Copyright © 2009 Frank Lynch.
Copyright © 2009 Frank Lynch.
Me: Frank Lynch Home These are my mundane daily ramblings.
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No "Joe Liebermans in Waiting" for the GOP. There's a special election for the House of Representatives being held on Tuesday in upstate New York, and if you haven't heard, a third party candidate was endorsed by Sarah Palin and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty -- where you might normally see these Republicans endorsing a Republican instead. But the concept was that the GOP candidate wasn't conservative enough for their tastes, even though she was the choice of local GOP leaders. Well, that GOP candidate pulled out of the race today, citing her poor polling. And the national offices, which never liked the local GOP candidate (see correction below), have now openly endorsed the third party candidate. Now, it's worth noting that the RNC has basically taken the position the original GOP candidate wasn't welcome in the tent, and should have been the third party candidate. Never mind that the Conservative Party candidate didn't know the local issues any more than he knows Persian. It didn't matter: he was more conservative than the local choice, and that was all that mattered. There's something to be said for this approach: no one wants a snake in the grass to rise through the ranks and be an unreliable vote. I get that, I do. But I think this pursuit of a monolithic GOP is a bit over the top, seeing as how they've had their heads handed to them in the 2006 and 2008 elections. There's a message for them that they're just not listening to. And while the Conservative Party candidate's fortunes were surely boosted by Palin and Pawlenty - - leading to the GOP candidate's withdrawal - - had these party luminaries gotten behind the GOP candidate, she would surely have been in better stead. Maybe now the national party will want to purge the local leaders who selected someone the national party saw as a non-starter. Now, let's be clear: it would be hypocritical of the national GOP, Sarah Palin, and Tim Pawlenty, having undermined the local GOP candidate in the pursuit of homogeneousness, to complain that Democrats who squawk about Joe Lieberman are wrong to do so. And it's not hypocritical vice versa. Why? Because Lieberman is not a Democrat, and he holds his seniority in committees by the good graces of the Democrats. It is a gift, freely given, which can be freely taken away. Secondly, Lieberman has threatened not just to vote against Democratic-sponsored health care reform, he's threatened to vote against the Democratic Caucus in a procedural vote, to not let the actual vote on the reform even come to the floor. So it's different. And Democrats can squawk about Lieberman, and they can point to the brouhaha in upstate NY at the same time as they do so, and not be hypcritical. CORRECTION: The RNC supported the GOP candidate. It was conservatives in the national party which undermined her. UPDATE: Washington Monthly's Steve Benen has a pretty damning RNC quote about the conservative candidate from the days when the GOP had an actual candidate: "the local Republican county chairs had the foresight to see that Doug Hoffman lacked the integrity and qualities needed to be elected to anything -- let alone Congress." How quickly they switch to love hug mode. 
I hated my House of Cards. That's the feeling you get from Bernard Madoff's interviews: the stress of not being caught by inept investigators made him sweat. Seriously, so much that he wished he'd been caught years before and couldn't bring himself to show up to the Feds and spread his junk hands on the table. I want to curse the ineptitude, but I also want to ask why he didn't end the misery himself and crash the house. He knows where the regulators are. Seriously. Young happens. Even for the Trashcans, in glorious "recorded in a shoe box" sound. You know I've been touting these guys for years, so please pardon me. Age happens (the electric guitarist on the left, Paul Livingston, gave way to male pattern baldness and now shaves his head; the guitarist with the acoustic guitar, John Douglas, looks remarkably the same, although a little more timid here, and then of course the singer's hair cut [Frank Reader]). But the song remains the same, and they're pretty faithful to it if you're lucky enough to hear them sing it now, 20 years later. The lyrics are of youthful frustration. And while frustration still exists as we age, it's a different source. When John Sebastian sings "and now, a quarter of my life is almost past," obviously there's an actor's job involved too. Worth noting in the song here, Frank Reader also sings about the "first quarter of life." Here's what they looked like in 2005. For the polling wonks among you... Nate Silver took a look at the current poll results in the NJ Gubernatorial race, and grouped them by interviewing method: live interviewer versus machine ("Interactive Voice Response," or IVR for short). Overall, in those where the poll is conducted by a live interviewer, the Democrat leads; in those conducted through IVR, the Republican leads, and he says the difference surpasses 95% statistical significance. Silver suggests a number of hypotheses for the result, among them that participation can be higher with a live interviewer (increasing the representativeness), lending more credibility to the live-interviewer-based polls. But on the other hand, if respondents feel they're "expected" to answer one way or another, I would think them more likely to bias their answers in that direction with a live interviewer than with a machine. That's when respondents think there's a reason for them to please the interviewer. This effect was hypothesized in a Virginia Gubernatorial race years ago, when Douglas Wilder, an African-American, didn't do as well in the anonymity of the voting booth as he did in pre-election polling. I'm not sure that a factor like this is in play here. I guess we're going to have to wait till Tuesday on this. DISCLOSURE: I work at Abt SRBI, and my company does political polling. Nonpartisan polling, for clients like Pew, Annenberg, Time, etc. My opinions don't represent the company's, and my work isn't in polling. So, there.
In one ear and out the other? Yesterday, former Senator Edward Brooke (R-MA) was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, during special ceremonies attended by Obama and leaders of both parties in the Senate and the House. Brooke is distinctive for a number of reason; he was not only the first African-American elected to the Senate (1966), he is also the last African-American Senator from the GOP. Hopefully that will change one day, but these days the chances look slim in spite of the efforts of Alan Keyes. (More on Brooke here.) Anyway, Brooke chided some of the attendees for non-partisanship:
In other words, the 2008 McCain-Palin slogan "Country First," only with action behind it. United we stand; Brooke sees it, but the GOP doesn't.
448,077 Ned Lamont voters can't be wrong. And 563,725 Joe Lieberman voters can be. I'd sure love to know whether or not Lieberman really promised to vote with the Democratic caucus on procedural votes. Promise or no, this is a stab in the back for being allowed to retain his seniority and committee chair. I very much doubt that this was how he campaigned in '06: send me Washington so I can act like a Republican. A curse upon you, Joe. I hope you are shunned everywhere you go. You had better have other career plans come 2012. America wants fake conservatives. The latest results from Gallup continue to show that more Americans self-identify as conservatives than either moderates or liberals. And yet, we have poll results on issues such as the public option which show majority support. If you listen to the leading Republicans in Congress, you're led to believe that the public option is a non-starter. John Boehner, for instance, claimed he'd never met anyone who was in favor of the public option. And despite Obama's recent, lower approval ratings, more Americans continue to feel that the country is on the right track now than before he and the new Congress had arrived. This of course, isn't exactly an indicator that the "I want my country back" forces are dominant. All of this is of course addressed nicely in the opening pages of Eric Alterman's Why We're Liberals. The word "liberal" has been so demonized by the Right and by media that self-identification no longer works as a measure. So when Tim Pawlenty complains about politicians who get elected as Republicans and vote as Democrats, he's misdiagnosing the disease: the Republican party is appealing to the wrong sorts of people if it thinks that a closer adherence to conservative ideals is going to help it. No, rather, it needs to become more moderate. It needs Republicans who run as moderates and vote as moderates.
Because you have to do something while waiting for baseball. Ian Hunter... It's still a mighty way long down rock'n'roll... I still remember the episode of ABC's "In Concert" where I first heard Mott. "All the Way to Memphis," and that "H"-shaped guitar. Still love his career to this day.
We Were Promised Jetpacks. Or flapjacks. Or sixpacks. Okay, humpbacks. "As the conflict reaches it's climax." Uh huh. Something to be said for reticence? No, I'm not talking about a 1970's prog-rock band, I'm talking about the quality which NPR's Ken Rudin was sorely lacking in when he compared the WH pushback on Fox news to the illegal tactics deployed by Richard Nixon. Fortunately he now has remorse. Unfortunately, his stupidity is on the record, free for any wingnut to quote without adding his retraction. It's Friday. Who couldn't use a little chuckle? From one of my all-time favorite ad campaigns, in a pre-Verizon world: When these originally aired, the television didn't screen didn't say "Civil Engineers" up front like it does on YouTube, so part of the fun -- unforuately ruined here, with the punchline telegraphed in advance -- was in guessing what the Yellow Pages category was going to turn out to be. At the end, You Tube provides a link to a couple other executions, but there's another I haven't found yet. Guy in a white waiter's apron is unable to field questions like "what are the specials?" and "where are the rest rooms?" Best the sap could do was an increasingly frustrated "I don't know!" The NYNEX yellow pages category they showed at the end was "Dumb Waiters."
Cheney's selective memory. If Cheney were a Catholic, and I were his priest, I would deny him the Eucharist. Because if he thinks he's atoned for his sins, or worked to improve himself, he's got another think coming. Last night he gave a speech indicting Obama on practically everything he could, and so much of it was unfair and irresponsible, you'd think Cheney was living on a different planet during the Bush years. He invoked the history of the Bus administration on terror for the seven years after 9/11, ignoring the total screw up which occurred on their watch, and in response to the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief which warned that Osama Bin Laden was intent n stroking the US. Ah, but that doesn't count, Cheney wants a "get out of jail free" card. As Rachel Maddow pointed out tonight, he also had the strange idea that Obama's fulfillment of the Bush-Cheney negotiated withdrawal from Iraq is all Obama's fault. Somehow. And the loser had the nerve to point fingers at Obama for being careful about Afghanistan when it was the Bush-Cheney administration which dropped the ball. Fortunately, Gibbs had a retort for that. Cheney can rot in hell: he's done enough damage to this country as it is.
Did any of the conservative blogs cover this? Not just the notice given the Alpha Troop, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, but also the recognition for Vietnam Vets in general? Wait, don't tell me, they did cover it, only it was from the perspective that it took Obama too long. Or they threw in a few "yeah buts" because he didn't visit any bases when he was in New Orleans. Yeah, that's the ticket. Perfesser?
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