No Runny Eggs

The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.

Archive for January 25th, 2010

Snap NRE Poll – Drunkblog or no drunkblog of the STF…er, SOTU speech

by @ 22:29. Filed under NRE Polls, Politics - National.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so the liver is recovered enough. The question is, has the sanity recovered? That’s where I need your help – do I break out the liquor and drunkblog Obama’s Shut The Fuc…er, State Of The Union speech or not?

Do vote quickly – the polls close at 17:00 Central (that’s 5 pm for those of you who can’t convert from a 24-hour clock).

Do I drunkblog the STF...er, SOTU speech?

Up to 1 answer(s) was/were allowed

  • Yes - load up on the drinks (73%, 8 Vote(s))
  • No - save your sanity (27%, 3 Vote(s))

Total Voters: 11

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Editor’s note – if you don’t get the STFU reference, see today’s Day by Day cartoon.

What’s With Sarah Palin?

by @ 21:01. Filed under Miscellaneous.

I do not believe Sarah Palin is presidential material at this time. I do, however, believe Sarah Palin is a person who has a combination of characteristics that equip her well to be the charismatic leader of a movement. But the movement I want here to lead is the anti-John McCain movement. I want her to stand for conservative principles.  John McCain has never worried about conservative principles.

That raises the question, why on earth is Palin spending time supporting the candidacy of John McCain against a real conservative like J.D. Hayworth, who is challenging McCain for the Republican nomination for Senate in Arizona.  For the record, Hayworth is a real conservative.

It might be as simple as loyalty.  McCain, after all, did make Sarah Palin a vice presidential candidate. But I think it goes beyond that.  You may recall that during the presidential campaign Palin pressed the “maverick” label to the point of absurdity.  Merriam-Webster defines a maverick as, “an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party.”  So when you think about it, being a maverick is not in and of itself a virtue.  People who engage in deviant behavior are “mavericks” to the extent they don’t go along with the group.

There are many times when going along with the group or party is the right thing to do.  I hope Ms. Palin understands that her popularity among her followers is the result of going along with the group when the group is right, and being a maverick when the group is wrong.  Her friend Senator McCain does not do a very good job of that.  If Sarah Palin wants to maintain her influence with the followers she currently has, she would do well to distance herself from the good Senator.

Video of the day – There’s a Tax for That

by @ 16:05. Filed under Politics.

Adam Andrzejewski, who is running for Illinois governor, cut a new commercial…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5fKlnJbY_M[/youtube]

Right Wing News’ 2012 GOP straw poll

by @ 15:50. Filed under 2012 Presidential Contest.

John Hawkins conducted a straw poll of 68 of the most-influential right-of-center bloggers plus me, asking who we would vote for if the 2012 GOP Presidential primary was held today. I was tempted to take the Shoebox approach and ask for a “none of the above”, but since that wasn’t on the menu, I decided to make a selection. Let’s review what we as a group chose:

12) Mike Huckabee: 0% (0 votes)

I would have thought that the guy who finished third in the 2008 primaries, who has almost all of the social conservative values one could want, and who was the biggest advocate for the “Fair”Tax would have picked up at least a couple votes. However, the message from him that government needs to be bigger and from us that government is just too damn big is an overriding one.

11) Ron Paul: 1% (1 votes)

The fifteen minutes of fame is over.

T-9) Newt Gingrich: 3% (2 votes)

Gingrich is the poster child of a double-talking politician (see his endorsements of Gorebal “Warming” with SanFranNan and of Dede Scozzafava)

T-9) Haley Barbour: 3% (2 votes)

Barbour is proof that a blind elephant finding a nut (his response to Katrina) is not enough to overcome a love of big government.

8) Rick Perry: 4% (3 votes)

That had to be the Lonestar Sympathy Vote.

T-6) John Thune: 7% (5 votes)

The last good thing I remember out of Thune was his removal of Tom Daschle from the Senate Majority Leader’s office.

T-6) Jeb Bush: 7% (5 votes)

If there’s one thing more damaged than the GOP brand, it’s the Bush brand. It is, in this case, very unfortunate.

5) Tim Pawlenty: 9% (6 votes)

The middle of the road is a great place to get high-lowed.

4) Mitch Daniels: 10% (7 votes)

It truly is a shame that Daniels is not more well-known outside Indiana. Of note, he is the highest current executive office-holder (of course, there’s only 3 on the list).

3) Mitt Romney: 12% (8 votes)

Next In Line™ lives.

2) Mike Pence: 14% (10 votes)

Pence is proof that making the right call on TARP is a winning play (full disclosure – I voted for Pence)

1) Sarah Palin: 29% (20 votes)

I have to wonder how much was knocked off by the fact that Palin will be stumping for her former running mate in his Arizona Senate primary.

Monday Hot Read: Stephen F. Hayes takes out Gibbs’ 50-minute claim

by @ 7:45. Filed under Politics - National, War on Terror.

The Weekly Standard‘s Stephen F. Hayes skewered White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ claim that we learned all we could from the Fruit of the Boom bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in a single 50-minute FBI interrogation before he was Mirandized and clammed up:

The FBI did not ask about the information in these intercepts. Wouldn’t it be helpful to do so now? The CIA dossier on Abdulmutallab has grown by orders of magnitude since his detention a month ago. Wouldn’t it be useful to ask him questions about its contents? Abdulmutallab lived in Yemen for four months. How many details about his life there did the FBI get in their 50-minute interview? He was involved with pro-jihadist groups as a student in London. Did the FBI even know to ask about this?

Perhaps more important, the FBI has lost the opportunity to ask Abdulmutallab about intelligence that U.S. government is collecting now. In the weeks leading up to the attack, the intelligence community had information on “Umar Farouk” and on “the Nigerian” and on an attack being planned in Yemen. There is, without a doubt, the same kind of raw, uncorrelated intelligence among the vast collection of NSA intercepts today. It’s entirely possible that Abdulmutallab would be in a position to give meaning to these pieces of information in a way that would at least help us understand al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and, at best, help prevent a coming attack.

This reminds me so much of the Clinton Administration’s response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Everybody was led to believe that the FBI had rolled up the entirety of the network, while Osama bin Laden was busy plotting his reattack.

Speaking of bin Laden, there’s this gem that Stephen recalls from Attorney General Eric Holder’s confirmation hearing:

It may be worse than that. The question may not be who would interrogate him but whether we would even have that opportunity. Senator Lindsey Graham asked Attorney General Eric Holder about this at a congressional hearing in November.

“Let me ask you this. Let’s say we capture him tomorrow. When does custodial interrogation begin in his case? If we captured bin Laden tomorrow, would he be entitled to Miranda warning at the moment of capture?”

Holder responded: “Again, I’m not — that all depends.”

Who’s The Real “Barack Obama?”

by @ 5:08. Filed under Politics - National.

After months of saying “no” and “hell no,” the American people, represented by the voters of Massachusetts, sent a clear message to President Obama; quit your head long run towards Socialism!  While I’m not sure they’ve gotten the message, the election of Scott Brown has clearly taken the wind out of the Administration’s sails.

From his interview with George Stephanopoulos where he claimed that he and Scott Brown were elected under the same “hope” agenda, to his blatant and obvious attempt at populism when he introduced his bill to penalize banks on the day following the repudiation of placebocare, it’s clear that the Obama administration has lost their momentum and is seeking a way to get it back.

With his mojo deflated, pundits and talking heads have been filling airwaves and electronic and printed media asking what will Obama do next.  In general, their question comes down to this; is Obama an ideologue who will not take no for an answer and continue to push his extreme left agenda or, will Obama become the reincarnation of Bill Clinton and learn the art of triangulation.  This skill that will be required if he wants any success with what will surely become a much more Republican filled House and Senate.

I’ve claimed from the start that Obama is an ideologue.  I have seen nothing in his character or agenda that suggested to me that he had anything other than a hard left perspective.  From Jeremiah Wright to Van Jones to his full bore tilt to have government control or dictate to all major American industries, it looked like he was an ideologue’s ideologue.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading the book “The Argument” by Matt Bai.  The book largely outlines the progression of the far left from theory on a slide show post 2002 elections, to the core of the Democrat party, and ultimately the presidency, by 2008.  In this book, Bai reports on one of the first encounters that then, Senator Barack Obama, had with the nutroot bloggers.

In 2005, while debating John Roberts for chief justice, Patrick Leahy had come out to support Roberts.  Obama said he would vote against Roberts but then supported Leahy’s position saying that those who didn’t accept diverse opinions were knee-jerk, amongst other things.  As the story goes forward, Obama is roundly criticized by the nutroots for not being “pure” on this issue.  Obama couldn’t handle the criticism so after brooding over it for a while, he wrote a two thousand word plus response which was posted on the nutroot’s holy site.

In this missive, Obama started by laying out the argument that the nutroots and their kind, were interested only in purity and that through enforcing this, eventually they would elect enough officials and the public would see just how right their positions are/were.  He then explained why this philosophy was flawed.  As quoted in the book, part of Obama’s response was:

I think this perspective misreads the American people.  From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and supicious of jargon.  They don’t think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent.  They don’t think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game tot he detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs.  They don’t think America is an imperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated…

Bai follows up this section of Obama’s letter with his own interpretation and further Obama quotes:

If Democrats really wanted to win the trust of these voters, Obama lectured, they couldn’t go around demonizing those who disagreed with them, nor could they impose some kind of purity test on their elected leaders.  “To the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, “true” progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward,” he said.  Citing Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., Obama said the country’s most compelling voices had been those who could “speak with the utmost conviction about the great issues of the day without ever belittling those who opposed them, and without denying the limits of their own perspectives.”

Note that the bolded items are my embellishments.

Look back at the bolded items.  Note how Obama, when addressing the nutroots was arguing directly against the attitude and policies that he has implemented as President!  “Bush is a good man but wrong”, “Don’t blame corporations” and “America is not a brute” has been replaced by the exact opposite talking points in Obama’s presidency.  “Recognizing, appreciating and considering diverse perspectives” has been replaced by a dogmatic “I won” mentality on every topic and approach.

What’s my point?

While I believe his core is that of a hard left ideologue, there have been times where Obama has at least, “talked” the game of a pragmatist.  I don’t know whether the “talk” was just that, “talk”, and he never was a pragmatist, or whether perhaps, he really did/does view his election and the corresponding sweep of Congress, as a mandate for a hard left transformation of the country and thus believed being an ideologue was what the people voted for.

If Obama took 2008 as a mandate, I suspect we will see some moderating of his hard left agenda.  I don’t think he’s going to recommend a reduction in taxes as a solution to our economic challenges.  However, it’s possible that some of the talk of extending the Bush tax cuts for a year could be just this kind of pragmatism coming to the fore.  On the other hand, if Obama is the ideologue he has portrayed in the first year of office, it will be a long three years.

If Obama continues to lead the nation believing that solutions come from the hard left, the results will be further increases in spending with little to no economic recovery.  If Obama continues as an ideologue, we will see damage done that could well cause the United States to cease being a world economic power.

That last sentence is a pretty sobering thought and not one that I wrote just as hyperbole.  The Obama presidency is at a cross roads.  If Obama recognizes that the American people are not with him, at least on his approach, and with a bit of humility leads the Democrats back to a plan that Independents support, he may yet have a chance to shape America.  If he doesn’t, any reshaping will result in long term damage to America.  While Obama regularly refers to “the last eight years,” if Obama doesn’t understand the implications of the Brown election, we may have Presidents for a generation referring to “the four years of Obama” as the cause for the problems they then face!

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