chrisishardcore.com

Disgusting

So if Republican Sens Chafee (RI), Ensign (NV), Graham (SC), Gregg (NH), Lott (MS), Nickles (OK) and Sununu (NH) disliked the Medicare bill enough to vote against its final passage, why did they think it was ok to waive supermajority budgetary rules to allow its passage in the first place? That Republican party loyalty is something else.

Um, Jim?

Finally, Jim Wooten and I agree on something: this Medicare bill stinks. I do have one question for Jim though. If liberals and "conservatives" both agree that this bill is no good, then I guess there are no true "conservatives" in the US Congress as practically every self-described conservative, Republican and Democrat, shamelessly voted for this bill as well as the energy bill. It's one thing for the Heritage foundation to take a principled stand against some or other piece of legislation. It would be quite another for an actual conservative member of Congress to do the same.

Statistically Insignificant?

I've noticed that Howard Dean seems to be raising about $65 per donor in his latest online fundraiser, up from an average of about $58 over the summer. I don't know what this means (fair disclosure: I've given about $200 to the campaign this year) but it seemed significant enough to blog about.

We tried it in Alabama...

From the horse's mouth it's Virginia Gov. Mark Warner's (D) plan for tax reform in that commonwealth. Sound pretty reasonable to me. We'll see what the wingnut opposition is.

Shame!

The passage of the Medicare bill in the House is a great shame for that institution. A 3 hour roll call vote? When will Republican reps grow some balls? It seems to me that if you're a Republican Congressman, your loyalty is to DeLay/Frist/Bush instead of your principles.

I can't believe we're paying private companies bribes to "compete" for senior's healthcare coverage. If you're a capitalist, I hope you understand that this is way worse than socialism, which is an appealing alternative to this bill.

Great News!

I spoke with a source in the state Senate who told me today that Gary McConnell (ex-GEMA director) is a go for district 52. In addition to that, state Rep. Ron Borders should be a lock to hold state Sen. Tim Golden's Valdosta district. They've fielded candidates in Athens, West Cobb, South Georgia (including the mayor of Alma to take on Tommie Williams), Augusta and LaGrange. We may be able to win back the state Senate without even defeating any of the party switchers, as at least 3 of the seats I mentioned above have strong Democratic performance numbers. It would be nice to beat the four turncoats, though.

Filibuster

I don't agree with Matthew Yglesias when he says the filibuster should be junked. He has proposed swapping the filibuster rule in general for up or down votes on judicial nominees. I suppose in a truly progressive era, the filibuster is an inconvenience, but now it's only doing progressive causes good. Today's Senate vote on invoking cloture on the energy bill was 57-40. I'd be happier with a solid 41 votes against it, and since two Senators who missed voting were Kerry and Edwards, I would say Schumer's Democrats probably have it in the bag.

Check out an interesting trend though, of Northeast and Sunbelt Republicans joining "blue state" Democrats in opposing their own party on this measure. New Hampshire and Arizona are key states in any Democratic presidential victory next year, and should also be key pickups for Democrats to target. Republicans stopped giving conservative Democrats from the South a free pass long ago, we ought to do the same to liberal Republicans from the North. If the Susan Collinses of the world want to stay in the Senate, they're going to have to switch parties one of these days.

I should have known better

From Zell's home page:

Miller: Atlantic Station able to compete for $2 billion in tax-free bonds.
Atlanta 'Smart-Growth Community' Receives Big Boost In Energy Bill

and

Miller-Chambliss Announce Georgia Funds Included in Energy and Water Bill

.

Well, this sours me further on my already pessimistic feelings about Atlantic Station. Regardless, it seems clearer to me that the key to understanding Zell is to look to the era he grew up in. Then Georgia's senators were often demagogues, playing it up to the local audience, all the while playing the game to get as much pork, whether from an energy bill or military base or farm bill, as possible. In 1980, Miller set out to unseat Herman Talmidge from the US Senate. In 2003, he's become him.

Majette for Senate?

Rollcall ($ub req.) and Capitol Impact's Georgia Report ($sub) are reporting that Congresswoman Denise Majette (GA 4) is being mentioned as a possible Senate candidate. Just passing this info on, really. I thought Majette was a relatively weak candidate (who ran against a much weaker candidate in the primary and general elections) who benefited from the fact that no stronger candidates were willing to get into the race against Cynthia McKinney. Of course, there are a lot of parallels with the Senate race, which a long list of suitors has turned down.

According to Capitol Impact, other rumored candidates are Columbus lawyer Jim Butler (who I'd heard mentioned) as well as state Rep. DuBose Porter (D - Dublin) and state Sens. Carol Jackson (D - Cleveland) and Michael Meyer von Bremen (D - Albany).

I don't think Butler has the bonafides to go from the Natural Resources board to statewide office. Porter's probably DOA due to his prominent role in the flag change and tobacco tax increase, though his departure from the Speaker Pro Tem's office would open up opportunities for some political allies of mine in the House. Jackson might make a good candidate, but would better serve Georgia Democrats by holding her North Georgia seat (unless ex-Sen. Bart Ladd (R - Dunwoody) makes good on his promise to run for that seat, which I doubt he could win even if it were open). Meyer von Bremen could probably make a good candidate, but if he thought he had a good chance why wouldn't you just talk Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor into running instead?

Wes, Greg Greene, others: We should start an inside baseball Georgia politics group blog. Remember how great the Georgia stuff was on the Political State Report last session? Why limit it to there?

Shorter William Safire

My first shorter entry.
Shorter William Safire:

Everyone opposed to the Iraqi war should apologize for it's lack of success. Unrealistic optomists like myself apologize for not being proven correct yet. President Bush doesn't owe anyone an apology.

What's the Point?

The Republican Senators from Maine, New Hampshire and John McCain (R - Ariz.) are going to join the majority of Democratic Senators in voting against the energy bill and possibly filibustering it if necessary.
If you want to see what a bill looks like that was written by and for lobbyists, check out the image to the right. This bill contains everything the industry could possibly want (minus ANWR) and few of the provisions the Senate actually voted on before it got to conference committee.
Susan Collins (R - Maine) is especially incensed, as two of her environmentally friendly amendments, which passed with 60 and 99 votes didn't even make it in the final bill.
Attention, Zell Miller: This really is the last straw for you and I. If you vote for this bill, you'll show yourself to be far from the 'independent mind' you advertise on your book jackets, and truly this President's yes-man in the Senate.
UPDATE: Here's a good conservative critique of the bill.

Ignorance is bliss

Senate Appropriations Chairman Jack Hill (D R - Reidsville) previews the Republican strategy to balance the budget in Georgia next year:

Hill said he was optimistic that Georgia's continuing population growth could generate the level of revenue needed to keep the budget in balance. "I think we're going to grow our way out of this situation".

Now, on the one hand this kind of optimism can be refreshing. But to suggest that more Georgians will alleviate our budget crises overlooks one major problem and a minor one. The biggest logical fault is that while more Georgians would pay more taxes, they'd also cause the state to incur greater expenses, especially if they have school aged children. At best it's a break-even. The minor flaw to this argument is that the kind of emigrees Gov. Perdue has reached out to are seniors who would a) pay no Georgia income taxes and b) be more inclined than the average Georgian to use government services like Medicare and Medicaid.
Hill has proven himself not up to task to be chairman of one of the legislature's most important committees. Surely the previous chairman, Sen. George Hooks (D - Americus) would be doing a better job. I suppose that's partisan sour grapes, but aren't Republicans like Sen. Mitch Seabaugh (R - Sharpsburg) or Tommie Williams (R - Numerous middle Ga locations) upset that they were looked over in order to reward a party switcher. It seems like someone would be upset with it.

Political Junkies Stock Exchange

A dream of mine for sometime has been to create a political stock exchange (most likely for fake money, but who knows) to track election related events. The Democratic primary is, to me, the perfect example of a huge situation where many interrelated outcomes will eventually align to pick one outcome...the nominee. Anyway, before I even begin to tackle this project, I would like to know 1) how many delegates each state will send to the Democratic national convention and 2) how they are awarded. Of course, 1 is more important than 2, for my purposes.

Regardless, looking at these numbers for 2000, it's pretty clear how and why South Carolina is an important state and maybe more important than New Hampshire. Additionally, I think the Iowa Markets, while historically pretty accurate, are prone to favoritism and swings. Do you really think Dean is 6 times as likely as Clark to be the nominee, 10 times more likely than Kerry, 40 times more likely than Lieberman and almost 2 times more likely than the rest of the field combined?

Yes, Virginia

Virginia Postrel, former editor of Reason magazine, is a pretty committed libertarian though I suspect she is also committed to tactical voting in close races. I recommend her books and blog for reading. That said, the following is hardly an endorsement for any of the Democratic candidates, or even "the" Democratic candidate come next November. However, she does make an interesting point:

The Rove Tariffs, as Andrew Sullivan calls them, don't just hurt California, a state Bush won't win anyway. The tariffs hurt the American economy as a whole, they hurt America's credibility abroad, and they definitely hurt the administration's credibility on economic issues. If there's one thing Candidate Bush appeared to believe in his heart of hearts, it was that free trade is good. If you can't trust him on a small, obvious policy issue like this one, how can you trust him on more difficult questions?

Milton County Solution

One way to squeeze the proposed Milton County into existence without having to modify the Georgia Constitution (which limits the number of counties in Georgia to the current number) is to change Gwinnett County into a city. I doubt this is going to happen, but like I said you never know and I'm sure every North Georgia Republican legislator would vote for it.

Disconnect

I think a huge disconnect in American culture is the "war on drugs" or whatever you want to call it. Middle to upper-middle class kids experience with drugs is viewed as merely a "growing pains" diversion, just one of the many hijinks on the road to adulthood. Consequently, when these same kids start to become politically active, the "war on drugs" is a convenient target -- why should anyone go to jail for the things that they or their friends enjoyed during high school and college?

On the other hand, the experience of most poorer communities with drug addiction and violence is no breezy day at the park. I have a hard time taking seriously those middle class drug users who protest for treatment instead of jail time when what they really mean is treatment for lower-class drug users while at the same time they plan on continuing recreational drug use themselves without penalty. Hmm.

The Honorable Dr. Frist

I think the real lesson of the whole Sen. Frist web poll thing is not so much that Frist is dishonest or maybe in over his head as majority leader of the U.S. Senate, but that webpolls are unscientific and generally a waste of time.

That's not to say that they can't be fun, my friend Emlyn often has a quirky trivial poll on his front page. But for Frist, or CNN, or the AJC to run online polls and pretend they are anything but a meaningless diversion is getting kind of old and should probably just cease altogether.

Psychology of Spam

I'm pretty sure I've talked about the economics of spam (it costs next to nothing so just one sucker's response will turn a profit). What I really don't get is the psychology behind it. I've signed up for Earthlink's SPAMBlocker, which to me at least, is a pretty clear message that I'm not interested in receiving any SPAM whatsoever. Yet some spammers will go to the trouble of filling out the auto-response form that gets them one step closer to mailbox, even though it still doesn't get them in.

I'd always thought that spam prayed on the innocence of newer internet users. "Sophisticated" netizens like myself who've been e-mailing since the early '90's don't fall for any of this, do they? Apparently so. Despite the fact that I've sent a clear signal to spammers that I'm not interested in their offers, they go the extra distance to either manually fill out a response form to my SPAMblocker or they wrote a program to do it for them. Either way it's a lot of effort for mail I'm not going to read much less respond to anyway.

The Water's Edge

I notice that when a Democrat dare criticize the President's foreign policy, right-wing hacks (though not all Republicans or conservatives) start shouting "politics stops at the water's edge" pining for some good ol' imaginary time when this was the case.

I also notice that few of these same hacks seem to mind when Bush injected politics into international trade by imposing protectionist tariffs on steel. It's good to see that the EU countries realize they are dealing with someone with no principles (other than winning) and are threatening hitting Bush back by imposing tariffs on goods from swing states like Florida he can't afford to lose in 2004.

Look: I'm all for free trade and I'm completely against tariffs of any kind, especially the nakedly political ones Bush has imposed. In fact, I'm willing to believe that the steel tariffs did him more harm (putting Michigan and Wisconsin out of reach) than good, as I doubt Pennsylvania is any more competitive now for him than it was in '00 and any Democrat who can neutralize the gun issue should be able to take West Virginia anyway. That said, if retaliatory tariffs from the EU (even if they never materialize) help more people in Florida or anywhere else realize how unabashedly unprincipled most all but especially Bush's economic policies are, well then my general attitude is you reap what you sow.

Mouse Trap

Who knew that the stem-cells approved for research by the President (of which there are only 11 lines) were grown with the aide of cells from mice? Thanks to a fundamentalist approach to science that values the "lives" of embryos frozen in a refridgerator in New Jersey that will never be implanted for conception purposes over, you know, actual living people, scientists in this country can choose between mouse-human hybrid stem-cells or nothing at all. Meanwhile, the rest of the world can get a head start on actually curing diseases because they value actual living people more than their far-right wing base vote.

Logical Flaw

Jonathan Chait has written one of many columns detailing the aftermath of Dean's ill-worded Confederate Flag remarks. (Saying 'guys with gunracks in their trucks' would have been soooo much better.) However, I find one flaw with the solid-South logic used by so many pundits.

Chait says:

...This is one of [many reasons] Dean would be squashed like a bug in the general election ... Bush could take the South for granted and concentrate all his resources on battleground states like Pennsylvania.

If Bush is going to win the South anyway, couldn't Dean skip it (just like Bush) and concentrate all of his resources on Pennsylvania as well.

Afterall, any Democrat gets to skip New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois, which, last time I checked, have more large media outlets than Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas combined. Chait's (and the national CW) logic may be completely wrong. A candidate who can compete in the South (Clark, Edwards, maybe Kerry) can do so with much less money in electoral vote rich Georgia, Tennesee, North Carolina and Virginia than Bush can in California. Those four Southern states have about the same amount of votes as California, or New York + New Jersey.

I'm not saying a Democrat has to win the South (or be competitive there) to win the Presidency. There's a good argument to be made that someone like Dean can carry the "Gore" states, plus New Hampshire, plus any two out of West Virginia, Arkansas, Ohio, Arizona and Nevada and still win the election. But it seems to me that were a Southern Democrat, like Clark, to be nominated, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas, West Virginia, Tennessee, New Hampshire, Nevada and Arizona are much lower hanging fruit than Pennsylvania, Michigan and California are for Bush. I think the more Democrats, especially those voting on Super Tuesday, take this into consideration, the more likely it is that Clark becomes the nominee.

Dan Reeves

Dan Reeves finally gets win 200. The Falcons snap their big losing streak. Good game overall. With Vick back in a few weeks, maybe things are turning around.

Picture Says 1,000 Words

Why do I think Clark is in better position than he's polling?

Illegal Immigrants

From the AJC:

• Some Americans worry about illegal immigrants joining the military in hopes of becoming citizens.

Yeah. They're called assholes. In particular his name is Dan Stein, the director of something called the Federation for American Immigration Reform. He says:

• This guy may be a stand-up guy -- but suppose he was an agent of Al-Qaida.

He's talking about Pvt. Jaun Escalante, who despite using forged documents to enroll in the Army, is still serving in Iraq because the manpower squeezed forces really have no choice. In fact, Army lawyers are helping him apply for citizenship so he can continue his service and then hopefully attend college on the GI Bill.
So, you've got someone who has nothing to do with Al-Qaida risking his life in Iraq, potentially even fighting against Al-Qaida operatives, and you've got a dishonest Immigration "Reformer" totally twisting the facts to score cheap political points by linking this (soon to be) American hero to Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately, this kind of unwelcome rhetoric is just too common from the far right these days.

Atlanta Bloggers

If you're an Atlanta area blogger, or even if you're not, Greg Greene technolobbyist extraordinaire has organized a big get together for tomorrow, Saturday November 8th at the Five Seasons Brewing Company on Roswell Road, just inside the Perimeter. See you there, maybe! You can sit at the chrisishardcore table (just kidding). Oh yeah, it starts at 7.

Site Updates

The site is now configured to allow HTML in the comments. So link away, Wes and Zack. And get better soon, Zack.

Flagger dishonesty?

From the AJC recap of the Mississippi Governor's Race:

• "Earlier, Barbour had revisited another issue that divided the races -- the Confederate flag. Recent ads reminded voters that Musgrove had supported an unsuccessful 2001 referendum that sought to remove the Rebel X."

Anyone who honestly believes that a referendum on the Georgia flag would have passed or that flaggers would have been less vociferous in their desire to oust Barnes had he supported one should take a good look at the Mississippi race. There are certain elements in Southern society who don't take kindly to change at all. Mississippi's Republican party didn't seem to have much of a problem exploiting them, Georgia's fortunately probably won't be able to now that they have a figurehead in Perdue just as tarnished by the flag issue as Barnes was.

Ralph Nader

I suppose Nader has some points in his latest screed. But his quest for irrelevency continues when he says both Democrats and Republicans are attempting to gerrymander districts after the dicennial redistrictings. Last time I checked, only Republicans were doing this.

Case Closed

This is my final Zell Miller entry. I can't speak for everyone here, but I can speak for Democrats regarding Zell. Even very partisan Democrats, like myself, know that not everything Democrats do (and not every Democrat) is great, and not everything Republicans do (and not every Republican) is terrible. It's not so black and white.

The fact that Zell can seemingly find nothing nice to say about Democrats while finding nothing unflattering to say about George W. Bush is the big beef. Maybe Zell has no problem with Bush at all, at which point he's become delusional, as even Saxby Chambliss votes against Bush's wishes and you could hardly find a bigger Republican supporter of Bush (or in Bush's case, a bigger supporter of Saxby's). But I suspect that Zell is still sane, and is overlooking the things he doesn't agree with Bush on as part of some sort of self-serving stunt to go out on top with Georgia voters.

Additionally, I don't like the current discourse in American politics, especially from supporters of the President, who insist that if you agree with George W. Bush on any measure, than surely you support him as President. On the one hand, this is ridiculous, of course I personally agree with some things the President does (like middle class tax cuts), but that doesn't mean I don't think a Democrat (or even another Republican) could continue doing these good things and also other things that I'd prefer over George W. Bush. The outcome of this disingenous attitude on the right has been a left that must vociferously be anti-Bush and any policy he's associated with, because they know that when a Hannity or O'Reilly type asks "but don't you agree with the war on terror" the next statement out of their mouth will be "well you must continue to support the President because Dean/Clark/Gephardt/Whomever is against the President and he must be against the war on terror."

This, along with a refusal of modern voters (on both sides of the aisle) to acknowledge the marginal costs they cost society and the government (think having your cake and eating it too) is the biggest problem in American politics. It's no surprise then, given the current political atmosphere, that someone like Zell Miller has stepped up to the plate to fill the role he's in now. Why point out the good things you're own party does (surely Russell Feingold's losing amendment to limit the pay of Congress, which Zell voted for and which the Republican majority was against, is a good example of a positive thing Democrats are doing) when it's so much easier to just go along with the positive chorus about the other party that dominates the media right now?