I swear I’ve seen a lot of stuff in my life…

but…that…was awesome!

The 2010 Massachusetts US Senate Special Election became the political equivalent of the deer waking up in the back seat in Tommy Boy. It was weird.

English Matters But Doesn’t

First there was Martha Coakley’s ad misspelling the Bay State “Massachusettes”.

This was just a typo we were told. And since Democrats were so nice not to criticize Dan Quayle for misspelling “potato” it is best that we return the favor. So I’ll back off.

Then New York Times columnist Gail Collins makes fun of Scott Brown’s daughter’s English skills:

One of his daughters — this is perhaps the best-known factoid in the campaign — came in somewhere between 13th and 16th on “American Idol.”

“For our family, especially me being on ‘Idol’ but my dad being in politics, there are always so many people who have something negative to say,” Ayla Brown told The Boston Herald this week. Her talent was singing, not sentence construction.

But two paragraphs earlier, in the same column:

She is the attorney general, and her speaking style has been compared to that of a prosecutor delivering a summation to the jury. In civil court. In a trial that involved, say, a dispute over widget tariffs.

Hmm that bold part is a sentence fragment. (bold emphasis mine)

“Massachusettes”. “Massachusettes”. “Massachusettes”.

Some Democrats want to get rid of the Senate

Baffling, I know, being that they huff and puff and threaten to blow the house down whenever any kind of inequality is perceived to be real. But the Senate was designed to be the equalizer of state representation.

The argument?

There are 100 members of the Senate. But as Brown is currently reminding us, because of the filibuster rule, it takes only 41 to stop any bill from passing.

U.S. population: 307,006,550.

Population for the 20 least-populated states: 31,434,822.

That means that in the Senate, all it takes to stop legislation is one guy plus 40 senators representing 10.2 percent of the country.

That would be true except for one fact: Those 41 Senators are not from the 20 least-populated states. Here’s what we get when the facts are incorporated into the argument:

Population for the states the 41 Senators represent*: 151,357,784. That’s 49 percent not 10.2.

Now you know why they want to raise the cloture requirement to 67.

The biggest lesson from this experience however is this: The citizens are the deer and Congress is the car.

*A State’s population was only counted once no matter the amount of Republican Senators. Some actually had two. I know weird right? But in a good way.

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Chris Cameron is a writer/columnist/beat reporter for Radioactive Liberty. He also has his own blog Angry Seafood.

Category: Political Humor Tags: 2010 Massachusetts us senate special election, Humor, Humour, martha coakley, Politics, scott brown