Recently in Politics Category

The BBC Web site has a great essay by political scientist David Runciman, a professor at Cambridge University, trying to explain the recent surge in anger among the populace regarding health care and just about everything else.

It begins:

"Last year, in a series of 'town-hall meetings' across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama's proposed healthcare reforms.

"What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence.

"Polling evidence suggests that the numbers who think the reforms go too far are nearly matched by those who think they do not go far enough.

"But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform - the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state - are often the ones it seems designed to help.

"In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.

"Instead, to many of those who lose out under the existing system, reform still seems like the ultimate betrayal.

"Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?

"Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies?"

Very good questions and Runciman tries to explain in this excellent essay.

This is a great country. It has to be. It rewards incompetence and stupidity like none other.

Take, for instance, Michael Brown. Remember him? The "heck-of-a-job-Brownie" guy whose training in running horse shows prepared him so well to respond to the destruction of a U.S. city as FEMA director?

He went to found a disaster consulting business, in which, I suppose, he advise people on how to turn disasters into catastrophes.

And now, he's landed a radio talk show in Denver.

Unbelievable.

We all missed seeing our own Todd Platts at the State of the Union Address. He has an excuse. He was traveling abroad.

This, of course, provides me with the opportunity to re-run "Where's Todd? (It's a .pdf file.)

Toddplatts.pdf

So, yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people too.

The court, ignoring decades of precedent, overturned laws that forbid corporations -- and labor unions; it cuts both ways -- from making unlimited financial contributions to political campaigns.

In making the ruling, five of the justices -- the conservative majority -- went well beyond what they were being asked to rule upon and established new law based on ideological and political concerns, rather than Constitutional matters.

The case before the court was whether the airing of a corporately sponsored attack documentary about Hillary Clinton counted as a political contribution -- up until yesterday, forbidden by law. Such contributions were forbidden for good reason -- to diminish the influence of special interests and prevent a de facto system of legal bribery.

The court went well beyond that and ruled that limits on corporate political contributions are unconstitutional, equating a number of things that simply don't compute.

For one thing, the majority of the court extended First Amendment rights to corporations, a right previously reserved for individuals. For another, it equated money with speech -- in essence, protecting bribery of public officials as free speech.

A couple of thoughts: I don't want to ever hear conservatives complaining about "activist judges." This case is a textbook example of activist judicial conduct -- ignoring precedent and the facts of the case to make new law based on ideological and political concerns. Of course, the real definition of an "activist" judge is one who makes a ruling you disagree with.

Another notion: If money is speech, well, feel free to yell at me all you want. I prefer cash.

Here's a clip, courtesy of the satirical Web site Wonkette:

Attention whore Rob Blagojevich is back. In Esquire magazine, he says, "I'm blacker than Barack Obama."

And speaking of attention whoring, Blago is scheduled to appear on "Celebrity Apprentice" this season as he awaits trial.

Just go away.

Out in Lawndale, Calif., residents are upset about the odor from garlic plants that line the city's streets. One city councilman, Jim Ramsey, objected to removing the offending plants.

"The only reason we had garlic put in was so we could keep the vampires out of town," he told a TV reporter. "And since we have had garlic I haven't seen one single solitary vampire in town."

Watch the video.

Former state Rep. Steve Stetler, D-York, gets himself mired in the Bonusgate scandal. And John Brenner's mayoral race had some connection to it too.

Jeez.

Here's a link to our coverage.

I'll have more to say about it in my Sunday column. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I can't help but think, maybe he should have stuck to selling Chryslers.

Unemployment remains high, but according to economic columnist Dan Gross, the jobs may come back sooner than expected.

His column this week reviews data that shows the job market will be bouncing back sooner than pessimists expect.

Still, pessimism rules the day. Why?

Gross writes:

"This tendency has been amplified by another force: politics. For the right, it has become an article of faith that so long as Obama sits in the White House, the economy must remain weak. Having voted en masse against the stimulus package on the grounds that it can't work, the line from Republicans is that Obama is a socialist, job-killing, market-wrecking disaster. It follows, naturally, that his policies can spell only doom. On March 6, Michael Boskin, the Stanford professor and economic adviser to Bush the elder, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled: "Obama's Radicalism is Killing the Dow." Since then, the Dow has rallied 57 percent. The party of Reagan is, in effect, rooting for economic rain."

Cheering for economic failure? Why do these people hate America?

That's Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi being attacked with a miniature statue of Milan's Duomo. You don't see that kind of thing every day.

Now, the attack may have been politically motivated. But seriously, given Berlusconi's penchant for being the Tiger Woods of Italy -- and I'm not talking about his golf game -- it could have easily had to do with his peccadilloes.

That's Sean Ramaley, a former state representative, and not The Beav.

A jury acquitted Ramaley of corruption charges, the most notable being that he accepted a no-work state job while running for the legislature.

It doesn't surprise me that the Beaver County Democrat got off. For one, the case seemed pretty weak, according to jurors interviewed afterwards. And for another, the guy was offered a no-work job. That's the American dream. Can you blame him?

I mean, had he turned down a no-work job, he should have been indicted for stupidity.

Read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's story here.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal reported that the mayor of Arlington, Tenn., believes President Obama's speech on Tuesday night on the war in Afghanistan was deliberately timed to block the Christian message of the "Peanuts" television Christmas special.

Mayor Russell Wiseman, on his Facebook page, wrote:

"Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim president is there, what a load.....try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose."

I would, but my wife has told me not to argue with crazy people.

Krugman nails it. No other columnist has been on top of health care like the Nobel Prize-winning New York Times writer.

In the piece, he makes a compelling argument that passing health care reform is the fiscally responsible thing to do and that politicians opposing it, fearing, I suppose, losing millions in campaign contributions/bribes from the insurance industry, are deluded when they believe reform is financially irresponsible.

He writes: "That's why anyone who is truly concerned about fiscal policy should be anxious to see health reform succeed. If it fails, the demagogues will have won, and we probably won't deal with our biggest fiscal problem until we're forced into action by a nasty debt crisis.

"So to the centrists still sitting on the fence over health reform: If you care about fiscal responsibility, you better be afraid of what will happen if reform fails."

Read it here.

The mayor of Baltimore, it turns out, is a small-time crook.

Sheila Dixon was convicted of embezzling $500 in gift cards intended for the needy.

Read the Baltimore Sun's coverage here.

Five-hundred bucks, huh? Pikers. Call us when your mayor is indicted for murder, OK?

Once again, The Onion nails it.