Alright, two quick things first:

Point One: James Bunning is a 7-time All-Star, Hall of Fame pitcher who retired with a 3.27 ERA (albeit in the National League). He kicks ass.

Point Two: He’s not handled his interactions with the press very well. Perfect example is his confrontation with ABC’s Jonathan Karl we’ve all seen a million times by now. Okay, Karl was asking a very stupid question that Bunning had answered a million times already (see more below) and was just goading him for dramatic effect. But Bunning, someone who’s been in Washington since 1987, should be better at such things.

Okay, now on with the post:

THANK GOD FOR JIM BUNNING
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Andy McCarthy, over at The Corner on NRO sheds light on disturbing language snuck into an intellgence bill last night. Please read the whole thing, it will chill you. Here are a few snippits from his post:

The proposal says the conduct reached by the statute “includes but is not limited to” the itemized conduct. (My italics.) That means any interrogation tactic that a prosecutor subjectively believes is “degrading” (e.g., subjecting a Muslim detainee to interrogation by a female CIA officer) could be the basis for indicting a CIA interrogator.

Waterboarding is not all. The Democrats’ bill would prohibit — with a penalty of 15 years’ imprisonment — the following tactics, among others:

- “Exploiting the phobias of the individual”
- Stress positions and the threatened use of force to maintain stress positions
- “Depriving the individual of necessary food, water, sleep, or medical care”
- Forced nudity
- Using military working dogs (i.e., any use of them — not having them attack or menace the individual; just the mere presence of the dog if it might unnerve the detainee and, of course, “exploit his phobias”)
- Coercing the individual to blaspheme or violate his religious beliefs (I wonder if Democrats understand the breadth of seemingly innocuous matters that jihadists take to be violations of their religious beliefs)
- Exposure to “excessive” cold, heat or “cramped confinement” (excessive and cramped are not defined)
- “Prolonged isolation”
- “Placing hoods or sacks over the head of the individual”

Naturally, all of these tactics are interspersed with such acts as forcing the performance of sexual acts, beatings, electric shock, burns, inducing hypothermia or heat injury — as if all these acts were functionally equivalent.

Andy sums up with something we have known pretty much all along:

Here is the fact: Democrats are saying they would prefer to see tens of thousands of Americans die than to see a KSM subjected to sleep-deprivation or to have his “phobias exploited.” I doubt that this reflects the values of most Americans.

As I said, please read the whole thing. Then call your Congressman.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

UPDATE: Good news… The bill has been pulled.

Just over a year ago, California’s junior Senator praised herself and her Democratic colleagues in the Senate for passing the “stimulus,” “In the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the Congress has acted today to save or create jobs in California and across the nation.” Her office noted that, “The White House predicts that the legislation will save or create approximately 400,000 jobs in California.”

Well, today, no one really believes her or the White House.  According to Jim Hoft:

Just 6% of Americans believe the $787 “stimulus” boondoggle created any jobs according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll.

Over at the Washington Examiner, they expose the Administration’s doctoring the data on job creation:

Thousands of jobs were claimed to have been saved or created in phantom congressional districts and ZIP codes. Thousands of raises given to public employees were counted as jobs saved or created. The Examiner’s David Freddoso and Mark Hemingway examined media investigations and found nearly 100,000 phony positions. In other words, the claim that 2 million jobs were saved or created by the Obama economic stimulus program was exposed as being about as trustworthy as the used car salesman’s assurance that the clunker on his lot was owned by a little old lady who only drove it to church on Sunday.

No wonder Americans are so dubious about the success of the Administration’s signature “stimulus.”

Wonder if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will ever take responsibility for her own mistakes.  The “so-called stimulus” isn’t creating the jobs she and her fellow Democrats promised so she vows to spend even more of our money on similar government schemes.

It’s like hiring a guy to do magic incantations to cure your recurrent headaches, then when his supposedly healing words don’t work and the headaches return with even greater force, tossing the Tylenol and renewing his contract.

Now, with the Democrats having been in charge for ten full months (and then some), after having promised us that should Congress pass that aforementioned “stimulus,” unemployment would peak at 8%, Mrs. Pelosi, wait for it, blames her party’s all-purpose bad a guy, a Mr. George W. Bush:

Though jobs numbers released this morning were better than expected, Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want anyone to forget that the economic crisis started under the Bush administration.

The Department of Labor estimated today that just 11,000 jobs were lost in November. . . . Pelosi took the opportunity to take a few shots at the last administration.

(H/t Gateway Pundit.)  Hey, Nancy, you know when that recession began, you’d been Speaker for nearly a full year.

Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress.  Wonder then how your party’s victories impacted the economy.  And what you and your fellow partisans were doing to forestall an economic decline.

So, here’s a story about an extramarital liaison which should have legs.  It has more relevance to our public discourse than any tale of a golf player’s indiscretions.  And reveals more about corruption in our nation’s capital than the irresponsible actions of a junior Senator who carried on with a staffer.

Here we’ve got a committee chairman, playing a key role in drafting health care legislation, not merely carrying on with a staffer, but doing so while nominating her for a position of power and authority:

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus’ office confirmed late Friday night that the Montana Democrat was carrying on an extramarital affair with his state office director, Melodee Hanes, when he nominated her to be U.S. attorney in Montana. According to a source familiar with their relationship, Hanes and Baucus began their relationship in the summer of 2008 – nearly a year before Baucus and his wife, Wanda, formally separated in April. The Senator has since divorced his wife.

Glenn Reynolds, whose post alerted me to the story quips, “At least the former Mrs. Baucus didn’t attack him with a golf club.“

For some reason, I don’t think the MSM will give this story the same coverage they gave to that featuring another Western Senator, but from the other side of the aisle.

Let’s see, 69 (of 258) House Democrats “have expressed opposition to the Speaker’s health care bill.”  The party’s leadership may delay the vote slated for tomorrow on the bill as they struggle to find enough votes to pass it.  No wonder they’re doing what they always do when they’re in a jam:  blame Republicans.

Yeah, but if Republicans are so divided, um, how come they’re unified in opposing this big-government boondoggle?

As a further sign of discontent on the right, er, left, let’s not forget that

left-wing activist group MoveOn.org began sending out emails seeking contributions to fund primary challenges against any Democratic senator who does not fully support “health care reform with a public option.” Now there’s an update: MoveOn executive director Justin Ruben says the group has raised $3,578,117 for the project and is thinking of new ways to punish errant Democratic lawmakers.

They need to find a way to get those moderates to toe the Pelosi party line.  Wonder if CNN plans to run any articles on the divided Democrats.  ’Cause when it comes to partisan unrest, that’s the real story this week.

Shortly after Bob Dornan lost his Orange County congressional seat by fewer than 1,000 votes (many of which turned out to be cast illegally), I was talking with a Republican political consultant who said that a number of his associates (in the political consultancy world) had warned the right-wing firebrand that he was in danger of losing to his Democratic opponent because he was neglecting the district.

But, the man who began the year by launching a quixotic quest for the White House, preferred to address his conservative fans across the country than to tend to his constituents in Southern California.  He saw himself first and foremost as the leader  of a conservative movement and not a representative of California’s 46th House District.  And that’s why he no longer represents a district that narrowly went for George H.W. Bush in 1992 and overwhelmingly rejected Barbara Boxer the same year.

With that history in mind, we can perhaps better see another reason Doug Hoffman narrowly lost a congressional seat earlier this week in a district that while historically Republican, went for Barack Obama last fall.

Jim Geraghty echoed a point made by a number of bloggers when he wondered yesterday if anyone asked upstate New Yorkers if they wanted their race nationalized?

Well, perhaps Hoffman’s botching of an interview with the Watertown Daily Times editorial board should have been a red flag.

We junkies of national politics overlook local issues way too easily.

No one ever really asked the voters of this district whether they wanted their House race to be a national fight. I’m slated to appear on Fred Thompson’s radio program today, and I’m a fan of him, and Sarah Palin, and all of the other big-name conservatives who jumped in to beat the drum for Hoffman. But maybe the locals wanted more than criticism of Obama and Pelosi and spending. Maybe the fact that he lived on the other side of the district line rankled with them.

Writing in a similar vein, Ann Althouse studied pictures of the two leading contenders in the race and observed

Owens, by contrast [to Hoffman], is big and rugged-looking. He’s an Air Force veteran and he has that military solidity, calm and self-possession. (more…)

Back in 2006, Democrats were able to recapture the congressional majorities they had lost in 1994 by putting themselves forward as the “not-Republicans.”  In 2008, they built on those majorities and their presidential nominee captured 53% of the popular vote, the highest percentage a non-incumbent Democrat had received in over three-quarters of a century by campaigning against an unpopular Republican incumbent and offering vague promises of “hope” and “change.”

Yet, this year, as Chris Christie’s campaign in New Jersey shows, while people are beginning to sour on the Democrats, particularly the incumbent Democratic Governor he seeks to replace, many are still not ready to pull the lever for the Republican.

In 2009 (and possibly 2010), it may not be enough to simply be the “not-Democratic” party (as it was in ‘06 and ‘08 to be the “not-Republican” party).  Perhaps, the GOP’s difficulty stems from the freshness of people’s memories of the last time the Republicans controlled all the levers of political power in our nation’s capital.  From 2003-2007, successive Republican congresses did little to control domestic spending, even with a Republican in the White House.

But, in ‘06 and ‘08, memories of the last Democratic Congress has long since faded (save for political junkies).   Few could remember what had sparked the 1994 Republican rout.

Perhaps many who did believed the Democrats had since learned their lesson and had changed their wayward (read:  spendthrift) ways.  On the campaign trail, they, particularly their party’s 2008 presidential nominee, certainly sounded like it.

Now that people can see that Democrats have returned to their free-spending ways, Republicans need show that we’ve learned from out recent setbacks.  Perhaps a GOP leaders need acknowledge that they lost their majorities, in large measure, because legislators failed to rein in federal domestic spending.

In that acknowledgement, they could remind Americans of the words of the document which, back in 1994, helped Republicans regain congressional majorities for the first time in forty years, the Contract with America: (more…)

In a previous post, I linked Mickey Kaus’s observation, “If an ‘astroturfing’ campaign gets real people to show up at events stating their real views, isn’t it … community organizing?“  Now that conservatives are organizing communities of concerned citizens in much the same manner Barack Obama did when once a recent transplant to the Windy City, well, the Democrats (and their allies in the MSM) just can’t fathom the notion of their ideological adversaries expressing their grievances in much as they have done for the better part of the last eight years.

“The activist Left,” as Michlle Malkin puts it, “can’t stand competition.“  It’s as if one may only legitimately agitate against Republicans, “corporate interests,” the military, Western nations and the allies and defenders of said groups.  And the object of their protest must be the end to a robust US defense policy and an increase in the size and scope of government at all levels, with appropriate tax increases on productive individuals coupled with a concomitant redistribution of wealth to favored classes and ideologies.

When the President “summons his army” to fight for his proposed health care reform, this is a legitimate, “grassroots” expression of popular will, but when citizens (some working with conservative groups) send out e-mails to their fellows urging them to rally in public against that health care reform, that is astroturf, ginned up by corporate special interests.

The man, who tells us he’s trying to “break pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame,” constantly blaming his predecessor (and that predecessor’s political party) for the wrongs he must clean up.  (Indeed, in the same speech that he contends, “All we do is just then bicker and point fingers,” he points fingers.)  The man who claims he seeks a bipartisan approach to policy-making, listening to all sides, tells the other side to shut up.

But, that’s contradictory statements show Obama only warming up his Orwellian approach. It’s when he tries to say his policies have prevented an even higher deficit that he uses words to mean their exact opposite, attempting to change reality with his rhetoric: (more…)

Imagine how the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media would have reacted if Republicans had succeeded in blocking the “stimulus” and the economy remained in the doldrums.  If the Republicans blamed the majority party for inaction, they would accuse us of hypocrisy while lecturing us on the evils of Republican obstructionism.

Although the “stimulus” passed, it has not worked as advertised, job losses continue to mount to levels far higher than those the Administration had forecast.  While the economic picture remains bleak, at least we can take some satisfaction in being proven right.

But, despite his best efforts (with the media covering for him), the unhappy Barney Frank cannot say the same thing about Republican efforts reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  You see, slthough then-President Bush repeatedly called for reform of the two government-sponsored mortgage giants, Democrats succeeded blocking Republican reforms.

And now with a report fingering Frank and others who thwarted such reforms, the mean-spirited man from Massachusetts continues to dodge responsibility and do what he always does when criticized, blame Republicans:

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who comes under some criticism in the GOP report, has said more foreclosures were caused by unregulated entities rather than Fannie and Freddie. He has also noted that Republicans were in control of Congress from 1995 to 2007, when the housing bubble was created.

Yup, the unhappy man is right.  Republicans were in control, but he did everything in his power to prevent them from using that control to pass legislation he didn’t like.  His obstructionism served a double purpose (1) preventiing Republicans from implementing policies Barney didn’t like and (2) blaming Republicans for their failure if things went south.

Barney just didn’t want to risk having Republican policies succeed.

I’m sure Barney would be singing a different tune if Republicans had blocked the “stimulus.”

Can this man ever admit his mistakes? When a student asks the unhappy Massachusetts Congressman, “How much responsibility, if any, do you have for the financial crisis?” the Democrat proceeds to blame Republicans, labeling the student, lashing out at the “right wing,” but sidestepping his question.

Sees Barney would rather blame the right wing than explain his own actions. To his credit, Frank did acknowledge the Fannie Mae reforms he helped pass in March 2007, but doesn’t address his efforts to thwart earlier Republican-sponsored reforms of the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) when it might have made a difference.

Kudos to this student for calmly challenging the mean-spirited Democrat. I guess he had expected more fawning from the Harvard crowd.

(H/t Reader Peter Hughes for alerting me to this Townhall post.)

UPDATE: Michelle: “His defensive bullying and sputtering and ranting about ‘right-wing attacks’ speaks for itself.“

UP-UPDATE: Calling this a “meltdown,” Glenn thinks Barney sounds “kinda defensive.“

To note (yet again)–Barney’s first impulse is to attack the student asking the question rather than consider his inquiry. And note which one does a better job of keeping his cool. So much in this clip, wish I weren’t so pressed for time today.

It seems to be the standard Democratic practice now to blame the economic crisis on George W. Bush as if Democrats’ hands were perfectly clean and they had done everything possible to prevent this from happening.  Last month, the President said he “inherited” the budget deficit at the same time he was making plans to leave his successor an even bigger deficit.

Now, his fellow Democrat Harry Reid has called the recent Senate passage of the president’s budget is “a critical step” in the direction of cleaning “up the mess we inherited.”  Well, it’s a mess Harry Reid inherited from himself given that he began his tenure as Senate Majority Leader well over two years ago.

Wonder what he did it that time to forestall the current crisis.  He held a leadership position in one of the three branches of the federal government, the branch with the power over the federal purse strings.  He was in a position to prevent this from happening.

In short, even before he took the reins in the Senate, Mr. Reid had the power to take action to avert this crisis.  Instead of using his position to effect reform, he used it to block it.

Indeed, in the two years prior to taking charge in the Senate, as the leader of the opposition, he did everything in his power to obstruct Republican reforms.  He didn’t want them to see any succees. He did nothing to discourage his Democratic colleagues, notably Connecticut’s Chris Dodd, from thwarting legislation then-President Bush and Republicans proposed to reform the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

He inherited a mess that he helped create.  This mess is as much his as it is the former President’s and the budget he and his Senate Democrats just approved will only serve to aggravate matters.

A MISMANAGED, BANKRUPT ENTITY PAYING OUT BIG BONUSES WITH TAXPAYER DOLLARS:

Capitol Hill bonuses in 2008 were among the highest in years, according to LegiStorm, an organization that tracks payroll data. The average House aide earned 17% more in the fourth quarter of the year, when the bonuses were paid, than in previous quarters, according to the data. That was the highest jump in the eight years LegiStorm has compiled payroll information.

Emphasis added.

In his press conference last night, the president said he “inherited” a $1.3 trillion annual deficit.  Guess this former constitutional law scholar has lost sight of the document which ostensibly served as the center of his legal studies.

According to that august document, Article 1, Section 8, “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”  For the last two years of George W. Bush’s Administration when the deficit spiked, Democrats, the incumbent president’s party, controlled Congress.  Obama, as a Senator from the great state of Illinois, was part of that majority.  This fact has led one blogger to ask,

What did Obama do to reduce the deficits as the Senator from Illinois? What legislation did he author? What opposition did he provide to the high-spending policies of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in 2007 and 2008?

Unless President Obama can provide evidence of such opposition, he shares responsibility for the deficits he claims to have inherited.

As we read yet again of Barney Frank’s grandstanding over executive salaries while remaining silent over his own cozy relationship with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I recall Mr. Frank has an ethics problem which Congress has yet to investigate.

As you may recall, while the Massachusetts Democrat served on the House Banking Committee in the 1990s (now the House Financial Services Committee which he chairs), he was living with Herb Moses, then an executive at Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) regulated by his committee.  Since a heterosexual Congressman would have stepped down from a committee if it regulated the industry where his wife worked, a gay Congressman should step down in similar circumstances.

Frank led Democratic efforts to thwart reforms of Fannie and its sister GSE, Freddie Mac.

So, learning of Frank’s outrage over AIG, I decided to do something I had intended to do when the Democrat’s conflict of interest came to light, write to my Congressman, Henry Waxman, asking to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee.

I just mailed (and e-mailed) the letter and encourage you to contact your federal representatives and ask them to do the same.  I include a copy of my letter below the “jump.”

To ignore this matter, would, as I have written previously, be tantamount to downgrading gay relationships.

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BARNEY FRANK COMES OUT AGAINST “rewarding incompetence.”

As I pondered Barney Frank’s accusation that John McCain was appealing to anti-gay prejudice when he brought up the Masachusetts Democrat’s recent proposals to raise taxes and slash defense spending, I was struck at how quick he was to smear Republicans.

Instead of taking issue with McCain’s arguments, perhaps defending the merits of his proposed tax increases or showing how a drastic cut in national defense wouldn’t impact national security, he immediately jumped to the conclusion that a Republican would only bring him up to play into anti-gay sentiments.

Does he believe his statements are not worthy of criticism?  Is he incapable of recognizing that conservatives might object to his ideas?  Why does he assume that a Republican who criticizes him does so because of prejudice?

I mean, he equates McCain’s criticism of him with “past Republican efforts to raise voter concerns about the prospect of congressmen Charles Rangel and John Conyers, who are black, becoming committee chairs.“  Um, Barney, both men come from the extreme left of your party, with the latter having “a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war” (before he chaired the House Judiciary Committee) with a host of left-wing conspiracy theorists.

It seems Barney harbors similar conspiracy theories about Republicans, given the assumptions he makes about us.  Call it his partisan prejudice.  It’s a sad day for America when a politician so prominent and so smart harbors such prejudices about the opposing party.  He ignores our ideas and assumes our animus.

Let’s see Barney Frank refuses to take any responsibility for the mortgage mess.  He accuses Republicans of racism when they fault government programs for causing the crisis.

Now, he’s getting all bent out of shape because John McCain, on the campaign trail, is making an issue of the Massachusetts Democrat’s proposals to raise taxes, increase domestic spending and gut the defense budget.  Ol’ Barney says it’s because he’s gay, calling McCain’s attack on his actual statements, “an appeal to prejudice.”

Sorry, Barney it’s not because you’re gay, it’s because you’re a liberal who’s been clearer than any of your colleagues on what would happen should the Democrats win the White House and increase their congressional majorities next week.

I thought that Barney was really smart. Yet, he doesn’t seem to understand where Republicans have been coming from since his first election to Congress in 1980.  All he can do is accuse us of the most nefarious of motives.  Doesn’t sound like a very smart man to me, sounds like a very narrow and intolerant one.

As Allahpundit puts it, Barney “never met a bad-faith accusation he didn’t like.“

Grow up, Barney, quit your belly-aching, admit your mistakes, resign from the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee and become a role model of responsiblity for gay people.  Because right now you’re an embarrassment to all of us.

In 1948, President Harry S Truman reversed his political fortunes and avoided what then-seemed a long certain defeat by running not just against his Republican opponent, Tom Dewey, but also against the first Republican Congress elected since the New Deal.

Tagging the 80th Congress a “do-nothing” legislature (as he did throughout the campaign), Truman told voters in Charleston, West Virginia on October 1 of that year:

The Republicans would like you to forget these fundamental differences between the two parties. But during the past 2 years we have been given a sharp warning that these differences still exist, and these differences are wide and deep.

. . . .

I know, of course, that there are many fine people throughout the United States, who from habit or choice are members of the Republican Party. To them I say that the national leadership of their party has failed them miserably.

With the current Democratic Congress’s approval as historic lows (making George W. Bush seem downright popular by comparison), it would seem John McCain would do well to run a similar campaign against the do-nothing 110th as a reminder of a stark difference between the parties.

It seems the only thing the Democratic Congress has been able to do has to be to increase federal spending at levels even greater than those of the preceding spendthrift Republican Congresses. Having scored his congressional colleagues in the past for spending money “like a drunken sailor,” John McCain should have found a profligate Democratic Congress a natural target.

But, maybe, the presidential election has prevented the incompetence of this Congress from exciting as much interest as it should. No sooner did Democrats take over in 2007 than the 2008 race for the White House began. And that seems to have turned media attention away from the Capitol and to the hustings.

The unending presidential campaign may well have prevented a campaign against Congress from really resonating.

Two years ago at this time, you could not open up a newspaper or turn on a TV newscast without learning about the follies of then-recently disgraced (& then-recently) former Congressman Mark Foley. That Florida Republican had been sending sexually explicit Instant Messages to male House pages.

Now, we learn that Tim Mahoney, the Democrat who won Foley’s seat in Congress, paid “a $121,000 payment to a former mistress who worked on his staff and was threatening to sue him.” The affair begin “in 2006 when Mahoney was campaigning for Congress against Foley, promising ‘a world that is safer, more moral.’“

So, why is it that we don’t get wall-to-wall news coverage of the Mahoney scandal?  The Democratic House leadership knew about it before the story broke this week.  And here, there is hush money, something absent from the Foley scandal.

Is it the gay angle that made the Foley story so sensational?  Or did MSM merely use the story to advance their narrative about the hypocrisy of gay Republicans?  Or was it that pesky little (R) after Foley’s name, but not Mahoney’s?

Methink the explanation is that last one, given how little attention the MSM has paid to various Democratic scandals this year, including that of another Florida Democrat, Robert Wexler and of New York Democrat Charles Rangel. Not to mention the fundraising shenaningans of the Obama campaign.

Why is it that the MSM only get into high dudgeon when the scandal involves Republicans?

I guess it’s up to us bloggers, like Gateway Pundit who’s been all over this story, to go where the MSM refuses to tread.

UPDATE: Jennifer Rubin builds on this theme (below the “jump”): (more…)