This morning’s Jolt is a good one. You’ll wish you subscribed if you haven’t already.

They’ll Let Anyone Chair the Judiciary Committee These Days
We all have members of the opposition who get under our skin. From time to time, I have to hope that after Michigan Democrat John Conyers gives some rambling, defensive, paranoid soliloquy at a House Democratic Caucus meeting, that somebody — a Heath Shuler type — turns to the guy next to him and says, ‘He’s not really a congressman, is he? He is? Seriously? Man, if he represents Detroit, no wonder Robocop turned out to be so prescient.”
I still can’t believe that John Conyers chairs the Judiciary Committee while his wife goes to the big house on bribery charges — and he won’t cover her legal expenses! – and when justifying the constitutionality of the health care bill invokes the “good and welfare clause.”
And now, the committee chair who didn’t see the point of reading 1,000 page bills is declaring, “We’re here now to understand the frustration of the teabaggers, and the people that are angry, uh – because many times when you’re angry you’re . . . uh . . . rational abilities are compromised, and you get mad at the wrong party and the wrong thing or whoever is the President . . .”
Ace of Spades thinks comments like this will generate more far-reaching effects than Eyjafjallajohhellicantspellthatvolcanoiniceland: “I think this is the Democrats’ real Waterloo . . .”
. . . I think Ace is partially right; I think that for a lot of the problems facing the Democrats in 2010 were baked in the cake: sluggish economic growth at best, letdown after a campaign that treated Obama as a messiah, a reflexive overselling of policy initiatives that never live up to the hype. But those problems are exacerbated by the fact that most of their most prominent leaders in Congress come from districts where the incumbents could say nothing but ‘I am the walrus, coo coo kachu’ in every speech for the next six months and still win with about 65 percent of the vote: Pelosi in San Francisco, Barney Frank in Massachusetts, Henry Waxman in Hollywood, Charlie Rangel in Harlem, Jim Clyburn from the heavily-African American corners of South Carolina. The guy whose job is to monitor the party’s health for upcoming elections, DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen, comes from a D+21 district in the Maryland suburbs. These guys have no idea what voters think outside of their deepest blue enclaves, and don’t realize that in most places where there is still a functioning two-party system, calling voters who are upset with your performance “irrational” is political suicide.