Hang Dog

Sen. Ben Nelson gets no Blue Dog love in Nebraska. How tragic, how sad, how well deserved.

Foxx's Hatred of Obama Hurts the 5th District of N.C.

Rep. Virginia Foxx's vote against the "Jobs for Main Street Act" was her last official act before leaving Washington to return to Watauga County for Christmas. It was more than just a vote against seeing President Obama succeed in any measure in turning around the Bush economic downtown. It was a vote against the people of her own district.

The bill in question, which passed the House without a single Republican vote, included money to extend unemployment benefits another six months, aid to help local communities retain teachers and firefighters, and money for public works projects.

Madam Foxx is much more dedicated to saying "NO!" to anything the Obama administration proposes for getting us out of the economic trainwreck that Bush caused than she is to helping her own constituents, and she actively depends on a non-existent or compliant news network in the 5th District to get away with it.

Few people seem to know how she votes in Washington or how those votes hurt our local communities.

Burr Wrapping Himself in the Bush Era

News that Karl Rove will do a fundraiser for Sen. Dick Burr in Raleigh in January produces a shiver of recognition: This IS, after all, a senator shaped by, made by "the awful aughts," and we certainly needed to be reminded of the massive failures of that whole crew.

The Burr "optics" are most curious but very revealing: nothing of solutions, nothing of a vision for the future, but just the same old same old, a discredited past and a nasty politics. Abysmal symbols for a lackluster public official.

FOOTNOTE
Rove, incidentally, will be shaking his money-maker for Burr fresh off his second divorce. He's sure to stress family values!

The Private Fun and Public Profit of Rotgut

What would you suppose would be the top-selling booze here in the heart of the Bible Belt?

Think about it for two minutes and you're bound to hit on Vodka.

Makes sense, no? The folklore is that Vodka does not leave a telltale odor on one's breath, so your fellow church-goers need never know.

Fact is, 80-proof Aristocrat Supreme Vodka, distilled (incidentally) in Bardstown, Ky., is the top-selling liquor in North Carolina's state-run ABC stores. It costs the state of North Carolina less than 50 cents a fifth, by the way, and the ABC store price is $5.67 a bottle (cheap! but a steep mark-up nevertheless).

Insanity

"Abstinence only" indoctrination for American teenagers has proven to be mightily productive of unplanned pregnancies and not much else, except pious posturing by conservatives who say they want government out of our lives except when it comes to teenager indoctrination. Yet abstinence only proponents are hoping that any new health reform legislation will empower their stupidity with more government money.

According to the WashPost, "The health-care reform legislation pending in the Senate includes $50 million for programs that states could use to try to reduce pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease among adolescents by teaching to them to delay when they start having sex," even though the budget signed by President Barack Obama earlier this year zeroed out such funding as hilariously ineffective.

Some powerful senator or group of powerful senators managed to squeeze $50 million back into the conservative trough, and if we know Obama the Great Compromiser, he'll go along with it.

Albert Einstein called it insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Well Okay Then

Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) sez that the watered-down Insurance Conglomerate Protection Act of 2009/2010 is just all right with her, including the bribes paid to Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and others not yet disclosed.

Oh, That Smell!

...of lobbyist cash, that is.

Sen. Dick Burr, topping the list for fundraising parties and the predictable flocking of like-feathered lobbyists who want to stuff money up his ever-lovin' patootie.

Nothing like corporatocracy and cocktails, eh, Senator?

Unfortunately, any number of Democratic Senators are also dog-paddling in those same Martinis.

Insurgent Tea-Partier Opposes Foxx

Brad Smith, the Wilkes County disaffected Republican who is trying to gather some 17,000 signatures on a petition to get himself on the fall ballot as an independent candidate opposing Madam Virginia Foxx, made the front page of the Winston-Salem Journal today. He has a website and a page that allows you to print a copy of his petition specific for your county.

Congresswoman Foxx was unavailable for comment.

Holding her breath and hoping Mr. Smith goes away?

Obama Losing His Base

It's his fault. It's President Obama's fault. What ... he thought he could rev up a coalition that wanted real reform and then betray it with a sell-out to corporate money and to Joe Lieberman? Apparently, he and his advisors naively thought that everyone would just fall right into step behind The Insurance Company Bail-Out Act of 2009, that his fans would accept any bill rather than a good one.

The web-based Obama troops, 13,000,000 of us on the Organizing for America (OFA) listserv, received e-mails on Wednesday, asking us to phonebank our senators to support the Joe Lieberman version of health insurance reform. We contacted Kay Hagan, all right, but not to urge her to support that piece of garbage. Politico sez the revolt is widespread and going viral:

One leading OFA volunteer in Florida blasted an email to a statewide listserv urging activists to "just say no" to the phone-banking effort -- uncorking a torrent of frustration from Florida Democrats -- while some OFA subscribers replied directly to the call-to-action email with angry messages and others asked to be removed from the list entirely.

Dave Hearn, an optician in Iowa who helped organize for Obama's campaign said that the president "is taking for granted that the volunteers who worked so hard for him were going to buy in to whatever strategy he chose to pass his major legislative initiative .... What am I going to say: 'I hate this bill, but we're Obama people, so let's do it?' "

That ain't working. Ain't working on any number of levels, and it's Obama fault for not fighting for what he said he wanted, both during the campaign and right regularly since he took office.

"If this bill passes, it will be because Joe Lieberman threw a hissy fit and was allowed to control what went into the bill," said Susan Smith, an OFA activist from Tampa. "That means that in the end, he had more power with President Obama and Senator Reid than we do. If he is rewarded, this tactic will be used over and over again to kill the progressive agenda."

Susan's got it right. Obama's got it wrong. It remains to be seen if this president can be a leader and a reformer or merely a jet-setting speech-maker.