Truth - Al Franken [139]
1 Actually, now that I think about it, there was a third option. The President and the bill could have both gone to a third location, perhaps halfway in between—say, Arnold Air Force Base in Tullahoma, Tennessee. That way, he could have signed the bill as much as an hour earlier, and cheered up some airmen while he was at it.
2 During the 2004 Senate primary campaign, Florida Republicans received a flier from Martinez accusing his opponent, Bill McCollum, of being “the new darling of the homosexual extremists.” After defeating McCollum, Martinez apologized and blamed the flier on “a couple of young turks” on his campaign staff. In the general election, Martinez did it again. After his campaign sent out a news release calling the federal agents who had removed Elian Gonzalez “armed thugs” that had “allow[ed] Fidel Castro to have his way,” Martinez again blamed his overzealous staff. We may never know who made these mistakes, but it certainly wasn’t Mel Martinez.
3 Besides Tom Coburn, who, as previously discussed, is a nut.
4 A week later, after Terri Schiavo had died, O’Reilly offered a heretofore unconsidered basis for opposing the withdrawal of the feeding tube: “One of the most powerful arguments against the way Terri Schiavo died is that you couldn’t do it to an animal in America. You’d be charged with a crime.”
One obvious reason that this argument didn’t gain much purchase is that anyone keeping a vegetative dog on a feeding tube would probably be either arrested or institutionalized.
1 Japan had started a preemptive war against us, which in those days was strictly verboten.
2 The CNMI minimum wage has grown from $1.35 in 1979 to a whopping $3.15 an hour today.
3 Fact: The third hole at St. Andrews has a sharp dogleg to the right. Fact: Angus is the best caddy, but he has a temper. Fact: Road Hole Bunker at the seventeenth is impossible to hit out of. Fact: Angus tells the best dirty jokes. Fact: Dirty joke about priest and nun golfing is funniest of Angus’s jokes. Fact: Don’t tell joke to beer cart girl.
4 Timothy Noah, who went to high school with Abramoff, wrote in Slate about how he coined the nickname.
5 Abramoff (College Republican National Committee chair, 1981–85), Norquist (CRNC executive director, 1981–83), and Reed (ED, 1983–85) were following in the footsteps of Karl Rove, who had been ED from 1970 to 1972 and national chairman from 1973 to 1974. Vast-right-wing-conspiracy trivia buffs might also be interested to know that Bush I henchman Lee Atwater managed Rove’s first campaign for chairman.
6 Fact: Ralph Reed takes a lot of mulligans. Fact: Abramoff hits from ladies’ tee. Fact: Maybe I can trick the Indians into buying me a new set of golf clubs. Fact: Reed’s supposedly dirty joke not really very dirty at all.
7 According to my anonymous source, The Truth About Hillary author Ed Klein.
8 George Miller, remember, is the California Democrat who has fought for labor protections in Saipan throughout his congressional career.
1 Here’s the idea. You raise the cap to $120,000. Then you don’t pay any more payroll taxes until you get to $500,000. Why? I don’t know, it just seems fairer somehow. The gap from $120,000 to $500,000 is the “donut hole.” Now, I don’t mind if you change the numbers around; they’re pretty arbitrary. But here’s why I like this idea. Imagine the Al Franken Donut Hole were adopted, and it saved Social Security into the infinite horizon. Then, maybe, 12 trillion years from now, people would say “You know who saved Social Security? Al Franken. It was that Donut Hole idea of his. Thank God for Al Franken. Because of him, we had the resources to put down the Robot Uprising back in 4,449,288,573,223 A.D.”
2 And which is way, way less solvent than Social Security. The ridiculously unreliable infinite shortfall for Medicare is $65.4 trillion, six times worse than the one for Social Security. But you don’t hear Bush talking about that.
3 If you want to look at it, go to www.ssa.gov/OACT/ProgData/funds.html. It’s very reassuring.