Barack Obama's Real Offense in the Eyes of the GOP - He's Black

When not insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim who was not born in the United States, the Tea Party crowd is busy fantasizing about impeaching Obama.  Never mind that they have no legal grounds for doing so.  It's simply because they cannot stand the man.  His real offense?  He's black.  He embodies all the fears and resentments of angry whites who see their privileged position in society eroding and the white majority position in the population declining.  Soon, they will be merely like everyone else or, and this is what terrifies them, less than everyone else.  There's a good reason the Tea Party is so strong in the South: since the beginning of the nation, one might be nothing, but if you were white in the South, you were assured a superior position in Southern society in most circles (not all, of course, my New Orleans belle grandmother so "poor white trash" as the lowest of the low since, unlike blacks, they did not face racial barriers to self improvement).  These people are steadily losing that once assured position to black, Hispanics, Asians, etc., and it has become an obsession embodied by Obama.  In the New York Times Maureen Dowd looks at the GOP obsession to impeach Obama and rightly concludes that it's really all about race.  Here are excerpts:

ON the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Kerry Bentivolio, a Michigan [Republican] congressman, has a dream, too: to impeach the nation’s first black president. 

Bentivolio graciously conceded that he’d have to come up with some grounds first. “I went back to my office and I have had lawyers come in,” he said. “And these are lawyers, well — Ph.D.’s in history — I said, ‘Tell me how I can impeach the president of the United States. What evidence do you have?’ You’ve got to have the evidence.” 

The Tea Party congressman, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, hopes to find e-mails linking the White House to the I.R.S. examination of groups with a “Tea Party” label seeking tax-exempt status. 

“I stood 12 feet away from the guy and listened to him and I couldn’t stand being there,” he said of President Obama,. . . .

Bentivolio is the perfect avatar of the impeachment fever gripping a G.O.P. that’s unmoored from reality, given that he once admitted in a court deposition, “I have a problem figuring out which one I really am, Santa Claus or Kerry Bentivolio.” That’s why he sometimes used the pronoun “we.” 

He’s been playing Santa Claus — as part of a business he started 19 years ago called Old Fashion Santa — with his own six reindeer.

The Free Press reported that Bentivolio, no Edmund Gwenn in “Miracle on 34th Street,” left a teaching job in 2011 “after complaints he bullied students, even telling one class on its first day that his goal was to make all the students cry once during the year.” How much more gratifying to bully the president. 

Not content with fighting off a popular immigration overhaul or threatening to shut down the government and set off the first federal default, hard-core Congressional Republicans want to nullify the election. Unlike when the Republicans did their nutty impeachment of Bill Clinton — (Newt Gingrich is back, starring in the “Crossfire” reboot) — they don’t even control the Senate. And as David Axelrod told me, there isn’t a “scintilla of justification.”

Earlier this month, the president’s motorcade pulled into the Orlando Hilton and was greeted by about 50 protesters holding signs saying “Kenyan Go Home,” “Impeach Obama” and “Obama Lies.” 

This month has been rife with efforts among the G.O.P. “wise men,” using every channel possible — polls, op-eds, cable, Twitter — to try to talk sense to the goons of August. When Condi Rice is a “wise man,” you know you’re in trouble. 

The Democrats never impeached W. and they had real grounds: starting a war on false premises and sanctioning torture. “The Republican Party is in a constant struggle between its ego and its id,” Axelrod says, “and the id has mostly won out lately.” 

It isn’t the president who should leave. It’s the misguided lawmakers trying to drive him out.  For some of the rodeo clowns clamoring for impeachment around the country, Barack Obama’s real crime is presiding while black. 

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How Republican Obstructionism Could Hand Congress To Democrats

In general there is little if anything positive I can say about today's Republican Party.  And I say this as a former Republican who held a city committee seat and was a precinct chair for 8 years.  The party's embrace of ignorance and insanity is near complete and those few sane Republicans who remain (they should be on the endangered species list)  appear unable to stop the run away freight train comprised of the Christofascists and their close cousins in the Tea Party.  With luck, the extremism of the GOP will help the Democrats to not only hold control of the Senate, but also allow them to recapture the House of Representatives.  A piece in Think Progress looks at this premise.  Here are excerpts:

Why are Republicans so freaked out?  . . . .  Politico suggests the reason for the glumness is fear about the political fallout from the GOP’s unyielding, nihilistic approach to governance on issues like Obamacare and the debt ceiling. That problem may be far worse than they imagine. A close scrutiny of the data reveals several demographic weak points that the current wave of Republican crazy could activate, leading to the outcome they dread the most: Democratic control of both houses of Congress.

Start with minorities. It’s not well-known, but Republicans in 2010 benefited not only from relatively low minority turnout (standard for an off-year election) but also from relatively low minority support for Democratic candidates.
If minorities snap back to 77-22 Democratic support as a consequence of Republican misbehavior, and the expected 2 percentage point increase in the share of minority voters from population trends emerges, then the Republican 6.8 percentage point margin in 2010 will be immediately sliced in half. And if the minority vote goes even stronger for the Democrats, reaching 2012 levels, that would eliminate about three-quarters of the Republicans’ 2010 advantage all on its own.

Another demographic problem for the GOP comes from a more surprising quarter: seniors. As Erica Seifert of Democracy Corps noted in a recent memo:

There’s something going on with seniors: It is now strikingly clear that they have turned sharply against the GOP.

We first noticed a shift among seniors early in the summer of 2011, as Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare became widely known (and despised) among those at or nearing retirement. Since then, the Republican Party has come to be defined by much more than its desire to dismantle Medicare.

We have seen other voters pull back from the GOP, but among no group has this shift been as sharp as it is among senior citizens.

It is therefore quite plausible that the GOP will benefit far less from senior support in 2014 than in 2010. If the senior share of voters returns to normal levels (19 percent) and the Republican margin among this group drops to its post-2000 average (6 points, about where it is right now in the Democracy Corps polls) that would take care of the rest of the GOP margin from 2010, getting the Democrats slightly past the break-even point in the popular vote. 

[T]here are certainly potential avenues to shift the 2014 House vote even farther in Democrats’ direction. There is the youth vote, for example  . . . If relative minority turnout is better in 2014 than 2010, then there will be an even larger increase in minority vote share over 2010, pushing the Democrats’ margin farther toward what they need to take the House.

The conjecture may be off base but one thing is certain: striving to disenfranchise minorities and leave senior citizens to live on dry dog food as they face staggering medical bills is not the way to win votes.  And with younger voters strongly pro-gay, the GOP's blind allegiance to the Christofascist anti-gay jihad isn't helpful either.

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GOP Elites in Full Blown Panic Mode

The damage being done to the Republican brand continues unabated as the lunatic Christofascist/Tea Party controlled base of the GOP veers further and further off into extremism and what is basically a fantasy world.  A fantasy world that a majority of Americans tethered to reality do not inhabit - and most importantly reject. As a former Republican who left the GOP as it sold its soul to the Christofascists, I will admit that I get some perverse delight in seeing my warnings to former GOP compatriots come true.  Unfortunately, the GOP has now become a threat to America and the party base seemingly would savor destroying the American (and world) economy.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the apparent panic gripping those who allowed the lunatic fringe to take over the party grassroots.  Here are excerpts:

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei are well sourced among top Republicans. And today they weigh in with a big piece reporting that GOP elites are in full blown panic mode about the party’s drift towards a series of Apocalyptic showdowns this fall.

The most interesting bit is the profound worry about the drift towards a government shutdown over Obamacare. But I think the fundamental problem is still being overlooked. Here’s the key part:

Republicans are in jeopardy of convincing voters they simply cannot govern. Their favorable ratings are terrible and getting worse. But there is broad concern it could go from worse to an unmitigated disaster this fall. Most urgently, according to a slew of key Republicans we interviewed, conservative GOP senators have got to give up their insistence that the party allow the government to shut down after Sept. 30 if they don’t get their way on defunding Obamacare.

The quixotic drive — led by Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee — is part of Rubio’s effort to make up with the conservative base after he was stunned by the backlash over his deal-making on immigration. Pollsters say the funding fight makes Republicans look even more obstructionist, and causes voters to worry about the effect a shutdown would have on their own finances.

Whit Ayres of North Star Opinion Research, who has been drilling down on this issue for the conservative public-opinion group Resurgent Republic, said: “Shutting down the government is the one way that Republicans can turn Obamacare from a political advantage to a political disadvantage in 2014.”

The government shutdown push has focused the attention of GOP elites, because it is probably suicidal politically for the party. At the same time, though, the unspoken premise is that the problem is only one of excessive tactics, rather than something more fundamental. If Republicans are in jeopardy of convincing voters they cannot govern, as top GOPers seem to fear, it’s not clear that this is only because a shutdown has become a real possibility.

A shutdown, because of its visibility and destructiveness, is obviously a glaring symbol of an inability to govern, one that voters (as the 1990s showed) easily understand in such terms. But the result of the relentless focus on the shutdown has been to quasi-normalize other opposition to Obamacare. If a shutdown risks conveying a fundamental inability to govern, why do not other efforts to sabotage the law . . . . while offering no alternative also convey the same?

Some Republicans have begun to acknowledge this larger problem in public, albeit in somewhat different terms. But the battle over the shutdown is distracting from the need to focus on that more basic challenge.

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Extremist Primary Electorate is Costing the GOP

As note before on this, other than a series of sustained electoral defeats, I do not know what can save the GOP from the insane Christofascists and Tea Party saboteurs who have highjacked the party grass roots and who predominate in primary contests.  Frankly, today's GOP base is utterly untethered from objective reality and lives in some bizarre imaginary alternate universe that doesn't - and never did - exist in fact and which bears no relation to the reality experienced by most voters.  The result is that primary candidates that excite the GOP base are in all likelihood viewed as radioactive by everyone else, including independent voters and self-styled moderates.  One only need to think of U.S. Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock as examples of the phenomenon.  A piece in the Washington Post looks ate the ongoing problem for the GOP:  Here are excerpts:

Republican chances for a Senate majority in 2015 took a bit of a hit today, with senior GOP Rep. Dave Camp announcing that he won’t run for the Michigan open seat. Whatever Camp’s chances, he was the GOP’s top choice, and with him out the chances are extremely good that Democrats will retain this seat.

This points to a broader, if mostly hidden, risk that the radicalization of the GOP primary electorate and many of its party actors poses for the party’s long term hopes.

Everyone talks about Senate seats lost to Republicans by awful candidates foisted on the GOP by the Tea Party, such as Todd Akin and Christine O’Donnell. But perhaps even more important is another Tea Party effect: the prospect of Tea Party upsets convincing strong candidates that primary elections are a hurdle they can’t surmount — leading them to decide not to run.

Candidates are important in Senate elections — it’s often the case that a strong candidate can be the difference between a sharply contested race and one that fizzles. The best candidates are usually professional politicians, and those politicians are, in the lingo of political scientists, strategic: they choose to run only when they believe that it’s a good time to run.

But the possibility of Tea Party upsets in primaries make it that much more difficult. If Senators Bob Bennett and Richard Lugar can’t get renominated, then why should someone such as Camp risk it when he has a perfectly safe House seat that he would have to give up?

We don’t get to know exactly how much of a factor this is in any particular decision. But there are signs it could broadly matter. In the last cycle, Republicans failed to recruit a solid challenger in states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — all states in which Republicans have at least a fighting chance. That seems to be happening this time around in the campaigns for open seats in Michigan and Iowa, and in the races against potentially vulnerable Democrats in Minnesota, Colorado, New Hampshire, and perhaps two or three others.

 [T]he GOP that has had the most recruiting trouble lately, and it’s almost certainly because Republican leaders can’t be trusted to clear the field for strong candidates. The temptation to support insurgents, even ones who would badly hurt the party’s chances in November, is just too strong for both party actors and voters in Republican primaries. 

It’s a real, and under appreciated, cost of the Tea Party effect. And it’s not going away any time soon.

To survive long term, the GOP has to find a means to send the Christofascists and the equally insane Tea Party crowd back to the political wilderness.  They are toxic and will become more of a liability with every passing year.

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The Tea Party Vision: Gays and Minorities Should Not Exist

I often get challenged for equating the Tea Party and the Christofascists as being more or less one and the same.  Both have hatred towards others who look different or hold differing belief and seem driven by greed as well as exhibited by their desire to slash social programs and leave millions of citizens without access to healthcare.  If Christians do not like being equated with these, in my view, vile people, then they need to open - and loudly - confront and condemn these Christofascists/Tea Party hate merchants.  As for gays, we need to understand that in the world view of these people, they literally do not want us to exist.  A piece in The New Civil Rights Movement looks at the Tea Party's anti-gay agenda.  Here are highlights:

The Tea Party has a “big picture” vision and gay people are not in it. Neither are black people, Hispanic people, or outspoken women. Why do we pretend we don’t know what they really want?

The Republicans are gathering again in Iowa this weekend at the Family Leadership Conference. Right Wing Watch compiled a list of speakers,  . . . . Right Wing Watch noted the Family Leadership conference this way:

“For anyone who anticipates that Republican presidential candidates will move towards the center in 2016, this weekend’s festivities are a very loud wake up call.”

The Republican Party of Karl Rove is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tea Party. The Tea Party accomplished this takeover by instilling in every elected Republican a testicle-shrinking fear of a primary challenger coming at him from the right. The Republicans of old, except for Ronald Reagan, who they like to pretend shared their stone-hearted philosophy, are no longer relevant.

This new Tea Party controlled Republican Party does not want to attract any “ethnic” people to its membership. They do not want black people to join. They do not want Hispanics to join. They do not want people who aren’t Christian, and they especially do not want Muslims. They do not want women who don’t know how to be “demure” and “feminine”, and they do not want new gay Republicans. To the contrary, they have done everything but put a plank in the party platform pledging to reinstate sodomy laws,

When the Tea Partiers talk about “taking my country back”, it’s true they yearn for a time when white made right. But it isn’t true that they want to go back to slavery, or ship black citizens “back to Africa.” They think there is a way to return to a time when people of color stayed in their ethnic ghettos and white people had the rest of the country to themselves, and in their minds, everyone got along just fine. 

The Tea Party vision is to establish a “Christian Country”. But they have adopted a  modern standard of Christian conduct, where everyone is armed just as Jesus and the apostles would have been, had firearms been an option in 18 AD. Things would have gone a lot differently for Judas and Pontius Pilate if Jesus and his boys had been packing AK-47s.

Those who want public schools, and there are many who don’t, want them to teach a Christian curriculum, and students to be led daily in Christian prayer. They aren’t going to insist every student join in. They are willing to tolerate other faiths in the name of freedom of religion. But they want non-Christians to do their misguided worshiping quietly. In a Tea Party country, their Christian way would be the government sanctioned way, and all laws great and small would have to be in agreement with the Christian bible.

They want schools where science takes a back seat to Bible studies. Where evolution is given the same weight as creationism. And where bullies are given a pass provided they are motivated by a deeply held religious belief that suspected gay kids should be given swirlies.

[T]hey are opposed to the government offering any relief. They call it “redistributing wealth”. Making sure your baby’s belly is full should not be the government’s concern. Taxes are for bombs and soldiers, and executing criminals, not for school lunches and Head Start. In a Tea Party America, not a dime would go to help the “takers.
 
It’s a grand vision, and they are executing it while our political pundits pretend they are merely a bunch of conservative leaning folks who are concerned about the deficit.

If it’s true that “By their fruits ye will know them”, the Tea Party fruits are rotten to the core. The Tea Party infested Republicans are no longer the “loyal opposition” keeping a check on power. It’s time we start talking about them as the threat to domestic tranquility that they have become.

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Conservatives Against Christie

The so-called Republican establishment continues to reap what it sowed in allowing the Christofascists and equally reality denying Tea Party crowd to hijack the party base.  Among the likely 2016 GOP candidates, one contender would not immediately be radio active to independents and more conservative Democrats:  Chris Christie.  The problem is, however, is that Christie is anathema to the Christofascists and Tea Party crowd who seem unable to forgive Christie for (i) seeking federal funds in the wake of Hurricane Sandy's devastation to New Jersey, and (ii) embracing Barack Obama's support for New Jersey.  Allahpundit questions whether Christie could overcome the far right's hatred of him to win the nomination.  Here are excerpts:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that Christie earns 21% support when Republican voters are asked whom they would vote for if the party’s primary in their state were held today. Florida Senator Marco Rubio runs a close second with 18% of the GOP vote, followed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush at 16% and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul with 15% of the vote.

Congressman Paul Ryan, the unsuccessful Republican vice presidential candidate in 2012, picks up 13% of the Republican vote, with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker dead last at six percent (6%). Just three percent (3%) prefer another candidate, and eight percent (8%) are undecided.

Good news for Christie-haters: He’s also leading the field — by double digits — when Republicans are asked who they’d least like to see win the nomination. (His new nemesis, Rand Paul, is a distant second.) This is why I keep thinking that, for all the slobber over his “electability,” he might be so widely and deeply disliked by a small but significant minority of righties that they end up staying home if he’s nominee and costing him the election. To be “electable” with a few percentage points’ worth of conservatives sitting out, he’d have to offset them by grabbing more centrist Democrats than expected from the Democratic nominee. How likely is that if Hillary’s the pick and Bill Clinton’s out there every day for her on the trail? Every candidate tacks toward the center after he’s nominated, but Christie would tack further than most — not just because he’s inclined to, but because he might have to in order to make up those lost conservative votes.

It’s time (already!) to stop thinking about national polls for 2016, though, and to start thinking in terms of Iowa and New Hampshire.

A new Granite State Poll  . . . . The poll’s new leader is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, at 21 percent. He is followed by Paul at 16 percent, former Florida governor Jeb Bush at 10 percent, Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) at 8 percent and Rubio at 6 percent.

Rubio’s a special case in that he’s a Florida native and could, in theory, win there even if he loses the first three major primaries, but imagine how many “Rubio disappoints again” stories will be written before then. New Hampshire is going to be even tougher than usual next time too thanks to Christie’s and Paul’s likely candidacies: Each of them, in very different ways, seems better suited to NH’s maverick-y sensibility than Rubio does.

One other fun fact from the Rasmussen poll: Among Democrats, Christie is the guy they’d most like to see win the GOP nomination — and Jeb Bush, by far, is who they’d least like to see win. Shouldn’t it be the opposite? If you’re a Dem, you’d love to run against a guy named Bush, especially if you’re carrying the dynastic liability of nominating someone named Clinton. Or do Democrats really think Jeb would be that formidable in the general?

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Government Shut Down - The GOP Obsession with Obamacare

So far many of the dire warnings of the GOP demagogues about Obamacare have failed to come to fruition and in a number of states it appears that premiums will be less expensive that the doomsday Cassandras predicted.  It seems that other than the Tea Party/Christofascist crowd, the only folks screaming are greedy business owners who view employees as modern day serfs and similarly greedy doctors who claim poverty while living far better than most of the populace (I have yet to meet a poor doctor in my legal practice - I tend to avoid them as clients because most are obnoxious and don't want to pay for services rendered).  So why is the GOP willing to shut down the federal government that will harm vast numbers of individuals and businesses?  A column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP obsession with destroying Obamacare and throwing millions of Americans back into an uninsured status. Here are highlights:

With the right wing in full-throttle defund-Obamacare mode, everyone seems to be wondering whether the August recess will bring a rerun of the now-mythical Summer of ’09, when the Tea Party came into its own and changed the national conversation on health care. One question seems to be whether the continuing Obamacare obsession will eclipse immigration reform.

But the Asheville Citizen Times of North Carolina offers an account of something else entirely: A GOP Congressman, Patrick McHenry, getting confronted by a constituent — one Skip Edwards — who is upset with his votes to repeal Obamacare, because of his own medical and financial situation. What’s particularly interesting is Rep. McHenry’s claim that he supports parts of the Affordable Care Act, chiefly the bit prohibiting discrimination against people with preexisting conditions:

Edwards and his wife, both 63, had health insurance until he lost his job during the recessio

n and the East Asheville couple found themselves in financial trouble despite staying relatively healthy.

Edwards and others wondered why McHenry would vote against a plan they feel is better than nothing at all. He said he would not vote for something he feels is bad policy.

McHenry floated a few familiar GOP solutions — allowing the buying of insurance across state lines and increasing competition — but Edwards said he wasn’t satisfied.

It’s easy to rail about Obamacare’s evils inside the safe confines of the conservative media echo chamber. But it may not be so easly for GOP lawmakers to explain to their constituents that they support repealing specific provisions in Obamacare, i.e., the ban on discrimination against preexisting conditions. 

[A]s unpopular as Obamacare admittedly remains, the battle over health care in 2014 may also be partly decided by the prosaic question of which side is perceived as genuinely wanting to fix our health care system. It remains to be seen whether suggestions such as those McHenry offered will be enough.

On top of this, conservative are putting heavy pressure on GOP lawmakers not just to keep trying to repeal Obamacare, but to shut down the government to force an Apocalyptic stand against the law. If it’s hard to explain repealing certain parts of the law, how will GOP lawmakers explain shutting down the government to defund it?

It also remains to be seen whether such episodes will get anywhere near the play that will likely be lavished on tales of Obamacare implementation going awry. Sure, constituents who don’t want the law’s provisions taken away may not be wearing funny three cornered hats or holding up signs proclaiming that tyranny has arrived on American shores, so they may not get much media attention. But surely they are an important part of the story, too.

Truth be told, the GOP simply doesn't care about a vast portion of the American population.  We're disposable garbage,  especially if we are black, Hispanic, or gay.

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The Tea Party’s Path to Irrelevance

One of the things most notable about today's Republican Party is the embrace by the party base of ignorance, bigotry, and racism, the later being openly displayed by the push for voter ID laws to disenfranchise blacks and opposition to immigration reform which is openly anti-Hispanic.  Fueling this trend is the Tea Party and white supremacist Christofascists like The Family Foundation here in Virginia.  While the Tea Party/Christofascist overlap is not complete, some 85% of the Tea Party crowd describes itself as conservative Christian.  Both groups are fighting a rear guard battle against modernity and demographic changes that are irreversible.  It's a case of long term political suicide.  The only question is how long before these bigotry filled Neanderthals drag the GOP to irrelevance.  I would argue, not soon enough.  An op-ed column in the New York Times looks at the lessons the GOP ought to learn from history.  And by history, I mean real history, not Christofascist revisionist history.  Here are some column highlights:

THE Tea Party has a new crusade: preventing illegal immigrants from gaining citizenship, which they say is giving amnesty to lawbreakers. Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, recently told Politico that his members were “more upset about the amnesty bill than they were about Obamacare.”

They’re so upset, in fact, that Republican supporters of immigration reform, like Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have become marked men in their party, while House Republicans have followed the Tea Party lead by refusing to even consider the Senate’s bipartisan reform plan. 

Tea Partyers often style themselves as disciples of Thomas Jefferson, the high apostle of limited government. But by taking the ramparts against immigration, the movement is following a trajectory that looks less like the glorious arc of Jefferson’s Republican Party than the suicidal path of Jefferson’s great rivals, the long-forgotten Federalists, who also refused to accept the inexorable changes of American demography.

The Federalists began as the faction that supported the new Constitution, . . . .   Culturally, however, they were identified with the ancient stock of New England and the mid-Atlantic . . .

The Federalists held together for the first few decades, but in 1803 the Louisiana Purchase — Jefferson’s great coup — drove a wedge between the party’s ideology and its demography. The national party was suddenly faced with a nation that looked very different from what it knew: in a stroke, a vast new territory would be opened for colonization, creating new economic and political interests, slavery among them. 

“The people of the East can not reconcile their habits, views and interests with those of the South and West,” declared Thomas Pickering, a leading Massachusetts Federalist.

Fearing that Irish, English and German newcomers would vote for the Jeffersonian Republicans, they [the Federalists] argued — unsuccessfully — for excluding immigrants from voting or holding office, and pushed to extend the period of naturalization from 5 to 14 years. Leading Federalists even plotted to “establish a separate government in New England,” 

Finally, in the fall of 1814, the Federalists convened the Hartford Convention to vote on whether to stay in or out of the Union. By then even the hotheads realized how little support they had, and the movement collapsed. And the Federalists, now scorned as an anti-national party, collapsed as well. 

Today’s Republicans are not likely to disappear completely, like the Federalists did. But Republican leaders like Mr. Rubio and Mr. Graham understand that a party that seeks to defy demography, relying on white resentment toward a rising tide of nonwhite newcomers, dooms itself to permanent minority status. 

The problem is that the Tea Party is not a party, and its members are quite prepared to ride their hobbyhorse into a dead end. And many Republicans, at least in the House, seem fully prepared to join them there, and may end up dragging the rest of the party with them. 

The example of those early days shows that American political parties once knew how to adapt to a changing reality. It is a lesson many seem to have forgotten. 

I doubt that the Tea Party/Christofascists will learn from history.  Why? First because they don't know accurate history.  Second, because they are too wrapped up in the own supposed exceptionalism and ignorance to see the handwriting on the wall. When I see a vehicle locally that has a Tea Party license plate - Virginia allows all kinds of plates to generate money - I cannot help but think, why not put a bumper sticker on ones car that reads "I'm a cretin."

 

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Tea Party Plans to Abandon GOP Stars

I have to confess that it gives me some deep pleasure to see the Frankenstein monster that the Republican establishment created - i,e., the Christofascist/Tea Party take over of the party grassroots - lurch increasingly out of control and threaten to utterly destroy the GOP long term.  When I resigned from my GOP City Committee seat some years back, I predicted that the party leadership would rue the day that it put short term expediency ahead of long term goals and in the process rejected logic, reason and intellect.  A piece in the Virginian Pilot looks at the Tea Party's plan to go rouge on some of the supposed GOP stars.  Note how the Tea Party wants to inflect local political offices with its insanity.  Here are excerpts:

This wasn't the revolution the tea party had in mind.   Four years ago, the movement and its potent mix of anger and populism persuaded thousands of costumed and sign-waving conservatives to protest the ballooning deficit and President Obama's health care law. It swept a crop of no-compromise lawmakers into Congress and governor's offices and transformed political up-and-comers, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, into household names.

But as many tea party stars seek re-election next year and Rubio considers a 2016 presidential run, conservative activists are finding themselves at a crossroads. Many of their standard-bearers have embraced more moderate positions on bedrock issues such as immigration and health care, broadening their appeal in swing states but dampening grass-roots passion.

"They keep sticking their finger in the eyes of the guys who got them elected," said Ralph King, a co-founder of the Cleveland Tea Party Patriots. "A lot of people are feeling betrayed."

[M]any more say they plan to sit out high-profile races in some important swing states next year, a move that GOP leaders fear could imperil the re-election prospects of former tea party luminaries, including the governors of Florida and Ohio. 

Local activists say they have focused largely on their own communities since Obama's re-election and the ideological drift of some tea party-backed politicians. Many are running for school boards, county commissions and city councils, focusing on issues such as unfunded pension liabilities and sewer system repairs.

"The positions that people are filling at the local levels are more important for the future of the movement and the future of the country," said Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, a national umbrella organization. "It's creating a farm team for the future."

The Republican establishment, however, is concerned about 2014. Party leaders worry about the GOP's most passionate advocates walking away, particularly those supporters angered by the Senate's immigration bill.

 

The lesson to the GOP should be that when you allow the insane and irrational to infiltrate your party, bad things are bound to happen. 

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Krauthammer: GOP Shut Down the Government over Obamacare is Nuts

I don't often agree with Charles Krauthammer on many things - he drinks too much of the GOP Kool-Aid typically - but in a Washington Post editorial he assails the GOP threat to shut down the national government as a means to sabotage Obamacare.  As is now the norm for the GOP on almost every issue, the far right faction in the party has no proposed alternative to the Affordable Health Care Act - or the Senate immigration reform bill either.  They'd rather throw millions of Americans on the trash heap with no insurance coverage and keep America with the highest priced, least effectively delivered health care in the world.  Here are excerpts from the editorial:

A combination of early presidential maneuvering and internal policy debate is feeding yet another iteration of that media perennial: the great Republican crackup. This time it’s tea party insurgents vs. get-along establishment fogies fighting principally over two things: (a) national security and (b) Obamacare.

(a) National security

The more fundamental GOP divide is over foreign aid and other manifestations of our role as the world’s leading power. The Paulites, pining for the splendid isolation of the 19th century, want to leave the world alone on the assumption that it will then leave us alone. 

Which rests on the further assumption that international stability — open sea lanes, free commerce, relative tranquillity — comes naturally, like the air we breathe. If only that were true. Unfortunately, stability is not a matter of grace. It comes about only by Great Power exertion. 

In the 19th century, that meant the British navy, behind whose protection the United States thrived. Today, alas, Britannia rules no waves. World order is maintained by American power and American will. Take that away and you don’t get tranquillity. You get chaos.

(b) Obamacare

 

The other battle is about defunding Obamacare. Led by Sens. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, the GOP insurgents are threatening to shut down the government on Oct. 1 if the stopgap funding bill contains money for Obamacare.

This is nuts. The president will never sign a bill defunding the singular achievement of his presidency. Especially when he has control of the Senate. Especially when, though a narrow 51 percent majority of Americans disapproves of Obamacare, only 36 percent favors repeal. President Obama so knows he’ll win any shutdown showdown that he’s practically goading the Republicans into trying.

Never make a threat on which you are not prepared to deliver. Every fiscal showdown has redounded against the Republicans.

Those who fancy themselves tea party patriots fighting a sold-out cocktail-swilling establishment are demanding yet another cliff dive as a show of principle and manliness. 

But there’s no principle at stake here. This is about tactics. If I thought this would work, I would support it. But I don’t fancy suicide. It has a tendency to be fatal.

As for manliness, the real question here is sanity. Nothing could better revive the fortunes of a failing, flailing, fading Democratic administration than a government shutdown where the president is portrayed as standing up to the GOP on honoring our debts and paying our soldiers in the field.

How many times must we learn the lesson? You can’t govern from one house of Congress. You need to win back the Senate and then the presidency. Shutting down the government is the worst possible way to get there. Indeed, it’s Obama’s fondest hope for a Democratic recovery.

Note how he touches on the issue of sanity.  Sanity is what the GOP has lost thanks to the Christofascists and Tea Party which now control the party base like a metastasizing cancer. 

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Republicans: Blinded by Self-Righteousness

Once again, one has to wonder when the swamp fever (i.e., the Christofascists and Tea Party) that has overwhelmed will be broken.  A new Pew Research Center poll released yesterday found that nearly 6 in 10 Republicans believe that the GOP need to reconsider some positions, while just over a third - again, the Christofascists and Tea Party lunatics - want the party to merely to make a stronger case for its current positions: anti-gay, anti-women, anti-immigrant, etc.  Candidly, until sane Republicans (or at least what ones are left) are willing to stand up to the Christofascists and Tea Party, or better yet, kicking them to the curb, I do not see meaningful change happening.  A column in the New York Times looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

Two-thirds of Republicans recognize that the party needs to change in order to do better in future

But that’s where things get tricky. Fifty-four percent believe that party leaders need to move in a more conservative direction, while only 40 percent believe that they need to move in a more moderate direction.  There’s the deflator. I knew this was too good to be true. 

The poll specifically asked Republicans whether the party’s position was too conservative, not conservative enough or about right on five issues: gay marriage, immigration, abortion, government spending and gun policy. 

In all cases except one a plurality thought that the party’s position was about right. The lone exception was government spending, on which a plurality thought that the party was not conservative enough. In fact, “not conservative enough” beat “too conservative” on every issue but gay marriage.

presidential elections, but they’re torn over what that change should be. 

Tea Party supporters were significantly more likely than Republicans who don’t support the Tea Party to say that the party was not conservative enough on these issues. 

[T]he problem the Republicans still have but many don’t seem to recognize is that the extreme arm of the party has an outsize role in selecting a nominee, and they don’t like anyone who smells of moderation.  . . . . .  most don’t have a favorable opinion of Chris Christie. In fact, among Tea Party supporters Christie had the highest unfavorable rating of the seven Republican leaders mentioned in the poll. 

This is the perpetual Republican Party conundrum: moderate, or go harder right. And many still seem to believe that going harder right is the best way to go. They have learned nothing. They can see no other way. They are so convinced that their way is the right way, but it’s just misunderstood, not clearly explained, not persuasively advocated. 

That’s what can happen in political echo chambers — faltering positions are reinforced rather than rightfully abandoned. Voices for moderation are maligned as agents of moral erosion. Giving a little feels like giving up.

In this world few leaders, particularly ones that could win a national election — which would require the winning of moderates and possibly the sloughing off of some conservative Democrats — would ever be sufficiently conservative to pass the purity test. 

So long as these voices — those of the most conservative Republicans — warp nominees who emerge from primaries on the right, they are doomed to an uphill climb toward the White House. 

It is  sad that a once rational party has been hijacked by crazy people who relish ignorance, racism, homophobia and bigotry in general as all the while they pat themselves on the back for their godliness.  The hypocrisy is stunning.

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Rand Paul's Isolationist Views Rebuked by Senate

Rand Paul may be a Tea Party darling, but he went down in flames in a vote in the U.S. Senate.  And that doesn't even take in the tongue lashing he received from Chris Christie on the issue of federal aid to a state - i.e., New Jersey receives 77 cents for every $1 sent to Washington - that gives much more money to Washington than it receives versus a state - i.e., Paul's Kentucky which receives over $1.5 for every $1 sent to Washington - which is a freeloader in comparison propped up by federal money.  The overall effect is to show that Paul is not ready for prime time outside of Tea Party circles.  The Washington Post looks at the rebuke in the Senate.  Here are excerpts:

Chris Christie, the popular GOP governor of New Jersey, last week called Paul’s libertarian views “dangerous.” And on the Senate floor Wednesday, Republican colleagues dealt the junior senator from Kentucky what can be described only as a resounding rebuke. 

Even the 86-13 vote against Paul’s proposal to strip Egypt of its foreign aid doesn’t capture the lopsided nature of the defeat. In the final seconds of the roll call and long after the outcome was obvious, a bloc of six GOP lawmakers led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) quietly cast their votes with Paul — not in agreement with him but in fear of the tea party voters who adore him.

But whether Paul’s position had seven Republican votes or 13, the isolationist gadfly found himself in the decided minority of the 45-member Senate GOP caucus. And in the hour-long debate that preceded the vote, Paul was alone on the floor defending his position against an emotional onslaught from his party’s most respected voices on foreign policy.  

The result reinforced the proud tradition of internationalism in the body, and in the GOP. For all the talk of a Republican civil war over foreign policy, Wednesday’s vote showed that the internationalists still dominate. McCain portrayed Paul as the heir to the America Firsters. 

Paul, attempting to attach his proposal to a domestic spending measure, made his familiar argument for “nation-building here at home” instead of overseas. “Detroit crumbles. Chicago is a war zone,” he said. 

His colleagues had different ideas. Sen. Jim Inhofe (Okla.), the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said he might have agreed with Paul 15 years ago, “before we realized the threats that we have in the Middle East.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tried a practical appeal, saying the aid cutoff would mean “you lose leverage.” And Graham read aloud a letter from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee opposing Paul’s amendment.

Paul responded to all this with rambling speeches and wild gestures, refusing to yield when colleagues asked him to and accusing his opponents of “empty thoughts and empty promises.”

For the Republican internationalists, this wasn’t about winning but dominating.

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Lindsey Graham’s Tea Party Opponents Are Emerging

Try as he might to stamp out a primary challenge, it looks like GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, a/k/a the Palmetto Princess, may have to deal with a Tea Party challenge.  To be candid, I despise Graham, but compared to his possible Tea Party opponents he looks rational.  Rational, of course, in the context of today's GOP is a very relative term.  The Daily Beast looks at Graham's possible challengers.  Here are excerpts:

According to sources in South Carolina and within the Tea Party, at least two serious challenges to Graham are expected to emerge in the next few weeks. Dustin Stockton, a leading conservative activist and head of Western PAC, told The Daily Beast that he is headed to South Carolina next month to help build a ground game for the 2014 primary.

Knocking off Graham, said Stockton, who helped defeat establishment candidates in Alaska and Nevada in 2010, was this year’s top Tea Party priority.

“The Lindsey Graham wing of the party,” he said, stands for “saying one thing and doing another, creating backroom deals, getting elected, and not doing anything.”

Richard Cash, a businessman and former South Carolina congressional candidate, announced his candidacy in April.

But Tea Party types are looking to coalesce around either Lee Bright, a Spartanburg state senator, or Nancy Mace, a public-relations executive.

Bright told The Daily Beast that he is looking to make an announcement in the coming weeks.

“My voting record in the state Senate is very similar to what Jim DeMint did in the U.S. Senate,” he said, referring to the hard-right former senator who resigned this year to lead the Heritage Foundation. “It is more of a match with conservative values in South Carolina. I just don’t think Graham is in touch with the people of South Carolina. He is more enamored of the national media than he is doing what South Carolinians would like to see him do.”

“Every election, at the state level, the county level, the precinct level, you find a bunch of people who talk about ousting Lindsey Graham,” said Hogan Gidley, a strategist and a former executive director of the state’s Republican Party. “But then they start watching TV ads, and more about his record comes out, and they say, ‘Wait a minute. This guy is more conservative than I thought.’

For his part, Bright has been pushing his conservative bona fides. He’s introduced a number of bills in the state Senate that will be red meat to GOP primary voters. One abortion bill would regulate abortion clinics in the same way that similar bills in Mississippi, Wisconsin, and Texas have done. Another, dubbed Constitutional Carry, would eliminate any special permitting for gun owners.

“If you own a weapon, you should be able to carry your weapon,” he said.

Graham, he said, “is a community organizer for the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East and is not very concerned about our Fourth Amendment rights.

The craziness will be entertaining to watch and every dollar spent on primary infighting will be a dollar less for the general election.

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Boehner Forced to Repudiate GOP Rep. Steve King’s Racist Remarks

If one wants to see the true face of today's Republican Party, one need look no farther than Rep. Steve King's (R-IA) who is pictured above.  The man is a homophobe, racist and would have women be obedient chattel of their husbands.  However, while many GOP elected officials dance around and try to cloak the party's agenda, King shouts it from the roof tops.  Recently, King engaged in an extremely racist anti-immigrant rant that went so far over the top that even spineless House Speaker John Boehner  felt compelled to do some damage control.  Talking Points Memo looks at both Kings rant and Boehner's attempt to hide the real GOP agenda.  Here are highlights:

Rep. Steve King's (R-IA) comments last week disparaging young undocumented immigrants went a step too far, drawing a Tuesday night condemnation from Republican House Speaker John Boehner.

Arguing against legalizing undocumented immigrants in an interview with Newsmax, the tea party stalwart said that for every valedictorian DREAMer -- an immigrant brought to the U.S. as a child -- there are existed 100 more who carried drugs across the border.

"For everyone who's a valedictorian, there's another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” he said. “Those people would be legalized with the same act."

Boehner called the remark "wrong."

"There can be honest disagreements about policy without using hateful language," he said in a statement. "Everyone needs to remember that."

Democrats and the White House also condemned the comment earlier in the day.

Don't be fooled by Boehner.  King is the true face of today's GOP, especially it's Christofascists/Tea Party controlled base.

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Quote of the Day: The Heartless and Mean Spirited GOP

In addition to needing a lobotomy and/or the IQ of a cretin, in order to be a Republican nowadays one needs to be at best morally bankrupt and/or one who holds the Gospel message of Christ - a figure the GOP base claims to revere - in utter contempt.  How else to explain the GOP House's passage of massive corporate handouts to corporate farming while eliminating any funding for food stamps.  Isn't feeding hungry children core to the Gospel message?  Michael Kinsley describes today's GOP well in a piece in The New Republic.  Here is the money quote:

[T]he Republican-controlled House has chopped off and discarded food stamps. (The program is now called “SNAP”—an acronym for something or other.) It’s like amputating a gangrenous limb, then keeping the limb and discarding the rest of the body.

Forget about kids going to bed hungry. (Melodramatic, but accurate.) Can this possibly be good politics? Are there actually people out there waiting for a candidate who will kill the food stamp program? It takes your breath away. The Republicans have now cornered the heartless vote. But are there enough heartless people in this country to counterbalance the sane people fleeing the other way?

The net effect of the farm bill, as it stands now in the House, is to take money away from a successful program for making sure that no one starves, and giving it to a variety of programs whose goal is to raise the price of food, for the poor and everyone else. Even if you only care about how things look, this does not look good, it seems to me.

As I have said many times, the GOP has become something truly ugly.  And the transformation began when the Christofascists hijacked the party grass roots.  The sickness continues to fester.

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Is ImmigratioReform Heading For A Slow Death?

Increasingly, the Republican controlled House of Representatives is proving to be an obstacle to passage of any meaningful legislation whether it be immigration reform or ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, assuming it is able to win passage in the Senate.  Obstructionism and blind fealty to the most racist and homophobic elements of the GOP base - i.e., the Tea Party and the Christofascists - are the norm.  Actual governing and movement on critical issues has hit a brick wall.  And worse yet is the fact that Congressional gerrymandering has made it all but impossible to defeat some of the worse extremists.  A piece in Politico looks at the likely fate of immigration reform.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans walked away from their 2012 debacle hell-bent on fixing their problems with Hispanics. Now, they appear hell-bent on making them worse.

In private conversations, top Republicans on Capitol Hill now predict comprehensive immigration reform will die a slow, months-long death in the House. Like with background checks for gun buyers, the conventional wisdom that the party would never kill immigration reform, and risk further alienating Hispanic voters, was always wrong — and ignored the reality that most House Republicans are white conservatives representing mostly white districts.

Republican leaders will huddle with their members Wednesday afternoon to plot their public strategy. But after holding countless listening sessions, it is clear to these leaders that getting even smaller, popular pieces of reform will be a tough sell.

Top Republican and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill see the momentum swinging decidedly against getting a deal this Congress. Rubio persuaded only 13 fellow Republican senators to back the bill; the editors of the National Review and Weekly Standard offered a rare, joint editorial in opposition to it this week; and private GOP headcounts show only a small fraction of House Republicans would ever vote for anything approximating the Senate deal.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a leader of the House’s hell-no-on-immigration-reform caucus, held a jam-packed meeting Monday night to walk through why his party should proudly defeat the bipartisan bill. King said the Senate’s immigration plan would help “elites who want cheap labor, Democratic power brokers, and those who hire illegal labor.”

“It would hurt Republicans, and I don’t think you can make an argument otherwise,” King said. “Two out of every three of the new citizens would be Democrats.” Some might dismiss this as the rantings of a bombastic right-winger — but his take is mainstream theology among House Republicans.

A large number of establishment Republicans think their party will seal defeat in 2016 if it cannot move beyond this issue.  .  .  . Most House Republicans quite frankly don’t care.

First, most represent districts with scant Hispanic populations. They will win or lose based on the views of whites, especially older ones, since that is who votes in their districts in off-year elections.

Second, most Republicans in the House and Senate just don’t believe Hispanics will vote for them in 2014, 2016 and perhaps ever — simply because they backed immigration reform.

Third, Republicans think they will look like fools with voters who would seriously think about voting for them if they backed a law predicated on trusting President Barack Obama to carry out tough border security measures.

With even the most modest measures facing an uphill fight, getting to a pathway to citizenship — which Democrats will demand be part of any eventual deal — looks like a pipe-dream.

As I have queried before, one has to wonder when handing out white robes and hoods will become standard practice at the beginning of city and county GOP committee meetings. 

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Tea Party Turns on Marco Rubio

Nothing makes for better sport than watching members of the GOP base turn on each other and their former darlings among the GOP elected officials.  As many expected, the drooling, knuckle dragging elements of the Tea Party (doesn't that describe all of the Tea Party?) are turning on Marco Rubio because of his support of the Senate passed immigration reform bill.  Here are highlights from The Daily Beast:

When Sen. Marco Rubio turned 42 on May 28, his Facebook page was swamped with more than 4,000 messages from people livid with him for championing the immigration-reform bill that was moving through the Senate. The notes variously called him a turncoat, a RINO, a traitor, or worse. Some birthday greetings suggested he celebrate in Mexico, Cuba, or hell, while one cheerfully said, “Happy Birthday! Now Resign!”

But the real backlash for Rubio came a month later, after he voted for the Senate immigration-reform bill. Senators headed home for the weeklong July 4 recess, or in Rubio’s case, a week of conservative blowback and hometown heartache, including a Tea Party protest in front of his Miami office.

“It was like a suicide mission that has served no purpose that we can tell,” said Everett Wilkinson, chairman of the Florida-based National Liberty Federation, of Rubio’s lead role on immigration reform. “The feedback I’ve received is that people are extremely upset with Marco. Tea Party members who were active with us and helped get Marco elected—several have said they’re no longer going to support him.”

A split now with conservatives and Tea Party members—the base of his base—will make Rubio a different kind of Republican going forward, for better and worse.

Juan Fiol, a libertarian Republican from Miami who volunteered for Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaign, says he won’t vote for Rubio again, nor will many Latinos he knows. “His own volunteers are turning against him. He’s in a lot of trouble,” Fiol said. “I am a Republican, but I do not identify with Rubio anymore. He could have been our savior, and he’s the nail in our coffin.”

While Rubio may have hurt himself at home with local supporters, the poll shows that his role on immigration reform has transformed his fortunes with national Latino voters almost overnight. He now dominates the potential 2016 GOP presidential field among Latinos, polling well ahead of Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, and Rand Paul, and has a majority of Latinos saying they’d be willing to consider voting Republican for the first time in years. The same poll also showed Hillary Clinton taking nearly two thirds of the Latino vote against any Republican if she runs.

But to get to a general election in Florida or nationally in 2016, Rubio will have to make peace with Tea Party activists or make plans to go around them. For now, many say they’d rather support Rand Paul or Ted Cruz.

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Tea Party Mobilizes to Kill Immigration Reform

Besides hating gays - and modernity in general - few groups receive the wrath of the Tea Party crowd more than immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants and other non-white immigrants.  With the United States Senate having passed historic immigration reform this week, the Tea Party is virtually foaming at the mouth and the overt racism of the Tea Party is bubbling into open view.  With Congress in recess, the prime targets of their wrath will be members of the House of Representatives who they seek to intimidate and threaten into killing the any meaningful immigration reform.  Politico looks at the toxicity of the Tea Party and what the prospects are for passage of immigration reform.  Here are highlights:

Activists are promising to spend the congressional recess reminding lawmakers who support the Gang of Eight legislation what the base is capable of. Think loud town halls, jammed phone lines and primary challenges down the road — echoes of Obamacare three years ago.

“The anger is more intense now than it was in 2010,” said Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation. “They are more upset about the amnesty bill than they were about Obamacare.”

[T]he majority of conservative groups are looking to replicate protests of previous years driven by Obamacare, the 2008 financial bailout, the stimulus bill, cap-and-trade bill and other Obama administration policies, which propelled the Republican House takeover in 2010. But after seeing President Barack Obama win re-election last year and GOP senators negotiate with Democrats, part of what’s driving the tea party is disappointment with the result of their electoral efforts and disenchantment with the Washington crowd.

“Some of these people have been up there so long and have been insulated and live in this bubble and aren’t connected to to the real world,” said Amy Kremer, chairwoman of Tea Party Express. “It’s this attitude of: They know better.”

Former Rep. Allen West, who has hinted he might challenge Sen. Marco Rubio in 2016, pointed to hidden details in the Gang of Eight bill that could cause the conservative base to lose trust in their lawmakers.

Kremer predicted that Republican lawmakers will avoid public appearances and other opportunities that might lead to an earful from an angered conservative base when they go back home this summer. Taped town halls became a hallmark of politics in previous summers, as lawmakers were filmed facing angry crowds or uncomfortable questions on both policy and topics like Obama’s birth certificate.

Cindy Lucas, a coordinator with the tea party-affiliated Martin County 9/12 Committee in Florida, said she spent this week trying to sway Rubio from supporting the bill. Next week she expects his phone lines to be “melted” by conservative complains and his offices in Florida barnstormed by agitated constituents, but she’s already moved to the next step.

The issue of immigration now heads over to the House, where many conservatives, facing pressure from their base, have made it clear that they oppose any bill with a pathway to citizenship even with beefed up border security measures.

House Republicans and activists are pressing Speaker John Boehner to invoke the Hastert rule on any immigration legislation, which means he won’t bring the bill to the floor unless it is supported by the majority of Republicans.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who organized a six-hour press conference in opposition to the Gang of Eight bill last week, told POLITICO that conservatives who support a pathway to citizenship lose the right to be called conservatives.

“There are few times that are true litmus tests for conservatives. This is one of those times,” Phillips said.   At the top of everyone’s lists are two primary targets for the 2014 election: Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Graham is a Gang of Eight member and Alexander is a sponsor of the border control surge. That list could also include Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Rubio in 2016.

It will be interesting to watch the Tea Party destroy Republicans and work to nominate utter nutcases akin to Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock who lost handily to sane Democrats.

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Tea Party Revels in Exposure of NSA Domestic Spying

As noted in previous posts, who would have believed a month ago that the cretins of Tea Party and liberal civil libertarians would be agreeing on anything.   Yet as the reactions and blow back from the revelations of the extent of U.S. government spying on American citizens continues to unfold, no one seems more elated than the Tea Party crowd.  To them, what has been learned underscores their hatred of government, although they still can't comprehend that highways, education, and major infrastructure projects do require a governmental role.  They don't just materialize by themselves or for free.  The Tea Party crowd likewise doesn't get it that it was George W. Bush and the GOP controlled Congress who set the current police state style of surveillance of Americans in place.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the Tea Party euphoria at the NSA leak revelations.  Here are excerpts:

As if Tea Partiers needed any more evidence that Big Government is out to get them, along come Edward Snowden and operation PRISM.

It was bad enough that the tax man had been yanking their chain: Everyone knows the IRS is a bunch of jerks. But the NSA combing through people’s phone calls and emails? That’s a whole different level of sinister.

“I read threads all day long by Tea Party people nationwide. I talk to dozens and dozens of people on a daily basis,” says Ken Crow, the Iowa-based editor of the Tea Party Tribune and cofounder of the activist hub teapartycommunity.com. “They’re all afraid.”

The mood among Tea Party Patriots is equally tense, reports the group’s cofounder Jenny Beth Martin. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Wait a minute, we seem to trending much more toward a police state than we ever imagined.’”

For a political movement largely driven by the specter of government run amok, the NSA snooping news is, to borrow a Bidenism, a big fucking deal, a smoking gun akin to Donald Trump unearthing Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate.

Indeed, Tea Partiers’ reaction to the news of late may be best summed up in four words: We told you so! “They say that those of us in the Tea Party wear tin foil hats and we’re out there and all that,” says Crow. “But take a look around!”

But almost as outrageous to many Tea Partiers as the NSA snooping itself has been the lack of outrage by Republican leaders. Even as a sprinkling of folks like Rand Paul and Glenn Beck decry the government’s assault on the Constitution and declare Snowden a “hero,” most party players have been more in tune with Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain, who have been quick to remind people of the hard realities of fighting terrorism, and Speaker John Boehner, who called Snowden “a traitor.” 

“We’ve given up on McCain and Graham,” says Crow. “It’s obvious to us that they are not going to carry the banner of freedom and liberty.” As for the speaker? “A marshmallow,” says Crow. “With a lot of these scandals, there is overwhelming evidence of perjury by senior officials in the administration—overwhelming evidence that criminal activity transpired. Nothing is being done, and we want to know why!”
  

Not that Tea Partiers expected much more from a GOP elite that many members have long held in disdain. “The political establishment voted to allow these things to happen and for government to get this large and out of control,” says Martin, adding sadly, “At this point, very little surprises me.”

This does not mean, however, that the Tea Party intends to take this insult lying down. Far from it. Various groups are rallying members to express their displeasure through calls and email petitions to Congress  .  .  .  .  The NSA mess is simply “the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

 Obviously, things will be interesting for the GOP Congressional leadership crowd - they are going to be bludgeoned from both the left and the right, with the Tea Partiers determined to make their lives difficult.  It should make for fun watching.

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