Author: Moe_Lane

My talk with Brian Walsh (NRCC).

Just to be clear, this is the Brian Walsh who is the political director of the NRCC, and not the Brian Walsh who is the communications director of the NRSC. We spoke for a bit on the recent past and the rapidly approaching future:

To expand on the third question a bit: sites like Reverse the Vote also exist to assist the eventual Republican candidates in a host of Democrat-held districts. As Brian noted, the important thing here is to flip the House.

Moe Lane

PS: Those who are interested in helping Charles Djou over the finish line via phone banking can go here.

Crossposted to RedState.

Rasmussen: Nikki Haley vaults to lead.

The word ‘dramatic’ comes to mind:

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Republican Primary voters shows Haley earning 30% support. She’s followed by State Attorney General Henry McMaster who picks up 19% and Congressman Gresham Barrett with 17%. Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer captures 12% of the vote.

[snip]

The new findings mark a dramatic turn of events for Haley who ran fourth in March with just 12% support.r McMaster earned 21% of the vote at that time, with Bauer at 17% and Barrett at 14%.

We over at RedState have long favored Nikki to be the next governor of South Carolina, and it’s a pleasure to see our work start to pay off.  The next step?  Getting her over 50% and with no need for a runoff to distract her from crushing the Democratic candidate in November.

So. Nikki Haley for Governor.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Administration caught lying on insurance relief law.

Yes. You are shocked.

(Via @amandacarpenter) Let us walk through a test case on the administration’s claimed insurance support for small business owners.

  • Zach owns a small business (24 employees, average salary $35K) and provides them with health care ($79.2K/year).
  • He has already seen a 15% increase in health care costs this year, so he is quite keen to hear about insurance relief.
  • The White House’s PR flunkies were bragging about a program that gives ‘broad eligibility’ to companies with less than 25 employees and average salaries below $50K.
  • Zach is covered both ways!  Bring on that insurance relief!
  • …Oh.  If you have more than 10 employees and average salaries above $20K… well.  The answer is, no, at Zach’s level he’s not getting insurance relief.
  • And here’s the important thing: he was actually told otherwise by the White House’s PR flunkies, remember?
  • We call that “a lie.”
  • And – possibly more importantly – “business as usual.”

Continue reading Administration caught lying on insurance relief law.

#rsrh Nixon: China :: Obama: …Israel?

The implications of that analogy by Ed Driscoll (guesting for Instapundit) – that Obama would there be an American President visiting a country that is in opposition to his ideology – are… disturbing.

No, not because it’s self-evidently a silly analogy.  It’s not self-evidently a silly analogy.  That’s why it’s disturbing.

Moe Lane

PS: If you’re keeping score, I don’t think that the President actively hates Israel, in anything like the same intensity found by your average antiwar activist.  I do think that he doesn’t grok what the consequences of his actions are when it comes to Israel, which is highly problematical right there.

But at least they have Obama!

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this John Dickerson article on what last night’s results really mean, but this last paragraph is probably the one that needs to be most referenced:

The night showed just how limited Obama’s political power is. He said he’d work all-out for Specter, but he didn’t campaign for the senator in the final days. That may have been a wise reservation of his political capital (he’s already been ineffective in previous races), but it also demonstrated how much has changed since 2008, when Obama was talked about as a force that could remake the political landscape. Critz won by running away from Obama’s signature achievement, and Lincoln, whom he supported, was forced into a runoff. For a president who is still far more popular than the Democratic Congress he aims to help, yet who is unable to translate much of that popularity to do so, this condition may be best described as limbo.

Continue reading But at least they have Obama!

#rsrh A follow-up to that press snub earlier this week…

…said press snub being, of course, the President mocking press inquiries while in the process of signing a law celebrating international press freedom.  I say ‘celebrating’ mostly because there’s not really much to indicate that the President is interested in actually doing anything to support international press freedom; goodness knows that Obama’s showing very little interest in enforcing the Executive Branch’s own rules on enforcing illegal immigration law.

Anyway, the NYT’s Caucus blog seems quite bitter:

At a ceremony to sign a bill promoting press freedom around the world on Monday, President Obama refused to take questions from reporters. “I’m not doing a press conference today,” he told Chip Reid of CBS News, “but we’ll be seeing you guys during the course of the week.”

So when the president hosted a “news conference” in the Rose Garden with the president of Mexico on Wednesday, Mr. Reid thought maybe this time Mr. Obama would take questions. Instead, Mr. Obama allowed only a single question from the American news media, calling on a reporter from the New York-based Univision…

There’s more impotent snark in there, but I suspect that you get the point.  One wonders if the New York Times ever will.

Moe Lane
Moe Lane