RNC Chairman Michael Steele in a debate with Harold Ford Jr., on the topic of taxation of the wealthiest Americans:
Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money.
That should be the Republican Party’s slogan.
From the so-stupid-it’s-funny files:
So come August, when it’s really hot, does that mean that the RPV is wrong?
Remember, kids: the plural of “anecdote” is not “fact.”
The interesting thing about a few senate Democrats crossing party lines to vote for SB714 (“Individual health insurance coverage; resident of State shall not be required to obtain a policy”) is that it gave me a chance to test out the accuracy of the partisanship matrix that I use on Richmond Sunlight.
The theory behind the simple algorithm is that bill cosponsorships is a form of a social network. Whenever a legislator cosponsors another legislator’s bill, has his bill cosponsored by another legislator’s bills, and the total overlap between one legislator’s copatroning relationships and another’s, allows one to see with which legislators a legislator has the greatest number of sympathetic connections, legislatively-speaking.
Under this ranking, the six least partisan (that is, most likely to work with Republicans) Democratic members of the senate are, from least partisan on down, Edd Houck, Chuck Colgan, John Edwards, Roscoe Reynolds, John Miller, and Phil Puckett. Of those six, all but Edwards voted for HB10. In that regard, this system seems to have performed pretty well.
Incidentally, the most partisan Democratic members of the senate appear to be Mary Margaret Whipple, Patsy Ticer, and Chap Petersen.
One more fun fact: Fully half of the Republican members of the senate are ranked as less partisan than Democrats. Robert Hurt is the single least partisan member of the senate, again, in terms of bill cosponsorship relationships.
McDonnell’s appearance runs from the 1:20 mark through 3:10. It’s pretty funny, and encapsulates my response to his Potemkin SOTU.
Rep. Tom Perriello is introducing a bill to make a brilliant modification to campaign finance law. It’s a bit breathtaking in its simplicity and utility. With the recent Supreme Court ruling (which is simultaneously legally correct and practically stupid), corporations can make unlimited contributions to candidates for political office. This will be, as anybody can see, a disaster. Note, though, that the restriction on contributions from non-citizens remains: you cannot give to a campaign if you’re Canadian, Mexican, or Iraqi. Americans only. There’s a clear conflict here. There’s nothing keeping somebody from establishing an American corporation but having a foreign national own the stock. That would allow foreigners to fund campaigns, which I suspect we can all agree is wrong.
Perriello to the rescue. He’s introducing a simple bill—and I do mean simple; it’s 10 lines long—that would prohibit corporations with foreign shareholders from contributing to campaigns.
I’ve only mulled over this for a few hours, but there’s really nothing to dislike about this. It fixes a significant loophole in the law in a simple, elegant way.
While I’m on the topic, here’s the good news about allowing corporations to donate to campaigns: it’ll force repatriation of some of these good-for-nothing faux-American companies who have moved their corporate headquarters into a mailbox in Bermuda. Stanley Tools was all set to move, but the outcry was great enough to keep them…but it doesn’t matter, I’ll never buy anything from them. Remember Tyco? They weaseled out of $400M/year in taxes by having their business in a country that they didn’t go to, where they had no offices, and required no services. If anti-American companies like these can’t get any skin in the game without paying U.S. taxes, maybe they’ll rethink this strategy.
That’s the worst silver lining I’ve ever ginned up.
The Tea Party presents itself as a grassroots, jus’ folks, not-gonna-take-it-any-more uprising, consisting of regular people who were so fed up after several weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency that they just couldn’t take it anymore and they just had to do something.
But that’s basically the opposite of what we’re seeing here in the fifth congressional district, where at least two of the Republican candidates are just rich guys self-financing their campaigns. Lawrence Verga was the first to do it. Having just moved to the district, he’s totally certain that he should be in charge. We can see that not many other people agree with him, since he’s had to give his campaign $226,579 just to get it off the ground. (A bunch of that went to Joe the Unlicensed Plumber to buy an endorsement.) The rest of his money—a grand total of $11,025—came from thirteen people, eight of whom live in the district, $6,250 in all.
Now Jim McKelvey has given his campaign a half million dollars, too. Haven’t heard of McKelvey? Well, that’s basically his problem in a nutshell. But, don’t worry, he’s got other supporters. Well, another supporter, singular. A Roanoke packaging salesman who gave him a grand.
For comparison, Feda Kidd Morton—for my money, far and away the most unhinged candidate in this race, and definitely the most vocal—has raised $14,301 from a grand total of seventeen people. I’ve worked on congressional campaigns in the pre-primary phase, and watched closely many more. Seventeen people contributing is not good. Seventeen people pledging $14,301 is cause to consider entering the race. Several months into the race, those kind of numbers are cause to pack up and go home.
But what’s even worse is McKelvey and Verga who, in dollar values or number of contributions, are in terrible shape when compared to the wretchedly unsupported Morton. (These three are the only candidates who have filed their reports yet. They’re due Sunday. No doubt some of those will be equally revealing.) As I’ve written, there’s nothing wrong with candidates contributing to their own campaigns. But when they use their money as a substitute for actual support, or to provide the appearance of support where there is none, that’s a sign of a fatally flawed campaign. In 2001 Mark Warner pumped millions into his own race, but not until October, and not as a means of feigning support, but to supplement his own already-healthy coffers.
With these kinds of numbers from candidates desperately jostling to be the Tea Party darling, it’s awfully tough to why in the world they’d want to tie themselves to such a wretchedly ineffective group. Given the well-lined pockets of McKelvey and Verga, the reality of Tea Party dynamics is becoming clear: they’re exactly like any other party. They talk a good game about being salt-of-the-earth types, but it’s the rich folks who run for office, trying to blend in with their supporters. The trouble is that their supporters don’t have any money. They’re just the proletariat, so star-struck by ostensible politicians listening to them—so utterly naïve about the political process—that they’ll hang teabags from their ears to demand that the government cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans who, not coincidentally, are the very politicians standing in front of them.
We’ve got a word for that: suckers.
This Fifth District Republican primary is really separating the men from the boys:
[Robert] Hurt is a likable person personally, [Mike] McPadden said, but “Democrats and moderates like Hurt will vote to raise taxes when the going gets tough.”
That’s right—if the U.S. were (say) invaded by China, that namby-pamby Tom Perrillo or the spineless Robert Hurt would probably do something pathetic, like fund the war with a two point tax increase on the wealthy. When the going gets tough, it takes a real man like Mike McPadden to recognize a great business opportunity for Chinese language tutors. The free market to the rescue again!
Given the new math of the Senate, aren’t Republicans nineteen seats from a Senate majority, rather than ten?
The great majority of my time in the past couple of years—and certainly the past six months—has been spent on the design and construction of our new house, which is slated for completion by the end of winter. The process has been enormously educational, and I’ve been intending to share some of what I’ve learned in this process.
Chief among the lessons from this process is the importance of properly siting a structure. Our house, as designed, would be an engineering failure if it were built 50 feet in any direction of where we’ve placed it, and an engineering disaster if built 500 feet away. That’s because it was designed for the very spot that we selected.
The bulk of our land is the side of a mountain. The logical place to have built our house would be towards the base. It’s flat, it’s relatively close to the main road, and there are neighboring houses (indicating that others believe it’s a good spot). But, being familiar with the area, we knew that it would be a poor location, for reasons that have apparently evaded some of our neighbors. Every decade or two, heavy rains wash down gullies along the mountainside, flooding the road and the land around it. That’s not just trouble for a house, but a minor ecological disaster for a septic system. There’s also the problem of sun. Being at the base of a narrow valley means limited access to the sun, what with the mountains. That means dark, depressing winters, significantly more need for auxiliary heat, and limited gardening possibilities.
Instead, we tromped around our land over the course of months, trying to find the best spot. There were a few criteria that we were using, which we ended up selecting a site on the basis of. We wanted a relatively flat spot. That would be easier to build on and it would give us the best access to the sun. We wanted to have deciduous trees on the south side of the house. That would provide us with shade in the summer, but open up to admit sun in the winter, saving us untold thousands in heating and air conditioning bills. We wanted to have trees between us and the road, because we figure that people shouldn’t have to look up and see our house. We needed a viable route to run a driveway. And we wanted to have enough relatively flat land nearby that we’d have space for pasture and gardens.
We eventually found the appropriate site, selecting a spot beneath the spreading bows of an enormous deciduous tree.
The next step was designing the house for that site. Working with an architect at Artisan Construction, we started by considering the natural grade of the land and the direction of the sun, and we aligned the house so that one of the long sides faced south. We covered the south-facing wall with windows, and clad the roof with unpainted aluminum, to reflect the sun’s rays. The overhangs were designed to be deep enough to shade much of the south face of the house from the high summer sun, but to also be shallow enough to allow the face to be bathed in the winter sun. Finally, we considered outdoor living space, making the south face of the house—the warmest, sunniest side—open up to a deck and patio, allowing us to expand significantly the functional size of our house for six months out of the year.
The resulting house is perfectly suited to its environs. If we moved it forward fifty feet, it would be exposed to full sun in the winter. If we moved it to one side fifty feet, it would be down in a gully, in the shade. And so on.
The three simplest steps that we took—steps that anybody ought to take when building a structure—were sizing our overhangs properly, maximizing window coverage on the south face, and having deciduous trees on the south face. Two of these things are free—there’s no reason not to do them. We’ll save a fortune in energy costs, and have a generally nicer home as a result.
Waldo Jaquith (JAY-kwith) is a website developer and political pundit who lives in the vicinity of Charlottesville, VA, USA. more »
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