At the outset of his presidency, Barack Obama promised to restore America’s great diplomatic stature, weakened in the politically costly wake of its war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Healed by renewed international cooperation, those wounds would be a thing of America’s darker, Republican past, he promised.

But Number 10 never envisioned that Mr. Obama’s overhaul of America’s international relations would come at the cost of its own special relationship. Despite Britain’s political and economic proximity to the United States, that special relationship — invoked in every Anglo-American diplomatic communique from Winston Churchill to George Bush — has waned, diminished in equal proportion to Mr. Obama’s disquieting provocations.

From the president’s endorsement of Eurofederalism to his State Department’s acknowledgement it considers the United Kingdom “just the same as the other 190 countries in the world,” Mr. Obama’s White House has made no secret of its Anglophobic posture on the international stage.

But the president outperformed himself last week, when, in a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, he gushed that America had no greater partner on the international stage than France.

Nothing — not his promise of neutrality in the British-Argentina conflict over the Falklands or his Oval Office renovation in which he chucked a bust of Churchill –  evidenced more the president’s willingness to shift southward America’s great European political alliance.

Read More →

After the whistleblower group Wikileaks released Afghan war documents identifying local informants, its founder Julian Assange said in an interview with the Today Show that if American sympathizers were targeted in the divestment’s wake it would constitute his own collateral damage: “If we had, in fact, made that mistake then of course that would be something we would take very seriously.”

The subject of my editorial for today’s Guardian, we’ll see how seriously Mr. Assange takes murder in the coming days, as an African dictator moves to execute his leading democratic critic. An excerpt follows below the fold.

Read More →

RNC chairman Michael Steele’s two most visible aides announced Sunday they would resign their posts later this week, following the group’s annual Winter Meeting in which it will select a new chairman.

When the former Maryland lieutenant governor took over the reigns of the national party apparatus two years ago, he promised an “off the hook” public relations campaign. Instead, Steele’s tenure has been marred by controversy, each more disquieting and embarrassing than the last.

For Michael Leavitt and Doug Heye, Steele’s chief of staff and communications director respectively, the chairman’s provocations were all-consuming.

From his mischaracterization of the Afghan war effort to playing the race card — and even the rationalization that his verbal misfires constituted some grand communications strategy — they were there for it all. But now they’re parting ways, even as their boss looks to retain his control over the committee.

While the two don’t expect Steele to successfully fend off his four challengers — the pair’s former colleague Gentry Collins last night dropped his bid to unseat Steele — they say they wouldn’t remain on staff even if the beleaguered chairman upset the handicappers and remained atop the Committee.

Read More →

Senate Democrats unveiled earlier this afternoon a 1,924-page omnibus spending bill to fund the government through fiscal year 2011. Aides to GOP legislators on Capitol Hill have already begun poring over the $1.1 trillion package, describing the proposal as “a total mess” to Fox News.

Republican lawmakers — including those in the lower chamber, like Speaker-elect John Boehner — are already vowing to help kill the appropriations measure, which freezes 2010′s $3.5 trillion budget for the following year without allowing for any spending cuts.

Offered in the waning days of the present congressional session, the bill designates $80 million in federal funds for the preservation of Pacific salmon and $14 million in clean water grants for Alaska’s native population. Of course, it doesn’t end there.

We’ve obtained a copy of the lame duck legislation so that RedState’s readers might begin dissecting the bill, posting the most egregious examples of pork barrel spending in the comments section. Embedded below the fold you will find the full nearly 2,000-page document.

Read More →

The same non-profit group who wasted no time in lobbying new members of Congress to slash federal spending — by blanketing Ronald Reagan Washington International Airport with print ads in time for this week’s freshman orientation session — unveiled today a quirky new web spot addressing the nation’s “uncertain” economic environment.

The video, which features a bullish “boss lady” who opens beer bottles with her teeth, “is a joke,” but “its message is not,” a release by the group, Bankrupting America, reads. “Washington’s rhetoric and policies have been creating a damaging environment of uncertainty for businesses.”

Read More →

Texas Governor Rick Perry will be named chairman of the Republican Governors Association when the group gathers in California next week.

Perry’s appointment to the RGA won’t be the governor’s first rodeo: He led the same committee in 2008 and had worked in varying capacities for the group in years prior.

The Washington-bound move — not the move for which some Republican donors had hoped — comes as Perry will soon become Texas’ longest serving chief executive, entering now his tenth year in the governor’s mansion.

The Texas Republican will replace Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty atop the committee as it prepares for three gubernatorial contests in Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky in the 2011 election season.

POLITICO has more.

When a deeply polarizing egotist leads an already-unpopular party, the only place to go is down, as endangered Democrats will soon realize. Some, having already learned the lessons of the Pennsylvania and Colorado Senate primary contests, are politely rebuffing–while others still downright rejecting–Barack Obama’s offers to join them on the campaign trail.

Instead, they’ve got another president in mind: Bill Clinton, whose presence on the campaign trail translates to more enthusiasm among Democrats and Independents, according to a recent Gallup survey. Now, as I write in an op-ed for Fox News today, that must be a tough pill for Obama to swallow, otherwise he’d be a recluse for the next 5 days.

Click below the fold for an excerpt.

Read More →

What’s Halloween without a little politics? And with little more than a week until Election Day, you can’t blame me that I incorporated it into my jack-o’-lantern last night, when I joined my family to carve pumpkins.

Inspired by a recent Gallup survey in which President Barack Obama and former President George Bush were virtually tied in a measure of approval, my get out the vote pumpkin for 2010:

Miss him yet? Then volunteer in the waning days of the election, when door-knocking and victory calls are most critical.

Read More →

A California union stagehand was abruptly terminated Friday for wearing a “George H. W. Bush” sweat shirt and hat while constructing a stage to be used for a get out the vote rally featuring President Barack Obama.

Duane Hammond says his clothes were not a political statement, rather a sign of support for his son, who is serving on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George H. W. Bush.

“I’m just humiliated,” Hammond said. “My son has been in the Navy for three years, he’s serving proudly, and I’m wearing his flag, so to speak.”

Read More →

In a state Democratic Party mailer that hit South Florida mailboxes last week, voters found an interesting figure on a top GOP House recruit: His social security number.

The Florida Democratic Party reproduced a 2005 tax lien–since paid–filed against Allen West for delinquent credit card bills. As the Palm Beach Post reports, the document contains the GOP hopeful’s social security number.

While the record does not identify the figure as such, West’s campaign manager said nine-digit figure is easily distinguished.

According to a 2002 survey by the Federal Trade Commission, Florida rated sixth nationwide in identity theft occurrences per-capita. That year, 16,062 Floridians were victimized; only three other states had a higher number of stolen identities reported.

The disclosure marks an “unprecedented new low in American, politics,” West said.

Read More →

Incumbent Democrats are desperate — increasingly aware the public’s taste for their brand of change has waned. Some, in generally conservative districts and states, are reaching for the mantle of the moderate; others, like those in reliably Democratic areas, have not yet begun backsliding on the president on the issues of health care reform and spending.

But all — no matter how comfortable their lead in polls and campaign funds — have gone to great lengths to portray their GOP challengers as wildly out of the mainstream: We’re bad, but they’re downright crazy.

In an editorial for the Washington Times, I examine Tuesday’s Democratic primaries in New York and Washington, D.C., which saw the ouster of Mayor Adrian Fenty and the renomination of Rep. Charlie Rangel, and offer some thoughts as to who is the real party of extremists:

The Republican Party has been so captured by its more conservative, if at times unreasonably radical, elements that it ousted Tuesday a mayor whose pragmatism earned him national praise and renominated a 20-term legislator for Congress whose ethics probes had become a symbol of corruption and a clarion call for term limits.

With all the speculation that the GOP had been torn asunder by the Tea Party movement in its bid to refashion the party in its own image, one might be inclined to believe, wrongly, that anecdote. One splashy headline after the next has fomented the expectation that the lunatics had stormed the hospital, with loony policies abounding: Social Security to be phased out; the Department of Education to dissolve; and the 14th Amendment to be repealed.

Read More →

In an election cycle where Democratic campaign advertisement expenditures disparaging their party’s landmark health care overhaul is wildly outpacing pro-reform spots, one New York congressman is embracing a bold approach: Taking ownership of the health care reform bill.

“I wrote the bill,” Rep. Anthony Weiner said Monday at a town hall, referring to his party’s landmark reform of the nation’s health care system. “The bill and I are one.”

Despite hailing from a heavily Democratic district, Weiner’s admission is borderline masochistic, with recent polling indicating 53% of Americans now favor a repeal of the measure.

And while that metric has compelled a great number of Weiner’s otherwise liberal colleagues to abandon the president and the cause of reform in advance of this fall’s midterm elections, the Brooklyn Democrat is undeterred, one of only a handful of Democrats running on–and not from–health care.

Read More →

A prominent civil rights crusader and former congressman on Thursday likened anti-big government Tea Party activists to members of the notorious Klu Klux Klan at a press conference questioning the motives a conservative rally scheduled for the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

The “Restoring Honor” rally, hosted by conservative radio and television talker Glenn Beck, boasts former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin among its lineup of speakers. The event is set to take place Saturday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C, and black civil rights activists are fuming, contending that conservatives have “declared war on the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

Rev. Walter Fauntroy, who represented the District of Columbia from 1971 to 1991 as a non-voting delegate and was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said at a press conference at the National Press Club that the monikers Tea Party and KKK were to be used interchangeably.

“We are going to take on the barbarism of war, the decadence of racism, and the scourge of poverty, that the Ku Klux — I mean to say the Tea Party,” Fauntroy said to laughter. “You all have to forgive me, but I — you have to use them interchangeably.”

Read More →

The story of an irritated JetBlue flight attendant whose tantrum last week drew national attention is the subtext of a new web ad in which endangered Democrats frantically escape an airplane piloted by the president with a course set for their home states and districts.

Parodies aside, the 50-second spot highlights a serious concern among Democrats: President Barack Obama’s unpopularity–stemming from his controversial overhaul of the nation’s health care system and an unprecedented surge in domestic spending–has translated into a considerable liability for Democrats nationwide, and his presence on the campaign trail may prove to excite opponents before party faithful.

After all, Obama’s batting average on matters not legislative has done little to instill confidence among endangered Democrats. In Virginia, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, those candidates for whom Obama invested personal political capital all lost. And last week in Colorado, 45 percent of Democrats voted against the White House’s pick in the state’s Senate nominating contest.

Though President Obama will be no where to be found on ballots in this fall’s midterm elections, those presidents whose approval ratings were sub-50 percent have averaged a loss of 36 House seats in midterm elections. For those curious, Obama’s approval rests at 42 percent.

Read More →

In today’s Politico, I have an editorial on the Democrats’ procedural gimmicks and faulty pay-for system that cost the passage of the James Zagroda 9/11 Health and Compensation Act:

In spite of fierce public opposition, the Democrats’ sizable House majority secured passage of President Barack Obama’s controversial overhaul of the nation’s health care system. But this same majority failed Friday in its efforts to create a popular multi-billion dollar health care fund for emergency responders affected by toxic dust and debris in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

The House leadership had suspended typical procedures—requiring a simple majority—on the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2009 in order to prevent GOP-offered amendments that they feared might compromise the votes of endangered Democrats.

Read More →

Political observers will attest that the majority of campaign ads are banal rehashings of tempered stump speeches. But we were greeted this week with a pleasant–and yet remotely disturbing–break from that pattern, with the video “Greene is on the scene,” a parody of South Carolina Democratic Senate nominee Alvin Greene’s campaign missteps set to a retro hip-hop tune.

The New York Times reported Thursday the video was, to the surprise of its nearly-18,000 viewers, an official product of the Greene campaign. That report also came as a surprise to the Greene campaign, according to CNN, who said it had no involvement in the video.

“I don’t know who made it.” But, the candidate said Friday morning, “it sounds good. Make sure everybody hears it.”

Notable lyrics include: “Well, Greene’s a new face in politics. And he don’t show porno to college chicks. … Real family values, those are rad. He loves family and lives with his mom and dad! … Alvin Greene is the one for you. He knows how you feel, ’cause he’s unemployed, too!”

Read More →

A House ethics committee has launched an investigation into New York Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel for undisclosed ethics violations, the Associated Press reported Thursday.

Rangel, who resigned from his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee in March following a formal admonishment for two corporately-underwritten Caribbean junkets, will appear next week before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. Composed of four Republicans and four Democrats, the panel will consider if sufficient evidence exists to prove the allegations against 20-term legislator.

The adjudicatory subcommittee was last impaneled six years ago, when it was called upon to handle the case of Democratic Congressman Jim Traficant, who served seven years on bribery and racketeering-related charges.

In the same way that Republican ethics violations loomed large in the 2006 midterm elections that saw the House of Representatives change hands, Rangel’s ethics misdeeds threaten to undermine Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pledge to run the “most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in History.”

But for now, the specific nature of charges against Rangel remain unknown — and will likely remain as such until next Thursday when he makes his case to the ethics panel. In the meantime, a list–that is, unfortunately, in no way comprehensive–of the 80-year-old lawmaker’s ethics lapses:

Read More →

Vice President Joe Biden was caught on camera calling a Glendale, Wisconsin custard shop manager a “smartass” after the man asked the White House lower his taxes.

Biden visited Kopps Frozen Custard, a popular Milwaukee-area restaurant the vice president mistook for an ice cream parlor, to chat with employees and patrons. Biden’s rebuke, which was captured on film by a local ABS News affiliate, came after he asked the manager what he owed.

“Don’t worry, it’s on us,” the store’s manager replied to the vice president. “Lower our taxes and we’ll call it even.”

Minutes later Biden is heard chiding the employee, saying: “Why don’t you say something nice instead of being a smartass all the time?”

Read More →

When the Washington Post hired bloggers Greg Sargent and Ezra Klein, it appeared the paper was inclined to invest heavily in its web presence — and prepared to shift its online editorial slant further leftward. To offset what many saw as a disproportionate coverage of Democratic politics, the paper announced months later it had hired Dave Weigel to cover Republican intra-party politics.

Sargent, whose muckraking at the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo made him a daily read for Capitol Hill Democrats or Republican operatives concerned their bosses had again strayed from prescribed talking points, was a natural fit for the Post. Likewise for Klein, whose wonkish, prolific writing often set the tone for progressive domestic policy talk.

And like Sargent and Klein, Weigel was poached from a progressive-leaning online outlet. But whereas Sargent and Klein hard carved out beats that largely matched their ideological leanings, which is to say progressive, Weigel was pitched to the paper’s leadership (by blogging wunderkind Klein) as the reporter best positioned to cover the conservative movement — specifically its more unsavory fringe elements, of which Weigel had become a connoisseur of sorts at The Washington Independent.

As others more acutely aware of the goings-on of the Washington Post newsroom have noted, Weigel found himself in an untenable situation: Misrepresented both by those who lobbied for his employment and later by his new employer, the reporter-blogger had to adopt a nuanced I’m-one-of-you posture. Weigel frequently cited his vote for Ron Paul in the 2008 Republican primary as an indicator of his conservative bona fides, though he less often noted he voted subsequently for then-Senator Obama in the general election.

Read More →

At Human Events, I have an editorial today on the multi-million dollar gamble organized labor made on Bill Halter’s ill-fated primary challenge to Blue Dog Senator Blanche Lincoln:

For Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Tuesday’s victory was bittersweet: She narrowly secured her party’s nomination, though head-to-head polls indicate she will lose six of every ten general election voters to her Republican challenger in November. But for organized labor, who invested upwards of $10 million backing Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s ill-fated primary challenge of Lincoln, it is all bitter.

From the outset of Halter’s bid, public employee unions and progressive groups rallied at the prospect of defeating Lincoln, whose opposition to labor mainstays like the Employee Free Choice Act and the public health insurance option were observed as mortal sins. The White House and Democratic establishment—most notably Arkansas’ favorite son, former President Bill Clinton—instead endorsed Lincoln.

The divergent paths of the White House and labor groups in the Arkansas nominating contest is symptomatic of a long-developing schism in the Democratic Party-organized labor coalition. For all the talk of a Tea Party-induced conservative schism, the movement has, largely, coalesced behind the Republican Party. The case is not so with frustrated labor organizers, as even loyal Democrats have difficulty swallowing the 21st Century union agenda.

Read More →