Don't worry, the Republicans are not slacking off with the crazy. I just got preoccupied (or possibly lazy) and now have to combine two weeks. The President's release last week of his "long-form birth certificate" (as opposed to the obviously illegitimate "certificate of live birth") means that we will be treated to some great political theater as the birther nuts immediately dismiss it as a forgery and the Republicans in Congress try to walk a fine line between alienating them, on the one hand, and endorsing their paranoid lunacy, on the other. of course, the announcement on Sunday that Osama bin Laden has been killed will also force the Republicans to tie themselves in knots, as they try to sound happy about the event while also trying to deny Obama any credit. And everyone will gear up, by next week, for more drama about the national debt ceiling. So there's a lot to distract us from Congressional affairs.
We don't want gay rights (or women's rights, or African-American rights, or...): First up: Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who, during a hearing on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), proclaimed that no one could believe the Founding Fathers intended gay marriage rights. And you know what? He's right! They didn't! "Sodomy" was a crime everywhere in the colonies, and no one was even talking about legalizing it.
Of course, this is not a very good argument against a right of gay marriage. Because, of course, the founding fathers also didn't want women's rights. That's why there was nothing in the original Constitution allowing women to vote. They also didn't want Blacks to have rights. That's why there's nothing in the original Constitution about either the "free Negroes' of the time, or restricting slavery (other than abolishing the African slave trade - but not slavery itself - at some future point). Does Lamar Smith really believe that our social arrangements should be based on what the Founders considered socially proper in 1789? Somebody better tell his constituents...
It's a conspiracy: Rep. King of New York continues to display his bizarre anti-Muslim paranoia, in particular his personal vendetta against the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. He is openly supporting and promoting a right-wing conspiracy theory that the DOJ and the administration are blocking prosecution of CAIR officials "associated with" or "linked to" or somehow-in-some-other-nebulous-way "supportive of terrorism.
Like all conspiracy theories, this one will never die, at least until either the people promoting it are dead, or events render it irrelevant. That's because it makes Democrats, and President Obama (that damnable Kenyan Muslim Marxist usurper) look bad. With the just-concluded raid that killed Osama bin Laden, of course, it will be a bit more difficult to portray President Obama as a terrorist sympathizer. Except, that is, for the hard-core paranoid lunatic fringe of the American right that are already suggesting they don't believe it's true. Which, oddly, puts them in agreement with the hard-core anti-American terrorist fringe.
Pollution, shmollution: Rep. Joe Barton is back, this time with a claim that pollution from power plants really doesn't affect health and prematurely kill people.
Now of course, to believe this, Barton must disregard or deny decades of data, on emissions of mercury, sulfur, and particulate matter, and on their health effects, by thousands of scientists. But this does not seem a difficult thing for Barton and the other Republicans to manage, because of course they continue to do exactly that in their denial of global warming as well. We have already seen that Barton will do just about anything to defend and protect the fossil fuel industry, so denial that toxic pollution actually hurts anyone is simply par for the course.
Don't know much 'bout the e-cono-my: Rep. Michelle Bachmann, an apparently bottomless source of misinformation, demonstrates her ignorance in an area you might think Republican would actually know something about: oil. In an astonishing "op-ed" piece, she gets so much wrong that it is hard to know where to start. But let's take ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and a favorite target of the drill-baby-drill crowd. Bachmann claimed that ANWR holds 30-50 years of oil supply for the U.S. Turns out that she is overestimating ANWR reserves by a factor of about 30 to 50 - because the most recent geological estimates suggest that all the oil in ANWR represents less than one year's supply for the U.S. She also notes the recent run-up in gas prices under President Obama, insinuating that his policies are somehow to blame. Of course, I'm sure that she blamed President Bush when gas prices hit a national average of $4 a gallon back in 2008 - right, Michelle? Michelle?
Other delusions on display include the notion that drilling in the Gulf of Mexico could meet our oil needs. But when it comes to oil production, one thing that Bachmann and the GOP are either ignorant of, or unwilling to admit, is that drilling in the U.S. has increased since President Obama took office. Which makes it kind of hard to argue that his policies are somehow increasing costs for consumers.
Medicare update: Did we mention that a recent CEPR estimate indicates that the Republican medicare "plan" will cost seniors $7 in out-of-pocket costs for every $1 that it saves the government? But don't worry. According to Speaker Boehner, the Republican Medicare plan is just misunderstood - it really turns Medicare into something very similar to Obamacare. Which is of course, a very, very bad plan that will economically destroy the country. Which makes one wonder why Boehner would want to equate it to the Republican medicare plan. Unless, of course, the Republican plan is intended to destroy the country.