I'll Flinch When Those Polling Numbers Tell Me Something I Don't Already Know

Word from Arkansas: Blanche Lincoln, Democratic Arkansas Senator up for rere-election in 2010, is in...(record scratch) trouble!!

Looks like she'll be facing a TOUGH CAMPAIGN?! And she'll have to raise SEVERAL MILLION DOLLARS IN ORDER TO HAVE A CHANCE TO WIN?! And she's having to WATCH HER EVERY WAKING MOVE FOR THE NEXT YEAR AND A HALF?!

What's going on here?! Locusts! Famine! Boils! Down is up! Up is down! The weatherman is wrong and dogs and cats are sleeping together...IT'S MASS HYSTERIA!

Ugh. This has been the story since about December of last year. Polling numbers are usually only good if they're telling you something new. There isn't an amateur political analyst out there who doesn't think that Lincoln and her campaign manager Steve Patterson aren't fidgeting nervously about next November.

But nothing so far has changed. All of her potential challengers in the Republican ranks are rather puny at this point, able to be handled handily by a large bank account, which she undoubtedly will be able to muster at her whim.

State Sen. Bob Johnson, Bigelow's Democratic Senate President, has thrown a wrinkle into the story, but this shouldn't be altogether unexpected. There's got to be a more ambitious Democrat out there who might want to take a poke at the U.S. Senate -- Why not Bigelow Bob? It's certainly not a matter of party loyalty; that's why we have primaries in the first place.

So this is going to be a grinder in the Natural State. It will likely be that way until February. We will see if Bobby Boy really steps up to the plate against Blanche, where I suspect he would collapse under the weight of her checkbook and name recognition. Then she would face hitherto paltry opposition against the GOP.

There are three outcomes, all of which seem kind of probable at this point, verified by those same tired polling numbers we've seen rehashed and re-edited over and over again: She is defeated in a primary, she is defeated in a general election, or she will win it all.

Her bank account, name recognition and political tenacity make her a shoe-in for the last position. But those outcomes, statistically speaking, make her twice as likely to be defeated.

The result: No difference yet. Come back in a few months. Let's move on to a different subject: I don't think we're talking enough about this whole health care business, do you?

Something That Rubbed Me The Wrong Way

And no, it wasn't the hot wings from lunch.

I don't know how this health care business is going to play out. I think we definitely need something to keep costs lower, eliminate inefficiencies, all that stuff, but I'm not entirely convinced that a government option is necessarily the way to go.

Honestly, with there being so many dead horses piling up in America's front yards, all fatalities due to blunt force trauma from the health care talking points, I just want there to be a conclusion. Yay or nay, but let's get it over with, I'm pretty unbiased.

But there's one point I'm hearing over and over again that really rubs me the wrong way. We're the only civilized country that doesn't have universal health care. This is used to decry that those Americans must be a bunch of backward, knuckle-dragging, booger-eating morons, if those Americans don't want universal health care.

Wanting universal health care is not a bad thing. Saying we need it because others have it is a whole other ball game.

My case in point, granted, an isolated one, but it got to me. France, yes, that civilized European parlor of love and elegance, France, outlawed burkhas. A 'burkha' for those of you out of the loop is a head-to-toe garment donned by devout and fundamentalist Muslim women. While that's kind of old news, I was reminded of it when I saw that a woman on the beach in France was arrested for wearing a full-body suit and mask, creating a waterproof beach burkha.

Creativity be damned, French officials said, and they arrested her for it.

A clear violation of personal rights --wearing clothing for religious purposes -- was not only passed into law in France, but is enforced as well. I just think it's really dumb to say that "oh, they're doing it!" that we must be remiss for not doing it here. The equivalent would be your local police officer knocking the yamacha off some rabbi's head.

This isn't to say that there aren't lessons we can't learn from the French (how DO they get croissants so fluffy?) and vice versa, or that these things have anything to do with one another. I'm not going to be ordering Freedom Fries anytime soon at my local McDonald's. I just think it's a shallow, useless point to be made in an argument, offered to the lowest common denominator of angry person who happens to be siding with universal health care.

Sorry. That just got to me. Carry on.

Trying to Contemplate the Birther Issue Without Laughing

Conspiracy Theorists, I guess, make the world go 'round.

I remember them growing up. I had an uncle who swore the moon landing never happened. He also thought that actors and thespians were doing nothing but "glorified lying." The kid next door had a dad who thought that "we aren't getting the whole story" about JFK, Area 51, or where magnets come from.

But they were always marked with other overt eccentricities that pretty much fit the statements they had made. Now comes this laughable bit of forehead-slappery called "The Birther Issue," proponents of which contend that our President Barack Obama was not born in America and therefore is an invalid candidate to be President.

Smiling politely as people ramble incoherently about this ridiculous accusation is now not enough it seems. Lou Dobbs is giving it some legs, and today on Politico they discuss the headaches this conspiracy theory is giving elected officials of the GOP who want to maintain the semblance of rationality and credibility among everyone else but would like to avoid marginalizing these very vocal insane people voters.

If you can't feel the restraint in my writing, please understand it now.

It is ludicrous to suggest that the President is not an American citizen and can't be president. The Hawaiian government has gone on the record — unequivocally, irrefutably, and unambiguously on the record — to say that he was born in Hawaii, which I'm pretty sure is an American state. But they don't look American! bellows a Birther from his trailer bathroom, door conveniently left open for just such an occasion. Upon further research, Hawaii became the 50th state on August 21, 1959. It's a state in America, like Arkansas, Texas, Delaware, Vermont, California...even Idaho! Being born there makes someone a citizen, and therefore able to be President. If there's more digging that needs to be done, then by all means, dig away with all of the powers granted by the FOIA, but I don't guess that the flights from Delaware to Hawaii are going to be in any higher demand.

Fie!, cries another Birther after swallowing his Copenhagen in shock and dismay that I would suggest that the documents in Hawaii are in fact the real documents, not lookalikes swapped out by them danged ole Democrats. He done switched em up! he proclaims, grinning like Encyclopedia Brown after cracking a case.

Yes, those Democrats and their crafty ways. Having a man born in Kenya, trained in the dark arts of community development, being unleashed in to Ivy League law schools and on to Chicago, the Senate, and the Presidency, all over the course of 40 years. It's almost too easy.

Uh. Sure. Maybe. That's a blanket statement that can be applied to a whole lot of things, but until evidence is produced it's just noise, not to mention so crazy that it doesn't warrant rebuttal. My problem with such statements, other than the fact that they're hopeless thrashings of people who really can't stand that a guy with a middle name like 'Hussein' is president, is this: If there were any indication that there might be a speck of truth, a hint of validity, an iota of credibility to this potentially-derailing claim, don't you think that a political party with the vested interest in that derailment — the GOP — would have done something to do just that, and derail this charismatic, confident, and composed man who made a bee line to the Oval Office?

If there were any truth to the matter, people who are paid to find the deepest dirt in the world for big, big bucks would have been happy to deliver these goods and then never have to work a day in their life again. It'd be that important.

Sadly, such reason will never reach the brains of people who really think that Barack Obama shouldn't be President right now. He should. He was vetted. He was elected. He's in. But the last ditch effort of sore losers who have uncomfortable undertones that reek of good-ole-fashioned racism is really getting, quite frankly, embarrassing. As more and more people line up into this fold, it's going to not only damage the already-punch drunk GOP, but I fear politics in general. I don't think the public forum can sustain such an aberration and dearth of common sense.

And there's the objectivity of it all. I'm not decrying Republicans or hoisting Democrats — These people are just bad for business all around. Unless you can show me a detailed research proposal that can state otherwise, please drop this.

Michael Jackson's death may be ruled a manslaughter or maybe even a homicide. Have fun with that one.