Month: October 2009

Palin boosts Boehner’s health care address.

Via her Facebook account, of course:

Mark my words – tomorrow is the game changer! Tune in to hear common sense solutions that bury the false accusations that conscientious members of Congress have no solutions to meet America’s health care challenges.

If you’re like me, shaking your head wondering why all the miscommunication between Washington and the American people who have been saying, “Please hear what we’re saying about our desire for health care reform,” then tomorrow will be a refreshing time of clarity for all.

As she notes, preview here. This will be interesting to see for two reasons; first off, as Dan Riehl notes this should provide Rep. Boehner’s address with a bit more traffic than these things usually get.  I’ll be interested to see whether or not it’ll be a significant spike, but it should be something.  Second: if you were holding out hope that former Governor Palin was going to play third-party advocate… you might as well stop.  This is her way of saying that NY-23 is a special case, not a general one; and that she’s still in, and in with, the GOP.

[Insert tired, yet labored Halloween cliche here.]

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Corzine: for leasing the Turnpike before he was against it…

…then for it again, and now against it…

Thursday, New York Times:

The Democratic governor, Jon S. Corzine, says he may revisit his plan to lease the New Jersey Turnpike to raise cash — a proposal that he abandoned last year in the face of intense opposition from lawmakers and voters.

Friday, Philly.com:

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine says he has no plans to increase tolls or lease toll roads.

(The New York Times is sticking with their version.)

Via Jim Geraghty, who also pointed out this report that Christie spent the day hammering this.  Which is smart of Christie: speaking as somebody who grew up in NJ, looking like you want to muck around with the toll roads situation is contraindicated.

Contraindicated.

Moe Lane

PS:  Chris Christie for Governor.

Crossposted to RedState.

The Telegraph wins the Internets.

This is an epic-level paragraph on the problems with getting Iran to negotiate about its nuclear program in good faith:

“It’s like playing chess with a monkey,” said one diplomat close to the talks. “You get them to checkmate, and then they swallow the king.”

That had to have been a Brit making that statement, by the way. No American would dare.

Via Hot Air Headlines.

More Democrats behaving badly?

While I felt that my response to this Washington Post article involving the investigation of seven PMA Porkers* was pretty succinct (mad giggling usually is), this follow-up article describing the document disclosure (completely accidental, of course) and some more names to watch deserves at least a bullet points list.  Also of interest to ethics investigators, apparently:

  • Charles Rangel (D, NY): Junketing to Caribbean islands on private companies’ dimes (illegal).
  • Alan Mollohan (D, WV): may be subject to DoJ probe over failure to disclose real estate disclosures.
  • Jane Harman (D, CA): subpoenas over potential trading of favors involving Israeli lobbyists.
  • Sam Graves (R, MO): Actually, they cleared him.  But the WaPo knew that they needed to not have this be completely a Democratic list.
  • Maxine Waters (D, CA): Not in the document, apparently, – but the ethics panel is investigating her for potentially getting her husband’s bank in on bailout money.  The WaPo felt the need to mention this, so it’s all right if I do.
  • Laura Richardson (D, CA): Likewise not in the document; likewise under investigation for failure to disclose; likewise mentioned by the WaPo.

All in all… oh, we are going to have so much fun in the spring and summer of 2010.

Moe Lane

*H/T Hot Air & Instapundit.

Crossposted to RedState.

There should be a word for ‘blustering cowardice.’ Hmm. ‘Graysonian?’

In a previous post I wrote some unkind (note: not ‘inaccurate’) words about Jon Corzine, and how he’s not being especially brave this election cycle. Of course, given that this guy (Rep. Alan Grayson, D-FL) is held up as a standard for speaking-truth-to-power among the Left, maybe that’s not so surprising:

That was taken from a larger clip done by O’Reilly and improved with several stills showing politicians from both parties doing precisely what Alan Grayson is whining that nobody expects him to do: answer questions in the hallway, just as if he was a regular human being and everything. You’d think that a guy who’s trying to make a buck off of his supposed tough-guy image would be eager to appear on a show like O’Reilly and take the fight to Fox; then again, that would assume that you believed that said tough-guy image was actually true to begin with.

No wonder that Central Floridan activists have already created a site dedicated to getting rid of him next year (H/T: the Orlando Sentinel).  Normally, this sort of thing waits until there’s an actual candidate for opposition to coalesce around; then again, normally sitting Congressmen don’t call female civil servants ‘K Street whores.’

Moe Lane

PS: You know, Grayson: you weren’t the only person in the universe who was always picked last for dodgeball. It’s just that the rest of us mostly got over it in college.

Crossposted to RedState.

Christie to Corzine: ‘Man up, and *say* I’m fat.’

“I’m pretty fat, Don… 550 pounds.”

Via Hot Air comes this Neil Cavuto piece on Don Imus’ interview with Chris Christie, where Chris addresses the two central issues of the Corzine campaign: Christie’s weight, and Corzine’s inability to even face that forthrightly.

“Hey listen: if you’re gonna do it, at least man up and say I’m fat.”

The phrase ‘wusses out’ was then used – accurately – followed by a couple of good lines about the need to keep stimulating the donut/restaurant industries. Give it a listen: like Allahpundit, I think that this is good retail politics, and it really does hammer home just how empty the Corzine campaign has been. I recognize that any Democratic campaign these days is going to revolve around trying to scare voters about the evvvvvil Republicans, but Corzine is being especially stereotypical about his response to what has essentially become a vanity campaign for him at this point. Which, given the way that he was fired from Goldman-Sachs and was more or less irrelevant as a Senator, is probably not too surprising. Depressing – why does the state of NJ have to pay for his therapy? – but not too surprising.

Moe Lane

PS: Chris Christie for Governor.

Crossposted to RedState.