Why Does RINO Mike Castle Want to ‘Kill Jobs and Drive Up Prices on Everything’?

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Delaware Rep. Mike Castle was one of the infamous gang whom Michelle Malkin dubbed the “Waxman-Markey 8” — liberal Republican members of the House who voted for Nancy Pelosi’s job-killing energy tax bill last year.

Now, running for the Senate, Castle is essentially asking for the opportunity to vote for cap-and-trade again — potentially becoming the key Senate RINO necessary to avoid a filibuster and pass the bill in the post-Nov. 2 lame duck session that Charles Krauthammer has been worried about. So, to stop that job-killer, we need a RINO killer:

“Passing Cap and Trade would throw sand into the gears of the American economy,” said Christine O’Donnell. “It would cripple our already struggling markets, taxing goods and services at every point of production and consumption. This bill would kill jobs and drive up prices on everything from peanuts to gasoline.”Rising in the polls, Christine O’Donnell has taken the offensive against her opponent Mike Castle’s voting record. Castle was rated one of the most liberal Republicans in Congress by the American Conservative Union.
“I will continue to hold Mike Castle to account for his liberal voting record,” said O’Donnell. “He has already voted for Cap and Tax, and he will do it again.”

Read the whole thing.  Let’s face it: The only difference between Mike Castle and Dede Scozzafava is lipstick and a pair of pantyhose.

BTW, my post yesterday about Team O’Donnell adding staffers from last year’s Doug Hoffman NY-23 campaign seems to have both Castle’s RINO supporters and Delaware Democrats sweating bullets. Tweet from Steve Foley:

@ericjodom Intense meeting @repmikecastle office allegedly on how to deal with the conservative goon squad http://twitpic.com/28wlv5 #DESEN

And one of the smarter commenters at the Delaware Liberal blog said:

I wonder if any of these guys has juice with Palin? If they pull in that endorsement, all bets are off. . . .
Moderate Republicans who laugh these guys off will be sorry.

Clearly, the O’Donnell campaign’s momentum is getting the attention of important people, including the overpaid sellout RINO operatives working for Castle. Maybe the pressure will cause those GOP Establishment swine to go negative early. It’s probably only a matter of time before the call in Will Folks to “reluctantly admit” to an affair with O’Donnell. Maybe they’re saving the real slime (“She’s a secret Muslim!”) until after O’Donnell pulls ahead in the polls, like they did to Nikki Haley.

VIDEO: Shirley Sherrod’s Husband Says, ‘We Must Stop the White Man and His Uncle Toms From Stealing Our Elections’

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Dan Riehl has the big scoop today at Riehl World View:

And just so you know where the Sherrods are coming from: When their daughter was born in 1967, while America was at war with communist North Vietnam, Charles and Shirley named their baby girl Russia — “with love,” no doubt. Read the rest at Riehl World View.

UPDATE: Yesterday, I called Dan out of the blue — more or less randomly, because I hadn’t talked to him in a while and his name came up in a conversation at the Right Online conference– and he told me about this scoop, which caused me to Tweet:

In phone call today, @danriehl told me, “I swear, I’ll hunt you down and kill your family.” Kinda out of context. #tcot

The “out of context,” you see, was kind of an inside joke, allusion to the charge of “raaaaacism” against Andrew Breitbart after he published a video of Shirley Sherrod. Breitbart says he only later learned had been edited to omit Sherrod’s “moral of the story” explanation that changed the meaning of comments that, in the edited version, were explosively inflammatory — but not as inflammatory as Sherrod’s subsequent accusation on CNN that Breitbart wants to reinstitute chattel slavery.

Dan worked very hard to find this new video and then to document the facts about Charles and Shirley Sherrod’s political history. So when he told me yesterday what he was preparing to release this morning, he made me promise not to breathe a word prematurely to anyone about the content, on penalty of death.

Was this threat merely a figure of speech? Probably. He laughed after he said it. But it’s Dan Riehl, and I certainly wouldn’t want to risk discovering whether he meant “hunt you down and kill your family” as a metaphor.

Dan’s from Jersey, y’know.

UPDATE II: OK, so the Sherrods named their daughter “Russia,” what about their son, Kenyatta? No doubt, he was named for Kenyan dictator Jomo Kenyatta. Because I’m in Vegas today, I don’t have access to my home-office reference library, but from Wikipedia we learn:

In 1932 to 1933, he briefly studied economics in Moscow at the Comintern School, KUTVU (University of the Toilers of the East) before his sponsor, the Trinidadian communist George Padmore, fell out with his Soviet hosts, forcing Kenyatta to move back to London. . . .
He made the Kikuyu-led KANU practically the only political party of Kenya. He consolidated his power greatly, and placed several of his Kikuyu tribesmen in most of the powerful state and security offices and posts. State security forces harassed dissidents and were suspected of complicity in several murders of prominent personalities deemed as threats to his regime . . .
In the 1969 elections, Kenyatta banned the only other party, KPU . . .
He remained president until his death . . . in 1978.

So, like Mussolini, Kenyatta was a communist-turned-nationalist. He made Kenya a one-party state and thus became one of those typical Third World despots who suppress all opposition and surround themselves with corrupt cronies.

This was the man for whom the Sherrods named their son. And because we wouldn’t want to be accused of taking that out of context, we’ll point out that Kenyatta Sherrod seems to have turned out to be an upstanding citizen, a health care executive for Pfizer-Thermacare in Albany, Ga.

Another triumph of capitalism. Is America a great country or what?

Dan’s now got his own Memeorandum thread, and gets the “Hmmm” heard ’round the world from Instapundit.

Brilliant: U.S. Gives Pakistan $1 Billion; Pakistan Helps Our Enemies Kill Us

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That’s the bottom line on the Wikileaks document dump, which shows that U.S. aid to Pakistan isn’t buying us any love:

Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.
The documents . . . suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

The White House has denounced the leaks as “irresponsible,” but what about the facts revealed? For $1 billion a year, we’re paying for Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency to help kill our troops in Afghanistan.

Via Memeorandum. This story was the No. 1 topic today on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” which is monitored religiously by Da Tech Guy:

So on Morning Joe we have a panel of people all against the war commenting on it. (In fairness the entire regular panel is against the war anyway so they would have to have a guest on to defend it.) Is there outrage, is there anger and this kind of leak? Nah. . . .
[T]hey say it is info we mostly already know, no big surprises. Harold Ford makes the correct observation that war is generally not clean and easy and the administration needs to explain that to the public. Barnicle points out that “this is Bush info” is not going to fly.
Will anyone be prosecuted for this? Unlikely. That would depress the administration’s base that is already depressed going into a midterm. They may or may not care about Afghanistan but they sure care if it is lost on their watch.

More blog commentary from Weasel Zippers, Patterico, and SusanAnne Hiller at 73Wire, who points out that the Wikileaks documents put Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the spot.

Leadership 102: Stand By Your People

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by Smitty (h/t Gateway Pundit)

It’s probably not an initial lesson in leadership, but, after a while, some fertilizer hits the air circulator, and a real leader has to stand by the troops. Hopefully, there is a foundation of communication, confidence, trust, and a clearly articulated direction of movement. If a subordinate makes an unforced error, it becomes a training opportunity.

A brief example.  While standing a watch in the engineering plant on a warship, oh, twelve years ago, I made a marginal call that dumped the load. The ship went dark. The senior troops in the Engineering Department had to rush in at a fine Navy hour and clean up. Fortunately, we were at anchor, but I was still about 2″ tall. Going over the details, I had been insufficiently skeptical about some readings, and had pushed a generator a bit too hard. It was a mistake you make once. The Chief Engineer, once the plant was alive and re-settled, took me to the wardroom and explained that this was an expensive lesson, but that I had to get back down there and do the job.

So here is former Governor and Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean looking a total apparatchik on Fox:

Sherrod’s been scuttled. Dean must be prescribing himself something good to numb the aftereffects of this debacle.

But forget those people. Think about the remainder. When Abu Ghraib went down, did Bush call for Rumsfeld’s head, as did so many in the media? No. It wasn’t until after the 2006 election, when that narcissistic ego-centric Bush, who never listened to the will of the people, ever, finally accepted Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation. You can argue that Bush was loyal to the point of blindness.

And it may be possible that Sherrod was so atrocious that she had to be ushered out now, now, now. Even in the case of General McChrystal, where the magnitude of the offense seemed smaller, there seemed to be so much more deliberation before the decision. At least some time passed between the announcement and the decision.

However, in light of the amateurish and sloppy approach to the whole Sherrod affair, where you have a senior party tool going on Fox news woefully un-briefed and having his backside amputated, what does that do for the rest of the administration? Is this a sign of exhaustion, or near collapse? Can we have a reporter offer a sewing kit to Gibbs to pass to Dean, so that Howard can stitch up his tatters?

The situation doesn’t look healthy. With the primaries finishing and the election campaign gearing up, it seems like the hits just keep on comin’ for the Unready Administration. They really should resurrect that old ‘cool, above the fray’ branding from the 2008 campaign, and apply it to these emergencies. I don’t care if the POTUS is a chain-smoking wreck: it doesn’t help the country for that to be so obvious.

The wisdom of the Framers in re-electing the House at a two year frequency shines at times like this. As fragile as all of this appears, would anyone be surprised by a resignation after an ‘unforseen, unanticipated’ drubbing for the Democrats in the election? The Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi even sets up the bogus medical precedent needed as a fig leaf. Write another best-seller, hit the golf course. Spare us all the political revenge talk, if Congress flips sufficiently.

Being in an organization where you don’t think the superiors will back you up is a special form of hell.  You still have a job to do, irrespective of those superiors, but the overhead of second-guessing every decision is debilitating.  I rejoice that none of the officers under whom I served were ever like this.  If the administration isn’t standing by its people until the facts are known, we may have to amuse ourselves with a Body Count Lotto on how many more acts of Sherrodism will occur. We’ll have to pin down exactly what ‘Sherrodism’ means, and whether the count goes back to the Inauguration, or starts how. Discuss.

You Thought Mel Gibson Had Problems?

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At least when Mel was shouting ugly things, he had the excuse of being drunk. Oliver Stone, not so much:

Director Oliver Stone belittled the Holocaust during a shocking interview with the Sunday Times today, claiming that America’s focus on the Jewish massacre was a product of the “Jewish domination of the media.”
The director also defended Hitler and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and railed against the “powerful lobby” of Jews in America.
Stone said that his upcoming Showtime documentary series “Secret History of America,” seeks to put Hitler and Communist dictator Joseph Stalin “in context.”

In the “context,” that is, of hating America. And Oliver Stone’s hatred of American is probably the best explanation for why a formerly successful feature director, an Academy Award winner, is reduced to directing crackpot “documentaries” for cable TV. Who wants to watch movies based on the theme that America is the unique embodiment of evil in the world?

There’s something frightening, really, when you realize how many people bought into the conspiratorial worldview of Stone’s JFK and then ponder the pathological destination to which this worldview has led Stone. And does anybody doubt that Stone has a handy scapegoat for his career problems? Blame the Jews!

Don’t Pay the Ransom, I Escaped!

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LAS VEGAS — Excuse the long blog silence, but I spent most of the Right Online conference shadowing the Christine O’Donnell campaign team. They’re trying to raise awareness among conservative activists of the crucial opportunity in the Delaware GOP Senate primary, which I wrote about last week at The American Spectator, and Friday here on the blog.

Anway, as longtime readers know, my idea it that there’s only one way to do campaign coverage: Go all-in. So for the past three days, I spent a lot of time with Team O’Donnell, sitting in on meetings that were “totally off-the-record,” according to sources close to the campaign.

That’s a phrase that’s become kind of a running joke with me. “Sources close to the campaign” are, as often as not, guys I’ve hung out — even guys whose sofas I’ve crashed on. The O’Donnell campaign just recently hired Yates Walker, whom you may remember from the Doug Hoffman campaign in NY-23. O’Donnell’s campaign manager is Matt Moran, who filled the same role for Hoffman, and their e-campaign team is Eric Odom and Steve Foley, whom I’m sure you remember from their 73Wire coverage of Hoffman.

In other words, “We’re getting the band back together,” to borrow a line from The Blues Brothers. The O’Donnell campaign is benefitting from lessons learned in the wild NY-23 campaign, which turned into a national conservative crusade in the last three weeks before the election. (See “Battle Cry in the North Country,” in the December/January American Spectator.) With seven weeks remaining until the Sept. 10 primary, O’Donnell seems to be very near a point of breaking through at the national level that Hoffman didn’t reach until there was less than a month to go before the election.

Anyway, so it’s a pretty exciting time, but this kind of close-range coverage means I spend a good deal of time having conversations I can’t report. The fact that I just shlepped my luggage from the fabulous Venetian Resort Hotel halfway across town to Odom and Foley’s condo, via a Las Vegas transit bus, is also an experience that doesn’t necessarily make for great blog fodder.

I’m about to get a long-overdue nap, but not before I give a special shout-out to those of you who have hit the tip jar. Also, Eric Telford and the crew at Americans for Prosperity for putting together a great conference, even if I still wasn’t invited to be on any of the panel discussions. I’ll have some more photos and videos from Right Online later, but for now I’ll leave you with this “man-on-the-street” interview:

Yes, that’s Christine O’Donnell beside the pool at the fabulous Venetian Resort Hotel. And, no, she wasn’t wearing a bikini. She did, however, agree to wear the famous fedora I borrowed from Da Tech Guy.

BTWT, dibs on the “Christine O’Donnell bikini” Google-bomb. Today is, after all, Rule 5 Sunday.

Important New Theory In Alleged March Racial Epithet Incident

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by Smitty

Power Line notes the NYT partially walks back the claim of the infamous word falling between ‘bigger’ and ‘rigger’ being used at the Kill the Bill protest in March.

there is no evidence that epithets reportedly directed in March at Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, outside the Capitol, came from Tea Party members.

So, perhaps somebody with an iPod and some speakers was standing inside the building, listening to gangsta rap, and the Congressmen heard it as they came out. Then the whole incident could be downgraded from ‘victimized by racial epithets’ to ‘experiencing art’. Look at me being a Helpy Helperperson!

Back to my Rule 5 Sunday work. Check back in an hour-ish.

Update: More at American Power.