HA! Senate Democrats just road-blocked Barack Obama’s own trade deal!

Just goes to show: there ain’t no such thing as a moderate Democrat.  They’ll always turn on you in the middle of a deal.  I guess it’s just in their nature?

Senate Democrats handed President Obama a stinging rebuke on Tuesday, blocking consideration of legislation granting their own president “fast track” power to complete a major trade accord with 11 nations in the Pacific Rim.

The Senate vote on a procedural motion to begin debating the bill to give the president “trade promotion authority,” was 52 to 45 in favor, eight short of the 60 needed for passage. Republicans and pro-trade Democrats said they will try to negotiate a trade package that can clear that threshold.

Continue reading HA! Senate Democrats just road-blocked Barack Obama’s own trade deal!

The Ferguson protest movement: Ripe For The Plucking.

It’s like watching a horror movie, really. Admittedly, one where you’re not really emotionally invested in who lives and who dies, but there’s still that sense of Yeah, don’t go into the cellar.  Yup, you went into the cellar. Fine, let’s get this over with. Here we go:

The next move after expressing anger in the street is often the hard part for new civil rights groups. Do they seek changes in the law? Push to elect sympathetic candidates? Focus on winning over those who aren’t yet on their side? Or pull back from the moment and get radical, pressing for wholesale social change?

In Ferguson, many of the more than a dozen organizations that formed in the tear-gas clouds of August fragmented over the course of the fall. Conflicts flared over organizers who spent much of their time honing their profile on Twitter and attending an endless series of conferences on activism. Members of some new groups grumbled about leaders who seemed more interested in scoring airtime with Don Lemon on CNN or winning donations from wealthy celebrities than about recruiting poor people to their cause.

So… business as usual, then, for Left-protest groups? The next step is where those in the leadership who display the right combination of ambition and bootlicking get to join the establishment (and burnish their fifteen minutes of streetcred for the rest of their lives), while the husks of the movements all get taken over by the blackshirts and used to advocate a permanent, violent Marxist ideology. So it has always been done, and so it will always be done to the Left. Establishment Democrats and the blackshirts are, in fact, pretty good at this entire symbiotic predator/scavenger relationship: and, of course, killing and gutting new Leftist protest groups as they appear are a great way to keep them from doing something truly subversive, like successfully primary Establishment Democrats and win elections.

Which is, by the way, a measure for success that many in the Activist Left hates. Mostly because they just can’t seem to, you know, succeed at it*. Hopefully, they won’t figure out why for a good, long time.

(via @gabrielmalor)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*I dunno. Go ask Eric Cantor whether the Tea Party movement still has any teeth.  …And while I wrote that out kind of facetiously, the truth of it is that Cantor went from being maybe the next Speaker of the House to an embryonic lobbyist in a single night. That’s the kind of power that Lefty street-level operatives crave. And that’s precisely the kind of power that their masters – word choice deliberate – in the Democratic party so carefully deny them.

The DSCC’s sudden, yet inevitable betrayal of Nate Silver.

I so totally knew that they would use this argument.

Democrats aren’t taking Nate Silver’s latest Senate prediction lying down.

In an unusual step, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee on Monday issued a rebuttal the famed statistician’s prediction – made a day earlier – that Republicans were a “slight favorite” to retake the Senate. Silver was wrong in 2012, the political committee’s Guy Cecil wrote in a memo, and he’ll be wrong again in 2014.

“In fact, in August of 2012 Silver forecasted a 61 percent likelihood that Republicans would pick up enough seats to claim the majority,” Cecil said. “Three months later Democrats went on to win 55 seats.”

Continue reading The DSCC’s sudden, yet inevitable betrayal of Nate Silver.

*I* don’t care that Nate Silver is giving a 60% chance to a Senate flip…

…but I know damned well that his devotees will care, so here you go:

Nate Silver, the former New York Times analyst who rose to prominence after correctly predicted every state that voted for Barack Obama in 2012, gave the Republican Party a 60 percent chance of retaking the Senate in November — a chilling prospect for Democrats who once found Silver’s predictions comforting.

Be sure to write those checks out to your party anyway, Democrats!  Sure, that money will just be thrown away, but that’s what Democratic donors are there for. Continue reading *I* don’t care that Nate Silver is giving a 60% chance to a Senate flip…

Jim Moran D, VA) stabs Democrats, @barackobama in the back over #Obamacare.

(H/T Hot Air) Jim Moran, having spent his professional life reliably being as awful a politician as possible without actually being arrested and/or beaten with sticks, has decided to end his political career doing what he does best. Which is to say, he hurt those who trusted him. Background: in Virginia young adults made up a paltry 27% of Obamacare signups.  This is a) unacceptably low and b) more or less in line with countrywide numbers.  When asked about what this meant, Moran replied:

“…I don’t think we’re going to get enough young people signing up to make this bill work as it was intended to financially.”

If Jim Moran’s prediction is correct, the whole law could unravel. He says there just isn’t enough incentive for healthy young people to sign up for insurance.

“And, frankly, there’s some legitimacy to their concern because the government spends about $7 for the elderly for every $1 it spends on the young,” Moran says.

Continue reading Jim Moran D, VA) stabs Democrats, @barackobama in the back over #Obamacare.

Dan Lipinski (D, IL-03) helpfully tells us which seats to prioritize in 2014.

Let me annotate this list of Democratic Members of Congress that have decided to stab Barack Obama in the back in order to keep their seats call for a delay of Obamacare (freshmen in red):

Rep. Lipinski was joined in introducing this bill with U.S. Reps. Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-9) [LEAN DEMOCRATIC], Scott Peters (CA-52) [TOSS-UP], Pete Gallego (TX-23) [LEAN DEMOCRATIC], Ron Barber (AZ-2) [TOSS-UP], Pat Murphy (FL-18) [TOSS-UP], John Barrow (GA-12) [LEAN DEMOCRATIC], Filemon Vela (TX-34) and Joe Garcia (FL-26) [TOSS-UP].

Lipinksi and Vela are both considered Safe by Cook Political Report – but you have to wonder, huh?  Especially since they’re both freshmen legislators.  At any rate, it might not be a bad idea to do some recruiting in those districts, huh?

Actually, that’s a good general rule.  Every district should have a candidate.

Via @Freddoso

Moe Lane

#rsrh In which I idly kick around the antiwar movement a bit.

I am slightly disappointed in this Victor Davis Hanson entry at NRO’s Corner on the curious event of the antiwar movement in the night-time.  It almost, but not quite, goes for the jugular.  For example, here’s this passage about the direct results of this administration’s continuation of the previous administration’s GWOT policies:

The chief symptom of this embarrassment is silence. Gone are the sloppy charges of “war criminal,” the Hollywood movies, the outbursts by celebrities, the anguished op-eds. It is almost as if the 2,000-plus suspected terrorists killed by Predators put a complete stop to all the talk of Guantanamo as a gulag or the water-boarding of three known terrorists as war crimes or any of the other harangues about supposed constitution-shredding. True, for many the hypocrisy is just the stuff of politics, but for others there is a quiet anger that they have been taken for a ride. Fairly or not, it is as if an entire corpus of prior written work, public rants, and activism between 2003 and 2008 — even if sincere — has now been exposed as mere partisan politics.

Good, so far as it goes – but “as if?” “Fairly or not?”  It is eminently fair to characterize the entire body of antiwar progressive thought (pardon the oxymoron) as ‘mere partisan politics:’ certainly the antiwar movement was not shy about reducing the pro-victory movement into something that their intellectually stunted minds could understand*. Continue reading #rsrh In which I idly kick around the antiwar movement a bit.

Barack Obama throws Elizabeth Warren under the bus.

Or, as Jake Tapper/Jake Tapper’s editor* put it, “President Obama Picks Former Ohio Attorney General to Run Consumer Bureau, Bypassing Woman Who First Came Up With the Idea.” I agree with Ed Morrissey: that’s not really the headline that you want to see in this kind of awkward situation.  I mocked the elevated importance that the Online Left has given both Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau yesterday, but let me do it again: if you want to understand just how little that Democrats who actually, you know, matter cared about either, look no further than Obama’s lackadaisical response to Warren’s nomination being blocked.

Not that any of this is stopping some on the Online Left, who are apparently currently – wait for it, wait for it! – pushing for her to run against Scott Brown** for MA-SEN.  The Wall Street Journal wants her to go for it; it is no doubt merely my imagination that they’re doing that while quietly chuckling and adjusting the scope on their metaphorical sniper rifle…

Moe Lane (crosspost) Continue reading Barack Obama throws Elizabeth Warren under the bus.

:raised eyebrow: Since when is raising a kid not ‘work?’

Ah, right: Joy Behar. Like it’s my fault that I married a roboticist.  Ach, well, what people do for ratings.

(Via Instapundit)

Moe Lane

PS: It’s Paul Rodriquez who was the comedian trying to get them to turn the damn taps back on in California, not George Lopez.  I mention this so that various people in comments sections stop thinking daggers at the former; yes, yes, I’m a mad optimist.