The Other McCain : Page 2212 : "One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up."

Biden Debt-Ceiling Talks Collapse as Republicans Cantor, Kyl Walk Out

Posted on June 23, 2011Comments

Several weeks of Potemkin “bipartisanship” go down the drain as Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats refused to agree to any debt-ceiling deal that didn’t include tax increases. Jon Kyl has not yet issued a statement, but Eric Cantor explains his exit:

[A]s it stands the Democrats continue to insist that any deal must include tax increases. There is not support in the House for a tax increase, and I don’t believe now is the time to raise taxes in light of our current economic situation. Regardless of the progress that has been made, the tax issue must be resolved before discussions can continue. Given this impasse, I will not be participating in today’s meeting and I believe it is time for the President to speak clearly and resolve the tax issue.

Let me explain what’s actually happening here: John Boehner and the GOP call the shots in the House — where it’s straight majority rule — but neither party can exercise such unilateral power in the Senate, where Democrats don’t have a veto-proof majority. Therefore, the White House would normally be expected to act as broker for a deal acceptable to both parties in Congress. However . . .

Obama’s gearing up his 2012 re-election campaign, and is therefore trying to paint Republicans into a box, to depict them as “extremist” and “irresponsible” if they don’t compromise with Democrats on a deal to increase the debt ceiling. And in this case, “compromise” means agreeing to a tax increase, which would be a 100% betrayal of the voters who gave Republicans the majority in last year’s mid-term election.

In other words, it’s a variation of the tactic by which Democrats in 1990 forced George H.W. Bush to agree to a tax increase, breaking his “no new taxes” pledge. And if Republicans let themselves be bamboozled that way now, they deserve to be defeated in 2012.

‘Community Organizing’: Not a Joke

Posted on June 23, 2011June 23, 2011Comments

My buddy Matthew Vadum has a new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, and it includes a very interesting passage (p. 27) where Newt Gingrich said Republicans were wrong to treat Obama’s “community organizing” career as a joke:

The GOP’s mockery “trivialized Obama and Obama is not a trivial person,” Gingrich said in an exclusive interview with Vadum featured in the book:

In [Gingrich’s] opinion it was a strategic blunder for Palin and Giuliani . . . [Gingrich said:] “Obama is the most serious radical threat to traditional America ever to occupy the White House.” It would have been better if Republican leaders “had gotten up and said, here is what [Obama] was teaching, and they had taken the audience through the five principles of [radical organizer Saul] Alinsky.” Such a discussion “would have sobered the country. It wasn’t a funny thing. It was a profound insight into how radical Obama is.”

You can read the rest at The American Spectator.

You Stay Classy: Liberals Now Peddling Gay Smear on Texas Gov. Rick Perry

Posted on June 23, 2011Comments

My reaction on Twitter last night was brief and blunt. It is astounding that they’d do this and I’d rather ignore it altogether, but now the desperate and ridiculous gay smear against Rick Perry has been promoted at both Politico and New York magazine.

Isn’t it interesting how so many high-minded journalists who sneered at the Anthony Weiner scandal as an absurd “distraction” from the real issues — an attitude that just coincidentally reprised Weiner’s original defense against accusations that later proved entirely true — are now willing to lend credence to mere rumors which are not only unsubstantiated but also highly implausible? There isn’t any reason at all to believe this smear, so why was it necessary to recycle it?

I’m not a particular admirer of Perry and, so far as talk of his entering the GOP 2012 field is concerned, my gut hunch is that voters probably won’t be eager next year to put another Republican governor Texas in the White House. Been there, done that, OK?

Yet we see that as soon as talk of a Perry ’12 presidential campaign got reasonably serious, the liberal media went hunting for the very lowest dirt peddled by left-wing bloggers in Texas.

Once again it is demonstrated that, if it weren’t for double standards, liberals would have no standards at all.

Ace of Spades delivers a freakin’ dissertation on what vile scum Texas liberals are, and gets a knowing “yup” from Bryan Preston, who spent two years as New Media director for the Texas GOP.

Geert Wilders Not Guilty of Hate Speech

Posted on June 23, 2011June 23, 2011Comments

A big victory for free speech in Europe. The courageous Dutchman’s most enthusiastic American admirer Pamela Geller is celebrating.

I trust commenters will alert us when Charles Johnson tries to rationalize this latest defeat for his “Eurofascist” smear campaign.

UPDATE: Could he possibly be more predictable?

Let’s pause first to ask whether anyone did more in the way “inciting hatred” than did Charles Johnson 1.0, back in the day when LGF was foremost among “the right-wing ‘anti-jihad’ loons.” It was only after he conceived a grudge against Pamela Geller (for her attendance at the October 2007 Brussels “Counter Jihad” conference) that Johnson sought to assert his authority among conservative bloggers to issue fatwas against Geller, Robert Spencer and others.

By the time Johnson denounced Geller as a “Poster Girl for Eurofascists” in April 2009, he had already spent some 18 months waging a one-man crusade to purge others (including Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity) from the ranks of “acceptable” conservative voices. And it was only because his attempted purge failed that Johnson then flipped and began positioning himself as an opponent of conservatives who had once been his only supporters. He has never been able to articulate any coherent political rationale for his conversion to the Left, and we can only conclude that his motives were selfish, spiteful and petty.

Thanks to commenter Randy Rager for the tip.

UPDATE II: The relentless LGF-watchers at Diary of Daedalus suggested checking the history of Charles Johnson’s blogging about Wilders, and from January 2008, we find this:

This is significant for a couple of reasons. Just three months earlier, CJ had begun attacking Geller over her association with European anti-jihadists. Yet he was still referring to Islam with the phrase “Religion of Peace™” — i.e., signifying as a conservative supporter of the Global War on Terror — and did not yet identify Wilders as a villainous “hatemonger.”

In early 2008, then, Johnson still identified with the Right, but was trying to push Geller and Spencer out. As I say, it was the failure of that purge — the frustration of his attempt to play arbiter of membership in the conservative blogsophere — that caused him to “part ways” with the Right.

Obama’s Afghanistan Speech

Posted on June 23, 2011June 23, 2011Comments

Frankly, I’m bored with Obama by now, so why blog about his speech, except that he interrupted primetime TV to make it? From the transcript:

In the days that followed [the 9/11 attacks], our nation was united as we struck at al-Qaida and routed the Taliban in Afghanistan. Then, our focus shifted. A second war was launched in Iraq, and we spent enormous blood and treasure to support a new government there. By the time I took office, the war in Afghanistan had entered its seventh year. But al-Qaida’s leaders had escaped into Pakistan and were plotting new attacks, while the Taliban had regrouped and gone on the offensive. Without a new strategy and decisive action, our military commanders warned that we could face a resurgent al-Qaida, and a Taliban taking over large parts of Afghanistan.
For this reason, in one of the most difficult decisions that I’ve made as president, I ordered an additional 30,000 American troops into Afghanistan.

Why, in 2011, does Obama insist on repeating this stale and misleading Democrat talking-point from 2004?

Al-Qaeda’s escape from Tora Bora in December 2001 did not happen because “our focus shifted,” and Gen. Tommy Franks has said that, as far as we know, Osama bin Laden may have already fled to Pakistan before the battle of Tora Bora even started. Either way, insofar as the U.S. military’s mission in Afghanistan was to kill or capture bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders, the chance for fulfilling that mission was gone by January 2002.

Operation Iraqi Freedom did not begin until March 2003, so that the propopaganda claim embedded in the Democrat talking-point — i.e., the Iraq war being a “distraction” from the anti-terrorism campaign against al-Qaeda — was always essentially a lie. Continue reading Obama’s Afghanistan Speech →

Thank’ee, Bernanke

Posted on June 23, 2011Comments

by Smitty

reversed cart and horse It looks like ‘action’ now means ‘value’:

The Fed would be “prepared to take additional action, obviously, if conditions warranted,” including the purchase of more Treasury securities, Bernanke said yesterday after U.S. central bankers met in Washington.

<shatner_voice>

Farce… the Financial Frontier. These are the voyages of the Federal Reserve. Its five-score-year mission: to explore strange new monetary value depths, to seek out new life in zombie Economics, to boldly go where no man with a shred of policy sense has gone before. . .

</shatner_voice>

Say It Ain’t So, Alcee!

Posted on June 23, 2011Comments

Rep. Alcee Hastings, the Florida Democrat who was elected to Congress after being impeached for bribery as a federal judge, has been accused of sexual harassment:

A congressional ethics panel is investigating allegations that Florida Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings sexually harassed a member of his staff, according to people familiar with the matter.
The investigation of Mr. Hastings is being conducted by the Office of Congressional Ethics, the House’s independent ethics investigative arm, and it is at a preliminary stage.
It began at least a month ago after Judicial Watch, a conservative group, filed a lawsuit as the legal counsel for Winsome Packer, a staffer on a commission Mr. Hastings headed. She alleged that she had been sexually harassed by the congressman and that he retaliated when she tried to report it.
At the time, Mr. Hastings was chairman of the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a group set up in the 1970s to monitor a Cold-War era pact. Ms. Packer, a Republican, also worked for the commission. . . .
In her suit, Ms. Packer made a number of allegations about events she said occurred between January 2008 and Feb. 2010. The congressman pressured Ms. Packer to allow him to stay with her during visits to Vienna, where she was based, and made inappropriate remarks, the suit alleged. In one instance, the suit said Mr. Hastings asked her “what kind of underwear are you wearing” in front of others.

The 36-page lawsuit is available in PDF form. Announcing the lawsuit in March, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said: “For two years Hastings subjected Ms. Packer to a never-ending barrage of unwanted sexual advances. And when Ms. Packer tried, time and again, to put a stop to it, he resorted to threats and intimidation to force her compliance.”

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air has a female source who says the congressman “has always behaved in a very professional fashion” around her. The Alcee Hastings bribery case is featured on pp. 17-20 of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party.