Because Mrs. The Other Smitty loves it when I abuse her tongue.
Ed Driscoll rolls out the hot shadow laughter for BHO-One Quixote*:
Incidentally, it’s got to be quite a comedown from having a rare combination of enough chutzpah and imaginary messianic power to say with a straight face, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” to being told less than three years later by CNN that “There is almost nothing a politician can do about it at least in the short run.”
When this presidency ends as a totally farcical take on a Greek tragedy, I want it known that I called it a while back.
*Attempted Obi-Wan Kenobi reference that fell short of congealing, sorry.
“I am looking at a format that will allow me to engage in more multi-dimensional storytelling…” As opposed to the one-dimensional storytelling she’s done all her life?
The Palm Beach Posthas identified former Air America radio host Nicole Sandler as the woman who was arrested and led out of a town hall meeting in handcuffs after she heckled Rep. Allen West and got into a confrontation with the Republican congressman’s wife.
Javier Manjarres at The Shark Tank has video of repeated disruptions at the town hall in Fort Lauderdale where West declared: “You’re not going to intimidate me.” The video ends with Ms. Sandler being arrested and led out of the meeting by police.
This is the left’s latest strategy- disrupt, heckle, insult, and silence conservatives.
Unfortunately for the left, the strategy won’t work with Allen West.
I’m trying to remember a quote from Nancy Pelosi where she compared the Tea Party protests at 2009 health-care town-hall meetings to Nazis.
UPDATE III: Ah, I knew I’d find it. Nancy Pelosi asked about Tea Party protests, August 2009: “I think they’re Astroturf — you be the judge. They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town hall meeting on health care.”
Nicole Sandler of Coral Springs interrupted when West was explaining the Republican position on Medicare.
Sandler shouted a question, which prompted responses from other audience members: “Shut up lady.”
She didn’t stop. As people recorded the scene with their camera phones, she was escorted out by a Fort Lauderdale police officer.
Sandler objected to being asked to leave, arguing with the officer as he escorted her out, including emphatically cursing at him. Ultimately he arrested her for “trespass after warning” and transferred her to another police officer who took Sandler away.
Sandler used to be a host on the now defunct Air America liberal radio network.
You’d think progressives would be out in force to try to embarrass a tea-party all-star, but no. . . . When the big dissident presence at a rally is a host from a defunct radio network, you’ve got yourself an optics problem.
Given that 2008 established the Racism Rule of political criticism, if the candidate is black, it must be a racist attack, I think we can conclude Nicole there could benefit from some serious sensitivity training.
Florida Democratic Party spokesman Eric Jotkoff told The Daily Caller that “Floridians are disappointed that Allen West refused to answer the hard questions from his constituents, who are clearly upset with his voting to end Medicare.”
“Once again tonight, we see that Allen West is completely out of touch with the people of South Florida, which is why they are going to send him into retirement in 2012,” Jotkoff said in an e-mail.
Did he refuse to answer any “hard questions”? I don’t think so. Accusing him of “stealing our Medicare” isn’t a question, it’s just a lie. It appears that Democrats who wanted a MoveOn.org “Recess Action” were angry they didn’t get to run the show according to their own plan.
UPDATE VIII: A little background on Nicole Sandler: Since leaving Air America, she now has her own 2-hour daily podcast, and Tuesday guest-hosted the Randi Rhodes Show (Rhodes being Sandler’s former Air America colleague). Then she sent this message via Twitter:
She’s not very popular: A former nationally syndicated radio host, yet she’s got fewer than 4,000 followers on Twitter.
Really. What dreck. Politico begins an article with two lines of slander, and then walk it back with “Those are just some of the opinions about Sarah Palin held by members of a small but extremely active network of gadflies, bloggers and authors who have devoted much of the last 2½ years to proving their case to American voters.” Well, as long as you put lies in someone else’s mouth, it’s OK.
Feel the tension mount, emphasis mine:
But some of their leading theories have been thoroughly discredited and earned them widespread criticism. (See: ‘Mama Grizzly’ Sarah Palin back on the prowl)
Yet that only seems to have hardened a commitment to accomplishing what they profess to be their ultimate goal: the absolute and complete exposure of Palin as a fraud unworthy of a role in American civic life. And now, with Palin edging back into the political spotlight in the face of flagging poll numbers, they believe that they are closer than ever to achieving it.
I have no doubt that there are “fraud(s) unworthy of a role in American civic life” afoot, but she isn’t the one I’m thinking of.
Summarizing the rest of the article:
Having lost sight of truth and fact as though they were spinal vertebrae, the Lefty worms seek comfort in lies.
And there shall be books and rumors of books spewing forth from that invertebrate Left.
And they shall throw this book at her, and that, and another, even unto the uttermost length of the shelf shall they stretch, grasping after tomes, that the utter dreck of the writing may somehow stick to Palin.
For they recall their 2008 propaganda coup, when an admittedly clever one-liner in uttered by the lips of a comedienne was mis-attributed to Palin by the multitudes.
But alas, real satisfaction is rooted in truth, which the Left rejected, back in verse #1, and thus are were they doomed to a life spent emitting crap in the manure spreader fashion.
What will the effect of this polarizing nonsense be? I submit that the polarized country left by the Uniter of 2008 will be little affected. Maybe some ambivalent people in the center will be turned off by the series of anti-Palin books. However, they will sell poorly, I predict. Their chief effect will be to rile up the Palinistas and improve her support. Because, sooner or later, everything the Left undertakes achieves the opposite of its intended effect. Only when they can make their efforts fail upward is there a temporary simulation of success.
Is she running for President? Not yet, not officially, and perhaps never. I wouldn’t even worry about it until almost the last minute. Nor should we care: the plan to recover the country from the Progressive Century is more important than who implements it. If she’s on the ticket, and you’re a conservative, then you know what to do.
He was the Nazi in Inglourious Basterds who was so evil that he didn’t need a James Earl Jones voice, and could make ordering a glass of milk into a sinister act. Sure, we’re talking some garden variety mayhem here, but he brings such a flair to the task that I truly think he could salvage ObamaCare, given the opportunity.
This American Idol clip show him in fine form casually, yet directly, addressing the problem at hand:
Morrissey makes it sound as though the Speaker of the House was ‘a young apprentice / caught between the Scylla and Charybdis’ when it comes to the debt ceiling:
Of course, most voters don’t want the debt-ceiling limit raised, either. That gives Boehner a lot more political leverage than he normally would have, since he can claim to represent the mandate of the electorate — and a broadly bipartisan mandate at that. Even a plurality of Democratic voters don’t want it raised again (48% to 36% supporting an increase in the CBS poll). But that’s also a trap for Boehner even if a deal is finally struck that includes both entitlement reform and a debt-ceiling hike; the result will be unpopular for both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
That means that Boehner has to get entitlement reform and take ownership of it while putting the blame for the debt-limit increase on the White House, an effort amply assisted by the Obama administration’s early hysteria strategy on the issue. He can’t afford to come out of the battle with nothing but the debt-limit increase and some assorted discretionary-spending caps that save just tens of billions of dollars like he did with the FY2011 budget. There are no real ways to win in this fight, but plenty of ways to lose. Boehner’s latest warning is a recognition of that fact.
Lacking GOP control of both chambers of commerce, it seems that the sucking wallet wound is going to continue to extract lifeblood from the American people.
One route Boehner could take would be to play the Simpson-Bowles card:
The plan would reduce cost-of-living increases for all federal programs, including Social Security. It would reduce projected Social Security benefits to most retirees in later decades, though low-income people would get higher benefits. The retirement age for full benefits would be slowly raised to 69 from 67 by 2075, with a “hardship exemption” for people who physically cannot work past 62. And higher levels of income would be subject to payroll taxes.
But the plan would not count Social Security savings toward the overall deficit-reduction goal that Mr. Obama set for fiscal year 2015, reflecting the chairmen’s sensitivity to liberal critics who have complained that Social Security should be fixed only for its own sake, not to help balance the nation’s books.
Substantially leverage the entitlement reform pieces of that, and serve it up as the President’s own work. For added snark, publish the legislation with a watermark based upon the Hawaiian long form birth certificate. Then, the President has to defend, again, the old panel he’s blown off. VP Biden would feel the heat, too, on his new panel. Oh wait, he has no clue.
After that fracas, the debt limit can be raised by enough to bring the issue up again in another month. If we’re going to talk about the President like a dog, let us ensure he returneth to his vomit, say, monthly. It will help mellow him out, for caustic values of ‘mellow’. Cubachi points to Sen. Mike Lee at The National Review preaching the Balanced Budget Amendment. Ho hum. When you’ve got a drug addict running the pharmacy, what good are promises? Tell me what you’re doing to separate the junkie from the pills, where ‘doing’ means ‘stripping power’.
If the deficit doesn’t matter, why have any taxes at all? And if there is some point at which the deficit does start to matter, and become dangerous, when is that point if $1.6 trillion isn’t it?
Three reasons, for starters:
Behavior shaping. Individuals may or may not have freewill, but the population as a whole gets mighty sheepish. For example, Washington can bait a lot of people into electric cars, then turn around and tax them. Brilliant!
Class warfare. The assumption of eminent domain over every American wallet is a fantastic divide-and-conquer tool. The poor get a kickback every spring from the Treasury, the rich can be conveniently demonized for not paying that ‘fair share’, and the middle class feels nutty there in the nutcracker.
‘Job’ growth through complexity. The less intelligible the tax code, the more staff required at all levels to manage it, and the more secondary opportunity there is. Before Gutenberg, literacy was a full-time job. The tax wonk is the modern scribe. Who says Progressives are not conservative, after their sick fashion. If the IRS added to the economy, instead of taking, it would be such a Good Thing.
Goldberg is right behind Hayward, again, my emphasis:
Why have a debt limit at all? I mean, if it should automatically be raised the second you reach it without precondition, isn’t it a purely arbitrary and fictional barrier? I tried to make this point last night on Special Report, and it came out a bit clumsy, in part because I used the mathematically rigorous term “kuh-trillion.”
Jonah is playing coy about this. He knows that we need to have political theater. Theater is a bi-partisan device whereby the Ruling Class Overlords generate a vast hue and cry and demand we move in a sane direction, then go the opposite way.
The federal government has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted and is incapable of internal reform. You don’t have a choice, Tea Parties: you’ve got to continue to pressure incumbents, vote them out, demand change, and take the required haircut like an adult.
Fiscal boot camp ain't no frickin' beauty contest, mister.
If you’re still too peppy after all that, then step over to Piece of Work in Progress for a hit of financial gloom from Meep. Truly, our government is a sucking wallet wound.
Now, it would be an ill thing to go with such an entirely down post, so let me finish on a Rule 5 note, with Stacy’s patron Twitter saint:
