Summer's over. Carry it in your heart from now on and forever. Or wasn't it one of those summers for you? Maybe Halloween will be kinder. Anyway, here's your top 20 Summer Song Jukebox Plays, Memorial Day to Labor Day, 2011. Ah, the memories....

That Rick Perry, he’s some slick politician. Even if Michele Bachmann won the Iowa Straw Poll, she’d still have to split the headlines with the Texas Governor. And a lot of people think that’s the last time they’d ever be tied.

The honest-to-God truth? In terms of actually getting the nomination, Bachmann never really had a prayer. Maybe she’ll lose out to Perry along the way, but it’s more likely she’ll be seen as merely setting up the table for Mitt Romney. Sucking all the oxygen out of the room and suffocating the likes of Pawlenty, Huntsman, Paul, Cain and the rest who, let’s face it, were barely breathing anyway.

Perry probably wouldn’t be any more successful than Bachmann in overtaking Romney, but he’d have a better chance. That Newsweek cover photo wasn’t that far off the mark. Tina Brown and a broad swath of the electorate know in their hearts that Bachmann is what you’d call a religious fanatic. The fat cats in the Republican Party know it, too.

A long historical record demonstrates how poorly devout types ultimately fare in the political arena. Look at William Jennings Bryan. Look at Thomas Moore. Look at Joan of Arc. Look at Jesus Christ.

Does anyone really think Karl Rove was going to let Michele Bachmann run the Republican Party? Does anyone think David and Charles Koch were going to let Karl Rove let her run the Republican Party?

This is not to dismiss Bachmann out of hand. Doyle McManus pointed out in the LA Times, “She has managed to turn the primary campaign into a straightforward, head-to-head contest between two versions of modern Republicanism: her insurgent tea party conservatism and the more traditional, big-business conservatism of Romney.”

But that was always where it was going to end. In the Republican Party, the smart money will always bet on the smart money. Basically Bachmann cleared out the riffraff, better probably that Romney could have himself.

The path of the devout is arduous. Most of us are simply not ready to follow it. Once people get the full wonder of Bachmann’s brand of conservative reconstructionist Christianity digested, their collective reaction is likely to be that where she wants to take us is just not worth the journey. We're not worthy.

Too many rules. Too many demands, too many beliefs, many of them a little hard to swallow (especially if you happen to be not Christian in the first place or even just the wrong kind of Christian).

Bachmann is the product of a school of thought that sees the destiny of America as that of a definitively conservative Christian state, ruled by conservative Christians and for conservative Christians.

Her intellectual mentors at Oral Roberts Law School taught her that whenever American law came in conflict with their interpretation of biblical law, adherents should try unrelentingly, through legal and political means, to get the former to change. (Sounds a lot like Sharia Law, no?)

She wants a constitutional amendment banning abortion. She wants the same for gay marriage. She rejects evolution and wants it mandated that Intelligent Design be taught in public schools. These positions are ironic since they would likely create a bit more government than Republicans say they want. Many opposed to abortion and gay marriage and even biology might be uncomfortable with extending the government’s reach into what may be at some level private matters.

Many of Bachmann's views are guided by an almost mindless—certainly an unyielding—certitude, one seemingly impervious to mere facts. No matter how skilled a politician she becomes, and she’s getting better all the time, one suspects the closer the discussion gets to exposing her core beliefs, the more voters are going to fidget.

While we might not admit it in public, a lot of us get nervous around people who think they have an ongoing conversation going with God, one where he answers back and provides detailed directions. That creeped people out about George Bush, and everyone knew he didn’t even really mean it. Ever since the days of enlightened despotism, the march of democracy has kind of been away from that kind of thinking.

She may feel she’s all “Onward Christian Soldiers,” but for a lot of people it might feel more like Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paridise.”

What next for Bachmann? She should consider moving.

To Greenville, SC, where she’d find a lot of like-minded, kindred spirits. She should go down there with Sen. Jim DeMint. With his quest to “save souls” in Congress he’s not feeling very much love in Washington anyway, even from his fellow Republicans. He knows South Carolina, and could be very helpful with introductions.

A large contingent of folks in the region think just like Rick Perry talks: about seceding from the Union, creating their own idyllic Christian state and letting the rest of the world go by.

That ship sailed 150 years ago. But there’s nothing to stop them from creating their very own political party. To build one with the requisite scale to actually change the direction of the country would take a lot of money, of course, and it’s unlikely they could get that from the Republicans,

But if she made her goals clear and played her cards right, there’s money out there. There’s a good chance the DNC, for instance, might be willing to chip in and lend a hand. And they’ve got real money. Obama has fat cats, too, and once they fully grasped the idea, they’d probably be glad to help her out.

The way House Speaker John Boehner won the support of recalcitrant members for their own party’s debt ceiling bill was to propose a balanced budget amendment for the US Constitution. Basically the same proposal Republicans had earlier approved in their previous “Cut, Cap and Balance” legislation, which passed the House on a party-line vote before vanishing into the dustbin of the Senate’s history.

Basically, President Obama said we should “eat our peas,” so Speaker Boehner trumped him by proposing to add an “eat your peas” clause to the Supreme Law of the United States.

Republicans of late seem inclined toward constitutional amendments as the way to settle a variety of matters, frequently ones they’re in the minority on. It’s an idea that has come up with respect to gay marriage, abortion, and immigration(where they would actually be amending an amendment, one passed in 1865 that made the descendents of slaves, and anyone else born here, US citizens. That amendment was approved by their Republican ancestors, but now they don’t like the idea so much.

Historians would point out this is a different Republican party. The one in the 1860s was considered in many respects a party of progressives. Recall that at the time, many Conservatives, particularly of the southern persuasion, regarded Lincoln as a big-government tyrant hell-bent on leading the nation down the road to socialism (even though they didn’t really know what that was yet)..

Lately, you can’t show Republicans a constitutional amendment they’re not in favor of. The last one they were against was the Equal Rights amendment in the ‘70s (which passed Congress but which the states failed to ratify). This seems somewhat ironic. The current Republican-controlled House of Representatives convened with a reading of the complete US Constitution, (although they inadvertently skipped part of Article IV.).

The idea was to showcase that party’s Constitutional devotion and their commitment to passing only laws that conformed to its tenants (a requirement Congress is actually already burdened with). But given their regularly-invoked desire to alter its contents, one is inclined to wonder what it was they saw in the document that they liked so much in the first place.

Since its ratification in 1789, the US Constitution has been amended 27 times. Ten of those were done in a group at the Constitution’s inception and are referred to, as every school child knows, as the Bill of Rights.

There was a flurry of amendments around the end of the Civil War, of course. And then again around World War I concerning the right to vote (women) and the right to drink (everyone). That latter, well-intentioned amendment (passed while most of the drinkers were out of town) was, upon sober reflection, subsequently rescinded, by means of another amendment, which is the way the Constitution works.

There really haven’t been all that many amendments if you exclude the Bill of Rights, the temperance flip-flop and several unexceptional changes to the order of succession to the Presidency and mundane changes to terms of office for the President and Congress.

But such stability belies the inner unrest of this country’s political beast. Some 10,000 amendments have been proposed since 1789. In modern times, about 200 or 300 proposals surface every year. Most go nowhere, but clearly a lot of people are unhappy with the Constitution, lip service to the contrary. And the truth is, it was that way from the beginning.

The mechanism for changing the Constitution was built into the original document. It’s no simple matter, of course. The Framers didn’t want it to be too easy in order to discourage ill-conceived, half-cocked or hastily passed amendments.



To date all amendments, ratified or not, have been proposed by a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress. However, if two-thirds of the state legislatures demand one, Congress must call for a constitutional convention, which would have the power to propose amendments. After passing Congress, an amendment must also be ratified by three-fourths of the states (either by state legislatures or special state conventions.)

Actually, the Bill of Rights was a defining issue in the Constitutional debate that took place among the young nation’s 55 delegates in Philadelphia in the hot, hot summer of 1787. Lots of people felt no fashionable Constitution of the time could be complete without a specific delineation of individual rights. Federalists felt the rights were already delineated and one wasn’t necessary; anti-Federalists made their approval contingent on one’s creation.

You probably know this already, but the whole point of the Constitutional Convention was to create a more powerful federal government. Many influential founders, like George Washington, felt the country couldn’t get anything done under the Articles of Confederation. But even back then there were many who feared the encroaching power of big government.

So the Bill of Rights was a way to calm folks down while still making it possible to raise the money needed to pay an army and, important in a country that didn’t have many, particularly to the suburbs, build the roads that would support national expansion.

In short, the Bill of Rights was a compromise meant to mollify the feelings of delegates that the new Constitution was too much about how things worked and not enough about championing individual rights against the powers of government.

(Originally, the Bill of Rights included legal protection for white men only, excluding most Americans and all women. It was left to subsequent amendments, a civil war and any number of Supreme Court cases to extend the same rights to all U.S. citizens.)

It has become fashionable among some modern politicians and pundits to characterize our founding fathers somewhat sentimentally as a monolithic and single minded-corps. Actually they were a contentious and disagreeable bunch. That they got anything done at all was actually their single biggest accomplishment.

The US Constitution was borne of many compromises, as well as tacit agreements to ignore some matters deemed too sensitive to even compromise on. Most notably, the whole issue of slavery was passed over by the Framers and left to be settled a hundred years later with a war of secession that nearly succeeded in tearing the country in two.

Other major sticking points requiring negotiated compromises, or left wholly or partly unresolved, included large state versus small state representation, business versus agrarian interests, tariffs, executive elections, the extent of the federal government’s power, the exact role of the office of the President, and even the length of the terms of Senators.

In point of fact, the Bill of Rights amendments were ratified in 1791 three years after the Constitution, but in many states it was understood they were coming and voters based their ratification on that understanding.

Eventually all thirteen states ratified the Constitution. Some did so unanimously, but in others the votes were quite close: Massachusetts 187 – 168; New York, 30-27; and Rhode Island 34-32.

Rhode Island never did like the idea of the Constitutional Convention in the first place, and had refused to even send a delegation. Patrick Henry declined the opportunity to serve as a delegate himself but agreed to attend as an advisor to the Virginia delegation. He advised, vehemently, against.

Clearly, many delegates were less than pleased with the results of the effort, Bill of Rights or no. Thirteen Founding Fathers not only refused to sign the new Constitution, they left the convention before it ended and went home. Another three stayed on but still would not sign the final document.

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. But our elected officials in Washington are now demonstrating that it’s never too late to look good tackling an old problem. Namely, the deficit.

So it seems only fair that you, loyal visitors, also get a second shot at fixing the budget, only this time under new, more generous rules.

Washington's new goal is to cut $4 trillion in spending. How can they do that when spending only amounts to about $3 trillion annually? Well, what they’re talking is over a decade. Why do they do that? Most likely because it sounds more impressive than $400 billion, which is the annualized hit they’re really talking about.

Now that’s your new goal, too. Much more achievable, no? Give it a shot.

What’s the point if that’s only about a third of the deficit? Listen: These guys may be stupid, but they’re not as stupid as you think they are. How do you think they got you to vote for them in the first place?

First, $400 billion in annual cuts when combined with $400 billion in new revenues suddenly covers two-thirds of the deficit. Second, remember the recently popular Republican mantra about how we don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem? Well, as you probably figured out (because you’re not as stupid as they think you are either), we’ve had both ever since the recession came to live with us.

Each year, revenues now come in a bit short of where they used to. Guess by how much? $400 billion. Trifecta! If we could just get back to where they were in 2008—as Obama gets down on his knees every night and prays they will—voila: The deficit is gone. Think he doesn’t want a deal? With all his heart. That way, he can eat Romney’s heart in the next election. Right in front of him.

Imagine the Republicans dropping an opportunity like that in his lap. Also worth noting, Obama is apparently thinking more along the lines of $100 billion in new revenue. So even if he were to get the deal, it would still come up a little short.

But just in case, go to work. Do your part. And then don’t forget to pay your taxes. Both the new ones and the old ones. You don't hear much about it, but the biggest problem Greece has is they don't pay their taxes over there.