In politics, it’s often difficult to know whether someone is crazy or just behaving in a crazy way for career and financial reward. Are they crazy or are they deliberately saying crazy things as a means of pandering to crazy voters. There’s a continuum for evaluating this dynamic, with “crazy” on one end of the spectrum and “crazy… like a fox” on the other end, and when it comes to Michele Bachmann, she’s totally crazy.

On his show last night, Chris Hayes defended Bachmann, and suggested that anyone who calls her crazy, especially the laundry list of blogs that posted lists of her craziest blurtgasms, is simply being dismissive.

Hayes said to panelists Joan Walsh and Dan Savage, “People call Michele Bachmann crazy a lot, people on our side, broadly, and it always drives me crazy a little bit because I just feel like that word has this kind of dismissive venom to it that doesn’t grapple seriously with someone who just has a set of beliefs.”

I’m not sure if Hayes was simply being classy and above-the-fray, or whether he was just being naive about the utter gibberish that’s belched out of Bachmann’s yapper on a regular basis, but needless to say I think he’s missing the point of what it means to call someone like Bachmann “crazy.”

Most politicians are sociopathic narcissists — even the good ones. There’s something broken or misaligned inside the head of a person who thinks he or she can best rule the nation almost exclusively. If you’re capable of staring into a mirror and seriously observing the visage of a human who has what it takes to be one of just 535 Americans who’s responsible for deciding on laws that control the lives of 310 million people and very course of American history, you’re a sociopathic narcissist. Tack on the fake vacant smile, the very serious haircut, the glad-handing and the endless, desperate campaigning during which you spend millions of dollars of other people’s money in order to repeatedly affirm to entire populations of people that they should select you to rule over them — if you’re wired to endure and even enjoy that process, you’re a power-starved nut sandwich. I say this as a political junky who’s devoted his adult life to following this stuff. Politicians are insane.

So with that as a launching point for Michele Bachmann, all you really need to do is factor into the equation her googly-eyed self-confirmed ideology that skews into the realms of a raving street loon and conclude, yes, she’s absolutely crazy. Hayes thinks her positions are just a set of beliefs, but that’s a little bit like saying cancer is just a set of cells.

Agreeing that abortion should be illegal — that’s an idea, a political position and a belief. It’s wrong, but it’s a legitimate point of view. But Bachmann believes Obamacare will allow children to get abortions during school. She believes zygotes are protected under the 14th Amendment, effectively criminalizing women who have abortions for any reason at any stage. She believes the founding fathers, many of whom were slave-owners, worked “tirelessly” to abolish slavery even though they didn’t. She doesn’t believe in evolution because humans didn’t evolve from blades of grass. She believes that hurricanes and earthquakes are punishments from God for, yes, the budget deficit. She believes that Democratic presidents Carter and Obama are responsible for swine flu outbreaks. She believes the climate crisis is a hoax and that there aren’t any studies — not one — that show carbon dioxide is harmful. She believes that same-sex marriage will mandate that schools teach children “to perhaps try” homosexuality. And she believes a McCarthy-style inquisition is a good idea.

Yes, in the loosest definition of the term, these are beliefs. But they’re crazy beliefs, formulated via mental illness and proud ignorance. And she’s allowed to not only vote on laws, but she’s allowed to sponsor and co-sponsor laws that impact America. Put this another way, if you walk into your doctor’s office and just before he examines your prostate, he says to you with a straight face, “If your prostate is enlarged, it’s a punishment from God for all of your credit card debt. Now bend over the table,” that’s not a belief, that’s medically inaccurate and extraordinarily crazy, and he should not be practicing medicine.

And it’s not just the so-called “beliefs” that make her crazy, it’s crazy that she doesn’t mind saying these crazy things out loud in public over and over again. To some extent, we all have the ability to think up crazy ideas, but most of the time we keep them to ourselves. Michele Bachmann, like Gohmert, Stockman and other fellow members of the Crazy Caucus, doesn’t mind loudly repeating these fever-dream mumblings — these geysers of ridiculousness — on national television or into the next nearest open microphone. She owns them. She believes these nuggets of crazy must be entered into the public record for the betterment of the United States. That’s crazy.

However, none of this is meant to imply that she’s a moron. You can be crazy and savvy enough to succeed in life. Look at Donald Trump or Alex Jones. You don’t get to Bachmann’s station in life without being good at the game. That doesn’t make her smart, just good at the process. She also graduated from law school — a feat that requires a quantity of gray matter. If she wasn’t passably smart, ambitious and good at her career, perhaps she’d be assembling a unitard out of plastic grocery bags for the amusement of the shadow people while insisting radio deejays are sending her coded messages about the Goblin Conspiracy. Nevertheless, Bachmann will continue to succeed in life outside of Congress, but thankfully she won’t be anywhere near the floor of the House chamber where she can vote on things. Because, yes, she’s crazy.

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When the Republicans determined that ACORN had somehow helped President Obama win the 2008 presidential election, and following a heavily-doctored video prank by James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart, the Republicans began a legislative witch hunt that ended with the total eradication of ACORN even though it really hadn’t done anything wrong — other than being conspiratorially associated with the Obama campaign. Oh, and it helped poor people, and Republicans will have none of that.

With the ACORN victory under its belt, the GOP aimed its crosshairs at Planned Parenthood. In this case, it wasn’t necessarily because it was associated with the Obama White House, but because of yet another selectively edited and therefore highly deceptive O’Keefe/Breitbart video. The de-funding campaign by the Republicans hasn’t yet been successful at the federal level, but Republican-controlled state legislatures are hard at work on the process, too, with successes in Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin — all of which have cut funding to the organization.

I’m sure you recall a video that circulated around the tubes before the election of an African American woman who was attending a roadside rally for the Obama campaign. In the video, the woman ranted somewhat incoherently about her apparently free “Obamaphone.” As soon as Drudge plastered her face above his logo, far-right Republican heads began to immediately explode over the notion of “minorities” receiving free phones from the White House as alleged bribes for volunteerism and votes.

Yesterday, Rep. Tim Griffin (R-Ark) announced that he and Michele Bachmann were co-sponsoring legislation to eliminate the so-called Obamaphone program.

The calculus is that everyone who votes for hooples like Griffin and Bachmann will believe that taxpayer money is being funneled by President Obama into fancy-shmancy cellphones for lazy, shiftless poor people (“lazy, shiftless” dog whistle words intentional). Why do they get a free iPhone (they don’t) when they can’t be bothered to get a job? And why do I have to pay for it with my money that I earned?! Makers and takers! Makers and takers!

The truth is that the Lifeline program has been around since 1984 when, that’s right, Ronald Reagan helped to create it. In 1996, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set up a non-profit outfit called the Universal Service Administrative Company, which receives financial backing via the Universal Service Fund. According to its website, money for the program is contributed entirely by “long distance companies, local telephone companies, wireless telephone companies, paging companies, and payphone providers,” and none of the funding comes from taxpayers via the federal government. It’s all privately donated money.

Wingnut conspiracy theorists might ask how Reagan could possibly have anything to do with cellphones way back in 1984. Well, some time later, TracPhone Wireless created SafeLink, a cellphone service that was tacked onto the Lifeline program. SafeLink provides the minutes and TracPhone provides the phones. And, again, not a penny in funding comes from the federal government in any way, shape or form — in the same way that government funding isn’t used for Planned Parenthood abortion services. So when exactly did the SafeLink cellphone service begin? 2008, when George W. Bush was president.

Fact: President Obama has nothing to do with the program, that is unless he owns a time-traveling Delorean and traveled back to 1984.

Of course the goal of the program is to make sure low income Americans have access to an affordable telephone in case of emergency or for the job search process. Sure, it’s possible that some recipients have abused the service and used it for… who knows what. But there are abuses everywhere. It’d be like shutting down a soup kitchen because a few people went back for seconds of the corn casserole.

Instead of going after oil companies that receive massive taxpayer subsidies while earning record profits and simultaneously charging us high gas prices, the Republicans much prefer demagoguing and eliminating services like Lifeline and ACORN because it’ll score them points with their mouth-breathing, racist base. And party is all too willing to flat-out lie to its base in the process, knowing full well that the Drudge-fueled conspiracy theory was thoroughly debunked the second it appeared. But that doesn’t matter when there’s racial resentment and hatred to be exploited for a few more votes.

And so what happens if they succeed in eliminating the program? The federal budget and the deficit will remain unchanged in its absence; welfare recipients will lose access to affordable phone services making it more difficult to call an ambulance or to get job; and Bachmann and Griffin will get to say they snatched away those evil Obamaphones from evil, lazy and shiftless poor people who probably hate America, too.

By the way, while traditional news media pundits concern-troll the president’s recent approval ratings, perhaps they ought to take a good look at what the American people think of the congressional Republicans who only seem motivated to play grabass with legislation like this Griffin/Bachmann bill. Truth be told, the president’s approval rating is the same as it was on Election Day: 50 percent, with a 46 percent disapproval rating. The congressional Republicans on the other hand have a 23 percent approval rating and a whopping 72 percent disapproval.

Yeah, I wonder why. Hmm. What could it be?

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Step aside, Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann. I believe we have no choice but to crown the new chairperson of the House of Representatives’ Crazy Caucus. Incidentally, the crown is more like the creepy wire mask worn by Hannibal Lecter. You know, to prevent spitting and biting.

It’s easy to qualify for Crazy Caucus membership. All you have to do is to repeatedly pop off with remarks that not only confound sanity, reason and rationality, but the remarks also have to make us wonder how the hell you qualified to be one of the elite 535 members of the U.S. Congress tasked with authoring and voting upon laws that impact the most powerful nation in the world and its 300 million citizens. Oh, and it’s a Republican-only club that includes the aforementioned Michele Bachmann and current chairperson Louie Gohmert, along with Steve King, Paul Broun, Scott DesJarlais, Virginia Foxx and Jack Kingston. Allen West and Joe Walsh are former “emeritus” members, but there’s always a chance they’ll make it back to Congress somehow.

And that brings us to the crowning of Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) as the wearer of the crown (mask). I’ll get into specifics after some brief background.

Blackburn has a long history of ridiculous statements. The first time I noticed her was back in 2009 when she said about healthcare reform, “There is no test case out there that they can point to, no pilot project they can point to where a government-controlled health care system has brought down the cost, increased the access, taken care of those with pre-existing and chronic conditions, allowed portability, dealt with malpractice reform.” No case — except for nearly all industrialized nations and Mitt Romney’s state of Massachusetts.

More recently, Blackburn brazenly parroted Alex Jones pro-gun talking points and seriously considered the notion that the president was lying when he said he’s shot skeet at Camp David. Both of these incidents catapulted her into the Crazy Caucus in the first place, and with the most meteoric rise to the top of the crazy heap, Blackburn has attained the leadership post with the following statement about why she voted against the Violence Against Women Act:

When you start to make this about other things it becomes an “against violence act” and not a targeted focus act that there is there to address the issue of violence against women. [...]

I didn’t like the way it was expanded to include other different groups. What you need is something that is focused specifically to help the shelters and to help out law enforcement, who is trying to work with the crimes that have been committed against women and helping them to stand up.

That’s right, she said she voted against the bill because it would’ve protected LGBT couples, Native American women and undocumented women who are victims of domestic violence. In other words, women in certain demographic or racial categories don’t deserve the same protections under the law, so she refused to allow anyone to receive special protections. Regarding Native Americans, ThinkProgress pointed out:

Additionally, the reauthorized VAWA includes provisions to prevent serial rapists and similar abusers from preying on Native American women. If Blackburn considers Native American women a “different group,” then it’s one she should be most concerned about: Three out of every five Native American women has been assaulted by an intimate partner.

Not only are Blackburn’s no-vote and subsequent remarks misogynistic (women can be misogynists, too), homophobic and racist against arguably the most decimated ethnic group on the continent, but her statement is also the same thin, tired argument that gets wheeled out every time hate crime-style laws come up for debate. The argument claims that no group should receive special protections against certain types of crime — instead, we ought to rely upon existing crime prevention and law enforcement. But women, members of the LGBT community and racial minorities are too often victims of special varieties of crime specifically because the assailants attacked them out of a violent and sociopathic hatred of who the victims are, and therefore the victims require special law enforcement protections and outreach beyond what the law currently provides.

But I’m admittedly dealing in logic, fairness and sanity in the face of the new chairperson of the House Crazy Caucus. There isn’t any logic, fairness or sanity to found there. Blackburn would rather pander to the darkest, most twisted instincts of the Republican far-right. After all, if there wasn’t money and votes in being crazy, there wouldn’t be a Crazy Caucus.

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Bill Maher explains why Romney lost the election:

Mitt Romney lost because of the Republican brand and Republican policies. There are other reasons, of course, like Mitt being unlovable to anyone not named Ann Romney, but nothing trumps the idea that 2/3rds of America thinks the other 1/3 is a frightening conglomerate of Bible-thumpers, xenophobes, and vaginophobes. (Not a word, but should be.)

Take Mitt’s pivot from being “severely conservative” to being “the white Barack Obama.” Sure, everyone tacks to the middle after the primaries, but Mitt’s performance was different: it was a full-scale repudiation of just about every idea that conservatives hold dear. The positions were changed. The rhetoric was completely different. He was basically Barack Obama, Caucasian Edition.

Now I know what you’re saying: this is what Mitt Romney always does. Being a shape-shifting phony isn’t an act; that’s who he is! And this is true.

But it isn’t who Michele Bachmann is. When it comes to nutty right-wing beliefs that are completely false, she’s a true believer. And yet what was Michele Bachmann saying during the waning days of her too-close-for-comfort campaign? She was putting out an ad distancing herself from her own Party — even her conservative district:

“Michele Bachmann is an independent voice working for us, saying no to big spending by both political parties but bringing them together…”

Then Michele pops on the screen and says, “That’s why I’ve been an independent voice working for you…”

Wow. …I’m just saying. When even Michele Bachmann can’t run as a proud Republican, your brand identification has reached “pink slime” territory.

Maher hits the nail on the head here – the Republicans are going to continue to have a hard time electorally because their party has now divvied off into so many extreme factions, there’s no coherence whatsoever. Romney was always going to have a hard time getting elected given the ideological gymnastics he had to play just to get through the primaries. He had to shore up the crazy Right and disown 99% of his record to become the Republican nominee, then pretend that it never happened in the general election in order to pick up votes from the center. The Democrats simply sat back and ran Romney’s own words against him making their job relatively straightforward (bar Obama’s atrocious first debate performance).

Obama has successfully re-branded the Democratic Party to encompass right wing foreign policy with a center left economic platform, giving it electoral coherence that doesn’t require too much shape shifting when running for office. Agree or disagree with what the Democratic Party now stands for (and in regards to foreign policy, I certainly don’t), it’s definitely working.

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Will it come to this? Impersonators play Romney and Obama

1. Look for Mitt Romney to attempt a ‘game changer’ during the debate. This could come in several forms – trying to look human, attacking Obama for his association with Rev. Wright (yes, really), or a revelation that he has black ancestry….

2. How many times will President Obama use the ”47%” remark against Romney? Surely there’s a drinking game to be had out of this?

3. Stupid questions from the moderator. Remember when CNN’s John King asked Michele Bachmann the incredibly important question as to whether she preferred Elvis or Johnny Cash? Let’s hope we don’t have repeat tonight.

4. Who looks ‘the most Presidential’. This is the most important question the mainstream media has come up in 60 years of Presidential debates. Which candidate’s suit fit better? What color was their tie? Did they smile and mention God enough? You know, the stuff that matters…

5. How many times will both candidates use their campaign slogans ‘Forward’ and ‘Keep America American’? Another drinking game?

We’ll be doing a live blog of the debate here at The Daily Banter so check back in later!

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Romney and Sununu can't stop lying about Medicare.

By Bob Cesca: Something hilarious and weird happened yesterday. No sooner had I posted my column here about the Republican Medicare Scam, but Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu returned to CNN, clipped on a microphone and shouted down Soledad O’Brien with the same crap-on-a-stick that I wrote about yesterday. Specifically, he repeated the whopper lie that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka. “Obamacare”) cuts $700 billion from Medicare, implying that benefits were cut.

$700 billion. Keep that number in mind.

Sununu said, “When Obama gutted Medicare by taking $717 billion out of it, the Romney plan does not do that. The Ryan plan mimicked part of the Obama package there. The Romney plan does not. That’s a big difference.”

So let’s get this straight. Sununu just said the Paul Ryan Medicare Plan — the one that Romney said he would’ve signed into law had he been president — cuts $717 billion from Medicare? Interesting. Thanks for clarifying, Mr. Sununu.

Lanhee Chen, Romney’s chief policy director told TPM, “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have always been fully committed to repealing Obamacare, ending President Obama¹s $716 billion raid on Medicare and tackling the serious fiscal challenges our country faces.”

It’s $716 billion now?

Mitt Romney said to First Read, “But my plan for Medicare is very similar to his plan, which is ‘Do not change the program for current retirees or near-retirees but do not do what the president has done and that is to cut $700 billion out of the current program.”

RNC Chairman and Star Wars Cantina Alien Reince Priebus said, “President Obama… stole $700 billion from Medicare.”

Stole?

Right-wing apparatchik and Sarah Palin fanboy Rich Lowry repeated the $700 billion number on Meet the Press last Sunday.

Now it’s $700 billion. This is the number I wrote about yesterday, and today the flood gates opened wide and this lie has been released into the world like the Motaba Virus.

Back in June, however, not a single Republican was saying $700 billion. Back then, the commonly repeated number was $500 billion. That’s a huge difference.

After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Obamacare, Republican Rep. Jon Runyan said, “My constituents simply cannot afford the $500 billion in new tax increases and $500 billion in Medicare cuts required to pay for this flawed legislation.”

Mitt Romney said something similar in June, “Obamacare cuts Medicare — cuts Medicare by approximately $500 billion dollars.”

As far back as a year ago, the quoted number remained $500 billion.

Here’s Michele Bachmann during a debate in June, 2011: “Senior citizens get this more than any other segment of our population, because they know in Obamacare the president of the United States took away $500 billion — a half-trillion dollars — out of Medicare, shifted it to Obamacare to pay for younger people.”

Mitt Romney in the same debate, “Obamacare takes $500 billion out of Medicare and funds Obamacare.”

So somehow in the last few days, the amount that was “stolen” from Medicare has magically increased by $200 billion! That’s amazing.

But of course it’s all lies. The notion of $500 billion in “cuts” ostensibly “stolen” from Medicare has been thoroughly debunked and discredited by everyone from Politifact to The Washington Post, both of which note that there aren’t any cuts to benefits — none. So it’s no surprise to learn that the bigger lie about $700 billion (or $717 billion or $716 billion) in cuts has also been widely debunked by fact-checkers everywhere including Bloomberg.

And yet they keep repeating it over and over and over, and, in fact, as we get closer to Election Day, the number is mysteriously increasing. At this rate, I suspect the Republican number to reach $1 gazillion-gajillion by October.

To repeat what I wrote yesterday, Obamacare doesn’t cut a single penny from Medicare benefits. In fact, it increases benefits through a variety of new programs including full coverage for preventative medical care without coinsurance or deductibles, discounts on prescription drugs and the gradual closure of the Part-D “donut hole.” In total so far, 220,000 retirees have saved $3.4 billion they would have otherwise paid out-of-pocket without the dreaded Obamacare legislation.

Meanwhile, Obamacare trims $428 billion in waste, fraud and abuse. Not $500 billion and certainly not $700 billion. No cuts to benefits, just increased efficiency, fraud protection and a reduction in Medicare Advantage payments to the same levels as Medicare proper. That’s all. The savings will add another decade of solvency to Medicare, while, according to the CBO, Medicare spending is expected to nearly double by 2020. Meanwhile, Medicare Advantage premiums are lower and enrollment is up.

The Republicans, including Mitt Romney, are vocally against these obviously positive changes to the system, and they’ve vowed to repeal Obamacare and all of the Medicare provisions within, including the streamlined savings, the preventative care coverage and they’ll re-open the donut hole, leaving retirees with potentially thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket drug expenses every year. At the same time, the Romney camp is positioning itself as the true savior of the program — a claim that’s absurd on its face and exactly the opposite of their true intentions.

So it turns out that the $717 billion number that Sununu was screeching about on CNN was pulled out of a July 24 CBO memo about the House plan to repeal Obamacare. Doug Elmendorf explained, “Spending for Medicare would increase by an estimated $716 billion over that 2013–2022 period.” There’s nothing in there about benefit cuts or anything else the Republicans have said. Nothing.

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The Romney/Ryan Agenda: Boom goes the economy.

Mitt Romney’s choice for his VP running mate really tells you all you need to know about the choice this year for the Presidency. Paul Ryan is about as far right as you can possibly get on the economic spectrum – a hardcore Ayn Rand ideologue who’s policy proposals consist of stripping away what is left of government and leaving the country to the ravages of the free market.The ‘Ryan Plan’ was touted as the boldest conservative economic proposal in the history of the Republican Party, meaning it was in reality, completely insane.

But not only is Ryan a militant libertarian, he’s also a lazy one who doesn’t actually bother to check whether his sums add up. Writes Paul Krugman of Ryan’s  lauded economic proposal:

Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.

Vice Presidents don’t have much say over actual policy when in office, but Romney’s pick was designed to be symbolic. He’s reaching out to the hard right this election and clearly aims to draw a stark contrast between himself and Obama in economic terms. Given Obama is pretty centrist when it comes to policy (at least in international terms), this is actually pretty scary.

George Bush’s Presidency was extremely militant from a foreign policy perspective, and a Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan Presidential ticket would equal that from an economic point of view. They would make Bush look like a socialist if they enacted even a fraction of the proposals in Ryan’s plan for the country.  As Nate Silver writes:

Various statistical measures of Mr. Ryan peg him as being quite conservative. Based on his Congressional voting record, for instance, the statistical system DW-Nominate evaluates him as being roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

By this measure, in fact, which rates members of the House and Senate throughout different time periods on a common ideology scale, Mr. Ryan is the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900. He is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the center.

If you needed another reason to get out and vote for Obama this November, this is a pretty damn big one.

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