Whenever you think the Post Office Congress of Damascus Nancy and Dingy Harry could find no lower of a road, they surprise you.
Yesterday the Democrat leadership suffered a defeat on Heather Wilson’s amendment to bar public assistance to illegal aliens on a vote of 215-213. Democrat leadership has now admitted gaveling the vote closed and to improperly reporting a 214-214 tie. Democrats followed this legerdemain by openly violating their own newly implemented House Rules that prohibit members from changing votes once cast by having Democrat members change their votes to produce a 216-212 victory for providing public assistance to illegal aliens.
Republicans cried “shame” and walked out of the House for several hours. It appears that House leadership is pushing the issue. The video is great; it shows that there is still a little fight somewhere in the national G.O.P., since “fight” has so notoriously vanished in the Senate and at the White House.
In the end, the Democrat leadership cheated and prevailed in their agenda to diminish and divide America by giving your tax dollars to illegal aliens. That, my loyal readers, is how you get a 14% approval rating.
Yesterday the Democrat leadership suffered a defeat on Heather Wilson’s amendment to bar public assistance to illegal aliens on a vote of 215-213. Democrat leadership has now admitted gaveling the vote closed and to improperly reporting a 214-214 tie. Democrats followed this legerdemain by openly violating their own newly implemented House Rules that prohibit members from changing votes once cast by having Democrat members change their votes to produce a 216-212 victory for providing public assistance to illegal aliens.
Republicans cried “shame” and walked out of the House for several hours. It appears that House leadership is pushing the issue. The video is great; it shows that there is still a little fight somewhere in the national G.O.P., since “fight” has so notoriously vanished in the Senate and at the White House.
In the end, the Democrat leadership cheated and prevailed in their agenda to diminish and divide America by giving your tax dollars to illegal aliens. That, my loyal readers, is how you get a 14% approval rating.
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This month, 31.3% of Americans consider themselves Republicans.
That’s down seven-tenths of a point from last month but up half-a-point from the month before.
During June, as the immigration debate raged, the number of Americans calling themselves Republican increased for the first time all year.
The number not affiliated with either major party jumped a full point to 32.9%. That matches the highest level ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports.
From a longer-term perspective, the number of Republicans has fallen nearly six percentage points since November 2004.
The number of Democrats has now fallen three points over that same time frame leading to a nine-point increase in the number not affiliated with either major party.
The gap between the parties increased a half-point this month and Democrats now enjoy a net advantage of 4.6 percentage points.
..it’s a significant decline from 6.9 point advantage enjoyed by Democrats at the end of 2006.
In fact, with the exception of last month, the gap between the parties is the smallest it has been since last July.
Political Hay
Liberalism on a Ledge
By Shawn Macomber
Published 8/3/2007 1:45:49 AM
...an audience member asked how panel members propose holding representatives accountable "without looking like all we're doing is being shrill and self-destructive."
"That's our job," Hamsher retorted. "We're supposed to be shrill and self-destructive....We're going to stand on principle and hold that line because if we don't nobody does it."
Ironically, the shrillness of a year ago has mostly been replaced with a general air of ill-defined discontent; the anger with an accounting of the sorrows of victory.
Gore/Obama 08 stickers fly off a table like hotcakes while the exhortations of the guy manning the Richardson for President booth bounce off impervious passersby as if he were a freeway ghost. Hillary's stand was completely abandoned.
The virtues of Ned Lamont's campaign are still being extolled. Faded Dean for America T-shirts are outnumbered only by Impeach Bush Tees.
NOT SO LONG AGO, progressive bloggers relished their outsider role as "citizen journalists" driven by passion not cash.
Yesterday I attended a workshop entitled, "A Union for Bloggers: It's Time to Organize!" during which a moderator posited, "I think all bloggers, in one way or another, view themselves as professionals" and a woman bemoaned the travesty of her and husband's inability to quit their jobs and become full-time bloggers because the "social safety net is in tatters."
In other words, Why won't society foot the bill for her hobby? Better organize!
It sounds like a spectacularly unserious endeavor, but Big Labor and its enablers apparently disagree. Representatives of the AFL-CIO, armed with "Kicking Ass for the Working Class" stickers, were on hand, as was a DNC employee, a D.C. District Court administrator, a Working America official and the man who got the National Writers Union up and going. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters not only posted Blogger Wanted: Inquire Within signs everywhere, but also handed out free T-shirts festooned with the slogan Working Class Blogger.
During the meeting there were surreal arguments over whether the union would be strictly for political bloggers. "There are knitting bloggers and nature bloggers and all kinds of bloggers and we have to include them as well, do we not?" one clearly miffed young woman asked. The man from the Teamsters counseled inclusiveness. Perhaps sore-knuckled knitters can find a place in an international brotherhood after all. The sky is the collectively bargained limit, even for conservatives.
"I would want to include conservative blogs because if they have to adhere to the journalistic standards the union sets..." the moderator began.
"...they'll go out of business!" a woman finished.
Cue predictably spontaneous applause.
The crowd gathered for the "Online Messaging: What Works and What Doesn't Fly Online" workshop had been split into groups to compose an Action Alert based on the lessons Jeff Lucas and Dean Nielsen of Progressive Majority had just imparted.
A few examples: "Personalization is key." "It's really important to pick a fight."
"It's always good to have an enemy."
"There's something to be said for fear."
And most improbably, considering the convention host: "It's fairly difficult to go too far online."
There's something deliciously ironic about these two guys unabashedly talking in public the way the left always warns us Karl Rove does in private.
At any rate, our charge was to stir up protest via email against a Washington State school district's decision to place a moratorium on the screening of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in the classroom.
The Kossacks tore into the assignment with relish.
"Do You Support Banning Books?" the subject line of one potential email read, comparing An Inconvenient Truth to Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye.
"School Board Pollutes Classroom With Censorship!" screamed another headline.
"Stop the Attack on Critical Thinking in Our Schools!"
"Every day in my classroom 30 students sit down and expect to hear the truth, but now the school board is telling me I cannot provide it to them," a young lady read aloud to the groups. "....We cannot allow the next generation to be denied their basic right to education!"
Which begs the question: Can the DailyKos crowd writ large actually believe partisan-to-the-core Al Gore is the only choice for educating our children?
I'm sure some evangelical parents would like The Silent Scream shown in every biology class in America as well, which would probably have Kossacks begging Buddhist monks to self-immolate on the Capitol steps.
What's good for the liberal goose isn't good for the conservative gander in this corner of the political world.
Such are the hypocrisies sanctioned when one is convinced he and his friends are humanity's saviors.
Shawn Macomber is a 2006 Phillips Foundation Journalism fellow. He is also blogging all weekend from the YearlyKos convention at AmSpecBlog
Friday, August 03, 2007
... the Administration’s Iraqi policy has made some slight gains in the Court of public opinion.
...Twenty-five percent (25%) of voters now say the troop surge is working and another 26% say it’s too soon to tell.
A month ago, just 19% considered the surge a success and 24% said it was too early to tell.
Combining those totals means that 51% are at least willing to give the policy more time.
That’s up from 43% a month ago.
Seventy-seven percent (77%) of Republicans say either that the surge has worked or that it’s too early to tell. That view is shared by 51% of unaffiliateds and 28% of Democrats.
Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Democrats say the surge has been a failure.
That assessment is shared by 44% of unaffiliateds and 19% of Republicans.
Overall, 31% of voters want troops brought home from Iraq immediately.
An earlier survey, found that a narrow majority wants to wait for the September report from General David Petraeus before making any major policy changes.
Another survey found that nearly half of American voters believe the withdrawal of U.S. troops will lead to an increase in sectarian violence.
Roughly the same percentage believe that when troops leave, the Iraqi people will still be better off than they were under the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Democrats embrace gay agenda
By: Ben Smith
August 2, 2007 09:13 AM EST
The 2004 election turned out to be the year, for Democrats, of gay panic.
It was a year in which Sen. John F. Kerry backed away from his longtime pro-gay record to support a state amendment banning gay marriage -- and in which former President Bill Clinton reportedly urged Kerry to go even further in standing against same-sex marriage.
But the mood among Democrats this election cycle seems closer to liberation. The party's leading presidential candidates will gather in Los Angeles on Aug. 9 for a forum sponsored by the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign and broadcast live on the gay cable channel Logo.
They're expected to reiterate their universal commitments to a broad range of gay rights in areas ranging from health care to immigration -- a substantive package that amounts to virtually everything short of the word "marriage."
Supporters of gay rights see a dramatic shift in their relationship to the party, a move from being a controversial minority courted only in the primary toward being an integral part of the Democratic coalition.
"We've moved from being just an issue to being a broader constituency," said Fred Hochberg, a gay activist and former Clinton appointee who backs Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.).
By RON FOURNIER, Associated Press Writer
Sat Aug 4, 7:11 PM ET
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton refused Saturday to forsake campaign donations from lobbyists, turning aside challenges from her two main rivals with a rare defense of the special interest industry.
"A lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent real Americans, they actually do," Clinton said, drawing boos and hisses from liberal bloggers at the second Yearly Kos convention.
Despite their own infatuations with special interest money, former Sen. John Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama put Clinton on the spot during a debate that featured seven of the eight major Democratic presidential candidates. They fielded questions from a crowd of 1,500 bloggers, most of them liberal. The gathering marked another advancement for the rising new wing of the Democratic Party, the so-called netroots.
The candidates were put on the defensive from the start.
The first question went to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who was asked why he once cited Justice Byron White, a conservative, as a model Supreme Court justice. "I screwed up on that," he replied.
Clinton was asked what three lessons she learned from her failed health care reform effort during the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton. "It is not enough to have a plan. You've got to have a political strategy," the New York senator said.
"In 90 seconds, I don't have the time to tell you all the mistakes I made."
Plunging headlong into the Internet era, all seven candidates fought for the support of the powerful and polarizing liberal blogosphere by promising universal health care, aggressive government spending and dramatic change from the Bush era.
Edwards received a loud cheer when he suggested his rivals were tinkering around the edges — "I just heard some discussion about negotiation, compromise" — rather than overhauling government. He said the nation needs "big change, not small change."
The party's 2004 vice presidential nominee, Edwards called on the field to join him in refusing donations from Washington lobbyists. He suggested that accepting lobbyists' money would make Democrats no better than Republicans.
"We don't want to trade their insiders for ours," said the former North Carolina senator.
Clinton, who accepts such donations, did not respond to Edwards until much later in the forum when the question was put to her. Even then, she stalled by stating the obvious.
"I think it's a position that John certainly has taken," she said, drawing laughter from the crowd. It was not clear whether the audience was laughing with her or at her.
Nonetheless, the bloggers booed and hissed when Clinton insisted a moment later that nobody would believe that she could be influenced by lobbyists' money. So would she continue to accept those donations?
"Yes, I will," she said, arguing that plenty of lobbyists represent good causes. "They represent nurses, they represent social workers, they represent, yes, they represent corporations that employ a lot of people."
Obama rejected that argument, saying Clinton should know better because special interest money helped sink her health care package in 1993. The crowd cheered wildly.
Edwards asked crowd members how many of them were represented by lobbyists. A few hands went up, and his point was made.
While they don't accept money directly from federal lobbyists, Edwards and Obama are not above benefiting from the broader lobbying community. Both accept money from firms that have lobbying operations, and Obama in particular has tapped the networks of lobbyists' friends and co-workers. Obama, a former state senator from Illinois, has long accepted money from state lobbyists.
Again and again, Edwards took swipes at Clinton. On terrorism, he said: "I don't believe we're safer. I don't agree with Sen. Clinton on that." In a previous debate, Clinton had said the country had been made safer.
Clinton explained Saturday that while post-9/11 reforms have improved the nation's safety, the country is not as safe under President Bush as it should be. "I listened carefully to John. I think we have a vigorous agreement," she said, coldly.
The Kos convention is a sign of the times.
Gone are the days when candidates and political parties could talk to passive voters through mass media, largely controlling what messages were distributed, how the messages went out and who heard them. The Internet has helped create millions of media outlets and given anyone the power to express an opinion or disseminate information in a global forum, and connect with others who have similar interests.
Clinton is viewed skeptically by the the blogging community, mainly for her history of hawkish views on Iraq. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of Daily Kos and spiritual leader of the convention, said Clinton still might be able to mitigate her problems.
"We may decide she's not our first choice, but she's not a bad choice," he said.
Appearing solo at a session of bloggers before the debate, Clinton was warmly received, especially when she jokingly blamed a microphone malfunction on the "vast right-wing conspiracy."
One thing most bloggers have in common — regardless of their political leanings — is an intense frustration with the political establishment. And so it was a convention dripping in irony when liberal bloggers welcomed the living symbols of the Democratic status quo — seven presidential candidates.
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