More Of The Same

In the movie L.A. Story, there's a television weatherman (played by Steve Martin) who winds up one of his reports with: "Our next weather report will be in four days." The joke, for those unfamiliar with L.A. weather, is that Southern California doesn't have "weather," but rather a "climate." Things don't change much, in other words, therefore one weather report will do just fine for the next four days.

I'm starting to feel a little like Martin's character, I have to admit. Because President Barack Obama seems to have hit a plateau in his approval ratings, which have remained largely unchanged for the past three months now, and not significantly changed since last November. Could it be that we've all just made up our minds about the job the president is doing? Should I just end this with "next Obama Poll Watch column in three months...?"

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We are in the process of changing our advertising here on ChrisWeigant.com. This may lead to bugs in the layout in the immediate future, and may lead to days without ads. I know, I know, it'll be hard to view our site without the wonderfulness of advertising to enhance your viewing pleasure, but fear not, new ads will be appearing soon. This may lead to additional revenue for the site, to the point where it actually pays for itself (the Donate button should still be active through this process... cough, cough...). In any case, wanted to let everyone know that the site may look a little wonky for a while.

In other site news, I have noticed that a bug was fixed automatically, due to the recent code upgrade we performed. The "Search" function seems to be working correctly now, which it never has before. It used to require you to do a site-wide search from the main ChrisWeigant.com page, and would return "Not Found" if you tried searching from anywhere else on the site. It now appears (at least to me -- try it out...) to do a site-wide search no matter what page you do the search from.

I will leave this Program Note open to comments, in case anyone has any other problems or suggestions they'd like to share.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Boy, Louisiana just can't seem to catch a break, can it? If it isn't Mother Nature walloping it with hurricanes, its a man-made disaster of enormous proportions about to bury its bayous and waterways under a blanket of foul-smelling muck.

We seem to be in the early days of what some are already cynically wondering might be "Obama's Katrina." It's looking more and more like a lot of valuable time may have been wasted at the very beginning of the disaster, and whether the Coast Guard or British Petroleum is to blame for this is a very open question. Perhaps nobody's to blame, and perhaps the disaster was unavoidable, given the situation. It's still far too early to draw any of these types of conclusions, which isn't stopping anyone from doing so, of course. As of right now it seems like help is on the way for the region, but may not get there in time, or may be too small to be very effectual. My heart goes out to any Gulf Coast residents who might be affected by this disaster.

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Charlie Crist just made the Florida Senate race a whole lot more interesting, by announcing he will run as an independent candidate, making it a real three-way race. This will make the election more interesting for political reporters, because it's always more fun to cover a three-horse race than a two-horse race (as it were). But the most interesting question to me is what happens if Crist actually wins and goes to the Senate -- with which party would he caucus?

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid just showed Democrats what real leadership (and what bargaining from a position of strength) looks like. After three days of repeated cloture votes to bring Chris Dodd's Wall Street reform bill to the floor of the Senate for debate, it appears the Republicans are ready to blink. The Republicans successfully managed to block the debate, in three successive votes, but they know they're paying a political price for doing so. At this point, the only question is how many of them will jump the aisle and vote with the Democrats in the next vote.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid held a second vote today on whether to begin debate on the Wall Street reform bill put forth by Senator Chris Dodd. As expected, all the Republicans voted against openly debating the bill once again. Also as expected, all the Democrats voted to move forward. Except one.

Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska voted against opening the debate for the second day in a row. He was the only Democrat to do so, unless you count the technicality of Reid himself voting against the bill (which is necessary to bring the bill back up for another vote, which is now scheduled for tomorrow). But Nelson didn't vote against the bill because Senate rules forced him to (as with Reid), Nelson voted against the bill because he wants the bill changed before debate even begins.

You may remember Senator Nelson from the health reform debate. He was the guy who infamously held out his vote in exchange for Nebraska getting a sweetheart deal. Republicans immediately jumped on this backroom deal, and dubbed it the "Cornhusker Kickback." It was eventually removed from the final law, due to Democrats admitting that it was a mistake to give in to Nelson in the first place.

Now he's back again, and fighting for "Cornhusker Kickback II" or perhaps "Son of Cornhusker Kickback." Only, this time, Democrats are not exactly capitulating to his demands. Instead, they're leaving him hanging, to twist in the wind.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid just scored a political victory by losing a vote. That sounds counterintuitive, but it's true. By failing to bring the Wall Street reform bill written by Chris Dodd to the floor for debate, and by losing a cloture vote on the issue to Republican opposition, Reid has shown that the Democrats (and the White House) have learned a few lessons from the health reform debate. Because by refusing to back down, and refusing to "compromise" (read: water the bill down and add loopholes for Wall Street) with Republicans, Reid is showing real strength, and real leadership.

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Democrats had a pretty good week last week. As attention shifts away from unpronounceable volcanoes (more on them in a moment) to the struggle in the Senate over Wall Street reform, the two parties almost seem to have changed their normal methods of playing the political game. The Republicans are all over the map on the issue, and extremely worried about the impression by angry voters that they are doing Wall Street's bidding -- as well they should be. Republicans are, one day, loudly denouncing the reform bill, using their standard Big Lie technique... and then, the next day, saying a deal is very close, and even voting for strong reform in committees. Republicans (some of them, at least) are chickening out of the upcoming partisan battle the Republican leadership seems to want over the issue (more on chickens later on, too). Democrats have, so far, managed both to admirably stay on message and showed an amazing amount of backbone in countering specious Republican arguments. And, so far, polls show the voters are solidly on the Democrats' side on this one, and just not buying what Republicans are telling them. As I said, we seem to have entered BackwardsLand, or something.

What I think is happening in the Republican camp is that they woke up this week to the fact that they are truly painting themselves into a corner. Imagine yourself literally painting a floor, backing your way into a corner while the rest of the room glistens with fresh paint. At some point, you are going to raise your head, look around, and realize what a stupid mistake you've just made. I believe the Republicans just passed that point in time.

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Happy 40th Earth Day, everyone!

Earth Day, as we all know, got going through the efforts of some starry-eyed idealistic hippie-types four decades ago. The "ecology" movement scored some of its biggest victories almost immediately, under (gasp!) President Richard Nixon, with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and passage of some updated federal anti-pollution laws. Since that time, it has become the very mainstream "environmental movement." Today (for instance), most people recycle things without a second thought for where the concept came from.

But rather than stroll down memory lane with an overall history of the movement itself... well, OK, upon reflection... here is the original 1970s "ecology" flag, just for sentiment's sake:

...and just because it's a pretty cool looking flag, don't you think? Ahem.

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Ever wondered where the Tea Partiers actually live? The PBS NewsHour website has now helpfully mapped it out as part of their "Patchwork Nation" project (in partnership with the Christian Science Monitor), for anyone interested to see. This map isn't exactly surprising, as it shows Tea Partiers are more concentrated in traditional Republican areas. But it is interesting to see such a level of detail, measured as concentration of Tea Party members for every county across America.

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