Getting Democrats back under 60?

This is the Republican party setting high standards:

“In 2012, their goal is to get Democrats back under 60,” said Jennifer Duffy of The Cook Political Report. “With 24 seats, the mathematical odds are pretty good.”

Democrats currently hold 56 seats in the Senate and the likely victory of Al Franken would put them at 57. Even giving them credit for the 2 independents (Lieberman and Sanders) only gets them to 59.

So isn't getting them "back under 60", two elections from now, quite a bit less than the bare minimum that the Republicans should be hoping for?

"Something called volcano monitoring"

Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana, complains about "wasteful spending".

While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called volcano monitoring.

Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.

Note to Bobby Jindal. Volcano monitoring is something like this, only for the people on the West Coast:



Hurricane Rita off the coast of Louisiana, 2005.
NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC

Forbes defines "liberal"

Lots of bloggers are puzzled by the fact that Forbes magazine's list of the 25 most influential liberals includes several self-described conservatives, moderates and advocates of George Bush's Iraq war. How did they get on the list?

Here's a summary of Forbes' reasoning:

• Andrew Sullivan - gay, gay, so very, very gay.
• Christopher Hitchens - atheist, thinks Sarah Palin is an idiot.
• Chris Matthews - likes Obama and it's been years since he thought only wackos hated W.
• Fareed Zakaria - really smart. looks foreign.
• Tom Friedman - come on, we all know Friedman is a liberal
• Fred Hiatt - mostly moderate and the left hates him, but Obama will probably read his column.

I guess we're a center-left nation after all

According to Forbes magazine, you're a liberal if you subscribe to "some or all of the following":

• progressive income taxation
• universal health care of some kind
• opposition to the war in Iraq, and a certain queasiness about the war on terror
• an instinctive preference for international diplomacy
• the right to gay marriage
• a woman's right to an abortion
• environmentalism in some Kyoto Protocol-friendly form
• and a rejection of the McCain-Palin ticket

I love the "certain queasiness about the war on terror" line. I suppose that's a euphemism for "opposes torture". And "rejection of the McCain-Palin ticket" alone puts 53% of all voters in the liberal category.

Republican women and the Lilly Ledbetter Act

Republican women Senators broke with their party to help pass the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, but Republican women in the House didn’t.

Ledbetter had sued her employer when she discovered that she was making far less than her male collegues, but (in a 5-4 decision) the Supreme Court decided that she hadn't discovered it quickly enough:

Although Ledbetter did the same job as her colleagues, and had more seniority than some of them, they were all being paid considerably more than she was. Ledbetter sued, under the Civil Rights Act, and proved that her lower pay was the result of discrimination early in her career, the effects of which had never been remedied. But victory was short-lived; the verdict was overturned on appeal, and then the Supreme Court ruled against her. The Court did not deny that Ledbetter had been discriminated against. However, according to the Civil Rights Act, Ledbetter’s lawsuit had to be filed within a hundred and eighty days, and the Court ruled that the clock started ticking with the first act of discrimination, almost two decades before Ledbetter found out what was going on.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act overturns that decision, clarifying that the clock starts ticking with the most recent discriminatory paycheck. Last year, Republicans successfully filibustered the bill and George Bush had threatened to veto it if it got to his desk. Yesterday's bill passed the Senate 61-36, enough to stop another threatened filibuster. Without the support of Republicans Susan Collins (R-ME), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) it would have fallen short.

Arlen Specter (R-PA) was the only Republican man in the Senate who joined them.

But before you conclude that Republican women and Republican men are hopelessly divided on this issue, realize that only 3 House Republicans supported the bill; Ed Whitfield (KY), Don Young (AK) and Christopher Smith (NJ) - all men.