I

n celebration … no, that’s not the right word … in recognition of the seating of Al Franken as the Dems’ 60th Senator, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has just released this spot:

Yeah, I know the GOP is hardly perfect and has a ton of lessons to learn, but I have to say, this message motivates me to open my wallet.

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R

ahmbama has stepped in it, and the stink isn’t washing off.  The Deceptive Duo’s attempt to move the Census to the White House so they can play Chicago ward politics with it has sparked more outrage than even Porkasaurus Socialistum, the stimulus spending bill – and none too soon.  The GOP, seemingly on the verge of being reclassified an invertibrate, is finding its spine again.

House Republican leaders said Thursday they’re ready to go to court against President Obama if he doesn’t scuttle his plan to move the census into the purview of the Oval Office, saying it’s an unconstitutional abuse of power. …

Under Obama’s plan, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau, who has yet to be named, would report to White House senior management in addition to the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau.

A Senate committee has scheduled a hearing next month on the potential change. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are also pushing for an investigation.

GOP leaders sent Obama a letter to the White House on Wednesday demanding a reversal of the plan.

“If the president doesn’t acquiesce to our letter, then we will seek the courts,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., a ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said at a news conference Thursday. (Fox)

That’s what I want to hear!  Obama promised an open administration and this outrage flies in the face of that promise. He deserves a long, hard, embarassing spotlight on this one, and I am glad to see the GOP is ready to shine it on him, instead of just shining it on.

Michelle Malkin linked to a post by former Census director Bruce Chapman in Discovery Blog:

It would be more expedient for the White House to have a pliable Secretary of Commerce in place if the aim is to “re-evaluate” the conduct of the 2010 Census in order to introduce adjustment of results through sampling and computer modeling. Gregg presumably would not have gone along–and would have been hard to run over.

But the legal issues will remain even if a willing partisan is nominated and confirmed as Commerce Secretary. There is a 1999 Supreme Court ruling that would make sampling-based adjustment difficult in the absence of compelling evidence that the customary hard count would be less credible. And that evidence not only is lacking, but a three year statistical study that was finished in 2003 to respond to this issue concluded just the opposite: adjusting the Census numbers through sampling and computer models could lead to a less credible Census result. A hard count has always been legally defensible. A fuzzy “adjusted” Census–where figures at the Census tract and block level would be demonstrably erroneous in many cases–could invite endless litigation and bad will.

Another problem for the Obama White House if it wants to change the Census approach: planning for the 2010 Census has been underway for years and now is in preparation for testing. The disruptions caused by an Administration decision to change those plans would cause great problems and probably agitate the resistance of career statisticians charged with responsibility for conducting the Census.

So, you see that while the vision was audacious, the execution was naive.  Rahmbama thinks the November vote provides a mandate for crapping on the Constitution and shuttling all promises of openess, but they’re not getting away with this one easily.

And here’s the kicker from Chapman:

Finally, one wonders if the President understands that the Census is a function of government that requires not only integrity in fact but also the appearance of integrity. The reputation of the Census should not be compromised. It is hard enough to get people to cooperate in the conduct of the Census without creating a reputation for politicization.

OBVIOUSLY, the Census must be above politicization, and the fact that Rhambama didn’t think this important enough to be a barrier shows an utter lack of integrity, a commitment to move America as far to the left as possible in the years they have in power.

And they quickness of their moves makes me think they may not be counting on getting a second four years.

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Welcome To The World Of Idiots

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here’s a fire! Quick, grab the fire extinguisher! … No, wait … we’re too stupid to use a fire extinguisher!

At least that’s how the world’s ultimate nanny state, the once-proud global empire of the United Kingdom:

Fire extinguishers could be removed from communal areas in flats throughout the country because they are a safety hazard, it has emerged.

The life-saving devices encourage untrained people to fight a fire rather than leave the building, risk assessors in Bournemouth decided.

Dorset Fire and Rescue defended the move, saying: ‘Obviously, in some cases, an extinguisher could come in useful but, with new building regulations, every escape route should be completely fireproof.’

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents backed their removal because different extinguishers should be used on different types of fire. (Source, via What Bubba Knows)

Yeah, that’s definitely too much for mere citizens like us to understand. Better we burn up than try to fend for ourselves without the help of our state-employed saviors, who are are smart enough to save us.  Bring on the Nannies. Continue Reading »

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M

y Facebook friend Dan Chmielewki, a Dem with whom I happily can have intelligent conversations, informs me that 17 percent of this year’s electorate were 18-24 year-olds, and they went 68/30 for Obama.

Imagine that – a tiny six-year slice of the electorate, perhaps 10 percent of it or so in terms of demographics, making up 17 percent of the vote. And the other CSM is telling us Obama hasn’t left them at the polls; he’s still wooing them:

The president-elect gives every indication he will continue to solicit input from young voters – though not just from youth. His transition website, www.change.gov, asks visitors to “share ideas.” As president, he plans Internet “fireside chats” with the public and online town halls with the cabinet. From the millions of e-mail addresses that his campaign collected, one can imagine a mass mobilization when important votes come up in Congress.

The same article tells us this gen, unlike some of its predecessors, is actually turned on by government:

Encouragingly, this generation actually wants to interact with government, politics, and public service. That’s a reversal of the “bowling alone” years of 1990s civic apathy among youth. A fall pre-election survey by Harvard’s Institute of Politics shows that almost 60 percent of voters ages 18 to 24 are personally interested in doing some kind of public service.

Nearly half said that could include working for federal, state, or local government. A third of the total said they would consider working for a campaign, and a fifth said they would consider public office.

If nothing else, Obama is exceptionally gifted at understanding demographics, and using that understanding to connect where the connecting is most fruitful. It paid off in this election – he pulled in the poor, the young and the tired-of-it-alls and fired their engines with racing fuel, not regular.

But now comes the real test, particularly with the youth vote. Obama’s “Facebooking” them, inviting dialog, seeking input, heck, probably even posting photos. But this is a generation with a finely tuned phony-meter, and if Obama passes from grassroots to Astroturf roots, they’ll sense it and rebel against it.

Meanwhile, the always quotable (that is not a compliment) Gary Kamiya writes smugly today:

The painful truth for conservatives is that the dogs aren’t eating their dog food — and every national trend indicates that they will never eat it again. Which means the GOP faces a wrenching choice: remain true to its increasingly irrelevant and rejected ideology and fade into political insignificance, or remake itself as essentially a more moderate version of the Democratic Party.

Never say never, Kamiya. Remember, the last time youth turned out in similar numbers, 1984, they went overwhelmingly for Reagan, sending Mondale down to crashing defeat.

The Dems have the youth today, but they also have one of the most exceptional candidates in American history. Not exceptionally qualified, not exceptionally right, but exceptionally appealing. He made that appeal by promising almost everything to almost everyone, a tactic that cannot be delivered upon in the end. Someone’s bound to be disappointed – a whole lot of someones.  As Cliff May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies so nicely put it:

Give Obama his due: It is an exceptional politician who can win the support of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, and Kenneth Duberstein, former chief of staff to President Reagan; of William Ayers, an unrepentant terrorist, and Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, founder of modern intellectual conservatism; of Rashid Khalidi, an Israel-hater, and Edgar Bronfman, former head of the World Jewish Congress. Here’s a not-very-bold prediction: A year from now, someone is going to be sorely disappointed.

Combine that cold wake-up call with the risks inherent with trying to be cool and connected to several tens of millions of online friends, and you have a recipe for disappointment. Add to that the fact that in 2016, whether or not Obama wins reelection in 2012, the Dems are almost certain to nominate some old warhorse with “he’s next in line” charisma.

Meanwhile, we’ll get to study Obama from the sidelines, learning what works and doesn’t work without risking immediate consequences, and begin preparing for the return everyone but Kamiya knows is going to happen.

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merican University’s Center for the Study of the American Voter has dispensed with all the rah-rah about this being a huge election.  You know, 10 million new registrants, a high water mark in a New America.  Not so, it found:

Despite lofty predictions by some academics, pundits, and practitioners that voter turnout would reach levels not seen since the turn of the last century, the percentage of eligible citizens casting ballots in the 2008 presidential election stayed at virtually the same relatively high level as it reached in the polarized election of 2004.

… the percentage of Americans who cast ballots for president in this year’s presidential election will reach between 126.5 million and 128.5 million when all votes have been counted by early next month. If this prediction proves accurate, turnout would be at either exactly the same level as in 2004 or, at most, one percentage point higher (or between 60.7 percent and 61.7 percent).

This shows a lot.  Big, phony surges in registration don’t lead to big, real surges in turnout.  Obama’s supporters were confident in his victory.  For many, the urge to vote didn’t overcome the fact that It was cold and lousy and lines were long in many precincts.

Republican voting was down 1.3 percent, a sign either of surety Obama would win, dispondency over the McCain selection or worry over the Palin selection.  Or cold, lousy weather and long lines.

Dem voting was up 2.6 percent, clearly attributable to Obama, especially if you look at states with high black populations, like NC and GA, which had record turn-outs.

But most significant is that the Dems increased their votes cast for the seventh straight election.  For a GOP that needs to throw out everything and start anew, one team should be breaking down Dem registration and voter turn-out strategies.  We don’t want to be – indeed can’t be – a new version of ACORN, but we can do better. 

And we have to come up with a candidate that can move the masses.

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W

ho energized the conservative Republican base?

Who got millions to open their wallets and purses and contribute big bucks to the campaign?

Who stood up to corrupt, sold-out, old-school party hacks and demanded a new, greater level of integrity?

Who best manifests the conservative principles we need to get back to in order to leave the political wilderness?

Who can we trust to speak unflinchingly and apologetically on behalf of American conservatism?

There’s only one clear choice for the new head of the Republican National Committee – the Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.

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W

hile the more sober Dem commentators are trying to explain away Obama’s fascination with redistribution of wealth, the more blood-thirsty are busy dancing on the grave of the conservative movement. They’re forgetting that the body’s not in the ground yet.

Case in point:

The modern conservative movement is dying in front of our eyes, and its death throes aren’t pretty. As John McCain heads for likely defeat, the GOP is eating itself. Right-wing politicians and pundits who never criticized Bush in eight years are suddenly jumping ship like rats, while bitter-end loyalists angrily accuse them of being “pathetically opportunistic.” After months of veering from one tactic to the next, McCain has finally settled on one message for his campaign, but it’s absurd: claiming that the party whose signature is tax cuts for the rich is really on the side of Joe the Plumber.

Meanwhile, 3.1 million real Joe the Plumbers across America are sending Barack Obama hundreds of millions of dollars, a torrent of cash that is helping to flush the GOP down the national toilet.

That’s the always quotable (not a compliment) Gary Kamiya, writing today in Salon. (You may remember Kamiya; I wrote rather extensively in September about his appalling ignorant and sexist piece, The Dominatrix, subtitled, “Sarah Palin is trying to seduce independent voters.” In his self-penned Salon bio, he admits he:

…lives on a street with cable cars with his wife, Kate Moses, and her son Zachary. He likes big cities, ’50s paperbacks with gratuitous cleavage on their covers, Steve Young, backpacking, Italy and people who like to talk. …

After moving to California, he attended Berkeley High, where the student government was run by a dadaist cabal; put in a brief, LSD-riddled stint at Yale; and some aimless years later washed up in the UC-Berkeley English Department …

In other words, he’s one of those San Francisco loons who hasn’t invested a brain cell in trying to understand conservative thought because he’s so busy making snide jokes and outrageous statements about it, thinking all the time he’s mainstream. Oh, how I hope and pray McCain pulls it out – stopping Obamadness is fine, but grinding Kamiya’s face in his smug self-assuredness is even better!

Whatever the outcome of the election, it won’t be the death of the American conservative movement.  Kamiya seems to miss the point that McCain is not the captain of the movement. Most of us voted for someone else in the primaries and accepted McCain with some reluctance when the old fighter got the nomination as conservatives split their votes between several candidates. But since then, Obama’s hard left, redistributive politics would make Lincoln Chafee look like a conservative Republican, so McCain’s OK with us.

You just can’t blame him for what’s going on with conservatism. That happened last spring and summer, as we watched a moderate take the ticket; the campaign since hasn’t been about conservatism, despite the partial return to the fold Palin brought with her.

Back to Joe the Plumber. Kamiya can rattle his PC-approved, SF-issued blunt, wobbly saber, but he does so while ignoring the changes in the poll numbers since redistribution of wealth entered the campaign with Joe. In spouting the 3.1 million donors, he ignores that Obama is running a crooked campaign, refusing to set up contribution software that matches the donor’s address with that on the credit card, so he can steal contributions.  How many of your 3.1 million are from people who are committing fraud with Obama’s approval, Kamiya? How many are donations from King Kong, Bart Simpson or Daffy Duck?

You have to wonder what world Kamiya’s been on for the last eight years:

There’s something surreal about how fast the GOP has gone from arrogant triumphalism to its death throes. Just yesterday, the GOP’s mighty Titanic was cruising along, its opulent decks lined with fat-cat financiers and neoconservative warmongers, all smoking cigars, drinking champagne and extolling the deathless virtues of their fearless captain. The compliant media issued glowing dispatches. Karl Rove cackled with glee as he plotted out a permanent Republican majority.

Rote, rote, rote; it’s the chant of the closed-eyed Left, even down to the thought that the media, the left-leaning, Obama-backing media, are compliant to the Bushies.

Kamiya goes on with more of this sort of analysis that, while it plays well with the majority of Salon readers, wholly misses the point.  And the point is as big as an elephant.  It is not conservativism that will die should Obama be elected, it is liberalism.  The capture of the Democrat Party by the hard-left, socialist, redistributive, anti-war, anti-American minority will have been realized and classic American liberalism, already on life support, will be euthanized.

As for conservatism, should Obama win, it will grow like Topsy, becoming healthier than ever.  Americans reject redistribution, as Gallup found way back in June:

When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly—by 84% to 13%—prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.

Conservatism is the only wrench the 84 percent will have available to them to throw into the cogs of Obama’s socialist machine.  Thank goodness it’s a strong wrench.

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Life In A Liberal Democracy

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h, liberal democracies, where political discord is honored, debate is civil, where respect for opposing views is understood as the foundation of compromise, and where compromise is seen as the glue that binds together the republic.

Someone apparently forgot to teach this to the RNC Welcoming Committee, an anarchist group poised to disrupt this week’s GOP convention. Police raids at several of the groups’ domiciles resulted in the confiscation of:

Materials to create “sleeping dragons” (PVC pipe, chicken wire, duct tape), which is when protesters lock themselves together
Large amounts of urine, including three to five gallon buckets of urine
Wrist rockets (high-powered
slingshots)
A machete, hatchet and several throwing knives
a gas mask and filter
Empty glass bottles
Rags
Flammable liquids
Homemade caltrops (devises used to disable buses in roads)
Metal pipes
Axes
Bolt cutters
Sledge hammers
Repelling equipment
Kryptonite locks
Empty plastic buckets cut and made into shields
Material for protective padding
An Army helmet.

Read more about the raids here.

That’s not the stuff of peaceful protest, so we can thank the investigators at the St. Paul police who uncovered what the RNC Welcoming Committee was up to and pulled off a successful raid. The Left, however, does not share my view:

Members of various protest groups targeted in last night’s raid held a press conference today to express their anger and frustration.

The raid was an effort to “derail RNC protest organizing efforts and to intimidate and terrorize individuals and groups converging in the Twin Cities to exercise what are supposed to be their basic civil rights,” RNC Welcoming Committee member Tony Jones read from a statement.

“We will not be intimidated,” Jones exclaimed.

Yeah, well neither will we, punk. Continue Reading »

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ven though it’s after noon and I still haven’t posted anything on C-SM, I did get up pretty early this morning – 9 a.m. or so – and finding none of the clan ready to get up yet, I downloaded today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal into my Kindle - it took 75 cents and about 45 seconds to complete the transaction – and strolled over to the La Quinta Resort’s restaurant for granola from the breakfast buffet, which I woke up craving.

I used the Kindle’s underlining capability to highlight areas of interest I thought I’d share with my (mostly) non-vacationing (presumably) readers. I’ve linked to the on-line stories, some of which you may need subscriptions to read.

I’ll cover two stories here; the rest may become full posts if vacation time permits.

William McGurn wrote in The NAACP and Black Abortions about the shocking incidence of abortions in the black community and the NAACP’s failure to deal with it. It thought this passage was particularly illustrative; it follows a discussion of Dr. Alveda King, MLK’s neice, now an ardent opponent of abortion in general and black abortion in particular:

What Dr. King is alluding to is that abortion disproportionately affects African-Americans. A fact sheet from the Guttmacher Institute puts it this way: “Black women are 4.8 times as likely as non-Hispanic white women to have an abortion.” The Centers for Disease Control further report what this means: While about one out of every five white pregnancies ends in abortion, it’s nearly one out of every two for African-Americans.

Amazing how terse and unemotional words can be, especially when written by Guttmacher, a primary non-profit supporter of abortion, or a government agency.

Yes, the article does get into the eugenic beliefs that were core to Planned Parenthood’s formation, and the recent expose about Planned Parenthood’s willingness to accept funding from sources posing as racists who wanted the money used to kill black babies.

Now that the frighteningly abortion-radical Barack Obama supposedly represents black America, the chances of this dreadful situation changing any time soon is remote.

The big Page One profile today is of the GOP’s answer to George Soros, Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the money behind Freedom’s Watch, the GOP’s answer to MoveOn.org.

Adelson is an international casino owner with operations in Vegas and China, which means he’s gotten rich of the misery of others, the breakdown of families crushed by gambling debt, and kowtowing to the Beijingoists in order to get rights to build casinos in the People’s Republic.

Am I happy that someone who makes his living in such a dreadful and disgusting manner is bankrolling GOP 521s? Not really. Am I likely to contribute to Freedom’s Watch? Probably. Sometimes in politics you just have to hold your nose, and this is such a case because I’m with Adelson on two out of three of his main beliefs: The threat of Islamofascism and support for Israel. (The third big threat to America in his book is unionization of casinos. Like I say, I’m holding my nose.)

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