The Democrats are nothing if not persistent. After trying to hang this dismal economy on President Bush while the Obama administration repeats every mistake from the Great Depression to create their own version, Tim Bishop says let’s go all in!
Hillary Clinton
This is a story you are not likely to hear about from the mainstream media. As previously reported on this site the Obama administration, led by Hillary Clinton, came down hard on the sovereign country of Honduras for upholding their constitution and fighting against a Chavez style, “leader for life” power grab by their president Manuel Zelaya.
I still find myself in awe of our Founding Fathers who created our form of government. The competing ideas that they sifted through to come up with our Constitution and the safeguards in it is wondrous. The designs upon it by the progressives is by equal measure disturbing.
With a week left in the election, Kirsten Gillibrand holds a substantial lead in the polls to be elected to the seat to which she was appointed after Hillary Clinton moved on to the State Department. Liberty’s Lifeline finds this a remarkable situation considering that for most of the past year polls have shown the Gillibrand trailed a generic “someone else”. It would seem that in this year of an anti-incumbent uprising, she would be among the easiest senators to unseat, and yet her race is considered “solidly Democratic”, in other words, in the bag.
If you watched the video of her debates with Joe DioGuardi she seemed overly scripted, delivering pattern Democratic talking points to questions even to the point of ignoring the question to parrot the memorized response. In a “lightening round” that required a yes or no answer, she seemed to struggle to give an answer to some questions that required thought before answering. It almost looked like a game show where she seemed delighted to get an answer right rather than giving answers she actually believed in.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DB-hJVLVh0&hd=1
Kirsten Gillibrand and Joe DioGuardi battle it out in a televised debate. Here are some of the highlights.
Kirsten Gillibrand was elected to Congress as a relatively conservative Democrat. She received a grade of “A” from the National Rifle Association and she was counted among the Blue Dog Democrats. After Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, Gillibrand was appointed to Clinton’s vacant senate seat. Since joining the senate she has changed her positions 180 degrees. The National Rifle Association now gives her a grade of “F”. She now votes lockstep with Harry Reid.
Joe DioGuardi is a Certified Public Accountant who has previously served in Congress. His position is focused on the fiscal issues we currently face and his objective is to go to Washington and approach it like an accountant to get their fiscal house in order.
Here are their key positions:
- Gillibrand supports ObamaCare, DioGuardi thinks ObamaCare should be repealed and we should start over, beginning with tort reform
- Gillibrand supports a public option and appears to support taxpayer funding of abortions
- Gillibrand says she is strongly opposed to outsourcing but voted for the GM bailout after which GM increased offshore production
- Gillibrand denies that she or Andrew Cuomo had anything at all to do with the housing bubble.
Senator Gillibrand is running from her record as fast as her legs will carry her. Although she does deserve credit for admitting she supported ObamaCare although she would be hard pressed to deny it. She thinks that ObamaCare is just swell, though, and the only thing to continue working on is those big, bad, insurance companies that have the temerity to raise premiums, something that conservatives said would happen from the beginning.
For all the hand wringing by the Republican establishment over Christine O’Donnell’s fitness for office two points must be made. One, who is calling the kettle black? Two, has anyone bothered to look at who she is running against?
In the desperate attempt to throw anything and everything they can find at Christine O’Donnell to try to derail her roaring comeback, her critics have gone all the way back to probe who her friends were in high school. High school. If that is a criteria for being unfit for government office, how about these gems:
- President Barack Obama admitted using marijuana and cocaine in high school, but he is fit to be the chief law enforcement officer of the United States
- Vice President Joe Biden committed plagiarism and had to drop out of the 1988 Presidential race, but he is fit to be the “experienced statesman” to balance the Obama-Biden team
- President Bill Clinton lied under oath to a federal judge to prevent a woman with a legitimate case of sexual harassment from having her day in court.
- Senator Ted Kennedy left a woman in a submerged car to die rather than doing everything possible to help save her life and his Democratic colleagues called him the “Lion of the Senate”
- Timothy Geithner oversees the IRS, but didn’t pay his own taxes
- Charlie Rangel is under investigation for numerous ethics violations including not paying his taxes despite being the former chairman of the Congressional committee that writes the tax laws.
- Hillary Clinton, not as a high school student but as First Lady, held a séance so she could talk to Eleanor Roosevelt.
Is that enough or should I continue? And these people and their supporters say, Christine O’Donnell is not fit for office? Maybe she should rob a bank so that her resume would be more in line with these icons of the Democrat firmament.
In New York we have the unusual situation of voting for two senators in the same year. Chuck Schumer is the incumbent running for reelection and Kirsten Gillibrand was appointed to the Senate to fill Hillary Clinton’s vacant seat when the latter became Secretary of State in the Obama administration. So in some respects, Ms. Gillibrand is running for the Senate for the first time rather than as an incumbent.
As a Congresswoman in 2007 she was a member of the “Blue Dog” coalition of conservative Democrats. In the Senate Ms. Gillibrand has been quiet as a church mouse. Perhaps that is because she doesn’t want people to notice her metamorphosis from a moderate Democrat from upstate New York with a 100% approval rating from the National Rifle Association to another far left Harry Reid “pet”, voting with the Democratic leadership 97% of the time. Now that she is in the Senate she has been endorsed for election by a leading gun control group which the NRA strongly opposes which prompted this response from the NRA
“She was either being dishonest with her voters in the congressional district or she’s being dishonest to the voters in New York state,” said the NRA’s chief lobbyist, Chris W. Cox. “Either way, the key word is dishonest.”
Gillibrand’s spokesman had no comment.
Ms. Gillibrand voted in favor of giving stockholders a vote on executive compensation in corporations. Does she favor giving Americans a vote on her and her colleagues’ compensation? In July 2009, she voted yes on a Congressional pay raise. So we need to keep those greedy corporate types in check, but she gets to vote herself a raise? But that’s not all; when as an attorney she represented corporations she had a very different role. As an attorney representing Philip Morris her job was to keep the Department of Justice from finding out that Philip Morris’ own research showed that tobacco was harmful.
“So when the Justice Department tried to get its hands on that research in 1996 to prove that tobacco industry executives had lied about the dangers of smoking, the company moved to fend off the effort with the help of a highly regarded young lawyer named Kirsten Rutnik [now Gillibrand].” – New York Times, March 26, 2009
Call it inconsistent, but whatever you call it, Ms. Gillibrand doesn’t like to talk about it.
The old bull Republicans continue to get rocked. Add Carl Paladino and Christine O’Donnell to the list that includes Rand Paul, Sharon Angle, Joe Miller and others. It drives home the point that was exposed in a Rasmussen poll that 72% of GOP voters say Republicans in Congress are out of touch with their base. On the Democrat side it is just the opposite where 61% of Democrat voters say the Dems in Congress fairly represent them. While the Democrats are standing pat, rank and file Republicans are asking for a new set of cards.
Liberty’s Life Line endorsed Mr. Lazio, because New York state government is such a dysfunctional mess it was felt more political experience and a detailed plan would make more headway than an outsider. However, the fire in the belly that Mr. Paladino demonstrated, we wish Mr. Lazio had. But Lazio ran another lackluster campaign as he did against Hillary Clinton for Senate, missing the key issue for voters by focusing on the Ground Zero mosque instead of the broken government. Oddly, he had a 24 page plan on how he would change things, but you had to hunt to find it. I have two suggestions for Mr. Lazio: drop out of the race on the Conservative line and free that up for Mr. Paladino, and give a copy of your plan to Mr. Paladino.
For the Republican party’s old pulls, it’s time to clean out your desks. Enough of the lamenting that we need moderates to win in the general election. When the going gets tough moderate Republicans vote with the Democrats. When do moderate Democrats vote with Republicans? Never, because there are no moderate Democrats. We don’t need any more Arlen Specters, Susan Collins, or Olympia Snowes. It is time to get polarized, energized, and laser focused on the issues that affect Americans. If that means we have two extremes, left and right, so be it. It also means Americans will have clear choices.
So let’s get behind the nominees and also put the old bulls out to pasture.
When 300,000-500,000 of your closest friends, depending on who is doing the estimating, show up for a rally on the Washington Mall you would think it was somewhat newsworthy, no? Of course it is, that’s why the New York Times published the story on page fifteen. If you were walking by a newsstand and glanced at the front page, you wouldn’t have know that a half million of your fellow citizens got together with Glenn Beck to restore honor in America. The front page would entice you with:
- Graft-Fighting Prosecutor Fired in Afghanistan
- For Obama, Steep Learning Curve as Chief in Time of War
- Upstarts Chip Away at Power of Feudal Pakistani Landlords
- Years Later, No Magic Bullet Against Alzheimer’s Disease
- In Hard Times, One New Ban (Double-Wide)
I guess our friends at the times couldn’t find any fabricated stories of someone shouting the “N-word” at Dr. Martin Luther King’s niece Alveda King, who was one of the featured speakers, to elevate the story to the front page. Perhaps it would have been too embarrassing to mention on the front page that Al Sharpton’s counter-demonstration where “several hundred people packed a football field at Paul Laurance Dunbar High School to stage a rally commemorating Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” Yesterday, you would have thought both rallies were the same size with crowd estimates of several thousand for each. Perhaps this shows the true value of racial politics today. America is tired of the race baiting and the false charges. President Obama was elected with hope and change to become the post-racial leader of the country. It appears the country has moved on without his leadership.
In another piece in the Times two Progressive women pine for a “Palin of Our Own”, to win the hearts and minds of America. The problem is America doesn’t want to listen to Janeane Garofalo or Joy Behar sneeringly spouting off about Sarah Palin. As far as any women Progressive politicians, who is there other than Hillary Clinton and we’ve seen that act and passed on it.
In another piece titled “Party Down”, Marc Ambinder tells us about the anti-incumbent mood, “Unlike parties, which often recruit candidates who would appeal to the average voter in a general election, these activists care only about nominating the person who accurately represents their own views and frustrations.” Appeal to the average voter? The problem with the Republican Party in the past is that they have been listening to the main stream media reports about who the “average voter” is. So they have elected so called “moderates” who get their clocks cleaned by real Progressives in the election. The left snickered in their sleeves while growing the government into the bloated, ineffective, couch potato that it is. It alarms those on the left that the Tea Party movement has changed all this and tone deaf incumbents are getting tossed left and right. They have unmasked the average voter to be conservative and by measuring candidates against a conservative yardstick, they have struck a chord with the voters who have long felt ignored and disenfranchised. Now those voters are energized and can’t wait to get to the polls. Reason for panic on the left, indeed.
In today’s New York Times there is a story about Rick Lazio latching on to the Ground Zero mosque issue as his new campaign theme. The first television ads I have seen regarding his run for governor are about this issue. He is strongly opposed. Okay, but he wants us to elect him governor to do what, exactly? New York has a lot of problems, from a state government that is completely dysfunctional to being broke and since everyone seems to agree that the mosque at Ground Zero is not about the right to build there but about the propriety of building there, what does it have to do with the office of governor?
When he pinch hit for Rudy Giuliani running for the senate against Hillary Clinton, after Mr. Giuliani dropped out of the race with prostate cancer, Mr. Lazio took a similar tack. You probably remember their first debate when Mr. Lazio famously walked across the stage to a startled Mrs. Clinton and asked her to sign his pledge on campaign finance reform. She refused and that was his theme. The problem is that although many people feel our political process is corrupt, when it comes to campaign finance reform, most people don’t care about it. Those who care about it are incumbents, who want to cripple those who run against them. Some of the so called “reforms” have politicians spending so much time chasing $50 donations that they can’t do what they were elected to do. Either that or we can only run multi-millionaire candidates who can spend their own money without limits. (Simple solution: let anyone contribute any amount to any campaign at any time and just post the information on the Internet within 72 hours in a database that is fully searchable. Done.) It only took a little time for the novelty of the debate video to fade and Mr. Lazio had no campaign.
Another challenger in this year’s governor’s race, Carl Paladino, one of the aforementioned millionaires, has been hitting the airwaves more frequently and more effectively than Mr. Lazio. He is not a one trick pony. His first ads hit Andrew Cuomo on being a career politician and that he, Paladino, was a business man who knows how to create jobs. What do we desperately need now? Jobs. What are we sick of? Career politicians, like Mr. Cuomo, who played a role as HUD Secretary in the Clinton administration of feeding the real estate frenzy and the subsequent housing collapse that created the financial crisis.
On the mosque situation, agree or disagree with him but Mr. Paladino says exactly what he will do about it. He will take the property away under Eminent Domain (thanks to the activist judges on the Supreme Court who gave us Kelo v. City of New London) and use the property to create a war memorial. He doesn’t just say he will oppose it he tells us what he will do about it.
In the interest of full disclosure, I contributed to Rick Lazio’s senate run in 2000 and I have no connection with the Paladino campaign. But if Mr. Lazio is serious about defeating Andrew Cuomo for governor, he has to find some issues that not only resonate with the people of New York but that are the responsibility of the governor to address. If not, rather than split the conservative vote, he should step aside and help ride the anti-incumbent wave that Carl Paladino is surfing.
