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Welcome to Pandora’s Tea Party!

Poster Board = $2.00, Two Sharpie Markers = $3, boiling down complex issues into a fictional comparison of choice = priceless.

There are two mostly unavoidable facts going into the first midterm elections for President Obama. One, the first midterm election after a new president takes power almost always sees a loss in the seats for his (or someday, her) party. This is commonly referred to as “buyer’s remorse” where the enthusiasm for the president’s party wanes after the win and they sit back on their laurels, while the losing party rallies harder and louder to try and come back from the embarrassing loss of the big seat. Two, in terms of this specific moment of economic hardship, the party in power is held to blame and again they lose more seats. It doesn’t matter where the problem started and how far back the blame can be placed. Most voters will only turn their calendars back so far before deciding that the current governing body had enough time to fix whatever ails the country. True, that sounds a bit illogical, but politics and logic are very, very long distance friends.

So as the Republican party looks to gain seats across the board during this so-called anti-incumbent rage, they are now seeing a quite different landscape over the horizon. There are still blue states where they were before, but now the red states are getting…redder. The fervor they helped whip up has bitten them much deeper and much sharper than the Democrats. Now heading into Nov. 2 the right wing of this nation has to figure out what they can do with a handful of wildly conservative, if not radically so, candidates which have to be groomed for the national stage. They opened a political Pandora’s Box and what rushed out has pushed any moderation in the Republican party completely out of the picture. Here’s just a snippet of what they are working with:

Sharron Angle (R-NV):

• she is an extreme pro-lifer, extending her anti-abortion stance even into cases of rape and incest. When asked her reasoning for those viewpoints she said “two wrongs don’t make a right” and when directly asked what she would tell a 13-year-old girl who was raped by her own father, Angle likened it to turning a “lemon situation into lemonade”
• she has repeatedly referred to unnamed members of Congress as “domestic enemies”
• after numerous attempts to help her back away from this statements, she has stood her ground on stating that if things don’t go the right way in November, the citizens have a right to fall back on their “second amendment remedies”. Yes, she means guns.

Christine O’Donnell (R-DE):

• in 1998 she made an appearance on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and espoused how truth is always the best route to take in any situation. While this is a morally upstanding belief, she was pressed on it and further clarified by saying she would not even lie to Nazis if she had Jews hiding in her house because “You never have to practice deception. God always provides a way out.”
• she founded a group called SALT (Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth) which lobbies the government on the basis of tightly followed Christian morals. At one point in a MTV interview she was quoted saying, “It is not enough to be abstinent with other people, you also have to be be abstinent alone. The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery, so you can’t masturbate without lust.”
• In a continued defense of bringing religion into every facet of society, she once said, “We took the Bible and prayer out of public schools. Now we’re having weekly shootings. We had the 60s sexual revolution, and now people are dying of AIDS.”
• In fact, since I can’t list all of the amazingly dangerous and inane stances she holds, here’s a link to an incredibly thorough list put together by Think Progress.

Joe Miller (R-AK):

• joins Angle in believing that abortion should be outlawed completely, even in cases of rape or incest (no word yet on his feeling about lemonade.)
• believes Medicare and Social Security should be phased out completely (no word yet on how he plans to help seniors pay for those benefits on their own.)

Those are only a few of the hard right wing extremists to swing out of the hurricane of anger and disappointment over the current state of affairs in this country. I’m not saying that the anger isn’t justified. The country is in rough shape, but this incoming flock of proposed candidates is talking about legislating by religion over democracy. They view the Constitution not as a document written by men, but one deemed to be written by God (the bitter irony being that many of those very men were defiantly against the idea of combining God and government.) There is a small, but loud and proud, group of people who are trying to split the country like the Red Sea, with Christian believers on one side and all others, known as “enemies”, on the other side. They say America needs to be brought back to its non-existent roots as a Christian-only nation. O’Donnell goes even as far as to say the idea of “separation of church and state” came from Hitler first (is there anything that guy can’t be connected to?)

Barbara Streisand said it best in the title to her Huffington Post piece: Stop. Think. Breathe. (You should truly take a peek.)In my own words, I would warn that if we are not careful as a country about where we let this flood of anger and fundamentalism takes us, we will find the country wiped clean, not of our sins, but of our freedoms.

Arizona moves out of the ‘Land of the Free’

The moment I sign this, can someone please check the guy behind me? He seems fishy.

Arizona recently enacted one of the most backwards and revisionist immigration laws in our country. The piece of paper the governor signed into practice states that the police are now under orders to pull over, question or otherwise force any person in the state that “looks to be an illegal immigrant” to immediately show proper documentation of their status as American citizens. Most pundits and newscasters have been referring to this as the “Papers, Please.” bill. While I do not personally live in Arizona, this is a dangerous game to begin because a number of other Southern states with more conservative leaning electorates are watching very closely as to whether this law will withstand the oncoming onslaught of civil liberty and constitutionality law suits. If it does, you can be assured you will see laws like this popping up all along the southern border and spreading upwards. Honestly, do they think every illegal immigrant just stops in the first border town?

Arizona is the number one crack in the wall for the passage of illegal immigrants and in turn the number one funnel for the Mexican drug trade, but this sweeping doctrine is the result of over-reactionary zealots who are attempting to purify the state. What this does once more is bring back the everlasting debate over what a “real American” looks like. Supposedly this is the only way the Arizona police will know who to pull over and who to let by. I don’t envy any officer who has to enact this incredibly misdirected statute, which, at its core, institutionalizes blatant racism.

Recent rumblings around the legal circles depict this new law being shot down right after its inaugural usage. The first case to be brought by either the ACLU or any other civil rights group will force this into the State Supreme Court and it will find itself tossed out as a poor reminder of immoral laws gone by, like Jim Crow. Governor Jan Brewer states we will not see the abuses of personal and public rights we fear and that she is only doing what she feels is best for her state in the absence of any real immigration reform on the Federal level. I’ll grant her a small point on the lack of movement from President Obama and his administration, but her rash decision cannot be polished into rational judgment by that fact alone. President Obama has immigration reform in his sights and it seems to be next on the list once Wall Street reform gets enacted. He’s on a real roll and the momentum could carry along many of the changes he promised along the campaign trail.

As for me, well, there were days before when I felt that one voice couldn’t do anything, but I’ve learned through many examples set out before me that one voice can be added to another and then to another until the once silent whisper of a concerned citizen becomes the booming cry of a motivated public cheering for justice. In that vein, I’ve taken to writing letters and e-mails to any politician I believe is proposing or supporting laws I do not believe in and I encourage everyone to make your own voices heard as well. If there is one thing the recent Tea Party revivals have gotten right (and as far as I can see it has been only this one thing) is the government works for the people, which means you. Never forget it is your right to inform your employees when they are not doing their job correctly.

Obviously, since Governor Brewer signed the bill into law, my plea fell on deaf ears, but here are the words I sent her way:

Dear Governor Brewer,

Although I don’t live in your state, the bill currently sitting in front of you is going to set a precedent which will affect a growing number of states, especially those along the southern border, like California. I truly empathize with your situation and the need to get illegal immigration under control, but this current attempt is the wrong way to go about it. All the talking points being sent out now in defense of it are only trying to pull the wool over the eyes of a stunned and offended nation. This is going to create state-mandated racial profiling in the worst way. Every Mexican-American, Latino-American or South American, born free here under our nation’s laws, will be treated to regular accusations and challenges to their status as Americans. Yet, while some might say this racial profiling would not happen in such dire terms, can you tell me Irish-Americans, Russian-Americans or even British-Americans are going to feel the same microscope following their every move on their downtown streets?

You have the power to stop your state from changing it’s identity from a piece of what we call the “land of the free” into a racially cleansed country club. Please use that power.

You can follow these links to find the contact info for your senator, state representative or governor. Let them know what you think. Then, let me know what you get back!