Quote of the Day, Jim Geraghty edition. #rsrh

On Speaker Pelosi:

Today her way of handling the problem of the rebellion of Bart Stupak and the other pro-life Democrats was to declare, “Let me say this: This is not about abortion!” Ma’am, to them it is. And until they get language that assures them that federal money will not be used to facilitate abortions, they’re not going to sign on. This can’t be as hard to grasp as you make it seem.

It’s not, but there are certain things that the Speaker of the House does not dare say, and ‘We have to at least pretend that we concede pro-lifers to be actual human beings’ is one of them.  This can lead to interesting verbal gymnastics.

The *wrong* Big Question.

(Via Instapundit) The Hill’s Congress Blog asks a question which has a very obvious answer:

Should Obama get tough with Congress?

or

Should President Barack Obama be more assertive in pushing the rest of his legislative agenda?

…and the answer is, of course, “Yes.” Presidents always need to get tough with Congress.  They particularly need to get tough with Congress when both the legislative and executive branches are held by the same party; when that happens, the former is prone to using the golden opportunity to do something extravagant and stupid… like, say, trying to pass two insanely expensive, ill-thought, transformational pieces of unpopular legislation right after passing a recklessly high, pork-laden spending bill on a party-line vote.  First-term Presidents doubly particularly need to get tough with Congress, assuming of course that they want to also be second-term Presidents.  So, it’s the wrong question.

The right question is:

Can Obama get tough with Congress?

The President obviously can be more assertive – that’s not particularly hard – but whether he’s actually able to make Congress do things has yet to be determined.  There’s been no indication that he even knows how.  And the primary carrot/stick that the administration was going to use for compliance (“I will campaign for Democrats who follow my lead.”) looked a lot more credible as a promise/threat in January 2009 than it does today.  Just ask Governors Deeds & Corzine, not to mention Senator Coakley.

All in all, at this point it may simply be too late for President to acquire any control over the 111st Congress.  And the future leaders of the 112th Congress have been busily taking notes.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The Pride & Prejudice & Zombies Trailer.

(Via Liber Ex Machina) Am I weak?

Yes, I am weak. This isn’t the trailer – it’s a good mashup of the 2005 movie trailer – but there is going to be a real one.  It’ll be starring Natalie Portman, who appears to be also a Jane Austen fan; and they seem kind of enthused about sticking with what made Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fun.

Meanwhile, The Whisperer in Darkness movie continues apace.

Two weeks to withdrawal on health care?

How nice of the White House to tell us how long they can hold out.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is ratcheting up the pressure on Congress to complete health-care legislation, setting March 18 as the deadline by which a final bill should be passed.

[snip]

The White House deadline means Congress would have exactly two weeks to pass a version of the existing Senate-approved bill in the House of Representatives and then pass a second bill filled with “fixes” in both chambers.

Two weeks. Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours. When we run out the clock, the White House will either have to embarrassingly declare that the health care discussion is over for now; or even more embarrassingly admit that they were irrelevant to the health care discussion in the first place. Either way, the longer this is delayed, the more (justifiably) scared and anxious wavering Democrats get.  Already they’re unsure of how much support they’re going to get from the administration on this; and now that it’s been made clear that there’s a firm timetable for withdrawal in place, that’s only going to make the precariousness of their positions even more clear*.

So… we run out the clock.  For the good of the country, and by the will of its people.

Moe Lane

*Unilateral timetables are like that – Wow!  Deja vu!

Crossposted to RedState.

So now the WH is *actively* fighting recognizing the Armenian Genocide. #rsrh

You’ll all be pleased to hear that apparently we no longer have any pressing domestic problems. At least, none that are more important than the need to squash recognition of the Armenian genocide.

White House Rebuffed In Effort to Kill Vote on House Bill Recognizing Armenian Genocide By Turks

The Obama administration asked the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to cancel a vote scheduled for today on a bill recognizing the Armenian genocide. The chairman of the committee, Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., is going forward with the bill “mark up” and vote regardless.

The bill, H. Res. 252, recognizes as genocide the “systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians” as ordered by the Turkish government from 1915 to 1923.  It’s the kind of statement then-Sen. Obama supported; as a candidate for president, he said, “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that President.”

Please note: this is technically not any more of a broken campaign promise than the broken one that it was before. I’m sure that the President intended to do a lot of things, once in office. Just like I’m sure that the President often means well.  That being said: you do realize that if you voted for this man on this issue you more or less threw your money away, yes? – Which is something that you should really take into consideration, next go-round.

Moe Lane

Berkeley students riot over 10K/year tuition.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Via Instapundit, Berkeley students are revolting.

A somewhat more measured take on the situation (God knows it wouldn’t be hard) can be found here. Essentially, the students are up in arms because UC-Berkeley students have to pay a whopping 20% of the average tuition for a private, comparable school like Stanford (to use the MercuryNews.com example). They’re having to do this because California keeps spending money that it doesn’t actually have, which makes things like fully-subsidized college educations a thing of the past, at least if your family makes more than seventy grand a year.

Personally, I’d handle this situation by expelling everybody who participated in this thing. Not because it’d solve the fiscal crisis*, but because it offends me that these people so blithely toss around the phrase ‘police brutality.’ We have standards by which to judge that, these days.  Or did we start executing students for protesting these days, and I just missed it?

Moe Lane

*Although if said expulsion didn’t come with a refund, that’d be a good one-time fix.

Who *shall* replace Rangel?

Having watched for a while the entertaining meltdown that is the Democratic party’s House Ways & Means chairmanship crisis, I’d thought that I’d take a look at the top seven replacements for Charlie Rangel (via Jen Rubin) and quickly point out the… complications.

  • Fortney Pete Stark, CA-13.  Crazy.
  • Sander M. Levin, MI-12. Public option squish*.
  • Jim McDermott, WA-07.  Seditionist.
  • John Lewis, GA-05. Racist.
  • Richard E. Neal, MA-02. Fifth in seniority.
  • John S. Tanner, TN-08. Retiring.
  • Xavier Becerra, CA-31. Seventh in seniority.

No, Neal and Becerra’s lack of seniority is an issue for Democrats.  They don’t rotate out their leadership like the GOP does.  Which makes the way that everybody skips past Levin a bit odd: looking over the guy’s record… well, there isn’t much of one.  He’s this 78 year old guy who’s been in Congress for 28 years and doesn’t seem to have done anything particularly noteworthy while he was there.  This is, of course, a personal tragedy and searing indictment of the man’s life choices: but it’s not precisely an obstacle to his taking the chairmanship, rambling progressive attack video or no.

Besides, even if it was: it’s only until January 2011 anyway.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState. Continue reading Who *shall* replace Rangel?