this morning while working out i watched the statements by harry reid & dick durbin re: seating burris. they’re backpedaling so fast on their letter that said they WOULD NOT SEAT ANYBODY PICKED BY BLAGO. it makes me mad.
i’m going to watch the impeachment committee meeting today. i wish i could go tomorrow when burris shows up, but i have to work.
i’ve been poring over the capitol fax blog, and here’s a really good point that somebody made, something that i haven’t heard anybody else talking about:
– Phineas J. Whoopee – Wednesday, Jan 7, 09 @ 10:11 am:
I find it weird why no one mentions the real reason why Burris does not deserve this seat. It is because others were unfairly and illegally excluded before his selection. Why should Roland Burris be the beneficiary of an illegal selection process? For example, I think Valerie Jarret should have been the Senator. I believe the evidence will show she was illegally excluded from the spot. How many others were illegally excluded because they wouldn’t pay to play? The taint is not selecting Roland Burris, it was illegally excluding the others.
Why doesn’t main stream media or Dem leadership ever make this point?
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this makes so much sense, and it should be talked about, instead of all the blather about race. there were so many GOOD people who could have been senator…and instead we’re going to have burris.
reid did seem to be as vague as he could be about actually seating burris; maybe it’ll go to the rules committee, and he says it’s definitely going to be voted on by the whole senate. surely all that would have to take some time, but the question then would be, would burris still be the guy even though blago is finally GONE?
that Phineas J. Whoopee, he’s a smart guy with opinions i support. of course i’m just assuming he’s a guy, maybe he’s a woman.
the name sounded vaguely familiar to me, so i just looked it up…phineas j. whoopee was a character in the cartoon “tennessee tuxedo and his tales.” i don’t really remember the show, but i bet i watched it. here’s the plot, as found on wikipedia:
TENNESSEE TUXEDO AND HIS TALES
The cartoon series revolved around the title character, a penguin (voiced by Don Adams), his best friend Chumley (voiced by Bradley Bolke), a walrus. The pair lived (not always willingly) at the Megapolis zoo, under the control of the ill-tempered zoo director Stanley Livingston (voiced by Mort Marshall whose character was a play on the missionary David Livingstone and journalist Henry Morton Stanley) and his zookeeper assistant Flunky (voiced by Kenny Delmar). It was on one of Stanley’s journeys that Tennessee met Stanley. Actually, it was Chumley that Stanley wanted, as Chumley was at the South Pole. Thus Chumley was a one of a kind: a South Pole walrus. Tennessee agreed to accompany Chumley and Stanley back to the zoo.
At the zoo, Tennessee and Chumley had many friends to help them out, such as Yakkety Yak (also voiced by Kenny Delmar), Baldy the eagle (also voiced by Kenny Delmar), Alfonse the giraffe, Peanuts the elephant, the Gopher brothers, and the Beaver brothers. But they also had a big rival, in the form of Jereboah Jump the kangaroo rat (also voiced by Bradley Bolke). Some of the episodes would center around Tennessee trying to outsmart Jereboah at his own game, and succeeding in the end, of course. They were also constantly bedeviled by Rocky Maninoff (an obvious pun on the composer and musician Sergei Rachmaninoff), a gangster with a Humphrey Bogart-like voice who always called them “dum-dums” and ordered them to do his will at the point of his machine gun.
Tennessee and Chumley regularly escaped from the zoo, only to find trouble in the outside world. When faced with more trouble than they could bear, the pair would turn to their friend, a college professor named Phineas J. Whoopee (voiced by Larry Storch), the “Man with All the Answers”. “Mr. Whoopee”, as he was known, was extremely knowledgeable on all subjects, and would frequently lecture the pair on such diverse topics as the physics behind the hot air balloon, to how musicians become popular. His lectures were illustrated and animated on the Three Dimensional Blackboard (3DBB for short), that he would retrieve out of an avalanche of junk from his overstuffed hallway closet. At the end of each lecture, Tennessee praised his mentor with the line, “Phineas J. Whoopee, you’re the greatest!” The pair would then attempt to use their newly-gained knowledge to get out of the trouble they had created (“Tennessee Tuxedo will NOT fail!”), but would invariably end up in more trouble with Stanley Livingston, who typically punished them in different ways — ranging from forcing them to work at the rock quarry, to making them scrub pots and pans for six months. Stanley even threatened to skin them alive many times.