I know it’s MSNBC and everything, but I still had difficulty believing I actually witnessed this clip on Breitbart TV of a silly little man saying the Constitution is irrelevant and confusing because it’s, like, more than 100 years old.

That does seem to be the sort of thing only the very young might say. So long as they are also rather foolish.

So I did a quick search for ‘Ezra Klein graduated with degree in’, hoping against delicious hope he was some sort of classics major. Or something indicating this young feller had possibly been required to read other really, you know, old stuff like maybe the Gettysburg Address or the Bible or…oh, dear, did he just say what I think he said about the Koran? Maybe Burke (I kid). Marbury v. Madison. Or Robinson Crusoe (‘Friday’? What the hell kind of name is that? Oh. 1719. Nooo wuuunder.)

But his degree was in political science. So class assignments probably didn’t range far beyond reading the writings of 26 year-olds at the Washington Post, which he wanted to grow up to become when he was 26. And did!

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I don’t really have a particular dog in the fight for RNC Chair. After twenty years in politics, I think well-run individual campaigns are more important to victory than the machinations of a national party organization. The RNC should mostly just raise lots of money, get out the vote and then…get out of the way. Its really kind of a political Hippocratic oath; first, do no harm…to the party’s brand or its candidates.

Still, I’ve been fascinated by Dan Riehl’s coverage of the race and, specifically, the problems swirling around the frontrunner (!?), Reince Priebus. Priebus is GOP Chair in Wisconsin and, along with about three dozen other state chairs, had a pretty good election cycle this November. (Of course, also along with three dozen other state chairs, he had a pretty disastrous cycle in 2008.) Until very recently, he was also on staff at the RNC, serving as General Counsel after steering Michael Steele into the Chairmanship.

On the side, it seems, he also used his legal skills and government and political contacts to secure federal stimulus money for clients. Redstate thinks there is nothing unusual in this, just another lawyer-helping-his-clients situation. Although, as Dan Riehl points out today, his work went quite a bit further than simply advising clients on the stimulus’ impact. And keep in mind, Priebus was the state GOP Chair at this exact time. At the very least, that obvious conflict sets up some pretty funny juxtapositions.

On March 5, 2009, Priebus co-authored a client alert heralding the awarding of $500 million to Wisconsin and noted:

The $529 million in stimulus funds allocated for Wisconsin state and local transportation projects is likely to result in increased opportunities for Wisconsin road, bridge and other transportation contractors, subcontractors and suppliers.

Of course, a little less than a year later he told this to the Stevens Point Journal:

“The stimulus, the jobs bill, all of them — they all create a very small amount of government jobs, but they cost us our future,” Priebus said. “We get very little in return for the massive amount of money that we’re putting toward these government programs.”

I doubt the media would ever do anything with those two quotes. Doubtless, they will also overlook this quote from a pitch also co-authored by Priebus:

If you are interested in learning about other provisions included in The Act, the Michael Best Stimulus and Economic Recovery Team is prepared to assist you in understanding the implications and in developing and implementing a strategy to secure the benefits of this unprecedented legislation. Specifically, we will assist you to identify opportunities, prepare appropriate proposals and make targeted contacts to secure funds.

Well, isn’t that precious.

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On Dylan Ratigan’s show, liberal cartoonist Ted Rall, author of the “Anti-American Manifesto”, suggests violence may be the only way to save America.

Ratigan himself asks “Are things in our country so bad, that it may be time for a revolution? The answer obviously is ‘yes’ ,the only question is ‘how to do it?”

Verum Serum has posted an excerpt from the Ted Rall book ‘The Anti-American Mainfesto” in which he calls for a violent socialist movement from within, here’s a little bit:

We are here because the U.S. is going to end soon. There’s going to be an intense, violent, probably haphazard struggle for control. It’s going to come down to us versus them. The question is: What are you going to do about it?…

Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-theworlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with “mainstream” gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the “Godless,” “secular” United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party.

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Barely one week before election day, it’s time to review what I like to call the “year of foolishness” lived out loud by U.S. Rep. Phil Hare, a liberal Democrat running for reelection in Illinois’ 17th Congressional District.

On Dec. 16, 2009, Hare told Chris Matthews’ MSNBC audience he would welcome terrorists from Guantanamo Bay to Thomson, Ill., essentially placing “economic stimulus” for a small Illinois town above proven national security benefits of the secure facility in Cuba.

Almost four months later, he uttered words that would elevate his nationwide visibility for all the wrong reasons: “I don’t worry about the Constitution to be honest.”

On June 3, Hare was told by real veterans that he needed to stop calling himself a veteran and, a day later, news of his threats against a veteran made the news.

Two months later, Hare was passed over for “promotion” when a Sgt. John F. Baker Jr. endorsed his opponent, Bobby Schilling. In response, one of his supporters devalued the Medal of Honor recipient in a letter to the editor of a district newspaper.

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From The Hill:

Likely voters in battleground districts see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than they do over the GOP.

This result comes from The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll, which found that 44 percent of likely voters say the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements, whereas 37 percent say it’s the Republican Party that is more dominated by extremists.

The revelations in a survey of 10 toss-up congressional districts across the country point to problems for Democrats, who are trying to motivate a disillusioned base and appeal to independents moving to the GOP ahead of the Nov. 2 election.

The polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland conducted the survey, contacting 4,047 likely voters by phone between Oct. 2 and Oct. 7. The margin of error for this sample is 1.5 percent.

More than one in every five Democrats (22 percent) in The Hill’s survey said their party was more dominated than the GOP by extreme views. The equivalent figure among Republicans is 11 percent.

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Senator Barack Obama campaigned for President against the “politics of personal destruction” and a future President who could “bring Democrats and Republicans together.”  As President, Obama has denounced opponents of the Administration and brought partisanship to a new level.  The latest attacks from the President and his allies bring to mind enemies lists of the past.

As a Senator running for President, Barack Obama sounded like a politician who would not use Chicago machine-style politics to demonize opponents and crush dissent.  On December 15, 2007 in Waterloo, Iowa, Senator Obama said the following (as quoted by MSNBC) in response to charges of past drug use and lack of experience coming from Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign:

There’s a history of politics being all about slash and burn and taking folks down and what I recall the Clintons themselves calling the politics of personal destruction, which they decried. And my suspicion is that that’s just not where the country is at. They are not interested in politics as a blood sport.

Evidently, Senator Obama did not like being the recipient of criticism, yet was perfectly comfortable using it himself to trash opponents later in his campaign and as President.  (more…)

When President Obama was inaugurated in 2009, lefty hearts were a-flutter over thoughts of a permanent progressive majority. A Great New Deal Society was dawning and the Republican party would be relegated to an inconsequential minority status forever. My, what a difference two years make.

The above ad, for DEMOCRAT candidate Joe Manchin tells you everything you need to know about today’s political climate. If you were an expat returning to the US after an extended absence, you would probably wager a tidy sum that Manchin were a GOP candidate. Heck, you’d probably wager that he was one of those crazy “Tea Party” candidates that the media keeps insisting is going to destroy the GOP. (The media’s concern for the health of the GOP is touching, even if it is more than a tad disingenuous.)

The Manchin ad crams more conservative touchstones into thirty seconds than a day-long seminar at the Heritage Foundation. Stunning.

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***UPDATE:  “Hardball” Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed

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Today, on MSNBC’s Hardball, Chris Matthews acknowledged (and appears to be the first member of the mainstream media to acknowledge) that the video Andrew Breitbart posted in his July 19th Big Government article about an NAACP audience’s reaction to a particular moment in Shirley Sherrod’s speech, does in fact include Ms. Sherrod discussing her redemptive revelation (transcript from Newsbusters):

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, there you go. [Quoting Ms. Sherrod] “I opened my eyes. I realized it wasn’t about black and white. It was, but it was about other things, about poverty.” So … that part, that part in there about redemptive revelation was actually in the initial tape.

This then prompts Mr. Matthews to ask his guests, Governor Howard Dean and Joan Walsh, a question that answers itself:

Yeah, but why do you think if this was a complete slime job, why do you think Breitbart kept that in there, Governor? Why did he keep in that part – let me let the Governor in here. Why did he put the redemptive part in here at all?

Dean admits he has never even viewed that 2:36 video in its entirety! Nor has he even read Andrew Breitbart’s original article, which states:

Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer.

Of course that has not stopped Dean from appearing on multiple networks and ripping Fox News as being racist for having played the video of Shirley Sherrod released on BigGovernment.com (yes, the same 2:36 video he has not watched all — any? — of). (more…)

NAACP President Ben Jealous just tried to weasel his way out of the unpopular, controversial, and obviously political resolution passed at the organization’s convention this week. The former civil rights group attacked and smeared the tea party patriots at their convention in Kansas City.

The Politico reported, via Free Republic:

NAACP President Ben Jealous said Thursday that the resolution passed by the group on Wednesday does not call the tea party “racist.”

The resolution the NAACP approved Wednesday at its annual conference in Kansas City alleges that the tea party has used racial epithets against President Barack Obama and has verbally and physically abused African-American members of Congress.

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The BP oil rig explosion will be President Obama’s ‘Katrina’ — in fact, it will potentially be much worse in terms of long term effect. While President Bush took a matter of a few days to mobilize federal assistance to flooded New Orleans, Obama has demonstrated near-complete incompetence and inaction over a month and counting. Still, there is no leadership or clear-cut solution to answer one of the worst environmental disasters in modern time. Eleven people are dead, fisheries and scores of fragile ecosystems dying day-by-day. President Obama finds himself deservedly being attacked from the left and the right.

Environmental activist Robert Redford is demanding action from the administration. When Barack Obama starts losing the Robert Redfords of the world — something is terribly wrong. Redford has even taken to the airwaves with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a liberal special interest group, to call the President out on the lackluster response to the spill and feet-dragging on energy legislation. Robert Redford has every right to be angry, along with boaters, fishermen, Governors, Mayors and the millions who live, vacation and work on the Gulf. I suspect there will be more than a few NRA members who will dearly miss duck hunting along Lousiana’s once-pristine marshlands.

The White House answer to the disaster in the Gulf: ‘let BP handle it.’ Put the oil company in charge of the epic disaster they created. Every day, the tendrils of the slick reach further into currents that will carry the sludge to new shores, killing everything in its path. To disperse the oil, BP is dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals into the Gulf — to the alarm of the EPA. Increasingly, independent scientific estimates place the amount of oil at 14 times the amount stated by BP. So, what is President Obama’s position on all this? He doesn’t have one. What is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) official assessment of the magnitude of this mess? There isn’t one. And that’s the problem.

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By now, readers of BigGovernment.com know that that the Democrats “Wall Street Bank” bill, which may get a final vote as early as this week, will reach far beyond Wall Street and ensnare businesses not typically thought of as “banks.” Stories here by this author and others have laid bare provisions of the Obama-Dodd-Frank-Everything’s-A-Bank bill that broadly define a “financial company” as any business “substantially engaged” or “significantly engaged”  in financial activities. And if your business happens to fall in such a category, it could be subject to a bailout “assessment” tax to bail out a high rolling financial firm, intrusive regulation by a banking agency or the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, or even outright nationalization if the troika of the Federal Reserve, Treasury Secretary, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation decide your firm is a threat to “financial stability.”

Trouble is, though its audience is growing by leaps and bounds every day, this site is still at the point in which not every American relies on it for essential political info. And because Republicans have done a mediocre job of explaining how far this bill would reach, and the establishment media largely has no interest in explaining these facts, supporters of Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd’s “Restoring American Financial Stability Act” have been able to get away with saying, “If you’re against this bill, you’re against reform of Wall Street.”

Or at least, that was the case until a couple days ago. That’s when Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) introduced an amendment with a straightforward message: A bill that claims to be about fostering transparency on Wall Street should itself be transparent in its objective and not sneak regulation on Main Street manufacturers and retailers.  Call it (and I just did) the Not-Everything’s-A-Bank Amendment.

Vitter has distinguished himself with his dedicated efforts in fighting for real financial reform.  He co-sponsored with self-proclaimed (but not necessarily sole) Senate socialist Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)a bipartisan amendment similar to the measure in the House bill to have the Government Accountability Office audit the Federal Reserve. When Sanders and others went for the Obama administration”compromise” of a one-time audit of a limited part of the Fed’s operation, Vitter carried the flag of Fed transparency.

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One pen stroke from Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has given her state a no-nonsense immigration policy and given America yet another opportunity to see the full face of leftist hypocrisy.

First some key points of the policy-

As shown in the picture above (featuring MSNBC’s poster child of intelligence, Contessa Brewer) this bill essentially says illegal means illegal.  If you are in the state of Arizona illegally you are guilty of trespassing (page 2 line 44), and if you are caught trespassing you will be transferred immediately to the custody of the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).  I will address the profiling allegations later.

This bill has teeth, and it puts the screws to employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants (page 6 line 7).  The burden of proof of work eligibility is now on the employer since this bill officially makes it illegal for an undocumented alien to “apply for work, solicit work in a public place, or perform work as an employee or independent contractor in this state.”

Complaints can now be filed with the Attorney General of Arizona or with a county attorney when a business is suspected of employing illegal aliens.  After an investigation, if a business is found to be employing illegal workers charges are brought upon the business, and expedited court status is given to the case.

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Written and Directed by David Nussbaum

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What is the most important issue facing the American people today? Until late last Fall, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Henry Waxman, the presidents of our major universities, and the editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, The New Yorker, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, WNBC, and the like –  not to mention the scientific establishment in the United States – were as one in telling us that global warming was a profound threat to our well-being and that of the rest of mankind. And John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and sadly, in the end, a hapless George W. Bush were willing to lend the hysterics a measure of aid and comfort.

In the United States Senate, the indomitable James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma was very nearly alone in standing up to denounce the whole enterprise as a hoax, and in turn he was himself denounced by all right-thinking people as a scoundrel and a fool. There were, of course, scientists proficient in meteorology who entertained grave doubts, and some of them made a great fuss, but they were soon denied federal funding for further research, and young entrants into the profession quickly learned that if they wished to have successful careers it was incumbent on them to join the chorus who denounced global-warming skeptics as lackeys of the fossil fuels industry. The global-warming cabal was to the liberal democracies of our time what  Trofim Denisovich Lysenko and his disciples were to biology in the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin.

When he became President, Barack Obama pledged to “roll back the specter of a warming planet” and “restore science to its rightful place,” implying – graceless as always – that the administration of George W. Bush had suppressed inconvenient scientific truths in the interests of ideology. In fact, Obama seems not to have understood what he was saying, for a specter is “an apparition inspiring dread,” and it is one of the principal functions of science to dispel illusions of this very sort; and, instead of debunking “the specter of a warming planet” and restoring “science to its rightful place” thereby, he embraced that specter and sought by way of inspiring dread in the American people to railroad his compatriots into subjecting the entire economy to the supervision of the administrative state.

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I was actually at the Tea Party march against the health care bill in Washington, D.C. yesterday. I don’t attend political events on the Jewish Sabbath, so I simply decided to go and observe, lending a quiet voice of protest. I was in our nation’s capital for the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and wandered down by myself to Capitol Hill after morning services at the historic 6th & I synagogue.

I saw thousands of people–fifteen thousand, I guessed at the time–gathered on the west lawn of the Capitol building. There were American flags and lots of Gadsden flags (“Don’t Tread on Me”). I noted some of the more humorous signs (“I’m not wee-wee’d up, I’m pissed off”), as well as some of the more esoteric ones (“Restoration, not Transformation”). Almost all of them were home-made with poster-board and marker.

I did not see any comparison of Obama to Hitler, nor any sign advocating violence of any kind. I did see two signs bearing a hammer-and-sickle–which I personally find just as offensive as the swastika, though it is bizarrely trendy to some Americans. There was one sign with an image of Obama and the words “undocumented worker,” which was the only hint of Birtherism I witnessed. The rest of the signs were straightforward slogans: “Kill the Bill”; “Start Over.”

The crowd was far from uniform. There were black people, white people, Hispanic people–both in the audience and on stage. One of the speakers invoked the example of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as an inspiration–and the crowd roared its approval, as it did for mentions of Thomas Jefferson and John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. A few of the speakers invoked religious sentiments about abortion. That was as edgy as it got.

At one point, the crowd to the right of the stage started to boo loudly. It was impossible to see exactly why, from where I was standing, but soon a group of people–members of Congress, apparently–ascended the stairs to the Capitol. If media reports are to be believed, that was the moment when racist and homophobic language was hurled at Rep. John Lewis, and a protestor was arrested for spitting at Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.

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Below is the full length speech Andrew Breitbart delivered to CPAC 2010. We have also taken the liberty of breaking out some of the best soundbites from the speech.

1. Mr. Podesta, we are watching you!
2. What I learned from Kurt Cobain
3. E Pluribis Unum
4. The Frankfort School roots of multiculturalism and political correctness
5. Big Education
6. MSM – You are not on the American team!
7. CPAC cuts Breitbart short

As a member of a very successful Tea Party in Quincy, Illinois it is my distinct honor and privilege to offer my thanks and congratulations to this astroturf response to the tea parties. This hard hitting website has taken the MSNBC format to a new level. Hit us again guys, because while you spend never-ending union dollars attacking Tea Parties, we are repairing the change you said we could believe in, one candidate at a time.

This tiny group of Tea Bashers says its mission is “To prevent the Tea Party’s dangerous ideas from gaining legislative traction.” You might want to watch something other than the mainstream media. In case you haven’t heard, we have already gained legislative traction, which I’ll venture a guess that this was the reason for the emergency birth and delivery of your premature website.

We can’t think of a better way for organized labor to spend its time and money. I am so thrilled with your approach I may donate to your cause myself.

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Andrew Breitbart raised the roof at the National Tea Part Convention this morning in Nashville, Tennessee. Speaking to the dozens of reporters assembled in the back of the room, Andrew said this:
“It’s not your business model that sucks, it’s you that sucks.”

Andrew finished his speech with this warning to the media:

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No recent Supreme Court ruling have evoked more liberal fury than Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a campaign-finance case involving government censorship of a political documentary called Hillary: The Movie. The Federal Election Commission prevented the anti-Hillary Clinton film from being shown on television just before the 2008 Democratic primaries, a decision that was upheld by lower courts. Siding with The First Amendment, the Court struck down laws regulating independent political advertising by for-profit and non-profit corporations before an election even as they reaffirmed rules about disclosure and disclosures for ads and against direct corporate giving to candidates.

Critics fear that corporations will now overwhelm the political marketplace with commercials and advertisements that will program citizens to vote for whatever agenda “the corprations” want at a given moment.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann railed against the decision, calling it “a Supreme Court-sanctioned murder of what little democracy is left in this democracy” and comparing it to the notorious Dred Scott decision, which ruled that  had no rights under the Constitution. His fellow corporate media host at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, exclaimed, “If you are a regular person who has ever made a campaign donation before, forget about ever having to do that again. What’s the point?”

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