Posts Tagged ‘election 2012’

One year ago today Massachusetts elected Scott Brown…

Posted: January 19, 2011 by datechguy in congress, economy, opinion/news, politics
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…in an attempt to stop Obamacare. In a broadcast by 73wire with Stacy McCain and Ali Akbar (Brown’s new media guy) we talked about the healthcare bill and there was an interesting exchange. I stressed how important this election was because it was necessary to stop obamacare BEFORE it was passed prompting the following:

Ali: “And if it does pass, we will repeal it!”

DaTechGuy: “No we won’t.”

It was very telling that Ali (who is a really smart young man) didn’t argue the point with me and changed the subject.

Well Scott won, but the democrats realizing that the only chance to get the bill passed now was for the house to pass the version that had already gone through the senate did so avoiding both a conference and the chance of a filibuster.

So the repeal bill is now coming up and we will find out who was right. I think Ali knows the its very hard to repeal a law once passed. He knows businesses and government have already adjusted their plans based on it. A lot of favors were done for a lot of people in that bill and those lobbyists who had those favors inserted want them preserved. Most importantly as a rule it’s easier to stop something than to do something in congress. A determined minority and frustrate the majority every time.

Yet there are real reasons to think he might be right. The left and the media are declaring that effort dead and phony but are doing their best to discourage this vote. If my original thought was right why would they bother? After all the senate is still a majority democratic institution. Very little chance on any change there is there?

The dirty little secret is until the house passes this bill the senate doesn’t have to even pretend to care, but once it IS passed than it is before the Senate. There are quite a few democratic senators who are in a tough spot. They either ran against Obamacare (WV) live in states where it is unpopular (MO) or face uphill reelection fights (Va). The retirement announcement of Kent Conrad in ND actually hurts the repeal effort because he can now vote to preserve it while the democrat who does run in his state can claim opposition.

However there is another factor involved. Every single democratic senator was the deciding vote to the passage of Obamacare this means that every vulnerable senator on the democratic side has that vote hanging around their neck. Those senators desperate to retain their seats and the power and privileges thereof will not want to run on Obamacare. A repeal vote would give them a chance to vote against it saying they’ve “reconsidered”.

Harry Reid might, in order to increase the chance of holding his senate majority allow a vote. If a democrat filibuster blocks it then vulnerable dems can clam they voted against said filibuster and if he allows it to reach the floor he can either “Fishbait Miller” the vote (let the three most vulnerable dems vote against it) or allow it to pass and let the president veto it.

This is the position that the White House least wants to be in. The president casting a very prominent vote to preserve a law that he pushed for against popular opinion. This would be a great gift to Republicans going into 2012 and represents (along with the rising price of gas and oil and high unemployment) the best chance for this president to lose re-election.

This is the importance of the house vote. It turns 2012 into a referendum on Obamacare. The closer these actions come to election day 2012 the worse the situation gets for democrats. The second best move for them would be to allow a Senate vote ASAP and get this whole thing over with early. The best option for democrats? That I’m not saying until the day after the presidential election.

Obamacare will not be repealed before the 2012 election but this vote might be the first step to insuring its repeal with a new person in the White House.

I’m late to this Sarah Palin story

Posted: December 29, 2010 by datechguy in elections, opinion/news
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but the contrast is stunning. First Juan Williams

“‘There’s nobody out there, except for Sarah Palin, who can absolutely dominate the stage, and she can’t stand on the intellectual stage with Obama,’ Williams said.

“Palin, like Williams, is a Fox News contributor. And when Williams was fired by National Public Radio this year after saying he felt nervous when he sees Muslims on an airplane, Palin was among the conservative voices defending him.”

Allahpundit being allahpundit further quotes Williams

I think most Republicans now in the polls question whether or not she has the credibility to be president,’

There is just one problem with this line of thinking…the facts as Ian Lazaran notes:

Has any other potential Republican presidential candidate other than Palin been able to force the New York Times to concede that he or she put Obama on the defensive? Has any other potential Republican presidential candidate other than Palin destroyed a liberal policy to such an extent that the Democrat Party is afraid to publicize what it is doing and can only get it implemented through channels outside of the legislative arena?

And how many times has Sarah Palin led from the front while other GOP candidates have waited in the wings afraid to engage? This is what a leader does.

As for polls, forgetting that they are a snapshot in time people are forgetting that a presidential primary is in the works and the candidates running not named Palin need their supporters to attack her since they don’t dare to so on their own. There are plenty in the GOP how see Palin as a threat to their prerogatives and their power and will be happy to help the media along in trying to destroy her as long as they are not seen as doing so.

Haley Barbor’s real crime: “We paid more attention to the girls than to King”

Posted: December 21, 2010 by datechguy in elections
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Ah 2011 is only 10 days or so away, so tis the season to hit one of the most qualified republicans in the likely field as racist:

The Citizens’ Councils were, right in the state of Mississippi where Barbour is from, the respectable face of white supremacist political activism.

Hmmm now what did Barbor say about the Citizen’s councils back then when he was 16 in that interview:

Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”Emphasis Mine

So in other words, if you were Klan in Barbour’s town you lost her job, unlike the democratic party (who with apologies to Dave Weigel who considers this sentence “standard republican deflection”) give their ex Klan Members the job of President Pro Tempre of the Senate until death as late as 2010.

I’m not a southerner, and anyone who thinks the citizens councils of the Jim Crow south believed in racial equality is deluding themselves, but that not what the question was. The questions were “why there was no violence” and “what he remembered as a 16 year old kid” who ( as we will see later) had other priorities. So lets see if the statement in question is supported:

Tom McGuire examines the case:

I don’t think Barbour claimed the Councils were led by integrationist progressives on the right side of history; I think he claimed they helped keep the peace. Two sources say they did, against which we have to weigh Matt’s shock and awe.

He quotes noted segregationists David Halberstam Neil McMillen (and yes I’m being sarcastic).

Meanwhile as we also seen in the interview Barbour attended MLK’s rally in his town …

“I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

Did you go? I asked.

“Sure, I was there with some of my friends.”

I asked him why he went out.

“We wanted to hear him speak.”

but had (ahem) other priorities:

I asked what King had said that day.

“I don’t really remember. The truth is, we couldn’t hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”

As you might guess on the left this is all over this (Journolist redux) over at Ace’s spot some good points are made:

First, both Barbour and Yglesias can be right. Based on the profile it’s clear that many people in Barbour’s home town (including his brother Jeppie, the then Mayor) held beliefs that simply were reprehensible about blacks but none the less managed to take a relatively benign course of action in integrating the community.

That’s very true, again; that is the question that was asked.  Meanwhile shades of a double standard:

Obama skated by on Bill Ayers by saying he was a child when Ayers was bombing buildings and killing people. Of course Ayers past wasn’t the issue, it was his unapologetic defense of it and the wisdom of a presidential candidate associating himself with such a man in the present.

Barbour was 8 years old when the 1955 campaign to intimidate supporters of school integration Yglesias cites was conducted. What’s the relevance of that to Barbour or his memories of integration efforts in the 60’s?

If Barbour were associating with men who still believed in segregation or defended their role in opposing it back in the day (as Ayers does about his terrorist past and continued belief in violence as a political tool), I’d be the first to say he has a disqualifying problem. But that’s not the charge, is it?

Oh and if supporting segregation is disqualifying (and again no one is claiming Barbour did any such thing, then or now), then I’d like liberals to explain their on going love affair with Jimmy Carter.

Drew M also points out that if you are from the North you have a particular view of the south drummed into you. When it came to Southerners I was rather bigoted and self righteous at one time and it took some years to get over it. Meanwhile Stacy McCain who is a Southerner provides some education about the “solid” south:

I don’t care how many times liberals invoke “The Southern Strategy,” that still doesn’t make it true. The Democratic Party remained a viable and even dominant political force in the South for three decades after the end of segregation.

Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 and Southern Democrat Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. The Democratic Party maintained control of the Georgia state legislature until 2003 and it was not until this year — let me check my calendar, yeah, it’s 2010 — that Republicans gained a majority in the Alabama state legislature.

As much as it may flatter the vanity of liberals to think that the Democratic “Solid South” ended in 1964 — and that the success of the GOP in the Sunbelt is therefore somehow attributable to redneck bigotry — it simply is not true.

And I’m sick and tired of pious lectures from arrogant fools whose moral horizons can be summarized in two words: “Vote Democrat.”

Even today’s uninformed “students” of history can use the net to find that out, but of course our scholarly friends of the left who think that C. S. Lewis is a mere children’s author may not know this.

So lets review the facts briefly:

  • The Citizen’s councils in Yazoo City kept out the Klan and kept violence out of the city.
  • The members of the citizen’s councils of the south in the 60’s were (like Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln and Margaret Sanger) not believers in the equality of races.
  • If you were 8 years old in 1955 and lived in the south odds are your parents, grandparents and neighbors were all people whose views on race were likely not the same as our views today.
  • Given the choice between caring about race or girls, 16 years olds, even those who will grow up to be pols like Haley Barbour, will choose girls over Martin Luther King every time. (Does he read rule 5 Sunday?)

And the final rule as told by Hotair

If he’s the nominee, Democrats will spend six solid months shrieking about racism in order to deflect attention from Obama’s record.

Mitigating factor: That’s actually their game plan no matter who the nominee is.

That’s pretty much it.

No winners + No Originality + No Transparency = No Credibility for No Labels

Posted: December 14, 2010 by datechguy in elections, internet/free speech, opinion/news, politics
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On Morning Joe they are pushing the whole No Labels story but Ann Althouse was not impressed

Every couple of months we get something like this, don’t we? It’s the “Coffee Party” all over again — isn’t it? — an attempt by elite Democrats to create the impression of a grass-roots movement. It never works. [Remember “One Nation”?] And “No Labels” is such a silly… uh… label. It has a certain nostalgic 60s vibe: I ain’t lookin’ to… analyze you, categorize you, finalize you or advertise you…. But I came from the 60s, and I’m sick of that vibe when it’s used to advertise to me.

Well its a new moment I’m sure it is not unoriginal is it. Well Nice Deb says not so much:

NL: We are frustrated and concerned about the tone of politics.

CP: Critical policy discussions are subjected to a perpetual cacophony of misinformation designed to breed cultural resentment.

NL: We are passionate about addressing America’s challenges.

CP: We believe that by talking and learning together – we can take action to solve the problems facing our nation

NL: We are Democrats, Republicans and Independents.

CP: …we are non-partisan

NL: We believe hyper-partisanship is destroying our politics and paralyzing our ability to govern.

CP: The ugliness on television, on talk radio, and on blogs and conspiracy emails is alienating to the vast majority of Americans.

Hey it’s just a coincidence, I’m sure they aren’t stealing logos or anything from other organizations. Gateway Pundit:

The RINO-Leftist group “No Labels” completely stole their logo-design from a New York website “More Party Animals.”

Don’t worry Ben Smith has it covered:

No Labels designer Dave Warren, a Madison Avenue vet whose firm is FLY Communications, said the similarity is just a clip-art driven coincidence:

Well this is a new group and it is all about doing things the right way so I’m sure they are very public about their sources of funding…or maybe not Says Salon:

No Labels, the new centrist pro-“common sense” advocacy group that launched at a high-profile New York conference today, will not be revealing to the public who is putting up the money for the effort.

Salon asked No Labels spokesman Adam Segal if the nonprofit group, which has reportedly raised at least $1 million so far, would reveal the sources of its funding now or in the future. Segal declined to comment on the record. That $1 million has already paid for the big conference at Columbia today, a flashy website, a new logo, and a P.R. guy. The Wall Street Journal did report the names of three wealthy donors last month (more on this below), but it’s unknown how much they gave and who else is involved.

No Labels is organized as a 501(c)(4), which means that it is not legally required to release the identities of donors. You may remember that designation from the midterm elections, when similarly organized groups spent millions of anonymously donated dollars on campaign ads.

You mean the same folks who derided the hidden money in politics is hiding something? Amazing! Well politico mentions who is involved:

And its speakers—who ranged from Republican moderates like ex-Virginia Rep. Tom Davis to liberal Democrats like New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand—sang the praises of cooperation and compromise.

But the only Republicans present at Columbia University’s modern, square Alfred Lerner Hall seemed to be those who had recently lost primary races, such as South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis and Delaware Rep. Mike Castle, or former Republicans like Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. No other senior elected Republican officials were in attendance,

All of these people are folks who lost and are part of the establishment, it’s as bi-partisan as I am (and I’m NOT), so what is it all about? Stacy McCain who writes for money and doesn’t pretend otherwise has the answer:

All of which is to say that this is an outright scam, and the only question you really need to ask about this kind of political hustle is: Cui bono?

Who benefits here? What’s the bottom line? Where’s the payoff, who’s paying and who’s getting paid? Before we identify the sow, let’s see which piglets are sucking the teats:

It’s something of an odd conceit, given the decentralized way powerful grass-roots movements generally come together these days. After all, MoveOn.org and the Tea Party groups sprang up organically and in a decentralized way, embraced by angry citizens circulating online petitions and holding rallies.
By contrast, No Labels was created by two Washington consultants, the Democratic fund-raiser Nancy Jacobson and the Republican image-shaper Mark McKinnon, and its slick opening event featured throngs of journalists, free boxed lunches and a song written for the occasion by the pop sensation Akon.

Ding! Ding! Ding! This scam is funded by Democratic money and scripted by the man whose name is a synonym for everything that’s wrong with the Republican Party.

So this No Labels operation is a stealth-Democrat ripoff perpetrated with the help of two-faced RINO backstabbers.

Or to put it another way, it is an attempt by consultants to stay relevant and keep making money and stay relevant because if the actual grass-roots are put in play, then their ability to suck money off of taxpayer dime is kaput!

I make my living selling myself and my radio show. When people buy from me they meet me and know exactly what they are getting. These people are selling a wisp of smoke that doesn’t really exist.

Will they be able to fool enough people to change elections? Likely not, but they might manage to keep themselves in other people’s money for a while, and that’s what it really is all about. It’s the time share media all over again.

Memeorandum thread here.

Update: Doug Powers at Michelle’s has a new logo for them. Somehow it looks familiar

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