Month: April 2014

The answer to Marco Rubio’s and Rand Paul’s problem is simple.

The problem is simple: both men are Senators in states where you cannot run for two federal positions at the same time.  The answer is equally simple: neither should run for President in 2016. Rand Paul should stay in the Senate and be an awesomely cranky Senate Majority Leader*; and Marco Rubio should run for governor of Florida in 2018 and get ready for 2024.

There. Problems solved.  That should have cost each Senator five thousand dollars apiece in consulting fees, but apparently those jobs are all locked up already.

Moe Lane

*Seriously, there’s all sorts of things that you can do to a federal bureaucracy from the top.

Turns out the new iPod has Siri on it.

Yup, the iPod that I bought with your generous contributions showed up this afternoon… which is good, because the old iPod decided to jump out of my hands this morning and say hello to the sidewalk.

I’m debating what to do about that, actually.  It will still work with a new glass cover, but replacing it is not cheap. At the same time, I don’t want to just casually throw it away. It seems… wasteful.

Normally you don’t see “Turnout will save us!” until about October or so.

It’s a bad time to be a Democrat, apparently, because they needed to toss out stuff like this pretty darn early this cycle: “[T]he most important news for Democrats going into November is that the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is planning to spend $60 million on data-driven GOTV efforts specially focused on reducing the “midterm falloff” factor.”  The link – unlike TPM’s – works, but I wouldn’t recommend clicking one way or the other.  The major questions raised by that quote: Continue reading Normally you don’t see “Turnout will save us!” until about October or so.

Harry Reid brings up Koch brothers. AGAIN.

Pro-tip for Democrats: when Politico casually mocks your favorite rhetorical flourish, it’s pretty bad.

Responding to the [McCuthcheon v. FCC] decision, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) invoked his favorite boogeymen: the Koch brothers.

“The Supreme Court today just accentuated what they did on Citizens United, which is a decision that is one of the worst decisions in the history of that court,” Reid said during a press conference on raising the minimum wage. “All it does is take away people’s rights because, as you know, the Koch brothers are trying to buy America.”

Bolding mine.  It is a measure of just how surreal the whole situation is that most people still weren’t ready to immediately believe that Harry Reid would start babbling about the Koch brothers buying America*. If you are a Reid staffer, take my sincere advice: get your boss to his doctor for a check-up.  Fast.

Via

Moe Lane

*Almost a shame that they won’t; God knows nobody in the Democratic party apparently knows how to do a budget properly.

You don’t often get to have headlines like this. …Thank God.

Well, this is… this is a thing that is a thing.

Harvard discovers three of its library books are bound in human flesh

…and Harvard does not want to know if they have any more.  I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that I do not blame them for that.

Via AoSHQ.

Rep. Ann Kuster (D, New Hampshire-2): hates town halls, likes being rude.

Ooh, I can answer this one!

Since taking office in 2013, Rep. Annie Kuster has yet to hold a legitimate townhall meeting for constituents in New Hampshire’s 2nd congressional district, and onlookers are taking notice.

Today Citizens for a Strong New Hampshire, a Republican-leaning group, released video footage of trackers merely asking why she’d yet to appear before the people who elected her in such a setting.

The answer is, of course, that Rep. Kuster doesn’t want to explain why she’s so far to the left of her constituents.  Not to mention, she apparently has staffing problems: Continue reading Rep. Ann Kuster (D, New Hampshire-2): hates town halls, likes being rude.

Sen Jeff Merkley (D, Oregon): soft on Iran, for apparently most of my life.

I appreciate the Oregonian nervously reporting* about the Washington Free Beacons’s chronicling of Senator Jeff Merkley’s knee-jerk tendency to apologize for a regime that hangs homosexuals and adulterers: I might not have gotten to it for a while otherwise. Anyway, it’s depressing how unsurprising this report is:

The senator who fronted a campaign against new sanctions on Iran earlier this year has since 1979 been advocating that the United States take a soft line on Iran due to his belief that America’s global power and influence are waning, according to a copy of the lawmaker’s 235-page college thesis obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.) emerged in January as one of the leading Senate Democrats who massaged the press on behalf of the Obama administration and pressured his colleagues to kill new Iran sanctions that were supported by a bipartisan majority of lawmakers.

Continue reading Sen Jeff Merkley (D, Oregon): soft on Iran, for apparently most of my life.

‘Fix Obamacare!’ ‘So you admit that it’s broken?’ ‘No!’ …Wait, WHAT?

Now, I know that a lot of people are basically permanently annoyed with Chuck Todd, particularly since he recently declared that Obamacare was here to stay. But the technique that he used on Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the video below remains easy to replicate. It turns out that taking a position solely because it polls well doesn’t work out as well when you get challenged on it:

Continue reading ‘Fix Obamacare!’ ‘So you admit that it’s broken?’ ‘No!’ …Wait, WHAT?