The Other McCain

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

Eight House Republicans Who Deserve a One-Way Ticket to Nuevo Laredo

Posted on | December 9, 2010 | 10 Comments

GOP Reps. Joseph Cao (La.), Mike Castle (Del.), Lincoln Diaz-Balart (Fla.), Mario Diaz-Balart (Fla.), Charles Djou (Hawaii), Vern Ehlers (Mich.), Bob Inglis (S.C.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.) all voted for the DREAM Act, which passed the House 216-198 last night.

Michelle Malkin has the whole pathetic story including a link to Hot Air where Allahpundit informs us that, of the eight Republicans who voted for this despicable legislative atrocity, two (Ehlers and Lincoln Diaz-Balart) decided to retire rather than seek re-election this year, two (Cao and Djou) lost on Nov. 2, one (Inglis) was beaten by a Tea Party challenger in the GOP primary and — ahem — backstabbing RINO crapweasel Mike Castle got beat in the Delaware GOP Senate primary.

And thank God for that.

You can say whatever you want about Christine O’Donnell, but you’ll never convince me there was any good reason for a conservative to have anything to do with Mike Castle, except perhaps to spit on the ground whenever his name is mentioned.

As for the two DREAM Act supporters who will be up for re-election in 2012 — Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-21) and  Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18) — I hereby pledge my unstinting support for any Republican who will mount a 2012 primary challenge to either of those two disgusting stains on the U.S. Congress.

Alternatively, as suggested in the headline, incoming Speaker of the House John Boehner should appoint Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen as a special two-member congressional investigative committee, and send them to Neuvo Laredo, Mexico. Their instructions should be to stand on a street corner and shout ugly homophobic slurs (in Spanish) about the leaders of the local drug gangs.


Category: Immigration, Michelle Malkin

LIVE AT FIVE – 12.09.10

Posted on | December 9, 2010 | 5 Comments

TOP NEWS

House Passes DREAM Act 216-198

From Left: Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA)

Likely to die in Senate, where GOP has vowed not to consider any other bills before the budget is passed

Senate Ready To Begin Debate On Tax Bill
Rank and file Democrats warming to the deal

PRC To Institute Own Award As Counter To Nobel Prize
Taiwanese honoree unaware of Confucius Award until asked by press about it

POLITICS

House Democrats Push Through Omnibus Spending Bill

Soon-to-be-ex-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md)

Freezes most Cabinet budgets, funds war in Afghanistan for another year, makes some cuts

Supremes Short One As Kagan Barred From Sitting On Arizona Hiring Law Challenge

Senate Convicts, Removes Federal Judge Porteous

Governor-Elect Brown Warns California Legislature To “Brace Yourselves”

THE ECONOMY, STUPID

Anonymous Lays Siege To Mastercard, Visa In Revenge For Wikileaks Cutoff

U.S. Lays Out AIG Exit Plan

SpaceX Launches Test Spacecraft (Video)

Irony: Open-Source Mozilla Removes Anti-Tracking Code From Firefox Even As Microsoft Adds It To IE9

SPORTS

How About Crawford & Greinke Instead Of Lee To The Yankees?

Royals ace Zack Greinke - would he win 20 with the Yankees?

Royals say the 2009 Cy Young winner could be had for the right price

Florida Recruits Uncertain After Urban’s Resignation

Garnett Clarifies “Cancer” Remarks To Karl

Baseball’s Free Agents Not Just For Yankees & Red Sox This Winter

Cubs Sign 1B Carlos Pena To One-Year Deal

Tribe Legend Bob Feller Moved To Hospice Care

Rays Deal SS Bartlett To Padres For A Pair Of Relievers

FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS

Sexy Christina Aguilera Pix Released By Hackers

The one photo in the set that wasn't NSFW

Still not enough to make up for DDoS attacks on CC company websites.

Family Confirms Queen Of Soul Has Cancer

Harvey Weinstein Persuades MPAA “Blue Valentine” Deserves R, Not NC-17

Oprah: “I’m Not A Lesbian”

Katy Perry Officially Becoming Mrs. Brand

Jessica Simpson, Eric Johnson To Do Prenup

Lindsay Lohan To Do DWTS?

Has-Been Hollywood Hack Whines About Sarah Palin’s Hunting
Also evidently can’t tell a caribou from a moose

FOREIGNERS

Obama Big Loser In Failure To Halt Settlements

Mullen: Too Much At Stake For PRC Myopia On Norks

Snow Shuts Down Paris, Flooding Kills One In Spain

Preval Calls For Calm As Electoral Violence Rocks Haiti

BLOGS & STUFF

Cubachi: Wikileaks  And Supporters Were For Freedom Of Speech Before They Were Against It

Confederate Yankee: Maureen Dowd Inexpertly Slaughters, Guts A Metaphor

Jim Geraghty: Will Deval Patrick’s 2010 Strategy Save Obama?

Joanne Jacobs: Parents “Pull Trigger” On Failing School

Daniel: Tax Compromise Gets Liquored Up

— compiled by Wombat-socho
Read more

Category: Live at Five

More MSNBC Awesomeness: Obama Gets Pimp-Slapped by Rachel Maddow

Posted on | December 8, 2010 | 34 Comments

Via Talking Points Memo:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Between this and the Olbermann rant, MSNBC is clearly signaling a new programming strategy, to challenge Fox News as the No. 1 cable destination for Obama-haters.

UPDATE: Welcome (again) Instapundit readers! I feel like Ted Williams on a hitting streak or something.


Category: Barack Obama, MSNBC

Keith Olbermann Punk-Smacks Obama in the Best ‘Special Comment’ EVAH!

Posted on | December 8, 2010 | 42 Comments

Talk about your “must-see TV”!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As I remarked last night on Twitter, if Glenn Beck had ever gone after Obama this hard, he would have been denounced for committing a hate-crime. (To be exact, with only 140 characters to work with, what I actually said was, “@KeithOlbermann‘s contempt for President Obama in ‘Special Comment’ would have gotten @GlennBeck on DHS watchlist.”)

Given Olbermann’s contempt for “the insatiable maw of capitalism,” I’m going to engage in an act of social justice by expropriating the entire 2,192-word transcript of his hectoring, self-important, anti-economic rant:

Finally tonight as promised, a Special Comment on the tax compromise.

To paraphrase Churchill, again, let me begin by saying the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing: “that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road. We should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of American politics and policy have been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being, been pronounced against this Administration: ‘thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting’.”

In exchange for selling out a principle campaign pledge, and the people to whom and for whom it was made. In exchange for betraying the truth that the idle and corporate rich of this country have gotten unprecedented and wholly indefensible tax cuts for a decade. In exchange for giving the idle and corporate rich of this country two more years in which to accumulate still more, and more vast piles of personal wealth with which they can buy and sell everybody else.

In exchange for extending what he spent the weeks before the mid-terms calling “tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires” to people who have proven, without a scintilla of doubt, without even a fig leaf of phony effort to make it look like they would do otherwise, that they will keep the money for themselves.

In exchange for injecting new vigor into the infantile, moronic, disproved-for-a-decade three-card monte game of an economic theory purveyed by these treacherous and ultimately traitorous Republicans, that tax cuts for the rich will somehow lead to job creation even though if that had ever been true in the slightest the economy would not be where it is today.

In exchange for giving tax cuts for the rich which the nation cannot afford, and extending their vintage through the next election and thus promising at best a reenactment of this whole sorry, amoral, degrading spectacle in the winter of 2012 and at worst a rubber-stamp from a wholly Republican House and Senate and even White House.

In exchange for this searing and transcendent capitulation, the President got just thirteen months of extended benefits for those unemployed less than 100 weeks. And he got nothing absolutely nothing for those unemployed for longer — the 99ers.

This the Administration is celebrating — taking the victims of Republican Economic Policy, taking the living breathing proof that the Bush Tax Cuts for the rich do not create jobs, and putting economic bullseyes on their backs as of next December.

On the one hand— Unaffordable Tax breaks for the beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts, made ever more permanent as they threaten to suck four trillion dollars out of government revenues in the next decade.

On the other hand: An insufficient dead-end unemployment solution for Americans who would actually work for a living, made ever more temporary.

And we are hearing nothing about those 99ers. Even though the numbers of them will balloon from two million to four million or more by next December, even with this deal. Even though just last Thursday, the President’s own Council of Economic Advisers reiterated the reality that the easiest way to create jobs and keep jobs is to make sure that the unemployed continue to have money to spend.

.The unemployed — unlike the rich whom this President has just bowed to are, in fact, the job creators. They do not have investment portfolios to expand. They do not have vast savings into which to stuff the government checks. They have to spend the money. And the Council reported last week that when someone becomes a 99er his or her household loses at least a third of its income.

And where the 99er was the sole breadwinner — four households out of ten — they lose 9/10ths of their income.

The economy is surprisingly simple. If business and the rich won’t spend, and the middle class can’t spend, the only factor left to keep pushing money into the insatiable maw of capitalism is the government.

So, should the government give the money to the rich who keep it, or the not rich, who spend it? Apparently this President does not know the answer to that question. Even though he has his own Council of Economic Advisers.

Mr. President, for these meager crumbs, you have given up costly, insulting, divisive, destructive tax cuts for the rich and you have given in to Republican blackmail which will be followed by more Republican blackmail. Of course, it’s not just tax cuts for the rich that you’ve given up.

There is also your new temporary payroll tax holiday, establishing a precedent that the way money is pumped into Social Security should be negotiated and traded off and making it just that much easier to gut Social Security later.

And, oh by the way, in the middle of a crisis over making temporary Republican tax cuts permanent, you give the Republicans another temporary Republican tax cut that they can come back later to blackmail you into making permanent. Well, Sir, at least that’s the end of it.

Except, of course, for the estate tax, what Republicans so happily call, “the death tax.” Which will be reduced from its 2009 levels.

Huh?

The money given by one dead rich person to some living rich persons, will not be taxed, up to five million dollars. More than five million and it’s 35 percent — which is less than it was under the tax laws of President Bush’s last fiscal year. Sir, you have given undeserved tax breaks —and you have carved them a little more deeply into the stone of law – to rich people, living and dead. And you want me to tell them which Democrat proposed the Estate Tax giveaway?

Blanche Lincoln! Blanche Lincoln, repudiated by nearly half the Arkansans in her own party, and then repudiated by 63 percent of the voters in Arkansas. Mr. President, you’re listening to Blanche Lincoln? What? Were Bob Beckel and Pat Caddell unavailable?

This President negotiates down from a position of strength better than any politician in our recent history. It is too late now to go back and ask why the President, why the wobbly Democratic leadership, whiffed on its chance to force John Boehner to put his money where his mouth was. In September Boehner said if he had no other option, of course he would vote to extend tax breaks only for the middle class.

So the President and the Democrats gave him another option, naturally. But didn’t extending the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthy became necessary to get Republican support for extending the jobless benefits? Nonsense.

Five times in the last two years, the Republicans have gone along with extending those jobless benefits, and they’ve done it without being bribed with tax cuts for the rich. Even now Boehner’s September confession, and the GOP’s unwillingness to take the blame for killing off jobless benefits, offered an alternative blueprint for this President:

Let the law expire as scheduled in 24 days. Let all the tax breaks go, and when the Republicans take over the House and try to pass them anew, if they somehow are not stopped in the Senate, veto anything that does not keep tax cuts for the middle class and unemployment benefits as the dog, and perks for the rich as the tail. The GOP is still terrified of being blamed for cutting off the unemployed. You take that fact and you break them with it.

There is only one possible rational explanation for this irrational and childish transaction. There are Republicans and Tea Partiers who are still intent on cutting off their noses to spite their faces — the “Blind Rage Conservatives” for whom any compromise is disaster, just as for this President, apparently no compromise is disaster.

Maybe the reason the Administration’s numbers don’t add up in this deal is that it was too busy instead counting votes and there really are enough on the Far Right to sink it and the President winds up having his cake and eating it too, proposing what he can call a “tax compromise” and then having it derailed publicly and embarrassingly by the Republicans. Maybe the political calculus here exceeds both in priority and quality, the real calculus.

But I deeply doubt it. Yesterday I had an exchange with a very Senior member of this Administration who wanted to sell me on this deal. I pointed out that that was fine, except that — as I phrased it to him — “frankly the base has just vanished.” “Well,” he replied, “then they must not have read the details.” There, in a nutshell, is this Administration. They didn’t make a bad deal — we just don’t understand it.

Just as it was our fault, Mr President, for not understanding your refusal of even the most perfunctory of investigations of rendition or domestic spying or the other crimes of the Bush Administration, or why you have now established for those future Administrations who want to repeat those crimes, that the punishment for them will be nothing.

Just as it was our fault, Mr. President, for not understanding Afghanistan. Just as we didn’t correctly perceive, Sir, the necessity for the continuation of Gitmo. Or how we failed to intuit, President Obama, your preemptive abandonment of Single Payer and the Public Option. Or how we couldn’t have foreseen your foot-dragging on “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Just as we shouldn’t have gotten you angry at your news conference today and made all the moderate Democrats wonder why in the hell you get publicly angry so often at the liberals who campaigned for you and whether you might save just a touch of that sarcasm and that self-martyrdom for the Republicans.

And of course, Mr. President how we totally betrayed your Administration by not concluding our prayers every night by saying “Thank you for preventing another Great Depression, you are entitled to skate along on your own wonderfulness indefinitely and if you get less than you could have on Health Care Reform or taxes, well, that’ll be okay, we’re happy to pay $10,000 for a $300 car because hey, it could’ve been $20,000, right? And because we only expect you to do one thing correctly during a presidency and you had pretty much cleared that obligation when it proved that you were, indeed, not John McCain.”

We are very very sorry. In some sense, the Senior Member’s remark about how we “did not read the details” is not utterly absurd. We have enabled this President, and his compromises-spinning-within-compromises. And now there are, finally, those within his own party who have said “enough.” In the Senate, the Independent, Mr. Sanders has threatened to filibuster this deal. He deserves the support of every American in doing so, as does Mr. Conyers and Mr. McDermott and the others in the house. It is not disloyalty to the Democratic party to tell a Democratic president he is wrong; it is not disloyalty to tell him he is goddamned wrong.

It is not disloyalty for the 99ers and the 99ers-to-be to rally in the streets of Washington. It is not disloyalty to remind the President that he was elected by people to whom he had given a clear outline of what he would do for them, and if he does not steer out of the skid of what he is doing to them, he will not only not be re-elected, he may not even be re-nominated.

It is not disloyalty to remind him that we are not bound to an individual. We are bound to principles. If the individual changes, or fails often and needlessly, then we get a new man. Or woman. None of that is disloyalty. It is self-defense. It is the acknowledgment that, as my hero Thurber wrote, you might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.

That is what the base is saying to this President, about his Presidency. “Well, then, (we) must not have read the details.” The Churchill quotation — as opposed to the quotation from the very Senior member of your Administration, Mr. President — is from October 5th, 1938.

I don’t want to make any true comparison to the historical event to which it related; the viewer can go ahead and look it up if they wish; I will confess I won’t fight if anybody wants to draw a comparison between what you’ve done with our domestic politics of our day, to what Neville Chamberlain did with the international politics of his.

The rest of what Churchill said, paraphrased — but only slightly paraphrased — bears repeating again. The terrible words have for the time being, been pronounced against this Administration: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.” And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and political vigor, we arise again and take our stand for what is right.

Understand that Keith Olbermann speaks for the vast majority of people who reliably vote Democrat.

They really think this way.

They really think of the rich as “idle” people who contribute nothing useful to the economy. They really think that unemployment payments create economic growth. They really think of economic liberty as a “three-card monte game.” They really think of Republicans as “treacherous and ultimately traitorous.”

Elsewhere, I’ve described this resentful class-warfare mentality — the politics of envy — as “Murthanomics.” It is the exact opposite of sound economics, and is the sentiment that elects to office demagogues.

To watch Olbermann indignantly lecturing the President of the United States in this manner is a delightful smorgasbord of schadenfreude for Republicans watching the Left turn upon its own fallen hero. This is the misery inflicted on Democrats by the Republican mandate of winning 242 House seats in the mid-term elections.

Yet the fact that Olbermann speaks for tens of millions of his fellow Democrats, still trapped within the hate-filled darkness of their economic ignorance, is in fact a tragedy. And we should not gloat.

Oh, what the hell. Who am I kidding? Let’s gloat our asses off!

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Insty also links Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey, who links Rob Port at Say Anything, all of which you should read.

Related: More MSNBC Awesomeness: Obama Gets Pimp-Slapped by Rachel Maddow.
Read more

Category: Barack Obama, MSNBC, Taxes, Video

Election 2010 Finally Ends as Republican Randy Altschuler Concedes in NY-1

Posted on | December 8, 2010 | 4 Comments

Painfully close, but not close enough:

New York Republican Randy Altschuler has conceded to Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop, bringing the final undecided House race of the 2010 election cycle to a close.

The final margin was less than 300 votes. I’d blogged Monday about suspicions of Democrat vote shenanigans. Sam Foster at Left Coast Rebel has Altschuler’s official statement:

Randy Altschuler, Republican/Conservative candidate, this morning conceded the hard-fought race for New York’s 1st Congressional District seat. With approximately 977 absentee ballots left to be counted, unofficial numbers showed four-term Democrat incumbent Congressman Tim Bishop with a 263 vote lead over Altschuler, with a total of more than 194,000 votes cast. The 1st Congressional District was the last undecided House seat in the nation.
Additionally, the Altschuler campaign dropped its legal challenges to the remaining uncounted absentee ballots. This will allow the Suffolk County Board of Elections to count the remaining ballots. While the Altschuler campaign has uncovered numerous instances of absentee ballots that may have been unlawfully cast, the campaign is confident that the proper authorities will take the appropriate action concerning them and that their number is too small to alter the outcome of the election.
Randy Altschuler said, “After consulting with my family and campaign staff, I am ending my campaign and offering congratulations to Congressman Tim Bishop on his victory.

As LCR notes, this last decision finalizes the GOP’s gain in the mid-term elections at 63 House seats, providing incoming Speaker John Boehner with a 242-seat majority (compared to 193 for Democrats).

Category: Congress, Election, New York

Julian Assange, Prince of Trolls

Posted on | December 8, 2010 | 6 Comments

Malware, viruses, denial-of-service, hacking — a troll attack of global proportions:

A small army of activist hackers orchestrated a broad campaign of cyberattacks on Wednesday in support of the beleaguered antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks, which has drawn governmental criticism from around the globe for its release of classified American documents and whose founder, Julian Assange, is being held in Britain on accusations of rape.
Targets included Mastercard.com, which stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; Amazon.com, which had briefly provided WikiLeaks server space; the online payment service PayPal, which cut off its commercial cooperation with WikiLeaks; the lawyer representing the two Swedish women who have accused Mr. Assange of sexual offenses; and PostFinance, the Swiss postal system’s financial arm, which closed Mr. Assange’s account after saying he provided false information by saying that he resided in Switzerland. . . .

Read the rest.

Category: WikiLeaks

Worst Scandal Imaginable

Posted on | December 8, 2010 | 23 Comments

A Texas company gets billions in taxpayer money to train police in Afghanistan and, it appears, provides services of a very multicultural sort.

I’m not even going to quote the story or describe it. It’s bad.

Very, very bad.

More at Memeorandum and Outside the Beltway.

Category: Aghanistan

Terrorist Catch-and-Release: FAIL

Posted on | December 8, 2010 | 1 Comment

Really, does this surprise anyone?

150 former Guantanamo detainees are either “confirmed or suspected of reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities,” according to a new intelligence assessment released by the Director of National Intelligence’s office on Tuesday. In total, 598 detainees have been transferred out of U.S. custody at Guantanamo. 1 out of every 4, or 25 percent, of these former detainees is now considered a confirmed or suspected recidivist by the U.S. government. . . .

Read the whole thing at The Weekly Standard.

Category: Terrorism
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