But this teabagging/tea party thing just doesn’t make sense to me.  We have a brand new president who has set in motion a whole raft of policy changes and programs that are worthy of protest, if you disagree, but why are taxes suddenly the problem?  Obama reduced taxes, so they can’t protest high taxes — are these people are just now realizing that they pay them annually?

I know, I know, the answer is “they’re just complaining about Obama in whatever way they can” — but that’s the whole problem.  Until the American right-wing becomes more serious about itself (and what it stands for), they’re going to be the butt of teabagging jokes for a long time to come.  Visit www.AndrewSullivan.com today for a play-by-play of “WTF?”

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As the global financial meltdown has rocked the stock market — and millions of 401-K’s along with it — the first thing to spring to the average American’s mind was something like “Okay, so how is George W. Bush responsible?”

It’s a question worth asking, but thus far there haven’t been many answers.  Democrats blame Republicans for their dogmatic obedience to the financial sector, and their refusal to believe that it could do anything wrong.  Republicans blame Democrats for… forcing them to give loans to minorities.  (Yes, political operatives on the GOP side are writing straight-faced editorials claiming that the global financial collapse which is bankrupting people from New York to Istanbul is thanks to a few thousand poor folks in Chicago — most often believed to be Barack Obama’s friends and family, all of whom are also terrorists.)

But if we’re going to place blame along political lines, it’s going to be hard not to find fault with the part who has controlled congress for 12 of the last 14 years, and the presidency for 8 of them (read: Gasp, Republicans!!).

However, I’ve always thought the problem was much more subtle than that.  It’s not so much that one party or the other has explicity designed our financial system to fail (though that is essentially the result of the GOP’s deregulation fixation).  Rather, it’s a decades-long belief by both parties in Washington that rules and regulations really are best left alone.  This is thanks to the popularity of Ronald Reagan.  Not, mind you, the success of his policies, which is meh — but just the fact that politicians are trying to somehow capture the same stuff that made him popular, to use it for themselves.

Anyway, the point is, there’s a great writeup in Business Week explaining a key moment in the meltdown, when state officials went to the federal office of the Comptroller to warn him that “aggressive lending” — in the praiseful words of George W. Bush — was causing huge problems in their states, and the Comptroller (appointed by Bill Clinton) decided that he didn’t care, and that the days of government watchdogs and regulation had gone the way of the Dodo.

It’s true; they had.  How about we bring them back?  Freedom is great — but regulation isn’t a lack of freedom.  It’s like putting more cops on the street, so we don’t let people’s freedoms result in the burning down of buildings.

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It’s a fair question, and a delicate foreign policy area.  Barack Obama said he would in a debate many months ago, and McCain called him out on it during Friday night’s debate.  So a kid asks Palin about it in a cheesesteak hut, and she says Obama’s right.

Today, McCain gets angry, cancels his town hall meeting, and yells at George Stephanopoulos about it.  Pretty funny.

Click here for video.

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Today, I can conclude that Jensen is undoubtedly correct. Stein’s pseudo-celebrity status and history of being a part-time speech writer for Republicans 40 years ago apparently earns him the right to be interviewed by CNN.com, and what he had to say was pretty revealing.

First, he said that John McCain needs to hire Karl Rove. Yes, the man responsible for the collapse of the current Republican party. The man credited with not only cheap campaign trickery, but inspiring his candidates to employ a king-to-servants relationship with their supporters. The man who continues to expand the power of the executive branch to such a degree that most constitutional analysts doubt it will ever go back. The man who essentially doomed the Republican party by convincing red staters that voting was about culture, not about governing. The GOP’s own version of Larry the Cable Guy — phenomenal success… through short-term gimmickry.

But that’s not important. What’s actually important is, Stein used this opportunity in a national interview (which he apparently held in a special, super-creepy room filled with past GOP yard signs), to call for a sequel to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Mystery solved. The guy just needs some love.

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First, John McCain’s top media adviser stepped down yesterday because he’s been saying for months and months that if Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, he wouldn’t want to run against him. Now, surprisingly, he’s actually made good on his word, choosing to resign rather than trying to stop an Obama presidency. He said:

“I just don’t want to work against an Obama candidacy. [Having him as president] would send a great message to the country and the world.”

But that’s not all. A friend of McCain’s, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, had some choice words in response to McCain and Obama’s manufactured foreign policy arguments about Iran and Palestine. This, from CNN.com:

Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel … said Tuesday he is “very upset” with some of the things the party’s presumptive presidential nominee has been saying as he campaigns for the White House.

“We know from past campaigns that presidential candidates will say many things,” Hagel reportedly said. “But once they have the responsibility to govern the country and lead the world, that difference between what they said and what responsibilities they have to fulfill are vastly different.”

Like I said, very strange.

Why is everyone treating Obama with kid gloves again? After months of hard-edged fighting with Hillary Clinton, we’re back to that point in time where people seem to think that attacking Obama will only hurt their public perception. And hey, maybe they’re right. But it almost makes me miss the days of Karl Rove.

Okay, maybe it doesn’t.

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President Bush, obviously heartened by all the “principled” successes of his White House career thus far, is getting a little veto-happy in his last summer as president. Maybe he resents all those GOP congressmen who have distanced themselves from him in this election year, but after spending six years as the president who didn’t even know what the word “Veto” meant, constantly signing anything the Republican congress sent him, he now is threatening to veto anything he hears about.

Two examples, relatively bipartisan, couldn’t be further apart in terms of reason.

One is a recently passed mortgage crisis relief bill for families in jeopardy of losing their homes. This is right. After bailing out Bear Stearns, the sinking investment bank whose practices played a big role in creating the housing market crisis, it only makes sense to try to help the homeowners they swindled. A shrewd President Bush has smugly called the bill “a bailout,” which it is. It’s almost the exact same sort of bailout that Bear Stearns got.

The other is a ludicrous bill to increase the subsidies being doled out to farmers, who are currently making record profits and reaping all the rewards of a world food crisis. This $300 Billion bill would do some very good things. It’s designed to expand the role of American farmers in producing clean energy solutions — from the terrible idea of increasing Ethanol production, to the fabulous idea of tax breaks for opening wind farms and solar fields on their land.

Bush will veto both, and we’ll have to wait until January to get both of them passed. As usual, they will cancel each other out; and, as usual, Bush got one right and one wrong — completely, by my estimate, by accident.

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I guess it’s nice to know that when Bush retires, he’ll be well taken care of and with “his own people.” That is if he even keeps “the ranch,” which he bought to market himself to people for the 2000 election — a fact which has been widely lampooned.

Anyway, it’s pretty funny. Especially when you consider that lovely law in Texas which allows homeowners to legally shoot people who are trespassing on their property.

Gulp.

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Now, the Republican National Committee is following suit, saying after a cell in Tennessee put out a slanderous press release about Obama’s middle name and trips to Africa, “The RNC rejects these kinds of campaign tactics.”  And while that historically hasn’t been true, this is certainly a refreshing turn for the party of small-tent traditionalists.

Let’s see if the non-politically employed members of the conservative movement can grow up and follow suit.

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Everyone’s favorite “acting” Governor (hah–see what I did there?), Arnold Schwarzenegger, has just released his new budget plan. If he had released the details in a speech, it would’ve went something like this:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m happy to announce that I’ve come up with a bold new plan to improve our state and enrich all of our lives.

As part of this groundbreaking initiative, I promise to shut down one out of every five public parks. And, rest assured that nothing but the most mediocre education is good enough for Cali-fornia’s students, because I’ll make it my personal business to slash the education budget by ten percent–that’s four billion dollars that won’t be holding back our kids any longer!

But wait, there’s more! Our streets have never been safer than they will be after today, because I’m flooding them with 22,000 newly released state prison inmates. It is my firm belief that this powerful plan will result in lower crime, because these inmates will obviously scare all the other criminals out of their lives of crime. I say, why overpopulate the prisons when we can simply overpopulate our streets?

Finally, I’m going to show these welfare moms who’s boss, and at long last hold their children accountable for their actions. That’s right, the children of welfare recipients who fail to get a job will no longer have those wasteful benefits turning them into lazy babies. No, I’m not cutting benefits to the welfare recipients–I’m explicitly cutting the benefits of their children. Just like I am for the do-nothing deaf and blind. That’s right: thanks to me, disabled citizens will have no aid at their disposal by the end of the decade.

But I’ll tell you who’s not blind: this administration. We’ve heard your cry for a dumber, dirtier, and less safe society–and finally we’re doing something about it. And what’s more, thanks to these new budget cuts, the state will almost make a profit this year–only 14.8 billion dollars in debt!

Oh, and I almost forgot. Look at my American Flag Lapel Pin. That means I love America, vote for me. God bless America. God bless you. And God bless God, I guess. I mean God needs a blessing too, right? God bless us, everyone. Except the Islamic Fascists.

Thank you.”

To read a less satirical take, feel free to click here.

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Now, whispers have already begun suggesting that John McCain is primed to supplant the new leader for the GOP nomination.

The New York Times is reporting that the politicos of the Republican party are stepping away from the populist preacher candidate, fearing that he doesn’t have the chops to win nationally in the general election. I guess something about a Southern governor and religious fanatic seems a little too familiar to the GOP elite.

Oh, and did I mention that Mitt Romney just took Wyoming?

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