Today was apparently “Benghazi Day” on Fox News.  Undoubtedly on talk radio, excepting for the possibility that Limbaugh might be talking about himself and his current dealings with his syndicate for a few hours.

Looking over the conservative blogosphere and message board land, I am always struck on the chest thumping of this rather innocuous Hillary Clinton quote, taken askew out of context to shade into nefarious covering of the up.  When this happens, you suspect nothing but a broad stoke of searching for the gotchas.  An auto-pilot that will play out any quote and spit out something that looks like this “Impeach Obama for stock market declines” whether it fits the reality or not.

And here we get to an interesting “looking past Obama” fissure on it, which slides into the confluence of the Democrats sighing on the panel and the anti-Obama figures slap dashing their hand… it’s an accidental “point”/ “same point” I saw when reading over my opinion magazine blogs this day.  Observe.

Point:  “The meta message that they’re trying to get out there is that this is a failure in judgment that goes to character,” Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, a senior Democrat on the Oversight and Foreign Affairs panels, told The Hill. “It didn’t work with Obama, so [they’re hoping that] maybe it’ll stick to Clinton.
“They’re trying to bring her numbers down. That’s what this is all about.”

Same Point.
My Twitter feed tells me that these hearings will spell the doom of the Obama administration. I’m going to make the wild prediction that it most certainly will not. It may spell doom for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chances as president in 2016, but even that will depend on who her opposition would be.

Supposedly Clinton is unassailable right now — I saw a dailykos post which referenced her having the surest road to the White House since Eisenhower.  (“She’d win Kentucky, for Pete’s sake!“)  In a few years we’ll find out if this is all actually true — she’s swerving back to a partisan figure after one term of not being so.

The post-mortems for a special election — one of big stature because of the Republican Comeback figure of Mark Sanford…

… he won.  It’s South Carolina.  The Republicans “came home”, and all that.  Judging from the campaign comments coming out of Elizabeth Colbert Busch during the home-stretch — she was in that “finding a center of a center of a right flank” bind.  And so Mark Sanford’s gambit of challenging a cardboard cutout of Nancy Pelosi across the state worked like a charm.

There will be a moment of partisan stoking going about … Republican spin “Even someone with Mark Sanford’s baggage”, Democratic spin is a little harder, but hinges on relative closeness, and… I don’t know… may go to “will take him on in the general election”.

Now herein lies my question.  How did the Green Party candidate do?

And mind you… in the last two Senate elections, the Green Party is what you would have had to turn to avoid Democratic joke candidates… (“When I say ‘Alvin’, you say ‘Greene’. “)  [Though I don’t think the Green Party had a candidate in 2008, so never mind.)

At the moment, with 91 percent of the precincts reporting… he appears to have won point five percent.

His goal of getting to the high single digits appears to have been a non-starter.  I suppose the interesting thing about the last poll, which showed Sanford edging ahead and this candidate Eugene Platt at four percent — if the margin of error were four percent, he would indeed be within the margin of error.

Internet commenters buzz in and ask the provocative question, which is just a means to start off into some stuff they have

This guy’s been busy.  (See too down here.)

Ever wonder why Portland has such a long history of opposition to fluoridation?

No.  Not really.  Gauging the dates, I have a pretty good idea why, but nonethless we get into this.

It might have something to do with this (excerpt from “The Fluoride Deception” by Christopher Bryson):

Or… it might be — let’s see…
1956 … no.  This is about the Commies.
1962 … no.  This is about the Commies still.
1978 … yes.  No longer fear the Commies.
1980 … no.  Reagan Revolution, from the ascension of the Christian Right — fighting the United Nations.  To be fair by this point we do have this “Military Industrial Complex” molding in here to form “new coalition”s, which is where we are scrabbled in 2014.

Sold to New Yorkers as a public-health initiative, the Committee to Protect Our Children’s Teeth had powerful links to the U.S. military-industrial complex, and to the efforts of big industrial corporations to escape liability for fluoride pollution. In 1956, for example, the Committees booklet Our Children’s Teeth was hot off the press. Before most New York parents had an opportunity to read about fluorides wonders, lawyers for the Reynolds aluminum company submitted the booklet to a federal appeals court in Portland, Oregon, where the company had been found guilty of injuring the health of a local farming family through fluoride pollution (see chapter 13). Inside the booklet, the judges were told, “are to be found the statements of one medical and scientific expert after another, all to the effect that fluorides in low concentrations (such as are present around aluminum and other industrial plants) present no hazard to man.” (Today such a pseudo grass-roots effort would be known as an “astroturf” organization because of its fake popular character and essentially corporate roots.) The committee was funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and its goals were to break the political logjam in New York and to help topple dominoes across the country, according to the committee’s program director, Henry Urrows. “That was the working assumption-our justification as far as the Kellogg people were concerned-and it turned out that was quite correct because we broke the back of the anti-fluoridation movement by winning in New York and Chicago,” Urrows told me.

Well they didn’t break Portland!

All very interesting.  But you do have to say… at least the Communist and Corporate Malfeasors accidentally stumbled into imrpoving the populace’s teeth enamel.

Well, let’s see.

“This really does reshuffle the deck in some fascinating ways that confound traditional lines,” said Phil Keisling, director of the Center for Public Service at Portland State University’s Mark Hatfield School of Government. “It has created some pretty interesting bedfellows on both sides of the ideological divide.”
How interesting? Consider some of those lining up against fluoridation: the Oregon Sierra Club’s Columbia Group, the Portland NAACP, the libertarian Cascade Policy Institute, the Kansas Taxpayers Network and an Indiana-based alternative health company that advocates, among other things, using tanning beds for vitamin D dosage.
On the other side? OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon, the Urban League of Portland, the Northwest Health Foundation, the campaign funds from several Democratic state legislators and conservative talk-radio host Lars Larson.

Hm.

Regretably the Oregonian doesn’t seem to have this letter in their oregonlive page, but there was actually a letter in today’s paper arguing the portion of the water district not getting to vote on the measure, which alludes to a kind of “No Fluoridation without Representation”… could be the slogan that brings the measure down if the part of the district can swing the election.

Something I knew I would see in quick order when I saw the Portland Mercury’s cover — blurbing why the Sane Opposition Against Water Fluoridation is Wrong, or some such phrasing…

… the Anti-Fluoridation crowd would stick their literature into the boxes.

And so it is.  Interesting, they haven’t done so with the Willamette Week boxes.  Which has the same editorial position for water fluoridation.  But the cover is of “Best New Band”…

A curious thing.  A couple of the reasonings against water fluoridation — inherent in the campaign slogan “Fluoridation Chemicals” — are just kind of obnoxious.  As in — if I go ahead and sympathize with their cause, the reasons would not be “chemicals in the pure water” — which seems to suggest this pure water where the city can just nab pristine water and out of the tap comes one parts H and 2 parts O that has never touched anything between there and here.  The other line lands about where climate change skeptisim and tobacco industry hacks always land: “science divided”.

Of course, there is a line of logic in the Willamette Week’s editorial which is faulty.  Skip to the part about the association of dentists, if they were going on their material interests, would be against water fluoridation.  There’s an interesting “can have it both ways” on the matter — hypothetically, if the national association of dentists or whatever the umbrella group was came out against water fluoridation — um… one could claim they had material interest to do so, and throw away whatever principled opposition by way of the alternative science divided being delivered?  No, that whole part of the column throws me for a loop.

“Ain’t that wacky” news of state legislators saying stupid things… we swerve over to actions taken by state legislatures themselves — Arizona passes gold and silver coinage because they’re Arizona and Mississippi passes Federal Gun Law Nullification…

… and then you jump to New Hampshire’s state legislators.  And it is worth doing a google news search on the phrase “New Hampshire leigslator” for this type of thing.  Because we’re going to find minor selebrity status from crazy comments.

Minor celebrity status earned by “New Hampshire legislator” for such things as… oh, Boston Marathon Trutherism.

Or… “Aren’t you worried about Armed Revolution” if Immigration Bills pass guy.  (I like the “Exclusive Follow-up Interview” line in this thinkprogress report… because this is such a huge “get”?)

We’re going back months now, but here’s a civil libertarian defense of … abusive relationships.

And… blah de blah on this.

Does any of this matter?  That a New Hamsphire legislator said stupid or crazy thing?  It is that thing that does follow out into the International Media — Iran’s Press TV — and the fact that they are elected officials gives it some “credence”.

The development comes as a US state lawmaker recently blamed the American government for the Boston Marathon bombings, describing it as a “Black Ops terrorist attack.”

(When the local alt weekly’s blog noted a college football player at the University of Oregon was posting “Sandy Hook Truther” videos on his twitter page, the first response was “A 19 Year old doing something stupid is not news worthy” — a matter that’s worth debating, I suppose — should we care or not?  Whatever the case, he’ll never be cited by Iran’s Press TV.)

The problem with New Hampshire, as opposed to the problem with [fill in the blank state full of cranks that we get these “State Legislator said stupid thing” story] — to wikipedia with the math:

The House of Representatives consists of 400 members coming from 204 legislative districts across the state, created from divisions of the state’scounties. On average, each legislator represents about 3,300 residents. If the same level of representation were present in the U.S. Congress, that body would have approximately 99,000 members, according to current population estimates.

Other factors are at work — the enclaves of “Free State” Libertarian utopias will surely create things — but mostly the matter comes down to … that’s a lot of elected officials to represent everyone and anyone.

Hm.

South Carolina has a reputation for dirty tricks, and next week’s special election between former Gov. Mark Sanford (R) and businesswoman Elizabeth Colbert Busch (D) is no exception.

Push Polling.  The most obvious example in terms of “South Carolina’s reputation” is… Bush V. McCain.  And behold the “on one hand” “on the other hand” use in the wikipedia article.  This one comes down to this:

An unidentified party began a semi-underground smear campaign against McCain, delivered by push polls, faxes, e-mails, flyers, audience plants, and the like.^[14][54] These claimed most famously that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains’ dark-skinned daughter Bridget was adopted from Bangladesh; this misrepresentation was thought to be an especially effective slur in a Deep South state where race was still central^[49]), but also that his wife Cindy was a drug addict, that he was a homosexual, and that he was a “Manchurian Candidate” traitor or mentally unstable from his North Vietnam POW days.^[14][48] The Bush campaign strongly denied any involvement with these attacks;^[48] Bush said he would fire anyone who ran defamatory push polls.^[55] During a break in a debate, Bush put his hand on McCain’s arm and reiterated that he had no involvement in the attacks; McCain replied, “Don’t give me that shit. And take your hands off me.”^[47]

Now then…

“What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you she had had an abortion?”
“What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you a judgeheld her in contempt of court at her divorce proceedings?
“What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if she had done jail time?”
“What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you she was caught running up a charge account bill?”
“What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if she supported the failed stimulus plan?”
“What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you unions contributed to her campaign?”

I would go for the big one and ask “What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you … she was the sister of Stephen Colbert?”

… Kind of what she’s best known for nationally, but may not have made a dent regionally.  And I don’t know if he has statewide appeal.

In other … allegations of “dirty tricks“…

A website connecting users looking for casual, and often extramarital, affairs is making Mark Sanford the face of their new marketing campaign.

AshleyMadison.com unveiled a billboard on Interstate 26 in Columbia, which shows a younger Mark Sanford smiling, next to the words, “Next time use….AshleyMadison.com to find your ‘running mate’.”

Mark Sanford posits… Just what is this website?

“South Carolina is the land of strange politics and in essence, dirty political tricks,” Sanford says.  “I think the reality we’ve all seen over the years, is you never know quite what’s coming in the last week of a campaign and I put this in that category.”

A front group for the state Democratic Party?  Is that what he’s implying?

And, yes indeed, strange politics.  Like… to quote his opponent during the one debate they had… “When we talk about fiscal spending and we talk about protecting the taxpayers, it doesn’t mean you take the money we saved and leave the country for a personal purpose.” — Appalachia Trail, he saideth.  (Sanford didn’t have a response in the debate… which is odd, because that’s the one thing you know is coming.)

According to AshleyMadison.com Founder & CEO Noel Biderman, said “Mark Sanford’s overcome a series of personal and professional hurdles to earn his place back in public service. While he recognizes the consequences of his actions, he maintains that his affair refined his life, but should not define it.”
Biderman hopes his campaign will strike a chord with voters to help secure Sanford’s place back in office. “There’s a changing tide,” Biderman adds. “More and more Americans are willing to forgive and forget. Millions of people have affairs and powerful politicians are no exception.”
The naughty dating site said they plan to add several more billboards in the weeks leading up to the big special election on May 7.

(Blink).  (Blink).  (Rub eyes.)  No, I don’t understand that rationalization either.  It’d be better to just say they’re taking advantage of the circumstances around the special election for publicity, and not cloud it around supposed “support” for either candidate.

For what it’s worth… Ron and Rand Paul have both lent their endorsements for Sanford. As has Larry Flynt… even though, politically speaking, that shouldn’t make sense.  Except to make a point about politics and sex, which I suppose trumps

ON TO MASSACHUSETTS.  Sort of regrettably, the “moderate”-ish man won the Republicna nomination.  And there really wasn’t too much entertainment value in the other candidates either.   Maybe there’ s something in the Independent candidate on the ballot… who gets tagged in the media with this label:

— perennial candidate Jack E. Robinson III

First ran in 2000, apparently.  Will never repeat this high water mark.

At least there’s the Socialist Workers Party candidate.  The party’s been shuffling her around on various ballot spots since 1993.