Once again a liberal talking point gets pwned by historical fact.

Jamie posted this at 12:15 PM EST on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 as Politics

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This just cracks me up.  I do hope that the truth of the matter comes out, one way or another, but I ask you, which would be funnier?

1)  That Reid would be desperate and sleazy enough to secretly run a fake Tea Party candidate.

or

2)  That multiple US Senate hopefuls would publicly entertain the paranoid delusion that Reid was secretly running a fake Tea Party candidate.

Either would be sufficiently hilarious for me.

Geoff posted this at 11:27 AM EST on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 as Amer-I-Can!, Buffoon Watch, Politics

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Three cheers for the residents of Texas’s State Board of Education, District 9 for tossing Creationist and Christian Revisionist Don McLeroy out of office in Tuesday’s primary (the man who beat him, a moderate on these issues, faces no opposition in the general election).

Due to its size — and the way California’s persnickety standards and budget woes have removed it from the process — Texas’s standards are extremely influential nationwide.  Getting a confirmed crazy loon like McLeroy off the board is an important victory.

Tom posted this at 9:39 AM EST on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 as Deep in the Heart of Texas, Politics, Science & Evolution

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Once again The Left demonstrates its rank hypocrisy when it comes to free speech:

(H/T: Jonah.)

Jamie posted this at 4:41 PM EST on Monday, February 15th, 2010 as Politics

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Unsatisfied with changing the rules regarding US Senate vacancies — for the second time in five years — Massachusetts democrats have a new plan to protect their complete dominion over us proles their constituents’ interest.

Friday, a spokesman for Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, who is overseeing the election but did not respond to a call seeking comment, said certification of the Jan. 19 election by the Governor’s Council would take a while.

“Because it’s a federal election,” spokesman Brian McNiff said. “We’d have to wait 10 days for absentee and military ballots to come in.”

Another source told the Herald that Galvin’s office has said the election won’t be certified until Feb. 20 – well after the president’s address.

Since the U.S. Senate doesn’t meet again in formal session until Jan. 20, Bay State voters will have made their decision before a vote on health-care reform could be held. But Kirk and Galvin’s office said Friday a victorious Brown would be left in limbo.

In contrast, Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Lowell) was sworn in at the U.S. House of Representatives on Oct. 18, 2007, just two days after winning a special election to replace Martin Meehan. In that case, Tsongas made it to Capitol Hill in time to override a presidential veto of the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Delightful, no?

Tom posted this at 10:48 AM EST on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 as CHANGE!, Politics, The Democratic Congress, Wicked Crazy Massachusetts

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To read He Who Shall Not Be Linked or to watch certain mainstream news commentators, one gets the impression that John Yoo is some sort of fire-breathing fascist neo-con warmonger.

In light of his recent beatdown of Jon Stewart:

I’m very much looking forward to this weeks Uncommon Knowledge. To be honest my libertarian leanings have forced me to view Professor Yoo in much the same way as Sullivan and Stewart, but based on this first video I am hoping that my initial beliefs are in error.

It is clear that there is room for a robust discussion on the nature of the executive in our Constitutional Republic, and Professor Yoo is making a very good case for a powerful and flexible executive. I only wish he had been allowed to make this case during the Bush Administration, he is clearly more than capable of doing so. Instead we got the sneering Cheneyism that ignored critics rather than engaging them.

I will be picking up his book this weekend and look forward to reading it.

Jamie posted this at 11:36 AM EST on Monday, January 18th, 2010 as Politics, We don't need no stinkin' Constitution

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Jonah posts an email that raises one of my favorite subjects that never gets raised. I posted a few years ago that for all the Democrats may bitch about Republicans gaining an advantage in the senate and electoral college from the disproportionate power of small states, the Democrats get at least their fair share. Now I’ve got an excuse to count things again!

Back then, in the 109th Congress (2005-07), for both the ten most populous states and the ten least populous states, there were 11 Democrat senators and 9 Republicans, with Republicans getting their large majority from the 30 states in the middle.

Now for the 111th Congress, which has 60 Democrat senators and 40 Republicans, I’ll review the ten most and ten least populous states. The ten least populous:

• 41. New Hampshire (1D 1R)
• 42. Hawaii (2D)
• 43. Rhode Island (2D)
• 44. Montana (2D)
• 45. Delaware (2D)
• 46. South Dakota (1D 1R)
• 47. Alaska (1 D 1R)
• 48. North Dakota (2D)
• 49. Vermont (2D)
• 50. Wyoming (2R)

That’s 15Ds, 5Rs. That’s a somewhat higher proportion (75%) than the overall number of Democrats in the Senate (60%). How about the ten most populous states?

• 1. California (2D)
• 2. Texas (2R)
• 3. New York (2D)
• 4. Florida (1D 1R)
• 5. Illinois (2D)
• 6. Pennsylvania (2D)
• 7. Ohio (1D 1R)
• 8. Michigan (2D)
• 9. Georgia (2R)
• 10. North Carolina (1D 1R)

That’s 13Ds, 7Rs, a somewhat more Republican ratio (35%) than in the ten least populous states, but still more Democratic than the Senate at large  (Note: In 2006, New Jersey was the 10th most populous state, and it had and has 2Ds; North Carolina has moved up).

As I did for the 109th Congress, I’ll break down states into groups of ten and list their partisan representation in the Senate:

• 1-10: 13Ds, 7Rs
• 11-20: 14Ds, 6Rs
• 21-30: 10Ds, 10Rs
• 31-40: 8Ds, 12Rs
• 41-50: 15Ds, 7Rs

So, as in the 109th Congress, the Republicans do better in states 21-40.  But what’s interesting this time is that the most lopsided group is the Democrats’ control of senate seats from the ten least populous states. I said this in 2006, and I’ll say it in 2009, and I’ll almost certainly say it for any future years I compile such numbers: “Remarkably enough, senate apportionment seems to most benefit the party that wins elections.”

While I’m doing numbers, I’ll also break down the 2008 presidential election as I did the 2004 presidential election, showing how many states from each group were won by each party. Overall, Obama carried 28 out of 50 states (56%):

• 1-10: 8Ds, 2Rs
• 11-20: 7Ds, 3Rs
• 21-30: 5Ds, 5Rs
• 31-40: 3Ds, 7Rs
• 41-50: 5Ds, 5Rs

So McCain won a majority of the 30 smallest states. But considering that he only got 32% of the electoral vote, it’s hard to say that Republicans really benefited from their wins in the small states. Obama carried a huge electoral majority because he won 15 of the 20 largest states. That is as it should be. The Constitution works again: he who wins the votes of the American people wins the votes of the American people. Hallelujah, amen.

Apollo posted this at 4:16 AM EST on Friday, January 15th, 2010 as Amer-I-Can!, Journalism, Politics

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Except for the Democrat-controlled 103rd Congress (1993-95), I think it’s safe to say that the Republican-controlled 109th Congress (2005-07) is, at best, the worst failure of all Congresses in the last 60 years in terms of maintaining its majority. If one considers how little the 109th got accomplished (deficit spending; forcing a federal judge to affirm a Florida court’s decision to allow Scott Schiavo to pull his wife’s plug; almost passing amnesty; letting the president’s judicial nominees be filibustered by a party with 45 senate seats), it might well be the worst Congress of the last century.*

With that in mind, I’m pleased to observe that of the 55 Republicans who composed the majority in the 109th Congress, no more than 32 of them will be in office when the 112th Congress is sworn in next January (see here, and here). That number will be 31 if my state’s senior senator stays true to her pledge to resign in the spring.

Considering that 6 of those Republicans were elected for the first time in 2004, there will be less than half of the 51 Republicans who comprised the Senate majority in the 108th Congress. That’s a lot of turnover.

*I’m trying to be objective here. If I were being subjective, I can’t think of a Congress that accomplished more evil than the 94th (1975-77), which turned its back on our Vietnamese allies, doomed tens (hundreds?) of millions to live their lives under the heel of Communist tyrants, and neutered American foreign policy for a generation. The yellow finks of that Congress left a shadow that we still haven’t escaped. But, speaking objectively, at least that Congress accomplished something, even if that something was, objectively, evil.

Apollo posted this at 1:37 AM EST on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 as Politics

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If ObamaCare is stopped, it seems unlikely that the libertarians or the Republicans are going to block it.  If anybody is going to stop it at this point, it’s the pro-life social conservatives like Bart Stupak and the USCCB.

American conservatism is a somewhat uneasy coalition of libertarians, hawks, and social conservatives.  But it seems clear that the most important group by the numbers are the social cons.  If they’re not on board, then the left wins.

However much we may love Cato and Reason, National Right to Life has probably done more to prevent health care socialism than they have.  Until economic conservatives can muster the number of voters that the social cons do, the libertarians are stuck with the religious right.

Hubbard posted this at 4:34 PM EST on Monday, December 21st, 2009 as CHANGE!, Conservatism, Politics

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James Fallows has made something of an ass of himself in a pair of posts arguing that Vice President Cheney’s criticisms on President Obama are uniquely vile.

Certainly, Cheney has been attacking Obama strongly and I frankly find it rather unseemly.  But, as NRO’s Peter Wehner points out, Cheney’s attacks are surpassed only by President Obama’s relentless blaming of the prior administration for all his problems.  Obama is the aggressor here and — though I wish Cheney would remain stoically quiet as President Bush has been this last year, as does Fallows — I can’t fault him.

Fallows also made a different and very dangerous mistake that that, to my knowledge, no one else has pointed out.  He wrote:

I am not aware of another former President or Vice President behaving as despicably as Cheney has done in the ten months since leaving power, most recently but not exclusively with his comments to Politico about Obama’s decisions on Afghanistan. (Aaron Burr might win the title, for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, but Burr was a sitting Vice President at the time.) [emphasis added]

Let the historical record show that Colonel Burr does not take kindly being called “despicable” in print.  Were I Mr. Fallows, I should avoid Princeton Cemetery at all costs, lest a spry zombie accost him and demand satisfaction.

Tom posted this at 9:51 AM EST on Friday, December 4th, 2009 as Global War on Terror, Politics

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The Economist has a remarkably good take on Palin, her book, and her appeal:

ONE day in January last year, Sarah Palin was watching her son graduate from boot camp. As she gazed at the ranks of “tall and strong and serious” young men marching in perfect unison, all of them “ready to sacrifice all in a fight for freedom”, she recalled something Senator John Kerry once told students in California. If you study hard, he said, “you can do well. And if you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” “What a loon,” thought Governor Palin. “What an elitist loon.”

This vignette captures rather well the secret of Mrs Palin’s appeal. John Kerry, of course, was a war hero, but these days he is the kind of senator who really annoys Mrs Palin’s fans. She, like most military mothers, thinks her son went to Iraq because he is brave and honourable. Mr Kerry implies that he went because he was too lazy or stupid to do anything else. Many Americans find this attitude condescending. These coastal liberals, some heartlanders grumble, think we all are brainless hicks—even the soldiers who defend them.

…

Some women think her feminism is fake. But others are inspired by the way she has juggled five kids and a career. When she first joined the Wasilla city council, she found it full of patronising old men. But she took her baby daughter to meetings, breastfed her while recording radio spots and “didn’t care too much what the good ol’ boys said about it.” She made enemies the right way—by shaking up the corrupt culture of her own party. And when she was elected the first female governor of America’s most lopsidedly male state, she worked well with Democrats, largely avoiding divisive social issues in favour of practical ones, such as oil and gas. At one point she was America’s most popular governor, in that nearly 90% of Alaskans approved of her. But all that changed when Senator John McCain thrust her into the national spotlight.

The backlash

She had a few days to cram for a hazing most candidates spend years preparing for. She flunked, badly. Two-thirds of Americans now say she is unqualified to be president. A YouGov poll for The Economist this week found that 52% disapprove of her, of whom 40% do so strongly. And some of her critics express themselves rather forcefully. Naomi Wolf, a feminist, calls her “a stalking horse [for] the coming police state”. Al Gore’s TV channel calls her a “gun-ho”. Mrs Palin recalls her young daughter looking out of a car window and seeing people wearing T-shirts that said, simply: “Sarah Palin is a cunt”. Such rudeness outrages Mrs Palin’s supporters—and makes them love her more.

As I’ve said before, Sarah Palin has an almost unrivaled ability to make otherwise sane people crazy, and crazy people even crazier.  This isn’t surprising when one considers that she stands at the nexus of controversies over sex, politics, and religion or that she enjoys throwing punches and that she’s incredibly attractive.  I’ve exactly zero interest in her as a candidate at this point but, I’d be liar to say I can’t see the appeal.

Tom posted this at 4:11 PM EST on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 as Politics, Pop Culture Is Filth

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Defending the then-new Constitution, Publius made very strong arguments in favor of mixed regimes, with power distributed among legislative, executive, and judicial branches so as to take advantage of the strengths of each, and to prevent any from accumulating too much power. The legislative branch can take time to be deliberative, and to enact legislation that appeals to a broad swath of the country. The executive can conduct deliberations in private, and provide a single, decisive leader for foreigners to deal with (rather than a squabbling and vacillating committee).

Putting together a few recent posts, it dawns on me that between Obama and the Democrats in Congress, our government has abandoned those advantages laid out in the Constitution. The House of Representatives rushes through legislation, without time for meaningless formalities like reading the bill or counting votes. Because, I guess, we’ve got to pass laws (that even if enacted won’t take effect for months) NOW NOW NOW!

Meanwhile, the president who campaigned on winning in Afghanistan, more than a year after his election, still doesn’t have a plan for what to do, and – much worse – is publicly dithering and casting into doubt our support for the Afghan regime. While Americans die and foreigners justly doubt our steadfastness, the president continues to publicly announce that he just isn’t sure what we’ll be doing.

So here we are, with a Congress that is acting with the petulant impatience of a boy-king who’s just attained his majority, and a president who is waging war with all the decisive unity and determination of a hundred-member committee. It’s like Opposite Day at the Constitutional Convention.

Apollo posted this at 6:56 PM EST on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Politics, The Democratic Congress

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How urgent was Nancy Pelosi’s need to pass her health bill? So urgent that she needed to swear in two representatives before the votes in their elections were counted.

What kind of banana republic is this? The next time you hear Democrats making some stupid argument about some group being “disenfranchised” because they have to show IDs to vote, point to the absentee voters of NY-23, who were literally disenfranchised: their votes did not count toward determining who won their election.

I don’t think there’s been a contested bill in the history of this republic so important that we needed to swear in Congressmen before the votes were counted. But I guess House Democrats would disagree. This ought to be a tremendous scandal.

Apollo posted this at 1:44 PM EST on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 as Politics, The Democratic Congress

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It’s often thought that the aphorism “Politics is showbiz for ugly people” is descriptive.  On the contrary, it is prescriptive.

If the last few years have taught us nothing else, it’s to be wary of attractive politicians.  Not because good-looking people are stupid, but because they make us stupid.  Witness the utter brainlessness that Sarah Palin and Barack Obama elicited from their supporters — not because of anything they did or were believed likely to do — but because they had tremendous sex appeal.  It’s no more a coincide that Palin is a woman and that the GOP is disproportionally male than it is that Obama is male and democrats are disproportionally female.

The GOP’s new diva, Rep. Michelle Bachman, may not be quite as attractive as Sarah Palin, but she’s comfortably over the “hot” threshold.  There also appears to be little question that she is both witless and increasingly popular among the GOP base.  Now, apparently, Sean Hannity is busy misreporting (or lying) about the size of her crowds.  People do funny things when people pretty are involved.  Politics shouldn’t be funny that way.

Tom posted this at 11:43 AM EST on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 as Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us, Politics

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Let’s say you’re the Speaker of the House, and you’re  interested in passing major legislation – by dollar value, the single most expensive piece of legislation in the history of the world, a piece of legislation that will restructure the entire economy of a nation that accounts for 1/4 of the economic output of the entire planet. And let’s say that you think it’s the legislation that your party has campaigned on for over a decade, and that helped usher your party to it’s greatest electoral triumph in forty years.

Do you pass it on a Saturday night, with two more votes than the bare minimum required for passage, and but a single vote from the opposition party?

The Democrats know this is a terrible bill, they know that the country is against it, and they know that if it becomes law it will lead to an epic defeat of their party. We know these things, with complete certainty, because of their actions. (Note that our worthless, lying, cowardly president is resorting to political hate speech. God  may have mercy on him, but henceforward I shall have none.)

This is no way to run a democracy.

Apollo posted this at 1:45 AM EST on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 as Politics, The Democratic Congress

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