Month: May 2011

#rsrh Free speech victory in Virginia.

A federal court has come to the fairly common sense realization that when the Constitution says “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” it kind of means it:

A federal court in Alexandria, Va. on Thursday struck down a federal ban on corporate campaign contributions, in a case with potentially dramatic ramifications for a campaign finance regulatory system under siege by legal and regulatory attacks.

The short version: this case draws on the landmark US Supreme Court free speech case Citizens United, which partially revoked the odious McCain-Feingold Act, which was easily one of the most blatantly unconstitutional laws that Congress has passed in recent memory.  Since CU ruled that you couldn’t muzzle a group under the cynical guise of ‘campaign finance reformed,’ the judge in the case has determined that a group may make the same kind of contributions to a specific candidate as a group that an individual can.  That effectively means that, say, the AFL-CIO can give Barack Obama five grand directly next year (half for the primary, half for the general), perfectly legally*.

This will be appealed, of course: the usual suspects are already making noise about how this case violates the last Supreme Court decision-but-one on the matter.  Of course, it’s the ‘but-one’ that’s the kicker…

Moe Lane

*Mind you, that particular group plans to give that particular candidate considerably more, ideally (for them) in a form that will not result in actual convictions for money-laundering.  Frankly, I think that it’d be easier all around if we had less restrictions on maximum contributions and more requirements on transparency.

Joe Conason lies about PPP WI recall poll.

This is very entertaining, because it takes real skill to muck up reporting this PPP poll about Scott Walker’s chances in a hypothetical recall election; fortunately, Joe Conason is up to the challenge. Let’s look at what Conason wrote (bolding mine):

Asked whether they would support or oppose [Scott Walker’s] removal from office in a recall election, 50 percent said yes and only 47 percent said no.

The same poll found that Wisconsin voters are also apparently sorry that they replaced progressive Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold last fall with a tea party extremist named Ron Johnson. Today, they would re-elect Feingold with a comfortable margin over any Republican…

I’ve already gotten a screenshot of this, by the way. Just in case Truthdig decides to memory-hole the entire thing.

Anyway, again: Conason is reporting that 50% of PPP’s respondents favor a recall of Walker. So far, so good for the Democrats. PPP also reports that in that hypothetical election Feingold would win. OK, piece of data to consider. But what Conason did here – and probably deliberately, seeing as he didn’t link to the original poll – was falsely claim that this means that Feingold would win re-election against Senator Ron Johnson, despite the fact that PPP did not poll that hypothetical match-up.  You see, Feingold was never governor of Wisconsin, so he cannot be re-elected to that position.  The poll is strictly about the Wisconsin recall situation*; not about Ron Johnson.  Perhaps PPP will poll a hypothetical rematch between the two, although why anybody would bother is beyond me completely (it’s not going to matter before 2016 anyway); but until then, it’s dishonest to use polling results in this manner.

Yes, ‘dishonest.’  Remember, we know that Conason meant this poll, because the numbers that he did specifically quote (but not source) are the same; and we know that Conason meant Feingold’s re-election as Senator, because he did specifically use the word “re-elect.” If Joe Conason tries to claim that this was all an innocent mistake – which he undoubtedly will – then said claim should be seen as the calculated insult to his readers’ intelligence that it is.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*As to the poll itself: yup, pretty harsh.  Guess we’ll see in July how those legislature recall numbers hold up, huh? And the obvious problem that the Democrats face in exploiting their hypothetical advantage is left as an exercise for the reader: I don’t give free hints to the Left unless it suits me.

TIME, Marshall Ganz, Barack Obama, and 2012.

The Platonic Ideal of Burying the Lede.

(Fair warning: while the original H/T is via RCP, there are a lot of links to Left-publications and sites in this post. This was essentially unavoidable)

It was the funniest thing: I was flipping through this Michael Scherer article on the resumption of the Obama 2012 campaign (short version: “Getting re-elected is hard!” Particularly when the Democrats have to run on an actual record, instead of the record that they breezily assured people was waiting just over the electoral horizon*), when I came across this passage:

Some on the left have argued that the President dropped the ball by failing to keep his network of supporters engaged and by following his transformational campaign with a transactional governing style. “Fighting to make something happen is different than sitting back and trying to mediate something,” says Marshall Ganz, a supporter turned critic of Obama, who teaches at Harvard. “People can’t organize around that.”

I don’t know why that triggered something in my head; it just seemed a bit… off, somehow. Maybe it was because whoever this Ganz guy was, it was enough to make David Axelrod bristle in the next paragraph. Which means that Scherer must have gotten that Ganz quote first. Which meant that Marshall Ganz may have been important.

So I decided to look Marshall Ganz up. Continue reading TIME, Marshall Ganz, Barack Obama, and 2012.

#rsrh “No recess for you!”

You know, there’s a part of me that deplores that we have to do things like this.

President Obama will not be able to make recess appointments over the week-long break to commemorate Memorial Day, after Republicans forced Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to keep the chamber open for pro forma sessions every three days.

However, there’s a much larger part of me that is prone to murmur Payback’s a bitch. And What goes around, comes around.  Guess that the Democrats shouldn’t have opened that particular Pandora’s Box, back in 2007…

Via AoSHQ.

Moe Lane

PS: Regarding President Obama making recess appointments anyway: yeah, sure, completely destroy that precedent.  The next Republican President will thank you for it.  Then again, nobody ever claimed that the Democratic party is big on long-term thinking…

Good News / Bad News for Debbie Wasserman Schultz!

The bad news: she didn’t realize that she was calling members of her own party ‘anti-woman’ before she started screaming The Weekly Standard‘s John McCormack about how people who voted to defund Planned Parenthood are anti-woman!

TWS: But there were eleven [correction: ten] Democrats who voted against funding for Planned Parenthood, so are those eleven Democrats anti-woman?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: No, they’re not, because if you, when I declare someone, when I make a broad statement like that, I look at the balance of somebody’s–where their priorities are, the balance of their record. And so one individual isolated vote here and there does not make you anti-woman.

TWS: So what are the broader votes that make those Democrats who voted on those same issues–on Planned Parenthood on H.R. 3–what makes them not anti-woman?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: I don’t think there are any Democrats.

TWS: Eleven.

Note that Debbie Wasserman Schultz happens to be the Deputy Minority Whip; I was unaware that the position was a sinecure.  Or that it causes traumatic memory loss among those who have been burdened by the job.  Or that the Democrats simply pick lying suckweasels for the position… actually, no: I was already aware of that one. Continue reading Good News / Bad News for Debbie Wasserman Schultz!

RedState Interview: Todd P’Pool (R CAND, KY-AG).

Todd P’Pool is the Republican nominee for Kentucky Attorney General, and he’s looking to topple incumbent Jack “Aqua Buddha” Conway this November.  We talked about that, the need for Kentucky to join the fight against Obamacare (and the job-killing EPA), and a variety of other things, starting with his name:

Todd’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

#rsrh QotD, Universial Application Edition.

Sure, Jen Rubin wrote this about Barack Obama’s Israeli policy:

Democrats are loath to admit the president doesn’t know what he is doing…

…but, honestly, when isn’t this true?

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

PS: For the record, I can’t help but notice that the level of commentary allowed by the Washington Post when it comes to Jen Rubin’s articles would probably be the subject of a disapproving article by the Washington Post if they were appearing on any other national website.

Folks: meet Tim Geithner, our Treasury Secretary!

This is his response to the straightforward question of whether he was aware that the IMF had a reputation of having a ‘predatory atmosphere’ when it came to sexual harassment!

Short answer (paraphrase): “No, because I am a man and we do not have the intellectual capacity to recognize sexual harassment.*” Continue reading Folks: meet Tim Geithner, our Treasury Secretary!