Tea Party Candidate: Stop Telling People What I Said!

Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle is well-known for some nutty and some ominous statements, such as this one:

“You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that second amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact, Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.”“I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying, ‘my goodness what can we do to turn this country around?’ I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”

She later retracted the statement--sort of. But she hasn't backed off on her suggestion that her followers might engage in armed insurrection if they don't get their way.

But now, it seems that Angle is threatening to sue the Reid campaign--for reposting what she said on her own Website.

After the former state Rep won Nevada's Republican Senate primary, Angle's campaign took down most of its website, and later replaced it with a relaunched version that in some ways toned down her right-wing rhetoric. But Internet pages are rarely ever forgotten -- the Reid
campaign saved the old version, and put up a website called "The Real Sharron Angle," reproducing the old content.

Then, they say, the Angle campaign sent them a cease-and-desist letter, claiming misuse of copyrighted materials in the reposting of the old website -- which was, of course, being posted for the purposes of ridiculing Angle. The Reid campaign has in fact taken down the site, rerouting visitors to another website that goes after Angle's positions, "Sharron's Underground Bunker."

This is the thing about the TPers: the only way they think they can win is by concealing how nutty most of them really are. And they're willing to go to court to hide what they themselves have said, and to hide their nuttier beliefs until its too late. Fortunately, that's harder and harder to do in the age of the Internet.

In Iceland, the Clowns Are Running the Circus

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America has long had a tradition of comedians running for public office, with varying degrees of seriousness and success.

Smother Brothers regular Pat Paulsen was known for his perennial presidential campaigns. (One slogan: "I've Upped My Standards. Now, Up Yours.") Columnist Dave Barry was also a frequent contender. (Slogan: "It's Time We Demanded Less.")

Comedy Central pundit Stephen Colbert actually went so far as to try to file for both the Republican and Democratic primaries in South Carolina in 2008. (He dropped out of the Republican race because of the $35,000 filing fee; the Democrats refused to let him on the ballot.)

Your Humble Columnist, let's remember, has also thrown his hat in the ring from time to time. ("Saturday Night Live" alumnus Al Franken doesn't make this list, by the way, because he retired from comedy before running a serious campaign to become the junior senator from Minnesota.)

But what would happen if a comedian ran a joke campaign for office - and won? To my knowledge, it hasn't happened in America yet, although I do admit to the possibility that Michelle Bachmann's career is some sort of extended comedy routine, or possibly a piece of performance art. Britain's Official Monster Raving Loony Party has had some minor electoral success, most notably in municipal council elections in the U.K.

But by far the most successful intentionally comedic politician has been Iceland's Jon Gnarr, whose so-called "Best Party" pulled down 43.7 percent of the vote in recent elections in the country's largest city, Reykjavik, thus making Gnarr the mayor and putting the other Best Party candidates (described by The New York Times as "a who's who of Iceland's punk rock scene") in charge of governing a third of the island's population.

It's been a tough couple of years for Iceland. First the economy crashed and burned in a particularly spectacular way, then the government was wracked by one corruption and cronyism scandal after another, and finally, just to top it all off, the world now blames the country for screwing up transatlantic air travel because that volcano whose name no one outside of Iceland can pronounce keeps erupting.

So maybe Gnarr, who once played in a punk band called "Runny Nose" and who's known for pranks like calling the White House, the CIA and the FBI (yes, ours) to see if any of them had found his lost wallet was just what the country needed to cheer itself up.

"We want a city that's cuddly, clean and cool, with topnotch stuff as a general rule," Gnarr and his -fellow Bestians sang in their campaign ad, a "We Are the World"-style music video which also promised "a polar bear for the Reykjavik Zoo" and "A drug-free Parliament by 2020." (some blog readers may need to click through the get the video in full screen):

Now that they've won their plurality, the Best Party faces the dilemma of the car-chasing dog who actually succeeds: Now that they've caught the thing, what do they do with it? First came the task of building a coalition government, although Gnarr solemnly insisted he wouldn't work with anyone who hadn't seen all five seasons of "The Wire."

And, he reassured the people, "No one has to be afraid of the Best Party, because it is the best party. If it wasn't, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party. We would never work with a party like that." Hard to argue with that logic.

Gnarr and his cronies may have started as a spoof, but they seem to be buckling down and getting serious about doing the work of governing. "I love this city very much so I really want to do a good job," Gnarr told Britain's Financial Times last month. The Best Party's plans include harnessing Iceland's plentiful geothermal energy to turn the city into a "hub for electric cars." And I hear they really are working on getting that polar bear.

In Iceland's most populous city, the clowns really are running the circus. It's almost enough to make Your Humble Columnist think of running for office again. After all, as I often say, "How hard can it be?" Hmmmm ... that might make a good campaign slogan. Anyone want to form an exploratory committee? And can you pick up some beer on the way over?

It Won't Make Any Difference to the Zombie Liars

Slashdot Science Story | Climategate's Final Days

"Climategate may be on its way out. An investigatory committee at Pennsylvania State University has formally cleared climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann of any scientific misconduct. Mann was central in the so-called Climategate scandal, where illegally leaked emails were purported to indicate examples of scientists trying to cover up any lack of global warming in their data. This finding by the committee (PDF) is another in a series of independent investigations that have all concluded that no misconduct has occurred."

Not that this will stop the climate change deniers from bringing up "Climategate" as "proof" that global climate change is a "fraud." Just like the alleged ACORN "pimp videos" are still being trotted out as "evidence" that the organization is up to some ill-defined, but nefarious plotting at the behest of George Soros, or Nancy Pelosi, or someone, even though not one but two investigations found that the videos had been "heavily edited" and that the organization, while having some flaws in its management, had done nothing wrong.

We live in the age of the Zombie Lie, where misinformation never dies.

GOP Senators Go After Kagan By Attacking...Thurgood Marshall?

Dana Milbank:

As confirmation hearings opened Monday afternoon, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee took the unusual approach of attacking Kagan because she admired the late justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked more than two decades ago.

Justice Marshall's judicial philosophy," said Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, "is not what I would consider to be mainstream." Kyl -- the lone member of the panel in shirtsleeves for the big event -- was ready for a scrap. Marshall "might be the epitome of a results-oriented judge," he said

It was, to say the least, a curious strategy to go after Marshall, the iconic civil rights lawyer who successfully argued Brown vs. Board of Education. Did Republicans think it would help their cause to criticize the first African American on the Supreme Court, a revered figure who has been celebrated with an airport, a postage stamp and a Broadway show? The guy is a saint -- literally. Marshall this spring was added to the Episcopal Church's list of "Holy Women and Holy Men," which the Episcopal Diocese of New York says "is akin to being granted sainthood."

With Kagan's confirmation hearings expected to last most of the week, Republicans may still have time to make cases against Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Gandhi.

Every day, in every way, the GOP continues to present themselves to the world as the party of cranky old white men who think the civil rights struggle and desegregation were bad things and who wish all those noisy brown people would just learn their place (and who indignantly shout about "playing the race card" when anyone points out this very obvious fact).

GO LEMMINGS GO!

The PR Geniuses at BP

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You know, British Petroleum probably thought it had made a pretty good choice when it picked Tony Hayward to be its CEO.

He's young, he's good-looking, he's got great hair, and he's got that charming British accent. The power of this last trait is not to be underestimated, as I discovered in college when a classmate from Great Britain was explaining why he hadn't done his assignment for that day. "You can tell me anything you want," the female teaching assistant cooed, "as long as you do it in that accent."

I was not, it should be noted, well pleased by this. But it did teach me an important truth of life: You can get away with almost anything if you make it sound like you're doing it on "Masterpiece Theatre."

The operative word there being "almost." In the aftermath of the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf, Hayward, accent notwithstanding, has apparently discovered a true genius for ticking people off.

First he tried to downplay the potential effects of the spill, saying the effect of millions of gallons of oil spewing into the ocean would be "very very, modest" and that the spill itself would be "tiny."

Then Hayward exhibited the kind of sensitivity one would normally associate with decapitated French royalty when he told an interviewer, on-camera, "There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back." Gulf residents were quick to point out that since there are a few million people along the coast who could say the same thing, to say nothing of 11 workers killed by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, their sympathy for Hayward's inconvenience was, shall we say, somewhat muted.

Things went from bad to worse when BP Chairman Carl-Henrik Svanberg tried to step in to reassure people and managed only to step into an even deeper hole. "We care about the small people," Svanberg said after a four-hour meeting at the White House with President Obama. "I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are really companies that don't care, but that is not the case in BP, we care about the small people."

Now, I'll be fair here and note that Svanberg is a Swede and English is clearly not his first language. So he probably didn't really mean to imply that the people of the Gulf coast were hobbits. Still, when you're trying to manage a disaster of biblical proportions, it might be a good idea to have someone in front of the cameras who knows the language.

Fortunately BP, alone and embattled, managed to find a defender, a white knight who rode to the rescue of their besieged reputation. Who was this brave paladin, this defender of poor and downtrodden BP? It should surprise no one to learn that it was a Texas Republican.

"I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday," Rep. Joe Barton said during congressional hearings on the spill. "I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown." Barton actually apologized for the White House being so mean to poor BP.

That rumbling you heard immediately afterwards was the sound of a thousand Democratic political strategists dancing for joy. Horrified fellow Republicans immediately disavowed Barton, even threatening to strip him of his seniority on the Energy and Commerce Committee. It's OK, you see, to be a harlot for the oil industry, but it's a PR problem to be such a shameless one.

Barton immediately began his own familiar song and dance.

First, it was the old "I didn't really say that" defense: "If anything I have said this morning has been misconstrued to an opposite effect," Barton said, "I want to apologize for that misconstruction." Then the "well, I did say it but I'm sorry" sidestep: "I apologize for using the term 'shakedown' with regard to yesterday's actions at the White House ... and I retract my apology to BP." Now all that's left is to apologize to the English language for atrocities like "misconstrued to an opposite effect" and "tragedy of the first proportion."

So in the end, Barton's apologized, Hayward's been pulled off of "day-to-day" management of the spill by BP, and Svanberg is probably still asking everyone (in Swedish) "What? What did I say?" And the oil continues to flow.

Sigh. Even I can't find anything to be amused about in that.

Obama's Katrina?

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Is the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico “Obama’s Katrina”?

Certainly a lot of right-wing pundits and radio hosts would like to make it so. But then, these people have been looking for something to dub “Obama’s Katrina” since the day he took office.

As the watchdog site Media Matters points out, nearly every crisis, no matter how large or small, has been described by someone as “Obama’s Katrina”: the H1N1 flu, the Fort Hood shootings, the failed Christmas Eve plot by the Undiebomber, ice storms in Kentucky, the Haiti earthquake, the GM bankruptcy, the Nashville flood — I guarantee you, if Obama ever appears in public wearing white after Labor Day, someone’s going to call it “Obama’s Katrina.”

The ironic thing about all this effort to dub the spill “Obama’s Katrina” is that the people who are so eager to do so, such as Rush Limbaugh, are some of the very same people who became bitterly angry when the blame for that botched rescue and relief effort was laid at the feet of President George Dubbya Bush and his cronies.

So maybe when Limbaugh calls this “Obama’s Katrina,” he’s calling it “a really big and unmanageable thing that someone else screwed up and that’s totally unfair to blame the president of the United States for.” But probably not.

The major difference between this and the Katrina debacle is this: Hurricane relief was something the government knew how to do and didn’t do it. For example, as I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, we don’t have a secret oil-well-capping ship hidden away.

During Katrina, on the other hand, we did have a U.S. Navy ship (the USS Bataan) steaming right into the Gulf behind the hurricane with a full complement of helicopters, 1,200 sailors and Marines, a water purification plant and a fully functioning hospital — and it steamed around for six days waiting for orders while people suffered and died.

And that’s just one example of things we knew how to do, but which didn’t get done because of incompetence all the way up and down the governmental chain.

In contrast, we don’t really know how to plug a leaking oil gusher a mile under the ocean. And while we have some technology for containing oil spills (booms and the like), this is the biggest spill anyone’s ever seen. Scientists are studying effects they’ve never seen before. We are, in the words of Indiana Jones, “just making this up as we go.”

This, of course, raises the question of whether we should be drilling that deep at all, or whether we should, as Canada does, demand that the oil companies drill a relief well at the same time as the main one, as well as providing a plan in case of blowouts.

But that’s not a question you’re likely to be hearing from the crowd that was mocking the idea of keeping your tires properly inflated to save gas and chanting, “Drill, baby, drill” in 2008.

Some have faulted the president for not visiting the area enough. In response, the White House has stepped up presidential visits to the Gulf Coast to the point where you begin to wonder if he might ought to just move the whole White House down there. Of course, this leads to criticism from the “Obama is always wrong” crowd that he didn’t come down sooner.

But you know what? If I’m someplace where everything is going down the tubes, I don’t want the president of the U.S. on the ground in the area, sucking up the attention, trailing a battalion of reporters and causing security headaches.

I want him nice and comfy in the White House Situation Room, watching the thing in real time with communications and overhead satellite surveillance that only God himself could rival, surrounded by smart people who he listens to, and a phone he can give orders into. That’s why they built the Situation Room in the first place.

The president summoned top BP oil executives, including CEO Tony Hayward, to a meeting at the White House on Wednesday. We don’t know everything that was said, but there’s one phrase made famous at the time of Hurricane Katrina that I’m pretty sure Obama didn’t use. I’m reasonably sure no one said, “You’re doing a heck of a job, Tony.”