2011 : Page 239 : The Other McCain

Acting with unusual speed, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to all but end collective bargaining for tens of thousands of public workers.

The unions, Democrats and their liberal allies are, as you might expect, apoplectic with rage. For example, Ed Schultz on MSNBC was even more obnoxious than usual today.

Allahpundit notes that David Prosser was in the majority on the 4-3 vote.

UPDATE: Excellent suggestion from Jeff in Walla Walla:

BREAKING: Democrats Call on GOP Candidate to Denounce PAC Video

Posted on June 14, 2011June 15, 201185 Comments

A new viral video ad criticizing Democrat Janice Hahn’s support for a “gang intervention” program has drawn a swift response from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Within hours of the debut of the online ad — sponsored by the Turn Right USA political action committee — the DCCC posted an online petition “calling on Republican candidate Craig Huey to condemn this offensive and sexist ad, and demand that the ad makers immediately take it down immediately.”

The duplication of the word “immediately” in the DCCC’s message may indicate Democrats’ concern that the ad, directed by independent filmmaker Ladd Ehlinger Jr., will focus media attention on Hahn’s controversial record as a Los Angeles City Council member.

Hahn is the Democrat candidate in the July 12 special election for the California 36th District seat vacated by the retirement of Rep. Jane Harman. Republican candidate Huey’s second-place finish in the multi-candidate, multi-party primary was called a “major upset” by the Los Angeles Times.

UPDATE: The liberal blog Talking Points Memo calls the ad “Willie Horton on steroids” and reports reaction:

“This ad is incredibly offensive and sexist to all women,” Hahn campaign manager Dave Jacobson told TPM. “The producer of this ad should be ashamed of himself and Craig Huey should be ashamed to have this kind of thing produced on his behalf.” . . .
EMILY’s List, which has endorsed Hahn, called the ad “the most vile, racist, sexist ad we have ever seen” and also called on Huey to condemn it. . . .
California Republican Party spokesperson Mark Standriff distanced the party and Huey from the web ad.
“The video in question is highly offensive and totally inappropriate,” he said “and has no connection whatsoever to the Huey campaign or the California Republican Party.”

No word if DCCC, Jacobson or Standriff were asked whether it was “offensive” for the Democrat Hahn to turn hardened criminals loose on the street with taxpayer money to pay them as “gang intervention specialists.”

UPDATE II: Dave Weigel explains the special election background:

Democrats sort of bungled a low-turnout jungle primary for Jane Harman’s open seat. They expected it to produce an all-Democrat race between Janice Hahn and Debra Bowen, but Bowen fell short, and Republican Craig Huey got the other runoff spot.

There is a Memeorandum thread.

UPDATE III: Yet another Memeorandum thread, including this rather predictable reaction from Charles Johnson:

Are people really so dense that I need to explain what Ladd’s video was intended to accomplish? Or, if they are that dense, should I be content to leave it unexplained? I’m torn.

UPDATE V: “Ladd Ehlinger Jr. Goes Gangsta,” says Andy at AOSHQ.

MacAoidh at the Hayride doesn’t know if he would have “gone there.” Yeah, but you’re watching it, ain’t you?

UPDATE VI: Jean Merl of the Los Angeles Times:

Democratic leaders and others on Tuesday reacted angrily to what they characterized as an offensive and sexist YouTube video that tries to portray Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, a Democrat, as friendly to gang members.

Hey, Jean, just a suggestion here: You work at a newspaper, right? You’ve got access to Lexis-Nexis, right? So that means you could try a couple of quick searches and find out if how the video portrays Janice Hahn “as friendly to gang members” actually has any basis in fact.

If a candidate for Congress was, indeed, demonstrably “friendly to gang members,” I think that’s what they used to call “news.” Just sayin’ . . .

UPDATE VII: Southern California blogger Richard McEnroe reminds us of the sorry failed history of liberal “anti-gang” efforts.

UPDATE VIII: The controverial ad inspires a reporter for the “alternative” tabloid L.A. Weekly to tout Hahn as “likely to waltz to victory.” Yet the reporter is apparently willing to ignore his own newspaper’s reporting on the disastrous, expensive failure of L.A.’s “gang intervention” programs.

Questions: Is Janice Hahn’s record as a city council member a legitimate issue in her congressional campaign? And shouldn’t she have to face tough questions about her record of support for this very bad policy? Are journalists in California just underpaid P.R. shills for the Democratic Party, or are they just too lazy to be bothered doing any actual reporting?

UPDATE IX: The Rhetorican is impressed: “Now That’s an Attack Ad!”

UPDATE X: Feminist blogger Margaret Hartmann: “Hunt For The World’s Most Offensive Campaign Ad Is Over.”

Da Tech Guy thinks the video should, at least, get people talking about CA-36.

Left-Wing Groups Getting Psyched Up for ‘Netroots Nation’ Event in Minneapolis

Posted on June 14, 2011June 14, 20114 Comments

Between 1999 and 2005, George Soros donated $535,000 to Alliance for Justice (AFJ), which has also received major donations from liberals like Ted Turner and Barbra Streisand. One of AFJ’s main activities is to help Democrats block the appointment of conservative judges (they supported filibusters of President Bush’s nominees) and to push for the creation of “new rights” as a strategy to advance the progressive agenda.

Because left-wing groups routinely pool their online resources, AFJ’s fundraising e-mails are distributed to millions of people who have signed up to receive updates from groups like MoveOn.org and Democracy for America. That explains why I received the following e-mail today:

Dear Robert,
We’re heading to Minneapolis for Netroots Nation this week! Here’s what we have in store for you at the Netroots Nation 2011 conference, an annual gathering of some of the most influential voices in the progressive online community.
The Roberts Court’s extreme pro-business agenda has been gaining more and more attention this term with cases like Wal-Mart v. Dukes and AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. This Saturday, Alliance for Justice and a panel of experts will tackle the Court’s hard right turn in “The Corporate Court: Your Rights vs. Corporate Interests.”
Our panelists — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Dahlia Lithwick (Slate), Eva Paterson (Equal Justice Society), and Carl Pope (Sierra Club) — will address the growing influence of corporations within the American judicial system, particularly in the Supreme Court on Saturday, June 18 at 10:30 a.m. in room L100 H.
We’ll also be screening excerpts from our award-winning film, Crude Justice, and a Q&A with AFJ Communications Director Kevin Fry as a part of the conference screening series. Join us in room M100 J during the General Showcase I on Thursday, June 16 at 4:30 p.m.
Alliance for Justice president Nan Aron will lead an informal discussion on judges, corporate influence, and the fight for a fair America on Friday, June 17th, at 4:30pm in the exhibit hall’s caucus area.
Don’t forget to stop by our booth (#922) to meet our staff, learn more about AFJ, and talk with our expert about developing hard-hitting social media campaigns without violating the restrictions imposed on nonprofits.

Talk to you soon,
Alliance for Justice
P.S. Tell us what you’re up to at Netroots by tweeting us @afjustice!

Notice I’ve highlighted the fact that this legal advocacy group — which employs dozens of leftist lawyers — is offering expert advice to progressives on “developing hard-hitting social media campaigns without violating the restrictions imposed on nonprofits.” This is what Soros & Co. are paying them to do: Teaching the Left to stretch the limits of the law to push their agenda.

What can you do to help fight back against AFJ and their progressive allies at Netroots Nation? Continue reading Left-Wing Groups Getting Psyched Up for ‘Netroots Nation’ Event in Minneapolis →

Democrat Janice Hahn Stars in the New Viral Video Smash Hit of the Summer!

Posted on June 14, 2011June 14, 201140 Comments

Janice Hahn is the Democrat running for Congress in the July 12 special election in California’s 36th District, to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Jane Harman.

As a member of the Los Angeles City Council, Hahn promoted a program to use taxpayer money to hire convicted criminals as “gang intervention specialists.” Predictably, Hahn’s government employment program for gangsters amounted to a taxpayer subsidy for violent crime. New York Times, June 24, 2009:

LOS ANGELES — Federal agents announced criminal indictments for 24 high-ranking gang members, along with a prominent gang intervention specialist who associated with city politicians and routinely raised money from Hollywood’s elite.
The specialist, Alex Sanchez, director of Homies Unidos, a gang outreach organization in Los Angeles for more than a decade, was arrested and charged with a federal racketeering count for his alleged role in the assassination of a man in El Salvador in 2006.

Incredible as it may seem, Hahn actually called for a tax increase to pay for more of this dangerous nonsense:

Councilwoman Janice Hahn said she was happy to see the mayor’s plan to dedicate more money to gang prevention and intervention.
“What’s important is that we’re taking action. We’ve done the studies, we’ve seen the reports, the evidence is in. We need to act,” said Hahn, who has proposed a $30-a-year parcel tax to raise $40 million for anti-gang programs.

In 2008, Michelle Malkin was astonished to learn about this program:

City anti-gang money is going to convicted criminal gang-bangers who are hired as “gang intervention” specialists–while continuing their criminal activity.
The conduit? L.A. City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who justifies the public pay-offs to gang members as a way to “keep the peace.”

Not surprisingly, the mainstream media is too busy celebrating Janice Hahn’s endorsement by Bill Clinton (who praises her “common sense solutions”) to bother examining Hahn’s involvement in the “gang intervention specialist” scandal. But somehow, I don’t think the media will be able to ignore that story much longer:

“Give Us Your Cash, Bitch” is directed by Ladd Ehlinger Jr.

This ad is sponsored by Turn Right USA, which is not connected to any candidate. And I’m pretty sure the Republican candidate, Craig Huey, is going to be as shocked as anyone by this video.

UPDATE: The director addresses the obvious accusation:

Before you charge racism at the ad, consider her one line in the video: “It takes a different kind of person to speak the language.” By that she means, it takes black people to talk to black people. It takes gang members to talk to gang members. They have their own language, we should coddle them. They’re not responsible for their actions if they murder someone, rape someone. They’re a minority.

Read the rest.

UPDATE II: The Daily Caller declares this the Most Offensive Attack Ad EVAH!

UPDATE III: Verum Serum and Flap’s Blog are now blogging the new video.

BREAKING: David Brooks Is a Douchebag

Posted on June 14, 2011June 14, 201139 Comments

This news is perhaps not shocking to regular readers of the New York Times‘ token “conservative” columnist, but if we ever needed smoking-gun proof, his column today is like RINO fingerprints covered with country-club DNA:

I’m registering a protest because for someone of my Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective, the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand. . . .
The Republican growth agenda — tax cuts and nothing else — is stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible. . . .
Republican politicians don’t design policies to meet specific needs, or even to help their own working-class voters. They use policies as signaling devices — as ways to reassure the base that they are 100 percent orthodox and rigidly loyal. Republicans have taken a pragmatic policy proposal from 1980 and sanctified it as their core purity test for 2012. . . .
If there were a Hamiltonian Party, it would be offering a multifaceted reinvigoration agenda. It would grab growth ideas from all spots on the political spectrum and blend them together. Its program would be based on the essential political logic: If you want to get anything passed, you have to offer an intertwined package that smashes the Big Government vs. Small Government orthodoxies and gives everybody something they want. . . .

You can read the whole thing, which I think you will agree constitutes conclusive proof of the utter uselessness of David Brooks. From time to time, as a sort of accidental consequence of the Law of Large Numbers, Brooks will criticize liberals from a conservative perspective — the blind pig finding an acorn, as it were. Yet when push comes to shove, Brooks habitually tries to push Republicans toward a Democrat Lite agenda of Big Government. Continue reading BREAKING: David Brooks Is a Douchebag →

New York Times: ‘Media Colonoscopy’ of Palin E-Mails Was ‘Not a Witch Hunt’

Posted on June 14, 2011June 14, 201122 Comments

Clay Waters at NewsBusters calls attention to an article by New York Times writer Jeremy Peters:

The New York Times and The Guardian sent reporters armed with scanners and then solicited readers’ assistance. Politico enlisted a dozen editors, reporters and interns who worked as a team from their Northern Virginia newsroom “plowing through” the documents, as one editor described it. The Washington Post initially asked for 100 volunteers to sift through the documents. They were quickly overwhelmed with too many applicants. Unable to screen all of them, the paper abandoned the plan late Thursday, opting instead to invite reader comments.
Were news organizations Dumpster diving, as one outraged reader of The Washington Post put it?
News outlets insisted that they were trying to be as thorough and efficient as possible while reporting on information that the public was entitled to know.
“This is not a witch hunt,” said Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor at The Times. “There are 25,000 documents here, and we can use all the eyeballs we can get.”

It was Greta van Susteren of Fox News who called this ridiculous exercise a “media colonoscopy.”

The CNN Debate: Tokyo Survived

Posted on June 14, 2011June 14, 201134 Comments

Having declared that the debate in Manchester, N.H., would result in Herman Cain stomping the other candidates “like Godzilla stomped Tokyo,” I’m now prepared to admit that the result was not quite so one-sided. However, I don’t get CNN at the house — some glitch in the cable service limits my choices to Fox and MSNBC — so I am dependent on the judgments of others.

And by “others,” I mean VodkaPundit, who drunkblogged it, because massive quantities of alcohol help clarify the issues.

Mr. G. liveblogged the debate (sober) and declared Cain the winner.

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post clearly disagreed, but Cillizza is a liberal, which is why he wrote:

A relatively tepid debate with candidates largely agreeing with one another on the major issues of the day.

But wasn’t that true of every 2007-08 debate among the candidates for the Democratic primary? I remember watching (or trying to watch) those debates and wondering, “Why bother?” You had three major candidates — Clinton, Edwards and Obama — and a bunch of guys who had no plausible chance. (Chris Dodd for president? I mean, really?) They were all predictably liberal, and their policy differences were matters of incidental detail. But I don’t remember CNN hitting them with a bunch of “gotcha” questions or trying to set them at each other’s throats.

Da Tech Guy delivers his verdict: “Bottom line: Bachmann wins, Cain remains solid, Newt and Santourm help themselves, Romney remains steady Pawlenty doesn’t help himself enough, Paul is Paul.”

Here’s an Associated Press video highlight reel of the candidates trashing Obama’s economic policy: