Thieves in the Temple.

The Senate passed the Murray budget by a hair-thin 50 to 49 margin on Friday, and The Hill notes that the four Democrats who voted against the budget all happen to be up for re-election in 2014. At least three of these four have accounted for their votes, and I bet you can detect a theme: the Murray budget wasn't bipartisan enough, didn't compromise enough, though it approximates an actual middle ground between the Back to Work budget and the Ryan budget. Ms. Hagan wanted something more "balanced and bipartisan," Mr. Pryor decried "one-party solutions" just like David Boren used to, and Mr. Baucus's aide (because the man himself doesn't have to talk to you!) lamented that there was no "middle ground." (Nothing Mr. Begich says means a damn as long as he's bringing the bacon back home to Alaska.) It's like they have no faith they can present the Murray budget as the "middle ground" to their own constituents -- or that they're just trying to disappear one of the poles. Of these four, Mark Pryor, at least, is toast.

Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee informs us that the evangelical wing of the Republican Party will likely walk away if the Party ever embraces gay marriage. Whether threat or mere prediction, my immediate reaction is: one can only hope! And not just because the Republicans might come to their senses somewhat if evangelicals go their own way -- maybe evangelicals, in turn, will take some of Jesus's teachings a bit more to heart if they no longer have to learn somebody's party line on clean water regulations and capital gains taxes. I've long hoped that Mr. Huckabee, who used to promote the occasional economic stimulus when he was Arkansas Governor and who sometimes sounded populist on the 2008 campaign trail, might make that pilgrimage, too -- but if he's capable of obnoxiously suggesting that letting gays marry is like lowering basketball hoops so more people can score, then he's at least as capable of lying to himself about the "stimulative" "power" of tax cuts. I'd be happy to be wrong about that, of course.

Penny rants for Sunday, February 17, 2013.

Illinois legalizes gay marriage, and a minor legislator lets loose this flatugasm: "To redefine marriage is discriminatory towards those who hold the sincerely-held religious belief that it is a sacred institution between a man & a woman." In other news, the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution "discriminate" against bigots who "hold the sincerely-held religious belief" the New Testament mandates slavery. (The repetition of "hold" really makes that sentence super-awesome.) But why does he think legislation that doesn't actually hurt anyone, but merely opposes a "sincerely-held religious belief," is "discriminatory"? Does the law force such people into gay marriages? Of course it doesn't! And trust me, if I "held a sincerely-held religious belief" that Republicans shouldn't hold office anywhere until they stop being whining little brats, I wouldn't cry "discrimination" because I'm not getting my way.

Mitch McConnell has co-sponsored a bill legalizing hemp, a variety of the Cannibis plant (though folks have made hemp into food, oil, soap, and cloth since time immemorial). One is tempted to say it's 21 months until Election Day and Mitch McConnell is already throwing a Hail Mary! but politically this is low-risk-high-reward -- clearly he's calculated that he'll look good and it'll never happen, because America is still the world's largest exporter (and third-largest producer) of cotton, so the cotton lobby will probably block the bill, with an assist from law enforcement, afraid that hemp growers will grow pot. Of course, regulating THC levels in hemp -- or taking pot off Schedule I, where it does not belong and never has belonged -- would ameliorate the law enforcement issue, and much to law enforcement's liking, I suspect. But not to Mr. McConnell's -- he'd call all that "big gummint."

Penny rants for Monday, February 11, 2013.

George Will proves the stopped-clock rule, with an editorial called "Break Up the Big Banks." That's right, the same George Will who seems to think that corporate campaign spending and free speech are the exact same thing also thinks too-big-to-fail banks should be broken up because a) they're not just too big but too "opaque" in how they operate and b) they crush "community banks." Sounds like what I've been saying -- well, except for the part where Mr. Will conflates Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the author of many break-up-the-big-banks bills, with the French revolutionaries conservatives haven't liked since Edmund Burke wrote his Reflections. Mr. Will might also want to think harder about why government financial regulations also seem opaque -- could it be because they're regulating such slippery stuff?

Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal Service announces it will discontinue Saturday first-class delivery (though it will still deliver some packages on Saturdays). If you've been a regular reader here, you know the "crisis" the USPS faces is Congress's making -- Congress mandated, in 2006, that the USPS pre-fund its pension program for 75 years, which no corporation in America has to do, and strangely enough, if you remove that part of the 2006 bill from public law, the USPS would actually operate at a surplus. Those of you ready to consign the USPS to the ash-heap of history because EMAILZ!!!! should remember that rural folks don't have broadband like cityfolk do, and I wouldn't go on about junk mail, either -- even this city mouse needs to send something through the mail fairly frequently, and I'm glad the USPS is there.

In other news, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) will give the "Tea Party" response to Mr. Obama's State of the Union address, after Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) gives the Republican response. Why do Republicans get two responses again? And why doesn't, say, Occupy Wall Street or the Coffee Party get a response? Because folks in tri-corner hats carrying signs depicting Mr. Obama with a Hitler mustache are so much more charming? Because 70-year-olds saying taxes are too high now when taxes were much higher in the "country they grew up in" are so compelling? I'm just joshing; I know "rich people's money" answers my question. And while Sens. Paul and Rubio were Tea Party darlings once, their current "opposition" is nothing to celebrate; it merely means that one of them has fooled the "liberal" media into believing he's Just One of the Guys Now.

Finally, two Phelps granddaughters leave the Westboro Baptist Church, apologizing for the hurt they never intended to cause (and for which they haven't quite accepted total responsibility, if I parse their statement correctly). One of them had even become the happy smiling face of Mr. Phelps's little operation, so her departure can't make Granddaddy happy. I like redemption stories as much as anyone, but I sure hope they don't join up with more mainstream anti-gay efforts like, say, Maggie Gallagher's outfit. And the Church spokeshack does his part, declaring the girls are going to hell for (let us not forget) deciding not to protest gay rights at soldiers' funerals anymore. Yep, sounds exactly like the kind of thing that gets God's shorts in a bunch! And the next right-wing "religious leader" who says Lloyd Blankfein or John Paulsen is going to hell will be the first.

Penny rants for Sunday, November 25, 2012.

Where to begin with this slab of hot-and-steaming about upper-end tax hikes from Investors Business Daily? With its failure to address Mr. Krugman's assertion that a 91% tax bracket would be moral? With its assumption that we should listen to JFK on taxes because he's JFK? With its slippery-slope reasoning that Mr. Obama wouldn't stop at a 39.6% top bracket when it's been like pulling teeth to get him that far? With its tired "penalizing success" line not two weeks after Citigroup's ex-CEO got another multi-million-dollar payout for crashing his company? How about paragraph 13, which transmutes the desire for more progressive taxation into "the socialist assumption that government has an unlimited claim on the wealth of the people"? Once you say "91% of income over a million bucks," you're setting a limit. How do the fools survive?

Per two Senators' aides, the financial services industry "has already moved to block" Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) from joining the Senate Banking Committee, given her long-standing support for tighter regulation and reform. I must've missed the part where the financial services industry got elected to the Senate, and indeed the mechanics of "blocking" her remain a mystery, except that they're "going nuts" trying to do so. And one hedge fund manager tells us that "(a)t exactly the time that big banks don't want more oversight -- or another potentially activist regulator --that's what they're getting." Again, I must have missed the part where banks ever wanted more oversight. Then again, the banking industry must have missed the part where they crashed the economy. Seriously, we've been putting up with bankster whining for how many years now?

Finally, Matt K. Lewis at The Week suggests that the Republicans should look to George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" in order to "modernize" -- just without all that nation-building and debt-spending stuff. I guess we're supposed to believe that, without those wars and budget deficits, Mr. Bush's two terms would have been just dandy -- nay, even compassionate! But what if "compassionate conservatism" was, in Mr. Bush's hands, merely a bait-and-switch -- what if Mr. Bush pretended to be a "compassionate conservative" precisely so that he could get into power and hand out taxpayer largesse to his cronies via "nation-building" and budget deficits? I mean, if you were at all awake during the Bush years, you wouldn't fall for this crap again in 2016 just because Bobby Jindal or Marco Rubio tried it -- unless, of course, Democrats did absolutely nothing with their power in the meantime, which is always the threat.

Penny rants for Friday, November 9, 2012.

"Money can't buy happiness, or an election," MSNBC says, citing the numerous losing candidates backed by four billionaires (though saying nothing of the gajillions spent by SuperPACs). Maybe money can't buy an election outright (though it seems to have bought more than a few U.S. Senators in 2010), but money can still buy a lot of TV ads, and right now TV ads are the most passive way of collecting political information, meaning too many people still get too much of their info from TV ads. And a lot of these clowns did a lot better than they should have. The self-funded Tom Smith, who never-not-once mentioned in his gazillion Philly-area TV ads that he was a Republican, did a lot better against Bob Casey than Rick Santorum did. And Josh Mandel, the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, shouldn't be elected to dog-catcher, let alone State Treasurer, yet the $31 million from outside groups got him to 45 points against Sherrod Brown. In 2018 Ohio Republicans might have the sense to get behind someone who's not a complete fool, and $31 million (or more!) might put him over the top.

I buzzed Michael Smerconish's take on Barack Obama's more insane opponents here yesterday, but I feel compelled to demolish a myth Mr. Smerconish propagates in paragraph 7: that the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. "Obamacare") "is premised upon personal responsibility." I guess he means that a single-payer health care system wouldn't be "premised upon personal responsibility," but a program that preserves (and subsidizes!) the private insurance industry would. But how, exactly, is a single-payer system anti-"personal responsibility"? Taxpayers would be paying for it, wouldn't they? And, as such, taxpayers would have a responsibility to stay on their Congressfolk about making sure it works the way it should work, right? It's a bait and switch -- talk "personal responsibility" and then subtly equate any private, corporate business model with "responsibility," never mind that America's private health insurance industry has become the poster child for irresponsibility. I'll grant that Mr. Smerconish might not be completely aware he's doing that.

Finally, the American people have re-elected Barack Obama for a second term -- which means the "liberal" media, having spent years parroting the far-right's absurd charges of "socialism," will now conclude that Americans have decisively chosen socialism, right? And Republicans, having pursued no policy other than Mr. Obama's defeat, will spend some time with the man in the mirror? I kid, of course. No, the "liberal" media will instead proclaim that the people want bipartisanship, and say nothing about the people's actual desire for good government regardless of whether anyone gets along or not. And Republicans will lurch further and further right -- and why shouldn't they, when Democrats meet Republicans in an ever-rightward-moving "center" so often that you'd have ever reason to suspect their sincerity? Their only reason to change will be this: the people hound them so much that they fear for their jobs. And n.b. that Mr. Obama just spent a year talking about rich folks paying more taxes and still won, in a lousy economy, no less. We have an opportunity, but we have a lot of work to do.

Penny rants for Tuesday, September 18, 2012.

Mother Jones has Mitt Romney on tape telling a gaggle of millionaires that nearly half the country will never vote for him because they are "dependent on government" and "believe they are victims" and "believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it," and that he'll never be able to convince them that "they should take personal responsibility" for their lives. That's a "cling to guns or religion" moment times ten, and I can't wait for the right-wing but he's right! firestorm, so I'll fire off a pre-emptive shot (again): nearly half of all American citizens may pay net zero or net negative income taxes, but they still pay payroll taxes, sales taxes, state income taxes, and property taxes if they own a home -- such that the average household making $64,500 annually still pays a higher percentage of its income in taxes than Apple does. Not to mention General Electric!

Fox and Friends yesterday interviewed alleged former Obama voter and unemployed college graduate Max Rice about his disillusionment with Mr. Obama, and Mr. Rice said he met Mr. Obama in third grade and suggested he was voting for Mr. Romney because he lost a basketball game -- in other words, he made a fool of himself. Or did he? Turns out Mr. Rice is a 20-year-old film student who punked Fox and Friends, and who in the mainstream media deserves a punking more than that trio of propagandists working the we're-just-folks shtick? It gets better: he told Fox News conflicting stories about his education and they still let him on the air. One caveat, though: Ms. Carlson seemed to catch on pretty quickly that something was wrong. Did she already know? And if so, could this be Fox and Friends trying to punk us? If so, they overthought it worse than a post-modernist philosopher.

Finally, give yourselves a pat on the back, because the Senate Homeland Security (sic) Committee postponed hearings on S. 3468, the so-called Independent Agency Regulatory Analysis Act, after getting feedback from good citizens like you. Who knew that people actually care about things like clean water and clean air and being safe from future economic Armageddons? I just wish I could say for sure that the Committee also heard from libertarian-types disgusted at the idea that a President needs yet more authority to override regulations his own branch issues. In any case, give yourself a pat on the back, because you stopped the Senate from running one in on you. You'll probably have to do it again after the election, though, since the Committee might take up S. 3468 again in mid-November. One almost hopes they'll still have too much unfinished business by then -- they almost certainly won't get a Farm Bill reauth or Post Office rescue done by then.

Penny rants for Friday, August 31, 2012.

George Will's latest tells us that "America's 57th presidential election is the first devoted to calling the nation's bluff. When Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan, Republicans undertook the perilous but commendable project of forcing voters to face the fact that they fervently hold flatly incompatible beliefs." What are these "flatly incompatible" beliefs? We never learn, as Mr. Will runs quickly to voters not being as conservative as they say they are to "clientelism" to FDR to public-sector unions to "diversity" to Walter Mondale to Andrew Jackson to telling Nevada to shut up if they vote for Mr. Obama again. The whole thing looks like he made up his mind to tell Americans they want too much, but didn't have the guts to say so. Of course Americans don't "want too much," nor do they want "incompatible" things -- Americans just want good government, government that gives a hand-up when you need it and stays the hell out of your way when you don't, and if that fervent desire doesn't fit snugly into Mr. Will's worldview, that's his damn fault.

Meanwhile, boy oh boy are the "liberal" media fact-checkers having a field day with that speech Paul Ryan made last night. Of course Talking Points Memo can get its licks in the next day, and maybe even the Associate Press, but Politifact? Business Insider? Fox News? Of course we shouldn't make too much of Fox News's infidelity to their man; it only happened on a Fox News blog, where all mainstream media outlets hide their writers who actually want to work, and the fact that it happened at all only means Bill O'Reilly can get a zinger in on anyone who challenges Fox's fairness. And we shouldn't make too much of the "liberal" media's quickness, either, because Paul Ryan's lies are bigger and bolder than usual, and he didn't have the foresight to deliver his remarks over the Labor Day holiday like Mr. Bush did. Besides, the next time any "liberal" media oldhead wants to reminisce about when men were men, he'll fall in love with Paul Ryan's "seriousness" and "intelligence" all over again. God help us if he becomes Vice President.

Penny rants for Friday, August 24, 2012.

California farmers face a shortage of labor this year. "Stronger border controls are keeping workers from crossing into the U.S. illegally," CNBC reports, not that any right-wingers will vote for Mr. Obama because of that, "and the current guest worker program is not providing enough bodies." Also, too, a lot of folks left farm work for construction during the housing bubble, and they sure ain't coming back to a job that pays less than $10/hour. You know what would help solve this problem? Paying your farm workers more, that's what. Maybe giving them more water breaks and bathroom breaks would help, too, since you're out in the sun all day. You know what else might help? If we stopped acting like picking food all day is crap work that only "those" people do. If your work actually helps people, you shouldn't be ashamed of it.

In a peripherally-related note, American researchers find that almost half of America's doctors are "burned out." I was surprised to learn 37 percent of physicians work more than 60 hours a week on average, because I thought that figure would be much higher. You see how the paragraph 3 implies that Obamacare will be to blame for even more burnout? What a terrible thing, to make sure more people can get health care -- did nobody think of the doctors? More people getting more health care isn't the problem -- a sick, immoral, and decadent society that puts pro athletes, rock stars, rappers, and reality show "stars" at its summit is the problem. If we were more committed to the common good, and not just to our own pleasure, we'd have more doctors, and therefore less burnout. Please excuse me for daring to think saying so out loud will do any good.

Meanwhile, Paul Ryan strangely touts "(voting) to send people to war" as a foreign-policy credential. Though I think "going to war myself" would be more impressive -- especially as an alternative to using Social Security funds to finance your college education and then presenting yourself as the poster child for Doing It On My Own -- I'm afraid that for many "liberal" media types, voting to send other people off to their deaths in a war that never made any sense smacks of courage. It's not that voting to send other people off to war is never courageous, but doing so in Iraq sure wasn't. I also recall that, for the "liberal" media, Russ Feingold's habit of being right about every foreign policy topic during the Bush Mobb years somehow made him uniquely unqualified to be Senate Foreign Relations Chair. Maybe we do live in Bizarro World after all.

Texas judge says we should be ready for "civil war" if Mr. Obama gets re-elected. Wow, that's almost a reason to vote for Mr. Obama! If civil war does indeed come to America, instigated by right-wingers who somehow feel "oppressed" by results they could have averted merely by not being pricks, I suppose I'll have to put up with a bunch of rubbish from our "liberal" media about how we should all be nice to our enemies and try to understand where they're coming from and reach out to them. But I don't reach out to whiny diaper-loaded brats, and I certainly don't reach out to whiny diaper-loaded brats trying to shoot me dead, or trying to install a right-wing dictatorship in place of a democratically-elected government. Remember how many liberals wanted to shoot Mr. Bush dead if he got re-elected? Approximately none of us, and he was hardly even elected, either time! When will right-wingers finally man up and live in a country with other people in it?

Penny rants for Saturday, August 11, 2012.

Presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney selects Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his running mate. In a sane and healthy society, this would be a disastrous pick -- Mr. Ryan has proposed two budgets that would kill Medicare and compared Wisconsin union demonstrators to Egyptian demonstrators without meaning to pay a compliment, and he's not even a lock to keep the House seat he's won easily in every election since 1998. But we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society, and here's how he could become Vice President: the "liberal" media, having spent so much time painting him as an "intellectual" and a "serious" "policy wonk," won't want to appear like a bunch of idiots for failing to point out that the Budget Emperor's been running without any clothes on for almost two years, so they won't. I suppose it's possible that the "liberal" media might understand that the "serious policy wonk" mythos won't stand the harsh light of a Presidential campaign, so they might "forget" they ever anointed him. But that's a hell of a thing to count on, and Americans deserve more than that.

In a possibly related note, the Romney campaign suggests that a rash of bad poll numbers for their candidate doesn't accurately reflect how well he's doing. "Guys, it’s the middle of summer, it’s the doldrums, it’s the middle of the Olympics," one Romney adviser said. "There has not been any national news, anything that would push these numbers from 3 to 9 points...You’ve got to have something to precipitate that kind of sea change." But I suspect we do have something that would "precipitate that kind of sea change" -- and that something is Mitt Romney.

Penny rants for Thursday, August 9, 2012.

The New York Times thinks there may be a "mass exodus" of rich people from France if President Hollande enacts a 75% tax on income over one million euros. Evidence? A lot of rich French are overreacting or contemplating overreacting, a few rich French left in the 1980s, three French celebrities left during the Sarkozy Administration. No doubt many of you remember that Princeton University found that Gov. Corzine's tax hikes on the top bracket didn't cause a mass exodus of les riches from New Jersey, despite flat-taxing Pennsylvania being right next door, and you may have noticed that even the Wall Street Journal has given up flogging reduced numbers of high-income earners in Oregon and Maryland as a result of some "tax exodus." I don't know what world the Times lives in, but in the real world, people don't put down or dig up roots only because of their taxes -- especially when their choice is either to be rich or to be rich.

In other news, Turner Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Time-Warner, acquires sports-blogging site The Bleacher Report for a whopping $175 million. Bleacher Report, which has almost as many unique visitors each month as Sports Illustrated's website does, contains mostly user-generated content, and I've read enough Bleacher Report to tell you that this isn't exactly a triumph for user-generated content. Huffington Post, which also uses a lot of unpaid labor and which also parlayed its notoriety into a big payday, does rather better at politics than Bleacher Report does at sports. Of course we tolerate regurgitated rumors and bad analysis much more easily when it's only a game. Problem isn't just that folks will expect that what works with Bleacher Report (and even their slideshows are only mildly amusing) will work anywhere else. Problem is also that folks bring that mentality to their citizenship, and treat their political party like it's their favorite sports team.

Finally, liberal blogger Bill Scher, asked why Mr. Romney seems like such a bad candidate, says "it's not the man, it's the policies" -- not Mr. Romney's "aloof" style, in other words, but the far right-wing policies mainstream Republicans now support. Actually, I tend to agree -- I've long regarded Mitt Romney as a rather smooth talker, even if he seems a bit mechanical at times, and if he doesn't sound smooth now, it must be because it's impossible to do so when you're spouting such crap as you must spout to keep right-wing voters appropriately enraged. What a sad thing for a man who clearly started planning his Presidential run in the late 1990s and obviously anticipated that the 2000s would be A Time for Moderates. I feel less sad, of course, when I hear him mouth all that stupid crap he mouths now like it was part of the plan all along. Really, it's like he just shrugged his shoulders and said, I guess I'll just have to do this instead.

Penny rants for Sunday, July 8, 2012.

Whoa, look out: a right-wing economist has just said that taxing income over $250,000 at 100% would close the deficit -- according to his calculations, doing so would raise $1.4 trillion, and our current budget deficit happens to be about that. Of course, Mr. Williams didn't put it like that, exactly: he said doing such a thing (which no one, including myself, has proposed) would keep the government running for only 141 days, and then he describes how a number of other initiatives no one has proposed (confiscating yachts and jewelry?) wouldn't fill the remaining 224-day gap -- which conveniently ignores the revenue our government already collects, which would just about cover those other 224 days, and also conveniently ignores that we'd run next year with an entirely new set of collected revenues. Also, too, revenues pay for things we all use. After all, did Walter E. Williams personally build the road that gets him to Georgetown?

Meanwhile, another Washington Times op-ed, another blowhard accusing someone of treason as if he's never read Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution he supposedly reveres. I have to confess that I thought Mr. Nugent's suggestion that it would have been better if the South had won the Civil War seemed a bit incongruous -- would slaveowners have annexed the North and subsequently crafted a better health care plan than the putatively conservative Heritage Foundation did? I wondered -- until I remembered that a Southern victory (and a Northern annexation, which Mr. Nugent takes for granted) would also have ensured that a black man never became President. I still think most folks who hate Barack Obama blindly hate him because he's a Democrat, not because he's black, but most clearly ain't all. In a possibly related note, I suspect that Mr. Nugent could have arranged his paragraphs in virtually any order and produced the same op-ed. I'm not actually going to carry out that experiment to be sure.

Penny rants for Thursday, July 5, 2012: special "Republicans still suck!" edition.

Rep. Joe Walsh (S-IL) has lately said that his opponent, Iraq war vet and double amputee Tammy Duckworth, is not a hero. Now he's loudly denying that he said she wasn't a hero, but he can't even defend himself using the Greg Brady Exact Words rule -- if you say Candidate X won't shut up about her heroism, and you also say "true heroes" don't talk about their heroism as much as Candidate X does, then you have just said that Candidate X is not a "true" hero, thus a "false" hero, thus not a hero. What in the world does anyone see in a man who takes a decade to settle up on six figures of child support payments, who says "American Jews aren't as pro-Israel as they should be," who yells at constituents who disagree with him? I'm not sure I ever want to meet someone who thinks this inveterate defender of the rich and powerful "tells it like it is."

Meanwhile, House Republican candidate Chris Collins (NY-27) tells us that people don't die from prostate cancer, breast cancer, and "some of the other things" anymore, because of Teh Technology. Of course, the number of folks who die from these two cancers every year exceeds zero by some 70,000, but Mr. Collins goes on to say that health care costs go up not because of insurance corporation greed or our government's failure to curb pollution, but because health care can do so much more for us now than even thirty years ago! That might be true for people like Mr. Collins, who can buy whatever they can imagine, but that surely doesn't justify crap policies like "selling health insurance across state lines," which only stops states from curbing absurd insurance premium hikes, and "tort reform," which only stops ordinary citizens like you and I from banding together against corporations that hurt us. Yeah, we need more people like Chris Collins -- in the government cheese line.

Penny rants for Tuesday, July 3, 2012.

Whine whine whine: Marc Thiessen wonders why Republicans are so "awful" at picking Supreme Court justices. Liberals get to be liberal all the time waaaaah -- which couldn't possibly be because the Court has had only four of them for a long time, could it? And according to his scorecard, John Roberts is a complete failure as a conservative based on one decision. Gonzalez v. Carharrt, Morse v. Frederick, Citizens United v. FEC, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 -- none of these make Mr. Thiessen's scorecard; if he admitted them as evidence, I suppose he'd have to whine less. And he actually suggests that the mandate's fine for noncompliance wasn't a tax just because Mr. Obama said so, just so he can claim Mr. Roberts "rewrote the statute." And the final paragraph executes a bait-and-switch so obvious I bet even Jonah Goldberg would be embarrassed to have written it.

Meanwhile, dig this: the North Carolina legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto of a fracking bill because one Democratic House Rep pushed the wrong button and accidentally voted to override the veto, and then Republicans wouldn't let her reverse her vote. At least that's the story -- I don't know Rep. Carney well enough to know whether it was really an accident or not, but she's being appropriately apologetic, which I'm sure will be of great comfort to anyone whose tap water gets set on fire by gas drillers. Why Democrats are whining about the process, I can't say -- if you screw up, you bums, don't complain about the opposition taking advantage, just stop screwing up. After all, the last time something like this happened -- anti-"free" trade Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC) voted for CAFTA because of a computer glitch -- Heath Shuler got to go to Congress. So, Reps and Senators, be careful out there, because actions have consequences.

UPDATE. That North Carolina fracking vote was even worse than I realized: as Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies tells us, another Democrat voted to override the fracking veto -- mere hours after Republicans inserted a "technical correction" to a budget bill that delivered $60 million in film industry-related tax breaks to said Democrat's district. Heckuva job, North Carolina!

Penny rants for Tuesday, June 26, 2012.

WA-01 Republican Congressional candidate John Koster claims "there's no Federal Defense of Marriage Act that I know of" during a debate -- and then "corrects" his mistake by saying that since Mr. Obama stopped defending DOMA in court, gay marriage has been left to the states. Uh, no: refusing to defend a law in court doesn't actually mean the Executive branch gets to ignore the law, unless and until the court actually overturns the law. So why is the headline "John Koster owns up to gaffe on federal gay-marriage law"? Long story short, the author asked the candidates during the debate to describe a mistake they'd made and what they'd learned from it, and Mr. Koster answered him after the debate. Strange that he'd credit Mr. Koster for that, given the timing -- and given Mr. Koster's continued ignorance about how our government works.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports on a massive, and apparently controversial, solar energy project on the California/Nevada border. It could kill birds! Flip airplanes! Attract heat-seeking missiles! But n.b. that the project doesn't use photovoltaic cells -- it uses mirrors and a water tower to generate steam, in what seems (to me, at least) a rather Rube Goldbergian scheme. So when the Times asserts that "(t)here is already documentation linking solar power to bird deaths," you could be forgiven for thinking that putting a few solar panels on your roof might make you a menace to the bird population, though the Mojave desert project doesn't use those panels. It's almost like that's the idea! Also, too, the article doesn't source any of said "documentation," despite running on for almost 40 paragraphs. Also, too, the passive voice sucks.

Penny rants for Tuesday, May 29, 2012.

Taegan Goddard laments that the number one New York Times bestseller this week is "a widely-discredited book about President Obama that's filled with false claims and poor research." Pick your snark: 1) "why, that describes a lot of NYT bestsellers!" or 2) if it sold a million copies, that'd still be less than one-third of one percent of the U.S. population. Seriously, though I'm always saying we are a sick, immoral, and decadent culture, Mr. Goddard's point would describe that culture more precisely if anyone put very much credence in "the charts" anymore. There are so damn many bestsellers/pop songs/TV shows now that we can hardly keep track of them -- rather, we carve out personal "tastes" for ourselves, tastes that might overlap with others' and then again might not, and I don't think that's an entirely negative development. After all, "Honey" and "Rock Me Amadeus" were number one hits back in the day, and they're utter crap.

Meanwhile, George Will wrote a piece of hot-and-steaming earlier this month defending Citizens United v. FEC and excoriating Rep. McGovern's proposed anti-corporate personhood constitutional amendment, and entitled this brazen slab of dung "Taking a Scythe to the Bill of Rights," no less! Mr. McGovern has written a lengthy and thorough response -- which the Washington Post has not printed, lest it hurt Mr. Will's fee-fees -- but I think he doesn't go far enough. Mr. Will commits two original sins: 1) he conflates money with speech so he can completely disappear the word "money" from his argument, and 2) he acts as if Mr. McGovern's amendment would deprive actual living people of their rights. It wouldn't: if people could no longer band together to spend their gazillions of dollars to lie to the electorate, they would still be people, and thus would still have Constitutional rights. They just wouldn't have more rights than you and I, which I'm certain is the state of affairs Mr. Will really aims to protect.

Finally, we learn that recent polls showing Scott Walker (R) on top of Tom Barrett (D) in the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election in a week's time suffer from a conservative bias, in that they tend to oversample the number of voters who call themselves "conservative" based on 2006/2008/2010 exit polls. You have to wonder why they'd do that -- it couldn't have anything to do with all that out-of-state money Mr. Walker's getting, could it? We also learn that the Democratic brain trust (sic) in WI seems to be running away from the very impetus for this recall: Mr. Walker's law stripping collective bargaining rights from public-sector union workers. Are Democrats trying to prove they're the party of all of Wisconsin? If so, how would pummeling Mr. Walker for lying about his plan to strip collective bargaining rights conflict with that goal -- and when did Koch Industries become Wisconsinites? Dems might snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again -- unless the people of Wisconsin have something to say about it.

Penny rants for Friday, May 11, 2012.

Yeah, I heard the news: Barack Obama feels gays should be able to get married -- and he also thinks it's a matter for the states to decide! Though gay marriage is no more "a matter for states to decide" than, say, Jim Crow laws were in the '60s, I'm not mad at him -- in a healthy civilization, the President leads with the bully pulpit more than he shoves his will down everyone's throat, and, yes, his speechifying ability means more in that context. I do worry that Mitt Romney's blasé reaction might be part of some long possum game from the Ragehead Party. And I do wish Mr. Obama would have this courage about, say, the PATRIOT Act -- as it is, we're left hoping that the 2013 sunset wasn't an accident, and that some spirited Republican (say, Rand Paul, who held the Senate hostage for seven hours on the eve of the last PATRIOT Act reauth) will do Mr. Obama's dirty work for him. That's not much of a hope, even for fans of nine-dimensional chess.

Meanwhile, Rasmussen has begun to poll a hypothetical three-way race between Messrs. Obama, Romney, and Ron Paul. You may well be asking yourself: self, when did Ron Paul ever suggest he'd run as an indie? (For the record, he has repeatedly said the opposite.) I suspect Mr. Rasmussen, himself a Republican whose brand has taken a lot of well-deserved hits over the years, is creating a non-story -- and blaming it on a hypothetical Democrat "wish" I've never heard anyone express in space-time, no less! And the narrative that Mr. Paul would throw a three-way race to Mr. Romney carries a lot less weight when you notice that Rasmussen has Romney winning 49-44 as of May 10 anyway. Do a significant number of Paulites hold their nose and vote for Mr. Obama? Of course they do! But that hardly makes an indie Paul candidacy a danger to Mr. Obama. Was Ross Perot a danger to George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole, when exit polls had him stealing as many votes from Mr. Clinton as from his opponents?

Finally, I wish I could just ignore these bastards, but the editor of the Greene County (VA) Republican Committee newsletter thinks we'll have "no coarse but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November." Everybody loves democracy, until it stops giving them the results they want! Why will we have no other "coarse", Mr. Diaper-loaded Brat? Because "(t)his Republic cannot survive for 4 more years underneath this political socialist ideologue." You mean the one who cuts payroll taxes, freezes federal workers' pay, and lets Monsanto do what it likes? The one who passes the Heritage Foundation's health reform plan and allows banks to remain "too big to fail"? That "socialist"? Barack Obama is less a "socialist" than any President since Grover Cleveland save Messrs. McKinley, Harding, Coolidge, Reagan, and Bush the Lesser, and anyone who's given two minutes of thought to the matter knows that. I just wish people who can't think straight couldn't shoot straight, either.

Penny rants for Wednesday, May 9, 2012.

So Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar lost his primary yesterday -- and lost big, by over 20 points -- to Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock. Apparently Mr. Lugar's outstanding ad attacking Mr. Mourdock's desire to junk Social Security came too late -- though not too late, of course, for Rep. Donnelly, whom Mr. Mourdock faces in the general election. I'm a bit sad about Mr. Lugar's loss, not because I think he's a "moderate," or even because I like some of the things he's done over the years, but because now folks think a "moderate" is someone who deviates from the party line two percent of the time, or someone who's not a rage-filled reactionary, or someone who actually gives a crap about government. Mr. Mourdock, for his part, assured us that his definition of "bipartisanship" means Democrats bow to Republicans, and I'm sure Mr. McConnell will discourage such bluntness going forward. And in case you thought Mr. Mourdock represents some kind of populist strain of voter, Gaius Publius will set you straight. One of Mr. Lugar's final acts of "apostasy," apparently, was his support for limiting credit card swipe fees, which seems to have angered the banksters.

Meanwhile, some idiot at a Romney rally dropped the "t" word on President Obama, and Mitt Romney waited until he spoke with reporters to condemn it. But I'm not willing to beat up on Mitt Romney over this -- the questioner got big applause twice when accusing Mr. Obama of stepping all over the Constitution (where she was between 2000 and 2008, I can't say), but got stone silence when she accused Mr. Obama of treason. Possibly, Mr. Romney decided the silence did his job for him; I'd rather he corrected her impression, preferably by actually referring to Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, but actually, I felt a little bad for him -- dig him saying the Constitution was "probably inspired." Probably? Teabagger Nation snorted, doesn't he know that God Himself handed the Constitution to the Founders on Mt. Sinai? Mitt Romney really doesn't like pandering to rageheads, though no one made him run for President of the Ragehead Party, and no one made him pander to people who'll vote for him anyway just because he's not The Hated One. Seriously, if Satan had Mitt Romney's money, he could have won this nomination.

Penny rants for Friday, May 4, 2012.

More evidence that Google has the FCC in its hip pocket arrives courtesy Chris Soghoian at Wired. Last weekend, Google released a minimally-redacted FCC report concluding that Google intentionally intercepted private WiFi communications in its Street View project. You may well be asking: didn't the FCC release that report? Well, yes, the FCC did release a heavily-redacted report two weeks earlier, blacking out the parts that described Google intentionally intercepting communications -- you know, the parts the public deserve to know about. Mr. Soghoian correctly demands Congressional investigations of both Google and the FCC, but I bet Darrell Issa, as conscious of all the googles in Google's bank account as anyone, passes up a chance to include the FCC's shenanigans in his "most corrupt Administration in history" narrative. That'd be a shame, because some good might actually come of it.

Meanwhile, Alyssa Rosenberg writes a complex critique of the Fox TV show Glee: "Glee is an immoral show, but not for the reason cultural conservatives (sic) believe. It’s become a show that’s not just sloppy but exploitative and manipulative of serious societal issues and human experiences." You mean it's immoral to discard complex situations as soon as they require more than an episode's worth of commitment (or as soon as they don't fit a particular week's song selection)? As someone who has long accepted that bad art is also bad civics, I totally agree: pop culture purveyors generally don't commit to their creations enough, settling for titillation and arousal more often than not, and thus don't commit to their customers enough. And I don't think it's coincidence that pop culture uses "trauma as a sparkly toy" while our elites in politics and business only seem to care about short-term profits.

Penny rants for Monday, April 30, 2012.

So the Washington Post, long a purveyor of "centrist" pablum, permits a pair of writers to assert that the Republicans really are the problem with American politics. But the sentiment still seems a little soft. Messrs. Mann and Orrnstein say "self-styled bipartisan groups" (paragraph 6) try to move politics to the center, when one could more easily argue they move politics to the right and call it the center. The writers mislabel four conservative Republicans "moderates" in paragraph 7 -- folks like Charles Matthias, John Sherman Cooper, or Margaret Chase Smith too unmemorable somehow? And saying that modern-day Republicans insist on "principle" (paragraph 19) frankly gives Republicans too much credit -- modern-day Republican "principle" only involves their corporate paymasters' money. The article says a lot of true things, sure, but you and I have known them for years, and I doubt the writers will penetrate the mindset of the "elites" by flattering their prejudices.

Meanwhile, another day ending in "y," another Republican calling anything he doesn't like "socialism." Or, more precisely, "the stage three cancer of socialism," which I presume is differentiable from stage four somehow. Of course, when Mr. Akin refers to "what the Democrats did to the private student loans and take it all over by the government," he actually describes an effort to get private bankers out of the federal student loan business, thus lowering the cost of said loans. Why would a nominally conservative Congressman support a federal government effort to outsource its loans to private bankers -- rather than, say, ending federal student loans while regulating private lenders? Possibly because his banker paymasters told him to, possibly because he wants to make the federal student loan process so onerous and expensive that it falls apart -- or possibly because he doesn't want anyone telling him what to do, like some diaper-loaded brat in the middle of a tantrum, or John Raese.

Finally, possibly because I enjoy causing myself physical pain, I did watch this entire five-minute-plus clip of Sean Hannity "interviewing" Michelle Malkin about matters including "little lynch mobs" attacking "Republican donors." Note well that, for Ms. Malkin, these "lynch mobs" include you, if you called Coke or your state legislator and told them to disassociate themselves from ALEC. But setting aside, for a moment, the fact that pressure from citizens does not equal an "ad hominem attack" -- it takes a full American crapload more than "ad hominem attacks" to make a "lynch mob," even a "little" one. Really! Over a dozen corporations dropped ALEC, with no ropes, no trees, no rifles. When nominal "conservatives" get this hysterical over the democratic process actually working -- and, indeed, Michelle Malkin seems hardly able to catch her breath here -- they not only act they way they say liberals act, but they dishonor the good name of conservatism.

Penny rants for Tuesday, April 24, 2012.

Here's the New York Times, burying the lede on a front-page above-the-fold story. The first six paragraphs suggest that Mr. Obama has shifted his view on executive power toward a view more like Mr. Bush's, which of course he has, but certainly not on the basis of the evidence the Times article presents in those paragraphs. Mr. Obama has, in fact, embraced Mr. Bush's unconstitutional and unconscionable doctrines of warrantless wiretapping and indefinite detention, but only after they became law, and when Mr. Obama raised fuel economy standards, he exercised a power Congress had already granted him via legislation, versus Mr. Bush's habit of saying a law simply doesn't apply to him. That doesn't justify anything Mr. Obama does, but the distinction is important, and we don't get a hint of it until paragraph nine, when it should have been in paragraph one. I wonder why the Times would want to "clumsily" conflate overruling statutes on torture and job creation programs for veterans in anyone's mind.

Meanwhile, Mike and Ike candies put out the sort of mildly-amusing PR campaign that no one would remember in six months anyway -- except that it's got Tony Perkins's shorts in a bunch. The Family Research Council President spoke thusly: "It’s just another subtle example of society chipping away at the value of marriage...And I don’t know what’s more disturbing -- that advertisers think divorce appeals to kids or that sexualizing candy will make people buy more....look for Mike & Ike to have a distinctly liberal flavor.” Ooh, snap! I don't know what's most distubring -- the use of "liberal" as a curse word, the use of "just another...example" as if anecdotes equal arguments, the reflexive equation of a breakup with a "divorce," the reflexive equation of homosexuality with "sexualization" in the complete absence of any actual gay sexual behavior, or the tenor of a man with no damn sense of humor about anything at all. Just kidding; I think the fourth item's the most disturbing. But not by much.

Penny rants for Monday, April 23, 2012.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) thinks folks should boycott Coca-Cola because it "sucombed (sic) to pressure fr Leftist (sic) not to support ALEC," but I ain't mad at him, and not just because there are plenty of good reasons to boycott Coca-Cola. What Mr. Grassley proposes is democracy at work -- we can put pressure on Coca-Cola to wash its hands of ALEC's anti-voter and pro-corporate initiatives, but other folks have just much right to put pressure on Coca-Cola to do the opposite. Naturally, I suspect the only way to get other folks to go along with a pro-ALEC campaign is to lie to them, to tell them that we're somehow abridging ALEC's "rights," and therefore all of humanity's rights! But nobody put a gun to Coke's head and made them quit ALEC. It didn't even take a shareholder's revolt.

In other news, I had nearly forgotten about Konstantin Chernenko, the Soviet leader for a little over a year until his 1985 death, until I saw Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes" video. And though in this pit Mr. Chernenko looks a bit vigorous, his appearance still seems an accident of history -- after all, Mr. Andropov preferred Mr. Gorbachev as a successor. A friend of mine, noting that the song felt "unfinished" to him, prompted a look at the lyrics, in which "cowboy number one/A born-again poor man's son" gets two lines to himself while Mr. Chernenko ("farmer number two"?) gets bupkus. Also, at video's end, as Mr. Reagan seems aware of the havoc he's helped cause, the world blows up with Mr. Chernenko's back to the camera. Could it have been that FGTH, fairly successful envelope-pushers in other ways, hesitated when confronting the Evil Empire?

Penny rants for Friday, April 20, 2012.

Now this is evil: agricultural corporation Monsanto has filed 150 lawsuits against small farmers for the "intellectual property theft" that supposedly occurs when Monsanto's genetically-modified seed contaminates their crop. If a man raped a woman and then claimed their child is a "rip-off" of his DNA in a lawsuit, he'd be no worse than Monsanto. I'd like to think that even if they put some thought into this scam -- by, say, sending out "warnings" to small farmers that they'll be sued if they don't protect their crop from contamination (which is, not incidentally, impossible) -- a judge would throw such a suit out in half a minute, and not just because Monsanto asserts a patent on a form of life! But I'd also suspect that the farmers they've sued would be broken by legal fees by then. Or maybe not: the Public Patent Foundation sued Monsanto a little over a year ago on behalf of over 200,000 farmers belonging to 60 organizations. Their novel thesis? That no Monsanto Frankenseed can be patented, because all it does is cause harm, and you don't give patents to harmful items. I wish them luck.

Meanwhile, from the EVERYTHING IS HITLER!!!!!!!!! file: West Virginia Senate candidate John Raese (R) -- last seen too incompetent to ride a big Republican wave in a big Republican state against a Governor of slipping popularity -- got caught on tape yesterday comparing no-smoking signs to Hitler's Jewish stars: "I have to put a huge sticker on my buildings to say this is a smoke-free environment....Remember Hitler used to put Star of David on everybody's lapel, remember that? Same thing." Now, as you digest that mound of dung, I don't want it to get lost that he also said "I don't want government telling me what I can do and what I can't do because I'm an American," as if laws proscribing, say, murder should maybe be optional. But, yeah, a government mandate that you keep people from smoking in your building is not comparable to being forced to wear a Star of David, simply because you don't get cancer from breathing in Jews. Next: Mr. Raese does a media tour to tell everyone how he's oppressed by accurate reporting of his own stupidity.

Penny rants for Thursday, April 19, 2012.

Oh, look, it's the "liberal" media hard at work trying to convince us that Mitt Romney's flip-flopping habit might actually be a strength. One might also say "oh, look, here's Howard Kurtz fortifying his bad arguments with quotations from his consultant friends," but the theme's the main problem. Does Mr. Kurtz really think that "if voters believe (Mr. Romney) was just throwing red meat to voracious primary voters" they might actually be more likely to vote for him? Giving two diametrically opposite positions on a controversial issue the same day because you're afraid a segment of your constituency will throw a temper tantrum about it is not the Webster's definition of "respect." None of this is to say Mr. Romney can't win despite his flip-floppiness, but it might take a lot more yammering from the "liberal" media about Mr. Romney's "secret positions" to seal the victory.

Meanwhile, we learn from the Greenlining Institute that the top 30 tech corporations in America pay, on average, 16 percent of their income in federal taxes. Boy, it's a good thing Republicans have such a hard-on for lowering the 35% corporate tax rate! Note well that the most profitable corporation in the world (Apple) pays less than 10% of its income in federal taxes, and Amazon has a lower tax burden than the average tax burden of families making less than $18,400 per year. Note, also, that you only have to make around $90,000 annually to have a larger tax burden than the Top 30 tech corporations' average -- and that profits for the Top 30 tech corporations have nearly doubled since 2009 as their average tax burden has fallen. But that means they're paying more in revenues, replies the Arthur Laffer Clown Car -- though that would not be a way of saying they're paying enough, and why aren't they hiring if they're doing so well?

Penny rants for Thursday, February 23, 2012.

Don't look now, but Mr. Obama has dropped another bomb on the American people, in the form of his corporate tax "reform." The "reform" cuts the top tax rate from 35% to 28%, thus giving legitimacy to the corporatist argument that corporations just can't compete in the world economy because every other country's tax rate is lower boo hoo hoo when, last I looked, corporations were still sitting on trillions of dollars, handing out billions in bonuses to their undeserving chieftains, and, ah, not paying any damn taxes. The punchline? Mr. Obama's tax "reform" claims to be "revenue-neutral," but though it closes a few loopholes it doesn't actually specify how it's going to make up almost $1 trillion in lost revenue over ten years. Which makes it kinda, you know, not revenue-neutral. And whatever happened to raising revenue, especially in a time of exploding budget deficits? We bail corporations out and we give them exemptions and loopholes out the wazoo, so the very least they could do is pay more money so we all might have a shot at a better life. But not, apparently, in Obama Super-Happy Bipartisan Consensus Fun Time Land.

Meanwhile, I realize I haven't just come out with what sticks in my craw about Rick Santorum, so I'll do that now: the man doesn't seem to comprehend that coerced devotion is useless. Let's say -- just for the sake of argument, and at the considerable risk of blowing open a hole in space-time -- that Rick Santorum is right about everything. If he were, as President, to force Congress to codify his hypothetical righteousness in law, such that America would have no choice but to become a Godly nation, he still won't create a Godly nation; he'll create a sham of a Godly nation, one in which good Americans go through the motions of being Godly without any pleasure whatsoever, and devotion without pleasure cannot endure, because people will not endure it. When Mr. Mencken called Puritanism "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," he might as well have been talking about Rick Santorum's 2012 Presidential campaign, which never ever shuts up about lust and homosexuality and the perfidy of wimminfolk and never ever talks about, you know, love, or friendship, or caring, or community. And God forbid he should talk about these things in his inside voice. Even Rush Limbaugh says he's loud.

Penny rants for Friday, January 6, 2012.

We've got good news for the economy -- no, not the latest unemployment or GDP figures, but minimum wage hikes in eight states beginning on January 1st. Though right-wingers have overrun many state legislatures, existing law in these eight states mandates that the minimum wage must keep pace with inflation, so now each of these states has a higher minimum wage than the federal standard of $7.25/hr. The CNN article seems sanguine about the stimulative power of higher minimum wages, which is refreshing. No doubt right-wingers will scream "bias," since the article quotes only one putative expert, from the National Employment Law Project (which provides us with action alerts). But "liberal" media "analyses" usually just quote "experts" who tell us minimum wage increases do nothing but harm, and never challenge them on the inevitable lack of support for that statement. Someone would need to explain to me how that's not bias.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama recess-appointed Richard Cordray to the CFPB and three officials to the NLRB this week, and the reaction from liberaldom was, approximately, it's about effing time. Though I normally expect Mr. Obama to cave, I'm not surprised by the appointments -- the CFPB is one of his cornerstone legislative accomplishments, and the NLRB is on the verge of operating without a quorum. Also, Mitch McConnell's not going to win people to his side by complaining about the precise length of a recess between the Senate pro forma sessions that have prevented recess appointments as far back as 2007, like the Constitution gives a damn about any of it. Note well, though, that Mr. Obama still has made fewer recess appointments than just about every other recent President, against far more obstruction from the opposition party. I do not understand the efficacy of constantly getting sand kicked in your face -- most people recoil from Presidents who constantly take abuse without fighting back.

Finally, as you know by now, Rick Santorum came within eight frickin' votes of winning the Iowa Presidential primary this week. One is tempted to chuckle at hard-right Republican voters placing their hopes in a man who lost a Senate re-election effort six years ago, by 18 points, but I feel compelled to ask: can he win the the big prize? And I feel compelled to answer: yes, he can. Pundits tend to overplay his working class roots (versus his millions "earned" as a consultant in recent years, for example), but they're not nonexistent, and the economy's still bad and Mr. Obama hasn't done enough about that. So, if the economy remains bad, and if we start seeing cracks in Mr. Obama's legendary discipline, and (this is important) if Mr. Santorum can learn to speak about half as loud as he normally speaks, then yes, Rick Santorum can win Florida and Ohio and Nevada and maybe even Pennsylvania. And sure he can get the nomination -- these days, the "liberal" media tolerates so much filth spewing from right-wing mouths that Rick Santorum must seem almost quaint to a lot of folks.