Randi Rhodes: Budget D-Day & Wis Goes Fla

Friday, April 8, 2011

It’s Friday, ya bastids!

With just a few hours left to avoid a government shutdown, we still don’t have a budget deal. Just a week before tax deadline day of April 15^th, it’s kind of appropriate to see that the government tends to put things off until the last minute too. Of course, that’s assuming they’ll get some sort of deal arranged by the last minute. There’s a very real chance that they won’t get it done until several weeks after the last minute. If I had the same attitude about deadlines that the Republican Congress does, I wouldn’t be this blog about today’s budget impasse until some time in mid-May.

The social conservatives are trying to use the budget fight to get their way on issues like abortion and pollution (and God knows what else from the GOP’s unbelievable list of ‘policy riders’). One of the big stumbling blocks is a Republican obsession to take down Planned Parenthood. Bizarre. These “family values” conservatives are all for parenthood… unless it’s planned evidently. No more Planned Parenthood! Conservatives believe that all parenthood should be random and accidental.

It looks like the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin has gone all Florida on us. In fact, the Wisconsin race has gone so far Florida that from now on, I think we’re going to have to start calling “going Florida” “going Wisconsin” instead. Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus announced yesterday that she “forgot” to save the results for a town called Brookfield—a town that went for the conservative candidate by over 7,000 votes. Wow. First thing you want to do is check to make sure that such a town exists in Wisconsin… and not in Middle Earth or Narnia. It seems that Brookfield is a western suburb of Milwaukee. The mother of Laura Ingalls Wilder is from Brookfield, and one of her “Little House on the Prairie” series of books is about her, and is called “Little House in Brookfield.” Now we have a whole new work of fiction that originates in Brookfield. She claims to have misplaced the votes. Kathy Nickolaus must not be very good with computers. Either that, or she’s really, really good with computers.

I’ll give Kathy Nickolaus this much—she doesn’t look nearly as disturbing as Katherine Harris. But then neither did the Phantom of the Opera.

Today’s Homework | Discuss

Things got testy last night at a Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) town hall meeting (video below). Rep. Moran will join us live today in the first hour of the show.