Fish You Olympia

Olympia Snowe writes in the New York Times, “We Didn’t Have to Lose Arlen Specter?:”

IT is disheartening and disconcerting, at the very least, that here we are today – almost exactly eight years after Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party – witnessing the departure of my good friend and fellow moderate Republican, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, for the Democratic Party. And the announcement of his switch was all the more painful because I believe it didn’t have to be this way.

The Republican party did not desert Arlen Specter.  Rather, Specter deserted the party.    Specter read the polling data and bolted for the ‘rats.   The Pennsylvania voters werel not willing to support a senator who voted for the  largest debt package in our nation’s history, Obama’s so-called stimulus bill.    Obama’s stimulus has not revived the economy.  Has no indication ever reviving the economy but has saddled our child and grandchildren with a staggering load of debt.   Specter voted for it, and Stowe is bewildered why the republican voters of Pennsylvania turned there backs on Specter.    If Spector, and Snowe, had any backbone, they could stopped the stimulus bill and our children and grandchildren would not be saddled with Obama’s debt.  It really isn’t that hard to figure out.

Addendum:(Bit) Of course anyone can see the real reason Ms Snowe is writing this lament… she’s properly identifed herself as being on the list of angry Republicans.

To begin with, let’s get a snip of this morning’s op-ed up on National Review:

Arlen Specter belongs to a type familiar to Congress: the time-serving hack devoid of any principle save arrogance. He has spent three decades in the Senate but is associated with no great cause, no prescient warning, no landmark legislation. Yet he imagines that the Senate needs his wisdom and judgment for a sixth term. He joined the Republican party out of expediency in the 1960s, and leaves it out of expediency this week.

Indeed. At the end of the day,what we have here is the second in a line of what will be many ‘victims’ of what are now being called the Tea Party protests. The first, I think, was John McCain.

Now, you’re going to be hearing, over the next weeks and months between now and the mid-term elections, how the supposed GOP swing to the extreme right has cost the Republicans the 2008 election. These charges have come from such as Lindsay Graham and Ramesh Ponnuru, among others, and of course from staunch Democrats, who it would appear are simply pulling themselves up on any available handhold.    Specter, in particular blames that factor on his leaving the party.  But it’s not so. In truth, the movement of the Republican party for the time that Specter has been in office, has been to the left… The exception… Reagan.. being their wildest success. That leftward march since Reagan has damaged the party, and the country and culminated in the GOP losses in 2008. The Tea Parties have been a reaction to that starboard movement, and one over-long in coming. The shut-out of Specter is merely one step on the path back to GOP principles… and in my view, an encouraging one, as I mentioned in my recent Pajamas Media article.

But for all his protests about how the party left him… thus invoking Reagan, interestingly, who used that line to explain why he abandoned the Democrats in the 60’s to follow the call of the then-conservative Goldwater… the fact is that even moderates have been deserting Specter for quite a while, now. The most recent one I’ve seen suggests that Specter was only leading among Republican moderates by around 8 points. 

The fact is, that the party that has been narrowing, these last few years, and particularly the last couple of years, is the Democrat party. As Jennifer Rubin points up yesterday,  at Pajamas Media:

With market capitalism under assault and polling showing voters quite concerned about spending, debt, and bailouts, you’d think Republicans could find a message which resonates with a wide audience.

And so they have. Thing is, the Republican rank and file recognizes in a way the party leadership is only starting to understand that the first task is to eliminate those who don’t share those concerns. And Specter, I’m afraid is one such. (I’ll take up my differences with Jennifer’s conclusions in another article) 

So, Specter, instead of fighting for the principles he claimed to believe in, jumps ship when he sees his political future coming to a sticky end, and now argues against those principles. Apparently, other than his own political future, Specter HAS no principles. As NR puts it:

We are not sure why self-respecting liberals would vote to have Specter as their representative. Most Democrats believe the country is with them and Pennsylvania even more so; why not have a true believer in the seat?

That’s exactly the issue that we’re going to see played out in PA, over the next several months.  Already, he’s got two running against him in the primary, who have more popular support.  

Now, lest anyone think that because the state is heavily Dem, Toomey, Specter’s Republican challenger, has no chance at Beating Specter, I’ll point out that Toomey has repeatedly won in heavily Democrat Beaver County, and by a wider margin than Specter ever did.

There is, however, another layer to all of this: The large number of Democrats who are none too happy with where their party, and thereby their country, is headed, either. By a number of reports I’ve seen some 20-25% of the people in those tea party protests were Democrats. I suspect that there are many Dems who will see Specter as part of the problem.

As the NR points out what the Democrats are taking on, here is a loose cannon.

Reporters are lazily saying that the Democrats will now have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but in truth whether that majority holds will depend on the issue.

… and of course where Specter comes down on that particular issue. More particularly, if it’s in Specter’s short-term political interest to vote with his new party. A Veto-proof majority requires someone who will vote in block, and Specter has a history doing exactly the opposite if it suits his own political fortunes… which are in the end, his only concern. No worries for the people, no association to anything resembling principle will be brooked in his personal deliberation on votes before him. That aspect of Specter’s history is fairly well known, very well-noted in his voting record, and is brought into even starker contrast by this move yesterday.

For all Specter’s statements of loyalty to his new party and their agenda, Democrat voters will always recall, particularly come voting time, that he told the Republicans the same thing, in April of 2009.

Bush adminstration prepared for pandemics, Tevi Troy, Wall Street Journal:

Swine flu has presented the Obama administration with its first major public-health crisis. Fortunately for the Obama team, the Bush administration developed new tools that will prove critical in meeting this challenge.

Under President Bush, the federal government worked with manufacturers to accelerate vaccine development, stockpiled crucial antivirals like Tamiflu, war-gamed pandemic scenarios with senior officials, and increased the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) sample identification capabilities. These activities are bearing fruit today

Criminal Stupidty, so says Fran Townsend of the one, via Kathryn Jean Lopze, Natiional Review:

“I would call this felony stupidity. This is probably not the right job for Mr. Caldera to be in if he didn’t understand the likely reaction of the New Yorkers and the mayor. And while the White House have said they are furious, I think they have to look at whether or not this is the right job for Mr. Caldera.”

“I think this office is too important to have somebody who doesn’t have the judgment to understand the impact of this. This was not necessary.”

 Ten minutes and fifteen dollars.  Mark Hemingway, National Review:

Regarding my observation that the use of Photoshop could have prevented yesterday’s Air Force One photo-op debacle, a few NRO readers have taken that suggestion and run with it.

This reader writes, “I am a graphic designer in Southern California. I spent ten minutes throwing this together this morning, which at my rates equals about 15 dollars. However, I will settle for the thanks of a grateful nation.”:

Maybe Eric can Photosop one of Nightlly Ramble One:?

 Does sodomy make you stupid ?, Mail(UK)

A senior teacher has been suspended from his £50,000-a-year job after he complained that a training day for staff was used to promote gay rights.
Kwabena Peat, 54, was one of several Christian staff who walked out of the compulsory session at a North London school after an invited speaker questioned why people thought heterosexuality was natural.

The presentation was given by Sue Sanders, a co-founder of the Schools Out organisation which campaigns for gay equality in education

Note that natural is not some synomym for good.   Rather, natural meerly refers to existing in nature.    If hetersexuality wsa not natural, Sanders would not be around to ask her stupid question.

Common sense in the face of stupity, Donald Douglas, American Power:

Same-sex couples cannot claim to be biologically equal to heterosexual couples. What they seek is to change society’s discourse and overturn the historical and regenerative conception of marriage as between one man and one woman.

Same sex couples need to talk to God if they seek equality.

Marcia Kramer,

NEW YORK (CBS) –  A furious President Barack Obama ordered an internal review of Monday’s low-flying photo op over the Statue of Liberty.

CBS 2 HD has discovered the feds will have plenty to question.

Federal officials knew that sending two fighter jets and Air Force One to buzz ground zero and Lady Liberty might set off nightmarish fears of a 9/11 replay, but they still ordered the photo-op kept secret from the public.

Even the Obama adminsstration is not so stupid as not believe low flying airliners would cause New Yorkers to panic.  Michelle is digging for some answers:

We now know thanks to WCBS in NY that the feds knew the “mission” would cause panic and that they went ahead with the secret plans, anyway. There are still a lot more unanswered questions about what happened in the skies above New York City. I have filed two FOIA requests with the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff FOIA Requester Service Center seeking more info, including the flight manifests; communications that would shed light on the origin of the “mission,” and copies of any and all photos taken on the taxpayer-subsidized journey. Let’s have some of that vaunted transparency Barack Obama is always talking about

 

As is Clarice:

Seriously, what other “photo op” except an adventure film could this have been for. And if the theory is right, was it worth scaring New Yorkers? How much did we pay for this Obama promotion–because surely the film will end with him flying victoriously in that plane followed by a fighter plane from Alabama?

The  Narcissus president, having just canceled the F-22, doesn’t believe in jet fighters for the national defense, but evidently does for photo-ops.  Contact New York’s senior senator and tell him you demand some honest answers.

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read on the sphere: The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble.

This is the “Big Airliner” Edition

• AF One flies over NYC, Obama crashes: Rumors about the BitsBlog jet being the one circling Southern Manhattan aside, we’re told that Air Force One was being flown over NYC for a photo op. Just taking their word for this, for the moment, (Always a dangerous proposition) I can’t wait to see what the photos get used to promote, can you? I mean, can you imagine how successful those photos will be for  promoting anything? And forgive me that I find annoying the FAA was hiding behind it’s regulations… supposedly wouldn’t tell us what was what on a cloud of secrecy. There’s something about this that smells of arrogance of the first order.  In other words, Obama. Can’t wait to see his approval numbers in NYC now…
• What about photoshop? OK, look, I can fully understand why Obama would want footage of the President’s private jet circling the Statue of Liberty. It’s likely the best image he could hope for given that the American people seem convinced his connections with liberty are imaginary at best. A little visual reinforcement would be just what Obama’s handlers would have hoped for.  But, I gotta tell ya… if I was interested in placing Air Force One over NYC, I’d just use Photoshop. For those of you who don’t know, I use that and a few other tools to make the Nightly Ramble graphics I post, like the one at the head of this Ramble.  Just for fun.  Anyway, it’s cheaper than buying all the stuff I show you every night. Matter of fact, I think I used Powerpoint and MSPaint to make that particular one.  I use those when I don’t want to break out the heavy tools. (You guys really think I have an airliner, for example?) So, if I wanted that kind of shot… AF1 over Manhattan… why in the name of Samuel Hill would I need to fly a jet and a fighter over a bunch of people still frightened from 9/11?
• George Lucas? Clarice Feldman wrting over at American Thinker, points to a report at Just One Minute that the whole thing was for a George Lucas movie about the Tuskegee Airmen.  A reasonable guess.  Personally, I wonder if  the thing wasn’t being filmed to use in the 100 days airing we’re to see tommrow night. Of course I won’t know until the next morning, but that’s another matter, I suppose.  Still, that leaves the issue of why someone of that kind of movie and tech prowess wouldn’t simply CG the bloody thing.
• Eric @ American Thinker:  Tom Lifeson was nice enough to post a few comments of mine over at American Thinker   on the matter.
• 9/11 still very much on people’s minds:   Marshall Foche is famously credited with “There are no atheists in fox holes”.  We saw an example of that yesterday in NY and NJ, I think.   They were feeling pretty good about themselves for a while, and secure enough that they voted Obama… someone who clearly doesn’t have much use for the military solution… or the military itself for that matter, into office.  I wonder how many Obama supporters in NYC were having second thoughts, yesterday as they watched those planes, and their survival insticnts came forward?  The reaction we all saw on those vids and the angry snarls we heard when the truth of the matter came out, tells me Americans are still affected by the 9/11 attacks. They are still very much in the minds of the American people. They’re still shell shocked to a degree that Democrat party leaders can’t seem to get their collectivist minds around.  Based on what we saw, I tell you this, in all candor: Obama mishandles the security of this nation at his own peril. I said yesterday that support for him was far more fragile than the numbers suggest,  and much more than half of Americans think the aggressive interrogation Obama’s trying so hard to get mileage out of just now, is appropriate. Yesterday’s events in NY shows us why.
• MK2009: Lorie Byrd tweets that Obama’s next photo-op could be 200 or so unmarked fighters and bombers over Pearl. Yeah, Lorie, that’ll work. I think. But only if they’re propeller -driven.  No jets.  Make ’em think they’re living “The Final Countdown”  I mean, if you’re gonna screw with people’s minds….do it RIGHT.
• Tick, Tick, Tick:  About that support for what pleases Obama to call ‘Torture’.  The ticking time bomb scenario comes into play, I think, in ways a lot of folks won’t talk about at parties.  There are times when such treatment is appropriate. And I see no evidence that this wasn’t one such time. In a choice between splashing some water on some scum bucket’s face and watching a city blow up, guess which way I’m going to go?  Put another way, refusing to splash some water on a known terrorist’s face, thereby allowing thousands of Americans to die doesn’t seem the moral high road to me. Sorry. And I’ll bet the people running from the plane yesterday, would agree.
• Turn your head and Oink:  Does anyone really trust the word of the Obama administration that their reaction to the Swine Flu scare is any different than it would be, were his administration fully staffed?
• Can you hear me now?  Kudlow, yesterday:
  

  What is going on in this country? The government is about to take over GM in a plan that completely screws private bondholders and favors the unions. Get this: The GM bondholders own $27 billion and they’re getting 10 percent of the common stock in an expected exchange. And the UAW owns $10 billion of the bonds and they’re getting 40 percent of the stock. Huh? Did I miss something here? And Uncle Sam will have a controlling share of the stock with something close to 50 percent ownership. And no bankruptcy judge. So this is a political restructuring run by the White House, not a rule-of-law bankruptcy-court reorganization.

  Well, I think I’ve said this about a million times… this was never about saving the big three, but rather, about saving the unions, one of  Obama’s core constituencies. Are you ready to take my word on this, now?

•  Hurray for Fox News: Fox News has apparently identified that BHO is using the news for his own non-stop campaign channel, and Fox is damned well sick of it.  They’ve shut him off. Good for them. The numbers for Fox will skyrocket on this one, I’m sure.
• Rivet, Rivet: Honorable Mention at OTB’s Caption Contest
• Mother’s day correction: Mother’s day is the tenth, not next Sunday. Thanks to the several people who wrote to call my attention to the error. You can stop now.  (Wry grin) Are these the same folks who can’t find their way to the comments section?

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Senator Arlen Specter, (U – Scotland) has made if official.  He will caucus with the Democrats and seek re-electiion as a Democrat.

Chris Cillizza, Washington Post:

Specter To Switch Parties

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter will switch his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat and announced today that he will run in 2010 as a Democrat, according to a statement he released this morning.

Specter’s decision would give Democrats a 60 seat filibuster proof majority in the Senate assuming Democrat Al Franken is eventually sworn in as the next senator from Minnesota. (Former senator Norm Coleman is appealing Franken’s victory in the state Supreme Court.)

For the record, we second Michelle:

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Now Senator Scottish Law is Dirty Harry Reid’s problem.    Good luck Harry.

Update:(Eric)

Well, look, he was never far off being a Democrat in any event, as has been widely observed.  In the end, this was the ultimate act of political self-preservation by means of a realtively small redefinition.  Look, just a few days ago, Real Clear Politics reported  that Specter was down by 21 points to Toomey in the primary. Clearly, he was going to lose that primary, and his only way to the general would be to jump the party. Trouble is, of course, that those numbers will not be changing more than a few points either side in the general, absent some huge swings, which I simply don’t see happening in that district. As a district it’s polled significantly to the right of Specter, to my memory of the thing, so he’s still got a hell of an uphill fight to beat Toomey.

Far as I’m concerned, this is the first volley in the kind of ‘boot their backsides out’ that was being called for in the Tea Parties.

Doctor Tim Ball, Canada Free Press:

The Issue

The US Congress is currently discussing the Obama climate change strategy and Cap and Trade. One part of the plan says, “Implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.”

The term “greenhouse gas emissions” is either deliberately misleading or indicates complete ignorance of the science, or both.

Given the disaster that has been the one first hundred days, and the shear incompetence of Obama’s cabinet officials, like Tim Geitner, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder and Jannet “Bitch” Napolitano, it is almost possible to believe that the Obama administration is so stupid to actually believe in anthropogenic global warming, but even the one is  not quite that stupid.

Rather as Doctor Krauthammer has suggested, the Obama administration is pushing the failed theory of anthropogenic global warming to finance the Obama social engineering objective,  state rationed healthcare and taxpayer funded education through college.

More on the adventures of the clueless Secretary 0f  Homeland Security, Janet “Bitch” Napolitano, from Bridget Johnson, Hill::

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the government’s response at a press conference Monday afternoon as reporters asked her about the risk of asymptomatic swine flu carriers entering the country.

Napolitano said the strategy of identifying and isolating those who seem ill and try to cross into the United States was adequate given the circumstances, as a reporter asked if closure of the border had been considered

p,,,[

“We believe at this level the appropriate precautions have been taken.”

 Who ‘we’ Paleface?

The Obama adminisation has its collettive head stuck up in Obamaland.   So what Obamaland data, video:

September Tenth of course. Call New York’s senior senator, annd demand that Schumer get an apology from BO.

More:  Allah Pundit, Hot Air.

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is the LightHouse Edition

• Mother’s day alert:  First of all, let’s take time out for this important message: You do know Mother’s day is this coming Sunday, right? Yeah. You’re welcome.
• Fur Flying: Lots of fur flying from my Pajamas Media piece posted earlier today, and that’s pretty much as I expected. I suspect I may have snarked the comment stream into silence, though, earlier today. We’ll see.
• Better than you: But there’s more in the way of indirect linkage to the points I made in that bit than I ever imagined. Take for example Mark Steyn, who points up in a post at The Corner today:
  

  My old editor, Charles Moore, has a piece in the London Telegraph on the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street. Very pertinent, as Britain regresses to the basket-case Seventies. But this passage, I think, has relevance to the American elite’s view of the current Tea Parties. Charles quotes the leftie writer Hanif Kureishi’s condescending dismissal – “Thatcher, like the Queen, is basically vulgar” – and adds:

  Without having Hanif Kureishi’s exalted, exquisite, Nancy-Mitford-style sensitivity for class distinctions, I do see that the combination of Mrs Thatcher’s beliefs and her social origins (and perhaps also her sex) is toxic for people like him.
  People like Mrs Thatcher – state-educated, lower-middle-class, provincial, female – were not supposed to question the 1945 state-socialist settlement. To its architects, such people were of no account. They were neither poor enough to attract romantic sympathy, nor grand enough to be entitled to power. They were expected to know their place.

  There’s a lot of that in that CNN reporter’s coverage of the Tea Parties: You’ll be getting your $400 Obama “tax credit”. So what’s your beef? Why don’t you know your place?

  Similarly, we know that the Democrats don’t seem to have a grasp on middle America, either,  or it’s values, having rather focused on the ends of the spectrum, the very poor and the very rich.  Alas, that attitude of ‘superior’ seems to permeate the GOP as much as it has the Democrats of late. That, I see as part of the problem the GOP rank and file must face. The sad fact is that the most natural thing a political class can do is look down it’s nose at the people who elected them once they get into power.

•  The Chruch of the bloody obvious: Right Wing News points up the obvious, but it does bear repeating: Alex Jones is a loon.
• An unlikely Friend: Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Tea Parties? Yep.  Not directly, but read closely what he’s saying and tell me that the worries he expresses are not the cries we’re hearing from the tea party protests.
• Summers and the Stimulus: Speaking of The Corner, here’s a bit from Mark Hemingway, pointing out that Larry Summers didn’t think the Stimulus was a good idea. Funny how things change once yet get into power.  This thing also shows us that the time of  short national memory, where pols can depend on people not remembering their positions on issues of the day in years past, has gone. Time was when people didn’t have the computer age a lots of hungry bloggers digging for contrary positions in a person’s history. That era is gone. Time was, too, when  News people rather than digging for facts knew their place… as promoters of the left. That era is also gone, at least to a larger degree than liberals are comfortable with.
•  One Flu over the HHS: You do know, I assume, that HHS is missing 19 key positions?  Reason, of course is the disaster that the nomination process has been for this administration. One of their rules for being appointed apparently is you have to be a tax cheat. The other rule is you can’t get caught at it. The failure rate with those rules in place leaves us with the condition we’re in.  Not that I suppose political appointments would have any immediate impact on the spread of this  flu problem, really. But as I said yesterday, I have a great deal of difficulty imagining that were this kind of a lack to occur under the previous president, that the press wouldn’t be doing their wall to wall mode over the political implications of the foul-up, and blaming Bush for it. Of course the leftie blogs are already trying to blmae the right for the issue, anyway.
•  100 days of Urkel:  I don’t put much stock in the 100 days, myself, being as it amounts to a holdover from the days of FDR, who Obama is desperate to cast himself as. I wouldn’t now, but for something I noted over the weekend, while doing a little research on the subject; I noted back in 2001, at 100 days into Bush’s first term, that Bush’s numbers were higher at this point than were Clinton’s at the same point.  What struck me then,  was the overtly biased stack of questions being asked by the various pollsters, particularly ABC at the time. The apparent goal was to minimize the positive impact of Bush. The news orgs of the day made as little as possible of the approval ratings Bush turned a in at the time, of course.  Bring it to today, however, and we have a whole different effort being expended by the press.  There’s a lot of praise going on for Obama, where under Bush, there was silence. Interestingly, though, Obama’s polling numbers are quite similar indeed to Bush’s. Considering the tongue bath the polling questions about Obama represent, that’s an amazing stat, of itself. But more interesting yet is the degree to which enthusiasm is waning for The Chosen One.  As I told someone at Pajamas Media, this morning, check back in 3 years.
•  But what has he done, really?  And that’s what all this comes down to. What are Obaa’s actual accomplishments, not what we FEEL about the whole thing since feelings tend to be manipulated by things other than fact.  I noticed the Fox News folks had a pundit put going this morning, discussing this very point.  Their answer to the question are remarkable: So far,according to the panel Obama has
  • Passed more spending than any other president in history. That bill, despite his assurences about Pork, was one written by the congress, not by him and thus loaded with so much pork as to double it’s size.
  • His popularity ratings are still high… an accomplishment which as I’ve said, is as much press manipulation of the facts… some would call it ‘brand management’ as it is his actual accomplishments.

  I submit that if this is a the best they can come up with, he’s got some serious problems, with even these strong points they’ve listed. Support based on feelings alone is paper thin by definition. As, I suspect, we are about to see, over the summer.

• The Dullest tool in the drawer gets tossed:  Patterico passes along word via McQ, that Ted Rall is looking for work. Of course given he got his wish with Oabam getting elected, we may all end up in his shoes, soon, but at least I won’t have profiting off Pat Tillman’s death on my list of accomplishments, along with Nick Berg’s beheading, on my resume.

From the Washington Post:

U.S. public health officials did not know about a growing outbreak of swine flu in Mexico until nearly a week after that country started invoking protective measures, and didn’t learn that the deaths were caused by a rare strain of the influenza until after Canadian officials did.

The delayed communication occurred as epidemiologists in Southern California were investigating milder cases of the illness that turned out to be caused by the same strain of swine flu as the one in Mexico.

In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and the more recent emergence of H5N1 bird flu in Asia, national and local health authorities have done extensive planning for disease outbreaks that could lead to global epidemics, or pandemics. Open and frequent communication between countries and agencies has been a hallmark of that work.

Whether delayed communication among the countries has had a practical consequence is unknown. However, it seems that U.S. public health officials are still largely in the dark about what’s happening in Mexico two weeks after the outbreak was recognized.

Personally, I have a great deal of difficulty imagining that were this kind of a lack to occur under the previous president, that the press wouldn’t be doing their wall to wall mode over the political implications of the foul-up.

It should be noted, that the apparent origin of the swine flu epidemic is Mexico. On that basis, it’s also fairly easy to see why a strong borders policy would prevent or at least slow the effects of that at the damage here in the United States.  As it is, with people marching over the border on a daily basis without even a rudimentary health check, well, you can imagine where that’s going to lead, particularly for those in Texas and New Mexico.

Again, I can’t help but wonder why the presses and screaming on that particular point. again, were this to have occurred on the previous President’s watch, the press would be in full cry on the “irresponsible borders policy implemented by the Bush administration’. As it is, Silenceo.

As Rick Moran points out its hard these days to cook the books on a Healthcare crisis. That said, it does seem fairly easy to slip one by the current administration.

Addendum I:  (Update and Bump) (David L)

As to Eric’c question of why team Obama did not know what are friends to the North knew, is that nobody was home, Carrie Budoff Brown, Politico:

The Obama administration declared a “public health emergency” Sunday to confront the swine flu – but is heading into its first medical outbreak without a secretary of Health and Human Services or appointees in any of the department’s 19 key posts.

President Barack Obama has not yet chosen a surgeon general or the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His choice to run the Food and Drug Administration awaits confirmation.

The one is simply too busy golfing,   campaigning and throwing parties to even bother naming  a surgeon general.  Apathy thy name is Obama. 

Mr. President, put down your golf clubs, quit the perpetual campaign, put down your steak knife and get with the Peoples’ business.   Do it now.

Addenudum II:  (David L)

Never fear, Janet is here.   TOTUS, the President too lazy to appoint a Surgeon Gnneral, tries to do what he does best, mouth soothing words. Jennifer Loven, Aasociated Press:

The White House defended the administration’s ability to respond to a crisis that is coming so early in its tenure and while it still lacks a health and human services secretary, a surgeon general and a CDC director. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs took pains to note that a long-standing presidential directive gives the homeland security secretary – not the health chief – the authority to coordinate federal action in such situations.

“Our response is in no way hindered or hampered,” Gibbs said

The Secretary of Homeland Security is the noted moron Jamet Napalitano, who does not know the difference beteen the Canadian and Mexican borders and the difference between a veteran and an  Islamist militant.   The same President who so boldly declared that his so-called stimulus package would save or create over three million jobs, is now touting his public expertise.  Obama economic advisors are incompetent and he  not even named  his health advisors yet.  Sleep tight tonight.

The Barack Obama economic plan, Obamanomics, has failed.  So says  the White House,

April 26 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. economy will continue to contract “for some time to come,” said Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council.

“I expect the economy will continue to decline,” with “sharp declines in employment for quite some time this year,” Summers said today on “Fox News Sunday.”

Before Barack Obama enacted his massive intergenerational debt plan,  his so-called Stimulus, we had a weak economy.    Now we both a weak economy and a over a trillion dollars of debt.      We have change but where is the hope.

Conservation:

Me, to waitress: Do you remember by [usual] order?

Waitress: It [already] is in.

Me: [heart patters]

Me, to same waitress: [recalls conservation] Is this what is like in Heaven?

Waitress: [smiles]

Me: [misssion accomplished]

Canucks call Algore a liar, Steve Milloy, Canada Free Press:

When Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn confronted Al Gore with his profiteering from global warming legislation at today’s House Energy and Environment Subcommittee hearing on the Waxman-Markey climate bill, Al Gore said that every penny he ever made from his business activities went into non-profit efforts

I said, hopefully there will be an accounting for those psshing, and profiting, from climate fraud.

Ben Smith, and Jon Martin at Politico:

There was Sen. John McCain’s daughter and his campaign manager who last week demanded that their fellow Republicans embrace same-sex marriage. Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman – the most devoted modernizer among the party’s 2012 hopefuls – won approving words from New York Times columnist Frank Rich for his call to downplay divisive values issues. The party’s top elected leaders in Congress, meanwhile, spooked by being attacked as the “party of no,” were recasting themselves as a constructive, respectful opposition to a popular president.

But outside Washington, the reality is very different. Rank-and-file Republicans remain, by all indications, staunchly conservative, and they appear to have no desire to moderate their views. GOP activists and operatives say they hear intense anger at the White House and at the party’s own leaders on familiar issues – taxes, homosexuality, and immigration. Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.

There is little appetite for compromise on what many see as core issues, and the road to the presidential nomination lies – as always – through a series of states where the conservative base holds sway, and where the anger appears to be, if anything, particularly intense.

Apparently, the word is out, now,  that there’s a full fledged GOP rebellion on tap now, and the GOP Leadership is going to have to deal with us. But what does that mean? What do we want them to do? I examine this, myself, this morning, in my new Pajamas Media piece, called “Getting back to GOP Prinicples”

While conservatives and libertarians make up the majority of the GOP, they don’t make up even half of the leadership. The rank and file are interested in principles of conservatism and libertarianism. They want to see those principles applied to governing. The GOP leadership has no interest anymore in such matters, being more enamored with attaining and remaining in power. Those principles are just standing in their way.

Still, at some point the Republican Party needs to be eased back into this discussion, because  there isn’t enough in the way of organization outside the party to represent the views of the conservative and libertarians among us. But how can that be done  given the way the GOP leadership has slid off the conservative/libertarian map?

Principles are the answer.

…

Republicans as a party shouldn’t be, as they have been, focused on the idea that we need to change in order to be relevant. We need to show that our principles are already relevant and should never have been relinquished.

Go and read.