Political News & Info

Since the publishing of Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer’s book, Throw Them All Out , support for the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act to ban members of Congress from using private information for personal profit has jumped from four cosponsors to 131. Yet in the wake of yesterday’s Senate hearings on the subject, several Capitol Hill observers are asking: does the bill, in the present forms being considered, go far enough? Hardly, say insider trading experts and Washington watchers. UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge calls some versions of the bill under consideration “ bizarre and toothless .” Equally unimpressed with the bill’s language is Atlantic Monthly senior editor Megan McArdle. “Will someone please guard the damn guardians?” writes McArdle . One member of Congress who is pleased with the STOCK Act is Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Yesterday, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who has come under fire for having acquired Visa IPO shares that resulted in a 203% profit while thwarting critical credit card reform bills, appeared to shrug off the urgency of passing the bill. “I would hope that it’s not as necessary as the whoop-de-doo over it makes it seem. But I do think that we all disclose what we do.” And Speaker of the House John Boehner’s comments yesterday seemed to leave open the question of whether such legislation is even needed. “ The hearings are a step in the right direction to determine whether there’s a need for such a bill to move. We’ll let those hearings proceed,” said Boehner. As for the official language used in the eventual bill, Rep. Pelosi said , “I’m sure they’ll come up with something that removes all doubt that this is something that is acceptable within the Congress, and when they do, to me it seems like it would fly through Congress.” However, a closer look at the loophole-ridden language of the bill under consideration, says Peter Schweizer, reveals the need for several additional provisions not presently included in the STOCK Act. First, political candidates and members of Congress should commit to placing their assets in a blind trust, says Schweizer. While many members of Congress do this voluntarily, most don’t. Whether through law or public pressure, says Schweizer, elected officials should reduce the appearance of a conflict of interest by establishing a blind trust. Second, Schweizer says the bill must protect the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) from budgetary or personal retaliation by the Congress for investigating its members. Third, an effective bill must prohibit members of Congress and their staffs from passing along private information to family members, friends, or associates that could aid them in making lucrative stock purchases. That, says Schweizer, is not clearly codified in the existing legislation under consideration. Finally, members of Congress should be required to provide greater transparency about their investments by publicly posting their stock trades within 48 hours of making them. As the New York Post noted yesterday , currently “the bills contain lawyerly loopholes, including a 90-day grace period on reporting stock trades and a narrow limit on trading proscriptions, making them applicable only to ‘pending or prospective legislative action’ involving the issuer of the securities.” Whether these provisions will make it in to the eventual legislation remains to be seen. However, with Congress’s approval ratings at all time lows, members may have a vested interest in passing a bill with real teeth, not a “toothless paper tiger,” says Schweizer. “We’re making real progress,” says Schweizer, “but citizens will need to keep the pressure on their elected officials to see to it that real reform becomes a reality.”

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Is the STOCK Act a Toothless Paper Tiger?

From The National Journal : The president’s dismal poll ratings, should they continue into next year, could sink Democratic hopes for reclaiming ground in the House and retaining control of the Senate — especially in battleground states and swing districts. “If he is where he is now, it’s not going to work for Democrats,” said Rep. Dan Boren, D-Okla., who opted earlier this year not to seek reelection in his competitive district. Democrats are also keeping their distance in two House special elections taking place later this month — in both a solidly-Democratic district in New York City and a Republican-leaning one in rural Nevada. The sting of Obama’s low approval ratings is already being felt in Queens and Brooklyn, where Republican candidate Bob Turner has turned the Democratic-leaning district into a battleground by framing the special election as a referendum on the administration and its treatment of Israel. Liberal firebrand Anthony Weiner held onto that district with ease for more than a decade, and even when scandal forced him out of office, few had thought the race to replace him would be close. In the Nevada race to replace Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., in the House, national Republican groups have aired advertisements connecting Democratic nominee Kate Marshall with Obama. Strategists from both parties expect Republican Mark Amodei to prevail — in a district where Obama won 49 percent in 2008. It’s a sea change from the early days of his presidency, when liberal and moderate Democrats alike sought to tie themselves to the president and benefit from his popularity and charisma. Most moderate Democrats supported his stimulus and health care reform legislation that they’re now distancing themselves from. Less than two years ago, Owens tied himself to the president’s agenda in his initial campaign for Congress. That’s now a distant memory. Read the whole thing here .

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Democrats Distancing Themselves from Obama

Hold on to your hats — here’s where I compare Barack Obama to Richard Nixon. Perhaps I should explain. When it comes to politics and presidents, everyone’s always looking for precedents. For parallels. Which is why you’ve been hearing so many references lately to 1994. “This is just like 1994!” the pundits cry. “A first-term Democratic president’s first midterm election, and the voters are really angry, and they take it out on the president’s party, and the Republicans take control of the House of Representatives for the first time in generations!” Not a bad comparison. Decision 2010 may turn out to look a lot like Decision 1994. Then there’s the 1980 comparison; I’ve been leaning toward the 1980 comparison lately. Another first-term Democrat in the White House, running for re-election this time, with a terrible economy at home and endless frustration abroad (the Iranian hostage crisis, for instance). But the parallel for me isn’t the Democratic president going down to defeat in November, but all the Senate Democrats who went down with him. See, anytime you have a slew of competitive seats, there’s a tendency to say, “Well, OK, it’s a bad year for our side, so maybe we won’t do as well as the other guys. A dozen seats up for grabs? Maybe we’ll only hang on to five.” But it doesn’t always work that way — and it certainly didn’t work that way in 1980. The results weren’t “a few more here, a few less here.” The results were a virtual sweep. Practically every competitive Senate race in 1980 fell the same way — to the Republicans. They took control. Many of the contests were close, but in almost all of them, the result was the same. A Democratic loss, a Republican pickup. Which to say: When it goes bad, it can go really bad. So 1980 isn’t a terrible comparison either. It’s hardly beyond imagining, even with the likes of a Sharron Angle or a Rand Paul or a Christine O’Donnell on the ballot, that the GOP runs the table — that it picks up the 10 seats it needs to grab the Senate. Unless, that is, the best comparison of all is to 1972 — but not the way you think. This is the part where Barack Obama gets to play Richard Nixon. In 1972, it was a Republican president — Nixon — running for re-election against George McGovern. George McGovern was that year’s darling of the left flank of the Democratic party — against the war in Vietnam, against a bigger military budget, in favor of decriminalizing marijuana. That sort of thing. Equally important, the McGovern campaign was… untidy. Undisciplined. Liberated women. Hairy kids. Multiple skin tones. A nominating convention so blissfully self-indulgent that by the time the candidate got his moment in the sun, it was the middle of the night. And — here’s the point, here’s the possible parallel: It took the Nixon campaign roughly three milliseconds to make its move on the rest of the Democrats. “Your party has been captured by the McGovernite wing,” the Republicans declared. “You’re every bit as appalled as we are.” “It’s not your party anymore,” Nixon and his pals told those disaffected Dems. “Come find a new home with us .” And millions did just that — they crossed party lines for the first time in their lives. They voted for Nixon and the Republicans. Many of them never came back. “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” they told themselves. “The Democratic Party left me. ” You think there aren’t millions of sensible, middle-of-the-road Republicans today who are looking at the sudden rise of the Tea Party — hearing the ravings of the Angles and Pauls and O’Donnells, the Palins and the Becks — and thinking exactly the same thing? “This isn’t my party anymore.” So the question is: How many milliseconds should it take for Obama and friends to put out the welcome mat? Rick Horowitz is a syndicated columnist. You can write to him at rickhoro@execpc.com.

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Rick Horowitz: No, Really — Dems Should Party Like It’s 1972

Last week, as the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy lumbered on and its companion news story, the infamous Koran burning that wasn’t, reached its anticlimactic culmination, we saw a spectacular example of one of the Right Wing’s favorite electoral strategies: pick a target, stoke fear, and reap the political benefits of nativist backlash. The Right is in the midst of a prolific run of fear campaigns — against Muslims, against immigrants, against gay people, against “elites.” In itself, that might not be news; the Right has been doing it for years. What is remarkable is how frequently, in the attempt to narrow the definition of who is a real American, the President of the United States himself is cast as the leader of an amorphous and scary invasion of people who are aren’t from around here . This smear has been floating around the edges of our political conversation since before President Obama was even elected, but it reached a new level of undisguised vitriol when Newt Gingrich — former Speaker of the House and aspiring 2012 presidential candidate — told the National Review that Obama displays “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior,” and that he “happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.” Gingrich, at least, can no longer be accused of dog-whistle politics. He has come right out to say what many on the Right have been insinuating since Obama appeared on the political scene — that the President is an un-American outsider who has pulled a fast one on the American people. There is no need to further rebut Gingrich’s remarks on factual grounds — Marc Ambinder and Adam Serwer , among many others, have already demolished the flimsy basis for his assertions. Gingrich’s comments — a response to a column along similar ridiculous lines by Dinesh D’Souza — couldn’t have much to do with the former speaker’s thoughts on Obama’s foreign policy. Instead, they were a deliberate appeal to the idea that the Right has been pushing of Obama as a strange and malicious “other.” Gingrich’s remarks are only the most recent, and blatant, in a long line of right-wing fear-mongering about the president. Just last week, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, chair of the Republican Governors Association and another possible 2012 presidential contender, said of Obama, “This is a president that we know less about than any other president in history.” This remark was factually untrue — Obama wrote a book of his life story and much of the nation celebrated his personal story throughout a very lengthy campaign — but served to advance the right-wing narrative about Obama’s mysterious origins. And that narrative has worked in their favor. Last month, a poll found that a quarter of Americans aren’t convinced that Obama was born in the U.S. In another poll , nearly one in five said they believed that Obama was a Muslim — a sharp increase from the response to the same question a year ago. Kyle Mantyla at People For’s Right Wing Watch blog has been reporting that “birthers” — those demanding copies of Obama’s readily available Hawaiian birth certificate — are now being joined by those demanding proof of Obama’s baptism and Christian faith. The campaign to frame Obama as a foreign invader — and, as Gingrich has said , “the most radical president in American history” — has been intimately tied in with the same fear-mongering that led to the outrageous reaction to the planned Muslim community center in lower Manhattan and that has stoked the kind of fear of immigrants that has led to racial profiling laws in places like Arizona. In troubled times, it’s convenient to blame everyone — both outsiders and those in power. In Obama, the irrational Right won the lottery. The attempt to paint Obama as a dangerous foreign radical has very real, and scary consequences. A year ago, we reported on the revival of violent anti-government extremism in reaction to Obama’s election. Since then, we have seen a violent strain in certain parts of the Tea Party movement — from Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle insisting that “Second Amendment remedies” might be needed against “domestic enemies” to an Idaho gubernatorial candidate last year suggesting the issue of ” Obama tags ” for hunting the president. But the impact of the Right’s whisper campaign against Obama goes far beyond the president. The right-wing leaders who have been pushing, or tepidly refuting, lies about the president are often the same people who are stoking resentment against American Muslims, Latinos, and gay people. They are peddling a very narrow idea of what it means to be, as Sarah Palin once put it, part of “the real America.” This definition of “the real America” doesn’t include immigrants or their children; it doesn’t include people of color; it doesn’t include gay people. When Gingrich and his allies build a myth about a foreign con artist president, they imply that all those who fall outside the narrowly defined “real America” are to be viewed with distrust. That may be an effective electoral strategy in the short run, but in the long run it stokes real divisions and creates real harm. And, it will not be an effective long-term strategy for the Right. The United States is a vibrantly diverse country and is growing more so. If the Right continues to insult and exclude entire groups of people, its politics will rapidly become obsolete.

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Michael B. Keegan: Not From Around Here: The Right’s Campaign to Redefine Obama

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) has revived “tax extenders” legislation that, in addition to a plethora of business tax cuts, would close a loophole that lets rich investment fund managers pay a lower tax rate than their dentists and would reauthorize funding for a welfare-to-work program responsible for creating 240,000 jobs. Baucus asked the Senate Thursday for “unanimous consent” to approve the measure, which is deficit-neutral. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) shot down the request, saying he wants an open amendment process, leaving the bill’s fate uncertain. Congress is only in town for another two weeks, and if it doesn’t reauthorize funding for the welfare-to-work program — the TANF Emergency Fund — that program goes kaput at the end of the month, and many of the jobs it supports will go kaput as well (though some will remain, as the program’s purpose is to subsidize private-sector jobs in hopes some of them will “stick” as the employees gain skills). Advocates of the program aren’t incredibly optimistic. “It’s good news if it passes, but as we’ve seen before, this can’t pass without bipartisan support and there’s no guarantee that there will be bipartisan support,” said Donna Pavetti of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in an email to HuffPost. “We have 13 days before the TANF ECF expires — that’s not a lot of time to get a bill that has any opposition through both the Senate and the House.” The tax extenders bill is supposed to be appealing to Republicans, as it’s loaded with more than $17 billion in tax breaks for businesses that are reauthorized every year and considered must-pass. The bill’s prospects are made murkier by the looming election and the battle over the expiring Bush tax cuts. “If I wrote for your publication,” said a senior GOP Senate aide in an email to HuffPost, “I would ask why Democrats were rolling out tax cuts for the rich and for big corporations before introducing the tax cuts for the middle class bill.” The tax extenders bill is deficit-neutral thanks largely to a $31.4 billion increase in the amount oil companies pay per barrel into the oil spill liability trust fund and a $13.5 clampdown on the “carried interest” loophole, which allows investment fund managers to treat their income as capital gains and pay less than half the maximum 35 percent tax rate that normal rich people pay. The previous versions of the tax extenders bill, which included the above provisions, were hitched to a reauthorization of unemployment benefits and went down in flames in a series of votes over the summer as Republicans objected to helping the jobless with deficit spending. “With all the shouting about needing to pay for things, it should be considered low-hanging fruit at this point,” said U.S. PIRG’s Nicole Tichon, who has long lobbied for the loophole closer and accurately predicted it would return after the unemployment debacle. “I wouldn’t say I’ve lost all hope.”

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Dems Revive ‘Tax Extenders’ Bill, Would Save Welfare-To-Work Program

From the hills and hollows of West Virginia, IT professionals are resolving to do what American IT professionals have never done before – stop the outsourcing of their jobs, the insanity of cost over runs for botched services, and the destruction of their identity as American professionals. Unlike assembly-line workers who find the gates to the factory shuttered one day, IT professionals are first lured into cooperating with a shadowy internal “chop-shop.” The chop shop’s mission is to analyze, dissect, disassemble and consolidate computing power and support. These same IT professionals, who have a sophisticated understanding of how the business works along with subject matter expertise, are expected to provide detailed reports to the chop-shop which will be included in a bill of particulars and handed over to potential outsourcers. Only then can vendors come up with a price to outsource. Once the outsourcing begins, so do the firings, the cost overruns, and loss of expertise. So when Robert Bolin, the new West Virginia State Director of Information Services, a former IBM employee and lawyer specializing in IT outsourcing contracts, assembled 35 programmers to inquire, “What does everybody think about outsourcing?” they thought they were dead-men walking. “You couldn’t draw this picture any better if you used Crayolas,” said Jennifer Ayers, an applications developer programmer who walked out of the meeting determined to fight. While other programmers were willing to “play-nice,” she and a handful of programmers at the state of West Virginia, all non-union workers who once considered unions irrelevant, formed a team that day that would draw a line in the sand against a national trend. Twenty years in the making, this trend is played out over and over: Permanent top dollar, white-collar jobs convert to dead-end perma-temp jobs which eventually sail abroad. First, this team alerted every IT pro they knew. Robert Bryant, a systems programmer with strong pro-union sentiments, replied, “You’re gonna be fired anyway. You might as will fight for your job–and our future as Americans. This is the only chance we have.” Then he contacted the union that just 4 years ago organized the state of West Virginia’s workers as an open shop. That union was United Electrical Workers (UE), the union made famous made by their successful 24/7 management take over of Republic Windows, pushing bank creditors away and saving a plant that employed 240 workers while their white-collar professionals cowered and bailed as Bank of America called in the loan. “It’s about the right to have a job.” John Thompson, an organizer for West Virginia’s Public Workers UE Local 170 , called a fact-finding meeting. A liberal arts major with only manufacturing experience, Thompson and the IT pros quickly spun out a bold “to do” list – fight this politically in the media, at the state capitols steps and in the courts. Thompson explained, “Americans are deeply resentful as they watch thousands of ‘jobs of the future’ shipped off shore. In this sense, this is first and foremost a political fight – it’s about the right to have a job.” An aggressive, preemptive strike against any outsourcing plans was devised. IT pros activated their broad networks, committing to reach all 600 IT workers across the state. While many IT professionals still wouldn’t speak out, support to quash any outsourcing plans was spreading covertly. It even reached into low-level management. Carolyn Saul, a systems programmer for the West Virginia Office of Technology discovered the fight back on the nightly news. She wrote to a colleague whose job was outsourced by her current boss, Kyle Schafer, in his previous position, “I have joined a union; something I never believed in. Because I assumed if you did your job you’d never have to worry about losing your job.” Two weeks later, she was a headliner at a rally of 75 IT professionals on the Capitol Complex. She explained why she spoke out publicly. “My mind kept repeating the famous poem displayed at the Holocaust Museum, “First they came for…”. I spoke for those who can’t yet.” While favorable local coverage expanded, the union moved to lobby state legislators – with IT professionals eloquently arguing their case. On September 5, 2010, the union filed a lawsuit against West Virginia’s Office of Technology and Kyle Shafer. The suit alleges Shafer has yet to submit a four-year plan that was due in June 2007 and failed to submit biannual reports of his activities. Both are required by law. In addition, UE is requesting the court prevent the Office of Technology from soliciting bids for outsourcing. IT professionals showed another display of strength on Tuesday, September 14th, by speaking to a joint House and Senate subcommittee, packing the upstairs gallery, and gluing themselves to their desks to hear the live audio of the hearing. Legislators then moved to audit the Office of Technology and examine all documents related to potential outsourcing plans. As House Delegate Randy Swartzmiller put it, “…we want to make sure that we know what’s going to happen with the employees that are down there working now and are doing a tremendous job.” “That’s when the congratulatory text messages from other IT pros started flooding my cell phone,” said Avery. “Finally, we’re first in something !” To a IT pro like me , that’s almost Heaven.

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Donna Conroy: West Virginia IT Pros Mount First US Resistance to Outsourcing

NOTE: The United States is under attack by foes who are openly animated by what is known in Islam as shariah, or Islamic law. According to shariah, every faithful Muslim is obligated to wage jihad – whether violent or not – against those who do not adhere to this comprehensive, totalitarian, political-military code.  A team of experts coordinated by the Center for Security Policy has recently produced a ground-breaking report, Shariah: The Threat to America , describing in detail precisely what shariah is and what it means for all of us. What follows is extracted from that report, issued on September 15. Adherents to shariah are fundamentally and unalterably opposed to the survival of the Constitution of the United States. Shariah is based on the Quran, which Muslims believe is the “uncreated” word of Allah as dictated to the prophet Mohammed; hadiths, the sayings of Mohammed; and agreed interpretations by Islamic scholars. Shariah commands that Muslims carry out jihad indefinitely until the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, where shariah is not enforced, is brought under the domination of the Dar al Islam, or House of Islam (literally the House of Submission), where shariah is enforced. Shariah commands both Islamic terrorism and pre-violent, “civilizational jihad” or “stealth jihad,” depending on necessity and circumstances. Those who work to insinuate shariah into the United States are conspiring to subvert and replace the Constitution, because under shariah, freedom of religion and other civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution – and the very concept of man-made law – are incompatible with Islam. Any system of man-made law is considered illicit under shariah, where Allah and only Allah has provided the law. This is not a radical concept in Islam, but a fundamental tenet of the faith.  Shariah is held by mainstream Islamic authorities – not simply fringe extremist elements who have supposedly “hijacked” the religion – to be the perfect expression of divine will and justice.  All Muslims, regardless of where they live, must submit to be governed by shariah, a cradle-to-grave “complete way of life” that mandates social, cultural, military, religious and political norms. Millions of Muslims around the world do not practice their faith in a manner consistent with shariah, but those who do submit to shariah have grounds for arguing that their version of Islam is the authoritative one.  By offering little, if any, meaningful opposition to the shariah agenda and by meekly submitting to it, a large number of Muslim communities and nations generally exhibit an unwillingness to face the consequences of standing up to shariah’s enforcers within Islam. Shariah is a totalitarian ideology that controls all aspects of life. All are forced to submit to Islamic law as defined by theologians. Shariah institutionalizes discrimination against women, deprives people of freedom of expression and association, criminalizes sexual freedom, and incites hatred and violence against people of certain social groups. As manifested in countries officially ruled by Islamic law, shariah condones or commands abhorrent behavior, including underage and forced marriage, “honor killing” (usually of women and girls) to preserve family “honor,” female genital mutilation, polygamy and domestic abuse, and even marital rape. Islam requires all Muslims to wage jihad. Some interpret jihad as a personal struggle of self-discipline and self-sacrifice to improve oneself to glorify God. Others interpret it as holy war in pursuit of a global Islamic state known as a caliphate, ruled in accordance with shariah. Islamic jurisprudence, known as fiqh in Arabic, forms the legal context for shariah and its rulings. Shariah scholars typically cite as authority for jihad any of the 164 verses of the Quran that specifically refer to jihad against non-Muslims in terms that include military expeditions, fighting enemies, or distributing the spoils of war. Among the most categorical of such Quranic entries and the most often cited as authoritative by the shariah scholars is the “Verse of the Sword.” That verse says, “So when the sacred months have passed, then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war; but if they repent and establish regular prayers, and practice regular charity, then leave their way free to them; for surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.” (Quran 9:5) Under the terms set down in the Quran, pagans or polytheists must convert or die. As for Jews and Christians, known in the Quran as the “People of the Book,” the definitive prescription for their treatment is as follows:  Fight them “until they pay the Jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” (Quran 9:29) Thus, Jews and Christians need not convert or be killed. They have a third option:  Submit to Islam as second-class citizens or “dhimmis.” We inadvertently submit as dhimmis when we censor ourselves or one another to avoid “offending” Islam or Muslims. When we change our customs, rules and laws to conform with demands of Muslims who immigrate to our country. When we apologize unnecessarily for our country and our culture. We become dhimmis when we go along with demands by, say, a cleric who insists on offending the vast majority of our countrymen by building a mosque next to Ground Zero. When we lose the ability to define our wartime enemy since 9/11, we become dhimmis. Our leaders do. Each of us does. Little by little, we erode away our own rights, laws, customs and civilization by submitting as dhimmis. We eat away at our own national ideals, our own personal dignity, and the rights of those around us when we practice shariah-ordained dhimmitude. Think this can’t happen in America?  Look at Europe, where a number of nations have become dhimmified to the point where shariah law is now practiced in enclaves or more broadly, side by side with the national law awaiting the day when – through demographics, political action, financial subversion or other means, the West’s total submission is achieved. In the next installment from Shariah: The Threat to America , we’ll take a look at the connection between shariah and jihad – and how together they threaten each and every one of us.

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What Is ‘Shariah’?

Reuters – The House of Representatives will vote on a package of loan incentives and tax breaks for small businesses next week, House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer said on Friday.

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House to vote on small-business bill next week
(Reuters)

Caught in a deeply difficult race, Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Tex.) went up on air Friday with what is perhaps the most intense ad yet from a Democrat trying to distance himself from President Obama. The Texas Democrat, who was once considered a potential vice presidential choice by the Obama campaign, touts not only his opposition to health care reform, cap-and-trade legislation and the like in the new spot . He also actively declares that he withstood pressure from Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in doing so. When President Obama and Nancy Pelosi pressured Chet Edwards, Chet stood up to them and voted no against their trillion dollar health care bill, and no to Cap and Trade. Chet votes with the conservative Chamber of Commerce sixty-seven percent of the time. And when Washington liberals wanted to take away our guns, Chet said no. That’s why the National Rifle Association has endorsed Chet Edwards over Bill Flores. I’m Chet Edwards, and I approve this message. The mentioning of his endorsement by the NRA and his ideological symmetry with the Chamber of Commerce is the coup de grace in the spot, which sets a new standard for beleaguered lawmakers running away from the White House in this tough political climate. Edwards may very well not end up retaining his seat come November. But the danger for the party at large is that ads like these feed into the narrative of a party dissatisfied with the agenda it has pursued.

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Rep. Chet Edwards Touts His Opposition To Obama, Pelosi In New Ad (VIDEO)

The House has honored plenty of not-so-serious people over the years: Sports teams, musicians, contest winners, etc. But they’re humans, not animals.

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House passes resolution to honor dogs