The Rand Paul Civil Rights Act Meltdown

If anyone missed all of this yesterday, here's a pretty good summary:

The Rand Paul Revolution Will Not Be Televised, or Possess Basic Manners

Stay classy, Rand.

Dancing the Stimulus Shuffle

The GOP's response to the stimulus bill has been something to behold. It's gone roughly something like this:

1) Oppose the bill en masse.
2) Deny that government spending can ever, ever create a job. Only rugged capitalists can do such a thing.
3) Claim that the stimulus has made the economy worse.
4) Continue this stance in public even when it is obviously true, and even acknowledged among right of center economists, that the bill has staved off a depression and saved lots of jobs.
5) Do everything in your power to get ahold of as many stimulus funds as possible for your constituency because, you know, that stuff creates jobs.
6) Take credit for 5 at local level.
7) Continue to engage in steps 2-4 at national level.
8) Repeat as necessary

Fiscal Conservatism for Thee

This article about "fiscally conservative" Republicans all butthurt because their own pet projects are being singled out for cuts is just too much. My personal fave is our very own Mitch McConnell whining about cuts to coal subsidies, with his spokesman claiming that "an end to subsidies is the equivalent of tax increases on the coal industry." Smell the free market freedomness!

Baltimore Smackdown

Watching Obama run circles around the GOP at their Baltimore retreat yesterday was kind of nice. They would basically trot out some hackneyed talking points, look like petulant children, and then he would proceed to pick apart their question. I think this link works if you haven't seen it yet. Kinda makes you feel good to have voted for the guy rather than the guys questioning him.

On a more downbeat note, Obama talked about appropriating money for COBRA. Are Duke and Snake Eyes aware of this? Is he in league with Destro?

So...

...can we pretty much acknowledge now that Justice Alito is pretty much just a political hack? Is it that difficult to control yourself during a speech? Was he unaware that there would be cameras present?

Post-Election Tumult in Sri Lanka

Well, the Sri Lankan vote finally happened yesterday, and it looks like the incumbent won, avoiding a runoff. However, there are allegations of rigging by the opposition candidate, General Fonseka (who, for some reason, wasn't allowed to vote yesterday). Things are going downhill fast:

Soldiers surrounded the Colombo hotel where Sri Lanka's opposition leader was staying Wednesday, hours after President Mahinda Rajapaksa was declared the winner of the country's first peacetime election in more than two decades.

Rajapaksa's opponent, Gen. Sarath Fonseka, said he did not accept the results of the election and is contesting the result.

There was "obvious rigging," Fonseka said from his hotel.

Officials results of the hard-fought race were not due until Wednesday afternoon, but Rajapaksa was said to have garnered more than 50 percent of the vote needed to avoid a runoff.

The government said the presence of the soldiers and commandos, some of whom had their faces covered, outside the Cinnamon Lakeside Hotel was a precaution.

They did not intend to take Fonseka into custody, but were looking for army deserters who were holed up inside, the government said.

Thought for the Day

Can Mitch McConnell retire into obscurity now, since his lifelong goal (and what a noble one at that!) of corporations being able to buy elections finally seems to have come to fruition?

QOTD

Sorry blogging has been so light from my end--I'm out of town for the rest of the week.

Today's QOTD comes from Dave Brockington over at LGM:

The U.S. Senate sucks. As an institution...I tend to treat the U.S. Senate in a breath normally reserved for the House of Lords. It's bad enough in terms of representation that the institution is highly skewed, and the median voter as represented in the Senate is considerably to the right of the median voter as represented in the House (or in the general population).

However, to add the tacit requirement of a super majority on top of this already skewed pattern of representation is to add insult to (small d) democratic injury.

Teabaggers Triumphant

Ladies and gentlemen, the guy who is replacing Teddy Kennedy in the United States Senate.

I know that Martha Coakley was a terrible candidate, but I was really annoyed by the fact that the most frequent thing brought up about her in the media was the Curt Schilling anecdote. We have elevated the "likeability" and "having a beer with the candidate" factor to absurd proportions in recent elections (see Bush, George W) and, as a result, we are getting absurd electoral contests.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I could give a damn less how much I relate to Candidate X or whether she bails hay or drives a pickup truck or castrates cattle or whatever. I'll vote for a candidate who's a complete prick if they'll make a concerted effort to produce sound public policy (see, for a poor example, Scott Brown's attempt to allow hospital employees to deny emergency contraception). So, congrats Mass. We probably won't get climate legislation or financial regulatory reform because you liked that naked guy's truck. Who knows about health care (don't get me started on Brown's absurd position on this).

I'm consoling myself with this video tonight, but now even it kind of makes me sad since the Chargers are out =/

Track of the Day

One of my favorite politically-themed songs of all time, and topical, given the elections in Chile (wherein a new president was just elected who seems uncomfortably close to the old Pinochet apparatus)!

QOTD

From Weber's Politics as a Vocation. Reading this, I could not help but think of Joe Lieberman:

Vanity is a very widespread quality and perhaps nobody is entirely free from it. In academic and scholarly circles, vanity is a sort of occupational disease, but precisely with the scholar, vanity--however disagreeably it may express itself--is relatively harmless...With the politician the case is quite different. He works with the striving for power as an unavoidable means. Therefore, 'power instinct,' as is usually said, belongs indeed to his normal qualities. The sin against the lofty spirit of his vocation, however, begins where this striving for power ceases to be objective and becomes purely personal self-intoxication, instead of exclusively entering the service of 'the cause.' For ultimately there are only two kinds of deadly sins in the field of politics: lack of objectivity and--often but not always identical with it--irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit one or both of these sins. This is more truly the case as the demagogue is compelled to count upon 'effect.' He therefore is constantly in danger of becoming an actor as well as taking lightly the responsibility for the outcome of his actions and of being concerned merely with the 'impression' he makes. His lack of objectivity tempts him to strive for the glamorous semblance of power rather than for actual power. His irresponsibility, however, suggests that he enjoy power merely for power's sake without a substantive purpose. Although, or rather just because, power is the unavoidable means, and striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the parvenu-like braggart with power, and the vain self-reflection in the feeling of power, and in general every worship of power per se. The mere 'power politician' may get strong effects, but actually his work leads nowhere and is senseless. (Among us, too, an ardently promoted cult seeks to glorify him.) In this, the critics of 'power politics' are absolutely right. From the sudden inner collapse of typical representatives of this mentality, we can see what inner weakness and impotence hides behind this boastful but entirely empty gesture. It is a product of a shoddy and superficially blase attitude towards the meaning of human conduct; and it has no relation whatsoever to the knowledge of tragedy with which all action, but especially political action, is truly interwoven.

Election Day is Here!

Polls are opening in two pretty momentous presidential elections in Chile and Ukraine today. Both of these elections have the potential of significantly affecting the course of each of those two states, so they're definitely worth paying some attention to.

In Chile, it looks like there's a decent chance that the right may come to power for the first time since the days of Pinochet, under the leadership of billionaire Sebastian Pinera. It's unclear to me why the center-left Concertacion coalition would be voted out, given the high level of success they have enjoyed under its control and the high popularity of the departing President Bachelet, other than the fact that they simply ran a lackluster candidate in former President Eduardo Frei. Hopefully, this won't be similar to the 2000 US election, where a pretty successful governing center-left party is voted out for no particular reason by a non-threatening right candidate who proceeds to steer the country straight off a cliff.

In Ukraine, the candidate accused of chicanery by the pro-Western Orange Revolution in 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, seems poised for a victory over the now-much-less-heralded former heroine of that revolution (and hottest world leader), Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Current President and Orange Revolution figurehead Viktor Yushchenko had a very lackluster showing in the first round of votes and didn't even make it into the runoff. Most of the analysis I've read on this election suggests that the predictions of a drastic pro-Russia shift in Ukrainian foreign policy following a Yanukovych victory are probably overblown. For instance, one of the first things that he is expected to do is re-negotiate energy deals with the Kremlin that are seen as unfavorable to Ukraine. At the same time, Tymoshenko has recently made overtures to Russia on some issues.

How's that anti-Avatar campaign going?

I was vaguely aware that there was a rightwing push against James Cameron's Avatar for its leftish political viewpoint, but this article describes it in more detail. It seems like pretty much every time the far right really gets its knickers in a twist over some movie it turns out to be an overwhelming success. Not so much with the movies that the right embraces.

For what it's worth, I haven't even seen Avatar yet, and I can't really get that excited about it. I would, I think, enjoy seeing it in IMAX, but we don't have one of those theaters here. I did watch Up in the Air and The Road recently. I would recommend the former, but not the latter. The Road was very well made and well acted, but I just can't bring myself to recommend it to anyone because of how soul-crushingly depressing it is. For some reason, I found it to be even more bleak than the novel.

Cognitive Dissonance

While I'm almost certain she probably has no clue what the term means, Palin certainly exemplified the term in her FOX debut, excoriating the authors of Game Change for "making up" stuff about her but turning right around and lambasting Harry Reid for his remarks, as documented by the authors of Game Change.

Health Care Reform Opposition From the Left

Since the passage of the Senate health care bill, there has been quite a bit of unrest on the left over its very modest, gradualist provisions, with some even preferring to completely scuttle the bill. I tend to disagree with this line of thinking, and thought it was mainly confined to a few ardent leftwingers.

A new poll from CBS (via pollingreport), though, suggests that quite a bit of the opposition to health care reform may now be coming from the left. Here are the specific results which lead me toward this conclusion:

1) Support for the Republican approach to HCR is even lower than that of the Democrats.

2) 35% of respondents say that the reform "doesn't go far enough" in terms of expanding access to coverage to only 32% who say it "goes too far" and 22% who say it's "about right" (you could put me in the 35%).

3) A full 43% say that the cost containment measures "don't go far enough," with only 27% saying that they "go too far" and 18% saying that they are "about right." There's nothing inherently leftwing about health care cost containment, but within the context of this particular debate, the GOP/rightwing position has generally been against "bending the curve" and pro-fearmongering about death panels and other deterioration in the quality of care coming in the wake of reform.

The Most Interesting Election in the World, 2010

While Barefoot and Progressive may well be right that the 2010 Kentucky Senate race is the most entertaining election in the United States this year, the most interesting election from an international standpoint may be this year's presidential election in Sri Lanka.

This election will be historic for a number of reasons. First, it will be the first presidential election since the end of the civil war and the defeat of the Tamil Tigers last May. The Tigers' insurgency had raged for over 25 years and was finally brought to a close by a brutal government offensive in 2009. Many Tamils are still languishing in IDP camps and this election will have a major impact on the course of national ethnic reconciliation going forward.

Second, the personalities involved are incredibly large. The election is going to pit incumbent President Mahinda Rajapaksa, the president who presided over the defeat of the Tigers, against Sarath Fonseka, the general who led the operations that defeated the Tigers and, according to India's Defense Minister, the "best army commander in the world."

The two Sri Lankan heavyweights have, predictably, begun to snipe at each other over who really deserves credit for the victory. General Fonseka has also criticized Rajapaksa's foot dragging on national reconciliation following the Tigers' defeat. This has created some odd political dynamics. For his part, President Rajapaksa has remained aligned with relatively anti-Tamil Sinhalese nationalist political elements. This has led Fonseka to align himself with Tamil and pro-Tamil political elements in the country. So you have the general who led the operation that was, by almost all accounts, a humanitarian disaster for Tamils living in Tiger-controlled areas, "championing" the Tamil cause. Needless to say, many Tamils are wary of Fonseka's newfound concern over their plight.

However, the Tamils could play an important role in the outcome of this election. They make up around 15% of the population in Sri Lanka. In the past, though, the Tigers encouraged them to boycott elections. The marginalized minority group may actually have the opportunity to play kingmaker in this election.

Track of the Day: Dodd & Dorgan

Anyway, the conventional wisdom on these two retirements seems is that they constitute sort of a mixed bag for Dem 2010 prospects: Dorgan is pretty much dooming that seat to a Republican pickup but Dodd's retirement actually makes that seat more likely to stay blue.

Kentucky Proud

Ya know, I kind of respect Jim Bunning for just half-assing (at best) what little remains of his...ahem...illustrious U.S. Senate career. He obviously could not give two shits about his job at this point, and I can't say I really blame him. We don't like him and he doesn't like us. Let's just try to remember him for his no-hitters.

Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., was the only senator to miss the historic Christmas Eve vote on the health care overhaul bill.

"The senator had family commitments” and was at home in Kentucky, Bunning spokesman Mike Reynard said in e-mails.

The missed vote was one of 21 this month — nearly half of all Senate floor votes — that the retiring senator skipped.

At least we'll be getting a new senator before too long. They couldn't be much worse than Bunning, right? Right? Oh crap, what's that you say? One of the major candidates is named after Ayn Rand? Oh dear...

Who Will Be the Next Dumb Senator to Become Indignant Over Some Arbitrarily Selected Provision of the Health Care Bill?

So they buy off Ben Nelson (who, according to some sources, "poops through his mouth") with federal Medicaid help for Nebraska...I'm seriously thinking the Democratic leadership basically needs to take a "we don't negotiate with legislative hostage-takers" line going forward before every Blue Dog/Conservadem demands several pounds of flesh at every step in the legislative process.