He’s blaming D Magazine reporter Dan Koller because of his election preview article didn’t make a big thing that Burk was gay.

Or maybe Sheridan is just mad because he received only 28 votes (0.27 percent), two years after he somehow backed into 1,054 of them (10.56 percent).

A teenager did better than him this time around - 18-year-old Jacob King grabbed 77 votes, and Sheridan promised to stop running for office if King’s total exceeded his.

Anyway, Sheridan grabbed the phone and left the sweet voicemail to Koller.

We cleaned up the worst of the dirty works, but it’s still some rough listening.

Every time the US bumps up against its debt ceiling, we start the cycle all over again.

President Obama insists he won’t negotiate over the debt ceiling, but of course he will.

Members of Congress grandstand about changing this vicious cycle, and then most clamber for the easy way out so they can return to matters they’d rather talk about, which is just about anything but cutting spending.

Meanwhile, federal spending continues and the debt clock keeps ticking.

We will hit the debt limit again this Sunday.

The Treasury is expected to exhaust its cash management tools sometime in September or October.

In the meantime, Washington’s periodic debt ceiling ritual will play out.

Debt ceiling fights are always about leverage.

Members of Congress want to use the vote to get concessions from the other side, usually the President.

The President pushes for tax increases from Congress.

Both sides say “no” and the talks end for the day.

Here we go again.

It’s a way of saying these people like me and you should too.

Here’s an endorsement to beat all those from the carpenters, the firefighters and the police – rolled into one.

A mayoral candidate in North Miami says she’s been endorsed by Jesus Christ.

Say hallelujah.

It’s right there on the campaign poster for Anna L. Pierre.

“It’s a spiritual endorsement. Why? Because everything I do I always get God involved.”

Pierre says she received three signs that Jesus was her endorser, and no, she won’t say what they were.

It’s been an interesting campaign…

Last week, candidate Jean Marcellus was punched in the face inside his own campaign headquarters by an so-called friend.

Candidate and former mayor Kevin Burns said he’s filed five police reports for stolen signs.

And Pierre said last month she was the target of voodoo spells.

We can’t wait to see who wins.

UPDATE: Pierre received just 56 votes and came in last in the field of seven.

This happened in a shopping mall.

It was video taped and used for a commercial for a bank.
Almost awesome.

There are two main reasons for this:

First, voters look at major issues such as economic performance and the conduct of foreign wars in making their decisions.

That leaves little room for everything else.

Second, the news media may overplay the story, scandalous or otherwise, on any given day, even though it may turn out to be relatively unimportant in the context of a multiyear political cycle.

But the recent admission by the Internal Revenue Service that it targeted conservative organizations with terms like “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names when they applied for tax-exempt status could be an exception.

Remember that the IRS is something that touches everyone, for better or worse.

It is not an admired agency and what’s going on is something that might interest most people.

The so-called scandal reinforces the negative feelings many have about the tax collectors.

It can negatively affect the President depending on how successful the Republicans are at blaming him.

We’re just at the beginning of this so-called scandal.

For now, it’s the standard blah-blah-blah about how we don’t know just what we’ll find.

But we can guess what the political implications will be – and they’re significant.

Let’s explore this:
The primary effect is that for some time to come – probably through next year’s election – it allows main stream Republicans to get on the same page with the Tea Party and what the Tea Party essentially is, which is the ideological base of the Republican party, which is pretty much unchanged for the last 25 years.

Of course, it goes without saying that a scandal on one party’s watch is good politically for the opposition party.

But it goes well beyond that in this case because of the aftermath of the 2012 election.

Gays and immigration have been key ways for Republican’s to connect with the party’s base for years.

Not the only ways but some of the most effective.

But after-2012 those two touch points are largely off-limits – immigration entirely and gay rights to a lesser degree.

This has been a major problem for Republicans.

The main ways they communicate with the base of their party have been largely off-limits.

It’s all made the national GOP constantly wrong footed or like a big ship without a rudder.

The IRS “problem” addresses that quite nicely.

Let’s assume for the moment that it turns out there was a combination of poor judgment and perhaps bias at lower levels of the IRS.

There was no direction from upper management that would implicate the administration or top appointees themselves.

The nature of this scandal – the government, particularly the IRS singling out and persecuting conservatives – appeals to the heart of the right-wing conspiracy-generating crazies.

If you wanted create a scandal to have maximum appeal to GOP base freak-out, this is it.

And it has the additional advantage of not creating the same sort of craziness loved by base Republicans.

It’s not about Obama’s ties to the Muslim brotherhood or where he was born.

It’s about taxes, something everyone has an experience with and understands.

And it’s at least rooted in something that’s true.

Something really did happen.

And it’s not good.
It shouldn’t happen.

That’s why we’re seeing Republicans like Mitch McConnell go so full-bore on this.

He’s not particularly well-liked in his state and he’s not particularly well liked by Tea Parties or base Republicans.

But now he can bang the drum on something that appeals deeply to all of them.

That is a very, very big deal to every national Republican elected official.

And again, all of this applies even if we learn that none of this came from political hanky-panky by administration leaders.

He’s the Republican that introduced a resolution last month in the state house to honor himself.

He’s now co-sponsoring a bill to take down a traffic camera.

The same one, we note, that busted him for speeding in 2010.

Lundberg said the traffic camera speeding ticket “had absolutely zero effect” on his decision to sponsor the bill, adding, “In fact, until you said that, I completely forgot about that.”

He was ticketed for driving 60 miles an hour in a 45 mile-per-hour zone just weeks before voters elected him to a third election.

He said he receives constant complaints that the traffic cameras are a bother for people wanting to visit the Bristol Motor Speedway in his district.

He said he is also worried about traffic crashes at the site of the cameras.

The answer is – of course – don’t speed.

To believe you’ll live forever and nothing can hurt you.

Is he or she supposed to represent their constituency and vote for what the people tell him or her what they want?

Or is their job to vote what they think is right, and you voted them into office to do that.

It’s not a simple question and there’s no simple answer.

We are a “republic” and a republic form of government is where we elect people to represent us in Washington.

When the Constitution was first enacted, there were no telephones, or telegraphs and the seat of government was days (or weeks) away by buggy or horse.

There was no way for the lawmaker to reach back to the home city or state to see what the people wanted.

They voted as best they could on the matter before them.

It’s different now.

Here’s our simplistic view of it all…

A republic is a state that does not practice direct democracy but rather has a government indirectly controlled by the people.

Here’s the confusion – what does “represent” really mean?

The reason this is important is what’s happening in Colorado right now.

Colorado Democratic lawmakers who recently helped pass some of the toughest gun-control laws in the country are facing the political backlash of recall efforts.

Some are saying they went against the will of the people.

The Democrat-controlled legislature passed bills that outlawed magazines holding more than 15 rounds and required background checks for all gun transfers.

They were signed into law in March by Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper.

At the same time, the Senate president, pushed a more far-reaching bill that called for holding owners, sellers and makers of assault-type weapons liable for havoc inflicted by their guns.

He pulled the bill when he realized he didn’t have enough votes.

Just trying to get the bill passed has upset a lot of people.

Two Petition drives are being organized to force all those people into recall elections.

The argument boils down to:

Are lawmakers supposed to vote for the will of the majority (measured some way) regardless of how they individually feel?

Or, are they supposed to vote their conscience because the people who put them in office agreed with how they felt about issues?

The America of 200 years ago is vastly different from the America of now.

We’ve pondered this over many a cocktail and still can’t agree.

Nine years ago, the now-mayor of New Jersey’s second-largest city was photographed naked on his front porch.

It was right before an election.

Asked to explain, Democrat Jerramiah Healy passed it off as a bad night of drinking.

He won the election and became Mayor of Jersey City.

New Jersey voters apparently can understand getting bombed and doing something stupid.

Now he’s running for reelection and appears to be changing his story.

Healy came up with a different and more bizarre account in an interview with a newspaper.

He now claims he had actually been drawn outside that night by a group of noisy Hispanic girls – who proceeded to rip off the towel he was wearing and do “filthy” things.

As you can imagine, this new version has opened Healy, who’s been endorsed by President Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, up to a new round of criticism from his political rivals.

Why he didn’t leave that stuff alone is hard to understand.

According to the paper, Healy said he was woken up that night by women banging trash cans outside.

He says he wrapped himself in a towel and went outside, to find “three Hispanic girls, young kids.”

“So I go out on the porch and they pulled the towel off me. Now I start laughing, and then they started doing other stuff. I said, ‘I’m old enough to be your grandfather.’”

Healy said “it was filthy” and he “chased them away.”

When he sat down, Healy says he was photographed by a political enemy.

We needn’t point out that’s not exactly the story from 2004.

The man has had his share of public controversies.

After he was elected mayor, he got into a highly publicized scuffle in 2006 with police officers outside a Bradley Beach bar owned by his sister.

He was arrested and later fined for the incident.

We figure the voter’s will forgive him for this too – but why he brought it up again boggles our minds.

He lives in France.

His thing in life is put on some sort of costume and see how many people he can piss off in one day.
He’s very good at what he does.