Rand Paul Looks Good By Keeping His Mouth Shut; Jon Stewart is a Really Decent Person, Chris Christie’s Strategy is Working

And Other Commentary After the End of the Shutdown Debacle

There are three freshman Senators who are running for President, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.  By keeping his mouth shut Rand Paul has looked the best of the three.  But not to worry, Mr. Paul will soon start making his usual ridiculous statement and remind everyone why he should not talk out loud.

The rise of Stephen Colbert was capped by his fantastic performance at the Al Smith dinner (watch the video!).  The really interesting thing is that his mentor, the man responsible for his success, Jon Stewart, is really, really pleased and supportive instead of being bitter and jealous.  Anyone who has followed the career of Mr. Stewart know what a great person he is, this just confirms it.

The presidential strategy of Chris Christie, the Republican Governor of New Jersey has been to win a big re-election vote.  This would enable Mr. Christie to run for President on the platform that he can win.  Right now this is not good enough, Mr. Christie would be crushed in primary voting if the elections were held today.  Once he is safely re-elected look for Mr. Christie to turn sharply partisan, and let loose the mean and vicious aspect of his personality.  It’s the only way he has a chance.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the formerly part time rational now completely off the rails columnist Peggy Noonan has invoked the late Senator Robert Taft in her arguments of how the Republican Party should act.  Senator Taft was a persona of the1940’s.  Really, read the piece.  It is incomprehensible to anyone except people who actually know who Senator Taft was, and even for those 20 people it is not all that clear.

The Republicans were so furious about losing the shutdown battle that they successfully prevented some tax decreases.  That’s right, rather than give Democrats something they wanted that Republicans also wanted they went back on the basic principle of their party, tax cuts.

MSNBC is hiring a 25 year old son of actress Mia Farrow.  Even so they will still not have anybody as bad as Rev. Al Sharpton.  And is Ronan Farrow the best they can do?

As near as anyone can tell, the problems with the rollout of health care reform have largely occurred because Republicans in states they control refused to set up exchanges and have done everything they could to disrupt and interfere with the program.  That they can say without contradiction by the Press that the the rollout is a failure of the Obama administration says all that is needed about the sorry state of the press in the United States.

It is important that Virginia Republican Ken Cuccinelli not just lose the governor’s race but that he lose big time.  That is the only way hard line conservatives will start to listen to the people telling them things they don’t want to hear.