Dear Commons Community,

Charles Blow in today’s New York Times comments on the state of the Republican Party and what he terms its “[Michele]  Bachmann Problem”.   He cites data from  a recent Pew Research Center  survey that indicates the Republican Party’s image is at an historic low with 62% of the public saying the GOP is out of touch with the American people, 56% think it is not open to change and 52% say the party is too extreme. Opinions about the Democratic Party are mixed, but the party in general is viewed more positively than the GOP.

Blow cites Andrew Kohut, the founding director of the Pew Research Center, who pointed out in The Washington Post on Friday that the party’s ratings “now stand at a 20-year low,” and that is in part because “the outsize influence of hard-line elements in the party base is doing to the G.O.P. what supporters of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern did to the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s — radicalizing its image and standing in the way of its revitalization.”

Blow blames hardliners such as Michele Bachmann who deal in hyperbole and who are fact-challenged:  For example:   “PolitiFact rated two of her claims during her CPAC speech last Saturday as “pants on fire” false. The first was that 70 cents of every dollar that’s supposed to go to the poor actually goes to salaries and pensions of bureaucrats. The second was that scientists could have a cure for Alzheimer’s in 10 years if it were not for “a cadre of overzealous regulators, excessive taxation and greedy litigators.

And in a speech Thursday on the House floor, she said of the federal health care law:

“The American people, especially vulnerable women, vulnerable children, vulnerable senior citizens, now get to pay more and they get less. That’s why we’re here, because we’re saying let’s repeal this failure before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens.”

Blow’s conclusion:

“People like Bachmann represent everything that is wrong with the Republican Party. She and her colleagues are hyperbolic, reactionary, ill-informed and ill-intentioned, and they have become synonymous with the Republican brand. We don’t need all politicians to be Mensa-worthy, but we do expect them to be cogent and competent.

When all the dust settles from the current dustup within the party over who holds the mantle and which direction to take, Republicans will still be left with the problem of what to do with people like Bachmann.

And as long as the party has Bachmanns, it has a problem.”

A problem indeed!!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It has been 98 days since the tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School when a lone gun man killed twenty students, ages 6 and 7, and six adults.  As the nation mourned a little more than three months ago,  politicians around the country expressed outrage and vowed to do something to protect people from guns.  This past week, the US Senate watered down even the meekest of attempts to reign in the proliferation of guns when it eliminated the ban on assault weapons in a proposed bill.

The Huffington Post in an effort to draw attention to the fact that guns kill people, has an interactive website that traces the deaths of Americans by guns across the United States.  At the website, the image above is interactive and visitors can see exactly where and when people were killed in the different parts of the country since the Sand Hook tragedy.

Worth a visit!

Tony