Iowa east of Des Moines was just about the most fundamentally decent place in America. Darkness and Decay and the Red Death now hold illimitable dominion over all.

As long as were going back to the inception of the country maybe we should give the Native Americans back their land.

Home schooling in Iowa must be regulation-free.

Home schooling in Illinois is regulation-free. Iowa has some sensible state monitoring of year-to-year progress. Which undoubtedly chaps her hide.

Alternate realities demand alternate forms of government.

http://youtu.be/tmPOdszK688

Even if we accept Shannon’s premise that the government is illegitimate, the fact remains that she hasn’t been elected….to any office…by voters. I wasn’t alive back then but I’m pretty sure even in the old days of appointed Senators, none of them just announced they were now Senators and then went off to “serve”.

Good morning, pups. Today we have Keller and Krugman. In “Five Obamacare Myths” Mr. Keller says the slogans and scare stories have taken over the discussion. The Affordable Care Act is humane, fiscally viable and Democrats should be out there defending it. Prof. Krugman, in “Policy and the Personal,” says there’s a lot of tut-tutting about the focus on Mitt Romney’s personal history. But it’s not a diversion; it’s a way to bring real policy issues to the forefront.

Here they are.

The coffee and tea are ready, the cold drinks are in the fridge, and the biscuits are out of the oven. That’s some pretty interesting stuff they have going on in Iowa. I’d like some of whatever it is that’s in their water coolers. IOWA — Idiots Out Walking Around. Time to go and scratch my head over what to bring for lunch. Have a great day.

Don’t know Margaret….Maybe an all Volunteer Senate…Like the group one doesn’t want to belong to if they let “me” in….Good Morning. We had enormous rain yesterday…

Look for something that will put these – uhum – concerned citizens under the microscope of the federal government just like the communists were after WWII.

Yeah, you guys got hammered!

Nah…instead we have the absurd practice of police beating down a woman for knitting at an occupy park while ignoring the right wing teabaggers who show up armed and bellicose to Democratic events.

Thanks Marion. That personal history stuff is defined thusly; ‘personal history — his record of profiting even as workers suffered, his mysterious was-he-or-wasn’t-he role at Bain Capital after 1999, his equally mysterious refusal to release any tax returns from before 2010.’ Now my personal history is a bit different from this in so many ways, but that reads like economic/business history to me. I don’t care a whit if he beat his wife and that’s ‘personal’. But I do care what his dealings with economic matters are, because it affects me.

Well wikipedia still insists that Iowa’s senators are Death Panels Grassley and Harkin. I guess Shannon’s office doesn’t include anybody who knows how to deface wiki entries.

They can say or do whatever they want with their new government, as long as they pay their taxes on time to the old government.

Boxturtle (At the end of the day, money is all that matters to TPTB)

I saw “Senator” Shannon’s screed on her Facebook page. What is it about wingnuts that compels them to capitalize half their nouns?

I shoulda gotten up earlier…lots of interest during the night. Including Fla Lt Gov thread…If you haven’t noticed, we are in a
crazy world. I really never heard of volunteering to be Senator:
OK, Here I am, choose me! choose me! Am I a senator yet? May one
day work in TX…

Nothing mysterious about any of that. He doesn’t want associated with Bain during those years because it will hurt his run when people who work see the decisions he makes. He won’t release his tax returns because even if everything he did is perfectly legal, it’ll be ugly when people pay attention to all the things a rich man can legally do to reduce his taxes. Thangs that aren’t abailable to the average taxpayer.

I think he taxes will show perfectly legal, allowing for the occasional stupid mistake.

Boxturtle (The 1% is worrying that if we see what they can do, we’ll stop it)

Spot on but further than that, if Rmoney decides to run on his Bain record, (because his record as governor is too toxic), then his record at Bain is fair game. That would be like me applying for a job, when I have two previous jobs in which the experience gained would be applicable. Maybe I don’t want my prospective employer to look to closely at one previous job so I mention it in passing while embellishing the other prior position because my resume is thin. Is my prospective employer entitled to dig into my resume and ask about inconsistencies? Of Course! S/he would be an idiot not to! If I had then skipped addressing those inconsistencies and called my potential predecessor names instead, would I get hired? Almost certainly not. This is just more clueless, entitled, rich guy behavior.

What is it about wingnuts that compels them to capitalize half their there noun’s?

Fixed for more wingnuttiness.

One more comment before I head out.

“Senator” Shannon is an extreme example, but the country is crawling with self-proclaimed experts on the Constitution, many of whom have never even taken a high school course in civics. Low-information voters give these “experts” the same amount of credence as people like myself who have actually graduated from law school.

Welcome to Charles P. Pierce’s Idiot America, where what is fact depends on how many people believe something is true.

Actually, this is the old government, if they’re saying everything since the Civil War is illegitimate. Guess they owe all the bills now.

LMAO! Mind if I take it further?
What is it about wingnuts that compels them to capitalize half their there they’re noun’s?

Since his entire profession of an ability to run the country is based on his Bain record, it’s about all that IS applicable.

Yes, what he’s done to avoid taxes is probably all legal but first the corporate welfare moguls wrote the laws to avoid taxing money made by the rich, particularly the money made in use of money that had already been taxed. The same doesn’t apply to social security, all of it earned and taxed along the way.

What I’ve seen of Rmoney’s speeches shows that he refers to his Bain record constantly as why we should vote for him. He made money. He has no concept of any other way to show his, or any, value.

self-proclaimed experts on the Constitution

Ask ‘em about any amendment other thant the 2nd, you’ll likely just get a blank stare. Or a trip WAY out to right field.

Boxturtle (the first amendment does not rule out a Christian theocracy, for example)

Love that she wants to exclude the amendments to the constitution beyond the 14th. The 19th gave women the right to vote.

You guys missed an opportunity for another misplaced apostrophe!

“What is it about wingnut’s that compels them to capitalize half their there they’re noun’s?”

And no matter whether he was the Mighty Favog of Bain in name only, he was sole stockholder. He owned the company. He cashed the checks. Game, set, match.

Another fun week, folks. Pass out the roque mallets and the popcorn, they’re gonna Eat It All.

I knew it was going to come to this.
I wonder how all these debt strapped states will exist on their own. do they plan to secede individually or en masse?
Does this mean a corporation can own a state outright?.
What about labor laws or will it just be blanket slave ownership again and will the immigrants be welcomed back ta that point?
Questions, questions.

They are still living in the seventeenth century, when it was common practice (maybe the printers didn’t have enough small caps to go around).

Since when have cotton and indigo been cash crops in Iowa?

Loon is right. That is truly embarrassing.

The actual relevant cases concerning the Constitution and possessions of the United States were decided around 1900 and are called “The Insular Cases.” Peter Finley Dunne’s “Mr Dooley” did a hilarous expository on the decision handed down by the USSC around that time

Um – this is pretty hilarious already, but:

you know which language capitalizes nouns, don’t you? Uh-huh.
German.

Just sayin’.

The whole states’ rights thing

Logically, you should either reject in its entirety the idea that the states of this supposed Union have any sort of independent existence, any right to any powers other than those the Union grants them, or you accept that the states are the source of all governmental authority. What we actually have is a muddle. We mostly live by the first idea in practice, but we never went back and changed the Constitution to make that the official theory.

We really can’t get by with both the Supremacy Clause and the Tenth Amendment. One of them has to go. For a long time it seemed that things would work just fine if we didn’t bother with theoretical consistency, if we just ignoired it and went on with the federal govt supreme in practice. The fossil remnants of states’ rights seemed no more threatening to our system than the fossil remnants of monarchy seem to threaten a return of actual royal rule of the United Kingdom.

So, sure, laugh at this loon and her Republic of the United States. It’s reassuring to think of states’ rights as the sole province of loons who fatally marginalize themselves by embracing it. But the theory she merely takes to its logical conclusion, that the Constitution has no weight except as a compact among the thirteen original states, is the core Federalist Society belief.

They aren’t willing to state it so baldly as this loon. It’s not just that pretending to take the Supremacy Clause seriously as a counterweight to the Tenth is necessary to getting past confirmation. They find that position substantively useful where the conservative movement would prefer a strong central govt. But make no mistake, the Federalist Society majority they have managed to pack SCOTUS with will take states’ rights as far as they have to, where they have to, to make progressive governance imnpossible in this country. Anything govt does that they don’t like will become subject to the 50 veto points of the 50 state legislatures.