The petition to impeach Barack Obama from the Senate has reached 10,000 signatures. The whack jobs may not have noticed that Obama has resigned from the Senate already. Oh, we can make fun of these whack jobs, and they mightily deserve it, but it is disturbing to me to imagine what the thinking processes of people such as this are like. Here’s the petition, which includes all the crimes they identify against Obama, and here is the list of signatories. (The end of the list is the best part.)

This is all about leadership, of course. Whack jobs are not generally going to be led to sanity, of course, but leadership in the Republican Party is lacking, either in sanity or in numbers. For instance, as I noted a couple days ago, the Republicans are going to have to try and replace George Voinovich seen, according to the latest reports. Chris Cillizza speculates on who will succeed Voinovich, and notes that the Republican bench in Ohio is strong, as opposed to the Democrats, but Cillizza doesn’t note that the radical religious right has a stranglehold on the Ohio Republican Party, and that will spell serious trouble in their selection of a more moderate candidate, and also in getting their candidate elected. The prediction here is they will opt for a whack job for their leadership.

Like Norm Coleman. These whack jobs will evidently defend Norm Coleman at all costs, even to the end of displaying their inability to read. This is the leadership of the GOP thinking 37% is a majority, not some lone whack job with a petition. I’m beginning to think the severe hatred of Al Franken has brought out the inner whack job in the Republican Party leaders, not that that inner whack job was hiding very effectively. Hey, Norm Coleman himself is such a whack job that he claims he loves Minnesota at the same time he wants to deny their representation in the Senate. Sure, losing can unhinge a candidate, but this guy’s hinges were barely hanging on in the first place.

The question is not about who is leading the whack jobs and their insane conspiracy theories, but whether the leaders of the Republican Party will ever wake up and recognize that they are being led by the whack job wing of their party so much that the term “whack job” has become an intimate part of the Republican brand. Sure, one reads the phrase “failed Obama Presidency” in the latest P. J. O’Rourke column and if one is a Democrat one giggles a little, just before thinking that there likely are many whack job Republicans, both in the leadership and the ignorant rank and file, for whom the phrase “failed Obama Presidency” is historically accurate, even though it refers to something in the future.

Hey, Haley Barbour, this problem you’ve got with the Republican Party repairing its brand is far worse and far different than what you report to the Wall Street Journal. Here’s one commentator who doesn’t think you’re going to figure out the enormity of your task for a very long time. Indeed, here’s one commentator who can’t tell whether there are any Republicans left who are NOT whack jobs.

Everyone knows Hillary Clinton was the most hated politician of the last 20 years, on either side of the aisle, at least most hated by the GOP. Just the mad and insane rumormongering about Hillary Clinton is enough to amaze. They said she killed Vince Foster because of an affair, for God’s sake, while at the same time maintaining that Hillary had lesbian lovers. Those rumors have become such a staple. . . well, here’s MadKane on the subject. Oh, there’s no doubt Hillary Clinton is the one Republicans love to hate, but she’s losing her crown. The new “Most Hated Democrat” is Senator Al Franken. From Politico:

“I don’t know if we’ve ever had an opponent who is so disliked by Republicans as Al Franken,” said Minnesota Republican Party Chair Ron Carey, who cautioned that Coleman’s election challenge could still turn the results back his way. “It’s one thing to lose to an honorable opponent, but Al Franken is not considered an honorable opponent by Minnesota Republicans.”

Marty Seifert, the Republican leader in the Minnesota House of Representatives, said Franken’s long record of antagonizing conservatives would make it difficult for him to connect with voters who supported Coleman.

“It’s going to be hard for Franken to be very effective with any Republicans, in terms of having any credibility with us, just because he’s been so nasty in the past,” Seifert said. “He certainly has callous and very partisan behavior in the past that is beyond the pale.”

According to Carleton College political scientist Steven Schier, Franken’s record as a “flamboyant and aggressive partisan” would make him ripe for criticism back home.

“I think it’s impossible to overstate the hostility Minnesota Republicans feel toward Al Franken,” Schier said. “He will be a very useful fundraising tool.”

Republicans outside Minnesota are equally apoplectic when it comes to Franken. Prominent conservative Rush Limbaugh, who Franken mocked in the title of one of his books, has already jabbed Franken on his radio show, telling listeners in December that Franken “won’t quit [the Senate race] because he doesn’t know how to get a real job…He’s a pathetic figure.”

Sure, it isn’t surprising that Franken is hated by Republicans, but these guys at Politico are a bit disingenuous using Rush Limbaugh as an example of just how hated Franken is by Republicans. First, while it is true that Rush Limbaugh is an expert at hate, he’s not someone appropriate to use as an example concerning either the subject of partisan hatred or Al Franken. First, Limbaugh is the undisputed king of hate, and despite his coming off of his illegal drug addiction it is not clear Rush has mellowed these last couple of years. Zecond, Rush and Franken have had a thing going over the last several years at least since the publication of Franken’s “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot,” perhaps the most insightful story of psychopathic personalities since Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi. OF COURSE Rush hates Franken. Why, though, should other Republicans hate Franken?

Well, the other vaunted Franken book is a study of psychopathic tendencies among large groups of people. If there was a Nobel Prize for psychology, or even for humor, I’m sure Franken would have won the award for “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” truly a trip into the dark side of the mind of a Republican. The facts here are that Republicans hate Franken for telling the truth, and also for showing that people don’t like the ugliness and dirty politics the Republicans have been feeding America for nearly 30 years. Let’s face it, Franken is about as big an underdog as you’ll see in an election. His background is as a comedian, for God’s sake, and he beat Norm Coleman, a Senator who was far from controversial, indeed, far from having a personality. Franken STILL WON!

There’s why Republicans hate Franken – they’ve buried their own party in ineptitude, hate, incompetence, runaway spending and corruption that even a comedian who starred in some of the most stupid movies of all time can beat one of the most innocuous Republicans in the country. That’s the measure of how woefully crippled the Republican party is, and that’s why Al Franken is now the man Republicans like to hate most. Step aside, Hillary, because you’re not the most hated anymore. Make way for Al Franken.

If only Bush were visiting Mike Brown this week we would have the finest possible ending to the Bush Administration, all filled with poetic justice and everything. But “Brownie,” the most potent symbol of the incompetence brought to us by Bush and Cheney these last eight years, brings us a moment of poetic justice nonetheless. You remember Brownie, the man who horrifically botched the government’s response to the Katrina disaster, at least partly through a failure to evacuate citizens. Well, Mike Brown himself was evacuated today because of wildfires in Colorado. Here it is from the Washington Post:

Former FEMA Administrator Michael Brown, a.k.a. “Brownie,” was among approximately 11,000 residents of Boulder, Colo. evacuated yesterday amid raging wildfires that have scorched at least 1,000 acres. After his eagerly anticipated resignation in Sept. 2005, the poster boy for the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina moved back to the Boulder area, where he once served as legal counsel to the Arabian Horse Association and now operates a disaster consulting business.

“I got back home to Boulder, the winds were just whipping up 60, 80 miles an hour, I was working in my home office, the dogs start barking and lo and behold there’s a Boulder County Sheriff with lights flashing saying there’s a mandatory evacuation,” Brown said during an interview this morning on KOA-AM’s “Colorado’s Morning News.”

The poetic irony of the whole thing makes me smile. The comments on the Washington Post article make me smile much more.

Joe Wurzelbacher, who showed that Republicans could be fooled into listening to a serial failure if he’s got a populist nickname like “Joe the Plumber,” is going to Gaza. No promises he’ll solve the 60 year old crisis there, but he’s going to get us in touch with average Joes, or Abduls, or whatever. This may be the stupidest idea to hit journalism in a long, long time. Of course, that assumes you consider Pajamas Media, the folks who hired Joe for this stupid stunt, to be a legitimate member of the media.

Let’s be clear. Joe Wurzelbacher fascinates Republicans, but even that fascination is misguided. Joe is not average. He aspires to owning a plumbing company, supposedly, but he needs to aim lower and aspire to average first. This guy’s got some serious delusions of adequacy. Why then, are Republicans fascinated by the whole Joe the Plumber schtick? It isn’t because Joe is related to financial criminal Charles Keating. No, that would spoil the mystique Joe’s got going of being a walking talking Ken doll. I think that’s the appeal to Republicans. Joe Wurzelbacher has enough personality to pull off the “Joe the Plumber,” “Joe the Campaigner,” and “Joe the fill in the blank” roles because he came that way in the box from Mattel. Barbie won’t let him have the dreamhouse? Fine, then he’ll be Joe the Army Ranger, or Joe the Toolbag, or Joe the Mailman. He is an (inadequate) everyman, and that works for Republicans because they hope he reflects their constiuency. Does the Republican constituency also suffer from delusions of adequacy? Maybe so. I’ll let you make the call.

But what about this Joe the War Correspondent thingie? Well, it appears Pajamas media, that conservative web site with delusions of adequacy, has hired Joe Wurzelbacher to be its war correspondent in Gaza. Before I hear calls for changing the missions of both the Israeli and Hamas factions in that action so as to aim at war correspondents suffering from delusions of adequacy, let’s hear a little bit from Joe about his qualifications, from the Herald-Sun:

Wurzelbacher said he was going to let “Average Joes” share their stories and get the real story of what is happening.

“It’s tragic, I mean it really is,” Wurzelbacher told Ohio television station WNWO.

“I don’t say that in any little way. It’s very tragic, but at the same time what are the Israeli people supposed to do?”

. . . .

“If given the opportunity to do some good however minute it may be, or could be something really good, you gotta take that chance. You have to do it,” Wurzelbacher said of his new job.

To sum it up, Joe doesn’t know what he’s doing, both sides have their arguments, it’s all very tragic, and it could be solved by talking to other average Joes and Abduls and whatever. Oh, and this is an opportunity for Joe Wurzelbacher to make money at a real job do good! And Joe? He’s not afraid. He’s got God on his side.

Wurzelbacher said he was not concerned about heading into a warzone for a 10 days.

“Being a Christian I’m pretty well protected by God I believe. That’s not saying he’s going to stop a mortar for me, but you gotta take the chance,” he told WNWO.

I suppose the theory here is that God loves even those whose aspirations are of “average,” who wish to make it in this world far more as an American Idol sort of 15 minutes of fame sort, like Joe, but who truly, at root, suffer from delusions of adequacy. What is startling to me is that Joe even has a theology that covers for him, protects him even when he so stupidly takes on a role in a dangerous area of the world where he clearly has no business. He’s a Republican Pundit Wannabe Gone Wild, all right, and his next stint, hopefully at FoxNews, is just around the corner. Even then he will be searching for adequacy, though.

The presiding judge who will seat the panel to decide the disputes in the Al Franken Norm Coleman election tangle has recused himself, giving over the decision to Alan Page, Associate Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. Of course, those of us with some history know Justice Page as a Purple People Eater. Here’s the relevant text from CNN:

Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Magnuson has recused himself from appointing the panel of three judges who will preside over the post-election proceedings resulting from the lawsuit filed Tuesday by former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman.

Magnuson was one of four judges chosen by Secretary of State Mark Ritchie to join him at the helm of the recount on the state’s canvassing board.

Kyle Christopherson, a spokesman for the Minnesota state courts, said in a Wednesday statement that “the next senior justice, Associate Justice Alan Page, will decide how to fill the panel. He added that there was no information available about when that will happen.

I’m pleased to see Justice Page in charge. He was one of my favorite players back in the day. I trust him mightily.

It is not astuteness, wisdom or party loyalty the Republicans seek. It is not regional representation or an attempt to sway demographics. The Republicans are not looking for political power or someone with a history of success either, which would be difficult given the last two election cycles. It seems clear from a debate sponsored by Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist’s group, that the GOP values gun ownership quite highly, and that it is at least one qualification for RNC Chairmanship, if not the #1 qualification. Here’s some reporting from that debate from the Gun Guys, who themselves quoted the National Journal’s Hotline blog:

When moderator Grover Norquist asked how many firearms the candidates own, the current RNC chairman, Mike Duncan, who despite presiding over his party’s 2008 electoral trouncing is reapplying for his job, noted proudly that he claims four handguns and two rifles.

Rival Katon Dawson, chairman of the South Carolina GOP, said that he has “too many to count.”

Former OH Secretary of State Ken Blackwell was willing to count. Seven, he said, adding: “And I’m good.”

MI GOP chairman Saul Anuzis said he has two guns, but in case the RNC’s 168 committee members, who will vote this month for the next party chairman, wanted to verify his stash, Anuzis said, perhaps only half jokingly, that he is not allowed to carry them in Washington.

Chip Saltsman, who managed Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign, offered up a list so long it was hard to track the pistol persuasion.

And GOPAC head Michael Steele, a one-term lieutenant governor of blue state MD, was the only man on the panel to say that he hasn’t a single firearm.

Hotline discusses why such gun talk is innappropriate, and I’d agree it is innappropriate, especially in a city like Washington DC where the citizens are trying mightily to control gun violence. But the real question here is why the question comes up at all, and what it has to do with a Republican’s qualifications for running his party.

As it stands, if gun ownership is a vitally important qualification for RNC Chair, then Michael Steele seems out of the running. Katon Dawson of SC and Chip Saltzman seem to be the front runners by this estimation. But the better questions might be about which of these candidates owns semi-automatic weapons. Or maybe someone should suggest they have a shootout. At a target range? Come on! A target range doesn’t show a true measure of a Republican’s devotion to guns. Maybe we could have a shootout among the candidates, or perhaps we could send them all on a hunting trip with Dick Cheney, and the survivor becomes RNC Chair. Hmm. I can just see Mike Duncan out there carrying a couple rifles and four handguns, a regular Pancho Villa or something.

This is as pitiful as. . . a Republican. –Nuff said.

In Maryland that was evidently the case, according to an article by Lisa Rein and Josh White in yesterday’s Washington Post. More complete details are now out about the suveillance program conducted by the Maryland State Police, and it is shocking the kinds of citizens groups that agency decided to infiltrate and report on, on the slim rationalization that the groups might be harboring terrorists. This is a mighty report, that’s for sure. Here’s the lead, from the Washington Post:

The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored – and labeled as terrorists – activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.

Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a “security threat” because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation.

One of the possible “crimes” in the file police opened on Amnesty International, a world-renowned human rights group: “civil rights.”

According to hundreds of pages of newly obtained police documents, the groups were swept into a broad surveillance operation that started in 2005 with routine preparations for the scheduled executions of two men on death row.

The operation has been called a “waste of resources” by the current police superintendent and “undemocratic” by the governor.

I’m willing to bet, based on the fearmongering inherent in these actions, and the incompetence the officers showed in choosing who to monitor, that every single one of the officers who hatched this illegal and unconstitutional surveillance program were Republicans. Though he was not implicated in any of this wrongdoing, the Governor of Maryland at the time, Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr., is a Republican. Micheal Steele, current GOPAC Chair and candidate for the Chair of the RNC, was Lietenant Governor of Maryland when these ugly crimes took place. Alas, Republicans will counter that they are not crimes since no charges have been filed, but I value the constitution far more highly than they do.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a bicycle enthusist, and log ten to forty mile trips quite often throughout the spring and summer. I have even joined an advocacy group here in PA, the Friends of Schuylkill River Park. Thankfully I live in Pennsylvania, and there is no evidence, as yet, that police or others gone wild in their zeal to perform Homeland Security tasks have targeted that organization.

Well, that seems to be one of the conclusions of the research by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, as reported by FoxNews:

Of those sampled, almost 60 percent had sex and more than 50 percent had oral sex five years later, and more than 80 percent of those who had taken virginity pledges had forgotten they ever did so.

OK, that’s FoxNews, which leads the article with the encouraging, if misleading, headline “Study: Religious Teens More Likely to Abstain from Sex.” The real news can be found in several other articles on the web, but I’ll quote from Psych Central News:

The study found more than half of youths surveyed engaged in sexual activity, regardless of whether they had made a pledge to remain sexually abstinent.

Researchers also discovered something not entirely unexpected – virginity pledgers were 10 percent less likely to use a form of birth control.

. . .

The findings suggest that “virginity pledges” do little to deter teenage sexuality. It also suggests that people who take such pledges are at a slightly increased risk for pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases when they do have sex, due to their decreased use of condoms or other birth control.

I suppose that explains Bristol Palin, eh?

To be serious, the abstinence-only education the Bush Administration has squandered $200MM on is bound to fail, according to scientifically-based criteria, and the reason it will fail is that it depends on a pledge to take over for any notion of rational thought. The girl or boy who takes the pledge is as likely as any other teen to end up in a “romantic” situation, whether on Prom night or while playing pool in the local bar. When the situation gets out of control, the next morning that teen can just blame the moment, and need not blame the lack of responsible planning. That’s the effect of abstinence-only education – it is a program that results in the abnegation of responsibility.

Aw, teens today! They’re not responsible about sex, and thus don’t use condoms, at least if taught the Republican way. No, none of us are surprised that Republicans do not advocate responsibility.

I love this. Ken Blackwell, who is largely responsible as Secretary of State in Ohio in 2004 for George Bush’s win, thus responsible for the continuation of Bush’s disastrous Republican policies, is reaping his reward from the 24%ers who still support George Bush. More particularly, he’s getting the support for RNC Chair from the biggest of the Radical Right Wing Christian Clerics, according to a report by Ben Smith of Politico. Here’s a few of Blackwell’s extremist Christian supporters:

Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum (I once met her nephew by marriage. He was so ashamed of Phyllis he called her his “uncle’s wife” and would not refer to her as his aunt.)

James C. Dobson, Founder, Chairman and Grand Poobah, Focus on the Family (Didn’t his organization just lay off a whole bunch of workers? Why would anyone want the endorsement of such a failed enterprise?)

Dr. Ronald Godwin, Vice Chancellor, Liberty University, who was instrumental in popularizing Syun Mung Moon in the US – hey, that’s some claim to fame, working for two whack jobs, Moon AND Falwell!

Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council. (Did they ever get this guy for those serial murders?)

Tim LaHaye, Founder and President, Tim LaHaye Ministries, the man most responsible, probably, for promoting the notion of the “End Times,” and thus responsible, in part, for how that notion helped twist the Bush Administration policies.

Hey, this is a whole bunch of the extremist Christian right wing of the party supporting a black man, Ken Blackwell. Perhaps it is because Blackwell was such a good and obedient soldier in 2004? whatever, the real surprising this is that there are a couple folks one wouldn’t expect to see on this list. Sure, Pat Toomey of Club for Growth pretends to be a fiscal conservative, but he’s a religious whack job from way back. Steve Forbes is the one who seems out of place to me. Hey, the man had a bisexual father, didn’t he, and famously so. How comfortable could Forbes, who has never in the past cozied up to the Christian extremists, be?

Of course, the RNC Chair race isn’t over, but as a Democrat I am pleased to see the Christian whack job wing of the Republican Party coalesce behind Blackwell, who will be the divisive presence, and likely incompetent, too, that we wish on the Republicans.

Remote undisclosed locations, we wonder?

OK, the Republicans have cerainly been whining since the election. It isn’t just Alberto Gonzales whining over not having a job, or Pat Toomey of the Club for Growth whining about unions (you must need viagra to join, I understand), or Rick Santorum whining about a moderate Republican supporting unions. Heck, we could sit here for days cataloguing the whines, but it is more fun looking at the list of right wing blogger fantasies (read: desperate lies), I suppose.

Still, I’m not the only one noticing the Republican whines. Here’s a bit from Paul Krugman, who notes the Republican whining, but also notes that they should be whining about their decisions over the last 40 years. From the New York Times:

But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck – either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.

The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

. . .

Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.

That about pegs it. The Republicans took up the banner of the south in the 60′s and have kept blinders on ever since, not recognizing that America is getting more and more diverse, and more and more embracing of that diversity. Until Republicans realize that, they will be wandering in the wilderness, and a few are doing just that on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, turning their backs on reality and running for some vacation resort. According to Politico, Republicans will be flying to Vegas and Switzerland and further in order to escape the reality of their loss of power that day. That’s it as I see it, whining and heads in the sand. No, they will not recognize their failed policies for a long, long time.