ConfirmThem

They threw him out 59-0:

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has been convicted at his impeachment trial and thrown out of office.

His removal comes nearly two months after his arrest on charges of trying to sell Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat. He becomes the first U.S. governor in more than 20 years to be removed by impeachment.

…and AoSHQ reports that they’re apparently setting it up so that he’ll never hold office in Illinois again.

In light of that: Blagojevich likes literary references.  I’m making one under the fold.

The book is called Silverlock, by John Myers Myers, and you will be a better person once you have read it.  Certainly better-read, if only in self-defense.  To give you an idea: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Poul Anderson nearly came to blows over who would have the honor of writing the foreword to the 1980s edition, which is why the book has three of them.  Anyway, when I saw the news that they were adding that little bit of humiliation to Blagojevich this passage sprung to mind:

“…As I say, it was all right for MacDairi to kick Cuchullain around, because up to that point it was a fair fight - MacDairi against a few hundred odd - but when he got Setanta down he rubbed dung in his hair.  It’s that sort of thing that breeds vengeance; if not from the injured party, from outraged Delian Law…”

…with “Delian Law” meaning “the way things ought to go in a well-ordered universe” in this context.

Yeah.  Not that I have anything against cruelty per se, of course, but wanton cruelty matched with pride - and, perhaps, fear - is a dangerous weapon in anybody’s hands.  I wouldn’t have rubbed dung in Blago’s hair like that, is all I’m saying.  Especially if I belonged to a state party apparatus that would need to be worked over with a high speed industrial scrubber before it could be elevated to the status of “dirty.”

Crossposted at Moe Lane.

The corrupt Democrat Governor of Illinois has been convicted by unanimous vote and removed from office by the state Senate.

According to MSNBC, “The governor said he would like to apologize, but couldn’t because he didn’t do anything wrong.”

According to the Chicago Way, I’m sure he didn’t do anything wrong — except get caught. That’s the cardinal sin when working in (let alone leading) as corrupt an institution as the Illinois Democratic apparatus.

Michael Hirsh has a typically asinine column in today’s Newsweek, in which he berates Republicans for being unwilling to “compromise” (read: abandon conservative principles and flock to President Obama’s pork-filled big-spending “stimulus” proposal) and follow Obama’s lead in putting “childish things” (like core beliefs) behind them and focusing on making America more socialist.

For the purpose of this post, I’ll just quote the final portion of the column:

In his Inaugural Address, Obama proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.” He said he wanted to move beyond “stale political arguments … The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”

That sounded about right to me, at least in terms of dealing with the crisis nature of the times. It is also smart, at this dire moment, to be trying to learn a few lessons from the past.

Obviously we don’t want to go back to the excesses of the long era of Democratic dominance and overspending—the New Deal-Great Society/Vietnam continuum—but neither can we simply return to the Republican era of Reaganite deregulation (especially of financial markets). It’s clear we need to do some serious rethinking of the best ways to make capitalism work, moving beyond both FDR and Reagan.

Get that? “Obviously we don’t want to go back to the excesses of the long era of Democratic dominance and overspending—the New Deal-Great Society/Vietnam continuum,” says Hirsh. Hm — if $800 billion in pork barrel giveaways isn’t “overspending,” what, in his opinion, would be?
He concludes:

But reaching a new consensus would require a reassessment of basic premises, and it appears, at least for the moment, that there will be very little of that. The emerging Republican consensus suggests that Bush grew so unpopular because he strayed from, rather than stood behind, the old GOP verities by creating a vast national-security state and giant deficits. Hence the Republicans are flocking to a proposal by the House Republican Study Committee calling for no new government spending at all, and nothing but tax cuts instead. A little over a week after Obama’s inauguration, “stale” political arguments again rule the day. So much for the post-partisan era.

Let me make sure I’ve got this straight: massive amounts of pork-barrel spending, using money we don’t have to redistribute wealth and fund pet projects, is a brand-new idea, yet actually allowing taxpayers (you know — the ones who produce goods and services and make this economy go) to keep more of their own money and use it as they see fit is a “stale political argument.”

Clearly Hirsh is as upset as Speaker Pelosi that House Republicans refused to provide Democrats with bipartisan cover on this failure-in-the-making of a spending bill.

Speaking of which, here’s a “fresh, new” idea for Mr. Hirsh: a majority party actually showing the backbone to take responsibility — without cover from the minority — for the policies they claim to firmly believe should be implemented. How’s that for revolutionary?

How much do Democrats need to spend to ‘fix’ the economy? Apparently more than FDR did during the New Deal:

Take a look at that, and remember that ‘progressives’ have hit upon one consistent talking point: if Republicans aren’t going to vote for the debt package, Congress should go ahead and make it much bigger.

Yes, it’s possible.

Call your Senators today, and tell them to put a stop to this.

Via RS’s sister site Human Events, it turns out that Speaker Pelosi’s office is working hard to react to yesterday’s strong, principled, and unanimous opposition to the Obama/Pelosi/Reid debt bill. The only problem is, knowledge of political history seems pretty limited in Pelosi’s circles, which is pretty bad since she was in office when the relevant events happened!

In other words, she’s wrong, and she’s not even predicting the kind of events that I think she wants to predict here.

Quoting the leaked Pelosi memo that Human Events uncovered:

This is not the first time the Republicans in the House have unanimously voted against a needed economic package. The last time, in 1993, when Democrats voted for tough action to clean up after Republican economic mess, not a single Republican voted for the legislation that produced record surpluses and a balanced budget.

Where to begin, where to begin? First of all, in the period from 1993 to 1997, government spending growth was held below 2%, and in fact went down in 1993, according to figures from the Heritage Foundation. That, combined with 4-7% growth in tax receipts annually, is what balanced the budget. The debt bill rejected by Republicans yesterday increases spending by unimaginable amounts, figures beyond any ordinary American’s reckoning.

Secondly, the deficit dropped by 22% and 21% in 1994 and 1995, the two years of spending controlled by Democrats in the Congress and President Clinton. Deficit reduction only accelerated when Republicans took over. The deficit went down by 36% and 80% in 1996 and 1997, and then finally we endured a surplus of taxation in 1998. Republicans got the job done, not Democrats. The difference? We cut some taxes and we truly held the line on spending. No midnight basketball. No multi-billion dollar giveaways.

Thirdly, what happened after President Clinton’s tax hike that we opposed? Did the American people side with us, or with Democrats? If Speaker Pelosi wants a re-run of 1994, I’m all for it. So let’s keep up the fight, House Republicans!

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat-Electable, Nevada) came out today and bragged that some Senate Republicans would vote for the awful so-called “stimulus” bill despite the fact that:

(A) It’s a massive, wasteful pork-barrel bill that won’t stimulate anything or anyone (except those who get really, really excited at the prospect of huge transfers of borrowed cash from larger governments to smaller governments); and

(B) doing so would provide the Democrats with bipartisan cover which they only need in order to have someone else to point the finger of blame at when this proposal goes down in flames like the Hindenburg.

I fully expect Republican Main-Streeters like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter to vote for this monstrosity which borrows and transfers more money than there is total currency currently in circulation; however, I’m hereby challenging every one of them and their colleagues to prove me wrong.

The House sent a powerful message yesterday by standing united against this terrible proposal. They have a long way to go before they’re redeemed for the last several years of mismanagement and Democrat-lite behavior, but yesterday served as a very good first step.

Call your Senator and tell him or her not to abandon the House GOP on the Front Lines of the current battle for Congress and for America’s future.

The Democrats have enough votes to pass this and every other rotten item on their agenda without Republican help. Let’s make them do it — and, through that, make them own every single negative outcome that results from their awful policies.

What say you? Are you with me?

Earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-CA) said the following:

I pledge to you–let us all pledge to the American people that: we will look forward, not backward; we will join hands, not point fingers; we will rise to the challenge, recognizing that our love of country is stronger than any issue which may divide us.

Let us listen to each other. Let us respect every voice and view. And then together, let us act.

As we in Congress pledge to reach across the aisle, we recognize that history will measure this decisive moment not just by what we do here in Washington – but by how we reflect and respect how all Americans work together for the common good to strengthen America’s future and faith in itself.

As you’d probably expect, that attitude lasted all the way until the first actual debate on legislation (which sadly wasn’t SCHIP, but the so-called “stimulus”), when she 180°ed on the post/bi/nonpartisan act and said the following:

There’s a pattern here of Republican economic mismanagement and Democrats stepping up to do what’s needed for the good of the country while Republicans acted in a partisan and irresponsible manner.

So much for the New Tone era of Obamitics in DC. I wonder if we’ll start hearing soon about how President Obama failed to bring to Washington the New Tone he pledged during the campaign…

…you know what? Never mind. When it’s a Republican, it’s the President’s fault for not being New Tonal enough. When it’s a Democrat, it’s — you guessed it — the Republican minority’s fault for not warming to that supposed New Tone.

Oh well. Again, a tip of the cap to House Republicans, who yesterday united and made the Democrats own the crap sandwich they want to feed the American people. If the GOP can keep this up through 2010, we may see a whole new party in charge of Congress come the 112th convening.

You’ve heard the horror stories about the wasteful projects in the House version of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi debt bill. You heard about reseeding the mall, and funding ’stimulative’ contraception. But did you know that the Senate has a whole raft of new items in their version of the bill?

Here’s a taste:

•    $20 million “for the removal of small- to medium-sized fish passage barriers.” (Pg. 45 of Senate Appropriations Committee report: “20,000,000 for the removal of small- to medium-sized fish passage barriers)

•    $400 million for STD prevention (Pg. 60 of Senate Appropriations Committee report: “CDC estimates that a proximately 19 million new STD infections occur annually in the United States …The Committee has included $400,000,000 for testing and prevention of these conditions.”)

•    $25 million to rehabilitate off-roading (ATV) trails (Pg. 45 of Senate Appropriations Committee report: “$25,000,000 is for recreation maintenance, especially for rehabilitation of off-road vehicle routes, and $20,000,000 is for trail maintenance and restoration”)

•    $34 million to remodel the Department of Commerce HQ (Pg. 15 of Senate Appropriations Committee report:  $34,000,000 for the Department of Commerce renovation and modernization”)

•    $70 million to “Support Supercomputing Activities” for climate research (Pgs. 14-15 of Senate Appropriations Committee Report: $70,000,000 is directed to specifically support supercomputing activities, especially as they relate to climate research)

•    $150 million for honey bee insurance (Pg. 102 of Senate Appropriations Committee report: “The Secretary shall use up to $ 50,000,000 per year, and $150,000,000 in the case of 2009, from the Trust Fund to provide emergency relief to eligible producers of livestock, honey bees, and farm-raised fish to aid in the reduction of losses due to disease, adverse weather, or other conditions, such as blizzards and wildfires, as determined by the Secretary”)

How many jobs are these projects likely to create?

Why am I predicting this? Well, to start off with, it’s not like getting it wrong is going to embarrass me or anything - I’m just this guy on the Internet, remember - so why not? Anyway, I’m figuring that the revision is going to happen, based on two factors.

First, for some reason Obama seems to want to play hardball over an-already passed bill:

Pushing back against the unanimous House Republican vote against President Obama’s stimulus plan, the White House plans to release state-by-state job figures “so we can put a number on what folks voted for an against,” an administration aide said.

“It’s clear the Republicans who voted against the stimulus represent constituents who will be stunned to learn their member of Congress voted against [saving or] creating 4 million jobs,” the aide said.

…see Ed Morrissey for additional scorn at the gambit. Personally, like Ed - and the GOP - I’d look forward to reminding people who did and didn’t vote for this monstrosity; I’d also look forward to reminding people that, for a supposedly cool, collected, post-everything healer and Lightworker, President Obama has an astounding ability to get into a snit-fit at the drop of a hat.

Only I don’t expect that I’ll be able to, because of the second factor. Fresh from my inbox:

Public Support for Economic Recovery Plan Slips to 42%

[snip]

Over the course of the past week, there has been little change in the views of either Republicans or Democrats towards the legislation. Seventy-four percent (74%) of Democrats support the plan along with just 18% of Republicans. Both those figures are up just a single point from the previous poll.

However, support among unaffiliated voters has fallen. A week ago, unaffiliateds were evenly divided on the plan, with 37% in favor and 36% opposed. Now, 50% of unaffiliated voters oppose the plan while only 27% favor it.

Bolding mine. The Politico article above mentions how liberal & Democratic groups are planning to target moderate Republican Senators to vote for this thing. With numbers like that, maybe they should be targeting moderate Democratic ones. Or possibly they should drop back five yards, punt, swallow their pride, and humbly ask the GOP to actually help them create a stimulus package. But if they don’t want to do that, well, that’s how it goes.

After all, they won.

Last night the House GOP stood together, moderates and conservatives, and opposed Barack Obama’s socialist stimulus scheme.

Today, Mitch McConnell is going to address the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting. According to Roll Call, in his speech McConnell intends to outline a “post partisan path” to leadership that “could also provide a rallying cry for old-line Republicans to reassert their authority within the party” — the same old guard that supported the Bridge to Nowhere and capitulated repeated to President Clinton when he was in office.

Already, McConnell has been favorably quoting Bob Dole on the need to compromise with the Democrats.

So here’s what we need to do. I’ve said he lost his testicles and is now spreading a cancer of capitulation throughout the Senate Republican Conference. We need to send Mitch some balls.

Seriously.

We’re teaming up with the Don’t Go Movement to do just that. Go here and send Mitch some balls. The House GOP can hold the line. Mitch and the Senate GOP should do the same and oppose the stimulus bill.

Mail the balls to Mitch’s Louisville Office:

Sen. Mitch McConnell
601 W. Broadway
Room 630
Louisville, KY 40202
Phone: (502) 582-6304

They can donate them to a local youth program, I’m sure. And they’ll get the point. And thanks to Don’t Go for helping us spread the word.

The Senate GOP Leadership needs to stand up for the GOP, not kowtow to the Democrats.

From the NY Daily News

compare with classic Larson:

What a goof. What a maroon. What an imbecile. Funny how the press doesn’t have a really good sense of humor these days.

Politico reports that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel holds daily chit chat sessions with several Old Media pals every morning to start his day. Apparently Emanuel has for years been involved with daily bull sessions to plan media coverage and ideological strategy with CNN’s James Carville and Paul Begala, as well as ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, with the occasional participation of pollster Stan Greenberg. But there is one little problem with this daily palling around with mediots these days: Emanuel now works for the White House.

As Politico’s John Harris notes, “in any given news cycle, it is quite likely that Washington’s prevailing political and media interpretation — at least on the Democratic side — is being hatched on these calls.” In light of this early morning scheming, one has to wonder where the supposed autonomy of the media is if they are being programed by the Obama White House in off the record, secret and daily conversations? Where is their objectivity if these media mavens are all assisting Emanuel mould and shape the news to further a specific ideological goal?

Even worse, where are the people that would normally decry a chummy, personal and secretive relationship between Emanuel, a partisan government operative recently called the second most powerful man in Washington, and major members of the Old Media? Where’s the outrage that the Obama administration is secretly programing media coverage?

Ed Morrissey of HotAir reminds us of the Old Media outcry that was raised when it was thought that the Pentagon held briefings for analysts that reported on military affairs.

Last April, The New York Times rebuked the Pentagon for offering information to analysts as a sort of breach of the public trust and reported the angry words of Democrat Ike Skelton (D- MO) on the matter.

Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a speech on Thursday that he and many other members of Congress were “very angry” about the issues raised by the article. “The story does not reflect well on the Pentagon, on the military analysts in question, or on the media organizations that employ them,” he said.

As Skelton said in April, the cozy relationship the TV analysts had with the Pentagon called those analyst’s veracity into question. If this concept was true last April, then the same absolutely must be said of Carville, Begala and Greenberg, and even more so of ABC’s George Stephanopoulos who is supposed to be a “news” man as opposed to an opinionist as Carville and Begala are.

After all, if we were expected to discount the military analysts because of their close relationship with the Pentagon, we absolutely have to view these supposed news guys with the same jaundiced eye since they are in daily, secret conversations with the President’s Chief of Staff.

So, we should be expecting CNN and ABC to announce their embarrassment that their purported “news” men are being so co-opted, right? We must be ready at any time to hear people say that Stan Greenburg’s work is forever compromised and untrustworthy, right? We must be on the verge of apologies by all four men for allowing their veracity to be called into question because of their cozy relationship with the Obama White House… right?

If not, then why not? Where is the proper level of outrage?

Unless…

Could it be?

Could it maybe be that these “news” agencies don’t care if their news men are being co-opted by the White House because it’s THIS White House? One run by a Democrat. And a White House run by The One, at that?

Well, I for one, am calling for ABC and CNN to fire Carville, Begala and Stephanopoulos as well as for everyone to stop considering Greenberg’s work worthy of attention. Short of firing the three TV newsers, the networks should tell their employees to cease and desist with these secret planning sessions with the White House and issue apologies to the viewers for not informing them of this secret pipeline to power.

How can we believe that Carville, Begala and especially Stephanopoulos will be informing us of what is really going on since we are now aware that they have been daily joining a powerful member of the Democratic Party in ideological strategizing? How can we believe that we are getting anything other than the Party line directly from Barack Obama instead of unbiased news when these three men speak to us from our TVs?

Fire Carville, Begal and Stephanopoulos now. They have sold out to Obama and cannot be trusted to report the news to the viewing public.

(Image credit: politico.com)

I got the tip from fellow RedState gonzo blogger absentee that Susette Kelo’s house - the one that the Supreme Court ratified the City of New London’s taking away from her, in what was frankly not liberalism’s finest hour - still hadn’t been replaced by anything. If that post by This Woman’s Weblog is accurate, it sure looks like it:

As you know, Susette’s little pink house and the homes of her neighbors were seized through eminent domain in a landgrab sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court. New London promised to put a glitzy new private development project on the land, but now, nearly four years after the ruling and $78 million in taxpayer money spent, literally nothing has been built on the land; it remains vacant, the neighborhood bulldozed.

A call to the New London Development Corporation (the group that’s supposed to be the developer of the Fort Trumbull area) lasted until I got tired of listening to the phone ring (the city itself redirected my questions pretty much immediately), and their website is… ah, uninformative. They apparently had Ms. Kelo and Jeff Benedict, author of Little Pink House: A True Story of Defiance and Courage on Hannity last night, and I found this video on said book via a site called Sharon4Council:

By all means, check it all out.

And if you don’t know why people all over the political spectrum have freaked out about this case for the last four years: go buy a house, and you’ll figure it out really quickly.

Crossposted at Moe Lane.

To answer the headline: NO.

According to the historically illiterate Democrats in the Arkansas legislature, the USA was “founded by slaveowners,” and so they said in a resolution celebrating the election of Barack Obama. Not surprisingly, a few Arkansas Republicans objected to this stilted and historically misleading language and voted against the thing and those few Republicans deserve a pat on the back.

The resolution congratulating President Obama was killed in the Arkansas House Committee on State Agencies and Governmental Affairs this week when Republicans raised objections over the language in the document that claimed the United States as a nation was “founded by slaveowners” as if every founder was a slave owner or slave owning was a chief reason for creating the nation.

Opposition led by Rep. Dan Greenburg, R-Little Rock, and Rep. Ed Garner, R-Maumelle, centered around laguage in the resolution that described the United States as a nation founded by slaveowners. Greenburg and Garner wanted the language stricken or amended, noting that not every founding father was a slaveowner.

Apparently, Democrats in Arkansas are unaware that a large number of the Founding Fathers not only didn’t own slaves, but abhorred what would come to be known as the peculiar institution. Famous Founders such as John and Sam Adams, Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine were very much anti-slavery. Paine, for instance, was a founding member of one of the first anti-slavery societies in the country, founded in 1775 in Philadelphia.

In fact, the country almost didn’t get off the ground because folks in the North East had wanted to eliminate slavery as a provision of nationhood. Sadly, politics intervened and the anti-slavery folks were convinced by their Southern brethren that the country would never be started unless the Northern members of the new nation relented on the issue.

Yet with the historical illiteracy of Arkansas Democrats aside, this language is even more insidious if not subtly so. For if the state government of Arkansas was to adopt a resolution that says something like “the United States is a nation founded by slaveowners” then it would be officially sanctioning the concept that slavery was a chief aspect of that founding. After all, to focus solely on the “slaveowners” aspect of our founders would be to focus on that slave owning itself.

Now, there is no denying that slavery was a sticking point in our founding. But slavery was not a chief component of the founding. Slavery was not featured as the raison d’être of the genesis of this nation. It was a messy fact of everyday existence — and had been for nearly 200 years already in the New World — but it simply was not a founding concept of the nation.

This is not to say it didn’t feature prominently in the negotiations between Northern and Southern factions of the founding generation, because it did. This is not to say that there was no fighting over it, because there was. This is also not to say that the anti-slavery side was so concerned over the issue that they refused to budge on moral grounds, because they did not.

But, as important an issue as it was, slavery itself was not a main reason for founding this country.

The Arkansas Republicans that killed this resolution were 100% right to scuttle it. It would have been no more logical to say that “the United States is a nation founded by men,” or “the United States is a nation founded by English speakers.” While technically true, of course they were English speakers and men, these singular facts had little to do with the founding itself.

At any rate, to focus on the slavery aspect of the founding era is misleading and to say outright that all the founders were themselves slaveowners is factually incorrect.

Good for these Arkansas Republicans for quashing this resolution. If they want to create another one that celebrates Obama’s election without surreptitiously trying to slide in the claim that all our Founders were slaveowners, then have at it. But, let’s not mar Obama’s success with ideological backbiting, historical illiteracy and lies shall we?

JANUARY 29, 2009

1. House Republicans Stand United Against Obama’s Socialist Stimulus Bill

It would fund “great sex” programs, birth control, and a host of other big government programs, but do little to actually help the American people. That the House GOP stood up to the President is encouraging news.

2. Someone, Acting for Obama, Sentenced AIDS Victims to Die

We don’t know who did it, but someone has decided to sentence people to death, just because President Bush came up with a plan. Nevermind that the plan and people behind it were effective.

3. Support the Rangel Rule Bill

What’s good for Charlie Rangel and Tim Geithner should be good for the rest of us.

4. Obama Fails to Delay Digital Television Conversion

The delay would only have profited members of Obama’s transition team. Of course, the media failed to report that.

5. The Right Must Persevere

We win some. We lose some. But we must stand up for what is right.

———————————————————————-

1. House Republicans Stand United Against Obama’s Socialist Stimulus Bill

It would fund “great sex” programs, birth control, and a host of other big government programs, but do little to actually help the American people. That the House GOP stood up to the President is encouraging news.

The final vote was 244-188, with 177 Republicans and 11 Democrats voting against (1 GOP member had to leave early).

The Democrats passed the bill, but couldn’t keep their caucus together — and the GOP managed to keep every single member in line.

Well done, Reps. Boehner, Cantor, and the rest of the House Republican caucus.

SOURCE

2. Someone, Acting for Obama, Sentenced AIDS Victims to Die

We don’t know who did it, but someone has decided to sentence people to death, just because President Bush came up with a plan. Nevermind that the plan and people behind it were effective.

During Obama’s transition, Dr. Mark Dybul was initially asked to stay on as the coordinator of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) for several months until a replacement could be found and confirmed. Because Dybul was the main architect of the program and one of its guiding visionaries, few were surprised by the offer. With Ambassador Randall Tobias, Dybul organized the most staggeringly successful foreign assistance effort since the Marshall Plan — eventually helping support lifesaving AIDS therapy for more than 2 million people.

By encouraging Dybul to stay until his successor was in place, the Obama administration displayed a generous spirit, as well as a practical concern for continuity in a vital program.

Then, the day after the inauguration, Dybul received a call asking him to submit his resignation and to leave by the end of the day. There was no chance to reassure demoralized staffers, or PEPFAR teams abroad, or the confused health ministers of other nations. The only people who seemed pleased were a few blogging extremists, one declaring, “Dybul Out: Thank you, Hillary!!!”

Firing Dr. Dybul will make PEPFAR less effective. That means that people who might have been helped in time will not be; that means that people will end up dead much sooner than they might have been. But that was less important to somebody in the Obama administration than scoring domestic political points. Or going after a gay man who had the brazen effrontery to assist a Republican President in the task of saving innocent African lives.

SOURCE

3. Support the Rangel Rule Bill

What’s good for Charlie Rangel and Tim Geithner should be good for the rest of us.

All U.S. taxpayers would enjoy the same immunity from IRS penalties and interest as House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY) and Obama Administration Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, if a bill introduced today by Congressman John Carter (R-TX) becomes law.

Carter, a former longtime Texas judge, today introduced the Rangel Rule Act of 2009, HR 735, which would prohibit the Internal Revenue Service from charging penalties and interest on back taxes against U.S. citizens. Under the proposed law, any taxpayer who wrote “Rangel Rule” on their return when paying back taxes would be immune from penalties and interest.

SOURCE

4. Obama Fails to Delay Digital Television Conversion

The delay would only have profited members of Obama’s transition team. Of course, the media failed to report that.

President Obama wants to delay the long-announced, long-planned, long-desired-by-first-responders transition from analog to digital television broadcasts. By replacing the old, large-bandwidth-consuming NTSC standard with the new, sharper, narrow-bandwidth ATSC, we create lots of room in the radio spectrum for other broadcasts, including those by firefighters, police, and other public safety workers.

However Obama wants to delay it for a few months, claiming that people aren’t ready. This despite the fact that anyone with cable or satellite is unaffected, vouchers for free set-top boxes have been around for months, and every broadcast station has been warning about the transition. The President thinks we’re idiots, it seems.

No matter, the Senate agreed and passed a bill implementing his wishes unanimously. On it went to the House for another easy pass? Not so fast. Democrats got confident and tried to do a quick-and-easy passage according to the suspension of the rules procedure. That procedure bypasses the normal process but requires a supermajority vote.

The Obama delay bill did not get that supermajority vote. It got a majority, but to pass notwithstanding the rules it needed significant Republican support. 258-168 was the final vote, but 290 were needed for passage.

SOURCE

5. The Right Must Persevere

We win some. We lose some. But we must stand up for what is right.

Yesterday the Politico ran a story on Jim DeMint filled with invective from anonymous Republican staffers in the Senate. They hate Jim DeMint because he perseveres. He is not always successful, but sometimes he is. And if he perseveres, at some point, he will prevail.

DeMint, in the article, said something very wise about the present Republican leadership. He said “that lawmakers in both parties ‘only respond to pain.’”

Again, we don’t expect to be successful all the time. We will have set backs. That is the nature of the game. We must also accept that some people have good reasons for doing what they do, though we disagree with them. But we must also expect and demand that we are respected as the base of the party. We must fight and our fight must frequently induce pain on our own side. It is frequently the only way to make headway.

Persevere and fight on.

One way to do so is to join the RedState Army. We will be sometimes defeated. We will be sometimes victorious. But most importantly, we won’t be idly bitching and yelling into the wind — we’ll be working to make a difference. It is no good to complain and not act. It is very good to act without complaint and fight the good fight until the setting of the sun.

SOURCE

The Arena had us discuss whether the stimulus package should have attracted Republican votes. I had no hesitation in answering no. The policy behind Keynesian stimulus is terrible; see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, just for starters on why Keynesian stimulus is a bad idea. The fact that House Republicans were cut out of the negotiating process only served to reduce the impetus for Republicans to reward the crafting of a bad bill with their votes.

There are plenty of critiques that can be made of this stimulus bill, critiques that make a powerful argument against its enactment. Phil Levy points out that the stimulus is tremendously protectionist and will counteract trade liberalization–something we would stay away from if we were serious about wanting to stimulate the economy (see also this piece by Levy). This piece reinforces concerns that the stimulus package will turn into a protectionist bonanza (we may in part thank the antediluvian Senator Sherrod Brown for the increased Congressional effort to make a bad economic situation worse through the promotion of protectionism; evidently, the words “Smoot” and “Hawley” mean precisely nothing to Senator Brown). Philip Zelikow reminds us that the crafting of this stimulus package detracts from the spirit of pragmatism that the President promised us he would follow:

. . . the current belief in the healing power of a gigantic stimulus package is substantially faith-based. Once one gets past the need to revitalize automatic stabilizers (like unemployment compensation) and give state and local governments appropriate access to credit, the relevant science and the historical analogies, when probed, are not so deep. Just a few months ago, the International Monetary Fund’s economists acknowledged that, “Perhaps surprisingly, the empirical literature on the effects of fiscal policy does not provide a clear answer to the simple question of whether discretionary fiscal policy can successfully stimulate the economy during downturns.” The new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, knows this all too well.

Zelikow doesn’t just critique; he comes up with an alternative proposal as well, one that has a whoe lot more intellectual integrity than does the Administration’s stimulus proposal. Larry Lindsey does so as well; his argument that we ought to cut the payroll tax is well-taken and has not, alas, meaningfully penetrated the inner policy circles of the Obama Administration. Steve Horwitz–via Will Wilkinson–reinforces the fact that the stimulus bill is just a Democratic policy wish list writ large. Jeffrey Sachs argues trenchantly that we ought to be concerned about the degree to which the stimulus bill is a fiscal disaster. Read the whole thing but the first paragraph is especially worthy of note:

The US debate over the fiscal stimulus is remarkable in its neglect of the medium term - that is, the budgetary challenges over a period of five to 10 years. Neither the White House nor Congress has offered the public a scenario of how the proposed mega-deficits will affect the budget and government programmes beyond the next 12 to 24 months. Without a sound medium-term fiscal framework, the stimulus package can easily do more harm than good, since the prospect of trillion-dollar-plus deficits as far as the eye can see will weigh heavily on the confidence of consumers and businesses, and thereby undermine even the short-term benefits of the stimulus package.

Sachs opens the door to tax increases. I would prefer that door remain closed but there is no gainsaying his argument that the stimulus will ruin any effort to achieve greater fiscal health. And it will do so to no positive effect whatsoever economically.

The more I examine this issue, the more I wonder why we are engaging in this fruitless exercise. I hope I am wrong and that the stimulus works. But I don’t believe it will and if it does not, then people will need to be called to account.

The accounting will begin in 2010. It should continue in 2012.

Alan Reynolds on Keynesian fiscal stimulus. He notes that for the creation of every job, we are spending $275,000. That’s a lot of money and should leave one smacked by gob, but I suppose that it is a bargain considering the fact that for every government job we are creating, we are spending $646,214.

Your HopeAndChange at work. Or, perhaps more accurately, your HopeAndChange pretending to take work seriously; I pray that in private, the President and the members of his Administration do not actually think that these proposals are intellectually defensible in any way. I would be terrified if they did.

The degree to which special interests are seeking breaks and assistance in the stimulus bill should appall people of reasonable sensibilities:

Craig Silvertooth, the president of the Center for Environmental Innovation in Roofing, said he’s concerned that lawmakers have failed to include tax incentives for energy-efficient roofs using solar panels. But the geothermal heat pump industry — represented by lobbyists for one company, Oklahoma-based ClimateMaster Inc. — said it won equal footing with solar and wind companies through a 30% homeowner tax credit in the House bill for installation of a geothermal heat pump.

Lobbyists for U.S. footwear makers and retailers want lawmakers to wall off their drive to scrap import taxes on cheap shoes from a competing push to lower tariffs on all imported clothing and textiles.

The shoe lobby sent a letter to congressional leaders Tuesday asking for a stimulus provision abolishing the import tax on synthetic, fabric and canvas shoes. The American Apparel & Footwear Association, the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America and retail footwear companies say the tax can reach 67.5%.

Once this kind of behavior commences, it is pretty difficult to stop it. Of course, the last thing we need in a recessionary economy is legislated protectionism and other such antediluvian policies but so long as Congress and the Obama Administration open the bidding to parochial interests, the chances that such godawful policies will get implemented goes up by several orders of magnitude.

“Reality-based” economics at its finest. Aren’t you glad we are giving government this much power over our lives?

It’s not up yet at THOMAS, but really: it’s the thought that counts. From Representative JOHN CARTER OF MARS!… err, actually, Texas’ 31st district (and a Republican, of course), we have this fun little bill:

All U.S. taxpayers would enjoy the same immunity from IRS penalties and interest as House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY) and Obama Administration Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, if a bill introduced today by Congressman John Carter (R-TX) becomes law.

Carter, a former longtime Texas judge, today introduced the Rangel Rule Act of 2009, HR 735, which would prohibit the Internal Revenue Service from charging penalties and interest on back taxes against U.S. citizens. Under the proposed law, any taxpayer who wrote “Rangel Rule” on their return when paying back taxes would be immune from penalties and interest.

Via AoSHQ, where they’re just as aware as we are that the Democratic Congress would never dare let this become law. After all, where would the country be if the proletariat was able to access the same considerations and exceptions currently enjoyed by the aristos running the place?  - Still, nice point there, Warlord.

…

What?  Has Edgar Rice Burroughslived in vain?  What did some of you people do growing up?

Moe Lane

Crossposted at Moe Lane.

The House GOP held the line. They voted unanimously to oppose the Obama Stimulus Plan. The Democrats will now own this failure.

Earlier today I said we must make our side feel pain when they displease us. But we should be prepared to say thanks too.

I’m giving a $22.00 donation to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the group that elects House Republicans.

We may not agree with them every time. But it is quite important that we say thanks to them when they hold the line on the advance of socialism.