democratic party – Page 3

Slowly it shifts…

Rust never sleeps, ladies and gentlemen:

Nearly two years into the recession, opinion about which political party is responsible for the severe economic downturn is shifting, according to a new national poll.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday morning indicates that 38 percent of the public blames Republicans for the country’s current economic problems. That’s down 15 points from May, when 53 percent blamed the GOP. According to the poll 27 percent now blame the Democrats for the recession, up 6 points from May. Twenty-seven percent now say both parties are responsible for the economic mess.

(H/t: Yid with Lid & Hot Air) And to quote Solomon Short: Rome didn’t fall in a day, either. So keep reminding people about just who’s been in charge of the purse strings since January of 2007, and the whole blessed government since January of 2009. Every little bit helps, and we’ve still got a year to correct the historical record.

Crossposted to RedState.

Scenes from the Democratic Party’s War on Tax-Paying: Missouri

Free tip for Missouri Democrats: when you’re trying to find a replacement for the third state legislator from your party who’s been caught up in a federal corruption case… find one who already pays her taxes.

ST. LOUIS — A day before she clinched the nomination to fill a vacancy in the Missouri House of Representatives on Saturday, St. Louis Democrat Hope Whitehead paid a visit to City Hall.

Not to mobilize supporters, but to pay hundreds of dollars in outstanding taxes.

Her trip downtown was more than just civic duty. Under state law, candidates with overdue tax bills are ineligible for the ballot.

(H/T: @TheAnchoress) Why does Missouri have to have this be an actual law? This should be elementary common sense for prospective legislators. Brush your teeth. Wear your underwear inside your pants. Pay your taxes. These should not be difficult concepts to grasp.

Apparently not.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Everything you need to know about Code Pink.

They can write things like this (note: link safe):

The recent shootings at Ft. Hood and the resignation of top Foreign Service officer Matthew Hoh demonstrate how even our military officers are opposed to US strategy in Afghanistan.

…and mean it.

Moe Lane

PS: The Democratic Party has gotten some money out of Code Pink, over the years.

They should give it all back now, please.

Crossposted to RedState.

And here’s confirmation that the Speaker is banning public access.

I just got tipped on this:

(Background: the Speaker of the House is holding a press conference on the Democrats’ health care rationing bill, and shutting out the public. This video shows security confirming that the restrictions comes from the Speaker’s office.)

The utter arrogance of the Democratic party leadership is only matched by their utter ignorance of the realities of modern communication technology.

Democratic election fraud in Troy, NY: a follow-up.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers. And Big Government readers, too.

(Via Atlas Shrugs) For the next time somebody tells you that Democrat/ACORN/WFP election registration fraud does not equal election fraud, feel free to point this story coming from Troy, New York, where the one led seamlessly to the other. Feel free to also point out that it doesn’t take all that much to flip some races:

Thirty-eight forged or fraudulent ballots have been thrown out — enough votes, an election official admits, to likely have tipped the city council and county elections in November to the Democrats. Candidates would have been able to run both on the Democratic and Working Families Party lines in two weeks, and that could have given the Democrats the general election.

A special prosecutor is investigating the case and criminal charges are possible. New York State Supreme Court Judge Michael Lynch ruled that there were “significant election law violations that have compromised the rights of numerous voters and the integrity of the election process.”

[Bolding mine.]

Continue reading Democratic election fraud in Troy, NY: a follow-up.

The Democratic Party’s War on Science.

No, that’s not an ironic title, as anybody who deals with either the anti-vaccination or the anti-nuclear power crowd* for any length of time will readily enough attest. Ronald Bailey of Reason (H/T: Instapundit) is busy beating his head against the wall over the smug, self-congratulatory rhetoric of James Speth (from the latter group): Bailey had to read Speth’s book, and noted that Speth was bragging over helping to block the production of fast breeder reactors. Now, you can make the argument that blocking these kinds of nuclear plants is a good thing, as fast breeder reactors produce Evil Sinful ScaryDevil Killing-Metal plutonium and The Triple-Cursed Dirt of Hell radioactive waste; and if nuclear weapons are your absolutely greatest worry, well, it’s a free country. But Speth’s supposed greatest worry is global warming.

Or, as Bailey notes:

…in an alternative universe in which 200 reactors come online, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would be about 35 percent lower than they currently are. In other words, the reactors that Speth opposed could have been a huge part of the solution to what Speth claims is humanity’s “biggest threat.”

They could have, but that would have been a violation of Speth’s religious beliefs. And we should all stop pretending that we think that the anti-nuclear Left is motivated by anything more rational than a particularly illogical theology; or that the Democratic party isn’t happy to pander to them.

Moe Lane Continue reading The Democratic Party’s War on Science.

Preparing for the Democrats’ Charge of the Light Brigade.

I just can’t decide which is the better passage from this Time article (yes, Time) by Christopher Caldwell. It’s either this:

Democrats have a tiger by the tail. It is dawning on them that the people screaming at those town-hall meetings over the summer were not just feigning anger or sublimating their personal neuroses.

or this:

Democratic reform efforts once focused on building a European-style single-payer Utopia. They now focus on enlisting Republicans, if only a few, to share responsibility for a plan that Democrats, if they were sufficiently contemptuous of public sentiment, would have the votes to pass on their own.

Either way, it’s going to be an interesting October. The public dislikes the current plan – more accurately, the lack of same – coming from the Democrats; and the non-Democratic portion of the country prefers to be responsible for their own health care choices. And yet, going bipartisan on this will infuriate the Democrats’ partisan base. It is, frankly, a mess for them.

A solution? The Left doesn’t want to hear my solution. Because it starts with them admitting that they weren’t that smart, after all, and gets worse for them from there…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

All Left is divided into three parts*.

According to Charlie Cook, at least: he calls the players in the current three-way low intensity conflict in the Democratic party “Loyal Obamists,” “Purists,” and “Skeptics” (I call them “Establishment Democrats,” “Progressive Base,” and “Ordinary, Decent Democrats”). To summarize Cook, the Loyal Obamists think that the economy will dictate the 2010 election results anyway, so they might as well protect their leader’s reputation by passing something on health care; the Purists think that the only way to ensure victory in 2010 is to go hard Left, stay there, and accept no substitutes; and the Skeptics are looking around nervously, because they’re pretty sure that they didn’t sign up for New Deal 2.0, particularly since the first two groups seem determined to do in months the sort of thing that took FDR years. What’s interesting here is the attitudes towards the economy: the first group essentially think that it’s ultimately beyond their control, the second thinks that it’s a mess because it’s not under their control, and the third thinks that while important, it’s not as important as the rather hostile populist reaction to government expansion that the first two groups are both pushing.

If you’re wondering how you maintain a coherent party strategy and Congressional majority under these circumstances, don’t worry about it: so does Charlie Cook. Addressing the willingness of the Loyal Obamists to sacrifice a few Congressman for the sake of their party leader’s reputation (the Purists are likewise more than happy to do this, too), Cook notes:

…the Loyalist notion that a dozen or so Blue Dogs might be expendable ignores the fact that a political environment that culls the Democratic herd in the House would very likely cost Democrats two to four senators, people whose votes are anything but expendable. Right now, seven Democratic Senate seats are vulnerable — eight if GOP Rep. Michael Castle runs for the open seat in Delaware. It is not hard to envision Democrats going 0 for 5 among the vulnerable Republican-held open seats (in Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Texas) and also not ousting any Republican incumbents. Another complicating factor for Democrats is that although Purple America holds some residual goodwill toward Obama, it has none for the Democratic Congress. When the institution is held in very low regard, plenty of well-liked and well-respected members of the majority party can simply get sucked down by the undertow. That happened to Republicans in 2006 and Democrats in 1994.

That it did, that it did. Not that the non-Skeptics in the Democratic party want to actually hear that; one thing that unites the two factions is their shared dismissal of the ever-more-organized opposition to their government policies. Both groups assume that a better economy will get rid of that opposition, which is in my opinion confusing trigger with cause…

Moe Lane

*Classical reference..

Crossposted to RedState.

Reviewing the August Democratic Party’s town hall performances.

This is not going to be a link-fest; this is going to be a scolding.

Speaking as a former Democrat: August was a personal humiliation for me. I would never have believed that the Democratic party could have produced such a crop of perpetually-terrified, start-at-their-0wn-shadow, two-for-flinching scaredy-cat politicians as the ones that showed up on our television screens and monitors, usually moving at high speed away from the cameras. Note that I did not use the term ‘old women.’ They were running away from old women. Extremely annoyed (and for good reason) old women, true: but you’d have thought that the Democratic party was facing the combined specters of the Mongol Horde, the bubonic plague, and Skynet, the way that their politicians stood not on the order of their coming, but went at once.

Yes, I know that the level of vitriol and projection on the people opposing health care rationing grates on a lot of people. I’m one of them; probably the most teeth-gnashing aspect for me was watching the Speaker of the House call people who disagreed with her Nazis, particularly since (as somebody else pointed out) a goodly number of the people who she was slandering actually fought Nazis. The casual sexual slurs and projection of motives weren’t particularly welcome, either. But what highlighted it for me was the way that the Democrats hid while they did all of that. Telephone town halls. Attempts to hold meetings without telling constituents. Last-minute changes in venues. Rigged question-and-answer periods. Bussed-in ‘supporters.’ Some of them didn’t even dare hold a town hall – and more would have tried that trick, if they hadn’t been pressured into doing it by their Republican challengers. And the ultimate item? They’re going to hide behind a dead person and try to pass health care rationing that way.

Which, by the way, won’t work.

All in all, this was just… embarrassing. I used to identify with this party. Most of my family still does, in fact – and from now on, when political topics come up, it’s going to be awkward for everybody involved. Them, for being stuck with a bunch of wimps representing their interests – and me, because I hate seeing my family distressed.

Incredible. Simply incredible – in the more archaic sense of the word.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Breaking: Hudson County (NJ) Democratic Party arrested.

Or so it seems. We’re having difficulty keeping up.

UPDATE: OK, more information:

2 N.J. Mayors Arrested in Broad Inquiry on Corruption

The mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus, a state assemblyman and dozens of others were rounded up early Thursday as the F.B.I. swept across four counties in New Jersey as part of a two-year corruption and money-laundering investigation that ranged from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn and has even reached into the State House in Trenton.

Agents raided the home of Joseph V. Doria Jr., commissioner of the state Department of Community Affairs, who also is the former mayor of Bayonne, an official confirmed Thursday morning.

Among the roughly 30 people arrested by mid-morning were Hoboken Mayor Peter J. Cammarano III and Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell, both Democrats, and Assemblyman Daniel M. Van Pelt, a Republican from Forked River, in Ocean County. Mr. Cammarano, who turned 32 on Wednesday, was elected mayor June 9 and sworn in July 1, after serving as councilman-at-large since 2005.

I’ve done a spreadsheet of the people named so far – and let me note: there’s something fun about a story where you need to do a spreadsheet in order to keep up with this sort of thing.

Name	Occupation	Democrat
Peter Cammarano	Mayor of Hoboken	Yes
Dennis Elwell	Mayor of Secaucus	Yes
Leona Beldini	Dep Mayor of Jersey City	Yes
Mariano Vega	Council President, Jersey City	Yes
La Vern Webb-Washington	Council Candidate, Jersey City	Yes*
Michael Manzo	Fire Department, Jersey City	No**
Daniel Van Pelt	New Jersey Assemblyman	No

*Ran as independent.
**Ran as independent.

There’s going to be a press conference at noon, and it should be riveting.

Moe Lane

PS: You know who else is from Hudson County? Senator Robert Menendez.

Crossposted to RedState.