This is a thought which has been bumping around my mind for a while now, and has an assist from — of all people — Michelle Bachman with — of all organizations — the most loathsome of the inter-connected Tea Partys, the “Tea Party Express”:

Earlier Friday, Republicans had announced that Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, who chairs the House Budget Committee, would deliver the GOP’s response to Obama after the State of the Union address is over. Bachmann’s remarks at TeaPartyExpress.org, apparently, will supplement the GOP response with a tea-party perspective.
Bachmann’s webcast will follow Ryan’s, so tea party Republicans won’t have to choose whom to watch.It’s a thought I had when I saw this item, after last November’s elections, from the Florida Whig Party.  It’s a rather meaningless message, but that’s in the eye of the beholder: if you want to develop a Whig Party, you have to state your message within the current political debate.  So, I was thinking the Whig Party really should blast everyone with a “Whig Response” at the SOTU speech, plastered live on youtube following Obama’s State of the Union address.
Regretably, there is no Natural Law Party, so we will get no Natural Law Party Response.  But I’m sure the three flavors of Libertarians will be able to compete against the three flavors of Socialist Partys for interest.

Multiple that by every Dick, Jane, and Harry political organization, and you have your multitude of choices.  For everybody to ignore.  Bachman, you understand, as a member of a affiliation of the Republican Party, will be reasonably ignored and forgotten, except as fund-raising mechanism for her party and outrage meter by Democrats — and I suppose an “Overton Window” mechanism for Republican Ryan’s benefit, but if some of the other Responses can gain some traction maybe the Window can expand.

Christie seemed to have the most fun with Diane Sare, who introduced herself as a Larouche Democrat who is planning a Congressional run in Bergen County. […]
Sare said afterward that she is currently in U.S. Rep. Steve Rothman (D-NJ09)’s district, but hopes that redistricting pits her against far-right U.S. Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ05) to the north.
At Thursday’s town hall meeting, Sare quickly listed her major criticisms of President Barack Obama – health care, bank bailouts, and space missions – then turned to Christie and politely said, “I think your policies are identical to his.”
Christie playfully called out for someone to alert the president of this development immediately.
But Sare waited for the laughs to subside, then laid out her plan to take private sector bailout funding and allocate it to state governments to get them out of the fiscal hole they’re in. She asked Christie to work with her to make the plan happen.
“You want to work with me,” he said, “after you called me Obama?”

High on a list of sentences I never thought I would ever see written:  (Alan) Moore’s the comic book version of Lyndon La Rouche.
Huh?

The thing about our political discourse, is that the only way a politician breaks through through into the news cycle and conciousness is by saying something outlandish.  I don’t know how you cure this, but it is what it is.  It’s always hard to figure if these things count as “gaffes” or something else, but they develop into a cycle of “Say something outrageous, defend, apologize for any offense”.

 Alabama’s new governor Robert Bentley is apologizing for comments he made Monday during a Martin Luther King Day celebration.
   Bentley issued an apology yesterday for stating that anyone who doesn’t share his Christian faith cannot be counted among his brothers and sisters.
   The offending comments came hours after Bentley was sworn in as governor, when he told a Montgomery Baptist church audience, quote, “Anybody who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister.”  His speech spurred outrage from Jewish and civil rights groups, who said the comments were offensive and inappropriate.
I guess I should shrug and say “It’s Alabama”, but what was the point of this statement?  You can shovel any number of Christian allusions without pointedly calling out non-believers.

An auxilary to the “like Hitler did” Godwin’s Law, the Goebels reference:

Rep. Steve Cohen on Thursday stood by his remarks in which he compared Republican attacks on the health care overhaul to Nazi propaganda advanced by Joseph Goebbels. 

The Tennessee Democrat, who is Jewish, said he regrets that anyone was offended and that his comments were used to “distract from the debate about health care.” But in a detailed written statement, the congressman elaborated on and defended his analogy. 

“Taken out of context, I can understand the confusion and concern,” he said. “While I regret that anything I said has created an opportunity to distract from the debate about health care for 32 million Americans, I want to be clear that I never called Republicans Nazis. Instead, the reference I made was to the greatest propaganda master of all time.” 

Goebbels references are a bit less offensive than Hitler, in the sense that Hitler has ceased to mean a damned thing and Goebbels at least refers to specific concerns of public relations in a world where facts are transmitted but are receptibily meaningless.  Laced in Goebbels’s techniques, for instance, is gratuitous invective — see for instance, calling a bill the “Repeal Job Killing Health Care Act”.  But as always, it’s something of a conversation killer.  He could just go the Joseph Wilson route and shout “You Lie!” and received the media attention.  (Or maybe he couldn’t have — does the House have a rule against pointed references to colleagues on the floor in debate?)

In case you’re curious on the roll call vote — almost a party line vote, except for one Democratic Congress-woman who obviously couldn’t vote, and three Democratic Congress-men who voted aye — Oklahoma’s Dan Boren, North Carolina’s Mike McIntyre, and Arkansas’s Mike Ross.   Curiously, I see that some media outlets get the Oklahoma Congressman wrong — reference his father, David — but really, one member of a political lineage in Oklahoma is about the same as the next — he got in off of his father’s coat-tails.

Sigh.

At an event commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Thursday, the general counsel of the Pentagon – Jeh Johnson – said that if King were alive today he would support the war in Afghanistan.

The remarks, reported by American Forces Press Service, are an unusual claim considering King’s lifetime commitment of fighting against what King referred to in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, the “three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism: …racial injustice, poverty, and war.”

Said King: “wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.”

Nonetheless, Johnson said, “I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.”

The Pentagon counsel noted that in King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech – his final one – delivered the day before his assassination at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn,, King told the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan who helped a man who had been beaten by thieves, after a priest and a Levite walked past him.

King noted that in the story of the Good Samaritan, it’s possible that “the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so … the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’

Rev. King, there to support a strike of sanitation workers, said, “that’s the question before you tonight. Not, ‘If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?’ Not, ‘If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?’ The question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?’ The question is, ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’ That’s the question.”

Johnson in his speech compared US troops to the Samaritan.

“In 2011, I draw the parallel to our own servicemen and women, deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, away from the comfort of conventional jobs, their families and their homes,” Johnson said. “Those in today’s volunteer Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road, and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people.  Every day our servicemen and women practice that ‘dangerous unselfishness’ Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968.

“Johnson is not without his knowledge of King – he graduated from King’s alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., and attended school with Martin Luther King III.He acknowledged that Johnson acknowledged that King called violence “a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy,” and that “returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” Johnson acknowledged that King made an “impassioned plea against the war in Vietnam” and “from that point on he questioned the whole rationale for war in general.  From the gospel song ‘Down by the Riverside,’ Dr. King repeated the line: ‘I Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.’”

Which makes Johnson’s claim all the more unusual.

But the claim still seems unusual.

King in 1967 called for the US to “take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war,” and said the US should “declare a unilateral cease-fire” and “realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.”

And in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Holbrooke said he “venture(d) to suggest to all of you and all who hear and may eventually read these words, that the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding the relations between nations. It is, after all, nation-states which make war, which have produced the weapons which threaten the survival of mankind, and which are both genocidal and suicidal in character….It is not enough to say “We must not wage war.” It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace.”

I think this is what you can call “Pentagon Spin”.

In case you missed the news, Herman Cain has thrown his hat in the ring, or more specifically has launched an exploratory committee for the Republican nomination.  This markst the first announced candidate, of any stature whatsoever, as against the masses who had flooded the zone at this point prior to the 2008 election, as Dave Weigel announced.  Maybe this hardly matters — everyone is bopping about in Iowa and New Hampshire anyway.

I do not know where this Herman Cain fits in the mix.  There may be something to say for scouting out presidential candidates outside the usual political venue, but then again maybe there is not.  I gather he will end up in Mike Gravel territory — he would make the debates, sure, but in a manner where everyone is rolling their eyes.  It may be that he slides in where Carol Mosley Braun fit in for the Democratic Party in 2004.  Braun was largely propped up for the purposes of directing attention away from Al Sharpton.  Herman Cain would exist to deflect some racial cultural baggage from the various Southern pols on stage– if you will, Haley Barbour.

Poke around his CEO hold of Godfather’s Pizza, and you get an ad from the 1980s with the “Black people eat a pizza like this; White people — they eat a pizza like that” schtick.  I don’t know if America is ready to watch old late 1980s early 1990s pizza commercials, and come to terms with this ugly chapter in our past.

Sure.  Tennessee.  And one dreary line in the “Culture War” that pierces the educational system.

Regarding education, the material they distributed said, “Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”

That would include, the documents say, that “the Constitution created a Republic, not a Democracy.”

The material calls for lawmakers to amend state laws governing school curriculums, and for textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.

“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” said Rounds, whose website identifies him as a Vietnam War veteran of the Air Force and FedEx retiree who became a lawyer in 1995.

Curiously there is surely a good contingency within this group who won’t keep this “Hero Worship” sentiment up with Abraham Lincoln.  They also likely will be bristling against Woodrow Wilson — oddly making issue with some of the same racial problems that float about the Founders, but mostly just to prop up a supposed government “Eugenics” plot, and for base partisan attack in Republicans versus Democrats.  As the case shows in Texas, they seriously would want to reconstruct the figure of Thomas Jefferson, or if they can’t manage him, would settle on emphasizing more religious founders — I guess leaving the “Tree of Liberty” quote to be taken up at the Age of Majority.

It is hereabouts that we find a serious fault line for this proposal:
Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, thinks members of his party and Republicans should sit together — not on opposite sides of the aisle — when President Obama delivers his State of the Union message to a joint session of Congress on Jan. 25.

In a “Dear Colleague” letter reported by NPR and Politico, Udall said, “There is no rule or reason that on this night we should emphasize divided government, separated by party, instead of being seen united as a country. The choreographed standing and clapping on one side of the room — while the other side sits — is unbecoming of a serious institution.”

Customarily, Republicans sit to the right in the House of Representatives chamber — as viewed from the Speaker’s rostrum — and Democrats to the left. On the night of the State of the Union it gets crowded as senators, cabinet members, the diplomatic corps and some Supreme Court justices also squeeze in.

I guess this would keep Representative Joseph Wilson from shouting “You Lie!”  (Code Pink had been barred as a guest of a Congress-woman during the Bush Administration for fear they would do what a Congress man did.)  But… is this a proposal to dissolve the two parties and show that the bitter arguments of governance are, at the elite level, a facade?  Or is this supposed to launch a new Era of Good Feeling, the kind of which we have not seen since the Federalists threw in the towel and co-opted the James Monroe Administration?

There wasn’t a State of the Union speech delivered until Wilson’s time — Jefferson had deigned toward obsequious displays of humbleness and this clashed with that.  But, you can imagine the partisanship that would televise through the years in rolling down the Senate division chart (and surely one exists for the House Chamber).  Funny thing here, though: note the 1855 session breakdown.  Interesting.  One Republican.  While he pretty well sat alongside the breaking-apart the party Whig and unsettled Northern contingency that was the “Opposition” party (amalgam of Whiggery, Republicanism, and American Know-Nothing), it is… you see… the case that at one point, there was a one member Republican Senate contingency.

So, congratulations.  Amos Nourse.  I understand he yelled at President Pierce “You Lie”, and was thus reprimanded, which strings together the eras of the Republican Party from its 1850s holding to its twenty-first century state.

Nutcases.  That’s all.

The tragic shooting in Tucson, Arizona over the weekend, which left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in a coma and six others dead, has been universally condemned both by Democrats and Republicans, as you would expect in any civilized society where violence and assassination with semi-automatic weaponry are considered inappropriate responses to political differences. But while even Sarah Palin — a forceful opponent of Giffords who once published an infographic targeting Giffords through gun sights — was publicly calling for “peace and justice,” at least one member of the retail comics community had a different message: “1 down, 534 to go.”

You can go to the link from the story.  There you will find two updates to offer some clarification.

UPDATE: You might be interested to read a long explanation of my thoughts on human rights, legitimate government, and when revolution is justified.
Not really. *
UPDATE: You should also read this quick flowchart to see exactly how you and I disagree politically. Despite the fact that you were drawn to this blog because of a tasteless subject line, I’ll bet that you agree with me on several big points, and perhaps all seven out of seven.
Surely he too was angry at the passage of HR 563.  Surely that absolves the entire matter.

Unfortunately I wouldn’t be all that surprised if this boosted his sales.  An annoying aspect of the news coverage of this story is seen by going over to the LA Times.  There, focused on a topic of “civility” and speech, is a photograph showing a focus on some such talk radio host you and I have never heard of, undoubtedly eating up his media attention, readying for the radio to comment profusely on his media attention.

During the interview, authorities say he acknowledged having made the calls, and said that while he had consumed alcohol before doing so, he still felt he was functional enough that at the time he could have driven his car.  And with that, I google up the McDermott story and see a talk radio guy’s website — who may or may not be the same guy but at least bears a resemblance — and his take on this story:

According to CBS News’ Political Hotsheet Habermann said he was trying to “scare” politicians “before they spent money that didn’t belong to them,” but added he had never intended to actually hurt them – particularly because he didn’t want to do anything that could jeopardize his access to a $3 million trust fund.

There was a slightly more realistic threat against Senator Cantwell.  

But the talk radio host reacted to this story thusly:

Liberal media pundits, reporters, editors and the politicians that they love all owe conservatives an apology for their gross slander of their fellow Americans in their attempt to link conservative politics with the actions of a madman. […]
All of this is why many of these same people will be ecstatic that a man has been arrested for making drunken threats against Congressman Jim McDermott.

This is that immediate defensive stance of deflection — see also the Michelle Malkin video released piecing together any and all vitrolic material from “the Left” she could find.  See too Sarah Palin and her “blood libel” comment – sure sign that Sarah Palin will never be president.  To be honest, I have no concern about her “target” map (though am annoyed by her “surveyor symbols” retraction), but any number of other items.

Anecdotally, we can thrust up some items as the “You Lie” assault weapon, which I guess is the most disturbing item in the collection of news tidbits.  To get a handle on something more concrete for this at times nebulous problem, you turn to these statistics:  This impression is bolstered statistically by reports that the Secret Service has had to deal with a 400 percent increase in threats against the president, that U.S. Marshals are facing double the number of threats against judges and prosecutors, and that Capitol Police found that threats against congressmembers tripled in the first quarter of 2010

Policy wise, there is not much direction to go with “civility”.  This is that “you are the change you have been waiting for”, which trips up due to searches for equivalencies to balance “right” and “left” in a political culture that takes on tribal characteristics.  Policy-wise, you’re backed into mental health and gun access… which will go wherever they go.

* Update: Okay.  I looked at it.  Question one is whether you would or would not kill Hitler.  No, seriously.  Off of this we can launch a flow-chart toward “1 down, 534 to go.”  ‘Cause… you see ?

The channels in the 700 range, or thereabouts, are that package of music stations — song playing underneath rotating band or artist promotional images and promotional factoids.   I was bouncing myself between the “classic rock”, “alternative rock”, and “classic alternative rock” stations.  It is interesting that they use for Talking Heads a few photographs from their “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” appearance — trailing off long after the band disbanded.  There is an interesting difference between bands or artists of long stature and flash in the pan one hit or one or two charting album groups — more images to pull from for Led Zeppelin and rotate than for (wait for it) Sponge.

It gets weirder still for the factoids that roll through the song.  A Led Zeppelin song will go through some tried and true rock history lore that exists as a stock-pile of information for toss-out use by every rock dj of the past several decades.  Then there is this band with a song from either 2009 or 2010 who appear to be destined to share a similar career trajectory of Sponge.  Factoids?  “Drummer Steve’s favorite snack food is the pickle.”  They’re either joking around or waiting for a good hotel story.  Or maybe there was no choice but to pluck inanities from facebook profiles?