The District of Columbia is about to take a big step along the road to political relevance. They appear poised to receive a full vote for their "shadow" member of the United States House of Representatives. In a bargain which harkens back to the Missouri Compromise, Utah will also add a House member at the same time. Much has been said about this story in the past week, but everyone seems to be overlooking one good result which will come from the new arrangement: a tie will never again be possible in the Electoral College, at least not without a third-party candidate picking up at least one elector.

I had fun with this concept, during the 2008 presidential race, where I explored exactly what might happen if we wound up with a perfect 269-269 tie (short answer: it would be messy, but Obama still likely would have won). This will no longer be a worry for the wonktastically-inclined. Because the Electoral College will always be an odd number, barring one small and very temporary loophole.

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The "Great Communicator," for our younger readers who were not exposed to him, was what the media eventually decided to call President Ronald Reagan. The title of this article, for our unhipper readers (excuse me, for "the suave-ically-challenged"), is an homage to Frank Zappa's boxed set of albums entitled Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar. You see, while Frank Zappa was a consummate musician as a guitarist and bandleader, his eclectic (to say the least) lyrical style, not to mention his singing ability, turned a lot of people off. So he released a three-album all-instrumental boxed set just for such semi-fans, with disks titled: "Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar," "Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar Some More," and "Return of the Son Of Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar." If Zappa couldn't have fun with the lyrics, he certainly wasn't going to forego having some fun with the album and song names (best track name: "Variations on the Carlos Santana Secret Chord Progression").

But I digress.

President Barack Obama may be distantly related to Dick Cheney, but I am not aware that he is related at all to Ronald Reagan. Nor is he returning zombie-like from the dead, for that matter. But he is indeed the embodiment of The Great Communicator, and the more time goes by, the more people are going to notice and comment on this. The label "Great Communicator II" has already been tossed around (by The Wall Street Journal no less), and will continue to pop up in political debates with more and more frequency, if my guess is correct.

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The Republican Party is at a real fork in the road. It is rare, in politics, to be able to see with absolute clarity such dividing points while they are happening, I should point out. Usually these things are analyzed after the fact, when conclusions can be drawn with certainty. But the GOP is now at such a point, and it faces two choices: absolute purity, or some shade or another of pragmatism ("the road less traveled," as it were, for Republicans these days).

In other words, does the party want the purest of the pure when it comes to ideology, or would it (perhaps) like to win some elections at some point in the future? Because make no mistake about it, that is the choice they now face. There is the Bobby Jindal / Sarah Palin path to the future, and there is the Charlie Crist / Arnold Schwarzenegger path to the future. The choice is theirs.

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Is President Barack Obama going to actually follow through on a vague promise he made on the campaign trail -- to fix the inherent unfairness of Warren Buffett paying a smaller percentage of his income in taxes than his secretary does? Call it the Buffett Conundrum: multimillionaires (and even some multibillionaires) pay less than half the tax rate as the employees who work for them (who make far less in income). But now, Obama has leaked his first budget outline, and it appears he is serious about attempting to fix this tax policy travesty.

This is a welcome surprise, since raising taxes on the rich is one of those things people like to talk about while campaigning... but seldom actually get around to doing. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (and others) drew attention to the Buffett Conundrum during their run for the presidency. But when asked directly what they would do to fix it, they both demurred at suggesting anything which would solve the Buffett Conundrum once and for all. It was, after all, campaign season, and while it's lots of fun to say something like "...those who are able to work the stock market and amass huge fortunes on capital gains are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries. That's not fair." (Obama, during ABC debate 4/16/08), it's less fun to tell people that you're about to raise taxes.

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We'll get to Rick Santelli, his CNBC rant, and the White House's reaction in a bit, I promise. But I've got to start with a rant of my own, over what just happened with California's budget. Feel free to skip to the next section if you'd like, but the issue could have national implications.

Now, I don't particularly care what made it into the budget and what didn't. Actually, I do care, but that's not what motivates me to rant. California's in a tough spot, and tough decisions needed to be made, and it's guaranteed that there's something in the budget for everyone not to like. Let's just stipulate all of that.

What annoys me, however, is how Democrats stood firm -- firm! -- on one tiny issue. They even had to accept an issue that they hated, but they still held rock firm to prevent one idea (from the Republican whose vote passed the budget) from making it in to the final legislation. This issue wouldn't have cost the taxpayers a dime (it probably would have saved them a bit a money, even). It wasn't ideological or right-wing or any of that.

The issue? A new law that would have cut off the pay for the state congress if the budget wasn't delivered on time. Once the deadline rolled around, if there was no budget signed, there would be no more paychecks for legislators. Period. They wouldn't get paid again (and would forfeit pay in the meantime) until the budget was finished.

I don't know about you, but that sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

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The town of Brighton, Michigan has just made it illegal to be seriously annoying. You just can't make this stuff up sometimes. The problem, as with all unconstitutional laws which sound like a good idea at the time, is: Who decides?

Bypassing the extra-snarky commentary from The Reporter in Vacaville, California, we turn instead to a (dare I say it) less annoying article in the Livingston Daily about the new law:

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After we get through this season of passing necessary emergency legislation (in order to yank the American economy back from the cliff Bush led us to), Congress is going to have to turn its attention to the federal budget. They didn't pass one last year, and this year's budget is right around the corner as well. But a little-known rule in the Senate may dramatically change the balance of power between the parties during this process. It's called "reconciliation." And it's a magic bullet to slay Republican opposition to passing a budget with President Obama's priorities and agenda intact.

Because (are you sitting down?) budgetary bills that go through the reconciliation process cannot be filibustered in the Senate.

Which means both Obama and the Democrats in Congress may be able to totally ignore the congressional Republicans of both houses -- since these Republicans will be utterly powerless and utterly irrelevant to the discussion. The ramifications are enormous.

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In the normal course of events, I try to avoid writing about California state politics. Our state government is so outrageous in normal times, that it requires an above-average situation of looniness for me to do so (Larry Flynt running for governor, for instance). Speaking of governors, I can tell you that we Golden Staters have been breathing sighs of relief as even-more-embarassing governors have topped our own Arnold Schwarzenegger as late-night comedians' favorite targets for quite a while now (Sarah Palin, Eliot Spitzer, Rod Blagojevich, etc.).

But I must put aside my reticence at lowering myself to talk state politics to support a local Republican's stance. His name is Abel Maldonado, and he is a state senator from a gerrymandered district fairly close to where I live. And, due to our insanely-high bar of having to pass budgets with two-thirds votes in both legislative houses, he is what could be the key swing vote to pass last year's budget (this budget, by the way, was supposed to be due this past June 15). Our statehouse has lots of Democrats, but to pass a budget they need a few Republican votes in the Assembly and a few in the Senate. They now have the votes in the Assembly, and they need one more vote in the Senate.

Enter Maldonado. He is demanding three things in exchange for his vote. The first is that, in future, if the state legislature doesn't pass the budget on time, they don't get paid. How's that for incentive to, you know, do the job you've been elected to do. The second is to deny legislators a raise when the state is in deficit. And the third is to hold "open" primaries, where anybody can vote in any party's primary without having to be an official member of that party (you get one vote, and you can use it in any primary you wish).

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Happy birthday, Abie baby,
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday, Abie baby,
Happy birthday to you!
-- "Abie Baby" from the musical "Hair"

Since it's the random Monday when we celebrate "Presidents' Day," and since it is the year of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, I'd like to take a moment to see whether any lessons can be learned from Lincoln in the Obama age. Lincoln and Obama seem linked together in our minds already (Obama encourages such, it must be noted), so I'd like to look back to Lincoln's First Inaugural Address and see what it has to say to us today.

Most, when quoting this speech, politely focus on the closing paragraph:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

It is an eloquent and poetic plea for stopping the Civil War before it began. It was, you might say, Lincoln's plea for bipartisanship. Lincoln was reaching across the aisle (which was growing into a chasm) and attempting to sit down and talk this thing out rather than go to war. He was a lawyer, so this was natural.

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About a week ago, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs got off a good line about the progress of the stimulus package: "The sausage race is the beginning of the next inning. So just stay tuned." This was about halfway through the bill's legislative process. Not only did he declare an opening to Baseball Metaphor Season, he also rather ingeniously alluded to Otto von Bismarck's well-known warning that the public should not look too closely at how laws and sausages are made.

That was last week. This week, we are approaching the bottom of the ninth for the stimulus. The game's a foregone conclusion at this point, all the season ticket holders have left, and the beer's been cut off for anyone still in the stands.

OK, maybe it's too early for baseball metaphors. I mean, that was fun to write and all... but even I have no idea what it means.

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