One of [Ratigan’s] producers called to ask me to be on his show last week but I declined, in part because I’d never heard of him. (I also don’t like it when people I don’t know call my cellphone, though to be fair, he probably got the number out of the computer from when I used to work for MSNBC).
MSNBC wasn’t always the National Moonbat Broadcasting Company. Heck, I remember when Ann Coulter was a regular over there.
White House officials tell ABC News that in his remarks [today] President Obama will indicate a willingness to work with Republicans on some issue to get a health care reform bill passed but will suggest that if it is necessary, Democrats will use the controversial “reconciliation” rules requiring only 51 Senate votes to pass the “fix” to the Senate bill, as opposed to the 60 votes to stop a filibuster and proceed to a vote on a bill.
UPDATE 3:37 p.m. ET: Perhaps you saw Obama’s big speech on TV, repeating the doctors-in-lab-coats motif of last summer. Notice how he emphasized that this is urgent and must be done now:
So now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America’s families and America’s businesses. . . .
Democrats and Republicans agree that this is a serious problem for America. And we agree that if we do nothing — if we throw up our hands and walk away — it’s a problem that will only grow worse . . .
I don’t see how another year of negotiations would help. . . .
I, therefore, ask leaders in both houses of Congress to finish their work and schedule a vote in the next few weeks. . . .
The American people . . . are waiting for us to act. They are waiting for us to lead. . . . Let’s get it done.
Why the haste? It’s the old high-pressure sales pitch — “Act Now! Don’t Delay!” — and as any experienced consumer knows, that’s usually a sign that somebody’s offering a bad deal.
The reasons for Obama’s hurry-up trick is simply because he knows that every time lawmakers go back to their districts, they hear more from their constituents — who, as polls clearly show, are opposed to ObamaCare. And the closer we get to Election Day, the more members of Congress are likely to listen to their own voters instead of listening to Obama (and the army of lobbyists pushing for his plan).
All Republicans have to do is hold the fort a few more weeks, and ObamaCare will collapse of its own weight — another “Epic Fail.”
Jonah Goldberg of National Review, Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Donald Lambro of the Washington Times will speak at a “Barack Obama Epic Fail Teach-In” at George Washington University tonight at 6 p.m. Among the policy failures to be addressed:
5.8 million people have been searching for work for more than 27 weeks . . . the highest ever.
19.1% unemployment rate among young people 16-24.
2.6 million people unemployed since the stimulus passed.
The same kind of anti-fun activists who complain about the Pamela Anderson blog ad are everywhere:
She was a frosty Venus de Milo, but one Rahway family’s snow-packed tribute to the Greek goddess of love and beauty was another person’s pornography.
Maria Conneran and her family worked feverishly to fashion their armless, nude snowlady from last week’s heap of snow, grabbing attention and photographs on Rahway’s Colonia Boulevard. . . .
Among the visitors was a patrolman dispatched to the Conneran household after Rahway police received an anonymous complaint “of a naked snow woman,” said Sgt. Dominick Sforza. . . .
“Curvaceous, bodacious and booty-licious,” said Elisa Gonzalez, a court reporter who built the snow goddess with her daughter, Maria Conneran, 21 and son, Jack Shearing, 12. . . .
When the officer arrived, Gonzalez said, he was apologetic and appreciative of the snowlady and her assets.
“He said, ‘It’s very good,’” Gonzalez recalled.
Despite his appreciation, the officer then asked the family to dress the snowlady. Nonplussed, they complied with a green bikini top and a blue sarong around her ample hips.
Key members of the Senate Banking Committee, after months of negotiations, are expected to unveil their proposal within the next week, people familiar with the negotiations said. While the sources cautioned that no agreement has been reached, the lawmakers, led by the panel’s chairman, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., are considering a new plan to entrust the Federal Reserve with protecting consumers from abusive financial industry practices. . . .
The latest proposal to house the consumer protection unit within the Federal Reserve came days after Dodd suggested putting it in the Treasury Department under the name of a “Bureau of Financial Protection.”
It remains to be seen what will win the support of Republican senators such as Richard Shelby of Alabama and Bob Corker of Tennessee . . .
Yeah, well if Shelby and Corker support Dodd’s plan they’re dead men walking, politically. The Federal Reserve is deeply implicated in the housing bubble, the Wall Street bailout and the current recession, and Dodd’s as crooked as a snake.
As with health-care “reform,” the appropriate response to Democrats’ financial “reform” is very simple: VOTE NO!
UPDATE: Ron Howard has produced a video, predictably pushing for enactment of CFPA, but kind of funny anyway:
Gov. Rick Perry won a decisive victory over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Texas GOP primary for governor Tuesday night, bringing a bruising fight between two of the state’s most popular Republicans to an anticlimactic conclusion.
Perry said his win should send a message to Washington.
“Quit spending all the money, stop trying to take over our lives and our businesses,” he said in a speech that seemed aimed as much as the Obama White House as his Democratic opponent Bill White. . . .
With 73 percent of all precincts reporting, Perry had a 51 percent to 31 percent lead over the three-term senior senator. Debra Medina, a favorite of Tea Party activists, was holding steady at 18 percent.
A Hutchison aide conceded that in the unlikely event Perry’s vote share dropped below the 50 percent threshold necessary to avoid a runoff, there was “no realistic path to victory.”
Via Memeorandum. Anybody think Perry will have trouble beating Houston’s mayor in November? No? I didn’t think so.
It isn’t clear at the moment whether he’s gone or his opponents are just applying pressure.
From the standpoint of those who care about the country, here’s Rush offering One Little Victory:
The video quality is sad, but Wikipedia has a clip in .ogg
A certain measure of innocence
Willing to appear naive
A certain degree of imagination
A measure of make-believe
A certain degree of surrender
To the forces of light and heat
A shot of satisfaction
In a willingness to risk defeat
Celebrate the moment
As it turns into one more
Another chance at victory
Another chance to score
The measure of the moment
In a difference of degree
Just one little victory
A spirit breaking free
One little victory
The greatest act can be
One little victory
A certain measure of righteousness
A certain amount of force
A certain degree of determination
Daring on a different course
A certain amount of resistance
To the forces of the light and love
A certain measure of tolerance
A willingness to rise above
Dangerous extremist militias taking over America? The Southern Poverty Law Center reports “an astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) – a 244% jump” from 2008.
OK, so let’s ask a question: How does the SPLC get these numbers? Do a “find” search on the their list of “Patriot” groups and you discover:
37 listings of the John Birch Society;
48 listings of We the People;
49 listings of Oath Keepers; and
50 listings of the Constitution Party.
According to the SPLC’s math, then, state-by-state representation of these four organizations count as 184 “Patriot groups” — 36 percent of the SPLC’s total. Let’s ask a few more questions:
“We the People” appears to be generally libertarian in orientation: 2004 Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik addressed the group’s 2009 “Constitutional Convention,” and [founder Robert] Schultz himself was a guest (along with libertarian figures like Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie and Rep. Ron Paul) on an August 2009 broadcast of Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Fox News TV program.
After finding the Web site of the Alabama chapter of “We the People,” I phoned Huntsville resident Lesha Martin, one of the members listed on the site. Is “We the People” some kind of violent militia-type outfit?
“Good heavens, no,” said Ms. Martin, an admirer of Ron Paul who described herself as devoted to individual freedom and “resurrecting the Constitution.”
How many peaceful citizens like Lesha Martin are lumped together to create the “grim and alarming portrait . . . of extremist organizations” presented by the SPLC?
Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that some of these groups are unwittingly harboring wannabe terrorists — short-wave wackos building pipe-bombs or stockpiling AK-47 ammo in their garages — but the claim of an “astonishing” increase in dangerous extremism looks very much like the kind of irresponsible exaggeration we’ve come to expect from The Church of Morris Dees. And of course, MSNBC books the SPLC’s Mark Potok, who gleefully uses this report to smear the Tea Party movement:
I don’t deny that there are kooks in America or that some of those kooks are dangerous, but the SPLC purposely hypes this kind of hysteria — using dubious statistics to inflate the numbers — for their own lucrative aggrandizement.
The Southern Poverty Law Center . . .would paint a box of Wheaties as an extremist threat if it thought that would help it raise money . . . To illustrate how dangerous these groups are, the Center cites some recent arrests of right-wing figures for planning or carrying out violent attacks. But it doesn’t demonstrate that any of the arrestees were a part of the Patriot milieu, and indeed it includes some cases involving racist skinheads, who are another movement entirely.
As far as the SPLC is concerned . . . skinheads and Birchers and Glenn Beck fans are all tied together in one big ball of scary. The group delights in finding tenuous ties between the tendencies it tracks, then describing its discoveries in as ominous a tone as possible.
A fool and his money are soon parted. Morris Dees was finance director of the George McGovern 1972 presidential campaign and figured out that hyping the “right-wing extremist” threat was a surefire strategy for separating those particular fools from their money.
For nearly 30 years, Dees and his crew have been working the same formula: Send scary letters to rich liberals, suggesting that if they don’t send the SPLC a check today, the brownshirts will be goose-stepping down Main Street tomorrow.
