Maybe the Gun Climate is Changing...

These poll numbers are interesting:

New PPP polls in Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, and Ohio find serious backlash against the 5 Senators who voted against background checks in those states. Each of them has seen their approval numbers decline, and voters say they're less likely to support them the next time they're up for reelection. That's no surprise given that we continue to find overwhelming, bipartisan support for background checks in these states.

Kind of amazing that there is a noticeable change in such a short amount of time, especially since people usually don't pay attention to votes like this until it gets closer to the election. Hopeful stuff.

Abolish the Senate

But since we can't do that, let's at least make the institution somewhat more governable with sane filibuster rules. A really good slideshow here on why reform is needed:

Call your Senator (especially if they're a Democrat) and tell them to support Senate Resolution 4. This would be a major win for democracy (and as a result, progressive goals).

Good Riddance, Health Shuler

Via Zaid Jilani on twitter, this video of Health Shuler:

Health Shuler just took a position with Duke Energy. Not surprising, but still hilarious.

Good Riddance President Snowe

Veteran Douche Caucus member Olympia Snowe is leaving the senate:

In a highly unexpected announcement, Olympia Snowe, the Senator from Maine, will not seek re-election, putting another seat on the table for the Democrats in the Senate and possibly shifting what was seen as a likely Republican takeover into more of a tossup.
Here’s the statement from Snowe, who didn’t really face much resistance for re-election:

After an extraordinary amount of reflection and consideration, I am announcing today that I will not be a candidate for re-election to the United States Senate.
After 33 years in the Congress this was not an easy decision. My husband and I are in good health. We have laid an exceptionally strong foundation for the campaign, and I have no doubt I would have won re-election. It has been an indescribable honor and immeasurable privilege to serve the people of Maine, first in both houses of Maine’s legislature and later in both houses of Congress. To this day, I remain deeply passionate about public service, and I cherish the opportunity I have been given for nearly four decades to help improve the lives of my fellow Mainers.
As I have long said, what motivates me is producing results for those who have entrusted me to be their voice and their champion, and I am filled with that same sense of responsibility today as I was on my first day in the Maine House of Representatives. I do find it frustrating, however, that an atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies has become pervasive in campaigns and in our governing institutions.

So Snowe alludes to the constant pressure on her to join her Republican colleagues on virtually every issue to block progress in the Senate, and presumably the prospect that she would have to do that for the rest of her career. This is another example of moderates being run completely out of the Republican Party.

Cry me a fucking river. Snowe has given cover for McConnell and the crazies more than just about anyone else. She went along with the nutjobs in her party almost ever time, doing their bidding in destroying any semblance of functional governance we had.

For all her bullshit moderate talk, when the chips were down, she was nothing but a coward. For this great moderate leader, where did she break with republicans on climate change? Immigration? Labor law? War? Health care reform when idiots on our side shut down the entire process to appease her every demand?

In the end, she caved to the demands of the crazy people running her party every single time. And for doing their bidding, I'm sure there's a lucrative career as a lobbyist waiting for her.

Good Riddance.

A Bold New Plan To Get Rid Of Medicare

And this one comes with the backing of a "liberal" senator! David Dayen:

In a surprise move, Paul Ryan found a Democratic partner to propose a new Medicare plan that does not fully privatize it, but instead keeps fee-for-service Medicare as an option alongside a premium support plan. This is the same proposal that the front-running Republican Presidential candidates have made.

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Its sponsors say the proposal would avoid shifting health costs to beneficiaries, but that’s not so.   It would replace Medicare’s guarantee of health coverage with a flat payment that beneficiaries would use to help them purchase either private health insurance or traditional Medicare.  It also would limit the growth in spending per beneficiary to the growth of gross domestic product (GDP) plus one percentage point (presumably on a per capita basis).  But health care costs have risen faster than that for several decades and, as Chairman Ryan acknowledged at a December 15 briefing, if that faster rate continues, the amount of the government’s premium support payment to beneficiaries would be cut back — with more of the costs of coverage shifted to beneficiaries — unless Congress intervened and made offsetting cuts elsewhere within Medicare.

Specifically, Ryan-Wyden would give Congress a period of time in which it could cut provider payment rates or make other changes to limit the rate of growth of Medicare spending before the premium support payments were automatically cut.  But Congress would not be — indeed, could not be — “required to intervene.”  And, Congress could well fall short of mustering the requisite majorities to enact alternative cuts — including 60 votes in the Senate — in the face of likely opposition by providers and other health-industry interest groups.

Many media accounts portrayed this part of the plan incorrectly (due to a confusing sentence in the proposal document that the sponsors issued yesterday), reporting that beneficiary premium support payments would be shielded — rather than cut — if health care costs rise faster than the target.


Ryan and Wyden also claim that their proposal guarantees that traditional Medicare “will always be offered as a viable and robust choice.”  Unfortunately, that’s not the case either.   Under a premium support system, traditional Medicare very likely would attract a less healthy pool of enrollees, while private plans would attract healthier enrollees (as occurs today with Medicare and Medicare Advantage).  Although the proposal calls for “risk adjusting” payments to health plans — that is, adjusting them to reflect the average health status of their enrollees — the risk adjustment process is highly imperfect and captures only part of the differences in costs across plans that result from differences in the health of enrollees.

Inadequate risk adjustment would mean that traditional Medicare was only partially compensated for its higher-cost enrollees, which would force Medicare to raise beneficiary premiums to make up the difference.  The higher premiums would lead more of Medicare’s healthier enrollees to abandon it for private plans, very possibly setting off a spiral of rising premium costs and falling enrollment.  Over time, traditional Medicare could well cease to be financially viable and could unravel — not because it was less efficient than the private plans but because it was competing on an unlevel playing field in which private plans captured the healthier beneficiaries and, thus, incurred lower costs.  The fact that Ryan-Wyden would allow private plans to tailor their benefit packages to attract healthier beneficiaries and deter sicker ones only makes this outcome more likely.

So yeah, this is a really horrible idea.

And it's hilariously insane politically, because the one chance the democrats seemed to have of a victory this November was running on the fact that all the Republicans voted for Paul Ryan's plan to destroy medicare.

Before any of this, I actually kind of liked Ron Wyden, because he was fairly liberal and had some interesting policy ideas. No one can no for sure what motivated him to do this, but my best guess it's another case of Egoism running rampant in the Senate.

Let's be clear about the stakes of this decision: Wyden is teaming up with the person who wants to end medicare to propose something that would weaken medicare at best. Additionally, he is fucking over every single person in his party by making their reelection chances that much harder.

Why would he do this? Well Dayen hints that this a retaliation against Obama for dropping his idea out of the health care bill, which seems about right considering the pettiness and entitlement we often see in the Senate. The other option is that he's an attention whore, and considering all TV invites and good press the DC media gives any democrat who wants to cut medicare/start stupid wars, I could see this being an option too.

At the end of the day, his actions are what's most important, and they merit him a strong primary challenge. The fact that I haven't seen that option even mentioned tells you just about all you need to know about the shittiness of the democratic party.

They Genuinely Don't Care About The Economy

Kent Conrad is the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee. Sunday he said this:

On Sunday, after he'd been schooled by leaders on the automatic cuts that could make a debt deal possible, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., talked to reporters. He was tight-lipped on the details but broadly optimistic about the bargain. There was one nagging question I wanted to ask: All the discretionary spending cuts in the plan—did they threaten to slow down growth, to drive up unemployment?

"Sure they do," he answered. "Now, what we don't know is: What will the offset be of improved certainty and confidence? And we'll just have to see."

Will austerity fuck up the economy? Maybe, says one of it's chief proponents.

They aren't blind to the facts, they just don't care.

Ben Nelson Just Can't Help Himself

After staying quiet for a few months, the legendary douche caucus member decides to make an appearance:

Sen. Ben Nelson, one of the more conservative Democrats in the chamber, has said that a deficit-reduction deal should focus on reducing spending, and not finding new revenues.

The Nebraska Democrat also said in a Wednesday statement that he thought a significant plan to roll back deficits would not necessarily have to take aim at entitlement programs.

“I want to see a broad and serious package of spending cuts,” Nelson said. “And we can cut trillions of dollars of spending without attacking Medicare and Social Security. But if we start with plans to raise taxes, pretty soon spending cuts will fall by the wayside.”

These debt ceiling negotiations just wouldn't feel right without Nelson getting involved.

Election Strategy: Douche Caucus Style

Harry Reid has a plan to make sure the Democrats hold the Senate: Let everyone do and say whatever the fuck they want.

What could go wrong?:

Over the past couple of weeks, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has railed against an increase in the debt limit, slammed his party on the budget and blasted President Barack Obama in a floor speech.

It’s all music to the ears of Democratic leaders.


“I don’t see that as an attack on the president; I think that’s just Joe Manchin,” said Washington Sen. Patty Murray, who as chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is trying to get Manchin reelected.

Manchin’s freelancing is part of what’s driving the Senate these days. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has given politically vulnerable Democrats license to do almost anything they need to survive a grim political environment, even if that means ripping the president, voting against Democratic bills and teaming up with Republicans to appear bipartisan. For Reid, it seems that, at this point in the election cycle, keeping his imperiled majority after 2012 is a far more important goal than preserving party unity on legislation.

. . .

Even on some politically contentious votes, there hasn’t been much effort to whip skittish 2012 senators into line. When the Democrats put forward their budget proposal earlier this month, Reid lost five Democrats and one independent who are expected to run for reelection next year. The defections opened up Democrats to GOP charges of pushing forward a bill that couldn’t even pass muster with the moderate wing of their caucus.

But in reality, it allowed the disloyal Democrats to tout their independence back home.

I realize that not every issue that liberals support will be crazily popular in all states, but with this everyone do what they feel like approach seems to destroy whatever common messages/brand you want to build.

If you don't have common values, you're just a bunch of assholes trying to beat another bunch of assholes in a statewide popularity contest, and that's about as far from a successful get out the vote message as you can get (See Deeds, Creigh).

At their core quite of few of these senators are just buffoons who don't give the slightest shit about policy of any kind (Ben Nelson and Joe Manchin are two of the most obvious, but they're far from the only ones). They want to protect the people who bankrolled their campaigns, see their face on TV so to feel special, but most importantly they need to win the biggest dick waving contest of them all, an election. There are lots of high priced consultants who make a living telling these people that the best way to win elections is through meaningless stunts, and of course these assholes don't actually care about any real policy issues, so they excitedly follow along.

So just to recap, Harry Reid is "freeing up" a lot of these douche bags to do even more pointless political stunts than usual, because everyone seems to agree it will help them get reelected.

Just another day in the US Senate, the living, breathing representation of why Americans hate politics and politicians.

The Social Security Hot Potato

Hey, great use of your time, senators!

More than 60 senators — evenly divided by party — sent President Obama a letter on Friday urging him to support a comprehensive effort to confront the nation’s growing deficit and debt.

The letter was signed by 32 Republicans and 32 Democrats in the hopes that evidence of broad support in the Senate will help prod Mr. Obama to lead the debt reduction charge this year.

“By approaching these negotiations comprehensively, with a strong signal of support from you, we believe that we can achieve consensus on these important fiscal issues,” the senators wrote in the letter. “This would send a powerful message to Americans that Washington can work together to tackle this critical issue.”

Senators Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, and Mike Johanns, Republican of Nebraska, led the effort to send Mr. Obama the letter from the 64 senators.

A smaller bipartisan group of six senators has been meeting privately for weeks in the hopes of negotiating a framework for changes to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the tax code. That group has said about 30 senators have expressed interest in their efforts.

Hey look, the letter is signed by an equal number of Democrats and Republicans! THIS MEANS SOMETHING.

But seriously, this letter is such a perfect embodiment of the Senate's worthlessness because with 64 senators, they could... (GASP) actually pass legislation and do something about this horrible problem worth writing a letter about! The reason they won't is that while all these people "know" that social security needs to be cut, most of them are too chickenshit to actually do it because... well...  it would end their careers.

Meanwhile, the leadership our president has shown on Social Security has been, errr, what's the opposite of courageous?

The White House will not prominently inject itself into congressional negotiations on Social Security reform until after key legislators in both the House and Senate unveil their plans to reduce projected long-term deficits, according to administration officials.

The White House's reticence has been characterized by some as a symptom of a rift between Obama's economic and political advisers. Some, like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, do in fact believe that a bipartisan deal on Social Security would result in real economic benefits, while others argue that Obama shouldn't embrace any plan that substantially cuts benefits at all.

But while opinions vary within the administration his advisers are united in the belief that achieving a workable deal with congressional Republicans will be difficult, and that it would be foolish for Obama to speak up now.

You could write a term paper on the idiocy of our Treasury Secretary thinking that cutting social security would improve our economy, but we don't have time to get into that too deeply. Let's just say that if he thinks that, he's an moron, and should have never been given the job/be fired immediately. But we knew all that months years ago.

The bottom line is that Obama is cool with cutting Social Security, but (just like his congressional counterparts) he's just to much of a pussy to say so himself.

It also wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility to expect a Democratic president to respond by strongly defending any attacks on Social Security, but I'm long past expecting Obama to do anything that positive.

So what's the end game?

Who the fuck knows, and it just depends on how serious everyone is about wanting to making old people suffer.

If people really want to get it done, they would have to make so bipartisan that no one can take the blame for doing this incredibly unpopular thing. Obama has made it clear that all he cares about is doing something "bipartisan", so I'm sure he wouldn't have any problem cheering on whatever abomination the douche 64 comes up with.

And that's how Social Security gets cut. There are obviously plenty of reasons it won't get happen (#1: Anyone who takes real responsibility for this will lose their job in the next election), but crazier things have happened.

Taking a step back, it's pretty phenomenal that with foreclosures rampant, high unemployment and multiple disastrous wars, the only thing a majority of US Senators and our Democratic president can agree on is the need to cut Social Security.

What a world, huh?

Evan Bayh Retired Like He Governed: As a Corporate Whore

I really liked this Ezra Klein post on Evan Bayh's retirement, but I'll lose all respect for him if he was actually surprised by any of this:

An acknowledged moderate who’d taken on these crusades wouldn’t have just been a good senator. He’d have been a great one. This new incarnation of Evan Bayh, I wrote, should stay in the Senate, where he could do some good. But he didn’t want to stay in the Senate, he told me in subsequent interviews. He waxed rhapsodic over his time teaching at Indiana University’s Graduate School of Business. “It was real, it was tangible, and it was making a difference every day,” he said. He wanted that feeling again. He wanted to come home at night, he told me, and say, “Dear, do you know what we got done today? I’ve got this really bright kid in my class, and do you know what he asked me, and here’s what I told him, and I think I saw a little epiphany moment go off in his mind.” For a United States senator to explain his retirement by saying, “I want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” was the single most persuasive and devastating critique I’d ever seen of the Senate as an institution.

But Bayh did not return to Indiana to teach. He did not, as he said he was thinking of doing, join a foundation. Rather, he went to the massive law firm McGuire Woods. And who does McGuire Woods work for? “Principal clients served from our Washington office include national energy companies, foreign countries, international manufacturing companies, trade associations and local and national businesses,” reads the company’s Web site. He followed that up by signing on as a senior adviser to Apollo Management Group, a giant public-equity firm. And, finally, this week, he joined Fox News as a contributor. It’s as if he’s systematically ticking off every poison he identified in the body politic and rushing to dump more of it into the water supply.

The “corrosive system of campaign financing” that Bayh considered such a threat? He’s being paid by both McGuire Woods and Apollo Global Management to act as a corroding agent on their behalf. The “strident partisanship” and “unyielding ideology” he complained was ruining the Senate? At Fox News, he’ll be right there on set while it gets cooked up. His warning that “what is required from members of Congress and the public alike is a new spirit of devotion to the national welfare beyond party or self-interest” sounds, in retrospect, like a joke. Evan Bayh doing performance art as Evan Bayh. Exactly which of these new positions would Bayh say is against his self-interest, or in promotion of the general welfare?

Evan Bayh spent his Senate career as one of the sleaziest motherfuckers in the building (and that's saying something), who lied, bargained and did the bidding of any corporate interest that looked nicely in his direction.

The idea that he would leave the Senate for anything different is laughable. Almost as laughable as Chris Dodd's "I won't become a lobbyist" talk, on the way to taking the most prestigious lobbying job that exists.

There's no need to expect any different from Bayh and Dodd, because they are just following the Douche Caucus plan. You do the bidding of these interests while in the Senate just long enough to make the necessary connections, then leave for a much easier job, making even more money directly for those same interests.

Most people on this path are just slicker about it than Bayh or Dodd were, but then again, it's almost telling that they didn't even need to pretend they were doing something more noble.

No one cares enough about their doublespeak enough to not invite them back on the morning shows every couple of months, and they're making more money than any of us will see in our lives.

What's their incentive to care about what anyone thinks?

Why the Senate is Broken

An amazing video. Best explination on this topic I've ever seen (via Boing Boing)


Filibustery: Episode One from Newsbound on Vimeo.

The Connecticut for Lieberman Offices Go Dark...

The biggest asshole in the Senate and chairman for life of the Douche Caucus has finally redered himself so unelectable that he'll be forced into retirement at the end of this term.

WASHINGTON -- Joe Lieberman will not run for reelection in 2012, Connecticut Democratic sources tell HuffPost, ending his four-term Senate career. Two prominent House Democrats, Chris Murphy and Joe Courtney, are eyeing a bid, with Susan Bysiewicz, a thrice-elected former secretary of state, also jumping into the race.

Lieberman, who lost a 2006 primary to netroots insurgent Ned Lamont, will announce his retirement on Wednesday. "Senator Lieberman made a decision about his future over the holidays which he plans to announce on Wednesday," a Lieberman spokesman said. In 2006, Lieberman ran under a party he created called Connecticut for Lieberman. Anti-Lieberman activists, however, have since taken it over.

It would have been nice to watch him get his ass handed to him in the next election, but it will be nice to see him out of office regardless.

Evan Bayh: A Jackass Till The End

Evan Bayh is leaving the Senate they way he spent his years there, by skipping his actual job to talk about how awesome he is:

Retiring Sen. Evan Bayh will not return to Washington, D.C., for a key procedural vote on the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in order to conduct a “farewell tour” of his state.

Good riddance, asshole.

Lindsey Graham Is Too Tired To Work

If you needed another reason to hate the Senate, Lindsey Graham took to the floor last night to complain about how he doesn't have time to do his job because he's too tired. (via dailykos)



In a just world he would lose his job over that clip.

DATD Repealed

Victory:

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Saturday struck down the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, bringing to a close a 17-year struggle over a policy that forced thousands of Americans from the ranks and caused others to keep secret their sexual orientation.

Kudos to everyone involved, the people organizng to get this repealed were relentless in overcoming the douchebaggery of the Senate.

Susan Collins' back and forth over how she would vote even though she kept publicly touting her support of the repeal was a perfect demonstration of just how broken the Senate is. In the end she was brought into line by another preening asshole by the name of Joe Lieberman, so it just proves you never know who's going to play the role of lead douche for each debate that comes up.

It's a shame that having gay soldiers will make our endless wars gay and less fun (whatever reason John McCain gave for opposing it) but I guess people like that will have stop getting us into so many pointless wars to make it even out.

Preemptively Destroying the CFPB

The lesson the Administration seems to have taken from the midterm elections is that people were clamoring for them to be more owned by the banking industry:

MELISSA BEAN FLOATED AS CFPB HEAD – Buzz on Friday had Rep. Melissa Bean (D-Ill.) possibly getting tapped as the first Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head depending on the outcome of her too-close-to-call reelection race, in which Republican Joe Walsh maintained a slight lead as of Sunday afternoon. But a possible Bean nomination is not sitting well with reformers on the left who say the moderate Illinois congresswoman is far too close to the banking industry. Said one administration official: “It’s not clear she would be acceptable to the reformers.

I disagree with that last sentence. It's pretty fucking clear that she would not be acceptable to reformers.

If you had asked me to make a list of the worst people to make head of the CFPB, Melissa Bean would be very close to the top. Jane Hamsher breaks down her record:

• FACT: Financial reform is the only major Democratic action of the past two years that is popular with a majority of the public, by a margin of 61-37.
• FACT: Audit the Fed, one of the key provisions of the financial reform bill, was something both liberals AND conservatives fought for, and was supported by 80% of the public. Only 9% opposed it. Bean voted AGAINST Audit the Fed.
• FACT: Melissa Bean and the New Democrats were able to shoot the House derivatives plan full of holes.
• FACT: Three in four Americans (76%) wanted the government to block or recover the bonuses AIG paid its executives after taking TARP money.
• FACT: Melissa Bean introduced an amendment to gut a House bill to limit bonuses for TARP recipients. It passed.
• FACT: President Obama and the DNC made attacks on Chamber of Commerce money one of the tentpoles of the 2010 campaign.
• FACT: Melissa Bean “earned the most support of any incumbent from the US Chamber of Commerce,” per a Sunlight Foundation study of how the US Chamber of Commerce used former government officials as part of their lobbying team on financial regulation. Bean’s former Chief of Staff John Michael Gonzalez was one of the nineteen former government officials they hired.
• FACT: Bean received over 40% of her 2009 campaign contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate sector.

That's a fucking shit show.

If the White House nominates Melissa Bean it shows they have absolutely no interest in keeping with the goals of the CFPB, and are 100% captured by the banking industry. The classic Republican tactic is not to destroy the institution, but to put someone in charge that has absolutely no intention of doing the job. Installing Mellisa Bean at the CFPB would do exactly that.

Pelosi For Minority Leader

This might be the quote of the year from Ryan Grim:

Conservative Democrat Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) has floated the prospect of challenging Pelosi for minority leader, but he is taken about as seriously by his Democratic colleagues as he was by secondaries when he was a bad quarterback in the National Football League. 

Shuler is a moron and doesn't stand a chance against Pelosi, but I'm sure that Steny Hoyer would be more than happy to take over if he thought support for he was on the decline.

Of Pelosi, Reid and Obama, only one of them was fighting for progressive policy during the last 2 years. Even now as Obama is sending signals that he's willing to cave and extend the Bush tax cuts, Pelosi is fighting back saying that she won't budge.

Sign this petition saying you support Nancy Pelosi as Minority leader to show your support!

Update: Brainfarted and originally titled the post Pelosi for Majority Leader. Ugh, it's been a long week.

The Corporate Whore Caucus

Pro Publica's investigation breaks down the New Democrat coalition:

As Congress entered the final weeks of its struggle to overhaul regulation of Wall Street in May, several hundred friends and colleagues slipped out of Washington for a private weekend on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Most were lobbyists for large banks, pharmaceutical firms, insurance companies, and big-ticket trade groups. However, 28 were members of Congress, and 29 were legislative staffers, all part of a coalition of House Democrats with a business-friendly agenda.

The retreat was held in honor of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of 69 lawmakers whose close relationship with several hundred Washington lobbyists has made their organization one of the most successful political money machines since the Republican K Street Project collapsed in 2007. In the past year and a half, New Democrats have pulled in more than $18 million in campaign contributions from their lobbyist fundraising network. The lobbyists, in turn, have mingled with lawmakers and their staffers at least 850 times during fundraising events and informal get-togethers.

The whole investigation is amazing and worth a read.

There's no question the Republicans are the worst, but the New Democrats and the Blue Dogs aren't very far behind. There's lots of work to be done, but driving these assholes out of the party is high on that list.

Ben Nelson Calls For Douche Summit

Even for Ben Nelson, this is incredibly stupid:

Senator Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) traveled to the conservative Heritage Institute on Wednesday to make the case once again that Congress should pass a full extension of the Bush tax cuts, at least until the economy turns around.

This is nothing new, even if the setting for the declaration was a bit off for a Democrat. Nelson voted for the Bush tax cuts in the first place and has been a leading skeptic of President Obama's plan to extend them only for those earning less than $250,000.

What stood out in the address was how the Nebraska Democrat tried to carve out a role as a Democratic emissary to the conservative crowd. Nelson told the crowd, according to an advance copy of his remarks, that he had written Obama recently encouraging him to host a bipartisan, bicameral summit on taxes, spending and the deficit.


"I suggested holding a private discussion, free of posturing and playing to the cameras, perhaps at Camp David," Nelson said. "If that setting could lead to the Camp David accords, why not the Camp David agreements?"

If there's anything our country needs right now, it's a pretentious gathering where the Olympia Snowes and Joe Liebermans of the world can exchange tactics on how to be bigger assholes. Thanks Ben, you never disappoint.

They Don't Like Taxing The Rich In Kentucky

The plan was to endorse Jack Conway as the next Train Action candidate. Maybe not:

No matter who Kentuckians elect to the Senate this fall, they're going to get an advocate for extending all the Bush tax cuts -- and not just those for the middle class. In their first (and likely only) nationally-televised debate of the race, Republican nominee Rand Paul and Democratic nominee Jack Conway disagreed on just about everything -- except for extending billions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans at a time when government is struggling to shrink the deficit.

"I think that raising taxes -- we shouldn't be doing it in a time of recession," Conway said. "Listen, in 2002, when I was running for the United States Congress, I was for the Bush tax cuts then. I was one of the few Democrats that was for them and I think now we just ought to extend them."

Ugh.

So fucking stupid.