Category: Michelle Malkin

Ryan: ‘Extraordinary and Unprecendented’ Cramdown on ObamaCare 2.0; UPDATE: Rubber Stamp; UPDATE: Pelosi’s Lips Are Moving

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7 p.m. ET: OK, last update of the night and then — I promise — we’ll go back to blogging about Kate Winslett’s cleavage or Rielle Hunter or something more interesting than the Zombie Health Care Cramdown That Won’t Die. Video of Paul Ryan via Hot Air:

The good news: They still don’t have the votes. The bad news: Obama doesn’t care:

If Obama refuses to look at public opinion polls, then how can he profess to know what the American people want? And if he doesn’t care about polls, then how come the White House is circulating polls on Capitol Hill asserting that support for health care legislation is rising?

UPDATE 6:26 p.m. ET: Nancy Pelosi reminds the national press corps that she thinks Americans are a bunch of idiots:

House speaker Nancy Pelosi held a news conference with children’s advocates at the Capitol on Monday to push for the Democrats’ sweeping health care legislation. . . .
In a brief question-and-answer session, a reporter asked Ms. Pelosi about assertions by Representative David Dreier of California, the senior Republican on the House rules committee, that Democrats were engaging in legislative gymnastics to complete the legislation.
“It’s about accountability of the insurance companies; it’s about affordability for the middle class,” Ms. Pelosi said. “It’s not about gymnastics alone — except if that’s part of the wellness program that we have for our children.”

Translation: “We’re going to ignore any criticism you might have. It’s about what I say it’s about, you stupid morons.”

UPDATE 5:57 p.m. ET: Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-NC) will vote NO. (Hat-tip: Virginia Right.) More cramdown blogging:

5:36 p.m. ET: I was just on the phone with Chris Cassone, and felt the need to explain that there are a zillion other things I’d rather be doing than blogging about the legislative progress of this damned health-care bill. (Ann Coulter in Vegas! ) But the Democrats are completely out of control, and I feel the obligation to pay attention — which is annoying, because there is nothing more boring than a Rules Committee mark-up hearing.

You know what this health-care cramdown is like? It’s like being trapped in the passenger seat of a Toyota doing 110 mph, driven by a dimwitted geezer who can’t find the brake pedal.

No wonder Democrats in swing states are running the other way.

UPDATE 4:52 p.m. ET: Philip Klein of the American Spectator:

As expected, the House Budget Committee just rubber stamped the “shell” health care bill with a 21 to 16 vote, sending it to the Rules committee, where all of the language will be stripped out and replaced with whatever deals Democrats have been negotiating behind closed doors. . . .
Two Democrats — Reps. Allen Boyd and Chet Edwards — voted against the bill and would have to be considered firm nos at this point.

That’s good news.

PREVIOUSLY: Rep. Paul Ryan on the Pelosi kabuki-dance: “This is an extraordinary and unprecendented abuse of the reconciliation process.”

Via Michelle Malkin who’s live-blogging the “Wreckonciliation.”

I was just on the radio for an hour with Ladd Ehlinger — his show is on WTKI 1450 AM in Huntsville, Ala. — talking about The 2,309-Page Scam That Will Live in Infamy.

TUESDAY: STOP OBAMACARE 2.0! BE THERE!

A Rhetorical Question, We Presume

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“Isn’t It Time To Euthanize Reid’s Wife?” 

Dan Riehl certainly knows how to provoke Alan Colmes to paroxysms of self-righteous indignation — a praiseworthy project in itself, quite apart from getting written up by the thought-police at Media Matters.

Speaking of euthanization, we earlier mentioned the March 16 Stop ObamaCare 2.0 event in D.C., which aims to put a merciful end to this legislative abomination. Michelle Malkin publishes a list of the key targets of the event.

UPDATE: “Dan’s a snarky bastard” — and I’m sure Tabitha Hale means that as a compliment. Just like Nancy Pelosi meant this as a compliment to unborn babies:

Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those – one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

Memeorandum captures further Riehl-induced commentary.

‘Dude, I’m So Wasted’

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It was nearly midnight in D.C., and I was sitting on the patio of the Dubliner with my friends Victor Morton and Pete Parisi of The Washington Times, when I saw Sean Pean walking past on F Street.

“Dude, that’s Sean Pean,” I said.

Pete and Victor turned to look, but Penn had his back to us, and they seemed doubtful of my celebrity-spotting ability.

“No, seriously, it’s him,” I said.

Evidently, while we had been enjoying our post-deadline refreshments at the Dubliner, Penn had been next door at Kelly’s Irish Times and was now departing, walking  eastward toward North Capitol Street. A gaggle of women who had been at the Irish Times caught up with Penn, and he stopped to have his picture taken with them.

I had my camera in my pocket, and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to add Penn to the “known associates” category (i.e., like former DNC chief Terry McAuliffe), but the Dubliner patio is surrounded by an iron fence, that separated me from the target.

I began preparations for scaling the fence when a woman sitting on the patio said, “No! Don’t try it.” The fence, about 3-1/2 feet high,  is topped with iron spikes, and the woman was obviously concerned that while going over the fence, I might impale myself in a most unpleasant way.

Indeed, on second glance, there was a real possibility of an accidental orchiectomy, and so I returned to the table with Victor and Pete — disappointed, but not disconsolate. Penn continued to the corner and caught a cab.

“You should Tweet this,” I said to Victor. He grabbed his iPhone to send out this message:

Was 10 feet from Sean Penn outside DC bar, had clear 2nd Am. view; all I did was hit my shoe against my head and say “dude, I’m SO WASTED”

Perhaps that reference to the Second Amendment was a bit hostile, but we’re professional journalists, after all, and we know what Sean Penn thinks of journalists:

First Amendment be damned . . . If Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn had his way, any journalist who called Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez a dictator would quickly find himself behind bars.
Penn, appearing on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday, defended Chavez . . .
“Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it” said Penn, winner of two Best Actor Academy Awards. “And this is mainstream media, who should — truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.”

Chavez is a Marxist thug, and Sean Penn is a ginormous douchebag. These are simply the neutral, objective facts.

My Big Day in D.C.

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to describe my experiences Tuesday, which were kind of weird. My plan was to go down to the Heritage Foundation for their weekly blogger briefing, just to show up and let my D.C. friends know I hadn’t fallen off the planet.

My 10:30 a.m. departure from Hagerstown would have put me in D.C. by noon, but I stopped at Sheetz to grab a sandwich, gas up the 2004 KIA Optima and put air in the right front tire. (Old tire with a slow leak. New tire, $75. Just sayin’ . . .) So it was past 11 before I got out onto I-70 and switched the radio to WARK 1490 AM.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Glenn Beck was on the radio, issuing a groveling apology to Michelle Malkin, but there was no context — Beck just rambled on, abasing himself, without saying exactly what he’d done that necessitated the apology. Rolling down the interstate at late-for-a-meeting speed, I grabbed my cellphone and started calling friends, trying to find out what this was about.

Eventually, of course, I discovered that Malkin and Beck had gone ’round over Beck’s coverage of Rep. Eric Massa:

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air and Michelle Malkin give the background, and there’s more at Memeorandum.

This is one of the conundrums of blogging. To stay up-to-date, I have to be online all the time, but that would mean never leaving the basement to go places and meet people. Just in the time it took me Tuesday morning to get ready for my D.C. trip, I’d missed this story, and now I was going to be out on the road  and offline — for several hours, because I seem to be the only person in the world who hasn’t gotten a Blackberry or an iPhone yet. 

En route to D.C., I got a call from Rob Ryan, spokesman for Doug Hoffman’s congressional campaign. Hoffman had announced his plan to run in NY23 again, but I hadn’t had time to blog it, because I’d been getting ready for this D.C. trip. See what I mean?

Blues Buddies and Tax Moochers

So I kept rolling, down I-70 to I-270 and onto the Beltway to the GW Parkway, across the bridge and up Constitution Avenue, over to Columbus Circle and past Union Station to Massachusetts Avenue, and I pulled up to the curb near the Union Pub across from the Heritage Foundation and parked illegally. As I was getting out of my car, who did I see on the sidewalk? D.C.’s hottest young blues pianist, Ian Walters of SwampKeepers fame.

“Dude, you here for the blogger briefing?” I asked.

“No, just waiting for Lisa,” said Walters, referring to CPAC Director Lisa DePasquale, who was inside at the briefing. During CPAC, Ian is media coordinator, in charge of setting up “Radio Row,” etc. — a very important job. But here he was, a vagabond drifter loitering on Massachusetts Avenue.

“Just make sure they don’t tow my car,” I said, as I jaywalked over to Heritage. I entered the bloggers briefing — now nearing its conclusion — helped myself to coffee and a free sandwich and sat next to Lisa, who has an iPhone and announced via Twitter:

uh oh, @rsmccain just showed up at #tbb!

You see that #tbb is the Twitter hashtag for “The Bloggers Briefing.” Rob Bluey was presiding, and I noticed several familiar faces around the table, including Tabitha Hale of FreedomWorks.

Perfect. I’d been planning to go by FreedomWorks after the Heritage briefing, as I needed to put a bug in Tabitha’s ear about Chris Cassone playing the April 15 Tax Day Tea Party. Now I’d be able to save myself the extra trip, with the traffic and parking hassles on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Also at the briefing was my old buddy John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who handed me a printout of his recent op-ed at BigGovernment.com: “Proxy Access: The Obama-Dodd-Alinsky Shareholder Jujitsu. Interesting stuff there. And there was more interesting stuff, a Heritage study by William Beach called, “The 2009 Index of Dependence on Government, which included this graphic:

Click here to see the chart full-size. In 2008, there were 48 million IRS tax returns with zero federal tax liability, so that more than a third of all Americans are getting a free ride. Uh, including me — because I’ve got six kids and blogging hasn’t yet become the lucrative gold mine of a six-figure income. But maybe if you hit the tip jar, we can get me off Uncle Sam’s tax moochers list. I’m just sayin’ . . .

Well, the rest of this story will have to wait for my memoirs. Events of Tuesday afternoon caused an unexpected furor at the media-gossip blog Fishbowl DC this morning, and I suppose there’s no point disputing these anonymous sources who seem to know everything: “Absolutely no way.”

Whatever. At least Sean Penn hasn’t put me in prison yet.

CPAC 2010: Bloggerazzi Photopalooza!

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“It’s all a blur,” Andrew Breitbart said to me in a phone conversation Monday, as we discussed events at CPAC 2010 — the biggest ever and, most attendees agreed, the best. The “blur” effect that Breitbart described is much like the experience of campaign coverage — you go, go, go day after day, with maybe four hours sleep night after night. Between the sleep deprivation and meeting so many people, you lose track of exactly who is who and what happened when.

When CPAC is over, you go through your pockets and find business cards for people you obviously must have met but whose names don’t match up with a face in your fatigue-scorched memory. And when you return to CPAC next year, you’ll be walking through the hotel and pass someone who looks vaguely familiar. You’ll say, “Hey, I know you.” And the other person will say, “Yeah, I think so, but I can’t remember where we met.”

That conversation will continue until either:

  • A. Your memories click and you recall which event you met at the previous year, or
  • B. You give up, admitting that you both were probably too drunk at the time to remember.

This is why it’s important to keep a camera in your pocket at all times during CPAC. My little pink Kodak digital — the famous “Barbie Cam” — captures those faces I might otherwise forget and those incredible scenes that no one would believe were it not for the photographic record. So brace yourself and get ready to be amazed. Continue reading CPAC 2010: Bloggerazzi Photopalooza! →

‘Who Is Ellie Light?’

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That’s the John Galt-like question Michelle Malkin ponders this morning:

It’s a handy rhetorical rejoinder the next the White House or your nutroots neighbors and co-workers try to tar the Tea Party or any other grass-roots revolts against President Obama as phony, top-down operations.
When Obama’s Soros-funded, Big Labor-directed, K Street-organized goons engage in classic projection and you need a glib way to call out the pot calling the kettle black, just snap back:
Who is Ellie Light?

Malkin reminds us of a column she wrote in August:

This week, Bloomberg News reported that White House senior adviser and chief campaign strategist David Axelrod’s former public relations firm, AKPD Message and Media, has raked in some $24 million in ad contracts supporting Obamacare – along with another p.r. firm, GMMB, run by other Obama strategists. . . .
Astroturf master Axelrod was president and sole shareholder of AKPD from 1985 until last December, when he resigned to take his White House position. His son, Michael, works there. So does former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe.

Plouffe is now officially joining the White House team to direct their political operation in the 2010 mid-terms and — what a coincidence! — Malkin points out that the Obamanoid machine is now hiring 32 paid professionals to direct canvassing offices for the mid-term campaign. (“32 jobs saved and created”!) It’s an extremely informative and timely post, so read the whole thing.

As for the identity of “Ellie Light,” I already told you: She’s a nasty slut — and I dare her to sue me for saying so.

Guess Who’s a Neo-Confederate
Faux News Tea-Bagger Extremist?

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“I look at the numbers and I am worried. I am worried about this government committing itself to so many entitlement programs and committing itself to such a level of taxation to support those entitlement programs . . .”
— Chris Matthews

“This just in: Chris Matthews is a racist and should be investigated by the Secret Service.”
— Ace of Spades

Weird things are happening everywhere now. Michelle Malkin notes Robert Gibbs’ counterfactual spin on Scott Brown’s election: “Gibbs asserted with a straight face that the same kind of ‘anger‘ that brought Obama into office also buoyed Brown’s candidacy.”

What We Can Expect Next: Charles Johnson starts a vicious flame-war with Andrew Sullivan over which of them deserves the most credit for Scott Brown’s election.

Are Democrats Planning to Steal the Massacusetts Election for Coakley?

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Only if they have to, but at last night’s Coakley rally, Da Tech Guy overheard some union official assure a Democrat, “Don’t worry, the cavalry’s coming.”  Was that perhaps a reference to the SEIU “Purple Army” that Michelle Malkin is warning about?

Scott Brown has consistently said he hopes for a fair election. “I have faith in the system,” Brown said yesterday at his rally in the North End.

The possibility of Democratic vote-rigging is like the rumors of a Lindsay Lohan sex tape — you can’t describe it until you see it. But as we were driving to a late dinner last night at the Border Grille & Bar in Leominster, I pointed out that there is no authority to hold Democrats accountable for their cheating.

“Who’s going to prosecute them? The state attorney general? And if you appeal to the feds — yeah, I’m sure Eric Holder will get to the bottom of it.”

And then there’s the poll-mongering. Jim Geraghty has a post about the leaked internal polls. You can obsess about poll numbers all you want, but at this stage of the game, polls are also like the Lindsay Lohan sex tape — interesting to look at, but not really very satisfying.

Polls are not a prediction, but a snapshot of voter sentiment at a particular moment. Talking about polls three days before a big election is like Texas fans talking trash before the BCS championship game. In football, the pre-game predictions don’t mean anything once they kick off and start playing. And in elections, what counts in the end is whether those “likely voters” actually vote.

Exit question: Is this “the end of change as we know it”?

Is Martha Coakley Even Sleazier Than
Tila Tequila? BUMPED: Reporter Hassled

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Tila is arguably the nadir of celebrity sleaze, but at least she’s not running for the Senate:

Democrat Martha Coakley is the voice of the “little people” the way Ted Kennedy was the voice of sobriety.

That’s from Michelle Malkin’s column and you should read the whole thing, which makes clear just what kind of sold-out hack Martha Coakley really is.

Among other things, if Coakley is elected to the Senate she’ll owe major payback to the purple people-beaters of the SEIU, who are “pulling out all the stops” for the Democrat. Counting $214,000 last fall and $685,000 in their latest buy, plus all the manpower of SEIU “volunteers,” the union thugs have about a million bucks invested in Coakley’s election. And that SEIU money is vital to the Coakley campaign, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post reports:

Ad spending by the candidates, party committees and outside organizations in the final week of the Massachusetts Senate special election will go over $6 million . . .  Scott Brown (R) dropping just short of $2 million in the final week while state Attorney General Martha Coakley (D) is spending $1.5 million. While Brown is outspending Coakley, Democratic-affiliated outside groups are making up the difference, with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in for $831,000 and the Service Employees International Union spending $685,000 on ads.  . . .

You might think that someone with such transparent ties to a brutally corrupt organization like SEIU would hesitate to make guilt-by-association smears. Think again:

Brown’s embrace of radical tea party groups for funding coincides nicely with his willingness to accept the millions in television ads from shadowy out-of-state organizations with links to Karl Rove 

That’s from a Democratic National Committee press release. Having failed with their Palin Derangement Syndrome gambit, now the Democrats are playing the Karl Rove card. Desperate much?

Speaking of desperation, I’m still rattling the tip jar for my Massachusetts trip. I’m hoping to leave Thursday and every $10 or $20 will help. Thanks to Eric in Arvada, Theodore in Stone Creek and Steve in Colorado Springs for their contributions to the Shoe Leather Fund yesterday.

UPDATE: William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection:

Coakley slept through December, has an arrogant attitude of entitlement which must put off voters, is mired in the past with her Bush-Cheney Derangement Syndrome, and doesn’t seem to understand that the voters are pissed off at the political establishment of which she is a part. The optics of Coakley going to D.C. [Tuesday] for a lobbyist fundraiser are horrible.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Professor Jacobson notes how Coakley confesses her desperation when she thinks only Democrats are listening:

On a private conference call with DNC chair Tim Kaine and top Dem donors this afternoon, Dem Senate candidate Martha Coakley acknowledged that GOPer Scott Brown’s surge was “frightening,” said top Dem donors had been complacent, and promised a last burst of TV ads to close out the race.
“It’s a little frightening how much traction he’s been able to get so quickly,” Coakley said on the call . . .

And now — shades of NY23! — the Weekly Standard‘s John McCormack gets roughed up by Coakley thugs.

Hit the tip jar, people, so I can get roughed up, too.

UPDATE II: Video via Hot Air:

Coakley staffers said afterwards that they didn’t know who the guy was who was hassling McCormack in the video. Really? He was just a passerby who decided to push him into a sidewalk railing and demand his credentials?

Hassling a reporter and demanding credentials? These Coakley thugs are worse than the BCS fascists!