Month: July 2010

Paul Kanjorski (D, PA-11) and the Golden Rule.

(Via Camp of the Saints) He’s kind of alarmed that people might do unto him as Kanjorski did unto others*.

[Lou] Barletta said Kanjorski won’t hold town hall meetings because he is afraid of “nuts to hit me with a camera and ask stupid questions.”

“Kanjorski is the one who paid a man with a camera $10,000 to follow me and my family around for five months in 2008,” Barletta said. “Kanjorski’s campaign manager (Mitchell) admitted this in a Times Leader story in November 2008.”

Indeed, he did (more on that here).  Aside from the fact that it’s not the people holding the cameras that are doing the hitting, it’s very interesting that Paul Kanjorski seems so affronted that he might actually be held accountable for his votes.  Besides, the racist already freely spouts off on C-SPAN: why should he be so worried about video footage made by private citizens?

Moe Lane

PS: Lou Barletta for Congress.

Continue reading Paul Kanjorski (D, PA-11) and the Golden Rule.

#rsrh [NLRB]’s* Craig Becker under ethics investigation.

Mark Tapscott calls this the “least surprising news of the week:” [NLRB]* recess appointee Craig Becker is under investigation for ethics violations.

Aside from impartiality, the other concern about Becker was that the former associate general counsel for the radical Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and AFL-CIO lawyer would be embroiled with conflicts of interest regarding unions he’s now charged with overseeing.

Sure enough, on June 2, Becker joined in on an NLRB decision involving SEIU Local 1957 and denied St. Barnabas Hospital’s request to review a union election. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Member Darrell Issa, R-Calif., asked the Inspector General to examiner Becker’s conflict of interest in the matter. An investigation is underway.

 Continue reading #rsrh [NLRB]’s* Craig Becker under ethics investigation.

Nah, Instapundit, it’s Deep Ones.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.  Disinformation, smishinformation.  It’s all about the crass commercialism of the Amazon.com link.

“Aliens on the sea floor.”  Pshaw, Glenn.  Clearly the ‘oil slick’ is part and parcel of the ongoing civil war between the Innsmouthite traditionalist and the Strossian reformer factions of the Deep Ones, and we’re just trying to keep it hushed up, lest we see a resurgence of breakaway Antarctic Space Elder Race terrorism again.  It was bad enough the last time that they were actively attempting to use our seaborne neighbors’ internal political conflicts to get their own back; the fallout (literally) from dealing with the Neu Schwabenland redoubt was bad enough, but Elder Race shenanigans breed South American fascists like a Innsmouthite breeds shoggoths – and that means that weak-minded artists will become prey for the Great Old Ones.  The human race simply cannot handle another assault on its sanity like Evita.

It simply cannot.

Moe Lane

#RSRH Cui bono, Rep Clyburn? No, really: cui bono?

Seriously, what is Rep. Clyburn’s problem?

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (S.C.) theorized that an operative ran unemployed Army veteran Alvin Greene’s (D) South Carolina Senate campaign to create a “mess.”

The Hill touches on the major objections to this… well, ‘theory’ and ‘hypothesis’ both seem to give this more credit than it deserves: perhaps ‘allegation?’  Whatever one wishes to call it, it seems to assume that there would be some point for putting Candidate A in the designated ‘crushed by DeMint in November’ slot, rather than Candidate B.  At this point in South Carolina politics, the various Federal and state executive seats are all pretty much foregone conclusions: John Spratt (D) is the most at-risk incumbent, while the Democrats are not expected to flip any seats in this hostile election atmosphere.  So it’s a good question to ask why anybody would bother risking a scandal just to make sure that the rubble bounced farther.

Or am I over-analyzing this?  Is it just that, after 70 years of being carefully taught to do so, Rep. Clyburn’s simply comfortable with the idea that all Bad Things that happen are the result of sinister, hidden forces?

#RSRH, Wall Street Blowback edition.

Following up on this “pseudo-populist-rhetoric-from-Democrats has consequences” post from a couple of days ago, there’s this happy comment:

“I think at least in the short term there is going to be a great deal of frustration with people who were beating the hell out of us — then turning around and asking for money,” said a senior executive of a Wall Street bank.

More here.  Hey, what are they going to do?  Give money to Republicans?

…Oh.  Right.

Moe Lane

Gallup whispers DOOM in 2010.

With less than four months to go before the fall elections, the greatest growth industry in the country right now is the tea importation business: everybody who has any interest in the November results is trying his or her hand at precognition.  Gallup is no exception:

This year’s low approval ratings for Congress are a potentially ominous sign for President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress. Gallup has found greater party seat change in Congress in midterm elections when Congress has had low approval ratings.

Specifically, in the five midterm elections in which Congress’ approval ratings at the time of the election were below 40%, there was an average net change in seats of 29 from the president’s party to the opposition. That includes the 1994 and 2006 elections, when the net change in seats was large enough to pass control of the U.S. House from one party to the other.

They currently track Congress’s approval rating at 20%. Continue reading Gallup whispers DOOM in 2010.