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Wednesday Morning Reading

A little longer today since we missed yesterday…

QUOTE OF THE DAY

In a sane world, the scandal would be that for eight years our multibillion-dollar intelligence community only “brainstormed” about dispatching agents to eliminate al-Qaeda operative wherever they could be found.

If this mindset had prevailed in an earlier generation, U.S. troops would have landed in Normandy about 1959.
Cliff May, The Corner

Palin Attacks Obama in WaPo Op-ed, How Will Media Respond?
Noel Sheppard, NewsBusters
If Palin Derangement Syndrome-afflicted media members thought the Alaska Governor’s surprising pre-Fourth of July announcement meant she was getting out of politics, her op-ed in Tuesday’s Washington Post should change their minds.
Read more.

Here’s the editorial…

The ‘Cap And Tax’ Dead End
Governor Sarah Palin,  The Washington Times
We have an important choice to make. Do we want to control our energy supply and its environmental impact? Or, do we want to outsource it to China, Russia and Saudi Arabia? Make no mistake: President Obama’s plan will result in the latter.
Read more.

Wolf: “Holder is a jerk”
Bearing Drift
“The attorney general’s failure to respond to legitimate congressional inquiries is a disservice to this president and the American people. This resolution would hold the attorney general to the president’s public commitment to transparency and accountability,”
Read more.

Will Republicans expose the two Sotomayors?
Byron York, Washington Examiner
Sotomayor’s professions of fidelity to the law and impartiality are the core of the argument that she has the right temperament and approach to serve on the Supreme Court. Yet her opening words just served to underscore the difference between what she says to win confirmation and what she has told friendly audiences over the years.
Read more.

Trumping the Race Card
Matthew Vadum, The American Spectator
If you’re going to be smeared by the left and the media — but I repeat myself — as a racist and a bigot no matter what you say, you might as well make the most of it.
Read more.

Study in contrasts: Christian scientist vs. eco-mad scientist
Michelle Malkin
Reporting last week on the president’s choice to head the National Institutes of Health, Times writer Gardiner Harris noted that praise for Dr. Francis S. Collins “was not universal or entirely enthusiastic.” The geneticist is causing “unease,” according to the Times, because of his “his very public embrace of religion.” Stomachs are apparently churning over a book Collins wrote describing his conversion to Christianity.
Read more.

NOTE:  As we reported in January, Dr. Collins spoke at this year’s Commonwealth Prayer Breakfast.

And in Virginia

McDonnell Campaign Flush: $5M In The Bank
Hotline on Call, The National Journal
The McDonnell campaign has almost $5M on hand as of 6/30, the end of the last reporting period. That’s nearly double the amount reported by Dem state Sen. Creigh Deeds’ team.
Read more.

So Steve Shannon is blaming Ken Cuccinelli for not voting a bill that he (Shannon) couldn’t even get out of the house?  Translation:  Cuccinelli never had a chance to vote on it.

Shannon Can’t Get A Bill Passed, Blames Cuccinelli
Bearing Drift
Shannon asks why Cuccinelli did not support Shannon’s HB 3086 in 2007  Problem is, HB 3086 died in the Criminal Law subcomittee of the House Committee of Criminal Justice.
Read more.

AG race, healthcare and energy
Bearing Drift
Some good reads today on the AG race, healthcare, and energy.
Read more.

RPV Applauds Biden’s In-Kind Contribution to the GOP Ticket
The Contemporary Conservative
“I think it’s great that Creigh Deeds is bringing in the world-renown comedian Joe Biden, which I guess means that Al Franken wasn’t available,” Chairman Mullins said. “But when you boil it down, the fact that Creigh Deeds is welcoming Joe Biden into the Commonwealth tells you an awful lot about where he stands on the issues.”
Read more.

Dark Clouds on the Democratic Horizon
Tertium Quids
The Augusta Free Press’ Chris Graham wonders “what in the hell is going on” with the three statewide Democratic candidates…
Read more.

Krystal Ball’s FEC Report Reveals Uranium, Secrecy, High Finance Handlers … and Switzerland?
Rappahannock Red
Krystal Ball’s Federal Elections Commission report was released today in her campaign to bring her experience in baby diapers and passion for nuclear-free $100,000 teachers to the forefront of U.S. Congress.
Read more.

Monday Morning Reading

Day One: Spotlight on Sotomayor
Michelle Malkin
The good news: At least we’ll be spared Joe Biden’s bloviations.
Read more.

On the “Cheney Didn’t Tell Us” Lie
Facts are troublesome things for the Democrats
Erick Erickson, RedState
Nonetheless, while Democrats are screaming that evil Dick Cheney did not tell them about a CIA program, the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency says Congress did know about it.
Read more.

Palin’s audacity of the unconventional
Star Parker, Townhall
So stepping down from a job in which you are no longer realizing your ideals to reconnect with family and self is not necessarily political suicide. But doing what everyone says you are supposed to do, compromising your values, and letting pundits and experts run your life is.
Read more.

Verse for Today

Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
But we trust the name of the Lord our God.
Psalm 20:7

Chaos on Capitol Hill: All Politics is Loco
Michael Barone, via Real Clear Politics
Disarray. That’s one word to describe the status of the Obama administration’s legislative program as Congress heads into its final four weeks of work before the August recess.
Read more.

Lawmakers, read the bills before you vote
Jeff Jacoby, Boston.com
Senators and representatives who vote on bills they haven’t read and don’t understand betray their constituents’ trust. It is no excuse to say that Congress would get much less done if every member took the time to read every bill.
Read more.

Thought for the Day

“Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.”
~ Vincent Lombardi, Football Coach

Mid-Week Reading

Is Barack Obama the next FDR?

Hmmmm…let’s see, the New Deal caused unemployment.  The Stimulus Package caused unemployment.  Now there’s a small Asian nation aiming bombs toward Hawaii…

Obama’s Stimulus is Proving as Disastrous as FDR’s New Deal
FrontPage Magazine via Opposing Views.
The nation could be spared much pain if our president would read the recently-released Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal by Robert Murphy. Correcting many popular misconceptions about FDR, this book explodes the myth of Roosevelt as America’s savior and shows him for who he really was – a willful man whose ill-conceived policies held the American economy in a mire of stagnation unseen before or since.
Read more.

READ MY LIPS: NO NEW BUSHES

Jeb Bush: The Future of the Republican Party
Tucker Carlson, Esquire
With no obvious candidate to lead the Republican party (and one having just stepped down), some are looking to Jeb Bush. Which is news to him.
Read more.

Sarah Agonistes
Tony Blankley, via Real Clear Politics
Well, I’m not so sure that being an incumbent is an advantage if the world seems to be going to hell and government is seen to be at least part of the cause for that journey. And though many conventional politicians might be seen as quitters if they resigned their offices, I have a very strong hunch that Sarah Palin is constitutionally incapable of being seen as a quitter. Because she is not. She constantly is taking on the biggest challenge on her horizon.
Read more.

Household Cap-and-Trade Burden Calculator
The Tax Foundation
The following calculator estimates the annual cost your household would face under a typical U.S. cap-and-trade system designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent.
How much will it cost your family? Click here to find out.

Poll: Sarah Palin remains threat to Mitt Romney in potential GOP 2012 race
Boston Herald
Former Bay State Gov. Mitt Romney is locked in a statistical dead heat with Sarah Palin for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, despite the Alaska governor’s abrupt resignation last week, according to a new poll of Republican voters.
Read more.

Wednesday Morning Reading

Ready when you are Governor.

George Allen writes book about sports and politics
Richmond Times-Dispatch
The book, “The Triumph of Character: What Washington Can Learn from the World of Sports,” is scheduled to be released by Regnery Publishing next June.
Read more.

Reid Tells Baucus to Stop Chasing Republican Votes
Taegan Goddar’s Political Wire
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on “strongly urged” Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) “to drop a proposal to tax health benefits and stop chasing Republican votes on a massive health care reform bill,” Roll Call reports.
Read more.

WashPost ‘Scandal”: They Got Caught
Jonah Goldberg, The New York Post
BEFORE Sarah Palin stepped on the story, the talk of the Belt way was Salongate at The Washington Post. The venerable newspaper hatched a scheme whereby it would hold a series of “salons” at the home of publisher Katharine Weymouth in order to sell lobbyists and corporations access to Obama administration officials and the Post reporters and editors who cover them.
Read more.

A Congress Full of Michael Jackson Wannabes
Ben Shapiro, Townhall
When the current Democratic Congress isn’t busy shoehorning financial giveaways to their union friends and business partners, when they’re not busy ramming unread, horribly written thousand-page bills into law, they’re busy on matters of vital import like resolutions praising Michael Jackson and pricey vacation “investigations.” They’re bad — they’re bad — and they know it.
Read more.

Obama’s Katrina
FoxNews
Make no mistake, the economic crisis and Obama’s failure to create real jobs with his stimulus package means we’re looking at this president’s Katrina.
Read more.

Monday Night Reading

While remembering Michael Jackson, take a moment to remember our fallen heroes
SWAC Girl
While America prepares for Tuesday’s Michael Jackson funeral after 24/7 coverage of his June 25th death, and as thousands prepare to invade Los Angeles, we may want to take a moment to remember American military forces who died in Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq) and Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) during the month of June 2009.
Read more for the list of names.

President Obama’s Top Five Health Care Lies
Reason Foundation

• Lie One: No one will be compelled to buy coverage.
• Lie Two: No new taxes on employer benefits.
• Lie Three: Government can control rising health care costs better than the private sector.
• Lie Four: A public plan won’t be a Trojan horse for a single-payer monopoly.
• Lie Five: Patients don’t have to fear rationing.

Read more.

37,000 at Dallas Tea Party — and next steps
Michelle Malkin
I returned from the Dallas Tea Party this weekend inspired and motivated by the massive turnout of citizen activists. The official county estimate of the day-long event’s crowd: 37,000!
Read more.

Meanwhile the Dallas Morning News snarks that there were only 37,000 people, not 50,000: Tea party protest at Southfork Ranch falls short of estimated 50,000 attendees

Show your ‘burka pride’
Barbara Kay, National Post
Clearly, there are many Muslim women who freely choose head cover, and perhaps body but not face cover, to express their religious sensibilities. But to assume that the burka would be freely chosen by any woman is crazy.
Read more.

Click to order.

Jackie’s Doomed Love – with RFK
The New York Post
Jackie Kennedy had a four-year love affair with Bobby Kennedy that began not long after JFK’s assassination and grew so intense that when RFK was gunned down, it was she — not his wife — who instructed doctors to pull the plug, an explosive new book claims.
Read more.

Monday Morning Reads

The Patriot Room has a good roundup of weekend blogging: Best of the Blogs – Weekend of July 4.

Putting Liberals on the Couch
Burt Prelutsky, Townhall
I’m wondering when the Mafia will officially ask for a government subsidy. Yes, I know it’s a criminal organization, but so is ACORN, which faces indictments for voter fraud in several states, and yet Obama and his Democratic cronies are funneling them millions of dollars.
Read more.

How’s the stimulus working for you so far?
Neal Boortz, Townhall
So … after hundreds of billions of dollars, government seizures of GM, Citigroup and others, imminent bank nationalization, massive favors handed to unions at the expense of private investors, and a pantload of new czars in the White House … all done to kick start our economy … what do we have. SNAFU, that’s what. Or TAUFU, if you like.
Read more.

New York Times Barbie strikes again
Andrew Breitbart, The Washington Times
While Mrs. Palin is at ease with her gender, as well as her place in the workplace and at home, Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey convey a base insecurity in their feminine skin. Their rage is fueled by liberalism’s false feminist dogma and they take it out on a woman who chose not to join their angry sorority.
Read more.

As Palin said, God bless people who run for political office, but – and she didn’t say this part – she’s too big to be a lame-duck governor stuck dealing with fishing licenses in Anchorage right now.
Ann Coulter (via The Women on the Web)

Friday Morning Reads

How’s that Porkulus workin’ out for ya?

As economy drops jobs, paychecks drop some weight
AP via Yahoo! News
Employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, far more than expected, and the jobless rate hit a 26-year high of 9.5 percent. Just as worrisome, wages shrank to their lowest in nearly a year.
Read more.

Small Businesses Not Seeing Impact of Stimulus Package
U.S. News and World Report
According to a recent survey by Intuit Corp., the vast majority of small businesses have not benefited from the stimulus plan—nor do they expect to.
Read more.

True, Barack Obama has only been President for six months. But his party has controlled Congress for two and a half years.

Where are the jobs?
Politico
The depressing job numbers released Thursday provided Democrats with a painful reminder that the economy is floundering on their watch now.
Read more.

Legal group’s records tell little about Sotomayor
Julia Hirschfeld Davis, TownHall
Republicans have criticized Sotomayor’s participation in the group, which they say has taken radical positions and sought to gain racial preferences for Hispanics. They argue that her ties to the group, taken together with Sotomayor’s statements about how her heritage shapes her views as a judge, raise doubts about whether she can be an impartial, colorblind justice.
Read more.

So Much for Wise Latinas
Ann Coulter, TownHall
According to Sotomayor, any test that gets the numbers wrong — whatever “wrong” means in any given context of professions, populations, applicants, workers, etc. — is grounds for a lawsuit, which in turn, is grounds for an employer to engage in race discrimination against disfavored racial groups, such as white men.
Read more.

Welcome to Obamacare Theater
Michelle Malkin
But the denials of pre-planning and stacked decks deserve nothing but derisive mockery. Obama’s town hall was filled with backroom players and a supporting cast of socialized medicine activists and ideologues.
Read more.

None Dare Call It Marxism
David Limbaugh, TownHall
He is desperately trying to spread the misery and impoverish businesses and individuals through his cap and tax plan, which no proponent of economic growth and prosperity would consider supporting. And in addition to gobbling up other businesses and industries, he is trying to nationalize medicine — to siphon off the evil surplus value charged by doctors and insurance companies — on the flawed Marxist theory that he can reduce costs overall, when the reason health care costs have already skyrocketed is that market forces have been suppressed in the industry.
Read more.

Thursday Roundup

Minority Leader John Boehner goes huntin’ for the stimulus jobs…

Just How Fake Can These ‘Townhall’ Meetings Get?
Bobby Eberle, GOPUSA
The problem is that there should be some kind of standards when it comes to a townhall meeting. By labeling it as such, Americans get the impression that this is a meeting of average Joes (and Janes) — people from all walks of life and all parts of the political spectrum — who can throw out questions to the president. Well… not quite…
Read more.

Memo To Mark Sanford: Man Up and Go Home
Jonah Goldberg, National Review
Invoking King David as your inspiration for hanging around like lech at the strip club after last call was stupid enough, but if you’re going to do that, you can’t start crying (again) about your Argentinian girlfriend or blathering on in a way that might cause John Belushi to descend from heaven just to smash your guitar against the wall.
Read more.

Who Cares About a Politician’s Affair?
Janice Shaw Crouse, Concerned Women for America
Surely we care when such actions reveal a lack of trustworthiness and credibility. Is it not significant that such behavior – and the subsequent and inevitable lying about it – calls into question both character and integrity? When a politician won’t keep his commitments to his family (the philanderers are generally men), how can we trust him to keep his commitments to the public he represents? If his wife and children can’t trust his word and depend upon his character, how can we?
Read more.

Jonah and Janice both have excellent points. As I wrote earlier (here and here) there is grace for Mark Sanford. But he’s not doing a very good job of accepting it. Do so quietly Governor. And quickly.

44% Nationwide Have Unfavorable View of Franken
Rasmussen Reports
Forty-four percent (44%) of U.S. voters have an unfavorable opinion of former “Saturday Night Live” comedy writer Al Franken as he prepares to join the U.S. Senate as its newest Democratic member.
Read more.

Holder: Whites and Ministers will not be protected by proposed hate crimes legislation.
The Muffled Oar
Then Holder goes on to list the only groups intended to be protected by the proposed law. This is racial identity politics taking a sinister turn. Holder explicitly says the proposed law only protects classes “where there is a history” of violence against those groups. “What we are looking for here in terms of expansion of the statute are instances where there is a historic basis. See, groups of people who are singled out for violence perpetrated against them because of who they are. I don’t know if we have the same historical record to say members of our military have been targeted in the same way that people who are African American, people who are Jewish, people who are gay, have been targeted over the many years.”
Read more.

Congress’s Travel Tab Swells
Spending on Taxpayer-Funded Trips Rises Tenfold; From Italy to the Galápagos
The Wall Street Journal
The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That’s a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago.
Read more.

Now they want Reagan’s name off the airport
Barbara Hollingsworth, The Washington Examiner
At Wednesday’s Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board meeting, chairman H.R. Crawford – a former District Council member and Marion Barry confidante – told fellow Board members that he has heard talk on Capitol Hill about yanking former President Ronald Reagan’s name off the local airport and returning it to its previous generic moniker: National Airport.
Read more.

Why They Hate Her, the Angelina Jolie of Politics
Jim Geraghty, The Campaign Spot
In her opponents’ minds, Palin’s made all the wrong choices, and cannot, they insist, be very bright. Yet she’s happy and successful. She is an anomaly that invalidates their worldview, and for that, they attempt to immiserate her — regardless of whether she wishes to run for national office again.
Read more.

Washington Post cancels lobbyist event amid uproar
Politico
The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”
Read more.

And when even Helen Thomas sees through the farce that is the Obama Administration, you know the left is messing up…

Thursday Morning Reads

Just think how hard Barbara Boxer had to to work to share her title with Senator Al Franken.

New Independence Push – 233 Years Later
Michael Reagan, TownHall
Now more than ever, it is time for each of us fortunate enough to be born into freedom to pay tribute to the men and women who made us a free nation — choosing the hard and difficult road – by choosing to once again fight for our independence. This time it is an independence from an over-intrusive and ever-encroaching federal government.
Read more.

Welcome to the ‘You Can’t Stop Us Now’ Era
Bobby Eberle, GOPUSA
The only hope for Republicans is to return to their conservative roots and start winning back seats in 2010. The Democrats control everything, and thus the condition of the country is entirely in their laps. The American people will be able to decide if this is the “change they can believe in.”
Read more.

Equality On Trial
By Thomas Sowell, via GOPUSA
For the fourth time in six cases, the Supreme Court of the United States has reversed a decision for which Judge Sonia Sotomayor voted on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. If this nominee were a white male, would this not raise questions about whether he should be elevated to a court that has found his previous decisions wrong two-thirds of the times when those decisions have been reviewed?
Read more.

And in Virginia…

McDonnell invites Deeds to debate
SWAC Girl
GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell has invited Democrat gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds to participate in a series of 10 debates over the next few months.
Read more.

Full press release at Virginia Virtucon:  McDonnell Calls for 10 Debates

$5,000 fine, 10 debates and a FOIA
Brian Kirwin at Bearing Drift
The Washington Post’s blogging is on fire lately. It blasts the Virginia Democratic Party for being fined $5,000 by the Federal Elections Commission for their flagrant disregard for campaign finance laws.
Read more.

Kaine Pulls a Gary Hart
Tertium Quids
It’s almost enough to make one wonder whether Kaine has booked passage on the “Monkey Business” after all.
Read more.