She may be an Angle, but she's not right.

Sharron Angle sues to suppress her primary campaign website

 Republicans face an inconvenient truth.  The winner of the Nevada  primary, who will oppose  hated Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid in November,  holds some way outside the mainstream political views.   Hard to believe that the woman who would represent Nevada, land of legalized prostitution and 24/7 bars with no "last-call" seeks a return to Prohibition (of alcohol). Nevada seniors will be heartened to know she would privatize Social Security and Medicare, since investing in the stock market has been such a fruitful way to secure their retirement dollars.  She has linked increase ammunition sales to a coming revolt against our duly elected "tyrannical government" through "second amendment remedies."  Not surprising that she received a perfect score from the NRA.  She will foster savings on government spending by eliminating wasteful and unnecessary institutions like the Departments of Energy and Education.

To the rescue, handlers from the Republican National Committee.  They took down her primary website and replaced it with a sanitized, rational sounding general election site.  When Harry Reid supporters attempted to keep the earlier site online, her lawyers tried to force its removal from the internet on the grounds of copyright infringement.  To keep her unguarded views available, the Reid supporters launched sharronsundergroundbunker.    The official Sharron Angle site paints quite a different portrait.

Players (Financial Regulatory All-Star Game)

The Urban Dictionary defines a player as "A man or woman that hooks up with many diffent persons but commits to none and in that process ends up hurting some of those invovled. " sic

Two rookie players on the Financial Regulatory All-Star Teams are Barack Obama and Scott Brown. Each has displayed a remarkable trajectory from populist champion to big money booster. Brown, number 41, won a senate seat in a special election last January promising “no more closed-door meetings or back-room deals by an out-of-touch party leadership.” He learned the fine points of the game among the pros in Washington, quickly evolving into a real power player. Ever the consumate athlete, he negotiated recently for 20 hours, holding on throughout the grueling financial regulatory reform reconciliation committee meeting. In the end, he won an exception to the Volcker rule for banks including hometown State Street Corp. and Mass Mutual. They will now be free to invest as much as three percent of their capital in hedge funds and private equity firms yet still continue to manage those funds. These risky investments necessitated the bank bailout that Tea Party candidates like Scott Brown have campaigned so vigorously against. In a further show of his rapid maturation as a player, Brown then threatened to vote against the bill if the banks were taxed to cover the cost of the law's implementation. He is shown here in a green Celtics jersey contrasting nicely with his trademark pink leather shorts, but his fundraising motto is "What can Brown do for you?"

The coaching staff at the White House is deservedly proud of their rookie, Barack Obama. In a January photo-op with Paul Volker, Obama called for reforms to "ensure that the failure of any large firm does not take the entire economy down with it." Elite coaches Lawrence H. Summers, head of the National Economic Council for the Obama administration and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have brought about Barack's new attitude. Summers earned nearly $5.2 million in just the last of his two years at one of the world’s largest funds in a position he describes as merely a part time job. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is a former president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In the late 1990s they worked to block the efforts of top regulators to regulate the same financial derivatives market that resulted in the current global financial crisis. No surprise then that Wall Street banks and the derivatives industry are considered to be big winners in the new financial reform legislation. Distracted by the Gulf Oil spill, Republican obstruction, Iran, Stanley McChrystal, and the Gaza flotilla, number 44 failed to make a critical slam-dunk with the big money donors from the banking industry.

Scott and Barry both live by the cardinal rule of all great players when it come to money or principles, "love em and leave em."

John, Take the Shot (The Republican War on the Middle Class)

How a Bill Doesn't Become a Law

Reading the Fortune Cookies at the Nihilist Restaurant on K Street

Fifth Highest Standard of Living in the World

Just in time for Independence Day holiday, the Republicans stuck it to the 1.3 million people with yet another threat of filibuster on extension of jobless benefits. While the senators are at home in their districts cooling off with beer at poolside fundraisers, the unemployed will sweat out another week of worry about foreclosure and feeding their children. With an average of six job seekers for each opening, the odds of securing employment are slim. Legions of job seekers are visible through the limo's windows.


Ben Nelson, Democratic senator from Nebraska, joined the Republicans in blocking the much needed relief. In my homage to Margaret Bourke-White, I depict him seated beside one of the architects of the the Republican senatorial strategy. By preventing government from performing its critical functions, Mitch McConnell hopes to return his party to power in the 2010 elections. Republicans rationalize this cynical approach to reclaiming ascendancy by claiming to be deficit hawks. Yet our fiscal decline began when they approved fighting two wars off the books while passing a tax cut for the rich.


Generous donations from industries that should be regulated keep senators living in luxury and out of touch with ordinary Americans. In 1937 when Bourke-White photographed the Bread Line, America boasted having the highest standard of living in the world. However, we have fallen to fifth place overall, with 37th place ranking among health care systems.

Piñata Party