Savvy Survivors.
Primary Day in Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Kentucky, among others, points to a fierce sell-off of incumbents and a lurch toward the patter of insurgents like Rand Paul and Joe Sestak. The political professionals are savvy enough to understand they must disguise themselves as outsiders, rebels, foxes in the coop, or just generally lean amateurs seeking to do the right thing. Pols are not volunteers. They are survivors (Mini-Me-Arlens). They are recruited and courted and indulged by a sharp business class seeking advantage with Federal and State regulators and tax authorities. Self-interest times three hundred million renders a self-correcting polity is the theory. What goes wrong can go right when the numbers don't match up with the performance expectations. Just like a market crash, or in the instance of May 6, just like the Flash Crash. Systems failure is an organic way of learning that you are on the wrong road. The digital masters of Wall Street are actually a loosely connected federation of market-making exchanges that exist entirely in the ether. Numbers link with other numbers, and when they wrong combination of numbers sweeps through the system wide warning system, the machines respond with random silliness. Sotheby's bid goes from 32 to 100,000 in a flash. Hilarious. What then happens is that the smart guys turn the digital slaves off. Click. And since no one is in charge, the failures in parts become the failure in the whole. Result: flash crash. Caveat that this is not all explained yet, and I do reserve the possibility that it was the Chinese hacker genius or the Russian mob hacker genius. No fingerprints ever is a clue. However for now I will allow that it was man-made interference in a man-made system of bots.
Election Primary Day.
This all points to the same problem with pols. The man-made system of tax and spend has clearly met a wall of resistance, or perhaps it is just the nature of systems that stop working when the fiat currency is laughed at even by the chumps who work for a living. They pretend to pay us this play money and we pretend we are rich? There is also the matter of politicians being too foolish to tolerate. Representing me with this knucklehead Mark Souder of Fort Wayne, Indiana or Richard Blumenthal of Hartford, Connecticut? Why would I vote for a guy I wouldn't take a meeting with, or even sit next to in the subway? Laughable next to laughing boy Chris Dodd, late disgraced Friend of Angelo of Connecticut. Primary Day is nature's way of telling the pols that they are trite, temporary, ignorant and generally disregarded -- which is why most of us don't vote in primaries. No self-interest to endorse or reject an unknowable whiner or con man or bubble head. The flash crash of May 6 and the primary day of May 18 share much in common in expressing the fact that no one is much in charge and that you must allow for a system where cowards and their sycophants rule (Blumenthal, Specter, Souder, Mollohan) and the bold are best regarded as Hollywood fictions. Recommendations: Sell Blumenthal, buy Sestak, long Burns, short DCCC, accumulate Irony, hold on Trust.
We have hit another wall. For as long as I can remember, we've been living in the greatest country on earth - the envy of the world. What is the fabled destination of every third-world denizen who's spinning his wheels in the mud of oppression, corruption, racism, and crony capitalism? It's where the streets are said to be paved with gold; where dollars and opportunity beckon soft and ripe like low-hanging fruit. So, they plan for the journey across the several seas. They sharpen their useful skills as to have something to trade when they arrive. And sure enough, they make a life for themselves and write home about it, inspiring others to undertake the journey as well.
It's half a life's work to make that journey. Sometimes, it's not all that easy - that tearing away of the heart from the (home) land. Sometimes they have to settle for their children reaching the top; the children conceived and spawned in the fecund new soil of America.
But where are those already here supposed to go? How do they exercise their hopes, their egos, their wits, impatience, their skills? They're already here, in the greatest place on earth. They take their luck for granted. They too look for new angles to satisfy their intellectual prowess. They too see what’s good in America - but to them it’s a wall. It can’t be moved.
They become politicians, journalists, muckrakers. They look for inspiration overseas. They light fires – small fires at first. Then they graduate to buildings, institutions. They run to the rescue, hoping to be heroes.
Ego. They start to meddle - rearrange things that can’t be rearranged; things that can’t be put back – like diabetes. Now they have a cause. They make new rules. They seek control. They deny themselves meat; they wear hair shirts – ego again. The more they meddle, the worse it gets. They’re overwhelmed.
Then they read somewhere that the path to Utopia must start with revolution. Things are already coming unhinged. They’ve had a part in its unhinging. Ego again. Now, the tearing down becomes a path. They reward and praise each other for essentially nothing – for kicking down the sand castle that’s taken Janie half the morning to build. We’ll have our revolution, by God! We’re tearing it all down. We’re doing something after all.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
Peter, how do you manage to stay so cheery all the time?
Taegan Goddard Political Wire:
Blumenthal War Claims Evolved Over Time
Former Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT) told the New York Times "that he had watched with worry" as Richard Blumenthal (D) "gradually embellished his military record over the years."
Said Shays: "More and more it kept creeping in. And it was very different than when he first described his service. I'm not surprised, because he just kept adding to the story, the more he told it. I think what happens in a case like this, it's a tiny increment of change, but when you haven't heard him in years you say, that's a big difference."
He added: "I understand how these things, over 30 years, you keep adding a little bit to it. And you're on very thin ice. And obviously he's on very thin ice right now. He walked too far out on the lake. It's really too bad, because he's a very good person."
Kinda puts an interesting light on "oral history" as history. How much is oral and how much is history. Probably true of every veteran who ever donned a uni.
Call me cynical, but I don't believe a word of any tale told by a Boomer about his "service." Those who did don't talk; those who talk tried to avoid service anyway they could, esp. Boomer Democrats.
It's funny what a double standard we have. It's considered de rigeur for a politician to lie about everything under the sun, except you can't lie about military service. I don't see why we have to draw a bright line there. I for one think Obama's "If you like your health plan, you can keep it" has much greater implications for America than somebody building up some whopper about how they rode next to Henry V at Agincourt.
Salena Zito does another Dewey defeats Truman with her take on Critz v. Burns over the last week. Again, I don't know how somebody can miss the mark by so wide a margin and be accounted an expert. My clients would fire me if I missed the mark by that much. But then I guess talk radio is just entertainment, not to be taken seriously.
"*** Republicans thought they had a winner in millionaire businessman Tim Burns. But Mr. Burns was handed the GOP special election slot over veteran Bill Russell, who had held Murtha to a 58% majority in 2008. The peeved Mr. Russell promptly ran against Mr. Burns for the party's nomination in the fall. Attacked from two sides, Mr. Burns underperformed in both races, winning 45% in the special and only 57% in the GOP primary over Mr. Russell.
Democrats exploited Republican doubts about Mr. Burns by getting to his right on taxes." - John Fund
Two points:
1) More living proof that the party has to stop pretending that it has no interest in who runs.
2) Anyone who seriously believes a Democrat running to the right on taxes deserves what they get. Unfortunately, their blatant stupidity takes the rest of us down with them.
Interesting take on Bennett (R-UT) defeat in the primary in relation to his membership on the Appropriations committee. I'm not holding my breath on reform of the Appropriations committee process because all those returning will merely dismiss the voter anger as a passing temper tantrum. Those returning have been too long in the saddle to learn anything except maybe how to Tweet.
"Utah Senator Robert Bennett has strong words for the delegates at his state's Republican convention who recently denied the three-term incumbent a spot on the party's primary ballot.
"You can win an election on screaming and anger but you cannot hold and govern for a significant period of time on screaming and anger," he told Jonathan Karl of ABC News this week. Mr. Bennett also has a warning for his fellow incumbents: "The degree of anger about Washington in general and the Congress in particular is much higher than I think a lot of people around here realized," he said.
A big change has been that in an era of sky-high deficits, voters no longer look kindly on members who bring home pork-barrel projects and other federal goodies. Mr. Bennett said he found voters "hated" his membership on the appropriations committee. "It was, 'You are a part of the fiscal problem that we have, if you're spending any money at all.'"
Mr. Bennett's friends say he was slow to realize just how vulnerable he became politically by playing inside Washington games. A former aide of his told me that he remembers urging his boss not to join the Appropriations Committee because he would wind up defending and fighting for federal programs he didn't believe in. "Sure enough, I can pinpoint the time when Senator Bennett began to lose touch with his base to the day he joined the 'favor factory' of the Appropriations Committee," the aide said.
This month saw anti-spending attitudes also reach into the Democratic Party with the defeat of Democratic Rep. Alan Mollohan, a 28-year incumbent who was a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee. More and more members are saying that with pork-barrel politics in disrepute, some reform of the appropriations process may be on Congress' agenda regardless of which party controls the institution."
-- John Fund