In a perfect world, candidates vying for public office would debate issues and contrasting philosophical approaches to the problems confronting the nation and her citizens. Historians like to point to the Lincoln/Douglas debates as an example of how campaigns ought to be run. But that was then, and this is now.

We live in an impatient and superficial world. Few voters bother to watch what passes for “debates” between candidates, and fewer still have the patience to actually listen to serious men discussing serious issues at length and in detail.

Candidates say they want to discuss the issues and avoid the name calling that has given the profession a bad name, but what they really mean is that they’d be happy to focus on their positions that most voters favor. Unfortunately, sometimes politicians discover their positions … or their performance in office … isn’t viewed with the adulation they believe they deserve. When this happens, all bets are off.

When a candidate discovers his or her approach to governing is in disfavor or when the public has turned on the candidate’s programs and policies, things can get very ugly, very fast. This fall, Democratic candidates are ripping and tearing at their opponents in an attempt to avoid talking about the record and to instead convince voters those conservative candidates are sleazy, crazy, incompetent or simply unqualified for the offices they seek.

A year ago, Democrats actually thought they would be able to focus on issues and on the successes they’d won in Congress. They pumped each other up saying the healthcare bill would prove popular once passed and the economy would recover as a result of their policies.

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On Wednesday The Hill reported on a new poll it has conducted of the 2010 midterms with initial focus on 12 districts held by freshmen Democrats and the news isn’t good for those incumbent Dems scrutinized. On the other hand, the poll seems to show that it isn’t pat that Republicans will necessarily run away with it all either.

On Wednesday The Hill reported that in 11 of the initial 12 races polled, Republicans are leading Democrat incumbents. In the 12th, the candidates are tied. While this may seem good for the GOP the downside is that none of the Republicans are polling over 50%.

However, a long held axiom states that an incumbent that can’t reach at lest 50% in the polls generally is in major trouble for re-election and if these polls show GOP leads in each case with not one of these incumbent Dems reaching the 50% mark, that says quite a lot about these midterms.

According to The Hill, the poll also shows that Obamacare is hurting Democrats. “A majority of voters in key battleground districts favor repeal of the legislative overhaul that Congress passed this year.”

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Today, in 2001, the US began its invasion of Afghanistan. That country has absorbed lots of great powers and drained their vitality. It seems, we are no different.

(Cheers, Maura)

Former Clinton Secretary of Transportation & Energy Federico Peña was stumping for Rep. Betsy Markey in the Denver area.  As Ms. Markey looked on, Sec. Peña told the crowd:

You know we’ve seen in this country historically, when strange things happen because people get carried away with the media, and they get carried away with myths, and they get carried away with fear.  We saw what happened to Asian Americans in this country, very very long ago with the Asian exclusion laws, and everybody thought that was the right thing to do.  And then during WWII, we put Japanese Americans in camps all over the county, thought it was the right thing to do.  Everybody got carried away with the emotion of the day. We thought they were somehow, you know, terrorists… And we see this happen in other countries, I won’t give you the history.  And that’s happening in our country today.

Upon finishing his speech with the Obama campaign Spanish catch-phrase, Sí se puede, Peña embraces Candidate Markey, who is clearly unfazed by the former Clinton cabinet member’s patently offensive historical comparison.

Margaret Thatcher nearly singlehandedly restored Britain from its cradle-to-grave welfare state to a thriving economy.  She believed that the socialism of her day was incompatible with the strong, productive, self-reliant, moral citizens she wanted the British people to be, and that freedom (economic and personal) was the only solution.  Her conservatism was a moral stance, not a technocratic one.

Our latest guest, author and journalist Claire Berlinski, talks about the Iron Lady, why she matters and what she stood for.  She suggests that were Thatcher and President Obama to meet, the former Prime Minister would “eat him for lunch.”  Even more surprisingly, Berlinski takes offense to the notion that Sarah Palin might be compared to Thatcher.  What are their similarities? “Sarah Palin is a woman; she’s from a small town; she’s a conservative.  The comparison ends there.”

Berlinski goes on to discuss her past 6 years living in Istanbul, moderate Muslims and moderate Islam, and why Americans should be paying more attention to Turkey.

Watch the full episode below:

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It is what everybody predicted would happen.  When Attorney General Stedman Graham er, Eric Holder announced that some of the Gitmo terrorist trials would be switched from military tribunals to civilian courts, people warned that key evidence would now be thrown out because it was obtained by enhanced interrogation techniques such as water boarding. That’s exactly what happened to day in the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani whose trial was moved into the civilian system last year. The terrorist Ghailani  is charged with conspiring in the 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, that killed 224 people.

The witness who was banned from testifying, Hussein Abebe, says he sold TNT to Mr. Ghailani that was later used to blow up the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  The Judge agreed that the government learned of  Mr. Abebe through Mr. Ghailani’s interrogation when he was being held in an overseas jail run by the Central Intelligence Agency.

According to Ghailani’s attorney,  the terrorist underwent coercive interrogation and torture while in C.I.A. custody, and that any statements or evidence derived from them is tainted and inadmissible. The  prosecution said Mr. Abebe’s decision to cooperate was voluntary and only remotely linked to Mr. Ghailani’s interrogation. “This is a giant witness for the government,” a prosecutor, Michael Farbiarz, told the judge last week, adding, “There’s nothing bigger than him.”  Mr. Farbiarz cited Mr. Abebe’s testimony that Mr. Ghailani made repeated trips to buy “black-market explosives” from him, adding, “That’s done for not many reasons in this life.”

Judge  Lewis Kaplan announced his decision today, blocking the government from calling  their “Giant Witness”

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There are no coincidences in the Obama “Community Organizing” organized hard-left.

Last month in Illinois at the Right Nation event, bused-in SEIU hordes coordinated with social justice activist ministers and Obama’s vaunted Organizing for America (formerly Obama for America) waving American flags that had been distributed to them by their “Community Organizers.”  The well-trained mob chanted “Stop the Hate” and wielded uniform, hand-crafted placards defaming Glenn Beck as a “liar” and a “hater.” What we were able to discover in short order, and quite predictably, was this group was “astro-turf” and with the provocation of simple questions, such as: “What does your sign mean?”, “Why are you here?”, the “Stop the Hate” rally devolved into spitting and inflammatory name-calling.

Someone, somewhere has had a plan to dress the union thugs up as pious and deeply patriotic now that a progressive socialist is in the White House, and to frame non-progressives, non-socialists and critics of the Obama Administration as out-of-tune with Jesus’s “Social Justice” activism (history revisionism at its worst) and un-patriotic.

When I was standing outside the News Corp. building Monday evening before my appearance on “Red Eye,” I saw a lone protester who looked not-unlike Scooby-Doo’s sidekick, Shaggy.  His name is Matt Sky.  He and his girlfriend are relatively infamous for being the most photographed supporters of the Ground Zero Mosque due to their constant, ubiquitous protests in front of the Cordoba House site.

In reading about Matt Sky, ubiquitous Manhattan protester, he’s been referred to as a math tutor and web programmer.  In what type of economy does a math tutor and web programmer have this amount of free time to do so much protesting?  In another less politically correct time, a reporter would start asking him whether or not he is actually employed or whether he is another statistic of the staggering unemployment brought on by the horrendous Obama economy. (more…)

For months, California has been a laughingstock state, unable to pass an annual budget, facing a declaration of “fiscal emergency,” fighting over pay cuts and furloughs for government employees, threatening to issue IOUs to creditors. With a “framework” budget agreement expected to pass later this week, Reason.tv looks at why this long fight over a bloated budget may be good news for California’s future.

The Golden State is facing a half-trillion-dollar shortfall in funding its pension commitments to public employees. But this year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has fought the unions and lost many times, got the momentum on his side. As the public seethes over cuts to public services and excessive compensation to public employees, Schwarzenegger has used the budget negotiation as leverage to wring concessions from the Democrats and their patrons in organized labor.

The first steps toward reform have already been taken. Several government employee unions have agreed to less expensive contracts, and the budget deal reportedly includes the repeal of a 1999 law that drastically increased the unfunded pension burden on taxpayers. The termed-out Schwarzenegger won’t be back. But the fight to get the state’s pension crisis under control will continue.

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If young girls were dying or becoming permanently disabled after receiving a vaccine approved by the FDA, wouldn’t you want the agency to pull the vaccine off the shelves and conduct more research?

That’s exactly the situation we’re in today. But unfortunately calls to the FDA to do something about it have fallen on deaf ears — even as the situation appears to worsen.

Judicial Watch received yet another batch of documents from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) detailing reports of adverse reactions to the vaccination for human papillomavirus (HPV), Gardasil.

These most recent adverse reactions include 16 new deaths (including four suicides) between May 2009 and September 2010. The FDA also produced 789 “serious” reports, with 213 cases resulting in permanent disability and 25 resulting in a diagnosis of Guillain Barre Syndrome.

Here are a few excerpts from the documents uncovered by Judicial Watch:

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This preordained doomed attempt should NOT serve as an impetus for unilateral FCC action

Last week gave us another piece of last minute, hurry-up and pass-it legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives – Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman’s bill to regulate the Internet, codify Net Neutrality (NN) and define the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s role therein.

As the recently departed White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel once said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”  Or a manufactured one – like the four-plus year slow burn “dire” need for Net Neutrality implementation.  Without which the Internet has exploded into a nearly limitless cornucopia of free speech, free markets and free people.

We’ve gone this long – and this incredibly well – without Net Neutrality.  We certainly don’t need the FCC ramming it through in an after-the-election November meeting designed from all appearances to thwart and avoid the scrutiny of the American people.

In actuality, this NN bill had ZERO chance of passing.  You can’t introduce it out of Committee the Tuesday before the Friday Congress adjourns – and expect it to become law.  Anyone who follows these things knows this is folly.

It did accomplish something.  Forced again to make a decision inside of six seconds on transcendentally important legislation, the Republicans rightly said No.  Ranking Committee member Joe Barton decided they would not, again, be forced aboard another screaming legislative locomotive.

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New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is traveling to Springfield, Illinois today to do a fundraiser for Bill Brady, the Republican gubernatorial candidate. While he’s in town, Christie should drop by the capitol and give Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, a Democrat, a lesson on how to trim state labor costs.

While Governor Christie has sensibly challenged the public employee union status quo in the name of fighting deficits, Governor Quinn is cementing union perks in place even as the state’s fiscal condition deteriorates.

The recent announcement of a deal between Quinn and AFSCME to stop any public employee union member layoffs and facility closings through June 2012 is causing a minor uproar in the Prairie State. Illinois is facing a record $4.7 billion backlog in unpaid bills, and the union’s agreement to accept a measly $50 million in savings in return for the concessions doesn’t pass the smell test.

The fact that AFSCME endorsed Quinn just days earlier brings up unpleasant reminders of Illinois’s history of a “pay to play” state. According to reports, Quinn’s budget director David Vaught attended a union endorsement session, albeit on his personal time.

Labor costs make up one in four dollars spent from Illinois’s general funds, and walling off a major chunk of the state budget from any spending reforms makes balancing the books infinitely more difficult. Under the Quinn deal, changes to the collective bargaining agreement would be forbidden until one-third of the way through the next gubernatorial term. By then, Illinois could be bankrupt. The state needs more flexibility to deal with public sector unions, not less.

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“So how do you plan to kill me?”  Charles Morse (played by Anthony Hopkins) asked Robert Green (played by Alec Baldwin) in “The Edge.”  It was at that moment that I realized I had a deep-held sympathy for the super wealthy. It’s got to be a lonely life.  It’s got to be a life void of trust and sadly, a life of being vilified by the media and politicians alike, through no fault of your own.  Sure you should probably never feel bad for a guy who owns a plane, but I often wonder, how many of us have ever really thought of the country’s wealthiest 2% as actual human beings?

We live in a world today where rich = bad. If a wealthy man shows up in a movie, you are to immediately assume that he’s the bad guy. Of course, these assumptions are never reserved for the middle-eastern terrorists, rather the man with the bryl-creemed hair and Brioni suit. Add to the fact that we have a Harry Reid-minded administration consistently setting up the “Us vs. Them” cultural narrative and it seems that today’s top earners find themselves in a never-ending, uphill battle against public hatred. Prejudice is bad. Why should prejudice towards the rich be any different?

As I foray into new territories in my career (and by foray, I mean play jester-monkey for coin), I find myself meeting more and more of today’s “super wealthy.”  Little known fact; most of them are good people. It’s crazy to hear, I know.  I expected to see more men looking like the Planter’s peanut guy, thinking only of ways to scheme their next shadily earned dollar.  The truth is that like any demographic, you’re going to end up with the same percentage of good people and jackasses. I would even dare to say that I’ve encountered far fewer jerks in the wealthy community, because success leaves less room for that kind of behavior. I’ve met far more selfish poor and middle class people than I’ve ever met wealthy folks.  Often, it seems that today’s middle class are so busy nickel and diming their lives that they rarely take the time to help others.  My mom never makes me sandwiches anymore.

Try this; at the next business gathering or conference that you attend, stand back and observe the interaction of the general public with some of the wealthiest people in the room.  Throughout the night you’ll see people treat them as veritable ATM’s, extending common courtesy only for as long as it takes them to pitch their latest investment or product. Sometimes these are the same people who turn around and complain about the “have’s and the have not’s” as they lobby for higher taxes on aforementioned rich people.

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This guy puts on a good game until he’s asked by EAGtv: “Did you see the movie?”  The movie, of course, is “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” the new documentary on public education.

Then his critique is as hollow as his pecs!

When President Obama sold his health care plan to the American people, he did so based on the broad notion that government really can run your life better than you can, even when it comes to your own health care. He did this in spite of massive evidence to the contrary from all walks of life, confident that Washington bureaucracy knows best.

Yet even before the major portions of Obamacare have been put in place, government bureaucrats are already falling behind and failing to keep their legislative promises to us. A new report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, commissioned by Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and others, finds astounding proof of the total administrative failure in implementing Obamacare. Coburn, who last week introduced an innovative new legislative package to stop Medicare and Medicaid fraud, continues to take the lead in pointing out the administrative problems of this big government regime.

According to the report, HHS has already missed one-third of the deadlines contained within the legislation for the first six months under Obama’s law. Below the fold is a list of the seven missed deadlines. Additionally, there were four deadlines where CRS could not reach a conclusion based on their research — meaning even more could have been missed. And this is just at the six month mark — imagine where we’ll be by 2014!
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Today, in 1973, Egypt, Syria and a host of Arab nations launched a surprise invasion of Israel. It would end badly for the Arabs.

When it comes to conservative political satire, there’s probably no more popular practitioner of the form than P.J. O’Rourke. Having overcome his own crazy hippie days in the ‘60s, O’Rourke went on to become one of the defining writers of the National Lampoon in the ‘70s and burst into politically-themed writing with an astonishingly funny series of articles for Rolling Stone throughout the 1980s, in which he planted himself as a white American guy into some of the troubled and anti-American places on earth. (The best of these can be found in his collection, “Holidays in Hell.”)

In 1991, he took on the U.S. government itself with a furor and viciously funny intelligence that would make Mark Twain proud, when he unleashed the book “Parliament of Whores” upon the world. The massive bestseller exposed the abject corruption and bloated nature of a modern-day government whose expanse vastly exceeded the roles which our Founding Fathers intended for it.

O’Rourke has continued in that vein for much of the past two decades, but his ability to settle into domestic bliss with his second wife and their two young children led him to focus on the still funny yet less pointed collection of fatherhood essays, “The CEO of the Sofa.” He also took on Adam Smith’s classic economics primer “The Wealth of Nations,” and broke it down in a funny yet informative way that made the tome accessible for modern audiences.

But as he stared down a cancer scare in the last two years, O’Rourke reclaimed his former fire and has written his angriest, funniest book since “Parliament” with the new “Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards.” Caught amid a nation gripped by Obamamania and a 21^st century set of problems, O’Rourke tackles all the big issues – from gun control and health care reform to terrorism and climate change – in a profane and defiantly funny set of essays that’s perfectly timed to the midterm elections.

Speaking exclusively with Big Government via phone from the Union Club in New York City on Monday, Sept. 27, O’Rourke spoke at length about his personal and professional transformation into conservatism and about the state of the union. He was loose, engaging, laid-back yet undeniably opinionated – just the way we like him.

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The 2010 primary season was, for the most part, a good one for limited government, freedom-loving conservatives. Most of the high profile challenges against the incumbent or establishment candidates, with Mike Lee, Ken Buck, Joe Miller, and Sharron Angle ended with the grassroots candidate winning. The American people clearly demonstrated that they are tired of long time incumbents, the ruling class, ignoring the will of the people and growing government spending and the role of government in people’s lives.

But we need to put things into perspective: the 2010 primary season must be seen as simply the opening salvo in the American people’s war against statism. It is the first battle in many to come in the war over whether the American people, or the ruling class, will control the American system of government.

Sure, there are reasons to celebrate, but let’s be honest: nothing has been won yet. The primary victories are just that: primary, not general election, victories. And while it’s humorous to see the befuddlement of the establishment as yet another one of its candidates goes down in defeat, think about this: of the 472 U.S. Representatives and Senators running this fall, it is almost guaranteed, in a supposed “anti-incumbent, anti-establishment” election that 80% or more of the incumbents will win this year.

Those statistics are just at the federal level, but they hold true even at the state level: roughly 80% of state house and state senate incumbents will win this fall. The good people over at Ballotpedia.org have even compiled a list of state legislators who will not even be challenged in the general election. The list is uncomfortably long, which is staggering given that this is a Congressional re-districting year due to the census.

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