And no doubt unicorn rides, seeing as the third is just as likely to happen as the first two.

In case you’re wondering, this call is due to the announcement that census worker Bill Sparkman killed himself for the insurance money (H/T: R.S. McCain) - which means that he was not murdered by conservative monsters from the id, or murdered for ideological purposes - or, in fact, was murdered at all.  I’m sure that this would be an embarrassment for everyone on the Other Side who flogged this particular narrative, except this would imply that they cared about Sparkman in the first place.  Which they didn’t, so expect a grudging bare minimum, at best.

Moe Lane

PS: For the record: when you try to set up your suicide to make it look like you’ve been murdered by your ideological opponents, you have officially abrogated any obligation for me to be upset at your plight.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Erick covered this already:

Lieberman Digs In on Public Option
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, speaking in that trademark sonorous baritone, utters a simple statement that translates into real trouble for Democratic leaders: “I’m going to be stubborn on this.”

Stubborn, he means, in opposing any health-care overhaul that includes a “public option,” or government-run health-insurance plan, as the current bill does. His opposition is strong enough that Mr. Lieberman says he won’t vote to let a bill come to a final vote if a public option is included.

…but I cannot resist asking: does anybody over on the Other Side sometimes, ah, regret, aiming at a king - and missing? I ask because this is the second time that Lieberman has been the grit in the gears for progressives: the last time was during the pre-Surge period, of course. His mere presence in the 110th Congress meant that Harry Reid couldn’t shut down the war before we could implement the standard American victory strategy*. And now he seems happy to do it for government-option health care. There’s obviously sound reasons for it - he goes into them - but, really, there’s a certain amount of blood-soaked revenge going on here.

I’ll spare you the lie about how I’m not enjoying this. I am. Even though I know that we’re still on track to get a no-public-option, no-abortion-funding monstrosity of a health care bill; honestly at this point there’s a certain fascination to seeing how much excrement that Congressional Democrats can dump on the sandwich and still be able to get its base to eat it.

Moe Lane

*Systematically flail about until we come across a working solution, then throw our essentially infinite logistics behind said solution and descend upon the enemy like an asteroid from orbit. It’s not the most elegant strategy out there, but it works.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Nine days after there was an announcement that their group was going to be investigated? Yup, that’s right: ACORN. San Diego office - just before California AG Jerry Brown came to visit. Alas, if only somebody had had the foresight to wait for this sort of thing to happen, and retrieve the documents…

Oh. Right.

They didn’t shred, they didn’t redact, and they threw out people’s sensitive and personal information - including things like copies of Social Security cards, W-4 forms, and driver’s licenses. I’m not a lawyer, but apparently that’s grounds for legal action right there; document disposal requirements are very, very strict. Which is why the local ACORN branch is trying the novel ‘Oops, fall cleaning‘ excuse.

Which almost might be believable, except of course for the underage El Salvadoran illegal immigrant brothel thing.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Drawing on and expanding from Jim Geraghty’s summary:

• IA-03. D+1.  Leonard Boswell is the incumbent (first elected 1997); Cook currently does not list the district as in play (Likely Democratic).  Former wrestler Jim Gibbons (no campaign website yet) has just announced; he’ll be facing former National Guard chopper pilot Dave Funk in the primary.
• MN-01. R+1. Tim Walz is the incumbent (first elected in 2006); Cook currently does not list the district as in play (probably because the Congressman won handily in 2008).  Former state legislator (and lightning rod) Allen Quist has declared; he’ll be hammering Walz on the latter’s support of the ’stimulus,’ cap-and-trade, and health care rationing.
• CT-04. D+5.  Jim Hines is the incumbent (freshman); Cook currently lists the district as in play (Likely Democratic).  Rick Torres (no campaign website yet) joins Rob Russo, Dan Debicella, Rob Merkle, & Will Gregory as competing for the Republican nomination.

Yup, the 2010 campaign season’s started. Time to start paying attention to your own, local races…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

They were asked why they didn’t bring in former Governor Sarah Palin to campaign for them in Virginia & New Jersey, and both of them made what are entirely excusable fibs about scheduling conflicts and the need to stay focused on state-specific problems.  Come, I will hide nothing from you: they didn’t bring her in because both of them concluded that her reputation had taken a hit and had not recovered enough.

Yet.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

On the principle that if a Congressional District that doesn’t exist can still generate 2,800 jobs (which also don’t exist) thanks to a ’stimulus’ (which really doesn’t exist), it can generate a Congressman:

See also here. Congressional hopeful Bosse has also called for a national Phantom Congress Movement. There’s already been several people joining up; somebody should start an official website. Or run for their state’s own phantom CDs.

Or, heck, run for real ones.

Moe Lane

PS: Feel free to provide links to you, or somebody else, jumping on this particular bandwagon. The more creative, the better.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

At least, he’s claiming that he’s been forbidden it by Bishop Thomas Tobin of the Providence Diocese, and Bishop Tobin hasn’t denied it - and Tobin has denied that he’s ordered priest under his authority to actually deny Kennedy the Sacrament. Bishop Tobin’s office has also released a letter indicating that the bishop has chastised the Congressman on the subject of abortion since at least 2007; which will call into question the accuracy of Kennedy’s accusation that this is all about the Church’s firm line on abortion funding. It’s probably a factor, and it’s certainly true that Rep. Kennedy has been obdurate in his heresy* for some time, so this is merely the latest salvo.

Still, it’d be nice if we didn’t have to deal with this particular legacy Congressman. There’s actually a serious candidate this go-round: John Loughlin. State legislator, business owner, former military; not to be unkind, but Kennedy really hasn’t worked a day in his [expletive deleted] life, and it shows. Like, for example, in Kennedy’s ability to get himself sufficiently in trouble with the Church on this issue so as to actually be denied the Sacrament.

That takes skill.

Moe Lane

*The fact that the Church has neither the ability nor the particular desire to punish Rep. Kennedy (or other avowedly pro-abortion Catholics) for their shared heresy does not make it any less of one.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

As promised. Short version: DNC beat RNC, NRSC edged DSCC, DCCC edged NRCC, and cash on hand would worry me more if the GOP hadn’t just removed the NJ & VA governorships from the Democrats and essentially handed NY-23 as part of a unfortunate but necessary life lesson to the GOP leadership.

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Eight of them:

Allentown union official Nick Balzano has been a political punching bag all week because he threatened to file a grievance against the city for allowing a Boy Scout to clear a walking path in a city park.

Three days of taking body blows nationally from conservative pundits, a rebuke from the Lehigh Valley’s congressman and even a lashing from his own union led Balzano to voluntarily resign his position Thursday as head of the local Service Employees International Union.

Balzano said he and seven other executive officers of the local SEIU stepped down.

Via HolyCoast.com. Note that the SEIU itself hung Balzano out to dry: when your guys are already out there on camera beating up protesters and gadflies, it’s not a good time to start a fight with the Boy Scouts of America*.  I suggest that the various loyalists of that organization keep that in mind.

Moe Lane

*Not that it’s ever a good time.  Nobody smart in American politics messes with the Scouts. Boy or Girl Scouts.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Seldom does the universe line up so perfectly. Jonah Goldberg:

Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus’ Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin. In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor’s writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:

“The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”

Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.”

Click through for the punchline; but you know it already, don’t you?

Via Ed Driscoll, via Sarah Palin’s Uterus - and if you were wondering whether the latter was vicious mockery of the Online Left or not, well: stop wondering. It is.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) I don’t know if Mediaite deliberately omitted the reason for former President Bill Clinton’s refusal to attend a Keith Olbermann-boosted ‘free clinic event.’  It’s entirely possible that the actual reason (warning: FDL link) - that Clinton thinks that the event in question is a thinly-veiled primary campaign event against Senator Blanche Lincoln (D, AR) and for Democratic Senate hopeful Bill Halter - was simply uninteresting to Mediaite, which is of course that site’s privilege.

That being said, this kind of allegation is newsworthy.  A former President accusing a more-or-less prominent Leftist television commentator of playing internal Democratic party politics with people’s health care coverage?  This should have been front and center on the site.  Heck, it should be above the fold on the New York Times.

‘Should,’ not ‘will.’

Moe Lane

PS: Does MSNBC… approve of this?

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

And threats don’t get more direct than this: either AG Holder starts investigating ACORN, or Breitbart dumps what he still has on the scene in time to make a difference in the 2010 elections.

And this message is to Attorney General Holder: I want you to know that we have more tapes, it’s not just ACORN, and we’re going to hold out until the next election cycle, or else if you want to do a clean investigation, we will give you the rest of what we have, we will comply with you, we will give you the documentation we have from countless ACORN whistleblowers who want to come forward but are fearful of this organization and the retribution that they fear that this is a dangerous organization.  So if you get into an investigation, we will give you the tapes; if you don’t give us the tapes, we will revisit these tapes come election time.

Italics in original. If this is a bluff… well.  Every time somebody thought that Andrew Breitbart has been bluffing on the ACORN scandal, he’s turned out not to be.  The latest one has Patterico almost gibbering in glee as he rakes the LA Times and James Rainey over the coals for their uncritical willingness to believe Lavelle Stewart; it doesn’t seem particularly safe to hope that this time is the time that Breitbart’s got nothing left.

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Big Government:

Apparently, “any measurement” doesn’t include the unemployment rate, job growth, number of jobs, wage growth, hours worked, home foreclosures, rate of mortgage delinquencies, etc.

Which leads to the next question: what does ‘any measurement’ include? Surely there’s something that qualifies: for example, I imagine that segment of the sex worker industry that handles corporate lobbyists and union leadership cadres have been enjoying the recent influx of stimulus money. That’s good, right?

Feel free to come up with your own possible examples in comments. If you can’t, well: open thread.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Everybody’s overthinking Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) flip-flop from his 2001 stance on military tribunals:

…those who commit acts of war against the United States, particularly those who have no color of citizenship, don’t deserve the same panoply of due process rights that American citizens receive. Should Osama bin Laden be captured alive—and I imagine most Americans hope he won’t be captured alive. But if he is, it is ludicrous to suggest he should be tried in a Federal court on Center Street in Lower Manhattan.

…to his current stance:

…when asked by the reporter why Schumer now backs criminal trials over military tribunals, Schumer says he wants to see them executed.

You see, in 2001 there was a Republican running the government, and that Republican was taking the attitude that we were going to treat the 9/11 attacks as attacks. So Schumer went along with that. But now it’s 2009, and there’s a Democrat running the government, and that Democrat is taking the attitude that we are going to treat things like 9/11 as crimes. So Schumer is going to go along with that.

Besides, there’s money in it.  After all, this is the man who justified “little, porky amendments.”

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

I know that Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC) is not on a lot of people’s Christmas card lists, but this exchange between him and Attorney General Eric Holder was four minutes, forty seconds’ worth of pure schooling:

Not filmed was the bit in the end where Holder was on the floor, looking for his teeth. You do not walk into a situation like that without an elementary knowledge of the relevant historical record*. You do not come completely unprepared for a obviously-telegraphed question like “So. What are you going to do with a captured bin Laden?” And you do not assume that Senators like being given the mushroom treatment. Because if you do any of that, you can be assured that some Senator, somewhere, will take the opportunity to introduce you to pain.

Moe Lane

PS: No, really. NPR even noticed. NPR. Via Newsbusters, via Instapundit:

The exchange started with Graham stumping Holder with a question one would have thought the attorney general would have been prepared for…

Not one of Holder’s better days.

*Reminded me of this, actually.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Via Instapundit, HHS Secretary Sebelius is trying to do some damage control on the recent ’suggestion’ that women stop getting routine mammograms before they’re 50:

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, meanwhile, told women to ignore the new advisory recommendations for now.

“The U.S. Preventive Task Force is an outside independent panel of doctors and scientists who make recommendations. They do not set federal policy and they don’t determine what services are covered by the federal government,” said Sebelius in a written statement.

“Our policies remain unchanged,” she said of the federal government. ” Indeed, I would be very surprised if any private insurance company changed its mammography coverage decisions as a result of this action.”

A statement that is very comforting… until you remember that the Democratic party’s goal is to establish governmental control over the health care insurance industry.  Who here thinks that an insurance company already grimly aware that they exist on governmental sufferance might feel the need to ‘change its mammography coverage decisions’ to reflect current state medical policy?  Particularly if there are consequences for not being in compliance with all the laws, regulations, rulings, and opinions that bureaucracies generate more or less automatically.  And if the government doesn’t like the idea that people are going to instinctively assume that said bureaucracy is willing to ‘encourage’ ostensibly-private entities to follow bureaucratic dictates, then perhaps the government might like to consider reining in its bureaucrats.  As publicly as it can manage.

I’ll end by noting that this is all an inevitable by-product of the health care rationing bill; it is, in fact, why I call it that.  More people covered, better service, lower costs: in the best-case scenario, pick any two.  In the scenario that we’re going to get, if this passes?  We’ll get the first one, and the current ruling party will muck up the second while flagrantly ignoring the third.  That’s because the first one is easy, and can be done by lazy people.  The other two require work to accomplish.

Moe Lane

PS: Ed Morrissey reports that there are no oncologists on the task force that made the ‘recommendations.’  I really, really hope that this isn’t actually true.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

It looks like terrorist lawyer - and you may parse that as you wish - Lynne Stewart may spend more time as an involuntary guest of the government than she first thought:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court upheld on Tuesday a disbarred New York lawyer’s conviction on charges of supporting terrorism by helping an imprisoned blind Egyptian cleric smuggle messages to militant followers, ordered her to prison and told a judge to consider a longer sentence.

The three-judge panel described the 28-month prison sentence given by the trial judge to civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart, 70, following her 2005 conviction as “strikingly low” and not matching “the seriousness of her criminal conduct.”

The appeals court ordered the trial judge to think about lengthening the sentence, noting that the judge had declined to consider whether Stewart committed perjury when she testified at her trial.

Two thoughts on this:

1. There’s something… pure… in this hysterical (again, parse as you choose) title found on Indymedia: ‘Fascist Obama Jails Framed Ill People’s Lawyer Lynne Stewart.’  And here I thought that wanting to bomb the United Nations was a nutball-far-extremist-right-fringe fantasy. Live and learn.
2. This comment by Stewart? “This is a case that is bigger than just me, personally. I am no criminal.” - I actually agree with that; she isn’t, except in the narrowest of senses.  Stewart gave aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States, adhering to him, and helping him wage war against my country.

And that last sentence shouldn’t need to be parsed at all.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

(Via Hot Air) Took him long enough:

President Obama acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that his administration would miss a self-imposed deadline to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by mid-January, admitting the difficulties of following through on one of his first pledges as president.

[snip]

On Guantánamo, Mr. Obama said that he now hoped to shut down the detention facility sometime next year, but he did not set a new deadline.

Translation: Gitmo isn’t closing in 2010, either - which means that it probably isn’t closing, period.  Which is something that I’ve known was going to be happening for months.  But then, I’m not the Fortunate Son.

Moe Lane

PS: Next time?  Run for and serve as Governor of something, Mr. President.  It helps cut down on rookie mistakes like this.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Reverse the Vote! is a program set up to specifically target 24 Democrats who voted for health care rationing, and against their constituents’ desires, last week.  The list is entertaining:

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Democratic pollster Tom Jensen earned a bit of polling goodwill by calling the NJ and VA gubernatorial elections accurately (and forthrightly admitting that PPP messed up NY-23, and why), so when he says that AR-02 is a trouble spot for the Democrats, people should probably pay attention to that.

Snyder’s approval rating is now 42%, with 46% of voters in the district disapproving of him. He’s at a solid 75% in his own party but with independents the spread is 30/56 and with Republicans it’s just 12/75.

[snip]

In possible 2010 match ups Snyder leads Tim Griffin 44-43, Scott Wallace 44-42, and David Meeks 45-42. Those close margins come despite the fact that none of the Republican candidates are well known- 67% of voters have no opinion about Griffin, 75% say the same of Wallace, and 78% are ambivalent toward Meeks.

That’s all within margin of error, and it’s not good news for Snyder.  Then again, he’s an incumbent Democrat who voted against his district’s wishes with regard to health care rationing: that’s not a good thing to be, these days.

Moe Lane

PS: Below are the Republicans mentioned above who are running in the AR-02 primary.

Tim Griffin
Scott Wallace
David Meeks

Crossposted to Moe Lane.