1.) No one does anything anymore now that health care has passed — In the weeks since ObamaCare passed, Congressional staffers have found time to go on that spirit quest in Wyoming and change out the spark plugs on dad’s Gremlin, FOX News reports. “After months of hand-to-hand legislative combat, the House could be a rather serene place. The House is now stocked with the equivalent of teenagers who moan to mom that they’re bored. Or that there’s nothing good on TV.” When asked what they’d be doing for the next, oh, eight months or so, one staffer answered, “Are you kidding me? I still haven’t recovered from health care,” while another simply said, “I’m golfing.” In other words, it’s all Nov. 2010 from here on out, baby! The Democrats did their thing with the unfunded spending and the Republicans did their thing (whatever it was), and now the only thing left for staffers to do is sit back and watch the boss smile and wave and deny that he ever meant to sleep with that woman/talk about the president’s negro dialect/vote for health care.
2.) Cool kids boycott Obama’s nuke party — “Questions are growing about the president’s ability to maintain important relationships,” writes The Daily Caller’s Jon Ward. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown will not be attending Obama’s Washington nuclear summit, nor will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and their absences have led several talking heads to wonder if maybe Obama sucks at maintaining long-distance relationships. “He seems to want to engage rivals, even enemies, more than spend time with friends and allies,” David Kramer, a top State Department official in the Bush administration, told Ward. “His lack of contact, relatively speaking, with close allies suggests an assumption that they’ll be with him in the end anyway. And yet he found time to go to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympics.” Apparently, reaching out to our enemies means elbowing our friends in the face.
3.) In honor of National Seafood Appreciation Month, Harry Reid flounders in polls — “Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) would lose re-election even if a Tea Party candidate chips away support from his Republican opponent,” reports the Hill. According to a poll conducted by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Reid might as well spend the rest of 2010 packing up his Washington digs, huffing paint first thing in the morning, and shouting obscenities at sweaty tourists, because he is all but not a senator anymore. “In a race against former Nevada Republican chairwoman Sue Lowden, Reid would garner 38% of the vote, compared to 46% for Lowden and 5% for Tea Party candidate Scott Ashijan.” Flounder fact: As the fish matures, both eyes migrate to the same side of its head. On occasion, this makes it difficult to see what’s coming.
4.) Communist utopia pays 1 million people to do nothing — “The Cuban government and its enterprises might have more than one million excess workers on their payrolls. That’s more than one million unproductive workers, out of what official Cuban figures show is a total of 4.9 million people working in formal jobs in a country of 11.2 million people.” While speaking to the Cuban Communist Youth, which Elián Gonzalez apparently joined in hopes of exacting revenge on the lipsticked yeti who sent him back to Cuba, Raul Castro complained of “inflated payrolls, very inflated payrolls, terribly inflated payrolls,” while reassuring the crowd of youngsters that “the revolution will not forsake anyone. I will fight to create the conditions so that all Cubans have honorable jobs.”
5.) SCOTUS is a battlefield — Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy believes that the White House will have a new Supreme Court justice in place by October, when the court will reopen for business sans a bow-tied and befuddled Justice John Paul Stevens. This means the summer will be exciting! And that Washington will once again be a’buzzin’ with veiny old men pontificating and grandstanding, and pasty overvalued journalists making hay out of blabber and salad speak and divining the progress of closed-door negotiations from the color of Robert Gibbs’ ties and the depth of Mitch McConnell’s tremor.
6.) Florida GOP continues to run amok — Over the course of 2 1/2 years, $1.3 million was charged to Melanie Phister’s GOP American Express card. According to the St. Pete Times, Phister, a junior GOPer, claims the spending wasn’t all hers. “Over that period of time, there were multiple instances when the card was used to make purchases that I had no knowledge of, and I did not regularly review the monthly credit card statements which I understand were sent directly to the Party’s accounting office.” And who did Phister answer to? Close Marco Rubio friend and former Florida House Speaker Ray Sansom. Based on several recent examples, here’s how this scandal will play out: Phister will be reassigned to cleaning out the stables, Sansom will die under a mound of paperwork, and Marco Rubio will come out smelling like roses (like, literally–Marco smells amazing).