Libertarian Leanings

Thanks, Famous Actors!

By way of Free Republic:

This Is What You Get...

...when you vote for Democrats.  There is a "pervasive culture of retaliation and intimidation" at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  A senior enforcement attorney at CFPB has testified at a House Committee on Financial Services hearing that senior managers at the agency retaliated against her for speaking out against mismanagement.

Scott Pluta, the CFPB assistant director of the Office of Consumer Response, demoted Martin after she filed a formal complaint of discrimination for being “isolated” and prevented from doing any “meaningful work” in December 2012. Martin has not been assigned a single case or enforcement matter since she dissolved her own law practice to work for the CFPB in 2011.

After filing her complaint, Martin, a former civilian attorney for the judge advocate general at Fort Bragg, was then removed from all of her job duties.

...

Misty Raucci, a workplace private investigator who was hired by the CFPB to investigate the case, supported Martin’s testimony.

After six months, Raucci said she became a “veritable hotline for employees at CFPB, who called to discuss their own maltreatment at the bureau, mainly at the hands of Scott Pluta or [CFPB official] Dane D’Alessandro.”

Raucci said Martin was subjected to “open bashing, bullying, and marginalization” from D’Alessandro. Pluta removed Martin from her position as chief counsel in the Office of Consumer Response.

Raucci suggested that Pluta colluded with two lower-level employees—Cathaleen Skinner and Cora Hume—to have them file complaints against Martin. Skinner “stood to benefit directly from Ms. Martin’s removal from her position as Chief Counsel,” Raucci said.

This is how Democrats believe the U.S. government should work — by intimidation and retaliation.  Consider this case concerning the EPA.

The US Supreme Court Wednesday ruled unanimously in favor of an Idaho couple seeking to have their day in court to challenge an Environmental Protection Agency order that scuttled plans to build their dream home on a subdivided lot the EPA said was a federal wetland.

The couple, Chantell and Michael Sackett, had started to fill the home site with dirt and gravel to prepare for construction. But the EPA intervened, announcing that the property was a regulated wetland. Agency officials ordered the couple to restore the land to its original state or face up to $75,000 a day in fines.

Or how about this one?

All Andy Johnson wanted to do was build a stock pond on his sprawling eight-acre Wyoming farm. He and his wife Katie spent hours constructing it, filling it with crystal-clear water, and bringing in brook and brown trout, ducks and geese. It was a place where his horses could drink and graze, and a private playground for his three children. 

But instead of enjoying the fruits of his labor, the Wyoming welder says he was harangued by the federal government, stuck in what he calls a petty power play by the Environmental Protection Agency. He claims the agency is now threatening him with civil and criminal penalties – including the threat of a $75,000-a-day fine.

And if you don't happen to be a landowner subject to EPA regulations, there is the IRS to harass you if you should happen to stray from the liberal orthodoxy.  Don't file for tax exempt status if your organization has Tea Party" or "Patriot" in its name.

The Obama administration obviously considers Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of two public service organizations, “King Street Patriots” and “True the Vote”, to be a very dangerous person. She apparently gained that ominous distinction soon after filing to obtain tax-exempt IRS status for King Street Patriots in July 2010…approval, incidentally, which has yet to be granted.  Nor has tax-exempt status been awarded for a True the Vote filing which was submitted at the same time.

Catherine’s life has changed dramatically since submitting those applications. The organization has been questioned by the FBI on numerous occasions; she has had her personal tax returns audited by the IRS; and has also had her small manufacturing business tax returns audited by the IRS. In addition, her business has been subjected to two unscheduled audits by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, and Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) and has undergone another unscheduled business audit by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

And that's how Democrats think the government is supposed to work.  Get in the way, and you get run over.  It's what you get when you vote for a Democrat.

Wisconsin Republicans Hold On

By winning four of six recall elections in GOP-held districts Wisconsin Republicans have retained a 17-16 advantage in the state Senate and have effectively demolished Democrat aspirations of turning back recent legislation that has imposed limits on the bargaining power of public sector unions.  The unofficial results of yesterday's recall vote leave Republicans in control of both houses of the Wisconsin state legislature and the governorship.

In the Milwaukee-area 8th District, where a winner wasn't declared until after midnight local time, incumbent Republican Sen. Alberta Darling defeated Democratic challenger Sandy Pasch, 54% to 46%, with 84% of precincts reporting, according to unofficial results from the Associated Press.

...

Republicans held on in three other districts. In the 14th District, in central Wisconsin, Republican Sen. Luther Olsen defeated Democratic state Rep. Fred Clark, 52% to 48%.

In the 10th District in northwest Wisconsin, Republican Sen. Sheila Harsdorf beat Democrat Shelly Moore, 58% to 42%.

In the 2nd District in northeast Wisconsin, incumbent Sen. Robert Cowles beat Democratic challenger Nancy Nusbaum, 60% to 40%.

In the 18th District, Democrat Jessica King was declared the winner over incumbent Sen. Randy Hopper, 51% to 49%. In their 2008 contest for the Senate seat, Mr. Hopper defeated Ms. King by less than 200 votes.

Democratic state Rep. Jennifer Shilling ousted Republican Sen. Dan Kapanke in the 32nd District, 55% to 45%.

The recall election had national implications.  As Wisconsin and other state governments successfully challenged the power of the public sector unions, Democrats and labor unions pushed back by petitioning for recall elections in hope of turning the legislative tide.  According to a Washington Post article published before the votes were tallied, a lot was riding on these votes.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Democrats and their allies in organized labor are hoping for a net gain of three seats, which would give them control of the state Senate, which, like the assembly, is controlled by Republicans.

“If you were a Republican governor in another state and the Democrats make a big comeback in these elections, it says you might want to slow down a little,” said Joseph Heim, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse.

The Democrats also hope a victory would serve as a warning to national Republicans, who they think have overreached in their policy aims. It would also give them momentum in a state crucial to President Obama’s 2012 reelection prospects, while setting the stage for a possible recall of Walker next year.

“These elections are little proxies for what is going to happen for the rest of the country,” said Rick Badger, executive director of AFSCME Council 40, which represents 32,000 local government workers across Wisconsin.

With record amounts of money flowing into Wisconsin, Republicans just barely hung onto their senate majority.  But their one-vote margin may widen, since two Democratic senators face recall elections next Tuesday. 

Outside groups — led by national unions on the Democratic side and limited government groups such as the Wisconsin Club for Growth on the Republican side — have shoveled more than $25 million into the recall effort, with both sides spending about the same amount. The candidates, meanwhile, have raised more than $5 million.

The staggering dollar amounts being showered on the eight recall campaigns — which after a July 19 election and Tuesday’s six contests will conclude with two elections on Aug. 16 — are shattering state records. In 2010, when the 99-member assembly and half the 33-member state Senate was up for election, outside organizations spent $3.75 million in Wisconsin — 15 percent of this year’s total.

It is a striking turn of events.  Wisconsin had been one of the bluest of blue states, but in the 2010 midterm election Democrats were swept out of office leaving Republicans in control of the governorship, both houses of the legislature, and even the state supreme court.  The Democrats' failure to retake the state Senate in their high stakes recall gamble can only be interpreted as a ringing endorsement of the policies pursued by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and other GOP governors. 

I can't help but see this as a very good sign of things to come in 2012.

Update:  David Freddoso describes just how badly the unions got thumped.

In the end, the union-backed Democrats picked up only two state Senate seats in Wisconsin last night, at a staggering cost in time, effort, and of course money. One of the seats was solidly Democratic, held by a Republican due to an apparent fluke of nature. The other was held by an alleged adulterer who had moved outside his district to live with his young mistress, and whose wife was supporting his recall.

As for the other four Republican incumbents the unions tried to recall, they didn't end up coming very close. And remember -- these weren't just any Republican incumbents. These were the ones that the unions judged most vulnerable, which is why they collected petition signatures against them.

Meanwhile lefty Markos Moulitsas feels "strangely energized and elated," which might also be translated as "delusional."  He thinks it was a great Democratic victory.

The Disappearing Centrist Democrats

What's to become of centrist Democrats?  According to Ben Smith the Democratic Leadership Council is about to fold.

The Democratic Leadership Council, the iconic centrist organization of the Clinton years, is out of money and could close its doors as soon as next week, a person familiar with the plans said Monday.

The DLC, a network of Democratic elected officials and policy intellectuals had long been fading from its mid-'90s political relevance, tarred by the left as a symbol of "triangulation" at a moment when there's little appetite for intra-party warfare on the center-right. The group tried -- but has failed -- to remake itself in the summer of 2009, when its founder, Al From, stepped down as president. Its new leader, former Clinton aide Bruce Reed, sought to remake the group as a think tank, and the DLC split from its associated think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute.

Progressives like Taylor Marsh laud the demise.  In his view conservative Democrats serve only to pollute the party's progressive purity.

William Jefferson Clinton was the DLC king who is blamed with taking the Democratic Party on the road to its current conservative status. But coming off 12 years of Reagan, to many his victory was about winning again and having someone at the top who could sell being a Democrat.

The real problem with the legacy of the DLC is that the conservative Democrats now exerting power make the group look liberal. The identity crisis for the Democratic Party has only gotten worse.

The good news is that progressives are claiming plenty of ground of their own these days, with a movement that is noisy, tenacious and not about to cede territory to conservative Democrats without them first knowing they’ve been challenged.

The first Democrat progressives rose to take on was Bill Clinton. The latest is Barack Obama.

Though lefties may take this turn of events with a certain sense of satisfaction, I have to wonder how they're going to like it in 2012.  Apparently Marsh hasn't noticed that a majority of American voters continue to favor repeal of the left's signature legislation -- ObamaCare.  The individual mandate, emblematic of the hard left turn progressives have forced on the country, isn't sitting well with the voters.

The progressive short term strategy had it that Americans would fall in love with the bill once it was passed.  That didn't happen.  In the longer term, the forced takeover and unionization of the health care industry would eventually funnel tax dollars through a unionized health care workforce to the Democratic party.  Once that apparatus is in place, dislodging progressives from their legislative fiefdoms will be next to impossible.  But can progressives get there without centrist support?  I'm betting, no.

"I think the midterms showed you really can't be a conservative and be a member of the Democratic Party," Bell said.

Ashley Bell, quoted above, is an African American lawyer who once served as president of the College Democrats of America and was an adviser to presidential candidate John Edwards.  He is 1 of 24 state senators and representatives across the south who have switched from Democrat to Republican.

Resurgent Republicans

House Republicans say they plan to schedule a vote on the repeal of ObamaCare. 

Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for incoming House Republican leader Eric Cantor, said the House plans to vote on legislation to repeal the healthcare law on Jan. 12.

"It will pass the House," Dayspring said.

Although Republicans will control the House, 242-193, Obama's Democrats retain control of the Senate by 53-47 and are likely to block any repeal of the healthcare law.

"Obamacare is a job killer for businesses small and large, and the top priority for House Republicans is going to be to cut spending and grow the economy and jobs," Dayspring said.

OK, but how is this talk of repeal going over with the voters?

The number of American adults calling themselves Republicans in December increased by one percentage point from November to 37.0%.

Also in December, the number calling themselves Democrats fell by a point to 33.7%.

Those figures reflect the largest number of Republicans in the nation since December 2004 and the lowest number of Democrats ever recorded in tracking since November 2002.

The generic ballot shows the Republican lead widening again.  Right after the November election voters seemed poised for a display of buyers remores.  Yes, they wanted the Democrats out, but were they happy that Republicans were in?   An 11-point lead the week before the election shrunk to 5 in the weeks after. 

Republicans hold a 10-point lead over Democrats on the Generic Congressional Ballot for the week ending January 2, 2011.  That’s a five-point jump from last week, but it's far from clear if the findings mark a real upswing in GOP support as the new Congress convenes or are just statistical noise. 

[...]

Republicans lead by 13 points among men and by seven points among women. They hold a 23-point lead among voters not affiliated with either major political party.

Right now Republicans are taking the right steps, voting to repeal ObamaCare being one of them, and voters are responding with their support.  So far, so good, but that support will evaporate if it's all for show.  Americans are not looking for congress to go on a diet until the excitement dies down.  We need a change in the way Washington conducts business, not an empty congressional New Years resolution. 

Senate To Consider Continuing Resolution

Republicans stuck to principle and maintained unity, forcing rejection of the Democrats' pork laden, lame duck, omnibus spending bill.  A disappointed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled it on Thursday.

This week Democrats unveiled a $1.2 trillion omnibus, legislation as pure an insult to the electorate as it gets. It was a 1,924-page monstrosity that nobody had time to read. It took 11 spending bills that Democrats couldn't be bothered to pass individually and crammed them into one oozing ball of pork and bad policy, going beyond even the obscene budget of 2010.

Yet to this legislative Frankenstein Democrats carefully attached the spenders' equivalent of crack cocaine. To wit, omnibus author and Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye dug up earmark requests that Senate Republicans had made in the past year (prior to their self-imposed ban) and, unasked, included them in the bill. He lavished special, generous attention—$1 billion worth of it—on some reliable GOP earmark junkies: Mississippi's Thad Cochran got $512 million; Utah's Bob Bennett, $226 million; Maine's Susan Collins, $114 million; Missouri's Kit Bond, $102 million; Ohio's George Voinovich, $98 million; and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, $80 million.

The bill had lots of things for Republicans to hate.

Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky had thrown his weight against the bill in recent days, saying it was "unbelievable" that Democrats would try to muscle through in the days before Christmas legislation that usually takes months to debate.

"Just a few weeks after the voters told us they don't want us rushing major pieces of complicated, costly, far-reaching legislation through Congress, we get this," McConnell said. "This is no way to legislate."

The turn of events was a major victory for earmark opponents like Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who for years have been steamrolled by the old-school members of the powerful Appropriations Committee.

[...]

Republicans were also irate that the measure contained money to begin implementation of Obama's controversial health care law and a financial overhaul measure that all but a handful of Republicans opposed.

On the merits, most of the rest of the bill had bipartisan support. It stuck to a spending cap sought by Republicans while boosting spending for Head Start, veterans programs and Pell Grants for disadvantaged college students. But that message didn't get out amid the firestorm over earmarks and the measure's remarkable size.

This is a huge victory.  It means there is hope for the country yet, as long as Republicans can just stay true to the voters who elected them. 

No Democrats

The choice is clear.  The national referendum on the Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda is on for tomorrow, when voters will choose between the Democrat and whoever is the most likely of the other candidates to beat the Democrat.  Off hand, I can't think of any race where that's not the Republican.   But how did it come to this?

We arrived at this point because we have a Democratic president and Democratic congress a who are determined to transform America, and we have an electorate that is determined to prevent them from succeeding at it.  Never in my lifetime have Americans felt so threatened by Washington as they do on the eve of this election.  

Our leftist president and his congressional allies took advantage of a financial crisis to push through a partisan agenda, which when all is said and done, was a brazen power grab.  Health care reform's individual mandate sits at the very heart voter fears.  Since it requires a person to buy a product or face government imposed penalties, the indivual mandate represents an unprecedented assertion of federal government control over the individual.  Democrats are the authors of that authoritarian legislation.

The rationale behind health care reform, aside from the usual stuff about compassion, was that it was supposed to bring government spending under control.  President Obama claimed it would bend the health care cost curve down, and since health care takes such a big chunk of the federal budget it would reduce government outlays.  As you might imagine, there were some who were skeptical. 

In what might best be described as a tactical blunder, Democrats took to accusing anybody who asked how all this was supposed to work of being a racist or just plain stupid.  They seem, even now, to be surprised that a lot of people would find this offensive.  Then came their strategic blunder.

Health care reform was advertised a weapon in the fight to bring down the deficit.  That didn't play well in Peoria, since Democrats were busy tripling the deficit with stimulus bills and bailouts.  This took a big problem for the Democrats and made it bigger, because all of this was going on while the economy was in the toilet.  Voters wanted Washington to cut the big spending and focus on jobs and the economy, but instead Democrats rammed through health care reform.

And it wasn't as if voters hadn't dropped a hint or two along the way.  A house-from-a-helicopter sized hint came in the form of Scott Brown's defeat of Martha Coakley in the special election to replace Senator Health Care himself, Ted Kennedy.  It was priceless.  Brown won that seat by advertising himself as the 41st vote against health care reform.

But Democrats passed it anyway.  There were the bribes.  Special exemptions for Lousiana and Nebraska became known as the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback respectively.  There were betrayals.  Pro-life Congressman Bart Stupak vowed to block the bill if it didn't include language to prevent federal dollars from supporting abortions.  Yet he voted for it over the objections of his constituents on a promise from Obama that there would be an Executive Order to make up for what the bill lacked. 

Finally there was the legislative trick.  Differing versions of the health care bill, one from the House and one the Senate, never went through conference committee to have their differences ironed out.  Had the bill gone to conference committee the revised legislation would have to go back to both the House and the Senate for final passage.  The Senate version had been passed before Scott Brown won his special election, which meant Democrats couldn't risk allowing a conference committee bill back to the Senate where Republicans with Scott Brown seated could block it.

So Democrats used a legislative process called reconciliation which is ordinarily reserved for budgetary issues, and the House passed the Senate version. Voters got the message, loud and clear.  Democrats were not interested in what the voters thought or wanted.  The Democrats wanted health care reform and they would have it. 

And that is what is at stake in the election tomorrow.  If tomorrow's vote leaves them in power, Democrats will take it as voter validation of all of the corruption, betrayal, and chicanery that went into the passage of health care reform.  In that event voters could expect even less respect from legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, than we get now. 

In order for the prevent that from happening, voters must defeat Democrats with their ballots.  If the latest opinion polls can be believed Americans are ready to do just that.  Tomorrow the most important vote is the vote against any Democrat.  The party must be punished. 

If we voters fail to punish the Democrats, and punish them severely, we can expect to be ignored from here on out.  And worse, we can expect to say goodbye to the America we know.  Democrats will transform it in a way that is intended to guarantee Democrat majorities.  We will become a European style social democracy with an entrenched ruling class.  The Democrats. 

So tomorrow when we vote remember this:  No Democrats.

Democrats Frustrated As Messages Lag

With just over two weeks to go until election day Democrats are still looking for the magic formula.

Perhaps nothing has frustrated Democrats more than their yearlong failure to find a message that could puncture the anger of millions of voters who seem bent on punishing the party in power. It wasn't for a lack of trying.

It wasn't for lack of persistence either.  Two years down the road with consecutive trillion-plus deficits under his belt, unemployment at nearly 10 percent, and recovery nowhere in sight, President Obama continues to lay the blame on George W. Bush.  The message is not resonating, and progressives are at a loss to explain it.

And that's not the only message that failed to penetrate.  The if-only-voters-were-smart-enough-to-understand-Obama's-brilliance message hasn't caught on either.  Democrats are mystified.  The reality based community was perplexed, but then the explanation hit them over the head like a two-by-four.

Rejection of policies like health care reform is really rejection of the president because he is African-American, they said.  They had discovered a vast body of Americans who were still racists!  Mystery solved! But somehow, public gratitude for this important constructive criticism never materialized.  Progressives are bewildered.

Instead of showing appropriate gratitude for this progressive enlightenment, Americans have been pouring millions into Republican election campaigns.  In fact, Democrats trail Republican fund raising by a wide margin.  It has gotten so bad that Democrats have been forced to pull advertising from several races.

Democrats, desperate to hold their losses to three dozen seats, plan to run TV ads in 59 races in the remaining days. But their chief House campaign committee has recently canceled millions of dollars worth of advertising for struggling Reps. Steve Driehaus and Mary Jo Kilroy of Ohio, Suzanne Kosmas of Florida, Betsy Markey of Colorado and Steve Kagen of Wisconsin.

Out of the Republican fund raising advantage comes Obama's new message:  The US Chamber of Commerce is a threat to our democracy.  David Axlerod went on Face the Nation last week to accuse it of using money from foreign sources to pay for political ads.  According to Axlerod, no offense but the Chamber is dishonest, criminal actually, until it proves otherwise.

It's odd, but this new message hasn't struck a chord with the electorate, either.  And though there is still time for it to take hold, there's not a lot of hope that it will.  Obama and his progressive allies may eventually find their way to comprehension, painful though it may be. 

But then again, maybe not.  In one of his more recent pronouncements Obama identifies yet another factor that clouds voter judgment:  fear.

"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared,” Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. “And the country's scared.”

Obama told the several dozen donors that he was offering them his “view from the Oval Office.” He faulted the economic downturn for Americans’ inability to “think clearly” and said the burden is on Democrats “to break through the fear and the frustration people are feeling.”

The strategy of casting American voters as ignorant, racist, dishonest, and stupid hasn't worked, but it's given Obama an idea for a new message:  Irrationally fearful Americans are responsible for the recession because they can't think clearly.  What could possibly go wrong with that one?  After all, we'll have the Democrats to allay our fears.

Updated at 6:45pm

The Disaffected Lefty Base

Democrats, particularly lefty Democrats, feel they have been betrayed, according to Michael Barone.

They hoped to see an abject and abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq within weeks of the Obama inauguration. They hoped to see a beginning of withdrawal from Afghanistan not in July 2011 but in the early months of 2009. They hoped to see the detention facility at Guantanamo closed and shuttered and the detainees tried in civilian courts or freed to regale the media with tales of torture.

The uncomfortable truth is that many -- not most, but many -- Democratic politicians and Democratic voters saw political benefit in an American defeat in Iraq. Many, including Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, then boss of Obama's new chief of staff Pete Rouse, thronged to the Washington premiere of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." They tried to give every appearance of agreeing with the "Bush-lied-people-died" crowd and with those who charged that high-ranking officials colluded in systematic torture.

It was a lot of fun while it lasted, up to election night 2008 and Inauguration Day 2009. But then Obama had to govern. Knowing little of military affairs, he retained Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has loyally served presidents of both parties. Understanding even if not admitting the great headway Americans had made in Iraq, Obama declined to throw it all away.

Update:  Apologies.  "Lefty Democrat" is inexcusably redundant. There are some who masquerade as conservative, but it always turns out to be a facade.  Bart Stupak comes to mind.

New Diagnosis For Voter Disenchantment

When progressives explain why voters are disenchanted with Obama and the Democrats, they never mention policy.  No, it's always about the disenchanted.  They're racist, or they're stupid, or they're both racist and stupid.  Well, now we have a new one.  They're psychotic.

The heightened role for government in the economy and health care has triggered mass psychosis among voters...

That bit of wisdom comes from the perceptive and sensitive Eleanor Clift.  She has more.

I’d like to believe that once the voters know more about John Boehner, the House speaker-in-waiting, they will recognize that elevating him is like buying fire insurance from the guy who lit your house aflame.

Such a persuasive case!  A sure way to win 'em over to your side, Eleanor!