If you are old enough to remember the 1990s when the Republican party did everything in their power to destroy President Bill Clinton and his wife, you know what’s going to happen if the Democrats lose control of Congress in this year’s election. It’s going to be all-out war against President Obama. The government will cease to function. We might actually see another Newt Gingrich-esque shut down of the federal government entirely. There will be one investigation after another and the White House will be unable to govern, and that’s the point.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is correct, it’s going to be a witch hunt.

The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment — at one point taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its Christmas card list.

Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.”

To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly.

Read Krugman’s column.

I'll be rich some day too. Yeah!

I don’t know if Democrats will lose seats in the House and the Senate in November, nobody does. But if they do, it will be more evidence that the dumbing down of America is reaching terminal velocity. If Republicans take control of Congress, it will be because Americans are just plain stupid. There’s no other answer, just dumb.

Bob Cesca outlines the GOP platform and contradictions in a Huffington Post column. In a nutshell, Republicans are selling voters a bag of goods and a lot of people apparently are snatching it up like those gold coins Glenn Beck peddles on his show.

Anybody that’s been following politics for more than a few years knows that the party plagued by the most glaring contradictions is the GOP. They hate the government, but they support subsidies for the oil industry, as well as, draconian laws requiring people prove they’re citizens. Republicans claim to be for small businesses, yet they support legislation that makes big business more powerful and it more difficult to compete as a small business. The contradictions are endless and obvious, yet they continue to win elections while representing just 1 or 2 percent of the wealthiest people in the country.

It’s mind-boggling, but check out Cesca’s story, he lays it all out.

Sharron Angle Tea Party Candidate Arizona

In this YouTube video mashup from yesterday’s show, Rachel Maddow exposes the hypocrisy and idiocracy of the GOP’s deficit hawk lameness.

Washington Post Ezra Klein

While the pundits will extrapolate only god knows what from Tuesday’s primaries, one thing that is clear is that the GOP got its ass handed to it.

Pete Sessions, NRCC chairman, said in a statement, “Tonight’s result was undoubtedly disappointing, but we will take the lessons learned from this campaign and move forward in preparation for November.”

Here’s the TPM story about Tuesday’s primaries.

A lot of the wonks, like Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, are claiming that yesterday’s primaries were a repudiation of incumbents. I don’t know – maybe. Trying to gauge the mood of the country by a couple of primaries is difficult and somewhat pointless. It’s OK if we don’t know yet what’s going to happen in November.

Klein wrote: “The country is turning against incumbents from both political parties, as you saw with Rand Paul in Kentucky and Bill Halter in Arkansas and Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania, except when it isn’t, as you saw when Rep. Jack Murtha’s aide Mark Critz blew past expectations to easily win his deceased boss’s congressional seat.”

I don’t know. I don’t buy it that Sestak’s win over Specter was evidence of an anti-incumbent mood. Perhaps, Sestak ran a better campaign, and maybe Specter had some serious problems with his party switching strategy. It’s not as if Sestak is some sort of outsider riding in on his white horse laden with tea bags. He is, after all, a sitting US congressman. He also worked in the Clinton administration on the National Security Council.

In Kentucky, Rand Paul’s win could be a repudiation of incumbency, but it isn’t, I think it’s more of a repudiation of the GOP. Senator Mitch McConnell(R-KY) and the Republican Party threw their full support behind Trey Grayson. Grayson ended up with 35 percent of the vote. You see, there was no incumbent running. This was a race to take over the seat of retiring Senator Jim Bunning. So I fail to see how Paul’s victory over Grayson has anything to do with incumbency since Grayson wasn’t the incumbent.

If there’s anything to take from these primaries is that it was bad news for the Republican party – that’s about it. Anybody claiming to be able to read the tea leaves to predict what will happen in November is a blowhard.

I’m the first to admit that we have an immigration problem in this country. The problem is that we have too many people coming here and living in the shadows. The vast majority of these people are coming here to fill jobs that Americans can’t or won’t fill themselves.

Now the reason Americans won’t do these jobs is because the companies that provide them can’t, or won’t pay a living wage. If companies were prevented from hiring undocumented workers and were forced to pay people a living wage to pick fruit, wash dishes, lawn work and for the low-skill construction jobs – that would be great. The downside of that would be more expensive food at the grocery store and restaurants. Prices would go up throughout the economy, but more people would have better paying jobs too.

But that’s not going to happen. The government, state and federal, is never going to crack down on businesses hiring undocumented workers – a little here and there, but for the most part – governments give businesses a pass.

The efforts to stop immigrants from coming here are focused on the border with Mexico. Build a wall! Send in the troops! Keep “those” people out! It might be worth noting that it’s not just Mexicans crossing the border with Mexico. We have Guatemalans, El Salvadorians, Brazilians, and the list goes on, but in America it’s easier to just lump them all together as “Mexicans.”

Politically, immigration is like abortion and gay marriage. Conservatives love these issues and they’ll never do anything to actually “fix” them. If Roe were overturned, it would take away a powerful rallying cry for their base. The same for gay marriage and immigration. These are the wedge issues that the Republican gets to roll out when their intellectually dishonest market-based solutions are falling on deaf ears.

You might have noticed that immigration is now being touted as the reason state budgets are so screwed up. It has nothing to do with the recession that happened when the Republican party controlled Congress and the White House. Oh no, it was “those people” pillaging our hospitals and schools. Of course, if that’s the case, why didn’t Republicans do something about immigration? See previous paragraph for answer.

But what I really want to talk about is the economics of immigration. An overwhelming number of Americans believe that immigrants are destroying the economy and taking our jobs. “They tuke er jobs!”

Here’s the summary of a Fact Check report on immigration headlined “Does Immigration Cost Jobs?”

Do immigrants take American jobs? It’s a common refrain among those who want to tighten limits on legal immigration and deny a “path to citizenship” — which they call “amnesty” — to the millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. There’s even a new Reclaim American Jobs Caucus in the House, with at least 41 members.

But most economists and other experts say there’s little to support the claim. Study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs. There is even broad agreement among economists that while immigrants may push down wages for some, the overall effect is to increase average wages for American-born workers.

Read the Fact Check report – it’s worth it.

Oil Rig Explodes in Gulf of Mexico Dumping Millions of Gallons of Oil into the Ocean

On Wednesday, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto interviewed Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) about the congressional investigation into the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but Pence was more concerned with the alleged slowness of the Obama administration’s response to the disaster.

Pence said the people “want to get to the bottom of what happened on April 20.”

Evidently, what Pence meant was that he wants to use a congressional investigation to attack what he says was Obama’s lackadaisical response to the crisis.

Read this story in its entirety on Examiner.com

Sarah Palin Boston Commons April 14, 2010

Now that thousands of barrels of oil are spewing into the Gulf of Mexico by the hour, Republican senators are pretending that “Drill, Baby, Drill” was never a party slogan.

“I think there was a candidate that used that,” Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said. “I think our phrase was ‘drill here, drill now,’ meaning here in the United States and as quickly as oil and gas leases are going,” reported The Hill’s E2 Wire blog.

Read this entire story on Examiner.com.

I for one have never believed that the Democrats are going to get their asses handed to them this November.

But if you watch Fox News, MSNBC, CNN or read the New York Times, Washington Post or consume any political news analysis, you’ve being assured that Democrats will in fact lose seats in the Senate and the House this November.

To the pundits, political hacks, pollsters and wonks, it’s a guaranteed that the party that controls the White House loses seats in Congress in the first off-year election. It has to be true because the over-paid dorks who spit and sputter on cable news say it is.

I think what most of these “experts” are thinking about is 1994 when Republicans took control of the House and the Senate for the first time in decades following Bill Clinton’s historic victory in 1992. But what these boobs fail to realize is that 2010 is not 1994. In 1994, the GOP actually had a platform to run on. Newt Gingrich had his “Contract with America.” The GOP had positioned itself as a Reagan-esque it’s “Morning in America” part deux.

In 2010, what does the GOP have as a platform? Repeal health care reform? That lasted about a week. Immigration? Sorry, but the truth is most Americans just aren’t as racist and fearful of immigrants as we once were. Will they dust off their old fail-safes: abortion and gay marriage? Maybe, but what has Americans nervous isn’t gays, abortion, immigration or even health care – it’s the economy.

In this year’s election, Democrats will show chart after chart of how well the economy is doing since they’ve been in charge and how poorly it did when Republicans were in charge. There’s data after data after data that proves that the GOP messed up the economy in a very real and serious way. It’s not that the Democrats share none of the blame for the current economic crisis, but only in the sense that they were enablers not the actual junkie.

What will Republicans campaign on? Maybe they’ll talk about tax cuts, but while trickle down economics might still have its backers, it just doesn’t sell like it used to. Reagan could sell it, but Mitch McConnell?.

When Reagan ran the country in the 1980s and the GOP ran Congress from 1994 until 2006, the economy was never as bad as it now. Most Americans know exactly why the economy that was once fairly stable isn’t so anymore. You know that it’s because of deregulation and out-of-whack income inequality that has turned our economy into a boom-and-bust one.

So how will the GOP convince you to vote for them? And who will do the convincing? Michael Steele. Mitch McConnell. John Boehner. Marco Rubio. John McCain. Sarah Palin. Rush Limbaugh. Glenn Beck.

The Democratic leadership is more than happy to go along with the message that they’re going to lose seats in November because it will help motivate their base to get out and vote, but my money is on the Democrats gaining seats in both chambers.

Sarah Palin Boston Commons April 14, 2010

Whether like it or not, Sarah Palin gets to say whatever she wants, and the mainstream media will simply regurgitate it.

The Associated Press ran a story on Sunday about how Sarah Palin was taken aback by President Obama’s comment regarding the US as a superpower. What she said was a total misrepresentation of the facts and the AP story just went with it.

Here’s what’s got Palin all riled up.

Obama said earlier this week that the United States must do its best to help resolve conflicts peacefully around the world, because if we don’t, it will fall on our shoulders – militarily and economically – to fix the problem.

Obama said:

But what we can make sure of is, is that we are constantly present, constantly engaged, and setting out very clearly to both sides our belief that not only is it in the interests of each party to resolve these conflicts but it’s also in the interest of the United States. It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.

Here’s what Palin said on her Facebook page:

Mr. President, is a strong America a problem?

Asked this week about his faltering efforts to advance the Middle East peace process, President Obama did something remarkable. In front of some 47 foreign leaders and hundreds of reporters from all over the world, President Obama said that “whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower.”

Whether we like it or not? Most Americans do like it.

Maybe Palin really is just as dumb as a box of hammers and she just doesn’t understand what the president said, but what Obama meant was that whether we like it or not, the US will get pulled into international conflicts because of our superpower status if we don’t work to resolve conflicts peacefully.

And if we do get drug into a conflict, it will cost American lives and treasure.

Maybe that’s the part Palin really likes – seeing people killed and taxpayer money spent on international conflicts – and any attempt to prevent that is just un-American gosh darnit.

Thanks John McCain. Thanks for introducing Sarah Palin to us, because now we get to spend an inordinate amount of time debunking her outrageously ignorant lies. It’s not like we don’t have anything else to do.

Tea Party Express Bus April 14, 2010 Boston

The people that are dumping millions of dollars into the Tea Party “movement” don’t want you to know that they’re dumping millions of dollars into the Tea Party. The problem is that their logos are all over Tea Party documents and Web sites.

Koch Industries went out of their way to tell the news media that they don’t have anything to do with the Tea Party – nobody asked. But their claim is only true if you don’t look at the facts. Koch CEO Charles Koch has been involved with Tea Party sponsor Americans for Prosperity for years and years. Koch Industries has shoveled more than $4 million into AFP since 2005. Just visit the AFP Web site and you’ll clearly see that they support the Tea Party.

The Tea Party is not a grassroots, or populist, movement. It’s not a movement at all. It’s a well-funded political operation designed to get Republicans elected in November.

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I Get the Tea Party Now by keith
Keith Olbermann on the Tea Party Ruse with Politco’s Kenneth Vogel by keith

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky)

When I hear Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) speak I want choke him. I’m not necessarily a violent person, but when I see McConnell’s greasy white face on TV I want to punch him in the throat.

The Senate minority leader is the current GOP hitman. It’s his job to lead the attack to kill every bill the Democrats bring to the Senate floor with lies, lies and more lies – three in the back of the head.

Now he’s making the utterly mind boggling claim that regulating Wall Street will hurt Americans on Main Street.

McConnell said that the current financial regulation bills winding their way through Congress “actually guarantees future bailouts of Wall Street banks … endless taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street banks.”

I know, it makes no sense. How can we prevent another economic collapse if we don’t regulate the banks that created it? And yes, the problem was created by Wall Street.

GOP Pollster Frank Luntz

But according to Frank Luntz, the GOP word guy, the financial collapse wasn’t caused by Wall Street but rather by Washington, DC.

In his document titled “Language of Financial Reform,” Luntz told Republican lawmakers and spindoctors that “Words that Work” sound like this.

“If there is one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the bad decisions and harmful policies by Washington bureaucrats that in many ways led to the economic crash must never be repeated.”

See? We can’t regulate Wall Street because regulators are part of the government and the government is always bad, wrong and evil.

Luntz wrote that this is “your critical advantage.”

“Washington’s incompetence is the common ground on which you can build support.”

Of course, McConnell is a US Senator, he voted for the Big Bank bailouts, and he’s very much a part of the “Washington” that Luntz is saying should be blamed for the financial crisis so …

Luntz claims that Americans aren’t just saying “no” to financial regulation, they’re saying “hell no.” He wrote this in January, so this should sound familiar to you by now. But it’s not the “American people” who are saying “hell no,” but rather McConnell, Congressman John Boehner (R-OH) and Sarah Palin who are saying it.

But as far as Luntz is concerned, the rejection of any government action to prevent another economic collapse is “rooted in the simple belief the government cannot effectively regulate the financial markets at any level.”

So the logic is that because the government, under the control of a Republican White House and a Republican Congress, can’t regulate financial markets at any level, they shouldn’t even try to. Remember, the GOP hates the government, wants it to go away, and so, when they’re in power, they actively work to make sure government doesn’t work for the people.

Of course, if the government isn’t going to regulate Wall Street, that means no one is going to regulate Wall Street – that should work about as well as it did in 2007, or during the hedge fund crisis in the ’90s and the Saving and Loan debacle in the ’80s.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote today, “It’s worth remembering that between the 1930s and the 1980s, there weren’t any really big financial bailouts, because strong regulation kept most banks out of trouble. It was only with Reagan-era deregulation that big bank disasters re-emerged. In fact, relative to the size of the economy, the taxpayer costs of the savings and loan disaster, which unfolded in the Reagan years, were much higher than anything likely to happen under President Obama.”

But that history doesn’t matter to the GOP. Luntz is telling the Republicans to link any attempt to regulate banks with the bank bailout, which everyone hates, and like I said, McConnell voted for.

“Frankly, the single best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout,” Luntz said.

In another “Words that Work” section he wrote, “Taxpayer-funded bailouts reward bad behavior. Taxpayers should not be held responsible for the failure of big business any longer. If a business is going to fail, not matter how big, let it fail.”

It’s all a dog-and-pony show.

“It’s a truly shameless performance,” Krugman said, “McConnell is pretending to stand up for taxpayers against Wall Street while in fact doing just the opposite. In recent weeks, he and other Republican leaders have held meetings with Wall Street executives and lobbyists, in which the GOP and the financial industry have sought to coordinate their political strategy.”

According to Krugman, Wall Street isn’t lobbying to prevent future bailouts. “If anything, it’s trying to ensure that there will be more bailouts.” Wall Street likes the paradigm in which they reap the rewards and the taxpayer covers their losses – that works well for them.

McConnell and his GOP henchmen are firmly on the side of Wall Street and not Main Street. Without effective government regulation, we’ll continue with a boom and bust economy and higher and higher unemployment.

McConnell’s hometown newspaper had this to say, “While the intricacies of financial regulation are complicated, McConnell’s calculus is pretty obvious.”

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Mitch McConnell’s Homestate Paper Thrashes Him For ‘Unabashedly Courting Wall Street Bankers For Political Money’ Huffington Post

Keith Olbermann Apr. 14, 2010

Here’s more evidence that the Tea Party movement is not a movement but merely a political operation geared towards getting Republicans elected and making lobbyists rich.

On Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night, Olbermann interviewed Politico’s Kenneth Vogel about his story on Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Express and the lobbyists who are backing it. As it turns out, this so-called grassroots movement is little more than a well-funded old-school political operation funded by Republican political consultants Russo Marsh + Rogers out of Sacramento, California. That’s the same group that helped boot out Democratic Governor Gray Davis in 2003.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Tea Party follower Portland, Maine

I’ve been scratching my head as to what this Tea Party thing is all about since it started last April 15 with people protesting paying their taxes, it didn’t make sense to me then, but I’ve got it figured out now.

What has had me perplexed, besides the contradictions in their message, is why the Tea Party people crawled out of the woodwork now. I mean, we’ve been paying taxes for a long time. Congress has been wasting our money for as long as there’s been a Congress. None of the issues that they complain about are new. So why now?

At first I thought, it’s because we have a black president and a lot these people are just old white racists who can’t stand seeing a black man in the White House. While that’s undoubtedly a motivating factor for some Tea Partiers, it doesn’t explain it all – it’s too simplistic an answer.

Here’s why the Tea Party exists today, and it didn’t in 2008.

Once the Democrats took over the Congress and the White House, really really rich people started freaking out in their really really rich people way; they hired lobbyists and agitated a faction of the American population.

One of the lobbyist they hired was former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Armey is the chairman of FreedomWorks. FreedomWorks is a lobbying organization headquartered in Washington, DC and it’s a major backer of the Tea Party movement.

To get enough white people riled up, the scared filthy rich folks then turned to Fox News. The cable “news” channel not only covered the events, Fox News employees even egged on the crowd to shout louder, louder and louder while the cameras were rolling. Rupert Murdoch’s news network sponsored and promoted Tea Party rallies with virtually 24-hour coverage of Tea Party events.

Fox News commentators and anchors banged the drum that President Obama is a socialist, a communist, a Nazi, not really American, a Muslim, etc. They successfully created the illusion that Obama isn’t legitimate. He’s not one of them. He has no right to tell you what to do. That’s where the subtle racism comes into play.

So with the money and organization flowing through FreedomWorks and the propaganda spewing forth from Fox News the Tea Party movement was born.

It has the illusion that it’s just a grassroots organization that just popped up out of nowhere, but no, this is a political organization funded by scared rich white people who need these angry lower and middle class white people to travel around the country to do their bidding, which is to stop government regulation of their industries and taxing their billion dollar bonuses.

It’s really the same old story, people with money convince average Americans to rally for their cause despite the fact that what the average person needs is exactly what they’re fighting against.

A perfect historical example of this was slavery. The average poor white southerner not only didn’t benefit from cheap slave labor, but it drove down their own income potential, yet, plantation owners convinced them to protect slavery and even fight a war over it.

The Tea Party backers have been able to tap into existing animosity towards Congress, and now a black President, to push their real agenda which is to stop any and all Democratic policies. If the Democrats lose the Congress and the White House, the Tea Party will fade into the background – at least that’s what the GOP and rich and powerful hope.

Sarah Palin Boston Commons April 14, 2010

Today Sarah Palin brought her Tea Party Express to Boston.

During her speech she rolled out her usual suspects.

“Drill baby. Drill,” Palin said and the crowd chanted her slogan calling to expand domestic oil drilling.

A couple weeks ago President Obama announced that he too wanted to see more domestic oil exploration.

The crowd was about 3,000 people. Most people weren’t native Bostonians, but Tea Partiers who’ve been following Palin’s Tea Party Express national tour.

At least half of the crowd couldn’t hear Palin because the volume was turned down so low only those near the former Alaska governor could hear what she had to say. All of the other speeches were delivered loud and clear.

Many of those from Boston were either just curious or outright opponents of Palin and her Tea Party followers.

Tea Party Express Bus April 14, 2010 Boston

“Fake America welcomes Sarah Palin,” one sign read – referring to Palin’s claim that “real Americans” don’t live on the east coast, despite the obvious reference to the Boston Tea Party that is a fundamental symbol employed by the Tea Party.

As usual, the message of the Tea Partiers is confusing. They claim to be against taxes, and at the same time supportive of the Iraq war.

While Tea Party followers are sensitive to accusations of racism, at least subtle racism was on display today.

Tea Party Follower "Don't Tax Me Bro" Sign April 14, 2010

“Don’t tax me bro,” said one Tea Partier’s sign. Not overtly racist, but if Obama weren’t black, the word “bro” probably wouldn’t have been employed.

One can’t help but wonder where the anger over taxes was during the Bush Administration. Obama hasn’t raised taxes, and if anything, additional tax credits have resulted in lower taxes under Obama.

Perhaps they just don’t like a “brother” managing their money.

Update: The “Don’t Tax Me Bro” sign was likely a reference to University of Florida taser incident in which a man said to the police, “Don’t tase me, bro, don’t tase me!” I didn’t catch that reference, but there you have it, likely no racial connotation meant here.

Anybody can tell you this, but it’s clear that the current economy recession is not just a normal economic downturn. For many Americans, this is a depression. All told, the US is down 11 million jobs and the deficit hawks are circling above hoping to prevent any real recovery. Why? Who knows.

According to Bob Herbert:

The evidence is stark. More than 44 percent of unemployed Americans have been out of work for six months or longer, the highest rate since World War II. Perhaps more chilling is a new analysis by the Pew Economic Policy Group that found that nearly a quarter of the nation’s 15 million unemployed workers have been jobless for a year or more.

The sad reality of our political climate is that getting anything important done is unrealistically difficult. We have the Teabaggers on one hand (many of home could use a job) bemoaning taxes and government spending. On the other hand we have Democrats who are all-too-often scared or incompetent to make a coherent argument for spending money to create jobs.

Herbert wrote:

Everything in Washington is a heavy lift. The successful struggle to pass last year’s stimulus package fended off an even worse economic disaster, and the Democrats have managed to enact their health care initiative. But the biggest threat to the health of the economy — corrosive, intractable, demoralizing unemployment — is still with us. And the deficit zealots, growing in strength, would do nothing to counter this scourge.

The bottom line is that if the federal government doesn’t spend money right now to create jobs, we aren’t going to have a meaningful recovery. And for Democrats, they will have to do this alone – just like health care. They’ve been bolstered by the health care reform win and they need to carry that momentum forward.

Herbert said:

Right now there is no plan that can even remotely be expected to result in job creation strong enough to rescue the hard-core groups being left behind. These include: long-term unemployed workers who are older; blue-collar workers of all ages; and younger people in the big cities, in the rust belt and in rural areas who are jobless and not well educated.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that they can’t pass another big bill so they’ll have to do it piecemeal.

“You can do smaller pieces,” she said. “You can break the task up into segments, into discrete pieces of legislation. If size is a problem, we should not let it be an obstacle.”

Republicans will blame Democrats. Democrats will point their fingers at Republicans. Whoever is at fault, incumbents are set up to lose big in November’s mid-term elections – maybe.

A new Gallup shows that only 28 percent think members of Congress deserve to be re-elected. Conversely, 65 percent of registered voters want to see current members of Congress back next year.

Gallup April 8, 2010

What most pundits and political wonks see when they read these polls is that Democrats are going to be swept out of power in November, but I’m not so convinced. I actually think that it’s the GOP who will take a beating this mid-term, despite the conventional wisdom that the party in power usually loses in these off-year elections.

For starters, these poll results have never been seen before. Look at 1994 poll results when the GOP took over Congress with its “Contract for America.” The numbers don’t look at all like they do today. Now look at the stats on what Republican voters are saying in 2010.

Gallup April 8, 2010

That’s 83 percent of Republicans who want to send members of Congress home.

The numbers look better for incumbents when voters are asked if they want to see their individual member re-elected. Forty-eight percent of Republican voters want to re-elect their legislator. Fifty-eight percent of Democratic voters say they’ll re-elect their representative.

Gallup said this poll shows that Democrats are going to get beat-up in the voting booth this November, but I read it differently. I see the GOP as a fractured party with moderates unsure what to make of the Tea Partiers, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. This confusion, I think, will result in voter turnout among Republicans being down this year, while Democrats will come out strong and re-elect their legislators who delivered on health care reform, and possibly financial regulatory reform. The unknown is how the economy will be doing in November.

Read the Gullup poll results and decide for yourself.

Or check Ezra Klein’s take on a different set of graphs and numbers that will play into this year’s elections.

Michael Steele RNC Chairman

When it’s convenient, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele claims his race is a non-issue, and when he needs to do so, he uses his race to slither out of a tight spot.

The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein has the story.

On Monday, the RNC chairman told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that, as an African-American, he is being held to a higher standard than his white peers.

“The honest answer is, ‘Yes,’” Steele said. “Barack Obama has a slimmer margin. A lot of folks do. It’s a different role for me to play and others to play and that’s just the reality of it. But you just take that as a part of the nature of it.”

The remark capped a week’s worth of largely unfavorable stories about Steele’s competence to manage the party. They also introduced the element of race into a conversation that truly had nothing to do with the topic — in the process inviting another debate about whether or not skin color plays a role in political discourse.

The fact is that obviously the RNC’s choice to put an African American to lead the party’s primary fund raising organization to blunt President Obama’s race.

Stein reported.

Steele has expressed similar criticism of Democrats on multiple occasions. Indeed part of his appeal when he was picked for his current job was that a black Republican would be the perfect foil for a president who was insulated from criticism due to his race. When he was running for the chair, Steele more or less accused Obama of building his campaign on top of this pedestal.

“[T]he Obama campaign played the race card, and it worked beautifully,” he told a conference call of conservative bloggers. Charges of racism, he said, hurt Bill Clinton, “tripped up Hillary Clinton,” and “stymied” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) because he refused to bring up Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

The sad truth is that race does matter. Post-racial? I think not. Pretending race doesn’t matter is political correctness for political correctness’ sake and Steele can’t have it both ways. Regardless of his skin color, Steele has failed as the leader of the RNC and should step down. I predict Steele will be forced to resign.

Sean Hannity

On Mar. 30, 2010 at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, Fox News’ Sean Hannity publicly admitted that he thinks the Tea Party movement is comprised of anti-government extremists, or as he said, “Tim McVeigh wannabes.”

“I think we won the debate,” Hannity said. “When you think of the vast majorities that they have in Congress, and they had to bribe, back room deals, corruption; that’s all because of the Tea Party movement – all these Tim McVeigh wannabes here.”

Wow. That’s nothing short of shocking. Of course, Hannity is a total freaking moron, so take what he says with a huge grain of salt, but to call a crowd of people Tim Mc Veigh wannabes and to get cheers in return, that’s amazing.

Tim McVeigh Mugshot

For those too young to remember, McVeigh murdered 168 people in Oklahoma on April 19, 1995. He killed innocent women and children when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building. At the time, it was the single biggest terrorist attack ever in the United States.

Each year, anti-government extremists celebrate this event along with the Waco Seige by the FBI of the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventists on April 19.

Michael Steele RNC Chairman

It appears that the hypocrisy of the GOP does have its limits. Well, it does when it comes to big Republican National Committee donors shelling out money for faux lesbians, private jets and lavish hotels.

“To have staff people flying around on private jets and spending five figures at hotels — it was never done that way historically,” one donor told The Daily Caller. “When you’re out trying to raise money people expect you to act responsibly, and acting responsibly starts at the top.”

While one low-level RNC staffer has been canned over the latest row and now people are calling for RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s head.

I’m surprised Steele lasted as long as he has. My cynical side tells me that he was picked to lead the RNC to offset President Obama’s skin color. An attempt by the RNC to say, “We have lots of black friends.” His political resume is rather thin.

But now that the GOP has driven itself into the ditch with Tea Partiers, military militias and other radical groups, I don’t think anyone in the GOP gives a rip about being the big tent party anymore.

And now donations are down. According to OpenSecrets, the RNC normally crushes the DNC when it comes to raking in the big money, but not anymore.

In 2006 election cycle, the DNC raised $130 million and the RNC $243 million. In 2008, the RNC recorded $427 million compared to the DNC’s $260 million. And so far in 2010, the DNC has pulled in $100 million and the RNC $109 million. That’s a meager $9 million fundraising edge for the RNC.

The Daily Caller reported today, “According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, at least eight of the RNC’s top individual donors have declined to contribute in the past 14 months, a list that includes Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus and real-estate mogul Harlan Crow. Each of the individuals had a record of contributing thousands to the RNC in past years but since 2009 have chosen to direct their money to the NRSC, National Republican Congressional Committee or individual campaign committees.”

If you know anything about the GOP is that they have no problem sacrificing one of their own for the greater good of the party. So long, Michael Steele, I’m sure you have enough material for another book.

C-SPAN's Bill Scanlan

I hate call-in programs because rarely does a caller make a valid or intelligent point. On Monday, C-SPAN’s Bill Scanlan got a call from North Carolina complaining that “80 percent of your callers” are black and that C-SPAN should change its name to BLACK-SPAN.

The caller said that he was just making “a little respectful criticism,” and Scanlan thanked the caller for his comment.

Scanlan should have just cut this guy off and moved on. He certainly shouldn’t have thanked him for his racist diatribe, but that’s C-SPAN for you.