Archive for November, 2010
Posted by Flap in Democrats, GOP
 Graphic Courtesy of Smart Politics
Remember the harangue of the LEFT after President Obama’s win in 2008 that the GOP was a regional minority party?
Well, as I said at the time, this is NOT true, but have the Democrats with the recent election have continued the trend of being a New York and California party – a two state party. Looking at the table above, you would have to say the evidence is clear.
Despite losing six U.S. House seats in New York on November 2nd (with defeats in NY-01 and NY-25 still tentative), the Democratic Party nonetheless continues to be ever more a party of two coasts – with a particular emphasis on the Empire and Golden States.
A Smart Politics analysis of 81 election cycles dating back to 1850 finds that the Democratic Party is now comprised of a larger percentage of Californians and New Yorkers in the U.S. House than at any point since California joined the Union.
When the 112th Congress convenes in January, 28.1 percent of the Democratic caucus will hail from California (34 members) and New York (20 members).
What will this mean for the 2012 Presidential and Congressional elections?
Well, I don’t suppose too many campaign media dollars will be spent on statewide races in New York and California. And, any Presidential activity will be fundraising trips only.
It also means will be easier for the GOP to maintain its majority in the House and look at taking the majority in the U.S. Senate.
Now, New York and California still command a goodly number of Electoral College votes but Obama will have to win in the Midwest or he will be denied re-election.
Funny how political demographic perceptions change but really stay the same. Tags: Democrats.GOP
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Day By Day by Chris Muir
Chris, somehow I think that Sam will be drinking even more with Zed going to Afghanistan.
And, talk about fairy tales, look at Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her attempt to hold onto political power.
The Democratic old guard will try to hold the line Wednesday against a rank-and-file rebellion intent on winning some concession — no matter how small — from a leadership team seeking reelection despite having presided over the loss of at least 60 Democratic seats earlier this month.
The leadership election follows on the heels of a brutally long, contentious and divisive leadership meeting Tuesday, and it will determine not only whether Speaker Nancy Pelosi remains the head of the House Democratic contingent but just how much authority she will wield in the new Congress come January.
Symbolism without substance will equal the continued morass for the Democrats with Nancy Pelosi in a leasdership position. She will have NO real power and younger Democrats will be stifled to change the perception of the party.
It is all good for conservatives and the GOP.
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Tags: Nancy_Pelosi
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Meeting with leaders of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus at the White House Tuesday, President Obama reiterated his support for fixing the country's "broken immigration system" — but gave little indication that in this year's remaining lame-duck congressional session, his administration could win passage of key legislation granting legal status to some illegal immigrant students.
The president, in a White House statement released following the meeting, thanked caucus members Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) "for their constant efforts on this issue" and highlighted earlier bipartisan support for the DREAM Act.
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Token payback for helping Harry Reid in Nevada and Boxer in California win re-election
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Some have asked why we just don’t use the handwand. Good question. Threats can be both metallic and non-metallic. Pat-downs, like AIT, allow us to screen for nonmetallic threats that handwands would not find.
And finally, the $10,000.00 question of the day… Will you receive a $10,000.00 fine if you opt out of screening all together and leave the checkpoint? While TSA has the legal authority to levy a civil penalty of up to $11,000.00 for cases such as this, each case is determined on the individual circumstances of the situation.
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Wow!
Guess I will have to decide whether to fly or not. The airlines cannot be happy with Obama's Big Brother TSA.
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Nevada Sen. John Ensign said Tuesday he has been planning to run for reelection “for a long time,” suggesting that the ongoing fallout of his extramarital affair won’t doom him politically.
“Mainly what I’ve been focusing on is earning people’s trust back in Nevada, getting around the state and doing my job,” Ensign told POLITICO in the Capitol. “We’ve been planning on it for quite some time.”
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There will be either Sharron Angle or another GOP candidate to run against him in the GOP primary
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Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corp., wrote a $390,000 check to boost the California Republican Party's efforts in the final days of the campaign. The contribution, made Oct. 28, was reported in an amended campaign filing posted yesterday on the secretary of state website.
Adelson, whose estimated net worth of $28 billion landed him the No. 3 spot on Forbes' list of richest Americans in recent years, owns several major properties on the Las Vegas Strip, including The Venetian, The Palazzo and the new Sands Expo and Convention Center
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Conservatives should frequent the Venetian and boycott Dem supporting Harrah's and MGM
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Key Republicans hoping to prevent Michael Steele from another term as chairman of the Republican National Committee, who just a week ago were anxious they might not be able to stop Steele, are now confident he will be defeated.
There is still no consensus candidate to run against Steele. But that no longer worries Steele’s adversaries, who told The Daily Caller that they believe the embattled chairman does not have the support he needs to win 85 votes when the RNC’s 168 members vote on Jan. 11.
Sentiments among Steele’s enemies – and there are many in the GOP – changed dramatically over the past week. Barely more than a week ago, there was grave concern that no clear front runner existed who would have the support of a majority of RNC members.
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Michael Steele should NOT run for another term. He should accept his thanks for the past year and move on.
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Former Republican National committee (RNC) political director Gentry Collins and RNC Chairman Michael Steele
Probably so.
Republican National Committee political director Gentry Collins resigned from his post Tuesday morning with a stinging indictment of Chairman Michael Steele’s two-year tenure at the committee.
In a four-page letter to Steele and the RNC’s executive committee obtained by POLITICO, Collins lays out inside details, previously only whispered, about the disorganization that plagues the party. He asserts that the RNC’s financial shortcomings limited GOP gains this year and reveals that the committee is deeply in debt entering the 2012 presidential election cycle.
“In the previous two non-presidential cycles, the RNC carried over $4.8 million and $3.1 million respectively in cash reserve balances into the presidential cycles,” Collins writes, underlining his words for emphasis. “In stark contrast, we enter the 2012 presidential cycle with 100% of the RNC’s $15 million in lines of credit tapped out, and unpaid bills likely to add millions to that debt.”
Here is a copy of the letter embedded below:
Gentry Collins Letter
RNC Chairman Michael Steele has yet to announce plans for re-election. But, with today’s revelation, I doubt he will run since it is obvious that he would not be able to win.
Going into the 2012 Presidential cycle, the Republican National Committee Chairman needs to be a very productive fundraiser as well as an executive leader. This is why California’s Carly Fiorina has been mentioned as a possible successor to Steele.
I don’t think she wants the position though.
I can see Carly more on Fox Business Network and writing a column for the Wall Street Journal.
Stay tuned…..
Tags: Michael_Steele
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Photo from my last year’s El Segundo High School reunion
You remember the City of Bell, California FLAP/SCANDAL?
A Times report on the huge salaries of top administrators and elected officials in the small, working-class city of Bell has ignited community anger, calls for resignations at City Hall and condemnation from politicians and civic groups. Most council members are earning nearly $100,000 for part-time work, far more than the $400-a-month stipend recommended for a city the size of Bell. The Los Angeles County district attorney and the state attorney general have opened inquiries.
Now, it appears this public employee largess at the expense of the taxpayers has spread to my hometown of El Segundo.
A homeowner in El Segundo posted the salaries of the overpaid cops in his town, on his blog – and the next thing he knew he was being harassed at work, by a police captain who makes over $300K a year, according to the LA Weekly.
The blogger, David Burns, is in charge of emergency preparedness at UCLA. After this incident, the same police captain turned in a public records request at UCLA to find out how much Burns makes. It turns out Burns makes a third of what the overpaid captain pulls in, and his salary has been cut by 23% due to budget problems.
It should be noted that El Segundo has only 16,000 residents and barely any crime, but their cops and firemen make hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This is shocking but I wonder if this isn’t the case in most Los Angeles County cities, where oversight has been remarkably absent. All I know is that this would never have happened in the days of my youth where the town’s people kept a close eye on the city’s coffers.
Although El Segundo has not experienced the same excessive City Council and City Manager pay as the City of Bell, El Segundo has experienced greatly excessive and unsustainable firefighter and police union and manager pay that may exceed that of Bell once detailed Bell data is obtained and analyzed. The approach being used in El Segundo – creating new fees for residents and raising business taxes to pay for obscenely excessive city employee salaries, benefits, and pensions – parallels what was done in Bell. It appears from the El Segundo salary and pension data that the firefighter and police union contracts make many public employees into millionaires.
Maybe a few dismissals and a roll back of public employee salaries and benefits will quickly solve the problem. If not, California’s state budget problems will only worsen.
Tags: Bell, el_Segundo
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Posted by Flap in Day By Day
Day By Day by Chris Muir
Zed, going into Afghanistan, you will need all of your senses, including good hearing.
But, I am positive Sam would rather have your beard and long hair – as long as you were home. And, I bet that the elbow flab does NOT matter at all.
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What happened to the Central Valley?
We've heard for years about the man-made water shortages, high unemployment, local Latino politicians switching to the Republican party and how unpopular are the democrats. The only problem is that 5 key counties failed to vote.
Where was the gusto ?
The statewide average of registered voters is about 55%. Yet Fresno [44.7%], Kern [53.1%] , Merced [50.9%], Stanislaus [50.7%] and Tulare [42.5%] didn't pull their respective weights. Some Republican power bases performed well, such as Ventura [59.5%] and San Diego [ 60.3% ! ].
Had the 5 central valley counties voted at 55% , we might have a new congressman Andy Vidak. Steve Cooley would have netted an additional 30,000 votes. Today, Cooley is behind some 14,000 votes.
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What happened?
An ineffective GOTV plan in the Central Valley and other GOP dominated areas.
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In the just concluded election, Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer captured 65% or 80% of that vote (depending on which exit poll you believe). More importantly, it was a bigger pie – 3 times larger than back in 1992. It was one of the major factors that kept the red tide out of California – and a factor that will only get bigger.
Here’s the story of how that happened…
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Read it all.
This analaysis will not bode well for the national GOP to ever fund California statewide races in the near future nor support illegal alien amnesty.
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The Wall Street Journal has a lead editorial arguing that one of the big tests of whether Republicans are serious about limited government is whether they embrace a ban on earmarks. Earmarks only represent a small portion of federal spending, the editors note, but they help grease the wheels of massive spending bills and are also of great symbolic importance. While I agree with this as far as it goes — and support a ban on earmarks — I also think that the overemphasis on earmarks has distracted attention from the much more important issue of how to deal with the entitlement spending mess.
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Agreed – entitlement spending has to be cut and the states must do their part as well re: welfare.
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But for all the maneuvering, not one of the possible 2012 Republican presidential contenders is planning to make a formal announcement before early next year or even later. Seeking to avoid the scrutiny and expenses that come with opening a full-fledged campaign, the potential candidates, including Sarah Palin and former Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, are instead quietly testing campaign messages, wooing local activists and trying to assess the shifting political climate.
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It will take $50 Million to run a good primary campaign. Romney plus either Palin or Huckabee are the most likely challengers to Mitt.
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CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: But what is going to happen? I mean, are you clear on where a compromise is going to be? It's got to be discussed before the end of the year, no?
KRUGMAN: No. Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes. It's going to be that we're actually going to take Medicare under control, and we're going to have to get some additional revenue, probably from a VAT. But it's not going to happen now.
So, we've got to get Medicare under control by deciding "what it's going to pay for…which medical procedures are not effective at all and should not be paid for at all."
AKA "death panels."
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Desperate transplant patients are being given the lungs of chain smokers because the NHS is so short of organ donations.
Surgeons are also being forced to use diseased body parts from cancer sufferers, drug addicts and the very elderly.
Experts say that the waiting list for transplants has now grown so long that hospitals are increasingly resorting to implanting so-called 'high risk' organs.
There are around 8,000 people needing an organ donation at any one time and every day three patients die because they do not get one in time.
As a result, doctors say that most patients would probably accept a 'high risk' or 'marginal' organ as without it they may not survive the year.
They are also using tissue from those more at risk of carrying HIV and Hepatitis C such as gay men and drug users.
These groups are not allowed to give blood but they can donate organs simply because there is such a shortage.
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Good ol' socialized medicine. A preview of ObamaCare?
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