[ Posted Monday, August 13th, 2012 – 16:46 UTC ]
The announcement of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney's running mate late last Friday sent a shockwave through the political and media world. The snap judgment of what passes for conventional wisdom among the chattering class is that the Ryan pick was bold (as opposed to safe), and that the election will henceforth be all about wonky details from the Ryan budget plan. "A campaign of Big Ideas!" the pundits excitedly gasped. "Just what we've always wanted!"
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[ Posted Friday, August 10th, 2012 – 16:56 UTC ]
With that "fair warning" out of the way, there are two highly amusing talking points coming from the Republican camp this week. If your irony-detector is as acute as mine, you'll appreciate the GOP completely and utterly destroying two of their bedrock positions just to score a few cheap political points. I don't know about you, but I find this sort of thing to be one of the more enjoyable forms of political entertainment around.
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[ Posted Monday, August 6th, 2012 – 16:38 UTC ]
This is the story of two political movements. As with any such movement, both eventually got to the point where they asked themselves the fundamental question of what they were attempting to achieve, and (more importantly) what methods they were going to use to accomplish their goals. This fork in the road can be summed up as: do we work within the existing system, or is the system itself so broken we should work outside the system in order to reform the workings of the system itself. One group chose one path, the other chose to head the other direction.
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[ Posted Friday, July 20th, 2012 – 15:28 UTC ]
To begin, we're not going to have our normal partisan talking points today. We're going to follow the lead set by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and we're just not going to go there today. There will be plenty of time for many vicious partisan talking points in the upcoming weeks, never fear. But today, it just doesn't feel right.
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[ Posted Tuesday, July 17th, 2012 – 16:59 UTC ]
Democrats in the Senate, led by folks such as Sheldon Whitehouse, Al Franken, and Carl Levin (as well as plenty of others), held a late-night vigil last night to force a vote. Today, they held a second vote. Both times, Republicans killed the legislation on party lines.
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[ Posted Thursday, July 12th, 2012 – 16:12 UTC ]
From tomorrow until the end of this year, the House of Representatives has scheduled an underwhelming 41 days of work. This is pathetic. Call it "our taxpayer dollars not at work," if you will.
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[ Posted Wednesday, July 11th, 2012 – 15:39 UTC ]
In fact, I'd go further and advise other special interest groups dive into the same pond and create your own super PAC. How about a "Populist PAC," for instance? Or even an "Occupy PAC" or a "99% PAC"? Perhaps, a super PAC devoted to passing a "corporations aren't persons" amendment? I see nothing wrong with any of these, to tell the truth.
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[ Posted Friday, June 22nd, 2012 – 17:44 UTC ]
For political wonks, this has been a week of waiting. Starting last weekend, we've all been waiting for Mitt Romney to address the issue of Barack Obama's new immigration policy. This waiting has been fruitless, and will continue for some time to come, apparently. Picture a phone ringing endlessly with nobody there to answer it... but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
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[ Posted Friday, June 15th, 2012 – 15:51 UTC ]
Marco Rubio's chances of becoming Mitt Romney's running mate just got a little worse. Granted, he is still a senator from Florida -- the biggest prize among the "battleground" states this November. But Rubio's signature issue was just completely and brilliantly co-opted by President Obama, which tends to significantly lessen Rubio's value to Romney as a vice presidential choice.
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[ Posted Wednesday, June 13th, 2012 – 15:41 UTC ]
Where are the grand messages of the campaigns? Being held in reserve for the post-convention season, perhaps? That's at least an understandable answer, but ultimately not a very satisfying one. Neither Obama nor Romney has yet clearly articulated what their big ideas are for the next four years, and both of them are missing the chance to pound their message into the American psyche for the next two or three months.
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