US Government a Joke in Europe?
In his years in Washington reporting for The Scotsman, Alex Massie developed an appreciation for many things this country has to offer, such as college football. But, as he explains in a piece for Foreign Policy, our Congress was decidedly not amongst them. His piece is subtitled "Viewed from across the pond, the U.S. Congress seems at best incompetent and at ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 27, 2010 20:21
Corporations Are People, Too
There's been a lot of upset to our left this week over the perception that Citizens United recognized corporations as having the same rights as people. The gist of the complaints seems to be that this notion is deeply offensive - that putting creatures of statute on par with people somehow diminishes the latter. This has led, unsurprisingly, to some pointed ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 23, 2010 16:32
USA Parliamentary Democracy?
National Journal's Ron Brownstein sees the recent bout of gridlock in the United States as a sign of a more fundamental shift in how our government operates. Obama's first year demonstrated once again that in this deeply polarized political era, big legislative crusades aimed at big national problems produce only big political headaches. President George W. Bush learned that when his ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 22, 2010 15:09
Money and Politics
Negative reactions against yesterday's Supreme Court ruling throwing out corporate and union spending limits continue to pour in from people who apparently think American politics operate according to the spirit of the various campaign finance laws passed since 1974 rather than, well, the way it actually does. A NYT editorial ("The Court’s Blow to Democracy") is typical. With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 22, 2010 09:57
What Democrats Should Learn from Massachussetts
[caption id="attachment_46365" align="alignright" width="440" caption="U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-MA) greets Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Martha Coakley after she conceded defeat to Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown in the special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Edward Kennedy in Boston, Massachusetts January 19, 2010. (REUTERS)"][/caption] Neil Newhouse, who served served as the pollster for the Brown for Senate ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 20, 2010 11:17
Tea Party Convention Will Be Closed to the Press
The first National Tea Party Convention, which convenes in Nashville next month, will apparently be largely closed to the press--including speeches by Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin.Word from Nashville on Monday was that the First National Tea Party Convention next month will be closed to the press, other than for a limited number of “selected” journalists. No word on who ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 13, 2010 03:09
Should Republicans Call Domino’s?
NRO's Jonah Goldberg thinks the Republican Party should take a lesson from Domino's Pizza, which has apparently admitted that their product is awful and is working to fix itself. You may have seen the commercials or the YouTube video touting the iconic pizza-delivery chain’s reinvention. But if you haven’t, Domino’s new campaign can be summed up easily enough: “We blew it.” Focus ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 9, 2010 09:32
The Senate’s Growing Unrepresentativeness
Has the Senate, which gives disproportionately more power to states with small populations, outlived its usefulness? Sandy Levinson thinks so: Wikipedia has a very helpful entry on the population of the US states. One gets to 50% of the total population, according to 2008 census estimate, with the nine largest states, California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 2, 2010 12:32
TSA a Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone
In the thread discussing the idiotic new TSA guidelines issued in overreaction to the Detroit terror plot, longtime commenter DC Loser observes, As a lifelong civil servant, anytime you create a large bureaucracy to deal with a specific problem, it is not in the interest of said bureaucracy for the root problem to go away. It always seeks to aggregate more ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on December 27, 2009 16:37
Health Care: All Over But The Secrecy
David Lightman and William Douglas of the McClatchy Newspapers syndicate point out that the real action on the health care bill will take place in the murky world of conference committees, which--like many other things on the Hill--don't really work the way your father's (or, for that matter, your) American government textbook says they do: To most Americans, the conference process ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on December 24, 2009 17:33
Cash For Cloture
Someone, perhaps this commenter at ABC's The Note, has coined "Cash for Cloture" to describe the outrageous giveaways agreed to by the Senate Democratic leadership to buy off the last few Senators to get to 60 votes on the health care bill. It's spreading fast, with Mark Steyn and Glenn Reynolds employing the meme and Michelle Malkin using the coinage ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on December 21, 2009 10:57
Ressentiment Creep
Earlier this week, Julian Sanchez penned a piece titled "The Politics of Ressentiment" to explain the Sarah Palin and Tea Party phenomena. It challenges Conor Friedersdorf's notion that Palin's "exaggerated victimhood" as part of a phenomenon he himself dubbed "the politics of schadenfreude — the strategy of deliberately drawing political support from the perception that you’re being treated unfairly." As ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on December 18, 2009 14:38
How Negotiation Works
In regards the current internecine Democratic fight over the health care compromise, Megan McArdle argues that many people are simply naive about as to how the negotiation process operates: This bill is, at this point, hideously unpopular. I'm pretty sure you've got a bunch of senators who would really, really love not to vote for it. Ultimately, the moderates had a ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on December 17, 2009 15:44
Senators ‘Holding Health Care Hostage’
In response to the growing refrains from the Left about Joe Lieberman "holding health care hostage," Steven Taylor observes that, "Either the votes can be mustered or they can’t. It is the way of legislating." Or of any close decision-making process, for that matter. Sandra Day O'Connor used to "hold the Constitution hostage." Now, Anthony Kennedy does it. Their vote ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on December 16, 2009 13:15
Health Care Compromise Too Much for Progressives to Swallow?
After months of compromising to satisfy Blue Dog Democrats and garner at least one Republican vote for the Senate version of health care reform, they've come up with a bill that their progressive base hates. Yes, they've apparently lost Nebraska's Ben Nelson. Oh, and Olympia Snowe may be off the train again, too. But they'll figure out a way to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on December 16, 2009 10:23
