A Conservative Review Of 2010 Part 1: Rule By Radicals

Things We Learned in 2010
from CFIF In life, there are good years and bad years. Then there are years like 2010, when the countdown to New Year’s feels like a Parole hearing. 2011 is looking up, with a new batch of Conservatives on Capitol Hill, a presidential contest that will soon get underway in earnest, and news that the Obama Administration is now taking an official stand against Torture (I refer, of course, to Robert Gibbs’ departure as White House Press Secretary).  But before we leave 2010 to our generatio

Re: Arizona Shooter Jared Loughner
t was only two days ago that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Az) participated in the Congressional reading of the Constitution, and read one of its most important Amendments - the First Amendment. Today, she lies in a Hospital ... the Victim of a gunshot wound to the head by Jared Laughner, who appears to be what Pamela Geller refers to as a lefty loon. At the moment it appears that Congresswoman Giffords is going to pull through, but six people were killed (including a Federal Judge and a n...

6 Reasons It Was a Good Week in Washington
“Hope and Change” are finally coming to Washington, two years after President Obama promised them. The tone in our fair city changed this week, not just at the White House or in the Congress, but seemingly everywhere. Here's why: The departure of Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. The White House's “attack dog” announced his Resignation this week in order to go on the speaker's circuit and become an outside adviser to the administration. While his replacement hasn't been ann...

Obamas Re-Election Strategy
Well, one thing is now clear. Barack Obama very much wants to be re-elected, and he is willing to do whatever it takes. As I have already pointed out in anticipatory posts - first  here, then here - he could not hire William M. Daley as his new White House Chief of Staff without eating a substantial helping of crow. Among Democrats, no one was as critical in public of the course chosen by Obama, Nancy Pelois, and Harry Reid in 2009 as was Daley. The op-ed he published in The Washington Po

Paul Krugman wastes no time in blaming shooting on political opposition
We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was. She’s been the target of violence before. And for those wondering why a Blue Dog Democrat, the kind Republicans might be able to work with, might be a target, the answer is that she’s a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona, precisely because the Republicans nominated a Tea Party Activist. (Her father says that “the whole Tea Party” was her enemy.) And yes, she was on...

DISGRACE: Krugman Blames GOP For Attempted Assassination Today (Before We Found Out Hes a Leftwinger)
What a disgrace. Paul Krugman immediately attacked Republicans today after the “Assassination attempt” by Arizona shooter Jared Loughner. If the New York Times was a respectable news organization Krugman would be reprimanded or fired. ¶A Democratic Congresswoman has been shot in the head; another dozen were also shot. ¶We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was. She’s been the target of violence before. And for those wondering...

James Zogby: Faux Faithful Abuse Constitution
In a display of faux piety, the 112th Congress opened its first day of business by reading aloud the Constitution of the United States. Referring to it as "our sacred text", one-by-one, over 130 Members of Congress queued up to participate, each solemnly reading a few words before giving way to a colleague who would read a few more. The entire affair was cloaked in the ritualism and reverence of a religious ceremony and might have been dismissed as harmless, though a bit blasphemous, were it n...

Clearing the Browser Tabs Snowy Saturday Edition
The Capital Weather gurus say that we’re likely to get a little bit of snow today, so I don’t imagine I’ll do a ton of driving around (as I had originally planned to do). It’s not that I can’t drive in snow, though it’s a pain to do so, but that folks around here freak out when the white stuff starts to fly. If I’m lucky, the Snowfall will be negligible so I can attend a dinner party this evening. Let’s hope! And now, links! John Hawkins presents T...

Texas Ground Report
We have a race for the Speaker of the Texas House, which is becoming contentious.  The Speaker for the last session is a “Republican” named Joe Straus.  He prevented much of the Republican agenda from seeing the light of day, even though there was a Republican majority in the Texas House.  Tea Party groups and others around Texas want to dump Straus in favor of Ken Paxton, a true conservative, because the election was a clear mandate for conservative principles.  ...

"If They Insist on Being Irresponsible with Our Common Liberties, then We Must Be All the More Responsible with Our Liberties"
William Jefferson Clinton: Remarks to the American Association of Community Colleges in Minneapolis, Minnesota (April 24, 1995): Before I begin today to talk about education and training, I'd like to say just a word or two if I might, before this audience of educators and people who believe in and appreciate the value of free Speech, about where we are in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing and what we are going to do about the kind of America our Children will inherit. Yesterday Hillary and...

The Shooter
The Shooter by digby So, this gunman has been identified and from his YouTube page it appears he a schizophrenic young man who's been under the influence of Extremist Right Wing Rhetoric. Political assassins are often mentally ill --- history's full of them. So let's not kid ourselves -- it's not a coincidence that he shot a congresswoman. His videos are full of Right Wing political gibberish and from what he said in his bizarre videos, it's clear that all the looney tunes anti-government tal...

What to Expect for the Next Two Years
In a nutshell: Senator Harry Reid will block any Republican reforms, and President Obama will only pretend to move to the center. Kimberly Strassel provides a preview of the next two years with Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader. He will do President Obama’s bidding. Expect many of the Reform Bills the House Republicans will pass to be stopped in their tracks in the Senate. Once full Repeal [of ObamaCare] goes nowhere, House Republicans (joined by some Democrats) will begin sending the...

Cokie Roberts Wonders: Do Republicans 'Really Want to See Jobs Increase?'
You don’t find many “gems” on a Saturday morning. It’s a lazy day, getting ready for football and a late breakfast---then Cokie Roberts, speaking on ABC’s Good Morning America, dropped the bomb. Roberts has apparently bought into the far-left's Conspiracy Theory that Republicans simply do not want to see Americans get jobs. Yep. Republicans are more interested in defeating old media’s Dear Leader than they are in Americans' well-being. ABC's Dan Ha...

'Don't Sweat' High Gas Prices -- They're a 'Good Sign'
You've probably noticed that those prices at the pump have risen considerably over the last month or so. But don't worry! It's not that big a deal! Well, according to Yahoo! Finance's Daniel Gross, that is. Why? Well, Americans are consuming less gas per capita than a few years ago, cars are more fuel efficient, and people are just plain getting weary of more and more traffic (and, hence, are driving less): There's also evidence that Americans' long-running love affair wi...

Defense Bill Stops All Club Gitmo Transfers To The US For Civilian Trials
Obviously, this has gotten Barack Obama all riled upPresident Barack Obama forcefully declared his support Friday for U.S. civilian trials of Guantanamo Detainees, pledging to overturn language in a sweeping defense bill that would effectively block such trials anytime soon. "The prosecution of Terrorists in federal court is a powerful tool in our efforts to protect the nation and must be among the options available to us," the president said. "Any attempt to deprive the Executive Branch of that...

I Love the Smell of Corporatocracy in the Morning
...The president has been reaching out directly to U.S. companies, meeting with 20 chief executives last month to ask for ideas on policies that would inspire them to invest and hire. And on Feb. 7, Mr. Obama will cross Lafayette Park from the White House to the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, his longtime political nemesis, to discuss working together on Job Creation. "The administration took some positive steps recently, striking a Bipartisan agreement to extend current Tax Rates...

Debt Hypocrisy
Paul Luce rightly notes that new Legislation limiting the issuance of credit by retail stores is obnoxiously paternalistic: many customers who wish to buy on credit, and many Retailers who wish to take the risk of extending credit, are now arbitrarily prevented from doing so (Letters, Jan. 8). This Legislation is especially infuriating because the same politicians who voted for it - the very same officious intermeddlers who claim to care so deeply about protecting unsuspecting Americans fr...

Miller backs plan for slots at Rosecroft
Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. says Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos has his full support in getting slot machines approved at Prince George's County's Rosecroft harness racing track by the end of 2012. Miller, a longtime proponent of gambling who represents parts of Prince George's County, said it doesn't make sense that the county is losing revenue from residents who are spending money at casinos in Delaware, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. "The citizens of those st...

Marxist Frances Fox Piven Calls For A Violent Uprising Against the American System
Editor’s Note: This popular post was first published on January 5 here. If at first you don’t succeed in murdering America’s constitutional legacy of Limited Government, try, try again. This sums up the approach of Marxist academic and Activist Frances Fox Piven. The strategy of orchestrated crisis she pioneered with her late husband Richard Cloward helped generate chaos in American society throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The so-called Cloward-Piven Strategy inflicted a lot ...

Someone Needs a Lesson in Blogging Etiquette
I’m behind on everything and the last thing I felt like doing this morning is dealing with a content thief. Now it’s almost 1:00 PM and I still haven’t gotten anything done. Over the past few days I’ve noticed trackbacks from a website called Conservative News. This morning I discovered this site was posting my entire RSS feed, meaning every word from every one of my posts was posted at his site. There was no contact information that I could see so I posted a comment as...

The Fighter: An Up Close Look at Harry Reid
Esquire magazine has an in-depth profile of Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, as well as a look inside the last 72 hours of his successful campaign against Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle. Reid has decided to spend the last evening of his last campaign thanking the people who have canceled a year of their lives for him, in what out in the world [looked] to be a doomed effort. Fifty-three field organizers scattered all over Nevada. Fifty-three calls to make. It is one thing to acquit yourself...

Q: Is Harry Reid more of a jerk, or a moron?
He told NPR: I know that my friend, Mitch McConnell, has said his number one issue in this next Congress is to get rid of Obama. I don’t think he really means that.Everyone on the planet knows what McConnell meant, that he very naturally wants to prevent Obama from getting reelected to a Second Term. Reid's absurd implication that McConnell meant something more sinister is sleazy and stupid. Pleeze. He also announced that "the Tea Party will disappear as soon as The Economy gets better."...

Can William Daley Improve Obama's Business Reputation?
When President Barack Obama named William Daley the White House Chief of Staff, the business community cheered. The implication, at least, was that business leaders had perceived Obama as anti-business. "I think there was a pretty widely held belief among top level business leaders that they were having trouble getting their voices heard in the White House," says Matt Bennett, a former Clinton Administration official who co-founded a liberal Think Tank called the Third Way, which counts Daley ...

Obama Admin Looking At Internet IDs For All
This isn’t going to go over well. CBS News reported: President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today. It’s “the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government” to centralize efforts toward creating an “identity ecosystem” for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said. That news, first re...

A promising start, but also a few misses
Gov. Scott Walker has promised the state 250,000 more jobs by the end of First Term. It's a big promise, one that may be hard to fulfill. But Walker is wise to focus on creating smart tax policy, targeted Economic Development programs and an atmosphere conducive to growth. An admirer of fellow Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, Walker has adopted his own version of Thompson's bear-hug, show 'em you love 'em approach to business. His "Wisconsin is open for business" battle cry sends the ...