I’ve had a mildly frustrating day today. I could access CalCon. I just couldn’t access my WP dashboard. (I kept getting 404 could not find errors.) After trying every trick in the book, & a few that weren’t, I decided “Screw this, download Firefox’, which I did. I got Firefox all setup the way I like it about a half hour ago. Or so I thought. I couldn’t access my TrueNorth dashboard with Firefox. MAJOR GRRRRR!!!

The next logical thing to do was to use Internet Explorer for TrueNorth & Firefox for everything else.

That’s when I noticed something unexpected and totally appreciated. When I started IE7, everything came up just like it’s supposed to, including my preset tabs.

HOORAY!!!

Now I’m back in business. It’s time to make up for lost time. It’s been an entire morning and afternoon since I’ve harrassed high profile liberals. With all this frustration, it won’t take me more than an hour for me to crank out at least 3-4 posts harassing liberals.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, California Conservative, Liberals, Internet Explorer, Firefox

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

Each election, candidates are scrutinized from a variety of directions and on an even wider variety of issues. Two issues that shouldn’t be debated, though, are the First Amendment and our nation’s prosperity. With that in mind, every candidate or incumbent nationwide should answer some questions on those subjects. Let’s get to the questions:

Do you support reviving the Fairness Doctrine? If you do, explain why? If you don’t, why not? Please keep your answers as precise and on point as possible.

If you support the Fairness Doctrine, outline with specificity how it could be implemented. Also, explain what impact it would have on the radio industry.

To House candidates:

Do you support Rep. Michael Capuano’s proposal to make it mandatory that representatives get prior approval to post work-related content on blogs, YouTube and other websites containing advertising on them? If you support it, why do you support it? If you don’t, why don’t you?

To all candidates and incumbents: (continue reading post »)

Salena Zito has a must read post on her Primary Colors blog that talks about the disconnect between superdelegates and voters. It’s a stinging rebuke of the Democrats’ nominating process, too.

Joe Andrew, a Democratic National Committee chair for five minutes, lives and operates out of Washington, D.C. But when it comes to giving news conferences about the presidential campaign, his podium is in Indianapolis. That is where Andrew went from Beltway boy to Hoosier to make his “big” announcement on changing sides from Sen. Hillary Clinton to Sen. Barack Obama.

And the whole word gasped.

Well, not really the whole world. In all honesty, the collective gasp was heard from within the Beltway, that patch of geography where the chattering elite class of politicos live, breathe and eat.

But drive 15 minutes in any direction outside of the Beltway, and no one knows who Joe Andrew is or why his deflection should affect their vote.

Here is the problem that the media seems to ignore in this race for the Democrats: While there is plenty of headlines and pontifications about superdelegates moving their support to Obama, there is a curious dismissal of Clinton’s string of strong wins with the John Deere voters.

The reality is that elitist Democratic Washingtonians love being in the power chair. They love to think that their’s is the final opinion, that their’s is the opinion that matters most.

As blogs become the voice of Mainstreet America, the superdelegates’ opinions matter less and less. That’s where the disconnect is most clearly seen. At the center of this is Howard Dean, the man who fancies himself as an outsider. In reality, he, like Markos Moulitsas, is a Washington insider with a brash voice pretending to speak for the people. (continue reading post »)

The last thing Howard Dean wanted to do on yesterday’s Meet the Press was defend the process in the Democrats’ presidential nominating process. That’s what he was forced to do, though, thanks to this quote from Ed Rendell:

GOV. ED RENDELL (D-PA): The popular vote is, to me, a much fairer indicia than the pledged delegates because the pledged delegates are elected in a very undemocratic way.

Here’s Dean’s reply to Russert’s question:

MR. RUSSERT: Do you agree with that?

DR. DEAN: Well, no, I don’t. First of all, I don’t agree with it. And secondly, look, we have a set of rules. My job here is not to side with one candidate or the other and talk about pledged delegates or superdelegates or any of that stuff. My job is to take the rules that everybody started with and enforce the rules without fear or favor of any candidate. The–somebody’s going to lose this with 49 percent of the delegates in Denver, and that person has to believe that they were treated fairly if–otherwise, we can’t win. Look, John McCain is a weak candidate. He’s wrong on Iraq, as far as the American people are concerned. We don’t want to stay there for a hundred years. He’s wrong on the economy; it wasn’t the mortgage holders that, that, whose fault this was. He’s wrong on healthcare. We should have health insurance for all our kids. He is not a strong candidate.

The only thing that’s going to beat us is if we’re not unified. And my, in order to be unified, both the losing candidate and the winning candidate have to feel like the system was fair. So Senator Rendell may say–I mean, Governor Rendell may not like the rules, but the rules are what we started with. Most of them have been in place for the last 25 years. That’s what we’ve got to go by, whether you like the rules or you don’t like the rules.

Dean’s got a point that both sides knew the rules going in. That said, Gov. Rendell is justified because he’s saying that it goes against the Democrats’ own principles. How can Dean’s Democrats justify Hillary winning Texas by a healthy margin but Obama getting more delegates than Hillary? How can they call that proportional apportionment? That’s what Al Gore called fuzzy math throughout the 2000 campaign. (continue reading post »)

According to this article, Harry Reid is shooting his mouth off again. The big question is whether anyone’s paying attention anymore. Here’s what Sen. Reid said today:

“Every place you go you hear about no progress being made in Iraq,” said Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid. “The government is stalemated today, as it was six months ago, as it was two years ago,” Reid told reporters, warning US soldiers were caught in the middle of a civil war. “It is not getting better, it is getting worse,” he said.

Sen. Reid is insulting us if he thinks that we’re that gullible. The civil war line is pure myth. The violence is dropping precipitously. I just sent Harry Reid an email chastizing him for his statement. Here’s the content of that email:

Sen. Reid’s statement that our soldiers are caught in a civil war in Iraq is insulting. Tell Sen. Reid that we read the reports. Tell Sen. Reid that we’ve seen the statistics that show casualties are dropping dramatically.

Most importantly, tell Sen. Reid that the days of bamboozling the American people with phony statistics are finished. We don’t rely on his statements to know what’s happening in Iraq. We hop on Al Gore’s internet & read a half dozen articles from Iraq telling us about the Anbar Awakening, which is quickly turning into the Iraq Awakening. We read about how Al-Qa’ida in Mesopotamia has been driven out of Baghdad.

The new paradigm demands that politicians tell the truth. The new paradigm demands taking responsibility for the misstatements politicians make.

It’s a brave new world, one which Sen. Reid doesn’t know exists…YET.

(continue reading post »)

Alot of pieces of the Hillary/Harry Reid/Senate Democrats puzzle fell into place after I read this article. The article tells about the comunications Hillary had with David Brock when he was putting Media Matters together. It talks about Hillary’s advising Harry Reid about putting a Senate Democrat War Room. Before we get started with the heart of the article, here’s a little background on who’s involved:

The first decision Hillary faced as she took over the [Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee] in early 2003 was whether to keep the staff director, Jodi Sakol. Sakol, in her early thirties, was already a communications veteran, having worked the beat for Al Gore when he was vice president and during his 2000 presidential campaign…

Ms. Sakol eventually got involved with this:

Concurrently, and on her own time, Sakol was involved in discussions about the
formation of another nonprofit, left-leaning group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which focused on government corruption. It was Hillary’s “proactive” efforts in this area and her desire to “beat the GOP at their own game” that prompted CREW’s founder, Melanie Sloan, a former prosecutor, to invite Sakol to the initial brainstorming sessions in 2003 where CREW was born. CREW was organized as a tax-exempt nonpartisan group, and on occasion, it has taken on Democratic targets. But since the Congress and the executive branch were in Republican hands at the time of its founding, its investigations were bound to focus on Republicans.

Sakol alerted Hillary and her staff about the newly forming group and its need for “Democratic progressive money.” The hope was that CREW would prove to be a perfect counterbalance to Judicial Watch, the corruption watchdog that had tormented the Clintons with lawsuits and press conferences throughout the 1990s. Hillary’s pollster and strategist Mark Penn became a director and vice president of CREW. “CREW could do things the senators couldn’t do,” Sakol said. And once CREW’s charges “were out in the press,” Sakol noted, other people could cite the findings of the group, which was usually portrayed as nonpartisan in news accounts.

CREW was touted as a nonpartisan watchdog group to the Lapdog Press, who bought it hook, line and sinker. That’s what the Lapdog Press would dutifully report whenever there was a news story involving CREW. CREW is Soros-funded hit squad whose goal is to smear Republicans. That’s only a bit of what I found on this alliance. Here’s another tidbit of information that needs to be told:

Brock’s nonprofit, a Washington-based media-monitoring venture called Media Matters for America, found a temporary home in early 2004 at the Center for American Progress. Already providing its daily news summary to Hillary, the center helped Sakol get the daily media analysis prepared by Media Matters in order to help shape the Senate war-room activities.

Media Matters is another liberal hit squad that touts itself as a watchdog group. As we can clearly see, that’s insulting to anyone who knows anything about the organization. Let’s show what a genuine watchdog group does, then compare that with Media Matters does.

CGAW is a legitimate citizen’s watchdog group. Their Waste Watch report rates how each representative did in terms of wasteful spending. For instance, Robert Wexler, (D-FL) had a 2 percent rating in 2006. Rep. Wexler has a lifetime 8 percent rating from CAGW. According to CAGW’s rating system, that puts him in the hostile to citizens category, meaning he’s a wastemonger. (continue reading post »)

We keep seeing stories about how tech-savvy Barak Obama is portraying himself to be. With digital pages (which he probably never touched himself) on MySpace and Facebook, and most recently joining LinkedIn, he’s trying to show that he’s down with Web 2.0. And if all that means nothing to you, then you might not be the youthful, “rock the vote” demographic that he’s catering to with that angle.

Regardless of partisan stripe, we think every politician, especially in Washington, should have a good grasp of modern technologies and the state of the Internet. After all, the future is being written in code. That all said, we’re happy to see that Fred Thompson is seeing some significant traffic online. It may not be newsworthy to the MSM, which would rather fawn over Obama. But Fred08.com is drawing a crowd.

(via MediaPost)

REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FRED THOMPSON’S Web site was the most visited of the presidential candidates for the week ending Sept. 8, reports Hitwise. Fred08.com received 34% of U.S. visits.

Rank Candidate Domain Market Share %
1 Fred Thompson
www.fred08.com 34.73%
2 Barack Obama
www.barackobama.com 13.49%
3 Ron Paul
www.ronpaul2008.com 12.88%
4 Hillary Clinton
www.hillaryclinton.com 10.38%
5 John Edwards
www.johnedwards.com 6.52%

Source: Hitwise

Note - the Hitwise data is based on a custom category of Web sites for only those presidential candidates that have officially announced their candidacy ranked by U.S. market share of visits, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Hitwise ranks more than 1 million unique Web sites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger Web sites. Hitwise categorizes Web sites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context.

Abdi Aynte, one of Keith Ellison’s biggest supporters, used Minnesota Monitor to deny Keith Ellison’s being the Grand Marshal of the Sept. 9 Muslim Day Parade in New York City. Here’s what Mr. Aynte said:

Contrary to reports circulating widely in conservative publications and blogs in recent days, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison will not be the grand marshal of the Muslim parade in New York next month, according to his office.

The freshman Democrat from Minneapolis was never scheduled to be there, said Brian Elliot, district director for Ellison.

Elliot said the congressman “was equally surprised” when he learned the buzz that he would be the grand marshal for the 22nd Annual Muslim Day Parade in New York City, which is scheduled for Sept. 9. Ellison “declined the offer to be the grand marshal a long time ago because he has other obligations in the district,” said Elliot.

Mr. Elliot might want to contact the Muslim foundation of America and find out why they had a flyer posted on their website announcing Rep. Ellison as the Grand Marshal:

Aynte made a major mistake when he wrote this:

In her “Rogues Gallery of Radical Islam” column, Canada Free Press’ Judi McCleod wrote that Ellison’s alleged role in the parade would have been “totally ignored were it not for the courage of a single freelance journalist.” Yet that journalist, FrontPage magazine writer Joe Kaufman, seems to have ignored a basic tenet of reporting: fact-checking.
(Ed.- emphasis mine)

I’ve known Joe for almost two years now. Joe is nothing if not meticulous. (continue reading post »)

Tomorrow morning, Meet the Press’s featured guests will be Rep. Harold Ford, the new chairman of the DLC, and Markos Moulitsas, the man behind the Daily Kos. Since its early days, the Netroots have looked scornfully at the DLC, thinking of it as selling out too often on progressive ideas. Based on this WSJ article by Kimberley Strassel, I’d say that the first shots have been fired:

“They’ll find their way back to the middle. And if they don’t, they won’t win.” So says a blunt Harold Ford Jr., chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, of his party’s current crop of presidential candidates. The question is just how many would-be Democratic presidents recognize the wisdom of his words.

Based on who showed up to the YearlyKos convention vs. the DLC convention, the hands down winner is the Kos kids. To be sure, the Netroots are spoiling for a fight too:

The far left has found something to unify it: hatred of George W. Bush. Technology has given it the means to organize; what the right found in talk radio, liberals have found in the “netroots” Internet, from MoveOn.org to Daily Kos. Its activism has of late overshadowed groups like the DLC, which still believe in such creaky notions as ideas. Even Mr. Ford, who took over the DLC chairmanship in January, is willing to admit his outfit has been eclipsed: “The DLC and other moderate groups have struggled a bit to find not only our voice, but a way to be heard.”

Making it harder is that this newly energized left is directing inordinate firepower on the DLC itself, in a crazed, purist drive to purge any group that would exert a moderating influence on the Democratic Party. New Republic scribe Noam Scheiber let loose a few weeks back in a New York Times hit piece, calling the DLC “radioactive” and “quaint,” gloating that its “fading influence was good news for the entire party,” and arguing that it should just get lost. Markos Moulitsas, chief flogger-blogger on the Daily Kos, this week slammed the DLC as a group that wants to “blur distinctions with the GOP,” and reveling that Democrats had won in 2006 because liberals like himself had “forced” Americans to pick sides.

While it’s true that Kos and MoveOn.org had forced a bit of a choice, it isn’t as ideologically pure as they’d like people to believe. After all, they got behind a number of the southern ‘moderates’ who they’re now attacking for not being progressive enough. Still, the tensions between the two groups aren’t imaginary. Kos currently has posted a reprint of an article first run in the National Journal. Here are the most important graphs of the reprinted article: (continue reading post »)

During Thursday morning’s news conference, President Bush drew a line in the sand of sorts. Though he didn’t use Rep. Oberstar’s name, President Bush told Rep. Oberstar that his gas tax increase was DOA should it even reach his desk.

“The way it seems to have worked is that each member on that (Transportation) committee gets to set his or her own priorities first,” Bush said. “That’s not the right way to prioritize the people’s money. Before we raise taxes, which could affect economic growth, I would strongly urge the Congress to examine how they set priorities.”

Talk about not pulling punches. OUCH. That’s a definite shot across the House Transportation Committee’s bow. These congressmen rule the Transportation budget in much the same way that John Murtha rules over the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. These politicians rule over it like it’s their private kingdom where they have all the power. Crafting great transportation policy isn’t their main concern. Getting re-elected is.

About $24 billion, or 8 percent of the last $286 billion highway bill, was devoted to highway and bridge projects singled out by lawmakers. The balance is distributed through grants to states, which decide how it will be spent. Federal money accounts for about 45 percent of all infrastructure spending.

I’d love to see which areas got the most earmark money and which ones got the least. Generally speaking, I’ll bet that Republicans will get less than Democrats this year. I’ll also bet that the Republicans that behave like Democrats will get far more earmarks than will reform-minded conservatives.

The Democratic chairman of the House Transportation Committee proposed a 5-cent increase in the 18.3 cents-a-gallon federal gasoline tax to establish a new trust fund for repairing or replacing structurally deficient highway bridges.

Until these politicians reprioritize the Transportation budget, taxpayers should tell these politicians that their voting for a gas tax increase guarantees a campaign contribution for their opponent. It’s time that these autocrats realized that we’re mad as hell and that we won’t take it anymore. It’s high time that they understood that they can’t get away with the things that they did a decade ago.

These politicians are essentially in denial after we blew their little kingdoms to smithereens during the amnesty immigration debate. They don’t want to admit that We The People will exert our will anytime that they don’t heed our demands. When they refused to listen to us during the amnesty immigration debate, we filled the politicians’ inboxes and melted down their switchboards.

It will likely take a few more of those types of responses but we will eventually get their attention. President Bush doesn’t need a few more shots across their bow, though, to get their attention. I’d bet that Thursday morning’s news conference got their undivided attention.

Technorati Tags: Earmarks, Transportation, Appropriations, James Oberstar, John Murtha, Tax Increases, Gas Tax, Immigration Reform, President Bush

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog