Democrats To Make Michele Bachmann Vanish, With Maps
by Josh Fruhlinger 8:38 am September 29, 2010
When Barack Obama reveals the census numbers on December 31, it will become clear just how many people have fled the sad, crumbling Midwest, which will result in many Congressional districts there ceasing to exist. Thus, the pathetic battles to govern and/or legislate for these frozen wastelands take on extra importance, as the next two years will be consumed with fights to redraw the legislative districts there for the congressional representatives for the few remaining Midwestern humans. If the Democrats seize control of Minnesota, will they work to eliminate Michele Bachmann’s exurban fiefdom? “The party wants to defeat Ms. Bachmann but not by redrawing her out of existence,” says the state Democratic leader, so, yes, they will redraw her out of existence. [NYT]- As usual, Congress will be forced to cobble together a continuing resolution to keep the government from shutting down this fall. Fox News’ Chad Pergman has written a lovely prose poem about this annual tradition, which he has called “Breakdancing Around Nitroglycerin” for no reason we can fathom. (It’s probably explained in the second half of the thing, but we lost interest long before that.) [Fox]
- Israeli Foreign Minister/right-wing wacko Avigdor Lieberman gave an ill-received speech at the UN, saying that maybe Israel would trade away land inhabited by Israeli Arabs to the Palestinians, and that they should set up a “long-term intermediate agreement” that would last a decade or two, until everyone stopped hating each other. But Prime Minister Netanyahu says that Lieberman probably should have cleared this speech with him first, since it doesn’t actually represent the policy of the Israeli government. [BBC]
- Sharron Angle has received the coveted endorsement of … hated failed Monday Night Football word-sayer/10-10-220 pitchman Dennis Miller? Sure, why not. [Politico]
Tagged
- avigdor lieberman,
- benjamin netanyahu,
- census,
- continuing resolutions,
- Dennis Miller,
- israel,
- michele bachmann,
- midwest,
- minnesota,
- it's morning in america,
- redistricting,
- sharron angle
Rebecca Schoenkopf (424)
Kirsten Boyd Johnson (927)
Sulagna Misra (4)
Kris E. Benson (11)
Liz Colville (170)
John Schoenkopf (7)
Jim Newell (5640)
Josh Fruhlinger (646)
Erik Jay (27)
Blair Burke (181)
{ 102 comments }
Bachmann would simply move into a Fox News studio and continue her crusade against sanity from there.
I have to believe that at some point even Fox will run out of right-wing rant shows to hand out to disgraced conservative nutjobs. I mean, there are only so many timeslots in the day, right?
OTOH, I guess they could start doing shows like The Hollywood Squares… but staffed with krayzees.
Which brings us back to my plan to have CNN rebrand itself as the conservative alternative to Fox News….
I'd bet a Fox News Match Game would be pretty awesome (Doocey could host, Glen Beck would have the Charles Nelson Reilly seat and Gretchen Carlson the random hot blonde seat). Just imagine all the fun and imaginative ways they could slip Reagan or Socialism into an answer.
Since Michelle was one of the freaked-out fever-dreamers who warned about the danger of the socialist census, redistricting her into oblivion would probably be way too poetic for prosaic reality.
More likely, they'll redistrict out some liberal flamer for the sake of congressional comity or some other such bullshit.
Couldn't they just make her wear sunglasses so no one can see those batshit crazy blowupdoll eyes? She's lose at least 3/4 of her powers if those were hidden.
Nah, the only thing we have in Minnesota that even represents a liberal flamer Representative is Keith Ellison, and he would be safe from redistricting, since he presides over Minnesota's Fifth, the only district actually filled with people.
Don't be so sure. I live in a town of all of 100K – small, but it is the state capitol, county seat and one of only a handful of cities that large anywhere outside of the Chicago metroplex. So it should be the hub of a competitive district, because there are both a lot of union workers and students but the outlying county is pretty red. Instead, because of gerrymandering (worked out by the machines on both sides of the aisle 10 years ago when the GOP was strong) they manage to have 3 different districts converge here for no damn reason, with 2 hyper right districts (John "God will save us from global warming" Shimkus, Aaron "ripped abs" Schock") and a weak blue district (Phil Hare, who has a tiny slice of town en route to a bubble around Decautur, so he's more of a blue dog than anything)
So no one is safe if the knifes are really out.
Dear Palestinians: yes there can be peace between us… but not 'till we've taken all your land and "transferred" you into Jordan.
Your pal: Avigdor Lieberman
So Dennis Miller is one of the few "big names" that support Sharron Angle? What's the matter, she couldn't get Joe Piscopo?
This is the third time in as many days I've been behind the 8 ball with the snark. Must be getting old.
And where's Chuck Norris? I would think that Angle would be right up his alley if she were younger, leggier, and blonde.
"be right up his alley if she were younger, leggier, and blonde"
Just like Mike Huckabee.
Chuck supports Huckabee because he appreciates how Mike plays bass off of the backbeat. If he were younger, leggier, and blonde, he'd be an ex member of the Go-Go's.
Ted Nugent would help but it's bow hunting week up in elk country.
Presume by "bow" you mean fully-automatic assault rifle?
Victoria Jackson is withholding her endorsement until she hears Sharron's multilateral foreign policy strategy on Mideast peace talks as it relates to Palestinian statehood.
And the use of scrunchies and similar teenager accessories by dingbat ex-performers in their 50s. She really needs an answer on that.
Perfect, Bumfug, just perfect!
I swear I remember laughing at Dennis Miller. Maybe he's getting back to being funny.
I still laugh 'at' Dennis Miller.
Who doesn't regret the '80s, to some extent? I certainly do.
Yeah, a long time ago, I used to find him funny,too. Now, I just find him sad and totally irrelevant.
I remember that too. I think I was actually laughing at A. Whitney Brown's jokes though.
Is every grating, smug, unfunny slob that SNL was dumb enough to employ a Republican? Victoria Jackson, Joe Piscopo, Sarah Palin, Dennis Miller…just sayin'.
Miller didn't go Republican until after 9/11, which seemed to send him over the edge. Probably not coincidentally, that was about the same time he stopped being funny.
Dennis claimed in a Fox interview that he had always supported Reagan and Bush The Elder, but the old HBO specials say otherwise.
Hell, his Weekend Updates during the late Reagan and Bush years say otherwise as well.
He used to pimp Ross Perot quite a bit in 1992 on his failed talk-show, after supporting Jerry Brown at first. He was also pretty merciless to Bush Sr. and Quayle on that show. He also hosted the 1993 MTV Inaugural Ball.
Maybe it was a joke, then. You know, the humorous irony of supporting the party that allowed Sept 11 to happen, then failed to respond in any meaningful way, then stretched our military to breaking while racking up $1 trillion in debt with China. Actually, that's not funny at all. I see where Miller is going with this.
Thinking back on Miller's early career, I would hypothesize that his obscurant references to things like the Babylonian Captivity, the Children's Crusade, the Treaty of Amiens (either one), and the War of the Spanish Succession would result in his being able to fit right in here at Wonkette, if he hadn't turned into a conservative douche.
Those states are impossible to keep heated in the winter, anyway, so if we pull everyone out and just close them off we can say $$ on fuel and be delivered from oily extremists. Amen.
Are we sure Avigdor was not proposing trading away the Israeli Arabs themselves? He is as insane as Michele B and even more hate filled. Also totally lacking filter between brain and mouth.
Insane? You demean the deranged. This Avigdor is a racist thug, nothing insane about this motherfucker.
From the politico article:
"is one of the few big names"
Was Dennis Miller ever a "big name"? Maybe back when he was funny…but since then, not so much. Also, great picture they have of him there. He has that batshit crazy-eye look down.
Dear DB, Dennis has a very nimble tongue and can be creative with it, much like a girl I knew in Kansas City…but I digress.
Wow, I knew Miller had gone crazy, but not Angle crazy!
Are you suggesting that 9/11 didn't change everything?
Oops, threw up in my mouth a little.
Seriously, to get rid of Bachmann, if we have to give Minnesota to Canada, I say "go for it".
Do not want.
I live in Minnesota and I'm willing to make the sacrifice.
Hey Lets do it. That would also solve my "I think I'd like to retire to a civilized country". problem and I wouldn't have to move.
The Canadians might not take her. How about a compromise where we anchor her in a house boat in the middle of the one of the Great Lakes. Might be nippy in the middle of winter, but our real concern would be that she might walk out if the lake freezes.
Could it be the same boat that the Minnesota Vikings used for certain scandalous team-building activities a couple years ago?
I say go for it. But I fear her 39(ish) foster/anchor/terror baby moneymakers might be a factor in keeping her out.
Remember when Dennis Miller used to be funny?
No.
I just went and checked:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLfcC6OFhS0
You're right.
Yeah, I do. It was when David Feldman was writing for him.
Dennis Miller was pretty funny, in the smartass-in-the-back-of-the-classroom kinda way. Not in the John Belushi/Bill Murray comic genius kinda way.
Actually, I used to love Victoria Jackson. But then, I thought she was doing comedy. If I'd realized she was being serious, I might have thought differently.
Not to go on a rant here. … [hilarious string of obscure intellectual metaphors omitted] … of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
He forgot the last part somewhere along the way.
I think I wore bright neon colors and jackets with huge shoulder pads back there. My hair might have been permed up big, too.
Can we get rid of any other annoying republicans by means of this cartographic prestidigitation thingie?
Repealing the Alaska Purchase and our Peace Treaties with the Confederacy and Mexico, we could probably get rid of the worst Republicans and get this country moving again.
Of COURSE the Minnesota DFL hope to redraw that district. All you have to do is look at a map of Minnesota Congressional districts. Bachmann's is completely insane and splits counties and is shaped unnecessarily strangely.
It was drawn based on the KKK membership distribution. A small minority in the state but a majority in district 6.
I love it when people call it the DFL.
It's the Democratic Football League! I'm guessing Miller won't be announcing for this one either.
The Illinois 17 is my fav. http://www.iqrealestate.com/CongressionalMaps/IL2...
It literally is the width of the interstate in places so that they can claim there's a contiguous connection between Decatur and the rest of the district without accidentally including any actual voters.
Wow, achieving Middle-East peace by dispossessing and expelling the remaining Israeli Arabs: it's a plan so simple, I'm surprised I hadn't come up with it already!
Next up, I'll tackle comprehensive US immigration reform by stripping citizenship from all Latinos and deporting them to Mexico. You can tell I'm not a bigot, and Seriously Committed To Solving Things, because I'm using the "Immigration Problem" as an excuse to strip rights from a group that is only related to the issue in that both groups are racially similar.
Actaully, Lieberman is proposing giving the the bits of Israel that are mostly inhabited by Arabs (which are severely under-infrastructured, natch) to the Palestinians (in exchange for the West Bank settlements). It's more like giving the shittiest barrios in LA and Texas to Mexico in exchange for Aculpoco and Cabo San Lucas.
Not that Lieberman isn't an awful guy who'd probably just cold expel the Israeli Arabs if he could; that just isn't want what he's proposing in this case.
We could sweeten the deal by offering Arizona as the New Palestine and Southern Florida as a second Jewish homeland.
Fine, but I'm not moving to Miami until I'm over 80.
That way all the Hamas anchor babies won't have to go through the trouble of learning Spanish first!
Right, but my reading is that he's also suggesting unilaterally making those places not-Israel, while the Israeli Arabs still live there and don't get a say, which is a de facto expulsion and also extremely classy. Given previous test balloons of convincing Arabs to "voluntarily" give up their land and citizenships, this still sounds roughly par for the course.
By the way, good to see you back now; along Laurie's current absence Riley's been mostly all alone in the morning the past week or two.
"It's more like giving the shittiest barrios in LA and Texas to Mexico in exchange for Aculpoco and Cabo San Lucas. "
Don't give the Texans any ideas. They might like to trim off the Rio Grande Valley and give it back to Mexico. They'd get some resistance from folks who draw water from the river for uses in the US, but the hard core types down there might think it's a fine idea overall.
So Israeli ministers talk about "living space" and mass expulsions of an ethnic minority and then wonder why people compare them to the Nazis.
Honestly, talk of expulsions is bad, but it's not quite as bad as the don't-you-dare-call-them-pogroms when the IDF razes villages of Bedoins basically living in the desert.
“The party wants to defeat Ms. Bachmann but not by redrawing her out of existence,”
Why the hell not? The R's would, (and have).
It's called winning Texas style.
Another option would be simply to douse her with a bucket of water. This has worked well in the past.
- Send her back to the hell-mouth
- Trade her to Iran or North Korea for a crazy to be named later
- Put her into a cryogenic chamber for 500 years
These are just off the top of my head – come on people! It's going to take some creative problem solving if we want to put this problem behind us. I want your 3 best ideas by Thursday morning, with a final decision made on Friday.
A teaspoon of salt. We have illegals to scrub the slime trail.
They would rather defeat Ms. Bachman the old fashioned way, caving to her every demand in exchange for none of her votes coupled with continuous verbal abuse of liberals, if possible.
I dig the 10-10-220 reference.
Oh, it would be so unfair if the Democrats were to eliminate an unnatural district created by a Republican legislature to insure that it would nearly impossible for a Dem to win, even if the Rep is clinically insane.
It's weird that the phrase "Fuck you, Lieberman, you evil cocksucking piece of shit" actually applies to two separate politicians in two different countries.
Serious point here: Once a month, I write an easy English newspaper for my students, and we include a crossword puzzle on some theme. This month was autumn, last month was back to school, etc…It's actually very easy to draw the grid. You make up a list of about 30 words related to the topic, and the computer links them, across and down, in seconds. It's a pretty amazing program.
Now, why couldn't all of the nation's home addresses with registered voters; places like schools and post offices that can serve as polling places; streets and roads leading to them, available parking, etc…be fed into a computer with instructions to arrange the voting districts so that they are maximally convenient, in terms of driving time and/or walking distance, for the greatest number of people.
I'm no computer expert, but I'm pretty sure this is within the limits of what is currently possible. As long as it's left up to congress, it's going to be partisan as hell.
Where would the fun be in doing something sane, rational, and non-partisan?
You're so cute being all rational and shit.
The software exists, the plans for similar rationalizations have been around for a long time, and in fact are often used to establish here to put polling places/assign voters to polling places.
But ever since the pocket boroughs and Mr. Gerry's districting, politicians and parties fucking over the people at large for the sake of ensuring the most predictable and favorable outcome has been an accepted part of the political world.
I thought most states did the "vote by mail" thing like we got out here in the Soviet of Washington. "Polling Place" is your nearest mailbox.
Bachmann and O'Donnell could just become the new representatives from Narnia.
Better if they were made ambassadors to Narnia.
Or just convinced that they were and stuffed into a securely locked wardrobe
A wardrobe's a type of closet, so O'Donnell's already stuck in one of those.
nice !
If they redraw Bachmann, I hope they give her bigger tits.
And a smaller mouth.
And photoshop away those neck wattles. She's a decent looking broad except for those wattles creep me out. (Yes, I know she's old.)
And no underwear. Assuming all of the above will be done.
When you've got nothing else to offer, try anagrams!
e.g. Avigdor Lieberman = Lamebrained vigor
She's not bad, she's just drawn that way?
Bachmann is Jessica Rabbit only in her own fevered hallucinations.
You don't know how hard it is being a woman looking the way she does.
Avigdor Liberman is and represents the Russian community in Israel, and that's how they see things. They have experience with that approach, seeing how well it worked in Chechnya, Afghanistan, etc.
Shutting up the BachMeister? Silence is golden, but duct tape is silver…I know a guy….
This sort of redrawing of maps is best left to Google. They are now the cartographers of the world anyway.
Let them tell us where we are and why we don’t deserve to be there.
hey! we here in the midwest may live in a sad and crumbling frozen wasteland, but at least we, uh, got, a super-sexy sexting d.a.! so there!
Here in Iowa, we are betting that the Tom Latham and Steve King districts will be merged. So hopefully, Steve King can go back to his favorite pastime of shooting raccoons with his .50 cal handgun from his back porch in Kiron.
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