"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
by Smitty
Barbara at American Freedom, both a senior friend of this blog and a TweetDeck user, appears to have had a blast.
Her wit and charm made up for a lack of Stacy McCain, fedoras, and pudding. Follow the link to find out how close she got to Governor Rick Perry.
Meanwhile, I’m still broke down in Lewisburg, West Virginia. Any burnt offerings to the car gawdz for prompt completion of the repair would be appreciated.
by Smitty (via Big Hollywood)
We can’t load-shed these Leftist idiots in Hollyweird quickly enough:
Among the more tedious aspects of the current political crisis is the Left’s systemic unwillingness to confront the fact that they have become exactly the kind on ill-liberal, authoritarian swine they should claim to despise.
Anyone else want to see Jon Hamm in a wig, playing some bitchy member of the British Parliament circa 1774 or so, railing about these obnoxious pamphleteers in the Colonies?
One suspects the role would seem strangely comfortable to the man.
No, Jon, there is abso-effing-lutely nothing secret about the Constitutional source of Tea Party discontent, the righteousness of the Tea Party’s cause, and the doom besetting your shallow, propaganda spewing ilk. You, Maher and both of his regular viewers should just go play bridge, for all you matter.
I don’t know if Mattie Fein ever dabbled in witchcraft, but she is certainly tired of being dissed by the same Republican establishment types who are running down the Delaware GOP Senate candidate:
Karl Rove’s now-infamous disparagement of Christine O’Donnell has provoked one Republican congressional candidate to go public with her criticisms of GOP leadership.
Mattie Fein, who won a three-way primary and is challenging Democrat Rep. Jane Harman in California’s 36th District, says she has been “snubbed” by National Republican Congressional Committee staff. . . .
As she explained in her guest editorial column last week, the attitude Mattie Fein has encountered among the GOP elite in California is a microcosm of what O’Donnell is facing in Delaware: A go-along-to-get-along idea among GOP leaders who refuse to challenge liberal Democrats head-on. When they can’t hand-pick their favorite “respectable” RINOs, the elite refuse to lift a finger for a Tea Party-backed conservative who actually wins the primary.
Like O’Donnell, Mattie beat the establishment favorite in the CA-36 primary and, now that she’s in the general election campaign, the Republican leadership is AWOL — or maybe even working to protect the Democrat incumbent!
Call the NRCC at 202-479-7000 and tell them to start fighting to win in November!
UPDATE: Dan Riehl has an important related thought:
Let’s face it, Castle’s years of government service made him a multi-millionaire. There’s no real sign that O’Donnell ever rode that gravy train . . . Is she some lunatic, going from witch to devout Christian? Or, is she mostly just your average American with the same noble qualities and some of the faults that the majority of us have?
That is exactly what Mattie Fein has been trying to get across to the GOP establishment types who don’t think she’s got a chance of beating Jane Harman.
Karl Rove, Charles Krauthammer and other establishment-oriented pundits have seriously underestimated the intensity of the wave of populist sentiment that’s going to come crashing ashore in six weeks. This isn’t just about the GOP conservative base. It’s about independent voters who are sick and tired of the Washington elite in both parties.
That’s why a supposedly “flawed” candidate like Christine O’Donnell could beat a 74-year-old lifetime politician like Mike Castle in Delaware and why she’s got a very real chance to beat Chris Coons on Nov. 2. People in the Rove-Krauthammer axis are thinking in terms politics as usual, and they don’t take seriously the voices of Ordinary Americans who for the past 18 months have been saying the same thing over and over to anyone who asks: “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!”
That’s why they’re willing to overlook whatever “nutty” stuff that Christine O’Donnell may have said or don in her past. She’s taking them seriously and giving voice to their resentments of the elite, and every time some snooty pundit puts her down, it just makes those people all the more resolved to fight.
This also explains why the GOP establishment doesn’t understand that Mattie Fein coud actually beat Jane Harman. The Republican establishment types are sitting around talking to each other’s analyses of the poll numbers instead of listening to what the people are actually saying.
Just like O’Donnell, Mattie Fein doesn’t “fit the mold” of the type of candidate the GOP establishment prefers and they might be right in any other year.
But 2010 is not any other year. It’s a year when the extremist Pelosi/Reid/Obama agenda has wrecked the economy in an attempt to radically alter the American system of government.
This is a year when all bets are off, when there are no “safe” incumbents, and when scrappy underdog “outsider” candidates could win stunning upsets — if only the big-money bastards at GOP HQ would wake up and seize the opportunity.
Six weeks until Election Day and Republicans are 10 points ahead on the generic ballot — and you want to tell me Jane Harman can’t be beat?
I repeat: Call the NRCC at 202-479-7000 and tell them to start fighting to win — and win big — in November!
You know you gotta watch it:
BTW, another of Maher’s guests on that 1997 show is also now running for Congress: Star Parker in California’s 37th District.
Of course, the obvious question is, why are all these RINO-hugging “experts” telling us that Christine O’Donnell isn’t “electable” as a senator — but Al Franken is?
UPDATE: Transcribed a little of this. Maher begins — where else? — with, “Speaking of sex . . .” He then talks about the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 (signed into law by that notoriously puritanical right-winger, Bill Clinton), and its provision of $250 million for sex education that teaches that “sex outside marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”
Now, this is another one of those situations — like Rachel Maddow’s sneer about O’Donnell’s anti-masturbation statements — where liberals think that all they have to do is roll their eyes sarcastically. Any claim about sex that contradicts liberalism, they apparently believe, is self-evidently ludicrous. O’Donnell dared to defend what liberals think is indefensible:
“Morality aside . . . look at it from a health issue. Twelve thousand teenagers a day are contracting sexually transmitted diseases. AIDS is very quickly becoming the number-one killer among teenagers. . . . So, we know how to prevent AIDS. We know how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases: Don’t have sex.”
Star Parker and O’Donnell were in solidarity on this issue, while the white males on the show — Maher, Franken and Ricky Schroeder — were all about “safe sex.” Yet the fact they want to ignore is this: There is no such thing as “safe sex”!
It’s a myth. Short of surgical sterilization, there is no fool-proof method of contraception. All contraceptive methods have what is called a “failure rate,” and even with a contraceptive that is 99% effective, that 1% failure rate can translate to thousands of unwanted pregnancies a year, if hundreds of thousands of people are using that product. And people who think they’re “safe” are obviously more likely to have sex with people with whom they don’t want to make babies.
This is why the widespread acceptance of contraception in American society has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of abortion — more than a million a year for the past 35 years, despite all the sex education, despite TV ads for condoms and birth-control pills, despite everything.
OK, so what about disease? Again, while the use of condoms can reduce the risk of contracting sexually-transmitted diseases, condoms cannot eliminate that risk. And for many STDs — including such serious diseases as herpes, chlamydia and HPV (genital warts) — using a condom may provide little or no protection.
This is simply a fact, and excuse the need for a bit of anatomical detail: Suppose that a woman has a herpes lesion somewhere on her vulva. During intercourse, will a condom cover every part of a man’s penis that might make contact with that lesion? And if everybody’s using condoms, isn’t it likely that a man who has herpes is most likely to develop lesions on the area of his penis (i.e., the base of the shaft) not covered by a condom?
Keep in mind, we’re not talking hypotheticals here. One in six Americans are now infected with genital herpes and — like so many consequences of the “Cultural Revolution” — women and minorities have been affected the worst:
Black women had the highest rate of infection at 48 percent and women were nearly twice likely as men to be infected, according to an analysis by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
About 21 percent of women were infected with genital herpes, compared to only 11.5 percent of men, while 39 percent of blacks were infected compared to about 12 percent for whites, the CDC said.
Are you paying attention? Nearly half of black women in the United States are now infected with this incurable disease.
Thank you, liberal America!
Our sophisticated and enlightened elites can snark and sneer all they want, but the facts are on Christine O’Donnell’s side of the argument.
Blessed are the peacemakers, who figure they might as well cash in on their D-list notoriety:
Sources close to the couple tell us they both agreed to a deal with Vivid Entertainment when the offer hit the “six-figure range.”
What? You wanted pictures? Continue reading In Desperate Effort to End Flame War Between Allahpundit and Dan Riehl, Former Playboy Model Karissa Shannon and Boyfriend Agree to Release Sex Video →
by Smitty (h/t Gateway Pundit)
Clinton in The Hill, emphasis mine:
Former President Bill Clinton said Sunday that the Tea Party movement “reflects the feeling of a lot of Americans that they’re getting the shaft,” but isn’t clear what it stands for.
We closed our eyes this past century, and liberty has slipped away. Getting the shaft? It’s more than a feeling.
by Smitty via (Insty)
Marianne Moran’s article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch concerns an Amendment to give States repeal power over Federal legislation:
We need an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that will allow the repeal of any act of Congress or regulation when two-thirds of the states agree to the repeal.
Insufficient, say I, and for this reason: $.
So long as the Federal government has eminent domain over the individual wallet (Amendment 16), and the States as such lack a voice in the Federal government (Amendment 17), and the Congress has a Cosmic Credit Card (The Federal Reserve), then the notion of permitting State repeals is lipstick on a pig in a deck chair on a sinking cruise ship.
Has anyone noticed that the 16th & 17th Amendments and the Federal Reserve Act all came about in 1913, to the funky beats of Fascist Woodrow and the Progressives?
This State repeal concept is a worthy idea, but I hope that the Tea Party movement will go hard or go home: this blog formally dares any 2012 Presidential candidate to go hard or go home. Campaign on repealing 16th & 17th Amendments and the Federal Reserve Act, commensurate with their centennial.
Then you can break the cycle of economic abuse that has made unethical deficit spending a commonplace activity, dependence on Federal bread and circuses a standard procedure, and an unfathomable debt the issue none dare address except Paul Ryan.
The current open-loop system does nothing but drive the cycle misattributed to Tytler, and ends in slavery.
At the risk of sounding discouraging, this notion of State repeal will likely not avail much.
The First State Patriots, a major 9/12 group in Delaware, will be hosting a candidate forum tonight:
Our next meeting will be on Monday, September 20th at 6:30 p.m. at the Frog Hollow Golf Clubhouse in Middletown, DE. This month’s featured panel will be those candidates that successfully win their primaries on September 14th for national office.
Christine O’Donnell has accepted the invitation to appear at the First State Patriots event, while Democrat Chris Coons turned them down.
Remember that in their first debate Thursday — just two days after the primary, while Karl Rove was busy telling the world that O’Donnell wasn’t qualified to bring him a cup of coffee — the supposedly unqualified Republican candidate held her own against Coons:
The forum was an early test for O’Donnell, who . . . has never endured anything close to the national media storm that has descended upon her since she defeated Castle on Tuesday.
At times the pressure showed, but O’Donnell appeared to hold her own Thursday despite the intense glare. She repeatedly emphasized her concerns over the growth of government and stressed “private-sector solutions” on a range of questions.
That debate was at the Jewish Community Center in Wilmington — home turf for the Democrat — and he has so far turned down every other opportunity to debate until an Oct. 6 event sponsored by the Wilmington News-Journal.
As Byron York pointed out Friday, as executive of New Castle County, Coons raised property taxes three times in four years — he never met a tax he wouldn’t increase!
Tell me again why O’Donnell can’t beat this bald-headed tax-raising Democrat even worse than she beat the septuagenarian RINO all the “experts” said she couldn’t beat.
As of 3 a.m. O’Donnell’s $2 million fund-raising drive had hauled in $1,879,486.36.
And if you want me to cover Christine O’Donnell at that Tea Party event in Delaware tonight — a 282-mile round trip — please hit the tip jar.
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