…and I have just determined that while I have a laptop, I have an internet connection, and I have a video camera (currently holding two clips of Pat Toomey) - I do not have a cable that will allow me to transfer video from the camera to the laptop, and then use to show the rest of you via the Internet.
So expect a whole lot of video downloading on Sunday, apparently.
Moe Lane
Contra Allahpundit. As one of Jake Tapper’s commenters noted, that way nobody else would have been able to get a word in edgewise. Looking at the body language, that might have been for the best.
This really is iconic for Dizzy City, isn’t it? Four guys sitting around trying to pretend that their casual meet-and-greet-with-smiles-that-don’t-reach-the-eyes aren’t being filmed by umpteen billion different members of the media. No wonder the cameras kept moving around: the people that weren’t having cold beer were just as much part of the story as the people that were.
Crossposted to Moe Lane.
If you’re surprised that he would renege on a campaign promise:
Bethesda-based USEC on Tuesday accused President Obama of reneging on a campaign pledge after the Energy Department turned down the company’s request for $2 billion in loan guarantees for a new uranium enrichment project in Piketon, Ohio.
[snip]
“We are shocked and disappointed by DOE’s decision,” USEC chief executive John K. Welch said in a statement. “President Obama promised to support the loan guarantee for the American Centrifuge Plant while he campaigned in Ohio. We are disappointed that campaign commitment has not been met.”
[snip]
While campaigning in southern Ohio last August, Obama praised the USEC project. “Under my administration, energy programs that promote safe and environmentally sound technologies and are domestically produced, such as the enrichment facility in Ohio, will have my full support,” he said later in a letter to Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland (D). “I will work with the Department of Energy to help make loan guarantees available for this and other advanced energy programs that reduce carbon emissions. ”
(Via The Conservatives.com)
The problem is that participating car dealers are currently on the hook for the trade-ins that they made in good faith, but have yet to see any of the deals signed off on by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. There are problems with the online system, you see.
Of course there are. It’s a government program, remember?
[Minnesota Auto Dealers Association vice president Scott] Lambert said the government has created a program that’s “so big and cumbersome that it can’t find a way to accept anything. We’re sending in good, reliable deals.”
It’s nerve-racking for the dealers, he said, because they have given the customer $4,500 and now the dealers need to be reimbursed.
WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton says running for office isn’t on her “radar,” but she still has an eight-person political team and sports two overflowing campaign war chests.
Her team transformed the former Democratic White House contender’s massive campaign debts into a $3 million mountain of political cash, according to federal fund-raising records through the end of June.
[snip]
By comparison, Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is up for reelection next year, had just three people on staff last quarter.
Via Andrew Malcolm, who likewise finds this fascinating. Also, before you ask: Clinton was and is not allowed to pay herself back for the money she lent her own campaign. That’s gone forever.
I find some of the rhetoric going on between Senator Hutchison and Governor Perry to be already a bit harsh, so here are the bare bones of the story:
Hutchison told WBAP-AM (820) host Mark Davis that she would officially kick-off her campaign in August.
“Formal announcement: I am in. Then the actual leaving of the Senate will be sometime — October, November — that, in that time frame,” she said.
It was her most definitive statement yet that she would leave the Senate in the middle of her third term.
This being a Senate seat, there will be an appointment made by the Governor, followed by a special election for the remaining two years of Senator Hutchison’s term. As the disclaimer below makes clear, my recommendation for Governor Perry is to appoint Texas Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams for the position, on the grounds that Williams is a). a solid conservative; b). prepared (thanks to his role as Railroad Commissioner*) to be a powerful voice on energy policy; and c). actively running for the spot. Oh, and d). he’ll be talking at the RS Gathering.
[Another UPDATE]: Yeah, yeah, yeah: I mucked the name up thoroughly. Sue me.
I say ‘curse it’ because if McDonnell had been just one point lower the title could have been
McDonnell/Deeds: 54/40, no fight.
Anyway, more details here (via @PatrickRuffini). August should prove interesting…
Moe Lane
PS: McDonnell for Governor. Contribute here.
Crossposted to Moe Lane.
[UPDATE]: What the heck: open thread. Haven’t had one in a bit.
It’s sad when a sitting US Congressman loses his ability to remember the basic details of the shenanigans he went through to bring in the cash. Via Boot Berry, this classic moment of what we call a Kinsley gaffe:
To those without video: it’s of Berry first confidently denying that he personally gets farm subsidies (in 2007), then (yesterday) momentarily forgetting that he denies personally getting farm subsidies, cheerfully admitting that he personally gets farm subsidies, then visibly stopping and going to himself Wait a second. I’m supposed to pretend that I don’t personally get farm subsidies. It’s the stop-and-wait-and-visible-oops moment that makes this video: by all means, watch it.
And then check out his opponent Rick Crawford. Because if Berry can’t even keep up on this, him returning to private life seems best for all concerned.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to Moe Lane.
There is - some - good news for the administration in this latest NPR poll (via Political Wire, h/t Soren Dayton), but when you’re a Democrat getting these kinds of results among registered* voters**:
Those are the chief findings of the latest NPR poll of registered voters conducted nationwide Wednesday through Sunday by a bipartisan team. The pollsters found 53 percent approving of the president’s handling of his job, while 42 percent disapproved — the narrowest gap of the Obama presidency to date. Most of the approving group said they approved strongly, and an even greater majority of the disapproving group said they disapproved strongly.
Poll respondents liked a Democratic statement on solving health care problems better than a Republican statement (51 percent to 42 percent). However, when asked about the plan now moving through Congress, a plurality of 47 percent was opposed and 42 percent said they were in favor, based on what they had heard about the plan so far.
…you have a problem. The poll results also report that voters are also currently favoring generic Republican candidates over Democratic ones, 43/42 (and hastens to add that it’s within MoE): Rasmussen, of course, reported yesterday that the GOP lead the Democrats 42/39 among likely voters (that’s the fifth week in a row that the GOP’s lead on that question). It’s going to be an interesting August, particularly since it looks increasingly likely that there will be a lot of Democrats that are going to be asked how they plan to vote on healthcare rationing, rather than why they voted for healthcare rationing. Either one would have been fun to work with, but I suppose that it’s unreasonable to expect to have both.
Moe Lane
*Although the actual poll says “likely” at the very beginning. I assume that there’s an arcane reason for that.
**Gallup had him at 54% on Tuesday. All of these numbers will go up, by the way: the President’s approval ratings are linked to his job performance, and presumably at some point he’ll appear to be performing it. But the days of the President being the One Who Ejaculates Roses are well and truly gone.
This throwaway line in a Hill article (”Dem healthcare infighting intensifies”):
And on Tuesday it prompted Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) to hint that more liberal members of the party should consider challenging centrist Blue Dogs in next year’s primaries.
…eventually led me to this (via The Patriot Room: he also has a related video there) article about what has to be one of the more, ah, creative strategies floated out there this year: taking down ‘conservative’ Democrats in conservative districts by weakening them or replacing them with liberal Democrats.
Wait, what?
Asked if she would recruit more liberal candidates to run against Blue Dogs, Waters said, “That’s normally not done.”
But she added: “There may be people out there listening and observing all of this who may get motivated based on what they’re seeing and throw their hat into the ring.”
She also criticized White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel for recruiting many of the House’s more conservative members when he headed the House Democrats’ campaign arm. Now, she said, “The chickens are coming home to roost.”
The confirmation of judges to the United States Supreme Court is a process that is exclusively the responsibility of the United States Senate. A candidate (like Ms. Sotomayor) is brought before the Senate Judiciary Committee for evaluation/grilling: once she makes it out of the committee (it’s generally considered a good idea to have at least one crossover vote), she is then voted on by the full Senate. At no time is the House of Representatives involved.
Why am I mentioning this? Because apparently the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee doesn’t know any of this. Doubleplusundead reported that this was the title of a press release*:
Senator Cornyn Votes NO on Sotomayor – Where is Rep. Pete Sessions?
To which FamousDC responded:
In the House.
Not voting on a Supreme Court nominee.
They only do that in the Senate.
I’m sure that we all hope that the DCCC has taken this lesson in elementary civics to heart, and earnestly that the offending press release in question is at least not lonely, wherever it’s been memory-holed*. Then again, it’s probably keeping company* with all those press releases on how well the DCCC is recruiting this cycle, so at least it has friends* in this, its time of sudden darkness.
Moe Lane
PS: Of course the NRCC would love to hear from you.
*Allegedly.
Crossposted to Moe Lane.
They’ll be “bonding,” instead. No, really: that was the word used. Which leads me to the image of Clinton writing down five things that she likes about Geithner while Chu makes Napolitano a personalized clipboard. And everybody’s had their shoes taken away at the beginning, and nobody’s allowed to watch TV, and the people who smoke will have to listen to the happy-shiny lecturing of the people who won’t, and then THE RAIN FITFULLY STARTS… sorry. Got sucked into a bad place in my memories there for a second.
Cabinet Will ‘Retreat’ to Blair House to Hand Out Report Cards
Aides promise that there will be no trust circles or “sharing” exercises, but President Obama’s Cabinet will gather Friday and Saturday to mark the administration’s sixth month in office with a high-level retreat.The gathering, to be held at Blair House and the White House Conference Center, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the executive mansion, will feature all 22 Cabinet-rank members for a series of policy presentations, several officials familiar with the planning said Tuesday.
They’ll also get graded on their performance - presumably, on a curve - which would suggest an interesting reality show of let-them-compete-in-weird-contests-to-keep-their-departments, but that idea’s been not only done to death
40 quatloos on the Secretary of State!
A recession is when you can’t lose your house.
A depression is when Tim Geithner can’t lose his house, either (via @jeffemanuel).
And a recovery is when President Obama loses his.
Crossposted to Moe Lane.
If you operate your own website and are following the Crowley/Gates brouhaha, you’ve probably noticed an abrupt switch in your comments section; one side went from being pro-Gates (reasonable enough) to virulently anti-Crowley within the course of several hours. It’s kind of fascinating to watch that happen; presumably the tapes and testimony coming available is acting as an irritant.
Or possibly it was this video (via Little Miss Attila):
Embedded video from CNN Video
I quibble at Megan McArdle’s adjective: ‘funny’ works ever so much better. After all, the GOP is the one laughing at the way that Specter’s race is shaping up: we have gone from a situation where Specter, Toomey, and a liberal Democrat would conspire together to create a vicious primary fight and a weakened Specter to a situation where… Specter, Toomey, and a liberal Democrat would conspire together to create a vicious primary fight and a weakened Specter. Only now the vicious primary fight is happening all the way over there, from our point of view; and I suspect that Megan may not be entirely checked out on Pennsylvania politics. Pat Toomey may not have been a shoo-in; but a Republican who can hold a D+2 district that went for Kerry & Gore should be taken seriously in a general election, especially since Toomey’s going to have a more or less easy primary of it.
And the best part? The Democrats were so looking forward to having somebody who was one of them in this race. Alas, the comfort of the Democratic party’s leadership overrides the needs of their base. Again.
You can donate to Pat Toomey here, by the way.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to Moe Lane.
It wasn’t until I read this AoSHQ post about the delay in the detention report (preliminary details here) that I started counting off the months on my fingers. Six months from July 21st makes… January 21st, more or less.
The work of a Justice Department-led task force, which had been scheduled to send a report on detention policy to President Obama on Tuesday, will be extended for six months, according to senior administration officials. A second task force examining interrogation policy will get a two-month extension to complete its work, which had also been due Tuesday.
[snip]
The officials said the administration remains committed to closing the prison in Cuba by January 2010…
I fail to see how. After the fold is the relevant text of the original Executive Order: note that it is dated January 22, 2009.
(Via Deceiver) Those wacky Inspector Generals. Always noting inconvenient truths:
Boy, the Energy Department is really having trouble practicing the energy efficiency it keeps preaching: The latest inspector general’s report found that the DOE often neglects to turn down the thermostat, wasting millions of dollars in energy every year.
The latest report found that “the Energy Department failed in many cases to use controls on heating, ventilation and air conditioning that are a primary means of conserving energy during non-working hours,” as Dow Jones Newswires put it. That could have cost the DOE more than $11 million.
Small potatoes, considering that we’re facing the wasting of trillions of dollars every year, for the forseeable future? Sure. Could the Department of Energy been even worse? Undoubtedly. Is it still obnoxious that, yet again, a government agency isn’t doing itself what it’s delighting in telling us to do? Ya, you betcha.
Moe Lane
*I swear that this popped into my head before I saw the WSJ title.
Crossposted to Moe Lane.
This comment by Jack Dunphy over the entire Gates brouhaha resonates with me:
So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.
When the officer has satisfied himself that it was not you and your Hupmobile that were involved in the Piggly Wiggly heist, he owes you an explanation for the stop and an apology for the inconvenience, but if you’re running your mouth about your rights and your history of oppression and what have you, you’re likely to get neither.
…because I was actually in a situation like this once. A couple of friends of mine and I were coming back from a play, and the cops pulled us over because a car just like my friend’s had been involved in an armed robbery; and my friend unfortunately looked a little like the suspect. Fortunately, we were all scrupulously polite, none of us had robbed a retail establishment, and we all had identification indicating that the three of us were two doctors and a library studies grad student, not an armed and dangerous criminal gang - which I’m sure was as much a relief to the cop as it was to us. Given that he was risking his life, and we weren’t.
That’s the point: the cop didn’t know that he was dealing with three people who meant him no harm. And at the time, we didn’t really think about how this entire situation (which ranged for us from annoying to funny) looked to him.
If so, the New York Daily News is being rather artful about it:
Meanwhile, people have been speculating with vengeance since we told you about the former Davis escort who contends Spitzer wasn’t the only governor she romped with. On Friday, when Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell’s spokesman Chuck Ardo resigned, Ardo insisted his retirement had nothing to do with Gawker and other sites putting Rendell on their short list of pols who may be Governor X. Ardo told The D.C. Write Up that Rendell is not the new luv guv - “no way, no how, no place, no time.”
Many seem to be aching for X to be Arnold Schwarzenneger. While we’re continuing to investigate the escort’s highly detailed story of her three “dates” with him, we won’t identify the chief exec with the prominent wife. But we will say this: it ain’t California’s Governator.
So Gov. Rendell’s former PR flack’s denial that his former boss patronizes prostitutes gets reported without comment - while unnamed rumors that it was actually Gov. Schwarzenegger get firmly and unequivocally debunked. Either way, absolutely deniable on the Daily News’ part.
Yes, I know what the Politico article said. But this is what is actually happening. Via Hot Air Headlines:
That spending has already begun, and its level is unprecedented, experts say, both in sheer volume and balance. According to data from the Campaign Media and Analysis Group, most of the ad spending this year has been to support initiatives pushed by Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress.
“That has almost never been the case in any administration,” said Evan Tracey, CMAG’s chief operating officer.
Through mid-July, CMAG, which uses automated capture technologies to monitor the airwaves, identified $9.7 million supporting Obama’s recently unveiled health care plan, $4.7 million opposing it, and $19.7 million more in generalized spending by groups staking out positions either before Obama detailed his plan or not directly supporting or opposing it.
In other words, as the largely-imaginary deadline on passing a health care rationing bill looms, the Democratic party is planning to use the August recess to hammer at the opposition of… its own members. Meanwhile, the Republican party is proving to be more than happy at reminding those members about why they’re in opposition in the first place; what makes it doubly entertaining is that, win or lose, tying ‘moderate’ or ‘conservative’ Democrats to health rationing will benefit the GOP in next year’s races. As Jeff noted earlier, the American people are by and large not particularly upset with their personal level of care, and they are not going to enjoy having it taken over by the government.
