It’s actually been a matter of some amusement for us: you could tell who the lazy or just dumb reporters were from their habitual reference of this site as Redstate.org, which it hasn’t been for years.  Apparently, the Washington Post has gotten around to updating their files, bless their hearts.  A shame that Eugene Robinson didn’t then try to actually talk to a Republican before he wrote his column, although I admit that it would have been harder than sneering at the Republicans that live largely in his head.

Let’s unpack a typical paragraph:

Will loyal members inform on others for harboring suspiciously moderate views?

Err, no.

Will anyone judged guilty have to wear a sign saying “Republican In Name Only” as penance?

Err, no.

Will there be re-education camps?

Err, no.  Also: cheapening to the memory of victims in the tens of millions.

Will deviationists face the Enhanced Interrogation Technique of being forced to listen to the wit and wisdom of Glenn Beck, at ear-splitting volume, for days on end?

Err, no.

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While I felt that my response to this Washington Post article involving the investigation of seven PMA Porkers* was pretty succinct (mad giggling usually is), this follow-up article describing the document disclosure (completely accidental, of course) and some more names to watch deserves at least a bullet points list.  Also of interest to ethics investigators, apparently:

• Charles Rangel (D, NY): Junketing to Caribbean islands on private companies’ dimes (illegal).
• Alan Mollohan (D, WV): may be subject to DoJ probe over failure to disclose real estate disclosures.
• Jane Harman (D, CA): subpoenas over potential trading of favors involving Israeli lobbyists.
• Sam Graves (R, MO): Actually, they cleared him.  But the WaPo knew that they needed to not have this be completely a Democratic list.
• Maxine Waters (D, CA): Not in the document, apparently, - but the ethics panel is investigating her for potentially getting her husband’s bank in on bailout money.  The WaPo felt the need to mention this, so it’s all right if I do.
• Laura Richardson (D, CA): Likewise not in the document; likewise under investigation for failure to disclose; likewise mentioned by the WaPo.

All in all… oh, we are going to have so much fun in the spring and summer of 2010.

Moe Lane

*H/T Hot Air & Instapundit.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Like robots programed to march until they find a cliff and can march no longer, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi have been forced into the most contorted public position on any legislation — perhaps ever.

Senator Durbin (D-IL), the U.S. Senate Majority Whip said yesterday that the left forced the Democrat’s hand, and we’ll “see where we come out.” (H/T Huffington Post.) Sen. Durbin did not say: we have the votes, we will win, but he said, we’ll see — read: we do not have the votes and don’t know if we will get the votes because we have not written the bill yet, nor have we scored it.

If either the Speaker or the Senate Majority Leader had the votes, they would be voting on the bill now.

Here is what Pelosi’s public-facing contortion looks like:

a) We must have a public option;

b) we will have a public option; and,

c) the royal we, have the votes for a public option.

But the reality for Speaker Pelosi, who tried the group-peer-pressure-routine on non-compliant House members on Friday in an emergency all-Dem House caucus meeting, is actually inverted:

a) the royal we, do not have the votes for a public option; and, therefore,

b) we may not have a public option; and,

c) the left will be disappointed but the votes are not there so we will just keep our base happy and tell them we tried.

This reality is too real, too hard, too unthinkable. But the unthinkable is being thunk (ok, so it’s a fun word): the auto-insistence that “we have the votes” masks a reality too difficult to thunk — so let’s all in the Leadership not think about it and insist that the night is day. Much better, don’t you think?

For the U.S. Majority Leader Harry Reid, his contortion looks like this, as described by the invaluable-bio-intel-collection-system known as Milbank (who writes for WaPo):

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James Pethokoukis (Reuters) cites two examples of why America is well down the road of a banana republic economy. Our record debt levels and deficits, combined the fiscal fantasy land the White House and Congress work and live in are writ large in both examples.

First, the White House announces a $250 payment to every senior for inflation that didn’t exist. “In effect, a COLA was paid on inflation that no longer existed,” notes Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute.

Second, the White House in its desperate attempts to get its health reform passed, has tasked the all-too-willing Majority Leader Reid to walk the plank by convincing him to push a $247 billion portion of health reform as an off-budget item, in a separate bill, to be on the Senate floor this week before moving to the merged ObamaCare bill. Even the Washington Post editorial board said “Mr. Reid proposes not to pay for any of it, not even $11 billion, but simply to write a $247 billion IOU.”

Pethokoukis correctly notes the considerable spin associated with JPMorgan Chase economist Jim Glassman’s attempt to convince the world that the falling dollar should rightly be interpreted as a sign of “new economic optimism” because dollar flight means the world economy is getting better and the world is pulling its money out of a safe investment. Really?

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Ouch.

Another for the ‘media’s starting to get just a bit tired of the administration’s crusade against Fox News’ file. From Ruth Marcus:

Obama’s dumb war with Fox News

There’s only one thing dumber than picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel — picking a fight with people who don’t even have to buy ink. The Obama administration’s war on Fox News is dumb on multiple levels. It makes the White House look weak, unable to take Harry Truman’s advice and just deal with the heat. It makes the White House look small, dragged down to the level of Glenn Beck. It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian — Agnewesque? — aroma at worst. It is a self-defeating trifecta: it distracts attention from the Obama administration’s substantive message; it serves to help Fox, not punish it, by driving up ratings; and it deprives the White House, to the extent it refuses to provide administration officials to appear on the cable network, of access to an audience that is, in fact, broader than hard-core Obama haters.

A colleague of mine wondered privately what could be the reason for what is fairly clearly a counter-productive effort on the administration’s part - and when you’re getting this kind of push-back from what is generally conceded to be a core constituency of the Democratic party, you’re engaged in a counter-productive effort. My response was one word:

Pique.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Desperate men do desperate things, and those who have any doubt just how desperate the Dems are over passing health reform should read the Washington Post editorial that puts the lie to what the White House and Senate Majority Leader Reid are attempting to do — put $241 billion in new health reform spending off-budget.

Off-budget is Washington speak for lets-spend-the-money-but-not-count-that-we-are-spending-it. Taking ever so slight liberties with Senator Gregg´s recent comments, this is more bananization of our republic.

President Obama and Majority Leader Ried are lying to make their other lie about health reform not adding to the deficit a less visible lie.

It´s just like printing money, let´s all just pretend that we are not going to spend $241 billion to buy off the American Medical Association´s continued political cover for our politically failing health care reform plan. It´s easy, just declare its off-budget and it does not count.

When RedState starts quoting the Washington Post editorial board, the outrage committed by the White House and Majority Leader Reid must be so great, that even the WaPo editorial board cannot bear it:

IN THE WORLD according to Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), setting Medicare payment levels for doctors has nothing to do with health reform. Really.

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“I hope to God you understand this race is winnable.”
Vice President Joe Biden at yesterday’s fundraiser for VA gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds.

Having flogged the nothingburger story of the 20-year-old master’s thesis of VA Attorney General Bob McDonnell to bloody rags, the Washington Post does and abrupt volte face today and blames the lackluster campaign of Democrat candidate Creigh Deeds on flogging Bob McDonnell’s 20-year-old master’s thesis to bloody rags.

Republican Robert F. McDonnell has taken a commanding lead over R. Creigh Deeds in the race for governor of Virginia as momentum the Democrat had built with an attack on his opponent’s conservative social views has dissipated, according to a new Washington Post poll.

McDonnell leads 53 to 44 percent among likely voters, expanding on the four-point lead he held in mid-September. Deeds’s advantage with female voters has all but disappeared, and McDonnell has grown his already wide margin among independents. Deeds, a state senator from western Virginia, is widely seen by voters as running a negative campaign, a finding that might indicate that his aggressive efforts to exploit McDonnell’s 20-year-old graduate thesis are turning voters away.

Nowhere in the story does it mention that the thesis that is turning away voters in Virginia is the same thesis that generates 572 Google hits within the Washington Post and was regularly featured on the front page and editorial pages of that paper.

If the old saying “success has many fathers while failure is an orphan” is applied here, one could say that Creigh Deeds has just been stuck with paying child support for the Washington Post’s bastard.

I’m not celebrating a victory yet. Election day is still a ways off and as we’ve learned from past experience if anyone can turn a sure win into an abject defeat it is a Republican candidate. Hopefully, regardless of the outcome of this election, the takeaway is that if you use an incident manufactured by the editorial board of the Washington Post as the centerpiece of your campaign, you have no one but yourself to blame when you fail. And the Washington Post will have no but you to blame either.

The MSM would like the American public to believe that the Senate Finance Committee bill was scored by the Congressional Budget Office. After all, WaPo, the NYT and the WSJ reported:

WaPo: “The bill would cost $829 billion over the next decade.”

NYT: “The budget office analyzed the bill … its newly projected cost — $829 billion over 10 years.”

WSJ: “The latest Senate health bill will cost $829 billion over a decade.”

But it is a score of a vapor bill — a bill that has no legislative language — and so with much fanfare and pomp the CBO has delivered a Vapor Score of a Vapor Bill. CBO has stated publicly and repeatedly that it cannot accurately score any bill without the legislative language — which does not exist so CBO cannot have it.

Heritage tagged this correctly its Bait and Switch blog:

As the Politico reported yesterday: “While the media and lawmakers often shorthand a CBO letter as a “score” or “cost estimate,” today’s CBO letter is neither. Because the bill is still in “conceptual,” or layman’s terms, CBO’s letter today was a “preliminary analysis.” For it to be an official cost estimate, the bill has to be translated into legislative language.”

And here is a thought from Ryan Ellis at ATR, the reason the latest ObamaCare bill scores so low is because of all the taxes. Here is the list.

For a more wonky analysis of the Vapor Score, see the blog by Donald Marron, a former CBO economist here, and from which the quotes from the MSM above were taken.

A regular reader of mine might be forgiven for wondering why there’s any sort of surprised tone in this Washington Post article.

Democrats Are Jarred by Drop In Fundraising

Democratic political committees have seen a decline in their fundraising fortunes this year, a result of complacency among their rank-and-file donors and a de facto boycott by many of their wealthiest givers, who have been put off by the party’s harsh rhetoric about big business.

The trend is a marked reversal from recent history, in which Democrats have erased the GOP’s long-standing fundraising advantage. In the first six months of 2009, Democratic campaign committees’ receipts have dropped compared with the same period two years earlier.

After all, the people reading this post already know all of this.  The ongoing fundraising situation has been regularly reported on here, here, here, here, here (all of which also compared points in this cycle to the equivalent points in the last one), here, and here - and also here for the state of the parties’ financial status at the end of 2008.  Readers of both RedState and my own personal website have been kept apprised that Democratic fundraising has been consistently below last cycle’s expectations, and that the GOP has been overperforming (compared to largely media-driven expectations) - and that the amount of debt that the Democratic party has chosen to retain is warping its cash-on-hand numbers (which is something that the above article neglects to mention).  So why is the Washington Post apparently discovering this now?

Oh, right: because I’m not a ‘journalist.’  Just somebody who was paying attention.

Moe Lane

*Thank you, Virginia Postrel.

PS: [Rather brazen call for filthy lucre relocated to here.]

Darryl Fears & Carol Leonnig being the Washington reporters who did their level best to make their story about James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles racial:

Though O’Keefe described himself as a progressive radical, not a conservative, he said he targeted ACORN for the same reasons that the political right does: its massive voter registration drives that turn out poor African Americans and Latinos against Republicans.

“Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization,” he said. “No one was holding this organization accountable. No one in the media is putting pressure on them. We wanted to do a stunt and see what we could find.”

(Bolding mine) Well, guess who had to retract that passage by Darryl Fears & Carol Leonnig*?

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Politico is reporting that the President will back a public option in his speech before the Joint Session of Congress tonight.

This means that the President will not get his public option through the Senate, nor will he likely have the votes in the House, since by including the public option, the political price for a yes vote became very high for moderate Democrats. Add into the mix the other issues like new taxes, new spending, increasing deficits, coverage for abortion (a WaPo op-ed states abortion could derail ObamaCare), cuts to Medicare and senior’s opposition, and you have a very expensive vote for the moderates.

TIME is reporting the following:

“House leaders have pulled back from their once-aggressive schedule. “I have no timetable” for passage of a bill, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters yesterday. While eschewing the idea that they would wait for the Senate to act, they are stuck waiting at least until Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus shows his hand.”

Given the House Leadership’s and the President’s refusal to budge on the public option, it makes the cost of a yes vote too high. There are not the votes in the U.S. House to pass ObamaCare, and if this is the big, re-activated, re-energized approach that President Obama will take on health care, good luck with that.

According to Politico:

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2006; Senator George Allen is running for re-election against former Republican Jim Webb. Despite the polls everywhere showing that the GOP was going to have a very unhappy Election Night in a few weeks, Allen was comfortably ahead and already planning his next six years in Washington DC representing the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Then he (as he says), derisively referring to a video stalker working for the Webb campaign’s mohawk style haircut, uttered one fateful three-syllable word; “macaca” - which supposedly was a racial slur in Morocco or French Tunisia sometime in the 1940s and ’50s.

Whatever the case, over the next few weeks until Election Day, on the basis of “macaca” George Allen found himself having to face charges on the front pages of Virginia’s newspapers, often leveled by anonymous “sources” or supposedly “neutral” witnesses that upon deeper investigation were revealed to be highly partisan actors that he was an unrepentant white supremacist who once stuffed a severed deer’s head in a black family’s mailbox and nicknamed college football teammates after KKK Grand Wizards.

Leading the charge was the Washington Post - the editorial board and reporting staff of which put out over a 100 articles and editorials, more than a dozen on the front page, in about half as many days on “macaca” - all very obviously deliberately calculated to plant the perception in the minds of the Virginia electorate that George Allen was a racist bigot just in time for the General Election - which Allen lost to Jim Webb by less than 1%.

The Washington Post had successfully swung an election to favor its chosen candidate … and three years later, it’s trying to repeat the same feat - this time in the upcoming Virginia Governor’s race.

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From Bloomberg:

A survey of 4,518 likely voters by Zogby International Aug. 28-31 put Obama’s approval rating at a record-low 42 percent; it also showed he’s well liked.

“He’s got to get control of his presidency,” said John Zogby, president of Zogby International.

And the Washington Post has the following assessment for Obamacare:

With health-care reform, the administration appears to have two options, one of which would involve the support of a single Republican senator, Olympia Snowe. The other option would involve using a parliamentary tactic to circumvent the usual 60-vote minimum for ending the Senate debate and instead ram through a more limited health-care bill with a bare majority, dispensing with the support of conservative Democrats or any of the Republicans.

Note that both of these “two options” involve the U.S. Senate.

And the U.S. House? The Washington Post is essentially announcing the U.S. House will wait for the U.S. Senate on health care — meaning that the House does not want to walk the plank a la Cap and Trade, only to watch the Senate let the House twist in the wind on their vote. The other possibility is that the House Leadership does not have the votes to pass health care.

Either reality means the Senate is up next on health care.

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We now have definitive proof that the Washington Post is intentionally generating in-kind contributions to the Creigh Deeds campaign in Virginia.

Having taken out George Allen over his macaca comment, the Washington Post intends to politically assassinate Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell for his college thesis written over 20 years ago.

How do we know? Because of their coverage of Green Jobs Czar Van Jones. The Washington Post has written exactly zero stories on Van Jones despite the very real and serious story — Barack Obama has hired, without congressional oversight, a man designated to spend $80 billion in tax payer dollars who has a very questionable recent past.

Compare that to the Washington Post’s treatment of Bob McDonnell. The Virginia gubernatorial candidate and present Attorney General for the Commonwealth wrote a college thesis over 20 years ago. Instead of focusing on McDonnell’s record in office or present events on the campaign trail, the Washington Post has written nine articles about Bob McDonnell in five days.

Were the Washington Post not a media operation, it would very much be in violation of campaign finance laws for its contributions to the Deeds campaign.

You gotta hand it to E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post.

Really, the town hall angst is really just a media conspiracy to make Obama and liberals look bad.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

Uh-huh. So are the tanking poll numbers, I guess.

Finally, twenty years after it was written and several major campaigns he’s run, the Washington Post is finally picking apart his college thesis.

No, I’m not talking about Barack Obama. The Washington Post never bothered to track down and examine the college thesis of Barack Obama. But, it has found the twenty year old thesis of Bob McDonnell, the Republican candidate for Governor of Virginia.

With Creigh Deeds imploding, the media decided it had to do something to help the Democrat. So they are highlighting McDonnell’s twenty year old thesis. In it, they find a candidate who is, brace yourselves, conservative. He went, after all, to Regent University, and his thesis is publicly available.

In other words, they could have written about it when he was running for the Virginia House of Delegates or Virginia Attorney General, but they wanted to wait until now when the Democrat needs some help. And what do they find that the man believed twenty years ago?

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The Washington Post, alas, gets this editorial wrong in the very first sentence:

NO ONE LIKES to be the bearer of bad news — especially when it could threaten your multibillion-dollar health-care reform bill.

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: considering the amount of time that the Right’s bloggers, pundits, and legislators have spent explaining why the Democrats in Congress needed to institute a Stop spending money we don’t have, you idiots policy, well.  We do live here, too, so our liking is hardly unalloyed - but we did say that this wasn’t going to work*.  Moving on:

And so the Obama administration did not exactly rush to publish yesterday’s required mid-session update to its federal budget estimates of last February. Still, once the numbers finally emerged in the dog days of August, they retained the power to stun: Instead of a cumulative $7.1 trillion deficit over the next decade, the White House now projects a $9 trillion deficit. These figures imply average annual budget deficits greater than 4 percent of gross domestic product through fiscal 2019, a rate of debt accumulation faster than projected GDP growth. This is not a sustainable fiscal path.

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The degree of the political problem that President Obama’s “damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead,” approach to health care reform has caused the ruling party in Washington, D.C. is beginning to become clear from some comments made by cognoscenti of the Democratic Party.

A gray-beard of the liberal establishment, Richard Cohen, wrote today in the Washington Post that the most apt comparison to President Obama is President Jimmy Carter. Ouch!

With regard to the health care debate, Cohen writes:

In the end, the success of the health care reform effort comes down to trust. A lesson of the raucous town-hall meetings is the sense of panic, the fear that this man in the White House does not appreciate the anxiety that middle-class Americans fear about health care — whether they will keep what they have, whether they will have enough or whether their last years will be spent in painful, degrading poverty….

More and more Obama is being likened to Lyndon Johnson, with Afghanistan becoming his Vietnam. Maybe. But the better analogy is to Jimmy Carter, particularly the president analyzed by James Fallows in a 1979 Atlantic magazine article, “The Passionless Presidency.” “The central idea of the Carter administration is Jimmy Carter himself,” Fallows wrote. And what is the central idea of the Obama presidency? It is change. And what is that? It is Obama himself.

Unlike Carter, Obama brims with energy and charm. His brilliance is not brittle but supple. Yet, another teachable moment is upon him and he seems lost. The country needs health care reform and a success in Afghanistan, and both efforts are going in the wrong direction. The message needs to be fixed and so, with some tough introspection, does the man.

Just how badly has the Democratic health reform effort failed? Democratic Senator Feingold (WI) is predicting no health care bill before Christmas, and when he said the most likely outcome is nothing being done at all, he was met with cheers from the voters at his town hall meeting.

As the Lakeland Times reports:

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The Washington Post is reporting the White House was taken off guard by the intensity of the left, and the digging in and hardening of their position on the public option.

The White House is lamenting the power of the issue for the left, and that the public option has become the litmus test to them about whether any health care reform, is real reform. Here are the key quotes from the top White House staff — note the use of the word “Waterloo,” and that the quotes have a whiff of whining as well:

“I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,” said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We’ve gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don’t understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform.”

“It’s a mystifying thing,” he added. “We’re forgetting why we are in this.”

Another top aide expressed chagrin that a single element in the president’s sprawling health-care initiative has become a litmus test for whether the administration is serious about the issue.

“It took on a life of its own,” he said.

While the Post does not report it, the White House has painted itself into the proverbial corner.

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