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ARLEN SPECTOR is everything that a conservative voter should abhor.
Yet, he has consistently won reelection with votes of conservatives in Pennsylvania.
He is a big time spender of tax dollars, he is a pawn of labor unions, he is pro-abortion, he is in favor of killing children in the earliest stages of life in order to havest their stem cells for research, he has blocked the appointment of consevative nominees to the US Supreme Court, he joined with 13 other senators to prevent the removal of a rule which permitted individual senators to block hearings on judicial nominees, etc.
In short, he needs to retire from the Senate and receive treatments for his
brain tumor.
The four-month Twilight Zone episode that the disputed Minnesota Senate race has become may be ending.
Democrat Al Franken rested his case yesterday before a three-judge panel that is hearing a lawsuit contesting his 225-vote provisional victory over former GOP Senator Norm Coleman. Attorneys for both sides believe the judges could begin their deliberations by next week, after Mr. Coleman presents witnesses to rebut Mr. Franken's presentation.
For his part, Mr. Franken took the opportunity during a trip to Washington to tell the 58-member Senate Democratic caucus that he expected to be seated after Mr. Coleman makes a final appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court once the three-judge panel issues its ruling.
Democrats are eagerly anticipating Mr. Franken's arrival because they will be just one vote shy of the 60 needed to shut off debate and pass their most controversial proposals. Chief among them is the "card check" bill introduced this week that would dramatically tilt the economy's playing field towards organized labor. It would mean an end to secret union elections in cases where organizers can convince a majority of workers at an employment site to sign cards indicating their desire to be union members. Strategists for business interests note that "card check" is getting increasingly unfavorable reviews from moderate Democratic senators, but they worry that a compromise measure might yet win such overwhelming Democratic support that it would become law.
"Without Al Franken, there's no chance a serious card check bill can become law. With Franken in the Senate, I fear that that a watered down version could make it through," says David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union.
Lawyers I spoke with in Minnesota say that while Mr. Coleman has a chance to reverse the results of the recount that stripped him of his lead last December, the universe of ballots the three-judge election panel is looking at is small. Mr. Coleman would have to win a clear majority of the some 1,700 ballots that are in dispute. "It's fair to say that Coleman was outlawyered in the early rounds of the recount," says former Federal Election Commission member Hans von Spakovsky, now a fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "The Democrats immediately brought in their A Team, and Coleman waited too long to bring in a similar team."
-- John Fund
Post-Apostate Republicans
President Obama has been in office for 50 days and already many of the prominent centrists or conservatives who once praised him have begun to express strong misgivings about his approach to governing -- especially the dog's breakfast known as the new Obama budget. In the media, the ranks of the disillusioned include columnists Christopher Buckley, David Brooks and David Gergen, who accuse the president of attempting a far too ambitious and more explicitly liberal agenda than they expected.
Now the Huffington Post reports that a very prominent former GOP Senator who backed Mr. Obama is unhappy with the administration. Lincoln Chafee, a moderate who lost his re-election bid in Rhode Island in 2006, says Team Obama should be sobered by the fact it could get only three out of 222 Republicans in Congress to vote for the stimulus bill.
"The whole appeal of the Obama candidacy was post-partisan, and to get off to that start I thought was surprising," said the Rhode Island Republican. "Ultimately, the chief executive has so much power, and just as a spectator, I thought the onus was on him to just make it happen. Get 80-or-so votes on your first big initiative, whatever it is." Mr. Chafee acknowledged that there are now fewer moderate Republicans such as himself in Congress, but said that didn't excuse Mr. Obama's failure to live up to his post-partisan rhetoric.
"To get off to that start, really, I was stunned about that vote in the House [in which every Republican voted 'no']. Oh, come on! You've got to get that first vote, whatever it takes. It was kind of sloppily put-together or something and it just gave to partisan oxygen."
-- John Fund
Quote of the Day I
"President Obama's Cabinet meetings will surely feature spirited debates and discussions of pressing issues. There is, however, one thing we're unlikely to hear: a Southern drawl. . . . Not one of his 15 Cabinet secretaries were born or raised in a region that until recently was considered the country's dominant source of power. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a holdover from President Bush, ran Texas A&M University earlier this decade, but his only other ties south of the Mason-Dixon Line are from his own college days. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spent 18 years in Arkansas, of course, but she was raised in Illinois and has worked hard since 2000 to establish New York as her political base. And so, four months after he carried three Southern states (Virginia, North Carolina and Florida), came close in a fourth (Georgia) and expressed regrets that he didn't run harder in a fifth (Texas), Obama has drawn together a top circle of advisers that lacks a real mouth from the South. Indeed, roughly half of Obama's Cabinet hails from three of the country's bluest (and, admittedly, most populous) states -- California, Illinois and New York" -- National Journal columnist John Mercurio.
Quote of the Day II
"The head of the [British] civil service, Sir Gus said the handover to President Barack Obama's administration was severely hindering preparations for next month's G20 summit. In an extraordinary blunder, the usually-guarded Sir Gus said no-one in the U.S. Treasury department was answering telephone calls. . . . Even though the world was in the grip of the worst economic crisis in decades -- top of the G20 agenda -- Number 10 was having trouble getting in touch with key personnel, said the Cabinet Secretary. 'There is nobody there,' he told a civil service conference in Gateshead. 'You cannot believe how difficult it is'" -- news report in Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper, on unguarded remarks by Sir Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Out of School
Buried in President Obama's recently-signed $410 billion spending bill was plenty of help for the D.C. educational system. The bill delivered $54 million for the public schools, $35 million in college tuition aid, and even $20 million to train and recruit new principals and revamp buildings. Also included, however, was language to kill a school voucher program that was opposed by teachers unions though it was succeeding in giving about 1,700 kids a ticket out of failing public schools.
It's a sad story, but one happy note was the emergence of several Democrats who voted to protect the program. Republican Sen. John Ensign of Nevada introduced an amendment to strip out the offending provision. He lost 58-39 with four Republicans (Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter, Mike Crapo and Lisa Murkowski) defecting to the teachers unions. When the final votes were tallied, however, three stuck out: Voting against the unions and in favor of kids were Senators Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Mark Warner of Virginia.
Sen. Lieberman, of course, was the Democratic Party's vice presidential nominee in 2000, though he has since been driven from the party by the anti-war left. But he continues to chair the senate committee that has jurisdiction over D.C. and plans soon to hold hearings on the voucher program whose star witness will be the District of Columbia's crusading schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, a Democrat, who last month defended the program: "I don't think vouchers are going to solve all the ills of public education, but parents who are zoned to schools that are failing kids should have options to do better by their kids."
Then there's Senator Warner. He's a rising star in the Democratic Party and was seen as a strong presidential contender this past cycle until he opted to run for the Senate. Mr. Warner comes from next-door Virginia where residents are well informed about the state of D.C. schools. And his vote exposes a crack within Democratic ranks that has the potential only to become wider. Even President Obama, after making sure the teachers unions were served, said through a White House spokesman after the Senate vote he hoped that some way could be found to keep the 1,700 voucher kids in the schools they are in now. Maybe Senator Warner will make his first mark in the Senate with a bill extending the D.C. vouchers to at least the existing beneficiaries until they're safely out of harm's way in the D.C. school system.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
POLITICAL DIARY ONLINE
THURSDAY, 12 MARCH 2009
*********************************************
Barack Hussein Obama aka Barry Soetoro
is not eligible to be President of the United States
because he is not a Natural Born Citizen
as required by Article Two, Section One, Clause Five
of the United States Constitution regardless of
where he was born (Mombassa, Hawaii, Chicago, or Mars)
because he was not born of TWO PARENTS
BOTH OF WHOM WERE UNITED STATES CITIZENS
at the time of his birth. His father was a subject/ciitizen
of Kenya/Great Britain
and his mother was too young to pass on her citizenship
according to the law in effect when he was born.
Check it out:
http://www.TheObamaFile.com/ObamaNaturalBorn.htm
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