Gingrich eats his words so he can spit
them out with a new preposition this fall.

I’ve always felt that politicians embody the most vile manifestation of celebrity, with newscasters hot on their tails. We like “real” celebrities – movie stars and music artists – because they’re pretty, or funny, or put a song in our heart. Newscasting has always seemed to draw people who want to be admired in this way, but fall a little short of silver screen level “star quality” or “It Factor”. But politicians? Dear God. They’re often not very attractive, they talk about things you don’t understand, care about, and exactly 50% of the time don’t agree with, and then they want you to LIKE them so much you actually have to trudge out and SAY SO in a voting booth. Since they’re generally so unattractive and disagreeable, that means that in order to secure this love and admiration they so desperately need, they have to lie and cheat almost constantly. Which is why I was so excited about the idea of the Newt Swingrich 2012 campaign. As such a despicable spouse cheat and hypocrite, he’s well on the way to winning our 2011 Best Politician award. Let’s not forget that Newt was not only cheating on his wife while engineering the Clinton/Lewisnky impeachment circus, he also was one of the key architects of the Contract with America. An interestingly titled document, since the only Americans that actually signed it were all GOP politicians. A document that was also interesting in that it is often credited with giving the GOP a congressional majority for the first time in decades, when this was in fact already well on the way to happening. It was sort of like Reagan shouting “tear down that wall” at a time when this was almost certain to happen anyway. Good timing and good politics, but not really “good leadership” in the conventional sense. In any case, I have much more to be excited about this week than last week regarding the 2012 presidential race. If historians record this era in America with any accuracy, it will be remembered as the era that turned politics into the DC version of “American Idol”, and Frank Luntz – GOP pollster, strategist, and author of the brilliant Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear – will be remembered as its kingmaker. And he’s at it again. You may have read or heard about his  survey work with 26 Iowa Republicans last month. The results were interesting, and could easily be spun in two distinctly different ways. While on the surface, Gingrich seemed to be the surprise winner, the inclusion of undeclared candidates like Michele Bachmann shifted the feel of things quite a bit. Suggesting that Bachmann may in fact be capable of more than just the Tancredo Effect. Just the other day CNN reported that she’ll be forming an exploratory committee by June. This would create a pretty volatile field, with the strongest contenders so far being Huckabee, Gingrich, Palin, and Bachmann. But can a teabagger candidate like Palin or Bachmann do anything but divide the party? Especially if there are two of them? And if they get enough media spin (as Andrew Breitbart says, Sarah’s really too good for the White House and should take her throne as the next Oprah) can the old-school white guys learn to work with them? Because they’d probably have to sign on to the teabagger remix of the Contract with America called the Contract FROM America . And then we have Trump to consider, and hell who knows, maybe even Hillary. As outlandish as THAT sounds, it was James Carville himself who not too long ago said “If Hillary gave [Obama] one of her balls, they’d both have two”. He also hilariously called Romney the “Designated White Guy”. Wherever this heads, you can trust we’ll have more fun than a tornado in a trailer park with the 2012 campaign trail. The Swingrich campaign is just the beginning. We’ll probably have to fine-tune our Donner Party platform, and give the Palyn/Quail ticket a re-think.

If you really DO prefer astroturf to grass roots,
you can always buy some on Amazon

If you’re an American who’s angry about joblessness, the cost of living, government spending, and your mortgage payment, I want to ask you to do me a favor. Put down that teacup and that Obama sign with the Hitler moustache drawn on it for a second, and think. When you go to the polls this fall, don’t think about elephants and donkeys, think about power, money, greed, and media. Now that a corporation has the same rights as a person, and a handful of wealthy people who aren’t you control corporations, before you give that person that vote, ask yourself: am I just voting against something again? Because if you are, there’s a pretty good chance you’re being sucker-punched. When less than a hundred people in America make over fifty million dollars, and money wins elections, who do you really think you’re voting for? Ignore for a moment the fact that NPR is a frightening haven for aging hippy liberal academics, and take a look at this interactive graphic that they’ve created that shows the cash flow between allegedly “grass roots” political action groups and GOP or Democrat sources. If you read or listen to the whole article, you’ll find it’s not anti-conservative, it’s anti-public deception. In fact, it compliments conservatives for refining the dirty methods of Democrats. Don’t think partisan when you vote this time, think about whether or not you want a guy that George Bush referred to as Turd Blossom shaping how you think. Because there’s a good chance he is.

Here’s O’Donnell proving she’s ready to devour her opponents if necessary.

Remember when you were in grade school and you would insult somebody, and say “no takebacks“, and they’d say “I’m in a no ‘no takebacks’ zone, so your ‘no takeback’ doesn’t count!” and it would perpetually escalate into an absurdly recursive game of making a rule about a rule that didn’t exist? Well, apparently some people have trouble outgrowing this behaviour. Back in March I saw this piece about a flurry of arrests in Indiana involving Sovereign Citizens, who – among other things – claimed they weren’t US citizens, but rather diplomats living in embassies, and would produce documents they’d made themselves to back it all up. I kind of wrote them off as typical rural Midwestern loonies; there are areas in just about every one of the United States where you might wanna turn down the Cat Stevens as you drive through if you don’t wanna get shot. But it turns out these people are for real, and as ginormously high-larious as their proclamations are, their deranged and misinformed logic has already caused one of the greatest tragedies on American soil, the Oklahoma City bombing. Yes, Terry Nichols, friend and accomplice of Oklahoma City Federal Building bomber Timothy McVeigh was one of them. More recently, you may have read about how the group Guardians of the Free Republics sent letters to 30 state governors demanding their resignations. Well, as my grandpa would say, “their elevators don’t seem to go to the top floor” either. Their site has a deadline of March 31 of this year for the bizarre actions they ramble about on this page. And all the pages of the site have a weird seal at the bottom that says “Private web site under non-corporate venue. This seal conveys immunity from public scrutiny, discretion, regulation or trespass. Trespassers beware. Co-claimant fee applies to impairment.” I’m sure if you stop by their embassy they’ll be glad to explain what that means. If you can find the bomb shelter it’s located in.

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember a time in America when if someone said they were having a tea party, they were probably under ten years old, and pretending. I guess things haven’t changed that much; these days if someone’s talking about having a tea party, they probably have the intelligence of someone under ten years old, and I suppose being delusional is kind of like pretending. It’s pretty amazing that we get so riled up about taxes at all, we pay significantly lower taxes than most of the world. It’s arguably because of our revolutionary roots, but I think we’ve lost sight of an important detail: American revolutionaries weren’t just protesting taxes, they were protesting taxation without representation. If a contemporary tea partier had a better grasp of that fact, they would have been just as angry at the last (or last several) administrations as they are at the current one. The thing is, the vast majority of these angry people are really just that – angry people. Today’s New York Times Polling the Tea Party survey highlights that fact in an odd way; the majority of tea party supporters are Republican, white, male, married and older than 45. Sounds like a recipe for being angry to me, especially when a black man with an apparent sense of humanity is in office. Respondents also openly expressed that they believe the president is a Muslim socialist. Apparently they’ve never met Rahm Emmanuel or other rabidly capitalist key White House staffers. And in my opinion, the fact that the poll also suggests that many tea partiers are college-educated highlights nothing more than a failure of the educational system. Heh. Had to get that one in. So in honor of you having paid your taxes once again this year, we thought we’d help you figure out where your money went. There are lots of clever graphs and charts out there like Death and Taxes (2.4MB jpg!), which is a little too pictographic for my tastes, but is probably cool to have on the wall to ponder over time. There are also annoyingly distorted charts like this one from Turbotax that not only makes it look like your company’s CEO pays all the taxes, but uses the color pink for the defense budget. Personally, I found this info from the National Priorities Project to be the most straightforward, and they also clarify who’s paying the taxes, not just where your income tax dollars go.

Given the recent court decision about corporations having the same rights as people, why don’t they pay the same percentage of taxes?

For some unsettling insights into who’s
really running things, check out the
DVD or the book “The Corporation”.

When it comes to politics, I sometimes get the feeling lately that I’m having one of those weird anxiety dreams where all the surroundings are basically familiar, but everything is just a little different somehow, and everyone else knows what’s going on except me. When you have a bunch of mostly working-class people calling themselves “teabaggers” marching against the party that historically has been on their side calling legislators niggers and faggots, and the best response that the liberal intellectuals of the country can muster is a contrarily-named coffee party, you have to pause and ask: what really is going on here? Well, after doing more reading and research on the topic than I’d really care to, I have a bit of an opinion forming. Almost every problem that I see in America right now can be traced to one basic source. Corporatocracy. Whether it’s the corruption that ensues from regulatory capture by way of DC’s revolving doors, or the travesty that is the current health care battle, or the incredibly unsustainable and unhealthy diet and food production process in America, it can all be directly traced to corporate interests. I’ve longed for a third party for some time now, and was too dense to realize it was right here all along. It’s big business. Whether it’s campaign donations, lobby dollars, or the direct infiltration of the government via the aforementioned “agency capture”, Global and national corporations are clearly more powerful than government today. And the sick part of the big joke is that the GOP will probably deflect attention from their profoundly corporatocratic beliefs by using the widely misunderstood term corporatist to call Democrats fascist corporatists (which will be partly true, in an odd way) and both groups of voters will buy into their side’s spin. The irony of course being that both parties will be telling some twisted version of the truth, while benefiting personally as people of wealth and power by keeping the citizenry split down the middle, pointlessly hoping for a democracy-based solution.

When I wrote about Why Democrats Always Lose & Why American Voters Need A Brand a while back, I was hoping for something a little more inspired than a choice loosely based on the title of a now painfully politically incorrect “tell all” book from the “swingin’ sixties”. Yes, the American liberal has once again built failure into their plans for setting the country back on track by letting the Republicans frame the debate. Oh, you have a tea party? Well, we have a…a…a COFFEE party. So there. The Coffee Party’s ragtag collection of unofficial spokespeople claim that they really have many of the same values as the teabaggers, but just think we need more reasonable discourse. They then go on to ramble about complex social issues in an intelligent and articulate fashion using all sorts of four-syllable words. Which is what Democrats do well. Analyze and calmly complain about Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck while sipping green tea and listening to NPR. I mean, c’mon liberals, they ALREADY CO-OPTED YOUR PREFERRED BEVERAGE, for cryin’ out loud. No, I don’t think the Coffee Party Movement is going to be any great threat to the Republican party. The movement is almost certainly going to get bogged down early on in some kind of infighting about cappuccino vs latte, skim vs lowfat vs soy vs whole milk debate. For now, I’m sticking to my existing proposal for the American voter’s branding:

Just when I was starting to find this whole teabagging thing entertaining, some mentally unstable individual in Texas has to go and wreck everything for me. You’ve almost certainly heard about Joe Stack burning his house down and crashing his plane into the IRS office in Austin, TX. But did you read his final note at embeddedart.com? If not, I’ve saved an original copy here. I saw it the morning before his hosting company decided to take it down for bandwidth reasons, so unlike the nutjobs posting in the forum the hosting company courteously provided visitors, I’m confident that there’s no FBI coverup conspiracy behind the takedown. I’m not surprised that both liberal and conservative sources are trying to link or unlink his action with the teabagger movement though; that’s just par for the course in politics these days. But to me it’s clear that he was just a fairly intelligent person who became consumed by his own pathological thinking. Reading Stack’s last words made me especially uncomfortable, partly because – like many of us – I can find myself agreeing with a lot of what he said. It revived unpleasant memories of reading Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s ramblings; there were portions of his lumbering manifesto that any modern person might agree with, but the overall tone and the author’s real-world actions rendered any points one might agree with irrelevant. For me, this was especially true in Kaczynski’s case; a personal friend of mine was one of the victims of his deranged actions. But back to the teabagger link. Is there a connection? How can a reasonably informed person deny that regardless of whether Stack considered himself a teabagger, he ABSOLUTELY had common ground with them? It’s ironic that a recent Fox News piece expressed concern with the headline Radical Anti-tax Groups Growing Threat, when it’s the opportunistic sentiment-baiting that Fox News and Bitchzilla from Wasilla (yeah, I can say that, there’s no editor around here) engage in that fuels the kind of rage that sparks violent protests and makes crazy men fly planes into buildings or bulldoze their houses. I imagine we’ll see a few more tragic events over the next few years as a result of people’s frustration with money & taxes. This Newsweek blog post points out that there have been 75 domestic incidents since the Oklahoma bombings, with 6 of them specifically targeting the IRS. I find it more than a little ironic that a government that was born of tax rebellion and presently sees terrorism as a threat from Islam is going through a two-decade struggle with domestic terrorists. If you’re not familiar with the recent history of violence and the American radical right, the Southern Poverty Law Center has compiled some interesting material. They have a quick list of specifically anti-IRS plots here, and a comprehensive and well-assembled summary of all the acts since Oklahoma City in a 3MB PDF here. If you were following the story around the time of the Oklahoma bombings, you’ll recall that at first everyone was sure it was arab terrorists, and were somewhat astounded when it turned out to be a freckle-faced midwestern former soldier. You can relax about the dark people now America. Your greatest enemy may be the dorky programmer at work who’s also in a band.

Don’t worry, there’s plenty of hate still to go around in America:

Click for larger image From the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Terror From The Right (2.9MB PDF)

To me, voting these days seems more like a choice of execution method than a treasured civil right. Would I rather be shot with the antiquated but lethal and remarkably reliable Kalishnakov (The Republican Party) or with the the Humanitarian Magic Fairy Love Rifle that turns the target into a pretty and confused unicorn and brings peace, love, high speed trains, and broadband to all (The Democratic Party)? Which is why I always delight when an alternative pops up, if only for the variety. Of course, in the case of guys like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader, that “variety” can work against the voter’s intention by helping the worse of their two perceived evils to win, as happened in 1992 and 2000, and that’s one of the reasons I’m fascinated with the teabaggers. The first reason is of course their choice of name. Although polls have shown that a lot of Americans aren’t (or won’t admit that they are) familiar with the well-established slang term teabagging, there had to have been quite a few former frat boys amongst the party’s ranks who were well aware of the term. Another reason I’m fascinated with them is their utter ignorance of the fact that they’re really just Libertarians. Somewhere between deciding on their values and choosing someone to represent them, things got really confused though. Which is why it’s fun to mess with them. The other day I visited the web site of the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition to see if there was any sanity embedded in their angst-driven herding behavior. I didn’t find much; they make their confusion clear in the second sentence of their little manifesto by saying “We are non partisan, unabashedly conservative, and drama free“. On the other hand, they show a little cleverness by putting social networking and sharing tools to use with a Ning site, user polls, and and an Eventful.com badge for a Glenn Beck appearance. Which is where I had a little fun, and where I think I finally discovered my place in modern politics. First, the trivial fun, then I’ll explain my new role in politics. I noticed they had a poll that said “Do you think Tea Party Coalition will be a usefull tool?“, so, after leaving a comment that said “Do I think [the] Tea Party Coalition will be a usefull tool? No. But I think you all ARE a bunch of tools. And I think you should learn how to SPELL before you try to EDIT the existing tax code. That would be ‘usefull’!“, I noticed the poll had no block on voting twice, so in the time-honoured tradition of “vote early, vote often”, I shifted the numbers a bit by voting “No” 270 times to amuse myself while I was busy on a phone call. Then I noticed they were also trying to get Homosexual Nazi Blood Elf Glenn Beck to come to Tennessee. I’m all for getting Glenn Beck as far away from ME as possible, so I voted a few times for that as well. And this is when it dawned on me. I don’t support either major party across the board, and this has frustrated me for quite a while. So in the interest of sticking to some of my core values but still doing something that has impact, I’m going to become a Bipartisan Dick Tuck, and offer my campaign pranking services to both parties, but based entirely on whether the prank aligns with my values. See you at the reader poll!

I shouldn’t be as astounded as I am that the GOP has once again taken ownership of a public sentiment that has absolutely no real foundation in a partisan stance. Tell me. Who in America (besides a bunch of bailed out bank executives) is NOT angry that tax dollars are being funneled into a mind-boggling array of government subsidizing of business and bailouts of epic business failures? And more importantly, how the hell did the GOP spin this out so cleverly and so quickly into their issue, when it is, plain and simple, their fault? This is the party that from Reagan to Cheney has said that deficits don’t matter. And now, suddenly, deficits are a horrible monster created by Barack Obama. The GOP is even benefitting from the humor and confusion that a typical witty liberal will enjoy when watching a pun-laden rant against tea parties, as in the MSNBC clip featured at left. Who’s behind this masterpiece of Astroturfing? Mostly the conservative lobby groups Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity. Nice job, Dems.