HALF-FULL REPORT 09/10/10

The magic is gone. It wasn’t so long ago that Barack Obama could fill football stadiums.  In Cleveland Wednesday, he couldn’t fill a rec center at a college in a heavily Democrat town.

The speech was weird.  He referred to House Minority Leader John Boehner eight times, which had to thrill Mr. Boehner.  Hardly anybody in America knows who John Boehner is, and many of those who do don’t care much.  By choosing to use the well tanned Ohioan as a straw man, he raises Boehner to his level, or lowers himself to Boehner’s.  Very unpresidential.  Very unwise politically.

Remind me again why people think this guy is smart.

According to Time Magazine, the bloom is off the rose for the Obama campaign organization, “Organizing for America,” too.

What happened to Barack Obama’s once vaunted political machine? The outfit that put upwards of 8 million volunteers on the street in 2008 — known as Organizing for America — is a ghost of its former self. Its staff has shrunk from 6,000 to 300, and its donors are depressed: receipts are a fraction of what they were in 2008. Virtually no one in politics believes it will turn many contests this fall. "There’s no chance that OFA is going to have the slightest impact on the midterms," says Charlie Cook, who tracks congressional races.

One law for thee, another for me.  T. W. Farnum of the Washington Post reported yesterday (9/9, my birthday):

Capitol Hill employees owed $9.3 million in overdue taxes at the end of last year, a sliver of the $1 billion owed by federal workers nationwide but one with potential political ramifications for members of Congress.

The debt among Hill employees has risen at a faster rate than the overall tax debt on the government’s books, according to Internal Revenue Service data.

Andrew Malcolm of the LA Times adds:

Privacy laws prevent release of individual tax delinquents’ names. But we do know that as of the end of 2009, 41 people inside Obama’s very own White House owe the government they’re allegedly running a total of $831,055 in back taxes.

Barack Obama, anticolonialist.  If you want to know how Barack Obama thinks, this article, by Dinesh D’Souza, is the best explanation I have ever read:

“For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world’s energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America’s carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.

Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government’s leash. That’s why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks–so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.”

Read the whole thing.

The incomparable Ramirez reveals why Democrats are having trouble with voters this fall:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/assets_c/2010/09/ISStoonIdem800_0909.php

And here is Ramirez on Recovery Summer:

http://www.investors.com/EditorialCartoons/Cartoon.aspx?id=546001

On Tuesday (9/14) Republican primary voters in Delaware will choose between uber RINO Rep. Mike Castle and Christine O’Donnell for the nomination for U.S. Senate.  Ms. O’Donnell is backed by the Tea Party Express.  On Thursday, she was endorsed by Sarah Palin.

With these endorsements, Ms. O’Donnell has a good chance to win.  Jim Geraghty of National Review notes that turnout for GOP primaries in Delaware historically has been low:16 percent of registered voters in 2008; just 8 percent in the non-presidential year 2006.

I rarely disagree with Sarah Palin.  But I do on this one.  I think Christine O’Donnell is a terrible candidate.  I would describe her as J.D. Hayworth in a dress, but that would be unfair to J.D.

O’Donnell lies a lot, and she lies stupidly.  She’s been claiming the carried two of Delaware’s three counties when she ran against Joe Biden.  But one of the counties she claims she won she actually lost by 14 percentage points.

She’s been claiming Castle supports Obamacare.  Castle has cast a lot of votes that make conservatives’ teeth grind.  He voted for cap and trade, and for the Democrats’ campaign finance bill.  But he voted against Obamacare.  And while he doesn’t think Obamacare can be repealed as long as Zero is president, he does support repeal when there is a Republican president.

When former employees of hers insinuated – without a shred of evidence – that Castle is gay, O’Donnell refused to condemn the slur.  This was too much even for Castle hater Erick Erickson of Redstate:

I would rather die a thousand times over via crushing by an anaconda while being torn limb from limb by a jaguar than see Mike Castle in the Senate.
  
But I’m moving on from Delaware. What has ultimately set me off is the “Mike Castle is gay” stuff, which is nothing more than the Will Folks hour come to Delaware. The failure of the O’Donnell campaign to deal swiftly with this tells me all I need to know.

When it was pointed out that all the people behind the accusation were O’Donnell campaign staffers, the response was “not any more.”

After a year of direct and indirect advocacy for Christine O’Donnell, it is pretty doggone hard to now stand apart and say “Nope, not campaign related.”

Baloney.

When a Scott Rasmussen poll indicated O’Donnell would get creamed by Democrat Chris Coons in the general election, she accused Rasmussen of being on the take.

And Christine O’Donnell’s personal finances are a mess.  She claims to have lived on an income of $5,800 last year.  If she had more income than that, then she lied on her financial disclosure forms.  She’s intermingled personal and campaign funds in ways which skirt – and may violate – the law.

If Christine O’Donnell were a better candidate, I would have a quandary, because she is a certain loser in November, and Castle is a very likely winner.  Castle will only vote with us half the time.  But Coons won’t ever.  Half a loaf is better than none, and Castle is probably as conservative a candidate as dark blue Delaware is likely to elect, even in a GOP tsunami.

But as Jack Wheeler and I have noted before, whether Republicans have nominal control of the Senate or not doesn’t matter a great deal.  And if Castle were to lose the primary, it could have a halcyon effect on the voting behavior of the gals from Maine, Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.  This is especially so since it appears likely Maine will elect a pretty conservative Republican as governor this year.  Sending shivers down the spines of RINOs could well be worth giving up a seat we could otherwise win, especially since Castle will be onside only half the time.

But since O’Donnell is a terrible candidate, my preference is clear.  She is the kind of candidate who lends credence to the wild things Democrats say about the Tea Party and conservative Republicans.  New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie evidently shares my view.  He endorsed Castle Sep. 3rd.

Speaking of the fat Reagan, here he is dismantling another teacher union tool:

Many of you have heard that a pastor in Florida is threatening to burn a Koran.  I refuse to comment on it because I don’t want to give that asshat any more publicity than he already has received.

There is one comment I do want to make.  The politically correct dodos in my business have taken to spelling Koran as Q’uran.  Koran is an Arabic word.  Arabic is to us a bunch of incomprehensible squiggles read from right to left.  The important thing for Westerners is to pronounce Arabic words properly.  Which means they should be spelled out simply and phonetically.  Turning incomprehensible Arabic squiggles into unpronounceable English words is stupid.

Fashion writers at the Washington Post and the New York Times tell us what great style First Lady Michelle Obama has.  Here’s an example:

http://www.emailvariety.com/2010/06/12/is-she-the-pinata/

How did the soldiers, sailors and airmen keep a straight face?