1. Playing With the Two Immutable Laws of Washington
2. An Easy Way to Stop Filibuster Reform
3. Al Qaeda’s Favorite Member of Congress Opens His Mouth
4. Breast Milk and the TSA
5. I don’t care (right now) about WHO the next President is; I care about WHAT the next President is.
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1. Playing With the Two Immutable Laws of Washington
There are two immutable laws of Washington, D.C. To understand the tax compromise in the Senate, you must know the laws.
Politicians in leadership believe that if they make both the left and right angry they must have done something right; and,
If Democrats and Republicans come together in a compromise — no matter how bad that compromise may be — the media will herald the compromise and inevitably use the word “tone” in discussing it.
Then there is a corollary to the two rules: people who want a seat at the table with the politicians and media will turn into sycophants and tell you how delicious the compromise tastes.
Understanding those two immutable rules and the corollary tell you all you’ll need to understand about how the tax compromise will be played. Let’s review what the compromise is.
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2. An Easy Way to Stop Filibuster Reform
Liberal Democrats are going to take a run at the Filibuster in January. The have adopted idea that the Senate is not a continuing body and that the rules can be changed with a simple majority of Senators voting in a new Congress, in January, to adopt new rules. This interpretation of the Senate rules ignores the clear rules of the Senate and long tradition of rules being changed with only a 2/3rds vote of Senators.
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3. Al Qaeda’s Favorite Member of Congress Opens His Mouth
To be fair, when Ron Paul said that it was completely awesome that Julian Assange was spreading our classified secrets across the internet for the entire world to see, he probably couldn’t have foreseen that the information would contain this . . .
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4. Breast Milk and the TSA
Now we have yet another TSA outrage. Something tells me the media would be much more worked up by this if George Bush were still President. Oddly enough, in an era when the press is falling all over itself to highlight bipartisanship, here is an issue uniting the left and right.
In this edition of TSA Outrage, we have a mother who didn’t want her breast milk going through the x-ray machine, which held her up 30 minutes. On her next trip through the airport, the same TSA agents detained her for more than an hour even after she gave them a copy of the TSA guidelines exempting breast milk from the x-ray machine.
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5. I don’t care (right now) about WHO the next President is; I care about WHAT the next President is.
Harold Stassen ran for President every quadrennial between 1948 and 2000. Why? What would cause a man to do such a thing?
Quite probably because he’d tasted the sweet essence of victorious electoral power, first as a county prosecutor, and then as Governor of Minnesota. He thus served from 1940 to 1943. He played the role of a minor king-maker at the 1940 GOP convention, and this might have sparked his Quixotic, life-long quest.
So, for every Presidential election until 2004, Harold Stassen’s name was on ballot. Of course, in the meantime, he managed to run for various other offices, including Governor of Pennsylvania (twice), US representative, senate, mayor, and quite probably drain commissioner, for all I know. He lost every contest after 1940. But, rather like the Energizer Bunny, Harold kept on running. And running. Stassen became the butt of jokes.
Every seeker of the Presidency has a chord or two of Harold Stassen sluicing through them. What makes them run? It certainly isn’t a cheap hobby; in some states, the filing fees alone run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Abraham Lincoln ran when he saw an opening in the national dialog, and he had secured a significant nest-egg as a successful corporate lawyer. Harry Truman ran because he had nothing much else to do. But what about a Mike Huckabee, or a Tim Pawlenty (-who, in a nod to Harold Stassen, is Governor of Minnesota)?
And the most important question: How do these private yearnings equate to public leadership?
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