No Love for Sen. Bunning

I just enjoy this too much to ignore it. Sen. Bunning (R-KY) is up for reelection in 2010. Time Magazine named him one of the five worst Senators. (Since that article was written, Bunning and Sen. Akaka (D-HI) are the only ones who are still in office.)

So, last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is also a Republican from Kentucky, tells the National Press Club that he doesn't know if Bunning will run for re-election.

Bunning gets pissed and tells the national media that he doesn't know why McConnell would say that. He says that he made it clear to McConnell that he will run for reelection.

Now, just a couple days later, the Senate Republican who oversees all Senate races, John Cornyn (R-TX), says "I don’t think he’s made a decision on whether to run," adding "We’re working with Sen. Bunning now to provide him all the information he needs in order to make that decision."

Too funny.

The Change-o-Meter

Can I just say that I hate this new feature by Slate?

Could it be any more arbitrary than this? On a day when the President goes to Congress to meet with the opposition party, and after Obama gives a very sympathetic, high profile interview to an Arab TV station, he apparently loses five "points" on the Change-o-Meter because... there were job losses announced by major American companies.

I don't get it. At all.

The New Bureaucracies

These three stories really just make me smile. Even if you argue that the Education Department, State Department, and the Interior Department are all filled with a bunch of liberals who would never like being led by a "republican", how important is it for the leaders of these bureaucracies to have a good working relationship with the staff in order to be successful in what they do?

Senator Whitehouse: We Must Look Back

This is a great piece of oratory. Not perfect, but good, thoughtful, and provocative.

Biden's Goodbye

Some may say Joe's the ultimate politician. I don't know. I think this is an excellent, straight-from-the-heart speech.

Full speech is here.

The Oval Office By 43

YouTube - Oval Office Tour By Mr. Bush 20081111



Wow. Three thoughts:

1) Obviously Bush thought they would edit his presentation to make him sound better.

2) Whoever should be crafting the President's image hasn't seen this video and demanded that it be edited. (It is still available on the White House's website as of 1/9/09.)

3) It's hard to imagine anyone other than the President giving a meaningful tour of the Oval Office, yet in this case, they probably should have gotten a historian to lead the tour...

As for A Charge to Keep? Well, it turns out the President didn't get his facts right...

Congressional Districts

FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: Why Are There No Black Senators?: "I suspect that a lot of the problem, however, is that as Congressional Districts have become more and more gerrymandered, leading to the creation of more and more majority-minority districts following the 1980 and 1990 censuses, the black political apparatus has become more and more 'ghettoized'. Black candidates have not had to develop a message that appeals to white voters, because most of them don't have very many white voters in their districts (about half the nation's African-American population is limited to the 60 blackest Congressional Districts). Nor do they have very many conservative voters in their districts, and so they have not had to develop a message that appeals to conservatives, even though the black population itself is far more diverse in its political views than is generally acknowledged.

...

"Democrats ought to be mindful of these things when redistricting occurs again after 2010, aggressively challenging Republicans on both the wisdom and the legality of creating ghettoized Congressional Districts. Majority-minority districts harm Democrats by creating surplus Democratic votes, and in the long run, they probably hurt African-Americans too."