Reid-Angle debate according to Me and Maureen. Dana Perino takes on Dowd.

It’s amazing how 2 people can view the same event and come away with entirely different perspectives and different views on the outcome. I watched the Angle-Reid debate, just as Maureen Dowd (NYT famed columnist) did, although she was actually present and I was watching on CSPAN. By all accounts, including the very left leaning Las Vegas Sun, Angle won. And won big. (The Las Vegas Sun is the Air America of Las Vegas. It couldn’t remain in business because no one read it, hence no one purchased advertising on its pages. The only way it’s remained in Las Vegas is by a joint operating agreement with the Review-Journal, which means it’s measly few pages are inserted into the R-J.)

If you listened to Rush on Friday, he hit all the debate highlights of note, and for Reid there were many. The guy really sounded and looked like he was just no longer up to the job of Senator and especially not Majority Leader of the Senate. He was disjointed and out of focus. He had to keep falling back on the old democrat talking points, sharing nothing new and stating outright lies. He said it wasn’t until after he made his famous “this war is lost” comment that the surge took place. Not true. He told us that he became rich because  “as everyone knows, I was a successful lawyer” and he has “lived on a fixed income” since going to Washington. Both not true, unless you consider that because he votes for his own pay raises, that it’s a fixed income. From sometime before he graduated law school until today, minus 2 years, he was never in private practice. In fact, he’s never worked in the private sector as an adult.  He’s been on the government dole his entire adult life. I think the most distinctly leftist and for me, jaw dropping comment came when Reid said that insurance companies are not in business for altruistic reasons but because they want to make a profit. Stunningly socialist.

Angle was sharp and did not appear at all rehearsed. She stayed focused and on the attack. It put Reid back on his heels because I don’t believe that he expected this from Sharron. Dowd says that Sharron was simply mean. That she is a dupe of Karl Rove and other right-wing operatives whose target is Reid.  I have news for Dowd: Reid is the target of every conservative in America right now. She inferred that Angle wasn’t smart enough to know how to respond to these questions on her own and was in need of coaching from the heavy hitters.

But before she went after Sharron, Dowd was petty, catty and small minded with every well known Republican woman, from Christine O’Donnell to Sarah Palin. The jealousy of these left-wing hags has no limits, they attack in the cattiest of ways any conservative woman in the public eye and they condescend to those of us who are the unknown but loud mass. And after reading her response to dour Dowds column in todays NYT, I’m proud to be part of the Dana Perino crowd:

Usually I’d ignore [Maureen]. But most conservative women running for office don’t have time to stop and be petty. I can do that for them.

As I’ve said about Maureen: It must be hard to be that angry all the time. That’s why I stay cheerful — just to irritate her. Two can play at that game, sister.

 

 

Why they really want Rove, et al to disclose his donors

With the big noise that Obama’s making about so-called foreign donors to Republican action groups, it’s become clear that the Dems have their own motives for wanting to know who’s donating to these campaigns:

Democrats claim only to favor “disclosure” of donors, but their legal intimidation attempts are the best argument against disclosure. Liberals want the names of business donors made public so they can become targets of vilification with the goal of intimidating them into silence. A CEO or corporate board is likely to think twice about contributing to a campaign fund if the IRS or prosecutors might come calling. If Democrats can reduce business donations in the next three weeks, they can limit the number of GOP challengers with a chance to win and reduce Democratic Congressional losses.

The strategy got a test drive in Minnesota earlier this year after Target Corporation donated $100,000 cash and $50,000 of in-kind contributions to an independent group that ran ads supporting the primary candidacy of Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer. MoveOn.org accused the company of being anti-gay, organized a petition, and crafted a TV ad urging shoppers to boycott Target stores. Target made no further donations, and other companies that once showed an interest have since declined to contribute.

From the Wall Street Journal

This is despicable behavior by the left and causes a chilling effect on First Amendment rights. How do these people justify their actions or even look at themselves in the mirror?

Hey Leftists! come explain your piggish ways!

After the One Nation rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. How disrespectful of a hallowed monument. What pigs! (from the Patriot Post)

Has the right hijacked “the angry voter?”

What was just so recently a message, albeit fake, of Hope ‘n Change and Yes we can, has been replaced with ridicule for what the left is now calling “the angry voter.”  The A-word and the fact that those angry voters are voting against them, is by all public appearances, totally baffling to the left. They don’t understand why there are angry voters, they don’t want to understand it and don’t try to tell them why voters are angry because as far as they are concerned, this is all a right-wing “scheme.”

Yesterday, stumping for Coakley in MA,  Obama railed about what he sees as a republican strategy.  “[The republicans are] going to let them [the democrats] make the tough choices, and let them rescue the economy, and then we’re going to tap into that anger and frustration.”

Obama calls it a republican “sleight of hand.”

Obama and a parade of Democrats who appeared on stage before a crowd a local fire official put at 1,100 at Northeastern’s modest gymnasium spent much of their time trying to explain to the audience, and to themselves, how they had lost their grip on the public “anger” – a word that has replaced “hope” as the emotion Democrats are trying to channel.

“The people of Massachusetts are angry, like they should be,” said Rep. Michael Capuano, a fiery Boston-area liberal who lost in the Democratic primary while running a different, more combative campaign that many local party officials now wish Coakley had run.

“They need to focus that anger in the right direction” – at “the people who put us in this position,” Capuano said.

Obama offered his own analysis of the voters’ anger.

“There were going to be some who stood on the sidelines, who were protectors of the big banks, protectors of the big insurance companies, protectors of the big drug companies who were going to say, ‘You know what, we can take advantage of this crisis,’” he told the crowd.

Paranoid much, Mr. Obama?

(As a side note, it’s interesting that he is blaming the right for being the protectors of the “big banks” but is it not his treasury secretary who is now on the Congressional hot seat for alleged back room dealings with Goldman-Sachs? The right is protecting the big drug companies? Is it not big Pharma who have been meeting behind closed doors with TheOne?)

But taking advantage of a crisis does sound a little Alinsky, doesn’t it?

Oh!  how it pains when the enemy uses your tactics against you, even when that only happens in your imagination.

What is it ol’ Saul said? Power is what the enemy THINKS you have.

The right is not looking for a crisis to take advantage of. They aren’t that devious. But yes, they are mad as hell. And this is a crisis the left cannot harness and make their own. If they try to do that, they will only further alienate and anger the voters.

This is all a precursor to what the next 10 months will be. This is the message that the left will be trying to carry: the angry voter being hijacked by the do-nothing, status quo right.

Obama debuted the message yesterday in Massachusetts. I think we’ll be hearing it a lot more in the coming months.

[Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31596.html#ixzz0cxp6Rtk2]

Conservatives are the left’s scapegoat

The president, the self proclaimed “citizen of the world,” dropped into Denmark for 5 hours, made an I-me-mine speech, then jetsetted out and the left is blaming Bush and conservatives for an Olympic-sized loss?

This is called projection.

I didn’t care if Chicago won this thing or not, although news reports were that many Chicagoans were against it.

But once again, TheOne was told NO by the world and the left can’t accept that it could be his own fault. It couldn’t be that TheOne took for granted that he could just drop in and give a glittering speech and win on his charisma and teleprompter-eloquence. The world is watching him and the world leaders are finding him to be naive and inexperienced – exactly what the right said about him last year during the campaign. So far, he’s not shown that he can step up to the plate and dispell any of those reservations. In fact, his indecision on Afghanistan and his lack of substance on his own healthcare reforms only reinforce those opinions of him. And reports are that his world apology tour didn’t endear him to our allies (think Sarkosy here.)

So TheOne and his staff (Valerie) miscalculated and messed up in Denmark and somehow that translates that conservatives caused this embarrassing Olympic slap down.  We need to get used to this. The left won’t take any responsibility if anything goes south for this president. For the next 3 years, every failure or faultering by this president will be OUR fault.

Why the left is so afraid of the TEA Party

Most of us think that right on the heels of the Declaration of Independence came the greatest work of mankind, the Constitution: Thomas Jefferson closeted himself up after declaring the country separate and independent from Great Britain, and then wrote the Constitution.

Not so.

The Declaration of Independence was written over 10 years before the Constitution. The Founders tried a thing called the Articles of Confederation, first. It ended up not working out very well, or at least as many of the Founders believed.

It took a little known and little understood rebellion to bring about the birth of the Constitution. Daniel Shays, a farmhand who had fought in the Revolutionary War, at Bunker Hill and Lexington, came home to Massachusetts to find himself penniless, property-less and on his way to debtor’s prison due to back-breaking taxes and debt and no compensation for his military service. He also found that he was not alone in his suffering.

The long and short of it is that Shays was one of many Revolutionary War veterans and farmers who demanded redress from the government and the government retaliated by doing some really unconstitutional things like suspending habeas corpus – holding people in jail without trial – denying the right of assembly and confiscating property.

To be clear, these farmers didn’t want to topple a government. They just wanted a fair shake from the sheriffs, the courts and the government. To show they meant business, they would swoop in to villages and surround courthouses, menacing the law officials and the judges. Local officials were loath to call out a militia, knowing that they would likely desert rather than take up arms against the unhappy farmers and their former Revolutionary comrades-in-arms.

But make no mistake, this was not a bloodless revolt. Hundreds were killed and thousands thrown in jail.

This rebellion put a real fear in the ambassador to the Court of St. James, John Adams, whose cousin and great American Revolutionary leader, Samuel Adams, had a hand in suspending habeas corpus and wrote a Riot Act in Massachusetts. This particular act was similar to one in Great Britain that gave power to local officials to order crowds larger than twelve to disperse if they were deemed unlawful or riotous.  If the group failed to break up in a certain amount of time, they were held as guilty of a felony and the penalty, in Great Britain at least, was punishment by death.

George Washington

George Washington, who had returned to his beloved Mount Vernon to once again be a gentleman farmer and landowner became alarmed at the news trickling down from the Northeast. “For God’s sake tell me what is the cause of all these commotions,” he implored a friend in the fall of 1787. Was it being promoted by the Tories to cause unrest and discontent or, he wondered, were these real grievances by the citizens that required just attention from the government? The most worrisome part of this all, for Washington, was the appearance to the Brits and Europeans that America could not govern itself.

Far from all this in Paris was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson didn’t seem to be as alarmed as his revolutionary comrades were. To Abigail Adams, he wrote “I like a little rebellion now and then. It’s like a storm in the atmosphere.” Of course, he didn’t favor a bloody rebellion but he feared repression and tyranny more. Jefferson believed that a better educated citizenry and the free exchange of ideas was the path for a great republic. He believed in a free press and said that he’d rather have newspapers and no government than a government without newspapers.

The Jefferson Memorial

Jefferson could not be too alarmed, yet at least, at the rebellions in Massachusetts because after all,  they had ALL been rebels and revolutionaries, and only a short time ago. That year – 1787 – with constant correspondence between John and Abigail (in London) and himself, he kept the same steady line with the Adamses that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

At 81, Ben Franklin was at home in Philadelphia, overseeing the addition to his house, spending time at the city’s public library which he had established, enjoying his grandchildren and visiting with friends at the American Philosophical Society, which he helped found. He would soon be called back into service when the 2nd Continental Congress would meet again and establish for all time, the Constitution of the United States of America.

Ben’s brother, James, the editor of the New England Courant was thrown into jail when Ben was 16. At that time, Ben wrote that there is “no such thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech which is the right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the Right of another.” He believed that the overthrow of a nation will only begin with the subduing of free speech and a free press.

James Madison

Enter the Father of Federalism, James Madison, Father of the Constitution; the Bill of Rights; an author of the Federalist Papers (which is still acknowledged as the most important commentary on the Constitution); a Founding Father of the United States of America; as Secretary of State for Jefferson, he would be instrumental in the Louisiana Purchase which would double the size of the nation and he would become the 4th president of the United States. His ingenious three-branch federal system with its checks and balances was the basis for the Constitution that we have today. Madison, like Jefferson and Washington, was a Virginian and like both men, he would leave the presidency poorer than when he entered it. This man alone could take up volumes of blog for me. Suffice it to say that this was the intellectual hero who rode into Philadelphia, in 1787 and was instrumental in creating the true and sustaining great nation that the United States of America would become.

And the catalyst to this Constitutional Convention of great thinkers and Founders, which produced the most magnificent document of all mankind was a little known, little understood grassroots rebellion in Massachusetts. To be clear, there were other things, aside from the Shay’s Rebellion that were happening at the same time and were weighing heavily on creating a “more perfect union” and that called together such great minds as those mentioned: high tariffs, a financial depression, non-uniform currency, to name a few.

But in the subconscious of the modern day Leftist,  grassroots uprisings like the TEA Parties strike fear in their hearts (if any have hearts) of a 222 year old rebellion that was the lightening rod for the Founders and the foundation of the greatest nation known to man.

Yes, they should be afraid.