How can a non-existent agency steal an election?

How can it be that the greatest nation on earth can be the home of a major political party with so many half-wits?  For today's Exhibit #1, we call your attention to a Public Policy Polling Survey reporting that 49 pct. of  the Republican voters believe ACORN, the former urban community organizer, stole the election for President Obama.   That would have been quite difficult inasmuch as ACORN was disbanded two years ago.  But the PPP pollster said there was still a very modest sign of progress  among people who expressed that belief because 52 pct. of the R's polled earlier believed ACORN was guilty of theft in Obama's first election in 2008.

Bachmann: Name, rank and serial number only?

HOW CAN I say this gently? Oh, hell!... Michele Bachmann is from Planet Pathetic, that mysteriously orbiting fragment that delivers folks to Congress to provide content for Fox News and diversion for everyone else.

Frankly, if Michele weren't an elected Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, which is looking more like a failed state every day with Norm Coleman's senatorial stonewalling, no one would take notice of her fanciful gibberish. But it is worrisome to me that she gets to vote along with normal people on everything that passes through the House of Representatives. I say normal because that's how some of the other crackpots in the House measure up so favorably against her verbal meltdowns.

That being the case, you may fairly ask , why all of the new attention that she has drawn these days from the gallery? Well, she is unhesitantly casting herself as a potential World War II detainee like the Japanese who were rounded up on our soil for internment. She leaps to that vacuous conclusion because of an encounter with the Census Bureau that, by law,will ask her to answer some questions for the 2010 Census. She says she will report no more than the number of people living in his home, which means she intends to break the law. "We will give the number of people in our home, and that's where we're going to draw the line," she told a flattering Glenn Beck, the tearful wannabe comedian and Limbaugh sound-alike, on his Fox show. Besides, she said, she doesn't want people from ACORN, the community organizers, knocking on her door for information. She despises ACORN.

You should also know that she has linked President Obama to swine flu, insisting that such epidemics occur only under Democratic presidents. (She tends to be forgetful. The las one was under Gerald Ford, a Republican) and once asked for an investigation of Congress to root out anti-American members. She also is satisfied that she was sent to congress by God.

Fair warning. But to repeat: she gets to vote like everybody else. .

TGIF stuff

TGIF Musings:

Once again,  President Bush started our day with a step-by-step diary of how the nation ended up in an "extraordinary crises"  that paralyzed the economy.  His old daring, defying voice was absent as he addressed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and much of what he said everybody already knew anyway.  It was almost the old excuse that the culprit didn't know the gun was loaded.  I am a terrible economist but I do suspect that the perfect storm that shut down our wallets didn't just happen in a few weeks but began to gather with rising force more than a few years ago while the Bush administration sat inattentively on the sidelines to avoid intruding on the wild spree of the free marketplace.  And thank you, too, Alan Greenspan.  Obviously none of the Bush economic circle  chose to heed Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman's warnings when a lot of people were euphorically cashing in on the housing market.  It was Teddy Roosevelt, I believe, who referred to the tycoons of his day who by hook or crook made fortunes as "the wealthy criminal class."  Sounds about right. 

'Todd Purdum's bouncy address to the Akron Roundtable the  Tangier caromed nicely between serious reflection on the current presidential campaign and light humor that helped one a bit  to digest the salty pork chops on the luncheon plates. Purdum, the national editor of Vanity Fair,  described the current campaign as a race between an "egghead and an egg breaker," asserted that race is "the question of the year," lamented the ugly tone of the combat and  observed that the official lineup on both sides of the ballot suggested that "any boy or girl can grow up to be president.  It's just one of the risks we take."  He also expressed his uneasiness with  Sarah Palin's presence on the GOP ticket - a "skin cell" from the presidency. 

It does seem, well, awkward to me that the Justice Department, as well as John McCain, have fogged up the past few weeks of the  presidential campaign with investigations and accusations of mischief and  alleged misdeeds of ACORN.  There won't be enough time to prove the validity of any of this.  But that's not the point,  The goal now is to confuse the public even more than it is already confused to create doubt and suspicion about THAT ONE.   Add this to the quadrennial GOP complaints of voter fraud,  such as the current challenge to tossed-up Ohio,  and it soon dovetails nicely with what Republican officials  have long told me what they wish for on Election Day:  rain, snow, anything that discourages the turnout.   Do their lobbyists hang out with the meteorologists, too,  on K Street?