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Gephardt Called Bush's Speech To Students 'Paid Political Advertising'

Flashback: Gephardt warned against Bush school speech in 1991

As Barack Obama prepares a nationwide broadcast to America's students next Tuesday, it has been revealed that Democrats complained in 1991 when then President George H. W. Bush broadcast a speech from a Northwest Washington junior high school.

In fact, the House Majority leader at the time, Gephardt (D-Mo.), said "The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students."

Video: Michelle rips Obama over school speech

Vodkapundit: Keep your kid home from school for Obama’s speech

WH deletes line about schoolkids helping Obama from speech prep materials

We must resist Obama’s school speech



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The Real Answer Is Left Unspoken

Durbin: Mandate? What mandates?

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Republican Voters Say GOP Reps In Congress Still Out Of Touch

Seventy-four percent (74%) of Republican voters say their party’s representatives in Congress have lost touch with GOP voters nationwide over the past several years. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 18% of GOP voters believe their elected officials have done a good job representing the base.

Most Republican voters (55%) say that the average Republican in Congress is more liberal than the average Republican voter. Twenty-four percent (24%) say the average Republican in Congress holds views about the same as the average Republican voter while just 17% think the Congressional Republicans are more conservative than GOP voters.

Republican voters overwhelmingly believe it is more important for the party to stand for what it believes in rather than trying to work with President Barack Obama. Eighty-four percent (84%) of Republicans hold that view while just 14% favor more co-operation with the President.



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Turnaround

Ridge backpedals on “pressure” claims

Less than two weeks ago, Tom Ridge launched his memoirs with the explosive allegation that Bush administration officials had pressured him to change terror-threat levels in order to boost George Bush’s re-election chances in the final days of the 2004 election.  A day later, the New York Times pointed out that the book not only didn’t have any supporting evidence for that claim, it also had Ridge insisting that he hadn’t seen any political pressure on threat levels.  Now Ridge himself has begun to backpedal from his publicity-seeking allegations

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Kennedy's Free Pass With Women

“I didn’t know about Chappaquiddick and the rape case until yesterday”

But how is it that so many women unabashedly revere Kennedy today? The particulars of Chappaquiddick are especially gory; his behavior after the accident approaches the amoral. Once he broke free and swam to the surface, Kennedy said that he dove back down seven or eight times to rescue Kopechne. Failing, he swam back to shore and checked back into his hotel, and a short time later lodged a noise complaint with the desk clerk. The people in the room next to his were partying and it was interfering with his sleep. Then he asked the desk clerk for the time

Perhaps, along with the hagiographic Kennedy myth, we can bury this outdated tradition of excusing the reprehensible treatment of women by the same male legislators who otherwise advocate for our rights politically. It's degrading. It's like making excuses for the husband who beats you up but pays the bills on time. It may be 2009, but the bulk of the talking heads who covered this funeral were older white males, and among the few women -- eminent historian Doris Kearns Goodwin among them -- it's still shocking to hear them, nearly to a one, reduce Kennedy's bad behavior to rakish abandon or poor judgement. Why shouldn't we hold our elected male officials -- especially those who so assiduously court the female vote -- to a standard of personal decency in their treatment of women? Why do we still assume that this is an either/or proposition?

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Porkulus Flopped, And They Know It

AIP column: Admission of Failure

Why did the Obama administration delay releasing the budget reconciliation numbers for a month, then try to sneak them into a Friday afternoon document dump in the middle of Barack Obama’s vacation?  They knew that the addition of more than $2,000,000,000,000 (trillion!) to their deficit projections was more than an admission of poor forecasting.  It also meant acknowledging that Porkulus failed, as I explain in my new American Issues Project column

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Or Was It Just A Handy Cover Story?

Did Megrahi only have weeks to live?

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Liberal Hypocrites

A real “Plame-gate”: Liberals and the CIA
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Illegal Immigration Is Depleting California’s Human Capital And Ravaging Its Economy

Catching Up to Mexico
Illegal immigration is depleting California’s human capital and ravaging its economy
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Debate

Why Sarah Palin should not leave the room

As many others have noted, Krauthammer begins his latest essay with his bizarrely offensive demand that Palin “leave the room,” then spends the rest of the essay essentially agreeing with her. It seems fair to say that his problem is more with her style than her substance. He misconstrues the “death panel” comment in a manner that suggests he might not have read her original Facebook posting. The “death panel” solar flare occurs in this paragraph

There is no doubt Obama and his allies want to drive the United States toward a single-payer health system. Some of his more colorful co-conspirators, like Barney Frank, aren’t particularly cagey about it when they speak in front of friendly audiences, and Obama himself has expressed that desire in the past. A health-insurance industry dominated by a tax-subsidized public option, whose vampiric “providers” can re-write the laws of the industry to destroy their nominal competitors, will inevitably collapse… leaving only the government. Tossing a shark into your aquarium is not a good way to enhance “competition” among the fish. When America inevitably loses enough blood to lapse into a single-payer coma, there will be rationing, and that means government functionaries will decide how the limited pool of medical resources is allocated. I don’t think “death panel” is an unfair metaphor for the resulting system, and the sense of dread it provokes in the listener is entirely appropriate.

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Hmmm … Don’t See That Power There.

Can Congress force me to buy health insurance?

One of the more troubling components of the ObamaCare bill wending its way through the House is the inclusion of individual mandates to carry health insurance.  What gives Congress the power to dictate that choice to American citizens?  A single document enumerates Congressional power, and former Department of Justice attorneys David Rivkin and Lee Casey have some trouble finding that power in it.  They argue, with appropriate citations of precedent, that HR3200 and any other bill that attempts to impose mandates will violate the Constitution

Most states now require drivers to have auto insurance before issuing drivers licenses, car registrations, or both.  However, that doesn’t apply here for three reasons.  First, that power rests with the individual states, as they are the licensing authorities and not the federal government.  Second, driving is not a right but a privilege, which gives access to state-owned roads in exchange for a demonstration of competence and appropriate safety and insurance preparation, so the state can and does set conditions on that privilege (too many, but that’s an argument for another day).  Third, because the insurance is conditioned on that privilege, it only affects a portion of the populace.  The states could not demand universal auto insurance on every man, woman, and child in their state.

But how about using the tax code to enforce the mandate?  Congress has the power to tax, as we know all too well, and they can create some severe penalties for failure to comply.  In fact, HR3200 does just that now.  However, as Rivkin and Casey explain, any tax that seeks to impose policy that goes beyond the limits of the Commerce Clause is also unconstitutional

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Didn’t The Left Define This As Treason?

ACLU, Gitmo lawyers exposed CIA agent identities to terrorists

The ACLU and defense attorneys for detainees at Guantanamo Bay surveilled and took pictures of CIA agents and then showed the photos to terrorists at Gitmo.  The Department of Justice has begun an investigation into the exposure of American agents, the Washington Post reports, in some cases in front of their homes.  It underscores once again the stupidity of involving the civil court system in the handling of unlawful combatants in wartime

I recall a large number of people arguing a few years ago that the unmasking of Valerie Plame amounted to treason.  I wonder if the same people making that argument about the leak of her identity as a CIA analyst (by Colin Powell aide Richard Armitage to the late Robert Novak) will remain consistent in this case.  After all, here we have Americans exposing field agents at their homes, and not to a journalist — but to the enemy.  If Plame’s exposure was treason, then this should be a hanging offense, no?

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Unstimulated

Unemployment rises again

Obama has a big problem.  The stimulus package has utterly failed to prevent unemployment from getting above the target line of 8%.  After some initial optimism about the economy, employers are once again shedding jobs and reducing costs, particularly as they see Obama’s expansive — and expensive — legislative agenda work through Congress.  At the time when Obama says, “Trust me to run health care,” voters are realizing that he couldn’t get the economy right while mortgaging the Treasury.  Maybe Obama should focus on fixing what he’s already broken before breaking something else.

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