Friday Notes:

The lowest most simple-minded jobber will tell you that one of the best ways to move up in the game of politics is to get yourself noticed.
No less a solon as the Late Tammany Hall Sachem George Washington Plunkett preached as much all his livelong days.
Plunkett spent most of his time at street fairs, religious holidays, wakes, funerals, baptisms and whatnot passing out boons and perks and courting public approval.
It wa axiomatic that the State Senator could beat most fire-engines to a house fire in his district....it was said he could hear a fire bell ten blocks away.
Truly the successful politician is a ubiquitous politician.
And so we come to the ghoulish spectacle of Pennsylvania Senator Rick "high pitch Rich" Santorum in the well of the U.S. Senate pounding the podium and smacking his lips with relish at the thought of outlawing "partial birth abortion".
Rich's moment was a hand last week a nice juicy incremental blow to a woman's right to choose, a feast for any main chance GOP politico.
And what the hell he got his way, the Senate transformed itself from a den of thieves, brutes, and fixers and into a medical commission just long enough to outlaw a rare surgical procedure.
Rich then stood behind the President grinning like a Mongoloid as GWB signed the bill and made the usual effusive remarks about the culture of life and other hallucinations.
This week Rick helped Fox News stage manage the Senate GOP's 30 hour filibuster highlighting Democratic obstructionism on Bush's judicial nominees.
As we all know Bush watches Fox News as often as possible so no doubt he is beginning to take notice of the fighting young reactionary from Pennsylvania.
It helps being one of the Capitol's most resolute Bush idolators...his call ins to the Imus program set a new standard for public sycophancy of the lowest and crudest type.
So I have to ask...what does Rick Santorum want in the quickening autumn of 2003?
He is already a telegenic, sought after U.S. Senator, his sinecure seems secure.
I think Rich wants to take his screechy psychotic whine into the office of Vice President of the United States.
Yup you heard it here first, Rick wants to be veep.
Currently Dick Cheney holds that position but the famed Halliburton rain-maker is looking mighty shopworn these days...this Iraq thing was all his idea after all.
Rick has to sense the President might be looking to change up come next summer's GOP convention...
If I had to guess Santorum has probably already done some polling to buttress his popularity in other states and among the sought after cohorts.
His GOP bona fides are perfectly sound, he's all for giving carefully selected groups (poor women and queers) as hard a time as the law will allow...which is sound conservative thinking in the 21st century. Certainly Rick would have no problems running on a platform of fag-bashing and limitless military pre-emption....hell he has been dreaming all his unnatural life of campaigning on such morbid nonsense.
As the Senate goes, he does have some competition in the complex game of Vice Presidential Ambitions, chiefly Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.
But Orrin is old and sounding more than a little querulous lately....that prissy little voice of his sounds impotent and school-marmish compared to Rich's Mick Jagger-ish shrieks of studied outrage.
Bush-Santorum in 2004...how does that sound?
Prefectly dreadful in every way.