Conservative - 1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change. 2. cautiously moderate or purposefully low: e.g. a conservative estimate.

Rep. Patrick McHenry

The last time I checked, Representative Patrick T. McHenry (R – N.C.) had an (R), not a (D), which means that he’s part of the GOP, which means that he’s conservative, which means that he applies to the above definition.  So why has he introduced legislation which would change the way our money looks?  That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, despite two foreign wars, student protests over public education tuition increases (32% in California!), a crippled economy, and a tsunami scare in Hawaii, Rep. McHenry has found time to draw legislation which, if passed, would replace President Grant’s face with President Reagan’s on the $50 bill.

Why, you may wonder?  Because presidential scholars rank presidents, and the order in which they come out always, Rep. McHenry says, places Reagan higher than Grant.  Do you know who else is usually higher than Grant?  Grover Cleveland.  Grover fucking Cleveland.  He’s on the $1,000 bill, but the U.S. Treasury doesn’t print that one anymore.  John Adams also consistently outranks Ulysses Grant, one of the Founding Fathers, as does James Monroe and John Quincy Adams!  Click here for an entire listing of relevant presidential rankings.

The people who are on our currency in circulation are: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, and Benjamin Franklin.  On coin: Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, FDR, George Washington, John Kennedy, and Sacagawea.  Notice anything?  How about those most responsible for our economic well-being appearing the most frequently?  Thomas Jefferson, appearing both on currency and coin, almost singlehandedly doubled the size of the United States with one of the shrewdest (and most racist!) purchases in all of history.  The economy that those GOP members are so desperately trying to defend was created by Alexander Hamilton, one of the non-presidents on currency.  Abraham Lincoln, while not an economist by any means, made a series of decisions which saved what-would-become the world’s most powerful economy from an incredible schism.  If economic prudence is the merit by which one is immortalized on currency, then we should just put a picture of Social Darwinist Rockefeller with the tagline “everyman for himself” on every bill.  Or pictures of slave-traders.

I remember sophomore year of college when I had to read a book by David Harvey called The New Imperialism. In it, Harvey argued that the United States had created a new empire which was based on unspoken, yet interminably strong economic dominance of foreign countries.  Not only has the “third world” come to rely heavily on the United States, our foreign influence (Pepsi plants, outsourced tailors, and so forth) runs more deeply than the ferocity of those cries of “domestic jobs” and “Americans first.”  I think this is neoliberal policy and I think it was aggrandized by the firebrand Ronald Reagan.  Actually, David Harvey wrote another book called A Brief History of Neoliberalism and I think Reagan was on the cover…

This isn’t new, by the way.  There have been proposals to put Reagan’s face on the dime, the $20 bill, and even the $50 bill five years ago, none of which have been successful because his policies are “still controversial.”  That’s a light way of putting it.  I imagine that those impacted by neoliberal economic policy, such as young Bangladese children, would feel just about the same way that American Indians felt when in 1928 Andrew Jackson’s face was put on the $20 bill.  Wait, didn’t he march thousands of American Indians to their deaths because of congressional pressure?  Didn’t the economy crash the year after his face was put on the $20 bill?

Rep. McHenry has more to worry about in North Carolina than what the $50 bills he carries around are going to look like.  How about the budget shortfalls expected for 2011?  In any case, this is stupidest, more absolutely irrelevant thing to spend time and money on.  I want the guy who led the army that defeated slavery to stay on my $50 bill, not the guy who created economically subjugating policy abroad.

Rick Snyder, the GOP candidate for governor and Ann Arbor businessman, seems to be struggling with more than just weak name recognition. You may have seen an advertisement aired by the Rick for Michigan campaign during the Super Bowl – labeling him as “One Tough Nerd“. Now, last summer during the Mackinac Island conference and the huge initial GOP buildup to the primary season, he adopted a “Rick for Michigan” logo in which the preposition “for” was so small, it appeared as if his name was “Rick Michigan,” a potential miscalculation that has many prognosticators scratching their heads.  However, with the new year came a new rebranding for Rick Michigan, accompanied by the One Tough Nerd spot on Super Bowl Sunday.

I remember my dad often making jokes about people called pencil pushers, wearing something called a pocket protector and using mysterious tools known as slide rules. Even with the great value placed on the pursuit of learning in my family, there was a distinct generational attitude towards the stereotype of the nerd as a negative thing. I can’t speak to whether this was rooted in a 1960s grade school experience or a distaste for bureaucrats coming out of the Reagan years, but either way, older folks just don’t like nerds. The opposite seems to be true of millennials – especially in these uncertain times, both genders favor finding a mate who will be able to carry their own weight financially, and like it or not, that grants a certain advantage to nerds. Apathy is no longer trendy – and being involved and aware of what’s going on in the world requires involvement on several different platforms.

The gamble the Snyder camp seems to be making is that the Tough Nerd message will resonate with a wide swath of the population, but he faces a twin set of difficulties. First is that young people just don’t turn out to vote to the same degree that their older counterparts do, which will be compounded in an August primary. Furthermore, despite the relative unpopularity of the Democratic Party in Michigan today, the fact remains that young people (even or perhaps especially conservative ones) generally don’t like Republicans, and certainly not enough to go to all the trouble to support one candidate over another in a GOP primary.

So Rick Snyder, once considered the frontrunner, seems to be dealing with the age-old dilemma that the more people know about you, the less they like you. But this will only be an issue if he sticks with the One Tough Nerd meme even close to as long as he did with Rick Michigan.

Well, everyone worried about Ted Kennedy’s death and what it would mean to any meaningful change to the health care system in the United States.  Apart from all the unwarranted hysteria about the Kennedy curse (he was old and he died…), I thought the press handled it pretty well, including The Kosmopolitan Online, which wrote a couple of nice editorials on Ted’s contributions to the Senate and how he was a one-man filibuster and so on and so forth.  I have to admit I never liked the guy, but staunchness and constancy aren’t very well spoken for in our representation, apart from on the extremely local level.  The paradigmatic Kennedy contributed a lot to health care reform while he was alive; he contributed even more by dying, creating an inamorata around which the Democrats could rally.  Democratic zeal for health care after his death is what got the legislation this far.

But now it’s fucked.

In an impossible victory, Scott Brown (R) defeated Martha Coakley (D) approximately 53 to 47 percent to take the late senator’s seat in Massachusetts.  The usually overwhelmingly democratic Massachusetts shocked the polity by electing to the senate the 41st member of the GOP, which keeps alive the Republican filibuster for the Senate health care bill.  President Obama’s first year in office is shot (unless he’s out of the country), and Democrats can wave goodbye any hopes of an expeditious piece of legislation.

Martha, Martha, Martha

I would understand if Martha Coakley had been in some kind of drug scandal and lost the election; I would understand if she was an ineffective campaigner.  No, I think Martha Coakley is another name for President Barack Obama and His Administration…Most democrats seem to have lost a little faith in their “change is coming” mantra, with frustration permeating throughout the House and Senate at the longevity of this convoluted health care bill.  Granted, the death of the champion probably didn’t help, but someone famous once said that things will one day be judged by the content of their character instead of outward appearances.

Scott Brown’s campaign platform makes the election even more painful for democrats to swallow: he actively opposes the health care legislation in the House and Senate.

It doesn’t help that Obama had a bad year.  What makes things worse is that he knows and admits that the year was bad, calling the Christmas Day attack of the Northwest airliner “a systematic failure” on the part of the administration.  The economy’s positive response to the senatorial election can almost entirely be attributed to increased faith in drug companies which would otherwise have been negatively impacted by the President’s health care package.  That’s sickening.

I think it’s funny that Scott Brown once posed nude for Cosmopolitan – it means we’re breaking down this crusty, white male paradigm of “what a politician should be” (iniquitous, venal, etc.).  I just wish Scott Brown was a (D).  Sigh…