Attention, Christine O'Donnell: They're not laughing with you

Delaware tea party Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell seemed to be the only person in attendance at Tuesday's debate who didn't know that the audience was laughing at her, not with her, as she went after Democratic opponent Chris Coons on evolution and separation of church and state.

O'Donnell, trying to close a double-digit gap in polls over the next two weeks before the election, was intent on trapping Coons in a "gotcha" moment to show off his supposed lack of constitutional understanding. So intent, it seems, that she ended up displaying her own far greater misunderstanding instead:

Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that "religious doctrine doesn't belong in our public schools." "Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked him. When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O'Donnell asked: "You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?"

Joe Miller's private security team handcuffs journalist

The bizarre Alaska Senate race has gotten even stranger. Tea party candidate Joe Miller is facing mounting criticism after members of his private security team handcuffed a reporter Sunday night at a public town hall event at an Anchorage middle school.

According to the Anchorage Daily News, Tony Hopfinger of Alaska Dispatch was trying to ask Miller about his departure from Fairbanks North Star Borough when he was surrounded by private security personnel who told Hopfinger to leave. As Miller escaped out the side door and a mob enveloped the reporter, Hopfinger said he felt threatened by the men in dark suits and crew cuts and pushed one away. Hopfinger says he was immediately shoved against a wall with his hands behind his back as steel handcuffs were put on his wrists by guards who dragged him into the hallway.

While Hopfinger was still in handcuffs, the guards attempted to prevent other reporters from talking to him and threatened them too with arrest for trespass. A Daily News reporter interviewed Hopfinger anyway. No other reporters were arrested, though a few shoving matches and chest bumps ensued as the guards attempted to cordon off Hopfinger and block photographs and videos from being taken of the bizarre school scene.

My granddad, the "anchor baby"

My grandfather loved to tell stories. It's one of the things I remember best and most fondly about him, and it's a trait I seem to have inherited. Whether you had heard the story before or not, he often delighted in telling us about the time he watched the Hindenburg fly over New York City on its fateful journey to Lakehurst, or used a borrowed limousine and his tan complexion to masquerade as a Saudi prince at Manhattan's exclusive nightclubs, or once answered the phone "Yankee Stadium, third base," only to learn the person on the other end was Admiral Chester Nimitz. I don't know how much was true and how much was exaggerated, but I do know he lived an extraordinary life and that he loved sharing it with his family.

Ernie Stevens,
notorious "anchor
baby"

It's funny, though. Of the dozens of Granddad's stories I must have heard hundreds of times, he never told me the one about being a terrorist plant bent on destroying America from within. Obviously that's because such a concept is completely absurd -- my grandfather was born in Pennsylvania, served in the Army Air Corps in World War II, married a farm girl from Kansas and became a successful accountant for major U.S. corporations. But though he voted Republican all his life (one of the only disagreements he and I ever had was over FDR), many on the right now believe my grandfather was somehow a dangerous individual who didn't even deserve American citizenship.

You see, though he probably never heard the term in his life, my grandfather was an "anchor baby." Born in America to non-U.S. citizens in 1921, the Fourteenth Amendment granted him birthright citizenship in the U.S. rather than forcing him to take the nationality of his parents. Now, however, Republican leaders like sens. Glenn McConnell, John Kyl and South Carolina's own Lindsey Graham (with Fox News' predictable support/guidance) are actually trying to change the Constitution to eliminate the clause which allowed my grandfather to be an American.