I ASSUME OBAMA WANTED TO BE HECKLED BY MEDEA BENJAMIN

I missed the president's speech, but I see that he was heckled by Medea Benjamin of Code Pink -- repeatedly:

As he spoke about wanting to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and mentioned being limited by Congress, Benjamin interrupted.

"Excuse me, President Obama, you are commander in chief ... it's you, sir," she shouted. As she continued, shouting about the hunger strikers there, Obama tried to keep speaking.

He got through a few more lines of his speech before Benjamin interrupted again. He spoke over her, "This is part of free speech, is you being able to speak, but also me being able to speak and you listening," he said.

Moments later, Obama added: "I'm willing to cut the young lady who interrupted me some slack because it's worth being passionate about."

Finally, after Benjamin again shouted, this time about Americans killed by drone strikes, including the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki, security officers started guiding her out of the hall.

"Abide by the rule of law, you're a constitutional lawyer," she said as she was guided up steps out of the auditorium.

I think he wanted her there. I think he wanted her to stay there. It would not surprise me to learn that he knew she was there and asked the security detail to let her stay awhile. (She was eventually removed.) I think he wanted her kept there long enough to heckle him a few times. I think he wanted her there so he could triangulate.

After all, in this speech he rejected the term "global war on terror." He announced that he's putting some curbs on drone attacks and making moves toward greater transparency. he's also looking to Congress to stop blocking the closure of the Guantanamo prison, and he'd like to overturn the Authorization to Use Military Force that was passed a few days after 9/11.

So, even though he defended the drone program in general, and the notion of a continuing militarized response to Islamist violence, he is, naturally, making himself vulnerable to attacks from crazy, war-loving right-wingers -- or, as they're more commonly known, "the entire Republican Party apart from Ron Paul." (Paul is, needless to say, crazy on pretty much every other issue.)

And so we have this response:

The senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee said President Obama's national security speech will be "viewed by terrorists as a victory."

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.) made the remarks in a statement released moments after Obama's speech....

****

So that's one thing the heckling accomplished -- it helped create the image that Obama is in the center, somewhere between the GOP and Code Pink. But does heckling like this accomplish anything else?

There are those who think so:

I get that some aren't down with raucous activism but the fall out of GTMO & drones aren't "polite" - why should activism against them be?

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) May 23, 2013

But activism shouldn't be judged on some abstract scale of intensity. It should be judged on whether it's effective.

Was this in any way effective? Did it help increase the number of people in this country who are willing to move to the left of the acceptable range of opinions on post-9/11 foreign policy? (Making the same relatively small group of lefties cheer is meaningless. Did this win new converts, or at least get people to reconsider their positions?)

I don't know. I suspect not. I certainly don't think this is how you move public opinion on a large scale.

The very conventional efforts of the anti-Iraq War movement actually did help change minds on a fairly large scale; unfortunately, it took years, and too many lives were lost or ruined in the interim.

This? I think it just gave Obama a foil.

THE ALL-CONTROLLING FASCIST WHO WON'T LEAD

I assume most Americans get their news from some combination of mainstream and right-wing sources -- Chuck Todd and Bill O'Reilly, David Gregory and Sean Hannity. And that's one reason the IRS story really might not stick to President Obama.

The mainstream media has told us for a couple of years now that Obama could get a grand bargain on the budget and get Gitmo closed and get lions to lie down with lambs and get all sorts of other wonderful things to happen if he'd just lead harder! Meanwhile, the right-wing media says (at least part of the time) that Obama's a golf-obsessed, endlessly vacationing lightweight who wouldn't be much of a president if he actually did work hard enough because he too damn stupid to think or talk without the aid of a teleprompter.

I assume the average American processes these two narratives, blends in a third narrative that includes positive stories about Obama, as well as his more engaging public appearances and statements, and the resulting stew comes out as: Obama -- nice guy, not really able to deliver the goods. Some are more positive, others more negative, and people in the middle may be disgruntled but think his heart is more or less in the right place. Still, no one really thinks he's kicking ass and taking names.

Which is what makes the argument of this Mitch McConnell op-ed in The Washington Post a tough sell. McConnell is trying to tell us Obama is kicking ass and literally taking names:

The IRS scandal and Obama's culture of intimidation

... there is ample evidence to suggest that the culture of intimidation in which these tactics were allowed to flourish goes well beyond one agency or a few rogue employees.

For years, administration officials have used the power of the federal government to isolate their opponents....

The spread of the speech police under the Obama administration has long been apparent.... the administration has been extremely creative in employing throughout the federal government the sorts of intimidation tactics that were used at the IRS....

Even if you're a casual observer of politics, I don't know how you can process the notion that Obama's opponents are intimidated and isolated and crushed by speech police. They're on Fox every night. They're on pretty much every commercial AM radio station in America 24 hours a day. They run the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court, and have de facto control of the Senate. Whether you blame Obama's enemies for this or think his failure to lead harder! is the problem, how can you possibly imagine there's an Obama "culture of intimidation," unless you're a chronically self-pitying right-winger?

And then there's this, from McConnell's House counterpart:

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Wednesday said he believed it was "inconceivable" that President Obama did not learn sooner about the Internal Revenue Service's political targeting of Tea Party groups.

"It's pretty inconceivable to me that the president wouldn’t know," Boehner told Fox News's Greta Van Susteren. "I'm just putting myself in his shoes. I deal with my senior staff every day. And if the White House had known about this, which now it appears they've known about it for about a year, it's hard to imagine it wouldn't have come up in some conversation."...

John, you're talking to people who've watched five years of golf and teleprompter jokes on the very channel that's interviewing you. The audience you're talking to keeps being told he's an empty suit. And, a couple of channels over on the "mainstream" news, Americans are told Obama's not presidenting hard enough. So this idea of him contradicts pretty much everything they've been told. So good luck selling it, John and Mitch.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK?

The first screening of this pro-gun propaganda documentary starring Ted Nugent, Wayne LaPierre, and other borderline-psychopathatic talking heads will be tomorrow -- followed by theatrical and DVD releases and, apparently, distribution through PBS:





The film itself is being funded via Kickstarter, but:





You know what, schmucks? If you hate government, and think that you guys and not the government should be responsible for protecting citizens from crime, then don't ask the damn government to spend money retransmitting your agitprop. But what do you expect from people who openly declare that they'd be delighted to overthrow the government -- and expect the government to give them the mans to do so?

THE REAL ENEMY, ACCORDING TO FOX NEWS

Let's see: Two men who reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" hacked a British soldier to death today, and there are reports that a Chechen man who was just killed by FBI agents in Florida was Tamerlan Tsarnaev's accomplice in a 2011 triple murder. Oh, and the U.S. has acknowledged the killing of four Americans in drone strikes.

So what does the homepage of FoxNews.com look like right now? This:





And here I thought that violent Islamist extremism was absolutely the worst thing in the world, and that the fight against it was the most important story of our time.

Nahhhh -- the most important enemies are Democrats and liberals. The most important enemies are always Democrats and liberals.

OBAMA IS EVIL -- THEY JUST CAN'T AGREE ON WHY

This is a bizarre development in the Boston bombing case:

ORLANDO, Fla. -- An FBI agent shot and killed a man early Wednesday morning in Orlando who had ties to one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, the FBI has confirmed.

According to officials, a special agent and two Massachusetts State Police troopers were interviewing the suspect regarding his connections to bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and other extremists. The suspect, identified by the FBI as Ibragim Todashev, was originally cooperative, but he was shot after attacking the agent, the FBI said.

Investigators said Todashev confessed to the FBI that he played a role in a triple murder in 2011 in which three men were murdered in an apartment in Waltham, Mass. Their throats had been cut, and their bodies were covered with marijuana, authorities said. No suspects had been arrested in that case, but officials were investigating whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who knew at least one of the victims, was involved....

That's a story from Orlando TV station WESH -- and I must say I'm enjoying the story's comment thread, because it suggests that there's a conservative crack-up under way, pitting Alex Jones wingnuts who think the entire Boston story is a lie against Fox/talk radio/Atlas Shrugs wingnuts who think it's outrageous that we haven't begun an anti-Muslim genocide in America:

nothing to see here folks.

****

so wait people connected to the boston bombings, in florida were questioned early today...than released....and later killed by fbi...hm...

*****

Yes, and they need to gather up these 2 liars and all their connections and investigate every inch of their backgrounds and what they are doing here.

*****

im more concerned at why the fbi is trying to eliminate every person involved...are they afraid of loose lips sinking ships?

*****

Investigate these 2 lying dirtbags also, more Muslims in our country milking us while hating America.

*****

...LOL, you are going to make a great slave, you main stream media loving, fact twisting, reality distorting, FOOL! Do yourself a favor and do 5 minutes of independent research on the Boston Bombings, instead of believing everything you see on the government controlled MSM!

More or less the same discussion is taking place in Michelle Malkin's comments:

Kill all Islamo-facists here and overseas.

*****

Perhaps we should team up with the Russians and give it a go. They seem to have a lot of trouble with the muzzies too. Might be a good use of those nuke stockpiles.

*****

Unfortunately, dead men tell no tales.

*****

Things that make you go hmmm.

*****

Too convenient. Too easy. Assassination

*****

More and more suspicious events are transpiring. More and more evidence is going missing. This looks very suspicious.

*****

If Obama wants a Stasi police state he might want to target actual enemies of America like this little darling and his friends.

Better yet, give out open-season licenses and ask us rednecks to clean things up for him. We'll have this settled in a few months. Then we could sit back in the rocker with our bourbon and cheroots and tell stories to the grandbabies.

BTW I want a sterling silver Texas-style Ranger badge. Pretty cool.

******

Why at the first shootout did the police keep shooting at the suspects when they yelled out , "chill out", "we didn't do it"

" we give up" ?

How was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev able to get away from police after the first shootout, after he yelled " we give up" ?

Why do the back packs that EXPLODED NOT MATCH either of the back packs carried by the Tsarnaev brothers ?

Why were there several Craft International Agents with BPs matching the exploded black nylon BPs running security at the Marathon? Exploded Black BPs with the white Craft International logo ? ...

The government is clearly evil -- but for completely opposite reasons, and, depending on which side you're on, you're either a Muslim dupe or a New World Order dupe.

As I watch this, I'm really sorry to see the IRS and journalist-targeting stories come along, because they're likely to unite these two wings of wingnuttery. I'd really enjoy the chance to kick back with a big tub of popcorn and watch them fight this out for the next few years.

THE TEA PARTY: PRODUCED AND ABANDONED

Michael Shear of The New York Times finds it puzzling that Washington knew in the midst of the 2012 campaign that the IRS was said to be targeting tea party groups, but it never became an election issue:

The allegations had all the makings of a perfect election-year scandal that might threaten President Obama's chances for a second term and re-energize a listless Tea Party movement: an activist president, running an overbearing government, treating conservative groups unfairly by wielding the federal taxing power to undermine his adversaries.

But a year ago, when the current Internal Revenue Service scandal that has swirled around Mr. Obama first emerged, Washington ... shrugged.....

Reporters wrote a handful of articles about the Tea Party allegations. A Louisiana Republican, Representative Charles Boustany Jr., held his hearing in Room 1100 of the Longworth Building. None of the Republican candidates for president seized on the allegations as big news....

The Republican colleagues of Mr. Boustany did not seem particularly exercised about the potential for abuse either. There were no news conferences or major speeches on the House or Senate floors....

To others in the city's political establishment, the Tea Party's complaints seemed like conspiracy theories from the fringe....

I talked about this a couple of weeks ago: Republicans (and the right-wing noise machine, led by Fox News) promoted the tea party in 2009 and 2010, in part to derail the Obama agenda, and in part with the idea that what you want to do going into midterm elections is fire up your base (because midterms tend to be low-turnout, and the party that motivates its base wins). That's also when Fox put the teabaggy, half-mad Glenn Beck on the air (his Fox show started the week of Obama's inauguration).

But when Republicans were going into 2012, they were hoping they could appeal to swing voters. Fox was conflicted -- Roger Ailes couldn't resist promoting the likes of Herman Cain and Donald Trump, but Beck was let go, and Gabriel Sherman was reporting in New York magazine that Ailes was looking to tone things down (somewhat) in order to elect a conservative but swing-voter-friendly president, because presidential elections have higher turnouts and are thus decided by swing voters, not base voters.

Well, now we're approaching another set of midterms, so once again it's time to get the base fired up. We can talk about the tea party again.

But I think the GOP and the noise machine have developed a wariness about the tea party. Note that the teabaggers haven't exactly been unleashed -- recall, back in 2009, that they were being aided and funded by deep-pocketed right-wing groups, and Fox was co-branding with the tea party. That's not happening now. The right wants the teabaggers as victims, not as high-profile activists.

Michelle Malkin spent a good part of yesterday on Twitter retransmitting photos of sparsely attended tea party protests against the IRS.





If the right really wanted to revive the tea party, resources would be pumped in and these protests would be much, much larger. But that moment has passed. The tea party is useful at this level, but potentially embarrassing to the GOP if it becomes more prominent.

A GRAND UNIFIED THEORY OF GOVERNMENT-CREATED TORNADOES AND THE IRS SCANDAL

Via Steve Benen, I see that Alex Jones suspects the Oklahoma tornado may have been created by the government:

On the May 21 edition of The Alex Jones Show, ... Jones said that "of course there's weather weapon stuff going on -- we had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force."

... Jones ... explained that "natural tornadoes" do exist and that he's not sure if a government "weather weapon" was involved in the Oklahoma disaster, Jones warned nonetheless that the government "can create and steer groups of tornadoes."

Jones didn't specifically mention HAARP, which surprises me, because it's been theorized in Jones World that HAARP created Hurricane Sandy. (The caller to whom Jones was responding did mention HAARP, however.)

What is HAARP? you ask. A 2011 Alaska Dispatch story explains:

A military-funded project called the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), located on remote tundra in Alaska, jumps off the horizon just past mile marker 11 on the Glenn Highway. The program's main facility sits behind a barbed wire fence that stretches as far as the eye can see. What grabs the imagination of most, though, are the couple hundred oversized antennas, described by legions of journalists and conspiracy theorists.

... the HAARP website notes that federal scientists are working to unlock the mysteries to other natural phenomena that have captivated humans for millennia. They're studying lightning, aurora borealis and the like. They've even learned how to induce both of those on a limited scale, according to a statement included on a Navy defense budget. HAARP also exists, the project's website notes, to learn more about shortwave radio communications and its application in global positioning systems, among other things....

Plenty of other theories have been explored about what exactly Uncle Sam is up to way out in the middle of nowhere, Alaska....

Among the HAARP conspiracy theories: weather modification.

There's a storied tradition of blaming devastating hurricanes on HAARP. That trend hit a fever pitch in 2005: first it was Katrina, then Rita, then Wilma....

"This is absolute hogwash," Stanford professor Umran Inan told Popular Science. "There's absolutely nothing we can do to disturb the earth's [weather] systems. Even though the power HAARP radiates is very large, it's miniscule compared with the power of a lightning flash -- and there are 50 to 100 lightning flashes every second. HAARP's intensity is very small."

But it's not just weather. There's also ... mind control:

Of all the conspiracies floating around about HAARP, this is perhaps the most entertaining, and scientifically farfetched.

The government is using the shortwave radio communication generated in Gakona, so the story goes, to control the minds of unsuspecting Americans.

What conspiracy theorists believe the Feds are trying to control is hazy. A good place to try and get a grip on this one is at the conspiracy website HAARP.net....

Yeah, just try reading that HAARP.net page:

... ELF waves from HAARP when targeted on areas can weather-engineer and create mood changes affecting millions. The intended wattage is 1,700 billion watts of power. A former govt. insider deduced they want to flip the world upside down. 64 elements in the ground modulate, with variation, the geomagnetic waves naturally coming from the ground.

The 'earth's natural brain rhythm' above is balanced with these. These are the same minerals as the red blood corpuscles. There is a relation between the blood and geomagnetic waves. An imbalance between Schumann and geomagnetic waves disrupts biorhythms. These natural geomagnetic waves are being replaced by artificially created very low frequency (VLF) ground waves coming from GWEN Towers....

Yeah ... right. Of course.

But maybe this can explain one aspect of the IRS scandal that remains a mystery. Simon Maloy of Media Matters had dubbed it the Legend of the Bureaucrat Whisperer. According to this theory, President Obama didn't have to tell any IRS agents to target his opponents. He merely had to say bad things about his opponents and the IRS agents then intuited that they should perform evil deeds aimed at those opponents. As a Wall Street Journal op-ed put it:

The IRS bureaucrats took the hint. No express order from senior administration officials would have been necessary. Like other federal enforcement agencies, the IRS has always been well-attuned to even subtle guidance from the White House, Congress and the political establishment.

"Well-attuned"! Maybe the IRS wasn't merely "well-attuned" -- maybe it was brainwashed by disruptions of natural cerebral rhythms emanating from HAARP on Obama's orders!

I think Jones's pal Rand Paul ought to hold Senate hearings to get to the bottom of this. Don't you?

WHY REPUBLICANS CAN POLITICIZE DISASTER RELIEF AND DEMOCRATS CAN'T

Republicans held up the Hurricane Sandy relief bill for weeks before it passed; Democrats are not going to do the same in response to the Oklahoma tornado. If anything, relief could be held up by Republicans, starting with the state's own Senator Tom Coburn, who wants spending cuts elsewhere to offset any aid. Meanwhile, Oklahoma's other senator, James Inhofe, says the two disasters are "totally different":

In the wake of the devastating tornado in an Oklahoma City suburb, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) rejected comparisons between federal aid for this disaster and the Hurricane Sandy relief package he voted against.

That was a "totally different" situation, Inhofe told MSNBC, arguing that the Sandy aid was filled with pork. There were "things in the Virgin Islands. They were fixing roads there and putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C."

“Everyone was getting in and exploiting the tragedy that took place,” he said. "That won't happen in Oklahoma."

Republicans can always talk like this because Republicans win the loyalty of their base voters by declaring certain fellow Americans to be evil, sinful, lazy, gluttonous, and parasitical. If, after a while, it became politically awkward to make that claim about the blue-state victims of Sandy, many of whom could be seen on TV every night genuinely suffering, the backup plan was to complain about money in the Sandy bill that wasn't going to Sandy victims. (Never mind the fact that some appropriations were put in the bill in response to other disasters, and some money was added to benefit states with Republican senators.) The Sandy bill eventually passed, but the message was always one that's near and dear to Republican voters: Someone is being evil and must be punished.

That message doesn't appeal to most Democratic voters -- yes, Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, responded to the tornado by denouncing climate-change denialists on the Senate floor, but you're not going to hear a lot of responses like that from elected Democrats. Even many people who agree with Whitehouse thought it wasn't the time to say what he said -- that's how most Democratic voters think.

Gallup consistently finds that self-described conservatives greatly outnumber self-described liberals in America -- and yet Democrats have won the popular vote in four of the past five presidential elections, and votes for Congress suggest it's a 50/50 country. That means that Democrats are winning the votes of a lot more moderates than Republicans are.

Moderates presumably don't want disasters politicized. Conservatives, by contrast, seem to have no problem with the politicizing of disasters. So Democrats run risks if they try to score political points after a disaster. On the other side, Republicans have free rein -- they can politicize away.

SCANDAL MONOMANIA IS THE NEW DEFICIT MONOMANIA

Another poll -- this one from The Washington Post and ABC -- shows that Americans disapprove of the events being highlighted in the current Scandalpalooza, but they aren't turning against the president:

Majorities of Americans believe that the Internal Revenue Service deliberately harassed conservative groups by targeting them for special scrutiny and say that the Obama administration is trying to cover up important details about the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans last year.

But a new Washington Post-ABC News poll also finds that allegations of impropriety related to the controversies have yet to affect President Obama’s political standing.

The president's approval rating, at 51 percent positive and 44 percent negative, has remained steady in the face of fresh disclosures about the IRS, the Benghazi attack and the Justice Department's secret collection of telephone records of Associated Press journalists as part of a leak investigation....

Ezra Klein thinks this is because people don't blame the president:

The public is simply separating the scandals from Obama. They’re upset about the IRS, Benghazi, and DoJ stories. But most think the president has been truthful.

Except that, as noted above, a majority of Americans (55%-33%) think the Obama administration "is trying to cover up the facts" with regard to Benghazi, and a small plurality (45%-42%) feel the same way about the IRS story.

My guess? They see misdeeds, and many think these misdeeds extend to the White House, but (apart from conservatives) they don't care all that much. Most ordinary Americans don't identify with the tea party. And four people died in Benghazi, but a lot of Americans have died overseas in the past dozen years. And they certainly can't identify with high-level journalists. This is yet another way the public is saying, Hey, when the hell are you going to start caring about us?

Obsessing about scandals is the new obsessing about the debt and deficits -- it's what D.C. insiders do instead of focusing on the economy and jobs and ordinary people's economic uncertainty. Obama, at least, pays some attention to ordinary Americans' economic distress -- and that's why the public gives him a not-great but passing grade:

A bare majority of Americans [51%] say they believe that Obama is focused on issues that are important to them personally; just 33 percent think so of congressional Republicans.

Clear majorities of Americans think these scandals are bad? Well, clear majorities of Americans consistently tell pollsters that the federal debt and deficits are bad -- but when you ask them what their top priorities are for government, the economy and jobs outrank the debt and deficits by a considerable margin.

So this is the new public-be-damned monomania. The public still wants what it's wanted for years -- jobs and a better economy.

GUESS WHICH STATES ALL THOSE "TAKERS" ON DISABILITY COME FROM

You've heard the right-wing complaints:

* "Disability Claims Explode During Obama's First Term"
* "Disability Ranks Continue to Surge Under Obama"
* "Getting People on Disability Has Become Big Business at Taxpayers' Expense"
* "[Bill] O'Reilly Exposes Massive 'Disability Con'"

Never mind the fact that disability rolls are probably going up for simple demographic reasons -- the population is getting older, after all. We've been told that people on disability are the 47%, the "takers," the people who've been lulled into parasitism by Obama's evil socialist policies.

Well, guess which states have the highest percentages of people on disability. Here are the top 10, accoding to the site 247WallSt.com:

10. Michigan
9. Missouri
8. South Carolina
7. Tennessee
6. Maine
5. Mississippi
4. Kentucky
3. Alabama
2. Arkansas
1. West Virginia

A lot of red there, wouldn't you say? Only two of the ten states, Maine and Michigan, voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Oddly, the bluest, most sneered at pinko-socialist states, California and New York and Massachusetts, aren't on the list. What happened? How is our excess of evil socialism not the main diver of this disability explosion? Inquiring minds want to know.

HIGH-MINDEDNESS

Today:

Folks, I have no patience for turning this tornado into a talking point, for right or left. All that crap can wait.

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) May 20, 2013

October 29, 2012, in response to Hurricane Sandy, while the storm was pummeling the New York metro area:

All I can think about is how all of this destruction will make NYC so much richer according to Paul Krugman.

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) October 30, 2012

"I have no patience for turning this ... into a talking point" is clearly Goldberg's euphemism for "I'm fresh out of one-liners."

SOMETIMES THE DUMB RUBES ARE ONE-PERCENTERS

I don't know if this ABC story describes a real trend or is just well-placed industry hype, but the mere fact that somebody is apparently buying the merchandise under discussion tells me that some of the dumb rubes who watch Fox News and listen to talk radio are in the upper-tax-bracket dumb rubes:

Bomb Shelter Boom Sees Underground Pools, Basketball Courts

The latest real estate boom to sweep America comes with all the trappings of luxurious living: custom-built swimming pools, gyms, full-length basketball courts, and even airplane hangars.

The only catch is that this time, the features are all buried underground.

The boom in bomb shelter sales over the past 15 years has taken the spartan 1950s notion of a fallout shelter and given it a makeover, according the owners of three companies that make and sell shelters....

"You can have all your major amenities: TV, high power and high voltage (appliances)... horticulture rooms where you can grow vegetables and gardens, a full shower, all the amenities of your full home. We're not limiting what people can do," said Brad Roberson, marketing director for Rising S Company, which builds and installs custom shelters....

A bunker on the small side of 10 feet by 20 feet starts at about $54,000. They go up from there to $10 million, Roberson said....

In the past 15 years, companies that make and sell underground bunkers have sprouted up around the country, mainly in the West and South....

The West and South! Imagine my surprise.

Bomb shelter manufacturers said that their average customer is a middle-aged, affluent man....

This is a midlife guy thing? Knock me over with a feather. Next you'll be telling me the guys are almost all white and Republican.

[Sharon] Packer of Utah Shelter Systems said that of her customers, she has seen few traditional "survivalists," and many more ordinary, highly-educated professionals coming to her in case of a worst-case scenario.

"The vast majority are professionals," Packers said. "They are very well educated, a lot of doctors. The majority of them are physicians, and attorneys, a lot of engineers, all of whom understand the real threat."

Which is what?

"It won't matter how close you were to the blast radius. It's going to be the 'haves and have-nots', and if they need it they're going to take it, to come into your house and burn it down," [Brad Roberson] said....

I say this all the time about phony macho men (e.g., the gunners), and I'll say it again: this isn't fear, it's wish fulfillment. It's people with too much money paying to have a bunker built that tells them a pleasing story every day: You are a rich and important person, and people would like to tear you down, but that won't happen because YOU ARE A SURVIVOR, you big, brave man.

The fact that these people might get through the immediate aftermath of the apocalypse is one reason I hope I'm flash-fried at Ground Zero if it ever happens. On the other hand, these are the last people I expect to survive an apocalypse long-term, because a lot of them have forgotten how to do anything without employing a lot of underpaid peons to do it for them. If anyone rebuilds civilization after an apocalypse, I think it's going to be those peons. (I'm not very resourceful myself, but I'm not deluding myself into thinking I am.)

In any case, the apocalypse is highly unlikely to be coming anytime soon -- sorry to burst anyone's bubble. Doomsday-prepper thinking, even on the part of one-percenters, is just a silly way to ignore the slow degradation of American society, which is what we really need to worry about. Of course, these are the guys who don't need to worry about it, because their American society is still intact, and still provides them with money to burn this way.

And on the subject of rich people's intelligence: well, if we didn't know rich people could be dumb Foxites and Beck-heads, all we had to do was read Donald Trump's Twitter feed, right?

I BET I'LL LIVE TO SEE THE DAY WHEN RIGHT-WINGERS ARE STICKING UP FOR "BIG POT"

Bill Keller has an op-ed in The New York Times today titled "How to Legalize Pot," in which he looks at the questions faced by Washington State and Colorado as they tries to create an aboveground marijuana market. Keller talks to Mark Kleiman, a policy expert who's offering Washington State legal advice on this. What strikes me about Keller's description is how non-laissez-faire the thinking is there:

One practical challenge facing the legalization pioneers is how to keep the marijuana market from being swallowed by a few big profiteers -- the pot equivalent of Big Tobacco, or even the actual tobacco industry -- a powerful oligopoly with every incentive to turn us into a nation of stoners. There is nothing inherently evil about the profit motive, but there is evidence that pot dealers, like purveyors of alcohol, get the bulk of their profit from those who use the product to excess. "When you get a for-profit producer or distributor industry going, their incentives are to increase sales," said Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon, another member of the Washington consulting team. "And the vast majority of sales go to people who are daily or near-daily consumers."

What Kleiman and his colleagues (speaking for themselves, not Washington State) imagine as the likely best model is something resembling the wine industry -- a fragmented market, many producers, none dominant. This could be done by limiting the size of licensed purveyors.

I bring this up because, in the print edition of today's Times, the Keller op-ed sits right above an "advertorial" (PDF) from the Washington Legal Foundation, a wingnut-welfare group funded by right-wing foundations. The ad complains about the targeting of certain foods as unhealthy:

We are constantly barraged with preachy messages and bad news about our food and drink choices. Advocacy-tinged studies accuse salt, sugar, and other essential food ingredients of causing countless "preventable" deaths. Quotable chefs and talk-show doctors implore us to absolutely avoid this snack or that beverage.

Such condescending demonization is not only intended to shame us into "healthier" diets, it's also aimed at building support for government policies like sin taxes, advertising restrictions, and even bans or limits on food. To advance their regulatory agenda, activists have also sharpened their accusations that Big Food and Big Soda, and not overeating consumers, are directly responsible for a fatter America.

See why I'm linking the two? In Washington State, according to Keller, the regulators want to make sure weed isn't taken over by "Big Pot," which will target, and rely on, excessive users. But what do you think is going to happen as more and more Americans accept the notion of legalized weed? The right is going to get on the libertarian side of this, especially in purple and red states (or, for that matter, any state with GOP control), and "Big Pot" is precisely what we're going to get: lower-quality mass-produced weed marketed to heavy smokers, and a regulatory mechanism as limited as lobbyists can make it.

What they're trying to do in Washington State right now will be denounced as intolerable nanny-state-ism. It will be fought vigorously, until Big Pot dominates the market.

Oh, I suppose, after the small growers are driven out of business, we might have a comeback of high-priced, niche-market "artisanal" weed. But in the meantime it'll be Miller-and-Bud-level weed dominating the market for a few decades. Because: freedom.

HEAR NO EXTREMISM, SEE NO EXTREMISM

You may have seen this over the weekend:

The Virginia Republican Party picked conservative minister E.W. Jackson as their nominee for lieutenant governor Saturday night. Jackson will run along side Ken Cuccinelli and is the first black candidate the party has nominated for statewide office since 1988 according to the Associated Press....

Jackson ... maintained a now defunct blog on his site, where he argued in one post that President Obama saw the world “from a Muslim perspective."

Obama clearly has Muslim sensibilities. He sees the world and Israel from a Muslim perspective. His construct of "The Muslim World" is unique in modern diplomacy. It is said that only The Muslim Brotherhood and other radical elements of the religion use that concept. It is a call to unify Muslims around the world....

You may have also seen that Jackson has compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan:

In a video posted to YouTube last September, the minister and activist urged black Christians to reject the "ridiculous lies" of the "Democrat Party." ...

He continues, "The Democrat Party has created an unholy alliance between certain so-called civil rights leaders and Planned Parenthood, which has killed unborn black babies by the tens of millions. Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was. And the Democrat Party and the black civil rights allies are partners in this genocide."

And he's said this:

Democrats now have fully embraced an abortion policy that amounts to infanticide. They have also made the lesbian-homosexual-bisexual-transgender agenda their vision for America. How have they managed to hold on to black Christians in spite of an agenda worthy of the Antichrist?

Jackson will be #2 on a ticket that, of course, will be topped by Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia's anti-gay, climate-change-denying attorney general, who's working hard to make abortion effectively illegal in the state.

Now, here's the thing: This radicalization of the state Republican Party is taking place right in the D.C. press corps's backyard. It's happening despite the fact that Virginia is a purple state now, one that voted for Barack Obama twice (although Cuccinelli seems to think that Obama was elected president twice because lack of voter ID in some states helped him steal the election). And, as The New York Times notes today, the radicalization of the Virginia GOP is no accident -- it's the result of "Mr. Cuccinelli's consolidation of his party by activating its most conservative members."

Two years ago, he challenged grass-roots Virginians excited by his lawsuits as state attorney general against Mr. Obama's health care law and environmental regulation to run for seats on the party's central committee. They did. Mr. Cuccinelli's selection was all but assured when the new blood on the committee, including Tea Party and libertarian members, canceled a Republican primary in favor of a nominating convention, which favors ideological purists.

On Friday, the central committee also ruled that it would pick next year's Senate nominee by convention.

It's obvious to anyone who's looked at how government is run in any state with Republican control, or who's looked at any recent contested Republican primary, that there's nothing anomalous about this these days. But it's happening within plain sight of the D.C. press corps -- and yet that press corps still refuses to acknowledge the Republican Party's nationwide tilt to extremism.

Remember, these are the same D.C. journalists who reported on the campaigns of Howard Dean and Ned Lamont as if they were witnessing Mao's Long March. This? No big whoop. Even the Times story focuses more on attendees at the Virginia Republican convention making IRS jokes than on the party's tilt to the extreme right. Teabaggism is just an interesting experiment in one isolated laboratory of democracy -- apart from that, nothing to see here.

****

ALSO, TOO: "The 10 Most Anti-Gay Statements From The Republican Nominee For Lt. Governor Of Virginia." This, by the way, is from BuzzFeed, as is the first link above. The Klan link is from the Huffington Post; the Antichrist link is from Right Wing Watch. The New York Times has nothing on Jackson's extremism, nor does this Washington Post story.

****

OH, AND: Regarding the GOP nominee for Virginia attorney general, Think Progress tells us....

If a woman in Virginia has a miscarriage without a doctor present, they must report it within 24 hours to the police or risk going to jail for a full year. At least, that's what would have happened if a bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) had become law....

ONLY WINGNUTS ARE STUPID ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THAT A GUY WHO CAN'T GET ANYTHING DONE IS ALL-POWERFUL

This new CNN poll shouldn't really surprise us:

President Barack Obama comes out of what was arguably the worst week of his presidency with his approval rating holding steady....

According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president's approval rating was at 51% in CNN's last poll, which was conducted in early April....

More than seven in 10 in the CNN poll say that the targeting by the Internal Revenue Service of tea party and other conservative groups that were applying for tax exempt status was unacceptable....

But more than six in 10 say that the president's statements about the IRS scandal are completely or mostly true, with 35% not agreeing with Obama's characterizations. And 55% say that IRS acted on its own, with 37% saying that White House ordered the IRS to target tea party and other conservative groups.

Only 42% of the public is satisfied with how the Obama administration has handled the September attack in Benghazi, Libya, which left the U.S ambassador to that country and three other Americans dead. Fifty-three percent say they are dissatisfied. But those numbers are virtually unchanged from November.

... 59% now say that the U.S government could have prevented the attack in Benghazi, up 11 points from last November....

Let's start with the IRS. The message of the right is that Evil, All-Powerful Obama used his Nixonian superpowers to crush opposition. But this is a guy who can barely manage to deal out a love tap to his opposition -- yeah, he won reelection, but he lost on the sequester and he couldn't even get approval in the one house of Congress his party controls for a gun control proposal with 90% national support. You and I know his problems with Congress are the result of serious flaws in our system -- the filibuster in the Senate, gerrymandering of House districts, an opposition party determined to nullify yet another election, a press that never stops trying to blame both sides equally. But the general public just sees a president who's not particularly powerful -- and can't square that with the notion of an all-powerful partisan crushing his enemies.

Wingnuts, of course, have no problem holding these two completely contradictory notions in their head simultaneously. That's just their nature. Obama is horrible in every conceivable way, even in ways that cancel other out.

The one argument wingnuts are possibly getting across to the general public is the notion that the four dead in Benghazi could have been saved -- note the uptick in the number of people who believe that. But that jibes with the center's sense of Obama as a guy who often doesn't get done what he sets out to do. The public doesn't think he wanted the Benghazi attackers to succeed -- only idiot wingnuts would believe that of the guy who ordered bin Laden killed and who sends out all those drones. The public just thinks his administration failed there, and maybe tweaked the narrative at first to downplay the errors made. The non-wingnut population doesn't see a massive coverup because Obama doesn't seem like a powerful evildoer to them. He just seems like a guy with generally good intentions who frequently falls short.

MAYBE YOU SHOULD TAKE YOUR OWN ADVICE, MODO

Maureen Dowd today:

The president should try candid; wistful and petulant aren't getting him anywhere. The Republicans who are putting partisan gain above solving the country's problems deserve a smackdown.

Interesting advice from a person who has one of the most high-profile commenting gigs in America, and who's written thirty columns so far this year, but hasn't once published the same kind of "smackdown" of the Republicans that she's recommending to the president.

Dowd has written this year about Bush and Cheney, and Cheney again, and then the whole Bush family, and (of course) Hillary Clinton twice; she's written about Hollywood historical fiction and The Great Gatsby and the golden age of newsmagazines; she wrote a column about Annette Funicello, Lily Pulitzer, and Margaret Thatcher, in that order.

Oh, and this is the third column she's written urging Obama to be tougher on the Republicans -- here are the first two -- as well as one urging Obama to be nicer to the Republicans.

Smackdowns of Republicans putting partisan gain ahead of the national interest? I'll let you know if I find one in Dowd's archives.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO, OBAMA IS NOT THE FIRST PRESIDENT WHO HAD A SERVICEMEMBER HOLD AN UMBRELLA FOR HIM

The ridiculous Obama umbrella "scandal" has been pretty thoroughly debunked by The Atlantic, by The Atlantic again, by The Washington Post, and, most memorably, by Wonkette's Rebecca Schoenkopf, who enlists her ex-Marine brother to explain, with many appropriate obscenities, that a Marine must follow any order issued issued by his commander in chief ASAFP. In the first Atlantic post, please note the military uniform on the umbrella holder in the second picture of George H.W. Bush.

I'll just add a couple more examples for the record.

LBJ, as president, had an umbrella held for him by an Air Force General, James U. Cross, according to Cross's own memoir:





Cross, later promoted to brigadier general, was LBJ's Air Force One pilot; more about him here, and about his memoir here.

And there's this, from a 1932 story about President Herbert Hoover attending an Easter sunrise ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery:





So, yes, servicemembers hold umbrellas if presidents ask.

IF THIS IS YOUR BABY IN AN INCUBATOR, MAYBE YOU OUGHT TO RETHINK YOUR P.R. STRATEGY

I think the IRS story has the potential to be very damaging to the Obama presidency -- but not if this is the right's idea of a victim with a tear-jerking story:

... Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a "wealthy individual" with a "less-than-reputable record." Other donors were described as having been "on the wrong side of the law."

This was the Obama version of the phone call -- put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land....

First of all, what's being alleged here (by Kimberly Strassel of The Wall Street Journal) is that Obama merely has to say a harsh word about someone and he's automatically responsible for anything bad that subsequently happens to that person -- people listening to his words have no independent agency. Fine. Then let's hold everyone to the same standard. By that standard, Sarah Palin should literally be indicted for murder and attempted murder, and be standing in the dock right next to Jared Loughner.

But seriously, righties -- you want us to shed tears for Frank VanderSloot? Yes, he was one of several high rollers mentioned on an Obama campaign Web page under this paragraph:

A closer look at Romney's donors reveals a group of wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them. Here’s a look at just a few of the people Romney has relied on....

And why might that be? Could it be because of the history of his company Melaleuca?

Melaleuca's get-rich pitches have in the past caused Michigan regulators to take action, resulting in the company's entering into a voluntary agreement to "not engage in the marketing and promotion of an illegal pyramid"'; it entered into a separate voluntary agreement with the Idaho attorney general's office, which found that "certain independent marketing executives of Melaleuca" had violated Idaho law; and the Food and Drug Administration previously accused Melaleuca of deceiving consumers about some of its supplements.

That's from Glenn Greenwald, who has much more about VanderSloot's "chronic bullying threats to bring patently frivolous lawsuits against his political critics -- magazines, journalists, and bloggers." Hell, even a somewhat admiring journalist, Phyllis Berman of Forbes, refers to Melaleuca as "a pyramid selling organization, built along the lines of Herbalife and Amway."

He's your poster child, righties? He's your aggrieved innocent? Well, good luck with that.

Oh, and did I mention that VanderSloot says that, yes, he was audited, but the audits actually saved him money? Yeah, tht's going to make him a really sympathetic figure to Joe and Jane America.

*****

ALSO, TOO:

GOP donor Charlie Moncrief telling ABC he was audited because he raised for Romney. Not his first time at the rodeo: nytimes.com/1998/08/02/bus…

— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) May 15, 2013

IF THEY WERE TRYING TO INFLUENCE THE ELECTION, THAT WAS A DUMB WAY TO DO IT

Micah Cohen of The New York Times reports:

Public data from the Internal Revenue Service ... shows that dozens of Tea Party groups were approved for tax exempt status beginning in May 2012. That was the same month that Representative Dave Camp of Michigan wrote to the I.R.S. asking for information about all "social welfare" groups that had applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 and 2011, to determine whether the I.R.S. was targeting conservative groups.

The flurry of approvals that came in the next few months was a sharp break from the previous two years, during which the agency approved just a handful of 501(c)(4) applications from Tea Party groups....

Here's a chart showing the approvals by month:





If you were a nakedly partisan IRS employee, is this how you'd have helped President Obama win reelection? It's not what I would have done. Remember late 2011: Herman "Uzbeki-beki-stan-stan" Cain led the Republican presidential field for quite a while. Then Newt Gingrich, temporarily an honorary teabagger, led the field. Then, in 2012, Rick Santorum made his move.

If you'd wanted to help the president, I think you'd have wanted to unleash the teabaggers in 2011. I think you'd have wanted them free to make mischief for Mitt Romney -- who, for all his flaws as a campaigner, could have pulled out a win against Obama with a better-executed campaign, unlike, well, every candidate enthusiastically embraced by tea types (see also: Trump, Bachmann). And I think you would have wanted teabaggers more deeply involved in GOP House and Senate primaries. More Christine O'Donnells and Sharron Angles!

So if you IRS folks were monkeying with elections, you were screwing it up.

AMERICA IS A MORAL CESSPOOL, AND IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT

Politico reports:

A majority of Americans are following both the controversy over the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi and the brewing IRS scandal - but at levels below historic averages, according to a new poll.

Fifty-four percent said they are closely following the story of how the IRS unfairly targeted conservative groups, according to the Gallup survey on Thursday, and 53 percent are closely following Benghazi. For both stories, 22 percent were following "not too closely" and 24 weren’t following at all.

"The level of attention being paid to each is below the average 60 percent of Americans who have closely followed more than 200 news stories Gallup has measured over the past several decades," Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport wrote in an analysis of the poll....

Sorry, GOP (and Washington insiders).

Now, if the public's reaction continues to fall short of all-consuming, pitchfork-wielding, head-on-pike-demanding outrage, I can tell you what will happen next. Recall that the famous 1998 Sally Quinn article about D.C. insider reactions to Monicagate was written out of a sense of disgust that the morally fallen general public didn't grasp the true import of what had transpired. Quinn wrote:

With some exceptions, the Washington Establishment is outraged by the president's behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The polls show that a majority of Americans do not share that outrage. Around the nation, people are disgusted but want to move on; in Washington, despite Clinton's gains with the budget and the Mideast peace talks, people want some formal acknowledgment that the president's behavior has been unacceptable. They want this, they say, not just for the sake of the community, but for the sake of the country and the presidency as well.

Bad public! Wag your fingers self-righteously or you won't get any pudding!

So if the public remains indifferent to the Obama scandals, it'll be the fallen nature of America that's at fault. I assume Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei will take the baton from Sally Quinn and be the ones to lecture Americans on their moral failings.

ALLEGED PARTISAN OBAMACARE ENFORCER: HIRED UNDER REAGAN, PRAISED BY BUSH

Right-wingers are crowing about this:

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS' Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

So what do we know about Sarah Hall Ingram? Well, we learned this in 2009:

Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman has selected Sarah Hall Ingram as commissioner of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division....

Ingram, who has served as Chief of Appeals for the past three years, previously served as TE/GE Deputy Commissioner from 2004-2006. Prior to that, she served as Division Counsel/Associate Chief Counsel for TE/GE, where she was responsible for providing legal services to TE/GE, as well as other parts of the IRS. Ingram began her career with the IRS in the former Tax Litigation Division in 1982.

Oh. So prior to that 2009 promotion, she got her previous promotion in 2004 -- under President George W. Bush. And she was hired when Ronald Reagan was president.

The only remotely scandalous story about her that I can find in the news archives is this story about large IRS bonuses, from 2004:

Last year, 25 senior executives in the [IRS chief] counsel's office received bonuses totaling $510,660, an average of $20,426. One lawyer, Sarah Hall Ingram, received a $46,900 award, after being singled out for distinguished service by President Bush.

Let me repeat that last sentence again:

One lawyer, Sarah Hall Ingram, received a $46,900 award, after being singled out for distinguished service by President Bush.

And in the Obama years, I see that Ingram showed her political bias by targeting a beloved right-wing institution: Harvard.

Harvard University President Drew Faust received $822,011 in salary and benefits in 2008, including travel expenses and the use of a home....

Harvard said in January that it's among about 40 institutions undergoing an audit as part of an IRS program to examine school finances. The federal agency is looking at how schools report income unrelated to their tax-exempt missions of teaching and research, and how officials are paid, said Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS commissioner of tax-exempt and government entities....

So, yeah, a lot of liberal bias there. Impeach!