LEAVWORLD: GRAFFITI POLITTI

What a crazy political week! First, Pelosi bashes Obama over the "spending freeze" before the State of the Union Show, then Obama slaps the Supreme Court to their faces at the Show! Let the Dems bash each other, and the Supreme Court, and see how that goes over with the public. Bashing the GOP is not helping, either. They stated their positions credibly at the Baltimore debate, and the President looked weak at times. If Obama, Pelosi and Reid are trying to sell "bipartisanship," nobody's buying it, especially independents. People who are sick of "party loyalty" creating "bad government" vote on the policies, not the politics. It's ironic then, that the President is trying to use party loyalty to pass legislation that is turning policy-minded independent voters against his party. It's political suicide, but "they've got Me," the President told retiring Dem Congressman Marion Berry, regarding his legislative agenda's p...

Senator-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts ran on a promise of being the forty-first vote to kill the partisan "health care reform" bill, ironically named after the late Senator Kennedy. Independent voters rallied to give him a huge victory in Tuesday's special election. While the vote margin wasn't "huge," the victory itself was. That much is beyond debate, though there will be much finger-pointing on how and why it happened. More on that later. Looking forward, what impact will this have on the health care reform legislation, which is currently in conference? Many are talking about different "gimmicks" that the majority can use to push it through before Brown is seated in the Senate. Some are suggesting using the "reconcilliation" process, which only requires fifty-one votes. None of these will work, for a number of reasons. First, there are no grounds to delay seating Brown. If the vote were closer, a recount would be understandable. H...

Reconciling the House and Senate reform bills is not going smoothly. There are numerous issues that can't be agreed on, from union opposition to the so-called "cadillac" tax, to abortion funding colliding with the House's "Stupak amendment." Conventional wisdom says that the final bill will be closer to the Senate version, which barely got a filibuster-proof sixty votes. Not so, according to Rep. Charles ("what taxes?") Rangel, who is demanding the final bill be closer to the House version, where it passed with a three vote margin. Meanwhile, former supporters are jumping ship left and right. New York Governor Paterson (D), and California Governor Schwartznegger (R) both have come out against the bill, saying it piles unfunded mandated on their states. One wonders what took them so long to realize this, after the same thing happened with the stimulus bill. That bill extended unemployment benefits, but only funded the first year's worth, leaving...