Thursday:

Wow, you can really feel the energy here in Minneapolis at Netroots Nation 2011 – the vibe is so much better than at Starbucks where that fascist Mr. Rodriguez keeps oppressing me by insisting that I get to work on time!  Because of the capitalist system under whose yoke we all groan, I had to get the money to come from my parents, which is only fair since they have money and because of George Bush I don’t.  I heard Dad joking about how he was “delighted to have that 30-year old bum out of my basement for a weekend.”  Mom gave me a ride to the airport in the Explorer and on the 747 I had time to write up a Daily Kos post about the need to ration carbon credits to control global warming – I mean “climate change.”

I went to check into my hotel room and the guy at the front desk complimented me on my clothes.  “Nice Che tee,” he said.  “Funny coincidence – my family is from Cuba.  So, will you be wearing your Mao t-shirt tomorrow?”  How did he know?  Anyway, I was a little unhappy with my room – it was on the top floor between the elevators and a guy who turned out to be the drummer for Anthrax.  He sure had a lot of loud parties.

Off to the convention center for to help build a socialist future – oh wait, I’m not supposed to say “socialist.”  Andrew Breitbert’s operatives are in the area and according to Markos, “We’re still keeping our real goal on the down low until after the reelection.”   Shhh – mum’s the word, fellow “progressives!”

By the way, I thought I saw Markos himself, but it turned out to be a guy dressed as an elf from the Dungeons & Dragons convention down the street.  My mistake!

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It took years, but there is something I finally agree with Barack Obama and Al Franken on. Obama and his propaganda machine in the mainstream media, not to mention his party of corruption, are calling for an investigation of “foreign money” in campaigns.

Finally.

I have been calling for a special prosecutor for years, ever since I exposed the millions Obama received from Muslim nations, Hamas-controlled Gaza and other foreign countries.

Obama warned Thursday that “groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections, and they won’t tell you where the money for their ads come from.” He also said that “just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations.”

Franken then duly hurried to do Obama’s bidding, calling on the Federal Election Commission to investigate the Chamber of Commerce, the group to which Obama was referring.

We move to a theater of the absurd upon hearing Al Franken, who lost his election on election night and began pulling votes out of car trunks to steal that election, calling for an investigation of foreign money.

Nonetheless, the Democrats’ mainstream media shills then took up the cause. On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow confronted Oregon Republican Congressional candidate Art Robinson with accusations about foreign contributions: “If you get elected in part because of this spending and you find out that it’s from criminals, or foreign interests, or communists or something, wouldn’t that bother you?”

Whether or not it should bother Robinson, it should bother Obama. While he is calling for an investigation into the Chamber of Commerce, there should be a full investigation into the foreign millions Obama received for his campaign.

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Since Bush v. Gore was decided in 2000, recounts have received far more attention; it’s almost like they’ve become a routine part of a campaign.  Each year, candidates, state parties, and election lawyers across the country prepare for these post-election challenges that may never come.

In 2008, we saw the impact that a recount can have.  In Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman won on election night.  On election night Coleman led comedian Al Franken by over 700 votes.  A canvass ensued, and Franken chipped away at Coleman’s lead, leaving Coleman ahead only 215 votes.  With a margin that narrow a recount ensured.  Over the course of the recount Franken managed to find enough votes to come out ahead by 225.  (Some news stories even reveal that the election may have been decided by the votes of convicted felons who were not eligible to participate in the election.)

This delivered Al Franken to the United States Senate, and delivered President Obama and Harry Reid a critical vote for their liberal agenda.

The Democrats learned a lot from this.  So much so, that this election cycle they want to be even better prepared.

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We have come a long way in the last twenty months. The President of the United States, his Chief of Staff, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Majority Leader in the United States Senate have done for the Republican Party what no Republican could have accomplished. Just as rigor mortis was about to set in, they brought the old corpse back to life. For their efforts on our behalf, we should be forever grateful.

It is easy to lose perspective. It is easy to forget the dire straits in which the Republicans found themselves in and for some time after November, 2008. On the first Tuesday of that month, they were soundly defeated. The Democrats controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress. In time, when Al Franken was seated and Arlen Specter turned coat, the Democrats would attain El Dorado – a commanding majority in the Senate capable to bringing a filibuster to a screeching halt.

The Republicans initially thought that to get along they would have to go along. Had Nancy Pelosi thrown a little patronage their way when the so-called “stimulus” bill was being put together, had Barack Obama intervened to insist that she include earmarks for compliant Republicans in the House, a great many of them would have voted for the measure. It is to her that we owe their solidarity on the occasion of the vote. She is responsible for the fact that on that occasion they presented themselves to the world as a party of principle. If the Tea-Party Movement, which sprang up in the immediate aftermath of the bill’s passage, was not as resolutely hostile to the Republicans as it was to the Democrats, it was because Pelosi and her minions wanted vengeance, sought it, and got it.

Even when the Tea-Party Movement had emerged, the Republicans were not quick to realize what was in the offing. On 2 May 2009, some six months after the election, Jeb Bush emerged from a meeting with Mitt Romney and House Republican Whip Eric Cantor to announce that it was time for the Republicans to give up “nostalgia about the past” and to leave Ronald Reagan and all that he stood for behind. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” he observed, “and the other side has something. I don’t like it, but they have it, and we have to be respectful and mindful of that.”

Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, and Eric Cantor may have been slow to grasp what was going on, but it would be a mistake to assume that they are dopes. It was not until early August in that year that I was willing to admit to myself that a political realignment in the Republicans’ favor was a serious possibility; and, as I noted in a piece posted in the aftermath of the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in early September, I was even then almost entirely alone. At that convention, I had attended a panel on Barack Obama’s first year as President at which not one of the distinguished students of American politics on the panel had in their prepared remarks even mentioned the Tea-Party Movement. And when I asked a question about it, I received a perfunctory answer. It was odd, my interlocutor remarked, that such a movement had emerged in the absence of institutional support. It was, I thought, very odd, very odd, indeed.

Now, thanks to Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, the Republicans appear to be on the verge of an historic victory.

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It’s time for your weekly dose of Coffee and Markets, featuring The New Ledger’s Francis Cianfrocca, a podcast brought to you by Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com and LibertyPundits.com, your home for conservative podcasts. In this week’s edition, we discuss the continued crisis in Europe, the possible lessons for America, Al Franken’s new credit rating bureaucracy, and why the elite left hates the Tea Party movement.

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You can subscribe to the podcast by following the links above, and if you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

TNL: The Limits of EuroTarp
Bloomberg: Euro Breakup Talk Increases
WSJ: Franken Credit Rating Amendment
FT: Tough New Spain Austerity Measures
WSJ: Voters Shifting Right
TNL: The Tea Parties and the Sixties

Today, in 1913, the 17th Amendment, providing for the direct election of Senators, became law. Previously, Senators were elected by their state Legislatures, which provided a check on the federal government. In just about a century after enactment, Al Franken would become a US Senator.

Al Franken became famous as a comedian. A long-time writer for Saturday Night Live, he developed routines and characters that made us laugh. But, as my latest video reminds us, even funny people can be humorless. Not only is Franken a jerk to me, as I ask admittedly tough questions about ObamaCare, but he’s a jerk to his own hapless staff. The job market in DC can’t be bad enough to put up with this.

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Eighteen states provide for recall elections to remove state officials.  Nine of those provide for the same for their Congressional representatives.  But such a right of recall can and should be adopted in every state.

Ideally this would be done by amending the state constitution to provide for such recall elections.  But it can be done through statute as well, with the New Jersey Uniform Recall Election Law as a good model.

The greatest opportunity is in the states that already provide for citizen initiatives to put state constitutional amendments or proposed statutes on the state ballot for a vote of the people for adoption.  In these states, the citizens can act directly, without depending on the politicians to adopt a check on their own power.

The right of recall is desirable because it maintains democratic accountability to the people throughout the entire term of elected officials, rather than just at election time.  This is more relevant now because increasingly we see an attitude among elected officials that they know best and the people are ignorant yahoos who should be ignored until they need to be fooled again at election time.  The people need a right of recall to remove officials who display this anti-democratic attitude after they are elected.

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To the people of Orlando: your long Florida nightmare may soon be over.  Congressman Alan Grayson is up for re-election this year.

But in the mean time, he’s continuing his gasbaggery.  He’s taking up President Obama’s mantle of intimidating the Supreme Court and has introduced several bills so political free speech can once again be squelched.

Grayson has introduced several pieces of legislation aimed at restricting political speech, according to the George Soros-funded Secretary of State Project.  But first, a bit about that group.

SOS was formed to elect Secretaries of State around the country that will be tolerant of ACORN-style voter registration and Election Day shenanigans.  The Minnesota recount debacle – and seating of Al Franken – came courtesy of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, an SOS Project recruit.

So now the Soros-funded SOS Project is pushing Grayson’s package of bills. The interpretations of them come courtesy of SOS, not me:

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In a previous post on Big Government, I questioned why Senator Paul Kirk has not stepped down as the Senator from Massachusetts, as he should have on January 19th.  Today, the attorney for Senator-elect Scott Brown stated in a letter Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick that Brown wanted the results of the January 19 election certified by 11 a.m. Thursday, so they could be forwarded to U.S. Senate officials for immediate action.

Governor Patrick’s office also issued this statement via email today:

As the Lieutenant Governor stated earlier today, the Governor will convene the Governor’s Council at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow morning and certify the results. This will ensure that Senator-elect Brown’s request to receive the final paperwork by 11:00 a.m. tomorrow is fulfilled.

This stunning move by Brown and fulfillment by the governor’s office forces Kirk to resign his seat–presenting problems for the Democrats as they move forward with the current Senate schedule, which includes the controversial M. Patricia Smith nomination.

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We’re accustomed to strange political phenomena rising out of Minnesota.

We can accept the occasional Jesse Ventura or Al Franken winning statewide office, because the state’s voters obviously like to be different.

But we doubt even the most offbeat citizens of that state would approve of the new K-12 teacher education program that’s been proposed for the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.

While the rest of the nation is trying to force teachers to help our children reach their potential, the university’s College of Education and Human Development wants to make sure future teachers are more anti-American, so they can share that philosophy with their future students.

We couldn’t even begin to make something like this up.

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