Your generous
donations help keep
this site running.
Visa/MC/PayPal accepted.
We have reached the eye of the hurricane. Half the storm is over. The Republican Party held their national nominating convention all week, and the Democrats are getting ready to hold theirs next week. So we enter these few days of calm between the howling winds, and to mark the occasion we're going with a unique format here today.
Before I read what the rest of the online world took away from the first night of the Republican National Convention, I thought I would share my own impressions. These are hastily jotted down, after watching roughly two and a half hours of speakers and pundits (some speakers I missed because I was either flipping through the channels, some of which didn't carry every speech).
Fast-forward to today, and we have a timeline: Hurricane Katrina. Three years later, Hurricane Gustav interrupts Republican National Convention. Four years later, Isaac threatens the first days of the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Draw your own conclusions.
Anyway, we got the following column submission from "michty6" a while back, but didn't even have time to do the formatting required until now. Sorry for the delay! When submitted, the article was preceded by a cartoon which I couldn't use for copyright reasons -- but, thankfully, we had the perfect C.W. Cunningham cartoon to use instead.
Moving right along, normally our Friday columns open with a bit of lighthearted news roundup, which is where I'd point out things like what Donald Trump is up to (always good for a laugh), and then move on to mutant butterflies in Japan due to radioactivity from their power plant disaster, which would end with a joke about Mothra.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.