In one text, Charlie says, “All I need is an Acct number etc and I will wire u 20k if u think that will cover everything … I really feel bad, u are as cool and sexy and as sweet and fun and friendly as they get!”
It seems there was a disagreement about how much her silence was worth. Charlie was willing to pay $20,000 to this “cool and sexy . . . sweet and fun” 22-year-old porn star. But when she tried to negotiate a higher fee, he (and his lawyers) decided that was “extortion.”
“New U.S. single-family home sales fell unexpectedly in October and prices dropped to a seven-year low, a government report showed on Wednesday, pointing sustained weakness in the housing market following the end of a home-buyer tax credit.”
— Reuters
“Orders to U.S. factories for long-lasting manufactured goods plunged in October by the largest amount in 21 months, reflecting widespread weakness in a number of areas.
Orders for durable goods dropped 3.3 percent last month, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday. . . .
“The unexpectedly sharp declines raised questions about the strength of manufacturing, which has been one of the economy’s standout performers.”
— Associated Press
The vindication for the NY Tea Party comes from the fact that Mr. Maffei was a true-blue, Obama supporting, Pelosi controlled liberal, who showed a great deal of disdain to any constituents who disagreed with his statist view of government’s role. In fact, he voted with Pelosi 96.5% of the time during his brief stint in the House, including yes votes on the stimulus, health-care, and cap and trade.
Why didn’t Maffei understand that this was an extreme agenda that wouldn’t sit well with voters? True, western New York isn’t Alabama, but it isn’t the Upper East Side, either. I still remember the place where Da Tech Guy and I stopped to get gas and coffee before the election:
“I work 75 hours a week at this place,” said the owner-operator of a convenience store on State Route 41 in Cortland County. “All I ever get are bills coming in, where they’re raising the taxes on this and raising the taxes on that.”
The silver-haired small business owner’s diatribe had begun when I put a copy of the Syracuse Post-Standard on the counter and he asked, “Reading about all our political prostitutes?”
Obviously I was from out of town and he had apparently spotted me as a reporter, so I asked him what his feelings were about the upcoming election. “I’m not voting for any incumbents — all the challengers, that’s who I’m voting for,” he said.
People kept saying, as loudly as they could: “We’re fed up!” And yet politicians like Dan Maffei kept ignoring them. Then Election Day arrived and the people spoke with overwhelming clarity.
We just had an election where Republicans running against Obamacare won more seats than anyone has seen in over 50 years and you are trying to tell me there is no mandate because of your poll?
Indeed, and if you want to find the GOP mandate, a good place to start looking is NY-25, as I explain in my latest American Spectator column:
Ann Marie Buerkle was outspent by a 5-to-1 margin in her campaign against incumbent Rep. Dan Maffei in New York’s 25th district. Maffei was a phenomenal fundraiser — of his $2.7 million total, the freshman Democrat collected more than $1.2 million from PACs — and the district had voted for Democrats in the past three presidential elections, delivering 56 percent for Barack Obama just two years ago.
When Buerkle first declared her intent to run for the seat, she said, “People looked at me like I was crazy. They said, ‘He’s got so much money. How are you going to beat him?'” . . .
And for all we know, he’s right. But let’s see how he frames his thesis:
How were all those insane Republicans able to win?
Some of them– too many of them– really are dangerous crackpots. Was it really just because Obama didn’t deliver enough of the Hope and Change agenda? Or was it because some of the very Democrats tasked with victory were focused on something entirely different from winning — focused instead on personal enrichment? This is a story of, at best, horrifying dysfunction at the DCCC.
If you’ll click that “dangerous crackpots” link, you’ll see that the list includes, among others, Renee Ellmers and Allen West, whose campaigns we’ve written about at some length. Howie Klein can’t bring himself to believe that there are voters who share the “extreme” views of these Republicans. And he also can’t bring himself to accept the Occam’s Razor explanation of the election — i.e., voter backlash against Democrats, generated mainly by the perception that Obamanomics wasn’t working.
No, simple answers won’t do. There must be something sinister afoot, for how else to explain such actions as this?
Stalwart Democrats who supported the agenda . . . were cut off by the DCCC, including progressives Alan Grayson, Mary Jo Kilroy and Carol Shea-Porter.
Alan Grayson? You want to make Alan Grayson your test case? And then you want to talk about Republicans as “dangerous crackpots”? Pot, kettle, black.
The Man on the Grassy Knoll in Klein’s conspiracy theory of Democratic defeat is former DCCC executive director John Lapp, who is now a consultant with his own firm, Raltson-Lapp Media. Lapp evidently exercised supervisory authority over the DCCC’s independent expenditure operation, as Klein explains:
Incumbents told me they would go to DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen or Debbie Wasserman Schultz and ask for financial help for their campaigns, only to be told that it was up to Lapp. One Member even told me that Van Hollen promised him help on four separate occasions, help that was never authorized by Lapp . . . and never came.
OK, looking at this accusation from the Republican side, I can tell you that there were lots and lots of GOP candidates — Renee Ellmers among them — who felt that they didn’t get enough help from the NRCC. But these were challengers, many of them running underfunded grassroots campaigns where an extra $5,000 or $10,000 would have been manna from heaven.
The disgruntled Democrats on whose behalf Howie Klein pleads were incumbent members of Congress. I’m sorry: If you’re a member of Congress and you don’t raise enough money to secure your own re-election, you’ve got worse problems than some consultant to your party’s campaign committee.
And, in point of fact, Alan Grayson’s problem wasn’t a shortage of campaign cash. He raised more than $5 million, whereas his GOP challenger Daniel Webster raised a mere $1.3 million. In what moral universe is Grayson a victim, deserving of charitable assistance from the DCCC?
Pete Sessions should have been stripped of his [NRCC] chairmanship the day after Dede Scozzafava endorsed Bill Owens. If there were still any old-fashioned justice in the world, Pete Sessions would have been horsewhipped and stomped to death by the House Republican Caucus, his head carried through the streets atop a pike, and his mutilated headless corpse fed to dogs.
So I share, in a general way, Klein’s contempt for these Beltway bandits who claim to possess a monopoly on political expertise. And I’ve warned grassroots activists that the difference between them and the campaign professionals is that the professionals get paid — and they get paid whether their candidate wins or loses. The important thing for grassroots activists is to avoid getting bamboozled by incompetents and quick-buck artists.
Success in politics tends to breed cynicism. People win elections and obtain power. As soon as they get power, some of them start looking for the window where they can cash in their chips and exchange power for wealth. Trying to turn politics into a get-rich-quick-scheme landed Jack Abramoff in prison, but there are plenty of people — on both sides of the aisle — who’ve run scams as cynical as Indian Jack’s and gotten away with it.
Were John Lapp and other Democrat consultants focused on their “personal enrichment,” as Howie Klein says? You betcha.
Let Howie Klein wrap his head around this: The people who run the Democratic Party are capitalists. They’re in the politics industry, and their goal in life is to get rich, rich, rich!
If you expect successful politics to be run entirely by amateurs — True Believers whose only motivation is their zealous devotion to the Sacred Cause — you’re a damned fool.
. . . think about Ann Marie Buerkle’s victory in NY-25. She is now six weeks away from being a member of Congress, but what about six weeks ago?
It was Sunday, Oct. 17, and Pete Da Tech Guy and I were driving on our way to cover the Buerkle campaign, when I got a call from the Lonely Conservative. The headline in that morning’s Syracuse Post-Standard was devastating:
The poll showed Maffei with a 51-39 lead. If this poll was accurate, Buerkle was doomed. When we stopped for lunch at a McDonald’s in Hancock, N.Y., I put up a quick blog post scoffing at the poll, but honestly? I was heartsick.
You can’t put too much stock in polls. “Polls Are Not Campaigns,” as I’ve said, but I feared that this poll, which was a big front-page headline in the Syracuse paper, would have such a demoralizing effect on Buerkle’s supporters that it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Buerkle campaign had been kind of a late addition to my campaign radar — I didn’t blog about her until Oct. 12 — and at that time, I had no idea what an onslaught of attack ads she was facing. Maffei had a 5-to-1 money advantage, and he was piling on more than $200,000 a week in TV ads accusing Buerkle of everything you could imagine.
Pete and I attended a Buerkle event in Clyde, N.Y., and there were maybe 50 people there. Maybe. Here it was, two weeks before the election, and the Republican candidate was still speaking to small groups, while Maffei had 1,000 at his rally with Bill Clinton.
This was not encouraging.
The next day, we covered a press conference near Syracuse where Buerkle pushed back against a Maffei attack ad that accused her of failing to pay her taxes. Maybe there were 50 supporters there. Maybe. And just the fact that she was having to do a press conference to answer an attack ad . . .
Look: You answer a TV ad with a TV ad. That’s just Campaign 101. Buerkle was doing a press conference, counting on the media to convey her response to this ad, which indicated that she couldn’t afford to run TV ads answering Maffei’s attacks.
This was not encouraging.
So when Pete and I left NY-25, I was seriously worried about Buerkle’s prospects. She was fighting hard, but unless something happened to change the dynamic of the race, it didn’t look like she could pull it off.
Anyway, Election Night found me in Boca Raton, Fla., amid the happy chaos of Allen West’s victory party in FL-22. It was difficult to keep track of results elsewhere, but somewhere during that madness I saw (perhaps at the Lonely Conservative) that Maffei was ahead by 3,000 votes.
Oh, well, nice try. Close, but no cigar. You win some, you lose some.
And then, the next afternoon, Left Coast Rebel posted the news that, due to late returns from Wayne County, Buerkle was now leading by more than 600 votes!
What happened? How had this campaign — outspent 5-to-1 by the incumbent and trailing in the polls — managed to pull off such an upset?
Remember the old saying, “Where there’s life, there’s hope”?
About five days before the election — while I was on my way to VA-9 to cover Morgan Griffith — the Maffei campaign played the “extremist” card with this ad:
OK, game over, right? She’s a kooky “anti-choice” extremist wingnut. Somebody like that can’t possibly get elected in this supposedly moderate district, right? But the Lonely Conservative didn’t see it that way:
NY25 covers all of Onondaga and Wayne Counties, and part of Cayuga and Monroe Counties. But a large portion of NY25?s voters are in Onondaga County. I did some digging and found out that there were 147,332 Catholics in Onondaga County alone in 2000. . . . I’m sure enough of those Catholics are registered voters who could swing the election in Buerkle’s favor. This race hasn’t been about social issues. It’s been about the economy, the direction of our country, and the failed policies of the current administration and Congress. By running this ad Dan Maffei just gave undecided pro-life voters a reason to vote for Ann Marie Buerkle.
See? Buerkle needed a miracle to win and, by highlighting her pro-life record in the final days of the campaign, her opponent gave her that miracle. Out of more than 200,000 votes cast in NY-25, Buerkle won by 657 votes, and how many of those votes were decided on the pro-life issue?
Da Tech Guy says “nobody outside of me, Stacy and the Lonely Conservative thought [Buerkle] was a winner,” but I had given her up for lost on Election Night.
You see that she and her supporters had every reason to become discouraged and quit. But they kept hoping and fighting and, thanks to an unexpected miracle, they won.
So hang in there. Where there’s life, there’s hope.
Sixty Minutes has been around since 1968, though given the show’s long-standing predilection for character assassination, cheap shots, and “investigative reporting” (but I repeat myself), one might be excused for thinking that it had been around even longer. Most conservatives have long ago given up on this miserable excuse for a “news program”, correctly evaluating it as a wretched hive of scum and agitprop, and spend the time in more productive pursuits. Still, some courageous Americans keep watch on the show so the rest of us can be spared for other, better things; one of those Americans is Joseph Fein, who comes to us from The Valley of the Shadow with a fisking of this week’s adventure into what passes for “journalism” among the demoralized remnants at CBS News. Enjoy.
Van Hollen said that Democrats – who maintain control of the House through the end of the year, including during the lame-duck session where the expiring tax cuts will be considered – continue to back the president’s commitment to allow tax cuts for couples making more than $250,000 a year to come to an end.
“I think the position of the great majority in the House of Representatives is the position the president took going into the election,” he said.
Dude. You just got a historic ass-kicking. You lost63 seats. Republicans just scored their biggest House majority since 1949. And you still think Obama’s got the winning formula? Are you even listening to yourself when you spout drivel like this?
Van Hollen, the outgoing chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, also conceded that his pre-election (and even Election Day) predictions that Democrats would hold on to the House turned out to be inaccurate.
“The pundits were clearly right about this, we were clearly wrong,” he said. “You know, I’ve drawn to the inside [straight] before when playing poker, and we hoped, obviously, that there would be some scenario where that would happen.” . . .
“We obviously hoped for the best. We did our whole cycle planning for the worst. I mean, we really did plan, and this is a case where even a lot of preparation was not enough to prevent a huge tidal wave from knocking out a lot of our members.”
“I should say that we take some consolation at the DCCC that our members and candidates have said that we did everything we possibly could do to help them, and in fact some independent analysts have said that it actually could have been worse. As bad as it was, it could, it could have been worse but for some of the steps that we took.”
Not a river in Egypt. IYKWIMAITYD.
Here’s the video, if anyone can stand to watch it:
(Hat-tip: Red Dog Report.) I’d like to see Chris Van Hollen — and Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama — in a room with the 63 House Democrats who got defeated this year. I’d like to see the bosses of the Democratic Party try to explain to the 1,800 soon-to-be-unemployed Democratic congressional staffers why it made sense to risk everything for ObamaCare, at a time when voters wanted Washington to focus on fixing the economy. Welcome to the ranks of the unemployed, Democrats.
