Month: January 2014

Maine Gov. LePage Wants to Put State’s Children to Work

Buck Banks

We don’t allow children to work until they’re 16, but two years later, when they’re 18, they can go to war and fight for us. That’s causing damage to our economy. I started working far earlier than that, and it didn’t hurt me at all. There is nothing wrong with being a paperboy at 12 years old, or at a store sorting bottles at 12 years old.

— Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R), telling a trade show audience that 12-year-olds should be allowed to work in Maine, the Portland Press Herald reports.

Gates Plumbs Depths of Thesaurus to Describe Congress

Buck Banks

Congress is best viewed from a distance — the farther the better — because up close, it is truly ugly. I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.

— Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in his new book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.

Promised RNC Anti-Democrat Ad Blitz Fizzles

Buck Banks

$30

The cost of a single ad on a single radio station placed by the Republican National Committee in Anchorage, Alaska. The RNC had announced “a fresh round in an expected torrent of campaign ads targeting Sen. Mark Begich and other Democrats” over Obamacare but the ad blast “turned out to be more of a sprinkle,” the Anchorage Daily News reports.

Christie Burned By George Washington Bridge Flap

Buck Banks

To this point, Chris Christie has treated the George Washington Bridge closure story as a joke, and national reporters have regarded it as a minor irritation. The public release of e-mails among his staff changes all that. The e-mails prove that Christie’s loyalists closed the bridge deliberately as political retribution, not as a ‘traffic study’ as claimed. They display an almost comical venality bordering on outright sociopathy. And they will probably destroy Christie’s chances in 2016.

— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine.

After Spending 20 Years Irreparably Dividing the Country, GOP Spin Doctor Frank Luntz Is Bummed That the Country Is Irreparably Divided

Jon Ponder

It’s amazing in the first place that an A-list Republican propagandist like Frank Luntz would allow himself to be profiled by a reporter who was not employed by a media outlet owned by one of his clients like, say, Rupert Murdoch. But he did, and the resulting article by Molly Ball in the Atlantic, “The Agony of Frank Luntz,” reveals Luntz to be, as Wonkette put it, “a clueless conservative asshole with the self-awareness of a rock”:

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