Palin 2012
A bright new future for Real America.
Relax. America would never vote for a complete idiot just because the idiot happens to be charming in a folksy down-home way.
Do You Like Your Job?
Reid says he expects the tactic of gentle persuasion to work best, given the size of his Senate Democratic flock and the political divergences within it. “I don’t dictate how people vote,” he said in an interview this month. “If it’s an important vote, I try to tell them how important it is to the Senate, the country, the president … But I’m not very good at twisting arms. I try to be more verbal and non-threatening. So there are going to be — I’m sure — a number of opportunities for people who have different opinions not to vote the way that I think they should. But that’s the way it is. I hold no grudges.”
If you’re not going to use a caucus for organizing a voting bloc via arm-twisting and chicanery, then what exactly is a caucus for? For knowing who to invite to your barbecues?
On the one side, we have Republicans in the government who hate the idea of having a government, and on the other side, we have Democratic politicians who hate the idea of politicking. Maybe the reason why our government is a habitual failure is because everybody in it hates their jobs. When state destabilization (ahem, I mean “small-government philosophy”) is lauded as a virtue, and when we congratulate leaders for not dirtying themselves with the ugliness of politics, then we have an un-political non-government that can’t do a single thing it’s designed to do, all in the name of bi-partisanship and “getting things done” even though the last time the government actually did get something done, it was the result of grudge-holding, arm-twisting, and cold-hearted nastiness.
Preemptive Excuses
When Democrats were in the Senate minority, they told us they can’t do anything because they don’t have 50. Then they got 50 and they said they can’t really do anything because they don’t have 60. Now they have 60.
Harry Reid today:
“We have 60 votes on paper,” Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, said Wednesday in an interview. “But we cannot bulldoze anybody; it doesn’t work that way. My caucus doesn’t allow it. And we have a very diverse group of senators philosophically. I am not this morning suddenly flexing my muscles.”
What kind of creative excuses do you think they could make if they had 70?
Whose Side Is Blanche Lincoln On? Is She On Our Side If We Pay Her Enough?
ActBlue is raising money for TV commercials to pressure Senator Blanche Lincoln (D- AR) into voting for public health care. It’s really interesting because ActBlue was Blanche Lincoln’s number one contributor to her campaign. Theoretically, politicians listen to big corporations because big corporations give them all the money they need for their campaigns. But this time it’s different. So theoretically, Blanche Lincoln should listen to her biggest booster. Does the theory apply when the campaign booster is a grass-roots, progressive Website? Will senators do anything for campaign dollars, or are they unflinching capitalist ideologues? We’ll see!
I Expected Them To Be Corrupt
But I didn’t expect them to do it exactly in this way:
For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.
The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”
A conflict? Yathink?
I wonder, how do they convince administration officials to spend time with the people they sell these meetings to? Money? Favorable write-ups? Something seedier? If only we had some sort of institution whose job it was to investigate these sorts of things and then tell us about them…
A WaPo spokesperson sent Ben Smith an official response: “The flier circulated this morning came out of a business division for conferences and events, and the newsroom was unaware of such communication. It went out before it was properly vetted, and this draft does not represent what the company’s vision for these dinners are, which is meant to be an independent, policy-oriented event for newsmakers. As written, the newsroom could not participate in an event like this.”
I’m glad that’s all cleared up. The problem is in how the event was written about, not that it’s happening. Phew. If they just write another memo, it will change everything.
But wait, if their excuse is that the business division is doing it and the newsroom didn’t know anything about it, then how good can their newsroom actually be? What kind of an excuse is it for reporters to say that corruption isn’t their problem because they didn’t know about it. Here’s a small hint: It’s supposed to be their job to know about it. It’s like an air traffic controller saying, “Hey, man. Back off. That fifty-foot-tall pile of flaming wreckage isn’t my fault because I wasn’t told that those planes were gonna wreck into each other on the runway right next to the tower like that. Don’t blame me!“
Come Armegeddon Come
‘The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.”
Feel free to point out the myriad ways his ideas are bad. I just want to point out that this is a top-rated show on the top-rated news network. You can dismiss this stuff in a lot of ways, but you can’t dismiss it as irrelevant.
Joe Lieberman Is With Us On Everything But The War
I like when he criticized President Clinton’s health care plan for being “too governmental.” Have you ever heard a football player criticize a football play for being “too footballish?” Why do people who hate the idea of a government try to be in charge of one?
So they can destroy it, I guess. Isn’t the word for this sort of person a “saboteur?”
Long Distance Love Affair
Staffers used to wonder why Governor Sanford (R - SC) took so many official trips to Argentina, and routed other trips through Argentina for no apparent reason. Now the leader of the Family Values party’s Governors Association is using the press to talk about how his mistress is his true soul-mate. If I were cynical, I’d figure that his lady-friend was getting nervous that he was gonna leave her, so he’s using the press to send her signals.
But you know me. I am cynical. So I do figure that he’s doing exactly that.
On the one hand, his relationship is his own business. On the other hand, he made it public. He’s the one who called a press conferences to tell us all about his affair after he skipped town for a week. And he’s the one who keeps talking to the press about his soul-mate. He wants it to be public. The guy is bragging.
I can appreciate that the guy is in love. I can’t appreciate how he uses state resources fraudulently to support his relationship, or how his love affair is completely reasonable, while everybody else’s is sinful and needs to be restricted by the power of the law. What a serious asshole. But that’s always the way with these family values types. They work hard to pass laws to make sure that you’re not allowed to do exactly what they’re doing. It’s never about morality. Morality is a red herring. It’s about sexual domination. For some people, dominating one person is enough. But for others, they have to sexually control an entire country.
Sixty
The Senator Al Franken era is upon us.
When Democrats were in the minority in congress, Democratic leaders said that they can’t do anything because they’re in the minority (even though Republicans have been effective as a blockading minority party for years). So Democratic activists worked hard won majorities in the House and the Senate. But it wasn’t enough. We were told that they have to have 60 Senators to pass meaningful legislation because you need 60 to stop a filibuster (the very same filibuster that the Democrats said they couldn’t use when they were the minority, which is why they needed the majority in the first place).
Now we have 60. No more excuses.
