Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told us all we needed to know this week about the divide that threatens the Democratic Party's majorities in next year's midterm elections.
"We got walloped," said Warner, a former governor of Virginia, about Democrats losing both gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, in his home state by 17 points.
As the suicidal Democratic congressmen proceed to rubber-stamp
the Obama healthcare reform despite the drubbing their party took in the ’09
elections, the president trotted out the endorsements of the AMA and the AARP
to stimulate support. But these — and the other endorsements — his package has
received are all bought and paid for. Here are the deals: Read more...
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, has a basic theory
about what makes people truly successful. He says that if you have the right
education, the right timing and the right experience, combined with a truly
extraordinary work ethic, you can be an outlier, somebody who succeeds beyond
everyone’s expectations.
One of the nuggets in this very interesting book is
Gladwell’s reciting of the 10,000-hour rule. Gladwell repeats the theory that
for someone to be truly proficient in a complex task, that person must work at
it for 10,000 hours or more. Ten thousand hours is a long time, about 10 years. Read more...
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her congressional
lieutenants were burning the midnight oil last evening, preparing for a
whirlwind few days in order to get her trillion-dollar health reform bill to
the House floor. To the pure political observers, it’s her best strategy. She
can’t afford to wait a day longer. As each hour passes, red-state Democrats are
waking up and realizing, “What happened on Tuesday night could happen to me
next year.”
Keeping her flock in town over the weekend is not by
accident. Pelosi’s henchmen know that if they release the rank and file back to
their districts following Tuesday’s shellacking at every level of government,
they will certainly get an earful as to why they are stubbornly ignoring the
will of the electorate and moving forward. Read more...
The jobless pain now increases to 10.2 percent of the nation. One hundred and ninety-thousand more jobs lost.
The American people are in a state of deep worry and major backlash that will now grow greater against Washington and Wall Street. The president should do what he should have done long ago: ask banks what they can do for their country. And ask them now. And act if they do not answer with the patriotism expected of all Americans and most especially those who made profits from the giant bailout paid for by the people who endure the pain.
You are comparing Obama to
the Marxist playbook? That post is total, complete and unadulterated baloney and
should placed in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum as an example of why books are written
about "The Death of Conservatism.”
The post does not deserve
and will not receive from me a serious answer. Is this your best intellectual contribution
to American political discourse? I suspect Obama has learned little, so far, from
Virginia and New Jersey. I know you have learned nothing from New York congressional
district 23.
Keep that Beck-Limbaugh pap
coming and you will nationalize what happened to your candidate in the 23rd district
in New York.
It was the French general Ferdinand Foch who said during the First World War: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack."
Foch’s tactics during the Great War, as it was called back then, unnecessarily killed hundred of thousands of French troops at the Battle of the Somme, leading to his eventual dismissal and an unhappy place in history.
One key fact explains the present that has come to us in Tuesday’s election: A deeply conservative Republican explaining himself without apology has won the Old Dominion by 18 percent. Virginia is bright red. It will be this way in Texas, too, where the conservative, Rick Perry, is ahead of the moderate, Kay Bailey Hutchison, by 12 percent.
I was reading Karl Marx recently. Marx wrote about how to turn a country from a capitalist nation into a socialist state. Step 1: destroy its economy. Step 2: make the people dependent on government. Step 3: maintain an atmosphere of class warfare. Once that happens, the government has inexorable control over the masses and can manipulate them as they please.
I wonder how much Marx’s writings have influenced the Obama administration. I don’t think I’m being paranoid when I say that it seems as if the Obama administration is pulling plays directly from the Karl Marx playbook.
Now we learn that while many kids, hospitals and pregnant women cannot get enough of the swine flu vaccine, the major banks and Wall Street firms were given a private allocation. At best, this is a ridiculous distribution strategy; at worst, these firms gave some vaccines not to high-risk people but to high-profit traders and senior managers.