Building identity behind the eight-ball

Funny. And too late.

The House Republican freshmen gathered outside the Capitol on Thursday to insist they aren’t a bunch of angry tea partiers ready to blow up Speaker John Boehner’s debt ceiling bill.

“So many of you like to write about our freshman class [that] we’re radical, we’re extreme, we’re uncontrollable,” said Sean Duffy, a former reality TV star turned freshman legislator from Wisconsin. “But today is important because this freshman class is coming together to get around a proposal, an idea.”

If you have to hold a press conference to tell people that you're not crazy as everyone says, you've already lost the war.

Boehner tells House GOP to "get your ass in line"

Maybe this would be going better for Boehner if he didn't spent the whole summer letting the tail wag the dog.

Scrambling for votes on his troubled deficit package, Speaker John Boehner bluntly told wavering GOP lawmakers Wednesday morning to “get your ass in line” behind his debt ceiling bill.

Boehner predicted Senate Democrats will fold and pass the Boehner debt bill if it can get through the House.

“This is the bill,” Boehner informed a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Wedneday morning. “I can’t do this job unless you’re behind me.

It probably doesn't help when Grover Norquist has more public praise for Harry Reid's competing plan, which saves nearly three times as much money, according to the CBO.

Republicans don't care about the deficit. They never have. They only care about taxes. When the economy is doing well, cut taxes. When it's doing badly, cut taxes. When we've got budget surpluses, cut taxes. When we've got budget deficits, cut taxes.

It should be no surprise that Republicans are struggling so mightily to achieve realistic and serious debt reduction in their plans. When your leaders spend years pursuing policies under the mantra "Deficits don't matter," policies that GOP members of Congress gleefully supported, it's pretty damn hard to right the ship.

Tacky.

This crap is no better when certain conservatives employ the approach either.


It's a shame that some people think that releasing their tantrum-prone inner four-year-old is a constructive contribution to democracy.

I'm not a huge fan of Governor Walker, but the guy won last November going away. And whether one likes what he is doing or not, he deserves to be heard no different than the protesters make themselves heard.

I am almost certain that these same people would find their behavior boorish and inappropriate if directed at President Obama. I'm also certain that Sheila Jackson Lee would then take to the floor of the House and assert that it's because Obama's opponents are racist - at which point countless Capitol staffers swear under their breath, put five bucks in the Sheila Jackson Lee jar, and pass it to a co-worker's desk.

Shouting people down is sadly reminiscent of mob rule, and given the general topics of the protesters' usual caterwauling, it's too bad they don't see the irony in just how undemocratic their own behavior is.

The problems with insurgency

Former Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) does a very fair job of accurately defining why the GOP seems to be struggling so badly to find a unified message and messenger in debt discussions with the President.

A substantial part of the Democratic caucus consists of professional politicians who have climbed the ladder in a manner that makes them responsive to their party's demands - they often won their first primaries by maneuvering to gain institutional support, and their ambitions invariably turn on the good graces of their party leadership. In turn, they are partisans first, ideologues second...

In sharp contrast, a major part of the Republican caucus, particularly its massive freshman class, consists of relative newcomers who did not form ties by climbing the traditional ranks, and in many cases, won their primaries by overcoming their party establishment and their local versions of John Boehner... Their external pressure arises from a base that loathes Barack Obama and grades them based on the intensity of their opposition to his agenda.

Dancing on the grave

Considering that nobody I've talked to thinks the Hansen/VanderLeest race in the 30th will be even remotely close, I've been a bit blown away after a few days back in the homeland by the sheer volume of anti-VanderLeest ads. Now admittedly, we haven't seen this much juicy campaign fodder since Lee Meyerhofer and Dave Plombon. These things run during local news, the MLB All-Star Game, the ESPY's, on Comedy Central. They're probably on OWN and Lifetime too, to play up the wife-beating angle.

I don't think that the guy who reported raising $2,000 is going to pull the upset next week. But what I suspect is happening here is that the Democrats, who are already winning the fundraising war, are going to try and use this race as an exclamation point to get their donors pumped for the real races next month. +4 might be a stretch, but at this point ,+3 definitely doesn't appear to be out of the equation.

Debt negotiations: You're all doing it wrong

This just in: people who negotiate for a living think politicians are crappy negotiators.

Both parties have been busy drawing lines in the sand. Republicans refuse to accept any increase in revenue, and Obama made clear earlier this week that he will not accept a short-term solution.

"When you say that publicly, you make it harder for negotiations to move forward," Bordone said. "Part of the problem here is it seems to be much more of a show for constituents than a genuine negotiation between leaders."

Gee, you think?

GOP conservation cuts rile sportsmen

Who needed the hunters and anglers anyway? The modern GOP is nothing more than an extension of Karl Rove's 2004 strategy - win elections by squeezing to death the craziest elements of your base and hope to God that you can win on turnout.

House Republicans fighting the Obama administration’s environmental agenda are finding themselves making decisions that threaten the party’s carefully nourished relationship with the hook and bullet crowd.

Anglers and hunters once courted by President George W. Bush don’t like what they’re seeing in the GOP’s mad dash to cut spending and have made their feelings clear in meetings this month with top aides to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

As the Republican leaders no doubt know, this is not a crowd to mess with. The Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation estimates that nearly eight in 10 hunters always vote in presidential elections, while six in 10 go to the polls in off years.

Leggies behaving badly

I remember a day early in my time at the Capitol when my boss sent me home for using 11-point font on a letter instead of the anally-prescribed 12-point Arial font that he insisted upon. Never mind that using 12-point font would've caused the letter to print only the signature block on the second page - adherence to absolutes was apparently more important than practical problem-solving skills. So some constituent got a letter and probably said to himself "why the f@#$ is this on two pages?" but the boss was happy.

I quickly learned that such self-absorption and inability to relate to the world is a common trait among legislators. On the whole, they're not very well-adjusted people. They tend to badly overestimate their own intelligence and competence. Many are more in love with the notion of being a legislator - the parades, the fancy office, people calling them "Representative" or "Senator" - than in doing the things that make you good at your job.

That stint was the longest 11 months of my life. But as bad at it was, it wasn't quite as bad as working for Sheila Jackson Lee, who is being sued for emotionally abusing a disabled employee. The Daily Caller did an outstanding report a few months ago titled "Congressional Bosses From Hell" that summarizes some of Rep. Jackson Lee's bizarre and egotistical conduct.

Some tasty tidbits:

You worked really, really, really late for her. When she was in town, you were in the office. So that meant, two, three, four o’clock in the morning – we were there,” one former staffer said.

She liked to hold her staff meetings — she would individually pull in the deputy chief of staff, myself and some other people individually to go over different parts of her day. But she would literally wait until super late at night. None of us could go home, because she wouldn’t tell when she was coming back or if she wasn’t. And if she called and you didn’t answer, it was like World War III,” the source said. (My first boss did this too. I'm not sure he was ever aware the extent to which staff and other members would make fun of him for it. The only people I heard take more ridicule for being crazy were Terri McCormick and Mary Lazich.)

...Jackson Lee’s requests don’t stop at the end of a normal working day. “In the middle of the night, people had to go get her garlic. She’ll call you at two in the morning for garlic because she takes them as supplements,” a former staffer said. Jackson Lee’s garlic runs were confirmed by other staffers, too, though no one could remember the exact brand of the supplement. The deputy chief of staff “would have to go get it, and he would have to go drop it off. It was some kind of a multi-vitamin,” another former staffer said.

...On Christmas Eve, one staffer was at a midnight mass ceremony at her church. When the boss called, the staffer didn’t answer. “She got so irritated that I wasn’t answering her call on Christmas Eve. So she called me every minute for 56 minutes,” the source recalled.

The sad thing is that constituents often never know well enough the kinds of shitty, abusive, clueless fools they're electing. As long as politicians put on the forced smile, and go to the pancake breakfasts, and spout the talking points, voters assume that the people they're electing are good human beings. If only they knew...

Another thing to thank Sarah Palin for?

After all, she's pretty much the inspiration for all these middle-aged women with the puffy, crunchy hairdos to get into politics and do stupid things... like point loaded weapons at people for fun.

Arizona state senator Lori Klein loves her pink Ruger pistol so much she just had to show it off to a reporter—by allegedly pointing it directly at his chest.

The pistol has no safety (because that would be crazy) and was loaded when Klein, a Republican, remarked “Oh it’s so cute,” and trained the gun’s laser sight on Arizona Republic reporter Richard Ruelas’ chest, the paper reports.

Klein insists the reporter was not in danger. “I just didn’t have my hand on the trigger,” she said in the Republic's initial account of the incident, which was detailed in a recent story about Klein’s decision to carry her loaded gun into the state Capitol only two days after the Tucson mass shooting that killed six and seriously injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, among others.

Redistricting updates

I'm just going to keep this open all weekend, and to the extent I can glean information, I'll post it here for the convenience/consumption of all.

2:15 a.m.

Senate thoughts from a guy named "glame" on DailyKos who sounds far more competent with GIS data than I am. Anyone who takes the time to input this crap into Dave's Redistricting App probably has little reason to lie about the outputs.

Italics are my additions.

The 5th (Vukmir), 8th (Darling), 9th (Leibham), and 21st (Wanggaard) become basically out of reach.

However, there are still opportunities with the 1st (Lasee - 53.9 Obama), 19th (Ellis - 54.3 Obama), 23rd (Moulton - 53.8 Obama), 29th (Galloway - 53.3), 17th (Schultz - 59.9! Obama), and the 32nd remains solid for the inevitable Shilling at 60.5 percent Obama. That means that including Hansen (who remains at 56.5 Obama) and if the Dems can find a way to knock off Schultz, there should be 15 seats where a Dem would be favored in a neutral situation. So not that bad but a process made more difficult. One note, the exact percentage are likely to be a little off due to the various ward splitting and thus, the inability to exactly map the districts in DRA.

The commenter's point is valid, if slightly optimistic. A Democratic majority in the Senate beyond 2012 would be possible, but it would certainly require the Senate Democrats to convert some seats with which they've historically had issues, all while protecting Jim Holperin and Kathleen Vinehout. To compound their dilemma, if you remove the 5th (ex-Sullivan), 9th (ex-Potter/Baumgart), and 21st (ex-Plache/Lehman), you're effectively taking out most of the seats that the Democrats used to leverage their way back into narrow majorities for the last two decades.

12:20 a.m.

If Google Maps is to be believed, it appears that the Pridemore/Lemahieu matchup should be amended to Pridemore/Kessler. In both cases, neither leggie has been drawn into the newly-christened 22nd district by more than about half a mile. This pairing also makes more logistical sense, as it would leave a GOP incumbent in the district and puts Fred Kessler on wildly unfamiliar territory.


10:10 p.m.

Sarah Palin might not be able to see Alaska from her house, but Nancy Nusbaum would be able to see her new Senate district if she beats Rob Cowles...


So close... and yet, so far away. On the plus side, perhaps she could become a Republican again and run against Dave Hansen next year.

9:45 p.m.

A huge thanks to reader Alex, who has pointed out that LTSB already has interactive maps up on their website. Find them here. They're super helpful for reviewing some areas (e.g. Appleton, Green Bay, Eau Claire) in greater detail. According to Alex, after checking all of the leggies' listed voting addresses, here's what we might well be looking at.

My neighbor is also a leggie:

Krusick/Zepnick
D. Cullen/Kooyenga
J. Ott/Pasch
August/Loudenbeck
Jorgensen/Nass
Kessler/Pridemore (see 12:20 am)
Jacque/Klenke
Nygren/Van Roy
Danou/Petryk/Radcliffe

I don't have an incumbent:

2, 9, 12, 13, 37, 47, 65, 80, 90, 91, and 93.

Says Alex: "Additionally, Roys has been drawn into the 48th district along with 4 of the candidates currently running in the special election. 2 of the 48th candidates are in Mark Pocan's new district. So, the southern half of the 48th (Monona, McFarland, and the Glendale and Lake Edge neighborhoods; which is now the new 47th) will have an open seat race again in 2012, no matter what happens."

Now we know why Kelda's so darn irritable.


8:30 p.m.

Dane101 is reporting that both Fred Clark and sometimes Democrat, sometimes Republican Nancy Nusbaum would end up outside of their newly-configured senate districts in the event they should be successful in their respective recall challenges against Luther Olsen and Rob Cowles. Apparently Nusbaum's shifted out of her district by just a block or two. Huh. Go figure. Wonder how that happens? That means each would need to move in the next year in order to stand for re-election.

Dane 101 also notes, as have others, that while the new 22nd Senate district, comprised of nearly all of the cities of Racine and Kenosha, would be Dem for life, the current Democratic senator, Bob Wirch, doesn't live in the district. Wirch's voting address puts him in an uber-conservative district where he'd have to run against Sen. Van Wanggaard.

According to Cindy Kilkenny's calculations, David Cullen's new district might have a constituent who's also in the legislature: Dale Kooyenga. That would make the new 14th district incumbent-free. Knowing that area, it could set off a total free-for-all in the GOP primary, where the winner is virtually guaranteed election in the general.

And meanwhile, Kelda Helen Roys has announced that she will be opening a winery, what with all the sour grapes she's constantly putting on display. Roys is fast becoming the Tracy Flick of the Assembly. Could someone leave Kelda where she is and simply draw her snotty, bratty demeanor into someone else's district?

Everyone's a cartographer now.

For those interested in such things, proposed redistricting maps were released today. Links, for your convenience.

Proposed maps

Present maps, courtesy of LTSB

Obviously, some relevant details are not included, like incumbent addresses. But I'm sure those who've been drawn out of their districts will be squealing like stuck pigs in the next 24-48 hours.

Some quick thoughts. If others have observations, feel free to comment.


Senate

The biggest change is likely the reconfiguration of the 21st and 22nd districts, so that the cities of Racine and Kenosha fall predominantly into the same district, and the suburban/exurban areas fall into another district. While both districts will be less competitive, communities of interest are probably better aligned as a result of the change.

Dane County is slated to pick up two additional senators, going from four to six. This is largely accomplished by two major reconfigurations of the Madison Assembly districts. First, taking those portions of Madison's east side presently in the 81st and 48th and putting them in one district, then doing something similar with those portions of Madison's south side presently located in the 46th, 48th, and 79th. The end result is two solidly Democratic Senate districts, while the remainder of rural Dane is splintered off into four largely rural districts. Jon Erpenbach's district just became a lot more competitive at the expense of Mark Miller's becoming less competitive.


Assembly

A bit trickier to discern - a detail map of the Fox Valley would've been nice.

Sandy Pasch's district (now 23, new 22) is decidedly more Republican, as it hugs the Milwaukee County shoreline and then runs clear north into Ozaukee County.

David Cullen and Tony Staskunas are both harmed by a shift that creates geometrically simpler districts that run clear out towards Pewaukee and Waukesha. The end result is cleaner geometry, but one that splits communities like Wauwatosa and West Allis.

Changes appear to have been made in the Appleton area to splinter Dem-leaning areas like Kimberly, Kaukauna, and Little Chute into solidly GOP districts. I would suspect any changes would make Jim Steineke's 5th district seat safer and Penny Bernard Schaber's 57th district seat an easier pick-up. (That the GOP lost that seat in the first place speaks to terrible candidate recruitment.)

A poorly-placed numeral makes it difficult to fully discern, but it appears that virtually all of Eau Claire has been drawn into a newly-conceived 91st district. That presumably makes life easier for Kathy Bernier, Tom Larson, and Warren Petryk.

Meanwhile, it appears that Chris Danou and Mark Radcliffe are drawn together into a vastly reworked 92nd district in which Danou would have an enormous advantage, since it's basically Radcliffe's number on Danou's district. That means there's at least one district out there without an incumbent at all, which I presume is the new 91st.

Still the smartest guy in the room.

Or one of them, at least.

(President Clinton) picked clean energy as the new idea most likely to revive job growth. In a National Journal forum on innovation, several experts offer an assortment of other possibilities—from improved transportation systems to more-sophisticated genetic engineering to advanced wireless communication.

The more pressing question is what policies are most likely to nurture such breakthroughs. Republicans, with renewed intensity, argue that less government will mean more innovation and growth. That strategy produced benefits during the 1980s. But if lower taxes and less regulation alone guaranteed growth, Bush's economic record would not have been so bleak.

The Democratic alternative that Obama touts is greater public investment in the building blocks of productivity—education, infrastructure, basic research, and development. Clinton is obviously more disposed toward that approach, but he also pointedly warned that Democrats can't implement it without shifting more federal resources from consumption (mostly through entitlements for the elderly) toward investment. "Our risk is that we'll be so averse to any changes in the entitlement programs that we'll continue to spend … too much money on today, so we don't have enough money [to invest] for tomorrow," he said. (emphasis added)

Government is drowning itself in unchecked spending on people who are no longer economically productive, and in the meantime we have technical colleges and universities that can't provide adequate capacity and preparation to meet the needs of growing, high-demand sectors of the economy.

Granny and Gramps are eating the goose that lays the golden eggs. How much longer are we going to stand for it?

Bad idea.

Few staff-to-leggie transitions ever result in great legislators, probably because it's mostly the untalented staffers that look to make the jump. This case is proving to be no exception.

Republicans, who now control the Legislature and the governor's office, would surely like to have a conservative in charge of the state Supreme Court. But the only way they're going to get one is by changing the way the chief justice is chosen. Of the seven justices, the three with the most seniority are the court's three liberals.

On Thursday, state Rep. Tyler August, R-Walworth, announced that he has authored a constitutional amendment that would allow the seven state Supreme Court justices to choose the high court's chief justice by a vote, rather than the current system that makes the longest-serving justice the chief.

"The leader of Wisconsin's highest court should not simply be who has been there the longest," says August in a press release, which does not mention Abrahamson. "The chief justice should be a consensus builder who has the respect of their fellow justices."

We're going to foster that consensus building attitude by allowing the court to choose its own chief on a potentially divisive, 4-3 vote. Sure. By explicitly encouraging the court to divide itself, the proposed amendment would accomplish the exact opposite of what the author alleges.

I agree that seniority seems a silly way to select a chief, but it would be far better to simply scrap the whole model and do as the federal government does: executive appointment with Senate approval.

Murdoch's scandal-hit News of the World to shut down

Just the typical kind of classy, top-notch reporting for which News International is known. Good riddance.

London (CNN) -- The embattled British tabloid News of the World, one of the oldest and best-selling newspapers in Britain, will shut down after Sunday's issue, its owner, News International, told CNN Thursday.

The dramatic announcement follows accusations that the paper illegally eavesdropped on the phone messages of murder and terror victims, politicians and celebrities.

The scandal "sullied" the newspaper and "has no place in our company," News International Chairman James Murdoch said Thursday in announcing the shutdown.

And paying out-of-court settlements to some victims was "wrong and a matter of serious regret," Murdoch said. He is a son of media magnate Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp., which owns News International...

The 168-year-old newspaper, which sells more than 2.5 million copies every Sunday, was brought down by an avalanche of public and political fury in the wake of revelations that the hacking victims included a missing 13-year-old girl who was later found to have been murdered.

Supply-side doesn't work when you don't share the wealth.

Even the WSJ can't hide from the facts any longer.

While the U.S. economy staggers through one of its slowest recoveries since the Great Depression, American companies are poised to report strong earnings for the second quarter—exposing a dichotomy between corporate performance and the overall health of the economy.

Two years after the official end of the recession, a range of indicators show that the economic recovery has been the worst, or one of the worst, since the government began tracking such data after World War II: Unemployment is too high, bank lending necessary to spur spending is too low, home prices are depressed while household expectations for financial well-being are near record low levels. Many economists predict the sluggish rebound may continue for years.

Against this backdrop, many U.S. companies are expecting to report surprisingly robust profits when second-quarter earnings are announced later this month. Combined earnings of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index are projected to rise 13.6% from a year ago for the second quarter, according to an analysis of Wall Street forecasts by Brown Brothers Harriman.

Corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP are at modern lows. GDP is higher now than it was prior to the recession and yet growth in wages during our recovery account for just 1% of growth in national income, while corporate profits account for 88% of that growth.

And we're supposed to believe people like Paul Ryan when they say the problem is that we're not doing enough to help those who create the jobs?

Supply-side economics is a tenuous theory at best, but it's an especially bad theory if corporations aren't interested in sharing their remarkable gains with their U.S. workers who are trying to buy their products, pay for their homes, and send their kids to college.

I'm not saying the answer to this conundrum is more government spending. But it's downright naive to pretend that giving more tax breaks to corporations is going to unleash a waterfall of wealth that will help everyday workers. Corporations have taken their existing tax breaks, built a giant dam ahead of the waterfall, and are diverting all the water into their swimming pools. Why would anyone be dumb enough to think that behavior will change if we give them more water?

Who's in charge?

Comments like this don't exactly breed confidence in law enforcement.

The police response to a weekend rampage by about 60 young people who beat and robbed a smaller group that had been watching fireworks from Kilbourn Reservoir Park "may not have been our finest hour," Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn told an audience Wednesday evening.

Flynn's comment preceded an account of the assault by a woman who was among the victims. The woman, who identified herself only as Jessica, drew applause from the crowd of about 200 after describing how police made her and her friends feel at fault for simply enjoying a holiday weekend at a public park.

"They told us to leave and started kicking us out of the park," she told the audience at the Gordon Park pavilion.

"It was then that we realized that no one got a chance to make statements except the two who required medical attention, even though there were 19 of us who had witnessed something a bit different. They did not even take our names and phone numbers to call us at a later time."

Maybe if the aforementioned Jessica was of the McBride variety, Flynn would think a more forceful response was warranted.

And then there's this priceless nugget:

Full reports include details about other crimes that happened at the time of the robberies, Flynn said. Once he and others read that information, they passed it along to the media, he said.

"It wasn't an attempt to downplay or minimize or deny the concern about what we ultimately learned," he said.

Flynn added that the first priority for police at the scene of the beatings had not been to make arrests, but to disperse the crowd and tend to victims. Making arrests would have taken much-needed police officers away from the areas where they were needed, he said.

So a mob of unruly black youth descend upon a park and start beating up a bunch of people watching fireworks, and Flynn's concern is that making arrests in a racially-tinged mob beatdown would take police officers away from where they were needed? Was something worse happening in his fair city that his department couldn't allocate adequate resources to this matter?

I've been asserting on this blog on and off for 5+ years that Milwaukee is a hopeless dump that should simply be bulldozed into Lake Michigan. I am still waiting for someone to prove me wrong.

Abbacadabba

I bet the kids would've tried a lot less hard if they had known their teachers and principals were all conspiring to change their answers anyway.

Across Atlanta Public Schools, staff worked feverishly in secret to transform testing failures into successes.

Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.

Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.

Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.

For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.

Now we can all sit back and enjoy the dance of unaccountability, whereby the principals and administrators deny knowing what was going on, and the teachers pretend to be victims and tell us that the principals and administrators made them do it.

Disgusting.

Spare some change?

Newt could use it.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will report raising approximately $2 million in the second fundraising quarter of the year and ending the month of June with $225,000 in the bank, POLITICO has learned.

But in a steep obstacle to Gingrich’s comeback hopes, his campaign remains about a million dollars in debt. It will be a struggle for Gingrich to put his balance sheet in the black and fund the kind of operation traditionally required to compete in Iowa, where he has indicated he’ll attempt to turn his campaign around.

I have a lot of respect for Newt as an ideas guy, but I think one of the downsides of the 2010 Republican groundswell is that a lot of old, tired GOP faces seem to think it represented their own vindication and a call for them to return to the national stage. Throw guys like Rick Santorum and George Allen in this group too.

The three fundamentalisms of the American right

A thoughtful and accurate summation of the unfortunate changes in the underpinnings of modern conservative thought, by Michael Lind.

History, to the fundamentalist mind, is a story of original perfection, followed by betrayal and restoration. The early Christian church was perfect; it was corrupted and betrayed by medieval Catholicism; and it was restored to its original purity by radical Protestant reformers. In the same way, the American constitution was not a flawed compromise among rival states and factions, to be improved by later amendment, but a document of superhuman wisdom, created in a kind of secular Pentecost at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. To believe today’s constitutional fundamentalists, the true constitution was betrayed around 1900 in the name of the "living constitution" by progressives and liberals, who play the villain’s role in political history that the evangelicals assign to the Catholic Church in Christian history...

The rise of triple fundamentalism on the American right creates a crisis of political discourse in the United States. Back when conservatism was orthodox and traditional, rather than fundamentalist and counter-revolutionary, conservatives could engage in friendly debates with liberals, and minds on both sides could now and then be changed. But if your sect alone understands the True Religion and the True Constitution and the Laws of the Market, then there is no point in debate. All those who disagree with you are heretics, to be defeated, whether or not they are converted.

The irony of Tea Party-tinged conservatism is that there's nothing conservative about it at all. The goal isn't to restore or preserve anything - it's to create an America that's never existed, based solely on highly selective, rose-colored visions of history.

The real verdict from the Casey Anthony trial

Nancy Grace is batshit crazy.

Playground Pick: Reluctantly, Dave Hansen for 30th SD

Now that the John Nygren signature debacle has come to a merciful close (and thumbs up to Nygren for having enough respect for the system to pull the plug after the circuit court ruling), we should take a moment to consider whether we should all let Dave Hansen pick our lottery numbers for us.

Hansen is not a particularly skilled or adept legislator. In fact, seeing Dave Hansen lose would delight me to no end. But sadly, he's running against the political equivalent of Happy Gilmore and consequently, the Playground offers Hansen a tepid endorsement in the 30th Senate District recall election.

Dave Hansen is the guy who keeps finding the lucky penny. In 2000, he had the advantage of running against a kook incumbent, Gary Drzewiecki. Then, four years later, he had the pleasure of thrashing Drzewiecki again after Drzewiecki dropped a giant turd in the GOP punch bowl and took out the GOP's preferred candidate in the primary. Then Hansen was up in 2008, a year in which Democrats could do no wrong, against a fringe lunatic from the Green Bay City Council who is best known for his crusades on behalf of the city hall nativity scene.

Now, Hansen gets the pleasure of running against David VanderLeest, a guy with domestic abuse allegations in his past who may currently be under investigation in Oconto County for the same thing. VanderLeest also seems to have a bit of a paranoid streak going for him, as he works to convince himself that people are after him because they can't beat him on the ideas.

Actually, I'm pretty sure people CAN beat him on the ideas. As a matter of disclosure, VanderLeest and I graduated in the same class from the same well above-average suburban high school outside of Green Bay. I can assure you that back then, nobody ever would've thought to put the phrases "David VanderLeest" and "good ideas" in the same sentence.

I should also add that we were taught in school to spell and communicate effectively, neither of which is on display in VanderLeest's rambling, unfocused response to the sea of allegations he is confronting. It's all because of "currupt" officials that VanderLeest's "inocence" is being questioned by the allegations that have been brought "fourth." They fear his ability to "polarize the public" and expose true corruption.

Perhaps the first thing your campaign needs to be introduced to is a spellchecker, champ. This statement is definitely in the running for the annual Bill Savage Award for Terrible Political Communication.

On the plus side, the GOP now has the opportunity to pull the plug on this race entirely and direct its time and resources to other campaigns which may be more viable. One dollar spent on the VanderLeest campaign is one dollar too many.

Dave Hansen for Senate. At least until 2012, when hopefully the GOP can find a better candidate.