Domestic Policy: September 2008 Archives

Do you care much about Adolph Ahmadinejad's annual harangue to the UN and touring of his country's future conquered estates?  I don't either.  His stuff ("He’s forever threading the needle between … psychopathic Islamist designs on Israel and the sort of squishy brotherhood nonsense that buys him legitimacy with the international community on which he depends") is pretty much rehashed from year to year, and not all that original in the first place.

Two ancillary items do merit mention, though.

1) Why would ANY American "journalist" of any stripe want to conduct a prime time interview with the Geico Caveman?  Do either CNN (natch - I guess Keith Olbermann must still be indisposed) or Lucky Larry really value 'dolph's take on our presidential campaign?  Don't they already know that the mullahgarchy is openly slavering at the prospect of President Hussein?  Or do they just wish to give him an opportunity to propagandize the American viewing public at our own expense, like the dhimmis they are?

2) Evidently somebody at Team Messiah was concerned about it, what with the foreign policy presidential debate only days away:

“I strongly condemn President Ahmadinejad’s outrageous remarks at the United Nations, and am disappointed that he had a platform to air his hateful and anti-Semitic views. The threat from Iran’s nuclear program is grave. Now is the time for Americans to unite on behalf of the strong sanctions that are needed to increase pressure on the Iranian regime.

“Once again, I call upon Senator McCain to join me in supporting a bipartisan bill to increase pressure on the Iranian regime by allowing states and private companies to divest from companies doing business in Iran. The security of our ally Israel is too important to play partisan politics, and it is deeply disappointing that Senator McCain and a few of his allies in Congress feel otherwise,” said Senator Barack Obama.

What was that Sinaed O'Connor once said?  "Fight the real enemy!"  An appellation that most certainly does NOT apply to "President" Ahmadinejad in the mind of The One....

UPDATE: Want more proof?  His bundlers love 'dolph almost as much as they do him.

Ed Morrissey is calling this a "concession" of defeat; I think it's just a stall:

Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in an months-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.

Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-WI, told reporters Tuesday that a provision continuing the moratorium will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running after Congress recesses for the election.

Republicans have made lifting the ban a key campaign issue after gasoline prices spiked this summer and public opinion turned in favor of more drilling. President Bush lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling in July.

“If true, this capitulation by Democrats following months of Republican pressure is a big victory for Americans struggling with record gasoline prices,” said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio.

Is it?  Remember the gist of Crazy Nancy's anti-drilling "drilling" bill, denying coastal states the right to share in the estimated $2.6 trillion of tax revenue that would flow from opening the full continental shelves to energy exploration.  That bill was DOA in the Senate, but the end of the drilling moratorium brings pretty much the same set of conditions: drilling is fair game, but states can't cash in on it without federal legislation.  Additionally, it doesn't take a crystal ball to look into the near future and see an avalanche of greenstremist lawsuits blocking every single last Big Oil attempt at opening up any additional fields or building so much as a single new drilling platform.

And let us not forget that, despite the 110th Congress being an almost total bust for the Dems - no defeat in Iraq, no new taxes, no double-impeachment of Bush and Cheney, no President Pelosi - they are nevertheless going to increase their majorities significantly.  Add to that dismal prospect President Hussein - who currently enjoys a slight Electoral College lead and very modest but undeniable momentum at the moment - and that drilling moratorium will be slapped back in place faster than a cheesy fry going down Bill Clinton's gullet come January, locking away our energy resources and keeping us economic hostages to our enemies in Tehran and Caracas and Moscow for another generation - if we survive that long.

Even if John McCain somehow pulls this election out, the Left's litigation hordes will still keep a lid on in OCS, and there'll be little or nothing he can do about it.

The Speakerette may be crazy, but she knows that folding on one bad hand does not the game concedeth.  Particularly when she's the dealer of marked cards in a stacked deck.

First, the Obama education ad:

Talk about "more of the same".  Equating education funding with educational performance, even though we spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on education at the federal, state, and local levels combined, and have declining test results to show for it.  Touting the Department of Education even though it has vanishingly little influence on nuts & bolts education policy, which is supposed to be a state & local function.  And haven't Dems spent the past seven years crapping all over "No Child Left Behind," of which accountability and standards were the crown jewels?

Here's McCain's answer: 

That's what you do when the other side throws a bomb at you; you don't get mad - you get even.

Predictably, BO got mad.  But only about the "teaching sex ed to kindergarteners" part, which is probably an intended corollary back to continuing the pillorying of Sarah Palin over her support for abstinence-only sex ed.  And, well, tough beans, Barry, because while you may not have overtly intended to give five-year olds "coloring books titled Why Does It Burn When I Pee?," your comprehensive sex ed bill included language such as:

"Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV."

And you voted for the bill, I'm guessing.  Or maybe this isn't the bill you thought you knew.

Meanwhile, the other three bullets...er, bullet points: "no significant mark on education," "elusive on accountability," "staunch defender of existing monopoly" - in other words, more of the same - plugged you completely unopposed.  Maybe that's because you're as big a hypocrite on socialized education when it comes to your own kids as you are on...well, pretty much every other issue.  And the Wasilla PTA mom kicks your ass on this one too.

Looks like another dose of whiny hand-waving to me.

Can we take this as conclusive proof that The One does not get frightened at the guy who stares back at him in the bathroom mirror every morning?:

Well, how about Governor Palin? She’s you know, an up and comer from Alaska.

And because of her, you're well on your way to being a down & outter from Illinois.  I wouldn't want to belittle you by suggesting you might be just a smidgen jealous, but the combination of green and....naw, I wouldn't want to make David Patterson's wet dreams come true.

She - they’re starting to run an ad now saying she opposed the bridge to nowhere....

....Well now, let’s get the facts clear here....

[SNORT] Geez, Barry, can't you WARN me when you're going to crack impromptu one-liners?  Now I've gotta go get the Windex and a washcloth.

When she was mayor, she hired a Washington lobbyist to get earmarks - pork barrel spending - all the things that John McCain says is bad, she lobbied to get! And got a whole lot of it. When it came to the bridge to nowhere, she was for it until everybody started raising a fuss about it and she started running for governor and then suddenly she was against it!

You remember that? For it before you were against it? I mean you can’t just make stuff up. You can’t just recreate yourself. You can’t just reinvent yourself. The American people aren’t stupid.

 ....As you appear to think we are.  What troubles you about Governor Palin's "shrinkage in office," Lucifer?  Its ideological direction, that she beat you to it, or the fact that hers is genuine and yours is phonier than a Bill Clinton alibi - and on so much more than just pork?

Why do you have such a bug up your ass about this lady, Teacher, when she's not even your opponent - and THAT geezer's earmark cherry really is still unpopped.  And, of course, your own running mate is filthier than Mike Rowe.  Is it any wonder that the Mavericks are as marveling at the ledgerdemain of your campaign strategizing as we are?

Must be a pretty big ass bug, too.  At least your "instant response" spot mentions McCain.  Way to get him back in the game, Barry!:

Um, O Bread Of Death, didn't you officially pierce your staff lobbyist maindenhead just last month?  Doesn't your spot concede that Barracuda ended up against the "bridge to nowhere", which you and Rogaine stuck behind even instead of redirecting the funds to relief for Hurricane Katrina victims?  And, er, your opponent isn't President Bush, either.  As a matter of fact, he's not even on the ballot.

Maybe if you didn't have such a neurotic case of Maverick-envy, you'd notice the degree to which your running mate is sawing your political legs off at the knees almost as effectively as you are:

Er, yeah, Joe, the Administration that put more women and minorities in top Cabinet positions than any of its predecessors is just oozing with racism and mysogeny.  And the party that has plumbed the depths of sexism and women-hatred in the past ten days at the spectre of the first female vice president in American history being a conservative Republican is the only vehicle for moving the fairer gender forward....in enforced lockstep.  In short, it doesn't matter if Sarah Palin has two X-chromosomes, two breasts, a well-used reproductive system, and the stretch marks to show for it, she's not a "true woman" because she's not a feminazi.

Just as she is some sort of flat-earth cave-dweller because she is no more willing to destroy viable human embryos for no valid medical reason than she is in utero children with "special needs":

Was Joe Biden referring to Sarah Palin, a mother of a child with Down syndrome, when he made this comment?

“I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there’s joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect. Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don’t you support stem cell research?”

Biden received a thunderous ovation when he made the remark at a town hall style meeting this morning in Columbia.

Er, Joe, the Governor DOES support stem cell research - ADULT stem cell research, which has produced dozens of viable treatment therapies.  So does one of your running mate's imaginary opponents, President Bush, who was the first president to authorize federal funding for such research.  It's funding for embryonic stem cells, which are as medically worthless as their destruction is pointlessly and morally abhorrent, that she rightly opposes.

Why do you people keep going back to this dry well?  To rebuild False Messiah's idol by depicting him like a Hinnesque faith healer?  After the beating he took at Saddleback last month, is that really a topic you want to send him back to?

And to think that this is what passes for Team Hussein's "high road".  We can debate how many degrees of separation exist between the sainted figure who proclaimed both tickets' families "off limits" while uttering nary a peep as the category 5 slimeicane from the leftosphere and Enemy Media descended on Sarah Palin with a fury like this country has never witnessed (and is far from exhausting itself).  But that levee is, shall we say, experiencing "progressive failure":

There’s been a spurt of 527 activity on behalf of Senator John McCain, but Barack Obama campaign has suddenly gone silent on the subject.

That’s because, after of year of telling donors not to contribute to 527 groups, of encouraging strategists not to form them and of suggesting that outside messaging efforts would not be welcome in Obama’s Democratic Party, Obama’s strategists have changed their approach.

An Obama adviser privy to the campaign’s internal thinking on the matter says that,with less than two months before the election and with the realization that Republicans have achieved financial parity with Democrats, they hope that Democratic allies — what another campaign aide termed “the cavalry” — with come to Obama’s aid.

And we all know how FAIR and RESPONSIBLE lefty 527s are, don't we?

But they do raise a lotta cash, though.  Of which The Golden Child suddenly finds himself in acute need:

After months of record-breaking fund-raising, a new sense of urgency in Senator Barack Obama’s fund-raising team is palpable as the full weight of the campaign’s decision to bypass public financing for the general election is suddenly upon it.

Pushing a fund-raiser later this month, a finance staff member sent a sharply worded note last week to Illinois members of its national finance committee, calling their recent efforts “extremely anemic.” …

The signs of concern have become evident in recent weeks as early fund-raising totals have suggested that Mr. Obama’s decision to bypass public financing may not necessarily afford him the commanding financing advantage over Senator John McCain that many had originally predicted.

It is to laugh.  Once again, Barry's head crowds everything else out of the proverbial room - in this case, his pocketbook, which is shrinking to accomodate it.  If he'd simply kept his promise to stay within the public financing system, he'd have the same $84 million McCain got for nothing.  Instead even his campaign's most optimistic estimates between now and November reach no higher than the seventy million-plus range, and at the rate BO's campaign fortunes are deflating, they may well take in a lot less.  Plus he's got to rain-make on a daily basis as well as purely campaign, while Sailor can focus entirely on making him look like an even bigger fool than he's made himself look like already.  And even if Team Messiah exceeds those expectations, their chronic profligacy takes considerable bang out of all those bucks.

Still, fundraising is nothing more than a political barometer in counterpoint to polling.  A leading indicator, as it were.  Which makes the causal correlation with Slimeicane Sarah very telling indeed.

UPDATE: Obamaversy of the day:

Did The Chosen One not-so-surreptitiously call Governor Palin a pig?  AP says no, Hugh Hewitt says yes.

I think it was another of his classic gaffes.  We all know what a godawful off-the-cuff speaker Barack Hussein Obama is.  From his reference to "fifty-seven states" at the start of the summer to his telling a crowd how happy he was to be in "New Pennsylvania" yesterday, The Chief Stumbling Block's verbal incontinence when unaccompanied by a teleprompter defies description.

Picture the setting.  There stands the Donk nominee in the townhall setting that will be the death of his candidacy.  He's trying to make the point that McCain-Palin don't really represent "change," in the sense that they don't represent partisan change.  He mentally flails for a witty metaphor and sees the common aphorism all we "bitter clingers" would probably toss off the top of our heads in his place.  For his immediate purposes it serves him adequately.

But, being The One, Governor Palin's convention speech line about the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull being "lipstick" completely evaded his rhetorical filters.  His slow-as-molasses synapses, laserly focused on trying to depict the Mavericks as identical Bush twins, never connected those contextual dots, and therefore gave not even seat-of-the-pants consideration to the inevitable way his listeners would hear his ill-chosen words.

When I first heard the clip, I burst out laughing, because it sounded like he'd blunderingly stepped on another PR rake, this one the size of a telephone pole.  Having listened to the clip several more times, that's still my conclusion.

And remember: that's what constitutes giving BO the benefit of the doubt.

UPDATE II: Here's the real punchline:

Anyone wanting a Hillary vs. Sarah smackdown might be in for a letdown. First, Sarah Palin launched her Republican vice presidential campaign with praise for the strides made by Hillary Rodham Clinton in her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. On Monday, Clinton spoke in kind.

"It is a great accomplishment," Clinton said of Palin's selection as the GOP's first female running mate. Clinton told a rally of five hundred that the election will be decided on issues, not the historical significance of the candidates, and Democrat Barack Obama and his running mate Joe Biden bring more to the table than the Republican ticket.

"Women as well as men make their decisions after they weigh the evidence," Clinton said. "As Americans go into that voting booth, what they have to ask themselves is not so much who am I for, as who is for me? And I don't think it's an even close question that we have the ticket that is going to do the best job in restoring the American promise."

About the most she'd say about Palin is that she and Republican presidential candidate John McCain "are not the change that we need."

Looks like that kamikaze run the Unholy One is looking for may not be so easily come by.

You can just hear the silent cackling, cantcha?

UPDATE II: I don't think Obama is stupid enough to publicly call Sarah Palin a "pig".  I think he's intelligent enough to recognize that the quickest way to get this pointless anchor dragging down his campaign out from around his scrawny neck is to go before his press sychophants and fall on his sword.  Say something like, "Uh, you know, uh, uh, my choice of metaphor yesterday in, uh, trying to make the point that John McCain, uh, and Sarah, uh, Palin don't represent, uh, real change was thoughtless and, uh, ill-considered.  I should, uh, have realized that the lipstick part of the, uh, reference would make, uh, people think of, uh, Governor Palin's acceptance speech.  It truly was, uh, not my intent to lob so coarse and, uh, juvenile an insult at her, and, uh, I deeply apologize, uh, to the Governor and, uh, anybody else who took it, uh, in that, uh, way."

Unfortunately for him, his colossus of an ego has his mental acuity in a permanent full nelson.  Thus does pride render The One a cosmic dumbass, and bury, uh, Barry under another avalanche of those "distractions" he dislikes so much - and which the rest of us know as accountability.

Demand in front of the American electorate for five weeks, and ye shall receive:

Evidently Crazy Nancy and the Donk Politburo dismissed the House GOP Oil Party as empty grandstanding, or they wouldn't have recessed Congress for over a month and left the minority party an open-ended, unopposed playing field to stoke the already simmering public anger against the majority's callous obstruction of opening up domestic energy exploration to help lower energy prices rather than continue to suck the asses of their environutter special interest cronies.

Just yesterday came an indication that perhaps bird-flipping malign neglect wasn't such a hot idea after all:

In the new [USA Today/Gallup] survey, more voters call themselves Republicans. Now 48% say they’re Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party; 47% say they’re Republicans or lean to the GOP.

Not since February 2005, right after Bush’s second inauguration, have Republicans been within a single point of Democrats in party identification.

What’s more, voters by 48%-45% support the Democratic candidate in their congressional district, the party’s narrowest advantage this year. [emphases added]

Think the energy issue, Maverick's "coming to Jesus" migration on drilling this summer, and his choice of Governor Sarah Palin, who signature issue is domestic energy development and is currently the most popular Republican on the planet, the combination of which threatens to take what was expected to be the biggest Democrat sweep in forty-four years and transform it into the biggest electoral debacle evah, might have had a wee bit to do with this?:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said Monday morning that the newest Democratic energy bill will be brought to the floor under normal rules and will be subject to a vote on a Republican alternative that is likely to call for even more drilling than Democrats are prepared to swallow.

Hoyer, holding his weekly session with reporters, would not discuss details of the new Democratic energy bill — which was first outlined by caucus Vice Chairman John Larson (D-CT) over the weekend. But Hoyer did outline the process for bringing the bill to the floor, and said it will be brought up under regular order.

“[Republicans] will have the opportunity to offer their alternative, yes,” Hoyer said in response to a question about how the energy bill will be introduced. “We understand that their motion to recommit will be their Republican alternative.”

The move is a dramatic departure from Democrats’ pre-August recess strategy, in which they brought up each of their energy bills under suspension of the rules and, in doing so, avoided having any votes on Republican measures calling for offshore drilling. But by embracing this strategy, Democrats also failed to get the two-thirds majority necessary to pass the majority of their energy bills.

Well, now.  THAT's more like it.

So, problem solved?  The reason why Crazy Nancy hypocrited herself on abusing her power as Speaker was precisely because she knew the GOP energy bill had the votes to pass, including, necessarily, Democrat votes from Donks in vulnerable swing districts captured in 2006.  So why is she relenting now, after the PR damage to her caucus had already been done?

Two reasons: (1) She doesn't want to go back to being House Minority Leader again; and (2) she knows that her counterparts in the Senate, where the "gang of ten" has now engorged to the "gang of twenty-two," can bottle it up and/or water it down long enough to get past the election, after which it can be quietly killed.

Why did this machievellian alternative not occur to Granny McBotoxImplants sooner?  Why, because she's so smart, of course....

UPDATE: Here's a pleasant scenario from the gang of twenty-two link:

These Republicans seem to think that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is going to offer them a free and open debate when this bill reaches the floor. But nothing in Reid’s record indicates that he will give Republicans a chance to offer amendments that reduce spending or open additional offshore areas to drilling. In the worst-case scenario, Reid and Pelosi ram the gang’s bill through Congress and force President Bush to veto it, giving Democrats a fresh talking point heading into November. Get ready to hear, “We supported drilling, but Bush vetoed our bipartisan energy legislation to protect Big Oil”.

They don't call our guys the "Stupid Party" for nothing.  If anybody is capable of screwing the pooch on an absolutely gimme wedge issue going down the 2008 campaign's home stretch, it's the party that wrote the book on seizing defeat from the jaws of victory.

This McCain ad is aimed at Michigan and Ohio voters, but it's a theme he needs to beat to death between now and November so that voters across the country fully grasp the connection between many of the current economic difficulties and the Obamacrats' status as "handmaidens to the environmentalist wackos," and enemies of "working class families".

Hey, why not try to limit the GOP carnage on Capitol Hill while he's at it?  Every additional Republican congressional seat is one more chance to limit the damage the Donks plan to do over the next four years.