The Other McCain

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

Allen West: A Firm ‘No’ on Budget Deal

Posted on | April 9, 2011 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

The Hill has it briefly, Liberty Pundits picked it up, and Cubachi elaborates with a Fox clip elaborating on his opposition:
West is such a mensch he scared Debbie Wasserman-Schultz out of the Florida delegation.
Given sufficient Allen West clones, I think the country’s problems are solveable. The question would move to where to put all the homo bureaucratus human wreckage left in his wake.

Bonus West at BlogProf.

Category: Allen West, Budget, Military

Thad McCotter On The House Floor With A Rock Reference So Old, Even Stacy McCain Gets It

Posted on | April 9, 2011 | 6 Comments

by Smitty (via Treacher on Twitter)

So the post title is a trifle gratuitous. Sorry. Meanwhile, as seen on Breitbart TV:

“The Democratic Party will shut down the government so they can spend more of your money. The Republican Party is committed to keeping the government open and spending less of your money.”

“The Song Remains the Same”

Thank you, McCotter, for truly packin’ the gear. We need more of your ilk, sir.

Update: linked at Bitsblog.

Category: Thaddeus McCotter

World’s Youngest Blogger Needs Name

Posted on | April 9, 2011 | 144 Comments

by Unborn Son of Smitty

Checking in a little early with you readers. I’m not due for launch until July-ish, but already the dark clouds of crisis hang in my future, the way bricks don’t. I need a name that doesn’t suck. My father has suggested “Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus Smith” , which caused momma’s stomach to do a back flip. You don’t want to be next to a stomach doing a backflip, let me tell you. Especially when you’re depending on it for food during the last trimester.
Hear my plea, oh readers! I need a name that is unmistakably masculine, and will roll off the German tongues of the grandparents easily. Nothing like “FaSoLaTeShawn”. Also out: “Angus”, because jokers at school will cross out the “g”. Biblical is fine, but “Hezekiah” will also be a tough sell.
And a little note to all those blighted souls who think pregnancy is a license to kill: repent.

Some fool may have discovered a sophistry by which snuffing the unborn could be deemed ‘ethical’. This does not mean that you’re pleasing anyone but the Adversary when you frivolously crush a blessing from the Almighty. Repent, and may the Almighty have mercy on you.
Will blog more when my fingers are better formed. For now, back to my nap.
Cheerio,
(________)

Update: weighing in on Twitter, we have the Bob Belvedere Chair of Applied Blogwhoring at Faber College:

The contest is not exactly closed, but the bar is now sub-orbital.

Further Updates:
II: linked at POWIP.
III: Lisa Graas is a solid thumbs up for all your naming needs.
IV: The Lonely Conservative links.
V: Picked up at American Digest.
VI: SWAC Girl is on the Itty Bitty Smitty Committee.
VII: the coveted Sundry-lanche!
VIII: Linked at SI VIS PACEM.
IX: Fishersville Mike offers, then discards an idea. Whew.
X: Hat trick goes to Steve Burri.
XI: Paco’s deft hand at prose, applied to the task of naming, goes rather pear-shaped, I daresay.
XII: Da Tech Guy checks in.
XIII: And the Pirate’s Cove serves up the first tasteful taste of Rule 5.

Coda: went back to my tent, and it was so late that I went ahead and did the hygene thing before falling down for a couple of hours. Got up and went to chapel. What hymn did they select?
Never let it be said that the Almighty is lacking in humor.

UPDATE (RSM): Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Category: Blogging

Brilliant!

Posted on | April 9, 2011 | 18 Comments

Last year, the National Organization for Marriage hired a 24-year-old kid who, as a high school senior in 2004, had gone door-to-door campaigning for John Edwards in the Iowa Democrat caucuses.

NOM didn’t just hire liberal Democrat activist Louis J. Marinelli to do office work, stuffing envelopes or something. No, they recruited him as the online national spokesman for their organization, put him in charge of a “NOMupdates” Twitter account, and sent him off on the “Summer of Marriage Tour.”

And now guess what?

In December I came out in support of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. . . .
I began to understand why the gay community was out there claiming opposition to same-sex civil marriage was all about hate.
I soon realized that there I was surrounded by hateful people . . .
My name is Louis J. Marinelli, a conservative-Republican and I now support full civil marriage equality. The constitution calls for nothing less.

The Constitution, of course, says no such thing. This hasn’t stopped the Left from doing cartwheels and backflips in celebration of recruiting “conservative Republican” Louis J. Marinelli as a gay-rights activist.

Well, heaven knows, there weren’t any adult conservatives with Internet communications skills that the National Organization for Marriage could have hired to run their online operation.

Category: Gays, Marriage

Let’s Laugh Now: Palin Edges Huckabee Among Mississippi Segregationists?

Posted on | April 9, 2011 | 4 Comments

While checking Memeorandum to keep track of the latest government shutdown developments Friday, I saw this headline at the liberal Talking Points Memo blog:

Nearly Half Of Mississippi Republicans
Think Interracial Marriage Should Be Illegal

Hmmmmm. So I went over to check the results at Public Policy Polling and found that, in a poll of “400 usual Mississippi Republican primary voters” — ostensibly intended to measure support for Gov. Haley Barbour’s GOP presidential bid, and Republican preferences for Barbour’s successor — liberal pollster Tom Jensen made this the 14th question in the survey:

Do you think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal?

Of course, no such legislative proposal is pending in Mississippi, but 46% of respondents answered, “illegal.” Frankly, I’d gone to the PPP site hoping to find out what percentage of Mississippi Democrats share that opinion, but Jensen has never asked Democrats any such question.

So we are left to laugh at the cross-tabs by which Jensen correlates (a) opposition to interracial marriage with (b) favorability of GOP 2012 contenders:

Haley Barbour . . . 79%
Sarah Palin . . . . . 74%
Mike Huckabee . . . 73%
Newt Gingrich . . . 56%
Mitt Romney . . . . 44%

Clearly, Romney’s got to do something to shore up his support among segregationists, or this could spell serious trouble for him in the crucial Mississippi presidential primary.

Category: Election 2012, Haley Barbour, Marriage, Mike Huckabee, Mississippi, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Polls, Racism, Sarah Palin

REPORT: Deal Struck, Averts Shutdown (Insert ’30 Pieces of Silver’ Joke Here)

Posted on | April 8, 2011 | 81 Comments

I’d been planning to go to bed early but stayed awake long enough to catch this:

President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said tonight that lawmakers have agreed on a temporary extension of government funding, averting a government shutdown while Congress considers a longer-term budget agreement.
Boehner made the same announcement during a very brief statement on Capitol Hill, little more than an hour before the midnight expiration of the continuing resolution that is currently funding the government; Boehner said the House will vote on the extension later tonight.

So now I guess I’ll stay up late enough to figure out how many magic beans Boehner got for the family cow.

UPDATE: Knife, back, some assembly required:

House Speaker John Boehner said he had reached agreement with the White House to avert the shutdown with barely more than an hour to spare, officials said.
“I am pleased that Senator Reid and I and the White House have been able to come to an agreement that will in fact cut spending and keep our government open,” he told reporters.
“I expect the House will vote tonight on a short term resolution into next week to allow some time for this agreement to be put together in legislative form and be brought to the floor of the Senate and the House for a vote.” . . .
The overall accord removed what Democrats had characterised as the biggest stumbling block – a Republican-crafted measure stripping federal funding from the Planned Parenthood clinics that provide abortions.

GOP Leaders: Standing Firmly for Our Lack of Principles!

UPDATE II: This irritated me:

OK, fine: Then show me one important liberal criticizing Obama and Democrats for giving up too much on this “compromise.” You can’t, because the Democrats gave up exactly nothing.

It is therefore not a “compromise” in any meaningful sense of the word, which is why there is not one peep of criticism from, inter alia, Alan Colmes.

Ace shrugs in weary exhaustion, and that’s OK, just so long as nobody expects us to pretend that the GOP has done anything meaningful to live up to its fiscal-conservative rhetoric.

UPDATE III: More details emerge:

After a long day of trading offers, the White House and House Republicans reached agreement Friday night on a budget framework that would cap 2011 appropriations near or below $1.050 trillion while cutting domestic and foreign aid by more than $40 billion from the rate of spending at the beginning of this Congress.

UPDATE IV: OK, thanks to Twitter friends who told me that Ezra Klein is unhappy with the deal:

Boehner’s the political winner here. Managed his caucus. Got dems to agree to more than expected. Averted a shutdown. He was very effective.

And in response to Obama’s speech, Klein says:

Listening to this speech, you’d think Obama was the one arguing for larger cuts.

And Klein doesn’t like Democratic leaders’ spin:

Shorter dems: these cuts we’ve been resisting and denouncing for months are historic and we’re proud to be passing so many of them.

So there we have exactly one important liberal criticizing the deal. I suppose we’ll have 100 more within a few hours, once Klein sends the secret bat-signal to all his JournoList buddies: “You must denounce Democrats as half-hearted weaklings!”

UPDATE V: “Historic” spending cuts, Harry Reid declares. The cuts aren’t as deep as those knives in our backs, but . . .

UPDATE VI: The following really deserves its own post. John Tabin named Ben Adler as one of the liberals disgruntled by the “compromise”:

Did I say it deserved its own post? No, it deserves an entire book: Why It’s Impossible to Discuss Economics With a Keynesian.

Ben Adler, you fucking moron* misguided young person: How does deficit reduction take money out of the economy?

The federal government doesn’t have a Magic Pot O’ Money and, contrary to whatever Ben Bernanke apparently believes, it can’t create money from thin air. Every dime that the federal government spends must come from one of three sources:

  1.  Taxation, which obviously takes money out of the economy.
  2. Borrowing (i.e., deficit spending), which also takes money out of the economy, in the form of drains on investment. Money that is spent by private investors to buy government debt (i.e., bonds) is money not available to private business either as loans or as investment capital (stock).
  3. Inflation, which devalues currency and thereby — yes, you guessed it — takes money out of the economy.

So Ben Adler’s idea that reducing the annual deficit means “taking all this money out of the economy” has no basis in reality.

UPDATE VII: Philip Klein declares this The Best Doggone Compromise in the Entire History of Compromises. Why, it’s even better than the Three-Fifths Compromise, which is to this day beloved by connoisseurs of compromise everywhere.

UPDATE VIII: Fire Andrea Mitchell says, “Boehner caves as expected.”

Here is a simple suggestion: Let Boehner survey the GOP House caucus and find out how many “yes” votes he has for this deal. If it’s not a majority, then Obama and Nancy Pelosi should guarantee enough House Democrat votes to pass it. So if there are 50 Republicans in a mood to vote “no,” that would mean Pelosi has 27 Democrat “yes” votes.

House Republicans who oppose the “compromise” should publicly declare themselves as “no” votes immediately, so that Pelosi is forced to put some skin into this game. Otherwise, just kill the damned deal and let’s start from scratch.

(* — John Tabin criticized my use of “fucking moron” to describe Ben Adler. Because I was once so stupid myself — and didn’t wise up until I was in my mid-30s — I use the term with the avuncular affection of an ex-fucking moron who wishes to discourage young people from persisting in error.)

UPDATE IX: When you get this high into the Roman-numeral updates, it’s serious news. Our friends at Uncoverage comment:

Did John Boehner “cave?” Well, yes, but that assumes that he didn’t plan to do what he did all along. Is $39 billion a significant cut? No. But it’s more than ever done before. In the context of saving America, we need to be talking about trillions, not billions.

I’m less enraged by the dollar amount than by the fact that Republican leaders appear to have used pro-lifers as a bargaining chip whose principles could be bartered away. But my devoutly Catholic friend Da Tech Guy is actually encouraged by Boehner’s Bargain, so maybe I’m misreading this.

Linked by Political Junkie Mom and by Reaganite Republican and, of course, welcome, Instapundit readers!


Category: Barack Obama, Budget, John Boehner

New Motherf–g Tone Update: Government Shutdown Edition

Posted on | April 8, 2011 | 24 Comments

“We are heading to a shutdown not because of a debate over money, not because of a debate over cuts but because Republicans continue to push a radical agenda against women . . . throwing women and children under the bus.”
— Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Maryland Democrat

Ezra Klein of The Washington Post claims that a mere 3% of Planned Parenthood’s budget goes for abortion. Let’s begin by pointing out the obvious: Do you think people can (a) make a profit from killing babies and yet (b) also be so scrupulously honest that they would never lie about it? Because that’s what Planned Parenthood is doing in defense of its federal funding.

Planned Parenthood performs more than 300,000 abortions annually, accounting for an estimated 38% of revenue from its “health centers.” And to the extent that the budget battle is about funding Planned Parenthood, this is the status quo that Democrats are fighting to preserve.

So while Planned Parenthood does more $150 million worth of abortions every year, it nevertheless claims that — although federal funding is apparently so vital to its operations that Democrats will shut down the government rather than end the funding — none of the taxpayer money it receives pays for abortion.

Bullshit. And when Democrat try to claim that this debate is about “women’s health,” that’s also bullshit.

“Planned Parenthood resorts to misinformation and scare tactics to garner public sympathy,” Chairmaine Yoest of Americans United for Life said today, in response to a statement by one Planned Parenthood spokesperson. “Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the nation. But pregnancy is not a disease for which abortion is the cure. Women deserve better than what Planned Parenthood provides.”

Get the point? Abortion is “health care” only if you consider pregnancy a disease. And most Americans are against taxpayer funding for abortion, so when this issue comes up, Planned Parenthood simply lies and Democrats dutifully repeat those lies. Why? Because that’s what Democrats get paid to do:

[Planned Parenthood’s] political action committee . . . donated more than $148,000 to federal candidates — almost all Democrats — during the 2010 election cycle. The PAC spent more than $443,000 overall.
Planned Parenthood also recorded $905,796 in independent expenditures during the 2010 cycle — money spent in support of, or in opposition to, federal political candidates, largely through advertisements. The top beneficiaries of this money were Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.).

We could probably produce a flow chart of this process to explain it for the truly dense, but it’s really quite simple: (a) Planned Parenthood spends more than a million dollars to help elect Democrats, (b) Democrats then vote to give taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood, and (c) if anybody tries to interfere with this cozy arrangement, Planned Parenthood and Democrats tell a bunch of lies and accuse critics of a “radical agenda against women.”

Barely a week ago, Barbara Mikulski was on CNN condemning “stridency,” calling for “respect” and “decorum,” and saying, “We need to lower the decibel level.” Without any shame, however, she now accuses Republicans of “throwing women and children under the bus.” If Mikulski is against “stridency,” why isn’t she denouncing Chuck Schumer, who accuses Republicans of wanting to “stomp on women’s health and women’s rights”? If she’s all about the “need to lower the decibel level,” why isn’t she criticizing Schumer’s vow “never, never, never” to pass the House version of the budget?

We know the answer: Mikulski won’t condemn Schumer because they’re both Democrats. All Democrats are liars, and none is more dishonest than Chuck Schumer, who tells a dozen lies before he has his first cup of coffee in the morning. But it would be illogical to expect people who vote to spend taxpayer money to kill babies to tell the truth about what they’re doing. And as for Barbara Mikulski’s lectures about “decorum,” the woman eats vitriol-frosted Hate Flakes for breakfast.

UPDATE: The Lonely Conservative calls Chuck Schumer pond scum. Which is an insult to pond scum.

UPDATE II: There are rumors of an impending last-minute deal that would save us from the horror — the absolute world-ending horror — of a government shutdown. And you know what? I don’t care either way.

It’s Friday night and I’m going to bed. If the world is still here when I wake up Saturday morning, I’ll assume that means either (a) John Boehner folded like a cheap suit or (b) shutting down the federal government was not, in fact, the end of life on Earth as we know it.

UPDATE III: Crap, I stayed awake another hour and now John Boehner has struck a deal.

Category: Abortion, Barbara Mikulski, Budget, Chuck Schumer, Planned Parenthood

Oh, Those Dirty Corporations

Posted on | April 8, 2011 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

Judicial Watch notes that the Chicago based corporation called ACORN is on the carpet again:

Facing more than a dozen felony charges in Nevada, ACORN pleaded guilty to one count this week for illegally paying canvassers to register voters during the 2008 presidential campaign. The deal means that ACORN will avoid going to trial, which was scheduled for later this month in Las Vegas. A judge will determine the sentence on August 10, according to a spokeswoman for the Nevada Attorney General’s office, the prosecuting agency.

Since ACORN is a corporation, it will only be fined and there will be no prison term, the Attorney General’s spokeswoman told Judicial Watch. The fine is expected to be a maximum of $5,000. In November the ACORN supervisor overseeing the illicit Nevada voter registration scheme pleaded no contest to two counts of conspiracy.

ACORN has a long, sordid history of election fraud and questionable hiring and training practices. The group has been busted for forging voter registration applications in key battleground states and submitting falsified forms in more than half a dozen others. In 2007 ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in the history of Washington State after seven workers were caught submitting about 2,000 fake registration forms.

Reached for comment, the carpet in Eric Holder’s office said “Yeah, I heard he’s in Wisconsin looking for evidence of GOP fraud in the Prosser election.”

Category: Uncategorized
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