Last night Cocktailhag-American Jan Brewer, governor (!) of Arizona, was faced with what turned out to be, for her, an insurmountable task: giving  one-minute opening statement in the debate between her and her Democratic opponent for election to the post she gained only through the Obama administration’s stupidity and tone-deafness, and in it she actually managed to make Sarah Palin look like a Rhodes Scholar.  It was stupefying, really.  She had a a few bland, content-free platitudes prepared and a little anti-Obama red meat, but she clearly had no idea what they might be, even as someone must have been applying her pancake.  Remember, Palin didn’t launch, jaw-droppingly, into moose-peranto until she was foiled by “gotcha” questions from that bulldog Katie Couric; Brewer was unable to read on television, without making a dunderheaded ass of herself, a PREPARED ONE-MINUTE STATEMENT.  On a Fox affiliate, to boot.

Is there any sort of floor, at long last, for Republican stupidity?  The whole point of the exercise is to make bad ideas look good on TV, and even in that pathetically modest endeavor, Brewer just scored a big, fat, fail, which is obviously destined to become a youtube blockbuster.  (The video is inescapable on the internet…  go to digby, tbogg, salon, tpm, or pretty much anywhere to watch it;  just pee first and set down all beverages before clicking play…)  Sure, Palin’s stupidity has been parleyed  into her well-crafted victimhood schtick, and stupid people everywhere are gaga over her for reasons they are unable to articulate, but nonetheless firmly hold; an undoubtedly boffo combination that has won many Republican victories in the recent past, but honestly…  Lengthy seconds of giggly silence, as the huge false eyelashes are cast down at something on her desk (what?  My Pet Goat?  Atlas Shrugged?) doesn’t seem like the sort of performance that is going to win over thinking Arizonans, in the unlikely event that there remains such a thing.

Clearly, Brewer has decided, along with most other far right Republicans running this season, that all media, except Fox and hate radio, is the enemy, and see no reason to engage with it at all.  But since they do have to sometimes appear in public before they are elected and can get on with the looting (in Brewer’s case it’s private prisons, who are eagerly making room for all the SB 1070 arrests already…), impertinent backtalk from the Fourth Estate can’t entirely be avoided, so would you people please, for the love of God, at least practice your vapid talking points?  The answer is obviously no.

Here in Oregon we have the male equivalent of a PalinBrewer ConservaBarbie running for governor, whose total qualifications for office consist of being 7 feet tall, a former Trailblazer, and the worst free-thrower in the NBA.  His name is Chris Dudley, and guess what?  No debates, and no appearances except with right-leaning media, and he has so much money, he just might beat former governor John Kitzhaber that way, with content-free attack ads.  Ah, democracy in the Citizens (!) United  era.  Let the dumbest candidate win.

That’s the inscription on the front of the Supreme Court building.  No, seriously.  The part right beneath it where it says “But Some Are More Equal Than Others” may as well be chiseled in now, under a no-bid contract  by Halliburton.  The court, whose rampantly corporatist wing wouldn’t even exist without its heretofore most ridiculous decision, Bush v. Gore, went ahead and cemented the fascist gains of that revolting and audacious overreach yesterday, providing the money shot for the typically graphic right-wing porno movie we’ve been forced to watch ever since.  Now, certain fictitious “people,” who are just the same as you and me except for the fact that they never die, can never be imprisoned, rake in billions every quarter, and can loot the federal treasury at will, have finally been rescued from their oppressed position in society, unlike, say, lesbian Moms who would like to marry.  Anatole France, who spoke of the “equal” rights of the poor and rich to sleep outside and beg for bread, must be fairly astonished.  The rich he was talking about could at least, in a pinch, be beheaded.  Not so JPMorgan Chase and Exxon.

I remember my annoyance, but certainly not surprise, at the coverage of the Roberts and Alito confirmations, when the media reliably threw up a smokescreen over the proceedings by dwelling on debates about abortion and the Nuclear Option, with their always feigned credulity about what Bush was really up to.  All of them, of course, are but the gaudy creations of undeserved constitutional favoritism and the absurd extensions thereof enacted by the right-wing politicians they so cravenly fawned over, and one could hardly expect them to think, when they are so handsomely paid not to.  But Roberts’ record as a corporate lawyer was rife with arguments in favor of corporate personhood, and revealingly bereft of any of the irrelevant and non-remunerative culture war garbage that the Republicans have pointed at for years as they systematically looted the treasury and silenced normal Americans.  Everyone knew that controversial and scary 5-4 decisions would fall like rain as soon as these Opus Dei lunatics were sworn in, but the media carefully avoided telling anybody what kind they would be.

Well, now we know.  Kiss my ass, Operation Rescue, it’s drill, baby drill.   It’s astonishing, really, but not when you know any of them, that the cultural right ever fell for such a flagrant bait and switch.  They’ve been deceived and duped for so long that they’ve come to like it, and the corporatist wing of their chosen party has cleverly given lip service to their kooky hobby horses to advance an entirely unrelated agenda they are, happily, too dumb to contemplate.  Losing and endless wars are sold as religious crusades, spring training for the muscular Jesus, while the profiteers laugh all the way to the bank.  Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter may never be able to get married, but with the kind of trust fund Papa racked up during the Bush years, who cares?  Probably the most intelligence-insulting part of this abominable decision was the part that equated unions and corporations, as though a party that had spent 100 years hating and attempting, quite successfully, to eliminate unions, considered the vestigial remains of those once-threatening populist organizations any sort of equal to multibillionaire, multinationalist, and world-dominating corporations.

Suppressing laughter, the Court pretended to worry that corporations like Nike were vanishing into obscurity because their pitiful, rights-deprived “voices” were being shouted down.  Citibank, the poor thing, didn’t stand a chance against the unseemly advantages of welfare mothers (what welfare?) and foreclosed homeowners.  Exxon lay prostrate before the arrogant dictates of “eco-terrorists,” and the helpless cries of United Health were drowned out amid the maelstrom of desperate diabetics’ howlings in emergency rooms.  Finally warming to its historic role of defending the powerless against the inevitable depredations of the powerful, the new Supreme Court stepped boldly into the breach yesterday.  Grandma’s $25 donation would no longer be allowed to shout down Goldman Sach’s billions.  ”I have a dream,” Clarence Thomas no doubt thought, as he added in his stupefying concurring opinion that even the scanty disclosure requirements the decision left intact might subject religious bigots to, well, bigotry.

Justice Stevens, whose full-throated and uncharacteristically vocal dissent is probably the last gasp of Democracy as envisioned by the Founders in a debate that was decided for us long ago, and, barring some actuarially unlikely development,  won’t be writing for the Court much longer , had this to say in his conclusion:

At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.  It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense.  While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah, you old hippie, was Justice Kennedy’s reply yesterday morning, albeit worded somewhat differently, of course.

Back in the days of Bush and the now-defunct Air America Radio, now-Senator Al Franken had a song he played, to the tune of “Hang on Sloopy,” called “Hang on Stevens,”  which implored  the aging Justice not to tip over before Bush was gone.  Stevens did his part, by the skin of his octogenarian teeth, and did again today, valiantly.  Sadly, it’s too late.

Karl Rove’s “math” turned out to be right on the, uh, money.

UPDATE: This morning, the  Oregonian applauded the Court’s decision as a victory for “free speech.”  This brought on a massive backlash from KPOJ.  Thom Hartmann’s wife unilaterally cancelled their Oregonian subscription, based on that and the paper’s fanatical (and lucrative) stance against 66 and 67, and a slew of callers did the same.  Thom, who was out of town when Louise made the decision, lauded it later on his show.  The front page wrapper about 66 and 67 sent my brother racing to the post office to get his ballot in.