BY GARY ANDRES

Reprinted from weeklystandard.com

Bill Thomas loved schemes. The former California congressman, who chaired the House Ways and Means Committee from 2001 to 2006, practiced the arcane art of parliamentary procedure like a wizard, concocting potions that turned his political opponents into hapless frogs.

Thomas sometimes even kept the details of his grandiose plans a secret from allies. He once pulled Majority Leader Dick Armey aside on the House floor and whispered that he had a new idea about how to pass a controversial piece of legislation. 

“Great,” Armey said. “What is it?” 

“I can’t tell you,” Thomas said with a twinkle in his eye. “But you’ll love it.” 

Thomas understood Congress’s dark side. His lengthy House tenure—28 years​—convinced him that there is a gene in congressional DNA that leads lawmakers to kick the can down the road rather than make tough choices.

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BY JOHN FEEHERY

Reprinted from: feeherytheory.com

Sometimes, I just want to strangle Ronald McDonald.

From approximately 2 in the afternoon yesterday until about 8 o’clock yesterday night, my four-year old son had one message and one message only.  He wanted to go to Old McDonald.

Old McDonald – as he likes to call the place where you get the Big Mac – serves Happy Meals, and apparently, the Happy Meal is the only thing that makes my son happy these days.

So, for every fifteen minutes, at various pitches and voice levels, my son requested that we go to Old McDonald’s and get a Happy Meal.

On one level, the discourse between my son and me was extraordinarily frustrating.  I knew that he wasn’t going to get a Happy Meal yesterday, and he knew he wasn’t going to get a Happy Meal yesterday, but that didn’t stop him from requesting it on a fairly regular basis.

But on the other level, the message discipline that came from little Jack was very impressive.  He stuck to his message, no matter how ineffective it turned out to be.

Little Jack reminds me a bit of Joe Biden.

Now, let’s not kid ourselves.  When it comes to message discipline, Joe Biden is no Jack Feehery.  Biden is usually on some crazy tangent somewhere, whether he is talking about Anna Chapman (probably my favorite Biden line ever), the President’s over-reliance on the teleprompter (a close second place), or whatever else comes through his transom.

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BY RICH GALEN

 What follows will be considered nothing less than heresy by other children of the ’60s (who are now IN our 60s), but the irony is too perfect to ignore.

• The poet laureate of our generation was a guy named Robert Allen Zimmerman, better known to some as Bob Dylan.
• Of all the poems he set to music, one of my favorites was “The Times They are a’Changin’” which was a plea to “mothers and fathers,” “writers and critics,” and “Congressman, Senators” to (in the latter group) “please heed the call.”
• Ok. You remember the song and, if you are of a certain age, you will now walk around for the rest of the day with the tune bouncing off synapses unused for the nearly five decades since you might have listened to someone playing it on their Martin nylon string guitar sitting on the floor of the TKE house at Marietta College, Marietta, Ohio 45750.
• Or, some variant on that theme.

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BY TONY BLANKLEY

Reprinted from Townhall.com

Abraham Lincoln: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” Lincoln address in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Feb. 22, 1861:

“That sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty … to the people of this country … Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? … if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.”

Lincoln’s inaugural address of March 4, 1861: “The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was ‘to form a more perfect Union.’ ”

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BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

 The flash from the explosion–and implosion–of General Stanley McChrystal has faded and his story is already old news.  Lindsay Lohan, Mel Gibson and Rod Blagojevich are back in the headlines. 

 That’s too bad.   If there is any good to come of the McChrystal tragedy, if we as a society are to learn from the experience, then we need to sift through the rubble again and see if we can’t find out more about the right and the wrong,  who did what to whom, why it happened and how, and what has changed or will change as a result.  It’s important. 

 General McChrystal, as you will recall, was the U.S. commander in Afghanistan brought down by a story in Rolling Stone Magazine. McChrystal and his aides were quoted as speaking derogatorily and crudely of the civilian chain of command from Washington to Kabul.

 The story caused serious direct and collateral damage.  The coverage for a brief time was thorough, but there is a lot more for serious journalists to cover. 

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BY GARY ANDRES

Reprinted from the Weekly Standard

If legislation were dirt, Democrats would have piled up a mountain of it over the past 18 months, digging themselves in a deep political hole in the process.

The House that Nancy (Pelosi) built continues to ramrod new policies through the legislative process, hoping the bustle will salve America’s sour mood. Senate Democrats move a little more slowly due to different institutional rules, yet their hearts are in the same place: the more legislative production the better.

That’s what legislators do, after all.  New laws are like seed corn, intended to grow public support.

But it’s not working.   The congressional majority keeps passing initiatives they say respond to the public’s desire for “change.” Yet the combination of current liberal initiatives and uncertainty about future policies now seriously hampers economic growth and business risk-taking. It’s also taking a toll on congressional standing with voters.

Gallup reinforced this point last week, reporting Congress’s job approval rate hovering near an all time low of 20 percent.

Perceived liberalism in the lawmaking process may also impact Americans’ ideological self-identification.  Gallup issued a separate study recently, demonstrating a significant rise in the number of Americans describing themselves as conservatives since the 2008 election.

Near record numbers now also say that the Democratic Party is “too liberal.”

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BY MICKEY EDWARDS

 Reprinted from The Atlantic

 Shakedown? You wanna talk about a real shakedown?

What? You didn’t think Al Capone was around any more? Let me tell you about the SEIU.

Merriam-Webster defines a shakedown as extortion. To “extort” is to obtain one’s money or property by force or intimidation. Herewith, a personal story which (I apologize) requires a bit of context.

After leaving Congress, I was invited to teach at Harvard. At Harvard, one’s ability to teach is gauged by fellow faculty members and administrators (who judged me to have done well enough that I was appointed and reappointed , eventually staying far longer — eleven years — than almost any other non-tenured “practitioner” in the Kennedy School’s history). And by the students (who voted to name me the most outstanding teacher in the school). Then I was invited to teach at Princeton and again did so successfully. I also taught, as a visiting professor, at Georgetown. All in all, more than 15 years of teaching at not-so-shabby places.

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 BY JOHN FEEHERY

From the Feeherytheory.com

There are two things that can ruin an MRI scan.   One of them is metal.  The other is Obamacare.

The MRI machine was first used on a human being on July 3, 1977.  Three doctors, Dr. Raymond Damadian, Dr. Larry Minkoff and Dr. Michael Goldsmith, worked for 7 years on their machine, which they called the “Indomitable”.

The MRI’s most important component is a huge magnet, which is why it is pretty dangerous to bring any kind of metal object into a room where a MRI is being used.

If you are holding a paper clip or a screw driver, when the MRI switch is flipped on, the paper clip or screw driver could fly out of your hand and through the air, towards the magnet, where the patient is usually laying down.  That paper clip or screwdriver then could become a flying missile, heading right for the poor sucker who just wants to find out what is going on inside his or her body.  That is one way to really screw up an MRI.

Basically, an MRI machine uses the huge magnet to create electromagnetic waves that create photons that are then turned into images, which are then read by radiologists.

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BY JOHN FEEHERY

 Reprinted from the Feeherytheory.com

  My father, a rabid White Sox fan if there ever was one, would always talk derisively about Cubs third baseman Ron Santo as Mr. Clutch. 

 “If you ever needed a guy that would hit a completely meaningless home run when it didn’t matter and strike out when it did matter, Ron Santo is your guy,” he would say with a laugh.  I was thinking about Ron Santo when I heard that the conference committee on the Wall Street reform package had just concluded.  

 The Democrats were very proud of themselves, with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd exchanging hi-fives and getting standing ovations from their colleagues.

 Some commentators have said that with the health care package that passed earlier this year and with this financial services package that will pass next week, theoretically, the President is really putting “points on the board.”

 But in my mind, those points are kind of like the points that the reserves get in garbage time, when the game is already over.  They aren’t going to help the Democrats win any elections, and more importantly, these legislative victories aren’t going to create any new jobs.

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BY GARY ANDRES

            When tiny globs of gooey brown oil began washing up on Gulf shores, it foreshadowed a more ominous environmental calamity lurking just over the horizon.  These first signs were troubling enough. But they also revealed a more daunting threat riding incoming tides that might prove impossible to fix.

            The Gulf disaster is a metaphor for our federal spending and debt crisis.   Globs of budgetary red ink have been washing up in Washington for some time now.  Cleaning up the immediate problem is hard enough. But the difficulty policymakers face addressing the current fiscal mess only underscores a larger challenge.

            The Senate’s efforts over the past month, trying to enact a state aid/unemployment/tax extender bill are illustrative. The Democrats’ original plan exemplified politics as usual.  These initiatives all cost the federal government money.  But instead of making the tough choices necessary to pay for these benefits, they proposed just adding more to the deficit.

            But with an election looming and nervous voters increasingly cranky about unsustainable debt, the original Senate plan, which increased the federal debt because it offset less than a third of the  $190 billion in spending, ran into a buzz saw of opposition.  Democratic leaders continue to ameliorate concerns by scaling back the package or finding other offsets.

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