White House response to possible Brown Senate victory

From the Politico, in the event of a Brown victory, the White House is planning a "combative response".

“The response will not be to do incremental things and try to salvage a few seats in the fall,” a presidential adviser said. “The best political route also happens to be the boldest rhetorical route, which is to go out and fight and let the chips fall where they may. We can say, ‘At least we fought for these things, and the Republicans said no.’”

My guess is that if Scott Brown wins, the Republicans are going to be the least of the White House's problem.

ABC's This Week

Congratulations to ABC's This Week and moderator Jake Tapper for conducting one of the more interesting and well-balanced round table discussions I've seen in a while. The round table featured left wing, progressive ideologue Katrina vanden Heuval, the partisan Democrat Donna Brazile, and conservatives George Will and Tucker Carlson.

Now for the two dumbest things said on the show.

Katrina vanden Heuval said that "Medicare for all", i.e. socialized health care, was in our nation's "DNA". Really? You would think that if that was the case, that the people who created the nation may have mentioned it somewhere. Maybe they could have included the whole "health care is a right" thing, in, you know, the Bill of Rights.

And then Donna Brazile, in criticizing Republican Senatorial candidate Scott Brown, said: "Scott Brown doesn't even buy health care for his own employees". And I bet he doesn't provide groceries either, or a home or an apartment to live in, or a Netflix subscription. My bet is that his staff is provided with what is called a paycheck. The remarkable thing about a paycheck is that it can then be used to buy all kinds of things, including health care, food, shelter, clothing, iPhones, etc.

And good for Tucker Carlson for calling on vanden Heuval to stop constantly using the term "teabagger".

[Update]

This was the quote from Martha Coakley on the details of the Scott Brown campaign staff compensation packages: “We already knew that Scott Brown didn’t want to make health insurance more affordable for Massachusetts families and businesses. Now we learn that he won’t even make health insurance available for his own staff.."

That's right, he won't make it available. Somehow, he is going to prevent his staff from using their paycheck to buy health insurance.

The Scott Brown campaign's response: "This is a silly issue. The small group working on the Scott Brown campaign either has existing insurance or were compensated sufficiently to purchase it on their own."

Good for them.

"What the heck is wrong with that woman?"

This is from the comment section over at Politico, and provides a nice summary of the situation in the Massachusetts Senate race.

What the heck is wrong with that woman? FIRST, she says that there are no terrorists in Afghanistan this week when the CIA got 8 guys killed last week in Afghanistan by a suicide bomber...SECOND, she says that actually shaking hands with voters at Fenway is a bad idea....THIRD, she cant spell her OWN STATE on her ads....FOURTH, she condemns all Catholics as unfit for ER jobs...and now, THE COUP DE GRACE, SHE HATES ON CURT SCHILLING, THE MAN WHO IGNITED BOSTON AND ENDED THE CURSE?

Help for Haiti

The Anchoress has posted a list of relief organizations who are coming to the aid of Haiti.

The Palm Beach Post has a similar list here.

The Red Cross is saying that fully one-third of Haiti's 9 million people may need emergency aid after what is said to have been the strongest earthquake to hit the country in the last 200 years.

Palin is a religious fanatic

This morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe, they showed complete disdain toward Sarah Palin (as they usually do) over her quote describing her nomination as "God's plan". It's as if they have never heard the expression "well, it's in God's hands now", or "it's just part of God's plan", or were completely unfamiliar with the idea that people put in incredibly difficult and unfamiliar situations might try to poise themselves with some help from above.

My guess is that they probably have heard those expressions before, even in the cocoon of the Washington/New york corridor, but describing her quote in that context wouldn't fit into the "Sarah Palin is a religious fanatic" narrative.

Kathryn Jean Lopez has more on this over at The Corner.

Where will the jobs come from?

Sen. Lindsey Graham announced today that he was open to negotiating with Democrats on the cap and trade bill, and in defense of his position asked the question: “If we fail on climate change and energy, where will our new jobs come from to pay our Social Security and Medicare bills?”

Sen. Graham is apparently just another politician who believes that jobs are created by lawmakers in Washington.

Actually, at the rate we are going, maybe he is right.

More evidence that we are governed by supergeniuses

This morning the good gentlemen at Powerline direct us to some particularly egregious misuses of stimulus funds. From a list compiled by the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota:

University of Minnesota - $190,464 to study sex reversal in mice:
When taxpayers were promised that economic stimulus funds would be spent only on the most critical public projects, few would have predicted that one of those projects would involve sex reversal in mice. But that's exactly what the University of Minnesota received nearly $200,000 to study.

Rodent sexuality is apparently a hot topic these days -- another ten grand went to a Dartmouth study of "sexual arousal in anesthetized female rats." And you thought "stimulus package" referred to the economy! One can be confident that these expenditures have saved or created innumerable jobs in the crucial anesthetized-and/or-transsexual-rodent sector of the American economy.

Everybody knows that old saying that legislation is like sausage; you wouldn't want to see either being made. But that's unfair to the Jimmy Deans of the world. When they make sausage, the end product tastes good. By contrast, the stuff that comes out of the Pelosi / Reid grinder leaves a foul taste in your mouth.

Blamer-in-chief humor

What did they expect?

This morning on MSNBC on Morning Joe, a group of pundits were going on and on about how terrible it was that the health care bill turned out to be one big payoff to the health insurance industry and big pharma.

But what did they expect? There is a direct correlation between size of government and corruption. As the government gets bigger and more intrusive, it becomes a much better investment for companies and industry to spend money lobbying and bribing politicians than it does to invest in other productive activities, like developing new and better products or providing better value to customers.

One of the pundits was Carl Bernstein, and he was arguing that the only solution was public financing of political campaigns. But who would then decide who gets that public financing, and how exactly will that process not get corrupted?

The best, and perhaps only way to reduce corruption and the influence of money in politics is to shrink the size of government.

Blamer-in-chief's disapproval rating climbs to 46%

Wow, even I am surprised.


Of course, Obama continued his blame-a-thon yesterday, blaming the Bush administration for the budget outlook. That was after last week's radio address, where he blamed the economic crisis entirely on the private sector.

President Bush inherited an awful economy, as well as an Afghanistan that was in such bad shape that it was being used by Al Qaeda as a base from which to launch terrorist attacks against the US. Despite these challenges, I don't recall him whining for 11 months about what a mess he was left with.

And President Obama is launching all of these attacks knowing full well that President Bush will not respond or defend himself. What leadership!