Nom de plume: Rivrdog

The Scozzafava lessons

It was the only thing the (D)onks could crow about after Tuesday's elections, their slim victory in the by-election in New York district 23, where their man barely beat out a Conservative Party candidate.

What are the lessons for the GOP out of that unique election?

First lesson: The National GOP MUST pay closer attention to candidate selections by local party apparatchiks. Dede Scozzafava is a well-known VERY liberal Republican in those parts, and has flirted more than once with the idea of switching parties. Scozzafava should have never gotten to the ballot as a Republican candidate.

Second Lesson: When a third-party candidate such as Conservative Party Doug Hoffman begins to outpoll the GOP candidate, why didn't the GOP have a plan in place to deal with it? That plan could have included options such as dumping Scozzafava and supporting Hoffman with enough money to allow him to win the election over Demoratic Party candidate Bill Owens. Is it possible that the entire NY State GOP party machine (I may be overusing the word "machine" here) is weak enough so that they didn't recognize what was was happening? If so, the National RNC should have stepped in.

Third Lesson: When Fox News asked Dede Scozzafava last week if she would switch parties after the election, and she REFUSED TO ANSWER, that should have set off every alarm bell at RNC HQ, but it didn't. Michael Steele and Co sat on their hands. At that point, they had five days to send some high-powered people up there, talk to Hoffman, get him on board, and start helping him with some last-minute TV ads, but they sat on their hands, Scozzafava dropped out and asked her supporters to vote Democrat. Somehow, I see that as having been perfectly predictable, and if I can see that from here, why couldn't the RNC?

The questions from this Congressional election debacle just keep cropping up, like mushrooms in the lawn in Oregon during November.

The GOP needs to examine EVERY State party apparatus, and invite GOP voters to send in evaluations of whether that apparatus can actually handle the job at hand. If they had done this in New York, Dede Scozzafava would still be just another crossover voter, not the national spoiler she turned into.

IN NY23, the GOP had an opportunity to ally themselves with the upcoming Conservative Party and use mutual strengths to take a seat that had been a "safe" Democrat seat since the Civil War. They blew that opportunity.

With Speaker Pelosi trying to force an unpopular, early, ill-advised vote on socialized medicine this week, the GOP has a great opportunity to gain visibility as saviors of the culture (it WOULD help, though, if they advanced their own Bill). After the Scozzafava debacle, I wonder if anyone is home at RNC?

Ducks, classified

I'm a Duck fan. GO DUCKS!

I've hunted ducks, eaten ducks, plucked a lot of ducks (my Mom refused to pluck the ducks I shot before college classes).

I know ducks.

As of last night, Obama and the Democratic Party are Lame ducks.

That is all.

Spotted Dick rises to defend itself...

...from the oh-so PeeCee United Kingdom comes the ultimate story.

It seems that a suet pudding dish, invented by the Royal Navy and served to sailors since 1700, has been forcibly renamed by a North Wales town council.

The dish, "spotted dick", is made slowly, where a slow cooking changes the heavy suet in it into a sugar. It is packed with energy, and sailors of the Royal Navy needed lots of energy to man their duty stations in the olde days.

The dish has also been served to British schoolboys, who, it seems, have been getting various hand-me-downs from the Navy for much longer. Corporal punishment comes to mind.

Schoolboys are never known for their sensitivity, though, and so many jokes have been made and published over the years about the name for the heavy pudding.

It's all detailed here.

As it says in the article, Spotted Dick has survived attempts to rename it before, and will probably survive this one as well.

In fact, I'll predict here and now that the Town Council winds up as the butt of this sailors' spotted dick joke.

Oh noe! I've failed the PeeCee test again, myself.

A tip of Jack Tar's cap to JGP, ever the Patrick O'Brian/Aubrey Turner fanboy.

Bucket of bilge...

Read this if you dare. It's a puff piece on Obama written by the AssPress, which has their corporate nose so far up Obama's hoo-hoo as to be in serious danger of suffocation.

The Big-O is pulling out all the stops for his big speech on healthcare. Don't get your hopes up, all he is going to do is blow more smoke our way in an attempt to revive all the Obama-mooning-and-swooning that gave him to us in the first place. The AssPress article is just one of many his machine will crank out.

My advice for him: that won't work. We've already seen that the Emperor has no clothes. He has the Reverse Midas Touch, with everything that he touches turning to garbage.

Further advice to him: follow the usual (D)onk dictum of deny, deny, counter-accuse. It's past time for denials, though, and the counter-accusal should be to throw Nancy Pelosi under the bus.

If Obama is a true centrist, as his article in the AssPress would have us believe, he has no need for Pelosi, who is a diehard Leftist. He should lay all his problems at her feet, telling the nation that he has tried, oh so hard, to get reasonable centrist solutions through, but she has insisted on leftist solutions only, and the nation doesn't want them. If he tosses her, and Stenny Hoyer assumes the post, the (D)onks might just save their majority next November. If she is allowed to run her witchcraft unchecked, she will take the whole Democratic Party down with her, Obama included.

"Throw the bums out" is a very real prospect for next year, and it can only be headed off by a few strategic sacrifices. Harry Reid seems to have already sacrificed himself, is polling very low in his re-election bid back in NV. If Obama can hang the Peloser out to dry, he may finally assert control of the party. His failures, up to now, are because of the extreme leftist direction of the Congressional leadership, and he should take this opportunity to change that leadership.

It's your move, Mr. President, and we are waiting for you to take it.

Stillbirth

The last attempt at socialized medicine in this country was aborted, this one is going to be a stillbirth.

The (D)onks have finally realized that they can't ram government-controlled healthcare down our gullets, and they will back off today or tomorrow.

The liberals will scream (are already "screaming", see former DNC hefe Dean's statement), some conservatives will do a "victory dance", but they shouldn't. The fact that the plan appears dead is an accident of the calendar, nothing else. If the August Congressional recess hadn't been due, the plan would have been rammed through the Congress and been signed into law by now.

Here's the AAR as it should appear, from the battlefield.

• The (D)onks have just been shown that their "absolute majority" doesn't give them an absolute mandate to disregard the normalcy of politics. We have a way of bringing legislation in this nation which most schoolkids learn, but the (D)onks have evidently forgotten about. The key process involved is DELIBERATION. Deliberation means taking the time to read the proposed law, politely discussing it for enough time to let it's import and meaning soak in, then going out to the constituents to see what THEY think. The (D)onks have disregarded that part of the plan up to now, and this time, they got caught out short on it.
• The GOP didn't stop this plan, the PEOPLE did. There was almost ZERO organized GOP opposition, yet conservatives and just plain folks turned out in droves during the recess to tell the pols that their ideas were wrong. The strength of their objections amazed even veteran political observers, but the pols appear to have gotten the message.
• If any political movement can take credit, it is the young and vigorous TEA-Party movement, which DID organize many of the protests at the "town hall" meetings. THIS political movement has life, even as the moribund GOP tries to take credit for it's work. The TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party movement now must decide how it's going to proceed, having just done something akin to a mythological dragon-slaying.

So, whither goest the TEA Party? That is the question of the hour, not "what will actually result that (D)onks can call "health care reform".

If the TEA Party keeps it together, and stays cohesive enough to successfully fight the next big (D)onk initiative, which HAS to be Stimulus Two, their momentum will carry on into the 2010 election season, and the Congress will change hands, ending Obama's leftward run at "only" the financial ruin of the Dollar.

If the TEA Party gets co-opted by the GOP, and it will EVENTUALLY need the GOP's help, then the movement will get bogged down in internal division and the sharks of the right will rise up to swallow the movement.

The simple political fact is that the (D)onk Machine is geared up to fight the GOP, and fight them successfully, but it is NOT geared up to fight the revolutionary-style organization of the TEA Party. The problem for the TEA Party is that like revolutionaries, they are well-positioned to offer loud and effective opposition at public events, opposition that even the news media can't overlook, but they are NOT geared up to offer alternatives.

The TEA Party may hang in there, and "throw the bums out" next Fall, but when they do, WHO will be occupying those seats in Congress? If they are the same tired old GOP stuffed shirts we have seen up to now, the momentary advantage will soon be lost, the stronger (D)onk Machine will again take over, and might even re-elect Obama in 2012.

This has to be done properly. The TEA Party is at a crossroads now. They have challenged the Left, and the Left fled the battlefield, but unless the TEA Party presses home it's advantage NOW, the momentum of their victory will be lost sooner than anyone thinks.

This observer's military eye already has a new target for the TEA Party: the traditional union picnics which dot the landscape between now and Labor Day. The TEA Party needs to show up, like an unstoppable swarm of yellowjackets, at these local events, and keep the message moving.

We need to take a little of the "dis" out of this "disorganized militia".

The Four Boxes, again

Again, they are the Soap Box, the Ballot Box, the Jury Box and the Cartridge Box.

We're just at the upper end of the Soap Box, and the Obama-bots are screaming as if we were up to the Cartridge Box.

Frankly, looking at my last post, I think that the Jury Box (impeachment) is a far more likely outcome for the end of our Obamanations than the Cartridge Box.

But it's good to see the full range of at least the First Box exercised.

Give 'em hell at those "town meetings"!

Let's quit playing their game

Imagine you are playing football on the side of a hill, and your opponents get to run downhill at your team.

That how Congress works today with all the wannabe-socialist legislation they are cramming down our throats. We have to fight uphill to stay in the game.

I say, let's quit fighting them.

Let's just leave the field.

When we leave the field, they will accomplish all their goals to turn the country Socialist, but there has been nothing that could have been done about that since Bush & Co lost the '06 Congressional election. The rest was a foregone conclusion.

When all opposition to the (D)onk's program ceases, and I would do it with a walk-out in both Houses of Congress, the (D)onks will be left to constantly wonder what the Right will be coming up with next.

Instead of us playing the (D)onks' game, let's have THEM guessing at ours.

Here's what I want them to guess about:

Will our game be browsers or bullets?

He's BAAAAAAAAACK....

Neanderpundit is back!

The world is decidedly less safe for idiots. Use your brain and you will get along with him. Forget to use it and he WILL dump you on your cretin ass.

That's the Neanderpundit way.

Now, if he will promise to attend GBR-IV, I might just have to show up myself...he was THE highlight at GBR-1 

Pay to Play vs. Influence Peddling

Government corruption is fairly easy to understand. Most of it revolves around the concepts of selling influence, paying to be able to approach a politician and make your pitch for government's help in some way. The rest of it revolves around Pay to Play.

In the past year, we had the Gov. Rod Blagojevich scandal, in which the IL Democrats finally had to admit one of their own was dirty and get him out of office. "Blago" was a "pay to play" guy. You paid him money to be considered for gubernatorial appointments. When the prosecutor played those tapes, even Mr. & Mrs. Dumb America could understand the wrong.

Now we have a growing scandal about Rep. John Murtha of PA, a corrupt politician of the influence-peddling type. You may remember John Murtha more for his anti-war stance during the Bush Administration than anything else, but for an anti-war pol, he was hip deep in the defense business, around which most of his corruption is involved, apparently. The man starts off as a hypocrite of the first water, touting himself as a brave soldier (USMC) while accusing the entire body of the military in Iraq of performing atrocities. Let's not digress too much, though.

John Murtha may easily be the single most corrupt politician in the history of the USA, when it comes to the sheer amount of influence he has apparently peddled.

You get the general idea about how much influence that might be when you consider the case of all of the money spent on the Johnstown, PA airport. That airport was what general-aviation types call a pea-patch. It was a small-town airport, suitable only for localized general aviation and a few of the smallest commuter airplanes. Understand, please, that airports usually qualify for expansion dollar grants based on increased passenger volume. Johnstown does NOT rate much additional money based on passenger volume, despite the steady trickle of prospective clients of business parks built nearby at the behest of Rep. Murtha.

Enter our porker, John Murtha. He lives nearby the airport. He wants to be able to easily commute to DeeCee, so he "invents" a huge Defense Dept mission for the pea-patch, and proceeds to get a huge and steady flow of earmarks going to expand it into a major regional air traffic hub. There have been hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this pea-patch, at a time when such development funds are scarce. He causes the Defense Dept to locate an Air National Guard facility there, despite Johnstown Airport having a poor weather history for such operations.

Now read this story, brought to our attention by the stalwarts at Random Nuclear Strikes. It would appear that John Murtha re-invented the entire business of influence peddling, closing the gap between it and pay-to-play, until the two distinctly different schemes of corruption now seem to be inextricably wedded into one huge scheme of political paydirt. What's more, it appears that a full third of the Democratic Majority in the House of Representatives may be involved in Murtha's murky web of deceit and theft.

GOP Reps have had their own dirty laundry, as the author of the linked article is quick to point out, but the fact remains that the Murtha slime has touched mostly Democrats. The article had the intent of exposing Nancy Pelosi, who is actively defending Murtha in the growing scandal, but what else could she do? If all the offending pork-peddlers-turned-influence-peddlers are turned out of office, she will probably lose HER position along with them. Politically, she has no choice but to fight.

It's going to be tough prosecuting these people in a Democratic Administration with a Democratic super-majority behind it. I'm betting that the sheer venality of John Murtha will make that possible, though. The only danger is that Murtha will ultimately be persuaded to take the fall to save his party, and when he does, he will assure all of us that he acted alone.

Punditry is fun, don't you think?

Big Pharma hype and Socialized medicine

Do you have an overactive bladder? Do you have fibromyalgia? You MUST have had your Lazik eye surgery by now, haven't you? How about that depression? Are you taking enough medications for it?

I'm not a doctor, but my Dad was, an uncle was, two cousins are and my youngest daughter is. Other members of my extended family are nurses, and I was an EMT.

I grew up in a medical family before it was considered ethical for doctors or pillpushers (what Pharma used to be called) to hype up their own business. In those days, you went to see a doctor and HE told you what HE thought was wrong with you according to his training and experience in diagnosis.

That's all in the past.

Now the One-Eyed Idiot Box tells you what's wrong with you, tells you what pills or procedures will fix that ailment, and tells you to go to your doctor to arrange that treatment. The doctor is reduced to a prescription writer, and in some "advanced" societies (read: socialist societies), fewer and fewer docs are even used. A nurse-practitioner writes the prescription.

Some docs rail at this reversal of their roles, but even more, I suspect, go with the flow. They go with the flow for a variety of reasons, but largely because they don't see pillpushing as either unethical or intrusive on their own domains. There's also the matter of direct payola. Doctors in independent practice (most are in small towns) have huge discretion on what to prescribe in the way of drug therapies, and there can be some serious money involved in prescribing the "right" drugs.

All of this hype makes the practice of medicine cost more money, and the dramatic price increases of the past 15 years or so have lead too many people to think that the Government is the answer to controlling costs. It isn't.

Look, this is business, pure and simple. Business like Mom and Pop run their store on Main Street, or business like Wall Street runs it. Business costs more when you add more layers of management, and the advertisements of Big Pharma are leading directly to socialized medicine, which, everywhere it's been tried, is inferior medicine.