Michele Bachmann And The New McCarthyism

Folks, bookmark this post. Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann goes off the charts here on the wingnut Obama-hating insanity.



"What I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out if they are pro-America or anti-America."

Folks, this is a sitting member of Congress asking for investigations of Barack Obama and other sitting Democratic members of Congress and the media for what amounts to suspicion of treason. You do not get any more wingnut batshit crazy then this. Do you think she will "reach across the aisle" to embrace a President Obama?

Afterwards, The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel takes Michele McCarthy out back to the woodshed, and not even Pat Buchanan will defend her.



At least there are some folks willing to stand up to incendiary nutjobs like Bachmann (and Sarah Palin for that matter) but there is a violently angry wing of the GOP that will never, under any circumstances, accept a Democrat in office. To them, a Democrat elected over a Republican is against the natural order of things...and one as President is tantamount to the most foul blasphemy. Throw in the fact this Democratic President is an African-American, and you get Michele Bachmann's tirade tonight on Hardball.

To her, Barack Obama literally represents the End Of Days. There are millions more folks like Michelle Bachmann out there, ranging from ignorant to hateful to downright violent. The GOP will let Bachmann and others like her spout their tirade, with the whole point of the exercise to dehumanize Barack Obama to the point of illegitimacy.

They honestly can't believe he will President. But he is not their President if elected, oh no. They will not recognize him as such if he wins. He will never be legitimate to Michelle Bachmann and her hate squad. They will attack him in a fashion that makes the GOP crusade to impeach Clinton look like a "minor playground misunderstanding."

This is the new McCarthyism, folks. Democrats are the Enemy. They must be destroyed by any means necessary. Should Obama become our next President as he most likely will be, they won't rest until Obama is gone. And you can take "gone" in any number of unpleasant ways, including the most dire.

We have a Secret Service protecting the man for a reason. And tirades like Michele Bachmann's exquisite little mountain of bile there serve only to fuel the need for more Secret Service protection for the President. My greatest fear is that somebody from this vile, hate-filled little place will say "Hell yeah, he's a damn traitor!" and take it upon themselves to rescue the country by doing something horrendous. We have quite a long history of good Presidents having their terms cut short.

I cannot help but pray that when that security detail is tested...when, not if...that our country can survive. I say "when" because various attempts have been made on every President's life since Kennedy's assassination. Of 43 Presidents, four have been assassinated. Two more were rumored to have been assassinated, and again, various attempts have been made.

It's not really a question of "if", really. It's how many...how many will be fueled by this sort of "free speech"?

Supremes Come Through

With a unanimous 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court told the Ohio GOP to go intercourse itself...for now.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in favor of Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, overturning a lower-court order that she provide to county elections boards by today details of discrepancies discovered with new voter registrations.

The court ruled 9-0 that the Ohio Republican Party, which sued Brunner for the information, was unlikely to succeed in its arguments that Brunner legally could be sued on this issue and that the courts had the authority to issue the order.

But the court expressed no opinion about whether federal law was being followed properly.

At issue is what should be done when personal information from newly registered voters doesn't match state motor vehicle and federal Social Security records after an automatic computer check is done.

The ruling settles for now a dispute that had worked its way through the lower federal courts in recent days, with district and appellate judges taking different sides on the issue.

The problem is that the issue of the dispute itself hasn't been addressed, only that the court wasn't the right avenue for it.

This may be over for now, but not for good.

Pointing Out McSame's Race-Baiting Proves Obama's A Racist

According to Chuck Krauthammer anyway. He's pissed at his own employer the NY Times calling McSame out on this, and insists that the only racism in this campaign is the stuff Obama's making up...

Let me get this straight. A couple of agitated yahoos in a rally of thousands yell something offensive and incendiary, and John McCain and Sarah Palin are not just guilty by association -- with total strangers, mind you -- but worse: guilty according to The New York Times of "race-baiting and xenophobia."

But should you bring up Barack Obama's real associations -- 20 years with Jeremiah Wright, working on two foundations and distributing money with William Ayers, citing the raving Michael Pfleger as one who helps him keep his moral compass (Chicago Sun-Times, April 2004) and the long-standing relationship with the left-wing vote-fraud specialist ACORN -- you have crossed the line into illegitimate guilt by association. Moreover, it is tinged with racism.

The fact that, when John McCain actually heard one of those nasty things said about Obama, he incurred the boos of his own crowd by insisting that Obama is "a decent person that you do not have to be scared (of) as president" makes no difference. It surely did not stop John Lewis from comparing McCain to George Wallace.

The search for McCain's racial offenses is untiring and often unhinged. Remember McCain's Berlin/celebrity ad that showed a shot of Paris Hilton? An appalling attempt to exploit white hostility at the idea of black men "becoming sexually involved with white women," fulminated New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. He took to TV to denounce McCain's exhumation of that most vile prejudice, pointing out McCain's gratuitous insertion in the ad of "two phallic symbols," the Washington Monument and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Hey Chuckles, keep telling yourself there's no racism in this campaign by Republicans that McSame isn't repudiating, especially when his entire campaign is based around plausible deniability of racist smears against Obama.

He then gets the assist from assholes like Chuckles here who clutch their pearls and want to know how dare Democrats (and Republicans and human beings in fact) get upset at this kind of thing, because pointing out these actions means Obama is "playing the cynical race card". The correct answer Chuckles is that when Republicans do this, they get called out on it, which probably explains why your boy Sidney there is losing by double digits.

The GOP Tries To Steal Ohio And More Part 2

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner's counterstroke against the Ohio GOP's legal victory forcing her to come up with a plan to verify all of Ohio's new voters? Appealing to the Supreme Court on the grounds that forcing the new voters to cast provisional ballots will disenfranchise hundreds of thousands.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide how 200,000 Ohioans will be voting in the presidential election.

Brunner wants those newly registered voters to use regular ballots. The Ohio Republican Party would prefer that they fill out provisional ballots to give boards of elections time to determine whether they are eligible to vote or not.

Late Wednesday, Brunner appealed a ruling from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that would force her to cross-check the names of people who have registered to vote or updated registrations since Jan. 1 against a state driver's license database. She would then have to tell Ohio's 88 boards of elections how to deal with people who don't match up.

Brunner fears voter suppression if the appeals court decision stands, since many provisional ballots are not counted for a variety of technicalities.

The GOP says a reversal of the appeals ruling would increase chances of voter fraud.

The court could decide to take up the case today.

At stake here is just how tough voter verification laws need to be surrounding the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, passed after Florida in 2000.

The Republicans argue that ideally anything less than 100% certainty and Federal uniformity in state voter eligibility laws will result in voter registration fraud and vote fraud, and that the right to vote is the most cherished right in America and therefore should be the most protected, and that if Americans seriously want to exercise that right, they must be willing to endure close scrutiny on behalf of the country. There is plenty of evidence that rigged elections throughout the world are a problem.

Democrats argue that there's no evidence of the kind of voter fraud the Republicans are complaining about, and that they are in fact trying to surpress millions of minority and poor voters -- traditionally Democratic voters -- in order to assure Republicans win elections. There's plenty of evidence to support laws designed to reduce turnout of these groups in our own history, laws struck down as unconstitutional burdens upon these voters.

The Supreme Court, if they take up the decision, could be deciding the future of voting in this country. It's very possible that the Supreme Court ruling will be used as a precedent across the country for minimum standards in voter eligibility checks. If they rule in favor of the Ohio GOP and do define strict guildelines for voter eligibility in the Buckeye State, there will be precedent to possibly rework voter eligibility laws across the country, and the challenges the GOP can make to new voters across the country, perhaps even in this election.

How much chaos would it cause if dozens of states that didn't already meet the strict guidelines the Supreme Court could hand down to Ohio had to then force all their new voters into provisional ballots? Millions of votes could get rejected across the country for not meeting the criteria, and that could turn an Obama landslide into a McSame victory.

If they side with Secretary Brunner, it may be a pyrrhic victory as well. Certainly the right wing Wurlitzer will sound off that more than ever McSame must win the election in order to replace the Supreme Court's "judicial activists" with "patriotic Americans" and will motivate even more hatred and bile against Obama than before. He will be seen as illegitimate by possibly millions of Americans, and it would only take one to possibly bring him harm, most likely spouting that famous Jeffersonian quote about the Tree of Liberty needing to be refreshed by the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Whether or not you agree that the GOP is trying to steal THIS election (I believe they are, they always play to win) they will try to set the stage for as much dehumanizing hatred as possible against Barack Obama. There will be violence eventually. It's just a matter of how deadly and widespread it will be. In these dire economic times, economic times that will get far, far worse before they get better, we will see good people do bad things in the name of what they believe to be justice.

This Supreme Court decision could become the GOP's final revenge against us all.

StupidiNews!

• Sarah Palin will in fact appear on SNL this weekend.
• Joe The Plumber? No plumber's license in Ohio.
• Washington Mutual's collapse has left a big hole in the Seattle charity scene.
• Brother, can you spare a job in Dayton?
• The Red Sox score a dramatic 8-7 comeback to stay alive against the Rays.