Who knew that the key to a functioning, effective Congress would be revealed in the scandal surrounding Representative Anthony Weiner? Yet, there it was in the Sunday Times in a piece by Sheryl Gay Stolberg explaining why sex scandals are rarely initiated by female politicians:
“The shorthand of it is that women run because there is some public issue that they care about, some change they want to make, some issue that is a priority for them, and men tend to run for office because they see this as a career path.”
What has been happening in Madison, Wisconsin, should cheer anyone who has lost hope in American democracy. It is even balm for the despair many of us feel about the often passive Democratic Party.
While the Democratic state senators Governor Scott Walker needs to kill collective bargaining remain holed up in an Illinois motel, thousands of protestors—public workers and their supporters— fill the public spaces of the Wisconsin’s rococo capitol building. Many of them have brought their sleeping bags to the rotunda.
This should not surprise us.
The Catfood Commission is what they call the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform over at firedoglake.com. For those too young to remember life before Medicare, catfood is what a lot of seniors ate in order to pay their medical bills.
If we’re not careful, we could be headed back in that direction.
I’m wondering—was I the only blogger to watch both the Academy Awards and the president’s prequel State of the Union Address? Two different worlds, of course, but often they conflate in the mind of this electronic onlooker, especially when you throw in the Obama Administration’s first state dinner with all those fancy gowns.
My reaction when I heard about timing of the dinner was, “They’re going to miss the Oscars.”
It’s not the New Deal. Or the New Frontier. Or the Great Society. Or, heaven help us, the Reagan Revolution. But I’m hoping after last night’s news conference, the passage of a stimulus package in the Senate and today’s rollout of a new TARP bailout that this is the Real Deal—a viable plan to restore some rationality to our economic life together as a nation.
Perhaps after the debacle of the last presidency it’s too easy to give President Obama high marks for engaging in a fruitful discussion of economics, foreign policy and, yes, even A-Rod’s steroid use. (He’s concerned about the message it sends to children.) For showing his understanding of the dynamics of Congressional politics, for using one of his vice president’s gaffes to make a point that no program’s perfect. This give and take went on for a full hour before he thanked the media and a heavy foot could be heard coming down from the podium as he strode off.