THE EARMARK

Brooklyn concertgoers awoke this morning to the disappointing headline: “Aretha Franklin Cancels Brooklyn Shows After Fall.”  The article explains how Franklin took a spill in her Detroit mansion and will need to miss two shows on August 12 so she can “undergo tests.”

But skip down to the end of the piece, and you’ll find the true news item: “Franklin also was to perform at an Aug. 11 birthday party for U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, (D-NY)”

Translation: Rather than face the indignity of performing for a soon-to-be-indicted Congressional felon, Franklin chose to hurl herself down a flight of steps and spend the next month on a gurney.

It’s a gutsy move by the Queen of Soul— and one we advise Rangel himself to emulate about a week before his trial.  The only complication is that Rangel will have to travel to the Dominican Republic to fall down the steps of his mansion.

The Earmark bids a fond farewell to Doris “Granny D” Haddock, a true patriot if there ever was one.  She died yesterday at age 100 in her New Hampshire home.

D was a hero to us in many ways.  She first gained national fame in 1999, when she walked across the country to promote campaign finance reform, despite the protestations of a sobbing John Roberts.  Her courageous efforts led directly (we’re pretty sure) to the passage of the McCain-Feingold bill in 2002, which in turn led to the possibility of a largely unknown African-American man being elected president.  So in other words, Granny D was responsible for fishing being banned nationwide.

But we remember D even more fondly for her bold run for the U.S. Senate at age 94.  She managed to win the Democratic nomination for the seat, largely due to her shrewd campaign tactic of baking pies for each of New Hampshire’s six Democrats.  In the general election, she won an impressive 34% of the vote from incumbent Republican Judd Gregg, who was so infuriated that he hired men to kidnap his wife.

Sadly, though, Granny D never became Senator D.  She lived for many more years, however, long enough to become a Hollywood legend and outlive her childhood nemesis, New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain.

Goodbye, Granny D.  We miss you.

California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina has one major selling point for anyone who stays awake throughout her campaign rallies: She was CEO of Hewlett-Packard 5 years ago.

And there’s plenty of proof for that claim.  Just go find a back-issue of Portfolio magazine— specifically the one listing the 20 worst CEOs of all time— and you’ll see Fiorina prominently profiled.

Or you can ask…

• HP shareholders whose share values tanked under Fiorina.
• Compaq employees that got hosed in Fiorina’s failed merger.
• The board of directors that fired Fiorina in the wake of her hefty personal bonuses and middling performance.

They all remember her.

But maybe you should just ask Arianna Packard, granddaughter of the company founder, who can definitely attest that Fiorina worked for HP.  In the sense that she nearly destroyed the entire operation…

“I know a little bit about Carly Fiorina, having watched her almost destroy the company my grandfather founded. So, allow me to disillusion you of a few of your stated reasons for supporting her,” Packard wrote.

“Most business commentators consider Fiorina’s tenure at HP to be a disaster,” Packard continued. “The stock price dropped by 50% only to rally 10% on the announcement of her firing. She fired 28,000 people before she herself was fired, departing with the 21 million dollar golden parachute that is financing her campaign.”

So if Fiorina’s tenure at Hewlett-Packard was a disaster and got her unceremoniously fired, why on Earth is she going around touting her time there as her top qualification to be a United States senator?

We’re not sure, but it might have something to do with the fact that her #2 qualification is getting unceremoniously fired by the McCain campaign in 2008.

Disgraced Representative Eric Massa (D-NY) only has a few hours left in his House term, which means he’d better hustle if he hopes to alienate all of Congress by day’s end.

Fortunately, Massa is off to a good start upon explaining that a male aide’s sexual harassment allegation was set up by the Democrats because Massa wanted to oppose the health care bill…

“Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill, and now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots.”

Massa began the dot-connecting process for us all when he attempted to explain his sexual harassment to a local New York radio station.  His primary points are:

• The main harassment took place when everyone was drunk.
• His wife was there, but only she wasn’t, because she, um, had… the stomach flu.  Yeah…
• First he sexually harassed some women, so remember that before you call him gay.
• The whole thing is actually Steny Hoyer’s fault.
• He’s had cancer, alright?

Roll Call has the full summary of the interview, and if you bother to read the whole thing, let us know.  Particularly if, somewhere in it, Massa starts calling himself “salty” again.

Remember how, back in 2008, we all voted out the Republicans because they were greedy, corrupt, and disrespectful of the voting public?  Well give them this much: At least they were good at it.

If you want to see politicians who are simultaneously a) corrupt and b) really bad at it, look no farther than New York state, where elected Democrats are tarnishing every institution of disciplined corruption that the Gambino family worked for decades to establish.

To illustrate our point, here’s a list of all the corrupt Democrats that New York has had to endure in recent months… plus the corrupt Republicans they could learn from.

Corrupt Democrat	Act of Corruption	Republican Who Did It Better
Eliot Spitzer, ex-governor	Hard to believe this was 2 years ago.  Spitzer rode a wave of self-righteousness all the way to Washington, DC, where he washed up aboard The Mayflower… and then paid several thousand dollars for rough sex.	David Vitter, who one-ups Spitzer’s hypocrisy by trying to criminalize the very prostitution industry he patronized so faithfully.
David Paterson, current governor	Allegedly used state police to intimidate the victim of his wife-beating aide. And he forced the Yankees to give him free World Series tickets.	Rudy Giuliani knows more about exploiting the Yankees.  He also knows how to get way more out of thuggish police officers.
Hiram Monserrate, ex-State Senator	Beat the crap out of his live-in girlfriend.	Ousted Rep. Don Sherwood (R-PA) beat the crap out of his live-in mistress.
Charlie Rangel, U.S. Representative	Despite chairing the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, he appears to not have declared a taxable asset since the Carter administration.	Ex-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who’s paying back taxes on lobbying gifts in the form of hand-made license plates.
Eric Massa, U.S. Representative	Propositioned a male aide in his Capitol Hill offices.	Actually, Massa even beats the Republicans in this category.  Not even Mark Foley was slick enough to use the excuse: “I’m just a salty old sailor.“

A year ago, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Congressional Country Club) rode back into her native Texas vowing to take the Governor’s office away from her nemesis and fellow Republican, incumbent Rick Perry.  After five terms in the Senate, she had much to prove to voters skeptical that she had gone soft while in Washington.  Well, hundreds of stock shows, chili cook-offs, and hog-slaughterings later, Hutchison’s hard work finally paid off yesterday.

With a massive defeat in the primary.

Having been embarrassed by an opponent whose main campaign tactic was to dispatch Ted Nugent to threaten to kill voters, Hutchison now has no choice but to fade away into retirement.  Because after all, she resigned her Senate seat in order to enter the governor’s race.

Oh wait, she didn’t! Turns out she accidentally forgot to resign back in November, conveniently leaving her with nearly three years left in her term. So she has the option to return to her beloved Washington, exchanging her bolo tie for a power suit and her Old El Paso salsa for an understated Bernaise.  Or she can do the right thing: fulfill her promise, bow out, and allow her successor to be appointed by … Governor Rick Perry.

Did somebody say Senator Nuge?

As chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) must protect our nation’s revenue, so that every American, no matter how rich and powerful, contributes to the common good.

And if there’s one thing that angers Ways and Means chairmen, it’s people who don’t report income, receive gifts without paying the proper tariffs, and generally cheat the tax system. That’s why Chairman Rangel cast his gaze over Congress and fired the man who most sullies the reputation of his committee: Charlie Rangel.

Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York announced on Wednesday that he would temporarily step down from his powerful post as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in an attempt to avert a politically bruising fight over permanently stripping the gavel from his hands.

In stripping Chairman Rangel of his duties, Chairman Rangel demonstrated he would have no tolerance for:

• Omitting hundreds of thousands of dollars in overseas vacation property from your tax returns.
• Omitting several million dollars in domestic assets from your tax returns.
• Attending lobbyist-funded junkets in the Caribbean, and neglecting to note them on your tax returns.

All of these are clear violations of federal law, leaving Chairman Rangel with no choice but to relieve Chairman Rangel of his duties.

With tax ethics properly addressed, Rangel can now turn his attention toward weeding out other Congressional impurities… including Congressmen who are overweight, Congressmen who wear their hair like Pat Riley, and Congressmen who talk like Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny.

Quickly, what do Carrot Top and U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) have in common?

That’s easy enough.  Both men…

• Perform in public using props.
• Have appeared on Comedy Central.
• Must have been beaten mercilessly by their childhood companions.

But that’s not all!  If Cantor has his way, they’ll also have this in common: Neither man will have any of his ideas included in Barack Obama’s health care bill…

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor released a statement today attacking President Obama for including four Republican ideas in his new health care proposal, which will be released tomorrow…

“If the President simply adds a couple of Republican solutions to a trillion dollar health care package that the American people don’t support, it isn’t bipartisanship - it’s political cover.”

The nerve of President Obama!  When Cantor and his fellow Republicans were imploring him to include Republican submissions in a health care resolution, they didn’t actually mean he was supposed to include Republican submissions in a health care resolution!  What about the prop comedy??

See while Cantor the legislator might want conservative ideas included in a new health bill, Cantor the prop comedian will suffer in a bipartisan Washington.  Will he still get to perform that “southern accent” he spends countless hours perfecting in the mirror?  What about a new routine based around his favorite punchline– “the Democrat party”?  And what’s he going to do with that giant stack of paper he likes to mug with for cameras?

And most importantly… how can a struggling comedian afford to buy health care in this climate?