Wave Maker

In the wake of the grave controversy regarding Mitt Romney's alleged animal cruelty, the Boston Globe has now reported that Romney may also have been a habitual violator of his hometown's dog leash law. This latest disclosure threatens to end his once promising presidential ambitions prematurely.

Caught by surprise by the Globe's investigative reporter, Romney's sister Jane blurted out the corpus delecti:

She says he was such a social dog that he often left Mitt Romney's Belmont home to visit his "dog friends" around town. "He kept ending up at the pound," she says. "They were worried about him getting hit crossing the street." So a few years after Seamus's ride to Canada, Mitt sent Seamus to live for a time with Jane and her family in California. "We had more space, so he could roam more freely," she says.

Sources suggest that the sister may also have been in violation of similar leash laws in California.
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Well that's how I'd anticipate reading about this nonsense on the prevailing leftie blogs.

Pfff, animal abuse. The whole thing is so petty, so intellectually dishonest, so sanctimonious and phoney, it makes me laugh.

There are plenty of issues on which Mitt Romney should be held accountable -- and is answering to every day. His treatment of the family dog isn't one of them.

[Apologies for the excessively spare posting, folks. I have become engaged in an exhilarating project -- asisting my father with the writing of his memoirs, and it is consuming much of my creative energy.]

Over two years ago, the nation was engaged in a great political debate as the majority Republicans in the Senate openly contemplated revising their cloture rules to prevent the minority party from being able to filibuster federal judicial nominees. It was referred to ad nauseam back then as the "nuclear option," i.e., reducing the percentage of votes required to reach cloture from 60% to a majority.

In a somewhat iconoclastic post at the time I argued thus:

The majority party in Congress is certain to change (eventually), the White House will not be held by the current party forever, and all in all, things seem to work themselves out -- provided that members of Congress cooperate, and do their job.

If the Republicans exercise their "nuclear option," what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The Senate has a resilient institutional memory. "People remember." And if the body of federal case law precedent is so radically shifted to the right by these so-called radical right activist judges, then it will be the privilege of the controlling Democrats at the time to shove a bunch of radical liberals down the throats of their opponents.

Admittedly, the subject matter upon which this stalemate arose was the stalled appointment of Bush's nmominees to the federal bench -- and that alone. But it was (at least in significant part) due to the so-called "gang of fourteen" compromise that avoided the stalemate and eventually led to the appointment of John Roberts and Sam Alito to the Supreme Court.

Now, of course, the "sauce for the gander" that I warned about has come to the Democrats roost, and poor Nancy Pelosi is complaining to her home town paper about those "obstructionist Republicans" in the Senate using the cloture rules to hamstring the anti-war vote, the immigration bill and other important priorities of theirs.

The difference in 2005 was the compromise agreement of the 7 Republicans and 7 Democrats. A similar compromise was not achievable with the immigration reform bill.

That is no reason for Democrats to begin contemplating Frist's "nuclear option" again.