(H/T: Hot Air) Feast your eyes on what the Copenhagen folks decided to start their conference with:
…Whoops! Sorry, wrong video. Obviously, I meant this one:
[pause]
Yeah, I know: they would have been better off with the first one. If for no other reason that they could have gotten their putative message in at half the time.
Moe Lane
PS: Never go back for the stuffed polar bear. Never go back for the stuffed polar bear. What are they teaching kids in school these days?
Known in Senate circles as the Senator who must have her way – even if it means a few tears in the leader’s office – Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) is the queen of wanting to have it both ways. She wants to run for Governor of Texas without giving up her Senate seat. She wanted to move up Senate leadership without taking a risk to run. She wants to be the “conservative” in the primary, and the candidate with “broad appeal” in the general election. She wants to be pro-choice and pro-life. This leaves one scratching his head a bit.
Everyone knows that Senator Hutchison is running for Governor of Texas – and challenging sitting Republican Governor Rick Perry in the process. But no one knows whether Senator Hutchison will actually step down from her Senate seat if she loses to Governor Perry.
Oh sure, she claims she will step down after the primary regardless of the result. But no one in Texas politics is willing to bet on it – and for good reason. Earlier this year, she was adamant that she would step down in the fall of 2009 to run for Governor, only to decide she needed to stick around to “fight Obamacare” and otherwise represent Texas.
Of course, that may be a difficult schedule to maintain, as was evident in this WFAA news story regarding her back-and-forth travel and somewhat unsuccessful efforts at taking on both just now, as well as a missed vote against a terrible Obama judicial nominee in November.
Well, now this is something. The New York Times is actually reporting the Dems still do not have 60 votes, even after Senator Reid’s much trumpeted vapor deal by the MSM (mainstream media):
“Democrats do not dispute that they still have not nailed down the 60 votes that will be needed to approve the health care measure.”
Patrick Ruffini has a very insightful post at The Next Right on self-funding candidates and their role in the conservative battle against the GOP establishment. I don’t necessarily share quite his vehemence against self-funders, but he makes a lot of excellent points about why Republicans should be skeptical of them as standard-bearers. A sample:
Self-funders are particulary popular among money-addled political insiders for a few key reasons. First, their personal money takes the need for much party money off the table, or so it’s thought. Second, they can afford to pay consultants, and lots of them, and for eye-popping amounts. Third, they will often refill the coffers of local parties in a wink and nod exchange for much-needed endorsements.
But the record of self-funders in American politics is notoriously poor…
It’s not just that these candidates were running unwinnable races. Often they were way ahead after an early barrage of advertising. But they blew it, despite their money.
The dollar signs dancing around in consultants’ heads don’t make up for the fact that most self-funders tend to be subpar candidates for important structural reasons. First, they’re political dilettantes unfamiliar with the rigors of elected politics. They make rookie mistakes. They assume their records before their recent entries into politics aren’t relevant or won’t be scrutinized. They have less political acumen or knowledge than many of the people I follow on Twitter, or even most of them.
Read the whole thing.
First a disclaimer: I have tried to write this post all week and think it needs to be said, but am not sure I have made my best go of it. Nonetheless, and for what it is worth, I hope I make some sense in this matter.
Now . . .
Let’s review our grammar for one moment. A noun is a word that defines what an object is, i.e. a dog. An adjective is a word that describes one attribute of the noun, i.e. the dog is brown. The noun is the dog because that defines the object in question and the adjective is the color of the dog, describing one attribute of the dog.
Christians, for example, typically say “I am a Christian” as opposed to saying “I am Christian.” The former sets the Christian into a defined group that believes in Jesus Christ. The latter describes one attribute of the person. Because Christianity typically defines who the person is, it is typically used as a noun, not an adjective.
I, for example, am a Christian before I am anything else. If you want an adjective describing me the Christian, I’d say I am Presbyterian.
I hope you are following me, because there are rough waters ahead.
He had a fundraiser in New Orleans that he rather badly needed to do, and never mind the rhetoric on how important it is to pass health care rationing.
The GOP mocked him, as was only fitting. The GOP is, in fact, using it as local campaign fodder; and so Senator Reid doesn’t get to go to New Orleans. He’s quite upset about it, too*: it’s unclear to whether it’s from being done unto as he has done, or simply because Reid needs all the help that he can get.
Moe Lane
*I don’t know: is he about to cry? I think that Reid looks likes he’s about to cry.
Crossposted to Moe Lane.
ObamaCare is a political failure.
The polling data has confirmed it — repeatedly, but recently, the already bad polls have taken a radical drop. You see the average of many, many polls put together by Pollster.com and it is frightening that the Democrats are still desperately attempting to pass something Americans do not want.
ObamaCare’s political failure will lead to its legislative failure.
The only question is when. ObamaCare is a dog that won’t hunt. It won’t even get off the porch.
An observant reader notes that my description yesterday of Ted Kennedy’s support for legal abortion as “lifelong” is an overstatement. In fact, early in his public career, even Ted Kennedy had not yet embraced the casual cruelty of his party towards the defenseless unborn; indeed, Kennedy’s rhetoric in those early days, displays genuine compassion for the defenseless unborn. Given Kennedy’s centrality to Democratic strategy on this issue - he was the leader of the fight against the Bork nomination - it’s interesting to look back. Here’s Kennedy during his 1970 campaign for a second full term in the Senate:
Great post from Wayne Simmons at Human Events.
At no time in recent American military history has a speech delivered by a President of the United States done so much to distance our nation from victory and put the men and woman of the military and intelligence agencies in harm’s way.
President Obama’s big Afghanistan speech caused nary a tremble in the polls. Before he spoke, most Americans didn’t support him. And after? His popularity continues to sink.
It was positively painful to watch Gen. Stanley McChrystal try to explain how you can win by not losing in his Tuesday congressional testimony. He’s doing the president’s bidding, not following a leader who has a clear idea of how to win a war.
The $700 billion Wall Street bailout last year proved exceedingly unpopular with regular Americans. Nevertheless, House Democrats, with their tin ears to the ground, are looking to make bailouts the status quo by creating a permanent bailout fund.
The financial regulation bill cooked up by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the “Barney Bill,” offers a smorgasbord of bad policies that will affect every American. The Barney is yet another leg of the Giant Government Takeover of major industries pushed through the House this year. If your appetite for bigger government wasn’t satiated by the Car Takeover (GM and Chrysler), the Energy Takeover (cap and trade) or the Health Care Takeover, Barney has something designed just for you: The Financial System Takeover.
There are many reasons to oppose the financial regulatory overhaul bill on the floor this week, but the major reasons are that it will further tighten credit, allow bureaucrats to chop up U.S. businesses they deem “too big,” cost consumers more and kill jobs.
Rasmussen finds former GOP Congressman Rob Simmons is still Dodd’s toughest opponent, leading Dodd by 13% — 48% to 35%.
The newest candidate in the race, Linda McMahon — the ex-CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, also leads Dodd 44% to 38%. But Dodd is now so unpopular, even “long-shot” candidate Peter Shiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, leads Dodd — 40% to 39%.
What is most notable about the Rasmussen poll is McMahon’s high disapproval rating. More voters have a very unfavorable opinion of McMahon. While Simmons is seen very favorably by 12% and very unfavorably by 8%, McMahon’s very favorables total 14% and her very unfavorables are 17%. These findings comes on the heels of McMahon’s expensive promotional advertising campaign conducted in the absence of any other candidate advertising. Rasmussen considers the number of people with strong opinions more significant than the total favorable/unfavorable numbers “at this point in a campaign.”
This is a big problem for McMahon and evidence that a major block of voters is already predisposed against her. The recent string of negative news stories about her will only feed that sentiment.
As third in line for the Presidency, and a woman to boot, if you were the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives would you say:
OK, just wondering.
[promoted from the diaries because anyone who commanded the second best rifle company in the same battalion I was in can always get a slot on the front page.
--streiff]
Although I have been registered with Redstate for over three years, I don’t normally post here because I am afflicted with nigh terminal cases of laziness and procrastination; and I have a great regard for Steven Pressfield’s admonition that “no one wants to read your s***”.”
This time I have come across something so egregious and so little remarked elsewhere that I will at least give a howl to the wind about it.
In my previous life; one of my jobs was to teach leadership and tactics to students at the US Army Ranger School. In this course students are placed in a simulated combat scenario, given a mission to complete and then graded on their units actions to carry out the mission. In a platoon size scenario, there are several graded positions. If the student makes one or more major mistakes they fail the mission. If they fail too many missions they don’t pass the phase and are either dropped from the course or recycled through that particular phase or through the whole course.
None of these are fun, and in some cases failing the course can be a career threatening event. Mindful that the Army needs Ranger School graduates, and that a failed student is a loss in training resources, and trying to be fair, the instructors try (even if former Ranger students don’t believe it) to be judicious when assigning a “No-Go” to a student. But, occasionally something would happen (or not happen) that was so bad, so utterly unacceptable, that instructors would fail the entire chain of command for a patrol. This was a serious event. The battalion commander for that Phase of Ranger School would have to be informed and the entire instructor chain of command would be involved in a review of the reasoning behind the grade and the facts of the case. It was not a casual action.
On the occasion of Barack Obama’s acceptance of the honor, it is worth looking back to a little history. Theodore Roosevelt, the first sitting President awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, did not attend the ceremony, but sent a telegram. But TR gave a Nobel lecture in 1910 - two years after leaving office, four years after winning the prize for mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese War, and four years before the world was plunged into The Great War - and his observations on peace are worth recalling, even as he was (at the time) optimistic about the possibilities for then-nascent international institutions:
Go here now. Sign the petition to free the SEALs who were arrested for capturing the mastermind of Fallujah.
Gresham voted for TARP, then went to a Tea Party:
Nikki Haley, had she been in Congress, would have voted no. She too went to a Tea Party:
They are both running for Governor of South Carolina. Which one do you support?
I honestly don’t know what the hell happens to these people when they get to Washington. That city really is a deadly disease.
Congressman Joe Barton (quasi-R - TX) apparently has so much time on his hands that he is teaming up with like-minded big-government nationalists to try to tell the American people and colleges around the nation how it must determine it’s college football national champion. Indeed, his bill has passed out of the House Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee – and Barton has had “good conversations” with those bastions of limited government, Henry Waxman and Barack Obama, about moving the bill forward.
Well, thank goodness these guys are on the ball, or how would we survive? How could we possibly sort this out without the wisdom of Washington, D.C. – those great men and women who have given us the over $12 Trillion in debt, the TARP program, Katrina-relief and now want to tell you what health care you can have.
The current college football D-I national championship system has serious flaws. And good conservatives can believe it needs a playoff system - just as good conservatives can believe it does not. I don’t care to address the merits of a playoff or different system here, because that’s not the point.
The point is this: ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FRIGGING MIND? SERIOUSLY? We’re at war with crazy terrorists who want to kill us… We’re fighting the biggest assault on liberty in our lifetimes with the likely Washington takeover of our healthcare system… We are bleeding money out of every pores of our collective body… and YOU idiots want to “fix” the college football playoff system?
Even worse - how can someone consider himself conservative and believe that it is the business of our national government in Washington, D.C. to determine how college football national champions are determined? You can blather on all you want about “interstate commerce” and other nonsense, but you can’t actually believe that Washington should take up this issue – ever, much less right now – and believe in a limited national government.
God help us with “conservatives” like this.
While others have reported that a bipartisan group of Senators arrived at the current Senate compromise all on their own, Howard Dean says that’s not true. It seems that he’s responsible for the proposal currently being considered in the Senate.
Former Governor Howard Dean helped broker a health care compromise that Senate Democratic leaders say could move the bill forward.
Dean’s proposal is designed to satisfy both supporters and opponents of a “public option” health plan.
VPR’s Bob Kinzel reports.
(Kinzel) While the vast majority of Democrats support the public option, all the Republicans and a few Democrats do not, and this group has threatened to filibuster the bill if the public option is part of the final package. And it appeared very unlikely that Democratic leaders could find the 60 votes that are needed to break a filibuster.
So Dean outlined a compromise plan to Senate Majority leader Harry Reid as a way to break the deadlock.
