A Confederacy of Oddballs

Teabagger and Christian Reconstructionist Sharron Angle pulled a trifecta yesterday. She ran an ad accusing Harry Reid of voting to give Viagra to sex predators. Even Mike Huckabee came to Reid's defense. She then topped this by telling people in Nevada that whole regions of American are now under Sharia law. Her example was Dearborn , Michigan where there is a large Muslim community, notably Iraqi refugees. And an interview with her pastor played the Mormon card on Harry Reid, saying he was a member of a multimillion dollar cult and owed his allegiance to Salt Lake City. Mitt Romney take note. This all led to Bill Raggio, the Republican leader of the Nevada's Senate, to endorse Harry Reid because of Sharron Angle's bizarre views on politics.

Blame it on the Black Guy. Republicans are trying to whitewash their own record on the economy by blaming the current situation on Barack Obama. The racist overtones to this debate are hard to miss. Now, Republicans are crafting an excuse if they don't sweep the elections--it's Michael Steele's fault. A majority of RNC members have openly come out and said that the DNC is better run and that Michael Steele is a disaster at a time the party can make enormous advances. This runs with the early accusations of the mortgage meltdown by conservatives on black homeowners. I'm proud and I'm White and I'm not responsible for anything. That's cool! I could get into that for myself. I'll draw up a list of scapegoats later this morning.

Should the American Chamber of Commerce register as a foreign agent? The backlash on the Chambers' gazillion dollar ad campaign against Republicans continues. The one item that actually makes the foreign agent registration appear a normal procedure is the revelation that the Chamber sends Issue alerts to their foreign members so that they can use the Chamber to lobby for or against our bill in Congress. As we've seen from the preliminary revelations, state oil companies and banks are their members and now it's been revealed that companies owned by the Chinese government are also members of their Chinese branch. If you're directly trying to affect legislation, that's lobbying, which the Chamber does, but if you're doing it for a forign country you have to be registered as such. This issue is not going to go away anytime soon.

Does anyone remember during the Cold War the spy scandal around the American Russian Trade Organization? It was used first as an NKVD front and then later by the KGB.

If you get bashed one day and your public answers don't satisfy the hunger for news, maybe it's best to lay low. But today, the Chamber has announced it will sue the Obama Administration for the regulations it is implementing through the health reform and wall street reform bills. While they are doing that, the Chamber will be hosting several state banks from the Gulf at a meeting here in Washington.

The Democrats have picked the foreign money story up and just run with it. It has morphed into Karl Rove travelling to Libya and Saudi Arabia to pick up cash for the election. Who knows whether it's true or not.

President Obama raised the larger issue of foreign money at the Bowie State rally yesterday, warning that our whole democracy was at risk and that Republicans and independents should be concerned. He told the audience that this would make it harder for representatives to fight special interests when the money put against them is infinite. "It will change the country we live in forever". He's right and that's the point of the whole exercise.

One member of the Chamber was not pleased by all this publicity--one Rupert Murdoch of the partly Saudi-owned, Dubai-based News Corps. His answer to questions was "I thought the $1 million was anonymous." Then Rupert slipped further when he said his contribution to the Republican Governors Association was because of his friendship with John Kasich, who is running for Governor in Ohio. This made Governor Strickland's day as he pounded Kasich over the head with both the Chamber and Murdoch contribution.

The Chamber attack ads ,which are accelerating, deflect their real reason for some of their attacks. For instance, former Admiral Joe Sestak, who is running against Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, is being slammed by the Chamber for voting for TARP and the stimulus package. That's very strange since the Chamber lobbied both for the bank bailout and the stimulus package. But some of the Chambers foreign and American oil companies might not like the Sestak's cap-and-trade legislation. Otherwise, their ad blitz doesn't make any sense.

If you see Democrats voting for massive cuts in Medicare, that's Karl Rove's work. Maybe this is paid with by Libyan money. Who knows? But that's the reason the donors must be identified.

It's bad enough that special interests by Congress but with the next Congress it'll be tough to know whether foreign governments bought it.

At least some Republicans know how to turn a good dime and take a fall. Carl Palladino, who is going down to certain defeat to Andrew Cuomo in New York, has played his zaniness just right. All of his campaign finances are paid to companies he owns or to people who rent space from him. So far, he's been able to launder some $2.2 million from his campaign to his own businesses. That's the way to do it. Down home corruption, not this jetset stuff. Carl Palladino, Man of the People.

The Republican candidate for Georgia Governor is doing the same thing, but he's over-billing his campaign for the planes he rents from himself. It was too conspicuous that the local papers called him out on this.

The Chicago Tribune had enough with Rep. Mark Kirk. They endorsed the Democrat in the Senate race even though they had endorsed Mark Kirk every other time he ran for office. They complained that they didn't know who he was anymore or what he believed.

Christine McDonnell, who is a constitutional scholar because of her short course at the Claremont Institute, not college, claims that "from her deep study" the health reform bill is unconstitutional. And if Congress repeals it and Obama vetoes it,Hillary Clinton will run because she has seen many Hillary for President ads.

Well, her deep study apparently didn't impress the Detroit district judge who ruled that the individual mandates in the healthreform bill were constitutional. This was a big preliminary win for the Obama Administration.

Maybe the Cooch will back off. Our distinguished Attorney-General is suing on healthcare reform but he is too pre-occupied right now with suing the University of Virgina and attacking climate scientist Michael Mann. You have to ask yourself what is behind everyone doubing down on their positions, even when they have already been shown to be wrong. The will to ignorance seems to be growing.

"Macaca man", George Allen met with Senator Cornyn about running against Jim Webb for Virginia Senator in 2012. Talk about a snoozefest.

The teabaggers really, honestly are going to go after Olympia Snowe in Maine when she seeks re-election in 2012. I hope she has the courage if she loses to run as an independent.

Meanwhile in Connecticut, Joe Lieberman is in the low 20s in approval and would lose to the Democrat in 2012. If the Senate is very close, look for Jolting Joe to switch sides. It's unlikely for endangered Democrat Ben Nelson because his state has a deep Republican bench.

The President vetoed an innocuous sounding bill, which virtually slipped through the deadloocked Snate without debate. It was a bill that would force other states to recognized local notarization from another jurisdiction. Clever. This was casually mentioned to two Senator by notaries who were in town for a professional organization. And the Senators complied. Problem--it would have led to more mortgage foreclosures and helped the banks who are only holding pieces of mortgages that were already slices and diced and sold as derivatives. The old American way is for a lender to present the whole mortgage and declared its due. But in the case of millions of homes this is no longer possible. So the banks need to scramble around to justify foreclosures when they no longer have the paper.

Tea-Bagging--Salad Tossing Next?

Fox News proudly sponsored a nation-wide series of events that had the unfortunate name of tea-bagging, which drew slightly over 260,000 people on a workday. Groups of white Americans took to the streets to protest a bewildering array of things from the TARP program begun under Bush, to corporate bailouts started under Bush and to the AIG bailout started under Bush, to socialism, the stimulus package and the alleged or projected laws against guns to be enacted in some distant future by President Obama. It was clear from the signage that the events were almost exclusively aimed at President Obama, who passed the largest middle-class tax cut in history. Depending on the region, the racist tone of the rallies varied but was underneath in all of them.

Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, who have been the mentors to the current Republican House Leadership, put their organization at the tea parties disposal with the view, in Newt's words, of running a trial balloon for the future. Impressed by President Obama's use of facebook, youtube and the internet, Republicans have been fantasizing about how to create such a counter-movement. In select areas, where the corporate money financed tea parties, I believe some of the events were in fact trial runs for future electoral contests.

For the most part, these events had a heavy dose of third party participants such as the libertarians, who claimed to have invented the idea, the Constitution Party and the American Independence Party. Some of the more vocal organizers claimed they were trying to create an organization like MoveOn.org or a Code Pink of the right. At the D.C. rally, one participant flew in from Oregon to"be in the belly of the beast" and meet celebrities like...drumroll--Alan Keyes.

But he shouldn't be mocked. There is a strange logic to the tea-bagging, which critics on the left ignore. You either know Alan Keyes for his insane pursuit of the Obama birth certificate issue or from Borat. The pictures of the events yesterday with women with hats covered with teabags and men dressed like colonial soldiers and signs portraying Obama as Hitler were in fact out of Borat. And I believe there is a reason for this.

If you have had a difficult time understanding why Glenn Beck is acting like he is, it's best to change the frame from which you view him. While the unintended consequences of his incendiary rhetroic recently has led to the killing of three policemen in Pittsburgh,he is nothing other than an instrument of the Fox Channel to cope in the Obama age when Fox no longer has access to the White House and no longer receives stories to plant.

Roger Ailes is a communications genius and Rupert Murdoch is as cold a cynic one can find. The name of the game is still money. The tea parties are a perfect example, not of astroturfing as the left is claiming about a top down movement, but rather television programming. Murdoch could care less if his minions incite armed violence. Clearly, having Sean Hannity post a poll about how do you want to overthrow the government is meant to suck the audience into the Fox orbit. The winning option was armed struggle, something I wish on no one either as the combatant or victim.

The events themselves are meant to be laughed at--they are entertainment and based on the principle of game shows or the old Jerry Springer Show that Americans love to embarrass themselves and be made fun of. The size of the tea parties suggest that precise thing--this was in fact Fox using their base audience as guinea pigs and turning the country into the Gong Show. The lack of irony in all this was intentional in the Murdoch world--the deliberate use of jargon for a gay sexual practice, the hosting of an event at the Alamo where Americans were slaughtered, and the list goes on. Conservatives need to feel victimized and embattled. What better way to create group cohesion and to ensure a loyal audience than to have them subject to ridicule? Even Michael Steele of the RNC fell for the bait--claiming "We outdid the MSNBCs of the world". In fact, all of us were to laugh at the participants so the "liberal" media could be criticized for its arrogant views of the average citizen. What better way to ensure group bonding.

The psychology of this from a marketing view is rather sound but its utility for political activism very negligible. Fox News triumphed with tea parties, filling hours of program time with little overhead and building their base audience. But in fact conservatives or Republicans wounded their own cause by appearing in the Murdoch production of Borat.

Consider how Machivellian this all is--the next event for the tea-baggers is July 4th, a date rarely, ever used for political demonstrations because people are out on a holiday and look at fireworks. But Fox is sadistic enough to get its audience to appear for the day on television exhibiting lunatic behavior.

For the Newt Ginrgich and Dick Armey's of the world, there has to be a reality check. According to recent, reliable polling, the Republican Party stands at historic low levels of 25% identification. The Democrats are 40% and Independents are at 35%. Republicans have lost the following constituencies: the youth (which Reagan once won 60% of ); Hispanics; Blacks; and professionals or the suburban vote. The Republican party has no representation in Congress from New England, a dwindling amount from the Mid-Atlantic states, and is rapidly becoming a Southern party.

A recent Gallup poll has for the first time in my lifetime recorded that basically Americans feel the tax code is fair. With Obama's tax-cuts going into effect, this might rise, depending on whether Fox spin is neutralized. So why will another platform of tax cuts be successful?

In another entry, I'll explore whether there is not another agenda to the recent Republican obstructionism. But in the meantime, Fox enjoys its ratings with the Reality Show: Americans Go Bonkers.