You were not elected to spend your days exercising oversight over school menus. You are also not my mom. You sure as hell ain’t me, which means that you don’t get a say in what my kids eat. So, please: stick to things that you’re good at. Admittedly, the only thing that you’ve shown any natural talent in has been in keeping the unemployment rate above 9% – but I’m sure that there’s something out there.
Dumbass.
Via @iowahawk and @breeannehowe.
(pause)
What am I thinking? That’s an awful name. Let’s call it… “BubbaRush?” “RushboBill?” “The East Coast will go up in a blaze of light and heat if those two ever shake hands?” – Nah, that one won’t fit on the weekly Nielsen ratings.
…when I said that the only result would be a symbolic gesture towards ‘reform’ with no real changes. It turns out that progressives didn’t even get that: their precious attempt to deny the Great Shellacking was quietly choked to death in a narrow, dusty room* Tuesday afternoon… and nothing was put in its place. Tim Noah of Slate is kind of upset about it all – which is kind of odd, considering that there was never a reasonable chance after November that the Democratic leadership would have made it easier to pass an Obamacare repeal bill.
Yes, that would have been the immediate result of this scheme. Let me spell it out for those folks on the Other Side who are having difficulty following along (which apparently include some of their Senators). When you control both Houses of Congress, but the opposition party has enough votes in the Senate to win cloture fights, you want filibuster ‘reform’ to make it easier to pass your legislation. When you only control the Senate, the Senate opposition party wants filibuster ‘reform’ to make it easier to pass their legislation – particularly when it looks likely that the opposition party will be the majority party after the next election.
This is not particularly difficult to understand. I’d say that I’m sorry that progressive politicians are too steeped in twinned warm delusions (first delusion, that progressives are popular; second delusion, that the November elections can be negated by an act of Will) to really comprehend this… except that I try not to lie to people.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Yeah, that’s a G.K. Chesterton reference. Because that’s how I roll.
The question before the board: below is a word picture of the reaction of NPR listeners to Tuesday’s State of the Union address (this can fairly be called a ‘receptive audience’ for a Democratic President). They were asked to describe the speech in three words: the larger the word in the picture, the more it was used – which presumably means the biggest word is one that can be reasonably be seen as the word that people will tend to most associate with the speech.
The word of the day was apparently ‘salmon’:
(H/T: @jeffemmanuel)
So here goes: Did President Obama intend for his speech Tuesday night to be about salmon? – Serious question: the President has a definite problem with generating memorable bits on his own for his prepared speeches*, and at least this one was a deliberate joke.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Now that the first rush of secular Messianic hysteria has subsided, can we all just admit that President Obama ripped off “Yes we can!” from Bob the Builder
Most of the Republican-themed political cartoons in this slideshow were wishful thinking, fairly naked agitprop, pretty dang stupid, or a combination of all three – but I look at this one and ask myself, Did the cartoonist really mean to pay us this compliment? Because it’s true: the Republican party did make a wide turn to the Right in the last election, and we did knock the Democratic party off of a cliff in response. I understand that Democrats would rather think about three Senate retentions than about the fact that, say, they effectively lost control of most of the Midwest/Appalachia, but at some point they’re going to have to confront their problems…
I’m not one to subscribe to theories of societal guilt, but seriously: somehow this… this… this can be traced back to us. I’m quite certain of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svOlz2ei4Yk&feature=player_embedded
Endhiran Tamil DVD with English Subtitles
Sorry?
Moe Lane
PS: Saw this on Twitter; don’t remember where, and not sure if the person who showed it really wants to given “credit” for finding it.
Yeah, I know: Inception
Moe Lane
I don’t know why he’s bothering to yell at the President over this, though: the question of whether Harry Reid has the ability to get earmarks passed into legislation was abruptly settled last November. The House has banned them, and in case anybody was wondering whether the Republican base considers that ban to encompass the conference process where the differences between the Senate and House versions of a bill are resolved, let me clear that up: the Republican base does so consider it.
And the Republican base will get very, very loud if it even looks like the House GOP is wavering on this issue – which, I hasten to add, it does not currently appear that they are doing. I fully expect them to stay fully righteous on earmarks, in fact. But it’s just best that everything be put on the table, all spelled out and everything, just so that there are no unfortunate misunderstandings later. I’m sure that we all want to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings, don’t we?
Via @amandacarpenter.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
Getting rid of Phil Hare in IL-17 last year was one of life’s little pleasures – originally because Phil Hare was an odious little apparatchik toady who inherited the seat and kept it from inertia, but later because I grew to like Bobby Schilling. Small business guy, pretty friendly, enjoyed taking whacks at Hare at every opportunity: what wasn’t to like?
Turns out that Representative Schilling hasn’t lost his taste for afflicting the comfortable: he’s publicly taken up the President on Obama’s kind offer to talk to Republicans about fixing the health care bill. Bobby’s got a bunch of things to discuss:
Continue reading Bobby Schilling (R, IL-17) calls President’s bluff.
…was, overall, not an advantage for the President: it made things dull.
Well. Duller. You kind of need that seating polarization to give you the feedback at how well or poorly the President is doing at the SotU. Mind you, the seating buddy thing also did something really, really cruel to President Obama: it denied him an opportunity to look over the crowd and think to himself Damn, but we got our heads handed to us last year. That’s something that he really, really needs to remember for the next two years, lest he end up watching the 2014 SotU address from a private residence in Chicago.
Hey, if I thought that he was actually listening to me I’d never be writing this out. It’s not like the President has me over every Sunday for cakes and tea…
Moe Lane
