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I had a great for a movie pitch today -- the long awaited sequel to one of my favorite flicks, "Groundhog Day" with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. The movie would be called "President's Day." You see, it's 20 years later now, and happily married with a tiny brood of kids, TV weatherman Phil Connors has entered politics (because of the humanity that he developed during his time in Punxatawney, he's now a liberal, of course :-) In the opening montage, the Murray character is elected senator and then the 45th president of the United States. But less than a month into his administration, on President's Day, he finds himself forced to repeat the same horrendous day over and over again. Every morning he wakes up at 6 a.m. to the same segment of "Fox & Friends" on TV joking that "he used to be a weatherman -- just like his terrorist friend Bill Ayers," and then he encounters the same insipid Republican congressman on a street corner, blithering "Phil? Phil Connors? We have to cut the capital gains tax again!," asConnors is forced to listen to the exact same Beltway punditry and tired conventional wisdom over and over. Will President Phil Connors make it to Tuesday and save the nation -- or will he be forever trapped in "President's Day"? I think we could get Murray and MacDowell for a good price these days.
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I'm still trying to figure this one out. A British newspaper gets its hands on a picture of Michael Phelps smoking from a marijuana pipe. Long after the fact, the sheriff decides to conduct an investigation of kids smoking pot at a college party, since apparently there is no other more up-to-date or serious crime in Richland County. S.C. And so the sheriff ends up busting eight unlucky schlubs, none of whom have 14 Olympic gold medals or multi-million dollar endorsement contracts. Phelps, of course, is totally scot free.
Man, is this a great country or what?
By the way, in looking upon the Google, I see that this very same sheriff bought this tank (pictured at top) that he dubbed "The Peacemaker" to keep the law-and-order in central South Carolina. OK, that answers my question. This IS a great country.
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The lack of posts here is because I was kicking off a week-long stint over at the TPMCafe Book Club, where we're talking about "Tear Down This Myth." The theme of my initial post is familiar to regular readers, but the twist will be when other commentators like "Nixonland"'s Rick Perlstein and Douglas Kmiec, who was a lawyer in the Reagan administration, weigh in later in the week.
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This weekend, Philadelphia lost yet another one of our best people, the sixth police officer to die in the line of duty in just 16 months. With each fresh murder, we are increasingly at a loss for words, even as our shock and outrage grows louder:
When Pawlowski and his partner approached, they were met by a hail of gunfire. Pawlowski was shot at least twice in the chest, once in an unprotected spot right above his bulletproof vest. Within an hour, he was dead.
Pawlowski, a five-year veteran of the force, grew up with policing in his blood. His brother Robert is a corporal in the radio room, and his father, John Sr., is a retired lieutenant with the Special Victims Unit.
Pray for our city.
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Not the third one in, apparently. Ferris, one of the Inquirer's seven or eight house conservatives, would not have gotten the joke last night; instead, he's here with a column that hails the GOP's stirring victory on the stimulus bill, if by victory you mean watching the bill become law with fairly minor changes and you mean taking a position that's the opposite of what most Americans believe.
Writes Ferris:
Sure, this was a flawed bill, with a priority not on stimulus, but on richly rewarding special interests loyal to Democrats. Republicans got that. More important, so did the public.
Still, the Republicans were outnumbered in Congress and supposedly out-messaged by the Great Communicator in the White House. It didn't matter. They did a better job of organizing their community and communicating.
Yes! Unless you're referring to the 59 percent of the public that supported Obama's position on economic stimulus. The ultimate irony is that Ferris and most congressional Republicans have now placed themselves in the position of rooting for the president's economic plan to fail, or else they'll look like complete idiots (...don't even say it.)Unfortunately, "SNL" hasn't been nearly as funny as the heady Fey-Palin days of autumn, so it was an interesting concept to find another famous ex-cast member (Dan Ackroyd, brought in from his recent undisclosed location) to play a politician that he resembles (the lamentable John Boehner). The ensuing sketch, below, wasn't laugh-out-loud funny, but it did nail the politics.
And while I didn't see John McCain (what is this?) on the morning shows, it apparently it was another case of life imitating "SNL." Yep, those Republics have Obana right where they want him.
Exhibit B: Judd Gregg.*
* I had a longer post on this that was killed by yet another glitch in the Clickability software. In protest, I refuse to recreate it.
Numbers don't lie.
While no more than 41% of Americans favor a criminal investigation into any of the matters, at least 6 in 10 say there should be either a criminal investigation or an independent probe into all three. This includes 62% who favor some type of investigation into the possible use of torture when interrogating terrorism suspects, 63% who do so with respect to the possible use of telephone wiretaps without obtaining a warrant, and 71% who support investigating possible attempts to use the Justice Department for political purposes.
So far, President Obama has been reluctant to pursue such investigations, but Leahy and Conyers in particular are calling for an accounting of what happened on Bush's watch.
PRINCETON, NJ -- Public support for an $800 billion economic stimulus package has increased to 59% in a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Tuesday night, up from 52% in Gallup polling a week ago, as well as in late January.
There's a saying in modern journalism that the audience knows more than you do. In politics, the audience knows more than the Beltway pundit class or a lot of our political leaders. Why do so few of them listen?
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
-- Abraham Lincoln, delivering his anti-slavery speech at New York's Cooper Union, Feb. 27, 1860.
I guess you could call Lincoln the original '60s radical -- 1860s, of course. Today the world honors the Great Emancipator on his 200th birthday, and rightfully so. He was also the first Republican president -- and in this present era of madness it's worth noting that the Party of Lincoln has produced some other great American leaders. The list would have to include Teddy Roosevelt, a force for progressive causes from scenic preservation to food safety, and Dwight Eisenhower, who understood the importance of a strong infrastructure and tried to warn the nation about the dangers of the military-industrial complex.
So who do you think was the greatest Republican president? Is Lincoln a slam dunk. How come none of the candidates for GOP chairman in 2009 even paid lip service to the 16th president?
Discuss.
UPDATE: Fans of Attytood can tell me what they think of this blog in person tonight, when I talk about "Tear Down This Myth" and sign copies (which will be sold there by Joseph Fox) at Philly's legendary Pen & Pencil Club, at 1522 Latimer Street, at 7:30. See you there...bring your rotten tomatoes.
Roughly this time a year ago, inspired by the insanity that was the 2008 presidential race, I started working on Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future." With a target publication date right before the Gipper's 98th birthday (or Reagan Day as modern conservatives have declared it), I did have one nagging worry. What if a decisive election victory last November by Barack Obama and congressional Democrats appeared to slay the Reagan myth for once and for all -- ushering in an Age of Aquarius in which government took a rational view of science, adopted economy policies that would actually help the middle class, and promoted a foreign policy in which our deeds matched our lofty rhetoric.
Silly me! Just like the bell in the Polar Express, the Reagan myth still rings for at least 37 Republican senators and 188 GOP House members, as it does for all who truly believe in the right-wing blather of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. And it's echoed by a lazy inside-the-Beltway press corps that came of age during the halcyon days of the 1980s and remains falsely convinced that America is a center-right nation, despite a slew of polls and election results to the contrary.
The Reagan myth was sold so successfully to the party's base by the likes of lobbyist and GOP point man Grover Norquist -- who founded the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project in 1997, in the dog days of the booming Clinton-era economy -- that too many Republicans really do believe that a tax cut is the solution to every problem, whether the nation has a budget surplus or a deficit, in times of war or peace, when the economy is booming or when Great Depression II looms.
Before this year's debate, the most bizarre manifestation came in 2003 when the Bush administration pushed through a tax cut even though America was engaged in two wars. Iowa Republican Jim Nussle, who headed the House Budget Committee at that time, explained "the basic playbook" on taxes is the one authored by Reagan, "and that is the one that I follow today." Meanwhile, one study found that nearly three-quarters of the whopping rise of nearly $4 trillion in national debt during the presidency of George W. Bush was attributable to two things: the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the size of his tax cuts.
When President Barack Obama, both as a 2008 candidate and now as commander-in-chief, declared it was high time to end the folly that tax cuts are the only solution to the nation's woes, this is how South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint responded: "It's incredible that he said that. It's clear that whether it's John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan or when Bush did this in 2001 and 2003, the economy came out of recession." But the evidence for that argument just isn't there.
In the case of Reagan's massive 1981 tax cut, it did start the great divergence of wealth between the very affluent and the middle class in this country, but it didn't save the American economy, which actually slid into a deep recession the next 15 months. When the economy finally reversed in the mid-1980s, it was the predicted bounce-back in the business cycle (even Reagan's budget chief David Stockman said so), a steep drop in global oil prices, and the inflation-fighting tight-money policies of then-Fed chairman Paul Volcker, an appointee of Jimmy Carter who today is a top adviser to Barack Obama. And yet the Ronald Reagan myth and the hanging-by-a-thread 41 Senate Republicans have foisted a recovery program on America that is too weighed down by more tax cuts, and spends far too little on the nation's crumbling infrastructure, on mass transit, on green energy.
History matters. To set a new economic course for America, Democrats including the Obama administration won't just have to win the daily news-cycle wars of the present. They will need to dig deeper, and recapture the past as well.