Month: September 2009

Democratic challenger says Steve Cohen (D, TN-09) too white for district.

Wait, what?

(via @BrianFaughnan) Contra the New York Times, there are no racial overtones to this challenge. It’s pretty much the melody line:

The black candidate, former Mayor Willie W. Herenton of Memphis, has argued that Tennessee needs a black voice in its currently all-white delegation. He is running a blistering campaign against Representative Steve Cohen, a fellow Democrat with a precarious hold on the majority black district.

“To know Steve Cohen is to know that he really does not think very much of African-Americans,” Mr. Herenton said in a recent radio interview on KWAM. “He’s played the black community well.”

[snip]

“This seat was set aside for people who look like me,” said Mr. Herenton’s campaign manager, Sidney Chism, a black county commissioner. “It wasn’t set aside for a Jew or a Christian. It was set aside so that blacks could have representation.”

TN-09 being a D+23 district, the Democratic primary race is going to be of special interest – and this is… well. It’s not so much the sentiments as it is the utterly unselfconscious way that they’re being presented. Remember that full and frank discussion of race we were promised? – because I suspect that this is not what people had in mind.

Moe Lane

PS: And one last thing: Steve Cohen did not “consider joining” the Congressional Black Caucus; he was told that he couldn’t join because of his skin color. They’re doing the same thing to Rep. Joseph Cao (R, LA-02), too – although I suspect that changing the ‘R’ to ‘D’ there might have caused them to reconsider.

Crossposted to RedState.

250-500K protesters at DC: I thought that this was supposed to be hard?

Transterrestrial Musings gives two different ways to measure the crowd; the first one estimates between 240K-320K for the marchers and the second estimates between 330K-500K at the Capitol itself.  Either way: use this as your baseline for what an actual populist, grassroots protest looks like.  I mention this mostly for the Other Side, who seem highly incensed that we’re making this sort of thing look easy.

Which it is, actually: you just have to be on the side of righteousness, that’s all.

Moe Lane

PS: More via Instapundit.

Crossposted to RedState.

*Third* time on the ACORN Hooker Advisory Train.

(Via @JTlol)This time, it’s Brooklyn. Which, as Big Government gleefully points out, is part of New York, which is one of the places that ACORN claims that the producers tried this sting and failed.

Second part of the video at the site: your call if they failed or not. Continue reading *Third* time on the ACORN Hooker Advisory Train.

“[expletive deleted] U KANYE. IT’S LIKE U STEPPED 0N A KITTEN.”

That’s from somebody called @katyperry – look, I’m freaking counter-culture, remember?  I’m also not 23 – and Simon Scowl of Deceiver.com is right; it perfectly captures the moment.  I didn’t think that I would be posting this again, but apparently there are a lot of political bloggers out there – cross-spectrum – who are enjoying mightily the site of Kanye West imploding his career, and I’m not proud:

Taylor Swift.

So load yourself up.

Moe Lane

PS: Deceiver also reported that “Later in the show, Beyonce won another award and invited Swift onstage to finish her hijacked acceptance speech.” That was a decent thing for her to do.

House Democrats: half-trillion tax hike for Obamacare.

(Via Texans for Sarah Palin) But it’s tax hikes for the wealthy (540 billion over 10 years), so that’s all right, right? At least, it’s tax hikes for the wealthy today. And what gets redefined as ‘wealthy’…

Key House Democrats decided Friday to raise taxes on the wealthy to help pay for health care legislation, capping an up-and-down week for President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority.

[snip]

Democrats on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee agreed to a new surtax that would start with households making $350,000 a year and begin in 2011, said the committee’s chairman, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.

…well, that’s up to Charlie Rangel.

Have a nice morning!

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Book of the Week: A Wizard of Mars.

It’s not available until April, but what the heck: I’ve always been fond of Diane Duane’s work, particularly her YA So You Want To be a Wizard series. And besides, if I excluded people who more-or-less vaguely hate people like me from these sorts of lists I’d have a very short list with which to work with. As long as I can’t guess at, or be reminded of, the politics from the first fifty pages everything’s golden*.

So, we replace with The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun with A Wizard of Mars, and go on with this lovely Sunday night.

*The besettling sin of the Still Life With Fascists series, alas. The idea is to discuss Why You Think It Would Have Sucked To Have Hitler Have A Peace Treaty With England, not Why The Bush Administration Made So Angry, You Wanted To Strangle A Manatee In The Nude**.

**Bloom County reference.

It’s the little things that make Schlock Mercenrary fun.

Take today’s little quick examination of evil, and how our various definitions of it and its origins is going to run into the thorny problem of created sapience like a sports car running into a brick wall, and how this entire conversation drives practical men mad – since they want to know the answer, yet don’t want to listen to the implications of the question…

Well. It’s Howard Tayler. That Hugo nomination was for a reason.

Annnnnnd Sen. Olympia Snowe (R, ME) comes out against the public option.

Wish I had seen this earlier: it would have changed the last post completely.  Via Drudge:

Snowe Urges Obama to Drop Public Plan to Pass Health Overhaul

Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine said there is “no way” a health-care overhaul that includes a public option can pass the Senate.

Snowe, one of six negotiators on the Senate Finance Committee, said that to gain more Republican support, President Barack Obama should explicitly drop the idea of a federally backed insurance program to compete with private insurers such as Hartford, Connecticut-based Aetna Inc.

[snip]

“I’ve urged the president to take the public option off the table,” Snowe said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” program. “It’s universally opposed by Republicans,” Snowe said.

Call me nuts, but it sounds like the Democrats just ran out of possible Republicans to give them cover. Guess they’re going to have to run over their own moderates to pass this health care rationing bill, then.

Moe Lane Continue reading Annnnnnd Sen. Olympia Snowe (R, ME) comes out against the public option.

Sen. Susan Collins (R, ME) rejects trigger for ‘public option.’

(via @seanhackbarth) For the very commonsense reason that you can’t trust the people who would be pulling the trigger. No, really: that’s what she said.

A moderate Republican who has previously broken with her party to support President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill said Sunday that she does not support the idea of using a so called “trigger” on the public health insurance option as part of health care reform legislation.

Asked on CNN’s State of the Union if the use of the trigger would make inclusion of the public option more acceptable, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, unequivocally replied “no.”

“The problem with trigger is it just delays the public option,” Collins told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King, “because the people who are going to be making the determination about whether the market is competitive enough, want the public option.”

Note that this doesn’t mean that Sen. Olympia Snowe is going to take the same position (although it doesn’t mean that she’ll be taking a different one, either); but Sen. Collins’ position on this does make it clear that the ‘public trigger’ scenario for a government option in health care is not actually bipartisan. Please also note that Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D, NH) apparently needed only eight months as a Senator to forget how to answer straightforward questions in a straightforward manner:

New Hampshire Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen refused to answer directly when asked whether Collins’ position indicated that President Obama should either not fight for inclusion of the public option in the final bill or, alternatively, pursue a legislative strategy that relied solely on Democratic votes for health care reform.

Continue reading Sen. Susan Collins (R, ME) rejects trigger for ‘public option.’