Mark A. Kilmer's Political Annotation

The Television Audience-Reach Limit

Our government ought not to be involved in any of this. What percentage of the television audience can a particular ownership reach with its signals? On Monday, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) reached a deal with the White House which would set the limit at 39-percent. This sounds arbitrary, but there is a very good reason why the limit is to be set at precisely 39-percent. It's just that no one knows what that reason is, and if the extraterrestrial beings which do know why it's 39-percent were to tell us, they would have to kill us with their guns which shoot green plasma rays.

Okay, it's ridiculous. Here's an article from Hollywood Reporter.com: Dems raise roof over deal on 39% audience reach. That is a particularly bad headline, as it was the Republicans who raised the roof, from 35% to 39%. But it's all semantics.

Sen. Fritz Hollings accused the GOP of reneging on an earlier agreement among the House and Senate negotiators that set the cap at 35%. Hollings is the senior Democrat on the panel's subcommittee that doles out funds to the FCC along with the Justice, Commerce and State Departments.

"The Republicans' decision to make the broadcast ownership cap 39% was no 'compromise' at all. It was a total violation of the conference agreement. Both houses included the exact same wording," the South Carolina legislator said on Tuesday. "The Republicans went into a closet, met with themselves, and announced a 'compromise.'"

That's the way it's done, Fritz, you old dinosaur you.

There's a provision in the bill which requires the FCC to review the ownership provision ever two years -- instead of four -- so Fritz needn't fall about himself with anger.

Or Byron Dorgan, also mentioned in the article:

"I, and others who have fought so hard to overturn these rules, will not sit quietly by while the White House insists on provisions that are counter to the public's interest," he wrote. "If the identical provisions which were approved by the House and Senate, and by the Conference Committee, are altered, it will provoke a major battle, at least here in the United States Senate."

The solution, Byron, is to stop regulating such things. Congress is not empowered to do so by the Constitution, and at least a stretch of a First Amendment case could be made that they are prohibited from doing it.

We want the airwaves!
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UPDATE: According to a piece I happened upon in the New York Times, for what it's worth, it's this provision which has Democrats ticked enough to hold up the remaining $820-billion in federal spending. The bill, that is. They vowed to crash Washington in December for the second consecutive year to work at something. That looks iffy, so we could be looking at another CR. Or they could pretend their on the West Wing with that theatric.
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Medicare Bill to Pay Illegals' Hospital Bills

The AP, via the web site of the Long Beach News-Journal, tells us that some $1-billion dollars will be doled out to emergency rooms in various border States over the next for yearsto pay for the emergency medical care of illegal immigrants. This is courtesy of today's Medicare Reform bill.

The House's main anti-illegals crusader, Representative Tom Trancredo (R-Colorado), posits that illegals will now cross the border for medical treatment: "If you build an illegal alien entitlement program, they will come." The problem with that statement is that it is already federal law that the hospitals have to treat the illegals -- and "unfunded mandate," of sorts -- and they have already been coming. This is why Congress critters from Arizona, California, Texas and New York had been seeking $1.46-billion in federal reimbursement in a separate bill which never saw the floor and now looks to be irrelevant.

Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) argued: "Immigration is a federal issue and the responsibility of the federal government and I'm glad to see some positive response on behalf of taxpayers." Cornyn, in essence, is saying the federal government is finally going to pay the bill rather than make the taxpayers continue to do so. That mode of thought is actually very creepy. It is similar to the argument that a tax cut is a government expense.

This is that with which faced.

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Third Quarter Economic Growth

Everyone but the standard-issue Democrat had to celebrate last month when the rate of growth for the third quarter of this year was put at 7.2-percent. It has been revised to an 8.2-percent rate of growth, this after a 3.3% rate in the second quarter. This marks the largest rate of economic growth for America since the first quarter of 1984, according to published reports. However, the Reagan Information Page lists Q1 1984 growth at 7.4-percent. Going by these figures, President Bush's 3Q 2003 GDP growth is the highest since Ronald Reagan's 10.9-percent in the second quarter of 1983.

Whatever. The economy is doing well. Both consumer and business spending have increased drastically. There are fewer factory jobs, but overall unemployment is down slightly.

The Dem 9 can harp about the "jobless recovery," and I think they're ingrained enough garbage about the economy being terrible when it wasn't half bad to cruise on that nonsense. They have the constant cry to internationalize the war, but there really is not much they have on President Bush that can stick.

This means that the back 8 will have to focus on Howie Dean more for now, while Dean figures out whether or not he was a strong supporter of NAFTA. (This changes almost weekly.)

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Medicare Reform Passes: A Campaign Boost

Bush/Cheney '04 received what could be a substantial boost today, as the GOP-led Senate approved, 54-44, the Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act of 2003. It is identical to the House version (H.R. 2473), which is said to resemble the other House version, H.R. 2469. (It's a big bill. It could be anything at this point.)

This is from a USA Today story:

Under the legislation, seniors would be eligible beginning next year to purchase a Medicare-backed discount drug card at a cost estimated at $30 a year. The administration estimated the card would mean savings of between 15% and 25% off retail prices; critics argued those numbers were wildly inflated.

Beginning in 2006, the legislation would allow seniors to purchase coverage for their prescription drugs. GOP officials estimated the drug insurance premium would be $35 a month, with a $250 deductible. The coverage would pay 75% of costs after that until a recipient's drug costs reached $2,250. After that, there would be no drug coverage until a recipient's out-of-pocket expenses reached $3,600, or roughly $5,100 in overall prescription expenses. Above that level, insurance would pick up roughly 95% of costs.

So our government becomes larger and more expensive, but the GOP has co-opted another Dem issue as we near an election season.

Kennedy complained that the bill, which passed over his personal pledge to stop it, will shove seniors "in the cold arms of the HMOs." Daschle called it a "bailout for the HMOs and insurance companies." That's insipid rhetoric which misses any semblance of a real point, but at least the towering figure of Ted Kennedy has been knocked over.

The Republicans needed Trent Lott, a sworn enemy of big government, to vote their way on cloture Sunday, to get the bill to a floor vote. It was bigger than the bill: this was about the President's reelection and the leadership strength of Frist. Here's this from the AP:

With five senators clustered around Lott, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, an architect of the legislation, did most of the talking. At another point, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.,and Grassley talked to Lott very intently. The Mississippi Republican kept on shaking his head.

The Republicans still were short of votes for cloture.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., also took a turn, gesturing with great emphasis to try to pry loose Lott's vote.

After nearly half an hour, Republicans still were two votes shy. Then, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., cut the shortfall to one.

Finally, Lott walked slowly up to the front of the Senate, pointed his thumb up without fanfare -- the 60th vote -- and walked briskly out of the chamber.

He did the deed then washed his hands. Both he and Graham voted against the bill on Tuesday, though, but the GOP did not need 60 votes to break Kennedy's filibuster. Only 51 for passage.

Earlier this month, Senate Dem Whip Harry Reid of Nevada, when whining about the upcoming marathon judicial debate the Republicans had planned, accused Frist of "mismanagement" and referred to him as a "rank amateur."

According to the AP article linked above, when entering the Senate chamber Monday morning, Senator Lott "politely declined [a reporter's] request to talk about Frist's first year as leader."

Welcome to President Bush's Great Society. Perhaps he'll cut this out domestically in his upcoming second term.

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Anglo-French Joint Press Conference

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac held a joint press conference In London yesterday following the yearly Anglo-French Summit. Here is a question from one of the Brits:

There will be a state visit to London and a state visit by the Queen to Paris, and it will be a good opportunity for you to have good Burgundy and Bordeaux wines in Buckingham Palace that apparently President Bush was not interested in last week. My question is: do you believe, President, that the British taxpayers will really need to spend millions of pounds to prevent you from hearing what the British public have to say, just as millions of pounds were spent last week to isolate the American President from the local environment? Given the Entente Cordiale and the events in Iraq, perhaps you would like the people of Britain to say something rather different?

First, the President of the United States did not turn his nose up at French whine because it is French; rather, the man does not drink. Secondly, the police were on hand during President Bush's recent stay in London to protect the public and their property from the mobs and the mob mentality, which is destruction. That question was an editorial.

The French government can be constructive. This from an answer by President Chirac concerning Syria:

We have had an engagement with Syria which has been an attempt by us to make sure that they play as constructive and positive a role as possible in the Middle East.

And this from the Beirut Daily Star online regarding the response from some Lebanese lawmakers to a French call for Syria to withdraw her troops from the Lebanon:

[Lebanese MP George] Najm accused the French legislators of being “manipulated by Israeli and US interests that are working to separate Lebanese and Syrian relations in order to target and weaken Lebanon and deprive its Islamic resistance from preventing the resettlement of Palestinians in Lebanon.”

Beirut MP Nasser Qandil said that a number of French MPs were often influenced by the Zionist lobby.

This is for public consumption in the desert. If someone, even a Frenchman, suggests that the Arab states do something other than run roughshod over Israel, they are labeled a part of the "Zionist lobby." The masses then blame this evanescent lobby instead of fingering their own inept and corrupt leadership.

Here come the Saracens.

posted by Mark Kilmer : 11/25/2003 08:48:00 AM [permalink]

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Dean, a serious contender?

Maybe. At least candidate John Kerry, still acting as if he were in the race for the Dem nomination, is attacking the attacker.

Good morning. His campaign issued a press release yesterday, featuring the words of former Senator Max Cleland (D-Georgia) who left three limbs in Vietnam. From the release:

At a time when young Americans are being killed and wounded by President Bush’s failed policy in Iraq, we don’t need another governor who ran from going to Vietnam and leading our country. We cannot afford to have a leader who weaseled out of going to Vietnam on a medical deferment for a bad back and wound up on the ski slopes of Aspen like Howard Dean."

That's strong stuff, but Kerry's desperate and Dean did run away from going to Vietnam.

If the question seems naïve, it's not. I do not think Howard Dean will or even can win the Democrat nomination. I think he is an apparition based on media hype from reporter's who think they know something

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Iraqis Approve Power Transfer Timetable

This from the BBC:

The Iraqi Governing Council has written a letter to the UN Security Council setting out a timetable for a return to self-rule.
The letter confirms a series of dates and deadlines agreed by American and British officials earlier this month.

It also calls for a new UN Security Council resolution.

The letter, written by current council President Jalal Talabani, confirms the intention to elect a new transitional government by the end of June 2004.

The body will then make preparations for a constitutional convention and ultimately general elections before the end of 2005.

Now if we can just get Howie Dean to sign off on it...
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No More Mad Babs?

The Fox News site has an interesting piece about the GOP targeting Senator Babs Boxer of California in 2004: GOP Targets Boxer in Effort to Win Over California. We knew this a year ago, but as the gears are about to grind, here's the deal according to Fox.

"The recall and victory of Arnold Schwarzenegger has motivated the party and they are clearly going to focus on next year and carrying that momentum forward," said Dan Allen, spokesman for the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee.

"[Boxer] is extremely vulnerable," said media strategist Sheri Annis, who worked with Schwarzenegger in his successful referendum campaign for after-school program funding in 2002. "The Republicans just need to put up the right person."

They drag in the ubiquitous Stu Rothenberg to tell us that this isn't a recall, Boxer isn't Davis, etc., etc., tell us something we didn't know.

It’s a potential long shot until the Republicans get a candidate who shows some pizzazz or fund-raising ability" said Stu Rothenberg, political analyst and editor of the Rothenberg Political Report.

Pizzaz. Okay, Stu's telling us that the GOP needs another Arnold-like figure. I think so too. Boxer's been in there for twelve years. She's "Year of the Woman," remember? (I met my wife in 1992, and that's the only thing that little slogan means to me.)

Let's get some names. The big one, according to the Fox piece, is David Dreier, the Republican Congressman who represents California's 26th district and led Governor Schwarzenegger's transition team. It might be me, but Congressman Dreier looks an awful lot like actor Fred Dreier, who is most famous being the original actor cast in the "Sam Malone" role in the 1980's sitcom Cheers.

That's beside the point, though. The media says Congressman Dreier is a star -- yay! -- but I knew that long before they figured out who he was. (He came to Washington, if I recall, on the 1980 coattails.) But Dreier says he is quite happy representing the CA-26, but he is not indispensable to the California delegation. This from a October 22piece in The Hill:

So far, no one on Capitol Hill is complaining about Dreier’s absence [while heading Schwarzenegger's transition team]. The congressman also heads California’s 20-member GOP delegation.

“David could just spend all his time in California and he wouldn’t be missed at all, the way we are proceeding around here,” ranking Rules Committee member Rep. Martin D. Frost (D-Texas) said.

Frost added that Dreier would be more needed when the committee takes up spending and energy bills later this year. Schwarzenegger becomes governor in mid-November — and, presumably, Dreier’s tenure as transition chief ends at the same time.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) added: “He’s a single man, so that always helps.”

Dreier missed an Oct. 1 Rules Committee meeting about a commerce report while he was campaigning for Schwarzenegger, Maney said. Dreier also missed floor votes Sept. 30 and Oct. 1-2, including the conference report on the partial-birth abortion ban.

He could win, so we'll see how Karl Rove is with twisting another arm, if that is what he sees as the answer.

Fox throws up one more name, that of Representative Darrell Issa. Issa's the man who funded much of the recall petition drive only to quit the Question Two election before he had even put his name on the ballot.

Darrell Issa, a.k.a. "Jihad Darrell," is an Arab American who has cozied with the Syrians, the Lebanese, Yassir Arafat, and Hezbollah. At least that's how Debbie Schlussel saw it in the linked article, and one never knows. Issa said that he was duped into making pro-terrorist quotes, and I have to agree. When he called the Palestinian bombers a legitimate resistance outfit, I think he might have just been trying to see the side of the people in the place from whence his family came. It's a common dynamic.

Boxer would eat him alive.

Who? Who does the California GOP have? Tom McClintock is not more exciting than was Boxer's 1998 opponent, Matt Fong (who beat Issa in the primary election that year). Why not run Fong again?

The ultimate candidate would be the Ronald Reagan of forty years ago.

Then again, there's always Danny Ball.

Okay, perhaps not. Would you vote for Dennis Miller?

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Motion to Invoke Cloture…

…on the Conference Report to Accompany H.R. 1.

Ted Kennedy's filibuster attempt on the Medicare bill failed [U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote]. In fact, after all his bluster and stern threats, carrying with it the weight for his umpteen decades of seniority, it fell flat.

Now we have to see what Parliamentary tricks the Dems are ready to unveil. (This will be their own "Nuclear Option.")

The vote was 70-29-1. (Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican, did not vote.) The President has Jumpin' Jim Jeffords on his side on this one, despite the fact that this is one of the more flagrant examples of the GOP arm-twisting which he so decried when he bolted.

Anyway, the Republicans voting against cloture were Vermont's Linc' Chaffee -- a Republican, I fear, only because his daddy (the late Senator John Chafee was one -- the ever-maverick John McCain of Arizona, who is obstinate about party lines, and Nebraska's Chuck Hagel, who has been busy establishing himself as the new maverick.

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The House Doesn't Like Spam

"Boob bait for bubbas." I borrow the phrase from the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York) to describe the anti-spam legislation which passed the House of Representatives today. It's an idiots' bill for pitchfork and torch carrying crusaders who "gotta do sumtin' 'bout it dammitall!" And they pass an Unconstitutional law.

The Senate passed the bill [BLOG POST and BLOG POST] in the last week of October, 97-0. On Saturday, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act passed the House, 392-5. The two bills are slightly different, so the Senate is expected to pass the House version quickly and send it to the President for his signature. This being an election year, and Spam being universally reviled, he'll sign it.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin (R-Lousiana) complained that Spam "makes regular email checking a seemingly endless hassle." Ban hassles, ban inconvenience, and the unattractive and the unpleasant.

We have lawmakers who cannot reach near unanimity on whether or not to financially support our troops overseas in Iraq, or to rebuild Iraq to keep it out of the hands of our enemies, but they can unite, pumping their fists and snarling, to attempt to proscribe e-mail marketing.

The bill proscribes using fake return addresses, using misleading subject lines, and clandestinely gathering addresses from Web sites in or for Spamming purposes. It also requires an opt-out mechanism for those who do not wish to receive the e-mail.

It cannot be enforced and there is no one to enforce it, but it looks good to constituents who know only that they don't like Spam, dammit, and mutter-mutter-curse-curse.

Boob bait for bubbas.

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Seniors are Political Pawns

From the December 8 issue of Fortune magazine, their web site carries a partial transcript of an interview they conducted with AARP CEO Bill Novelli. Here's the section I found most interesting:

Q: Still, your critics are accusing you of selling out seniors. Are you?
A: Actually, we're doing the exact opposite. These critics say that this is going to bring the downfall of Medicare. AARP champions Medicare. We would never do anything to harm it.

Q: So why is Ted Kennedy attacking the bill?
A: The truth of the matter is, I'm not sure. I have tremendous respect for Ted Kennedy, and he wants Medicare legislation. He wants drug coverage. I thought that he would support this bill, and maybe he still will.

By harming the bill, the Dems harm President Bush. They want to smack the President, so they attempt to off the bill. And they get the "historical champion of the seniors," Ted Kennedy, to do it for the Party. If fact, I think it more likely that it was Kennedy's plan.

Kennedy would be a natural friend of any plan to further enlarge a federal program, but he wants to be the guy doing it. He wants it to originate from his party.

Next question

Q: Are you worried about long-term fallout with the Democrats?

A: Yes. When this is over, we're going to have to mend some fences. We're a nonpartisan organization, but we see these people as our once and future friends.

They are not a nonpartisan organization by any stretch, and they are bipartisan only when the Republicans attempt to legislate like Dems.

What will today bring?

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Shevardnadze Gets the Hook

My wife thought I should write of this. If you want to read about Ted Rall or Jacko, someone's writing about it somewhere. This one is long overdue.

On the Feast of St. George.

Eduard Shevardnadze joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1948. He worked his way up the ladder of power, like all good Soviet apparatchiks, joining the powerful Communist Party Central Committee in 1976. In 1985, he became a member of the Soviet Politburo and the Foreign Minister to the last Soviet dictator, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. He resigned his posts in 1990, having seen the writing on the wall and following where the power led.

He was elected President of the Republic of Georgia in 1995 and again in 2000, leading the country to corruption, oppression, and economic misery. (By coincidence, Schevernadze has been praised in the past by former President Jimmy Carter, who wasn't technically corrupt, did not per se oppress anyone, but had the misery thing down pat.)

Secretary of StateColin Powell gave the United States opinion that the elections had been fraudulent. (Candidate Wes Clark, speaking on Face the Nation today, claimed that Don Rumsfeld was brought in at Defense to counteract Powell at State. But then again, Wesley is a bit mental.)

The Georgians seized the day on the Russian Orthodox Feast of St. George, the patron saint of Georgia, to storm the Parliament building and hand Shevardnadze his walking papers. This came after meetings between the Shevardnadze, the opposition, and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, whom we remember as a close ally of the poet Dominique DeVillepin, foreign minister of France.

The interim President of Georgia is former speaker of parliament Nino Burjanadze, who has spoken with Powell. Opposition leader Mikhail Saakashvili said that Shevardnadze will not face trial for corruption. Elections are due in 45 days.

Fireworks over Tbilisa, and no blood in the streets. When Shevardnadze seized power in January of 1992, it was behind a 5,000-member paramilitary force. On Sunday, he lost control of the interior ministry's troops and quit in time to prevent disaster.

What does this mean to domestic U.S. politics? Probably not much, unless the Dem Nine start accusing President Bush of having propped Shevardnadze up to distract Americans from something or other. It's just a heads-up to my fellow Reaganites out there. The revolution is still underway.

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What more can one say…

...about Joltin' Joe Lieberman?

He was a guest, briefly, on Wolfgang's Late Edition program early this afternoon ET. Said Blitzer: "He was once the presumed front-runner." Sure, but too much of the media's use of the term "front-runner" is a deal with presumption. Lieberman was the only guy still in the race who had been an actual nominee for national office. And…?

Nothing. Lieberman was leading in national polls when they were absolute name recognition. (They still are today to that extent, but with many fewer people.) Blitzer showed him national poll after national poll, taken recently, it which Lieberman was trailing both Dean and Kerry. Lieberman pointed out that each was within the margin of error, and that his own polls showed him leading.

Blitzer showed a clip of Howie Dean, in an interview setting, blaming Kerry, Edwards, Dean, and Gephardt for letting the President invade Iraq without asking the tough questions. I saw it with my own eyes: Howard Dean smirked. While President Bush smirks slightly in a best friend manner, Dean smirks like the who knew that no matter what you said, he was the one who ultimately assigned the TA to give the grades.

He defended his vote to invade Iraq, saying that Saddam was a "homicidal maniac": "He was an enemy of stability in the Middle East." If by "stability" Lieberman meant status quo, he was wrong. Ousting Saddam upset the status quo and altered the calculus of the Middle East.

He wants the United Nations to assume control over the "civilian security" in Iraq.

He regrets it, he says, but he has to oppose the Medicare bill. Blitzer asked him if he'd skip campaigning to oppose it, and he said he was skipping an event.

He's joining Teddy Kennedy's filibuster. John McCain had indicated on ABC's This Week that he would also be joining the filibuster, though he made no statement other than a "sure" in answer to the question from Steph.

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Wes Clark on Face the Nation

He began the show by complaining about the new RNC ad [BLOG POST] running in Iowa. Wes said it violated the President's pledge not to use September 11 for political purposes and struck at the heart of democracy by suppressing the right to free speech. It's a critical part of democracy, a right of every citizen, to speak out against their government.

Lost on the clueless Clark was that it is also the right of every citizen to speak out in favor of the President and to criticize those have used the war on terrorism as a tool to attack the President and win the Dem Presidential nomination.

Clark demanded that the RNC take the ad off the air. The man is a would-be censor, not the kind of person we'd want as President.

He also went into the typical Dem fit about people impugning the patriotism of those who disagree, etc.

[It's a good political ad, and HERE it is again.]

He disagrees with the decision by the Bush Administration not to allow the TV networks to use the returning bodies of soldiers killed in Iraq as tools to weaken support of the war. Clark said that they should be seen on television, "so we can honor them."

Schieffer mentioned an interview a few years back which Clark had with NBC's TODAY show co-host Matt Lauer, in which Wes said that Don Rumsfeld was an excellent choice as Secretary of Defense, ready for the job. In a more recent interview with CBS's Dan Rather, Wes said that Rumsfeld was unqualified and that he "wouldn't have picked him" as Secretary of Defense.

Clark responded that Rumsfeld was still living in the Cold War, when you had to attack all of your enemies. Clark vastly misstates the atmosphere of the Cold War in such a way that he is 100% incorrect. During the Cold War, we did not attack our all of our enemies, and neither did the Soviet Union. The two nations did not attack each other. Geopolitics was on eggshells.

Clark is a liar and a buffoon.

Clark explained that if he would have had a chance to sit down and interview Rumsfeld, he would not have chosen him. He did not cover himself.

Schieffer brought up his flip-flop on Iraq. Clark explained: "It's a complicated series of issues … I handled the question badly."

Yes, he saw Saddam as a threat, but not as an immediate threat to the United States, he told Schieffer. He also told Schieffer that he "never saw evidence that he was a threat." Then he told Schieffer that he saw Saddam as a threat to the U.N. Security Council.

Gay marriage? Wes supports gay civil unions. As for the marriage qua marriage: "I think that's an issue for the churches, the synagogues, and the State legislatures." Working together, Wes?

Mid-February at the latest.

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Two Quotes

The Rightsided Newsletter is now in the Inbox of subscribers and posted to the web site, and I promised two interesting quotes from this morning's Sunday shows before I got into Wes Clark on Face the Nation and Joe Lieberman on Late Edition.

The first comes from former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, recalling for host Schieffer on FTN , for the kazillionth time, that day in Dallas 50 years ago, wiping a tear, etc. Schieffer asked him what he thought the lasting historical legacy of Kennedy would be. (Though it has been 40 years, and the history books have been written.)

Cronkite said that Kennedy was in office for only a few years, so it has to be the Cuban Missile Crisis: "That will be the sole achievement of the Kennedy years." Come to think of it, what else did Kennedy do besides begin the conflict in Vietnam? I think when Kennedy becomes a fading memory, he will be remembered for being assassinated.

Some do remember him now for cutting taxes, though.

The other quote is more humorous, I thought, than anything else. Host Schieffer was doing his closing bit whining about all the screen-time Jacko has been getting of late. Schieffer said: "I think Michael Jackson is a creep. I don't want to know anything about him."

There's nothing like honesty.

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If it's Sunday…

Tommy Daschle is listed as the lone guest -- "the lone gunman," this weekend -- on NBC's Meet the Press this morning. My wife, however, tells me that Mary Matalin and James Carville will appear on the show. They are entertaining, if nothing else, but we'll see what Tim Russert does this morning. He might opt to give Daschle the full hour to be soft-spoken.

Candidate Wes Clark will be the lone guest on CBS's Face the Nation, probably part of Bob Schieffer's "watch the Dem candidates decide who they are this week" series. Clark will attack President Bush and call for the internationalization of various things. Wes has got this jihad thing going.

On Steph's show, ABC's This Week, he'll talk to Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy. McCain is one of the leading Senate opponents of the President's Energy Bill, while Ted Kennedy is planning to filibuster the President's Free Drugs bill. Also , he'll talk to Representatives Lynn Musgrave (R-Colorado) and Barney Franks (D-Massachusetts). Franks is know primarily for being gay, so it is likely they will talk about last week's Massachusetts supreme court ruling.

Wolfgang Blitzer's guests on CNN's Late Edition will be Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee), candidate Joe Lieberman (D-Connecticut), Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia), and Representative Jane Harman (D-California). Since it is CNN, Blitzer might wish to discuss Jacko.

Also this week, we'll begin reviewing the first hour of FNC's Weekend Live with Tony Snow. I'll cover them all for the Rightsided Newsletter, free, to which you can subscribe by visiting the web site or by sending a blank e-mail to rsn-subscribe@topica.com.

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The Senate Debates Health Care

The Senate debated the Health Care bill today, and Minority Whip Harry Reid has promised that 15 Dems will speak tomorrow morning for 1/2 hour each. I saw part of the debate, and I suppose it was indicative of what is happening.

Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) declared that the AARP was run by "big wigs" beholden to Newt Gingrich. He railed on and on about Gingrich, taking his "wither on the vine" comment of almost a decade ago as far out of context as anyone else has.

Senator Zell Miller (D-Georgia) recently wrote that national Dems like the Clintons, Daschle, McAuliffe, and Pelosi ought not to campaign for Dems in the South. They could do much more harm and no good. The same applies for Gingrich and Republican-sponsored legislation. The GOP leadership should beg Gingrich to stay home and keep his mouth shut next time. (Maybe they can talk him into moving overseas.)

Harkin declared: "The AARP… has brazenly betrayed the wishes of its members on this bill." In fact, he said that 80% of AARP members vehemently oppose the bill. Later, he argued that the Republicans were forcing the bill through so fast that seniors did not have the time to read it. Which is the Republican argument: that those who oppose the bill haven't read it.

Political statements? Harkin rebuffed arguments that government cannot create jobs for people by relating that his father worked for some gawdforsaken New Deal program that President Roosevelt II threw together. He praised New Deal socialism as an example of government giving jobs to people without recalling who is paying those people and how their money is extracted. (Taxpayers pay, and the money is taken by force.)

Harkin also praised President Truman for his Fair Deal. He attacked President Bush, however, for what he called the "Big Deal." This means, he told the massive C-SPAN2 TV audience: "The bigger you are, the better the deal." (Would someone implore Senate staffers not to try to be clever?)

He said that social security was in so much trouble "because they squandered the money in tax cuts." A government cannot squander that which does not belong to it.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) talked of how many times they had attempted this reform and failed. "Of course the bill is not perfect; compromise never is." But he at least understands the Dems: "It's easy to see why [they object] if what you want is socialized medicine."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R- Tennessee), whom Senator Hatch allowed to speak and conduct some business in the middle of his own floor speech, said that he hoped that "the senior Senator from Massachusetts" would not carry through with his threat to filibuster. Kennedy needs 40 other Senators to block the measure. With the AARP and their media machine on their side, the GOP should be able to successfully portray the Democrats as obstructionists. If they handle it correctly, which should not be difficult, they could spread the label to the Dems' treatment of judicial nominees.

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This and other matters will be discussed on the Sunday shows tomorrow morning, and I'll review and analyze them for the free Rightsided Newsletter. I'm expanding my coverage this week to include the first hour of FNC's Weekend Live with Tony Snow. To subscribe, visit the web site or send a blank e-mail to rsn-subscribe@topica.com. Stay ahead of the curve.

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A Political Question…

The question, I guess, would be: Why? Reading a Hartford Courant story about candidate Carol Mosley Braun -- Low on Funds, But Not Hopes -- I happened upon the following paragraph:

The former Illinois senator is pinning much of her hope on the rainmaking and policy skills of her campaign manager of only a few days, Patricia Ireland. Ireland, who headed the National Organization for Women from 1991 to 2001, has known Moseley Braun since the 1970s, when they were comrades in the unsuccessful effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

Okay, why?

Policy skills? Well, Ms. Ireland did help foster 1992 as the "Year of the (Leftist) Woman," but that fell apart and the momentum died. Women are rarely, these days, elected because of the sex; rather, they win on their own merit.

She fought hard for all forms of abortion on demand, and this fell apart. She fought hard for the "Equal Rights Amendment," and this died. NOW is taken less seriously now than it was before she assumed control of the organization from one Molly "Hatchet" Yard in 1991.

Rainmaking skills? Her results are hardly excellent, which is what one needs to be considers a political rainmaker.

Last month, Ms. Ireland was fired from her position as head of the YWCA after she attempted to turn the Young Women's Christian Association into a ultra-leftist, radical, pro-about advocacy group. Said YWCA Chairwoman Audrey Peeples in a press release at the time:

"We have the deepest admiration for Ms. Ireland's dedication to women's issues and social justice, but the YWCA has proved to be the wrong platform for her to advocate for these issues."

This is madness. The Dem field is a mess, from top to bottom.

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Where were you when…?

Good morning. For an aging press corps, it is remembered as a seminal moment. Noted political scientist Larry Sabato notes that it was the point at which our nation lost its innocence. (Everyone else says that, as well…)

I think our nation lost is innocence, is such it ever had, at the start of the Civil War. We confronted the issue of human slavery, we were guilty as hell, and we had to wake up to just what we were as a nation. And what we wanted to be. The notion that the United States of America was some naïve nation lounging on a cloud until a particular President had been killed. By my quick count, three President were assassinated prior to Kennedy, and there were more than a dozen unsuccessful attempts. That Kennedy's is singled out has to be due to the solipsistic nature of the America's self-knighted and painfully benighted press corps. You see, it was they who brought the nation word that "President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas." They were crucial to the event that caused a nation to ask where they were when JFK was shot.

Not to share in the solipsism, but my parents were engaged to be married in a month and I wouldn't be born for almost exactly another year. The question is, as my mother (may God bless her soul) said, and idle one. To me, the operative question -- and a rhetorical one -- is: Where were Abraham Zapruder and his little camera when Lincoln was shot? Where were Snarlin' Arlen and the single bullet theater when Garfield was gunned down?

Alas, the retrograde nostalgia can tend towards catharsis to a nation which eats what it's fed.

John F. Kennedy, Jr. died when his plane went down. Who is the heir to Camelot? It most certainly is not Ted, who lives, breathes, and governs in a haze of one sort or another. I think we are to believe that the heir to Camelot is none other than John-John Kerry. (I call the man that for a reason.)

In 1986, John-John Kerry wrote and submitted to the Congressional record as if spoken, the following words: "'For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestry, we take great pride in the contributions that Irish-Americans." Kerry is not of Irish descent, while the original John-John (Kennedy) was. John-John Kerry is of Austrian descent, as is the husband of one of John-John Kennedy's cousins.. (The nature of how those remarks were recorded in the Congressional record is itself a form of accepted contrivance. Senators can submit remarks into the record as if they had been spoken on the floor of the Senate.)

JFK. And I mean John F. Kerry. This Camelot is, indeed, "only a model."

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Republican Ad in New Hamphire

Enough is enough. In a press release today, the RNC has announced that it will run its first ad in Iowa beginning Sunday.

Here's what the release said:

"After 10 months, Democrats running for President have coalesced around policies that are wrong for America. They unanimously oppose the President's policy of pre-emptive self-defense. They unanimously support massive tax increases. The RNC will continue to highlight the differences between the two parties on policy after policy that will provide the American people a clear choice in the next election," said Ed Gillespie, Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The ad is dramatic, with clips of the President speaking to congress over unnerving music with full-screen statements like: "strong and principled leadership" and "some are attacking the president for attacking the terrorists." It urges people to support pre-emptive self-defense as the President explains the danger. (This after the George Soros piece in Atlantic Monthly took non-sequitur shots at this doctrine.)

The ad can be viewed in Real format by clicking: THIS LINK. It's a sharp contrast to what the Dems have on their plate.

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The Bill Would and Should have Passed

The Energy Bill did not pass the Senate this morning. In fact, the Energy Bill did not get a vote in the Senate this morning. It takes 60 votes to invoke cloture, ending debate, on bills such as these, and the cloture vote on H.R. 6 was 57 for to 40 against. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee) vowed to try again on Monday -- "This will not be the last vote on this bill," said Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, the majority leader. "We're going to keep voting until we pass it and get it to the president." -- but it is likely that the bill will not pass this year.

The main stumbling block among Republicans was said to be the exemption of MTBE manufacturers from lawsuits, as mentioned in Thursday's Rightsided Newsletter, which several North Eastern Republicans were said to reject for environmental reasons. It should be noted that, according to the Senate's online record of the roll call, three of the six Republicans who voted against cloture are GOP Mod Squadders: Linc Chaffee of Vermont and Susie Collins & O. Snowe of Maine. The other three were John McCain of Arizona (an honorary Mod Squadder) and Judd Gregg & John Sununu of New Hampshire.

(As an aside, the roll call web page, linked above, lists seven Republicans as having voted against cloture on H.R. 6: the five mentioned above and Frist: " Frist (R-TN), Nay." I scratched my head, thought about it for an instant, and moved on.)

The list Democrats who supported the cloture is interesting: Max Baucus of Montana, John Breaux & Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Tom Daschle of South Dakota (see earlier post). Blanche Lincoln & Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Zell Miller of Georgia, and Nebraska's Ben Nelson.

We can be fairly certain that they all got stuff in the bill. That's how it works. And more stuff can be put in, other stuff taken out, until they get a bill which will pass. I heard two interviews, each seeming to offer a different assessment on whether or not the bill has a chance this year. Chuckie Schumer of New York, the main man against H.R. 6, indicated that he thought the Republicans could do something to the bill to pass it over his filibuster attempt. John Sununu, the New Hampshire Republican, seemed to think that it was dead.

Curiously enough, David Broder writes today in his column GOP: Masters of the Grand Finale:

As this is written, Democrats are debating among themselves whether to go along with the Medicare bill; they already have conceded defeat on the energy legislation. If they allow Bush his Medicare victory, they will once again look feckless. If they try to stop Medicare with a filibuster, they will be labeled as obstructionists.

Although I lack Mr. Broder's contacts, I knew that cloture on the energy bill would be a tough battle. (The bill itself would pass easily if Chuckie weren't playing games again.)

We'll see.

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Rally for Moore

The Boulder Daily Camera editorialized Tuesday:

Can we all forget about Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, now that a state disciplinary panel has thrown him out of office? Unfortunately, no. Moore and his admirers will see to it that we don't.

They miss the point. This is not about Roy Moore; rather, it is born of the anger and frustration of people being governed by judges who are not empowered to craft laws but decide that the practices in the country have been contrary to its Constitution from the document's inception. (Today is "Ratification Day" in North Carolina, the anniversary of the day in 1789 when that State ratified the Constitituion.)

This is from a press release I received last night:

Rallies at all 50 state capitols are being organized for Saturday, November 22 at 1pm to launch a petition drive seeking congressional limits on the federal courts in the area of religious matters. The National Coalition to Restore the Constitution (NCRC) is launching the petition in the wake of numerous federal cases that have focused on prohibiting certain religious speech and activities, like the recent court case concerning Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore."

NCRC spokesperson Debbie Hopper said:

"Nowhere in the Constitution is the power to decide or legislate over matters of religion, religious speech or activity in the states delegated to the federal government. This fact is further underscored by the straightforward wording of the First Amendment which prohibits Congress from making laws that in any way
respect an establishment of religion and it is further banned from making laws that in any way prohibit the free exercise of religion."

The argument is that the first Amendment, though its Free Exercise clause, specifically prohibits our federal government from passing laws (or judicial opinions, by the current stretch) restricting religious practice.

If Church and State are to be separate -- as per the line in Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, from which the notion of this "separation" is erroneously derived -- then hands off. Plaques and prayers are not the governmental establishment of a religion, and they are not means of forcing anyone to practice one.

Ms. Hooper noted: "The Constitution assigns the responsibility of limiting and regulating the jurisdiction of the federal courts to Congress." Congress can thus pass legislation removing religious jurisdiction from the courts.

Despite what the Boulderites muse, this is not a Roy Moore expedition. The courts are not empowered to restrict religious speech; it seems they need to be specifically prohibited from doing so. Rally on!

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Daschle and the Energy Bill

Good morning. Despite the support of Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle (D-South Dakota), Senate Republican calculate that they are still four votes shy of the 60 needed to break the inevitable Dem filibuster.

The New York Times quotes Chuckie Schumer (D-New York) on the matter:

"As the day goes on, we are getting more optimistic, but this one is far from over," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who is a leader of the effort to block the bill.

The Sioux Falls Argust Leader reports:

If Daschle really supports the bill, Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson said, he should push Democrats to vote to end the debate. Otherwise, he can reap political benefits at home for defending ethanol even if the bill fails.

"Surely, surely the Senate minority leader has enough clout to prevent members of his own caucus from killing this bill he says he wants to pass," said Iverson, who has worked for former South Dakota Rep. John Thune, a Republican who might challenge Daschle in next year's election.

Daschle's people say the Republicans have enough problems on their own side. They do, when you consider that several Senators from the North East have indicated that they will not support the bill because of fuel supplement lawsuit exemptions.

Daschle's position works best for him politically. The bill would benefit South Dakota's farmers through its ethanol program, so it looks best for him as a South Dakota Senator to support it. Passage of the bill would be a political victory for the President, so it looks best for him as a blindly partisan Democrat not to support it with all means at his disposal.

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The Soros Doctrine, revisited

Back on November 11, I wrote about The Soros Doctrine, so named for billionaire hedge fund operator George Soros, a 74-year-old Jewish American who hates both Israel and the United States. This aging misfit suffers from paranoid delusions of President Bush outlawing dissent and annexing the Sudetanland.

The Washington Post on that day wrote:

Soros believes that a "supremacist ideology" guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans." It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ("The enemy is listening"). "My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me," he said in a soft Hungarian accent.

Well, the Atlantic Monthly web site brings us this: The Bubble of American Supremacy, by George Soros.

He starts by asserting that history was changed on September 11, but not so much by the attack itself as by how President Bush reacted to it. This is a fair argument, but of the attack itself, he says it was "historic in its own right" and "fully accomplished this objective [to terrorize]."

He conjectures that the United States had not flexed its military muscle for a while, so President Bush seized the opportunity of the terrorist attack to show the world just how mighty the United States really is. He blames this on neoconservative, which he equates with social Darwinism: "In economic matters social Darwinism takes the form of market fundamentalism [capitalism]; in international relations it is now leading to the pursuit of American supremacy."

This is his thesis: That the war against terror is all about the neoconservative desire and pursuit of American Supremacy.

Here is an argument:

"The supremacist ideology of the Bush Administration stands in opposition to the principles of an open society, which recognize that people have different views and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth."

He is wrong. There is an ultimate truth -- a right and a wrong -- and an open society, while recognizing that there may be misguided views on this matter, does not rule that this conclusion is incorrect.

Soros quotes the President from his speech [TEXT] before Congress on September 22, 2001:

"The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise."

Soros objects in his own, singularly confused manner:

The assumptions behind this statement are false on two counts. First, there is no single sustainable model for national success. Second, the American model, which has indeed been successful, is not available to others, because our success depends greatly on our dominant position at the center of the global capitalist system, and we are not willing to yield it.

Relativism does not buy you beer in the real world, with reality. There is one single, sustainable model for national success, and it has been proven by history. Our "dominant position at the center of the global capitalist system," on which Soros insists our success depends, had to be achieved. It has taken many hundreds of millions of Americans and over two centuries living in a free and democratic society with free markets to put American to the fore where she is. No other country could possibly have achieved what America has, because no other country has been as free in matters of life, liberty, and property as has the United States.

Soros disagrees that America's success was achieved by Americans. To wit:

The quest for American supremacy qualifies as a bubble. The dominant position the United States occupies in the world is the element of reality that is being distorted. The proposition that the United States will be better off if it uses its position to impose its values and interests everywhere is the misconception. It is exactly by not abusing its power that America attained its current position.

He is admittedly using the terminology of the financial markets with which he is familiar. A bubble. We're all familiar with the "Clinton Bubble" of the late '90s. Soros, during one of those mornings when he could not sleep and had to scribble his thoughts, decided that America's current place in the world is a bubble much like Clinton's good economy. Bubbles burst and markets are corrected, and he sees that for America.

He argues against "the proposition that the United States will be better off if it uses its position to impose its values and interest everywhere." He seemingly cannot comprehend what is happening in the world. The values America seeks for others are the values and interests they themselves seek. That they are shared by America is coincidental with the fact that America can help others create a society which shares those interests and values.

It really is a waste of time to deal with this tripe point by point. It is almost incoherent enough to make a cogency-capable mind spin, but let's have at one more flaw which shows Mr. Soros's banal assumptions at their least thoughtful:

eanwhile, largely as a result of our preoccupation with supremacy, something has gone fundamentally wrong with the war on terrorism. Indeed, war is a false metaphor in this context. Terrorists do pose a threat to our national and personal security, and we must protect ourselves. Many of the measures we have taken are necessary and proper. It can even be argued that not enough has been done to prevent future attacks. But the war being waged has little to do with ending terrorism or enhancing homeland security; on the contrary, it endangers our security by engendering a vicious circle of escalating violence.

His thesis is, essentially: "Do not fight your enemy, as you will just make him mad." He later writes:

recent Council on Foreign Relations publication sketches out three alternative national-security strategies. The first calls for the pursuit of American supremacy through the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive military action. It is advocated by neoconservatives. The second seeks the continuation of our earlier policy of deterrence and containment. It is advocated by Colin Powell and other moderates, who may be associated with either political party. The third would have the United States lead a cooperative effort to improve the world by engaging in preventive actions of a constructive character. It is not advocated by any group of significance, although President Bush pays lip service to it. That is the policy I stand for.

He misstates the first option, which is forceful deterrence when force is the only language comprehensible to those who must be deterred. The second, for which I've never heard Secretary of State Powell argue, is to sit back and hope we catch them next time. Soros argues for the third option, one which would have an international partnership do something to stop terrorism other than fight it. He does not say what.

You see, he's already surrendered: "Terrorists will never disappear." He's left to relying on an international community to combat it, but he does not know how this can be done:

How to deal with failed states and oppressive, corrupt, and inept regimes? How to get rid of the likes of Saddam? There are too many such regimes to wage war against every one. This is the great unresolved problem confronting us today.

President Bush is busy resolving it. Some, like Saddam's Iraq, must be dealt with militarily. Others, such as the Soviet Union, must be pushed to collapse. North Korea requires a unique group of nations to pressure it. Soros would give up and leave it to a group of babbling international bureaucrats to issue fatawa in the form of Security Council resolutions.

But Soros has written an entire book about this. As he admits, he was sleepwalking when he wrote it. And he's sleepwalking through history, which is passing him by.

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The Anti-American Brits

There were to be 100,000 of the Bush-bashers tearing down President Bush in Trafalgar Square today. Yeah, and they predicted 500,000 at the last recent bicoastal rent-a-mob, bi-coastal gripe-fests here in the United States. Many or several years ago, Minister Louis Farrakahn -- who plays violin like convicted DC sniper John Mohammed's daughter -- said he had a million men at his march.

Just now, CNN's Wolf Blitzer ran tape of the London protestors -- looked like 2,000 max -- counting down and toppling the papier mache effigy of President Bush in the dark. When that tape concluded, he ran the archived footage of the Iraqis tumbling Saddam Hussein's statue April 9 in Baghdad in broad daylight. That is CNN wearing its Captain Bias. They both report and decide.

My good friend Jim McCaffrey sent along this link to a column by the London Daily Telegraph's Mark Steyn, who looks at the Brits' problem with some witty panache in his prose: It's 'peace' psychosis in a nut's hell. Here's a sample:

If the anti-war cause is so just, it seems odd that it has to be so risibly "sexed up" by Medact and the rest, but the post-9/11 grand harmonic convergence of all the world's loser ideologies, from Islamic fundamentalism to French condescension, is untroubled by anything so humdrum as reality or logic. There's "no connection" between Saddam and al-Qa'eda, because radical Islamists would never make common cause with secular Ba'athists. Or so we're told by pro-gay, pro-feminist Eurolefties who thus make common cause with honour-killing, sodomite-beheading Islamists, apparently crediting Saddam with a greater degree of intellectual coherence than they credit themselves.

I'm not kidding. Read it. To borrow a phrase from the Brits, Steyn is spot-on, and it is a must-read. It's a story of a nut's hell in a nutshell.
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South Dakota Politics

Good morning. Al Qaeda, or some people claiming to be al Qaeda, have attacked in Istanbul (Constantinople/Byzantium). Apart from being worthless mutant garbage, they are proving that they are beyond stupid. They believe, evidently, that their god will render them triumphant, no matter whose lives they take, what good they destroy, and they attack anyone and everyone, with no thought to who will be their ally against whatever perceived Satan they are hunting. "Good morning" needs that qualifier.

Also in the news is Jacko, the perpetual child, is finding out that one can live in a dream only so long as one does not harm others. He had the wherewithal to set up whatever personal universe he wished, but he cannot excuse real world perversion.

Finally. South Dakota politics. Stephanie Herseth is the Democrat who lost the election for South Dakota's lone House seat to Republican former Governor Bill Janklow. Representative Janklow has since gotten into a wee bit of trouble, having killed a man with his car. And according to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, she's going to give it another go:

'Based on the strength of our last campaign, I feel I want to give it another shot,' she said. 'I have received a lot of encouragement, and that is based on the type of campaign I ran last time. We built up a lot of good will, and I think we were focused on the issues, and we ran a positive campaign.'

Janklow has not decided whether or not to seek reelection.

The paper said that some Republicans have sought to pressure former Representative John Thune to seek the seat next year. It was once Thune's seat, but he decided not to seek reelection last year and instead run against Senator Tim Johnson. (Thune "lost" that election by the margin of a few hundred dead South Dakota Sioux.)

The paper reports that State Senator Larry Diedrich, who was running as the Republican in the race last time until Janklow entered, might also seek the GOP nomination.

The paper does not report that the White House is evidently pressing Thune to run against Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle next year. The Tomster is beatable, by all accounts, and Thune is the one to do it.

As for the Democrat, Ms. Herseth:

Herseth, 32, is the daughter of former state Sen. Lars Herseth. She is the granddaughter of the late Gov. Ralph Herseth and the late Secretary of State Lorna Herseth.

And if the race were decided on merely physical comeliness, Janklow, Thune, and Daschle would not be in contention against her, but it is thankfully not.

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Howie Addresses Indians in New Mexico

He cancelled his visit to must-see Governor Bill Richardson, but Dem candidate Howie Dean received mixed reviews for his speech to the 60th annual National Congress of American Indian Conference.

The AP loved it, proclaiming: Dean Shows Support for Tribal Sovereignty. Tribal sovereignty exists today, and I hadn't heard that anyone was challenging it. But although it is not portrayed this way by the reporter, Dean seems to think that tribal governments have a history of working only for a privileged few:

"The truth is, the government is only working for the interests of a privileged few - and the people are being left behind," Dean said. "In tribal communities, it's been happening for 200 years."

The Native American press, at least in one instance, was less enthusiastic than trumpeting Dean's support for a principle no one had questioned.

The Native American Times, which showed Dean on the defensive:

Dean said "first I want to address a press release which says I'm against Indian gaming." A letter sent out by Patrick Kennedy on behalf of Dick Gephart ran as part of an article in the Native American Times in which Dean said he was opposed to gaming in his state. The article did not run all of Dean's comments.

And that's blogging for today. The Rightsided Newsletter will go out as scheduled at midnight, but I've birthday obligations of which to take care. Etc.

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Chairman Ney to Subpoena Dems

House Administration Committee Chairman Bob Ney (R-Ohio) -- The Hill: Ney's subpoenas loom -- wants his committee to hear from six leading Dem fundraisers over their illegal soft money; they're not cooperating, so he has threatened to issue subpoenas.

Five of the six collectively sent Chairman Ney a letter, as quoted in the above-linked piece in The Hill:

Your invitation asks that we appear before a congressional committee in a public session and open the whole range of our political programs and strategies to committee scrutiny. A congressional committee may not simply call political organizations to answer under oath to whatever questions, however politically sensitive, members may have an interest in asking."

The five who signed the bill were Ellen Malcolm of America Coming Together (ACT), Cecile Richards of America Votes, Steve Rosenthal of Partnership for America’s Familes, Marc Farinella of the Democratic Senate Majority Fund (DSMF), and Howard Wolfson of the New House PAC. Each of these are soft-money organizations recently created for the simple purpose of defeating President Bush in next year's election. Technically, the are known as 527 Political Action Committees, named after a section of the tax code. They may solicit as much anonymous and undisclosed money as they wish to use for mass media political campaigns and, of course, for more fundraising.

The Democrats say it is a witch hunt, while the GOP says they want to know if these committees are violating John McCain's Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. (It's the one candidate Gephardt, when he was House Minority Leader, trumpeted as the "most important piece of legislation" the House had passed in his lengthy tenure. If, somehow, he is the Dem nominee next year, he stands to benefit greatly from it, though not necessarily of his own volition.)

Gerald McEntee of Voices For Working Families did not sign the letter, according to The Hill, and he did not tell the paper why. However, Voices seems to be a more labor-oriented and legitimate get-out-the-vote organization than the others, which are merely front organizations for large Dem donors. (McEntee is also President of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union.) Whatever one wants to say about organized labor, at least McEntee did not wish to be associated with pond scum.

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SPAMMING FOR LIBERALS

This is the SPAM which clogged my filter this morning. I'll clean it up and share it, as it proves an important point. It deals with controlling the size of a body part, and it is a case in point.

To wit:

Traditional, liberal or newschool? Depends on how you were raised. Are we getting political here? Hell, no! This is just to describe your sex life. If you're traditional, delete this mail now. Please. If you're liberal, you get yourself some pills after you've realized that hanging a two-pounds [sic] stone from [body part] doesn't make it longer. If you're newschool, you happily dabble with things others don't even know about. Traditionals have already deleted this mail. Ahem. Liberals - click here for the VP-RX, the best [body part] enlargement ever invented. If you're liberal heart rebels, no worry, it's money back guarantee.

One wonders why, exactly, such products would appeal to liberals.

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It's Wictory Wednesday

In a singular twist of consequence, my birthday on the solar calendar this year coincides with a Wictory Wednesday. That's the day when, through the designs of the palpably provoking PoliPundit, many or several of the President's supporters from around the blogosphere drop everything for a post to remind you that you can be a part of the Bush/Cheney '04 Campaign team.

We're concentrating on fundraising, because our contributions are the sine qua non of politics. You can click HERE to be taken to a safe page on the Bush/Cheney campaign site to done something. Why not send them $25/week? Anything helps, and they do appreciate it. It makes you a part of the team which will reelect the President.

You can also click HERE to become a Bush Team Leader, a cyber-campaigner in you spare time.

Here is a list of those bloggers conscientious enough to carry this message on my birthday:

Backcountry Conservative
Boots and Sabers
Bowling for Howard
Dean
BushBlog.us (unofficial blog)
Bush-Cheney 2004 (unofficial
blog)
ExPostFacto
Freedom of Thought
The Hedgehog Report
The Irish Lass
Jarhead
Jeremy Kissel
Left Coast
Conservative
Matt Margolis
The Ole Miss Conservative
PoliPundit
Political Annotation
A Rice Grad
Ryne McClaren
Slublog
Southern Conservatives
Stephen Blythe
Viking Pundit
The Wise Man Says

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The "Art" of British Protestors

According to the PA News wire (UK), via The Scotsman:

Around 80 people layed down at the Tate Modern in central London form the three words in the Turbine Hall – their message reflected on the mirrored ceiling above.

There message, formed by a bunch of people laying on the floor at an art exhibit, was: "Bush Go Home."

They didn’t have enough people to form the words, so they gathered volunteers from the small group of onlookers in the building. The article estimated that it took about 80 folks to form the words.

They did this in a temporary art exhibit, The Weather Project, by a British artist named Olafur Eliasson, who evidently claimed that this was a real name and that he is part Icelandic. Eliasson told the press:

“Stop what you are doing, think,” he said. “He is lying to us. He is lying basically about everything that the war has been based on and now I think we know his motives.”

He did not say what our President's motives for allegedly lying might be.

This bit about the President lying has been treated many times by conservative bloggers: the President did not make the claims which are being attributed to him. The texts of his speeches show that this is all invention; however, invention is accepted by the press and become part of the circulation, and will thus substitute readily for truth. It's nauseating.

Anyway, we're sure President will be concerned that he's bugged some artist guy named Olafur.

Also in Britain, in the village of Norfolk, they've been building a 26' effigy of President Bush out of chicken wire, recycled carpet rolls, papier-mâché, glue and several pots of green and gold paint. My source is EDP24 news out of Britain, though I had read of the effigy earlier elsewhere.

A protest group called Theatre of War built the effigy for another group called Stop the War Coalition, who are going to haul the statue to London Thursday and smash it with a toy tank. Why? According to one nut who worked on the effigy: "Bush has extremely aggressive foreign policies that we do not agree with. We want to raise awareness that this should not be happening."

At least they're having fun, and that's all it is. They get to feel like they're doing something about something, which is not actually much of anything about anything.

"Vegetable rights and Peace!"

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Blanco Defeats Jindal - Lousiana Revisited

This from on of the nation's premier political scientists, Charlie Cook:

In Louisiana, the conventional wisdom among politicos is Democratic Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco's upset, 52 percent to 48 percent win overRepublican policy wunderkind Bobby Jindal principally resulted from Jindal's refusal to counterattack after a withering assault of television ads against him over the final 10 days of the race. The ads charged as secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals, Jindal had ruthlessly cut costs and hurt patient care, particularly for
the poor.

This makes sense, as politicians cannot afford to turn the other cheek unless they're Ronald Reagan, but there could be another reason for Blanco's ultimate surge. Says Cook:

We worried from the start that many of the undecideds might not
actually be undecided," said the Jindal strategist, leading me to believe Jindal's ethnicity hurt him in rural areas but was not a problem in the more populous suburbs. While Jindal is the first Indian-American to seek a governorship -- and very few people of East-Asian descent live in the state -- most believed his ethnicity was not a real problem. To the extent Indian-Americans have any stereotype at all, it is largely positive.

Jindal received 9-percent of Louisian's African Americans, just about twice what the Republican usually gets. This might mean that the anti-Schumer (etc.) southern sentiment is active even amongst blacks who have traditionally voted Democrat. (Note: I used Schumer as a random name. Substitute Pelosi, Dodd, Clinton, etc.)

Here's one:

One decision that is not second-guessed much was Republicans'
determination not to have President Bush campaign for Jindal. Bush's overall numbers in the state are fine, but the Democratic Party was not particularly unified behind Blanco, and minority turnout was not expected to be -- and was not -- particularly high. A Bush visit probably would have energized the Democratic base in a way it otherwise was not in this race.

That statement assumes that Louisiana Democrats hate the President in much the same way as do many northern Dem activists. Nah. This race would have been won or lost by Jindall, Blanco, and the silk-figured creatures we call voters marking the spot with whimsy.

He throws in a few old truisms about the Democrats eating the undecided vote in Louisiana. It's time to revise that, though, as the Democrat Party is leaving the south in much the same way it left Ronald Reagan all those years ago. And Zell Miller of late, though he likes his comfortable, old shoe.

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The Same Message from the Dems…

Good morning. Here's another Jim VandeHai piece from the "beautiful", newly redesigned Washpost web site Democratic Candidates Assail Bills.

Seriously, the post site looks a lot less clunky than it did, almost as if they want to join the 21st century news arena. Of course, then they would be a blog, but we won't go there.

Here's what Mr. VandeHai writes:

Even before many of the details were known, the candidates blasted Bush for what they view as shortchanging consumers and using the bills to reward his campaign contributors. "The latest energy plan and the prescription drug benefit are more paybacks for George W. Bush's special-interest friends and campaign contributors," said Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), expressing the emerging Democratic message.

They know they'll have to attack the plan no matter what it looks like, they want to be the first on the block to criticize the President for it, so they go for the head start.

There's also the energy bill, and…

Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are critical of both the Medicare and energy deals, but they might have a hard time preventing moderates from breaking ranks and allowing Bush to declare bipartisan victories. Already, Sens. John Breaux (D-La.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.) are hailing the Medicare agreement, which they helped strike, and several Democrats from oil- and ethanol-producing states are expected to vote for the energy package, too.

Life will be difficult for the Democrats this coming election year if the President is able to come up with a Medicare bill after the failure of the last President to do much of anything with it.

The AARP supports the President's bill. It's another incremental step in what many plan as the eventual socialization of medicine, so why not? That's not why the Dems oppose it.

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A few things…

…along the way.

I watched Special Report on FNC tonight, and Brit played a piece of tape of Hillary speaking at the Jefferson-Jackson thaang. She shouted something, rallying the crowd, which might have been particularly anti-Dean:

"Pundits and polls don't pick Presidents! People pick Presidents, and that's what's going to happen!"

That could have been merely a "yaaay, you're voters, you make the difference" line, or it could also have contained a slap at the pundits and the polls which have elected Howard Dean the next President of the United States.

The other thing. I saw Wes Clark interviewed by someone at FNC. He claimed that Newsweek magazine knows where Osama bin Laden. He explained, "I read their articles!" He thinks we ought to make Newsweek tell us where bin Laden is.

He's in Howard Fineman's basement.
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Governor Schwarzenegger

Arnold's in. He borrowed a phrase from the late John F. Kennedy, Sr. when he called himself an "idealist without illusions." He brought a few famous actors and actresses to watch his inauguration: Tom Arnold, Jamie Lee Curtis, Danny DeVito, Linda Hamilton, Rob Lowe, Dennis Miller, and Vanessa Williams.

He played nice with former Governor Gray Davis, and he emphasized that this was not to disgrace an individual (Davis), but to change the way things are done in Sacremento. There were a smaller scad of other ex-governors on hand: Pete Wilson, George Deukmejian, and Moonbeam (Jerry Brown).

Will he governor as a conservative? He's got the "R" on his t-shirt, so California can worry about that later. His first official act as governor will make the rest, if bad it be, much more palatable. He signed an order repealing the State's 300% increase in the Car Tax.

While he was campaigning, liberal pundits and some conservative ones deemed the tax impossible to rescind given California's economic situation. After he won, liberal pundits taunted him, saying that he would not be able to repeal the tax increase.

He did it. Taxes can be cut. God bless Arnold Schwarzenegger, and may God continue to bless the State of California. No matter how one opts to pronounce it.

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For Edwards…

Taegan Goddard, who does A-1 work over at his Political Wire site, uses the following headline: Edwards Struggles To Stay Relevant. Relevant to whom? To the press?

He talks of an article in Edwards's "hometown paper," the Raleigh News and Observer: What Edwards Needs to Stay in the Race. Mr. Goddard quotes the first paragraph:

With the emergence of Howard Dean as the clear front-runner in the Democratic presidential race, the task facing Sen. John Edwards and his rivals has come into sharp focus.

More relevant is the fifth:

Edwards has maintained a basic strategy from the outset: Perform respectably in Iowa and New Hampshire, and then win South Carolina, the first test of Southern strength, which comes a week later. After that, the field likely will be winnowed -- increasingly it's looking like Dean and one or two others. The Edwards campaign hopes the direct contrast with a front-runner will work to its advantage.

The article talks about how pundits say a third place finish in Iowa and a reasonable showing in New Hampshire would set him up for South Carolina a week later. That is what I have said, and it is what Edwards himself said on Sunday.

The article shows the race in which Edwards is involved in Iowa, is a race with John Kerry for third place.

Meanwhile, Howie Kurtz, in his Washpost column, excerpts from Edwards's new tome: Four Trials:

"I learned that you can never for a moment forget the big picture or the broad ambitions of justice," Edwards writes. "I am grateful for those years, for it was then that I came to genuinely understand how smart and decent all kinds of regular American people are. . . . I also learned how our great system can often discount the hardships and genuine suffering of such people -- and how it can sometimes seem to forget their struggle almost completely."

One can always sue.

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Jefferson-Jackson Dinner

Good Morning. The South Carolina Democrat's held their annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on May 2, 2003, featuring Louisiana Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu.

Des Moines. The media love these events, the "real" Jefferson-Jackson Dinner run yearly by the Iowa Democrats. Last year, an almost-anonymous Howard Dean was the star of the event. This year, it was evidently Senator Hillary Clinton (D-New York) took that honor. Even to me, a solid Republican, she's much more interesting than the nine zeroes seeking the Dem top spot.

They had 8,000 people, raised $300,000, and staged the Hillary Clinton Show. It caused the nation's more drab political press to "speculate" whether or not she'll seek the Dem nomination. The media loves stars and does not comprehend politics.

Howard FIneman, the bozo-daddy of them all, goes into his bi-monthly swoon, writing of a triumphant Hillary "mak[ing] an entrance as healer and unifier at the end of the primary season in May or June." (He attributes the speculation to a "hard-boiled insider" who is also an "advisor," but regardless, the dreamy-eyed fairy tale is Fineman's.)

There, I've written about that gawdawful dinner. Next.
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John-Boy on Late Edition

Edwards was on CNN's Sunday show early this afternoon, chatting it up with Wolfgang Blitzer, but I have lost my notes except for one quote I had put with some other material. I can recreate this from memory.

Edwards's image in the CNN DC bureau was on a flat screen monitor, LED, a tall and thin rectangle hanging off the wall. He was in Des Moines.

The actual quote: "First, Wolf, I'm happy Ambassador Bremer and the Administration have admitted that their policy was failing." That's Edwards. No one involved with the Administration said any such thing, but our tort lawyer cum candidate is nothing if not a wanton mischaracterizer.

He again lashed out at the Patriot Act, and he did so like everyman's civil libertarian. Blitzer asked him why he voted for it. Edwards had a tale to tell.

You see, he said, it was so close after September 11 and some of these things we had to get on the books to combat terrorism. Now, however, we can get rid off the provisions that he does not think should be there.

He stressed the Feds rummaging through bookstores and libraries, which they say they've not done under the Patriot Act. (This was done pre-Patriot Act, though, in the hunt for the Unibomber.)

Blitzer showed the poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire, and they put Edwards at the bottom of the "Serious Six" pack, double digits behind the two frontunners in each State. (Gephardt and Dean in Iowa, Dean and Kerry in New Hampshire). He said the polls show that he's the only candidate with momentum. He's leading in South Carolina, he told us.

Keep an eye on this man. He is the only Democrat in the field with even an outside shot at defeating the President.

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Gephardt on This Week

The line was the same as that of everyone else: "I think the problem here, George [Steph], is that we've got to get the help of other countries." OTHER COUNTRIES. He used those words about one half of a dozen times. That's the general Dem so solution: the problem will go away once the French get there. After all, the reasoning goes, the world respects Chirac and the poet DeVillepin.

The new timeline for self-governance"? It was Gephardt's idea: "I've been saying for some time that we've got to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis."

However, he repeated numerous times: "This President doesn't work well with other countries." The way he kept repeating it, I had to assume he was making sure everyone got the joke. But what could be the joke?

A kindergarten teacher could write: "Marky doesn't play well with others." She'd have been wrong, of course, because all I was trying to do was…

Heaven forbid this should turn into a pasquinade.

Some kids don't play well with others, and some smarmy former minority leaders say that President Bush doesn't work well with other countries.

We'll give him a pass: he believes it's clever.

Columnist George Will tried to pin him on the internationalist nonsense. Gephardt had said that he lost the official endorsement of leadership of those labor unions, but he still had the rank-and-file. That may well be. Actually, I hope it is true. Trade unions no longer speak for the individual workers, and nobody owes their soul to the company store.

Anyway, Will said that if he were so internationalist, what did he think of the WTO ruling that the President's steel tariffs are illegal? "We've got to keep the tariffs." Will shot back with something like, "Doesn't that make us a unilateralist, go-it-alone, rogue nation?" Sarcasm indeed.

Gephardt replied: "I have a very internationalist trade policy." Okay. His solution, he said, would be to work with the WTO and bring the standards up in the other countries. Since when has an international organization made another country live up to U.S. standards? Instead, the WTO penalizes the United States until they lower their standards.

While whining about low standards in other countries, he alleged of Mexican workers: "They live in worse conditions than many farm animals in North America.' He lost the PETA vote if they watched anything other than cartoons. According to PETA and those sundry groups, no living creature lives in worse conditions than the American farm animal. Set them free to do what they will in our yards. (The animals, that is. PETA can stay in their comfortably padded cells.)

Of George Soros, Gephardt said that he "is not consistent with campaign reform, but it is consistent with free speech." Where was that line when he trumpeted McCain-Feingold as the "most important piece of legislation we've passed in all my years in Congress." (To Steph, he took credit for "working with John McCain" on campaign finance reform.")

"As you know, George, my dad was a teamster and a milk truck driver." This from a SLATE piece in September:

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "Gephardt's account misses what other family members recall as a central part of [his father's] personality: that he hated driving that truck, deeply resented the series of bad breaks that put him there and objected vociferously to Roosevelt-style government programs. 'My dad was in the Teamsters at Pevely [a dairy company], but that's because he had to be' to get the job, says Gephardt's brother, Don. 'I don't recall him talking much about the union, about how great it was. He prided himself on being a Republican. He hated (Harry) Truman. … He had the feeling that you had to make it on your own, that any kind of welfare program would just raise his taxes." Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune adds that Dick Gephardt "didn't mention that his father also sold life insurance and real estate, which somehow don't convey the same sense of grinding deprivation."

He's still favored by the press to win Iowa, but it's too early to make those calls.

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The Dems on a Sunday

Wes Clark had the full hour of NBC's Meet the Press with Tim Russert. Trickless Dick Gephardt was fit between Paul Bremer and Dicky Rubin, and John-boy Edwards warranted a few minutes on CNN's Late Edition.

They all welcomed news that the administration had "beat a retreat" and agreed to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis by June, but they each expressed regret that this was not done sooner. It is important, they said as if in metaphysical unison, to internationalize the Iraqi situation.

[Has anyone asked the Iraqis about this? If it is their country and we should return control to them ASAP, should not the Dems be asking the Iraqis if they want blue helmets and Frenchmen running about their countryside?]

Clark wants the United States to "transfer authority to the Iraqis tomorrow." (The Iraqis say that they're not ready, but Wes wants to cut and run.)

Russert reminded Wes that in Kosovo, the war he ran for Clinton, the United Nations did not grant us authority. Wes said that Kosovo was an emergency, an imminent threat to the United States. We had to go alone, he said, because other nations refused to act. This brought up the obvious question, but Wes answered by saying that Iraq was not an imminent danger while Kosovo was.

He said it. I don't know why.

Wes talked about Iraq and Russert asked: "Are you saying you could have won in Iraq without losing a single American soldier?" We answered: "No, not necessarily."

He said it. I don't know why.

Clark said that we were distracted from catching Osama bin Laden, which he thinks should be our primary mission in the war on terror, by fighting in Iraq. OBL is secondary to the war on terror, but it sounds better campaign-wise for Dems to equate him with all terror.

He's going over to the Hague to testify about the 150 hours he spent talking to former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. He admitted himself that he would be providing only circumstantial evidence in the case against Milosevic, but, he added, "I'm proud to be doing this under international law." He digs international law, because that's the fashionable thing for Democrats to smoke these days. They will push this too far, if they haven't already.

Testimony courtesy of the Clark campaign.

Gephardt next…

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That's that

Today's Rightsided Newsletter has been composed and sent, but I've just noted that the Topica mailing system is down for maintenance until 1p PT this afternoon, which is another hour and a half. My server is giving me 502 proxy errors, so I cannot update the web page. This is all well and good.

Coming up in here this afternoon and evening will be descriptions of candidate Wes Clark's appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, Trickless Dick Gephardt's on ABC's This Week, and John-boy Edwards's brief stop on CNN's Late Edition. They all talked internationalizing the effort in Iraq. They also talked about how it was a good thing that the Administration was finally giving the Iraqis more control over their own country.

Has anyone asked the Iraqis if they want French and German blue helmets patrolling their streets? Before we internationalize it, by their reasoning, shouldn't we ask the Iraqis what they want?

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And the Gates of Hell Opened up…

…and we got this week's Sunday Talk Show.

Friendly faces are few. Paul Bremer, hardly a conservative firebrand, makes guest stops on Fox News Sunday (FNS) and ABC's This Week (TW), and Senate GOP Whip Mitch McConnell stops by CNN"s Late Edition (LE), but that's the extent of conservatism this morning.

Daschle's on FNS, and Chris Dodd of Connecticut and candidate John John Edwards are on LE. < b>Snore Richard Gephardt and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin further debase Steph's show (TW), and candidate Wes Clark own's NBC's Meet the Press.

The entire half hour of CBS's Fact the Nation belongs to Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), and I cannot think of why Schieffer would want to put his viewers and/or his ratings through that nonsense. What relevant has Kennedy to say? Unless he's trying to work off his hangover on national television.

I'll review and analyze these shows for this afternoon's Rightsided Newsletter, which you can receive by subscribing on the web site or by sending a blank e-mail to rsn-subscribe@topica.com.

I'll be using an "Earth Write" #2 for the first time since I've been blogging. "Pencils made 100% pre-consumer waste materials." "Contains NO rainforest wood." I bought a package at Staples last summer, figuring I'd do my part, then they seemed to disappear amongst the other pencils.
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A side note on Bobby Jindal in Lousiana. Democrat Kathleen Blanco ran on the Right, and I just discovered that she is a Cajun. Jindal is 32-years-old, so there will be other offices. Now that his name is known, perhaps he might consider a run for Democrat Senator John Breaux's seat next year. (Breaux is and has been the Mullah of the Moderates.)

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Allard on Daschle

From the AP, via CBS4: Denver:

Sen. Wayne Allard is criticizing the Senate's Democratic leader for leaving an around-the-clock debate to attend a fundraiser in Denver.

Allard, R-Colo., said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, should not have left debate about Democratic filibusters blocking several of President Bush's judicial nominations.

Daschle spokeswoman Ranit Schmelzer said the senator went to Denver Wednesday night to attend a fundraiser hosted by former U.S. Attorney Tom Strickland and Jim Crow, president and chief executive officer of Level 3 Communications.

Okay, Strickland was the Democrat who ran against Allard last November and lost. He also ran against Allard in 1996, and he lost then as well. Level 3 is a multinational firm, and correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Jim Crow once have laws that had to be overturned as Unconstitutional?

Okay, so the Tomster jetted out to Colorado Wednesday night. Daschle's Daschle's Daschle.

What struck me was this quote from Senator Allard:

"I'm extremely disappointed he would be back in Colorado raising money when we were having such important debate here in the Senate,'' said Allard. "This is a debate that is going to change the way the Senate does business.''

Change the way the Senate does business. How?

I heard some "conservative columnist" on FNC this afternoon whining that the debate did not accomplish its objectives, i.e. -- the nominees were not confirmed. The goal of the debate marathon was not to have the nominees confirmed. They knew that this was not going to happen. Rather, the debate was a lesson. And it was a prep. The American people had to see what was going on and prepared form what might happen next.

One of two things should now occur. In the first, the President would make some recess appointments, thus bypassing the Senate confirmation process and installing these nominees until they are voted on during the next session of Congress.

This would inflame the Democrats, possibly causing them to shut down the Senate. The American people have hopefully been prepped for this, but it would not change the way in which future nominations would be debated and confirmed. The goal, repeated throughout the marathon debate, is to eliminate the option of filibuster for judicial nominees.

The other thing which could occur, if something does, is known as the Nuclear Option. The Republicans would go to the Senate Parliamentarian and ask him to rule that a simple majority can invoke cloture for judicial nominees. The Parliamentarian would do so, as the GOP is the majority party in the Senate.

This would also anger the Democrats, but they would have less of a case to make to the American people AND the rules would be changed for any future Supreme Court nominee.

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Iraqi Political Timetable

Jalal Talabani, the current man in the revolving chair of the 23-member Iraqi Governing Council, announced Saturday that a Transitional Council would be selected in May to choose a Transitional Government by the end of June. United States occupation of Iraq would officially end then, though the U.S. would still have a contingent of troops on the ground. They've pledged to draft a constitution and hold elections by the end of 2005.

This news comes after the Governing Council met with administrator Paul Bremer late last week, after Bremer had been to Washington to meet with the President. The President evidently wants this wrapped up soon, and the June date would have U.S. occupation completed well before the election.

The French wanted the Iraqis to assume control by the end of this year. Many Dems wanted the President to share power with the French.

I am anxious to hear what they say on the Sunday shows. If you'd like to receive my free twice-weekly newsletter, including the review and analysis of the Sunday shows, visit the Rightsided Newsletter web site or send a blank email to rsn-subscribe@topica.com.

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Candidate Kerry says NO to Matching Funds

John-John Kerry's campaign has been adrift for several months. Howie Dean is doing well in Iowa and New Hampshire. Last week, Howie Dean decided to forgo federal matching funds. This week, John-John decided he didn't need them, either.

He told supporters in an e-mail:

I wish Howard Dean had kept his promise to stay within the campaign finance system. But he did not. He changed the rules of this race - and anyone with a real shot at the nomination must now play by those rules. And today, let me be clear: I'm in this campaign to win the nomination and to defeat George Bush next November.

Because of the matching-funds dilemma, he is now asserting that only he and Howie have shot at the nomination, as they've opted out of the Watergate-era federal system.

The federal system of matching funds provides a candidate up to 250 taxpayer dollars for every donation he receives. (Exact matches apply to donations less than $250,) The system maxes out at $18.7-billion and limits a candidate to campaign expenditures of $45-million

According to Responsive Politics, Kerry was already eligible for $5.6-million in taxpayers' money to fund his campaign.

It also limits how much a candidate can spend in each State, which the Kerry campaign claims is the restriction they do not want. They have pledged to stay within the $45-million overall limit.

Kerry's initial statement said that he would take out a personal loan to cover expenses, but that line was quickly removed.

In the e-mail, Kerry writes:

In doing this, I will follow the law which requires that those assets be mine and no one else. I am fortunate to be able to contribute it.

His wife is the former wife of the late Senator John Heinz (R-Pennsylvania), and as such, she possesses a tremendous ketchup fortune. If he uses any money from her or which the couple possesses jointly, he would have to disclose this. Not that he would.

Before the his campaign, when the Presidential run was in the talking stages, Kerry said that he would consider using his wife's ketchup fortune, but he retracted that shortly thereafter, perhaps after she learned of his statement.

Since so much about the Kerry campaign is fake, it seems only fitting that he should use imitation blood when he says: "I don't want your ketchup money!"

Seriously, since the Kerry Campaign is in no financial position to do something like this, it seems possible that they sought the press such a wild-eyed move would get. It gives political reporters reason to talk about the Kerry campaign, which might otherwise have been ignored.
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BLANCO OR JINDAL: HISTORIC VOTE TODAY. Go Bobby Jindal!
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Dem Candidates Don't Vote For nominees...

...or against them.

We've heard the Dem candidates tell us how important the judiciary is, how seriously they take their advise and consent role with nominees.

My friends at RNC Research have uncovered that candidate John-John Kerry has missed 53 votes on judicial nominees. His colleague, candidate Joltless Joe Lieberman has missed 43, while candidate John-boy Edwards has missed 33.

Here it as a PDF.
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The "Bush Jobless Recovery"

I got this one from PoliPundit. It's a table including every Presidential term since Truman's, ranking them by rate of unemployment.

The worst two are the 8.58-percent of President Reagans first term and the 6.64-percent in the Nixon/Ford term ('73-January, 1977). The lowest unemployment rates are the 3.95% of Johnson's full term and the 4.22% of Eisenhower's first term.

Octobers rate of 6% is dab in the middle.

Perhaps this is why so many Dems want to make illegals welfare eligible: it'll knock the President's figures up a few notches. (I doubt it, but it's a snide comment.)
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Way down in Louisiana…

They are having a gubernatorial election. Either Democrat Kathleen Blanco or Republican Bobby Jindal will be elected the next governor of Louisiana after Saturday's vote. Both candidates portray themselves as a conservative, and each has a very clean image. (When looking at this race, I almost find myself pining for former Democrat Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, who was finally convicted a few years back of 17 counts of racketeering, money laundering, and conspiracy. It's more fun to poke sticks at the imbecilic and the corrupt.)

Okay, the latest tracking poll of from the Marketing Research Institute out of Pensacola, Florida. They surveyed -- on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings -- only people who claim to have voted in the October 4 primary. They got 46 percent backing Jindal, 42% on Blanco, with 12-percent who just don't know. (That seems like an awfully high percentage of voters still undecided considering that these people are involved enough to have voted in the primary election.)

That looks good, at first glance, for Jindal. That's a hypothetical pickup of six points from an earlier survey for Blanco, who issued a statement: "I feel my campaign surging as I have moved around the state in the past few days."

It's a close race, but it seems Bobby Jindal has it under control. I'll forecast the race for him because he has Darrell Waltrip. They like NASCAR in the South, and they like the drivers. Waltrip is a well-known driver, and he is stumping with Jindal. He has so far this year campaigned with Ernie Fletcher in Kentucky and Haley Barbour in Mississippi.

He has the pre-vote lead and the most important intangible down there.

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Howard Dean: Superstar?

The Case for John Edwards

Since his first flurry with voters, I have been repeating that candidate Dean will not win the Dem nomination. To me, it's a no-brainer. He appeals to a certain sect of Democrats, those who hate President Bush and demand some sort of unbranded change. Really, though, there is nothing to him. He had lost the south long before his little labeling with Confederate flags and pickup trucks. (Someone pass the grits.)

Howie Dean now has the support of two major labor unions. So? Labor unions, qua unions, cannot vote. Their endorsements, in today's political climate, are like an costume candidates wear to the appropriate occasions then throw in the closet until next time.

There are six Democrats within striking distance, according to the polls, of each other: Clark, Dean, Edwards, Gephardt, Kerry, and Lieberman. Of those six, Kerry can be most easily written off. His campaign has shot its wad and missed. He's running on having the experience to take on the President on matters of foreign policy, war and peace, etc. Why? He fought in a war? He was has been his State's junior Senator for a couple of decades?

Kerry's campaign is deflating. By attacking frontrunner Dean as he goes, the takes a chunk of Howie with him.

Gephardt should win the Iowa caucuses, but he'll be fortunate to finish in the top six in New Hampshire. His pro-war stance will not play well with the anti-Bush Dem dead-enders elsewhere in the country, and I do not see him lasting into March.

Lieberman. His core of support was the Dems who were still ticked about 2000. They're shiting elsewhere.

Clark. Dean's got the outsider role locked up. Wes is a little too outlandish, with his bizarre proposals to capture bin Laden and constant adjustment on his positions.

John Edwards. Democrat operatives had referred to him as the "next Bobby Kennedy. Senator Ted Kennedy has said that Edwards more closely resembles his brother John. Edwards has the looks, the message, the Southern charm, and the trial lawyers.

He has a book due out soon, one which details how he saved the day as a tort attorney for an innocent little girl who had her innards sucked out by a swimming pool filtration system, etc. His career as a trial lawyer can be turned into a scene of "John Edwards, champion of those victimized by LARGE CORPORATIONS."

According to the latest Gallup poll, 58-percent of Dems nationwide do not know enough about candidate Edwards to hold a favorable or unfavorable opinion of him. According to the same survey, 54-percent do not know Dean well enough to have an opinion. (Those are easily the highest of the six contending candidates.) As voters get to know these two, will they prefer the lunatic Dean or the "shucks-like" Edwards?

Dean's campaign has been an acerbic mass of negativity. Edwards says he is stressing the positives, with plans for the economy, this, that, and the other. Edwards is also laying it onto Howie Dean. (I found this James Ridgeway piece in the Village Voice which does a fair job of pointing out that Edwards is creepy.)

Edwards is the most skilled liar amongst the group of Dems. He has the… well, creepy ability to lie to you with a reassuring smile, leaving you scratching your head and wondering if the obvious untruth he just spoke is not reality. A third place finish in Iowa would set him up nicely for South Carolina. (A third place finish in New Hampshire and they might as well skip the rest of the primaries and nominate him then and there.)

Of course, if the UFO's do come, all bets are off and the nomination belongs to Wes Clark.

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Reverse Marathon, Part Four

Good morning. Senate Republicans last night decided to extend the marathon by ten hours this morning, asserting that the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) went on the defensive this morning, protesting that the Democrats were not anti-women. (They are blocking both female and minority nominees.) He proceeded to list Democrat Senators who are women -- Diane Feinstein, Babs Mikulski, Patty Murray, Debbie Stabenow, etc. -- and protested that they were not anti-woman. This is like the teenage skinhead denying that he hates blacks because he has a few on his paper route. (Leahy would have listed Democrat Senators who are black to defend himself against charges of racism, but there aren't any. They are not, in their language, diverse.)

The marathon will end with 45 Democrats refusing to vote cloture on the nominations of Judges Carolyn Kuhl to sit on the Ninth Circuit and Judge Janice Brown to sit on DC Circuit. The pro-abortion special interests have spoken. The United States Senate is being held hostage by a few crabs at NARAL. And the Democrats dare not vex them

It might being nearing time to talk to the Parliamentarian. The "nuclear option" might be what remains.

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Reverse Filibuster, Part Three

After this, I'll wait for the tracking polls to see if anyone actually noticed what has happened, if the message was made clear. Yes, the tracking polls. Mission accomplished?

Wednesday evening, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California) argued that either Senate Democrats could rubber stamp all of the President's judicial nominees, or they could "take a stand on some, and we have chosen to take a stand on some."

They have chosen to take a stand on four of the President's nominees so far? Why? It's not for ideological reasons. As the Republican Senators have pointed out time and time again last night and today, almost all of the President's nominees are ideological conservatives. The reason, it seems to me, is that the Democrats have picked a few which they think would make funky examples and latched onto opposing them.

"No offense, Judge Pickering, but you're a white southern guy whom it would be easy to brand a racist."

"No offense, Mr. Estrada, but you're not really Hispanic. You're a disgrace to your ethnicity, and it would be easy to oppose you."

"No offense, Judge Brown, but you're not really black. You can easily be labeled another Clarence Thomas traitor to your race, so it's easy to oppose you."

It makes one wonder about Judge Kuhl, though. What about her makes it easy to cast her aside? I posit that she is opposed because she is nominated to the "Liberal Court." Like Thurgood Marshall's seat on the Supreme Court was "reserved from blacks" -- Justice Marshall rejected the term "African American" -- so the 9th Circuit out of San Francisco is "reserved for leftist kooks."

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Reverse Filibuster, Part Two

The Republicans have stressed that the Democrats are violating the Constitution with their filibuster, but Senator Chris Dodd said today that he carries with him ever day the pocket Constitution which Bobby Byrd gave to him a few years back. Said Dodd: "I read it every day."

He reads the same thing I do: The President "shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States." That's Article II, Section two - Executive power. In Article I, the Constitution specifies a 2/3rds vote for convictions of impeachment, but it gives no such majority for confirming judicial nominees, even such aspirants as considered "controversial" by less than a statistical minority of 45 Senators. (If 49 Senators can be a minority, then 45 could well be a nether-minority, in the same sense that 60 is a "super-majority. But that's called digression.)


Article II, Section 2 also states the following of the President: "He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur." Two-thirds for conviction of impeachment and two-thirds for ratifying treaties. Again, no such majority specified for confirmation of judicial nominees. That is wholly the extra-Constitutional invention of the Senate minority.

The Republican Senators have discussed the need for what Frist called "filibuster reform." This afternoon, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) was asked to hearken to his own words of over a decade ago, when he evidently sought to eliminate the filibuster entirely. When challenged by Senator Wayne Allard (R-Colorado), Harkin said that he still supported the notion, but that the Republicans wanted to keep the filibuster for legislation but eliminate it for judicial nominees.

Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) earlier said that the Dems were "breaking the law," and that "this is about violating our Constitution." Senator John Warner (R-Virginia) invoked the late Benjamin Franklin, who upon leaving Constitution Hall in Philadelphia after the work of the summer of 1787, told a curious person what type of government they had been given. Franklin answered: "We have giver you a republic, if you can keep it." Warner charged that the Dems were not keeping it.

Senator Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, said of the nominees: "They are not qualified in the judgment of many." How many? Forty-five Senators and the abortion lobby scoring the vote.

There is going to be a vote tomorrow on the Frist-Miller rule, which would allow the number of votes required to invoke cloture to slip by three with each passing vote until it passes or reaches 51, whichever comes first. It takes 2/3rds of the Senate to vote in favor of a rule change, and thus this one will not pass.

This leaves the "nuclear option," which would be the Republicans going to the Parliamentarian for a ruling stating that a simple majority is needed to invoke cloture on a judicial nominees. Since the Republicans are in the majority, the ruling would be in their favor, as is their prerogative.

The Democrats have already pledged to shut the Senate down if this happens.

There will be a Supreme Court vacancy to fill soon. The Democrats' blockage-by-minority must be cleared by that time.

I have one more point to make about this, which I will do shortly. Then I want to discuss the race for the Dem nomination.

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The Ninth Circuit

A point of contention Wednesday night and Thursday, during the 30 hour session, has been the nomination of Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl to sit on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the on which banned the Pledge of Allegiance last June, said that one could possess marijuana for "religious reasons," and ruled that California's recall election was Unconstitutional because of some punch card ballot machines disenfranchised minorities. It is said to be the nation's most unwaveringly liberal court in America. Judge Knight is, of course, a conservative.

In a letter written for people to sign and mail to their Senators, the NAACP has the sender accuse Judge Kuhl of demonstrating "through judicial activism a blatant disregard for ethnic minority Americans as well as a contempt for the rights of women, the disabled and individuals." She's a conservative. She is being blocked because she is a nominee to a traditionally very liberal court, It's as if to Schumer and his ilk, diversity demands a leftist judiciary.

Senate Minority Whip Mitch McConell (R-Kentucky) suggested that the Ninth Circuit "needs diversity." This afternoon, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) suggested that there was a move pending to split the 9th Circuit, which is the largest of the thirteen U.S. Circuits and currently includes all federal courts in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

The Dems not only do not want conservatives adjudicating in our federal system, they want at least one Court devoid of even moderates. And they'll scoff at their Constitutional duty to advise and consent on judicial nominations to do it.

posted by Mark Kilmer : 11/13/2003 05:30:00 PM [permalink]

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Reverse Filibuster, Part One

Yesterday, Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) called the Senate marathon: "reverse filibuster," explaining: "Filibusters are put forward by the minority to try and block action from occurring. We're trying to move to the floor to try to force action on judicial nominations. We're going to do everything we can to get a vote on judges, and they're going to do everything they can to block a vote on judges."

Yesterday shortly after 6p, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee) said: "Tonight, we embark on an extraordinary session." He wants filibuster reform.

The forty minutes or so after Senator Frist's opening remarks, though, were filled with Democrat questions and a few parliamentary moves.

The aging Senator Robert Byrd(D-West Virginia) said that he had nothing really to say about the filibuster, but that he wanted to vote on the veteran's appropriations bill before he has to catch a train Friday for West Virginia to received some gawdforsaken FDR bravery award. He was accommodated, but Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid (D-Nevada), a nasty fellow, later twisted this incident. He claimed that Byrd was "outraged" because the Republicans wanted to waste time on four judicial nominees while our veterans go hungry, or some such. This was a lie, and I think he knew it.

The Republicans then called for immediate votes on the nominations of Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl of California to sit on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Janice R. Brown to sit on the DC Circuit. As expected, the Dems objected. A lot of the talk was about the accomplishments of Judge Brown and the stellar reputation of Judge Kuhn, but I'll treat that later.

A Dem talking point throughout has been a memo Reid says was faxed to someone by a producer at the Fox News Channel. The memo asked the Senators to walk onto the floor after 6p so Brit Hume could show it live on Special Report, the best political show outside C-SPAN. They say that this proves that the entire marathon is a "circus." The GOP has maintained that it is a show. Senator Frist has long maintained that this would not bring the nominees to up or down votes.

Another Dem them was that other judges have been filibustered, specifically Abe Fortas in 1968. At the time, Fortas was a sitting Justice whom President Johnson sought to promote to Chief Justice. There was a weeklong bipartisan filibuster -- based primarily on objections to separation of powers/independent judiciary concerns because of Fortas's proximity to the Johnson White House -- which was broken by a majority vote. (The rules then required only a simple majority to invoke cloture.)

Even though cloture was voted by a majority, Fortas did not have the necessary majority to confirm his nomination. He has Johnson to withdraw it, the President did, and the entire matter lasted ten days from start to finish.

The Fortas filibuster was broken. It was not used to defeat his nomination. New York Senator Chuckie Schumer (D-New York), who first brought it up, is a crass liar.

When he first spoke, Schumer showed a chart which said 168-4. The Dems evidently had pins made which said 168-4. They have confirmed 168 judges and filibustered only 4, the argument goes. Said Chuckie: "This debate will boomerang on the majority, because the American people will see those numbers."

That was more or less a setup, and I'll have more later.
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Power Outtage

I'm coming off a ten hour power outtage here: no television, no 'puter. I've a lot to catch myself up on, and a lot already to write.

I'll catch you after lunch.
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Past Judicial Filibusters?

A point of contention in the earlier hours of tonight's debate was the Republican claim that this was the first time in history that a judicial nominee had ever been filibustered. No, hissed Senator Chuckie Schumer (D-New York). What of Abe Fortas, President Johnson's 1968 nominee to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? Fortas had been filibustered, by Senators from both political parties, for a week, then the Senate voted cloture by a simple majority. (The rules were different then.) Not everyone who voted cloture for Fortas supported his confirmation, though, and Fortas asked President Johnson to withdraw his nomination when he saw that he did not have the votes to be confirmed. Chuckie's is a flawed example.
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The Talking Has Begun…

It began Senatorially enough. You know, deliberative body, plod along, etc. It's charming, even though the matter over which they met is gut wrenching.

"Tonight, we embark on an extraordinary session," said Majority Leader Bill Frist.

"Filibuster reform."

There was a lengthy delay in starting the discussion because Senator Robert Byrd wants to vote on a veterans' appropriation bill, with the vote scheduled at some time on Friday. Byrd, you see, has to drive back to West Virginia on Friday to receive some gawdforsaken Franklin Roosevelt courage award; he damn well wants to get home in time.

The first outburst from the gallery came when Senator Byrd said that he has "long admired the distinguished Senator." Someone found that offensive, and someone was warned to keep quiet. This person didn't let Senator Byrd finish: "I have long admired the Senator from Tennessee as a distinguished physician."

The Republicans asked to schedule votes on various pending judges, such as Carolyn Kuhl to the 9th Circuit and Janice Brown the DC Circuit. The Democrats kept interrupting and asking questions, and the floor debate did not begin until about 6:50p DC time.

Wisconsin Dem Senator Russ Feingold talked about manufacturing job losses, which was supposed to be the Democrat strategy for the 30 hours. Minority Whip Harry Ried, however, said "jobs and unemployment," then went off about someone wanting to time the start of the session so that it could be aired live on the Fox News Channel. (Special Report, with Brit Hume -- the politics program -- air at that time.)

Feinstein came out to whine about Blue Slips, which are no longer used. They allowed a single Senator from a nominee's home State to block the nominee. It's tradition. (Rather, it was.) She whined about a "filibuster of one."

And that's an hour and a half.

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Let the Dems Filibuster

This evening at 6p Easter Time, a GOP talk-a-thon begins. Lest you think for even a sec that this is a Republican-led filibuster, it is not. Currently, three of President Bush's Judicial nominees -- Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, federal district Judge Charles Pickering Sr. of Mississippi, and Alabama Attorney General William Pryor -- have been passed from the Senate Judiciary Committee with favorable recommendations, and their nominations are officially being debated on the Senate floor. These nominations will be officially in the floor debate stage until 60 Senators -- a super-majority -- votes to close the debate (cloture) and allow an up-or-down vote on the nomination.

It takes 60 Senators to invoke cloture, ending debate and setting up the vote; more importantly to the current situation, it takes 41 Senators to block cloture and thus an up-or-down vote. This is how a majority of Senators, fulfilling their mandate to advise and consent on judicial nominations, could find a nominee acceptable, while a minority, shirking that responsibility, could stubbornly block the process.

Why are they blocking it? I have heard that the pro-abort groups have told Democrat Senators that they are scoring the votes on cloture and will attack Senators who do not vote their way. If one counts on such groups for reelection, he thinks twice before ticking them off. So, it seems, the United States Senate is being held hostage by the crabs at NARAL.

Clearly stated Senate Republican Conference Chairman Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania yesterday: "Tomorrow, we're going to be starting what I call a reverse filibuster. We are going to do everything we can to do what they're [Senate Democrats] doing."

This evening, they begin. More senior Senators have little hideaway "nooks" in the Capitol where they can go to catch some sleep, and cots will be brought into the "Strom Thurmond Room" -- so named for the late Senators 24 hour and 18 minute filibuster back in 1957, when as a Democrat he filibustered the voting rights bill -- for the more junior Senators.

The Republicans, it is said, plan to talk about the nominees and the malignancy of filibustering them, perhaps setting the stage for the eventual use of the "Nuclear Option," having the parliamentarian rule that cloture can be invoked on a simple majority. Democrats have threatened nuclear winter for the Senate if it comes to that.

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It's Wictory Wednesday

Today is PoliPundit's"Wictory Wednesday," the day when Republicans from around the blogosphere do their thaang to remind themselves and others that it is important that we chip in and be a part of the effort to reelect President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Billionaire Dem George Soros is doing his heavy-walleted part to remove President Bush, whom his psychosis tells him is a Nazi ghost from his Hungarian past. That's a lot of nonsense to counteract, but we can do it one small donation and one pledge of time and effort at a time. By visiting the Bush/Cheney webpage, we can donate money via this secure server, and/or we can volunteer to be a "Bush Team Leader" using this secure server. Everything helps.

Here are those who've volunteered to carry this message, in whatever form, on this "Wictory Wednesday." The blogroll of the willing:


Backcountry Conservative
Boots and Sabers
Bowling for Howard
Dean
BushBlog.us (unofficial blog)
Bush-Cheney 2004 (unofficial
blog)
ExPostFacto
Freedom of Thought
The Hedgehog Report
The Irish Lass
Jarhead
Jeremy Kissel
Left Coast
Conservative
Matt Margolis
The Ole Miss Conservative
PoliPundit
Political Annotation
A Rice Grad
Ryne McClaren
Slublog
Southern Conservatives
Stephen Blythe
Viking Pundit
The Wise Man Says


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Yes, I was serious.

When I asserted that billionaire Dem George Soros suffered from a form of psychosis, I was not piling on the partisan name-calling of someone of whose actions I might not be happy. I don't play those games.

I was very serious. To wit:

1. Soros see in George Bush the reemergence of the Nazis who terrified him as a child. He might have the propensity to dislike President Bush for the typical Dem reasons -- the way he won the election, payback for Clinton -- but that standard aversion seems to be tainted by the psychosis of the re-emerging monsters.

He tells the Washpost post that he has nightmares which force him awake each night, leading him to scribble his thoughts in journal.

I do think the man is mentally unstable, and it seems that Halperin and Podesta and those sick people are exploiting his psychosis. Feeding him lines, amplifying it so that they can have ready access to his cash.
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"The Soros Doctrine"

Opinion Journal talked about billionaire Bush-basher George Soros yesterday in the context of how he,and Harold Ickes were exploiting the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law to contribute (Soros) or raise (Ickes) huge gobs of cash for the anti-Bush effort. I chose to look at the piece from the angle of the Democrats' anti-Bush machinery. [See Soros and Ickes from yesterday.]

The mainstreamers are now looking at the same thing. CBS.com opens:

Billionaire George Soros has pledged $15.5 million to efforts to unseat President Bush in an election that he sees as a "life and death" struggle to defeat the administration's "supremacist ideology," a newspaper reports.

"America, under Bush, is a danger to the world," the 74-year-old Soros tells The Washington Post. "And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is."

For their part, the Washpost reports:

"It is the central focus of my life," Soros said, his blue eyes settled on an unseen target. The 2004 presidential race, he said in an interview, is "a matter of life and death."

Soros, who has financed efforts to promote open societies in more than 50 countries around the world, is bringing the fight home, he said. On Monday, he and a partner committed up to $5 million to MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group, bringing to $15.5 million the total of his personal contributions to oust Bush.

Why is he so motivated? The Washpost piece offers this from Soros:

Soros believes that a "supremacist ideology" guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans." It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ("The enemy is listening"). "My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me," he said in a soft Hungarian accent.

So his problem with the President is a result of his psychotic paranoia. It's that simple, it seems.

The Washpost prints of Soros's delusions:

Soros said he had been waking at 3 a.m., his thoughts shaking him "like an alarm clock." Sitting in his robe, he wrote his ideas down, longhand, on a stack of pads. In January, PublicAffairs will publish them as a book, "The Bubble of American Supremacy" (an excerpt appears in December's Atlantic Monthly). In it, he argues for a collective approach to security, increased foreign aid and "preventive action."

"It would be too immodest for a private person to set himself up against the president," he said. "But it is, in fact" -- he chuckled -- "the Soros Doctorine."

So we see the symptoms of the man's psychosis, but what -- or who -- could be fueling it? The Washpost tells us:

His campaign began last summer with the help of Morton H. Halperin, a liberal think tank veteran. Soros invited Democratic strategists to his house in Southampton, Long Island, including Clinton chief of staff John D. Podesta, Jeremy Rosner, Robert Boorstin and Carl Pope.

So the Dems are exploiting the psychosis of a sick but wealthy man for political purposes. They are encouraging his delusions to take his money. This is sick.

Consider the post-Clinton political climate. Schooled by Begala and Carville, these Dems seem apt to do anything to suit their unfocused ends. The goal is power, or their conceptualization of it, and distraught men like Soros are they angry callers to C-SPAN are spreading a form of psychosis of one degree or another. A segment of our body politic is living in a parallel universe.

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Orrin Hatch on C-SPAN's Washington Journal

The Chairman of the Senate Judiciary was on Washington Journal this am, and he made a few generalizations about his fellow Senators which always takes us to that interesting speculation about whom he might have meant.

Speaking of the Rockefeller Memorandum, he first forgave Senator Rockefeller, the ranking Dem on Senate Intelligence whose staffer had written those 545 words. He said that JayRock, as we'll call the West Virginia Democrat, was a nice guy who "had to get a handle on that committee." The Chairman is Republican Pat Roberts of Kansas, so Senator Hatch must have meant that Rockefeller had to control the minority better.

Said Hatch of some committee Democrats: "They really shouldn't be appointed to the Intelligence Committee, but unfortunately they are." Whom could he mean?

Besides JayRock, the committee's Dems are Carl Levin of Michigan, Diane Feinstein of California, Oregon's Ron Wyden, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Indiana's Evan Bayh, Maryland's Babs Mikulski, and candidate John-John Edwards of North Carolina. Which of these Senators allow their own partisanship to supercede the general interests of the United States of America.

First and foremost, Hatch was talking about Levin. Carl, if I may so be so bold as the call the distinguished gentleman by his given name, has something painful in his pants. When he is scheduled to speak on some news show or -- as on the last Fox News Sunday: transcript -- takes to the well of the Senate, I brace myself for snide, partisan negativity. Ooze is the proper verb here, because that is the way general contempt seems to leave the man's person. He hates everything, and he seems uncertain as to why this is.

Levin is the main malefactor and possibly the only person Hatch had in mind when he said that some Dems "really shouldn't be appointed to the Intelligence Committee." (I'm here letting candidate Edwards off the hook, somewhat, because he's a known liar, as is Levin, and this is the type of thing Presidential candidates do. It excites their base.)

It most certainly was not Evan Bayh of Indiana, who is -- in my opinion -- the frontrunner in the Veep race, especially if Howie Dean wins the nomination. Bayh is from the Midwest, where the President has been strong. Bayh is not physically hideous, compliant, and a few bricks shy: all requisites to be a Dem veep nominee.

On the Senate floor Friday, Bayh explained the matter of Rockefeller and the memo in this manner: "Senator Rockefeller has been under intense pressure -- intense pressure -- by some others to pursue a much more partisan line of inquiry, to be much more confrontational. Instead he has chosen to try and pursue the cooperative path first."

Some others. Okay, maybe DiFi, Dicky Durbin, and the Dem leadership (Daschle, Reid).

On another matter, Hatch noted: "We have people in our [Republican] Party who are extreme and do some things they shouldn't."

This one has me baffled, unless he means Olympia Snowe, Linc Chafee, and Snarlin' Arlen Specter.

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It is Veterans Day

Veterans Day was Armistice Day. At 11 am on November 11, 1918, World War I ended with an armistice. Three years later, on November 11, 1921, an unknown soldier of World War I was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. This is Veterans Day. The same ceremony took place in both Britain and France for one of their unknowns, marking their own such Veterans Day.

Some news organizations, such as CBS News, are using this day to attack President Bush. Columnist David Broder of the Washington Post uses his column today to lament the fact that there are not more veteran's in Congress. He blames the lack of comity in the House on the fact that there are fewer veterans today than there were way-back-when.

I will use today to say thank you. Someone has to protect our nation and our freedoms if we are to keep it and them, and it is a job which requires a special type of person. Everyone who has served has helped keep all of this possible. Thank you. For the grueling training, the life on constant call, the uncertainty, the blood spilled, the sacrifices, and for the job well done, I thank you.

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The United States Senate is…"

…the deliberative body.

Or so they are fond of telling us. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle was on Fox and Friends this morning to pitch his new book. He was warm and friendly. He spoke of how much he likes President Bush as a person: "We differ on some matters of policy."

(RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie told Talon News last week: "My own view is that Daschle is more beatable than [South Dakota Democrat Senator Tim] Johnson was and that [former Congressman John] Thune would have a better chance of defeating Daschle [in 2004]." I can say that Thune would make it competitive, but he has not committed to doing so. He might do it, having lost to Johnson last year by the margin of only a few hundred dead South Dakota Sioux.)

I read a Reuters piece about how the clash in the intelligence committee over the memo -- 545 Words -- just might mean that "no more meetings or hearings will be held on prewar intelligence related to Iraq for the rest of this year." Carl Levin's bowels were in an uproar about this on Fox News Sunday yesterday.

For those of you who do not subscribe to my free Rightsided Newsletter, here's this, in the style of that newsletter:

The memorandum, written as it was by one of Senate Intelligence Vice Chairman ranking Dem Jay Rockefeller's staffers, is a partisan plan to use the committee as a political tool to damage the President as the election season is beginning. And it has actually made some on both sides angry, albeit for different reasons. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) told FNS host Tony Snow that he was "stunned by this memo, shocked by it." He said the memo threatened to destroy the committee's special nonpartisan nature, built since the days of the late Chairman Frank Church (D-Idaho), who ran the committee from 1975 through 1980. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chairman Roberts is most angry that no Democrat has so far been willing to "publicly state that this [type of thing] is not done." He argued: "Somebody has to disavow this memo." He added that "I can tell you my Republican colleagues are outraged," and he seemed affronted that "some [Democrat] members of the Senate [are] actually embracing it, reveling in it."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He agreed with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's (R-Tennessee) decision to shut down the committee pending an apology, but intimated that the members of the committee still receivie their usual intelligence briefings.

So that's that.

Then there is the old-style filibusters. The GOP are bringing the cots on Wednesday to begin 30 straight hours of debate. This has to do with the Democrats' filibustering of the President's judicial nominees, though Frist concedes that this will not get the names through; rather, it will call the public's attention to what the Dems are doing.

Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid of Nevada took to the Senate floor to day a grumble and whine. According to CNN this afternoon:

"It's inappropriate that we are not going to be able to work through this week; we're going to take two days to talk about judges," said Reid. "I've been told the reason it's being done, deliver a message to the base. Well, I don't know what that means except it's being done for reasons that I don't think are appropriate for the Senate."

The message is not to the GOP base, though. The message is being sent to the voting public who need to know who is obstructing whom.

GOP Whip Mitch McConnell of Kentucky then offered a dose of reality:

Before Reid started talking, Majority Whip Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, defended Frist's leadership. Frist, said McConnell, has performed far better than former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, under similar political circumstances.
"Someone on the floor of the Senate referred to the Republican leader last week as amateur and used the term mismanagement," said McConnell. "In addition to being quite unsenatorial, let us recall that this leader is laboring under a one-vote margin, just like the last leader had to endure, given that same burden.
"It might be appropriate and timely to compare the hard facts," he continued. "With the same one-vote majority, Senator Frist has pushed 10 appropriations bills across the Senate floor while last year's leadership delivered only three."

To protest the pending 30 hours of non-stop debate, Reid then proceeding to speak for six hours, throwing travel plans out of sync.

Let's be absolutely clear about the upcoming 30 hours. The filibuster is the Democrats' They can end floor debate at any time simply by voting to do so (i.e., cloture). It's their refusal to vote for cloture, allowing the nominees an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor, which allows the Republicans to do this. There was a time, many decades ago, when the Republicans would have done exactly that since the beginning.

If you hear them whine, think: Vote cloture, you weasels, and be done with it.

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Soros and Ickes

This morning, Opinion Journal reminds us, in spades, of Mr. George Soros and Harold Ickes

Mr. Soros is the billionaire hedge-fund operator turned drug-legalization advocate and liberal political activist. Mr. Ickes is the New York lawyer who was at the center of the Clinton fund-raising scandals of 1996. Thanks to campaign-finance reform, these two men are fast becoming the Democratic Party's most important power brokers, nearly as crucial to regaining the White House as the party's Presidential nominee.

Soros has

"already pledged $10 million to America Coming Together (ACT), a new outfit dedicated to spending an unprecedented $75 million to defeat President Bush next year. He has also reportedly chipped in $20 million to the Center for American Progress, a new liberal think-tank that is financing the likes of Bush-hating pundit Eric Alterman.

This is from the ACT web site:

What We Will do

In seventeen battleground states America Coming Together (ACT)

will listen to voters’ concerns about issues that affect them and their families;

will communicate with voters about those issues, highlighting the extremist positions of the Bush agenda and discussing positive, progressive alternatives;

will coordinate with progressive organizations so we will all be more effective and efficient, working together to mobilize millions of voters who will say NO to the Republican agenda by voting to defeat George W. Bush and elect progressives up and down the ticket.

Worst loss of jobs since Herbert Hoover was President … Massive deficits that threaten Medicare and Social Security and mortgage our children’s future … Alienating the United States from the international community … Right-wing judges … Underfunding of Homeland security … More arsenic and mercury in the water.

There are so many reasons for America Coming Together (ACT).

That's the standard Dem pep talk straight from their programmers, the same cast who would annex Poland for a nickel, and Soros is one of their bags o' money.

The Center for American Progress is a goofy policy org:

The Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all Americans. We believe that Americans are bound together by a common commitment to these values and we aspire to ensure that our national policies reflect these values. Our policy and communications efforts are organized around four major objectives:

• developing a long term vision of a progressive America,
• providing a forum to generate new progressive ideas and policy proposals,
• responding effectively and rapidly to conservative proposals and rhetoric with a thoughtful critique and clear alternatives, and
• communicating progressive messages to the American public.

Here's another bit from the Opinion Journal piece:

More recently, since September 11, Mr. Soros has made it his goal to burst what he has called "the bubble of American supremacy." He has said that having helped to liberate Communist countries, he now views America as the gravest threat to world freedom. In the Financial Times in March, he wrote that Mr. Bush "deliberately fosters fear because it helps to keep the nation lined up behind the president." Other flavorful Soros descriptions of current U.S. policy include "imperialist vision" and "Orwellian doublespeak" and something that "cannot be reconciled with the idea of an open society."

I'm going to turn the words of Hillary "Ratbag" Rodham back on her: We're looking at a very well-financed and organized Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy to destroy our President. When she used that expression, she was simply assuming and inventing. We have it right here in print.

The opinion journal turns to the fundraiser, Ickes:

Mr. Ickes has had previous fund-raising star turns, most recently under oath before a Congressional investigating committee. The most memorable thing about the Clinton White House deputy chief of staff's testimony was his sudden lack of memory. While never charged with a crime, Mr. Ickes was called the "Svengali" of the Clinton fund-raising operation by Charles La Bella, who ran the Justice Department campaign-finance task force. Mr. La Bella recommended that Attorney General Janet Reno name a special counsel to explore in particular the Ickes role, but she refused.

And now thanks to campaign-finance reform, Mr. Ickes is back in business. Except that this time his $50 million fund will be able to tap fat cats with less scrutiny than before. His donors can give as much cash as they desire. And while he will have to report contributions to the Internal Revenue Service, the disclosure patterns of these "527" fund-raising committees have been full of holes and evasions, according to the liberal Center for Public Integrity.

The point of the O.J. piece is that everyone but John McCain knows that his legislation did nothing to get large contributions away from politics:

The new rules are arguably more corrupting than the old system because they promote the illusion that such influence has been banished. Dr. Dean can gather all of the small-dollar Internet donations he wants, but in the end he's still going to be relying on the Soros-Ickes machine to get him to the White House.

There's nothing knew there. The illusion has been explained for years, since long before the bill became law.

The penultimate paragraph of the piece closes with this line:

"A President Dean would owe far more chits to Mr. Soros than Vice President Dick Cheney has ever owed to Halliburton.

That assumes that Vice President Cheny owed anything to Halliburton aside from a good job while he had it.

To me, the point is that the Democrats have the funds and a machine to push their swill on the hapless American voters. And they're going to try, and it's going to be a good show, but it doesn't matter.

The left genuinely believes that voters are unsophisticated and easily manipulated, and they succeed only to the extent that they are right. But the facts cannot be disputed.

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Gore's Speech

I've really not much to say about Al Gore's speech to Moveon.org in Washington, having only read the transcript. It follows in the pattern of a lot of Democrat speeches/remarks/interviews of late, filled with distortion, lies, and non-sequitur.

This is really just an advisory to ignore it if these things make you want to strike something or someone.

Here's a sample quip, comparing the Patriot Act with the Iraq war:

In fact, in my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama Bin Laden.

In both cases, the Administration has attacked the wrong target.

In both cases they have recklessly put our country in grave and unnecessary danger, while avoiding and neglecting obvious and much more important challenges that would actually help to protect the country.

In both cases, the administration has fostered false impressions and misled the nation with superficial, emotional and manipulative presentations that are not worthy of American Democracy.

In both cases they have exploited public fears for partisan political gain and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country while actually weakening not strengthening America.
In both cases, they have used unprecedented secrecy and deception in order to avoid accountability to the Congress, the Courts, the press and the people.

He begins with an assumption he knows to be a lie, and does so for purely partisan political purposes. And he does this before the crowd at MoveOn.org, which is particularly dangerous. They're a group of politically unsophisticated, malleable people who await word from their leaders and blindly lurch forth as a mob. Al Gore could tell them that the Bush Administration is bad for America, next he will tell them to annex Poland. It's the same mindset, talking to the same crowd.
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I Won't Accept a Fee unless I…

…take money from you in the form of taxes.

Candidate John-boy Edwards, a tort lawyer, was on Meet the Press, and he had the whole show. He was by general acclaim trounced when he was on the show on May 5, 2002, when the media was just starting to talk about Edwards as a candidate. (I was talking about him as a scary Dem nominee the previous summer, and I received some gently taunting feedback after Edwards made an arse of himself that Sunday on Russert.)

Last July, Taegan Goddard ran with a story about Edwards and his desire to appear on Russert for a rematch. (I'm glad I was able to Google the link.) The rematch occurred today, and I paid as much attention as I could.

Edwards seemed calm, confidant, self-assured, Presidential, and he lied shamelessly without breaking a sweat.

He was, however, candid about the wealth he earned as a very talented and successful tort lawyer, and he feels that it was all luck and he should repay his debt to society. He said to Russert that wealthy folks "like me and you, Tim, who have been lucky enough to do well in this world" should give something back in taxes. He wants their money confiscated by the government by force, which is taxation.

What else do I have?

Lesse, Russert pointed out that in September, John-boy had said he would not leave our troops stranded in Iraq, but he voted against the money to support them. He voted to leave them stranded in Iraq. He explained to Russert that he was sending a message to the President that he had to get a plan and internationalize the effort. Russert stressed that if a majority of Senators had, God forbid, voted with Edwards, our troops would be stuck penniless in Iraq.

Aw, shucks. Edwards said that he refused to give the President a blank check. The troops would have been fine, he asserted, because the President would have come back eventually with a plan of which he, John-boy, approved.

He wants to "take the American face off this operational and internationalize it." The international community, as such, did not liberate Iraq. They refused.

About Howie Dean and the Stars and Bars, Edwards claimed that he grew up knowing that the flag of the Confederacy was a "divisive symbol." The chip appeared on his shoulder, as he complained about Dean's stereotype of the Southerner, "with a pickup truck and a confederate flag."

He talked of Dean's "Northern Elitism."

He also stated that convicted felons, once released, should be allowed to vote. He says he sees it as a way to help get these convicts back into society. It would also mean more Democrat voters, but I won't go there.

He then said that "we do it in North Carolina, and it works."

But he wants to Federalize this nonesens.
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Jack Snow on a Sunday

Let's talk first of Treasury Secretary John Snow's appearances on Fox News Sunday and CNN's Late Edition.

On Fox, he told host Tony Snow that job creation is still possible because the "American economy remains fully capable of creating jobs for all who are looking for them." We have a "strong, vibrant, healthy manufacturing sector," which he tells us is "60% larger than the entire Chinese [PRC] economy."

Secretary Snow mentioned controlling entitlement spending, and Host Snow asked Secretary Snow if the President were still eyeing former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil's concept of the option privatization of part the Social Security investment. Secretary Snow did not answer directly: "The best thing we can do for Social Security is to have a strong, vibrant, healthy economy." On further prodding, Secretary Snow mentioned that President Bush "still supports and investment option," but he did not touch the issue that the Dems and the AARP could and would use against him and the President.

Either he agrees with the quasi-socialists that private investment of Social Security funds is a bad thing or he is a coward. It's an idea which can and should be explained to people in honest terms, not in the psychotic, "all gonna die" language of the left.

He predicted that the President would cut the deficit in half in five years, and that because tax receipt will grow while spending is controlled, the deficit to GDP ration will be under 2-percent, which he termed "manageable."

On Late Edition, he was rightfully pleased but carefully not cocky: "I don't want to declare victory by any means. There's still a lot of work to do." As the President said about the U.S.S. Lincoln, "We have difficult work to do." The battles are different, but as the President acknowledged last May, Secretary Snow also conceded this morning: One taste of success does not mean the work is finished.

He predicted 4-percent growth for the 4th quarter of 2003 and throughout 2004. (Parenthetically, between the 4th quarter of 1992 and the 2nd quarter of 1996, real GDP grew only 2.6 percent per year.)

Blitzer showed a graphic of job gains during the terms of Presidents Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush. Snow explained that he President had inherited a recession and had gone through a lot of very difficult shocks. He said that European central bankers have expressed amazement to him that America's economy has done so well despite what we've been through.

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The RSN has been sent...

... to Inboxes around the world.

It is readable, in a slightly less attractive format, at the website.

Later this afternoon, I hope to put some of the rest of the Sunday morning chit-chat here in the Political Annotation. We've got Treasury Secretary Jack Snow on Fox News Sunday and Late Edition, candidate John-Boy Edwards owning Meet the Press, and candidate John-John Kerry on Face the Nation.

Also, the ghost of Dick Holbrooke and one of Steph's conspiracies from This Week.

After errands...
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If It's Sunday…

I see no pattern.

Treasury Secretary John Snow is to be a guest on Fox News Sunday, one presumes to discuss the Bush economy, but then there's… no one else. The term "the Bush economy" now means something vibrant and alive, but now the talking heads do not want to hear about it.

Unless it's from John-John Edwards on NBC's Meet the Press or Trickless Dickie Gephardt on CNN's Late Edition. Edwards gets the entire MTP, and one wonders if his campaign had to pay for the time. Either way, it's nice to know that someone else besides me thinks he has a real shot at the Dem nod. It's frightening to know that the someone else is Tim Russert.

Or maybe candidate John Kerry would like to discuss the economy on CBS's Face the Nation. He shares time on that half-hour show with Senator John McCain, that oft annoying maverick Republican from Arizona, so one suspects host Schieffer will continue to fret about ammunition dumps.

Steph has some good guests to grill with George Will this morning. Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware), who gave up a sure thing at Judiciary to take Foreign Relations, only to see his party lose their Senate majority, leads off. He'll question the intellect of the free world, then Clinton's "other" U.N. guy, Richard Holbrooke, will appear onscreen to reaffirm that he is irrelevant. Richard Perle follows if I'm still awake.

Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) and disgruntled partisan Carl Levin (D-Michigan) will be on FNS, one assumes to discuss the Democrat memo. The label fits nicely next to "obstructionist." Tom Daschle's stewardship of Senate Democrats has been an amusing failure, but I doubt they will discuss that aspect of the situation.

Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska), the new maverick, will drop by LE to criticize the President.

Do you remember Afghan foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, who prefers to be called simply "Abdullah"? He's the youngish, quasi-debonair guy who loved to be interviewed in his stylish Western outfits. He's been off the radar for a while, but he'll be on LE this morning.

I'll summarize and analyze for the Rightsided Newsletter, which will be in your Inboxes early this afternoon. You can subscribe at the web site or by sending a blank e-mail to rsn-subscribe@topica.com.

I'll see you in a few hours.

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Funny How Time Flies

Tomorrow morning, the Sunday Talk Shows are live. Sunday afternoon, I glean what's important, describe and analyze it, and set it out to subscribers to the free Rightsided Newsletter. Visit the web site to subscribe, or send a blank e-mail to RSN-subscribe@topica.com.

I'm looking forward to it.
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"The Jobless Recovery"

I found this paragraph in the November 10 issue of NEWSWEEK magazine:

UNFORTUNATELY, THERE IS still no evidence that a surge of growth in the U.S. economy is creating jobs. Even the U.S. economy’s surprisingly strong third-quarter showing last week does not change the fact that many of the factors creating the jobless recovery in the United States are still in place. The dot-com boom led companies to hire floods of people and invest in all kinds of digital technology that they still have not begun to fully use. As markets have crept upward, businesses have tapped into these earlier investments to be productive without having to add employees. Equipment is still being used at three quarters of capacity, well below the average 84 percent, and quarterly productivity numbers are still rising. But the most powerful forces behind the U.S. jobless recovery are global phenomena that will likely hamper the rest of the developed world’s fight against unemployment when their economies eventually return to health. China is becoming a factory to the world, allow-ing American, European and Japanese firms to farm out production at much lower costs. And the Internet now makes it possible to outsource even high-tech services to such low-wage countries as India and the Philippines. The result of this global labor arbitrage, argues Stephen Roach, chief economist with Morgan Stanley, is “the distinct possibility that jobless recoveries may remain the norm in high-cost developed economies for some time to come.”

November 10, the date on the Newsweek issue from which those words were copied, is Monday. Two days from now. They hadn't heard the latest, but they did a good job of explaining what turned out not to be so.

It's global, Newsweek admitted. Productivity growth, for instance, 40% in Europe what it is in the United States, we're told, and German Thomas Mayer of Deutsche Bank offers: "It’s rather old-fashioned: no productivity miracle, no jobless recovery."

Now the jobs are being created: nearly 300,000 in the past three months.

But the Seattle Times finds time to whine:

But most of the new jobs were part time or in low-paying sectors, such as education, health care and services.

Let's have an election.

I read that candidate Howie Dean will not accept federal matching funds, and the concomitant behavior-limits, for his campaign. He thinks he can raise enough without them.

He might be able to out-plunder the other eight, but he cannot hold the President's pocket change.

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There is a Jimmy Stewart-style filibuster…

… in the works for the Senate next week, according to the Washpost this morning: "The Republicans are bringing in food and cots for the "Justice for Judges Marathon," scheduled for Wednesday night through Friday morning."

Good morning. Some conservative activists have been calling for a non-stop filibuster, the kind in which GOP Senators might be forced to bring in extraneous material just to keep the floor conversation going. We might get phone books, novels, and gun manuals, so be sure to have your TV tuned to C-SPAN2 for the fun, frolics, and hijinks. As Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee) argued on Fox News Sunday last month, this move is almost certainly not going to get any of the President's judicial nominees the up-or-down votes to which they are Constitutionally entitled, but it will make for good theater.

And it will make news. People will see the Senate doing something very unusual, and they will be told why. The case can then be made with no doubt that Senate Dems are obstructing the President's judicial nominees, and it will be seen by all but the most partisan lefty as pure obstruction for purely political purposes. Because that is what it actually is.

It's almost an election year.

This will also play perfectly for Senator Zell Miller's book sales.

The Washpost piece contains this misleading paragraph, and it's what we can probably expect from the lefty press next week:

Bush and Republicans, meanwhile, may irritate rather than please their most conservative backers by promoting controversial judges who cannot win confirmation even in a GOP-controlled Congress. Some of those activists are accusing Senate GOP leaders of going too easy on the Democratic minority, a prime reason for next week's talkathon. No one in the Capitol expects it to solve anything, but the leaders hope it will convince voters that Democrats are to blame.

I supplied the italics. Every one of the judges currently filibustered by the Dems has enough votes -- including some Democrat votes -- to easily win confirmation in an up-and-down, majority rules Senate vote. And the President has given no indication that he will ever nominate a judge whom he does not believe can and should win such a vote. The reporter went fishing in the cobwebbed recesses of his brain for that one.

It's 2003, and we will actually get to see a genuine, old-style filibuster. I wish there were a way the denizens of the blogosphere could contribute to this drama.

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Dems Don't Vote

Would that it were so easy.

I'm referring, though, to the Democrat elected representatives of the people, none of whom (save Kucinich) cast a vote in Congress last week: Tricky Dicky Gephardt, John-John Kerry, Joltin' Joe Lieberman, and John-boy Edwards.

I come with documentation, in the form of a .pdf from RNC Research: DEMOCRAT VOTE WATCH: November 7, 2003. The subhead is: "Playing hooky from work." Yes, "Senate Dem hopeful skip key agriculture, judicial nomination votes."

The link will open up your Acrobat reader and detail the exact votes missed per candidate.

I offer this information about the Democrats as a part of my nascent effort to be a bipartisan blogger. Earlier today, I talked about President Bush and his speech before the National Endowment for Democracy, and now we've something about the Dems.

They don't do their jobs.

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In Politics, Obstructionists can be Punished

The Associated Press has a little Alan Fram piece discussing how the House GOP leadership is giving Democrats no projects for their home districts in the large education and health spending bill. Why not? They voted against the bill when it was first introduced last Summer.

The Democrats are whining:

But furious Democrats say the move would be an unprecedented retaliatory blow at an entire political party. They say Democrats voted their conscience against a $138 billion measure they said would shortchange schools and other high-priority programs at a time when Republicans have cut taxes for wealthy Americans.

"This would be a taxpayer-financed slush fund to intimidate members to vote to squeeze down education funding to get table scraps for their districts," said Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, which writes spending bills.

What has the Hammer to say about this matter?

"We're doing business as usual," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said Friday. "If you don't support a bill, you have no right to say what's in the bill."

A Majority Leader cannot act like he's trying to win a public popularity contest, which is why the House GOP is fortunate that N. Gingrich was never the Republican Leader. (When Foley was ousted after the '94 election, GOP Leader Bob Michel had not sought reelection, sp the Whip (Gingrich) was the natural choice to move up to Speaker. Had the Democrats -- don't laugh -- managed to hold-on to the House that election, Gingrich would have become minority leader.)

Anyway, this repayment is healthy for a representative Democracy. It should make the minority party think twice before opposing for partisan reasons a majority-sponsored piece of legislation or spending bill.

Let's hope Bill Frist is taking notes for when the Republicans expand their Senate majority after the 2004 elections.

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His most important speech…

This was it, President Bush's speech to the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. This is not so because of the lofty, almost (John) Kennedyesque words about the future and the freedom of man. This is not so because of the lofty, almost Reaganesque words about breaking the yoke of tyranny. This about an international environment wherein the United States deals only with governments deriving their just powers from the consent of those they governed.

Said this President:

In June of 1982, President Ronald Reagan spoke at Westminster Palace and declared, the turning point had arrived in history. He argued that Soviet communism had failed, precisely because it did not respect its own people -- their creativity, their genius and their rights.

President Reagan said that the day of Soviet tyranny was passing, that freedom had a momentum which would not be halted. He gave this organization [the Endowment for Democracy] its mandate: to add to the momentum of freedom across the world. Your mandate was important 20 years ago; it is equally important today.

The Soviet Union, the single greatest threat to human civilization in mankind's history, is no more. The problem now is a sect of backwards runts intent upon damaging all that is good of human civilization to remake in within the confines of their dismal worldview. That's the Democrats, and the terrorists also fit the bill, although they are violent mutants.

He continued with these words, which I think have an interesting import:

A number of critics were dismissive of that speech by the President. According to one editorial of the time, "It seems hard to be a sophisticated European and also an admirer of Ronald Reagan." (Laughter.) Some observers on both sides of the Atlantic pronounced the speech simplistic and naive, and even dangerous. In fact, Ronald Reagan's words were courageous and optimistic and entirely correct.

While the audience was laughing, as indicated by the "(Laughter)" inserted into the text by the White House Press Office, President Bush tilted his head slightly and a smile crossed his face which I had seen before -- on the face of our fortieth President when pointing out to the nay-sayers that they are too often clueless.

The President continued:

Historians will note that in many nations, the advance of markets and free enterprise helped to create a middle class that was confident enough to demand their own rights. They will point to the role of technology in frustrating censorship and central control -- and marvel at the power of instant communications to spread the truth, the news, and courage across borders.

Historians in the future will reflect on an extraordinary, undeniable fact: Over time, free nations grow stronger and dictatorships grow weaker. In the middle of the 20th century, some imagined that the central planning and social regimentation were a shortcut to national strength. In fact, the prosperity, and social vitality and technological progress of a people are directly determined by extent of their liberty. Freedom honors and unleashes human creativity -- and creativity determines the strength and wealth of nations. Liberty is both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here on Earth."

The President is fully aware of the historic nature of his charge, of what is happening. Despotism is dying. Humankind will be free, and the United States if the Shining City on the Hill. The President said: "And now we must apply that lesson in our own time. We've reached another great turning point -- and the resolve we show will shape the next stage of the world democratic movement."

He forecast eventual liberty in the People's Republic of China, using the "give 'em an inch" argument. Then he talked of the Middle East:

In many nations of the Middle East -- countries of great strategic importance -- democracy has not yet taken root. And the questions arise: Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter?

These are valid questions. Given vast lots of oil wealth, as is the case of many of them, their leaders prefer to act as despotic sheepherders and bedouin, living as settled peoples only because they were given a mandate and boundaries in the past by an erstwhile British Empire. Or the running joke of the United Nations.

President Bush borrows President Reagan's term for this attitude: "cultural condescension." They aren't as sophisticated in the Middle East as we are here in the United States. By the same measure, though the President did not point this out, it could be said that we are not as sophisticated as are the French. We in the United States suffer cultural condescension from some in Europe. That's their game, but it need not be ours.

The people of the Middle East can and will be free, the President said. He blamed much of the backwardness of the Middle East, at least tacitly, on the effects of European colonialism. He concludes of this:

Many Middle Eastern governments now understand that military dictatorship and theocratic rule are a straight, smooth highway to nowhere. But some governments still cling to the old habits of central control. There are governments that still fear and repress independent thought and creativity, and private enterprise -- the human qualities that make for a -- strong and successful societies. Even when these nations have vast natural resources, they do not respect or develop their greatest resources -- the talent and energy of men and women working and living in freedom.

Instead of dwelling on past wrongs and blaming others, governments in the Middle East need to confront real problems, and serve the true interests of their nations. The good and capable people of the Middle East all deserve responsible leadership. For too long, many people in that region have been victims and subjects -- they deserve to be active citizens

He chided Saudi Arabia and Egypt for not moving beyond their despotism, while maintaining that it is not innate, that it can be surpassed.

There are, however, essential principles common to every successful society, in every culture. Successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military -- so that governments respond to the will of the people, and not the will of an elite. Successful societies protect freedom with the consistent and impartial rule of law, instead of selecting applying -- selectively applying the law to punish political opponents. Successful societies allow room for healthy civic institutions -- for political parties and labor unions and independent newspapers and broadcast media. Successful societies guarantee religious liberty -- the right to serve and honor God without fear of persecution. Successful societies privatize their economies, and secure the rights of property. They prohibit and punish official corruption, and invest in the health and education of their people. They recognize the rights of women. And instead of directing hatred and resentment against others, successful societies appeal to the hopes of their own people.

The speech was the most visionary thing we have heard from the White House since Reagan was President. Such vision and intellectual curiosity are hallmarks of great thinkers, though I've not seen such a list which contain either of the names of the last great President of the 20th century and the first of the 21st.

The Semit Kory Wen said of the speech: "But it came at a moment when Mr. Bush is struggling to create democratic institutions in Iraq itself, and when the daily casualties among the American and allied soldiers have led many in the region to question whether the United States is capable of transforming the nation it invaded." That is not reporting. Those are the inventions and words of a myopic critic.

Most certainly not all is well, but at least we're working on it.

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Here come the Judges

Good morning. Three appointed federal judges -- District Judges Richard Casey of New York, Phyllis Hamilton of San Francisco, and Richard Kopf of Nebraska -- have blocked enforcement of the new federal law banning the partial birth abortion procedure. The injunctions are, of course, temporary -- to last at least until the judges can decide if the law actually violates the Constitution. Whether or not it does violate that Constitution can have little to do with the document itself, as judges and justices have been wont to find little things in the "emanations of the penumbra" -- I believe that phrase was the late Justice William O. Douglas's -- of the Bill of Rights.

The Nebraska ruling affected only the three doctors who sued for the injunction, but Louise Melling, the director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Act, said that the New York Order prohibited enforcement of the law against all National Abortion Federation (NAF) member doctors, accountable for half of all abortions performed in the United States.

Situations like this remind one of how important the Senate's advise and consent function with federal judges is to our Republic. There should be a thorough investigation as to whether they will uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, accepting that it cannot be altered via judicial whimsy. It is a "living, breathing" document, in the sense such descriptives are commonly used, only in that Article V allows for amendment and specifies how this can be done. To wit:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

There are no ever-changing emanations and penumbrae.

posted by Mark Kilmer : 11/07/2003 08:13:00 AM [permalink]

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His Most Important Speech

In a lot of ways, the President's speech to the National Endowment for Democracy was just that. I have a lot to say about this when time is on my hands, which will be tomorrow.

For now, I will say that the President admitted what he is doing, and that is finishing the job. I saw a flash of President Reagan's smile, with the tilt of the head, at one point.

The enemy is great, but President Bush today showed another trait the Gipper had in spades: optimism about America, her dream, and her place in the world. President Bush has always displayed an optimism which should by right be contagious with everyone were it not for those still embittered by the self-defeating past.

Iraq will be the shining city in the Middle East, to which others in the region will look for their own sakes. This was the policy since last summer, as gleaned from hints of what was said by the President, Secretary of State Powell, and several others. I saw it then, and I spilled it into print from the ,a href="http://rightsided.tripod.com">Rightsided Newsletter.

This is bigger than the danger of a long-term threat. This is bigger than one unaccountable despot. And this is bigger than one of the many things the press has attempted to label "The Bush Doctrine." This is bigger than, I daresay, President Reagan.

The Dems really need to think about adopting some of this as their own, offering new, constructive ideas about which the Administration maybe hasn't thought. There best bet, both in now and for the future, is to run with this.

They won't, conditioned as they are to say nay and oppose.

More on the speech tomorrow.
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"Gen. Clark, this is Earth Calling...

...are we reaching?"

I received this one from RNC research this afternoon.

WES CLARK:
CONSPIRACY THEORIST
Clarks Penchant For Rumors And
Innuendo Damages Campaign


CNN’S SOLEDAD O’BRIEN: “A speech made in New Hampshire Monday night, you said that there was a memo that was circulating within the administration after 9/11 which talked about overturning the governments of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan. Did you see this memo? Do you know that, in fact, this memo exists?”

CLARK: “Well, the people that told me about it would not have told me about it had it not existed. Now, what's happened to it since, I don't know. But it's been the subject of the sort of neoconservative talk network for some time. And the President's obliquely referred to it.” (CNN’s “American Morning,” 11/6/03)


LATEST WHOPPER: CLAIMS TO KNOW OF SECRET INVASION PLANS

Claims Bush Administration Planned To Invade “As Many As Seven” Countries After 9/11.
“Clark … renewed his charge that soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration contemplated overturning as many as seven Middle Eastern and African governments. Clark … told an audience . . . that he learned while visiting with Pentagon acquaintances in the fall of 2001 that such thinking had already been put on paper … [H]e reeled off the countries that he had heard were on the administration’s potential hit list …” (Paul Barton, “Clark Again Tells Of Post-9/11 Hit List,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 11/4/03)

Asked To Back Up Claim, Clark “Acknowledged” He’d Never Seen Proof, Just Heard “Gossip.” “Questioned afterward, Clark acknowledged he never saw the Pentagon memo or paper himself. ‘But they told me there was something, some kind of a memo or something. I never saw it. I said, “Stop, I don’t want see anything more. I just didn’t want to get into it.”’ When asked if it was prudent to make the charge when he hadn’t seen the Pentagon paper, Clark insisted it was. ‘It’s in my book,’ he said, adding, ‘You only have to listen to the gossip around Washington and to hear what the neoconservatives are saying and you will get the flavor of this.’” (Paul Barton, “Clark Again Tells Of Post-9/11 Hit List,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 11/4/03)


CLARK MAKES HABIT OF RELYING ON
RUMORS RATHER THAN FACTS

Claimed Rumsfeld Leaked “His Own Memo.” “Clark asserted that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ‘had to leak his own memo,’ . . . . Asked how he knew that Mr. Rumsfeld was behind the leak, he replied, ‘Well, that's what the rumor is, and it's been talked about on the Sunday talk shows.’” (Katharine Q. Seelye, “Clark Lays Responsibility For 9/11 At Bush's Feet,” The New York Times, 10/29/03)

Claimed White House Tried To Get CNN To Fire Him But Had No Evidence. CLARK: “The White House, actually back in February, apparently tried to get me knocked off CNN. And they wanted to do this because they were afraid that I would raise issues with their conduct of the war.” FOX NEWS’ CARL CAMERON: “Clark said he had no evidence, only rumors, which he nonetheless made public.” (Fox News’ “Special Report,” 8/26/03)

Claimed “People Around The White House” Told To Him To Hype Saddam-9/11 Connection. CLARK: “I think there was an immediate determination right after 9/11 that Saddam Hussein was one of the keys to winning the war on terror. …” NBC’s TIM RUSSERT: “By who? Who did that?” CLARK: “Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, ‘You got to say this is connected. … This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.’ …” (NBC’s “Meet The Press,” 6/15/03)

Then Claimed His Wife Got A Call From Head Of “Middle East Think Tank” In Canada, Then He “Personally Got A Call” From Canadian, But There Is No Such Think Tank In Canada, So Clark Changed Think Tank Location To “Outside The Country.” After all of these shifts in his claim, Clark actually claimed, “There’s no waffling on [his story]. It’s just as clear as it could be.” (WDUN’s “The Martha Zoller Show,” 7/1/03; Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes,” 7/1/03; Matthew Continetti, “Drafting General Clark,” The Weekly Standard, 9/1/03; Wesley K. Clark, Letter To The Editor, “Hussein And 9/11,” The New York Times, 8/13/03)

We all know that Clark says he wants to be our President, but this is the kind of stuff which, pre-Clinton, would have a candidate locked in a padded room with Lyndon LaRouche. Is he getting away with this simply because the Dem frontunner, Howie Dean, is almost as lunatic?

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The Bush Economy

The words dripped off the mouths of the Dems with contempt: "The Bush economy." The President had, to hear the tale as told by our friends on the left, taken the Clinton boom and given it to Enron, Halliburton, and the very wealthy. He had destroyed the Clinton economy.

The President looked directly at the camera, the American people, and told them that his plan was going to work. He never had a doubt, and his certainty further irked the derisive left.

More good economic news today: lower jobless claims and increased productivity.

For a summary on the good economic news of late -- and there has been rather a lot -- please visit this post on the official BushCheney2004 blog: The Bush Boom Round up.

President George W. Bush is not a weak President. He's not a caretaker President. He's not a mediocre President. The man who won in a close election in 2000 -- was constantly told by the press that he did not have a mandate to lead -- is leading the country to great things. And he's taking the world along for the ride.

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Why CBS pulled RWR miniseries

Good morning. A man so great in his efforts for his cause -- individual liberty, individual achievement, individual merit, individual worth -- that he was an anathema to those who want to see Americans thralls to their government. A man so great in his efforts for his cause that he remains as a symbol to those who seek individual freedom from governmental control. That is President Ronald Reagan, and to some, he must be torn down. The truth cannot tear him down, so it must be time to invent material, attribute it to him, and attack that. And that was the miniseries. But that's not why CBS yanked it and sold it to Showtime.

We get the real reason this morning from a Brian Lambert in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. He tells us that the miniseries got the hook because of the actions of "various kindred elements of what, collectively, can be called the conservative media attack engine." B-B-B-B-B-BOGEYMAN! Under the bed, in the closet, waiting for the liberals to make the wrong move!

He whines that the credibility of CBS and Viacomm has been damaged, and "[c]redibility is a precious commodity." I wish he would have thought before he wrote that. This had a lot to do with the credibility of the networks, but they didn't lose any by pulling the tabloidesque garbage. If they had aired it, they'd have lost any air of integrity and credibility they still possessed after two decades of Dan Rather.

But it's about Clinton to Lambert. It's always about Clinton. The visceral hatred of the left for President Bush is about Clinton, losing a part of what remained of his legacy when Al Gore was given the boot in 200.

Said Lambert of this maching:

The Drudge Report ran days of outraged headlines. Bill O'Reilly railed. L. Brent Bozell organized a campaign threatening advertiser boycotts. The Republican National Committee fired off a read-between-the-lines letter to CBS president Les Moonves demanding Reagan-friendly "experts" review the film prior to air — or else. Viacom chief Sumner Redstone grumbled from on high. Web sites hammering CBS were launched. And, of course, every foghorn with a microphone on the 800-plus radio stations broadcasting conservative choir music 24/7 from sea to shining sea railed that the film was further proof of the ongoing Hollywood liberal smear campaign against everything to the right of Bill and Hillary.

You know, of course, that to folks like Lambert and his ilk, Clinton was a great president who was ruined by the outside forces of The Conspiracy.

Someone else must be to blame, right?

He wanted that movie to air, no matter what it did to CBS. The network, on the other hand, was forced to make a decision. That's how things work in a capitalist system. We do not have to tolerate any offal that anyone wants to toss at us. It's our country, our revolution, and its non-violent.

Put the crap on PBS.
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President Bush signs PBA ban in Reagan Building

It is now illegal in the United States to perform a specific type of procedure wherein a baby is yanked most of the way from its mother's womb, its head punctured by scissors, its brains sucked out by a vacuum device, and its skull is crushed. The procedure is finished by yanking the now-deceased baby from the mother and tossing the bloody remains in the garbage. The procedure, commonly known as partial birth abortion, is called "dilation and extraction" by abortionists and their supporters.

President George W. Bush signed into law Wednesday afternoon a bill which makes performing such atrocities a federal crime. In Lincoln, Nebraska, however, Judge Richard Kopf fumed: "It seems to me the law is highly suspect, if not a per se violation of the Constitution." We assume that he meant the Constitutional right to abort invented in the emanations of the penumbra of the federal Bill of Rights, but he had still not settled on what the Constitution actually dictates: "It's probably likely I'm going to issue an injunction." All imperiousness aside, however, he said that his ruling would probably apply only to the four Nebraska abortionists who filed the lawsuit, not to all abortionists nationwide.

Twice previously -- in 1996 and 1998 -- a similar bill was placed before Clinton, who proceeded to veto it with the claim that he wanted to see an exception to the ban when the procedure is necessary for the health of the mother. (Abortion is a prima facie rejection of motherhood.) The procedure is, of course, never necessary to protect the physical health of a pregnant woman, so this exception could be used to allow such a mutilation if the "mother" might get ticked off upon having a child. Mental health. President Bush signed this ban Wednesday in the Ronald Reagan Trade Center here, the most fitting building in Washington for the signing. Said the President [Bush]: "Today, at last, the American people and our government have confronted the violence and come to the defense of the innocent child."

Opponents of the legislation had already filed suit in San Francisco, Omaha, Nebraska, and New York, New York to have enforcement of the law blocked. Pro-abort groups Wednesday began airing a television commercial which charges that President Bush is interfering with doctor-patient privacy and is for removing the rights of all Americans. It is an expected rabid reaction to a bitter group seeing their shibboleth -- "right to choose" -- exposed for what it is: gruesome death as an option. President Bush replied: "The executive branch will vigorously defend this law against any who would try to overturn it in the courts."

The confluence of a Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois) -- who was front-and-center in the Reagan building for the signing -- Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a physician, and President George W. Bush has the potential for saving the lives of thousands of unborn Americans, as well as proving that the poorly-conceived 1973 case of Roe v. Wade is not annihilation set in stone.

This case, which will be pressed by the pro-aborts, likely will not make it to the Supreme Court in time for the current nine Justices. There will doubtless be at least one new face.

Godspeed, President Bush.
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Howie Dean and his flag…

Candidate Howie Dean is a Vermont liberal trying to look purrty to southern white guys. Last week, he told a reporter in Iowa: "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks. We can't beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats."

At a Dem debate Tuesday night, Dean referred to the flag as "a loathsome symbol," but excused himself for allowing this atrocity because he was only "reaching out to poor whites." Howard Dean admitted to pandering to poor, white southerners whom he acknowledged that he believes are racists honoring a loathsome symbol.

At the debate, candidate Al Sharpton declared: "If a southern person running [for the Dem nomination] had said that, they'd have been run out of the race." Maybe, Al, but we know it would have been the end for any Republican.

Sharpton gave Dean a bye on the question of bigotry: "I think it is insensitive and you ought to apologize for it. You are not a bigot, but you appear to be too arrogant to say I'm wrong." Candidate John-boy Edwards also got in his shot, demanding an apology and chastising Vermont's Howie: "The last thing we need in the South is somebody like you coming down and telling us what we need to do." Dean has precious little and quickly evaporating chance of carrying any of the southern States, especially with John-boy there to call him on his little remarks. But the IF with Edwards is a big one.

In New York on Wednesday to talk about campaign finance, Howie showed that he had been told how badly he had looked. He offered:

"I regret the pain that I have caused, but I will tell you there is no easy way to do this and there will be pain as we discuss it and we must face this together hand in hand as Dr. [Martin Luther] King and Abraham Lincoln asked us to do"

And you could almost hear The Song play on cue.

On behalf of southerners everywhere, candidate Edwards accepted his apology: "It sounds like he's done the right thing. It would have been better if he'd done it last night." Edwards is not holding Dean's feet to the southern fire.

It's time for the Nine to say goodnight, a la the TV family on Walton's Mountain.

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Mississippi's undercard…

Former RNC Chairman Haley Barbour, whose signature is on the first of my RNC Life Member certificates, will be the next governor of Mississippi, having ousted Democrat Governor Ronnie Musgrave. This is neither an upset nor a surprise, but it is good news for President Bush, who campaigned heavily in-State for Barbour.

The undercard tells an interesting story. Republican Lieutenant Governor Amy Tuck, elected as a Democrat, was challenged by Democrat Barbara Blackmon, an African American who spent much of Tuesday night denying that she had lost.

Tuck, who had switched from the Democrat to the Republican Party in December of 2003, ran as a conservative, which is how she acted as lieutenant governor: "I have no regrets. I am the same person I've always been. I've changed parties...not principles."

Blackmon, with her campaign struggling and clinging to the pro-abort special interests, challenged the pro-life Tuck, several weeks ago, to sign an affidavit stating that she had never had an abortion. You see, Tuck had accused Blackmon of being an "extremist" on the abortion issue, which is a tactic I'd like to see more of on the national level. All pro-abort activists and most pro-abort politicians are out of the mainstream. They use the "out of the mainstream" argument on President Bush's judicial nominees, yet it more readily applies to them and they should be called on it. Either way, Blackmon's was garbage-innuendo, and though Tuck says she was insulted, she also pledged to sign such an affidavit.

[As an aside, the late Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the ill-constructed opinion in Roe v. Wade. The spelling of the surname is slightly different, and it is unlikely that the two were related.]

Last week, Tuck finally signed the requested affidavit, and Blackmon tried to portray the action, which she had demanded, as an attack on her: "This is a delicate issue that my opponent has continued to use as a springboard to attack me as she seeks to garner favor with her new constituents." The "new constituents" barb was a bit of a lash at Tuckman for switching parties.

Some Mississippi analysts say that the affidavit demand hurt Blackmon, while actually signing it helped Tuck.

But concluded the Jackson Clarion-Ledger:

Tuck's party switch to the GOP late last year apparently didn't hurt her. "This is not a place where the long-term prospects of Democrats are glowing,'' University of Mississippi political scientist John Bruce said.

President Bush carried the State by 17-points in 2000.

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It's Wictory Wednesday

Today is PoliPundit's "Wictory Wednesday." It is the day when we issue a wake-up call: The President cannot be reelected in a vacuum. By visiting the Bush/Cheney webpage, we can donate money via this secure server, and/or we can volunteer to be a "Bush Team Leader" using this secure server. Everything helps.

The war against terrorism is a war against mutans who are not compatible with civilization or humanity. The 2004 Presidential election is the most important in federal history, and a lot depends on reelecting President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Here are those who've volunteered to carry this message, in whatever form, on this "Wictory Wednesday":

Backcountry Conservative
Boots and Sabers
Bowling for Howard
Dean
BushBlog.us (unofficial blog)
Bush-Cheney 2004 (unofficial
blog)
ExPostFacto
Freedom of Thought
The Hedgehog Report
The Irish Lass
Jarhead
Jeremy Kissel
Left Coast
Conservative
Matt Margolis
The Ole Miss Conservative
PoliPundit
Political Annotation
A Rice Grad
Ryne McClaren
Slublog
Southern Conservatives
Stephen Blythe
Viking Pundit
The Wise Man Says


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Kentucky is Republican

Representative Ernie Fletcher -- 2002 ACU, 92 out of 100 -- is the new governor of Kentucky. When all votes are counted, there is an outside chance that he could defeat Democrat Attorney General Ben Chandler by 10-percent.

Kentucky Dem activists, figuring that no one could possibly like what President Bush is doing, told voters that a vote for Chandler was a vote against the President's economic policy. ("Failure," was the term they used.) Chandler himself kept discussing the "Fletcher-Bush economy." If they'd have paid attention, they'd have seen forecast growth of over 7% for the past two weeks or more. An economy begging for a rebound after tax cuts is the wrong item to campaign against, but Chandler now knows this.

Fletcher is anti-abort, pro-gun, and fiscally straight. A Baptist by religion, he's not hiding it from those afraid of such things.

I called this one, and I called Mississippi for Barbour. We'll see. (I also called Philly for Street, but that's all a part of the Rendell dynamic.)

I like Bobby Jindal to succeed Mike Foster in Louisiana, but I'm not getting enough to give that a good enough read yet. Is Blanco's support amongst African Americans eroding? That's a dynamic at which to look.

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"No More Mad Bob"

Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida) quit the run for the Dem nomination last month, and he just announced that he will not seek reelection to his Senate seat. This is not a surprise, as it was his initial position when he began talking about the chase for the Dem nomination: that he would run for President and, failing that, would retire. Well, he's going.

The popular pundit scuttlebutt is that Graham is the most popular thing in Florida since Disneyworld -- a shoe-in for reelection, this guy. Whether that was the case then, it's not now. Many Floridians are said to be scratching their heads when contemplating Graham. "Is this the guy we voted for in '98?" He let the campaign drag him into the land a unsightly attacks and irrational assertions, and to be honest, he did not look entirely comfortable doing it.

One thing in his favor, when he was Chairman of Senate Intelligence from 2001-02, he is said to have had a great working relations with Vice-Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Alabama). I have not heard the same about Roberts and Rockefeller this term. (Of course, Shelby was a former Intelligence chairman -- albeit briefly -- himself. Rockefeller a tall man with a wealthy surname.)

So who will replace Mad Bob after the 2004 election? For a while -- back when Graham had taken himself out of the running, before putting himself back in and finally taking himself back out -- I was looking at Representative Mark Foley, the House Deputy Majority Whip. He represents Palm Beach and Port Charlotte, that area. The media argued that he was too conservative -- ACU 92 -- but the media says such things. There's no basis in fact for much of that tripe.

But Foley took himself out in September, citing the health of his sick father, and some of his staff went to Republican Daniel Webster, who is not the one on whom I would put my money right now.

Former Republican Representative Bill McCollum is giving it another go, after having been beaten by now-Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, in 2000. (At the time, I thought McCollum should sue to have a recount of the dimpled chats…) He is not the odds-on favorite this, though, by any means.

Florida House Speaker Johnnie Byrd of Plant City is also seeking the GOP nomination. From his web site:

I am running for the Senate because I believe the Democratic Party's liberal agenda is out of step with the typical Florida family.

With me, what you see is what you get. I have a pretty simple name, and a pretty simple message: lower taxes, fiscal responsibility, commonsense conservative values, and a strong national defense.

This should be another GOP pickup, and take that with GOP gains in the two Carolina States, we are beginning to look at a more functional Republican majority to open the President's second term.

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Election Day

Good morning! It is Election Day 2003, and we all have something for which to vote. For me stuck in these mountains, it's a County Commissioners race. It's a done deal, after the primaries, as we select two Republicans and one Democrat. (Or two Democrats and one Republican, should the universe be significantly altered.) This time, however, one of the Republicans is new, and I've heard rumors about him and a barstool. (Such rumors existed, in a particularly vociferous and nasty way, about our President in 2000.)

The other Republican, the longtime commissioner, is a malignancy who is registered with the wrong party.

One of the Democrats has been there so long that I think she had her first name legally changed to "Commissioner." (I think her given name was "Donna," but I cannot be sure.) I've never heard of the other Democrat, can't think of her (?) name, but will vote for her in about an hour.

You see, this is local stuff. There are no tax cutters running. It spins around personalities, but it's part of the political game.

Caspar Weinberger was briefly on FNC this morning, and I was alerted in time to see it. I'm hearing music from another time…

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Reagan: the CBS miniseries

They are probably going to pull it, perhaps relegating it to Showtime. ("CBS, Ronald Reagan, and the American People" by John Averyt)

The director quit because CBS was removing some of his slanderous fiction. Well, there was just too much of this film which evidently just wasn't so. So much of what President Reagan did, Clinton could not undo. President Reagan's legacy in firmly in place, and too many don't have the stomach for the cheap shots.

Well, good night. God bless you, and may God continue to bless America.
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"[T]hey let off steam by ridiculing the president..."

I found this piece of commentary -- Plumbing the anti-Bush sentiment, by Godfrey Sperling -- on the web site of the Christian Science Monitor. It's set to be in Tuesday's (November 4) edition.

Among other things, the piece looks into the form of this hatred and compares it to Republican hatred of President Roosevelt back "in the day":

WASHINGTON – We could hear talk against the president on almost any street corner. Media voices lashed out at the president every day. It had become an ugly scene, where president-haters seemed to be everywhere.

No, that is not today's America where anti-Bush feeling is intense. It's the Midwest of the 1930s where dislike of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was palpable in that stronghold of conservatism.

That dissent had become personal, much the same as what's heard from liberals today. Those Republicans were almost viscerally opposed to FDR's New Deal effort to lift the country out of the deepening depression. And they let off steam by ridiculing the president for his personal style. They particularly disliked the jauntily tilted cigarette, the supremely confident smile.

On the downside, he mentions the metaphysically irrelevant Al Franken, blames the total of the Dem hatred of this President on sour grapes over 2000, and speculates that "angry Democrats who, increasingly, bash this president could be the hard core of a Democratic force that overturns Bush in the next elections.

It's analysis with an asterisk, and those angry Democrats are a minority, a small but loud one at that.

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A Constitution is…

Something Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld said on ABC's This Week with former Clinton staffer Steph on Sunday springs to mind when reflecting on the process they are undertaking in Afghanistan. (It has become, it seems, a Constitution by focus groups.)

Rumsfeld was discussing the progress in Iraq, the upside, and he talked of their newfound freedom: "Anything which is not prohibited is permitted. That's a reverse." (I maybe should have had him exclaim those sentiments, as he did use that excited voice which surfaces when something excites him.)

Under Saddam Hussein, it is said, the Iraqis could do only that which Saddam allowed. The Iraqis have gone from a list of actions they could take, with every other action ventured on pain of death, to a list of what they cannot do, with everything else being permitted. Permitted not by a government, but by right.

The United States Constitution, as first adopted, granted the federal government specific powers. If it was not enumerated in the Constitution, the federal government could not do it.

In No. 84 of The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton wrote:

It has been several times truly remarked, that bills of rights are in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgments of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince. … It is evident, therefore, that according to their primitive signification, they have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people, and executed by their immediate representatives and servants. Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain every thing, they have no need of particular reservations.

The Constitution was, to the government created by it, an organ specifying certain powers. The Bill of Rights, however, was contrary to the original document, in that it vested rights in the people, which rights the Constitution did not empower the federal government to take in the first place. Hamilton:

I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colourable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?

Okay, so it is a wee tad late to argue against appending a Bill of Rights to our Federal Constitution, but it most certainly is not too late to point out the danger of creating a constitution as a giant bill of rights. Governments created under such documents will be able to rightly do anything their constitution does not prohibit them from doing.

We have the Afghan draft and the upcoming Iraqi document, and we have a United Nations with sticky fingerprints. Let's see what we get. (The world now has to live with these governments created with these documents.)

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New Afghan Constitution

Good morning. CNNi reports that a constitution for the new Afghanistan has been drafted by a 35-member Constitutional Review Commission and now must be approved by an Afghan loya jirga in Kabul next month. (The jirga is comprised of tribal elders selected by each individual tribe and sent to a meeting to vote on the document. It was a similar loya jirga which selected Hamid Karzai to be their president. Writing in the Rightsided Newsletter at the time (Spring of 2002), I referred to the council as the "U.N. Loya Jirga." It was to move Afghanistan from the U.N.-appointed "provisional government" to the partially elected "interim government," and I had determined that the U.N. was an inadequate organization by which to found a nation, and that the constitution would take a year to draft. It's taken six months longer than I had forecast.)

The article reads that "Included in the constitution are rules on the formation of political parties." A government with a hand in such things tends toward tyranny. According to the South African press service:

The draft also allows political parties to be established as long as their charters "do not contradict the principles of Islam" and sets other conditions such as not having any military aims or foreign affiliation.

From a Reuters piece via Swiss Info:

There will be a strong presidential system which will have one vice-president," Constitution Commission member Shukrya Barikzai told
Reuters at the ceremony on Monday.

She said there would be no position of prime minister and the president would be elected directly by the Afghan people, not by members of
parliament.

The draft describes Afghanistan as an "Islamic republic".

Constitution officials and Western diplomats expect Afghanistan to adopt Islam as its main religion, although they do not anticipate the
harsh imposition of sharia laws, as seen under the ousted Taliban regime.

But according to the CNN piece:

The draft is based on Islamic principles and recognizes that no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam," Afghanistan's 35-member Constitutional Review Commission said in a statement Monday, adding that the document provided for the freedom of religion for other faiths.

The process of writing the constitution was criticized for it secrecy, so the "Constitution officials" sent out scads of questionings and received in reply even, they claimed, audiotape from people who were unable to read or write.

The United States Constitution was written in private during the summer of 1787.

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Zell Miller on Meet the Press

Looking at the Sunday morning talk shows hoping to find the next rumor for Wes Clark to repeat -- a la the one about Donald Rumsfeld leaking his own memo, attributable to disgruntled former NSC perp Dick Clark on ABC's This Week last Sunday -- I came across Tim Russert's interview with Senator Zell Miller (D-Georgia), who happened to be hawking his book: A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat.

First of all, nice guy that he is, Miller is no conservative. His ACU rating last year was 47 out of 100, while his life ACU was 54. Snarling Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) was at 50/42. But Miller has voted with the President on some key issues, and he is, in general, a tax cutter.

He mentioned that the national Democrat Party had written off the South as unwinnable, and that national Dem figures would do more harm than good for a candidate on the campaign trail down there, specifically mentioning: McAuliffe, Clinton, Gore, Daschle, and Pelosi.

McGovern ran on liberal social issues, Miller recalled, and won all of one State (Massachusetts and the District of Columbia) against Dick Nixon in 1972. Fritz Mondale wanted to raise taxes in 1984, and he won only one State (Minnesota -- barely -- and the District). This year, Senator Miller insisted, "they have managed to make this a double failure of what's worst about the Democratic Party."

He blasted Howie Dean and his remark about wanting voters who fly the confederate flag. (Miller has opposed that flag strongly.) Asked where he though the flag could be flown, Miller commented: "Maybe at a museum."

Interesting insight: "They can call [me] Bush-light or Republican-light, but that's where the people are." Right-of-center but not too far. I'm not certain how he calculated this, but it's worked for him in Georgia.

So why doesn't Senator Miller leave the Democrat Part: good riddance to bad rubbish? He explains: "It's like living in an old home." Maybe some strangers have moved into the basement, he said, but "I'm not leaving it. It makes sense to me, and that's all that matters."

Buy his book, is the message. I wonder his how sales will stack up against those of My Declaration of Independence, by Jumpin' Jim Jeffords.

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Gephardt on FACE THE NATION

To set this up, I'll include the opening paragraph of the bit I wrote in the Rightsided Newsletter this afternoon about Biden & Lugar on this week's Face the Nation (CBS):

Bob "Make Love, Not War" Schieffer began this morning's FTN by asking: "Senator, Lugar, I have to ask you: how long can this go on?" He later asked: "How much more of this 'winning' can we stand?" -- a statement he lifted from remarks of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota), who last week said: "I don't know how much more of this 'progress' we can take." In his closing comments, Schieffer argued that today's political discussion had become juvenile, with the (unnamed) cable people stating what they believe and questioning your patriotism if you disagree, an excuse used by many liberals to avoid discussion. That was Schieffer's direction this morning.

Gephardt was on the second segment, and he said that the downing of the Chinook outside Fallujah was prove that President Bush needed to get more international support for the effort in Iraq. (One assumes that he in some way believes that the Russians or the French could have prevented this with their European extra-sensory perception.)

Gephardt said that he had been advising the President to get more international involvement since before the war. (I guess Dick's not a trusted Presidential advisor, and for good reason.) He doesn't like Rumsfeld, but thinks it’s the duty of the President to fire him. The President obviously thinks Rumsfeld is doing a good job, which Dick sees as some indictment of the President's judgment. Dick's been hanging out at too many Gephardt 2000 campaign fundraisers.

A woman from the Cook Political Report -- didn't catch her name -- joined Schieffer in the questioning. She mentioned the 7.2% rate of growth in the third quarter of this year, asking if this news would damage the Dem message: that President Bush is destroying the economy. Dick responded: "I think it's too early to tell if that is a sustained trend." And: "We're still not seeing the jobs." And, of course, the debt problems. This could sell for the Dems if they push it correctly, but only until the job market expands.

Schieffer asked Dick if he'd quit if he did not win Iowa. Dick responded confidently that he will win Iowa.

The sooner he's gone, the better. One by one, they will leave our immediate discourse.

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The Talk Shows

Good morning. We're getting ready to report on this morning's public affairs Talk Shows for the free Rightsided Newsletter", and the dramatis personae reads Rumsfeld.

The Secretary of Defense will Fox News Sunday (FNS), NBC's Meet the Press (MTP), and ABC's This Week (TW). In fact, he's the only guest listed for FNS and TW, and he shares the show on MTP with Georgia Democrat Senator Zell Miller, who announced last week that he will support President Bush next election, even campaign for him if asked.

On CBS's Face the Nation (FTN), guests include Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Dick Lugar (R-Indiana) and his ranking member, Joe Biden of Delaware. Senator Biden is usually very interesting, as takes great pains to try to intellectualize the Democrat gripe-of-the-day. It's often amusing to watch.

Also on FTN, someone -- presumably host Bob Schieffer if he's there -- will ask the soft questions to candidate Dick Gephardt, as he nears the end of his political world.

On CNN's Late Edition, guests include the relevant --Iraq Administrator Paul Bremer -- the irrelevant -- IAEA chief Mohammed "Remember Me?" El Baradei -- and the requisite two Senate panel: Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) and his ranking Dem, Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia). We might get a good quip out of Jay.

It's easy to get my summary and analysis by subscribing to the free Rightsided Newsletter by visiting the web site or sending a blank e-mail to rsn-subscribe@topica.com.

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President Bush in 2004: A French Analysis

One of my favorite tunes is George Gershwin's An American in Paris. It was written in 1928, seemingly aeons before Saddam, Chirac, and the poet DeVillepin, so it doesn't mention BYOAC ("Bring Your Own Air Conditioner").

The French want to analyze American politics, and they do just about as well as many of the single-cells populating the ranks of network punditry, as the Agence France Presse (AFP) headline reads: A year ahead of presidential vote, Bush vulnerable but still holding cards:

Thursday's announcement that economic growth hit a blistering 7.2 percent in the third quarter, the strongest quarter in 19 years, came just as the Republican president sought justification for his policy of stimulating the economy with tax cuts.

The economy has so far been the president's weak flank in his battle for a second four-year term. The rebound will have to last long enough to lower the unemployment rate, another stone in Bush's shoe. At 6.2 percent, the percentage of workers seeking jobless benefits is the highest in nine years.

The Dems can harp on jobs, and increased productivity and population growth tend to increase jobless claims.

The French (AFP) tell us that President Bush's largest advantage over the Dems is in campaign funds, but they point to "security in Iraq" as a problem. They quote the President:

"I will defend my record at the appropriate time and look forward to it.

"I'll say that the world is more peaceful and more free under my leadership, and America is more secure.

"That will be how I'll begin describing our foreign policy," he told reporters this week.

They quote University of Boston professor Lance Morrow. Morrow is also a single-cell at TIME magazine, who tells the French that in the American mind, the lessons of Munich are battling the lessons of Vietnam:

"The lessons of Munich say: 'Aggressors must be vigorously and promptly and actively opposed.'

"The lessons of Vietnam say: 'Don't go rushing with all your immense power into foreign wars, especially those involving people not of your race or background.'

"That way lies 'quagmire,' the dreaded word."

The thought of Iraq becoming another Vietnam is vacuous at best. The United States never occupied North Vietnam is the simple way of saying it. We weren't helping the Vietnamese to set up their own government. We were spending our wealth on the infrastructure of Vietnam. Vietnam was a war ostensibly to contain communism; Iraq is a war ostensibly to eliminate terrorism.

Geopolitics was altered irrevocably with the fall of the Soviet Union.

The French, by the way, did not surrender in Vietnam; rather, they ran away.
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On Tuesday

November 5 is not a, per se, national election, but people will be, for the most part, choosing between Republicans and Democrats. I mentioned this in It's almost November 4 last Monday, but it is more than that.

In Kentucky, Democrat Attorney General Ben Chandler faces U.S. Republican Representative Ernie Fletcher for the seat now held by retiring Democrat Governor Paul "With a Woman-Not-My-Wife" Patten. This from a piece in today's Lexington Herald-Leader:

Democrat Ben Chandler and Republican Ernie Fletcher both knew it might come down to this: Traditionally Democratic far Western Kentucky is going to have a lot to say about who moves into the governors' mansion.

And although that block would seem to hand Chandler a big edge on paper, that's not exactly happening as both men scramble for votes on the far side of I-65 with three days left before Tuesday's election.

Fletcher's specially tailored anti-abortion, no-tax, pro-gun message is winning over many who are officially on the books as Democrats.

There is no home in the national Democrat Party for these people. The writing is on the wall -- and it ain't Philly-style graffiti -- for Kentucky to have its first Republican governor in over three decades. I must have been in second grade. That seems like such a long time ago. The Kentucky Dems are trying to make their election a referendum on the direction President Bush is taking the country. (The Dem presidential wannabes have also been big into this, and it should all backfire.)

Speaking of Philadelphia, Democrat Mayor John Street has a nine-percent lead over GOP challenger Sam Katz, but I'm not quite ready to ice this one yet. Street is bleeding, and he had the king of the political hemorrhage in to campaign for him lat week. From today's Philadelphia Inquirer:

Bill Clinton came to Philadelphia yesterday to boost Mayor Street's surging candidacy, urging voters to ignore the FBI probe and reelect a mayor who he said tackled crime, cleaned lots, and "gave the city back to the neighborhoods."

The way Clinton used it, "neighborhoods" is a code word for African Americans, and Clinton was again playing the race card to mobilize the black vote for Street.

Former RNC Chairman Haley Barbour, despite his media portrayals as a "Washington Insider" big money fat cat, is about to oust Democrat Governor Ronnie Musgrave President Bush is out for Barbour today, and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported today on Barbour's efforts with black voters.

Barbour's camp said its strategy is nothing complicated: Barbour is simply asking for something other Republicans have not. Barbour has held community meetings with African Americans around the state, and also has arranged several larger statewide meetings with African-American residents.

And we end this post with this nice thought from an AP article today:

In Denver, a ballot item called the "peace initiative" would require city officials to start programs to reduce stress and promote peace. Some top ideas: soothing music in public places and better school lunches.

City leaders have expressed some skepticism.

More power to 'em, I guess.

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Crushing Corporate Capitalism, Soviet-style

Good morning. A brief bit of news caught my eye on my homepage -- news.google.com -- this morning, from CNN.com: Russians support Putin over Yukos. Yes, it's a Russian-style attack on BIG OIL, the bogeyman of our homegrown Dems here in the States.

[And note that I used the descriptive "Soviet" in place of "Russian" not because I am confusing the current system at work in the former Soviet Russian Federation with that of the Soviet Union. They're the same leaders and their apparatchiks as would have run that show if Gorbachev had not been forced out of office and the Communists out of power. The spawn of the Soviets are forced to play by different rules.]

Yukos, you see, is Russia's largest and most profitable oil company. It's Chief Executive, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has been arrested and charged with fraud, tax evasion, etc. Russian President Vlad Putin faces the voters next Spring, and he needs another issue besides his long-term support of Saddam Husseing, what with Saddam in hiding near Tikrit and directing attacks at the New York Times, or whatever they said.

According to the PRC's state-run Xinhua wire, they've also nabbed Khordorkovsky's main subordinate, Vasily Shakhnovsky.

Toss aside the key! Burn them at the stake!

According to Businessworld, out of Ireland, Russian premier Mikhail Kasyanov is one of a growing number of Russian leaders who fear the probe into Yukos is politically motivated.

The Russian people, however, are not stupid. From the CNN story:

Nearly two-thirds of Muscovites polled by the respected VTsIOM-A agency were skeptical about Kremlin assertions the YUKOS affair was purely a criminal matter and saw Khodorkovsky's arrest as political.

But, alas, this goes beyond the U.S. Dem diatribes against Halliburton, Enron, and Worldcomm. Rumor has it, according to CNN, that Khodorkovsky was about to enter politics:

Analysts said charges against Khodorkovsky and allies were prompted by his attempts to move into politics and reflected a desire by Kremlin hardliners to regain control over business.

But that is a smokescreen. The real dynamic at work is the "Kremlin hardliners [seeking] to regain control over business. It is the same dynamic which prompted the recent spate of corporate "scandals" in the United States -- i.e., Congress' desire to regulate as much of the economy as possible.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

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Credit for the good economic news…

Are you ready from some ultra-sheer audacity? This headline, and concomitant story, comes from the web site of the Dallas Morning News: Bush, GOP take credit for economic surge. Can you believe the effrontery of those tax cutters?

The article began:

WASHINGTON – The burst of unexpectedly good economic news Thursday set off a new round of political bickering that is destined to persist right up to Election Day, a year away.

The Administration has been forecasting this kind of expansion for a while, and this was hardly unexpected. On the 20th of this month, I wrote:

According to several reports, analysts are claiming a 7-percent growth rate for the 3rd quarter of this year. This is not a "Bush recession." This is not a "sluggish economy." (The growth rate for 1999 was 4.2-percent.)

Cut taxes, the economy will rise. Who ended the Carter malaise? President Ronald Reagan. Who is ending the Clinton-Bin Laden malaise? President George W. Bush.

The President and the Congressional Republicans, with some few likeminded Dems, deserve the credit. Their policies have enabled the American people to crawl from stagnation. But the Dems and their media stooges cannot let credit go where credit is due. Mission One: Create Doubt. Mission Two: Smile and say you did it despite the GOP.

From the Morning News article:

For President Bush and fellow Republicans, the fastest economic growth in nearly 20 years was hailed as proof that his tax-cut policy was finally boosting a stagnant economy.

For Democrats complaining about job losses and challenging the president's bid for re-election, the upbeat report threatened one of their key election-year premises: The president has made a bad economy worse.

Actually, the Dems' premise was that the President took a robust economy anemic.

And speaking of anemic, how's this from candidate Joe Lieberman?

"While today's news is encouraging, it does not change the fact that the president has turned Main Street into a one-way street going in the wrong direction," said Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the nine Democrats seeking the party's presidential nomination.

"We've lost more than 3 million jobs, 3 million people have fallen into poverty, the budget deficit and national debt are growing, health care and college tuition costs are escalating," he said.
"And this president still has no real plan to sustain this growth, translate it into jobs and rebuild a strong middle class."

They even let candidate Howie Dean rant for print:

Still another Democratic contender, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, made clear the nation's economic vitality depended in large part on the restoration of jobs and the creation of new ones.

"President Bush has compiled the worst economic record since the Great Depression," Dr. Dean said, "and it is going to take a lot more than one quarter of growth to clean it up."

Yes, it's "Dr. Dean"! Like in the Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein, the lab assistant ("pronounced "Eye-gore") hands him an abnormal brain and the good doctor creates a freak. And that's his campaign. But I'm digressing.

Jobs, jobs, jobs. Bipartisan political analyst Charlie Cookagrees:

"His tax cuts may turn the broader economy around," Mr. Cook suggested. "But if it doesn't do anything to create jobs and put some of these people back to work, it doesn't get the same political bang."

Yes, it's hard to vote for a President if you feel he cost you your job. It's easier to vote for a President if he hasn't. Chew on that.

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Miranda, the conservative teenaged Texas blogger, is back with her Right Winged blog after a month of computer purgatory. Check out her stuff.
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Planned Parenthood's Pro-Abort Lawsuit

According to the Planned Parenthood press release of this afternoon:

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the nation's leading reproductive health organization, and Planned Parenthood Golden Gate (PPGG), the affiliate based in San Francisco, Calif., announced today at a press conference that they have filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco federal court to challenge the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, a federal abortion ban that was passed by Congress on Oct. 20 and has been sent to President Bush for his signature.

Since the ban on partial birth abortion is not now law, what are they suing? If there is no law against which to sue for an injunction, the case is not justiceable. The court technically can't hear it, as there is no "it" to hear.

Are they seeking an injunction against the President taking several pens to paper, as Presidents are often wont to do in as a way of manufacturing souvenirs, and signing the bill into law?

The case should be thrown out of court, and they should also be given the hook and told not to return.

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Foreign Aid and the Social Justice League of America

Good morning. A piece in Reuters this morning tells us that InterAction -- an alliance of nongovernmental foreign assistance groups -- does not approve of President Bush's linkage of foreign aid to national security.

"The administration has increasingly turned its attention to development assistance as a tool of the war on terrorism,'' InterAction said in a policy paper.

They also complained that the DoD had too great a role in distributing foreign aid in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is a no-brainer, but is seems we're not dealing with people who have human brains in the metaphysical sense. At this level of cognition, abstracting beyond a simple "They need money, so give it to them" is impossibility.

The report also complains that the work of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), set up by Prez John F. "Ask Not" Kerry -- er, Kennedy -- forty years ago. The good folks at InterAction complain that the work formerly done by USAID is now being performed by other agencies.

There has been a long-standing effort to dismantle USAID and a lot of blame has been leveled at them. One way of doing this has been to disburse aid to other departments,'' said one aid agency source.

"Social justice." That's the term InterAction likes to call it.

Social Justice. Consider first the ultimate source of the monies in question.

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The PRC wants a counterbalance

We know about French Prez Jacques Chirac and his whimsy about a superpower to counter the untrammeled will of a United States which threatens to consume the entire globe in the absence of the Soviet Union to counter her expansionist schemes.

So it goes. The French tried that game, enlisting the Russians and Germans, over the UNSC feud over whether or not Saddam should get the hook. Saddam's gone, Iraq is working on independence, and Chirac's axis has fallen apart.

Wait…

Said the PRC's deputy Maoist dictator, Premier Wen Jiabao, at a meeting with the European leaders and Eurocrats Wednesday: "It is our hope that the European Union will become our biggest partner in economic cooperation and trade." To the definite exclusion of the United States.

European Commission President Romano Prodi, the Italian for whom no European outside of government voted, proclaimed in response: "We need to intensify our relations, both in the trade and investment sectors. We must become the biggest partners. We must have the biggest relations - more than anywhere in the world." He did not name the United States, but we were mentioned tacitly.

Okay, Chirac and the poet DeVillepin could be dancing an Axis/Vichy jig right about now. The dream is alive.

Or is it?

I don't think so. What is the main thing -- perhaps the only thing -- standing between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China? Human rights. In the PRC, there are none. They torture, kill, twist, manipulate, destroy. And the second baby must be eliminated.

Commerce Secretary Don Evans brought up the PRC's disrespect for intellectual property. The Europeans say, whatever. The PRC's human rights record draws yawns from the Eurocrats.

There's what this means. The Europeans are working out a deal with the PRC through which all refugees -- political by definition of the Chinese state -- would be returned to the PRC and their storied Lao gai.

The world's largest trading partners -- on the corpses of millions of dead Chinese.

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GDP Grows at Highest Rate Since Reagan

When Treasury Secretary John Snow told the Times of London ten days go that he expected interest rates to rise with a growing economy, I posted -- Secretary Snow and Interest Rates -- I intimated:

According to several reports, analysts are claiming a 7-percent growth rate for the 3rd quarter of this year. This is not a "Bush recession." This is not a "sluggish economy." (The growth rate for 1999 was 4.2-percent.)

The analysts were low by two tenths, as the Gross Domestic Product grew by 7.2-percent last quarter. This is the highest GDP rise since the first quarter of 1984.

President Reagan's growth in the first quarter of 1984 was in the first quarter of election year. President Bush's growth in the third quarter of 2003, is in the penultimate quarter before the election year. And this year, the "election year" politically began early.

In November of 1984, President Reagan was reelected 58.8% of the vote. None of the current crop of Dems resembles Walter Mondale -- or Jimmy Carter, for that matter, and any such talk is nifty as far as it goes, but it doesn't buy you beer.

So what have the Dems got? Well, it's been a jobless recovery, but it is no longer shedding jobs. With this kind of growth in consumer spending and business investment, re-employment is just a matter of time.

The Dems can harp on Iraq and the war on terror -- two issues on which they once thought the President to be untouchable -- but that issue is not a winner for them.

President Bush is doing very well right now, and things can only keep improving. The mutants are doing their worst in Baghdad as we speak. I daresay there is not much more that they can do in a country occupied by the United States military.

We are fortunate that President Bush is able to remain, for the most part, above the small talk, the cheap and snide pundits, the pugnacious partisans, and the wannabe presidents. I suspect he responds only when his staff begs him to do so: "Mr. President, you can't let them talk about you like this!"

After employment has revived, we've won the peace, and President Bush is comfortably reelected, I hope he expends his political capital on abolishing the Department of Education. And cutting taxes.
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Zell Miller to vote Republican

Democrat Senator Zell Miller of Georgia has announced that he will vote for President George W. Bush next November. Democrat Senator Zell Miller of Georgia has announced that he will campaign for George W. Bush's reelection if asked to do so.

Zell Miller is a Democrat, and he has been offered, no doubt, some high prizes if he were to make the switch. He has refused, but at the press conference held when then-Georgia Governor Roy Barnes appointed him to fill the vacancy left by the untimely death of Senator Paul Coverdell, Miller told those assembled: "I will serve no single party but rather 7.5 million Georgians."

That is what he thinks he's doing with his latest announcement, and that is what he is doing. Bypassing CNN, headquartered in Atlanta, the Georgia Senator told Fox News yesterday:

"The way I see it is, that these next five years are going to be crucial in determining what kind of world my grandchildren and great grandchildren live in, and I don't want to entrust that to any of these folks that are running out there on the Democratic side. I'm going to vote for George Bush," Miller said in a taped interview for Fox News' Hannity & Colmes show.

Of the Democrats' anti-Bush -- disguised as anti-war -- rhetoric, Miller said:

"It makes me ashamed. It's a disgrace for anyone to talk about -- talk like that in a time of war. … You know, if some of these folks have been living back to that April night in 1775 when Paul Revere came riding through, saying, 'The British are coming, British are coming' - if Howard Dean was living back then he would have yelled out the window, 'Shut up I'm trying to get some sleep in here.' It's a disgrace."

He told further told Sean Hannity:

"I've given this a lot of thought. I think that George Bush is the right man in the right place at the right time. The way I see it is, that these next five years are going to be crucial in determining kind of world my grandchildren and great- grandchildren live in.

And I don't entrust that to any of these folks that are running out there on the Democratic side.

I included so much of what Miller said because he sounds like so much of what I've been reading in the blogosphere and hearing from friends. It's what I meant when I wrote Tuesday night that: "We have to win this one. If we don't, civilization dies. The 2004 Presidential election is the most important political event in this history of the United States. We are playing for keeps."

"This does not mean I am going to become a Republican," Miller said yesterday. "It simply means that in the year 2004, this Democrat will vote for George Bush."

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Two New Quinnipiac Polls

Good morning. There are two new Quinnipiac polls out today, of 1262 registered voters taken from October 23-27, with a margin of error of plus or minus three points.

The first Quinnipiac poll shows President Bush with 47-perecent to candidate Wes Clark's 43-perecent. He was 48-43 if candidate Lieberman, 49-43 over candidate Kerry and over candidate Gephardt, and 48-42 over candidate Dean, considered by many to be the likely Dem nominee. (I still consider Dean to be doubtful.)

What if Hillary were to jump in the race? She'd be the probable Dem nominee if she did, and President Bush would beat her, 50-42, the most support the President receives against anyone. Hillary knows that she has half of America strongly opposed to her, so she is not about to enter the race. Her negatives are far too high.

The second poll is identical to the first.

The first poll is reported by the New York Post online as: Bush Tops Prez Field.

The second poll is reported by the Associated Press as: Bush approval rating slips, Dems gain. (The President's approval rating fell two percentage points, from 53% to 51%, from a September 17 poll of different people. This is within the margin, of course.)

They are the same poll, reported with two different biases.

The AP piece quotes poll director Maurice Carroll as intoning: "President Bush is ahead, but he's hearing footsteps." The results are not significantly different from previous polls, so the statement is a poll directors braggadocio and nothing more.

The Post piece also points out that the poll puts Clark atop the Dem field with 17-percent, tied with "Don't Know."

There's no Democrat-fever currently sweeping the nation. Unless or until the media manages to harp of something which catches the public's notice -- and they are trying -- the President's lead looks to be safe.

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New Dem Think Tank

Former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta is the president of the new lefty DC think tank: the Center for American Progress.

From their web site:

The Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all Americans. We believe that Americans are bound together by a common commitment to these values and we aspire to ensure that our national policies reflect these values.

Okay, they claim to represent America's values. According to Podesta on Fox News, however, they want to change America's values:

We think the debate has been unbalanced in the country," center president John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton, told Fox News.

"The conservative movement has really built up an infrastructure of not just ideas, but the ability to kind of get out there and do the kind of hard communications work to sell to the American public," he added.

Liberals have this weird thing. They believe that the world will agree with them if they just yell loud enough. They believe that when America tells them to go to hell, it means only that they have to work harder to enlighten Americans to see the "truth."

They are launching a talk show to compete with conservative talk radio, now this think tank. Their news network is still losing its share. The kids still love Clinton, and they had candidate Wesley Clark at their opening conference. Wes Clark cannot make up his mind even about which lie he's telling when.

It's falling to bits, my friends. I'll have to post that Robert Reich column from 2001. It's even more relevant now.

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The Dems Get Funky

Back in September of 1999, Al Gore marched to the podium at the DNC's Plenary Session to the sounds of Love Train, by the Ojays:

People all over the world (everybody)
Join hands (join)
Start a love train, love train
People all over the world (all the world, now)
Join hands (love ride)
Start a love train (love ride), love train
The next stop that we make will be soon
Tell all the folks in Russia, and China, too
Don't you know that it's time to get on board
And let this train keep on riding, riding on through
Well, well

He later adopted the tune as a campaign them song, dressed as he was in Naomi Wolf's earth tones.

My mind raced. Here was a new Democrat Party, suitably retro with an A-1 '70s sound. Priceless. The Democrat Party had finally lost it.

The song disappeared with Gore, only to reappear at -- of all places -- the funeral of Paul Wellstone, this time covered by a new group. We were looking at a neo-new Dem Party, getting funky at a funeral. (PoliPundit includes a photo of Clinton and Mondale sharing a laugh at the funeral with his Wictory Wednesday post of this morning.

People, ain't no war
People all over the world (on this train)
Join in (ride the train)
Start a love train, love train (ride the train, y'all)
People all over the world (come on)
Join hands (you can ride or stand, yeah)
Start a love train, love train (makin' love)
People all over the world ('round the world, y'all)
Join hands (come on)
Start a love train, love train

But it is going to get better. I found this story on today's Washpost:

The Democrats have a dream, that politics can be hipped up. And that the disaffected young citizens of America will set aside their sense of abandonment and apathy and flash-mob the polls, pulling the Big D lever in '04.

The dream undulates into shape Monday night at Dream, the sleek, four-story dance club on New York Avenue NE, with a Democratic National Committee fundraiser that raises the roof and a quarter-million dollars, one $50 ticket at a time.
DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe looks out over the club's second floor, so packed it represents the sardines-in-a-can wing of the Democratic Party, and beams. "How great is this!" he yells over the blasting hip-hop, thrilled that 90 percent of those who bought tickets are first-time party donors.

The bass lines are so thumping that it defibrillates the hearts of all 4,500 people, lured to party with former president Bill Clinton. The aim is to make politics sexy for the 18-to-34 crowd, not in a "Sir, the girl is here with the pizza" way, but in a smart, leggy, sassy way. One person onstage will say that only one in five of this group voted in the last presidential election, and one will say only three out of 10, but why quibble about numbers? It's not enough.

The story goes on with who was there -- a mostly young(ish) set of varied backgrounds -- including the soul master of deranged funk himself, Bill "Da Man" Clinton:

…In Da Club" lyrics inside -- "I'm into having sex, I ain't into making love / So come give me a hug if you into getting rubbed." This is what's playing when the former president takes the stage.

Of course, all wasn't well after this funky fundraiser. The Washpost piece concludes:

Outside on the sidewalk, Richard Strauss, 34, a former Clinton staffer, reflects wistfully on Da Man. "I'm longing for him," he says. He sees President Bush as vulnerable, but doesn't see who right now in the Democratic field can generate the same excitement as the 42nd president.

"I don't think there's anyone else, period," says Justin Pascal, 29, the DNC staffer who directs McAuliffe's office and created the event. For young people, "he is their president. Most people came of age under Bill Clinton. They graduated when he was in office, got their first job when he was in office. He is their president."

So people all over the world, join hands. Start a love train.

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The Madness of Candidate Wesley Clark

This from the New York Times. While he was in Durham, North Carolina, to sell his health care scheme, he had a few interesting accusations for the Bush administration.

First, he declared that September 11 was indirectly the doing of President Bush:

"You can't blame something like this on lower-level intelligence officers, however badly they communicated in memos with each other," said the retired general, the latest entrant in the Democratic presidential field. "It goes back to what our great president Harry Truman said with the sign on his desk: `The buck stops here.' And it sure is clear to me that when it comes to our nation's national security, the buck rests with the commander in chief, right on George W. Bush's desk."

"And," he added, "we've got to say again and again and again, until the American people understand: strong rhetoric in the aftermath is no substitute for wise leadership."

This begs the question: who blamed September 11 on "lower-level intelligence officers" with bad memoranda? The blame is on the terrorists, as the President has repeatedly insisted, and some of us would add that they were buttressed by the belief that our reaction would be weak and ineffective. The terrorists themselves used the term: "paper tiger."

Clark's second lunatic assertion, made also by former NSC bureaucrat Dick Clarke on NBC's Meet the Press, was that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld leaked his own memo, "because no one would have believed him that we've been two years in the war on terror and we don't have a strategy and we don't know how to measure success." When confronted about this later, he admitted: "Well, that's what the rumor is, and it's been talked about on the Sunday talk shows."

Clark of all people ought to know better than to believe Sunday Talk Show rumors. He started his own whopper, what with his claim that he received phone calls from the White House on September 12 directing him to blame 9-11 on Saddam Hussein. It never happened, he later backtracked, and no one knows what he's going to say next.

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Wictory Wednesday

Today is PoliPundit's "Wictory Wednesday." It is the day when we issue a wake-up call: The President cannot be reelected in a vacuum. By visiting the Bush/Cheney webpage, we can donate money via this secure server, and/or we can volunteer to be a "Bush Team Leader" using this secure server. Everything helps.

The war against terrorism is a war against mutans who are not compatible with civilization or humanity. The 2004 Presidential election is the most important in federal history, and a lot depends on reelecting President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Here are those who've volunteered to carry this message, in whatever form, on this "Wictory Wednesday":

Backcountry Conservative
Boots and Sabers
Bowling for Howard
Dean
BushBlog.us (unofficial blog)
Bush-Cheney 2004 (unofficial
blog)
ExPostFacto
Freedom of Thought
The Hedgehog Report
The Irish Lass
Jarhead
Jeremy Kissel
Left Coast
Conservative
Matt Margolis
The Ole Miss Conservative
PoliPundit
Political Annotation
A Rice Grad
Ryne McClaren
Slublog
Southern Conservatives
Stephen Blythe
Viking Pundit
The Wise Man Says


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The Return of Edwards's Bus

Back in August, when fulltime fundraising was starting to grow thin on him, candidate John Edwards had his bus: the Real Solutions Express. At the time and in this space, I said that if it worked for McCain in 2000, with his Straight Talk Express, then Edwards might as well give it a go. One thing Edwards should remember, though: it did not work for John McCain in 2000. McCain, whom the press perceived as a certain loser to Al Gore, had a media-supported run for a while, then he quit.

Here's this from an Edwards e-mail of this evening:

That's right the Real Solutions Express was a hit in August, so we are bringing it back in November. We need your help to get the word out on November 1st & 2nd.

Don't miss the true NH experience of going door-to-door, talking about why John Edwards should be our next President and inviting voters to more than a dozen Town Hall Meetings with Senator Edwards.

New Hampshire's first-in-the nation primary is less than 100 days away!! Come learn how presidential campaigns are really won.

Which leaves me to remark in mock admiration: so that's how McCain did it!

On ABC's This Week last Sunday, John-boy predicted to Steph and George Will that he would finish third, behind Howie Dean and John-John Kerry. He'd better look out, though, as Wes Clark, Superstar is skipping Iowa to concentrate on the Granite State.

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Why Mutants Kill at Ramadan

Too many journalists and pundits attributing rational thought processes to the mutants in Iraq:

"They're killing the Red Cross to frighten international organizations out of Iraq."

"They're trying to reduce American public support for the war effort."

"They're not helping their cause by killing their fellow Iraqis."

Folks, human reason does not apply here. This is jihad. Their actions are not compatible with civilization. Their thought processes and their selves are not compatible with humanity. When I call them "mutants," it's not just throwaway name-calling: they are mutants.

A rational human being, if he had signed onto a suicide mission, would reach the target then detonate; if he did not make it to the target, he'd return to base and try again another day. A mutant kept from his objective would blow himself up wherever he stood, taking anything (whatever) with him.

Jihad. To the death, and the winners will meet in paradise. Tortured by the oppression of corrupted leaders who treat them as disposable pawns, they need to hate something. The mullahs tell them whom to hate: the monkeys, the dogs, and their allies in Washington.

The Nazis in Germany had a sophisticated system, a "well-oiled machine," for exterminating Jews qua Jews. This is what they did. The scale of this systematic slaughter defies sane credulity, but it happened. The Nazis were mutants. But in public, they put on the façade of civilization. We know what they did behind closed doors, because they kept records.

The mullahs teach this same breed of insanity. It is not human. And this mutant madness would devour the world if there was no one to stop it. Osama bin Laden saw one obstacle standing in his path: the United States of America. On September 11, 2001, he gave it his best shot to neutralize this impediment. He didn't.

We have to win this one. If we don't, civilization dies. The 2004 Presidential election is the most important political event in this history of the United States. We are playing for keeps.

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The President's News Conference

In the Rose Garden this afternoon, President Bush held a news conference. [transcript]. The questions had been asked before, and the answers, we've heard. But a few caught my ear.

Norah O'Donnell of MSNBC asked:

Mr. President, if I may take you back to May 1st when you stood on the USS Lincoln under a huge banner that said, "Mission Accomplished." At that time you declared major combat operations were over, but since that time there have been over 1,000 wounded, many of them amputees who are recovering at Walter Reed, 217 killed in action since that date. Will you acknowledge now that you were premature in making those remarks?

The President challenged O'Donnell to look at his May 1st remarks aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln: "I said, Iraq is a dangerous place and we've still got hard work to do, there's still more to be done. And we had just come off a very successful military operation. I was there to thank the troops."

Major combat operations are over. There are no more divisions racing north to Baghdad. There are no more cities and towns to liberate. There is no more Shock and Awe.

Aboard the Lincoln, the President said:

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people.

The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

O'Donnell did not ask the President if he thought the remarks had been premature; she challenged him to admit that his remarks were premature.

His remarks were candid and accurate. O'Donnell is living in the media-generated "universe by reporters' consensus." Everything is what the press invents and repeats. Reality has no meaning.

Fox's James Rosen, in questioning the President, brought up the Bush Doctrine, which he phrased: "If you feed a terrorist, if you clothe a terrorist, if you harbor a terrorist, you are a terrorist." He then laid out the White House case for P.L.O. chief Yasser Arafat and his relations with terrorists. He asked, then, isn't Arafat a terrorist who "should be dealt with in the same way that you've dealt with Saddam Hussein and Charles Taylor?"

The Mid Eastern situation involving Israel operates with different factors than Saddam in Iraq and Taylor in Liberia. The most basic difference is that Arafat governs no nation from which he can be ousted.

Many of Saddam's neighbors assisted us in removing him. Many of Taylor's neighbors did most of the work in ousting him. Arafat's neighbors support him, monetarily in the case of the Saudis.

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Dealing with the Devil

Some Senate Republican staffers call it "negotiating with terrorists," but Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is striking a deal with the dour Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) which would give Michigan two new federal judges in exchange for Levin dropping a few of his obstructionist moves. One GOP committee member called the plan a "split-the-baby solution."

Senator Levin has been disgruntled because the wife of one of his cousins was nominated by Clinton in 1997 to a federal judgeship, and the Republican Judiciary Committee never gave her a hearing. Because he was just plain mad at the world, Levin decided to spend the last two years, in part, blocking the Presidents judicial nominees from Michigan. He's been in the Senate since 1978, and he doesn't have to take any of this here nonsense. Or some such. Committee Democrats aided in the obstruction as a favor to Levin.

Word of Senator Hatch's deal with Levin comes in this morning's Washington Times. The deal is not yet done, but preliminary reports have another seat (the 23rd) being added to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals; the seat will be filled by someone from Michigan. Also on the table, the Times was told, is adding another seat (the 31st) to one of Michigan's two federal district courts.

Now, word is that the new seat on the federal circuit court would go to that wife of Levin's cousin, Michigan Judge Helene White, though the President would have to sign off on that.

From the Times piece:

Asked if he was willing to placate Mr. Levin by adding the Michigan judicial posts, Mr. Hatch said: "I'm always very open, but let me not ..." and trailed off.

"It's sensitive," he resumed. "These are very sensitive negotiations."

Generally speaking, Mr. Hatch said, he wants to "resolve this without poking anybody in the eye."

Another problem for Hatch if he's making the deal, the article reports, is getting his Republican colleagues on Judiciary to go along with it. He might not have trouble with weasels like Arlen Specter, but Texas' freshman Senator John Cornyn said: "It's not very palatable to me. I'd be very curious whether [White House Counsel] Al Gonzales and the rest of the West Wing would be amenable to that."

The Dems are embittered and tenacious, and it will require a substantial Republican Senate majority to move the Senate in the right (Right) direction. Note that I did not say it would require a conservative Republican majority, as we lack one now but even moderate and liberal Republicans tend to vote with their President on judicial nominations. For this and for other, similar reasons, I stress that it's important to keep liberal Republicans like Linc Chafee, Olympia Snowe, Specter, and the erstwhile Republican Jim Jeffords in the party. They not only increase the majority, but they can usually be counted on to vote correctly on certain issues and nominations.

That being said, Representative Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania) will make a better Senator than Snarlin' Arlen.

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A California Wildfire

Not in the Simi-Valley fire, but another of California's current wildfires is believed to have been caused by humans. Witnesses saw two long-haired white men in a truck throw a blazing object into brush on Saturday morning.

It seems likely to me that the truck bore the bumper sticker: "NO on Recall/ YES on Bustamante." It fits the profile: a disregard for private property and an awareness that the federal government will send them money.

Never fear: Geraldo's there.

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Bush to get his EPA administrator…

Good morning. Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, whose nomination had been obstructed by a few Dems, is set to become the next head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Senator Hillary Clinton and Jim Jeffords, candidates John Edwards, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, as well as former candidate now Senator-again Bob Graham. They had forced a procedural block on the nomination which would have required a 3/5ths majority (60 votes) to break, but they surrendered to the inevitable when it became clear that they did not have the 40 votes they needed.

The Senators and candidates had opposed Leavitt's confirmation, they had said, because they opposed President Bush. The President, they asserted, would not give them information regarding the reportage of the air quality at Ground Zero following September 11. Pulling a trick from their Texas brethren's book, they had even skipped a hearing so as not to have the quorum necessary for a vote on Leavitt's nomination.

Utah Senator Robert Bennett, the chief deputy GOP Whip, said that he expected Leavitt's nomination to pass this morning "with maybe 70-plus votes."

If they feared shame, this would have been a humiliating setback for Hillary and the Dems, who, by their own accounts, were opposing Governor Leavitt's nomination to make a case against President Bush as the election season approaches.

Natalie Gochnaur, a spokeswoman for Governor Leavitt, said Monday: "The governor remains patient and gracious; he feels optimistic he can make a meaningful contribution at the Environmental Protection Agency and looks forward to the final vote in the morning."

The Dems tried, but no one showed up at their little protest.

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It is almost November 4

There's an open governor's seat in Kentucky, and Republican Representative Ernie Fletcher is leading Democrat State Attorney General Ben Chandler comfortably. Fletcher will replace Democrat Governor Paul E. Patten is going the way of the term limit.

In Mississippi, we all remember Haley Barbour. He signed my first RNC Life Member certificates. (I received two of them in the space of a few months, by a fluke. I think it was a result of the transition between Barbour and Jim Nicholson.) Haley's leading Mississippi's Dem Governor Ronnie Musgrave by 5 points in the latest polls, but that's the margin.

Barbour's getting it from all sides in the press. I read one article a week or so ago -- "straight news piece" -- likening Haley's success with that of Arnold Schwarzenegger in California: a star with a national name firing up the voters with an anti-incumbent fervor a lots and lots of big bucks. There are so many flaws in that analogy that I had to spend time trying to think of ways in which it could be considered valid.

Anyway, that's two GOP gains this November, an off-year election. And it's tricky for a President to have coattails when he isn't running, and especially in an off-year, but this year might be different. The Democrats have made the President an issue, which shows questionable judgment when his job approval rating is in the mid-50s.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Democrat Party needs a political savior with a strong set of beliefs, someone to move that lazy leviathan beyond the current crop of nobodies doing nothing, beyond the retrograde Clinton nostalgia. That person does not exist, at least not in a big-ticket way. (Harold Ford is too young, and to little like Jesse, though he verges of leftism-lite. Nancy Pelosi brushed him aside like the dandruff settling on her shoulders.)

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Is Lieberman nearing the end?

It's an interesting thought from Talon News, in which Kennebec County, Maine GOP Chairman Charles Mahaleris writes that he thinks Joe Lieberman's campaign is coughing up blood.

He writes of Lieberman's tactics in Sunday night's debate, which seemed no different than standard Joe to me. He talked of Joe stubbornly clinging to support of the war and opposition to Palestinian terrorists. That's Lieberman being Lieberman, nothing new.

These efforts, however, could be just the last gasp for a dying effort. Lieberman's campaign, which at one time was leading the way, may be weeks from closing up.

Weeks? Lieberman still has money, and he he'll have a few weeks off later this year where he won't have to play Senator. Maybe he'll drop a little before Chanukah and enjoy the Festival of Lights with his family.

With the two Lieberman positions the article mentions, he seems perfectly sane, and those positions would appeal to rational voters. But remember, Lieberman is trying to win the Democrat nomination.

I think he's waiting for the delusions and hyperbole to wear thing on voters, and he could well see himself as the emergency escape valve for Dem voters who wake up to see just what (who?) is trying to operate their party. That times not going to come. Hatred is a powerful emotion, and there is an unsettling core to that party who literally loathe our President. If they let it consume them to the center, we're going to have a Democrat Howie Dean running against President Bush. Sure, it will be a walk, but I shudder to think of it. (John Edwards would be much more of a challenge against whom to run, and possibly even more frightening. He says what he says, but his manner makes it seem palatable.)

Thinking aloud.

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Iraq and Tourism

In Madrid Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi announced that Iran was going to do its part to help reconstruct Iraq. (No, the offer was not on of 100,000 new mullahs by the end of 2004.) Kharazi said that they would share oil facilities with the Iraqis, lend them $300,000, and promote tourism in Iraq. He spoke of 100,000 Iranian tourists (many of whom would doubtless be mullahs) per month, spending about $500-million annually.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was asked about this at his Monday press briefing, and he answered: "There may be pilgrims who come for legitimate purposes but we've also raised concerned about [people traveling] across for not-so legitimate purposes, either smuggling or people coming across to foment violence and to oppose the progress that's being made." Not to belabor a point, but he was referring, in part, to the mullahs.

According to this French (AFP) story, half of the twelve imams the Shi'a hold holy are buried in Iraq.

The Administration, via Boucher, is taking the proper stance: "We've made clear that religious freedom is part of the environment that we'd like to create in Iraq and part of the environment the Iraqis themselves want to create. So as long as people are really pilgrims and not up to no good or smuggling, then I'm sure they'd be welcomed."

This can spread good will, of course, but there is no way of telling which Iranian tourists are going to foment discord and violence in the relatively tranquil south or Iraq. I think we can rely on the Iranian government not to attempt to stir the pot, as they know they are on a thin leash right now, with both the Europeans and the United States.

According to Paul Bremer Sunday, the real terrorists seem to be arriving from Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and the Yemen. He stressed that Syria was a problem on Fox News Sunday and Face the Nation, while mentioning the other nations, but dropped the stress on This Week.

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Former bureaucrat Dick Clarke complains…

Good Morning. Former Bush cybersecurity chief Dick Clarke was one of Steph's guests on ABC's This Week yesterday, and I'm not sure why. He didn't seem to be hawking a book or complaining about anything recently in the news, and the man hadn't be the President's cybersecurity honcho since early this year.

He seemed deeply bitter, displaying an astringency which might require medication to bring the brain chemicals back into balance. He had, after all, spend three decades dealing with the nation's security and had been President Bush's counterterrorism chief on September 11, 2001 -- a day on which terrorism was not countered.

To Steph on Sunday, he said: "No, we're not winning the war on terrorism."

By invading and occupying Iraq, he said on ABC, "we've made it easier for them [al Qaeda] to attack us." His dull eyes seemed to blaze black when he faulted the President's "bring 'em on" line of earlier this year. He does not like the idea of having the terrorists focus on Iraq rather than New York and Washington, as it is more immediate on the ground near Baghdad.

On This Week, Clarke accused the administration, in the act of invading Iraq, of confusing Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, but Clarke in the camp of those who cannot quite understand that the ouster of Saddam and liberation of Iraq was not payback for September 11. It was helping to prevent other such attacks, but Clarke is stubborn.

According to former Clinton aide Sandy Berger, Clarke was not liked by subordinates because he pushed them hard. Berger says that he liked that in Clarke, and that Clarke "had President Clinton's ear." (This was not on the ABC show; rather, it was from quips made when Clarke decided to quit government rather than be transferred to the new department of Homeland Security.) So we have a Dick Clarke betrothed of Clinton and afraid of "this new-fangled Homeland Security stuff we didn't have in my day."

On This Week, Clarke complained of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the attempts of the Defense Department to try to do things which are the purview of others, such as the State Department, the CIA, or the National Security Council. He feels the DoD "should let the experts do it." He resents Rumsfeld.

Steph seemed to cut the interview short when Clarke announced that he had heard that Rumsfeld had leaked his own memo.

At least the man's out to pasture. We can thank him for his service to our country and regret that he stayed on past his mental fitness. It's sometimes sad, in a wistful way, to see a dedicated public servant/bureaucrat go out in this manner.

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Dem Debate Tonight

Here's the best quick analysis of tonight's CBC/FNC Dem candidate debate from the Fox Theater in Detroit = trade unions = Dick Gephardt. (Humor me, 'k?) For lack of anything better, we'll give him home field advantage.

Candidate Joe Lieberman had a major breakthrough tonight, announcing that he would negotiate with Hamas if they renounced terrorism. ("People can change.") Hamas is terrorism, that's their raison de'etre. Ground control to Joltin' Joe.

Candidate Dennis Kucinich is from the same county as was President James A. Garfield. He wants to create a cabinet-level Department of Peace, "to make non-violence an organizing principle in our society." Who, dude. "Vegetable rights and peace!" He's a high-minded globalist: "We need to work with other nations in the world to make war archaic." Let's talk to Kim Chong-Il, and Bashar Assad, Ayatollah Khamenei, and Hu Jintao of the PRC. Let's sit naked in our beds and sing along with John and Yoko.

Candidate Al Sharpton made a few unintelligible noises and the crowd went nuts.

Candidate Carol Mosley-Brain decreed that she would remove the trade deficit by implementing a single-payer health care plan.

Candidate John Edwards has a dream. Etc.

Candidate John Kerry talked about being presidential.

Candidate Dick Gephardt did not attend. Or he was hiding. Or I just didn't hear him.

Candidates Dean and Clark. It's a trick. I think they do it with mirrors.

Kerry seemed the most Presidential in bearing. Senator Edwards seemed the most likely to say shucks. Dean reminded me of Gary Hart circa 1984, sans even the ephemeral ideas. Clark looked like he had been let out for a while but would soon be put back in the jacket and put in a room where the walls won't hurt him.

There was no winner. Each candidate struck me as a loser, and that's hopefully not simply a partisan thing. I cannot picture any of them behind the Presidential seal, although Lieberman's close -- but Lieberman's not going to happen.

I didn't want to have the opportunity to watch this debate, as I was hoping beyond home for a Game 7. You know, though, seeing the Dems tonight was pretty much the equivalent of seeing my New York Yankees at the plate during the past week.

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Joltin' Joe Lieberman Faces the Nation

It now seems like a lifetime ago, but candidate Joltin' Joe Lieberman was a guest this morning on CBS's Fact the Nation with Bob Schieffer. I do not have the physical stats handy, but it seems to me that Lieberman appears on Schieffer's show more than any others, and that Schieffer has Lieberman as a more frequent guest than any other zany Dem crowd. It's actually comforting to know that they have each other.

Schieffer had the morning show talking point to lead off. Every host proclaimed this: "The news from Iraq seems to be even worse this morning." You see, the White House had been spinning it as getting better, so the networks had to quick portray it as getting worse.

Lieberman went through the usual bit about the United States going it alone -- a "one-sided process" -- and Schieffer accepted it as stated. Even Steph, a former Clinton sleepover pal, hassled candidate Edwards about this assertion.

Lieberman said that we went over there without any kind of plan. I've argued that the State Department had a plan, but I've received argument that this was not so much a plan as an outline of what to expect. The pre-war State Department report also contained suggestions for responses, though, so while it was not a plan in the concrete sense, it was more than the null which some Democrats -- including Lieberman this morning -- have suggested.

Paul Bremer on This Week this morning told Steph that there has been a plan since before he arrived there, and that the current version has 128 pages. It was by this plan that they got the electricity functioning at pre-war levels by October 1, Bremer said.

"We’re not doing as well as we should be doing," Lieberman asserted. He begs the question, how well should we be doing? There are a few malcontents causing a bit of trouble north of Baghdad.

Lieberman blamed Don Rumsfeld for the Administrations lack of planning. Again, the plans are in place and have been since before the war. But Joltin' Joe said, when asked by Schieffer if Rumsfeld should be sacked, said: "Judgment about whether he stays or not is up to President Bush. But if I were president, I would get a new secretary of defense." Sure. In a Lieberman administration, the Pentagon would answer to… Secretary of Defense Babs Boxer.

Fourteen months from now, these people will be off the airwaves. Be strong until then.

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Candidate John Edwards: A Damnably Good Liar

John Edwards is easily the smoothest liar we have seen on the political scene in ages; some say even Clinton had a slight tick. Edwards can do it well.

Edwards went on ABC's This Week this morning and began his verbal assault on the war effort. "It should be an international effort," he stated flatly. The United States if going it alone. But we have over 30 countries in the coalition, host Steph snidely protested, "and the Security Council resolution." Edwards countered that "it looks like an American operation to the Iraqis," the he returned to hammering President Bush for alienating the world by invading Iraq unilaterally.

To hear John-boy tell it, President Bush woke up one morning and decided to attack, catching the world by surprise.

On screen, Steph put up the words of Senator Joe Biden, saying that it was childish and incoherent to continue protesting that the action was purely unilateral. "It might work in the primaries," he said, "but it will fail in the general election." Edwards rebutted that: "What I have said from the beginning was completely coherent and completely consistent.

The current go-it-alone policy is not working, candidate Edwards insisted. As proof: "Look at what happened this morning with Secretary Wolfowitz." What happened this morning with Secretary Wolfowitz? The Al-Rashid hotel was attacked with crude rockets from a truck while Wolfowitz was evidently in the building, but he was out speaking a few hours later. He seemed fine. (Then again, candidate Edwards is a tort lawyer, and thus might know something about being injured when you're not.)

Edwards came out strongly against the Patriot Act. Columnist George Will, on hand to help Steph, pointed out that he had voted for it. Edwards retorted that he liked a lot of things about it, but he did not like that it gives the attorney general the power to rifle through people's library records and book purchases. Will pointed out that they could do this before the Patriot Act was passed; it was used to hunt the Unibomber, for instance. Edwards said he opposed the "level of discretion it gives to the attorney general," invoking John Ashcroft as the enemy of the constituency to which Edwards wants to appeal.

Search warrants, Will pointed out. He still needs those. Or is he arguing that the judiciary can also be subverted via the Patriot Act. Edwards said that the "Attorney General can do some things without judicial permission."

The man's face is earnest. His voice quavers at the right pitch. His eyes seem to open up his heart to those who watch him. And everything he says is complete crap, yet I can understand why most people would want to believe him. I'm concerned that more people will see him.

Steph flashed the poll numbers, with Edwards stuck in the middle group. Edwards said he's competing in Iowa and can win that State's caucuses. He said that this year's New Hampshire primary was unusual, in that you had two candidates from adjacent States in the field: candidate Howie Dean of Vermont and Massachusetts' John-John Kerry. According to Edwards's polls, he says, he's currently in third place in the Granite State. And, of course, "more importantly [than the polls]," he said, "I see what's happening on the ground."

He is certain of winning South Carolina, and what's more: "I'm not going to lose this election. I'm going to be the Democrat nominee for President."

He could be trouble. He's a damnably good liar.

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Edwards, Lieberman, and Clarke

The Rightsided Newsletter has been published -- it's on the web site, if you want to see that version -- and there are a few more things about this morning's Talk Shows to discuss.

Candidate Joe Lieberman was bland but trying to attack on CBS's Face the Nation, while candidate John Edwards was brazen and bald-faced on ABC's This Week.

I've got errands, but I'll scribble about those items when I return, as well as former NSC staffer Dick "New Years Rockin' Eve" Clarke's peformance on This Week. That cat was nearly surreal.

Back in a few...
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The Talk Shows

Good morning. The most relevant word this morning will come from, I think, Paul Bremer, the chief civilian administrator on the ground in Iraq. He will be on Fox News Sunday, and we can expect host Tony Snow to give him an interview on which he can accentuate the positive developments in Iraq. What the media isn't telling us. He's also appearing on CBS's Face the Nation, where host Bob Schieffer might try to pin him down about "quagmire" and sixteen words. Based on his record of late, Steph should give Bremer a good interview on ABC's This Week.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Dick Lugar (R-Illinois) and Democrat ranking member Carl Levin (D-Michigan) are guests on CNN's Late Edition, and host Blitzer is one of the consistently worst interviewers on Sunday morning. Levin is always a negative droner, and do you remember that Lugar ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996? He was good on foreign affairs, natch, and he was certainly more exciting than was Bob Dole. (That's a truism which probably does not bear repeating.)

Tim Russert, on NBC's Meet the Press, interviews Secretary of State Colin Powell. If he's true to his latest form, Russert will bring up settled matters and move on to ask the Secretary if he's stepping down for President Bush's second term.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Fristof Tennessee will step onto Fox News Sunday, and he's probably our best bet to get word on the passage of the ban on Partial Birth Abortion. It's a no-brainer in a civilized society, so what was the opposition.

Candidates Joe Lieberman and John Edwards will be on Face the Nation and This Week respectively. This makes sense, as Schieffer has always seemed to dig Lieberman to the exclusion of the other Dems, while Edwards is the most Clintonesque in the Dem field, thus arousing a stirring in Steph's loins.

I'll review the madness and the nonsense in the afternoon's Rightsided Newsletter, to which you can subscribe for free, no strings. Visit the web site, linked in this paragraph and on this page, or send a blank e-mail to rsn-subscribe@topica.com.

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