IMHO: POTUS’s SOTU
When POTUS gives the SOTU, it could be a big hit.
Lots of folks are looking forward to hearing it.
The issues are intense,
The pressure’s immense,
But legislators are keenly focused on where they’ll sit.
Year: 2011
Getting Over Olbermann
Ah, Keith, we hardly knew ye,
During your tenure at MSNBC.
‘Twas that evil Murdoch
Who put your head on the block,
But in doing so did he give us a senator-to-be?
GOP Continues to Spotlight White Males
Jeb Bush’s recent plea for his party to pay more attention to its Latino members seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Their selection of a white guy Midwesterner to perform the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union address ignored rising star sunbelt Latinos, including New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will give the speech, which according to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, will deal with economics.
“Paul Ryan has spent the better part of the last two years explaining exactly why the Democrat agenda has been so bad for jobs and the economy, and why we need to ditch the government-driven approach in favor of creative, common-sense solutions that put the American people back in charge.
Maybe Gov. Bobby Jindal’s poor showing reinforced the natural Republican inclination to stick with white guys
Republicans apparently noticed the economic crisis after the inauguration of Pres. Obama. It slipped past them when they were voting to allow Pres. George W. Bush to run up the deficit to unprecedented levels in order to wage war on a country that had not directly threatened us. They also must have been confused when they voted for Bush’s plan to spend $700 billion to bail out banks and other large corporations that had invested in mortgage-backed securities. Bush signed that Republican-approved law on Oct. 3, 2008.
Rubio, like Rep. Michele Bachmann (GOP/TEA-Minn.), plans his own State of the Union rebuttal for the benefit of his followers.
Hey, Sarah, How’s That Dopey-Ragey Thing Workin’ out for Ya?
So far, 2011 — all 23 days of it — has been a bad year for Sarah Palin’s presidential campaign.
First, her response to the mass murder attack on Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on Jan.8 gave voters invaluable insight into how, as president, she would perform under pressure. Pres. Palin, they learned, would make the crisis — say an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel — about herself and then give a speech from the Oval Office in which she used her limited oratorical skills to dress down her critics.
Last week, two polls found that Palin’s approval rating had dropped to 38 percent. Her disapproval rating in the Gallup poll was 53 percent and 56 percent in the CNN survey. In Sarah Palin’s own Alaska, her approval is 33 percent.
Now Palin has come in fourth in a presidential straw poll of Republican activists in New Hampshire — behind vice presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty and just a notch above her even crazier doppelganger, Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Palin received just 7 percent of the vote — which is eerily the same as the 7 percent she received last February in the straw poll at CPAC, the wingnut confab sponsored by the hate group, American Family Association.
Until recently, pundits were blue-skying the 2012 Republican primaries as playing out like this. Palin wins the Iowa caucuses, comes in second in New Hampshire after Mitt Romney, the former governor of next-door Massachusetts, and then rolls into the South Carolina, a hotbed of rage-addicted tea baggers — in other words, her base — and where Mormons like Romney are considered satanic cultists. By taking two of the first three, she becomes an unstoppable force and sews up the nomination.
That scenario, which took a beating after Tucson, came apart yesterday in New Hampshire. Here’s how Fox News reported it online:
More Americans See Obama as Moderate
40%
Portion of Americans who believe Pres. Obama is a “moderate.” The figure represents the highest of his presidency, according to a recent NBC/Wall St. Journal poll, with only 45% continuing to see him as “liberal,” and a really out there 11% labeling him “conservative.”
Beck in June: Speaker Pelosi Is ‘Going to Have to Shoot [Journalists, Democratic Members of Congress] in the Head’
Transcript of complete segment from Glenn Beck’s show on the Republican Party’s Fox network in June:
Beck Inciting Violent Threats Against 78-Year-Old Professor, Frances Fox Piven
the CCR asks that Ailes distinguish between First Amendment rights, of which they are “vigorous defenders” and an “intentional repetition of provocative, incendiary, emotional misinformation and falsehoods [that place that person] in actual physical danger of a violent response.”
Beginning in September of 2010, Glenn Beck started branding Piven, a distinguished professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as an “enemy of the Constitution.” Piven, well known for advocating for the organizational rights of the poor and encouraging voter registration, has since received threatening phone calls and letters, and has become the subject of many death threats left open to the public on Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze.”
No Honeymoon for GOP-Tea Partyites in Congress
Hey, when I’m wrong, I’m wrong. And I was wrong late last year when I predicted that Pres. Obama’s poll numbers would be tanking into the 30s in mid-January — so, now — primarily because he made a deal with Republican, who were threatening hissy fits if he did not agree to extend tax breaks for their billionaire sponsors.
The GOP’s fav/unfav has gone from a net positive in December (38 percent-37 percent) to a net negative now (34 percent-40 percent). – NBC/GOP-WSJ poll
The way it looked then was that hordes of liberals and fiscally responsible Democrats would abandon the president over the deal, that whatever he might gain in support from moderates and swing voters, he’d lose from his base, and then some.
But the White House followed up its caving on the tax cuts with other successes, particularly the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
