Democrats
April 28, 2013 — John Hinderaker
People who don’t regularly communicate with the Democratic Party have no idea what a cesspool of hatred that organization is. It has one means, and one means only, of rallying its supporters to contribute money and to vote: that is to personalize every issue, and to demonize every opponent with smears that would make an honest man or woman blush. This email is typical; the Democrats sent out several, almost
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April 28, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Rep. Hank Johnson is, as they say in presidential nominating speeches, “the man who.” Rep. Johnson is the man who worried that the island of Guam might capsize. In 2010 Johnson expressed concern at a hearing that the planned military buildup on the island of Guam might cause the island “to tip over and capsize.” The testifying naval officer struggled manfully to reassure Rep. Johnson that the island would survive.
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April 7, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Tod Lindberg wonders whether a Hillary Clinton candidacy would “clear the field” of serious Democratic alternatives in the 2016 presidential race. He doubts that it would, and so do I. For one thing, Clinton, eight years older than in 2008 and a loser that year, possesses less of an aura of invincibility than she did when she failed to clear the field the last time. For another, potential challengers have
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March 30, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The 2012 election, in which nearly every traditional rule about presidential politics was broken, showed that we have entered a new era. One feature of this new era is the permanent campaign. Until now, there has always been some respite–growing shorter over the years, admittedly–between the end of one campaign and the beginning of the next. The Democrats have now obliterated that gap; the 2014 Congressional campaign began on the
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March 21, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The Senate continues to debate the Democrats’ budget, which features massive deficits as far as the eye can see. Tonight Jeff Sessions moved to recommit the budget in order to produce a budget that balances sometime in the next ten years. This is the language of Sessions’ motion: Mr. Sessions moves to commit S. Con. Res. 8 back to the Committee on the Budget with instructions to report back no
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March 20, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Today the Senate passed a mammoth spending bill that will fund the federal government until September, and that locks in the Republicans’ sequestration victory. The Senate also debated the Democrats’ budget–the first they have proposed after four long years. We have written extensively about the Democrats’ budget proposal. It would increase taxes by $1.5 trillion, accelerate federal spending and add $7 trillion to the federal deficit. It is, in other
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March 19, 2013 — John Hinderaker
We wrote here and here about reports that Democrats will try to rush an immigration bill through the Senate without substantial debate or even, as they prefer, without giving anyone an opportunity to read the bill. The bill presumably would be based on the “Gang of 8″ plan; we know that Lindsay Graham, for one, wants to speed the bill to approval rather than “leave it hanging out for two
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March 19, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Wall Street Journal has devoted an excellent reported editorial to Thomas Perez, Obama’s nominee to head the Department of Labor. The editorial is tightly focused on the lengths to which Perez went to induce the City of St. Paul into withdrawing its appeal of the fair housing lawsuit that raised the viability of claims based on disparate impact. The City of St. Paul’s petition for Supreme Court review had
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March 19, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Walter Olson is Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and author of several books on litigation. He holds down the fort at Overlawyered. He has forwarded a column responding to the flurry of articles that appeared in the liberal press a few weeks ago opposing the federal law that bans certain gun lawsuits (the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act), led by the Washington Post. Since then the attacks
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March 18, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Arkansas Fourth District Rep. Tom Cotton appeared on CNN’s State of the Nation yesterday along with his colleague Hawaii Second District Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (video below). Our friend Rep. Cotton set forth a few significant truths about the American effort in Iraq that should not be obscured by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and his media colleagues. In the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, Naval War College professor of national security affairs
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March 18, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The New York Times and other newspapers have devoted a large number of column inches to the Senate investigation of the multibillion dollar losses incurred by JPMorgan Chase in its so-called London Whale trades. See, for example, Jessica Silver-Greenberg’s Saturday Business article and Gretchen Morgenson’s Sunday business column. Why should we care about the bank’s trading losses? Morgenson gets around to the question at the end of her column, but
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March 5, 2013 — John Hinderaker
At The Hill, John Feehery makes a provocative claim: John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are eating Barack Obama’s lunch: Don’t tell the Tea Party, but the tag team of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are currently mopping the floor with Barack Obama. The president convincingly won a second term in November, but since that time, the congressional Republican leadership has outfoxed, outmaneuvered and plain out-strategized him on just about every
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March 1, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Newt Gingrich met yesterday with some Republican Congressional staffers and gave them the memo below, which I obtained from a Congressional aide. It lays out Newt’s assessment of where the Democratic and Republican parties stand today. Much of it will seem familiar to readers of this site, but Newt sets forth the facts–many of them grim–with his customary panache. This is obviously a big topic, and I have just a
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February 26, 2013 — Scott Johnson
President Obama’s transparent mendacity about his responsibility for the sequester is revealing. The obtuse Chuck Todd doesn’t think it’s a story; he characterizes it as a traditionally sterile argument about who is to blame for the unpleasantness (which is the way the New York Times treats the issue it when it deigns to touch it). Todd can’t be that stupid, can he? True, it would be nice to know how
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February 25, 2013 — John Hinderaker
As we have noted repeatedly, the Democrats never stopped campaigning after the last election. They know they can’t move the country significantly to the left as long as Republicans control the House, so everything they are now doing is intended to fire up their party’s base so that they will have the kind of enthusiasm in 2014 that conservatives had in 2010. Can it work? Given what happened in November,
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February 6, 2013 — Steven Hayward
There’s been a lot of chatter about whether Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell might be vulnerable to a challenge in next year’s election, especially if he was challenged by the telegenic Ashley Judd. But I’m guessing Judd might think twice about the idea when she takes on board this prototype ad from American Crossroads:
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February 5, 2013 — Scott Johnson
I’ve known David Horowitz for more than 20 years, from the time he came through town with Peter Collier talking about their invaluable book Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties. As Jay Nordlinger has written, David was a leader of the New Left who became a leader of the fighting Reaganite Right: “He is a thinker and a doer, an intellectual and an activist. His mind ranges widely, and
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