Author: David Weigel

The implosion of would-be Democratic candidate Tamyra D’Ippolito in Indiana looks, in retrospect, totally unsurprising. But there were a solid 20 or 21 hours when this … passionate cafe owner had some liberals and conservatives convinced that she had a chance of making it onto the ballot to run for Sen. Evan Bayh’s (D-Ind.) open seat.

Certainly, the fact that she made time for every media outlet and reporter that called her — when she was ostensibly facing down a hard deadline that could make or break her career — should have tipped people off to her unseriousness. But it didn’t. And this interview with Fox and Friends may be the best memento of her unexamined, un-fact-checked insta-celebrity. Best moment: When Steve Doocey asks why she wants to represent “Ohio.”

I think Matthew Yglesias and Jonathan Chait pretty effectively pummeled this silly Mike Potemra post about the filibuster, but they missed something. Potemra:

Three years from now, Palin is president, with J. D. Hayworth as Senate majority leader, and Michele Bachmann as Speaker of the House. (Of course it’s impossible – just like the election of Obama was, and the election of Scott Brown, and . . .) I imagine they, too — Palin, Bachmann, Hayworth, Secretary of Defense Liz Cheney, Secretary of Education Glenn Beck, the whole team — are going to want to pass some legislation. Would 51 Senate votes be OK for that, as far as you’re concerned?

OK: In this scenario, how do Liz Cheney and Glenn Beck get confirmed? Because Potemra is giving the Democrats 49 Senate seats, nine more than they need to filibuster anyone. And in this scenario, they watched the GOP filibuster just about everything in a not-so-secret scheme to deny the Democrats long-term victories.

The origin of the modern filibuster-mania was really the Clinton-era Republicans’ use of the trick to block the president’s nominees. The tactic was streamlined by Bush-era Democrats, and perfected by our modern Republicans. And it’s gotten so bad, as Ezra Klein points out, that the administration can neither fully staff up or fire people in Senate-confirmed positions — every nominee is subjected to political warfare. And that’s in a Senate that has had, at minimum, an 18-seat Democratic majority.

The oh-so-brief conservative push to get fringe cafe owner Tamyra d’Ippolito on the Indiana ballot as the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate seems to have hit the reef. Reid Wilson reports:

An official in Marion Co. (IN) tells Hotline OnCall d’Ippolito turned in just 3 signatures in the 7th CD, the district with the highest percentage of Dem voters. The noon deadline has passed, meaning d’Ippolito failed to meet the requirements to get on the ballot. She would have been required to submit 4,500 signatures, including at least 500 from each of the state’s 9 districts.

If she falls short in just one district, she’s off the ballot. It’s been a bad afternoon for d’Ippolito backers, who thought just an hour ago that she had a chance. Still, Erick Erickson of RedState tells me it was worth the effort.

“It was worth it just to freak out the Democrats,” said Erickson. “The reality is the information got on the radar late on the holiday before the noon deadline in the middle of a snow storm. But Proctor & Gamble is sponsoring the Olympics, so I’m happy to boost Pepto-Bismol sales.”

The week before the annual Conservative Political Action Conference is one of countless stories poking gentle fun at the stranger items on the schedule. Alex Pareene has a lot of fun with the presence of XPAC, the Christian conservative project set up by Stephen Baldwin and Kevin McCullough. But I think he missed the big news: XPAC has managed to book The Gregory Brothers, who won weeks of fame for their “auto-tune the news” YouTube videos.

After the jump, the XPAC promo sheet — which also promises an event honoring James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles.

Fringe candidate Tamyra D’Ippolito, obviously enjoying her moment in the sun, is telling anyone who asks that she’ll turn in enough signatures to become the Indiana Democratic Party’s nominee for U.S. Senate. (She’s also informing anyone who asks that she’s got a tenuous grip on reality, accusing Democrats of a secret plot to junk the sure-thing Bayh candidacy for a bid by Rep. Baron Hill, a plot she calls “Indianagate.”)

But is she simply spinning everyone? And is there actually a Republican/conservative effort to help her on the ballot, as encouraged by Erick Erickson of RedState? The evidence is strong for the former and weak for the latter. For starters, D’Ippolito claimed last week that she was 1,000 signatures short of the 4,500 minimum — 500 per congressional district — for ballot access. Even if she’s barely over the hump now, any election guru will tell you that you need a serious cushion to make sure you really qualify for the ballot. And that’s especially true when, as here, there’s a bad-faith effort to help the struggling candidate.

Here’s a recent example. In 2006, Pennsylvania Green Party candidate Carl Romanelli was going nowhere in his quest to get on the ballot in the U.S. Senate race between Bob Casey and Rick Santorum. He got help from Republican Party volunteers and nabbed 94,544 signatures. But when Democrats challenged the signatures, they found 69,622 of them to be invalid, and Romanelli was kicked off the ballot.

It’s hard to know what D’Ippolito will actually turn in, because, simply put, she doesn’t tell the truth — she claims that she’s the first female U.S. Senate candidate in Indiana history (Jill Long Thompson was the first in 1986) and that there’s a conspiracy to stop her. But talking with Tea Party activists yesterday, I found a lot of awareness of the bad-faith campaign to get her on the ballot, but no one who was heading out into the snow to do it. One Indianapolis activist passed on the RedState alert email she’d gotten and said most of her friends considered it amusing — they had a tough time convincing themselves that they could compromise their principles to help a fringe left-wing candidate.

On her Twitter feed, D’Ippolito is embracing the support:

A year ago, Pajamas TV was taking some licks for hiring Joe the Plumber to do reporting in Israel and, later, in Washington. But the web-based video network was all over the National Tea Party Convention, and last week I noticed its reporters and fans trying to get a hashtag — PresidentMe — surging on Twitter. What’s the reference? It’s to Andrew Klavan, one of the network’s creative types who’s come out of the closet as a conservative and can’t talk about anything else, “singing” a musical about Barack Obama.

Check out the video after the jump…

This isn’t the first PJTV music project. Last year the site’s breakout star, Alfonzo Rachel, recorded a Rolling Stones parody with lyrics about Barack Obama disposing of inconvenient allies. Here’s Rachel again, introduced as a guest on “Post-American Bandstand” by Pat Boone (!) to sing a song about how the president appears too often on TV.

The Sun-Sentinel reports on former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s visit to the Daytona 500, and her response to a reporter’s political question.

When asked what a trip to a swing state like Florida does for her political ambitions, the former Alaska governor said, “Haven’t thought a darn thing about the politics of this. I’m thinking about this good, active, speed-loving event that a lot of Alaskans, too, are really into. We’ve got our snow-machine races up there, and this is, of course, on a much greater scale, same type of sport though, same type of breath-taking, speed-loving, All-American event that we like to see up north.”

David Dayen of Firedoglake talks to the potential Democratic spoiler in Indiana, gets some of the same canned quotes from Tamyra D’Ippolito as Jonathan Martin, but basically plays it straightforward.

D’Ippolito told me she is the first woman to ever run for the US Senate in Indiana. Her impression from working on prior campaigns and from this one is that Indiana political culture is a “tight old boys school, it borders on sexism.” In a state where the population is 52% women, D’Ippolito says “in the future, we women of Indiana are not going to tolerate” the chummy, insider culture.

Worth pointing out, since D’Ippolito has repeated her “first woman ever” quote to multiple reporters — the 2008 Indiana Democratic candidate for governor was Jill Long Thompson. She was, and is, female. She was also the party’s unsuccessful 1986 candidate for U.S. Senate against incumbent and future Vice President Dan Quayle. D’Ippolito doesn’t really know what she’s talking about.

Interestingly, the comments on Dayen’s article broadcast some immediate support for D’Ippolito — whose nomination would functionally hand the Senate seat over to Republicans. One Republican who realizes that is Erick Erickson, who’s encouraging RedState readers to get signatures. But that’s less surprising than the FDL reaction, which is of a piece of that site’s turn against Democrats seen by readers to be puppets of Rahm Emanuel.

UPDATE: The conservative, Anschutz-owned Washington Examiner runs an item instructing readers how to help out the D’Ippolito effort.

Jonathan Martin writes about the possible, if unlikely, “nightmare” scenario of cafe owner Tamyra D’Ippolito succeeding in her fringe campaign to get on the Democratic ballot to replace Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.). D’Ippolito has not reported any campaign funds raised and has not provided a clear estimate of the number of signatures she’s gathered. (She’s required to submit at least 500 valid signatures in each of the state’s nine congressional districts.) And between the lines of Martin’s report, one can see a candidate who is not ready for prime time.

She said she was committed to the race in part because she was sick of the male-dominated Democratic Party in the state.

“It’s very much an old boys club in Indiana and I’m out to break it,” she said.

Before hanging up she added that she wanted to offer a “reminder:” “Indiana is 52 percent women.”

D’Ippolito also suggested that Bayh’s announcement was timed so that the state’s top Democratic officials could hand-pick his successor.

“I don’t know if they’re smoking cigars there, but the decision has already been made,” she said.

Democrats I talk to think D’Ippolito’s only path to the ballot would be a quasi-dirty trick by Republicans to help her out, the sort of thing some operatives pulled in 2006 in an unsuccessful bid to get Carl Romanelli on the Pennsylvania ballot as a Green candidate for U.S. Senate — before that, the efforts by some operatives to help Ralph Nader get on presidential ballots.

But this isn’t a candidate who can deploy a political machine or war room to get the job done.

One of the big surprises of Democratic rule — perhaps it shouldn’t have been such a surprise — has been the degree to which Republican opposition has ground down the party’s agenda. While the Democrats only had a supermajority for four months, the 58-41 majority with which they began 2009 and the 59-41 majority with which they began 2010 are still the largest majorities either party has had since the 1970s — larger than the GOP’s majority since the 1920s. And it’s hard to think of Democratic initiatives or nominees that did not, at some point, have simple majority support.

In that context, this part of Sen. Evan Bayh’s (D-Ind.) withdrawal statement is befuddling…

Two weeks ago, the Senate voted down a bipartisan commission to deal with one of the greatest threats facing our nation: our exploding deficits and debt. The measure would have passed, but seven members who had endorsed the idea instead voted ‘no’ for short-term political reasons. Just last week, a major piece of legislation to create jobs — the public’s top priority — fell apart amid complaints from both the left and right. All of this and much more has led me to believe that there are better ways to serve my fellow citizens, my beloved state and our nation than continued service in Congress.

If Bayh has future national political ambitions, he’s in a unique position to know how the current behavior of the Senate makes it difficult for any president to get things done on “top priorities.” There’s literally no incentive for a minority party with 40 or more seats to let the majority party’s bills pass — the experience of Democrats in 2006, and the experience so far of Republicans in 2010 — is that obstruction offers the majority party less to show voters come Election Day. It also makes it harder for theoretical bipartisan coalition-building — what if Bayh only had to wrangle 50 senators, instead of 59, for a bill?

If Bayh wants to be president some day (and every indication is that he’s still thinking about it) he must realize how the behavior of the Senate would cut down his initiatives. He’s seen how an ideal Democratic situation — a massive majority in both houses, a popular president — was ground down by filibusters. So why not stay in the Senate and change that?

One theory from Steven Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins:

Almost all Democratic moderates will resist procedural reforms in the Senate because they are much more worried about being pushed to vote on something that they’d prefer to remain silent on, than not being able to vote for something they do want to vote on. In political science terms, moderates in places like Indiana care about blame avoidance more than credit claiming and position taking. Since the filibuster prevents a significant number of recorded votes they just don’t want to make from occurring, it is in some ways just as essential to their electoral strategy as it is to the Republicans. That’s why Democrats shouldn’t count on any of the moderates supporting filibuster reform, unless supporters are able to muster enormous political power to push them to do so.

So, here’s my understanding of how Indiana law works in a situation like the one Evan Bayh has created. Tuesday — tomorrow — is the last day that a candidate can start collecting signatures for a Senate race. By Friday, that candidate needs to have 500 valid signatures in all nine of Indiana’s congressional districts.

What if no one qualifies for the ballot? That lets the party with no candidate pick its nominee by June. That’s what Democrats would like to happen here. The wrinkle is that Tamyra d’Ippolito, a first-time candidate, is already running, albeit reportedly having trouble with her last 1,000 signatures or so. If she qualifies for the race, Democrats would be forced to run a write-in campaign for the May 4 primary.

Indiana’s Democratic senator announces that he won’t seek re-election despite raising $13 million for the contest and leaving his party four days to find a replacement — which creates a similar problem in the districts of congressmen tipped as replacement candidates, like Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-Ind.) and Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.).

Here are two measures of what a surprise this is. One: Ken Spain, spokesman for the NRCC, simply tweets “unreal” as he begins a series of observations about what this means for Democrats. Two: A Democratic strategist confirms to me that Bayh didn’t let anyone at any level of the party know about this, and shares with me an expletive I won’t share about the man himself.

Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling comments that more bad news like this could throw the Senate to the GOP. It’s not so much that Bayh is gone — he clearly had a glass jaw, and Democrats may find a credible candidate to hold the seat against the deeply flawed former Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.). It’s more that nothing is breaking the Democrats’ way.

UPDATE: The Cook Political Report’s take:

With Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh’s decision not to seek a third term in November, the race moves to the Lean Republican column. While Democrats have not had the opportunity to assess their options, it is unlikely that they will be able to come up with a strong enough candidate to compete in a GOP-leaning state in the current political climate.

Ken Vogel has a revealing scoop on the Republican Party’s effort to co-opt Tea Party activists — something anathema to a few activists, something that other activists had hoped would happen from the beginning. Tomorrow, Michael Steele will meet with 50 state Tea Party leaders. One of the models for this kind of accord, reports Vogel, comes from Colorado.

In Colorado, tea party activists raised a ruckus when a Republican gubernatorial candidate in December appeared on Fox News Channel as the “Tea-Party-backed candidate,” prompting state Republican party Chair Dick Wadhams to begin a series of ongoing meetings with tea party activists across the state to encourage tea party activists to get involved in the party.

“Prior to that, we hadn’t heard anything from him,” said Lu Ann Busse, the state chair of a coalition of tea party-esque entities known as 9/12 groups. Even now, she says “there is not a great deal of cooperation. On the Democratic side, they want to fire up their base and cause even more divisions between conservatives. And Republicans are trying to use the tea party movement. They see it as a way to get elected by combining the Republican base with the tea party activist base, which includes a lot more independents.”

Wadhams said his message to Colorado tea partiers has been: “Join the Republican Party, participate in our process and help us nominate candidates.”

RedState’s Erick Erickson announces a blanket ban on conspiracy theorists at his site, taking some whacks at liberals and “Clintonistas” for starting the “truther” and “birther” conspiracy theories while announcing that he will “part ways with the individuals and groups willing to share the stage and treat as legitimate the crazies who believe the President was born in Kenya, the crazies who believe our government was complicit September 11th terrorist attacks … two groups, incidentally that increasingly overlap.”

It’s an interesting statement, especially for the focus on how craziness can blow back onto the rest of the conservative movement. Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos has long banned conspiracy theorists, but that has not stopped the occasional anti-Zionist diary from appearing on the site, generating a ton of comments and being used against Kos and allies as “representative” of the left.

The whole statement:

We’ve always banned truthers at RedState. Increasingly, we have also banned a number of individuals who think Barack Obama is disqualified from being President because despite the Republican Governor of Hawaii confirming the legitimacy of the Democratic President’s birth origin as a citizen of the United States.

Today I want to reaffirm and make it more definitive. If you think 9/11 was an inside job or you really want to debate whether or not Barack Obama is an American citizen eligible to be President, RedState is not a place for you.

Birfers and Truthers are not welcome here. Period. End of Story.

But I want to expand on this too.

The tea party movement is in danger of getting a bad reputation for allowing birfers and truthers to share the stage. At the National Tea Party, Joseph Farah treated the birfer issue as legitimate. In Texas, tea party activists have rallied to Debra Medina who, just yesterday, refused to definitely dismiss the 9/11 truther conspiracy as crackpot nonsense. If a candidate cannot do that, we cannot help that candidate. It’s that simple.

So we arrive at one of those moments where I am fully prepared to part ways with the individuals and groups willing to share the stage and treat as legitimate the crazies who believe the President was born in Kenya, the crazies who believe our government was complicit September 11th terrorist attacks … two groups, incidentally that increasingly overlap.

This sets us up for attacks from the left and from within that we must anticipate. It is one thing to separate ourselves from these individuals and groups. It is quite another to know that these people are among us. We should be careful. All of us have an obligation to vet those who we ally with. Just because someone is stridently against the size of government does not make him an ally if he also believes the U.S. Army blew up the World Trade Center. Such a person brings disrepute on us all, deservedly so.

On the other hand, it may not be known that someone is a birfer or truther. We should be willing to show each other good grace and a measure of understanding in dealing with the troublesome fringe. We should also remember it was the Clintonistas who started the birfer rumor and the most vocal truthers live in Hollywood and voted for Obama. That is not, however, an excuse for us to associate with the nuts.

The media never runs stories about the Communist Party USA’s routine pronouncements in favor of Barack Obama. The media has never run legitimate stories about Barack Obama’s ties to the communist oriented New Party in Chicago. Obama gets a pass even on radicals whose support he personally solicited and those he personally befriended for years. But the moment a birfer opens his mouth and spouts his stupidity from the stage of a tea party rally it becomes headline news on every news network. Complain all you like that that’s not fair, but it’s the world we live in.

We must be vigilant. We must be willing to draw a line in the sand and stand against fatuous nonsense that opens up the right to attacks by a left-leaning media intent on embarrassing the good people who have developed through the tea party movement a renewed sense of civic involvement.

Birfers and Truthers have no place among us. And they are most decidedly not welcome at RedState.

This sets us up for attacks from the left and from within that we must anticipate. It is one thing to separate ourselves from these individuals and groups. It is quite another to know that these people are among us. We should be careful. All of us have an obligation to vet those who we ally with. Just because someone is stridently against the size of government does not make him an ally if he also believes the U.S. Army blew up the World Trade Center. Such a person brings disrepute on us all, deservedly so.

I’d add that “birthers” often encourage members of the U.S. military not to serve under Barack Obama — it was the saga of a military contractor, Stefan Cook, that pushed the “birther” conspiracy theory into the headlines.

An interesting interview with Edward Luce of the Financial Times — who begins the segment by saying “John McCain has faded somewhat from global prominence” — gets into Dana Milbank’s surprising column that whacked the Arizona senator for voting uniformly against President Obama’s agenda. This exchange begins at 5:44 in the video.

LUCE: Dana Milbank, the columnist for The Washington Post, wrote a column last week and it began, “I miss John McCain,” and he said you’re not the straight talk express that you used to be, you’re not the independent-minded Republican you used to be and that, he alleged, that it was because of these reasons that you face a teabag kind of primary challenge. Are you saying there’s absolutely no truth in that, that sort of description?

MCCAIN: Of course not. And I pay a lot of attention to a lot of commentators, but that’s not one of them.

“Do you miss Dana Milbank?” Luce asks. McCain snorts, derisively.

UPDATE: Arthur Delaney of the Huffington Post jogged my memory of this McCain moment from the health care reform debate last year.

If the Senator will yield, on that map, I wonder should there not be a sticker for the State of Florida? According to a published report by one of my favorite columnists, Dana Milbank, of the Washington Post: “Gator Aid: Senator Bill Nelson inserted a grandfather clause that would allow Floridians to preserve their pricey Medicare Advantage program.”

So maybe we should have one of those stickers for Florida there.

That was on December 22, 2009. In 52 days, Milbank went from one of McCain’s “favorite columnists” to a commentator he doesn’t pay “a lot of attention” to.

Here’s one example of how little the McCain brand is cherished by the conservative grassroots. Les Phillip, the self-identified Tea Party Republican candidate challenging party-switching Rep. Parker Griffith (R-Ala.), just fired off a lengthy statement attacking Meghan McCain — who’s become a sort of a spokeswoman-without-a-constituency for GOP moderation — for comments attacking apparent racism inside the Tea Party movement.

“Myself, and several other black conservative candidates, have enjoyed broad and growing support from the tea party movement,” says Phillip. “Ms. McCain has led a life of privilege and couldn’t understand the pressures of living from paycheck to paycheck. I respect her father’s service to this country, but she ridicules what she cannot understand.”

The whole statement:

HUNTSVILLE, Ala.– Alabama Republican congressional candidate Les Phillip, in a statement issued today, called out Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain’s daughter Megan McCain for “reckless and uninformed” comments about the tea party movement. Ms. McCain stated in an appearance on ABC’s “The View” that she believed the tea parties were inherently racist. Her claims were based on discussions within the tea party movement regarding a requirement for voters to demonstrate the ability to read and understand English. Opponents of literacy tests claim that because minorities have lower literacy rates, the tests are meant to prevent minorities from voting. Supporters suggest that literacy testing would result in a more informed electorate, less likely to succumb to catchy but substance-less candidate marketing.
http://rawstory.com/2010/02/meghan-mccain-tea-party-represents-innate-racism/

“Myself, and several other black conservative candidates, have enjoyed broad and growing support from the tea party movement. While any movement has bad eggs, the Tea Party movement has shown itself, as a whole, to be a movement of the people against massive government spending, infringement on personal rights, and job killing regulations. It’s a movement of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. It’s a movement of all races, creeds, and colors. Just this week, a young black woman from Mississippi announced her candidacy for U.S. Congress, after appearing at nearly every Tea Party event held in the state over the past year. This young woman, Angela McGlowan, wrote a top-selling book about how the left has used false accusations of racism to drive blacks into the arms of the Democrat Party, and away from the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr. Mrs. McGlowan is the face of the Tea Party movement for many in the deep south state of Mississippi, a true testament to the attitude of most Tea Partiers,” Mr. Phillip said.

“I have spent the last year attending and speaking at Tea Parties myself, here in the 5th district, and throughout Alabama. I attended the monumental rally in Washington D.C. on September 12 and I’ve heard from Tea Party activists from all over the United States. Here in Huntsville, the Tea Party rallies have been organized by a hard working 26 year old girl, Christie Carden with the help of several others in their 20’s and 30’s. These young patriots are not thinking about race when they rally against trillion dollar stimulus bills, the massive government takeover of health-care or the “cap and trade” bill that would drive many of them onto the welfare rolls with thousands of dollars in new taxes and increased energy costs. They are thinking about the future and they are thinking about the jobs we will need to survive. Ms. McCain has led a life of privilege and couldn’t understand the pressures of living from paycheck to paycheck. I respect her father’s service to this country, but she ridicules what she cannot understand.”

“I encourage voters to look past race, political parties and petty ridicule. Look at the powerful diversity, conservative constitutional principles, and Christian values that made this nation the greatest on Earth. The Tea Parties have figured that out, and I believe that on election day, the people of North Alabama will vote to restore those values and bring back personal responsibility and economic liberty. I pledge to support those values for every American, and fight for jobs and businesses here in the Tennessee Valley.”

Debra Medina digs herself a deeper hole — with the conservative netroots, if not with Republican primary voters — with this explanation of her 9/11 Truth comments.

The 9/11 Commission report, you know, great sections of that are redacted and they’re top secret. That makes us all wonder, well what’s happening back there? The same is true with the birth certificate thing. I think it’s healthy that people are asking questions.

This is how WorldNetDaily has often (not always, as when it’s indulged the ridiculous “Obama has dual citizenship” claims of Orly Taitz) framed the “birther” issue. It’s not about attacking Obama per se, and it’s certainly not about racism. It’s about not trusting the mainstream media and the government. And Medina’s gambit — if that’s what it is — to frame her Truther comment as just plain speaking about not trusting the government is smart, if we take seriously polling on Southern attitudes about the “birther” conspiracy.

I’m really fascinated by the rapid rise and apparent fall of Debra Medina, the small-time Republican activist who surged into the mid-20s in her race for the GOP gubernatorial nomination in Texas, then whiffed on a chance to distance herself from 9/11 conspiracy theories in an interview with Glenn Beck. And what it suggests to me is that the Tea Party enthusiasm has elevated — temporarily, it seems — some candidates who, in previous election cycles, would have remained in obscurity and gotten some fraction of the vote without much scrutiny.

Take Adam Andrzejewski, the Illinois gubernatorial candidate who ran a pretty platitudinous campaign but aggressively sought support from Tea Party groups. Take some of the small-scale House candidates, like the three people challenging Ron Paul, who’ve gotten media attention for minor campaigning and fundraising. Or take Medina. For months, she had been courting hard-right and fringe support and doing a pretty good job. In October she appeared on Texas-based, conspiracy-minded radio host Alex Jones’s radio show, and the interview delved again and again into bizarre topics. In this clip, at 9:20, Jones rants about how law enforcement has been trained to go after patriotic Americans.

MEDINA: We’ve got a big problem in Texas. We’ve got a lot of work to do, to re-educate… I’ve seen some activity…

JONES: We’ve got Soviet brainwashing in the state police.

MEDINA: We do.

At other points in the interview (cut into four piece on YouTube), Medina complains that “Texas hasn’t lifted a finger to nullify anything under [Gov. Rick] Perry’s leadership.”

We need the Texas legislature nullifying law and we need the Texas governor interposing against federal law enforcement where it oversteps the bounds of the Constitution.

But the most revealing part of the interview might be the question posed in this clip at 8:30.

CALLER: Would she go on record saying she’s not a Bilderberg and she would not support what Rick and Kay do?

MEDINA: I think I’m on record loud and clear in lots of places all over Texas saying I’m not a Bilderberger and I in no way support Rick and Kay.

Compare that to her answer to Glenn Beck on 9/11.

I don’t have all of the evidence, there, Glenn. So I don’t… I am not in a place — I have not been out publicly questioning that. I think some very good questions have been raised in that regard. There’s some very good arguments. And I think the American people have not see all of the evidence there. So I have not taken a position on that.

I think because the mainstream media were slow to cover the Tea Parties as anything but a ridiculous joke, there’s been a lot of overcompensating that imbues these activists with fresh, bold, out-of-nowhere political tactics. But that the fact is that some people on the political fringes have made lateral moves from Alex Jones-listening or Obama birth certificate-sleuthing or Bilderberg-obsessing into the Tea Party Movement. And if Glenn Beck hadn’t decided to see how far Medina wanted to go with this, she’d be on track to get into a gubernatorial run-off. (I think Beck has threaded this needle brilliantly, obsessing over some fringe theories while ruling some, like birtherism and trutherism, totally out of bounds on his show.)

Your daily dose of unsettling anti-Obama filmmaking — “Fraud,” a movie with a trailer and not much else, consisting of interviews with attendees of the 9/12 march on Washington and found footage of images such a small girl waving a “where’s the birth certificate?” sign.

The apparent implosion of conservative support for Texas gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina after she choked on a question about the “government’s role in 9/11″ was an interesting moment in the history of Tea Party activism. On the one hand, conspiracy theories have been present at plenty of these events: Alan Keyes got a prominent role at the 4/15 D.C. Tea Party and a rapper who yelled “Where’s your birth certificate?” got big applause at the 9/12 march. Medina herself had spoken out for secession — not a conspiracy theory, but a pretty fringe issue. It took “trutherism” to take her down. But I’m curious to see how the fringe will interact with the GOP as elections get closer.

Check out “Fraud” after the jump:

The Obama administration is reportedly looking more closely at recess appointments for some nominees who’ve been mowed down by filibusters, with Sen. Richard Shelby’s (R-Ala.) holds and the self-parodying filibuster of National Labor Relations Board nominee Craig Becker — it only took 33 votes to block him on a snowy half-workday — lighting a fire. The RNC is putting out a preemptive attack on that, and it’s worth reading to get a sense of just how the party is ready to frame this as a hypocritical and unfair denial of its right to block, basically, everything. Notably, many of their examples of Democratic quotes come from the period when the party had a Senate majority.