Dr. K hands out some wisdom on Saint Sarah of Wasilla:

*wink*

Jamie posted this at 8:24 PM EDT on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 as Kraut-hammered, Politics, The Passion of St. Sarah of Wasilla

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Of the 20 state high courts that have female chief justices, 15 are in states that George Bush won twice.

Apollo posted this at 11:07 PM EDT on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 as Politics

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Pat Buchanan, a bitter critic of much of the Bush administration’s policies, has surprisingly praised Dick Cheney:

Dick Cheney is giving the Republican Party a demonstration of how to fight a popular president. Stake out defensible high ground, do not surrender an inch, then go onto the attack.

The ground on which Cheney has chosen to stand is the most defensible the Republicans have: homeland security. In seven-and-a-half years after 9-11, not one terrorist attack struck our country.

And, unlike Obama’s position, Cheney’s is 100 percent reality based. He was there. He lived through this. He made the decisions to use the harsher techniques on the worst of the enemy who could yield the greatest intelligence to save American lives.

“The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do.” And they “prevented the violent deaths of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of innocent people.”

Having defended every decision he took, Cheney then counterattacked. He charged The New York Times with virtual treason in exposing the program to intercept calls from al-Qaida and mocked its Pulitzer Prize. He accused liberals and Speaker Pelosi of “feigned outrage” and “phony moralizing,” asserting they were fully briefed on “the program and the methods.” He charged Obama with endangering national security by “triangulating,” adopting a policy designed less to secure America than to unite and appease his political coalition.

[snip]

That Cheney is winning seems undeniable.

[snip]

And the Democrats are losing because, with few exceptions, they have been neither consistent nor honest.

The next big political fight for the right is the Sotomayor nomination.   Conservatives might want to ask her the questions that Neomi Rao lists in todays WSJ:

- Do you believe that judges should use “empathy” to decide cases? If so, what’s the difference between empathy and judicial activism? The president has emphasized empathy as a paramount judicial quality. Polls show, however, that Americans want moderate judges who follow the law, not their hearts. Chief Justice John Roberts said in his confirmation hearings that judges should act like umpires — calling the plays, not making them. Mr. Obama has suggested he wants a home-run hitter.

- Do you believe that interpretations of the Constitution should evolve to keep up with the times? If so, how would you decide when the Constitution needs updating? The president has said he believes that the Constitution has to change to keep up with the times, and in Ms. Sotomayor he has probably not chosen a candidate who believes in following the original meaning of the text. Nonetheless, constitutional text and original meaning should provide some constraint on the scope of interpretation. The nominee should be able to state some guidelines and limits for interpretation, including whether and how she would consider international law or the constitutional law of other nations.

Good questions.  The right needs to start counterattacking, and this nomination deserves a slugfest.

Hubbard posted this at 8:27 AM EDT on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Politics

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A while ago, Andrew Ferguson discussed Billy Bob Gasket disease:

The man I call Billy Bob Gasket had been involved in Arkansas politics for thirty years or more. He was used to its homegrown scandals and the mostly harmless diversions enjoyed by members of its ruling class. In this spirit, back in the early 1970s, he became an energetic booster of the young Rhodes Scholar who’d come home from Oxford and Yale with the impressive hair and the glimmering eye and the semi-permanent catch in his voice.

Then, along about Clinton’s first term as governor, Gasket noticed something. Bill Clinton was different. He was not just another in the long line of amiable cads and genial roués who had grasped power in Arkansas since Reconstruction. The new governor was, Gasket came to believe, the least principled, sleaziest politician he had ever seen at work. That the lack of principle and sleaziness were lacquered over with twinkly charm and vaguely progressive politics made the situation, for Gasket, all the more maddening.

And maddening is the word. As Clinton was returned again and again to office, Gasket was at first disbelieving, then agog, and finally crazed. Why couldn’t his fellow Arkansans see the truth? Why couldn’t they penetrate the governor’s sheath of bogus empathy and concern to see the creature of seething ambition and power hunger and raw cynicism that writhed so self-evidently beneath? Gasket became a hair-puller, a lapel-grabber, a mid-sentence interrupter, a nut. When, in the late 1980s, national reporters began trickling into the state to look over the promising young governor with national ambitions, their search for knowledgeable Clinton watchers led them inevitably to Gasket, and they found a madman.

Clinton became president. Gasket Disease trailed him like a cloud. It laid waste to Republican ranks in Washington and far beyond, to vast stretches of the country at large–by the end, if I read the polls correctly, roughly a third of all Americans had succumbed. Those who caught the disease didn’t just dislike Clinton, as, say, they might have disliked Jimmy Carter. The crux of Gasket Disease was not contempt but unendurable frustration. They could not fathom why everyone else didn’t grasp his essential, transparent fraudulence: the phoniness of the lower-lip-bite, the moist insincerity of the smile, the vanity in every tilt of the carefully coifed head. As with syphilis, so with Gasket Disease: Some Republicans recovered, others were driven mad.

It appears that someone has now fallen victim to the Obama version of Billy Bob Gasket disease:

Recently we were uplifted when the president informed Chrysler’s secured creditors that they had agreed to donate their ownership stake in the company to the United Auto Workers. Just last week, we were enthralled to see a group of auto executives beaming with pride as the president announced that in order to reduce gas consumption, they would henceforth be scaling back on all those car lines that consumers actually want to buy.

These events have heralded a new era of partnership between the White House and private companies, one that calls to mind the wonderful partnership Germany formed with France and the Low Countries at the start of World War II. The press conferences and events marking this new spirit of cooperation have been the emotional highlights of the administration so far.

These events usually begin when the executives gather in the Oval Office, where they experience certain Enhanced Negotiating Techniques. I’m not exactly sure what the president does to inspire the business leaders’ cooperation and sense of public service, though those who remember the disembowelment scene in “Braveheart” will have a general idea.

Was this Mark Levin?  Ann Coulter?  Michael Savage?

No, this was David Brooks, once Obama’s biggest quasi-right supporter.  Brooks is certainly right that Obama is abusing government power, but just about any undecided moderate who doesn’t follow politics too closely will take a look at Brooks’s column, smell the Billy Bob Gasket, and write him off. 

Billy Bob Gasket disease is striking the right, and it needs to be contained quickly, so four years of Obama don’t become eight.

Hubbard posted this at 9:39 AM EDT on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Politics, Possession by the Coultergeist

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Perhaps “love” is too strong, but Reid sure knows how warm the cockles of a right-wing heart with how he’s treating Snarlin’ Arlen:

In a unanimous voice vote, the Senate approved a resolution that added Specter to the Democratic side of the dais on the five committees on which he serves, an expected move that gives Democrats larger margins on key panels such as Judiciary and Appropriations.

But Democrats placed Specter in one of the two most junior slots on each of the five committees for the remainder of this Congress, which goes through December 2010. Democrats have suggested that they will consider revisiting Specter’s seniority claim at the committee level only after the midterm elections next year.

“This is all going to be negotiated next Congress,” Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), said tonight.

Specter’s office declined to comment.

Without any assurance of seniority, Specter loses a major weapon in his campaign to win reelection in 2010: the ability to claim that his nearly 30 years of Senate service places him in key positions to benefit his constituents.

It looks as though the Democrats don’t want to keep Specter in their caucus longer than they have to.  Perhaps Specter can tell us the Scottish law term for “dunce.”

Hubbard posted this at 10:32 AM EDT on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 as Politics, The Democratic Congress

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We long-time loathers of Arlen Specter have been told that him leaving the Republicans should be a sign that something’s gone wrong with the Right.  Hogwash.  Let the Democrats clean up this garbage from him now:

Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Democrat, said part of the reason he left the Republican Party last week was disillusionment with its healthcare priorities, and suggested that had the Republicans taken a more moderate track, Jack Kemp may have won his battle with cancer.

Mr. Specter, responding to a question from CBS’s Bob Schieffer over whether he had let down Pennsylvanians who wanted a Republican to represent them, said he felt his priorities were more in line with those of the Democrats.

“Well, I was sorry to disappoint many people. Frankly, I was disappointed that the Republican Party didn’t want me as their candidate,” Mr. Specter said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “But as a matter of principle, I’m becoming much more comfortable with the Democrats’ approach. And one of the items that I’m working on, Bob, is funding for medical research.”

Mr. Specter continued: “If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.”

Good riddance.  (H/T)

Hubbard posted this at 10:39 AM EDT on Monday, May 4th, 2009 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Politics, The Democratic Congress

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We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its costs.

– President Obama, from his inauguration speech

As I have written before, the sublimation of scientific fact to political ideology is a bi-partisan enterprise.  Politicians of all stripes will praise and use science when it is useful to them, and will denigrate and ignore it as soon as it becomes inconvenient.  As is well known, religious conservatives often object to evolution because it contradicts their theistic beliefs (or, at least, the belief that their theistic beliefs can be confirmed by science).  As a conservative, I am deeply troubled by this and have written about it at length.

But contrary to the president’s self-congratulation, liberals treat science as poorly as conservatives, though the particular sets of evidence they object to, and their religious/philosophical reasons for objecting, are quite different.  Sadly, this gets very little press.

That said, I’m very pleased to see Phil Plaitt of Bad Astronomy acknowledge that the anti-vaccination movement — a source of much of his rightful ire — is (predominantly) of the Left.

I am sometimes accused of attacking Republicans on this blog, but that’s not necessarily true. It’s more that the Republican party has held an increasingly anti-science stances these past 15 years or so, and I have been attacking that (plus the occasional other platform or two).

However, I’ve also been attacking the far left for some time now, but I just haven’t come out and called it that. Mostly because it’s not an overtly political stance, but it does tend to fall along that party line: the antivaccination movement. A lot of the most vocal advocates in this pro-disease camp are on the left; look at how they have shifted their name to “Green our Vaccines” for example.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tom posted this at 1:41 PM EDT on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 as Politics, Science & Evolution

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The British Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has been caught in a rather embarrassing and silly scandal:

LONDON — Britain’s Home Secretary apologized Sunday for putting five pay-per-view movies on her parliamentary expense account _ including two X-rated ones screened by her husband.

Jacqui Smith admitted she should not have claimed any of the movies and said all the money would be paid back. She attributed the mistake to not being careful enough with a service package that included both Internet and TV….

“X-rated is not the same as porn,” the spokewoman said, refusing to elaborate. She spoke anonymously in line with government policy and would not release the names of the X-rated movies.

That last line deserves greater *ahem* fleshing-out. Fortunately, the BBC sitcom Coupling, had a lengthy and *cough* in depth *cough* discussion on exactly this matter (some NSFW dialouge).

Tom posted this at 7:45 PM EDT on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 as Humor, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!, Politics

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Buried in this NYT piece is the predictable outcome of Bush’s love affair with the signing statement:

In his directive, Mr. Obama said any signing statement issued before his presidency should be viewed with doubt, placing an asterisk beside all of those issued by Mr. Bush and other former presidents.

“To ensure that all signing statements previously issued are followed only when consistent with these principles,” he wrote, “executive branch departments and agencies are directed to seek the advice of the attorney general before relying on signing statements issued prior to the date of this memorandum as the basis for disregarding, or otherwise refusing to comply with, any provision of a statute.”

Hope everyone is pleased with themselves.  Now that Obama’s president, he (quite understandably) feels free to ignore his predecessor’s objections at will.  This should be especially disturbing to anyone who maintained that Bush used signing statements to protect his rightful powers, since the laws those statements modified are still on the books and Bush isn’t president any more.

John McCain — who’s no genius when it comes to constitutional matters — was right on this one: signing statements are foolish quick-fixes that keep bad laws on the books and allow presidents and their successors to act unconstitutionally.

Elsewhere in the article, Obama promises to keep using signing statements, though with greater reserve than Bush:

But Mr. Obama also signaled that he intended to use signing statements himself if Congress sent him legislation with provisions he decided were unconstitutional. He promised to take a modest approach when using the statements, legal documents issued by a president the day he signs bills into law that instruct executive officials how to put the statutes into effect. But Mr. Obama said there was a role for the practice if used appropriately.

“In exercising my responsibility to determine whether a provision of an enrolled bill is unconstitutional, I will act with caution and restraint, based only on interpretations of the Constitution that are well-founded,” Mr. Obama wrote in a memorandum to the heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch.

That’s a relief.  Because Obama never makes empty promises that appear to elevate his own virtues at the expense of others.

Tom posted this at 12:43 PM EDT on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 as George Bush Sucks!, Politics, That's Not Change!, The Democratic Congress

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From the unlikely source of Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, come two articles about Democrats passing legislation that puts ideology and corruption above science.

First, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) — who’s asking price for violating the 1st amendment is apparently $9,000 — is busy creating a monopoly for science magazine publishers:

Recently, government-sponsored agencies like NIH have moved toward open access of scientific findings. That is, the results are published where anyone can see them, and in fact (for the NIH) after 12 months the papers must be publicly accessible. This is, in my opinion (and that of a lot of others, including a pile of Nobel laureates) a good thing.

Astronomers, for example, almost always post their papers on Astro-ph, a place where journal-accepted papers can be accessed before they are published.

John Conyers (D-MI) apparently has a problem with this. He is pushing a bill through Congress that will literally ban the open access of these papers, forcing scientists to only publish in journals. This may not sound like a big deal, but journals are very expensive. They can cost a fortune: The Astrophysical Journal costs over $2000/year, and they charge scientists to publish in them! So this bill would force scientists to spend money to publish, and force you to spend money to read them.

Why would Conyers do this? Interestingly, if you look at the bill sponsors, you find that they received twice as much money on average in donations from journal publishers than Congresscritters who don’t sponsor the bill — though to be fair, the total amount is not large. Still, Conyers got 4 times as much.

Meanwhile, in Illinois, the Democratic-controlled state assembly has ruled that Pluto is considered a planet again, out of homage to its native-born discoverer.

RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE NINETY-SIXTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that as Pluto passes overhead through Illinois’ night skies, that it be reestablished with full planetary status, and that March 13, 2009 be declared “Pluto Day” in the State of Illinois in honor of the date its discovery was announced in 1930.

Phil rightfully wonders what happens when Pluto is located above a state other than Illinois (heh).  I shudder to think of the loopholes left in all the other laws these idiots must pass.

All of this is a long-winded attempt to show that anti-science is a thoroughly bipartisan exercise.  Contra President Obama’s self-righteous inaugural promise to “restore science to it’s rightful place,” Democrats are just as corrupt, narrow-minded, and willing to put ideology above evidence as Republicans.

Tom posted this at 5:27 PM EST on Friday, March 6th, 2009 as Politics, Science & Evolution

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Maureen Dowd (of all people!) is actually worth reading today.  Admittedly, she cribs much of her column from John McCain’s twitterings, but she still sounds almost like Mark Steyn at times:

In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.

He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday.

“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.

He reckons he’ll need Congress for more ambitious projects, like health care, and when he goes back to wheedle more bailout billions, given that A.I.G. and G.M. and our other corporate protectorates are burning through our money faster than we can print it and borrow it from the ever-more-alarmed Chinese.

Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that “the status quo is not acceptable,” even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork.

Obama spinners insist it was “a leftover budget.” But Iraq was leftover, too, and the president’s trying to end that. This is the first pork-filled budget from a new president who promised to go through the budget “line by line” and cut pork.

On “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, dismissed the bill as “last year’s business,” because most of it was written last year.

But given how angry Americans are, watching their future go up in smoke, the bloated bill counts as this year’s business.

So the upper class, Georgetown-Manhattan liberals are feeling leery about the budget omnibus bill.  What about Middle America?  Well, Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) isn’t thrilled about it, either:

The Senate should reject this bill. If we do not, President Barack Obama should veto it.

The omnibus increases discretionary spending by 8% over last fiscal year’s levels, dwarfing the rate of inflation across a broad swath of issues including agriculture, financial services, foreign relations, energy and water programs, and legislative branch operations. Such increases might be appropriate for a nation flush with cash or unconcerned with fiscal prudence, but America is neither.

Drafted last year, the bill did not pass due to Congress’s long-standing budgetary dysfunction and the frustrating delays it yields in our appropriations work. Since then, economic and fiscal circumstances have changed dramatically, which is why the Senate should go back to the drawing board. The economic downturn requires new policies, not more of the same.

Interesting, most of Obama’s policies are unpopular (federal funding for abortions, the porkulus bailout, dropping missile defense to woo Russia) but he himself remains popular.  Will he be another Teflon President, a la Reagan or Clinton?  Or will he be made of velcro, a la Carter or Bush 43?

Hubbard posted this at 11:08 AM EST on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Politics

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About 35 minutes into his speech the other night, President Obama said:

Yesterday, I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office.  My administration has also begun to go line by line through the federal budget in order to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs.  As you can imagine, this is a process that will take some time.  But we’re starting with the biggest lines.  We have already identified two trillion dollars in savings over the next decade.

There was applause.  From Congress.  That’s like a DA getting a standing ovation from mafia dons at the end of his get-tough-on-crime speech.

I don’t know whether this reflects worse on the president or congress.

Tom posted this at 1:47 PM EST on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 as Politics, That's Not Change!, The Democratic Congress

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Nathan over at A Few Thoughts deplores the game-playing with the federal courts and explains the rules:

1. Identify rising legal stars in the opposite political or judicial camp.
2. When a president nominates these rising legal starts to “pipeline” positions that could lead to a seat on the Supreme Court, fight their nominations with every substantive complaint and procedural maneuver you can manage. (The public doesn’t pay much attention to this round of the game, so if you want to defeat nominees that would be hard to oppose in the attention-grabbing Supreme Court nomination round, this is your chance. Be sure to oppose the nominations of women and racial minorities with zeal.)
3. Don’t let your guard down when you defeat one nomination; you can’t let anyone through. That way, the president will be forced to nominate someone you like (or at least one you like better than the nominee you defeated).

He opposes the Republicans who oppose Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan, who was blocked from the federal bench in 1999.  But now that Kagan is up for Solicitor General, she has a duty to answer questions about what she’ll argue in court.  Courtesy of the WSJ’s Political Diary (sorry, no link) here’s a summary of her testimony [emphasis added]:

The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote today for President Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan to become the Justice Department’s new Solicitor General. The dean of Harvard Law School is expected to be confirmed, but her refusal to answer questions is setting a bad precedent.

Supreme Court nominees have in recent years declined to answer many questions on grounds that their answers could jeopardize impartiality in future cases. The exemption has not extended to executive branch nominees, however, whose policy opinions and judgments are a relevant part of their qualifications.

That could change if Ms. Kagan’s antics are allowed to stand. Seventeen times in response to Senate questions on topics including legal policy regarding gays in the military, enemy combatants and the Second Amendment, Ms. Kagan declined to give her views. Why? She claimed either she had a special duty to the Court or that she did not wish to prejudice future decisions from the Solicitor General’s office.

Well, Well. That’s a major departure from other executive branch nominees, including two Bush-era solicitors general, Ted Olson and Paul Clement, who answered questions at their hearings on controversial issues, from ROTC on campus to detainee treatment.

Ms. Kagan’s real motive for staying mute has been a subject of speculation. She may wish to avoid going on record with anything that could complicate her own potential nomination to the Supreme Court. If so, perhaps she shouldn’t have accepted Mr. Obama’s nomination to the SG’s office. The Senate confirmation process exists to provide oversight and give voters often their only chance to learn about the people who will govern in their name. The Solicitor General is not an empty vessel but the top legal advocate for the United States.

Republican Senators roll over for Democratic nominees in ways that Democratic Senators do not for Republican nominees; this is why Orrin Hatch, long time ranking Republican on the Judiciary committee, was the subject of an irritated but truthful aphorism: “Don’t count on Hatch till he’s chickened.”  The problem is that if one side is throwing punches and its opponent is not, the side throwing punches has no motivation to stop.  Republicans need to do unto their political enemies as their enemies do unto them. 

For example, the Democrats were obsessed with using sex scandals (or the implication of them) to bring down Republicans like Bob Packwood and Clarence Thomas.  It took Bill Clinton’s sexcapades to get Democrats to back off that tool.  If Republicans want to end the game, they need to stop complaining about the rules and win the silly thing.

Hubbard posted this at 1:14 PM EST on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 as Politics, We're all DOOMED

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The North Dakota House has just passed a bill that gives full legal protections to all homo sapeins, from the moment of conception onwards:

BISMARCK, N.D. — A measure approved by the North Dakota House gives a fertilized human egg the legal rights of a human being, a step that would essentially ban abortion in the state.

The bill is a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that extended abortion rights nationwide, supporters of the legislation said.

Representatives voted 51-41 to approve the measure Tuesday. It now moves to the North Dakota Senate for its review.

The bill declares that “any organism with the genome of homo sapiens” is a person protected by rights granted by the North Dakota Constitution and state laws.

I’m a moderate in the abortion debate* but I think everyone can agree that this legislations is insane.  As Marianne points out on Ladyblog, this essentially means that the state — e.g., child protective services — has the power to boss you around about your kid before you even know you have one, or potentially hold you liabable for not preventing a miscarraige.  Some additional questions

• Wouldn’t this effectively restart the clock of one’s age to conception, rather than birth? Could 17-1/4-year-olds sue to vote, and 21-1/4-year-olds sue to drink?
• Interstate commerce: If a pregnant woman from Bemidji, Minnesota traveled to Fargo, then decided to have an abortion back at home, could a ND attorney sue on the fetus’ behalf?
• Criminal charges: If a woman in ND does have an abortion, will she and the abortionist be charged with murder? If the father is involved, could he be charged as an accomplice? If not, why not?

Essentially, do we really want to confer legal rights on persons whose existence are difficult to ascertain and who — in so many, many ways — we don’t treat as regular people?  Don’t most women delay informing friends and family about a pregnancy until it’s far enough along to be a (reasonably) certain thing?  Well, if the North Dakota House has anything to do with it, you’ll need to tell the government you’re expecting.  So they can help you, you understand.

I hereby accuse the North Dakota House — an the Pro-Life Movement, by extension — of Stage One thought.

* I am vehemently anti-wade and reluctantly pro-choice, and in favor of much greater legal restriction on abortion.

Tom posted this at 5:15 PM EST on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 as Politics, The Law Is An Ass--An Idiot

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Scrapple Face does a satirical piece that I actually wish would happen:

With the announcement that Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) has pulled out of his bid to become President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Commerce the Republican National Committee (RNC) today offered Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) as a replacement.

“Sen. Specter is a career lawyer and politician, but he’s a fast learner and could be quickly trained to run the Commerce Department,” said RNC Chairman Michael Steele. “Of course, Republicans would miss his stalwart, reliable voting in the Senate. Conservatives never have to wonder how Arlen Specter will vote.”

White House insiders suggested Sen. Specter could get the same deal from Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, former chair of the Democrat National Committee, that Sen. Gregg made with his state’s Democrat governor — to appoint a Republican replacement once he’s confirmed as Commerce Secretary.

However, Mr. Steele said such a concession would be unnecessary, since replacing Sen. Specter with a Democrat would be an “ideology-neutral” move.

A White House spokesman said Mr. Obama bears no hard feelings toward Judd Gregg, praising his abortive nominee as “a man who paid his taxes on time.”

The administration claims it’s still on-target to fulfill its number one goal for the first 100 days, which is to fill all cabinet posts.

“The president is all about creating and retaining jobs,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. “However, at this pace there is some concern that getting an additional four million people hired may take more than one term of office.”

RNC Chairman Steele said he’s committed to helping the new president fill those jobs, and has also offered Maine Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, whom he recommended as “team players, depending on which team you’re talking about.”

One can dream. . .

Hubbard posted this at 3:04 PM EST on Friday, February 13th, 2009 as Humor, Politics

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