Todd's Mischief Blog

This week's edition of the Sunday Spin Cycle is going to be brief, not only because I have other time obligations, but because all the Sunday shows were in virtual lock-step today. With the exception of CBS Sunday Morning , which did an episode inexplicably devoted entirely to islands, all the shows focused on the debt limit and the Paul Ryan Plan vs. the Simpson-Bowles Plan. In a nutshell, Washington is poised for another budget battle when it comes to spending limits. The Democrat argument is that if Republicans would agree to raise the debt limit, then the debt wouldn't matter. The Republican argument is that spending limits wouldn't need to be raised if spending could be brought under control, and the debt absolutely matters. The Democrat counter-argument is, "La-la-la-la!" Moving on to budget plans: if you are a Democrat, then Simpson-Bowles = Good while Ryan Plan = Bad. If you are a Republican...well, you can figure it out. Here's the nasty little secret...

Susan B. Anthony List has produced a shiny new ad against the Obama administration. I'm impressed with the production on this. It's on a budget but it has the creativity and the punch to overcome that. I'd like to see more Republican and conservative ads like this one. RespectMyVoice.com

Yesterday , the right wing media was abuzz with the story of Deb Fischer, the Tea Party David who took down the establishment GOP's Goliath, Jon Bruning. So why would Nebraska Senator Mike Johanns take issue with that? “She's not going to get tangled up in Tea Party and everything else,” Johanns told the Omaha World Herald. “I just think she's going to be a very common-sense, practical conservative, and we need more of that here.” Conventional wisdom would say that Johanns isn't even making sense. How can the Tea Party candidate not get "tangled up" in the Tea Party? What is he talking about? Johanns is talking about reality. What's being billed as a Tea Party victory has almost nothing to do with the Tea Party. I'm not going to make many friends among those who claim victory after-the-fact, but the simple truth is that no Nebraska Tea Party groups made any official endorsements in the primary election. I don't doubt that there were many Tea Party...

On Monday, I lamented that Sarah Palin and Breitbart.com were dabbling in local Nebraska politics that they didn’t fully understand. The day after I wrote that, Herman Cain—who hasn’t lived in Nebraska for decades—seconded that endorsement. Last night, for better or worse, they and others got their wish as dark horse Deb Fischer beat favorite Jon Bruning in the Nebraska Republican senate primary. (Full disclosure: I volunteered for the Bruning campaign.) It’s impossible to gauge by any objective measure how much influence their endorsements had on that outcome, but as one on the ground, I am inclined to say it was more than a little. There is just one thing I want to reemphasize before moving on and moving forward, that this was a primary contest among conservatives all around. In spite of certain characterizations, there was no “establishment” candidate in the race and certainly no RINO. I say this only because I hate to see a good and solid conservative’s reputation tarnished just t...

What was, just one week ago, a fairly tame US Senate primary in Nebraska with a young and popular conservative Attorney General holding a comfortable lead has now become a neck-and-neck race for the finish as the candidates try to “out-conservative” one another. Last Wednesday, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin made a late endorsement in the Nebraska GOP Senate primary for Deb Fischer, previously in a distant third place. Now today Breitbart.com is running the story--billed as EXCLUSIVE--that calls Jon Bruning “establishment” in the lead. Alaska might rhyme with Nebraska, but that doesn’t make Sarah Palin an expert on our politics. And Brietbart.com is so intimately familiar with the Cornhusker State that in a March story about the lawsuit against ObamaCare, they made Bruning the AG of South Dakota! As Maxwell Smart would say, “missed it by that much.” What Palin and Breitbart are doing is putting an underline beneath the old adage, all politics are local--or at least they should be....

Sunday once again, and that means cleaning up the messes that don’t clean up after themselves. This is Weak (with George Snuffleupagus) amazingly gave me cause to agree with Barney Frank. In defending Obama’s non-statement on gay marriage, Barney said that marriage should be a states’ rights issue. Unfortunately, I suspect that Barney’s love of the tenth amendment is a matter of convenience. He pointed at the introduction by Republicans in the 2000s of a proposed federal marriage amendment as if to say, “they started it.” But the gay community has been looking for opportunity to make a run around the legislative process since the Civil Rights era by putting the matter before the Supreme Court as a 14th Amendment. Sorry, Barney. No sale. Frank was a double-whammy today, as he was also brought on to talk about the economy and the role of the Dodd-Frank legislation. He instead, in a typically childish display, chose to shout down Marsha Blackburn and accuse her of interrupting him until t...

While I can't truthfully say that I'm recovering from Cinco de Quatro , I am feeling a touch under the weather today and I decided some extra sleep was more important that watching the Sunday shows. (Or doing the laundry, for that matter.)