Can’t have any of that nasty, old dissent:

The pro-abortion grassroots activist group MoveOn says it has raised millions of dollars to take on any pro-life or moderate Democrat who would vote against or hold up the health care reform bill. Pro-life groups oppose the bills because they currently contain massive government funding of abortions.

MoveOn informed its members in a Thursday email that it has raised well over $3 million to fund pro-abortion challenges to any Democrat who votes against the bills.

It says it has raised $3,578,117 to challenge “any Democratic senator who blocks an up-or-down vote on health care reform with a public option.”

I believe that all GOPers should donate to that fund…except that it might result in a pro-abortion politician getting elected, and thus would be a morally reprehensible act…

But, hey, have at it, liberals.

Mish has a long, interesting article on the subject. I recommend reading the whole thing, but to nutshell it:

Canada, faced with the global recession, has gone on a spending binge and has massively inflated its housing market. While Canada’s banks are technically in good shape, this is only because the toxic assets have all been shoved off to the government…which will have to either massively increase taxes or cut spending to make ends meet. Guess which way liberal Canada is heading? Towards higher taxes, of course.

But the fundamental problem is that the government has created a housing bubble in Canada and not only will it collapse, it must collapse. The only question is, when? And the problem for us is that Canada is a major purchaser of American goods and services – our best customer might be heading for the poor house for a while, and that means our already battered economy will take another big hit.

Exit question: which will cause the “double dip” recession to hit – the collapse of China’s real estate bubble, or Canada’s?

If this were a GOPer…

FOX25 has learned that Congressman Barney Frank was present during a marijuana arrest at James Ready’s home in Ogunquit, Maine. Ready is well-known for his relationship with Congressman Frank.

According to a police report, police charged Ready with marijuana possession, cultivation and use of drug paraphernalia in August of 2007. Ready admitted to civil possession and paid a fine. The remaining charges were dismissed in 2008.

Sources tell FOX25 that when Frank was questioned he told police that he did not live in the house and that he only smoked cigars.

I ain’t buying that – it just explains too much of what we get out of Barney these days. And it makes me feel better – I hate to think that Barney’s absurdities go un-noticed, but having the explanation being that everyone’s stoned over there is comforting…

As Instapundit put it, had this been Sarah Palin’s third cousin, it would not have been more than 2 years before it got in to the public square and, of course, it would have been a massive political firestorm. But, as Matt and I discovered in writing Caucus of Corruption, when Democrats do bad things, its ok…because they have compassion…you know, like Hollywood’s compassion…

Liberals seemed determined on suicide:

Thus the stimulus bill fell far short of what many economists — including some in the administration itself — considered appropriate. According to The New Yorker, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimated that a package of more than $1.2 trillion was justified.

Meanwhile, the administration balked at proposals to put large amounts of additional capital into banks, which would probably have required temporary nationalization of the weakest institutions…

We didn’t give enough money to the UAW, banks and State governments to cover their budget shortfalls – so goes liberal “thinking”. Two things about this:

1. If the Donks lose next year and Obama in 2012, the left will say the same thing they say about Carter in 1981: He lost because he wasn’t liberal enough.

2. Liberals are impervious to facts.

The first such case I’ve heard:

The New Hampshire Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit that calls into question the legal protections available to independent Web sites that cover news.

The case involves mortgage lender Implode-Explode, a Las Vegas-based site launched in 2007 that publishes stories about the meltdown of the mortgage industry. The court did not make a final decision on the case Wednesday, but one of its options could be to send the case back to the lower court for further review and litigation on specific points of law.

The dispute began in November 2008 when The Mortgage Specialists Inc (MSI) won a temporary injunction requesting that a confidential document, “2007 Loan Chart,” be removed from Implode-Explode’s site, ml-implode.com. MSI also requested the identity of the source and of a commenter, “Brianbattersby,” who they allege made defamatory comments about the company and its president.

Implode-Explode removed both the loan chart and the comments, but refused to either provide the identity of their anonymous sources or promise to refrain from posting the document again in the future.

At issue: is a blogger a journalist? If you read the rest of the article, it does appear that the blog obtained valid information indicating illegal practices at the lender which were then confirmed upon regulatory investigation. This is what journalism is supposed to be about – finding out what is going on, and then reporting it to the public. The tip off to the blogger does seem to have been a leaked document the blogger did not have a right to see – but journalists are always getting documents they don’t have a right see, so no great problem provided the courts recognize the blogger as a journalist.

Continue reading →

Bad enough for a floundering Democrat to call a legislative session for what will likely be a round of budget cuts, fiscal hocus-pocus and tax increases – worse that he’s also putting legalization of gay marriage on the agenda:

New York, November 6, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Gov. David Paterson has convoked an extraordinary session of the New York State Legislature to address the state’s soaring budget deficit, as well as to pass legislation that would legalize same-sex “marriage.”

Paterson issued a special proclamation Thursday announcing the special session would convene on November 10 at noon. He said the legislature would take up consideration of the Governor’s $5.2 billion “Deficit Reduction Plan” – a proposal which promises steep cuts in government spending – along with several other items including the same-sex “marriage” bill already passed by the Assembly.

Oh, but New York is liberal and so legalizing gay marriage is ok…sure, but please recall that Maine just rejected gay marriage on Tuesday. All Paterson is doing is ensuring that the social conservatives of the GOP are absolutely on fire to defeat him and the rest of the Democrats in 2010. 1,000 points for sticking to your liberal guns, governor, but minus a million for spectacular poor timing.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad – and our Democrats are completely ’round the bend these days.

Its not getting better out there:

Regulators have shut small banks in Georgia and Michigan, bringing the number of bank failures this year to 117 amid the struggling economy and a cascade of defaults on loans.

But the stock market is higher and the banks are making great profits! Ummm…is this really what you liberals voted for?

Some more hopeychange:

All of those twentysomethings who voted for Barack Obama last year are about to experience the change they haven’t been waiting for: the return of income tax bracket creep. Buried in Nancy Pelosi’s health-care bill is a provision that will partially repeal tax indexing for inflation, meaning that as their earnings rise over a lifetime these youngsters can look forward to paying higher rates even if their income gains aren’t real.

In order to raise enough money to make their plan look like it won’t add to the deficit, House Democrats have deliberately not indexed two main tax features of their plan: the $500,000 threshold for the 5.4-percentage-point income tax surcharge; and the payroll level at which small businesses must pay a new 8% tax penalty for not offering health insurance.

This is a sneaky way for politicians to pry more money out of workers every year without having to legislate tax increases. The negative effects of failing to index compound over time, yielding a revenue windfall for government as the years go on. The House tax surcharge is estimated to raise $460.5 billion over 10 years, but only $30.9 billion in 2011, rising to $68.4 billion in 2019, according to the Joint Tax Committee.

This is just another way for liberal Democrats to steal more of our money without the inconvenience of having us know they’re doing it. Never underestimate the rank dishonesty of a liberal politician – remember, Obama ran as a centrist – they will lie, right to your face and while you know they’re lying, if they think they can get away with it. This is what comes from having people who don’t believe in absolute right and wrong – if you don’t hold to such a thing, then there’s nothing wrong, and so lying to advance your cause is just cleverness…and a way to beat down those fools who believe that lying is wrong. Pelosi and Obama have said that their health care experiment will not cost any additional money. That is a lie, and they know its a lie – and so they are restoring to scams like this to plug the gap.

It really is “welcome back, Carter”. 28 years after Ronald Reagan saved us from a second Carter term, the people who were young, liberal zealots at the time (and Obama was one of them, though not in any official position at the time) are determined that Carter’s plans be carried out. How else can we explain the kowtowing to enemies, the insults to friends, the massive new spending, the crushing tax increases pending and, now, this back door way to pick our pockets? Heck, now that Daniel Ortega is setting himself up as re-dictator of Nicaragua, Obama will even leave his successor a Sandinista tyranny, just like Carter did. All we need are the really bad clothes and a revival of disco and our misery will be complete.

Hmmm…

Democratic Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu is out as keynote speaker for the Palm Beach County Democratic Party’s annual fund-raising dinner next week because party leaders dislike her stance on health care reform, county Democratic Chairman Mark Alan Siegel said today.

Landrieu, a moderate who recently described herself as “extremely concerned about a government-run, taxpayer-funded, national public plan,” has not committed to voting to cut off a likely Republican filibuster and forcing a vote on the legislation.

Democrats need 60 votes to invoke “cloture” and force a vote.

“We just didn’t want to have a keynote speaker who’s not committed to cloture. It would have just been wrong,” said Siegel…

Well, Senator, you can always join Lieberman as an Independent.

Krauthammer gets it very right:

…November ’08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm — and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.

The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm — deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years — because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his “New Foundation” for America — from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.

Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama’s hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt — the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters — as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.

Some rump…

The stars aligned perfectly for the Democrats in 2008 – there was not one additional thing which could have been added to give them a better advantage. And yet their vote total, while a solid win, was fairly modest. The sort of result you’d expect from two evenly matched parties who slugged it out with enthusiasm. Actually, the GOP was in terrible shape in 2008 – short on money, lacking enthusiasm, with an unexciting standard-bearer; and yet, had just a couple things gone right, McCain would be President right now.

But Obama and his Democrats choose to treat their victory as a mandate for change – and not just a mandate for any, old change, but for very ardently leftist change. This in spite of the fact that one of the prime reasons they won was because they hid their leftist agenda behind a fog of centrist rhetoric and the MSM played cover for them. They didn’t win on a leftist platform, but immediately proceeded to govern on one. The reaction we’ve seen is completely natural – the people are not leftist; never have been, never will be. We’re Americans.

Added to this and intensifying the effect has been the stunning incompetence of President Obama. I was discussing this with a friend yesterday and our hope is that Obama is a puppet…because if he’s not, then he’s just a plain and simple idiot. If Obama is lucky, hardly anyone saw that presser in the wake of the Ft Hood attack – my wife saw it live and was just disgusted by it; listening to it on the radio later I was stunned at the complete obtuseness of the man. To talk up Indians while America is in shock over mass murder is, well, just the most amazingly dumb thing imaginable. But this isn’t the first time such things have happened. I’m actually a bit worried that Obama simply will not get the hang of being President and that we’ll be stuck with a moving disaster until January of 2013.

Be that as it may, the playing field has tilted back towards the center/right. But it has not tilted back towards the GOP. The Republican party still has a long way to go to earn the trust and respect of the American people – even though the GOP is likely to score some impressive gains next year, it won’t matter much unless the people actually trust the GOP to do the right thing, once back in power. The people are in the process of taking back their government – our job, as Republicans, is to simply assist them in this task and then carry out the long-needed reforms being demanded. We do that, and we’ll route the left for good in this nation.