This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Politics

  • Senate stands in way of rebates

    Snowe and Collins

    The House of Representatives and the White House cooperated to push through a timely bill to rush tax refunds to Americans and soften the economy’s downturn. But the bloated and bloviating Senate stands in the way of Americans getting their money (Washington Post link);

    Shrugging off a personal plea from President Bush, senators from both parties said yesterday that they will push for significant additions to the $150 billion stimulus package hammered out Thursday by House leaders and the administration.

    Bush, appearing at a retreat for House Republicans in West Virginia, warned Congress not to load the deal with spending projects or delay sending it to his desk for a signature. Although it may not be everything Republicans want, he said, the package of payments to workers and incentives for business investment puts money in the hands of everyday Americans and does not raise taxes.

    “Congress should move it quickly,” Bush told the lawmakers. “I understand the desire to add provisions from both the right and the left. I strongly believe it would be a mistake to delay or derail this bill.”

    House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), one of the deal’s chief negotiators, put a partisan slant on that warning, cautioning: “It would be irresponsible for Senate Democrats to load this bill up with pork and other spending. Families and small businesses need help now, and this agreement shouldn’t be derailed because of partisan politics.”

    But there is nothing partisan about the opposition developing ahead of next week’s meeting of the Senate Finance Committee, which will draft its own economic stimulus bill. Republicans and Democrats alike said the administration does not have the right to force a plan on senators who had no say on its details.

    “I was very pleased with the progress the House made in working out the agreement, but the Senate is a separate entity, and the White House needs to engage in negotiations with the Senate, as well,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

    Now, I don’t know what Washington Post is trying to say, but quoting Susan Collins as the Republican holding up the Senate is kind of far-fetched. Collins hasn’t voted with Republicans in decades.

    In Washington, however, senators were busy drawing up lists of potentially costly additions to the package. Collins said a bipartisan coalition of Northeastern and Midwestern senators will push to secure as much as $800 million in heating assistance for the poor, a provision that House Democratic leaders dropped in favor of securing payments for about 35 million families who earn too little to pay income tax.

    Collins said she will push to restore about $12.5 billion in unemployment benefits and $5 billion in food-stamp extensions that House negotiators also eliminated, a call echoed by her fellow Maine Republican, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe, who vowed to add funds next week in the Finance Committee. Snowe will be joined by another Republican on the committee, Sen. Gordon Smith (Ore.).

    Nevermind that the bill is already a bi-partisan cooperation between the House and the Administration, the Senate, pompous arrogant spastic retards that they are, have to muck it all up with politics. Oh, and Olympia Snowe doesn’t count as a Republican, either. You might as well call these clowns Republicans, too;

    Democratic Sens. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Robert P. Casey Jr. (Pa.) called yesterday for hundreds of millions of dollars for mortgage counselors, while Republican Govs. Tim Pawlenty (Minn.), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Calif.) and Charlie Crist (Fla.) pushed for a temporary boost in the share of Medicaid financing assumed by the federal government.

    So much for trying to save the economy with bi-partisan cooperation.

  • Israel Embassy Protest; Dhimmis in DC

    I found out from Gateway Pundit yesterday about a protest planned at the Israeli Embassy in DC this afternoon, so I packed up my cameras and took a half hour off from work and slipped across town to Embassy Row.

    The first people I found was a small group of counter protesters, part of the same bunch that counter protest at Walter Reed every Friday night.

    They told me that before I got there, the protesters were pretty quiet, but the counter-protesters broke out their bull horn and got them all worked up;

    So they got their own bullhorn out;

    An arms race ensued;

    And they got ugly;

    But they were probably pretty ugly before they got there. Here’s a YouTube Video of the crowd. And another video of our heroes.

     

    The whole protest consisted of the moonbats shouting “Liars, liars, occupiers” while the counter-protesters tried to use actual ideas and substance to engage them. But they were more interested in shouting bumpersticker slogans.

    It was a real family affair;

    Then the usual self-hating Jews showed up;

    So guess who gets the press coverage;

    And what terrorist-supporting demonstration would be complete without the terrorist-hugging Code Pink contingent;

    Apparently they don’t like publicity;

    I should probably mention that this blogger, the mean, nasty, rich Republican came by public transportation while the Code Pink Hags arrived by taxi from about the same distance away from Embassy Row.

    Well, now that the gang was all here, it was time to leave;

    So we did (YouTube video link) . I don’t know where they went, but I went home (by public transportation) and got my blog fixed (by a wonderful Liberal, too – I know she’s reading).

    But like I said, the Left was more interested in being louder than the few counter-protesters. They were so preoccupied with shouting down the counter protesters, their shouting drowned out their own speakers who tried to speechify (You Tube link), but couldn’t over the “Liars, liars, occupiers” shouts. But that’s symptomatic of the Left; it’s not that they have anything of substance to say, just so long as they’re talking.

    Welcome Gateway Pundit, Atlas Shrugs, Solomonia and Weasel Zippers readers.

    Speaking of Atlas Shrugs, Pamela Geller has photos and an excellent report from the protest and counter protest in NYC on Saturday. Some samples;

  • Kucinich is out

    No, not that OUT…
    He’s only pulled out of the Democratic race for the Presidential Nomination.
    He says he wants to continue to serve in Congress, and, the people of Ohio are apparently stupid enough to keep re electing him…

  • The Vast Clinton Wing Conspiracy

    I wrote a few days ago about how if a Republican former-President acted during a campaign like Bill Clinton is acting these days, the Left would be apoplectic over “unseemly” behavior. Well, those chickens are coming home to roost. The Wall Street Journal quotes some Democrats;

    The Democratic epiphany about the political tactics of Bill and Hillary Clinton continues, with scales falling from eyes on a daily basis. “I think it’s not Presidential,” said former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, about Mr. Clinton’s steady barrage against Barack Obama. “It’s not in keeping with the image of a former President, and I’m frankly surprised that he is taking this approach.” Mr. Daschle supports Mr. Obama, but how he could be surprised is another matter.

    “This is beneath the dignity of a former President. He is not helping anyone, and certainly not helping the Democratic Party,” added Vermont Senator Pat Leahy. On the point of “helping” the party, Mr. Leahy seems to have forgotten that the Clinton Presidency was an era of more or less persistent Democratic losses — except for the Clintons.

    Even today’s LA Times expresses some measure of dismay;

    He’s scrapping with reporters. Pushing his wife’s candidacy. Lashing out at her top rival in the Democratic presidential race.

    Former President Clinton’s recent aggressive tactics in the 2008 campaign have propelled him squarely to center stage — to the dismay of some prominent Democrats who fear he may be damaging the party’s prospects for November.

    The vocal role he is carving out also may be a preview, should Hillary Rodham Clinton win in the fall, of how the White House would operate under the unprecedented scenario of a president being married to an ex-president.

    Bill Clinton is using both the megaphone he commands and his popularity among Democrats to try to help wrest a victory for his wife in Saturday’s primary in South Carolina, a state where polls show she lags behind Barack Obama.

    While touting his wife’s credentials, the former president has tried to redefine Obama as a more calculating politician than voters might suspect. And he makes plain he is nursing grievances about how the campaign has unfolded.

    Koolaid drinking Clintonoid Robert Reich complains about Clinton in his own blog;

    I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife’s campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a “fairy tale”) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it. Meanwhile, the attack ads being run in South Carolina by the Clinton camp which quote Obama as saying Republicans had all the ideas under Reagan, is disingenuous. For years, Bill Clinton and many other leading Democrats have made precisely the same point – that starting in the Reagan administration, Republicans put forth a range of new ideas while the Democrats sat on their hands.

    You know when an old Marxist/Clintonist like Reich gets down on the Clintons, something is wrong. However, you and I both know that the Clintons do nothing without checking to see if it works in the focus groups, so it may just work for them. For the time being, though, it looks like the Clintons may do what Gingrich couldn’t do in the 90s – make the Clintons irrelevant.

  • Tax rebates become income redistribution

    A tentative deal has been reached between Congressional Democrats and Republicans – and socialism is winning out (Associated Press link);

    Democratic and Republican congressional leaders reached a tentative deal Thursday on tax rebates of $300 to $1,200 per household and business tax cuts to jolt the slumping economy.

    Congressional officials close to the negotiations said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio reached agreement in principle in a telephone call Thursday morning.

    […]

    Pelosi, D-Calif., agreed to drop increases in food stamp and unemployment benefits during a Wednesday meeting in exchange for gaining rebates of at least $300 for almost everyone earning a paycheck, including low-income earners who make too little to pay income taxes.

    So it’s not a tax rebate at all – a tax rebate would be sending money back to the people who earned it, but instead, Pelosi wants to send money they confiscated from the person who earned it and send it to someone who didn’t earn it. That’s income redistribution, that’s socialism.

    And why do you think they’re going to give it to someone who didn’t earn the money? To buy their vote. And what is that person going to do with that money? Squander it, just like everyone else with found money.

    Say what you will about the President but his plan actually returned money to taxpayers;

    President Bush has supported larger rebates of $800-$1,600, but his plan would have left out 30 million working households who earn paychecks but don’t make enough to pay income tax, according to calculations by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. An additional 19 million households would receive only partial rebates under Bush’s initial proposal.

    So people who actually earned the money end up getting less so the people who didn’t earn the money get included. And it was House Republicans who caved;

    Democratic aides said greater GOP flexibility over giving relief to poor families with children — who would not have been eligible under Bush’s original tax rebate proposal — was the catalyst that moved the talks forward.

    “Greater flexibility” means Republicans folded like cheap lawn chairs.

    I don’t care who gets what money – I care about honesty. If it’s a big program to hand out money to the poor, then say that. You can’t rebate something to someone who never owned it in the first place.

    And because there’s more people to whom the IRS must mail checks, it’ll slow the whole process down (WSJ link);

    Even if Congress meets its goal of finishing a stimulus bill before March, it is likely to take until June for the government to start sending out the millions of rebate checks that would be the plan’s centerpiece. It would take a couple more months before all the checks could be mailed.

    […]

    A big question for the IRS is how to get benefits to people who don’t have income-tax liability. The last stimulus rebate, in 2001, went only to income-tax payers. This time, the IRS and the Social Security Administration have been discussing how they might identify and locate a broader group.

    Two points – One; If the IRS was taking our money, they’d damn sure be fast about it, tax season or not. Two; of course the IRS doesn’t know where the people who don’t pay taxes are – why would they? f’Pete’s sake.

    S.A.Miller at the Washington Times writes the good news;

    Mrs. Pelosi also abandoned the Democratic push for spending on infrastructure projects, including construction and repair of roads and bridges, which critics said would take months to start and even longer to affect the economy.

    So at least we’ve got that going for us. But Michele Malkin writes that Lil’ Chuckie Schumer has another plan for yet another “stimulus package”. We all know what kind of “stimulus” The Putz has in mind.

    More from the AP;

    Republicans, for their part, were pleased that the bulk of the rebates — more than 70 percent, according to an analysis by Congress’ Joint Tax Committee — would go to individuals who pay taxes.

    If the Republicans were happy that 70% of the recipients were taxpayers, maybe they’d be just as happy working for 70% of their pay, too. Or with 70% of their staff. Or to get their free mailings cut to 70%. They’re already getting 0% of my campaign donations compared to election year 2000.

  • What I’ve learned in the last 24-hours

    Back on January 16th, Curt at Flopping Aces posted a Pajamas Media poll that showed a 67% support for Fred Thompson among bloggers. I was one of them and I figured that with that kind of support on the internet, how could Fred lose? Well, he has quit now and bloggers on the Right are thrashing around looking for someone to support for President. Well, I learned the same thing that the Kos Kids learned when they tried to unseat Joe Lieberman last year – bloggers don’t have the influence to pick winning candidates that they think they do. Yet.

  • LA Times Writer Slams Revisionist Historian

    LA Times Article
    In his review of ‘God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215’ by David Levering Lewis,Tim Rutten slaps around the revisionist history of the book so well, you’d never think he wrote for the LA Times.
    Money shot:
    In other words, the West would be better off if it had been incorporated into an all-conquering Islamic empire in the early Middle Ages.

    OK.

    Still, it’s fair to wonder why, if that’s true, the West ended up with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Revolution and the Islamic world got chronic underdevelopment, a pervasive religious obscurantism, Al Qaeda and the trust fund states of the Arabian peninsula? It’s also fair to point out that both the Muslim philosopher Averroës and the Jewish philosopher-physician Maimonides were sent fleeing for their lives by Islamic fundamentalists and not the Christian Reconquista.

    Wow. A writer for an unabashedly liberal newspaper opines that Islam might not be the “Religion of Peace and Scholars” as we have been told again and again, even by people who damn well know better… That is, to say the least, unexpected.

  • Politics of personal destruction

    The Republicans have been blamed, since the 1994 midterm elections, for the current political climate of “partisan bickering” and mudslinging. In some cases, that might be true, but the roots of this vile political battling are finally exposed this week – and the true culprit is uncovered. It’s Clintonian politics.

    (more…)