The West is the Best

You never know what to expect if you're a hard worker. If you walk your doors and drink your tea uncaffeinated and sweetened with sweet and low.

If you have a father who taught you grass roots city politics and you are teaching him inside baseball Republican politics. today, he winked at you and said, yeah, this is my first campaign. Well, it was far from that, but it was is first in his House seat as an independent, a party switcher.

Turns out, he tells me, people will vote for you if they know you, if you've defined yourself to them. Wary be the candidate that fails to do that.

Look for the fat apathetic politician and you'll see a guy who is not walking his doors or even standing at every possible function and not eating everything in sight or drinking too much, even the coke calories, the dead calories of high fructose corn syrup, no way to run doors on a campaign.

I told him a true rumor about a valued staffer who he'd walked with who was finally lured to the Senate, he and his wife, to do the same sort of successes he did for the House GOP. A quiet loss, irreplaceable really, in the dedication to task alone. True, but not widely known yet.

What is the Senate really like compared to the House. Slower paced, well, I don't think so anymore. That has now proved to be a formula for failing leadership. The most public kind of failure, losing at election, but another sort of failure is resorting to the courts to fight your battles. That just tells me you're rich, and that is how you are defining yourself.

Does one want to be promoted there really, or is that a place to retire? A careerist in the legislature needing a change of scene and some payola after working government wages with the skills one has. Twice the pay would be more deserving.

But if the members cant vote it for themselves, how can they administer it for their staffers?

Do you know who Joshua Bolten is?

How does the second term Casa Blanca chief of staff do the tap dance on Meet the Press under heavy pressure on all fronts? Iraq, and the number of civilian deaths at 100 last week, stem cell research on fertilized embryo = murder, wow, that's a tough task for anyone, even if Tony Snow calls killing a fertilized embryo murder...but for someone who is basically just on the job after certain staffers do their second term leaps back to the private sector after their public service...before it's too late and you get interminably linked to a flagging administration defined by partisanship and war, not just the death of war, but the spending of war...back into the deep red zone after being in the black briefly in the mid-90s. Oh the nostalgia of a fiscally conservative federal government...

sure, they give you a tax break, but then they spend $500 million a day killing arabs, further fueling the good will toward America in the Middle East.

Now, they talk of Hezbollah as a proxy war vs. Iran. Let's not even go there. We need to weasel out of the wars we are in first. Before the Empire crumbles.

When following up Bolten, you have the guy on who wrote the book on the war called Fiasco to find out why the title was chosen. Saying probably it's one of the worst war plans ever...90 percent of the time on 10 percent of the problem...how to get to Baghdad...

Now, the only question is how do you get out?

The Politics of the City

So for those of you in-town tourists, now that the political show under the big top is adjourned for a while, check out what Mr. Reed is doing in the little top of the city politic itself.

Music festival muddies by the big muddy 300 year rainstorm, yet salvages with two July humid days, and bringing in the people to the downtown. It really is quite a pretty city. The politics though, always seems to be as muddy and debriis-filled as the susqy at her most mean looking.

She can sure handle a load, and anyone who's been tracking the big top for as long as I has, has seen it all so much that it all comes full-circle, maybe twice already. The ebb and flow of it like a river holding a storm. mr. Reed, your damn idea was a bust because it might help tourism, but might hinder floods, in the most flood-prone state.

We under the dome can handle our loads two, whether it is educating each other or doing what we perceive to be the good deed of serving politics as best we can in our own little fiefdoms, but it's a job somebody has to do.

So downtown was a hoppin on a nonsession night Monday night, the momentum of the lobbyist-fueled smoke and mirors, dinner and arm twisting, a little more light shining in on the process this time around.

When in Rome do as the Romans do. This weekend, it's play guitar.

Oh, by the way, a city cop wanted to spend some of the taxpayers time harassing this skater traveling gas-free up Walnut Street, sai peace officer was ready to block traffic at third and walnut to make his point that he was Johnny Law. I thumb my nose at any applicable ordinance and would fight it if brought to the fore. City Council thinks they can get smokers to stop smoking in city parks, well, Mr. Reed, instead of harassing skaters, how about the dude who asked me for a light at the Walnut St. pavillion. I said, are you testing the city ordinance. I saw many instances of this infraction and no enforcement, so what little city council veto override does when not enforced. But harass the expert skater trying to save on gas and find a non-business public parking space that is not in a parking authority garage...street-parking free areas, that's right, tow the tourists and fine them for trying to park in your illustrious city.

So, I pick my board up and walk it across the intersection ignoring the cop and kicking my way up third street to meet this beautiful new GF of mine and her Jeep Liberty full.

Should th ecops enforce the smoking ordinance at the beach boy concert tomorrow night?

Inside Baseball

Does anyone even use that term any more, inside baseball. It's the world cup we're talking about. The international parlay of members of the House and Senate, from el Fumar and his iron grip on the Senate Ds to Il Duce, and up and comer quick with the soundbyte on the House R side. You try to learn what you can if you're any good at what you do. Sometimes that's all you can do with the gig - collect information in the eventuality you will need to use it.

Did anyone have fun last week in the House. I know I did, from the complaining about having a palate better than the shipped in staff food, the basest of eats, makes you long for your own home cooking. Personally, my first meal after exile from the old horse stalls was a nice chicken salad, garlic and olive oil...now of course the members eat better catering, not the, wee need to feed 500 people fast sort of food...Yeah, you can imagine. If I were a member, I think I would have to eat that crap to see what the staff are subsisting on, like a good general does to see what sort of meals are in the stomachs of the infantry.

There's nothing like watching the process. Being immersed in it. It's not the whole making sausages aspect of the system that is evident to the seasoned observer of a political microcosm. The ebb and flow is sort of like baseball, you can place events in the time it takes for the season. Football is more of a finite and measured game. Consider the July 2 at 1:45 a.m. adjourn time as the extra innings needed for all sides to win the game, like a nil nil football match playing right now over there in Stuttgart.

These newbie recruits, may they not get picked off rushing the defenses of the enemy like running the thin red line on Guadalcanal. May they outflank their foes, and find a way to use and adapt the system as it pleases them, and forget jousting the windmills, unless it's to corral (cant use that word in English only) more votes for a state wind farm alternative energy grant program for the likes of Somerset County and other areas where a wind farm makes sense to power the state. Now, the Big Cheesesteak, he knows this, but let's take a look at the DEP and DCNR budget to see what programs are offered there in toto...What was it peeps, $3 million for a new program for alternative energy. Yes, I too believe it can be an economic development tool for the state - wouldn't it be nice to earmark some of these tax credits floating about EITC, the capital stock and CNI reductions, to specific types of businesses, the manufacturers of the parts for the alternative energy industry, or for the industry itself. Someone has to make the steel and alloys for the windmills. Give em some props for using their brains where the federal government is not.

Talking to an expert about the D spin on why the welfare budget is so out of whack, and coming to realize point blank that it is about defederalization, or devolution of federal funding, a change in rules in DefRA, the federal deficit reduction act, stops payment on the checks written the last time the welfare system was reformed, about a decade to a dozen years ago it started - under Clinton finally, with the momentum of the years playing to his benefit, like it does for some many politicos.

So, where do the programs go when the funding is renounced. Does the state choose to drop them as the House Conservative Caucus would have you believe. They can argue that because the only villian in the funding is the Democrats, who we associate the social program with the liberals, who created it - make sure you spit out the word liberal like the swear word conservatives have made it, because liberal D or Liberal Republican like me (not an oxymoron), face it, if you dont take time to understand what is going on, you're just a tool for the PTB.

How to play the game

You have something they want, a handful of votes that you've put together, many handfuls even, so you call them a coalition and exert the fact that you exist. Mandy has stepped forward from the D side of the dividing line in an under-reported press conference to Join the "35"in the House Conservative Caucus, well, maybe not. Mandy was so thrilled, she asked for the list. Yeah, she asked me. Like with so many other lists, it is afraid to be published, I told her. I have three of them, I said, for that much I can vouch. Reformers. We need them, and we need those that believe in them. More importantly we need them to work together. Dont be afraid to step forward, Mandy Declares and we see a list of 59 generated - tell me something true, that no one else knows, and it can be played diplomatically into the slipstream.

How do you defeat a state budget 15-34, tell me? You build these coalitions of the strange bedfellows and you do it. Simple as that politics is, said Yoda. Remember that any minority can exert its influence on the majority, and I told her I didn't have the list, but that Style would...Could I write the list, well now I can, that is how you get the information, you ask for it, and it finds you.

Did you check out the alleged Taxpayer Relief Act fix? It failed, in the end, just like the lobbying bill, not for lack of creative lingo - imagine a straw poll being conducted, wow, we're so California with our referendums...oh, one of the rooks on my side, the one that passed me a hard copy of the lingo in the bill, he pointed out to me that it was nonbinding. Um, yeah, I told him, that's the first thing I noticed, and just for good luck, I circeld it in red, after the green of my go-colored highlighter. I saw this was no highlight of any negotiation, but linguistic pandering, a punt to the electorate. Um, yeah I noticed. I guess he didn't find it as obvious? Anyway, thanks for the help. I wanted to notice it, so that I knew I didn't have to get it noticed on a grander scale...no PR would be forthcoming on that one, and as it turned out, it didn't see a vote. The Lobbyist Bill, it got nonconcurrence, but a promise to get right on that.

That is for this one, but stayed tuned to the 11 o'clock news for more TMI.

Quiet, Work in Process

Sometimes the Legislature just has to exert its power. Sometimes the public forgets about our bad old self, sometimes we just need little knuckle crack reminders that we exist in the outside world.

Every culture has its lingo. Every culture has its games, and the game of politics is the biggest money of them of all. The people seeking to get in need to observe that, lest they become a part of the problem. The more that see the need for reform of this partisanship that evades the doing of many things...quoted so wisely by Rep. Dan Surra at a Labor Relations Committee meeting last week on the minimum wage bill. Said with enthusiam: "We are the best at doing nothing!" yes, with an exclamation point as the dilatory oral amendment was being discussed. I was a fly on the wall at that meeting.

Of course, the room was packed with flies, given the amount of sheet that was getting flung. Busy-ness, bidness, business. It's all about business.

This job, politics, for those newbies out there, it isn't a fair game, it is as tough as nails to be immersed in it, to truly get it, without suffering from ponophobia - fear of fatigue, overwork. You get to this point it is time to jump off the stressometer and move into a more peaceful line of work.

But here I sit, an 18 year fly on the wall, keeping coming back for more like Cool Hand Luke keeping coming after Dragline and being told to stay down. We stay down for no man and for no voter. We cant standing being locked up in this place any longer, but willing to fight to the drop down to do the job it takes to be here, because the process needs thinkers like us to keep the ship of state afloat whether the ship of state knows it or not.

Un appreciated, we are the rats under the floorboards picking up all the litter and hoarding it into little secret stashes until implosion occurs. Know where the skeletons are hidden? Hell, we put them there, holding the foot end of the load.

# 1 Rule of Politics. Know where the bodies are buried and better yet, know who did the burying, and make sure they know you know.

This keeps you in the position of your choice for as long as you choose that choice.

The political process is sort of like pro sports, in that you have a certain lenght of career that you are most effective, and through the natural ebb and flow, you outlive your star status as a member of the process. Obviously, the brain does not suffer the injuries of the body that happen to a footballer, but the mind too can suffer injury from the stress of this process. There has therefore to be a lot of mental illness hidden in politics. Take the NJ Gov. Candidate admitting depression the other day.

We are a story in how to manage chaos with brinkmanship.

You puppies read the stories coming out of neighbor New Jersey? A budget impass that has something to do, let me see, with property taxes being shifted onto the sales tax? sound familiar? You thought we made that up? Senate Bill 30 in special session did not move with its lollipop language asking the Secretary of the Commonwealth to call some vaguely worded nonbinding statewide referendum about shifting to sales tax from property tax, foisting that decision on voters, like a straw poll, because they have been afraid of the backlash if they act on it without the tacit endorsement of the electorate that is still so very pissed off at them at the moment via the 4th Estate because of the money issues.

So, I called it, eventually. Fiscal Year 2006-2007 budget arrives, first thought to be stillborn in the Senate, it got properly Fumoed, but not without getting a little bit Birmelined, on Sunday, July 2, 2006 around 1:45 a.m. a new session day properly rang in for a new perdiem, and peeps, it was worth it, ok, you just come on in and spend the time it takes to get it done and tell me you can do it better.

But give credit folks, I see how this show is run, and I challenge you to do it any better. Come try to come on in and try, I think I'm going to like the levity...I'm not saying change isn't coming or that I wont embrace it, I'm saying that with change comes growing pains, mistakes, experiements gone awry. This means: cost taxpayers money. Governments, like businesses, should learn from their mistakes.

The General Assembly kept its unmade pledge not pass a bill at the witching hour, you see, because it is those items getting passed then that are the last in the legislative freight train, and there is a dang good reason that a pay raise is the caboose of the thing, because it is the kicker on all the other shenanigans that just passed down the tracks in the preceding cars. First, the deal is you have to make these deals and not renege and then we conclude the deal.

I hope that was coherent, I am done rereading for now, I have a warm day to play in.

So they did not go to the witching hour of Pay Raise 2 a.m., but they gotter done. More later peeps.