bob the Banker speaks out
In an exclusive interview, Joe the Plumber’s big brother reveals why Obama’s plan to “spread the wealth” will turn America into a socialist hell.
Gary Kamiya, Salon
Oct. 21, 2008

I’m Bob the Banker, and I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. If Barack Obama wins, he’s going to take my hard-earned money and hand it over to a bunch of deadbeats and losers. He’s going to turn the greatest country on earth into a socialist hell. Nothing less than our free-enterprise system is threatened. I’m angry! I’m really, really angry! And when you hear exactly how deeply Obama’s far-left tax scheme is going to reach into my pocket, you’ll be even angrier.

First of all, I’d like to give a big shout-out to my little brother Sam — or “Joe,” as he seems to be calling himself now. If it weren’t for Joe, America might never have realized that it was on the verge of installing Karl Marx II in the White House. As you probably know, Joe told Obama he was “getting ready to buy a company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year.”

Then he asked, “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?” That’s when V.I., I mean Barack, Obama said, “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Hello, Mr. Engels! These true-believing pinkos can only hide their true colors for so long. Sooner or later, they’re gonna slip up and reveal their plan to declare class war. It’s in their (Red) blood. Thank goodness that John McCain picked up on Obama’s fatal mistake and is making it the centerpiece of his campaign. The best and brightest Republican pundits agree: Obama’s colossal boo-boo could turn this whole race around.

I know, I know. The “elite” liberal media have been beating up on Joe, saying he isn’t a plumber, isn’t named Joe and isn’t really going to buy any business. But you know what? Real Americans, not snooty liberals who swank around at Georgetown cocktail parties, don’t care. They know that the point is that Joe wants to buy that plumbing business, and no Harvard-educated pinko should raise his taxes if he does. The American dream is aspirational!

Besides, Joe’s story is irrelevant anyway. Because it just so happens that I make exactly the same amount of money as that plumbing business that Joe hopes to buy someday. Obama’s tax plan will hit me right in the wallet.

I kept telling the McCain people this. I explained to them that I really am a small businessman who is angry that his taxes will go up under Obama. I told them they should make me their poster child, not Joe. I told them I wasn’t on some kind of ego trip, I just wanted to help save America from socialism. But for some reason they didn’t seem interested. They kept saying something about how they really needed someone who was named “Joe the Plumber.” Go figure.

Anyway, let’s get back to my story. I’m a typical middle-class American. I run a small family bank in Ohio. I’m no Master of the Universe, no hedge-fund manipulator. I have a couple of dozen employees. I work hard. I obey the laws. I have a family. But if Barack Trotsky Obama wins, I can kiss it all goodbye. I’ve done well for myself, but $280,000 a year doesn’t go as far as it used to, even here in Akron.

The numbers don’t lie. So here they are.*

So, as I said, I make $280,000 annually after business expenses. I’m married and filing jointly. Under Obama, my itemized deductions would actually increase slightly — I’d get $49,420 in itemized deductions, while under McCain I’d get $48,975. But my personal exemptions would increase slightly under McCain — he’d give me $6,911, whereas I’d only get $6,132 from Obama.

That leaves my taxable income at $213, 766 under Obama, $213,433 under McCain. Now we have to factor in the bracket cutoff, which for 2009 is $208,850. Anything below that figure for married couples filing jointly is taxed at the fourth tier, 28 percent. Any income above it, until you get up to near $400,000, is taxed at the fifth tier. And this is where the raving income-redistribution scheme of Barack Robespierre Obama kicks in.

As you can see, my taxable income is about $5,000 higher than the cutoff. McCain is going to tax that $5,000 at the current rate, which is 33 percent. But Obama’s crazed plan calls for raising that rate to — get ready for it — 35 percent.

And here’s what this means. Under McCain, my total tax bill would be $48,254. Under Obama, it would be $48,511.

That’s a difference of $257. I’ll say it again: Two hundred and fifty-seven dollars.

That’s not two hundred and fifty-seven dollars I, or America, can afford.

Things are tough right now. Average working Americans like me are really struggling. They’re angry. And when they see the effects of Obama’s spread-the-wealth lunacy on an average angry struggling American like me, they’ll be even more angry, average, and struggling.

Let me lay it out for you. Right now, I take home about $19,000 a month after the government skims off its share. And I don’t have to tell you that $19,000 a month isn’t what it used to be.

Take my Jaguar. Do you have any idea how much it costs just to have that thing tuned up? It’s like a BMW repair bill on steroids. We’re talking $500 just to open the hood.

The hard times are taking a toll on my family life, too. My wife has had to completely cut out having her colors done, and her personal shopper is threatening to walk if we keep cutting back on her hours. We’re tightening our belts, but you can only tighten so far before there’s no more room to pull.

Then there’s food prices. All across America, families are angry and struggling as they try just to get by. We’re in the same boat. It’s getting harder and harder just to put food on the table. We’re only eating filet mignon twice a week, and under Obama’s crazed far-left regime, we may have to completely give up Maine lobster and Macanudo cigars.

And those are just a few examples. I could go on and on. The point is, under Obama Big Government is going to take $21.40 out of my pocket every month — money I could use to start another business, help the economy grow, or watch a couple of softcore porn movies on demand.

But this wild socialism will not stand. This isn’t like the un-American, Commie-loving World War II years, when the top marginal tax rate was between 88 and 94 percent, and the hardworking executives who drive our economy made seven times less than they do now.

These days, thank God, no one buys that pinko stuff about “sacrifice to fight a common enemy.”

These are tough times. The economy is collapsing, the stock market is devastated, home foreclosures are soaring, unemployment is up, healthcare is unaffordable and the entire world banking system is in danger of failing. And at this moment of crisis, Americans know that one thing and one thing only can save our great country: an obsessively ideological anti-tax crusade that will allow me to mow the grounds of my estate five times, not four times, a month. After all, what’s good for my lawn is good for America.

Just stay off of it. ++

*Author’s note: All figures about the comparative tax bills under Obama and McCain come from an interview with Gerald Prante, an economist at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

Let the Blame Game Begin
James Carville and Paul Begala, HuffPo
October 20, 2008

As Barack Obama and the Democrats appear poised for an historic sweep, we have a message for our Republican friends: It is time to point fingers.

We are pro-finger-pointing. We disagree strongly with Gov. Sarah Palin who said recently, “Do you notice that our opponents sure have spent a lot of time looking at the past and pointing fingers? You look to the past because that’s where you find blame, but we’re…looking to the future, because that’s where you find solutions.” On the contrary,

Governor, blame assignment, while much maligned, is essential to determining what went wrong and how to set it right. Besides, it’s a hell of a spectator sport. Here’s our primer for a little game we like to call Big Losers Always Make Excuses (BLAME):
First — a couple of ground rules. You can’t blame the press or minorities. Sure, media-bashing is part of the conservative catechism, and minority voters are likely to support Barack Obama in record numbers. But finger-pointing is only interesting when you point at someone on your team. Republicans need a civil war — a steel cage death match — to sort out what they stand for. Scapegoating outsiders won’t purge the party of what’s rotting it on the inside.

Here’s the most important thing about finger-pointing: you have to start early. If you’re a Republican who wants to avoid blame for the current meltdown, you cannot afford to wait until after the election is over.

The smartest people in the conservative movement are already pointing like a bird dog on a South Georgia quail hunt. David Brooks and Bill Kristol are leading the way. Mr. Brooks, representing the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, called Ms. Palin, “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.” Attaboy, Brooksie. Score one for the brainiacs.

Mr. Kristol, on the other hand, blames neither Ms. Palin nor Sen. John McCain, but rather McCain’s campaign advisers, writing of the campaign: “Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic.” See? That’s how you do it.

Kristol can’t say McCain’s problem is that he supported the Iraq war, (which Kristol advocated) or that he chose Sarah Palin (whom Kristol praised). So rather than play defense, Bill went on offense, blaming McCain’s Steve Schmidt-led campaign. But we have a feeling this fight will only begin when the Schmidt hits the fan.

But where are the other voices? We need to hear, for example, from Karl Rove. Whom will he blame? We stipulate that Karl is a genius — albeit a genius whose advice took Pres. Bush from a 91 percent approval rating down to 26. With the House of Bush ablaze, Karl is going to have to do some quick finger-pointing before they change they change his nickname from The Architect to The Arsonist.

How about Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other radio personalities? They never liked McCain much — but his campaign cratered only when he embraced their wild attacks on Sen. Obama. It was only after Mr. McCain borrowed the Limbaugh-Hannity line on Bill Ayers, only after Gov. Palin accused Mr. Obama of “pallin’ around with terrorists,” that the bottom fell out for Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin. We’re betting the hot air boys will blame the intellectuals. After all, if you want to make an omelet, you’ve got to break a few eggheads.

The Republican Party is atomizing, and each faction must participate in Project BLAME. The neocons may want to blame the theocons. The economic conservatives will likely blame the big spenders. The conflagration will be so multi-dimensional we’ll need a program to sort out the players. They will need to answer fundamental questions: What does it mean to be a Republican? Do Republicans support laissez-faire or nationalized banking? Do Republicans support a balanced budget or half-trillion-dollar deficits? Do Republicans want a “humble foreign policy” like George W. Bush, or preventive war against countries that pose no threat, like, umm, George W. Bush? Are Republicans the party of limited government or a vast Medicare prescription drug benefit? Are they wary of Big Brother or eager to expand warrantless wiretaps? Do they support Christian values or torture? Are they the party that believes that cutting-edge technology can shoot a missile out of the sky or the party that believes humans and dinosaurs walked the earth simultaneously?

These questions should define the 2012 GOP presidential primaries. So start blaming, all you would-be candidates. That means you, Ms. Palin, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist. Hurry up. You only have 1,165 days left until the Iowa Caucuses. ++

James Carville and Paul Begala were senior strategists for the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign. They’d like everyone to know it’s not their fault.

Buh-Bye And Smoke Up
Andrew Sullivan, Daily Dish - the Atlantic
21 Oct 2008

A hedge-funder who got an 870 percent gain last year quits and writes a memorable farewell letter:

“I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.”

He urges throwing away your blackberry and getting stoned. The full, somewhat brazen, and thoroughly enjoyable screed is after the jump. He’s right about marijuana, of course.

[open link to finish article]

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

1 comment October 21st, 2008