Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

More Obvious Bias From The Inquirer

Jul 23rd, 10 / 0 Comments

The Philthadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board is using its blog to call for something stupid, the resignation of Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett from his position as Attorney General (link):

Attorney General Tom Corbett should quit his day job and focus on running for governor. It’s nearly impossible lately for the public to separate Corbett’s law-enforcement duties from his role as the GOP nominee for governor. Increasingly, his actions as attorney general are tinged with political ramifications for the November election.

For example, Corbett decided last week to pit Pennsylvania against the Obama administration’s effort to overturn Arizona’s new stop-on-sight immigration law. He joined several other state attorneys general in filing a court brief, arguing that the federal government’s action violates state authority. Corbett’s move came without any consultation or warning to Democratic Gov. Rendell, who happens to disagree with Corbett….

Corbett would be well-advised to disregard this advice.  Since the Philadelphia Inquirer stands on two facts (suit against Obamacare and signing the brief in favor of the Arizona law), it needs to do a lot better before asking for this resignation.  They’re just trying to help Dan Onorato get some good quotes for his campaign.

Bad Ideas, Politics, news tilt

Las Vegas Isn’t In The Desert

Jul 17th, 10 / 0 Comments

I missed this during the week. This is incredible in its most literal form. Via Sistah Toldjah (link), we get this gem from 8 News (link):

LAS VEGAS — In this election season, Senator Harry Reid’s campaign events often include claims of how many stimulus funded jobs he’s created. But how many of these construction jobs are going to workers in the country illegally?

E-Verify is a computer program many employers use to determine if job applicants are U.S. citizens. Construction companies are not forced to use the official E-Verify system to determine if construction job applicants are in this country legally.

Republican Senator Jeff Sessions introduced an amendment in 2009 that would have made E-Verify permanent and mandatory for all construction companies. Senator Reid did not allow the idea to come up for a vote.

“The reason: we need to do comprehensive immigration reform. We cannot do it piecemeal,” said Reid.

“When you go to the unemployment office there’s many U.S. citizens who are unemployed construction workers and they don’t have jobs because right now, some of those construction companies find it easier to hire undocumented workers,” said Reporter Nathan Baca.

“I think that any information you have in that regard is absolutely without foundation,” responded Reid.

But a Pew Hispanic Center study shows 17-percent of all construction workers are in the United States illegally. Reid says not in Nevada. “That may be some place, but it’s not here in Nevada.”

But their latest 2009 numbers show Nevada is the state with the highest percentage of “unauthorized immigrants” in the labor force.

Hopefully Angle takes advantage of this.

Politics, illegal immigration

Sacrilege!! “Majority Of Americans Lack Faith In Obama”

Jul 13th, 10 / 2 Comments

This is actually good news, if you’ve been following the latest from the ten commandments (link):

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Nearly 60 percent of American voters say they lack faith in President Barack Obama, according to a public opinion poll published on Tuesday.The results of the Washington Post/ABC News poll are a reversal of what voters said at the start of Obama’s presidency 18 months ago when about 60 percent expressed confidence in his decision making.Confidence in Obama is at a new low but the poll found that his numbers are still higher than lawmakers of either major party four months ahead of the November congressional elections.Asked how much confidence they have in Obama to make the right decisions for the country’s future, 58 percent of respondents said “just some” or “none.”Sixty-eight percent expressed the same sentiments about Democrats in Congress and 72 percent said the same of Republicans

It’s really ok though, the Obamessiah doesn’t require your confidence, he requires your dependence to fulfill his role in the prophecy called “The Road To Serfdom”.

PBO, Politics, faith

“Alvin Greene Fever” in SC

Jul 12th, 10 / 0 Comments

Byron York hit my funny bone on this post (link).

Politics, funny

Tracking GOP Gaffes

Jun 29th, 10 / 0 Comments

Along with the fossil media (in this case, the evidently unedited Yahoo! news), the DNC is launching a tracking website for GOP candidate gaffes. My only question is, will it cover all 57 states? (link):

29 mins ago

The Democratic National Committee on Tuesday unveiled “The Accountability Project,” a website where visitors are encouraged to display their own recordings of Republican candidates’ bloopers and missteps on the campaign trail. The hope is to create a clearing house capably of delivering Democrats their next “macaca” momen—and put strong GOP candidates on the defnesive for a gaffe-ridden political performance much as Virginia Gop Sen. George Aleen was during his failed 2006 re-election bid.

Of course, the site doesn’t things quite that way. The site explains that it seeks to target candidates who say “one thing in Washington and another back home” and can therefore get away with statements they don’t have to answer for in either venue. “But it doesn’t have to be this way—you can make sure that this year’s elections are contested in the light of day,” the site reads. Visitors are encouraged to upload video, audio, campaign mailings, and notify other volunteer trackers of upcoming events.

Videos displayed on the site Tuesday afternoon were far from shocking. One showed Sen. Jim DeMint speaking at February’s Conservative Political Action Conference, while election-themed videos of Republican candidates in Florida topped its list of available media. Lately, video trackers themselves have been the ones making headlines. Democratic Rep. Bob Etheridge of North Carolina apologized for grabbing a self-identified student who was videotaping the lawmaker on a D.C. street and a tracker was thrown out of an event for Illinois Democratic Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias this month.

But each new campaign tactic, of course, generates its equal and opposite reaction: Republican strategists are trying to get out ahead of the expected influx of video trackers this season. The Republican National Committee has already issued a memo to campaign staffers instructing them on how to properly deal with videographers from the opposition.

–Rachel Rose Hartman is a politics writer for Yahoo! News.

Yahoo! News also points out the “gaffe” of the Palin campaign in sending out a rough draft of an email (see above passage from Yahoo! news for what a rough draft looks like) and for Palin’s misstatement of where Ronald Reagan’s alma mater was (link):

Following in others’ grand tradition of demonstrating gaps in knowledge while addressing a university, Sarah Palin told a crowd at a fundraiser at California State University in Stanislaus last weekend that Ronald Reagan, personal hero and inspiration, was a California college graduate. She told the cheering crowd: “This is Reagan country, and perhaps it was destiny that the man who went to California’s Eureka College would become so woven within and interlinked to the Golden State.”

There’s just one problem here: Reagan went to Eureka College in Illinois from 1928 to 1932, the Alaska Dispatch reports. He didn’t move to California until five years after his graduation. There’s no Eureka College in California (though there’s a town of Eureka that has a College of the Redwoods nearby).

Immediately after her speech, a live microphone caught voices in the press area trashing the former Alaska governor, Mediate reported. “The dumbness doesn’t just come from soundbites,” one complained. The Fox affiliate owned the microphone but says their reporters did not make the comments.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports on a more serious recent mistake of Palin’s political organization. Administrators for her legal defense fund accidentally sent out a rough draft of an email to thousands of supporters that falsely claimed she faced “millions of dollars” in legal fees because of “frivolous” ethics suits against her. The corrected version of the email said the fees numbered in the hundreds of thousands, not millions.

Critics say several more claims in the email were not true. The email said 26 of 27 ethics violations against Palin were dismissed outright, which is false: Three moved into the investigative phase. One inquiry resulted in a cash settlement; another found that ethics had been abridged but declined to recommend legal proceedings because the charge involved the dismissal of the head of the Alaska state trooper force, who was an at-will employee of the governor.

The email also alleged that the Democratic National Committee created a website whose goal is to keep Palin out of public office — a charge that the organization says is untrue.

So Palin lost in 2008 and is not running for anything at the moment, yet every day the administration that did win and resides in the White House backpedals on campaign promises, lies, hides info from the public, and has gaffe after gaffe.  But you’re watching Sarah Palin.

By the way, if the (unofficial) Palin campaign wants a 24/7 available fact-checker with encyclopedic trivia, editing ability, and grammatical genius, my contact info is available on the “about” page.

PBO, Politics, news tilt

Sunburn

Jun 3rd, 10 / 0 Comments

I didn’t know that darker-complected people could get burnt so badly by sunshine (link):

Black lawmakers want to limit new ethics office

Jun 2, 3:24 PM (ET)

By BEN EVANS

WASHINGTON (AP) – Stung by a series of inquiries, nearly half the members of the Congressional Black Caucus want to scale back the aggressive ethics procedures that Democrats trumpeted after gaining control of Congress.

Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, and 19 fellow black lawmakers in the all-Democratic caucus quietly introduced a resolution last week that would restrict the powers of the new independent Office of Congressional Ethics. The office, formed by Congress in 2008, is run by a panel of private citizens.

Black caucus Chairwoman Barbara Lee, D-Calif., is among the sponsors, but the full 42-member caucus did not endorse the measure. Lee declined comment through a spokesman.

The absence of support from top Democratic leaders for Fudge’s proposal – including from House Whip Jim Clyburn, a black caucus member from South Carolina – suggests that it isn’t going anywhere. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered no immediate comment.

Since its inception, the ethics office has investigated at least eight black caucus members, including veteran Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., and five others in that group over privately funded trips to the Caribbean.

Some lawmakers have complained that the increased transparency of the new office is unfair to lawmakers who are ultimately cleared of wrongdoing.

Fudge’s spokeswoman did not immediately respond Wednesday to requests for comment on the proposal.

Or maybe they’re just vampires.

Feeding Seagulls, PC World, Past Crimes and Grievances, Politics, leviathan

Resignations, etc

May 30th, 10 / 0 Comments

There were some notable resignations from the Obama administration over the last week or so.  Each has some significance as part of the narrative how this administration manages itself.

Admiral Dennis Blair resigned as Director of National Intelligence, and Jena McNeill at the Foundry blog notes that the failures he’s blamed with are partly due to the structure of the bureaucracy and partly due to an administration that can’t bring itself to acknowledge the Islamic Jihad against America (link). Well, okay, they acknowledge Islamic Jihad, just as a legitimate part of Islam (link):

During a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, John Brennan described violent extremists as victims of “political, economic and social forces,” but said that those plotting attacks on the United States should not be described in “religious terms.”

He repeated the administration argument that the enemy is not “terrorism,” because terrorism is a “tactic,” and not terror, because terror is a “state of mind” — though Brennan’s title, deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security, includes the word “terrorism” in it. But then Brennan said that the word “jihad” should not be applied either.

“Nor do we describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children,” Brennan said.

Ok, I know what he’s saying, but the teaching of Jihad as holy war is pretty widespread throughout the Islamic world, and that is Islam’s problem, not his job to define it. How screwed are we again?  Speaking of getting screwed, after the drilling accident the scandal-beleaguered (link) minerals management department’s director resigned, making sure to blame former President George W. Bush (link), who has not been in office since 1.20.09, that date that most moonbats had on their calendars for years.  The President didn’t know the circumstances of her resignation, because his plate was full that morning- meeting with the NCAA Champion Duke basketball team. I guess Rahm Emmanuel was in Israel so nobody else was capable of letting him know before his press conference, which was the first in about a year.

A little over a week ago, a voting rights division attorney in the Obama DoJ resigned over being forced to stonewall the investigation into why charges were dismissed against the New Black Panthers who “guarded” a polling area in Philadelphia with batons. (link) I’ll be curious to see what comes out on this (though it will probably be after the November elections).

Finally, former perjurer-in-chief Bill Clinton evidently volunteered to be the fall guy (link)  for the Joe Sestak bribery case.  The thing is that stuff like this isn’t a matter of the crime committed, but very often the coverup.  I tend to think we’re still early-on in this case.  Of course, the administration’s internal probe of the administration found no wrongdoing by the administration., but there are inconsistencies (like Sestak’s eligibility for the intel position).

On the bright side of things, the Sestak scandal could make the PA Senate race perfect: Toomey wins, Specter’s out, Sestak’s discredited, and possible impeachable offenses.  Sounds good to me.

Bad Ideas, PBO, PC World, Past Crimes and Grievances, Politics, leviathan, terror war

Purple Senators Head Down The Road To Serfdom

May 26th, 10 / 0 Comments

Remember when the GIN declared a moratorium on calling people from the Bay State “Massholes” in our cautious optimism over Scott Brown’s election to the Senate? (link)  Well, that’s officially been lifted, now that Scott Brown is going to be “that guy” and vote for half the Obama platform, as he did with Financial Reform (link).  All these weasels in the Senate think that if they switch over on one or two issues it will be ok, and they can be popular with their newspapers and such. I’ll explain why voting “yes” on anything is voting yes for everything in the next post.

Well bad news, because if a few weasels switch on each part of the platform, the whole thing goes, and we are no longer a republic.

Here’s the Heritage Foundation’s page on “financial reform” (link).

Thanks a lot, Senator Brown. You’re dead to those of us who supported your candidacy. Mort. And to the people of Massachusetts, you’re still Massholes.

Accurate Predictions, Bad Ideas, Feeding Seagulls, G.I.N. discussions, Past Crimes and Grievances, Politics, economy

No Room For Moderate Democrats

May 19th, 10 / 0 Comments

You must be a radical leftist to be a member of the Democratic party (link):

May 19, 2010, 12:36 pm

Unions Vow Push to Defeat Lincoln

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

MIDTERM ELECTIONS

Organized labor says it plans to go all-out to defeat Blanche Lincoln, the Democratic senator from Arkansas, in a June 8 runoff election against Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.

“We’re certainly ready and able to spend whatever we need to spend on behalf of Halter,” said Karen Ackerman, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s political director.

She said labor’s big push for Mr. Halter — including more than 60,000 phone calls and 200,000 leaflets distributed at work sites — helped prevent Ms. Lincoln from obtaining the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff in Tuesday’s Democratic primary.

“We look forward to the runoff,” Ms. Ackerman said in a phone briefing on Wednesday. “We’re in it to win it, and we’ll spend the next three weeks in a very aggressive, continuing campaign to turn out union voters.”

Ms. Ackerman said unions campaigned against Ms. Lincoln because she opposed the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would make it easier to unionize workers, and had voted against Craig Becker to serve on the National Labor Relations Board. (President Obama gave him a recess appointment.)

“She waffled on health care, and she was not for the public option or other issues we care about,” Ms Ackerman said. “If you look at the record, there’s no question why union voters would reject her and move toward Halter.”

On Tuesday night, Ms. Lincoln derided the influence of outside groups. In her speech, Ms. Lincoln, like Mr. Halter, sought to portray the election results (43 percent for Ms. Lincoln and 42 percent for Mr. Halter,) as a victory. “They thought they could write us off, but guess what — they’ve got another thing coming,” she said. “My humble appreciation goes out first to the Democratic voters of Arkansas who have really recognized that this campaign is not – it is not, folks — about the outside groups who are trying desperately to exert their influence here.”

The Service Employees International Union and several of the other unions that quit the A.F.L.-C.I.O. also campaigned hard for Mr. Halter, running numerous broadcast spots, one of them criticizing Ms. Lincoln for backing trade deals that the unions said hurt the Arkansas economy. All told, unions spent more than $3 million on behalf of Mr. Halter.

Speaks for itself.

Politics, union thugs

Rand Paul

May 19th, 10 / 0 Comments

I appreciate Representative Ron Paul’s efforts on individual Americans’ freedoms.  I haven’t agreed with everything he’s been on, but I respect him as someone whom I believe has been very consistent on a liberty-first priority set.  Ron Paul’s son, Rand Paul has won the GOP Senate primary in Kentucky. Go Rand Paul! (link). He is the type of politician we need to advance now, one with the knowledge and courage to question government interference in Americans’ lives.  I look forward to the potential of Dr. Rand Paul’s political career.

Politics