Posted in Democrats, Elections, Vice President Biden, tagged Elections, Joe Biden on October 27, 2012| Leave a Comment »
The following link takes you to the New Tampa Republican Club video of a debate between Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden and Joe Biden. It is quite funny. “And I always say what I mean…”
Just one heart beat away from being President…
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Jack Markell, tagged Democrats, Elections, Mike Katz on October 22, 2012| 1 Comment »
So the DSEA weighs in with a mailer for Doc Mike Katz. Doc Mike is, evidently, the “right decision”. Frankly, I think that you should call Doc Mike per the instructions of the mailer @ 302-735-1781. The problem is that when someone picks up the phone, it is likely going to be Darryl or Carol Scott, because the number on the mailer is not Doc Mike’s number. Check the link to the White Pages…
Oops, but that’s just poor proof-reading and kind of funny. It’s that the piece is out-right wrong that is the problem…
The piece says that Doc Mike:
- Supported necessary school funding to prevent teacher layoffs and keep class sizes at reasonable levels.
- Voted for uninterrupted construction of new schools
However, Doc Mike voted against the Bond Bill in 2011 (The only NO vote in the Senate), and against Budget bills in both 2011 & 2012.
Therefore, Doc Mike did NOT vote for uninterrupted construction — to the contrary, he voted against it! And, unless the DSEA is now endorsing no salary increases or program expansion, he voted against the “necessary funds to prevent layoffs & keep reasonable class sizes”…
So I guess that means that the DSEA is now either 1) endorsing no pay increases for their members; 2) they’re just lying about Katz for political reasons or 3) they just replaced Darryl Scott’s name with Doc Mike without updating the copy to reflect Doc Mike’s actual voting history.
In truth, I have to assume that it was item 3 in the list, but the piece is still outright wrong.
Is being fraudulent in a mailer a campaign finance violation??? Call Doc Mike and ask? Oh, yeah, you can’t not only because the number on the mailer is wrong, but Doc Mike has an unlisted number (How’s that for constituent service?)…
Posted in Elections, President Obama, tagged Elections, President Obama on October 17, 2012| Leave a Comment »
“These guys eat too much red meat!” (Source: Ray Dawn Chong in the movie Commando)
Only 47% of the electorate is ‘X’ chromosome challenged. In other words, 53% of the voters are women. Last night’s debate, which was generally a draw, was a display in chest-pumping, intimidation-matching action. I have heard that women are a very large share of the professional wrestling market, but I wonder if our two Presidential candidates, in an effort to not look “meek”, are now in a blood match to see who can be more aggressive, macho, and rude. It is very evident that the two gentlemen have a pretty low opinion of the other.
In the “I’m as manly as you” category, the President did succeed in matching Governor Romney. But, he failed to describe, other than repeating his “let’s tax small businesses making $200,000 or more” mantra, how he alters his policies of continued run-away spending and economy-choking regulatory oversight.
Furthermore, the President was forced to take the opening made by the moderator to quickly move away from the Benghazi discussion. She gave him coverage by interrupting Governor Romney as he was going to challenge the President on his handling of Libya and the Middle East. There is a large distinction between claiming that a mob of unruly hooligans crashed the barricades and killed our Ambassador as a result of a Youtube video and admitting that an armed Al Qaeda paramilitary organization, operating under orders, purposely attacked the US, murdering our Ambassador, in its on-going war against the West. For two weeks, the Administration obfuscated, misled, and confused the two, to the detriment of America. You can clearly hear the President repeat, several times, “Let’s move on.”
Or, to quote another movie (this time Monty Python & the Holy Grail), “Run Away!!!”
On the other hand, Governor Romney opened the door to the President’s 47% closing statement, which was not a strong ending for the Governor.
Net-net, neither side gave ground and neither side scored any major points. My opinion, being among the XY-chromosome community, is that it will be interesting to see the impact on the 53%, an impact that I’m ill-equipped to fully fathom.
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Vice President Biden, tagged Elections, Joe Biden, Vice President Biden on October 12, 2012| Leave a Comment »
I watched last night’s Veep debate, and in the immediate aftermath, I felt very good about Ryan’s performance. He was solid, on-point, accurate. I thought he stumbled the constituent service part of the debate, but that was his only slip — and one that nobody really cares about. I watched MSNBC because I like to know what the other side is talking about, and I find Rachel Maddow to be really very funny (although I don’t think that that is her intent).
There were two beefs that Rachel & the gang had…
1) Relative to Afghanistan, I thought Ryan was crystal clear. It is still the fighting season. We had a surge to give the Afghan authorities time to build up security and civil infrastructure so that they can hold the gains on their own. We have pulled out 20,000 surge troops too early. So, we have left a light force to fight heavily armed insurgents while our only help is a still poorly trained Afghan military. Who do you want fighting next to you? An American Marine? Or a recently trained Afgani, who might shoot you in the back?
Ryan’s position is clear. Allow the surge to continue through the fighting season so that our troops are supporting our troops. Reduce our force level after the fighting season when it is safe to withdraw them all.
2) Eliminating tax deductions are a negotiation with Congress. That’s what Reagan and O’Neill did. It worked. We already know that if you mention an obvious cut, like the uber-wealthy Sesame Street business interests, that the leftwing and their media friends will try to hammer you. But, just as John Kennedy did and Ronald Reagan did, you can lower the rates and broaden the base and the economy grows. The Jared Bernstein acolytes don’t understand this (it isn’t in their Macroeconomic models), so the MSNBC folks don’t get it either.
So, I felt pretty good upon calling it a night last night. Upon waking this morning, I knew that we had won another debate because even MSNBC, this time Andrea Mitchell, was yammering on about how Biden had claimed during the debate that the Administration didn’t know that the Benghazi embassy had asked for more troops prior to the 9/11 attack and that they didn’t know that there was not a protest. So, either the Administration is being mendacious or incompetent (neither of which is a flattering description). If they’re being mendacious, then they’re playing the mainstream media for suckers, and even Ms. Mitchell doesn’t like that.
In short, Ryan nailed it, and Smilin’ Joe looked goofy and incompetent. On to next week.
Posted in Delaware, Delaware State Senate, Democrats, tagged Delaware, Democrats, Elections, Michael Katz on October 9, 2012| 1 Comment »
I’ve seen a copy of a mailer sent out by Doc Mike Katz. He is running for “re-election” in a newly drawn district, and for the most part, his campaign literature seems to be him in a lab coat hobnobbing with Governor Markell. That is until his hypocrite streak kicked in..
It seems that the good doctor is whining that Greg Lavelle gives too much of his legislative compensation to charity ($30,000 at last count). Doc Mike points out that Rep. Lavelle hasn’t returned his stipend for serving in leadership. The problem is that Doc Mike has served for 4 years on the Joint Sunset Committee and so is also receiving a stipend. And Doc Mike also hasn’t mentioned that he has pocketed the same expense reimbursements that he complains that Greg Lavelle has taken.
So let’s see, both have received expense reimbursements and stipends and annual pay raises along with the pay raises in the quadrennial compensation commission report. Greg Lavelle has pointed out that the annual pay raises are improper given the Compensation Commission raises and so gives those raises to charity to the tune of $30,000. In other words, Greg feels that legislators shouldn’t get two pay raises at a time (one automatically and the other voted on in the annual budget), so he returns his by giving it to charity.
Doc Mike? He pockets both sets of pay raises, and whines. My understanding is that Doctors take a Hippocratic oath. Looks like Doc Mike also took a hypocritic oath, too…
Posted in Democrats, President Obama, tagged Elections, President Obama on October 9, 2012| Leave a Comment »
As everyone, including the estimable Rachel Maddow, knows, President Obama was awful in the debate the other night. Simply awful. There have been many excuses from “He wanted to look Presidential” to “Jim Lehrer is a right-wing stooge”. I blame the President and his campaign for a fundamental error… His sparring partner in the run up to the debate was none other than John Kerry.
Yes, that’s right. John Kerry. The 2004 Democrat Presidential candidate who failed to beat George W. Bush in the debates that year. The same John Kerry who had trouble fitting in 400 words when 25 would do. This is a guy who speaks in run-on sentences that would make William Faulker blush. This has to be one of the dumbest moves of the Obama campaign since they claimed that a video incited the violence that killed an American diplomat.
Here’s some free advice to the Obama folks… Get a sparring partner who is a good, pit bull-type debater. I’m sure that Ed Rendell or Howard Dean are available. These guys don’t leave meat on a dead animal. They aren’t cerebral (as the President allegedly is), but they will rip him into shreds, which is something that he needs if he expects to not repeat Jimmy Carter’s experience.
Posted in Democrats, Elections, President Obama, tagged Democrats, Elections, President Obama on July 27, 2012| Leave a Comment »
There are very few friends and allies in politics. Even the Democrats in the U.S. Senate are using the President’s woes as a tool to raise money for themselves. With friends like that, who needs enemies..
From an email sent by the Fundraising entity that is the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee…
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In case you missed it, Ms. King admits that Romney is on a roll. He is out-fundraising the President and has caught him in the polls (actually says “destroyed [his] lead”). Strong admission from the President’s “friends”…
Posted in Democrats, Economy, Medicaid/Health Care, President Obama, Tea Party, tagged Democrats, Elections, Healthcare, President Obama on June 28, 2012| 1 Comment »
The Liberal 4, including 2 appointed by the President know that it was a tax. Since they are partisans, they wanted to save the President’s socialist utopian legislation irrespective of the law. So, they were willing to call a tax a tax and rewrite the legislation — putting the President in an awkward spot, campaign-wise. George H. W. Bush comes to mind — “Read my lips”.
In short, President Obama is the author a huge tax increase on the Middle Class. We’ll see how that plays out in an election…
Am I disappointed in John Roberts? Yup. Although it is ironic that both Biden and Carper were holding up his nomination back in the day.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You were against the individual mandate…
OBAMA: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: …during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax?
OBAMA: Well, hold on a second, George. Here — here’s what’s happening. You and I are both paying $900, on average — our families — in higher premiums because of uncompensated care. Now what I’ve said is that if you can’t afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn’t be punished for that. That’s just piling on. If, on the other hand, we’re giving tax credits, we’ve set up an exchange, you are now part of a big pool, we’ve driven down the costs, we’ve done everything we can and you actually can afford health insurance, but you’ve just decided, you know what, I want to take my chances. And then you get hit by a bus and you and I have to pay for the emergency room care, that’s…
STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it’s still a tax increase.
OBAMA: No. That’s not true, George. The — for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I’m not covering all the costs.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But it may be fair, it may be good public policy…
OBAMA: No, but — but, George, you — you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase. Any…
STEPHANOPOULOS: Here’s the…
OBAMA: What — what — if I — if I say that right now your premiums are going to be going up by 5 or 8 or 10 percent next year and you say well, that’s not a tax increase; but, on the other hand, if I say that I don’t want to have to pay for you not carrying coverage even after I give you tax credits that make it affordable, then…
STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”
OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition. I mean what…
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, no, but…
OBAMA: …what you’re saying is…
STEPHANOPOULOS: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.
OBAMA: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy. You know that. Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we’re going to have an individual mandate or not, but…
STEPHANOPOULOS: But you reject that it’s a tax increase?
OBAMA: I absolutely reject that notion.
Posted in Democrats, Economy, Elections, President Obama, tagged Democrats, Elections, President Obama on June 18, 2012| Leave a Comment »
From the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web blog comes a great piece reflecting the history of political reporting from the 1980’s with the political reporting of today. All the whining that we read in the MSM was previously espoused by the same MSM 32 years ago. Fascinating…
“In the same years when presidential politics changed so greatly, governing did, too,” writes the Times’s Tom Wicker: “It got harder. . . . The rise of single-interest politics and independent legislators has made it more difficult to put together a governing coalition; sophisticated new lobbying techniques wielded on behalf of virtually every interest group further complicate the task. And a strong argument could be made that the major issues–energy and the economy, for instance–are more complex than they were.”
Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t Tom Wicker die last year?
Why yes he did. That quote came from a column he wrote in April 1980, the last time a Democratic president was in the midst of an unsuccessful re-election bid. And he’s not the only one whose 32-year-old plaints sound awfully familiar.
“The Presidency today is entangled in the great crisis of all established authority,” wrote Henry Graff, a Columbia University historian (now emeritus) in the Times July 25, 1980. “Executives of every kind–political, educational, ecclesiastical, corporate–are under incessant public attack.” Those damn blogs! The president’s life, Graff wrote, “is under such relentless scrutiny that he can only seem ordinary, never extraordinary. No man is a hero to his valet, and America is now a nation of valets.”
Graff did not mention Twitter, blogs, Facebook and so on and so forth.
“Watching President Carter try to juggle all the contradictory foreign and domestic problems of the nation during a presidential election and an economic recession, you have to wonder who can do it and who can govern America,” wrote James Reston, another Times columnist, in June 1980.
Reston, who died in 1995, concluded: “Carter’s campaign theme is clear. It is that while the economic figures are not on his side, the economic ‘trends’ are changing for the better, and that, as he hopes to demonstrate in his meetings with world figures, he knows more about foreign policy than [Ted] Kennedy, Reagan or [John] Anderson.”
Then again, it’s easy to be whipsawed by events.
“The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world,” declared the subheadline of a Jan. 13, 1980, Washington Post story, whose author, Walter Shapiro, has since ascended to Yahoo! News.
Titled “Voters Expect to Elect a Mere Mortal,” the Shapiro story (quoted by the Media Research Center) observed: “Voters have lowered their expectations of what any president can accomplish; they have accepted the notion that this country may never again have heroic, larger-than-life leadership in the White House. . . . Some voters have entirely discarded textbook notions about presidential greatness and believe that Carter is doing as good a job as anyone could in facing new and difficult problems and in coping with an independent and restive Congress.”
In August 1980 (in a story not available online), Post reporter Robert G. Kaiser, now an editor, described the speech in which Carter accepted the Democratic nomination:
President Carter in 1980 had to try to explain why he had not become the sort of leader Jimmy Carter promised to be in 1976. . . .
Not surprisingly, this 1980 Carter sounded much more defensive. Carter’s 1976 acceptance speech contained no negative references to . . . Gerald R. Ford. it was entirely a positive statement.
About a fourth of last night’s speech was devoted to lambasting the Republicans and Ronald Reagan. If the Grand Old Party should win in November, Carter said, “I see despair . . . I see surrender . . . I see risk.” He also sees repudiation, of course, which explains his defensiveness. . . .
Carter’s acceptance speech in 1976 was a magical moment, perhaps the high point of his political career. Carter spoke quietly that night in the lilting cadence of a Baptist preacher with a sure sense of himself and his message. . . .
There was no magic in Thursday night’s speech. Instead, a weary convention heard the sounds of slogging from a worried politician who knows he is in deep trouble.
Listen closely and you can hear the sounds of slogging echo across the decades. They emanate not just from the failed president but from sympathetic journalists trying to absolve him of the responsibility for his failure.
We learned in the 1980s that the presidency was still big. It was Jimmy Carter who turned out to be small.
Resolute Determination 