As promised. Short version: DNC beat RNC, NRSC edged DSCC, DCCC edged NRCC, and cash on hand would worry me more if the GOP hadn’t just removed the NJ & VA governorships from the Democrats and essentially handed NY-23 as part of a unfortunate but necessary life lesson to the GOP leadership.

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Eight of them:

Allentown union official Nick Balzano has been a political punching bag all week because he threatened to file a grievance against the city for allowing a Boy Scout to clear a walking path in a city park.

Three days of taking body blows nationally from conservative pundits, a rebuke from the Lehigh Valley’s congressman and even a lashing from his own union led Balzano to voluntarily resign his position Thursday as head of the local Service Employees International Union.

Balzano said he and seven other executive officers of the local SEIU stepped down.

Via HolyCoast.com. Note that the SEIU itself hung Balzano out to dry: when your guys are already out there on camera beating up protesters and gadflies, it’s not a good time to start a fight with the Boy Scouts of America*.  I suggest that the various loyalists of that organization keep that in mind.

Moe Lane

*Not that it’s ever a good time.  Nobody smart in American politics messes with the Scouts. Boy or Girl Scouts.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Seldom does the universe line up so perfectly. Jonah Goldberg:

Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus’ Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin. In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor’s writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:

“The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”

Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.”

Click through for the punchline; but you know it already, don’t you?

Via Ed Driscoll, via Sarah Palin’s Uterus - and if you were wondering whether the latter was vicious mockery of the Online Left or not, well: stop wondering. It is.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) I don’t know if Mediaite deliberately omitted the reason for former President Bill Clinton’s refusal to attend a Keith Olbermann-boosted ‘free clinic event.’  It’s entirely possible that the actual reason (warning: FDL link) - that Clinton thinks that the event in question is a thinly-veiled primary campaign event against Senator Blanche Lincoln (D, AR) and for Democratic Senate hopeful Bill Halter - was simply uninteresting to Mediaite, which is of course that site’s privilege.

That being said, this kind of allegation is newsworthy.  A former President accusing a more-or-less prominent Leftist television commentator of playing internal Democratic party politics with people’s health care coverage?  This should have been front and center on the site.  Heck, it should be above the fold on the New York Times.

‘Should,’ not ‘will.’

Moe Lane

PS: Does MSNBC… approve of this?

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

And threats don’t get more direct than this: either AG Holder starts investigating ACORN, or Breitbart dumps what he still has on the scene in time to make a difference in the 2010 elections.

And this message is to Attorney General Holder: I want you to know that we have more tapes, it’s not just ACORN, and we’re going to hold out until the next election cycle, or else if you want to do a clean investigation, we will give you the rest of what we have, we will comply with you, we will give you the documentation we have from countless ACORN whistleblowers who want to come forward but are fearful of this organization and the retribution that they fear that this is a dangerous organization.  So if you get into an investigation, we will give you the tapes; if you don’t give us the tapes, we will revisit these tapes come election time.

Italics in original. If this is a bluff… well.  Every time somebody thought that Andrew Breitbart has been bluffing on the ACORN scandal, he’s turned out not to be.  The latest one has Patterico almost gibbering in glee as he rakes the LA Times and James Rainey over the coals for their uncritical willingness to believe Lavelle Stewart; it doesn’t seem particularly safe to hope that this time is the time that Breitbart’s got nothing left.

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Big Government:

Apparently, “any measurement” doesn’t include the unemployment rate, job growth, number of jobs, wage growth, hours worked, home foreclosures, rate of mortgage delinquencies, etc.

Which leads to the next question: what does ‘any measurement’ include? Surely there’s something that qualifies: for example, I imagine that segment of the sex worker industry that handles corporate lobbyists and union leadership cadres have been enjoying the recent influx of stimulus money. That’s good, right?

Feel free to come up with your own possible examples in comments. If you can’t, well: open thread.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Everybody’s overthinking Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) flip-flop from his 2001 stance on military tribunals:

…those who commit acts of war against the United States, particularly those who have no color of citizenship, don’t deserve the same panoply of due process rights that American citizens receive. Should Osama bin Laden be captured alive—and I imagine most Americans hope he won’t be captured alive. But if he is, it is ludicrous to suggest he should be tried in a Federal court on Center Street in Lower Manhattan.

…to his current stance:

…when asked by the reporter why Schumer now backs criminal trials over military tribunals, Schumer says he wants to see them executed.

You see, in 2001 there was a Republican running the government, and that Republican was taking the attitude that we were going to treat the 9/11 attacks as attacks. So Schumer went along with that. But now it’s 2009, and there’s a Democrat running the government, and that Democrat is taking the attitude that we are going to treat things like 9/11 as crimes. So Schumer is going to go along with that.

Besides, there’s money in it.  After all, this is the man who justified “little, porky amendments.”

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

I know that Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC) is not on a lot of people’s Christmas card lists, but this exchange between him and Attorney General Eric Holder was four minutes, forty seconds’ worth of pure schooling:

Not filmed was the bit in the end where Holder was on the floor, looking for his teeth. You do not walk into a situation like that without an elementary knowledge of the relevant historical record*. You do not come completely unprepared for a obviously-telegraphed question like “So. What are you going to do with a captured bin Laden?” And you do not assume that Senators like being given the mushroom treatment. Because if you do any of that, you can be assured that some Senator, somewhere, will take the opportunity to introduce you to pain.

Moe Lane

PS: No, really. NPR even noticed. NPR. Via Newsbusters, via Instapundit:

The exchange started with Graham stumping Holder with a question one would have thought the attorney general would have been prepared for…

Not one of Holder’s better days.

*Reminded me of this, actually.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Via Instapundit, HHS Secretary Sebelius is trying to do some damage control on the recent ’suggestion’ that women stop getting routine mammograms before they’re 50:

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, meanwhile, told women to ignore the new advisory recommendations for now.

“The U.S. Preventive Task Force is an outside independent panel of doctors and scientists who make recommendations. They do not set federal policy and they don’t determine what services are covered by the federal government,” said Sebelius in a written statement.

“Our policies remain unchanged,” she said of the federal government. ” Indeed, I would be very surprised if any private insurance company changed its mammography coverage decisions as a result of this action.”

A statement that is very comforting… until you remember that the Democratic party’s goal is to establish governmental control over the health care insurance industry.  Who here thinks that an insurance company already grimly aware that they exist on governmental sufferance might feel the need to ‘change its mammography coverage decisions’ to reflect current state medical policy?  Particularly if there are consequences for not being in compliance with all the laws, regulations, rulings, and opinions that bureaucracies generate more or less automatically.  And if the government doesn’t like the idea that people are going to instinctively assume that said bureaucracy is willing to ‘encourage’ ostensibly-private entities to follow bureaucratic dictates, then perhaps the government might like to consider reining in its bureaucrats.  As publicly as it can manage.

I’ll end by noting that this is all an inevitable by-product of the health care rationing bill; it is, in fact, why I call it that.  More people covered, better service, lower costs: in the best-case scenario, pick any two.  In the scenario that we’re going to get, if this passes?  We’ll get the first one, and the current ruling party will muck up the second while flagrantly ignoring the third.  That’s because the first one is easy, and can be done by lazy people.  The other two require work to accomplish.

Moe Lane

PS: Ed Morrissey reports that there are no oncologists on the task force that made the ‘recommendations.’  I really, really hope that this isn’t actually true.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

It looks like terrorist lawyer - and you may parse that as you wish - Lynne Stewart may spend more time as an involuntary guest of the government than she first thought:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court upheld on Tuesday a disbarred New York lawyer’s conviction on charges of supporting terrorism by helping an imprisoned blind Egyptian cleric smuggle messages to militant followers, ordered her to prison and told a judge to consider a longer sentence.

The three-judge panel described the 28-month prison sentence given by the trial judge to civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart, 70, following her 2005 conviction as “strikingly low” and not matching “the seriousness of her criminal conduct.”

The appeals court ordered the trial judge to think about lengthening the sentence, noting that the judge had declined to consider whether Stewart committed perjury when she testified at her trial.

Two thoughts on this:

1. There’s something… pure… in this hysterical (again, parse as you choose) title found on Indymedia: ‘Fascist Obama Jails Framed Ill People’s Lawyer Lynne Stewart.’  And here I thought that wanting to bomb the United Nations was a nutball-far-extremist-right-fringe fantasy. Live and learn.
2. This comment by Stewart? “This is a case that is bigger than just me, personally. I am no criminal.” - I actually agree with that; she isn’t, except in the narrowest of senses.  Stewart gave aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States, adhering to him, and helping him wage war against my country.

And that last sentence shouldn’t need to be parsed at all.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

(Via Hot Air) Took him long enough:

President Obama acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that his administration would miss a self-imposed deadline to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by mid-January, admitting the difficulties of following through on one of his first pledges as president.

[snip]

On Guantánamo, Mr. Obama said that he now hoped to shut down the detention facility sometime next year, but he did not set a new deadline.

Translation: Gitmo isn’t closing in 2010, either - which means that it probably isn’t closing, period.  Which is something that I’ve known was going to be happening for months.  But then, I’m not the Fortunate Son.

Moe Lane

PS: Next time?  Run for and serve as Governor of something, Mr. President.  It helps cut down on rookie mistakes like this.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Reverse the Vote! is a program set up to specifically target 24 Democrats who voted for health care rationing, and against their constituents’ desires, last week.  The list is entertaining:

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Democratic pollster Tom Jensen earned a bit of polling goodwill by calling the NJ and VA gubernatorial elections accurately (and forthrightly admitting that PPP messed up NY-23, and why), so when he says that AR-02 is a trouble spot for the Democrats, people should probably pay attention to that.

Snyder’s approval rating is now 42%, with 46% of voters in the district disapproving of him. He’s at a solid 75% in his own party but with independents the spread is 30/56 and with Republicans it’s just 12/75.

[snip]

In possible 2010 match ups Snyder leads Tim Griffin 44-43, Scott Wallace 44-42, and David Meeks 45-42. Those close margins come despite the fact that none of the Republican candidates are well known- 67% of voters have no opinion about Griffin, 75% say the same of Wallace, and 78% are ambivalent toward Meeks.

That’s all within margin of error, and it’s not good news for Snyder.  Then again, he’s an incumbent Democrat who voted against his district’s wishes with regard to health care rationing: that’s not a good thing to be, these days.

Moe Lane

PS: Below are the Republicans mentioned above who are running in the AR-02 primary.

Tim Griffin
Scott Wallace
David Meeks

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Via Instapundit, ‘Agencies stiff-arm GAO on info’:

The investigative arm of Congress has been denied information repeatedly by various government agencies, indefinitely delaying lawmaker-requested probes, according to a letter obtained by The Hill.

The State Department, for example, initially balked at giving the Government Accountability Office (GAO) a list of sex offenders. Senate Finance Committee leaders asked GAO for a study on how many passport holders have not paid their federal taxes…

This really isn’t too surprising: I imagine that most members of this administration have passports.

…or are registered sex offenders.

I take the high road. 

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This has been circulating around the Hill today; some kind, cruel soul from there took the trouble to forward it to me.  Twenty-four hours and they still haven’t fixed recovery.gov: remember how we got told that the new administration was going to bring us into this new, wonderful Web 2.0 reality? These guys can’t even get a database up and running properly. Heck, they can’t even be bothered to check typical search results for garbage before they take said database live.

Moe Lane

PS: At them. We are all laughing at them. Not with.

—–

SEN. LEGHORN ANNOUNCES $14.7 MILLION FOR TEXAS; ‘YEE, HAW!’ HE ADDS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*

WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Foghorn J. Leghorn, D-State, announced Tuesday that he had won an extra $14.7 million in stimulating funds from the solicitous Obama Administration for the people of seven congressional districts in Texas.

“This funding will go for good,” the Senator said.  “Why, son, 98 hardworking, taxpaying, aging, poor, honest, hungry, working-class, middle-class, undereducated, disadvantaged, undercounted, overlooked, underprivileged, overtaxed and uninsured constituents of my good friends and esteemed colleagues in the 52^nd, 58^th, 86^th, 00^th, 68^th, 91^st, and 85^th Congressional Districts of Texas deserve every penny,” he added.  “Yep, they can shore count on me.  Vote Leghorn!  Yee, haw!”

Following is an official, premeditated account* of the stimulating funds provided by the Obama Administration through Sen. Leghorn’s good offices:

Texas Congressional District    Jobs      Amount

52nd congressional district     0       $8,937,289
58th congressional district     45      $3,659,694
86th congressional district     6       $943,326
00 congressional district       11      $752,292
68th congressional district     1       $310,963
91st congressional district     30      $57,367
85th congressional district     5       $56,661

Stimulus Total: $14,717,592

Jobs Total: 98

*Please don’t call Sen. Leghorn’s office about this.  He’s busy working on health care today.  For further information on this gracious investment of job-creating government money, please “track the money” through the President’s Recovery website, http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=stateSummaryAllCD&statecode=TX

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Clemons is very, very upset that the administration casually threw away former WH counsel Greg Craig once it became clear that they a) would take a hit from actually closing Gitmo and b) needed somebody to blame. He’s so upset, in fact, that he’s even now comparing this administration to the previous one. Try not to giggle too loudly at this:

But the sustained nature of the leaks—and the fact that they ultimately proved to be true—indicates something quite disappointing for anyone who had hoped that the Obama White House would operate more transparently and honestly than the Bush team had.

Yes, it’s like Clemons has never heard of OBAMABUS, or its victims. Or that the previous administration was routinely criticized for showing too much loyalty, not too little.  Or, in fact, that the supposed transparency and honesty of this particular administration was largely an invention of this particular administration’s fan club.  Of which club Steve Clemons is a charter member:

We need to see the checks and balances of our form of democracy restored and the usurpation of unprecedented and dangerous powers by the White House rolled back. We need to pursue accountability for the collapse of trust at home and abroad and reform the nation’s balloting process in order to make certain that citizen voices are heard restoring again a representative form of government.

From his statement of why he was (ostensibly) voting for Obama.

Umm.

Oops?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

That was Rep. Stupak’s (DEMOCRAT) blunt response to David Axelrod’s assertion that the pro-life language currently in the health care rationing bill would be ‘adjusted.’ Stupak’s having none of it:

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) pledged on Tuesday morning to defeat healthcare reform legislation if his abortion amendment is taken out, saying 10 to 20 anti-abortion-rights Democrats would vote against a bill with weaker language.

“They’re not going to take it out,” Stupak said on “Fox and Friends,” referring to Senate Democrats. “If they do, healthcare will not move forward.”

See Hot Air for the video. Stupak claims to have more than enough votes to shut down any final version that removes his amendment, which is both false and true. It’s false because the closeness of the original vote reflected a lot of horse-trading on the individual Member of Congress level; theoretically, the Speaker of the House could simply pressure the Democrats who got to vote ‘no’ last time to vote ‘yes’ this time.  It’s true because one of the reasons that they were able to get a final vote was because while the Stupak amendment was scored by NRLC, the final bill was not.  Strip out Stupak, and a vote for health care rationing becomes a vote for federal funding of abortions.  The NRLC pretty much cannot not score that appropriately.

I close with this observation: this situation for the Democrats is pretty much entirely due to the decision by House Republicans to oppose the health care rationing bill en masse.  They’re doing that because the Congressional Democratic leadership decided to shut out everybody except themselves and various outside lobbyists when it came time to put this monstrosity of a bill together.  And because the President didn’t intervene when it became clear that the process was disrupting his narrative, we’re now at the point where the Democratic party has to decide which side of the abortion debate is safer to infuriate.

But don’t feel bad for them: after all, they didn’t learn a blessed thing from their mistakes over the ’stimulus’ and cap-and-trade.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

There are not 75. Hey, everyone else is looking up their state, so I might as well do so, too.

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Somebody in the regular media was whining about what the point of Twitter was, a few days ago.  The answer?

Rerouting around obstacles.

hey Chinese government - i found a way to sneak around your firewall on my laptop to get to twitter. Dont fear freedom, Chinese government.

He’s also commenting on the ChiComs’ attempt to stop American media from interviewing students. Sounds like there may be some juicy stuff on ABC tonight.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Matthew Berry. Not the ESPN guy: the former Clarence Thomas clerk/DoJ/FCC guy. He’s running on a fiscal conservatism/national security/ethics platform; and opposing the infamous Jim Moran, believer in Israeli conspiracies.  His statement about Moran’s blathering* on the NYC show trials works for me:

“It is wrong for Congressman Moran to question the patriotism of the millions of Americans who believe that terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be tried by military commissions rather than in civilian courtrooms. Furthermore, Congressman Moran’s comment reflects a basic ignorance of American history. Military commissions were used to try war crimes during the Revolutionary War, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, and World War II. The use of a military commission to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would have been entirely in keeping with American history and tradition.”

For those wondering: VA-08 is a D+16 district that includes Arlington, Virginia, which makes Matthew’s oppositional stance on the hot-button topics of the stimulus, cap and trade, and the health care rationing bill all the more notable.  He’s also supportive of the Tea Party’s objectives of more citizen involvement in government, particularly from a fiscal point of view.  Lastly; Matthew happens to be gay, and is making no attempt to hide his sexual orientation.  Which, given the way that minority conservatives routinely get viciously targeted by the Other Side, deserves particular mention.

The race itself is in its early days; Matthew appears to be the first candidate to declare for the primary (the VA GOP**, while not involving itself in primaries, did note that “it would be of great benefit to the Commonwealth of Virginia if Jim Moran were to lose his seat;” they look forward to supporting the eventual candidate).  All in all, a fiscon and natsec hawk sounds like a definite trade-up to the guy that we have in there now - especially since he reads RedState.  Note to candidates: that is a very, very smart thing to do…

Moe Lane

*Apparently, objecting to show trials in NYC is now somehow un-American.  I’d note the irony, except that I’m more bemused at the irony that a ’show trial’ has become the best possible outcome for this administration.

**Who did a nice job with the last election, by the way.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.