Why We Like Women

Women are winning everywhere: Elaine Marshall, Nikki Haley, Blanche Lincoln, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman.   North Carolina leads the way. Marshall would make two female Senators. A female governor. As Thomas Mills with the Marshall campaign pointed out, seven of ten statewide winners in 2008 were women. And women are moving up in the legislature…

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Nuts

Republicans are determined to save Democrats from electoral disaster this year.   With any luck, the GOP will nominate Tea Partier Bill Randall to run against Brad Miller. Randall distinguished himself this week by speculating that the Gulf Oil spill is a conspiracy between Washington and BP.   Did anybody ask him if 9/11 was…

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Emoter-in-Chief

What’s with this mania about whether President Obama has shown enough anger over the BP oil spill?   Is this the legacy of Bill Clinton, who so famously felt our pain?   Or that old actor Ronald Reagan, who could muster a catch in the throat and a flash of anger at the drop of…

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Old Guvs Rule

Tuesday’s primaries across the county were good for women candidates. And old governors didn’t do too badly.   California Democrats nominated Jerry Brown for governor again. Brown, 72, served as governor from 1975-1983.   Iowa Republicans nominated Terry Branstad for a return engagement. Branstad, 63, was governor from 1983-1999.   Both were fellow governors with…

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Blame the Republicans

The White House needs to go on offense on the Gulf oil spill.   Democrats, all too often, are weenies when it comes to political combat. They want to be fair, see all sides and over-intellectualize.   It’s time for a go-for-the-gut message: Blame the Republicans.   Here’s how it goes:   This all started…

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A Bright Line

That didn’t take long.   For all the Tea Party’s denials of racism, it took Tea Party poster boy Rand Paul about one news cycle to trip over race.   The federal government, he says, has no business telling a business it can’t discriminate on the basis of race.   Of course, he added, he…

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Endorsements and Establishments

Do endorsements matter? Not judging from Tuesday’s primaries.   A candidate endorsed by President Obama loses a Democratic primary in Pennsylvania. A candidate endorsed by the Senate Republican leader – and the state’s senior Senator – loses the GOP primary in Kentucky.   So how does Ken Lewis’ endorsement help Elaine Marshall?   Well, it’s…

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Obama Sets a Trap

About the only varmint on earth these days more unpopular than a Democratic Congressman is a Wall Street banker – so to save their political hides President Obama and the Democrats in Washington have gone banker hunting.   Now, broadly speaking, Wall Street bankers have a simple theory of politics: Without regard to race, creed,…

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The Trust Deficit

It’s bad news for Democrats when only 22 percent of Americans say they trust government.   That number comes from a Pew Research Center poll, which found “a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government — a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.”  …

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Tea Time

The Tea Party movement may return the Republican Party to power – or ruin it. Whichever, the Tea Party controls the GOP’s future.   If Mushmouth Mitch McConnell and Suntan John Boehner become majority leaders in the next Congress, they’ll have no choice but to walk the Tea Party line.   That would pretty much…

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