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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The Sunlight Foundation’s Luke Rosiak reported on Friday the Republican National Committee spent $1.4 million on the redesign of GOP.com, a figure which totals more than five times what the RNC’s Democratic counterpart spent to host and maintain Democrats.org. Sources familiar with the RNC’s digital makeover, however, contest Sunlight’s report, calling it “ridiculous.”

Rosiak writes:

The biggest disparity seems to be bandwidth costs–the RNC paid Smartech Corp., a Republican-focused hosting firm, more than a million dollars, plus $22,000 to Eloqua, compared to the DNC’s $203,000 to Sprint, Switch and Data and Servint Corp.–despite the fact that the two sites’ traffic, which determines bandwidth usage and, largely, hosting costs, was the same.

But the design of the site itself was costly, too. In the months prior to the October 13 launch of GOP.com, the committee paid $328,000 to 11 firms for Web development.

For an organization that prides itself on investigative research, the Sunlight Foundation is comically inept at reading campaign finance data. “They should learn to read an FEC report,” remarked my source.

The most outrageous of the RNC’s web-related expenditures, Sunlight’s exposé goes, is the $1 million-plus disbursement to Tennessee-based Smartech Corp. for hosting services. Smartech, considered by many a heavyweight in Republican web hosting, began consulting for the RNC in 2000.

“I can tell you from my tenure there that the Smartech bill includes a lot of things that aren’t GOP.com,” said former RNC eCampaign Director Michael Turk. “If you go back and look at that bill over time, I suspect it has always been high, regardless of who was Chair and regardless of whether they were rolling out a new GOP.com.”

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Organizing for America, the increasingly combative political operation of the White House, today unveiled a new web video targeting Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele, charging the Republican Party chief with “siding with Washington elites and insurance companies and playing political games to kill reform.”

The latest installment in OfA’s “call ‘em out” campaign—a call to arms of sorts for complacent allies of President Barack Obama to debunk Republican myths about heath care reform—accuses Steele of scare-mongering and orchestrating a misinformation campaign against the President’s efforts on health care.

“Michael Steele is willing to lie and play political games in order to kill reform that would help Americans of every political party — so we’re calling him out,” reads an email from OfA Executive Director Jen O’Malley announcing the video.

The Democrats’ new web campaign, however, is as blatantly wrong as it is overtly hostile.

Opening with a recent segment from White House-scorned FOX News on health care reform’s “obligation to older Americans,” Steele said, “Just look at the situation with our veterans when you have a manual out there telling our veterans, you know, stuff like are you really a value to your community. You know, encouraging them to commit suicide.” Promptly followed by a blaring, rubber-stamped chyron reading “FALSE,” OfA cites as Politifact.com as cover for their claim.

At issue is a Department of Veteran Affairs-funded pamphlet—dubbed the “death book” by the Wall Street Journal—which presented various advanced care scenarios to aging veterans, callously prompting readers to then decide if their life would be “not worth living.” Democratic strategists correctly note the “Your Life, Your Choices” document was first published in 1997 and promoted by the VA throughout President George W. Bush’s two terms in office. What they fail to mention, conveniently, is that the “manual” was suspended after a review by Bush administration officials – and only later revived in 2009 by the new Democratic administration.

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It’s that time again.  Short version: RNC beat DNC, but DSCC & DCCC significantly outraised their counterparts - sufficiently so that the Democrats raised more overall for the month.  When debt is factored in, the Democrats also went from being significantly behind on cash-on-hand to being slightly ahead.  That being said: the RNC and NRCC are both reporting significant increases in small-person donors.

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How worried is the White House that it doesn’t have any Republican support for its health care rationing bill?

WASHINGTON (Oct 11) - The Democratic National Committee is canceling a television ad touting GOP support for health care reform after protests from one of the Republicans mentioned, former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole.

[snip]

Dole told ABC News on Sunday that he objected to the ad’s criticism of the current Republican leadership.

“I just didn’t think it was fair, when I’ve tried to be helpful in encouraging a bipartisan solution, for the DNC to run an ad that I interpreted and I know others did as a backhanded comment about Republicans,” Dole said.

This worried. Also, desperate: after all, while I have nothing against former Senator Dole I’m also not that interested in his position on health care. If the President wants the GOP to sign off on his health care proposals, there are plenty of current Republican elected officials for him to court. The complication that most of them have been repeatedly rebuffed by this administration for months (and are thus legitimately disbelieving of the administration’s motives) is a complication of the administration’s own making, and is their complication to resolve. The White House can start by apologizing to Rep. Boehner and the rest of the House leadership for shutting them out for six months.

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Wow, this is off-message.

The DNC:

“The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists - the Taliban and Hamas this morning - in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize,” DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse told POLITICO.

Meet some terrorist lot thrower-inners.

Glenn Greenwald:

there are simply no meaningful “peace” accomplishment in his record — at least not yet — and there’s plenty of the opposite. That’s what makes this Prize so painfully and self-evidently ludicrous.

Peter Beinart:

I like Barack Obama as much as the next liberal, but this is a farce. He’s done nothing to deserve the prize.

Ezra Klein:

How long till the Nobel Committee just gives up the ghost and names “you!” the winner of the peace prize?

Lot of people discovered this morning that they’ve suddenly been made Republicans now, is all I’m saying.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, whose decision not to seek a third term as governor sparked immense speculation among Republicans about a 2012 campaign, announced today he will launch the “Freedom First” PAC in early November, granting him the opportunity to curry favor among the party faithful by raising and transferring sums of money to state and federal Republican candidates.

After launching a website last week describing Pawlenty as “extreme,” the Democratic National Committee today characterized the potential 2012 contender as a “part-time Governor” after news surfaced he was to launch a political action committee.

“Tim Pawlenty is quickly becoming the definition of ’say one thing and do another’. Today’s news about Pawlenty starting a political action committee is just the latest in a series of broken pledges by the Governor - first breaking his pledge to not raise taxes on the people of Minnesota, and now breaking his pledge to finish his term ‘strong’ as Governor,” said DNC spokesman Hari Sevugan.

“This is just more evidence that Pawlenty is, at best, a part-time Governor who cares more about his national political ambitions than the people of Minnesota,” he said in an email to reporters this afternoon.

While the formation of PACs are indeed a signature of budding presidential campaigns, Democrats have not always been of the opinion they somehow represent a “broken pledge” or a dereliction of duty, as one political advisor close to Pawlenty noted.

Then-Senator Hillary Clinton filed a statement of organization for her leadership PAC, “HILLPAC,” on January 5, 2001, spending eight years as a “part-time” Senator before leaving her post in 2009.

On June 25, 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama announced the formation of “Hope Fund,” whose donations to politicians in key 2008 primary states raised questions of legality on the level of coordination between the PAC and the Obama campaign.

And four days after the official formation of Obama’s “Hope Fund” PAC, then-Senator Joe Biden filed a statement of organization with the FEC for his “Unite our States” PAC, in anticipation of his campaign for president in 2008.

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Wouldn’t you know it: I decide not to do anything consequential and the fundraising numbers become available. Short version: the GOP out-raised the Democrats for the first time since April; the NRSC beat out the DSCC for the second month; the NRCC continues to stay essentially tied with the DCCC; and the Democrats aren’t paying their debt down.

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I hope that they spent money on this:

Look, I think that George W. Bush’s current unpopularity among the American people is a bit unfair, but I recognize that it exists - so trying to excuse the current President’s habit of doing end-runs around the nomination process because he’s just like Bush* is, well, dumb. The majority of the populace will react badly to the comparison and the percentage that won’t react badly will also not take it particularly seriously.

Michael Silence (via Instapundit) wants to know what the point was for this campaign ad. I refer him to Andrew Klavan for the answer.

Moe Lane

PS: No, by the way.

*Not that he is, more’s the pity.

Crossposted to RedState.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) Explicitly, and as part of the pushback to the Cheney interview where the former Vice President weighed the current President in the balance, and found him wanting.

Democrats hit back just minutes after Cheney’s interview aired. The Democratic National Committee fired off an e-mail to reporters disputing Cheney’s argument that the CIA records released last week showed the enhanced interrogation techniques under the Bush administration were effective in gathering intelligence about Al Qaeda. The e-mail, which cited various news reports, also accused the former vice president of being a “strong and vocal proponent of torture,” and pointed to polls that show “American’s don’t agree with Cheney on national security.”

Leaving aside for the moment the wanton cruelty done to the English language with that rogue apostrophe - grammar-boarding, perhaps? - I have to ask: will this official accusation by the Democratic National Committee be acted upon, or even officially noticed, by the President of the United States?  And if not: well, why not?  After all, I assume that he agrees with the accusation - no competent party leader would let his organization go so off-message like this - so you’d think that he’d want to do something about it.

You’d think.

Moe Lane.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Short version: Democrats had a good month for the DNC - they beat out the RNC for a change - which was enough to let them end with a edge in amount raised and total cash-on-hand of a couple million. Fortunately, July fundraising for the congressional and senatorial committees was not a repeat of June’s: despite their having a significant edge in membership, the DSCC lagged the NRSC and the DCCC barely edged the NRCC. And the debt still remains significant on the Democrats’ side.

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Greg Sargent, doing his part as a mouthpiece for the online left, is trying his best to deflect concerns over flag@whitehouse.gov, but in the process reveals that Democrats are now admitting the White House collected data on individuals from flag@whitehouse.gov.

Here’s the deal — and you’ll have to pardon wading through the stupid that is Greg Sargent regurgitating DNC talking points:

John Cornyn has a contact form on his Senate website.

You can contact Cornyn by filling in your name, address, etc. and sending an email note.

Greg Sargent breathlessly reports that

Now the DNC is striking back by pointing out that similar email collection is done on the Web sites of Senators and members of Congress, including … John Cornyn.

Over on Cornyn’s Senate Web site, for instance, you find that people who want to contact the Senator are asked to submit personal info, such as their names, addresses and emails, which are all required.

In other words, “John Cornyn does it too.”

But, as Cornyn points out, and the DNC admits, with Cornyn’s website it is an individual offering their own information to contact the Senator. With Barack Obama, it is people offering other people’s information.

The distinction is huge.

But the DNC argues this is a meaningless distinction. Following Cornyn’s logic about the White House, the DNC says, shouldn’t those who write in to Cornyn’s Web site to criticize the Senator ask what his office will do with their personal info?

Of course that is desperation on the Democrats’ part. Trying to deflect attention from the White House invading people’s privacy, the Democratic National Committee is making real news by admitting flag@whitehouse.gov was used to collect data on people being turned in by third parties.

Hari Sevugan is the Democrats’ spokesperson at the DNC. Sevugan is the one responsible for suggesting Eric Cantor supported or, more precisely “fanned the flames” on Nazi-ish conduct among Obamacare opponents. Nevermind that Cantor is Jewish. And nevermind that Cantor was in Israel and unable to respond at the time.

Sevugan is now either lying or just foolish. Either way, the DNC and Barack Obama are really souring relations with Democrats in Congress.

Moe noted yesterday that Barack Obama’s “Organizing for America”, which is run out of the Democratic National Committee, has been scheduling people to meet with their members of Congress. The constituents were getting emails confirming their appointments, showing up, then discovering that there was no appointment. Congresscritters are hacked off with all these people showing up for appointments that were never really scheduled.

Well, Sevugan said

the issue was “not a widespread problem” and characterized contact between lawmakers and the DNC, which is the president’s political operation, as “a couple of questions.”

Heh. That’s called being foolish or lying.

By Wednesday, the scope had grown considerably. Sevugan said it was understandable given the size of the effort that a few people would misinterpret the instructions.

More:

Dianne Feinstein has complained that as many as 100 people showed up expecting a meeting with the senator herself. And Republican aides say they have gotten complaints from 15 House GOP offices saying that the blast e-mail from President Obama’s political arm led some people to believe that they actually had a meeting with their member of Congress.

In fact, numerous members of Congress of both parties have been encountering Democratic activists in their offices who thought they had an appointment. It makes the Congressmen, regardless of party, look bad when a person shows up thinking they have a appointment scheduled via Barack Obama complete with an email confirmation. And it, in turn, really makes the congressmen angry at Barack Obama.

Way to play to core competencies, Obama and Hari!

At a health care town hall today, President Barack Obama told a New Hampshire audience that he has never claimed to be an advocate of a single-payer health care system, alleging that his Republican opponents were employing “scare tactics” to derail substantive health care reform.

“I have not said that I am a supporter of a single-payer system,” he said, channeling former presidential contender John ‘I voted for it before I voted against it’ Kerry.

But in August of last year, Obama touted single-payer systems as a promising solution to the ailing health care system at a New Mexico town hall. Eliminating private insurance companies and instead opting for a pseudo-Medicare system with the government footing the bill for all health care-related expenses, he said, would be a more effective means to provide greater coverage than our system’s current iteration.

“If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” said then-Senator Obama. “I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody.”

Evidence of Obama’s open embrace of single payer health care systems dates farther back than 2008, much to the chagrin of the White House’s professional wordsmiths, who no doubt spent hours retooling the president’s message for today’s town hall.

Unequivocally expressing his support for a government-run health care system, Obama said to a crowd of AFL-CIO members in 2003, “I happen to be a proponent of single-payer, universal health care coverage.”

Obama’s evolution on the extent to which the federal government should meddle in the private marketplace of health care coverage is one that speaks to the White House’s justifiable concern they may be losing the debate. Obama and Congressional Democrats are anxious to stem the tide of fleeting public opinion, and both have gone to great lengths to cast their opponents as fear mongers.

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As ordinary citizens across the country continue to ratchet up their level of interest and activity in the legislative process, President Obama and his campaign arm, Organizing (formerly “Obama”) For America, are struggling to cope with the tufts of grass sprouting up in the midst of their carefully astroturfed national field.

Last week, in what may have been the first instance of an American government officially calling on one group of American citizens to protest against, “get in [the] faces” of, and shout down another group of their own countrymen, President Obama authorized his campaign arms, the DNC and Organizing for America, to call opponents of his health overhaul plan a “dangerous mob” and to encourage supporters to counter (violently, if necessary) reasonable demonstrations and to put a stop to their questioning of elected officials.

Obama followed this up by sending an email via OFA in which he declared the health care reform debate “the moment [his] movement was built for” and called on his remaining campaign supporters to attend “thousands of events” across the country to crowd civic-minded Americans out of public events and to create, through organized efforts, the appearance of actually-nonexistent support for his extremely unpopular health overhaul.

The White House also put out a request for its supporters to turn in any of their fellow citizens who voiced concerns with President Obama’s $1 trillion health care overhaul to the White House — even if those concerns were simply spoken in what the White House called “casual conversation.”

Today, in an additional effort to create the appearance that the proposal is far more popular than it is among the voting public, OFA director Mitch Stewart called on Obama supporters to flood their Representatives’ district offices in support of Obamacare.

The text of the email is below:

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The Democrats just can’t get their talking points right on Eric Cantor (R-VA).

It was only last year when Cantor’s name was mentioned as a possible Vice Presidential pick that the Democrats wanted everyone to know he’s a Jew. They didn’t mention the religion of any of the other potential candidates.

Now, however, they are accusing Eric Cantor, who is Jewish, of fostering Nazism in the United States.

Hari Sevugan of the Democratic National Committee sent out an email earlier today with this:

It’s disgusting that rather than condemning this hate filled symbolism and mob activity, the highest echelons of the Republican party from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck on down, are encouraging it - and that the likes of Michael Steele and Eric Cantor are fanning the flames of this is reprehensible. The repeated use of Nazi symbolism at community meetings by the Republican incited mob proves that these protests have nothing to do with health care, but rather that the Republican party is willing to sink to the lowest, most despicable levels to accomplish their goal of “breaking” President Obama.

That’s just how desperate the Democrats are — accusing a Jewish Republican of fanning the flames of Nazism and the use of Nazi symbols.

I would have liked to have gotten a comment from Eric Cantor on this, but he is in Israel this week. Ironic.

With well over half of America firmly in opposition to the Obama/Kennedy/Pelosi health overhaul plan, Democrats are grasping at anything they can possibly find to reassure themselves that they are still both right and representative of the “collective American will” on this and myriad other issues.

To that end, Jen O’Malley Dillon, executive director of the Democratic National Committee, sent an email to supporters this afternoon that is virtually dripping with desperation. Called “5 Facts About the Anti-Reform Mobs,” Dillon’s email is a frantic effort to reassure the shrinking, increasingly-fringe minority that actually support’s the President’s debt-growing and government-expanding programs that, against all evidence, they are the true majority on this issue and the opponents of their increasingly-unpopular proposals are an angry, paid, fringe “mob.”

Dillon wrote:

There’s been a lot of media coverage about organized mobs intimidating lawmakers, disrupting town halls, and silencing real discussion about the need for real health insurance reform.

The truth is, it’s a sham. These “grassroots protests” are being organized and largely paid for by Washington special interests and insurance companies who are desperate to block reform. They’re trying to use lies and fear to break the President and his agenda for change.

Health insurance reform is about our lives, our jobs, and our families — we can’t let distortions and intimidation get in the way. We need to expose these outrageous tactics, and we’re counting on you to help. Can you read these “5 facts about the anti-reform mobs,” then pass them along to your friends and family?

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Escalating their attacks on President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul as a dangerous “experiment,” the RNC released a new web video today in which they characterize the President and his White House as, among other things, “in denial” over the economy.

RNC Chairman Michael Steele said, “President Obama has been in office now for 200 days, and the second hundred days of his administration have been worse than the first. The $787 billion stimulus experiment he rushed through Congress still isn’t creating jobs. The job-killing national energy tax he rushed through the House is threatening families and small businesses with higher energy bills.

“And now he wants to rush through Congress a $1.6 trillion government-run health care experiment that will make health care more expensive, add to the deficit and cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their current health insurance and doctors. President Obama has done all of this in just 200 days – and there are still 1,260 days left in his term. America can’t take any more of President Obama’s experiments,” he said.

This morning, the DNC launched a new ad curiously portraying President Obama’s critics as right-wing fringe lunatics, reflexively opposed to the president’s domestic agenda for belief in a citizenship conspiracy. At the close of the offensively absurd web video, a voice over instructed viewers to call the RNC to voice their outrage.

But the RNC was quick to the turn the tables on the Democrats with the particularly well-produced web ad, featuring an aloof Obama playing basketball while figures of the economic downturn race across the screen.

And in a surprising display of savvy, Democratic allies who reached the RNC’s phone lines were instructed to press 1 to voice concern over Republican “mobs,” at which point their call was automatically directed to the DNC’s main switchboard.

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Update: “The RNC is inciting angry mobs to shout out legitimate discussion at public events across the country and now they want to ignore people who deplore their tactics,” said DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse about the DNC’s failed effort to incite angry mobs to flood the RNC with phone calls.

*       *      *

This is clever:

Republicans played a trick on Democrats today by redirecting angry telephone calls coming into their switchboard to the Democratic National Committee, CNN reports.

Earlier this morning, the DNC released a web video accusing the GOP of inciting mob activity.

“At the end of the video, the DNC instructs people to call the Republican National Committee to express outrage. Callers who dial the RNC’s main number to voice their concern about the DNC’s charges are told to press 1, which sends them to the DNC’s main switchboard.”

The emphasis on that deliciously ironic pair of phrases is mine. In the name of countering what they claim is the GOP’s inexcusable “incit[ement of] mob activity,” the Democrats did what they always do: stir up the masses and, yes, incite mob activity in opposition to the GOP.

Whoever the clever RNC staffer was who thought to redirect those calls right back to the source of the outrage — the DNC — deserves a free lunch and a letter of commendation. That was freaking awesome.

As President Obama called on his activists around the country to attend “thousands of events this month” in an effort to convince legislators that they, not the 55% of voters who oppose the Obama/Kennedy/Pelosi health care overhaul proposals, represent the majority of Americans (or, as a DailyKos diarist put it, “the collective will of the American people”), the Democratic National Committee was releasing an ad decrying the Obamacare-opposing “mob” as a bunch of Limbaugh-loving, Bible-carrying, extremist “birther” sheeple.

The ad is below:

Interestingly, the same crowd that is currently spending time and money to organize a campaign denigrating the “mob’s” dissent spent the last 8 years proclaiming such “mob” actions to be the quintessential example of Constitutionally-protected, God-given Freedom of Speech. This includes the current President, who spent that time and the decades before it acting as a professional rabble-rousing astroturfer (something that makes his sensitivity to such tactics understandable, but his apparent inability to recognize real dissent and outrage, rather than its manufactured counterpart, more than a bit puzzling).

As Jim Geraghty wrote this morning in a post titled “When More Than Half Dislike Your Ideas, It’s More Than ‘The Right-Wing Base’“:

I think the DNC — and Democrats, and the Obama administration — are on the verge of making a serious error by dismissing folks who show up at constituent meetings as “the mob.” …Skepticism of this health care plan goes way, way beyond “the right wing Republican base.” Alternatively, the right wing Republican base now amounts to a bit more than half of the voting public. …In the face of numbers like these, what do Democrats gain from a message like this[?]

Beyond being a whiplash-inducing reversal of position from the last 8 years (remember Hillary Clinton screeching “WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEBATE AND DISAGREE WITH ANY ADMINISTRATION!”?), the left’s change of position on both free speech and community organizing has negated what they portrayed as President Obama’s strongest qualification for the office (which isn’t saying much, given his overall lack of qualifications): his experience as a community organizer.

Even more striking is the fact that those the DNC and Obama now insultingly claim are organizing and provoking the angry “mob” are, to use Obama campaign rhetoric from just last year, doing the same work Jesus did when He was on the earth.

It’s often striking to consider the swiftness of the people’s reversal on Jesus Himself, from a king’s entrance on Palm Sunday to condemnation and crucifixion just days later. With the Democrats’ sudden 180° on the actions of those they compared to Jesus just months ago, we have a living, current example of just how such a change can happen.