Blue Texan at Firedoglake, after noting that the disruptors at a Texas town hall last week were organized by the Travis County Republican Chair, and how the disruptors seemed also to opposed Social Security and Medicare:

They’re just throwing a temper tantrum over “SOCIALISM!” — which in their wingnut brains applies to everything from TARP to the stimulus bill, and yes — to Social Security and Medicare.

They’re fringe, anti-government nihilists and they’re not interested in the government reforming health care, or anything else. The media, however, continue to frame these events as a referendum on health care reform, which they are not. One side wants to reform health care, the other wants to lynch the federal government.

This kind of sums up the key points we need to understand about the disruptors. It’s not really about health care to begin with, and it’s being inflamed not just by far-right front groups funded by corporations, but the Republican Party itself has deliberately decided to encourage and organize people to throw gurgling, babbling hissy fits.

So while some on the right put on their Chesire cat grin and proclaim that Democrats are somehow against ordinary Americans expressing themselves, it’s pretty clear which side is trying to prevent real debate. Their claims that we did such things to them are false and the result of the fevered imagination born of right wing victimhood, a necessary and ever-present mental contortion they use to justify wrong actions. A few Code Pink and such protestors here and there are simply not the same thing. Anyone can go pick out random incidents and make a false equivalence, a favorite tactic of the right.

Imagine, if you will, that during the lie-up to war the DNC and labor had adopted a deliberate strategy of shouting down Republicans at their district meetings, or anywhere else they appeared. Imagine that they hired tons of lobbyists and spent millions of dollars to do so. Imagine the airwaves, mainstream and not, filled with crazy-ass claims that George W. Bush was actually from another country and thus not the president. You get the idea.

As we all know, not only did that not happen, progressives had to show Democrats that they could win at the ballot box by vigorously defending basic Constitutional principles and at least talking about real problems like health care.

The only protestors I recall, for the most part, were individual Americans forlornly taking to the streets of our cities while many Democrats went along with the madness, and the protestors were often met with pepper spray and derisive cries of “traitors” from the right. What so offended the righties is that anyone would dare to oppose their madness, and they have now conflated peaceful, non-violent protest with their desire to destroy civil discourse once and for all.

As many have noted, it was only a few years ago that some Oregon teachers were removed from a Bush rally for daring to wear pro-Constitution t-shirts. I recall a public lecture series here in Vancouver during the Bush era, held on public property, at which a few anti-war protestors who desired only to silently hold small placards were escorted out of the venue, at the mayor’s insistence, by uniformed police, because their views were “insulting” or some such nonsense. Public resources were used to squash free speech, and the local newspaper didn’t seem to have much problem with it.

Yet here we are being lectured at by some of the same fools who couldn’t stand to have their eyeballs scalded by the searing sight of someone else’s views about the wrong-headed invasion of Iraq. Forgive me if I have had enough of the lies, the double standards and faux outrage.

What we did to the Republicans was beat them at the polls, and they can’t stand it. They can’t stand it so much they are throwing yet another magnificent, reprehensible hissy fit, mostly because it makes us mad. I guess we should get mad easier.

While it’s understandable that individual constituents may be confused and angry because of right wing distortions, or even not confused and angry for good reason, reasonable people will agree that a major political party deliberately shutting down public meetings as a strategy is petulant at best and dangerous to democracy itself at worst.

Leaving aside the real possibility that mentally unstable people will do bad things, here we have the remains of a reactionary conservative movement that built itself on “law and order” in reaction to the excesses of the 1960’s now behaving in the very manner it supposedly found so loathsome. History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it hardly seems like a winning strategy.

Sure, the obvious thing to do would be to shut down Republican town halls at every opportunity, if you can find any, up and down the ticket, but that’s well, too obvious. Far better to find creative ways to have real discussions, with or without the disruptors, and see if we can’t somehow make the health care system less nuts for regular people. I guess people who want to are going to yell and scream no matter what, but after they get done shouting and being rude there will still be the matter of tens of millions of Americans who have no health care insurance.

If this is the path Republicans continue to follow in their struggle to regain even a modicum of respect from most Americans, I’d have to say that in the long run we’ve already won.

Free Viagra.

Conservative impotence is a problem that can no longer be ignored.

He that soweth iniquity shall reap evils, and with the rod of his anger he shall be consumed.

I’m shocked but not surprised. From The Hill:

The Secret Service may investigate a fax sent to a Democratic lawmaker that depicts President Barack Obama as the Joker and warns of “death to all Marxists.”

The black-and-white fax portrays Obama in makeup similar to that worn by actor Heath Ledger in his portrayal of the Joker in last summer’s “The Dark Knight.”

On Obama’s forehead is a communist hammer-and-sickle insignia, and beneath the image is the text: “Death to All Marxists! Foreign and Domestic!”

Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) received the fax and passed it along to U.S. Capitol Police.

I’m sure the state’s editorial boards will renew their calls for civility on the left.

One little fact that is consistently being overlooked, even by some traditional media reporters, is that Baird had never scheduled any in-person town halls in August to begin with. A right-wing Portland radio host and a Republican blogger from Clark County started demanding that he do so, for obvious partisan effect. And if there’s one thing we know about Baird, it’s that you don’t get anywhere by pushing him.

I listened to his telephone town hall, and he took calls from quite a few Republicans, including some party chairs and the very same right-wing blogger who has teamed up with the Portland radio host. Much to my surprise, the format actually seemed to work pretty well.

So, predictably, conservatives are attacking Democrat Brian Baird, WA-03, for refusing to play their stupid “mob rule” game and will have telephone town halls instead of the rugby scrums desired by the tea birthers.

Which got me to wondering who else has used telephone town halls.

From a 2007 post by former Seattle Times reporter David Postman.

About 400 people pressed “1” and joined Reichert for his first district-wide “tele-town hall.” It was about an hour-long conference call that for Reichert has replaced the old-fashioned, in-person, town hall meeting.

Actually, Reichert, a two-term Republican, has never held a traditional town hall meeting. Early in his first term he convened a panel discussion to talk about Social Security. But that didn’t go well.

“People started chanting and yelling,” Reichert’s chief of staff, Mike Shields, said this week. The forum was moderated by Times editorial page editor Jim Vesely. He wrote afterward that the event turned into a “hockey game.” That was the end of any plans for open-door town halls for Reichert.

Go figure. It’s okay for Republicans, as always.

The Columbian reports on the findings of an audit concerning the failure of Bank of Clark County. The whole article is worth a quick read if you follow the financial meltdown, because the FDIC during the Bush administration appears to deserve some of the blame. But so do the “best and the brightest” of Clark County’s bidness guys ‘n gals, as they got caught in a death spiral of declining property values.

The report lays the bulk of the blame on bank management, which in several instances ignored the FDIC’s warnings. In its 2008 examination, FDIC examiners discovered the bank had failed to provide current appraised values on at least 11 of its loans, causing regulators to underestimate the bank’s need for backup funds.

“They were hiding appraisals — that’s pretty damning stuff,” said Scott Jarvis, director of the Washington Department of Financial Institutions, on Thursday.

One thing that still gripes me about this case is how certain bank customers were tipped off about troubles at the bank, and others were not. What’s troubling is that it appears, from best I can tell, no laws were broken.

It may be legal, but that doesn’t make it right. The local bidness guys ‘n gals ran this bank into the ground in their effort to secure huge profits from excessive development that was not justified by population growth nor demand. When the bubble burst they were screwed, as were customers who didn’t get the word to bail.

You’d think someone would do something, in addition to an audit. At the very least releasing insider information to some customers and not others should be illegal.

So Democrat Rep. Brian Baird, WA-03, is going to do telephone town halls instead of play along with the infantile tactics of the tea birthers. From The Columbian:

“What we’re seeing right now is close to Brown Shirt tactics,” Baird, D-Vancouver, said in a phone interview. “I mean that very seriously.”

As a friend of mine says, right on with your right on. It’s about time someone called this crap what it is. The right has been throwing Nazi analogies around like it’s going out of style, and now they’ll get their panties all in a bunch about Baird’s comment, no doubt. Too bad.

Oh, they just want to dissent? Then why has a certain right-wing radio host and her Vancouver based Republican blogger been dogging Baird about having town halls since last month?

Too bad for them, Baird is smart enough not to play their stupid game. And to the inevitable cries that Baird is afraid to have a town hall, I think we all know that’s complete baloney. He’s had a ton of them, including the beating he took when he decided to back the surge in Iraq, so so he’s no shrinking violet.

Naturally, what the righties backing the insurance companies want is that everyone lose sight of the true goal, which is decent health care reform. Regular people who don’t believe the birfers need to weigh in, and you don’t need a town hall to do it, telephones and email still work.

Look, the Republicans are enjoying all this because when the only power you have is destructive, that’s what you use, like a misbehaving child. And like a spoiled child, the GOP hasn’t really gamed this out all the way. Health care reform is coming, and if the right’s only reaction is to be destructive, then they have abdicated any moral right to have a say in what happens. They can tell it all to their hired professional liars on AM radio and television, the rest of the country has reality to deal with.

So the conservative lumpenproletariat had lots of fun during the 2008 campaign claiming liberals are all robots, ie “Obamatrons,” and such. They got a hard on over some idiot bimbo on their ticket, celebrated a mindless liar who claimed to be a plumber, and basically acted like douchebags on a daily basis. But we’re the mindless robots who act on orders.

Yeah, um, okay.

These are the stupid fucks willing to show up at meetings and act like assholes on behalf of giant insurance corporations. These are the stupid birther fucks who insist on spreading absolute bullshit about Barack Obama, as if everyone else in the country is some kind of two year old that will believe any old thing.

Nobody will ever catch on that the whole show is orchestrated through the noise machine.

These are the stupid fucks who bought high while listening to right wing AM radio. You know the type. They never could resist the multi-level greed pitch and the arousing lure of screwing someone over. Now that their greed bubble has been burst, they lash out at anyone and anything they can.

What I want to know is: when are we going to act in kind? This bullshit right wing temper tantrum needs to be answered in Republican Congressional district offices all over the state. We’ll march, shout, make signs, act like douchebags, hang people in effigy and generally be stupid. You know, like them.

Now quick, someone find out where the fuck there are any Republican district offices.

From an article at The Hill about former GOP administration staffers running for Congress comes this little tidbit from David Castillo, a Republican candidate intending to take on Democratic Rep. Brian Baird, WA-03.

“I’m going to try to cajole [Bush and Cheney] to come out and do an event for me,” said David Castillo, a former deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Veterans Affairs who also worked in the Homeland Security and Labor departments. “As we progress, I’m hoping to utilize my Bush-Cheney relationships to the fullest extent I can.”

That would be bad news, at least in terms of fundraising, for the other announced Republican candidate. But I really don’t know the landscape on the GOP side, maybe Bush and Cheney would help both of them, that would be cool. Lots of photos.

It’s happening here.

Then Cong. Smith asked for comments, and the comments began. The first question: would this new plan include tax payer support for abortion? The next question, from one of the young fellas sitting in front of me: on page … of the House bill, (reading from a copy he had obtained from the internet) it says plainly that if an individual elects the public insurance option, he can never ever have private insurance again. Then many people in the room started to vocalize and clap, drowning out Cong. Smith’s response, and shouting arguments to him.

He asked for people to line up at the microphones for comments. Many people did line up… They spoke of their distrust of the government; the post office, social security, etc; they did not want their health care in the hands of bureaucrats. Several people said in a very angry tone of voice, I just want you (Cong. Smith) to be the first to take this new public insurance, and see how YOU like it. At this, the people in the room jeered, some shook their fists, some said angrily Yeah!

When Cong Smith then took a question from an elderly person sitting up front, who had not lined up at the microphone, a young man shouted loudly that she should wait her turn, why did HE have to stand up if she didn’t… Much supportive vocalization from the seated people. More comments from the next person at the microphone: People who are uninsured now can afford to buy insurance, they just don’t. Many people qualify for medicaid and they just don’t bother. The statistics of infant mortality (the US being number 42 or so in industrialized countries) are false…

So um, hey, maybe reporters could say, walk up to these “opponents” and ask them basic stuff. It wouldn’t be that hard, if there were reporters available and if they knew how to do their jobs and stuff. Just an idea. I guess it’s kind of hard to do since so many veteran political reporters are not working for newspapers any longer.

All this “anger,” and nobody to cover it. If editorial boards ever caught wind of this from reading their own newspapers, fainting couches and smelling salts would be in darn short supply. There is nothing more horrible than partisan incivility, as the editorial boards so frequently remind us.

(Props to WFSE Political Blog.)

From Think Progress:

Today, House members are back home to begin their month-long recess. The far right has indicated that they plan to welcome many of their representatives with large, angry throngs (“town halls gone wild”). The corporate lobbyists engineering these “grassroots” efforts have indicated their harassment strategy is to “yell,” “stand up and shout,” and “rattle” the members. Politico reported that Democratic members of Congress are increasingly being confronted by “angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior” at local town halls.

And you can bet that the first time a liberal says or does something intemperate in response it will be all over the national media.

We live in a political culture that is insane. People expect and accept this sort of behavior from the right wing, because they’ve always done it. If there is one hallmark of movement conservatism, it is crude, aggressive and threatening behavior bankrolled with scads of corporate money.

Then when the debate turns sour newspaper editorial boards get to bemoan “partisanship,” as if nothing that came before had anything to do with what is happening in the present. The only strategy conservatives have left is to make rational discourse impossible, and the traditional media has always let them get away with it. We’ll see if anyone in the tradmed calls them out this time.

From a blurb in The Columbian:

The U.S. Air Force 304th Rescue Squadron is conducting pilot certification training in Clark County.

On Friday, a Columbian reader reported seeing a black helicopter gunship, which he thought might belong to the CIA, flying low along the East Fork Lewis River just downstream from Daybreak Park.

Look out, it’s the gumbint helicopters practicing to rescue your sorry ass when you fall into a crevasse on an area mountain! Tyranny I tell you!

There are lots of solid reasons to be suspicious of governments, and indeed our democracy depends on a healthy level of skepticism. Being afraid of rescue helicopters and their crews isn’t a solid reason, these are the good women and men who will do almost anything to help those in distress.

But it’s distressingly weird how this kind of pathetic paranoia happens only when a Democrat is in the White House, as the noise machine spreads its cancerous disinformation.

And from a purely practical standpoint, if there are people out there who really think helicopter gunships are ready to descend on Clark County, do they think the small arms they’ve been busily purchasing are going to be effective against gunships? Yeah, I guess thinking things through isn’t a hallmark of the paranoiacs.

If someone likes to go bird watching, but sees a black helicopter carrying the President who was “not” born in the USA, does that make them a Birder Bircher Birther?

The state labor council has the second in its series “Outside the Echo Chamber” posted here. It’s part of labor’s new and vigorous effort to combat the endless wankery in this state about how we supposedly suck so bad in terms of business climate (thus the sardonic “trademark” bit.)

This second article deals with Washington’s worker’s compensation system and argues it actually is pretty low cost for employers while still providing good benefits for injured workers, by some estimates having the 5th lowest costs in the entire country.

But, surprise, the bidness guys and gals only want to focus on benefits, as if providing decent compensation automatically means costs are too high. But hey, since we didn’t farm things out to (generally conservative) contractors to rip us off, we can keep costs down! Go figure.

(As an aside, you know how it is. Conservatives always want to define worthy and unworthy recipients of help, even if the recipients play a significant part in paying for it.)

The first article in the series dealt with Washington’s overall rankings as a good state in which to do business, if you look at a wider range of rankings than those provided by Boeing-hired consultants.

Personally, I love realistic capitalists who say what is what, and over time I’ve become a fan of “Jim the Realtor,” aka northern San Diego County realtor Jim Klinge, whose blog Bubble Info has been linked to by Calculated Risk with some frequency.

It’s possible Klinge and I may not not have similar political views, although I have no way of knowing, but if I was looking for a property in northern San Diego County I would definitely beat a path to his office. He steadfastly offers analysis of his market, mostly residential properties, based on facts, local conditions and historical trends. Plus he’s often hilarious.

Wall Street could use guys like this. Our family had the benefit of a real estate agent who worked like this, and it’s a huge advantage IMHO. It may be your home, but it’s also a business deal, and having someone who knows stuff can be pretty helpful.

Here Jim the Realtor takes a look at a couple of strip malls in his area. I bet the local developers are so glad he puts these things on YouTube.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=110dykaIre0[/youtube]