The Nigh Seen Creeder

I love it when liberal hypocrisy is on full display. Like this ...

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D., Ill.) is among the most vocal critics of the town-hall protesters. But when arguing against the GOP plan for Medicare prescription-drug coverage six years ago, she thought such tactics were just fine. From the Congressional Record, November 21, 2003:

Mr. Speaker, a little history lesson. August 17, 1989, front page of the Chicago Tribune, outside the Copernicus Senior Center in Chicago. These are the constituents of Congressman Dan Rostenkowski who is in this car. They are not happy with their Congressman, and they are not happy with the catastrophic health care bill. When the Congressman escaped from his car, a reporter asked him if he sympathized with the seniors who were mad about this bill, and he said, “No, they do not understand.” But, unfortunately, it was not the seniors who did not get it. It was the Congressman. Three months later that bill was repealed. A big mistake was made. This Congress overwhelmingly passed the catastrophic. Everyone on Capitol Hill liked it including the AARP. They did not check with the seniors, and we are about to make the same mistake tonight. A thousand pages and more, 40 years of Medicare, but 40 hours to read this bill. I tell you, if you vote for this, you better get your running shoes. The senior citizens will be after you.

By the way, the community organizer who helped rally the seniors was a young Jan Schakowsky.

You know, I think we really need to be in front of a television set. You take T.V. out of this relationship, it is just torture.

-- George Costanza talkin' to his Ma, Seinfeld, The Fusille Jerry

You know, you get the President of the United States away from his TelePrompter, and, well, it's torture to those of us who've not swallowed the B. Hussein's-the-smartest-President-ever Kool-Aid.

Yesterday, our Prez was up in New Hampshire trying to drum up support for his health care, er health insurance, reform scheme. In the midst of his "uh-ing" and "ah-ing," he inexplicably said this ...

"FedEx and UPS are doing just fine. It's the Post Office that's always having problems."

The president is hell-bent on setting up a "public option" federal program which'll compete against private insurers on the open -- er, on some kind o' market. But, wait ... didn't he just say that public b'iness and as efficient as private b'iness?!

Obama unwittingly made a free-market, anti-ObamaCare point when he said what he said 'bout the Post Office and FedEx. That's what he gets for gettin' off-script, n'est-ce pas?!

You know, I feel sorry for those folks who fell for all that Smart Obama shit. The man's been a Gaffe Machine since he first started runnin' for president. To-fuckin'-wit ... www.gop.com/BarackGaffes

From the Campaign for Working Families PAC:

Beyond the anecdotal evidence, numerous polls prove ObamaCare is not popular. ... Yesterday, pollster Scott Rasmussen released a new survey of likely voters. Here are the key findings:

42% of likely voters support the congressional healthcare reform plan; 53% oppose it. Those figures represent a 16-point swing in the past two weeks against the bill.

The intensity of opposition to the bill is twice as strong as the intensity of support for it: 44% of voters strongly oppose the bill, while just 26% strongly support it.

Now get this: 62% of independent voters oppose the congressional healthcare reform bill and 51% strongly oppose it! Among senior citizens, 46% are strongly opposed.

51% of voters believe that the quality of healthcare will get worse if this bill passes (26% think quality will improve), and 51% of voters also believe that costs will go up if this bill passes. Only 19% believe Obama’s argument that a thousand-page, trillion-dollar “reform” bill, full of government mandates, will make costs go down.

Back when I was "doing politics" in Murfreesboro, TN, the Daily News Journal was a reliable shill for elected Democrats ... such as John Bragg, Mary Ann Eckles, and Bart Gordon.

I never thought I'd live to see the day when the DNJ would badger ol' Bart Gordon like this ...

At a tumultuous time in American history, U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon must go to the people.

The Murfreesboro Democrat isn't doing himself or constituents any favors by limiting his annual town hall meetings to telephone conversations.

The 25-year representative should either meet face-to-face with voters or hold public town hall meetings throughout the 6th District during his August recess.

Gordon announced last week he would hold two separate telephone town hall meetings — conference calls of sorts — at 11 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. Aug. 21.

Participants would be able to sign up by visiting his Web site at www.house.gov/bart or by calling his Murfreesboro office at 615-896-1986. Constituents would be able to hear questions and answers during the call-in times and would be able to punch in a code to ask a question. In that format, Gordon's staffers could make sure participants reside in the 6th District and won't ask the same questions time and again.

Gordon defended his telephone meetings last week, saying there was no other way to effectively hear from some 700,000 constituents in the 15-county district.

Not too many years ago, Gordon could hold town hall meetings at old Brown's Store in Lascassas and only 10 to 15 people would show up.

This time, however, we predict hundreds, if not thousands, would turn out to protest Gordon's votes in favor of the $787 billion stimulus package, cap-and-trade energy legislation and a committee vote in favor of President Obama's health care bill, though he voted for it only after some concessions were made.

If and when Bart loses the absolute support of the DNJ, that's when he's done for.

Stay tuned ...

Reckon U.S. Senator Al Franken -- Christ, is there really a coke-nosed liberal comedian serving in the Upper Chamber of our nation's Congress?! -- will name-check President B. Hussein Obama in future editions of Lying Liars ...? To wit:

"I have not said that I am a supporter of a single-payer system."

-- President B. Hussein Obama in Portsmouth, NH today

Compare that statement with what ol' B. Hussein said back when he was ingratiating himself to left-wing donors/primary voters ...



Yes, Al, the President of the U.S.A. is a liar, and a shameless liar at that. So there.

In case you haven't heard, U.S. Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan) likened anti-ObamaCare folks to Klan members. U.S. Rep. Brian Baird (D-Washington) said the folks who're protesting ObamaCare are Nazis. And today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- along with her top lackey, U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer -- penned a USA Today op-ed stating that anyone who dares petition an elected official with ObamaCare grievances, as is their constitutional right, is "Un-American."

You know, it wasn't that long ago when Democrats were practically canonizing anyone who vocally agitated against the Iraq War. Chief among 'em was one Hillary Rodham (Clinton), who said this back in 2003:

"I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you're not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration."

Here's the video so you can check out Hillary at her shrieking best ...

Phillip Klein makes some very good points ...

I have a rule of thumb in politics that if one side is doing a lot of whining, it probably means they're losing. This was true, for example, when liberals were on an electoral losing streak and carped that Republicans were simply meaner people and better at Rovian/swift boat tactics; or when conservatives blamed the media for the fate of the McCain-Palin ticket. Liberals complained about special interests destroying health care legislation in 1993/94, while conservatives were forced to lament the dishonest demagoguery being used by the left to turn the public against Social Security reform in 2005. As I wrote yesterday, Democratic lawmakers have been at the receiving end of a public backlash against their health care proposals, and now they've been working with their liberal allies to discredit protesters by painting them as tools of insurers and the Republican Party. Today, a blogger for liberal activist group Campaign for America's Future equated opponents of liberal health care policies with Holocaust deniers, and the Democratic National Committee jumped into the fray today with a statement claiming that, "The Republicans and their allied groups - desperate after losing two consecutive elections and every major policy fight on Capitol Hill - are inciting angry mobs of a small number of rabid right wing extremists funded by K Street Lobbyists to disrupt thoughtful discussions about the future of health care in America taking place in Congressional Districts across the country."

This is silly. We can argue about how many of the anti-government health care protesters were encouraged to attend townhall meetings by larger groups and how many decided to organize at the local level. But either way, it doesn't really matter, because the whole reason activist groups exist is to encourage citizens who agree with them to get more involved. This is no different from what unions, liberal activist groups, the DNC, or Obama's own Organizing for America are trying to do.

Read the rest here.

My only beef with Mr. Klein is his description of liberals as "whiners." That's like saying bees are "buzzers," or strippers are "mooners," or gang members are "bangers." Liberals, for the most part, are ignorant souls who couldn't explain the difference between a marginal tax rate and a tub of margarine if their life depended on it. I can think of many, many other ways to define a modern liberal, but I really don't want to spend 48 consecutive hours doing such.

You know, if there was any justice in this world, Mr. Manzanares and his baby mama would be -- well, they wouldn't be allowed to procreate no more ...

Imagine that you wander into a video rental place on a Saturday night, because for some ridiculous reason, you still haven’t joined Netflix. After making your selections, you get in line to check out, only to see that the woman working the counter is being threatened with her life, as her assailant knocks over displays and generally tears the place up.

This is what unsuspecting patrons witnessed at a Hollywood Video store in Commerce City, Colorado in April of 2008. However the real drama came into play when it was revealed what the altercation was about.

The person allegedly attacking the store employee was actually the father of the employee’s child, Joseph Manzanares. Manzanares and his teen-mother girlfriend were members of different gangs in Commerce City. Manzanares is purportedly a member of the "West Side Ballers" while his video store clerk girlfriend apparently had affiliations with the local Crips gang.

Though the couple belonged to different gangs, the altercation that occured in the video store was not about turf wars, snitching, or any of the usual things that members of different street gangs usually fight about. Manzanares was apparently angry with his girlfriend because they had differing perspectives on which gang their four-year-old child would be joining, after coming of age.

Read the rest here.

If they were me, and I was you
Would you have liked a present too?

-- Altered Images, "Happy Birthday"

This blog recently celebrated its third birthday. (One week from today, I'll be celebrating my birthday with a select coterie of friends and family.) Please to enjoy this The Nigh Seen Creeder post from August 2006 ...

Quote of the day

"I want [Junior] to go there so bad, not because [Junior] is a hardcore Democrat, but because [Junior] is a hardcore thinker."

-- President Bill Clinton heaping praise on U.S. Senate candidate Harold Ford, Jr., aka Junior, in Nashville on August 3

During the effusive roar that erupted when ol' Bill uncorked this praising praise, if you will, several witnesses on the scene claimed the former president said "hardcore" yet a third time ... and qualified his statement by name-checking Nashville's Metro News, the "world's largest adult bookstore."

U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon is gettin' a lot of attention these days, and ain't none of it favorable. National Review Online's Jim Geraghty has up a great piece about Gordon's future electoral prospects. A sample:

It’s hard to overstate how incongruous Gordon seems compared to other lawmakers in his neck of the woods. His district’s state senators and state representatives have gone from nearly all Democrats to nearly all Republicans in the past 20 years; the change represents the heart of the Republican state-legislative takeover, particularly in the last decade. Gordon survived the Republican tsunami of 1994 because his challenger, then-lawyer Steve Gill, was underfunded in a year with two Senate races and a governor’s race — even with that against him, Gill came within 2 percentage points. After that, Gordon voted a much more conservative line, including for much of the Contract with America. Al Gore’s presence on the national ticket helped Gordon in 1992, 1996, and 2000.

"This is a district that really wants to vote Republican; they already vote Republican for everything else," said the Tennessee strategist. "This isn’t like a senator who can vote liberal for four years and then veer right in the last two years. I don’t see how Gordon can hide from these things when people are already talking about them."

In April, a Tea Party descended on his district office in Murfreesboro, with chants of "Bye Bye Bart." His vote to pass the House version of cap-and-trade legislation brought another round of protests. Gordon voted for cap-and-trade, while fellow Tennessee Blue Dogs Lincoln Davis and John Tanner voted against it.

In the past, Gordon has "won the race on filing day," as the strategist puts it, amassing enough popularity and resources to deter top-tier, well-funded challengers. But now Republicans are looking hard at various options for challengers; Army Reservist Maj. Gen. Dave Evans is already in the race, touting the support of former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson.

"A Republican with resources will make Gordon spend a lot of time talking about issues he doesn’t want to talk about, and there’s been a lot more interest in this race in the past two weeks," concludes the Tennessee strategist. "All you have to do to get on the ballot is get 25 signatures."

In explaining how Bart Gordon's managed to stay in office despite Tennessee's turning decidedly more Republican, Geraghty misses two important points:

Following the 2000 census, the Democratic-controlled General Assembly allowed Gordon to draw his district to his specification earlier this decade. Gordon's allies in the state legislature not only removed uber-Republican Williamson County from his district, they packed as many majority-Democrat voting precincts into it as possible. If Gordon survives what could turn out to be 1994 redux next year, and if Republicans are able to maintain their majority in the General Assembly, look for Gordon't district to be radically altered in 2011. That might be just the inducement Bart needs to call it a 28-year career.

That said, Bart Gordon is a master of constituent-service. While his legislative record is very, very thin, ol' Bart can locate a missing Social Security check faster'n a good hound dog can tree a 'coon. This explains why his mostly rural, conservative constituents give him a pass at election time: a lot of 'em have turned to Gordon for help on a whole host of piddlin' matters, and they all get bombarded with PAC-financed direct-mail and radio ads every two years telling 'em that Bart Gordon works harder than any other soul on Capitol Hill -- nay, in the whole of Washington, DC.

I certainly hope Bart Gordon is returned to private life following next year's election (I've already fired off a $100 check to Dave Evans hoping to do my part to make it so), but I'm not going to hold my breath in anticipation. I'm banking on Gordon waking up one day in 2011 to find that his district don't look nothing like it used to. That's when the real fun will begin.

[Note: One of these days I'm going to tell you about two confrontations I had with one Bart Gordon. Both of 'em are pretty funny, and you'll just have to keep comin' back to The Nigh Seen Creeder to read all about 'em. Stay tuned.]

According to statisticians at Oregon State University, the easiest way for people to have a long-term impact on their "carbon footprint" is to have fewer kids:

A study ... at Oregon State University concluded that in the United States, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environment-friendly practices people might employ during their entire lives - things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

"In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime," said study team member Paul Murtaugh. "Those are important issues and it's essential that they should be considered." ...

Reproductive choices haven't gained as much attention in the consideration of human impact to the Earth, Murtaugh said. When an individual produces a child - and that child potentially produces more descendants in the future - the effect on the environment can be many times the impact produced by a person during their lifetime.

For the most part, folks who worry about "carbon footprints" and the like tend to be on the left side of the political dial and, thus, are more likely to support the redistributionist welfare state. With populations rapidly aging in the West, it’s vitally important that a growing number of young people enter the workforce over time to pay the taxes that fund said welfare state. (Mark Steyn has done yeoman’s work on this particular issue.)

If everyone stops having kids, a critical mass will be reached when there are more people getting stuff from the guv’ment than there are people available to pay for the stuff. So left-wingers can’t have it both ways. They can’t say "having kids burdens society" without also working to reign in the 100 lb gorilla of societal burdening: Big Government.

You know, it only takes is a little bit of common sense to debunk the loftiest of left-wing theorizing.

Very interesting ...

Roughly one month ago Delaware State Senator (Senator President Pro Tem as well) Thurman Adams (D) died at the age of 80 from a bout with pancreatic cancer. There was a special election yesterday and the two front runners were Joe Booth (R) and Polly Adams Mervine (D and daughter of the late Senator Thurman Adams). Polly had two major things going for her:

1) she is a Democrat; and

2) she is the daughter of Thurman.

Legacy politics is the political way of life in Delaware. Beau Biden won the AG's spot because of his last name... nothing else.

Nevertheless Joe Booth won, taking a seat that was held by the Democratic Party for roughly 40 years in a state where the Democrats rule the House, Senate, and the Governor's office.

What is most remarkable about the win was the margin. Joe garnered over 60% of the vote in a heavy Democrat area and trounced Adams Mervine by 30 points. ...

That happened despite Polly Adams Mervine raising over 2 times the money. Joe raised about $20,000 while Polly raised over $52,000. I am not a political expert but I don’t think that happens all too often. More food for thought.

If Democrats are having trouble in Delaware, what does that say about their chances in swing-states next year?

The folks at National Review, the Weekly Standard, and RedState.com have all expressed shock that U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Murfreesboro) caved on cap-and-trade, caved on ObamaCare, and caved on an amendment to ObamaCare that would prohibit public money from being spent on abortions. Speaking as someone who's actively observed Bart Gordon's political career, and who worked for the last two candidates to give Bart serious competition (Marsha Blackburn and Steve Gill), I can say that I'm not shocked at all.

We Republicans like to speak of big government-lovin' Republicans as being RINOs, or Republicans In Name Only. Well, Bart Gordon is a Blue Dog In Name Only. Blue Dog Democrats fancy themselves as deficit hawks and social conservatives who ain't afraid to buck their party's leaders whey they tilt too far to the left. Bart Gordon ain't a deficit hawk, and he ain't socially conservative. And Bart Gordon has NEVER bucked his leadership on any issue. Indeed, if Nancy Pelosi called Bart Gordon today and said, "Bart, I want you to paint my house," ol' Bart would ask, "What color paint do I need to buy?"

Please to enjoy something I wrote about Bart Gordon back in November (the last paragraph kinda makes me look like a soothsayer):

Writing in yesterday's Nashville City Paper, Clint Brewer said this about the U.S. House of Representative's Blue Dog Coalition:

Four of Tennessee’s five Democratic Congressmen are members of the increasingly influential Blue Dog Coalition within the Democratic House Caucus. Congressmen Jim Cooper, John Tanner, Bart Gordon and Lincoln Davis are all Blue Dog stalwarts, and their caucus within a caucus seeks to pull House Democrats to the reasonable middle of the road on policy matters.

Unfortunately, Mr. Brewer don't even know what he's talking about. Influential? Middle of the Road? The Blue Dogs? Puh-leez. Never in the history of Congress has there ever been a more irrelevant and/or ineffectual caucus that the group of individuals who've dubbed themselves the Blue Dog Coalition. Case in point:

U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon -- a "card-carrying" Blue Dog -- is basically a city councilman masquerading as a Member of Congress. In his 20+ years in Congress, Gordon has never sponsored a piece of legislation that would significantly change America's tax code or entitlement system or military or judiciary. His most important legislative achievement is a law which bars jailbirds from receiving Pell Grants. Good one, Bart.

Now, if you want to know why your grandma's Social Security check was late in coming, or if you want the bridge that straddles the creek near your house named after your semi-famous grandpa, that's when you call Bart Gordon ... and that's when he shines like the midday sun in July. Gordon is an expert when it comes to piddlin' around, but he's a 13-term amateur when it comes to grasping and tackling the major issues of the day. See what I mean when I say he's a city councilman masquerading as a U.S. Rep? "Influential?" Hardly.

That said, Bart Gordon ain't no middle-of-the-road Congressman, neither. He's pro-choice; he's a proto-Keynesian; and his lifetime score from the American Conservative Union is 29. (By comparison, Lincoln Davis, another Tennessee Blue Dog, gets a 60 score from the ACU.) Furthermore, in his 20+ years in Washington, Gordon's never - ever - bucked the Democratic leadership on any important issue. Whenever his party's leaders've have instructed him to jump, he's jumped.

When B. Hussein Obama and his congressional henchmen/henchwomen start proposing billions of dollars in new spending next year without truthfully revealing how they intend to pay for it, don't expect Bart Gordon to stand athwart House Democrats shouting "Stop!" What he'll do is fall into line and do what he's been instructed to do. Just you wait and see.

Deficits are up. Tax Revenues are way down. And the Democratic Party has a spendin' wish-list that'd make Santa Claus blush. Over the weekend, the Obama Administration floated a middle-class-tax-hike trial balloon. An uproar ensued and the White House today let the air out of said balloon (notice I didn't say "popped").

Let's be honest, there ain't no way in hell that Obama and his yes-men and yes-women in Congress can pay for all of the shit they've proposed without burdening middle-class workers with new taxes. All anyone who thinks otherwise needs to do is read The Road to Serfdom, Capitalism and Freedom, or The Way the World Works to see the error of their ways.

That said, the Wall Street Journal's been wise to Obama and the Dems for many, many months, and they tell us 'bout their machinations here. A sample:

Democrats already plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts, but that won’t raise enough money. So they’re proposing an income tax surcharge on "the wealthy," but that won’t raise enough either. Democrats have no choice but to soak the middle class because only they have enough money to finance the liberal dream of yoking the middle class to cradle-to-grave government entitlements. ...

The undeniable reality is that you can’t run a European-style welfare-entitlement state without European-style levels of taxation on the middle class (and eventually without low European-style growth and high jobless rates). It’s looking more and more like Mr. Obama’s no-middle-class-tax pledge was one of the greatest confidence tricks in American political history.

Do you remember the "On health care …" commercial B. Hussein Obama’s campaign ran during last year’s presidential election? If you were anywhere near a TV during October you certainly should. Hell, it seemed to run every hour on the hour.

The gist of Obama’s health care commercial was this: on health care, some folks want to do nothing [see John McCain – which was a flat-out lie, by the way]; some folks would like to see the United States implement a socialized, single-payer system; and then there’s Obama, who wants to split the difference, letting people keep private insurance if they’re happy with it and setting up some kind of moderate guv’ment scheme to assist those who can’t – or won’t – purchase their own insurance.

It was a pretty effective commercial, I’ll admit. And since most folks didn’t know a lot about B. been-in-the-Senate-just-two-years Obama at the time, he was able to define himself on his own terms. The mainstream media, thoroughly in Obama’s hip pocket, allowed him to do it, too, letting him say things that discerning souls like myself knew to be patently untrue.

Now that speeches are being uncovered which show that Obama is much more radical on health care reform than he let on last year, that “On health care …” commercial should be remembered as one of the most disingenuous political ads of all time (right up there with LBJ’s infamous “daisy” ad).

Let's see Barry talk, er TelePrompter, his way outta this ...



UPDATE: The White House sent out some flunkies today to say that Obama was taken out of context in the video above. Unfortunately for the Obamaniacs, there're more videos in which ... well, you'll see:

Remember this?

The White House was updating their pictures of Air Force One and had the idea of having the plane fly low near the Statue of Liberty with an F-16 flying above it, taking pictures. Despite the great managerial ability that the Obama government boasts off, they neglected to mention anything about the photo shoot to authorities in New York and needless to say, it started a panic amongst residents of the city who thought there were seeing a repeat of September 11, 2001.

The Obama Administration has authorized the release of dozens of pictures from that BIG ****-up, like this one:



That pic is a perfect visual representation of the Obama Administraion, ain't it? I mean, according to most polls his agenda is starting to spin out of control ...!

National Review's Rich Lowry has this to say 'bout Senator Bob Corker:

Just checked in by phone with Sen. Bob Corker, the impressive Republican freshman from Tennessee, to see what he's making of the latest on health care and cap-and-trade ...

Corker says President Obama recently met with him, something he appreciates. But Corker doesn't think Obama "has his feet on the ground with regard to what appropriate health reform is." He adds, "And he personalizes everything, it's all, 'I, I, I.'" Corker suspects that for Obama "doing this with some massive bill is about politics ... To him, it's about a political victory, not about doing what's in the long-term interest of citizens."

I endorsed Mayor Corker back in 2005 -- my car still bears the scar from Corker's distinctive red-white-and-blue bumper strips. Talk about being très impressive in retrospect.