In the latest rant against Marco Rubio Crist attacks Rubio for voting for tax increases in Florida, which were actually unanimously endorsed and Jeb Bush sponsored refusals to roll back property taxes for education initiatives. Crist is also attacking Rubio for wanting to get rid of property taxes by raising sales taxes, a measure that Crist had actually suggested in the first place.

It that wasn’t bad enough, Crist called himself pro-life, ignoring that until recently he called himself pro-choice and called himself “anti-tax” despite proposing and signing into law several recent tax hikes on Florida citizens.

But it gets even better.

Crist also attacked conservatives generally. He pointed out a left wing Daily Kos poll that shows people who question Barack Obama’s citizenship support Marco Rubio. He called conservatives supporting Rubio “angry.” Then he said something peculiar.

“There are a lot of Republicans that don’t have the inclination to go to executive committee meetings,” he said. “There is wide swath of republican voters out there that don’t necessarily listen to cable tv all the time.”

Now, I don’t know if he means that as a good thing or a bad thing. My suspicion is Crist views people who show up at GOP meetings and watch cable news as bad for him. Why? Because all of the county GOP executive committee’s in Florida are backing Marco Rubio and the cable channels are documenting Crist’s flip-flops with great diligence. In other words, Crist is hoping a lot of ignorant voters show up to vote for him on election day.

Lieberman has been a thorn in the side of the left ever since they decided to challenge him back in 2006. In that year, the left beat Lieberman in the Connecticut Democrat Primary. Lieberman decided to stay in as an independent in the general election and won. With a number of his long time Senate friends endorsing the Democrat in 2006 because the man had a “D” next to his name, Lieberman has been his own man ever since.

Lieberman retains his Senate committee chairmanship and the privileges of being a Democrat member of the Senate. That may change soon as Harry Reid is staking his reputation on passage of the health care legislation.

Oh. Right.

They didn’t shred, they didn’t redact, and they threw out people’s sensitive and personal information - including things like copies of Social Security cards, W-4 forms, and driver’s licenses. I’m not a lawyer, but apparently that’s grounds for legal action right there; document disposal requirements are very, very strict. Which is why the local ACORN branch is trying the novel ‘Oops, fall cleaning‘ excuse.

Which almost might be believable, except of course for the underage El Salvadoran illegal immigrant brothel thing.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

In a recent post on Cato-at-Liberty, I suggested that advocates of limited government should not attack Obama for the record FY2009 deficit. My argument was based on two points. First, the real problem is government spending, so that is where we should focus on energies. Fixating on deficits can be helpful, to be sure, but it also can unwittingly aid the other side since it enables them to offer a “solution” in the form of higher taxes. My second point was that Obama is largely not responsible for the FY2009 budget, which began on October 1, 2008.

This second point has led to some spirited - and conflicting - responses, with Bruce Bartlett attacking me from the left and Mustango attacking me from the right.

Let’s deal with Mustango’s criticisms. He argues that budgets are passed by Congress, presumably implying that Nancy Pelosi, et al, should be blamed. The Speaker of the House is a complete statist, so I’m a big fan of anybody who points out her flaws, but since President Bush supported all of the wasteful spending adopted in the last year (as well as the first seven years) of his presidency, he also must bear responsibility for the results.

The second criticism is that I was letting Obama off the hook for his pork-filled stimulus. That’s definitely not the case. My blog post specifically noted that Obama bears part of the responsibility for the FY2009 deficit, but since less than $200 billion of so-called stimulus was allocated in FY2009, that is rather trivial compared to a budget deficit of more than $1.4 trillion. And even if the extra spending from the omnibus spending bill is added to Obama’s tab, his total is still less than $250 billion.

Bruce Bartlett’s disagreements are harder to address, largely because I have a hard time believing anybody could read my post and conclude that I was being - as he wrote - a shill for the GOP. Bruce seems to think I was blaming Obama for all post-2009 deficits, even though I never made such a claim. What I did say, and completely stand by, is that Obama “is continuing the wasteful and profligate policies of his big-spending predecessor.”

I don’t care if somebody has an “R” after their name of a “D” after their name. If they increase the burden of government spending, they should be criticized.

You may feel like the political system is broken and the Democrats are not listening to the voters. You feel that way because it is true, the Democrats are not listening. But that does not mean the bill will not die — because it turns out that the two Independent Senators are listening.

Clearly, the Democratic Senate leadership and the White House put so much pressure on the so-called moderate Senators to win this one vote to proceed to the bill, they created a political mirage that the bill’s chances are strong. But they are not. The bill is very brittle, and when it implodes, it will shatter.

As the bill stands right now, the Democrats cannot pass it. They cannot get to 60 votes on the vote to end the filibuster of the bill.

If they try to take the public option out, Senator Sanders and others (Burris, Brown and Franken) are threatening to vote against ending the filibuster. If they keep the public option in, then Senator Lieberman has threatened to vote against ending the filibuster. Either way — public option in or out — the bill dies. And Senator Sanders is not going to agree to any co-oped-trigger-opt-out compromise on the public option.

Is it any surprise that the two Independent Senators have put the Senate in this position? They are listening to the public, and are playing a role that no single Democratic Senator has the courage to play — you know, listen to your voters.

Turns out the moderates like Senators Lincoln, Landrieu and Nelson are now viewed by their voters as servants of Senator Reid and the White House. They destroyed all their work to try and get their voters to see them as something other than liberal Democrats who will just spend and tax and spend. This was the highest price Senator Reid paid to win the vote to proceed to the bill: he has forced the so-called moderate Senators look like lap-dogs.

Now the moderates are going to have to do something equally dramatic to convince their voters they are not puppets of Senator Reid and the White House. And the only thing dramatic enough is to vote against ending the filibuster of the ObamaCare. It is the only vote that matters now.

Meanwhile, the Dems sink farther in the polls the longer health care is front and center — and the Senate rules are going to make sure the health care bill is front and center. Here is how:

Every single amendment offered on the Senate floor will be filibustered. Every single one, so the Dems will need, again, 60 votes, just to attempt to vote on an amendment to the Reid bill. Here is how Senator Lieberman described the Senate floor on ObamaCare over the weekend:

“[O]nce the bill is on the floor, amendments will be offered,” he said on Sunday. “But essentially every amendment is subject to a filibuster and will take 60 votes to pass. My only resort, and every other senator — and there will be others who feel exactly the way I do about the public option, if the public option is still in there — the only resort we have is to say no at the end to reporting the bill off the floor.”

Finally, I am really shocked, but some one in the Democratic party is talking rationally about the negative political impact health care is having on their members and on the Democratic Congress. (Usually this concern is expressed by Democrats as — we need to focus on jobs and the economy.)

But this morning was different. Howard Dean (the former National Democratic Party Chairman) said the Democrats were “playing with dynamite” and that health care was opening up “huge divisions within the Democratic party” and that there are going to be “high costs” in terms of lost Congressional seats in 2010, because President Obama will not be on the ballot. Dean also said without a public option, the activists will sit on their hands in 2010. Clearly, the left is worried the public option will be dropped to get Senator Lieberman’s vote and are now positioning themselves, through Senator Sanders and Howard Dean, to stop that from happening.

But what Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders and Senator Lieberman are really doing is laying the political framework for the collapse of ObamaCare — because they believe the political costs of passing something with or without a public option are just too high — and I agree with them.

(Rich Lowry also agrees that the health care issue is killing the Democrats politically. “The Democrats Health Care Delusion,” is particularly harsh, and one I agree with.)

And the public option is just one of many politically damaging issues the Democrats must deal with in the Senate: abortion, tax increases, huge spending increases, Medicare cuts and government control of health care, are all going to be in play.

There are other political forces at work too: Senator Sanders and Howard Dean likely sees that the left will take the blame for health care costing huge numbers of House and Senate seats in 2010, and it will impair the left’s entire non-health care agenda. So they are now trying to build a firewall against that blame — by pointing any lack of a public option as the real cause of the collapse of health care reform.

Just for the record, on cloture votes in the U.S. Senate, the anti-ObamaCare and pro-ObamaCare forces are tied, 1-1. We won the “doc fix” cloture vote by 13 votes, and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Reid won the recent cloture vote on the motion to proceed to the bill by not a single vote to spare.

Now, the moderates must go above and beyond opposing the White House and Senator Reid for them to earn their so-called moderate label back. Right now, the voters are never going to believe these Senators again about happy-talk about being concerned about the public option, or the deficit, or being pro-life, or fighting against new taxes, or opposing Medicare cuts.

The only way they are going to be able to prove they are truly concerned is for them to vote against ending the filibuster of the bill, and actually kill the bill. But it doesn’t matter if these Dems cave on the filibuster, the Independent Senators have said they won’t.

Perhaps this is why Senator Lieberman said on Sunday, “I don’t think anybody thinks this bill will pass.”

UPDATE, with a H/T to Drudge, for making this his lead story: Gerald F. Seib’s opening from his story “Lieberman Digs In on Public Option,” from the Wall Street Journal, is worth quoting:

“Sen. Joseph Lieberman, speaking in that trademark sonorous baritone, utters a simple statement that translates into real trouble for Democratic leaders: “I’m going to be stubborn on this.”

Stubborn, he means, in opposing any health-care overhaul that includes a “public option,” or government-run health-insurance plan, as the current bill does. His opposition is strong enough that Mr. Lieberman says he won’t vote to let a bill come to a final vote if a public option is included.

Probe for a catch or caveat in that opposition, and none is visible. Can he support a public option if states could opt out of the plan, as the current bill provides? “The answer is no,” he says in an interview from his Senate office. “I feel very strongly about this.” How about a trigger, a mechanism for including a public option along with a provision saying it won’t be used unless private insurance plans aren’t spreading coverage far and fast enough? No again.

So any version of a public option will compel Mr. Lieberman to vote against bringing a bill to a final vote? “Correct,” he says.”

Hmmm, says I.

Rasmussen reports today that a meager 38% of us “favor the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats.” In fact, the article goes on to suggest that 56% actually oppose it. The aristocrats on the Hill, meanwhile, continue to push forward with the most un-American, un-Patriotic legislation presented to the American people…their BOSSES…since the New deal. ANY socialized Government-run system runs counter to everything our Founding Fathers fought and died for, and voting for it runs counter to everything being an “American” is supposed to represent.

We’ve given the ruling class Tea Parties, and they call us Nazis. We’ve had protests and rallies and we’ve crashed their phone systems trying to tell them no, and they’ve thrown the race card in our face. They’ve tried to define “we, the People” along party lines by suggesting the GOP is just the party of “no”, while the Democrats are the party “fulfilling an agenda of progress and change”. [For the record, I'll take "party of no" over "party of death" any day.]

The health care debate is not about health care, it’s not about what race you are, and it’s certainly not about which party you’re affiliated with. The health care debate is about who really runs this country. Is it the American taxpayer, or is it the power-monger on Capitol Hill?

• IA-03. D+1.  Leonard Boswell is the incumbent (first elected 1997); Cook currently does not list the district as in play (Likely Democratic).  Former wrestler Jim Gibbons (no campaign website yet) has just announced; he’ll be facing former National Guard chopper pilot Dave Funk in the primary.
• MN-01. R+1. Tim Walz is the incumbent (first elected in 2006); Cook currently does not list the district as in play (probably because the Congressman won handily in 2008).  Former state legislator (and lightning rod) Allen Quist has declared; he’ll be hammering Walz on the latter’s support of the ’stimulus,’ cap-and-trade, and health care rationing.
• CT-04. D+5.  Jim Hines is the incumbent (freshman); Cook currently lists the district as in play (Likely Democratic).  Rick Torres (no campaign website yet) joins Rob Russo, Dan Debicella, Rob Merkle, & Will Gregory as competing for the Republican nomination.

Yup, the 2010 campaign season’s started. Time to start paying attention to your own, local races…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

See also here. Congressional hopeful Bosse has also called for a national Phantom Congress Movement. There’s already been several people joining up; somebody should start an official website. Or run for their state’s own phantom CDs.

Or, heck, run for real ones.

Moe Lane

PS: Feel free to provide links to you, or somebody else, jumping on this particular bandwagon. The more creative, the better.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

But more stories like this one mean the GOP gains in 2010 are going to be significant.

Rep. Dennis Moore (D-Kan.) is reportedly going to announce today that he won’t seek re-election, making him the first Member of Congress this cycle to announce an outright retirement from the House.

The six-term Democrat’s departure, which was reported first by the Kansas City Star Monday morning, will leave his Republican-leaning district up for grabs in 2010.

I have thought for a while now that the left’s obsession with “man made global warming” looked much more like a religion than any sort of scientific debate.   After reading Chapter 6 of Liberal Fascism, I understand that it’s not global warming that is the religion, it is the entire spectrum of hot button issues the left defends.

Mr. Goldberg argues throughout the chapter that there was a religious faith in the 60’s by radicals and liberals in the God state.   Only through the state could man’s greatest potential be realized. This faith included their savior, JFK.  I am young enough that I only know what I was taught in school about JFK.  What I learned there was that he was assassinated in Dallas, and that the nation wept.  In school I was never taught any of things he may have done as President to become a great figure.  Just that he was, and that it was a national tragedy that he died.

…after Kennedy’s murder, Kennedy the nationalistic Third Wayer was replaced by Kennedy the fighting liberal.  The JFK Camelot eclipsed the one who tried to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro.

Woodrow Wilson’s grandson Dean Francis Sayre delivered a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral in homage to the fallen leader.  “We have been present at a new crucifixion,” he told the assembled dignitaries.  “All of us,” he explained, “have had a part in the slaying of our President.  It was the good people who crucified our Lord, and not merely those who acted as executioners.”

Mr. Goldberg spends a significant amount of time comparing Kennedy’s actual presidency with what it is described as today by the left.  Anytime people look back on history, there can be a desire to white wash events.  The left seems to have forgotten the white wash and gone with a total re-write.  But what struck me the most is the number of descriptions of Kennedy by the left that could equally be applied to President Obama by the liberal media today.  For example:

In 1964 James Reston summarized the newly minted liberal nostalgia for America’s Greek god of a president.  “He was a story-book President, younger and more handsome than mortal politicians, remote even from his friends, graceful, almost elegant with poetry on his tongue and a radiant young woman at his side.”

Or later on…

Recall the key themes to Mussolini’s cult of personality:  youth, action, expertise, vigor, glamor, military service.  Mussolini cast himself as the leader of a youth movement, a new generation empowered through intellect and expertise to break with the old categories of left and right.  JFK’s stirring inaugural spoke of “a new generation of Americans –born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.”

Both of these passages were describing JFK’s legacy, but they could equally describe President Obama’s current cult-like following.   How many times have we heard about President Obama’s story book campaign?  A political “outsider” who came out of nowhere.  And keeping Michelle Obama in the back of your mind, do you think the press wouldn’t use the first passage to describe Obama today?  Surely we can all agree that during the election, the “cult of personality” was in full effect on President Obama.   We were told that the youth of the nation would carry Senator Obama to victory.  And even though the youth turned out in very comparable numbers to previous elections, I have heard news stories just this week discussing what the youth will do in 2010 after getting their President elected last year.

So I ask, “Is President Obama the second coming in the religion of the left?”  His polling numbers are continuing to drop.  However, people seem to go out of their way to say, “I disagree with the President’s policies, and not with him.”  When Rush Limbaugh said he hoped the President failed, the left went into a fury.  Many of the bad decisions of this administration have been placed at the feet of Obama’s staff, and not the President.  Have we really forgotten who runs the office, and who is ultimately responsible for their decisions?  Or being the second coming of the liberal God-state, is it simply forbidden to dispute President Obama?

]]> http://www.redstate.com/andyd/2009/11/23/lf-chapter-6-and-the-second-coming/ Jed Babbin has the top story today at Human Events.

Many of President Obama’s critics argue that he and Democratic congressional leaders are out of touch with America.  That judgment is both too harsh and too kind.

It’s too harsh because President Obama congressional Democrats are already reacting to the Tea Partyers’ rebellion against his massive increases in government spending. It’s too kind because the president, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are undeterred. They will do whatever is necessary to convince voters that their relentless pursuit of their hyperliberal agenda will reduce the deficit in the hope that voters won’t stop them until it is too late.

Back in May, Obama’s administration was projecting a deficit of $7.1 trillion for the years 2010-2019 on top of the $1.8 trillion deficit in 2009.  Those projections would result in a 2019 deficit that amounted to 82% of the GDP. At that level, America would be a bad credit risk, and the deficit would either result in huge tax increases or an America that would, simply, be bankrupt.

From: John Borowski
Subject: climate change
Date: November 22, 2009 11:06:00 PM EST
To: contact@redstate.com

Dear Redstate,

I am a long time environmental/marine science teacher who lives in a state where climate change is making its mark. Our ocean’s pH is dropping? Glacial ice in the Cascades is receding? Bird migrations have been altered? We are watching invertebrate migration off the coast change? The carbon dioxide levels are 387 ppm? And because of hacked email…now, climate change is definitely a fraud? How sad that you put politics above all us. It is transparent and pathetic. I was…a registered Republican. A Ted Roosevelt/fiscal conservative/God fearing conservative for years and years: now I see my party taken over by fools and corporate shills. Shame on you!
John F. Borowski

Here’s the funny bit — if you google this guy you will find that he is anything but a conservative, let alone a “God fearing” conservative.

Why do lefties always feel the need to lie to establish some level of credibility with their hate?

Mary Landrieu refused to vote for cloture on the motion to proceed to the health care debate. Reid raised the offer to $300 million and Mary proved she wasn’t a cheap date after all — she took the increase, voted for cloture, and then bragged about the $300 million bribe.

In a statement sure to be repeated by Republicans endlessly over the coming weeks of Senate health care debate, the senator flaunted the inclusion of the provision. “I will correct something. It’s not $100 million, it’s $300 million, and I’m proud of it and will keep fighting for it,” Landrieu told reporters after her floor speech. “But that is not why I started this health care debate; I started this health care debate for all the reasons I just mentioned in my statement” on the floor.

Fox News has the details.

Scott Fenstermaker, the lawyer for accused terrorist Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, said the men would not deny their role in the 2001 attacks but “would explain what happened and why they did it.”

The trial of Zacarius Moussaoui tied up the federal courts for six years and he had pled guilty. How long will the American court system be tied up with pleas of not guilty and claims that America made them do it?

The data paints an ugly picture of scientists operating as political hacks orchestrating smear campaigns against global warming dissidents, deleting files rather than make their data publicly available, and manufacturing data to prove their case when the actual data does nothing of the sort.

The University of East Anglia has confirmed the authenticity of the documents. With that confirmation, we see global warming for what it is — a scam perpetuated by scientists intent on gaining access to money.

Even the Washington Post has felt the need to cover this story. The Australian Herald Sun was one of the first to cover the story. They note:

The 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down skeptics.

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle.

Ed Morrisey, at Hot Air, and others have done significant digging into the emails and documents. The highlights are:

1. Prominent environmental scientists organize a boycott of scientific journals if those journals publish scholarly material from global warming dissidents.
2. The scientists then orchestrate attacks on the dissidents because of their lack of scholarly material published in scientific journals.
3. The scientists block from the UN’s report on global warming evidence that is harmful to the anthropogenic global warming consensus.
4. The scientists, when faced with a freedom of information act request for their correspondence and data, delete the correspondence and data lest it be used against them.
5. The scientists fabricate data when their data fails to prove the earth is warming. In fact, in more than one case, scientists engaged in lengthy emails on how to insert additional made up data that would in turn cause their claims to stand out as legitimate.

Andrew Bolt of the Australian Herald Sun has sifted through the emails and finds some surprises that, at first, he was not sure were authentic, but have now been confirmed to be authentic. One, from Kevin Trenbeth in Bolder, CO, to a group of fellow global warming scientists, admits “that [they] can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that [they] can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.”

Another, from Professor Phil Jones at the Climate Research Unit, admits he “completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline [in global temperatures].”

This is damning stuff.

Still, it’d be nice if we didn’t have to deal with this particular legacy Congressman. There’s actually a serious candidate this go-round: John Loughlin. State legislator, business owner, former military; not to be unkind, but Kennedy really hasn’t worked a day in his [expletive deleted] life, and it shows. Like, for example, in Kennedy’s ability to get himself sufficiently in trouble with the Church on this issue so as to actually be denied the Sacrament.

That takes skill.

Moe Lane

*The fact that the Church has neither the ability nor the particular desire to punish Rep. Kennedy (or other avowedly pro-abortion Catholics) for their shared heresy does not make it any less of one.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Mary Landrieu, after getting $300 million in the bill for Louisiana, voted for it.

Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas not only voted for it, but now favors a public option.

Voters will remember.

Along the way, there seems to be divisions shaping up within the Democratic Party. Amendments will be offered to try to patch up differences.

Republicans should exploit this. Drag out consideration of the bill as those divisions grow, then offer amendments to exploit the divisions.

As I have said before, if Republicans work to improve the legislation, they presuppose its passage. Instead, the GOP should plan for the destruction of the bill by offering amendments designed to divide and fracture the Democrat coalition.

The Congressional and Senatorial committees’ ability to stay at rough parity is a bright spot, but the cash-on-hand problem would be a matter of some concern… if it weren’t for the fact that the Democrats just spent 14 million in October to lose the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, while the Republicans spent 16 million to win them.  I’m sure that the Democrats got every ounce of consolation out of winning NY-23 - after the GOP base demonstrated that they were willing to lose another seat rather than be ignored* - but they weren’t happy to make that trade.

All that being said:

RNC.
NRCC.
NRSC.

If it hurts too much, try Reverse the Vote! Specifically targets 24 Congressional Democrats in Red districts, goes straight to the general election candidates, the national committees don’t see a dime.

Moe Lane

*A tactic that progressive Democrats, of course, are too timid to try.  Bluster about, yes, but not actually do.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

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.