Tag: democratic party

Debbie Downer’s bad first month as DNC Chair.

(Via Hot Air) The Politico is just now starting to realize just how big a boon DNC chair Debbie Downer (aka Debbie Wasserman Schultz) is… for the Republican Party:

She’s accused Republicans of wanting to reinstate segregation and of waging a “war on women.” She has asserted, somewhat nonsensically, that the GOP wants to make illegal immigration — by definition against the law — “a crime.” She’s also been mocked for driving a foreign car after pounding Republicans for not supporting the American auto industry.

[snip]

No one seems ready to declare her the Democratic version of Michael Steele, the gaffe-prone former Republican National Committee chairman whose rhetorical and administrative missteps led numerous party leaders to publicly insist he had to go.

Continue reading Debbie Downer’s bad first month as DNC Chair.

Union dues reform bill passes Florida House.

The bill in question is HB 1021, and it is designed to get government out of union’s business by: banning automatic dues collection for public sector unions; and requiring union leadership to get permission from individual members before using those dues for partisan politicking.  The bill passed 74-40, despite the rather strenuous objections of Big Labor: a similar bill (SB 830) is making its way through the Florida Senate.  The success of HB 1021 should help with the success of SB 830, which has been fought every step of the way, naturally; the Democratic-Big Labor governmental alliance has zero interest in seeing their profitable feedback cycle disrupted by the ability of mere workers to decide whether they like having their money go to keep one party in office.

Should the bill make it to the state Senate floor, it should pass relatively easily – both branches of the Florida legislature are solidly Republican.  In fact, they were like that before the last legislative elections… and that detail is something that I’d like to highlight, because it’s important.  Given that Florida is in fact a Right-to-Work state already, it may seem surprising that union reform is progressing even further in that state.  Well, there may be a reason for it, and that reason may be Wisconsin: specifically, the puerile, undemocratic, hooliganish, contemptuous, and generally infantile way that Democrats/Big Labor attempted to avoid dealing with the simple notion that elections have consequences.  The Left’s cheerleaders are currently ‘bragging’ – scare quotes because I’m not sure why anybody would be proud of the fact that they’re being vocal defenders of a political party’s deniable corruption slush fund – that their shrill, petulant extended whine against labor union reform in Wisconsin galvanized the Left nationwide.  That may or may not be true, but I can tell you one thing: it definitely galvanized the Right.

And, hey! – We control more state legislatures than you do!

Moe Lane (crosspost)

#rsrh Rep. Lynch (D, MA) to base: shut up and sit down.

More like blue-on-blue than red-on-red (it is one of the great ironies of American politics that these days the Right is designated as red while the Left has blue, to both side’s secret annoyance.  Or not-so-secret annoyance) – still, Weasel Zippers (H/T: …somebody) is correct: watching Establishment Democrats try to get their base under control is pretty funny.

Let me give you the gist of the article: Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, still smarting over the way that the dirty, smelly union hippies (I paraphrase) dared to challenge him in the last election primary, came out to tell progressives that their refusal to rubber-stamp incumbent Democrats cost the party eight seats, so shut up.  This did not, as they say, go over well: particularly funny was watching DCCC chair (read: “designated scapegoat for 2012”) Steve Israel practice the arcane art of sounding confident and declarative while at the same time saying nothing at all, but the progressives made up for that lack of semantic content with… an entirely different lack of semantic content. Continue reading #rsrh Rep. Lynch (D, MA) to base: shut up and sit down.

The Democratic knives come out in the House.

And, like all entertaining wars to the knife, this one has multiple factions. The ‘moderates’ blame the liberals for walking all over them; the liberals blame the moderates for going along with passing bad ideas like the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and Obamacare; the idiots (this may be a subgroup: there’s a bit of an overlap here with the first two groups) are claiming that this entire problem would have gone away with a little more marketing; and everybody blames the President.  Because really, why not?  It’s fairly clear by now that being on Barack Obama’s good side is not exactly inherently valuable.  They’re all right, of course: the Democratic debacle in the House represents a perfect storm of legislative cowardice, political greed, a grotesquely flawed group understanding of proper civic policy, and a White House that routinely demonstrates the organizational and administrative core competency that normally one associates with opium-raddled Victorian expatriate remittance men.  None of which helps them right now, of course; but it’s a lot of fun to point out.

As to solving their problem…  well, even if I wanted to I couldn’t.  Congressional Democrats are only going to be united by one person – the President – and just in case there’s still somebody who hasn’t noticed by now: the President is incompetent at leading people in directions that they don’t already want to go.  Which is not what the Democrats need right now.  So there’s no solution in sight, unless of course the President wants to start learning all of those boring, practical political skills that he should have started picking up a couple of decades ago…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

(Via @davidhauptmann)

#rsrh Kaine Commands Cadre.

‘Don’t run against your own party head in the election.’ You’d think that this would be elementary political wisdom, much like ‘never get caught with a dead girl in your bed,’ ‘never pick a fight with a group that can plausibly use a ten year old precocious moppet as a spokesperson,’ and/or ‘never use the American flag to strangle a three-legged puppy on national television.’ But apparently Tim Kaine – nominal head of the DNC – feels the need to warn his own party’s legislators to ix-nay on the unning-ray against Obama-way:

“Democrats who kind of are afraid to be who they are, or are pushing back on their leaders, I think they’re crazy,” said Kaine during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.” “You can’t win as a Democrat without energizing Democratic voters, and if you pour cold water on them and think you’re going to win, it’s tough….The good news is this is not what I’m seeing generally, as I travel around.”

Apparently Fox News felt like being helpful, because the rest of the article provided amusing selections from all those politicians that Kaine didn’t see running away from the President (but felt the need to lecture anyway).  And if that wasn’t enough, Kimberly Strassel (H/T: Hot Air Headlines) looked at the three House Democrats who have most successfully pretended to be conservatives*: not unsurprisingly, they’re also doing distinctly better than their colleagues in equally at-risk districts.  I understand that Kaine needs to spin this, and he certainly needs to spin this now that it’s becoming increasingly clear that the DNC’s disastrous performance in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts was an appetizer for Democratic disaster in November, and not the main course; but he could have come up with something better, surely.  Something not so evocative of panic.

Hey, what about calling Republicans racist?  It’s not like the Democrats go often to that particular well.

Moe Lane

*There is no such thing as a conservative Democrat.  A ‘conservative’ Democrat will happily caucus with a party that puts its doctrinaire liberals in leadership positions, and that particular vote invalidates any supposedly ‘principled’ stances later.  Walt Minnick, Bobby Bright, and Gene Taylor (the three mentioned by Strassel) are as much enablers of Pelosi/Waxman/Frank as are Charlie Rangel, Alan Grayson, and Carol Shea-Porter.

Never forget this.

My Green Jobs suggestions.

You know, at first I was probably just a touch annoyed that the White House has spent billions – this is not an exaggeration; billions – on encouraging ‘green jobs’ without knowing what the heck a green job is:

Buried deep inside a federal newsletter on March 16 was something called a “notice of solicitation of comments” from the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor.

“BLS is responsible for developing and implementing the collection of new data on green jobs,” said the note in the Federal Register, which is widely read by government bureaucrats and almost never seen by the general public. But the notice said there is “no widely accepted standard definition of ‘green jobs.'”

But then I saw this:

To help find that definition, the Labor Department asked that readers send in suggestions.

Suggestions?  Oh, I have suggestions: Continue reading My Green Jobs suggestions.

‘So, Moe, how’s your election cycle going?’

Let me put it this way: below (in no particular order) is my Top Ten List of Democratic Members of the 111th Congress Whose Presence There Personally Offends My Sense of Civics.

David Obey
Jack Murtha
Alan Mollohan
Eric Massa
Charlie Rangel
Russ Carnahan
Carol Shea-Porter
Alan Grayson
Jim Moran
Patrick Kennedy

It’s going great. Thanks for asking!

Moe Lane

Jay Inslee (D, WA) uses lobbyist letter for Net Neutrality push.

I believe that the technical term for this is “Oops.”

A letter that Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., is circulating on Capitol Hill expressing gushing support for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s controversial proposal to subject broadband to tougher regulation wasn’t written by the congressman.

How do we know? Digital fingerprints left by the author, Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, a media watchdog.

(H/T: Ed Driscoll) Continue reading Jay Inslee (D, WA) uses lobbyist letter for Net Neutrality push.

Scott Lee Cohen bringing a knife to the IL-GOV race?

What?  Too soon?

What’s odd is the reaction to this:

Gov. Pat Quinn said he’s ready to take on Scott Lee Cohen in the general election if the embattled Chicago pawnbroker publicly announces he’s making an independent run for the state’s highest office.

“When all is said and done, there will be a robust contest of ideas,” Quinn said.

I mean, you would think that the normal reaction to this – to wit, shaking Cohen violently while shouting “YOU TOOK STEROIDS AND THREATENED YOUR GIRLFRIEND WITH A KNIFE, YOU FOOL! GET OUT OF MY STATE BEFORE I SET THE WOLFHOUNDS UPON YOU!” – would have been the expected one from Quinn.  I mean, let’s review: Quinn already has to deal with a Senatorial candidate who’s loaned money to convicted pimps and bookies, a Lt. Governor candidate who got selected (not elected) because she’s white and has a useful last name, and, well, a gubernatorial candidate who’s laboring under the burden of being Pat Quinn.  The last thing the man needs is to have to run against a guy who somehow managed to win a Democratic primary despite being somebody who likes steroids for himself and knives for his partners.

And trust me: this will come up on a regular basis.  The possibility of being able to use the slogan Vote Republican.  We don’t cut women and have it still be relevant to the race after all comes as most welcome news to those of us on the VRWC…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

‘Nice’ list of Bush-era protest photos…

…for a given value of ‘nice;’ but John Hawkins missed one.

Hawkins’ point is nonetheless well-taken; the credibility of the Democratic party is going to be fundamentally compromised until they address the fact that, from about 2003 to 2009, they were increasingly willing to let people like the above (or the ones in Hawkins’ lists) march in their rallies sans denials, disavowing, or frankly a punch in the face. And it doesn’t matter how much the media covers for them; ordinary, decent Americans react to this sort of thing with an instinctive and absolutely justified revulsion, which made countering it a whole lot easier during the Bush administration.

And since the Left doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.