Triskadekaphobia

Happy Friday the Thirteenth.

That is all.

Waiting for the third shoe to drop

Lou Dobbs, out at CNN.
John Solomon, out at Moonie Times - which itself is in chaos.

Here's hoping that these things come in threes.

Sunday Audition: Obama Fails Again

A comprehensive health care reform bill that creates a national health exchange, complete with an option to enroll in a government-run program, has just passed the US House of Representatives.  While the development may seem to be good news for President Barack Obama, being the realization of health care reforms he had been pressing throughout the 2008 Presidential campaign, it is in fact just another in the long line of stinging rebukes of his failing presidency.

The House bill is such an indictment of Obama's ideals that his response to it happening was a clear declaration of his intent to veto the bill, should it cross his desk.

How did this happen?  Liberals like to joke about things that "no one could have predicted", usually about some sort of situation that is truly unpredictable.  But the fact that Barack Obama has failed yet again, was easily predicted well over a year ago, when conservatives were warning the country.

Obama's audacious plan to provide near-universal health care to the public was so extreme, a pipe-dream that liberals have been pursuing for a century, that conservatives laughed at it.  Taken in context with the fact that the untried and untested freshman senator from Illinois had no experience and was unlikely to get anything accomplished had many a conservative guffawing and rolling in the aisles.

So it was very easy to predict that Obama's health care reform program would fail, and with the passing of HR 3962, it has.

Win Some, Lose Some

Worst possible outcome for me.  I was somewhere around D +5, which I guess shows my optimism.  Then again, the key factor in my previous predictions was incumbency - and if being incumbent means less at election time, that's not a bad thing.  Anyways, having called half the winners correctly, I neither look presciently clever nor moronic stupid enough for a Wash Post column.  Also Maine Prop 1 sucks like hell.

Okay, time to assess - McDonnell was a gimme, and polls were strongly in Christie's favour for the entire campaign season only tightening near the end.  NY-23 is the big story of the night having gone D for the first time in, like, a bajillion gillion years.  Actually, the real story is about outside interests with deep pockets being told off by a united electorate.  That's a big win.

No, my real disappointment from last night is Prop 1.  I can't believe that 52.7% of Mainers (Maine-ians?  Maine-ites?  Maine-ese?) voted for that sucker.  WTF went wrong there?  Anyways, I no longer feel bad about claiming that Moxie tastes like ass.

Predictions

I figure if I'm right, then I look clever which is YAYYS!
If I'm wrong, I'll be that much closer to a job writing for Fred Hiatt.
If, much more likely, I get a little bit right, and a little bit wrong - I can always delete the post.

NJ Gov - Corzine in a squeaker.  48-45-7
VA Gov - McDonnell blow-out.  55-45 or greater.
NY 23 - Owens blow-out.  55-45 or more.
MA Prop 1 - Yes 48, No 52

Sunday Audition: Kiss My Rump

With the withdrawl of Dede Scozzafava from the race for New York's 23 congressional district, the claims of the Republican party shifting towards the extreme right have become in vogue again. Indeed, the suspension of Scozzafava's campaign is being used as an excuse to trot out the accusations of the GOP being a rump anew.

It was one year ago yesterday that Paul Krugman called the GOP a rump party, based on predictions that the 2008 elections would see 15 Republican representatives lose their seats, with the majority being more moderate than the bulk of the party. Once again, reality shows that Krugman was completely off the mark, as 26 Republican congressmen lost their seats, nearly double what Krugman was basing his analysis on.

Extremist liberal Markos Moulitsas, founder of the fringe left website DailyKos.com has been beating the drum of rump status for the GOP for months. His only evidence is that approval of the GOP is highest in the level-headed working class South, the region the lions share of Republican senators hail from.

And now with moderate Dede Scozzafava leaving the race, claims that the GOP has abandoned the mainstream to pander to the base have reached new highs.

Well, firstly as a complete rebuttal to Moulitsas' ridiculous claims, note that the race here is for a congressional seat in New York. Last time I checked, New York wasn't part of the South.

But more importantly, note that the official voice of the GOP in this circumstance, the NRCC, has now endorsed Doug Hoffman. Polling indicated Hoffman had three times as much support as Scozzafava, if not more. Thus the NRCC switched to a candidate favoured by more New Yorkers, a move that only partisan hacks could claim was anything but appealing to moderates.

Indeed, if either of the two major political parties is pandering to their base and conducting purges of those who don't toe the party line, it's the Democrats. For simply engaging in some attempts at bipartisanship, Joe Lieberman is being threatened with having his committee assignments revoked.

All of this is even more astounding since the topic driving all of this political posturing is socialized medicine. Can there be a greater example of how far the Democratic leadership is pandering to the extreme left base?

The fundamentalist progressives that have taken over the Democrat party were initially pushing for a universal single-payer system like "Medicare For All", but in the race to pander the most to these hardcore left-wing extremists, that has morphed into the public option that is in the proposed bills from both House and Senate. Not content with the complete government take-over of health insurance, these liberal activists pushed for a public option where a small fraction of the US population would get to choose to enroll in a government insurance program. And the Democratic leadership was all to happy to add this decidedly pro-choice persepctive.

Indeed, the Senate version even allows entire states to choose to not offer the program at all.

Considering all of that, it's clear which party is being run by fanatical ideologues.