Webb wants to have his progressive cake and eat his re-election, too

Brilliant foreshadowing of how multiple votes on the same bill provide political cover to a shifty Democrat:

Senator Webb has taken a number of tough votes in the last month-- always voting his conscience and without bowing to party politics. . . . During this debate, he has broken with his party six times, including four votes to prevent cuts in Medicare. At the same time, he appreciates that the need for health care reform is great. The status quo of our health care system burdens families and undermines the competitive position of American business."

In other words: Count Webb as a Democratic "yes" vote on cloture for ObamaCare, although his vote on final passage of the bill is purely a function of whether Harry Reid needs him to get to 51 (which is unlikely). Either way, if challenged about his votes in 2012, his votes on various amendments provide him with a chance to play it both ways.

Webb has shrewedly amassed a facing-both-ways record that can be used to fend off either a "progressive" primary challenger or a conservative Republican in the general election. The Conscience of a Centrist!

(Hat-tip: AmSpecBlog.)

Not exactly news: Democrats continue to destroy capitalism, prevent recovery

You're not surprised by this, are you?

The House passed the most ambitious restructuring of federal financial regulations since the New Deal on Friday . . .
The sprawling legislation would give the government new powers to break up companies that threaten the economy, create a new agency to oversee consumer banking transactions and shine a light into shadow financial markets that have escaped the oversight of regulators.
The vote was a party-line 223-202. No Republicans voted for the bill; 27 Democrats voted against it.

Hey, did you catch that? The government could "break up companies that threaten the economy."

• Question: Which companies are targeted by this?
• Answer: Any big company that gives too much money to Republicans.

Honestly, this misguided legislation is about one thing and one thing only: Expanding government power. A few other tidbits from the Washington Post:

The 1,279-page House bill . . .
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who guided the bill through the House Financial Services Committee . . .

1,279 pages! Let's face it: The Democrats couldn't pass a resolution to honor National Stamp Collecting Week that didn't run at least a thousand pages long with $50 billion in pork-barrel spending buried in the amendments.

And of course Barney Frank is in charge of the bill! Who else can we trust to bring reform and transparency to the financial industry?

And when the bill goes to the Senate, Chris Dodd will be in charge of it. Because this just makes sense, you see?

Please, Mr. Caterpillar, let me hit that hookah. After four or five puffs, maybe the madness will seem sane.

NY23: Democrats and unions will go door-to-door in effort to beat Hoffman

From my report at The American Spectator:

The offices of the Clinton County Democratic Party here in Plattsburgh -- Owens' hometown -- were busy this afternoon, as young Democratic staffers were ready to begin a weekend of door-to-door canvassing operations. Staffers were preparing to distribute stacks of door-hanger GOTV cards that tout President Obama's endorsement of Owens, telling voters: "Those standing in the way of Change want you to say home on Tuesday -- don't let them win." . . .

Please read the whole thing. I've got to run over to Hoffman's local campaign office to meet with sources and then make the trip to Lake Placid, so I'll be busy for a few hours. Expect updates here from Jimmie Bise, and also keep an eye out for 73Wire's Campaign Trail -- those guys are breaking exclusive after exclusive up here.

Memeorandum also has news from the Politico, WSYR-TV, And So it Goes in Shreveport, Weekly Standard, Left Coast Rebel and Conservatives4Palin.com.

Thanks to all those readers who have contributed to the Shoe Leather Fund to make this trip possible. If you could give a little extra, that would be nice. Coming through Tupper Lake about 1 a.m. this morning, I had a low-speed encounter with a deer crossing the road. (Speed limit in Tupper Lake is 40 mph and, for once, I was obeying the speed limit, which is bad luck.)

Frightening for me, but rather more unfortunate for the deer -- and it's a rental car. Although the damage was minor and superficial, you know how difficult (and potentially expensive) such things can be.

UPDATE: Linked at TCOT Report.

Andrew Sullivan is still capable of intelligent, lucid, honest judgment

And this is so brutally true:

[The gay-rights group Human Rights Campaign is] putting pressure, as they always have, on gay people to go to the back of the line and be grateful a president attends their fundraising event. The only word for this is a racket. And if gay people do not rise up and demand change from this organization and stop funding a group whose goal has always been to sell the Democrats to gay people rather than secure civil rights, then they will continue to suffer the discrimination they live under day after day.

The HRC is now transparently the same "hoax of a sham of a farce" (to use Woody Allen's line from Bananas) that NOW and NAACP have been for so long. The Official Gay Movement, like the Official Women's Movement and the Official Civil Rights Movement, has been co-opted and sold to the Democratic Party, which is always the highest bidder in the identity-politics auction.

This explains why conservatives become so disgusted by Republicans who attempt to placate feminists and other such identity politics Mau-Maus -- racketeers who use guilt-trips, victimhood and accusations of mala fides to extort concessions from enemies and allies alike.

The "two-can-play-at-that-game" approach -- e.g., John McCain's pandering to MALDEF -- doesn't work for Republicans, simply because the essential spirit of the GOP is anathema to the identity-politics conception of politics. The Republican Party has for decades generally, and in the post-Reagan era especially, offered a basic message that ought to be of universal appeal: Prosperity through liberty, peace through strength.

The task of GOP leaders should be to explain to any individual (and the individual is the world's smallest minority) how this agenda is ultimately superior to the corrupt coalition politics of the Democrats. Sometimes the party has lost its focus or blundered through bad leadership, but if they would be true to to their basic message, they would be unconquerable, as they would solicit the support of all who are wise and honest.

"Compassionate conservatism" was a betrayal of that Reaganite spirit, which is what brought the GOP to such a low ebb and has allowed the Democrats to regain (by the usual dishonest methods) the upper hand.

If gay people vote Republican, they might not get the bullet-point agenda items demanded by HRC, but they will at least not have to accept the kind of two-faced, backhanded insults they get from Democrats who claim to be their "friends."

Cythia Yockey has often remarked that she was surprised at how warmly she, as a lesbian, was embraced by conservatives. Cynthia doesn't agree with my opposition to same-sex marriage, and I don't agree with her advocacy of it. So freaking what? At least I'm not playing the two-faced shtick of trying to win friends by lying.

Honesty is always the best policy, which is another reason why the Democrats are always wrong.
(Via Memeorandum.)

Fritz hears a dog-whistle: 'Raaaaacism!'

Evoking Mondale's painful memories of the bitter civil-rights struggle in Minnesota:

Former Vice President Walter Mondale joined his old boss Jimmy Carter Wednesday, arguing that some of the opposition to President Obama's agenda is fueled by racial animus. . . .
"I don't like saying it," Mondale continued. "Having lived through those years, when civil rights was such a bitter issue, and when we argued those things for years ... I know that some of that must still be around."
"I don't want to pick a person, say, he's a racist, but I do think the way they're piling on Obama, the harshness, you kind of feel it," he said. "I think I see an edge in them that's a little bit different and a little harsher than I've seen in other times."

Also, some opposition to George W. Bush was motivated by prejudice against rich Texas Republicans.

(Via Memeorandum.)

Will Dems Euthanize ObamaCare?

"The term 'fiscally conservative Democrat' is an oxymoron," says Monique Stuart, who has a point. The Blue Dogs are the Oxymoron Caucus, but they are important enough to Nancy Pelosi that they were able to delay the ObamaCare onslaught:

A group of fiscally conservative House Democrats announced Wednesday they had reached a deal with the chamber’s Democratic leaders on a bill that would revamp the nation's health care system.
Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas, speaking for four of the Blue Dog Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said Wednesday that the agreement called for the panel to begin debating the bill later in the day, but for the full House not to vote until after the August recess.
Ross and the Blue Dogs had threatened to derail the bill in the committee because of concerns that it costs too much and fails to address systemic problems in the nation's ailing health care industry. It was not immediately clear Wednesday if other Blue Dogs beyond the four represented by Ross would agree to the deal he announced.

More at The Hill, Roll Call and Politico, which scores it a victory Democrats for committee chairman Henry Waxman. True, the compromise allows the bill to move forward, but it is in some sense a small victory for opponents of socialized medicine.

It would have been a big victory if the Blue Dogs had told Waxman to shove the bill up his oversized nostrils. However, delay is delay, and slowing down this monstrosity buys more time to organize opposition, as the American Spectator's Philip Klein notes:

But by delaying the full House vote until September, it means that there will still be time for Blue Dogs to change their mind on the final bill if they take a lot of heat from their constituents during August recess.

In trying to rush this mess through Congress in July, the Democrats were making a very cynical move. Almost nobody pays attention to politics during the summer, so if Obama could ram a bill through before the August recess, it would be a fait accompli before most Americans had a clue what it was all about.

Today in Washington, I talked to a conservative communications strategist who pointed out the Democratic strategy: Forcing opponents to fight health care and card-check and Waxman-Markey all at the same time. It's a tough fight, and the Aug. 22 Recess Rally is a chance for everyone to help.

MATSUI-GATE? California Democrat'sIntervention in AmeriCorps CaseRaises Questions on Capitol Hill

HUGE hat-tip to California blogger Eric Hogue for spotting a March interview with a Sacramento radio station in which Rep. Doris Matsui -- the Democrat who represents California's capitol city in Congress -- vowed to get stimulus cash By Any Means Necessary:

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson has asked U.S. Rep. Doris Matsui to help keep the flow of federal funds coming into the city.Johnson is not allowed to receive federal funds because of allegations his St. Hope-Hood Corps Foundation misused federal money.
Matsui, D-District 5, who appeared on the KCRA 3 Morning News on Saturday morning, said she believes Sacramento will get money, but she can't guarantee it."
Under any scenario, we are going to get the money. We are going to get the money," she said. "I understand that process has to unfold. The mayor is dealing with that. We are dealing with the situation at the federal level. The city is taking the right steps. They have to disclose this, and we are moving forward."
Matsui added that she has been in contact with White House officials and other members of the federal government.

More IG-Gate news where that came from. Trust me when I say that Hogue's blog post made a big difference. Important people are paying attention and, to borrow the words of Ricky Ricardo -- that hero of investigative journalists everywhere -- I expect that Ms. Matsui has got some 'splainin' to do.

UPDATE 1:35 p.m.: Sigh. If a blogger breaks news and nobody links it, is it really news?

Tuesday night at Townhall.com, Eric Hogue asked, "Where is the media?" I've got a better question than that: "Where are Republicans?"

For months, I've complained about the cluelessness of Republican media operatives, and this is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. For some reason (and I say it's because almost nobody in the GOP has ever worked in an actual newsroom) these people seem incapable of judging "news value."

There is an observable tendency among GOP media operatives toward a talking-points approach to news: "I'll push the stories that the RNC, etc., want me to push." And then there is the star-system approach to news: "If it's on Drudge or Limbaugh or Fox News, then it must be important -- and to hell with everything else." But why bother repeating what I've already said so often before? Nobody's paying attention.

So here is Eric Hogue, pointing to definite indications of political influence in the firing of Gerald Walpin, and . . . nothing. That IG-Gate Update has been online at the American Spectator since 10:34 a.m., and except for Bob Belvedere, nobody is in the conservative blogosphere has even noticed.

Next time I run into some overpaid "Web 2.0" guru who tries to lecture me about why the GOP sucks at New Media, I'll turn around and walk away. This is the only alternative to punching his fucking lights out.

ObamaCare: Health Rationing for Americans, Not for Illegal Aliens

Michelle Malkin's new column:

Big Nanny Democrats want to ration health care for everyone in America — except those who break our immigration laws. Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee defeated an amendment that would have prevented illegal aliens from using the so-called "public health insurance option." Every Democrat on the panel voted against the measure. . . .
At a time when Democratic leaders are pushing rationed care in a world of limited resources, Americans might wonder where the call for shared sacrifice is from illegal immigrant patients like those in Los Angeles getting free liver and kidney transplants at UCLA Medical Center. "I'm just mad," illegal alien Jose Lopez told the Los Angeles Times last year after receiving two taxpayer-subsidized liver transplants while impatiently awaiting approval for state health insurance.
Now, multiply that sense of entitlement by 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants. Welcome to the open-borders Obamacare nightmare.

Read the whole thing. And let me remind you that Michelle Malkin is author of the new blockbuster Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies, also known as Best. Book. Evah! (With apologies to any of my friends who forgot to thank me for "invaluable writerly advice" in their books.)

What Obama Says When OnlyLiberals Are On the Conference Call

Dan Riehl caught this notebook account:

Doing nothing is defending the indefensible
Opponents are offering up nothing and admit that they are just trying to stop it. He mentioned Jim DeMint and Bill Kristol as examples of obstructionism.
Liberal Bloggers have done an excellent job of debunking right wing myths...
Bloggers have played and will play a critical role in passing legislation.

John Amato of Crooks and Liars was the JournoLister stupid enough to transcribe Obama's marching orders to the troops, even going so far as to provide audio.

Note once more Obama's habit of debating straw men who favor doing "nothing," as if "nothing" were the only possible alternative to the Democratic plan of shoveling another trillion or two of borrowed money out the door to pay for a Rube Goldberg contraption of innovation-strangling bureaucracy.

Exit question: Does anybody think Democrats will support "transparency" on ObamaCare any more than they support "transparency" on the TARP bailout?

Dear Angry Gay Democrats

I used to be like you -- which is to say, I was once an angry Democrat, too.

"Born that way," you might say. Well, I wasn't born angry, but I was born a Democrat. Hard-core yellow-dog Democrat, too. I voted for Mondale, for crying out loud.

The Democrats paid me back the same way they always pay back their most loyal constituents: Those two-faced weasels stabbed me in the back. (I mean, really, what part of "From My Cold Dead Hands" is so hard to understand?)

OK, so now you've been ripped off, sold out, and stabbed in the back by the Democrats. Join the club.

Did you know Ronald Reagan started out as a Democrat? By his own admission, the Gipper was once such a "bleeding heart" liberal that he unwittingly joined two Communist Party front groups in the 1940s.

So if this latest knife in the back from your Democratic "friends" is one betrayal too many, maybe you should consider becoming an ex-Democrat, too. I mean, if you want to raise millions of dollars for untrustworthy politicians who oppose gay marriage, the Republican Party would certainly welcome your support.

I'm just sayin' . . .

UPDATE: Some of you angry gay Democrats are probably asking, "But what's in it for me?" Just because Republicans are never going to support your identity-politics agenda doesn't mean they don't have anything to offer you.

For example, think of the delicious fun of payback politics, evening the score with those Democrat bastards who sold you out. How do you think Cynthia Yockey became Ann Coulter's favorite lesbian?

UPDATE II: Welcome once more, Instapundit readers! Just to clarify: I'm a married father of six with 20 years of monogamy to my credit, so the only person feeling my pain for the past two decades is Mrs. Other McCain. And despite the Speedo-filling studliness, don't believe those porn-star rumors . . . LIES! ALL LIES!

On the other hand, some traits are hereditary and who knows what Other McCain Jr. has been up to . . .

UPDATE III: Little Miss Attila's right: The GOP's "incompetent half the time, but not truly evil." Hmmm. Exactly what Mrs. Other McCain says about me . . .

Health-care townhall goes green?Obama cultivates the plants!

The MSM is asleep at the switch as Barack Obama fields "spontaneous" health-care questions from . . . a former Democratic Party candidate for Congress:

This questioner can be seen in a CNN video covering the Green Bay event. The woman is identified as "Paulette Guerin" and labeled as an "attendee" of the meeting on the CNN segment. In fact CNN got the spelling of the woman's last name wrong, it's not Guerin, but Garin. . . .
Garin was a recent Democrat candidate for Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District. Not only that but Garin is a proponent of a single-payer plan, as Obama was when he was a Senator from Illinois. In fact, Garin says right on her webpage that Obama is a proponent of the single payer plan and she urges fellow Wisconsinites to flood Congress with calls to implement the single payer system . . .

Jeff Gannon could not be reached for comment.

Why Terry McAuliffe lost

Look, I can't claim all the credit but . . .

Who needs opposition research? Just send me to hang out at your opponent's fund-raiser with a pink camera. I'm a one-man guilt-by-association smear. And then you can blame it all on the Brian Moran campaign. "No fingerprints," as they say, and I neither confirm nor deny . . .

Fisherville Mike did his part, too. A nod is as good as a wink to blind horse, eh? Nudge, nudge.

What Part of 'It Won't Work'Is So Hard to Understand?

Dec. 8, 2008: It Won't Work
Feb. 9, 2009: It Still Won't Work
May 4, 2009: Hey, By The Way, Just In Case You Didn't Notice, It Won't Work
May 27, 2009: OK, Now I Will Speak Very Loudly So Maybe You'll Understand: IT WON'T WORK!

Lather, Rinse, Repeat: IT WON'T WORK!

UPDATE: "Are the people of this country really that stupid??" Adrienne, did you ever hear of something called "the public education system"?

Against the Politics of Niceness

At the library Friday, I picked up Naftali Bendavid's book, The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution.

It's an excellent insider account of the 2006 congressional campaign, with DCCC chairman Rahm F---ing Emanuel as the protagonist. This outburst, from a May 2005 meeting between Emanuel, DSCC chairman Chuck Schumer and DNC chairman Howard Dean, is typical:

"You're nowhere, Howard. Your field plan is not a field plan. That's f---ing bulls---. . . . Look, Chuck comes from Brooklyn. I come from Chicago. It's not Burlington, Vermont. . . . I know your field plan -- it doesn't exist. I've gone around the country with these races. I've seen your plan. There's no plan, Howard."

The old adage that nice guys finish last is quite true in politics. Some people have a 10th-grade civics class concept of "democracy" as something pure and noble, but if you've spent much time close to the process, you understand that "democracy" is a brutal, ugly business. It is not for fainthearts and starry-eyed dreamers.

So when Rod Dreher gets sniffy about Mark Levin or people act horrified by an implied slur in an RNC video, I just want to pound those weenies on the head and scream: "Wake the f--- up, you clueless dingbats! The Democrats are eating Republican babies for breakfast, bankrupting our grandchildren, and giving major industrial corporations as gift-wrapped presents to their labor goon buddies! If you want to award gold stars for 'plays well with others,' go be a kindergarten teacher and leave politics the hell alone!"

Maybe when the grown-ups are through beating the Democrats, then we'll have time to mind our manners like we were eating watercress-and-endive finger sandwiches at the Ladies Cotillion Society luncheon.

This is fight time, and the neurasthenic wussie-boys need to shut the f--- up with their ceaseless whining. Meanwhile, anyone who's interested in actually fighting the Democrats needs to read this book. We've got to find a way to reverse-engineer Emanuel's take-no-prisoners approach to politics.

UPDATE: Stogie calls our attention to his post about Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, a book I read more than 10 years ago. It's very insightful in terms of basic principles of political organizing.

I think Stogie would enjoy The Thumpin' , because it gives excellent detailed accounts of various aspects of practical politics. One of the things I hate about intellectual-type pundits is their habit of "trendmongering," where they're always offering a "Big Picture" idea of where the country is going. But if you know anything about actual politics, you know that it doesn't work that way.

Every "trend" is a function of mulitple distinct events. The objective of the political activist is to make those events happen or, as the case may be, to capitalize on events that happen beyond his control.

The defeatist attitude of Republicans toward MSM bias is an example of how people surrender the initiative because they see a "trend" -- something beyond their control -- rather than looking for ways they can make something happen to change the trend.

Another example is how Republicans allow themselves to believe that certain groups -- minorities, women, gays, academics -- are effectively off-limits to them as potential voters. Look, if only 4% of black voters are Republican, that's still hundreds of thousands of voters. If you could identify those voters, organize and train them as activists, and support them in an effective outreach program, there's no telling what you might achieve. But you're never going to accomplish anything if you accept the "trend" and surrender the initiative.

A defeatist mentality guarantees defeat, because that mentality always counsels doing nothing and accepting the status quo. If the enemy is winning, and you do nothing, the enemy will continue to win. But even if you're winning, if you content yourself with a do-nothing approach of defending the status quo, the enemy will sooner or later seize the initiative -- as Rahm Emanuel did in 2006 -- and then you'll be forced to fight with an army grown weak and lazy by years of do-nothingism.

BTW, I also recommend Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms by veteran Republican campaign operative Ed Rollins. It gives you lots of detailed stories about individual campaigns, including the 1994 Senate campaign of Michael Huffington, where Rollins' efforts were effectively sabotaged by Huffington's idiot wife, Arianna. She's typical of a certain type of dilettante who turns to politics as a fasiohable hobby, but can't be taught anything because she is too arrogant to think she has anything to learn.

ObamaCare: Your Future?

Victims of government health-care speak out in this video from Conservatives for Patients Rights:

Democrats are trying to stifle debate.

ACORN/SEIU axis?

The Washington Examiner's Kevin Mooney has a story about ACORN, quoting Matthew Vadum on something I hadn't heard before:

While the organization’s complicated structure makes is difficult to determine how many affiliates and subsidiaries are tied in with ACORN's vast apparatus, its connection with organized labor, especially the Service Employees International Union, is well-established, Vadum observed. SEIU Locals 100 and 880 are identified as allied organizations on ACORN’s web site. U.S. Department of Labor LM-2's (financial disclosure forms) point to over $600,000 in transactions between these same SEIU locals and other ACORN operations. A 2007 LM-2 form shows SEIU Local 880, which is active in Illinois and Minnesota, donated $60,118 to ACORN for "membership services." Organized labor has kicked it back in the form of gifts and grants to ACORN totaling $2.4 million, the LM-2's reveal.

Obama has very close ties to both SEIU and ACORN, and this evidence of direct coordination between these two left-wing groups is quite interesting. I wonder if Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the other Democrats who got steam-rollered by the Obama juggernaut in the primaries understand what it was that hit them.

America's leading cause of racism

Florida Democrats:

Gradulations! In 3 minutes and 38 seconds, Corinne Brown turns back the clock at least 40 years. (This video hate is brought to you by Iowahawk.)

Terry McAuliffe and me

There's got to be some explanation for this photo, right?

UPDATE, 3:15 p.m.: Moe Lane suggests a scandalous explanation., which I will neither confirm nor deny, since nobody has yet asked me to confirm or deny anything. All I know is that I have once again proved a great axiom of journalism: Nobody can resist a man with a pink camera.

Hammer, nail, head

"Plain and simple, the Democrats are buying their votes, with policies that only harm the communities whose votes they are buying. Once again, we let the Democrats frame the issues to make it sound like our policies, or our objections to theirs, are selfish and designed to protect the rich. Unfortunately, too many of our spokespeople get caught up defending themselves against wild accusations rather than just exposing the truth about the harmful results of these sound-good Democrat policies."

The sadistic pleasure of 'progressivism'

Remember when Eliot Spitzer's anti-capitalist crusades made him a darling of the "progressive" Left?

"I was never fully undressed. He was naked. He was perspiring a lot. He was holding me down. He pinned me to the bed. That didn't bother me. But when he grabbed my throat, that was too much. I remember trying to push myself up off the bed, which made him apply more pressure. I've never been worried about my safety, but I was really concerned."

Strangling hookers. Something symbolic there, eh?