Talk Straight

2012 Coming Fast. Let’s Look At President Obama’s Accomplishments

Barack Obama tripled the national deficit in his first year. Obama nearly matched it his second year. This year the deficit will be even higher.

He passed a failed trillion dollar stimulus.

Spending was up 84% under Obama.

Obama is the worst jobs president since the Great Depression.  8 million jobs have been lost.

The federal government accumulated more new debt– $3.22 trillion ($3,220,103,625,307.29)—during the Obama years than it did during the first 100 Congresses combined.

And, don’t forget that he rammed through Obama’s nationalized (except for Maine) healthcare bill on a straight party-line vote.

And he started a new war kinetic military operation.

Four More years! Four More years!…..Good Grief.

State-Run Media Whitewashes McCaskill’s Obamacare Voting Record…or it’s beginning to look a lot like election time

Thank goodness Claire can count on the media to help her out.
The press started spreading the rumor this week that McCaskill is questioning Obamacare even though she not only supported the plan, but also traveled the state promoting it at townhall meetings.
Jake Wagman at The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported:

With 2012 Republican opposition already circling, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill continues to question a key component of the president’s health care plan.

Politico has McCaskill, who’s already attracted two GOP contenders hoping to unseat her, joining a band of moderate Senate Democrats exploring ways to replace the mandate portion of the health care legislation approved by Congress last year.

McCaskill told Politico writer Manu Raju that they are looking for something “less than a mandate,” such as limited enrollment periods with financial penalties for not signing up. (That’s not a mandate?)

“It may be that the mandate is the only way we can do it,” McCaskill said. “But I think we should explore it.”

Under the plan signed into law last year, individuals could eventually face a fine of up to 2.5 percent of their income for not having insurance.

Of course, they forgot to mention this…
When McCaskill had the opportunity to remove the mandate during Senate negotiations in 2010, she refused. Instead, she voted to keep the mandate in the bill by killing a Republican amendment (H.R. 4872, CQ Vote #101: Motion agreed to 58-40: R 0-40; D 56-0; I 2-0, 3/25/10, McCaskill Voted Yea).

Lloyd Smith, Executive Director of the Missouri Republican Party, said this:

“Claire McCaskill voted to keep the unconstitutional individual mandate in the health care bill, she cast the deciding vote in favor of Obamacare, and then she traveled the state in support of the law. McCaskill had plenty of opportunities to seek alternatives to the individual mandate, but instead, she sided with Barack Obama every chance she got and forced costly, burdensome, and unconstitutional regulations on every single Missourian. McCaskill’s sudden election-cycle repentance is too little, too late.”

More here

WHICH REPUBLICANS SOLD OUT?…or I’m in Congress for the power and chicks

With the new Republican power in Washington, it is doubly important to keep a close eye on the doings of GOP Senators and Congressmen to spot those who are straying from orthodoxy, seduced by power and the insider clubiness that characterizes Washington.

In the Lame Duck session, we want to draw attention to six Republican U.S. Senators who voted with the Democrats on a key issue. We should all bear their apostasy in mind and, in particular, make them mindful of the possibility of primary challenges to their re-nomination.

Two Senators, in particular, deserve to have primary challengers take them on in 2012 — Tennessee’s Bob Corker and Mississippi’s Thad Cochran. Both men voted for the START treaty which conceded a permanent edge in nuclear weaponry to Russia. While the Treaty provided for equal and reduced stockpiles of strategic warheads, it did nothing to address the vast piles of tactical nuclear warheads held by the Russians. The Russians have 10,000 of these battlefield nuclear weapons piled up in the stockpile while we have only a few hundred.

In addition, START’s preamble blocks the U.S. from developing missile defenses, now especially important in light of North Korea’s and Iran’s expanding capacities.

Both Corker and Cochran face re-election in 2012. They should both be challenged for the nomination by men who put our need for national security above appeasing the Russians. Having suppressed democracy, wiped out free speech, taken over all the media, nationalized their oil and energy industry, invaded Georgia, enabled the Iranian nuclear program, and tried to establish a natural gas monopoly in Europe, what else does Putin need to do before Corker and Cochran realize that appeasement won’t work?

Bob Corker’s vote for START probably stems from the insider-old boy network on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on which he sits. Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who also voted for START, sits alongside him on the Republican minority on the committee. Led by Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking GOP member on the panel, all three voted for START. Unfortunately, Isakson is not up for re-election until 2016. When he does come up for re-election, we hope that the citizens of Georgia’s Republican Party hold him to account.

Lamar Alexander, also of Tennessee, backed START and faces re-election in 2014.

In a previous column, we called attention to the defections of Republican Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Mike Crapo of Idaho from the ranks of fiscal conservatives. Both Coburn and Crapo voted for the recommendations of the Bowles-Simpson Deficit Reduction Commission which recommended cutting the deductions for home mortgages and charitable contributions by two-thirds for most taxpayers and urged the enactment of almost $1 trillion in new taxes.

Coburn and Crapo only announced their intention to endorse the Commission report after they had been re-elected on November 2, 2010. Now they are safe in their seats until 2016. But we hope to be still writing columns by then and will remind the voters of those two conservative states how ill-served they were by their Republican senators.

So who sold out?

Thad Cochran, Mississippi
Bob Corker, Tennessee
Mike Crapo, Idaho
Tom Coburn, Oklahoma
Lamar Alexander, Tennessee
Johnny Isakson, Georgia

Let’s remember.

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Two black Democrats bolt party for GOP…or prepping for the next election?

Two African-American Democrats on Thursday announced that they were joining the Republican Party.

Hall County Commissioner Ashley Bell and former state executive committee member Andre Walker said the Democratic Party had grown too liberal and they are finding a new home with the Republicans.

The state GOP touted Bell as the first black elected official in modern times in Georgia to leave the Democrats for the GOP. But that distinction belongs to former state Sen. Roy Allen of Savannah, who joined the Republican Party in 1994.

Bell was introduced as a Republican at a news conference Thursday at party headquarters.

“My district is pretty Republican as it is,” Bell told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “My wife and I have been thinking about this for six months.”

He said they are both conservative “and the Democratic Party has been our home. The party had conservatives and liberals both in the party. [But] this election showed us the liberal wing of the Democratic Party is very, very strong. If your’e a conservative, it became more difficult to be in the Democratic Party.”

Bell, a former national president of the College Democrats of America, was a 2004 delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

Bell has two more years left on his term and said he was switching now to make his intentions known. He said he plans to run for re-election as a Republican.

Walker, who runs the political blog Georgia Unfiltered, resigned from the Democratic Party’s state executive committee. Walker was a delegate to the 2004 Democratic National Convention and is a former president of College Democrats of Georgia.

“Since the first Democratic lawmaker bolted to the Republican Party, left-leaning activists have mocked and ridiculed those individuals as being self-serving people only looking for ways to remain in office,” Walker told the AJC. “But I’m not an elected official. I don’t hold public office. I’m not trying to protect my seat. I don’t have a seat to protect. I’m just a regular citizen with a healthy interest in the political process, and I’m joining the GOP because of ideology.”

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Michelle Obama on a second term: It’s important for Barack to finish what he started…or we don’t want to leave the orgy until we’ve screwed everybody

As Dennis Miller once said in comparing German reunification to a Martin and Lewis reunion, I’m not a fan of his previous work and thus I’m really not looking forward to seeing the new sh*t. In fact, what is the new sh*t that he has planned for a second Obama term? Cap and trade is dead for good, I think; they were struggling to find the votes for that even when Democrats were flying high, but after this month’s shellacking, it’ll be years before they get another centrist to come aboard. Amnesty is always possible, but The One really wants to get that done before 2012 so that he can be personally rewarded for it by Latinos at the polls. After the election, his incentive to push it through will disappear.

 Expanding ObamaCare to include a public option would have been a no-brainer if Democrats were still in good shape congressionally, but he’s probably facing a Republican majority in both chambers come 2013. In which case, what’s the big legislative program that he needs to “finish”? Are there some more car companies he’s hoping to bail out? Do we need to blow a few hundred billion dollars more on another wasteful stimulus now that the first one’s petering out? Is Michelle waiting for term two to become the new Jackie Kennedy that parasitic D.C. socialites dreamed she’d be when he was first elected? What’s the plan?

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Political Scientist: U.S. Voters Are ‘Pretty Damn Stupid’…or Bill Maher is that you?

Political reporters often rely on University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles Franklin for expertise.  In just the past few months, his insights have appeared in articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Associated Press, Politico, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications.  He’s also a co-founder of the influential website Pollster.com, as well as co-director of the Big Ten Battleground Poll.

So Franklin answered with considerable authority when he was asked, at a recent forum on the November 2 election results, why Republicans emerged victorious in so many races.  “I’m not endorsing the American voter,” Franklin said.  “They’re pretty damn stupid.”

Franklin was responding to a question from Bill Lueders, news editor of Isthmus, a weekly alternative newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin.  In an account published Thursday (H/T Ann Althouse), Lueders says he asked Franklin why “the public seemed to vote against its own interests and stated desires, for instance by electing candidates who’ll drive up the deficit with fiscally reckless giveaways to the rich.”

“Franklin, perhaps a bit too candidly, conceded the point,” Lueders writes.  “‘I’m not endorsing the American voter,’ he answered. ‘They’re pretty damn stupid.’”

Lueders writes that he responded, “Thank you, professor.  That’s the answer I was looking for.”  The rest of Lueders’ account explains that smart voters support things like high-speed rail and higher taxes for the rich, while dumb voters support “an obvious phony like [Republican senator-elect] Ron Johnson over Russ Feingold.”

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Obama’s Nominee for UN Reform Job Left Senate Race After Specter Joined Dems…or That Joe is a real team player

President Obama’s nominee for a high-level United Nations reform position dropped out of the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania last year shortly after Sen. Arlen Specter switched parties and won an endorsement from the White House.

Joe Torsella, chairman of the Pennsylvania State Board of Education, was nominated this week for U.S. ambassador for the U.N. Management and Reform, a post that has been vacant since Obama took office.

A spokesman for Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who appointed Torsella to the chairmanship, told the Philadelphia Daily News that he was not aware of the U.N. job but has “recommended Joe to the White House for a number of positions.”

Rendell was among the Democratic leaders who embraced Specter in the race, which drew national publicity after his primary opponent, Rep. Joe Sestak, revealed that the White House tried to lure him out of the contest with a high-level job.

The White House later disclosed that it had former President Bill Clinton offer Sestak an unpaid position on an intelligence advisory board if he would stay in the House. But Sestak went on to defeat Specter in the primary and lose to Republican Pat Toomey this month in the general election.

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. gave $1,608 to Torsella’s Senate campaign last year and later got a refund after he withdrew his bid, the Daily News reported.

The White House did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment. Torsella did not return messages requesting an interview.

John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. during the Bush administration, told FoxNews.com that Torsella’s nomination raises a number of questions about his background, including his experience working to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from government programs.

“And from what I see, he doesn’t have it,” he said. “In the absence of significant management experience with government programs, these are all questions the Senate should raise.”

Read more: ______________________________________

Shocker!….Not!

‘Our Work is Now Finally Beginning’: Progressives Claim Victory in Midterm Elections…or now that the moderates are gone, we can unleash the hounds

Republicans may have made historical gains in last week’s midterm elections, but liberal progressives are the ones now claiming victory.

Look no further than the far-left DC-based Institute for Policy Studies — the “ideas factory” behind the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC). As Speaker Nancy Pelosi is having to give up her Speaker’s gavel, IPS is celebrating the fact that nearly all hard-left members of the CPC were re-elected. The notion may seem shocking, but Trevor Loudon of NZ Patriot notes, it’s partially true:

While so called “centrist” or moderate democrats lost hugely, the Progressives lost only three members Alan Grayson, John Hall and Phil “don’t worry about the Constitution” Hare… [T]his means that Obama and the remaining Democrats now have nothing to lose by pushing hard to the left.

Karen Dolan of the IPS is now encouraging President Obama to “do the right thing through as many Executive Orders as we can present to him.”

Did we all miss the news flash? PROGRESSIVES WON! Two significant exceptions are of course the tragic defeat of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and the sad loss of prinicpled Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL). But, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus in the House Democratic Caucus at over 80 members, emerged virtually unscathed, losing only three members.

By constrast, the conservative Blue Dog Democratic caucus was more than sliced in half from 54 members to only 26. Further, of the 34 conservative Dems who voted against Obama’s Healthcare Reform, a mere 12 won re-election.

Dead weight gone. Good Riddance. The blame for the stalemate to come can now fall squarely where it belongs…on the anti-progressive, anti-democratic, anti-populist Republican members of Congress.

Our work is now finally beginning. The veil of a happy Democratic governing majority is finally lifted. We didn’t have it then; We don’t have it now. But what we do have now is a more solidly progressive bunch of Dems in Congress and a president presumably less encumbered by the false illusion that playing nice will get him a date with the other team….

As NZ Patriot warns, don’t dismiss the progressive ramblings of IPS — they seem to have friends in high places these days.  As Loudon notes, IPS is not only a strong voice within the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but has also advised the White House in the past.

“If you want to know what the Democrats will do tomorrow, read what I.P.S. is advocating today,” Loudon writes.  After all, it was IPS staffer Chuck Collins who “recommended that Obama appoint communist Van Jones as a ”Green Jobs Czar”, even before the 2008 election,” he concludes.

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Bag of Uncounted Ballots Found in Bridgeport, Conneticut…or what? You want us to actually count them?

In what has become one of the stranger twists in an already bizarre Governor’s race, a bag of uncounted ballots was found in Bridgeport Thursday night.

Republican officials were approached by Democratic operatives and told about the surprise ballot bag, according to Bridgeport GOP Chairman Marc Delmonico.

Delmonico said Democrats asked to have several people deputized to count the uncounted ballots, but Republicans objected, claiming that wasn’t proper procedure in the vote-counting process.

Instead the GOP asked police to take custody of the bag of ballots until the matter could be sorted out.

The votes could be pivotal in the race for Governor, in which neither candidate has conceded defeat.

Wednesday, Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz declared Democrat Dan Malloy the “unofficial” winner, but numbers released by her office show Republican Tom Foley still leading Malloy by more than 8,000 votes. Those totals do not include any of the vote totals from the City of Bridgeport.

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Keep in mind that I got this story from NBC, so don’t be surprised when the bag ends up having about one million votes for the democratic candidate.

California Democrat wins Re-election-even though she’s dead…or we see dead people

Death has no political sting in California.

Exhibit A: even though Jenny Oropez died last month, the Democrat easily won re-election to California’s State Senate, defeating John Stammerich, her Republican challenger, by a 58-35 margin.

Oropeza died from complications due to a blood clot on October 20, which was too late to replace her on the ballot.

As one might expect in an election where a deceased candidate wins, controversy abounds. According to the Daily Breeze, Sammerich has filed charges against the state‘s Democratic Party and Secretary of State because of a questionable mailer sent in the election’s twilight.

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