LIVE AT FIVE – 04.11.12

Bush hasn’t got a lot to say here, other than ‘grow the economy’, and ‘buy the new book’. #OccupyResoluteDesk ought to be thankful that W doesn’t come off the top rope with a vicious rhetorical body blow; but that’s just not W’s style.

I guess I could muster more nostalgia for Bush if, as seen in this clip, he didn’t tacitly accept Entitlements as a given. It’s as though Bush is saying “Hey, lung cancer, I know you’re tissue, too. Just misunderstood. And if we breath a little harder on the good lung, we can make up for the way you’re sucking our vitality down the drain.”

No, W: I realize you gave Social Security reform the collage try in your second term, but history is going to judge you for not making a stronger case. Granted, the electorate threw you under the bus in 2006. I just wish you’d been less of a Progressive, and made a stronger conservative argument.

If you’ll forgive me the crassness of explaining myself, the title is a send-up of the Lefty hyperbole surrounding W., not a personal judgement of the fellow as really being that evil.

via The Blaze

Update: linked at POH Diaries.

Category: Republicans

Dean Clancy At FreedomWorks Didn’t Get The Memo

Posted on | April 10, 2012 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

And so here is Clancy, nattering on, in defiance of the Received Wisdom that the GOP has no ideas of how to improve health care in the United States. He even blasphemes the Holy Tax Code:

The Republicans do have a bunch of ideas for fixing what ails our health care system. I’ll just mention a few of them here. For example:

Reform state medical malpractice laws.

Incentivize hospitals and doctors to publish their prices, to promote comparison shopping.

Let people purchase insurance across state lines.

Let small businesses band together to obtain insurance for their workers at group rates.

Expand Health Savings Accounts and flex benefits.

Ease federal mandates that contribute to emergency-room over-crowding.

Block-grant the Medicaid program back to the states.

Here’s my personal favorite:

Let seniors join their Member of Congress’s health plan.

Those are just some of the ideas that various Republicans have proposed. And they’re by and large pretty good, common-sense ideas. I think they’d reduce costs without costly mandates, without a big new bureaucracy, without a 2,801-page bill that “they have to pass so we can find out what’s in it.” Oh, and by the way, with all of these ideas, you would actually get to “keep your coverage if you like it,” unlike under the president’s plan. Anyway, that’s all great.

But the one problem that I haven’t mentioned the Republicans dealing with — and it’s very important — is pre-existing conditions. You probably know what that is. It’s the most important problem in health care. If you fix the problem of pre-existing medical conditions, I think you fix the health care issue, as a general matter.

What is that, exactly? It’s the problem you face when, let’s say you have diabetes and you’re unemployed or you lose your job — you have no health insurance. So you go to buy coverage online or out of the yellow pages, and they want to charge you an arm and a leg because of your health status, because of your preexisting condition. That’s a problem for a lot of people, maybe 2 to 4 million people in this country, so not a huge percentage of us, but for each one of those people it’s a big deal.

And guess what? That problem can be addressed. It’s mainly caused by government policy. My line is whenever someone tells you that there’s a “market failure,” look closer: it’s a government failure. There’s some government policy causing the problem. And that’s definitely the case here. The problem with pre-existing conditions is primarily caused by the United States tax code. That’s right, it’s the tax code. And how does that happen? Well, basically the government doesn’t create a level playing field for health care versus health insurance, for health insurance obtained at the workplace versus health insurance obtained out of the yellow pages, for health insurance that has a low deductible versus health insurance with a high deductible. By the way, a deductible just means the amount that you pay out of pocket before the insurance kicks in. All of those distortions are caused by the way we treat health benefits in our tax code.

Read the whole contra-Narrative mess, and remember to savor the Ultimate Truthiness: the GOP has no reform ideas.

It’s either ObamaCare, or under the bus for every manjack among you.

Update: linked by The Lonely Conservative.

Update II: linked at Daley Gator.

Category: Health Care

SANTORUM DROPS OUT

Posted on | April 10, 2012 | 154 Comments

UPDATE 6 p.m. ET: In a post at Rachel Maddow’s blog (!) lefty Steve Benen says, “Santorum has done something I honestly didn’t think was possible,” going on to list the miraculous successes of Santorum’s low-budget underdog operation. Beyond the credit due to the candidate and his family — his wife and kids were, at one point, nearly the only people working full-time for his campaign — much of the credit goes to the scores and hundreds of dedicated volunteers whom I mention below.

Also: Because he went so long without any significant media recognition, Santorum was always the most accessible of the candidates and was willing to answer almost any questions. That got him in trouble a few times, and drove his staff and consultants nuts, but the folks in the press corps — including liberals who totally disagreed with Santorum on the issues — appreciated the honesty and openness of his campaign.

UPDATE 4:50 p.m. ET: Video of Santorum’s speech today:

UPDATE 4:40 p.m. ET: A volunteer just started the “Rick 2016” Facebook page.

UPDATE 4:20 p.m. ET: In a message on the Team Santorum Facebook page, the campaign’s grassroots coordinator Shelley Ahlersmeyer links Rick and Karen Santorum’s note of thanks to their supporters.

The story of Santorum’s grassroots army has been seldom mentioned in the media, even in my own coverage of the campaign. Some people were mystified by how Santorum kept winning — from Colorado to Louisiana — and so often out-performing the polls.

Shelley Ahlersmeyer had run grassroots outreach for Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign, and when she joined Team Santorum, it was a big gain for his campaign that didn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserved at the time. Ahlersmeyer brought with her not only her experience, skill and energy, but also extensive connections with Huckabee’s volunteers from four years ago.

So: How did Santorum win, for example, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama, states that had seemed likely to go for Newt Gingrich? How did Santorum stay competitive in Michigan and Ohio, despite being massively outspent by Romney?

Three words: “Phone from home.”

A comparative handful of fired-up, dedicated volunteers — mostly moms and grandmothers — each made many thousands of phone calls to Republican primary voters in those states. Exactly how many people participated in Santorum’s phone-from-home program, I don’t yet know, but there were a hard-core handful who have spent practically every day for the past four months calling up total strangers and asking them to vote for Rick Santorum.

God bless ’em, they pulled off a miracle or two — Rick’s campaign manager, Mike Biundo, told me that the top campaign staff didn’t think they could win Mississippi until they saw the votes come in — and those volunteers deserve far more credit than they got.

Linked by The Lonely Conservative, Republican Redefined and Bob Belvedere at the Camp of the Saints — thanks!

UPDATE 3:50 p.m. ET: Michelle Malkin came through with a crucial endorsement of Rick Santorum on Jan. 31 — the day of the Florida primary — and says of his scrappy underdog campaign:

Rick Santorum fought hard, he fought well, and he gave voice to a large contingent of grass-roots conservative activists across the country who wanted a candidate who lived the values he preached. He held Mitt Romney’s feet to the fire on health care, challenged Newt Gingrich’s green flirtations and past support for the individual mandate, and took on Ron Paul’s foreign policy extremism. His presence improved everyone else’s game — and that will serve the GOP ticket well this fall, whoever ends up on it.

Let’s not talk about that yet, huh? By the way, Michelle Malkin is hereby formally invited to “DoomCon 2012,” which I hope to convene in Tampa the day before the ~~RINO coronation~~ Republican convention in August. The general theme will be, “How screwed are we?”

UPDATE 3:55 p.m. ET: I hope Jeff Goldstein can make it to Tampa, too.

UPDATE 3:40 p.m. ET: Chris Moody, my young friend who was covering his first presidential campaign this year, reminds us how it was:

In the final days before the first Republican caucuses in Iowa — a contest on which Santorum rested his entire strategy — it appeared that his campaign would be laid to rest in the state where it was born. Iowa Republicans did not turn their eyes to the man who had spent more time in their state than any other candidate until the very end, but they ultimately awarded him with a surprise, hair’s-breadth victory — not formally confirmed until weeks after the vote–that helped keep his fledgling campaign afloat into the spring.
The first public whispers of his impending rise came with a CNN poll released three days after Christmas that showed Santorum in third place among likely Iowa caucus-goers, higher than he had ever been before in a public opinion survey.

Oh, that wasn’t first whisper, Chris: Have you already forgottten the Dec. 1 earthquake in Vanuatu? And I was calling it the “Santorum Surge” for weeks before that CNN poll confirmed my insight. Just the other day, I recounted some of those headlines.

UPDATE 3:05 p.m. ET: Video report from Associated Press:

Donald Douglas at American Power:

Santorum’s campaign represented the great hope of “full-spectrum conservatives” in 2012, and his exit will leave a mark on the general election campaign, as social issues and working class concerns will continue to resonate with the electorate into the fall.

I’d been planning to travel tp Pennsylvania next week to cover the campaign leading up to the April 24 primary. Now? To look on the bright side, I can begin planning for “DoomCon 2012.”

*** PREVIOUSLY (2:36 p.m. ET) ***

The news broke online while I was sending an e-mail, and I just watched Santorum’s speech on TV.

UPDATE: You know what’s gonna hurt? Telling my son Jefferson.

UPDATE II: Lisa Graas must be heartbroken.

UPDATE III: Chris Stirewalt and his fellow Romneyites on Fox News are talking about how Mitt will win now. We won’t forget their glee.

UPDATE IV: More of the news I missed at The Hill. As one commenter said, “We’ll always have Iowa.” And New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Louisiana, to name some of the places I encountered Santorum on his long, wild campaign trail.

Category: Election 2012, Rick Santorum

Derbyshire, Goldstein and Lowry

Posted on | April 10, 2012 | 63 Comments

The Bonfire of the Derbyshire has burnt itself out, although some latecomers are still poking around in the ashes. Liberals have reassured themselves of their moral superiority. Rich Lowry has reassured himself of his own editorial adequacy. And all is right with the world.

Except of course, it’s not really.

The wheels keep turning, and if Derbyshire’s downfall was just an isolated incident, rather than part of a larger phenomenon, it wouldn’t have resulted in such a carnival of finger-pointing and recriminations.

Mark Judge congratulates himself upon the theft of his bicycle? Meh.

The other day, I made a call to a Known Thought Criminal and chatted for a while about all this. Republicans have an amazing flinch reflex about race, I said, and the Left’s politicization of race is something the GOP can’t figure out how to deal with. National Review is a Republican magazine, and Derbyshire’s extracurricular outrage was a public-relations nightmare in an election year, which Think Progress seized on in a way no one had hitherto seized on Derb’s previous excursions into race-talk.

Having studied the ways of the finger-pointers — sanctimonious white liberals who are as eager as Ashley Judd to drape themselves in a borrowed mantle of righteous victimhood — the whole ritual was to me entirely predictable. From the minute it was brought to my attention, I knew Derbyshire was doomed. If he wished to advocate freedom of association, certainly Derb understood that the proprietors of National Review must be extended the same freedom, eh?

We may therefore say they segregated themselves from Derbism, and the great misfortune may have been Derbyshire’s foolish belief that he could integrate himself into an unwelcoming community.

Perhaps no one will be offended (but my apologies in advance, anyway) if I extend the metaphor by saying that one day, Derb was minding his own business, wearing his hoodie and walking back from the store with some Skittles, when suddenly his career was ambushed by the Zimmermans of tolerance.

Like I said, apologies in advance.

Jeff Goldstein offers some wise words:

Eric Holder once told us were were afraid to have a real dialogue on race. And he did so because he knew we were …

Goldstein’s theme is “defending the indefensible.” I know Jeff as someone who, like me, absolutely hates to see liberals win a fight — any fight — and especially hates it when liberals win because conservatives permit cowardice or convenience to persuade them to surrender.

You don’t have to agree with Derbyshire’s argument to say that liberals routinely get away with making worse arguments with more serious consequences: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” And isn’t politics about electing officials and enacting policies?

Isn’t it true that accusations of racism — overt or implicit — are a common tactic of the Democratic Party? So wouldn’t it have possible for Rich Lowry to say something like this?

“Wait a minute! I’ve called John Derbyshire on the carpet, read him the Riot Act, and suspended him from National Review until we can calm down and figure this out. I strongly disagree with what John wrote, and some of my colleagues are very angry at me for having let Derb drift along like this for so long without any attempt at enforcing editorial discipline. He’s an old man undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, and I think his ill health should be taken into consideration in dealing with this problem. It is not, and should not be interpreted as, an endorsement of Derbyshire’s opinions for me to refuse to fire a longtime employee, a writer whose work has been enjoyed for years by our magazine’s readers, under such extraordinary circumstances.
“We may be unable to work out any honorable solution, and in that case, a parting of the ways will be necessary. However, as matters stand, Derbyshire is suspended until further notice, and this seems like as good time as any — a ‘teachable moment,’ as our liberal friends might say — for National Review to have a thoroughing discussion about how issues of race relations have impacted our nation’s culture and politics. What Derbyshire did was both stupid and wrong, but if I’m the Boss around here, I must bear the responsibility for what my employees do.
“I am inextricably implicated in Derbyshire’s misdeeds, which happened under my negligent supervision. Therefore, as General Lee said to his defeated troops as they retreated from the failed assault on Cemetery Ridge he had ordered, ‘This is all my fault.’
“It would be dishonorable for me to say otherwise, and if the board of directors should see fit to require my resignation as the consequence of this embarrassment, I would tender my resignation without resentment, regretting only my costly failure.”

Yes, if Rich Lowry were a man, he might have said something like that.

But the word “if” denotes a hypothetical, doesn’t it?

Category: Journalism, Protein Wisdom, Racism

Do We Now Know Why Media Matters Dumped M.J. Rosenberg?

Posted on | April 10, 2012 | 3 Comments

You may have missed it over the weekend when I mentioned that the lberal smear outfit Media Matters had parted ways with M.J. Rosenberg, who had been espousing the “Jews Against Israel” gibberish we’ve recently heard from the far-left “J-Street” movement.

Rosenberg tried to portray this move as voluntary, but in an update on the story, Jeff Dunetz remarks:

There is no evidence that MJ Rosenberg was fired. Perhaps he woke up one day and decided to quit a $130,000 a year job in a lousy economy just because he wanted to start a blog.

Doesn’t add up, you see? Permit me to suggest that the J-Street crowd have outlived their usefulness as “useful idiots,” and that some people who thought they were clever back in the day — when attacking “neocons” (nudge, nudge) was politically beneficial to Democrats — have overstayed their welcome.

What I’ve called the “Sirhan Sirhan Wing” of the Democratic Party is ultimately a liability to the party and, in a crucial election year, wisdom would suggest that they can’t afford to encumber their messaging apparatus (of which Media Matters is a key mechanism) with crazies who spew “Zionism is racism” bile and rant about the “Jewish Lobby.”

A public relations problem, at the very least, and so you can easily imagine how some of the folks at Media Matters must have reacted to this Internet video about Rosenberg’s anti-Israel rants:

Anybody want to guess who made that call? A Famous Friend of Hillary?

“Oh, the wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round . . .”

Category: Israel, Liberals, Progressivism

« go back — keep looking »

About

This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

LIVE AT FIVE – 04.11.12

‘Most Beautiful Woman in Canada’ Is …

Once Again, With Feeling

Most Evil Human Being In Known Universe Speaks, Sounds Semi-Sensible

Dean Clancy At FreedomWorks Didn’t Get The Memo

SANTORUM DROPS OUT

Derbyshire, Goldstein and Lowry

Do We Now Know Why Media Matters Dumped M.J. Rosenberg?

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Search

Recent Posts

RSS reader subscription

MEMEORANDUM

Recent Comments

THE AMAZING GONZO FEED

Major Leagues

Archives

Free Agents

SHAMELESS CAPITALISM

Triple-A Franchises

Blogroll

About

Subscribe to our feed

Search

Admin