What Tim Pawlenty left behind….

This morning’s PiPress front page spells it out pretty clearly, Tim Pawlenty is leaving behind an unholy mess.

Any day’s newspaper would have worked. This is a state that, like so many other states, is  hurting. Radical Republicanism (Dixie on an insertable stick) has ruined our economy, our world standing and even our closest relationships. Friends prey on friends, employers exploit employees, relatives steal from relatives, caregivers abuse those in their keep, and fast-talking entrepreneurs enrich themselves by screwing customers and investors alike.

A kinder, gentler nation lured into predatory ways. Tony Soprano would have left behind a better country. Deregulation and defunding government services results in jungle law and only the most unscrupulous survive. Good and decent people lost their livelihoods because they couldn’t lower themselves ethically to the level of a Nigerian spammer (the model for modern Wall Street capitalism).

Everything in Minnesota is the worse for Pawlenty having been in charge. Name one thing that has gotten better here since 2002. Real taxes have risen (unless you’re rich), infrastructure has continued to deteriorate, businesses have left or shut down, urban and rural schools are maxxed out (while the ‘burbs and private schools keep cranking out perfect SATs) — in every way things have turned to shit for all but those who were already well situated. 

Exactly as planned and hoped for. Minnesota is now what Tim Pawlenty wanted us to be: broke and desperate, willing to work for reduced wages. Instead of leadership we got a top>down business model with long hours, crummy wages and no benefits. It’s the ownership society utopia Daddy Warbucks wanted.

Our villain even has the perfect Dickensian name: Timothy Pawlenty, a self-righteous, uncompromising Christianist politician who abjures all of Christ’s teachings in his base-weening effort to be second banana on a failed Presidential ticket. Timothy Pawlenty, a name that ranks with Uriah Heep, Bill Sikes, Quilp, James Carker, Fagin, and others of ill repute with questionable motives.

Congratulations Timmy: you’re making Jesse Ventura look good again and thanks to the list of wannabe replacements (Matt Entenza, Mark Dayton, Susan Gaertner, Michelle Bachmann, Norm Coleman, Brian Sullivan, Marty Seifert, Laura Brod, Tom Emmer, and Steve Kelley), Jesse is in fact looking like a credible front runner.

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The Wurlitzer was calling Sotomayor anti-gun for supporting a Chicago gun law, but now the conservatives on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals have reached the same conclusion.

“Sotomayor, a politically correct lover of centralized government power (as long as she is part of the power elite), immediately went into counter-attack mode against the Heller decision,” said a statement by the Gun Owners of America.

But yesterday, a panel of the 7th Circuit, hearing a challenge to gun laws in Chicago and the suburb of Oak Park, came to the same conclusion. “We agree with Maloney,” said the opinion, referring to the 2nd Circuit’s decision. The 7th Circuit’s decision was written by the circuit’s chief judge, Frank H. Easterbrook, one of the nation’s leading conservative jurists, along with two Republican-appointed judges, including conservative favorite Richard A. Posner.

The 7th Circuit opinion said it is not up to appeals courts to evade the Supreme Court’s precedents by agreeing with unique arguments from lawyers that tried to undermine them.

If that were the case, Easterbrook wrote, the court’s decisions “would bind only judges too dim-witted to come up with a novel argument.” 

Not that the right will stop calling her anti-gun. It’s not about the truth, it’s only about politics and the lies that liars tell. See also Ruth Marcus playing the skeptic to Republican hyperbole.

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Kathleen Parker:

It has long been a problem for the GOP that some of the party’s cherished positions are embraced most enthusiastically by people whose grip on reality is sometimes . . . tenuous. This is especially true with regard to abortion

There are certainly compelling secular arguments against abortion that one might be perfectly willing to hear. Then Randall Terry shows up.

Terry, the colorful founder of Operation Rescue, doesn’t represent the Republican Party, but he is nevertheless the most familiar face of the antiabortion movement. When President Obama recently gave the commencement address at Notre Dame, who showed up to lead the protest but Terry and the equally odd carnival performer Alan Keyes?

Rather than persuading people to think differently about abortion, the Terry-Keyes act makes one want to write checks to Planned Parenthood. And smart Catholics, who were perfectly capable of articulating their objections to the president’s invitation to America’s premier Catholic university, were suddenly stuck in the frame with rabble-rousers who demean the message.

Such is the continuing dilemma of the GOP: How do you get out the message when the messengers keep getting in the way? 

The party of Dixie wearing Lincoln’s shroud as if to go to a toga party. This country won’t be set right until this party stitched together from Dr. Frankenstein’s unused parts bin dies and the Democrats split their traditional and progressive wings into a new set of parties, one conservative and one liberal. This socially liberal corporate whores versus socially conservative corporate whores shit just ain’t working anymore.

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“The idiocy of rural life,” and how that keeps authoritarian armies strong. Harold Meyerson on Tiananmen Square and the failure of Wal-Mart Republicanism to put a check on totalitarianism.

Barefoot and pregnant or in uniform following orders — either way works for the top>down crowd. 

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E.J. Dionne spells out the obvious for Post readers regarding Pawlenty’s probable refusal to certify Al Franken. I don’t know if skipsailing28 is a Minnesotan but his/her response is priceless wingnuttery:

Just to check my understanding EJ, are you saying that you’re unhappy with Pawlenty because he’s refused to capitulate under pressure from Democrats?

Further are you saying that Pawlenty can improve his credentials as a conservative and Republican by simply giving the Democrats what they want?

your final assertion is laughable on its face. Democrat demogoguery in legendary. Just today Mona Charen reminded us of the nastiness surrounding the nomination of Charles Pickering.

I sincerly doubt that the Democrats in congress can get any less principled than they are today. I wonder what “play much tougher” means? Are you suggesting that Democrats engage in out right lies? Oh like the ones Ted (water boarding is for lightweights) Kennedy told about Robert Bork?

This is all classic whining. The Democrats sowed, now they reap. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

This is music to my ears. Liberals whining when things don’t go their way. Its about time. 

Because a governor signing an election certification is about “pressure from Democrats.” Because Charles Pickering speaks to a Senate election? Classic gibberish from the folks who refuse to agree to any common facts or national purpose. We do everything their way or the “whining” ramps up like a pack of fence-cutting snowmobilers trespassing their way across the back forty at sixty miles an hour in a fog of drunken good ol’ boyism.

The more the extreme right marginalizes itself with idiocies like this, the more justified they feel in shooting politicians they don’t like. George Tiller wasn’t their first and he certainly won’t be their last victim.

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Got to take the car in. Brakes are fine but when the master brake cylinder starts to go, well, driving around town becomes more interesting than it should be.

Keeping clunkers running is a green thing (once you invest that much energy into manufacturing a car it’s best to keep using it so long as it doesn’t become an oil burner).

Besides, you’d have to be an idiot to drive a nice car down the pothole-infested washboarded streets Pawlenty’s leaving behind.

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