While Obama Seeks New Ideas, His Bureaucracy Stifles Them
by Byron York

Nearly a year ago, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and his healthcare policy team came up with a simple way to save the state’s Medicaid program a lot of money. Why not have Medicaid recipients and applicants handle their paperwork online? Using e-mail and a special website rather than paper, Herbert calculated, would save Utah about $6.3 million a year. “It seemed like a no-brainer to us,” says the governor.

The problem was, going paperless required a rules waiver from the Department of Health and Human Services. And that’s where the idea ran into a brick wall.

“We tried for eight months to get the waiver,” says Herbert. HHS delayed and delayed and delayed — and then finally said no. “The denial we got back from the secretary of HHS was by e-mail, of all things,” Herbert says, pausing a second for the listener to take it in. “The irony is rich.”

It might seem odd that a governor would need to become personally involved in the question of whether his state can use e-mail to deal with Medicaid recipients, but that’s what happened next. Still determined to go paperless — “I know in Washington it’s chump change, but for Utah, $6.3 million is real money” — Herbert traveled to the Nation’s Capital to meet Cindy Mann, director of HHS’ Center for Medicaid and State Operations. Mann and her staff were receptive, but then, a few weeks later, lower levels of HHS again held up the no-paper plan.

The bureaucratic runaround was on Herbert’s mind when he joined other governors in the White House State Dining Room in late February to hear President Obama pledge to help states burdened by skyrocketing healthcare costs.

Obama told the governors that he is always open to new ideas to improve the system. “I don’t believe that any single party has a monopoly on good ideas,” the president said. “And I will go to bat for whatever works, no matter who or where it comes from.”

After the event, Herbert approached Obama. “I said, ‘You know, we’ve been trying to get this waiver and go paperless,’” Herbert recounts. “He said, ‘That’s a great idea.’ And I said, ‘I think so, too, but we can’t seem to get HHS to give us the ability to do it.’”

At that moment, Obama spotted HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius nearby. “Kathleen, Kathleen — come over here,” he said, according to Herbert. When Sebelius came over, Obama explained what Herbert was trying to do.

A few hours later, Herbert received a handwritten note from the HHS secretary. “Just learned that we have worked with your staff, we have a draft agreement and we should have a formal agreement later today,” Sebelius wrote. Utah had finally won permission to go paperless.

Herbert is pleased, but a little baffled at why getting an ordinary waiver was so hard. “I appreciate the fact that they’ve come around after eight months, but does it take a governor having to talk to the president of the United States to make a simple cost-saving change?” he asks. “And the bigger question is why in heaven’s name do states have to ask for permission anyway?”

Herbert and other governors fear bigger problems ahead. New mandates in the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, will cost Utah $1.2 billion over the next decade, an increase Herbert calls unsustainable.

He’s still frustrated that Congress and the Obama administration didn’t pay much attention to governors during the Obamacare debate. “We were never even invited to the table,” he says. And he’s not impressed by the president’s promise to allow states to opt out of Obamacare, as long as they meet the administration’s requirements for coverage. “He’s saying, you can have flexibility, as long as you do it our way,” says Herbert.

But Herbert is happy the new Republican leadership of the House is paying more attention to the states. During his visit to Washington, Herbert, along with Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, urging that Congress allow the states more leeway in paying for health care. “Real healthcare reform will arise from the states, not be imposed by the federal government,” Herbert told the committee.

That seems unlikely, as long as it takes presidential intervention for the smallest improvements in the system. But Herbert is still hoping for the best.

Chicago on the Potomac
by Michelle Malkin

No matter how you rearrange President Obama’s inner circle, it still looks, smells and tastes like a rotten Chicago deep-dish pizza.

Ready for the latest topping on this moldy old pie? It’s a possible chief of staff slot for Wall Street banker/lawyer/wheeler-dealer William Daley, brother of outgoing Chicago mayor/machine politics mastermind Richard M. Daley (also the former boss of White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and first lady Michelle Obama), whose retirement paved the way for former Obama chief of staff and Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel. Phew.

The White House is reportedly looking to manufacture a “pro-business” aura with Bill Daley, who holds a “corporate responsibility” executive office at J.P. Morgan and once headed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the latter, a left-wing hate object and Obama punching bag leading up to the midterms.

But the Beltway-based Chamber of Commerce is too often a fair-weather statist lobbying organization. It supported the TARP all-purpose bailout, the auto bailout and the bottomless, pork-filled stimulus package, all of which have forcibly redistributed money from taxpayers and small businesses to politically connected special interests (including Daley’s J.P. Morgan, which was most recently swept up in a massive pay-to-play bond scheme in Alabama).

Daley has about as much real experience creating jobs as Da Boss now sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave — which is to say, less than a thimble full. (It’s a New Year. I’m being generous.) In 2009, the head of Chicago’s sanitation department implicated Daley in a hiring corruption scheme tied to his brother’s mayoral administration. The official was convicted; Daley shrugged off the federal probe. “Even if it happened — and I’m not saying it did — things were different. There was nothing illegal about that stuff.”

Instead of distancing himself from the favor-trading Wall Street fat cats who have earned the ire of both anti-bailout tea party activists and anti-corporate liberals, Obama remains wedded, embedded and indebted to the worst kind.

Daley has served on the board of government-sponsored financial behemoth Fannie Mae since 1993. Like the Richard Daley machine in Chicago, Fannie Mae in Washington has served as an industrial-sized patronage factory — sharing profits with political allies, spreading taxpayer funds to ethnic groups, and doling out jobs to left-wing academics, Washington has-beens and back-scratching buddies. Like Daley. And close Obama adviser Jim Johnson, the Fannie Mae exec who got sweetheart loans from shady subprime lender Countrywide.

While they raked in six-figure salaries, Fannie Mae and government-sponsored sibling Freddie Mac engaged in Enron-style accounting, plunged into debt and helped usher in the subprime housing meltdown through reckless lending practices.

Bill Clinton, the man who appointed Daley to the Fannie Mae board, also appointed Emanuel to the Freddie Mac board of directors at a time when its oversight manager called the quasi-governmental agency “so pliant” that it enabled rampant book-cooking. Freddie Mac’s stock skyrocketed; its CEOs helped themselves to massive bonuses. Emanuel’s hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune, exposed how Emanuel’s “profitable stint” during this corruption-plagued period entailed almost no work:

The board met no more than six times a year. Unlike most fellow directors, Emanuel was not assigned to any of the board’s working committees, according to company proxy statements. Immediately upon joining the board, Emanuel and other new directors qualified for $380,000 in stock and options plus a $20,000 annual fee, records indicate.

On Emanuel’s watch, executives told the board of a plan to use accounting tricks to mislead shareholders about outsize profits the government-chartered firm was then reaping from risky investments. The goal was to push earnings onto the books in future years, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable on paper for years to come and helping maximize annual bonuses for company brass.

And now the torch may be passed in an endless Windy City circle, from Daley to Emanuel, from Emanuel to Daley, with Obama. ‘Round and ’round it goes in Chicago on the Potomac. Remember: When Crony State corruptocrats brag about “job creation,” the only jobs they’ve ever created are each other’s.

Charlie Rangel Is a Symptom of a Bigger Problem
by Star Parker

Charlie Rangel, convicted of eleven ethics violations – the most ever found against any member of Congress – was resoundingly re-elected, getting 80% of his district’s vote.

After 40 years representing these folks, you can’t conclude he was an unknown commodity. Granted, the conviction occurred after the election, but the charges were well publicized.

Has Charlie Rangel’s leadership produced life so grand in Harlem that flagrant and persistent unethical behavior by their Congressman means nothing to its residents?

The national poverty rate is around 14%. In the 15th district of New York, Charlie Rangel’s district, it’s 24.3%. The child poverty rate is 30.9%.

Whatever it is that Harlem voters find so attractive about Mr. Rangel, it’s hard to conclude that quality of life is something they feel they owe to him.

But let’s think about this in a broader context.

Charlie Rangel is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

There are now 41 House members who belong to the Caucus. In the most recent elections, 37 of them ran as incumbents and all regained their seats handily. The four seats that were vacated were easily captured by new black Democrats.

That’s a 100% return rate. These Black Caucus Democrats recaptured their seats getting an average 75% of their district’s vote.

In a year when 62 Democrats were defeated – a 25% reduction in the bloc of 252 Democrats in the current Congress – the reduction of the bloc of 41 black Democrats was zero.

The average poverty rate in the districts of Congressional Black Caucus members is 20.3% – six points higher than the national average. The average child poverty rate in these districts is 28.8%.

So, as in Charlie Rangel’s case, it’s hard to conclude that these Black Caucus Democrats are being sent back to Washington by large voting margins, year after year, because they are delivering such fine lives to their constituents.

A problem here is that elections in Black Caucus districts are not exactly what might be described as free and open.

About three quarters of these districts are Majority Minority districts, hard wired to guarantee election of blacks. The remaining districts are also gerrymandered through various schemes flowing from collusion of political parties and state legislatures.

The initial provision of the Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, to deal with voting problems was structured to counter schemes going on in the South – literacy tests, etc – rigged to keep blacks from registering and voting.

But by the 1970’s, this provision morphed into district gerrymandering. What was initially meant to protect the voting rights of blacks evolved into provisions to guarantee the election of blacks.

The result of this overall process is a bloc of politically manipulated districts which, coupled with other institutional biases protecting incumbents, virtually guarantees the election of black Democrats.

You might say that rigged elections might be justified if it meant better lives for black constituents.

But given that these districts are largely characterized by persistent poverty and some of the worst public schools in the country, this is a conclusion that’s hard to reach.

Earlier this year, the New York Times profiled the prodigious money raising prowess and dubious ethics of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. The Times editorialized, “Of all the money machines shaving ethical corners, few rival the Congressional Black Caucus…..the caucus spends far more on gala entertainments and golf outings than on the scholarships that billboard its charity drives.”

Political markets are like commercial markets. The absence of competition results in shoddy products.

When we send American soldiers into harm’s way abroad to fight for free elections, perhaps we should spend more time considering the quality of our own democracy at home.

Call Me Madam Joe from RightChange on Vimeo.

Wow. Just Wow. Could The Wave Grow Larger Still?
by Hugh Hewitt

I was talking to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza on my radio show Wednesday when the story broke that Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann had raised $5.4 million dollars in campaign contributions in the third quarter of 2010. Cillizza took in a deep and very audible breath, as did I. It is an astonishing amount of money for a single Congressional candidate to raise.

A day earlier the GOP Senate nominee in Nevada, Sharron Angle, had announced that in the same period she had raised $14 million dollars!

I asked Cillizza what these sort of totals meant, and he stated the obvious fact: The intensity and breadth of the grassroots opposition to the president, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid is difficult to overstate. These contribution totals are the best evidence of the country’s mood. This isn’t just about an intention to vote or an opinion given to a pollster, Cillizza noted, it is about a deep passion that is opening pocketbooks in a way that has never been seen before.

Democrats are of course praying that the surge to the right breaks before 11/2 and begins to recede, but as every day goes by the evidence of a growing wave accumulates. Whatever the president and Joe Biden might have done to stop the Republican trend, they instead chose to launch a foolish and instantly dismissed attack on Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie as a sort of pair of Sith lords of the campaign finance world. Even Democratic pundits were left scratching their heads and wondering what madness had overcome the “brains” behind the Democratic campaign.

The fecklessness of the president’s campaign rhetoric combines with the near invisibility of Democratic candidates at public events from coast-to-coast to reinforce the electorate’s emerging collective decision to make a major change in Washington, D.C. When no Democrats are willing to defend Obamacare it is very hard for the public to do other than conclude that a giant mistake was made when Obamacare was jammed down the throat of the country.

And when the president himself admits to the New York Times, as he does in this Sunday’s edition, that “There’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects,” he is confessing to a naivete that is as surprising as it is frightening. This admission of error by the president undermines the last claims of the Democrats to effectiveness via the so-called “stimulus.” It is so stunning a concession that most of the Beltway press is still staggering backwards trying to spin the president’s own words.

Less than three weeks to the vote and the Republican grassroots are pouring on the money and the energy, the Democratic candidates are in hiding, and the president is apologizing for his wrong-headed belief in the efficacy of the so-called stimulus.

There is no reason to believe that trends will not continue, and perhaps they may even accelerate. The country wants a U-turn, and even the base of the Democratic Party has got to be wondering if that isn’t the best thing for their directionless, poorly-led party as well. When no one, from the president to the speaker to Harry Reid and lefty Beltway pundits can come up with a persuasive argument to vote Democratic, then it is time to give up and give way.

Four Causes that Will Lead to a Democratic Election Nightmare
by Fred Barnes

The four causes of what’s likely to be a landslide defeat for Democrats in the midterm election are now locked in place. All that’s left for Democrats in the final three weeks of the campaign is to trash Republicans, stir their base to vote, and pray.

The last cause of the Democratic downslide to be cooked in the election cake was the economy. The Labor Department last week reported the jobs picture for September: 95,000 jobs lost and the unemployment rate mired at 9.6 percent.

These gloomy numbers are important because there won’t be another jobs report until after November 2. So any hope by Democrats for a dramatic uptick in employment – or even a small increase – before Election Day is gone. They’re stuck with the ultimate albatross in politics – a bad economy.

Two of the other causes – liberal overreach and disappointment with President Obama – began to surface last year. By early 2010, they had become overriding issues in the campaign. Now they’re such a drag that Democratic candidates would rather not talk about them.

Liberal overreach is an old problem for Democrats when they take control of both the White House and Capitol Hill, as they did in 2008. Their no-holds-barred pursuit of a liberal agenda tends to turn off the electorate, a majority of whom fit into the center-right category. A midterm backlash occurred in 1966 and 1994, and to a lesser extent in 1978.

This year, the $862 billion stimulus, the cap-and-trade climate bill (passed by the House), health care, a thicket of new regulations, and unchecked spending constitute the overreach. The trillion dollar deficits and a projected tripling of the national debt have made matters still worse for Democrats.

And the bursting of the Obama balloon has created a critical mass of voters who swooned over Obama when he was a candidate but have been deeply disappointed by his performance as president. Many are independents who have flipped and become likely Republican voters this year.

Obama’s promise to end polarization in Washington, pursue bipartisanship, and change the way business is done in the nation’s capital had appealed to these voters. His failure to deliver on any of the three has added fuel to their migration to Republicans.

The fourth cause is one Democrats couldn’t do anything about – or not much anyway. That’s the historical tendency of the party that doesn’t hold the White House to gain in the first midterm election after a new president is inaugurated. There have only been two exceptions, 1934 and 2002.

At one point, Democrats thought they might escape the midterm curse or at least mitigate its impact. When the economic recovery proved to be painfully weak and both Obama and his policies lost favor, that dream died. What’s ahead now for Democrats is a nightmare.

Liberal Crackup
by Walter E. Williams

Charles Krauthammer, in his Washington Post column (8/27/10), said, “Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed,” pointing out that overwhelming majorities of Americans have repudiated liberal agenda items such as: Obamacare, Obama’s stimulus, building an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero, redefinition of marriage to include same-sex marriage, lax immigration law enforcement and vast expansion of federal power that includes unprecedented debt and deficits.

The nation’s elite and the news media see being against the Obama-led agenda as being racist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, mean-spirited and insensitive. Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times, has a different twist expressed in “It’s Witch-Hunt Season” (8/29/10). Krugman says that the last time a Democrat sat in the White House, Bill Clinton, he faced a witch-hunt by his political opponents. “Now,” Krugman says, “it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse,” asking, “So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?”

Professor Krugman and others among America’s elite blame some of the rage on talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. They are only partially correct. What talk shows have accomplished is they’ve ended the isolation of many ordinary Americans. When the liberal mainstream media dominated the airwaves, Americans who were against race and sex quotas were made to feel as though they were racists and sexists. Americans who were against big government were portrayed as mean-spirited and uncaring. What talk radio and the massive expansion in non-traditional media have done is not only end the isolation, but more important, the silence amongst ordinary Americans.

Krugman says that what we’re witnessing is “political craziness.” Therefore, the overwhelming majority of Americans who think our borders ought to be secure and think we should have the right to determine who enters our country are politically crazy. Americans who can find nothing in the U.S. Constitution granting Congress the power to take over our health care system are politically crazy. Americans who think a mosque should not be built in the shadows of the Muslim-destroyed World Trade Center are simply religious bigots. By the way, those who oppose the building are not saying there’s no legal or constitutional right to do so any more than they would say a person has no legal or constitutional right to curse his parents, but neither is a good idea. In Thomas Sowell’s column on the topic (8/31/10), he reminds us that “If we all did everything that we have a legal right to do, we could not even survive as individuals, much less as a society.”

Krugman predicts that political craziness, and by inference crazy Americans, will result in a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and play chicken with the federal budget. Chicken with the budget is precisely what Defundit.org has called for. Already they’ve obtained the pledges of 165 congressional candidates not to fund any part of Obamacare.

While America’s liberal elite have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision and, as such, differ only in degree but not kind. Both denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are for control and coercion by the state. They believe they have superior wisdom to the masses and they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. They, like any other tyrant, have what they see as good reasons for restricting the freedom of others.

Their agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Free markets imply voluntary exchange. Tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrants think they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning control and regulation.

Why liberalism has become an ugly sight, as Krauthammer claims, is because more and more Americans have wised up to their agenda.

An Epic Dem Disaster
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

The magnitude of the catastrophe facing the Democratic Party in the fall elections is only gradually becoming clear to the leaders of both parties. The Democrats will lose both the Senate and the House. They will lose more House seats in 2010 than the 54 they lost in 1994, and they will lose the Senate, possibly with some seats to spare.

In state after state, the races that were once marginal are now solidly Republican, those that were possible takeaways are now likely GOP wins, and the impossible seats are now fully in play.

Colorado offers a good example. Betsey Markey was supposed to be a marginal new Democratic member. But Cory Gardner, her Republican opponent, is now more than 20 points ahead. John Salazar, the brother of the interior secretary and a well-established Democratic incumbent in a largely Republican district, is now almost 10 points behind his GOP challenger Scott Tipton. And Ed Perlmutter, a solidly entrenched Democrat in a supposedly nearly safe district, is running 1 point behind his GOP opponent, the unusually articulate Ryan Frazier (a black Republican with Obama-esque charisma). The Republicans will probably win all three seats.

Or take Arkansas. Blanche Lincoln is clinically dead, trailing John Boozman 65-27 in the latest Rasmussen poll. In the race that was supposed to be close for the open seat in AR-2, Republican Tim Griffin is massacring Democrat Joyce Elliott by 52-35. In the race that was thought to be a likely Democratic win — AR-1, the East Arkansas district — Republican Rick Crawford is running seven points ahead of Democrat Chad Causey. And, in the district that was considered a safe Democratic seat, the home of Blue Dog leader Mike Ross, Republican Beth Anne Rankin is showing surprising strength and may topple her opponent.

In the Senate, Republicans are solidly ahead in Delaware, North Dakota, Indiana and Arkansas. They have good leads in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Washington. The Democratic incumbents are perpetually below 50 and basically tied with their Republican challengers in Nevada, California and Wisconsin. Illinois is tied. Connecticut and New York (after the primary) are in play. That’s a gain of up to 13 seats!

And, then consider West Virginia, where the hugely popular Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin — who boasts of a 70 percent job approval rating — looked like the certain successor to Robert Byrd. But, in the latest Rasmussen poll, he leads Republican challenger John Raese by only 48 to 41. When 22 percent of the state likes the job you are doing as governor but doesn’t want to vote for you for senator, you are in deep, deep trouble. That’s 14!

Why the disaster? Obama’s poll numbers alone don’t account for it. With a job approval in the low 40s, he is not as radioactive as Bush was. He still has a ways to fall to reach those depths. So why the unbelievable wipeout in the congressional races?

Obama has a lot to do with it. But so does Congress itself. With congressional approval at 23 percent in the realclearpolitics.com average, the Democrats in the House and Senate have contributed mightily to their own demise. The Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters investigations and the impending decision to let each keep his and her seat does a lot to undermine Congress’ image. So did the deals surrounding health care reform, as the public watched sausage being made in Washington. The spectacle of Congress voting on bills the members have not read adds to public discontent.

In most off-year cycles, it is the president’s party that is judged in the voting. But, this year, Congress has been in the forefront of most of the legislation — up to actually writing the stimulus and health care bills — that the body itself is attracting its own negatives. Republican insurgents’ success in derailing incumbent senators in Alaska and Utah attest to the bipartisan nature of the disaffection.

But, for whatever reason, the only mistake either party can make as 2010 approaches is to aim too low. It is not the marginal seats that are in play, it is the safe ones!

The Left Loses Its Way by Abandoning ‘Third Way’
by Michael Barone

Left parties are in trouble in the Anglosphere. Here in America, Democrats are doing worse in the polls than at any time in the last 50 years. In Britain, the Labor Party is on the brink of finishing third, behind both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, in the election next Thursday.

All of which raises the question: What happened to the “third way” center-left movement that once seemed to sweep all before it?

Only a dozen years ago, in 1998, President Bill Clinton enjoyed 70 percent job approval. Prime Minister Tony Blair was basking in adulation in his first full year in office.

Clinton “third way” New Democrats and Blair’s “New Labor” party seemed to have a bright and long future ahead. Clinton’s designated successor, Al Gore, despite some ham-handed campaigning, came out ahead in the popular vote in 2000 and lost the presidency by only some hundreds of votes in Florida. With Blair at its head, Labor won unprecedented re-election victories in 2001 and 2005.

Now, less than a generation later, both New Democrats and New Labour seem defunct.

Both parties have moved well to the left. Barack Obama and Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, head governments that are running budget deficits of 10 percent of gross domestic product. Both are promoting higher taxes and expansion of government programs.

The financial crisis is one reason for the large deficits. But it is undeniable that to varying extents both Obama and Brown have pursued more statist policies than their predecessors did a dozen years ago.

And it is undeniable, too, that both are in trouble with the voters.

In these circumstances, it is surprising that the pundit class is not chiding Obama and Brown for abandoning the politically successful policies of Clinton and Blair. The same pundit class is always ready to chide American Republicans and British Conservatives for not pursuing the courses that Rockefeller Republicans and pre-Thatcher “wet” Conservatives pursued with some political success a much longer time ago.

Rocky and the wets supported a continuing expansion of government and maintaining the power of labor unions. But a British party last won an election on that platform in 1974, 36 years ago, and no American president has been elected on such a platform between 1964 and 2008. And with Democrats plunging in the polls, Obama’s election is beginning to look like an exception that proves the rule.

Americans may have voted for “hope and change,” but not in the form of the 2009 stimulus package and the 2010 health care bill.

Looking back in history, the Rockefeller Republicans chose their course because they believed their party could not beat New Deal Democrats except by moving some distance toward their philosophy. And in particular, they believed they could not beat Democrats in New York, which in the first half of the 20th century was both the nation’s largest state and one of the politically most marginal.

But by the early 1960s, New York was no longer the nation’s largest state and was safely Democratic. And by the early 1970s, Americans were no longer voting for big government. The Rockefeller strategy was rendered obsolete.

It’s not clear that the Clinton New Democratic strategy is similarly obsolete. Clinton calculated that Democrats could not win except by making inroads in the South and by making big gains in the suburbs. That’s how he won twice, and Obama improved on his leads in the suburbs and carried three Southern states with Northern-accented suburbs (Virginia, North Carolina and Florida).

But Obama ran well behind in eight Southern-accented and Mountain states that Clinton carried in 1992. And polling now shows Democrats weaker than Obama was in 2008 virtually everywhere except in university towns and the affluent precincts of metro New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Similarly, in Britain polling has shown Brown’s Labor party holding its traditional redoubts in declining industrial towns but getting shellacked in the affluent suburbs where Tony Blair’s New Labor thrived.

The left parties have reacted to their unpopularity by playing the race card. Democrats have tried to portray tea partiers as racist, and Brown called a lifelong Labor voter who questioned his policies a “bigoted woman.”

Blaming the voters is the last resort of a party in trouble. Old Labor and the Obama Democrats may not yet be finished. But they’re not doing as well as their “third way” predecessors.

Defining the conservative versus liberal divide
by Star Parker

Now that President Obama is getting ready to make his second Supreme Court nomination, the usual banter is taking place about the court and judicial philosophy.

The Supreme Court, of course, profoundly influences the character of our country.

Although, for instance, many look back on the policies of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal programs as the beginning of the real growth of the American welfare state, it is really key Supreme Court decisions during that time that enabled all of this. Court decisions changing the interpretation of “general welfare”, interstate commerce, and the authority of the federal government to tax changed the game and opened a new era of big government.

At the beginning of the 1930’s, the federal government’s take of national GDP was a little over ten percent. By the mid-1940’s it was over twenty percent, and the trend has been only upward since.

Although much of the discussion about judicial philosophy contrasts how conservative and liberal judges relate to the constitution, I think the real key to conservative and liberal divergence is the world view these judges already have when they sit down to interpret the constitution.

The statement of vision defining American values appears in the Declaration of Independence. Understanding that vision is where I think the most fundamental conservative versus liberal divide exists.

Consider how President Obama relates to the Constitution, as he wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope – “Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth….”

Our president is a moral relativist. So we may expect that he doesn’t take very seriously the idea, as state in the Declaration of Independence, that there are absolutes. That we have God given rights that precede government and that the job of government is to secure them.

Rather than seeing government’s job as securing our rights, the liberal sees it to invent them. The politician – or the empathetic judge – defines what is moral and just.

There’s a lot of speculation about what is driving the tea party movement and why, as reflected in the latest survey by the Pew Research Foundation, Americans’ trust in government is at an all time low.

I think most fundamentally it’s discomfort with this moral relativism that is driving the pervasive unrest.

The whole unique idea of American government – the idea of human liberty – was that there are absolute truths and that individual citizens can and must be protected from arbitrary rulers – whether it is a king or a political class with arbitrary powers.

President Obama said the other day regarding the kind of court nominee he will seek, “…I want somebody who is going to be interpreting our Constitution in a way that takes into account individual rights…”

What in the world can this possibly mean from our president who has just signed into law a health care bill which will force every single American citizen to buy a government defined health care insurance policy? A health care bill that opens the door to unprecedented government control over how private individuals manage their health care and the most private decisions they make over their own lives.

Or what can it possibly mean coming from our president who opposed the Supreme Court’s decision a few years ago banning partial birth abortion – which is pure and simple torture and murder of a live infant?

The real differences over liberal and conservative judges is most fundamentally about the world in which Americans will live. Whether we live and will live in a nation in which there are absolute truths or one in which we are at the hands of political arbitrariness in which our lives and property are up for grabs.

Our country is being governed today by those with the latter view of the world and, fortunately, more and more Americans are deeply concerned.

John Murtha: Requiem for a Corruptocrat
by Michelle Malkin

We are not supposed to speak ill of the dead. But those whom the deceased viciously smeared and humiliated deserve to be defended. Entrenched Democratic Rep. John Murtha passed away on Feb. 8 after a botched gallbladder surgery. He has been hailed as a “military advocate” (Associated Press) and “one of the greatest patriots ever to serve in Congress” (former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr.). These obsequious obituaries leave out inconvenient truths:

John “Jack” Murtha was an unrepentant smear merchant and corruptocrat to the bitter end.

In May 2006, during an MSNBC TV show appearance that Marines and their families will never forget or forgive, Murtha accused U.S. troops of wantonly killing some two dozen civilians, including children, in the terrorist stronghold of Haditha, Iraq. Bellowed Murtha: “Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” Murtha publicly indicted the Marines before military investigations had been completed. His remarks opened military-bashing floodgates around the world.

In the wake of Murtha’s reckless blabbing, MSNBC executioner Keith Olbermann accused the Haditha Marines of “willful targeted brutality.” The Nation magazine claimed that “members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment perpetrated a massacre.” The New York Times dubbed Haditha the “defining atrocity” of the Iraq war. International papers piled on with Vietnam-era “My Lai” allusions. Murtha cold-bloodedly sat back and enjoyed the ride while the Marines were left twisting in the wind.

By 2008, seven of the Marines charged in the incident had been exonerated or had charges against them dropped. Lt. Andrew Grayson was acquitted. Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, Capt. Lucas McConnell, Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz and Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani all had their cases dismissed. Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the last of the Marines facing charges, awaits a long, dragged-out trial this year.

Murtha, the so-called “military advocate,” went to his deathbed refusing to apologize or retract the attacks on the Haditha Marines (several of whom unsuccessfully sued him for libel to restore their honor). Decent people would call this intransigent treachery. Murtha’s friends apparently consider it great patriotism.

The ego-bloated, big-mouthed lawmaker treated his own constituents with trademark contempt. During his last congressional campaign, he mocked voters in his district as bigots. “There’s no question that western Pennsylvania is a racist area,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Responding to mounting criticism on both sides of the aisle about his logrolling orgies on the Hill, he sniffed: “If I’m corrupt, it’s because I take care of my district.”

First, foremost and forever, Jack Murtha took care of Jack Murtha. The glowing encomiums from his liberal colleagues have glossed over the 19-term Democrat’s defining moment of political self-service. In 1980, Murtha was an unindicted co-conspirator in a massive bribery probe — in which undercover FBI agents videotaped Murtha entertaining a $50,000 bribe from agents posing as emissaries for Arab sheiks trying to enter our country illegally. From transcripts of those conversations published by the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson, Murtha’s true colors shined:

“I want to deal with you guys awhile before I make any transactions at all, period. … After we’ve done some business, well, then I might change my mind. …”

“I’m going to tell you this. If anybody can do it — I’m not B.S.-ing you fellows — I can get it done my way,” he boasted. “There’s no question about it.”

Murtha worried not about his integrity or how his constituents might be harmed, but about getting ratted out:

“All at once,” he said, “some dumb (expletive deleted) would go start talking eight years from now about this whole thing and say (expletive deleted), this happened. Then in order to get immunity so he doesn’t go to jail, he starts talking and fingering people. So the (S.O.B.) falls apart.”

“You give us the banks where you want the money deposited,” offered one of the bagmen.

“All right,” agreed Murtha. “How much money we talking about?”

“Well, you tell me.”

By the time of his death, Murtha had been caught intervening on behalf of a law-breaking Pennsylvania company convicted of selling military equipment parts illegally overseas; had steered unprecedented billions in federal earmarks to friends, family and donors; had earned multiple “most corrupt in Congress” designations from both the left-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the right-leaning Judicial Watch; and had remained intimately tied to PMA Group, a former lobbying firm under federal investigation, and Kuchera Industries, a defense contractor also under federal investigation.

From his character assassination of innocents to his insatiable appetite for pork and power, Jack Murtha embodied everything that is wrong with Washington. If only the culture of corruption he serviced could be buried six feet under with him.

Seven Huge Flaws in the Way Liberals Think
by John Hawkins

1) Liberals believe they can change human nature. Sure, human beings can be shaped and molded to a certain extent. Any parent who has spanked a child can tell you that. However, most people care more about what they’re having for lunch today than an earthquake that kills ten thousand people on the other side of the world. We’re just built that way and no amount of sensitivity training, preschool classes, or Michael Moore documentaries is going to “fix” it.

2) Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies. One of the weirder quirks of liberalism is their belief that many of our bitterest enemies have rational reasons for disliking us and that can easily be talked away if they realize we’re good people. Hence, the common liberal refrain of, “Why do they hate us?” The reason this is a particularly odd belief is that liberals don’t even believe this about conservatives in the United States. The average liberal thinks that if we’re nice enough, we can reach an understanding with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can’t be reasoned with.

3) Liberals don’t have enough respect for our culture and traditions: To liberals, our cultural, economic, and political norms were formed by backwards troglodytes making arbitrary decisions based on superstition and racism. Unfortunately for them, as a general rule, that’s not so and proceeding as if it is, will often lead to exactly the same difficulties that our ancestors already dealt with in times past. No matter how smart we are, as Thomas Sowell would say, our wisdom is often no match for the “distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.” Truly wise people are aware that there is a great deal that they do not know.

4) Liberalism is a fundamentally immoral political philosophy. Ironically, given all their talk about “shades of gray,” liberals have a very Manichean view of the world. They consider their fellow travelers to be on the side of the angels, while the people who disagree with them are treated as evil. This leads to an “anything goes” mentality when dealing with their foes: ignoring the law via a “living constitution,” politically based prosecutions, shouting down opposing speakers, and treating lying about their agenda or opponents to be moral. On the other hand, liberals will support other libs, no matter how corrupt, sleazy, or vile they are as long as they’re politically useful to the left. See Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, John Murtha, and Robert Byrd for examples of that. In other words, as Margaret Thatcher has said of the Left, “For them, the end always seems to justify the means.”

5) Liberals believe merely being liberal makes them good people. Liberals who’re obsessed with money think they’re compassionate because they give away other people’s tax dollars. They believe they care more about the earth than other people, even as they fly around in private jets, because they babble on about global warming. They can be dumb as a rock, but believe they’re smarter than most other people because they’re liberals. In other words, in the minds of most liberals, liberalism is an all-purpose substitute for actual virtue instead of just another political philosophy.

6) Liberals have too much faith in government. Even most liberals would admit that government regularly fails the people. If you don’t believe that, just ask them about the Bush Administration and they’ll give you an earful. However, liberals tend to believe that with the right person in charge, government won’t be so slow, stupid, inefficient, and badly run. Human history proves that they’re wrong about that.

7) Liberals have minimal interest in whether the programs they support work or not. To most liberals, whether a government program betters people’s lives is completely irrelevant to whether they’ll support it. A program that doesn’t work and costs billions, but sounds compassionate and helps Democrats politically is a huge success in the eyes of the Left. Once you understand that liberals think this way, their baffling support for programs that make no “common sense” is much easier to understand.

Dems’ Lock on Senate Is Mixed Blessing for Obama
by Michael Barone

Year One of the Obama administration ends Wednesday. Another era may come to an end the day before, when Massachusetts voters — or at least those of them motivated enough to vote — choose a senator to fill the three years remaining in the term of Edward Kennedy, who held the seat for 47 years.

If Republican Scott Brown wins that election — and at this writing he seems to have an excellent chance to do so — that election will mean the end, after just seven months, of the Democrats’ 60-seat supermajority in the Senate.

That era began in July when Al Franken was seated after protracted litigation over the result in an election in which both he and incumbent Republican Norm Coleman got an underwhelming 42 percent of the votes. And Franken was the 60th Democrat only because in the preceding April Arlen Specter, in his 29th year in the Senate and facing defeat in the Republican primary, switched parties for the second time in his political career.

And if you want to go back a little further, Democrats owed their 60 seats to the victories in 2006 of Jon Tester by 3,562 votes in Montana and Jim Webb by 9,329 votes in Virginia. In the 435 House races each year, close races tend to be split evenly between the parties. But in the 30-some Senate races in each cycle, a very small number of votes can make a huge difference in the balance of power in that chamber.

So the Democrats’ 60-vote supermajority was the result of a series of happy (or unhappy, depending on your point of view) accidents. The same was true of the 55-45 majority Republicans held just three years ago.

The very real possibility that the Democrats may lose their 60th seat — and in Massachusetts, the only state George McGovern carried in 1972 — suggests that it was perhaps not such a happy accident for them in the end.

Barack Obama got 62 percent of the vote in Massachusetts in 2008, his eighth best in any state. His percentage was lower in 42 other states. With the Massachusetts seat in jeopardy, no Senate seat in those 42 states can be considered utterly safe for Democrats in today’s climate of opinion.

That climate might have been different if Democrats had never gotten that 60th seat. In that case, they would have had to bargain with Republicans to pass a health care bill and might even have proceeded on the genuine bipartisan approach that Obama promised in his campaign.

We might have been spared the spectacle of the Louisiana purchase ($300 million for Mary Landrieu’s vote) and the Cornhusker hustle (Ben Nelson got Nebraska exempted from Medicaid increases). Or at least the onus of such spectacles would fall on Republicans as well as Democrats.

But with 60 seats, the Democratic leadership took the partisan path and the Obama White House supinely went along. They ignored the abundant evidence that their government-directed health care bills were increasingly opposed by most voters.

The 60th seat was a temptation, and like Oscar Wilde, the Democrats were able to resist anything except temptation.

Barack Obama has acknowledged that the Democrats’ health care legislation is unpopular. He says the public will come to like it when it goes into effect (although some taxes kick in before the supposed benefits). Other Democrats say that once they pass it they can then persuade voters it’s a good idea, as if they haven’t been trying to do that for most of a year and conspicuously failing.

But their health care bill is not going to be passed if Brown is elected. Some Democrats are talking about delaying his swearing in and passing a bill in the meantime. Doing that in open defiance of the clearly expressed views of (Massachusetts!) voters would touch off a political firestorm unlike any we’ve seen since Richard Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Democrats up for re-election like Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln should understand that and not go along.

Obama was supposed to be a great persuader. It turns out that’s only half true. He did persuade most of us that he should be president. But in Year One, he has failed to persuade most of us to support his major proposals. He’s even moved us in the other direction. That’s clear, whatever happens in Massachusetts.

Nanny State Gone Wild: Defining Dependency Up
by Michelle Malkin

The greatest gifts you can give your children can’t be boxed and bowed. Consider the timeless gift of self-sufficiency — a stubborn thirst to leave the nest, make it on your own and live as a free-willed adult. It’s a concept that Big Nanny Democrats are sabotaging at every legislative turn.

Several times during the sneaky debate on the government health care takeover bill this past Sunday, Democrats hailed a provision requiring insurance plans that cover dependents to provide benefits to children up to age 26. Democratic Sens. Ben Cardin and Tom Harkin both specifically championed the unfunded mandate in their floor statements.

This manifestation of the Nanny State is especially galling given the massive levels of generational theft the Democratic majority has presided over this past year. If they truly cared about the physical and financial well-being of young Americans, they’d stop piling on expensive regulations that simply put affordable health insurance out of their reach.

I propose a new symbol for the Democrats. Out: donkey. In: a giant adult pacifier.

I can tell you what most fiscally responsible parents are thinking when they hear the feds “taking care” of everyone else’s adult “children” by confiscating their tax dollars and forcing private companies to comply: You’ve got to be kidding me. Yes, Virginia, there are still some of us left who believe our children shouldn’t depend on a government-manufactured umbilical cord as they approach their third decade on earth.

Nonetheless, there are now an estimated 20 states that have already passed legislation requiring insurers to cover adult children. The slacker mandates cover “kids” ranging in age from 24 to 31. And it’s these government health care mandates that are driving up the cost of insurance.

Health policy researcher Nathan Benefield of the Commonwealth Foundation reported that in New Jersey, Nanny State peddlers claimed the adult kiddie protection law would help 100,000 uninsured young adults. “Yet in two years, only 6 percent of that estimate has been realized. The primary reason — health insurance is still too expensive.”

Wisconsin has experienced similar results. “Whenever you insure somebody whom you didn’t insure before there’s some additional risk,” insurance expert James Mueller told the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal. Mueller points to the premium increases that have followed coverage mandates on employer-sponsored plans. “The problem with all these good ideas is there’s funding necessary,” Mueller said. In Wisconsin, not only are adult children covered, but also the children of those “children” if they live in single-parent homes.

As he rammed through this mandate and the mountain of other government regulations buried in Demcare, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised on Sunday: “We are reshaping the nation. That’s what we want to do.”

Indeed, this defining dependency up phenomenon is part of the larger push for single-payer-by-proxy. The other universal health care Trojan horse signed into law this year — the expansion of SCHIP (the State Children’s Health Insurance Program) — welcomed more non-”children” into the government insurance fold.

Both political parties have advocated federal waivers to use SCHIP funds for adults, including parents of Medicaid/SCHIP children, caretaker relatives, legal guardians and childless adults. According to the General Accounting Office, SCHIP-funded expenditures on adults nationwide “totaled about $674 million in 2006.” J.P. Wieske of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance notes that the bennies provide an incentive for parents to drop their private coverage in order to take advantage of free or discounted health insurance for their children. “It has become a program for the middle class at the expense of the poor.”

This is the engine that will power the Demcare architects’ most naked, radical ambitions: “Health care as an inalienable right,” as Sen. Harkin put it. How? By breeding a massive permanent culture of dependency and bottomless debt in the name of the “children” from birth through quarter-life — and beyond.

Stumbling Governors Signal Trouble for Dems
by Michael Barone

With polls showing a drop in Barack Obama’s job rating and sinking support for the Democrats’ health care plans, there is evidence of collateral damage where you might not expect to find it: in the standing of Democratic governors. Pennsylvania’s Ed Rendell suddenly is getting negative job ratings in both the Quinnipiac University and the Franklin & Marshall College polls — his lowest marks in seven years as governor. Ohio’s Ted Strickland, who has spent most of his first term working amicably with Republican legislators, scores less than 50 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll and has only tenuous leads over two Republicans, John Kasich and Mike DeWine, who may run against him next year.

In the two gubernatorial races being contested this year, Republicans seem to have advantages. In Virginia, Republican Bob McDonnell has led Democrat Creigh Deeds in all but one poll and picked up the support of Black Entertainment Television billionaire Sheila Johnson, one of the biggest contributors to the incumbent, Democratic National Chairman Tim Kaine. New Jersey incumbent Jon Corzine, who spent more than $100 million on narrow wins for senator in 2000 and governor in 2005, is 15 points behind Republican Chris Christie. Corzine will not be helped by the indictment of multiple Jersey pols, most of them Democrats, in a case initiated by Christie when he was a U.S. attorney.

There’s an argument that these results hold little relevance to the standing of the national parties. Almost every state faces severe fiscal problems, and standoffs between a governor and a legislature can drag the governor’s ratings way down, as in the case of California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. Moreover, a governor’s personal strengths and weaknesses can override party identification; one of the nation’s highest-rated governors is Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat in very Republican Wyoming.

Even so, these numbers should be troubling for Democrats. Rendell and Strickland are attractive personalities with some penchant for centrist policies. Both were suggested as possible running mates for Barack Obama. (Both sensibly swatted away those suggestions.) Corzine is running in a state that, with a rising immigrant population and an outflow of affluent residents, has been solidly Democratic for a dozen years. Altogether, these states have 69 electoral votes, and Obama won all four by comfortable margins last November.

Democratic governors in other important states also have been getting low marks from voters. North Carolina’s freshly elected Bev Perdue has only 26 percent of voters willing to re-elect her. Colorado’s Bill Ritter, Washington’s Christine Gregoire, Oregon’s Ted Kulongoski, Wisconsin’s Jim Doyle, Massachusetts’ Deval Patrick and Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm have been getting sub-majority voter approval most of the year.

These governors are mostly able and attractive people, and every one of their states voted for Obama. None of them is tarred by scandal or not up to the job, as seems to be the case with the nation’s lowest-rated governors, Nevada Republican Jim Gibbons and New York Democrat David Paterson.

I take all this as evidence — not conclusive evidence, but significant evidence — for the proposition that economic distress does not predispose voters to favor bigger government. Not all the reasons for these governors’ negative job ratings arise from debates over the size of government, but many do — and voters clearly are not hankering for more government.

When you put these results together with Obama’s slide in the polls, they suggest trouble for big-government Democrats. Pollster Scott Rasmussen now shows Obama with only 49 percent job approval; when he asked voters which party they’d like to represent them in the House, Republicans came out ahead of Democrats.

Some analysts will point out that Rasmussen’s results tend to be more negative for Democrats than those of other pollsters. That’s because, as Rasmussen explains, he uses a likely-voter formula that tends to assume that first-time voters in November 2008 will not turn out in force in 2009 or 2010.

That seems to have been the case so far in most 2009 special elections and primaries. In off-year elections without Obama on the ballot, it seems unlikely that young blacks will turn out in larger proportions than young whites, as the Census Bureau reported happening in 2008. Democratic candidates will have to make their own cases, and the governors’ job ratings suggest their prospects may be dicey.

GOP: Time To Get Things Undone
by Michelle Malkin

President Obama thinks he knows what the primary objective of Republicans in Washington should be: to “get things done.” Bashing Rush Limbaugh last week, Obama urged GOP lawmakers to ignore the voices of obstructionism and sign on to his behemoth stimulus package: “We shouldn’t let partisan politics derail what are very important things that need to get done.” Meeting with GOP leaders on Tuesday, Obama repeated his entreaty: “I don’t expect 100 percent agreement from my Republican colleagues, but I do hope that we can all put politics aside and do the American people’s business right now.”

Since when did it become the Republican Party’s top priority to “get things done”? It was as annoying a campaign platitude when John McCain adopted it as it is now coming from Obama’s lips.

History has shown us that “Get Things Done” is mindless liberal code for passing ineffective legislation and expanding government for government’s sake. “Reaching across the political aisle” and “putting politics aside” always entail selling out the right and putting conservative principles aside. How about preventing the damage done by Democratic meddlers trying to get their “things done”? How about getting more things undone?

For the past year, I’ve chronicled the inevitable lard-up of bipartisan bailouts and stimulus boondoggles — and the predictable Chicken Little dance in Washington when these massive emergency “fixes” have fallen short. Contrary to the belief that Obama is America’s Lightworker who can defy political gravity, H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, guarantees more of the same old borrow-spend-panic-repeat cycle that got us into our current mess in the first place. This is not an investment in America’s future. It’s an unprecedented mortgaging of America’s future — which is why the bill is forever known in my book as the Generational Theft Act of 2009.

The ruckus over Nancy Pelosi’s contraception funding (which still may sneak its way into the bill) is the tip of the iceberg. Despite Obama’s vow to prevent earmarks from bogging down the bill, the package is stuffed with goodies for every special interest group from left-wing fraudsters ACORN and other subprime shakedown activists ($4 billion for “neighborhood stabilization”) to Hollywood ($246 million in new targeted tax breaks) to universal health care promotion ($600 million) to dubious “green job” projects ($24 billion). More fundamentally, there is no there there.

On Monday night, the Congressional Budget Office sent out a full analysis of the House stimulus bill. The new report elaborates on what last week’s partial analysis disseminated by Republican Hill sources illuminated: The vaunted infrastructure spending will take years and years and years to kick in. Just 7 percent of the total $800 billion-plus stimulus funding would enter the economy by the end of this year.

The nonpartisan CBO tells eternal truths about government spending in the past, present and future:

“Frequently in the past, in all types of federal programs, a noticeable lag has occurred between sharp increases in budget authority and the resulting increases in outlays. Based on such experiences, CBO expects that federal agencies, along with states and other recipients of that funding, would find it difficult to properly manage and oversee a rapid expansion of existing programs so as to expend the added funds as quickly as they expend the resources provided for their ongoing programs.

“Brand-new programs pose additional challenges. Developing procedures and criteria, issuing the necessary regulations, and reviewing plans and proposals would make distributing money quickly even more difficult — as can be seen, for example, in the lack of any disbursements to date under the loan programs established for automakers last summer to invest in producing energy-efficient vehicles. Throughout the federal government, spending for new programs has frequently been slower than expected and rarely been faster.”

Translation: They can’t spend the stimulus money fast enough to actually stimulate anything other than campaign coffers, media buzz and bureaucratic paperwork.

The Democratic Culture of Corruption
by Michelle Malkin

Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi can stop clucking now. For the last three years, Democratic leaders cheered GOP ethics woes. Dean accused Republicans of making “their culture of corruption the norm.” Pelosi touted cleanliness as a liberal virtue. But with the eye-popping pay-for-play and bribery case against Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich topping a year of nationwide Democratic scandals, the corruption chickens are coming home to roost.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald called the breadth and depth of charges against Blagojevich and his Democratic Chief of Staff John Harris “staggering.” That’s an understatement. Anything that breathed was a potential shakedown target. It’s the Chicago way. Democrat Blago’s so dirty he’d hit up a children’s hospital for money. Oh, wait. He’s accused of doing that, too.

Democrat Blago allegedly conspired to use his power to appoint President-elect Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat as a bargaining chip for financial payment. He explored trading on that authority for an appointment as Health and Human Services secretary or as an ambassador or for installment in a cushy union position. (He discussed his trading scheme with an unnamed “SEIU (Service Employees International Union) official” and unnamed “various consultants” in Washington.)

According to the criminal complaint released yesterday, he also tried to leverage his influence over the sale of Wrigley Field (owned by Tribune media company) in an attempt to get Chicago Tribune editorial writers who called for his impeachment fired — which illustrates the very perils of media/government entanglements I warned about in my newspaper bailout column last week. His wife, Patricia Blagojevich, was apparently in on the thuggery, too. Taking a break from her first lady duties advocating “on behalf of women and children,” she is heard in taped discussions about the Chicago Tribune/Wrigley Field deal telling a governor’s aide “to hold up that f**king Cubs sh*t. … F**k them.”

Pelosi, champion of women as political cleaner-uppers, was unavailable for comment.

Fitzgerald says President-elect Obama was not implicated in the plethora of charges against Democrats Blago and Harris. The national media went out of their way to absolve him, too. But declaring Team Obama’s hands clean — especially with Blago crony and indicted Obama donor Tony Rezko in the middle of it all — is premature. (And if you’re wondering why I keep putting “Democrat” in front of the accused corruptocrats, it’s because the mainstream newspapers can’t seem to remember to identify their party prominently the way they do when Republicans are nabbed.)

Chicago’s Fox affiliate reports that Obama Chief of Staff and Chicago hometown heavy Rahm Emanuel was the catalyst for the Blago takedown and suggests Rahm-bo tipped off the feds. If so, this raises more questions than it answers about who on the transition team may have talked to Blago and his shakedown artists about what and when. Needless to say, if it were the Republican Bush administration tied to the Blago bust, the White House press corps would be frothing like a pack of Michael Vick’s pit bulls.

Democrats and the media can no longer rest on the old rationalization that Blago is an exception to the “we’re cleaner than thou” rule. 2008 was the year of Democratic Reps. William “Cold Cash” Jefferson, Charlie “Sweetheart Deals” Rangel, and former Detroit Mayor Kwame “Text Me” Kilpatrick. It was the year Democratic Massachusetts State Senator Dianne Wilkerson got caught stuffing bribes from an FBI informant down her shirt. It was the year 12 Democratic leaders and staffers in Pennsylvania’s state Capitol were stung in a massive corruption scandal involving cash, sex and abuse of public office. And it was the year of multimillion-dollar embezzlement scandals at Democratic satellite offices of ACORN and the SEIU.

The Democrats have met the culture of corruption, and it looks like it ain’t just elephants among the jackasses soiling public office.