The Next Royal Baby

Now that Prince What’s-His-Name has made his fashionably late arrival and media royal womb watchers are all agog, it behooves a former member of the fraternity to offer the benefit of his experience to help them move on from their current trauma.

In the 1980s, as a woman's magazine editor duty-bound to run cover stories about the new baby’s super-celebrity grandmother, I published one showing her holding up Prince William, with a line reading "Princess Diana Faces the 'Terrible Twos' and Baby No. 2," based on nothing more than a suspicion that the royal timetable called for a backup prince sooner than later.

The day the issue came out, the Palace announced Diana’s second pregnancy, and I was besieged by phone calls from reporters about how we knew. To my shame I responded with exquisite bad taste, "Inside information."

Far-thinking royalty journalists should be marking their 2015 calendars since, even with the monarchy bench now three-deep, William and Kate are not likely to want to rear an only child.

Meanwhile, a retired member of the fraternity will be watching all the jubilation with pure pleasure at news that for a change doesn’t make him sick of the human race.

The Queen’s great grandson was only one of more than 300,000 babies born all over the world yesterday, but even just hours old, he is what used to be called a bundle of joy.

Update: The new prince is no longer nameless. He has three: George Alexander Louis, a long handle for such a short person but, as he grows, the media will find ways of shortening it. Prince Lou has a nice ring to it.

A Life in Black and White

Now that Barack Obama has turned personal about race and started a national debate, an older witness is impelled to step forward and testify.

Nearly 90 years ago, I was born to white shopkeepers in the black ghetto of Harlem, living in back of a small store, selling things to people even poorer than they were. Their customers were descended from African slaves, while they themselves had left behind a Europe where their kind would soon be killed by the millions.

We were all safe here from servitude and slaughter, but not fully American, free but far from equal.

When I was three and seriously ill, my parents gave up the store and moved away, but my father kept working in Harlem for the next forty years. When I was old enough, I would sometimes go with him on a Saturday for the fourteen hours he spent in a pawnshop there.

The patrons came parading through, most of them well-dressed, almost all black, carrying clothes, jewelry, musical instruments, cameras to offer as hostage for the few dollars they had to have for a few days or weeks.

Some seemed down and defeated, but many were jaunty, with the aliveness of people always dancing on the edge. Seeing me, they flashed white smiles from their dark faces, surprised and amused to find a kid among the forbidding figures guarding the pawnbroker’s cash box. I always smiled back, trying to drink in some of their joy.

Pawnbrokers made loans to the desperate, with higher interest than banks were allowed to charge. In earlier days, they were little more than fences, acquiring stolen goods cheap to resell. Now strict laws required them to be wary--but it was a sad business, bordering on usury, profiting from human misery. For my father, it was simply where he worked sixty hours a week to earn sixteen dollars.

Once he brought home an autograph, from Colonel Hubert Julian, an American pilot who single-handed had opposed Mussolini’s air force in Abyssinia to become known as Haile Selassie’s “Black Eagle.” What led him to a Harlem pawnshop I never learned, but for years I saved that scrap with the flamboyant signature of a genuine hero.

In the windows of Harlem shops, black-on-yellow placards showed the week’s offerings of local movie houses: Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen (huge letters) in “Gone With the Wind” with (much smaller) Clark Gable, or “The Big Broadcast of 1937” starring Rochester and (footnote size) Jack Benny. There was so little to nourish pride on those streets that when Joe Louis (called by newspapers, without irony, “a credit to his race”) knocked out Max Schmeling in their 1938 rematch for the heavyweight title, Harlem erupted in riotous joy.

From the Bronx, I commuted to City College, walking ten blocks to and from the subway station every day through a sea of dark faces without fear or harm.

After returning from World War II and being shot at by white people, I graduated and went to work at that Harlem campus, where I fell in love with a beautiful, brilliant young woman. But a decade before Barack Obama was born, we--certainly I--did not have the courage to marry and bring interracial children into a world so little changed from the time of my own childhood.

Soon afterward, I went to work as an editor in midtown Manhattan and was eventually hired by George H. W. Bush’s father-in-law as the first Jew among hundreds of employees. Needless to say, everyone there was white.

In 1955 at Redbook I assigned the first article in a national magazine on 26-year-old Martin Luther King during the Montgomery, Alabama bus strike. Ten years later when I was editor of McCall’s Dr. King wrote a memoir for me about leading young African-American gang members from Chicago on non-violent Freedom Marches in Mississippi where “they were to be attacked by tear gas. They were to protect women and children with no other weapons but their own bodies.”

When I became head of the American Society of Magazine Editors, I began an effort to recruit African-American college students as summer internes, but that program was watered down by fellow editors and subverted by a young black woman hired to recruit applicants who was found to be urging them not “to buy into the system.”

Martin Luther King was killed, and so was any white naivete about easily changing a culture so deeply ingrained in American life.

Looking back at that time and the years that followed brings a heavy sense of swimming against powerful tides that now seem even stronger than ever in the wake of an African-American president.

Yet there is hope in TV panels of black faces debating uncomfortable statistics on crime in their own communities and old white people trying to sort out what they can do for a better future.

Barack Obama has opened up biographical soul-searching. If it can slowly begin to change minds and hearts, the generations that follow us will be the better for it. 

Netflix Hijacks the Emmys

Talk about voter fraud, consider this: The brain-damaged “House of Cards” gets nine Emmy nominations this year while Aaron Sorkin’s brilliantly flawed “Newsroom” is barely cited.

The hyped-up news is that “the online streaming network Netflix, best known until recently for rerunning other companies’ old shows and films, officially joined its cable and broadcast counterparts in the race for television’s most prestigious prizes, picking up more than a dozen nominations, including a best drama nod for its political thriller ‘House of Cards.’”

Turn the deck face up and you can see the truth. “Cards,” a bad re-do of a sly 1990 British series of the same name, is rated by Netflix viewers at two stars (“didn’t like”) while its predecessor gets three (“liked”).

If Netflix’s Emmy coup represents anything deeper than a change in content providers, it is the McDonaldization of TV drama, an instant delivery of 13 slabs of fatty spiced-up stuff for those who might mistake it for filet mignon.

Chalk it all up to Netflix’s wooing of Academy voters, along with their possible discomfort over the openly liberal political tone of “Newsroom.” Corporate show biz is still the scared-rabbit venue it was back in the Joe McCarthy days of blacklisting. So it’s safer to cite Jane Fonda and Jeff Daniels rather than the series itself.

“House of Cards” will win its share of Emmys but the public knows better.

Obama's Calm Coda to a Painful Week

“Trayvon Martin,” Barack Obama tells the nation, “could have been me 35 years ago.”

In an unannounced, unscripted White House press room appearance the President caps a week of heated national introspection with his usually calm demeanor yet the most personal public 20 minutes of his presidency.

Talking about “a history that doesn’t go away,” he says : “There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

“There are probably very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me--at least before I was a senator.

“There are very few African-Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off...

“For those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these Stand Your Ground laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?”

In pointing out that “things are getting better,” Barack Obama nonetheless asks Americans not to get into a finger-pointing political debate but look into their own hearts, as he is doing, to find ways of doing better still.

He ends his appeal for racial conciliation by indirectly invoking Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.

“Am I judging people,” he asks Americans to ask themselves, “as much as I can based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character? [Dr. King],” adding “Those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature [Lincoln] as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions.”

No one, it would seem, could quarrel with that, but Fox News brings on Sean Hannity, George Zimmerman’s brother and others who do.

For many of us, however, it was a return of the Barack Obama we admired in 2008 and in whom we invested so much hope. We would like to see more of him in the next three years.

Update:  A New York Times editorial sums up the rational reaction:  “It is a great thing for this country to have a president who could do what Mr. Obama did on Friday.  It is sad that we still need him to do it.”

Self-Inflicted Snowden Wounds

Barack Obama is the most powerful man in the world, Vladimir Putin is not far behind. Why are they straining their relationship in a schoolyard spat over a 30-year-old in a Moscow air terminal?

Now the White House threatens to cancel a September summit over the Edward Snowden impasse and snipes at the Russian justice system in an escalating war of words that has no bearing on significant issues between the two nations.

Is this any way to run a nuclear world?

From the start, something has been askew in the Obama Administration’s response to Snowden. Put his revelations into context, yes, but why get caught up in a melodrama to capture and prosecute him? Why give credence to Glenn Greenwald’s assertions that the self-proclaimed whistle blower has more to spill?

Barring any truth in that, it would have made more sense to declare Snowden a fugitive and let him get asylum in Russia, Venezuela or on the moon. But the White House has been keeping him in the headlines and ramping up foreign policy strains over him.

All this has made even Putin sound reasonable as he tells reporters, “Bilateral relations, in my opinion, are far more important than squabbles about the activities of the secret services.”

From the other direction, reliable Lindsey Graham is pushing to move the G-20 meeting out of Russia altogether and have us boycott the 2014 Winter Olympic to be held there.

  
Just what we need now, a brain-damaged replay of the Cold War even as the temperature starts to cool in Washington with John Boehner harrumphing about some House movement on immigration.

Conflict is media meat, but promoting it in foreign policy should be enough to make vegetarians of us all. Why don't we stick to arguing over the "glamorous" Rolling Stone cover of the Boston bomber?

Trayvon Martin Rorschach Test

America’s past and possible future converge as Jimmy Carter and Hillary Clinton speak up about the Zimmerman verdict. What they have to say reverberates far beyond the limits of a local murder trial and into the heart of what is becoming a wider debate about the nation’s values and, even deeper, the state of its heart.

The case that refuses to go away is turning into a Rorschach test. In the ink blots, Carter sees “the right decision” in “a nation of laws.” Clinton discerns “deep, painful heartache” for families who “have to fear for their child walking down a street in the United States of America.”

Now that Juror B37 has had her long Confessional with Anderson Cooper and been rebuked by others, a deep division emerges between those who expect everything to be rational and those who know that such mastery of the mind is beyond human reach.

Journalists strive to be objective, but they soon learn the impossibility of such a goal. Being fair, dispassionate and aware of one’s own prejudices is as good as it gets. Politicians are not called to be that way, but the very best try. Lawyers are paid to be truth-twisting advocates.

As the talkative juror pours out her story, what comes through is a state of mind manipulated into a literal reading of a set of facts blinkered into “following the law” but abandoning common sense and human feeling, a robotic concession to courtroom reality.

Over the years, during jury service, I have often been amazed at the ability of a dozen disparate strangers to evaluate what they have seen and heard and come to what struck me as the right decision. Their wisdom may have been turned into a melodramatic cliché by “Twelve Angry Men,” but such a basic collective sense of reality is, in the main, undeniable.

Jimmy Carter’s response to the verdict is, for a long-time non-admirer, typical of the man—-a brilliant parser of facts that led him into being a President with no emotional intelligence or empathy whatsoever to complain about “a national malaise” that he himself helped create.

In last year’s election, voters responded to a huge Rorschach test by seeing beyond the many Mitt Romneys flashing before their eyes.

Now, as the Zimmerman case eventually fades away as it must, three improbable figures are in New Hampshire—-Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, two Tea Party Latinos, and Rand Paul, the Anglo from Mars.

What will be voters see as those cards flash before their eyes? 

  

New Lows for Tea Party Meanness

House curmudgeons are working on a trifecta of malice and spite. Not only are they gutting the Senate immigration bill, John Boehner’s Scrooges are taking food out of the mouths of poor children while renewing subsidies for corporate farmers who don’t need them and trying to hobble a 2010 law with new food safety provisions before it goes into effect.

Patriots with “the bloodlines of the Founding Fathers” are resisting a “huge influx” of low-wage foreigners who would become a burden on the federal government. “You bring in foreigners who are going to be net tax producers, not net tax consumers,” says one House sage.

They want to reform immigration in “bite sizes,” spending billions on border security now while, like Scarlett O’Hara, promising to think about pathways to citizenship tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the House passes a 608-page farm bill, the first since 1973 not to include food stamps. Eric Cantor says they will act on those “with dispatch” but does not specify when.

Such patterns of disdain for the poor and helpless, coupled with concern for wealth and power, have become so pronounced that they are parodying themselves. Little wonder that a new Gallup poll finds “Hispanics of all ages in the U.S. today are more than twice as likely to identify with or lean to the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party.”

If voters act with awareness next year, such Tea Party antics may be gone with the wind, but for now, we have the departing Michele Bachmann warning that immigration reform would give the President “a perpetual magic wand, and nobody’s giving him a spanking yet and taking it out of his hand.”

Symbolically, as Bachmann sounds off, one of her aides is being arrested for “a string of burglaries” at the House Office Building. Not all redistributions of wealth, it would seem, are off limits.

Why Must Self-Defense Be Lethal?

“Trayvon Martin,” says a New York Times editorial, “was an unarmed boy walking home from the convenience store. If only Florida could give him back his life as easily as it is giving back George Zimmerman’s gun.”

Much of the furor over the verdict has focused on racism, as it surely deserves to be, but in an even broader sense, we are back to guns again. In an age obsessed with self-defense, is killing a perceived attacker the only way to stop him? In the heat of feeling threatened, is murder the best and only answer?

In a healing statement on the case, the President observes, “We should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence that claims too many lives across this country on a daily basis.”

The answer, of course, is no. George Zimmerman was carrying a concealed Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm semi-automatic pistol that night, which costs about $239 and fires lethal bullets. For as little as $19, he could have armed himself with a stun gun that would have immobilized Trayvon Martin without murdering him.

As distasteful as the image of electronically zapping human beings may be, we live in a society that finds it more acceptable to spare cattle by controlling them with such devices than human beings.

What all this suggests is that, since Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia reinterpreted the Second Amendment into a NRA slogan in 2008, we are living in a country that values a previously non-existent right to shoot people dead over the victims’ right to life.

George Zimmerman won’t be the last lost soul to benefit from that distortion.
  

Amen to the President's Summation

As always, Barack Obama is the nation’s mourner-in-chief. He deserves the final words on the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case:

“The death of Trayvon Martin was a tragedy. Not just for his family, or for any one community, but for America. I know this case has elicited strong passions. And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running even higher. But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken. I now ask every American to respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who lost their young son. And as we do, we should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own communities. We should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence that claims too many lives across this country on a daily basis. We should ask ourselves, as individuals and as a society, how we can prevent future tragedies like this. As citizens, that’s a job for all of us. That’s the way to honor Trayvon Martin.”

Amen to that.

American Verdict

The irony of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin is that, for the first time, he may sense how his victim must have felt that night.

While the jury deliberated, Zimmerman’s lawyer was telling an interviewer that, even if his client were to be freed, his life would change forever.

"I believe his life is at risk, and I don't say that for dramatic effect," Mark O'Mara said before the jury freed his client. "There are a lot of people who think George killed Trayvon Martin for racial reasons, even though nothing supports that. And if they feel that anger enough, they could react violently."

Rightly or wrongly Zimmerman will know how it feels to be hated for who you are and to have unknown people disposed to harm you, not for how you interact with them but based on prejudice, a literal pre-judgment that can lead to dramatically distorted encounters such as the one on the night Trayvon Martin died.

The end of the media circus about all this can leave no one elated. The verdict will be grist for days more of deep-think about American justice and race, little of it edifying or helpful with the pain left behind, and then public attention will shift back to dysfunction in Washington.

Hopefully, no one will try to harm George Zimmerman, but he will have to be even more wary of those who try to shower him with money and praise for what he did on the worst night of his life.

If he resists it might help him to see Trayvon Martin as a fellow human being.

Hillary's Lively Hibernation

The former First Lady/Secretary of State may be out of the news, but she’s not lolling around on a hammock to catch up on summer reading.

Hillary Clinton’s hibernation includes time in New York and Washington offices, working on Obama-years memoirs and traveling around the country giving speeches at $200,000 each, arranged by the same agent who wheels out Dick Cheney at $75,000 a pop.

Clinton, who turns 66 in October, is politically at an awkward age, not officially running for anything in 2016 but doing just what she would if she were.

Her $8 million book deal with Simon and Schuster will be a platform next year for setting the record straight on Benghazi and other Issa smears, while taking a victory lap on 60 Minutes et al to remind supporters why they admire her just as GOP presidential hopefuls turn up the volume for their nasty primary fights.

This tome will have no Monica Lewinsky bombshells like its predecessor, but there will be enough inside stuff about nailing bin Laden and other Obama foreign policy goodies to remind voters of Clinton’s crucial role in all of them while maintaining her distance from any new embarrassments like Eric Snowden that arise between now and then.

Meanwhile the GOP smear machine is tuning up just in case. A spokesman for a “politically conservative action committee” says it’s too early to send operatives to Mrs. Clinton’s speeches, but they are watching from a distance “to monitor whether she’s hobnobbing with investment bankers in New York City that might seem like favoritism down the line.”

It won’t be long before the Koch brothers spring for the price of tickets, but meanwhile Hillary Clinton will be smiling all the way to the banks to deposit her speech gratuities and book royalty checks. She may even run into her husband on the way.

The Trial of Treyvon Martin

The umpteen hours of cable TV courtroom melodrama are finally over, and the reaction of an intermittent viewer is to recall the old cliché that used to pervade rape trials: “She asked for it.”

An unarmed teenager is shot dead, but like the sexually assaulted victim with her “provocative” clothing and behavior, the issue has been contorted into whether Treyvon Martin somehow provoked George Zimmerman into killing him.

Technically Zimmerman has been facing charges, but his victim has been on trial to justify what he did.

This is being written as the jury starts to deliberate, but whatever the verdict, American life has been damaged by both the crime and its aftermath.

Price Tag for Taking Back the Country

Bill Clinton’s “arithmetic” lesson at their 2012 convention should be on the front burner again as Democrats parse the price of wresting Congress—-and the nation—-from Tea Party control.

A new report by the Campaign Finance Institute shows that winning a House seat last year cost the victor twice as much as it did a quarter of a century ago: $1.6 million, compared with $753,000 in 1986.

Such an increase comes when most races are not as competitive as they once were. The heavy spending was in a small number of battlegrounds that allowed the GOP to retain its majority and offers a road map for Democrats who want to win back the House next year.

This month backers of immigration reform are spending $1 million dollars in the districts of John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Darrell Issa and eight other Republicans to blast them for refusing to deal on the issue. What would it take to get Democrats on offense again in the 2014 contests to raise and spend whatever it takes to retake full control of the House?

As Cantor announces new obstruction for next month, it should be a wakeup call for those who really want to get the country unstuck. How much would it cost to yank Tea Party naysayers out of enough seats to end their stranglehold on the American future?

Fifty million? A hundred? More? There must be millions of frustrated Americans willing to pay the price.

If someone will organize the means for letting them put their money where their minds and mouths are, they can make the difference.

Which Egypt?

The post-revolt revolt in the land of the Pharoahs is presenting a problem for American response that would elude the wisdom of the Sphinx.

Confusion abounds. Now John McCain is denouncing the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, calling it a “coup” and urging the President to suspend all aid to the country. When our leading hawk rails at Egypt’s military and pushes against a policy that might end with a more pro-American regime, something is askew.

Obama calls for a “more inclusive” resolution, and John Kerry insists that “we firmly reject the unfounded and false claims by some in Egypt that the United States supports the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood or any specific Egyptian political party or movement.” Does it get any more scrambled than that?

For non-Egyptologists, which likely includes us all, making sense of this is daunting. George W. Bush, traveling in Africa, urges patience, opining that the Arab Spring was “a good thing because people are demanding their rightful place.”

Sane voices are few. “It would have been far more preferable,” Thomas Friedman observes, “if President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s party had been voted out of office in three years. This would have forced the party to confront its own incompetence and popular repudiation. I wish the Egyptian army, which has its own interests, had not been involved. But perfect is not on the menu anymore in Egypt.”

So we are in another no-win in the Middle East, as we have been so many times before in the past decade, trying to influence or moderate the playing out of ancient hatreds that express themselves in body counts.

Lest we forget, it was only two years ago that CBS’ Lara Logan was brutally sexually attacked in Cairo’s Tahrir Square by “liberators” urging the overthrow of Mubarak. 


To add further confusion, stream Netflix for a 2009 film “Cairo Time” which, while otherwise a love poem to the beauty of Egypt, shows a fair-skinned middle-aged American woman unable to walk the streets without being constantly molested and offhand cruelty to local women and girls.

As the US keeps getting pummeled by the turmoil there now, which Egypt are we trying to preserve and protect—-the one struggling toward democracy or the one still caught up in a savage past?

And how do we tell the difference?

Darrella Issa's Horny Toad

If you want to know exactly what’s wrong with politicians today and have a high threshold for disgust, skim the bloated “How to Win in Washington” in the New York Times Magazine.

Written by chief national correspondent Mark Leibovich and culled from his insider Beltway book, the piece is an acrobatic feat of journalistic tap-dancing, revealing the sliminess of Darrell Issa’s hatchet man Kurt Bardella while at the same time recounting with a straight face his subject’s illegal behavior (and Leibovich’s own) in violating privacy that makes Eric Snowden look like a Sunday School teacher.

Talk about reading other people’s mail: Self-proclaimed opportunist Bardella copied the reporter, without their knowledge, of e-mail to and from US senators and media people on a regular basis.

Leibovich offers his coziness with Issa’s gnome to support his thesis that “an economic and information boom in recent years has transformed the city...To say that today’s Washington is too partisan and out of touch is to miss a much more important truth--that rather than being hopelessly divided, it is hopelessly interconnected. It misses the degree to which New Media has both democratized the political conversation and accentuated Washington’s myopic, self-loving tendencies. And it misses, most of all, how an operator like Kurt Bardella can land in a culture of beautifully busy people and, by trading on all the self-interest and egomania that knows no political affiliation, rewrite the story of his own life.”

The ins and outs, and ups and downs, of Bardella’s symbiosis with Issa has led to his mentor “firing” him over revelations of his ruthless illegality and then re-hiring him as “senior adviser” to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, of which guess-who is chairman.

Issa has been lying low since he overreached on a Sunday talk show by calling White House spokesman Jay Carney a “paid liar,” but he will be back with new hearings and new Obama smears soon and, right there with him will be his Issa-Uber-Alles henchman, Kurt Bardella.

No Day for Downton Abbey

Fellow fans of the Crawleys, forgive me, but in middle age, I fell in love with my country all over again during a tour of England's stately homes. The sight of all that grandeur reserved for a hereditary few to live in mansions at the expense of miserable lives for so many was a reminder of what Jefferson, Adams and the rest resisted translating to America in 1776.

Today, as we celebrate what they gave us--"a republic, if you can keep it" in Benjamin Franklin's words--with flags, parades, fireworks and speeches, it may help to remember he was answering an anxious question at the close of the Constitutional Convention, "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"

America was not inevitable. As children, we drink in our freedoms like mother's milk and, except on the Fourth of July, may forget what it took, and still takes, to give us such nourishment.

At the age of 81, Franklin told the Convention that "when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views."

In this year of political turmoil, as men and women bring all that and more to the continuing American debate, it may help if we remember how we got here and what we avoided along the way.

 

As we anguish over government reading of our mail and other affronts to liberty, the debate continues.

“No transition to democracy,” President Obama tells Egypt and the world, “comes without difficulty, but in the end it must stay true to the will of the people.”

Even after 237 years.

Stinging Tea Party Scorpions

An old fable gets a new twist: House Tea Party diehards face retribution from the immigration tortoises they are trying to drown.

Backers of reform will spend $1 million dollars in the districts of John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Darrell Issa and eight others to blast them for refusing to deal on the issue that Republicans only a few months ago recognized as crucial to their future chances to win the White House.

But now, just as a GOP scorpion stings the tortoise carrying him to safety because “it’s in my nature,” immigration proponents are striking preemptively to hit the Tea Party where it hurts.

As House leaders stall on the bill passed by the Senate last week, a huge coalition supporting reform says it will launch an “all-in throw-down” this month to force a vote. “We need a vote on citizenship,” says a labor union spokesperson. “The immigrants deserve that, and our country deserves that.”

As the Obama Administration disappoints ardent supporters by announcing a one-year delay in implementing health care reform, the immigration pushback is a heartening sign that Democrats may be gathering their forces to solve the President’s overriding problem: cutting down the Tea Party faction that is blocking everything he is trying to do by unseating some of them in next fall’s elections.

If Boehner. Cantor and their recalcitrant cohorts start to feel the heat of voter wrath, there could be a start to loosening the Congressional logjam on other issues. Somewhere, at long last, even scorpions must have a survival instinct.

Another Ms. Match for Mitch McConnell

Only months after bulldozing Ashley Judd out of running against him, the Senate GOP charmer is facing another young woman who could send him back to Kentucky next year to enjoy his recently found wealth and out of Barack Obama’s hair.   

The new challenger is 34-year-old Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky’s Secretary of State, scion of a politically powerful family with strong ties to Hillary and Bill Clinton, who won’t be as easily deterred as Judd was by a preemptive campaign to smear her for nude scenes as an actress and openness about her personal history.

Grimes’ announcement follows weeks of deliberation in the face of $300,000 in SuperPAC ads attacking her, but McConnell’s warn-off strike has not worked this time. “I’m no stranger to being an underdog,” she says. “His ads are based out of fear of losing his 30-year grip on power.”

Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr., on government payrolls all his life, is now the tenth richest Senate member, with a reported fortune somewhere between $9,839,049 and $44,587,000 in 2010, much of it apparently from his second wife, Elaine Chao, who comes from a wealthy Taiwanese shipping family and served as George W. Bush’s Secretary of Labor.

McConnell failed in his promise to make Barack Obama a one-term president but hopes to keep leading Senate naysaying past the end of the President’s second, but Democrats seem intent on showing their anti-Tea Party muscle by thwarting his bid for another term.

It will be a nationally watched contest to see which group has the will and muscle to prevail and set the tone for Obama’s lame duck years.

McConnell’s defeat would be good news, but in their hearts, political connoisseurs will miss his startled owl face on the Sunday morning talk shows.