Fine cartoon

Check out this from the  The Salt Lake Tribune :




Sorry for the dearth of blogs. The political situation has been depressed and depressing. More soon (I hope...)

Goodbye Rick Perry. I hope that the media will stop saying that you've never been defeated in an election -- even though you quit this one after being defeated in every primary so far. You really were an icon for the Texas bluster and stupidity that the state so often exhibits.

Who should we root for?

So we want a Republican candidate who will lose to Obama. However, just in case, we want a Republican candidate who, if he wins, won't be too disastrous. Who should we root for (and don't tell me "whom")?

I guess I'd have to go for Huntsman who is possibly not actually beneath contempt, though his conservative economics don't appeal to me. He might be tolerable as President, but he is unlikely to win, given the screwball nature of a lot of Republican voters these days. Huntsman may very well come in second in NH since he isn't Mitt and he seems to have landed a big zinger Sunday morning when he called Romney out over the issue of serving as Obama's ambassador to China.

The silver lining to the never-ending air time given to Republicans this primary season is that they are generating a lot of free negative ads attacking each other. In particular, Gingrich and Santorum have been digging up a lot of facts (already reported by the liberal media) concerning the anti-worker activities of Romney's company Bain Capital.These attacks have been, of course, largely financed by Pacs and SuperPacs for the other Republican candidates. They will come in handy for the Dems in the general election. (The Dems have been victims of this phenomenon in previous elections when they have had long primary battles.)

Another debate

Somehow I watched a large chunk of the Republican debate this evening. As usual, there was little actual content and almost no facts. The Republicans are getting  a lot of free airtime to vent their nonsense -- that Obama is a radical European Socialist, for example, or that there are no "classes" in America.

This last, by the way, was from that frothy candidate Rick Santorum, who then went on to say that he is the candidate of blue collar workers. (They're not a "class" -- maybe just a subset or category, huh?) Of course, Rick Santorum stands for everything that screwed his coal-mining ancestors. The only thing, let me repeat, the only thing that made the lives of mine workers better was unionization. Not the work ethic, not courage, and certainly not religion. It was unionization, something Santorum and every single other Republican of any sort is against.

(And, for the record, about the only political party that fought long and hard in support of the mining unions was CPUSA: the American Communist Party. Whatever its motivation, and whatever the communists did that was horrible in the USSR, they gave unqualified and courageous support to the one thing that helped the working class in this country: unionization.)

The Republicans don't know this, or don't want to know this. And the idiot "moderators" of this debate -- the pretty boy and Diane Sawyer (is she on drugs?) -- swallowed everything without the slightest visible urge to bring any sort of reality to the "debate."

Pitiful. As I've said before: this was the B-team, and there is no A-team. The same statement holds true for the both candidates and moderators.

Why didn't I watch some football or do another crossword? What part of beneath contempt don't I still understand?

Interim appointment

It's good to see that the reality of American politics has finally broken through to our President. He has received negligible support from the Republicans on anything, and they have declared openly that they would not approve any head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless the Bureau, set up through a super-majority (filibuster proof) vote of Congress, is stripped of many of its powers.

Consider, then, the following quote from Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader: “Although the Senate is not in recess, President Obama, in an unprecedented move, has arrogantly circumvented the American people.” On the face of it, this is about as absurd a statement as can be made. When a President is not allowed to appoint a qualified head of a federal agency that was created by majorities of both houses of Congress, who exactly is trying to circumvent the American people?

This is the latest in a long list of Republican gas attacks on the truth, and is further proof that both parties are not equally to blame for the impasses in Congress. Let's hope that, for a change, the media will point this out.

Thanks Mr. President for shoving the eminently reasonable Cordray interim appointment down the throats of the Republicans -- couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of phonies.