The Victorious Opposition

Republican House leadership has been successful in forcing “motions to recommit” via attaching gratuitous-but-politically-useful amendments to bills. Doing this for uncontroversial and potentially useful bills led to the Simpsons comparison. Norm Ornstein from the American Enterprise Institute:

John Boehner used to be a serious legislator. Eric Cantor is smart and a justifiably rising star in the GOP firmament. But they are becoming the Bart Simpsons of Congress, gleeful at smarmy and adolescent tactics and unable and unwilling to get serious. Instead of encouraging a constructive relationship with the serious and fair-minded legislators on the Democratic side, they are adding to the traction of their take-no-prisoners counterparts. What a shame.

On the same issue, although not sure if it’s the same reference, Life Imitates The Simpsons:

Today’s action on the House floor:
...

The Simpsons, 1995:

Kent Brockman: With our utter annihilation imminent, our federal government has snapped into action. We go live now via satellite to the floor of the United States congress.

Speaker: Then it is unanimous, we are going to approve the bill to evacuate the town of Springfield in the great state of—

Congressman: Wait a minute, I want to tack on a rider to that bill: $30 million of taxpayer money to support the perverted arts.

Speaker: All in favor of the amended Springfield-slash-pervert bill?

[everyone boos]

Speaker: Bill defeated. [bangs gavel]

Kent Brockman: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: democracy simply doesn’t work.

(there’s a link to the episode along with that post; the except starts at 12:45).

A few months ago, Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and current candidate for California’s Republican nomination to the Senate ran an incredibly bizarre ad attacking one of her GOP opponents. Now the Democrats have come up with this:

They’re on the money about Carly as HP CEO; I brought that issue up in comments on the earlier post. It’s interesting to see the Democrats spending ad dollars attacking Carly during the GOP primary season; maybe they think they’re vulnerable to her? I hope Californians aren’t falling for Carly’s “I can manage your money” stuff without looking at her HP history.

Either way, it’s a pretty good ad…

Yes, this is a soundbite. Yes, it’s probably taken out of context. But still - holy crap:

Coburn also batted down constituents who raised ill-informed concerns about the health care bill. When one woman said she feared being thrown in jail if she didn’t get health insurance, Coburn advised turning off the TV.

“The intention is not to put any one in jail. That makes for good TV news on Fox but that isn’t the intention,” Coburn responded.

He warned of basing opinions about policy or politicians on the cable news network. “What we have to have is make sure we have a debate in this country so that you can see what’s going on and make a determination yourself,” he said. “So don’t catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody is no good. The people in Washington are good. They just don’t know what they don’t know.”

And he defended Nancy Pelosi:

In remarks at the town hall, Coburn referred to Pelosi, a California Democrat, as a “nice lady,” which prompted audible disagreement from Oklahomans. “Come on now. She is nice – how many of you all have met her? She’s a nice person,” Coburn said, according to Capitol News Connection.

He continued: “Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn’t mean they’re not a good person. I’ve been in the Senate for five years and I’ve taken a lot of that, because I’ve been on the small side both in the Republican Party and the Democrat Party.”

Yeah, she very well may be a nice person, although I don’t honestly believe that. That doesn’t make her competent to be Speaker of the House (or even in the House, for that matter). And it doesn’t change the fact that she’s the biggest danger facing our country.

Still, he gets props for ragging on Fox News in public. That takes Balls of Steel.

I’m guessing he apologizes to Glenn Beck and/or Bill O’Reilly within the week.

A Phyrric victory for the Democrats and a defeat for, well, everyone else.

I’m not in Apocalyptic mode today.  Like many Americans, I watched these proceedings very closely and I’m disgusted by how this bill came about.  As far as I can tell, some Democrats passed this just for the sake of passing something while others were bribed with goodies to be revealed later.  It’s the foundation for what I am sure will become a huge new entitlement, it’s going to add to the deficit (the way distorted and overspun CBO report notwithstanding), and it’s going to destroy jobs at the worst possible time.  I think they voted for this bill for the wrong reasons and they did it in the wrong way.

Some conservatives are in “game over, man, game over” fits today but I’m not.  We were already pretty well screwed thanks to Social Security and Medicaid, those other entitlements that are going bankrupt.  This changes nothing and only shows me that Washington still doesn’t get it.  The voters chose to give the Democrats unchecked control of the government in 2008 and this is what we got.  In the next act, Obama and Congress will try to slip the public option back in, provide amnesty to the millions of illegal aliens living here, and so build the dependent voting bloc that will guarantee their dominance of government in the long term.  If they could pull this travesty off, the sky really is the limit between now and November.  The Administration will now be able to say: “You’re already screwed in November.  You may as well vote for amnesty/cap-and-trade/whatever and take any deal we offer.”

How stupid were the independents that believed that Obama was a post-partisan pragmatist or that electing Democratic Senators and Representatives in traditionally Republican areas in order to install far-left Democrat leadership in both houses of Congress would be a good idea?  If it’s true that they did it to punish the Republicans for Iraq, guess what?  Iraq is well on its way to becoming a prosperous, functional democracy while the Democrats here at home steamroll the opposition and dole out bribes with money the Treasury doesn’t have in order to dump a bill that a clear majority of Americans don’t want and think will harm the already crippled economy.  Great job, guys!  I don’t know if the GOP has exactly earned the right to be in the majority again, but it should now be beyond question that the Democrats are far worse when they’re in power.  Hate deficits?  Here’s more in one year than Bush could manage in eight!  Want health care reform?  Here’s something wildly unpopular that won’t reduce costs and it required Congressional arm-twisting and payola to drag across the finish line over bipartisan objections!  Hate the crappy economy?  Here’s new burdensome regulation and taxation to smother any hope of recovery!

What needs to happen is that certain elements of this bill need to die and the GOP needs to commit to strangling it in the crib.  There are lawsuits pending and I don’t know if that will work or not.  You know how I am about letting the courts be the final word on things.  I would rather not see this undone by a court, even though I wouldn’t cry about it if it did happen.  As I see, the elected branches have fucked up and it requires that the elected branches or the states unfuck it.  I want the Republicans to run on—and succeed at—reversing the worst parts of this bill before it completely goes into effect and, failing that, bring on a Constitutional Convention through the state legislatures to resolve it once and for all. 

This isn’t over, not by a long shot.

I’m sure by now most of you have seen or heard about the keynote address delivered by Glenn Beck at this years Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).  Despite a killer speech by George Will, it seems Mr. Beck is the one who got all the attention, calling on conservatives to have a “come-to-Jesus” moment.  Beck expressed a lot of the feeling many of us share here at the VO, including the need for the GOP to own up to its failures and win back the trust of the American people.

Perhaps Beck’s critics were surprised to hear such criticism levied at Republicans, but I was not.  Like many “intellectual” conservatives, I’ve found myself distancing myself from Beck, calling his rhetoric “over the top” and counterproductive to the cause.  But ever since I got his latest book (”Arguing with Idiots:  How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government”) for Christmas, my opinion of him has slowly been changing for the better.  That positive change in opinion crystallized when I gave Beck an entire hour of my open-minded attention by watching his CPAC speech (which is probably more than many of his critics have given).

Granted, I did not agree with everything he said.  I am especially disappointed at his criticism of my favorite President, Theodore Roosevelt, for reasons that are better explained by someone more knowledgeable and eloquent than me.  But the man made many great points, drawing on facts and history to stitch together a compelling narrative that explains much of the predicament our country and the conservative movement find themselves in.  I was especially moved by this passage from a post by JE Dyer at HotAir:

Conservative commentators fill different roles, and sensitizing his audience to history is – surprisingly, perhaps, for a self-styled rodeo clown – a key element of Beck’s.  He gets it right more often than not, and he highlights things no one else with such an audience does, like the history demonstrating the essential, philosophical antithesis of left-progressivism and limited-government constitutionalism – and the fact, known by hardly anyone today, that presidents as revered as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were on the side of the former.

The popularizing of rare intellectual insights is never pretty.  But it’s necessary.  I’d rather it were happening than not, especially in such a time as this.

What Dyer and other commentators seem to be getting at is that Beck serves an important role in the resurgent conservative movement.  His equal-opportunity criticism of Republicans as well as Democrats is helping to keep the conservative movement honest, and conveys arguments and sentiment that are shared by a large number of Americans.  He has been ringing the bell for some time about the “day of reckoning” that many of us know is coming—where we finally feel the consequences of the fiscally unsustainable and statist course our country is on.  It’s clear from reading his book and watching his speech that he seriously studies the lessons of history and is trying his damnedest to make sure that we don’t repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past.

So maybe Beck isn’t the imbecilic blowhard everyone seems to think he is.  I, for one, will be paying a little closer attention to what he has to say.

With a title like “Putting Americans In Control Of Their Health Care”, you’d think that maybe some libertarian concepts had actually crept into the White House health care plan.

You’d be wrong.

It’s pure window dressing. Top to bottom. Not a single substantive change from the Senate bill. True, there is no “public option” and there is no single-payer model (there are still exchanges, but they’ve taken the public option out of them). There’s still an individual mandate. The system is still fundamentally employer-centric, rather than individual-centric, making the portability thing a pure fiction. They say:

Nothing in the proposal forces anyone to change the insurance they have.  Period.

Leaving out the entire “as long as you remain with the same employer and the employer doesn’t change the plan”.

There is no attempt at actual Medicare/Medicaid reform. It pretends that elimination of fraud & waste is enough. Even assuming such were possible, that’s a ludicrous concept. They even spend more on Medicare by closing the Part D “donut hole”. Let’s not forget that Medicare Part D is unfunded in the first place.

They pay lip service to including GOP ideas (there’s a “Republican Ideas” page that lists the things they’ve pulled from GOP bills). None of these are remotely substantive. Pure window-dressing.

To make things worse, the Democrats are apparently planning to go the reconciliation route after all:

Democratic officials said the president’s proposal was being written so that it could be attached to a budget bill as a way of averting a Republican filibuster in the Senate. The procedure, known as budget reconciliation, would let Democrats advance the bill with a simple majority rather than a 60-vote supermajority.

I have, of course, written to the President and my Congress-critters yet again to object to this move, as I’ve done every time it’s come up for the last year. A couple of Democrats have said they’ll oppose reconciliation. We shall see.

A month ago I asked why the GOP wasn’t taking the lead on health care. Seems to me that window has closed. The Democrats are now back on track. And the election of Scott Brown won’t amount to either diddly or squat at the end of this debate.

The most aggressive response to come from the GOP so far has been Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap For America’s Future”, which I discussed previously. Unfortunately, the GOP leadership has hung Ryan out to dry over this:

“Paul Ryan, who’s the ranking member on our budget committee, has done an awful lot of work in putting together his roadmap,” Boehner said. “But it’s his. And I know the Democrats are trying to say that it’s the Republican leadership. But they know that’s not the case.”

(emphasis in the original)

So Thursday’s “televised health care summit” will be exactly the dog-and-pony show that people are predicting. And the Democrats will ramrod some egregious form of health care “reform” through within the next month or so.

While the GOP continues to eat their young and think they can do better.

Politics as usual. Wonderful. Pelosi and Boehner need to be replaced. Maybe Ryan and Cantor can stage a coup; I’m not sure who I’d root for to stage a coup for Pelosi’s job, but pretty much anyone would be better.

Just in time for a last-minute Valentine’s Day greeting, the RNC has set up this website. Some of these are pretty good. Here’s a couple:

A picture is worth a thousand words:

As HuffPo points out - don’t get caught with your notes written on your hand when you’re busting on the Prez for using a teleprompter:

Closer inspection of a photo of Sarah Palin, during a speech in which she mocked President Obama for his use of a teleprompter, reveals several notes written on her left hand. The words “Energy”, “Tax” and “Lift American Spirits” are clearly visible. There’s also what appears to read as “Budget cuts” with the word Budget crossed out.

Watch her quote from her hand during the post-speech Q&A:

Maybe this was actually Tina Fey standing in for Palin, and she simply didn’t have time to memorize her lines?

H/T: A Facebook friend

Remember Obama talking about that bi-partisan budget reduction commission during the State of the Union address? The one that he’s going to now create via (pointless) executive order, since the Senate voted it down? Even the Republican sponsors of the bill voted against it:

A month ago, a bipartisan group of senators asked Obama for his “strong support” for a commission to solve the national debt crisis. “We don’t recommend this special process lightly,” they wrote, calling it “the best way to reach a lasting bipartisan solution that will put our nation back on a sound long-term fiscal path.”

One of the signatories, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), issued a news release trumpeting his sponsorship of the legislation. “Now is the time,” he proclaimed.

On second thought, maybe not. Obama heeded the letter writers’ advice and backed the commission. But when the proposal came to a vote on the Senate floor Tuesday, four of the Republican signers—Crapo, Kay Bailey Hutchison (Tex.), Jim Inhofe (Okla.) and Robert Bennett (Utah)—voted no. So did three other Republican senators who had also been co-sponsors of the legislation—2008 presidential nominee John McCain (Ariz.), Sam Brownback (Kan.) and John Ensign (Nev.). An eighth co-sponsor, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), didn’t vote.

And if that’s not bad enough, on Thursday, they voted against “paygo”, unanimously. And they laugh about it:

The Congressional Record will show that Democrats prevailed in the vote, but the enthusiasm on the floor was the other way around. There was no celebrating among party members, no congratulatory handshakes.

The 92-year-old Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), needed in the chamber to overcome the Republican opposition, voted from his wheelchair and rubbed his forehead. Across the aisle, Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), a GOP leader, belted out a “no!” and then chuckled.

They are so committed to opposing Obama, to voting “no”, that they will vote against the things that are theoretically core GOP fiscal conservative principles.

Pathetic.

I wrote about the GOP’s “Roadmap for America’s Future” after muddling through the 100 page document, and as I said then:

There needs to be more than “trust us, we really mean it this time”. Because, TBH, I do not trust the Republican leadership’s fiscal conservative talk any more than I would believe it if this document had Nancy Pelosi’s name on it (well, that’s an exaggeration,  but you get the point). For me, it’s a “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” thing with the GOP leadership. I used to trust the GOP to walk the walk on fiscal issues, and most of our disagreements were in other areas. Nowadays, I don’t trust the GOP leadership on fiscal issues any more than I trust the Democrats. Sorry, I just don’t.

Or, as the author of that first piece put it:

There is a risk that so many Republicans have become so ideological in their opposition that, even in control of Congress, they would use their increased power to bring the government to a halt.

Then again, the government is already paralyzed. When Republicans are so eager to thwart the president that they vote against what they themselves believe is in the national interest, we’ve pretty much reached rock bottom.

Paul Ryan may be for real. Eric Cantor may be for real. But the GOP leadership, and the partisan hackishness of the GOP in general, is in no way superior to the Democrats. If I can’t count on the GOP to be actually fiscally conservative, I have no reason whatsoever to consider supporting them.

Pathetic.

Yes, I already said that. It bears repeating. I’ve said repeatedly that “party of no” is doing nothing but enabling Obama’s spending spree. When the GOP can’t even get it up to support “paygo”, they just provide the evidence to prove my point.

Pathetic.

H/T: DrWex

In discussion about the State of the Union Address, Rich pointed us at the latest plan from the GOP, entitled A Roadmap for America’s Future. This is a just-updated version of a plan from 2008, which appears to be being driven by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin (aside - whenever I hear “Rep. Ryan”, this douchebag is who comes to mind - I need to break that habit, because they are completely different people).

The website is useful, and if you drill down enough, you can find this 100 page PDF document which really explains what’s going on. It’s not the best-structured document of all time - the actual proposals don’t show up until almost fifty pages into it, and while the stuff before that does a decent job of trying to explain what’s wrong, it’s both overly dense and overly terse at the same time (it goes into gory details on some issues, sometimes several times, and yet still depends on terminology and concepts that are probably unfamiliar to many of the people these detailed explanations are targeted at). This made it a much harder read than I expected. I hope that they restructure this document - perhaps summarizing the proposals first, then the details on the problems these proposals are designed to address, then the detailed versions of the proposals.

Anyhow, you should at least review the website, and skim through the document, if not read it fully.

Rep. Ryan introduced H.R.4529 on Wednesday, entitled “To provide for the reform of health care, the Social Security system, the tax code for individuals and business, job training, and the budget process.” (I love the grandiose titles that wind up on a lot of bills). The text of the bill still isn’t available yet; so it’s difficult to assess what they’re really proposing, so we’ll come back to that when the text is available. (Update: I found a link to the draft legislation drilling down through other stuff on their website. It’s 630 pages. I haven’t read it yet…)

There is a lot to like in this proposal as it currently stands, though I do have some major concerns. Let me get to my big concern first, though.

The GOP message on health care right now seems to be “We need to start over”. Period. It was said repeatedly, in almost exactly those words, on the Sunday AM shows (Orrin Hatch, John McCain, Mitch McConnell all said something of that ilk). Well, I agree with that sentiment. What I don’t get is - why isn’t there a concrete proposal for the common ground Hatch & McCain are saying is there? Why are they stuck on talking about the process, and not taking the lead on the substance?

It’s quite clear to pretty much everyone that the Democrats are currently in complete disarray on this topic - the House Democrats are at polar opposite ends of the spectrum from each other as their leadership tries to get them to pass the un-amended Senate bill. The Senate Democratic leadership is sitting on its heels with “wait and see” (which, actually, is an appropriate and somewhat commendable position for them to be taking). The White House is all over the place, backing absolutely everybody on every proposal, and hence having absolutely nothing useful to say on the topic.

I think people truly believe there is common ground. And there are GOP agenda items that are enormously popular (e.g. tort reform) that could be driven back into the conversation. Why aren’t we hearing this? In the GOP’s response to the President’s weekly message on Saturday, Rep. Boehner didn’t address it. As I mentioned, the Sunday morning talk show guests didn’t address substantive program ideas. TBH, I am unsurprised by this, but continue to be perturbed by it.

There is a short window here; it’s not impossible that the window closes Wed. night at the President’s State of the Union address, where he might re-take the initiative on this front. I was really hoping to see some leadership from the GOP. The GOP leadership continually claims to have ideas, plans, etc, but repeatedly fail to deliver any of that message, falling back into pure opposition politics. As I’ve said before - maybe that’s a viable tack to take on “stimulus” (although I continue to believe they just handed the Democrats victory with that tactic), but on health care, things absolutely need to be addressed on a range of topics that both parties agree on (e.g. pre-existing conditions, dropping coverage/coverage limits, access to insurance plans, drug costs, etc). There isn’t agreement on how to do these things, but there is agreement on issues (e.g. on the access issue, Democrats want the government to do it and Republicans want market changes to let the market do it, such as removing the interstate barriers, or on the drug cost issue, Democrats want regulation and Republicans want tort reform).

So I ask you - why is the GOP letting this golden opportunity to take control of the agenda slip away from them? Maybe they won’t succeed in getting their agenda through, but if they would take this fleeting moment to drive a concrete message to the public, they would completely flip the debate and show themselves as the party of ideas and the Democrats as the obstructionists. Right now they seem to be continuing to open the door for continuation of the “party of no” label, by failing to capitalize on the Democrat’s “party of better than nothing” moment.

Thoughts?

As expected, David Hamilton was confirmed by the Senate:

The Senate on Thursday confirmed U.S. District Judge David Hamilton for the Chicago-based federal appeals court, approving a nominee targeted by conservatives as a liberal activist.

Hamilton was approved on a 59-39 vote and became the eighth of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees to win confirmation. He is the third confirmed for a U.S. appeals court, which is usually the last stop for federal court cases.

Republican senators — backed by their conservative allies outside Congress — had blocked a vote for five months until Democrats overcame a filibuster last Tuesday with a 70-29 vote.

As I predicted, most of the Republicans who voted against the filibuster also voted against confirmation:

...but 10 GOP senators sided with 60 Democrats to end the filibuster. Nine of those Republicans voted against Hamilton on Thursday, leaving his home-state Republican, Sen. Richard Lugar, as his sole GOP backer. A number of senators frown on delaying tactics against a president’s picks for the bench, even if the senators oppose a particular nominee.

It’s amusing how Hamilton’s opponents focused on just a couple of cases out of the many thousands he oversaw to try to paint him as a radical. He’s clearly not their type of conservative, but he’s nowhere near a radical. I wonder what they’re going to do when Obama nominates a serious liberal.

Conservatives in the Senate have been holding up a vote on the nomination of David Hamilton to the Federal bench. His crime? He ruled in a case in 2005 that the Indiana legislature could not open its sessions with sectarian Christian invocations - that any such invocations must be non-sectarian. He also sentenced a kiddy-porn freak to 100 years in jail (which was upheld on appeal). You’d think that there might be some balance here. But no - upholding the First Amendment and requiring the state legislature to not broadcast itself as Christian is a fatal flaw.

I wrote earlier this year about how the GOP needed to be glad they didn’t invoke the “nuclear option”. This is case in point. I personally disapprove of filibusters in this type situation - I think there should be an up and down vote. And I have no problem with people calling for a vote against this guy (it seems a little over the top to me, but to each their own). But the hypocrisy being displayed is noteworthy.

N.B. I don’t know that much about David Hamilton (i.e. there may be tons of info I don’t have), and don’t really have an opinion on his confirmation. This post isn’t about supporting Hamilton. It’s about the filibuster and the hypocrisy involved.

What is so interesting in this case is that now we have groups who were out fighting for the “nuclear option” and against the Democratic filibuster of Bush’s nominees calling for a filibuster of David Hamilton. For example RedState:

Call your Senator. Tell your Senator to oppose cloture on Judge Hamilton and support a filibuster.

Now, time-warp back about 4 years or so. There was a website called ConfirmThem, run by RedState. Don’t bother clicking that link; the site no longer exists (hmm). Fortunately, we have the wayback machine, so you can go look at the old versions of ConfirmThem (the wayback machine is damned slow to pull up pages, but they’re there).

So it seems that RedState isn’t really in favor of up-and-down votes on judicial nominees, just those they approve of.

Then there’s the Conservative Action Project (chaired by Edwin Meese), which has posted on open letter signed by a bunch of individuals and organizations calling for the filibuster of David Hamilton. 15 of the 24 signers (individuals or organizations) of this open letter also signed onto a letter from from FreedomWorks calling on Sen. Majority Leader Frist to invoke the “nuclear option” and/or one from the National Coalition to End Judicial Filibusters objecting to the deal from the “Gang of 14” that headed off the “nuclear option”.

This is the ultimate in hypocrisy. Either you believe in the up-and-down vote or you don’t. Either you support filibusters or you don’t. The “they did it too” defense can’t work here. They did. And you said it was wrong for them to do it. How can it now be right for you to do it?

There’s also the Judicial Confirmation Network, founded around that same time, to push the anti-filibuster issue. Nowadays they are about judicial non-confirmations (you can use the wayback machine to see their old site) - their agenda is opposing liberal nominees. To their credit, they don’t seem to be calling for filibusters. Some have accused them of that, but I’m not sure they really are. I do find it odd that they still call themselves the “Judicial Confirmation Network” when their entire message is against confirmation (of a range of Obama nominees). You’d think they’d change the name or something.

I’d gladly sign onto a letter, from either side, to end filibusters (certainly in this context; I think I’d sign on to get rid of them entirely). And I’m not saying that any of these people should support Hamilton. They should feel free to oppose him as strenuously as they care to, just like his supporters are pushing their point of view. But he should get his up-and-down vote, and these people should acknowledge their hypocrisy on this issue.

Update: For the record - if the Republicans are successful in these filibusters (which isn’t inconceivable, given that it would only take one or two votes from, say, Lieberman or a Blue Dog or two), and the Democrats start getting on their high horses about “up-and-down votes” and “nuclear option”, etc, I will jump their shit too. You can hold me to that. This is about the hypocrisy (and to a certain extent, my objection to the filibusters in general), not specifically an attack on the GOP (I have enough places to do that )

Update 2: Filibuster failed. Senate voted 70-29 for cloture. The list of 10 Repubicans who voted to end debate is interesting:

The official roll call hasn’t been posted yet, but according to People for the American Way, which has been following the Hamilton nomination closely and pushing for a vote, the following ten Republican Senators voted with all Democrats to support cloture: Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), John Cornyn (Texas), Orrin Hatch (Utah), Richard Lugar (Ind.), John Thune (S.D.), Judd Gregg (N.H.), Olympia Snowe (Maine), Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska).

I would be unsurprised to see several of them to vote against Hamilton in the up-and-down vote - making a statement about filibuster, rather than making a statement about Hamilton.

I’m trying to get a handle on what it all means.  Conservatives say that this is a debacle for Obama and Democrats think it’s just a blip.

As I see it, the New York Congressional race is the one that really mattered and Hoffman—a good conservative—lost it.  That seat has been occupied by at least a RINO for over a century or so.

For the governorships, Virginia went against the party that controls the White House which I thought is a pretty typical trend for them (dwex apparently isn’t alone in that “maintain some balance of power” attitude).  Still, Democrats were sure that Obama’s win in VA was significant and that they had flipped the state “blue”.  I suppose it isn’t so unless the Messiah is on the ballot.

New Jersey’s race was probably the most significant to me, although it’s possible that Corzine was so unpopular that almost anybody could have won.  It cannot be ignored that NJ has been a Democrat-controlled state for a long time, is over-taxed, and went Republican when we’ve been hearing again and again that the GOP is dead in the water.

The impact of this is probably that it is more psychological for the Democrats; who will see the setback in VA and the defeat in NJ as causes for concern.  This might give Obama and his Congress a good “oh, shit” moment but I am not convinced yet that it’s part of a larger trend.  Given the amount of personal attention that Obama gave Corzine’s campaign, it can be called embarrassing. 

Mind you, the Republicans will almost definitely pick up seats in 2010 but I don’t think right now that they’re going to get the massive blowout they need in order to win back the House unless they get a strong, credible message of fiscal responsibility.  Had Hoffman won in NY, I’d be more optimistic about Republican prospects in 2010.

I’m sure you’ve seen numerous news items about President Obama’s plans to do a webcast to school kids on Tuesday (the first day of school in many school systems). I rarely agree with Robert Gibbs (he being generally rather a childish caricature), but this time he’s got it right:

“I think we’ve reached a little bit of the silly season when the president of the United States can’t tell kids in school to study hard and stay in school,” presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. “I think both political parties agree that the dropout rate is something that threatens our long-term economic success.”

Seriously, folks. Get a grip.

Care to recall where George W. Bush was when he was informed about the 9/11 attack? That’s right - at a photo op/presentation to kids at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida.

What, you say? That’s completely different! This is the whole country.

• He’s the President of the whole country, and to say that kids shouldn’t be taught to look up to the President of the country isn’t a very good lesson, now is it?
• The technology to do what he’s planning to do, in an affordable & logistically-reasonable fashion, is only a few years old.
  • Television is neither affordable, nor logistically-reasonable, so this has to be InterWebs
  • I worked with the team that did the Live 8 webcasts in mid-2005, and that was a logistical miracle. YouTube is a 2005-6 innovation, and had no real scale until late 2006.
  Bush could have done this in the last couple of years, but that’s about it.

For the life of me, I cannot fathom how a “work hard, stay in school” message from the President is causing such a furor. To me, it’s simply more evidence that the GOP has no message other than “no”.

N.B. If his message is anything other than “work hard, stay in school”, I’ll gladly condemn him for politicizing things. But to assume that this is some sort of political indoctrination/conspiracy is indeed quite telling.