Kevin Kolb through three-and-a-half quarters of today's Birds' game: 22 of 28 for 302 yards and three touchdowns (and one interception).

Which can lead both your typical WIP caller and coach Andy Reid, who gets paid money out the wazoo to know better, to to conclude the same thing: "We want Vick!"

In theory, having two decent-or-better QBs should be a blessing and not a curse, but one can't help thinking this is not going to end well.

What's wrong with David Akers?

UPDATE: Rich Hofmann weighs in on the mess. Kolb's passer rating today was 133.6 -- jeez o' man. (The highest posible, by the way, is 158.3 -- in a burst of energy I actually looked it up :-) .)

I know what most of you are thinking: What I really need is an evening out, preferably one where a couple of tweedy authors will be talking about the unlikely revival of the Democratic Party in the mid-2000s and the rise of the Tea Party as a counter-revolution starting around Jan. 20, 2009.Well, the wait is over! This coming Wednesday, Oct. 20, the Nation's Ari Berman and Your Blogger will be appearing together at Philiadelphia's legendary Pen and Pencil Club to discuss and debate our rival tomes. Ari's book is called Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, and all of you are assigned to read it between now and Wednesday. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it on this blog before but my book is called The Backlash.

The event is at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and the Pen and Pencil Club is located at 1522 Latimer Street (which comes between Locust and Spruce,and is, um, between 15th and 16th in Center City.) But here's the deal. The event is open to all Pen and Pencil Club members but invitations to non-members are limited. So if you want to come down and hear me and Ari, get your copies of our books signed or buy them (!) if for weird reason you haven't yet, email me at bunchw@phillynews.com and I'll get you on the list!

This is a weekend open thread. Is that Sean Hannity in your back pocket, or are you just happy for the Phillies?

And he's "the sensible one" on Fox News Channel:

Meet the guy they called "Rich Whitey" -- too funny.

Recovering from a pre-dawn mission into the dark heart of Delaware, so talk amongst yourselves for a while.

Paranoid politics, which has flourished in the Obama era, can lead people in some strange directions. I can find no better example than this: Tomorrow, a large crowd of protesters mostly affiliated with the Oath Keepers, a network of ex- and current military and law enforcement formed amid the radical right-wing backlash to the Obama presidency, will rally outside a New Hampshire courtroom.

Their mission?

To get a newborn baby girl released to a couple in which the father is accused of  a "lengthy history of domestic violence" that includes sworn allegations from a judge that the dad -- Johnathon Irish of Epsom, N.H., is "the main suspect" in bruises found in an older child that was recently taken from mother of Irish's newborn daughter.

The civil rights plight of Johnathon Irish isn't exactly the Selma-to-Montgomery march, is it? But this bizarre story is a pretty good metaphor for the age of paranoia in our current 21st Century breakdown. The Oath Keepers, an organization that didn't exist when Obama became president in  January 2009, has largely used the Internet to rapidly recruit thousands of new members -- there are currently 23,289 members in its Facebook group -- to a group whose main credo is promising NOT to do things that aren't going to happen anyway, conspiratorial ideas that are mostly bat-guano crazy. The Oath Keepers' list of 10 orders they won't obey includes, most famously, "We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps."

OK, so they won't do that, but they will march tomorrow to outside a Family Court hearing for an allegedly abusive father, in what ironically will be the most pro-active thing -- other perhaps than spearheading a pro-gun march on Washington earlier this year -- that the Oath Keepers have done in their 18 months of existence. It's appropriate, in a way, because their approach to the Johnathan Irish case is rooted in the same muddled and potentially dangerous thinking that leads them to believe that the federal government is about to round up law-abiding citizens into concentration camps.

Irish is a member of the Oath Keepers, and because the affidavit filed by child protective services officials in New Hampshire mentions that tie and mistakenly describes the group as "a militia" (more on that later), the Oath Keepers have labored to make the story a case of a baby taken from a couple because of the dad's politics. Nothing could be further from the truth -- the evidence is overwhelming that the girl was taken from Irish and the mother Stephanie Taylor at the hospital for the only reason that the government should take that extreme step: To ensure the safety of an otherwise helpless child.

According to the Concord Monitor newspaper, here's the primary reason the newborn was taken from the parents hours after she was born on Oct. 2:

[S]tate officials took the child because of Irish's long record of violence and abuse. According to the affidavit, a judge determined that Irish abused Taylor's two other children. She is still married to the father of those children, though Taylor said yesterday that her husband has refused to accept her divorce petition for the past two years.

The affidavit also says that the police in Rochester report a "lengthy history of domestic violence" between Taylor and Irish, and that she accused him of choking and hitting her on more than one occasion. According to the document, Irish failed to complete a domestic violence course as ordered by the state, and that a hearing was held last month to terminate Taylor's parental rights over her two older children.

But paranoid politics entered the fray because the affidavit also included this:

The affidavit also states that Irish is "associated with a militia known as the Oath Keepers and had purchased several different types of weapons including a rifle, handgun and Taser."

Soon, Oath Keepers were widely circulated a redacted version of the affidavit regarding the parents which included the reference to their group -- but omitted the more serious allegations against Irish. The word spread with a big assist from one of the biggest conspiracy-mongers in the talk radio universe, Texas-based and nationally syndicated Alex Jones. Now, the Oath Keepers' founder -- a former aide for Rep. Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign named Stewart Rhodes -- is using the controversy to rally the troops.

Frankly, it was arguably shoddy work by the New Hampshire authorities to reference the Oath Keepers, especially in the fashion that they did. I reported extensively on the group for a chapter in my recent book "The Backlash," and the Oath Keepers are certainly not "a militia" in that it doesn't carry out any kind of paramilitary training or drills; instead, it is a group that holds dangerous and delusional ideas about American politics, but ideas that are legal to express. As for Irish's weapons' purchases (A Taser? Really?), I think you could argue that these are relevant in connection with his other violent activities.

Most importantly, the references to the Oath Keepers and Irish's weapons are minor events in the context of his alleged violent behavior toward women and children. The Oath Keepers are not the reason the baby was taken from the couple. But what a apt metaphor for what the Oath Keepers and some of the more extreme right-wing groups that have risen up in the anti-Obama backlash are all about -- blind to the bigger picture of what is going on, focused on the small screen of disconnected conspiracies that plays into their misguided and apocalyptic view of America.

As the 1960s historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about the paranoid style in American politics, "[t]he paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization."

It's just tragic when a baby girl gets caught behind those barricades.

Psst, Philadelphia. I know that in theory we currently have a schools superintendent, but the best educator in America is suddenly a free agent:

Michelle Rhee, the public schools chancellor of the District of Columbia who drew attacks from unions for firing more than 200 teachers, mostly over student performance, has resigned, effective at the end of the month.

Hey, you can't make an omlette without breaking some eggs, right?

Rhee, 40, favored measuring teacher quality by students’ test scores, firing underperforming instructors and pushing merit pay -- the same changes advocated by President Barack Obama’s administration in its $4.35 billion Race to the Top program. In July, Rhee dismissed 241 teachers and put 737 on notice to improve within a year or leave, depending on the results of standardized test scores. Washington has languished for years near the bottom of national rankings in student proficiency in reading and math.

OK, so Rhee (more background here) may have a bit of an autocratic streak, but who wants to live in a world where there only people who can get things done are the Chileans? There's not a chance in hell that Rhee would consider coming to Philadelphia -- by all accounts she has bigger things on her plate -- but the local leaders, if there is such a thing, should give her a call anyway. The idea that we could replace the dreadful Arlene Ackerman -- whose won eternal notoriety for botching the attacks on Asian students at South Philadelphia High School -- with the daughter of Korean immigrants would just be icing on the cake.

(Photo by San Francisco Weekly)

Remember when the Phillies were drawing 13,000 people to the concrete dog bowl of the Vet and begging anyone to come out and watch them play? It wasn't that long ago. But when you sell out every game for a season and a half, you could be a little choosier. Here's one fan that the hometown team doesn't need: Torture-meister and former Inquirer op-ed columnist John Yoo.

The people at San Francisco Weekly thought it would be, you know, funny, to ask the waterboarding enabler whether the Philadelphia native and graduate of Episcopal Academy if he would be rooting his native Phillies or for the Giants, since he's now, remarkably, still a law professor at Berkeley.

I'm a die-hard Phillies fan, grew up in Philadelphia.  I've lived through decades of terrible Phillies teams.  I am looking forward to the Phillies and Giants meeting in the playoffs.

The SF Weekly people didn't let up, also asking him if it wasn't, heh heh, torture to root for the Giants, who have not won a World Series since moving to the Bay Area in 1958:

Whatever Giants' fan think they are enduring, it is nothing compared to Phillies' fans and their decades of losing teams.

Of course, if you want to continue with that analogy, what Phillies' fans have gone through is nothing compared to simulated drowning, stress positions and other tactics authorized by Yoo in his notorious "torture memos" for the Bush administration. The good news is that while the Phillies can't formally sever their ties with Yoo, the Inquirer can -- and did -- over the summer, with little fanfare, not long after previously ownership group led by Brian Tierney lost their auction bid to keep control of the paper.

If there were justice in America, Yoo would have plenty of time to keep up with his beloved Phightins -- from his jail cell.

If there were justice in America.

We are going to protect our young, we are going to protect the next generation of Americans, so the Mama Grizzlies are growling, we are rising up on our hind legs and saying no, we are going to change course, we need that real hope, we need that real change.

-- Sarah Palin, speaking this weekend to a Patriotic Gala Celebration in San Diego.

"...[C]hildren and grandchildren..."

During late 2009 and early 2010, I criss-crossed the country talking to the rank-and-file not just of the Tea Party Movement but the 9-12 Project, the Oath Keepers and others in the backlash movement that sprung from nowhere practically in the hours after President Barack Obama's inauguration.

And there were days when it felt like if I collected a dime for every time a Tea Partier told me the main reason they threw themselves into the movement -- spending seven hours in a dank arena listening to Glenn Beck and his pseudo-historian David Barton or marching against health care reform -- was to save America for their "children and grandchildren," I'd have enough cash to pay for my travels and maybe take in a couple of NHL hockey games with all the spare change.

The idea that that weren't doing it for themselves -- struggling with their own anxieties and deep discomfort with cultural change in America -- but were fighting to save "the next generation of Americans" is a core belief.  Beck -- whom I listened to for that long day at the UCF Arena in Orlando so that you didn't have to, while reporting my book The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama -- knew this and played it to the hilt. He even told the throng of mostly $134 ticket buyers on that March day to keep a Moleskine diary of their activity in the Tea Party uprising.

Said Beck:

"I'm telling you -- our children and grandchildren will fight over who gets Grandma or Grandpa's Moleskine - they will fight over this! You need to tell history, because whether or not you believe it yet, you're making it."

This comment to another journalist at a Tax Day Tea Party from April this year sums it up well.

Many Tea Party activists say that they're motivated to speak out about fiscal responsibility on behalf of future generations.

“When I first started going to meetings, I immediately liked that everyone was friendly, organized, and genuinely concerned for their children and grandchildren,” said JoAnne Carowick, a homemaker who became involved with the Tea Party in State College, Pa.

Carowick said she worries every time she thinks about her six-year-old grandson and the burden she believes he will face from excessive government spending and high taxes.

Here's the thing: Of course, Tea Party activists are "genuinely concerned for their children and grandchildren" -- anyone with a pulse wants a better world for their loved ones who come after them. The tragedy is that their genuine concerns are being played -- manipulated by the high-def hucksters like Beck and Palin who've become multi-millionaires through fact-free appeals to fearful Americans and by billionaires like the Koch brothers who a self-serving agenda.

With a radical agenda that aims to bring to a standstill not just government spending but two centuries of can-do American initiative, the Tea Party Movement -- and what may be an unstoppable tsunami of voter despair on Nov. 2 -- aims, unwittingly, to usher in a sad era of national decline. In fact, the children and grandchildren of the Tea Partiers (and the rest of us, unfortunately) would attend crumbling schools that lag increasingly behind other industrialized and emerging nations, assuming their school bus can even make it through traffic-clogged highways. Unable to find jobs, many will instead enlist to fight new wars overseas for the world's shrinking oil supply, while savvier nations reap the benefits of alternative energy.

Consider the new darling of the anti-Obama backlash, macho division -- New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who even aced out Palin over the weekend at a straw poll of the Virginia Tea Party. Just a couple of days before, the tough-talking Christie offered a powerful symbol of the right wing's just-say-no-to-everything approach to running America, when he singlehandedly took steps to kill a multi-billion dollar new rail tunnel under the Hudson River that would greatly expand and improve mass transit in our largest metropolis. His radical approach could save New Jersey millions of dollars in the short-sighted short-run -- or it might not -- but there is little doubt that Christie will whack future economic growth that might bring in millions in new tax dollars, if the Tea Party crowd would simply allow it to take place. (Meanwhile, China -- whose supplanting of the United States as the world's economic powerhouse is a major source of  Tea Party concern, and understandably so -- is building a high-speed rail system likely to put this country to shame.)

All of which means that even if our "children and grandchildren" are fortunate enough to get a job in Manhattan in 2020, they may not be able to get there. But what kind of vision did you expect from Christie, who came into office proposing $450 million in state aid cuts to public schools -- that would be "children and grandchildren," if I'm not mistaken -- and turned around and vetoed a tax on very adult successful millionaires that would be brought in $637 million.

It's true that our progeny will suffer greatly if America were indeed on track to run out of cash. And so one does wonder why the Tea Party both celebrates Ronald Reagan -- who ushered in an era of unprecedented government borrowing -- and failed to protest George W. Bush as he squandered billions on unproductive causes like the war in Iraq. But now the bankrupting of the United States since Obama became president is largely a right-wing radio soundbite not supported by stubborn facts.

A column today by Paul Krugman in the New York Times noted there's been no appreciable increase in government spending under Obama and that 350,000 fewer Americans have government jobs since the start of 2009. The economic stimulus package -- which started so much of the Tea Party blather -- was too small to stop the long-term massive loss of jobs, hampering growth and the nation's ability to bring the budget back into balance at some future date through taxes from people who are actually employed.

That future date of this again-productive America could have been the time that my own two children -- teenagers today -- are ready to start having children of their own, if they can afford to. Like the Tea Party, I worry about their future, about their ability to find a job in an economy stagnated by our newfound lack of daring and initiative, in a world where America whiffed at its best opportunity to do anything about fending off climate change and which the only spending that goes unchallenged is to sustain wars 11,000 miles away. But my biggest worry for them and their children is living out the 21st Century in a Chris-Christie-fied "nation of no,' that that has lost its ability to dream big things and won't remember how to get that mojo back.

But that is not the Big Lie that's been foisted on and then endorsed by the Tea Party -- that we need to keep the marginal taxes on their billionaire backers like the Koch brothers at record low rates and get rid of a "death tax" that only affects the wealthy, and that any of this has to do with making our super-downsized nation a better place for the next generation to live and work.

You know, there was something else that Sarah Palin said in San Diego this past weekend about the Tea Party, that "[w]e are not the extreme ones. We are the voice of reason." But unfortunately, the exact opposite is true. And sadly, the Tea Party is only hurting the ones it loves.

I've written here several times recently about the wanton recklessness of right-wing radio and TV hosts -- particularly Glenn Beck but also nationally syndicated conspiracy-monger Alex Jones and others -- in spewing out conspiracy theories to keep listeners engaged for fun and profit, with no regard for how their words might impact the most unhinged in their audience.

One of the chapters in my recent book "The Backlash" deals with one such case in Pittsburgh, a young employed fan of Beck -- and also of racist websites -- named Richard Poplawski who was parroting Beck-inspired theories in early 2009 about rounding up citizens into so-called "FEMA camps" and the collapse of the dollar and the food supply and the coming "Obama gun confiscation" all right before he gunned down three police officers who came to his house in a domestic dispute that April.

As I noted this summer:

"Rich, like myself, loved Glenn Beck," Poplawski's best friend Eddie Perkovic told me during a long interview in his narrow rowhouse on the steep hill running down to the Allegheny. (Perkovic had a lot of time -- he was wearing an ankle bracelet for house arrest because of an unrelated case.) Perkovic and his mom -- who also had a close relationship with the accused cop-killer, still awaiting trial -- told me that for months Poplawski had been obsessed with an idea -- frequently discussed by Beck, including in ads for his sponsor Food Insurance -- of the need to stockpile food and even toilet paper for a societal breakdown. Poplawski was also convinced that paper money would become worthless -- another claim given credence by the Fox News Channel host, particularly in close connection with his frequent shilling for the now-under-investigation gold-coin peddler Goldline International.

This morning. Media Matters for America -- where I am a senior fellow -- published a powerful investigative report on another case in which irresponsible and unfounded ratings-seeking blather from Beck and other talk hosts on the right, including Alex Jones and Michael Savage, drove a man in California named Byron Williams (pictured at top) on a path toward a violent shootout with law enforcement:

At one point, I ask Byron if he thinks Fox is worthwhile.

"I'm not gonna say anyone is worthwhile," he replies. "I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn't for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind. I said, well, nobody does this."

Throughout the interview -- and in a letter I would receive later -- Byron tells me I need to watch Beck's programs from June. He says that's where I can learn about the Soros-Obama-Petrobras conspiracy he heatedly described in our earlier conversation.

 "You need to go back to June -- June of this year, 2010 -- and look at all his programs from June. And you'll see he's been breaking open some of the most hideous corruption," Byron says. "A year ago, I was watching him, and it was OK, he was all right, you know? ... But now he's getting it."

The entire report is lengthy, but it deserves a read to understand the threat of violence that comes from irresponsible trash talk out of the media megaphones underwritten by large corporations like News Corp. No one is suggesting that Beck or the others lose their all-American right to free speech, but exercising free speech at that level comes with real responsibility, and so decent society needs to hold their feet to the fire when Beck or Savage or Jones spew lies and half-truths that inspire the deranged into action. The role that half-baked, media-money-driven thought played in the murder of three Pittsburgh police officers - Eric Guy Kelley, Stephen Mayhle, and Paul Sciullo -- is already unconscionable, but encouraging one more violent loon like Rich Poplawski or Byron Williams to go off would be beyond unforgivable.

Footnote: I see that Beck is off for a few days this week undergoing medical tests for several ailments. I hope that he gets well soon. I always wish the best of health for political adversaries so they can return to the playing field of ideas -- where their dangerous ideas can be crushed.