Daily Kos

Open Thread and Diary Rescue

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:00:05 GMT

Tonight's Rescue brought to you by ybruti, dopper0189, dadanation, noddem, Elise, taylormattd, and pico.

Diary Rescue is all about promoting good writers, so remember to subscribe to diarists whose work you enjoy reading.

canadian gal explains how Plumpy'nut, a tasty mixture of peanut butter, powdered milk, sugar, vitamins and minerals, is reducing childhood malnutrition in Niger. (ybruti)

After a hiatus, Johnny Venom returns with his regular series Manufacturing Monday: When the savior comes from overseas. (taylormattd)

greggp continues his series on influential drummers with Happy Birthday Jim Gordon, and provides relevant information about the California prison system and mental health facilities. (ybruti)

Having argued before Judge Sotomayor several times in the Second Circuit, litigatormom returns to Daily Kos after a long absence to post A "Wise Latina" (Maybe) Lawyer Comments on Sotomayor. (ybruti)

Wattree takes a closer look at "American Exceptionalism" - the latest conservative talking point against Obama - in America: Are We Really that Exceptional? (dopper0189)

In a classic take-down, A Siegel details why the soon-to-be-former-Governor of Alaska is Ready to lead America away from science and back into the past. (dadanation)

David Swanson highlights the accomplishments of the Progressive Democrats of America in Happy Fifth Birthday to PDA! (ybruti)

John Terzano The Justice Project explores the all too common problem of innocent men and women serving prison sentences for crimes not committed in False Confessions: What would it take to make you confess? (noddem)

jotter brings us High Impact Diaries: July 13, 2009.

BeninSC has Top Comments - Kick a Kleathan?

Please suggest your own favorites from the last 24 hours, and use as an open thread.

If you enjoy Diary Rescue, please consider joining the Rescue Rangers. It's a great way to become more involved with the Daily Kos community. Did we mention it's rewarding and fun? To volunteer or learn more, please contact us (don't forget to tell us your screen name) at: dkos.rescuerangers@gmail.com

Polling and Political Wrap-Up, 7/14/09

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:02:05 GMT

Not a ton of news today, but a few little nuggets of political information greet us on this Tuesday evening.

RACE FOR THE HOUSE: Follow the Money
Tomorrow is the official deadline for campaigns to show their cards vis-a-vis their second quarter fundraising. Some campaigns turned over their hands early, with impressive results. The most impressive report filed today had to come from CA-03, where Democratic physician Dr. Ami Bera raised $288,000 in this, his first quarter of the campaign. Most impressive of all--only about five grand of this was loans or personal contributions. Dan Lungren, you'll recall, badly underperformed in 2008 against Democrat Bill Durston (49-44). Downstate in CA-45, Democrat Steve Pougnet came in at $201,000. Meanwhile, in WA-08 Suzan Del Bene reports $257,000 for the quarter and $572,000 for the first half of the year. Worth noting in her case, however, is that more than half of that was a personal loan. There were a couple of GOP candidates in the mix today: in IL-11, Iraq War vet Adam Kinzinger raised $111,000, while in the open MI-02 former pro football player Jay Riemersma reported $154,000, but with two-thirds of that coming from a personal loan. If you are interested in checking out your favorite candidate, the Federal Election Commission makes it easy for you.

DE-AL: Is Castle On His Way Out The Door? FEC Report Might Have Clues
One incumbent had a pretty instructive FEC report, as well. Longtime Republican Congressman Mike Castle, of Delaware, raised around $125K, with about 85-90% of that money coming from PACs. Everyone was pretty sure he was either moving up (in the form of a Senate run) or out. This makes "up" pretty hard to believe, although it is still possible that a Senate or House run is in the works for Castle.

PA-Sen: Toomey Finally Gets A Little Bit of NRSC Love
It took them only about two months longer than it did in Florida, but the Senate campaign wing of the GOP (the NRSC) has offered its endorsement of the candidacy of former Congressman and Club For Growth BFF Patrick Toomey. It was just last week when a Philadelphia Daily News article pointed out that some local GOP leaders had reservations about Toomey as a Senate nominee, leading one college professor assessing the race to quip, "You go to war with the army you have."

TX-Gov: Perry Calls Out KBH After Monday's Announcement
As reported here yesterday, Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison announced that she was going to run for Governor against incumbent Republican Rick Perry. Today, Perry publicly cast some doubts, saying that he was trying to avoid a primary and that it was "always a possibility" that KBH would choose to stand down.

VA-Gov: McDonnell Announces His Finances, Recent Take A Fraction of Deeds'
Republican nominee Bob McDonnell has a bit of good news/bad news in the finance reports he filed today. The good news--he still has nearly $5 million on hand heading into the general election. The bad news--he raised $1.8 million in the same time that Creigh Deeds raised well over $3 million. Team McDonnell was quick to point out his CoH edge, and also claimed that Deeds' edge was owed to major outlays by AFSCME, SEIU and the Democratic Governors Association. While it is true that those three groups combined for just over a million dollars of the Deeds' funding, it is instructive to point out that even discounting those three expenditures, Deeds still would have led McDonnell by about half a million dollars.

NJ-Gov: Q Poll Gives Christie Double Digit Lead, Unless You Count Indie Candidate
Depending on how you frame the question, Quinnipiac gives Republican challenger Chris Christie a lead of nine or twelve points, according to a poll released today. The "x-factor" is an Independent candidate, Christopher Daggett, who draws 8% of the vote in a three-way trial heat. With Daggett, Christie leads 47-38-8. Without Daggett, Christie crests 50%, leading 53-41.

Meanwhile, in somewhat...interesting...news, it appears as if Governor Corzine has settled on a former reality show star as his nominee for Lieutenant Governor. His name is Randal Pinkett, he is 34 years of age, and he won season four of NBC's The Apprentice.

MA-01: Democratic state Senator Announces Bid...For 2012
Well, this story embodies the maxim that it is never too early to start. Andrea Nuciforo, a former MA state Senator, has announced that he will run for Congress in Massachusett's 1st Congressional District...in 2012. Evidently, Nuciforo is presuming that John Olver, the longtime incumbent here, will retire by 2012, when he will be in his mid-70s. Until then, he has plenty of time to order stationary and fill his rolodex. Only 28 months until Election Day!!

Fox goes birther

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:18:05 GMT

Just when you thought Fox couldn't get any lower, they trot out the latest birther nonsense in order to make the claim that "dozens of legal challenges to the President's nationality" are a "persistent problem" for the Obama administration:

Actually, the only "persistent problem" is that scumbags at places like Fox continue feeding conspiracy troll nonsense like this to the public.

The crackpots who file legal challenges claiming otherwise may be a nuisance to the court system, but they are not a problem for the administration.

Surely, Fox knows that President Obama was in fact born in Hawaii, as his birth certificate and birth announcements in local papers make clear. The fact that Fox reported this story as if it were an serious legal question, offering only a terse statement from Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to debunk the birthers, demonstrates their complete lack of ethical or journalistic standards.

The thing that is really bad about Fox isn't that it's conservative and partisan -- the thing that's really bad about Fox is that it is consistently inaccurate. The bottom-line is that Fox is propaganda. That's why the truth and Fox never have and never will mix together.

Fox is to political news what Weekly World News was to supermarket tabloids...but without a sense of humor.

Feedback On Regina Benjamin, Nominee For Surgeon General

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:30:04 GMT

Having reviewed her sterling credentials as a doctor (and as a human being, she's a mensch,) I wanted to know from a public health expert what they thought of the nomination of Regina Benjamin to the post of Surgeon General. And who better to ask than Georges Benjamin, Executive Director, American Public Heatlh Association (no relation.) We've interviewed the APHA's Dr. Benjamin on Daily Kos, and we thought he'd have a unique perspective on the nominee. Dr. G. Benjamin's response:

There are ten essential services that public health practioners believe
comprise the core of the work that we do. They are (From CDC):

Monitor health status to identify and solve community health problems.

Diagnose and investigate health problems and health hazards in the community.

Inform, educate, and empower people about health issues.

Mobilize community partnerships and action to identify and solve health problems.

Develop policies and plans that support individual and community health efforts.

Enforce laws and regulations that protect health and ensure safety.

Link people to needed personal health services and assure the provision of health care when otherwise unavailable.

Assure competent public and personal health care workforce.

Evaluate effectiveness, accessibility, and quality of personal and population-based health services.

Research for new insights and innovative solutions to health problems.

Of these Dr. Benjamin has engaged in all of these services at various times during her career. Many of us have come into the world of public health from years of clinical practice. In fact, most state health commissioners come from the practice side of the house. In addition we often say public health does three things: Access community health, develop policy to address the needs, as well as provide assurance through clinical and nonclinical services. Dr. Benjamin's experience in looking at the health of her community and that of the nation in her many volunteer roles; her impressive career as a health policy developer through organizations like the Institute of Medicine; and her life long dedication to providing care for her community through her clinic all meet these principles. If public health practice is the art and commitment of ensuring the health of a population, then Dr, Benjamin is one ideal example.

Georges C. Benjamin, MD, FACP, FACEP(E), Hon FRSPH
Executive Director
APHA

That, she is. A day later, this looks even better as a choice. Mike Stobbe the health reporter at AP, notes one reason why.

The U.S. Surgeon General has been described as "the nation's doctor," a "national nanny" and the person who puts warning labels on cigarette packs. But lately, the position has been mostly called something else: invisible...

Public health experts say the person who holds the job is as important as the surrounding administrative framework. They say the surgeon general must boldly discuss what public health science dictates, even when political bosses disagree. Koop has said a surgeon general needs to be willing to walk away from the job to preserve that principle.

Some who know Benjamin say she can be soft-spoken at times, and is not likely to be the kind of firebrand that people remember in Koop and Dr. Joycelyn Elders. Some suggested Benjamin, 52, is more in the frank but lower-key style of another accomplished surgeon general, Dr. David Satcher, who served in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

She'll need to be frank, and she'll need to be clear. America needs a Surgeon General who can speak truth to power. We only remember the ones that do.

That's Going To Leave A Mark

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:50:04 GMT

In a variation of the old admonition that a lawyer should never ask a question if they don't know the answer, today Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) learned that it's not a good idea to use someone to make an argument without making sure that the person being used isn't in the room:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), seeking to discredit Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, cited her 2001 "wise Latina" speech, and contrasted the view that ethnicity and sex influence judging with that of Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, who "believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices."

"My friend Judge Cedarbaum is here," Sotomayor riposted, to Sessions’s apparent surprise. "We are good friends, and I believe that we both approach judging in the same way, which is looking at the facts of each individual case and applying the law to those facts."

And what does Cedarbaum think about Sotomayor's judicial philosophy?

I don’t believe for a minute that there are any differences in our approach to judging, and her personal predilections have no affect on her approach to judging."

Oops. That has to be embarrassing

And an added bonus from the article:

In 1986, Cedarbaum and Sessions were both nominated to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, and were members of the same orientation class for future judges. Their paths then diverged, however. Cedarbaum was confirmed, but Sessions’s nomination floundered over a controversy surrounding comments he made involving the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP.

... because there can never be too many mentions of Sessions' affinity for the Ku Klux Klan.

For more discussion, visit Upper West's diary.

Sanford's AWOL excursion may have cost SC jobs

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:16:04 GMT

Yet another example of the price South Carolina must pay for its AWOL governor:

The governor allowed some economic development initiatives to take a back seat during his secret trip. Sanford was invited to — but turned down — a dinner invitation June 24 with representatives from a company looking to expand its S.C. operation, according to e-mail records. The company’s name was redacted. Sanford also declined a June 25 celebration event for a plant expansion by a S.C. business because his schedule was "just absolutely jammed this summer," wrote a staffer in an e-mail.

So on the one hand, Mark Sanford thinks the stimulus was the wrong way to go about stabilizing and boosting the economy. On the other hand, he thinks his sex life is more important than meeting the private businesses who he says are the only way to truly grow the economy.

Apparently, Mark Sanford just isn't interested in the kind of jobs that South Carolina needs -- jobs that will put people back to work.

Late afternoon/early evening open thread

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:46:04 GMT

New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time

Republican war on empathy, Sotomayor edition

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:00:04 GMT

As I've noted here and here and here and in several other pieces I'm too lazy to dig up, the GOP's hostility toward empathy, now fully out in the open, is electoral poison. There's a reason Bush and Rove concocted their "compassionate conservatism" fiction -- to make their party seem more warm and fuzzy to swing voters. Now, they're not even pretending. And look how that value polls:

Do you think empathy is an important characteristic for a Supreme Court Justice to possess or not? Yes No 18-29 63 17 30-44 47 34 45-59 55 26 60+ 46 35 White 41 39 Black 81 4 Latino 79 4 Other 79 5 Men 48 34 Women 56 24
Dem 73 12 GOP 18 56 Ind 54 28

There's a reason the Democratic Party is the party of ethnic and racial minorities, women, and youth. They all think empathy is a good thing. Even whites are evenly split. Now look at the geographic breakdown, from the same question above:

Northeast 63 18 South 41 42 Midwest 55 25 West 53 27

I guess that's the danger of being a rump regional party -- you lose touch with the rest of America. If half of southerners want an indifferent and callous government, that's their prerogative of course. But when the rest of America disagrees, it makes for a nationally unelectable Republican Party.

Republicans at the Sotomayor hearings think they are scoring political points. And they are -- for Democrats.

Top aide tried to reach Sanford 15 times during "hike"

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:26:04 GMT

The State continues its terrific reporting on the Sanford scandal, paints a portrait of a staff privately panicking over the location of their boss, but publicly covering up their concern:

Sanford’s office couldn't locate missing governor
E-mails, phone calls outline efforts to contact, cover for AWOL leader

Gov. Mark Sanford’s chief of staff, Scott English, called the governor’s cell phones 15 times during the governor’s secret trip to Argentina to visit his lover last month. But the governor never picked up.

So how did the South Carolina Republican's staff handle the situation? Naturally, they lied:

Meanwhile Sanford’s communications director, Joel Sawyer, worked to minimize the fact the governor had been out of touch with his staff for about four days.

Records released Monday show Sawyer juggled e-mails and media calls from around the nation, giving a consistent message that was later proven to be untrue.

Pause for a moment to consider the reality of what happened: Mark Sanford's staff had no idea where he was. Instead of admitting that they had no idea where in the world the governor might be, they decided to lie about his whereabouts.

In so doing, the staff not only risked putting Sanford in jeopardy -- imagine if instead of goofing off in Argentina with his mistress he had actually been in physical danger for some reason -- but they also risked creating a constitutional crisis in South Carolina. What if something had happened in the state -- a wild fire, or some other natural disaster -- that required gubernatorial action. With Sanford AWOL, would they have simply forged his signature? Would they have trotted out a look-alike, as in the movie Dave?

The more you think about it, the more breathtaking Mark Sanford's lapse was. In any other job, he'd have been fired for going AWOL. But thanks to South Carolina Republican Party, Sanford has gotten off with nothing more than a bit of self-inflicted public embarrassment.

House health care bill races to markup

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:46:03 GMT

The House "tri-committee" health care bill, introduced earlier today, is already set for markup in the committees beginning on Thursday.

Take note here: The "tradition," at least on most committees, is to give two days' notice between introduction of a bill and a markup on it. But committee rules, typically, require only one day. It's interesting to note, then, that they've chosen to go with the rules rather than tradition. That'll engender some Republican resentment, to be sure.

But here's the thing: I think it's realistically the case that there's nowhere for Republican votes to move as a result of this resentment. In other words, the Republicans have pretty much redlined their opposition meters, so in some respects, it's no longer worth giving deference to their feelings in this, since the deference is never returned in kind.

It's hard to disagree with that thinking. Might even be useful in the Senate, though it certainly runs counter to the way things have normally worked there.

Then again, so did the record-breaking pace of cloture voting in the last Congress. Doesn't feel a great deal like that's changing in this Congress, either.

House Tri-Committee Healthcare Reform Bill Introduced Today

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:10:04 GMT

House leadership and the Tri-Committee chairs, Charlie Rangel of Ways and Means; Henry Waxman of Energy and Commerce; and George Miller of Education and Labor, are introducing the initial House version of healthcare reform bill this afternoon, following a meeting yesterday with President Obama who apparently told Democratic leaders in both chambers to pick up the speed and get the work done on these bills prior to August recess.

The speaker met with Obama at the White House on Monday, along with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.).

Both sides told the president they’re still committed to moving a bill out of each chamber by the time lawmakers leave town for the August recess. Baucus and Rangel will each pursue a different way to pay for the bill, and Obama told them he will help them reconcile those differences during conference negotiations, according to White House aides.

During the meeting, Rangel promised to mark up the bill this week, and Baucus told the assembled lawmakers and the president that he would mark it up next week — something that Rangel thinks will help him reassure House Democrats that the Senate will act. The Ways and Means Committee chairman also said the president didn’t give him an explicit signal to abandon an idea to impose a surtax on the wealthy.

Republicans are blasting the potential surtax on the wealthy, while a handful of moderate Dems who don't want the public option to peg reimbursement rates in the program to Medicare, apparently because, again, that would be unfair to private insurers. As for the surtax, the Politico articles notes:

According to a new Greenberg Quinlan poll circulated late last week by House Democrats, Americans favor raising taxes for people making more than $200,000 by 61 percent to 37 percent.

To ground this debate on surtaxing the wealthy, because we're bound to see much screeching about it, Conor Clarke has an an instructive post and graph:

So what does this mean? Here are a few thoughts:

The details haven't been released yet, but most (if not all) of the families that fall under Rangel's tax plan will also be in this 1% range.

These are families that paid a lower rate in 2006 (the last date of available data) than they did 15 years ago. That's not an argument for upping the taxes, of course. But it puts it in perspective. (Confession: If you go back to the Reagan years, the top effective rate is lower. But the current rate is still below the historical average.)

News reports have anticipated Rangel proposing a 1-3% surtax. Even a 3% increase across the board will leave an effective rate lower than it was in 1995.

Keep that in mind when the screeching about taxes starts up.

NV-Sen: Ensign Doubles Down

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:32:03 GMT

Well, this one goes out to all of you who were convinced that John Ensign was on the brink of resignation:

Republican Sen. John Ensign said Monday that not only does he have no intention of resigning in light of his affair and his parents’ payout to the woman’s family, he plans to seek reelection when his term is up in 2012.

In another interesting nugget, the Sun article says that Ensign claims that he has received supportive comments from those "on both sides" of the Senate leadership.

This stands in a bit of contrast to how the Sun describes the reaction to recent events from leaders within Ensign's own party:

Ensign’s colleagues failed to rally to his side late last week as Ensign revealed the payments.

Senate Minory (sic) Leader Mitch McConnell declined to comment when approached by the Sun late Thursday as the Senate was closing for the week, as did other Republican colleagues and leaders.

Ensign's already embarrassing personal scandal took a turn in the past week, when it was revealed that Ensign's parents had paid the family of the woman in question, Cynthia Hampton, nearly $100,000, and that Ensign might have broken campaign finance rules by failing to disclose a severance package to Hampton (this last bit according to her husband in an interview with Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston).

Ensign's poll numbers took a precipitous drop in the wake of the revelations of his affair last month, but he might be gambling on the fact that he can resurrect his image in the three-plus years between now and his date with Nevada voters.

Democrats have a growing bench in the state, and there have been stray rumors that longtime Las Vegas Congresswoman Shelley Berkley might be interested in heading to the other side of the Capitol.

Midday Open Thread

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:46:03 GMT

Well, this sucks. Hilzoy is retiring from blogging.

Media Matters Action Network fact-checks Sarah Palin's op-ed in the Washington Post. It goes about like you'd expect given her historic relationship to the truth.

Bill Clinton is now "basically in support" of marriage equality. This is good news, and highlights again that we're moving steadily in the direction of justice. Individuals are seeing their views change, and there's a bigger generational change coming.

The horror! Emptywheel said blow job on tv yesterday! And apparently, David Shuster considers a reference to a consensual blow job more offensive than his own allegation that Chelsea Clinton was pimped out by her own parents. Steve Benen and DougJ also respond to the great blow job scandal of '09.

This would be a huge step forward:

The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans.

I'm not sure why you would make a quiche out of a Croissan’wich meal and a Ham, Egg & Cheese biscuit meal from Burger King, but in case you want to, Fancy Fast Food has this and other recipes. (Via Gastronomalies).

There's a lot about politics and power to the New York Times wedding page.

Chris Matthews, man of principle.

Any number of Congressional Republicans seem to have cast their eye onward and upward recently, from Eric Cantor and Mike Pence to Jim DeMint. Clearly those are the guys who are going to rescue their party from alienating voters through wingnut batshittery.

OMFG, Sessions. OMFG.

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:12:03 GMT

O. M. F. G.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, complete with his best Foghorn Leghorn stammer, reaches astonishing new levels of asshattery:

You voted not to reconsider the prior case. You voted to stay with the decision of the circuit, and in fact, your vote was the key vote. Had you voted with Judge Cabranes, himself of Puerto Rican ancestry, had you voted with him, you could have changed that case. So in truth you weren't bound by that case.

Had you voted with the other beaner, why, I say, why, this case coulda come out a whole different way!

Her head comes up pretty quick from her note taking, eh? And she didn't even scream, "M-Fer, I want more rice!" even once! What a judicial temperament!

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, ladies and gentlemen. Puzzled as to why all Puerto Ricans judges don't rule exactly the same way. I mean, given that they're all... you know... Puerto Ricans and stuff.

Gosh, I wonder why the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee sunk this dumbass's own nomination back in '86?

FL-Sen, PA-Sen: Insurgent fundraising

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:26:04 GMT

I'm on record as predicting Marco Rubio will prevail over Florida Gov. Charlie Crist in their state's Republican Senate primary. More quarters like this last one, and I'll have serious egg on my face.

Crist announced Thursday that in just 50 days he raised an eye-popping $4.3 million for his U.S. Senate campaign. That not only dwarfs the previous Florida U.S. Senate fundraising record set by Republican Mel Martinez -- $1.7-million in his first fundraising period in 2004 -- but it highlights the huge hurdles for Crist's Republican Senate rival Marco Rubio, who raised just $340,000 in the same period.

That Crist number is the largest I've seen of anyone, anywhere this quarter. Rubio will never match Crist, but $340K is pretty pathetic for someone who seems to be growing a legitimate grassroots movement.

You want to build credibility as a challenger to an establishment, candidate, this is how you do it:

U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak plans to report this week that he raised a little more than $1 million in the second quarter this year, giving him $4.2 million in the bank for an expected Democratic primary challenge to Sen. Arlen Specter, campaign officials said yesterday.

"We believe this means we will have more cash on hand than any Senate challenger," said Joe Langdon, spokesman for Sestak's campaign committee. "As you know, this was achieved without the institutional support of the Democratic establishment."

It's not too late for Rubio, with his primary still 13 months away. As for Sestak, we've got a real race on our hands assuming he decides to run. Sure, Specter has about $8M in the bank, but we can work with a 2-1 disadvantage. We've done it several times before -- the grassroots magnifier is better than 2-1. Unfortunately for Rubio, it's not going to overcome a 13-1 cash deficit.

By the way, isn't it perfect that Netroots Nation is in Pennsylvania this year? A bit of nostalgia trivia -- Sestak attended the very first YearlyKos in Las Vegas back in 2006, back when he was an underdog candidate for a tough House seat against an entrenched incumbent Republican. Here he is now, an underdog candidate for a tough Senate seat against an entrenched incumbent ~~Republican~~ ~~Democrat~~ ~~Republican~~ who the heck knows.