Not only have two of my comments to Tedski’s blog been disappeared, but my response to Timmy’s Cat’s comment on last night’s post got eated too. It’s completely gone. Doesn’t even show up as spam. Whither my comments, WordPress?

Raul Grijalva is now under the dirty hippie bus.

Tedski’s post that I tried to comment to was about how Rep. Grijalva is being unfairly savaged by the Beltway liberal punditocracy for his opposition to the Senate health care bill. Matthew Spieler, card-carrying DC Villager and blogger for The Faster Times, who appears to be an Ezra Klein clone and looks to be about the same age (though I couldn’t find his DOB) laid into Raul Grijalva for, I kid you not, not upholding Democratic values.

More after the jumpety-jump.

Quoth Spieler:

When I registered to vote as an 18-year-old, it seemed to me that a belief in universal health care was central to “being a Democrat.” I still don’t see much point in being a registered independent — at least in states that have closed primaries. You simply disenfranchise yourself. But registering with a political party ought to be about more than maximizing your voting leverage. When you register with a party, you are making a moral statement — a statement about your core values and philosophy. Universal health care has always been the backbone of the Democratic domestic policy platform. This is why people who believe in universal health care tend to be Democrats.

Spieler incorrectly claimed that Grijalva enjoys the FEHB plan through Congress when, in fact, he opted out of it. Kudos to Ted for pointing that out in the comments section and on his own blog. Here’s my comment to Spieler:

Matthew, I am an Arizonan and though I don’t live in Grijalva’s district I can tell you that Raul is a great public servant and a profoundly decent man. You, on the other hand, strike me as interchangeable with any number of clueless elitist Villagers dispensing wisdom to us proles (whose lives you know exactly jack squat about) from on high.

Raul Grijalva represents a district that stretches across southern AZ from Nogales to Yuma, encompassing low income parts of Tucson and Phoenix, as well as a lot of poor rural communities. A lot of undocumented immigrants live in his district, and though they can’t vote, they are his constituents. The HCR bill, with it’s cruelly cynical exclusion of undocumented immigrants basically tells them to drop dead.

Now I’ll await the responses on how denying coverage to undocumented immigrants was politically necessary because shut up you dirty hippie.

Bipartisanship and cutting the deficit poll well. Mom and apple pie poll well too.

But if Mom’s an abusive alcoholic and you’re diabetic, then Mom and apple pie aren’t good for you. Along those lines, I predict we’ll hear much about the need for bipartisanship and to cut spending in the President’s speech tonight. And speaking of selectively interpreting polls, why is an empty hairdo with a truck getting elected in MA a sign that Democrats MUST MOVE TO THE RIGHT but an election in Oregon where voters chose to tax the rich and corporations by a wide margin is …election? What election in Oregon?

MoDo goes TMI on us again, while playing that same broken record

Obama’s Oneness has been one-upped. Why settle for a faux populist when we can have a real one? Why settle for gloomy populism when we can have sunny populism? Why settle for Ivy League cool when we can have Cosmo hot? Why settle for a professor who favors banks, pharmaceutical companies and profligate Democrats when we can have an Everyman who favors banks, pharmaceutical companies and profligate Republicans? Why settle for a 48-year-old, 6-foot-1, organic arugula when we can have a 50-year-old, 6-foot-2, double waffle with bacon?

Yick. The last time she was this gross was when she was salivating over GWB back in 2000. Different year, different phony rough-hewn Republican dude, same MoDo. And this is supposedly the NYT’s “liberal” columnist.

Another one to add to the IOKIYAR list. Espionage. Plus being locked up means you aren’t attending to your facebook fan page

Alas, wingnut hearts are breaking across the land as their young ACORN hidden camera pimpin’ hero has been arrested and faces serious charges. Naturally, the Right is doing its best to ignore or downplay James O’Keefe’s crimes as a “youthful prank”. Back in October, several GOP House members were so impressed with O’Keefe and his “investigative journalism” that they introduced a resolution to honor him and his “hooker” Hannah Giles. I’m going to give y’all two guesses as to who the two dunces from the AZ GOP delegation who signed onto it were. (Hint: Jeff Flake is way too smart for something like that.)

For some pre-SOTU entertainment I highly recommend O’Keefe’s facebook fan page. It has been, shall we say, infiltrated.

Toodles! Catch y’all apres SOTU.

At Unocal, we believe that the central factor in planning these pipelines should be the location of the future energy markets that are most likely to need these new supplies. Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union are all slow growth markets where demand will grow at only a half a percent to perhaps 1.2 percent per year during the period 1995 to 2010.

Asia is a different story all together. It will have a rapidly increasing energy consumption need. Prior to the recent turbulence in the Asian Pacific economies, we at Unocal anticipated that this region’s demand for oil would almost double by 2010. Although the short-term increase in demand will probably not meet these expectations, we stand behind our long-term estimates.

I should note that it is in everyone’s interest that there be adequate supplies for Asia’s increasing energy requirements. If Asia’s energy needs are not satisfied, they will simply put pressure on all world markets, driving prices upwards everywhere.

The key question then is how the energy resources of Central Asia can be made available to nearby Asian markets. There are two possible solutions, with several variations. One option is to go east across China, but this would mean constructing a pipeline of more than 3,000 kilometers just to reach Central China. In addition, there would have to be a 2,000-kilometer connection to reach the main population centers along the coast. The question then is what will be the cost of transporting oil through this pipeline, and what would be the netback which the producers would receive.

For those who are not familiar with the terminology, the netback is the price which the producer receives for his oil or gas at the well head after all the transportation costs have been deducted. So it’s the price he receives for the oil he produces at the well head.

The second option is to build a pipeline south from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. One obvious route south would cross Iran, but this is foreclosed for American companies because of U.S. sanctions legislation. The only other possible route is across Afghanistan, which has of course its own unique challenges. The country has been involved in bitter warfare for almost two decades, and is still divided by civil war. From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders, and our company.

Submitted without comment. Emphasis mine.

So I’ve got just one thing I’d like to say to any of Jason Rose’s folks who may be reading this:

Your boss is a pendejo. Please feel free to pass that memo along to him.

But let’s not forget he wasn’t the only candidate in that district who gave local political junkies cause to cast the fish-eye. Last month Sarah Fenske wrote a hard-hitting investigative piece on Clean Elections excesses and Margarite Dale was not spared:

Strangely, Dale’s campaign also chose to spend a full $10,500 on “polling/research.” Consultants say that’s rare in a legislative campaign; polling is much too expensive when you’re seeking grassroots support.

Even odder: Dale chose to use National Research, a polling firm in New Jersey. Among the few Arizona pols listed on the firm’s Web site as past clients? Jim Weiers himself.

So did a big chunk of Margarite Dale’s funding go to help her supposed “opponents” figure out the lay of the land? It certainly looks that way, and when New Times reached Dale by phone last week, her denials were fairly unconvincing. How did she come to hire the New Jersey firm? Dale couldn’t say. Did she share the data she gathered with her Republican “opponents”? Dale didn’t know.

“I don’t know what the big thing is,” she said. “Everything we paid for with Clean Elections money was exactly within the confines of what we were supposed to be doing. Everything we got, we used for my campaign. I did run a campaign, and I got 3,000 votes. You don’t get 3,000 votes by doing nothing.”

When pressed about her ties to Weiers, Dale grew audibly annoyed. “I thought this was about my experience in the campaign,” she said. “I’m kind of done. Thanks.” Then she hung up.

Dale’s numbers are a little off. She got 2,358 votes, not 3,000. But that was unquestionably enough to make a difference. Jackie Thrasher lost her House seat by a fraction of that — just 553 votes.

$10,500 in polling for a Green candidate in Phoenix, Arizona. Yeah, right.

If I didn’t follow politics closely, I would think these people are the ones who won the election.

It’s a sad, sad day when Fox(!) is exhibiting the closest thing resembling parity in coverage.

H/T to Think Progress for the chart.

AIG said in the filing that the 130 payments included $3 million for retirement services chief Jay Wintrob. His award, almost 400 percent of his 2007 salary of $775,000, was the only one disclosed by AIG. While most recipients will get 60 percent of the money this month and the rest in December 2009, AIG said, Wintrob elected to get his first payment in April.

$1490 an hour, assuming a 40 hour work week. Nice.

**Update:  It was $372 an hour, until I realized that AIG was offering him 400% of his $775,000 salary.  Well exuuuse me, rich dude!   What the holy hell does he DO to deserve that??!?

I try not to assume that every Green candidate is a GOP-backed spoiler, because there are parts of the country where they field legitimate candidates and have a true presence in the political community.   But this isn’t San Francisco or Vermont, and when I hear the word Green invoked locally I immediately think of it’s common blogospheric acronym:  Getting Republicans Elected Every November. 

To be fair, it appears that the actual Green Party in Arizona is legit. They are opposing the Republican stalking horse candidates, including Dale. 

To refresh y’all’s memories:  http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2007/11/sheriff_joes_nick_tarrbaby_joe.php