Category: Politics & Elections

“If this guy [Fed Chairman Bernacke] prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.”

Governor Rick Perry

Unconscionable.

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

Willard Romney, Iowa State Fair

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.

The dramatic and unabashedly negative turn is the product of political reality. Obama remains personally popular, but pluralities in recent polling disapprove of his handling of his job and Americans fear the country is on the wrong track. His aides are increasingly resigned to running for reelection in a glum nation. And so the candidate who ran on “hope” in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent.

Above the beginning of a report from Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin at POLITICO.com.

Voters don’t choose divided government. It’s chosen for them by a system, unique in the democratic world, of multiple overlapping elections held at different intervals in which different electorates fill different offices, none of whose occupants have ultimate responsibility. The electorate of 2008 chose Obama and the Democrats. The electorate of 2010—consisting mainly of McCain voters, and smaller by forty-five million—chose the Republicans. Hardly anybody voted as they did out of a desire for “divided government,” as opposed to a desire for a government that would embody their own political and ideological leanings.

Hendrik Hertzberg, from a brief blog post.

“It turns out, I’m sorry to say, that he wasn’t the one we were waiting for.”

Paul Krugman

… Although Republicans routinely accuse him of being a socialist, an honest examination of his presidency must conclude that he has in fact been moderately conservative to exactly the same degree that Nixon was moderately liberal.

Here are a few examples of Obama’s effective conservatism:

• His stimulus bill was half the size that his advisers thought necessary;
• He continued Bush’s war and national security policies without change and even retained Bush’s defense secretary;
• He put forward a health plan almost identical to those that had been supported by Republicans such as Mitt Romney in the recent past, pointedly rejecting the single-payer option favored by liberals;
• He caved to conservative demands that the Bush tax cuts be extended without getting any quid pro quo whatsoever;
• And in the past few weeks he has supported deficit reductions that go far beyond those offered by Republicans.

Bruce Bartlett, The Fiscal Times

A reporter took in the Sarah Palin movie in Orange County, California, and he was, it’s fair to say, the only person watching the movie.

Sarah Palin Movie Debuts to Empty Theater in Orange County

At a press conference in Los Alamos just now Senator Tom Udall said, “New Mexicans pull together in hard times.”

Yes, Senator, we are so unlike those no-good folks in the other 49 states. Geez.

The Senator also reminded tourists everywhere that New Mexico is “still open for business.”

As long as you aren’t looking for fresh air during your visit.

Senator Udall, I respect you and voted for you, but did you really need to be here for platitude time?

“But if I wanted to make a case that our system really has become pathologically trivializing and self-defeating — and that our problems, theoretically correctable, may be beyond our powers to address …”

James Fallows introducing “What’s Wrong with America, Chapter 817: Sen. Richard Shelby.” Want to be even more disgusted? Follow the link.

“My position many, many months ago when I wrote an op-ed for one of the major national newspapers was this. President Obama was setting up this false choice between default and raising the debt ceiling. And at least for a while, you can take away that false choice by ordering the Treasury to pay the obligations to outside creditors first, and there’s enough cash flow to do that for quite some time.”

Tim Pawlenty today on “This Week” via ABC News

Even an off-the-cuff remark this displays just colossal ignorance. What in god’s name is an “outside” creditor?

“God forgives you at any age, but voters should only reward reformations that occur before the miscreant receives his first copy of the AARP bulletin.”

Gail Collins in a column highlighting Newt Gingrich as the fool he is.

When Facebook gets involved, relationships can quickly fall apart – as Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi have discovered. But dictatorships are not the only ties being dissolved by social networking sites: now Facebook is increasingly being blamed for undermining American marriages.

Even though the rate of divorce in the US has remained largely stable in recent years, American divorce lawyers and academics have joined Middle East analysts in picking out Facebook as a leading cause of relationship trouble, with American lawyers now demanding to see their clients’ Facebook pages as a matter of course before the start of proceedings.

The Guardian

There’s more.

“Huckabee was never an entirely plausible candidate for President–could we actually ever elect a man who has his doubts about evolution? whose comments about Israel seemed to indicate a literal interpretation of the Bible and the Rapture myth?–but he always struck me as a good guy, more concerned about working-class America than most of his rivals. These comments, however, and his subsequent lie that he really meant Indonesia not Kenya, really show a demented, perverse sensibility, and they demonstrate some of the ugliness at the heart of Obama hatred.”

Joe Klein

What Huckabee said:

“If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”

Why do we keep electing the worst among us to public office?

He said he was 39; he’s 46.

He said he was a lobbyist; he was a Member of Congress.

He said, “Sorry. Its all I had,” when the woman asked if he always sent shirtless photos of himself.

(It’s a cellphone photo taken in a mirror. You can see the phone in the photo. He could have put a shirt on and taken the same photo.)

But the lameness of that excuse isn’t what makes me wonder why we elect reprobates.

And it’s not the lying.

It’s not even the presumed attempt at adultery.

What bothers me most is that he left the apostrophe out of “it’s.”

Photo from Gawker.

At Louisville Juice. Tom tells us about a South Carolina legislator “whose legislative record would seem to merit ’round-the-clock adult supervision based solely on things he does on purpose.”