crazy extremists

It's long but Alan Minsky did a thorough biopsy of the tumor debilitating the Beltway Democrats.

Yesterday we took a look at some of the really extremist crackpots Republicans across the nation elected to Congress Tuesday.

New Jersey voters are sending an African-American woman to Congress-- for the first timeYesterday, Limbaugh said that Republicans were elected "to stop the Democrats. Republicans were not elected to govern." Democrats, on the other hand, are elected to govern.

Do fascists now control the Senate GOP? Curtis Haas and Ted CruzFormer Colorado congressman and virulent racist Tom Tancredo wrote on some fringy, far right website that if the GOP captures the Senate today the GOP leadership should move immediately to impeach President Obama. So? Who cares what a crackpot like Tancredo, a private citizen with absolutely no mainstream credibility, has to say?

Before Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932, he had already served in Parliament between 1918 and 1931 first as a member of the Conservative Party, then as an independent and later as a member of Labour. Mosley’s fascist party, which was also blatantly anti-Semitic, had the support of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror .

Boehner's lawsuit against Obama is turning out to be the bust most people predicted it would be. A Federal Court of Appeals threw out an almost identical lawsuit yesterday.

Tom Petri has been the most mainstream of Wisconsin's 5 conservative congressmen. First elected in 1979, he's generally considered a "moderate" in Congress and has been part of Steve Israel's Center Aisle caucus of Blue Dogs and mainstream Republicans. This has also guaranteed that he wouldn't face any serious challenges from Democrats while Israel ran the DCCC.

With right-wing congressman Bill Cassidy running for Mary Landrieu's Senate seat, his Baton Rouge-based House district looks very attractive to an awful lot of candidates. It's a grotesquely gerrymandered (i.e., ethnically-cleansed) deep red district with a PVI of R+21. Obama won 31% there against McCain and 32% against Romney. In 2012 the Democrats didn't even bother putting up a candidate against Cassidy.

One of the most overlooked races in the country, NC-06, had their Republican primary runoff last Tuesday.

John Birch Society stalwart and former drug addict Paul Broun has widely been considered Congress' most extreme Member. He ran in the May Georgia Republican primary for the open U.S. Senate nomination and lost miserably, failing to even crack 10%. But in his own north central Georgia district, GA-10-- stretching from just east of Atlanta to just west of August and from Athens in the north and Milledgeville in the south-- he's pretty popular. The Democrats didn't bother running anyone against him in 2012. The district has a PVI of R+14 and Obama only managed 36%.