As a show of good faith Maes should withdraw from the Colorado race, while that means that republicans will have a tougher time getting on the ballot in 2012, the hinderance doesn't make it impossible since as we can see Tancredo is on the ballot as the constitution party candidate.

If the role was reversed there would certainly be calls for Tancredo to withdraw. I don't even like Tancredo because he is really an overly populist anti-immigration Pat Buchanan clone. On the other hand Pat Buchanan and Tancredo are interesting folks. I mean Tancredo's campaign is run by Bay Buchanan who was Secretary of the Treasury!!!(not actually true but I don't find this out until I double check my source.)

My sense of history is still changing!

"“The men had views from their offices and were only in for meetings on Thursdays and left Friday mornings,” she said, recalling her tenure as Secretary of the Treasury. “I wasn’t invited to the meetings.”

When a co-worker advised Buchanan to ask for a room with a view and to attend the meetings with the rest of the men, Buchanan called her well-known brother Pat.

“Do you want to be remembered as someone fighting for an office with a window?” he asked. “You have only a few battles, so fight for important issues.”

So Bay Buchanan is telling us that as secretary of the treasury she didn't have a room with a view, and she wasn't invited to the meetings?

Good Lord! now certainly feminists can't be happy about Bay Buchanan's attitude, but to think about how things change I get the sense that Timothy Geitner is more important than say Joe Bidden.

You can't immagine Geitner even being worried about having a room with a view, as he seems to be globe trotting with almost the same frequency as Hillary Clinton, and his influence over china may be greater than that of the secretary of state.

Of course the even stranger part is that Townhall.com almost pulled a quick one on me...Bay Buchanan was never Secretary of the Treasury...

On the other hand I discovered that apparently it is an office that is traditionally a bone tossed to women.
Ever since 1949 when Harry Truman appointed Georgia Clark, every subsequent Treasurer has been a woman, and six of the past ten Treasurers have also been Hispanic.

If that isn't blatant soft-sexism, soft-racism...I don't know what is... of course it is almost a sure thing that no one pays attention to who the Treasurer of the United States is, on the other hand her signature does appear on our paper money.

I think Obama should shake things up and get rid of Geitner(before he starts a trade war with China), replace him with say Meg Whitman after she looses California to moonbeam, this might signal that he is willing to listen to criticism that he is anti-business, plus it would be more interesting than simply appointing a woman to be Treasurer of the United States.

Obama could break the chain of predictable bones tossed to women in the Treasurer of the United States position by appointing an interesting white male, say Steven Horwitz the austrian economist.

This would make things interesting reverberation wise for the elected duo of Rand Paul/ Ron Paul.

I am just wondering if Austrians change perspectives when they have to govern or work within the system, instead of speculating from the outside.

I mean you have Alan Greenspan who contributed to Ayn Rand's Capitalism the unknown ideal, and yet was not an objectivist Chairman of the Fed.

It seems to me there are a lot of ways to think of Big Change on the level of ideas, that might not be capable of any sort of translation to actual policy, especially if you have treasurers who are afraid to ask for window offices.

The way I see it, it doesn't hurt to make Tancredo gov., and it doesn't hurt to put in a Rand Paul even if you don't agree with him, because you have to think of Washington and government in general as a prism that bends all light.

I can think of a sort of artistic independent who having no loyalty to the drab greys and browns of recent american political life is simply curious to see what color might emmerge if we put some firebrands into the mix, a "socialist" Obama, no problem, a paleo-conservative like Tancredo, an Austrian like Rand Paul, tea partiers of other stripes sure why not?
In any case the rhetoric will be hotter than the actual policy.

One way of thinking about things is that Obama overeached his mandate, another plausible way of thinking is that he didn't quite go far enough, and while he promised to close Guantanamo and repeal don't ask don't tell, he actually worked to keep both policies alive.

That is interesting because it kind of gives you an idea of where the limits and bottlenecks are. If Obama didn't overreach his mandate we would know nothing.

That is you have to kind of vote in radicals just to know exactly what issues are settled political questions. Even in the campaigns that are run, we sort of know that the meatball commercial is a lot of fun, but not a clear winner. You know Sarah Palin tapped into something, but was not serious, you aren't even sure what sorts of proximate causes she unleashed, but you sort of know that the Christine O'Donnell derivative: "I am not a witch" is going a bit too far.

That is maybe it is only by boldly going too far, and failling that anything is established. Maybe we want our politicians to fail sometimes, because we reason that if they don't fail from time to time then they didn't think boldly enough.

That is you can think of Obama and the tea party as both representing an ideological vision, that asks: is this possible?

In many ways I don't think Obama should be rebuked for thinking that he had a mandate for experimentation, maybe the american people didn't send him to washington so he could win re-election.

It isn't a stretch to suggest that a clear message to all politicians is that they aren't being sent to washington to win re-election, but to fight perhaps even with imprudent zeal for policies that will ensure that they are ousted.

That is maybe the independents are just looking to pump in a series Michelle Rhee's, Obama's, Rand Paul's and Tancredo's or Ryan's in part because we know they will clash with the NEA or the relevant assortment of power structures.

Michelle Rhee isn't going to reform education, Obama is not going to end war, poverty and racism. Rand Paul isn't going to abolish the Federal Reserve, Tancredo isn't going to magically solve the immigration problem, and Ryan isn't going to solve the federal deficit.

But maybe having overran institutional prudence, they will all go down in a controversy, that sketches limits.

This strikes me as preferable to seeking out political advice about getting a window office.