Obama bets the chalk in the Big Dance

1 comment March 17th, 2010 01:17pm Pat Cunningham

President Obama, something of a hoopster himself, is PREDICTING that the Final Four in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament will be made up entirely of first and second seeds.

I think he’s wrong. My own sense of the matter is that two of the Final Four contestants will be no better than fifth seeds.

Remember where you heard it.

Thinking about Natoma

5 comments March 17th, 2010 12:43pm Pat Cunningham

Man with Parkinson’s mocked and jeered by Obamaphobes

13 comments March 17th, 2010 09:49am Pat Cunningham

And THESE PEOPLE dare to claim that they’re the decent and patriotic majority?

Brownshirts is what they are.

Think states’ rights trump federal law? Think again

15 comments March 17th, 2010 09:17am Pat Cunningham

Among liberals and conservatives alike, there’s a resurgence of support for so-called states’ rights these days.

But, as noted HERE, there’s a constitutional problem for those who think states’ rights take precedence over federal law.

An excerpt:

“Everything we’ve tried to keep the federal government confined to rational limits has been a failure, an utter, unrelenting failure — so why not try something else?” said Thomas E. Woods Jr., a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a nonprofit group in Auburn, Ala., that researches what it calls “the scholarship of liberty.”

Mr. Woods, who has a Ph.D. in history, and has written widely on states’ rights and nullification — the argument that says states can sometimes trump or disregard federal law — said he was not sure where the dots between states’ rights and politics connected. But he and others say that whatever it is, something politically powerful is brewing under the statehouse domes.

Other scholars say the state efforts, if pursued in the courts, would face formidable roadblocks. Article 6 of the Constitution says federal authority outranks state authority, and on that bedrock of federalist principle rests centuries of back and forth that states have mostly lost, notably the desegregation of schools in the 1950s and ’60s.

“Article 6 says that that federal law is supreme and that if there’s a conflict, federal law prevails,” said Prof. Ruthann Robson, who teaches constitutional law at the City University of New York School of Law. “It’s pretty difficult to imagine a way in which a state could prevail on many of these.”

NBC-WSJ poll has bad news for Dems, worse news for GOP

5 comments March 17th, 2010 08:45am Pat Cunningham

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll is full of fascinating — and, in some cases, surprising — numbers.

Let’s cover the highlights in question-and-answer style:

Is it true, as Republicans are always telling us, that most Americans are opposed to passage of President Obama’s health-care plan? No. The public is almost evenly divided on the issue (46 percent favor passage, 45 percent oppose it).

Most Americans disapprove of how Obama has handled the health-care issue, right? That’s true (41 percent approve, 57 percent disapprove). But some of that disapproval is among people who think the plan doesn’t go far enough. And there’s even greater disapproval of how congressional Republicans have  handled the health-care issue (35 percent approve, 59 percent disapprove).

Is President Obama’s overall approval rating higher or lower than that of Congress? Actually, it’s much higher. Forty-eight percent approve of the job Obama’s doing while 47 percent disapprove. Seventeen percent approve of the job Congress is doing while a whopping 77 percent disapprove.

Does the low rating for Congress mean that most Americans want Republicans to regain control in the November elections? No, it doesn’t. Forty-five percent want Democrats to maintain control, and 42 percent want control to pass to the GOP.

Are congressional incumbents generally in trouble? Well, maybe and maybe not. Fifty percent of poll respondents say that, given the opportunity, they would vote to defeat every single member of Congress, including their own representative.

Asked if they would still vote to replace every single member of Congress if that resulted in Democrats still controlling Congress, nearly three-quarters (72%) said yes.

And asked if they would still vote to replace every member if that resulted in Republicans controlling Congress, a virtually identical number (73%) said yes.

How about overall positive and negative feelings about Obama and other political personalities and movements? On that score, Obama’s in fairly good shape. His positives are at 50 percent, far higher than those for Mitt Romney (27 percent), Sarah Palin (30 percent), Karl Rove (14 percent), the Tea Party movement (29 percent) and the Republican Party (31 percent).

For all the numbers, check HERE.

POSTSCRIPT: Lest any of our wingnut friends dismiss this poll as the work of those darned liberals at NBC, it should be noted that the survey was co-sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the same outfit that owns Fox News.

Moreover, the poll was conducted by a company run by Peter D. Hart, a Democrat, and Bill McInturff, a Republican.

If passage of health bill will doom Dems, why are Repubs desperately fighting it?

36 comments March 16th, 2010 02:38pm Pat Cunningham

Republicans argue that passage of health-care reform legislation would marginalize the Democratic Party for aeons to come. They also promise to repeal the measure once they regain power.

This raises the question, of course, of why the GOPers don’t just sit back and let the Democrats destroy themselves. After all, most of the bill’s provisions won’t take effect for a while yet, and the Republicans should be back in the saddle by then, which would give them plenty of time to undo what damage, if any, has been done.

The truth of the matter, however, is that Republicans aren’t really all that sure that a health bill, once enacted, will be so unpopular among Americans in general.

Josh Marshall touches on these factors in THIS PIECE.

An excerpt:

Passing Health Care Reform won’t save Democrats — whatever “save” means in this context. They’re going to have a very hard November. But there’s little doubt that passing will improve their prospects politically — perhaps only marginally, perhaps by quite a lot. Republican leaders get that, which is why they’re pulling out all the stops for a final push to stop it. So since the politics makes sense and the policy does too, there’s simply no reason not to push ahead to conclusion.

Adulterer or not, anyone who disses Twitter can’t be all bad

4 comments March 16th, 2010 11:41am Pat Cunningham

What Petraeus says is no longer infallible?

5 comments March 16th, 2010 11:09am Pat Cunningham

Six weeks ago today, I posted THIS PIECE about how Republicans seem to have decided that criticism of Gen. David Petraeus is not as unpatriotic as they once thought.

And now we have FURTHER EVIDENCE of this dramatic turnaround.

Dick Armey concedes that health bill likely to pass

12 comments March 16th, 2010 10:39am Pat Cunningham

Former Republican congressional leader Dick Armey, a major shaker in the Tea Party movement, SAYS his gang’s battle against passage of health-care reform legislation seems to be a lost cause.

Repubs whine and cry when Dems emulate their tactics

14 comments March 16th, 2010 10:12am Pat Cunningham

“Do as we say, not as we do.”

That seems to be the motto these days among Congressional Republicans who hate it when the parliamentary procedures they’ve used in the past are emulated by those terrible Democrats.

The GOPers also figure that the dimwits who comprise their base won’t see the hypocrisy in all of this.

Steve Benen has the story HERE. (Personal note: Benen refers to Don Wolfensberger, a former chief of staff for the House Rules Committee under Republicans, who was a childhood acquaintance of mine in Freeport.)