Monthly Archives: September 2010

September 21, 2010 — Paul Mirengoff

A red light at the intersection of incompetence and ambition

Harry Reid failed today in his attempt, fueled by his re-election ambitions, to insert into a defense policy bill (1) the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and (2) the DREAM Act that would have enabled citizenship for illegal immigrant students in exchange for government or military service. The controversial provisions failed due to a filibuster. Reid’s interest in pushing for the DREAM Act is obvious – he hopes to »
September 21, 2010 — Paul Mirengoff

Desperate times call for desperate name-calling

Back when I was ardently following the battle for control of the House of Representatives (I’m doing less of this now because I’m increasingly confident that Republicans will gain control of the House and have shifted my focus to the Senate), I wrote about the race in Michigan’s Ninth District between incumbent Gary Peters and challenger Rocky Raczkowski. I also posted a link where readers could »
September 21, 2010 — Paul Mirengoff

Today’s Senate polls

Newly released polls of Senate races bring mixed but mostly good news for Republicans: Alaska: Miller 43, Murkowski 27, McAdams 25 (Rasmussen) Ohio: Portman 49, Fisher 36 (Fox) Pennsylvania: Toomey 48, Sestak 40 (Fox) Nevada: Angle 46, Reid 45 (Fox) California: Boxer 47, Fiorina 46 (Fox) New York: Gillibrand 49, Dio Guardi 39 (Rasmussen) Delaware: Coons 54, O’Donnell 39 (Fox) I view the Nevada and California polls as reasonably favorable »
September 21, 2010 — Scott Johnson

Not inside the whale

Bill Kristol has reproduced in full the Yom Kippur sermon given by Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren this past Saturday at three DC area synagogues. (Here is the printer-friendly version.) Oren takes as the text for his sermon the biblical story of Jonah that is read each year in the Yom Kippur service. Oren’s sermon is a characteristically lucid meditation on “the ultimate quandary of statecraft” presented »
September 21, 2010 — Scott Johnson

Twenty candidates who need help plus two

Jim Geraghty updates his list of “Twenty candidates who need help.” Jim spotlights the 13 members of his original Underfunded 20 who still belong on a list of important GOP challengers needing every bit of help they can get. It’s a good list. Please check it out and help where you can. Reader Daniel Reasoner writes that in Iowa (“a very purple state”), Mariannette Miller-Meeks is is running for Congress »
September 21, 2010 — Scott Johnson

Annals of government medicine

Last week in “Socialized failure” I linked to John Hinderaker’s long-running series of posts titled “Annals of Government Medicine” via the Google search function on our site. Reader Andrew Garland thought that the search link failed to do the collection justice, so he organized the posts and added summaries. “I want such information to have the greatest impact and to be easily accessible,” he writes. Mr. Garland has provided summaries »
September 20, 2010 — Paul Mirengoff

The pet and someone he’d like to pet

Fresh off of referring to Chris Coons, the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Delaware, as his “pet,” Harry Reid has now called Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) “the hottest member” of the Senate. The comment about Gillibrand came at a fundraiser. The junior Senator from New York reportedly turned red. Not long ago, of course, Reid said of then-Senator Barack Obama, that he’s “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect.” »
September 20, 2010 — John Hinderaker

The Down-Side of Gangster Government

In the Telegraph, Jeremy Warner considers the impact that the Obama administration’s treatment of BP has had on our economy: As is now apparent, the social, economic and environmental costs of the disaster, while not to be underestimated, have proved far from the outright catastrophe of recent media and political imagination. In most respects, it has been a much happier outcome than seemed even remotely possible a few months back. »
September 20, 2010 — Paul Mirengoff

Not all unpopularity is equal

Chris Cillizza claims that as November nears, voters are turning their backs on both parties. The claim is a bit odd. Polling suggests that, while Democratic Senate and House seats are about to shift en masse to Republicans, there’s a good chance that Republicans won’t lose a single Senate seat and will lose fewer than half a dozen in the House. Cillizza relies on polls showing that the approval rating »
September 20, 2010 — Paul Mirengoff

It really is as simple as that, or should be

Robert Barnes of the Washington Post begins his look at the impact of the Roberts court’s 2007 decision on efforts to achieve racially balanced schools through the race-based assignment of students this way: Chief Justice John G. Roberts made it sound so simple that day in 2007 when he and four other members of the Supreme Court declared [Louisville’s] efforts to desegregate its schools violated the Constitution. “The way to »
September 20, 2010 — Scott Johnson

An evening with Michael Barone

Michael Barone is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and co-author of the biennial Almanac of American Politics, now nearing its fortieth anniversary and available online. Mr. Barone is the author of several other books, among them the political history Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan as well as Our First Revolution and Hard America, Soft America. »
September 20, 2010 — John Hinderaker

Palin vs. Obama

Democrats often take comfort from the fact that, while Sarah Palin commands the allegiance of millions of Americans, poll data suggest that even more disapprove of her. Perhaps so. Yet, when matched head-to-head against President Obama, most voters say it is Palin who better represents their own views: Fifty-two percent (52%) of Likely U.S. Voters say their own views are closer to Sarah Palin’s than they are to President Obama’s, »
September 20, 2010 — John Hinderaker

Did DOJ Misrepresent Disposition of New Black Panther Case?

The Department of Justice and liberal media have argued that the controversy over the Department’s dismissal of its voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party–after the case had already been won by default–is much ado about nothing. DOJ’s position has been that the decision to drop the case was made by “the top career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division,” solely on the basis of the merits of »
September 20, 2010 — John Hinderaker

Whose Money Is It?

We conservatives tend to suspect that liberals in government believe that our money really belongs to them, and they allow us to keep part of it on sufferance. In the United Kingdom, that way of thinking may be about to become official: “UK Proposes All Paychecks Go to the State First”: The UK’s tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, »
September 20, 2010 — Scott Johnson

A sense of the Senate, cont’d

Professor Daniel Lowenstein is the Director of the Center for the Liberal Arts and Free Institutions at UCLA Law School. He writes to comment on Paul Mirengoff’s “A sense of the Senate.” Mr. Mirengoff’s state-by-state analysis seems correct to me, but for a complete assessment of the probabilities, another important variable needs to be considered. Congressional elections are decided by a combination of national and local (meaning state, in the »
September 20, 2010 — Scott Johnson

The trouble with Israel

Barbara Hollingsworth reports on an illuminating experiment conducted by University of Illinois Professor Fred Gottheil: Prof. Fred Gottheil told Frontpagemag.com that he compiled a list of 675 email addresses from 900 signatures on a 2009 petition authored by Dr. David Lloyd, professor of English at the University of Southern California, urging the U.S. to abandon its ally, Israel. Prof. Gottheil discovered that six of the signers, who hailed from more »
September 20, 2010 — Scott Johnson

Notes on creative destruction

When Christine O’Donnell emerged triumphant over Rep. Mike Castle in the Delaware Senate primary contest for the Republican endorsement, Karl Rove turned up on Fox News vehemently denouncing Christine O’Donnell’s personal record. After his spirited denunciations of O’Donnell, he occasionally got around to acknowledging that Democratic nominee Chris Coons (a/k/a “the bearded Marxist”) had a few issues too. Rove’s denunciation of O’Donnell is explicable by the disappointment of a political »