With Scott, GOP ship of state sails on...

If you happened to read beyond the first paragraph the reports on South Carolina Rep. Tim Scott's appointment to the U.S. Senate, you will learn that (1) he is the first black Republican to serve in that role from the south since 1881 and (2) he is virtually a political clone of retiring conservative Tea Party Sen.  Jim DeMint.

Not only that, we are informed by the New York Times that Scott "first earned his Republican credentials by serving  as a campaign co-chairman  in 1996 for Sen. Strom Thurmond, a onetime segregationist, in his final campaign."

With the defeat of Rep. Allen West of Florida in the November, and the departure of Scott, the GOP House will be without a single black.  But Republicans will now have a single African-American in the Senate.

We can only add that for Republicans, who were wiped out by black voters in November,  it's a start.

Of hurricanes, locusts and Michele Bachmann

THE REPUBLICAN presidential candidates and their kin have been constructing their own Tower of Babble since Annie Oakley arrived from Alaska to lay waste to the Obama Administration. Sarah Palin and her wondrous reflections on everything not verified by textbooks have sort of been orbiting on the fringes of the current crop of carnivores, but it does lead you to wonder whether there isn't some truth to the peril of peaking too fast.

Meantime we've been treated to the grapes of wrath from everyone else carrying the banner of God, Jefferson Davis, Glenn Beck and Grover Norquist. (I've left some others out, but you surely get the idea.)

Some samples of this political theater of the absurd: The President will declare martial law (Mentioned prez candidate Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican) ; The federal government should be "inconsequential'', hotshot (hot flash?) meteor Rick Perry; Obama is overreaching by encouraging children to exercise (Fox & Friends, presidential "advisors".) Obama is only interested in creating class warfare instead of jobs (House Majority leader Eric Cantor) ; Obama is a Communist, socialist and elitist because he put Dijon mustard on his hamburger. (Ready choir?)

And just now, candidate Michele Bachmann has plaintively lamented in response to the hurricane: "I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians."

If you don't mind, Michele, I presume we still have to get to the frogs, lice and locusts. I don't even want to wait for the movie.

Are these the cries of the wilderness?

WHO WOULD HAVE thought that we would be closing out a terribly troubled year with so much attention being paid to the minor crisis of sobbing adults? To all of the sobbers of the world it is a phenomenon for which they can give deserving credit to John Boehner. As you might have noticed, he has revived official sobbing to a new level of honored masculine achievement as he tearfully reflects on rising from an Ohio nobody to achieve the American Dream as the next Speaker of the House..

I've witnessed several instant sobbers besides Boehner. Glenn Beck, Alex Arshinkoff and my mother, may she rest in peace. Mom was a professional mourner in our little town and often showed up at wakes for people she didn't know, where she joined in tearful respect for the deceased. Unfortunately, it never occurred to her that that she was participating in the American Dream. Nor that some day as a woman with Old World traditions, she might hold public office.

Well, had she seen Boehner and the others showering tears in public, she would have been deeply moved, even though it was unlikely that she would have been motivated enough to go to the polls on Election Day.

But the current story line is sort of refreshing. The holiday season will now have a less threatening story line of pending school closings, higher unemployment and reports that Sen. Jim DeMint, the Vader figure from South Carolina, was preparing to have a voluminous report on the START treaty read, word for word, to block any further action. On the other hand there could be Republican filibusters to shut down the government altogether even though DeMint believes that forcing the pols to work through the Christmas season is totally "unChristian."

While I'm at it, may I suggest a way to discourage filibusters? Wouldn't it help if the senators were not paid for time they were idling while a distinguished colleague was reading the "Epic of Gilgamesh?"

If you really want to see uncontrollable sobbing all over the Senate chamber, I think my idea is worth a try. Money talks more than epics.

Jim Duh-Mint, back to the pulpit

While Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is under attack from the conservative Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), accusing him of being a closet gay, Graham's Republican colleague in the Senate, Jim DeMint, shown at right, is busying himself defending the tea party movement as being, blessed be, a "spiritual revival". DeMint, who is known for saying a lot of silly things, (He predicted a year ago that the health care reform bill would fail and would be President Obama's "Waterloo"), now opines that government is failing because it has "turned its back on God." Hear him out:

"I think some have been drawn in over the years to a dependence relationship with government and as the Bible says, you can't have two masters and I think as people pull back that they look more to God. It's no coincidence that socialist Europe is post-Christian because the bigger the government gets the smaller God gets and vice-versa. The bigger God gets the smaller people want their their government because they're yearning for freedom."Apart from the non-sequitur bit about freedom, might somebody remind DeMint that when the French revolted to rid themselves of oppressive royalty to, um, gain their freedom. they also buried religion, too, sending many clerics to the guillotine. It had nothing to do with socialism and much to do about putting food on the table.

But here I go again, preaching secularly to a South Carolina politician. I don't have a chance.

Anti-health reform mobs: Nullification next?

THE WORD FROM OTHERS:

The New York Review of Books has an essay by Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy: a Journal of Ideas, that has a sobering look at the growing clout of the Tea Party mentality that is partly fueled by racism. Saying that it's unlikely that the reaction would be as hatefully demonstrated if the Democrats had elected a white president. He writes:

"We can't measure this, and I'm not sure what good it would do us to know even if we could. What we do know is that this movement is backed by corporate millions, powerful media organizations, such as Fox News, and votes in Congress, and that it will be around for some time, advancing new scandals and lies. The next phase in all this, if health care passes, might well be 'nullification' lawsuits or resolutions in states that don't want to have to implement Obama's reform."

Tomasky notes that South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty have "intimated" that nullification would be the best course of action. (Sounds to me like the kind of stuff that was going around in South Carolina in the years leading up to the Civil War.)

THE BONUS ONUS remains very much alive, no matter where you look today. Even the Tribune Company, the mega-media owner of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and TV stations, is arguing in bankruptcy court that its $66 billion in bonuses were important to

"incentivize"(God, how I hate the word!) its management. David Carr takes up this silliness in his The Media Equation column in the New York Times.

"Let's say that a group of corporate executives uses scads of debt to take over a struggling company, sells off some profitable assets, lays off thousands of employees while achieving miserable results. And then less than a year after saddling the company with $8 billion in debt, they opt for bankruptcy.

"You'd expect them to walk the plank, or at the least, spend a good stretch of time in the naughty corner. but you wouldn't expect the top 700 managers to collect $86 million in bonuses. But that's just what might happen at the Tribune Co.

(By the way the guy defending incentivization (!) is the Tribune Co.'s chief financial officer, Chandler Bigelow III. That's not the sort of name that would head a Laborers Union.)

Thanks to Talking Points Memo for alerting us to the judicial setback for the wacky California dentist/lawyer Orly Taitz, who has been one of the national ringleaders in challenging President Obama's birthplace. Taitz is a birther who has been challenging Obama's legitimacy wherever she could park her lawsuits. But U.S. District Judge Clay Land (Georgia Middle District) decided he had had enough of her nonsense and fined her $20,000 for misconduct. Should you question the logic behind the fine, here is, in part what he wrote:

When a lawyer files complaints and motions without a reasonable basis for believing that they are supported by existing law or a modification or extension of existing law, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law. When a lawyer uses the courts as a platform for a political agenda disconnected from any legitimate legal cause of action, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law. When a lawyer personally attacks opposing parties and disrespects the integrity of the judiciary, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law. When a lawyer recklessly accuses a judge of violating the Judicial Code of Conduct with no supporting evidence beyond her dissatisfaction with the judge's rulings, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law. When a lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law, that lawyer ceases to advance her cause or the ends of justice.

The bookish right-wing polemicists

SCANNING THE Sunday book sections, it soon became apparent to me that the Obama boo birds are on wing rather early his year. And considering that the president hasn' t been in charge for more than seven months, this jury of "authors" has spent less time on their convictions than if he had been charged with a library fine.

The latest eruption from the right-wing jeering section is Michele Malkin's tome, Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheaters, Crooks and Cronies. Given the normal length of time to write and publish a book these days, it would be fair to suggest that our author, a right-wing polemicist, must have begun her outline for the Obama book when he was still at Harvard. But she's not alone. The ubiquitous Dick Morris, who has worked both sides of the aisle depending on the political climate of the moment, and his wife, Eileen McGann, are represented on the best-seller list by the apocalyptic work, Catastrophe, which the New York Times mini-captions as "stopping President Obama before he transforms America into a Socialist State".

There's also one by South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, who's out with a remedial book, Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide into Socialism. And forever, there is always something from Bernard Goldberg, one called, A Slobbering Love Affair, the true (and pathetic) story of the torrid romance between Barack Obama and the mainstream media.

Really, Bernie. Slobbering? And considering how far downstream the mainstream media have drifted for several years, they are too far away from the action for mutual slobbering.

Out of the mouths of...

FAIR WARNING to Jon Stewart: a new comedy team on Capitol Hill and in the outlands is getting dangerously closer to challenging your top-rated comedy schtick. The past week saw an avalanche of droll one-liners from Conservative Central. Can't stop laughing, and I don't have to wait until your late night news spoofing to make my day. Much of last week's fun derived from the so-called health reform debate but there were other fiscally conservative spinoffs. Don't have the space or energy to repeat all of the examples, but here are some that made the cut, with help from Think progress and other gag-watchers:

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., on the Obama health-care reform plan : The president is "dropping likc a rock. The plan would make us look like Havana in 1959 when Castro came in." (Or the U.S. when Dubya went out?)

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N. C.: "There are no Americans who don't have health care."

Rush Limbaugh, who thinks he should play the high priest in Mozart's Magic Flute: "Let's

face it, Obama's black, and I think he's got a chip on his shoulder."

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.: " If we're able to stop Obama on this [health care reform] it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

Lou Dobbs, CNN, on Obama's birthplace: "The questions won't go away because they haven't been dealt with."

Rush Limbaugh, again, on why he has an audience: "I'm inspiring."

U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn: "Let's agree that we're going to have PAYGO [pay as you go] enforcement, that we're not going to cry 'emergency' every time we have a Katrina, every time we have a tsunami, every time we have a need for extra spending, that we don't go call for a special appropriation to allow us circumvent the PAYGO rule. [Note to Blackburn's district of Memphis: Stop laughing. This could cost you big bucks, and everything you own!]

My sides are splitting.