Via Joe Bodell at MN “Progressive” Project, it seems that Rep Tim Walz’s  (DFL, MN 1st District) feet are cooling down in re the notion of passing the Senate Obamacare bill.

Bodell:

One of the remaining options for the health insurance reform effort is for the House of Representatives to pass the Senate version of the bill verbatim, thus avoiding having to send a modified bill back to the Senate for debate, where it would likely die thanks to 41 votes being stronger than 59.

Which, of course, the Dems could “fix” by invoking the “Nuclear Option” – changing the Senate rules to allow cloture, or the shutting down of filibusters, on a majority vote rather than needing the traditional 60 votes.  Which they are loathe to do, since it’ll come back to haunt them when the Senate changes hands again, and that change looks to be closer at hand than they’d figured a year ago.

So it’s back to parliamentary tactics 101:

Thus, [the Tics] need to figure out where House members stand — several have said various things about whether they would vote for the Senate bill, and TPM is making a list — and Minnesota’s Tim Walz looks like he falls into the “maybe” category.

I got the following statement from Walz’s spokesperson:

Congressman Walz has not taken an official stand on whether he would vote for the Senate health care reform bill verbatim if it were put before the House. However, the pay-for-value Medicare reimbursement provisions that currently exist in both bills are an extremely important consideration.

So the absence of a public option in the Senate bill doesn’t sound like a deal-breaker for Walz — but unless it looks like there could be 218 votes for the Senate bill, members are likely to be very skittish about making public pronouncements one way or the other.

“Skittish” is a good word for it.  Walz squeaked into office in 2006 by beating “Moderate” Republican Gil Gutknecht in one of the worst elections for Republicans in recent memory (until 2008).  He represents a largely red district in the rural southwest part of Minnesota, hundreds of thousands of acres of conservative farmers surrounding a tiny blue outpost in Mankato.  He’s right to be skittish; he must looking at Byron Dorgan and Earl Pomeroy’s contortions, and Collin Peterson’s deep ambivalence about throwing himself on a sword for Barack Obama in his very similar Seventh District, and calculating his odds.

CORRECTION:  Yeah, I know – Walz is the First, not Third, District.  I’m a Saint Paul guy.  Anything west of Lyndale is a purely academic concept to me.  As is the concept of “a responsive Congressperson…”

Today former cover girl and presidential candidate John Edwards admitted that he is in fact the father of Rielle Hunter’s 2-year old daughter. However, it is being reported that Edwards needed proof first.

So he asked former aide Andrew Young to perform above and beyond the call of duty.

“Get a doctor to fake the DNA results,” Young said Edwards told him. “And he asked me … to steal a diaper from the baby so he could secretly do a DNA test to find out if this [was] indeed his child.”

The results? Conclusive. The diaper was full of shit, just like her father.

The irrepressible Dennis the Peasant examines the results of Tuesday’s Massachusetts’ Senate election, and declares it more like Imperial Japan’s experience in the 1942 Battle of Midway, than the more common metaphor of Napoleon’s Waterloo.

The third and final type of failure is catastrophic failure, and it is also a complex failure. For catastrophic failure to occur, the failures of learning, anticipation and adaptation must all be present at the same time. As one would suspect, catastrophic failure is nearly always as wide in scope as it is irredeemable. A perfect example of catastrophic failure would be the defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy at Midway in 1942. (See Parshall and Tully’s superb Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway for a detailed application of Cohen and Gooch’s methodology.)

Although Cohen and Gooch never suggest so, it seems obvious to me that their methodology has an obvious application in the analysis of political – as opposed to military– failure. Here’s my stab at just an analysis of the defeat of Obamacare in 2010.

This is one of those read the whole thing times.

Two months ago, an arrogant GOP district committee tries to hand-pick a very blue candidate for a very purple district. Very red backlash comes up barely short, finishing up barely behind the Democrat, and going 3:1 against the very blue “Republican”…

…and the media and the lefty talkingpointbots portrayed it as a referendum against conservatives – one of which Dede Scozzafava was not.

Today – uninspired Democrat committee picks a very blue candidate in a very blue district. A district that’s been in Democrat hands for two or three generations.  She is upset by a Republican.  One that came out of nowhere within the past month.

Nope.  No referendum there.

“Air Force One made an emergency trip to Logan field…”

“when theres trouble in Massachusetts, rest assured, there’s trouble everywhere and they know it.”

-Scott Brown tonight

We in Minnesota have a perspective on Martha Coakley that most states don’t.

It’s been 25-odd years since an overzealous prosecutor in Jordan, MN tripped into a controversy over a pre-school, and pretty much invented the genre of the “entirely fantasy-based sex abuse case”; the conventional wisdom of the day was that children never, ever made up stories about abuse – so pre-schoolers, under questioning, pretty much let their little fantasy lives run amok, destroying not a few lives in the process and serving as the first of a wave of “satanic child abuse” cases that wracked the nation during the early eighties.

Including a similar, and at face value vastly more sickening, case in Massachusetts, involving a daycare run by the Amirault family.  Building on the same wave of suggested memories and childish fantasy that we saw in the Scott County case, the State of Massachusetts sent several of the Amiraults to jail – until it became clear that the procedures used to convict them were fatally flawed.  And so most of them were released.

Except for one of them:

In July 2001, the notoriously tough Massachusetts parole board voted unanimously to grant Gerald Amirault clemency. Although the parole board is not permitted to consider guilt or innocence, its recommendation said: “(I)t is clearly a matter of public knowledge that, at the minimum, real and substantial doubt exists concerning petitioner’s conviction.”

Immediately after the board’s recommendation, The Boston Globe reported that Gov. Jane Swift was leaning toward accepting the board’s recommendation and freeing Amirault.

So far, so good.

Enter Martha Coakley, Middlesex district attorney. Gerald Amirault had already spent 15 years in prison for crimes he no more committed than anyone reading this column did. But Coakley put on a full court press to keep Amirault in prison simply to further her political ambitions.

By then, every sentient person knew that Amirault was innocent. But instead of saying nothing, Coakley frantically lobbied Gov. Jane Swift to keep him in prison to show that she was a take-no-prisoners prosecutor, who stood up for “the children.” As a result of Coakley’s efforts — and her contagious ambition — Gov. Swift denied Amirault’s clemency.

Thanks to Martha Coakley, Gerald Amirault sat in prison for another three years.

There are few things in this world lower than fraudulently destroying another person’s life for your own gain.

Martha Coakley deserves defeat because she’s a tone-deaf political patrician who’s run the worst campaign in recent memory, anywhere.

She deserves ignominy and pointed scrutiny for what she did in the Amirault case.  An emphatic retiredment from public life seems a small price to pay.

For her, anyway.

A few years back, incontinent shriekblogger Karl Bremer jumped up and down and shot steam out his nostrils and bellowed that the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers was a conservative organization.  To be fair, Bremer always jumps up and down and squirts steam out his ears, so it’s not that big a distinction…

…but the main point is that the MOB is, and has always been, intended to be utterly non-partisan.  That it is largely conservative could be chalked up to any number of reasons – I suspect it’s that way too many liberals really really can’t tolerate cognitive dissonance – but the proof is in the pudding; our seminnual MOB parties have welcomed people of every political stripe, from Swiftee to Eva Young to Eric Black.

At any rate, Flash from Centrisity is one of the MOB’s charter members.  He’s a center-lefty, and so is his blog.

But just as Flash and I go way back beyond blogging and politics (we’ve been friends and neighbors since long before either of us thought “blog” was anything other than a post-drunken-burrito-frenzy kind of bodily noise), his blog often enough focuses on the sorts of things that should unite us all; family (including his years-long narratives about his songs, including Sergeant Tom, who just got out of the Marines), community, and most importantly, beer:

Yes folks, Global Climate Change has been officially confirmed.

Today, January 15, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Spring arrived in the Midway. On tap, Natural Ice! I need the 5.9% alcohols to keep the lines clear LOL

Flash’s kegerator has long been not only the social center of the central Midway for almost a generation – but its’ first tapping of the season is always the great harbinger of spring in this part of Saint Paul.  The ceremonial first tapping is usually a sign that winter is over.

(But…January 15?  The phrase “Beerational Exuberance” springs to mind.   I’ll discuss it at the garage sometime this next weekend).

The Jester recounts his “accomplishments” thus far and blames the GOP for Congress’ Low Ratings.

What a joke.

…no less coming from a man whose qualifications for the job never exceeded telling them. From the gaping maw that is Al Franken:

I’d say the proudest accomplishment is just the overall impact I had on the health care bill. It may not have been the highest-profile stuff, but I think it’s stuff that both reflects Minnesota’s values and what Minnesota has done well, and will also ultimately not just benefit Minnesota, but benefit the whole way that health care is delivered.

…save the fact that clearly Americans and Minnesotans are against government reform of health care, hence the lack of transparency, closed-door negotiations, and blatant political payoffs to the unions of late on the part of our Democrat-led congress.

His self-aggrandizement defies the imagination of any sane voter, but not moreso than his take on Congress’ abysmal approval rating:

I would like to see give and take. I think the most surprising (is) sort of the lack of real debate, especially between the two parties, especially on the health care thing. …

I must have done between 10 and 15 roundtables on health care, with providers, doctors and hospitals, with insurance companies, nurses, health care economists, with public health people, rural health, one on health care disparities. And, you know, that was because I wanted to reform health care. … And every member of the Democratic caucus did the same. And I felt like the Republican caucus in the Senate did not do that. And that they were not invested in reforming health care; they were invested in stopping the Democratic … reform of health care.

What was disappointing to me was what came from the other side, or from opponents of health care.

[It is telling that liberals now synonymize “health care” with “government health care”-JR]

(It) seemed to be kind of talking points. There wasn’t much behind them. And also quite a bit of disinformation.

I think [our low rating is] because they see things like that. I was sort of saddened by that.

Boo Freaking Hoo, Al. Save the crocodile tears for another day. When it’s a Democrat speaking it’s reasoned debate. When it’s a Republican, it’s “talking points”, right Al?

Al Franken opines that the American people hold Congress in such low esteem because Republicans haven’t paralleled the Democrats’ enormous investment of time, effort and political capital pursuing health care reform that a growing majority of Americans no longer want.

He went on to say that the next task at hand will be to tackle job creation, as if ten percent unemployment hansn’t warranted more immediate attention than health care reform, that again, for emphasis, most no one wants.

Yet it’s the minority party’s fault that Congress suffers such low esteem among the populace?

A joke indeed.

Remember back in the eighties, when some less-than-articulate conservative commentators lapsed into self-parody by referring to fairly run-of-the-mill fabian statists as “commies”?  The reversion to facile cliche did conservatism no favors, and probably helped you (this kills me) look like the level-headed ones?

I just though I’d thank Chuckles Schumer (P[inhead], NY) for paying the favor back with interest:

New York Sen. Charles Schumer, who famously hammered then-Sen. Alfonse D’Amato for calling him a “putz-head” in their hot 1998 campaign, was accused Thursday of stepping into the gutter himself after he sent out a fundraising e-mail in which he called Massachusetts Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown a “far-right tea-bagger.”

The two-term Democrat, in accusing Brown of being aligned with the conservative “tea party” movement, used a term that every tea party critic knows refers to a sexual act.

DISINGENUOUS LIBERAL: “But nooo! They themselves sent tea-bags to legislators! That’s what me (sknxx) mean!  Honest!”

“Chuck has a way of saying things that I don’t think he really understands or means, and it’s unfortunate,” Brown told Fox News Thursday when asked about the e-mail. “I’m not into name-calling. … so shame on Chuck.”

What was it Gandhi said?  “First they ignore you; then they mock  you; then the mocking turns into a self-parodying cliche that says more about the smugness of their own isolated, cossetted point of view and their tendency to listen to your own press; then your degrading cliche turns into a wry rallying cry for the very opposition you’re trying to mock; then they get angry realizing you’re turned their smug ignorance has been turned against them, and they either say something even dumber (see Martha Coakley vs. Curt Schilling) or they sic your SEIU goons on the opposition; then we win.”

Yeah.  I think that was what Gandhi said.

In Obama’s speeches, one favorite phrase: ‘Let me be clear’

Obama’s declarations of clarity are far more than a little presidential throat-clearing.

In a presidency in which everything is murkier than Obama could have imagined, the “let me be clear” preface has become a signal that what follows will be anything but.

“Now let me be clear — let me be absolutely clear…”If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, a quarter-million dollars a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.” Since then, several proposals have muddied that assertion, including the Obama-approved tax on costly health insurance plans.

Let me be absolutely clear about what health reform means for you,” he said in July. “. . . It will keep government out of health-care decisions. It will give you the option to keep your insurance if you’re happy with it.” In fact, the government’s role in health care would increase under the legislation, and the changes would, in all likelihood, result in many people ending up with different coverage through reasons not of their own choosing.

Now, let me be absolutely clear:

Proverbs 26:24-26: “A malicious man disguises himself with his lips, but in his heart he harbors deceit. Though his speech is charming, do not believe him, for seven abominations fill his heart. His malice may be concealed by deception, but his wickedness will be exposed in the assembly.”

Forget the Palestinians and the Israelis; the White House is embroiled in the biggest no-win diplomatic war of all.

It’s W trying to deftly navigate the whitewater…

The White House on Thursday quickly took away the possibility of Boise State University’s football team joining the national champions Alabama at an honorary Rose Garden ceremony.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) — a well known opponent of college football’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS) — sent a letter to President Barack Obama requesting that the undefeated Boise State Broncons join the undefeated University of Alabama Crimson Tide at the ceremony.

But a White House spokesman indicated to The Hill that Boise’s presence at the ceremony is unlikely, but did not rule it out completely.

The reason?  Well, kudos to the President:

“The president has previously articulated his displeasure with the BCS system, but he’s focused on more important things right now,” White House spokesman Adam Abrams said in an e-mail.

Of course, this doesn’t mean there’s not some interest in the recreational equivalent of nation-building:

Obama has criticized the BCS and backed a playoff system in past media appearances but today’s indication shows that he is not quite willing to make a large-scale statement on the issue.

On the other hand, it might be a better use of half of the President’s time:

The president is simultaneously trying to shepherd healthcare reform legislation through Congress before his State of the Union address in a few weeks and help coordinate U.S. disaster relief efforts in Haiti after a massive earthquake struck there this week.

But at the end of the day – if someone gets a “stimulus”, everyone wants a “stimulus”:

The anti-BCS political action committee PlayoffPAC criticized the president for missing an opportunity to “make a statement” against the BCS without spending taxpayer dollars.

“No one’s saying this is a top-tier issue on the President’s agenda, but college football’s off-the-field impact on schools isn’t trivial either,” PlayoffPAC official Matt Sanderson said in an e-mail. “He promised a year ago to ‘throw his weight around,’ but now it looks as if he may pass-up a golden opportunity to make a statement without spending one extra taxpayer minute or dollar. An overwhelming majority of college football fans will be disappointed if the President doesn’t make good on his word.”

Let me make this clear:  WE are at war with people who want to kill us.  We are in a recession that looks like it’s going to be a lot more intractable than even the Jeremiahs have been saying.  So what in the flaming fine feathered flying flapping fowl is the Federal government doing wasting any time on this kind of crap?

If one taxpayer dollar is wasted on this utter non-issue, it should be an excuse for taxpayers around the nation to storm capitals with torches and pitchforks and chase people from office with coats of tar and feathers.

That will be a playoff we can use.

…weren’t we told that the November Republican turnaround victory in Virginia and the stunning upset in New Jersey weren’t referenda on Obama’s first year?

If that were true, then wouldn’t this story just, like, totally not exist?

Coming off stinging election losses in Virginia and New Jersey — not to mention Copenhagen, where he failed to win the 2018 Olympics for his hometown of Chicago — President Obama is staying away from what could become another painful loss.

Even though the campaign of Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has been making quiet entreaties, the president has no plans to visit her in the last week of the special election to fill the Senate seat once held by the late Edward M. Kennedy.

“It’s not on our schedule to go to next week,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said matter-of-factly.

Huh.

Damn tea partiers.

Some folks  never get the word:

A musical about Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” election campaign premieres in Germany this weekend, including love songs by the president to his wife Michelle and duets with Hillary Clinton.

This doesn’t entirely not make sense; “The world” was perhaps Obama’s biggest constituency.

The venue for the premiere seems appropriate since the optimism of Obamania remains largely intact in Germany, about a year after Obama, an accomplished public speaker, became America’s first black president. One campaign highlight was a July 2008 speech to some 200,000 people in the heart of Berlin about the world, the U.S. and its place in it.

To be fair, “Peanut Farmer From Plains” just closed last year in Munich, after a 32 year run.

…last night, this crossed my mind.

Remember last November?

For starters, Democrats tried to spin their crushing, upset, turnaround defeats in Virginia but New Jersey as something other than “a referendum on Obama?” It was untrue, of course, but it’s understandable that they’d float it as damage control, and I’d never expect that the utterly compliant lefty blogosphere would repeat it as anything other than fact).

Then they tried to paint the New York 23rd District race, where a virtually unknown Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, running a ,last-minute, poorly-funded campaign against a liberal “Republican”, Dede Scozzafava, (who actually ran to the left of the Democrat, and spent more money against Hoffman than against her putative opponent),  very nearly won running against both of them, as a defeat for the GOP.  I’ve never really figured out the logic behind this – and being Democrat propaganda, it wasn’t intended for consumption by the logical anyway – but apparently it has something to do with Sarah Palin’s endorsement not causing the sky to open and rain ballots like it did for Obama.

Now, the “reason” given for this is that “It’s proof that the conservative movement is too partisan and extreme!” (ignoring, of course, that Scozzafava waas an extremist for the other side, in a district that had always voted for real Republicans).

But let’s take it at face value; let’s bite our tongues and accept for argument’s sake that Hoffman’s “loss” – and the temporary loss to the GOP of a fairly backwater House seat that will return to the GOP in about eleven months anyway – was a symptom of an “extremist” takeover of the GOP?

Very well.

So, all of you who were hopping up and down like poo-flinging monkeys over Hoffman; aren’t, then, the departure of the vastly more power Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan even more-proximate symptoms of the side-effects of the inflexible extremism of the Pelosi/Reid/Obama agenda?

Buddhapatriot is another of the “Class of ’04” blogs.  Things’ve been a little slow, but he’s always worth a read.

Like this post, near and dear to my heart, on living on the fringes of the big conservative tent:

I was thinking again this afternoon, after hearing Hugh Hewitt hawk “Intelligent Design” on his radio show, about how weird it is for me to have become this “right-wing” Republican five years ago.

How can I hang out with conservatives if I’m anti-death penalty, anti-tort reform, anti “Marriage Amendment”, against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and for open border immigration?

Well, in case you hadn’t read my previous post on the subject, it’s because many leftists are just thoroughly icky people.

Support your local MOB blog!

If someone who goes to a “Tea Party” is a “Tea Bagger”, then shouldn’t fans of Ed Schultz be called “scum baggers?”

Apropos not much.

———-

Well, it was apropos not much, until I caught this bit of late-breaking news; according to the HuffPo,  Fast Eddie Schultz is thinking about running for North Dakota’s newly-open Senate Seat.

MSNBC talk show host and liberal firebrand Ed Schultz is considering a run for Senate in his home state of North Dakota following the abrupt resignation of Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) on Tuesday evening.

The longtime talk show host, who was until recently based out of Fargo, North Dakota, told the Huffington Post that “there is a lot to think about” after he was approached by Democratic leaders in the state about a possible run. But the possibility is there, even if a decision is far off.

A brief tangent:

Dear Lord:  If I say my prayers and eat my vegetables, can I please please please please please watch Fast Eddie Schultz flame out against John Hoeven?  Just once in my life?

The MSNBC host, who has lengthy ties to the state, said he was called last night by Dorgan who, in a rather suggestive question, asked Schultz how old he was. Hours later Boucher was on the phone asking Schultz to consider a run for the Senate seat.

“I asked him very point-blank if this was an official ask.” Schultz said. “He said, ‘Yes it is’. I’m flattered. I’m honored.”

His “ties to the state” include time as a legendarily peevish sportscaster and, later, cut-rate Limbaugh clone who flipped his political allegiances about eight years ago, to the relief of conservatives everywhere. 

I MCed a “Debate” between him and Michael Medved almost two years ago.   In it, he showed that if he weren’t allowed to bellow, bluster and wave his hands like a puffy, red-faced pocked Mussolini, he’d be overmatched in a battle of wits with Jessica Simpson. 

Oh, yeah.  And he’s a dick.  After my turn at MCing his “debate” appearance, during which I (like my co-host Matt Entenza) questioned both Medved and Schultz aggressively but civilly, he called me “Mitch Craig” on the air, and referred to me as an “a-hole”.   Not that being called names fazes me – puhleeze, I get worse from my own family – but it just shows you what a class act that intellectual flyweight Schultz really is.

For the record:  Fast Eddie Schultz is an ignorant, moronic blowhard; if intelligence and wit were gasoline he’d run out of gas halfway around the inside of a Cheerio.  He actually is as dumb, knee-jerk and hate-choked as the lefty cliche about talk radio would have you believe about his competition.

Run, Eddie.  Run.  I dare you.

I grew up in North Dakota; I was born in Rugby, and grew up and graduated from high school and college in Jamestown.  I was 19 before I saw a city bigger than Fargo.  The place is still a huge part of me.

And for my entire cognitive life, Byron Dorgan’s been in politics.  He was appointed Tax Commissioner when I was five years old, at age 26; he was elected to the House, succeeding Mark Andrews, when I was a senior in high school in 1980.  He was elected to the Senate 18 years ago.  He’s been a politician virtually his entire adult life – and much more than mine.

As you’ve no doubt heard, Dorgan’s not running for re-election:

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) announced this evening that he’s retiring at the end of his term, a shocking development that threatens Democratic control of his Senate seat next year.

Dorgan was up for re-election in 2010, but the third-term senator wasn’t facing any strong Republican opposition– but was facing the growing possibility of a serious challenge from popular Gov. John Hoeven (R-N.D.).

Cassy Fiano, writing at the Greenroom, echoes a common mistake among those who don’t follow NoDak politics:

The Democrats are dropping like flies, and this gives the GOP just one more potential opening. North Dakota was won by John McCain in the election last year, and it’s entirely possible that Dorgan would had been defeated anyways.

Well, perhaps – but Mac had nothing to do with it.  North Dakota has voted Republican in virtually every election since statehood – but Dorgan went to the house in 1980, not only succeeding a popular Republican (Mark Andrews, who went to the Senate), but bucking the Reagan tide in one of the reddest states there is.  He survived the Gingrich revolution quite handily.

The reason?  Like many farm states, which are mostly famously conservative, North Dakota is addicted to pork.  The various federal Farm Bills are the staff of life – at least politicially.  And Byron Dorgan brought home the pork for a generation.  Not “dumb pork” – none of the Ben-Nelson-style legal graft.  Just lots and lots of farm bill subsidies.

And so a generation of North Dakota farmers has voted for Republicans – even Nixon and Dole – while sending Dorgan (and his successor as Tax Commissioner, Kent Conrad, and Earl Pomeroy – all of them porkocrats) to Washington to keep the swag coming.  And time is money in Washington; Dorgan’s seniority made him one of the most powerful men in the city.

But this year is different.

A recent Rasmussen poll showed him losing to Republican Governor John Hoeven, 58% – 36%. This would’ve scared the pants off of Dorgan… especially considering that Hoeven hasn’t even said that he’s going to run yet.

And the biggest question of this election isn’t “how big will Hoeven’s margin be”; it’s “will he run?”  Hoeven’s been a very successful governor; North Dakota is one of four states to have no budget deficit last year; North Dakota’s schools’ results are as good as or better than Minnesota’s, for vastly less money per student; the state rode out the recession in some style, and not entirely because of the oil boom.  In a just world, he’d be a presidential candidate; he’s one of the most accomplished governors anywhere.

But he’s been reticent so far about committing to run for higher office.  That’ll be the big question.

The Politico:

In his statement, Dorgan said his retirement was borne out of the desire to spend more time with his family.

And Beria died of a cold.

Democratic Senate campaign officials only found out about Dorgan’s decision within the last 24 hours. Dorgan began calling Senate leaders on Tuesday afternoon to inform them of his decision to retire, according to Senate insiders.

He had previously given no sign that he wasn’t going to run for re-election or was even considering retirement and had been raising money for his 2010 campaign.

Could it be that Dorgan finally found a third rail even he couldn’t jump over?

Obamacare is a famously unhealthy product to push in North Dakota, whose population veers between a fairly elderly population outstate who stand to take a huge hit on healthcare with the demotion of Medicare, and a fairly young population in high-tech and university-dominated Fargo and Grand Forks.

Could it be that the rabid partisanship of the Pelosi/Reid Axis has led a Democrat two key Democrats (along with Senator Dodd) to jump before they get impaled?

…that this loathsome incident…

A doll found hanging off a Main Street building in Plains is causing controversy.

Controversial enough to get the United States Secret Service involved.

Witnesses say it was an image of President Barack Obama with a rope around his neck, and the display was found hanging in one of the city’s most recognizable sites dedicated to former President Jimmy Carter.

…will:

a) be blamed on the “climate of hate” that all conservative opposition to Obama is being speciously linked to, and

b) eventually be found to be a hoax by a lefty trying to discredit conservatives.

I said 75% safe.  Not a lock, just fairly confident. 

We’ve been down this road a few times.

From Fox – nine stories, each of which harsh the “New Era Of Hope And Change” mellow, which the mainstream media ignored last year.

Senator Ben Nelson – one of the crucial votes the Administration bought last week to win the Health Care vote in the Senate – isn’t up for re-election this term.  But he’s bleeding from the ears, and he’s currently down by around 30 points in a hypothetical race against Nebraska’s Republican governor for his normally-secure “blue-dog” seat.

But Nebraskans aren’t amused:

As a fresh poll measured the political cost of Sen. Ben Nelson’s health reform vote, he prepared Tuesday to take his case directly to Nebraskans during Wednesday night’s Holiday Bowl game.

Nelson will air a new TV ad in which he attempts to debunk opposition claims that the Senate legislation represents a government takeover, and he makes the case for health care reform.

“With all the distortions about health care reform, I want you to hear directly from me,” the Democratic senator says in the ad.

That’s a great idea, Senator Nelson.  Why don’t you hear directly from your constituents.

At a statewide series of town hall meetings?  Where you can hear from them, too?

Or are all those peasants just too…pesky?

It’s been a while since we’ve seen Obama actually deified.

No, I mean actually deified, this time in the left-leaning Danish site Politiken.dk:

He is provocative in insisting on an outstretched hand, where others only see animosity.

His tangible results in the short time that he has been active – are few and far between. His greatest results have been created with words and speeches – words that remain in the consciousness of their audience and have long-term effects.

He comes from humble beginnings and defends the weak and vulnerable, because he can identify himself with their conditions.

And no we are not thinking of Jesus Christ, whose birthday has just been celebrated – – but rather the President of the United States Barack Hussein Obama.

I had to double check to see if the angry Moslems had killed noodle-, brained lefty commentator in Denmark after the “Mohammed Cartoons” controversy, and they’d hired Grace Kelly as a ringer:

For some time now, comparisons between the two have been a tool of cynical opinion that quickly became fatigued of the rapture that Obama instilled prior to and after the presidential election last year.

From the start, Obama’s critics have claimed that his supporters have idolised him as a saviour, thus attempting to dismantle the concrete hope that Obama has represented for most Americans.

Actually, my Danish friend, it’s the lefties and their bobbleheaded deification that created the cynical opinion; it’s Obama’s incompetence that have dismantled the “concrete hope”.

The idea was naturally that the comparison between Jesus and Obama – which is something that the critics developed themselves – would be comical, blasphemous, or both.

If such a comparison were to be made, it would, of course, inevitably be to Obama’s advantage.

That’s right.  Obama’s better than Christ.

Read the whole thing. 

I’m tempted not to go riot in the streets and demand the author’s death.

Our old friend Susan Lenfestey’s holiday cheer has apparently been harshed by President Obama’s first year in office…

…oh, who are we kidding?  Susan Lenfestey has never met a mellow she couldn’t harsh.

Still, even by her dysthemic standards, this blog post was a doozy:

Maya Angelou’s poem, Still I Rise, has been going through my head lately. Some verses:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Catch that?  If Susan Lenfestey’s special little world, Barack Obama – a child of the middle class, who’s benefited not only from the best (or at least highest-rated) education American money can buy but from the American people’s open-mindedness, is no different than a Jim Crow-era sojourner who had to deal with real, genuine, constant oppression!

I’d say “every single one of us who disagrees with the President must be no better in their eyes than some Grand Kleagle”, but I guess we’ve already established that).

Feel like that’s what our president is dealing with, and still, he rises.

Well, no.  He doesn’t.

Below is a reject from the Star Tribune on Obama’s Afghan speech. Yeah, it’s a tad dated, and we’re on to Copenhagen, but Barb is sick of holding up her end of the line without me, so I thought maybe something’s better than nothing. Or maybe not. Sorry for the absence, I lost my mind.

This absence of smart-ass riposte is brought to you by the kinder, gentler Mitch.  Or at least the Mitch that’ll let the occasional hanging curve-ball by out of pity.

A while ago, codified all of the various Berg’s Laws in one place.  These laws – an encyclopedic survey of several small but fairly universal truths – include perhaps one of my most trenchant observations, captured for posterity as Berg’s Seventh Law:

Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection – When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are projecting.

Critics have misguidedly assailed this law; “you’re basically saying you’re rubber and we’re glue”, which may sound satisfying on a superficial level, it ignores the fact that the Seventh Law is entirely true.

For example – liberals constantly tell conservatives they’ve “gotten too extreme” for the American people.  This is at a time when the American people are rejecting Obama’s far-left overreach in droves, even to the point of the once-unthinkable; conservatives organizing and going to demonstrations. 

In the meantime, some Democrats – the ones that have to live in the real world outside the Beltway – are starting to get nervous.

This might be the only time you ever see me call  Chicago mayor Richard Daley a moderate.  He’s got an op-ed in the WaPo:

The announcement by Alabama Rep. Parker Griffith that he is switching to the Republican Party is just the latest warning sign that the Democratic Party — my lifelong political home — has a critical decision to make: Either we plot a more moderate, centrist course or risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.

Rep. Griffith’s decision makes him the fifth centrist Democrat to either switch parties or announce plans to retire rather than stand for reelection in 2010. These announcements are a sharp reversal from the progress the Democratic Party made starting in 2006 and continuing in 2008, when it reestablished itself as the nation’s majority party for the first time in more than a decade.

That success happened for one major reason: Democrats made inroads in geographies and constituencies that had trended Republican since the 1960s. In these two elections, a majority of independents and a sizable number of moderate Republicans joined the traditional Democratic base to sweep Democrats to commanding majorities in Congress and to bring Barack Obama to the White House.

Daley is leaving out a few things, of course; Obama and the Dems made those “inroads” against the legacy of a deeply unpopular outgoing Administration, with the full complicity of a media that made a rigid agenda point of showing Obama as a moderate, to the point of actively stifling any discussion of his far-left past, associations or record.  I think the left accepts that as a given, by now.

But wait! (I’ve added some emphasis):

This call was answered not just by voters but by a surge of smart, talented candidates who came forward to run and win under the Democratic banner in districts dominated by Republicans for a generation. These centrists swelled the party’s ranks in Congress and contributed to Obama’s victories in states such as Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado and other Republican bastions.

But now they face a grim political fate. On the one hand, centrist Democrats are being vilified by left-wing bloggers, pundits and partisan news outlets for not being sufficiently liberal, “true” Democrats. On the other, Republicans are pounding them for their association with a party that seems to be advancing an agenda far to the left of most voters.

The political dangers of this situation could not be clearer.

Or more fun!

In particular, I love Daley’s probably-offhanded admission – that the left wing smear machine actually is as venal, smug and divisive as they’ve always alleged hosts like Limbaugh, Hannity and the Northern Alliance – whose messages are actually relatively closer to the center of American politics – to be.

Witness the losses in New Jersey and Virginia in this year’s off-year elections. In those gubernatorial contests, the margin of victory was provided to Republicans by independents — many of whom had voted for Obama. Just one year later, they had crossed back to the Republicans by 2-to-1 margins.

Witness the drumbeat of ominous poll results. Obama’s approval rating has fallen below 49 percent overall and is even lower — 41 percent — among independents. On the question of which party is best suited to manage the economy, there has been a 30-point swing toward Republicans since November 2008, according to Ipsos. Gallup’s generic congressional ballot shows Republicans leading Democrats. There is not a hint of silver lining in these numbers. They are the quantitative expression of the swing bloc of American politics slipping away.

The Mayor still knows his audience:

Despite this raft of bad news, Democrats are not doomed to return to the wilderness. The question is whether the party is prepared to listen carefully to what the American public is saying. Voters are not re-embracing conservative ideology, nor are they falling back in love with the Republican brand. If anything, the Democrats’ salvation may lie in the fact that Republicans seem even more hell-bent on allowing their radical wing to drag the party away from the center.

Of course, the biggest second-tier danger facing the Democrats is believing their own talking points about the GOP and conservatism; just because you relentlessly intone that everything to the right of Olympia Snowe is “extreme” doesn’t make it so. 

The real conservative case – limited government, individual and economic liberty, security, family – is the American mainstream.  And when Republicans act like conservatives rather than beltway lobbyists-in-training, it shows at the polls. 

Read Daley’s entire op-ed.

“Rock the Vote” is urging supporters of socialized, government healthcare rationing to go all Lysistrata on their purported pro-free-market paramours:

Just when every tactic in the book had been seemingly exhausted in the health care debate, Rock the Vote comes along with a new one: if you want health care reform, don’t sleep with anyone who opposes it until his or her mind is changed. 

The youth advocacy group is pushing the campaign in a Web video and pledge on its Web site, which asks supporters to “hold out” for health care. 

The campaign isn’t just absurd; it’s an example of incredibly poor market research.  Given that most lefties, especially the young ones, regard politics as their religion, “not being a fellow statist” is often as not a showstopper for young relationships; a young Barbara Boxer supporter is staggeringly unlikely to be dating someone with an independent streatk anywhere in his/her mind.

But I have a better idea:   People who support the free market?  You withhold sex from people who support Obamacare!  Because liberals crave instant gratification and lack conservatives’ calm and patience, they’ll cave in long before you do. 

Oh, yes – and American Left?  Stay classy.  Really:

The subtlety of the online pledge, though, is completely undone by the video, which employs zero rhetorical devices, except for a couple of bleeps, to get its message bluntly across. 

“We pledge ourselves to the health and liberty of young Americans and to government for the people … and to never f—ing you if you are against us,” the team of actors in the video says. 

“We will vote against you, work against you, and once again, just in case you forgot, never ever, never ever, never ever, never ever f— you.” .

Fear not, commercial starlets (a couple of flavor-of-the-month actors from some current flash-in-the-pan series); pretty soon, you’ll discover your agents and management have taken care of that for you.  And then you’ll be doing the same thing on one casting couch or another until your plastic surgery gives out, and you won’t give a Flaming Pelosi what the casting agent’s take on healthcare will be.

(And if I were a young person, I’d be pissed that the Left figured I was such a slave to my desires that that would work on me anyway).

The House healthcare vote:  on a Saturday, when the news media was out golfing.

The last few healthcare votes – also on Saturdays, to avoid more media scrutiny.

The big kahuna vote in the Senate?  Very likely Christmas Eve, when Anderson Cooper and the rest of our elite media will be busy covering shopping lines.

The development came with Senate leaders working round the clock trying to finalize their 10-year, nearly $1 trillion bill in time for a final vote on Christmas Eve. Nelson is emerging as a major obstacle – perhaps the only remaining one – since Democrats need his vote to have the 60 necessary to overcome Republican stalling tactics.

The Pelosi Administration seems to be learning its lesson; next year, votes will be carried out first on the swing shift; when bloggers and talkradio discover this, they’ll vote by meeting at motels in Maryland; eventually our entire system of government will devolve into flash mobs that gather in odd public places, vote, and disperse before they draw attention.