Congress

In advance of the upcoming baseball season, the right-wing blogosphere has gone viral with a parody of Ernest Thayer’s immortal “Casey at the Bat,” with Barack Obama replacing the Mudville slugger striking out with the tying runs on base. Here’s the progressive response, with all due apologies to Grantland Rice. (And if some enterprising young filmmaker wants to get Red Sox fan Matt Damon to narrate the retort at Fenway Park, have at it.) OBAMA’S REVENGE: A POLITICAL PARODY There were saddened hearts in D.C.

Sarah Palin’s recent statement that, presumably during her childhood, she and her family used to cross the border from Alaska to take advantage of Canada’s health care system is not really a gaffe or a verbal slipup, but offers an interesting insight into Palin. It is not exactly surprising, or even”ironic,” to use Palin’s words, that somebody who has made a name, and a great deal of money, for herself by linking health care reform to some kind of socialist bogeyman, used to take advantage of socialized medicine.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of writing lately that gets at the point that Americans are poorly informed about substantive issues in politics and that further laments the lameness of our political institutions. I don’t like to write too much about such negative things, because it tends to bring me down and piss me off at the same time. So I’m not writing anything more on it for a bit, but I am giving you a few fun–and well-written–things to read. Is it an echo chamber? Perhaps. But I like the sound my thoughts make when they bounce off of smart people.

PHOENIX — Defeated just two years ago as the Republican presidential candidate and with his bonafides as a true conservative again being challenged, John McCain finds himself in a struggle to get even his party’s nomination for another term in the Senate. Many conservatives and Tea Party activists are lining up behind Republican challenger and former talk radio host J.D. Hayworth, reflecting a rising tide of voter frustration with incumbent politicians. Only 40 percent of Arizonans have a favorable view of McCain’s job performance.

Never underestimate Sarah Palin. She did a better job articulating anti-banker sentiment at last week’s Tea Party Convention than Obama’s done. Its followers don’t realize it, but the Tea Party movement is really a Trojan Horse filled with bankers and lobbyists. It’s a brilliantly designed mechanism for redirecting anti-bank rage for the banks’ own benefit, with Palin et al. in the forefront. And it could work.

The State of the Union rebuttal is one of the lousiest gigs in all of politics. Until my colleague Sam Stein reminded me that Virginia Senator Jim Webb had done a halfway decent job with his in 2007, I couldn’t think of a single one that was at all well-executed. The last time a Virginia governor was tasked with the rebuttal, it was Tim Kaine, and the big takeaway was that the DNC was going to have to add a line item for eyebrow wrangling into their operational budget .

Democracy worked tonight in Massachusetts. The citizens of the Bay State, in which Democrats outnumber Republicans three-to-one, which doesn’t have a single Republican in its U.S. House delegation, and whose citizens just 14 months ago voted for Barack Obama by a margin of 62 percent to 38 percent , elected Republican Scott Brown, who happily accepted tea party support and questioned whether Obama’s parents were married , over Democrat Martha Coakley for Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat.

Political pundits are like astrologers and psychics: They get away with making outlandish predictions and are remembered when lightning strikes and they guess right, but rarely are they called to account for a litany of missed calls that would put weather forecasters and stock market analysts to shame. We were told to be nervous about Barack Obama, but after one year in office, it should be clear to all but President Obama’s most partisan critics that he has been good for Israel.

No, not that kind of feminism. Not the theory of women’s equality or the history of suffrage or the First Wave or the Third Wave or 18 million tiny cracks in the glass ceiling. I’m talking about Feminism TM , as in the largest feminist advocacy organizations in the country raising millions of dollars to fight on behalf of women. And I’m wondering if Feminism TM is really such a good investment. You know those emails?

By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger The next United Nations climate change conference is almost a year away, and health care is still dominating the legislative agenda in Washington. That means climate reform opponents, from the coal industry to the global warming skeptics, have plenty of time to work, out of the spotlight, to derail progress. Here’s a glimpse of the enemies of reform–and the companies and individuals that are still fighting for change in 2010.