What a great week!

Voters repudiate big government. Republicans retake House.  Pelosi decides to run for Minority Leader so as to remind everyone of the "ugly face" of big govenment.

And now Keith Olbermann is suspended without pay for ethical violations!



Apparently, somebody at MSNBC decided that Olbermann was "shilling" for Democrats.

Here's more on the topic.

And Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard thinks the suspension is unjust.  Kristol is high-minded and probably right but (a) that just makes the news so much sweeter and (b) it's only when the left gets hoisted by their own rules that they develop a sense of fairness.

But the question is, why is NBC only now starting to get interested in impartiality?  This post notes:

And this is just cause to kick Olbermann off the air? And why now? William Kristol wonders if NBC’s parent company, General Electric. isn’t trying to curry favor with the new GOP majority in the House. More likely, as Bryan Preston points out, since Olbermann’s ratings have been tanking, his prickly presence in the newsroom has caused enormous friction with both on-air and behind-the-camera staff. MSNBC President Phil Griffin may have taken the opportunity afforded by Olbermann’s transgression to send the Kos-darling packing, ridding himself of this meddlesome high priest of hyperbole.

Apparently, it could not have happened to a more deserving jack-ass:

Certainly, the faux journalist Olbermann, whose “Special Comment” is among the most hyperbolic, exaggerated, and mean-spirited political commentary available, is the least deserving of sympathy of any figure on the left in America. He oozes a sneering, self-righteous superiority that only liberals who feel similarly blessed with outsized notions of transcendence can stomach. Reportedly, he is not a very nice fellow either, but how could he be otherwise given the manner in which he routinely portrays the opposition as a cross between the devil and Hitler?

Two days after the election, Boston Herald Columnist declares that she's not voting for Barney Frank.

Better late then never.

Apparently, it was Barney Frank's graceless acceptance speech that finally turned Margery Eagan against Frank.

After 30 years, Barney Frank finally lost my vote.


On election night, he lost my respect as well.

Frank’s road rage acceptance speech was an out-of-body experience.

There was the congressional king of anger, vituperation and vitriol lashing out at the Herald and Fox 25 for, in his words, “anger, vituperation . . . and vitriol.”

It's weird that this stuff wasn't enough:

Alas, Mr. Whip Smart wasn’t smart enough to see the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae disaster that resulted in the cruelest foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression. And he’s not enough of a stand-up guy to fully admit his role.


Now Frank is acting as if the Herald’s tough news stories about him are somehow out of bounds. Really?

This summer, the paper reported a controversial taxpayer bailout Frank arranged for a Boston bank at the center of an ethics scandal involving disgraced California congresswoman Maxine Waters, disgraced ex-state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson and a disgraced banker arrested on rape and cocaine charges.

Then there was Frank’s trip to the Virgin Islands aboard a private jet owned by a bailout billionaire. And the $40,000 his campaign took from bailout banks after he promised not to. And finally, there was the Herald video capture of Frank’s partner taunting Sean Bielat after a debate.

It seems that corruption is not enough; what's really inexcusable is not being a witty homosexual.

California Ballot Measure Results.

From the SOS.

Proposition Title Yes


Votes % No

Votes %

No 19 Legalize Marijuana in CA, Regulate and Tax 3,412,387 46.1% 3,978,314 53.9%

Yes 20 Redistricting of Congressional Districts 4,268,103 61.2% 2,712,119 38.8%

No 21 State Park Funding. Vehicle License Surcharge. 3,048,756 41.9% 4,227,021 58.1%

Yes 22 Prohibit State From Taking Some Local Funds 4,291,832 61.0% 2,750,022 39.0%

No 23 Suspend Air Pollution Control Law (AB 32) 2,806,234 38.9% 4,404,634 61.1%

No 24 Repeal Allowance of Lower Business Tax Liability 2,912,221 41.5% 4,101,719 58.5%

Yes 25 Simple Majority Vote to Pass Budget 3,884,542 54.8% 3,212,365 45.2%

Yes 26 2/3 Vote for Some State/Local Fees 3,692,156 52.9% 3,298,677 47.1%

No 27 Eliminate State Redistricting Commission 2,783,908 40.6% 4,072,505 59.4%





Taking Back Democracy.

Voters in Iowa have tossed three of their Supreme Court Justices who divined a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

In California, the Supreme Court justices up for retention were retained, but in every case it was by a 60 - 30% margin, which suggests inchoate unhappiness with the judiciary.

Is Obama Serious?

In a question put to him during his Press Conference about the effect of the election on his Healthcare bill, Obama says that we "should not misread the election" and "the voters don't want to relitigate issues that have been discussed for the last two years."

Huh?

Isn't one of the purposes of an of election to control our besuited masters in Washington when they go to far?

Update:

Jonah Goldberg picks up on Obama's weird claim that it would be "relitigating the past" to dismantle a program that the people didn't want in the first place and which they repudiated the first nanosecond they had the chance:

During his press conference this afternoon, President Obama insisted that the American public doesn’t want to “re-litigate the past.” Roughly four minutes later, he insisted that he inherited the deficit, which got worse because of a recession he inherited, as well. Somehow Obama forgot to mention that he increased spending 23 percent, tripling the deficit in the process.


No wonder he doesn’t want to re-litigate the past.

Indeed, earlier in his remarks the president claimed that spending went up after he came into office solely because he and his party were forced to deal with a crisis. “Now, the reason was, it was an emergency situation. But I think it’s understandable that folks said to themselves, ‘You know, maybe this is the agenda as opposed to a response to an emergency.’”

No doubt the financial crisis came with significant costs for the taxpayer, but among the myriad things the president left out of the story was the fact that his pre-crisis top campaign priorities—healthcare, “green energy,” and education—what he called his “new foundation,” were his top post-crisis priorities as well. In other words, it was his agenda. For a year, as he relentlessly pushed a healthcare bill, against public opposition, his advisers kept telling the press that once he got his healthcare priority passed, he would “pivot” to focusing on jobs. So while the country bled jobs from its economic jugular, Obama crammed through an unpopular piece of legislation that wouldn’t fully kick into effect until 2014. He did not do so in secret. “A crisis,” his chief of staff explained numerous times, “is a terrible thing to waste.”

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

President Obama came close, but he still just cannot admit that his radical policies and their effects on the economy are the cause of his devastating political rebuke. For most of his press conference, an oddly depressed Obama voted present, as he all but said that the problems are mostly ours, not his — or at least not his agenda but perhaps an occasional inadequate communication.

In clingers fashion, he once more is talking down to us, explaining that we confused his necessary solutions with a bogeyman increase in big government, and so typically, in fright and ignorance, lashed out at his party. He is claiming the outrage grew from the same frustration that elected him, rather than arising precisely because of him and his agenda. In short, we are angry because his EU-socialist agenda is progressing too slowly and hasn’t delivered as promised — as it will in time. Perhaps then we will thank him for his proper big-government, big-spending solution.

He seems bewildered (for the first time?) that his popularity as a campaign rhetorician did not last when he became responsible for actual governance. For most of the press conference, a humbled but deer-in-the-headlights Obama half-heartedly argued that the populist outrage against his own massive debt, huge wasteful government, and elitism was really outrage against the economy he inherited, an outrage that he shares. We don’t know it, the president hints, but we are still angry at the Bush years, and yesterday mistakenly took our wrath out on Obama’s methodical, albeit too slow, efforts at recovery. In short, there was little admission whatsoever that Obama’s message and the way he pushed it turned off millions — there was no repentant Clinton, circa autumn 1994, here; instead, a shocked Obama who seems hurt that we do not appreciate him.

I don’t think the American people — who just last week heard their president boast that Republicans had to sit in the back seat, and that Latinos should punish their Republican “enemies,” and who have now given him the greatest midterm putdown in over a half-century — suddenly will pay much attention to his calls for an end to the old divisiveness.

Hush!  Professional Journalists at Work!

MSNBC's clowns show that they don't have a clue about why no one watches them.

Chris Mathews explains that he never said that he "felt a tingle run up his leg" during an Obama speech.



In fact, Matthews said that he felt a "thrill run up his leg."



What a moron.

The Daily Beast has other videos from MSNBC's meltdown, such as this moment by Keith Olbermann:

Barney Frank Releases his Inner Liberal.

According to Michael Graham of NRO this is the worst victory speech ever:

From our friend Barney Frank. Having won by about 14 points, he spends ten minutes trashing Sean Bielat, the media, and everyone else. He’s outraged that he had to run a race at all. He calls the Bielat campaign “beneath the dignity of a democracy” or words to that effect. This from a guy who ran millions of dollars in attack ads, repeatedly insulted Bielat, and shouted down his own constituents.

If you want to know what’s really going through the mind of Democratic incumbents this morning, just listen to Barney Frank release his inner arrogant liberal.

It's a shame this corrupt politician is returning to Washington.

Deep Question: If it was ironically cool for Stewart to have a rally in order to make fun of other rallies...

...would it even be cooler to make fun of Stewart's rally against other rallies?

You decide.

Campaign Finance Reform is Bad for Democracy.

The Wall Street Journal declares that campaign finance reform is dying along with Russ Feingold's Senate career.  Insofar as it makes the "game-rigging" by incumbent politicians more difficult, this is probably a good thing:

That failure was underscored recently by no less an expert than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who explained her party's troubles this year by saying that "Everything was going great and all of a sudden secret money from God knows where—because they won't disclose it—is pouring in."


By "God knows where," the Speaker means from the businesses whose First Amendment rights to engage in political speech were restored by the Supreme Court in January's Citizens United v. FEC. Democrats are now using post-Citizens United fundraising as an excuse for whatever dire fate befalls them today. We'd sympathize more with her lament if she weren't being gored by her own reforms.


The 2010 fundraising breakout is the predictable consequence of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, aka McCain-Feingold. By squeezing donations to the political parties, campaign reformers all but assured the rise of outside groups to fill the gap. Like water running downhill, political money will always find a way. When straightforward avenues were closed off, donors naturally diverted into the perfectly legal if less transparent vehicles of 527 and 501(c) groups.

Democrats were delighted with this deal in the three previous election cycles, when they were the first to exploit the new fundraising potential of 527 groups and outraised Republicans by a healthy margin. According to the Campaign Finance Institute, Democratic 527s claimed a nearly 3 to 1 financial advantage over Republican-oriented ones in 2004—a dominance that continued through 2008. Altogether in 2004, 2006 and 2008, independent 527 groups spent $667 million for Democrats against $242 million for Republicans.

Which shows why John McCain is such a doofus and why we were lucky he lost in 2008.

Along with being unhappy about the "messiness" of robust political speech - apparently preferring the decorum associated with elections in the late unlamented Soviet Union - liberals have been attacking the decision in Citizens United as if it were some radical innovation, because, obviously, the Constitution had always intended that Congress could outlaw the distribution of political books and films near an election.  The WSJ writes:

We warned in part because we had seen this happen before. Congress's initial campaign-finance laws, which passed in the wake of Watergate, were first declared constitutionally suspect by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. That decision allowed limits on political contributions to candidates, but it tossed out overall campaign spending limits and it barred limits on individuals spending on their own behalf. That created the millionaires loophole that gave an advantage to well-heeled candidates. It also created the era of special-interest political action committees, or PACs. It did not reduce campaign spending.


Liberals who blame the Supreme Court are really arguing with the U.S. Constitution. For some remedial free speech instruction, we recommend that reformers read an essay by litigator Floyd Abrams in the Yale Law Journal Online that defends the logic in Citizens United as squarely in the tradition of First Amendment jurisprudence. Mr. Abrams has represented the New York Times, and he eviscerates the arguments of his clients, among others.

Like the WSJ, I've changed my opinion about disclosure requirements after seeing liberals harass small donors to political camaigns, as occurred after California's repudiation of "gay marriage":

These columns have long supported disclosing political contributions as part of a larger deregulation that allowed any American to give as much as he wants to any candidate. This is the Virginia model and it works well, as it did at the national level for decades before the goo-goos got into the act. Lately, however, as we've watched Democrats and liberals attack Target Corp. and other businesses for donating to independent groups, we wonder if even disclosure is wise. But as the price for a wholesale repeal of all campaign-finance limits and putting the Federal Election Commission out of business, we're willing to compromise.

Chris Matthews is not feeling the tingle.

Via NRO.

Accusations of Racism have jumped the shark.

Washington Examiner has posted a video of "crazed Democrats" ripping up signs and hurling accusations of racism with this explanation:

If you thought negative campaign ads were a problem in this election, perhaps you haven’t spent enough time in Virginia’s 5th district. This video depicts two men unleashing a string of racial epithets at members of Americans for Prosperity, who took the video. While flailing arms and shouting, the two also start yanking signs off of private property and throwing them aside, while saying, “This is public space. I pay taxpayer dollars while y’all to spread racism and bigotry.” See for yourself:

The Legacy Media is Caught Again.

Reporters caught conspiring to concoct story designed to embarass Republican candidate Joe Miller.

Clearly the reporters were conspiring to set up some type of smear of Joe Miller. With glee, they even cite a recent controversy over an incident involving the Rand Paul campaign, while discussing how they would spread the story via social media after whatever incident they had in mind came off. It also brings to mind another recent episode that ended with Jerry Brown’s California gubernatorial campaign being caught up in controversy when someone from Brown’s camp called Brown’s opponent, Republican Meg Whitman, a “whore.”

Mainstream Media reporting ought to be listed as an "in-kind" donation to the Democrats.

NRO's Battle 10 has the transcript:

FEMALE REPORTER: That’s up to you because you’re the expert, but that’s what I would do…I’d wait until you see who showed up because that indicates we already know something…


[Laughter]

[INAUDIBLE]

FEMALE REPORTER: Child molesters…

MALE REPORTER: Oh yeah… can you repeat Joe Miller’s…uh… list of people, campaign workers, which one’s the molester?

[INAUDIBLE]

FEMALE VOICE: We know that out of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender.

[Laughter]

MALE REPORTER: You have to find that one person…

[INAUDIBLE]

FEMALE REPORTER: And the one thing we can do is ….we won’t know….we won’t know but if there is any sort of chaos whatsoever we can put out a twitter/facebook alert: saying what the… ‘Hey Joe Miller punched at rally.’

FEMALE REPORTER: Kinda like Rand Paul…I like that.

[Laughter]

FEMALE REPORTER: That’s a good one.

Liberals resorting to bigotry, again.

This has to be the worst campaing season ever. People who resort to appeals to religious prejudice, whether it's the inane "Aqua Buddha" ad or the recent attempts to use Catholic imagery as an unspoken reason to vote against someon deserve to lose.  And now there's this "are you now or have you ever worked for a Catholic Diocese" strategy from Missouri.

Big Journalism has a post on an attempt to smear Missouri Congressional Candidate Ed Martin as a Catholic for purported involvement in the pedophilia scandal because - hey- all Catholics are guilty by definition. It appears that the site is funded by  Martin's opponent, Democrat candidate Russ Carnahan. 

Here is the site whose allegations appear to be that Martin worked for the Diocese between 1998 and 2001 and therefore must have been involved in alleged pedophilia that happened decades earlier.  The site finds great signficance in Martin's wedding invitation.

According to Big Journalism:

It must be asked: Is this what all reporters from CBS and NBC news are really like? How could an Emmy award-winning journalist and an Edward R Murrow award-winning journalist be reduced to such reprehensible actions? Did they try to push the story through the media and fail? Anderson Cooper had enough interest to call the local Fox channel for an investigation, but it wasn’t moving fast enough until Ed Martin called the press conference to get ahead of the smear. Add in the suspicious payments to a research department at the University of Arizona that researches speaking to the dead, and you get a very nasty, very under-handed, almost certainly illegal coordination hit piece, run by former Dateline journalists, and financed by Russ Carnahan’s re-election campaign.


This is the state of modern journalism. Handed the keys to a juicy story about an attack piece that failed, no media outlet was interested in discovering who was behind a blatant smear of Catholics and a congressional candidate. Once again, an unpaid blogger presented the evidence. It is our hope that the media finally reports on the matter, calling out their former comrades for conduct unbecoming of a professional journalist.

All of this, of course, merits not a second of interest in the media since anti-Catholicism is "the last acceptable prejudice.

Minnesota Democrat Party runs "The Most Anti-Catholic Political Ad You'll Ever See."

According to National Catholic Register:

A Democrat Party supporting independent non profit group has sent out perhaps THE most anti-Catholic political advertisement I’ve ever seen. Sometimes there’s a little subtlety to anti-Catholic political rhetoric but not this time. This is in your face anti-Catholicism. A postcard was sent out to voters with a photo shopped picture of a Catholic priest wearing a campaign button saying: “Ignore the Poor.”


As you can see the pic takes up nearly the entire length of the postcard. It’s anti-Catholicism is not one point of many. It’s the point.

According to its website “The Minnesota DFL supports and works to enact the ideals and principles of the Democratic Party and strives to sustain the foundations in our Party’s grassroots history.”


One of the more worrisome things about this is that this group must believe that there’s enough of an anti-Catholic vote that this would pay dividends. Could that be true?

Never mind the factual basis the charge that the Church ignores the poor is absolutely ridiculous because the Church is THE most charitable organization on the planet. But this postcard has nothing to do with the poor. What this is about is the fact that the Church stands strong against abortion and gay marriage. And that makes some very angry.

This election season has been a nasty one. And this may be its low point.

See also The Eponymous Flower.

I'm not getting the point of the ad. How does accusing the Catholic Church of "ignoring" the poor make people vote Democrat? 

 

Former New York Mayor Ed Koch Predicts Republican Blow-out.

This falls in the man-bites-dog category. Koch writes:

I predict a Republican victory of tsunami proportions on November 2nd.


For the last six months in various public forums, I have said that Republicans will take both the House and Senate. Most political observers, citing statistics from various states, continue to say that, while it appears certain that the House will go Republican, there are too few Senate seats in play for a Republican takeover. Further, many pundits state that Democrats will preserve their control of the Senate because the Republican Party has undermined itself by fielding whacko and semi-whacko candidates from the "Tea Party" wing or otherwise offering inferior candidates, e.g., Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Linda McMahon in Connecticut and Carly Fiorina in California.

Without being able to cite statistics that support my view, I nevertheless predict the Republicans will also take the Senate.

 
And:
 

Why would intelligent voters leave the Democratic Party that they endorsed so heavily two years ago in the 2008 presidential election? The reason is obvious - deep, deep disappointment in the record of President Obama. The President has wasted many opportunities in his term to date, and has lost by his own admission almost every battle for the hearts and minds of the electorate in pushing through Congress monumental legislation that he signed into law.


Why did the President and Congress insist on reinventing the wheel when it came to health care coverage? Weren't there prototypes in Europe and elsewhere developed and used for more than 50 years with proven track records that could have been used as models? Did the President and Congress have to terrify people who had insurance coverage in order to provide coverage for the additional 32 million Americans covered under the new law? Couldn't those without insurance have been attached in some way to the Medicaid rolls? Why did the President and Congress sell out to the prescription drug companies and strip Medicare of the right to negotiate volume discount purchases that could have saved U.S. taxpayers more than a trillion dollars over ten years? What rankles most for many, including me, is why have there been so few criminal prosecutions of those who are responsible for having brought the U.S. economy to its knees, destroyed the nation's prosperity and caused millions of Americans to lose their homes, their jobs and a substantial portion of their retirement savings? Why when looking at Obama's cabinet and advisers, do we see the faces of those who many hold responsible for the economic debacle?

It is for these reasons, I believe, the coming November tsunami will roll across America and give the Republicans, who are undeserving of the honor, control of both Houses. The American public is enraged and wants to punish those who have been in charge of the country. They know those who will replace incumbents may be as bad or worse, but they also believe they can't do any greater damage. They are willing to put up with them until the next election to teach our elected representatives a monumental lesson -- that public service is an honorable profession and must be performed competently and honestly.

Brent Boger for Clark County Prosecuting Attorney

Oofta!

Tim Pawlenty teaches President Obama some useful Minnesotan phrases.

Crazy Republicans.

On the other hand, you get some crazy amateur political talk from some amateur polticians like GOP congressional candidate Stephen Broden who says "violent overthrow of government is 'on the table.'"

In a rambling exchange during a TV interview, Broden, a South Dallas pastor, said a violent uprising "is not the first option," but it is "on the table." That drew a quick denunciation from the head of the Dallas County GOP, who called the remarks "inappropriate."


Broden, a first-time candidate, is challenging veteran incumbent Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson in Dallas' heavily Democratic 30th Congressional District. Johnson's campaign declined to comment on Broden.

In the interview, Brad Watson, political reporter for WFAA-TV (Channel 8), asked Broden about a tea party event last year in Fort Worth in which he described the nation's government as tyrannical.

"We have a constitutional remedy," Broden said then. "And the Framers say if that don't work, revolution."

Watson asked if his definition of revolution included violent overthrow of the government. In a prolonged back-and-forth, Broden at first declined to explicitly address insurrection, saying the first way to deal with a repressive government is to "alter it or abolish it."

The comment is made by a sacrificial lamb who is never going to get elected and doesn't represent the official views of anyone but himself, and, yet, this is just nutty talk.

Mark Shea has been doing Yeoman's work of pointing out the hypocrisy of not condemning this kind of talk from the Right if we are going to condemn it on the Left:

The more these people gaze upon the terror of the Nazis under the bed that haunt their Beck-filled dreams, the more they slowiy turn into that which they fear most. Aristotle is right: we become like that which we contemplate. The Thing that Used to Be Conservatism is transmogrifying into the fascist it fears.

Airplane's David Zucker lampoons Boxer's "Call me Senator" line.



Call Me Madam Joe from RightChange on Vimeo.

Like Richard Nixon wearing a suit at the beach, the Democrats this year are working too hard at passing for normal.

What is with the Democrats this year?  It seems that all of their fears are projections about what they would do if given the opportunity.

Ann Althouse provides these clips.

Here is the political ad from Rand Paul's opponent, which, if it had been put out by a Democrat, would have caused the Left to have vapors about the coming Theocracy.



Here is Paul's statement from his debate.