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Some weeks, not much happens in political news, and other weeks it seems like almost too much happens. This was one of the latter types of week.
We've got a number of oddities to dispense with before we get started this week.
If we had a "best quote" awards category, we'd certainly have to nominate what outgoing House Republican Steven La Tourette had to say about the whole situation, after the Senate had voted 89-8 to approve the fiscal cliff avoidance deal: "We should not take a package put together by a bunch of sleep-deprived octogenarians on New Year's Eve." Now that's funny!
A federal appeals court has reaffirmed every American's right to communicate with the police solely through the use of the middle finger. You read that correctly: what is variously called "flipping off" or "flipping the bird" or "the one-finger salute" -- even to a police officer -- is indeed protected speech under the United States Constitution. Which is a victory for free speech and the First Amendment.
We're all talking about the same thing today. We are, indeed, having a "national conversation." The subject is tragic, which is why it has everyone so focused. Another shooting rampage, another town consumed by grief, all played out on the nation's television screens. But precisely because everyone's talking about it, I find that I don't have much to add to the main discussion. All I have are a few fragments that are mostly peripheral in nature, and mostly to do with the news media.
Every so often, I get an idea which I know would make me millions of dollars. Today, I had another one: develop and market a pill which, when taken, would put you to sleep until the morning after the election. The pill would be magically timed to work no matter when you took it, meaning a citizen in Texas or California might not want to take one until perhaps mid-October, but the folks in Iowa and New Hampshire might be expected to take one New Year's Eve -- thus avoiding not only the debates and punditary frenzy of the general election, but the entire primary season as well. It would be marketed under the name "The Rip Van Winkle Pill."
Unsolicited advice to the Romney campaign: this is not the way to convince voters that your candidate isn't Thurston Howell III. I'm just sayin'....
The second item of note is that today marks the fifth "birthday" of this column series. September 14, 2007 saw the very first Friday Talking Points column ever (although the name and the column format wouldn't solidify for a few months). Since then, almost every Friday, we've been attempting to provide Democratic talking points for politicians to use to get their point across in a snappy and memorable fashion. How much success we've had doing so is open to interpretation, but we're still here doing it, which tends to indicate that Democrats still have a ways to go to match the Republican ability to keep "on script" during interviews. To put this another way, it's the old Democratic "herding cats" problem.
With that "fair warning" out of the way, there are two highly amusing talking points coming from the Republican camp this week. If your irony-detector is as acute as mine, you'll appreciate the GOP completely and utterly destroying two of their bedrock positions just to score a few cheap political points. I don't know about you, but I find this sort of thing to be one of the more enjoyable forms of political entertainment around.
In a surprise announcement today, the International Olympic Committee has filed a lawsuit against Mitt Romney and his entire family. Not, as some might have expected, for his recent comments about the London Olympics, but rather because Mitt has been using the term "Romney Olympics" to describe a summer festival held at his palatial vacation home, up to and including this year. The I.O.C. is famously protective of the term "Olympics" and who is allowed to use it, and according to their press release, they are merely protecting their brand. No word on what financial penalty the I.O.C. will be seeking, as an I.O.C. spokesperson told us, "We're going to have to subpoena Mitt's tax returns before we can answer that." He also added, "Mitt's dancing horse will be disqualified from the dressage event, as well."