But Number 10 never envisioned that Mr. Obama’s overhaul of America’s international relations would come at the cost of its own special relationship. Despite Britain’s political and economic proximity to the United States, that special relationship — invoked in every Anglo-American diplomatic communique from Winston Churchill to George Bush — has waned, diminished in equal proportion to Mr. Obama’s disquieting provocations.

From the president’s endorsement of Eurofederalism to his State Department’s acknowledgement it considers the United Kingdom “just the same as the other 190 countries in the world,” Mr. Obama’s White House has made no secret of its Anglophobic posture on the international stage.

But the president outperformed himself last week, when, in a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, he gushed that America had no greater partner on the international stage than France.

Nothing — not his promise of neutrality in the British-Argentina conflict over the Falklands or his Oval Office renovation in which he chucked a bust of Churchill –  evidenced more the president’s willingness to shift southward America’s great European political alliance.

“We don’t have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy and the French people,” Obama said at the White House press avail.

The enduring value of Britain’s unique alliance with America is eclipsed, one might argue, for a president increasingly focused on his own domestic dilemmas: A fractured Congress, an uneasy public and compounded threat that his signature health care reforms might be upended by both.

For those who have chronicled Obama’s calculated insults, however, it is more likely the president never held America’s special relationship with Great Britain in any special esteem.

Some, including Obama’s grandmother, have speculated the president carries a lingering grudge against the British, who tortured his grandfather during Kenya’s fight against colonial rule. Obama wrote briefly in his autobiography of his grandfather’s imprisonment, which was said to have lasted more than six months.

As President Obama’s grandmother, Sarah Onyango, recounted in an interview last year with the Daily Mail: “Generally, my grandson has never believed the British do anything for a common good, rather than their selfish interests,”

Whatever the cause of President Obama’s anti-British outlook, its result — namely, a fatigued partnership across the pond — is more concerning.

On the eve of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, former UK premier Gordon Brown’s requests — no fewer than five, according to aides — for a meeting with President Obama were rebuffed. During that same period, the president held meetings with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

Even when Obama has been unfaithful, America’s compatriots across the Atlantic have held up their side of the bargain. England’s steadfast commitment to the special relationship forged decades earlier has been no where more evident than her cooperation in America’s war on terror.

Like candidate Obama, who once called the Afghan front the “war we need to win,” the Brits appreciated the necessity of the military incursion, realizing the promise Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made to Ronald Reagan three decades ago: “Your problems will be our problems and when you look for friends we shall be there.”

Providing the second largest troop contingent to the Afghan military incursion with nearly 9,500 soldiers, over 345 British servicemen have perished on the battlefields of Afghanistan since 2001. France, meanwhile, provided 63 percent fewer troops.

And yet for Obama, France has succeeded the United Kingdom as America’s greatest ally.

In administrations past, Britain was not merely another country. So, too, in the Obama era of mending international geopolitical fault lines is Britain not considered just another country: It’s decidedly less.

The subject of my editorial for today’s Guardian, we’ll see how seriously Mr. Assange takes murder in the coming days, as an African dictator moves to execute his leading democratic critic. An excerpt follows below the fold.

When WikiLeaks whistleblowers began circulating in April footage of a 2007 Iraq war incursion in which US military personnel unwittingly killed two war correspondents and several civilians, the international community was aghast at the apparent murder. With sobering questions on the material’s full context largely falling on deaf ears, the group was free to editorialise the scene as it pleased: “collateral murder”.

But now, with the recent release of sensitive diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder, upending the precarious balance of power in a fragile African state and signing the death warrant of its pro-western premier.

Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai’s call to public service has been a tortured one, punctuated by death and indignity.

[…]

After Zimbabwe’s 2008 presidential contest – featuring incumbent Mugabe, Tsvangirai and independent Simba Makoni – failed to award any candidate with the majority necessary to claim victory, the election defaulted to a runoff between the two highest vote-getters, Mugabe and Tsvangirai.

[…]

Following intense negotiations, the two parties agreed in February 2009 to a coalition government, in which Mugabe would remain head of state – a post he had held uninterrupted for 30 years – and Tsvangirai would assume the premiership. Not one month later, Tsvangirai and his wife were involved in a suspicious collision with a lorry. Though the prime minister survived, his wife for 31 years died.

With little regard for the nuances and subtlety of soft international diplomacy, WikiLeaks released last week a classified US state department cable relating a 2009 meeting between Tsvangirai and American and European ambassadors, whose countries imposed travel sanctions and asset freezes on Mugabe and his top political lieutenants on the eve of Zimbabwe’s 2002 presidential election.

[...]

Now, in the wake of the WikiLeaks’ release, one of the men targeted by US and EU travel and asset freezes, Mugabe’s appointed attorney general, has launched a probe to investigate Tsvangirai’s involvement in sustained western sanctions. If found guilty, Tsvangirai will face the death penalty.

And so, where Mugabe’s strong-arming, torture and assassination attempts have failed to eliminate the leading figure of Zimbabwe’s democratic opposition, WikiLeaks may yet succeed. Twenty years of sacrifice and suffering by Tsvangirai all for naught, as WikiLeaks risks “collateral murder” in the name of transparency. …

Read the article in its entirety at The Guardian.

When the former Maryland lieutenant governor took over the reigns of the national party apparatus two years ago, he promised an “off the hook” public relations campaign. Instead, Steele’s tenure has been marred by controversy, each more disquieting and embarrassing than the last.

For Michael Leavitt and Doug Heye, Steele’s chief of staff and communications director respectively, the chairman’s provocations were all-consuming.

From his mischaracterization of the Afghan war effort to playing the race card — and even the rationalization that his verbal misfires constituted some grand communications strategy — they were there for it all. But now they’re parting ways, even as their boss looks to retain his control over the committee.

While the two don’t expect Steele to successfully fend off his four challengers — the pair’s former colleague Gentry Collins last night dropped his bid to unseat Steele — they say they wouldn’t remain on staff even if the beleaguered chairman upset the handicappers and remained atop the Committee.

A majority of the RNC’s 168 members indicated in a new survey Monday they would not support Steele’s reelection bid. Fifty-five members, according to a Politico whip count, said they will not support the chairman under any circumstances while another thirty-three pledged to support his challengers.

Worse still for a chairman who won his post only after 6 intense rounds of balloting, not a single member of the committee indicated Steele was their second choice.

And so it appears Leavitt and Heye won’t be the only ones adjusting to life after the RNC.

In an email to friends and colleagues announcing his departure, Heye praised the efforts of RNC staff despite “difficult circumstances.” In an interview Sunday with Politico, Heye twice more spoke of the RNC’s “challenging” work environment.

To even the casual RNC observer, there is little question what created such a heavy lift for an otherwise adept communicator.

When the chairman of the Republican National Committee appropriates language once used by anti-war Democrats to describe the on-going war efforts in Afghanistan, his aides can only do so much. In this case, they could only buckle up and prepare for turbulence.

Heye has not yet announced his next job job, but Leavitt is said to have accepted a lobbying position straddling Maine and D.C.

This afternoon, Chairman Steele will debate his four would-be replacements — Saul Anuzis, Maria Cino, Reince Preibus and Ann Wagner — in an event jointly hosted by ATR and the Daily Caller and broadcast by C-SPAN.

Cross-posted from Skepticians.

Republican lawmakers — including those in the lower chamber, like Speaker-elect John Boehner — are already vowing to help kill the appropriations measure, which freezes 2010′s $3.5 trillion budget for the following year without allowing for any spending cuts.

Offered in the waning days of the present congressional session, the bill designates $80 million in federal funds for the preservation of Pacific salmon and $14 million in clean water grants for Alaska’s native population. Of course, it doesn’t end there.

We’ve obtained a copy of the lame duck legislation so that RedState’s readers might begin dissecting the bill, posting the most egregious examples of pork barrel spending in the comments section. Embedded below the fold you will find the full nearly 2,000-page document.

UPDATE: According to a tally by Sen. John McCain’s office, the legislation includes 6,488 earmarks totaling nearly $8.3 billion. In a speech from the floor of the Senate, McCain blasted the bill, asking is his colleagues if they had been “stricken with amnesia” for appropriating such wild earmarks only weeks after a swift electoral rebuke for Democrats.

“Enough with the spending, enough of mortgaging our children and our grandchildren’s futures. The phenomenon of the Tea Party — taxed enough already — they were against the spending, the earmarking,” McCain, who is looking to force the bill be read in its entirety from the floor of the Senate, said. “What is going on here? Are we tone deaf? Are we stricken with amnesia?”

The senator’s aides — as well as the senator himself on Twitter — have begun circulating what they deem the most outrageous and wasteful spending measures in the bill. Some choice selects:

$247,000 – Virus free grapes in Washington State
$413,000 – Peanut research in Alabama
$125,000 – Fishery equipment for the Guam Fisherman’s Cooperative Association
$349,000 – Swine waste management in North Carolina
$277,000 – Potato pest management in wisconsin
$246,000 – Bovine tuberculosis treatment in Michigan and Minnesota
$522,000 – Cranberry and blueberry disease and breeding in New Jersey
$500,000 – Oyster safety in Florida
$400,000 – Solar parking canopies and plug-in electric stations in Kansas
$165,000 – Maple syrup research in Vermont

Continue posting those earmarks you’ve found in the comments section.

UPDATE II: By way of C-SPAN, video of McCain’s floor speech:

Cross-posted

The video, which features a bullish “boss lady” who opens beer bottles with her teeth, “is a joke,” but “its message is not,” a release by the group, Bankrupting America, reads. “Washington’s rhetoric and policies have been creating a damaging environment of uncertainty for businesses.”

Indeed, ambiguity over business’ new regulatory burdens — from the president’s overhaul of the health care sector, financial regulatory reform and the near-certain expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts — have upended the private sector, concerned that expansions and the costly investments associated with it might break the bank.

A recent report by the Heritage Foundation revealed that if the White House blocks a deal to extend all the Bush era tax cuts — including those governing rates on capital gains, dividends and estate taxes, which are scheduled to expire on December 31 — the economy would produce 238,000 fewer jobs in 2011. For the next decade, the lapse would markedly stall job creation, producing on average 693,000 fewer jobs annually.

Even as businesses have seen marginal rebounds in profits, like the one featured in the new advertisement, decision makers are unable — many unwilling, for good reason — to reinvest as legislators and the Administration use business as their whipping boy.

“When business lack clarity, they can’t plan ahead — choking expansion, investment and job creation,” the ad’s funders warn.

Perry’s appointment to the RGA won’t be the governor’s first rodeo: He led the same committee in 2008 and had worked in varying capacities for the group in years prior.

The Washington-bound move — not the move for which some Republican donors had hoped — comes as Perry will soon become Texas’ longest serving chief executive, entering now his tenth year in the governor’s mansion.

The Texas Republican will replace Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty atop the committee as it prepares for three gubernatorial contests in Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky in the 2011 election season.

POLITICO has more.

Instead, they’ve got another president in mind: Bill Clinton, whose presence on the campaign trail translates to more enthusiasm among Democrats and Independents, according to a recent Gallup survey. Now, as I write in an op-ed for Fox News today, that must be a tough pill for Obama to swallow, otherwise he’d be a recluse for the next 5 days.

Click below the fold for an excerpt.

In a January strategy session with a handful of endangered incumbents, President Barack Obama took exception to the notion that brewing public opposition to his party’s landmark legislative victories somehow portended massive Democratic losses this fall. Republican-fomented speculation that the 2010 midterm election would mirror the 1994 midterm elections, which famously robbed President Bill Clinton of his majority in the House of Representatives, the president insisted, was greatly overblown.

And unlike sixteen years before, the president told his concerned colleagues the “big difference” would be “me.” The problem for Democratic candidates, according to a new Gallup survey, is that their base prefers the man who presided over the last great Democratic electoral loss than the man likely to preside over the next.

Fifty-three percent of Democratic voters say they would be more inclined to vote for a given candidate if the former President Clinton campaigned on that candidate’s behalf, whereas only 48 percent said the same of President Obama. Among Independents and Republicans, the margin between the two grew even wider.

…

In at least a dozen instances, the election efforts of high-profile House and Senate Democratic candidates are at least in part predicated on a rejection of the president’s administration and its increasingly unpopular domestic agenda.

Barack Obama is so manifestly unpopular that voters–and indeed candidates, at least the honest ones–overwhelmingly prefer as a surrogate a man whose presidential tenure was marred by philandering and impeachment proceedings. And despite holding a 23-point advantage last year, Obama is now tied in a measure of approval with a man virtually chased from the White House in 2008 by angry villagers.

If Democrats this year could have three wishes, the first, second and third would almost certainly be for Barack Obama to disappear and reappear as Bill Clinton. Or perhaps their third wish might be for Obama to reappear as Bush, under whom they performed quite well.

Read the article in its entirety at Fox News. If you like it, I hope you consider tweeting the story with your friends..

Inspired by a recent Gallup survey in which President Barack Obama and former President George Bush were virtually tied in a measure of approval, my get out the vote pumpkin for 2010:

Miss him yet? Then volunteer in the waning days of the election, when door-knocking and victory calls are most critical.

(And yes, I did actually spend upwards of two hours carving that pumpkin. It was cathartic.)

Duane Hammond says his clothes were not a political statement, rather a sign of support for his son, who is serving on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George H. W. Bush.

“I’m just humiliated,” Hammond said. “My son has been in the Navy for three years, he’s serving proudly, and I’m wearing his flag, so to speak.”

That explanation did not sit well with Hammond’s supervisor, who said either the shirt, which bears a large image of the aircraft carrier, went or he would.

“And because it said Bush I was told to go home and either turn my sweatshirt inside out,” the man said. “But first they made me take off my hat.”

The Florida Democratic Party reproduced a 2005 tax lien–since paid–filed against Allen West for delinquent credit card bills. As the Palm Beach Post reports, the document contains the GOP hopeful’s social security number.

While the record does not identify the figure as such, West’s campaign manager said nine-digit figure is easily distinguished.

According to a 2002 survey by the Federal Trade Commission, Florida rated sixth nationwide in identity theft occurrences per-capita. That year, 16,062 Floridians were victimized; only three other states had a higher number of stolen identities reported.

The disclosure marks an “unprecedented new low in American, politics,” West said.

In 2005, Maryland Democrats released the same delicate information on Michael Steele, then the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. In 2008, the Alaska Democratic Party revealed the social security number of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

DONATE TO ALLEN WEST’S CAMPAIGN HERE.

But all — no matter how comfortable their lead in polls and campaign funds — have gone to great lengths to portray their GOP challengers as wildly out of the mainstream: We’re bad, but they’re downright crazy.

In an editorial for the Washington Times, I examine Tuesday’s Democratic primaries in New York and Washington, D.C., which saw the ouster of Mayor Adrian Fenty and the renomination of Rep. Charlie Rangel, and offer some thoughts as to who is the real party of extremists:

The Republican Party has been so captured by its more conservative, if at times unreasonably radical, elements that it ousted Tuesday a mayor whose pragmatism earned him national praise and renominated a 20-term legislator for Congress whose ethics probes had become a symbol of corruption and a clarion call for term limits.

With all the speculation that the GOP had been torn asunder by the Tea Party movement in its bid to refashion the party in its own image, one might be inclined to believe, wrongly, that anecdote. One splashy headline after the next has fomented the expectation that the lunatics had stormed the hospital, with loony policies abounding: Social Security to be phased out; the Department of Education to dissolve; and the 14th Amendment to be repealed.

But it was not the Republican Party that caved Tuesday night to deep-pocketed labor unions or willfully overlooked a career of stunning ethics violations in its intraparty contests in Washington and New York City. That’s the kind of change in which President Obama’s Democratic Party believes – though if generic ballot polls are an accurate indicator of the national mood, it’s not the change for which Americans signed up in 2008.

…

But the most appropriate rejoinder to Democratic criticism that the GOP has gone off the rails is not to observe that polling indicates supposedly extreme Republican candidates are leading or in contention with incumbent Democrats. Rather, it is to offer this simple reminder: You renominated Charlie Rangel.

…

No reasonable party would endorse the candidacy of a man whose previous misdeeds include the leasing of several rent-stabilized Harlem apartments while using one as a base of operations for a previous re-election effort, failing to disclose upward of $75,000 in income from beachfront Dominican Republic property, securing tax benefits for a company whose chief executive he was courting as a potential donor to his private foundation, and the undertaking of two corporate-financed tropical junkets in 2007 and 2008.

No reasonable party would oust a mayor whose aggressive school-reform campaign had won national accolades in a school district where, at the outset of his reforms, only 9 percent of ninth-graders were expected to earn a college degree in nine years.

And yet the Democratic Party did both to appease its radical elements. So much for the unelectable, extremist argument.

You might say that Democratic operatives living in glass, rent-controlled Harlem apartments would do well not to throw stones. Read the article in its entirety at the Washington Times.

“I wrote the bill,” Rep. Anthony Weiner said Monday at a town hall, referring to his party’s landmark reform of the nation’s health care system. “The bill and I are one.”

Despite hailing from a heavily Democratic district, Weiner’s admission is borderline masochistic, with recent polling indicating 53% of Americans now favor a repeal of the measure.

And while that metric has compelled a great number of Weiner’s otherwise liberal colleagues to abandon the president and the cause of reform in advance of this fall’s midterm elections, the Brooklyn Democrat is undeterred, one of only a handful of Democrats running on–and not from–health care.UPDATE: The website of Weiner’s GOP challenger, Bob Turner, can be found here.

The “Restoring Honor” rally, hosted by conservative radio and television talker Glenn Beck, boasts former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin among its lineup of speakers. The event is set to take place Saturday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C, and black civil rights activists are fuming, contending that conservatives have “declared war on the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

Rev. Walter Fauntroy, who represented the District of Columbia from 1971 to 1991 as a non-voting delegate and was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said at a press conference at the National Press Club that the monikers Tea Party and KKK were to be used interchangeably.

“We are going to take on the barbarism of war, the decadence of racism, and the scourge of poverty, that the Ku Klux — I mean to say the Tea Party,” Fauntroy said to laughter. “You all have to forgive me, but I — you have to use them interchangeably.”

Fauntroy’s remarks come after months of Democratic partisans blasting the conservative activists as racist, most recently with an NAACP resolution condemning “racist elements” in the movement.

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Parodies aside, the 50-second spot highlights a serious concern among Democrats: President Barack Obama’s unpopularity–stemming from his controversial overhaul of the nation’s health care system and an unprecedented surge in domestic spending–has translated into a considerable liability for Democrats nationwide, and his presence on the campaign trail may prove to excite opponents before party faithful.

After all, Obama’s batting average on matters not legislative has done little to instill confidence among endangered Democrats. In Virginia, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, those candidates for whom Obama invested personal political capital all lost. And last week in Colorado, 45 percent of Democrats voted against the White House’s pick in the state’s Senate nominating contest.

Though President Obama will be no where to be found on ballots in this fall’s midterm elections, those presidents whose approval ratings were sub-50 percent have averaged a loss of 36 House seats in midterm elections. For those curious, Obama’s approval rests at 42 percent.

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In spite of fierce public opposition, the Democrats’ sizable House majority secured passage of President Barack Obama’s controversial overhaul of the nation’s health care system. But this same majority failed Friday in its efforts to create a popular multi-billion dollar health care fund for emergency responders affected by toxic dust and debris in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

The House leadership had suspended typical procedures—requiring a simple majority—on the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2009 in order to prevent GOP-offered amendments that they feared might compromise the votes of endangered Democrats.Senior Democrats were concerned that Republicans might offer a motion to recommit — sending the bill back to committee with instructions to pay for it with funds from the president’s health care reforms.

The Democrats’ procedural tack meant the bill needed two-thirds majority to pass — a large coalition that senior Democrats surely knew was untenable.[…]

Mired in political quicksand, with many of the caucus’s most senior members facing tough re-election battles, congressional Democrats have become increasingly aware that their many legislative victories are not enough to sour voters’ new taste for Republicans.

Another legislative win would have a negligible effect on what most political handicappers predict will be a Democratic-hostile election. What Democrats needed, and found in the bill’s failure, was the ideal opportunity for a thunderous rebuke of Republicans: An ideological win that would capture the interest and anger of the nation still lingering from Sept. 11.

Read the article in its entirety at POLITICO.

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The New York Times reported Thursday the video was, to the surprise of its nearly-18,000 viewers, an official product of the Greene campaign. That report also came as a surprise to the Greene campaign, according to CNN, who said it had no involvement in the video.

“I don’t know who made it.” But, the candidate said Friday morning, “it sounds good. Make sure everybody hears it.”

Notable lyrics include: “Well, Greene’s a new face in politics. And he don’t show porno to college chicks. … Real family values, those are rad. He loves family and lives with his mom and dad! … Alvin Greene is the one for you. He knows how you feel, ’cause he’s unemployed, too!”

As much as the wrongful attribution of the parody to the Greene campaign is an indictment of lazy reporting, it is also a testament to the spectacle that is Alvin Greene.

As a professional political consultant, I would hope no candidate would attest to their unemployed status, voluntarily acknowledge they live with their parents, or make a vague reference to felony charges related to pornography in an official campaign production. Of course, I would also hope that no black candidate would show obscene material to a white female college student not-yet twenty in a state with a history of racial tensions, unveil a jobs plan whose central plank was the production of candidate-resembling action figures, or film the campaign’s inaugural interview from a messy den wearing socks and a ratted family reunion t-shirt.

But Alvin Greene managed to do all those things. And more.

Cross-posted to Skepticians.com.

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Rangel, who resigned from his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee in March following a formal admonishment for two corporately-underwritten Caribbean junkets, will appear next week before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. Composed of four Republicans and four Democrats, the panel will consider if sufficient evidence exists to prove the allegations against 20-term legislator.

The adjudicatory subcommittee was last impaneled six years ago, when it was called upon to handle the case of Democratic Congressman Jim Traficant, who served seven years on bribery and racketeering-related charges.

In the same way that Republican ethics violations loomed large in the 2006 midterm elections that saw the House of Representatives change hands, Rangel’s ethics misdeeds threaten to undermine Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pledge to run the “most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in History.”

But for now, the specific nature of charges against Rangel remain unknown — and will likely remain as such until next Thursday when he makes his case to the ethics panel. In the meantime, a list–that is, unfortunately, in no way comprehensive–of the 80-year-old lawmaker’s ethics lapses:

• Violating New York state and city zoning laws, Rep. Rangel rented in 2008 several rent-stabilized Harlem apartments and used one for a base of operations for his reelection effort.
• Days later it was revealed Rangel had used congressional letterhead to solicit funds for his personal foundation, the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service.
• The following month, in August of 2008, the New York Post reported that Rangel had failed to disclose income from renting his beachfront villa on a Dominican Republic resort. In total, Rangel failed to disclose $75,000 in rental income since 1988. Rangel secured a seven-year fixed rate loan at 10.5 % for the property, but two years later the interest on the loan, which was awarded by a company for which the congressman was an early investor, was waived. Rangel paid $10,800 in back-taxes for his 2004, 2005 and 2006 tax returns for the unreported rental income.
• Rangel violated House rules and failed to report income to the IRS when he left his 1972 Mercedes in a House parking lot for several years without registering the car. The car, without license plates and covered by a tarp, occupied a space for several years valued a $290 per month.
• In November 2008, the Post’s muckrakers discovered that Rangel had improperly received a “homestead” tax exemption on a property he owned in Washington, D.C., while occupying his four rent-stabilized apartments in New York City.
• Rangel secured tax benefits for a company whose chief executive he was courting as a donor for his private foundation.
• And most recently, a House panel admonished the scandal-plagued congressman for wrongly accepting reimbursements for two Caribbean trips in 2007 and 2008.

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Biden visited Kopps Frozen Custard, a popular Milwaukee-area restaurant the vice president mistook for an ice cream parlor, to chat with employees and patrons. Biden’s rebuke, which was captured on film by a local ABS News affiliate, came after he asked the manager what he owed.

“Don’t worry, it’s on us,” the store’s manager replied to the vice president. “Lower our taxes and we’ll call it even.”

Minutes later Biden is heard chiding the employee, saying: “Why don’t you say something nice instead of being a smartass all the time?”

Some have already said the Kopps manager is to Joe Biden what Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher is to President Barack Obama, who gained national attention after he questioned the Democratic presidential candidate’s tax policies.

The Vice President was in town to campaign for Senator Russ Feingold, who polls show running even with Republican challenger Ron Johnson. At a Friday fundraiser, Biden told a crowd of donors “there’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.”

No doubt Kopps’ manager has some suggestions for the administration.

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Cross-posted to Skepticians.com.

Sargent, whose muckraking at the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo made him a daily read for Capitol Hill Democrats or Republican operatives concerned their bosses had again strayed from prescribed talking points, was a natural fit for the Post. Likewise for Klein, whose wonkish, prolific writing often set the tone for progressive domestic policy talk.

And like Sargent and Klein, Weigel was poached from a progressive-leaning online outlet. But whereas Sargent and Klein hard carved out beats that largely matched their ideological leanings, which is to say progressive, Weigel was pitched to the paper’s leadership (by blogging wunderkind Klein) as the reporter best positioned to cover the conservative movement — specifically its more unsavory fringe elements, of which Weigel had become a connoisseur of sorts at The Washington Independent.

As others more acutely aware of the goings-on of the Washington Post newsroom have noted, Weigel found himself in an untenable situation: Misrepresented both by those who lobbied for his employment and later by his new employer, the reporter-blogger had to adopt a nuanced I’m-one-of-you posture. Weigel frequently cited his vote for Ron Paul in the 2008 Republican primary as an indicator of his conservative bona fides, though he less often noted he voted subsequently for then-Senator Obama in the general election.

On Wednesday, a Beltway media-gossip blog published intemperate comments Weigel made on Klein’s “JournoList,” an email listserv housing the discussions of an estimated four hundred Washington reporters, academics and policy wonks. Save for two previous outings of otherwise off the record comments, the intra-liberal exchanges were largely a secret. For the DC intelligentsia it was an exercise in message conformity; for Republicans it was a reminder of the coordinated lengths political operatives and media personalities would go to ensure liberal talking points were appropriately weaved into the day’s news.

Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller published Friday additional inflammatory comments made by Weigel on the one-time-private JournoList. Comments published ranged from banal cheerleading for President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul to personal jabs at Matt Drudge, with whom Weigel had been engaged in a feud over Drudge’s penchant for saucy headlines.

With conservative activists rallying the nation-over in competitive primaries to upend long-time Republican incumbents and establishment favorites, the emergence of the Tea Party as a quantifiable and feared force in Republican politics–which represented a great degree of Weigel’s coverage–is an important beat. But it was a beat that would have bore little fruit, as it had become increasingly apparent that Weigel held mainstream Republican figures in contempt.

The publishing of Weigel’s private conservative lamentations was not the first time the blogger had been thrown into the spotlight. In May, shortly after he was joined the Post’s stable of blogger-reporters, he referred to opponents of gay marriage as “bigots.”

As both a sign of good faith and remorse, Weigel offered his resignation on Thursday evening. In the wake of new emails, the Post was obliged to accept it Friday morning.

The Washington Post’s leadership was correct to remove Weigel from his beat; his blog’s subtitle–”inside the conservative movement”–betrayed him, as few operatives and insiders would now look kindly on his inquiries. But they were in the wrong by nixing entirely his reporting.

While Weigel’s in-person affability for many won’t excuse his unvarnished commentary, it’s clear he appreciates the value of shoe-leather journalism. He was a regular fixture of conservative events and meetings and was not afraid to pick up the phone to chase stories and sources.

As it appears Weigel owes much of his current predicament to false pretenses–that Weigel presented himself as conservative, or that the paper had billed him as such–I compiled a list of reporters and bloggers who the movement would accept without pause (and regard as dyed-in-the-wool conservatives). In no particular order:

1. David Freddoso, Washington Examiner

2. Mary Katharine Ham, Weekly Standard

3. Amanda Carpenter, formerly Washington Times

4. Jim Geraghty, National Review

5. Ed Morrissey, HotAir

6. Jennifer Rubin, Commentary

7. Jim Antle, American Spectator

8. John McCormack, Weekly Standard

9. Caleb Howe, RedState

10. Matt Lewis, Politics Daily

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Cross-posted to Skepticians.com.

For Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Tuesday’s victory was bittersweet: She narrowly secured her party’s nomination, though head-to-head polls indicate she will lose six of every ten general election voters to her Republican challenger in November. But for organized labor, who invested upwards of $10 million backing Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s ill-fated primary challenge of Lincoln, it is all bitter.

From the outset of Halter’s bid, public employee unions and progressive groups rallied at the prospect of defeating Lincoln, whose opposition to labor mainstays like the Employee Free Choice Act and the public health insurance option were observed as mortal sins. The White House and Democratic establishment—most notably Arkansas’ favorite son, former President Bill Clinton—instead endorsed Lincoln.

The divergent paths of the White House and labor groups in the Arkansas nominating contest is symptomatic of a long-developing schism in the Democratic Party-organized labor coalition. For all the talk of a Tea Party-induced conservative schism, the movement has, largely, coalesced behind the Republican Party. The case is not so with frustrated labor organizers, as even loyal Democrats have difficulty swallowing the 21st Century union agenda.

But Republicans–and even moderate Democrats who stand in opposition to the union agenda–should not rest on their laurels. Unions organizers are, if anything, innovative agitators:

They tried securing establishment goodwill by subsidizing a presidential bid; they sought to establish their own party; and they attempted infiltrating another. It should be no secret now—labor is an agile beast. And as union organizers’ previous moves show, Halter’s defeat was only a minor obstacle in their greater campaign.

What is most disconcerting here, though, is the labor movement’s dynamic, imaginative tactics. We won’t know just what they’re planning next until we’ve already been broadsided.

Read the article in its entirety at Human Events.

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