President Obama’s strategy for helping fellow Democrats win in the 2010 midterm elections is apparently to campaign against George W. Bush.

At a fundraiser two weeks ago, Obama declared of Republicans’ desire to take back leadership of Congress, “After they drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back.  No!  You can’t drive.  We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch.  We just got the car out.”

Emory University political science professor Merle Black recently characterized voters’ likely reaction to Obama’s emerging campaign strategy: “If you’re the leader of a large corporation and you’re in power for a year and a half and you start off a meeting with your shareholders by blaming your predecessor, that wouldn’t go over very well.”

Now, why do you suppose Obama wouldn’t have any idea how the leader of a corporation should behave?  Wait—it’s on the tip of my tongue…  I know!  Do community organizers have actual responsibilities?

Perhaps at one point Obama intended to assist other Democrats by trumpeting his own record in office, a gambit that was based on the assumption he would whisk Senators and Representatives into power via the same sweeping electoral coattails he possessed before people saw him actually doing something besides campaigning.  read more »

Senator Arlen Specter was a registered Democrat in Pennsylvania from the age of 21 to 35.  Like any sensible person, he became a Republican in his 30s, even though he switched parties not so much to suit his changing political philosophy as to be able to challenge an incumbent Democrat for the job of district attorney in Philadelphia in 1965.

A funny thing happened when Senator Specter turned 79 last year: he decided that his 21- to 35-year-old political self had been wiser than his 35- to 79-year-old self.  (Given his voting record for most of his Senate career, it’s hard to quibble with this point.)

Arlen Spectacle (as Mark Levin calls him) categorically stated in March 2009, “To eliminate any doubt, I am a Republican, and I am running for reelection in 2010 as a Republican on the Republican ticket.”  A month later, after genuine conservative Pat Toomey had thrown his hat into the ring for the Republican nomination, Specter announced that, to eliminate any doubt, he was a Democrat, and was running for reelection in 2010 as a Democrat on the Democratic ticket.

Specter inarguably changed parties to avoid a repeat of his close race in 2004 with Toomey, whom Specter beat with a measly 51% of the vote, despite the advantages of incumbency and overwhelming support from the national and state party establishments, including President George W. Bush and fellow Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.  As early as April 2009, just three months into Obama’s presidency, Specter must have sensed that the burgeoning anti-incumbent mood would smother him by the time of the 2010 primaries, and so he deserted the GOP.  read more »

As the newly appointed Dean of Harvard Law School, Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan decided, in the middle of the War on Terror, to cripple the Reserve Officer Training Corps’ recruitment capability on campus by denying it crucial access to funding, operating space, and assistance from the Office of Career Services.

Kagan’s action fits into a shameful history of antiwar college administrators’ kicking ROTC off university campuses nationwide, most visibly at Ivy League schools, out of opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 60s and 70s.  After the war ended, officials extended the policy out of supposed concern over the military’s ban on gays in the 80s and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the 90s.

After the Solomon Amendment barring federal funding to universities that ban military recruitment on campus was fully implemented at Harvard in 2003, Kagan signed on to a legal challenge to the amendment.  The Third Circuit Court overturned the amendment in 2004, but stayed its ruling pending Supreme Court review.  Kagan, impatient with the vagaries of the legal system, decided to force Harvard back onto its anti-ROTC policy, even though the law hadn’t yet been changed.  The Supreme Court unanimously overturned the Third Circuit ruling in 2006, at which point Kagan reversed her actions to comply with the ruling.

Gay rights supporters defend Kagan’s actions as a necessary stopgap against government-sponsored military discrimination.

It is instructive to reconsider Kagan’s stance in the context of the role our military plays, the people and the rights it protects, and our enemies’ attitudes toward individual liberty and their treatment of gays.  read more »

I’ve got it—an excuse the Obama administration can use to explain why it waited so long to take substantive action in dealing with the Gulf oil spill, an account that also manages to stick it to George W. Bush: Obama was so busy cleaning up Bush’s messes that he didn’t have time to clean up the mess in the Gulf!

The timeline of events since the explosion of the British Petroleum-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20 reveals a less than flattering picture of the acuity and alacrity of the government in fulfilling its role in handling the crisis.

Three days after the explosion, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs insisted to reporters that the catastrophe would not affect the President’s plans to open several microscopic pockets of our vast offshore oil reserves for drilling, the only reassuring result of this debacle.

It is important to understand that in Obama WhiteHouseSpeak, Gibbs’ statement is tantamount to announcing, “It’s a teeny-tiny spark that’ll be put out by morning, and we’re not remotely worried about it.  Why bow over spilt milk?”  The administration that popularized the saying “Never let a serious crisis go to waste” and would love any excuse to backtrack on its recent Democrat-infuriating promise to minimally expand drilling would not have let the opportunity to renege on its promise go by if it had truly apprehended the full extent of the impending disaster.

True, the first Deep Horizon oil leaks were not discovered until the next day, after the Coast Guard had called off its search operation for the missing rig workers.  Yet somehow it took until the following Tuesday, a full week after the explosion, for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to announce that he would be launching an investigation into the incident.  read more »

Everyone’s bemoaning Florida Governor Charlie Crist’s “political” decision to run for Senate as an Independent instead of a Republican, since he knows he’d lose the primary to Marco Rubio.

Everyone’s missing the point.

The political rule-bending is tied to the ideology.  Liberals and centrists are more likely to bend the rules to win elections and votes than conservatives.  It’s part of their political philosophy.

Behold the following Democratic party-hoppers in recent years:

•    Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republicans in 2001 to swing the balance to Democrats early in George W. Bush’s first term, after being promised cushier arrangements by Democratic leaders

•    Liberal Mayor Mike Bloomberg switched from Republican to Independent in 2007 to garner greater support for his nanny-state governing style in New York

•    Arlen Specter left the Republicans for the Democrats last year in anticipation of a difficult primary race

•    New York Senate Democrats Hiram Monserrate and Pedro Espada, Jr. became Republicans temporarily last summer in an attempt to enhance their leadership positions, then switched back to being Democrats when their bid failed

•    RINO Dede Scozzafava endorsed Democratic candidate Bill Owens over conservative Doug Hoffman after dropping out of NY-23 last November

Also witness the following liberal rule-bending over the last decade:

•    Al Gore’s campaign pushed for hand recounts using loosened standards in select counties in the 2000 Florida presidential recount  read more »

The best conservative argument for the United States is the teeming, swarming multitudes of foreigners from every continent except Antarctica falling all over themselves to get here, make something of themselves, and call the U.S. their home.  Why are we turning them away?

Last week Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed unconstitutional legislation requiring state police to shake down brown people in the hopes of catching illegal immigrants, and threatening lawsuits against police departments that aren’t sufficiently paranoid in their enforcement of said law.

The Senate will be introducing immigration reform legislation soon, if they can decide whether or not it’s more important to destroy industrial production via cap-and-tax legislation first.

It’s time to calm the hysteria, put aside the pitchforks, and break down the argument for immigration into its fundamental components:

•    Immigration is an action that, like owning firearms or taking illegal drugs, does not inherently harm anyone else.

•    Immigration can incur penalties for crimes associated with it, rather than the action itself; for example, some immigrants may become involved with gangs, just as some gun owners may accidentally shoot family members or some drug users may commit violent crimes due to lack of self-control.  read more »

As the Senate gears up to introduce its version of the House’s cap-and-trade global warming legislation next week, it’s instructive to consider the impact of myriad geological, meteorological, and astronomic effects on climate change, as exhaustively chronicled in Australian scientist Ian Plimer’s essential new book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science.

Plimer’s book, published last year, boasts 2,000 footnotes from an array of sources including top peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Science, and Geophysical Research Letters; journals on solar physics, hydrological science, and glaciology; books on climate change, environmentalism, and the history of science; and research by dozens of climate change skeptics.  Plimer also dissects the various contradictory iterations of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports.

His evaluation of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis?  Pure, unadulterated waffle.

If “agnostic” is to “atheist” what “skeptic” is to “denier,” then Plimer would happily plant himself in the denier camp.

Plimer demolishes AGW by broadening the scientific timeline under consideration to incorporate thousands, at times millions, of years to show how climate has been changing through hot and cold swings much wider than anything we’ve seen in recent centuries, and all in the absence of disposable Starbucks cups.  read more »

When anticipating Obama’s upcoming nomination to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, there are two approaches conservatives might consider:

Hope that Obama nominates the most conservative candidate, in case he gets confirmed;

Hope that Obama nominates the most liberal candidate, to highlight Obama’s radical ideology and make it easier for Republicans to reject her.

Relatively speaking, the most conservative candidate on Obama’s short list is D.C. Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland.  The most liberal is Seventh Circuit Appeals Court Judge Diane Wood.

The problem with hoping for a moderate candidate is that anyone Obama is dreaming of nominating would be a disaster as far as adherence to the rule of law and upholding the Constitution.

The problem with hoping for a leftist candidate is that we cannot rely on Republican Senators to be courageous enough to block even the most egregious Obama nominee—even after the Democrats just declared war by passing a bill taking over the country’s health care system without a single Republican vote.

Given their dismal failure last summer to stand up to Our Wise Latina Sonya Sotomayor’s incendiary record (typical GOP critique during her confirmation hearings: Lindsey Graham’s creepy, drooling paean, “I like you!”), Republicans cannot be counted on to offer meaningful opposition to whichever train wreck Obama picks this year.  read more »

Over the weekend a poor lithium battery plant worker from South Carolina named Doris stumbled into a bear trap we’ll call “Obama in a contemplative yet incoherent, feisty yet expansive mood.”

Dear Doris asked Obama a question and was hit with a 2,600-word, 17-minute onslaught that makes any rambling reply Sarah Palin supposedly ever gave seem like the soul of brevity.

To be fair, Doris had placed a tall order: she had asked Obama to sell her on the recently passed health care overhaul legislation via a diatribe that rehashed the history of Medicare, trotted out charges against Bush, and stopped along the way for an analogy involving leaky roofs.

Oh wait—she didn’t; that was what she got.  She asked Obama whether raising taxes in a recession was a good idea.

A prickly Obama jumped in and implied that Doris and millions of other Americans who had been reading about the health care legislation over the past twelve months were badly misinformed, easily misled by huckster politicians, and quite possibly morons.

He launched into one of several internally and externally redundant lists cataloging the reasons for health care reform (which was not Doris’s question).  In a vastly condensed nutshell:

List 1, Point 1: Some people don’t have health insurance.

L1, P2: Some people with health insurance might not have it in the future.  read more »

ObamaCare supporters who claim that opposition to the recently passed health care legislation is motivated by hatred of empowered minority group members are right about one thing.  Those who oppose the bill and want it repealed are in fact motivated by hate.

They hate a lot of things they’ve witnessed over the past year, none having anything to do with African Americans, Latinos, or women wielding power in Washington.

Among other things, they hate:

The health care bill:

•    Its unconstitutional individual mandate and general abridgment of liberty

•    Its ban on non-government-sanctioned health care plans, including catastrophic coverage that many young people prefer, and its usurious taxing of “Cadillac plans”

•    Its boneheaded enforcement mechanism which, in addition to being miswritten, would simply lead people to pay a relatively piddly fine instead of buying health insurance until they needed it

•    Its paying only six years of benefits while levying ten years of taxes and claiming to be a deficit reducer

•    Its stubborn and complete absence of free market reforms, such as malpractice tort reform, removal of the ban on selling insurance across state lines, and health insurance tax credits for the self-employed  read more »