Après avoir lancé le débat controversé sur l’identité nationale, Eric Besson s’est fait plus discret. Le ministre de l’immigration, de l’intégration et de l’identité serait-il en disgrâce, obligé de se brider ? Il nie et repart à l’offensive : “C’est le tabou et non le débat qui entretient les mauvais instincts”, assure-t-il en annonçant la tenue d’un colloque le 8 avril.

On ne vous entend plus. Vous êtes en quarantaine depuis le débat manqué sur l’identité nationale ?

Pas du tout, j’ai participé à plusieurs réunions publiques, j’étais mercredi 3 mars en Isère, je serai mardi 9 en Alsace et en Lorraine aux côtés de Xavier Bertrand. Etant plus présent dans les réunions locales depuis quinze jours, je me suis moins exprimé au niveau national.
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Topeka, ville d’un peu plus de 100 000 habitants dans le Kansas, aux Etats-Unis, s’appellera “Google” pendant le mois de mars, a expliqué son maire, lundi 1er mars. Le site Internet de la ville accueille désormais les visiteurs par un bandeau : “Ville de Google”, écrit dans la police de caractères et les couleurs du logotype de la firme californienne.

“Cette proclamation est plus un clin d’œil qu’autre chose”, précise le maire, William Bunten, dans le quotidien local The Topeka Capital Journal. Mais par cette initiative, les autorités locales cherchent en réalité à attirer le géant américain, et son projet d’installer des réseaux à très haut débit.
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Nearly half of the Arizona Legislature wants to force President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate to state officials if he runs for re-election.

A state House committee on Tuesday approved the measure sponsored by 40 of the state’s 90 legislators. It would require presidential candidates who want to appear on the ballot in Arizona to submit documents proving they meet the requirements to be president.
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Senator Evan Bayh’s comments this week about a dysfunctional Congress reflected a complaint being directed at Washington with increasing frequency, and there is broad agreement among critics about Exhibit A: The unwillingness of the two parties to compromise to control a national debt that is rising to dangerous heights.

After decades of warnings that budgetary profligacy, escalating health care costs and an aging population would lead to a day of fiscal reckoning, economists and the nation’s foreign creditors say that moment is approaching faster than expected, hastened by a deep recession that cost trillions of dollars in lost tax revenues and higher spending for safety-net programs.
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Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) primary challenger, former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), has clearly made the political calculation that the longtime senator and 2008 presidential candidate is vulnerable on his conservative flank.

But how vulnerable is that flank? McCain supporters are sending around a clip of Hayworth’s appearance on CNN last night, in which the onetime congressman refuses to flat-out disavow the birther conspiracy movement and even suggests that, in the age of identify theft, questions about President Obama’s citizenship are legitimate.
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Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.
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Sarah Palin on Twitter

This twittering mating game may not disclose actual political plans and aspirations on behalf of Glenn Beck but Palin has declared herself ready and willing if not rough and ready, she has publicly cuddled up to elderly wisdom, and the wise old man is apparently going along as far as the ride will take him. Both twitterers seem to be flaunting blatant political opportunism in a giddy, frivolous manner indicating that whatever they are doing, it is working.

This, of course, annoys the purist. Self-declared founder of the Tea Party movement and undisputed “President/Founder” of www.TeaParty.org, Dale Robertson, recently warned his fellow teabaggers against the Republican “NeoCon” attempts at taking over the movement:

“I am sending an alarm to the Tea Party membership! Be alert to turncoats and deceivers being herded into the Tea Party by usurpers from the weakened Republican Party for the sole purpose of capturing our populist movement. Our political ideals were once theirs and our immense growth has created a lusting for their good old days!

Sarah Palin’s well delivered speech and her attractive demeanor is little more than a veneer for her less attractive political philosophy. She seems more like a duck out of water among true Conservative Constitutionalists. Palin demonstrates her NeoCon flippant viewpoint and her naïveté as she seems envious of the swelled numbers of Patriots pledging their allegiance, to of all things, AMERICA and not to a kool-aid ridden political dinosaur.”

Glenn Beck on Twitter

It is interesting that the GOP is presented as running on Kool-Aid. As is explained on Wikipedia “Drinking the Kool-Aid has become a common phrase owing to the beverage’s alleged role in the Jonestown Massacre, and is used to insinuate that one has mindlessly adopted the dogma of a group or leader without fully understanding the ramifications or implications.” If the “republican elite” are nothing but wolves in sheep’s clothing, trying to steel the momentum of the teabaggers, they are surely better described as cynical, whereas the “countless Patriots acting as one” in the hailing of non-negotiable core beliefs seem more thirsty.

“The common thread running the length and breadth of this government is a Common Sense Constitutional Conservative Approach to self-governance.” Maybe you actually need to drink some of the tea-flavoured Kool-Aid in order to make sense of that concoction of coltishly confused alliteration. “Common sense,” in its populist usage, is nothing more than a feeble attempt to hide “nonsense,” while trying to express a “no bullshit” approach to, in this case, that most sacred document (for teabaggers at least): The U.S. Constitution.

Dale 'Tea Bag' Robertson

But of course, once your non-negotioable core beliefs claim absolute authenticity, your movement will soon need purification by steadily ostracizing any single individual who dares speak on behalf of the “countless Patriots acting as one.” Because, evidently, they do not act as one. This is why there are so many warnings about straying too far, cf. a commentary on politico.com:

“I say again, be careful, Tea Party Nation. You are being infiltrated. You are being compromised. You are being neutered. Stick to your principles. Stick with the Constitution. Keep opposing unconstitutional, preemptive wars. Keep calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve. Keep fighting for less taxes, reduced federal spending, and states’ rights.”

Common sense is nourished by fear, the unifying force of the fear that all that is solid melts into air and that evil others are contaminating your self-evident truths. This is also seen in Glenn Beck’s 9.12 project and his attack on the book The Coming Insurrection ². Teabagging as a patriotic pursuit is an act of fear expressed through the desperate search for a world that makes sense. And so common sense – the one “we” have in common and which distinguishes our authentic “we” from the spectacular elite others – is found in the non-negotiable principles of the Constitution and the Bible. The second amendment and Leviticus 20:13 tell us that guns are good and gays are bad, end of discussion. It is the pursuit of an authentic unifying identity by means of readily available ideological bric-à-brac: National and religious origins all rolled up in to that one weird concept Patriotism.

The interesting bit in this excessively banal phenomenon is that it is exceedingly widespread in the western hemisphere. France is debating national identity, Denmark is debating national identity in a slightly less formal but every bit as ignominious way. This is why teabagging as a patriotic pursuit should not be ignored. It might be banal, it might be so innately inconsistent that it is doomed to slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard, but the movement is presently uncomfortably real. Should the political system succeed in their current attempt at tapping into the Tea Party energy it will create a political force to be reckoned with. And then a Palin/Beck ballot suddenly seems like more than frivolous flirtations and twittering temptations of two tea tray twirling twits.

The decision by Iranian judicial authorities to start executing political dissidents shows the courts are closer to the regime than ever and neither has any intention of compromising with protesters.

Two political prisoners have been executed and the courts have imposed nine further death sentences; the country is waiting to find out whether there will be more.
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She mocked Obama’s supporters: “How’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for you?” she asked. And she savaged the whole Democratic program: “The only place the left hasn’t placed the blame is on their agenda,” she said. “So, some advice for our friends on that side of the aisle: that’s where you gotta look because that’s what got you into this mess.”
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