So let’s get busy.
Thursday will be day one for the 110th Congress and it’s time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi has not made much of a secret of the items on the agenda for the first 100 hours. So much for those old-fashioned “100-day” agendas. Strap on your socks and get ready. With the stage set by Pelosi and Harry Reid’s pledges to keep the House and Senate open for business with…. gasp…. actual five-day work-weeks, I’m looking forward to tuning into C-SPAN.
The Preznet tried to jump the gun and grab a little press for himself on Wednesday with a little op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, begging for a spirit of bipartisanship. I caution you that before you read it, you might want to make sure you’ve taken some sort of anti-emetic and that you not try to read the whole thing at once. The degree of hypocrisy and stubborn-headedness, not to mention the insistent repetition of misleading statements sold to us for the last six years is not for the faint of heart. I may try taking a shot at dissecting it a bit when I can carve some time out over the next few days.
Whatever he says, though, the cheerleader-in-chief is on the wrong side of public opinion and the wrong side of the vote count on almost everything that the Democrats plan to put forward in their agenda. DailyKos pointed me towards this CNN poll that was taken in December for release Wednesday. They slice and dice the questions a couple of ways in their survey, but they basically asked people whether they favored/opposed/lacked opinion on the various Democratic proposals that we will see coming forward. Suffice it to say that these are pretty popular proposals amongst the American public (numbers in parentheses are favor/oppose/no opinion):
Allowing the government to negotiate with drug companies to attempt to lower the price of prescription drugs for some senior citizens: (87/12/1)
Raising the minimum wage: (85/14/1)
Cutting interest rates on federal loans to college students: (84/15/1)
Creating an independent panel to oversee ethics in Congress: (79/19/2)
Making significant changes in U.S. policy in Iraq: (77/20/3)
Reducing the amount of influence lobbyists have in congressional decisions: (75/21/4)
Implementing all of the anti-terrorism recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission: (64/26/10)
Maintaining the current Social Security system to prevent the creation of private investment accounts: (63/32/6)
Funding embryonic stem cell research: (62/32/6)
Reducing some federal tax breaks for oil companies: (49/49/2)
Changing the rules to allow Congress to create new spending programs only if taxes are raised or spending on other programs is cut: (41/54/5)
Over half of these proposals are favored by the public by a three-to-one margin. All but two of them are favored by at least 30 percentage point margins. We’ve seen how little was accomplished in the last six years under single party Republican rule. Now let’s show them how it’s done.
[…] It was a bit different that he spoke of a domestic agenda first. Now, it was pretty lame of him to try to score points by shilling for things that were in the Democratic Party’s “First 100 Hours Agenda”, but whatever. I guess if I were him, I wouldn’t want to lead with Iraq either. By the midway point, when many people may have been snoozing safely. he moved into the foreign affairs agenda. By this point, I was so buzzed that I couldn’t keep track of my drinking rules anymore, but I think he said Iraq or Iran about a billion times, which is coincidentally, about the same number as the number of Iraqi civilians that have died so far due to this war. But I digress. Beer does that to me. […]