Saturday, April 28, 2012

Eric Cantor Tries to Stop Stalwart Scott Keadle in NC-8

This has been a tough week for conservatives in Washington.  Republicans in both houses are caving on the postal bailout, highway bill, appropriations, Ex-Im Bank, Violence Against Women Act, and the student loan bailout.  It’s not going to get easier when they come back from recess in May.  This is why we need game-changers like Scott Keadle in Congress.  Keadle is running in NC-8, the seat currently held by born-again blue dog Larry Kissell.

As I search out conservative candidates throughout the country on behalf of the Madison Project PAC, I’m struck by how few candidates truly grasp the problems at hand within the Republican conference.  Sure – they all talk about repealing Obamacare, a balanced budget, and out-of- control spending.  But it is some of the aforementioned issues that separate the real supporters of free-markets from those who merely offer a pale-pastel contrast from the Democrats.

I’ve spent a lot of time with Scott Keadle, and have come to realize that he is one of the biggest super stars of this election cycle.  This is a guy who will get it right on every issue.  And he truly understands the problems inherent with our current leadership.  Perforce, it comes as no surprise that Eric Cantor and his “Young Guns” are taking their show on the road to NC-8.  This, from Hotline:

The super PAC affiliated with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., has made its first independent expenditure in support of a Republican challenger, according to FEC filings. And it comes in a race where another powerful conservative outside group has lined up on the other side.

The YG Action Fund, which is run by ex-Cantor aides, has spent $22,750 on a mailer supporting Richard Hudson for the Republican nomination in North Carolina’s 8th District, currently held by Democratic Rep. Larry Kissell. The GOP race also includes Scott Keadle, a dentist and former county official who is one of six House candidates who received endorsements from the Club for Growth this cycle.

Hudson is a longtime Hill aide who served as chief of staff to Texas GOP Reps. Mike Conaway and John Carter and Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C.

There is a reason why this is Cantor’s first independent expenditure on behalf of a Republican challenger.  Keadle will never beat to the drum of leadership.  Richard Hudson is a creature of Washington with his robust ties to GOP establishment leaders.

People often ask me where they could get the best value for their political contributions.  There are a few good stars this cycle, but if I were forced to pick the best individual to support, it would be Dr. Scott Keadle.  If you don’t believe me, just ask leadership.

The primary will be held on May 8, but there will be a runoff if no candidate receives 40% of the vote.  Let’s help end it on May 8.

Cross-posted from The Madison Project


View the original article here

Mitt Romney is Batman. And knows kung fu.

This is an old story – one that Jim Geraghty (via the Morning Jolt) reminisced about while noting the time that Mitt Romney saved a bunch of people* from drowning – that relates the time that Mitt Romney had somebody take a swing at him on a flight. Supposedly, Romney had asked the guy in front of him to put his seat up before takeoff (Romney and his wife flew economy class, by the way**), the guy swung on him, situation resolved by local security forces. Nothing unusual, right? …No, that’s just what THEY want you to think. There’s a conflicting report.

[Alleged rapper] Sky Blu says Romney drew first blood. Well, he said Romney grabbed him after angrily telling him to move his seat up.

“He grabs my shoulder .. and I just react BOOM get off me!” Blu told the video camera. “He put a condor grip on me. What am I supposed to do?”

“That’s like a Vulcan grip,” offered his bandmate Redfoo.

“Like a Vulcan grip,” Blu concurred. “I’m not your prey. I’m not a salmon going upstream. You’re not going to grip me up.”

Well… I am forced to note, sir, that in fact Mitt Romney was indeed going to grip you up for violating both the laws of decorum and our shared sense of American civics. And that if you do not like it then you should keep your seat upright until the flight attendant informs you that you can recline it. Because if you don’t, then you may receive a condor grip from… hold on. Millionaire businessman. Carefully maintained public persona. Strong positions on law and order. Goes around saving people using high-tech vehicles. Engages in principled low level vigilantism designed to make the world a better place on a street level.

Dear GOD.

MITT ROMNEY IS BATMAN. And knows kung fu.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*And, as I am forced to point out by the current zeitgeist, their dog. I am likewise forced to point out that Romney did not save the dog for dinner later.

**When’s the last time Barack Obama flew coach, anyway? …And if the answer is “more than two years before he ran for President,” well, I can’t help it if people might think that that reflects badly on him.


View the original article here

Obama Administration Hails Its Own “Gutsy Call.”

The newest Obama campaign video highlights the killing of Osama bin Ladin.

This video is hardly surprising. http://www.gutsycall.com takes you to https://donate.barackobama.com/page/contribute/o2012-donate-main. So it isn’t like this move hasn’t been telegraphed for a year. It is notable for a few things.

First, it is narrated, in part by Bill Clinton. If there is anyone to blame for the rise of al Qaeda it is Bill Clinton. It was on Bill Clinton’s watch that all the events happened that resulted, ultimately, in the tragedy of September 11. It was his withdrawal from Somalia that showed al Qaeda that a handful of deaths could evict us from a theater of operations. It was under Clinton than the World Trade Center was first attacked in 1993. His non response to the bombing of US military facilities in Saudi Arabia, the demolition of two of our African embassies, and the attack on the USS Cole gave al Qaeda good reason to believe that we would do nothing if attacked. I guess this is an appeal to bring moderate Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents back to Obama. As such, it reeks of flopsweat rather than a confident candidate.

Second, it calls into question whether Romney would have ordered the attack that killed bin Laden based on a 2007 Romney quote:

It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.

This is patently nonsense because the quote neither says nor implies that Romney would be reluctant to make the call to kill bin Laden.

Third, this may be the first campaign video in history, and perhaps the first time in the history of political campaigns in general, that a candidate has touted merely doing his job as a reason he deserves reelection. Not that he did it well or efficiently or better but just that he showed up for work and did what we paid him to do.

For some reason, presumably because there have been focus groups that agreed with the concept, the Obama campaign seems to think that foreign policy will be the theme with which it can beat Mitt Romney though it is hard to see how this argument, if it is anything more substantial than carrying bin Laden’s head around on a pike until November, will have the strength to last.

Don’t get me wrong on this. I’m glad bin Laden is dead because justice has finally been partially extracted for the attacks of September 11, 2001. But let’s not kid ourselves. Bin Laden has been a non-entity in the direction of al Qaeda and as an al Qaeda fundraiser since 2005 at the latest. I also don’t see the immense courage and steel backbone needed to conduct a raid deep inside a friendly (mostly) country. While Obama has been busy dancing the Electric Slide to celebrate bin Laden’s death, he has studiously ignored that Ayman al-Zawahiri, who has actually commanded al Qaeda since Tora Bora was evacuated, is very much alive, well, and in control.

Besides, do we really think any (added to address some valid point in comments) post-9/11 president could, in the possession of the same information as Obama, could have refused to carry out the raid? Hardly. Word would have leaked within days and that would have been the effective end of any administration.

The foreign policy accomplishments of Obama are tissue thin. In fact, it is difficult to find a single place in the world where America is better situated today than it was four years ago. By and large we have attained a Carteresque perfect storm where our friends don’t trust us, our enemies don’t respect us and there is no will or interest in the White House to change the situation.


View the original article here

Morning Briefing for April 26, 2012

RedState Morning Briefing
April 26, 2012Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

Yesterday on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, she asked Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell about a recent Roll Call article that framed me as one of the loud leaders of conservatives opposed to Mitch McConnell. The Senator from Kentucky responded that he had never heard of me and I did not have an audience.

That sounds a bit like the child, when asked if he ate the cookie, replying that he had not and besides it did not taste good. If he’d never heard of me, how can he comment on my audience? If he states plainly I have no audience, how can he claim to not have heard of me? His remarks also came less than a day after I came out publicly against bronies, the adult male fans of My Little Pony. I hope that’s just a coincidence.

Mitch McConnell’s remark is just another example of him being vastly overrated as both a strategist and tactician. He claims to have advanced the conservative cause, but told Laura he has to be mindful that to govern Republicans must reach out to all Americans. Perhaps that is why in 2010, with the rise of the tea party, Mitch McConnell backed Arlen Specter against Pat Toomey, Charlie Crist against Marco Rubio (McConnell staffers went to Florida to help Crist), Robert Bennett against Mike Lee, and Trey Grayson against Rand Paul.

I grew up thinking Mitch McConnell was a right wing warrior. It turns out he’s just a typical Washingtonian appropriator who has presided over a massive expansion of the welfare state doing not much more than issuing bold platitudes as he cuts deals to expand government spending and along the way made some major tactical and strategic blunders that groups like ACORN were able to thrive.

Let’s review the record.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

An untold story today following Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primaries is what a bad, bad night it was for Planned Parenthood.

In Pennsylvania’s 134th House district, they spent an eye-popping $100,000 on a TV ad campaign trying to sink the candidacy of Republican Ryan Mackenzie by linking him to ultrasound legislation that was before the legislature.

As Politico noted, this was seen as a trial-balloon of sorts.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

Never mind the fact that Obama got yoghurt splashed on him last night – that’s just an ongoing hazard of being a politician running for re-election in this country. The real story here is this: the President went to Colorado to, essentially, lie to a bunch of kids about how they can get themselves out of this mess that they’re in. And it is a mess. 50% of college graduates are unemployed/underemployed; couple that with student loan debt levels that should really be frightening more people and we end up with a situation where millions of kids are getting out of college and staring DOOM right in the face. And while they are adults – and thus, responsible for their own fates – guess what? The people that connived to put them in this mess are adults, too. We expect twenty-somethings in this culture to make poor life choices, sometimes; what we don’t expect is for the generations above them to so ruthlessly take advantage of that.

Anyway: Obama’s answer in Colorado, last night? …Entrepreneurship. That’s what he was telling the kids. Start that restaurant! Develop that smartphone app! Make your own destiny! Get slammed with a tax hike on small businesses in the form of tighter restrictions on payroll tax exemptions!

…Yeah. One of these things is not like the others.

Please click here for the rest of the post.


View the original article here

Why Doesn’t Marcy Kaptur Respect Veterans?

From the diaries.

Not long ago, my opponent, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur used her Congressional website to take Republicans to task for not being “sensitive” about “the plight of unemployed returning veterans.” She was angry that the House of Representatives had rejected her proposed amendment to the 2013 budget.

The amendment would have established a Veterans Job Corps, which she claims “would employ at least 20,000 veterans over 5 years in projects to preserve and restore America’s national parks, state parks, and other public lands.”

This idea may sound good on paper. But it ignores several important questions that involve sensitivity, common sense and responsible government.

Number One: Who was being more sensitive, thoughtful and responsible here? House Republicans who want to reduce out-of-control federal spending, borrowing and deficits – and reduce the size and intrusiveness of a federal bureaucracy that has become a massive legal and regulatory drag on our economy and job creation?

Or an out of touch Democrat politician who is determined to keep borrowing, spending and growing our government – and who rejects our veterans’ military backgrounds and wants to turn them into federally employed landscapers and groundskeepers?

Is Kaptur suggesting that the military training and hands-on experience our veterans acquired during their time in service isn’t good enough? Or that these jobs are the best they should expect? Or does she just not respect their service and training?

Kaptur and her campaign staff certainly don’t respect my own military training. That’s obvious from the way they call me a “faux” plumber. Are all our other veterans “fake” in their jobs too? Marcy’s campaign has denied my military experience several times before, each time proving that she and her staff don’t respect veterans and our military experience.

This lack of respect goes a long way toward explaining why Kaptur is so willing to turn this nation’s soldiers into landscapers and groundskeepers, when instead they could be transitioning to productive civilian lives in trades for which they have already received training. Heck, a few might even make pretty good plumbers.

Number Two: What this nation needs – and what our veterans need, so that they can find good jobs – is an economy that is growing. Last year, growth didn’t even reach a lousy 2 percent. Our economic growth needs to get back to 4 or 5 percent a year, every year.

For that to happen, government needs to stop borrowing and spending the money the private sector needs – the money private businesses would invest in new equipment, new hires and new ideas far better than government ever can. Government also needs to stop taxing and regulating everything in sight, dragging our economy down, far too often for no health or environmental benefit.

Congress and the federal bureaucracy also need to stop wasting taxpayer money on worthless fake-energy wind, solar and algae schemes – and start letting companies drill again for oil and gas that power our economy and create real jobs and revenues.

Just over the past few years, oil and gas “fracking” on state and federal lands created 600,000 jobs! It generated real energy that we can use, and billions of dollars in revenue! And here Kaptur is upset that the House rejected her proposal to borrow more money to create a lousy 20,000 menial jobs.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “young male veterans” between the ages of 18 and 24 had an unemployment rate of 29.1 percent last year. Non-veteran males in the same age group had “only” a 17.6 percent unemployment rate – which is also intolerable, insensitive and unnecessary.

It’s clear that America is in a crisis – which almost everyone outside of Washington, DC realizes. Ms. Kaptur, along with most other Washington politicians and bureaucrats, however, is isolated and insulated from this crisis. Both they and we should all be asking: Why are veterans, with all their training and experience, so much worse off than non-veterans, after having served and sacrificed so much for their country? And how much longer can we tolerate this destructive situation?

Yes, Congress has tried repeatedly (and failed repeatedly), to “fix” the unemployment problem. But little has been accomplished beyond partisan bickering and political grandstanding. While our political “heroes” keep talking about unemployment, America’s real heroes continue returning home to live it.

We need to focus on getting excessive government out of the way, so that the private sector can create jobs for our veterans and the millions of other Americans who so desperately want to work again.

A soldier understands one thing above all others: results. Congress, as history continues to prove, doesn’t understand this concept. Worse, too many politicians keep coming up with crazy ideas that they think will get them votes – when what they will really do is make sure the problems remain unsolved. They obviously have no clue what they’re doing.

Veterans deserve better than a 29% unemployment rate. Veterans deserve better than politicians who don’t respect what they went through and what they learned from military life. Veterans deserve respect, and an appreciation for what they’ve done for their country.

Most of all, veterans deserve to be represented in Washington by people who understand and respect what they did, what they do, what they know, and what they have to offer their country when their military service is over.
_______________
Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher is a Republican candidate for Congress in Ohio’s ninth congressional district. Samuel Wurzelbacher rose to national fame as “Joe the Plumber” when he challenged then-candidate Barack Obama on his plans to increase taxes for the middle class. Since 2008, Wurzelbacher has spoken nationally in support of blue collar workers, encouraging voters to get engaged in the political process. Learn more at http://www.JoeForCongress2012.com/


View the original article here

A Nobody With No Audience Gets Noticed by Mitch McConnell

Yesterday on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, she asked Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell about a recent Roll Call article that framed me as one of the loud leaders of conservatives opposed to Mitch McConnell. The Senator from Kentucky responded that he had never heard of me and I did not have an audience.

That sounds a bit like the child, when asked if he ate the cookie, replying that he had not and besides it did not taste good. If he’d never heard of me, how can he comment on my audience? If he states plainly I have no audience, how can he claim to not have heard of me? His remarks also came less than a day after I came out publicly against bronies, the adult male fans of My Little Pony. I hope that’s just a coincidence.

Mitch McConnell’s remark is just another example of him being vastly overrated as both a strategist and tactician. He claims to have advanced the conservative cause, but told Laura he has to be mindful that to govern Republicans must reach out to all Americans. Perhaps that is why in 2010, with the rise of the tea party, Mitch McConnell backed Arlen Specter against Pat Toomey, Charlie Crist against Marco Rubio (McConnell staffers went to Florida to help Crist), Robert Bennett against Mike Lee, and Trey Grayson against Rand Paul.

I grew up thinking Mitch McConnell was a right wing warrior. It turns out he’s just a typical Washingtonian appropriator who has presided over a massive expansion of the welfare state doing not much more than issuing bold platitudes as he cuts deals to expand government spending and along the way made some major tactical and strategic blunders that groups like ACORN were able to thrive.

Let’s review the record.

In the 1990's Mitch McConnell, then the Republican manager against the Motor Voter bill, made the brilliant tactical decision to not filibuster the motion to take up the bill. Consequently it passed. ACORN and other left-wing groups were emboldened to do what they’ve done over the past two decades. Yes, people forget that it was Mitch McConnell’s tactical decision to let Motor Voter get to the floor of the Senate despite the warnings of what would happen. Passage of that law made it ever easier to engage in voter registration fraud. McConnell had the votes to stop it from being considered, but once it got to the floor of the Senate everyone knew there were enough wobbly Republicans who would not dare go on record actually opposing it on passage.

In the early 2000's when McCain-Feingold went through the Senate, McConnell yet again cut out the legs of its opponents telling them not to worry because he’d let the Supreme Court do their dirty work for them and kill it. McConnell lost in the Supreme Court.

Mitch McConnell’s more recent record makes clear he is more interested in being Majority Leader than advancing any sort of conservative principles. It’s all about McConnell.

He is an appropriations cardinal in the Senate who has routinely stymied fiscal conservative efforts to rein in spending by Senators Coburn, DeMint, and even John McCain.

Recall, if you will, Senator McConnell didn’t just vote for the Wall Street bailouts, he rescued it from near defeat by adding earmarks to TARP after it failed in the House.

As I mentioned, in 2010 Mitch McConnell backed Arlen Specter against Pat Toomey, Charlie Crist against Marco Rubio, Robert Bennett against Mike Lee, and Trey Grayson against Rand Paul.

After House GOP made a stand on payroll tax this past winter, McConnell pulled the rug out and cut a deal with Harry Reid that paid for a payroll tax cut with increases to home mortgages. Allen West said he felt betrayed over this.

McConnell personally recruited Senator Roy Blunt to stop conservative Ron Johnson from winning a key leadership spot.

McConnell vowed to block conservatives from forcing votes on full repeal of Obamacare this year, then flipped and said he’d force votes in March when RepealIt.org threatened to run ads for him to resign, He has yet to keep his promise to force votes. McConnell’s loyal lieutenants in the Senate, at the time, explained that forcing full repeal votes on the Democrats would undermine their ability to cut deals with Harry Reid.

Senator McConnell just last week voted with Senate Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee against Paul Ryan’s budget spending levels. Last year McConnell refused to whip support for Ryan’s budget when it came up for a vote in the Senate.

Senator McConnell and his allies frequently say he has to do what he does because they must keep the moderates to be in the majority. Except 2010 gives the lie away. In races conservatives absolutely could win, McConnell sided with the moderates. Behind the scenes, on issues like Obamacare that remain hugely unpopular with the American people, McConnell cuts deals with the Democrats instead of forcing votes.

McConnell is emblematic of all that is wrong with Washington, D.C. He covets power relentlessly and only acts when it is threatened, then only doing so much as to stop the threat without actually leading. Along the way, he has been deeply complicit in putting our Republican in a position of bankruptcy.

I may be a nobody with no audience, but Mitch McConnell is a leader with no spine to lead.


View the original article here

Job Creation and EPA Enforcement Philosophy – Coincidence With Roots

“…the soldiers out of rage and hatred, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest.”

– Flavius Josephus (HT:Wikipedia)

In the video above, Al Armendariz discusses how his agency should enforce regulations on Oil and Gas extraction firms. The term crucifixion enters into the discussion. I’m sure it was just a rhetorical flourish in the proud tradition of Huey “The Kingfish” Biden, however, our choice of wording does offer a nice, handy window into our souls.

The EPA’s crucifixion agenda was on leafy, green display when they ruled that power generation facilities could not emit more than 1,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt of electricity produced. The people getting nailed to the cross predictably come from locations that rely on coal-fired power for their electricity. The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin describes why this poses a difficulty for coal-fired generation facilities.

“The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.”

This would be fine and dandy to anyone who doesn’t dig or ship or burn coal except for two wee problems. The US currently derives 45% of its electricity from coal-fired plants. These plants would have to install carbon sequestering technology which does not exist at a level yet where it can be commercially mass-produced.

In and of itself, we wouldn’t be dead just from enhanced regulatory costs levied against coal-fired electrical production. The problem occurs when the EPA uses other regulatory actions to also squeeze the viable alternatives to coal-fired plants. Natural Gas extraction firms have rapidly increased supply availability via the use of frakking methods to force previously unavailable natural gas out of the ground. Senator Jim Inhofe describes EPA actions towards natural gas producers following Armendariz’s infamous crucifixion edict.

“Not long after Administrator Armendariz made these comments in 2010, EPA targeted US natural gas producers in Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming.
“In all three of these cases, EPA initially made headline-grabbing statements either insinuating or proclaiming outright that the use of hydraulic fracturing by American energy producers was the cause of water contamination, but in each case their comments were premature at best – and despite their most valiant efforts, they have been unable to find any sound scientific evidence to make this link.”

(HT:Cnsnews.com)

And meanwhile at The Bureau of Labor Statistics, we learn that the Glorious Obama Recovery seems to have hit a rough patch. Employers added only 120,000 new jobs to their payrolls last March after several months of averaging twice as many. Meanwhile, the four-week moving average of new unemployment claims hit 381,750. This is as poorly as this indicator has fared since early January.

This stalling economic activity occurs in synonymy with rising energy prices. It occurs at the same time our Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, claims that the US Government has no control over the price of gasoline. He says this while the EPA does everything in its power to increase two possible substitute goods for crude oil in power generation. His disingenuous response bears no relation to what the explicit goal of President Obama’s energy policies have been since 2008. Here is how President Obama described the economic outcome of his environmental policy goals.

Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money.

(HT:Hot Air.com)

So does the EPA have a deleterious effect on the current economy? A reflexive thought would be that firms undergoing regulatory crucifixion tend not to have excess funds to hire new staff. They also tend to stay away from anything that would require them to take regulatory risk. Regulatory crucifixion leads firms to stop asking where they should explore and start asking what they need to shut down if they don’t want nail holes in their hands. Logically, this should lead to a necessary level of damage to American economic vitality.

Logic also suggests that higher electricity prices, as President Obama indicated he believed would occur, should create negative externalities in consumer spending and on hiring in mechanization-intense industries. This quite possibly shows up in the perniciously stubborn U3 rate of unemployment that only seems to decline when hoards of perpetually idled workers get officially classified as “discouraged.” Or maybe this is all just a result of American velleity.

I tend to think the crucifixion philosophy at the EPA, the high prices of energy and the slowing rates of economic vitality are all components of a system. The EPA regulatory posture has a steady-state effect that increases the prices of energy inputs to production. The things firms produce have a higher manufacturing overhead, so that they are harder to make. The firms hire fewer workers and charge consumers more for their goods and services. This is how The Government-Centered Society kills economic vitality.


View the original article here

Daily Links – April 26, 2012

Today is April 26th. On this date in 1514, Copernicus recorded his first observations of Saturn. He concluded that God must have liked it, because “he puteth a ring upon it.” Also on this date, in 1711, David Hume was born in Scotland. His “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” essay was a big influence on the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. Also, he could out-consume both Schopenhauer and Hegel. On this date in 1865 Abraham Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth was killed by Union soldiers at a Virginia farm. His final words, apparently directed at his hands, were “useless, useless.” To this day, historians are unsure why both of Booth’s hands had the same name. And finally, today is National Richter Scale Day, in honor of the birth of seismologist Charles Richter in 1900. Says David Caruso: I guess you could say he really … [puts on sunglasses] shook things up. YEEAAAAAHHHH! Consider this an Open Thread.

Exclusive: Red State Founder Erickson Fires Back At Sen. Mcconnell | Big Journalism
“This was essentially an attack not just on Erickson, but on the new media as a whole. It suggests that those on the internet have no credibility, and that they can be talked down to by their betters in the political bigwig world.”

EPA: Hey, sorry about that whole “crucify” thing | Hot Air
“The EPA has scrambled to contain the damage from the clip highlighted by Morgen Richmond this morning, which went viral yesterday, showing an EPA administrator bragging about crucifixion as a means to impose the EPA’s will on American subjects, er, citizens.”

Meet The Left-Wing ALECs | Free Beacon
“The progressive groups leveling charges that the American Legislative Exchange Conference (ALEC) is ‘shadowy’ and ‘nefarious’ rely on hidden donors and overheated rhetoric to attack ALEC and ignore similar activities by liberal organizations.”

The Assault on Food | John Stossel
“But the scientific question should not overshadow the more fundamental issue. Who should decide what you can eat: you? Or the state?”

Today’s Word of the Day comes via Dictionary.com.
macaronic (mak-uh-ron-ik): adjective 1. composed of or characterized by Latin words mixed with vernacular words or non-Latin words given Latin endings. 2. composed of a mixture of languages. 3. mixed; jumbled.


View the original article here

Planned Parenthood’s Bad, Bad Night

An untold story today following yesterday’s Pennsylvania primaries is what a bad, bad night it was for Planned Parenthood.

In Pennsylvania’s 134th House district, they spent an eye-popping $100,000 on a TV ad campaign trying to sink the candidacy of Republican Ryan Mackenzie by linking him to ultrasound legislation that was before the legislature.

As Politico noted, this was seen as a trial-balloon of sorts:

Most state legislative races and ad campaigns don’t necessarily have any larger resonance, but Democrats have been working to make the ultrasound bill the kind of liability for Republicans in Pennsylvania that a related proposal became for Republicans in Virginia.

That trial balloon popped when MacKenzie cruised to victory by an 18-point margin, 59 percent to 41 percent.

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania’s 31st district, former Planned Parenthood CEO and board member, Republican Helen Bosley, lost in the primary to a pro-life Republican woman, Anne Chapman. Thanks to the help of the Pennsylvania Family Institute, abortion played a central role in the race and again, it was no contest. Despite Bosley’s endorsement from the Bucks County Republican Committee, pro-life Chapman won with 63 percent to 37 percent – a commanding 26-point margin.

And on the Democratic side, they didn’t fare much better. In the tightly contested primary between Reps. Jason Altmire and Mark Critz, Altmire relentlessly attacked Critz – in TV commercials, in the mail, and in debates — for voting to defund Planned Parenthood. Altmire went down by four points, despite leading in most polls leading up to last night.


View the original article here