That was the first time Etheridge’s Tea Party-backed GOP challenger was mentioned on the blog. We frequently mentioned Ellmers during the course of the campaign — I’m sure many of y’all contributed to her — and I interviewed her at the Capitol the day she was sworn into office.
This year, Ellmers caught people’s attention in late June when she confronted U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on whether a tax increase on 3 percent of small-business owners should be coupled with spending cuts to reduce the national debt and national deficit. Geithner said there is no other alternative. “You are wrong,” Ellmers told him. A tax increase would stifle job creation, Ellmers said.
A few days later, the House leadership had Ellmers deliver the Republican Party’s official response to Democratic President Obama’s weekly national address. She talked about Republican ideas on how to create jobs.
Since then, Ellmers has appeared on national television at least eight times. Several of those appearances focused on the debt ceiling. . . .
Before President Obama’s speech, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 90 points. Now — as of 10:45 a.m. ET — it’s down 110 points.
Why? Because he used his speech for a partisan hit on the GOP as offering a bill that “does not solve the problem” and can’t pass Harry Reid’s Democrat-controlled Senate.
Obama says “The House is still trying to pass a bill that the Senate won’t vote for. It does not solve the problem and it has no chance of becoming law. Any bill to avoid default must be bipartisan. It will have to have support of the House and the Senate.” . . . This is a nothing speech, actually.
Exactly — a mere repetition of his earlier talking points.
Arizona Republican Rep. Jeff Flake just said that changes in the Boehner bill make it something he can vote for. And the DJIA just broke into positive territory, so my $10 bet is looking shaky.
Hatred of Muslims and resentment of the left — one of us has repeatedly received resentful diatribes against the “multiculturalist elite,” and was mentioned in Mr. Breivik’s own writings — is not confined to Norway. Mr. Breivik has praised Gates of Vienna, a Web site that compares contemporary Europe to long-ago wars with the Ottomans. He has praised writers like Bruce Bawer, the American author of “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within,” and Bat Ye’Or, the pseudonym for the British author of the conspiratorial “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis.” He is an enthusiastic reader of thevirulently anti-Islamic blog of Pamela Geller, an American who leads the group “Stop Islamization of America” and gained notoriety for her opposition to an Islamic center near ground zero in Manhattan.
Europe’s new right is, in other words, not neo-Nazi; it has swapped anti-Semitism for Islamophobia. After a hiatus of several hundred years, fear of Islam reemerged around 1989, as the Cold War was ending and Iranian mullahs issued a fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie. It gained popularity as increasing numbers of Muslims entered Europe as immigrants in the 1990s, and became widespread in the aftermath of 9/11. Traditional racism may actually be waning in several European countries, but hostility toward Islam and animosity toward Muslim immigrants and their children is on the rise. . . .
At least the authors don’t pretend that “hostility toward Islam” arose without any provocation.
The question, I’d say, is which is the greater danger: Islamicization or Islamophobia? And if you believe the former is the greater danger, then the latter is actually rational — even when it presents itself in “virulent” fashion.
After Pete and I made our friendly wager last night, my buddy John Guardiano started giving me flak about it, saying that among other things I was “playing into the Left’s eagerness to stoke a market downturn so they can force House Republicans to capitulate.”
Here’s the thing: I’m not making a value judgment. It’s irrelevant, as regards my $10 bet, whether the House should or should not pass the Boehner bill. I’m just acting on the knowledge that the market hates uncertainty, which is why the DJIA lost a total 484 points in the past five sessions. And here are the headlines in Friday’s papers:
Are you getting my drift here? If the DJIA was losing an average 97 points per day beforelast night’s big flop, doesn’t it just make sense that Wall Street will be having a Freakout Friday Fire Sale today?
Drew M. at AOSHQ says: “Tomorrow (Friday) is 2Q GDP report day. Should be fun. And by fun I mean, awful.”
The initial reaction to the Big Boehner Bungle from both U.S. futures markets and the Asian markets indicated my common-sense hunch was right. But markets are notoriously unpredictable (otherwise we’d all be rich), so it’s anybody’s guess whether Pete or I will be smiling when the closing bell rings on Wall Street this afternoon.
House Republican leaders have postponed indefinitely a vote on Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) debt limit bill after they could not persuade enough Republicans to support the measure.
“No vote tonight,” the third-ranking House Republican, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), told reporters after leaving Boehner’s office shortly before 10:30 p.m.
The most obvious possible prediction: The Dow Jones Industrial Average will drop at least 200 points Friday.
About 2 dozen pizzas were just delivered to Boehner’s office. It’s going to be a long one…
It is at times like this that I say to myself, “Maybe I should’ve stuck with that forklift-driver job I had when I was 25.” Who knows? I might have been loading-dock foreman by now . . .
UPDATE 10:00 p.m. ET: National Journal‘s informal count “showed that 22 House Republicans say they will vote no on the measure, four leaning no, and six undecided,” which would be 26 “no” or leaning “no,” meaning that Boehner is now three votes short of the majority 218 needed for passage.
Nobody ever asks my advice on things like this, but if I was in Boehner’s shoes, I’d say, “Damn the torpedoes: Call the vote!”
It would be better to have the vote and lose it, than to sit around until midnight begging for votes.
And if Boehner loses the vote? Offer his resignation. Immediately.
Because if you can’t get a majority on a key bill like this, your leadership is meaningless.
Call the vote. Win or lose. Go all in, Boehner.
UPDATE 8:15 p.m. ET: Another source on Capitol Hill says they’re currently in “limbo,” expecting to hear by 9 p.m. whether or not there will be a vote tonight. The latest word now is that 25 House Republicans are either “no” votes or leaning toward “no” — which would put Boehner two votes short of a majority for passage.
Getting in touch with my inner cynic, I guess this means that staff are busy putting earmarks into the bill. Somebody’s district is gonna get a new post office or a freeway off-ramp out of this deal, or else an aspiring senator is going to get an extra $20,000 for his 2012 campaign.
UPDATE 9:05 p.m. ET: Still no word on whether they’ll actually have the vote tonight. Moneyrunner comments:
I just watched Special Report with Brett Baier and both Stephen Hayes and Charles Krauthammer – who I admire – are insisting that if Republicans pass the bill that Speaker Boehner crafted they will be in a strong position at the negotiating table.
I have to admit that I need a lot of things explained to me when something is not glaringly obvious but I kept asking: “Why?”
Let me say this: If all you know about what’s happening is what you hear on cable-TV news, you’re probably going to be surprised when you find out — tomorrow, next week, next month — what was actually happening behind the scenes.
Whatever your opinion about this bill, don’t let yourself get worked up into a tizzy by what a bunch of talking heads are saying on TV. They get paid to pretend that we’re on the verge of the Apocalypse. Nobody’s paying you to believe them, so keep your powder dry.
UPDATE 9:18 p.m. ET: OK, now the word is, they’re going to vote some time tonight, but we don’t know when yet, and it is alleged that they don’t even know whether they’ve got the votes to pass the doggone thing. When they go to a roll-call without a complete whip-count — i.e., the result still anybody’s guess — that’s when the going gets weird, and the weird turn pro.
UPDATE 7:25 p.m. ET: While we wait to find out exactly what’s going to happen tonight — will the House vote on the debt-ceiling bill or not? does Boehner have the votes to pass it? — we have a sort of cryptic message to GOP House freshmen from Sarah Palin:
Today I re-read the open letter I wrote to Republican Freshman Members of Congress in November 2010, just days after they were ushered into office in an historic landslide victory due in large part to the activism of commonsense patriots who are considered part of the Tea Party movement. I respectfully ask these GOP Freshman to re-read this letter and remember us “little people” who believed in them, donated to their campaigns, spent hours tirelessly volunteering for them, and trusted them with our votes. This new wave of public servants may recall that they were sent to D.C. for such a time as this.
What does she mean by that? Dunno. But “for such a time as this” is a quote from the Bible (Esther 4:14). Maybe it’s a code word, the secret Mama Grizzly signal or something.
And “for such a time as this,” my sources on the Hill are supposed to be answering their cell phones. IKWIMAITYD.
Please excuse the non-chronological sequence of the updates tonight, but I suppose that conveys as well as anything what a chaotic whirlwind has descended on Capitol Hill.
UPDATE 6 p.m. ET: House Speaker John Boehner postponed the vote mere minutes before the roll call was scheduled to begin.
UPDATE 6:20 p.m. ET: It’s complete madness on Capitol Hill, folks. One GOP staffer says they got the news about the delay via an e-mail sent out by the Democrat whip team. Meanwhile, they’ve heard nothing from Republican whip, Kevin McCarthy, who is said to be still twisting arms to get votes for the Speaker’s bill.
And here’s the scary thing: McCarthy was the head of the GOP’s “Young Guns” candidate recruitment program in the 2010 mid-terms. There are freshmen who owe McCarthy big-time, so if the vote had to be delayed because he can’t promise 218 . . . Dude.
So it’s a total clusterfark in the GOP caucus at this point, although they still expect to have a vote tonight. But they’re now relying on media reports to tell them what the hell is going on with their own Republican leadership.
UPDATE 6:30 p.m. ET: Just to let you know I’m not kidding you about Republicans having to get information from media reports, one of my best Hill sources e-mailed me Major Garrett’s story from National Journal:
Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, is delaying the House vote on his plan to cut the deficit, Republican and Democratic sources told National Journal on Thursday. Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s office said the vote would still take place later in the evening.
A Democratic source said only that Boehner was pushing back the vote. A senior Republican source said the House speaker, who was facing opposition in his caucus, had “delayed” the vote.
“The vote will be this evening,” said a spokesman for Cantor’s office.
You see what I’m talking about here?
A. Democrats know what Boehner’s doing before Republicans know what Boehner’s doing; and B. Republicans don’t find out until it’s reported in the media.
Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue.
If you’re a blogger hoping to get linked at Hot Air, never bother to do any original reporting, because Allah hates bloggers who do reporting.
PREVIOUSLY (5:05 p.m. ET): (Original headline was “BREAKING: House Roll Call on Boehner Bill Expected to Begin at 5:45 p.m. ET”)
So says my source on Capitol Hill. Love it or hate it, House GOP leaders are twisting every arm to pass it. We’ll have complete updated coverage here, of course, but I wanted to share this video of Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.) announcing her support of the bill:
UPDATE 5:45 p.m. ET (Smitty): Via iOwnTheWorld, Priceless Princess Pelosi:
“What we’re trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We’re trying to save life on this planet as we know it today.”
Thanks, lady. Had you condescended to budget when you were running matters, your remarks wouldn’t resemble something the World’s Youngest Blogger just did.
Next month, Quebec native Maryeve Dufault will attempt to qualify for the NASCAR Nationwide Series NAPA Auto Parts 200. The race will be Saturday, August 20th at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve road course in Montreal. This will be Dufault’s first race in the Nationwide series.
Dufault, 29, presently drives for Tony Marks Racing in the ARCA series, having competed in ten of the eleven races held thus far in 2011. Her best finish is tenth in the Messina Wildlife Animal Stopper 150 this past June at Chicagoland Speedway. . . .
