The Superior Multi-face-edness

Remember this little Shea-Porter caper from a few weeks back?  Frankly, Carol, the Nashua Telegram gives a damn - and they're letting your entire state know about it:

Shea-Porter’s mailing at taxpayer expense totaling $1,059 was an abuse of the representative’s franking privilege — the authority granted Congress to use the U.S. Postal Service for constituent communication. They are specifically forbidden from using the privilege for campaigning, which this clearly is . . . The schools should be off-limits for partisan political campaigning, whether by mail or on-premise distribution. School officials in Nashua, to their credit, denied a request from another legislator seeking the home addresses of students graduating from Nashua’s two high schools this year.

Class B felony, Carol; one to seven years behind bars, Carol.  Better get your closet full of Wolverine Steel-Toed boots packed up, because November is just the beginning of the downward spiral your miserable life is about to take.

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I've never understood why pols get so pissily self-righteous about lobbyists.  Lobbying is nothing more and nothing less than "petitioning the government for redress of grievances."  They've been around as long as the U.S. government has been around.  It's just that armies of lobbyists are what you get when you take a government that's supposed to fit within a city block and explode it to the size of frakking Jupiter.  But that didn't happen because of lobbyists, anymore than barnacles were just floating around on the surface of the sea, minding their own business, when these ravenous boats came along and kidnapped them by adhering them to the undersides of their hulls.  I'm pretty sure the boats came first in that little equation.

Well, maybe I do kinda-sorta understand why Democrats employ that tactic, given that their "some kind of a god" - the most lobbyist-infested pol in American history, even before he seized the White House - nevertheless got away with claiming the exact opposite, justifiably confident that hopenchange fog and mass psychoses would camouflage it for the duration.

Well, now, you know the disclaimers they put on shows like Jackass and WW[E] Raw and Smackdown: "Don't try this at home."  This is because the performers make look easy things that you'll kill yourself trying if you start thinking it really IS that easy.

Brad "The Sherriff" Ellsworth thought attacking the next Republican Senator from Indiana, Dan Coats, as a lobbyist whore looked easy because Red Barry made it LOOK easy.  And then he did a really, really, REALLY stupid thing:

Did Sherriff Brad really think he'd get away with this barely a week after posing as Sherriff Andy?  Is his next ad going to show him whistling with a fish pole over his shoulder while he's taking his trial lawyer buddies down to the D.C. Aquarium so he can put in a line and they can dive into the tank and feed on the sharks?  What was he thinking?

He was thinking he'd get away with it, probably because this gig was in Canada.  Which I guess he thought didn't have cell phones or cameras or Internet access or TVs or indoor plumbing.

Chalk it up to the arrogance of power.  Which, given that this bumpkin has only been in Congress for four years, shows how fast a learner - at some subjects - he really is.