Wow, this is a cool new dodge I hadn’t thought of. So long as a cost is in place for a decade, you no longer have to pay for it. (Medicare, Social Security, National Defense–existing policies! No longer a problem!) So says Mitch McConnell, when asked how he would suggest paying for $3 trillion which would otherwise be added to the debt by extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich:

Well, what, what, what, what are you talking about, ‘Paid for’? This is existing tax policy. It’s been in place for 10 years. What they’re talking about is raising taxes…

See? Now, let’s say that I have bills to pay. But I also hate working 40 hours a week. It just taxes me too much, saps my energy and all that. It’s just too much stress. So I cut my work hours from 40 a week to 15. I plan to keep it that way for ten years, and then go back to work full-time. Over that time, I rack up an impressive amount of debt. But I feel better. Then, after ten years, I hate the idea of taxing myself 40 hours a week that I figure I’ll just make my current situation permanent.

So then some a-hole financial planner says I have to start taxing myself at the rate of 40 hours a week again, or else how am I going to pay for those bills? Bad stuff is about to happen, he tells me. In fact, that’s what I’ve been saying myself, that after all these years, that huge debt is going to ruin me. But I couldn’t find a damned one of my costs I would be willing to cut.

But now I have Mitch McConnell’s sterling brand of logic! I don’t have to change a thing! Because my 15-hour-a-week schedule is “an existing tax policy, it’s been in place for ten years,” there’s going to be no impact on my debt! That financial moron is talking about raising my taxes, for no apparent good reason! What an ass!

In fact, I feel that he’s to blame for all of this! My debt, the threat of working more–it’s entirely his fault! Yeah, I was feeling just dandy until that guy started telling me how bad things are and how I have to do this tax thing, he must be the one responsible for all those debts in the first place. And working 40 hours a week? Who ever heard of that? He’s trying to tax me more!

Thank you, Mitch McConnell. It’s so swell to think like a Republican.

Well, it’s official: now that Obama has spoken out in approval of the Cordoba House project [Clarification: he did not “approve it” or even “approve of it” per se; he only supported their right do so], Republicans are grabbing the issue as an election-year theme. Never mind that this should be an issue of religious liberty. Never mind that this is a clear appeal to lump together all Muslims under the terrorist label and use them as a political scapegoat.

Who cares about any of that when you can get people to vote for you?

Count me as disgusted. Not surprised, just sickened.

Michael Steele, Republican Party Village Idiot:

“Keep in mind again, federal candidates, [Afghanistan] was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in. … It was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well, if he’s such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed.”

Umm… if Obama is the one who chose to start the war in Afghanistan, then pray tell, what the bejeezus were we doing there for the previous seven years? And what would Steele have done differently, so that had Obama done it, Steele and the entire right wing would not eviscerate him for it?

The denial is staggering.

Seriously, I am beginning to think that Steele is there to make Boehner and the other Republicans look brilliant by comparison.

Seriously, if Obama were to announce a plan to fight serial killers who target nuns and orphans, Republicans would take the side of the serial killers, just out of reflex.

Obama scored a coup with the $20 billion escrow fund (who knows how much of that will actually be paid, or if it’ll be enough to pay for what can be paid for, but hey, we can hope). Several prominent Republicans immediately took the side of BP. Palin, Limbaugh, Bachmann and others on the right were opposed to BP paying for the oil spill.

Wow. How knee-jerkingly tone deaf can you be? I mean it, seriously. And it’s not just that: they actually got upset that Obama mention God so much.

The only down side: they probably won’t pay a political price for this. Most people in America are too comfortable with the whole “It’s OK If You’re A Republican” bit. Really, a right-winger would have to sexually molest an infant on live TV to cross the line these days, and maybe not even then.

Not that I’m complaining: anything right-wingers can do to screw up the midterms for themselves is OK with me. But after Republicans succeeding by acting like hysterically demented idiots for the past year and a half, I’m not holding my breath or anything.

You’ve probably heard this already, especially Jon Stewart’s take on it. Still, this is the quality of news analysis on Fox:

CARLSON: You have this country, that is in the middle of a huge war, BUT… there’s money to be found there, so who is going to now suddenly want to take over Afghanistan? What about the Taliban? What about China?

DOOCY: Sure. Because China is not too far away, and it’s a great big country that needs a whole bunch of stuff.

A great big country. They need a whole bunch of stuff. My god–he’s channeling the Pakleds. “China is not far. China is big. China needs a bunch of stuff to make them go.”

Had one been walking through a graveyard populated by the late greats of journalism just at the moment Doocy said that, one would have heard the muffled, collective slap of foreheads directly through six feet of soil.

Then the other guy in the interview gets in almost as dumb a statement:

KILMEADE: They can be transformed into the mining center of the world. So there you go. All right, now they can pay for the war, perhaps.

Wow. You just have to stand in awe of the arrogance of that statement. “Everything they have is ours, we can just take it.” Then, when you recover from that, the sheer stupidity strikes you. Seriously, remember when Republicans were all like, “hey, the war in Iraq will pay for itself because the oil is there”? Same thing here: if anyone gets the goodies, it’ll be the business interests. Not one cent will go back to the U.S. taxpayer. But hey, whatever helps put our troops in the line of fire so profits can be made, right?

Can Fox News be any more dumb? (Note: yes, I am aware of the answer to that question. It’s just simply hard to believe sometimes.)

Three years ago today, I asked this question concerning the right-wing assertion that it was highly improper to criticize a president while we had troops in the field, with my own short answer:

Let’s say that a Democratic candidate wins the 2008 election, and, for a while at least, we still have soldiers on the ground in Iraq. Will Republicans lay off criticizing the president, especially on war issues, during that time?

No, I don’t think so either.

Couldn’t have called that one more right, could I have? Of course, it was a no-brainer–anyone not completely fooling themselves could have answered that spot-on. Right-wing hypocrisy is one of the true constants in the world.

If anything, the question was far too mild; while the hypocrisy was a given, it was just as sure that no one could guess the degree. In the prediction above, substitute “lay off criticizing the president” with “refrain from hysterically vehement attacks on the president, calling him a communist, fascist foreign usurper and a traitor to America,” and you’re closer. But who would have guessed such bizarrely self-contradictory drivel would have been spoken aloud, much less used as the central themes in a consistent barrage of smears aimed at the president of the United States?

But I guess if you’re an American patriot who supports the troops and puts country first, then you gotta have priorities.

Democrats are currently crowing about a major victory in the Senate right now, as Republicans folded under pressure and gave up on their obstructionist attempt to weaken or kill the financial reform legislation before debate even started.

On the other hand, the Democratic “victory” was that with a 59-41 majority, Democrats, after several days, were finally able to open debate on a bill that must later go through several other steps before passing.

One way of looking at it says that Democrats have done the equivalent of tying their shoelaces correctly. Hardly impressive. Another way of looking at it, though, is that they have successfully tied their shoelaces while a bunch of people make a concerted effort to keep them from doing it. Imagine trying to lace your shoes with three or four people constantly yanking at your hands and feet, trying to stop you. I think you’d be impressed by anyone who get their shoes tied under such conditions.

But in a political sense, the achievement or lack of same is less important than the fact that both sides had resolved, and one side caved. If Obama was trying to pass a law for “National Shoelace Day” but Republicans thwarted him, the relative importance of the law would be of little importance, as the main focus would be who has got stronger political will.

So, for the time being, at least, Democrats are doing pretty well, keeping a fairly good image ever since the passage of the health care law. And it doesn’t help the Republicans that they are making their stand for the banking industry, which everyone now detests, trying to thwart reform which will help keep another bailout from happening. That’s not a very defensible stance, which is most likely why they folded–along with the fact that they were preventing even debating the legislation. If Dems can similarly succeed in blasting the Republicans as being pro-bank and anti-reform when cloture and passage come to pass, it would be an even bigger win. Republicans are also not helped by right-wingers pulling crap like the immigration law in Arizona and the Nevada Republican seriously advocating livestock payments for health care.

Of course, one can always count on Republicans to provide a steady stream of idiots to do stupid stuff like that. The real question is, how long can the Dems keep this up without reverting to weak-kneed giga-wimp form?

The Bush administration thoroughly attacked the Constitutional rights of all Americans. They virtually killed off the 4th amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That administration essentially made it legal for the U.S. government to invade your privacy–your person, house, papers, and effects–without a warrant, without probable cause, without even a specific location and without anything more than a general category of what is to be searched for. After stacking the Supreme Court with justices just waiting for an excuse to place their stamp of approval on such practices.

And the Fourth Amendment wasn’t the only one shredded. You can be arrested without being informed of the charges and swept away to a foreign land without counsel–there went the Sixth Amendment–to be held without due process, and you can be tortured so as to testify against yourself–there went the Fifth and Eighth Amendments–and can be locked up for years without a trial, and never get a jury trial–there went the Seventh. That these rights are not violated daily against all citizens is moot; the foot is in the door, the camel’s nose is under the tent flap, and the precedent is set.

So it flabbergasts me when I see right-wingers going berserk about how the Obama administration is somehow responsible for depriving them of their rights, seemingly oblivious as to what went on under Bush, as if his bolstering of the Second Amendment made up for stripping most of the rest. Sure, the Obama administration gets the blame for perpetuating many of these practices, but the Republicans are the ones who did the damage, and the point is that once the damage is done, it almost never gets undone. Even more to the point, the right-wing protesters don’t even seem to be protesting the actual deprivation of Constitutional rights that Bush committed and Obama is being soft about, but instead they are outraged by some imagined theft of rights that Obama hasn’t even come close to perpetrating.

Consider Arizona: Republicans in control of the state senate just passed a bill which would allow police in the state to stop people just for looking like they’re not legal citizens, demand to see one’s “papers” like they were Gestapo or Soviet state police, and if you don’t have them, haul your ass off to jail. This is exactly the kind of crap that the Tea Party crowd imagines Obama is pulling and get outraged about it–but it’s the Republicans in Arizona doing it, along party lines (all Democrats opposed it and only one Republican joined them). The paradox is that the Teabaggers will probably love this because they imagine it will never apply to them–so it’s OK to violate the rights of Americans of color, even as it whittles away at the rights of everyone. It’s “no government-run health care and don’t touch my Medicare” all over again.

The stupidity dazzles, the irony blinds. Welcome to the Tea Party™.

Democrats voted for the person, and we got Obama. Republicans (at least the politicians) voted for the color and got Steele. And the irony is that conservatives accused Democrats of voting for Obama because he is black, ignoring the charisma and the message, instead imagining massive “white guilt,” while Republicans without any doubt elected Steele because they felt they needed a black guy too, and he was best-positioned to take advantage of that. In effect, Democrats hired a man on his merits, while Republicans hired a man as part of an self-imposed quota system. Well, our president turned the job market around with the stimulus, got health care reform passed, and is making America respected in the world again by crafting responsible leadership, as seen with the recent nuclear treaty.

How’s your “any guy we could find so long as he’s black” working out?

It’s like shooting fish in a barrel when the other side completely and utterly abandons any and all semblance of reason or adherence to facts or logic. Nevertheless, with Jon Stewart, shooting fish in a barrel can be such fun.

It is so, so sad that millions of Americans take these right-wing gasbags at face value. But then, we’re looking at a populace which has this as a representative sample:

Palin’s view of nuclear weapons was shaped by her stint as the commander in chief of the Alaskan National Guard, our first line of defense against Soviet nuclear weapons. Obama has held his same views since he was a stoner college student and has showed no signs of maturing.

Which of the two would you trust?

One does not have to wonder much why the “comments” section of his blog post is strangely blank. To his credit, the blogger posted an update in which he admits to being wrong about Palin having had control over nuclear weapons while governor of Alaska. Less to his credit, he does not acknowledge that Palin had no business whatsoever with the Alaskan National Guarda. This, of course, completely ignoring everything else wrong with what the guy writes. At some point, you just have to stop critiquing, usually when you realize that you are dissecting the verbiage of what is essentially the political equivalent of the village idiot.

A urologist in Florida has posted a sign on his office clinic door:

If you voted for Obama, seek urologic care elsewhere.

---

Changes to your healthcare begin right now. Not in four years.

Patients in his inner office become exposed to more right-wing propaganda, including a photocopied list created by the GOP attacking the recently-passed health care reform. The doctor will almost certainly be investigated by licensing authorities, and though he may become a hero in the right-wing community, he’s likely to get into at least a little trouble with those in his profession. Many certainly believe that he crossed a very significant line that should never be crossed.

Truthfully, if I were going to his office for care, I would be relieved. Relieved to know that I had been tipped off that someone I would have trusted my health to is an idiot. Without the sign, I would have been treated by someone who does not allow his reason to triumph over what he hears on Fox News. No way I want someone like that providing me health care. A conservative doctor I would have no problem with–this is not about the doctor’s politics. Instead, it’s about his intelligence and his ethics.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor is pissed off at Democrats. Why? Because they are complaining about a wave of threats and acts of violence in the wake of the health care reform bill passing. The bastards. How dare the Democrats make public the fact that they are being terrorized. If right-wingers are being unduly violent and bullying, Democrats should just man up and take it quietly. Mentioning them at all is equivalent to using them as a “political weapon,” a phrase Cantor repeatedly used.

Cantor demonstrated this by mentioning a recent “threat” made against him:

Just recently I have been directly threatened. A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week, and I’ve received threatening e-mails. But I will not release them, because I believe such actions will only encourage more to be sent.

Wow. OK, a bullet was fired at his office. That’s equal to what the Democrats have suffered, so of course if he’s not using the fact that liberal extremists are firing weapons at his premises, then Democrats should follow his sterling lead, right?

Except that the bullet wasn’t fired “at” his office. It was fired randomly up into the air from a distant location, and by chance happened to strike his window from the sky.

Oooohhh. Scary. Those damned liberals extremists, firing guns up into the air from distant parts of the city until the bullets randomly hit Republican campaign offices. Yes sirree, that’s about as direct a threat as you can get. And I am sure that the emails Cantor will not release are just as legitimate.

The threats that Democrats have been getting include direct, immediate threats to shoot and kill their children, coming from an extremist element that is well-armed and eminently willing to use those weapons, from whose number have come people like the one who killed the doctor in his church in Kansas, or the man who shot three police officers in Pittsburgh. The acts of violence were numerous and direct, the threats were far more volatile than the norm and had infinitely more potential to be carried out than what Cantor said he received himself.

For Cantor to use a random bullet falling and generic hate email and say that this is somehow in any way equivalent to what Democrats have been subjected to this week is reprehensible, and Cantor should be ashamed. Of course, he would not be.

This is not your usual level of background threats and violence, nor is it isolated, nor is it bound to decrease over time. It is escalating, and not a little because of the wildly hysterical rhetoric coming from people like Cantor himself.

It should also be noted that (a) Cantor, while “not condon[ing] violence,” did not condemn the threats or acts of violence either, and (b) he did condemn the Democrats for complaining and essentially blamed the Democrats for future acts of violence, saying that they were encouraging it. Which is BS, of course; making such things public will bring about public censure and harm the opposition’s cause, thus providing far more impetus to reduce the violent acts. But instead of trying to calm things down, Cantor instead only continued to use inflammatory rhetoric while at the same time sending the message to the instigators of the violence that what they are doing is just business-as-usual, and that the Democrats actually deserved it. In short, Cantor was the one “fanning the flames.”

That said, Cantor should take more care in choosing his examples; I have noted that Republican politicians often do this, using bogus illustrations to make their points. This reminds me of the time Dan Quayle was on the campaign trail in 1992, and the Bush administration was criticized for the poor job market–not just the lack of jobs, but also the decreasing quality of available jobs. He actually stopped his motorcade and pulled the media caravan over so he could show them a “help wanted” sign that he had spotted from his limo. The sign, he said, showed that there were in fact jobs out there to be had, and the economy was looking up. When reporters asked the establishment–a Burger King franchise–displaying the “Now Hiring” sign, they found that the job in question was a part-time, minimum wage job.

The above is an actual billboard located on I-35 near the town of Wyoming, Minnesota. It’s been garnering quite a bit of attention, and has become the new big gag among the right-wingers. Do a Google Image search of “Bush Miss Me” and you’ll see that it’s been reworked as one of those “motivational posters” and slapped on half the wingnut blogosphere.

Considering that half the stuff people are “tired” of are direct results of actions taken by the Bush administration, and the other half are the result of right-wing hysteria and Republican obstructionism, the suggestion of “missing” the Bush era is more akin to blackmail than a call to better times.

It’s like a kid who wants to sit in the front seat of the car on a family trip, and when he gets put in the back seat does nothing but scream, kick, and throw things until everyone else just gives up and gives him what he wants.

The difference is that with the punk kid, he eventually gets tired and shuts up.

You begin to wonder if right-wingers actually believe their own claims against global warming. I know that many of these people are simply knee-jerk reactionist idiots, but even idiots can figure out simple stuff from time to time.

They know as well as anyone else by now that “global warming” does not mean that it never, ever gets cold enough to snow anywhere.

They know that warmer average temperatures means more water evaporates.

They know that more water evaporated means more precipitation, and that where it gets cold enough, more snow.

So they know that global warming can cause greater snowfalls. Snowfalls like the very one they claim disproves global warming.

The question is, are they really so astonishingly stupid, or are they fully aware of their BS and are astonishingly dishonest? If one were to give them the benefit of the doubt, which way would it go?

This story is getting coverage in all the lefty blogs, and I must admit it’s way too funny to pass up. For some time, crazed loon Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) had been spreading insane lies about the upcoming U.S. census, telling anyone who would listen that the census will be used to round up conservatives so they could be sent to concentration camps. She encouraged people to not fill out their census forms.

But now, she’s mum on the census, has been for a few months–and a Minnesota newspaper has discovered the most likely reason why: if Minnesotans don’t fill out their census forms, the state could lose a House seat–and that seat would most likely be Michelle Bachmann’s. More details here.

Oh, sweet irony.

Okay, I have to blog on this. If the story is familiar with you, jump to just below the video.

Remember about a month and a half ago when Al Franken proposed an amendment concerning rape and government contractors? Some contractors have a clause hidden in the small print which forbids female employees raped by their colleagues overseas from suing the rapists in court. The rapists are never prosecuted because they commit the crime in Iraq (although hundreds of cases of rape have been reported, not a single one has been prosecuted, despite the DoD having the power to do so), so a civil suit back home is the victim’s only recourse. Their employers, however, forbid this with the contractual small print, forcing the women to submit to binding arbitration that will favor the rapists.

The case came to light when Dawn Leamon, a KBR (formerly Halliburton) employee attempted to get the courts to allow her to sue her rapists. Ms. Leamon was drugged and then brutally raped and sodomized by her co-workers in Iraq. KBR employees told her to keep quiet, warning her that she would be in danger if she pressed the case, and tried to get her to sign a non-disclosure form. Her laptop was confiscated and her movements were restricted, while her rapists walked about free without any repercussions. Eventually, KBR tried to enforce the clause forbidding a civil suit.

Hearing of this, Al Franken was incensed. Franken has, for a very long time, been an ardent supporter of U.S. troops, having done multiple tours for the USO. On his radio show, the one thing that would make him genuinely furious and would even move him to tears would be the mistreatment of the troops. This is not some flash publicity thing for Franken, it is instead a core value very close to his heart.

As a result, Franken proposed an amendment to a Defense Appropriations bill which would forbid such terms in contracts written by government contractors. Immediately, Republicans attacked the amendment. Republican Senator Jeff Sessions claimed that “Congress should not be involved in writing or rewriting private contracts,” something that Jon Stewart highlighted as rank hypocrisy considering the GOP’s mission to do exactly that where ACORN is concerned. Sessions further classed Franken’s amendment as “a political attack on Halliburton,” despite KBR no longer being a part of that organization. One KBR Iraq rape victim said that the amendment “means the world to me…It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it.”

When the amendment came up for a vote, no fewer than 30 Republican senators callously voted against it. Stewart did a cutting piece on the matter:

OK, so that’s the story. 30 Republicans vote against victims of brutal rape, and vote for KBR to shield gang rapists from lawsuits. Naturally, this will, without any doubt, lead to criticism that these senators are pro-rape. That may be unfair–they may just be pro-military-contractor, and incidentally be pro-rape. But they had to know that the criticism would be forthcoming, or else they are unimaginable idiots.

So, when the criticism naturally came, what was their response? Blame Al Franken. Why? Because he’s not doing enough to suppress the criticism. Seriously. You can’t make up crap like this.

Despite the fact that Franken himself is not doing the criticizing, it is rather interesting how his GOP colleagues are dumping this directly on him:

The Republicans are steamed at Franken because partisans on the left are using a measure he sponsored to paint them as rapist sympathizers — and because Franken isn’t doing much to stop them.

“Trying to tap into the natural sympathy that we have for this victim of this rape —and use that as a justification to frankly misrepresent and embarrass his colleagues, I don’t think it’s a very constructive thing,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in an interview.

And so what will they do about it? Cornyn continues:

“I think it’s going to make a lot of senators leery and start looking at things he’s doing earlier on, because I don’t think it got appropriate attention ahead of time.”

So. Franken proposes an amendment to help victims of brutal rape. Republicans politicize it, and vote with the contractors and the rapists, giving hypocritically flimsy justifications. Republicans are very rightly criticized as not protecting rape victims. Republicans then blame Franken and threaten him.

I am sorely tempted to say, “So, what else is new?”

One of the other reasons why I’m less enthusiastic about reporting on politics:

This is what a looming national train wreck looks like, and seems to confirm that the Republican strategy of “screw the American people, we want to take control of this train so we can drive it off a cliff” is working beautifully. Obama and the Democrats are not helping by (a) beginning all negotiations with a compromise, (b) making it an imperative to look “bipartisan” when the Republicans both define what that means and make no effort to be bipartisan themselves, (c) not taking the Republican-style hardball stance of doing whatever it takes to get legislation through, and (d) generally wringing their hands and caving at the first sign of something going wrong. They are quite literally snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and even with a 60-vote supermajority (more or less), are having more trouble than any majority party I’ve ever heard of in getting anything passed. Democrats did not threaten the nuclear option when Republicans used the filibuster to obstruct, even though the Republicans did so–effectively–when the Democrats used it relatively sparingly; Democrats did not use reconciliation to get their major legislation past a potential filibuster, though Republicans did so–again, effectively–when they were in power.

On the media front, the conservative news media (let’s not play the game of “is the media librul?” when it is so blindingly obvious that it leans so notably right-wing) strategy is also working. Fox has dominated the national discourse and effectively created the neoconservative imperative: the self-serving narrative that everyone buys into.

I often wondered, “What could possibly happen which could blind the people to the egregiously vicious and idiotic insanity of the right wing and allow them to elect conservatives next year, when it is so clear that doing so will wreck any hope of recovery or future worth for the United States?”

And here we have the answer: a galvanized right wing whipped into a frenzy by the insane Becks, Bachmanns, Limbaughs, and Palins; a disheartened left wing driven to apathy by weak-kneed, ineffective Democrats; and independents robbed of a rational national discourse, pulled to the vitriol of the right or the lethargy of the left, or else left hanging in the middle with nowhere to go.

I keep hoping that Obama’s got a rabbit or two left in his hat, that the liberals and independents will rail against the vile madness of the conservatives, that the right will shrink into a tiny ball of fury unable to move elections, or that something will happen to restore sanity and allow the nation’s business to get back on track again.

Instead, we seem to be driven by the right wing’s incessant, obstructionist drive to destroy the nation in the name of regaining power, driven to charge off that cliff, waving flags and screaming “America’s Number ONE!!” at the top of our lungs as we go.

The most frightening thing is, when the right wing finds a strategy that works, it employs it even more strongly the next time. I thought we’d seen the worst the right wing could do under Reagan, when the neocons started taking over and saddled the economy with massive debt; then I thought I’d seen the worst with the relentless, eight-year smear campaign against the Clintons and the campaign to create a fictional narrative with the likes of Limbaugh and the birth of Fox News; then I thought I’d seen the worst with Bush & Cheney after 9/11, when the real national self-destruction got under full steam; but now we have a right-wing which is doing crap which frankly leaves me speechless. This is not a once-only thing, this is a trend. And it scares the living shit out of me to consider what’s next.

Why? Because 52%, according to a recent poll, think that ACORN stole the election for Obama. ACORN, of course, is the right wing’s favorite new smear target.

The thing is, even if you do believe that ACORN is so corrupt that its goal is to steal elections, and so effective that it is successful at it, believing that it stole the election for Obama is so ludicrously insane as to be beyond imagination–which I will mathematically prove below.

In 2000, all it took to steal the election for Bush was a few hundred votes–and there is documented proof that Katherine Harris alone did that, by generating that intentionally fake “felon’s list” which wound up disenfranchising thousands of legitimate Democrats. Add the thousands more Republicans from Seminole and other counties who should have been disqualified but were allowed to vote by illegal means, and you’re way over the top.

But in 2008? Obama won by nine and a half million votes, and by 192 electoral votes, 365 to 173. That means ACORN would have to have stolen at least 87 electoral votes for Obama to win, assuming that in a fair vote, McCain would have won by the slimmest of margins while losing the popular vote by a few million.

If you take the states where Obama won by the fewest number of votes and assume that only the barest number necessary to put Obama over the top were stolen, that would still require ACORN to have stolen at least 935,000 votes in 14 states–and that’s assuming that the people at ACORN were criminal masterminds of unbelievable precision, knowing exactly where to steal just the right number of votes to tip the scales. (Additionally, since ACORN only operated in 21 states, it is unlikely that they were active in the 14 necessary to achieve theft by the smallest number of stolen votes.) Assuming less miraculous precision, one would have to assume that ACORN stole anywhere on the order of four or five million votes.

In the 2008 election season, however, ACORN collected a total of 1.3 million registration forms–and rejected 400,000 as incomplete or fraudulent. Which means that only 900,000 people were registered by ACORN for the election, only half of those being new voters (the other half were address changes).

Which means that even if you assume that every single last registration that ACORN filed represented a stolen vote, then you’re still 35,000 votes short of stealing the election, even with the criminal-mastermind precision.

Which is where we get the “unbelievable morons” part. But you don’t have to crunch the numbers like I did to figure that out–fact is, the idea that ACORN stole the 2008 elections is ludicrous on its very face. More than that, it is literally mathematically impossible.

What’s even more amazing to me than the fact that 52% of Republicans believing that ACORN stole the elections is that 9% of Democrats also believe that, which makes them even more unbelievable morons, albeit in a non-partisan fashion. In addition to 52% of Republicans believing that ACORN stole the election, 21% of Republicans weren’t sure–meaning that 73% of Republicans thought that it might have been possible, and only 23% reject the idea outright.

ACORN has simply become the scapegoat mechanism which is now being blamed for any loss by Republicans; unsurprisingly, Conservative candidate from NY-23, Doug Hoffman, is claiming that the only reason he lost is because ACORN “schem[ed] behind closed doors, twist[ed] arms and st[ole the] election.” He also blamed unions, but ACORN was the alleged mastermind.

Expect more of this: if a right-winger loses, that must mean that ACORN stole the vote. No matter that there is zero documented evidence, no matter that it is mathematically impossible. If a Republican lost, it simply couldn’t have happened that way honestly, so the only possible explanation is that liberals stole it, and ACORN is the scapegoat of the hour.

And their party faithful are just the unbelievable morons to buy it.

It’s amazing that those on the right, who claim to have a deep love for America and its Constitution, so readily and even eagerly abandon both at the drop of a hat. A Democrat elected president? Let’s throw a four- to eight-year shit-fit and threaten to secede. Terrorism threatens? Shred the Bill of Rights and welcome a police state.

Now that the Obama administration has brought the 9/11 suspects to trial, right-wingers are gnashing their teeth, overwrought that the Constitutional criminal justice system won’t work. They are frantic about the possibility that the bad guys might all get set free on a technicality, and are fully opposed to open trials in the court system. I suppose it stems from their self-fulfilling sense of government fallibility, or their long-held belief that a pansy liberal justice system is incapable of actually punishing criminals (bitterly ironic in a country with a sky-high incarceration rate).

It’s hard to figure out if conservatives are either just simply fundamentally unpatriotic, or are sniveling cowards with an infantile mentality, or both.

The truth is, the defendants will all be found guilty, and punished to the greatest extent of the law. I don’t know if the conservatives have noticed or not, but in high-profile cases like this, defendants rarely, if ever, get off on technicalities. (And no, O.J. wasn’t at this level, despite the media attention.)

Though I can see why the right-wingers might think this–look at Oliver North and Scooter Libby. Conservative criminals have been getting off scot-free on technicalities and government corruption for years. That might be why they have so little faith that the system will convict people.

But the 9/11 criminals don’t have a deal with Congress for immunity, or a sympathetic president in their corner to grant them clemency. And there is no possibility that a judge will be weak on this one, or that a jury will nullify anything.

If there is anything that could get them off, it’s the fact that the Bush administration, and conservatives in general, while in control, did their damnedest to break every law, betray every principle, and violate every ethic they could find when it came to national security. And that, I think, is at the heart of it all: they expect that their crimes will come back to haunt them, that what they know they did wrong will work against the interests of the American people, and they want to make sure that if that happens, the liberals are blamed for it.

But frankly, I don’t think that even that will get the criminals off this time. No judge will dare let them free, no jury will dare find them innocent. When it comes to something like this, justice has a firm thumb on the scales.

Sarah Palin, and not a comedic parody:

Noting that there had been a lot of “change” of late, Palin recalled a recent conversation with a friend about how the phrase “In God We Trust” had been moved to the edge of the new coins.

“Who calls a shot like that?” she demanded. “Who makes a decision like that?”

She added: “It’s a disturbing trend.”

As it happens, the Republican Congress and George W. Bush were the ones who made that call. But that’s not the really disturbing thing here. Let me again pull out my soapbox.

There is a very specific and intentional movement to allow a merging of church and state in this country, and the “In God We Trust” motto is a big part of it. The motto is a clear violation of the Establishment Clause of the Bill of Rights, and should never have been approved. The same goes for what is now a de facto religious test that politicians must add “So help me god” at the end of their oaths of office (if they did not, they would be accused of heresy–today called “being anti-Christian”–and would never win another election), despite this being 100% unconstitutional. Nor is the injected “under god” phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance constitutional, where government employees force children to mindlessly repeat it day after day.

None of these were part of the original plan for the United States, and despite right-wing claims, none would have been approved by founders like Jefferson. They chose they motto “E Pluribus Unum,” for example; that was replaced as the national motto in 1956; it was on coins since 1795, discarded when Congress assumed the power to appoint mottoes on coinage, and “In God We Trust” was imposed in 1873. The religious reference in the Pledge was tacked on in 1954.

At a few times in our history, pro-religious sentiment became so high that any protest on the grounds of constitutionality were simply not heard, and unconstitutional acts were made more or less official. And if anyone dared to challenge these illegal incursions, the two-pronged response was the same: first, the claim was made that the objections were an attack on religion, and second, the claims were belittled as frivolous, because these were not serious things. Just a few words in the pledge! Just a voluntary tack-on to an oath! What harm do a few words on a coin do?

The answer is: a lot. It is the proverbial camel’s nose.

Think I’m being paranoid? Then let me share with you words from a ruling written by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

Presidents continue to conclude the Presidential oath with the words “so help me God.” … Our coinage bears the motto “IN GOD WE TRUST.” And our Pledge of Allegiance contains the acknowledgment that we are a Nation “under God.” …

With all of this reality (and much more) staring it in the face, how can the Court possibly assert that “ ‘the First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between . . . religion and nonreligion,’” … and that “[m]anifesting a purpose to favor . . . adherence to religion generally,” … is unconstitutional?

Scalia wanted to make government endorsement of religion–of a specific denomination of religion, no less–constitutional. That was the minority opinion in McCreary v. ACLU (PDF)–but is was a minority by one vote only. Had Sandra Day O’Connor not voted the way she did, that opinion would now have force of law. Had that case been heard after she was replaced by Alito, it almost certainly would be the force of law. And it could become the force of law very soon.

These incursions are NOT minor, are NOT harmless; as is clearly shown in the above dissent that came so close to being law, it is precisely these incursions which would allow corrupt Supreme Court justices like Scalia to use them as a legal wedge and inject their own religious views into the highest laws of the land.

Which is precisely why Sarah Palin is so rattled by the fact that the words were moved from the main body of the coin to the edge–she, and others like her, fear that these illegal incursions, which could make America into a theocracy, are being marginalized–literally, in this case–and see any attempt to modify them in any way as a threat.

Tell me, if “In God We Trust” on the coin is not serious, then why do people like Palin rant and rage and rend their hair when it’s even moved from one part of coin to the other?

There should be a movement to remove that motto from all coinage and currency; to forbid the words “under god” from oaths as they constitute a de facto religious test; and to restore the Pledge of Allegiance to what it was before the Red Scare made it possible to inject it daily into the minds of millions of schoolchildren. (A dozen kids singing about Obama twice is indoctrination, but tens of millions chanting “under god” every day for decades isn’t? Please.)

And before we forget, this is not some atheistic coup. It is about the restoration of the founding principal: if religion and state become too close, then all religions, all beliefs, and all people fall under peril.