Could this all be “a giant mind-frak”? Smitty entertains the possibility:

Say that BHO, surveying the wreckage of the steaming pile of manure delivered to his desk, decrees that it is too contentious, too perilous, and that Reid and Pelosi have done what they could, but that the legislation simply wasn’t up to signing standards.

Well, he’d be right.

Then again, true steaming piles tend to be fairly contiguous and easily identifiable, which would seem to argue against the term “wreckage.”

Given that some are already calling for impeachment, I’d say this is a non-zero possibility.

I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that vote.

Michael P. DeCicco, a resident of Severn, Maryland, writes to the Baltimore Sun:

I’m not part of the black helicopter crowd. I don’t think the census will be used to track my movements or steal my DNA. Still, I don’t see any advantage in filling out the form and returning it.

My county knows who and where I am, and I trust that locally my family is accounted for. I religiously pay my taxes, so someone somewhere knows I exist.

I don’t want the federal government spending any more money on my behalf. I don’t want them to spend money on my census form, I don’t want them to pay people to come to my house, I don’t want them to pay someone to tabulate the data from my form. I don’t want them to allocate any more federal dollars to the state of Maryland due to my existence. I don’t want them burdening my children with any more debt.

The state of Maryland exists as it does due only to our proximity to the high paying jobs of the federal government. If not for that, the entirety of our one-party dominated anti-business state would be wallowing in filth, crime and food stamps. We consistently rank at the bottom of business-friendly states. We have no idea how to sustain ourselves without jobs and assistance from the federal government. I want no part in that.

It’s also obvious to me that Maryland’s congressional representatives are the worst in the nation. They are predictable liberals with no new ideas and no good ideas, whose only mission appears to be to sustain their employment while passing their bills along to our children. Are we expected to work toward increasing the ranks of those who ignore our concerns and economically assault our children on a daily basis?

I see no benefit to filling out the census. I don’t want more Maryland representation in Congress, I want less. From my vantage point, my only two options are to throw the form in the trash, or fill it out and say that I live in Texas.

I’m sure Texas would be happy to have Mr. DeCicco.

Lynn is treating the Census with the utmost seriousness:

I plan to be a good, obedient citizen and fill it out properly. Exercising one’s freedom by putting down “human” as one’s race could result in having unpleasant people knocking on one’s door.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out where I’m supposed to get a time machine to be able to answer this question:

How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment, or mobile home on April 1, 2010?

I suppose I could wait until the second of April to mail the thing, at which time I would know for sure, but I have just about the same response to unpleasant people knocking on my door.

Three members of Parliament face criminal charges over their allegedly-fraudulent expense accounts, and while they of course maintain their innocence, they argue that their very trials are invalid:

Elliot Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine, all of whom are charged with false accounting under the Theft Act and face jail terms of up to seven years if found guilty, waited at the back of the court instead of entering the dock.

This was because they are arguing that the case against them should not be heard in court at all. They believe they are protected from prosecution by parliamentary privilege enshrined in the 1689 Bill of Rights and that the House of Commons should decide their fate.

The pertinent passage:

[T]he freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.

See? It’s not a legal matter at all. It’s just part of the routine in Parliament.

Evidently not all Britons are buying this premise:

The MPs were jeered by protestors as they entered court, one man dressed as a pig shouting: “Oink, oink”. And when they climbed into a cab after the brief hearing, a voice in the crowd called: “Don’t forget to get a receipt”.

A spot of tea, anyone?

File this under “Well, we’ve got to punish her somehow“:

An 18-year-old Mississippi lesbian student whose school district canceled her senior prom rather than allow her to escort her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo said she got some unfriendly looks from classmates when she reluctantly returned to campus Thursday.

The district announced Wednesday it wouldn’t host the April 2 prom. The decision came after the American Civil Liberties Union told officials a policy banning same-sex prom dates violated students’ rights. The ACLU said the district not letting [Constance] McMillen wear a tuxedo violated her free expression rights.

I’ve got to assume that there’s at least one formal-wear establishment in Mississippi that didn’t have any problem with the poor girl coming in and getting fitted for a tux.

Says Jenn:

This was probably the right choice, this way none of the other students will catch the gay and civilization won’t crumble from two girls kissing.

At least she didn’t spell it “teh ghey.”

I remember that my own prom, forty-odd years ago, was subjected to extraneous political and/or cultural concerns, which didn’t get it canceled but did get it rescheduled for maximum inconvenience. To me, anyway, it’s another reason to take her side.

And you know, Ellen’s pretty darn dapper in a tux.

Hold still for a moment and I’ll tell you why not.

Politico has been circulating this story:

First-term Rep. Eric Massa announced Wednesday that he will not seek reelection, saying his doctors have told him that he can’t continue to “run at 100 miles an hour.”

But several House aides told Politico that the House ethics committee has been informed of allegations that the New York Democrat, who is married with two children, made unwanted advances toward a junior male staffer.

If he did that at 100 mph, I suppose I ought to be impressed.

Jenn’s take on the matter:

His sin here isn’t that he wanted to have sex with his (male) staffer (although sexual harassment is very wrong), or that he was attempting to cheat on his wife (although that is both sleazy and wrong). His sin was that he was apparently a bad enough boss that other staffers didn’t feel the need to protect him, and instead turned him in. You reap what you sow.

I dunno. I figure anything done or attempted on the side qualifies as sinful as well as sleazy, but I have to figure, if your own staff sells you out, you can’t be much of a bargain.

Speaking of office atmosphere, the following dialogue took place at my door yesterday, the first day in several weeks that was actually warmer than the seasonal norm, resulting in the usual HVAC Fail:

Office Babe: “Are you hot?”

Me: “No one’s ever said so.”

I suppose you had to be there.

One has to assume that Mayor Mick Cornett will win reelection today — Clark Matthews figured a 99.999-percent probability — but people aren’t exactly storming their way to the polls, if my own neighborhood is any indication: at 5:05 pm I shoved ballot number 164 into the box, indicating that there had been a lot of slack time for the two babes working the precinct. (They did fetch up a box of magazines, I noticed.)

And actually, I was wavering a bit until the Gazette put out its head-to-head on the two candidates last week. (You’ll note that no endorsement was offered here.) Maybe some day I’ll tell you why.

Addendum: It actually came out fairly close: Cornett 58 percent, Hunt 42.

Outgoing Governor Brad Henry may be the state’s most popular Democrat; he spanked Republican Ernest Istook in the 2006 election, pulling 66 percent of the vote, and he still enjoys lofty approval ratings.

But a Rasmussen poll shows that not even Brad Henry could dislodge Tom Coburn from the Senate:

The first Rasmussen Reports Election 2010 telephone survey of likely voters in Oklahoma finds Coburn, a Republican, leading Governor Henry by 12 points, 52% to 40%. Two percent (2%) like some other candidate, and five percent (5%) are undecided.

Both men are popular with Oklahoma voters, but the problem for Democrats is that Henry, who is term-limited and can’t seek reelection, has said so far that he has no interest in running for the Senate this year.

The Muskogee Politico quips:

Just more evidence that the conservative movement is turning Oklahoma the ‘reddest of the red’, thanks in part to the work of people like President Ronald Reagan, President Barack Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Harry Reid, all for convincing Democrats that they were actually Republican, and to OKGOP Chairman Gary Jones, for his adept leadership of the Republican Party in Oklahoma.

I’ll grant him Gary Jones, but at the moment, Harry Reid doesn’t have the persuasiveness to run the ice-water concession in hell, and Nancy Pelosi would spend all her time trying to get the lesser demons to agree to a bottle deposit.

You think that duck is lame? Think again, says Smitty:

It’s far too early to start writing anything triumphal about the lameness of the POTUS. The chief reason is that, while the Tea Parties are an impressive outpouring of outrage, they haven’t demonstrated staying power. They cannot, except to have massive impact on the 2010 and 2012 races, and then keep up the pressure.

There really isn’t precedent for such. Ross Perot stirred up a heap of resentment in ‘92, including garnering my vote, but the GOP mostly absorbed that momentum by ‘94.

And then conveniently forgot about it over the next decade and a half.

The Republicans would like to think that they will be the beneficiaries of all this outrage. I’d like to give them a John Houseman-esque scowl and remind them that trust is obtained the old-fashioned way: they have to earn it.

The Republicans, Marcel says, have lost their way:

Today’s party is nothing but a boring fund-raising apparatus, instead of the Grand Old Party it should be. We need to return to our roots, rediscover the foundation of legitimacy. We need to be a party again — a real party, with a club house, beer, and hot wings.

A club house?

Buy the old Ungulate’s Club. Charge modest dues, and have steak night on Tuesdays. Get local businesses to subsidize it in exchange for good will. “All you can eat for $4.99, thanks to the guys at Megatrode, who hope you’ll vote for Smith.” What’s the point shaking down the corporations if we just spend it all on ads to persuade the rank and file to vote? Just spend it on the rank and file.

Of course, this gets a bit more complicated the farther you go with the plan, but when is that not true?

The practice of Tax Increment Financing in Oklahoma is remarkably controversial, given the fact that it doesn’t involve actual tax increases; what happens in a TIF district is that revenue over and above a specified baseline figure is then spent on improvements in the actual district. (Michael Bates explained the process in Urban Tulsa Weekly some years ago.) Poster child for these things is the downtown Oklahoma City district set up around Devon Tower, expected to bring in about $225 million once the tower is in place; objections stem from the fact that this money is designated for upgrading that specific area, rather than spread around to all the usual open hands.

We also have something called Business Improvement Districts, which are financed by an additional assessment on property owners within their district. Since this does require a tax increase, approval by the majority of property owners is required. The Downtown OKC BID was approved in 2001.

While the BID is ongoing, TIFs tend to have an expiration date: Oklahoma TIFs are limited by law to 25 years, though most of the TIFs in Tulsa expire in 15 years. And Oklahoma City’s MAPS sales taxes have all had expiration dates, though you’d likely not have noticed it unless you read the small print on the ballot; each new collection began the day after the previous one expired. In general, people seem to like the idea that a tax can run out, which explains the actions of this guy in St. Louis County, Missouri:

The campaign for a sales tax for an emergency communications system in St. Louis County is not over although 67.74 percent of county voters approved a 0.1-cent sales tax for the system on Nov. 4.

State Sen. Jim Lembke, R-south St. Louis County, has introduced a bill (SB 638) in the state Senate that would limit the tax to five years, exempt food from the tax and prohibit the county from ever proposing the measure again.

The bill would protect taxpayers, he said. The tax needs a sunset, he said. “I don’t want to thwart the will of the taxpayers,” the senator said. The tax “should not go on in perpetuity,” he said.

I am surprised that the ballot measure didn’t specify an expiration date, since this was a one-time project. Or maybe I’m not so surprised:

Former County Councilman Skip Mange, chairman of the campaign committee for the tax, said Lembke’s bill would kill the system. “There is no other available tax revenue,” he said.

Does this constitute an admission that the measure as written would not produce the amount of revenue needed — or that the county was looking forward to that tenth-of-a-cent extra once the new system was paid for?

I don’t have a problem with dedicated sales taxes per se; apart from MAPS, OKC collects 0.75 cents on the dollar for public safety, and 0.125 cents to support the zoo. But those are ongoing activities, not one-shot projects, and they don’t have expiration dates, unlike the MAPS taxes. Jim Lembke seems to grasp the concept:

Lembke said he is willing to work with supporters to calculate a sunset for the tax. After that, the county should pay for the system’s operation and maintenance out of its general fund, he said. Or supporters should go back to voters for a special tax to maintain the system, he said.

Doesn’t sound so complicated to me.

(Triggered by a reference in this piece by Brian J. Noggle.)

Iran, says President Ahmadinejad, is now a “nuclear state”:

In a nationally televised address in the square, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed that Iran has produced its first batch of uranium enriched to a higher level, saying his country will not be bullied by the West into curtailing its nuclear program a day after the U.S. imposed new sanctions.

“The first package of 20 percent fuel was produced and provided to the scientists,” he said, reiterating that Iran was now a “nuclear state.” He did not specify how much uranium had been enriched.

Leaders of the Democratic Party in the United States professed concern, but expressed their confidence that Ahmadinejad had pronounced “nuclear,” or its Farsi equivalent, correctly.

In other news, North Korea announced that it would rebrand itself as a tourist destination and would seek a partner to construct two five-star, or maybe it was five two-star, hotels in downtown Pyongyang; Somali pirates proposed a Safe Passage Weekend; and an item of intimate wear alleged to have been worn once by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin turned up on eBay, where it was purchased for $11,621. We are unable to confirm that Andrew Sullivan spent the next day begging Atlantic owner David Bradley for a raise.

(Iran story via Jenn, who apparently was expecting a lot more of an announcement from Tehran.)

Just in case you think “race-baiter” is a recent addition to the Occupational Outlook Handbook:

I was shielded from a lot of the old ugly bigotry as a girl, albeit fully aware that there were small-minded people in the world. Even way back during that time my parents never allowed any hint of bigotry in their children. So I grew up very naive in thinking that a black person would accept my sincerity of personal interaction as a matter of course. It wasn’t until high school that I tasted the bitter edge of something new: I got played by a young Barack Obama-type. He was a transplant from Chicago, and he wanted to start a Race Forum, with the proposition of promoting more racial understanding in the student body. I was close friends with a black guy, a bright poet, which was still kinda tabu back then in the South (both poets and black guys as boyfriends. Heh.) Some had rumored us to be dating, though it wasn’t so. However, this led to my being asked to participate in the forum. I was excited to be a part, but it all came about that I had to pass a litmus test for which I was set up by the young “organizer” and was summarily found to be unsuitable for their purposes. It was not really a Race Forum because they were not going to allow any white students in it who couldn’t see themselves as oppressors and bigots. It turned out to be an Outrage Forum that bewildered those of good will.

Of course, they’d never concede that she had good will: she didn’t pass their damnfool test. And therefore:

Neither I nor my friend had anything more to do with them. Besides, he loved country music and Jesus and our little Chicago organizer was never going to allow either in a Forum for Understanding.

Of course not. It would drown out the sound of the axes being ground.

Now this is hilarious. “Democracy Dollars,” they call ‘em:

The answer to the disproportionate influence of big money is to give ordinary citizens the financial capacity to compete effectively in the political marketplace.

The place to begin is with a tax cut. Each American should get a refundable federal tax credit of $50 that they can use to make contributions to federal candidates during presidential years, and a suitably smaller sum during off-year federal elections.

“Big money,” they say. I figure, if the likes of ExxonMobil and SEIU want to piss away their treasuries in an effort to change my mind on something — which effort, incidentally, will not even come close to succeeding — let ‘em.

In fact, I said so back in 1996:

No more restrictions on contributions, coupled with full disclosure of the list of contributors.

To pick an example entirely at random, if some neofascist newspaper publisher from some provincial backwater wants to pour his fortune into getting a kindred spirit into one of the seats of power, he ought to be able to — and the public should be able easily to identify the anointed one as “Mr _________’s lackey”.

Meanwhile, Rachel asks:

Didn’t whatshisname — you know the guy who took the hallowed Kennedy seat — raise a boatload of money from a boatload of little guys within hours of his debate appearance? And all of those people decided to make a contribution without first waiting for the government to give them their yearly campaign allowance. Imagine that.

You want to get “big money” out of campaigns? Get the government out of the business of granting favors.

And no, this is not a request for more snow and ice.

You know, if you’re really intent on spamming the nation’s Letters to the Editor pages, it would behoove you to mix things up a little now and then:

Obviously the White House has the right to get their message out, but this smacks of unseemliness. If Obama’s army of followers wants to write letters on a suggested topic that would be something else altogether. Maybe the GOP should take a lead from this and start having their followers do the same thing, but perhaps use a Chinese menu approach. Pick a paragraph from column A, another from B and a conclusion from C. That way the astroturfing would be a little harder to detect.

I dunno. It’s pretty hard to sneak this sort of thing past, say, Patterico.

Paul Scott, who currently represents District 51 in the Michigan House of Representatives, is running for Secretary of State, an elective office in Mittenland, and he’s listed four policy changes he advocates. All of them involve drivers and/or their licenses, but #3 seems a bit odd:

I will make it a priority to ensure transgender individuals will not be allowed to change the sex on their driver’s license in any circumstance.

A priority, yet. There is, of course, an explanation for this:

When asked to explain how such a mandate from the Secretary of State would benefit Michigan, he said it was about “preventing people who are males genetically from dressing as a woman and going into female bathrooms.”

Unfortunately, he forgot the old rule that says “Stop digging”:

He said his mandate would be in place even for those who had completely undergone sex reassignment surgeries.

“That’s who you are. You can have cosmetic surgery or reassignment surgery but you are still that gender,” he said.

As a guy, I suppose I consider this sort of thing discriminatory: why would I want some post-op M2F hanging around in the men’s room?

Okay, “hanging” is the wrong word. But if this is his idea of a “priority,” I shudder to imagine his idea of trivia.

(Via Zoe Brain.)

The Draft Dave Rader campaign, introduced earlier this week, has apparently asked itself: “What can Scott Brown do for us?” The answer, of course, is to provide a catchphrase. From yesterday’s email by David Tackett:

This is not John Sullivan’s seat. This is the people’s seat. And
that’s why I’m involved with the Draft Dave campaign.

“I’m not even dead yet and they’re already treating me like Ted Kennedy,” John Sullivan was not heard to say.

The inevitable Der Untergang parody sequence, as Hitler is informed of the results of the special election for that Massachusetts Senate seat:

I never quite get tired of these.

There’s a campaign being developed to draft former football star Dave Rader for the House seat (OK 1) not necessarily being vacated in 2010 by incumbent John Sullivan.

I got a letter from the Draft Dave organization in email yesterday, signed by political consultant David Tackett. Some of what it said:

I know many of you have read the newspaper article about our initiative to draft Dave Rader for the 1st Congressional District. While we have had many calls in support of our initiative, several people have asked why are we working against a sitting Republican incumbent Congressman? A few have flat out asked us, “Hasn’t he voted right during these past eight years?”

I’m here to tell you that I’m part of the Draft Dave campaign
not because our current Congressman has voted wrong on bill “a” or resolution “b” (Although, I’m not the least bit happy of John Sullivan’s vote for the TARP Bailout program or his several votes against free trade). I’m doing this because I believe we deserve better than a rubber stamp in Washington D.C.

We deserve better than a Representative who just goes to
Washington and has a great time sitting comfortably in the back benches of Congress, never trying hard to pass meaningful legislation and just pushing the “aye” or “nay” button enough times to placate his constituents back home.

We deserve better than a Representative who can only claim 7 authored bills and resolutions that have successfully passed in his past eight years in office. And of those, only one has been enacted into law, and that was to change the name of VA Children’s Outpatient Clinic in Tulsa. (source — Govtrack.us)

I’m just weird enough to think that placating the constituents is a major part of a Representative’s job.

In Sullivan’s defense, he did subsequently call for TARP to be rolled up and discarded. And my idea of “meaningful legislation” is legislation that undoes previous bad legislation, of which we have an abundance; it’s probably unrealistic to expect anyone to be able to pass anything like that in the current Congressional environment, and I’m not anticipating that, say, Nancy Pelosi, who presumably is placating her constituents, will suddenly decide to turn her life around and become a community organizer/Mob enforcer/kindergarten teacher [choose one].

More to the point, I don’t live in Sullivan’s district, and the person who represents the district in which I do live is busy running for governor. Maybe they can talk Dave into moving to Edmond or something.

Jenn says she’s confused about something:

People who proclaimed John McCain the coming of Satan because of his liberal positions are lining up in droves behind [Scott] Brown. Could it be that they have figured out it’s better to deal with someone who you agree with 50+% of the time than someone that you agree with 0% of the time.

Besides, if you’re looking for someone you agree with 100% of the time, your best bet — perhaps your only bet — is to find the nearest mirror.

In the meantime:

You’re a little late to that party guys.

Not exactly unprecedented, that.

When I was a kid, I was pretty good at connecting the dots.

Nowadays, it seems to be a lost art, says the Old Grouch:

“[D]ot-connecting” is as much an art as it is a skill, and nine times out of ten it’s the product of a judgment call. It’s tricky under the best of circumstances, even more so when being wrong might land the dot-connector in political hot water.

And good dot-connectors are smart — certainly smart enough to detect the unspoken messages issuing from their superiors. What kind of messages do you suppose our dot-connectors are detecting?

What is obvious is that neither the Bush administration (which began by “declaring war on a noun”) nor the Obama administration (whose F.B.I. is busy taking sensitivity lessons from people connected with the Muslim Brotherhood) have been interested in connecting the “wrong kind” of dots. Fear of accusations of racism, international pressures, political correctness, sympathy for “revolutionaries” … whatever the reason, both administrations have continually bent over backwards, failing to name the enemy and rushing to declare each new incident “isolated.”

The assumption, apparently, is that the General Public is as easily spooked as a New York Knick, and therefore must be subjected to purely-artificial lighting.

I cannot believe that our military and our intelligence agencies have lost all ability to connect the dots. What I can believe is that our dot-connectors know which way the wind blows, and — consciously or unconsciously — tailor their output to avoid conclusions their superiors “don’t want to hear.”

There is a word for those who don’t avoid those conclusions, and that word is “unemployed.”

That 1980 centerfold pose by Scott Brown? Not a problem in the Massachusetts Senate race, says Robert Stacy McCain:

This September item at Cosmo’s Web site was almost certainly an opposition-research hit from the Coakley campaign. The Democratic idiots probably figured that the revelation that Brown had posed nude when he was 22 would hurt him with the “value voters.” But for every stuffy prude who was offended by the Cosmo pictures, the Republican candidate picked up at least three votes from chicks with a non-partisan admiration for his bod.

This assumes that there actually are people who would cast a vote based on a candidate’s physical appearance, to which I say, um, please don’t look at this.

McGehee (8 January) looks for Hyde to be tanned:

Back in 1995, after his party took over the majority in the House of Representatives on the strength of the Contract With America — of which one of the points was congressional term limits — Rep. Henry Hyde took to the floor to argue against term limits by claiming you couldn’t find effective representation by taking names at random from the phone book.

With that comment — along with his longtime support for federal gun control — Hyde eclipsed, to my mind, everything worthwhile he ever had done or ever would do. That idea, of the indispensable political veteran who must intermediate between the people and their government, has been the single most corrosive concept ever introduced into American politics. For his part in blocking that legislation, Hyde deserved to depart Washington by rail in a sticky, feathery suit.

As has been pointed out on occasion — thank you, Lisa — the electorate can always throw the bums out, should they be so inclined. But McGehee has hit on the subtext here: we’ve become accustomed to thinking in terms of hiring the expert rather than doing the job ourselves. And I appreciate this concept: after recently failing to reduce the size of an overgrown holly which was threatening to take over a section of roof, I had to call in a tree surgeon. But the American political system is based on the idea of, yes, doing the job ourselves. You could argue that the job is now too big for us; what is needed, I believe, is to cut it back down to size.

From the AP wire:

Some House Democrats say the proposed government insurance option remains alive, although they speak publicly of its possible demise as long as insurance companies aren’t let off the hook.

California Rep. Xavier Becerra, who’s on the leadership team, said House members would only be willing to abandon the public plan if they were certain the final bill achieves the goals they want, as [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi described.

“We’re willing to give up what’s good for America as long as we get something good back,” he said.

Oh, those crazy Democrats, always willing to give up what’s good for America.

Amazingly, this hasn’t been all over Twitter. Yet.

(Hat tip: farblondzhet, via email.)

Matt A. Mayer wonders when the heads are going to start rolling:

Snickering aside, how does anyone expect accountability in government when those who fail suffer no real consequences? Other than Mike “Heckuva Job, Brownie” Brown, I am not aware of one federal employee who was fired due to the failures involved with the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina. What does a federal bureaucrat need to do to get fired? If we want accountability, then we need to change how federal employees in national-security fields are protected from being fired for failing to do their jobs.

So, yes, Secretary Janet Napolitano should go, but she should go because her tenure as a whole has been a wreck. From her response to the “right-wing” threat report, to the counterproductive reverses made on immigration policy, to the continued pork-barrel feeding frenzy of the homeland-security grants, to the semantic sleight of hand on “man-made disasters,” to her clueless claim that “the system worked,” she does not instill confidence in either the American public or the DHS bureaucracy. Napolitano is just plain ineffective, which is deadly. DHS is hard enough to manage already; an ineffective leader will only ensure further failures. But it shouldn’t just be token political appointees who get fired when failures occur.

Napolitano’s boss, at least, knows where the buck is supposed to stop.

To hear Jenn tell it, it’s the head of the Republican National Committee:

With [Byron] Dorgan retiring and [Arlen] Specter in trouble the balance of power in the Senate is ready to shift, but I am sure Michael Steele will find a way to throw it away.

Brittany Cohan is no more impressed:

Michael Steele’s silence on the race in Massachusetts and his inability to follow through on the very topic of his own book is louder than his constant media presence these days.

I’m starting to think the GOP could be better run by this Michael Steele.

David Brooks wants you to know that he’s a member of the Educated Class, which, according to Purple Avenger, means he’s not entirely useless:

The “educated class” is useful because they provide job security for plumbers. They’re all too stupid to change a leaky flapper valve themselves. Thousands of plumbers would be out of jobs were it not for the “educated class”.

Before you ask: yes, I can change a flapper valve.

Political tomes, says Lisa, don’t have much staying power:

Even the best written political books have the shelf life of whipcream in an 80 degree room. I know, I’ve bought hundreds right when they hit the store and were hot, read them immediately, tried to sell them back to the used bookstore within the week, only to be told that they are “past their peak of interest”.

My two-part system for avoiding this particular confrontation with an irked bookstore clerk:

1. Place the books in a large cardboard box and set it in the far corner of the room.
2. Move to another house.

Needless to say, I can’t pull this off very often.