Thursday, May 15, 2008

Dead canaries

Republicans are down 0-3 in special elections this cycle and that bodes ill for their chances in November. All three were in once heavily Republican districts starting with former Speaker Dennis Hastert’s seat in Illinois. Last week they lost a seat in a heavily Republican district in Louisiana and this week it was a heavily Republican district in Mississippi that went from Red to Blue.

Republicans are understandably worried now.

Representative Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia and former leader of his party’s Congressional campaign committee, issued a dire warning that the Republican Party had been severely damaged, in no small part because of its identification with President Bush. Mr. Davis said that, unless Republican candidates changed course, they could lose 20 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate.
“They are canaries in the coal mine, warning of far greater losses in the fall, if steps are not taken to remedy the current climate,” Mr. Davis said in a memorandum. “The political atmosphere facing House Republicans this November is the worst since Watergate and is far more toxic than it was in 2006.”

If they can’t win seats in solidly conservatives districts in Louisiana and Mississippi, where can they win? And what makes them think they will have a prayer of a chance of winning back the White House after the most unpopular administration in the nation’s history finally vacates the premises early next year?
It is no longer a question of whether or not Democrats will win, it’s a question of how big their win will be. How many House and Senate seats will they take in the coming rout? Democrats are expected to pick up Senate seats in Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota and New Hampshire. But will Senate seats previously considered safe in Texas, North Carolina and Alaska also get swept up in a Democratic landslide?

If these special election outliers are any indication, I’d say we will have a lot more dead Republican canaries littering the floor pretty soon. That’s because the political atmosphere generated by the Bush administration is proving to be highly toxic to GOP candidates right now.

Give ‘em hell, Joe!

Sen. Joe Biden calls B.S. on President Bush’s latest B.S.





Fortunately, no one really cares what Bush has to say anymore.

All those mountains look alike

This is kind of silly, but in the world of politics it is a hugely embarrassing screwup and will probably be enough to sink Schaffer’s slim hopes of winning the open Senate seat in Colorado.

a television ad for the Republican Bob Schaffer's campaign for U.S. Senate mistakenly switched Mount McKinley in Alaska for Pikes Peak in Colorado...

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Why vote for Barack Obama? Part II



Great analysis. Here are some of my responses and reactions:



Admittedly, it is all just semantics.



I look forward to further debate. Thanks, Steve!

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Why vote for Barack Obama?

Oh boy! I’ve been challenged to defend my support for Barack Obama by a youthful blogger named Steve Kroll living way up in the northern hinterlands of Milwaukee.
Steve asks that I give an answer that has nothing to do with John McCain, but rather why I think Obama is qualified and what particular stances I agree with him on.
Sounds like fun!
But one of the challenges will be trying to craft an answer that can bridge the generation gap between us. My youthful challenger lists his age on his blog as 20. My goodness! That means he wasn’t old enough to vote in the last presidential election. He was only about 12 during the 2000 election fiasco that placed popular vote loser George W. Bush in the White House. And, he wasn’t even born when Ronald Reagan was in office!
Man, I feel old!
When I was Steve’s age, I was casting my first vote for Ronald Reagan. I thought people who were planning to vote for Walter Mondale were nuts. So I know something about how opinions can change over time. And I think it is a positive sign that Steve is reaching out to liberal bloggers such as myself trying to answer a question that must be weighing heavily on his mind. How can anyone justify voting for Barack Obama?
Well, I will have to sleep on that one and try and answer it in the morning.

Manu highlight reel

Monday, May 12, 2008

Joe Lieberman - agent/saboteur?

While looking at this video clip of Joe Lieberman advocating military strikes on Iran it suddenly occurred to me how utterly creepy he really is.
And then I began to wonder if we could have Lieberman all wrong. Maybe his decision to support the John McCain camp so aggressively was more strategic than we realize. Could he be acting like a top-secret agent/saboteur, helping to pull the McCain campaign down from the inside?

What other campaign would even consider having Joe Lieberman’s support an asset? Why does McCain want to be represented by someone who talks constantly about waging wars and starting new ones? Someone who makes a fool out of himself by taking transparently ridiculous pot shots at Obama such as the “He’s endorsed by Hamas!” canard?

And didn’t it just help to call attention to McCain’s recent verbal gaffes everytime Lieberman would interrupt him in mid-speech to correct him? Hmmmmm. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Mountain morons

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads

It looks like Hillary Clinton will win big in West Virginia tomorrow and I could really care less.
I can’t really fathom why Democrats in West Virginia would still insist on voting against Barack Obama at this stage after it is clear he will be the party’s nominee in November. But it appears they will do just that and then some.
I’m still ticked at West Virginia over the 2000 presidential election when the state, which had been solidly Democratic for so long, suddenly went Republican for the first time. There were a lot of factors that could have shifted the results of the 2000 election that brought us the total disaster that is the George W. Bush presidency. The five partisan Republicans on the Supreme Court could have allowed all the votes to be counted in Florida; Ralph Nader could have abandoned his legacy-destroying campaign to take away Democratic voters and help elect Republicans; the voters in Tennessee could have supported their home-state hero rather than shooting themselves in the foot....
And, of course, West Virginia could have stayed in the Democratic column.
Any of those events would have helped avoid the eight-year debacle that has greatly damaged this country and threatens our status as the world’s dominant superpower.
But here we are eight years later buried up to our noses in debt thanks to Bush’s fically irresponsible stupidity; stuck in a Middle Eastern hellhole that is killing American troops and sucking up hundreds of billions of U.S. taxdollars every year; paying $4 a gallon for gasoline; and suffering through yet another Bush recession after already plodding through one of the most listless and stagnant economic periods in our nation’s history.
And what do the Democrats in West Virginia want to do? They want to try and drag down the Democratic ticket yet again and help elect Bush-clone John McCain to a third Bush term in office.
Fortunately, it doesn’t matter at this point what the morons in West Virginia do. I don’t care.
On Tuesday night I will be watching the Spurs-Hornets game, not pointless election returns from West Virginia.