CA-45: Bono Mack Being Hunted

Mary Bono Mack has in her career adeptly threaded the needle, voting mostly with the right but surprising on just enough bills every year to appear moderate to her district, which went for Barack Obama in 2008 and has a PVI of only R+3. But her yes vote on the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill has incensed conservatives, so much so that they are waging jihad against not only Bono Mack but her Congressman husband, who by the way voted against Waxman-Markey.

So it was probably a bit of a shock to her when she saw the headline above that I captured in a screen shot from the Republican Party blog, Red State: Mary Bono Mack Should Be Burned In Effigy And Voted out Of Office. It was written by Georgia Republican Party operative Erick Erickson and something tells me Erickson isn't about to endorse Palm Springs Mayor Steve Pougnet, who's not just gay, but married (to another man) and happily raising their two children! Too far a stretch for Republicans who seem to always be involved with "opposite marriages," or whatever they call the degrading situations traditional marriage sanctity defenders like Mark Sanford, David Diapers Vitter, Larry Craig and John Ensign are in.

Erickson and the fringe loons on the furthest reaches of the non-criminal right are so upset with Bono Mack that they are threatening to not just defeat her but to go after the right-wing extremist husband to boot! He demands that she vote against health care reform and against the energy bill when it comes back from the Senate-- where it will probably be watered down and look more acceptable to mainstream conservatives!!!-- or face the consequences.

"Otherwise, we beat her and her husband at the polls.

Yes, you heard me. We can get at Mary Bono Mack in two ways-- her district and that of her husband. He should feel the heat just as much as her."

Now, Erickson is a silly person. And his frothing at the mouth is unlikely to result in any change in CA-45. However, I wonder if they can entice some far-right activist to run in the primary. Gary Jeandron, who lost to Manuel Perez convincingly in 2008, is supposedly preparing for a rematch. But AD-80 is far less cordial to Republicans than CA-45 is. And maybe enough foot-stomping tea partiers can persuade him - or some other teabagger - to challenge Bono Mack in the primary. As one of only 8 Republicans to vote for the Waxman-Markey bill (and one of them, John McHugh, is about to become Barack Obama's Secretary of the Army), the wingnuts don't have many targets. Bono Mack may have poked her head up on the wrong bill.

This could be a good time to check out Steve Pougnet.

Cheney '12

Maybe he's just happy to be out of the undisclosed location, but Dick Cheney has appeared on the teevee more often than Ryan Seacrest lately. There was Face the Nation. And then another Fox News go-round. And an upcoming AEI speech for the C-SPAN set. While most of the dialogue has been about torture - his favorite subject - Cheney isn't afraid to dive into a diverse issue set, like denying workers the right to organize.

I have to concur with Steve Benen: it certainly looks like Cheney's trying real hard to raise his profile and keep his name in the news.

I'm not trying to start any rumors, but Cheney is certainly acting like a guy who plans to run for something. He's doing lots of media interviews, cultivating his connection with Limbaugh, attacking the president, lying about Democratic ideas, and giving at least one speech at a major conservative think tank about his vision for the future.

Put it this way -- if one of the Republicans with his/her eyes on 2012 maintained this kind of high-profile schedule in Washington, wouldn't the assumption be that he or she was laying the groundwork for a campaign?

Well, either a campaign or a lawsuit, although this could be considered jury tampering in the latter case.

If Cheney did up and announce for President, he would have a cheering section from Erick the Red and his merry band of calcium deficient all-stars:

Put me in the Cheney-Limbaugh camp. Heck, put me in the Cheney-Limbaugh 2012 camp.

If not a Presidential ticket, at least they should be the listened voices on the right — the ones whose advice guides the direction our candidates go.

Yes, the left may laugh at that and encourage it, but they would be wise to think about it.

OK, I'll think about i- no, I'm just going to laugh and encourage it.



It's also fun to watch Erick the Red pining for a terrorist attack that kills thousands of his fellow citizens:

This is an important point to keep repeating because it has the virtue of being true and of lingering in the public conscience. If we are attacked again, and with Obama in charge it is more than likely that we will, the public needs to remember what it was like to have grown ups running the show.

I know that's what I was thinking on 9/11 - "at least we have grown-ups."

Let's close this out with a walk down memory lane of Fourthbranch's Greatest Hits:

The Beavis And Butt-head Party Strikes Again

Today is the second annual Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to raise awareness on the issue of climate change. At 8:30pm local time, major businesses, local and national points of interest, and individual homes will dim their lights for one hour. Already today, sites ranging from the Sydney Opera House to the Egyptian Pyramids have lowered their lights in recognition, and 4,000 cities in 88 countries will participate in the event. Sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund, Earth Hour will provide, in the words of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, "a way for the citizens of the world to send a clear message: They want action on climate change."

It will also provide a new way for conservatives to show what hardcore rebels they are.

Tomorrow is something called Earth Hour. Take the official RedState Pledge:

I do solemnly swear that I will honor Earth Hour by turning on every light in my residence at 8:30 p.m. on March 28, 2009, for one hour. God said, "Let there be light." Who are we to argue?

Yeah, they want you to turn your lights off, but everybody knows darkness leads to crime.

It's amusing to see Erick Erickson so terrified of possible boogeymen infiltrating his house from 8:30 to 9:30, as well as the wingnut tendency to go after all the most important targets, like symbolic light-dimming actions. But this has now become a cliche. My local wingnut radio hosts were making the same "jokes" last night: "I'll turn on every light in the house!... I'll keep my car running for an hour!" And of course, Glenn Beck devoted an entire show to running his car in the parking lot a couple months ago.

Conservatives are allowed to show their ignorance of sound science any way they want, but they ought to at least liven it up a bit. The "I'm going to turn on every light in the house" bit is getting about as hackneyed as jokes about airline food and Gilligan's Island ("all those clothes for a three-hour tour?"). Let me introduce you to a Republican with innovative and novel thinking about climate change. It's embarrassingly wrong, but at least it's new:

We've repeatedly documented Rep. John Shimkus' ridiculous positions on climate change. During a House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing earlier this week, the downstate Republican was in rare form. Speaking to British global warming denier Lord Christopher Monckton, Shimkus made a novel argument that because plants need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, limiting our man-made carbon dioxide emissions would actually kill the world's plants. Watch the exchange here:

SHIMKUS: It's plant food ... So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere? ... So all our good intentions could be for naught. In fact, we could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying.

I've always wanted to use this line on Steve's site, and now it's appropriate: Shimkus did not appear to be kidding.

Shimkus basically maps out a world where, prior to the Industrial Revolution, no plant life existed, because we hadn't yet set into motion mass production of their "food." In this scenario, plants actually sprung to life shortly after the invention of the Watt steam engine in the 18th century.

Now THAT'S a new one! Relentlessly stupid, sure, but new.

Grab The Popcorn

I haven't paid much attention to the RNC Chair's race because I don't think it matters at all who gets to play second-fiddle to Rush Limbaugh for the next four years. But it is kind of amusing that there's no consensus at all. After three ballots there is no favorite, and the guy who led after the first ballot, current Chair Mike Duncan, just dropped out of the race. This is supposed to be a "win" for those who want "change" in the party, but change to what? The guy who passed out the "Barack the Magic Negro" CD dropped out earlier. Katon Dawson, the South Carolina party chair who belonged to a whites-only country club, is still in it. Then there's Ken Blackwell, who stole Ohio for Bush in 2004 and lost by the biggest landslide imaginable in 2006; Michael Steele, who got pummeled in his race for Senate in Maryland and who claimed that protesters threw Oreos at him without any evidence; and the state party chair in Michigan, the state with the highest unemployment rate in the country and growing fully hostile to Republicans.

You're telling me this race matters?

Quite awesomely, RedState is down right now.

...Hilarious. Duncan dropped out so that the segregationist Katon Dawson could stop the black guy from winning. Just call them the Dred Scott Party.

...and they couldn't stop Michael Steele. I expect him to be on Meet The Press every Sunday until 2012. Judd Legum has some facts about the new Chairman.

Heroes Of The Stupid

The difference between Horatian and Juvenalian satire is that Horatian satire simply presents folly and holds it up for ridicule, while Juvenalian satire attacks that folly directly.

I'm a little tired today, so I'm going to go all Horatian on war correspondent Joe the Plumber:

"I'll be honest with you. I don't think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what's happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I-I think it's asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you'd go to the theater and you'd see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for'em. Now everyone's got an opinion and wants to downer--and down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers. I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you're gonna sit there and say, 'Well look at this atrocity,' well you don't know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it."

And RedState head cheerleader Erick Erickson:

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. Those rough men might hesitate knowing their commander-in-chief just might not stand behind them if their actions become known. Their hesitation will lead to American deaths.

And potential RNC Chair Ken Blackwell:

Gay-rights activist and talk-radio host Michelangelo Signorile has posted an amusing piece of audio of Ken Blackwell during the Republican National Convention, telling Signorile that homosexuality is a compulsion that can be "restrained," and he's quite confident he would be able to suppress it within himself -- though of course he's never had any sort of problem like that.

"I've never had to make the choice because I've never had the urge to be other than a heterosexual," Blackwell said, "but if in fact I had the urge to be something else I could have in fact suppressed that urge."

I mean, sure, you can go to all the trouble of making the jokes, and satirizing them to within an inch of their lives, but don't they do a much better job themselves?

Behold the Insane

If you start out on just the level of conservatives out in the world you get some pretty insane people. Then when you move into the subset of conservative politicians and activists, the insanity stretches even further. Once you hit conservative BLOGGERS, you're in some other kind of dimension. Look at this thing from the folks at RedState.



I guess this is supposed to be for their online field organization, but to me it looks like some sort of crest for LARPing, which as Bradrocket says is something of an unfair characterization of LARPers. Either way, there is a way for these folks to get uniforms and deadly weapons and have all sorts of fun running around and destroying the enemy. It's called the military. Somebody get them directions to the nearest recruiting office.

John Cole gets in on this fun as well.

The key to electoral success for the GOP is not an elite strike force of blithering idiots spamming everyone’s email with bullshit about Obama’s birth certificate. The nation doesn’t need a trillion twitters about William Ayers, they need a Republican party that isn’t batshit insane. Spending all this time pretending the only problem is insufficient text message spam is going to get you nowhere, because the reason we elected a bunch of Democrats the last couple of years is because the Republicans and their ideas suck.

A few days earlier, this new RedState front-pager made a complete fool of himself with the lugubriously over-the-top rhetoric:

RedState is not the corner malt-shop, some nickel and dime agitprop echo chamber. RedState is the biggest mover and shaker in the right-blog universe, and the Directors and Contributors here are one high-profile, professional bunch of political thinkers and operators. It is no exaggeration to say that things said and done on RedState affect votes and debates in Congress.

It is no exaggeration to say RedState controls the agenda of this and many other small countries, and one word typed out on their powdered-sugar-stained laptops can cause the mountains to fall and rain to actually reverse course and go back up into the heavens. Do not taunt RedState. Avert your eyes, people. Avert.

Meet Your New Zombie Lie

Next thing we'll be hearing that Sarah Palin fought off a polar bear while delivering her remarks last night:

Sarah Palin delivered a powerful speech last night, but she did not "wing it."

That is what Erick Erickson, citing sources close to McCain, has written on his blog, RedState.

Erickson writes that "the teleprompter continued scrolling during applause breaks. As a result, half way through the speech, the speech had scrolled significantly from where Governor Palin was in the speech."

This claim has been picked up on Drudge and could quickly enter into the insta-mythmaking about a speech that need not be embroidered.

Perhaps there were moments where it scrolled slightly past her exact point in the speech. But I was sitting in the press section next to the stage, within easy eyeshot of the teleprompter. I frequently looked up at the machine, and there was no serious malfunction. A top convention-planner confirms this morning that there were no major problems.

It's mythology now, of course, to be repeated endlessly. Despite there being photographic evidence, on every shot over her shoulder, that the TelePrompTer matched her words.

The Calvert Chronicles

This is pretty hilarious. Ken Calvert got an earmark inserted last year that would put a transit center within walking distance of seven properties that he owned. This would obviously boost the value of those properties. But the House Ethics Committee said he did nothing wrong because:

"any benefit to Calvert would be shared by other similarly situated landowners."

So because other people would get as rich as him, it's not unethical for him to write his own laws that get him rich.

Brilliant.

OK, so let's just say that I'm a property-rich lawmaker who wants to push the boundaries and play the earmark game for all its worth. What would it take for me to get into trouble? Just how self-serving of a project would actually garner the House ethics committee's disapproval?

“You’d have to be remodeling your kitchen,” Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense told me.

Meanwhile, in the continuing Calvert/Red State saga, they're still going after him, and they think they've found proof that he lied to the GOP caucus by saying that he was not being investigated. The Hill has an update. Unfortunately, the Steering Committee isn't taking their phone calls:

According to House staffers, Boehner's staff is out putting pressure on Steering Committee members to not say how they voted on Calvert.

Two different people tell me the deck is so stacked in Boehner's favor that even if a majority of the Steering Committee voted against Calvert, he could still get on Appropriations. But, that would look terrible to have a majority vote against Calvert and him still getting on Appropriations.

So, Boehner is pressuring the Steering Committee to totally ignore us.

Pretty funny that these guys are solely focusing on Calvert when even his replacement is under investigation for corruption. If corruption was a disqualifying event for Republicans, we'd have a 9/10 majority in the House.