Will This Bill Not Get A Constitutional Challenge, If Passed?

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by Smitty (via Big Government)

The Hill reports on a casual $100B that will blow right past state capitals and go to local governments:

Miller’s bill would make $100 billion in grants available to localities over the next two years in the form of grant programs for funds to save or create local jobs, or to create work-training programs for city workers.

I get that Pelosi, Miller & Co. have almost a century-long tradition of shenanigans to back them up.
Other than that, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for the Federal government to be cruising at the Local level.
Well, the Federal government has the deep pockets, and the States are broke, is the likely response.
Let’s get some legal beagles to band together and start defending the Constitution, the 10th Amendment in particular, and start agitating for the Federal government to focus on Federal concerns.

If You Haven’t Been Groped by Eric Massa Yet, Please Raise Your Hand

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OK, let’s do a count . . . uh, so far, looks like I’m the only one:

[I]n conversations yesterday and today with some of Massa’s Navy shipmates, it became clear that the behavior toward his subordinates that got Massa into trouble in Congress is part of pattern that dates to his time in the Navy.
According to Peter Clarke, a Navy shipmate, Massa was notorious for making unwanted advances toward subordinates. He tells the story of his friend Stuart Borsch, with whom Massa shared a hotel room while on leave during the first Gulf War. “Stuart’s at the edge of the bed,” Clarke says Borsch told him at the time, “and [Massa] starts massaging him. Massa said, ‘You’ll have to get one of my special massages.’ He called them ‘Massa Massages.'” Ron Moss, a Navy shipmate and Borsch’s roommate, confirmed that Borsch told him this story at the time.
Borsch, now a history professor at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, didn’t addresss that specific incident, but did confirm to me in an email that he was groped by Massa: “In 1990, aboard the U.S.S. Jouett, I was awakened when a senior officer, Lt. Commander Massa, seemed to be groping me. (I was a lieutenant at the time.) I believe he may have been drinking. I shouted at him and he left. I mentioned the incident to several other officers. I did not officially report it.”
Clarke says that Massa’s roommate, Tom Maxfield, was also assaulted. “Tom lived on upper bunk,” Clarke say. “When you’re on ship, you’re almost exhausted 24-7. So a lot of times you sleep with your uniform on. Tom and Massa shared a stateroom together. Massa climbed up on the top of his bunk, which is hard to do–you never crawl up on somebody else’s bunk. He wakes up to Massa undoing his pants trying to snorkel him.”

(Via Memeorandum.) That’s a euphemism — “snorkel” — I hadn’t heard before, but I’ll be sure to keep it handy henceforth: “President Obama got another snorkel from David Brooks today . . .”

Don’t ask, don’t tell. IYKWIMAITYD.

UPDATE: Allahpundit:

 To no one’s surprise, because of Massa’s resignation, the less-than-worthless House ethics committee has ended its investigation into his alleged misconduct.

Nancy Pelosi’s Three-Ring Circus continues.

Our Problems Exceed Barack Obama

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by Smitty

Dan Riehl’s post looks into Rasmussen’s poll numbers and concludes that they are suggestive of BHO’s arrogance and that

Obama is completely out of step with America’s priorities right now.

Barack is the culmination of a century of centralization in American politics.
If you check out the non-snarky Twitter #thankaliberal entries, the Left is quick and unfailing to pat itself on the back for every single positive thing that ever happened in the US.
We have to be diligent until January 2013, and I don’t mean to distract from that task.
But do save a couple of brain cycles for the bigger picture. The Left hopes you do not. They, I infer, would gleefully let us think that BHO is the source of all ill, and all we need to do is vote him out. No’ so fast. The real threat is the underlying ideology.
It’s an open question, not to offend the HillBuzz lads, whether HRC would have been better than BHO. I suppose she’d have driven a bit closer to the median, as opposed to stacking her administration up in the port-side ditch. But is her underlying ideology significantly different? I’m not so sure.
The bigger strategic question is more than just how we fight off another unsustainable entitlement. No, it’s how do we take the rest of those sacred cow entitlements out back and butcher them, in a politically executable fashion.
The problem is not the names, but the ideology, and the entitlements it breeds.

Update: Rick Moran points out 8 myths about BHO that Conservatives push.  Again: ignore BHO the tool, and focus on saving the greater project that tool was harming.

‘Dude, I’m So Wasted’

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It was nearly midnight in D.C., and I was sitting on the patio of the Dubliner with my friends Victor Morton and Pete Parisi of The Washington Times, when I saw Sean Pean walking past on F Street.

“Dude, that’s Sean Pean,” I said.

Pete and Victor turned to look, but Penn had his back to us, and they seemed doubtful of my celebrity-spotting ability.

“No, seriously, it’s him,” I said.

Evidently, while we had been enjoying our post-deadline refreshments at the Dubliner, Penn had been next door at Kelly’s Irish Times and was now departing, walking  eastward toward North Capitol Street. A gaggle of women who had been at the Irish Times caught up with Penn, and he stopped to have his picture taken with them.

I had my camera in my pocket, and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to add Penn to the “known associates” category (i.e., like former DNC chief Terry McAuliffe), but the Dubliner patio is surrounded by an iron fence, that separated me from the target.

I began preparations for scaling the fence when a woman sitting on the patio said, “No! Don’t try it.” The fence, about 3-1/2 feet high,  is topped with iron spikes, and the woman was obviously concerned that while going over the fence, I might impale myself in a most unpleasant way.

Indeed, on second glance, there was a real possibility of an accidental orchiectomy, and so I returned to the table with Victor and Pete — disappointed, but not disconsolate. Penn continued to the corner and caught a cab.

“You should Tweet this,” I said to Victor. He grabbed his iPhone to send out this message:

Was 10 feet from Sean Penn outside DC bar, had clear 2nd Am. view; all I did was hit my shoe against my head and say “dude, I’m SO WASTED”

Perhaps that reference to the Second Amendment was a bit hostile, but we’re professional journalists, after all, and we know what Sean Penn thinks of journalists:

First Amendment be damned . . . If Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn had his way, any journalist who called Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez a dictator would quickly find himself behind bars.
Penn, appearing on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday, defended Chavez . . .
“Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it” said Penn, winner of two Best Actor Academy Awards. “And this is mainstream media, who should — truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.”

Chavez is a Marxist thug, and Sean Penn is a ginormous douchebag. These are simply the neutral, objective facts.

My Big Day in D.C.

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to describe my experiences Tuesday, which were kind of weird. My plan was to go down to the Heritage Foundation for their weekly blogger briefing, just to show up and let my D.C. friends know I hadn’t fallen off the planet.

My 10:30 a.m. departure from Hagerstown would have put me in D.C. by noon, but I stopped at Sheetz to grab a sandwich, gas up the 2004 KIA Optima and put air in the right front tire. (Old tire with a slow leak. New tire, $75. Just sayin’ . . .) So it was past 11 before I got out onto I-70 and switched the radio to WARK 1490 AM.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Glenn Beck was on the radio, issuing a groveling apology to Michelle Malkin, but there was no context — Beck just rambled on, abasing himself, without saying exactly what he’d done that necessitated the apology. Rolling down the interstate at late-for-a-meeting speed, I grabbed my cellphone and started calling friends, trying to find out what this was about.

Eventually, of course, I discovered that Malkin and Beck had gone ’round over Beck’s coverage of Rep. Eric Massa:

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air and Michelle Malkin give the background, and there’s more at Memeorandum.

This is one of the conundrums of blogging. To stay up-to-date, I have to be online all the time, but that would mean never leaving the basement to go places and meet people. Just in the time it took me Tuesday morning to get ready for my D.C. trip, I’d missed this story, and now I was going to be out on the road  and offline — for several hours, because I seem to be the only person in the world who hasn’t gotten a Blackberry or an iPhone yet. 

En route to D.C., I got a call from Rob Ryan, spokesman for Doug Hoffman’s congressional campaign. Hoffman had announced his plan to run in NY23 again, but I hadn’t had time to blog it, because I’d been getting ready for this D.C. trip. See what I mean?

Blues Buddies and Tax Moochers

So I kept rolling, down I-70 to I-270 and onto the Beltway to the GW Parkway, across the bridge and up Constitution Avenue, over to Columbus Circle and past Union Station to Massachusetts Avenue, and I pulled up to the curb near the Union Pub across from the Heritage Foundation and parked illegally. As I was getting out of my car, who did I see on the sidewalk? D.C.’s hottest young blues pianist, Ian Walters of SwampKeepers fame.

“Dude, you here for the blogger briefing?” I asked.

“No, just waiting for Lisa,” said Walters, referring to CPAC Director Lisa DePasquale, who was inside at the briefing. During CPAC, Ian is media coordinator, in charge of setting up “Radio Row,” etc. — a very important job. But here he was, a vagabond drifter loitering on Massachusetts Avenue.

“Just make sure they don’t tow my car,” I said, as I jaywalked over to Heritage. I entered the bloggers briefing — now nearing its conclusion — helped myself to coffee and a free sandwich and sat next to Lisa, who has an iPhone and announced via Twitter:

uh oh, @rsmccain just showed up at #tbb!

You see that #tbb is the Twitter hashtag for “The Bloggers Briefing.” Rob Bluey was presiding, and I noticed several familiar faces around the table, including Tabitha Hale of FreedomWorks.

Perfect. I’d been planning to go by FreedomWorks after the Heritage briefing, as I needed to put a bug in Tabitha’s ear about Chris Cassone playing the April 15 Tax Day Tea Party. Now I’d be able to save myself the extra trip, with the traffic and parking hassles on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Also at the briefing was my old buddy John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who handed me a printout of his recent op-ed at BigGovernment.com: “Proxy Access: The Obama-Dodd-Alinsky Shareholder Jujitsu. Interesting stuff there. And there was more interesting stuff, a Heritage study by William Beach called, “The 2009 Index of Dependence on Government, which included this graphic:

Click here to see the chart full-size. In 2008, there were 48 million IRS tax returns with zero federal tax liability, so that more than a third of all Americans are getting a free ride. Uh, including me — because I’ve got six kids and blogging hasn’t yet become the lucrative gold mine of a six-figure income. But maybe if you hit the tip jar, we can get me off Uncle Sam’s tax moochers list. I’m just sayin’ . . .

Well, the rest of this story will have to wait for my memoirs. Events of Tuesday afternoon caused an unexpected furor at the media-gossip blog Fishbowl DC this morning, and I suppose there’s no point disputing these anonymous sources who seem to know everything: “Absolutely no way.”

Whatever. At least Sean Penn hasn’t put me in prison yet.

NY-23: Hoffman Is Back.
Opposition Seized By Dismay.

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by Smitty

Having met the gentleman at CPAC, it is a pleasure to point to Robert Stacy McCain’s article on Doug Hoffman over at The Washington Times.

Mr. Hoffman’s Conservative Party campaign last fall became a nationwide crusade after party leaders backed state Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, whose liberal record angered conservatives bloggers, such as Erick Erickson and Michelle Malkin. Republican 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and the Club For Growth were among those who endorsed Mr. Hoffman.
As polls showed a Hoffman surge in the final weeks of the race, Mrs. Scozzafava quit the campaign and shocked Republicans by endorsing Mr. Owens, who won with a 48 percent plurality.
Mr. Hoffman’s supporters immediately began urging him to run again, with House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence praising his “brilliant” campaign.
Mr. Hoffman has reassembled most of his 2009 campaign team, including Mr. McLaughlin’s polling firm and TV advertising specialist Nelson Warfield, and begins with more than $200,000 in campaign cash remaining from last year.
Mr. Hoffman used his Facebook online network to announce his 2010 candidacy to supporters Monday night.

Read the whole thing

Ed Morrissey also offered analysis at Hot Air, along with a CPAC interview clip:

Circumstances should favor Hoffman this time. In the previous contest, a special election to fill John McHugh’s seat, the state didn’t allow for a primary contest, throwing the nominations to the county chairs of both parties. Democrats chose Bill Owen, while Republicans passed over Hoffman to select DeDe Scozzafava. Hoffman ran as a third-party candidate instead, winning over Tea Party enthusiasts while Scozzafava campaigned poorly and alienated voters in her district. Hoffman came within a couple of percentage points of winning the whole race.

More at the Memorandum River.

This blog predicts that Hoffman’s straightforward honesty will go over in the 112th Congress like a musician at a rap concert.  Clearly we need to send more musicians like Doug to DC.

UPDATE (RSM): Speaking being “seized by dismay,” I’d like to know which anonymous worm was responsible for this vicious lie.

Rep. Pelosi Offers A Quote That Shall Live In Infamy

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by Smitty

Tabitha Hale brings you the video:

Ace had an excellent riff:

In fairness, she’s quoting from the Federalist Papers, which spoke eloquently of “passing some laws so we can find out what great shit’s in them, and stuff.” Pretty sure that was John Jay.

Let’s channel a actual Founding Father, then. Alexander Hamilton:

It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.
Federalist No. 1, October 27, 1787

If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.
Federalist No. 33, January 3, 1788

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.
Alexander Hamilton and Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 62, 1788

Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
Federalist No. 62, 1788

If it be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws — the first growing out of the last…. A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government.
Essay in the American Daily Advertiser, Aug 28, 1794

Pelosi is consistently atrocious, if you recall her Are you serious? Are you serious? interrogative from last October.
Yes, Madame Speaker, we’re as serious as a

Godforsaken Heart Attack!

Update: More links at Ed Driscoll.

Update II: Dan Riehl, as is his wont, puts a ‘positive’ spin on matters:

I think I need a shower after watching the political news. And I’d really appreciate it if Rahm Emanuel left me alone long enough to scrub off the grime of the Democrats we’re getting to see in all their glory right now.

Heckuva job, Barry! Through incompetence and trying to foist your agenda on a nation that mostly rejects it, you are destroying the Democrat brand. He really is, you know. This all begins and ends with Obama. And at this rate, there may not be much of a party left by the time he’s finished. And he will be finished in 2012. Mark my words.

In defense of BHO, while the POTUS is nominally the head cheese of the party, the fact that he’s been national-level goods only since he Gave Good Speech in 2004 means that older, saner heads should be offering Rehoboam more forceful advice.