Inadvertent Movement Member

Apparently, there’s an insurgency of fiscal apathy in the Republican Party: the Not One Dime movement, wherein Republican contributors withhold contributions.

According to the MAWB Squad (and Captain Ed), this movement captures the frustration many feel with the Republicans in the Senate regarding judicial nominees. Sandy of the MAWB Squad says:

You don’t seem to be listening to me. We are not giving to the Republicans until they act like the majority party.

My own personal extra spending money (that won’t be sent to the GOP to earn a new gold membership card) comes from my disgust not so much with how the Republicans govern the government, but how the government governs its citizens. I’m more upset with excessive regulation in broadcast, excessive spending in most endeavors, and so on.

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Jack Cardetti Strikes Again

Jack Cardetti, a spokesman for the Democratic Party, said Blunt’s budget cuts would hurt children, older adults and vulnerable people who lack lobbyists to protect their interests in the state capital.

“He’s especially ravaged the Missouri Division of Youth Services, a national model for how to take care of juvenile offenders and then turn them into productive citizens,” Cardetti said.

What’s he talking about? My governor, Matt Blunt, has apparently announced more cuts:

Gov. Matt Blunt has announced a second round of state budget cuts that will reduce state spending by $240 million and eliminate an additional 1,274 state jobs.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to say that Matt Blunt, boy wonder of Missouri, will be old enough to be president in 2008.

I don’t want to gloat to my friends in Illinois or Wisconsin, but Ha! In your face! A Republican governor with a Republican legislature!

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Hugh Hewitt Excludes Me

Hugh Hewitt, responding to something by Andrew Sullivan that I haven’t and won’t read, says there’s no conservative crack-up occurring:

On this side, Andrew, the ABC polling team, Charles Fried and –sort of– William F. Buckley and some additional, talented essayists. On the other side –my side– the president, all of the leadership of the GOP in the House and the Senate, every possible GOP presidential candidate who has spoken on the issue, all but Boortz of the vaunted “Republican noise machine,” and the rank and file.

Hewitt enumerates a large number of elected leaders and the only voters he names are the rank and file. That is, the dyed-on-the-sheep conservatives.

However, those elected leaders didn’t get elected by just the rank and file. Bush was elected with a coalition of moral/religious conservatives, libertarian-conservatives, and hawkish Democrats. During the election season, I was pleased with how inclusive the Republican electorate was becoming. Now, after the election, it’s condensing to its rank and file “Hewitt’s side” is sacrificing government constraint and government fiscal discipline to legislate its morality.

Now that Hewitt and his side have gotten my libertarianesque vote in the election cycle, they’re ready to excommunicate me from the Republican orgy. I, and some of the others not on Hewitt’s side, will remember this next election cycle. When a third party candidate comes along with just enough strength to draw our protest votes and the Clintonocracy is restored to the throne, will Hewitt’s side learn its lesson?

Probably not. But the last time we had a Republican legislature and a Clinton presidency, it worked out to the best for domestic policy. The Republicans wouldn’t give Clinton what he wanted, and Clinton could veto what Hewitt’s side wanted. Of course, the United States lost ground in foreign policy and international safety, but perhaps we need to toggle between good domestic policy and good foreign policy every decade or so to keep the republic as healthy as possible.

Which, unfortunately, seems only to be heroic measures at the end of the republic’s life.

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Damn Faint Praise

Last week’s edition of the Riverfront Times, St. Louis’s alternate weekly, provides some damning details about Richard Gephardt’s career:

Gephardt, who turns 64 next month, showed up more than 90 percent of the time to vote in all but 7 of his 28 years in Congress.

Yeowtch. So for 75% of his career, he’s been present 90% of the time to do his job. Although that’s better than my scholastic career, it’s nowhere near my professional behaviour.

The Riverfront Times goes on to enumerate some of the years where he’s fallen short:

  • 1987, where he made 18% of votes.
  • 1988, where he made 80% of votes.
  • 1996, where he made 88% of votes.
  • 1997, where he made 87% of votes.
  • 2003, where he made 9% of votes.

The RFT doesn’t cover the last two years, but they don’t have to. It serves to highlight that legislators, of both parties, not just Gephardt and the 2004 senatorial tandem that shamed their consituencies most publicly, receive hundred thousand dollar salaries and then don’t bother to show up for work.

Imagine the jobs you’ve held, gentle reader, where you can take that six figure salary and only show up one day every two weeks. Or the one where you got four day weekends every weekend without working more than eight hours Monday through Thursday. Are you having trouble? So am I.

Of course, if you start to figure in vacation, you might have missed a couple of weeks of work. Certainly, this downs your percentage. But it shouldn’t figure into a position, such as Congressional representative, where the employee has plenty of time to relax when Congress is not in session. Nor do Congressional missed votes come from sick days, for the most part. Instead, they come when the employee takes care of personal business–whether looking for another job or working deals with other employees regarding workload and credit for accomplishments.

No, our legislators have the best of government work. High salaries, long vacations, and less accountability than real people or even other government employees.

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Pot to Kettle: Does This Hypocrisy Make My Butt Look Big?

In the December issue of Playboy in the Republibashing Forum section immediately following advice on how to get your wife to agree to a threesome, Patricia Schroder writes:

The Patriot Act was rammed through Congress six weeks after the 9/11 attacks. In the three years since, we have learned that before the vote few members of Congress had read the bill, much less given thought to its provisions and implications.

Obviously, much like adults put away the silly habits of childhood, Ms. Schroeder has learned that a little legislation is a dangerous thing. Of course, one must believe that Ms. Schroeder read every single omnibus spending bill thoroughly during her six terms as member of the House of Representatives, or one would have to think that Ms. Schroeder not only deplores the Patriot Act but the way our elected officials rush to ill-advised action on many, of not most, bills that they pass without reading, deliberating, or comprehending.

Or one might read the whole thing (not available online, but guys, tell your wives you wanted the article by Pat Schroeder and not the Denise Richards pix) and understand the context of the Playboy Forum and conclude that Patricia Schroeder wants to cudgel the Bush administration.

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Electoral College Defended

Someone in a populous coastal state defends the electoral college:

What should an election system for choosing the president attempt to achieve? Certainly one goal is to reflect the popular will, an outcome that might (or might not, depending on how the system is structured) be achieved with a direct popular vote.

But as the founding fathers recognized, reflection of the popular will is not the only goal.

Another goal is to provide candidates with incentives to broaden their geographic and political bases and to steer toward the center rather than the extremes of the political spectrum.

This, the founders felt, would help reduce the sources of political strife and, in the extreme case, avoid civil war. They understood that passions and irrationalities can afflict mass decision-making under direct democracy.

(Link seen on Roger L. Simon.)

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Welcome to Our Newest Watch List Member!

The Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker, who openly pleads for someone to assassinate George W. Bush:

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod’s law dictates he’ll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr – where are you now that we need you?

Lovely. He’s inciting assassins. I’m not sure how anyone can defend this column other than his domestic partner, whom Brooker might feed with the proceeds. He’s the equivalent of a white man calling for jihad in that he wants someone else to martyr himself/herself for a greater good revealed only to him.

I am going to stop typing now, because the more I go on, the madder I get, and it’s too lovely of a Saturday for that.

(Link seen on A Small Victory.)

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We Had To Destroy the Republic In Order To Save It

Stephen Green reflects on the Democratic Party’s national strategy:

If Drudge has it right, then the Kerry-Edwards campaign is going to do its damnedest to turn our fine nation into a banana republic.

To these guys, winning office is more important than the sanctity of elections. Holding power is more important than the Constitution. Much as I despise at least half of what most Republicans stand for, they don’t seem nearly as willing to trash the system they’re trying to run. Too many Democrats, especially at the national level, just don’t care that our system, our nation is far more important than any single election.

I could mention the Lautenberg Trick in New Jersey. Or Gore’s ballot shenanigans in Florida. Or the voter-registration fraud currently going on in Colorado, Nevada, and elsewhere. Or the Democrat’s successful call to bring election observers into this country. Bring them in from where, Venezuela? Hey, no big deal sullying the reputation of the world’s oldest continuously-functioning democracy, just so long as we can make the Republicans look bad, right?

He forgets to mention Missouri’s decision to run a dead Democrat for Senate in 2000. Which, I believe, Al Franken approved of based on his comments in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

In some cases, I think it’s beyond a simple lust for power; with naked ambition, there’s some calculation. I think that at the base level, some vocal members of the Democratic party and some moonbat fringes of Left thought just must rule the Others in the lesser tribes; the rubes from the middle of the country, the undereducated (which means those who think differently), and those who have that dreaded Christian religion.

Because they’re Ubermensch, although undoubtedly there’s a nicer term that they use when discussing it amongst themselves.

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Kerry Admits He’s A Crook

— MfBJN Exclusive — Must Credit MfBJN —

Here’s telling quote from the debate last night:

KERRY: I want you to notice how the president switched away from jobs and started talking about education principally.

Let me come back in one moment to that, but I want to speak for a second, if I can, to what the president said about fiscal responsibility.

Being lectured by the president on fiscal responsibility is a little bit like Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order in this country.

Help me while I explain the “Interviewed by our WoT allies like Sudan” logic behind this bombshell:

  • The president is fiscally irresponsible, although he really only gets to spend the money given to him by the legislature, which includes the Senate, which contains 98 state representatives who show up to vote on spending bills. But George W. Bush has truly not vetoed any spending, and he has not squeezed the great self-interested bureaucracies that he heads to offer rebates.
  • John Kerry is fiscally irresponsible, at least in the vast volume of public spending and programs and giveaways he’d implement if President. Undoubtedly, he’s voted for gratuitous spending as a Senator (even though he’s tried to balance the social programs with unequally small cuts in military programs).
  • Tony Soprano, a fictional character, is a criminal.
  • Therefore, when George W. Bush (fiscally irresponsible) lectures John Kerry (fiscally irresponsible) about fiscal responsibility, it’s like Tony Soprano (criminal) lecturing John Kerry (?) about law and order.

Irrefutable logic that seems to have fallen and struck its head while taking photographs of a demonstration in Iran.

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Election 2004 Guest Commentary

In an effort to broaden the commentary here on MfBJN, we’ve sponsored a roundtable-style discussion of Election 2004:


GOZER
Subcreatures! Gozer the Gozerian, Gozer the Destructor, Volguus Zildrohar, the Traveler, has come! Choose and perish!

RAY
What do you mean, choose? We don’t understand!

GOZER
Choose! Choose the form of the Destructor!

PETER
Whoa! I get it, I get it. Very cute! Whatever we think of – if we think of J. Edgar Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover will appear and destroy us, okay? So empty your heads. Empty your heads. Don’t think of anything. We’ve only got one shot at this.

GOZER
The choice is made! The Traveler has come!

PETER
Whoa! Whoa! Nobody choosed anything! Did you choose anything?

EGON
No!

PETER
Did you?

WINSTON
My mind’s totally blank!

PETER
I didn’t choose anything!

RAY
I couldn’t help it. It just popped in there!

Enjoy your president, America. He just popped in there.

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I Thought So

Here’s what passes for hard-hitting investigative journalism here at MfBJN. Our crackhead staff contacted our sources looking for insight into John F. Kerry’s plan:

John Kerry's Plan
Click for full size

I had to get a screencap because I understand that thirty seconds after I click Publish Post, George Soros will go the extra $75 to buy that domain.

You want to know the length I will go for a gag? It’s obviously less than a single domain name registration. There you have it.

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Fill In Your Own Conspiracy Blanks

From various sources including Associated Press and the New York Times (links courtesy of Boots and Sabers and Little Green Footballs respectively), we get the dramatic fevered imaginings of a few:

What was that bulge in the back of President Bush’s suit jacket at the presidential debate in Miami last week?

According to rumors racing across the Internet this week, the rectangular bulge visible between Mr. Bush’s shoulder blades was a radio receiver, getting answers from an offstage counselor into a hidden presidential earpiece. The prime suspect was Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s powerful political adviser.

In the hopes of elevating this line of thought from the absurd to the….well, there’s really nowhere more absurd to go as a serious story. So I will do my best to mock it.

The real reasons for the bulge under Bush’s jacket:

  • It’s the wind-up key. Because President Bush, unlike other candidates in this particular race, actually shows up for the job for which taxpayers pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, he had to send his wind-up body double to the debate. And it didn’t do to badly. It certainly looked less mechanical than, say, Al Gore.
  • Missouri is a right to carry state. Since Bush can’t feel the comfort of cold steel in leather in Washington DC, which he frequently visits on the people’s business unlike his opponent, Bush wore a piece to the debate. He wore it McClane-style so as to not frighten the undecideds in the audience nor to stir controversy with the press should his jacket fall open to display it. Undoubtedly, they would say he was trying to intimidate Kerry and pander to the NRA.
  • It’s where the mechanical arms attach.

    To manipulate oil prices, to violate the civil rights of every man, woman, and child in the world, to start wars just to watch them burn, and to conduct his other maniacal schemes, Dr. Octobush has devised a set of extra chimp arms to help him do all the evil that he does more easily. They attach via a special clip wired directly into his brain.

  • Man, who knew how small devil wings folded up?

Hey, feel free to add your own. We’re on the Internet for crying out loud. It’s all tRuth.

(Note: Capital R truth does in fact differ from capital T truth, but it’s more accommodating to those whose personal feelings differ from the real world, so it’s capital E bEtter.)

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No Live Blogging Here

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not live blogging the second presidential debate, although I have watched about twenty minutes of it too much (which, oddly enough, was about twenty minutes). I am voting for Bush, and every time Kerry opens his mouth, I start spitting and cursing and quite frankly, I cannot afford the bib cleaning bills.

I don’t dislike Kerry as a person, because I don’t know him. And although I can snark a bit here among friends, I don’t think he’s necessarily a lying, conniving coward. I have no way of knowing. He’s never started a bar fight and run off while I got pounded.

I do know that almost everything I hear him attack George Bush for, particularly in domestic agenda, blurs the division of government powers laid out by our Constitution and sometimes even blurs the line between government and private life, and if we elect someone who thinks that the President, not the Congress led by the House of Representatives, spends tax dollars or that the only the George Bush’s obstinance and not understanding of economic and human nature principals holds up drug reimportation schemes, well, I guess we’ll be ready to elect someone who’s willing to nationalize industries to protect the children and are ready to dismiss the Congress to save money better spent on unelected bureaucracies run by appointees of Our Glorious Leader.

Some people impugn Bush and his administration for their simple devotion to protecting the country from threats abroad and for enforcing the ill-conceived lawa passed on by the too-comfortable and too-protected-from-the-consequences-of-their-actions legislators. But I, almost alone it seems, recognize that the executive branch of the government, including the President, only has those powers granted by the legislature.

And when I hear a legislator, or an alleged legislator whose absence from the legislature has not matched the legislator’s willingness to forego pay that we taxpayers like to give to practicing members of that hallowed profession, when I hear that pseudo legislator bloviating about the president spending money, or running a deficit, or cutting anything, I….well, I’ve explained what I do.

Hasn’t it occurred to any other voter but me that the entire reason John F. Kerry enjoys his $200,000 income tax bracket is because he’s supposed to be a Senator? Come on, the really rich in America aren’t paying income taxes, they’re paying capital gains, if anything at all. Oh, but Senator Kerry as Supreme Leader would exercise powers not granted to the Constitution to repeal the tax cuts granted to the “richest” Americans, and at the same time he’s lambasting that these people get tax cuts while President Bush hasn’t single-handedly created five million jobs.

Pardon my misunderstanding of economics as a small business owner, but galdern, “Senator” Kerry, but when you’re wanting to soak those who make two hundred thousand dollars a year and “Big Corporations,” who’s going to hire the unemployed? Last I looked in the want ads, I didn’t find many $30,000 a year junior technical writers or $25,000 printers looking to hire five million people. Not even two and a half miillion each. So where do you think the capital is going to come from to keep the economy going?

Oh, I forget, the government will have us all working in its Bureau of Pharmacology, where we can work ten hours a day turning the manual pill-presses to grind out some acetylsalicylic acid to cure any ailment our citizens–who’ll return to the time-honored tradition of dying before they’re sixty–have.

I’d say a pox on ya, Senator Kerry and his idealogical counterparts, but I am still trying real hard to merely pity you instead.

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My Senator, Hard At Work

Looks like Jim Talent, R. MO, is putting his, erm, talents to work on issues of national importance: lighting the Gateway Memorial Arch pink for Breast Cancer Awareness month:

108th CONGRESS

2d Session

S. 2895

AN ACT

To authorize the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, to be illuminated by pink lights in honor of breast cancer awareness month.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. ILLUMINATION OF GATEWAY ARCH IN HONOR OF BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH.

In honor of breast cancer awareness month, the Secretary of the Interior shall authorize the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, to be illuminated by pink lights for a certain period of time in October, to be designated by the Secretary of the Interior.

Passed the Senate October 5, 2004.

Swell. One of my two Senate representatives, purportedly of the small-government party, has wasted his time, his staff’s time, and other taxpayer-funded time not to mention sundry expenses to turn this idea into law.

And that’s before we get to purchasing a large number of pink light bulbs or pink cells and paying maintenance people to implement them…..

But that Jim Talent, he’s sensitive.

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Make the Connection

Another internal consistency pointed out, courtesy MfBJN:

Remember this nugget in the first debate between Kerry and Bush?

I think the United States should have offered the opportunity to provide the nuclear fuel, test them, see whether or not they were actually looking for it for peaceful purposes. If they weren‘t willing to work a deal, then we could have put sanctions together. The president did nothing.

How about someone directly contrast this with 1994’s Agreed Framework, wherein the Clinton administration exchanged fuel for promises that North Korea would scrap its nuclear program.

John Kerry wants to apply the unsuccessful Agreed Framework to Iran.

But at least that foreign policy type is consistent. Consistently bad.

But hopefully, perhaps to them, a Republican administration will come along after a short failed Kerry era to take the fall for Iran’s nuclear weapons.

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Mishandled Metaphors

Meanwhile, back in the Seattle Post-Intelligence, columnist Thomas Shapley decries an ad from a candidate for Senate. George Nethercutt, the Republican challenger, includes in the advertisement Senator Patty Murray from this immortal exchange:

“He [Osama bin Laden]’s been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful,” Murray told them.

Shapley tut tuts the despicable practice of using someone’s words against her and opens a can of whoop metaphor:

By that standard, fighting crime by trying to figure out what drove Gary Ridgway to murder 48 women is excusing him of the crimes. Sorry, that Doberman won’t hunt.

Perhaps Shapely took a Doberman hunting when he went crawling through the brush with John Kerry and a trusty shotgun while deerhunting.

(Link via National Review‘s Kerry Spot.)

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John Edwards Goes Negative – On Me

According to this Drudge Flash, John Edwards has decided to forego negative attacks on the president and to carry it directly to the electorate:

ABC’S BOB WOODRUFF: “He has avoided the kind of negative attacks that can make national news, although recently, he has stepped up his rhetoric.”

SEN. JOHN EDWARDS (D-NC) (clip of a speech): “I’d say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you’ve lost your mind.

Now that he’s begun publicly questioning my mental fitness (without even reading this blog), I have contacted my attorney to determine if his allegations are actionable.

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Debablogging: The Wrap

So when the pizza guy brought my pseudobachelor dinner this evening, he pointed to the Bush Cheney sign in the yard and was happy to see it (he explained in with a light Newyorican lilt in his voice). He said Bush was going to bury Kerry tonight. I’m disappointed he didn’t.

I think Bush and Kerry did about what we would have expected. Bush was on message, sometimes almost fumblingly so, Kerry was not intolerable. Kerry might have elevated his discourse from flip-flop to paradox, but he didn’t speak in French.

Kerry raised himself to nearly human, or perhaps lowered himself to nearly human, but you still get the sense that he’s not quite sincere, not quite earnest. Bush is. And I’ll still vote for Bush.

Unlike Instapundit, I don’t think Kim Jong Il will be nervous if Kerry’s elected. He’s about sanctions, resolutions, and Bush is about popping you one if you deserve it. Friends, that’s a capital fear for other nations to have, particularly those with opposing viewpoints.

This liveblogging experience brought to you without the aid of alcohol, because until I get a fridge in this office, it’s a long trip to the kitchen for a refill. This evening’s entertainment also brought to you without the skill of touch typing, which is why your content is thinner here than with the pros. But thanks for coming anyay. I should have listened to my beautiful wife and used that Mavis Beacon she bought me when I was but a young man of eight and twenty.

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Debablogging 35

Bush’s statement:

This is more than the next four years; this is the next hundred years and civilization. No draft. No vetoes over foreign policy. I believe, I believe, and then we, we, mountain metaphor and valley.

Earnest, and he ends it very presidentially. His best performance of the debate, and he trumped Kerry’s response.

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